David Sims

In early December, it seemed like a dam was about to break in Hollywood. With the pandemic certain to stretch on for more than a year and little hope of theaters worldwide returning to full capacity, WarnerMedia announced that it would release all of its 2021 movies on HBO Max and in theaters simultaneously. The massive decision sparked concerns that other major movies would be rebranded as at-home experiences too. But by and large, other studios haven’t followed Warnermedia’s lead.

Doug Liman has never shied away from big challenges. He’s directed genuinely great films such as Swingers, Go, and Edge of Tomorrow; he launched the Jason Bourne franchise; and he once re-edited and re-released his little-seen flop Fair Game mostly for fun. For his next project, he’ll literally travel to space alongside Tom Cruise to film in orbit.

If Disney’s animated-movie formula relies on tales of heroes and princesses, of villains destroyed and personal freedom achieved, then Pixar’s formula is far more mundane. For decades, the computer-animation studio has made movies that portray transcendent feelings and experiences as the products of ordinary jobs, performed diligently by strange little beings behind the scenes. Monsters, Inc., in 2001, revealed that our fears were created by cuddly, blue-collar creatures.

Early in Netflix’s Mank, the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman) ambles onto an outdoor movie set, where he bumps into an array of glamorous characters. In a scene full of repartee with real-life figures such as the actor Marion Davies, the film honcho Louis B. Mayer, and the mogul William Randolph Hearst, the visual details of the environment might seem unimportant. But to Mank’s director, David Fincher, they mattered.

This week, a seismic shift hit the cinema industry. WarnerMedia, one of the world’s biggest movie studios, announced that all of its 2021 films, including blockbusters such as Dune and The Matrix 4, would debut on HBO Max and in theaters at the same time. Each movie would stream for one month before leaving the platform, an unusual arrangement seemingly geared toward giving subscribers a stream of new films, while also allowing movies to play in theaters.

David Fincher’s new film, Mank, begins with a title card announcing the arrival of one of cinema’s first real auteurs. “In 1940, at the tender age of 24, Orson Welles was lured to Hollywood by a struggling RKO Pictures with a contract befitting his formidable storytelling talents,” it reads. “He was given absolute creative autonomy, would suffer no oversight, and could make any movie, about any subject, with any collaborator he wished.

In The Nest, a family moves into an English mansion in the countryside filled with opulent rooms, creaky staircases, and secret passages. The setup is familiar for a horror film: A happy couple buys a mysterious property and discovers, upon arrival, that something is terribly wrong with the house. The movie, directed by Sean Durkin, opens with appropriate portentousness, a discordant piano score clanging over the title card.

In The Nest, a family moves into an English mansion in the countryside filled with opulent rooms, creaky staircases, and secret passages. The setup is familiar for a horror film: A happy couple buys a mysterious property and discovers, upon arrival, that something is terribly wrong with the house. The movie, directed by Sean Durkin, opens with appropriate portentousness, a discordant piano score clanging over the title card.

“Everyone in this world is one of three kinds,” declares Mamaw (played by Glenn Close), the wise grand-matriarch of Ron Howard’s new film, Hillbilly Elegy. “A good Terminator, a bad Terminator, and neutral.” I hate to correct Mamaw, who is trying to encourage her impressionable grandson, J. D. Vance (Gabriel Basso), to follow a righteous path by invoking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s beloved action franchise.

The coming holiday season will be a particularly strange one, with family gatherings limited and travel options diminished because of the coronavirus pandemic. One of my favorite traditions as fall edges into winter is watching movies, whether that means corralling the family to catch new releases at the theater, or arguing over the best film to enjoy at home on the couch.

The screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz is an odd sight on a glamorous Old Hollywood movie set. As played by Gary Oldman in David Fincher’s new biographical film, Mank, he’s a disheveled figure on the sidelines, an acclaimed New York wordsmith brought to serve as a cog in a giant Los Angeles machine.

Dave Chappelle had the same thing on his mind when he came out onto the Saturday Night Live stage in 2016 and 2020, both times hosting the show right after the U.S. presidential election. “Don’t forget all the things that are going on … all these shootings in the last year,” he said in 2016, invoking the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub.

Over the course of 2020, I’ve compiled several movie-recommendation lists for viewers who are at once in desperate need of distraction and yet never able to fully escape the year’s pressing realities. A global pandemic. Economic turmoil. An impending election showdown. Natural disasters. Police killings and unrelenting national protests.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the already infamous climax of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the Amazon sequel that heralds the return of the titular Kazakh journalist and agent of chaos played by Sacha Baron Cohen.

