Jerry Seinfeld's Pop-Tart opus, Ghostbusters nostalgia, and more from this week in film

Bustin’ used to make me feel good

The original Ghostbusters is a near-perfect film. It’s just the right blend of comedy and legitimate horror, with Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, and Ernie Hudson in their prime. When it came out, it was innovative from both a technological and storytelling standpoint, and my goodness, was it ballsy, depicting a giant marshmallow man terrorizing New York City. It was lightning in a bottle. – Charles Moss Read More

Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted is as goofy as you’d expect in new trailer

It’s the movie that will make you say, “This is Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut? Huh!” The first trailer for Unfrosted, premiering on Netflix on May 3, is here. If you’re wondering why Seinfeld chose this, of all subjects, for his first outing as a filmmaker, he’s just apparently been obsessed with Pop-Tarts his whole life. According to Tudum, he first mentioned the idea publicly on the Late Show in 2010, and tweeted about it again in 2018. During the pandemic, bored with nothing else to do, he and co-writer Spike Feresten finally said, why not? And thus, Unfrosted was born. – Mary Kate Carr Read More

Is The End Of Evangelion an undeniable masterpiece or nonsense for nonsense’s sake?

This month, for no real reason other than the fact that it was a cool idea, anime distribution company GKIDS announced a North American theatrical run for Hideaki Anno’s groundbreaking film The End Of Evangelion—originally released in Japanese theaters in 1997 as both a tie-in with Anno’s iconic TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion and an attempt to gently redo the original anime’s ending in a way that would be a little more palatable. Whether or not he succeeded at that is up for debate, because End Of Evangelion is undeniably bizarre and thrillingly audacious in the narrative and aesthetic turns it takes (which says a lot about the anime’s original ending), but pretty much everyone agrees that it is a masterpiece of animation. – Sam Barsanti Read More

The American Society Of Magical Negroes review: A movie that’s afraid of itself

Although The Matrix came out two years before Spike Lee famously coined the term “magical, mystical Negro” in 2001, it successfully inverted the potential fulfillment of that trope. Morpheus was undoubtedly a self-sacrificing guide to Neo. but it was Morpheus’ confidence, the weight of respect his character’s presence inspired throughout the film’s world. Kobi Libii’s debut feature, The American Society Of Magical Negroes, attempts a different approach to subverting the trope, by conceptually centering his film around a whole secret society dedicated to using magic exclusively to help white people. – Mustafa Yasar II Read More

Will Smith returns to the big screen with Bad Boys 4 trailer

You can’t keep a bad boy down for long. We haven’t seen Will Smith on the big screen since The Slap (Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation excepted as a straight-to-streaming drama). But he’s finally making his triumphant (hopefully!) return alongside Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, the fourth installment in the beloved buddy cop comedy franchise. This is comfortable territory for Smith to rebound: a light action comedy where he gets to look cool and competent across from a supportive co-star who has his back, in a film series with a proven track record for success. If anything can get him out of Hollywood jail, it’s Bad Boys. So will audiences buy it? – Mary Kate Carr Read More

Yorgos Lanthimos gets Emma Stone and the whole band back together in Kinds Of Kindness trailer

Sweet dreams are made of this: Yorgos Lanthimos has brought his merry band of weirdos, including Best Actress winner Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and Joe Alwyn, back together for a new picture. Kinds Of Kindness, which premieres in theaters June 21, also adds a perfect crew of newcomers to Lanthimos’ repertory: Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Hunter Schafer. The new trailer for the film doesn’t give away much, but it does do a good job of drumming up excitement for this stellar cast. – Mary Kate Carr Read More

Miles Morales does battle with a common enemy in new Spider-Verse short

Spidey stans may have to wait a little while longer for Beyond The Spider-Verse (the film still hasn’t gotten an official release date since it was postponed last summer), but Sony is helping to build a web across the gap with The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story, a new short film featuring everyone’s teen web-slinger, Miles Morales. – Emma Keates Read More

La Chimera review: Alice Rohwacher’s haunted Italian romance lives among the ruins

The past is so close you can almost touch it in Alice Rohrwacher’s romantic treasure hunt, La Chimera. Set in the liminal space between living and dying, better known as the Italian countryside, Rohwacher’s carefully excavated narrative unearths a funny and deeply satisfying meditation on loss and hope. Appropriately, half the joy of La Chimera is in discovery, making its plot brutal to discuss. We meet Arthur (Josh O’Connor, best known to American audiences as one of the The Crown’s Prince Charleses) in a dream. From his first-person perspective he admires the face of the woman he loved, lost, and is desperate to find again, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello). She haunts Arthur from just beyond his grasp, leaving behind a red string from the past that he longs to pull. Luckily, that’s what Arthur does best. – Matt Schimkowitz Read More

Beyond the Dunes: 5 other great “unfilmable” sci-fi novels someone should probably film

The story of the last 20 years of pop culture is, in many ways, the Victory Of The Nerd: Comic book films, gaming adaptations, the general adoption of deeply nerdy genre trappings like time loop stories, superheroes, and more, all making billions of dollars at the box office as geek obsessions infiltrate the body mainstream. But even this transition has come with phases (nerds love phases, don’tchaknow), as we’ve steadily moved from easy putts like iconic superhero brands and classic action stories with a sci-fi patina, to more cerebral, less accessible works—until you wake up one day to find that classically “unfilmable” books like Frank Herbert’s Dune and Isaac Asimov’s millennia-spanning Foundation series are now some of the biggest brands on the planet. – William Hughes Read More

Evil lurks everywhere in first trailer for Evil Does Not Exist

There are few things more bone-chilling than the real-life evils set upon our planet and its people each and every day. This is the type of horror Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is contending with in Evil Does Not Exist, the stirring and eerie follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2021 film, Drive My Car. – Emma Keates Read More