From Cannes 2025:

Dear Evan Hansen for Holocaust survivors.

Read more at Decider: decider.com/2025/05/23/scarlett-johansson-eleanor-the-great-movie-review/

From Cannes 2025:

In director Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, several threads that might otherwise feel disparate are made to work in beautiful tandem. The Norwegian director’s follow-up to The Worst Person In the World — a great film about millennial malaise — brings lead actress Renate Reinsve back to the fore in a radically different, but no less touching and hilarious work about a great many things. It’s about fathers and daughters who can’t communicate, about physical spaces holding onto memory, and about the very process of pouring yourself into art in a desperate attempt to stay afloat. The result is bittersweet, self-reflexive cinema that reveals an immensely powerful portrait of anguish, and of re-building one’s sense of self.

The movie follows thirty-something sisters Nora (Reinsve), a stage actress, and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), an academic researcher, shortly after their mother dies, and their estranged father, the esteemed filmmaker Gustav Borg (a thorny Stellan Skarsgård), re-enters their lives. In a seeming attempt to reconnect with Nora, Gustav presents her with a script written with her in mind. “It’s about a mother,” he says before trailing off, unable to bring himself to say it’s about his mother. When Nora refuses to play the part, Gustav casts the up-and-coming Hollywood starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), leading to a film (and a film-within-a-film) of understated emotional quests, as the characters begin searching for answers to questions they can barely verbalize...

Read more at Decider: decider.com/2025/05/22/joachim-trier-sentimental-value-movie-review-cannes-film-festival-2025/

From Cannes 2025:

Director Julia Ducournau’s Alpha is incredibly strange — not for anything it presents, but for how its every narrative and aesthetic decision feels like the wrong one. The tale of a mysterious disease, an overbearing mother, and a vulnerable teenage girl, it unfurls in awkward ways, through an HIV metaphor verging on confounding, and several flailing gestures at prevalent social issues, which feel vestigial in function. With a thundering score that underlines obfuscated drama and convoluted symbolism, it becomes hard to take seriously beyond a point, making for arguably the worst movie in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival...

Read more at Decider: decider.com/2025/05/21/julia-ducournau-alpha-movie-review-cannes-film-festival-2025/

From Cannes 2025:

At this point in his career, Wes Anderson is practically a genre unto himself. But even viewers attuned to his wavelength might find his latest film a challenge. The Phoenician Scheme, a star-studded 1950s espionage farce, is a surprising step backward for the whimsy maestro, whose signature aesthetic has often revealed a hidden thoughtfulness, and a melancholy outlook about the state of things. It’s not that these layers aren’t present here; rather, the issue is Anderson fails to reconcile the growing tension between his surface and subtext, despite a few flourishes that gesture towards breaking through his stylistic constraints. The result might just be his least engaging work.

The film begins in explosive fashion, with mid-air antics befitting classic 007 (What if Wes Anderson directed a Bond movie? Well, now we know). It’s the umpteenth failed assassination attempt against rich industrialist Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), which leads him to reassess his estate. Rather than leaving his wealth to his eight adolescent sons, who live in a dormitory near his mansion, Korda now hopes to make his estranged daughter Leisl (Mia Threapleton) his sole heir, for which he summons her from her nunnery. It just so happens that Korda is widely rumored to have had Leisl’s mother murdered. So, in order to clear his name and win his daughter over, he sets out on a global fact-finding mission which doubles as a protracted business venture. The story’s scattered, episodic unveiling — during which Korda negotiates with various powerful figures played by the likes of Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed and Bryan Cranston — is broken up by title cards listing the specifics of his conglomerate’s gap financing.

That the film harps on these financial specifics hardly makes for an interesting backdrop, but Anderson makes sincere overtures towards crafting a father-daughter story of reconciliation, with a spiritual twist. Between Leisl’s piety, and Korda’s close calls granting him visions of the afterlife — a stylized venue for cameos from several Anderson regulars, like Bill Murray as the Abrahamic God — The Phoenician Scheme takes on a far more religious bent than the director’s previous works. It often centers the Biblical question of what it would take for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, given the tycoon’s ruthless practices.

In a film adorned with facsimiles of ancient Egypt at every turn, the afterlife and judgment loom large in what is, at the very least, a thematically cohesive work. It plays, at times, like a lament for the contemporary state of things, where every industry and facet of life feels like it’s being strip-mined for parts by billionaire self-interest. However, intuiting these themes is one thing. Experiencing them comedically and dramatically is another, and The Phoenician Scheme seldom translates its lingering charms and sorrows through its characters or designs.

For one thing, del Toro feels entirely wrong for the part of Korda, despite the role being written with him in mind. He’s too withdrawn and understated to lead a movie that requires comedic modulation and outward charisma, especially opposite relative newcomer Threapleton, who plays Leisl with a familiar, Andersonian deadpan. A large chunk of the runtime involves exchanges between the father-daughter pair, but there’s never a meaningful enough contrast between their energies to keep things exciting. The punchlines feel drawn out, resulting in awkward cuts and delivery with too much dead air. Despite Alexandre Desplat’s propulsive score in the vein of The French Dispatch, the images here never quite feel as exciting as the music...

Read more at Inverse: www.inverse.com/entertainment/the-phoenician-scheme-review-wes-anderson-cannes

From Cannes 2025:

Neeraj Ghaywan’s “Homebound” is the first time in ages that a mainstream Hindi-language production has felt vital — at least since Ghaywan’s own “Masaan,” which premiered at Cannes 10 years ago. A drama in which aspirations collide with harsh political realities, its tale of impoverished young men trying to escape their circumstances proves to be both a moving character piece, as well as a searing indictment of modern India.

The stage is set when lifelong best friends Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) — a Muslim and a Dalit, respectively — board a crowded train to a nearby city. They, along with countless other disenfranchised youths, hope to gain access to a handful of increasingly exclusive government jobs, as their only means of making a decent living. In Shoaib and Chandan’s case, they hope to become police trainees, under the optimistic belief that the official uniform will render them immune to discrimination based on religion and caste. However, soon after this prologue, an entire year es without an official answer, leaving them in social and financial limbo.

