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Fire of Wind
(2024)
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Richard Brody
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What makes “Fire of Wind” superior to the kind of topicality that passes for political filmmaking in the art-house mainstream is its metapolitical essence.
Posted Oct 30, 2025
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Frankenstein
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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Just as Victor’s Harlander-funded experiment goes logistically awry, so del Toro’s Netflix-backed dream project feels, for all its beauties and intricacies, like a technologically compromised creature.
Posted Oct 30, 2025
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Bugonia
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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“Bugonia” is an altogether more intoxicating specimen. Lanthimos's gaze, so exactingly attuned to human ugliness, has seldom given us lovelier things to look at.
Posted Oct 26, 2025
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Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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No one expects a bio-pixposé of the Boss, but this movie is so respectful and dignified as to seem like puff.
Posted Oct 26, 2025
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The Perfect Neighbor
(2025)
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Jessica Winter
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I haven’t felt such visceral and intensely gendered loathing for a documentary termagant since “Dear Zachary.”
Posted Oct 18, 2025
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Hedda
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Thompson’s compressed fury provides a fiery core for DaCosta’s cinematic vision. The director wrenches apart Ibsen’s terse and precise mechanism and makes room for a proliferation of arresting moments.
Posted Oct 18, 2025
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The Mastermind
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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It offers the pleasures of being caught off guard both by major twists and by minor details whose startling originality merits discussion but that viewers should be allowed to discover unprepared.
Posted Oct 15, 2025
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A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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When the experience was over, my cuticles were entirely intact, and, throughout, the only alarm I could muster was for Bigelow -- a creeping fear that she had gone to battle with mediocre material and lost.
Posted Oct 15, 2025
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Nouvelle Vague
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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“Nouvelle Vague” isn’t a portrait of Godard by Linklater but a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.
Posted Oct 12, 2025
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Blue Moon
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Blue Moon revels in a fine mind and a great soul, and Hawke’s embodiment of both is exalted and startling. His makeup renders him unrecognizable and is eerily compelling, while his vocal self-transformation is nothing short of miraculous.
Posted Oct 12, 2025
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If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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From scene to scene, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” can feel so formally aggressive, verging on assaultive, that it takes a moment to appreciate that it’s also a movie of strategic elisions and structured absences.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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One Battle After Another
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Anderson elicits memorable inflections of dialogue, intent glances, brazen thrashes of energy and outbursts of fury from his charismatic cast, making “One Battle After Another” a feast of inspired and dedicated acting.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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After the Hunt
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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“After the Hunt” will be derided as little more than an intellectual parlor trick, a flimsy house of cards. I wouldn’t disagree, but few directors build more luxurious houses than Guadagnino does, whatever the materials.
Posted Oct 03, 2025
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The Smashing Machine
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Safdie takes a story of passion and fury, of rage and torment, and reduces it to the arm’s-length mode of the interesting.
Posted Oct 01, 2025
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One Battle After Another
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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One Battle After Another, as great an American movie as I’ve seen this year, doesn’t simply meet the moment; with extraordinary tenderness, fury, and imagination, it forges a moment all its own, and insists that better ones could still lie ahead.
Posted Sep 26, 2025
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A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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The refinement of Kogonada’s direction is never in question, but, paradoxically, it may make things worse. A less deft or more vulgar filmmaker might have endowed the formulaic emotions with an element of camp.
Posted Sep 19, 2025
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Megadoc
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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“Megadoc” shows that what’s truly utopian about “Megalopolis” is its mode of production; Figgis’s perceptive view of the shoot brings to the fore the artistic ideas that Coppola’s way of working embodies.
Posted Sep 15, 2025
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Eddington
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Aster is so intent on using ripped-from-the-headlines events that he fails to make proper use of them, and ends up cynically debasing them all.
Posted Sep 10, 2025
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Toy Story
(1995)
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Bruce Diones
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The easy-to-follow screenplay, about the rivalry between two toys—cowboy Woody and spaceman Buzz Lightyear—should excite young children; teen-agers and parents can enjoy the brilliantly executed action sequences.
Posted Sep 09, 2025
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Erupcja
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Charli XCX may not have much movie experience, but she dominates the action with classical canniness, her energetic yet poised performance showing keen awareness that movie acting favors minimal strain.
Posted Sep 05, 2025
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Caught Stealing
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Aronofsky has it both ways, and for a cinematically effective reason: the movie is, at times, cartoonlike, because its pain is nearly unbearably authentic.
Posted Aug 28, 2025
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Eden
(2024)
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Justin Chang
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Its title notwithstanding, “Eden” is a drama of paradise despoiled. The movie, to my eyes, badly miscalculates the ratio of paradise to despoilment, indulging the latter at the expense of the former.
Posted Aug 26, 2025
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Four Nights of a Dreamer
(1971)
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Richard Brody
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Bresson, tuning in to the times with wry views of rockers and hippies, exalts his protagonist’s self-sacrificing devotion as untimely and sublime.
Posted Aug 22, 2025
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A Little Prayer
(2023)
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Justin Chang
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“A Little Prayer” is spare yet brisk, and it unfolds with a graceful, almost musical sense of modulation: Camp and Weston, both veterans of MacLachlan’s work, strike bracing high notes of acerbic wit.
Posted Aug 22, 2025
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Splitsville
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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“Splitsville,” I think, wants both to satirize the anything-goes absurdity of modern romance and to show us how little we know what we really want from life and love. But it adds up to not much more than a four-way shrug of indifference.
Posted Aug 22, 2025
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Honey Don't!
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Visceral though it is, “Honey Don’t!” whips up a merely decorative frenzy, concealing the well-worn tropes on which it relies. Yet something of substance remains, even if it takes a long, clattery while to show itself.
