“I’ve been called a witch, a slut, and a murderer. Maybe people confuse me with the characters I play in films… like I’m an empty vessel onto which they project their fantasies and their shortcomings, but I don’t need to settle scores. I’m reclaiming my soul. I write as a woman searching for another adventure.” […]
Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenburg (2024) Read More »
Tell me if this sounds familiar: A romantic couple, one American, one British, one the proprietor of a small, very narrow business, happy with family and friends but lonely and a little lost, one a global superstar, but lonely and a little lost. Both are spectacularly beautiful. And there’s a reason the star has to
With the notable exception of “Barbie,” the modern blockbuster can be pretty serious stuff. Whether it’s the dense lore and world-building of “Dune” or “Avatar: The Way of Water,” or the self-serious connected universe of the MCU, blockbusters have often felt like work lately too. This is not to say that some of these films
In middle school, John Green novels were the quintessential YA diaries in which my friends and I indulged. Ferociously consuming his books and feeding our angst and inflated otherness through Margo Roth Spiegelman and Alaska Young, or pining for the love of Hazel and Augustus, the announcement of an adaptation sent us straight to theaters
Sometimes, the revolution is televised. In 1998, an aspiring comedian auditioned for a Japanese TV show that put young people in difficult situations and filmed them for entertainment. By the luck of the draw, he won the chance to pursue fame in the burgeoning realm of reality television. Forced into a studio apartment with no
The notion that love could blossom in the most horrifying of places say, a concentration camp during the Holocaust is a tough pill to swallow, even at the best of times. And yet, Lali Sokolov and Gita Furman, two Slovakian prisoners at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, did indeed meet at the camp, fall in love, and survive
“You can’t get a head start if you aim for perfection,” a clueless moneyed entrepreneur muses during a video chat with his two shell-shocked subordinates in the new film from writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. In the context of the actual conversation the sentiment is even more inane than it sounds on the face of it. And
Luca Guadagnino directs “Challengers,” a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley. There’s even part of one match
Several enemies of the state are murdered on live TV in a pivotal scene from “Boy Kills World,” a hyper-action movie about a media-addicted killer who wants to avenge his family’s deaths. We don’t know who these TV casualties are or what people think of their deaths, but we do know that their killers are
Most of us don’t like finding them on our windowsills, crawling on our walls, or making thread-y homes of their own in forgotten crevices. They are our foes as much as any unwelcome pest even if they are helpful in keeping out other creepy crawlies. In Sébastien Vanicek’s nightmarish feature debut “Infested,” there are more
