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Wes Anderson's latest is part espionage thriller, part parenting comedy — and a pure delight.

Both a continuation of Anderson’s highly imitable, endlessly meme-able strain of filmmaking and an expansion of his thematic preoccupations, 'The Phoenician Scheme' finds our man Wes in a somewhat pensive mood. Not that 'The Phoenician Scheme' isn’t playful, or filled with the surface pleasures so many of us have come to cherish about Anderson’s specific visual template.

The best of his movies — 'Rushmore,' 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' 'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' — find a way to gel a bigger-picture pathos with the idiosyncrasies, stylistic tics, tricks, and storytelling modes that has made him a beloved figure among both film nerds and discerning viewers desperate for watching big stars have fun. We’d rank this one right next to those.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/the-phoenician-scheme-review-wes-anderson-1235345732/

‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ Is One Long Tom Cruise Victory Lap

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning wears its swan-song vibe on its sleeve, right down to the title. But it’s not going out without a victory lap. Or two. Or 22.

You may be tempted to rewatch the septet of entries that preceded this long goodbye. Don’t worry. The movie itself provides refresher supercuts before the opening credits’ signature fuse starts burning, all the better to catch you up so it can cut to the actual chases.

It feels like a conclusion to 30 years worth of proving that yes, you still can conjure up a certain vintage strain of Hollywood magic. It also feels like the end of an era. We will still get “Tom Cruise movies.” Just not like this, not from a movie star of his magnitude, assuming they can even manufacture another singular figure like him in the age of perpetual, cut-rate content. But hey, anything’s possible.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning-review-tom-cruise-1235335689/

‘Love Hurts’ — But It’s Not as Painful as Watching This Movie

Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan deserves a much, much better starring vehicle than this limp, lazy action flick.

A stock riff on the ol’ former-killer-dragged-back-into-the-life scenario, this star vehicle for Quan couldn’t feel more D.O.A., even if the star himself gamely tries to inject life into it at every opportunity. The mix of behind-the-camera pedigree, name-above-the-title novelty and the actor’s newly minted ass-kicking persona should have made this a surefire mix of thrills, spills, humor and mayhem. What’s onscreen, however, just feels like a lot of poorly choreographed chaos masquerading as an action movie. Fans of the genre might want to consider suing for false advertising.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/love-hurts-review-ke-huy-quan-1235251770/

Is ‘Sinners’ a Western, Crime Thriller, Southern Gothic, or Monster Movie? Yes. Ryan Coogler’s messy but rollicking take on a vampire story blends and bends genres, but it never skimps on entertainment value.

Truthfully, "Sinners" might be more interesting before the vampires show up. Coogler has fun with the logistics of letting the wrong one in, as former friends and neighbors try to finagle an invitation they didn’t need before.

But if Sinners is messy, it’s sometimes pretty glorious, too. Coogler is swinging wide and far beyond the boundaries of franchise fare.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/sinners-michael-b-jordan-ryan-coogler-1235307958/

‘The Shrouds’ Is David Cronenberg’s Most Personal Movie Since ‘The Fly’

Cronenberg is less interested in who done it and far more intrigued with the emotional contours of how one attempts to move on after a staggering loss — or, perhaps, why you’d want to when grief has become a key part of your identity, which is a far scarier thought he’d like you to muse on.

You can see shadows of his previous work — notably 1999’s eXistenZ, which also used a conspiracy-thriller template to dig into darker, knottier soil — flicker and flutter throughout this wintry riff on his long-held themes and preoccupations.

Yet the primary reference point, especially after a parting shot that suggests even faded grief is everlasting, may be Emily Dickinson’s famous poem about not stopping for Death.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/the-shrouds-review-david-cronenberg-1235303959/

Nicole Kidman delivers a no-holds-barred, everything-bared performance as a woman who finds sexual liberation through domination....It's a lot.

'Babygirl' is an exploration of a charged sexual relationship between a female CEO and her young, male intern that ends up finding freedom in sub-dom dynamics, this drama from Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijns leans heavily into the power structures inherent in such December-May affairs.

Nicole Kidman makes you feel like this isn’t just a provocation so much as a tantalizing what if. As in: What if a movie was to take female sexuality outside of the vanilla realm seriously?

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/babygirl-review-nicole-kidman-1235204315/

'The Amateur' takes off from a hooky hypothetical: What if the most intelligent man in central intelligence had to leave his desk and enter the field?

For a sense of how that plays, imagine watching Q assume the mantle of 007.

Back in his 'Mr. Robot' comfort zone, Rami Malek leans on all his old affectations of antisocial oddity: the bug eyes perennially averting, the face puckering so much you’d swear he was chomping on a lemon during every encounter.

The Amateur reflects the spy movies, and the spycraft, of a very different era. Today, you wouldn’t need the mad hacking skills of Charlie Heller to declassify America’s shadiest operations. You’d just need a Signal and a dream.

'Drop’ May Put You Off Dating — and Screens — Forever

Just leave your inability to suspend biblical amounts of disbelief at the door, and prepare to experience the absolute bone-chilling horror that is a constantly pinging smartphone.

"Drop" gives Meghann Fahy a perfectly acceptable showcase for flexing both maternal action-hero muscles and her keep-it-slow-and-low chops. It also makes a strong case for keeping your phone on mute.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/drop-review-meghann-fahy-1235302205/

‘Warfare’ Wants You to Experience What Combat Feels Like Firsthand

War is hell, the film reminds you, while also being kind enough to hold the door for viewers as it ushers them into the scalding heat.

Yet what this film really nails is the battalion camaraderie that goes beyond spending hours, days, weeks with the same folks and flips into something else entirely once shots are fired. From the second you meet the Navy SEALs who will have to scrap their way out of a house in Ramadi, Iraq, that’s surrounded by insurgents, you’re encouraged to see them as a stand-alone entity — many faces, numerous limbs, all one organism.

