The absence of any major American films from this year’s Cannes Film Festival competition allowed room for some French films to sneak in. The Birthday Party aka Histoires de la Nuit is a film which would have never otherwise been allowed to compete for the Palme d’Or. It’s the kind …
Writer-director Volker Schlöndorff probably remains best known for his 1979 film The Tin Drum, but that underestimates his career. He has been a solid and thoughtful filmmaker both in English and his native German for more than this half-century, without ever quite having a major hit that provides an easier …
At a foreboding manor tucked back in the New Hampshire mountains, four young girls gather with an eccentric host to compete for the prize of being named the heiress of a vast fortune. At first glance, it seems like the opportunity of a lifetime, especially for these girls who each …
Jessica’s life is falling apart around her. Her son has decided he’s a nonbinary, vegetarian, hedge witch who goes by They/Them. Jessica tries to be supportive, but she isn’t sure she understands any of it. Meanwhile, her husband spends more time at the office than with her. And at 46, …
The best film of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival premiered out of competition. La Bataille de Gaulle: L’Âge de Fer, which has the English title De Gaulle: Résistance, is an absolute triumph of cinema. It is a fast-paced and largely true historical epic that handles complex and layered political events …
We all know China is an industrial superpower, but we (especially in the west) don’t devote much time wondering how China has become an industrial superpower. Well, part of the answer is that it buys a lot of its raw materials in from Mongolia. China’s upstairs neighbour is a nation …
Margo’s got a lot going on. At just 19 years old, she’s a single mom with no support system. Yeah, when you have a baby, they actually just kick you out the door with no idea what you’re doing and say, “Have a nice day!” But it’s okay, Margo’s got …
I don’t typically do product reviews, but an e-mail from Santoki recently caught my eye. It’s back-to-school season, and with that comes new opportunities for flair. I like both travel and cute stationery, and their bag tags and pens were right in my wheelhouse. While Santoki provided these items for …
It’s been eighteen months since Season Three of Reacher and the series’ appeal is more valuable than ever. The character of Reacher – ex-military brat, ex-military police, now a keenly observant drifter with no living family, no possessions, no way of being traced as he moves through the world, and …
How much are you actually supposed to care about a family being hunted by dinosaurs? Normally the answer is simple: just enough to root for them, not so much that a stray death throws the whole experience off balance. David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) spends most of The End of …
Gregory Maguire has brought the land of Oz to us in ways we could never have imagined a century ago. We’ve gotten the story behind the Wicked Witch of the West (as both an adult and a child), her sister (the Wicked Witch of the East, remember), her son, her …
Some secrets are fun, some are exciting, and some should stay buried. Thirty years ago, the entire Dixon family disappeared in the middle of a storm. The power went out, and no one ever saw them again. Except someone did. Someone knows what happened to them. Now new people have …
I confess I went into The Last House with a strange kind of curiosity that had nothing to do with horror and everything to do with career pivots. Louis Leterrier has spent the better part of two decades making things go fast and loud — muscle cars, magic tricks, superhero …
The trouble with prison documentaries is the elephant in the room. Either you must find the reasons people are incarcerated beneath mentioning, or you must be right up front with the conviction that landed someone inside. This unfair but reasonable fact of life might go double if the documentary is …
Venom is a host-jumping alien symbiote who is most associated with Eddie Brock. But it’s had many hosts over the years, and in What If…Marc Spector was Host to Venom by Mike Chen, we see what it would be like if Moon Knight hosted the alien. But we get extra …
Ulysse is once again the kind of daily-life film at which French cinema excels. Here the family is a mother, her disabled son, and the army of professionals whose job it is to help her son find his way in the world. It is indeed an odyssey, told from the …
Cannes Film Festival liked doing things in pairs in 2026. It jointly awarded All of a Sudden’s two lead actresses, the French Virginie Efira and the Japanese Tao Okamoto, the Best Actress prize. (Ms. Okamoto beginning her acceptance speech by referring to herself as a “mediocre Japanese actress” prompted a …
When it comes to animated superhero properties, my knowledge is rather limited. The only one that I had any insight into was, of course, Batman. Prime Video’s Batman: Caped Crusader proved a major surprise upon release in 2024. The show was a darker, noir-focused, and genuinely unique take on the …
It is a pleasant surprise that the two lead performances of Coward shared the Best Actor prize at this year’s Cannes. In the announcement, the jury mentioned that is because these performances change how masculinity is normally portrayed onscreen. But what the performances in Coward do is meet the current …
When reviewing The Agency season one, released in 2024, I chose to leave expectations at the door. At its core, the series was not a slam-bang action tale, but a methodically paced story about the effects of espionage on human psyche. Now entering its second season, The Agency is back …