34 Best Movies To Watch After Lost in Translation (2003)

If you’ve ever encountered those “normal looking photos with a scary backstory” posts on social media or are interested in odd true crime stories, chances are good you’re familiar with the plot of Woman of the Hour. In broad strokes, Cheryl Bradshaw (Anna Kendrick, also in the director’s chair) is a down-on-her-luck actor. To pay the rent, she takes a gig on one of those 70s “One Single, Three Suitors” dating shows. Among her three options, Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) distinguishes himself as neither a self-entitled horndog nor a too-anxious-to-function empty suit. Rodney is also, it turns out, a prolific serial killer. It sounds like the setup for a suitably sorted erotic thriller. Perhaps, in other hands, it would be just that. However, Kendrick’s direction and Ian McDonald’s script center Alcala’s targets, not the “isn’t this wild?” aspect. In their hands, Woman of the Hour becomes commentary on the dangers these women (and too many others) faced, fought, and sadly, sometimes succumbed to. While firmly centered in the late 70s, it doesn’t take much of a squint to find the antecedents of modern issues of sexism, control, and gendered violence. Tony Hale, Anna Kendrick, Matt Visser, Jedidiah Goodacre, and Daniel Zovatto play get to know you games. All with a killer in their midst. (Leah Gallo/Netflix) The best section unfolds during the latter half of Bradshaw’s dating game appearance. Inspired by a makeup artist, she ditches the questions prepared for her by the show’s producers and ignores “benign” sexist host Ed Burke’s (Tony Hale, playing Jim Lange in all but name) passive-aggressive attempts to pull her back on message. Instead, she begins to pepper the guests with queries that quickly expose their misogyny and lack of intelligence. Only Alcala rises to the occasion, using his engrained sociopathy to present as the kind of “modern” man Bradshaw wants. Continue Reading →

Fight Club is still one of the peak cinematic explorations of toxic masculinity. Now, we may finally have a true female equivalent in The Substance. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a former Oscar darling whose career has stalled out, stranding her in a Jane Fonda-esque workout show. When she overhears her producer demanding they replace her with someone younger and hotter, she’s desperate to do whatever it takes to stay in the limelight. Enter The Substance. She’s handed a mysterious ad that promises to create a better version of herself — literally. In this case, her alter ego is the sexy, youthful Sue (Margaret Qualley). It’s not long before Sue and Elisabeth begin fighting to the death for the right to exist. Continue Reading →

From Certified Copy to Mass to the Before trilogy, cinema is replete with examples of great movies that wring transfixing drama out of an intimate scope and a cast of characters you can count on one hand. Christy Hall’s feature-length directorial debut Daddio aims to follow in the footsteps of those features, but stumbles mightily in the process. Daddio begins at a New York airport, where Girlie (Dakota Johnson) plops into a taxi after a trip to her home state of Oklahoma. Driving this cab is Clark (Sean Penn), a grizzled man in his sixties who loves shooting his mouth off. Initially, the focus of his ramblings is typical old-man material. He gripes about the ubiquity of apps and credit cards in the modern world. Gradually, though, the duo gets trapped in traffic. Stuck on the road, Clark begins asking Girlie increasingly intimate questions. They started this car ride as strangers. But conversations ranging from the raw to the ribald will have Girlie discovering the listener she didn’t know she needed. Unsurprisingly, Daddio started as a concept for a stage play. What's surprising is how the final film's visual impulses seem determined to avoid comparisons to something you could watch on Broadway. Hall, cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, and editor Lisa Zeno Churgin act furiously to avoid lengthy single-take shots. Nobody will ever compare this to a Chantal Akerman or Chung Mong-Hong movie. Instead, images default to close-ups and medium shots. Hall and company continuously jostle viewers around the cab. Maybe this is out of concern that moviegoers will see a more staid visual style and immediately ask, “Why isn’t this a play?” Continue Reading →

