There is a scene, early in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece Le Mépris, that surely contains the ultimate cinematic statement on Homer’s Odyssey. An American producer has asked the film’s screenwriter protagonist to help rewrite an adaptation of The Odyssey helmed by the great German director Fritz Lang (playing himself, beautifully). The writer comes to meet Lang in the studio and watches a few rushes for the proposed film.
If it seems odd to call Steven Spielberg a 21st-century filmmaker, that’s surely because Steven Spielberg has had an odd 21st century. On the surface there’s been little consistency to his choice of projects. Yet look closer, and some themes emerge. There are the weird one-offs (The Adventures of Tintin), hokey throwbacks (War Horse, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), a remake (West Side Story), and weird vanity projects (The BFG, Ready Player One).
After an eight-year hiatus from feature films, actor and comedian Mike Myers shocked audiences around the world with a surprise return in 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, playing a fictional record executive who rejects the titular song for its length and perceived radicalism. Myers’ appearance remains one of the more bizarre facts of his late career, given that his character is wholly made-up and the struggles presented on-screen for Queen are entirely fake, which does raise the question of whether he simply wandered onto set and started messing around.
Obsession is a nifty little horror movie. Genuinely disturbing, and exhausting, it seems destined to become a midnight movie classic, if we still have that kind of thing anymore. That the film was made for a pittance (less than $1 million) and has just become the least expensive movie since 2009’s Paranormal Activity to top the box office is an obvious victory for buzzy little movies, and a hopeful sign that audience interest can still accrue somewhat naturally around a tiny film like this. Of course, it’s still 2026, so said film must almost inevitably be a horror film and some kind of conversation piece.
They’ve been calling Kristoffer Borgli this year’s enfant terrible, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. I’ve been avoiding all The Drama drama. I’ve fully opted out. Deep within my brittle bones I’ve grown more than fatigued by the cinematic discourse du jour. I’ve started to feel its weight, like a particularly evil germ, haunting my digestive tract.
Christmastime in Las Vegas: tinsel on the slot machines, Santa hats on the pit bosses, short days, vivid winter sunsets, balmy nights. Tourist shortages have recently put the city in a nervous mood, as Americans increasingly choose to gamble from the safety of their couches, but you wouldn’t know that making your way through the crowds that fill the plush lobbies and malls and casino floors of the Wynn and the Venetian and the Flamingo, crowds of staggering variety: couples and families from Tel Aviv, from Dubai, from Shenzhen, all there to experience the most American of cities, that strange neon bloom in the desert built on mob money and defense money and the fantasy of hitting it big.
Oscars Season is upon us, and consistent readers can probably guess which films I favor for the biggest awards. One Battle After Another certainly seems like a lock for Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay — and as our greatest working director, Paul Thomas Anderson deserves to finally be recognized by the Academy. So you’ll get no complaints about that from me.
I want to take advantage of the ramp-up to Oscar season — a wonderful time, during which my inner child will always be excited, no matter how pessimistic I’ve become over the years. I believe in being candid, so I’ll admit this serves a dual purpose: (1) allowing me to get to a few films from 2025 which I still have yet to review, and (2) allowing for time, since movies are usually released much later here in London than in the States, and several enticing films (Sirât, Resurrection, Sound of Falling, The Moment, The Secret Agent) haven’t even hit theaters.
Much of contemporary discourse about China remains trapped in what might be called an all-consuming Trump vortex, where nearly everything is refracted through the prism of the 45th and 47th president. Two new works on China manage to escape that pull for a wider lens look at a country that has undergone a rapid shift over the course of the past several decades.
In my brief tenure as critic here, I’ve been pretty clearly pessimistic about the current state of the cinema. Discerning readers will note that the only film I’ve reviewed positively so far was released 50 years ago. They’ll note, too, that I’ve been entirely ambivalent about the overall quality of this past year’s cinematic output. I took the chance in my Superman review to air my exhaustion with the whole superhero genre (a sentiment that at least seems somewhat shared by the general moviegoing public — for now).
A long lineage of Jesus films depicts Christ as almost otherworldly, serene, and calmly removed from the people around him. Movies like Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) depict Jesus as bathed in a soft glow of light, and as he moves through Jerusalem he seems to barely touch the ground. While Christian doctrine professes that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, depictions of him in film almost always place a heavy thumb on the scale of divinity.
It gives me little pleasure to report that Train Dreams is an unfortunately empty film. A pretty film, in some ways. But an empty one. And as a moviegoer who believes that today’s critics are, on the whole, far too easy on this contemporary strain of middlebrow cinema, I must confess: I’m tired of films that look and feel like Train Dreams. I know nothing about the original Denis Johnson novel, which some people I know have called a great one — I only have the film.
About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a knife. Things look dicey for a moment — until Cruise gains some distance and kicks him repeatedly in the head. While doing so, he imparts a few words of wisdom: “You spend too much time on the internet.”
Someday someone will actually adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a film. Until then, we will have to make do with filmmakers using Shelley’s ever-resilient scaffolding as a playground for their own obsessions. Del Toro’s newest treatment of the story has been marketed and blurbed by many critics as “the movie he was born to make.” More than anything, though, the film serves to prove how far we still are from realizing the depths of Shelley’s original vision. Del Toro’s achingly sincere and fitfully compelling version of the book has maintained only that — the mere scaffolding of the story.
Seth Rogen is dreaming of New Hollywood. Just a few weeks ago, Apple’s The Studio won 13 Emmys — setting the record for most wins for a comedy series. The cynical read on this would be that there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than another backstage satire about itself; such an avalanche of golden trophies is as much a marker of the movie business’ self-love as it is for any qualities of the show, which are plenty. Certainly, The Studio is no Sunset Boulevard — no pitch-black excoriation of the underbelly of the world’s glitziest exploitation land, nor some more highly wrought tragic riff on a dying medium.