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.
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.
Only during a global pandemic would the biggest film in the U.S. be not a superhero blockbuster or a Fast and the Furious sequel, but a low-budget horror movie about a teenage boy in the suburbs doing battle with a witch living next door. Thanks to the coronavirus disrupting the usual summer release schedule, The Wretched now belongs to a tiny group of films that have topped the U.S. box office for five weekends in a row, including Titanic and Avatar.
Palm Springs is set during a never-ending day. Sorry to give away the big plot point, which comes some 15 minutes into Max Barbakow’s wonderful new comedy, but that premise feels pertinent today in a way that it didn’t when the movie premiered at Sundance six months ago. The film belongs to the growing canon of time-loop stories, which ensnare their characters in a repeating cycle from which there’s no discernible escape.
In an ideal world, I’d expect a Disney+ edition of Hamilton to have some real Broadway flavor. Perhaps there’d be a filmed rendering of waiting in line to have your ticket ripped at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, or a re-creation of buying an overpriced drink before taking your seat. But the stage recording of the hit musical, which starts streaming today, offers no such thing.
Sincerity is the key to every great Will Ferrell comedy. His classics, such as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, are surreal satires of American arrogance. But they work because the title characters are earnest creations—buffoons invested with the genuine belief that what they’re doing is special.
Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is a vital work on an overlooked subject in American film: the experience of black veterans in the Vietnam War, a perspective largely lacking from Hollywood’s 50 years of output on that conflict. The movie follows a group of 60-something retirees, still mourning their leader Stormin’ Norman (played by Chadwick Boseman), who died in battle, as they return to Vietnam to recover his body and a cache of gold bars he was buried alongside.
Many of Judd Apatow’s protagonists have had the mindset of someone who lives in their parents’ basement. Steve Carell’s 40-year-old virgin, Seth Rogen’s many affable stoners, and Amy Schumer’s titular train wreck were all lovable heroes who had plenty of growing up left to do.
“War is about money. Money is about war. Every time I walk out my front door, I see cops patrolling my neighborhood like it’s some kind of police state. I can feel just how much I ain’t worth.” So says Stormin’ Norman (played by Chadwick Boseman), the mythic figure at the center of Spike Lee’s bombastic war epic Da 5 Bloods (out on Netflix today).
The heroes of Judd Apatow’s movies always have some growing up to do. The director’s early television work on comedies such as Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared dealt with the growing pains of adolescence. His filmmaking debut, 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, focused on a grown man (played by Steve Carell) whose life was frozen in place because of his sexual inexperience.
“A clean house is evidence of mental inferiority,” Shirley Jackson (played by Elisabeth Moss) grumbles at her husband as he stumbles around her messy bedroom. By that yardstick, Shirley might be the smartest person alive; her North Bennington abode is so full of dirty dishes and random junk that it feels almost haunted. But that’s the mood the director Josephine Decker wants to conjure in Shirley—one where even a mundane home has a distinct air of spookiness.