13 pieces
Eighteen months after Coralie Fargeat's prosthetic-heavy fable drew both Oscar nominations and walkouts, the strange alchemy of The Substance has only clarified. The film is less about Hollywood than it looks, and more about what we're allowed to say with bodies on screen.
Almost two years on, Furiosa's $175m worldwide gross still looks like the most depressing box-office story of the 2020s. Not because the film is bad, it is not, but because of what its failure reveals about the economics of the action film.
Eleven months after Severance returned, the second season's structural gambles are clearer. The show's patience has always been its argument; the real question is whether that argument still scales.
Bertrand Bonello's 2023 film, released in the US in April 2024, is the strangest and most formally ambitious film I saw in either year. An argument for the specific dread of being alive in multiple decades at once.
A year and a half on from the sequel, the case for Dune: Part Two is less about its scale and more about its refusal. An argument for the blockbuster that does not entertain.
Graham Yost's second season of Silo split its story across two bunkers and asked viewers to wait. The waiting is the show's argument, and also its risk.
Drew Hancock's debut strips its premise to a weekend-house structure and one central idea. The discipline is the film's argument, and the argument lands cleanly.
Chris Sanders' adaptation of Peter Brown's novel is the best animated feature of the year and an argument for DreamWorks doing specifically what Pixar has stopped doing.
Francis Ford Coppola self-funded his first film in thirteen years. It is nearly unwatchable in specific places and almost-great in others. The project is the point.
Fede Álvarez's Alien entry is a competent piece of horror filmmaking that wants, urgently, to remind you of other films. The reminders are where it falters.
Jonathan Nolan's Fallout is the best video game adaptation anyone has made, because it treats the source material’s tone as the thing worth preserving.
Netflix's adaptation of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy is, on balance, a better show than the Game of Thrones showrunners' previous form suggested. It is also structurally compromised in specific ways.
Emma Stone's performance as Bella Baxter does something almost no leading actress is allowed to do in a studio film: she becomes less polite, less articulate, less easy to root for, and the film rewards her for it.