Almodovar Turns the Camera on Himself yet Again Pedro Almodovar has an incredibly distinct style, in both his narrative tone, which plays with the melodramatic, as well as with his visuals and sets, which are vibrant and alluring. While the Spaniard has been making films for over four decades with this consistent signature style, he’s undergone several evolutions. He started as part of the “Movida Madrileña” cultural movement, with an extroversion of the artistic and social f

Nature, Robots, and a Pixar Firing on All Cylinders Like much of the other Disney brands, Pixar's reputation was severely hurt by the insatiable quotas for "content" in the Streaming Wars, to populate Disney+. The result was that the once pristine animation studio began to turn to easy stories, choosing quantity over quality. The studio had already begun to show creative fatigue as it started to heavily focus on sequels in the mid-2010s, with  Finding Dory  (2016) and  Incred

More Snooze Than Scream No franchise is safe from Hollywood milking it for all that its worth. The Scream movies had remained a solid franchise that, despite entries of diminishing returns, had always delivered an enjoyable and meta take on its horror genre. Since being “revived” after an 11-year hiatus between Scream 4 (2011) and the fifth entry, confusingly titled Scream (2022), the franchise has been risking an overproduction that would dilute its reputation. Thus we arriv

A provocation that mistakes erotic excess for emotional depth Despite being one of the most iconic love stories ever written, Emily Brontë’s  Wuthering Heights  has never had a definitive screen adaptation, with many filmmakers and onscreen pairings failing to capture the complex push-pull relationship at its core. This is not for a lack of trying; the novel may be one of the most adapted books in cinema history, with the likes of William Wyler, Luis Buñuel, and Andrea Arnold

A campy survival comedy undone by its own third act While bursting onto the scene with the inventive comedy-horror  The Evil Dead  (1981), Sam Raimi also helped pioneer the superhero craze of the 2010s by directing the Tobey Maguire  Spider-Man  trilogy. Yet after such big-budget success, he has only returned to directing for the big screen once in the past thirteen years, with another Marvel film,  Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness  (2022). Those studio projects pr

A breathless con-man epic dismantling the myth of the American Dream The unmasking of “the American Dream” as one in which people have to con their way to the top is a thesis American cinema has explored before, going as far back as  The Sting  (1973) or  Paper Moon  (1973). These films emerged in the 1970s, during a moment of backlash and activism against American idealism shaped by Vietnam and a revived anti-capitalist fervor. American filmmaking was broken into by young, u