Critic's Notebook

Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures

It’s perhaps fitting that the New York all-media press screening for Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi extravaganza, “Disclosure Day,” took place on an especially apocalyptic afternoon, one in which large swaths of Midtown Manhattan were effectively sealed off from the public because President Donald J. Trump had somehow decided that Game 3 of the N.B.A. Finals between the New York Knickerbockers and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden was the ideal venue for a nap. Anticipating the inevitable disruption, Universal Pictures relocated the screening across town just four days beforehand. What the studio may have underestimated, however, was the depth of contempt the N.Y.P.D. appears to harbor for the public—and the degree to which the department seems to view its primary mission as protecting and serving the One Percent.

Continue reading “Higher Beings” »

I don’t know what’s with writing and domestic partners Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s weird obsession with lesbians, especially ones that look like Margaret Qualley. Following “Drive-Away Dolls,” they return with “Honey Don’t!,” yet another very blah entry in their supposed sapphic noir trilogy.

Continue reading “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” »

Since Disney is resolved to mine and recycle all its animated I.P. into live action, DreamWorks is also joining in on the act – or at least that’s the logical conclusion that redditors on the r/DreamWorks sub are already drawing. The studio is so gung ho about the odds for the “How to Train Your Dragon” live-action remake that a sequel is already in the pipeline for 2027.

Continue reading “The Way of the Dragon” »

“The Phoenician Scheme” is, for better or worse, an archetypal Wes Anderson movie. The Cannes Film Festival competition entry is, once again, a timeless motion storybook about affluent eccentrics that’s symmetrical, pastel and droll. While Mr. Anderson’s rigorous mise en scène is always to be admired, telling a tale like this in the techbro oligarchy era is a choice – sort of like the cinematic equivalent of let them eat cake.

Continue reading “Beyond the Dreams of Avarice” »

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” »

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” »

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” »

“Wolfs” is the new action-comedy starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney and directed by Jon Watts, who is responsible for the last three “Spider-Man” movies. It should get some butts in seats on these names alone; here we have two of Hollywood’s surviving movie stars who’ve earned their stripes before the industry’s almost complete pivot to IPs in an effort to draw box office. But these household names and their screen personae can be a blessing and sometimes a curse. Case in point: “Wolfs.”

Continue reading “The Odd Couple” »

After centuries of conflict and decades of occupation by the latest foreign army, a country picks up the pieces. Local politics reforms; young men look for work; a diminished government takes stock of its military equipment to work out which guns function and which might fall apart when anyone pulls the trigger. It also ponders, in this case, what to do with $7 billion-worth of the most advanced efficient killing technology in existence, left behind by the United States. For this is Afghanistan in 2021: the weapons are those given to the Afghan government by the U.S. before the latter withdrew chaotically and the former fell apart; and the people finding the stuff left behind are the Taliban.

Continue reading “Arms and the Men” »

A movie that revolves around two Georgians in Istanbul, Turkey, looking for someone they know, “Crossing” is very reminiscent of “Central Station.” Ain’t nothing wrong with that! The Walter Salles film is a masterpiece that others should aspire to emulate. It also sets the bar impossibly high.

Continue reading “Trans Mission” »