Not long ago, scores of women on social media discovered that, apparently, a large swath of heterosexual men recurrently think about the Roman Empire. An endless source of shared fascination. For many of those adult men such interest probably emerged from watching Ridley Scott’s original “Gladiator” more than two decades ago and not from textbooks. The honor-driven, kindness-laced heroism of Russell Crow’s Maximus represented an admirable brand of manhood to aspire to, that of a grieving, unwavering individual fighting for a just cause. 

Continue reading ‘Gladiator II’ Review: Paul Mescal Gives A Mostly Worthy Fight In Sequel That’s Timelier Than It Seems  at The Playlist.

Trite as it certainly sounds, the saccharine label of a “lover letter to cinema” applies all too precisely to French director Arnaud Desplechin’s enchanting docufiction effort “Filmlovers!” (“Spectateurs!”). But even with that obnoxiously overused denomination hanging over it, this multifaceted personal essay succeeds at rekindling or reaffirming one’s own relationship with the miracle of this young art form that we so often take for granted.

Continue reading ‘Filmlovers!’ Review: Arnaud Desplechin Pays Tribute To The Miracle Of Cinema On Enchantingly Personal Docufiction [Cannes] at The Playlist.

Like a macabre pilgrimage, the Overlook Film Festival summons genre film obsessives from around the country and beyond to the party-friendly streets of New Orleans, Louisiana—a city whose one-of-a-kind history with the otherworldly befits the event’s atmosphere.

Dedicated to the late Doug Jones, a longtime festival programmer and esteemed member of the Los Angeles film community, the 2024 edition featured repertory presentations from his personal wish list. Throughout the weekend (April 4-7), festival co-directors Landon Zakheim and Michael Lerman paid tribute to Jones at multiple screenings, highlighting his contributions to Overlook over the years and his devotion to both film and music.

Continue reading At the 2024 Overlook Film Festival, The Past And Present Of Genre Merged at The Playlist.

Steeped in what its audience might deem mature mythology, “The Pink Opaque,” a fantasy show aimed at teen audiences, comes on at 10:30 PM on the Young Adult Network every Saturday. Unfortunately for Owen (first played by Ian Foreman), a meek mixed-race middle school boy growing up in the 1990s, that’s past his strict bedtime.

READ MORE: Sundance 2024: The 23 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch

Connected telepathically after meeting at sleepaway camp, Tara (Lindsey Jordan) and Isabel (Helena Howard), the program’s young heroines, fight monstrous adversaries under the command of Mr.

Continue reading ‘I Saw The TV Glow’ Review: Jane Schoenbrun Has Rendered An Entrancing, Richly Stylized Trans Masterpiece [Sundance] at The Playlist.

No one can predict if Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki’s output has finally come to an end, but there’s a solemn finality to “The Boy and the Heron” that suggests he’d be satisfied if that were the case this time. Its contemplation is that of an artist who’s come full circle and is now probing at the very meaning of his extensive oeuvre through a discerning lens.

That Studio Ghibli decided to release the film in Japan without so much as an official still much less a trailer, seems like a sensible move once you’ve seen the finished adventure.

Continue reading ‘The Boy & The Heron’ Review: Hayao Miyazaki Looks Inward For A Masterfully Mature Animated Drama [TIFF] at The Playlist.

When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) first conceived of the multifaceted premise that would eventually become the lauded non-fiction book “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents,” her editors were concerned about whether she would manage to cohesively merge her personal experiences with all the moving parts of her research across cultures and continents to prove that it all interconnects.  

Venice Film Festival 2023: The 17 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch

That’s in turn the same task that writer-director Ava DuVernay faced to convey the big-picture ideas and Wilkerson’s revelatory odyssey to put them on the page in an enticingly cinematic manner.

Continue reading ‘Origin’ Review: Ava DuVernay Adapts Isabel Wilkerson’ ‘Caste’ With Dazzling Inventiveness [Venice] at The Playlist.

An English lieutenant, an American cowboy, and a mixed-race Chilean sheepherder venture into the inhospitable limits of the Tierra de Fuego region at the southernmost tip of the South American continent—the ends of the Earth, some might call it. Under the orders of their employer, landowner José Menéndez (the always masterful Alfredo Castro), the trio’s mission is to savagely murder as many Indigenous people as they encounter in their path. 

