31 Best Movies To Watch After Shrek (2001)

Sometimes, you end up respecting what a movie’s trying to discuss more than you enjoy the film itself. Case in point, Spellbound. In the new animated feature, Princess Ellian (Rachel Zegler) is on the eve of her 15th birthday. Sadly, the celebration is a bit muted this time around. That’s because her parents, Queen Ellsmere (Nicole Kidman, eventually) and King Solon (Javier Bardem, after a fashion), aren’t quite themselves. A year earlier, they encountered a whirling black cyclone in the woods. It turned the couple from attractive royal types into big, brightly colored, childlike monsters. Ever since, Ellian has been struggling to find a solution to their conversion while hiding it from the kingdom of Lumbria. Growing desperate after a meeting with the Oracles of the Moon and Sun (Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess, both as hammy as you please) goes poorly, the Princess decides to drag her parents back to the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness, where the curse began. As a plot goes, it’s fine. In practice, it often feels hobbled together from pieces of other films. There’s a bit of Brave here. A dash of How to Train Your Dragon there. If you squint, you can even spot some Frozen in its DNA. Fairy tales, by their nature, are remixed and rehashed from previous source material and other stories, so none of this is especially egregious. However, it isn’t what makes Spellbound interesting. Continue Reading →

Mother, Couch doesn’t believe in a gentle leadup or easing viewers into its bizarre premise. Instead, it knocks you out of a plane with a hammer, letting you crash land in a world that only masquerades as the one we’re familiar with. On a grand scale, it’s a movie about familial trauma, loneliness, and the desperation that comes with trying to make your family be what you wish it were. On a more literal level, it’s about a mother who won’t stop sitting on a couch inside a furniture store. David (Ewan McGregor) and his brother Gruff (Rhys Ifans) have brought their mother (Ellen Burstyn) to a furniture store in search of a dresser when she settles herself on an expensive green couch and refuses to leave. Her children are baffled, and David, in particular, becomes increasingly frantic as hours turn into days of her refusing to budge. He’s doing everything he can to both understand his mother’s insane decision to essentially live inside a furniture store and get her to reconsider while his own family unit cracks and crumbles around him. The setting for all this turmoil is Oakbed’s Furniture — a shop full of showrooms designed to look like actual living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms with a labyrinthine layout on par with IKEA’s (as the characters repeatedly mention). Only instead of sleek, Swedish design, Oakbed’s feels like the memory of a house you visited in a dream where the layout is full of impossibilities that you accept without question. It’s only when you wake that you realize everything was wrong. Continue Reading →

“How could Zuckembourg let this happen?” Thelma (June Squibb) stammers at the police officer trying to make out a report. Though her loyal grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger), assures her that Mark Zuckerberg had nothing to do with this, someone needs to be held responsible. She’s been the victim of a scam, convinced to drain her bank account for a fake emergency, and now it’s payback time—literally. Writer/Director John Margolin’s Thelma is an endlessly thrilling action film that moves at its own speed. Clearly a loving student of the genre, Margolin uses the standard beats of an action film but on a much more senior scale. The chase scenes feel familiar; they just occur on mobility scooters. Working in tandem with the film’s composer, Nick Chuba, the filmmaker uses thumping action-thriller cues and whirling camerawork to give even the opening of a handicapped door a sense of life-or-death excitement. In some ways, simple falls are honestly more perilous for the 94-year-old protagonist. By using perfectly placed musical themes that feel archetypal to the action film, Thelma puts in her hearing aids like its Mission Impossible tech. Clearing pop-ups feels like hacking the mainframe. June Squibb sets the tone for the whole film, which appears delicate but still full of hardscrabble tenacity, just like her character. There’s no stopping Thelma when she has an errand. We can say the same of Squibb in every scene she’s in. Thelma begins the story as a victim, but by the end, Squibb has straightened her spine and takes aim at the resolution with full guns blazing. Though people are constantly telling her character that she’s fragile, Squibb is always the center of gravity, not pulling focus but creating an orbit for her colleagues to perform and find the space to play.  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 →

Big old monster brawls are a delight. They're one of the great pleasures of the Ultra series, the Eiji Tsuburaya-created science fiction series that's brought joy to folks worldwide for 58 years and counting. While the series kicked off with the monster mystery series Ultra Q in 1966, it was Ultraman (launched in July of that year, shortly after Ultra Q wrapped), the tale of a benevolent alien superhero who lived among humanity and fought aliens, giants, and giant aliens alongside a human Science Team (in capital letters). In the decades since Ultraman broke out, the series has proven flexible. It's first and foremost a kids' superhero show, but it's made space for experimentation and idiosyncrasy. See, for example, the great Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno's 2022 film Shin Ultraman, a loving tribute to and riff on the original 1966 series that embraces kaiju wrestling and contemplation of humanity's place in the cosmos equally. Or, heck, head back to 1966 and dig into the episodes of the original series directed by acclaimed filmmaker Akio Jissoji. At its best, the new animated feature Ultraman Rising proves the strength of the Ultra series' core ideas—right good monster mashing mixed with a journey into humanity—with loveliness and style. Unfortunately, it's not at its best often enough to clinch the game. Rising is a messy, disjointed picture. Continue Reading →