One of Fancy Dance’s most tender moments takes place in a place one wouldn’t normally associate with personal epiphanies. After glancing at a swarm of convenience store bathroom graffiti, teenager Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) sees an opportunity. Taking out a marker, she scribbles “Roki was here” in her native Cayuga language on the wall. It’s one of many instances in Fancy Dance of characters finding little ways to reinforce their presence even when they’re not physically around. Roki clings to trinkets, including a ritzy jacket associated with her missing mother. Performers at a major Powwow event dance to commemorate dead or lost loved ones. This thematic motif is extra important given that Roki, like nearly all of Fancy Dance’s principal characters, hails from the Seneca–Cayuga Nation Reservation in Oklahoma. The norm in America is to erase Indigenous lives. Their children are stolen. Homes are wiped out. Cultures are suppressed. The figures on screen here find countless ways to refute that erasure. Such rebellion even manifests through something as small as convenience store bathroom graffiti. Before Roki writes that fateful piece of graffiti, she’s living a quiet life with her aunt Jax (Lily Gladstone). With Roki’s mom missing for weeks now, Jax is the only parent this teenager has. She seems the only one concerned about that vanished lady, given how little effort law enforcement has put into finding her. Unfortunately, Jax’s criminal record from years past leads to the state deeming her unsuitable to be Roki’s guardian. This surrogate mother/daughter duo is now destined to be separated. In the process, this adolescent would also leave behind her reservation's home and culture. Continue Reading →

Throughout such films as Shotgun Stories (2007), Take Shelter (2011), Mud (2012), Midnight Special (2016), and Loving (2016), writer-director Jeff Nichols has shown himself to be a filmmaker particularly fascinated with telling tales of people living on the fringes of society. On the surface, his latest effort, the long-delayed The Bikeriders, would seem to be an ideal use of his particular talents. But that makes the failures of the structurally confused, dramatically inert, and ultimately meandering project seem all the more baffling. Loosely inspired by the work of photographer Danny Lyon, who embedded himself with the Chicago chapter of the Outlaw Motorcycle Club for over a year and chronicled it in the influential 1968 book The Bikeriders, the film charts the development and growth of the Vandals, a motorcycle gang led by Johnny (Tom Hardy). He's an ordinary suburban Chicago family man with a job as a trucker who is nevertheless compelled to form the gang after watching The Wild One on TV. (Good thing he wasn’t watching Guys and Dolls instead.) Soon, he collects a number of like-minded guys who seem to spend all their time riding, working on their bikes, or getting drunk and violent in bars and group picnics while their wives and girlfriends look at them with varying degrees of exasperation. One of those wives, Kathy (Jodie Comer), is our guide to the story, regaling the tale of the gang in a series of interviews with Lyon (Mike Faist). One night, she finds herself in a bar with the Vandals and catches the eye of Benny (Austin Butler), perhaps the most dedicated member of the group outside of Johnny himself. The two marry after only a few weeks, but his fealty to the group and his recklessly headstrong ways begin to drive a wedge between them. As the group changes and evolves over the years—becoming more violent and aggressive with the influx of younger riders wanting to prove themselves—a tug-of-war develops between Kathy and Johnny for Benny's love and loyalty, one which ultimately proves painful for all involved. Continue Reading →

Janet Planet captures a girl caught in her mother’s orbit in the summer of 1991 as she struggles with what to make of the people who enter her mother’s life (friends, boyfriends, strangers) and what to make of herself. It’s also a brutal and empathetic reminder that of all the possible ages to be, 11 might be the worst, and in Janet Planet, 11-year-old Lacy would be the first to agree.  As desperate as adults are to regress to a world before endless Zoom meetings and the monotony of laundry, it’s easy for us to forget how utterly powerless you are at 11. It’s an age where adults still control nearly every facet of your life, and you bear constant witness to their bad decisions with no ability to either help or remove yourself from the situation. “Every moment of my life is hell,” Lacy tells her mom, Janet, and if you’re honest with yourself about what being 11 actually felt like, you know it’s the most acceptable of hyperboles. But Lacy, observant and thoughtful, shows the kind of understanding I never did at that age when she adds, “But I don’t think it’ll last, though.” Creating moments of clear-sighted vulnerability like that is what playwright and now first-time director Annie Baker does best.  Continue Reading →

