Cinema’s Last Great Gamble: On Three New Films, Warfare, Sinners and Friendship

Prophesying cultural doom has become a popular pastime online, to the point of being hackneyed. I have been guilty of it myself. My most popular post on my Substack, Cross Current, titled “There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness for Most of the 21st Century So Far,” has the subhead “Human Mediocrity Will Pave the Way for AI Supremacy.” Dramatic, I know. When I say I see a speck of light in my crystal ball, this is not some manifesting hocus-pocus. I hurt my own brand by saying this, potentially losing scrollers fiending for their next fire and brimstone doom sermon. Sorry, no stone tablets here. For the past month, from April to May, a string of releases has reinvigorated my faith in the power of theatrical cinema. If there are even three more films as good as the three I am reviewing here, this will be the greatest year in cinematic history since 1999, meaning of course this will be the greatest year for film this century. What makes this month so different from all the others? Blockbusters may have been all Marvel or Fast and Furious, but have we forgotten all those great indies? Even Netflix was releasing great films like Roma. I guess I would point to the evolution of what Stephanie Zacharek in Time calls a “real movie” or a “movie movie.” What she means is a movie that is worth leaving the house and watching in the theater. While she does not limit the criteria to include only big, bold projects, that is what unites all three of these phenomenal “movie movies”: ambition. Yes, they are intelligent, moving and have an artistic sensibility. Still, Alex Garland, Ryan Coogler and Andrew DeYoung know all too well that, in our era of “Voice” audition pop, pretty West Village influencers who perform their privileged consumer choices and creepy AI videos of bread rolls morphing into puppies, you either go big or go home. Mousiness and restraint are a luxury that we cannot afford in our current moment.

A World Beyond Words: On Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow

A century ago, all Hollywood knew was silent films. People flocked to the cinemas. Dressed in gowns and tuxes, they treated a night at the movies like a night at the opera. Of course, they had nothing to which to compare it. Perhaps to our bleary, overstimulated eyes, the silent film is as much a quaint relic as the rotary phone or a children’s toy fashioned out of sticks. To the moviegoer of 1925, though, going to the theater to see static photographs transformed into moving images must have seemed as mystical as the thought of flying to the moon. Recently, I experienced a form of this magic for myself with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I wanted to watch it out of obligation. Could I call myself a cinephile if I skipped over this colossus of cinema history? But I was not expecting much. How could a film without words sustain my attention or stimulate my curiosity? Well, it did. Swells and silences in the score, monumental production design, the expressive faces of talented thespians — all of it coalesced into a stirring depiction of greed, industrialization, and class.

Great American Psycho: On the Film and Novel, 25 Years Later

Search the internet far and wide, and you’ll find that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fan-edited videos of Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho; Bateman is portrayed by Christian Bale in the film adaptation directed by Mary Harron. Beneath these videos is an interpretation of Bateman as an Übermensch figure with the ideal body. This powerful investment banker lives in luxury, carved from nowhere like a porcelain statue, with a devil-may-care attitude. Many of the movie’s scenes have been parodied numerous times. A scene where Bateman walks into the office while listening to Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” shows him in his glory through bright and distorted filters. His morning routine — an obsessive attempt to have the perfect skin texture through conditioners, as well as an intense exercise regimen — is also highlighted in these edits. Other popular scenes include all the men comparing their business cards and Bateman becoming very envious when one’s more textured; the infamous sequence of Bateman’s execution of Paul Allen, after he monologues about Huey Lewis and the News, is recreated with Huey Lewis. There’s also no shortage of memorable quotes like “cool it with the antisemitic remarks” or “I’m going out to return some videotapes.”

The Rocket Never Landed: On Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17

Mickey 17 longs to make sweeping and grandiose political statements but has to settle for a referendum on Robert Pattinson’s merits as a leading man. While those who are wholly immune to his charms should stay clear, if you’ve been won over by his transformation into a bona fide leading man, then it’s worth the price of admission, if nothing more than to see what Bong Joon Ho can do with a mega budget. Bong has been one of the grittiest, most genre-bending international auteurs in the cinematic game. He’s never been one to pull punches or to withhold layering in seriously heavy social critiques. This time, he decides to use this adaptation of 2022 science fiction novel Mickey7 as a pretext to level criticism at a surfeit of targets. The issue is that with all of the opprobrium being spray-gunned in practically every direction, most of it fails to resonate in any tangible way.

American Faust: On Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice

It is abundantly clear, nearly ten years since he descended that gold-trimmed escalator, that Donald Trump is the most significant political figure of our time. Even his most bitter enemies would have to admit, however distasteful it may be, that no president has held greater sway over American government other than perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt during his 12-year presidency, and no single biography has displayed more variety, or taken as many improbable turns, since the rise of Theodore Roosevelt. As the author of this remarkable destiny, Trump himself is chiefly responsible for shaping a story that has altered our politics (many would say for the worse), changed the course of history (in a still undetermined manner), and now places the fate of much of the free world in the hands of a man who, as recently as May 2015, was mostly famous for firing celebrities on a reality show, coiffing his perm-blond hair in an absurd fashion, and going bankrupt in a series of asset devaluations by the end of the 1980s.

