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The 25 Best Movie Critics of All Time

Everyone else's opinions are optional.

Image via Complex Original

As self-ran blogs and online message boards continue to dominate pop culture conversations, one old adage seems more apt than ever: Everyone's a critic.

The days when new movies were reviewed exclusively by knowledgeable film scholars are gone. Anyone who knows how to navigate Wordpress can publish their written views about the latest art-house film, popcorn flick, or costume drama. And, chances are, somebody's going to read it.

The most frustrating thing about this online renaissance—aside from suffering ignorant comments from trolls—is the way it trivializes the grade-A essays and critiques penned by folks whose entire lives have been dedicated to cinema studies.

In our own humble ways, we operate this Pop Culture channel utilizing the fine examples left by the greatest women and men of film criticism, albeit without losing sight of the modern vibes of 21st century Internet methodologies. And by "the greatest," we're referring to The 25 Best Movie Critics of All Time . Anyone who takes cinema seriously is advised to read their work.

RELATED: The 50 Harshest Roger Ebert Movie Review Quotes RELATED: The 100 Best Movies of the Complex Decade RELATED: 20 Pieces of Hollywood Trivia That Will Blow Your Mind!

Written by Matt Barone ( @MBarone )

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25. David Edelstein

Publications: Slate , New York Post , The Village Voice , Boston Phoenix , The New York Times , Rolling Stone , Vanity Fair , Variety , New York Read Reviews Here

As filmgoers, we obviously prefer good movies over bad ones, but when it comes to reviews, it's always more fun to read a tear-down of a truly crappy movie. Few critics are able to eviscerate cinema's dregs quite like New York 's champion of snark, David Edelstein. It's exactly that brand of written scorn that immortalized Edelstein during the heyday of Saw and Hostel , wholly unpleasant horror movies that he famously dubbed "torture porn."

24. Kim Newman

Publications: City Limits , Sight and Sound , Empire Read Reviews Here

Highbrow movie critics have a tendency to downplay horror movies, and unfairly so. Kim Newman, on the other hand, has made a career out of championing the weirdest, most overlooked, and decidedly one-of-a-kind gore flicks, creature features, and every other kind of scare flick.

Hailing from London, Newman also moonlights as a horror fiction writer, but it's his regular Empire column, "Kim Newman's Video Dungeon," that still provides the 28-year veteran's most anticipated writings. Everything from Lucio Fulci pictures to schlock like Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks the Same  (yes, that's a real movie) gets the Dungeon treatment.

Those interested in catching up with Newman's pro-genre narratives should start with his massive, brilliantly comprehensive book Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s .

23. Wesley Morris

Publications: The Boston Globe , Grantland Read Reviews Here

Wesley Morris' resume speaks for itself. First, there's the college he attended: Yale University. Second, and most importantly, there's that measly honor he was bestowed with last year: the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Just imagine the sobs and head-smacks happening inside The Boston Globe 's office when Morris announced that he was leaving the newspaper to join Bill Simmons' Grantland full-time and become its biggest on-staff movie head.

22. Mike D'Angelo

Publications: Las Vegas Weekly , The Village Voice , Variety , Time Out New York , Nerve (website), Esquire Read Reviews Here

Mike D'Angelo caught onto the power of online film criticism way before anyone else. Back in 1995, he started the blog The Man Who Viewed Too Muc h , a popular cyber hub for D'Angelo's accessible yet brainy reviews. Through the success of that site, he scored a full-time gig with Time Out New York and handled a monthly column in Esquire .

These days, he's back on the World Wide Web via AV Club's recurring "Scenic Routes," where D'Angelo breaks down one key scene from a noteworthy film in extensive detail.

21. Todd McCarthy

Publications: Variety , The Hollywood Reporter Read Reviews Here

Movie junkies who impatiently wait for the first reviews of prestige pictures and pricey blockbusters should know Todd McCarthy's name well. Beginning in the late 1970s, McCarthy spent more than 30 years writing reviews for Variety , meaning his takes were, more often than not, the earliest published reactions to big studios' latest releases. And in that, he became a major authority whose dry, clinical observations helped to either build buzz or deliver a film DOA.

20. Glenn Kenny

Publications: The Village Voice , Premiere , The Auteurs (website), MSN (website) Read Reviews Here

Reading Glenn Kenny's reviews and essays is like being in a film class, but without the dry chafing of academia. As astute as he is witty, the former Premiere  critic has a strong knack for connecting current movies to old classics.

On his highly recommended blog, Some Came Running , Kenny regularly posts long, knowledgeable analyses of vintage films that draw insightful connections to today's pictures. In early January, for example, Kenny used the racial debate surrounding Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained to reflect upon D.W. Griffith's 1915 controversy magnet The Birth of a Nation .

19. Dana Stevens

Publication: Slate Read Reviews Here

To best appreciate Slate 's Dana Stevens, and in an effort to show her unpredictability and dedication to her own convictions, let's cite a few of her more recent reviews. As most of her peers were praising Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained , Stevens reacted from a place of inner disgust : "Tarantino’s intent may have been to showcase the horrors of slavery, but there’s something about his directorial delectation in all these acts of racial violence that left me not just physically but morally queasy."

But, at the same time, she's able to embrace the splattery weirdness of genre maverick Don Coscarelli's absurdist delight John Dies at the End , writing, "The story’s rabbit holes got so deep that I can’t actually tell you whether the movie’s title is a spoiler or not, but I loved John Dies at the End for so confidently whisking the viewer to a place where the question 'Well, did he die or didn’t he?' seems hopelessly un-nuanced and square."

18. Vincent Canby

Publications: Variety , The New York Times Read Reviews Here

During his 24-year run as the chief film critic for The New York Times , Vincent Canby's (1924-2000) words wielded the power of mighty swords. If he chastised a foreign or independent movie, which he so often did, said film didn't stand a chance of catching on in the Big Apple. Take British director Terence Davies, for example, who made two pictures that Canby ridiculed in print and inadvertently prevented from receiving healthy American distribution.

His reviews didn't read like scholarly texts; rather, Canby's writing favored whip-smart humor. When covering a young, seriously bulked-up Arnold Schwarzenegger, he described the Austrian bodybuilder as ""something the actor might want to shed in order to slip into something more comfortable."

17. Philip French

Publications: The Times , The Observer , Sight and Sound Read Reviews Here

Over in England, Philip French is a loud voice among film critics. In fact, he's arguably the UK's greatest living movie analyst. And if French has an area of untouchable expertise, it's in the cowboys-and-spurs sect of cinema: Originally published back in 1977, French's definitive book Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre is regarded as the greatest book ever written on the subject. And, best of all, you don't need to know Sergio Leone's birthday off the top of your head to appreciate the genre, thanks to French's lively writing.

16. Dilys Powell

Publications: The Sunday Times , Punch

Check those publication names above—far cries from the worldwide notoriety of periodicals like The New York Times , right? That's why the late Elizabeth Dilys Powell (who dropped her first name when writing) isn't frequently referenced when people discuss their favorite movie critics.

She worked in a vacuum of sorts, and her self-aware, pithy style of writing wasn't universally acknowledged until after her death in 1995. The source of her posthumous respect: cinephiles acquainting themselves with her sprawling, though now hard to find, book The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films .

15. Lisa Schwarzbaum

Publications: The Boston Globe , Entertainment Weekly Read Reviews Here

Earlier this week, the face of Entertainment Weekly began an unexpected face-change when Lisa Schwarzbaum, one of the magazine's two in-house movie critics (the other being Owen Gleiberman), announced that she's leaving the post after 22 acclaimed, productive years. It's a real blow to the glossy, easily consumed mag, since Schwarzbaum's loose, conversational reviews are, on a weekly basis, one of EW 's strongest components.

14. Manny Farber

Publications: The New Republic , Time , The Nation , New Leader , Cavalier , Artforum Read Reviews Here

Manny Farber (1917-2008) had a low tolerance for high art. Which isn't to say that the Arizona native had bad taste—on the contrary, Farber possessed a brave, against-the-grain fondness for otherwise frowned-upon fringe cinema. Most of his peers couldn't be bothered by the genre trappings of anti-prestige artists like Laurel and Hardy, Don Siegel, and Andy Warhol, but Farber, bless his soul, devoted most of his career to casting their kinds of creative minds in a celebratory, you-need-to-watch-this light.

See his landmark essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" for a look into this singular mind.

13. Janet Maslin

Publication: The New York Times Read Reviews Here

Those who currently read The New York Times solely to check out film critic Manohla Dargis' latest reviews should salute Janet Maslin, big time. From 1977 through 1999, the NYC-bred Maslin brought her sterling combination of smarts and wiles to the reputable newspaper, specifically riding hard for the independent movie scene.

12. A.O. Scott

Publications: Newsday , Slate , The New York Times Read Reviews Here

One look at Anthony Oliver (or, simply, A.O.) Scott's family background should quickly explain why he's such a poignant writer: Both his parents were college professors. Keeping the Scott brood's educated leanings alive and well, Mr. New York Times Movie Reviewer (working alongside Manohla Dargis) represents a younger breed of critical prestige. He's only 46-years-old, yet Scott's work can be placed next to the also currently active Roger Ebert's output. Don't be surprised if he's held in the same kind of reverential esteem as Mr. Ebert by the time he reaches 70.

11. James Agee

Publications: Time , The Nation Read Reviews Here

A true trailblazer, James Agee gave film criticism a boost of widespread credibility back in the 1940s, when he reviewed countless movies for both Time and The Nation . And he never hid his affinity for silent films, often saving his most positive thoughts for wordless cinema. As for every other kind, Agee is largely remembered as being a tough man to please. He wasn't the type to hand out middling criticisms—his standards were sky-high.

Clearly, he knew what he was talking about: After ending his critic hustle in the early 1950s, Agee went on to work on the screenplays for the greatly revered films The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). Plus, following his death in 1945, Agee posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Death in the Family .

10. Anthony Lane

Publications: The Independent , Independent on Sunday , The New Yorker Read Reviews Here

In a different reality, Anthony Lane could be a prolific comedy writer. Through his intelligent reviews, The New Yorker 's free-wheeling critic (he's been on staff there since 1993) always conveys a sharp sense of humor, addressing a film's faults and positive attributes with self-deprecation and jokes.

In his 2003 book, Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker , Lane provided a short list of must-do practices for anyone who's interested in following a similar career path, and it's quite indicative of the man's wit. Case in point, this tip: "Try to keep up with documentaries about Swabian transsexuals (or, see everything regardless of budget or hype)."

9. François Truffaut

Publication: Cahiers du cinéma Read Reviews Here

François Truffaut is remembered best for being a master filmmaker, and with good reason. With undisputed classics like The 400 Blows (1959) and the meta Day for Night (1973) under his belt, the icon of French filmmaking (1932-1984) stands as one of cinema's exemplary directors.

But all of the talk about his behind-the-camera work detracts from his impressive run as a movie critic, during which he earned a stigma as France's harshest voice, writing for Cahiers du cinema, the film magazine from which the Nouvelle Vague  movement sprang from. His polarizing negativity reached its apex with the article "A Certain Trend in French Cinema" (1954), a call-to-arms for those who weren't happy with the country's moviegoing trends.

8. Manohla Dargis

Publications: Los Angeles Times , LA Weekly , The Village Voice , Film Comment , Sight and Sound , The New York Times Read Reviews Here

You have to respect Manohla Dargis' anonymous gangster. Whereas every other movie critic on this countdown will gladly take pictures and go on camera to voice their opinions, the 50-something Dargis has enjoyed a respected, fruitful career without needing to put a widely-seen face to her byline.

Week in and week out, her learned, gorgeously written work enhances The New York Times Arts section, giving equal attention and excitement to films as diverse as Silver Linings Playbook and divisive as French writer-director Gaspar Noe's dizzying Enter the Void . Unlike most high-end critics, Dargis' name above a review of a genre film doesn't guarantee a wrongly slanted, probably disinterested point-of-view. For her, weirdo cinema has just as much potential as Oscar fare.

7. David Denby

Publications: The Atlantic , New York , The New Yorker Read Reviews Here

Consider David Denby the film critics' circuit's answer to the hip-hop community's Nas. Similar to how Nasir Jones made it his mission to question the existence of his once-prevalent and always cherished art form, The New Yorker 's chief film writer shook up the world of big-screen lovers with his controversial book Do the Movies Have a Future? . Largely avoiding snark, Denby's writing throughout the page-turner is earnest, focusing on the promotion of film's older ideals against the blockbusters and money-first products that major studios rush into theaters nowadays.

