The Long Take Review

This time last year, part one of Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the famed Broadway musical, Wicked, had taken the world by storm. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande became legendary for their “holding space” press tour, licensed merchandise permeated every aspect of daily life, and, of course, the film received 10 Oscar nominations, ultimately winning both Costume Design and Production Design. Today, we...

As effortlessly as Glinda tossing her hair (toss toss), the Golden Globes seem to have shaken off years of controversy and scandal, reemerging as a mainstay in awards season. Host Nikki Glaser garnered much praise last year, including from us at The Long Take Review. (Who can resist a good pope pun ?) And this year, pundits, journalists, and podcasters seem extra aglow to read into the nominations...

What flavor of Yorgos are you? The director’s black comedy has taken many forms, from the absurdist futurism of The Lobster to the spicy costume drama of The Favourite or the Gothic coming of age story of Poor Things . In this episode of The Long Take Review, we try to place the acclaimed filmmaker’s latest work, Bugonia , on that continuum. After striking out with the anthology film Kinds of Kind...

Guillermo del Toro has waited his whole life to adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. In many interviews to promote the 2 1/2 hour film, now on Netflix, the writer and director has said that he read Shelley’s novel at 11 years old and has been thinking about it ever since. It remains to be seen, however, if critics and audiences think the Gothic tale starring Oscar Isaac an...

Welcome to a new subseries on The Long Take Review feed: LTR Quick Takes! In this inaugural episode, Co-host Greg flies solo to offer some SPOILER-FREE thoughts on the films he saw during the IFF Boston Fall Focus series. Join Greg for his Short Take, Recommendation Algorithm, and Oscars Watch on three highly anticipated films from this festival. First, Greg treads carefully reacting to Rian Johns...

Oscar nerds most remember Kathryn Bigelow as the winner of an infamous Best Picture showdown between her film, The Hurt Locker , and her ex-husband James Cameron’s film, Avatar in 2010. And while a rematch could theoretically emerge between Bigelow and Cameron this year, Bigelow’s newest film, A House of Dynamite , has gotten much more notoriety for the political implications of her nuclear attack...

Director Luca Guadagnino has had some success with the Academy, getting a Best Picture nomination for Call Me By Your Name (2017), but he has yet to have his big Oscar moment. That’s why many pundits predicted that his next film starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri, a seemingly more mainstream thriller about a college campus sexual assault case, could go all the way and mark hi...

We’re in the end game of fall film festival season now! AFI, the last big festival of the year, is just wrapping up and, meanwhile, smaller regional film festivals get to show many of the films we’ve just been hearing about for months. P.T., Antonio, and I were lucky enough to attend the Korean Spotlight screening of Park Chan-wook’s dark satirical comedy, No Other Choice , at the Newport Beach Fi...

Casablanca , directed by Michael Curtiz, was filmed and premiered in 1942, then saw wide release in early 1943. This makes it easily the oldest movie we have covered on this show by more than three decades! The World War II set and filmed movie tells the story of a jaded American expat (Humphrey Bogart) wrestling with whether to help his former lover (Ingrid Bergman) and her Resistance-leader husb...

The Venice Film Festival went wild for Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, based on the life and struggles of MMA/UFC Fighter Mark Kerr. When the film opened in theaters last weekend, however, the box office was a huge disappointment . What is the decision of The Long Take Review crew? Host Jen Sopchockchai is joined by Greg Cass and Antonio Elefano to discuss the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson showca...

The superlatives that have already been bestowed upon the new PTA (Paul Thomas Anderson) movie that just hit theaters last weekend are, quite honestly, hard to believe: to many, it’s PTA’s best film, Leonardo DiCaprio’s career best performance, the best film of the year, and even the best film of the decade. How could the film, which chronicles an ex-freedom fighter’s frenzied chase away from a wi...

With the major film festivals completed, we launch into award season with the kind of prestige drama that was designed for the fall: an adaptation of Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound. Host Jen Sopchockchai is joined by Greg Cass and Antonio Elefano to talk about the decades-spanning drama about a singer, played by Paul Mescal, and a musicologist, played by Josh O’Connor, who meet by chance and...