Torture, Survivorship, and the Lens of Youth: On RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys

Nickel Boys is the story of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), a pair of black youth, one idealistic, the other cynical, who are snatched from their families and placed into a juvenile reformatory where students are routinely tortured. The story is a fiction based on the real Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida where violent crimes against students were regularly committed — and with students suffering many of the exact same tortures that were perpetrated on their ancestors by white hands. Nickel Boys is set in Jim Crow Florida in the 1960s, and partially in the 2010s, where one of the characters revisits his trauma through news articles online. Like the novel on which it is based, the film is well done. The visuals are pretty and it is worth streaming. It is a hard task to confront brutal history and shape it into something truthful yet palatable, let alone entertaining.

Trying To Save Emilia Pérez From Itself: On Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez

When a film has been widely condemned and derided, it can create within one an illogical hope that the movie is actually good. And I, the genius, am the only one to see its goodness and I will bravely present my contrarian take and convince everyone they have been wrong. I was kind of hoping this would be true for Emilia Pérez, but about ten minutes into the film I realized this was unlikely to work out, and what I would be left restating was everyone has said. Emilia Pérez! What the fuck?! Let’s just get some stuff out of the way. It’s the story of a violent Mexican narco who fakes his death, goes to Israel for surgery to transition as a woman, attempts to regain a connection to her children, and tries to atone for her past by establishing a nonprofit to help those whose lives have been impacted by narco violence. It’s a French production set in Mexico with almost zero Mexican people working on the film. Also it’s a musical. And on Netflix.

Stand Up for Better Oscar Bait: On Edward Berger’s Conclave

The mother of all costume dramas. Conclave starts with a simple, can’t-miss premise. We will stick ourselves in the Vatican for two hours. What we have to spend on the elaborate set will be offset for by never having to change locations. We will be surrounded by absolutely fabulous art, by marble columns reaching up high over the top of the frame, by the sea of cardinal red. If we don’t have much in the way of sex or violence, the dopamine receptors in our brain will be lit up by cardinals, and here the film’s producers are really onto something. Archbishops don’t do it, even popes somehow don’t quite do it, but imagine being poolside in Hollywood and picturing this project: an entire College of Cardinals, gathering for a cardinal conclave, all in cardinal red, with round red cardinal hats and red cardinal suits and sometimes special cardinal mitres, all going about their cardinal controversies, and then, as the last drunken archbishop totters away with the Swiss Guards closing the gates behind him, the cardinals are sequestered, so that (except for the kitchen staff, who keep annoyingly intruding into the narrative in order to provide some gender balance) they are only ever interacting with other cardinals, getting onto special buses in which the only other passengers are cardinals, staying in special cardinal hotels that look well like it might be the set of John Wick but now booked-out entirely for cardinals, and if it happens to rain at any point in the film then the entire conclave will be issued with special white cardinal umbrellas that, needless to say, when glimpsed from a balcony shot, color-coordinate perfectly with the red cardinal outfits as they sashay slowly forward to the accompaniment of string instruments.

Architecting a Myth: On the Brutalism of The Brutalist

I wonder if László Tóth escaped the Nazis by jumping out of a prison transport train? Director Brady Corbet does not tell us how Tóth, a fictional Hungarian Jewish émigré in America, survived the Holocaust in his epic The Brutalist. But towards the beginning of the film, Tóth mentions that he broke his nose jumping from a train car, while mistaking as gunfire the sound of bone cracking against a tree. Perhaps Tóth, as an architect and aesthete, would appreciate how Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl described a trip in a Nazi prison train as a rare opportunity to experience beauty: As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor — or maybe because of it — we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long.

Maybe on Corbet’s cutting room floor, there’s a scene where Tóth got lucky, and the bars on his train car window broke off during the journey. The wispy man would have been slender enough to launch himself out of a small opening, once the train slowed just enough to risk it. Even if the attempt killed him, at least he would die on an awesome mountainside instead of inside the next camp.

But Tóth jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Corbet barrages us with so much trauma throughout the film — adultery, poverty, betrayal, famine, rape, addiction, young children losing their mothers, disease, more rape, overdose, suicide, the woman who became mute because her pain was unspeakable — that including the Holocaust on screen would have been gratuitous. As historical backdrop, it merely hovers behind the story until the epilogue, when Tóth’s life’s work is celebrated at the 1980 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Then we learn that the layout of the monumental Brutalist building that Tóth designs and builds throughout the film is based on his prison in the Buchenwald concentration camp, but with a twist — he gives the cramped rooms high ceilings meant to inspire hope.

