Film
A24 Shares Trailer for Sean Baker’s New Film Red Rocket: Watch
Sean Baker, the award-winning director behind The Florida Project and Tangerine, is getting ready to unveil his latest feature film, Red Rocket. A24 has just released the first trailer for the dark comedy, which you can watch below. Red Rocket tells the story of washed-up porn star Mikey Saber, played by Simon Rex, as he decides to return to his small hometown of Texas City, Texas, a Gulf Coast city in Galveston County. While it’s clear that nobody wants him to come back, Saber makes the most of his journey by trying to reconnect with old friends, make amends with his foes, and even pursue a new relationship. In the trailer, we see Saber putting on his best smile and flexing his porn star muscles while roaming about the dusty Texas town. After trying to land a job and convince his wif...
Russian Film Crew on International Space Station Begins First Movie Shot in Space
There have been countless movies about life in space, but none of them were actually filmed in space — well, until now. Russia just sent its veteran astronaut Anton Shkaplerov, actor Yulia Peresild, and movie producer Klim Shipenko to the International Space Station to make an original feature film. It’s tentatively titled Challenge and it will be the world’s first-ever movie filmed in orbit. After lifting off in the Soyuz MS-19 from Baikonur, Kazakhstan earlier this morning, all three people arrived at the International Space Station safely a little over three hours later, reports The New York Times. The trio confirmed they were feeling okay and the spacecraft systems were functioning normally, despite a brief glitch in the automatic docking system that Shkaplerov, who has been on three s...
Netflix Unveils New Trailer for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tick, tick…BOOM!: Watch
“The time keeps ticking” until Netflix releases tick, tick…BOOM!, the highly-anticipated film adaptation of Rent composer Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical. The streamer has shared a new trailer for the forthcoming feature — which marks Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut — and it centers around Larson as he cuts his teeth in New York City as an aspiring playwright. Additionally, Netflix has also shared the soundtrack’s first single, “30/90.” tick, tick…BOOM! is slated to premiere in theaters November 12th, and will arrive on streaming November 19th. Starring Andrew Garfield, the musical follows the struggles of a burgeoning playwright amid the ongoing AIDS crisis. As the pressure from his peers and loved ones weigh on him, Larson feels his time is running out — a message ...
NYFF Review: Joaquin Phoenix Gets Avuncular for the Warm, Low-Key C’mon C’mon
This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: Every five years or so, Mike Mills — not the one from R.E.M., though, confusingly, he is a music video director and graphic designer for some of their contemporaries — releases a sensitive, heartfelt drama about delicate but deceptively strong family ties. C’mon C’mon is the 2021 model, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a documentarian who must unexpectedly spend several weeks taking care of his nine-year-old nephew. I’ll Figure It Out: “Nobody knows what they’re doing. You just have to keep doing it.” That’s advice given late in C’mon C’mon by Viv (Gaby Hoffman) to her brother Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) as he struggles to figure out how to substitute-parent her nine-year-old son Jesse (Woody Norman). Viv has been c...
Halloween Kills… The Franchise, To Be Specific: Review
The Pitch: It’s the late hours of Halloween night 2018, and Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) house is still aflame from trapping Michael Myers in a flaming prison she’s spent decades building. But even that’s not enough to kill the soulless demon monster with a penchant for homicide; he escapes with nary a scratch on him, save for some scorch marks on his William Shatner mask. As daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) rush an injured Laurie to the hospital, the rest of Haddonfield learns of the asylum bus crash that led to Michael’s escape, and a mob forms to try to catch the killer. But will strength in numbers be enough to vanquish pure evil? Halloween Persists: In the age of “legacyquels,” followups to nostalgic hits from the ’70s and ’80s that...
Rob Zombie Unveils “Entire Neighborhood” Built for His Upcoming Munsters Movie: Photos
After sharing in-progress pictures of the new 1313 Mockingbird Lane a few weeks ago, Rob Zombie has now unveiled an entire neighborhood that’s been constructed for his upcoming Munsters movie. Zombie, who is writing and directing the movie based on the popular 1960s TV sitcom, has been keeping fans updated on the movie set’s progress via his Instagram page. On Thursday (September 30th), he shared photos of the now-completed 1313 Mockingbird Lane (also known as the Munsters’ mansion), as well as a number of surrounding suburban homes. They’ve all been erected by a crew in Budapest, Hungary, where the movie is being filmed. “What a difference 7 days can make!,” wrote Zombie. “1313 is looking good! Lots of work left to do, but it is getting there! Takes a lot of work to build an entire neighb...