The only agenda in "Warfare," in other words, is to give you a sense of not just what happened but how everything felt while it was happening. A tall order, to be sure, but one that Filmmakers Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza and their cast and the crew pull off shockingly well.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/warfare-review-1235307378/

‘The Friend’ Is the Perfect Movie for Grief-Stricken Dog Lovers

The main question that hovers over "The Friend": How do you deal with another’s overwhelming flood of grief in parallel with your own?

The filmmakers get that this isn’t just a story about a woman bonding with a dog — it’s a tale of loss and sorrow that inherently knows such heavy feelings aren’t confined to a single species. And it’s the combination of this duo’s ability to lean into the deep connections forged from mutual wounding without devolving into a soppy, sentimental mess, the humanity of Naomi Watts’ performance, and the way the camera loves her enormous, perky-eared co-star (Bing, not Bill Murray) truly makes "The Friend" feel like more than just a valentine to pets, New York, and New York pets.

More: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/the-friend-review-naomi-watts-1235297517/

‘The Woman in the Yard’ Will Get Inside Your Head

The movie quickly milks this beguiling, WTF-is-going-on-here? scenario for all the dread it’s worth, while not necessarily being in a hurry to fill folks in on the full 411 regarding this sticky situation.

As for director Jaume Collet-Serra, he’s a hell of lot better as a contemporary B-movie genre filmmaker than Liam Neeson’s go-to action guy or a for-hire studio journeyman. If projects like this surprisingly solid take on the return of the repressed keeps him from doing stuff like "Black Adam" and "Jungle Cruise," we’ll happily sit in theaters to him, black veil and all.

‘A Minecraft Movie’ Is Exactly What You Think It Will Be, and Less

Regardless of whether you’ve ever played Minecraft or not, you’ll recognize the kind of endless ribbing, nudging, winking knowingness on display here.

It is steeped in the self-aware absurdism of, say, those Old Spice commercials that aim to confuse and confound in the name of moving products off store shelves. 'A Minecraft Movie' is essentially a 101-minute version of that. It, too, is pitching a product, and you either buy what it’s selling in the name of making bucks off of fandom and star power, or you don’t.

Much like the game itself, the choice is yours. We just don’t want to be the one to inform God what his creations hath wrought with this expensively cheap, 100-percent corporate mess.

'Death of a Unicorn' has got stars, mythical creatures, gore, and a grudge against Big Pharma — but this A24 satire has absolutely zero bite

Cleverness and cutting commentary are not on the proverbial menu here. Which is just as well, we guess, considering that the entire idea of attacking the profit-over-people mentality is merely a set-up for what
'Death of a Unicorn' really wants to be, which is a riff on Jurassic Park.

Except once the film toggles full-time into monster-movie mode, you really began to see how sloppy and poorly executed the thrills and chills are as well. What are we doing here?

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/death-of-a-unicorn-review-jenna-ortega-paul-rudd-1235274306/

Robert De Niro is his own worst enemy in this Mob drama about the 1950s gangland war between Frank Costello and Vito Genovese.

'The Alto Knights' may have its share of talent spread around, with no less than Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas) penning the screenplay, cinematographer Dante Spinotti (Heat, Public Enemies, L.A. Confidential) setting up a warm, autumnal period-piece palette and production designer Neil Spisak channeling the lost Gotham of yesteryear.

But all of it is simply at the service of one long retread of very well-trod ground. You’d swear that this was simply reverse-engineered to play every single Sunday Afternoon Mafia Movie Marathon on a second-rate cable channel in perpetuity, and its ambitions stopped there.

‘Snow White’ Is Like Being Stuck in the Most Controversial Disney-Adult Nightmare Ever

What feels irritating about this 'Snow White' is how it pats itself on the back for being so performatively progressive while being content to be safe, generic, and a little lethargic regarding everything else.

Rachel Zegler has a lovely voice and, as West Side Story showed, can hold her own against stronger actors when needed. Yet she barely s here. As for Gadot, she can’t quite decide whether her Evil Queen should be camp or chilling, and ends being neither.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/snow-white-review-rachel-zegler-gal-gadot-1235297513/

‘Black Bag’ Is a Great Spy Thriller — and an Even Better Marriage Drama

Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are spouses caught in the middle of an intelligence-agency leak in Steven Soderbergh’s sexy, suspenseful, and flat-out sensational riff on love and espionage.

With "Black Bag" Soderbergh and company have given us a remarkably fun riff on international intrigue. They also slip in a wonderfully intimate portrait of a couple who turn each other on as much as the movie turns you on. See it with someone you love.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/black-bag-review-cate-blanchett-michael-fassbender-1235274320/

Is "Moana 2" better than the straight-to-video sequels Disney used to grant their most popular titles back in the day? Of course it is.

And the animation of these sun-dappled Pacific Island landscapes, the aqua-blue gulfs and roiling ocean waves, and the purple-hued meteorological phenomenons couldn’t look more awe-inspiring.

What’s more confusing is the lack of a true Disney villain, and while a killer storm blessed with more purple rain that a Prince impersonator convention might make for sly climate change commentary (or not — maybe we truly are reading too much into this), the fact that the big boss battle feels too vague is not something that plays in Moana 2‘s favor.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/moana-2-review-disney-1235175741/

"Better Man" ticks all of the requisite boxes, from childhood trauma to early fame, tabloid infamy to total flame-out, broken records to broken windows, hit singles to healed souls. You will leave with a good sense of who this man is, and why his music matters to so many.

It’s all a very by-the-books music biopic, with the sole exception of which species is singing about manufacturing miracles and angels contemplating his fate.

It’s not a vehicle for converting the non-believers. Diehard fans, the Robbie-curious and those who love to eavesdrop on therapy sessions, however, will adore it.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/better-man-review-robbie-williams-biopic-1235205650/

"Brave New World" establishes the mighty Anthony Mackie as the superhero who’ll lead the Avengers (and the franchise) into the future. But it’s a generic mess in every other respect.

While it is nowhere near as bad as the various MCU low points of the past few years, this attempt at both reestablishing the iconic character and resetting the board is still weak tea.

