Anderson, Paul Thomas and Leonardo DiCaprio. "Leonardo DiCaprio Unfiltered." Esquire (August 13, 2025) [The two are discussing their upcoming film One Battle After Another. "How do you get the actor talking? Put him in a room with Paul Thomas Anderson. During hours of conversation, two era-defining men—on the record together for the first time—went deep. They cracked some jokes, too."]"A Serious Man." Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics (November 17, 2024) ["A Serious Man (2009) may seem much different from the Coens’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men, which they released two years earlier. But they both concern a likable man who finds himself posing questions that the universe–or any of its wisest men–cannot answer. And even if there are glimpses of answers to the question “What does Hashem, or God, want,” neither late-thirties Larry or late-sixties Sheriff Bell can read the writing on the wall (or, in the case of A Serious Man, the writing on the teeth). The film begins with a quotation from Rumi, “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” Join us for a conversation about one of the Coens’ best films and a terrific look at people to whom things happen and are forced to receive the will of a God who never tips His hand about His intentions."]Aster, Ari and Adam Curtis. "‘Nobody believes in the future any more’: Adam Curtis and Ari Aster on how to wake up from the post-truth nightmare." The Guardian (August 8, 2025) ["Paranoia is exploited to control us. Movies are groomed to flatter us. And trauma has been twisted to make us blame ourselves. How can we make sense of our lives? The two film-makers try to navigate the chaos."]Hering, David. "Bringing Bodies Together: On David Cronenberg and The Shrouds." Notes From the End of Cinema (April 22, 2025) ["Much of Cronenberg’s reputation as a horror director derives, of course, from association with his biggest hit, The Fly (1986). This reputation obtains, even though nearly half of Cronenberg’s filmography has no supernatural or horror element at its centre. If you want to find a constant in Cronenberg’s oeuvre, it’s not horror but technology. The description of Cronenberg’s work as ‘chilly’ is, I think, a perspective that develops from expecting horror – a visceral, affective response – only to find fascination in its place. Cronenberg’s work has a prevailingly scientific eye, one that doesn’t shrink from observing the changing and degenerating things that happen to bodies. In his latest – and he has suggested, possibly final – film, The Shrouds (2024), this viewing position is at the heart of the story. Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a rich businessman, desolate following his wife’s death, invents a technology, a shroud in which the dead are wrapped, that allows the bereaved to view an accurate computer-generated image of their loved one’s decomposing body."]Hudson, David. "Alexander Horwath's Henry Fonda for President." Current (September 11, 2025) ["Fonda “personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and—thanks to his rebellious children—the 1960s generation gap,” writes J. Hoberman for Artforum. “Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, Henry Fonda for President, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary—what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life.”"]
---. "Chloe Zhao's Hamnet." Current (September 9, 2025) ["A quote from Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt opens both Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet and Chloé Zhao’s adaptation: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” In Zhao’s film, cowritten with O’Farrell, young Will Shakespeare writes his immortal play about a Danish prince hurled into an existential crisis by the loss of his father and a smoldering desire for revenge as a way to mourn the loss of his eleven-year-old son. He was also reaching out to his wife with an urge to have her understand that he shares her fathomless grief. For Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, Hamnet is “devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years,” and most early reviews find critics on the same page. There are, however, a few detractors."]
Hudson, David. "Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice." Current (September 10, 2025) ["Known around the world as the Front Man in Squid Game, Lee Byung-hun is most famous in South Korea for starring in films directed by Kim Jee-woon such as A Bittersweet Life (2005), The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008), and I Saw the Devil (2010). He broke through, though, playing a South Korean soldier who befriends a couple of North Korean border guards in Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area (2000). Lee stars in Park’s No Other Choice as Man-soo, a paper factory manager with a loving wife, two kids, two handsome golden retrievers, and a painstakingly (and expensively) renovated home, and he “undoubtedly delivers one of the year’s great leading performances as a desperate corporate crumb,” writes Luke Georgiades for A Rabbit’s Foot. After twenty-five years at the company, the Americans are taking over, and higher-ups pass along word to Man-soo that they have “no other choice” but to let him go."]Kaye, Jenni, et al. "Dog Day Deep Cuts: a starter pack of twenty underseen summer horror films." Cinemascope (August 6, 2025) ["For those who have already worked their way through the summer horror classics like Jaws and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Jenni Kaye has packed a cooler full of twenty underseen sweaty thrillers, campy romps, and slow burn screams for your watchlist."]
Murthi, Vikram. "“Making a Movie is Just a Succession of On-Set Challenges”: Ari Aster on Eddington." Filmmaker (July 31, 2025) ["Ari Aster previously used the horror genre as a lens to examine dysfunctional family dynamics in Hereditary and break-up messiness in Midsommar. He then pivoted to the manic surrealism of Beau is Afraid, which immerses viewers in the title character’s perma-anxious mindset, generated by his mother’s domineering hold on his entire world. In Eddington, Aster pivots again, away from individual psychological portraits towards a more panoramic view of recent political history."]
Rife, Katie. "Monstrous Feminine: Twenty feminist horror films to explore the subversive genre." Cinemascope (July 29, 2025) ["From final girls to monstrous liberation, horror has long been an avenue to unpack and subvert misogynist tropes—Katie Rife dives in, sharing a starter pack of twenty feminist horror films that’ll rock your world."]