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Set in 1901, “The Settlers” (Los Colonos), a scorching Western on Chile’s blood-soaked national myth, takes aspects from the official text-book history and probes at their conveniently sanitized interpretations of how they shaped the country’s future.

Continue reading ‘The Settlers’ Is A Scorching Western That Examines Chile’s Blood-Soaked National Myth [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

Within the first few minutes of “The Delinquents,” Del Toro (Germán De Silva), the manager of a Buenos Aires bank, longs for the days when people were allowed to smoke anywhere: on airplanes, at restaurants, etc. He mourns that past as a time of greater freedom, until a colleague challenges him to reconsider the statement—the dictatorship ruled in those days. 

Del Toro backpedals and clarifies that what he misses is the notion that everybody smoked.

Continue reading ‘The Delinquents’ Is A Genius Argentine Tragicomedy On The Elusive Nature Of Freedom [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

With her feature debut, “The Chambermaid,” Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés materialized a graceful character study of a hardworking mother. Though enriched via the meaningful interjections of its supporting players, the narrative had a singular focus. For her follow-up, “Tótem,” Avilés has now confected an intimate ensemble piece from a family’s acts of tenderness as experienced through the sorrowful gaze of a young girl. A luminous and soul-nourishing microcosm built on profound love in the face of impending grief, the film reveals itself in the charged interactions between its multiple characters.

Continue reading ‘Tótem’ Review: Mexican Director Lila Avilés Stuns With A Soul-Nourishing Microcosm Built On Profound Love In The Face Of Grief [Berlin] at The Playlist.

With an admirable cohesiveness, Mexican-Salvadoran director Tatiana Huezo (“Prayers for the Stolen”) has curated a body of work that often returns to familiar questions, subjects, and even precise images of evolving girlhood and untarnished nature. The filmmaker’s most fixed preoccupation is the spaces women carve for themselves and each other in communities where their safety, needs, and aspirations often suffer the tacitly violent tactics of patriarchal social norms. 

Back to her documentary roots, Huezo follows her acclaimed fiction debut, “Prayers for the Stolen” (“Noche de Fuego”), with another multigenerational saga of mothers and daughters in a remote locale.

Continue reading ‘The Echo’ Review: Tatiana Huezo Returns to Her Non-Fiction Roots with Another Striking, Multigenerational Story of Women and Nature [Berlin] at The Playlist.

Fifty years ago, the sci-fi thriller “Soylent Green” warned viewers of a distant future—the year 2022—where environmental catastrophe and over-population would cause such dire resource scarcity that the bodies of those who ended their lives voluntarily and with the government’s assistance were transformed into edible wafers to feed the masses.

In “White Plastic Sky,” a heady dystopian animated feature from Hungary, directors Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó depart from nearly the exact same premise, a reality a century from now where crops and animals no longer exist, but the solution to ensure humanity’s survival is no longer a matter of personal agency but of mandated duty for all citizens.

Continue reading ‘White Plastic Sky’ Review: Dystopian Animated Feature from Hungary Imagines a Future Where Our Bodies No Longer Belong To Us [Berlin] at The Playlist.

There has always been a certain dark irreverence and cartoonish bizarreness to musician-turned-director Rob Zombie’s cinematic outings, as prominently seen in his earliest horror sagas “House of a Thousand Corpses” and its sequel “The Devil’s Rejects.” Take, for example, Captain Spaulding (played by the late Sid Haig), a central carnivalesque figure in these gory narratives who imbues them with deviant humor.

Continue reading Rob Zombie’s ‘The Munsters’ Is A Fittingly Ridiculous Tribute To Campy Spookiness [Review] at The Playlist.

Peculiarly shaped mirrors, Jordan Peele’s movies harness genre conventions, in varying degrees of success, to package ideological inquiries in exciting narrative vehicles where collective fears and biases are projected. To look into his intellectually adventurous pop confections means to confront those scary reflections while being utterly entertained. “Nope,” the writer-director’s latest broad-appealing, but never less than intriguing production, unfurls as a mostly clever potpourri of science fiction influences and diverse references dealing with meetings between humans and the unknown.

