Like many musician biopics, Elvis can feel a bit like an overstuffed Greatest Hits album at times—Presley’s recording and concert successes, forays into film and television, and Vegas residency all get significant airtime, in addition to his marriage to Lisa Marie, addiction struggles, and financial exploitation by Parker—but Elvis is more than just an average tale of a musician’s rise and fall. I mean, sure, it is that, but it’s also a Baz Luhrmann picture, which means it’s a maximalist…

If nothing else, writer-director Alex Garland is a premier purveyor of visual spectacle, a trait his latest film bears out. The winkingly titled Men offers up a buffet of imagery that intrigues, confuses, and terrifies in equal measure, all lusciously shot by regular Garland collaborator Rob Hardy. But while spectacle often suffices, Garland tends to set his sights higher, marrying his visual creativity with unsettlingly ambiguous ideas about the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos. In previous…

With Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s fourth collaboration with star Viggo Mortensen, right around the corner, Kino Lorber has issued a new release of the director and actor’s second feature together, 2007’s Eastern Promises. Their follow-up to the critically acclaimed A History of Violence, Cronenberg and Mortensen — alongside writer Steven Knight and co-star Naomi Watts — turn their sights on the operations of the Russian mafia in London. When hospital midwife Anna Khitrova (Watts) comes across the diary…

Maximalism is the name of the game when it comes to RRR, S. S. Rajamouli’s three-plus-hour genre-defying action-musical-bromance, but I’m confident you’ll find it worth every minute. Rajamouli’s epic period piece fictionalizes the lives of two early-mid 20th century Indian revolutionaries, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju, by asking the all-important question: what if these two men, who by all accounts never met, were actually…best friends? If that sounds a little silly it’s because it is, but that’s a feature,…