The French film school La Fémis, which accepts only around 1 percent of applicants to its directing program, has a well-earned reputation as one of the most exclusive institutions of its kind. It promises world-class instruction and facilities to budding filmmakers, provided they speak near-fluent French and can pass…
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. With the Academy Awards right around the corner, we’re suggesting the perfect pairings for this year’s Best Picture nominees—movies to watch with, or instead of, each of them.
The characters of the wildly prolific and consistent South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo are awkward guests in lives of missed opportunity and dreamlike repetition, their insensitivities and drifting attentions paralleled by a predisposition to smoke, drink, and overstay one’s welcome. In that sense, Ko…
In Nancy Meyers’ 2000 hit What Women Want, Mel Gibson plays an alpha-dog ad executive who gains the power to read women’s minds after accidentally electrocuting himself in a bathtub, and quickly discovers that most of his female coworkers think he’s a massive tool: His aftershave stinks, and so do his jokes. But while…
A crashed cargo plane sits on a sheet of snow, one wing twisted, nose blackened by an engine fire. Some distance away, a lone man works at the snow and ice with a long metal spike, clearing an “SOS” that’s been scraped into the rock underneath. We watch as he heads back in the direction of the plane and stops to check…
Dresden, in the mid-1930s. A precocious little boy and his beautiful young aunt follow a tour through an exhibit of “degenerate” artworks, taking in the paintings of Otto Dix and Wassily Kandinsky while their tour guide blathers on about the common man, real art in the Reich, and the like. Nazism is the status quo,…
The Kid Who Would Be King, the English writer-director Joe Cornish’s family-friendly take on the King Arthur legend, might be smarter that the average live-action kids’ movie, but it’s hamstrung by a lack of visual imagination and a generic script. It starts promisingly enough. After an animated prologue about the…
The Intouchables, Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano’s monster hit about the friendship between a quadriplegic white millionaire and a black ex-con, was such a formulaic crowd-pleaser that the idea of a Hollywood remake seems redundant. Yet here we are with Neil Burger’s The Upside, an adaptation that moves the story…
We’ve been telling jokes about Sherlock Holmes since the beginning. The earliest send-ups of the world’s greatest detective appeared not long after Arthur Conan Doyle started publishing his stories about Holmes and his trusty sidekick, Dr. John Watson, in The Strand Magazine, and by the early decades of the 20th…
Adam McKay’s Vice opens in 1963 in Casper, Wyoming, as the young, puffy, and whoopingly drunk Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) is about to be arrested for driving under the influence for the second time in a year. After losing his scholarship to Yale, he has returned to his hometown to work as a lineman for the local…
Anyone who read comics in the ’90s probably remembers Peter David’s mean, bearded Aquaman, a rejoinder to the Filmation and Hanna-Barbera cartoons that had cemented the character’s popular image as a weenie, the Fred Jones of the seven seas, and the butt of endless jokes about his fish friends and the limited…
Although it’s more faithful to the characters of The Jungle Book than any of the Disney adaptations, Andy Serkis’ long-delayed Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle owes as much to bastardized interpretations of Joseph Campbell as it does to the stories of Rudyard Kipling. Mowgli, the wild child raised by wolves in central…
