If the Academy Awards were pretaped, the public would never have seen Will Smith slap Chris Rock last year. Sure, the incident would be known about and reported on, but the bizarre, disquieting electricity of that moment came from it happening live, on a worldwide broadcast, during a meticulously choreographed event. Ever since then, the question has been how Rock would officially respond.
Every Oscars season brings new surprises: first-time nominees, snubbed Hollywood veterans, a list of honorees spanning blockbusters to indies. But one kind of movie is always a contender: the biopic. A true-story film is one of the most reliable forms of awards catnip; seven of the past 10 winners for Best Actor in a Leading Role were nominated for their portrayal of a real figure, sometimes a well-known celebrity, such as Freddie Mercury or Winston Churchill.
Pretty early into Cocaine Bear’s running time, I started searching desperately for the metaphor. Elizabeth Banks’s action-comedy-horror is, as you might have heard, about a black bear in 1980s Georgia who eats a lot of cocaine that fell out of an airplane. The cocaine makes her angry and hungry for more cocaine, and given that she’s already a big bear with sharp claws, the combination is quite distressing for the people in the forest around her.
Marvel movies have never been excessively attached to the real world, given their affinity for Norse gods, alien warriors, flying wizards, and the like. Still, some of these films had at least a vague sense of tactility, and perhaps the most grounded hero was plucky little Ant-Man, played by Paul Rudd, the perfect smirking everyman of the 21st century. Ant-Man’s power is that he can get very small (though sometimes he’ll switch it up and get very large).
Steven Soderbergh is the rare filmmaker who views a sequel as a chance to do something different. In a moviemaking era suffused with safe and predictable follow-ups, Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve remains a sterling example of a strange, surprising left turn from its predecessor’s formula.
One of pop culture’s favorite locales of late is a secluded resort for the rich and irresponsible, a landscape defined by both gorgeous vistas and cutting satire. Think The White Lotus, Glass Onion, the culinary getaway of The Menu, or the doomed luxury yacht of Triangle of Sadness. It’s the perfect setting for a story to deride opulent foolishness, give some wealthy villains their comeuppance, and critique the churning, ever-widening gyre between the haves and have-nots.
For once, the Academy Award nominations seemingly arrived without too much existential panic about the entire enterprise. The latest slate of honorees, announced this morning by Riz Ahmed and Allison Williams, includes two of the most commercially successful films of the year, a bunch of crowd-pleasing word-of-mouth hits, and some genuine indie and foreign surprises.
Every Thanksgiving weekend, once the holiday itself has passed and people are looking for things to do for the rest of the break, I get texts from friends seeking movie recommendations: What’s worth seeing in theaters right now? In 2022, that query became more of a plea.
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night, maybe having been roused by a mysterious noise, and tried to look around the room while your eyes adjusted to the dark? That unsettled feeling is exactly what Kyle Edward Ball’s new horror film, Skinamarink, aims for: an atmosphere where you’re not quite sure if you’re still dreaming, and where every shadow on the wall is imbued with menace.
In the landscape of video-game adaptations, a specific quandary comes up again and again as the medium grows in ambition: How do you translate a game that was itself clearly inspired by film and television? When The Last of Us was released on PlayStation in 2013, I marveled at its cinematic verisimilitude.
Come January, Hollywood always undergoes a strange shift in its major releases, from awards-centric fare and festive hits to the doldrums of the post-holiday season. Studios usually regard this period as a dumping ground for low-quality genre films that seem designed to be quickly forgotten. But 2023 is different, because this year, viewers have a special new friend to help them acclimatize: a pint-size robot girl named M3GAN.
Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project.
Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project.
This article contains mild spoilers for the film Knives Out.When I last spoke with the filmmaker Rian Johnson, in 2019, he was two years removed from working on one of the world’s biggest franchises—Star Wars—and had quickly turned around a smaller, nimbler mystery-comedy set in wintery Massachusetts called Knives Out. That was enough of a hit that it started a new franchise around Daniel Craig’s lilting detective, Benoit Blanc.
Joanna Hogg is probably the most understated filmmaker to currently have an entire cinematic universe revolving around her. The British director emerged with her 2007 debut feature, Unrelated, which had an autobiographical tinge, and went on to make two other brilliantly quiet interpersonal dramas, Archipelago and Exhibition. But it was with 2019’s The Souvenir that Hogg began to build out an interconnected series that blurs the line between fiction and memoir.
