The biggest compliment I can give Last Breath, a gripping, workmanlike new movie about an undersea rescue, is that I would happily watch a version of it where absolutely nothing goes wrong. The director Alex Parkinson’s debut dramatic film is based on his 2019 documentary of the same name; both recount an incident in the world of “saturation diving,” in which a technician was stranded 300 feet under the North Sea.
The director Sean Baker probably didn’t predict this outcome while he was filming Anora, his latest small-budget indie project, in the snowy Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach—that a couple years later, he’d be accepting Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It was one of five prizes that his spiky indie dramedy collected on Hollywood’s biggest night. After a drawn-out awards season in which the biggest contenders seemed often in flux, Anora dominated at a fun if elongated Oscars ceremony.
In 1956, an aspiring young actor named Gene Hackman joined the Pasadena Playhouse in California, struggling to find a way into a field he’d been fascinated with since childhood. Hackman, who was born in 1930, had already served five years in the Marine Corps, then bounced around New York, Florida, Illinois, and other places without much luck.
With last year’s slow-roll Oppenheimer sweep, the leading Oscar contenders seemed to have sewn up their wins long before the ceremony began. This edition of the Academy Awards has been quite the compelling scramble by comparison, as half a dozen movies have gained and lost supposed front-runner status over the past few months.
This may sound like a hopelessly naive thought about a superhero movie, but Captain America: Brave New World presented an exciting opportunity. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, now on its 35th entry, has probably been exhausted at this point, yet the latest installment’s advertising was intriguing. It promised a thinky thriller in which the new, Black Captain America butts heads with a growly, militaristic president (played by Harrison Ford).
The Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh announced that he was retiring from filmmaking in 2013. By 2017, he had returned to work, releasing the delightful heist caper Logan Lucky, and in the years since, new Soderbergh films have become as seemingly inevitable as death or taxes.
In the years since it began a committed effort to diversify and expand its membership, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has weathered strikes, the pandemic shutdown of theaters, and constant hand-wringing about declining TV ratings and potential cultural irrelevance. But one trend has remained consistent for the Academy Awards, the voting body’s annual big event: The Academy has been getting more and more international.
Historically speaking, the point of the Golden Globes has always been two-fold. First: Get some memorable speeches out of a bunch of celebrities packed into a ballroom and plied with booze on national television. Second: Give some insight into who’s favored to win at the more prestigious Academy Awards. For better and worse, this year’s Globes didn’t really bother to do either. Save for Kieran Culkin, none of the winners seemed too buzzed to speak.
Cinematic history has long been lousy with Draculas: Dozens of remakes, sequels, and spin-offs of Bram Stoker’s seminal gothic novel have graced the screen over the years. But F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is a rarer breed. The 1922 German expressionist film cribbed the plot of Stoker’s Dracula (with some alterations) and created the first horror-movie masterpiece, conjuring a unique take on one of the genre’s hoariest texts.
Cinematic history has long been lousy with Draculas: Dozens of remakes, sequels, and spin-offs of Bram Stoker’s seminal gothic novel have graced the screen over the years. But F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is a rarer breed. The 1922 German expressionist film cribbed the plot of Stoker’s Dracula (with some alterations) and created the first horror-movie masterpiece, conjuring a unique take on one of the genre’s hoariest texts.
The first Deadpool film, released in 2016, broke lots of rules. It was R-rated and hyper-violent, but it was also self-aware in the Family Guy way, frequently puncturing the fourth wall and mocking the seriousness of the superhero genre. Deadpool, played by Ryan Reynolds, knew he was in a movie—and a dumb one, at that.
The big new character in Pixar’s Inside Out 2 is Anxiety, which makes sense, given how much pressure was being loaded onto the film before its release. In a Time feature, Pixar’s creative head, Pete Docter, candidly admitted as much: “If this doesn’t do well at the theater, I think it just means we’re going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business.
In a Violent Nature is a slasher film designed, as most slasher films are, to unsettle and distress. It follows a group of teenagers who unintentionally disturb a grave, awaken a monster, and then get hunted through the woods by this mute, superhuman creature. The plot is stubbornly formulaic.
They did not break the mold when they made Glen Powell. That’s not to say the actor isn’t talented—after first really noticing him as a strapping baseball hunk in the filmmaker Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, I figured Hollywood would take quick notice of his charms. Since then, he’s vaulted to fame in movies such as Set It Up, Top Gun: Maverick, and Anyone but You.
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When George Miller started dreaming up his first Mad Max movie, in the late 1970s, he had just a vague sense of the world it would be set in; he knew only that his independent debut feature would be action-packed and shot cheaply in the Australian countryside.
