Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical drama The Souvenir was one of our favorite films to come out of this year’s Sundance Festival. Set in the 1980s, The Souvenir follows a “quietly ambitious film student,” through the ups and downs of her first serious love affair with a charismatic but troubled government official.…

Rejoice, for Terrence Malick has written a screenplay again. After nearly a decade spent cobbling together improvised memory poems like To The Wonder and Knight Of Cups, this great American director has returned to the blueprint of narrative filmmaking, ready to tell something like a straightforward story again. But A…

Pedro Almodóvar has never won the top prize at Cannes. That could change in a few days. Pain And Glory (Grade: B) is far from his best movie—it lacks both the mad energy of his early countercultural work and the ravishing melodramatic pleasures of the critical darlings from his prestige period (including All About My…

Would it be giving Rocketman too much credit to assume that the filmmakers behind this Elton John biopic (who include executive producer Elton John) are at least faintly aware of their film’s hoariness? The movie opens, like so many musical biographies (and one timeless spoof) before it, with a famous singer…

The name Laura Dern needs no introduction—at least, we hope it doesn’t. A driving force in the acting profession, both on screen and behind the scenes as a member of the Oscars Board Of Governors, Dern was born into a famous Hollywood family, and has been a working actress since her early teens. In the years since,…

One of the prevailing ironies of Cannes is that while the films that win prizes here (see the work of Loach, first name Ken) are often urgent pleas for equality, the festival itself runs on rigid hierarchy. There is, for one, the whole badge system, which divides the thousands invited to attend every year into…

This week’s question is in honor of the release of John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, and its irreplaceable lead:

“This isn’t going to end well,” Adam Driver remarks a few times in The Dead Don’t Die. Three days after opening Cannes, Jim Jarmusch’s underwhelming zom-com has itself stubbornly refused to die, its general philosophy—a consuming pessimism about our here and now—spreading across the festival like a virus. Driver’s…

Norman Mailer used to tell a story about Darryl F. Zanuck, the cigar-chomping super-producer responsible for The Longest Day, the vast and impersonal war epic that became 1962’s highest-grossing movie. To hear Mailer tell it, Zanuck, at the wrap party for the film, announced that he was one of only three people in the…

Does anyone watch a monster movie for the human drama? With all due respect to the cast of Godzilla: King Of The Monsters, the thing we’re most curious about in Legendary’s upcoming monster-mash sequel is the creatures: What will they look like? Where will they come from? How will they move, and more importantly, how…

Of the three film festivals that happen at the same time as Cannes in Cannes, Quinzaine (or Directors’ Fortnight) is the one that comes closest to rivaling the main one in prestige, importance, and quality of selections. Two days in, it’s too early to say how this year’s Fortnight will measure up to this year’s…

In his feature-length debut, See You Yesterday, co-writer and director Stefon Bristol asks one of sci-fi’s most indulgent questions: If you had the power to travel through time, what would you go back and change? When 16-year-old science prodigy Claudette Walker (Eden Duncan-Smith)—affectionately referred to as CJ by…

No one likes to see a dog die. In fact, most people are so averse to even fictional depictions of canine mortality that there’s an entire website devoted to warning viewers away from movies where the dog doesn’t make it. Self-help writer-turned-pop novelist W. Bruce Cameron has made a cottage industry out of making…

Even if you don’t know anything about the Cameron Todd Willingham case, it’s easy to intuit within the first few minutes of Trial By Fire that you’re watching a movie about an innocent man who was wrongfully convicted. Everyone’s far too certain that he’s guilty: Arson investigators walk through the charred remains of…

Midway through The Sun Is Also A Star, a cynical teen complains that all poems are about one of three things: love, sex, or the stars. While you could certainly quibble with her literary analysis—especially given that she’s speaking to a teenage poet whose influences range from Emily Dickinson to Tupac Shakur—her…

The Cannes Film Festival opened tonight with a zombie movie, and I can’t be the only American in attendance who felt very seen. Not just because the film itself was American—that’s frequently the case on opening night of the world’s most prestigious film festival, which tends to commence with a burst of pure star…

When we first see Asako (Erika Karata), the central character of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, she’s milling about a photography exhibition titled Self And Others—though it’s not long before her attention wanders to a slouchy hunk whose name, she later learns, is Baku (Masahiro Higashide). He exits the gallery;…

From executive producers Steven Soderbergh and Flying Lotus comes the psychedelic sci-fi thriller Perfect, a story of an “emotionally-troubled young man” who attempts to plant “plug-and-play characteristics directly into his own body,” in pursuit of perfection. Ahead of its release this Friday, we spoke with stars…

Hearing a voice on the other end of the phone say, “This is Werner Herzog,” is a surreal—and, frankly, rather intimidating—experience. It’s true that Herzog has leaned into his status as not only one of the premier filmmakers of his generation, but also as a stone-faced existentialist meme factory, agreeing to…

The photographer at the Gateway Of India in Mumbai makes an unusually poetic sales pitch. Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), trying to sell Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) on a touristy souvenir photo, promises not only the instant capturing of a memory, but also the potential to recall exactly what she was doing at that…