Continue reading ‘Nope’ Review: Jordan Peele’s Sci-Fi Thrill Ride Floats With Superlative Craft But Can’t Quite Land Its Ideas at The Playlist.

Succinctly clarified in an opening title card, the conceit of “Lightyear,” Pixar’s latest feature and a tangential prequel to the “Toy Story” storyline, is far less bizarre than anticipated: what we are watching is supposed to be the popular sci-fi adventure that Andy, the young owner of all the beloved toys, loved back in 1995. The Buzz Lightyear we know, according to this fresh lore, is an action figure based on the fictional protagonist of this movie.

Continue reading ‘Lightyear’ Review: Pixar’s Latest Is OK, But “To Infinity & Beyond” Really Only Means To An Inevitable Sequel at The Playlist.

Observed in isolation, detached from the body or in extreme close-ups, organs and other vital viscera resemble moist masses of soft tissue plucked from alien landscapes in the unflinchingly immersive medical documentary “De Humani Corporis Fabrica.” Alternating between footage from cameras inserted into patients for the purpose of treating ailments and grisly shots from the operating room, directors Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the team behind the striking non-fiction film on fishing “Leviathan,” apply their fascination for uncanny imagery with relativist intent to the inner workings of French hospitals and, in turn, the human body.

Continue reading ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’ Review: Unflinching Medical Doc Zooms In On Life & Death [Cannes] at The Playlist.

Between her job as a French-English interpreter, the prospect of romantic fulfillment, and the impending deterioration of her father’s health, the woman holding together all the threads in Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning” navigates a wide spectrum of human emotion. In the director’s follow up to last year’s English-language meta homage “Bergman Island,” Sandra (Léa Seydoux) oscillates between desire and grief with believable fluidity.

Continue reading ‘One Fine Morning’ Review: A Marvelous Léa Seydoux Illuminates Mia Hansen-Løve’s New Drama [Cannes] at The Playlist.

As floridly written and meticulously etched as they are, at their core the ornate period works of director Robert Eggers summon an elemental human conundrum: the constant clash between free will and the unexplainable in the construction of one’s fate. If there are forces beyond our control meddling in our mortal existences, must we surrender or can we fight back?

In 2015’s “The Witch,” a young woman gives in to the preternatural entities that haunt her in part to go against a religious microcosm that demands her submissiveness.

Continue reading ‘The Northman’ Review: Robert Eggers Offers A Staggering Feat Of Visceral Filmmaking In A High-Octane Action Odyssey at The Playlist.

Hiding underwater to escape her vicious aggressors, a rush of terror washes over Sara (Laura Galán), a large-bodied teenager target of incessant insults, and worse, about her weight. The callousness of the bullying perpetrated against her one summery afternoon won’t go unpunished but will place the victim in a conundrum fluctuating between guilt and a warranted desire for retribution.

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Hard-to-watch for its depiction of such wickedness, Spanish writer-director Carlota Pereda’s debut feature “Piggy,” expanded from her same-title Goya Award-winning short film, is a blood-splattered portrait of a girl brought to the brink of insanity.

Continue reading ‘Piggy’ Review: A Blood-Spattered Look At Fatphobia, Shame & Humanity’s Capacity For Cruelty [Sundance] at The Playlist.

“Curiosity is stronger than fear,” utters Katia Krafft, via an actress giving voice to her writing, underscoring images of unimaginably scorching lava exploding around her. With her endearingly reckless husband Maurice Krafft, they form the one-of-kind couple that blazes through the arresting documentary “Fire of Love” from director Sara Dosa.

READ MORE: Sundance 2022 Preview: 20 Must-See Movies From The Festival

Constructed from the hundreds of hours of grainy footage that the intrepid French volcanologists, previously featured in Werner Herzog’s own exploration on the subject “Into the Inferno,” left behind after their untimely passing, the film makes the case that their marriage was the foundation of their fearlessness.

Continue reading ‘Fire of Love’ Review: Volcanologists Doc Tells Story Of A Singular Romance Blazing With Jaw-Dropping Imagery [Sundance] at The Playlist.

