31 Best Movies To Watch After The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

White Bird, currently in theatres (or just departed, depending on where you live), spins off from surprisingly well-done Wonder. However, the true 2024 heir to the warm and unusually honest 2017 family film arrives on Disney+ this week in the form of Out of My Mind. The “kids with a chronic condition” genre is challenging to navigate. Too far to one side and the work mires itself in cliché while elevating the lead to something like sainthood. Too far in the other direction, it becomes cruel, unpleasant, cynical, and possibly devoid of empathy. It is a credit to Out of My Mind that it navigates that tightrope without visible strain. Directed by Amber Sealey from a script by Daniel Stiepleman, it does right by the tart Sharon M. Draper novel without simply being an airless recreation. There are some stumbles regarding the villains and the film’s final note, but overall, it is a quick-on-its-feet family film that doesn’t wince away from the hardships of disability and being 12. It’s clear from the early moments that plenty of thought has gone into the feature. Because Melody’s (Phoebe-Rae Taylor) cerebral palsy affects her muscle control, including that of her tongue, she cannot communicate via her voice. She still has an inner monologue and, as she points out, can give that any voice she wants. So who does she choose? Who any 12-year-old girl in 2002 would. Jennifer Aniston, of course. And see Rachel Green herself gives Melody (and the film) her voice. Continue Reading →

Many interpret the magic of the movies as referring to film’s ability to show audiences something they’ve never seen, immersing them in worlds they’ll never visit. But the flip side of it is also true. Sometimes, movies can magically ground viewers in worlds achingly familiar, surrounded by people so recognizable they’d swear they knew them already. That latter “trick” is what A Real Pain pulls off with unfussy ease. David (Jesse Eisenberg, also pulling writing and directing duties) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) were the kind of cousins who grew up so close that you could confuse them for brothers. Time and responsibility take their toll, though. A family man, David can no longer spend all night running around the City, even as he now calls it home. Benji, on the other hand, has plenty of time but has rooted himself in Binghamton and the basement of his mom’s house. Before the start of the film, their grandmother dies, prompting the duo to finally follow through on the tour of Poland—and visit her childhood home—they had been circling for years. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin struggle to see each other clearly. (Searchlight Pictures) The big headline of early coverage of A Real Pain has been Culkin and rightfully so. Benji is a maddening figure. He speaks empathetically and seems poised to big up everyone around him one moment, the next lashing out, unable to see a situation from anyone’s perspective but his own. His criticisms are often nasty and barbed. Yet he’s quick to dismiss them when the occasional target circles back to say, “That hurt, but you did show me something true.” He’s well-loved but pushes that love to its limits, seemingly just to point and say, “See, you don’t care about me.” It’s a perfectly cooked steak of a role and Culkin relishes it without swimming in the ham river (to mix meat metaphors). Continue Reading →

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 →

Amrit Rathod (Lakshya) is a commando. He is a peerless soldier among peers. He's as ruthless as he is skilled, and when he fights, he wins. It might be a slugfest, and he cannot walk off a hit like it's nothing, but if someone fights him, he's the one who walks away from the fight. He's also a good friend to his fellow commando Viresh (Abhishek Chauhan) and a loving partner to his girlfriend Tulika Singh (Tanya Maniktala. When Tulika's wealthy father arranges her engagement to someone she doesn't love, Amrit and Viresh catch the Singhs' train. The plan is simple—link up with Tulika and elope. The trick is that their train has been marked for robbery by an extended family of bandits—fathers, siblings, and cousins. Fani (Raghav Juyal) may not be the patriarch, the strongest, or even the most respected among the bandit crew. But he is ruthless, sadistic, and determined to come out on top. No one will stop him from pulling the robbery off, and he will not tolerate disrespect. When the bandits make their first play, Amrit wants to stop them. After Fani makes his play, a vicious move that introduces the title card 45 minutes in, Amrit wants them dead. And he has the ability and the will to make that happen. Writer/director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat's Kill is a decent entry in the growing hyper-violent 21st-century action cinema library. Like Gareth Evans' The Raid, Kill uses the geography of its setting to its choreography's advantage. Like John Hyams' Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Kill pays attention to the immediate psychological effects of extreme violence. Like Timo Tjahjanto's The Night Comes for Us, Kill builds some of its strongest action beats on improvised weaponry and unique flavors of grody that can result from its creative application. It doesn't reach their level, but it's a worthy swing with strong narrative escalation and an enjoyably despicable turn from Juyal. 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 →

