40 Best Movies To Watch After Bend It Like Beckham (2002) (Page 2)

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 →

Despite interminable “why is horror so popular?” articles written by people who have little knowledge about or interest in horror, the reason why it thrives as a genre is because of its flexibility. You can approach virtually any subject – sexuality, xenophobia, illness – through the lens of horror and make it effectively nightmarish. Certain all-too-vocal horror fans don’t like when things get too topical (presumably because it forces them to think), and point to slasher movies as “real” horror, because they focus predominantly on violence and mayhem, rather than bringing any real-world elements into it. Watch most slasher movies from the 80s through the 00s and you’ll notice that, other than maybe the hair and clothes, nothing sets them in any specific time period. They exist in bubbles, with characters seemingly untouched by anything until a masked killer shows up to ruin the party. Continue Reading →

With a travel book in her hands and a cigarette in her fingers, Carmen (Aline Küppenheim) deliberates what shade of paint she’d like for her walls. She wants it like a sunset but not too pink. Maybe a bit blue. After all, it’s not like she goes outside too often. Even her commutes, now to her Las Cruces beach house, are isolated. It’s 1976 in Chile, three years into dictator Augusto Pinochet’s rule. While paint drips onto Carmen’s heels, defectors and accused communists fall in the streets. But hey, she’s got a home to renovate.  Continue Reading →

The white lie at the center of You Hurt My Feelings isn’t harmless, nor does it spiral out to reveal lie upon lie, turning a marriage into a house of cards. Instead, it lies somewhere less explored: a trivial thing whose impact is understandably real. It’s a fine line to walk, but Nicole Holofcener does just that, and with a razor-sharp wit to boot. Continue Reading →

Rachel Sennott excels in a film that never rises to the level of her performance. Having already more than proven her comedic chops in the great Shiva Baby and the not-so-great Bodies Bodies Bodies, I Used to Be Funny finds rising star Rachel Sennott showing off her dramatic chops for a change. In this task, she succeeds. Alas, that’s more than can be said about the film as a whole. It proves to be little more than an angsty muddle that never quite seems to know what it is trying to accomplish.  She plays Sam, a stand-up comedian whose rising career stalled due to a recent traumatic incident. She’s been unable to return to the stage or do much of anything ever since. Instead, she just holes up in a house she shares with two loving but worried roommates. Then, one day, she hears a news report about a missing 14-year-old girl named Brooke (Olga Petsa). Realizing she may have been the last person to see Brooke alive jolts her from her malaise. Continue Reading →

Two tales of fathers and repression explore the importance of self-realization and the cost of parental absence. In trying to represent marginalized communities accurately, we often see portrayals that treat marginalization as a point of exceptional virtue. There's an implication that people who don’t live lives presented by dominant media as “normal” need overcompensation. This manifests itself as portrayals in an infallibly positive light. This tends to happen because there is still an inherent misunderstanding, especially in Hollywood, that being underprivileged or underrepresented is something to overcome through fictional media and not through things like policy, legislation, and freedom.  Andrew Durham’s Fairyland provides a refreshing contrast to this typical presentation. It showcases its foremost gay character as a free-spirited individual who values the ability to express his lifestyle AND a frequently inadequate, often neglectful, and ultimately regretful father.  Continue Reading →

The first films we saw in this year's festival deal with the anxieties of parenthood and personhood. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.) Film festivals, Sundance in particular, are often the domain of the solid three-star movie -- unremarkable but workable indies and debuts that prove the arrival (or resurgence) of a major talent, albeit without the polish that would make the work they're bringing you feel complete. And that was certainly the case for my first day at (virtual) Sundance, with a quartet of titles covering similar thematic ground and running out of steam long before the end credits roll. Put together, this crop of films collectively explored the loneliness and isolation of the human experience, not to mention the specific vagaries of (cis)womanhood, especially where children are concerned. And they were... okay, I guess? Continue Reading →