Netflix’s new short-form experiment “Voir” (French for “See”) aims to distill our relationship to cinema by examining what it stirs inside us based on how and what artists put in front of us, what they conceal, and who they choose to point the camera at. This series of short film essays pairs images with the anecdotes and personal observations of individuals who write about the medium in some way. 

Continue reading ‘Voir’ TV Review: Mixed Bag Of Film Essays Blends Anecdote With Analysis at The Playlist.

When Cameron (Mahershala Ali) first meets his duplicate—a genetically identical, lab-crafted doppelganger—a wave of visceral bafflement possesses him. And who wouldn’t lose composure in the presence of a three-dimensional reflection of oneself, which doesn’t only mimic you physically but will also inherit all of your memories and innermost thoughts so it can ultimately take your place after you perish?

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Such existentialist, near-future sci-fi concept doesn’t register as what we could expect from Irish writer-director Benjamin Cleary, recipient of an Oscar for his humanistic short film “Stutterer.” On close inspection, however, this intriguing and sometimes revealing debut, “Swan Song” (the second film out this year under that title) evokes the same muted yearning of that smaller story also dealing with unconventional romantic endeavors.

Continue reading ‘Swan Song’ Review: Sci-Fi Drama Ponders Grief & Cloning Via A Remarkable Mahershala Ali [AFI Fest] at The Playlist.

Oregon-set folk horror feature “Antlers,” finally being released after a long pandemic-induced delay, resembles what one might find in a rusty cauldron after a disorderly witch mixed an array of incongruent ingredients for a potion. Chunks of childhood trauma, a dash of the opioid crisis, a few drops of environmental distress, and Native American mythology swim together in a foggy concoction of a plot without meaningfully merging.

READ MORE: The 25 Most Anticipated Horror Movies Of 2021

Eclectically-inclined director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart,” “Out of the Furnace”)—with Mexican master of monsters Guillermo del Toro serving as producer— flails through this sporadically hair-rising but mostly dull genre proposition.

Continue reading ‘Antlers’ Review: Poignant Performances Can’t Save Scott Cooper’s Thematic Hodgepodge Of Dull Scares [Beyond Fest] at The Playlist.

Toronto International Film Festival: The utilization of hand-drawn animation as preferred medium for artists to assimilate and explicate real-world chaos in recent years has produced gorgeously sensitive visions including Cartoon Saloon’s “The Breadwinner,” and just this year the animated documentary “Flee” and Ari Folman’s tenderly fantastical “Where is Anne Frank.”

READ MORE: Fall 2021 Movie Preview: 60+ Must-See Films

Realized with few flourishes of imagination but an undaunted resolve for dealing with human tragedy, “Charlotte,” by directors Tahir Rana and Éric Warin and based on a screenplay from writers Erik Rutherford and David Bezmozgis, joins the growing list of such mature animated projects with underlying social justice concerns.

Continue reading ‘Charlotte’: Animated Holocaust Drama Recounts The Tragic Life Of An Artist [Review] at The Playlist.

Comfortable in his newly found friendship, Hatzín (Hatzín Navarrete), a teenager from Mexico City who traveled to Chihuahua’s northern state to reclaim his father’s remains, pretends to be upset and explains he’s decided to return home. He laughs several seconds later, tricking Mario (Hernán Mendoza), his boss and impromptu life mentor.  

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Proving he can convincingly lie on command is the first indication of the lengths to which the boy will go to protect this bond he holds so precious.

Continue reading ‘The Box’: Golden Lion Winner Lorenzo Vigas Crafts A Tense, Slow-Burn Coming-Of-Age Drama [TIFF Review] at The Playlist.

There’s no escape for the women in Hany Abu-Assad’s blistering new film “Huda’s Salon,” a fearless statement on gender oppression shaped as an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Back in top form, the acclaimed director behind stunners such as “Paradise Now” and “Omar” returns to dissecting the perilous Palestinian experience under Israeli control.

READ MORE: Toronto Film Fest 2021 Preview: 16 Must-See Movies To Watch

Before his camera enters the eponymous beautification business where lives are upended, Abu-Assad eases us into the reality of his people via snippets of quotidian interactions in the occupied territories.

Continue reading ‘Huda’s Salon’: Hany Abu-Assad Offers a Fearless Reckoning on Women’s Oppression in Occupied Palestine [TIFF Review] at The Playlist.