Indisputably, our cinemas are clogged with superheroes. Griping about a trend that’s just a Hollywood fact of life is almost trite, but in the case of Morbius, the dark and gloomy Jared Leto vehicle finally making it to theaters this weekend, I have to register a complaint. Morbius, a “living vampire” who can fly and has super-strength and -reflexes, is the least helpful superhero I have ever seen in a movie.
This year’s Oscars had a slightly chaotic air to them from the start, with awards choppily edited in from earlier in the night, three hosts awkwardly trading off zingers, and bizarre fan-voted prizes given to the films of Zack Snyder. But nothing tonight, or in the 94-year history of the Academy Awards, could have prepared viewers for what happened during the presentation of Best Documentary Feature.
One could easily accuse The Lost City of cribbing from the classics. The fizzy action comedy sees the romance author Loretta Sage (played masterfully by Sandra Bullock) get dragged to a mysterious tropical island, where she’s forced to contend with the kind of high-stakes adventure she writes about. She’s joined there by Alan Caprison (Channing Tatum), the beefy model who graces all of her book’s covers; predictably, the two end up together.
A month ago, another installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series was released, an attempt to modernize the horror franchise while still harkening back to its gritty 1970s roots. It was a creative failure, too reliant on digitally enhanced gore and thudding callbacks. The task of matching an all-time classic seemed impossible.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Ben Affleck, resplendent with stubble and weary eye bags, is a rich but bored husband with a beautiful (but also bored) wife, rattling around in a giant house wondering what to do with himself. Soon enough, a dead body appears.
The union of the filmmaker Kogonada and the actor Colin Farrell might not have seemed obvious at first glance. Kogonada’s debut film, the excellent 2017 indie Columbus, is told with quiet remove—the camera is often placed quite a distance away from the lead actors (John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson).
Pixar’s animated films are typically defined by their impressive ambition. Monsters, Inc.; Inside Out; and Coco cleverly crafted worlds of monsters, emotions, and the afterlife that felt both logical and fantastical. Movies such as Wall-E and Up dared to embrace long narrative chunks without dialogue or juvenile antics. Recent works such as Onward, Soul, and Luca have plotted a path forward for the company that doesn’t rely on easy sequels.
After Yang begins with a dance. The opening credits of Kogonada’s new science-fiction film are an invigorating introduction: a montage of the movie’s entire cast executing a synchronized musical number in groups of four, as part of a virtual competition. The dance moves are rigid, though still delivered with flashes of improvisation, and the entire joyous sequence is the kind more movies could stand to indulge.
The best onscreen Batmen have always understood the value of a good frown. Over the many cinematic iterations of the comic-book hero, one thing has remained consistent in his portrayal: His menacing cowl leaves the bottom half of his face exposed. The actors who did the most with the role in years past (think Michael Keaton and Christian Bale) made full use of their mouths, pouting with all their might.
The premise of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre is, even by the short yardstick of the horror genre, quite simple. Some youths traveling through rural Texas come across a ramshackle house where a family of cannibals live. Leatherface, a brutish, childlike member of the clan wearing a mask made of human skin, attacks them with a chainsaw (among other weapons). That’s pretty much it.
Play just a few minutes of any Uncharted video game, and the basic concept becomes clear: What if you could be the main character in a blockbuster action-adventure film? Embodied by the dashing treasure hunter Nathan Drake, the player leaps from boulder to boulder, explores ancient ruins, and exchanges gunfire with evil mercenaries in a modern update on Indiana Jones.
The plot of Marry Me is hard to describe without it sounding a little addled. Kat Valdez (played by Jennifer Lopez), a world-famous singer about to marry another pop star during a joint concert, ditches her betrothed at the last second when his infidelity is revealed. To replace him for the ceremony, she invites a stranger onstage, a math teacher and charming single dad named Charlie Gilbert (Owen Wilson), who was unwittingly holding a Marry Me sign passed to him by a friend.
Since his return from self-proclaimed retirement five years ago, Steven Soderbergh has been working at a breathtaking pace, directing a stream of robust thrillers and talky dramas. At a time when Hollywood pundits are wringing their hands about the death of mid-budget grown-up movies, Soderbergh has become a leading creator of frugal filmmaking, doing some of the most wide-ranging work of his career.
The power of Jackass has always rested with the peanut gallery. Almost every ridiculous, painful stunt Johnny Knoxville and his gang of nimrods have pulled over the past 20-plus years has come with a reliable laugh track: the rest of the ensemble gathered around to watch, doubled over and cackling as someone subjects themselves to unspeakable injury.
The power of Jackass has always rested with the peanut gallery. Almost every ridiculous, painful stunt Johnny Knoxville and his gang of nimrods have pulled over the past 20-plus years has come with a reliable laugh track: the rest of the ensemble gathered around to watch, doubled over and cackling as someone subjects themselves to unspeakable injury.
Julie (played by Renate Reinsve), the 30-year-old protagonist of The Worst Person in the World, keeps getting stuck in conversations about her future. The issue is relatable for many a Millennial; Julie is beautiful, intelligent, and hardworking, but she’s struggling to understand what her place in the world should be, what career she should pursue, what kind of person she should settle down with.