The duo’s domestic lives, in their tiny North Indian village, are sketched with vivid physical and emotional hues, denoting their generational plight. For the gruff, outgoing Shoaib, a job and money are a matter of urgency, given his disabled father’s impending knee surgery, until which he can’t work in the fields. The more reserved and simmering Chandan hopes to earn enough money to build his parents a concrete house, so his mother doesn’t have to work. Both young men also harbor a sense of yearning: Shoaib wants to stay close to home, near the sights, fragrances, and people he knows, while Chandan begins attending college as he waits, if only for the sake of his crush, the similarly lower caste but slightly more well-to-do Sudha (Jhanvi Kapoor).

Shoaib and Chandan start out as a playful pair, but their struggle to find work leads to increasing frustrations, driving a wedge between them. Khatter and Jethwa put on immensely endearing and unpredictable performances. Unfortunately, unlike her “Dhadak” co-star Khatter, Kapoor (who was similarly raised in the Hindi film industry) hasn’t yet learned to shed the enunciations and gestures that suggest someone who was raised in a major city, surrounded by wealth. This makes Sudha’s dynamic with Chandan play like the kind of inter-class or inter-caste romance typical of Indian dramas, despite what’s actually intended. However, this disconnect is limited to only a handful of scenes, since Kapoor’s role is truncated to the point of feeling perfunctory. It’s the movie’s only major flaw, but it works in its favor, allowing the leading duo the lion’s share of the runtime.

“Homebound” is built in the vein of a traditional Bollywood social drama, which is to say it contains broad political statements delivered practically down the lens, but its leads inject this otherwise obvious cinematic form with moving, naturalistic nuance. Where some of the dialogue is overt, other exchanges tease hidden details that slowly reveal themselves over time, like the way Chandan hesitates to introduce himself with his full name, lest he be judged on his social standing. Shoaib, ever the romantic about what the two of them are owed as human beings, chastises Chandan for not embracing his identity, and the advantages that come with quotas for the oppressed, even if it means embracing the scorn of conspiracy theorists...

Read more at Variety: variety.com/2025/film/reviews/homebound-review-1236405833/

From Cannes 2025:

Spike Lee can shift tones mid-movie like few other directors – and in Highest 2 Lowest, he swings that pendulum as hard as he possibly can. Based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime drama High and Low (as well as its inspiration, the novel King’s Ransom by Ed McBain), it’s a curious melodrama that evolves in fascinating ways and boasts a tremendous lead performance from Lee’s long-time collaborator Denzel Washington. To say that the pair still has it after all these years and all their successes together and apart would be a massive understatement.

It might not seem that way at first, though. Highest 2 Lowest’s story of kidnapping, class, and moral dilemmas takes Lee back to New York City, his hometown and the setting for some of the most vital entries in his filmography. (Do the Right Thing and 25th Hour, to name a couple.) But the vibrancy the city lends those movies takes a while to emerge in this one, which opens within the comfy, cushy Brooklyn penthouse of record producer David King (Washington). This is by design, though it can be concerning, given Highest 2 Lowest’s initially stilted quality and the sensory assault of Howard Drossin’s ceaseless, oppressive soap-opera piano score.

If the action in the early goings ever moves from these ritzy confines – adorned with expensive artwork depicting Black history and pop culture from Lee’s own collection, and magazine covers highlighting King’s achievements – it’s to show that this is a tale of two New Yorks. In the one occupied by the main character, he glides by the riff raff on the sidewalks in a luxury SUV. Even something as simple as an establishing shot of a long line of police cars, arriving as soon as King calls them to report the apparent kidnapping of his teenage son, speaks to how the city bends to his will. That the child being held for an eight figure ransom is actually the son of King’s less well-to-do driver, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), puts this split into focus – as does the loaded question of whether or not King will still pay to save the kid.

However, as soon as he’s forced back to his old Bronx neighborhood by the kidnapper (played by A$AP Rocky), Highest 2 Lowest undergoes a radical transformation, resulting in some of the most electric filmmaking of Lee’s career. King is thrust into the other New York in a sequence modeled after the breathless chase of another Big Apple classic, The French Connection, winding through crowded streets during a Puerto Rico Day parade and into the subway on a train full of fans headed to Yankee Stadium. It’s here that Drossin’s score accelerates, becoming propulsive rather than plodding. The fabric of the visuals – courtesy of cinematographer Matthew Libatique – goes from cold and austere to sweltering and more textured, with all the film grain and cinéma verité of a classic, grimy New York indie. This sequence proves that Lee is no King, who strives to show that money and influence haven’t diluted his talent and authenticity. The director has neither missed a step, nor lost touch with the city...

Read more at IGN: www.ign.com/articles/highest-2-lowest-review-denzel-washington-spike-lee

From Cannes 2025:

With Eddington, 21st-century horror maestro Ari Aster makes an ambitious swing towards politically flavored comedy – but he misses just as wildly with this dusty, small-town modern Western. The first misfire of Aster’s directorial career makes a futile attempt to capture and satirize the rampant paranoia and cultural fault lines of the summer of 2020 via its COVID-era tale of bitter rivals running for mayor. With flailing jabs in every direction, Eddington ends up with shockingly little to say, and meanders for much of its 145-minute runtime.

There’s some superficial enjoyment to be found, especially in the lead performances: Eddington is an extremely slight work in the body of a comedy that’s only ever funny because the likes of Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone make real attempts at finding something beneath the surface. But given the material they’re working with, they often come up short. Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the rebellious, alarmingly individualistic sheriff of the fictional Eddington, New Mexico, who spends his time listening to right-wing talk radio and attempting to politely (but aggressively) navigate his way around pandemic mandates (or insisting that others do so). His messy domestic life informs at least some of his frustrations, between his withdrawn, younger wife, Louise (Stone), and their intrusive, extended-stay house guest: Louise’s mother, Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell).

