He's well into his 40s now and letting the passage of time show on his face, in his demeanor and in the complicated men he's choosing to play on screen. In Paul Schrader, Hawke is ideally matched with a filmmaker whose own work has only grown deeper and more resonant over the past several decades. It has echoes of past efforts from both while it also wrestles with bracingly contemporary themes of personal responsibility, stewardship and activism.
Hawke stars as Reverend Ernst Toller, a country priest in upstate New York whose involvement in the lives of a married couple in his congregation steadily causes him to lose his grip. With heavy shades of the iconic character he created in Travis Bickle, Schrader vividly presents a man who's grappling with reality and his perceived role within it. He says so much within the film's quiet stillness and precise austerity as well as with masterful narration that offers a glaring contrast between Toller's journals and the truth.
But it also allows Amanda Seyfried to show a dramatic depth we haven't seen from her before as the woman who could be Toller's salvation or his undoing. That sense of ambiguity only becomes more gripping as the film progresses, leading to an ending that's boldly open for interpretation but is undeniably daring and haunting.
Christy Lemire. Like many good dark comedies ex: " Office Space ," " Bamboozled " the hysterically caustic "Sorry to Bother You" feels like a full-blown panic attack. The film's class conscious anxiety and mordant sense of optimism is also contagious, as it is in movies like " Starship Troopers " and "Putney Swope. At the same time: Riley's thrillingly inventive conception of the rise-fall-rise-fall-and-rise-again character arc of call center worker drone Cassius "Cash" Green an incredible Lakeith Stanfield always feels real enough, even when it takes a hard turn into what is currently the realm of science-fiction.
In that sense: "Sorry to Bother You" is also a great American social critique ex: "A Face in the Crowd," "Idiocracy" since it teaches viewers how to watch it.
Riley handily realizes Francois Truffaut's goal of introducing four ideas per minute—and they're each fully-realized and easily understood. That's a major talent when your film essentially weaponizes audience surrogate Cash's relatability. We grow more and more aware of the unbearable heaviness of Cash's existence as a young, black, and talented man.
First he stops thinking of himself as a barnacle on an unfathomable ship of industry and starts to see himself as a major player. Then he stops letting himself be seduced by the trappings of his newfound financial success and starts to focus on the application of his talents.
Finally, Cash stops fooling himself into thinking that he's just a messenger of utilitarian progress and becomes a victim of his own self-deluded progress. But by then it's too late.
Or not. It's late, but it ain't never. Simon Abrams. But that sells it short. It sells short how each narrative feels like it flows into the next. The hotel is deserted, staffed by a single desk clerk. Some of the new guests' reasons for being there are less than innocent and some are not who they appear to be. PG min Action, Comedy, Crime. PG min Animation, Adventure, Comedy. Set in Japan, Isle of Dogs follows a boy's odyssey in search of his lost dog.
R min Horror, Sci-Fi. Five years after an ominous unseen presence drives most of society to suicide, a mother and her two children make a desperate bid to reach safety. Votes: , R min Drama, Music, Romance. A musician helps a young singer find fame as age and alcoholism send his own career into a downward spiral. PG min Comedy, Musical, Romance. Five years after the events of Mamma Mia! R min Action, Biography, Drama. A true David vs. Goliath story of how the 14th century Scottish 'Outlaw King' Robert the Bruce used cunning and bravery to defeat the much larger and better equipped occupying English army.
Votes: 66, R min Comedy, Romance. A young couple must navigate a blossoming romance, amidst a war between their families' competing pizza restaurants. R min Comedy, Crime, Mystery. Stephanie is a single mother with a parenting vlog who befriends Emily, a secretive upper-class woman who has a child at the same elementary school. When Emily goes missing, Stephanie takes it upon herself to investigate. Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in an epic action-adventure that will set the course of one of the Star Wars saga's most unlikely heroes.
