Inside a dark theater in Midtown Manhattan, Allison McCulloch watched “Kraven the Hunter,” an origin story for the obscure Spider-Man villain, while jotting notes on a white piece of paper smaller than a Post-it. Fur clothing. Taxidermied animals. Characters eating steak. McCulloch is the Roger Ebert of vegans, a dedicated cinephile who cares as much … Read more
“I don’t know how you get justice from an accident.” In 2021, the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot on the set of the movie “Rust.” The new Hulu documentary “Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna,” directed by Rachel Mason, a friend of Hutchins, is not a chronicle of Hutchins’s life, nor a … Read more
Being the 6-year-old daughter of Mark Krotov, the publisher and one of the editors of the literary magazine n+1, is an all-access pass to New York City’s foreign films and contemporary art. “She’s always very, very receptive to stuff,” he said of his daughter, Daria Krotov-Clarke, whom he and his wife, Chantal Clarke, a writer, … Read more
One night shortly before the Oscars ceremony, my boyfriend decided to catch up on “Flow,” the animated film from Latvia that would go on to win best animated feature. When I returned home from dinner, I found that the film had also captured the attention of another viewer — my dog Daisy, a corgi mix. … Read more
‘Coconut Head Generation’ Stream it on Ovid. A room, a dusty projector and a small screen mounted on the wall. That’s pretty much all there is to the Thursday Film Series, a movie club started by students at the prestigious University of Ibadan in Nigeria, which forms the focus of Alain Kassanda’s documentary. But from … Read more
During his acceptance speech at the Oscars on Sunday, the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis (“Away”) spoke about overcoming our differences, a central theme of his movie and a lesson that feels more urgent today than ever. “Flow,” which won best animated feature film, is the dreamy tale of a black cat with huge, expressive yellow … Read more
There’s a temptation, when making a documentary about some obviously retrograde practice from the past, for filmmakers to treat their subject like something to gawk at. Can you believe how backward earlier generations were? Let’s all point and stare and wince. “Housewife of the Year” (in theaters), directed by Ciaran Cassidy, could very easily have … Read more
ADLER What I learned immediately is if the critics didn’t like you, you didn’t have long. So at that point, not to spoil any of the excitement of coming out of London and L.A., and about the release of the film, I wanted to close as quickly as possible. If I regret it, I only … Read more
‘Mickey 17’ The latest from Bong Joon Ho follows Mickey (Robert Pattinson) on a dangerous space expedition as he repeatedly dies and is resurrected via cloning and develops a relationship with a fellow crew member, Nasha (Naomi Ackie). From our review: Like the working-class crew of the extraterrestrial tugboat in Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” Mickey, Nasha … Read more
In “Mickey 17” (in theaters) Robert Pattinson plays a former pastry chef and an amiable dimwit who applies for a lousy, inevitably lethal job on a contaminated ice planet. As an Expendable, Mickey goes into the worst sorts of situations, dies in some horrible way — you know, for the mission — then gets cloned … Read more