If written by a lesser critic, Do the Movies Have a Future?  would've came off as a real bitch-fest, one akin to an aged D.I.T.C. fan crying about Chief Keef and Trinidad James for 368 pages. But thanks to Denby's sterling, deserved reputation, it's an important conversation-starter from a master who's at the top of his game.

6. Jonathan Rosenbaum

Publications: Cahiers du cinéma , Film Comment , Chicago Reader Read Reviews Here

Jonathan Rosenbuam is a true crusader. Born in Alabama, the wide-eyed, then-26-years-old go-getter moved to Paris in 1969, where he routinely contributed film reviews to publications like Sight & Sound and The Village Voice . That time spent overseas filled Rosenbaum with an intense appreciation for non-American movies, and he's since made it his personal mission to promote international filmmaking here in the states.

For his most impassioned defense of non-Hollywood productions, the indispensable 2002 book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See is a must.

5. J. Hoberman

Publications: The Village Voice , Film Comment , The New York Times , The Virginia Quarterly Review , ArtInfo (website) Read Reviews Here

Simply put, there's no greater living film essayist than James Lewis Hoberman, better known as J. Hoberman. Starting at The Village Voice  in the '70s, the New York City native owned the paper's film reviews section with his beautifully composed, scholarly critiques until he was wrongly removed from his post in 2012.

The thing about Hoberman's reviews, though, is that they don't read like reviews; they're more like heavily researched narratives that relate the movie in question to larger, all-encompassing themes that touch upon society, cinema, and politics.

For incredibly informative and vibrantly penned time capsules, pick up any one of Hoberman's many books. Our recommendations: the cult community manifesto Midnight Movies (co-written with Jonathan Rosenbaum) and his most recent release, Film After Film , a compilation of Hoberman's post-9/11 writings that makes for a dynamic companion to Denby's Do the Movies Have a Future?

4. Pauline Kael

Publications: City Lights , McCall's , The New Republic , The New Yorker Read Reviews Here

It takes a lot of nerve to go against the popular consensus, no matter the contrarian's gender, but a female movie critic who doesn't fear pissing off her (male) contemporaries nor Hollywood's (male) elite? That's one tough person.

Widely regarded as one of the most influential film analysts ever, the late Pauline Kael filled her  New Yorker  reviews (published from 1968 through 1991) with fearless wit, often writing in the first-person to either attack or praise a motion picture. She thrived during times when jealous ones especially envied, weathering sexist insults and accusations of star-chasing favoritism.

Best of all, Kael championed genre filmmakers like Brian De Palma, Walter Hill, and Sam Peckinpah, artists who are revered now but initially released low-budget, unfairly B-pegged flicks. She was a rebel with a passionate cause.

3. Andrew Sarris

Publications: Film Culture , The Village Voice , NY Film Bulletin , The New York Observer Read Reviews Here

Every cinematic shotcaller working today, whether independent or major, owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Andrew Sarris. Strong-minded and blessed with the gift of fluid prose, the late Brooklyn-born writer is best remembered for his classic 1968 tome The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 , an exhaustive, opinionated dissection of pre-'68 sound films broken down by the individual filmmakers.

In The American Cinema , Sarris fully developed the influential auteur theory, bringing the daring pro-director beliefs practiced by the many great critics working for France's Cahiers du Cinéma and popularizing them in the United States.

2. Roger Ebert

Publication: Chicago Sun Times Read reviews here

Like Jay-Z is for rappers, Roger Ebert is the most widely recognized movie critic ever. He's been cranking out entertaining, witty, and often heartfelt reviews for the Chicago Sun Times since 1967, forging a 40-plus-year career that's seen him conquer print media, the online blogosphere, and even television. Of course you remember watching him on his groundbreaking At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert , which he co-hosted with his best confidante, the late Chicago Tribune  critic. Together, they made upward and downward thumbs iconic.

Ebert's congratulatory reviews are top-notch, yet it's his negative, gloves-off beatdowns of crappy cinema that have always been his most delightful to read. Read his 50 harshest review quotes for yourselves .

1. André Bazin

Publication: Cahiers du Cinéma Read Reviews Here

There's arguably no book about movies that's as mandatory as André Bazin's What is Cinema?  Still taught in film classes today, it's the definitive explanation of what makes the medium's proverbial heart beat, offering groundbreaking views on visual storytelling, with a special fondness for patience and duration. Bazin was a strong advocate of the long take, after all.

He's also responsible for co-founding the game-changing magazine Cahiers du Cinéma  in 1951, through which Bazin and his colleagues introduced the auteur theory that has since helped to contextualize the classic films made by the likes of Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock.

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Can't decide what to watch? Here are the best movie review YouTube channels. From new movies playing in theaters to classic films, these popular YouTube movie reviewers praise the best films and trash the worst movies of all time . What are the best movie review channels on YouTube? 

When ranking the best movie review YouTubers, AngryJoeShow, Jeremy Jahns, and Chris Stuckmann are definitely in the top ten. If you're looking for funny movie reviews , trailer reactions, and film recommendations, check out theres other good YouTube film critics, like CinemaSins , RedLetterMedia, YourMovieSucksDOTorg, kermodeandmayo, and Beyond The Trailer.  

Vote up the best movie reviewers on YouTube, and add your favorite film review YouTube channels missing from this list. 

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The Best Movie Reviews We’ve Ever Written — IndieWire Critics Survey

David ehrlich.

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Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.)

While this survey typically asks smart critics to direct readers toward good movies, we hope that the reverse is also true, and that these posts help movies (good or bad) direct readers towards smart critics. 

In that spirit, we asked our panel of critics to reflect on their favorite piece of film criticism that they’ve ever written (and we encouraged them to put aside any sort of modesty when doing so).

Their responses provide rich and far-reaching insight into contemporary film criticism, and what those who practice it are hoping to achieve with their work.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SidizenKane), Freelance for The Village Voice and /Film

Let’s cut right to the chase. Christopher Nolan is probably my favourite working director, and going five thousand words deep on his career after “Dunkirk” was an itch I’d been waiting to scratch for nearly a decade. “The Dark Knight” was my dorm-room poster movie — I’m part of the generation that explored films through the IMDb Top 250 growing up — though as my cinematic horizons expanded and my understanding of storytelling grew, I didn’t leave Nolan’s work behind as I did the likes of “Scarface” and “The Boondock Saints.” What’s more, each new film by Nolan hits me like a tonne of bricks. I’m waiting, almost eagerly, for him to disappoint me. It hasn’t happened yet, and I needed to finally sit down and figure out why.

In “Convergence At ‘Dunkirk,’” by far the longest piece I’ve ever written, I’d like to think I unpacked a decade worth of my awe and admiration, for a filmmaker who uses the studio canvas to explore human beings through our relationship to time. Tarkovsky referred to cinema as “sculpting in time.” Time disorients. Time connects us. Time travels, at different speeds, depending on one’s relationship to it, whether in dreams or in war or in outer space, and time can be captured, explored and dissected on screen.

What’s more, Nolan’s films manipulate truth as much as time, as another force relative to human perception, determining our trajectories and interpersonal dynamics in fundamental ways. All this is something I think I knew, instinctively, as a teenage viewer, but putting words to these explorations, each from a different time yet connected intrinsically, is the written criticism that I most stand by. It felt like something that I was meant to write, as I interrogated my own evolving emotional responses to art as time went on.

Carlos Aguilar (@Carlos_Film), Freelance for Remezcla

At the 2017 Sundance premiere of Miguel Arteta’s “Beatriz at Dinner,” starring Salma Hayek, I found myself in shock at the reactions I heard from the mostly-white audience at the Eccles Theatre. I was watching a different movie, one that spoke to me as an immigrant, a Latino, and someone who’s felt out of place in spaces dominated by people who’ve never been asked, “Where are you really from?” That night I went back to the condo and wrote a mountain of thoughts and personal anecdotes that mirrored what I saw on screen.

This was a much different piece from what I had usually written up to that point: coverage on the Best Foreign Language Oscar race, pieces on animation, interviews with internationally acclaimed directors, and reviews out of festivals. Those are my intellectual passions, this; however, was an examination on the identity that I had to built as an outsider to navigate a society were people like me rarely get the jobs I want.

My editor at Remezcla, Vanessa Erazo, was aware of the piece from the onset and was immediately supportive, but it would take months for me to mull it over and rework it through multiple drafts until it was ready for publication in time for the film’s theatrical release. In the text, I compared my own encounters with casual racism and ignorance with those Hayek’s character faces throughout the fateful gathering at the center of the film. The reception surpassed all my expectations. The article was shared thousands of times, it was praised, it was criticized, and it truly confronted me with the power that my writing could have.

A few months later in September, when Trump rescinded DACA, I wrote a social media post on my experience as an undocumented person working in the film industry, and how difficult it is to share that struggle in a world were most people don’t understand what it means to live a life in the shadows. The post was picked up by The Wrap and republished in the form of an op-ed, which I hope put a new face on the issue for those who didn’t directly knew anyone affected by it before. Once again that piece on “Beatriz at Dinner” regained meaning as I found myself filled with uncertainty.

Ken Bakely (@kbake_99), Freelance for Film Pulse

Like many writers, I tend to subconsciously disown anything I’ve written more than a few months ago, so I read this question, in practice, as what’s my favorite thing I’ve written recently. On that front, I’d say that the review of “Phantom Thread” that I wrote over at my blog comes the closest to what I most desire to do as a critic. I try to think about a movie from every front: how the experience is the result of each aspect, in unique quantities and qualities, working together. It’s not just that the acting is compelling or the score is enveloping, it’s that each aspect is so tightly wound that it’s almost indistinguishable from within itself. A movie is not an algebra problem. You can’t just plug in a single value and have everything fall into place.

“Phantom Thread” is Paul Thomas Anderson’s dreamy cinematography. It is Jonny Greenwood’s impeccably seductive, baroque music. It is Vicky Krieps’s ability to perfectly shatter our preconceptions at every single turn as we realize that Alma is the movie’s actual main character. We often talk about how good films would be worse-off if some part of it were in any way different. In the case of “Phantom Thread,” you flat-out can’t imagine how it would even exist if these things were changed. When so many hot take thinkpieces try to explain away every ending or take a hammer to delicate illusions, it was a pleasure to try and understand how a movie like this one operates on all fronts to maintain an ongoing sense of mystique.

Christian Blauvelt (@Ctblauvelt), BBC Culture

I don’t know if it’s my best work, but a landmark in my life as a critic was surely a review of Chaplin’s “The Circus,” in time for the release of its restoration in 2010. I cherish this piece , written for Slant Magazine, for a number of reasons. For one, I felt deeply honored to shed more light on probably the least known and least respected of Chaplin’s major features, because it’s a film that demonstrates such technical virtuosity it dispels once and for all any notion that his work is uncinematic. (Yes, but what about the rest of his filmography you ask? My response is that any quibbles about the immobility of Chaplin’s camera suggest an ardent belief that the best directing equals the most directing.) For another, I was happy this review appeared in Slant Magazine, a publication that helped me cut my critical teeth and has done the same for a number of other critics who’ve gone on to write or edit elsewhere. That Slant is now struggling to endure in this financially ferocious landscape for criticism is a shame – the reviews I wrote for them around 2009-10 helped me refine my voice even that much more than my concurrent experience at Entertainment Weekly, where I had my day job. And finally, this particular review will always mean a lot to me because it’s the first one I wrote that I saw posted in its entirety on the bulletin board at Film Forum. For me, there was no surer sign that “I’d made it”.

Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow), The New Yorker

No way would I dare to recommend any pieces of my own, but I don’t mind mentioning a part of my work that I do with special enthusiasm. Criticism, I think, is more than the three A’s (advocacy, analysis, assessment); it’s prophetic, seeing the future of the art from the movies that are on hand. Yet many of the most forward-looking, possibility-expanding new films are in danger of passing unnoticed (or even being largely dismissed) due to their departure from familiar modes or norms, and it’s one of my gravest (though also most joyful) responsibilities to pay attention to movies that may be generally overlooked despite (or because of) their exceptional qualities. (For that matter, I live in fear of missing a movie that needs such attention.)

