Rachel Handler

New York

Features Writer at Vulture

Features Writer at New York Magazine

features writer @vulture @nymag, preeminent mandy patinkin scholar.

Articles

The 11 Best Movies We Saw at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

1 week ago | vulture.com | Rachel Handler |Alison Willmore

Spend 12 days watching movies, and you can’t help but notice patterns. Some of the recurring elements at this year’s Cannes Film Festival were coincidences, like the many scenes in which women angrily masturbated, or children bulled one of their own, or a house became a portal into generations of family history. But other similarities felt like signs of the times — look at the characters who metaphorically and literally turned the music up in an effort to drown out what’s happening around them.
The 11 Best Movies We Saw at Cannes This Year

1 week ago | gossipbucket.com | Rachel Handler |Alison Willmore

A big swirling bucket of the latest rumors, celebrity news and Hollywood gossip. The premier celebrity gossip app. The only apps that gives you a comprehensive real time celeb news stream. Gossip Bucket aggregates and streams the latest gossip news and headlines from the top sources in one place.
What Is Volume? What Is Nudity? And More Urgent Questions from Cannes

1 week ago | vulture.com | Rachel Handler

The phrase “recession indicator” has been overused to the point of near-meaningless, and yet, it’s the only phrase I can use to describe the scene at Cannes this year. The day before the festival began, the powers that be randomly decided to ban nudity and voluminous dresses from the red carpet. Was this an austerity measure (less fabric) (but also, more fabric, due to the lack of nudity)? Were they bowing to encroaching global conservatism?
Chatting With June Squibb at Cannes About Matzo-Ball Soup, Men, and Lying

2 weeks ago | vulture.com | Rachel Handler

June Squibb was first at Cannes back in 2013 for Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, a role that earned her an Oscar nom for playing Bruce Dern’s spitfire wife. She’s back this year for Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, this time as the star — the 95-year-old’s second leading role after last year’s Thelma. Squibb plays Eleanor Morgenstein, a feisty Jewish widow who lives with her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar), a Holocaust survivor, in Florida.
Chatting With June Squibb at Cannes About Matzo-Ball Soup, Men, and Lying

2 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Rachel Handler

Scarlett Johansson Wants To Return To Marvel In a New Role (& It’s Perfect)Scarlett Johansson does want to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but not on screen. The actress has not appeared in an MCU film since Black …
Why Julia Ducournau Was ‘Scared’ to Make Alpha

2 weeks ago | vulture.com | Rachel Handler

Four years ago, Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or for Titane,her masterpiece about found family and car-fucking. Her followup, Alpha, premiered at Cannes this week. Like her first two films, it centers on a young woman undergoing a strange physical transformation: In Raw, it was cannibalism; in Titane, vehicular impregnation; in Alpha, its titular character (fantastic newcomer Mélissa Boros) gets a stick-and-poke tattoo at a party with a dirty needle and plunges into a world of panic and fear.
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor Were ‘Naughty’ While Making The History of Sound

2 weeks ago | vulture.com | Rachel Handler

Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, and director Oliver Hermanus have been trying to make The History of Sound since 2020, just after Mescal rose rapidly to fame with Normal People and O’Connor did the same with The Crown. All of the usual suspects (financing, strikes, the pair’s increasingly frenetic schedules) got in the way for nearly five years, but the film finally premieres tonight at Cannes.
Kevin Spacey Accepts Lifetime Achievement Award at Cannes

2 weeks ago | vulture.com | Rachel Handler

The actor accused of sexual assault received a lifetime achievement award at a Cannes gala. Meanwhile, other canceled men are walking the red carpet. More often than one might like, the French film industry fetes American men who have been credibly accused of sex crimes.
Nicole Kidman Interview at Cannes About Female Directors

2 weeks ago | vulture.com | Rachel Handler

On Sunday afternoon at Cannes, Nicole Kidman sat down for a chat as part of Kering’s Women in Motion series. Kidman, who looked unbelievably cool in a black leather Balenciaga jacket and black jeans, talked cheerfully about her work supporting and starring in the films of female directors. The moderator asked her about her declaration, made eight years ago, to work with a female director every 18 months; in those eight years, she’s actually worked with 27 (in Australia, math is different).
A Spontaneous Chat with Spike Lee at Cannes about the Knicks and Numerology

2 weeks ago | vulture.com | Rachel Handler

Spike Lee touched down at Cannes today to support his latest film,Highest 2 Lowest, which premieres in competition tomorrow and stars Denzel Washington and A$AP Rocky. I approached him at an intimate party, hosted by Hyde Beach Campari and The Hollywood Reporter, and before I knew it, we were sitting down at a table overlooking the ocean and he was reminiscing about Cannes past, marveling at the Knicks’ playoff success, and scrolling through his Instagram, explaining his photos to me.