Somehow, while we were worrying about superheroes and star destroyers and hot rods and whether Captain America could beat up Superman or whatever, the goddamned Planet of the Apes movies became the most vital and resonant big-budget film series in the contemporary movie firmament. And they did it with the…
Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is a remorselessly entertaining, impeccably assembled action-musical in which cars and people defy the laws of physics and common sense. They leap into gunfire and hop over hoods and careen down streets in perfect time to the beats of an unimpeachably cool soundtrack. It’s all absurd,…
The pitch for The Big Sick might sound like a tacky weepie you’d have been afraid to watch on TV in the 1990s. But it’s hard to do justice to the balancing act that the creators of this singular comedy have achieved. Based on events in the life of star…
In the opening scene of Transformers: The Last Knight, we are presented with the spectacle of King Arthur and his knights locked in an existential battle for the survival of human civilization, even though we’re not really told who they’re fighting or why. No matter, because this after all is…
Over the years, Tom Cruise has been many things, but he’s almost never been marginalized — not in one of his own movies. Oh, he’s played supporting parts and done cameos here and there, but even in those smaller roles (in films like Tropic Thunder or Rock of Ages), he…
A couple years into his supposed retirement, the 80-year-old Ken Loach showed up at Cannes with I, Daniel Blake and proceeded to win the Palme d’Or (his second, after 2006’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley). The film follows an aging carpenter (Dave Johns) with a heart problem and a…
The 2017 Cannes Film Festival wrapped up last Sunday with a slate of generally predictable (and perfectly worthwhile) awards. And while it may have been a somewhat lackluster year for the festival’s main competition, there were plenty of cinematic treasures to be found on the Croisette – even a couple…
Imagine a remake of Cape Fear shot like Kubrick’s The Shining, with Max Cady recast as a child, and you’ll have some idea of the strangeness of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The film has quickly proved to be one of the most divisive titles at this…
In the run-up to this year’s festival, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja was one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Selection lineup. Now that people have seen it, Okja has turned out to be…one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Selection lineup. What is it, exactly? A children’s…
Solid rule of thumb: Never accept strawberries from strangers on the street, no matter how good-looking the fruit or well-spoken the unknown person. But maybe that’s just me. For Clare (Teresa Palmer), the intrepid Australian backpacker who in Berlin Syndrome finds herself imprisoned in a Berlin apartment by a romantic…
Last year’s Cannes Festival seemed to be all about the past, trauma, and the persistence of memory. It’s too early in this year’s festival to suss out any broad themes, but the one-two punch of Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, the first two Official Competition titles to screen,…
It might be surprising to realize that David Lynch has only ever made one period piece: The Elephant Man (1980), set in the Victorian era. The rest of the director’s films, save for his 1984 sci-fi disaster Dune, take place in what presumably is the here and now. Or, more…
Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I’ve never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director’s feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy. Yes, the opening scene — black-suited crooks bantering about Madonna and the…
If nothing else, Alien: Covenant is the most ambitious Alien film ever made. It’s almost as if Ridley Scott, foiled in his recent attempts at biblical epics, metaphysical dramas and thorny psychosexual thrillers, decided to revisit those genres under cover of a prized franchise sequel. That’s not to suggest that…
Newly restored, James Ivory’s elegant and passionate 1987 film, Maurice, adapted from the posthumously published novel by E.M. Forster, is being rereleased. Last year, I had the chance to discuss this film and some of Ivory’s other works with the director. Here is some of our conversation. I remember the…
Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece, Heat, comes out this week in a brand-new, fully loaded and beautiful Blu-ray edition. To explore further what makes this epochal crime drama so special, I recently talked to the director. The story of Heat was based on real-life personalities. There was real thief named Neil…
The true heart of Michael Mann’s Heat is revealed a little more than an hour into the film. No, I’m not talking about the classic coffee conversation between Robert De Niro’s master thief, Neil McCauley, and Al Pacino’s obsessed LAPD cop, Vincent Hanna — that fantastic and immortal face-off comes…
King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy…
Not long before the surprisingly violent finale of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), Melanie Griffith’s wild girl-turned-good-girl-turned-complicated-girl Audrey asks Charlie (Jeff Daniels), a straight-arrow-Wall-Streeter-turned-desperate-romantic-turned-man-of-action, “What are you gonna do now that you know how the other half lives?” “The other half?” he asks, confused. “The other half of you.” The…
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is one of the best films I’ve ever seen about corruption. That’s true despite the fact that Mungiu underplays the typical elements found in tales about this subject: You won’t find many fast-talking crooks, sinister cops or elaborate sting operations here. Or a looming sense…
“Ludwig, you are the favorite of the Lord because more than any other man, you are exposed to sin.” A compassionate priest says this to the mad king of Bavaria about halfway through Ludwig, Luchino Visconti’s sprawling 1972 film, now finally available, in all its uncut glory, in a gorgeous…
“Rob has this ridiculous beard and it’s such great, self-effacing, wonderful work he’s doing,” James Gray says about his film recounting the life of a British explorer who disappeared while pursuing his lifelong obsession with a mythical city in the Amazon.
