Festival de Cannes
MOVIE REVIEW
The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
“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.
Michael Muller/52nd New York Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Inherent Vice (2014)
Let the conspiracy theorizing begin: Paul Thomas Anderson must not have gotten over “There Will Be Blood” losing the Oscar race to the much inferior “No Country for Old Men.” That would explain him going all Coen brothers on us with his latest, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice.” Inherently a Coenesque film noir, it features an uncannily Coenesque universe of cartoonish oddballs and a distinctive vernacular.
Marvel
MOVIE REVIEW
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Risky: It’s a word that’s been used almost relentlessly in relation to Marvel’s new kids on the block — a huge gamble on a part of the Marvel universe that until now was considered niche, unknown to all but the hard-core fans and tricky to translate onto film.
The universe is complex; the factions many and varied; and the characters are more than a little eccentric. It was an accident waiting to happen, but sometimes wonderful things happen in the most unexpected of places.
Let’s cut to the chase — “Guardians of the Galaxy” is a riot. Blistering action, sometimes dizzying especially in 3-D, a smart script and the kind of love-hate relationships and whip-crack dialogue you might find in an episode of “Firefly.”
MOVIE REVIEW
7 Days in Havana (2012)
Rezo Films
Portmanteau anthology films — not exactly fashionable, but never quite extinct either — enjoy a shot in the arm every few years from producer Emmanuel Benbihy's Cities of Love franchise, the cycle that has so far produced "Paris, je t'aime" and "New York, I Love You." But Mr. Benbihy's all-star bite-size format feels like a shallower option than the approach tried in "7 Days in Havana," which lets seven diverse directors get their teeth into longer-form stories all penned by the same Cuban screenwriter, Leonardo Padura. The aim is to get under the skin of a city with enough juice in its veins to power any seven stories and another 70 to boot.
MOVIE REVIEW
Che (2008)
Daniel Daza/IFC Films
The complicated life of Ernesto “Che” Guevara — idealistic doctor, determined revolutionary, postmortem counter-cultural symbol — is fodder enough for dozens of movies, so it’s no surprise that Steven Soderbergh decided to make two. The magnum opus of a director increasingly drawn towards experimentalism, the nearly five-hour “Che” divides into “The Argentine” and “Guerilla,” with each focused on the defining periods of Che’s career as a revolutionary. Experiencing the “roadshow” version – in which the two films are combined in one sitting with a 15-minute intermission – can be taxing, but there’s no questioning the scope and depth of this achievement.