Sofia Coppola is no stranger to ennui. From the death-obsessed ’70s teens of her directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, to the disaffected heroines of Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, and Somewhere, the filmmaker has long fixated on emotionally and physically isolated characters looking for a sense of purpose. Coppola should be the perfect storyteller for 2020, a year when monotony has ruled so many people’s lives.

Horror means something different to everyone. One of my most traumatic movie memories remains the . Karyn Kusama’s movie was a major comeback for a talented filmmaker who had toiled in so-called director jail for years; with a limited budget, she turned an awkward dinner party in the Hollywood Hills into an unbearably tense satire of modern self-help groups.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a courtroom drama where no one—neither the characters, nor the viewers—expects that justice will be done. When the defendants take their seats at the start of Aaron Sorkin’s new Netflix film, the audience already knows that the charges against them are ludicrous and the result of a political vendetta.

Saturday Night Live’s return to television last night seemed intended to project a reassuring air of normalcy. Yes, there may still be a pandemic ravaging the nation, and the president is currently in the hospital afflicted with COVID-19, but Season 46 of SNL was going to proceed much like the past 45, live from Studio 8H at 11:30 p.m.

Miranda July’s cinematic output has always been concerned with human connection. Her first two features, 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know and 2011’s The Future, are crucial tales of generational malaise in a diffuse, internet-dominated culture.

This story contains spoilers for the film Antebellum.Antebellum is the kind of film that requires true storytelling daring to pull off. A horror movie that blurs history, fantasy, and darkest nightmare, it would only work with the cleverest calibration, striking a balance between thrills and social commentary that recalls the films of Jordan Peele or the best episodes of Black Mirror.

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was supposed to be a boon for movie theaters, a light in the darkness after the coronavirus pandemic shut down cinemas for months. Here was an original film from a beloved director, one of the biggest titles of our postponed summer-movie season—surely this would be enough to lure people back to the big screen.

Charlie Kaufman’s first new movie in five years is a horror film. In some ways, the same could be said of every feature he’s made. Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa were eerie tales of existential dread and loneliness. The earlier scripts that made his name as a writer—Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—all had touches of the macabre despite being ostensible comedies.

Warner Bros.“We live in a twilight world.” This phrase is recited often in Tenet, as a passcode that opens doors and gains trust (especially if you get the desired response, “and there are no friends at dusk”).

Almost as shocking as the news that Chadwick Boseman died yesterday at the age of 43 was the revelation that the actor had spent the last four years battling colon cancer. This timeline means he was diagnosed in 2016—the year that he debuted as King T’Challa in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War.

Almost as shocking as the news that Chadwick Boseman died yesterday at the age of 43 was the revelation that the actor had spent the past four years battling colon cancer. This timeline means that he was diagnosed in 2016—the year that he debuted as King T’Challa in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War.

The pandemic has suspended moviegoing in the U.S. for so long that it makes sense to bring it back with a work as crude as Unhinged. The first film to get a national release in theaters since mid-March, Derrick Borte’s thriller does not demand much rumination. A frazzled single mom having a bad day honks her horn at a pickup truck; its occupant, played by Russell Crowe, responds by chasing her around the city in a murderous rage.

Boys State is a documentary about a high-school civics experiment that doubles as a nerdier, nonlethal Lord of the Flies. Every year, more than 1,000 young men, age 16 or 17, descend upon the Texas State Capitol to participate in a mock government: They split into political parties, elect members to offices including caucus chair and Supreme Court Justice, and vie for the highest position—governor.

A year after the release of his 2010 film, Inception, Christopher Nolan invited some of the movie industry’s most prominent directors—Michael Bay, Jon Favreau, Edgar Wright, and others—to a special screening in Los Angeles. He treated them to the first six minutes of his next film, The Dark Knight Rises, on an IMAX screen, the huge canvas that had become a trademark for Nolan’s movies.

Bryan Anselm / ReduxFinally, there’s some good news for Hollywood: Yesterday, Warner Bros. announced that Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated action thriller, Tenet, will debut next month following multiple delays. As the pandemic has shut down cinemas across the globe, Tenet has been widely regarded as the film that could revive a depressed theater industry, and now it has its chance.

Summer blockbusters have started to look the same in recent years: iterations from the same franchises, with comic-book superheroes leading the pack again and again. But because of the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 summer-movie season never really began. With Hollywood’s biggest films delayed for months, or indefinitely, I’ve assembled a list of unconventional and underrated movies with a much more eclectic range of heroes to cheer for or be thrilled by.