As any fan of tennis can inform you, one of the sport’s chief joys is how rivalries between players can develop and mature over decades. Certain matchups are larded with history, friendship, and sometimes real animosity that can be far more personal than in any team competition. Luca Guadagnino’s new film, Challengers, injects romance into this dynamic, as the on-court battle between two players quickly comes to include a woman they both love.
There’s something comfortingly irrelevant about Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. The fifth film in the Ghostbusters franchise came out last weekend to mediocre reviews and middling box-office numbers; it’s probably selling enough tickets to justify yet another entry, but the product itself is so perfunctory that it’s driving zero cultural discourse. Thank God.
This year, the mission of the Academy Awards was, more than anything, to avoid catastrophe. The most-discussed ceremonies in the last decade have been marked by jaw-dropping viral moments—none of which had much to do with the movies supposedly being celebrated. The wrong Best Picture was announced. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, then gave a rambling acceptance speech for the Best Actor award.
It’s still a mystery why the Coen brothers stopped working together. The pair made 18 movies as a duo, from 1984’s Blood Simple to 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, setting a new standard for black comedy in American cinema. None of those movies was flatly bad (although The Ladykillers comes close, I don’t mind it); many of them were masterpieces. Then, a few years ago, they split up—allegedly, Ethan Coen had grown tired of the grind, though neither of them ever spoke about it on the record.
Decades into the comic-book-movie experience, filmmakers are still experimenting with the form. Madame Web, the latest in Sony’s vaguely intertwined series of films connected to the wider world of Spider-Man, is about a woman named Cassie Webb (played by Dakota Johnson) who discovers that she has clairvoyant powers.
For me, the experience of watching The Daily Show belongs to a different, bygone era of TV. Either I flipped my cable box over to Comedy Central at 11 p.m. if I happened to be channel surfing that late or I caught up on my DVR the next day, eagerly fast-forwarding through the ads to get to Jon Stewart’s monologue.
The last time the Academy Awards introduced a new category, back in 2001, it was very overdue: a dedicated Oscar for animated films. Since then, only one idea has almost broken through, in 2018—an ill-defined “best popular film” award that was triumphantly announced and then quickly shelved when nobody could really agree on what its parameters would be. Expanding the Oscars is always tricky, because there’s already so much hand-wringing about the length of the ceremony.
Next month, Hollywood’s latest Godzilla movie will hit theaters. Titled Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, it will join Warner Bros.’ “MonsterVerse,” a glitzy American spin on a formula that Toho Pictures began in 1954 with the original Godzilla. The film features a fearsome monster doing battle with King Kong and other beasts, while an all-star cast looks on in horror.
Navigating the Sundance Film Festival can be a tricky endeavor. The stacked screening schedule is practically made to send cinephiles into a tailspin: If the line for the new Steven Soderbergh movie starts forming at 9 p.m.
I have to give some credit to Matthew Vaughn’s new film, Argylle, for one thing: It is not—repeat, not—based on anything. An action movie with a reported near–$200 million budget and no connection to any preexisting intellectual property should be thrilling, a glorious throwback to the days when big films could just be about people punching and shooting each other without referencing some other storytelling universe.
A woman directs a commercially successful and critically acclaimed film that is nominated for a slew of Academy Awards, but none for Best Director. Sound familiar? Back in 1992, this is what happened to Barbra Streisand, whose Oscar snub for directing The Prince of Tides prompted the ceremony’s host, Billy Crystal, to sing “Did this movie direct itself?” to the tune of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in his opening monologue.
The film Anyone but You’s paltry $6 million opening over Christmas weekend seemingly confirmed a persistent assumption in Hollywood: Theatrical romantic comedies are a thing of the past. Once a pillar of the release calendar, rom-coms have largely been consigned to the smaller-scale world of streaming. They are seen as more difficult to sell overseas and distinguish at the box office (during that first weekend, Anyone but You lagged behind Wonka and Aquaman 2).
The first sound in Hayao Miyazaki’s new movie, The Boy and the Heron, is an air-raid siren, heard over a screen of black that quickly explodes into tumult and destruction. It’s 1943, and a firebombing has set a Tokyo hospital ablaze, killing the mother of 12-year-old Mahito Maki, the movie’s protagonist.
The opening scene of Anatomy of a Fall achieves a rare, special kind of disorientation, one baffling enough to make the viewer question reality. Did I arrive late? I wondered, even though I knew I’d been sitting in the theater when the house lights had gone down minutes prior. Sandra (played by Sandra Hüller), a writer, is being interviewed in her home by a graduate student about her work.
Horror franchises tend to be defined by their immutability. Make a hit in the genre, and you’re all but guaranteed a slew of sequels that follow a tight formula: slasher films where a monstrous force stalks the youth, ghost stories set in creepy houses. But The Exorcist has always been different. The recently departed William Friedkin’s 1973 film was a box-office sensation—adjusted for inflation, it’s still one of the 10 biggest movies ever made.