-
2 weeks ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
After the disappointment of Captain America: Brave New World, and The Marvels before that (and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Eternals), we probably can’t blame Marvel for being a bit down in the dumps. The studio has had some rough going in the last few years, a steep fall from a decade-plus of utter market dominance, gilded with good reviews.
-
3 weeks ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
Maybe the most glaring indicator of a failing year in movies is how we react to its successes. Last weekend, Ryan Coogler’s electrifying vampire movie Sinners opened to big box office in the United States, following a raft of critical praise. It earned an “A” in audience exit scoring, something a horror movie hasn’t achieved in nearly four decades.
-
3 weeks ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
In the years since the Walt Disney Company acquired Marvel and Star Wars, its strategy has been to flood the market with as much Marvel and Star Wars stuff as possible until audiences are begging for more. That onslaught has, shockingly, proven less than effective; interest in Marvel and Star Wars projects has waned, both in theaters and at home. A saturation point was reached, and viewers began to move on to other things.
-
3 weeks ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
While we wait for famed writer-director supposedly final film, we decided to take a look back at all 10 Quentin Tarantino movies and rank them from worst to best—just as we did recently with Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre. Tarantino’s resumé is a bit shorter than Spielberg’s, but it nonetheless contains some seismic, seminal American classics alongside a few smaller curiosities.
-
1 month ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
After a decade of Creed films and Black Panther movies, it’s a thrill to see writer-director Ryan Coogler—one of the great populist Hollywood talents working today—do something new. Though his latest film, Sinners (in theaters April 18), traffics in familiar horror-action tropes, its milieu and thematic arguments feel novel to the genre. Big, ambitious, and erratic, Sinners is a wide-appeal studio movie from a filmmaker breathtakingly adept at the form.
-
1 month ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
The first season of HBO’s The Last of Us, which premiered in 2023 to great acclaim, looks best in contrast to something else. It’s a somber, scary zombie apocalypse drama, but it is not The Walking Dead. The latter show’s aggressive nihilism is nowhere to be found in the first season of The Last of Us, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann’s adaptation of the popular video game. Darkness looms over everything, but hope and humanity seep in through the cracks.
-
1 month ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
Perhaps those complaining that this season of HBO’s The White Lotus was a little slow were at least partially satisfied by Sunday night’s action-packed finale, which ended with a gun battle and the second-highest body count we’ve yet seen on the series. Unlike last year’s ludicrous bang-bang ending, with Jennifer Coolidge shooting her way out of a gay murder boat (only to trip, fall, bang her head, and die anyway), this melee was a graver, more earnestly tragic affair.
-
1 month ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
The actor Nina Hoss first came into my consciousness in Christian Petzold’s rapturous, sad, mysterious 2014 film Phoenix, in which Hoss gets to be at the center of one of the greatest closing scenes in recent memory. Hoss holds a small audience rapt with a song, in the process gradually revealing her true identity in devastating fashion. She’d been a rising star in her native Germany for some time, both onscreen and onstage, but Phoenix put her on the international map.
-
1 month ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
The hook of the new mini-series Dying for Sex (FX on Hulu, April 3) is right there in the title. There will be dying—but first there will be sex, the kind you won’t see on regular television. There is also the draw of star Michelle Williams, a former teen idol turned highly respected dramatic actor being given the chance to do something ribald, daring, transgressive. In its first few episodes, Dying for Sex leans into the promise of giddy, provocative risk.
-
1 month ago | 
vanityfair.com | Richard Lawson
I probably first encountered Val Kilmer, who died on April 1, in the spy spoof Top Secret!, in which his pouty-angel beauty is used to shrewdly comic effect. Kilmer gets the joke on a deeper level, though. He’s a riot in the movie, as aware of his ironic casting as the late, great Leslie Nielsen was of his own in the Naked Gun movies.
