This review initially ran out of the Sundance Film Festival in February 2021. CODA will be released Aug. 13 in theaters and on Apple TV+. The Sundance Film Festival is still often a place for small unpolished gems. But CODA, which premiered there on Thursday night, is the kind of movie that seems to arrive … Read more
Movies and video games have changed a lot since the last time Mario and Luigi were on the big screen. When Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo played the titular roles in 1993’s Super Mario Bros., the concept of adaptation was very loose: The idea wasn’t to replicate the experience of playing a Mario video game … Read more
Ghosted, available now on AppleTV+, is an apt name for a film given that it will haunt me forever for the ways in which it wastes its central talent. Directed by Dexter Fletcher (Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman), Ghosted is a fish-out-of-water action comedy in the vein of Spy (divine) and The Spy Who Dumped Me (dismal). … Read more
When it comes to thingamabobs, Disney’s got plenty, but as far as saving graces go, one tale rises to the surface. In 1989, when The Little Mermaid made its initial box office bow, it reinvigorated Disney animation and launched what has been dubbed the Disney Renaissance. It marked the studio’s first animated feature-length hit since … Read more
Modern superhero films have kind of mastered a formula: a comfort food of acts and arcs defining who and what makes a hero. Franchises were built across the past couple of decades with select champions saving the world onscreen… again and again. Yet in the 15 years since a once-scrappy Marvel Studios turned comic book … Read more
When Warner Bros. announced plans to launch a Barbie movie, the entire premise sounded a bit like a game of Hollywood Mad Libs gone wrong: Quick, name a beloved indie director (Greta Gerwig!), an unadapted piece of intellectual property (Barbie dolls!), and an adjective (neon pink!). Every new piece of information that trickled out on … Read more
Anatomy of a Fall has already earned plenty of praise this film season, snagging the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, back in May. Now, it’s making its way stateside to ensnare audiences in its taut and twisty web. When Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) is found dead beneath his French chalet, … Read more
There’s an entire subset of bookish young women who’ve gone through a Flannery O’Connor phase (it usually comes somewhere right before or after the Sylvia Plath obsession). With Wildcat, Maya Hawke gets to channel that literary phase into a big-screen story that is half Flannery O’Connor biopic, half adaptation of O’Connor’s short stories. Directed by … Read more
Lily James was made for fairy tales. The English actress, 34, who gained attention on Downton Abbey and made her first big screen splash in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, channels her charms into a new kind of fairy tale in Finally Dawn during a never-ending night in mid-century Rome. When Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci), a young Italian … Read more
There’s an eternal temptation with public figures to convince ourselves that, because we see and hear them so often, we must actually know them. But listening to someone’s musical output for decades, or watching their every TV appearance, doesn’t necessarily bring us any closer to understanding the movements of their heart or the decisions they … Read more