David Sims | The Atlantic

Steven Soderbergh’s Strange, Surprising Heist Movie

2026-04-10T17:13:17-04:00

Julian Sklar spends most of his workday performing on camera. Not for anyone important; the cantankerous artist (played by Ian McKellen), the protagonist of Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, The Christophers, is recording jokey Cameos for eager fans. Facing a ring-lit iPhone, he rambles about his fading career with chipper bumptiousness. Julian, the viewer quickly learns, is guarding a series of unfinished masterpieces in his house that he refuses to complete or sell, and his greedy children want their hands on his stash either way. His kids have thus concocted a scheme: Hire someone to work as their father’s assistant, secretly finish the paintings under his nose, and make a profit.

This being a Soderbergh movie, one might hear that premise and expect a caper—he directed Ocean’s Eleven (and two of its sequels), after all. He’s a master of the heist movie, and what Sklar’s useless kids, Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Gunning), are engineering is a whimsical, intimate theft. They bring in an unheralded artist named Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), who says she can imitate Julian’s style enough to finish his famous collection of portraits: the Christophers, named after their mysterious young subject. But what distinguishes the movie is how quickly it abandons the initial stakes. As Lori entwines herself within Julian’s odd, crusty retired life, the film becomes something much deeper than the genre’s typical slick tale about a thief pulling off the job of the century; it becomes a meditation on the relationship between art and commerce.

The Christophers is Soderbergh’s most plainly emotional story in years—and he’s been pumping out many of late. Ever since the director came back from a self-proclaimed retirement with 2017’s Logan Lucky (an excellent heist film), he’s been working at a furious pace, usually on a small scale, and hopping from genre to genre with finessed ease. That stretch has included the horror-thrillers Unsane and Kimi, the crime drama No Sudden Move, the spy romance Black Bag, and the haunted-house movie Presence. The Christophers introduces itself as another indie spin on a familiar conceit, then heads in a much more empathetic direction than Soderbergh’s usual portrayal of burglars on the down-low.

[Read: The films Steven Soderbergh watches on a loop]

Coel, however, is the wild card. Where McKellen effortlessly conjures a warm presence, Coel has an incredibly distinctive on-screen manner that unsettles as much as it compels. (Her shattering work in I May Destroy You, as a woman repressing an emotional breakdown, comes to mind.) Lori seems to be a bit of a blank slate, both to Julian’s bumbling children and to Julian himself, who thinks Lori has been hired as his assistant to help manage his affairs and sort through the paintings littering his crumbling abode. He clocks that she’s an artist too, but not one who has ascended to celebrity status, as he had at her age; when he prattles on about his colorful past and opines about the contemporary art world’s descent into rubbish, she reacts impassively. McKellen can make a terrific meal out of just a few grunts and groans, spending whole scenes mumbling about nothing in particular; meanwhile, Coel comes across as impenetrable, yet alluringly so.

The playing field is leveled when, quickly enough, Julian realizes that Lori is interested in the Christophers. The set of portraits haunts Julian’s attic, sitting in an empty bathtub in their partial states. And so an endearing psychological dance starts to unfold between the two characters: Julian is insistent on destroying these works that his admirers around the world seem so interested in learning about, and Lori affects not caring about them at all. Her motivation for saving them, though, is more than just the money she might earn from finishing them herself—it’s cracking whatever secret Julian is guarding about why he doesn’t want anything to do with them anymore.

[Read: The man who owned 181 Renoirs]

Every time I thought I’d figured out the direction of the writer Ed Solomon’s script, The Christophers would make a surprising shift, tweaking the balance in Julian and Lori’s tête-à-tête or peeling back new layers to Lori’s intentions for embedding herself in Julian’s life. McKellen lands every snippy bon mot and backhanded compliment that Julian doles out, but Coel makes every crack in Lori’s facade really count, as the mystery behind her commitment to Julian unfurls. Julian’s shambling charm wears her down, the elder statesman challenging his younger peer’s view on their industry. The dynamic keeps the film from ever feeling too cramped or quiet, and the characters from ever being held at too far a remove.

It would be nice to see Soderbergh create on a larger scale again; he remains one of America’s most talented filmmakers, and his blockbusters always stood out amid Hollywood pablum. But it’s worth paying attention to his run of smaller efforts too, which allow him to play in many different sandboxes and show off what makes him so special as a director. As is typical of a Soderbergh production, The Christophers doesn’t waste an ounce of its limited resources; the director always knows exactly how to keep the viewer on the hook while allowing the story’s emotions room to breathe. The real heist of The Christophers is that Soderbergh snuck such a bittersweet tale into cinemas, dressed up as a silly caper.

The Worst Possible Moment to Rethink Your Relationship

2026-04-03T16:45:34-04:00

The drama of The Drama isn’t a total secret—if you’re looking to spoil the button-pushing premise for yourself, a quick Google search will do the trick. But the writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s new film hinges on the viewer’s reaction to one character’s shocking revelation. The film doesn’t linger on its provocation, however; instead it sits with the moment’s ramifications in ways both darkly funny and sneakily challenging. Whether it tickles or offends, The Drama seems intent on generating a strong reaction from everyone who sees it.

And with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as its stars, many people will likely go see it. Both actors are fond of taking some risks in the projects they pick, and this time they’re rolling the dice with Borgli. The Norwegian filmmaker’s last effort was Dream Scenario, a surreal comedy that never quite gelled. The Drama thankfully has a tighter focus. Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) seem to be an ideal couple, well matched in looks and career—he’s a bumbling but handsome British museum director; she is a spunky, beautiful bookstore clerk. That impression changes when, days before their nuptials, while she and Charlie hang out with friends, Emma shares a dark story from her past, throwing her fiancé into a deep existential crisis.

What she tells them is crucial, and not just as a way to get the plot rolling. Emma’s history is jarring, rooted in her uncomfortable experiences as a teenager. Charlie isn’t sure how reliable she is as a narrator of her earlier misdeeds, and neither is the audience. That disconnect is the point of Charlie’s panic—can you ever really know someone? Even the person you’re planning to spend the rest of your life with? Emma’s past behavior is very specific and horrifying to consider, yet what makes The Drama broadly appealing is Charlie’s anxiety about it. Anyone who’s even been adjacent to planning a wedding of any size has borne witness to what this couple is going through: pondering what fond memories to put in their vows, what friends they should pick to give speeches, how to present their coupledom within the expectations of matrimony. Borgli has nasty fun with that pressure (an obnoxious photographer, played by Zoë Winters, is a highlight), before really twisting the knife with Emma’s big admission.

[Read: The existential terror of monogamy]

That comes at a dinner table with Emma and Charlie’s best friends, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim). Rachel dares the group to reveal “the worst thing” they’ve ever done, then reacts with total revulsion when Emma actually divulges something alarming. Weddings are designed to portray the most manicured vision of a couple, but Borgli wants his viewers to reckon with a question: What secrets could everyone involved—including the guests and members of the wedding party—have buried to protect that image? Zendaya, who has the more dramatic role, deftly captures the growing isolation that comes with her confession; she constantly looks on the verge of either vomiting or scratching her skin off once her friends and fiancé begin to perceive her differently.

Pattinson is Zendaya’s incredibly funny foil. He leans into full buffoonery, stumbling over furniture and stammering every other line like he’s Hugh Grant from Four Weddings and a Funeral on turbo mode. It’s a sweetly observed take on gentle masculinity coming unhinged, and stands among the best performances Pattinson has ever given. Since hitting it big with Twilight (as the longed-for romantic lead), the actor seems to be most interested in attacking the concept of alpha heroism in every way he can—for example, as the dirtbag grifter he played in Good Time and the Looney Tunes–voiced grunt worker in Mickey 17. In The Drama, Pattinson embodies Charlie as the model of tame, harmless Brit charm, and the minute the actor has built his character up, he clearly takes perverse delight in unraveling him.

But Borgli isn’t just delivering a biting satire on the ultimate case of cold feet. He also offers little snippets of Emma’s past in flashback to chew over, and leaves it to the viewer to decide what is or isn’t forgivable. Her transgression is one of the worst things imaginable; in a way, what Emma is hiding stems from a societal ill that gets papered over every day. The Drama doesn’t know how to solve that problem. It does know that there’s a wicked sport in picking away at it.

A Boring Video Game I Can’t Put Down

2026-03-31T17:06:09-04:00

It probably won’t shock you to learn that the best-selling game of 2026 thus far is not about the mundane activity of running a video store. Yet for me, it might as well be: Retro Rewind, an indie exercise in retail management, has captured my attention as much as the real global chart-topper, Resident Evil Requiem. That latest entry in the smash-hit horror franchise is exceptionally sleek, with gory action and a discomfiting atmosphere. In Retro Rewind, meanwhile, zero zombies are slain, no conspiracies uncovered; the biggest crisis the player faces is the phone ringing while they’re trying to make change for a customer. It’s a simple experience that has nonetheless completely gripped me.

Retro Rewind is the latest in a category called “store simulators”—games that basically create bottled versions of hourly-wage drudgery. Set in the ’90s, the game tasks players with such activities as stocking shelves, manning the checkout counter, and balancing the daily books; sometimes a videotape needs to be rewound, or a patron disputes a late fee. The graphics are cutesy, if basic, and the movies available to rent are fictional. I’m not the only one who, despite the game’s seemingly bare-bones offerings, can’t stop playing it—on Steam, the popular gaming marketplace, Retro Rewind was a surprising entrant in the top-10 best-sellers chart, debuting at No. 1. Making this accomplishment even more impressive is the fact that, while today’s biggest games can have a development staff of thousands, Retro Rewind was created by just two people.

The game’s success lies in pushing a gentle-but-distinct nostalgia button for a generation missing the experience of visiting the local rental hut. At least, that’s what appealed to me about it: Video-rental stores were quintessential third places of my youth, where I could browse for hours without much trouble. I would take an armful of VHS boxes off the shelves, puzzling over whatever promotional blurbs and fuzzy pictures had been cramped onto the back. In an era when carousels of streaming-service options are bland and overwhelming, I’ve longed for the slower pace of brick-and-mortar shops, which are now much harder to come by.

[Read: The game that shows we’re thinking about history all wrong]

Retro Rewind exists to scratch that itch—sort of. The gameplay, for one, doesn’t actually revolve around browsing. When I started the game and set up my modest shop, I endeavored as mightily as I could to mimic the stores of my youth, going heavy on wood paneling and dark carpet. (If you want to feel like you’re back in a ’90s-era Blockbuster, there are plenty of brighter design options available.) But once I opened the doors, my experience was a whirlwind of retail nightmares I had largely buried in the 20 years since I had last worked an actual cash register. Much of the in-game day, which lasts at most 15 minutes, is spent pinging between attending to the growing line of customers, sorting the video returns piling up on the counter, and answering the busy office phone. The word contactless has no meaning in Retro Rewind’s world; patrons pay in cash, and they expect exact change. The events are thrilling only in their pure mundanity.

Even the brief moments of calm, usually right before the evening rush, are too transient to enjoy. There are times when I have spent 10 seconds pondering if I should rearrange some shelves, only for a group of people to walk in and comb through what’s available. The level of stress the game conjures rivals that of the new Resident Evil installment, in which a young woman armed with only her wits and a pistol faces down ravenous monsters. Somehow, that adventure is nonetheless objectively filled with far more moments of peace and quiet than Retro Rewind ever really allows. The progress in Resident Evil Requiem is scripted; I’m moving through predetermined levels and defeating bosses. In Retro Rewind, the fear comes from a daily existential crisis of how ambitious I want to be: Do I simply hang out forever in my tiny store or expand it, opening myself up to new dimensions of stress?

Lots of the other popular retail simulators try to re-create this classic local-shop vibe, and a rival video-store game even was released around the same time that Retro Rewind was. But that effort, which has received fewer plaudits, has a much broader premise, extending the world beyond the register and including more traditional role-playing elements. Retro Rewind hinges on its limitations; like an episode of Severance, it’s set only at your character’s workplace, their life outside of it irrelevant. The day ends when the shop door closes, and the next begins with the player character walking back into it. The only major difference from the day before is that there might be a new release to stock.

[Read: The Amazonification of everything, now as a video game]

As video games have expanded in scope and budget, developing small-scale titles has also become easier; creators are able to market their work directly to players. The level of attention Retro Rewind has received, however, is pretty rare on the indie front. There are much glossier options out there providing a similar kind of tranquil, repetitive experience, including farming games such as Stardew Valley and the Harvest Moon series; games where you maintain cartoony towns (think Animal Crossing); and the juggernaut that is Minecraft, the ultimate indie game that could. The newest Pokémon spin-off, Pokémon Pokopia, swaps pitting the beloved fantasy monsters against one another in battle with tending to their habitats.

All of these offerings have some appeal to me, and I’ve dipped my toe into digging tunnels in Minecraft and collecting furniture in Animal Crossing. Those games tend to grow old, however, because they are designed to never end: I can always build more, accumulate extra goods, and unlock fancier upgrades. The developers of Retro Rewind are already contemplating what an expansion could include (DVDs, perhaps). Though I keep waiting to hit a wall with Retro Rewind, I haven’t yet—and instead of doing my taxes, catching up on real-life work, or sending emails, I find I’m happier spending 20 more minutes stocking virtual shelves. After all, real chores are no match for the digital ones; only the latter can actually level me up.

A Radical Message for a Kids’ Movie

2026-03-26T19:05:24-04:00

My daughter is now of the age where she will go see any new animated film in a theater, which means that again and again, I encounter a very specific utopian vision from the world of children’s entertainment: Wouldn’t it be nice if all of the animals lived together in harmony? The theme is certainly a knock-on effect from Zootopia, the 2016 smash hit whose sequel was the highest-grossing American film of 2025. But that success also led to the sci-fi woodland antics of The Wild Robot; the Oscar-winning, postapocalyptic vision of feline collaboration in Flow; and the paean to basketball teamwork that was this year’s Goat. Now there’s Hoppers, the latest blockbuster Pixar film, which follows a girl who beams her brain into a beaver robot in the hope of saving a beloved habitat.

I expected Hoppers to offer some fanciful twist in the manner of those other movies. Take the Zootopia series and Goat, in which animals exist in a human-free world and play our roles: They don clothes, earn money, and defy their basic instincts in order to maintain their weird, civilized societies. Each of those films also features a plucky, diminutive hero who succeeds in the face of naysayers—an easy figure for any kid watching to root for. In Zootopia, the main character (a rabbit named Judy Hopps) becomes a police officer despite the fact that, as a bunny, she’s seen as “prey” rather than “predator.” In Goat, the pygmy goat Will Harris is the first “small” to play a super-intense version of basketball against teams of elephants, giraffes, and other big creatures. But if these movies are progressive allegories of beings transcending their differences, then Hoppers is a surprisingly blunt pushback to that notion. Its advertising promises goofy hijinks amid an enclave of diverse species whose ecosystem is threatened by humans. The movie, in actuality, is refreshingly mordant about what might really happen if prey and predators were to try banding together: Their efforts would immediately devolve into a despairing, even political quagmire.

Hoppers is set in a reality that more closely resembles our own than that of other animal-centered films, and it even has a human protagonist. Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda) lives in Beaverton, Oregon, and fights to save the idyllic forest glade that she often visited with her grandmother when she was growing up. The glade has mysteriously emptied of wildlife just before a highway is set to be built straight through it. Mabel, now a college student, hijacks her professor’s experimental new technology to “hop” into an artificial beaver body, which allows her to communicate with animals—so that she can coax the missing critters back home. (It’s silly, yes; just go with it.)

[Read: A cartoon gateway to real-world issues]

Mabel quickly realizes that the glade’s inhabitants have not left of their own accord but have been pushed out by the scheming mayor, Jerry (Jon Hamm). Jerry has installed fake trees that emit high-frequency noises to scare them away, allowing him to develop the land as he pleases. Mabel’s mission seems clear and appropriately legible for a children’s film: She simply has to mobilize the animals in protest, dismantle Jerry’s devices, and restore peace to her beloved meadow. But the underlying message of Hoppers is that the strange animal collective Mabel is working with is no well-oiled machine. The movie interrogates the limits of collective action: Mabel and her furry buddies do manage to save the glade, yet they achieve more chaos than progress in the meantime.