If you’ve ever argued back while listening to us prognosticate, now is your chance to show us up! We’re competing in Vulture’s Movies Fantasy League , and we want you to join our mini-league, “ltrpod ,” so that we can all follow this year’s Oscar season together. The task is deceptively simple: use 100 fake dollars to buy eight movies that will earn you the most points for awards, box office, and...

When our favorite critics and journalists travel across the globe — from Venice to Colorado and Toronto — to watch and review new movies, Oscar addicts like us sit up and pay attention. Films from high profile, beloved directors can flop. New films from unknowns can break out onto the scene. It’s never what anyone expects. On this episode of The Long Take Review, P.T. and I pass the mic back and f...

The air is turning crisp and the coffees are getting pumpkin spiced, but before we head into Fall Festival (and Oscar!) season, we want to do a quick recap on Summer Blockbuster season. On this episode of The Long Take Review, host Jen Sopchockchai is joined by P.T. McNiff, Antonio Elefano, and Greg Cass to debrief the season that was, reliving the highs (biplanes!), the lows (mutant dinosaurs!),...

Is an author allowed to deny any interpretations of his film? That’s exactly what Director Zach Cregger ( Barbarian 2022) has done on his press tour for Weapons, which is playing in theaters now. Most of his interviews emphasize a personal tragedy of his that inspired the movie, rather than the various political valences one might place upon a story about 17 kids who mysteriously disappear in the...

In more ways than one, The Fantastic Four: First Steps did not perform as expected. In spite of superhero fatigue, Matt Shakman’s retro futuristic adaptation of Marvel’s first family was well-received by many critics. Brandon Yu of the New York Times , for example, called it a “refreshingly new direction” and Amy Nicholson of the LA Times said she felt comforted by the film’s evocation of “classic...

Assuming you were all on the edges of your respective seats, waiting with bated breath to hear the rest of our Top 10 Best Films of the 21st Century lists, here is the long-awaited second half of our response to The New York Times’ list of “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century.” Starting with our number six spots, we each take turns revealing our #1-6 picks of the best films made from 2000 to 2...

When The New York Times released its full list of “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century,” we quickly realized that this cinephile’s feast deserved an entire episode. Then, once we recorded for a little over three hours, we realized that we needed to split up our conversation into two episodes. So in this episode you’ll find our general discussion of the NYT list, how we put our individual top 1...

Who knew the most unexpectedly popular movie of the summer would be an animated feature about KPop stars who protect the world from demons with both their music and their deadly weapons? We at the Long Take Review (and most other critics, it seems), surely didn’t. The latest offering from Sony Pictures Animation ( Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ) has not only topped Netflix’s charts but musical...

It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s…the biggest movie of the summer? Superman is certainly the central focus of Director James Gunn, who left Marvel Studios to become the Co-Chairman & CEO of the shop across the street, DC Studios, in 2022. So did he do it? Did he do this iconic comic book character justice? Did he successfully launch the new DCU? On this episode of The Long Take Review, we debate this...

Did you think The Shape of Water was romantic or just weird? In this Oscar Fairy Flashback episode, we look back at the 90th Academy Awards, which brought us one of the most polarizing Best Picture winners, Guillermo del Toro’s dark fantasy about a woman who falls in love with a fish man imprisoned in a government lab. Will we downsize some of its wins in favor of some other big nominees this year...

Even if you yourself don’t follow Formula 1 racing, it’s hard to deny its global popularity, with an audience of 750 million, according to Nielsen Sports. But does that mean Director Joseph Kosinski ( Top Gun: Maverick ) can lap other movies at the box office this weekend with F1: The Movie ? So far, news outlets like the New York Times have declared that the underdog sports action drama is a hit,...

If you were Dakota Johnson, would you choose Pedro Pascal or Chris Evans? (And no, both is not an option.) On the surface , The Materialists seems to pose this as a pleasurably difficult question, in glossy rom com fashion. That’s a considerable departure from Celine Song’s last film, the Oscar-nominated indie and LTR favorite, Past Lives . Is the marketing for the film creating a bait and switch...

Most film historians would say that when Steven Spielberg made Jaws in 1975, he changed Hollywood filmmaking forever. Not only would the shark tale launch his career into the stratosphere, making him a leading voice in American cinema, but it invented the summer blockbuster season and movie marketing that we easily take for granted now. This year (to the day, in fact!) marks Jaws ’ 50th Anniversar...