Recent articles
October 16, 2026
The Hiring of Peter Rice at Netflix Could Set the Stage for a Corporate Culture Clash About the Future of Movies
The profile of what a Hollywood executive is — the role, the methods, the priorities — is now in the midst of a transformation. The old definition of a successful studio executive was someone who’s...
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October 16, 2026
‘Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald’ Review: Judd Apatow’s Juicy and Haunting Portrait of a Comedy Star as Troubled as He Was Hilarious
At times, he had a streak of Andy Kaufman’s antisocial hostility in him, as if comedy was his way of testing both himself and the audience, seeing what they would accept, and seeing if he would be ...
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October 10, 2026
‘Tenzing’ Review: A Remarkable Adventure That Puts the Audience Right Up on Mount Everest, Along with the First Two Men — One a Sherpa, Overlooked by History — to Scale It
"Tenzing" earns its inspirational fervor, but the reason it fits into the new wave of mountain-climbing movies is that the director, Jennifer Peedom, an Australian who’s been making documentaries a...
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October 10, 2026
‘14th’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Powerful Sequel to ‘13th’ Turns a Constitutional Amendment into Living History
The movie, I’m pleased to report, exerts the same kind of historical/topical force that "13th" did. DuVernay, while she works in an extremely accessible and mainstream way, has a singular gift for ...
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October 6, 2026
‘Artificial’ Review: Luca Gaudagnino Has Made the Real Sequel to ‘The Social Network’ — a Brain-Spinning Tech-Geek Docudrama, Brilliantly Acted by Andrew Garfield and Yura Borisov
"Artificial" is a brilliant but playful docudrama, meticulously true to history, that focuses on the founders of OpenAI, notably its CEO Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield). But the tale it tells is much ...
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October 4, 2026
‘A Statement’ Review: Just What We Need Right Now — Another Movie About Climate Change! But Tom McCarthy’s Historically Based Talkfest Reveals How Much We Knew in 1980
On paper, "A Statement" sounds like an interesting movie, but it’s at once talky and flat, grabby and meandering, impassioned and neutral. It wants to be a "firebrand" docudrama, yet I can’t imagin...
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October 3, 2026
‘Behemoth!’ Review: Pedro Pascal Is a Classical Cellist Skating Through a Midlife Crisis in Tony Gilroy’s Elevated Bauble of a Music Drama
"Behemoth!" is a classical-musician movie. It’s a midlife-crisis movie. It’s a romantic mystery. It’s Tony Gilroy fiddling around with pure movie form.
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October 2, 2026
‘Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall’ Review: Paul Thomas Anderson Directs a Rapturous Solo Concert Movie Built Around the Songs — and Haunting Sound — of Cameron Winter
The slow rolling piano echo through the hall like a rhapsody from the deep. The sound is rich, lustrous, bottom-heavy, grand. And that voice! Winter sings in a low baritone (and occasionally a high...
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September 30, 2026
Robert Pattinson Is a New Kind of Movie Star: The Anti-Tom Cruise
In the last few years (ever since “Top Gun: Maverick”), Tom Cruise has often been hailed as The Last Movie Star. He’s certainly the gold standard, though it might be appropriate to add Brad Pitt an...
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September 29, 2026
‘Digger’ Review: As a Texas Oil Tycoon, Tom Cruise Goes Over the Top in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bombastically Self-Important Satire
"Digger" isn’t funny. It’s nervy, in your face, audacious, adventurous, and bizarro in a free-swinging, out-of-the-box way. And it feels like a comedy, since it’s fueled by the relentless overactin...
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September 27, 2026
‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ Review: Godzilla and King Ghidorah Battle to the Death in the Even Grander Follow-Up to ‘Godzilla Minus One’
Yamazaki, who rebooted the genre and took it to a new peak in the revelatory 2023 retro kaiju classic "Godzilla Minus One," works with a quality that none of the filmmakers of recent decades has su...
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September 22, 2026
‘Heart of the Beast’ Review: Brad Pitt Is a Veteran Stranded With His Combat Dog in David Ayer’s Stirringly Crafted Survival-in-the-Wild Saga
Ayer and Pitt (both producers on the film) have teamed up to make something that isn’t so far removed, in form and spirit, from an old-school Disney movie. But the real surprise of "Heart of the Be...
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September 19, 2026
‘Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been’ Review: A Stirring Pop Doc Traces How the Great Singer of ‘He’s a Rebel’ and Other Classics Reclaimed Her Name
"Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been" tracks the unique fusion of glory, injustice, fleeting opportunity, dashed dreams, resilience, and latter-day recognition that defines her story. The movie, l...
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September 16, 2026
‘Resident Evil’ Review: Zach Cregger’s Reboot Is Funky Monster Fun, a One-Man-Against-the-Squish-Zombies Lark That Never Gets Bogged Down in Video-Game Sludge
His "Resident Evil" is different, and much better, than the other "Resident Evil" movies — it’s a creepy-crawly squishfest that takes its time and has a weird innocence about it. (At moments it rem...
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September 15, 2026
‘The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd’ Review: Amanda Seyfried and Scoot McNairy Are Powerful in Tim Blake Nelson’s Twisty Dark-Side Prison Saga
Tim Blake Nelson’s "The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd" is a gripping, wrenching, dark-as-midnight crime drama that taps into a phenomenon many might view as an underground secret (or maybe they j...
