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Letterboxd •

Lights Up: a starter pack of 20 fantastic films with transformative movie theater scenes

The ways in which the movie theater is romanticized can be incredibly familiar to many modern cinema lovers—or anyone who can recite the Nicole Kidman AMC commercial from memory. The smell of the popcorn, the respectful silence as the lights dim, the adrenaline of 100 people reacting to the same jump scare or joke in unison; the theatrical experience appeals to us as a place—a secular, but not necessarily unspiritual, temple—we are drawn to because of a unifying desire to be swept away.
The cin...
TIME •

The True Story Behind 'Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing'

For Boeing, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 live in infamy. The first plane crashed in October 2018 in the Java Sea shortly after taking off, and the second crashed in central Ethiopia only five months later. Both were Boeing 737 Max aircrafts, a newer and more fuel efficient model that was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2017. Within two years of first entering into service, every 737 Max had been grounded after the same malfunction led to a combi...
TIME •

The True Story Behind 'Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing'

For Boeing, Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 live in infamy. The first plane crashed in October 2018 in the Java Sea shortly after taking off, and the second crashed in central Ethiopia only five months later. Both were Boeing 373 Max aircrafts, a newer and more fuel efficient model that had was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2017. Within two years of first entering into service, every 737 Max had been grounded after the same malfunction led to a c...
AV Club •

The "formative years biopic" is just as bad as its broader cousin

Biopics face a serious and often unresolvable contradiction. Their audience is built upon name recognition, but the eternal cultural currency of celebrity is mitigated by a passé genre with a reputation for lazy, exploitative, and inert works. It’s no small thing to film the story of a leader, activist, or artist with a large following (and thus a large likelihood of backlash), especially if they died prematurely and tragically. Tony—the first fiction film about beloved chef memoirist and food t...
The Guardian •

Love me, love my bruised ego: what the narcissist-artist film tells us about the fear of ageing

Entertainment culture is so preoccupied with nowness that last month we were inundated with speculation about how directors under 30 topping the box office would change the industry. The flipside of a youth obsession is the conviction that age will increase irrelevance, and this is something that a new crop of films about ageing artists is zeroing in on. Specifically, Bitter Christmas, Late Fame and The Christophers are films in which artists – all male – indulge in selfishness, vanity and spite...
TIME •

The True Story Behind 'Monsters of God'

As a lifelong lover of reptiles, Eric Goode has known about the world of exotic reptile smuggling for decades. “I didn't become acutely aware of the criminality of it until probably into the late ‘80s,” says the director of Tiger King and Chimp Crazy ahead of his latest documentary, another foray into wildlife crime, Monsters of God. The five-episode HBO series is Goode’s most ambitious project to date, surveying the explosion of endangered reptiles trafficked into the country in Florida from th...
Men's Health •

You Loved ‘The Odyssey.’ You’ll Love These 10 Action Epics Too.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S THE Odyssey is upon us, in all its prestige format rollout glory. The significance of a $250 million adaptation of Homer’s epic poem cannot be overstated: this is the first Odyssey blockbuster, and while the story of Ithaca’s king wandering across high seas and strange lands for ten years has influenced plenty of canonized works of literature and beloved media (like Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? and, if you squint, Star Trek: Voyager). But ancient historica...
AnOther •

A Guide to the Spectral Films of Andrei Tarkovsky

Beginning with his Great Patriotic War-set Ivan’s Childhood, auteur Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven features over the span of 24 years. But despite the restrictive creative conditions of the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev era – a saga of censorship that led to the filmmaker leaving his homeland for the final years of his life – all of his films feel completely uncompromised. In his dedication to foregrounding philosophy, art and poetry (Tarkovsky references his poet father, Arseny, in multiple films),...
AV Club •

"I'd been given this gift of dying": Nicolas Winding Refn on his operatic return to the big screen

Contrary to the internet’s belief, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s career did not begin with 2011’s Drive, the Los Angeles getaway driver thriller starring Ryan Gosling as an asocial aura-farming antihero. In truth, Drive marked the halfway point of Refn’s career; the Danish provocateur had already explored the dark psychological side of Copenhagen crime in his Pusher trilogy, given Tom Hardy his breakout role as England’s most violent offender in Bronson, and even tried to capitalize on the se...
Inverse •

25 Years Later, The Most Unfairly Maligned Jurassic Park Sequel Is Better Than You Remember

There have been six sequels to Jurassic Park — one trilogy, one reboot trilogy, and one reboot of the reboot — but none of them come close to the excitement and suspense of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original. Jurassic Park’s magic is deeply connected to its sense of discovery — even if you’ve seen the dinosaur romp a dozen times, the alchemy of John Williams’ score, Industrial Light and Magic’s effects, and Spielberg’s sharp direction of a stellar cast always makes it feel like we’re encountering...
AV Club •

The best Odyssey films adapt the epic in unheroic terms

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns—preferably in a four-quadrant movie format. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey is, according to the director himself, the most challenging film he’s made, filmed across six countries, often on terrain hostile to blockbuster film crews, with a massive A-lister cast and a degree of grit and realism typical to Nolan’s filmed versions of heightened material. But while The Odyssey‘s press run has supplied enough anecdotes of...
AV Club •

Bicentennial cinema shattered the myth of America

There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. How to mark the 200th anniversary of the Declaration Of Independence was debated for years, all while the country was rocked with a series of tough truths and scandals. The end of the Vietnam War, a major recession with millions unemployed, and the 1974 resignation of President Nixon—this all felt at odds with an expensive celebration of American pride and legacy. Surely a new legacy was being formed in real t...
Inverse •

In The Hand Of Dante Is A Heady, Ridiculous Art Heist Film About Gangsters And Poetry

Two authors, both alike in dignity (and both played by Oscar Isaac), stand at the center of In the Hand of Dante. The first is Dante Alighieri, the revered Italian poet who penned the Divine Comedy in the 14th century — the epic poem depicting his journey through the circles of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The second is Nick Tosches, a frustrated and principled New Jerseyan author at the turn of the new millennium.Don’t let the film’s fluid, handheld cinematography, ambitious dual lead perform...
Men's Health •

Guy Ritchie Has Made a Lot of Movies. We Ranked Them All.

