“Hello. I’m Denis Villeneuve. I’m the director of ‘Dune, Part Two’.” [TENSE MUSIC] “So this scene happens exactly after the introduction of Feyd-Rautha, where we saw him as a psychopath. And here, we bring this character into his political environment, where it would be a strange celebration of its birthday, where in Harkonnen culture, the … Read more
Who is nominated? The Spanish-language narco-musical “Emilia Pérez” leads the pack with 13 nominations, followed by Brady Corbet’s epic drama “The Brutalist” and the gravity-defying musical “Wicked” with 10 each. “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic; and “Conclave,” Edward Berger’s Ralph-Fiennes-led drama about a group of cardinals gathered in the Vatican to choose a … Read more
A wife, wearing a nightgown and her hair uncovered, lies down next to her husband in bed. An older man and woman, drunk on red wine, dance wildly and discuss the complexities of sex and nudity at their age. A distressed young woman navigates the sexual advances of a male employer in a job interview. … Read more
A film by a Japanese woman about her search for justice from uncooperative authorities after she reported being raped is a contender at Sunday’s Academy Awards. Yet, despite being the first full-length documentary made by a Japanese director ever nominated for an Oscar, the movie cannot be seen in her home country. In the film, … Read more
2. La Bionda: “I Wanna Be Your Lover” Trust me when I say you need to watch this music video. This playful, deliriously catchy, proto-Daft Punk hit from 1980 is a quintessential specimen of the so-called subgenre of space disco and, in all likelihood, the greatest song ever made about being seduced by a slimy, … Read more
Isabelle Huppert stands upstage center, demurely holding her hands in front of her waist, and starts to speak. She is motionless and in silhouette so we don’t see her mouth, creating a sense of dislocation as to where the words we hear are actually coming from. And as we quickly discover, the Robert Wilson production … Read more
On the face of it, the Russian actor Yura Borisov was an unlikely actor to land an Oscar nomination in 2025. Just a few years ago he played a guileless soldier in a Kremlin-sponsored movie that celebrated a Soviet tank model. Later, he starred in a biopic of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the man who invented the … Read more
In the decades separating the suave Cary Grant from the willowy Timothée Chalamet, there was a leading man with a rougher kind of charm. Even in his box-office heyday, Gene Hackman had a receding hairline and a paunch. He could pass for 50 when he was 30. He described himself as a “big lummox kind … Read more
Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died on Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 88. The cause was esophageal cancer, … Read more
When the director Wes Anderson and the actors Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray and Gwyneth Paltrow took the stage in 2011 for a panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” there was no need for small talk before addressing the elephant in the room. “So, no Gene Hackman?” began the director Noah Baumbach, … Read more