35 Best Movies To Watch After Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) (Page 2)

Near the beginning of Bros, Bobby Lieber (Billy Eichner) meets with a Hollywood executive. The exec wants our protagonist to write a script for a gay rom-com. The executive is after something easy, a script that is palatable to straight audiences, a story about “nice gay guys.” Bobby, of course, isn’t having it. He tells the executive that gays have different stories than straight people before leaving, movie deal dead in the room.   Continue Reading →

Pinocchio is not a movie. It’s the latest in a long line of live-action remakes of classic Disney cartoons. The Mouse House’s newest excuse to print money can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead! Or until it only has Pocahontas and Home on the Range left to turn into live-action features, whichever comes first. If the track record of movies like The Lion King and Alice in Wonderland isn’t enough to make you discouraged about the prospects of Pinocchio, it’s worth remembering that this is also a Robert Zemeckis directorial effort made after 2001. Continue Reading →

Our final dispatch from Fantasia features a blend of powerful stories with dynamic female characters. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2022 Fantasia Film Festival.) There is perhaps no more literal or better example of Fantasia's killer run of female-centered stories this year than Amanda Kramer’s kaleidoscopic Give Me Pity! Following Sissy St. Claire (Sophie Von Haselberg) for her singular Saturday night special, this remarkable feat of staging and performance is a golden, glittery, and gothic descent into the twisted psyche of a performer desperate for acceptance. At once a TV concert, sketch show, and dramatic showcase, Give Me Pity shows off the exhaustive range of its visionary director and solo star. Continue Reading →

Elder statesman Saul Williams has never shied away from grandiose, multivalent projects. An early adopter of both democratic distribution methods and envelope-pushing indie noise-rap, his career has been typified by restless innovation and intimidating prolificacy. Co-directed with partner Anisia Uzeyman (her second feature), Williams’ directorial debut feature, Neptune Frost, arrives with an analogously charged and audacious context. Continue Reading →

In 1996, a peaceful time of American prosperity between the Cold War and Twitter, music’s biggest things were imports. One was Canadian Queen Celine Dion, with her classic “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” playing from car radios on constant rotation. The other was Irishman Michael Flatley who came to our shores with the step dancing phenomenon Riverdance.  Continue Reading →

Though their first project made exclusively for Netflix, Robin Robin brings animation studio Aardman back to familiar territory. Aardman’s big claim to fame was Wallace and Gromit shorts released as TV specials like A Grand Day Out or The Wrong Trousers. It may be dropping on a streaming platform rather than on broadcast television, but Robin Robin allows Aardman to once again cram a lot of beautiful animation and charm into 30 minutes of storytelling.   Continue Reading →

Once Upon a Time… Continue Reading →

Watching Clifford the Big Red Dog, it immediately becomes clear that the titular canine’s red fur represents represent the blood of the proletariat spilled at the altar of capitalism. After all, why else would Clifford populate the cast with kindly working-class humans while delivering antagonists in the form of big Pharma executives, cops, and even a pesky landlord? Clifford’s slapstick rampage is directed at the bourgeoise, whose massive number of sins are reflected in Clifford’s gigantic stature. Old Dogs auteur Walt Becker is putting the transgressions of the privileged class on display and introducing children to the concept of class consciousness.  Continue Reading →

What if during one of your worst nightmares, you couldn't wake up, no matter how hard you tried? This the brooding question hanging throughout Come True, Anthony Scott Burns' sophomore horror thriller, coming off of Our House in 2018. The director (and now screenwriter) brings his visual effects background to develop an atmospheric wasteland of pure, spine-chilling dread with just a touch of analog sci-fi. The result is an ironically snoozy slog about the horrors of sleep paralysis that gets by more on vivid aesthetic than the sheer terror of what keeps us up at night.  Continue Reading →

Radu Jude's latest is as unsubtle as it is gripping, a strange tryptich about sex, justice, and communal madness. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) In Radu Jude’s Golden Bear-winning tenth feature, the zanily titled Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, there is no subtlety. The message is loud and clear from start to finish: The world is a sick place and not a lot of people are capable of empathy. For Emi (Katia Pascariu), a teacher, not having empathy from others means she could her job for a ridiculous reason: An amateur sex tape featuring Emi and her husband is circulating all around the internet, and when the parents of Emi’s students find about this, they demand the school to fire Emi. Jude, however, doesn’t address this plot point right away. Instead, he toys around first, dividing the movie into three equally bizarre parts. Continue Reading →

The thing about guilt is that it can wear you down until you’re more a cluster of exposed nerve endings than a human being. That, at least, is the premise behind The Night, a new psychological horror and debut film from director Kourosh Ahari. Set in Los Angeles and spoken almost entirely in Farsi, The Night is a wonderfully odd mix of being spare and a bit too much all at once.  Continue Reading →

After Ukraine Is Not a Brothel and Casting JonBenet, Kitty Green makes her first scripted feature in one of the year’s very best. Julia Garner plays Jane, a Northwestern University graduate and aspiring film producer. Now she works as an office assistant for an industry executive. She does the work one would expect her, but it’s over the course of a day that she becomes aware of the predation going on. Comparisons to Harvey Weinstein have already been made, but to relate the two is to simplify the issues on screen here. Continue Reading →