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…
Review by Kate Erbland
There’s little question that diving deep into the psyches of superheroes can render some dark finds (hell, Batman has turned that into a signature move over the course of numerous film franchises and television series, and that’s just one bat-eared dude), but the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s treatment of the state of young Spider-Man’s (Tom Holland) soul has continually added fresh dimension to an ever-expanding franchise. Spidey has always been an emotional dude — baseline biographical bits…
Review by David Ehrlich
It’s fitting — maybe even fate — that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” should be the biggest and virtually only movie in the world on the week that “The Matrix Resurrections” is released. Both are mega-budget, meta sequels that feed on our collective familiarity with their respective franchises. One is a poison, the other its antidote.
One is a safe plastic monument to the solipsism of today’s studio cinema; an orgiastic celebration of how studio filmmaking has…
Review by David Ehrlich
Gary Valentine is 15 going on 30, Alana Kane is “25” but in air quotes that basically allow her to be whatever it might say on her eventual dream ticket out of Encino, and they first cross paths on a pale 1973 morning in the San Fernando Valley at a strange moment in history when Old Hollywood and New Hollywood have started to overlap. Bing Crosby is still alive even though Jim Morrison is already dead,…
Review by David Ehrlich
Even now, after surviving for more than 100 years and almost as many supposed deaths, the movies are still full of surprises. I submit to you the following as further proof of that phenomenon: At a time when feature-length sci-fi is dominated by franchise spectacle, someone made a tender, quiet, and terrifically affecting post-apocalyptic drama in which Tom Hanks plays a dying engineer named Finch Weinberg who builds a robot to care for his rescue dog…