NYFF Review: Benedict Cumberbatch is a Macho, Petulant Cowboy in The Power of the Dog
This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: Acclaimed writer-director Jane Campion adapts the semi-obscure 1967 novel The Power of the Dog into a feature of the same name. It’s a Western of sorts about Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a self-consciously macho cowboy who hassles his more reserved brother George (Jesse Plemons) on the ranch they own and operate together. When George marries the widow Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), Phil turns his cruelty toward her, as well as her teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), in spite of — or is it because of? — some unexpected common ground they share. Not So Old West: The Power of the Dog takes place in rural Montana in 1925, which amounts to a sort of netherworld between Old West imagery and the well-past-d...
Quentin Tarantino on Filming Women’s Feet: “That’s Just Good Direction”
Quentin Tarantino puts his interests on screen — a man of heart and sole, you might say. His predilection for feet is so famous that Brad Pitt joked about it at the SAG Awards, saying the filmmaker “has separated more women from their shoes than the TSA.” When he was asked about it in a new interview with GQ, the filmmaker reportedly sighed and said, “That’s just good direction.” As Tarantino explained, he shrugs off the criticism. “I don’t take it seriously. There’s a lot of feet in a lot of good directors’ movies.” Ever the historian, he also gave a brief discourse on directors going toe-to-toe with their interests. “Like, before me, the person foot fetishism was defined by was Luis Buñuel, another film director. And Hitchcock was accused of it and Sofia Coppola has been accuse...
A24’s Lamb is Slow-Burn Folk Horror Like Ewe Have Never Seen: Review
The Pitch: Out in the foggy hills of Iceland, Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Gudnason), a couple spending a dignified, quiet existence on their sheep farm, reside far from the rest of civilization. It’s relatively unspoken, but one intuits early that they’re reeling from the recent loss of a child. It still stings, but the two press on in their virtually silent existence, going about their chores and assisting their ewes’ new births. One day, a member of the flock gives birth to a curious creature — an uncanny hybrid of man and lamb — that the pair immediately adopt as their own child. Her name? Ada. But as the three of them build a strangely comforting existence together, their fog-shrouded idyll is disrupted by forces outside their control. The arrival of Ingvar’s dead...
NYFF Review: Todd Haynes Turns Up the Volume for His Engaging Velvet Underground Doc
This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: The Velvet Underground might have been the best American rock band of all time, and Todd Haynes has made a documentary about their relatively short but extremely influential career, which means covering not just core members Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Moe Tucker, but collaborators and contemporaries like Nico, Andy Warhol, and Jonas Mekas. Started Shaking to That Fine, Fine Music: Todd Haynes obviously loves rock and roll, which makes it all the more impressive that he’s spent his career making movies about key figures in its history while avoiding the usual lionizing cliches. Starting with Superstar, his doll-acted Karen Carpenter biopic that’s not commercially available, and continuing wit...
NYFF Review: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is a Star-Packed Issue Worth Picking Up
The Pitch: Wes Anderson returns with his first live-action movie since 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, crafting another group of stories within stories (and aspect ratios within aspect ratios). Here, he presents a 1975 issue of The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, a fictional New Yorker-ish magazine, featuring dramatizations of three major stories: a profile of an imprisoned artist (Benicio del Toro); a chronicle of youthful social revolution, led by Timothée Chalamet; and a combination crime story and food piece narrated by a jack-of-all-trades writer (Jeffrey Wright). That’s just a fraction of the sprawling cast, which includes Anderson mainstays like Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Edward Norton alongside newbies like Chalamet, del Toro, Wright, and Léa S...
NYFF Review: Simon Rex Gets a Surprising A24 Showcase in Sean Baker’s Red Rocket
The Pitch: Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) rolls back into his hometown on a bus, bruised and nearly penniless. His career as an adult film performer has seemingly dried up some time ago, so he shows up at the doorstep of his not-quite-ex-wife Lexi (Bree Elrod), another porn-industry castoff. With few job prospects and no car — he tools around on a one-speed bike — Mikey attempts to rebuild his life. This might sound like a kitchen-sink recovery drama, but Mikey’s interest in self-improvement is questionable and filmmaker Sean Baker’s interest in misery-wallowing is, as ever, minimal. Instead, Red Rocket is a queasily hilarious chronicle of misdirected American hustle. Sunshine States: After exploring the streets of Los Angeles in Tangerine and the outskirts of Orlando in The Florida Project, Bake...
