Listening to John Malkovich sing about holding his cowboy hat at the age of sixteen while his boyhood love drives away to chase her Hollywood dreams is a surreal pleasure, but it wouldn’t play as anything more than a curio without the genuine insight into pop entertainment and its attendant pre...
2025-07-13 16:56:34 +0000 UTC View Post
The Phoenician Scheme is a lesser Wes Anderson almost from its first moments, in which flat line readings and hurried pacing grate against the cartoonish tone of an airplane crash sequence. Benicio del Toro makes the most of his relatively thin role as arms dealer and international facil...
2025-07-11 21:22:01 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s no big twist in Bring Her Back. From about ten minutes in we understand what Laura’s trying to do. An attentive viewer might pick it up even earlier, during the cold open in which unnamed Russians perform obscure occult rituals on screaming, dead-eyed subjects in an abandoned...
2025-07-03 23:19:55 +0000 UTC View Post
“We will not waste a single drop of your precious urine,” simpers Eunuch Zhang (Yidi), patron of the arts and former courtier, to the pubescent Cheng Dieyi (Yin Zhi, with Ma Mingwei as his younger self and avant-garde stage and screen legend Leslie Cheung in the main adult role). It is perhap...
2025-06-26 22:42:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Animated in a style intentionally evocative of both stop-motion and manhwa/manga, KPop Demon Hunters stands out immediately from the visually generic computer-animated fare churned out by Pixar and Dreamworks. The outsize, cartoonish emoting, the gorgeously fluid jerkiness of the visual ...
2025-06-26 20:19:29 +0000 UTC View Post
As Jaime (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) and his twelve-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams) leave their island home on Spike’s first hunt, a stylized recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Boots Boots Boots’ by Taylor Holmes descends like a pall. Holmes’ voice is heavily distorted, evoking the q...
2025-06-20 20:04:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Sparse dialogue, a gorgeous hand-painted visual style, and a good, solid understanding of genre storytelling go a long way in the right hands. Predator: Killer of Killers may not break any new ground for sci-fi action, but its first two shorts demonstrate the restraint and attention to d...
2025-06-07 02:15:51 +0000 UTC View Post
We meet two deeply flawed but interesting people. We watch them struggle for some version of success on the largely brutal and mercenary Western frontier of post-Civil War America. They succumb to their flaws. That’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s gorgeous revisionist West...
2025-05-25 17:15:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Oh wow, is war really loud? Is it confusing? Does it rob soldiers and civilians alike of their humanity? Should we have a party? Should we invite David Petraeus? Alex Garland’s Warfare certainly seems to think so. Interchangeable characters recite reams of jargon over the radio. They f...
2025-05-20 03:15:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Freedom is a pure idea. So said Nemik, the young Rebel soldier crushed to death in a tragic turn of fate during the long-ago heist on Aldhani. His words live on. A broken Major Partagaz listens to a recording of Nemik’s manifesto in the room where he spent his career trying to do every frantic,...
2025-05-14 05:41:02 +0000 UTC View Post
The secret’s out. The party’s over. A handful of jumbled names — of planets, technicians — and a list of materials, the bare beginnings of a plan that will lead straight down a trail of bodies and desperate gambits to Luke Skywalker pumping a pair of proton torpedoes right into the Death ...
2025-05-14 03:39:35 +0000 UTC View Post
“Make it stop,” a young Luthen begs. He says it again and again, more a compulsive tic than a prayer. He shouts it in between swigs from his flask. People are dying outside the ship where he sits, gunned down by the dozen as he listens to their screams, to the rapid tattoo of blaster fire. Bu...
2025-05-14 02:30:06 +0000 UTC View Post
A Kaqchikel woman (Margarita Kenéfic) runs through a field of withering maize, one child on her hip, another clinging to her hand. Soldiers are coming. We can hear the tramp of their boots, the crass rumble of their voices. She tries to hide as her pursuers draw closer, fear twisting her regal f...
2025-05-13 19:43:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Another year, another movie about the torturous cultural anxiety over fatness in which the only even remotely fat presence onscreen is a faceless body double. Like last year’s far superior The Substance, Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister has fatness on the brain but st...
2025-05-13 03:23:24 +0000 UTC View Post
We open on a shot of the Imperial Senate Building reflected upside-down in the water of an ornamental pond. The lights of Coruscant glow softly above its sweeping dome. As Mon Mothma prepares to give a defiant anti-genocide speech for which she is almost certain to be arrested, tortured and kille...
