David Sims

Joanna Hogg is probably the most understated filmmaker to currently have an entire cinematic universe revolving around her. The British director emerged with her 2007 debut feature, Unrelated, which had an autobiographical tinge, and went on to make two other brilliantly quiet interpersonal dramas, Archipelago and Exhibition. But it was with 2019’s The Souvenir that Hogg began to build out an interconnected series that blurs the line between fiction and memoir.

These days in Hollywood, scale seems to be one of the easiest things to achieve on-screen. Breakthroughs in visual-effects technology mean that audiences get to watch one epic battle after another, and are accustomed to seeing dozens of superheroes zipping around pointlessly. James Cameron has always been a director who harnesses the latest CGI advances to whip up thrills, but with Avatar: The Way of Water, his first film in 13 years, he faces an undeniable challenge.

Even as the movie industry continues to recover from the pandemic’s debilitating effects, the ongoing story of film is not about loss of quality. This was a year filled with cinematic delights from every part of the world, with first-time filmmakers doing everything they could to shock audiences, and old masters delving into their darkest reminiscences for indelible works of memoir.

Let’s get this out of the way quickly: The Menu is not—I repeat, not—a movie about cannibalism. I say this not to spoil potential viewers but to reassure, since it’s the first question almost anyone who’s aware of the film has asked me.

Dave Chappelle’s comedy has always walked a practiced knife-edge; he’s one of America’s most successful and discussed stand-up comedians because he can suck the air out of the room in a second and fill it back up just as quickly. He can have his audience whispering “Did he just say that?” but will then undercut his own provocation with an impish grin.

This story contains major spoilers for Barbarian.On the opening day of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, one film was on everybody’s lips. As I ran into other critics around town, they kept asking, “Have you seen Barbarian yet? You’ve gotta.” That kind of chatter is typical at a festival, but the only wrinkle was that Barbarian wasn’t even playing at TIFF.

This story contains spoilers for the entire first season of House of the Dragon.One of the most common complaints about serialized television in the streaming era is that it moves far too slowly. Whole seasons contain plotlines that probably could fit within one episode; characters spend a year getting ready to do something.

Reflecting on a career spent making movies and plays that have featured exploding cats, surprise decapitations, and other inventive acts of destruction, Martin McDonagh let out a rueful laugh. “I don’t think I ever set out to shock,” he told me. “Every single one of them just came out that way.

Angela Lansbury was a boundlessly versatile performer, with a decades-long career filled with roles that played to her many strengths. She was a chilling villain in The Manchurian Candidate, a flighty and flirty accomplice to the psychological torment of Gaslight, and a winsome tavern singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray, earning an Oscar nomination for each role.

Not long ago, a colleague who’s squeamish about horror movies described some of the scariest films she’d been able to make it through. One of the titles she mentioned? Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. But wait, I thought, that’s not a horror movie. A tense thriller, maybe, a satirical drama with some frightening set pieces, but not something that would’ve been put on the “horror” shelf in video stores, back when video stores existed.

Todd Field’s new film, Tár, opens with a scene that should feel inherently uncinematic: an onstage Q&A. The conversation, between Lydia Tár (played by Cate Blanchett) and Adam Gopnik (gamely playing himself), is the kind of hoity-toity event that’d be a coveted ticket for a certain highbrow milieu. Tár is the preeminent conductor of her generation.

The celebrity appeal of Billy Eichner has always rested on his outrageous causticity. The host of the viral series Billy on the Street, Eichner would barge around New York, holding a microphone in one hand and often dragging a celebrity with the other, barking questions at passersby.

The world of Don’t Worry Darling is picture-perfect at a glance: a company town called Victory, California, where a bunch of mid-century-modern homes have magically sprouted in the desert. Imagine someone opened a Mad Men theme park in Palm Springs, with the men outfitted in skinny ties and horn-rimmed glasses, and the women in glitzy dresses keeping everyone’s martinis fresh.

Robert Zemeckis has always been a director fascinated by avant-garde technology. His biggest films of the ’80s and ’90s—Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, Forrest Gump—were all revolutionary in their use of visual effects and CGI. In the 2000s, he dove into the nascent field of motion capture to produce the animated movies The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol.

This story contains spoilers for Episode 2 of House of the Dragon.The opening credits of Game of Thrones famously offer a dynamic bird’s-eye trip around a pulsing map of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy world. The sequence serves partly as a practical guide to a sprawling universe.

George Miller’s 2015 insta-classic Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the most propulsive movies ever made. It tracks a caravan of souped-up vehicles blasting across the desert in a glorious postapocalyptic battle. His follow-up is, on the surface, quite the opposite. Three Thousand Years of Longing is primarily focused on a long conversation between two characters wearing bathrobes in a fancy Turkish hotel room. But that first impression sells the film short.