Full review: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/captain-america-brave-new-world-review-mcu-anthony-mackie-1235251815/

‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ Is Shocking, Surreal — and Absolutely Brilliant

Zambian filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s second feature starts with a dead body in the road. It ends with rage, righteousness, and a reminder that it takes a village to keep a secret.

After having delivered a pointed take on the social protections afforded to predators to avoid “awkwardness,” the unnecessary shame shared by survivors and the need to speak out regardless of such stigmas, Nyoni gives the movie an ending that seems to blend all of the sorrow, the fury, and the symbolic gestures into one loud cri de coeur.

‘Heretic’ Proves That Evil Hugh Grant Is the Best Hugh Grant

It’s not just that Grant is digging into this spiritual-seeker-slash-sadist with an unbridled sense of glee, playing up the corny dad-humor, the faux-politeness that hides true intentions, and the rhetorical sportsmanship in the name of goading his victims to their own revelations. Rather, it’s how he shows you Mr. Reed’s sheer conviction behind what he’s doing that sells the whole shebang.

The A24 horror film starts off strong, but begins tripping over its own philosophical musings in an extremely wonky middle section, and devolves into pure, uncut balderdash by the last act.

What Bong Joon Ho's dystopian sci-fi satire lacks in sharpness, it more than makes up for by showcasing Robert Pattinson as an endlessly resurrected, infinitely copied schlub.

He’s also why the second half of "Mickey 17" works twice as strong as the first. The former heartthrob is now deep into his wild-card phase as the 21st century’s primo screen weirdo, leveraging his handsomeness and charisma in order to sell bolder, batshit character idiosyncrasies.

Scholars of British author Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) will no doubt shriek, “Off with Tim Burton’s head!” for the liberties he takes in this 3-D mix of live action and animation.

The actors help enormously, but only a few are given the time to stretch out and insinuate themselves. Helena Bonham Carter gets laughs, whether she’s warming her feet on a squealing pig or ordering decapitations like lattes.

Johnny Depp is a marvel as the Hatter, orange hair sprouting as a result of poisoning from the mercury used in making hats. He handles Carroll’s language so well that you wish more of it had slipped into the script.

Two snipers fall in love and gun down mutants crawling out of a cursed valley in this mix of rom-com and sci-fi/horror/action blockbuster.... At least one half works.

The Gorge works best when its just the two leads staring at each through binoculars, bantering via sketch-pad scrawlings and letting their flirtations organically morph into something more intimate.

Once the pair find themselves plummeting from their perches — one on accident, the other in search-and-rescue pursuit — "The Gorge" switches into something like a run-of-the-mill horror/action flick, and that’s where the problems start.

Both a valentine to Iranian cinema and an absurdist look at Winnipeg, Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin's comedy is indescribable — so "lo-fi masterpiece" will have to do.

"Universal Language" is a hilarious yet heartfelt love letter written in duplicate, that borrows another culture’s calligraphy to adequately express affection for one’s own.

The filmmaker’s fondness for Iranian cinema isn’t a hipster pose or a pretentious front — it’s 100-percent genuine, as pure as fresh snowfall on Chief Peguis Trail.

The director of "Longlegs" delivers an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story that is, frankly .... bananas.

"Final Destination" feels like it’s as much an inspiration as King’s source material, yet director Osgood Perkins deserves credit for how deftly he milks his own brand of gallows humor and existential handwringing in the name of poking your gag reflex.

Both Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande give this long-awaited adaptation of the popular musical wings — but Erivo’s the one truly defying gravity.

Cynthia Erivo has already established herself as a singer, a stage performer, and a screen presence extraordinaire, whether she’s a ing-role dynamo or the best part of an otherwise so-so project. What she’s doing here with Elphaba is, quite simply, magical. Erivo can go big, filling up a frame with sound and fury when needed. But she can also give you so much by simply moving her eyes, slightly adjusting her jaw, tilting her head back in a way that suggests pride, or unexpected joy, or a rage that’s on the verge of spilling over.

It’s hard to think of a recent turn in a big look-at-me studio movie, much less a brash movie musical, that manages to be so simultaneously buoyant and grounding. It’s not so much that Wicked doesn’t rise to meet her. It’s more like Erivo keeps soaring higher and higher above it.

Coralie Fargeat’s bloody-as-hell satire lets Demi Moore flip the bird to showbiz’s youth obsessions and beauty double standards — in the best (and grossest) way imaginable.

"The Substance" won’t reset society’s fixation on youth or cure Hollywood’s sexist ills. It will, however, remind you that when you’re chasing your past by any means necessary, you are always your own worst enemy.

Filmmaker RaMell Ross doesn't just interpret Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel about a racist, nightmarish boys reformatory. He immerses you in it.

It’s a bold gamble, sticking to a fixed first-person POV more associated with gimmicky, swing-and-a-miss genre experiments and video games, even if this wasn’t a prestige drama based on a Pulitzer-winning novel, and dealing with a gut-wrenching historical tragedy. But Ross’ formalist roll of the dice pays off in a huge way, and it’s this choice that makes
"Nickel Boys" not just unique but undeniable. There is simply nothing else like it.

What the filmmaker and his collaborators have given us is something truly special: a radical work of art that channels a tsunami of radical empathy. And it couldn’t feel more necessary or vital at this moment in time.

Beloved actor Fernanda Torres breathes life into the role of a grieving woman living under a military dictatorship in this politically charged drama.

"I’m Still Here" wisely lets you know what’s at stake here by taking its time in the lead up to the tragedy, and giving you an incredible sense of the disruption that happens when political violence literally arrives at your doorstep.

To say that Torres digs into the role of Eunice Paiva, who spent a good deal of her life trying to demand ability for her husband’s disappearance, would be an understatement. This is a showcase for her as much as it is a based-on-a-true-story prestige drama, though it respects both the enormity and the emotional weight of the IRL Paiva’s experience.

"Emilia Pérez" is one of those films in which the description on a page can’t do justice to the delirium onscreen.

It’s still a festival highlight, still a star-making showcase for Karla Sofía Gascón, still a pointed commentary about that evil that men — specifically men — do, and still a clear crowd favorite for the Cannes cognoscenti. But man, do the bum notes here affect the overall melody.

