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One of the most audacious young auteurs working today, 35-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan makes movies that don’t pull you in as much as they slowly wash over you. Moody, melancholic and filled with daunting technical feats, especially the director’s signature logistics-defying long takes, his films are beautifully realized meditations on nostalgia and loss in which the cinema is often a character itself. In his beguiling new feature Resurrection, movies are both subject and object of a story spanning a hundred years of film history, from the silent era to the end of the last century. Reflecting on the seventh art’s past, present and possible future at a moment when many believe it to be in its death throes, Bi Gan has crafted a time-tripping, genre-jumping paean to the big screen in which he revives the films...

In Amrum, Fatih Akin stages a sentimental conversation between himself and his mentor, the German director Hark Bohm. This project, which premiered at Cannes outside the main competition, was born of a collaboration between the two filmmakers: Bohm wrote the screenplay, which is based on memories of his youth in the waning days of World War II, and Akin directed (as well as helped edit the script). Indeed, one of the film’s intertitles calls Amrum a “Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin.” That’s a useful note, because it announces Amrum as atypical of the Turkish-German filmmaker’s usual offerings. It doesn’t have the thriller textures of In the Fade or the grittiness of Head-On. With its focus on the experiences of a young boy, Amrum most closely aligns with Akin’s 2016 coming-of-age drama Goodbye Berlin. Amrum The Bottom LineA war-time coming-of-age tale that's a bit too lovely for its own good. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Premieres) Cast: Jasper...

Leave it to Kelly Reichardt to make a ‘70s movie that looks and feels like a lost ‘70s movie, from its scruffy visual aesthetic to its muted colors, its patient character observation and unhurried pacing to its unstinting investment in an underdog protagonist whose careful planning results in a coup that soon goes south. Josh O’Connor’s rumpled appeal makes him an ideal fit for the title role in The Mastermind, a minor-key heist caper that spends as much or more time on the aftermath of the crime, when it morphs gracefully into another of the director’s singular character studies of struggling Americans. The film is set in Massachusetts circa 1970, two decades before the infamous art theft at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, whose walls still conserve the empty spaces where stolen paintings by artists including Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet...

Even if there were no identifying credits, it would be easy to tell that Mountainhead is the work of Jesse Armstrong. The award-winning creator of the landmark HBO series Succession makes his film directorial debut with this similarly themed exploration of toxic masculinity and rich people behaving very, very badly. But while it features plenty of Armstrong’s trademark nastily witty, profane dialogue and incisive characterizations, this effort, premiering on HBO and HBO Max (unless they change the name yet again), feels more slapdash in its execution and minor in its effect. It’s certainly entertaining enough while you’re watching it, thanks to the expert performances of its four lead actors, but it’s unlikely to make as much of an impact in the cultural zeitgeist. Mountainhead The Bottom LineEntertaining enough, but very minor. Release date: Friday, May 30 Cast: Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith Director-screenwriter:...

In Honey Don’t!, the latest film in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s intended lesbian B-movie trilogy, Margaret Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, a tough but glamorous private investigator in Bakersfield, California. Honey is typically in the business of infidelity, taking cases involving suspicious spouses and their philandering partners. But at the start of Coen’s prankish film, which premiered at Cannes and will be released in theaters by Focus Features on Aug. 22, the sleuth finds herself drawn into a higher-stakes mystery. The death of a local woman leads Honey down a slippery path involving religious cults, megalomaniacal pastors and an unexpected romance. For the most part, Honey Don’t! lives in the same thematic universe as Coen’s first solo narrative venture Drive-Away Dolls, which the director also co-wrote with Cooke. In that film, Qualley played a lesbian Lothario, who, after a bad break-up with her police officer...

Exactly one week after the opening of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, there are at least three things that everyone here at the fest seems to agree on. Firstly, in what is probably a reflection of these uncertain economic times (thanks, Trump), there has been a striking dearth of promotional fanfare along the Croisette, where tons of installations, stand-ups and stunts can usually be found. This year, it’s really just been luxury cars and, in front of the Carlton, a Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning display. Secondly, there have been precious few announcements of high-profile acquisitions, which could be for the same reason, or because many of the hotly-anticipated films have thus far underwhelmed fest attendees, or perhaps because distributors, in a post-Emilia Pérez era, are taking a bit more time to vet potential partners before committing. Thirdly, a year after a record number of films that...

One of the constants in the intimate films of Joachim Trier is his ability to bring out the very best in his actors. With emotional acuity, he mines their inner lives for truths that seem subcutaneously to connect his cast to his characters. Actors don’t so much play roles in the Danish-Norwegian director’s work as live inside them. His transcendent 2022 feature, The Worst Person in the World, is both a romantic comedy and an anti-rom-com, a close study of a woman navigating a messy transitional period, alive with intergenerational insights and foibles most of us can recognize from some point in our lives. Trier’s exquisite new film, Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi), shifts its gaze from romantic to familial love, at times harmonious and at others tainted by resentment and anger. The director’s observation of the mutable contracts between sisters, and even...

Unless you followed the ups and downs — well, mostly the downs — of Julian Assange’s life over the past 15 years, you’ll have to wait until the last half-hour of Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary, The Six Billion Dollar Man, to understand what its title means. By that point, the WikiLeaks founder had been holed up for over six years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he faced imminent arrest by the UK authorities. It’s then that we learn how the first Trump administration offered, via the IMF, to loan Ecuador’s government $6.5 billion if they agreed to kick Assange out. The move is not exactly shocking, especially coming from a dealmaker like Trump, and it shows just how much the U.S. authorities were willing to pay so they could nab one of their most wanted men. The...

Kelly Reichardt returns to the Cannes Film Festival with The Mastermind, a 1970s-set anti-heist film that’s less about the robbery and more about its emotional and social fallout. The latest feature from the First Cow and Showing Up director is another exploration in quiet rebellion and the tension between individual freedom and collective responsibility. Premiering Friday night, it’s the last competition film to screen on the Croisette, and among the most anticipated. Art house distributor and streamer Mubi will release The Mastermind in North and Latin America and in select territories, including the U.K. and Germany, with The Match Factory handling international sales. The Mastermind stars Josh O’Connor as James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney, an art-school dropout and unemployed carpenter who plans that one big job that will change his life: A daytime heist from a scarcely-guarded local museum. The plot was inspired by several actual snatch-and-grab jobs from the era,...

The actress says she’d be more than willing to keep playing herself in the show’s second season. A short list of things Zoë Kravitz does during her three-episode guest stint on The Studio, playing herself: • She pretends not to care about winning a Golden Globe while really caring whether she does; • Accidentally ingests a dangerous amount of shrooms at a CinemaCon party in Las Vegas; • Climbs on a hotel nightstand and refuses to come down, because she perceives it as being too far a drop; • Conflates the movie character she’s there to promote — a vampire assassin named Blackwing — with herself; Related Stories TV Here's How 'The Studio' Got All Those Season One Guest Stars -- and Its "White Whale" TV How 'The Studio' Creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg Seduced (and Skewered) Hollywood   • Plaintively wails “Where’s Zoë?!” when others decide to refer to her as...