Luke Hicks

The chemistry between Chalamet and Russell is off the charts. Their love is desperate, passionate, true, confused and confounded, perpetually crushing under the ethical crisis they face in killing innocent people to survive, not to mention the fact that they feel very differently about it.

The duo is responsible for one of cinema’s greatest cinematic achievements, Malcolm X, while the other three would have a fighting chance at most directors’ best. If Highest 2 Lowest falls on the lower end of their partnership, the sparks of brilliance they’ve found in the past will flare up multiple times.

It relegates its thematic strengths to the corner of ironically thoughtless family fun entertainment that seeks to please and assuage where other projects might investigate the theme and leave you with a sense of concern over the real-world parallels without sacrificing entertainment

Splitsville is overflowing with one-liners and gut-busters that make it ripe for subsequent viewings.

Penélope Cruz steals the show as the pistol-wielding Laura. . . It’s a great performance founded on a sizzling bitterness that manifests the film’s only (darkly) comedic moments in bursts of scathing monologue.

Though struggling with some pacing issues, it’s mostly an engaging, well-performed drama that offers a fascinating peek into an institution matched in significance only by the Vatican itself.

If The Year of the Everlasting Storm isn’t exempt from the typical disjointedness of portmanteau films, it yields more coherency than its kin. With so many disparate works included, the experience becomes an intriguing exercise in cinematographic range and creative perspectives on the most globally unifying trauma in human history.

At its strongest, Emilia Perez is a blend of inspired cinematic technique and stereotypically cool music-video aesthetics. And even at that, it’s a flashy slog at two hours and ten minutes.

Among many films that tackle class, race, and privilege at Cannes this year ... War Pony is more subtle in its pursuit. The stories aren’t plotless but the emphasis isn’t on any one narrative conflict. Keough and Gammell make it more about witnessing the culturally and spiritually rich world of Pine Ridge.

It’s often pleasant, pretty, impressive, and well-scored (and we’ll note the spectacle of design shortly), but that isn’t enough for someone of his caliber. Where is the emotion? The feeling? The Owen Wilson perspective of his storytelling soul?

Bodies Bodies Bodies feels like A24 trying to suck up to the cool kids––a vapid, perhaps successful attempt to reel in a contemporary influencer crowd. Enjoying it feels partially dependent on one’s familiarity with celebrity pop culture, the intricacies of tabloid news, and the ever-evolving landscape of political correctness.

It’s so funny for the first hour and last 20 minutes that one can’t help wondering what the hell happened with the 40 in-between––a frustrating, unfunny slog of a middle section that’s so hard to sit through it will unfortunately keep many from reaching the brilliant, bizarro finale.

This silly, simplistic sci-fi journey means to be thought-provoking, but the irony of its banality is more recoiling than provocative.

Whether it’s a new chapter for Aronofsky or a tangential dip into different territory, Caught Stealing proves the auteur hasn’t lost his touch.

It’s tough to watch a movie like Elvis and totally dismiss it, no matter how much of a trainwreck it might seem. Name a department that isn’t the Tom Hanks department and there’s plenty of creative work worth praising. It’s just utterly incoherent with the material—that’s even tougher to get past.

Lanthimos has put together another dark, well-crafted delight, if not a slightly more forgettable one.

The charges against him are lobbied on a cellular level, eventually turning The Apprentice into a deep-dive diss track on the souls of the ex-President and the country, its traditional values, and one man’s infatuation with them.

I don’t know if The History of Sound is worth revisiting for its devastating romance, the likes of which deepen this story’s emotion but make it a much heavier haul, but I’m counting down the days until I can revisit its songs, sonically and visually; the hearing speaks for itself.

Thirty minutes in—with all interesting ledes sufficiently buried or ignored, the charm of his husky southern drawl faded—you realize you’ve been conned into letting Coen take you on a YouTube train of his favorite Lewis performances and interviews. If you like Lewis’s sound, that’s fun for a short while. Then you realize he’s just playing the same songs on repeat and it starts to get annoying, as getting cornered at a party usually does.

The movie looks amazing, it’s often intriguing, the style is evocative, and it should be distinct from Kaufman’s work. But in the ways that it’s similar, there’s less to be discovered––the ghost of revelation where it feels revelation could be.

The movie doesn’t have much to offer by way of score, composition, camera movement, sound design, style, lighting, production design, etc. At least there will be some narrative to discover, and a pleasure in lead performers still harmoniously attuned to one another despite the script’s hobbles.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a slog, confused about the artist at its heart and stuck on unconvincing ideas about his art.

Gyllenhaal never tones down the brutality, ripping us through bloody tongues, heads, and bodies—in cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s fit of gorgeously captured violence—until the frenzied finish

One film too late for a sophomore slump, Alpha feeds on its own potential, turning a possibly brilliant collection of ideas into one so muddy it’s hard to say exactly what any of them connote. But the feeling of having to trudge through is there all the same, and over two hours is a long trudge.

The explosiveness and wavering intrigue and sleek blue-gray cinematography minted for a cop movie––the kind that reflects thematic consideration and well-crafted execution in matching the steeliness of its hard-nosed leads––can’t do enough to save it.

At the end of the day, for better and for worse, in awe and in tired confusion, Megalopolis is a garish wonder to behold.

When it’s all said and done—the technical marvels elucidated, the stylistic flare appreciated, the wide-eyed self-reflection given a fair shake in retaliation to the all-too-easy critique of self-indulgence—I can’t help but wince a little at the thought of a second watch. If it’ll be great to revisit certain sequences, the thought of stomaching all three hours again so soon is grueling.

The documentary elements are fantastic; then we have to return to 2073, a time and place that simply lacks the story, conception, cinematography, and funding needed to make it work.