A tougher Timothée Chalamet. Way more Zendaya. A truly psychotic Austin Butler, a moody Florence Pugh and twice as many sandworms. This is what a true sci-fi epic looks like.

Thank your respective gods that Denis Villeneuve got the greenlight for another chapter. His "Dune: Part Two" isn’t just a continuation of a saga. The French-Canadian filmmaker has delivered an expansion and a deepening of the world built off of Frank Herbert’s prose.

It’s unapologetically geeky. It’s twice as unapologetically cinematic.

Blessed is this Camembert of cheesy pope fiction.

Director Edward Berger’s take on Robert Harris’s airport-read bestseller drops the sort of institutional skullduggery normally associated with secret societies and international spy rings.

There are some truly wonderful laugh-out-loud moments to be had throughout, though the fact that, much like the German filmmaker’s previous movie, this preposterous bit of Popesploitation is somehow being positioned as Oscar material may be the funniest part of it all.

Bob Dylan gets the "Walk the Line" treatment — and thanks to Timothee Chalamet, it's damn near electric.

There are so many reasons to automatically hate both the idea of a “straightforward” Dylan biopic and the notion of casting a movie star who comes with his own media-persona baggage despite still being a shade under 30. "A Complete Unknown" chips away at those reservations, slowly and steadily, until you find yourself leaning in every time Chalamet pops out one of Bob’s venomous bon mots or does justice to one of Dylan’s dozens of tunes written during those fertile years between 1961 and 1965.

"The Brutalist" Is Brady Corbet’s Great American Masterpiece.

Clocking in around three-and-a-half hours (including an overture and an intermission) and displaying the scope, excess and ambition of the New Hollywood mavericks’ shoot-the-moon projects, this throwback to the days when giants roamed the earth and ruled single-screen theaters is like a gift from the heavens.

It’s not just that they don’t make movies like this anymore — of course they don’t! — so much as no one bothers to tell these types of sprawling narratives with this level of storytelling, chops, nerve and verve.

The best sex worker screwball comedy of 2024.

The shadow of "Pretty Woman" hangs over Sean Baker‘s "Anora," but not in an anxiety-of-influence kinda way; it’s less a cover version auto-tuned for the present moment than an answer track, a fractured-fairy-tale take on the Prince Charming fantasy that sticks around long enough for the comedown.

Like the rest of Baker’s back catalog, this raucous blend of lap dances and the late capitalism blues is nothing if not bursting with humanism and a nonjudgmental sense of life in the margins.

Review by K. Austin Collins

American Utopia begins where David Byrne’s 2018 album of the same name ended: with the song “Here.” “Here is an area of great confusion,” the former Talking Heads singer declares from a steel-gray, uncluttered stage, a model brain aloft in his hand. He points to another region on the brain: “Here is a connection with the opposite side.”

Connection — and not only between opposites, but in the manner of a neural network or, to make the obvious but still valuable analogy, a world community — is the guiding element, maybe even artistic theology, of American Utopia. A filmed version of the hit Broadway show that ran from October 2019 to February 2020 (and begins streaming on HBO Max October 17th), it’s a time capsule with a timely end-date for a project that finds unity where many of us might only see difference and disruption. Byrne isn’t alone up there, of course. There’s also director Spike Lee, who, as he did adapting the rock-musical ing Strange into a movie in 2009, is more than just wingman-ing here. Like the late Jonathan Demme, director of Stop Making Sense, Lee is here not just to document but to heighten. There are close-ups on Byrne’s face, his eyes, even his feet; dynamic roving views from onstage and off; a keen awareness of the audience. And, of course, there’s the thrill of seeing people standing up in their seats, clapping along, silhouetted against Byrne’s bright, inviting presence onstage. All of it lends a sense of alive-ness to this live performance.

It helps that Byrne is ed by a crew of 11 musician-costars who are just as intriguing to watch as he is, everyone doing double duty, everyone barefoot in matching gray suits (though not oversized, à la Byrne’s iconic look in Demme’s movie). They dance while they sing, prowl and perform and constantly restage themselves across the steel-colored, minimally decorated box of the Hudson Theater’s stage. One second they’re a loose collective, everyone facing different directions, together but apart; the next they’re like a marching rhythm section.

“Utopia” is accurate, as titles go. Yes, Byrne is the lead singer. But despite being und with a band, he’s never come off as a “solo artist” in the literal sense. The proceedings here are far less interested in Byrne alone than in the former Talking Heads singer as the emcee of a party to which all of us are invited. The musicians onstage, in keeping with the theme, are from around the world: , Brazil, Canada. Byrne himself was born in Scotland. And in one of the many comfortably talkative monologues he delivers between songs, he says, in that assured but invitingly casual warble of his: “Most of us are immigrants.”

It’s a point more interestingly made by the pure spectacle of it all, which wears its influences as comfortably as Byrne’s music ever did. Seeing the entire crew kneel onstage, backdropped by a photo of Colin Kaepernick, is effecting. But even that can’t match the power of the group covering Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a powerful protest anthem which, in this updated rendition, climaxes with the entire group shouting Freddie Gray’s name.

It goes without saying that Byrne, a consummate entertainer, also plays a few hits: “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” “Burning Down the House,” “Once in a Lifetime” — he knows what we want to hear. But he’s also trying, however gently, to push us. His monologues never amount to the monotonous good feelings more suited for Ted Talks and Apple product launches. He’s wider-ranging. Hugo Ball and Dadaist ethics, police brutality, the Sony Triniton television that Byrne bought with his first recording contract — they’re all related, and even if they weren’t, it’s his job to make the connections. Your job is to relax and enjoy it. Clap along. Connect with each other, and with yourself. As Byrne seems to say, we owe ourselves that much.

Review by K. Austin Collins

The title of Kirsten Johnson’s extraordinary new documentary, Dick Johnson Is Dead, is not a true statement — yet. Dick Johnson, the filmmaker’s beloved father, is not dead. Still, this oddly poignant and sneakily provocative movie, which is now streaming on Netflix, shows him dying any number of ways, twice, thrice … one starts to lose count after awhile. A trip down the stairs. An air conditioner falling on his head. A construction mishap involving a plank. Another trip, this time on a curb. There’s blood, twisted limbs, the cringing thud of a body hitting concrete. Somehow, there’s also laughter.