Posted Aug 21, 2025
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Highest 2 Lowest
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Lee’s aesthetic of production, and of the power that’s an essential and inescapable part of art, is fundamentally conservative -- and no less stimulating for being so.
Posted Aug 15, 2025
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My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
(2024)
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Justin Chang
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This is, in no small part, a film about what it means to wait -- for a colleague to be released from a pointless, unjust detention, or for the world to finally come crashing down.
Posted Aug 15, 2025
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An Officer and a Spy
(2019)
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Richard Brody
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Rather than reconsidering history by intimate acquaintance with a lesser-known hero, it turns its hero into a stick figure no more personalized, complex, or contextualized than a comic-book creation. Far from arousing curiosity, the movie forecloses it.
Posted Aug 15, 2025
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Harvest
(2024)
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Richard Brody
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“Harvest” is fundamentally a work of political cinema, a social archeology of the emergence of capitalism—of the depravities of modern economics and the inherent injustices of its legal premises.
Posted Aug 08, 2025
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Weapons
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Facile sensationalism cuts the movie off from its own most powerful implications, blocking any view of a recognizable world.
Posted Aug 08, 2025
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Souleymane's Story
(2024)
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Justin Chang
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Lojkine’s film, for all its blunt force, also has fleeting instances of relief, and it presents them, for the most part, with a wise lack of inflection or emphasis.
Posted Aug 07, 2025
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The Naked Gun
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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Fear not: “The Naked Gun” hits the target, but barely. This reboot of the beloved franchise, centered on the Los Angeles Police Squad, is funny enough to sustain patience without rivalling the original’s wild charm.
Posted Aug 01, 2025
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The Rules of the Game
(1939)
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Richard Brody
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Like the opera [The Marriage of Figaro], the film blends these disparate moods and tones at a whirlwind tempo: slapstick comedy and poignant melodrama, graceful lyricism and bumptious braggadocio, witty satire and bitter tragedy.
Posted Jul 31, 2025
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The Fantastic Four: First Steps
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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There’s more energy in the eye-catching production design than in the drama. The director, Matt Shakman, evokes little struggle, terror, or wonder, and the fine cast delivers amiable and mild performances.
Posted Jul 25, 2025
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Cloud
(2024)
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Justin Chang
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That tension between modes [of realism and online fantasy] gives Cloud tremendous visceral and intellectual force, plus a persistent air of moral inquiry.
Posted Jul 17, 2025
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Near Orouët
(1971)
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Richard Brody
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Combining freewheeling plots with impulsive performances by mostly nonprofessional actors, Rozier pays quasi-documentary attention to summertime sites and customs while focussing dramatically on the season’s romantic prospects and frustrations.
Posted Jul 12, 2025
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Superman
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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There’s no grandeur and no wonder to Gunn’s universe and, although there’s much discussion of the defining quality of one’s actions and choices, the film’s superheroes seem thin, constrained, and undefined.
Posted Jul 10, 2025
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Superman II
(1980)
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Pauline Kael
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[Richard Lester] brings it one light touch after another, and pretty soon the movie has a real spirit - what you wished the first had had.
Posted Jun 28, 2025
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M3GAN 2.0
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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M3GAN 2.0 has little dramatic shape and no directorial style. In striving for more than the original, it achieves far less.
Posted Jun 27, 2025
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Familiar Touch
(2024)
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Justin Chang
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It’s devastating to behold. But devastation is only the culmination, and not the entirety, of Ruth’s journey, and Chalfant’s performance, for all its exquisite subtlety, is also furiously alive.
Posted Jun 27, 2025
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28 Years Later
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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Even near the end, dwarfed by a tower of skulls, it is Comer whose wrenching performance gestures toward the monumental.
Posted Jun 26, 2025
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Afternoons of Solitude
(2024)
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Richard Brody
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The aesthetic of bullfighting is revealed to be as exquisite as it is terrifying.
Posted Jun 20, 2025
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Meeting with Pol Pot
(2024)
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Richard Brody
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Panh combines sharply observed action with archival footage and diorama-like re-creations -- complete with clay figurines -- of horrors that went undepicted.
Posted Jun 20, 2025
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F1 The Movie
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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Again and again, “F1” finds fresh pathways into familiar material; it keeps its surface-level moves unpredictable even though its overarching trajectory isn’t.
Posted Jun 20, 2025
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The Life of Chuck
(2024)
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Richard Brody
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Unlike horrors and dreams and fantasies, the imaginary world that dominates The Life of Chuck is utterly devoid of personality. The trickery of its creation is clever but impersonal for reasons that go beyond the story’s stiff detail-twiddling.
Posted Jun 18, 2025
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Materialists
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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This triangle of invention in text, image, and performance lifts “Materialists” to a high level of aesthetic delight -- for about half the movie. Then, the film falls with a thud, never to rise again.
Posted Jun 13, 2025
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Materialists
(2025)
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Justin Chang
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I don’t buy it, Jane Austen wouldn’t buy it, and deep down I don’t think Song buys it. In attempting to merge escapist pleasures with financial realities, “Materialists” trips up on its own high-mindedness.
Posted Jun 09, 2025
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Videoheaven
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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With clips from more than a hundred movies, Perry channels an obsession into a fascinating encyclopedic form.
Posted Jun 07, 2025
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Ballerina
(2025)
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Richard Brody
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In the John Wick films, Reeves has become an accomplished actioneer, but the role fits him like a costume, not like a second skin, and that’s equally true of de Armas, who is a purposeful and determined presence nonetheless.
Posted Jun 07, 2025
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