In response to their home being invaded, the glade’s various groups of fauna have each anointed a friendly “king” to lead them. The mammals are led by a chipper naïf of a beaver named George (Bobby Moynihan), who insists that everyone can still live in harmony even as their territory shrinks. Mabel is the incensed revolutionary, whereas George is the establishment incrementalist, working to plug holes on a steadily sinking ship and refusing to fight back against the people who have taken their land. Hoppers is about their two viewpoints meeting in the middle: Mabel is correct that George is sticking his head in the sand a little bit; George, however, is correct that the animals can’t just get everything they want through protest.

That perspective struck me as an amusingly pragmatic one for a cartoon to impart to little kids, and it underscores much of the plot. Mabel, in faux-beaver form, rallies the wildlife to fight Mayor Jerry but sows anarchy in doing so. A megalomaniacal butterfly (Dave Franco) grows obsessed with “squishing” the humans who have killed his kind for so long. A flock of seagulls lifts a shark from the sea so that it can try eating Jerry alive. A wildfire eventually breaks out, requiring some expert dam destruction from George’s fellow beaver pals to just barely save the day. This comic violence is mostly in the name of fun for the children watching, of course, but the lesson Mabel learns from it is clear: Merely knowing that you’re in the right isn’t enough.

[Read: What Pixar should learn from its Elio disaster]

The takeaway here is much more sobering than those of cinema’s other big animal fantasies, in which the hardworking mammalian protagonists tend to triumph over adversity. Hoppers is a much more measured viewing experience, a youth-focused lecture on how we should have a ceiling to our radical hopes and dreams. The core theme also automatically makes it the most interesting work Pixar has put in theaters in years, a sign of what long ago set the studio apart as an animation storytelling powerhouse. Whereas other movies aimed at kids advocate for how being yourself is the best approach to life, Hoppers adds a caveat—that “being yourself” doesn’t mean you’ll get everything you want.

Project Hail Mary Should Be Easier to Root For

2026-03-20T17:39:15-04:00

Here’s how you know Project Hail Mary is a work of science fiction: It’s about the disparate nations of Earth pooling together their resources and intelligence to confront an apocalyptic problem—in this case, the pending death of the sun, due to a mysterious alien substance. The film, co-directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, is based on a novel by Andy Weir published in 2021, when the world was haphazardly confronting the coronavirus pandemic; intentionally or not, the book felt like a nakedly optimistic bit of counterbalance to international chaos and discord. The screen adaptation is similarly heartening, even cheerful—it suggests that a can-do attitude and some cutting-edge technology might be enough to see humanity through calamity. (Ryan Gosling’s sparkling smile and finely tousled hair have been thrown in for good measure.)

Is that perspective naive? Maybe, but Lord and Miller, who previously engineered similarly bouncy adventures such as 21 Jump Street and the Spider-Verse series (which they wrote and produced), are daring audiences to hope against hope. Project Hail Mary, despite its harrowing premise, is a Big Friendly Giant of a movie, told at epic scale and somewhat daunting length (156 roomy minutes). It’s the kind of dazzling-looking, all-ages adventure that’s become rare in Hollywood: a grown-up story that kids can also enjoy. Lord and Miller’s endeavor here should be easy to root for.

But Project Hail Mary’s self-conscious grandeur does sometimes get in its own way. The loose, sometimes flippant script is stuffed with goofy physical antics and nerdy in-jokes—yet the amusement occurs within a high-stakes, Interstellar-size space drama, outfitted with swanky visual effects and death-defying action sequences. The tonal mash-up is a tough needle to thread, though threading that needle is basically Lord and Miller’s specialty: They managed to invest some emotion and sincerity into a project as ludicrous-sounding as The Lego Movie without sacrificing any of the silliness.

[Read: Hollywood’s star power is shifting]

The directors’ insistence on maintaining a light atmosphere for their story about a world-ending catastrophe nevertheless sometimes set my teeth on edge. I had to remind myself how much worse the vibe could have been: Other filmmakers have fumbled as of late by trying to undermine whatever big-budget yarn they’re spinning with self-referential gags and winks to the audience; it’s as if they’re embarrassed by their source material. Lord and Miller are much more dialed into the pragmatic, chipper nature of Weir’s storytelling. The novelist loves to saddle his protagonists with a seemingly unsolvable problem, then have them roll up their sleeves and get ready to solve it with a good old-fashioned love of science. Lord and Miller, along with Gosling—starring as the one person who may be able to rescue Earth from certain death—are fiercely committed to that level of positivity.

Along those lines, it’s interesting to compare Project Hail Mary with the other big adaptation of a Weir novel, Ridley Scott’s The Martian. The 2015 movie saw Matt Damon playing an astronaut who tries to science his way off Mars, where he’s stuck with limited food or oxygen. Scott’s take was a little heavier on thrills and derring-do than Lord and Miller’s; Damon, although self-deprecating and winsome, still had the posture of an action hero. Gosling, despite his chiseled jaw and prominent biceps, is leaning as far away from that mode as he can. He plays a molecular biologist turned middle-school teacher named Dr. Ryland Grace, who finds himself alone on a spaceship when the story begins. He is plagued by amnesia, and his memory comes to him in bits and pieces, letting the viewer put together alongside Grace how he came to be there. The approach makes him more of an audience surrogate—yes, we eventually learn that he’s something of an expert in peculiar bacteria, but he figures it out slowly enough to be convincing as a lovable goof who’s still making sense of how all the buttons work.

Gosling is great at playing the dashing clown, of course. That talent is what made the flawed-but-fun The Fall Guy watchable; it’s why The Nice Guys is one of the most underrated comedies of the 21st century. Project Hail Mary, in fact, could be called The Nice Space Guy, because that’s how Gosling plays it—Grace is a regular Joe who merely happens to look like a Ken doll and has ridiculously stumbled into becoming the savior of Earth. I could roll my eyes (okay, maybe I did a couple of times), but Gosling is talented enough to make the character just plausible enough. The flashbacks eventually coalesce into backstory: Grace’s goal, he comes to remember, is to stop a species of extraterrestrial microbe that consumes solar energy. An international government coalition sent him as part of a team to a distant star that seems to hold the key, and his crewmates have died on the journey, making Grace the planet’s—and, as he soon learns, the galaxy’s—last hope.

[Read: Ken will never die]

Well, Grace and Rocky. Because although the film is basically a one-man show for Gosling (Sandra Hüller does strong work in flashbacks as Grace’s stiff but well-meaning superior), he spends a lot of it acting alongside an alien buddy called Rocky who is, well, made of rocks; think Baby Yoda, but mineral instead of animal. Rocky is from a world that’s dealing with the same issue, and most of Project Hail Mary’s tension lies in this unlikely pair learning how to communicate and work together to patch things up. The creature, an animatronic puppet, is almost too cute to function; it’s remarkable just how many big-budget sci-fi movies need a cute little guy who is destined to be turned into a toy (Baby Groot also comes to mind). But if I’m applauding Project Hail Mary for trying to be a good time for the whole family, perhaps I shouldn’t get too Grinchy about this latest example.

That was my overall takeaway from Project Hail Mary: Anytime Grace donned another T-shirt with a groany pun on it or figured out how to do a high five with his pebbly pal, I had to nudge my more cynical self in the ribs. This film is not quite the masterpiece its grand visual scale sometimes suggests it’s shooting for. Still, it’s pretty consistently enjoyable, with a message that the viewing public could afford to hear—that we’re better off joining forces than fighting one another. Project Hail Mary says that problem-solving is “for the win,” and who am I to argue with that right now?

What Are the Oscars for, if Not This?

2026-03-16T00:48:29-04:00

The narrative of this year’s Oscars was: how to pick? Between Sinners and One Battle After Another, voters put two majorly successful, critically beloved, star-driven studio releases at the top of the nominations pile. While One Battle After Another had seemed like the odds-on Best Picture favorite for months, Sinners was collecting enough trophies, and getting so much love at precursor ceremonies, that it felt impossible to fully count the film out. The 98th Academy Awards, which came at the end of what felt like a particularly never-ending cycle of discourse and prognostication, did a good job making plenty of room to celebrate both movies sincerely. Yes, One Battle After Another won Best Picture, one of six trophies it won. But Sinners took home four, with its honorees delivering the most powerful speeches of the evening.

Tonight’s ceremony had none of the major dramatic mishaps that have both embarrassed the Academy Awards’ organizers and affirmed the event’s status as must-see live TV. There was no slap, no incorrect naming of a winner; even Adrien Brody humorously acknowledged how he’d rambled on for too long during his Best Actor speech last year. The host, Conan O’Brien, ran a relatively tight ship, seeming even more confident in his second go at the gig after doing a bang-up job the year prior. The show’s only truly awkward thuds were Sean Penn not even bothering to turn up for his historic third acting trophy (reports surfaced he may be in Ukraine) and a few victors being shooed offstage before they could speak into the mic.

By Oscars standards, this all adds up to a pretty chill atmosphere. Many of the recipients who took the stage seemed especially eager to shout out their fellow nominees, acknowledging that everyone in the room likely has a similar goal: to preserve cinema as an art form that mass audiences still care about. Michael B. Jordan, accepting the Best Actor award for Sinners, gave thanks to God, his family, his team, and the movie’s cast and crew, before concluding his lovely speech by expressing gratitude to theatergoers who saw the film again and again when it came out almost a year ago. They were the ones, he said, who helped make the movie into the unexpected box-office phenomenon it became.

[Read: Ryan Coogler doesn’t want to hide anymore]

Jordan’s victory was maybe the most dramatic of the ceremony. The Best Actor category was widely seen as up in the air: After most early attention during the awards season went to Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet, Jordan had gained some momentum with a surprise win at the Actor Awards earlier this month. But watching him take the stage tonight seemed almost a fait accompli; the love for Sinners from the Academy voters felt profound, and was strong enough to power the movie to other big victories even in the face of One Battle After Another’s clear domination. Jordan is an industry veteran who started his career on The Wire, then moved to soap operas and well-liked TV such as Friday Night Lights; now he has joined the rarest air of all, becoming a true A-list superstar with an Oscar to his name, and it was a moment that felt genuinely thrilling to watch live.

Otherwise, the evening was more about anointing talent that was arguably overdue for awards recognition. Paul Thomas Anderson, who won for producing, directing, and writing One Battle After Another, was sitting on 14 career nominations without a win going into the ceremony. As with Christopher Nolan a couple of years prior, the Academy decided now was his moment—solidified by the fact that Anderson had made a trenchant film on a far grander scale than he’d ever worked before, an old-fashioned family epic that was still defined by his spiky sense of humor. But One Battle After Another was not the total juggernaut it could have been: Penn won the movie’s sole acting award, and it also took home Best Editing and the inaugural Best Casting honor.

Along with Best Actor, meanwhile, Sinners won for its screenplay, cinematography, and score, which made for some really memorable speechmaking. Its writer-director, Ryan Coogler, affectionately shouted out his wife and producing partner, Zinzi; its composer, Ludwig Göransson, spoke of his father investing him with a love of blues music from childhood. Most moving was the film’s director of photography, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who became the first woman to earn the Best Cinematography prize—she asked women in the audience to rise to their feet, representing the support she’d had in her journey to success.

Watching her speech was the only moment I wavered on my belief that One Battle After Another would take Best Picture, despite its daunting haul of precursor accolades at several guild awards, the Golden Globes, and the BAFTAs. That slew of prior ceremonies, which begin in late November and, this year, slogged all the way through to March for the Oscars, has become a bit of a chore; sometimes they sap the big show of any real drama, as the same series of winners repeat their speeches ad nauseam. But the audience in the Dolby Theatre had too much affection for, among other films, One Battle After Another and Sinners for this year’s Oscars to ever feel dutiful. To see that kind of big-budget artistry properly lionized, given some of the duds the Academy has recognized in recent years—I’m looking at you, Green Book—felt like a true triumph.

[Read: A hilarious—and poignant—Oscars moment]

The two films’ dominance did mean other worthy nominees were largely snubbed of attention. Marty Supreme’s obvious place for a win was Best Actor, but the narrative had seemingly turned against Chalamet’s fantastic performance in recent weeks because of his idiosyncratic approach to campaigning. (The storm in a teacup over his thoughts on ballet and opera, which came the day voting closed, was likely not a factor, although O’Brien made sure to reference it during his monologue.) I thought the loopy, wonderful Brazilian thriller The Secret Agent might triumph somewhere, most likely in the International Feature category; it lost out there to the Norwegian drama Sentimental Value, which took home its only prize of the night after nine nominations. Jessie Buckley, an ironclad lock, earned Hamnet’s sole trophy in Best Actress, while Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein cleaned up in the craft categories but was a nonfactor anywhere else. Two other films that clawed their way to Best Picture nominations, Bugonia and Train Dreams, were afterthoughts.

But that’s the inevitable result of a ceremony dominated by two big movies, a much rarer situation than one titanic favorite enjoying a major sweep. As Anderson took the stage for his final win of the night, he recalled the incredible Best Picture contenders of 50 years prior, in 1975—Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jaws, Nashville, and Barry Lyndon. “There is no ‘best’ among them. There is just what that mood might be that day,” he said. The 1975 lineup is a hard one to beat, but this year’s roster had a similar robustness to it, and Anderson was wisely paying homage to his film’s closest “rival” in Sinners: There’s no “best” on this stage, just whatever might take your fancy on a particular evening. On this evening, fortune happened to favor him.

This Year’s Oscar Winners Will (And Should) Be …

2026-03-13T18:22:19-04:00

The run-up to the Academy Awards is a fun, ridiculous, and loopy monthslong stretch. It also encourages something vital to Hollywood’s artistic ecosystem: Movie studios, in the hopes of achieving Oscar glory, put money toward more stylistically challenging projects, rather than consistently aiming for the broadest common box-office denominator. But when the ceremony itself finally nears, I find myself desperate for it to be over—especially in a year like this one, when the Winter Olympics have pushed the Oscars into mid-March, extending what already feels like an endless trail of precursor events ahead of the ceremony. My primary note after this awards gantlet: Please hold the Oscars earlier next year.

My exhaustion with awards season itself, however, is mitigated by my appreciation of the films—2025 was an exciting year for cinema; the two Best Picture front-runners (One Battle After Another and Sinners) generated serious fanfare in a time otherwise fraught with industry drama and the politics of corporate mergers. One Battle has enjoyed overwhelming praise since its September release, but Sinners—which was in theaters nearly a year ago—has never faded from the conversation. The result is some down-to-the-wire races in several major categories.

Here are my final predictions of who will—and who ought to—take home the “big eight” awards this year, in advance of Sunday’s ceremony. Conan O’Brien is returning as host, and the broadcast begins on ABC and Hulu at 7 p.m. eastern time.

Best Actress

Nominees: Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Kate Hudson (Song Sung Blue), Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value), Emma Stone (Bugonia)

This trophy has been Jessie Buckley’s to lose since Hamnet premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August. A Best Picture nominee, the period romantic drama seems most likely to be recognized in this category, and Buckley is the perfect example of an ascendant star whom the Academy loves to reward. It helps that her work in Hamnet is very strong: heavy, steeped in personal tragedy, and deeply felt. My favorite performance of the year was Rose Byrne’s spiky and angsty portrayal of motherhood in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but that movie is likely too polarizing for her to win. The prize is Buckley’s, her feelings about cats notwithstanding.

Who Will Win: Jessie Buckley

Who Ought to Win: Rose Byrne

Best Actor

Nominees: Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme), Leonardo DiCaprio (One Battle After Another), Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon), Michael B. Jordan (Sinners), Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent)

This could be the night’s tightest category, composed of a powerhouse lineup of five terrific actors. The pick seems to have come down to two inarguable Hollywood stars: Timothée Chalamet of Marty Supreme and Michael B. Jordan of Sinners. Both actors are fairly new entrants to the A-list, and equally committed to working with up-and-coming auteurs (Josh Safdie and Ryan Coogler, respectively); Chalamet’s and Jordan’s status helped get the directors’ blockbuster original features made. Each of them gave a masterful performance—Chalamet a loud blend of comedy and anxiety; Jordan playing twins, one a live-wire charmer and the other more smoldering. Awards prognosticators long presumed Chalamet to be ahead; he came close to taking the Oscar last year for the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and muscled Marty Supreme to box-office success through his unorthodox approach to publicity. But momentum has shifted to Jordan in the closing weeks, thanks to his more subdued affect on the red carpets and a triumphant win at the Actor Awards earlier this month. Will that be enough? I’m leaning toward yes. The darkest of dark horses, though, is Wagner Moura, who was wonderful in the Brazilian thriller The Secret Agent. He gave a remarkable turn as a grieving political dissident, for which he collected a surprise Golden Globe, and the film itself is up for four awards—suggesting its popularity particularly among international voters.

