22 Best Movies To Watch After Maria Full of Grace (2004)
Immaculate
According to the press tour for Immaculate, Sydney Sweeney first auditioned for the film years ago. Despite not getting the role at the time, the script made a sizable impression on her. Thus, when she had enough clout, she immediately pursued it once again. Alas, for most of the jump scare-heavy but not especially frightening, horror movie, it’s difficult to understand why the script so captured her heart. After a brief prelude that would cost Immaculate little to lose, audiences meet Sister Cecilia (Sweeney) at Italian customs. After surviving a fall through the ice in her childhood, Cecilia felt called to serve God although not sure how. When her Michigan congregation closed, the young nun felt even further adrigt from His will. However, an invitation from Father Sal (Álvaro Morte) feels like it might be her true purpose. Therefore, despite not speaking Italian, she accepts his invitation to a remote convent specializing in hospice for nuns. Mother Superior (Dora Romano) and another novice nun, Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli), greet her kindly. The fellow Bride of Christ who makes the biggest impression, though, is Sister Isabella (Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi). She brings sharp bitterness to her first encounter with Cecilia, softening to warn Cecilia off taking the convent's vows. When the new nun rejects the advice, Isabella doubles down on that initial attitude. The seeming professional rivalry only increases when Cecilia discovers she’s pregnant despite being a virgin. Continue Reading →
Love
Engage in holiday self-care with some movies that put a stake in the heart of romance. Even if you're in a content, stable relationship, Valentine's Day can often feel like a bit of a joyless slog. Like a lot of holidays in the internet era, it's become less a day of celebration, and more another excuse to engage in conspicuous consumption and endless games of one-upmanship. Who got the biggest flower arrangement at the office? Who cares? Whether single or not, you may understandably feel as if all the fun and romantic flair has been squeezed out of the day. In keeping with that, consider this short list of bleakly funny, sad, or just plain horrifying cinematic takes on romance to get you in the anti-spirit. Continue Reading →
Memory
Both the main characters in Michel Franco’s Memory are struggling to deal with the echoes of their past. Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), a recovering alcoholic and single mother to 13-year-old Anna (Brooke Timber), desperately wants to forget the unspoken traumas of her childhood. Saul (Peter Saarsgard), on the other hand, can’t grab a hold of his past. He’s powerless as early-onset dementia slowly but inevitably steals it from him. After their high school reunion, he wordlessly follows her home and spends the night standing outside her building. In turn, she visits him at the house he shares with his brother (Josh Charles) and niece (Elsie Fisher). Then she takes him for a walk and accuses him of participating in a rape that she endured at the age of 12, a crime that he has no memory of committing. Continue Reading →
Breakfast at Tiffany's
John Carney's new drama is just one of a diverse collection of features at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the works being covered here wouldn't exist. Irish filmmaker John Carney made his big breakthrough in 2007 with Once, a film focused on the redemptive power of music and its ability to bring people, whether they are strangers or family, together in the pursuit of creating something that allows them to give voice to their once-buried hopes and desires. This was followed by Begin Again (2013), a film focused on the redemptive power of music and its ability to bring people, whether they are strangers or family, together in the pursuit of creating something that allows them to give voice to their once-buried hopes and desires. After that came Sing Street (2016), a film focused on the redemptive power of music and its ability to bring people, whether they are strangers or family, together in the pursuit of creating something that allows them to give voice to their once-buried hopes and desires. Continue Reading →
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
