Shirley Li

Fast & Furious 6. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Top Gun: Maverick. For decades, Memorial Day weekend has been a reliable time for unveiling a new installment in a popular film franchise, sometimes to the tune of more than $100 million at the box office over the holiday break.
But this year’s Memorial Day weekend returns were meager, delivering a blow to Hollywood. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, earned just $32 million; the other new release, The Garfield Movie, cracked only $31 million.

Even as a little girl, Furiosa understood the value of staying hidden in the wasteland of postapocalyptic Earth, where resources are scarce, war is everlasting, and strangers are immediately treated as threats. But keeping out of sight is not the easiest task in the Mad Max films.

On-screen, during an early scene in The Fall Guy, the stunt driver Logan Holladay pulls off a move that looks utterly chaotic. He steers an SUV that soars across a beach, parts of it breaking off as it tumbles over and over until landing upside down, in a mess of smoke and debris.  
But Holladay could feel, even before he was told, that he’d completed the stunt as planned.

As an actor, Dev Patel has tended to play bighearted softies in rousing crowd-pleasers. Though he’s occasionally ventured beyond such territory—see his brooding, magnetic work in 2021’s The Green Knight—Patel’s résumé highlights include playing an embattled game-show contestant in Slumdog Millionaire, a kind manager in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, and a haunted adoptee in Lion.

There is rarely a good time for Godzilla to show up, but the MonsterVerse version of him could not have picked a worse moment to rampage again. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the fifth entry in Legendary Pictures’s slate of movies featuring lumbering kaiju and dubious continuity, arrives just weeks after Japan’s Godzilla Minus One concluded its impressive box-office run in the States.

This story contains mild spoilers for Netflix’s 3 Body Problem.
In Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem, a scientist being manipulated by an extraterrestrial force is told to look up at the sky one night and watch the universe “wink” at him. The effect—akin to stars blinking on and off in unison—won’t be visible to Miao Wang’s naked eye; he has to use special glasses to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The Oscars are not built for somber appeals about current events, though the show has tried in the past to balance celebration with seriousness. Sometimes that effort has worked: In 2002, after 9/11, Tom Cruise opened the evening with a vague but elegant speech about needing movie magic “more than ever,” which eased the apparent anxiety in the room.

You know you’ve delivered an Oscars speech for the history books when your fellow nominees are getting teary. Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who won the Best Supporting Actress trophy tonight for her work in The Holdovers, spoke about her career with such earnest passion that she received no shortage of weepy faces from her competitors: Jodie Foster could be seen welling up, as could America Ferrera.
Randolph thanked her mother, her acting teacher, and even her publicist—a funny role reversal.

Alejandro, the protagonist of the film Problemista, is an aspiring toy designer who creates idiosyncratic renditions of classic objects. To him, every toy truck should come with a tire that slowly deflates to illustrate the concept of running out of time. Cabbage Patch Kids should hold cellphones that display worrisome notifications, such as an unexpected Venmo charge from a frenemy. My favorite is his concept for Barbies: His version of the doll keeps her fingers crossed behind her back.

Expats, Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s best-selling novel The Expatriates, is a slow-burn drama following the lives of three American women in Hong Kong in the aftermath of a tragedy. Each protagonist deals with complicated feelings of grief as their lives overlap, with the affluent Margaret (played by Nicole Kidman) serving as the story’s anchor.

Earlier this month, I watched what will probably be the strangest movie I see all year. Sasquatch Sunset is an absurdist film chronicling the lives of four Bigfoots (Bigfeet?). The cast, which includes Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg, donned heavy prosthetics, layers of makeup, and furry costumes to play the titular mythical creatures. The script is devoid of dialogue.

For all the glamorous stars and standing ovations, last night’s Emmys were a rather muted affair. The host, Anthony Anderson, didn’t blame his writers for misfiring jokes. The speeches were appropriately emotional. Elton John became an EGOT winner; he didn’t show up to accept his trophy, but everyone seemed extremely happy for him.
That there weren’t many surprises perhaps came as no surprise.

Here are some things I saw while tuning in to last night’s Golden Globes that made me laugh harder than anything the ceremony’s host, the comedian Jo Koy, said on stage: this video of Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy looking lost on the red carpet; the moment The Bear star Ayo Edebiri remembered to acknowledge her “real family also” after thanking her castmates; this tweet.Which is to say, well, Koy bombed.

Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Color Purple, was a serious-minded prestige drama. The film simplified the story but faithfully rendered the book’s emotional weight through Spielberg’s vibrant direction, Quincy Jones’s sweeping score, and a strong ensemble cast.

Jonathan Glazer’s new film, The Zone of Interest, begins with a black screen that lingers for at least a full minute. There’s music in the form of a groaning score, as well as a smattering of noises—faint whispers, rustling leaves—that can be heard through the discordant notes. Otherwise, though, nothing appears.

