Legendary Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s magnum opus, Spirited Away, was released in 2001. Miyazaki’s animation career at his studio, Studio Ghibli, is rivaled by only Walt Disney, and Spirited Away is a big reason as to why.
High Life, the first English-language film by French auteur Claire Denis, made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2018. Planned by Denis for 15 years, High Life finally saw a limited release in the United States in April 2019. In comparing the film to genre heavyweights, it is closer to The Phantom Menace’s meandering than A New Hope’s quality. High Life would’ve been better off unrealized.
Screenwriter and director Paul Schrader is best known for writing Taxi Driver and co-writing Raging Bull. With First Reformed, a movie written and directed by Schrader, the filmmaker can step out of Martin Scorsese’s long shadow and add an accomplishment all his own to the list of his most prominent credits.
Featuring a pastel-colored prison bakery, a bear riding a stray dog like Napoleon Crossing the Alps, and a pop-up book leading to long lost treasure, Paddington 2 is pure childhood bliss in a 104-minute package.
In Avengers: Infinity War, the Sorcerer Supreme, Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), willingly gives the all-powerful time stone to Thanos (Josh Brolin), a galactic-conqueror and freshman-year philosophy major. When Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) questions Dr. Strange’s decision, the sorcerer responds, “We’re in the endgame now.” After 21 Marvel movies, he’s right. Avengers: Endgame is a fitting conclusion to Marvel’s first 11-year cinematic story.
Twenty-nine years after Driving Miss Daisy unconscionably secured the Academy Award for Best Picture, Green Book, a movie informally dubbed the reverse Driving Miss Daisy, took home the same prize at the 2018 Academy Awards. Studios won’t halt production on the Green Books of the world until movies like it are no longer profitable and well received, but the Academy should stop rewarding them. Green Book is entertaining, innocuous (on its surface), and feel-good for the right viewer, but the context surrounding it and the subtext that can be garnered from it change the conversation.
With Booksmart, Olivia Wilde becomes the third rookie director in a year to kick her career off with a coming-of-age story. Wilde joins a list that includes Bo Burnham (Eighth Grade) and Jonah Hill (mid90s). Burnham and Hill, coming from comedy and acting, respectively, made the transition with ease. Wilde’s lively, pensive debut about female friendship and identity makes her the third new director to find success in the genre.
Long Shot, an R-rated, politically-set romantic comedy starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen, enters theaters as streaming services continue to dominate the genre. Charming and surprisingly raunchy, Long Shot could serve as a litmus test for the future of rom-coms at the multiplex. Fortunately, subverting comedy norms and relying on its stars is enough to make for an enjoyable trip to the theater despite the film’s tendency to step into worn genre tropes like a pair of old shoes.
Set in Harlem in the early 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk is a story of family, hope, and despair. Released in 2018 and based on a book of the same title by famed author James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk reveals what we already knew: writer-director Barry Jenkins is a master of the craft.
With 2017’s Get Out, comedian-turned-filmmaker Jordan Peele burst onto the scene in a full sprint. With just one film under his belt, Peele was already dubbed this generation’s Alfred Hitchcock, setting expectations unreasonably high for Us, Peele’s 2019 sophomoric follow-up. Although Us isn’t Peele’s second masterpiece in as many tries, the ponderous plot and themes may make Us, not Get Out, the longer standing fixture in the cultural conversation.
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