In real life, the elderly Johnson is dying of natural causes; he suffers from dementia. And so these fake deaths, staged by father and daughter, are all nightmare visions of what might happen to such a man out in the real world. They’re jokes, sure. But in real life, he has already begun to make dangerous errors — like, for example, driving through a construction site and making his way home on four flat tires. It’s no mistake that the staged deaths here are all freak accidents, like silent-comedy whimsies and gags that tilt away from morbidness and violence toward cartoonish hilarity. Watching them reset and restage these accidents is like watching a supercut of the Road Runner dropping anvils. And in Dick Johnson Is Dead, the anvil drops, and drops, and drops.

It is, forgive me, a killer premise. Frankly, it’s also easy to imagine a version of this that mostly coasts on the cleverness of that premise and is just as poignant, even as funny, and sort of leaves it there. But Johnson’s doc is unusual. It stands out in part because the filmmaker — a non-fiction cinematographer by trade, thus someone used not only to seeing the life and labor that thrive behind the camera, but also living it — has peeled back the artifice of moviemaking in precisely the way that her project has scraped her father’s imminent death of some of its mystery. In a way, it plays like a behind-the-scenes look at the “movie” she and her father are making, comprised of the stuff a Hollywood movie would save for its DVD extras.

But those extras are of interest to Johnson. Same with the sound and camera people, the stuntmen, the makeup technicians with their bottles of fake blood, and every other worker therein. Because these are her people, just like her star (of course). As much as Dick Johnson’s humorous meta-awareness of itself as a movie, the subject himself is something that no other film of this kind might have. Dick — professional psychiatrist, lover of fudge, father, widower, jokester — is plainly one of a kind, and unusual. His gameness for this odd project is evidence enough of that, a shard of insight into the personality and humor of the man, as well as a disarming summary of his attitude toward the death that he already knows awaits him.

What’s as endearing as it is unsettling, however, is how natural it all seems to both him and the movie. It isn’t so much that he’s fully reconciled himself to shuffling off this mortal coil and therefore sees no need to be a sourpuss about it. In fact his daughter takes care to confront the insecurities of the man, for example his lifelong embarrassment over his club feet, but also, in the present tense, his sheepish awareness of the fact that his memory is slipping.

The tone of the movie is so contagiously light at first that it takes a pastor at Dick’s church — a man who no doubt presides over the deaths of his friends and community by trade — to point out the obvious: The whole thing is weird! “This is not good for me,” the pastor says, getting emotional at the sight of his buddy asleep in a coffin during a mock funeral. “But this is a movie,” he continues, “and I keep reminding myself that this is a movie. And you see a lot of weird things in movies that never happen.”

Death will happen, however, and the fact that Dick’s daughter had the foresight to enlist him in the making of this movie does not mitigate the pure fact of his eventually no longer living. Dick Johnson Is Dead‘s portrait of the filmmaker’s father is by no means simple, or simply feel-good. For all the ways that Dick is game for the film’s games, the portrait we get of this man is not that he is a fully resolved, blemish-free individual completely content with himself. He’s simply a human being. Common is the documentary that falls in love with its subject. Rare is the movie that makes you fall in love, too.

But it can’t all be jokes. The inevitability of Dick’s death persists despite all the constant, playful fiction. In one scene, they clear out Johnson’s office, changing the message on his answering machine to redirect patients to a doctor who isn’t retired. Dick lifts a heavy-looking box of books. Kirsten notes from behind the camera that the situation is a heart attack waiting to happen. This is no idle fear, since her father had had a heart attack in 1987, thanks — the joke goes — to a double fudge cake a friend had made. This being the movie that it is, we visit the woman who made the cake; she proceeds to bake him another one. We then learn that this woman is dead: “In loving memory,” the text onscreen says.

Part of the power of this movie is in the way every other minor accident they film gets magnified and made comically excruciating. Even a simple fall has meaning, here, and painful context. Kirsten’s mother had once fallen down the stairs, breaking a hip. “That was when the brutality started,” Dick says. (His wife ed away from Alzheimer’s in 2007.) Then, in a surprising reenactment, he falls down the stairs and “dies.” Compare this to the reality of a long shot of Dick riding in a car, having now moved in with his daughter and living in Manhattan. The moment begins with him singing a song from Popeye and ends with him drifting, experiencing the same cognitive fade-out that his daughter informs us, via voiceover, has been happening more often.

Even this, the mere documentation of it, is tethered to a worldview, not only concerning images or illness, but also to Dick Johnson’s own beliefs and the role these gags might play in the bigger picture. This is a family of Seventh Day Adventists, believers in the promise of Heaven to the righteous. Believers, also, in the fact that Heaven is what will come only with resurrection. In a way, resurrection is what happens every time Dick Johnson dies and gets back up and resets the scene.

Given a little thought, this is a piercing, provocative idea. Maybe it’s no mistake that Johnson’s idea of Heaven, as it’s playfully staged here, features him sitting alongside the likes of movie stars like Buster Keaton and Bruce Lee. Johnson’s movie plays on (and complicates) the ability of the moving image to resurrect what’s lost — the power of those images to contain and sustain the life of a person such as a movie star. Movie stars never die because we can always saturate ourselves in their images. In truth, they are more alive to the vast majority of us onscreen than they could ever be in the flesh.

Regular people, however, don’t live on through catalogs of Hollywood spectacles. Their genre is much more intimate and ephemeral, far more easily lost, but also far more treasured: the home movie. The impulse that seems to drive this documentary isn’t just the time Kirsten gets to spend deg macabre jokes with her father, though, as the footage we see makes clear, the bonding between them that happens is clearly, and very movingly, inherent to the idea. It is, just as pointedly, a lovely excuse to rend Johnson’s work as a filmmaker to her work, her life, as the daughter of a man she loves and whose life is too vibrant for any one image or gag to contain.

