Ridley Scott's House of Gucci sits in a frustrating liminal space, always both too much and not enough, preposterous in its way, but not as preposterous as it should be.
The more I see Riders of Justice, the more I understand how this oddball philosophical comedy served as a perfect balm for my weird, terrible year.
Licorice Pizza offered me more of the joys of cinema than anything has in years, but I regret its perpetuation of an erasure ironically similar to that practiced in the era Anderson satirizes.
Whatever Bo Burnham’s Inside is—a stand-up routine, a television special, a piece of musical theater, a music album, a documentary, a cinematic selfie, a confession—I think it’s cinema.
The very best films and first watches in 2021 from the BW/DR editorial staff.
Undine is a story of the more timeless complications of love, long predating the European cataclysm and sure to outlive our present day.
This month on the show, we’re diving deep into Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog with film critic and Quorum (Film Quarterly) editor Girish Shambu.
Drive My Car suggests that art itself is a vehicle for both communication and self-exploration. It can communicate what cannot be said out loud, if we are willing to listen, and can also be the vessel through which we better understand who we are.
The great literary twist of Midnight Mass is that, after all that, their salvation is also their sin, and it is entirely earthly, entirely finite.
Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is a a true musical, with brass-cracking orchestration; colors so anodyne they whisper, so blaring they shout; voices that soar and temporize and stay. Within seconds, it necessitates its own existence.
The illusions of The French Dispatch are wondrous and sweet, and possibly vanishing. This singular setting and this singular filmmaker bolster one another, though, an inevitable convergence of two finely cultivated worlds—the outsider dream of France, and the extended universe of Wes Anderson.
The magic trick of Joanna Hogg’s film is not so much that The Souvenir Part II is funnier or stranger or better than its predecessor: it’s that Part II redefines both films as another form of memoir entirely.