R min Action, Adventure, Crime. The drug war on the U. To fight the war, federal agent Matt Graver re-teams with the mercurial Alejandro. R min Comedy, Drama, Musical. Six tales of life and violence in the Old West, following a singing gunslinger, a bank robber, a traveling impresario, an elderly prospector, a wagon train, and a perverse pair of bounty hunters. R min Drama. A film that begins with Wakanda enjoying its wealth in isolation and secrecy asks: What if the nation instead chose to help those of African ancestry worldwide?
And then, a step further: What if it engaged in global conquest and an inversion of the colonialist order? A terrific movie with a terrific cast, Black Panther raises the bar for the entire superhero genre. It is also a reminder that both of these characteristics can be signal virtues.
Whether or not the role proves to be final, it is one of his very best. Sissy Spacek is wonderful, too. In a perfect world—and there is very little sign that we are living in anything approaching one—Redford would be taking a Best Actor Oscar statue with him into a much-earned retirement.
Widows , directed and co-written with Gillian Flynn, of Gone Girl fame by Steve McQueen, is that most delightful of cinematic delicacies: a genre film that transcends its genre. The cast, headed by Viola Davis, is excellent, and while the script has an occasional head-scratching moment, it is for the most part taut and clever.
It all adds up to an immensely satisfying movie-night movie. There are oddities on display here, notably that the multinational cast members all speak in their native accents. Another film that is exquisite in its smallness. He subsequently suffered a severe head injury when he was thrown from a horse, and was then prohibited from further riding.
The Rider is a lightly fictionalized version of this story featuring Jandreau himself his surname is changed to Blackburn , his family members, and the partially paralyzed former rodeo star Lane Scott who also plays a version of his real-life self. Is this genuinely one of the 10 best films of ? Of course not. The bleaker sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web , suggests that our digital lives are not under threat from supernatural forces. Instead, the movie's protagonist, a driftless twenty-something dude named Matias Woodell who likes to Skype with his friends online, is pursued by a secret society of hackers and trolls that should feel stomach-churning-ly familiar.
Many of the scares are ridiculous and the story takes some wildly implausible twists, but, as with the first Unfriended , the hyper-detailed approach to re-creating your average desktop experience makes this a revealing, fascinating snapshot of our current technological moment.
Or should I say screenshot? This adaptation of Kevin Kwan's bestselling novel of the same name is built around a central romance between NYU professor Rachel Chu Wu and mega-wealthy heir Nick Young Golding , but the movie's most potent material concerns the intergenerational struggles between Rachel and Nick's skeptical mother, played with nerve by Yeoh.
Each verbal slight stings; each withering glance leaves a mark. When the two face off over a game of mahjong at the film's conclusion, it's as gripping as any white-knuckle gambling movie showdown. Even in this rarified rom-com world, the stakes are high and the actresses are unquestionably playing for keeps. Released: December 6 Cast: Paula Niedert Elliott, Chris Elliott, Abby Elliott, Bridey Elliott Director: Bridey Elliott Why It's Great: Casting your own famous family as thinly veiled stand-ins for themselves and shooting a movie at your parents beautiful Connecticut home is the type of indulgent indie movie cliche that might send movie-goers running for the exits.
Luckily, Bridey Elliott has a secret weapon: her family is blazingly, riotously funny. Her father, Chris, was a staple on Late Night With David Letterman in the '80s and the star of the cult comedy Cabin Boy , her sister Abby was a cast member on SNL for four seasons, and her late grandfather, Bob Elliott, whose paintings appear in the film, was half of the legendary comedy duo Bob and Ray.
So, it's no surprise that Chris Elliott and Abby Elliott excel at playing gleefully obnoxious versions of themselves, with Chris telling crude jokes while drinking his life away and Abby unleashing brutal one-liners while stressing out about her upcoming wedding.
But Bridey's smartest move in concocting this familial ghost story was pushing those two scene-stealers to the margins, taking a supporting role herself, and focusing on her mother, Paula Niedert Elliott, who plays the titular Clara. More than a little unhinged, Clara finds herself neglected by her show-biz-obsessed offspring and dismissed by her bitter husband, but Bridey's roving camera sees her with poignant and hilarious clarity.
