With his new science-fiction satire Mickey 17, South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho is back with his first movie since he swept the Academy Awards for 2019 with his lucid-looking class-conflict film Parasite. Granted, nobody writing in English has yet put forward a convincing explanation of what Parasite meant to say about the condition of the working class in South Korea. For example, why is the poor family defeated by simple paying tasks such as folding pizza boxes, but when they begin to infiltrate the CEO’s family by posing as American-educated art therapists and the like, they suddenly ...
H.L. Mencken once said that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public, but the American public of his time was full of Lorenzos the Magnificent by comparison with the ...
Conclave is a (non-action) thriller set inside the Sistine Chapel during the election of a new pope, starring veteran acting luminaries Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow as cardinals ...
London, 1911. Two proper gentlemen meet for an ale. “With this land grant and generous endowment by the Brothers Wilks—who stomp the earth to extract petrol for lamps and ...
I’ve had a lot to say over the years about how rightists refuse to act locally, or seem incapable of doing so. With one of the defining aspects of the Trump era being “the ...
The defining entertainment industry story of 2024 was the collapse of Hollywood, the “death of movies,” to quote the L.A. Times. The defining story of 2025 is, to quote the ...
I never did get to do my New Year’s “wrap-up” column (I got distracted by the H-1B visa thing, then the fires started). I feel bad not only because it broke a long-standing ...
The musical biopic A Complete Unknown competently depicts the most famous of the heel turns Bob Dylan has amused himself with over his long career: how he stabbed in the back his ...
Sir Ridley Scott’s 2000 movie Gladiator with Russell Crowe as the hero Maximus has been one of the more unexpectedly culturally influential films of the 21st century. Americans ...
Having a column that runs Monday/Tuesday means I’m forever doomed to post the evening before/day of elections. And today? You’re on edge. Everyone is. So I’ll take my cue ...
Has 85-year-old Francis Ford Coppola pulled off the artistic comeback of the century by liquidating half of his heirs’ expected inheritance in his wine business to film ...
I considered writing about presidential politics, but the way things are going lately, by the time you read this on Wednesday, we may well be on to a whole new storyline I can’t ...
As I mentioned last week, I took a Substack poll regarding my readers’ preferred topics, and the top vote-getters were “scolding idiot rightists” and “musing about ...
I’ve done three straight weeks of politics, so let’s lighten the mood with the Holocaust. Wait, that came out wrong. I mean, let’s lighten the mood with Hollywood. And the ...
The Last Duel, a 2021 film by Sir Ridley Scott with Matt Damon as a mulleted French aristocrat chud battling honorably (if stupidly) a suave Adam Driver in 1386, turned out to be ...
In director Christopher Nolan’s campaign to save moviegoing from technological and social obsolescence, his latest ploy is his most clever yet: to lure grown-ups with ...
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