Not long after the 1989 launch of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking comic-book series, came the inevitable question that plagues critically acclaimed smash hits—how best to translate it to the screen? The series’s central family, known as “The Endless,” live in a vividly cinematic world; each member personifies a natural force, including dreams, death, and desire. But Gaiman’s epic story spans eons and an ensemble of dozens.

In the world of moviemaking, it’s generally considered good business to release the movies you make. After all, they can cost tens of millions of dollars to produce, and (pardon me for getting overly technical here) selling tickets for the general public to view them can help recoup that cost. Streaming TV has changed that calculation a little. Now films are sometimes made not to sell tickets but just to beef up entertainment libraries for monthly subscribers.

Stoicism has long been a powerful weapon in Ryan Gosling’s cinematic arsenal. One of his best-remembered films remains the taut 2011 thriller Drive, in which he played an unnamed stunt driver who is cool behind the wheel but monosyllabic in conversation. As Officer K in Blade Runner 2049, he was quite literally robotic, an artificial “replicant” designed to be void of emotion.

By far the most arresting character in Thor: Love and Thunder, the twenty-bajillionth Marvel movie, is the splendidly named villain Gorr the God Butcher. Bald, covered in scars, and draped in monklike robes, Gorr (played by Christian Bale) is a vengeful wraith who wields a mystical blade and has only one goal in mind: killing gods. Any deity he can get his hands on, no matter the faith or civilization they belong to.

Baz Luhrmann is a filmmaker who picks subjects as extravagant as the genre allows. When he made a teen romance, it was William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. His musical Moulin Rouge was scored with love songs from nearly every pop era. For a literary adaptation, he went with the totemic, supposedly unadaptable The Great Gatsby. He’s an Australian director who made a movie about Australia and literally called it Australia.

When the author George Saunders was asked about the dark underpinnings of his short story “Escape From Spiderhead” in a 2010 interview, he gave an answer that would make any moviemaking executive sit bolt upright with interest. “More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens.

In Minority Report, when the detective John Anderton goes on the run in Washington, D.C., one of the first things he needs to do is swap out his eyes. The police of Steven Spielberg’s film, set in 2054, are not the only ones tracking people with eye-scanning machines mounted around the city. Public transit does so too, as does every business, and even all the billboards, which scream slogans such as “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now!” as he walks by them.

In Jurassic World: Dominion, a fate worse than extinction has cruelly visited the cloned dinosaurs that have been roaming on silver screens since 1993: They’ve become mundane. A nuisance. The kind of pests you might call your local wildlife department about, as you peek out your window onto the backyard and say with a sigh, “Honey, there’s another pack of Compsognathus trampling the daffodils.

I can think of two action films from the past decade that involved a stunt in which an actor throws an entire motorcycle at someone. The first is the 2015 Marvel sequel Avengers: Age of Ultron. Captain America (played by Chris Evans), battling bad guys in a snowy forest, does a flip with his bike and flings it at an armored tank.

The gray-haired, cloak-wearing protagonist of David Cronenberg’s new science-fiction film, Crimes of the Future, is a very particular sort of conceptual artist. Saul Tenser (played by Viggo Mortensen) sleeps in a bizarre contraption that looks like a spiky womb, speaks with the cadence of someone being strangled, and is constantly growing new organs, which his partner, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), surgically removes from his body for a live audience.

In the original Top Gun, the enemy is intentionally obscure: anonymous pilots flying MiGs from a hostile but unnamed country who have to be chased away and shot down by the heroic Maverick (played by Tom Cruise) and his fellow graduates of the Top Gun naval flight school. Who exactly the enemy is does not matter. What matters is that the hero is America. Tony Scott’s film was a highly successful, undeniably compelling advertisement for brash 1980s jingoism.

Top Gun: Maverick is out soon! But can any movie with fast planes, Tom Cruise, and beach volleyball truly compare to the classic fighter-pilot movie about, as writer Shirley Li puts it, “cute boys calling each other cute names”? And do audiences have an appetite anymore for what Megan Garber called an “infomercial for America”? Find out with Shirley, Megan, and David Sims, and explore the moral (but fictional) simplicity of an earlier era: the Cold War ’80s.

Hollywood loves a good comeback story, and the new Disney+ film Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers has a great one. No, not that of the titular chipmunk heroes, starring in their first project since the 1990 conclusion of their animated series.

Alex Garland has never shied away from unusual endings. His 2018 sci-fi film, Annihilation, adapted a mind-bending best seller and put a poetic spin on its final showdown, in which Natalie Portman performs a balletic fight with an alien copy of herself. Then he made the TV show Devs, an inscrutable tech thriller whose conclusion unfolded over multiple parallel universes.