Critic's Notebook

Asking a Lot

Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

By MARTIN TSAI

Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the few European directors from non-English-speaking countries (in his case, Greece) in recent years to successfully pivot to full-time filmmaking in America. Unlike, say, Lars von Trier or Nicolas Winding Refn, Mr. Lanthimos has been recognized by the Academy with multiple nominations. He’s also lucky that he’s never had to placate Harvey Weinstein.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

Caesar Films

MOVIE REVIEW

Megalopolis (2024)

By MARTIN TSAI

The kindest way to describe “Megalopolis,” Francis Ford Coppola’s latest grasp at relevance, is that it is somewhat late-career Felliniesque, with its Art Deco production designs, costumes that range from ancient Greek to prerevolution French and the decadent life-as-circus motif. But let’s face it. Late-career Coppola gonna late-career Coppola. The film is bloated, unfocused and self-indulgent.

Fury Road to Nowhere

Jasin Boland/Warner Brothers Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

By MARTIN TSAI

Reviving the “Mad Max” franchise in 2015 after a three-decade gap turned out to be a very good idea for George Miller. So instead of another “Babe” or even “Happy Feet,” we’re getting a Furiosa origin story. Well, there’s apparently a sequel planned for “Mad Max: Fury Road” as well, but that’s a whole other conversation for another time.

Night for Day

Diaphana Distribution

MOVIE REVIEW

The Second Act (2024)

By MARTIN TSAI

Quentin Dupieux’s “The Second Act,” which opened the 77th Cannes Film Festival, is a somewhat interesting, if half-baked, objet de curiosité about the blurred line between fiction and reality. It’s the classic film-within-a-film, except that realities of the film set and behind-the-scenes drama pretty much hijack and drown the threadbare plot of the fictional project herein.

Blood and Oil

Apple TV+

MOVIE REVIEW
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

What Martin Scorsese has done here is nothing less than subvert his entire career. For with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” he has made a movie about the same people he has almost always made movies about – immigrants scrabbling to make a living in an unforgiving nation – but for the first time, he is not on their side. For the immigrants in this film are the white people, guests of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, the richest people per capita on earth thanks to oil on their tribal lands. These immigrants are there to get their hands on that wealth by any means necessary; and their methods are horrible, all the more so for this story being broadly true.

Just Wandering

Slot Machine

MOVIE REVIEW
Eureka (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

“Eureka” has too many ideas and no shape for them. It's especially irritating as some of the images were the strongest of the Cannes Film Festival. But images need a plot; and a plot needs structure, or at least more than this.

A Killing Spree

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
The Settlers (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

On a windswept pampas a group of English-speaking men are building a barbed wire fence in silence, until the machinery makes an awful noise and a man lets out a scream. It was only his arm, he says from the ground, as the severed stump pulses blood and the others watch in silence. He'll be up and back at work in just a moment, if someone would bandage it. No one moves, except the overseer, a Scottish lieutenant named MacLennan (Mark Stanley), who rides up on horseback. The injured man's affirmations that he’s absolutely fine reach a higher pitch as MacLennan sighs in frustration, unholsters his gun, and shoots the injured man in the head. That's how callously death arrived for you at the turn of the last century in Tierra del Fuego, the literal end of the world.

Out of Her Element

Disney/Pixar

MOVIE REVIEW
Elemental (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

Possibly the greatest piece of recent cultural criticism was the tweet which said all Pixar movies are about whether something has feelings. Cars, toys, fish, robots, planes, rats, feelings themselves. In “Elemental,” the newest Pixar/Disney movie and the closing film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, this concept is taken one further. What if the basic elements of life (air, fire, water and earth) had feelings, and furthermore what if some of those feelings were racist? This is quite an extrapolation for a kids' movie, especially one that overlooks the fact that kids having parents of different races is not remotely unusual anymore. Some really stunning visuals, a refreshing attitude to gender roles, and the first explicitly gay women in a Disney movie go some way to make up for this throwback of a concept, but it's unfortunately not enough to make the movie any good.

Recipe for Love

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
The Taste of Things (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

“The Taste of Things” is like a tender lover, leaving you both sated and ravenous for much, much more. It is a movie about the art of cooking and how food and its preparations are a gift for those you love. It’s set in the 1890s, features a character repeatedly and sincerely called “the Napoleon of gastronomy” and deserves every single possible plaudit for how respectfully it takes the art of pleasure. Writer-director Tran Anh Hùng won the best director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which should be the first of many, many awards for this exceptional film. Everyone it goes it should be thrown a parade, followed by a feast.

Recipe for Love

Festival de Cannes

MOVIE REVIEW
The Pot-au-Feu (2023)

By SARAH MANVEL

“The Pot-au-Feu” is like a tender lover, leaving you both sated and ravenous for much, much more. It is a movie about the art of cooking and how food and its preparations are a gift for those you love. It’s set in the 1890s, features a character repeatedly and sincerely called “the Napoleon of gastronomy” and deserves every single possible plaudit for how respectfully it takes the art of pleasure. Writer-director Tran Anh Hùng won the best director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which should be the first of many, many awards for this exceptional film. Everyone it goes it should be thrown a parade, followed by a feast.