No one quite knows what to do with director Fatih Akin. His explosive early movie Head-On was about the complex convergence of immigration and mental health issues between two Turkish-German punks. It’s one of the most violent and romantic movies ever made and also one of the smartest about intersectional …
In Cuerpo Celeste, the symbolically loaded debut feature from Chilean writer-director Nayra Ilic García, the past not only fractures the present and future but actively exists along with it as if they are all one and the same. The film explores that threshold, the possibility to re-encounter even something we …
In his debut directorial effort, French director Laurent Slama joins forces with Alex Lawter and Agathe Rousselle to deliver a story about a woman on suicidal watch in A Second Life. Set on the opening day of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, we follow Elisabeth (Rouselle), who is living …
Sentimental Value won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival thanks to the three central performances by Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning and Stellan Skarsgård. Director Joachim Trier has a real talent for pulling out the emotional subtexts of ordinary lives and figuring out why people make the choices …
Romería is the movie above all others I have been recommending from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. That is because this is such a powerful story, told with such an incredible amount of love, that it is utterly impossible to be unaffected by it. And that is before I mention …
The Uruguayan director Lucia Garibaldi presents her sophomore feature, Un Futuro Brillante (A Bright Future), at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Her first film, Los Tiburones (The Sharks), premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Consequently, her subsequent work became a highly anticipated title on the festival circuit, and it …
Romane Bohringer is a French actor who, for her second film as director, has chosen to make an extremely personal story about her search for more information about her mother, Maggy, who left the family before she was a year old and died when Ms. Bohringer was in her early …
This enormous, sumptuous, magnificent movie is almost too much, which is not a complaint. Resurrection is one of those movies that decided to tell the story of a universe starting with a kitchen sink and then built out from there. It’s very long – 160 minutes in this edit – …
British gangster content has become a popular pastime for entertainment media enthusiasts. There’s a heightened quality that’s proven uproariously entertaining for viewers. British gangster classics such as Snatch, Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Layer Cake, and the old-school The Long Good Friday proved this correct. One commonality amongst some …
The movie with the best title at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is also the kind of movie filmmakers love to make: a movie about making a movie. But less joyously, the setting here is present-day Egypt, a nation not currently enjoying the delights of democracy. The creatives involved, beginning …
The six hippie scientists from the non-corporation planet that Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) is tasked with protecting on their mining mission are as follows: Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), the admired mission leader, parent of seven, and terraforming expert who is secretly prone to panic attacks Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), the non-binary lawyer and …
The eponymous hero of this new TV show Murderbot, based on the first of The Murderbot Diaries series of novels by Martha Wells, is strictly speaking a cyborg. It – though sometimes its clients misgender it as a he – has a metallic structure covered with cloned human flesh, including …
What is a “feel-good” movie? Is it just an uplifting story? Or something even more? That’s a tricky question that doesn’t have a distinct answer. Something that may be heartfelt to one person may be found schmaltzy and manipulative to another. Adding that idea to 2025 films makes the prospect …
Why is a movie about the aftermath of a Parisian career woman’s mental breakdown, set in a small town in eastern France, named after an area of the west coast of Ireland? Because in 1981 a French singer, Michel Sardou, had a massive hit with a song called “Les lacs …
This Japanese movie is named after an art print a preteen girl buys her terminally ill father. This strange misdirection fits this quietly misguided film, about how that girl passes the time while her parents are too preoccupied for her. This includes some topics on the very edge of what …
Paul Mescal has the very rare talent of making unusually good choices. He has made a few damp squibs; nobody loved Carmen but me, and while his charisma carried his stage performance of A Streetcar Named Desire from London to Brooklyn, the whole show was misguided. That said, he has …
Japanese director Masayuki Suô’s 1996 romantic comedy, Shall We Dance? Follows Shohei Sugiyama (Kôji Yakusho), an accountant who is surprisingly discontented. Despite his successful career and a wife and daughter who love him dearly, there’s something missing in Sugiyama’s life. On his daily commute, he spies from the train a …
Film critics could argue that certain films prove challenging to review. Hearing that statement may lead fans to assume one thing: that a film is bad. Bad movies are the hardest to review because there’s only so much to say about them. That statement can be stretched further into the …
Everything in Hacks blew apart in A Slippery Slope, episode 9 of season 4. So many threads that we have been following all season came to a head in the penultimate episode. And I admit, the writers had me on the ropes in this one, waiting to see how everything panned out. And …
The dual drop of Hacks episodes 7 and 8 was interesting, but it makes sense for these two to air at the same time. The two work well together and set up the final three episodes well. By the end of episode 8, several conflicts have been set up that should make …