Just when it seemed like Cannes couldn’t get any worse for “Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny,” it turns out that James Mangold’s $300 million sequel wasn’t even the festival’s best movie about a sad and grumpy archeologist who chases a band of tomb raiders across the waters of Italy in order to stop them from selfishly exploiting a priceless artifact from before the birth of Christ. What are the odds?
Strange as that coincidence might be, it’s no…
It’s been a long time since the last Michel Gondry movie (and perhaps even longer since the last time you actually saw one), but at least the “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” director’s semi-autobiographical new comedy offers a fun — if also fraught and occasionally worrying — explanation for why it took him eight years to follow up “Microbe & Gasoline.”
In “The Book of Solutions,” Pierre Niney plays Marc, an obvious Gondry stand-in who’s deep in post-production on a…
To judge by Aki Kaurismäki’s typically wry and winsome “Fallen Leaves,” the Finnish auteur’s first movie since threatening to retire after “The Other Side of Hope” came out 2017, only two things have any significant importance have happened in the world over the last six years.
The first and most pressing of those is the war in Ukraine, which bleeds into Ansa’s (Alma Pöysti) already depressing kitchen every time the supermarket cashier dares to turn on her radio after work.…
the most hardcore food porn since Big Night or Babette's Feast, and every bit those movies' equal. an absolute joy.
Like any movie by Wes Anderson, “Asteroid City” is the epitome of a Wes Anderson movie. A film about a television program about a play within a play “about infinity and I don’t know what else” (as one character describes it), this delightfully profound desert charmer — by far the director’s best effort since “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and in some respects the most poignant thing he’s ever made — boasts all of his usual hallmarks and then some. A…
If nothing else, every new Jessica Hausner film makes an increasingly undeniable case that no other narrative director is more skeptical of — or even hostile towards — the social institutions into which people entrust their faith. Her first and still only great movie confronted that subject head-on by telling the story of a wheelchair-bound woman whose multiple sclerosis appears to be cured by a visit to the Catholic sanctuary of Lourdes. Alas, both of the contemporary-set films she’s made…
There have been any number of films about Henry VIII and how the English king’s various wives kept losing their heads, but precious few have focused on the one queen who managed to outlive him; Katherine Parr has been a bit player in the likes of 1953’s “Young Bess” (in addition to several movies titled after her murderous husband, and more recently the final season of Showtime’s “The Tudors”), but Karim Aïnouz’s “Firebrand” puts this radically progressive woman of the…
A sweet and shimmeringly beautiful film about how life can flow and then freeze and then thaw into something entirely new if you let it, Anthony Chen’s “The Breaking Ice” finds hope in the most frigid of places. In this case, that place is the small Chinese border city of Yanji during the depths of its endless winter, when people’s breath is as thick as the gray fumes that spew out of the factory smokestacks, and the snowy peak of…
A heartbreakingly sincere piece of high camp that teases real human drama from the stuff of tabloid sensationalism, Todd Haynes’ delicious “May December” continues the director’s tradition of making films that rely upon the self-awareness that seems to elude their characters — especially the ones played by Julianne Moore.
Here, the actress reteams with her “Safe” director to play Gracie Atherton-Yoo, a lispy former school teacher who became a household name back in 1992 when she left her ex-husband for…
Martin Scorsese may like to think of “Killers of the Flower Moon” as the Western that he always wanted to make, but this frequently spectacular American epic about the genocidal conspiracy that was visited upon the Osage Nation during the 1920s is more potent and self-possessed when it sticks a finger in one of the other genres that bubble up to the surface over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime.
The first and most obvious of those is a gangster…
Holocaust cinema has so implicitly existed in the shadow of a single question that it would no longer seem worth asking if not for the fact that it’s never been answered: How do you depict an atrocity? The most urgent and indelible examples of the form offer equally simple yet perfectly contradictory responses. Documentaries like “Shoah” and Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” suggest that you don’t, while historical epics like “Schindler’s List” insist that you must. If the latter argues…