“In the past 20 years, in film, I see that ambiguity is gradually being destroyed.”
I interviewed Ryûsuke Hamaguchi about his extraordinary EVIL DOES NOT EXIST, the closeness of death, unresolved natures, and inconvenient truths.
For
@ebertvoices
:
BETTER CALL SAUL has officially entered the vaunted “too good for Emmys” pantheon, alongside THE WIRE, IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY, THE LEFTOVERS, BOJACK HORSEMAN, and plenty more of the greatest TV series ever
"Better Call Saul" has set an unfortunate Emmys record for most losses ever. It received 53 Emmy nominations during its run and never won a single one.
We have reached the five-year anniversary of Hollywood’s crowning achievement: that time Universal accidentally uploaded the IMAX trailer for THE MUMMY with no sound effects apart from Tom Cruise screaming
In THE BEEKEEPER, Jason Statham is a former member of a secret organization known as the “Beekeepers,” but he’s also a literal beekeeper who repeatedly vows to “protect the hive” and speaks in bee metaphors. You later meet other beekeepers, and none of them are like this.
Bowen Yang called seeing Selena Gomez with Steve Martin and Martin Short “like watching Lady Gaga take care of two Tony Bennetts,” and it’s by far the funniest thing that’s happened tonight
Park Chan-wook's DECISION TO LEAVE getting snubbed at the Oscars across the board, and especially in Best International Feature, is really frustrating. Just a great work of art on every conceivable front.
What Kieran Culkin has achieved in SUCCESSION’s final hours is exquisitely hard to watch. Blinded by all he cannot face, made reckless by the power he was raised to worship, Roman has never been this monstrous, this grotesque, this isolated, but also never more his father’s son.
EXCLUSIVE: Jenna Ortega, who was a lynchpin draw in getting ‘Scream VI’ to the horror franchise’s best opening grosses ever at $44.4M stateside, $67M global, isn’t expected to return for
#ScreamVII
, we hear from sources (click photo below for story)
This scene in AFTERSUN shatters me into a million little pieces every time; in its precisely calibrated yet gradually more fractured flashes of sound and image, slipping loose of time even as it grounds us in an overwhelming sensation of loss, it's emotionally seismic film craft.
Cannes moderator asking about the dangerous stunts in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE: “You risk your life, monsieur. Why do you do it?”
Tom Cruise: “No one asked Gene Kelly, ‘Why do you dance?’”
Cold take, I fear, but Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project — for preserving, restoring, and making more accessible underseen masterpieces from all over — is flatly one of his most important contributions to film, and such a gorgeous way of giving back to his medium
WESTWORLD had the most-watched first season of any HBO original series at the time of its premiere, so its erasure from streaming six years later feels like the highest-profile (and therefore most mind-numbingly stupid) instance of this cost-cutting strategy to date.
Hadley Freeman’s dedication to interviewing legendary authors like Judy Blume and Margaret Atwood to minimize their literary achievements and twist their words into support of her own anti-trans rhetoric is as well-documented as it is pathological and inane.
‘I’m behind
@jk_rowling
100 per cent’
The bestselling
@judyblume
changed a generation like the Harry Potter author — and she’s every bit as controversial | ✍️
@HadleyFreeman
Dehumanization of Palestinians has always been the goal of Israel's occupation, and Glazer was courageous and coherent in refuting its extremist government's co-opting of Jewish identity and the Holocaust to justify its genocide. The signatories are on the wrong side of history.
More than 450 Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter denouncing Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” Oscar speech.
The
#Oscars
awarding eight categories off the air to make room for red-carpet blather feels just as disrespectful to those nominees as we knew it would. Low point for the ceremony, right off the bat.
It’s going to be a funny few months of Colin Farrell campaigning for an Oscar by discussing how he prepared to play a nice guy who likes chatting to animals
Ruth Negga not receiving a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her exquisitely layered performance in PASSING will go down as the biggest Oscars snub of the year.
Denzel Washington de-escalated all that by saying "At your highest moment, be careful, that's when the devil comes for you" at the same Oscars where he was nominated for playing Macbeth. 👑👑👑
BANSHEES OF INISHERIN treats depression as a state of anticipatory self-mourning, fear of death and fear of being forgotten, but also sees this state as solipsistic, self-fulfilling oblivion, a way of blotting out what little light exists while it still does. “How’s the despair?”
However long he’s on SUCCESSION, Jeremy Strong’s career deserves to explode next. The depth of Kendall’s emotional catatonia, the heights of his delusion, the profound wreckage of his soul, often articulated with a posture, dead stare, or silent scream. An immense performance.
The eight
#Oscars
categories that will be awarded off the air are...
