Leave it to director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron to create a romantic comedy about two people determined not to be in a romantic comedy. Tracing the relationship of Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) as they meet, break up, get back together, break up, etc. is anything but overly cute and schmaltzy—it’s incredibly funny, sharp, sarcastic, and, before it ends, genuinely romantic. Movies are generally meant to be entertainment, but every so often it’s good to remind yourself that they can be more than that. Jeanne Dielman by French director Chantal Akerman runs three and a half hours long and forces you to watch a lonely French woman painstakingly go about her daily routine. ” It’s not a movie to pop on when you want to kick back and just enjoy a good show, but it’s an astounding example of just how far movies can push the envelope. Prior to Psycho, the idea of a “horror movie” still involved cobwebbed castles and Eastern European actors in plastic fangs and capes.
It’s the kind of good movie that runs you through the gamut of emotion but rewards you for the journey. When it comes to cultural touchstones, few things have the power of good movies. You don’t even have to have seen a Rocky movie to know Bill Conti’s iconic score, and people throw around lines like “These go to 11” or “I’ll have what she’s having” even if they haven’t actually seen This is Spinal Tap or When Harry Met Sally.
Rather, it’s a means of shaking up the conventional wisdom, introducing different perspectives on how greatness is defined and sparking passionate debate among the readership. This wasn’t the result of any kind of “out with the old, in with the new” intention. In some cases — Scorsese, Spike, Godard — we felt their best work was pre-21st century. In Spielberg’s case, there were several films that had love (including Minority Report and West Side Story), but none that united all six of us in full-throated enthusiasm. In other cases, as in Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, Malick’s The New World and The Tree of Life, and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there were ardent supporters but also just-as-ardent detractors. A Chinese immigrant (Michelle Yeoh) is struggling to connect with her husband (Ke Huy Quan) and her adult daughter (Stephanie Hsu) all while trying to pass a tax audit.
When Gladiator hit theaters in 2000, there hadn’t been a serious “sword-and-sandals” epic in a long, long time. Director Ridley Scott and star Russell Crowe removed all of the stock cheesiness that had come to define the genre and delivered a powerful historical epic that mixed a painstaking recreation of ancient Rome with some legitimate stand-up-and-cheer action sequences. Based on a rare non-horror short story by Stephen King, Shawshank Redemption stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman as inmates who develop a friendship over time in a harsh prison in 1950s Maine. What makes this movie exceptional is, first and foremost, the chemistry between the two leads—this is a high point in the careers of both Robbins and Freeman (which is saying something). The other thing is the unexpected twists and turns of the story that veer from dour to tragic to comic to…unexpectedly hopeful.
She regularly contributes to Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Day, Good Housekeeping, and YouGov, among other publications. When she’s not working, you can find her running, traveling, or scrolling TikTok. Sigourney Weaver ushered in the era of the female sci-fi hero as Ripley in Alien, the first entry into Ridley Scott’s extra-terrestrial horror franchise.
While you’re at it, make sure to check out these hit books being made into movies this year. So, yes, more people will likely watch “The Power of the Dog,” the latest from Jane Campion, than any other film in her decades-long career because it’s on Netflix. And you should watch it whether at home or, if you can, in a theater. But I’m grateful that I’ve seen it several times projected in theaters.
- So too is the movie industry, which has been on quite a rollercoaster ride courtesy of COVID-19 and our up-and-down efforts to contain it.
- Felix Kammerer offers an impressive performance as Paul Bäumer, a young soldier whose excitement about fighting for his country quickly turns to anxiety, exhaustion, and disillusionment.
- Be it early shots from the perspective of its parachuting-through-trees protagonists, or a snowy attempt to infiltrate a metropolitan gala, Zhang blends Hitchcockian suspense with Dr. Zhivago beauty, all while shouting out to (among others) Charlie Chaplin and Sergio Leone.
- When it all boils over, you’ll understand why Clint was always the consummate movie cowboy.
- Oh, and for the record, we’re on the “This is a Halloween movie” side of the “Halloween Movie” vs. “Christmas Movie” debate about this one, but make your own call.
A recent graduate tries his best to avoid planning his future and instead has a tryst with a married woman before falling for the woman’s daughter. Funny, satirical, and masterfully acted all around, it’s a real gem that deserves its place among the all-time classics. This is the movie that really cemented Robin Williams as a gargantuan talent. Everyone knew he was funny, but few movies corralled http://nextmovietrailer.com/ his gift for inspired improv with his sizable talent as a dramatic actor. Dead Poets Society is about a progressive teacher who comes to a repressive boarding school and inspires his students to be free thinkers despite the concerns of the conservative staff and the boys’ disapproving parents. Williams is remarkable, but so are the kids, led by future stars Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke.
It feels almost a disservice to call Rosemary’s Baby a “horror film,” because although the story of a young couple who move into an apartment building populated by Satanists certainly fits the bill, this is not a horror movie in the traditional sense. A scary story made for people who normally avoid such things, the movie eschews jump scares and gore for a mounting sense of dread, tantalizing glimpses of the unusual, and a surreal final punchline. Gripping and artful, it’s a benchmark for the genre that had come a long way from old castles and bats.
When a man mysteriously plummets to his death from a mountain, detective Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is sent to determine if he could have been murdered. Ultimately, he begins to suspect that the dead man’s wife, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) might be the guilty party … but he’s also starting to fall for her. It’s not a new trope, but in this director’s hands it may as well be. Jordan Peele’s Nope didn’t make as much noise as Get Out or Us, but it might be the director’s most accomplished film. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as OJ and Em Haywood, siblings who—with their father Otis (Keith David)—provide and train horses for film and TV productions. When Otis is killed by a coin falling from the sky, OJ and Em set out to investigate.
You see Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays its tormented villain, and in his strut you also see John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood. You see the sweep of the western genre, the men and women you know, the world you live in. The story of a married couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) who are grieving the death of their young daughter forms the basis of Don’t Look Now, a movie that appears at first to be a look at love and loss but then hits you with an absolutely unexpected and, frankly, terrifying ending. The less you know, the better, but it’s a movie that lulls you along at a slow pace while planting powerful visual images in your head along the way—you won’t soon forget any of it long after it’s over. The two leads’ extraordinary performances do a lot of the heavy lifting, too.
Any family is going to have some dysfunction—especially when trapped in an automobile together—but ultimately their squabbles feel unimportant when the purpose of their journey is revealed. Park Chan-wook is a director’s director—an auteur who is regularly lauded by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee (who had the temerity to mount his own version of Oldboy a decade after Chan-wook’s film shook viewers). While he’s known for his keen ability to turn acts of extreme violence into beautiful movie moments, one might argue that Decision to Leave is the auteur’s tamest effort.