FANCY ENTERING A world of smarmy mercenaries, expert street fighters, and both-sides-playing gangsters? It's impressive how much director Guy Ritchie insists on filling his work with his favorite tropes and stylistic flourishes from the action and crime worlds. Ever since his debut with the savvy 1998 gangster flick Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels—the influence of which can still be felt on British crime media today—Ritchie has been telling stories that are as aggressive as they are playful...
BFI •

11 discoveries from Cannes 2026

Winner of the Camera d’Or for Best First Feature Film, Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s reckoning with the 1994 Rwandan genocide is a feat of cinematic wonder and community collaboration. A decade of research and the involvement of survivors, who deliver moving testimonies during group scenes, is threaded through a taut dramatic concept. Tutsi survivor Vénéranda (Clémentine U. Nyirinkindi) is a group leader at the Kibeho chapter of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, initiating dialo...
AnOther •

An Interview With Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan’s Master of Existential Cinema

Forty years and dozens of films since Kiyoshi Kurosawa began his career, the exceptional Japanese director of chilling, comfort-shattering horror films has made a samurai film. Just don’t expect Seven Samurai or Lone Wolf and Cub – based on the prize-winning novel by Honobu Yonezawa, The Samurai and the Prisoner is an absorbing, detailed mystery drama, a fictionalised account of Lord Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) and the enemy strategist Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda) locked up in the castle du...
AV Club •

Kiyoshi Kurosawa stages a delightful samurai Columbo with The Samurai And The Prisoner

Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) is a rare lord in Japan’s Sengoku period. The Samurai And The Prisoner—Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s first samurai film—begins in 1578, deep in the pre-Edo “Warring States” period, and ruthlessness does not come to Murashige easily. This is making his betrayal of the far more powerful warlord Nobunaga Oba (Bando Shingo) and the impending siege of Arioka Castle a pressing concern. When envoy Kanbei Kuroda (Cloud‘s Musaki Suda) visits to warn the lord about his dismal odds,...
AV Club •

Pedro Almodóvar regifts his own pithy, self-critical autofiction in Bitter Christmas

How do you respond when a filmmaker announces to the audience that his latest film is a minor work? In the case of Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas, this self-critique comes late in the game through the dramatic avatars of a very Almodóvar-styled director, Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and his no-bullshit agent Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), who are locked in a fierce debate about whether Raúl has total freedom to crib the painful experiences of his close circle, or if he’s just bring a prick. Mor...
A Rabbit's Foot •

Palme frontrunner Minotaur gets to the corrupt (and cuckholded) heart of Russia - A Rabbit's Foot

“What do you want to endure?” is a throwaway question in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, a pithy insult in a major argument between a rich Russian husband and wife. Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is drunk and upset about the uselessness of being the neglected wife of a wealthy CEO, Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov)—she wants to live, to endure, but her clumsy cries for a richer, grander experience fail to convince. Neither of them mention the elephant in the room—Galina’s young, hot lover Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk),...
AnOther •

The Man I Love: Ira Sachs’ Soulful and Transcendent Musical Drama

Performance seeps into nearly every scene of The Man I Love, Ira Sachs’ frank romantic drama about the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on New York’s gay community and downtown theatre scene. Our subject is Jimmy (Rami Malek), a minor, localised theatre celebrity on the mend from a debilitating bout of AIDS-related illness, cared for by his non-performer partner, Dennis (Tom Sturridge). He’s excited about his new starring role to focus on. But outside of rehearsals, performance is the principle me...
AnOther •

Harry Melling on His Intimate and Reckless Role in Butterfly Jam

One year after the world premiere of Pillion, Harry Melling has returned to Cannes in Kantemir Balagov’s new film, the chaotic and dangerous immigrant family drama Butterfly Jam. “Two years in a row is not bad,” the actor jovially agrees, speaking to AnOther on the rooftop terrace of the glamorous JW Marriott Cannes – on what will undoubtedly be the windiest day of the festival. Furniture is being hastily rearranged to protect audio levels when Melling arrives; he rallies his interviewer to take...
A Rabbit's Foot •

Sandra Hüller is magnetic in Pawlikowski's muted portrait of post-war Germany - A Rabbit's Foot

In Mephisto, both the novel by anti-fascist writer Klaus Mann and its Academy Award-winning 1981 film adaptation, a German stage actor achieves his dreams of stardom by acquiescing to the demands of the Nazi regime, unaware he’s accepted a Faustian deal even as he performs in Goethe’s celebrated play. In Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, the same barbed questions of compromising artistic integrity to support building a national consciousness are present, but they have a new emotional timbre: muted...
Inverse •

78 Years Later, The Most Surreal Sci-Fi Noir You've Never Seen Just Got A Huge Upgrade

Don’t underestimate the significance of Czech science-fiction — the word “robot” is a Czech invention, coined by author Karel Čapek for his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Four years later, Čapek published the novel Krakatit, a prescient cautionary tale about a scientist who creates a seismic explosive and realizes just how hellish its impact on mankind will be. A film adaptation was produced over 20 years later, when Czech director Otakar Vávra used the precarity of post-war Europ...
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