Whenever Joe comes home, he finds Louise and Dawn lost down their own separate online rabbit holes. Louise gravitates towards the teachings of new age self-help messiah Vernon Jefferson Peak (a severely underused Austin Butler), while Dawn constantly absorbs and regurgitates absurd conspiracy theories from YouTube. At a glance, these details are not entirely unfamiliar: When Joe scrolls through his phone, he’s met with a variety of content that’s either incendiary or mind-numbingly banal, as any of us might. However, much of this is just window dressing, worthy of a chuckle before we forget about it (Eddington certainly does). Fed up with the state of things, Joe decides to run for mayor against incumbent candidate Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a smirking politician who harbors an angry streak at home, and who hopes to inject the town with tech jobs by welcoming the construction of a massive data center – portending the popularity of AI in a few years’ time. This is perhaps the closest Aster comes to offering any lasting social commentary.

Given Joe’s attempts to skirt the very rules he’s supposed to enforce, it’s hard not to be unsettled by some of the movie’s early interactions. Rightly so: Phoenix is incredibly adept at barely buried simmering, ensuring that Eddington begins in unnerving territory. This, however, ends up a promise unfulfilled. There’s little exploration beyond the period-piece façade of social distancing and social unrest, which hint towards wider details and context we never see, and whose effects seldom trickle down into anyone’s behavior beyond the first time we meet them. It’s a film in emotional and thematic stasis, even when things appear to change rapidly. It may be set in 2020, but the sickening roller-coaster feeling of living through that moment in time is rarely reflected.

When protests over the police killing of George Floyd begin spreading throughout the United States, the people of Eddington begin preparing for an explosion – but the blast feels only partially formed, and entirely insincere. On one hand, as the town’s more conservative residents grow furious at the increasing presence of Black Lives Matter protesters, Joe and his deputy Guy (Luke Grimes), both white, try to navigate the awkwardness of open discussion with trainee Mike (Michael Ward), who is Black. This subplot makes for an amusing flourish, but it unfolds at length without ever engaging with its central tension beyond fleeting punchlines, and the comedy is seldom informed by Mike’s perspective or experience. On the other hand, the protesters are caricatures of teenagers who don’t know better than to adopt an enlightened vocabulary they barely understand in order to get laid or to show off online. All the while, a lingering enmity between Joe and Ted looms larger, concerning a possible sexual impropriety between Ted and Louise, which may have ushered the latter into her cocoon.

Whatever Aster’s attempts with this premise, he spins far too many plates, and his approach ensures that Eddington’s satire is no deeper than a kiddie pool. The film plays with incendiary material but fumbles it constantly, by rarely (if ever) making genuine attempts to examine the humor or absurdity found within its characters’ points of view. Aster’s grief-tinged horror movies Hereditary and Midsommar depend on a genuine, detailed understanding of who he’s making suffer and why, but he doesn’t apply those skills here. Its construction is ideologically flimsy, as though drawn from a highly removed liberal angle on both right-wing frustrations and left-wing activism. For instance, the mess of conspiracies in Joe’s life keep the more paranoid characters at odds (rather than their paranoia feeding off each other), while the film’s engagement with the era’s discourse on race and policing is no more detailed or honest than that of the teen characters delving into these topics for the very first time...

Read more at IGN:https://www.ign.com/articles/eddington-review-pedro-pascal-joaquin-phoenix-emma-stone-ari-aster-a24

From Cannes 2025:

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic Breathless is a film of grand importance and influence, which you might not know from watching Richard Linklater’s “making of” throwback Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave). Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The Cannes 2025 competition title is slight in historical scope, but it makes for a delightful comedy-drama in the vein of Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! and Dazed and Confused.

Whether or not Linklater reveres the French New Wave maestro seems irrelevant to the movie’s telling. He takes Godard’s ideas seriously without deifying the man, because Nouvelle Vague isn’t so much about singing the praises of Breathless as it is about observing the compelling moment of its creation. Save for a handful of effective close ups, there’s a distance between Linklater’s camera and the events as they unfold, which grants him permission to ape the outward texture of Breathless—black and white film stock, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and so on—if not its techniques.

For the uninitiated: Breathless broke new ground with its oblique aesthetic decisions, from lengthy walk-and-talks to jump cuts, though these have since become common visual parlance. Linklater’s own Before trilogy owes a huge debt to Godard, but rather than re-visiting this cinematic source code, the Texas native instead opts to craft a movie that feels entirely his own, with the rhythms of something with more classical (and more classically American) in its framing, editing and staging. Perhaps Godard would have balked at this depiction—Linklater’s fictional version of him (played by a resplendently fun Guillaume Marbeck) practically does—since the outsized influence of American cinema was a huge sticking point for the French legend, and a big reason Breathless exists at all. However, that Linklater’s homage doesn’t involve pale imitation is something of a relief. What could possibly live up?

The result is a hangout movie first and foremost, one that understands that while Godard went on to push the boundaries of cinema right up until his death, his directorial career began with a scrappy independent project that would’ve likely been fun and frustrating to those yet to be convinced of his genius. He was, after all, only 29 when he made his mark, a fact of which Nouvelle Vague never loses sight, with its litany of ing characters playfully dressing him down.

The movie begins by introducing Godard alongside fellow New Wave enfant terribles Francois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest) and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), fellow critics for French magazine Cahier du Cinema, who all recently made their directing debuts. Godard is the last of their cohort to take the leap, leaving him to navigate both the labyrinth of film funding and pressures of expectation. However, Marbeck’s droll delivery helps craft a cool, calm and collected Godard, who spouts philosophical quotes from behind his shades, and almost always poses with a cigarette as he saunters across the frame. He’s a mystery of sorts, not unlike James Mangold’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Only where Mangold’s camera felt in awe of his central subject, Linklater’s seems more amused by his youthful gamble...

