Showing film results: From 6 to 16
Combining the bawdiness of Walerian Borowczyk's medieval fantasies with the postmodernism of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, Norwegian writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt's The Ugly Stepsister might be described as a neo-fairy tale. It's essentially the Cinderella story, taking elements from both the Perrault and Brothers Grimm versions, and it's set in a beautifully rendered version of some non-existent Scandinavian kingdom of the past. But the trouble with fairy tales is that they were written hundreds of years ago when the world was a cruel and insensitive place, and their black and white presentation of good and evil doesn't fit with our modern sensibilities. Nor does the reprehensible idea present in so many fairy tales that physical "ugliness" is a sign of bad moral fibre.
You know you're out of touch when a movie introduces you to a piece of technology to which you're oblivious, but which everyone in the movie is entirely familiar with. That's the case with Drop, a thriller centred around 'DigiDrop', a fictional cousin of the iPhone's AirDrop feature. As someone who views a phone as a necessary evil (if I could live without one in 2025 I gladly would), I had never encountered the concept of "drops," which I now know are messages sent between iPhones (via bluetooth?) within a certain distance of one another.
1981's The Amateur was an early entry in the wave of '80s Cold War thrillers that simultaneously exploited both the public's growing interest and general ignorance of computers. Rather than a James Bond figure, the protagonist was a nerdy codebreaker who becomes a proto MacGyver, using brains rather than brawn to seek revenge for the killing of his wife by terrorists. The use of technology in the movie was absolute hokum, but 1981 audiences simply didn't know any better and assumed that maybe an arcade machine could be reconstituted as a code-breaking device.
Today's employers expect far too much from their workers. They expect you to work through your lunch. To stay on an extra half hour without overtime. To answer phone calls, texts and emails outside of office. To start a war with the Russian mob when your boss's daughter gets herself abducted.
Paul Walter Hauser is best known for portraying one of the unluckiest men in America, the title character of Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell. Perhaps it's only fitting then that he should now find himself headlining The Luckiest Man in America.
French cinema is full of melodramas in which various characters lose their minds over some desirable nymphet. They're usually played for laughs (Gemma Bovery), but sometimes for thrills (One Deadly Summer). With Misericordia, writer/director Alain Guiraudie mines this setup for both black comedy and even darker thrills, delivering a devilishly queer take on a Gallic storytelling staple.
Movies about super intelligent characters often fail to convince because they're clearly not made by super intelligent filmmakers who possess the ability to think as smartly as their fictional creations. Sew Torn is a comic thriller about a very smart and resourceful young woman, and it works because its first time writer/director, Freddy Macdonald, is clearly a mad genius himself. It's not often I find myself thinking "that's something I haven't seen before" while watching a new movie, but it's a thought that crossed my mind at several points in Macdonald's debut, which is an expansion of his 2019 short of the same name.
The 1934 mystery classic The Thin Man famously climaxes with the married heroes - amateur sleuths Nick and Nora Charles - throwing a dinner party designed to flush out the person responsible for the murder they've spent the movie attempting to solve. Director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp draw heavily from The Thin Man for their spy thriller Black Bag. Their movie similarly climaxes with a tense dinner party, one which resolves itself almost exactly like its '30s predecessor, but it also opens with a dinner party, one purposely designed to set its guests on edge.
If you thought Joker owed a lot to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, you ain't seen nothing yet. Writer/director Eljah Bynum's Magazine Dreams is so indebted to those Scorsese movies (along with a couple of other obvious influences) that it makes Todd Phillips' film seem like a work of staggering originality by comparison. But for all its nods and homages, Magazine Dreams is a movie that keeps us engaged thanks to a fascinating central performance and a narrative that plays like a slow motion car crash from which we simply can't look away.
Michael Cera did it in Youth in Revolt. Jesse Eisenberg did it in The Double. Jake Gyllenhaal did it in Enemy. Now it's Robert Pattinson's turn. Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17 is the latest movie that asks its leading man to play two versions of themselves, one a socially awkward nebbish, the other a confident and sinister alpha male. Pattinson plays the part(s) well, but the movie around him is a fiasco, perhaps the worst ever made by a filmmaker directly after landing a Best Picture Oscar.