Whether she's watching a dog video on her phone, searching for a missing shoe, or leaving a heartbreakingly sweet voicemail for a wine company, Clara is a star, the type of complex woman Hollywood too often ignores. As the night spirals out into a ritualized bender right out of a Eugene O'Neill play -- but with way more stoned Haley Joel Osment -- the movie takes flight.
As geriatric felon Forrest Tucker, the former Sundance Kid gets to lay on the charm in his signature low-key manner, flirting with bank tellers and building a relationship with his no-nonsense love interest Jewel Spacek , and Lowery shoots it all in a grainy, nostalgic style that stops just short of coming off as too precious.
Towards the end, Lowery even incorporates footage of Redford from old movies for a moving, clever montage. There's very little grit or tension to this story -- Tucker doesn't like using his titular gun and the grizzled cop chasing him, played by a typically drowsy Affleck, isn't exactly obsessed with catching him -- but that ephemeral quality works to Lowery's advantage as a filmmaker.
Even when the movie feels like it might float away, you want to float with it. Grant, Dolly Wells, Jane Curtin Director: Marielle Heller The Diary of a Teenage Girl Why It's Great : The dark interiors of early '90s Manhattan bars, a terrain free of smartphones and conversations about whatever happened on Twitter that day, are the lovely, comforting backdrop of this literary con artist story.
Like a more landlocked take on Catch Me If You Can , Heller's endlessly perceptive true crime comedy understands the care and affection that goes into meticulously creating the perfect fake. Israel has a gift, one that the larger publishing apparatus fails to recognize, and so does McCarthy: She draws the viewer into thrill and desperation of each transaction.
Shot with the bright colors of a 90s music video and the roving camera movements of a Michael Bay blockbuster, Coralie Fargeat's ultra-slick reinvention of the rape-revenge sub-genre follows Jen Lutz as her romantic getaway with a married man Janssens is interrupted by his two loathsome hunting buddies.
One of the friends assaults Jen, violating her in the morning after a night of partying, and later the three men push her off a cliff, leaving her to die in the sweltering desert heat.
She springs back to life. Her violent retribution is often simultaneously stomach-churning and ridiculous -- the hallways of the chic rented house get turned into a bloody slip-and-slide by the ending -- but the performers and the filmmakers are zeroed in on a shared sensibility that does more than simply shock and provoke.
The trailers and marketing made it look like yet another studio comedy in the post-Apatow mold, filled with improv-juiced banter, zingy pop culture references, and predictable emotional beats about battling middle-age ennui.
It many ways, it is that movie, especially in its first 30 minutes, but as the high-concept premise kicks in -- basically, a group of charades-loving yuppies led by Bateman and McAdams's hyper-competitive couple find themselves in a violent ARG similar the one that terrified Michael Douglas in 's The Game -- the directors, who previously helmed 's Vacation remake and co-wrote the less amusing Bateman vehicle Horrible Bosses , reveal that they've put more work into designing the thriller elements of the story then you may have assumed.
The slapstick sequences have the visual wit and spatial playfulness of an Edgar Wright movie, especially as the movie speeds into its twist-filled conclusion. McAdams in particular sells each joke with a studied earnestness.
Like the movie surrounding her, she attacks even the dumbest task with surprising rigor. Gemini , which stars Kirke as a personal assistant to Kravitz's famous actress, is set in the same wealthy universe of fame-adjacent underlings, but instead of taking a supernatural route it stumbles down the path of a low-key stoner noir.
Katz's version of a murder mystery in Los Angeles isn't sweaty or sunny. He envisions the city as a chilly, neon-drenched world of small transactions, petty squabbles, and the occasional violent outburst. It's the perfect backdrop for this sly comedy of careful negotiation. There was little in his previous two directorial efforts, the indies Brief Interviews With Hideous Men or The Hollars , that suggested Jim from The Office was a budding genre filmmaker.
