Movie news

Also: Alvin Ailey’s annual City Center residency, the D.I.Y. virtuoso Jay Som, Alexandra Schwartz’s Shakespeare-movie picks, and more.

On November 16, 2023, Sasha Skochilenko, a thirty-three-year-old artist, poet, and musician, stood in court to give what is known in the Russian judicial system as the “last word”—final remarks of the accused before the judge delivers a verdict. Skochilenko, from inside a metal cage, where defendants are confined during courtroom hearings, said her case … Read more

This year’s best movies feel plugged in, inextricably connected to forces bigger than the ordinary faces of local and private authority—and confrontationally so, with a sense of danger and urgency amid forms of pressure that are all the more terrifying for acting invisibly and inexorably. In other words, these movies are all political thrillers—some of … Read more

For nineteenth-century writers like Gustave Flaubert, the concept of stupidity came to encompass the lazy drivel of cliché and received opinion; one of Flaubert’s characters says that, in mass society, “the germs of stupidity . . . spread from person to person,” and we end up becoming lemming-like followers of leaders, trends, and fads. (This “modern stupidity,” Jeffries … Read more

COBB: Well, I’ll ask you the question that I use when I conclude any interview with any subject, which is: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you think is important for the audience to know? APATOW: We love Roger Angell. COBB: Everybody loves Roger Angell. APATOW: I just want that to be … Read more

The defensive Secretary of War.

Two families, unconcerned with dignity. The Hathaways are farmers, in the English county of Warwickshire, with close ties to the land—some would say too close, at least in the case of Agnes, a young woman so eccentrically at one with nature that she is rumored to have been born of a forest witch. The Shakespeares … Read more

Civilization outlasts humanity in the new sci-fi drama “Pluribus.” On the night that the world as we know it is destroyed, a novelist named Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn) sees cars and planes veer off course, an emergency room full of convulsing bodies, and her city, Albuquerque, on fire. The President dies under mysterious … Read more

Meanwhile, a real shark has washed ashore; the movie’s MacGuffin is a human leg found in the creature’s belly. To investigate, the city’s wily and pompous chief of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes), heads straight from his own Carnaval revels, covered in confetti and lipstick stains, to see the limb at an oceanography lab, where he’s … Read more

A few years ago, Andrew Fox was struck by a transcendently bad idea. He would turn the story of Anne Frank into a satirical hip-hop musical: intersectional, inclusive, and inane. Fox was a theatre-loving composer who had grown dispirited by the industry in general, and by humorless and preachy productions in particular. His gloomy outlook … Read more