Movies

In the remix of club comedown banger ​‘Everything Is Romantic’, Charli xcx transformed her original ode to an transcendent Italian vacation into a lowkey existential freakout in London. The confessional hits on brat after a parade of bolshy odes to drugs and dancing, the musical equivalent of waking up in an unfamiliar living room at four in…

The Director’s Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival has become a target of debate in recent years, sometimes viewed as “the films that didn’t get into the main Cannes program.” While it may be true for a few films, there’s a lot of quality in DF, not only exemplified by the excellent clip reel…

In the modern pantheon of movie protagonists who are simultaneously virtuous and vile, Shana (Eva Huault) is up there with the best of ​‘em. She is what you might call a dyed-in-the-wool bridge burner, someone who will violently argue her case and make sure that her POV is heard while remaining blithely unaware of the fact…

Confession: I am an absolute sucker for any movie in which a character grabs dry-erase markers and begins drawing diagrams to illustrate a novel theory about how capitalism, democracy, and the natural world interact. That remarkable exegesis—and it is remarkable, as riveting a scene as Cannes has offered so far—takes place about an hour and…

The Cannes Classics program has become one of its most interesting sections, offering restorations of great films from around the world, and they slotted arguably the hottest ticket on the Croisette this year in “Ken Russell’s The Devils,” a complete version of the masterful director’s controversial film. Released theatrically in October 2026, it will serve…

One sultry summer night in Chicago around 1967, I was backstage at the Broadway Strand with my dance troupe, The Foscoettes. The Strand, as it was called then, was located on Chicago’s West Side. On this night, it was transformed into a variety show space similar to the more famous Regal Theater. But most nights,…

When we talk about ​“set pieces” in relationship to cinema, we often think of a jaw-dropping, computer-assisted visual sugar rush that is primed to leave the audience banjaxed with a sense of breathless awe. In Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s tremendously beautiful and wise new film, All of a Sudden, there is one such set-piece, and it involves a character, Tao Okamoto’s…

This year’s Competition program at the Cannes Film Festival is filled with familiar names that include Pedro Almodovar, James Gray, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Two international auteurs were slated early in the festival, promising an intellectually invigorating start to the year’s battle for the Palme d’Or. Only one fulfilled that promise, and even that’s…

How can you tell that a painting is the work of a great artist? In Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, art restorer Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) is enlisted in a scheme to forge a series of portraits by Julian Sklar, a renowned painter of the pre – Young British Artists generation. The first and second series of the ​“Christophers” (named for their young subject) sell…