Critic's Notebook

Schramm Film

Christian Petzold continues the exploration of his favorite theme – doubles – with “Miroirs No. 3.” Named after a Maurice Ravel composition, the film is apparently a modern Brothers Grimm fairytale per the German auteur during a post-screening Q&A at the film’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight world premiere. He’s surprisingly frazzled in person, polar opposite of the clinical precision his work projects. This is a story about doppelgängers, but with a twist.

Continue reading “Second Family” »

A24

I often catch myself saying “during the pandemic” in reference to the Covid-19 lockdown, knowing full well that the virus is far from eradicated. Though people hardly mask up anymore, there are still deaths from it in 2025. The lockdown apparently remains very much on the minds of some of the world’s top filmmakers, as we find out from a few of the Cannes Film Festival selections that seem to have been inspired by it either directly or indirectly. Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” which takes place in late May of 2020 in the eponymous town in New Mexico, is a case in point.

Continue reading “Long Covid” »

Courtesy photo

Perhaps best known as Sean Baker’s codirector and cowriter on 2004’s “Take Out” and producer on his five other projects, Tsou Shih-ching marks her first solo directorial outing two decades later with “Left-Handed Girl,” premiering during Critics’ Week at Cannes. Her new film shares a vibe with Mr. Baker’s oeuvre – which is not terribly surprising given that he serves as its cowriter, coproducer and editor. But Mr. Baker’s handprints seem more visible on the stylistic choices. The plot itself is a culturally specific critique on the latent sexism in families of a certain demographic in Taiwan.

Continue reading “Unfavorite Daughters” »

Paramount Pictures

This is going to date me, but Tom Cruise’s first stab at “Mission: Impossible” in 1996 was also my first review assignment for my college campus newspaper. Even though my editor went at it with a heavy hand, the result was still fairly amateurish. Thankfully, my most embarrassing writings were at the infancy of the internet and left no digital trace. In 2011, I critiqued the fourth entry in the series, “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” on this very site when it was still somewhat thriving. And here I am again, checking out the eighth installment at its Cannes Film Festival premiere and sashaying down the same red carpet as the cast and crew. But enough about me.

I am bringing all this up because Late Cruise has been mostly trafficking in nostalgia. Hollywood’s last movie star reminds us all of the good ol’ days when marquee names could make or break the box office, the days before Netflix and venture capitalists spoiled everything. “Top Gun: Maverick” was the template. Sure, it had “it” boys like Glen Powell, but the most memorable moment for boomers and Gen-X had to be Mr. Cruise’s reunion with an ailing Val Kilmer. “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” sort of does the same thing. It gathers the likes of Henry Czerny and Rolf Saxon from way, way back. There are even montages of earlier films peppered throughout.

Continue reading “Last Action Hero” »

Topshot Films – Les Films du Worso – Pathé Films – France 3 Cinéma

Opening the 78th Cannes Film Festival, Amélie Bonnin’s out-of-competition debut feature “Leave One Day,” based on her 2021 César-winning short, is a whimsical musical about a chef at the crossroads of her career and personal life.

Continue reading “Pack Your Knives and Go” »

Kino Lorber

According to the cliché Paul Schrader‘s tormented males journal their pain and get it down on paper; but in “Oh, Canada” Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) might struggle to hold the pen. Enfeebled by terminal cancer, stuck in a wheelchair and in need of assistance on and off the lavatory, Leonard does a more cinematic thing and unburdens himself to a camera instead. As a renowned documentarian – the “Ken Burns of Canada” we hear – Leonard is supposed to be telling a camera crew about his life and times, including the 1960s flight from the U.S. Vietnam War draft that took him to the slower waters north of the border in the first place. This testimony involves Leonard directly addressing the camera, which the film, as an inside joke, calls the signature style of his documentaries. Mr. Schrader and anyone familiar with the work of Errol Morris knows that it’s actually the Interrotron set-up that Mr. Morris uses for his own documentaries, designed to torment interviewees and lever confessions out of people who know they have things to confess. Leonard fits the bill.

Continue reading “Slow Country for Old Men” »

Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures

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.

Continue reading “Asking a Lot” »

Caesar Films

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.

Continue reading “Fiddling While Rome Burns” »

Jasin Boland/Warner Brothers Pictures

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.

Continue reading “Fury Road to Nowhere” »

Diaphana Distribution

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.

Continue reading “Night for Day” »