Who Will Win: Michael B. Jordan

Who Ought to Win: Wagner Moura

[Read: The 10 best movies of 2025]

Best Supporting Actress

Nominees: Elle Fanning (Sentimental Value), Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (Sentimental Value), Amy Madigan (Weapons), Wunmi Mosaku (Sinners), Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another)

This is another close contest, whose winner could be taken as an early indication of the Academy members’ preference for Best Picture. Teyana Taylor is electrifying in the first act of One Battle After Another as the character who sets out the dramatic stakes, and her Golden Globes speech was a highlight of this awards season. Wunmi Mosaku’s performance as the estranged wife of one of the twins in Sinners is more quietly pitched, but, similar to Taylor, she is the movie’s emotional engine; she also won the BAFTA for Supporting Actress, and that voting body has significant overlap with the Academy. Still, the leader seems to be Amy Madigan, who provides the frightening punch of the horror film Weapons’ third act. Madigan is an esteemed veteran who’s been a wonderfully wry presence on the campaign trail, and many voters might respond to her comeback narrative: This is her second Oscar nomination, 40 years after she was recognized for Twice in a Lifetime. I’ll predict Madigan, but the relative weirdness of Weapons might keep her at bay—in which case Taylor and Mosaku would both be very worthy choices.

Who Will Win: Amy Madigan

Who Ought to Win: Teyana Taylor

Best Supporting Actor

Nominees: Benicio del Toro (One Battle After Another), Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein), Delroy Lindo (Sinners), Sean Penn (One Battle After Another), Stellan Skarsgård (Sentimental Value)

This category has seen a lot of twists and turns over the many moons of awards season. My personal favorite, the serene Benicio del Toro, won many of the critics’ prizes for his performance as the revolutionary sensei of One Battle After Another. Jacob Elordi’s sensitive take on Frankenstein’s monster, meanwhile, received the Critics’ Choice Award, and Stellan Skarsgård took the Golden Globe. Delroy Lindo was a delightful and unpredictable inclusion, earning his first career nomination after not really popping up in precursor contests. But Sean Penn has had all the momentum of late, which picked up after he won the BAFTA and the Actor Award. He plays the domineering, pathetically grim villain Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw in One Battle, a bold role that could net Penn his third Oscar—but if voters think he’s received enough flowers over the years, I think they’ll opt for Skarsgård, as something of a career acknowledgment.

Who Will Win: Sean Penn

Who Ought to Win: Benicio del Toro

Best Original Screenplay

Nominees: Robert Kaplow (Blue Moon); Jafar Panahi, Nader Saïvar, Shadmehr Rastin, and Mehdi Mahmoudian (It Was Just an Accident); Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme); Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value); Ryan Coogler (Sinners)

Sinners may end up as the runner-up for Best Picture (at least that’s what the betting odds suggest), but it’s the front-runner for this award. Coogler is in pole position to collect his first Oscar in what promises to be a storied Hollywood career. The potential spoiler could be It Was Just an Accident, directed and co-written by the venerated Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi, which critiques his country’s repressive regime in wry, skillful fashion. But I think the desire to justly reward Coogler for his achievement will win out.

Who Will Win: Ryan Coogler

Who Ought to Win: Ryan Coogler

Best Adapted Screenplay

Nominees: Will Tracy (Bugonia), Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein), Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet), Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another), Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar (Train Dreams)

One Battle is an exceptional feat of adaptation that uses only the bones of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland—one of the author’s more straightforward works, though hardly a simple one—to create a gonzo epic. The writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is wild, sometimes rip-roaringly funny, and at other times disturbingly trenchant; it’s also a good old-fashioned family melodrama. Anderson’s expert blending of such disparate tones probably makes him a shoo-in. The runner-up seems to be Hamnet, but that movie received softer support across the nominations (Buckley’s co-star Paul Mescal notably missed out), and Chloé Zhao already has two Oscars to her name.

Who Will Win: Paul Thomas Anderson

Who Ought to Win: Paul Thomas Anderson

[Read: The Oscars are rewarding Hollywood’s big bets]

Best Director

Nominees: Chloé Zhao (Hamnet), Josh Safdie (Marty Supreme), Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another), Joachim Trier (Sentimental Value), Ryan Coogler (Sinners)

Anderson is the favorite for Adapted Screenplay, but he’s probably even more of a lock for Best Director. He’s one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded filmmakers, and has four Best Picture nominations and 14 Oscar nominations total. Yet with zero wins, he’s considered overdue—especially because, as he’s aged (and as the Academy’s voting body has changed), Anderson has grown from an upstart outsider to a much more respected figure. He has a similar narrative to that of Christopher Nolan, who won in this category two years ago for Oppenheimer. Coogler has the slimmest of possibilities, but I think Anderson will pull ahead.

Who Will Win: Paul Thomas Anderson

Who Ought to Win: Paul Thomas Anderson

Best Picture

Nominees: Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams

One Battle After Another has essentially been the presumed winner since Oscar season began. Anderson’s film has amassed a daunting collection of critics’ awards and other trophies that usually suggest broad industry support, including top prizes from the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild, and multiple wins at the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes. The only thing that could work against it at this point is inertia—and enthusiasm for Sinners, a smash hit that picked up the most Oscar nominations this year and seems to engender a similar amount of love in the room at every industry event. Perhaps a major upset is coming, but One Battle has not been deterred from any big prizes yet.

Who Will Win: One Battle After Another

Who Ought to Win: One Battle After Another

*Illustration sources: A24 / Everett; Focus Features / Everett; Neon / Everett; Warner Bros / Everett

The Movie Star Hiding in Plain Sight

2026-03-13T16:34:44-04:00

Look at a list of the highest-grossing actors of all time, and you’ll see a lot of familiar names. The group includes franchise-hopping performers such as Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, and Zoe Saldaña; legacy A-listers such as Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks; and one 74-year-old Swede who has built a bustling, storied career doing a little bit of everything. Stellan Skarsgård, who earned his first Academy Award nomination this year for his role in the Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s family drama Sentimental Value, has been on our screens for decades: He began acting in the late 1960s, before establishing himself as a Hollywood fixture in the mid-’90s. Yet only now has Skarsgård become more than just one of cinema’s most reliable players—he’s also one of its most beloved stars.

The reason for his heightened level of fame could be any number of things. Is it because he’s the dad of an army of talented children, including the actors Alexander, Gustaf, and Bill, who have all settled their own beachheads in American culture? Or is it because of his consistent supporting presence in branded universes such as Marvel, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Dune? Or are people simply charmed by the avuncular grump he dutifully plays on press tours, where he jokes about the “naughty life” he’s led and pokes fun at the bad films he’s made? Skarsgård has portrayed many a villain, curmudgeon, and sad dad on screen, but he’s just as believable as Mamma Mia’s high-kicking, ABBA-singing sailboat enthusiast.

Now he is potentially going to take home an Oscar that would normally serve as something of a career capper, except that his career shows no signs of slowing down. Instead, Hollywood has only just begun to fully deploy Skarsgård’s potential, giving him a place in the mainstream that he likely could not have predicted for himself. The actor spent the ’70s and ’80s churning away in Swedish TV, theater, and indie cinema, building up name recognition in his home nation. But despite some small but memorable appearances in the U.S. hits The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Hunt for Red October, he struggled to translate that success outside of Europe. Skarsgård’s eventual international breakthrough was via an unexpected route: He became a close collaborator of the Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, known for creating work that typically divides audiences.

[Read: A deeply personal film, but not in the way you might think]

Breaking the Waves, von Trier’s beautiful and artfully punishing 1996 melodrama, elevated Skarsgård’s image in America from side character to formidable screen presence. The reception is a funny thing to consider, given how arduous the movie is: Breaking the Waves is centered on Bess (played by Emily Watson), a sweet, devoutly religious woman suffering from unspecified mental trauma. Skarsgård plays her husband, Jan, who works on an oil rig and is paralyzed in an industrial accident. Now impotent as a result, Jan pushes Bess to find new lovers and tell him about her dalliances with them, an odyssey that eventually drives Bess to madness. It’s an unrelenting viewing experience, and Skarsgård’s character is both complex and unsympathetic. Yet Breaking the Waves was an art-house sensation, scoring an Oscar nomination for Watson and nudging Skarsgård into contention for big-budget Hollywood roles.

Skarsgård’s career soon split into two separate paths: In the United States, the actor played secondary roles, usually weary, nervy authority figures, such as the stern mentor (Good Will Hunting) and the persnickety scientist (Deep Blue Sea). Rarely did he land a leading part, save for a turn in the 2004 box-office bomb Exorcist: The Beginning. In Scandinavian cinema, meanwhile, he had become a big name. Instead of men on the sidelines, Skarsgård played stiff guys with some moral dimension to them—the troubled military man, the struggling cop. He also was given the chance to play against type, and he demonstrated a range relatively untapped in America. (Take, for instance, some of the characters he portrayed in other von Trier films: a rapist in Dogville; an obnoxious figure adjacent to a woman’s dark sexual odyssey in the two-part epic Nymphomaniac.)

But not much of his oeuvre suggested the more whimsical turn he’d take and maintain in his later years—a shift that really arrived with 2008’s Mamma Mia, in which Skarsgård plays one of three potential fathers to Amanda Seyfried’s character, Sophie. (He was also the one actual Swedish connection to the ABBA music that everyone is singing.) The movie hit big with audiences worldwide, who suddenly saw Skarsgård as the fun older man. He embraced the image, which led to more roles in that vein: a befuddled professor in Thor, its sequels, and two Avengers installments, and a silly, puffed-up duke in Disney’s Cinderella remake. He even parodied the irreverent director Werner Herzog on HBO’s Entourage.

[Read: The sad dads of Hollywood]

His kids’ emergence in the industry around the same time, particularly the chiseled Alexander, helped reinforce this image both on- and off-screen. The eldest Skarsgård wasn’t just another European fixture to slot into a prestige project; he was the venerable head of a thespian family. The patriarch vibe comes out especially in press appearances, during which he is candid, loudly political, and happy to take on sacred cows—he raised some eyebrows of late for critiquing the Swedish filmmaking legend Ingmar Bergman as a “manipulative” Nazi sympathizer. He also participates in interviews with his sons in which he somewhat jokily plays into the Nordic stereotype of the demanding father. With his family in tow, he’s conjured a sense of relatability—as a dad many of us know or have.

Perhaps that’s why Sentimental Value has resonated particularly strongly with awards voters. Skarsgård’s role in the film mirrors many people’s conception of the actor himself: He plays a director whose strained relationship with his children serves as the movie’s dramatic engine; too often, they come second to his artistic pursuits. It’s a strong performance, but if he wins, the award will undoubtedly be partly in recognition of his ever-growing filmography. In fact, Skarsgård’s most compelling performance last year was not in Sentimental Value but in a franchise: the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, in which he played the two-faced spymaster Luthen Rael. The character captured the twin strengths the actor has cultivated over several decades: Luthen is showy and whimsical in public but steely and ruthless in private, unafraid to sacrifice loved ones for the greater good. Skarsgård switched between these modes with just a flash of teeth or a furrowed brow, quietly reminding viewers that his talents have been hiding in plain sight—he’s an industry veteran who’s still able to surprise us.

Hollywood’s Star Power Is Shifting

2026-03-08T07:00:00-04:00

Hollywood has been fretting over the death of the movie star for nearly a decade now, and the fear is not unfounded: The golden era when the likes of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, and Denzel Washington could coax audiences to the cinema with sheer name recognition seems to be passing into memory without enough proper successors to take their places. For a while, franchise sequels, which produced a whole new group of leading men and women, appeared set to replace the classic star vehicle. Many of these works, however, are built around familiar characters, not the people portraying them; actors such as “the Chrises” (Hemsworth, Evans, Pine, and Pratt) have at times struggled to maintain their commercial success outside of the popular intellectual property that launched them.

Now the industry is in a bit of a strange no-man’s-land. Once-reliable bets, such as established brands and genres, are floundering somewhat, and stars seem to matter less and less. But this moment feels artistically exciting, if financially risky: During Presidents’ Day weekend, none of the top five films at the box office was a sequel, and only one, Wuthering Heights, was based on an existing property. Odd phenomena such as Iron Lung, a horror movie self-funded by a popular YouTuber that has grossed nearly $50 million worldwide, also suggest that there are innovative ways to appeal to theatergoers. Another emerging trend skews more classic Hollywood—directors, particularly those who might be considered auteurs for their well-defined aesthetic and storytelling style, have begun to matter just as much as the actors attached to them. Yes, 2026 will bring a new Avengers installment, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and a Michael Jackson biopic. What’s atop the Rotten Tomatoes list of the year’s most anticipated releases, though? A note that Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan have new movies on the way.

For decades, if there was one filmmaker most viewers could identify, it was Spielberg. In the 1970s and ’80s, the director of smash hits including E.T. and Jaws established himself as such a force that his mere participation as an executive producer (on movies as varied as Gremlins and An American Tail) functioned as an automatic guarantee of quality. A few other blockbuster figures came close to ascending to that status in the years that followed, including James Cameron and Peter Jackson; certain indie breakouts, such as Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee, became minor celebrities through sheer force of personality. But lately, as Hollywood has struggled to sell its films on the backs of big stars, hard-core cinephiles—the type of moviegoer who buys tickets months in advance and logs everything they’ve seen on Letterboxd—have begun emphasizing the role of the director in deciding what to watch. Studios now seem to be picking up on this interest: The prerelease discussion of Nolan’s version of The Odyssey, for instance, primarily frames the movie as his grandest effort yet, despite the presence of A-listers such as Matt Damon, Zendaya, and Tom Holland.

Spielberg’s name, after all these years, still holds cachet—it is the only one above the title on the teaser poster for the sci-fi drama Disclosure Day, out this summer. Yet even lesser-known filmmakers have become a selling point: The latest reboot of The Mummy is titled Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, making the young writer-director sound like the next cause célèbre in that genre (regardless of whether critics agree or not). And Wuthering Heights, which topped the box office in its opening weekend, was prominently touted as the latest work from the director Emerald Fennell, despite the fact that her two prior films had made only about $20 million apiece worldwide. Fennell’s penchant for love-it-or-hate-it erotic melodrama has distinguished her work among moviegoers; the resulting cultural fascination has helped her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel pull in $150 million globally thus far.

Why studios are clinging to this kind of branding is easy to see. The two most Oscar-nominated films this year are Sinners and One Battle After Another, R-rated dramas from the directors Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson. Neither movie, on the surface, sounds like an obvious success: Sinners is a music-filled vampire story set in 1932 Mississippi; One Battle After Another is a nearly three-hour-long, generation-spanning, political action-dramedy. Yet they won over not only critics but also wide audiences. Among the year’s other big-budget productions, the films stood out to cinemagoers as idiosyncratic and stylish, with resonant themes of family and community. They captured each director at a professional turning point as well: Anderson has received Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture, for his previous work, yet he had rarely broken through to a mainstream audience—let alone made something at this scale. Sinners, meanwhile, was Coogler’s leap out of the world of franchises (he made Creed and the two Black Panther installments). The movies’ highly personal nature meant that Coogler and Anderson were as prominently discussed as their superstar leads, Michael B. Jordan and Leonardo DiCaprio.

