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Paste Magazine •

It Was Just an Accident Is Jafar Panahi's Suspenseful and Human Search for Answers

For more than six months across 2022 and 2023, director Jafar Panahi was imprisoned in Iran. The filmmaker, who began as a protege of Abbas Kiarostami, was originally sentenced in 2010 for his support of the Iranian Green Movement – although he would not go to prison for a dozen years after sentencing, the Islamic Republic of Iran banned him from filmmaking, traveling, and speaking to the international press for 20 years, effectively immediately.Since then, Panahi’s films have been made in secre...
Men's Health •

The Rock Is Wrestling With Himself in 'The Smashing Machine'

BEFORE ONE OF the big fights in the mixed martial arts biopic The Smashing Machine, prize fighter Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) is arguing with his girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt). The heavyweight wrestler was an emerging talent in the late 1990s, before MMA was a billion-dollar industry, and in this specific scene, he's high on painkillers. He feels defensive when his girlfriend calls him out for it, which leads him to accuse her of being out of control. Johnson delivers the line with so muc...
Inverse •

33 Years Later, David Lynch's Notoriously Misunderstood Masterpiece Just Got A Huge Upgrade

A soothing waterfall, a gently humming mill, a fetching northwestern forest: these are the sights of Twin Peaks, a throwback town that disguises its mystery and selfishness under a visage of true Americana. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s mystery series focused on the murder of popular but troubled high schooler Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), with the intrepid, boyish FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan) discovering a nest of demonic spirits implicated in her death. For years, the prequel film that...
TIME •

The Wild Political Story That Inspired 'One Battle After Another'

The novels of Thomas Pynchon—which include towering canonical works such as Gravity’s Rainbow and V.—are challenging. They’re also brilliant: intoxicating, hilarious, maddening, and vulgar, aggressively lampooning the fascist-capitalist sweep of history and rich (sometimes overwhelmingly so) with cultural references. These challenges are key to his appeal among devotees, including Paul Thomas Anderson, the beloved director whose latest project, One Battle After Another, is a loose adaptation of...
BFI •

10 great films set in 1970s America

From The Ice Storm to Inherent Vice: 10 period pieces that capture a nation caught between the aftershocks of the 60s and the dawn of Reagan era.During Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997), 14-year-old Wendy (Christina Ricci) watches with attentive but cynical eyes as a Watergate-snared President Nixon spins and deflects on television, all while her parents argue in the background. It’s a concise and expressive example of the power of American films that look back to the 1970s – children scrutinising...
Teen Vogue •

Jacob Elordi Is a Monster in 'Euphoria.' In 'Frankenstein,' He’s More Human Than Ever

In this review, writer Rory Doherty explores Jacob Elordi's track record of playing monsters and how his role in the new film Frankenstein contributes to that legacy.Guillermo Del Toro says he cast Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s Monster because of his eyes: that piercing, vulnerable stare we’ve seen over the years on screen used as a tool of intoxication and control against the people under their spell — or in their way.It’s that history, and that gaze, that make his performance as the monster i...
TIME •

The True Story of Mark Kerr and 'The Smashing Machine'

The day before the premiere of The Smashing Machine at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, former mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr describes his emotional state as “vibrational.” It’s tough to pin down where jet lag ends and nerves begin, but not long before audiences will see Dwayne Johnson act out his life story for the first time, the 56-year-old is just trying to roll with the absurdity of the moment. Keeping a clear head has been at the top of his agenda for some time now: the f...
Flicks •

“We’ve become very, very paranoid”: Ari Aster explains Eddington

In a small, isolated New Mexico town, an emasculated sheriff channels the tension of his home life into a feud with the charming but corrupt mayor. Plans to install an environmentally costly data centre show how ambitious the town’s leaders are, while the early policies of the COVID-19 pandemic trigger ordinary, alienated townsfolk to erupt with frustration. Where does everybody turn? To digital worlds where everything feels more certain, personal, and paranoid. This is Eddington, the latest wor...
AnOther •

Five Key Visual References Behind The Bear’s Cinematography

For four seasons, The Bear has taken the adage “if you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen” to psychological extremes. Rarely can the inventive, disciplined head chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) handle his demons, but he’d never leave the only place he can prove himself. The hit restaurant drama stars White, Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and a fleet of character actors and famous guest stars in the ongoing saga of Michelin star ambitions, Italian beef sandwiches, and fallout...
AV Club •

Primer: An eerie road through the disaffected world of Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Primer is The A.V. Club‘s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
The world painted by Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of disaffection. The Japanese auteur has made a career of identity thrillers, metaphysical horror, and cultural commentary, with films often sporting deceptively simple monosyllabic titles—Cure, Pulse, Chime, and now Cloud—that circle around existential themes...
Big Issue •

Legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg: 'Technology is not alien – it’s completely human'

The Shrouds takes David Cronenberg’s contemporary style to an ultra-modern place – the film is filled with screens, digital tampering and tech industry sabotage, all of which add a strange tension to the story’s very human grief and despair. Karsh is a direct expression of his own creator, not just because they both sport a white shock of hair. Like Karsh, Cronenberg lost his wife to illness after decades of marriage, and the way that grief consumed him led him to questions about the ways we mou...
Vulture •

Every (Live-Action) Superman Movie, Ranked

For nearly 90 years, Superman has been the archetypal superhero — a man of extraordinary ability, with warm, handsome features, dressed like a heroic strongman. He has the entire starter pack of classic and enviable superpowers: flight, superstrength, superspeed, X-ray vision, and a secret identity so mild-mannered that no one believes their dorkish newsroom colleague could possibly be a titan from another world. Since Superman debuted in Action Comics No. 1 (the creation of writer Jerry Siegel...
AV Club •