Gradually, Dick Johnson reveals itself to be equally, though subtly, about the filmmaker’s mother. What little footage Johnson has of her late mom, she tells us/shows us, are images of her in decline. Missing are images of Johnson’s mother comparable to what she has of her father eating chocolate fudge, laughing with strangers, kicking his feet back on a movie set. Those fleeting moments, in other words, that mean the most to the people rewatching them — the people left behind.

And so you may watch Dick Johnson Is Dead with the distinct sense of a filmmaker attempting to correct for that absence — that she wants to preserve the man as he is, before his decline into someone who no longer recognizes her the way her mother no longer recognized her. That, in a way, is what motivates the creation of home movies — and it’s why it’s wonderful that Dick Johnson Is Dead so often feels like one. Home movies are less about the stories we, the people filming them, are trying to tell, and more about the lives and moments we preserve, accidentally and not. They are an archive of the everyday, homespun artifacts intended not for a mass public, but for a private, familial one. Isn’t this what makes them so eerie, so disarming?

Eerie, disarming, ephemeral moments are, as anyone who’s seen Johnson’s Cameraperson (2017) knows, of specific interest to this filmmaker. She was already decades into her career as a cinematographer when she made that movie, entirely comprised of unused footage from many years of work as a nonfiction collaborator, and crafted into an experimental riff on all that images can and can’t contain. Johnson’s specialty, her genius, is for taking these marginal realities and shaping them into art. When her father asks why she makes documentaries rather than fiction films, where the “big bucks” are, she answers, “Real life is much often more fascinating than what you can make up.” For all its playfulness, it’s the real, stinging, joyful, inconvenient reality of life that Dick Johnson Is Dead gives us. It’s a committed act of preservation: a looping, reeling, repeatable act of love. “As much as I may be trying to kill you off,” says daughter to father, “I’m not trying to get rid of you.” Dick Johnson Is Dead is the proof.

This review may contain spoilers.

Review by David Fear

The guy with mask and the cape runs onstage, to the screams of thousands of people standing in Victoria Park on a characteristically brisk April day in 1978. He calls himself “Mr. Oligarchy,” but folks backstage — and some of the savvier people attending this outdoor concert — know him as Red Saunders. “This ain’t no Woodstock,” the gent tells the assembled Britons before him. “This is the carnival against the fucking Nazis!”

As Saunders himself recounts, decades after the fact, the cheer from the crowd was massive. Back then, he was a curly-haired, mutton-chopped photographer who decided, along with some like-minded activists, to take on the National Front and other racist groups that were making a bid for England’s hearts and minds. His response was an organization dubbed “Rock Against Racism.” The show in Victoria Park was a huge RAR event that featured bands like X-Ray Spex, the Tom Robinson Band and the Clash. The set that Joe Strummer & Co. played that day, including an incendiary version of “White Riot” with Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey, was legendary.

If you’ve seen Rude Boy, the 1980 half-documentary/half day-in-the-life fictional take on the only band that mattered, then you know the gig; the footage of that real spirit-of-’78 concert makes up roughly a third of the film. The story behind the how and why of that show, however — the urgency and necessity and call-to-arms radicalization of it — has receded into the background as a footnote, and this is where White Riot pogos into the picture. A look back at the formation of Rock Against Racism and the era that gave birth to it, Rubika Shah’s incendiary documentary drops viewers into a less-than-United Kingdom where scumbags like Enoch Powell preached hate in parliament and skinheads attacked West Indian and East Asian communities. This was a country who’d once fought fascism tooth and nail on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields; now it was suddenly seeing a certain subset of its citizens re-enacting it on the streets. A kick against the pricks was called for. Saunders may have played a cartoon character in a cape onstage, but he, along with the kindred spirits of RAR, were real-life superheroes.

It was at a Birmingham concert in 1976 that Eric Clapton, deep into a debilitating drinking problem, declared his for Powell after unleashing some racial epithets onstage. The statements made headlines. (As the movie reminds us, the guitarist wasn’t the only rock star saying dumb shit around that time — Rod Stewart had referred to Powell as “the man” in an interview, and a coked-up David Bowie had declared that Britain was ready for a fascist leader.) Incensed, Saunders shot off a letter to the New Musical Express, calling Clapton a “colonialist of black music”; at the end of the missive, he asked for help starting a movement “against the racist poison in music.” He dubbed it “Rock Against Racism.” and along with co-conspirators like Roger Hubble, Ruth “Pink Heart” Gregory and “Irate Kate” Webb, begin holding meetings. A ‘zine called Temporary Hoarding (Saunders dug the name because it had “RAR” embedded in it) laid out their mission statement: “We want rebel music … crisis music. Now music. Love music. Hate racism.”

And though it was mainstream rock that fired those first pro-Powell salvos, it was punk rock that would respond in loud, confrontational fashion. White Riot makes a point of viewing the emerging punk culture as both a defining aesthetic for RAR’s work, from the Dadaist cut-up look of its Xeroxed in-house rag to the flyers for shows, and as a battleground. Led by Martin Webster, the National Front was recruiting new in front of schools and among the disenfranchised hanging out on street corners, many of whom were gravitating toward this new music’s brash, fuck-off–friendly attitude. Sid Vicious wore a swastika t-shirt as a shock treatment towards polite society; the organization trying to bring his fans into their fold, however, hid “the swastika behind the Union Jack.” Despite the culture being intertwined with black music (notably reggae and ska) and black/interracial musicians, “punk could have gone either way,” says one talking head. It was up to RAR to make sure it didn’t slide to the far, far right.

Yet one of the best things about Shah’s music-history lesson, besides the vintage performance footage and hearing Selector’s Pauline Black and the Clash’s Topper Headon reflect on the moment, is the way it shows you how deeply the culture at large was already steeped in racist ideologies. A quick montage of TV programming shows sitcom characters blithely using slurs as punchlines; a full-out minstrel show (!!!) was considered primetime BBC fodder in 1977. Powell and Webster’s declarations for keeping Britain “for the British” — you don’t have to read between the lines to get what they’re saying — ran on the front page of newspapers and was debated on evening chat shows. Meanwhile, those same outlets reported on the rise of violence against immigrants. An general election threatened to usher a fringe movement into power. It was a tipping point. Plus ça change ….