[Read: Ryan Coogler didn’t want to hide anymore]

In the particular case of Coogler, placing him front and center in Sinners’ marketing makes sense. He’s a young, vibrant, charming presence; he recently went viral for his paean to Freestyle soda machines on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast. He also talks about cinema nerdery—film stock, aspect ratios—in an accessible way. Studios have clearly taken notice of how warmly viewers respond to this more inside-baseball approach, as promotional campaigns and social-media collaborations that happily lean into technical language have grown more common in recent years. Back in 2023, Christopher Nolan sold younger audiences on Oppenheimer by detailing the mechanics of IMAX-footage projection in clips with Reece Feldman, a TikTok creator whose film-production-themed videos has established him as Hollywood’s “Gen-Z whisperer.” Ahead of One Battle After Another’s release in September, Warner Bros. trotted Anderson out to explain the VistaVision cameras he used to shoot it, drumming up excitement among the average moviegoer about a niche type of cinematography; the studio even worked with a handful of theaters to show it in the vintage format. And the filmmaking team Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, regarded for their visual maximalism and subversive storytelling, just broke down the bespoke theater experiences planned for Project Hail Mary, their upcoming sci-fi movie—including roller coaster–like immersive options.

Obviously, having major stars involved is still valuable. Timothée Chalamet, who leads the Oscar-nominated movie Marty Supreme, is a rare younger actor to qualify as a household name—a fact that he used to Marty Supreme’s advantage by dominating the press tour. Anderson, whose previous films were made with modest funding, would likely never have gotten One Battle’s blockbuster-size budget approved without DiCaprio’s attachment. Project Hail Mary has Ryan Gosling on board as part of its big push, which includes a Saturday Night Live–hosting gig and a (faux) Jeopardy appearance. Gosling, despite his level of fame, nonetheless has only two major hits to his credit: Barbie and La La Land. Meanwhile, in Julia Roberts’s heyday, even a midsize movie for grown-ups could have made $100 million with her name behind it. Gosling’s presence matters, and his work selling a movie will likely garner any studio the vital “impressions”—attention on social media, podcasts, YouTube—that it seeks. But packaging actors, or even popular franchises, with a director known for their specific point of view is becoming a prime selling point, upping a project’s artistic bona fides.

Perhaps the best example is Barbie. Warner Bros. and Mattel took the gamble of handing the brand to Greta Gerwig, who had emerged from the micro-indie mumblecore movement before netting Oscar attention with Lady Bird and Little Women. The self-referential pique of Gerwig’s filmmaking style was vital to Barbie’s gigantic success and its awards nominations; meanwhile, her star Margot Robbie’s next project, the romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, vanished without a trace in 2025. Next from Gerwig is an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, the first chronological book in the Narnia saga, which Netflix is using to relaunch the beloved series this Thanksgiving. The previous big-screen versions of Narnia, in the 2000s, were directed by Andrew Adamson and Michael Apted—neither of whom meant much to most ticket-buyers. Narnia was the only name that mattered; now Gerwig’s will be just as important.

[Read: Greta Gerwig’s lessons from Barbie land]

It’s unlikely that Hollywood will ever see a return of the truly freewheeling days of the ’70s, when studios took chances on letting auteurs such as Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and Martin Scorsese reinvent a stuffy system and push storytelling boundaries. Superhero sequels such as Avengers: Doomsday and Supergirl are still major pillars of the 2026 release calendar, along with the new Dune, Super Mario, and Star Wars movies. The overreach of the 2010s saw the industry assume that audiences would always show up to reheated editions of the same genre formulas, only to be proved wrong. Directors whose personal style has become a box-office draw likely won’t be able to fill the financial gap left by audiences’ declining interest in long-running franchises—but for the sake of cinema, trusting the artist is always going to be worth the gamble.

Why on Earth Did Maggie Gyllenhaal Make This Movie?

2026-03-06T16:23:13-05:00

Monster movies come in strange bunches. Vampires dominated the screen in the 2010s, as gritty zombie hordes had the decade before that. Lately, we’re awash in Frankensteins, each adding stylized flavor to Mary Shelley’s novel: Zelda Williams’s goofy high-school version, Lisa Frankenstein; Yorgos Lanthimos’s steampunk reimagining, Poor Things; and Guillermo Del Toro’s faithful-to-a-fault take, currently up for nine Oscars. All used Shelley’s tale to sow sympathy for the creature, a relatable innocent navigating a world they didn’t ask to live in.

Now shambling down the block comes Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a proudly discordant spin on Bride of Frankenstein, the sequel to the classic 1931 Frankenstein movie that probed the titular monster’s desire for a companion. Rebuilding that story around its female lead could have made for a provocatively modern interpretation. Instead, any attempt by Gyllenhaal at conveying a message is drowned out by her film’s overwhelming goofiness.

The Bride! has a little bit of something for everyone: Do you like Fred Astaire musicals? Or throwback gangster pictures? Perhaps you’re in the mood for a girl-power revolution, or maybe you just want to watch a scar-ridden colossus curb-stomp a goon—Gyllenhaal seems to want viewers to have it all, as long as they can tolerate frequent meta-textual references and buckets of gore. The ambition on display reflects other recent Warner Bros. passion projects, such as Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Wuthering Heights, that let exciting directors work on a grand scale, Hollywood timidity be damned. Each of these managed (Wuthering Heights possibly the least) to thread social commentary with entertainment rather seamlessly. But The Bride!, exclamation point included, shows how a filmmaker can end up getting lost in their venture’s size, remembering to throw the big ideas at the audience only right at the end.

The movie is Gyllenhaal’s follow-up to The Lost Daughter, an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel that announced her as a directorial talent. That earlier film, a languid, unsettling thriller, focused on its protagonist’s emotional breakdown during a supposedly tranquil Mediterranean vacation. I was intrigued by the idea of Gyllenhaal taking on Bride of Frankenstein, a movie that’s been remade only slightly less often than other famous horror stories, including Frankenstein. Given Gyllenhaal’s last work, I hoped for something similarly subtle, a meaningful twist on a well-trodden formula.

[Read: The movie that understands the secret shame of motherhood]

Instead, her creation is an amalgam of disparate concepts, brought together in defiance of storytelling logic (and the opinions of test-screen audiences). Jessie Buckley stars as Ida, a gangster’s girl in 1930s Chicago. At the beginning of the film, Ida eats an oyster so slimy that she reacts violently to it and becomes possessed by Mary Shelley herself. Soon enough, she’s been murdered by the lowlifes she hangs out with—but fear not, because across town, Frankenstein’s monster (played by Christian Bale) is trying to find a suitable mate. He and a mad scientist (Annette Bening) dig up Ida’s corpse and zap it back to life.

The plot doesn’t get any simpler from there. But every time a viewer might begin to investigate a hole in the story’s logic, there’s another distracting plot development or act of violence to grasp. How does Shelley exist in the same world as her fictional beast, one might ask? The Bride’s answer: Don’t worry about it! Once Ida is revived, Buckley is rife with tics and guttural asides, switching between rat-a-tat mobster slang and Shelley’s flowery English prose like some postmodern literary Gollum. Bale, lumbering around in impressive makeup, is mournful and sweet as “Frank,” but prone to fits of rage when threatened. Together, the grimy pair start riding the rails across the country, watching movies starring Frank’s favorite actor, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), and somehow sparking a feminist plot to overthrow the kinds of mean gangsters who killed Ida in the first place.

This all sounds like a lot—and that’s because it is. These events are tied together only by the fact that they happen to Frank and Ida. Gyllenhaal simply cannot pick a tone, and although maximalist mash-ups in this vein have worked in the hands of more confident directors such as Baz Luhrmann, too often the choices here feel random for the sake of randomness. The aforementioned uprising, for example, occurs during a dance sequence that inspires an army of young women to imitate Ida, down to her peculiar face tattoos. I haven’t even mentioned the subplot of Detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his plucky Girl Friday Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), the bickering duo chasing Frankenstein and his bride. Yes, this is a script that figured a big-budget gangster-monster epic could also manage to fit a screwball buddy comedy.

I do want to applaud Gyllenhaal for going so big. At its best, this kind of genre splicing could be a fun, flirty knee to the face of “elevated horror,” trying to have fun with the genre rather than anointing it with arty prestige. But The Bride! repeatedly lurches toward a serious, almost hectoring mode, in case the audience doesn’t realize that Ida’s tortured love story is also one of liberation from the patriarchy. The film sometimes dazzles in its ridiculousness, but there are simply too many appendages sewn on for it to make any coherent sense.

Netflix Just Avoided a Huge Headache

2026-02-27T17:31:55-05:00

When the news broke yesterday that Netflix had dropped out of the monthslong bidding war to control Warner Bros. Discovery—including its massive film library, range of TV networks, and news empire—the streamer’s stock immediately jumped. It was a curious market reaction, but one that seemed to reflect the deep mistrust that Netflix’s investors, and much of the media industry at large, had about the proposed deal. The company has built up huge profits and a gigantic market share partly by avoiding businesses such as movie theaters, cable television, and 24-hour news channels. Why would it suddenly be interested in them?

We may never know what Netflix had planned to do with Warner Bros. Discovery, a conglomeration that houses movie-production companies, HBO, DC Comics, CNN, and various other cable properties, such as Discovery Channel. (In its deal structure, Netflix was going to purchase HBO and the Warner Bros. film studios, while WBD would spin off the less-profitable linear cable networks separately.) But the combination of Netflix’s streaming assets with the HBO Max platform’s prestigious offerings, for example, would have created a force to be reckoned with in the TV world. Some analysts also thought that the Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos wanted to take advantage of WBD’s deep media library to accelerate the streamer’s AI-training efforts going forward. No matter what the strategy, Netflix’s final offer of $82.7 billion was steep—and it was unclear if the company would have even surmounted growing regulatory concerns about the possible merger.

Instead, Netflix walks away with a $2.8 billion termination fee, which has been paid by WBD’s new presumptive owner: Paramount Skydance, David Ellison’s company, which encompasses a streaming service, production studios, and several TV networks. The corporation will end up spending $111 billion on the takeover. Paramount initially lost out to Netflix, but finally triumphed after a harried campaign of ever-increasing bids, political gamesmanship, and financial assurances provided by Ellison’s father, Larry, who is the sixth-richest person in the world. That President Trump seemed to favor Ellison in the bidding war may also have helped. (Sarandos visited White House staffers the day that Netflix decided to pull its offer, but reportedly not the president.) Ellison’s desire to purchase the entirety of WBD—CNN included—must have been particularly appealing to Trump, who has said it is “imperative” that the news network be sold.

[Read: It’s not just Netflix—it’s your entire life]

Theater-chain owners may breathe a sigh of relief at this turn of events. David Ellison has been publicly committed to the idea of putting movies on big screens for a minimum of 45 days, if not longer; though Sarandos had also loudly claimed that he would honor a traditional release for Warner Bros. movies, many industry analysts were deeply skeptical of this promise. Sarandos has in the past been openly hostile to theatrical exclusivity, prioritizing the at-home viewing experience—a dissonance that spoke to the ultimate confusion swirling around Netflix’s pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery. Why would the streamer be interested in a business that made money in a completely opposite way from how Netflix made money? Why add a giant company to one with an entirely different philosophy?

There is a long history of media businesses overpaying for movie studios that they ultimately don’t know what to do with. Warner Bros. has already been at the center of multiple transactions that didn’t work out for the buyer, such as the famous AOL–Time Warner merger of 2001, and AT&T’s shambling transformation of the company into WarnerMedia in 2018. Netflix, meanwhile, has grown from a DVD-rental service to a streaming titan by staying very focused on its at-home model; adding a company with far more diverse operations would have created a million new economic headaches for Sarandos and his fellow executives. Netflix’s opportunities for greater expansion may now have shrunk without an empire like WBD on the table, but at least it can walk away with a termination fee and a fairly clean bill of financial health.

Paramount’s gamble is an even more staggering one to consider, though the largesse of Larry Ellison will help assuage certain monetary concerns. In adding WBD to Paramount’s holdings, David Ellison is taking on a company that is almost 10 times its size (Paramount’s market cap is $12 billion, whereas it’s paying $111 billion for WBD). He’s also adding an unthinkable amount of debt to his ledgers, and relying on financing from sources such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Company, and the Qatar Investment Authority. And WBD’s failing linear TV networks, now under Paramount’s umbrella, have little hope of being long-term profit makers.

The results of Paramount’s purchase will likely be layoffs and cost-cutting that run into the billions of dollars, a further consolidation of an already squeezed movie-and-TV marketplace, and the addition of CNN to the CBS News network, which is currently being editorially transformed by Bari Weiss. Critics have begun to ponder what other changes could happen: Under Ellison, CBS got rid of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show—could HBO’s Last Week Tonight, hosted by the even more openly progressive John Oliver, be next? By bowing out, Netflix will not have to answer that kind of messy political question. The future of moviemaking and TV broadcasting remains murky, but the company has halted any potential philosophical transformation, leaving legacy media companies to clean up the mess.

A Different Kind of Leading Man

2026-02-16T18:01:00-05:00

Robert Duvall didn’t speak a word in his first film performance. When he was cast as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, he was but an up-and-coming theater actor, and his role as the silent, mysterious neighbor to the heroine Scout Finch was small but pivotal. With his shock of blond hair and his haunted, sunken eyes, he somehow looked both childlike and ancient, and although Duvall wouldn’t rise to proper fame for another 10 years, Mockingbird was, for most of the world, an introduction to a man who’d be one of Hollywood’s most versatile and fascinating screen presences for decades to come.

Duvall died yesterday at the age of 95, having never formally retired from acting. His last two roles, in 2022, were in the sports comedy Hustle and the gothic thriller The Pale Blue Eye, and had the same cranky verve and twinkle he’d long brought to movies. Even though he didn’t appear in a movie until he was 31, he made more than 140 of them, receiving an Academy Award (along with six other nominations), an Emmy, and four Golden Globes. He could carry a film thunderously, as in The Apostle or The Great Santini, but won an Oscar for his beautifully melancholic work in the low-key country-music drama Tender Mercies. He could swoop in with a supporting performance like his electrifying Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, rhapsodizing about the smell of napalm in the morning, but just as easily stand out in subtler roles, like his calming consigliere Tom Hagen in the first two Godfather movies.

Most important to his extraordinary legacy as an actor, Duvall just didn’t stop working, putting in fabulous turns in notable movies, but never phoning it in in the smaller, sillier fill-in roles he took along the way. His filmography tells the story of a changing industry several times over. It includes sturdy ’60s classics such as Mockingbird and True Grit; challenging ’70s movies like George Lucas’s THX 1138 and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H*; the beloved ’80s TV adaptation of Lonesome Dove; ’90s action hits such as Days of Thunder and Deep Impact; and fantastic 21st-century throwbacks like Open Range and We Own the Night. There are more than a dozen Duvall films you could plausibly pick as your favorite without being laughed out of the room, a truism that some of his best-known peers, such as Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, might struggle to replicate.

Duvall was born in San Diego in 1931, the son of a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy and an amateur actress; through his mother, he was reportedly related to Robert E. Lee, whom he would later play in the 2003 film Gods and Generals. He was raised mostly in Maryland, where his father worked at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. But Duvall didn’t follow in his footsteps, leaving the Army after two years; he then studied at Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City alongside future luminaries such as Dustin Hoffman, James Caan, and Gene Hackman. Duvall spent the rest of the ’50s on the stage, largely working at Long Island’s Gateway Playhouse; the screenwriter of Mockingbird, Horton Foote, spotted him and recommended him for the Boo Radley role.

Everett Collection

Robert Duvall and Mary Badham in To Kill A Mockingbird

Although striking, Duvall’s wordless work in Mockingbird hardly led to instant fame. His proper breakouts came in the Korean War satire M*A*S*H*, in which he played the infuriated villain Major Frank Burns, and the challenging sci-fi epic THX 1138, which saw him play a functionary chased by robot policemen in a world that has outlawed emotions. His first Oscar nomination came for his crafty turn as Tom Hagen in The Godfather, a German Irish adopted brother to the Sicilian Mob family who always has one foot outside of the deepest inner circle. Duvall is logical, phlegmatic, but always steely here; he does scene-stealing work without ever having to raise his voice.

That’s not to say Duvall was incapable of going big. He could be a domineering presence, a champion deliverer of monologues, and Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola handed him some of the greatest in movie history for Apocalypse Now, the Vietnam War epic that landed Duvall his second Oscar nomination. In Network, as a harried TV executive, Duvall is similarly roaring, spitting some great Paddy Chayefsky soliloquies with relish. Maybe the apex of this style for Duvall was his work as the terrifying but impotent Marine veteran Bull Meechum in The Great Santini (for which he received his third Oscar nomination), who channels his rage at his family when he doesn’t have a war to fight in. Bald from a young age, Duvall dropped the hairpieces early on and used his bullet-headed image to his advantage, a unique visage that undergirded his complex portrayals of masculinity.

