In his review of Milos Forman’s 1984 film “Amadeus,” Roger Ebert opines on the difference between greatness and near-greatness. “True geniuses,” he says, “rarely take their own work seriously,...

Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” which was recently nominated for an obscene 13 Academy Awards, is a fascinating movie largely because of how bad it is. Even discounting its myriad thematic issues,...

More so than any other year in recent memory, I felt completely disconnected from the general moviegoing audience in 2024. The big studio blockbusters I liked underperformed, while the ones I hated or...

In a recent article, Variety awards writer Clayton Davis attempted to predict which five lucky individuals will be nominated for best director at the 2025 Academy Awards. Among his predictions are some,...

The term “Oscar bait” is thrown around carelessly in film discussions, applied to essentially any movie that doesn’t have Batman in it. It’s become such a broad classification that it sometimes...

Near the end of Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” Mike Faist’s disgruntled tennis pro Art Donaldson tosses the ball into the air. This in and of itself is unremarkable — it’s a tennis movie,...

LCD Soundsystem’s entire career has been an exercise in irony. Disgruntled producer and DJ James Murphy, annoyed with the way his music career had stalled in his thirties, wrote the group’s deadpan...

In the second scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating magnum opus “Megalopolis,” protagonist Cesar Catalina stumbles onto a scaffold, towers over a model city and manically recites the entire...

Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” now in theaters via Mubi, opens with a card touting its Best Screenplay win at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. The movie that follows led me to call the Cannes...

The experience of watching Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow” is best encapsulated by a line that Owen, the film’s main character, utters early on. “It feels,” he says, “like someone took...

Over the past few months, tastemakers and artists on the trendier side of the pop spectrum have become obsessed with reviving “indie sleaze.” Indie sleaze is an aesthetic defined, as far as I can tell,...

Synthpop duo Magdalena Bay’s sophomore album, “Imaginal Disk,” opens with a short burst of mechanical noise, followed quickly by a single word: “Hello,” placidly intoned by vocalist Mica Tenenbaum....