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.
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.