As an act of synergy, the Beyonce-directed Disney+ release Black is King feels natural, perhaps even inevitable. At this point, Beyonce has successfully built herself into a massive entertainment brand, one that can conceivably hang alongside the immense Disney conglomerate. Indeed, few brands, companies,…
“Sweet” and “gentle” are two unlikely descriptors with which to anoint a Seth Rogen flick (outside of the Kung Fu Panda series), and yet their application absolutely fits the comedian’s latest venture, HBO’s An American Pickle. Advertised as a raucous, high-concept comedy, featuring Rogen…
Taking as his subject the Japanese company Family Romance LLC, director Werner Herzog returns to offer a work widely labelled as ‘strange’ by the media that renders the line between real and artificial indistinct. Titled as it is — Family Romance LLC, after the company — the film plays out…
Another in an emerging subgenre of films featuring Tom Hanks in desperate situations, Greyhound is a visually clean, tactically-minded, and workmanlike effort from Aaron Schneider. Two things set Greyhound apart: its clean visual geometry and its narrative economy. We’re all prepared for a WW2…
Hamilton barely qualifies as a film, losing much of what makes it a stage success in translation, and its historical revisionism feels much murkier in 2020 America. In New York, during the 19th century, there was Broadway, which catered to New York’s more affluent…
The Old Guard navigates familiar genre terrain but with enough punch to put the hetero white male actioner ethos on notice. Every big-budget action flick should be as effortlessly entertaining as The Old Guard. Written by Greg Rucka, adapted from his own comic book co-created…
Ever since H.G. Wells unleashed The Time Machine upon the world in 1895, artists have used the conceit to impart important life lessons, waxing broadly on everything from mortality to regret to the meaning of existence. Wells was the first to offer a science-based…
There is more than a bit of irony to be found in the fact that the new Will Ferrell/Netflix comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is being released in 2020, the first year since the singing competition’s inception in 1956 that…
Olivier Assayas produced a stunningly idiosyncratic series of works in the 2010s, even by his typically eclectic standards. From the mammoth Carlos to the autobiographical Something in the Air to the cryptic chamber dramas Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper, Assayas seemed to be searching for new forms, new avenues…
Spike Lee’s newest joint, Da 5 Bloods, makes perfectly clear its influences when, within the first five minutes, the camera pans out from a giant poster of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Vietnam War treatise Apocalypse Now, itself a spin on Joseph Conrad’s high school…
