Marty Supreme is in many ways an anti-sport movie. While it has all the hallmarks of the typical sports film (the underdog, the corporate villain rigging the game, the dramatic finale game against the foreign opponent), it spends most of its time critiquing its protagonist's misguided determination to be the world's best, sacrificing friendships, family, money, love and almost sanity towards an end goal that might offer ultimately nothing more than a footnote. It's the 1950s. Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) works as a shoe salesman, but treats the job (and really everyone else) as a side hustle to his true passion: professional table tennis.

Rian Johnson never should have made a Star Wars film. It's just no his MO. What Johnson excels at is stepping inside of genre and prodding around a bit, as evidenced by Looper, Knives Out, Brick and now, Wake Up Dead Man. His Knives Out movies both poke fun of and admire the detective story, focusing on twists and turns and mashing genres in inventive ways; this is where his talents lie. We didn't need Star Wars deconstructed; but with Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the deconstruction is the point and the fun.

Some sequels match their predecessor (The Godfather Part II, Back to the Future Parts 2 and 3); some even surpass their predecessor (The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2). But most fail. And the vast majority of Disney sequels really fail. For instance: The Return of Jafar, Pooh's Grand Adventure, Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas, Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World, The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea, Return to Never Land, The Hunchback of Notre Dame II, 101 Dalmatians 2: Patch's London Adventure, The Jungle Book 2, Mulan II, Kronk's New Groove…

What is the purpose of art? To entertain? To enlighten? How about to console? The answer of course is varied, but with Chloe Zhao's Hamnet, based on Maggie O'Farrell's best-selling book (she also co-wrote the screenplay), to console is exactly one of the qualities art can manufacture, even in relation to the most dire of life's troubles. The film begins with a young William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), a Latin tutor, meeting a young Agnes (Jessie Buckley), a girl with a talent for falconry rumored to be the daughter of a forest witch.

What's the scariest trope in horror films? Satanic cults? Creepy dolls? Serial killers? Axe murderers? Demented families? How about a movie with all of them! Written and directed by Osgood Perkins, Longlegs follows FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe). Together with her supervisor William Carter (Blair Underwood), they investigate a series of bizarre murder-suicides in Oregon. Each case consists of a father killing his family then himself, leaving behind a letter with Satanic coding signed "Longlegs", with handwriting belongs to none of the family members. Further investigation leads Lee to discover that each family had a 9-year-old daughter born on the 14th day of the month, the murders all occurred within six days before or after that birthday and their respective dates form an occult triangle symbol on a calendar, with one date missing.

It's been six years since Avengers: Endgame and since that time, the MCU has been narratively rudderless. Doctor Strange: In the Mouth of Madness, Shang-Chi, Eternals, Thor: Love and Thunder, Captain America: Brave New World... meh. Nothing has really felt like it's building towards anything. Robert Downey Jr. or Chris Evans' charisma also hasn't been replaced. Their narrative thrust is gone. So maybe, just maybe, Fantastic Four: First Steps would right the ship, give this big, lumbering cinematic universe a new direction and some new lead characters. Well, no such luck.

Hi, I'm Ian Brennan, the guy who exploits real-life trauma and murder for personal gain and ostensibly must add homosexual subtext even if it's grossly inappropriate. I've done some TV shows on the Menendez brothers, that guy who killed Versace, O.J. Simpson, and Jeffrey Dahmer. You might think that given their sensitive subject matter I handled each subject with grace and care, but actually, what I did was add a whole lot of unnecessary gore, gratuitous sex scenes and not-so-subtle ruminations on modern culture. Now I present to you my newest creation, …

Kurosawa is an expert filmmaker. No, not Akira. A different Kurosawa. Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Where Akira is world known for his samurai epics and for being one of the best filmmakers of all-time, Kiyoshi has carved himself a different niche in film history, one that is much more terrifying. With a career spanning more than 40 years nows, Kiyoshi has focused on Japan's economic malaise and societal soullessness, and in them he has searched for truths that reveal not how we don't know each other, but how we don't even really know ourselves.