It’s disappointing and fitting that director Ti West’s MaXXXine is undone by its sheer ambition. Throughout West’s licentious slasher series, his films have always featured titular heroines whose dreams were never commensurate with the limitations of their present circumstances (cue Mia Goth’s iconic “Please, I’m a star!” diatribe in 2022’s Pearl). In a similar vein, MaXXXine follows Maxine Minx (played once again by a show-stopping Goth) as she struggles to make a name for herself in Hollywood despite a less-than-savory past (for starters, she’s the sole survivor of a brutal massacre, as depicted in the first film of the series, X). Like its titular protagonist, MaXXXine has high ambitions, attempting to weave in commentary about the dignity of sex work, the glamor and exploitation of Hollywood, the soul-crushing dogmas of conservative Christianity, and the pitfalls of fame all while delivering bloody genre thrills. It’s an admirable attempt, but, unfortunately, that desire to cover so much thematic ground does a disservice to the film as a whole, ultimately rendering MaXXXine a sizzle reel of iconic 1980s set pieces in a desperate search for a more compelling story to thread them together.  Taking place in 1985 and six(xx) years after X, the film follows Maxine as she carves a successful name for herself in the pornographic film industry. Still, she’s convinced that she’s meant for greater things, hoping to make the leap into non-stag films. She gets her big break when she lands the lead role in the horror film The Puritan II, but cannot rest on the laurels of her inchoate movie career. A serial killer known as the Night Stalker has been brutally murdering young LA hopefuls, and after three of the victims have a direct connection to Maxine, she realizes that her past has caught up with her. In between her blossoming movie career, she strives to stop the Night Stalker, lest her dreams are thwarted. Continue Reading →

The biggest challenge any director making an exorcism movie faces is: How do you top The Exorcist? William Friedkin's apocalyptic, daring 1974 classic defined the genre so thoroughly that any subsequent entry is both indebted to, and haunted by, its mastery. The smartest move, really, is to just embrace its fog-covered shadow; The Exorcism, a meta-textual possession film that swims happily in the iconography of its forebear. In so doing it comes away with surprisingly melancholic ruminations on the strain that came with, well, making The Exorcist. The film is co-written and directed by Joshua John Miller (Final Girls), whose most direct connection to The Exorcist comes from being the son of Jason Miller, the actor who played Father Karras in Friedkin's original. In a way, this story feels like Miller exorcising demons of his own, likely spurred by watching the emotional toll his father experienced working on Friedkin's famously chaotic and unpredictable set back in 1974. Here, the timeline is moved to the present, where a film called The Georgetown Project (a nod to the town in which The Exorcist is set) is put on hold after the actor playing the priest (a brief turn from Adrian Pasdar) meets a grisly fate late one night in the film's doll-house like soundstage. In desperation, the film's director (Adam Goldberg) turns to Anthony Miller (Russell Crowe), a washed-up movie star freshly sober and looking for his way back into the spotlight. In an early scene of confession -- a perpetually useful device for Catholic-flavored exposition -- we learn that Miller is a lapsed Catholic whose life has been haunted by childhood sexual abuse as an altar boy. This itself rippled out into drug and alcohol problems and a strained relationship with his daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins), who comes home after washing out of college just in time for Miller to contemplate a return to screen. 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 →

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 →

After catching Lisa Frankenstein this weekend, check out some of these weird & wild spins on the legendary tale. Now that we've all established that Frankenstein (or Fronkensteen, whichever you prefer) is in fact the name of the doctor, and his creation is just "the Creature," we can sit back and enjoy a revival in appreciation for Mary Shelley's landmark story that skillfully wove together body horror, science, and existentialism. Following the critically acclaimed Poor Things is Zelda Williams' 80s-set comedy Lisa Frankenstein, opening in theaters tomorrow, which acts as a nice appetizer before Guillermo del Toro's long-awaited adaptation on the story and Maggie Gyllenhaal's version of Bride of Frankenstein, both set for release next year. While often overlooked in favor of the cooler, sexier Dracula, there's plenty of media dedicated to Dr. Frankenstein and his creation, starting with James Whale's unimpeachable 1931 adaptation and its even better sequel, 1935's Bride of Frankenstein. It's been lovingly parodied (Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein), given a family-friendly treatment (Tim Burton's Frankenweenie), turned into a musical (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and even made into porn (more movies than you can possibly imagine). Here now are a list of some of the more notably unusual (and non-pornographic) takes on the story, offering gore, laughs, romance, or just general weirdness. Continue Reading →

