A fair bit of dillydallying on this episode before the discussion on Alex Garland’s criminally underseen Annihilation including a (very) lengthy discussion on WandaVision and the Disney’s grey morality as a content/art provider, a less lengthy discussion at 27:46 about why we’d rather fight with...
Much of the music in Florian Zeller’s The Father is diegetic, or at least partially so, the music on the headphones of Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), the patriarch of the title, expanded to fill the movie. All of it is beautiful,...
Let’s be honest. The deep bench cast list of Nicholas Jarecki’s Crisis is both the main reason many will want to see it and–in at least one case–the main reason others will stay away. Gary Oldman–not without baggage–is a big...
At the end of Cherry, a title card pops up reading, “A Russo Brothers Movie.” The word choice there is a fitting summation of the directors’ entertainment-first ethos. Their relentlessly larger-than-life inclusions–red tinting, swooping cameras, massive text superimpositions–occasionally serve a...
In ways both good and bad, Andrey Konchalovskiy’s Sin isn’t strictly a biopic of Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo (played here by Alberto Testone). Like most good biographical films, it doesn’t try to cram too much of the man’s life into...
Kevin Macdonald’s The Mauritanian opens in cinemas this weekend. None of us should be going to movie theaters any time soon but, while watching a screener copy in the safety of my living room, I found myself wondering if that’s...
Early in Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie–a movie that makes a case for self-indulgence not necessarily being a detriment to quality–Malcolm (John David Washington), a film director who’s just returned home with his girlfriend, Marie (Zendaya), after the triumphant premiere...
Right at the beginning of Sam Hobkinson’s Misha and the Wolves, we hear the voice of a radio personality (one of the first people to report on the story the documentary will unpack), say, “Sometimes a story is so astonishing,...
After nearly a year of video-on-demand premieres–and coming almost at the end of an entirely virtual film festival–the larger-than-life, widescreen photography (by Sean Bobbitt) and the abundant close-ups in Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah made me long for...