Glasshouse Images / Alamy

Robert Duvall and Tess Harper on the set of the film Tender Mercies

Like his acclaimed contemporaries Pacino, Hoffman, and Hackman, Duvall did not cut the kind of clean, handsome image of movie stars from decades prior; he was earthier and meaner, his face more lined. He’d risen to fame later, and in an era (the New Hollywood of the ’70s) that rewarded shades of gray. When he finally won his Oscar in 1984, for Tender Mercies, he was playing a sympathetic but flawed man, a washed-up recovering alcoholic musician trying to pull his life back together. It’s a gorgeous performance that the film’s distributor, Universal Pictures, initially didn’t know what to do with; it put the movie in theaters with zero fanfare and quickly sold it to cable TV, where it became a hit, collecting surprise awards more than a year after its release.

Duvall largely shifted to smaller work as he aged. The Apostle in 1997 was something of a leading-role comeback, a dark independent film that Duvall wrote and directed and that seemed to owe as much to the Sundance generation of the ’90s as to Duvall’s New Hollywood of the ’70s. He collected two other Oscar nominations for reliable supporting turns in the legal dramas A Civil Action and The Judge, as well as a slew of attention for high-profile TV projects such as Lonesome Dove, Stalin, and Broken Trail.

He was married four times with no children; Duvall’s last partnership was with the actor Luciana Pedraza, whom he co-starred with in the thriller Assassination Tango; they were married from 2005 until his death. “I think everybody has vulnerability. Even when I played Stalin I found vulnerability,” he said in a 2014 interview looking back on his career. When asked if he had an epitaph planned for his career, he declined to think of one. “‘Ashes.’ No, I don’t know. I don’t need a gravestone. Cremation’s fine with me.”

A No-Name Director to Everyone but His 38 Million Fans

2026-02-16T11:56:25-05:00

At the box office earlier this month, four out of the five top-grossing movies were not from big companies. There was Solo Mio, an inspirational romantic drama starring Kevin James from the faith-based distributor Angel Studios; a filmed concert from the K-pop group Stray Kids; and a French adaptation of Dracula from the director Luc Besson that had already made big money overseas. But by far the most unusual offering was Iron Lung, which has thus far grossed more than $30 million domestically against a $3 million budget. It is a strange sci-fi tale of a man exploring a mysterious underwater world, but stranger still is the fact that it’s even in theaters: Iron Lung was funded, made, and released entirely by a YouTuber most famous for playing video games on camera.

The writer-director of Iron Lung is Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier—one of the most popular content creators on YouTube, if not the internet. He’s a veteran of the video format known as “Let’s Play,” in which on-screen personalities offer cheeky commentary while running through a video game. The bulk of Fischbach’s work thus mostly features little else but game footage and his cheerful face reacting to whatever he’s playing—usually something of the indie-horror variety. Each of his simple-sounding uploads typically receives millions of views; his channel currently has more than 38 million subscribers. Fischbach has spent nearly 15 years building his audience, establishing himself as a funny, pleasant, and charitable guy on a platform often lacking for them.

But even with those accomplishments, what he’s achieved with Iron Lung is the kind of creative success story most independent artists can only dream of. Fischbach has long explored other such efforts alongside his usual fare; he has launched a clothing line, hosted podcasts, and made interactive, choose-your-own-adventure-style series, also published on YouTube. Fischbach announced in 2023 that he was making his first theatrical film: an adaptation of the video game Iron Lung, which he would write, direct, and star in. He would also be financing, producing, and distributing the project himself, outside of any typical Hollywood structure. Iron Lung was shot over 35 days that spring; it took years to release partly because Fischbach edited it himself, then declined to make a deal with any traditional distributor. Instead, he spent months booking theaters privately, encouraging his fans to reserve tickets online. When prospective viewers realized the film wasn’t screening in their city, they started calling local cinemas to complain. By the end of this grassroots effort, Iron Lung was booked on more than 3,000 screens in North America.

[Read: This guy makes millions playing video games on YouTube]

Fischbach never launched a paid media campaign ahead of release—he simply used his own feeds for promotion, cut his own trailers, and built up anticipation among his large viewer base. The result was a film that almost came out of nowhere, nearly surmounting another new movie with more mainstream clout: Send Help, a star-driven, $40-million thriller from the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios. Send Help opened to $19.1 million, while Iron Lung made $18.3 million in its first weekend, and has since doubled that gross worldwide in just two weeks. Despite knowing practically nothing of Fischbach’s work or the game he was adapting, I was intrigued enough by its origins and audience pull to go see it. I was expecting Iron Lung to be small-scale, given the production cost; I was also anticipating a lot of the cheap thrills that can come with low-budget horror hits—some shocking gore, some jump scares, and a fast-and-simple plot.

Maybe the most intriguing thing about Iron Lung, beyond its unusual release strategy, is that it has basically none of those elements. It’s an odd, heady, talky bit of ambient storytelling that runs for 127 minutes, despite not very much actually happening. As far as I could tell from checking out videos of Fischbach playing the original game, the film translates the premise and gameplay faithfully. Simon (played by Fischbach, replete with tangled hair and clad in a cruddy diving suit) is a convict piloting a ramshackle submarine on a distant moon, where there’s an ocean made of blood. He’s exploring for deep-sea life, perhaps to help undo an unspecified apocalypse that’s seemingly wiped out life around the galaxy, but everything else remains unclear—who sent him below the surface, what monsters reside within, and what will happen with the samples he collects and the freaky X-ray pictures he tries to take.

After a while, I cheerfully gave up on trying to follow the film’s attempt at a narrative. The inscrutability is clearly the point: In scene after scene, Simon’s anxiety mounts as he fiddles with buttons, tries to interpret garbled commands, yells at his higher-ups, and begins to possibly hallucinate. There are no giant frights or dynamic action sequences, and the slow pacing makes the film feel at times punishingly long. Instead, Fischbach aims to keep the audience invested by ratcheting up the sense of atmosphere. The blood-filled waters and the bizarre fish skeletons aside, however, the movie is not quite the Cronenbergian nightmare the director wants it to be. Yet I found myself charmed by Iron Lung’s shagginess; I haven’t seen anything quite like it, and the idea of such a curious piece of art becoming a genuine box-office phenomenon is a little heartwarming.

[Read: 10 standout indie movies to watch for this year]

Fischbach isn’t the first YouTuber to jump into big-screen filmmaking. Chris Stuckmann, who reviews movies on his channel, released his first feature last year; he funded the project on Kickstarter. After the film, Shelby Oaks, was picked up by the indie distributor Neon, Stuckmann reshot some of the sequences to boost the production value. The end product was nonetheless a critical and commercial disappointment, a work of demonic found-footage pablum that felt imitative of better-known forebears. The Philippou brothers, makers of the much more successful supernatural tales Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, also launched their careers on YouTube; they released an array of shorts that became their calling cards, earning them actual budgets to direct Hollywood movies. Yet Fischbach’s accomplishment is more impressive than those of his cohort: He essentially built the entire engine himself and landed the plane with aplomb. His fully self-driven model is one that other online creators could try to imitate. Even if they do, I wonder whether their artistic instincts would be as unexpected—or captivating.

An Erotically Untamed Take on Wuthering Heights

2026-02-09T15:20:20-05:00

Wuthering Heights, the writer-director Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s groundbreaking Gothic novel, is her best film to date—a heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time at the cinema. It is also a gooey, grimy mess. The camera lingers on dripping egg yolks and squishy, bubbling dough; the protagonist, Cathy Earnshaw (played by Margot Robbie), must wade through pig’s blood on her way to the moors near her home, leaving a trim of viscera on her gorgeously anachronistic dress. This is Fennell’s aesthetic throughout: loudly stylish on top, and just as loudly nasty right below the surface.

The clash of beauty and filth is well suited for Brontë’s desolate tale of romance in a tempestuous climate, where Cathy is constantly caught between Victorian propriety and her baser, wilder nature. Fennell’s take is thuddingly blunt; it brings the book’s simmering sexual repression to a boil. Wuthering Heights, sprawling and objectively tough to capture faithfully, hinges on the unbalanced, teenage energy of its central relationship—here, expressed through glossy, MTV-esque visuals that the director deploys with aplomb.

As with almost every cinematic interpretation of Wuthering Heights, the plot’s more unwieldy second half is disposed of entirely. Fennell has also stripped down the first half, removing some major characters and simplifying the motivations of others. She focuses largely on the bond between Cathy and her tortured lover, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), from quasi-feral childhood on. Some of these changes might feel mercenary to superfans of the novel; I count myself among them. I love the loopy directions the book’s later chapters veer in, so I expected to greet this new version with crossed arms. Instead, I was impressed with the director’s narrowed focus. She’s managed to make a weighty work feel nimble.

[Read: The director tackling the dark side of millennial desire]

Thematically, Wuthering Heights is reminiscent of the director’s previous movie, Saltburn, which also saw a rough outsider infiltrating the upper class in Britain. Saltburn’s near-contemporary setting, however, didn’t really suit Fennell’s unsubtle storytelling approach; the entire ensemble seemed cartoonish, their fancy trappings chintzy and fake. In Wuthering Heights, she more successfully turns the howling Yorkshire moors that Cathy wanders into a stylish fantasyland, reminiscent of a Meat Loaf video’s flamboyant theatricality. Everything is appropriately dialed-up: The titular mansion that Cathy lives in is a dark, foreboding shambles, while at the estate next door, there are rooms entirely devoted to ribbons. One of the chambers is even wallpapered to look exactly like Cathy’s skin, down to the freckles.

Cathy and Heathcliff’s emotional ties begin at a young age. One day, her father returns home with an orphan in tow; she quickly bonds with the boy, named Heathcliff, and they become a gleefully untamed duo. The years pass, and soon enough, the pair are all grown up—but no less primitive. (Robbie is a stretch as the 20-something Cathy, but her performance is winning enough that the viewer can largely keep that out of mind.) Some more civilized tenants, the sweet but stuffy textile heir Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his sister, Isabella (Alison Oliver), move into the estate next door. With them comes the wedge that drives Cathy and Heathcliff apart: the harsh realities of class and Victorian society. Cathy might be as uninhibited as Heathcliff when roaming the outdoors, but a woman of her status can’t be allowed to marry a foundling, especially one who now works for her family as a servant. She’s nudged into Edgar’s arms, transforming Heathcliff into a vengeful, horny demigod of sorts. Heathcliff is the paragon of Byronic anti-heroism, which, to Fennell, means that he’s as cruel as he is seductive. She sands off the more abusive edges of his literary counterpart, but he’s still domineering and callous, hell-bent on embarrassing a community that can’t take him seriously as a potential husband.

Robbie and Elordi’s chemistry is strong, and both are major Hollywood talents who can smirk, scream, and sob with the best of them. The gleeful visuals and sounds, however, are what really propel the movie along. There are ravishing songs by the pop star Charli XCX, surprisingly none of them too out of place; some truly ridiculous costume choices for Cathy as she embraces Edgar’s hoity-toity life; and all of that goo, blood, and viscera. The film opens with what sounds like erotic groaning over a black screen, which is revealed to be the final gasps of a man being hanged. Touches like these could not be more direct, but they work here—Fennell wants the audience to think about how closely sex and death are intertwined. This is especially true for Cathy and Heathcliff, who might honestly rather expire than be apart.

[Read: The Brontës’ secret]

The story’s dreamy and at times ludicrous emotional landscape often struggles on more realistic grounding. In 2011, the great director Andrea Arnold attempted a version of Wuthering Heights with a much more muted, credible tone, even casting a mixed-race actor in the role of Heathcliff (in the book, his ethnic background is pointedly ambiguous). Although Arnold’s attempt was interesting, it felt flat, bereft of Brontë’s eccentric flourishes. Fennell has streamlined the book’s narrative, yes, but not its white-hot melodramatic core—and she understands it well enough to create a worthy swoon-fest for the ages.

Pete Davidson’s Charm Is Working Against Him

2026-02-07T08:00:00-05:00

The first question to confront when considering The Pete Davidson Show, a new Netflix series that the streamer is calling a “video podcast,” is: What is a podcast? The term can be a little difficult to pin down; what initially referred to downloadable audio files you ported onto your iPod is today used for most online radio. Now the notion of a podcast is transforming again to include filmed entertainment. Bite-size clips of chat programs are flooding every social-media feed, in a desperate hunt for engagement. But I would argue that podcasts should always involve a dedicated feed you can listen to on your phone.

The Pete Davidson Show does not have that. Instead, the weekly program is available to consume only on Netflix, and only in video form. A cynic might wonder if branding The Pete Davidson Show a “podcast” is just a way for the streaming empire to avoid paying for the kind of unionized crews and production staff a talk show demands. Or perhaps, if I am being more charitable, Pete Davidson’s effort is considered a podcast because it’s imitating the stripped-down aesthetics of one. The host sits in a fairly bare garage, with a couple of paint cans stacked between two comfy armchairs. His first guest, the musician Machine Gun Kelly, doesn’t even have a place to put his coffee, so he sits it on the floor near his feet. Talk shows have bands and green rooms; podcasts are for raw, unfiltered chat, though preferably, for companies like Netflix, also between famous people.

So on that front, does The Pete Davidson Show deliver? There’s already a gigantic pile of celebrity talk programs in the podcasting space—many of them weak clones of other lo-fi interview podcasts, most obviously WTF With Marc Maron, which ended last year. Davidson, who has been in the public eye since joining the cast of Saturday Night Live at age 20, is the sort of highly scrutinized person viewers might want to learn more about. This is partly the allure of any public figure’s podcast: that you encounter them in a more candid mode.

But as a host, he is casual to a fault. He’s prone to slouching in his chair, ripping a thousand cigarettes, and reminiscing about various awkward interactions he and his guests have had at parties over the years. In the series premiere last week, Davidson and Kelly (who are good friends) hold court about, among other topics: Davidson’s fancy Japanese toilet; Kelly’s flight to the podcast taping, in upstate New York; acting together in The Dirt, the Mötley Crüe biopic; and generally weathering the slings and arrows of megastardom. There are interesting pockets of intimacy between the pair, as they discuss their mirrored battles with depression and addiction, and sweeter moments, like when they gush about their young daughters. But for being just 38 minutes long (which is pretty short by most podcasting standards), the episode feels unfocused at best.

[Read: The Dirt celebrates the soullessness of Mötley Crüe]

Davidson’s inexperience becomes obvious when seated across someone much better versed in the medium. Episode 2 features Charlamagne tha God, a seasoned radio personality, whose comfort and facility with the format force Davidson to keep up. He trades quips with the comedian before eking out further insights: A string of jokes about the rapper turned actor Ice-T and his longtime wife, Coco, becomes a reflection on the role romantic partners can play in one’s career. As Davidson thanks his guest for stopping by, he also notes Charlamagne’s prowess: “This also made me appreciate how amazing you are at this job,” he says.

Maybe Davidson can grow into the gig; very few hit podcasts emerge from the gate fully formed. But The Pete Davidson Show is a particularly rough lump of clay. The garage setting riffs on Maron’s format, but the space is devoid of any notable physical objects for guests to bounce off—nothing like Maron’s frequently remarked-upon tchotchkes or guitars. Davidson’s chat with Kelly has no structure, no segments, and no particular gimmick; and while none of that is required of a podcast, some sense of organization can help shape an otherwise-unformed snippet of conversation. Most vital, Davidson doesn’t have much interest in learning more about Kelly, because he doesn’t need to—this is his good friend, with whom he already has a rich history that the viewer only gets glimpses of over the course of their chat.

The lax vibe stands in stark relief to that of most successful celebrity-chat podcasts. Maron, who launched WTF when his comedy career was on a downswing, as peers emerged and surpassed him in fame, took an almost antagonistic approach with guests: He’d try to puzzle out their insecurities and ambitions, then compare them against his own. For Conan O’Brien, an old hand whose podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is a big player in the field, witty banter and appropriately leading queries come naturally; O’Brien also has plenty of pals on, but has a knack for turning their back-and-forth into a deeper examination of their friendship. The latest hit example is Amy Poehler’s Good Hang, which collected the first-ever Golden Globe for Best Podcast this year. As a host, Poehler has demonstrated a surprising amount of savvy in how she runs her show, from booking guests to steering them toward a compelling conversation.

