newyorker.com
Quick reminder: “Challengers” is the story of a tennis threesome; Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), and Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). I list her last because she’s the latecomer to the group. Art and Patrick are friends since childhood, fellow tennis-school trainees in the early two-thousands, who, as high-school seniors (and men’s-doubles junior champions), meet Tashi, a high-ranking young woman on the junior circuit. Art and Patrick, who will face each other in the singles f…
10 days ago
newyorker.com
Schoenbrun’s earlier film, set around the time that social media came into wide use, is centered on a teen-aged girl, a goth isolated in a comfortable suburb, whose participation in an interactive horror-video craze leads her into an intense online correspondence with an adult man. In the new film, the action starts in 1996, when the protagonist, Owen, a suburban seventh-grader, a bit overparented and conspicuously lonely, tells a ninth-grader named Maddy about his fascination with a TV show cal…
13 days ago
newyorker.com
“The Fall Guy” fits snugly into all of these categories. A playful action-comedy about a stuntman, it’s directed by David Leitch, a longtime stuntman and stunt coördinator whose career as a director (which started with “John Wick”) revolves around action films. It’s loosely based on a nineteen-eighties TV series of the same title, in which Lee Majors played an underemployed stuntman named Colt Seavers, who moonlighted as a bounty hunter. But in the new movie, written by Drew Pearce, Colt Seavers…
15 days ago
newyorker.com
Ann’s desire to be dominated appears to be less about the physical effect of pain or bondage than it is about humiliation. In the first scene, she’s naked in bed, lying on top of a blanket under which Allen is sleeping, and rubbing herself against his inert body as she expresses appreciation for the way he ignores her pleasure. It turns out that Allen is awake, but just ignoring her. She says, “I like how you don’t care if I get off, because it’s like I don’t even exist,” and he responds, “Can y…
20 days ago
newyorker.com
But “Civil War” cries out for close attention to its directorial aesthetic and its cinematic form, because its main characters, being journalists, are intimately concerned with how the conflict has arisen and how it is represented. The protagonist is a war photographer named Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), who, while covering a face-off between protesters and police in New York, protects and counsels an enthusiastic tyro photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who’s underexperienced and underequipped.…
24 days ago
newyorker.com
However, the sixty-nine-minute film that I’ve been enjoying, recorded from a TCM broadcast long ago, is a drastic abridgment of the original, edited down and reissued by Columbia Pictures in 1938. The studio wanted to rerelease the old picture to take advantage of Tracy’s burgeoning stardom, and therefore sought to bring it into line with the moral strictures of the Hays Code, a doctrine of self-censorship that Hollywood had adopted to ward off the threat of actual censorship. (The code was publ…
30 days ago
newyorker.com
These two social vectors of the video store are the heart of a notable new documentary, “Kim’s Video,” directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin. The film commemorates a New York video-store mini-empire that got its start in 1987 and became defunct, technically, in 2014, though it actually gave up its soul in 2009. That’s when its main store, Mondo Kim’s, on St. Marks Place, closed, and its mighty collection of DVDs and VHS tapes—some fifty-five thousand of them—was shipped off to Salemi, a smal…
about 1 month ago
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Drew, who also stars in “The People’s Joker” and wrote it with Bri LeRose, plays the Joker and tells the character’s origin story in flashbacks, as a first-person coming-of-age drama. (The movie blends live action with animation and jubilantly janky special effects—and these eye-grabbing, exuberant artifices are crowdsourced, too.) From the start, Drew borrows from the same crucial source that Phillips’s overblown, absurdly earnest mega-version does: Martin Scorsese. This latest Joker declares,…
about 1 month ago
newyorker.com
The Zellners, who are brothers, have been working together for nearly three decades. They’ve built a career dramatizing near-absurdities, whether grim or merely eccentric, with earnest intensity. (They directed three episodes of “The Curse,” a satire of reality TV.) In their 2012 feature, “Kid-Thing,” a neglected child connects with a woman trapped at the bottom of a well. In “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” a Japanese woman who believes that the movie “Fargo” is a documentary travels to America i…
about 1 month ago
newyorker.com
After Dylan’s L.A. Times piece appeared, Amazon sought to terminate its deal with Allen. A small distributor, MPI Media Group, which specializes in horror films and stock footage and hadn’t had a significant theatrical release in more than a decade, acquired “A Rainy Day in New York” and released it in just a handful of theaters in the U.S. before bringing it to streaming services (including Amazon). Several of the film’s actors, notably Chalamet, Gomez, and Hall, expressed regret for having wor…
about 1 month ago
newyorker.com
Hondo, who died in 2019, made his films internationally—in France, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Tunisia—and he extended his attention to the African diaspora, whether in France or in French territories elsewhere, such as in the Caribbean. Hondo’s work shows French cinema to be African cinema because of the historical connection between France and Africa. From this central preoccupation, Hondo devises a distinctive and singular aesthetic, sharply personal yet historically informed. He does no…
about 2 months ago