From the cosmic ether to the granular eye, Daina Oniunas-Pusić’s singular debut feature, Tuesday, migrates across space and scale with poignant ease. Fifteen-year-old Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) is terminally ill, which her mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) doesn’t want to accept. It’s not until Death visits them as an elder macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene) that Tuesday and Zora can confront the terrifying mysteries of mortality and embrace an afterlife. It’s a soaring cinematic fairy tale about life and loss that touches our heartstrings with the tenderness of a feather.  It starts with the simplicity of belief. Oniunas-Pusić’s writing feels so contemporary because it wholeheartedly embraces wonder as an axiom. This is not a late 20th-century magical comedy where half the movie is spent convincing someone (usually a parent/adult) that the magic is real. There is no dramatic irony. Instead, Pusić invites us to trust and believe in the magical reality she sets before us, just as Zora must learn to trust and believe her daughter when she says it’s time to let go. The appearance of the talking parrot sets off a chain of empathy in which everyone, including Death, wants to be understood. It’s easy to understand these characters when the performers make everything so legible. Petticrew shows Tuesday’s conflicted feelings about being a youth at the end of her life. She’s being pulled away yet has found much to appreciate and enjoy. Tuesday could be a tragic figure, but Pusić and Petticrew render her more human than mortal. It would be easy for Petticrew to remain at Louis-Dreyfus' feet (as Tuesday does) for most of the film, but they instead crafts a fortitude that holds its own. Continue Reading →

Save for that movie where Larry the Cable Guy supposedly urinated in public, Pixar sequels are rarely terrible. Finding Dory, Incredibles 2, and Monsters University are vastly preferable to the average Minions or Hotel Transylvania follow-up. Even Cars 3 wrung more pathos than expected out of its ill-conceived universe. The greatest problem with these sequels has been that they’re merely competent. They’re serviceable watches, but many are safe retreads of the familiar. Risks are minimal, idiosyncratic animation flourishes are scarce. When absorbing these follow-ups, it's hard not to yearn for more challenging original Pixar titles like Turning Red, Ratatouille, or WALL-E. Still, details like the unexpected third-act detour of Monsters University or the charming new characters in Finding Dory are absent from your standard Ice Age or Illumination sequels. If we must live in this franchise-dominated pop culture landscape, Pixar has delivered more hits than most. Goodness knows the Toy Story sequels are outright masterpieces of long-form cinematic storytelling. The newest example of the label’s pleasant, if far from groundbreaking, sequels, is Inside Out 2. Directed by Kelsey Mann (a new feature film helmer taking over for previous director Pete Docter), the sequel expands on the world of Riley’s mind established in 2015’s Inside Out. Continue Reading →

As the director, co-writer (alongside American Vandal’s Dan Lagana), executive producer, and composer of Música, Rudy Mancuso’s filmmaking debut suggests he’s carrying a certain “do it all yourself” energy over from his previous career as a prolific YouTuber. Impressively, it does not feel insular or self-involved despite his hands being in nearly all aspects of the process. That isn’t to say, however, that it all works. Mancuso plays, well, Rudy, a college student barreling towards graduation with little semblance of a plan for what comes next. His dedication to puppetry and music shows great creativity, but it doesn’t seem like a promising moneymaking venture if his occasional busking is any indication. Further complicating matter is his synesthesia, a condition that underlines every aspect of his day with a constant beat. It may be great for his musicality, but it also creates a distance between him and others. Often distracted, sometimes overwhelmed, by the music only he can hear, he frequently misses out on what others are trying to tell him. Rudy Mancuso explains the "What's up Brother" meme to Camila Mendes. (Prime Video) His perceived lack of ambition proves too much for his girlfriend Haley (Francesca Reale), leading to a break-up at the film’s start. This clears the decks for Rudy’s mom (Maria Mancuso, the filmmaker’s real-life mom) to start playing matchmaker with every Brazilian-American girl around his age she can find and for Rudy to fall for Isabella (Camila Mendes), an employee at a local seafood counter. When Haley returns, things fall apart quickly, thanks in no small part to advice from Anwar (J.B. Smoove), a food truck entrepreneur and seemingly Rudy’s only friend. Continue Reading →

