If you’re not going to get a good movie for your money, you may as well get a lot of one. So it goes with Mortal Engines, a YA fantasy novel adaptation that seems to have learned from the overlong Divergent series by packing the entire Mortal Engines trilogy into one movie. Or, perhaps producer […]
The romantic costume drama gets an injection of style and attitude in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. By its description—period piece from the director of Dogtooth, wartime power struggles, a love triangle, cousins jockeying for the Queen’s good graces—you’d have no way of knowing that The Favourite is one of the most ferociously funny films of […]
By its very nature, portraying the life of an artist of any medium on film while incorporating the substance of his work into the overall aesthetic is a risky endeavor. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that visual artist and director Julian Schnabel has helmed two of the most resonant films about the lives and work […]
Viewed purely on its own, Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind is a masterpiece by one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, proving to us that even long after death, he is not out of new ideas. It joins the ranks of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz as a […]
It’s unfortunate that movies about exceptional people usually end up being so conventional. Queen was a band that defied expectations and broke down barriers, redefining what a rock band could be, and Freddie Mercury is not only one of history’s greatest frontmen but an icon for the alienated, particularly for LGBTQ fans. Bohemian Rhapsody, meanwhile, […]
When the great classics of world literature were first being written, they were not meant for students or academics decades or centuries in the future. First and foremost, they were meant to foster a relationship between reader and writer. For Andrew Kaufman, who teaches Russian literature at the University of Virginia, that connection came to […]
We’ve had Halloween sequels for decades. What’s different this time? The same thing that’s different in found footage, possession movies, even the Amityville franchise: fresh blood, literally and figuratively. For many of the slasher sequels and remakes of the ’80s and ’90s, it was difficult to tell what the filmmaker disliked more, the audience or […]
As Janet Armstrong, Claire Foy exclaims, “You’re just boys playing with balsa wood models!” to the NASA scientists preventing her from listening to the direct feed of husband Neil’s (Ryan Gosling) test flight. It’s a terrific dressing down of administrators more concerned with public relations than personnel, and a fitting description of space travel as […]
There may be no better time for The Wife than this moment, in which the role of the male genius whose achievements came at the expense of unrecognized or exploited women is under scrutiny. (A few months in the doghouse, it seems, is plenty of time for celebrated entertainers to atone for sexually assaulting or […]
Before we get to just how bad The Nun is, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the fact that it’s taken the so-called Conjuring Universe this long to deliver a full-on dud. The tone was effectively set by director James Wan in The Conjuring back in 2013, and even when its successors haven’t matched […]