Read more at Decider: decider.com/2025/05/18/richard-linklater-nouvelle-vague-movie-review-cannes-film-festival-2025/

From Cannes 2025:

Based on the 2011 memoir by American college swimmer Lidia Yuknavitch, Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water rebukes the “vanity project” label often foisted on first time actors-turned-directors with its harsh, disorienting cuts, yielding an immensely uncomfortable movie. Elliptical in structure, but precise in its telling, Stewart’s masterful debut begins with brief, impressionistic flashes of blood from a sudden miscarriage running down the shower drain, alongside the agonizing wails of its protagonist: Yuknavitch, as played by English actress Imogen Poots. The subsequent narrative — which begins with stream-of-consciousness vignettes accompanied by overlapping, whispered voice over — guides us through the difficult tale of a childhood marred by abuse, and an adulthood spent trying to untangle its knots, while embodying the tumultuous, unspoken emotional fallout.

Making its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, this period biopic verges on the avant-garde, two forms of cinema which are usually diametrically opposed, but are forced here into a powerful collision. There’s perhaps no better reflection of Stewart’s own career in front of the camera, as former YA mega-star turned international arthouse darling, who has worked with (and claims to learned from) the likes of Personal Shopper’s Olivier Assayas and Spencer’s Pablo Larraín. Given Yuknavitch’s stature as a prolific author, the story also becomes about its own telling — which is also true of the book — but the adaption builds on this theme in remarkable ways, to the point of Stewart engaging with the material as a means to project questions of her own authorship into its story.

Take, for instance, Poots’s livewire performance as a troubled teen (and eventually thirty-something), and whose physical and emotional language creates a character itching to crawl out of her own skin, as though she wants to be anywhere but on screen, not unlike a lifelong celebrity trying her hardest to avoid the spotlight. Her voice and mannerisms don’t so much resemble the real Yuknavitch as they do a prototypical Stewart performance. The resemblance is uncanny.

However, before these similarities comes to light, the film remains laser focused on minor details, from the five o’clock shadow of Yuknavitch’s stern, short-tempered father as he yelled at her without reason, to the way her addict mother rested her hands on the table, refusing to intervene, to her older sister’s helpless stares. We’re introduced to Yuknavitch through her childhood memories of specific moments and sensations, opening the door to Stewart and editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm’s jagged, repetitive cuts between closeups of items and body parts only half in-frame.

This framing is also key to Yuknavitch discovering her attraction to women; when the camera embodies her gaze, it does so with a sense of shameful hesitation, at least at first. But by the time she throws herself headfirst into all manner of sexual experiences, Stewart and cinematographer Corey C. Waters’s camera becomes unafraid to focus gently on physical and emotional vulnerabilities, often in the same breath.

Scene transitions are often marked by harsh flashes in the 16mm film stock, as though the end of one memory (and the beginning of the next) were defined by light leaking into celluloid at the tail end of a reel. This, paired with the constant visual presence of dirt around the edges of the un-matted frame, creates almost Brechtian texture, as though the very act of translating this story into cinematic form were part of its story. Yuknavitch, of course, is not a filmmaker, but her attempts to scribble down her thoughts and feelings in moments of dismay — with the sound of pencil on paper becoming grating, among other repetitive cues — are just as key to Stewart’s narrative as the many terrible things that happen to Yuknavitch throughout her childhood...

Read more at Decider: decider.com/2025/05/17/kristen-stewart-the-chronology-of-water-movie-cannes-film-festival-2025-review/

From Cannes 2025:

In Mascha Schilinski’s sophomore feature Sound of Falling, a German farmhouse plays host to the stories of several young girls and women across more than a century. Split between four distinct periods—World Wars I and II, the 1980s, and modern day—Schilinski’s ethereal drama travels elliptically through time, revealing a multi-generational saga steeped in trauma and secrets. It’s a film that portrays great anguish experienced in silence, all within the confines of femininity, through norms which have evolved over a hundred years, but which mirror each other in haunting ways.

Each segment is rooted in the perspective of one or two central characters—usually sisters, or mothers and daughters—but the connections from one timeline to the next are seldom clarified up front. Rather than laying out a linear plot, Sound of Falling jumps back and forth in time, as if caught in a stream-of-consciousness, but using recognizable sensory motifs as its temporal window. In the 1910s, adolescent Alma (Hanna Heckt) and her teenage sister Lia (Greta Krämer)—two of the family’s many children—gaze upon photographs of dead family , both young and old. Their subsequent recollections of farmhouse funerals involve the sounds and images of buzzing flies, a recurring symbol of rot that yanks the movie through the decades.

In the 1940s, a young woman named Erika (Lea Drinda) becomes fascinated with her one-legged uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), to the point of stealing his crutches and hobbling around the farm, placing herself in the headspace of an amputee. In the 1980s, rebellious teen Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) observes the quiet melancholy of her mother Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading) while dealing with wandering gazes of her cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann) and his father Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst). Finally, in the film’s contemporary setting, a new couple moves into the farmhouse, as their playful adolescent daughters, Nelly (Zoë Baier) and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), befriend a grieving neighbor their age, the mysterious Kaya (Ninel Geiger).

On the surface, few of these plots feel directly connected, and the relationship between them is initially vague. Save for Fritz, who briefly appears in the 1910s as a younger man, no two characters seem to cross-pollinate between the timelines, leaving these women’s relationship to one another uncertain—if they’re related at all. However, it soon becomes clear that the logistical details don’t matter all that much, given the spiritual connections between the characters, and the way Schilinski binds them together through reverberating themes told with a deft artistic hand. Sound of Falling is a film of morbid fascinations, between the macabre family photographs in the 1910s—taken alongside dead family propped up like puppets, a once-common practice—and the numerous scenes and impressionistic images of young girls submerged underwater, holding their breath, as if chasing death itself.