Teenage Dreaming: On Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will be Girls

You ride a tattered scooter. You wear clothes that are either too baggy or too tight. You won’t shave. You flirt with Marxism. You hate capitalism. You believe you’re misunderstood. You’re mad at mom and dad because you think they don’t get you. No one gets you, and you know no one gets you, but something about them not getting you frustrates you greatly. You’re always fighting. They have dreams. You have dreams. And as you grow older you have stumbled upon that half-awkward, wholly painful realization that your dreams might differ from their dreams. You think you’re hopelessly lost, but the romance of that listlessness hasn’t set in. You like Pink Floyd and Metallica, until a girl with kaleidoscope eyes sits frightfully close to you and shares one of her two earbuds and forces you to listen to Nada Surf. Your world changes. As the lyrics of a song that you feel like you’ve known for a lifetime and many lifetimes envelop you, your world certifiably changes. The sun sets. You share furtive glances with one another. There is an ineffable desire, a desire that you haven’t yet the vocabulary for, to hold her hand. You slightly shamefully extend your pinkie, or let it linger on your walk back home, with her by your side. And the rest becomes history.

Thirsty for Piss: On Joker: Folie à Deux and Megalopolis

When I was sixteen, in 1992, I wanted to be a novelist like Stephen King, only better. I wanted the literary prestige of Edgar Allen Poe. I had conceived of this idea for a novel: The River of Lost TimeM. It was about a deranged criminal who illogically stabs a little girl and dumps her body in the river. But he’s cursed; now he has to see the world through her eyes. With this shift in consciousness, he goes up the river and meets all the great figures of the past (Socrates, Shakespeare). These figures are on two opposing sides: the mind and the soul. I don’t remember much more about the idea (I wrote one page of it when I was nineteen before giving up entirely), beyond my desire to have the inevitable film adaptation play Stone Temple Pilots’ “Where the River Goes” in the closing credits. We have no problem seeing this as a dumb, bloated — if ambitious — idea.

Shame, Sex, and the Female Body: On The Substance and Babygirl

“The particular greatness of movies,” Pauline Kael once wrote, is the power to connect with us “emotionally … in spite of our thinking selves.” I’m never going to be swept away by films that are treatises, feminist or otherwise. Tell me a good story whose ending I can’t predict. Make me weep. Make me smile with pleasure. Turn me on. Give me one delicious image. Let me leave the theatre pondering what I’ve just seen. Break my heart. Just don’t lecture me. The Substance and Babygirl: Two films by female writer/directors, both inspired by the experience of living in a female body in a culture that instills shame and self-hatred in us. It’s an evergreen theme for feminists; we’ve been writing about it (though only occasionally making movies about it) since the dawn of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960’s, and freshening the ideas up is a challenge.

Sniping for Love: On Derrickson and Dean’s The Gorge

The Gorge, an Apple Original, is exactly that—original—not a sequel, a remake, or based on a novel. Without fanfare or announcement, Apple TV+ (the streamer arm of the tech titan has only been around five years) released a fresh, modern love story on Valentine’s Day 2025. Directed by Scott Derrickson from a spec script written by Zach Dean, the megacorp’s slick new flick mashes multiple genres to great effect: romance, thriller, action, adventure, sci-fi and horror. Derrickson took risks on the ambitious film, and they paid off. I can’t predict whether it will stand the test of time, but despite mixed reviews, I thought The Gorge was a good movie. I will even go as far to say it was a very good movie.

The Poet of the New Gothic: On Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu

Both times I’ve seen Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu on the big screen — the first time on 35mm, the second digital; each in packed houses of squirming audiences — were vaguely ecstatic experiences. On 35mm the film was like an occult artifact, like a magic lantern capturing some older time, peeking in on things which we were perhaps not meant to be seen. I felt overwhelmed by the sound, the shadowed images — “like Rembrandts” a friend of mine said. The detail was overwhelming, the atmosphere beyond unnerving. Like being pitched into a dark storm at the center of which stood real, palpable evil. Then being vomited safely up, exhausted, on the other side. The second time I began to catch smaller things, and I started to appreciate the rhythm of the film. Something which I have yet to see remarked on in reviews of the film is just how wonderfully old-fashioned an entertainment it is. There’s humor, largely through the sheer presence of Willem Dafoe, whose Van Helsing-like character is (importantly) the only one able to give in to the wildness of the story. There are stock jump-scares: an especially horrifying one involves our first full look of the vampire (and, without exaggeration, Bill Skarsgaard’s Count Orlock is one of the most unreally-real special effects I’ve ever seen in a film). And there are moments so archetypal, which so clearly relish the obvious iconism they’re drawing on, that often the audience is left with nothing to do but laugh (somewhat uncomfortably) at how fully the film has committed to it.

When You Ain’t Got Nothing: On Bob Dylan and A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan isn’t dead, but he may as well be. With a slate of books, think-pieces, and, now, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, we’ve condemned the man born Robert Zimmerman to a fate usually reserved for those already playing their great gig in the sky: becoming fodder for a few Golden Globes. It would be heartrending if it weren’t so absurd. The insanity of it all was not lost on a group of young cinephiles attending the Angelika in late October who, during the previews, caught their first big-screen glimpse of Timothée Chalamet’s mannered impersonation, and began laughing.