I will give Unfrosted, director/co-writer/star/breakfast aficionado Jerry Seinfeld's heavily fictionalized, would-be-gonzo take on the invention of the Pop-Tart, this: I did laugh, albeit mirthlessly. For one sequence, Seinfeld and his creative collaborators push past stale, semi-affectionate satire and into the rarefied realm of "Yes, we're going for it." It's a funeral. The deceased is laid to rest with the highest honors a breakfast food developer may be accorded. Why is he dead? An office culture that prioritized the appearance of safety (testing the revolutionary self-stable fruit pastry in a full space suit, complete with isolated oxygen supply) over actual safety (keeping said oxygen supply next to an overclocked toaster). After all, beating Post to market is far more important than protecting your staff from violent immolation. The Corn Flakes rooster, Toucan Sam (Cedric Yarbrough), Tony the Tiger (Thurl Ravenscroft, as played by Hugh Grant), and Snap, Crackle, and Pop (Kyle Mooney, Mikey Day, and Drew Tarver), among others, perform the rites. As the deceased's widow (Sarah Burns) looks on in increasingly horrified bafflement, these priests of the breakfast table lower the coffin into the ground and then dump cereal and milk into the grave, topped with fresh fruit laid by professional mourners. A cereal box prize is presented like the flags given to the family of slain soldiers. It's an audacious, out-there scene, a moment of distinct, morbid silliness that reminds me of when Barry B. Benson had Winnie the Pooh sniped. In a world where rival cereal companies seek the aid of Kennedy (Bill Burr) and Kruschev (Dean Norris) and the head of Big Milk (Peter Dinklage) can have someone tortured for daring to suggest that breakfast might not always need cow juice, Full Cearal Honors feels like Seinfeld and company cranking up the dial to eleven and jamming while dancing around Stonehenge. What is there to do but laugh? Continue Reading →

Denis Villeneuve finishes his epic two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel with sprawling scope and thorny politics. It's really a miracle that the first of Denis Villeneuve's Dune films penetrated the public consciousness as well as it did. It was released amid a worldwide pandemic; it was an IMAX-ready blockbuster that was simultaneously dropped onto people's streaming subscriptions same-day; it's based on a dense, impenetrable sci-fi novel Villeneuve patiently chose not to wholly adapt in one film. The results, blessedly, were commercial and critical success and a host of technical Oscars the following year. That success was enough to secure Dune: Part Two, a chance for Villeneuve to complete his vision of Frank Herbert's seminal work of political science fiction. Where Part One worldbuilds, Part Two barrels down the road of its inevitable conclusion in satisfying style, even as it makes some noted changes from the novel or any previous adaptations -- some for the better, some for the worse. Continue Reading →

The latest chapter in Sony's Spider-Man Universe makes Morbius look like a masterpiece. In an age where the Marvel Cinematic Universe has categorically lost its luster, it's tempting to imagine how green the grass is on the other side of the hill. To imagine that someone, somewhere, is doing inventive work with some of America's most pervasive modern myths -- without the heaving strain of an interconnected narrative, a cast of over-it actors, or visual effects teams stretched beyond their breaking point. You won't find it, however, in the strangely-dubbed "Sony's Spider-Man Universe" -- that casually connected series of antihero films (the Venoms, Morbius) that attempts to cobble together its own Sinister Six from the contractual scraps Disney left Sony after its acquisition of Marvel Studios. And Madame Web, the latest grasp at superhero relevancy in a dying comic book movie landscape, is easily its messiest, most forgettable shrug in that direction. It's astonishing to think that Sony could put out a worse product than 2022's Morbius -- a misfire of a mad-scientist picture that at least contained a few interesting images and the perverse sight of Matt Smith gnashing his pointy vampire teeth through a chopped-up villain performance -- but boy, Madame Web manages it. It's a passive whisper of a film, one that barely registers its own existence. The only reason someone would even deign to make it is because they're contractually obligated to maintain a specific character's intellectual property, not to mention a heaping stake of product placement from Pepsi. Continue Reading →