White Riot culminates in that Victoria Park show, the National Front’s defeat in the ’79 election and Rock Against Racism’s coronation as a genuine gamechanger. For old-school punk fanatics and armchair Anglophiles, it’s a glorious look back at a landmark moment. But to hear Saunders, now a bald greybeard rocking red suspenders over a Santa-level belly, talk about the struggle is to note that he keeps slipping in and out of the past tense. Rock stars backing racists and sprouting idiotic nonsense have not gone away, as anyone who’s Googled “Morrissey news” over the last few years will tell you. The word “Brexit” has entered the global lexicon. We currently have a commander-in-chief who’s telling hate groups to stand by. It helps to what the song that gives the doc its name is about; should there be any doubt, Shah includes a clip of Strummer himself explaining that he wanted white people to realize they needed to rise up against racial equality as well. The filmmaker has given us a pitch-perfect, punk-as-fuck portrait of a movement. She’s also reminded us that, regardless of bygone victories, the fight still goes on. Here’s a blueprint for resistance.

From a breezy look back at a groundbreaking classic to funhouse-mirror portraits of our politically fractured moment — our picks for the film festival's highlights.

• Adam's Sake
• Eddington
• Honey Don't!
• It Was Just an Accident
• My Father's Shadow
• Orwell: 2+2=5
• Nouvelle Vague
• The Phoenician Scheme
• The Secret Agent
• Sentimental Value

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

There’s a lot to take in even if you don’t count the remakes, reboots, rom-coms, trad-coms, sequels, prequels, “requels,” and too many horror movies to keep track of, all of which are also hitting big — and in a few select cases, not-so-big — screens over the next 14 weeks. We’ve curated a list of 36 movies you should be paying attention to this summer. ☀️

• Hurry Up Tomorrow
• Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
• Lilo & Stitch
• Bring Her Back
• Karate Kid: Legends
• The Phoenician Scheme
• Echo Valley
• The Life of Chuck
• Pavements
• How to Train Your Dragon

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A Juilliard graduate, a movie star, an actor who could play anything from fantasy heroes to flyboy villains, bank robbers to superheroes, dashing lead roles or demented sidekicks — Val Kilmer was all of these things, and way, way more.

Here are Rolling Stone's picks for his 10 best performances, from Top Secret! to Top Gun: Maverick. We’ll miss you, Val.

More: www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-lists/val-kilmer-best-movies-1235308803/top-secret-1984-1235308807/

• Top Secret!
• Real Genius
• Top Gun
• Willow
• The Doors
• Tombstone
• Batman Forever
• Heat
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
• Top Gun: Maverick

He played cocky cops, doomed detectives, corporate fat cats, kindly coaches, and any number of Grade-A All-American assholes — both the sheer range and the overall reliability of the gentleman’s work over four decades is astounding. Yet the one thing the late Gene Hackman, who was found dead in his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Feb. 26, never did was phone it in. He was an actor’s actor, the sort of performer who cut his teeth in theater and TV in the 1960s, alongside fellow future legends like Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall, fit in perfectly with the moody-antihero vibes of the 1970s, and excelled at playing powerful and flawed men in the Reagan era of the 1980s. There was something so natural about whatever Hackman did onscreen, whether he was screaming in fury or shyly giving an “aw, shucks” smile. Sometimes he even managed to do both at the same time.

But his body of work attests to someone who was committed to not only perfecting the craft but also pushing himself forward in the name of always locating what made these people tick. The question was never whether Hackman belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Screen Legends. It was, to borrow the headline of Rob Sheffield’s appreciation: Was Gene Hackman a Great American Actor, or the Greatest American Actor?

These 20 roles represent Hackman at his finest — from his breakthrough as part of the Barrow Gang to an aging patriarch conning his way back into his family. There will never be another star like him.

• Bonnie and Clyde
• The French Connection
• The Poseidon Adventure
• Prime Cut
• Scarecrow
• The Conversation
• Young Frankenstein
• Bite the Bullet
• Night Moves
• Superman

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The Oscars have been around for almost 100 years now, celebrating a medium that was born in the last few years of the 19th century, became the art form du jour of the 20th century and continues to flourish in the 21st century. When we entered the new millennium, we all wondered how the movies would change and evolve — and if the ceremony that handed out “Hollywood’s biggest honor” every spring would change with it.

The answer is… yes. And no. And sometimes, kinda. And, as in so many of the previous century’s editions: WTF, Oscars!? We’ve gone back and rewatched every Best Picture winner since the year 2000, and the result has been eye-opening. Some films have aged poorly, some have surprisingly stood the test of time, some have reminded us that when Oscars gets it right, it can get it really right — and some movies will forever be cursed with being Crash. Our ranked list.

1. Moonlight
2. Parasite
3. 12 Years a Slave
4. Spotlight
5. No Country for Old Men
6. The Departed
7. Everything Everywhere All at Once
8. The Hurt Locker
9. Oppenheimer
10. Gladiator

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It’s grainy, faded, and, given the clip is now 125 years old, more than a little worse for wear. But this brief footage is not so ancient that you can’t clearly make out two men, waltzing together, as a third man plays a violin in the background. It was an experimental short made by William Dickson, designed to test syncing up moving pictures to prerecorded sound, a system that he and Thomas Edison were developing known as the Kinetophone. It’s known as “The Dickson Experimental Sound Film,” and dates back to 1895, the same year movies were born. While there’s nothing to outright suggest that these men were romantically involved or attracted to each other during the roughly 20-second length of their pas de deux, there is nothing that contradicts that notion either. It’s considered by many to be one of the first examples of gay imagery in film, and a reminder that homosexual representation has been with the medium from the very beginning.

