Jonathan Glazer was, by his own admission, a little lost. The writer-director behind Sexy Beast and Under the Skin had been chasing an unformed idea for a movie for years, uncertain of where he would go with the story or what he wanted to say about the subject. “It wasn’t …
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Cord Jefferson wants to tell a quick story. It involves something that happened to a friend of his, although the writer-director of American Fiction is quick to point out that the incident in question could have easily happened to any number of Black creatives he knows, or for that matter, …
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Andrew Haigh‘s All of Us Strangers has its share of mysteries and dreamscapes and detours into the mystical, but it drops a breadcrumb morsel of a clue to viewers early on. You don’t know it on a first viewing — and this is the sort of rich, layered, remarkable work …
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Do you like the Star Wars franchise? How about the new version of Dune? And what about Avatar, The Matrix, Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones? And also: Westerns, samurai movies, Inglourious Basterds, ancient mythology (Greek, Roman, and a smattering of Eastern), the Dungeons & Dragons …
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They were all young once: Don Corleone and Darth Vader, Butch and Sundance, Hannibal and Leatherface, Maleficent and Cruella. And long before he was the world’s best-known chocolatier and distributor of life-changing golden tickets, William “Willy” Wonka was just a twentysomething kid with a top hat, a sweet tooth, and …
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Holocaust movies are now a genre. It makes one more than a little queasy to acknowledge this. We’re talking about art that seeks to recreate an atrocity of such devastating scale and magnitude; to imagine the unimaginable. You can say the phrase “Holocaust movie” and a number of images and …
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“I ought to be thy Adam,” says the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “But I am rather a fallen angel.” It’s the basis for every mad scientist story: You try to create man and end up with a monster. Fuck around with playing God and see what happens. Poor Things …
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“All art is autobiographical,” Federico Fellini once said. “The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” No one would accuse Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s two-and-a-half-hour epic (that’s the theatrical cut’s running time, mind you; there’s a four-hour version waiting in the wings as well) about the French dictator’s rise and fall, of being …
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It’s only about two minutes and 25 seconds, yet it remains the single best thing Eli Roth has ever done. Tucked right in the middle of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino‘s ambitious, mondo-grimy Grindhouse (2007) is a trailer for a fake movie called Thanksgiving. You probably remember it, if you …
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The man is a consummate professional. In the outside world, he could be anyone — just another ridiculous looking dude somewhere between the ages of 32 and 48, the everyguy in line behind you at an Ace Hardware store or in front of you at McDonald’s. But sitting here, in …
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