The word for Rose Glass (Saint Maud) and Weronika Tofilska's Love Lies Bleeding is "precise." From the individual and combined performances of leads Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian (whose turn as a cunning Imperial agent was a bright spot in the often dreary third season of The Mandalorian) to DP Ben Fordesman's chameleonic camera work and hair department lead Megan Daum's wide-ranging design work, everyone on the project knew exactly what they wanted to do and how to get it done. The result is a bracing, clear-eyed noir thriller, and a fraught, swoon-worthy romance. It's my favorite movie of 2024 so far. It's the late 1980s. The reserved and insightful Lou (Stewart) manages a grimy bodybuilding gym in a sunbleached western suburb. She does not talk to her father, the cruel, cunning crime lord Lou Sr. (Ed Harris). She loves her sister, fraying housewife Beth (Jena Malone), and hates that she will not leave her loathsome slimeball husband JJ (Dave Franco). The closest person Lou has to a romantic partner is the aggressively cheerful Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), and their on-off something or other boils down to, in Bart Simpson's words, "geographical convenience, really." Enter Jackie (O'Brian), a drifting bodybuilder aiming for a Las Vegas contest where victory can leap passion into profession. The sparks are immediate. Jackie (Katy O'Brian) strives for bodybuilding stardom. She's doing the work, but the events of Love Lies Bleeding bend the barrier between her reality and her dream. A24. Jackie's drive lights a fire in Lou, and Lou's methodical care grounds Jackie. Simultaneously, Lou's desire to help Jackie achieve her dream and Jackie's desire to make Lou happy lead them to make bad calls—the sort of bad calls that lead to worse calls that lead to blood. And neither JJ's venality nor Lou Sr.'s mercilessness should be discounted. Continue Reading →

Blitz Bazawule's adaptation of the Alice Walker classic (and the Broadway musical) is a more joyful, celebratory film than its predecessor. The Color Purple has taken on a musicality ever since Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones adapted Alice Walker’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for the screen. When the first film was released in 1985, Spielberg already referred to it as a “musical.” In a behind-the-scenes interview about the film's musicality included in Warner Bros’ sumptuous new 4K release, Walker, Spielberg, and Jones conduct us through the “diverse places” that music appears in the original film. There are rail work songs, African dance, juke joint blues, and revival gospel; all tonally matched together in a near seamless “immersion” of sound. In an age where nearly every popular and cult film gets a Broadway adaptation, The Color Purple is a particular no-brainer. Celie’s journey of self-discovery through systematic abuses and struggles at the turn of the twentieth century lends itself to the kind of emotional bigness a musical requires. With music by the legendary Brenda Russell and the late queer songwriting icon Allee Willis, The Color Purple: The Musical also showcases a diverse range of musical styles and modes, especially those well suited for the stage, like swing and Greek chorus. Continue Reading →