The Broadway adaptation defangs its best characters in a misguided effort to appeal to a new generation of viewers. Paramount’s new version of Tina Fey’s cult classic Mean Girls boasts a tagline many Millennials found downright offensive upon debut: “This ain’t your mother’s Mean Girls!” The movie, based on the Broadway musical adapted from the original 2004 film, makes it abundantly clear that it’s aimed directly at Gen Z from its very opening moments, which look like a vertical phone video straight out of TikTok. Fey, the writer of both versions of Mean Girls, hasn’t been without her fair share of controversies over the twenty years since the first film premiered. In a clear effort to avoid upsetting younger audience members who have grown up with more sensitive media, Fey kneecaps many of her own best jokes. The updated script is a wobbly attempt to satisfy fans of the original without offending newcomers. The set-ups where there used to be jokes still remain, but they’re empty husks strung together by mostly forgettable songs. Though not without its unique charms, the musical Mean Girls is glaringly unfunny. The music, written by Fey’s husband and frequent creative collaborator Jeff Richmond, does little to make up for the chasms where cutting punchlines have been removed. Richmond can write excellent, hilarious songs like the ones in 30 Rock and Girls5eva, but his compositions here are basic and feel uninspired. Most of the sincere songs revolve around bland messages about self-esteem that lack any insight into the actual emotional experiences of teenage girls. Emo outcast Janis ‘Imi’ike (Auli’i Cravalho, Moana), formerly a supporting character, gets what feels like four separate songs about the power of Being Yourself. Only “Sexy,” a playful number about Halloween costumes performed by ditzy beauty Karen Shetty (Avantika), stands out.  Continue Reading →

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 →

The Netflix documentary uses historical evidence and modern scholarship to demonstrate racism's continued role in US society. At the start of the new documentary Stamped from the Beginning, filmmaker Roger Ross Williams asks his various interview subjects, “What is wrong with Black people?” Considering that all the interviewees in question are also Black, it is unsurprising that the question’s seeming hostility initially throws many. However, once they recognize the context of that query—Williams is asking for a historical context as to what Blacks have done to deserve centuries of institutionalized racism and violence—they are more than willing and able to discuss the subject at length throughout this strong and often provocative film. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s book of the same name inspired the Williams’ film, a karmic debt the director pays back by including the doctor among a number of knowledgeable Black female scholars and activists. Together, they discuss how the twin stains of racism and white supremacy permeate American society in ways that continue to fester today. They explain how the concept of deeming people as greater or lesser by the color of their skin was born out of slavery. The aim was to simultaneously remove enslaved people’s distinguishing characteristics to make them seem like one undifferentiated mass and drive a wedge between them and white “indentured servants” to prevent the groups from joining forces against their common enemy, the wealthy landowner. Continue Reading →

Kids deserve better than yet another dull, going-through-the-motions misfire. The animation world was recently startled by Warner Bros.' announcement that they planned to shelve their recently completed feature Coyote vs Acme for a quick tax write-off, rather than spend money to release it. Not to be outdone, Disney Studios offers up Wish, an animated feature that is the kind of artistic misfire that deserves to be hidden away and never spoken about again. This is a creation so alternately bewildering and banal that it's implausible that at no point during the entire creative process did anyone point out the seemingly obvious fact that virtually none of it works on even the most basic levels. Wish takes place in the kingdom of Rosas, which was founded and is currently ruled by Magnifico (Chris Pine), a seemingly benevolent sorcerer who offers peace and protection for all those who live there. The catch is that they must surrender their deepest wish to Magnifico, who stores them in the lab in his castle in bubbles and once in a great while returns one to the person who made it. Inexplicably, the people of Rosas think this is a good deal, none more so than Asha (Ariana DeBose), a teenager who is all in on both Rosas and Magnifico and is hoping that the latter will present her beloved grandfather (Victor Argo) with his wish to commemorate his upcoming 100th birthday. Continue Reading →

After stumbling with Downsizing, Alexander Payne bounces back with a gentle & witty comedy-drama. The artist Dmitry Samarov one said to me that the ratio of good to bad late periods in an artist's life was depressing to consider. For every Sir Edward William Elgar there was an Eric Clapton (my example, not his), and that it was rare to see someone sharpen as they aged. Now, I like Dmitry and certainly respect his opinion, but I can’t help but feel that when film overtook painting as the dominant artwork that people engage with, the ratio shifted towards bizarre experimentation and welcome self-reflection as much as dull self reflection. Take for instance 62 year old Alexander Payne, who, after the biggest disaster of his career (2017’s confused parable Downsizing), has started his fourth decade as a director by leaning hard back into what he knew (and what the royal “we” enjoyed) and rediscovered himself with The Holdovers, a movie no one can seem to stop comparing to Hal Ashby. No mean feat, of course, but even that sells its virtues short. This is no mere homage, no mere return to form, this is the movie that Payne’s been hoping to make since his 90s heyday, a film that earns both its jaundiced gaze and its catharsis. Continue Reading →

