6 Best Movies To Watch After Wild Strawberries (1957)

Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) have the kind of meet-cute that hits with a bang, forgive the pun. A rising chef and a techie for Weetabix, respectively, they meet when she strikes him with her car. Unaware that the reason Tobias was in the road was running to get a pen to finally sign his divorce papers, Altmut buys him dinner at a kind of Americana diner cousin to the one where All of Us Strangers set its glorious heart-ripper of a climax and then invites him and his wife to dinner at her much ritzier restaurant--as a two-part act of penance. He takes her up on the invitation. Solo. In short order, they get to connecting. Despite the guilt and the neck brace, they hit it off. There’s a spark, one they run with once it becomes clear that despite being unready to shed his wedding band, Tobias is single. That’s how We Live in Time starts, but it’s not where it starts. No, director John Crowley (Brooklyn) opens years into Almut and Tobias’ partnership. Instead of meeting Almut committing an act of near vehicular homicide, the audience first encounters her blending pleasure (a morning run) and business (gathering wild ingredients for a parfait recipe she’s been experimenting with). Pugh makes a strong first impression. She’s someone who stops to smell the flowers both for joy and utility. More importantly, she's found a balance between the two that brings happiness. Continue Reading →

A Different Man is all about what it means to be seen, in all the best and worst ways. It’s what it means to avoid eye contact with the unhoused man on the subway and to gawk at anyone who looks remotely outside the norm. It’s the difference between simply being noticed and being intimately seen, the way only someone who actually understands you can. Writer and director Aaron Schimberg looks for as many ways as possible to play with these ideas, fitting the seer and seen inside each other in a little matryoshka doll. But first and foremost, our gaze is on Edward. Adam Pearson isn't internationally known, but he's known to rock a microphone. (Matt Infante/A24) Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a struggling actor with a rare condition that covers his face with large, benign tumors. He’s quiet and reserved. His every movement reveals a discomfort even existing in the world, never mind taking part in it. So when he gets the chance to take an experimental new drug that can completely heal him, he does so without a thought. Reborn as his new, more handsome self, he finally gets what should be the part of a lifetime in a local play based on his life. That is until Oswald, a man with the same condition as Edward, steals the part. In the process, this new arrival reveals just how exactly Edward has actually transformed.  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 →

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 →

Long overshadowed by Sideways, we’re giving this understated dramedy its due for depicting Midwest with the specificity Hollywood rarely gives it. Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is as unassuming as the regular Midwestern folk it depicts. Even though this small, quiet, black-and-white comedy was flooded with nominations during the 2013 awards season it won almost none of them. Ten years on, it remains overshadowed by Payne’s more popular works like Sideways and Election. But this odd little dramedy is not only one of Payne’s finest films to date, it’s also his one true love letter to his home state of Nebraska and the Midwest itself. Elderly alcoholic Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) has fallen for a Publisher’s Clearinghouse–style scam and is convinced he’s won a million dollars. Determined to collect the cash in person, son David (Will Forte) ignores his mother and brother’s pleas and agrees to drive him all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska. On the way, the pair get waylaid in Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne, giving David a glimpse of not just who his father is, but how a place and the people in it shaped him. Continue Reading →

There’s something to be said for a ramshackle film that delights in itself and doesn’t take anything especially seriously. Unfortunately, what a filmmaker and their fans find fun may read as piffle or drudgery to less dialed-in audiences. Case in point: Kaboom. Continue Reading →