Letterboxd — Your life in film

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, this year’s NYFF Main Slate boasts the latest films from Wim Wenders, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Jonathan Glazer. As previously announced, the festival will open September 29 with Todd Haynes’ “May December,” followed by Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” as the Centerpiece screening. The festival will conclude with Closing Night selection “Ferrari” by Michael Mann, debuting October 15.

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 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…

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…

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…

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.

Fans of Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” have spent nearly three years wondering how leading actress Yalitza Aparicio would follow-up the three-time Oscar winning drama. Aparicio was a schoolteacher plucked from obscurity to star in “Roma,” which resulted in her becoming the first Mexican woman to be Oscar nominated for Best Actress in 14 years and the first Indigenous woman in history. Aparicio has not acted in a second film until now. As reported by Mexican publication El Universal, production on Aparicio’s second feature kicked…

Chloé Zhao won the Golden Globe for Best Director, a history-making victory as she is now just the second woman to win the category in the Globes’ 78-year history. The first and previously only woman to win Best Director at the Globes was Barbra Streisand for “Yentl.” Zhao was awarded Best Director for her work on “Nomadland,” which also won her the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Zhao’s fellow nominees in 2021 were David Fincher (“Mank”), Regina King…

During a three-hour discussion on a recent episode of “The Empire Film Podcast,” Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino revealed the existence of their makeshift quarantine movie club over the last 9 months. As Wright explained, “It’s nice. We’ve kept in touch in a sort of way that cinephiles do. It’s been one of the very few blessings of this [pandemic], the chance to disappear down a rabbit hole with the hours indoors that we have.” Tarantino added, “Edgar is more social than I am. It’s…

A year ago, the film industry was packing their Canada Goose and Bludstones for Sundance, the opening salvo for another frantic 2020. Park City proceeded as usual, with the occasional news about a virus across the world, and we all know what happened next.

“Mank” is a lot to take in. Diehard fans of classic Hollywood cinema and “Citizen Kane” obsessives alike may be well-suited to parse David Fincher’s complex portrait of world-weary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, but even then, this intricate black-and-white drama draws on a lot of reference points that a many audience members may not grasp the first time around.

Comprised of five films, “Small Axe,” Steve McQueen’s new series for Amazon Prime Video, tells a multitude of stories that chart Black British culture and experience. The historical anthology — consisting of “Mangrove” (November 20), “Lovers Rock” (November 27), “Red, White and Blue” (December 4), “Alex Wheatle” (December 11), and “Education” (December 18), all directed by McQueen — is pioneering in its depiction of these previously untold tales. Premiering on November 20, one film will be released every week, and the collection…

It’s a great time to be a Wong Kar Wai fan. Not only is the Hong Kong auteur at work on a new directorial project (“Blossoms,” see more information about the dramatic series here) and planning a mysterious sequel to his 1994 classic “Chungking Express,” but seven of Wong’s best films have gotten brand new 4K restorations courtesy of The Criterion Collection and L’immagine Rtrovata. Janus Films will be rolling out the restorations later this year in a package titled “The World of Wong Kar Wai.”

Cinematography is tough to judge on its own merits, because it can be hard to extract it from the other powers of great visual storytelling. At the same time, every beautiful movie shows the signature of a talented director of photography as much as a filmmaker. In the process of considering the finest cinematographic achievements of this decade, this list includes on gorgeous films that — in some cases — achieve more on the level of cinematography than anything else. The…

The first reactions for David Fincher’s “Mank” are in from film critics and journalists and they’re strong, although the script’s dense storytelling sounds like it won’t appeal to everyone. Netflix scored 10 Oscar nominations for Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” earlier this year across above- and below-the-line categories, and it seems like “Mank” could be heading toward double-digit noms as critics are raving about its cinematography, production design, costumes, and acting, notably Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried.

“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” finds its fake Kazakh journalist (plus teen daughter) pranking Americans across the country, with shocking results that often lead them to reveal embarrassing or offensive beliefs. Despite the many unnerving surprises throughout the movie, however, much about this “Borat” entry is business as usual: star Sacha Baron Cohen has been building his cringe-inducing blend of documentary and performance art for two decades, ever since “Da Ali G Show” hit HBO. Once again, his antics have targeted a wide-range of…

Oscar-winning filmmaker Sebastián Lelio has set up his next project at A24, “Bride,” a genre-bending film set to star Scarlett Johansson. Lelio, whose “A Fantastic Woman” at Sony Pictures Classics won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2018, previously teamed with A24 on “Gloria Bell.” “Bride” is also the latest collaboration between A24 and Apple, who together are this year releasing Sofia Coppola’s “On the Rocks” in theaters and via streaming on Apple TV+.

In 2014, DIY animator extraordinaire Don Hertzfeldt wrote a loopy sci-fi story around some ridiculously cute audio recordings he made while playing with his four-year-old niece Winona. He cast her as a pigtailed stick figure named Emily Prime, and roped in friend and animator Julia Pott to voice the time-traveling adult Emily clone who zaps into the past on a mission to retrieve something from her younger, original self (and leads Emily Prime on a whirlwind tour of the future along the…

Theaters deserve credit: They took elevated steps to keep their audiences safe. Theaters deserve sympathy: They are at the mercy of those who supply movies. Theaters are also in actual dire straits, as Regal Cinemas shuts down, AMC is a junk bond with just six months of cash, and exhibitor lobbyist NATO pleads with the government for financial bailout. At this rate, by the time “Dune” plays next October, the theatrical landscape may look like the barren plains of Arrakis.

As the house of cards that is theatrical distribution 2020 continues to fall, the latest casualty is Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Dune,” which has just been moved off this year’s calendar and into 2021. “Dune” will now open on October 1, 2021, just under a year after its planned opening of December 18, 2020, in IMAX and 3D. Collider first reported the news. Warner Bros is not confirming the release date change at this time but we expect the announcement to be made…