A death-obsessed Britain serves as the bloody spine of 28 Years Later

Like any country rigidly divided by wealth and marginalization, there was no essential experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in Great Britain. Instead, there was a fiercely felt mass of contradictions—a projection of stiff-upper-lip and chummy camaraderie (or “Blitz spirit”), but also the insistence of individualism in direct defiance to community policy. Why should we care about our fellow humans when our entire history, culture, and mythos is based on the comfort of feeling more legitimate than...
TIME •

The True Story Behind Netflix's Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy

In November 2021, the third Astroworld music festival commenced in Houston, Tex., the hometown of rap superstar Travis Scott. Scott had a personal affinity for the Six Flags AstroWorld theme park in Houston that had closed its doors in 2005, naming his six-time platinum certified 2018 album after it and holding the inaugural festival near the site of the demolished amusement park. After canceling the 2020 edition because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Astroworld 2021 promised to be bigger than the tw...
Flicks •

Meeting The Phoenician Scheme cast in Cannes feels like we’re in a Wes Anderson movie

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme has just celebrated its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival.
While at the fest, Rory Doherty sat down to chat with seven of its cast – Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Richard Ayoade, Rupert Friend, and Jeffrey Wright.
Being ferried between different hotel suites to talk with seven different, immaculately presented artists over a single hour evokes the experience of being in a Wes Anderson movie yourself: pockets of focused, cha...
Men's Health •

‘Adolescence’ Is About Fathers

The following story contains spoilers for all four episodes of Netflix's Adolescence. IT'S EPISODE TWO of Adolescence, the four-part British miniseries that exploded on Netflix last week, and DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) is at a school investigating the death of teen Katie Leonard. Throughout the half hour of police interviews, pupils have been alternately emotional and evasive, and Bascombe is still in the dark about what could have caused the shocking crime. That is, until Bascombe’s 15-y...
AV Club •

Primer: The socially conscious spectacle of Korean sci-fi

Primer is The A.V. Club‘s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
Mickey 17 is Bong Joon Ho’s biggest English-language film yet. The slapstick sci-fi blockbuster that satirizes the industrial commodification of labor is also his long-awaited follow-up to Parasite, a historic Best Picture winner that satirized domestic labor dependency in Korea. The man loves his pet th...
Men's Health •

Gene Hackman Brought Real Men to Movies

IF GENE HACKMAN movies want you to know one thing, it’s that Gene Hackman can’t have everything. No matter how close his anti-heroes get to catching their man, or getting off scot-free, or untangling themselves from conspiracy, there’s often some intangible, existential cost that their survival depends on. Consider the hollow determination on Popeye Doyle’s face at the climax of The French Connection, as he assures his partner he’ll catch the European drug fiend, willfully ignoring that he’s jus...
British GQ •

Director Osgood Perkins on the inspiration behind Theo James gorefest The Monkey

The following article contains spoilers for The Monkey.Life sucks, and then you die. So says Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, the gory new adaptation of the 1980 short story by Stephen King, which spans the troubled adolescence and arrested development of Hal (Theo James), whose timid preteen years (played as a child by Christian Convery) are violently interrupted by the discovery of his absent father’s toy monkey. As it turns out, the doll is cursed, resulting in the variously bizarre, slapstick, an...
Big Issue •

I’m Still Here director Walter Salles on the tragedy he never forgot

When Big Issue spoke to Walter Salles, celebrated Brazilian director of Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries and now I’m Still Here, his lead actress Fernanda Torres had not yet won a Golden Globe or been nominated for an Oscar – the biographical dictatorship drama hadn’t even been released in Brazil. In the time since, I’m Still Here has become the highest-grossing Brazilian release since the pandemic and received widespread acclaim from audiences who championed Torres’s exemplary performanc...
Flicks •

Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones on their epic Oscar contender The Brutalist

Lengthy, weighty and visually enormous, The Brutalist is a big swing for the fences. Stars Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones join Rory Doherty to discuss the ambitious awards contender.
Independently of each other, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones describe Brady Corbet’s epic, 70mm shot, capitalist critiquing, period drama The Brutalist to me as a love triangle.
Their characters have little in common—she is Erzsébet, an educated, Hungarian Holocaust survivor, he is Harrison Lee Van Buren, a disgustingl...
Big Issue •

Nickel Boys star Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: 'Black women's tears are exploited'

Director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray shot the drama from first-person perspectives – everything we see of Nickel Academy is through the eyes of newcomer Elwood and long-term resident Turner (Brandon Wilson).

It’s an emotional story. “I get asked to go to those places a lot, in the roles that I played recently at least,” Ellis-Taylor says. “I try to be aware of that, because I think you can exploit Black women’s tears. So I try to look at it like, OK, this is what is demanded of t...
AnOther •

A Definitive Guide to the Work of William S Burroughs on Screen

Few American writers remain as transgressive as William S Burroughs. The postmodern author’s distinct and daunting literary style makes translating his work for the screen a difficult task, though plenty have tried – and Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Burroughs’ early, confessional novella Queer may be the highest profile one yet.
Queer sees heroin-addicted writer William (Daniel Craig) fall hopelessly in lust with Eugene (Drew Starkey), an ex-US serviceman living out in Mexico City. Eugene doe...
Teen Vogue •

'Smile 2' and 'Trap' Turn Pop Stars Into Final Girls, Expose Horrors of Fame

In a year where conversations about the righteous parasociality that fans feel towards celebs like Chappell Roan spark headlines nearly every day, two major films — Smile 2 and Trap — use major massive music tours as a method of delivering intense scares and thrills. Both turn pop girls into final girls, revealing the hidden barbarity behind celebrity hyper-exposure.Celebrities are expected to give their fans an exact blend of authentic, private access and a curated, uncontroversial brand — we w...
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