Vis, Dave. "Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films." Letterboxd (Ongoing) ["Letterboxd's Top 250 movies, based on the average weighted rating of all Letterboxd users. I removed all stand-up specials, stage plays, concert films, documentaries, shorts, 'collection listings' and other 'rarities', so only feature length narrative movies are listed here. Films should have a minimum of 15,000 ratings to be eligible to enter the list."]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Lydia Tár (née Linda Tarr) is a germophobe. We see the stress that touching other humans gives her; we watch as she tries and fails to scrub herself adequately clean in the apartment she keeps in Berlin, its tasteful clutter arranged just so. The implication—that someone who cultivates a sense of the exotic, who claims to speak on behalf of Indigenous groups to the white elite, cannot handle any intrusion into her body—is at direct odds with the steely public persona the character has created for herself. Cate Blanchett, at turns terrifying and terrified, has never been better. See especially the scene when she has lunch with a cellist who hopes to play in Tár’s orchestra: Whether the allegations of sexual impropriety are true or not, Lydia here is a predator resting patiently on her haunches. —Thompson
---------------------------------------------------------"AMERICAN HONEY will make you feel dirty. Not because it features several scenes of barely clothed young people grinding up against each other (though they are designed to arouse, successfully) but because director Andrea Arnold is so fascinated with the sheer amount of grime, filth and decay that, in her vision at least, constitute the American South. It's there that the British filmmaker chronicles the exploits of Star (Sasha Lane), orphan to a meth-head mother, and her merry band of youthful delinquents (including Shia LaBeouf, at his rattiest) who eke out a living selling – of all things – magazine subscriptions… It's bold, captivating cinema, with a soundtrack that threatens to never leave your head." - Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail-----------------------------------------------------------Some actors chew scenery. In his Oscar-winning performance in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, Javier Badem quietly liquefies it with his mere presence on-screen. As Anton Chigurh, Bardem gave us a villain more terrifying than his mop top. Within mere weeks—maybe even days—of the film’s release in November 2007, Chigurh became an iconic movie villain on par with Hannibal Lecter and Nurse Ratched. Bardem is measured but unfiltered; he kills coolly and calmly but has a warm smile. His silhouette, a captive bolt pistol by his side, increases heart rates and sweat production. Bardem channels the menace of Chigurh through an absence of anything recognizably human behind his unprepossessing brown eyes. He doesn’t play evil with a wink. Instead, Bardem’s performance is completely absent of exaggeration. It’s mechanical and weirdly polite, as exemplified by the coin toss with Kelly Macdonald (“I got here the same way the coin did”) and the calm way he asks for the coin toss in the gas station (“Call it, Friend-O”). In a film full of silence and stark and striking landscapes, Bardem fills the space with a dread so thick that you could choke on it. It’s a performance that stalks you. Seventeen years later, we’re still scared to call heads. —Wittmer
-------------------------------------------------------------"AMORES PERROS, was a foreign- film Oscar nominee, but it didn't stand a chance. Blood actually sizzles on a grill in it, and the stench of its Mexico City is stronger than that of the average art house's popcorn… Inarritu doesn't give you a Mexico City that's a vista-laden window on exotic locales. Written by Guillermo Arriaga, the film is a side-streety, rat's-eye view of a city undergoing economic upheaval… This is hard core, and it ain't pretty. His movie doesn't have to be falsely gorgeous, though 2 1/2 hours after it begins, it finds the human beauty that spills out of the knife wounds." - Wesley Morris, San Francisco Chronicle
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In 2025, it’s easy to forget how nervous—or outraged, even—Batman fans were about the casting of Heath Ledger in the role of the Joker in 2006. Until that point, the Australian actor was best known for being a heartthrob in romantic comedies, from 10 Things I Hate About You to A Knight’s Tale, and for his Oscar-nominated turn in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain. Bat-stans couldn’t fathom Ledger becoming the iconic villain who had existed in comics, TV, and film dating back to the 1940s, with memorable on-screen performances from the likes of Jack Nicholson and (the voice of) Mark Hamill. Yet, these days, Ledger’s take on the Joker in The Dark Knight is widely considered the definitive portrayal of the Clown Prince of Crime. Ledger’s transformation in The Dark Knight is so convincing that it’s hard to believe that—somewhere beneath all of that messy clown makeup—the actor who serenaded Julia Stiles on those high school stadium steps could be the same guy performing magic tricks for Gotham’s mob bosses. Ledger is terrifying, hilarious, and mesmerizing as Batman’s archnemesis, stealing every scene he’s in while serving as the primary engine for the greatest superhero movie ever made. It’s fitting, then, that he became the first actor to earn an Oscar for a role in a superhero flick, with Ledger posthumously honored as the Best Supporting Actor at the 2009 Academy Awards following his death the previous year. He would remain the only actor to achieve the feat for a full decade, until Joaquin Phoenix stepped into the same role for 2019’s Joker—and it feels safe to say that the billion-dollar film would have never existed if Ledger hadn’t redefined the villain in The Dark Knight. —Chin
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