The real nightmare in Sean Baker’s ‘Anora’ isn’t what you expect
In Anora, Mikey Madison plays a sex worker who dances at a strip club and meets — and marries — the son of a Russian oligarch. Filmmaker Sean Baker seems to anticipate and avoid conventions about on-screen violence.
Incarcerated men at Sing Sing will judge New York’s prison film festival
There’s a film festival coming up at Sing Sing, the maximum security prison in New York. It’ll screen films about criminal justice. Do these movies get the prison experience right?
Anna Kendrick’s ‘Woman of the Hour’ speaks volumes about violence
Netflix’s Woman Of The Hour is not your conventional serial killer movie. It’s based on the true story of a serial killer who appeared on The Dating Game in the 1970s. But it’s also about the women who became — or almost became — his victims. Directed by and starring Anna Kendrick, it’s a tense, thoughtful film that has much to say about the systems that make life easier for dangerous and otherwise crummy men.
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We watch classic movies for the first time
We’ve all been there. A major movie is mentioned, you shrug, sheepishly, and someone says, “I can’t believe you’ve never seen that!” Today, we make a dent in our own lists of classic films we somehow had not yet gotten to, including Erin Brockovich, Fl…
‘Anora’ is the wild rom-dramedy we didn’t know we wanted
The new movie Anora is a dark rom-dramedy about an enterprising sex worker (Mikey Madison) who links up with a very rich and very immature young man (Mark Eydelshteyn). Their transactional encounter turns into a quickie Vegas wedding. But her new in-la…
A sex worker marries the son of a Russian oligarch in the comically chaotic ‘Anora’
Anora is easily one of Sean Baker’s funniest works — and also one of the saddest. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and the director says it’s dedicated to sex workers “past, present and future.”
‘Smile 2’ is a superior horror sequel, complete with pop bangers
The horror movie Smile was a massive hit. Its flashy new sequel Smile 2 finds the franchise’s terrifying entity infecting a new host: a pop star (Naomi Scott) who’s about to head out on tour after experiencing a trauma. And the movie has a lot to say a…
Mitzi Gaynor, star of the big-screen musical ‘South Pacific,’ dies at 93
Mitzi Gaynor, the effervescent dancer and actor, starred as Nellie Forbush in the 1958 film of “South Pacific” and appeared in other musicals with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly.
In ‘We Live In Time,’ Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh fall in love out of order
Two people meet, they fall in love, and someone gets sick. The new film We Live In Time tries to bring something new to that familiar story of the preciousness of life. Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield laugh and cry as a couple trying to make the most…
The scary movies and books that still haunt us
A lot of us are about to have the experience of opening our front doors to find witches, goblins, ghosts, and Moo Deng standing on our porches. Why? Because it’s almost Halloween. In this encore episode, we talk about what kinds of entertainment scared us when we were kids, and whether they still scare us now.
It’s an A+ idea to watch a B-list ’90s romantic comedy this weekend
Maybe you rented them from Blockbuster on VHS, or maybe you’re seeing them for the first time — but there was an age when nearly every movie actor took a swing at romantic comedy. And it was glorious.
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