The week in film: Thanksgiving's gory feast, and what's wrong with Marvel

Thanksgiving review: Eli Roth serves up a gory feast

Horror fans have been waiting more than a decade for Thanksgiving, director Eli Roth’s holiday slasher about a killer in a pilgrim mask terrorizing a small Massachusetts town. Ever since Roth’s fake trailer for the film showed up in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, we’ve been wondering what the finished version could look like, and how much Roth might lean on the vintage slasher feel of the fake trailer when it came time to make the real movie. That trailer, of course, is now the stuff of legend, with fan-favorite moments that just have to have an homage point in the movie itself. Read More

Saltburn review: Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi seek racy thrills

The darkly comedic and corrupt whims of the wealthy are on full display in filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s racy thriller Saltburn. The cheeky provocateur’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning directorial debut, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn wages war on the stuffy British elite by way of a lower-class scholarship student, who charms and smarms his way into an aristocratic classmate’s life. If this premise sounds familiar, it’s because it parallels that of The Talented Mr. Ripley, not solely with a similar overarching plot, but also within its sentiments. However, unlike that aforementioned film, Fennell’s feature all-too-frequently fumbles, misunderstanding character construction and misjudging the audience’s intellect in sussing out her anti-hero’s deviant actions. Read More

May December review: An intoxicating portrait of an emotional predator

From its very first shot Todd Haynes’ May December announces itself as a wildly intoxicating, intentionally strident provocation. Close-up images of Monarch butterflies and their surrounding manicured flower gardens are scored by the theme from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between. The archly dramatic music lends a discomfiting feeling to the scenes of domesticity (a cookout for friends and family in Savannah, Georgia) that soon follow. Such a jarring juxtaposition, best encapsulated by said music leading into a character complaining about not having enough hot dogs, sets up a film that wants to suture the lurid and the mundane, creating in the process a masterful meditation on performance and predation. Read More

Next Goal Wins review: Taika Waititi returns to his roots

The marketing for Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins promotes the film as an underdog sports comedy about an ill-fated South Pacific soccer team, full of the highs and mostly lows of a struggling squad trying to make good. Revisiting the fallout from the worst loss in World Cup history—when Australia defeated American Samoa 31-0 in a 2001 qualifying match—provides Waititi with plenty of predictably amusing opportunities to good-naturedly skewer the ineptitude of the Polynesian team, but he also has a parallel agenda. Read More

Please Don’t Destroy finds common ground with Beyoncé

The Please Don’t Destroys guys haven’t really been gone, but they’re back nonetheless. Sure, Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy returned to Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago after the writers’ strike ended, but when their new film, Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure Of Foggy Mountain, premiered during the New York Comedy Festival last week, they weren’t allowed to attend because the actors’ strike was still ongoing. That left producer Judd Apatow and director Paul Briganti to promote the film in their place. Read More

Dakota Johnson suits up as clairvoyant Madame Web in the movie’s first trailer

Get ready to spend Valentine’s Day with another promising female superhero team-up. On the heels of the MCU’s The Marvels, Sony has released a trailer for their upcoming Madame Web, starring Dakota Johnson. Limes, Ellen DeGeneres, and now supervillains—she’s coming for them all. Read More

Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s Anyone But You finally looks like a rom-com

Anyone But You, starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, went from one of the most anticipated movies of the year to the most dubious after the teaser trailer was released. Fans who fawned over the casting and fell for the behind-the-scenes hype feared the worst when the brief teaser seemed to lack chemistry. But a new, full trailer for the film, which premieres December 22, falls back into familiar romantic comedy rhythms that may put people’s minds at ease. Read More

Here’s everything you need to remember before watching The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes

The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes arrives in theaters this week, which means it’s time to take the long train ride back to Panem. It’s been almost a decade since the last of the original films premiered, so you might be worried about confusing your Jabberjays with your Tracker Jackers, or remembering why this society makes a spectacle out of kids fighting to the death in the first place. Don’t worry, we have the tools to help you survive. Maybe not in the arena, but at least to the end of this latest cinematic take on the widely read YA franchise. Read More

What’s right and what’s wrong with Marvel today?

It’s not much of a surprise that The Marvels didn’t fare so well at the domestic box office in its first weekend. Sure, it came in at No. 1 with $47 million, but that’s the lowest opening of any film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Factor in the $41.4 million it made internationally, and that’s still less than $90 million total—a far cry from the film’s reported $275 million budget, and light years removed from Captain Marvel’s $456.7 million worldwide opening weekend. Read More

All The Marvels Easter eggs and references explained

For better or worse, a certain level of fluency in the ever-expanding tapestry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is required by The Marvels. While the film—which brings together Captain Marvel’s Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), WandaVision’s Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani)—fills in some blanks and provides certain answers, it also triggers plenty of questions. Read More