But another aspect of that same enthusiasm is the discovery of the unrealized future of the past—of great movies made and seen (or hardly seen) in recent decades that weren’t properly discussed and justly acclaimed in their time.”. Since one of the critical weapons used against the best of the new is an ossified and nostalgic classicism, the reëvaluation of what’s canonical, the acknowledgment of unheralded masterworks—and of filmmakers whose careers have been cavalierly truncated by industry indifference—is indispensable to and inseparable from the thrilling recognition of the authentically new.

Deany Hendrick Cheng (@DeandrickLamar), Freelance for Barber’s Chair Digital

It’s a piece on two of my favorite films of 2017, “Lady Bird” and “Call Me By Your Name”, and about how their very different modes of storytelling speak to the different sorts of stories we tell ourselves. Objectively, I don’t know if this is my best work in terms of pure style and craft, but I do think it’s the most emblematic in terms of what I value in cinema. I think every film is, in some way, a treatise on how certain memories are remembered, and I think cinema matters partly because the best examples of it are prisms through which the human experience is refracted.

Above everything else, every movie has to begin with a good story, and the greatest stories are the ones that mirror not just life, but the ways in which life is distorted and restructured through the process of remembering. Every aspect of a film, from its screenplay on down, must add something to the film’s portrayal of remembering, and “Lady Bird” and “Call Me By Your Name” accomplish this organic unity of theme with such charm yet in such distinct ways, that they were the perfect counterpoints to each other, as well as the perfect stand-ins for cinema as a whole, for me.

Liam Conlon (@Flowtaro), Ms En Scene

My favorite piece of my own work is definitely  “The Shape of Water’s” Strickland as the “Ur-American.”  I’m proud of it because it required me to really take stock of all the things that Americans are taught from birth to take as given. That meant looking at our history of colonialism, imperialism, racism, anticommunism and really diving into how all Americans, whether they’re liberal or conservative, can internalize these things unless they take the time to self-examine. Just as “Pan’s Labyrinth’s” despotic Captain Vidal was a masterful representation of Francisco Franco’s fascism, Richard Strickland represents a distinctly American kind of fascism. Writers Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor took great care in Strickland’s creation, and my piece was my own way of self-examining to make sure I never become or abide by a person like Strickland ever again.

Robert Daniels (@812filmreviews), Freelance

This is tricky, but “Annihilation” is definitely my favorite piece of film criticism that I’ve written. My writing style is a combination of criticism and gifs, and sometimes the words are better than the gifs, and the gifs are better than the words. With “Annihilation,” I thought the balance was perfect . My favorite portion: “Lena is just an idea, part of an equation that’s been erased from a chalkboard and rewritten with a different solution. The shimmer is part of her, even down to the DNA” is up there as one of my best. It was also a struggle to write because that film had more wild theories than the Aliens in Roswell. Also, the amount of research I had to do, combining Plato’s Ideal Forms, Darwin, the Bible, and Nietzsche, was absurd. However, it did make it easier to find matching gifs. The result made for my most studious, yet lighthearted read.

Alonso Duralde (@ADuralde), The Wrap

I’m the worst judge of my own material; there’s almost nothing I’ve ever written that I don’t want to pick at and re-edit, no matter how much time has passed. But since, for me, the hardest part of film criticism is adequately praising a movie you truly love, then by default my best review would probably be of one of my favorite films of all time, Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York.”

David Ehrlich (@davidehrlich), IndieWire

I can’t summon the strength to re-read it, but I remember thinking that my piece on grief and “Personal Shopper” was emblematic of how I hope to thread individual perspective into arts criticism.

Shelley Farmer (@ShelleyBFarmer), Freelance for RogerEbert.com and Publicist at Film Forum

My favorite piece is a very recent one: For this year’s Women Writers Week on Roger Ebert, I wrote about “Phantom Thread”, “Jane Eyre,” and twisted power dynamics in hetero romance . I loved that it allowed me to dig deep into my personal fixations (19th century literature, gender, romance as power struggle), but – more importantly – it was exciting to be part of a series that highlighted the breadth of criticism by women writers.

Chris Feil (@chrisvfeil), Freelance for The Film Experience, This Had Oscar Buzz Podcast

My answer to this would be kind of a cheat, as my favorite work that I do is my weekly column about movie music called Soundtracking that I write over at The Film Experience. Soundtracks and needle drops have been a personal fascination, so the opportunity to explore the deeper meaning and context of a film’s song choices have been a real labor of love. Because of the demands and time constraints of what we do, it can be easy to spend our all of our energy on assignments and chasing freelance opportunities rather than devoting time to a pet project – but I’ve found indulging my own uncommon fascination to be invaluable in developing my point of view. And serve as a constant check-in with my passion. Pushed for a single entry that I would choose as the best, I would choose the piece I wrote on “Young Adult”‘s use of “The Concept” by Teenage Fanclub for how it posits a single song as the key to unlocking both character and narrative.

Candice Frederick (@ReelTalker), Freelance for Shondaland, Harper’s Bazaar

“ Mother ” written for Vice. It’s one of my favorites because it conveys how visceral my experience was watching the movie. It’s truly stifling, uncomfortable, and frantic–and that’s what my review explains in detail. I wanted to have a conversation with the reader about specific aspects of the film that support the thesis, so I did.

Luiz Gustavo (@luizgvt), Cronico de Cinema

Well, I recently wrote a piece for Gazeta do Povo, a major outlet at Paraná state in Brazil, about Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” (it is not on their site, but they were kind enough to let me replicate on my own website ). I don’t know the extent of the powers of Google Translator from Portugese to english, so you have to rely on my own account: is a text in which I was able to articulate de cinematographic references in the work of Mr. Del Toro, as well his thematic obsessions, the genre bending and social critique. All of this topics were analyzed in a fluid prose. On top of that, it was really fun to write!

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Best Movies of 2021

Even when a film wasn’t great, filmgoing was. But there were some truly wonderful releases, ranging from music docs and musicals to westerns and the just plain weird.

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By A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis

A.O. Scott | Manohla Dargis

The 10 best arguments for the importance of movies.

This year, it felt to me as if every good movie was also an argument for why movies matter. There is a lot of anxiety, pandemic-related and otherwise, about what the future of the art form might look like. Will everything be streaming except a handful of I.P.-driven spectacles? Will streaming platforms (and their subscribers) be receptive to daring, difficult, obnoxious or esoteric work? Anyone who claims to know the answers is a fool. What I can tell you for sure is that these 10 movies, and the 11 that almost made the list, do what they can to resist the dishonesty, complacency and meanness currently rampant around the world. They reward your attention, engage your feelings and respect your intelligence. Every little bit helps.

1. ‘ Summer of Soul ’ (Questlove)

This documentary about a series of open-air concerts in Harlem in 1969, interweaving stunning performance footage with interviews with musicians and audience members, is a shot of pure joy. The lineup is a pantheon of Black genius, including Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, the Staple Singers, Mahalia Jackson and many more. But the film is more than a time capsule: It’s a history lesson and an argument for why art matters — and what it can do — in times of conflict and anxiety. ( Streaming on Hulu . )

2. ‘ Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn ’ (Radu Jude)

From its hard-core opening to its riotous conclusion, this category-defying Romanian film captures the desperate, angry, exhausted mood of the present almost too well. A Bucharest schoolteacher (the brilliant, fearless Katia Pascariu) finds her job endangered after a sex tape she made with her husband goes semiviral. Meanwhile, the Covid pandemic and simmering culture-war hostilities turn everyday life into a theater of grievance and anxiety. Holding everything together — barely — is the abrasive intellectualism of Jude’s direction and the earnest rage that fuels his mockery. (In theaters.)

3. ‘ The Power of the Dog ’ (Jane Campion)

There are a lot of talented, competent, interesting filmmakers working today. Then there is Jane Campion, who practices cinema on a whole different level. The craft in evidence in this grand, big-sky western — the images, the music, the counterpointed performances of Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee — evoke the best traditions of old-style Hollywood storytelling. But there is nothing staid or conventional in the way Campion tackles Thomas Savage’s novel of jealousy, power and sexual intrigue. (Streaming on Netflix .)

4. ‘Petite Maman’ (Céline Sciamma)

The death of a grandmother, the grief of a parent, the acquisition of a new friend — these ordinary experiences, occurring over a few weeks in the life of an 8-year-old girl, provide the basic narrative structure of this spare, perfect film. Whether it’s best described as a modern-dress fairy tale, a psychological ghost story or a low-tech time travel fantasy is up to you. What’s certain is that the performances of Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz, real-life twins playing possibly imaginary friends, have a clarity and purity that Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) deploys for maximum emotional impact. (Coming to theaters.)

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Hollywood reporter critics pick the best films of 2023.

A romantic collision of past and present, a subversive feminist fairy tale, a metaphysical ghost story, an epic retelling of a horrific footnote in American history and a sublime anti-rom-com are among this year’s highlights.

By David Rooney , Jon Frosch , Lovia Gyarkye , Sheri Linden December 13, 2023

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Any year in which an unlikely summer double bill became a global moviegoing event — with one film soaring toward $1.5 billion in worldwide grosses and the other closing in on $1 billion — can’t be considered bad news for Hollywood. But the Barbenheimer phenomenon aside, bad news plagued the film industry for much of 2023.

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Theatrical grosses remained inconsistent, struggling to regain pre-pandemic momentum for most genres except horror (all hail, new scream queen M3GAN ; a big hand for Talk to Me ), and even the once-reliable cash cow of the superhero blockbuster sputtered more often than not.

The Marvels was a major flop for the MCU, as was The Flash for DC, and although many of us found Blue Beetle an unexpected delight that overcame our weariness with folks in spandex and capes, the movie’s considerable charms failed to translate into healthy ticket sales.

No one knows what’s a safe bet at the box office anymore.

Still, the annual task of whittling down the year’s releases to a Top 10 was more challenging than ever. As is invariably the case, the best of them were festival discoveries. My list is bookended by Sundance premieres, with titles from Cannes, Venice and Telluride occupying every spot in between.

This was a year to celebrate auspicious debuts by women filmmakers whose command of the medium was matched by thematic maturity and an ability to coax transfixing performances from their female leads. In addition to Celine Song’s Past Lives and Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama , both of which appear on my list, that includes Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt , Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean , A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One and Tina Satter’s Reality .

The documentary field delivered too many highlights to name, but the nonfiction films that stayed with me included Wim Wenders’ visually seductive Anselm ; D. Smith’s intimate portrait of Black trans sex workers, Kokomo City ; Maite Alberdi’s shattering glimpse into one couple’s lives together, The Eternal Memory ; and Jesse Shortbull and Laura Tomaselli’s searing indictment of the theft of sacred land from its Indigenous owners, Lakota Nation vs. United States .

Two music docs were among my most exhilarating viewing experiences this year — Lisa Cortes’ rip-roaring bio of a singular rock pioneer, Little Richard: I Am Everything ; and Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s you-are-there account of a sui generis marathon concert by one of our most original performers, Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music .

Finally, seasoned documaker Roger Ross Williams segued into narrative features with the uplifting Cassandro , giving Gael García Bernal his best role in years, as a trailblazing queer lucha libre wrestler.

Read on for my ranked Top 10, plus 10 honorable mentions, followed by those of my brilliant comrades in the THR critics’ trenches, Jon Frosch, Lovia Gyarkye and Sheri Linden. I know I speak for all of us in saying 2023 was such a stellar year for movies that our lists could easily have been twice as long. — DAVID ROONEY

2. Poor Things Yorgos Lanthimos has been irreverently thumbing his nose at genre constraints since his Greek Weird Wave breakout with Dogtooth . But nothing in his unique filmography can compare with the fantastical flights of this inspired riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Led by a spectacular high-wire act of physical comedy, intellectual curiosity and gleeful licentiousness from a never-better Emma Stone, this adventurous adaptation of Scottish cult author Alasdair Gray’s novel is part absurdist comedy, part picaresque feminist Candide and 100 percent breathtaking original. There’s not a weak link in a supporting cast that includes Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Kathryn Hunter and Christopher Abbott.

3. All of Us Strangers There was no tighter ensemble this year than Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell and Claire Foy in Andrew Haigh’s dreamy metaphysical ghost story. While it’s a companion piece of sorts to the Brit writer-director’s 2011 breakthrough, the instant queer classic Weekend , the new film mirrors its contemplation of romantic love with an equally thoughtful probe into familial love. Imaginatively adapted from a Japanese novel, this emotional depth charge plumbs the complex relationships between gay men and their parents with uncommon compassion, while also reflecting on the scars of a generation that came of age during the AIDS crisis.

