Tran Anh Hung’s new film, The Taste of Things, is about cooking—as gesture, as labor, as love, as skill.
Like all the best Michael Mann films, Ferrari moved me in a way I find impossible to describe. The tragedy of it all is so obvious: do not think that I weep for a car company’s founder so much as I do for the pain of ambition.
It’s the purview of art, of good art, to move. To move emotionally, intellectually, to move with or against the moment in which it’s found. It’s also the purview of the critical observer to take on whatever totality of context and understanding about the art and artist they already retain, or accumulate and decide for themselves what the work means, if it happens to mean anything.
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.
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.
Oppenheimer, like its namesake J. Robert Oppenheimer, is a noble failure—but I've continued to revisit it in my mind’s eye, wondering if it worked on me or if it was merely evocative—and to what degree “evocativeness” is a measure of quality.
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.
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.
You get what you bring into Past Lives, a lush and dreamy new film and the directorial debut of playwright Celine Song—a story of love and loss and reconnection between childhood sweethearts across a quarter-century and two continents.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is a self-fulfilling prophecy that undoes itself in the telling, an ouroboros regurgitating its own tail rather than eating it.
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.
The Green Knight seeks not simply to retell or reimagine the poem’s story, but to interrogate or cross-examine the poem itself: to cast a shadow of postmodern skepticism over the original telling, and indeed all of Arthuriana.