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Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is a film about clothes, but it is manifestly not about fashion. At one point, the word “chic” makes society dress designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) simply recoil; for we are in mid-’50s London, and the foreign word represents all the things that threaten to make this classicist of sartorial beauty eventually démodé. Yet Reynolds has never been modish, for his craft isn’t fashion but couture, which is something else entirely—something supposedly ineffable and beyond the dictates of mere trend....

The recent trial of 93-year-old former SS guard Oskar Gröning has reanimated long-running debates about justice, reconciliation, and the necessity or usefulness of prosecuting war criminals who have reached advanced old age. Much of the debate around Gröning’s trial has centered on the forgiveness publicly extended to him by Holocaust survivor Eva Kor, who received an embrace and a kiss on the cheek from the old man in court. It’s hard not to think of this while watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s new documentary The Look of Silence, a follow-up—and in some ways a contrasting companion piece—to his much-praised but highly controversial The Act of Killing (12)....

Going to the cinema is a bit like eating in certain restaurants that try to dazzle you with too much information: the more fancy ingredients that come listed after the name of a dish, the less you actually need to taste the thing. Similarly, the credits of some films come so ostentatiously laden with prestige that the safest thing might be just to gasp with appropriate respect, then walk on....

Under the Skin is an audacious gamble, both in its concept and in its day-to-day execution—as witness also the fact that Glazer took nearly 10 years developing the film, working with three different writers (for this final version, Walter Campbell) before arriving at a workable approach to Michel Faber’s 2000 novel. The film pares Faber’s grimly witty, altogether Swiftian fiction to the barest bones: on screen, the “heroine” loses her name, Isserley, as well as a substantial back story, including the macabre details of her forcible surgical transformation from a furless long-snouted quadruped into one of the “grotesque” upstanding two-legged creatures of Earth....

There’s a moment in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young that makes you do a double take. First you think, “Neat cultural apercu,” then you worry that perhaps Baumbach hit the Zeitgeist Analysis button a little too neatly on cue. It’s one of the film’s many juxtapositions of the lifestyle of Josh and Cornelia (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who are in their mid-to-late forties, settled and somewhat jaded, and that of indefatigably enthusiastic, creative young hipsters Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried)....

The Gingerbread Man More than Boston Market or even Starbucks, the Nineties’ most successful franchise seems to be the novels-cum-movies of lawyer-cum-literary superstar John Grisham. Just like a new location for a fast-food chain, a Hollywood studio can purchase the rights to one of Grisham’s stories and have a pretty solid idea of what they’re going to get. Grisham’s bestsellers seem designed to present themselves as perfect fodder for the Hollywood hit factory....

This 1949 adaptation of John Klempner’s 1946 novel is the first Joseph L. Mankiewicz film to demonstrate his very personal approach to cinema—creating sparkling yet bittersweet, intricately structured multi-character comic dramas with a frankness about matters that other films of the period fudged or looked away from, in this case class and money. Jeanne Crain, Ann Sothern, and Linda Darnell are the three Connecticut society wives who receive a letter from their mutual enemy informing them that she will run away with one of their husbands that night....

FILM COMMENT spoke with McKay about The Big Short, his early years in improvisation, the aesthetics of comedy, and his bizarre podcast that never found an audience. The Big Short is your most explicitly political film, but those elements have been in your work from the beginning, and I was curious what political material you did in your improv days. I read a story that you staged a revolution in the streets at one point....

In preparing the feature, Lucca spoke with one such digital artisan, Alexander Lemke, the co-founder and VFX supervisor of East Side Effects, in an interview providing a snapshot of contemporary VFX workflow practices and labor concerns. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk There’s this book by Michael Pollan called The Omnivore’s Dilemma, where part of his argument is that because we have so many choices about what to eat, we end up making terrible choices....

Copenhagen-based Anthony Dod Mantle burst onto the cinema scene in the late ’90s with his frantic, transgressive handheld camerawork in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998), the inaugural film of the subversive Dogme 95 movement. In accordance with Dogme’s rejection of control and its embrace of spontaneity, Dod Mantle wields the camera like a hunter in The Celebration, observing and physically emulating the emotional dynamics of the dysfunctional family at the center of the film....

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation The fifth film in a franchise might not sound like the place to go for directorial personality, but Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is a surprising exception. After making an early splash as the screenwriter of the indie sensation The Usual Suspects (95), McQuarrie turned to directing with another low-budget genre piece, The Way of the Gun (00)—and then his name disappeared from movie screens altogether until he resurfaced as the writer of Valkyrie in 2008....

Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, 2020) In 2011, director Cristi Puiu, best known for setting the course for the Romanian New Wave with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), conducted an acting workshop in Toulouse based on episodes from Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s 1900 novel War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ. The sparsely staged scenarios, never intended to be shown publicly, eventually became Three Interpretation Exercises (2013), a three-part feature in which Solovyov’s text, a veritable taxonomy of modern social ills and humanity’s inherent evils, revealed a nascent philosophical streak in the filmmaker’s work....

David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis does not pander. Notwithstanding the sleek elegance and breathtaking ingenuity of the moviemaking, the moments of wild gallows humor, and the pathos of the final scene—it plays as if a weary Laius had returned, moldering from the grave, to avenge himself on Oedipus, the son who thoughtlessly murdered him—Cronenberg’s depiction of slow death by disassociation is as chilling as daily life is today. Like Videodrome, Cosmopolis is a zeitgeist movie in which a new technology brings forth a “new flesh....

Adapted for the screen by Gillian Flynn from her 2012 best-seller, Gone Girl has engendered much speculation, especially among the novel’s six-million-plus readers. Indeed, no major film since Hitchcock’s Psycho has been such a minefield of spoilers, and for viewers who haven’t read the novel, that minefield begins less than halfway into the narrative. We have tried not to give any of the film’s surprises away. Gone Girl is about Amy and Nick Dunn, two not particularly distinguished journalists who met and married in New York just before the crash of 2008 cost them their jobs....

Twenty-four hours before American Hustle received its 10 Academy Award nominations—including that rare achievement of securing acting nods for all four of its principal stars (Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence)—Russell settled into a booth at the Early World Café, a pointedly unfashionable West L.A. diner that could easily have served as one of Hustle’s shooting locations. Russell, who lives nearby in Santa Monica, has been coming here for 15 years, ever since his older son attended a pre-school down the street, and he’s on a first-name basis with the entire staff....

I hope that the school in the movie does not come from personal experience, but in any case, the bond between Aslan and the transfer student from the city makes me wonder: are you a city kid, or from the country? I’m a mixture, because I was born in the village, and then we moved into a bigger settlement, which wasn’t even the central settlement—it was a kind of district settlement....