Movies
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The Supply Closet That Film Geeks Love March 24, 2025
At this year’s South by Southwest festival, in Austin, film premieres weren’t the only major events. The buzziest affair, arguably, took place inside a truck: a facsimile of the Criterion Collection’s fabled office closet, bursting with select editio...
It's Time for a Serious Adaptation of ‘Starship Troopers’ March 24, 2025
Neill Blomkamp is going back to Planet P—back to Bug City—to hunt for something no one’s ever seen before: a faithful adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.Don’t get me wrong, I love Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cut, not least because Verhoev...
The Fated Family March 21, 2025
I first learned of Sophie Madeline Dess’s work when a friend sent me her story “Unfathomably Deep,” then just published in The Drift. It was sent without comment, though with the implication, I think, that here was something striking and original, th...
Hype Train Coming March 20, 2025
Rock and roll ghosts are possessing our movie stars. Austin Butler apparently went so deep into character over the years-long process of filming Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis that he got stuck there, eventually hiring a vocal coach to help de-Elvis him. Watch...
To Save Our Cities, Let’s Go to the Movies March 20, 2025
Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England, is undergoing something of a renaissance. Downtown has a professional theater and great places to eat. In a major coup a few years back, the city pulled what was then the Pawtucket Red...
Are Film Bros Ruining Indie Movies or Saving Them? March 18, 2025
I didn’t ask for fame. It was thrust upon me when I added “Neon intern” to my résumé. My LinkedIn, previously a crypt-quiet corner of the internet, was suddenly raucous. The onslaught of pinging connection requests started to embarrass me in public p...
The Best Sports Movie of the Decade March 14, 2025
Eephus, the new film directed by Carson Lund and cowritten by Lund, Michael Basta, and Nate Fisher, sits perfectly in the middle of the baseball movie and hang-out movie Venn diagram. The movie follows two amateur baseball teams in suburban Massachus...
The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies March 11, 2025
A warrior is in a prison cell. His guard approaches and shows him the wooden sword that he will receive once he has earned his freedom. The warrior grabs it, uses his unlocked cell door to knock the guard down, and places the sword’s tip on the guard...
'Mickey 17' Is Bong Joon-ho's Most American Movie Yet March 11, 2025
This story contains mild spoilers for Mickey 17.When the indie distributor Neon recently won their second Best Picture Oscar with Anora, it also marked the fifth anniversary of their first win: for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a South Korean thriller abo...
‘Mickey 17’ Review March 10, 2025
Parasite, 2020’s Best Picture winner, is director Bong Joon Ho’s second-best film about the depredations of capitalism.Don’t get me wrong: Parasite’s a solid movie, particularly through the first 90 or so minutes. Bong does an impeccable job of intro...
'The Breakfast Club' at 40 March 10, 2025
One of the most important but largely unsung heroes of the Reagan Era was movie-maker John Hughes. A close friend of P. J. O’Rourke, Hughes wrote, directed, and/or produced a whole slew of movies, including Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, ...
Joan Didion, Movie Critic March 10, 2025
Writing a book about Joan Didion is a good way to discover that many people love her but far fewer people have read much of her work. In the five years since I started working on my book We Tell Ourselves Stories, I’ve surprised a lot of her admirers...
The Expendability of Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Mickey 17’ March 07, 2025
There are two Robert Pattinsons in Mickey 17—one sweet and dopey, one sullen and sharp, each the other’s distorted mirror image. They’re both clones hatched as part of a futuristic experiment designed to literalize the concept of “human resources”; t...
Modern Life Is Ruining Storytelling March 07, 2025
Over the last few months, for various reasons (teenage visitors, post-Christmas lull, being tired), I’ve had cause to watch a good few movies from the eighties, nineties and noughties, namely: Back to the Future, Sister Act, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Legal...
Trying To Save Emilia Pérez From Itself March 06, 2025
When a film has been widely condemned and derided, it can create within one an illogical hope that the movie is actually good. And I, the genius, am the only one to see its goodness and I will bravely present my contrarian take and convince everyone ...
In Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho Misses the Moment March 06, 2025
Bong Joon-ho was delighted by a congratulatory letter he received from Martin Scorsese after his 2019 Korean-language film Parasite triumphed at the Oscars. At a press conference, Bong revealed that Scorsese had said he and other directors were keenl...
John Cena Has Turned Heel March 06, 2025
There was a disturbance in the force last weekend. I speak not of the destruction of the post–World War II global order, or those tariffs Donald Trump keeps teasing. No, on Saturday night, John Cena—the iconic wrestler and up-and-coming movie star—dr...
The Artificial Culture March 06, 2025
I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies ...
The Dallas Mavericks Are Now a Full-Blown Disaster Movie March 06, 2025
The sky wasn’t falling in Dallas. (That happened last month.) There were, however, violent downward gusts descending upon North Texas—ironically, the opposite of a windfall. On Tuesday afternoon, the skies in the Dallas-Fort Worth area became tinged ...
The No-Drama Oscars March 06, 2025
When Quentin Tarantino strode onstage last night at the Academy Awards ceremony to hand out best director, it was an indicator of two things. The first was that last year’s winner in the category, Christopher Nolan, was unavailable. Nolan is currentl...
Call Her “Daddy”! March 05, 2025
The hottest accessory in women’s fashion requires no cleverly engineered underwear, no skipped meals, and no waiting lists. Interested? See me in my office. Not that I have one—a trivial detail since that is not a requirement for nailing a tie.Ventur...
Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now? March 05, 2025
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theat...
Bob Dylan’s Call to Freedom March 04, 2025
Bob Dylan is, as I have previously written for Law & Liberty, America’s “definitive post-war artist.” The new James Mangold movie, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet as the young Dylan in the first part of his career, 1961–65, proves just...
Hollywood’s Obsession With AI-enabled ‘Perfection’ March 03, 2025
The notion of authenticity in the movies has moved a step beyond the merely realistic. More and more, expensive and time-consuming fixes to minor issues of screen realism have become the work of statistical data renderings—the visual or aural product...