"It’s impossible to overstate how much fun this thing is, with twists and welcome detours along the way." "Somehow, a slacker epic decades in the making turns out to be exactly the movie for right now." "A beautifully choreographed fever dream of resistance and reckoning, blending absurdist satire with a poignant meditation on parental legacy." "One Battle After Another, as great an American movie as I’ve seen this year, doesn’t simply meet the moment; with extraordinary tenderness, fury, and imagination, it forges a moment all its own, and insists that better ones could still lie ahead."

Where is Amy Bradley? No one knows. Or at least no one is talking. She vanished without a trace more than 25 years ago, disappearing on a family cruise ship. A terrible tragedy to be sure, but is the mystery really that... well, special? Created by Phil Lott and Ari Mark, Amy Bradley is Missing features interviews with Bradley's family, friends and lovers as well as the investigators and suspects involved with the case. Whether Bradley threw herself overboard, was kidnapped by a sex ring or was abducted by aliens, all the possibilities are examined as this mystery continues unsolved.

What's your version of Charlie Sheen? The dramatic actor from Platoon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Wall Street? The hyper-male leader of the 2000s "movement" against the mainstream? The wise-cracking Uncle from one of the biggest sitcoms of all-time, Two and Half Men? None of them are actually the real Charlie Sheen. In the shadow of his incredibly talented and famous father, the real Charlie Sheen is actually a depressed guy who never felt like he was good enough for all the attention he got. In aka Charlie Sheen,

I thought that the idea of Pamela Anderson (yes, that Pamela Anderson) giving a performance worthy of award acclaim was unbelievable. How could the noted sex-kitten of Baywatch and star of Razzie-winning Barb Wire be good in, well, any movie role. And yet in The Last Showgirl, Anderson somehow excels as a fading Las Vegas stripper whose time on the strip is rapidly coming to an end. And although she didn't get that Oscar nomination for her performance, it is hard to deny that she delivers the acting chops so many of us might have deemed impossible.

Glen Powell seems to be one of Hollywood's new "it" men. He's attractive, he's charismatic, he has a nice smile, great abs... and with Hit Man, apparently he can write too (co-writing the screenplay with director Richard Linklater). What a dick. Based off the book by Skip Hollandsworth which was inspired by the true story of its subject, Hit Man is the story of Gary Johnson (Powell), a dorky psychology teacher at the University of New Orleans who moonlights as a fake hitman for the FBI. Targets seek out hitmen to whack their husbands, wives, brothers, neighbors, etc., they meet up with Johnson who pretends to be a badass killer, he records their confession and the feds show up to round them up.

It took forever for the Wicked musical to finally leap from the stage to the cinema; could the long-gestating film capture the magic that its theatrical run had for so many? Not only is the answer yes, but it might actually improve upon it. Written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox (based off their own play, which itself is based off the book by Gregory Maguire... which I guess is based off the 1939 movie, which is based off the book by L. Frank Baum) and directed by John M. Chu, the film follows Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), a sorcerer-in-training long ostracized for her green skin, and her enemy-turned-friend Glinda (Ariana Grande), a bubbly, self-obsessed blonde.

Steven Soderbergh has built himself an impressive filmography that includes everything from high-stakes dramas (Traffic) to fun heist films (Ocean's 11, 12, 13) to epic Spanish biopics (Che Parts 1 and 2). Neither flashy nor soapy, his artful camera is adept at peering behind the veneer of everyday life to reveal people's secret thoughts and motivations, skills that serve him quite well in making a film like Black Bag. George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is a counterintelligence officer who is given one week by his superior, Philip Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård), to investigate the leak of a top-secret software program called Severus.

When you're dealing with cyberstalking, your natural inclination is to suspect a random creep out there, lurking a la Michael Myers. You probably don't expect to find the monster instead very, very close and much less mysterious. Such is the case with Unknown Number: The High School Catfish that starts off like Black Christmas, but in the end turns out to be Mommie Dearest. Directed by Skye Borgman, the documentary focuses on American teenager Lauryn Licari and her then-boyfriend Owen McKenny who begin receiving harassing text messages from an unknown number in October 2020.

Ryan Murphy is a hack. He's a talented hack, but a hack nonetheless. After pilfering the O.J. Simpson murder, the Bill Clinton scandal, Gianni Versace's murder and Jeffrey Dahmer's victims all in varying degrees of tastelessness over the past few years, he now turns his opportunistic gaze to the Menendez brothers. Lyle (Cooper Koch) and Erik (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) Menendez buy a couple of shotguns and blow their parents, Jose (Javier Bardem) and Kitty (Chloë Sevigny), away one night in 1989. Once caught, their trial reveals a whole slew of nefarious details and questions that don't have conclusive answers: Were they abused by their father?