Thomasin McKenzie & Anne Hathaway burn up the screen in William Oldroyd’s unsettling thriller. Eileen will likely be lost in the holiday season shuffle among such spectacles as the upcoming Wonka and awards-friendly fare like Ferrari. On the other hand, it’s unclear under what circumstances Eileen would make a big splash. It’s an odd, occasionally off-putting little film that wouldn’t work as well as it does if not for the scorching chemistry between its two leads. Based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s (also odd and occasionally off-putting) novel of the same name, Eileen stars Thomasin McKenzie as the titular character, a lonely young woman stuck in a miserable rut. Living in the most depressing town in Massachusetts circa 1964, Eileen is forced to take care of her alcoholic, mean-spirited father (a chilling Shea Whigham, still somehow not one of Hollywood’s biggest stars), a former cop who’s taken to waving his gun at their neighbors. Working as a secretary at a juvenile detention center, though she’s in her twenties she comes off as someone much younger, a meek and awkward child merely dressing up as an adult. Eileen also has a child’s taste for doing things like ignoring her hygiene, stuffing herself with candy, and compulsively masturbating, while maintaining a rich fantasy life involving rough sex with a detention center guard, or murdering her father. Her boredom has reached pathological levels. Continue Reading →

As daybreak bleeds from within the walls, Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) wakes up next to her husband, Elvis (Jacob Elordi). Her water’s broken and, as he calls for a car, she goes to the bathroom, where she applies the perfect fake eyelashes in silence. Continue Reading →

With her first film, Promising Young Woman, writer-director Emerald Fennell took a storyline that was essentially a cloddish-but-glossy retread of such female-driven revenge sagas as Ms .45 and I Spit on Your Grave, infused it with insights regarding gender issues that would barely have passed muster in a 100-level college class and somehow rode it to inexplicable praise and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Continue Reading →

Fair Play is all about the rules of engagement—in business, in bed, in relationships—and the chaos that ensues when someone who lives and dies by those rules suspects his partner is breaking them. However, it isn’t the fairness of the righteous or the just she’s violating. No, it is the unwritten rules he believes everyone should play the game by. Continue Reading →

“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again…” So begins Daphne du Maurier’s gothic masterwork Rebecca, one of the most famous opening lines in fiction. Rebecca proved a hit upon release in 1938 and has remained in print ever since. Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation, coming just two years later, netted him his first Best Director nomination. That interpretation of the text has come to be considered a classic, and with good reason. Its misty black-and-white photography and mysteries hypnotize.  Continue Reading →

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 →

Of all the oddball trends in 2023’s multiplex movies, the strangest has to be Hollywood’s current obsession with films about the origins of familiar consumer lines and products, including Air Jordans, Tetris, and the BlackBerry PDA. The films have been okay—and Air’s genuinely quite good—but even so, when all is said and done, it is hard to shake the sense that what you have been watching is less a movie than an elaborate brand extension designed to remind viewers of the benevolence and vision of our corporate overlords. That is especially true in the case of Eva Longoria’s directorial debut Flamin’ Hot, a film whose story is almost too good to be true (more on that later) but which is, in practice, an ironically bland bit of product placement even more processed and devoid of nourishment than the snack food it celebrates.  Continue Reading →

Alice, Darling may tout itself a psychological thriller in its marketing, but that leads audiences astray. This isn’t Repulsion or Mulholland Drive. Instead, it’s a startlingly accurate portrayal of domestic abuse. Continue Reading →

We’re all living in the looming shadows of our past. The actions or mistakes we undertake today shape our tomorrow. It’s as true for the poorest pauper as it is for the mightiest king, and Causeway protagonist Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) is no exception. Formerly deployed to the Middle East as a soldier, she’s come home to New Orleans after suffering a brain injury. The ensuing movie’s emphasis on coping with the long-term effects of trauma is quietly established through Causeway beginning not with a grisly accident overseas, but rather with a shell-shocked Lynsey waiting for a taxi in America. Continue Reading →

Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde’s latest film, is neither a masterpiece nor a disaster. Based on the amount of behind the scenes drama that has surrounded the entire production filming to promotion, this review will surely come as a disappointment to some. But if not for the gossip about the filming of the movie and the celebrities involved, this deeply forgettable film would probably fade from the public eye in no time at all. Continue Reading →