#film criticism

#film criticism

Shuffling under the mortal coil this week (aka hosting the Gabfest), it's our OG players Steve, Dana, and Julia. Like a morose Danish prince contemplating a human skull, they gaze upon the Oscar nominated , based on the novel by Maggie O'Farrell inspired by William Shakespeare's life. Directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Hamnet has brought some critics to tears and left others cold. Our hosts share where they landed.

There's a mildly amusing on-paper joke at the centre of manic art world comedy The Gallerist: what if someone was accidentally impaled on an exhibit but rather than report it, the corpse became part of the artwork? Sure, poking fun at the absurdity of modern art might seem a little dated and definitely a little too easy but maybe with a packed cast including Oscar winners Natalie Portman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Da'Vine Joy Randolph, there could be a fun, fast-paced caper here?

Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true. It's curiously circular. In a film about grief, the valorised quality is depth of feeling; it stands or falls by how profoundly the hero(ine) experiences emotion, and the audience proves its acuity, buys itself into the imaginative contract, by its ability to mirror that profundity.

Fraser plays Phillip, a hapless unemployed actor from the US who a few years previously came to Tokyo to do a goofy TV ad for toothpaste and, having no friends or family back home, simply stayed on. He lucks into a weird new source of income: working for a rental family, based on firms in Japan which really do offer bespoke therapeutic role-play services, such as errant spouses, deceased

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is the follow-up to 2023's Five Nights at Freddy's and, like that movie, is a live-action adaptation of the popular horror game franchise that features a lot of evil animatronic figures and tons of confusing and bizarre lore. The original film was a big hit at the box office, but took a beating from critics and ended up with an abysmal 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. I bet Blumhouse and Universal would love for the newly released sequel to have that score. Instead, critics seem to hate this new entry even more, with Freddy's 2 sitting at a truly awful 12% on the review aggregate site. Ouch.

Eternity doesn't rank among them, though director David Freyne and his co-writer Pat Cunnane deserve some credit for setting their sights so high. They have built an entire vision of the afterlife to serve as the setting for their otherwise modest romantic comedy. Okay, some credit ... and maybe also some blame. The beyond that they've conjured up is so ridiculously specific that we can't help but start poking holes in it.

Oliver Laxe leads his audience into a wilderness of non-meaning in this strange and unrewardingly oppressive film that was the joint jury prize winner at Cannes this year and the recipient of all sorts of critical superlatives. For me, Sirat is the most overpraised movie of the year exasperating and bizarre in ways that become less and less interesting and more and more ridiculous as the film wears on.

[ Big sigh.] Well, reactions have been divided already. This may speak more to my reaction than anyone else's but I think the feeling will be Didn't we just do this a year ago? And with this movie opening now, right as the annual scourge that we call awards season is getting under way, I'm sure people will be talking about performances.

In the Now You See Me movies, the so-called explanations for the big tricks are even more ridiculous than the tricks themselves; they're not built on the characters' skill or determination or cleverness, but on narrative convenience and screenwriter contrivance. These films are anti-magic: They quash the wonder of both a perfectly executed trick and its oh wow reveal. (This also makes them bad heist movies, by the way.)

Scored to the upbeat romantic sounds of Mickey & Sylvia's "Love is Strange, a brief collage from a ghostly POV hops and skips through time, as various women across the decades and centuries become enamored with some ghostly, unseen figure, but each romance soon curdles. Awkward silences abound, speaking volumes even in musical montage. These things happen, after all. Boy meets girl. They fall in love. They drift apart. It ends in bloodshed.

The first is that they all should have spawned gratuitously sleazed out direct-to-video sequels that recast Amy Adams in the lead role and aired on Cinemax every other night for the entirety of my high school years (shout out to Roger Kumble, the James Mangold of Adrian Lynes). The second - and perhaps more broadly relevant - aspect that binds those movies together is that Hollywood is currently in the process of remaking each and every one of them.

There was her 1999 debut, "Ratcatcher," about an impoverished Glasgow boy suffering tragedies and drawn almost telepathically to an eerie canal. Then, "Morvern Callar," in which Samantha Morton assumes the authorship of her dead boyfriend's manuscript, a man she has dismembered and buried in the Scottish mountains. "We Need to Talk About Kevin" became one of 2011's most controversial films, dousing us in the mental wreckage of a woman (Tilda Swinton) after her son shoots up his school with a bow and arrow.

The Nuremberg trials have inspired filmmakers before, from Stanley Kramer's 1961 drama to the 2000 television miniseries with Alec Baldwin and Brian Cox. But for the latest take, "Nuremberg," writer-director James Vanderbilt focuses on a lesser-known figure: The U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who after the war was assigned to supervise and evaluate captured Nazi leaders to ensure they were fit for trial (and also keep them alive). But his is a name that had been largely forgotten: He wasn't even a character in the miniseries.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

The built-in paradox of the artist biopic is that, with rare exceptions, any film that tries to represent the life and creative process of a great artist will necessarily result in a less brilliant work than its subject would themself have produced. , for one, is a fine example of the musical biopic, with a galvanic lead performance from Jamie Foxx, but can it hold up to Ray Charles' 1960 recording of " Georgia on My Mind"? Last year's A Complete Unknown featured a superb Timothée Chalamet as the young Bob Dylan, but no one would call James Mangold's well-observed portrait of a folk musician on the verge of a creative breakthrough the cinematic equivalent of a Dylan ballad like " A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."