That clip appears in The Celluloid Closet, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary based on Vito Russo’s study of homosexuality in the movies, along with countless examples of how gay characters showed up, per narrator Lily Tomlin, as “something to laugh at, or something to pity, or even something to fear.” The history of representation is long, and extremely storied, often shaping how the public viewed “the love that dare not speak its name” for better or worse. But since those two men first danced, there have also been scores of stories, characters, and filmmakers that have presented the varied, multitudinous aspects of LGBTQ experiences 24 frames per second that have gone past those stereotypes, or flipped them on their heads. Some have been documents of a moment or era of gay history, some have been used as correctives to decades of negative clichés, and others have simply celebrated the fact that the movies can be queer, they’re here, get used to it.

Here's our choices for 50 essential LGBTQ films — from comedies to dramas, documentaries to cult classics, underground experimental work to studio blockbusters. It is nowhere near a comprehensive rundown of every great movie to feature out-and-proud heroes and villains, or a queer sensibility, or even just visible (and/or risible) examples of gay life in cinema; we could have easily made this list twice as long. Rather, consider this a primer that helps illustrate the relationship between queer culture and the silver screen.

• Angels in America
• Bound
• Boys Don't Cry
• The Boys in the Band
• BPM (Beats per Minute)
• Brokeback Mountain
• Call Me by Your Name
• Carol
• The Celluloid Closet
• Cruising

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

For nearly 55 years, he’s chronicled the weird, the wild and the obsessed … and with two new films coming out in April (Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman and James Franco; and Salt and Fire, featuring Michael Shannon and a supervolcano) and having just taught a filmmaking seminar in Cuba, Werner Herzog is showing no signs of slowing down. Over the course of a long, storied career – either 70 or 78 movies, not even Herzog knows for sure – the German filmmaker has explored the notion of “how far is too far?” in both fictional features and way-stranger-than-fiction documentaries. In honor of Erik Hedegaard’s profile of Herzog, and for those who simply know the director as the guy who lent his Teutonic baritone to both foul-mouthed children’s books and The Simpsons, we’ve put together a quick Herzog 101 primer: 10 essential movies that exemplify the genius and the madness that characterizes what’s still one of the most impressive filmographies in modern cinematic history.

• Even Dwarfs Started Small
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God
• The Enigma of Kaspar Ha
• Heart of Glass
• Nosferatu the Vampyre
• Fitzcarraldo
• Little Dieter Needs to Fly
• My Best Fiend
• Grizzly Man
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams

It was the decade that gave the world the maverick New Hollywood drama, the Nixon-era paranoid thriller, the slasher flick, the all-star disaster movie, the gross-out comedy and the modern mega-blockbuster. But the Seventies were particularly kind to one specific cul-de-sac of cinema: the science fiction film, a subset category that was still buzzing from its late-Sixties head-trip phase courtesy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As the Age of Aquarius slowly slid into the beginning of the nation’s Watergate-and-disco period, you could still find sci-fi movies that wanted to blow an audience’s possibly addled, probably enhanced mind. But by the end of the 1970s, it was possible to have checked out post-apocalyptic action-adventures, future-shock case studies, technophobic nightmares, low-budget exploitation movies about what-if scenarios and big-budget space operas — all of which fell under the S.F. umbrella and helped turn the genre into a gamechanger. And the influences of this period are still showing up in theaters near you.

So, in honor of the 10-year-period that made science-fiction filmmaking what it is today, we are counting down the 50 best sci-fi movies of the 1970s. Some of them belong in the greatest-of-all-time canon; others, we will fully it, are the cinematic equivalent of a ripe Camembert. But each of these helped the decade redefine where science fiction could go on the big screen, whether it was in a grungy grindhouse or a state-of-the-art multiplex. This is where the genre genuinely started to boldly go where it had never gone before.

• Laserblast
• The Incredible Melting Man
• Starcrash
• Welcome to Blood City
• Beneath the Planet of the Apes
• Deathsport
• Message from Space
• Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
• Escape from the Planet of the Apes
• Damnation Alley

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Every Halloween, people reach for a small, select group of horror films to satisfy their scary-movie craving. Maybe it's one of the canonized classics, like the original versions of Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or Dawn of the Dead. Perhaps its something from the many slasher-icon franchises that sprung up in the 1980s, when you had a choice of Jasons, Freddys or Chuckys. Or maybe you head straight for the boundary-testers of the 2000s, when the Saw and Hostel movies shoved the genre into torture-porn territory.

Regardless of whether viewers prefer original recipe or extra-crispy, however, folks tend to go for a number of no-brainer titles — the kind of films that even a non-horror fanatic knew about. (Ask the average moviegoer who Jigsaw is and you're likely to get a blank stare; ask them if they know about the Saw series and watch them shudder in recognition.) But what if you're looking for something besides the usual scary-movie suspects? Nothing too extreme, too underground or too obscure…just a few choices that might be outside the norm or under the radar, yet would still bring the fear in a big way?

In the spirit of helping you achieve the maximum clammy-palmed, dry-mouthed, soiled-undergarment Halloween chills, we've come up with some alt-viewing options. Here are 20 horror movies that you probably haven't seen and will scare the beejesus out of you in a big way. (We're talking from 1968 to the present, since that was the year George A. Romero helped kick start the modern wave of horror with Night of the Living Dead.) Some are from the arthouse, some are from today's equivalent of the grindhouse, some might not even seem like a horror movie at first glance. Maybe you've even heard of a few of these titles. But chances are good that, unless you're a diehard scary-movie aficionado, you may not have seen all of these genre treasures — and trust us, you need to.

• Audition
• The Descent
• Excision
• Funny Games
• God Told Me To
• Dead of Night
• The House of the Devil
• I Saw the Devil
• Inside
• Kill List

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

From ‘Raging Bull’ to ‘Rocky & Bullwinkle’.

www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-lists/robert-de-niro-acting-roles-best-worst-performances-165878/ugly-backdraft-1991-153746/

• Taxi Driver
• Showtime
• Raging Bull
• The Family
• Brazil
• The Godfather Part II
• What Just Happened
• Awakenings
• Mean Streets
• 15 Minutes

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.