The Secret Agent won two major awards at this year’s Cannes film festival, Best Director for Kleber Mendonça Filho and Best Actor for Wagner Moura, an unusual and enormous compliment. The Secret Agent is a lot like Waiting for Godot, as it is two and a half hours of set-up …
Rosemead deals with one of life’s most significant challenges. What happens to our loved ones after we leave? Will they be in a safe position as we depart? The film focuses on a mother played by Lucy Liu, who sees the world that she knows coming to a close. But …
Expectations were low. My relationship with this saga has been, I admit, troubled: mixed feelings regarding the original film and manifestly negative regarding the second chapter. Despite being aware that this third entry, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, has received the warmest reception of the entire franchise so …
Director Stephen Shimek recently sat down with us to discuss Murder at the Embassy, his new film that’s out now in theaters and on demand. It’s a murder mystery set in 1930s Cairo starring Mischa Barton along with Mido Hamada and Richard Dillane. It’s the second installment in the Miranda …
Rose Byrne’s magnificent performance grounds this takedown of modern motherhood (not parenthood) under capitalism, but If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is really about the flaws of modern American society. Its unmissable message is that America is completely ruled by its addictions and its impossible desire to get without …
Dragonfly is based on a simple idea: how dangerous it is to trust anyone while you’re weakened, whether through old age, disability or both. Unfortunately it is also so worried that we won’t understand the nuances of this very good idea that it overdoes things, and collapses. This is very …
Travel back to 1930s Cairo in this exclusive interview with Mido Hamada, who discusses his role as the skeptical Head of Security Mamoud in the new murder mystery film Murder at the Embassy with Mischa Barton. It’s the second installment in the Miranda Green series and is a delightfully fun …
My viewing of The Running Man was, honestly, one of the “blindest” I’ve had all year. I wasn’t familiar with the original novel by Stephen King, nor the first 1987 film adaptation. I managed to completely avoid any images, clips, or even reactions to this new release. My expectations, however, …
Following his 2021 Filmmakers of the Present debut Streams, Tunisian director and screenwriter Mehdi Hmili made his return at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, with the out-of-competition title Exile, which functions as part revenge thriller and part grief and social drama stylized in a way that evokes visual poetry and …
Cinema has the power to drag us into the depths of conflicts we’d rather ignore in real life. The driving force behind Anniversary started for me long before the movie itself: in its brilliant ensemble. Someone had the fantastic idea of bringing together some of the most promising and underrated …
The expectations surrounding A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow’s new and highly anticipated film, were understandably stratospheric. After military tension and psychological analysis masterworks like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, the prospect of Bigelow returning to a theme of war and existential crisis — dealing with the nuclear …
Following the intense and visceral rawness of All Quiet on the Western Front and the meticulous religious intrigue of Conclave — both of which are among my absolute favorites from their respective release years — the mere idea of Edward Berger tackling a psychological thriller focused on addiction and moral …
My expectations for Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt were, I confess, moderate, but they leaned toward cautious optimism. I like most of his films, with Challengers being my favorite, and I generally admire his work, even if I don’t consider myself an unconditional fan. However, the initial reception of this …
There is a fascinating new trend in cinema gathering steam: action movies with hardly any dialogue. Finland’s Sisu from 2022 shows Nazis being slaughtered without saying much about it, while America’s No One Will Save You from 2023 has a young woman fighting off an alien attack. And now Detroit …
The formula established in Knives Out and Glass Onion has been changed in Wake Up Dead Man. The series of good old-fashioned murder mysteries solved by gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has been a roaring success because they were mostly about fabulously wealthy people being held to account. Tweaking the …
Jude Law’s first appearance as Vladimir Putin is so eerily accurate the Venice Film Festival audience around me laughed in surprise. Who would have thought he could do it? Well congratulations to director Olivier Assayas and his casting director Antoinette Boulat, because the performance Mr. Law gives here is one …
We don’t choose our family. Love them, hate them, they are our families, and we are stuck with them. Some of us are blessed with living, supportive ones; others not so much, and the rest fall somewhere in between. Black Rabbit is a story of brothers who fall somewhere in …
Comedian Mae Martin’s (Feel Good) first venture into drama is a confused exploration of a dysfunctional town with a mysterious school. What has the potential to be a Lynchian mystery falls flat as it struggles to combine two perspectives. Told through two separate viewpoints, Wayward follows cop Alex Dempsey (Martin) …
Of all the hype bubbles that form around the first reactions to a new release, One Battle After Another generated some of the most effusive of this century. And I mean that almost literally, since many of those reactions contained the pull-quote-ready taglines that marketing departments love so much — …
The Cut, starring Orlando Bloom, is an intense film about all the psychological drama that goes on behind the scenes of a boxer determined to make weight and redeem himself. It’s gritty and massively thrilling and one of the most interesting films of the past year. That’s why I was …