24 Best Movies To Watch After Lost in Translation (2003)
Música
As the director, co-writer (alongside American Vandal’s Dan Lagana), executive producer, and composer of Música, Rudy Mancuso’s filmmaking debut suggests he’s carrying a certain “do it all yourself” energy over from his previous career as a prolific YouTuber. Impressively, it does not feel insular or self-involved despite his hands being in nearly all aspects of the process. That isn’t to say, however, that it all works. Mancuso plays, well, Rudy, a college student barreling towards graduation with little semblance of a plan for what comes next. His dedication to puppetry and music shows great creativity, but it doesn’t seem like a promising moneymaking venture if his occasional busking is any indication. Further complicating matter is his synesthesia, a condition that underlines every aspect of his day with a constant beat. It may be great for his musicality, but it also creates a distance between him and others. Often distracted, sometimes overwhelmed, by the music only he can hear, he frequently misses out on what others are trying to tell him. Rudy Mancuso explains the "What's up Brother" meme to Camila Mendes. (Prime Video) His perceived lack of ambition proves too much for his girlfriend Haley (Francesca Reale), leading to a break-up at the film’s start. This clears the decks for Rudy’s mom (Maria Mancuso, the filmmaker’s real-life mom) to start playing matchmaker with every Brazilian-American girl around his age she can find and for Rudy to fall for Isabella (Camila Mendes), an employee at a local seafood counter. When Haley returns, things fall apart quickly, thanks in no small part to advice from Anwar (J.B. Smoove), a food truck entrepreneur and seemingly Rudy’s only friend. Continue Reading →
The Color Purple
Blitz Bazawule's adaptation of the Alice Walker classic (and the Broadway musical) is a more joyful, celebratory film than its predecessor. The Color Purple has taken on a musicality ever since Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones adapted Alice Walker’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for the screen. When the first film was released in 1985, Spielberg already referred to it as a “musical.” In a behind-the-scenes interview about the film's musicality included in Warner Bros’ sumptuous new 4K release, Walker, Spielberg, and Jones conduct us through the “diverse places” that music appears in the original film. There are rail work songs, African dance, juke joint blues, and revival gospel; all tonally matched together in a near seamless “immersion” of sound. In an age where nearly every popular and cult film gets a Broadway adaptation, The Color Purple is a particular no-brainer. Celie’s journey of self-discovery through systematic abuses and struggles at the turn of the twentieth century lends itself to the kind of emotional bigness a musical requires. With music by the legendary Brenda Russell and the late queer songwriting icon Allee Willis, The Color Purple: The Musical also showcases a diverse range of musical styles and modes, especially those well suited for the stage, like swing and Greek chorus. Continue Reading →
Priscilla
As daybreak bleeds from within the walls, Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) wakes up next to her husband, Elvis (Jacob Elordi). Her water’s broken and, as he calls for a car, she goes to the bathroom, where she applies the perfect fake eyelashes in silence. Continue Reading →
Saltburn
With her first film, Promising Young Woman, writer-director Emerald Fennell took a storyline that was essentially a cloddish-but-glossy retread of such female-driven revenge sagas as Ms .45 and I Spit on Your Grave, infused it with insights regarding gender issues that would barely have passed muster in a 100-level college class and somehow rode it to inexplicable praise and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Continue Reading →
Fair Play
Fair Play is all about the rules of engagement—in business, in bed, in relationships—and the chaos that ensues when someone who lives and dies by those rules suspects his partner is breaking them. However, it isn’t the fairness of the righteous or the just she’s violating. No, it is the unwritten rules he believes everyone should play the game by. Continue Reading →
Rebecca
“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again…” So begins Daphne du Maurier’s gothic masterwork Rebecca, one of the most famous opening lines in fiction. Rebecca proved a hit upon release in 1938 and has remained in print ever since. Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation, coming just two years later, netted him his first Best Director nomination. That interpretation of the text has come to be considered a classic, and with good reason. Its misty black-and-white photography and mysteries hypnotize. Continue Reading →
High-Rise
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →
Flamin' Hot
Of all the oddball trends in 2023’s multiplex movies, the strangest has to be Hollywood’s current obsession with films about the origins of familiar consumer lines and products, including Air Jordans, Tetris, and the BlackBerry PDA. The films have been okay—and Air’s genuinely quite good—but even so, when all is said and done, it is hard to shake the sense that what you have been watching is less a movie than an elaborate brand extension designed to remind viewers of the benevolence and vision of our corporate overlords. That is especially true in the case of Eva Longoria’s directorial debut Flamin’ Hot, a film whose story is almost too good to be true (more on that later) but which is, in practice, an ironically bland bit of product placement even more processed and devoid of nourishment than the snack food it celebrates. Continue Reading →
Alice, Darling
Alice, Darling may tout itself a psychological thriller in its marketing, but that leads audiences astray. This isn’t Repulsion or Mulholland Drive. Instead, it’s a startlingly accurate portrayal of domestic abuse. Continue Reading →
Causeway
We’re all living in the looming shadows of our past. The actions or mistakes we undertake today shape our tomorrow. It’s as true for the poorest pauper as it is for the mightiest king, and Causeway protagonist Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) is no exception. Formerly deployed to the Middle East as a soldier, she’s come home to New Orleans after suffering a brain injury. The ensuing movie’s emphasis on coping with the long-term effects of trauma is quietly established through Causeway beginning not with a grisly accident overseas, but rather with a shell-shocked Lynsey waiting for a taxi in America. Continue Reading →
Don't Worry Darling
Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde’s latest film, is neither a masterpiece nor a disaster. Based on the amount of behind the scenes drama that has surrounded the entire production filming to promotion, this review will surely come as a disappointment to some. But if not for the gossip about the filming of the movie and the celebrities involved, this deeply forgettable film would probably fade from the public eye in no time at all. Continue Reading →
