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"Behemoth!" is a classical-musician movie. It’s a midlife-crisis movie. It’s a romantic mystery. It’s Tony Gilroy fiddling around with pure movie form.
It’s easy to poke fun at the English upper classes, but that’s no reason not to do it. Amid continued social inequality in the U.K., the extreme wealth and societal remove of the aristocracy looks more absurd than ever — and rarely more so than in “Lady,” a wildly silly and highly enjoyable portrait of […]
The slow rolling piano echo through the hall like a rhapsody from the deep. The sound is rich, lustrous, bottom-heavy, grand. And that voice! Winter sings in a low baritone (and occasionally a high one) of astonishing power, the notes hanging there in a suspended quaver so bold it’s hypnotic.
If you love something, let it go, the adage advises, and maybe it will come back to you. Maybe, however, it will go and go and go and never come back, and that, so Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s increasingly lyrical and persuasive “What Remains” would have it, might be its own sort of reclamation. The slowly built, […]
"Digger" isn’t funny. It’s nervy, in your face, audacious, adventurous, and bizarro in a free-swinging, out-of-the-box way. And it feels like a comedy, since it’s fueled by the relentless overacting of a bad Coen brothers movie. But "Dr. Strangelove," built around the genius of Peter Sellers, was brilliantly funny. "Digger" borrows the doomsday architecture of "Strangelove" but leaves out the slyness, replacing it with a lavishly in-your-face spectacle of browbeating.
On the first “Weekend Update” of “Saturday Night Live” Season 52, Jeremy Culhane revived his fan-favorite impression of Tucker Carlson to offer his thoughts on some of the summer’s biggest blockbusters. On “The Odyssey,” Carlson mentioned the specialty format of Imax 70mm, saying, “The Hollywood cabal shoots its filth with millimeters — or as I […]
Yamazaki, who rebooted the genre and took it to a new peak in the revelatory 2023 retro kaiju classic "Godzilla Minus One," works with a quality that none of the filmmakers of recent decades has summoned: a fairy-tale innocence, an immersion in the annihilating heavy-metal poetry of Godzilla — the way the destruction of a city can become a spectacle out of a dream (which is to say, a national nightmare). In "Godzilla Minus Zero," when Godzilla and King Ghidorah go at it, it’s more than a WWE match of primeval rivals. It’s a clash of the titans that will reduce everyone in the audience to a wid
Macabre and melancholy but suffused with a delicious absurdism that somehow doesn’t clog the arteries of its hopeful little heart, Pablo Larraín’s sprawling, peculiar, terrific “My Sad Dead” is about 20 things at once in every moment. It’s a ghost story, obviously, on account of all the ghosts. It’s a droll tragicomedy, with eccentrically deadpan […]
OpenAI is conducting an extensive review of misaligned model activity after disclosures involving an Australian government portal and other websites.
Since hitting an artistic peak with the back-to-back festival triumphs “Head-On” and “Edge of Heaven” in the mid-2000s, German-Turkish auteur Fatih Akin has darted all over the map in genre, style and form — occasionally striking commercially, as with the Diane Kruger thriller “In the Fade” and the local hip-hop biopic “Rhinegold,” without ever matching […]
The first thing to know about “Charlie Harper” is that it’s not, in fact, about someone called Charlie Harper. Charlie (Nick Robinson) and Harper (Emilia Jones) are a couple, meeting and parting at various stages across a five-year timeline; the title of this earnestly melancholy first feature by directing duo Mac Eldridge and Tom Dean […]
The Unabomber may be a figure of enduring public fascination, but it’s hard to see that extending to “Unabomber,” Netflix’s unimaginatively titled and prosaically assembled drama about how domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski was radicalized, and how he was caught. Alternating between a standard-issue procedural thriller, dramatizing the FBI’s final year of investigation on the case, […]
In Hollywood, parallel thought is a funny thing. As in every other sphere, two or more people can have a similar idea at the same time, but when those ideas bloom into movies, their release can feel like a land rush. Which is more firmly cemented in moviegoers’ memories, “Dante’s Peak” or “Volcano”? “Lambada” or […]
It’s at the tail of its closing credit scroll that “Ancestors” drops its final, plainly worded message, also setting its title in context: “No survivors, only descendants.” As the sign-off for this heartbroken drama of connections made and lost as AIDS ravaged London’s queer community in the late 1980s, it’s a lyrical rejoinder to anyone […]
Nobody sings in the latest adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1462-page cinder-block classic, but the absence of rousing musical numbers does not mean that Fred Cavayé’s “Les Misérables” is going for gritty realism. The 179-minute film, enjoying a reported $37m budget and a host of Big French Stars trapped in starchily archetypal Big French Roles, spackles […]
For those of us who only ever think about reindeer when December draws in, and even then in a fairly abstract sense, “Brace Your Heart” arrives as a flinty reality check. Following the life and trials of a young female reindeer herder in the present day, it’s stripped of any fairytale essence, and doesn’t stint […]
Defence Secretary Wes Streeting has confirmed the review after Donald Trump told Andy Burnham the deal was "terrible".
Long before the relevant authorities do, you’ll figure out the secret that immigrant homemaker Hermine Ryan (née Braunsteiner) holds close to her chest in “The Housewife” — a giveaway that may be the fault of some heavy-handed direction and scripting, but speaks to the detail and integrity of Naomi Watts’ lead performance, which often seems […]
Despite the generic title, “Voices” is quite the novelty. Mixing the rarely combined genres of chamber thriller and musical, the film takes place almost entirely in one location — a Detroit motel room in 1967 — and focuses on just three characters. The actors start singing at the most tense moments, puncturing the perception that, […]
Ayer and Pitt (both producers on the film) have teamed up to make something that isn’t so far removed, in form and spirit, from an old-school Disney movie. But the real surprise of "Heart of the Beast" is how well-made it is. Ayer draws on his logistical talent, and even his taste for violence, to craft a tale of survival that makes us feel the pain, the fear and the hardship, the stakes of what it takes to battle nature.
