The narrative of this year’s Oscars was: how to pick? Between Sinners and One Battle After Another, voters put two majorly successful, critically beloved, star-driven studio releases at the top of the nominations pile. While One Battle After Another had seemed like the odds-on Best Picture favorite for months, Sinners was collecting enough trophies, and getting so much love at precursor ceremonies, that it felt impossible to fully count out.
The run-up to the Academy Awards is a fun, ridiculous, and loopy monthslong stretch. It also encourages something vital to Hollywood’s artistic ecosystem: Movie studios, in the hopes of achieving Oscar glory, put money toward more stylistically challenging projects, rather than consistently aiming for the broadest common box-office denominator.
Look at a list of the highest-grossing actors of all time, and you’ll see a lot of familiar names. The group includes franchise-hopping performers such as Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, and Zoe Saldaña; legacy A-listers such as Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks; and one 74-year-old Swede who has built a bustling, storied career doing a little bit of everything.
Monster movies come in strange bunches. Vampires dominated the screen in the 2010s, as gritty zombie hordes had the decade before that. Lately, we’re awash in Frankensteins, each adding stylized flavor to Mary Shelley’s novel: Zelda Williams’s goofy high-school version, Lisa Frankenstein; Yorgos Lanthimos’s steampunk reimagining, Poor Things; and Guillermo Del Toro’s faithful-to-a-fault take, currently up for nine Oscars.
When the news broke yesterday that Netflix had dropped out of the monthslong bidding war to control Warner Bros. Discovery—including its massive film library, range of TV networks, and news empire—the streamer’s stock immediately jumped. It was a curious market reaction, but one that seemed to reflect the deep mistrust that Netflix’s investors, and much of the media industry at large, had about the proposed deal.
Robert Duvall didn’t speak a word in his first film performance. When he was cast as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, he was but an up-and-coming theater actor, and his role as the silent, mysterious neighbor to the heroine Scout Finch was small but pivotal.
At the box office earlier this month, four out of the five top-grossing movies were not from big companies. There was Solo Mio, an inspirational romantic drama starring Kevin James from the faith-based distributor Angel Studios; a filmed concert from the K-pop group Stray Kids; and a French adaptation of Dracula from the director Luc Besson that had already made big money overseas.
Wuthering Heights, the writer-director Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s groundbreaking Gothic novel, is her best film to date—a heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time at the cinema. It is also a gooey, grimy mess. The camera lingers on dripping egg yolks and squishy, bubbling dough; the protagonist, Cathy Earnshaw (played by Margot Robbie), must wade through pig’s blood on her way to the moors near her home, leaving a trim of viscera on her gorgeously anachronistic dress.
The first question to confront when considering The Pete Davidson Show, a new Netflix series that the streamer is calling a “video podcast,” is: What is a podcast? The term can be a little difficult to pin down; what initially referred to downloadable audio files you ported onto your iPod is today used for most online radio. Now the notion of a podcast is transforming again to include filmed entertainment.
Sam Raimi is one of Hollywood’s finest purveyors of junk. I say this with love and reverence, and with full acknowledgment that he’s the man behind such masterpieces as Evil Dead II and A Simple Plan. But the director has spent decades digging for gold amid pulpier genres, turning out oddball horror, thriller, and comic-book movies.
Timothée Chalamet’s promotional campaign for his new film Marty Supreme has been a little unconventional thus far. Staged Zoom sessions. Promotional blimp work. A lot of chatter about a jacket nobody can buy. When Chalamet did The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, he was flanked by an entourage of people with giant orange ping-pongs for heads.
For someone best known as an actor, Bradley Cooper’s core interest as a filmmaker is perhaps unsurprising. Thus far, he has been entirely consumed by examinations of performance—first digging into a pop musician’s stratospheric career climb in A Star Is Born, then wrestling with Leonard Bernstein’s desire to reimagine classical music in Maestro. Both movies were hefty pieces of entertainment, filled with love, death, and grand human experiences.
Marty Mauser cannot stop the hustle. In Marty Supreme’s electrifying opening moments, the audience is introduced to the wiry 20-something (played by Timothée Chalamet) in 1950s New York. He’s working as a shoe salesman, talking a fussy older customer into buying a fancier brand with easy confidence. Almost immediately thereafter, we learn that his boss (who happens to be his uncle) wants to make him the store manager. But Marty, a working-class Jewish kid, won’t hear of it.
When Mad Men arrived on HBO Max earlier this week, after years languishing on the less-subscribed-to AMC+ service, the streamer’s parent company, Warner Bros., heralded it as a triumph. Finally, the much-acclaimed Emmy magnet would be available to watch in glorious 4K resolution; viewers would now have “the opportunity to enjoy the series in a fresh way,” as the WB executive Royce Battleman trumpeted.
Agnes Hathaway, the elusive heroine of the director Chloé Zhao’s new film, Hamnet, seems happiest when in nature: retreating to the woods as often as she can, collecting mushrooms, tucking into tree hollows to sleep. She spends so much time outdoors that rumor spreads across her English village about her mother being a witch. It’s a believable claim; Agnes, as played by the actress Jessie Buckley, is raw, brooding, and fundamentally enigmatic.
Jeremy Strong has, of late, been prone to transformation on-screen. In last year’s The Apprentice, he became a late-in-life Roy Cohn, the venomous mentor to Donald Trump—all bluster with a thick Bronx accent and short temper. He earned plaudits for his dedication to sinking into the role, and his first Oscar nomination. Next year, he’ll play Mark Zuckerberg—older and cannier—in Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network.
“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.