It was just supposed to be a nice weekend away, nothing more than a fun jaunt to a friend’s beach house, complete with Seventies soft rock sings-alongs in the car (Kenny Loggins’ “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend’” is a great road-trip jam) and maybe even a quick hand job en …
Read More »Wes Anderson's 'The Phoenician Scheme' Is One of His Best
There are dozens upon dozens of memorable eccentrics, delusional antiheroes, blustery authority figures, sad sacks, screw-ups and all-too-lovable schmucks that populate the 12 feature films and handful of shorts directed by Wes Anderson. It is safe to say that there’s nobody else like Anatole “Zsa Zsa” Korda in his back …
Read More »Mia Threapleton Idolized Wes Anderson. Then She Became the Breakout Star of His New Movie
If Mia Threapleton had to pick an avatar for her creative awakening as a kid, she might choose a fox. She could have gone with a lion, the animal she’d pretended to be during summer camps and after-school “acting clubs” with her friends, and which gave her an early peek …
Read More »'Highest 2 Lowest' Is a Chance to Watch Denzel Go HAM
A new Spike Lee movie is still a calendar-clearing event; in the near 30 years since She’s Gotta Have It helped kickstart the Amerindie boom and introduced the world to a brash, trash-talking auteur from Brooklyn, he’s given us era-defining statements and eccentric sidebars, epic biopics and intimate performance movies, …
Read More »That Doc on Shia LaBeouf's Acting School Is Even Crazier Than You've Heard
In 2018, Shia LaBeouf was feeling heartbroken, adrift, in a state of what he called “spiritual sickness.” So the actor did what a lot of us were doing back then when we found ourselves in serious need of help: He went on Twitter. In the video that LaBeouf posted on …
Read More »Kristen Stewart's 'The Chronology of Water' Is One Hell of a Directorial Debut
“I bled, I peed, I cried, and vomited.” This sentence comes at the end of the second paragraph of The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch’s extraordinary, extraordinarily raw 2011 memoir about growing up, nearly giving up, and straining to getting a grip on a traumatic past. It follows one of …
Read More »Pedro Pascal Speaks Out at 'Eddington' Premiere: 'Fear Is the Way That They Win'
Pedro Pascal spoke out about the political climate under the second Trump administration and the current immigration policies during the Cannes press conference following the premiere of Eddington. The Ari Aster film stars Pascal as a progressive New Mexico mayor battling Joaquin Phoenix’s small-town sheriff amid the Covid pandemic in …
Read More »'Eddington' Is the Perfect Conspiracy Thriller for a Broken, Brainwashed Nation
Ari Aster would like you to go back in time. The writer-director of Hereditary and Midsommar doesn’t need you to travel too far. Just five years. You probably remember a few of the details from May 2020: social distancing, social-media diatribes, swabs being thrust violently into nasal cavities, “I Can’t …
Read More »'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' Is One Long Tom Cruise Victory Lap
Eight movies. Five directors. Three dozen character actors. Two dozen exotic locales, each one of them the perfect background for globetrotting espionage. A dozen action set pieces. A half dozen peeled-off masks. One best-of-show brawl set in a public bathroom. Numerous car chases, motorcycle chases, helicopter chases, explosions, collateral-damage relationships, …
Read More »'Caught by the Tides' Is a Masterpiece 20 Years in the Making
In the early months of 2003, a film that had been building buzz on the festival circuit the year before began to make its way to American arthouses. A story of twentysomethings caught up in petty crime and the punishment of perpetual restlessness — and blessed with the English title …
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