The film's biggest highlight is the actor as an unlikely hero: a beekeeper-turned-assassin. Bees, scammers, and a hive of lies. Jason Statham’s latest record-breaking feature The Beekeeper is honey-soaked, with wisdom that leaves the viewer wanting more and learning to be wary of scammers, stop elder abuse, and save the bees. As he aggressively fights to save the bees (and society) from total destruction, Statham serves up the same kind of grizzled Brit-buster vibes he's given us through decades of punch-em-up action. But this one's something special, a caper that leans into the meme of both Statham's curious star power and his apian brethren. Directed by David Ayer, The Beekeeper tells the story of Adam Clay (Jason Statham), a beekeeper and retired member of the crime-fighting organization of the same name. But when his elderly neighbor Mrs. Parker (Phylicia Rashad) is subject to scammers and loses everything, Adam goes on a mission to find the scammers and kill their operation to “protect the hive.” His journey leads him all the way to the White House, even involving the FBI and CIA. 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 →

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 →

Jonathan Glazer's first feature in 10 years is a near-unclassifiable work of patience and intentional distance from its historical horrors. What am I to say here? What can I say? I feel as if I’m to say nothing at all. My mind has gone and I feel sick, and while that’s due to the film in question, another degree of it comes from a deeper truth. I feel wrong in my reaction to it; it can’t help but feel inadequate. The Zone of Interest has leveled me like few things ever have, but that’s not the point. That’s not its point. 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 →

Serve up this bizarre, oddly funny 80s slasher as part of your holiday entertainment feast this year. Though Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s retro horror double feature Grindhouse met with audience indifference, the collection of fake movie trailers during its “intermission” became amusing pop culture ephemera. Of the four featured, Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” is probably the most fun to revisit, mostly because of its loving dedication to capturing the unique seediness of an 80s slasher film. There’s something so familiar about the murky film quality, the low budget special effects, the incoherent plot (it appears to be a trailer for two different, unfinished movies stuck together, as was the case for many 80s horror movies), the glimpses of T&A, and of course, that hilarious voiceover and excellent tagline, that it seems unbelievable that it hadn’t actually already been made. Though it took over 15 years, Thanksgiving is finally a full-length feature, released to largely positive reviews just last weekend. It is not, however, as has been claimed elsewhere, the first Thanksgiving slasher film. Before that, there was 1987’s Blood Rage, a movie that leans into all the best and worst tropes of its genre, while also being deeply strange and often undeniably funny. 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 →

Having earned just about every accolade there is and long cemented his position as one of the all-time great filmmakers, Martin Scorsese has nothing left to prove. Yet, on the cusp of 81–an age when most directors are either retiring to the Lifetime Achievement Award circuit or making films that are largely variations of their past glories–he is still out there challenging himself and audiences with bold and audacious projects. Continue Reading →

Upon the news of the passing of William Friedkin, every headline reporting on the news focused on two films. It’s not surprising that the media spent so much time talking about The French Connection and The Exorcist, two bona fide masterpieces that paved the way for a new era of American filmmaking. What was disappointing was this seeming willingness to reduce a cinematic legend’s legacy to a burst of time in the early 1970s, thus dismissing the five decades that followed as either negligible or outright unworthy of interest.  Continue Reading →

At the risk of making a "getting a lot of Sorcerer vibes from this" guy out of myself, The Hunted—William Friedkin's 2003 old-master-hunts-rogue-student thriller really does make for a fascinating counterpart to his earlier men-on-a-desperate-mission masterwork. Both delve into the lives of damaged, forlorn, isolated men on perilous quests for deliverance. And both of those quests lead deep into madness. Both pointedly contrast man-made, flame-choked hellscapes (Sorcerer's exploding oil well, The Hunted's secret mission amidst the Kosovo War) with the vast, amoral green of the deep forest (Columbia and Oregon, respectively). Both turn on setpieces that thrill while maintaining a grounded (if not necessarily "realistic") feel and weave surreality in with care. Continue Reading →

After the aggressively negative critic and audience response to 1980’s Cruising, William Friedkin took a curious “hell with it, I’m going to do whatever I want” approach to projects. None of what he directed over the next decade, save for To Live and Die in L.A., came close to receiving the kind of acclaim his early 70s career did. If anything, it seemed as though he had given up his precise, occasionally unreasonable eye for perfection in favor of churning out the most generic cable-friendly nonsense possible.  Continue Reading →