[Read: The Golden Globes tried to have it both ways]

I kept thinking about Poehler’s show (which is filmed but is also available on an audio feed) while watching Davidson’s attempt. Good Hang is similarly pitched as a casual, low-stakes hour or so of chitchat between two celebrities; Poehler, one of Davidson’s fellow SNL alums, has chummy banter with a well-known subject, a role that has been filled by such major names as Jennifer Lawrence, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Ina Garten. But Poehler opens every episode by secretly calling up a friend of her guest on FaceTime, setting the mood for what she and her audience might be intrigued to learn. She then peppers her interviewees with a good mix of serious and silly questions, keeping them just goofy and off-balance enough to maybe reveal some vulnerabilities.

Nothing is revolutionary about what Poehler is doing, but she’s doing it well—it’s why the anodyne-seeming Good Hang has risen above the many imitators, to the point where anecdotes from the episodes regularly make news. Davidson’s chat with Kelly, on the other hand, seemingly vanished without a trace after its Friday drop. Perhaps some of his future guests will come armed with hotter takes, or juicier gossip, to avail the show’s relaxed host in his smoky garage. Or perhaps Netflix’s video-only podcasting experiment will go the way of many other such clones in this medium, which never took on board the lesson that podcasts require more than two microphones and a garage to actually be interesting.

A Delightfully Gruesome Take on ‘Eat the Rich’

2026-01-31T08:00:00-05:00

Sam Raimi is one of Hollywood’s finest purveyors of junk. I say this with love and reverence, and with full acknowledgment that he’s the man behind such masterpieces as Evil Dead II and A Simple Plan. But the director has spent decades digging for gold amid pulpier genres, turning out oddball horror, thriller, and comic-book movies. As his career went on, Raimi graduated to making blockbuster versions of junk, including the first Spider-Man trilogy and, most recently, a Doctor Strange sequel for Marvel. His new film, Send Help, however, is a welcome throwback to his roots—a horror-comedy full of spirited, violent silliness. It’s a perfect bit of shlock.

All credit to Raimi—he’s still able to deliver on a smaller scale, which his contemporaries (such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Zemeckis) might now struggle to do. Send Help is breathtakingly unpretentious, a campfire tale that swirls a CEO’s nightmare with the fantasy of every bedraggled, overworked office drone: What if a plane crash stranded an evil boss in the jungle with a meek but capable subordinate, and their roles began to reverse? The story is essentially a stripped-down, airplane-novel version of Ruben Östlund’s Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness, which skewered the foolishness of capitalistic order by dumping a bunch of rich folks and service staff on a desert island.

[Read: A horror movie about befriending the rich and powerful]

Send Help reduces that premise further by focusing on a party of two. Bradley Preston (played by Dylan O’Brien) is a preening nepo baby in charge of a multinational corporation, and Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a harried member of the planning-and-strategy department whom he just passed over for promotion. Bradley is largely concerned with perfecting his golf game; Linda spends her off hours obsessing over the TV show Survivor. After Bradley begrudgingly invites Linda to join him on a work trip, his private jet crashes in the Gulf of Thailand, stranding the pair on a remote beach, Linda’s devotion to Survivor suddenly gets put to good use. Raimi delights in turning a mousy, reality-TV-loving woman into a boar-hunting, shelter-building alpha dog.

McAdams, who did yeoman’s work in Raimi’s previous movie (the aforementioned Marvel sequel), is the perfect fit for this kind of nonsensical Hollywood role. She has somehow mastered the ability to plausibly toggle between retiring and glamorous. She was the terrifying queen bee of Mean Girls but also the sensible, slacks-wearing junior-string reporter from Spotlight; essentially, she’s someone who can play both a wallflower and a domineering megastar without a hint of ridiculousness. Raimi has always been drawn to that kind of protagonist, from Liam Neeson’s scientist turned superhero in Darkman to Tobey Maguire’s sweetly humble take on Peter Parker in Spider-Man. But with Linda, the director only gestures at the kind of good-hearted morality embedded within those costumed heroes. For the most part, Raimi is here to have sick, progressively more twisted fun.

Unlike his co-star, O’Brien has long seemed like one of showbiz’s underutilized resources. He emerged from the world of young-adult action-adventure franchises and has since proved to have a deeper set of chops: He turned in an excellent performance last year in the dark indie comedy Twinless and stood out among the ensemble in 2022’s The Outfit, a gangster thriller. Here, O’Brien is well attuned to portraying the kind of shallow jerk that Raimi needs viewers to root against—otherwise, they might turn on Linda more quickly for keeping Bradley under her thumb. Bradley is cruel, arrogant, and seemingly low on actual talent, and that’s before he crash-lands on an island; there, he spends most of his time grumping at Linda for not finding good-enough food or not listening to his meaningless leadership prattle.

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For the story’s first act, Raimi almost hints at romantic comedy—perhaps these two crazy kids will find some common ground while they’re stuck together, as Bradley learns to be a kinder boss and Linda figures out how to better stick up for herself. In the hands of a more optimistic filmmaker, maybe that would be the move. But then Linda goes chasing a wild boar through the jungle while toting a bamboo spear, and impales it to death in a gleefully gratuitous scene of CGI gore. She emerges bloodstained from the tree line—a changed woman, and not necessarily for the better.

The rest of Send Help hinges not on how these two characters will find common ground but on which one will emerge victorious from an ongoing power struggle. Sometimes they’re friendly, other times they’re openly battling, but Raimi never lets go of the core tension between them: Bradley sees Linda as less than him, and Linda sees Bradley as someone who will only really respond to domination. It’s Lord of the Flies on the corporate ladder, nudging the audience to simultaneously cheer for “eating the rich” and wonder whether Linda is losing her grip on reality. In most desert-island movies, the goal is for the characters to get rescued; to Linda, that’s merely a foolish distraction.

My overall view of the film came down to whether Raimi would nail the last act—I feared he might pull back into more sentimental territory rather than doubling down on the two characters’ ultimate enmity. I won’t spoil the details, but Send Help sticks the landing by going for broke, piling on the carnage, goo, and vomit as Linda and Bradley’s pas de deux spirals into feral madness. Last year, cinema wrestled with the limits of idealism and heroism on-screen; perhaps 2026 will be the “lol nothing matters” year in theaters. Or perhaps Raimi is just kicking it back to his more brazen early years as a director. Either way, I was happy reveling in the deplorability of it all.

The Oscars Are Rewarding Hollywood’s Big Bets

2026-01-22T13:22:30-05:00

This morning’s Oscar nominations capped a year marked by a stunning run of critical and commercial success for one of Hollywood’s biggest—and most discussed—studios. Warner Bros. dominated proceedings with big hauls for One Battle After Another and Sinners. The latter, a vampire story set in 1930s Mississippi, made Academy history by becoming the most nominated film of all time: It earned 16 nods, two higher than the previous record holders, Titanic, La La Land, and All About Eve. The Academy Awards are commonly defined these days by a struggle for relevance, making the fact that such high-quality, non-franchise movies from a major studio connected with audiences a considerable boon—especially after last year’s show, which celebrated a swath of more inscrutable indie pictures.

That success still came with familiar existential baggage for the film industry. Warner Bros., while making creative bets that paid off, has been embroiled in high-stakes merger drama for several months. Netflix and Paramount have both vied to purchase the studio, which in either case would create a corporate behemoth likely less inclined to take the risks that lead to a One Battle, or a Sinners, or even a Weapons (which nabbed a Best Supporting Actress nod for Amy Madigan, who played the antagonist). No matter what the future holds, though, the Warner Bros. triumph can’t be undermined: It helped define 2025 as a year in which movies coaxed adult audiences to theaters by blending action and spectacle with more challenging, trenchant storytelling.

Other big nomination-getters included Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel that especially drew plaudits for its emotionally demanding performances. (Jessie Buckley, who plays a grief-stricken mother, has been the presumed front-runner for Best Actress since awards season began.) A24’s gamble on a big-budget table-tennis epic paid off, with Marty Supreme earning nine nominations; not only has the film become the indie studio’s highest-grossing release ever, but its star, Timothée Chalamet, is also tipped for Best Actor. Meanwhile, Apple’s hit sports drama F1, which collected four nods, including Best Picture, is the closest thing to a typical blockbuster contender. Two box-office smashes that once seemed like guarantees, meanwhile, are absent from Best Picture, namely Avatar: Fire and Ash and Wicked: For Good; the sequel to last year’s Oscar-winning Wicked blanked entirely this year. Handing out nominations to a film headed up by a big name like Brad Pitt—as well as several of his movie-star peers, such as One Battle After Another’s lead, Leonardo DiCaprio; Michael B. Jordan, who plays two roles in Sinners; and Emma Stone, for Yorgos Lanthimos’s acidic satire Bugonia—guarantees a glitzier show, which is vital to the point of the Oscars: The ceremony is essentially an advertisement for the act of theatergoing.

[Read: The 10 best movies of 2025]

In recent years, the Academy Awards have been shaped by the more international and art-house tilt of the nominations. This run began with Parasite’s Best Picture win in 2020, and perhaps peaked last year with a slew of less commercial nominees. The controversial French musical Emilia Pérez led the field; the indie dramas Anora and The Brutalist picked up several major nods, as did the gory horror satire The Substance; Anora took Best Picture. Meanwhile, bigger franchise hits such as Wicked and Dune: Part Two were relegated to wins in the technical categories. In decades past, winning the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the coveted Palme D’or, was of little relevance to later awards success. But of late, it’s been a vital indicator: Anora and Parasite used it as a springboard to Oscar glory, and fellow Palme d’Or victors such as Triangle of Sadness and Anatomy of a Fall ended up with awards-season success.

With that track record in mind, the indie powerhouse Neon snapped up every big Cannes winner that it could, including this year’s Palme winner, It Was Just an Accident; the Brazilian period drama The Secret Agent; the nail-biting thriller Sirāt, a co-production from France and Spain; and the director Joachim Trier’s Norwegian family dramedy, Sentimental Value, his follow-up to the well-regarded The Worst Person in the World. Some pundits wondered whether Neon had gone overboard with its awards slate, but all four movies were recognized in the International Feature Film category and elsewhere; The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value also made it to Best Picture. Sentimental Value was particularly beloved, earning nine nominations, while Wagner Moura’s Best Actor nod for The Secret Agent makes him the first Brazilian ever recognized in that category.

There were a few other surprises, particularly in the acting categories. Among the nominees for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress were two Sinners stars, Wunmi Mosaku and Delroy Lindo—the latter a Hollywood veteran finally getting his first nod. Kate Hudson sneaked into the Best Actress category for Song Sung Blue, an inspirational true-story musical drama; the One Battle After Another ingénue, Chase Infiniti, meanwhile, was locked out. Hamnet, which won Best Motion Picture—Drama at the Golden Globes earlier this month, slightly under-indexed; Paul Mescal missed out on Supporting Actor despite noms at several other awards ceremonies this year. The film also missed out on key technical nods, such as Cinematography and Editing. And in the Best Picture lineup, Netflix’s meditative drama Train Dreams earned a spot, whereas two of the streamer’s splashier movies—the George Clooney–starring Jay Kelly and the latest Knives Out sequel, Wake Up Dead Man—didn’t make the cut.

[Read: The conversation that moviegoers don’t need to be having]

Now the nearly two-month trudge to the ceremony itself begins. Although there’s likely to be the usual hand-wringing in the press about plateauing viewership, the Oscars’ long-term future has already been secured: YouTube will own the broadcast rights starting in 2029. That deal will keep funding the show, guarantee a wider audience, and banish any larger concerns about Nielsen ratings as the traditional broadcast model continues to go extinct.

This year’s awards narrative was already feeling especially ossified. One Battle After Another has been the front-runner since sweeping the critics’ prizes and winning four Golden Globes, including for Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy. Sinners’ huge nomination haul, however, will throw it back into the mix as One Battle’s biggest potential rival—rewarding Warner Bros.’s year of risk-taking mightily, regardless of what happens.

The Secret to One of Hollywood’s Most Enduring Friendships

2026-01-21T07:30:00-05:00

Here’s a good rule of thumb for making a movie: Don’t allow the press tour to be the most exciting component. The Rip, from the director Joe Carnahan, is a cop drama where macho guys (and gals) tote carbine rifles and grunt law-enforcement lingo—the kind of crime-genre pablum that commonly gets thrown onto Netflix in mid-January. But this one comes with a ridiculously stacked cast, including, most important, its two leads: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. The longtime Hollywood pals have dutifully hit the promotional circuit to talk up their latest collaboration, as well as argue over who’s the bigger New England Patriots fan, reminisce on their former shared bank account, and generally remind everyone about the wholesome endurance of their creative bond.

But none of that cheerfulness or easy friend chemistry can be found in the film they’re plugging. Damon and Affleck have acted together on-screen numerous times, but this is their first time sharing the top billing since Dogma, their 1999 dark comedy about a pair of fallen angels. The hiatus makes The Rip the kind of nostalgia-inducing star vehicle that should pique viewers’ curiosity—which is why its seeming disinterest in the leads’ personal connection is so bizarre. Affleck plays the Miami Police Department detective J. D. Byrne, and Damon is his superior, Lieutenant Dane Dumars. Byrne and Dumars get drawn into a conspiracy surrounding a colossal stash of illicit money, which is coveted by cartel leaders and crooked cops alike. Carnahan, however, seems more interested in depicting realistic police procedure than in letting the famous friends have much fun together.

That The Rip is such a bland venue for its charismatic stars’ reunion is a terrible shame. They do look the part, sporting big beards and close-cropped hair; their brows are eternally furrowed and their eyes are constantly narrowed as their characters try to sniff out each other’s loyalty and the loyalty of other teammates drawn in by “the rip” (the $20 million they’ve just discovered). If this film had been made in the ’80s or ’90s, it would be crackling with zippy one-liners—which writers including Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) were paid top dollar to sprinkle into every script. Instead, Carnahan, who’s made other weighty masculine dramas such as Narc, The Grey, and Copshop, is mostly devoted to exploring how a large sum of money starts breeding suspicion among colleagues.

As Dumars and Byrne, Damon and Affleck are reduced to growling law-enforcement speak, barking into walkie-talkies and carrying out every conversation while at least one hand rests on an automatic weapon—just in case someone bursts through the wall. The supporting cast, including Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun, Kyle Chandler, and Catalina Sandino Moreno, all get their own assault rifle and dictionary of cop lingo. But it seems they’re more likely on board not because of the material but because of the allure of working with Damon and Affleck. (Perhaps also appealing is the fact that the duo’s production company, Artists Equity, worked out a profit-sharing model with Netflix.) The Rip has little else to offer the actors or the audience beyond a plot built on ratcheting up tension and double-crossing characters.

[Read: Ben Affleck gives the performance of his career]

I’m not sure why this is the movie Damon and Affleck decided to reunite as co-leads for. In the lead-up to The Rip’s release, the pair gave context for the long hiatus they took as artistic collaborators. They didn’t want to be seen as a double act, they explained; the media had quickly regarded Damon and Affleck as such after they co-starred in and won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting. The film, which they wrote together in their early 20s, when they were toiling away on small projects, launched them to megastardom.

Their careers as A-listers have differed quite dramatically, however. Damon became a model of consistency: He headed up robust franchises with the Jason Bourne and Ocean’s movies while also churning out work with serious auteurs such as Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, and Christopher Nolan. Affleck’s experience with fame was a roller coaster; he appeared in and out of the tabloids and had multiple declines and comebacks. He’s played two different comic-book superheroes, married two different superstars, and become a celebrated director in his own right, even winning Best Picture at the Oscars for Argo. Yet he’s struggled to maintain a similar artistic quality to Damon, bouncing between high highs (such as Gone Girl) and low lows (perhaps most infamously the box-office bomb Gigli).

Damon and Affleck’s proper post-Dogma on-screen reunion came with Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel in 2021, which the pair co-wrote. The movie was a financial disappointment, but it was well reviewed. They followed that up with Air in 2023, a lighter true-story dramedy about Nike’s courtship of Michael Jordan in the 1980s. In both films, Damon took the lead role and Affleck played a princely supporting character who would swoop in for some comic relief—a fine balance they first established in Good Will Hunting, and one that recalled what drew audiences to them all those years ago. But neither reunion was the total head-to-head that some fans might have longed for.