5. Fallen Leaves Six years after Finland’s poet of the proletariat murmured about retirement following his typically idiosyncratic Syrian refugee story, The Other Side of Hope , Aki Kaurismäki returns with an expertly chiseled tale of romantic missteps that lead — with patience, playfulness and humor simultaneously deadpan and steeped in melancholy — to the exultant possibility of love. Laced with winking cinephile references to the director’s auteur heroes, this deceptively modest film is both dour and droll, every frame finding beauty in a dingy milieu that seems frozen in time. As the lonely souls fumbling for connection, Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen are gloriously attuned to Kaurismäki’s wavelength, while his own dog nails a scene-stealing supporting role.

7. Showing Up Comedy has not factored much in the films of Kelly Reichardt, but the director’s latest collaboration with frequent muse Michelle Williams and Pacific Northwest author Jon Raymond has a low-key vein of humor that often recalls the eccentric American microcosms of vintage Robert Altman. Set around the now shuttered Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, it tracks the frantic preparations of Williams’ flinty sculptor for a solo gallery show as she deals with the headaches of her messy family, her fellow artist landlord (a hilarious Hong Chau) and a wounded pigeon. Rich in seemingly casual but telling observations, the film is equal parts funny and affecting; it might be Reichardt’s most personal work in its depiction of the challenges of making art amid chaos.

9. Perfect Days A serene film for chaotic times, Wim Wenders’ best narrative feature in years returns to the Japanese capital, almost four decades after he retraced the footsteps of Ozu in the documentary Tokyo-Ga . The great Kōji Yakusho plays a middle-aged man living a life of monastic austerity, greeting each new day with gratitude in his morning routine and approaching his job of cleaning restrooms in the city’s public parks with almost religious devotion. Little by little, hints are dropped of the more complicated earlier existence he left behind, as the rewarding drama becomes a poetic, unexpectedly moving account of one man’s hard-earned peace and contentment.

10. Passages Another German actor, like Hüller, who had a major breakout year is Franz Rogowski, playing the narcissistic film director at the center of Ira Sachs’ bruising Paris-set drama. Rogowski’s Tomas is an emotional wrecking ball, blithely beginning a relationship with Adèle Exarchopoulos’ French schoolteacher without anticipating the wedge it will drive into his marriage to Ben Whishaw’s seemingly more mild-mannered English printmaker. Caustically amusing, sexy, sad and unflinchingly intense, this is an intimate study of the formation and collapse of a romantic triangle, played with an invigorating absence of sentiment by three actors at the top of their game.

Jon Frosch’s Top 10

1. Killers of the Flower Moon 2. Anatomy of a Fall 3. Passages 4. Afire 5. May December 6. Fallen Leaves 7. Showing Up 8. The Zone of Interest 9. Kokomo City 10. All of Us Strangers

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): Asteroid City ; The Holdovers ; Maestro ; Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros ; Oppenheimer ; Other People’s Children ; Past Lives ; Poor Things ; Totém ; You Hurt My Feelings

Lovia Gyarkye’s Top 10

1. Showing Up 2. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt 3. Earth Mama   4. Passages     5. Our Body 6. Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros   7. Anatomy of a Fall   8. Fallen Leaves 9. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret 10. Totém

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): The Boy and the Heron ; Fair Play ; Killers of the Flower Moon ; May December ; Monster ; Oppenheimer ; Orlando, My Political Biography ; Our Father, the Devil ; A Still Small Voice ; A Thousand and One

Sheri Linden’s Top 10

1. Showing Up 2. May December 3. Anatomy of a Fall 4. Killers of the Flower Moon 5. Past Lives 6. Oppenheimer   7. Pacifiction 8. Asteroid City 9. Passages 10. The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): The Boy and the Heron ; A Compassionate Spy ; The Delinquents ; Maestro ; Occupied City ; The Peasants ; Rodeo ; The Taste of Things ; The Teachers Lounge ; The Unknown Country

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DAMON WISE: I thought Anora was great, but I’m not entirely sure of its performance as an awards title. Mikey Madison is not a known lead. She’s quite a young actress playing a very sexual role, so I don’t know quite how people will react to it. The story is about a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch and it’s played as a screwball comedy. It’s a very odd mix of genres. It’s certainly an Independent Spirits pick, but for Oscars, I don’t know quite whether it will have the same momentum that something like Parasite got from Cannes.

I think it’s a very strong film. I don’t think it’s Sean Baker’s best, but I do think it shows what he’s good at and just that he can stretch himself. It is very different to say Tangerine and Starlet , which is probably my favorite of his. It’s an odd one, but I mean that in a good way. I think it does fit in the awards conversation, but is it director? Is it film? Cast? Or even screenplay?

After a while you just get into the rhythm of it and the acting is great, not just Mikey, and not just Mark Eidelshtein, who plays her husband, but also the supporting actors here are great. I think it could be a SAG ensemble. It’s one of those movies, and there are a few movies like that this year that have just terrific ensembles. I laughed through the whole thing, I thought it was a lot of fun. Again, it’s a very different kind of movie for Academy members to look at, but it’s one that’s going to keep them awake, I can tell you that much. And I think they will watch it with the idea of, “Oh, this won the Palme d’Or, OK.” I do think it’s Sean Baker’s best film, quite frankly. And I think that’s the reason he finally was able to move up in categories here at Cannes, and I think this will be a Best Picture nominee. He has risen very quickly from not being in Cannes at all, to Director’s Fortnight, Florida Project , and a very quick ascension to the official selection, to the Palme d’Or.

The Apprentice

Synopsis: In the 1970s, Donald Trump seeks independence from his father’s influence. With notorious lawyer Roy Cohn’s support, he enters Manhattan real estate and becomes a leader. Director: Ali Abbasi Screenwriter: Gabriel Sherman Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick, Joe Pingue, Mark Rendall, Ben Sullivan Distributors: Briarcliff Entertainment (United States), Mongrel Media (Canada), StudioCanal (Ireland) Nordisk Film (Denmark)

HAMMOND: I’m interested in anything political and what they do with Donald Trump. So, there was a big want-to-see for me when it premiered in Cannes. It’s an origin story, and walking out of that movie, I actually thought, even though Trump threatened to sue, his base, and he himself, if he ever bothers to watch it, would actually like this portrayal, except for a couple of scenes: the rape and when he gets liposuction.

Yes, he becomes a total asshole in the film, but it also gives him a little empathy, which he is incapable of himself. But you see what his father did to him early on, and you see his relationship with his brother, who was never good enough for the father. I thought Sebastian Stan was really terrific in a role that could have gone sideways. He was beautifully modulated here as Trump.And Jeremy Strong was the perfect Roy Cohn, who is the guy that taught Trump everything he knows. But also, I had sympathy for him , particularly in a scene where he’s begging for Trump to put up his desperately sick lover [who has AIDS] in one of his hotels. And then Trump hands him an invoice for that. I thought that showed Trump perfectly here.

But this is not an anti-Trump movie necessarily, it’s a try-to-understand-this-guy movie. And on that level, I thought it succeeded brilliantly with the great acting across the board, including Maria Bakalova also as Ivana Trump. I think if Trump’s base saw this movie, they’d say, “Yeah, this is great.” What that says about the base though is entirely something else.

Whether this has any Oscar possibilities is to be continued. I think it depends on the election and where people are psychologially by the time we get to voting for the Oscars. We may be done with Trump by the time that election rolls around.

HAMMOND: Well, Roy Cohn’s story has been made before—James Woods did a television movie [ Citizen Cohn ]. And of course, the documentary called Where’s My Roy Cohn? detailed it. You’re right, his is a really interesting story in and of itself. He was accepted in New York Society circles, Barbara Walters was his best friend. He had a certain charm beyond the horrible stuff he did with the McCarthy hearings and all of that. But that’s not this movie.

WISE: I just thought when he disappeared and Trump became the new Roy Cohn—maybe this was the intention—he wasn’t the worthy successor of Roy Cohn.I do think the education of the period is very, very good. It’s a bit like Joker in the sense of the way it shows the dilapidation of New York in the ’70s, and reminds how often we forget that, in the ’70s, it was a city on the verge of bankruptcy. And it’s also a reminder of the fact that Trump did take a leap with those early hotels. It’s hard to describe him as a visionary, but then we’ve all become more than a bit blunted to his ego, really.

I prefer the earlier part of the movie to the second part, for pretty much the same reasons as you have articulated: we’ve run out of empathy and we’re just seeing what he turned into, rather than how he got there, which I thought was dealt with very well.

HAMMOND: But it’s interesting through the eyes of Ali Abbasi. This is not an American film. And that everything he put in that film is based on fact, so they had every right to do that.

I thought it was a really interesting movie, and it played very well when it played In Telluride, when they got it out there secretly. They were so nervous about letting anybody know, because it was, ‘what’s MAGA going to do?’ But I think MAGA would have no problem with this movie in most cases, except the rape scene, I would assume. They might not even care about the liposuction. Trump would though for sure.

WISE: What will Roger Stone think? He’s a kind of a pool boy in the movie, right?

HAMMOND: Roger Stone. Oh my god. All those people, they’re the really dangerous ones. The people around him, the Kash Patels, the Stephen Millers, the Roger Stones.

There’s a new book talking about the people that made The Apprentice , the TV show, and how they had to keep heavily editing the show because he would fire the best people in the first episode because he had no sense of anything. And so what they did is they just edited the hell out of it to make sense of it. But then they created him, just as Roy Cohn did. So there’s that.

Synopsis: A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much-younger intern. Director-screenwriter : Halina Reijn Cast: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde Distributor: A24

If it was going to get anything awards-wise, I think she could be charming enough to make people want to go with her. And I think that’s where the film works, in that she sweeps you up in this kind of madness. As a thought exercise, it’s interesting, but as a film, it’s very, very unsatisfying. But I do think Nicole Kidman was great.

HAMMOND: Another thing that was in Venice was Disclaimer , Alfonso Cuarón’s television series for Apple TV+. And it made me think of Babygirl too, because it also gets into this very sexual need for this character who is supposedly happily married, but seducing this young guy because something is not fulfilled in her, and she knows it. You see Antonio Banderas in Babygirl as her happy husband, and it looks like everything’s great. In fact, I kept thinking, why did he take this role? He’s just this clueless guy in it. But then, oh boy, he sells it in the end to me, when you see that in the marriage there’s something false going on here and something needed.

With Nicole Kidman, I thought, as I always do, there’s nobody that takes bigger risks and she wants that, but I thought she was great. I understood that character: somebody who’s in total charge at work, tempted by this intern. If I had a problem with any character, it’s Harris Dickinson’s character, who really did not strike me as a guy in command of all of this stuff. It’s suddenly Last Tango in Paris meets 9½ Weeks and I didn’t see that coming with him. I think that character might have been a little bit contrived. Also, like Last Tango , it’s mostly dressed. I thought this was going to be this flaming-naked-bodies-on-the-screen kind of movie, from what I’d heard. I didn’t think it was that at all. It was a power trip. He says to her very early on in the movie, “You want to be told what to do.” And she succumbs to that. It is about power and relationships and it’s intriguingly directed by a woman. None of those other movies I referenced were, and for me that made it doubly intriguing, not the usual male-driven story we see in these circumstances.

The Brutalist

Synopsis: Hungarian-born Jewish architect, László Tóth emigrates to the United States of America in 1947. Initially forced to toil in poverty, he soon wins a contract that will change the course of the next 30 years of his life. Director: Brady Corbet Screenwriters : Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, and Alessandro Nivola Distributor: A24/ Focus Features

WISE: I was very surprised to see The Brutalist popping, but it’s for all the right reasons. First of all, it’s long and it has an intermission, but actually it is a kind of ‘hangout’ movie, which I wasn’t expecting. I did actually enjoy spending time with the characters. I wasn’t so enamored of the second half, which makes some surprising choices, but I was never bored by it. In fact, I got impatient during the 15-minute intermission because I wanted to get back straight into the movie. And I think a lot of people when they see it will be surprised at how commercial it is. It’s actually very performance-driven. Adrien Brody—is it too early to say this is his best so far? I think it’s one of his best performances.

