Celine Song turned a real-life bar encounter—her husband, her Korean childhood sweetheart, herself translating between both—into *Past Lives*, now an Oscar-buzzing debut sensation.
Andrew Haigh's fifth feature is an emotionally devastating meditation on queer grief, parental loss, and the possibility of love, anchored by Andrew Scott's extraordinary performance as a lonely screenwriter who begins a tentative romance with his neighbor Paul Mescal while also revisiting his long-dead parents in supernatural scenes of raw, unresolved longing. Bradshaw calls it a masterpiece, and his review lingers on the specific textures that make it so: 80s queer pop on the soundtrack, a near-empty Ballardian tower block, and Scott's uncanny ability to
Celine Song's debut is a quietly devastating romance about a Korean immigrant and her childhood sweetheart reuniting decades later. Deeply emotional, unmissably good.
Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig unpack *Wake Up Dead Man*'s ending, religion, and their creative partnership—essential reading if you've already watched the film.
*Big Trouble in Little China* flopped so badly it drove Carpenter away from Hollywood. A cult classic born from box-office disaster and racist stereotype debates.
Charli xcx's *Brat*-fueled era spans film, music, and cultural politics. A sharp look at how she's outpacing pop's boundaries without abandoning her hyperpop roots.
Anthony Lane argues that Sean Baker's Palme d'Or winner achieves a convincing surface authenticity—shot entirely on location in Brighton Beach strip clubs, mansions, and pool halls, with a mix of professionals and nonprofessionals—while remaining curiously hollow at its core, with characters who never seem to mentally inhabit the vivid spaces around them. If you're a Baker devotee drawn to his immersive, location-based filmmaking and his recurring focus on sex workers navigating class and power, Lane's sharp critique will push you to interrogate what you love about the director's work and whether
Brian Eggert offers a measured, dissenting take on Sean Baker's Palme d'Or winner, appreciating the filmmaker's signature immersive energy, 35mm handheld immediacy, and gift for drawing out raw performances—here from a volatile Mikey Madison as Brooklyn sex worker Ani—while resisting the widespread rapture the film has inspired. Framing *Anora* as a sobering anti-fairy tale with more Fellini in its DNA than *Pretty Woman*, Eggert weighs Baker's genuine strengths against a film he found more caustic than
Andrew Haigh's *All of Us Strangers* stars Andrew Scott as a lonely London screenwriter who revisits his childhood home and begins a series of tender, impossible conversations with his long-dead parents, coming out to them across the divide of grief and time, while falling into a fragile new love with his neighbor (Paul Mescal). Ehrlich frames the film as a timelessly soul-stirring ghost story that weaponizes queer longing, parental loss, and the ache of unlived emotional honesty into something genuinely shattering.
Sean Baker's *Anora* centers on a Brighton Beach stripper (a luminous Mikey Madison) whose whirlwind Vegas marriage to a Russian oligarch's son sets off a collision between her hard-won resilience and the brutal machinery of inherited wealth and power. Baker refuses to moralize, letting the contradictions of love, transaction, and class warfare play out with the kind of messy, empathetic authenticity that defined *Tangerine* and *The Florida Project*.
Sean Baker's *Anora* follows a Russian-American sex worker whose whirlwind Vegas marriage to a Russian oligarch's son sends her into a screwball collision with hired goons, Orthodox priests, and the brutal machinery of class and money. The Roger Ebert review celebrates Baker's signature humanist alchemy—raucous comedy curdling into genuine heartbreak—and positions Mikey Madison's ferocious lead performance as the film's electric center.