The Trolls movies continue to indulge in their best and worst impulses in a third installment. The poster for this past summer's R-rated comedy No Hard Feelings had a reasonably clever tagline to explain the strained dynamic between the film's two leads. Against an image of Jennifer Lawrence squeezing Andrew Barth Feldman's cheeks, a single word is placed on top of each person's face: "Pretty" and "Awkward." Nothing revolutionary in design, but it gets the job done. Best of all, that tagline also makes for an apt descriptor for Trolls Band Together. The third entry in the Trolls trilogy (based on the popular 80s dolls), Trolls Band Together does indeed live up to the phrase “Pretty. Awkward.” The animators at DreamWorks keep coming up with gorgeous-looking environments for the titular critters to inhabit that look like they emerged from the wreckage of a craft store explosion. Unfortunately, the writing remains as stilted as ever. Continue Reading →

To talk about The Killer is to strip away pretense. Well, one can try. Cold it may be, but David Fincher's latest is an incredibly open film. The houses are made of glass; the windows are ceiling-high; the voiceovers from the title character (Michael Fassbender) give infallible insight into his worldview. The film is his worldview, simple in its machinations and complex in its philosophy. In most other circumstances, this would unfold over time. And it does here, at least to an extent. Continue Reading →

Most films don’t come with homework. The same cannot be said of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s new movie, The Marvels. Unless you’re a devoted MCU fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of both the movies and the Disney+ TV originals, it’s difficult to understand the mechanics of this disastrously convoluted entry in the floundering franchise. It feels like being dropped headfirst into a crossover episode based on three shows you’ve never seen -- mostly because it is. The Marvels kicks off with a bit of genuine visual interest (that never appears again) in the form of hand-drawn comics created by teenage superhero-slash-Captain Marvel fangirl Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), aka Ms. Marvel. Vellani, who previously appeared as Kamala on the little-seen Disney+ series Ms. Marvel, is a spunky, hilarious teenage heroine whose impressive comedic timing buoys the leaden, disjointed script. She so thoroughly steals the show that it’s disappointing this movie wasn’t just about her; instead, it's a confused mix of storylines involving Kamala, Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), and astronaut Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris, Candyman). It feels like the powers that be made a huge mistake in consigning her story to a poorly publicized streaming original, instead of letting her headline a film on her own. Continue Reading →

When I was around thirteen, two classmates, Christina and Taylor (their real names, it’s not like they’re going to read this), played a prank on me that resulted in my eating dog food. In retrospect, it could have been worse: nobody else saw it happen, and for whatever reason they kept it to themselves. But when I think about my teenage years (and I try not to much at this point in my life, other than at a superficial pop culture level), my mind often goes to that moment. Continue Reading →

An overview of the diverse features selected to screen at this year's Austin Film Festival. This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn't exist. A cycle rickshaw, adorned with a Texas flag billowing in the wind, whizzes by while blaring a Luke Combs tune. Massive murals of Willie Nelson and Post Malone gaze down on passersby like the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg. A man in a Blue Lives Matter shirt waltzes past a "PROTECT TRANS KIDS" sign planted on the lawn of a Catholic Church. Welcome to Austin, Texas, a Southern hotspot that, for the final weekend of October 2023, wasn't just home to these and other oddball sights, but also the backdrop for the 30th edition of the Austin Film Festival. Though not as world-famous as the Toronto International Film Festival or Cannes, Austin's annual ode to cinema is still a much-ballyhooed event attended by freelance journalists, aspiring screenwriters, iconic filmmakers, and everyone in between. Continue Reading →

Local filmmakers, horror & desire are all given the spotlight at the Chicago International Film Festival's shorts program. This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn't exist. The first program of shorts featured at this year's Chicago International Film Festival, titled “City & State,” highlighted local voices with astounding range. Dustin Nakao-Haider’s film Ethan Lim: Cambodian Futures is a poignant and complex film highlighting Chicago chef Ethan Lim and his hope for a different future that moves Cambodian food in revolutionary directions. Director Linh Tran’s Video Funeral grapples with similar issues of loss, (re)connection, and family brought about by diaspora. Like Linh Tran, Ian Kelly’s animated short Soft Lights and Silver Shadows is a tender testament to how art and media can help transcend time, distance, and mortality. Equally fascinated with different domestic dynamics, Tetsuya Mariko intently investigated what makes a family against crumbling infrastructure in his tense Before Anyone Else. 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 →

At this point, you can roughly divide the output of Nicolas Cage into one of two categories. First, there are films so tailored to his reigning wild man of cinema persona that it seems unimaginable they could exist if he passed. In the other camp are the quieter efforts like The Weather Man, Joe, and Pig that remind of what a powerful actor he still can be. His latest project, writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, combines both approaches into a single offering. The result is a strange and wildly audacious work anchored by a surprisingly deft and low-key turn from Cage that stands in marked contrast to the weirdness surrounding him. Continue Reading →