Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
Showing that rich women in 1969 are “living in a bubble” is like demonstrating that, as ever, water is wet. But even if Palm Royale was meant to deliver messages of great satirical significance, it’s too weak to carry them.
Do you ever hear about a new movie like the Road House remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal, assume it’s terrible, mentally prepare your vicious takedown of it — and then watch it? And it’s actually. . . good?
The new Apple TV+ miniseries Manhunt turns the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s murder into a zany crime thriller with oddball pleasures.
Yet another “return to normal” Oscars — briefly disrupted by a statement from Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer criticizing Israel’s assault on Gaza — only demonstrates just how boring even a “good one” can be.
Critics love Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days for its depiction of a happy and humble Japanese toilet cleaner. But it’s really a fantasy of escape — one that seems to appeal mostly to the affluent.
The new HBO miniseries The Regime imagines the last days of a crumbling modern-day autocracy. The series is obviously intended to draw parallels to our own slowly collapsing empire, with Kate Winslet as a grandly imperious and unstable head of state.
The story of Bob Marley’s reggae music and his politically infused Rastafarian beliefs is fascinating. Not that you’ll learn anything about them from watching the new feel-good biopic Bob Marley: One Love.
Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls is a delightfully raucous lesbian road comedy. Don’t listen to the wet-blanket critics — this film is good news in dull times for American movies.
Largely set in occupied France during World War II, the new Apple TV+ series The New Look zeroes in on Christian Dior’s rivalry with Coco Chanel — but it falls flat when it tries to handle Chanel’s infamous Nazi sympathies.
Loosely based on the 2005 film, the new Mr. & Mrs. Smith TV reboot uses the action-comedy genre to represent how impossible life is for so many people today, with two misfit unemployables turning to assassin work out of desperation.
The second season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud follows Truman Capote’s infamous breakup with the East Coast socialites he called “the Swans,” showing how his charm and talent as a raconteur couldn’t save him from being banished by wealthy elites.
Jonathan Glazer’s haunting new film The Zone of Interest follows the life of an Auschwitz commandant in 1943 as his family goes about their business with the horrors of the Holocaust just on the other side of a wall. It’s mesmerizing and unsettling.
The “Barbie snub” has kicked off an online kerfuffle about the 2024 Academy Award nominations. The decisions of the Academy are generally cynical and silly — but perhaps we should appreciate the fighting spirit awakened annually by the nominations.
The 2023 film American Fiction, starring Best Actor nominee Jeffrey Wright, aims to spark discussion through a darkly comedic portrayal of a long debate about representations of black Americans on film. It’s a worthy directorial debut by Cord Jefferson.
Hollywood AI boosters claim that “democratized” movies based on personal choice await us, if only we can get rid of those pesky human beings.
Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, is gorgeous, thought-provoking, and wonderfully acted. All it’s missing is some more weight behind its feminist spirit.
When it came to movies this year, the junk outstripped the gems. But three films rose above the muck.
In Maestro, Bradley Cooper plays famed conductor Leonard Bernstein, but the film leaves out the complicating — and fascinating — real-life details for a more streamlined, tear-jerking product. It will doubtless do well at the Oscars.
In Wonka, Timothée Chalamet dons the eccentric chocolatier’s purple jacket in yet another film adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This one is playful and harmless, but it can’t touch the 1971 original movie.
Nicolas Cage’s new comedy fantasy film Dream Scenario desperately wants to satirize our celebrity-obsessed times. But with American society already so steeped in hypercommercialism, it feels like it’s several decades too late.