David Sims

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.

Sequels are clogging theaters this fall—just look at the new entries in the James Bond, Venom, Halloween, and Marvel franchises. Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II is yet another retread, following up on her 2019 movie about a young filmmaker coming of age and navigating a doomed relationship. But this is not a typical sequel, and in a cinematic landscape often dominated by lazy, cash-grab blockbusters, Hogg’s work stands out.

Every Edgar Wright film to date has been a bubbling cauldron of movie homages, winking visual gags, and genre tributes. The British director emerged as a noteworthy filmmaker in 2004 with Shaun of the Dead, a “rom-zom-com” that chucked classic George A. Romero–style zombie movies in a blender with a comedy about a man-child who just needed to grow up.

When I asked him about his film adaptation of Dune, the writer-director Denis Villeneuve quickly held up his prized copy of Frank Herbert’s book, a French-translation paperback with a particularly striking cover that he’s owned since he was 13. “I keep the book beside me as I’m working,” Villeneuve told me cheerfully over Zoom. “I made this movie for myself. Being a hard-core Dune fan, the first audience member I wanted to please was myself.

The 1978 film Halloween, for all its notoriety, seems almost quaint compared with the countless slasher movies that have followed it. In John Carpenter’s singular masterpiece, we watch a masked serial killer named Michael Myers murder four people in the fictional town of Haddonfield. In the opening scene of Halloween Kills, the latest edition in this indestructible franchise, a group of plucky firefighters rescues Myers from a burning building. He promptly annihilates 11 of them.

The Last Duel introduces Jean de Carrouges (played by Matt Damon), its ostensible hero, with the gritty fanfare expected from a Ridley Scott epic. Much like the valiant former Roman general Maximus of Gladiator or the stouthearted Crusader Balian of Kingdom of Heaven, Jean proudly charges into battle, sword in hand, hacking at the enemy with no regard for his own life.

Julia Ducournau does not make movies that audiences are likely to see themselves in. Her knockout debut feature, Raw, follows a veterinary student who develops a craving for uncooked flesh, mostly of the human variety. Like so many horror films, the work is suffused with metaphors about hard-to-discuss topics—in this case, sexual maturity and peer pressure.

Saturday Night Live began its 47th season with a brand-new cast member staring down the camera lens, a pointed announcement that the show is looking to stay ahead of the curve. That actor was James Austin Johnson, a comedian who gained a Twitter following for his short, surreal impressions, most famously of Donald Trump, during which he rambled through the streets while delivering strange soliloquies in the former president’s voice.

One of the most underrated aspects of the cinemagoing experience comes when you emerge from the theater, turn to the person you came with, and realize they’re as excited as you are to talk about what you just saw. Although I missed plenty about going to theaters when they were closed during the pandemic, the absence of those shared moments stands out the most.

Clint Eastwood’s first Hollywood swan song was 1992’s Unforgiven, a dark, bitter Western that bade goodbye to the genre that had made him famous. He was 62 at the time, and after some 30-plus years of riding horses on-screen, the actor-director seemed ready to retire from the fictional range. Since Unforgiven, Eastwood has made 23 more films, starring in 10 of them, and many of those projects could also be considered curtain calls.

In The Card Counter, William Tell (played by Oscar Isaac) keeps his emotions under strict control. He’s a poker player, and the slightest facial expression could give away his hand. William’s life is equally circumscribed: He travels around the country from casino to casino, subsisting on low-stakes games and doing nothing to draw attention to himself.

First comes a whistled tune—“The Farmer in the Dell,” delivered with extra menace. Then the sight of him—Omar Little, played by Michael K. Williams, stalking the streets of Baltimore in a billowing duster concealing a shotgun. Omar was the most indelible character on The Wire, one of TV’s greatest dramas, and the show was most viewers’ introduction to Williams, a captivating screen presence who was found dead yesterday in Brooklyn at the age of 54.

What is the value of a human life? This is the question with which the lawyer Kenneth Feinberg (played by Michael Keaton) opens the new Netflix film Worth, stressing to his students that he’s not posing it as a philosophical query. He is a high-powered mediator who assesses damages in cases involving unexpected, large-scale death—such as lawsuits involving Agent Orange or, in the case of this film, the September 11 attacks.

What would a modern Cinderella look like? The classic fairy tale has been told so many times on film, always following the same basic arc: A charming girl, who is forced into servitude by her mean stepmother and wishes to go to a ball, ultimately gets what she wants with the help of three mice and a magic fairy. Cinderella is the world’s most famous underdog, but she’s also more of a plot vehicle than a deep character.

The 1992 original Candyman film, my favorite piece of horror cinema from that decade, is about an interloper. Helen Lyle (played by Virginia Madsen), a plucky, white graduate student researching urban legends in Chicago, is drawn to the city’s dilapidated Cabrini-Green projects, where she learns of a monster named the Candyman: a vengeful Black ghost who appears if you say his name five times while looking in a mirror. The movie becomes a tale of seduction and fascination.

Last week, I attended my first film screening that required proof of vaccination against COVID-19 upon entry. I presented my Excelsior Pass and photo ID and swanned on in. The entire process took 15 seconds, and in return I received the invaluable assurance that my fellow cinemagoers had also been inoculated. My experience was in line with New York City policy, which mandates proof of vaccination for many indoor activities.

Hugh Jackman has spent a surprising amount of his career floating in water tanks. In Reminiscence, the new sci-fi noir thriller on HBO Max from writer and director Lisa Joy, the actor plays Nick Bannister, a former soldier turned private investigator of the mind, probing people’s memories while they’re submerged in a big, futuristic bath.

Ruby Rossi, the titular “child of deaf adults” in Sian Heder’s new film, CODA, lives a bifurcated life. Early in the morning, she works on her family’s fishing boat, sorting fresh-caught haddock from the boots that get stuck in their net and, as the only hearing member of the Rossis, helping translate sign language to vendors onshore. Then she goes to school, often so tired that she’ll fall asleep at her desk, to the bemusement of her teachers.

The year 2001 was a pivotal one for Hollywood. The indie wave of the ’90s was still cresting, but an era of franchises and unending sequels and reboots was on the horizon. Some of the hits of 20 years ago (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Fast and the Furious) have footprints that extend into the present day. It’s hard to imagine other daring work (A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Vanilla Sky) making as big of an impression now.