There's something incredibly stunning about Jurassic World: Rebirth. No, it's not the special effects. Nor the action scenes. It's not the directing or the casting or the acting. It's the absolute utter lack of trying to make anything other than a big monster movie. Written by Dave Koepp and directed by Gareth Edwards, the film follows a rogue's gallery of missionaries on the way to Île Saint-Hubert on a daring mission to collect blood samples from three species of formerly extinct creatures: Martin Krebs, an executive at pharmaceutical company ParkerGenix (Rupert Friend), Zora Bennett, an ex-military covert operative (Scarlett Johansson), Dr.

Are serial killers having "a moment"? Public fascination with them has always been high, ever since the days of Jack the Ripper, with bloody pictures in the newspaper (then TV, then Facebook and YouTube, etc.) leading to anarchy in the streets and dramatic courtroom portrayals worthy of their own production budgets. But it seems that Netflix, Hulu, hell, probably even Disney+, can't go more than a few weeks without releasing another serial killer true-crime documentary. Are there more serial killers out there all of a sudden? Probably not. This is all probably just a marketing plan that targets in-demand topics and seeks to fill the need.

Gabby Petito's life was a sad story. She was abused by her boyfriend, murdered and dumped. All of these events led to her killer, boyfriend Brian Laundrie, offing himself after refusing to help the police in their investigation. It's a familiar tale, one all too common, and now even more vivid because of the prevalence of the couple's lives on social media. In terms of filmmaking, this gives Netflix show creators Michael Gasparro and Julia Willoughby Nason an unprecedented view into the run-up to the murder and the devolution of Gabby and Brian's relationship.

James Gunn has gone on quite the run of late with hiss odd-beat superhero characters, from Star-Lord to Polka Dot Man to Peacemaker. But Superman? Superman is an iconic, straight-shooting paradigm, the definition of a superhero. How could a guy like James Gunn handle a character like that? Well, it turns out the solution is to keep the Man of Steel his normal, good-doing self and surround him with a-hole renegades and oddballs. And it somehow works. The film starts in medias res as Superman (David Corenswet) gets his ass kicked by "the Hammer of Bovaria" aka Ultraman.

With Eddington, writer/director Ari Aster attempts to make a movie about the modern era's addiction to technology and stupidity. It's a bold task. It's an admirable task. Is it an impossible task? Maybe. But perhaps the bigger question is, can you even try to tell a story that doesn't seem like it's ended yet? The film follows Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) from the small town of Eddington, New Mexico during the early stages of COVID in 2020. Distrustful of mask mandates and deeply resentful of town mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), Joe launches his own mayoral candidacy that features all the crazy we've come to know and loathe over the last few years: racism, classism, conspiracy-driven, malicious, narcissistic drivel.

Celine Song's first film, Past Lives, was a near perfect romance about cultural identity and childhood love. By setting the bar that high, her second film was always going to be somewhat lesser by comparison. And Materialists definitely feels less than Past Lives which is a shame not only for us, but for it because on its own, it's a pretty good film by itself. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a matchmaker with a sterling record, on her way to her ninth wedding. What is the key to her success? She's incredibly cynical.

Sometimes when you look at a filmmaker's filmography, some things just stick out as... weird. Cameron Crowe's Aloha? Steven Spielberg's 1941? Brian DePalma's Black Dahlia? The weird dud every now and then really stands out. I mean, we're all human. Duds happen. But Francis Ford Coppola's list is just about the strangest ever made. The Godfather? The Godfather Part II? The Conversation? Apocalypse Now? Among the best movies ever made. Then there's the dour Bram Stoker's Dracula, the insufferable Youth Without Youth…

Writer-director Payal Kapadia is an obvious cinephile. This is evident even before you see any interviews of her where she doles out her love for Fellini, Ray and Chytilová. It's obvious because her debut film, All We Imagine as Light, feels like it comes straight out of a college film course. Not the shitty entry-level course that's a forced elective where your final is going to the movies and writing a one-page review. Like the film course for film nerds, where they show you the really good movies that define cinema standards.