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This is a film that even the actors who worked on it can’t seem to properly describe. What exactly has Ari Aster created here? The film sounds unique, dreamy, surreal and unexplainable. Oh, and it stars the ever-fascinating Joaquin Phoenix, an actor whose unpredictability, on and off the screen, has turned him into one of the most important actors of the 21st century. Nathan Lane, who has a supporting role in “Disappointment Blvd,” was questioned by Deadline about the film....

It sounds politically-charged and it probably will be. Just look at what McKay told Rolling Stone earlier in the year, describing his film as being about “a global catastrophe and a bumbling U.S. President who refuses to listen to his White House scientists advice”. A reader who saw the film at a recent test screening in June told me that it was a global warming satire with a lot of the same meta-editing McKay brought to his last two films (“The Big Short” “Vice”)....

Yes, the provoking questions “Downhill” asks, even though all derived from “Force Majeure, are timeless and incredibly relevant to today’s socio-political dynamics. Much like its foreign counterpart, “Downhill” deals with the patriarchy, and what a man’s worth now means in a society that is slowly, but surely empowering women as equals; it’s the “breadwinner dilemma”, so to speak. Telling the story of Pete (Ferrell), his wife Billie (Dreyfuss), and their chaotic, existential ski trip, Faxon and Rash’s film tackles a middle-class couple, who seem to have enough disposable income to take their two sons, Finn (Julian Grey) and Emerson (Ammon Jacob Ford), on a weeklong ski vacation in Austria....

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Yes, the film is about a huge, earth-shaking event, one which I wasn’t alive to bear witness to or understand the importance of, but truth be told, what did the government exactly accomplish by going to the moon? Stealing Americans’ precious tax-paying dollars? From all that I’ve read, Armstrong’s landing was a statement of American jingoistic might against the Russians. In fact, one of the film’s more fascinating sequences is a montage sequence of protests happening all around the country, backed by Gil Scott-Heron’s classic protest song “Whitey on the Moon,” which tries to show us how inner-city destruction took a backseat to the government’s adamant push to put Apollo 11 in space....

This past year, more than others, has had audiences and critics severely disagreeing on what constituted the best movies of the year. With the Academy adding a third of its members just last year, it’s not unreasonable to understand why ‘Rhapsody’ and ‘Green Book’ triumphed at the Oscars and Golden Globes. Fact of the matter is this, both movies are crowd pleasers, likable, charming, easy on the eyes and enjoyable because they seem to be what audiences want in a movie these days....

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In the age of Marvel, it’s kind of hard to dump on Shyamalan. At least he keeps trying new original ideas. Yes, Shyamalan is a brand. His name alone being stamped on a trailer can bring asses to seats. In his latest film, the India-born, Philadelphia-raised filmmaker riffs again on a “Twilight Zone”-like premise. You can hate on the guy all you want, but, at some point, Shyamalan was known as the director who gave us “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable....

All of this to say that “Nightmare Alley” was supposedly test-screened last night. This is, as far as I know, the first time it has been screened anywhere. A reader attended the showing last night, he swears he was there, and sent me an email reaction. Is this legitimate? You be the judge but it’s a very positive take on the film. UPDATE: Due to the request of Searchlight Pictures, I’ve taken down the reaction....

Kurzel’s film debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won a best actor prize for Caleb Landry Jones. A hybrid release is planned both in theaters on March 30, 2022, and on AMC Plus, AMC Networks’ streaming service. The film is about the Australian mass killer involved in the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, which led to scathing changes of gun control law in that country. “Nitram” swept the 2021 Australian Academy Awards Tuesday night with a eight total wins, including best film, lead actor, director, lead actress, supporting actor, supporting actress, original screenplay, and editing....

As the year’s pass, the deceitful excuses and the disturbing decision by the Bush Administration to wage war against Iraq in 2003 grow increasingly criminal. The continuous barrage of first-hand knowledge that has been revealed over the last 15 years since the invasion, has made it quite clear that the intelligence community distorted facts and manipulated the American people. This shameful time in American history has resulted in a slew of scathing films (fiction and non-fiction) and the latest zeroing in on this topic— following its recent appearance in Adam McKay‘s satirical Dick Cheney biopic “Vice“— is “Official Secrets,” by South African director Gavin Hood (“Eye in the Sky”)....