The film’s youngest characters all seem curious about dying—about what it feels like, and what comes after—though none of their older family provide satisfying answers. Meanwhile, their teenage counterparts often imagine themselves in vivid, violent scenarios occasionally involving suicide and self-harm, wherein they embrace oblivion. This instinct to embrace absence permeates each story, whether as childlike curiosity, or as a response to depression and malaise. Several key characters are forced to contend with dark family secrets, and with other horrors presented with chilling matter-of-fact-ness, creating distinct echoes between each story.
Some of these echoes are subtle. They’re embodied purely by narrative developments, like the slow reveal of familiar cultures of silence—surrounding incestuous sexual impropriety—across the decades. Other connections, however, exist in an unspoken, ghostly aesthetic space. Schilinski and cinematographer Fabian Gamper often tether their roving camera to specific characters’ points of view, but they also introduce fleeting moments during which the frame has a spectral quality. The protagonists seem to acknowledge this, and make eye with the lens (accompanied by brief voiceover), as if in recognition of something invisible in the ether, connecting them to the other characters beyond time...

Read more at Observer: observer.com/2025/05/screening-at-cannes-mascha-schilinskis-sound-of-falling/

From Cannes 2025:

As its title suggests: there’s a sense of finality to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, for better or worse. The eighth (and by far longest) entry in the Tom Cruise spy saga sees the methodology of four-time M:I director Christopher McQuarrie finally hitting a wall. He and Cruise are known for laying tracks directly in front of their charging production train, which results, in this case, in a strange and often disted film that stands apart from the rest of the franchise. However, the strengths of the Cruise-McQuarrie enterprise have long outweighed its faults. After repeatedly testing fate with their improvisational filmmaking, and their larger-than-life spectacles, the gigantic series finale is their final reckoning too, and they miraculously emerge the victors.

At nearly three hours in length, The Final Reckoning spends almost its first hour in flashback mode, with montage upon montage recapping not only the last movie (Dead Reckoning – Part One), but the series as a whole. Each of these is interspersed with some semblance of character and plot, things that have long been central to the franchise, but which take something of a backseat here. This allows the series’ swan-song to firmly establish itself as a victory lap, after three decades of dominating the Hollywood action scene with brazenly practical stunt-work.

Some of the movie’s recaps come courtesy of the last film’s malicious, all-powerful A.I. — known as the Entity — showing protagonist Ethan Hunt (Cruise) numerous possible futures, from inside a coffin-like structure, while also recalling key moments from the past. Other flashes are run-of-the-mill memory montages triggered by dialogue. Some are even dream sequences, caused by Hunt nodding off while traveling between locations (he’s nearly a senior citizen, after all). It’s a fever-dream first act where time and space no longer seem to exist, with dialogue scenes cut awkwardly and obliquely so they can soon give way to a greatest hits album. A number of newly-shot scenes recall images from throughout the series’ thirty-year history. But when the film finally gets going on its own , it’s damn-near unstoppable, culminating in a breathtaking climax for the history books...

Read more at Big Bad Film: www.bigbadfilm.com/m-i-8-review

“This is the Zone. It might seem capricious, but at each moment, it’s as if we construct it according to our state of mind.”

Preserved within the sci-fi drama Stalker — between its elliptical cuts that bend space, and in its looming, lengthy takes that extend time — is the very essence of its director, Andrei Tarkovsky. The late Soviet filmmaker has long been hailed as one of the all-time greats, a cinematic poet and philosopher whose thoughts on the medium helped expand our understanding of its capabilities. There is perhaps no greater compendium of his artistic worldview than the eerie and deeply spiritual sci-fi masterpiece that might have slain him.

Released in the USSR in 1979, Stalker would go on to premiere at Cannes in May of 1980, 45 years ago. Its influence can still be felt today (in successors like Alex Garland’s Annihilation), though its emotional power lies in the slow and deliberate unfurling of its straightforward plot, resulting in ruminations that reveal greater complexity. A mystifying area known as the “Zone” — which some believe might have extra-terrestrial origins — is cordoned off by the Soviet military. Before long, this abandoned realm becomes the venue for a strange kind of tourism, wherein a local guide dubbed a “Stalker” (Alexander Kaidanovsky) leads curious pilgrims across a dilapidated, phantasmagorical landscape to a room that grants their deepest desires.

With exteriors shot in the vicinity of an abandoned Estonian hydro power plant, and interiors designed after collapsing 20th century infrastructure, Stalker reflects — through its modern ruins — the era’s nuclear anxieties. Its musings on faith don’t exist in opposition to its man-made locales, but are embedded within its walls, as though the abandoned plants and sewer pipes the characters traverse were once temples built to some modern sociological ideal meant to replace old religions with the new; they’re ruined monuments to humanity itself. This fallout area all but presages what would become of Chernobyl in 1986, and just as pertinently, the foaming wastewater seen on screen proved so toxic that it may have made several of the crew, including the director himself, fall fatally ill. Although Tarkovsky would go on to make two more films, many, including sound designer Vladimir Sharun, attribute his 1986 demise from bronchial cancer to the chemical waste poured downstream. A similar cancer would claim the lives of several crew including Tarkovsky’s wife Larisa, and key ing actor Anatoly Solonitsyn, who plays a writer the Stalker leads through the perilous Zone.

The exact causes of these fatalities are hard to corroborate, but they’ve since become part and parcel of the movie’s legend. It certainly didn’t help that Tarkovsky had to shoot the whole thing twice — after improper film development rendered his first year of outdoor footage useless — resulting in even more prolonged exposure to poisonous conditions. However, this pursuit of greater truth at the cost of his well-being bears a certain irony, given how Stalker plays out.

As the Stalker guides the Writer and a Professor (Nikolai Grinko) according to tightly-set rules laid down by a mentor, the trio’s conversations begin taking introspective and philosophical bents. While the Stalker believes in the ethereal power of the Zone, and treats it with fearful reverence, the Writer and Professor’s cynicism get in the way, and eventually prevent them from entering the room at the end of their journey, each for their own reasons. Rumors of a pilgrim who hoped to resurrect his brother, but whose desire was fulfilled in the form of wealth instead, yield hair-raising interpretations of the Zone as a place that reveals latent desires intrinsic to one’s nature, in ways a subject might not even consciously perceive.

