The Long Take Review

Calling all girl dads! Wes Anderson has a new film for you. Starring Benicio del Toro as business tycoon Zsa Zsa Korda and Mia Threapleton as his estranged daughter Liesl, The Phoenician Scheme begins when Zsa Zsa calls upon Liesl to become the legal heir to his vast fortune as more and more of his rivals attempt to assassinate him. Hijinks ensue as the two face off against the customary starry en...

Stephen King contains multitudes. He may be more well known for classic horror stories like Carrie and The Shining , but he’s also responsible for equally successful emotional dramas like The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me . Whatever the genre or tone, his works almost always beg an adaptation to the big screen. That’s where Director Mike Flanagan comes in. Best known for Doctor Sleep (2019)...

The Oscars recently announced that their 100th ceremony in 2027 will feature a brand new Best Stunt Design category , and the timing for Tom Cruise and his infamously death-defying Mission: Impossible series could not be worse, as Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning , the eighth and potentially final installment released in theaters this past weekend. The marketing for the film heavily impli...

It’s difficult to write an intro to a Marvel movie review without feeling like a broken record: Marvel has been in a slump, it’s no longer king of the Hollywood hill, fans are out, theatrical releases aren’t an event anymore, yada yada yada. To be honest, I’ve grown very tired of talking about how far Marvel has fallen, so it is an absolute delight to be able to review an MCU film that everyone el...

We have wanted to get more guests on the show for some time now, but didn’t necessarily want to subject them to the pace of our regular coverage of new releases and award season. Thus, we’d like to welcome you to The LTR Guest List , a special series in which we ask our friends to pick a movie – any movie – to discuss with us on air. Our guest for this inaugural episode, Karl LaClair, is the co-ho...

Hello there, and May the 4th be with you! We’re so happy Revenge of the Sith (2005) returned to theaters this spring because it gave us an excuse to talk about Star Wars on the show. Greg, P.T., and I provide a retrospective look at how we experienced the film in 2005 vs. how we see it now. We discuss the impact of audience expectations, how this film influenced the future of franchise filmmaking,...

Anyone following movie news lately will likely know that Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners is a sensation. After some controversial discourse surrounding its box office success , the film quieted all its skeptics when it only dropped off 6% in its second weekend , which is the smallest decline since James Cameron’s Avatar in 2009 and the smallest ever for an R-rated film. Most recently, the film has...

Many critics, pundits, and podcasters have told us that the mantra for movie studios and theaters has been “survive until ‘25.” And now that 2025 is here and we know what movies are slated to come out for the rest of the year, our question is will we survive or thrive in 2025? In this episode of The Long Take Review, the whole crew gathers together to try to answer this very question. We take turn...

It’s been a minute , but we are so happy to be back with our Oscar Fairy Flashback project, in which we reexamine a slate of Oscar nominees and winners to “correct” them, as if we had the power of an all-powerful Oscar fairy. This time, we’re looking at the 89th Academy Awards — the infamous Moonlight vs. La La Land year, in which a card mix-up wreaked havoc when La La Land was announced as the wi...

The Russo brothers became household names for many Marvel fans after directing four of the biggest films in the MCU: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) , Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019). It’s no wonder, then, that Netflix was willing to give them a $320 million budget to create a science fiction action-adventure starring pop fr...

It’s never a good sign when the McDonalds toys for your movie come out long before the movie actually does, and it’s an even worse sign that not all of the characters represented in those toys made it into the final cut of the film. After delays and reshoots , the latest cinematic entry in the MCU, Captain America: Brave New World , released in theaters this past Valentine’s Day to mixed to poor r...

This time of year can be a little slow for awards junkies like us, but, every once in a while, a smaller film that has no chance at the Oscars surprises us. Clocking in at a crisp 1 hour 33 minutes, Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, a spy thriller mystery call ed Black Bag , is a smart and stylish genre exercise that was as fun to talk about as it was to watch. Acting titans Cate Blanchett and Mich...