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September 14, 2026
‘Pretenders’ Review: A Superb Portrait of Chrissie Hynde and Her Legendary Band Captures Their Incandescence…and Tragedy
Hynde, though she had the feelings of punk in her bones, was the most romantic songwriter of that entire scene. I don’t mean romantic as in "love songs," but as in conjuring the majestic romanticis...
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September 13, 2026
‘Misty Green’ Review: Chris Rock Tells the Story of a Party-Girl Actress, Brilliantly Played by Rosalind Eleazar, in The Best Movie About Hollywood in Years
"Misty Green" is an amazing slice of showbiz sociology, riveting in the details of what a contemporary Hollywood actress — even a successful one — is up against. Rock isn’t casting stones. The warp...
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September 13, 2026
‘I Play Rocky’ Review: Anthony Ippolito Channels Sylvester Stallone in Peter Farrelly’s Cleverly Crafted Crowd-Pleaser About the Making of ‘Rocky’
For a biographical drama to work, it’s not required that the central actor do a pinpoint uncanny, so-close-to- the-real-thing-you-might-think-it’s-the-real-thing impersonation of the person he’s pl...
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September 12, 2026
‘The Julia Set’ Review: Chase Infiniti Confirms Her Movie-Star Mettle in Niki Byrne’s Riveting Math-Geek Bad Romance
In "The Julia Set," she portrays a numbers genius in the most convincing way possible — by wearing her virtuosity lightly and casually, as if it were second nature (which, for someone like Julia, i...
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September 11, 2026
‘Being Heumann’ Review: Siân Heder’s First Film Since ‘CODA’ Is a Bold and Stirring Dramatization of the Protest That Launched the Disabled-Rights Revolution
"Being Huemann" isn’t as transporting a movie as "CODA" was, yet it’s a stirring drama cut from the same cloth of cathartic empathy.
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September 7, 2026
‘You Can See Everything’ Review: Nathan Fielder’s Documentary About Elizabeth Holmes Is a Shameless, Fascinating, Reality-TV-Eats-Its-Tale Look at Entitled Duplicity
"You Can See Everything" is about the furthest thing from a "pure" documentary you’ve ever seen. That’s part of its appeal — it’s a one-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus. Yet it...
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September 6, 2026
‘The Debut’ Review: Julianne Moore Is Astonishing in Jesse Eisenberg’s Funny and Dizzying Community-Theater Comedy
What holds it together is the suppleness of Eisenberg’s voice as a writer-director (the wit that singes, the story that never stops poking around corners), and the utterly astonishing performance o...
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September 5, 2026
‘Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes’ Review: The Legendary Rocker Gets a Lively Doc That Asks: Who Are You? And Then Doesn’t Fully Answer It
The film centers itself on Pete Townshend’s contradictions, his growing pains, his turmoil, and his complexity as a human being and rock artist. And that’s all good. But given where it sets the bar...
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September 5, 2026
‘Elsinore’ Review: Andrew Scott Is Powerfully Moving as Ian Charleson, the ‘Chariots of Fire’ Star Who Played Hamlet While Ravaged by AIDS
The tender power of "Elsinore" is the way Scott’s performance takes us right inside Ian’s state-of-mind — his belief that what’s left of his life needs to mean something, and that playing Hamlet wi...
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September 5, 2026
‘A Long Winter’ Review: Andrew Haigh’s Moody Drama, Set on a Farm in the Rockies in the Early ’50s, Is a Sweeping Act of Cinematic Storytelling
Based on a novella by Colm Tóibín, it’s a movie austere enough to risk alienating its audience, yet if you get onto its wavelength you stay right there, inside the movie’s world.
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September 5, 2026
‘Tender Loving Care’ Review: Mike Leigh’s Tale of Social Workers, Lonely Hearts and Dementia Should Have Been a Fuller Portrait
Leigh doesn’t make any wrong moves here; just about every scene in the movie plays. Yet "Tender Loving Care" builds (or maybe I should say recedes) to something more schematic than it is powerful.
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August 23, 2026
‘Boorman and the Devil’ Review: The Making of John Boorman’s 1977 Disaster ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ Becomes a Documentary So Unbelievable It’s Funny
You might call Boorman’s fortitude admirable, but you could also call it delusional. And it lends "Boorman and the Devil" the quality of a true-life Christopher Guest movie. For this is the uninten...
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August 22, 2026
Why Do We Love Spider-Man So Much?
Why does everyone love Spider-Man so much? When “Spider-Man: No Way Home” came out at the end of 2021, it made an insane amount of money ($814 million in the U.S. alone), blasting away any vestige ...
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August 22, 2026
‘Spa Weekend’ Review: Leslie Mann and Isla Fisher in a High-Concept Comedy Without the Comic Highs
I watched "Spa Weekend" and realized that the genre it’s in — the high-concept movie with the concept in the title, the comedy that puts out a vibe of "Look, I’m crass and dumb and obvious! And tha...
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August 19, 2026
‘Mutiny’ Review: Jason Statham Dies Hard on a Cargo Ship in a Thriller of Impeccable Bring-the-Pain Timing
"Mutiny," a revenge thriller set aboard a giant cargo ship, shows that there’s life in the "Die Hard on a Boat" concept. The film makes you think of Bruce Willis in other ways too, since its star, ...
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