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"Uglies," Netflix's latest big movie adaptation of a young adult novel, takes place in a dystopian society in which teens are expected to go through an extreme cosmetic surgery at 16 to make them "pretty." (Spoiler alert: This system turns out to be bad.) The film originally caught some flak online for its choice to cast conventionally attractive actors for the main "Ugly" roles, but director Joseph McGinty Nichol (widely known as McG) has clarified that there's a pretty good reason for this. As he explained in an interview with The Wrap:

"We're saying it's never enough [...] I think, if you spoke to some of the most universally regarded beautiful people in the world, they're some of the people with the most intense body dysmorphia. Nobody's immune from this toxicity that's out there of 'It's never enough. You can always have a thinner waist, bigger hips, fuller lips.' Take your pick.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Saltburn.

Saltburn continues to captivate audiences with its rich literary and historical references, exceptional acting, and shocking cinematic scenes. However, there are some noticeable plot holes and moments that don't quite add up, which could prevent it from becoming an awards season contender. The film draws inspiration from Gothic literary dramas, Stanley Kubrick films, and works by Shakespeare and Greek mythology, but these hidden details may distract from the inconsistencies in the timeline and plot.

Saltburn has proven to be one of the most talked about and rewatched movies of 2023 and has continued to fascinate audiences into the new year. Written and directed by Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), Saltburn is rich with hidden literary and historical references, exceptional acting from a picture-perfect cast, and, most notably, carries some of the most shocking cinematic scenes in recent memory. That being said, there are still quite a...

May December director Todd Haynes with screenwriter Samy Burch, and his producers Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, Jessica Elbaum and Sophie Mas Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Todd Haynes’s May December, screenplay by Samy Burch, shot by Christopher Blauvelt and starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, and Charles Melton opened the 61st New York Film Festival on Friday. Todd’s previous films screening at the New York Film Festival were Velvet Goldmine (NYFF 36), I’m Not There (NYFF 45), Carol (NYFF 53), Wonderstruck (NYFF 55 - Centerpiece Selection), and The Velvet Underground (NYFF 59).

Todd Haynes responding to Anne-Katrin Titze’s comment and question: “I did not create the lisp! There are some people who are missing today who could speak so beautifully about how they built these characters.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At the press conference Todd Haynes spoke about connecting his composer Marcelo Zarvos to Michel Legrand’s score for Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (Harold Pinter...

It’s a curious quirk of the British calendar that Mother’s Day — or Mothering Sunday, if you want to be formal about it — falls not in May, with all that month’s springy symbolism of new life, but the damp, unripe chill of mid-March, when no one feels much like celebrating anything at all. In “Mothering Sunday,” however, a number of upper-class English families meet to picnic on a day so unseasonably warm and bright that the weather is the one safe running topic of conversation: It’s a gathering of more parents than children, where unspoken and unspeakable losses are politely talked around. If Graham Swift’s 2016 novella was a guest at the same elegant, repressed garden party as L.P. Hartley’s “The Go-Between” and Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” Eva Husson and screenwriter Alice Birch’s unusual, stimulating adaptation comes closer to the shattered experimentalism of Joseph Losey...

Warning: contains spoilers for Line of Duty series six.

When I tell Jed Mercurio that I felt bereft after the end of Line of Duty, he thanks me and jokes “Well, we do aim to leave people disappointed.” I’m talking about missing the communal viewing experience and frenzy of fan theories between episodes; he’s talking about a well-publicised outcry from some viewers that the finale’s ‘H’ mystery reveal was a let-down.

Speaking on Zoom three weeks after Line of Duty concluded – perhaps for good – Mercurio has answered the finale’s critics his way. On Twitter, he shared Audience Appreciation Index stats on the final series – scores out of 100 compiled on behalf of the BBC Audience Research Unit and used as an indicator of how viewers felt about a particular programme. He won’t argue with subjective reactions, he says, but will confront what he describes as a...

Chicago – Writer/director Matthew Weinstein is bringing a bit of Chicago to the Beloit (Wisconsin) International Film Festival this upcoming weekend (February 21st and 22nd) as he presents his short made-in-Chicago film, “A Missed Connection.” Featuring a couple, a chance encounter and a meditation on the past, more information on the screening is available by clicking here.

“A Missed Connection” is a cause and effect story, as a series of events ends up with a couple (Tyler Pistorius and Kimberly Michelle Vaughn) meeting by chance in a coffee shop. They share a past with each other, but also has had enough of a life beyond that past to formulate a new present. The film was shot in Chicago and nearby Glenview, and has a noir feel in the use of locations.

'A Missed Connection,’ Screening at the Beloit International Film Festival

Photo credit: Third Wheel Entertainment

Matthew Weinstein is a based-in-Chicagoland filmmaker.

Spike Lee has been making movies for more than 30 years now, racking up some two dozen feature credits leading up to the release of “BlackKklansman” this weekend.

And I’m happy to say: I knew him when. Way back at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, I was approached by an aggressive PR rep to cover the first feature by a director he identified as “the black Jim Jarmusch” — a promising up-and-comer named Spike Lee. The description was intriguing, but the film itself, “She’s Gotta Have It,” is what really made me take notice. Decades later, I’m still following the career of the young upstart who has aged gracefully into grey eminence without any diminution of his willingness to take risks, or his ability to surprise and provoke. Of his several exceptional films, these are the ones I would select as his ten best.

10. Jungle Fever (1991)

Call it a double...

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is the famous first line of L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between.” Not so in Hulu’s “11.22.63,” in which an English teacher played by James Franco travels from 2015 to 1960 to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The early 1960s are so warm and cozy (never mind that fleeting glimpse of the “Whites Only” bathroom signage) that Franco’s Jake Epping hardly has to adjust. Jakes does bump up against some problems inherent in time traveling, of course. There’s the way the past keeps throwing hurdles like roaches and.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” said British novelist L.P. Hartley. For instance, they try people as witches. (Usually women, but not always!) Rural Scotland in the mid 1700s was still, for all intents and purposes, the Dark Ages. And the Dark Ages looked very dark indeed from the bottom of a thieves’ hole.Claire and her frenemy Geillis begin the episode tossed into that squalid pit. They fight about who’s to blame. Sure, Geillis has danced naked in the moonlight, praying to spirits; she has killed one woman with a spell (maybe) and one man with poison (definitely). But Claire has that superior English thing going on that annoys the hell out of people. Plus, the long hand of the law only reached in once Claire arrived to warn Geillis to run. Geillis should have taken Intro to Statistics: Correlation does not equal causation.

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," L.P. Hartley noted in the opening of his novel The Go-Between.

In 1986, Francis Ford Coppola tried to explore that notion with his wan whimsy in Peggy Sue Got Married, which closed the New York Film Festival. Kathleen Turner, who was nearing the end of her film career as a marketable entity on the West Coast (The War of the Roses (1989) was her final Hollywood hit), starred as the eponymous fortyish mother whose greasy spouse (Nicolas Cage) is ditching her. Distraught, Peggy Sue is persuaded to attend her high school reunion where she ends up being crowned queen. Immediately, she collapses and winds up traveling back in time to her teens. The quirk is that both she and the audience see that Peggy Sue clearly is a middle-aged mom dressing up in age-inappropriate attire, while her parents, friends, and all...