Style
“One Battle After Another” Is a Powerhouse of Tenderness and Fury
At a crucial moment in “One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s electrifying new action thriller, someone cries out, “Who are…
Tag
the current cinema
Style
“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” Is None of Those Things
If movies were given scores as figure skaters are, fantasy would start with a high rating for technical difficulty. The landings of the…
Culture
“Eden” Is a Messy Survival Thriller with Nietzschean Appeal
The new movie “Eden” features bursts of foul temper, wild sex, grisly violence, and nihilist ideology—a departure, you might say, for Ron…
Style
“Splitsville” Plays Infidelity for Laughs; “A Little Prayer” Shows What’s Really at Stake
In the studiedly rambunctious comedy “Splitsville,” Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin play a pair of homewreckers. The home, a…
News
“Highest 2 Lowest” Marks a Conservative Pivot for Spike Lee
It’s fascinating when filmmakers make drastic late-career shifts, as Martin Scorsese did with “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Francis Ford…
Style
“Weapons,” “Harvest,” and the Shackles of the Horror Genre
Horror is an accursed genre. Because it promises to deliver a specific sensational effect, its stories are obliged to fit into preordained…
Style
“Eddington” Is a Lethally Self-Satisfied COVID Satire
“Eddington” is a slog, but a slog with ambitions—and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of…
News
The Simplistic Moral Lessons of “Superman”
The world may be going to hell, but the writer and director James Gunn has graced it with a sunshine “Superman.” The most recent…
Style
“F1” is a Well-Tooled Engine of Entertainment
In “F1,” a snazzy piece of blockbuster engineering, Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a devotee of fast cars, beautiful women, and simple…
Style
“Materialists” Is a Thoughtful Romantic Drama That Doesn’t Quite Add Up
The work of the Korean Canadian filmmaker Celine Song is modest in scope and intimate in feel, but listen closely to her words—to say…
Culture
Is “The Phoenician Scheme” Wes Anderson’s Most Emotional Film?
Wes Anderson’s new film, “The Phoenician Scheme,” is a funny-ha-ha comedy, but there’s nothing funny about its story, which involves a…
Style
“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” Goes Hard on Valediction
“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” has a running time of just under three hours. Within those three hours, alas, I’d say that Tom…
Style
“Caught by the Tides” Is a Gorgeous Vision of Loss and Renewal
More than two decades in the making, Jia Zhangke’s mostly archival film embodies the sweeping transformations of modern China in its very…
News
“Sinners” Is a Virtuosic Fusion of Historical Realism and Horror
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the bloodstream, along comes a new horde of vampires, in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” to…
Style
“The Shrouds” Is a Casket Case—and an Unsettling Vision of Techno-Paranoia
David Cronenberg’s new film, “The Shrouds,” contains the funniest and saddest blind-date sequence I’ve ever seen. Myrna (Jennifer Dale), a…
Culture
“Warfare” Offers a Hyperrealist Rebuke of the American War Movie
“Warfare” ends the way a lot of movies based on true events do: with a series of side-by-side photographs. Here are the characters you’ve…
News
In “The Alto Knights,” Robert De Niro Sings a Familiar Gangland Tune
How might a mid-century New York City Mob boss spend his nights? Frank Costello, the acting head of the Luciano crime family, prefers to…
Culture
The Uneven Cross-Cultural Comedy of “Paddington in Peru” and “Universal Language”
Not every filmmaker is a cinephile, but, among those who are, that passion can manifest itself in unexpected ways. The driving pleasure of…
News
“The Brutalist” ’s Epic Inversion of the American Dream
Not long into “The Brutalist,” the director Brady Corbet plunges us into darkness—a darkness that, although neither formless nor void,…