While Cannes winds down on the ground, I make my way home in the sky. In some respects, it was a weird year for the festival. Genre films, for example, were everywhere, with the competition lineup going unusually heavy on guns, flying saucers, zombies, evil spirits, cultists, and mind-controlling plants. And that’s…

Netflix’s new horror flick The Perfection follows onetime cello prodigy Charlotte (Allison Williams) and the new star cellist of her former school Lizzie (Logan Browning), whose relationship leads them down “a sinister path with shocking consequences.” Ahead of it hitting Netflix today, we sat down with Williams and…

One party animal on screen tells another that “It’s the end of everything,” and I finally lose count of the number of films at this festival that have vocalized the fatalism of our time, the nagging feeling that we all may be hurtling toward a point of destructive conclusion. Uttered during one of the last screenings…

Sitting around chatting with some friends after dinner recently, I mentioned there were a handful of Netflix original rom-coms I was planning to catch up on before writing this piece. It turns out everyone else in the group—people who aren’t paid to follow pop culture for a living—had already seen them all, and were…

I’m not proud to admit it, but my heart sank a little last May when Cate Blanchett announced that Shoplifters, from Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu, was her jury’s choice for the best film in the Cannes competition lineup. Nothing against the movie—quite to the contrary, Shoplifters is wonderful, and wound up…

If Netflix is the new video store, then The Perfection is the new direct-to-video thriller. A lurid little movie that tracks horror mud onto the wall-to-wall carpeting of ’90s erotic thrillers through the sheer force of its creative sadism, it would play extremely well on the bottom half of a bill headlined by Korean…

Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, the coming-of-age tale Booksmart, follows best friends and academic overachievers Amy and Molly as they attempt to cram four years of raucous fun into the night before their high school graduation. Ahead of the film’s release this Friday, we sat down with Wilde to talk about the film,…

Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, is one of the best teen comedies to come along in years. The film is all-around excellent, but none of it would work without the core duo of Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein, who star as overachieving, politically minded, codependent high school BFFs Amy and Molly. Dever…

The forced march of listless live-action Disney remakes continues with Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, the worst of a batch that has already gifted us forgettable, over-designed reimaginings of Cinderella and Beauty And The Beast. Of course, Disney’s beloved 1992 animated musical about a young thief and the campy,…

It seems that we are living in a golden age of female-led coming-of-age comedies. Lady Bird and The Edge Of Seventeen announced their directors as filmmakers to watch, while Blockers put the lie to the idea that it’s impossible to be both sensitive to changing social mores and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.…

In the years since the release of Man Of Steel, Zack Snyder’s version of Superman has been subject to a certain amount of distortion and oversimplification, appropriate given the distortion and oversimplification of Snyder’s clumsy superhero films. His Superman may not be a successful reimagining of the character,…

A few years ago, Quentin Tarantino announced, with typical stop-the-presses grandiosity, that he would officially stop making movies after completing his 10th feature. It remains to be seen if American cinema’s reigning rock-star auteur will make good on this early retirement plan, but the rationale behind it appears…

Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, the coming-of-age tale Booksmart, follows best friends and academic overachievers Amy and Molly as they attempt to cram four years of raucous fun into the night before their high school graduation. Ahead of the film’s release this Friday, we sat down with stars Kaitlyn Dever and…

Controversy, like long lines and coffee breath, is inevitable at the Cannes Film Festival. Last year, Lars von Trier supplied the lions’ share of it, as is his wont. This year, it comes from Quentin Tarantino, who may or may not dramatize Sharon Tate’s murder in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (I’ll find out today,…

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…