Parasite (2019) is arguably one of the best Best Picture winners of the last decade, and it certainly put its director, Bong Joon Ho, on the global cinema map in a way he had not been before. It’s no surprise, then, that a big studio like Warner Bros. would essentially offer him a blank check to make his next film, Mickey 17 . The film’s release has been far from a success, however. Warner Bros. d...

For many critics and fans (including us), one of the happiest upsets at this year’s Oscars was Flow winning Best Animated Feature, beating out acclaimed titans from much bigger animation studios like The Wild Robot and Inside Out 2 . The film’s tiny team from Latvia, led by Director Gints Zilbalodis, went home national heroes, as their statuette now sits in the Latvian National Museum of Art , wit...

What a night, especially for Sean Baker, the director of Best Picture winner, Anora ! The film won five of the six of its Oscar nominations, surprising even those who had predicted it to win Best Picture. What does the indisputable success of a small indie film made for $6 million dollars (for reference, Wicked cost $150 million) with a 40-person crew mean for the future of movies? On this episode...

Easily, the biggest surprise of Oscar nomination morning was the Brazilian docudrama, I’m Still Here , making it into the Best Picture 10 in addition to being nominated for International Feature. We recently got a chance to catch up with Walter Salles’ film about a family targeted by a military dictatorship in 1971 and knew that we absolutely needed to squeeze a review in before the Oscars this Su...

The Oscars are finally here! If you haven’t had time to watch all the films, but find yourself looking to predict some winners, we at The Long Take Review have got you covered. In an epic, record-breaking episode, we discuss who will win and who should win in every . single . category . So this is your one stop shop for help with your Oscar pool. We’ve tiered the episode so you can opt in dependin...

Early speculation about films for 2024 frequently highlighted an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, The Nickel Boys , purely based on the source material’s notoriety. Few film critics, however, could have known then that Ramell Ross’ adaptation, Nickel Boys , would be so bold in its aesthetic choices. Ross reconfigures conventional film continuity to create what he call...

It’s hard to believe, but The Long Take Review podcast has made it to 100 episodes! To commemorate this milestone, P.T., Greg, Antonio, and I take a break from our Oscar season coverage to ask each other some probing questions, both about the films we have covered during the first 100 episodes and more generally about our filmgoing lives. What has been our most memorable theatrical experience? Wha...

Is it too early to talk about next year’s Oscars when this year’s hasn’t even happened yet? The Sundance Film Festival says no. In fact, a handful of films that premiere there go on to compete in the awards race the following year. And unlike most other film festivals, Sundance offers online screenings for us civilians, which means we can actually review some films! P.T., Antonio, and I share our...

Find someone who looks at you the way everyone in A Complete Unknown looks at Timothee Chalamet playing Bob Dylan. For James Mangold’s film, covering Dylan’s four-year journey from first arriving in New York City through “going electric” in 1965, one debate amongst critics centers on the representation of Bob Dylan’s genius: does the film fall into the stereotypical biopic trap of putting its subj...

Everyone over at The Long Take Review got up bright and early Thursday morning to watch the live announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations. We share our thoughts on the broadcast, as well as the nominees. How many did Jen correctly predict? How many has Greg already seen? What is P.T.’s mastermind theory about which films have a path to winning Best Picture? And why did we spend so much time t...

Director Brady Corbet gave not one but two acceptance speeches at The Golden Globes, as he won for Best Director and his film, The Brutalist , won Best Motion Picture Drama. Star Adrien Brody also won Best Actor Motion Picture Drama. There were two predominant themes amongst those three speeches: that immigrant stories matter, and that film studios should take more chances on filmmakers’ artistic...

Before we describe this episode of The Long Take Review, we would like to acknowledge and express our support for the victims of the Los Angeles wildfires. Here are some ways to help: The Entertainment Community Fund provides a safety net for performing arts and entertainment professionals, including those impacted by the wildfires. This GoFundMe supports a colleague of ours displaced by the Eaton...

After years of scandal, attempts to change , and a host who bombed last year , it seems like the Golden Globes has finally found its footing. Comedian Nikki Glaser, best known for her roast of Tom Brady , has received ubiquitous praise for her appropriately pitched jokes. And after expanding and diversifying their voting body last year , critics seems to be much less judgmental about the Golden Gl...