I was riveted by the film. I was surprised. 3 and a half hours, that’s a lot. Plus an intermission, which is so unusual these days, even if you’ve got a 3 and a half hour-movie, Scorsese did it, and other people, but they don’t stick in an intermission, so I thought that was good. The first half was better for me than the second half. I thought in the second half it got into a weird darkness, but overall, this is an epic you don’t see made anymore. And I would agree the performances are outstanding. Adrien Brody is just phenomenal in this throughout, and Guy Pearce just blew me away too. The Brutalist is one definitely worth seeing and I think it’ll play very well with the Academy. The Venice reviews helped I think, and set that movie up well. I do think it has a shot at Best Picture. We’ll have to see.

Synopsis: Cardinal Lawrence must oversee the selection of a new pope. Surrounded by powerful religious leaders in the Vatican, he discovers secrets that could shake the foundation of the Roman Catholic Church. Adapted from the Robert Harris novel. Director: Edward Berger Screenwriter: Peter Staughan Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini, John Lithgow, Carlos Diehz, Lucian Msamati Distributor: Focus Features

HAMMOND: Berger made All Quiet on the Western Front , which won an Oscar and the BAFTA, and what an amazing second film here, that in every way, exceeds my expectations. As a story of the election of the Pope, I’ve seen this kind of thing before, but this movie is riveting. You’re on the edge of your seat watching it, with an outstanding cast. Ralph Fiennes, I think, is going to be nominated, and I would also nominate Isabella Rossellini, who in a very brief scene just knocks it out of the park, along with John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci. This movie is a really thoughtful one and it also has great twists and turns and great crafts. That’s why I think it’s going to appeal across the board to the Academy voters.

WISE: What Berger has done here is he’s taken very successful book and found a very visual way to translate the way those kinds of densely worded page-turners are read, into a very visually-driven kind of thriller. When I was reading the book, I was thinking, how is this going to work as a film? But with this script by Peter Straughan, he found that way, particularly with using Isabella Rossellini’s character, to make it just more than a boys’ club, and to comment on not just the esoteric process of electing a new pope, but also the political machinations that feed into that. I think he’s such an intensely detailed director. He storyboards everything. I visited the set and saw that first-hand.

I think he’s really nailed in the film what the actual point of the book is, and I think that’s what people will respond to. To my mind, this is the kind of film that can redefine in a way what an Oscar movie actually is, because it isn’t an obvious blockbuster, but he’s taken a fairly commercial book and made a very arty and interesting yet surprisingly commercial thriller out of that.

HAMMOND: I would add, when it premiered in Telluride where I saw it, there were a number of Academy voters there and the talk on the street was about this movie, how it popped there. You can get a good idea from that that this is going to go all the way, at least to multiple Oscar nominations.

Emilia Pérez

HAMMOND: I saw this at the Cannes Film Festival, and I just thought it was such an original film, and unexpected from Jacques Audiard, the French director. There’s nothing French about this movie, but it is the French International entry. What Audiard did was he told a compelling story of the title character, Emilia Perez , played by Karla Sofía Gascón. You will be blown away. When I saw this movie, I came out of it and thought, ‘Wow, she’s amazing. I’ve got to find out who played the guy in the beginning of it too.’ I was blown away when I found out that the same actress played him. All of the performances are great by these women. That’s why they shared the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress. All four of them are great.

WISE: I was also just completely blown away by it. It’s surprising on every level. Again, talking about length, it’s around 2 hours, 10 minutes, which seems a bit daunting going in, but it flies by. As a musical, it’s hard to know where the drama ends and the music begins, because it’s a little bit like Annette , the Sparks musical—the singing and dancing is seamless with the action to the extent that you have no idea how he did it. How do you rehearse something like that? The way the dialogue just splinters into these songs, and then while you’re still trying to figure out how that worked, the story’s moved on and you are into another one. I think the lead actress, Gascon, is going to be the MVP of the season. I think she’ll be very much in demand everywhere. She’s very funny and personable and I think that will disarm a lot of people who might have preconceptions about the film and what it should and shouldn’t be doing.

HAMMOND: They might also have preconceptions about Selena Gomez. She is so popular now with Only Murders in the Building , and in her music career. And she’s a revelation in this movie too, in addition to Zoe Saldaña and Adriana Paz—all of them are great. You talked about the musical element, but Netflix is not hiding the fact that this is a musical, as other studios tend to hide their musicals as non-musicals . Take a look at the trailer for Folie à Deux , you would never know that’s a musical, but that’s a big blown-out musical. They think that’s going to turn people off, but Netflix is embracing the musical aspects of this movie too, and that makes it an original in every which way.

WISE: I think Audiard is reaching that point where he could easily pop into the Director category.

HAMMOND: And there are several International films in recent years that have been in the Best Picture race. Parasite was one that actually won, which was the first time, and it was the first winner at Cannes to win at the Oscars in 50 years. The Academy has become much more international in its membership now, and so more willing to do this. France has not had a winner since Indochine , I think, 30 years ago or so. And they haven’t had a nominee since around 2018. They’ve been on a cold streak when it comes to Oscars. So, it’d be ironic to see France finally win with a movie that is anything but French except for its director. We’ll see.

HAMMOND: I was really impressed with Angelina Jolie here. I think the movie itself is not going to be to every taste here. He has a certain style in this sub-genre with Jackie and Spencer which I thought was underrated, but it’s so nice for me to see her back doing a role like this. She’s quite impressive with her film career, but to get her teeth into a role like this is unexpected because she’s not really a singer, but it’s the best lip-syncing I’ve seen. And they say she actually did study for seven months. She does sing. She actually told me that at Telluride too. There’s a whole technical thing where her voice is blended in, and that’s why it’s so effective. But if you look at the end credits, every single song says, ‘performed by Maria Callas.’ So, I don’t know, there may be a technical thing there, but she did it and really was convincing to me. I had seen a play on Maria Callas years ago at the Mark Taper Forum Masterclass, and I was fascinated by Maria Callas. I’m not an opera fan at all, but that was a great play. That’s what I thought this was going to be, but this was more esoteric, and it was more about her end days and her life. And I thought for that performance, I really recommend it. If you want to see why Angelina Jolie is a great actress, this is a movie to see.

WISE: I am not a fan of the way Pablo Larraín has this kind of fetish for a certain kind of famous woman, and I thought this one was going be possibly the worst, actually. But I think it’s actually the best. He started with Jackie and then Spencer , and I think this one actually has the best idea and the strongest execution. And, as Pete says, it’s the best performance. I thought with Jackie and Spencer he was mostly working with impersonations and then just having those actresses kind of sleepwalk through a series of things that may or may not have happened. Whereas I like the more abstract nature of this one. It took on board the fact that she was a bit of a piece of work and it addressed her flaws perhaps more than the other films. Jackie bored the hell out of me. And Spencer . I’m in agreement with Pete on this one: It’s Angelina’s film. Callas is a much more complex character than the previous two. She was a much more active participant—in terms her own fame or even her own myth —than the other two, and I think Maria addresses those complexities. She’s very, very good in it.

Synopsis: Outcast expat American Bill Lee recounts his life in Mexico City. He pursues a young man named Allerton, a US Navy serviceman recently discharged from Jacksonville, Florida. Based on William S. Burroughs’ book. Directo Luca Guadagnio Screenwriter: Justin Kuritzkes Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville, Henrique Zaga Distributors: A24, Lucky Red

The film takes place in the year following an incident where he accidentally shot and killed his wife Joan, and if anything’s going to impede its Oscar chances, that could be it. That’s also where the film might not fly with a lot of viewers, because you maybe have to know the timeframe. So if you don’t know who she is, it could be confusing, since Joan turns up in Bill Lee’s dreams—where he sees her disembodied body—and the shooting is referenced very explicitly at the end. The first half of Queer is very straightforward, but the second half is much more of a stylized reflection of what his writing was trying to do, how he was trying to transcend all the regrets of his life and become something other.

If we’re going to stick to the performances, I think Daniel Craig really did a very, very good job of inhabiting a Burroughs-like character, without doing what Naked Lunch ’s [Peter] Weller did, which was basically a very good impersonation. Daniel Craig does a lot with wardrobe and a little bit of the voice, and you can still hear a little bit of his English accent poking through, but for me it works. I thought it was one of the best Burroughs adaptations.

HAMMOND: This film wasn’t what I expected. I hadn’t read the book, so I’m going to talk as a person that hasn’t read the book, and in the middle of the movie, it turns into The Lost City of Z . I’m thinking, wait, I thought this was Death in Venice , where he becomes obsessed by a young guy. But it wasn’t anything that I expected it to be. It’s an exceptional showcase for Daniel Craig’s talents, which he doesn’t usually get credit for. I saw a movie years ago called The Mother and people don’t think he’s done anything but James Bond and so on. They should watch him in some of his earlier stuff. He’s a great actor, and this gave him the chance to show that. So I went with the character, if not the story.

It turns into this bizarre thing where they’re in the jungle and then it gets very obscure at the end. I don’t think it’s for everyone, and I wonder what’s going to happen with the Academy when they see this movie. I think it’s a very hard sell. I think Daniel Craig will bring them in and I think they’ll appreciate his performance and I think that’s about as far as it’s going to go.

The Room Next Door

Synopsis: Ingrid, a best-selling writer, rekindles a relationship with her friend Martha, a war reporter. The two women immerse themselves in their pasts, but Martha has a request that will test their newly strengthened bond. Adapted from the novel by Sigrid Nunez. Director-screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar Cast: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Raúl Arévalo, Melina Mathews, Victoria Luengo Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Both Swinton and Moore are terrific in this film and it’s an interesting subject too. She wants her friend to help her die. She’s ready to go. The Swinton character was quite intriguing and Moore’s character, you think at first, OK, well she’s sort of helping along. Then she knocks it out of the park in the second half, it really becomes that she’s the driving force of this film. Across the board, I thought it was terrific.

WISE: I feel like people want Almodóvar to stay who he is and what he is. So, I’m mixed on this, in terms of, why not make it with some Spanish actors? But these actresses are amazing, both of them. He has an easy ride to an Oscar. It’s his time, and so there may be a drive to take it to Best Picture. Saying that, it would be a shame if he won and then people said, “Well, it’s kind of a lifetime achievement thing.”

But as Pete says it, people underestimate him, as they don’t understand what a cineaste Almodóvar is. He’s done the work, he studied these films. He isn’t compared to George Cukor by accident. He knows those movies, he knows what Cukor did, he knows what John Ford did, or Anthony Mann. He’s a very widely read and very intelligent director. So, I have mixed feelings about it only because I’m being a bit of a film snob and worrying what other people will think about it, rather than enjoying the film.

HAMMOND: Well, I think it’s interesting too that it won the Golden Lion at Venice and he’d never won that top prize. He’d never won the Palme d’Or, he’s not won Best Picture at the Oscars, and this could be the thing that does it. The irony is, as it’s his first English language feature film, as you’re saying, maybe people will say, “Oh, it’s because of that,” but to me, it is seamless with his other work, and it shouldn’t be penalized or celebrated either way because it’s in English. Ingmar Bergman had a Best Picture nomination eventually for Cries and Whispers , but Almodóvar’s never had one.

WISE: Maybe he will now.

Saturday Night

Synopsis: Based on a true story, the film follows the humor, chaos and magic of what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live . Director: Jason Reitman Screenwriter s : Jason Reitman, Gil Kenan Cast: Gabriel LaBelle, Dyan O’Brien, Willem Dafoe, J.K. Simmons, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Lamorne Morris, Matt Wood, Nicholas Braun, Finn Wolfhard, Jon Batiste, Ella Hunt, Cooper Hoffman, Andrew Barth Feldman, Naomi McPherson, Kaia Gerber Distributors: Sony Pictures Releasing

The film did actually fill in a lot of gaps in terms of my Saturday Night Live knowledge, but I still don’t know who half of those people were. I think I’ll be interested to see whether it does gather any momentum, because if it does become a hit with the Academy, it’s more likely to be as a piece of filmmaking. So I don’t think it works as a piece of nostalgia necessarily, because I didn’t feel like I was left out of a big rose-tinted look back at a big piece of American cultural history.

HAMMOND: It was a huge success at Telluride on its opening night and of course they played it on Saturday. The person introducing it said, “Live from Telluride! It’s Saturday night.” And so there was such a want-to-see and I thought it played great. It’s comedy, and Jason Reitman who directed it and co-wrote it with Gil Kenan, I thought, had a great idea here and really executed it. At 90 minutes it moves with the clock going just as it did that night when they’re going to go live. And all of it is true, but it’s condensed. It’s things that happened, but not all in those 90 minutes and that’s what they have to do in a movie like that. But I thought that was brilliant the way they worked it in. I also think this is another case of a great ensemble cast, perfectly cast.

