Film

I’m not sure if everyone feels this way, but as much as I love going to the theater to watch new movies, my social battery is sometimes completely exhausted by the time Friday rolls around. My heart wants to spend a few hours in a room full of strangers, but my spirit just wants to […]

It’s deeply frustrating to be a film critic in the midst of an endless, exhausting culture war. The moment casting choices were announced for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Earth’s first trillionaire tweeted that the filmmaker had “lost his integrity” by casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Predictably, the conservative half of […]

When I go to the theater, I’m rarely there for just a single movie. I spend an inordinate amount of my life in dark rooms, staring at giant screens alongside strangers, all hoping to be transported out of the mundanity of existence. I think ultimately we all want to enter worlds that make us feel […]

While the first half of the year hasn’t given us an overabundance of masterpieces, it has been a banner year for genre entertainment. From the meteoric rise of YouTube creators turning out horror blockbusters like “Obsession,” “Backrooms” and “Iron Lung,” to the deeply touching, humanistic “The Sheep Detectives,” and the jaw-dropping maximalist brilliance of “I […]

I’ll be perfectly honest with you right now. The hardest I’ve ever cried in a movie theater was at the end of “Toy Story 3.” Rewatching it to prepare for the release of “Toy Story 5,” I figured it wouldn’t wreck me as badly as it did 16 years ago. I thought I was an […]

Every July, I like to look back at the first half of the year to take the temperature of our current cinematic landscape. By this time last year, we already had the dizzying peaks of “Sinners” and “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” and the subterranean lows of “Jurassic Park: Rebirth” and “Snow White.” Will 2026 […]

Cinema has long been obsessed with the concept of machines that can think, feel and one day be indistinguishable from their creators. When done correctly, artificial intelligence as a cinematic device can serve as a perfect mirror for human anxiety, ambition and existential dread; at its worst, it’s a goofy stab at speculative fear-mongering, nervously […]

I think how much you’ll like “Disclosure Day,” the newest film from Steven Spielberg, depends a lot on what your favorite film of his is. From the raw, thrumming energy of “Jurassic Park,” “Jaws” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” to the throwback sentimentality of “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” back around […]

Going to the movies this weekend made me feel like I was living through a cultural event horizon of the late 20th century, where Hollywood desperately picks up and shakes my inner child just to see if any more loose change falls out. This week, the box office gave us two diametrically opposed flavors of […]

The theatrical release and box office explosion of the new A24 psychological horror film “Backrooms” represents a landmark moment in modern cinema. It serves as the intersection of three major contemporary cinematic trends: the box office dominance of horror, the mainstream acceptance of a new YouTube-to-cinema pipeline and a successful push to get Gen Z […]