The film, on one hand, embodies the increasingly rigorous struggle to hold on to faith and religion in an increasingly scientific, secular world. This struggle is echoed by Eduard Artemyev’s score, born from the tension between classical Indian and Azerbaijani string instruments, and modern synthesizer sounds, bringing into conflict the theological and technological. The very nature of the Zone, as both invisible and omniscient, suggests a parallel to theistic belief, wherein faith in the Zone is a prerequisite to availing of its gifts and curses. On the other hand, the Zone may as well be a physical manifestation of cinema itself: a place where time and space have no boundaries, where engagement requires the faith of an open heart and mind, and where spectators bring their own beliefs and experiences with them, projecting them into empty spaces. On more than one occasion, the characters deliver both dialogue and silent moments straight down Tarkovsky’s lens while staring into rooms and hallways, as if to force the viewer to personify something beyond the physical...

Read more at Inverse: www.inverse.com/entertainment/stalker-45-year-anniversary-tarkovsky

This movie has the same understanding of weed as Reefer Madness (1936)

This movie has the same understanding of weed as Little Italy (2018)

For the last few years, the experience of watching every Marvel movie has entailed what I’ve come to call “the Marvel drop.” First, there’s usually a moment early on when I think to myself (or whisper to a friend next to me), “Wow, this is a real movie,” before that inevitably stops being true. The movie soon drops off, and turns into what critic Matt Zoller Seitz once described as a movie-flavored product. Take the COVID-era prequel Black Widow, whose initial Bourne-esque stylization made me think I was in for something special, before it quickly devolved into weightless CGI antics. Ever since the 2019 culmination Avengers: Endgame, each entry in the Marvel universe has consistently reached this breaking point, so it’s something of a relief that Thunderbolts delays its “drop” for far longer than its contemporaries. It’s the kind of film that gives you a glimmer of hope for a once-dominant cultural mainstay: it’s almost really good...

Read more at JoySauce: joysauce.com/marvel-makes-a-minor-comeback-with-thunderbolts/

I was born in a 70mm IMAX dome, but the Sphere is biggest thing in existence [citation needed]

I'm viscerally against gen AI filmmaking. I'm also fascinated by its allure for so many artists, and bothered that festivals like the Berlinale would platform an entirely AI-generated feature—so I sat down with its director to talk about it: www.polygon.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/563883/whats-next-ai-generated-movie-interview-ethics

Having now seen the film a second time, I had to go long on one incredible shot midway through that functions as its visual, musical, and thematic centerpiece. One of the best things I've seen this year.

An excerpt:

...Coogler has a few of these “one-ers” on his résumé, but they’re largely fight scenes that compress time and space, preventing us from escaping the adrenaline. In Sinners, the form this takes is a long, snaking shot that travels around the makeshift juke club as Sammie first performs for the paying audience in attendance: mostly local Black sharecroppers looking for a space of their own. It’s here that Sammie’s abilities come to the fore, albeit in a manner only visible to the audience. As he plays his tune and sings his heart out, specters from across time enter and exit the frame, dancing and playing their own instruments, from tribal drums to electric guitars which, at the time the film is set, haven’t yet been invented.

For two-and-a-half minutes, composer Ludwig Göransson matches Coogler’s visual rhythms with melodic mixtures that blend past, present and future, from primal percussions all the way through West Coast DJs mixing records in the 1980s. By refusing to cut away, the scene expands temporally outward as different points in history collide, existing impossibly in the same space and time.

Along the way, as the film’s two Chinese American characters walk through the scene—the twins’ friends, Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), who assist them on opening night—we also catch glimpses of Peking opera dancers performing the folkloric Journey to the West, based on a novel with enormous influence on modern storytelling (especially in manga and anime). The scene also features a Jimi Hendrix-type waltzing with the camera as the sound of his electric axe and Sammie’s rickety acoustic instrument cross pollinate. It’s practically a chapter on the history of modern music, distilled down to a spiritual cinematic moment—one deeply reminiscent of Steve McQueen’s pulse-pounding British West Indian romance Lovers Rock...

Read more at JoySauce: joysauce.com/the-incredible-long-take-that-defines-ryan-cooglers-sinners/

There are two kinds of messy big-budget movies, and as of 2025, Ryan Coogler has made them both. There’s the Marvel kind (seen in Coogler’s Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), where directorial vision comes second to the studio machine, and to shared-universe requirements, VFX constraints, notes from audience test screenings, and a restrictive house style. And then there’s the Sinners kind, where no matter the studio process, the result is stamped with the artist’s signature through and through. His vampire-gangster-Western — and occasional musical! — is chaotic not for its lack of ideas and influences, but for their overabundance. It’s surprising that it holds together, given the sheer number of tones on display. What’s practically a miracle, however, is that it’s also one of 2025’s most sharply conceived works of popcorn entertainment...

Read more at Polygon: www.polygon.com/horror/556489/sinners-review-ryan-coogler-vampire-black-panther

From SXSW 2024:

An incisive expression of family and culture that neither apologizes nor over-explains itself, Roshan Sethi's A Nice Indian Boy is a riotous, moving queer romantic comedy with a wildly unique premise. While it resembles many modern third-culture stories — specifically, tales of disconnect between first-generation South Asians in the West and their immigrant parents — it widens its scope in surprising ways that reflect and refract both personal and cinematic identity.

Taking inspiration from a romantic Bollywood classic, the film follows a gay Indian American doctor whose parents are nominally accepting, but who want him to find "a nice Indian boy." Long story short: He does! The immediate wrinkle, however, is that this nice Indian boy is none other than Jonathan Groff — yes, Hamilton's original King George — playing a white man raised by Indian parents.

On one hand, A Nice Indian Boy is the tale of a typical Indian American family, with typical Indian American problems — a generational disconnect, gendered double standards, and a culture of awkward silence around sexuality — but on the other hand, its evolution into grand romantic saga is anything but typical. It's also a story of cross-cultural adoption that dovetails into not only a hilariously awkward meet-the-parents comedy, but also a film about freeing oneself from emotional and generational baggage, in a way that yields tears of joy and laughter...

