Monday

20-10-2025 Vol 19

Month: September 2025

Venice Film Festival 2025: The Smashing Machine, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, The Testament of Ann Lee, Father Mother Sister Brother

The bit in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘60s film “Pierrot le Fou” where Belmondo asks maverick filmmaker Sam Fuller, playing himself, to…

Healers and Nurturers: Ethan Hawke on the Artists of “Blue Moon” and “Highway 99: A Double Album”

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” is a phrase a young Ethan Hawke took to heart while filming “Dead Poets…

The Unloved, Part 140: Shattered

I grew up with Wolfgang Petersen’s films. I saw them in theaters; they were always on TV. The fabled original…

Venice Review: An Impressive Dwayne Johnson Softens Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine

The Smashing Machine is a movie with a lot of heart and soul. It’s also a movie with great love…

Venice Review: The Wizard of Kremlin Proves an Irrelevant, Cynical Approach to Vladimir Putin’s Russian 

In April 2022, two months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Italian author and political writer Giuliano da Empoli published a…

Telluride Review: Noah Baumbach Makes His Fellini Film with Jay Kelly

Let’s start here: Billy Crudup is one of our truly great actors. Early into Jay Kelly, written by Noah Baumbach…

Telluride Review: Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet Reminds Us Why Art Matters

Hamnet is a great work of empathy and the best film Chloé Zhao has made by quite a wide margin.…

Venice Review: Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada is a Stupefying, Time-Slipping Ghost Story

The films of Mark Jenkin ooze a hypnotic, seasick sensibility; to watch them is to be lulled by their restless…

Venice Review: With Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro Crafts an Intricate World and Rhythmically Off-Kilter Adaptation

In the rather niche academic field of monster studies, the common understanding of monstrosity is very similar to that of…