Are you looking for recommendations about the best and worst in current film releases? Our movie reviews try to get past brief opinions and dig into why a given movie works, and what it has to offer.
Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 powers through its turbulence to tell a timely story about workers’ rights.
Marvel’s latest Captain America movie.
A24’s Heretic was one of last year’s more surprisingly fun (read: deranged) horror features, and it’s set to make its Max streaming debut on March 7th.
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An understated portrait of a life, oscillating between heartbreaking tragedy and hopeful beauty. The movie follows Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) from his quiet vantage point in Idaho at the turn of the century. An orphan who eventually finds a successful career in logging, his largely lonely life is upended when he meets a woman (Felicity Jones) and, with her, finds a real reason to live. And yet Grainier finds that death seems to follow him wherever he goes. Eventually he loses everything — and spends the rest of his days trying to find that reason for being again. (Train Dreams was acquired by Netflix, and so hopefully will be streaming in the near future.)
The festival comes to a close today, and while there hasn’t been a particular standout film, there is plenty to keep an eye out for once they hit theaters and streaming services. You can keep up with everything we’ve watched so far right here, including the likes of Artropia, Zodiac Killer Project, and Bunnylovr. And expect more updates throughout the day.
This incredibly meta story isn’t strictly about the Zodiac Killer, but rather a failed attempt to make a documentary. After director Charlie Shackleton lost the rights to adapt the book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, he decided to make a movie that shows what the film would have been like. It plays out like an extended director’s commentary for a movie that doesn’t actually exist. The result is a surprisingly compelling story on its own, but also one that serves as a clever deconstruction of true crime, and a very open look at the editorial decisions that shape the genre.
This film is gorgeous, taking place across a warm and cozy Paris, ultra modern Chongqing, and a virtual reality metaverse where players hunt down a mysterious, mystical deer. Unfortunately its parallel stories of estranged families aren’t particularly compelling on their own, nor do they intersect in a satisfying way. It attempts to throw in some tension through other means – like a surprisingly simple million-dollar art heist, and the search for the virtual deer – but ultimately Luz is too meandering to remain captivating for long.
Set in an unnamed, fictional European country that, due to a long war where residents only had cabbage to eat, has outlawed the vegetable and imposed severe punishments for smugglers. When a honeymooning American couple (Himesh Patel and Sarah Goldberg) gets caught with cabbages in their pants, they end up racing for their lives. The movie is, obviously, ridiculous – and there are some fun comedic performances from Steven Yeun, Dave Franco, and Matt Berry – but it awkwardly tries to mash its humor with a more sincere tale of a couple facing their differences that never really comes together.
It turns out Juliette Lewis makes a very good chair. In this surreal film her character Camille feels overlooked and ignored, until one day she finds the most beautiful designer chair, and the two somehow switch places. While Camille’s inanimate body becomes a strange source of fascination for her friends, she truly feels seen with her soul inside of the chair, which has become an obsession for pianist Olivier (Mamoudou Athie). The movie can drag in moments, particularly because of its lengthy narration, but its strange vision is weirdly charming and eventually pushes towards a surprisingly intense climax.
A zombie apocalypse isn’t enough to stop Vinita’s (Kiran Deol) podcast ambitions. She hosts the titular show despite the world coming to an end, and a planned live performance for episode 100 becomes a useful way to connect with survivors, who are largely isolated in this dystopic world. Didn’t Die starts out as mostly a comedy, with the scary bits serving as background, but when Vinita’s ex and a surprise baby get involved, it becomes a touching –and tragic – story of family and loss, one that ends on a heartwarming and hopeful note.
A gorgeous adventure in the mold of E.T., the movie has a lot of promise but is missing the spark to truly stand out. It takes place in an isolated mountain community, where ape-like creatures called ochi are hunted by farmers trying to keep their livestock safe. But when a young girl (Helena Zengel) finds an injured baby ochi, she sets off on a quest to return it to its family. The creature design is incredible, and there’s a lot of mystery to the post-apocalyptic seeming world. Ultimately, though, Ochi is a charming-yet-fairly-standard family-friendly adventure. (It hits theaters on April 25th.)
Paramount Plus’ new Star Trek film is the sound of scene chewing in space, which is to say, it’s pretty damn fun.
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu gets at the heart of what makes vampires an eternally fascinating fixture in our sexual imaginations.
Sony has made bad Spider-Man spinoff movies before, but Kraven the Hunter is another level of terrible.
Director Kenji Kamiyama’s new Lord of the Rings anime film feels like what happens when you try to turn a footnote into a feature-length story.
Jon M. Chu’s Wicked adaptation gets at the heart of what makes musicals such a spectacular form of storytelling.
Sony’s third Venom feature feels like another throwback to when comic book movies kept things short and silly.
Todd Phillips’ new Joker sequel is a pitchy mess that wants to explore what happens when villains become folk heroes.
R.T. Thorne’s postapocalyptic thriller frames farming and community as the keys to humanity’s survival after society collapses.
Former soldier-turned-farmer Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler) is tough on her children because she knows how much more dangerous the world has become after pandemics, famine, and a second civil war in the US.
People would kill for their fertile plot of land up in Canada where precious produce still grows. And when gangs of hungry cannibals start popping up, the Freemans have no choice but to take up arms and stand their ground.
Equal parts post-apocalyptic thriller, family drama, and ode to Octavia Butler, the film is a brutal and beautiful debut from director R. T. Thorne.
Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating epic Megalopolis is a series of loosely connected ideas, tied together with an undercooked world and embarrassing dialogue.
An ol’ fashioned tear-jerker about Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield), who quickly fall in love after the former hits the latter with her car. The film does a great job of balancing its heart-rending story with hilarious jokes, but the most notable thing is the way it deftly jumps around in time.
Its non-linear story seems sporadic initially, yet I was never lost or confused, because it moves around in a way that lets you follow the highs and lows of their relationship in a completely natural way. Just don’t forget Kleenex.
Marielle Heller’s defanged adaptation pulls back from the book’s ferocious strangeness to lean into a more quirky, feel-good vibe.
What if Uncut Gems was a comedy? That’s how this film from Juno director Jason Reitman feels.
It covers a very specific moment in Saturday Night Live history: the 90 minutes before the first episode in 1975. Series creator Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) desperately tries to keep everything together despite not really knowing what he’s doing. Also, the lighting director quit, they have too much material, and Chevy Chase and John Belushi won’t stop fighting.
It’s a stressful race to the finish line, but eases the tension with lots of jokes.
OK, maybe not all of them, but Charles and I are covering TIFF again this year and filling this stream with our many, many thoughts. Highlights so far include The Substance and The Life of Chuck. But you can check out plenty more right here.
Director Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance goes full David Cronenberg body horror with a gruesome parable about the violence of youth-obsessed beauty standards.
The nods to Iron Giant and Castle in the Sky are pretty obvious, but even still Wild Robot carves out its own distinct vibe. It’s centered on a helper bot (Lupita Nyong’o) that washes up on an island filled with wildlife but no humans. Quickly it finds a mission: preparing an orphaned gosling for migration.
What follows may be a fairly straightforward story about finding yourself, but there’s so much heart that it doesn’t really matter. The all-star cast — which also includes Pedro Pascal, Matt Berry, and Catherine O’Hara — only makes things better.
Super assassin 13 (Aurora Ribero) has one problem: she actually has feelings. That’s how she ends up pulled into Jakarta’s underworld searching for a young boy. The film is full of derivative moments you’ve probably seen in other revenge-fueled action flicks — blood on the snow in Japan, a neon-lit shootout in a club, drug deal gone horribly wrong — but makes up for it with some inventive fight choreography and an escalating level of cartoonish ultraviolence.
If there was an award for best use of a frying pan, this movie would win hands down.
An amazing name for a horror satire that can’t really decide what it wants to be. Its story of a high school science teacher (Brandon Routh) saving a small town from an infestation of violent plants is meant to be a send-up of ‘90s-era horror like The Faculty. It looks and sounds the part, but leaves itself stranded in the middle: not funny enough to be a spoof, and not scary enough to work as horror.
In the future, a test makes it possible to scientifically determine your ideal soulmate. (It’s a premise very similar to last year’s Fingernails, only less gross.) Initially, it seems that the film is going to do the typical romcom thing when best friends Laura (Imogen Poots) and Simon (Brett Goldstein) have a clear connection despite their opposing views on the value of the test.
But instead of being obvious, All of You skillfully explores the mess, chaos, and pain inherent in love. I wish its sci-fi elements were more developed, but the rest hits hard.
Before N.E.R.D, The Neptunes, and becoming one of the more convincing arguments for the existence of vampires, Pharrell Williams was a kid from Virginia Beach who didn’t know that most people don’t see sounds as colors. He had no way of knowing that his love for music would transform him into one of the most influential artists of the 21st century. But those who knew him could always see that he was destined for greatness.
The doc is gorgeous, but far from revelatory, and features too much Robin Thicke and Justin Timberlake for its own good.
Though mother (Amy Adams) loves her husband and son, she can’t deny feeling trapped in her life of suburban domesticity. She would never admit to feeling like a caged animal — a dog, specifically — being driven mad. And yet when she starts sprouting hair from strange places all over her body and craving red meat, her feelings seem to be transforming her in ways that shouldn’t be possible.
The film skews more comedic than the book, and eases up on the body horror to its detriment. Adams is great, but this could have been so much meatier.
For broke cinephiles like Nasir Shaikh (Adarsh Gourav), piracy is the ultimate form of flattery. It’s the only way he can bring the world’s films to his hometown where his families expect him to be responsible and get a humdrum job.
It’s hard for Nasir to explain why he can’t get over his dream of making films. But when he starts creating experimental parodies, his peers can’t deny his talent or their desire to join in. As biopics go, the film’s a stunner that starts wobbly but sticks the landing.
An oil tycoon (Michael Shannon), art curator (Tilda Swinton), and their son (George MacKay) are separated from the apocalyptic horrors outside, spending their time in a bunker writing books, arranging flowers, and eating lots of cake. But the facade steadily slips away after a young survivor (Moses Ingram) enters their home.
Filled with dark humor and even darker revelations, the film also happens to be an uplifting musical, but those two sides never gel in a satisfying way. Instead, it ends up feeling bloated and, even worse, doesn’t have memorable songs.
Nobody shines quite like TV aerobics star Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), but when her sexist boss fires her on her 50th birthday, she spirals into an existential darkness that feels like death.
All she wants is for the world to see how powerful she still feels inside, which is why she doesn’t think twice about injecting a mysterious cosmetic drug known simply as “The Substance.” And while The Substance gives her exactly what she wants, it comes with some deliciously nightmarish, Cronenbergian side effects that will speak to the Malignant lovers out there.