2025-05-07 04:17:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Staring day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year at millions of people starving to death in real time, being shot and tortured and bombed, is enough to make you lose your mind. Everyone with a conscience understands this now, if they didn’t when the current savage esca...
2025-05-07 03:35:15 +0000 UTC View Post
“They have no shame, do they?” says Senator Oran (Raphael Roger Levy), discussing a staged terrorist attack on his home planet of Ghorman. “They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore.” It’s a sentiment every victim of social sadism and its hegemonic equivalent understands, to be subj...
2025-05-07 02:45:26 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s a miracle this show exists. That it’s one of the greatest seasons of television ever made is self-evident by the time its premiere wraps on a fight between vacant, dead-eyed cop Martin (Miles Teller) and a naked gangster in a mechanic’s garage. If you aren’t sold by then, perhaps Jam...
2025-05-05 20:45:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello gang! Beginning with tomorrow's screening of Anora, this month's entire slate of programming in the theater will be available to all $5 dollar subscribers in gratitude for all your support.
This link is a temp...
Running a restaurant, as Artie Bucco tells us, is like owning an elephant. It costs a fortune, and sooner or later it shits on your head. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon weighs in firmly on the “sooner” side of things. Within ten minutes we’re watching an elephant take an explosive dump on a te...
2025-05-01 01:12:10 +0000 UTC View Post
“You will carry her with you everywhere,” says Vel to the sniveling wannabe revolutionary who accidentally shot her lover, Cinta. “This is like skin now.” The message is clear. There’s no escaping our mistakes, no taking back the worst moments of our lives. Cinta is gone, killed for not...
2025-04-30 06:00:28 +0000 UTC View Post
“I can’t believe you had me followed,” says Syril, his eyes alight with sick arousal as he locks eyes with his lover, ISB agent Dedra. It’s clear he’s weak in the knees at the knowledge that with a single order his girlfriend could have a blaster bolt placed dead-center in the back of h...
2025-04-30 03:45:49 +0000 UTC View Post
The soft pastels and jewel tones of the Mothma estate, the tawny wheat fields, the deep greens and browns of the jungles of Yavin IV, that’s all in the past now. Ghorman is gray. The drab little Coruscant apartment where Cassian and Bix live between missions is gray. Gray offices. Gray streets....
2025-04-30 02:45:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) can’t see herself. Or, rather, she sees something, some shadow on the wall — perfect, vulnerable, desirable, beloved — but there is no stable self to cast that shadow. It’s a projection. A story she tells others, and one she can’t stop telling. She’s not a pe...
2025-04-29 17:02:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Havoc isn’t great. The digital photography is often murky, the color palette is bland and played out, there’s nothing noteworthy happening on the acting front aside from a fun performance by Tom Hardy doing his signature mush-mouthed delivery, and the script is never better than fine. Even wh...
2025-04-26 23:59:30 +0000 UTC View Post
There isn’t much good horror about nursing homes. The subject is so taboo, especially among Americans, so freighted with guilt over the abandonment of aging and infirm parents to a hostile system, that we hardly talk about it outside of hushed confessions to our nearest and dearest. Working fro...
2025-04-26 01:19:57 +0000 UTC View Post
“NIAMOS!” cry the guests at the Mothma-Sculdun wedding as they swirl and gyrate on the dance floor in the wake of the nuptial vows, their delicate scalloped gowns and flowing sleeves giving them the appearance of ornamental koi in motion. The thumping bass and one-word chorus, the name of the...
2025-04-23 21:55:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Titled after the first two elements of a traditional Chandrilian wedding toast, ‘Sagrona Teema’ is as engrossing as it is beautiful, so preposterously better than anything else Disney has done with Star Wars it might as well be an entirely different medium, like one of the Jim Henson Workshop...
2025-04-23 05:41:59 +0000 UTC View Post
“If I die tonight,” asks Imperial research technician Niya (Rachelle Diedericks), taking her first steps into the world of rebel action, “was it worth it?” Andor’s second season premiere leans hard on the dueling themes of the cost and method underpinning revolution, juxtaposing a rocky...
2025-04-23 02:53:14 +0000 UTC View Post
“I miss my people,” says the vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell, more than reminiscent of the late, great Bill Paxton) to young Blues guitarist Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). “You can bring them back.” It’s not blood that Remmick wants, or at least not just blood, but music. Stories. A part...
2025-04-22 02:24:02 +0000 UTC View Post