Every Joe Wright movie, for better or worse, is brimming with theatricality. The British director has tackled literary adaptations (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina), true-story dramas (The Soloist, Darkest Hour), and action-adventure (Pan, Hanna) in his surprising and varied career. Regardless of genre, he’s not a filmmaker who strives for grounded realism.
Drive My Car involves a lot of driving, but in one of its best scenes its main character is simply describing driving. Yusuke Kafuku (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima) is an actor and director who, because of his developing glaucoma, has been assigned a chauffeur, Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), by the theater festival he’s working for. Asked how her driving is, he says, “I think it’s great. When she speeds up or slows down, it’s very smooth and doesn’t feel heavy at all.
Five years ago, I talked to George Clooney at the Toronto International Film Festival about his latest directorial effort, Suburbicon, a strange hybrid of black comedy and social satire that failed to connect with critics. At that time, Clooney was more than 30 years into an acting career that had seen him star on the hit TV show ER, play Batman, win an Oscar, and work with directors such as Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, and Alfonso Cuarón, on top of making his own films.
Until the return of Spider-Man, every film’s box-office performance during the pandemic had come with an asterisk. Some movies, such as Black Widow and The Suicide Squad, were available to stream the day they opened in cinemas, helping explain somewhat depressed ticket sales. Others, such as No Time to Die and F9, relied on international revenue to boost domestic takes that were middling by pre-coronavirus standards.
The Matrix was set at the end of history. Released in 1999, the Wachowskis’ sci-fi film painted a quotidian picture of the late 20th century: The protagonist, Thomas Anderson (played by Keanu Reeves), lived in a bland-looking megacity where he worked a dull cubicle job and pondered the hopeless future that many feared at the end of the millennium.
Guillermo del Toro has always had a special fondness for misfits and monsters. His Hellboy films made superheroes out of paranormal beings, while his most recent Oscar-winning film, The Shape of Water, spun a tender romance between a mute woman and an amphibious fish-man. That the writer-director would take on Nightmare Alley next makes sense. The melancholic thriller about a carnival con man is based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham that was adapted for the big screen once before, in 1947.
Steven Spielberg has been making films that feel like musicals for his entire career. No, the fearsome shark of Jaws and dinosaurs of Jurassic Park didn’t belt out a tune, and heroes like Indiana Jones and Tintin weren’t dancing through their set pieces, but they might as well have been. Spielberg is an expert at the careful choreography of camera blocking; his gift for legibly communicating complicated sequences of movement on a massive scale is second to none.
Mikey Saber, the preening, confident chump who’s the ostensible hero of Sean Baker’s new film, Red Rocket, enters on-screen to a loud and familiar tune: “Bye Bye Bye,” by *NSync. The song is a piece of mainstream pop from yesteryear (it’s a shiver-inducing 21 years old), and its usage in this arty indie film seems laced with irony.
Alana Kane (played by Alana Haim), the wayward 25-year-old at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, Licorice Pizza, is very bored and a little broke. Stuck in odd jobs and still living with her family in the San Fernando Valley, Alana finds herself drawn to a fast-talking, hilariously self-possessed 15-year-old named Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a child actor bounding from one adventure to another in 1970s California, years before the invention of helicopter parenting.
In House of Gucci, opulence is not always alluring. But Ridley Scott’s new movie takes its time before delving into the insidious, gilded world of the Italian luxury label. The film, which charts the turbulent marriage of the fashion heir Maurizio Gucci (played by Adam Driver) to the ambitious Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga), instead opens with the pair’s gentle romance.
Watching Saturday Night Live has always been an uneven experience—there are duds and gems, silliness and darker satire, and often stark shifts in tone from one sketch to the next. But given the anxious state of the world today, watching the show has started to feel uncannily like doomscrolling through a social-media feed. The news the show is riffing on has been unrelentingly bleak for years, and the show’s satire has only grown more apocalyptic.
Jonathan Larson is someone who writes like he is running out of time. That’s the underlying message of “30/90,” the first song in his original musical Tick, Tick … Boom and an energized ballad about the theatrical composer’s worries that he hasn’t accomplished enough—at the age of 30. As he hammers away at a piano, Larson notes that his idol, the composer Stephen Sondheim, contributed to his first Broadway show at the age of 27.
The protagonist of Reinaldo Marcus Green’s new film, King Richard, is, to put it mildly, an unconventional networker. Driving around Los Angeles in a ramshackle VW bus, Richard Williams (played by Will Smith) is focused on finding a coach for his daughters, whom he is hell-bent on molding into tennis prodigies.
If you assembled a focus group of frequent moviegoers and asked them to describe the elements of a good action film, they’d probably come up with something along the lines of Red Notice. The star-laden blockbuster, which is dropping on Netflix this week, features three A-list names, all in familiar roles: Dwayne Johnson as a tough FBI agent, Ryan Reynolds as a motormouthed art thief, and Gal Gadot as a mysterious criminal who forces the two men to team up against her.