“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 →

With perhaps the single exception of Heaven’s Gate, perhaps no American film produced in the 1980s received more bad press, critical hostility and commercial indifference than Elaine May’s Ishtar. Scathing press coverage revolved around its enormous budget—which extended to the reviews, many of which felt as if they were written by investors rather than critics—and studio machinations pretty much ensured that it would fail. Audiences stayed away in droves; as May herself once quipped, “If all the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today.” Continue Reading →

I first came to Bright Star through gifs and screenshots, posts on #aesthetic Twitter and Tumblr accounts devoted to sharing loving looks at beautiful people on film. I was already a fan of Ben Whishaw when I became aware of Bright Star, having fallen wholly in love with the entrancing actor in Cloud Atlas and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. With his swoopy hair, his sad eyes, and his impossibly-beautiful waif-like frame, Whishaw can convey longing like few others on screen, positively vibrating in both films with unfulfilled artistic promise and an aching desire to be known, to be loved, to be seen. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 South by Southwest Festival) Continue Reading →

Continue Reading →

A game cast can't save Abi Damaris Corbin's misguided, manipulative account of a real-life tragedy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) In a long line of recent movies that are desperate to say something important about our society today, 892 takes an ideologically muddled approach to racial and social politics. Abi Damaris Corbin's film functions similarly in its structure and tone to a few other past Sundance offerings like Fran Kranz’s Mass and Gustav Möller’s The Guilty, a lot of it stemming from the use of a single location for the majority of the action. Unfortunately, 892 is the weakest of these movies, a limp social-issue thriller that suffers from an uncontrolled eagerness to say everything all at once. Continue Reading →

Early in the King's Man, Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) reads a newspaper chronicling the human cost of the then-nascent World War I. The headline for all this carnage reads "When will this misery end?" It’s fitting since I found myself constantly asking myself the same question as The King's Man dragged on and on. For some reason, a franchise that’s previously leaned heavily on anal sex jokes and Elton John beating up evil henchmen wants to get serious in the most superficial way possible. Continue Reading →

What if you were the only one in your entire family without magic? Disney's Encanto sets out to answer that question with music and charm as its fanciful powers. Continue Reading →

Ron’s Gone Wrong has some lofty goals: it’s a bold attempt to talk about how social media addiction, consumerism, and technology at large has taken over kids’ lives in a way that’s not just unhealthy, but that’s actively leaving them lonelier. And if anything can be applauded about writer and director Sarah Smith’s film, it’s in the way it wants to tackle all of this head on. Only in this world, swap the iPhones and tablets for “B-bots”—cute little AIs proudly labeled “your best friend out of the box!” They follow you everywhere, learn everything about you, and use that info to help you make new friends via other kids’ B-bots. It’s the tech solution to friendship! ...And a handy little metaphor for the way tech once designed to bring us together has mutated into something else entirely. Continue Reading →

Natalie Morales directs herself and Mark Duplass in a tender look at the bonds we form to save ourselves in a hard world. How are we supposed to process our grief when the closest we have to comfort is sharing feelings through zoom video calls? In Natalie Morales’ directorial debut Language Lessons, that question is explored at the center of the story. Wonderfully written and packed with heart and sensitivity, this heartwarming two-hander mumblecore celebrates the beauty of human connection in any kind of medium, depicting how the unexpected bond we have with other people, even the one only shared via computer and phone screens, can help us heal from the pain of losing our loved ones. Morales, who co-writes the script with indie darling Mark Duplass, plays Cariño, a Costa Rica-based Spanish teacher hired by a wealthy man named Will (Desean Terry) to give his husband, Adam (Duplass), a 100-hour lesson on the Spanish language. Though their first meeting starts off awkwardly, the two eventually warms up to each other, especially after Adam opens up about his life, his relationship with Will, and even his strange morning routine.  Continue Reading →

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 →

Rebecca Hall adapts Nella Larsen's novella about Black social mobility (and its corresponding resentments) to haunting effect. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Nella Larsen's 1929 novella Passing is a fascinating text, a frank but elegant discussion of the intersections of race, class, and gender as cold and delicate as its subject matter. It makes sense, then, that Rebecca Hall's adaptation is similarly airy and ominous, an intimate portrait of resentment and racial/social mobility set amid the stifling backdrop of 1920s New York. Continue Reading →