The casting director, John Papsidera, actually wrote me after my review and said, “Since you love the cast so much, I was the casting director.” I said, “Yes, I agree with you that you did a great job and right down the line with all of these characters.” Willem Dafoe as Dave Tebet was perfect. And for me, J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, was so deliciously knife-cutting and on the edge—that performance of who Milton Berle was, the old NBC variety star, the last guy that did it live, facing a new generation. And I thought, that’s where the film took this concept and gave it a lot of gravitas with what it was really about and what was happening. I was an NBC page once, and Finn Wolfhard as the page was perfect. I will not wear a blue jacket to this day because of that job. I was in Burbank though, I was not in New York, but I started two days after Saturday Night Live began at NBC and I was involved in that whole thing, and even had a legendary experience with Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase coming out to LA that my fellow pages never stopped talking about. But nevertheless, I saw what Wolfhard did and got a kick out of it. The costume design was authentic.

In the same way that Damon’s looking at it from a British point of view and not knowing the show at all and still being able to see what a good job this was, whether it has any Oscar chances, I don’t know. Comedy is really an endangered species when it comes to the Academy. If they have a chance not to vote for a comedy, they generally do. They’ve nominated plenty of them, especially in screenplay, but I don’t know if it gets into Best Picture.

September 5

Synopsis: The ABC Sports TV control booth faces an ethical and nail-biting dilemma in covering the first televised act of terrorism when the militant Palestinian group known as Black September took the entire Israeli Olympic team hostage in Munich. Director: Tim Felbaum Screenwriter s: Tim Felbaum, Moritz Binder, Alex David Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch Distributor: Paramount Pictures

It’s a great ensemble, and it’s a movie that sneaks up on you. I don’t think Venice quite knew what they had. I don’t think Paramount knew what they had, until recently when they said, “Oh, we’re going to do it.” They read reviews, maybe my review, and other reviews that came out of Telluride, because it blew the roof off. And so I think this is the surprise. This is the one to look for this Oscar season. It really could go all the way.

WISE: On the ground in Venice this was the film that people were talking about more than any other in terms of, why is it being tucked away in this side bar? Maybe there was scared of it because of the subject matter, given what’s happening with Israel and Gaza, but it was a genuine word-of-mouth hit from Venice.

HAMMOND: Telluride had a whole bunch of things from Cannes, so it had a bigger plate, but it was one of the most talked about out of there too.

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Terrifier 3 Review: Art The Clown’s Gleefully Brutal Return Is A Christmas-Themed Gift For Gorehounds

Up on the housetop, reindeer pause… for art the clown’s bloody santa claus..

Perhaps more than any other genre following, horror fans appreciate and celebrate gnarly homegrown creations far more than think-tank Hollywood productions. Slasher villains just don’t get more do-it-yourself than Art the Clown, the muted ghoul-igan at the bifurcated heart of Damien Leone’s Terrifier franchise and more. So it’s no surprise that David Howard Thornton was rather quickly brought back to get bloodier than ever for the jubilantly gruesome gorefest that is Terrifier 3 following the success of Terrifier 2 .

Release Date: October 11, 2024 Directed By: Damien Leone Written By: Damien Leone Starring: David Howard Thornton, Lauren LaVera, Elliott Fullam, Samantha Scaffidi, and Chris Jericho Rating: Unrated Runtime: 125 minutes

Two years have passed since Terrifier 2 broke the indie horror mold with its 138-minute runtime built atop a shoestring-esque budget and some of the nastiest practical effects ever put to film. In that time, the fandom has exploded to the point where Art the Clown shirts and merch are becoming nearly as common as Freddy, Jason and Chucky. The budget also exploded for the latest sequel, giving Leone & Co. more resources than ever to gross out more moviegoers than ever. The math just works!

Shifting the holiday-specific shenanigans from Halloween to Christmas, Terrifier 3 definitely comes across as a step up from the first two films by way of production design, location changes, and number of ways to completely fuck up victim’s bodies. We also get honest-to-goodness B-movie cameos even outside of Chris Jericho’s return, causing a few “pinch me” moments to make sure it isn’t all just a tinsel-covered fever dream.

Where Terrifier 3 starts to fall apart beneath all of its mangled corpses however, is with the story, which continues to build upon this so-so canon without much of it being 100% coherent or fun to follow along with. We do catch up with just about everyone who lived through the first two films, from Samantha Scaffidi’s monstrous survivor Vicky to Lauren LaVera’s Sienna to Elliot Fullam’s Jonathan. No one’s performance is anywhere near the level of Thornton’s madcap glee, though, so it’s on similarly uneven grounds as previous films.

David Howard Thornton executes his best and freakiest performance yet as fan-fave Art the Clown.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes Art the Clown so unsettling and engaging to watch, but Thornton seems to be thoroughly informed on the matter. Part of it is how well he can sell seemingly any emotion with an overstated reaction, complete with myriad brilliant editing cuts between him and other characters. And part of it is how convincing he is at instantly shifting from childlike appreciation to sinister curiosity to murderous animosity.

Without tipping a disembodied head to how the black-and-white clown returns to form after Terrifier 2 's horrifying post-credits scene, suffice to say he is back after a bit of a time-jump, and now has Samantha Scaffidi's Vicky as his endlessly disturbing sidekick. Hand to the fire, I think she may actually be a nastier beast than even Art himself, and she shows her support for his mayhem in... unique ways. If I say "broken glass sex toy," the absolute worst imagery you can conjure up is the ground floor that Damien Leone tap dances across.

So yes, Vicky is a formidable partner-in-slime for this franchise, but we're here for Art the Clown, and he is here for us. And not always with our best intentions in mind, as proven in the merciless opening scene featuring the inventive killer taking out an entire family on Christmas Eve with random, reckless abandon. But not even that level of brutality will make viewers spend even a second of the next two hours reassessing their love for this sadistic clown. This movie isn't called Treat Passively-er , after all, and Art lives up to the title descriptor in every which way.

Two particular highlights regarding David Howard Thornton's performance involve other characters wearing Santa Claus outfits, one inside a mall and one inside a bar. In different ways, they both lean into Art's playfulness and moments where he genuinely connects with other characters. You know, before heads are split open and eyeballs get eaten or whatever.

Terrifier 3 delivers a blood-red Christmas with another round of magnificently brutal kills.

Christmas horror is an under-sung subgenre, but even if the opposite were the case, Terrifier 3 would still rank as an upper echelon treat thanks to just how heavily the production design and special effects utilize holiday iconography throughout the entire movie. "Santa Art" gives an already signature character another layer of bizarre menace, but that's just the sharp tip of the icicle.

From characters' organs being used as Christmas tree decorations to highly destructive "gifts" to Art's new skill for freezing things, the wintery holiday season is central to many of Terrifier 3 's best set pieces – to the point where I'm more than halfway behind the idea of Leone going full-tilt on theming future sequels around other holidays, days of significance, destination locations, national landmarks, cultural events, etc. Seeing Art the Clown to murder-wild on an entire stadium of MLB Opening Day attendees would be incredible.

Not that Terrifier 3 exclusively hinges on specific theming to coat the walls red with viscera. Art the Clown puts a chainsaw to use in a way that is unmistakably free from Christmas cheer, and once rats enter the picture... well, the less said about that, the better in this spoiler-free piece. Except to say, "Holy shit, that rat-related nightmare fuel!"

Scattershot storytelling and long runtimes remain the Terrifier franchise’s biggest issues.

For all the guts and glory on display when Art the Clown is physically showing characters their intestinal fortitude, Terrifier 3 further proves that Damien Leone's storytelling chops seem to be his only shortcoming. Rather than setting its central antagonist out for randomly occurring murder sprees, the filmmaker continues building out a baffling quasi-mythos that remains tied to Sienna and Jonathan for... reasons?

I don't exactly hate Sienna or Jonathan or the performances from LaVera and Fullam, and by the end of this third feature, SIenna rather deservingly reaches the messianic stage of Final Girl-dom. But at no point do I ever whole-heartedly care what happens to them either, so long as it isn't "get killed offscreen by a minor threat." It's not so different from a large number of horror releases from the '80s onward, but the vast majority of those movies kept their runtimes around 90 minutes.

Terrifier did just that with its whip-cracking runtime of 85 minutes, and it's ambitious to a fault that Leone ramped the output up by more than 40 minutes for the second movie. But even though the third chapter is shorter, it's not nearly short enough. The writer/director gets all my support for wanting to give fans the meatiest sequel possible, but I'm not sure even the most brilliant plotting would add all that much to watching Art the Clown maul whatever's in his path.

If Terrifier 4 ends up being eight to ten completely disparate segments featuring Art the Clown going ham on victims Looney Tunes -style, I'll be first in line with a lumpy Acme-branded trashbag at my side. Until then, I'll know who I won't want to run into under the mistletoe this Christmas. To be clear, it's both Art and Vicky.

But anytime I need a quick fix of something wickedly dark and harrowing to go along with a holiday rewatch of Black Christmas , Gremlins or Krampus , I already know Terrifier 3 is a holly jolly good time.

Nick is a Cajun Country native and an Assistant Managing Editor with a focus on TV and features. His humble origin story with CinemaBlend began all the way back in the pre-streaming era, circa 2009, as a freelancing DVD reviewer and TV recapper.  Nick leapfrogged over to the small screen to cover more and more television news and interviews, eventually taking over the section for the current era and covering topics like Yellowstone, The Walking Dead and horror. Born in Louisiana and currently living in Texas — Who Dat Nation over America’s Team all day, all night — Nick spent several years in the hospitality industry, and also worked as a 911 operator. If you ever happened to hear his music or read his comics/short stories, you have his sympathy.

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‘The Wild Robot' Could Win Box Office Weekend As This Decade's Best-Reviewed Animated Movie

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The new DreamWorks animated film “The Wild Robot” is projected to win the box office weekend against lackluster competition, possibly benefitting from stellar reviews that make it the best-reviewed computer-animated film on Rotten Tomatoes released in the 2020s.

Lupita Nyong'o voices the titular robot in the DreamWorks animated film "The Wild Robot." (Photo by ... [+] Chris DELMAS / AFP) (Photo by CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images)

“The Wild Robot” has a near-perfect 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes based on its first 82 reviews, with only two of those critics leaving an unfavorable, or “rotten,” review.

A 98% score would rank “The Wild Robot” among the top 10 best-reviewed computer-animated films of all time on Rotten Tomatoes and the highest-scoring animated movie released in the 2020s.

“The Wild Robot” has better reviews than recent animated hits like “ Inside Out 2 ,” which has a 90% score and became the highest-grossing animated film of all time this year, as well as “ Puss in Boots : The Last Wish,” which earned a 95% score in 2022.

“Toy Story” (1995) and “Toy Story 2” (1999) top Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the best-reviewed computer-animated films, with perfect scores of 100%, while “How To Train Your Dragon” (2010), with a 99% score, is the only DreamWorks animated movie with a better score than “The Wild Robot.”

How Much Will “the Wild Robot” Gross This Weekend?

Multiple outlets, including The Hollywood Reporter and Variety , projected “The Wild Robot” will win the box office weekend, with a projected gross between $24 million and $30 million at domestic theaters. Some forecasters believe it could surpass $30 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter, but are holding back projections because another new animated film, “Transformers One,” fell behind projections to gross $24.6 million last weekend. The film is expected to dethrone “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which won the last three weekends in a row as few blockbusters hit theaters this month.

Also opening in theaters this weekend is “Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded $120 million epic, which is projected to open with $5 million to $7 million in what The Hollywood Reporter calls a “financial disaster.” The dystopian drama has been hampered by various controversies, including a retracted trailer that used fake quotes from critics and allegations of conflicts and inappropriate behavior by Coppola on set that led him to sue Variety for libel. The film polarized critics, earning a 52% score on Rotten Tomatoes , and struggled to find a U.S. distributor after its Cannes Film Festival premiere.

Key Background

“The Wild Robot” stars Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as the voice of the titular robot, with Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Catherine O’Hara and more in supporting roles. The film follows Nyong’o’s character, Roz, who is shipwrecked on an abandoned island and develops relationships with the animals that live there.

What Are Critics Saying About “the Wild Robot?”