I saw “Olympic Dreams” a few weeks after its world premiere last March at the SXSW Film Festival. Performance-wise, the film purports to deliver nuanced lead roles, but there is a tonal inconsistency in the film which makes the connection between the two romantic leads feel a little too disingenuous. The cute and quirky connection is somewhat charming at first, but quickly deteriorates into the maudlin. Penelope is underwritten, lacking the emotional traits needed to make the character click....

“We reject in the strongest possible terms the decision to pander to local laws and censor ‘Rocketman’ for the Russian market, a move we were unaware of until today,” read a statement released Friday. “Paramount Pictures have been brave and bold partners in allowing us to create a film which is a true representation of Elton’s extraordinary life, warts and all. That the local distributor has edited out certain scenes, denying the audience the opportunity to see the film as it was intended is a sad reflection of the divided world we still live in and how it can still be so cruelly unaccepting of the love between two people....

Based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel, Decker tries to capture the spirit of real-life author Shirley Jackson (a miscast Elizabeth Moss), a depressed literate genius with a bad case of writer’s block. Merrel’s novel dealt with the events that lead Jackson to create her classic, “The Hangsman”, and that’s exactly what Decker tries to tackle here as well. Married to music professor Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), Shirley would eventually find inspiration in Rose (Odessa Young), an early twenty-something bride who moves into the Jackson’s Vermont home with her husband Fred (Logan Lerman) for his summer apprenticeship and teaching assistant gig with Stanley....

“Far From Home,” the second installment in the latest live-action Spider-Man reboot really wants to be an MCU “European Vacation” but is continuously bogged down by the familiar narrative beats that come in being, you know, part of the MCU. Taking place in a post ’Endgame’ world, where Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark is gone and Spidey has to contend withbeing the new leader of the Avengers, this latest MCU movie cannot replicate the visual magic of last year’s animated romp “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse....

Directed by Belgian directors Felix van Groeningen (“Beautiful Boy”) and Charlotte Vandermeersch, here is a film so dramatically inert that you almost feel as if its mountainous setting has sucked the oxygen right out of you. The film is based on Paolo Cognetti’s Italian novel of the same name. It’s a coming-of-age tale spanning 30 years and tackling a bromance between two Italian boys — one, named Pietro (Luca Marinelli), who is the son of a chemist, the other, Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), of a stonemason....

This is a major twist in the Oscar race. Williams was basically the frontrunner to win Supporting Actress as it is being seen as a very weak field and she’s excellent in “The Fabelmans.” Now, she has to go up against the mighty Cate Blanchett whose performance in “TAR” is getting raves all across the board. Someone at Universal needs to reevaluate this. Maybe the TIFF reception ‘Fabelmans’ received pumped a little too much confidence in them....

To say that Lanthimos was inspired by the surreal iconoclasm of Bunuel’s work would be an understatement. You can see it all over his work. However, the moralist approach that Bunuel had in his pictures was all but gone in Lanthimos’ films. Instead, a Kubrickian detachment, a total dis-empathy towards character if you will, was what the Greek auteur was looking for. This mixture of Bunuel and Kubrick was never going to be an easy sell; it worked in “Dogtooth” and half-succeeded in “The Lobster,” the latter of which was a film that lost the scathing satire of its first hour for a more sentimentally driven approach in its second....

I was told Telluride head honcho Julie Huntsinger absolutely loved Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand Of God,” so much so that it was one of the first films she chose for the festival’s 2021 lineup. The film is also vying for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival this September, and it could very well win it due to the home advantage. This is an autobiographical film for Sorrentino as the filmmaker looks back on his youth in a personal tale about an Italian teen coming of age in the mid-1980s....

Malaimare Jr. is a brilliant choice to lens. He’s been Coppola’s go-to DP now with “Youth Without Youth,” Tetro” and “Twixt.” All three of those films were beautifully photographed. I can’t get any more excited about this whole project. I noticed some people are not as enthusiastic as I am. Is it the cast? One of the greatest directors in the history of the medium will finally be making his long-gestating passion project and people are not excited?...