David Sims

“On some levels, I understand that this is like a breakup.” So said Marc Maron on his podcast last week, monologuing in his garage for a final time. WTF With Marc Maron wrapped its 16-year run yesterday; the comedian interviewed Barack Obama, a conversation recorded in Obama’s office. The chat was something of a victory lap for Maron, who made headlines for interviewing the then-president 10 years prior. (Back then, the pair met on the host’s home turf.

No franchise in Disney’s deep corporate Rolodex is more odd and misshapen than Tron. The original 1982 film was for years a pop-culture bookend: The tale of a video-game developer who gets zapped into his own software, it was the first movie to significantly use CGI in its production. As visually groundbreaking as it was, Tron is also narratively puzzling—built on an internal logic of digital life that required lots of exposition.

The Upper West Side deli where I meet Benny Safdie is filled with a particular kind of grumpy old-school Manhattanite. They’re the type of figure who has tended to populate the filmmaker’s movies: many of them neurotic, and more concerned with finding a means to their own ends than placating the people around them. With his brother, Josh, Benny has built a career on his fascination with these occasionally surly characters, often men on the downswing.

As Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this year, the discussion about the show’s legacy rarely focused on its comedy. Instead, the emphasis was placed on its lore and rituals as well as the Sphinx-like decision making of the show’s creator, showrunner, and executive producer, Lorne Michaels.

The new crime comedy Caught Stealing unfolds in the year 1998, traveling across a distinctly grungy New York City—all dingy subway platforms and drab Chinatown apartments. The time frame differs just slightly from that of the novel it’s based on, which is set in 2000. I can think of only one reason the director, Darren Aronofsky, might have decided to make this tweak: The film shares its time and place with his debut feature, Pi, which premiered that same year.

This article contains spoilers for the movie Weapons.
The most daring aspect of Weapons is that it answers all of its big questions. The sleeper-hit horror film, written and directed by Zach Cregger, has a distressing but undeniably hooky premise: One night, at 2:17 a.m., all but one student in the same third-grade class got up out of their beds and ran out of their suburban homes with their arms outstretched, vanishing into the night.

This was supposed to be the summer superhero movies became fun again. At first, that appeared to be true: Superman, released earlier this month, relaunched DC’s previously dour cinematic universe as a brighter and bouncier affair; the film zips from one encounter to the next with sincere aplomb.

When CBS embarked on the project of replacing David Letterman as the host of The Late Show, in 2014, the network spared no expense. It hired Stephen Colbert, who had collected Emmys and acclaim while hosting his Comedy Central talk show, The Colbert Report; gave him total creative control; and fully revamped Manhattan’s Ed Sullivan Theater so Colbert could make the show’s longtime venue his own.

Early last year, Pixar appeared to be on the brink of an existential crisis. The coronavirus pandemic had thrown the business of kids’ movies into particular turmoil: Many theatrical features were pushed to streaming, and their success on those platforms left studios wondering whether the appeal of at-home convenience would be impossible to reverse. Disney, Pixar’s parent company, premiered the Pixar films Soul, Luca, and Turning Red on Disney+, and each was well received.

In most Superman movies (and there’ve been a fair few of them over the decades), no one else like Superman exists. The blue-and-red-costumed Kryptonian is typically unique in our world—an alien god plopped into an unfamiliar society, inspiring both reverence and fear. Not so in this latest iteration, the character’s first solo movie in 12 years.

The strangest thing has happened to the Jurassic Park films over the past 32 years. In the original movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, the characters were mesmerized by dinosaurs. They saw these amazing beings, resurrected from DNA that was hundreds of millions of years old, and either stared in wonder or shrieked with fear. (Spielberg is known to be pretty good at capturing that whole “awe” thing.) But since then, each successive sequel has chipped away at that sense of discovery.

The stakes are almost embarrassingly simple: A man needs to win a race. F1 is a loud sports epic that thrusts the viewer into the high-octane, technocratic world of Formula One racing. These competitions are decided by complex car engineering and tactical pit stops; individual drivers are only as important as the car companies they work for.

The question that beguiles almost every film fan, from the obsessive cineast to the casual enthusiast, is the simplest one: What should I watch next? Endless carousels on streaming services that feature very little of note don’t provide much help.

The horror genre has come to feel oversaturated with message films: artistically rendered stories that use scares less to frighten and more to manifest psychological or philosophical themes. So when the Philippou brothers—a pair of Australian directors (and twins) who got their start on YouTube—premiered their feature debut, Talk to Me, it felt like a burst of youthful energy.

Final Destination, as a horror franchise, is known for its reliable results. Each of its first five movies begins with someone having a premonition of a terrible disaster (a plane crash, a highway pileup, a roller-coaster accident), persuading a group to avoid it, and then spending the rest of the movie dodging the Grim Reaper, who seeks to collect the souls he lost. Death exists in these films as an amorphous concept; there’s no cloaked villain carrying a scythe.

