Film Reviews & Insights
Wonka
No more kids in chocolate factories or fantastical candy lands. In Wonka, the origin story that is based on Roald Dahl's iconic character, which has now been played by three [...]
Leave the World Behind
Director Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) has shuffled back to feature filmmaking with the begrudgingly-paced but captivating apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind, based on Rumaan Alam's 2020 novel. The Netflix [...]
The Zone of Interest
A quietly distressing tour de force, Jonathan Glazer's screen version of Martin Amis' 2014 novel of the same title, The Zone of Interest, takes a much different approach in its [...]
Maestro
An impressively skillful performance by both Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan provides some riveting emotional depth for Maestro, a stylized, conventional, and uneven biopic of the late Leonard Bernstein. While [...]
Poor Things
Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos's adoration for surrealist aesthetics and edgy material is apparent once again in Poor Things, this time showing a fascination for silent movie aesthetics and highly stylized [...]
The Boy and the Heron
After the release of the brilliant The Wind Rises in 2013, legendary director Hayao Miyazaki announced that he was retiring from work on feature-length films. After a 30-plus year career filled with [...]
Silent Night
“Start Gang War?” This annotation, a calendar reminder written by the film’s protagonist Brian Godluck (Joel Kinnaman), is a perfect encapsulation of just how stupid Silent Night is. Legendary director [...]
Godzilla Minus One
After 2016's critically acclaimed Shin Godzilla, another soft reboot of the 1954 kaiju classic Godzilla may seem redundant. However, Toho's latest resurrection of the beloved property, Godzilla Minus One, proves [...]
Dream Scenario
A surrealist satire that takes a lot of aim in its commentary doesn't always rise to the occasion, but it draws some rich ideas about our modern meme culture. Very [...]
Fallen Leaves
Perhaps Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki's (The Man Without a Past, Le Havre) simplest film of his 40-year career, an amusing and bittersweet seriocomedy, Fallen Leaves breaks no ground; it's executed [...]
Napoleon
Surprisingly, the legendary historical figure Napoleon Bonaparte has never had a historical Hollywood epic, and the grandiose new epic Napoleon doesn't live up to the potential this story has to [...]