In cinema, water is a site of birth, rebirth, and drastic transformations. In movies ranging from Sansho the Bailiff to Moonlight to Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, characters walk into vast bodies of liquid one person and exit another (if, that is, they resurface). It tracks, then, that the romantic drama Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe kicks off its central relationship at a community pool. A conversation between the film’s titular leads, set against the blue, kicks off a life-changing connection. Continue Reading →
Blue Jean
A portrait of a closeted lesbian woman living in England during Margaret Thatcher’s oppressively homophobic 1980s reign, Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean illustrates a unique paradox for a critic. How does one navigate criticizing a film’s self-imposed binaries while also accounting for the realities of a restrictive period, the gravity of the subject matter (and parallel current circumstances), and the differentiation of what is intended as cinematic affect and what constitutes clumsy filmmaking? Continue Reading →
You Hurt My Feelings
The white lie at the center of You Hurt My Feelings isn’t harmless, nor does it spiral out to reveal lie upon lie, turning a marriage into a house of cards. Instead, it lies somewhere less explored: a trivial thing whose impact is understandably real. It’s a fine line to walk, but Nicole Holofcener does just that, and with a razor-sharp wit to boot. Continue Reading →
Evil Dead Rise
Folks, I simply would not open that book. Continue Reading →
Scream VI
The Scream franchise's strength has always been in its self-awareness. Initially, it turned the camera towards the audience, demanding that they ask themselves why it's so entertaining to see other people being made to suffer, and what happens if, as the tagline went, someone took their love of scary movies too far. Then it mocked the inevitability of sequels, then the movie industry in general, then how the media treats trauma victims like celebrities, with varying levels of success. The 2022 reboot, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, sought to address all of it in some fashion, with toxic fandom on top of that. It was mostly successful, despite being at times aggressively meta. Scream VI does much of the same, although this time the knowing winks and nods are starting to feel a little tired. Continue Reading →
Babylon
Babylon is a frenetic crash course in Hollywood history that plays fast and loose with most of its facts. However, it still paints a vivid portrait of Tinseltown from its birth to the behemoth it is today. You won’t find the meticulous and mind-boggling commitment to detail of Mank (most of Margot Robbie’s costuming looks more 2010s than 1920s). Still, director and screenwriter Damien Chazelle is less interested in getting everything right than translating that history into something an audience can feel in their bones. Continue Reading →
Blonde
Social media has normalized behaving as though we know and can even speak for celebrities. Going beyond the concept of the “number one fan,” we address them directly, make demands of them, and attack anyone perceived as meaning them harm, acting as though we’re under personal orders. It peaked during the Amber Heard defamation trial, then that angry energy transferred over to Olivia Wilde, largely for committing the crime of dating Harry Styles. The mere tweeting of Wilde’s name seems to summon antagonistic replies listing her sins, accusing her of everything from being a rape apologist to a pedophile to preventing Styles from being with the person he truly loves, fellow One Direction member Louis Tomlinson. Though Styles and Tomlinson have both denied (many times) that they’re in a secret relationship, their “true” fans insist that they know better, and that it’s all subterfuge to fool the press. So it’s up to the fans to aggressively defend them, even threatening those they perceive as “enemies.” Continue Reading →
Ragtime
When it was announced in 1975 that Robert Altman, then riding high on the success of his groundbreaking epic Nashville, had been hired to direct the film version of E.L. Doctorow’s sprawling novel Ragtime, it almost seemed too good to be true. After all, not only was he one of the most inventive American filmmakers of the era, he seemed uniquely qualified to bring the book to the screen. Additionally, with its sprawling cast of characters, multiple storylines, and cheeky mixture of fact and fiction, Nashville now seems like an experiment to test out potential approaches for tackling that book. Continue Reading →
tick, tick... BOOM!