- Documentary short
- Film editing
- Makeup and hairstyling
- Original score
- Production design
- Animated short
- Live action short
- Sound
The tragedy of SUCCESSION, one of its many, is that Logan Roy raised his children — and led his employees — not to be empowered, nor to succeed him in business, but to take a bullet for him and to be fully incapable of contemplating a world without him.
Adam Sandler in Spaceman.
An astronaut realizes that the marriage he left behind might not be waiting for him when he returns to Earth. Desperate to fix things with his wife (Carey Mulligan), he is helped by a mysterious ancient creature (Paul Dano) he finds hiding in the…
The Oscars’ actors’ branch not having a sense of humor about MAY DECEMBER but flipping for every performance in a biographical drama they could watch on Netflix is so predictable and embarrassing!
Before Levinson and Tesfaye scrapped and overhauled her mostly completed season of THE IDOL, Amy Seimetz made THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE, a mesmerizingly brilliant series about fantasies of control and women negotiating their power in a world of possessive men. Watch that instead.
Bruce Willis has given us so many iconic characters and great performances across his career. Forever a legend. Wishing him all the best, and I hope he enjoys retirement.
What a season for Lily Gladstone with KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. She’ll be nominated again, but what an achievement to embody Mollie Burkhart so fully, to convey the complications of her soul and identity in such an epic, coursing story as this. A performance I’ll never forget.
I hope Martin Scorsese’s KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON is a major event in theaters. One of our greatest filmmakers and his most seasoned collaborators operating with a blockbuster budget on a vast historical scale, a late-career masterpiece out on IMAX screens. I hope it’s massive.
Israel does not represent Judaism, oppressing others is anti-Jewish, and to conflate critique of Israel's violent policy and politics with anti-Semitism is dangerous, a way to shield a foreign state from condemnation as it commits genocide. What Glazer said was so necessary.
Emi Wada, costume designer on Kurosawa’s RAN and many others, has passed away. Her work was lavish, passionate, and resoundingly authentic. Wada won the Oscar for RAN, for which she spent three years creating 1,400 costumes using 16th-century techniques. (It shows.)
If major studios can’t figure out how to release a sweeping, sexy motorcycle-club drama led by Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, and Norman Reedus, I fail to see the point of major studios:
MALIGNANT is on Hulu. James Wan’s exuberantly unhinged horror spectacle, frenzied and absurd but also stylistically bold and impossibly well-calibrated. In its Gothic excess, it evokes 90s Dark Castle, with Henelotter’s trashy mad-science kicks and shades of De Palma and Argento.
Maika Monroe is playing the FBI agent tasked with tracking down a serial killer played by Nicolas Cage, in an Oz Perkins joint called LONGLEGS? Guaranteed nightmare fuel, can’t wait
Lily Gladstone will and should win the Oscar for KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. Theirs is an extraordinary and revelatory achievement, explosive and implosive, still and yet seismic. The film swells in their silences—its anguished, spiritual power is inextricable from their gaze.
Happy birthday to Park Chan-wook, a filmmaker with a formalist’s eye for symmetry, an architect’s sense of structure, and a poet’s ability to stoke the passions raging inside precisely balanced frames, who makes ferociously controlled art about ferocious, uncontrollable impulses.
Massive shouts to Elijah Wood for using his LOTR coin to produce some of the wildest, coolest-looking genre fare of the past five years over at SpectreVision. Never an uninteresting movie from those guys.
Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography for NOPE is genuinely groundbreaking in how it exploits large-format IMAX and overlays infrared 65mm with 70mm film, as ingenious an exploration of cinema's transformational lens as Peele’s own interrogation of spectacle:
LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER was the title they ended up with after rejecting my very good suggestions of BOAT DRACULA, LET THE RIGHT ONE SWIM, and TRIANGLE OF VLADNESS
Love this headline because it makes it sound like Nolan discovered Affleck going through the trash behind his trailer and was like "You know what, Casey? Just come on in"
THOROUGHBREDS, starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke, is now streaming on HBO Max and Hulu, if you’re in the mood for a stylish, razor-sharp, ruthlessly funny little psychodrama.
Emerging from a pandemic that nearly killed theatrical distribution, AMPTP has decided to finish the job, not because of a global health crisis but because studio heads simply don’t think writers and actors deserve to survive
All three of the lead actors in THE HOLDOVERS are extraordinary. Such a warm, generous picture, and it excels through affording each of them the time and space to develop a character worth caring about.
Honestly, for a filmmaker like Francis Ford Coppola, who has been finding ways to subvert and work around the studio system to make some of the greatest films of all time since the '60s, MEGALOPOLIS being assessed as having "zero commercial prospects" is a ringing endorsement.
For all your Aubrey Plaza needs, EMILY THE CRIMINAL is now streaming on Netflix. A taut gig-economy thriller, and possibly Plaza’s finest hour in how forcefully she captures the grit, desperation, and furious adrenaline of a gig worker hustling to survive LA’s transactional hell.