Watch the promotional videos for The Rip and it’s clear why people may clamor for Damon and Affleck to revive their dynamic. They’re not play-acting their friendship for the cameras; they have a deep, shared history, and are canny about how Hollywood has changed in the decades since they tried breaking into the industry together. (For the record, they’ve been pals since Damon, age 10, met Affleck, age 8, at school.) Their real-world mix of camaraderie and quiet rivalry, however, is a vein they’ve somehow rarely tapped on-screen. Off-screen, Affleck has a slightly rougher star persona, while Damon’s can be a little more withdrawn and intellectual. Their characters in The Rip, meanwhile, left me frustrated by their similarity: They’re essentially just playing two sides of the same coin.

Then again, maybe Damon and Affleck are smart to produce a movie like The Rip. Grumbly action dramas seem to play well on streaming services this time of year, when awards season is dying down and viewers turn to something a little trashier. The movie is hardly a catastrophe; it is just a by-the-book, somewhat forgettable little notch in the crime genre. I’m glad Damon and Affleck are comfortable carrying a film together now, after working hard to establish themselves as individuals. But I’d love to see the actors’ chummy New England competitiveness translate beyond the press-tour TikToks and return to the screen—using the differences that make their partnership intriguing to their benefit.

An Apocalypse Film That Will Prompt Wild Cheering

2026-01-15T14:14:49-05:00

It’s the oldest, creakiest trope in the zombie-movie storybook: You know who’s scarier than decaying, flesh-eating monsters? The people they’re chasing! Every legendary entry in the genre, be it Night of the Living Dead or the never-ending Walking Dead franchise, has dug into this concept at some point. After all, it’s just as terrifying to imagine how the survivors of societal collapse might behave toward one another as it is to envision them beheading the undead. So it’s especially impressive when a movie about the undead somehow finds a new angle on such a well-worn premise. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, in theaters this week, does just that, finding a reason to be hopeful, rather than fearful, for postapocalyptic humanity.

This kind of reinvention is perhaps unsurprising for an entry in the 28 Days Later saga, which has been innovative from the jump. With the first film in the series, released in 2002, the director Danny Boyle offered an aesthetic twist on the zombie film: Instead of the archetypal shuffle, these decomposing villains, dubbed “the infected,” had the power to dash around at top speed. But 28 Days Later’s final act still felt familiar, as the film’s human protagonists confronted a unit of soldiers who had decided, in the grimmest ways possible, to take the law into their own hands.

Last year’s 28 Years Later, Boyle’s inventive sequel, revisited that world in a distant future, with Britain (the site of the “infection,” a virus that emerged from a lab leak) quarantined from the rest of the planet. The few survivors either huddled to tiny communities or began to stalk the island’s overgrown remains, looking for resources. Although I loved 28 Years Later, I worried about the cliff-hanger ending—a jarring sequence seemingly designed by the script’s writer, Alex Garland, to lead straight into the next installment. In the movie’s final minutes, the plucky young hero Spike (played by Alfie Williams)—who left his local village behind to discover what exists beyond it—runs into a pack of infected but is saved by a sadistic cadre of teenagers all referring to themselves as “Jimmy,” who gleefully rip bodies apart with spears and golf clubs. Here was Garland’s apparent vision of humanity at its worst: a cult of tracksuit-clad weirdos just as gruesome as the monsters they’re dismembering.

Would focusing on such bizarre characters be enough to sustain a sequel? The answer is yes. The Bone Temple is gnarly, challenging, and an incredibly impressive swerve, with Garland’s grim worldview beautifully captured by the director Nia DaCosta. Her visual approach is less kinetic and showy than Boyle’s in the previous film, which was shot back-to-back with The Bone Temple. But that style suits the sequel’s tone—unsettling, mordant, and sometimes bitterly funny. At the fore are the weird ways that belief and spirituality can evolve under the harshest, strangest of conditions, explored through the journey of the homicidal “Jimmys.” Yet DaCosta and Garland also offer stunning pockets of compassion, further iterating on a narrative blueprint that’s often followed the same pattern.

[Read: The lightest, fizziest Marvel movie in years]

The Bone Temple portrays its central figures as the scum of the earth. The adolescent “Jimmys” are led by a mellifluous adult who calls himself Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). Jimmy Crystal and his cronies’ costumes, which include peroxide-blond wigs, are modeled after the British TV personality Jimmy Savile—one of the eeriest, most visually troubling ideas Garland has cooked up. Savile, who died in 2011, is best-known these days for the horrifying child-sexual-abuse allegations that emerged against him after his death. But in the world of the film, everything came to a halt in 2002, when the public was unaware of Savile’s predatory behavior; to Jimmy Crystal, Savile was just a beloved entertainer famous for his charity work helping children. Jimmy Crystal was a child when the infection spread, and his crew reflects the mind of someone raised on the TV of that moment: They do Teletubby dances and wield Tamagotchi toys. At the same time, they’re Satan worshippers who wear inverted crosses and are fond of torturing anyone they come across.

The story begins with Spike’s induction into the gang, and what follows is sometimes very tough to watch. The Bone Temple is disquieting even within the bounds of a gory horror movie because of how young the Jimmys are; if the entire movie just depicted their terrible exploits, and Spike’s efforts to escape the group, it would probably be too much to take. O’Connell’s layered performance helps keep the events from becoming overwhelming, making clear that Jimmy Crystal’s response to the end of the world adheres to a twisted sort of juvenile logic. He’s not only a lawless, evil being, but a sad and childlike one too.

The Jimmys’ harrowing travails are further balanced out by The Bone Temple’s other plotline, which is optimistic, humorous, and oddly sweet. Also returning from the previous entry is Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a former general practitioner with the National Health Services; he has devoted his postapocalyptic life to building a giant memorial to the victims of the epidemic out of their bones. Kelson is both a strange creature and an aspirational ideal: someone who has managed to endure society’s complete dissolution with his morals intact. Kelson is primarily interested in healing Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), a hulking mega-infected with whom he has formed a strange bond. The notion of reversing the virus’s effects is highly unorthodox by zombie-film rules, but Garland manages to make some sense out of this risky direction.

The Bone Temple is, on the whole, much heavier on rumination than Boyle’s thrill-fest. But the film is never lacking for tension. Although DaCosta doesn’t employ the same kind of flashy camera business that Boyle is so fond of (he shot much of 28 Years Later with iPhones), she creates a gorgeous and moody atmosphere, building to an outstanding climactic set piece that should prompt wild cheering from any audience. This may be another zombie movie about the inhumanity of man, but it’s also deeply, triumphantly humane.

A Sobering Awards-Season Pivot

2026-01-11T23:02:45-05:00

Timothée Chalamet’s promotional campaign for his new film Marty Supreme has been a little unconventional thus far. Staged Zoom sessions. Promotional blimp work. A lot of chatter about a jacket nobody can buy. When Chalamet did The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, he was flanked by an entourage of people with giant orange ping-pongs for heads. The strategy has worked—the film is doing well at the box office—but Chalamet’s energy has vibed uncomfortably with the fusty atmosphere of awards-season campaigning, where glad-handing with showbiz retirees and eating rubber chicken at galas is still very much the norm.

Chalamet seems to have clocked that dissonance, and his speech at tonight’s Golden Globes (where he won for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy) was tellingly subdued despite the show’s notoriety for messy, drunken speech-giving. “My dad instilled in me a spirit of gratitude growing up: Always be grateful for what you have,” he said, after tossing off a few jokes about the movie’s crowded cast and the presence of Shark Tank’s “Mr. Wonderful,” Kevin O’Leary, who plays a villainous businessman in Marty Supreme. “It’s allowed me to leave this ceremony in the past empty-handed, my head held high, grateful just to be here, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say those moments didn’t make this moment that much sweeter.”

It was a perfectly lovely sentiment that just sounded a tad jarring coming from a celebrity who has been delightfully un-humble over the years. After some noteworthy supporting turns as a teen actor, Chalamet burst to fame at the age of 21 with Call Me By Your Name. Since then, he has grown into a unique A-lister, finding a variety of big-budget projects that fit his skinny frame and delicate screen presence, among them the Dune films, Wonka, and the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. He has every reason to swagger, but that’s just not something that happens at award shows, where faux-humble surprise is always the order of the day.

[Read: The blockbuster that Hollywood was afraid to make]

That’s what made Chalamet’s tactics last year, when he was campaigning for A Complete Unknown, stick out so sorely. “I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” he said when he won the SAG Award for Best Actor. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats.” He then threw out some names that inspire him: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, Viola Davis, Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps. It was memorable stuff, but Oscar pundits pointed out that while Chalamet was yapping like an ESPN talking head, his rival Adrien Brody was working Hollywood parties. Brody, eventually, ended up with the Oscar for his turn in The Brutalist.

With Chalamet’s aggressive and surreal approach to selling Marty Supreme, it looked like he was staying true to himself, whether or not Oscar voters could handle it. But then at last week’s Critics Choice Awards (another televised show that serves as an Oscar predictor), a slightly more demure Chalamet took the stage upon winning Best Actor. He thanked his fellow nominees by name; he thanked Marty Supreme’s director, Josh Safdie; he thanked his partner, Kylie Jenner, saying, “I love you. I couldn’t do this without you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

Classic stuff—and the kind of stuff he’s avoided. Chalamet didn’t really spotlight Jenner during last year’s awards tour, but this year she’s been front and center, getting another thank-you during the Globes speech. Gone is the lovably hyped-up guy pitching exasperated marketing executives about blimp rentals. In the parlance of political thinking, he’s now pivoting to the center after winning the primary. Given that his most major competition in Best Actor is probably coming from Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of One Battle After Another, it makes some historical sense, too. DiCaprio didn’t win an Oscar for decades, missing for hits including The Aviator, Blood Diamond, and The Wolf of Wall Street. When he finally collected, for The Revenant, it was by contritely playing the awards-season game, going to the dinners, and giving many dutiful speeches acknowledging the work he’d done to get to this moment. Now it might be Chalamet’s turn to do the same.

Stand-Up Comedy, All Joking Aside

2026-01-09T16:02:45-05:00

For someone best known as an actor, Bradley Cooper’s core interest as a filmmaker is perhaps unsurprising. Thus far, he has been entirely consumed by examinations of performance—first digging into a pop musician’s stratospheric career climb in A Star Is Born, then wrestling with Leonard Bernstein’s desire to reimagine classical music in Maestro. Both movies were hefty pieces of entertainment, filled with love, death, and grand human experiences. His newest, the fetching dramedy Is This Thing On?, has all that heady, arty stuff too. But Cooper has now dropped the wildly high stakes of his previous stories, to focus on someone audiences may find more recognizable: a regular guy telling jokes.

Instead of concerts held in ancient cathedrals or sold-out stadiums, Is This Thing On? follows its protagonist to the Comedy Cellar, the famed New York City institution. There, a listless, middle-aged salaryman named Alex (played by Will Arnett) rediscovers himself as a stand-up comic. Based ever so loosely on the true story of a British performer who stumbled into a new life as a club fixture, Cooper’s film is still about the ways that art and art-making can invigorate the soul and lay bare its dark truths. Only now, those realizations are being mumbled by the gravel-voiced Alex to a small crowd at an open-mic night.

In some ways, I appreciate the scaled-back approach. Cinemas have been lacking for these kinds of movies of late: stories about grown-ups working through their feelings, navigating interpersonal relationships, and at no point picking up a gun, encountering a demon, or doing battle with a supervillain or serial killer. The tension of Is This Thing On? simply revolves around whether Alex will make some emotional progress while he tells his punch lines, and if doing so will help him heal his rift with his wife, Tess (Laura Dern). In an awards season filled with human suffering, the premise is a refreshing downshift.

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The tone reminded me most of the work of Cameron Crowe, a former collaborator of Cooper’s. Cooper starred in Crowe’s Aloha, one of the director’s later and more misbegotten films. Cooper obviously longs for that era of storytelling to return—nobody could lob a sincere, big-feelings dramedy over the plate better than Crowe (Say Anything, Singles, and Jerry Maguire). Is This Thing On?, in its strongest moments, brushes against those heights. Yet the movie is too scattered, switching haphazardly between Alex’s journey as a stand-up and his efforts to rebuild his marriage.

The stand-up-comedy section of the movie simplifies some matters. Perhaps it’s implausible that Alex gets to stumble onstage at one of America’s most celebrated comedy clubs, but just roll with it, for the sake of cinema. Cooper uses the clubs’ brick-wall backdrop and claustrophobic vibes to his advantage, taking a setting that looks familiar to even the most casual comedy fan and turning it into a hostile proving ground for Alex’s darkest, weirdest thoughts. A handful of real-life comedians (none of whom are household names) essentially play themselves, and they nudge Alex to be more daring. Cooper uses these established performers sparingly, to present a more honed version of what Alex is stumbling toward: material that’s more self-deprecating and personal than observational or political, recalling the confessional mode of today’s most popular comics.

Cooper keeps the camera in a tight close-up on Arnett’s face every time he performs, embracing the harsh intimacy of the stand-up form; the choice can be both appealing and distressing. More important, he never lets Alex get too good at delivering jokes; the character rises from doing awkward and stilted five-minute sets to mediocre 10-minute ones, achieving the level of a competent hobbyist at best. Any movie about comedians might prefer to lean on some rags-to-riches narrative or, in the social-media era, a convenient plot shortcut about “going viral.” Is This Thing On? avoids all of those pitfalls, and the Comedy Cellar (and other venues that Alex eventually visits) is used simply as a place for the character to build up some interiority.

Alex’s search inward speaks to the other side of the film, the relationship drama. Alex and Tess begin the story having agreed to a divorce, before reckoning with what led to it—and whether it was the right decision. Dern does great, heartfelt work as a mom and a former Olympic volleyball player who feels taken for granted by Alex. But Cooper (and his co-screenwriters, Arnett and Mark Chappell) have made the breakup so light on drama that the consequences are a little lacking. Is This Thing On?, in essence, is about two adults realizing they’ve forgotten to have a few big conversations. I do commend Cooper’s willingness to try something more prosaic with this occasionally sweet little tale. At times, though, Alex’s career journey makes me miss the gifted protagonists of Cooper’s previous films—and their many crescendoing triumphs and failures.

Watching Someone Fail Shouldn’t Be So Fun

2025-12-25T08:00:00-05:00

Marty Mauser cannot stop the hustle. In Marty Supreme’s electrifying opening moments, the audience is introduced to the wiry 20-something (played by Timothée Chalamet) in 1950s New York. He’s working as a shoe salesman, talking a fussy older customer into buying a fancier brand with easy confidence. Almost immediately thereafter, we learn that his boss (who happens to be his uncle) wants to make him the store manager. But Marty, a working-class Jewish kid, won’t hear of it. He has a singular career goal—to become the world’s best-known table-tennis player. His athletic ideal hasn’t exactly focused him, however: He walks right out of his uncle’s office and into a storage closet with another supposed customer—really his close friend, Rachel (Odessa A’zion)—to make passionate love.

Marty is vivacious, and the film around him is buzzing at the same frequency: itchy, anxious, yet unbearably exciting throughout, each minute defined by some hairpin plot turn. Not long after that raucous first scene, he arrives in London, where he prepares to compete in a global Ping-Pong tournament while complaining about the shoddy hospitality. Like his previous movies—most of them directed in collaboration with his brother, Benny—the filmmaker Josh Safdie makes what soon becomes a high-stress journey palatable by setting off with an exhilarating level of momentum. Though the film is a hefty 150 minutes, it operates at a careening pace, barreling from twist to twist. The audience is kept handcuffed to a protagonist who’s possessed by undeniable skill and moxie, but simply can’t get out of his own way.