Adrian Horton, a critic for The Guardian , called “The Wild Robot” one of the “best animated films of the year” in a four-star review and predicted it will be a frontrunner for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards. Observer critic Emily Zemler also said the “Oscar for Best Animated Feature is The Wild Robot’s to lose,” praising it as “deeply moving” and “beautifully crafted” with universal themes about the importance of finding community. Associated Press critic Mark Kennedy said “The Wild Robot” is not just the best animated film this year, but may be “the best movie of the year” overall, calling it an “absolute movie triumph” and a “soulful sweet-sad animated journey.” In one of the movie’s only negative reviews, Wall Street Journal critic Kyle Smith said the “script fails at its core” by making the audience indifferent about the titular robot’s fate, and called the plot “strictly mechanical.”

Further Reading

Box Office Preview: ‘The Wild Robot,’ ‘Megalopolis’ and Pro-Donald Trump Doc All Hit the Big Screen (The Hollywood Reporter)

Lupita Nyong'o brings her outsider experience to 'The Wild Robot' (NBC News)

‘We Screwed Up’: Lionsgate Pulls ‘Megalopolis’ Trailer Featuring Fabricated Critic Quotes (Forbes)

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Here are the best reviewed movies on Apple TV+

Apple TV+ offers a wide variety of TV shows, movies, and documentaries. While the service has a strong track record for making quality TV ( here are the best shows ), the film library is more hit or miss. There’s still a lot to enjoy, though, especially if you know what you’re looking for. And you can look no further: here are the best reviewed movies on Apple TV+.

Best of the best: 90-100% Rotten Tomatoes score

Wolfwalkers (99%).

• Genre: Animation
• Release: 2020

In a time of superstition and magic, a young apprentice hunter, Robyn Goodfellowe, journeys to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last wolf pack in Wolfwalkers . While exploring the forbidden lands outside the city walls, Robyn befriends a free-spirited girl, Mebh, a member of a mysterious tribe rumored to have the ability to transform into wolves by night. As they search for Mebh’s missing mother, Robyn uncovers a secret that draws her further into the enchanted world of the Wolfwalkers and risks becoming the very thing her father is tasked to destroy.

Come From Away (98%)

• Genre: Musical
• Release: 2021

Come From Away is the filmed version of the award-winning Broadway musical. It tells the story of 7,000 people stranded in the small town of Gander, Newfoundland after all flights into the US are grounded on September 11, 2001. The people of Newfoundland graciously welcome the “come from aways” into their community in the aftermath. All the while, passengers and locals alike process what’s happened while finding love, laughter and new hope in the unlikely bonds that they forge.

Fancy Dance (96%)

• Genre: Drama
• Release: 2024

Fancy Dance tells the story of Jax (Lily Gladstone), who has cared for her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) since her sister’s disappearance. The two scrape by on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma. Every spare minute goes into finding Jax’s missing sister while also helping Roki prepare for an upcoming powwow. At the risk of Jax losing custody to Roki’s grandfather, Frank (Shea Whigham), the pair hit the road and scour the backcountry to track down Roki’s mother in time for the powwow. What begins as a search gradually turns into a far deeper investigation into the complexities and contradictions of Indigenous women moving through a colonized world while at the mercy of a failed justice system.

In CODA , seventeen-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the sole hearing member of a deaf family – a child of deaf adults (CODA). Her life revolves around acting as interpreter for her parents (Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur). Her mornings are spent working on the family’s struggling fishing boat before school with her father and older brother (Daniel Durant). But when Ruby joins the high school’s choir club, she discovers a gift for singing and soon finds herself drawn to her duet partner Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). Encouraged by her enthusiastic, tough-love choirmaster (Eugenio Derbez) to apply to a prestigious music school, Ruby finds herself torn between the obligations she feels to her family and the pursuit of her own dreams.

Flora and Son (93%)

• Genre: Comedy
• Release: 2023

In Flora and Son , single mom Flora (Eve Hewson) is at a loss about what to do with her rebellious teenage son, Max (Orén Kinlan). Encouraged by the police to find Max a hobby, Flora tries to occupy him with a beat-up acoustic guitar. With the help of a washed-up LA musician (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Flora and Max discover the transformative power of music. From the musical mind of John Carney, “Flora and Son” explores the bond between mother and son who journey toward new harmony.

Killers of the Flower Moon (93%)

• Genre: Crime Drama

Killers of the Flower Moon is an epic western crime saga, where real love crosses paths with unspeakable betrayal. Based on a true story and told through the improbable romance of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), it tracks the suspicious murders of members of the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight after oil was discovered underneath their land.

The Tragedy of MacBeth (92%)

The Tragedy of MacBeth is a tale of murder, madness, ambition and wrathful cunning. Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand star in Joel Coen’s bold and fierce adaptation.

Nearly top-tier: 80-89% score

On the rocks (87%).

On the Rocks features a young New York mother, faced with sudden doubts about her marriage, who teams up with her larger-than-life playboy father to tail her husband. What follows is a sparkling comic adventure across the city – drawing father and daughter closer together despite one detour after another. Acclaimed filmmaker Sofia Coppola brings a light touch to this blend of an exuberant love letter to New York, a generation-clash comedy about how we see relationships differently from our parents, and a funny celebration of the complications that bind modern families even as they tie us in crazy knots.

• Release: 2019

Seventeen-year-old Pakistani American teenager Hala (Geraldine Viswanathan) struggles to balance desire with her familial, cultural and religious obligations. As she comes into her own, she grapples with a secret that threatens to unravel her family.

Causeway (85%)

• Release: 2022

Causeway is an intimate portrait of a soldier (Jennifer Lawrence) struggling to adjust to her life after returning home to New Orleans.

Cha Cha Real Smooth (85%)

Fresh out of college and without a clear life path going forward, 22-year-old Andrew is stuck back at home with his family in Cha Cha Real Smooth . But if there’s one thing that belongs on his nonexistent résumé, it’s how to get a party started, which lands him the perfect job of motivational dancing at the bar and bat mitzvahs for his younger brother’s classmates. When Andrew befriends a local mom, Domino, and her daughter, Lola, he finally discovers a future he wants – even if it might not be his own.

Tetris (82%)

• Genre: Thriller

Tetris tells the unbelievable story of how one of the world’s most popular video games found its way to avid players around the globe. Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) discovers TETRIS in 1988, and then risks everything by traveling to the Soviet Union. There, he joins forces with inventor Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov) to bring the game to the masses. Based on a true story, “Tetris” is a Cold War–era thriller on steroids, with double-crossing villains, unlikely heroes and a nail-biting race to the finish.

Solid viewing options: 70-79% score

The banker (79%).

Inspired by true events, The Banker centers on revolutionary businessmen Bernard Garrett (Anthony Mackie) and Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson). Together, they devise an audacious and risky plan to take on the racist establishment of the 1960s by helping other African Americans pursue the American dream. Along with Garrett’s wife Eunice (Nia Long), they train a working class white man, Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult), to pose as the rich and privileged face of their burgeoning real estate and banking empire – while Garrett and Morris pose as a janitor and a chauffeur. Their success ultimately draws the attention of the federal government, which threatens everything the four have built.

Swan Song (79%)

Set in the near future, Swan Song is a powerful, emotional journey told through the eyes of Cameron (Mahershala Ali), a loving husband and father who is expecting his second child with his wife Poppy (Naomie Harris). When Cameron is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he is presented with an alternative solution by his doctor (Glenn Close) to shield his family from grief. As Cameron grapples with whether or not to alter his family’s fate, he learns more about life and love than he ever imagined.

Greyhound (78%)

• Genre: Action

In Greyhound , Tom Hanks stars as a longtime Navy veteran tasked with protecting a convoy of 37 ships carrying thousands of soldiers and much-needed supplies across the treacherous waters of the Atlantic during World War II. For five days with no air cover, the captain and his small force of three escort ships must make their way through an area of the ocean known as “the Black Pit,” battling Nazi U-boats while protecting their invaluable ships and soldiers. “Greyhound” is inspired by events during the Battle of the Atlantic, which took place in the earliest months of America’s alliance with Great Britain and the Allied Forces.

Finch (74%)

• Genre: Adventure

In Finch , a man, a robot and a dog form an unlikely family. It’s the story of one man’s quest to ensure that his beloved canine companion will be cared for after he’s gone. Tom Hanks stars as Finch, a robotics engineer and one of the few survivors of a cataclysmic solar event that has left the world a wasteland. But Finch, who has been living underground for a decade, has built a world of his own that he shares with his dog, Goodyear. He creates a robot, played by Caleb Landry Jones, to watch over Goodyear when he no longer can. As the trio embarks on a perilous journey into a desolate American West, Finch strives to show his creation, who names himself Jeff, the joy and wonder of what it means to be alive.

Wolfs (73%)

• Genre: Action Comedy

Global superstars George Clooney and Brad Pitt team up for the action comedy Wolfs . Clooney plays a professional fixer hired to cover up a high-profile crime. But when a second fixer (Pitt) shows up, the two “lone wolves” are forced to work together. They quickly find their night spiraling out of control in ways that neither one of them expected.

Palmer (72%)

Palmer tells the story of former high school football star Eddie Palmer (Justin Timberlake), who went from hometown hero to convicted felon. Following 12 years in a state penitentiary, he returns home to Louisiana, where he moves back in with Vivian (June Squibb), the grandmother who raised him. While trying to keep his head down and rebuild a quiet life for himself, Palmer is haunted by memories of his glory days and suspicious small town eyes. Things become more complicated when Vivian’s hard-living neighbor Shelly (Juno Temple) disappears on a prolonged bender, leaving her precocious and unique 7-year-old son Sam (Ryder Allen), often the target of bullying, in Palmer’s reluctant care.

Spirited (70%)

• Genre: Musical Comedy

Each Christmas Eve in Spirited , the Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) selects one dark soul to be reformed by a visit from three spirits. But this season, he picked the wrong Scrooge. Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds) turns the tables on his ghostly host until Present finds himself reexamining his own past, present and future. For the first time, “A Christmas Carol” is told from the perspective of the ghosts in this hilarious musical twist on the classic Dickens tale.

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Megalopolis took more than 40 years and $120m to make. It's been worth every bit of trouble

By Luke Goodsell

ABC Entertainment

Topic: Arts, Culture and Entertainment

Francis Ford Coppola's long-time passion project involves time travel and an A-list cast. ( Supplied: Mad Man Entertainment )

A dizzy work of cinematic dreaming that's at once ambitious and playful, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis has taken more than 40 years, $US120 million of the filmmaker's own money, and a year of bad press , bewildered reviews and bungled marketing to make its way to the screen.

The journey — and it's a great pleasure to report this — has been worth every bit of the trouble.

Billed as a fable, the film revolves around the supernaturally gifted architect Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver, the best he's been since Annette ), who we first meet perched on the precipice of an Art Deco skyscraper like some cross between Philippe Petit and Anakin Skywalker.

A man out of time — quite literally, he has the power to stop clocks and reshape the landscape with his mind — he dreams of building a utopia to be known as Megalopolis, what he calls "a city that people can dream about".

It's New York — here restyled as New Rome — sometime in the third millennium, though the scramble of high-tech screens with newspapers, flash-bulbs and mid-century cars suggests a world that could be set anywhere between 1930 and the year 3000.

Bathed in a perennial golden hue, the city's beauty betrays a society in the throes of decline — one in which power, we're told in Laurence Fishburne's slippery voice-over, resides with a handful of corrupt men.

Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis. ( Supplied: American Zoetrope/Megalopolis/Mihai Malaimare )

The parallels to modern America are obvious, and intentional.

Standing in the way of Cesar's plans is the Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a conservative pragmatist in cahoots with the decadent imperialist, and Cesar's uncle, Hamilton Crassus III (a grotesque Jon Voight, who may as well have been called Biggus Dickus).

Meanwhile, Cesar's cousin, Clodio Pulcher — played by Shia LaBeouf in a sodden mullet and sculpted eyebrows — is plotting a coup by posing as a rabble-rousing, MAGA-like man of the people.

There's also a tabloid TV host with the great Vonnegut-via- Southland Tales moniker Wow Platinum (a never-better Aubrey Plaza), whose secret affair with Cesar might be a play for power, and the mayor's daughter Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), a club kid caught in the middle of the family feud.

Aubrey Plaza as glamorous talk show host Wow Platinum in Megalopolis ( Supplied: Madman Entertainment )

Grandiose and mischievous

Contrary to all those reports suggesting it was a work of "batshit" lunacy, Megalopolis is relatively straightforward as narrative, almost an old-fashioned Hollywood epic.

