Review: Meg Ryan’s ‘What Happens Later’ is a Comedic Misfire

by Abe Friedtanzer

Thirty years ago, Meg Ryan and David Duchovny were at the height of their popularity. Ryan starred opposite Tom Hanks in one of the definitive romantic comedies, Sleepless in Seattle, and Duchovny was headlining, along with Gillian Anderson, what would become one of the most popular series of the 1990s, The X-Files. While Duchovny has starred in other series like Californication and Aquarius, and a few films since, you have to go back to 2015 for Ryan’s last screen credit, her directorial debut Ithaca. The two are back together in Ryan’s second try at directing, What Happens Later, a film that falls flat early on and doesn’t get much better after that…

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Brendan Fraser has the Girth

by Cláudio Alves

As one of the world's foremost The Whale haters, I was ready to despise whatever Brendan Fraser was up to in Killers of the Flower Moon. Indeed, part of me relishes how many have turned against our current Best Actor champion, eviscerating him for going ridiculously over-the-top in his brief scenes as William Hale's attorney. And yet, some of the criticism feels unfair, failing to recognize the character's purpose within the film's sprawling canvas and bizarre tonal twists into dark humor. After despising his lauded work under Aronofsky, I now find myself an unlikely Fraser apologist. 

I'm not alone in this, of course. Apple defends him with an appeal to literary authority, and Martin Scorsese has recently said that what the actor did with the role was perfect. In the master's own words, he had that girth...

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Everything's coming up Jacob

by Cláudio Alves

With Priscilla in theaters and Saltburn on the horizon, it's a good time to be Jacob Elordi. Or, alternatively, one of his fans. After terrorizing the characters of Euphoria and skating by the Kissing Booth movies without much effort, the Australian actor is proving to be a force to be reckoned with and an auteur magnet to boot. For Sofia Coppola, he's Elvis perceived through a prism of domestic nightmare, proposing a take on the legend that should be antithetical to last year's Luhrmann-directed biopic. In Emerald Fennell's sophomore feature, his statuesque figure is framed as an object of perilous desire cum obsession, like a British twist on Highsmith's Dickie Greenleaf. It's fair to say that the erstwhile HBO hunk is on his way to becoming a movie star…

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Doc Corner: 'Another Body'

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Well, this is upsetting.

When college student Taylor Klein receives a chat message from a male friend with a PornHub link, she naturally assumes he’s been hacked. Turns out he is informing her that a sex tape of her has appeared online. Except that it’s no such thing. It is a fake. A deepfake; a video in which her likeness—taken from a social media sweep of images wherein she eats ice-cream, kisses her boyfriend and spends time with family—has been digitally imposed upon pornography. We’ve certainly come a long way from putting a celebrity’s head on a porn star’s body and saying it’s legit. Several sad yet logical steps down the ladder to the bottom of the barrel.

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Best Costume Design is all about Big Hats

by Cláudio Alves

It's always interesting to find links between otherwise disconnected pictures, whether in the context of a film festival or just the calendar year. Sometimes, the awards season can suggest interesting threads uniting films by virtue of competition-born comparison. Note that one need not be very intellectual about this, and it's always good to have some fun about the race. This year, for example, I couldn't help but notice how three of our likely nomination leaders are bedecked in exuberant millinery, with Killers of the Flower Moon taking the cake as 2023's best hat movie. Or, at the very least, 2023's most hats movie.

And, as we all know, when it comes to the Academy, "most" often trumps "best." Not that Jacqueline West is locked to win Best Costume Design for the Scorsese movie. After all, even in hat terms alone, there's stiff competition from Barbie and Oppenheimer…

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