And yet: A Quiet Place is a top-notch roller coaster in the Spielberg-ian mold. After sound-hating monsters take over the planet, a husband Krasinski and wife Blunt live a life of extreme caution with their two children, protecting them in a carefully maintained world of hushed whispers and relative silence. As you'd guess, the monsters have other plans. The political allegory component of the story isn't particularly compelling -- it's been interpreted as a commentary on the hysteria of Trump era -- but as a movie about parental anxieties, it's steely and effective.
This Netflix-funded set of old West stories gets off to an odd start -- the chapter starring the title character played by Tim Blake Nelson is a little ridiculous and the Franco-led bank robbery tale is too brisk -- but soon the movie finds its footing. In addition to finding death, cruelty, and despair in the West, the Coen's also find romance in the people and beauty in the landscape. What's the best chapter? In a movie that's not afraid to make you laugh or make you ponder some deep existential questions , the moments that leave you misty-eyed are what make it rocky terrain worth exploring.
Kayla Fisher is in many ways a typical teenage outcast: She endlessly scrolls through her carefully maintained social media feeds, desperately wants to be liked by her peers, and physically recoils at every remark from her well-meaning father played with an almost supernatural tenderness by Hamilton. While some critics have been quick to compare this chronicle of adolescence to Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird , which was also produced by hit-making indie distributor A24, Burnham has a more clinical, anthropological eye.
That can lead to some beautiful places -- a social media binge scored to Enya's "Orinoco Flow" will be recognizable to many -- but it can also lead to some clumsy, obvious symbolism. When Kayla breaks her phone's glass screen and then pricks her finger while trying to scroll, it's hard not to roll your eyes. You see, technology can deliver pleasure and pain! But once the tears start flowing in the film's moving final third, you'll likely overlook those flaws.
What's a movie about puberty without some growing pains? The Favourite , which follows Queen Anne of Great Britain and Ireland Colman, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance and the two women Weisz and Stone vying for her attention and affection, is aware of that tension and appropriately plays it for brutal laughs. Stone's newly arrived Abigail manipulates and humiliates herself to acquire power; Weisz's more experienced Lady Sarah schemes and triangulates to preserve her status; Colman's easily irritated Queen Anne simply lets her whims dictate her actions.
Watching the three of them clash is a vulgar pleasure. As was the case with his previous arthouse hit The Lobster , Lanthimos's gift for finding the absurd in human cruelty is at its most potent when it remains in a deadpan, almost affect-less comic register. Despite the endlessly game performances from the three leads, the movie wobbles in its second half as the story builds to an obtuse conclusion.
The claustrophobia of the court -- and the general disinterest in looking too far beyond the castle walls -- becomes a liability as the movie attempts to arrive at larger truths. And yet, the story of Isabelle, a middle-aged French artist Binoche struggling through a series of frustrating and alienating romantic encounters, is unapologetically, swooningly romantic. Many of the scenes between the endlessly charming Binoche and her often odious suitors, like a petty lout who demands "gluten-free olives" at a bar, are poignantly, wickedly funny.
Denis's simultaneously sensual and heady film, which is loosely based on a philosophical work by the writer Roland Barthes, is about being stuck in behavioral patterns. Many of the conversations in the movie are circular, with flirtation and blame getting passed around in a verbal dance, and Isabelle always appears on the verge of a major emotional or psychological breakthrough.
She remains open to life's possibilities, a mindset that also helps one enjoy this calming and loopy movie. The pair are back in high-octane Agatha Christie mode with The Commuter , a mystery that begins with Farmiga's chatty passenger Joanna presenting Neeson's haggard ex-cop and loyal transit-enthusiast of the title Michael MacCauley with a bizarre hypothetical: If you could perform a seemingly insignificant task that would have disastrous consequences for another commuter in exchange for a generous financial reward, would you do it?