These days in Hollywood, scale seems to be one of the easiest things to achieve on-screen. Breakthroughs in visual-effects technology mean that audiences get to watch one epic battle after another, and are accustomed to seeing dozens of superheroes zipping around pointlessly. James Cameron has always been a director who harnesses the latest CGI advances to whip up thrills, but with Avatar: The Way of Water, his first film in 13 years, he faces an undeniable challenge.
Even as the movie industry continues to recover from the pandemic’s debilitating effects, the ongoing story of film is not about loss of quality. This was a year filled with cinematic delights from every part of the world, with first-time filmmakers doing everything they could to shock audiences, and old masters delving into their darkest reminiscences for indelible works of memoir.
Let’s get this out of the way quickly: The Menu is not—I repeat, not—a movie about cannibalism. I say this not to spoil potential viewers but to reassure, since it’s the first question almost anyone who’s aware of the film has asked me.
Dave Chappelle’s comedy has always walked a practiced knife-edge; he’s one of America’s most successful and discussed stand-up comedians because he can suck the air out of the room in a second and fill it back up just as quickly. He can have his audience whispering “Did he just say that?” but will then undercut his own provocation with an impish grin.
This story contains major spoilers for Barbarian.On the opening day of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, one film was on everybody’s lips. As I ran into other critics around town, they kept asking, “Have you seen Barbarian yet? You’ve gotta.” That kind of chatter is typical at a festival, but the only wrinkle was that Barbarian wasn’t even playing at TIFF.
This story contains spoilers for the entire first season of House of the Dragon.One of the most common complaints about serialized television in the streaming era is that it moves far too slowly. Whole seasons contain plotlines that probably could fit within one episode; characters spend a year getting ready to do something.
Reflecting on a career spent making movies and plays that have featured exploding cats, surprise decapitations, and other inventive acts of destruction, Martin McDonagh let out a rueful laugh. “I don’t think I ever set out to shock,” he told me. “Every single one of them just came out that way.
Angela Lansbury was a boundlessly versatile performer, with a decades-long career filled with roles that played to her many strengths. She was a chilling villain in The Manchurian Candidate, a flighty and flirty accomplice to the psychological torment of Gaslight, and a winsome tavern singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray, earning an Oscar nomination for each role.
Not long ago, a colleague who’s squeamish about horror movies described some of the scariest films she’d been able to make it through. One of the titles she mentioned? Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. But wait, I thought, that’s not a horror movie. A tense thriller, maybe, a satirical drama with some frightening set pieces, but not something that would’ve been put on the “horror” shelf in video stores, back when video stores existed.
Todd Field’s new film, Tár, opens with a scene that should feel inherently uncinematic: an onstage Q&A. The conversation, between Lydia Tár (played by Cate Blanchett) and Adam Gopnik (gamely playing himself), is the kind of hoity-toity event that’d be a coveted ticket for a certain highbrow milieu. Tár is the preeminent conductor of her generation.
The celebrity appeal of Billy Eichner has always rested on his outrageous causticity. The host of the viral series Billy on the Street, Eichner would barge around New York, holding a microphone in one hand and often dragging a celebrity with the other, barking questions at passersby.
The world of Don’t Worry Darling is picture-perfect at a glance: a company town called Victory, California, where a bunch of mid-century-modern homes have magically sprouted in the desert. Imagine someone opened a Mad Men theme park in Palm Springs, with the men outfitted in skinny ties and horn-rimmed glasses, and the women in glitzy dresses keeping everyone’s martinis fresh.
Robert Zemeckis has always been a director fascinated by avant-garde technology. His biggest films of the ’80s and ’90s—Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, Forrest Gump—were all revolutionary in their use of visual effects and CGI. In the 2000s, he dove into the nascent field of motion capture to produce the animated movies The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol.
This story contains spoilers for Episode 2 of House of the Dragon.The opening credits of Game of Thrones famously offer a dynamic bird’s-eye trip around a pulsing map of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy world. The sequence serves partly as a practical guide to a sprawling universe.
George Miller’s 2015 insta-classic Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the most propulsive movies ever made. It tracks a caravan of souped-up vehicles blasting across the desert in a glorious postapocalyptic battle. His follow-up is, on the surface, quite the opposite. Three Thousand Years of Longing is primarily focused on a long conversation between two characters wearing bathrobes in a fancy Turkish hotel room. But that first impression sells the film short.