Hollywood trade publications often call attention to how the film industry is in danger: If a hotly anticipated movie bombs at the box office, it’s evidence of people not going to theaters anymore; if a studio shelves a completed film in exchange for a tax write-off, it’s a sign of diminished optimism in cinema both commercially and artistically.

There’s a legendary bit of movie-nerd lore that sums up Hollywood’s shift away from using intricate little puppets. During preproduction on Jurassic Park, the stop-motion artist Phil Tippett was working to create animatronic dinosaurs—and then a visual-effects demo helped convince Steven Spielberg that CGI was ready to handle the assignment. After watching the digitally created reptiles himself, Tippett exclaimed, “I think I’m extinct,” a paraphrase of which made it into the script.

Ryan Coogler, the writer-director of the new film Sinners, has made five movies in his 12-year career, all of them well-received hits. Fruitvale Station is a wrenching true-crime drama, while the film Creed dynamically reimagines the Rocky franchise. He is perhaps best-known, however, for Black Panther and its sequel, building a world that became a cultural phenomenon and a high-water mark for Marvel.

The director Alex Garland’s 2024 film, Civil War, was gritty, realistic, and often horrifying to watch, but it was fundamentally a flight of fantasy. One could debate just how fanciful its near-future depiction of America going to war with itself over a president who refused to leave office was, but for all that movie’s intense effort to depict combat realistically, Garland was only imagining the reasons for it.

The first time I booted up the video game Minecraft, in 2011, it was still in its beta-testing infancy—just a hint of the multimedia, kid-friendly powerhouse it’d one day become. I tooled around with total ineptitude in the pixelated forest environment that my avatar had been dumped into, until the sun set and a zombie ate me.

On the first episode of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, Netflix’s new talk show, the comedian gathered a panel of 11 actors who have played Willy Loman, the tragic protagonist of the classic play Death of a Salesman. He lobbed queries at the group, which included recognizable stars (among them Christopher Lloyd) and fresh-faced students, asking them to answer in character—but not about their performances or the play itself.

Steven Soderbergh films are like buses: There’s always another one coming. This isn’t a complaint, exactly, but the director’s prolific nature is on my mind with each of his new projects—he released Presence two months ago, and he’s already got another one? How much effort could he have put into it? Black Bag, a taut spy thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, is an argument for the filmmaker’s ruthless efficiency.

The director Bong Joon Ho’s new movie, Mickey 17, at first seems like a major pivot from his previous one, 2019’s Parasite. After winning Best Picture at the Oscars for the domestic (if gonzo) Korean black comedy, he’s following it up six years later with a lavish Hollywood sci-fi epic starring Robert Pattinson. But even though Mickey 17 is set in outer space about 30 years from now, its hero isn’t that different from those found throughout Bong’s filmography: a working-class schmo.

The biggest compliment I can give Last Breath, a gripping, workmanlike new movie about an undersea rescue, is that I would happily watch a version of it where absolutely nothing goes wrong. The director Alex Parkinson’s debut dramatic film is based on his 2019 documentary of the same name; both recount an incident in the world of “saturation diving,” in which a technician was stranded 300 feet under the North Sea.

The director Sean Baker probably didn’t predict this outcome  while he was filming Anora, his latest small-budget indie project, in the snowy Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach—that a couple years later, he’d be accepting Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It was one of five prizes that his spiky indie dramedy collected on Hollywood’s biggest night. After a drawn-out awards season in which the biggest contenders seemed often in flux, Anora dominated at a fun if elongated Oscars ceremony.

In 1956, an aspiring young actor named Gene Hackman joined the Pasadena Playhouse in California, struggling to find a way into a field he’d been fascinated with since childhood. Hackman, who was born in 1930, had already served five years in the Marine Corps, then bounced around New York, Florida, Illinois, and other places without much luck.

With last year’s slow-roll Oppenheimer sweep, the leading Oscar contenders seemed to have sewn up their wins long before the ceremony began. This edition of the Academy Awards has been quite the compelling scramble by comparison, as half a dozen movies have gained and lost supposed front-runner status over the past few months.

This may sound like a hopelessly naive thought about a superhero movie, but Captain America: Brave New World presented an exciting opportunity. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, now on its 35th entry, has probably been exhausted at this point, yet the latest installment’s advertising was intriguing. It promised a thinky thriller in which the new, Black Captain America butts heads with a growly, militaristic president (played by Harrison Ford).

The Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh announced that he was retiring from filmmaking in 2013. By 2017, he had returned to work, releasing the delightful heist caper Logan Lucky, and in the years since, new Soderbergh films have become as seemingly inevitable as death or taxes.

In the years since it began a committed effort to diversify and expand its membership, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has weathered strikes, the pandemic shutdown of theaters, and constant hand-wringing about declining TV ratings and potential cultural irrelevance. But one trend has remained consistent for the Academy Awards, the voting body’s annual big event: The Academy has been getting more and more international.