Global stories. Digital first.
Topic
As one of Hollywood’s staunchest Republicans, the late James Stewart perhaps wouldn’t be rolling in his grave in response to “Jimmy,” a biopic that — in focusing rather less on his artistry than on his military service — paints him in a glowingly conservative light. But either way, he deserves better than this hokey, superficial […]
Arriving a bit late to ride the fizzled momentum of the nation’s semiquincentennial, and a bit early for Christmas, patriotic musical “Drummer Boy” nonetheless should strike a chord with Christian audiences. It’s the first feature for several collaborators since 2024’s “Unsung Hero,” one of the bigger “faith-based entertainment” hits in recent years, though this tale […]
The new "Cat in the Hat," it goes without saying at this point, makes no attempt to be a faithful adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s most fabled books. That would simply be too quaint for our buzzy, mercurial, attention-crashing, video-games-on-Ritalin era. Yet even as the movie departs all too eagerly from the innocent wildness of the Seuss books, it devotes itself, with a corporate diligence that’s the opposite of free-spirited, to mimicking the scale and spirit and plot setups of too many familiar blockbusters. It’s a mish-mosh of pop recycling.
There’s an increasingly undeniable hunger for the hand-crafted. As discourse around animation becomes more and more absorbed by anaesthetizing questions about AI, it becomes clearer that people who care about the medium are pushing for tactility and foregrounding real texture, materials imprinted with genuine human feeling. This feels especially true of Sun Xun’s “Magic Atlas,” […]
The early moments of “Hinotama: Ball of Fire,” the debut feature from young Japanese director Yaza Takenoshin (who graduated from Harvard this past summer), almost move like clockwork, finding a pleasing rhythm in everyday mundanities — matching the repetition of numbers being called out for test papers to a mother having groceries counted at the […]
Late on in “Kefi,” one of its central protagonists — the youngest of three sisters — justifies a spontaneous hook-up with a random stranger by claiming that “the flow” of their chance encounter “was really cinematic.” The same, perhaps, can be said for Kisin Saito’s brazenly confident debut feature as a whole — a genre-fluid […]
It takes a bold director to combine body horror with Sylvia Plath, but then again Rubaiyat Hossain has never shied away from pushing the envelope. From her 2011 debut “Meherjaan,” widely attacked by conservative forces, to “Under Construction” and more recently “Made in Bangladesh,” the maverick director’s focus on gendered spaces and female sexuality have […]
Since the days of “Vanishing Point” and Steven Spielberg’s “The Sugarland Express,” Hollywood has been making films about fugitives in fast cars who become media-sensation folk heroes. Companies like American International Pictures and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures would deliver movies like this a few times a year back in the 1970s, while simultaneously introducing […]