New York City. January 29th, 1990. Composer and playwright Jonathan Larson (Andrew Garfield) turns 30 at the end of the week. SUPERBIA, the dystopian science fiction musical he's spent most of a decade writing, is about to have its first-ever full workshop. It's a critical moment for Jon, one that could well make his career (or break it irreparably). If SUPERBIA bombs, Jon will be washed up before he ever set out to sea. To crank up the pressure, the show is missing a critical song, a tune that the whole affair will turn on. Continue Reading →
Italian Studies
Adam Leon's foggy mood piece is as endearingly formless as its amnesiac protagonist, a moody reflection on creativity and youth. This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. There's no explicit explanation given for why Alina Reynolds (Vanessa Kirby), a short story writer of some recent renown, finds herself aimlessly wandering the streets of New York City sans memory in Adam Leon's hypnotic Italian Studies. But if anyone was to thrive in the Big Apple in such a remarkable fugue state, it'd be someone so preternaturally attuned to listening and observing as Alina. And that she does for the vast majority of Italian Studies' runtime, creating a listless yet engrossing fever dream about the unexpected gifts of curiosity. Continue Reading →
False Positive
Pregnancy sucks. Though we do it all the time, because otherwise god forbid more women would choose to not subject themselves to it, it seems almost morally wrong to sugarcoat it. Even an “easy” pregnancy is uncomfortable at best, when foods you normally love become repulsive, and even tasks as simple as putting on shoes become a comedy of errors, if your feet can even still fit in them. Childbirth itself is the most excruciating pain the human body can endure, and the effort for such a “natural and beautiful” process can result in vaginal tears that can make future intercourse difficult. Mostly, we just get real weird about pregnant people. Pregnancy is perceived as a communal event, with everyone, even casual friends and co-workers pushing advice and suggestions, while often dismissing (if not shutting down outright), the pregnant person’s needs and concerns. Ilana Glazer and John Lee’s False Positive is a chillingly effective look at an expectant parent’s sharp decline from excitement to unease to paranoid terror. Her fears are brushed off as part of “mommy brain,” but there may be something to it. Continue Reading →
Oxygen
Director Alexandre Aja built his career finding as many ways as possible to explore tension and suspense. His tone shifts from project to project, from the gruesome violence of The Hills Have Eyes to the goofiness of Piranha 3D. His most recent success, Crawl, was lauded as a true successor to Jaws—just swap the boat for a creepy house and the shark for a pack of gators. But always at the core of his work is Aja’s interest in finding new ways to thrill his audiences, and Oxygen is no different. Continue Reading →
Lucas
As we continue the bleak discourse about how well pop culture of the past has aged (or hasn’t, rather), it’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of 80s comedies aren’t going to hold up to present day scrutiny. Hobbled by casual racism, sexism and homophobia (not to mention rape gags, if you’re Revenge of the Nerds), to watch many of them now is to cringe in discomfort. Teen comedies didn’t often escape it either, as evidenced by the vastly different Porky’s and Sixteen Candles, both of which aged like milk. It’s interesting that the comedies that addressed “dark” subjects, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (abortion) and Heathers (suicide) are the ones that managed to survive relatively unscathed. Continue Reading →
Language Lessons
Natalie Morales directs herself and Mark Duplass in a tender look at the bonds we form to save ourselves in a hard world. How are we supposed to process our grief when the closest we have to comfort is sharing feelings through zoom video calls? In Natalie Morales’ directorial debut Language Lessons, that question is explored at the center of the story. Wonderfully written and packed with heart and sensitivity, this heartwarming two-hander mumblecore celebrates the beauty of human connection in any kind of medium, depicting how the unexpected bond we have with other people, even the one only shared via computer and phone screens, can help us heal from the pain of losing our loved ones. Morales, who co-writes the script with indie darling Mark Duplass, plays Cariño, a Costa Rica-based Spanish teacher hired by a wealthy man named Will (Desean Terry) to give his husband, Adam (Duplass), a 100-hour lesson on the Spanish language. Though their first meeting starts off awkwardly, the two eventually warms up to each other, especially after Adam opens up about his life, his relationship with Will, and even his strange morning routine. Continue Reading →
Passing
Rebecca Hall adapts Nella Larsen's novella about Black social mobility (and its corresponding resentments) to haunting effect. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Nella Larsen's 1929 novella Passing is a fascinating text, a frank but elegant discussion of the intersections of race, class, and gender as cold and delicate as its subject matter. It makes sense, then, that Rebecca Hall's adaptation is similarly airy and ominous, an intimate portrait of resentment and racial/social mobility set amid the stifling backdrop of 1920s New York. Continue Reading →