Author Archive
December 3, 2024On the fictional South Pacific island of Motunui, there now exists a variety of tween girl known as the “Moanabe” (pronounced “Mo-wannabe”). These eager,...
November 22, 2024Devising a logical sequel to the Oscar-winning 2000 blockbuster Gladiator was not a self-evident task, given that the hero of the original, Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus...
October 8, 2024In 2019, a year now separated from us by enough catastrophic global events to feel like a remote archaeological era, the movie Joker, like it or not (I certainly didn’t), was a...
September 24, 2024When I read back in the spring that Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance was the most divisive movie at Cannes—it got the festival’s longest standing ovation (11...
September 9, 2024There was every reason to approach Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with the trepidation of a haunted-house owner opening a creaky attic door. The original Beetlejuice is 36 years old now,...
July 19, 2024“It’s old, but it’s field-tested,” says a character in Twisters as he unveils the original prototype of Dorothy, a device built a generation earlier by a team...
April 25, 2024The tennis match that begins, ends, and provides the central narrative framework for Challengers, the vibrant new film from director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Bones and...
April 11, 2024The year is unspecified—it could be a few years into some alternate future, or it could be right now. The president, a clean-cut establishment type played by Nick Offerman, is...
February 27, 2024Theocratic authoritarianism, colonial violence, the pitiless economics of resource extraction: These subjects are present in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, not as vague...
January 11, 2024In the seven decades since Ishirō Honda’s 1954 classic Godzilla kicked off the durable genre of the kaiju (or giant monster) movie, this fearsome mega-reptile, a prehistoric...