The Woman King
Gina Prince-Bythewood is indisputably one of the most interesting directors working in Hollywood today. Since breaking out with the hit sports romance Love & Basketball, her work has ranged from intimate family dramas and love stories (The Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights) to action-packed superhero movies (The Old Guard). It took Prince-Bythewood seven years to bring her new film, The Woman King, to the screen. Epic, thrilling, and jam-packed with delightful character beats, The Woman King understandably feels like the culmination of Prince-Bythewood’s work so far. As masterful at shooting stunning fight sequences as she is wringing emotions from intimate dialogue scenes, Prince-Bythewood delivers a crowd-pleaser for the ages. Continue Reading →
Grbavica
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Continue Reading →
The Portrait of a Lady
Campion followed The Piano with a Henry James adaptation dedicated to the magnificently fraught question of desire or duty. Artwork: Felipe Sobreiro In the wake of the critical success of The Piano, Jane Campion’s 1996 adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady barely made a splash at the box office, grossing only a fraction of The Piano’s $140 million US earnings. It too seemed to puzzle critics. Some called it “claustrophobic” and “stifling,” and to be fair–they’re not wrong. The world that James creates in his masterful 600-page novel is at once lush and chilling, thrillingly intimate and so frustratingly tragic that as a whole it’s nearly impossible to quantify. James’s Portrait is not necessarily Campion’s, and vice versa. But few authors have had such a clear-eyed view of the inner lives of women, so it’s fitting that Campion–a director who has always portrayed women as they are, without pretense or romanticization–should be the one to adapt James’s greatest work. Continue Reading →
Tytöt tytöt tytöt
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival. Continue Reading →
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack weave effortlessly through a sizzling, intimate two-hander about the therapeutic nature of sex work. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) There’s a moment early on in Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande in which one of its leads says to the other, “Desires are never mundane.” It’s a simple line, but one that defines the film and the relationship at its core well; Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) desires a new experience and Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) exists to fulfill that desire. Their interactions are awkward at first, as with any arrangement between a customer and someone providing a new service, but gradually shift with time and further interaction. Continue Reading →
The Lost Daughter
Much to the Republican Party’s dismay, the birth rate in the United States has been gradually on the decline, hitting an all-time low in 2020. Couples are not only waiting longer to have children, they’re having less of them, with an average of 1.6 per family. While climate change and cost of living expenses are the primary factors in the decision to have fewer children (or none at all), a small part of it can also be attributed to more people accepting a difficult truth: that raising children can be an incredibly hard and thankless task. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes an assured debut as a writer and director in her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, a complicated and strangely moving psychological drama/thriller about two women who bond over this truth. Continue Reading →
Bruised
The best sports movies uplift and invigorate. They often take their formulaic structures to greater heights than what seems achievable. They transcend the films that they’re modeled after, pushing forward different definitions of winners and losers. The classics, Rocky, Hoosiers, A League of Their Own, offer the catharsis that sports can bring; they unite an audience in rapturous applause, even if the underdog doesn’t win the title fight. Unfortunately, Halle Berry’s directorial debut, Bruised, neither elevates nor shifts this formula, resigned to a middling existence likely to get lost among the endless titles shuffling through Netflix. Continue Reading →
The Last Letter from Your Lover
While author Jojo Moyes doesn’t confine herself to the romance genre, her works do share a rosy bloom. Light-heartedness and melodrama and historical settings and yes, love, all abound. So without even reading it, you’ll probably have some idea of what to expect from the newest adaptation of her work, The Last Letter from Your Lover. There’s the French Riviera and 1960s fashion and mystery and a torrid love affair—the works. And director Augustine Frizzell doesn’t seem too interested in taking this tale off the tracks.In short? It’s your classic Netflix weepie, though perhaps a little more star-studded than usual. Felicity Jones (Rogue One) stars as Ellie, a modern London reporter with a bad case of heartbreak and a crappy attitude. While researching a basic assignment, she stumbles upon an old love letter that’s so intoxicating she becomes determined to track down who it belongs to and what happened to the couple in question. In between scenes of Ellie’s search, we see the romance play out. Jennifer (Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies) is a 1960s housewife with a husband who doesn’t seem to know or care that she exists. So when she meets dashing reporter Anthony (Callum Turner), it isn’t long before the two become swept up in each other and fall madly in love. But you won’t know if their romance ends in tragedy or happily ever after until Ellie gets to the bottom of it. Continue Reading →
The Cable Guy
It can’t be overstated how much the mid-90s belonged to Jim Carrey. Largely a stand-up comedian and supporting actor at first, Carrey shot to stardom thanks to In Living Color, and the grotesque characters he played on it, including the disfigured Fire Marshall Bill, and ponytailed lady bodybuilder Vera de Milo. His leap to leading roles in comedy features was swift and wildly successful, with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber all released the same year. There hadn’t been a comic actor much like Carrey before, someone who did childish things like pretend to talk out of his butt, but also had a wild look in his eyes that suggested a hint of danger with the body contorting nonsense. Continue Reading →
Jack
There was a trend when YouTube first launched, one that still pops up from time to time, where a skilled editor will take a film such as Dumb and Dumber or Elf and recut the trailer as a horror film. These pet projects are amusing at first glance, and serve to highlight deeply disturbing elements of classic comedies generally played for laughs. They demonstrate the power certain filmmakers have to elicit a specific audience response often diametrically opposed to the given circumstances on screen. Continue Reading →