It's a convoluted twist on Richard Matheson's "Button, Button" short story, which was adapted into a classic Twilight Zone episode and the bonkers Richard Kelley movie The Box , but Collet-Serra is less interested in the moral dilemma. Instead, he simply wants to strip the giant locomotive -- and his star's lumbering frame -- for parts, finding Hitchcockian tension in each padded seat, empty corridor, and nervy patron. It's action filmmaking as controlled demolition -- and the best train potboiler since Steven Seagal's Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.
Released: June 8 Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro Director: Ari Aster Why it's great: I consider myself a relatively seasoned horror moviegoer who doesn't get scared easily -- the "it's only a movie" mantra tends to work -- but Hereditary got under my skin in a big way. What makes this movie tick? It's all in the performances: The incredibly versatile Toni Collette, who first stunned horror audiences as the mother in The Sixth Sense , plays Annie, an artist who works from home constructing intricately designed miniatures of her own life.
When her elderly mother dies, Annie's family, which includes Byrne as her distant husband, Wolff as her aloof son, and Shapiro as her troubled daughter, is thrown into a crisis. For its first 40 minutes or so, the film plays like a strange psychodrama in the vein of Michael Haneke, but then an unspeakable event occurs about halfway through and the tension skyrockets.
Annie visits a friendly medium Ann Dowd of The Leftovers and begins to communicate with the dead. She sleepwalks and has terrifying nightmares; a supernatural force has descended upon the house. Aster directs the hell out of the movie's harrowing final stretch , which will likely leave some viewers scratching their heads, but Collette is the real MVP, throwing herself into a demanding role with unwavering commitment.
Released: August 17 Director: Bing Liu Why it's great: Skateboarding has always existed in a nebulous space between athletic activity, creative expression, and mode of transportation. It's also a form of socializing, with the long gaps between tricks serving as a time to crack jokes, kill time, and make friends.
Minding the Gap is a documentary that understands the sport on a granular level, examining how skating brought three young men in the economically struggling town of Rockford, Illinois together. One member of the trio is actually the filmmaker Bing Liu, and his level of involvement in the narrative changes as the film progresses and the years pass.
What starts as a movie about slackers lighting off fireworks and drinking beers on rooftops becomes a nuanced, carefully modulated study of domestic abuse, particularly the way violence cycles through generations of family members. It's a thoughtful film about race and class, too. Liu doesn't announce his ambitions or telegraph his themes right from the jump; he doesn't abandon his curiosity about skateboarding to chase these bigger ideas, either. Instead, he allows our knowledge of the lives and histories of the skaters to inform the often beautiful footage of their movements.
By the end, both skating and filmmaking are revealed as forms of therapy. Where to see it right now: Stream on Hulu watch the trailer. Reportedly shot through the lens of an iPhone, which gives the film a discombobulating and flat look, Unsane follows Sawyer Valentine Foy as she gets checked into a hospital's psych ward against her will and battles with an insurance system that wants to drain her bank account with little regard for her wellbeing.
You could call it a quasi-sequel to Soderbergh's pharma-thriller Side Effects. The reveals that come in the third act will leave some viewers shaking their heads in disbelief -- the story sets up narrative turns it doesn't follow through on -- but this isn't a movie looking to be reduced to a single twist or slogan.
It's a story as layered, inscrutable, and prickly as Foy's commanding lead performance. You can't look away. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's a re-creation of its former self, which makes it fertile ground for director Robert Greene, who specializes in projects that blur the line between reality and fiction. In examining the Bisbee deportation of -- a shameful chapter in America's labor history, when 1, striking miners were forced out of the town under threat of violence -- he's found a subject that perfectly matches his larger philosophical concerns and aesthetic tendencies.
More importantly, it also allows him to expand his scope; this is a big, wildly ambitious movie. It builds toward a dramatic re-staging of the deportation, with the present day citizens of the town playing the roles of workers and deputized anti-union police force.
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