You have the Odyssey. You have Shakespeare’s great canon of work. And now you have This Is Me… Now. All stunning masterpieces that have shifted culture, transformed art, and changed the very nature of storytelling.
Auteur Jennifer Lopez invites us into a lush, vivid world unlike anything we’ve ever seen (James Cameron, take note). It’s a world that blends a sci-fi utopia, celestial mythology, effervescent music, and a Hollywood fairytale to tackle a most pressing theme: love. What does it…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Watching Crossroads on the big screen for the first time feels like a holy pilgrimage, a homecoming. It’s a day of reckoning, as so many wrongs committed against Britney Spears are finally righted, and her pride and joy, her only major picture role, long banished to the realm of the DVD and found nowhere on streaming, is getting its long-overdue second life.
This movie is actually impeccable, though it was misunderstood and dismissed in its time by boomer critics and the…
It’s maybe not Christopher Guest’s sharpest satire, but For Your Consideration is still a hilarious showcase of his stable of talent. More importantly, this film sheds light on the sickening lack of Purim content in the entertainment industry. The story of Esther is ripe for a Dreamworks animated musical (somebody please make it!). But even this fake film-within-a-film couldn’t get a Purim storyline across the finish line.
Jesse Eisenberg’s exacting judgment as a director and taut but impactful script are enough to make this an impressive and heartwarming watch, but Kieran Culkin’s performance alone elevates this film to its award-winning status. We all have people in our lives like Benji—fiercely loyal but troubled, charming but volatile—and Culkin embodies the complexities of those contradictions to a tee. A Real Pain’s strength is in its relative simplicity and its ability as an uncomplicated buddy film to be so emotionally resonant.
I love that movies like this exist. It’s clearly a deeply personal story, so detailed and specific that the smallest moments would likely spin off into an entire subplot in any other film (smuggling Cyndi Lauper cassettes into Iran as a child, for instance). The tone is all over the place, with each act feeling like its own movie and each scene taking a detour into another genre, but this film is made all the better for it. It’s a…