Read more at Mashable: mashable.com/article/a-nice-indian-boy-review

Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys is a film set on the fringes of society, emanating from beyond the boundaries of “acceptable” taste. It’s a delicious throwback to the low-budget indie trash of early John Waters—in particular, the 16mm fetish comedy Mondo Trasho, and the self-reflexive exploitation melodrama Polyester—featuring the exaggerated flaws of low-budget celluloid processing, and even janky sound equipment. As a tribute, it hardly breaks new ground, but it’s a not-so-subtle reminder of how sanitized even the most obscure corners of American indie cinema have become. That it stars and is directed by a mixed-South Asian American woman is just the cherry on top—given the scrutiny around sexual norms she’s no doubt had to deal with—but the film was made, according to Sriram, in part to break free from racial typecasting.

Best known for her role on Billions, Sriram received a Special Jury Award “for a Multi-Hyphenate” at SXSW, where the movie was programmed with its uncensored title. In addition to writing and directing, she plays protagonist AP, a sex worker living in a fictitious, pre-digital American city known as Trashtown. Its industrial smoke stacks, strangely dressed garbage clean-up crews, and enormous, fancy hotels (one of which is simply called Fancy Hotel) speak of a post-housing-recession economic sensibility and wealth disparity, even though the movie cobbles together a number of 20th Century influences, from dial-up Internet and brick phones, to AP’s nebulously 1960s hair and makeup. She could be a classy heroine of the era hailing from practically any country—given the movie’s cross-cultural soundtrack feature tunes in multiple languages from Italian to Vietnamese, she may as well be—but that she is, in her own words, “a hoe” by profession is just the tip of Fucktoys’ subversive iceberg.

The hazy, dreamlike story begins out on a raft in the middle of a swamp, with the tongue-in-cheek fantasia of AP being read tarot cards by a fortune teller (played by rapper/drag queen Big Freedia), who clocks an apparently urgent curse afflicting AP, which can be lifted for the mere sum of $1,000. In a fun running gag, AP crosses paths with numerous mystics and psychics who practically smell the curse on her. Real or not, she believes there’s something to it, and that people can sense her string of bad luck, from her recent breakup to her mysterious lost tooth.

The question of how she’ll lift this curse (if at all) looms large over the plot, but Fucktoys is largely a story of kindness and community, with frank depictions of kink and violence along robustly defined lines of consent. As soon as anyone crosses that boundary, the movie dips its toe into somber, unnerving territory. But for the most part, Fucktoys is casually euphoric—which is to say, joyfully unafraid—in its matter-of-fact portrayal of the nasty, queer fight club in the backyard of a grungy, dilapidated house where AP spits and urinates on an eager, tied-up john. When she reunites with her crush, the charismatic, androgynous Danni (Sadie Scott), she quickly invites them to in the golden shower as they catch up.

That the leather-clad Danni spends much of the film proud of their busted, bleeding lip is immediately alluring, but it’s also an image Sriram doesn’t take for granted. AP helps Danni out by finding them high-paying clients, but as soon as the lines of consent and respect are blurred, Danni and AP are rightfully put out. (Danni in particular rebels with righteous violence, punching out a pompous James Franco-type).

Over its 106 minutes, the hijinks-heavy comedy follows AP and Danni from gig to gig, which Sriram captures with the raw, improvisational, cobbled-together quality of a low-budget grindhouse nudie. There isn’t actually all that much nudity to be found in Fucktoys, but what little it features feels intimate and playful in an almost platonic sense. Which isn’t to say it isn’t sexy—Sriram absolutely intends for it to be, and she knows how to wield her own image as the object of her camera’s gaze—but like early Waters, the quality Sriram brings as a filmmaker is one of camaraderie between the characters, and between the actors and the lens...

Read more at JoySauce: joysauce.com/annapurna-srirams-fcktoys-harkens-back-to-a-dormant-era-of-trash-cinema/

A video game involving unlimited expansion and creativity shouldn’t yield a film adaptation this rote and uninvolving. Alas, here we are. Based on Minecraft—the 2011 open-world sandbox game from Mojang Studios—Jared Hess’ A Minecraft Movie seeks to map a plot and self-reflexive themes created from scratch, onto a straightforward, often ive gaming experience about collecting, building and exploring (and occasionally, surviving zombies). The result is dull and disastrous: an empty husk of a Hollywood studio movie that can’t seem to figure out its tone or target audience.

The story follows Steve (Jack Black), the game’s blue-clad default skin, turned not so much into a character as something vaguely character-esque. Once a child and now an adult (that’s as far as his backstory goes), Steve has long yearned to enter a secret, protected mine. Here, he finds a mysterious blue device—dubbed the “orb” despite its cubic appearance, a joke about how the game’s graphics render round shapes—which transports him from the real world into the block-like realm of Minecraft, known to its residents as the Overworld. Its cube-like bees, pigs and trees take after the game’s pixelated appearance (it’s made up of large voxels—pixels in 3-D), but the movie’s polygonal shapes clash oddly with its photorealistic textures.

This isn’t a problem for the more cartoonish creatures, like skeletons and other ghouls that roam the Overworld at night. However, it makes for a gross, uncanny combination when applied to the realm’s nonverbal human villagers, and the squarish pig-people who populate the Nether, a hellish dimension connected to the Overworld via another, similar portal. Steve refers to the Nether as “a place with no joy or creativity at all.” Unfortunately, this doubles as a warning about the movie itself...