The protagonist of the new film Poor Things is no ordinary heroine. As played by Emma Stone, Bella Baxter is a corpse reanimated by a man who replaced her brain with that of her unborn child; she’s therefore a blend of juvenile innocence and adult promiscuity, shamelessly charting her own course through life because she’s never been conditioned to meet societal constraints.

People clad in green tracksuits stand nervously in a circle. They’re participating in a “test” on Squid Game: The Challenge, Netflix’s new reality competition series based on the streamer’s hit South Korean drama Squid Game, but they’re really just playing a game of chance. Each player must nominate someone to be eliminated, and then roll a dice. If they roll a six, the person they chose is eliminated.

Watching something made by Nathan Fielder can be an act of endurance. The creator, host, and star of shows such as Nathan for You and The Rehearsal has cultivated a reputation as a merry prankster and a mastermind of hallucinatory television. On-screen, he tends to be deadpan and awkward, making himself the butt of the joke as regularly as he messes with the ordinary people he meets.

The Marvels arrives at a strange moment for Marvel Studios, the company that ushered in more than a decade of spandex-clad blockbusters. Because the (just-ended) SAG-AFTRA strike prohibited its actors from participating in promotional activities, the film is being released with little fanfare and is on track to make less at the box office than most of its comic-book predecessors.

Not long after the Writers Guild of America’s strike started in May, Eugene Ramos began trying to walk the picket lines at least twice a week every week. On such occasions, he dons his sunglasses and baseball cap—equipment for “war,” he calls it—to combat the Los Angeles sunshine, heads to a studio’s entrance, and scribbles his name on a sign-in sheet before joining the rally.

Only Murders in the Building is easy to watch. Each season follows Charles (played by Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez), true-crime podcasters who solve murders in the Arconia, the titular building in which they live. Every episode mines comedy from the trio’s generational differences and explores how their unusual shared hobby bolsters their equally unusual friendship.

Early on in the raunchy talking-animals comedy Strays, a montage plays of four dogs humping inanimate lawn ornaments, guzzling beer leaking from trash bags, and bonding over a plan to bite off a man’s genitals. It’s an inartfully staged sequence, packed with sophomoric jokes and enough f-bombs to rival a Quentin Tarantino film.

Any time I try to recommend How to With John Wilson to someone who has never heard of the show, I struggle to figure out where to begin. HBO markets it as a docuseries by the filmmaker John Wilson in which he explores the idiosyncratic behavior of New York City’s wackiest residents. But calling it a “docuseries” feels wrong; yes, the program relies on footage and interviews Wilson has collected from wandering through the city, but the material is also presented comedically.

This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.As soon as I asked a question about Ken, my call with Greta Gerwig dropped. When the writer-director of Barbie returned, she had no idea what happened. I suggested that of course merely mentioning Ken—the pining and overlooked doll played by Ryan Gosling—would cause a failure of some sort. Gerwig agreed. “The world was like, I don’t care,” she joked.But the world cares very much about the movie he’s in.

This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.The Greta Gerwig–directed Barbie is like a Barbie superfan’s imagination run wild. There are elaborately choreographed dance numbers for the dolls. The dialogue pokes easygoing, knowing fun at Mattel’s products.

Forget Barbenheimer; July has a different double feature you should pay attention to. Two films premiering this weekend celebrate the value of putting on a practical production. One is the newest Mission: Impossible, a thrill ride as heartfelt as it is breathtaking. The other is Theater Camp, a mockumentary that, with apologies to Tom Cruise, might better underscore his message about the importance of committing one’s life to the arts (and at about half the runtime too).

Championing an underappreciated television show can be a joy, an inside secret you’ll share with other fans who have stumbled upon the same discovery. Sure, it’s no fun to feel like you’re the only person in your friend group watching, for instance, Veronica Mars—I certainly did back in the aughts—but as more people caught up and caught on over the years, finally getting to talk about the biggest twists and the best performances felt thrilling.

Joan is an ordinary woman with ordinary complaints. She wishes the coffee at her office tasted better. She thinks her new hairstyle might be a bit much. She loves her fiancé, but worries their sex life isn’t as exciting as it should be. “I feel like I’m not the main character in my own life story,” she explains at a therapy session. When her therapist asks her if she would like that to change, she nods.

In the previous season of Netflix’s sparkly teen comedy Never Have I Ever, Sherman Oaks High’s resident heartthrob, Paxton Hall-Yoshida (played by Darren Barnet), gave a poignant speech at his graduation about persistence. “Push yourself out there,” he told his classmates. “Defy other people’s expectations of you, and don’t ever let a label define you.

If the writer-director Nicole Holofcener could predict the future, she’d guess that no matter what happens to the planet, no matter how much human society evolves and devolves, our descendants will still get emotionally distressed over something small, petty, and entirely irrelevant to anyone else. People hurting each other’s feelings, she told me over Zoom last week, is “going to happen until the end of the world.