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The Best Way to Watch Movies: Can Home Viewing Really Ruin a Blockbuster?
It started, as so many things do these days, with a tweet. Over the weekend, IndieWire’s own Anne Thompson took to social media to share a recent interaction regarding the consumption of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic, “Dune,” which finally arrived in both domestic theaters and streaming on HBO Max after a year of pandemic-pushed delays. Thompson tweeted, “A friend of mine admitted he stopped watching Dune on @hbomaxafter 90 minutes and I lost it. That’s only one part of what’s wrong with…
Annie Clark Unzips Her St. Vincent Persona for Meta Mockumentary ‘The Nowhere Inn’
Annie Clark unzipped out of her St. Vincent musical persona more nakedly than ever with the release of the 2017 album “Masseduction,” a chronicle of fame and excess that deals in drugs, sex, and broken relationships. While Clark argues that “you do know me if you listen to my music,” as the former Polyphonic Spree guitarist turned divine solo act explained to IndieWire, that album offered listeners a more raw St. Vincent than they’d heard before, especially in the aftermath of high-profile romances…
Paul Schrader Got ‘So Blatant’ in His Critiques of Tiffany Haddish, and She Loved It: ‘Yes, Give Me More’
Few people in Hollywood work as hard as Tiffany Haddish, who took her 2017 breakout in the raucous “Girls Trip” and ran with it something fierce, starring in everything from “Night School” and “The Kitchen” to “Tuca & Bertie” and “The Last O.G.,” while also performing standup, penning a best-selling memoir, and winning both an Emmy (for hosting “Saturday Night Live”) and a Grammy (for Best Comedy Album). Her jam-packed schedule has slowly given way to more unexpected outings, including her most…
45 Must-See New Movies to Catch This Fall Season
After more than a year of pushed-back release dates, ever-evolving release plans, and a raft of virtual festivals and other in-home viewing pivots, the release date calendar is looking a touch more normal these days. While many things are still in flux, the fall of 2021 is shaping up to offer one of the more stacked seasons in recent memory. From festival favorites to awards contenders, scrappy indies and dark horses, this autumn might still contain its own surprises, but one thing…
The Best Movies of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, According to 31 Critics
At the end of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, some pundits expressed surprise that “Titane,” the adventurous body-horror riff on gender fluidity from filmmaker Julia Ducournau, won the Palme d’Or over more traditional entries in Competition. However, many critics who covered the festival this year wouldn’t have it any other way. “Titane” topped IndieWire’s annual critics survey of the best films of the festival, with 31 critics participating from around the world, and Ducournau also topped the category for Best Director.
Lists
THE 2022 VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2 films
The 10 Best First Feature Films of 2021 10 films
It's nearly impossible to feel worried about the future of cinema with such a wealth of new talents debuting their…
42 Must-See Movies Eligible for the 2021 Oscar Nominations 42 films
From "Sound of Metal" to "Soul," catch up now on the best films contending for the 2021 Oscars.
40 Indie Horror Movies Now Streaming, from ‘The Witch’ to ‘Midsommar’ 40 films
From "Hereditary" to "Evolution," "Baskin," and "Suspiria," these are the scariest indie movies streaming has to offer.
Denis Villeneuve’s Favorite Movies: 20 Films the Director Wants You to See 20 films
From "Seven Samurai" and "Dead Ringers" to "Under the Skin" and "The Beguiled," here's a guide to Villeneuve's favorite cinema.
The Best Queer Films of 2020 12 films
From unlikely romances like "Kajillionaire" to nonfiction portraits like "Mucho Mucho Amor," 2020 was packed with quality LGBTQ stories.
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Recent reviews
Review by Sophie Monks Kaufman
Images of Marilyn Monroe are the most replicated of any actress to emerge since the dawn of cinema. Her peroxide curls, cupid’s bow pout, and va-va-voom figure are recognizable to the point that her marketing potential has long since overwhelmed the matter of who she was as a person. To take a swing at saying — or showing — something resonant about the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson, a storyteller would have to go to…
Review by David Ehrlich
You might think it would be strange to see a mega-budget Noah Baumbach movie complete with CGI explosions, a Spielbergian kind of holy terror, and even one sadistically drawn-out jump-scare dream sequence, but the oddest thing about “White Noise” is its persistent sense of déjà vu. Not just the déjà vu of watching such a faithful adaptation of any Great American Novel — although there’s plenty of that — but also the déjà vu that’s supposedly…
review by Adam Solomons
Opening with a clip 0f Donald Trump is a rare unwise choice made in “The March on Rome,” the latest film from Irish author and documentarian Mark Cousins. That’s not because Trump isn’t a fascist (where you have been?), it’s just that Cousins can, and will, tell the story of far-right politics’ inherent illusions — spring-boarding off Mussolini’s famous, semi-fictional voyage 100 years ago in October — with a little more grace than that.
Maybe grace…
Review by David Ehrlich
Slowly, gradually, and then with great enthusiasm, what begins as a staid tale of people hurling CGI at larger pieces of CGI while yammering on about whatever new thing is threatening all existence evolves into something less familiar: A violent, wacky, drag-me-to-several-different-hells at once funhouse of a film that makes good on the reckoning Chiwetel Ejiofor promised at the end of "Doctor Strange" by cutting away the safety net that previous installments of the MCU have tried to pretend wasn’t there.
Review by Jude Dry
Not that we needed a reminder, but Russia’s recent human rights violations — while flagrant — are sadly not a new phenomenon. David France’s “Welcome to Chechnya” documented the horrific genocide being waged against LGBTQ people in what is now a Russian Republic, a terrifying sign of what could lay in store for LGBTQ Ukrainians. Taking an altogether different tack, the stately period drama “Firebird” tells the true story of an ill-fated military romance between two men in Soviet-occupied Estonia during the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Review by David Ehrlich
Sometimes all you need to get a movie — and maybe even to love it — is an opening shot of a willowy young woman sprinting down the sidewalks of Paris with a crushed bouquet of flowers under her arm while a sun-shower of classical piano music sprinkles over the soundtrack at twice the pace of her footsteps. Much like its harried blithe spirit of a heroine (Anaïs Demoustier, as captivating here as Renate Reinsve was in Joachim Trier’s similarly headstrong “The Worst Person in the World,” and twice as restless), Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s “Anaïs in Love” simply refuses to waste any time.
Review by Kate Erbland
On the occasion of their second meeting, Youcef (Theo Rossi) asks Emily (Aubrey Plaza) the question on everyone’s mind: “You can’t make money another way?” Emily, a one-time art student trapped in a series of dead-end jobs because of her criminal past and growing debt, is bruised and bleeding, breathless from pulling off a daring (and maybe even dumb) crime for Youcef, and can only fire back, “You can’t make another way?” Well, no, neither of…