Read more at JoySauce: joysauce.com/a-minecraft-movie-is-deeply-unpleasant-except-for-jason-momoa/

Few American war movies have featured the kind of breathtaking tension Warfare instills — or the kind of eardrum-rupturing sound. Coming off the speculative war photographer drama Civil War, Alex Garland (who co-directs Warfare with former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza) crafts an explosively gripping Iraq War thriller, whose mere 95 minutes play out like an extended nightmare of blood and bone. Its screenplay is drawn from traumatic memories as retold by U.S. soldiers on the ground, making it both fragile, and susceptible to highly subjective whims. The result is a harrowing work of cinema whose intuitive (and at times ugly) story is locked in an inherent clash with its own top-down imagery.

The broad strokes of Warfare resemble your run-of-the-mill “war on terror” production, à la Peter Beg’s Afghanistan-set Mark Wahlberg vehicle Lone Survivor. Both films are based on true stories, and follow Navy SEALs surveilling, and then engaging, in firefights with armed insurgents. But where Berg’s movie has an almost holy reverence for American death in the line of duty, Garland and Mendoza’s features no such glory around suffering. Its matter-of-fact irreligiousness verges on nihilistic, making its protracted scenes (and screams) of anguish so excessive that they eventually tip over into slapstick hilarity. Mind you: that’s a good thing. It’s the kind of movie where you have no choice but to laugh — if only to relieve some of the maddening tension — at the soldiers’ horrifying predicament...

Read more at Inverse: www.inverse.com/entertainment/warfare-review-alex-garland-a24-war-thriller

When a review embargo and *press screenings* aren't until after a film opens to the public, it's usually a bad sign...

Read more at Mashable: mashable.com/article/the-woman-in-the-yard-review

Slanted aims for the highs of Get Out in its send-up of whiteness and racial double standards, but it ends up somewhere in the realm of The American Society of Magical Negroes. It’s anodyne, un-confrontational racial satire, with rote observations more befitting of an Instagram slide. Whatever version of the movie may have once existed, the final product has little intellectual or emotional rigor. Instead, it uses mere observation as a crutch, as though the act of reflecting some element of the world were somehow akin to saying something meaningful about it...

<Read more at JoySauce: joysauce.com/a-surgery-turns-you-white-in-the-racial-satire-slanted/

Hitting more than 120 U.S. theaters last week, the Debra Messing-produced, Wendy Sachs-directed October 8 seeks to explore rising antisemitism through the lens of college campuses—more specifically, pro-Palestine demonstrations. It would be all too easy for those of us predisposed against these claims to dismiss the documentary as naked propaganda that does exactly what it says on the tin. In some ways, it does. However, the narratives it seeks to create and through implication are part of a larger conservative and destructive pattern. Given recent developments in the country—like the ICE detention of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil—the film is far more relevant than it seems, and thus, worthy of extra scrutiny.

It's also likely more harmful to Jewish Americans than any of the protest slogans it features...

Read more at JoySauce: joysauce.com/october-8-is-a-danger-to-both-student-protesters-and-jewish-americans/

It’s De Niro versus Pesci, only De Niro plays both roles.

Read more at IGN: www.ign.com/articles/the-alto-knights-review-robert-de-niro

If it seems obvious now, it’s only because of how hauntingly prescient it was. A corrosive neon fairytale of white hedonism entwined with reactionary violence; impersonations and rejections of blackness that may as well mirror DEI fear mongering news stories from just this week

The best Disney live-action remake in a decade (not that that’s a particularly high bar to clear), Snow White adapts the broad strokes of the 1937 original, while fleshing out its themes of kindness. Rachel Zegler crafts a remarkable, melodic version of the classic princess who leads with her heart, even if her CGI co-stars are difficult on the eyes...

Read more at IGN: www.ign.com/articles/snow-white-review-rachel-zegler-gal-gadot

From SXSW 2025:

Michael Bay’s Broyaanisqatsi.

Read more at JoySauce: joysauce.com/michael-bays-visceral-parkour-doc-we-are-storror-is-a-nail-biting-thrill-ride/

From SXSW 2025:

Andrew Patterson's sophomore feature The Rivals of Amziah King is a comedic modern Western that swerves headfirst into lurid revenge drama — all while featuring soulful musical interludes, centering on a story about stolen bees. It runs the emotional and tonal gamut akin to a South Indian blockbuster, with the requisite stylizations that make it feel enormous in scope. It's country maximalism, with a highly controlled visual approach that feels liberated, to the point of overcoming even the movie's most noticeable flaws.
It starts out incredibly strong, fumbles along the way, but recovers magnificently by throwing off the shackles of expectation (not to mention, of consistent morality). There are times when its tale of a kindly apiarist and mandolin strummer, Amziah King (Matthew McConaughey), verges on outsider art — given its whizbang unfurling and rosy view of disquieting character turns — which only makes it more meaningful when it maintains an unwavering focus on community.

In that vein, the film is equally about Amziah's foster daughter, a young Choctaw girl named Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), who returns to their rural Oklahoma town after years away, and slowly begins to feel at home. After establishing a wistful, folksy emotional core told with the broadness of soap opera, The Rivals of Amziah King earns the right to fly off the rails, since it also earns its audience's trust enough to know they'll follow...

Read more at Mashable: mashable.com/article/rivals-of-amziah-king-matthew-mcconaughey-review

From Cannes 2024:

Nostalgic docufiction that morphs into a lockdown thriller, Lou Ye‘s “An Unfinished Film” is the second work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (alongside Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides”) in which a “Sixth Generation” Chinese filmmaker has repurposed their old films to create something new. The line between reality and drama blurs as Lou genuinely re-discovers years-old footage, and proceeds to follow a fictitious film crew completing an abandoned project, only for China’s severe Covid-19 lockdowns to interrupt their work, as well as life in all its rhythms.

Few films have so skillfully captured the way Covid caused such traumatic temporal disruptions in its early days, wherein sudden changes in physical and emotional routine caused time to both stretch and collapse...

Read more at Variety: variety.com/2024/film/reviews/an-unfinished-film-review-1236014279/

From Sundance 2025:

Bizarre to watch, given how incomplete the movie feels, and how it obscures the one tenet that ought to be central to a story such as this: the controlled reveal of information...

Read more at Mashable: mashable.com/article/opus-review