Marty Supreme is Safdie’s first solo effort since splitting with Benny; their last work together was the fractious, nervy hit Uncut Gems. Benny also directed a sports drama this year on his own: The Smashing Machine, a much more muted effort that swerved from the Safdies’ jittery style. Marty Supreme indicates that Josh may have been the chief engineer of that approach, as evidenced by both the movie’s style and its story. The first act does the important work of establishing Marty’s desire for sports superstardom as well as his penchant for getting himself into ridiculous entanglements. The film initially seems like a familiar sports story: Loosely inspired by the real-life table-tennis player Marty Reisman, the tale follows an underdog rising through the ranks and brushing up against immortality. But Safdie, as always, seeks to challenge convention. Marty’s attempt to break out of postwar poverty, for example, feels modern; it’s even set to a pulsing soundtrack full of ’80s–New Wave hits.

[Read: Only Timothée Chalamet could get away with this]

Marty Supreme’s ensemble is similarly colorful. During his odyssey around the world, Marty encounters an array of other frenzied creatures: There’s Milton Rockwell (Shark Tank’s own Kevin O’Leary), a cruel businessman who wants to bankroll Marty; Milton’s wife, Kay Stone (a magnificently frosty Gwyneth Paltrow), an actor with whom Marty pursues an affair; and Ezra Mishkin (the director Abel Ferrara), a scuzzy figure whom Marty accidentally double-crosses. He makes friends, too, including the Ping-Pong-playing cab driver Wally (Tyler Okonma), who helps his pal with a moneymaking scheme. Marty’s mentor, Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig), is a former table-tennis champion who gently tries to dissuade his protégé from chasing his overblown goal. But everyone in this movie, rich or poor, seems to be on the edge of polite society, working their own angle while our hero strives for greatness.

In the hands of a lesser actor, Marty’s difficult personality might make him tough to root for. But he so perfectly matches Chalamet’s spirited, try-hard charisma—the same presence that made him a comfortable fit playing such varied roles as the fanciful Willy Wonka, a renegade young Bob Dylan, and Dune’s super-powered mystic Paul Atreides. Even as Marty’s quest veers off course, Chalamet imbues the character with an irresistible passion. Marty isn’t getting mixed up with criminals and flirting with married actors on a self-destructive impulse, like Adam Sandler’s gambling addict in Uncut Gems or Robert Pattinson’s petty criminal in Good Time, another pulse-quickening Safdie-brothers production. Instead, the director portrays the nightmarish baggage that comes with fighting to achieve victory outside the mainstream.

Much like Marty himself, Marty Supreme conjures a sense of being on the outside looking in. The story unfolds on a Hollywood scale, with a huge budget and close attention to period detail, but Safdie has managed to keep the indie ethos that powered his prior successes. This is a movie that, among its other quirks, is laden with unusual performers—the playwright David Mamet; the retired basketball legend George Gervin; the magician Penn Jillette; and even the New York grocery magnate John Catsimatidis. As a holiday-viewing experience, Marty Supreme stands alone: Unlike the heroes of this season’s glitzy blockbusters, Marty is a superstar only in his own mind.

Avatar Is No Longer Trying to Get Anyone on Board

2025-12-19T10:38:51-05:00

For Avatar fans, I have great news: The latest installment of James Cameron’s magical-alien adventure saga is here, and you’re going to love it. Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third entry in a franchise that has consumed the attention of Hollywood’s greatest action-movie director for the past two decades, is a giddy bundle of familiar sights: willowy blue warrior-aliens; Day-Glo beasts of air, land, and sea; eminently jeer-worthy humans trying to invade a celestial paradise. The bad news for anyone not already on board: This film has no interest in you.

The sense of exclusivity is the one big charge I can level against Fire and Ash, which furthers the fable of Pandora, the fantastical moon that’s home to the Na’vi. The focus remains on Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), a soldier who has permanently ported himself into a Na’vi body; he’s now raising a family with his warrior-queen wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña). The previous chapter in their tale, 2022’s The Way of Water, felt like a newcomer-friendly reinvention for the series. Its sequel is a straightforward continuation by comparison, mostly keeping to previously introduced environments and enemies. But Cameron has spent ample time building out this sci-fi world, whose nooks, crannies, and philosophical limits are still delightful to examine.

Fire and Ash makes clear up front that it’s different from the previous Avatar films, though, by opening on a downbeat note. It picks up directly after The Way of Water, which is a cheerful romp through a reef-side Na’vi community that ends in tragedy: Jake’s oldest son dying in a fight against an army of human colonizers. Thus, Fire and Ash has a dark pall over its proceedings; the protagonists are still in mourning and planning courses of vengeance. It contains less of the sense of discovery that makes the prior entries so thrilling, such as their navigation of an ecosystem and all of the intricately designed creatures within it. Instead, the movie devotes itself to weighing the cost of Jake’s arrival on Pandora, and his transformation into a member of its native species. The heavier tone is appropriate for the story Cameron is trying to tell. It’s just also a little less joyful.

[Read: Hollywood learned all the wrong lessons from Avatar]

Meanwhile, as ever with Avatar (and most of the director’s works), the screenwriting is direct to the point of clunkiness. All of the dialogue is geared toward communicating plot or plainly stating a character’s emotional state. The straightforwardness is in the service of Cameron’s real preoccupation, however: exploring and further building out this strange utopia. This film’s best invention is the “ash people,” a Na’vi clan that lives in the volcanic mountains. Although the other Na’vi are very tapped into large Mother Gaia notions of flora and fauna, and the belief that everyone is connected on Pandora, the ash people have a much more nihilistic worldview. Their disdain for their home is somewhat frightening, as is their eagerness to take up human arms—yet they’re refreshingly novel too.

The ash people’s perspective allies them with the group looking to strip-mine Pandora’s resources. They get on particularly well with the franchise’s knottiest figure, the villainous Quaritch (Stephen Lang). He’s a wonderfully perverse creation, an invading warrior now trapped in the form of his enemy; after dying in the first Avatar, Quaritch had his consciousness cloned into a Na’vi body. As usual, Lang plays the brute’s Heart of Darkness–esque descent into madness with gleeful relish. Quaritch finds a twin soul in the form of the ash people’s leader, Varang (Oona Chaplin). The two pretty quickly embark on a lot of drug-fueled campfire happenings, as if they’re at Burning Man. Theirs is the kind of loopy side quest that only Cameron has the guts to cram into a Christmastime blockbuster.

Narrative turns such as this are why I find it impossible to be bored by these movies. There’s always some bizarre new sci-fi consideration among the extravagant bits of combat. One of the most notable ideas that Fire and Ash throws around is the relationship between Sully’s adopted teenagers: Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, playing a dreamy pseudo-clone of the actor’s human character in the first Avatar) and Quaritch’s son, Spider (Jack Champion), who has miraculously adapted to life on Pandora like some space-age Tarzan. Each of them represents evolutionary concepts, such as adaptation, through which Cameron expands an already-mystical universe; their paths pave the most intriguing ground for future stories to develop on.

[Read: Hollywood’s love affair with fictional languages]

Their subplot also represents Avatar at its most complex. Playing the hits—Jake, Neytiri, and company doing glorious battle with men in mech suits—would have been easy, and Fire and Ash still serves up plenty of impressive warfare. Yet the Na’vi are just as often seen plugging their ponytail into an animal, or even into the roots of trees, to share their consciousness. That’s Avatar’s potent, if polarizing, cocktail: Hippie-ish spirituality comfortably exists alongside absurd action scenes, such as when Jake nerfs Marines with a carbine rifle while flying on the back of a dinosaur. I have no clue whether Cameron wants to keep working on the series; he’s been somewhat demure about the possibility of additional sequels, having already devoted a huge chunk of his career to the skies and seas of Pandora. The director clearly isn’t trying to win people over in the meantime, but I’ll never turn down a chance to delve into this gigantic, goofy world.

Rob Reiner Was a Quiet Titan of Storytelling

2025-12-15T08:36:04-05:00

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The shocking loss of the filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner is especially distressing because of the manner of his death: He and his wife, Michele, were found in their home in what appears to be a homicide. But he was also part of Hollywood for more than 50 years, the son of a comedy legend who built out a multi-threaded career of his own that included quintessential sitcoms, groundbreaking mockumentaries, and a cinematic legacy that went far beyond his comic origins. Reiner, 78, was an avuncular public figure through it all, taking on kindly-mentor and chipper-sidekick roles—both on- and off-screen—for decades, as well as a quietly brilliant force in the industry, producing the kind of intelligent, varied films no one could have expected from a man audiences once knew best as “Meathead.”

Reiner was the son of Carl Reiner, who left his own indelible impression on entertainment, beginning as a pioneering sketch-comedy writer and collaborating with luminaries such as Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, and Steve Martin over his many years (he died in 2020 at the age of 98). Rob followed a similar path up the showbiz ladder, doing bit parts in ’60s movies and writing with Martin on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour; on the latter, he brought a youthful perspective to a sketch show notorious for presenting a more challenging brand of satire.

In 1971, Reiner debuted as Michael “Meathead” Stivic, the young liberal foil to his cantankerous father-in-law, Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), on the controversial hit sitcom All in the Family; it ran for nine seasons and won Reiner multiple Emmys. Despite the nickname, Meathead existed largely as a moral counterbalance to Archie, a bigoted, lovable loudmouth who battled with the younger generation over all the ways the times were a-changin’. Mustachioed, mildly arrogant, but largely well meaning, Meathead defined Reiner’s early work, to the point that he believed he might never shed the moniker. But it was through that show, and his connection to its creator, Norman Lear, that he found the next phase of his career.

After All in the Family concluded, Reiner was trying to get a joke–documentary film made, focusing on two rock-star characters that the comedians Michael McKean and Christopher Guest had written together. He pitched Lear on the project, called This Is Spinal Tap, and, as he recalled years later, “I’m a very active pitcher. I’m giving it everything I’ve got. I’m yelling and shouting and telling them I’m not leaving till they agree to make Spinal Tap. Finally, I leave. And Norman turns to the others in the room and says, ‘OK, so which one of you wants to tell him he can’t do it?’ That’s how Spinal Tap got made.”

Reiner was given a small budget—about $2 million—and he, Guest, McKean, and the rest of the cast improvised the entire movie, working off loose outlines to tell the story of a bumbling heavy-metal band going on tour to promote their latest album. The end result was well reviewed and a modest hit at the time, but its influence has been staggering. Reiner created a model for the mockumentary that’s copied to this day; he always found the right balance between absurdity and pathos for his silly, silly subjects, and lent filmic realism to utterly bizarre scenarios.

It could have been an eternal comic wheelhouse for him, and Guest and McKean went on to collaborate on many more such projects. But Reiner’s directorial arc evolved in startling ways post–Spinal Tap. His 1985 follow-up, The Sure Thing, starring John Cusack, was a passable comedy and a minor hit. After that, Reiner went on a chameleonic run that is still incredible to consider.

From 1986 to 1995, he made the coming-of-age drama Stand by Me, the comic fantasy-adventure The Princess Bride, the totemic romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, the Oscar-winning psychological thriller Misery, the sterling military-courtroom spectacle A Few Good Men, the bizarre children’s odyssey that is North, and the winning presidential dramedy The American President. All (barring North, a notorious turkey) were hits, and all saw their reputation grow in the following years. Almost all of them have some immediately recognizable moment that’s referenced and remembered by moviegoers to this day, such as A Few Good Men’s “You can’t handle the truth!” and Misery’s chilling “hobbling” scene.

Most impressive, none of them matched what came before. Yes, Reiner worked with some collaborators multiple times, adapting two Stephen King stories and directing two Aaron Sorkin scripts, but he hopped from genre to genre with extraordinary ease. He was also a charming character actor capable of dashing off a fun, supporting performance—think Sleepless in Seattle or Primary Colors. He slowly became something of a mogul, too, with his production company, Castle Rock Entertainment, backing many other movie and TV projects, most notably the sitcom Seinfeld.

Reiner’s filmmaking career never slowed down. After that miracle stretch, he directed 13 more movies, some of them straightforward comedies (Rumor Has It, Alex & Emma), others serious historical dramas (Ghosts of Mississippi, LBJ), and others still in a more inspirational lane, such as 2007’s popular The Bucket List. Reiner’s final film was the warm, gentle reunion of the Spinal Tap gang in 2025’s mockumentary sequel. Though Reiner never again had the consistent success he had at the start of his directorial arc, he was a lovable workhorse, one drawn to human relationships as well as punchy critiques of American politics (Reiner was, much like Meathead, an avowed Democrat who loaned his voice to progressive causes).

His movies will endure—indeed, to this day, it’s easy to startle people with the fact that all of those great works were made by the same guy. But the horrific manner of his death is hard to comprehend, clashing terribly with the face Reiner always showed the world: upbeat, energetic, and spoiling to entertain.

A Throwback Rom-Com About One Millennial Trying to Have It All

2025-12-12T09:30:00-05:00

Perhaps you’ve seen the poster for Ella McCay and marveled at its title character, a woman who’s clearly trying to Have It All—by which I mean she’s futzing with a high heel while wearing a sensible overcoat and dress. James L. Brooks’s new film, his first in 15 years, feels like a throwback to the kind of light dramedy Hollywood doesn’t make anymore, a movie where the stakes are no higher than finding a balance among work, love, and family. Brooks is the aging master behind triumphs of that genre such as Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, but those were made in the 1980s. Can Ella revive his magic in a contemporary setting?

The answer is no, but on a technicality: This strange, shaggy movie is actually a period piece, tellingly set in 2008, a time of both hopeful promise and material misery for Americans. It follows Ms. McCay (played by Emma Mackey), a driven, idealistic 34-year-old lieutenant governor of an unnamed state who finds herself having one of the wackiest weeks of her life. Her boss, a beloved, aging governor (Albert Brooks), is accepting a position in President-Elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet, giving Ella his job. But her husband, Ryan (Jack Lowden), the useless scion of a local pizza magnate, has inadvertently dragged her into a minor scandal. Her brother, Casey (Spike Fearn), is an agoraphobic shut-in failing to confront his mounting mental-health crises. And her philandering absentee father, Eddie (Woody Harrelson), has decided to pop his head back into her life and beg forgiveness.

Brooks’s screenplay makes ample space to dump praise upon its protagonist while bemoaning her many predicaments. The narrator, her secretary Estelle (Julie Kavner at her raspiest), opens the film by sitting down in front of the camera and monologuing about how she just loves Ella McCay. A longtime Brooks collaborator, Kavner is basically functioning as his stand-in as he presents an extended ballad of Millennial promise and Boomer failure. Ella is something of an off-putting try-hard, a do-gooder brimming with policy ideas while possessing no sense of how to achieve what she wants. She’s surrounded by horrible older role models and being handed their mess to clean up—and Brooks just loves her for it.

Will audiences? It’s hard to deny that Brooks’s storytelling style, where characters trade long, flowery speeches loaded with piquant one-liners but light on realism, has grown somewhat unfashionable. His past two filmmaking efforts, the family comedy Spanglish and the sporty rom-com How Do You Know, were overlong and unfocused, burdened with narrative tangents. Ella McCay is trying harder on this front, keeping its run time to a trim (by Brooks’s standards) 115 minutes. But the movie cannot shed his woolly energy, which puts any no-name side character at risk of dropping an impassioned soliloquy about some heretofore-unexamined personal drama.

[Read: The godfather of American comedy]

The plot ping-pongs among Ella’s statehouse maneuverings, her personal “scandal” (the actual contents of which are relatively harmless, considering our age of daily political crises), and her off-kilter family members. At first Ella McCay seems like it might be about how this intrepid political prodigy pulls everything together, but Brooks has always been more interested in watching things unravel and then plunging into the resulting tangles. Mackey, doing spirited work, is at her best when things are at their worst. Other performances, like Lowden’s egotistical failson and Fearn’s twitchy brother, come off too broadly even for Brooks’s stylized tone.

The real juice of the movie is in the political intrigue, not the personal, and its most successful scenes revolve around Ella running headfirst into stagnant partisan realities. The 2008 setting, which initially seems baffling, ends up being a pointed reference to the last moment when idealism could triumph in America. The entire film comes off like an apology from Brooks on behalf of his generation to his kids and grandkids—a big sorry for the turmoil his once-principled cadre have dumped into their laps, Great Recession and all. It’s that stealthy sense of guilt that turns Ella McCay into a rich, if often bewildering, document for me. Yes, it’s the kind of movie Hollywood doesn’t make much of anymore, but honestly, even back in the day, the industry rarely ever pushed out something this delightfully weird.