5 Best Releases Like Bend It Like Beckham 2002 on Hulu
Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos directs a sumptuous adult fairy tale featuring Emma Stone at her very best. Here’s the thing about Yorgos Lanthimos: you’re either on board with him, or you’re not. Even in The Favourite, arguably his most accessible film, there’s a sort of joyful grotesqueness to it, leaving the audience laughing and wincing simultaneously. His latest offering, Poor Things, is his most visually dazzling film yet, with moments of stunning beauty and bittersweet insight, but still isn’t afraid to test the audience’s sensibilities. It’s a film about what it means to be alive, every little disgusting aspect of it. Based on Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Poor Things opens in dreary black and white London, where eccentric scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is overseeing an experiment that’s both miraculous and horrifying. Baxter, whose face looks like it was carved into several pieces and then put back together the wrong way, has brought a woman back to life after she committed suicide. The woman, whom he’s renamed Bella (Emma Stone, with a magnificent pair of eyebrows), initially has the mind of a toddler, but she’s learning and maturing at an astonishing rate. Bella refers to Godwin as “God,” and so far knows no one and nothing else but him and their home together. Continue Reading →
High-Rise
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →
Theater Camp
For decades, the great American institution of summer camp has been fodder for cinema, and for good reason. A group of hormonal teenagers put together in an artificial environment is the perfect recipe for drama, with the gorgeous backdrop of the outdoors. Continue Reading →
See How They Run
“You’ve seen one you seen them all," says the dastardly movie director from beyond the grave. It’s the recently murdered Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), telling us early in the film about how stale the murder mystery genre was even by the 1950s, when See How They Run takes place. It’s also a warning to the audience that this movie will not be adding anything new, revelatory, or exciting to whodunnit cinema. Everything here has been done before, and better. Continue Reading →
Petite maman
Céline Sciamma's followup to Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a graceful tale of rediscovered childhood. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) In the wake of the international success of her hypnotic, Gothic-infused romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), it would have been natural to assume that Céline Sciamma's next film would be a major project and the center of great scrutiny. Perhaps recognizing and preferring to avoid that template, Sciamma instead went the other way. She not only follows up Portrait with the decidedly small-scale Petite Maman, she shot it so quickly and in such secrecy that most people didn't even know she was working on anything until its world premiere at Berlinale was announced. Continue Reading →