Hollywood loves a good comeback story, and the new Disney+ film Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers has a great one. No, not that of the titular chipmunk heroes, starring in their first project since the 1990 conclusion of their animated series.
Alex Garland has never shied away from unusual endings. His 2018 sci-fi film, Annihilation, adapted a mind-bending best seller and put a poetic spin on its final showdown, in which Natalie Portman performs a balletic fight with an alien copy of herself. Then he made the TV show Devs, an inscrutable tech thriller whose conclusion unfolded over multiple parallel universes.
One day, deep into production on David Lynch’s 2006 film, Inland Empire, a producer approached the actor Laura Dern in a panic, trying to parse a strange request from the director. “He took me aside and said, ‘Laura, David called me this morning, and I can’t figure out if it’s a joke,’” Dern, the movie’s lead, recalled in an interview. “‘He said, “Bring me a one-legged woman, a monkey, and a lumberjack by 3:15.
The last time Sam Raimi made a comic-book movie, nobody had ever heard of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That film was Spider-Man 3, in 2007, the final entry in his trilogy of adventures starring Tobey Maguire as the hero. It seemed like a story at war with itself; the director’s earnest zaniness was bumping up against studio demands for more villains, more plot twists, and more money on the screen. It was a box-office success but underwhelmed critics.
Cinemas are pretty much always the best way to watch a movie. The darkened screening room is the ideal place to immerse yourself, distraction-free, in a film’s sound and visuals. That’d be a fine setting for Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a tale of online alienation that debuted at 2021’s Sundance Film Festival and hit theaters and some streaming services this month.
Ten years ago, Netflix started offering its subscribers exclusive TV shows (we all, of course, remember the hit series Lilyhammer). An approach that at first seemed like a fad quickly yielded a handful of awards juggernauts—and then became a model for the entire TV streaming industry. For the past decade, the company has spent freely to fatten its library, eventually making hundreds of shows and movies a year, with the goal of staying ahead of its many online rivals.
In the early scenes of Céline Sciamma’s gentle new film, Petite Maman, 8-year-old Nelly (played by Joséphine Sanz) is exploring a haunted house of sorts—the quiet abode of her recently deceased grandmother. The location is mundane.
The magic of Robert Eggers’s breakout first film, The Witch, a horror fable about a Puritan family besieged by supernatural forces, lay in its authenticity. Not from the close attention to period detail, though that was itself impressive, but from the earnestness of its tone, which presented every supernatural element as matter-of-factly as the grim realities of corn farming in 17th-century New England.
Ambulance is an action movie with a simple hook, the kind of “high concept” story pitch that one can just imagine a Hollywood executive’s eyes lighting up at. Two bank robbers, the adoptive brothers Danny (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) and Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), hijack an ambulance after a heist gone wrong, using it to sneak by the cops.
Ambulance is an action movie with a simple hook, the kind of “high concept” story pitch that one can just imagine a Hollywood executive’s eyes lighting up at. Two bank robbers, the adoptive brothers Danny (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) and Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), hijack an ambulance after a heist gone wrong, using it to sneak by the cops.
When Sonic the Hedgehog made his theater debut two years ago, after decades as a famed video-game mascot, the cinematic equivalent of a ball and chain was placed around his speedy little legs. He still looked every inch the big-eyed blue speedster from Sega’s many games, but the movie made him spend all of his time palling around with a local cop in small-town Montana instead of battling alien robots in phantasmagoric, loop-de-loop-filled locations like the Casino Night Zone.
The first thing the viewer hears in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria is a loud but distant thud. The vague sound stirs Jessica Holland (played by Tilda Swinton) from her sleep and then begins to haunt her. Over the next two hours and 15 minutes, Jessica tries to understand what it is that she keeps hearing, a distracting noise seemingly perceptible only to her.
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.