Lawyers for Donald Trump have sent a cease-and-desist letter to the producers of the biopic The Apprentice in an effort to prevent the sale and distribution of the film. After the movie — which stars Sebastian Stan as the then-young real estate scion alongside Jeremy Strong as infamous Trump lawyer …
Read More »'Action Is Character': George Miller on the Wild Ride of Making 'Furiosa'
Imagine a kindly grandfather-type figure sitting by an open hotel window, staring out at the sea on the French Riviera. The early sun hits his shock of gray hair in a way that almost makes it look like there’s a halo above it. The black-on-black ensemble suggests he’s arrived in …
Read More »'The Apprentice' Is the Most Brutal Donald Trump Biopic Imaginable
Every superhero gets an origin story. So, for that matter, do most supervillains. The Apprentice drops viewers into New York circa 1973, when a 34-year-old resident of Queens walked in to the upper-crust establishment on the Upper West Side known as Le Club. He went there in an attempt to …
Read More »Cate Blanchett's Cannes Film 'Rumours' Named After Fleetwood Mac Album, Directors Confirm
The directors of the Cate Blanchett-starring Rumours, one of the movies that premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival, confirmed at a press conference Sunday that the film is named after the classic Fleetwood Mac album. Rumours — described as “dark comedy” about a group of G7 world leaders …
Read More »The Most Delirious Film at Cannes? A Transgender Cartel-Gangster Musical Starring Selena Gomez
Imagine a world in which Stephen Sondheim made Sicario. Yes, that Stephen Sondheim; yes, that 2015 thriller about the world of Mexican drug cartels. Got that? Good. Now add in Selena Gomez as the wife of a narco who, in a moment of deep grief and remembrance, utters the line, …
Read More »'Kinds of Kindness' Is Weird, Wild, and Way More Than the Sum of Its F-cked-Up Parts
Those lucky enough to have discovered Yorgos Lanthimos right as he was establishing himself as a world-cinema weirdo — we’d carbon-date the initial who-the-fuck-is-this-guy?! moment as mid-2009, when his breakthrough film Dogtooth was worming its way through the festival circuit — remember what a shock it was to encounter the …
Read More »'Megalopolis': Francis Ford Coppola's Decades-Long Dream Project Is Truly Epic
Some 45 years ago, the Cannes Film Festival invited Francis Ford Coppola to bring his latest project to the French Riviera for a special “work-in-progress” screening. The movie’s production had already achieved a mythic status as an example of Murphy’s Law made manifest, from last-minute actor replacements to monsoons to …
Read More »'Furiosa' Isn't Just a Prequel to 'Fury Road' — It's a Perfect Origin-Story Saga
She is watchful, wary, able to ward off Wasteland degenerates and War Boys alike with a well-aimed headshot. She’s a survivor, a scrapper, someone who makes a compelling case for smeared axle grease as a postapocalyptic fashion statement. You need someone to do repair work on a War Rig going …
Read More »'The Animal Kingdom' Asks: What If Humans Suddenly Switched Species?
As far as high concepts scenarios go, Thomas Cailley’s The Animal Kingdom has been blessed with a primo what-if premise: France is in the middle of a pandemic. (No, not that one.) A good deal of the population has been stricken with what doctors and scientists have been calling a …
Read More »'The Taste of Things' Is the Best Food-Porn Movie of the Year
Movies are designed to dazzle through sound and vision. That leaves three out of five senses untapped, at least until cinema reaches its inevitable maximum-immersive “feelie” stage. The Taste of Things, the latest from the French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, is one of those rare works that gives you the …
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