Ethan Hunt has been engineered as Cruise’s go-to export, the slippage between character and actor deliberate; Hunt is the closest an audience gets to seeing Cruise act like a normal person.
Claire Simon's Our Body is not only a fascinating look into the modern healthcare system, but is also, as with any documentary worth its weight, a peek into the ordinariness of extraordinary things.
After a long and stressful weekend, I went to go see Hell Or High Water by myself, and it absolutely gutted me.
Lucrecia Martel’s new documentary feature Nuestra Tierra is a portrait of a particular community on a particular plot of land in a particular municipality, but it opens in the non-descript vacuum of space.
If Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is about anything other than its star, it's about the sheer labor involved in putting on such a production.
I approached Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Wicked with skepticism. Were we really doing this all over again? Was I still being asked to take this bizarre Wizard of Oz-inspired, anti-fascist fanfiction seriously? Those answers soon became irrelevant. Thirty minutes into the film, I leaned over to my friend and said: “I’m kind of loving this.”
The formal ambition of Steven Soderbergh's Presence ties into its awareness of and reverence for the narrative possibilities of the ghost story. Knowing that everything the audience sees is a product of an entity, the camera becomes not just an eye, but an entire being.
Tran Anh Hung’s new film, The Taste of Things, is about cooking—as gesture, as labor, as love, as skill.
Where Asteroid City shines, where it is made masterpiece, is in its brief flashes of joy: a good picture, a milkshake, a song and dance, one more martini. Here is a life not perfect—soldiers wielding guns, no personal space, endless boredom—made enviable by one thing only: each other.
It’s an exciting thought—Dylan the preternatural genius who can’t walk down the street without a brilliant song falling from his pockets. There’s a kernel of truth to it, of course, but is it effective drama? Or is Dylan a cipher at the center of his own story?
For Richard Linklater, Hit Man is a genre exercise, or really, an exercise in the idea of genre—because, as the film repeatedly reminds you, it's more about perception and the malleability of identity than it is a true thriller.
For the first time, Paul Thomas Anderson has produced a film distinguished not merely by his characteristic fascination with the world but by a deep love for it.