Like lots of superhero sequels, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 basically begins with a flurry of action. The Guardians, those mismatched intergalactic goofballs for hire, have gathered on a giant helipad to protect some giant glowing batteries from a giant, toothy monster that wants to feed off their energy. The…
Claire Denis is one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, but don’t let her hear you say that. She’s not crazy about compliments, the publicist warns me in the lobby of the hotel, minutes before our interview is scheduled to begin. Denis has come to Chicago to talk about her new movie, the hypnotic science-fiction drama …
One could be forgiven for assuming, based on title alone, that Dogman is yet another superhero movie. There’s a lot of them out there right now, after all, especially this month. But one look at the main character of this simmering new drama from writer-director Matteo Garrone (Reality, Tale Of Tales) should dispel…
In Her Smell, the unfortunately named new drama from Alex Ross Perry, Elisabeth Moss does something you almost never see in movies about rock ’n’ roll: She sucks all the cool—all the sexiness, all the glamour, all the romance—out of a downward spiral into debauchery. Her character, Becky Something, is the frontwoman…
It’s hard to envision what the Marvel Cinematic Universe would look like today if it hadn’t kicked off with Iron Man. Would it exist at all? A different movie, one built on a different character and/or approach, might not have connected with audiences in the same way—and if the test balloon popped, the whole plan to…
If there’s a scene everyone knows from Pet Sematary, it’s the one where Jud Crandall, wizened voice of New England wisdom, issues an ominous warning about the graveyard of the story’s title, a place in the woods where the buried don’t stay that way. A long version of the speech appears in Stephen King’s original…
Nearly all of High Life takes place aboard a spacecraft careening across the cosmos at light speed. On the outside, it looks like a portable speaker, rectangular and sleek—more Apple than NASA. The inside is another story. Though certain wings are awash in seductive shades of orange and blue, most of the ship has all…
As the title character of The Beach Bum, Harmony Korine’s shaggy new comedy of dirtbag decadence, Matthew McConaughey renders redundant any further parodies of Matthew McConaughey. Sporting a shoulder-length mop of dirty blonde hair and a wardrobe of unbuttoned Aloha shirts, the actor is exaggerating the stereotype of…
You know you’re in the hands of a natural born filmmaker when you can feel yourself being tugged, as if by invisible forces, from one shot to the next, into a movie’s diabolical design. That’s the sensation provoked by Jordan Peele’s Us, which begins with a sequence so expertly shot, cut, and orchestrated that you can…
In more ways than one, and true to its title, Dragged Across Concrete is abrasive. It comes from the mind of S. Craig Zahler, whose last grisly, leisurely, and evocatively named genre experiment, Brawl In Cell Block 99, climaxed with some rather literal abrasion: a face being loudly scraped against the hard floor of a…
The ensemble cast of Gaspar Noé’s deranged new movie, Climax, is made up mostly of nonprofessional actors—of dancers playing dancers, pretending to have the world’s worst collective drug experience. The one exception is the film’s star ringer, Sofia Boutella, who got her start in dance but has transitioned into a…
It’s really rather impressive, the extent to which Captive State sucks everything even potentially fun out of the alien-invasion genre. That includes, for the most part, the aliens themselves, who are spoken of much more often than they’re seen, words being free and all. Set in the aftermath of a worldwide…
Just shy of an hour into his new movie, Ash Is Purest White, the great Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke offers up a truly ingenious, discombobulating callback. The setting, momentarily, is 2006. On the deck of a ferry approaching the banks of the Yangtze River, Jia’s longtime muse and spouse, Zhao Tao, surveys the…
“What if it’s a prank?” So asks Behnaz Jafari, the famous Iranian actress, in the opening minutes of 3 Faces. Jafari, who’s playing herself, is in the passenger seat of a car, hunched over a cell phone, her face illuminated by its glow. She’s watching what appears to be the video equivalent of a suicide letter that’s…
There are no talking heads in Apollo 11, the remarkable new documentary about the first manned mission to the moon. Including hindsight recollections would have spoiled the manufactured present tense—the way director Todd Douglas Miller, working with a trove of stunningly preserved archival footage, creates the…
The cognitive dissonance sets in early, maybe at the first sight of a car. We’re in Paris, that much is clear. Armed stormtroopers patrol the streets, setting up checkpoints, issuing a familiar demand: “Your papers, please.” A German man, Georg (Franz Rogowski), haunted and desperate, is fleeing a wave of fascism…