At the same time, the movie's bravura visual palette draws on what feels like the entire history of motion pictures — from classic science fiction (Things To Come, Metropolis ) and experimental cinema, to Fellini, the expressionist Star Wars prequels and those " The world if " memes.

But the movie resembles nothing so much as a breathless summary of Coppola's own filmography, opening with one of those poetic skies from Rumble Fish , laying on the lavish montages of The Godfather and — best of all — indulging the baroque romanticism and in-camera effects of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Among the many exhilarating images are an inspired cut from the cosmos — via an orbiting Soviet satellite — to da club, and a bacchanalian blowout at Madison Square Garden complete with wrestling, Busby Berkeley choreography and holographic pop stars. (There's so much going on that you might even blink and miss the movie's fourth-wall-breaking interactive moment , which is being included at selected screenings.)

It's a movie with a lot on its mind — musings on power, politics, class, the return of capes as a fashion statement for men (legendary costume designer Milena Canonero' s gilded outfits are a marvel).

What are the limits of idealism? Will civilisation itself be the end of humanity? What is the role of the artist in all of this?

It's a movie that's both visionary and deeply sceptical of its own vision.

If that all sounds like heady, grandiose stuff, then rest assured that Coppola is equally mischievous, unafraid to swing both big and, on occasion, wonderfully dumb.

Always a great collaborator with actors, he pushes his players into strange, idiosyncratic performances (LaBeouf seems to be channelling Dennis Hopper's wild-eyed jester from Apocalypse Now), while mixing quotations from Shakespeare and Roman emperors with lurid wordplay and moments of outright camp.

Clodio Pulcher (Shia Labeouf) and Huey Wilkes (Bailey Ives) in Megalopolis. ( Supplied: Madman Entertainment  )

Typical of the goofy tone is an appearance by miss " helicopter fiasca " herself, Coppola's granddaughter Romy Mars, who appears as a space-cadet journalist for high-school paper The Dingbat News. (In a movie that asks the big questions, her "Is it better to look good or to smell good?" might be the most probing enquiry.)

Even without his granddaughter (or nephew Jason Schwartzman and sister Talia Shire, the latter touching as a beleaguered matriarch), this would be a very personal film for Coppola — one from the heart, if you will.

In many ways, Cesar is a clear surrogate for the director and, as such he's not without his failings and contradictions — ambitious to a fault, something of a womaniser (the film is dedicated, rather movingly, to Coppola's late wife, Eleanor ), a man whose dedication to art can obscure his personal and public responsibility.

Megalopolis's ambitious storyline is matched only by its lush set design. ( Supplied: Madman Entertainment )

Amid all of its lofty design and potential hubris, Megalopolis is something of a humble admission of defeat, at least at the hands of time. It's ultimately a gift to the future, a passing of the torch from one of New Hollywood's heavyweights — who, at 85, knows the clock is ticking — to the next generation of filmmakers, whatever shape they take.

It's a bold, beautiful portrait of humanity in all of its paradox, and if it does turn out to be Coppola's swan song, then it's as vital a piece of filmmaking as his greatest work.

Megalopolis is in cinemas now.

‘May December’ Netflix Movie Review: Should You Watch?

The latest Netflix Award Season Hopeful, May December, is now streaming, but should you give it a watch?

May December, L to R: Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry with Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix

Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this past summer before a short run in theaters in November, May December is the latest film from writer/director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Carol) adapted from Samy Burch’s 2020 Black Listed Screenplay.

Editor’s Note: The movie is only available on Netflix in the United States and Canada.

Based in part on the 1997 Mary Kay Letourneau case, the story centers around a married couple, Gracie & Joe, who live in the suburbs of Georgia with their twin children. However, their story is not your average romance – Gracie & Joe met & fell in love when Joe was a 13 year old part time pet shop employee and Gracie was his mid-30s married employer.

Now, decades after their criminal beginnings, Gracie & Joe’s relationship will be under the microscope once again as an independent film will be bringing their story to life for the big screen. Though cautious and concerned about the project, Gracie & Joe agree to allow the lead actress who will be playing Gracie in the movie, Elizabeth Berry, to shadow their family and gain an understanding of how their relationship came to be. However, as Elizabeth digs deeper and Gracie & Joe’s marriage starts to buckle under the pressure, the story becomes less about the sensational past and more about the complicated present of a family in crisis.

The script for May December was brought to Haynes’ attention by his co-lead actress & producer Natalie Portman, who plays the deeply fraught Elizabeth in the film. In a Netflix “Inside the Script” featurette, Haynes remarked that the script “evoked the kind of morality and ethics that used to be a much more prevalent part of movies that we all saw.”

Looking for an experienced hand to guide us through the moral ambiguity, Haynes turned to his longtime collaborator and celebrated actress Julianne Moore to take on the role of Gracie. May December marks Haynes & Moore’s fifth film together, including Moore’s Oscar-nominated performance in 2002’s Far From Heaven .

In Gracie and her relationship with Joe, Haynes gets to return to one of his more familiar story elements: the decay under the seemingly perfect life. Mental & physical illness rearing its head in Safe. The crumbling marriage and hidden sexual desires in Far From Heaven. The loveless & convenient marriage turned ugly in Carol. In May December , Gracie & Joe appear to have a battle-tested marriage that thrives despite their past. Living in a picturesque community with friends, family, and careers, they appear to have it all. However, as the story unfolds, the audience is slowly made aware of all the cracks in the facade. Toxic manipulation and controlling behavior stemming from their initial relationship dynamic of adult and child. Secret relationships & one night stands. Children cast aside or living in the shadow of the wrong type of fame & notoriety. All of this being wiped away or pushed down by the insecure yet suffocating puppetry at the command of Gracie.

May December, L to R: Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo with Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix

Enter Elizabeth Berry. A wild card of two minds: a journalistic instinct to find the humanity & truth to satisfy her desire to portray Gracie fairly & accurately and a more sociopathic admiration for Gracie’s ability to wipe the slate clean every day, never showing guilt or shame in the face of rational evidence. Despite Gracie’s attempts to control the proceedings, Elizabeth seems to be taking pages from the Gracie playbook as she delves deeper into her character and uses her manipulations & lack of empathy to suit her own reality. Though more subtle and less confrontational, it wouldn’t shock anyone if Portman drew some inspiration from her Black Swan past to get into the mindset of her chess match with Moore’s portrayal of Gracie. The thought of another woman interrogating you and becoming you with designs on undermining you and exposing you seems akin in ways to more thriller-based versions of this type of story.

Stuck in the web & crumbling within at the nexus of this dynamic is Joe; corrupted, exploited, & massaged by Gracie’s influence from the beginning and starting to fray at the edges on his way to a complete meltdown. Played perfectly by the understated Charles Melton (“Riverdale”), Joe is lulled to sleep by the comforts of his life; a life seemingly derailed or obscured by the immature decisions of his youth. However, much like his well-nurtured butterflies, he craves for a new beginning of his own creation. He will never be seen as an equal to Gracie and, with the impending departure of his twin children off to college, he shutters to think about a life alone with her. He drinks, he acts out, he cheats. He just wants to break free of the chains of his old self before it’s too late.

Colliding these forces with a masterful direction, Todd Haynes creates one of the best films of his career. Evoking some of the dramatic flair of David Lynch’s view of suburbia and his past films’ history with the complicated roles we play in our own lives, Haynes weaves a rich tapestry of melodrama, madness, & metacommentary. Bold & stinging bursts of Marcelo Zarvos’ piano-laden score mixed with rich textures & hints of soft focus create a heightened yet sometimes soapy & comedic tone that draws our attention while the drama & the actions play out in a more subtle & tactical way.

The most radical way this movie shows its perfect execution is in its ability to never dip too far into the salaciousness of its back story and never allowing our minds to dwell on the criminal behavior of its subjects. Haynes presents it as a family crisis at a critical juncture on the eve of being exposed. 90s tabloid celebrity gives way to modern true crime dissection & humanizing family trauma.

Overall, May December is one of the best films of the year and in the running for best Netflix Original film of 2023 . Burch & Mechanik’s empathetic, darkly funny, & deeply layered screenplay is a perfect match for Haynes’ fascination with the decay under pristine facades. Portman, Moore, & Melton play off each other perfectly in the most uncomfortable ways. I hope to see this film continue to be recognized as we get further into awards season.

Watch May December If You Like

• Single White Female
• Far From Heaven

MVP of May December

Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry

May December, Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix

After spending the last decade largely bouncing between MCU movies and forgettable films, Portman seems to come back to form in her role as actress Elizabeth Berry in May December . Bringing the script to Todd Haynes’ attention herself and co-producing the project as well, Portman has been all in on this one from the beginning.

With her meta portrayal of sorts as an actress researching a role for an upcoming biopic, Portman creates a portrait of a woman who admires all the wrong aspects of her subject and uses those traits to delve deeper into their carefully crafted existence. Ranging from uncomfortable method acting to sociopathic levels of disregard, Portman’s Elizabeth blurs the lines between her own abilities to manipulate & dismiss those closest to her and the role of her sociopathic subject, which sheds guilt & shame at every turn. It’s Portman’s most interesting & enticing role since Black Swan and she knocks it out of the park.

While many of us haven’t seen the remainder of Netflix’s 2023 slate, it’s safe to say May December is their most alluring & layered film to date. Haynes and his trio of amazing actors have pulled something special out of something so divisive.

Andrew Morgan is a film critic & podcaster with 20 years of experience on the sets & offices of film & television. Current podcast host of the entertainment review show, Recent Activity. He lives in the Northeast of the United States.

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'Life of Chuck' Finally Sets a Release Window

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Horror master Mike Flanagan is ready to unsettle audiences once again with his upcoming adaptation of the Stephen King short story, The Life of Chuck , and we've now gotten an update on when exactly this might happen. The film has reportedly been acquired by Neon for distribution in the United States and is eyeing a theatrical release in the summer of 2025, according to Variety . A specific date for the release remains unclear, but it seems that we won't have to wait too much longer for the highly anticipated film.

The film is an adaptation of King's 2020 short story, and stars Tom Hiddleston as Charles Krantz. The story is "split into three distinct chapters that unfurl in reverse chronological order and set against the backdrop of a world that appears to be slowly crumbling," according to the film's logline. Amid the chaos, a mysterious billboard appears congratulating Krantz for 39 years of work, though it appears there is more to the billboard - and the world - than meets the eye. The Life of Chuck also stars Mark Hamill in the role of Albie alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor as Marty Anderson, a man who is seemingly unable to go anywhere without seeing Chuck. Karen Gillan, Jacob Tremblay, Matthew Lillard , Harvey Guillén, Kate Siegel , David Dastmalchian, Mia Sara, and more also star.

Flanagan, best known for his Netflix horror The Fall of the House of Usher and for directing The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep, directed The Life of Chuck from a self-adapted screenplay. Flanagan is also producing the film via his Red Room Pictures banner alongside Trevor Macy for Intrepid Pictures. The Life of Chuck recently premiered at TIFF, where it received rave reviews from critics and audience alike.

'The Life of Chuck' is Earning Great Reviews

The Life of Chuck hasn't been seen by that many people yet, but the ones who have watched it appear to have nothing but positive things to say. "With Mike Flanagan’s stellar The Life of Chuck , we have another adaptation that immediately contends for being crowned the best King-originated film ever made," Collider's Jason Gorber said in his review . The film's "intertwined stories are knit together in ways both subtle and overt that, from its opening to closing frame, encourages us to find moments of joy in the face of existential dread," he added.

The Life of Chuck isn't the only King adaptation on the horizon, either; HBO's highly anticipated (and long-delayed) adaptation of Salem's Lot is set to premiere on Max on Oct. 3. Like The Life of Chuck, Salem's Lot earned positive reviews, with Collider's Robert Brian Taylor calling the film a "solid new adaptation" of King projects. A television spinoff of King's It series called It: Welcome to Derry is also slated for a release sometime in 2025. The Life of Chuck doesn't have an exact release date yet, so stay tuned to Collider for more information.

The Life of Chuck

This story, told in reverse order, begins with the death of Chuck at 39 and moves backward through his life, uncovering significant moments that shaped his existence. As the narrative unfolds, it explores themes of memory, fate, and the connections that define a person’s life.

• Tom Hiddleston