Once upon a time, a broad-shouldered actor who started out in the brawny sporting world made a successful leap to Hollywood—first playing villains and quirky supporting roles, then becoming a star who could headline hyper-violent R-rated thrillers as easily as family comedies. Eventually, he parlayed this superstardom into political office.
Stillwater’s premise is simple: What if you were Amanda Knox’s father? This Matt Damon–starring project from the director Tom McCarthy is only loosely based on reality, but the dilemma facing roughneck Oklahoma dad Bill Baker (played by Damon) has the same sensational hook: His daughter is imprisoned in Europe after being found guilty of murdering her roommate in a splashy trial.
The release of Black Widow earlier this month was one of the biggest tests of a new Hollywood paradigm that emerged after the coronavirus pandemic began: the simultaneous rollout of a blockbuster in theaters and on streaming services. The latest Marvel movie opened in thousands of cinemas in the U.S. and Canada on the same day it was made available to Disney+ subscribers for a $30 surcharge. At first, the gambit seemed to work.
On the basis of its advertising, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the indie film Pig is nothing more than the latest over-the-top entry in Nicolas Cage’s bewildering Hollywood career. He’s developed from promising young talent to Oscar winner to action star to, well, living meme.
Crucial to the upcoming family film Space Jam: A New Legacy is the premise that the historic Warner Bros. studios are built atop a supercomputer that algorithmically decides what movies should be made next. That detail is presented as a hilarious bit of sci-fi, but it also comes across as a guilty admission of the truth—that corporate cinema these days isn’t so much written as it is generated by passionless machines that recycle and smash together bits of intellectual property.
Fern (played by Frances McDormand), the hardscrabble hero of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, is the kind of resolute, independent protagonist that has dominated American movies since the dawn of the Western genre. She drives around the country in her van, living as self-sufficiently as possible, and carries a flinty affect with people, revealing little about herself and the turmoil that has led to her life on the road. But Fern is not a bullheaded cowboy fighting on the frontier.
The open, green plot of land that the Yi family moves to at the start of Minari represents something different to each member. The kids, David (played by Alan Kim) and Anne (Noel Cho), treat it as a playground, a mysterious new landscape to run around and explore. The mother, Monica (Yeri Han), views the isolated lot—and the vacant trailer home in the middle of it—with horror and resignation.
Judas and the Black Messiah begins with William O’Neal (played by Lakeith Stanfield) getting ready for the only TV interview he ever gave about his role in the death of the Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). O’Neal appears sweaty and uncomfortable.
Shaka King’s new film, Judas and the Black Messiah, is both a prestige picture and a pulpy thriller. It’s a biographical portrait of the Illinois Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton (played by Daniel Kaluuya), who by the age of 21 had become a major figure in the national party and founded the Rainbow Coalition movement.
Saturday Night Live returned last night after a six-week hiatus, ready to tackle a turbulent period that included the insurrection at the Capitol, the inauguration of Joe Biden, and the second impeachment of Donald Trump—the kind of chaotic political fodder that’s been a mainstay of the show for the past four years.
“When you pray, do you get a response?” A terminally ill cancer patient named Amanda (played by Jennifer Ehle) poses this innocent-sounding but loaded question to her nurse, Maud (Morfydd Clark). Amanda knows that Maud is religious and says her nightly prayers, but Maud reveals that her devotion to God runs even deeper. “Sometimes he talks,” the nurse replies. “Most of the time it’s just like he’s physically in me, or around me.
For the past few years, American cinema has been deprived of one of its most dependable assets—Denzel Washington. Since he earned his ninth Oscar nomination, for the interesting but underseen 2017 drama Roman J. Israel, Esq., the biggest superstar of his generation has largely been missing from Hollywood. (His only other recent credit is the disappointing 2018 sequel The Equalizer 2).
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.