The Next Picture Show

Joe Wright’s new adaptation of the bestselling novel THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW is hardly the first film to tip its hat to Alfred Hitchcock in general and 1954’s REAR WINDOW in particular, in no small part because Hitchcock’s film is in many ways a movie about the act of watching movies. But it can also be processed as a film about storytelling in general, or the journalistic impulse in particular, b...

The new MORTAL KOMBAT, directed by Simon McQuoid, drops a new, nobody protagonist, Cole Young, into the videogame world’s established mythology, positioning him as an outsider within a generations-spanning supernatural battle. That conceit is a big part of why we chose to pair the film with John Carpenter’s BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, but does it make for a compelling movie narrative? No, it does...

The newest film iteration of MORTAL KOMBAT is a fighting fantasy with roots in the tradition of Asian martial arts movies, but with a pronounced supernatural component that pushes it deeper into the realm of the uncanny. That particular combination, along with the film’s outsider protagonist, put us in mind of John Carpenter’s BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, a 1986 action-comedy that plops a mostly h...

The second half of our pairing looking at young women publicly testing the goodwill of their loved ones drops in on another awkward community function in the form of SHIVA BABY’s titular gathering. We’re joined again by film writer Jordan Hoffman to talk about Emma Seligman’s extraordinary debut feature and how it connects to Jonathan Demme’s RACHEL GETTING MARRIED in its view of familial and soci...

The new indie comedy SHIVA BABY’s focus on a young woman attending an obligatory family event and finding herself the center of attention reminded us of a similar cinematic predicament set at a very different sort of major life event: Jonathan Demme’s 2008 drama RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. Revisiting the film for this week’s pairing, along with our special guest, film writer Jordan Hoffman, was a pote...

The new Bob Odenkirk-starring revenge thriller NOBODY could be read as commentary on the revenge thriller form, but that may be an overly generous reading — or it may just be because we’ve paired it this week with Steven Soderbergh’s THE LIMEY, which is much more overtly reflective about its fantasies of violence and retribution. After working through what did and didn’t work for us about NOBODY,...

The new NOBODY, starring Bob Odenkirk as an unlikely action star, is drawing on a long tradition of revenge movies, which means we had our pick of comparison points this week, but Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 film THE LIMEY struck us as particularly apt not just for the commentary it provides on the revenge narrative, but also for its focus on its protagonist’s relationship to his past. In this first...

The new HBO documentary TINA touches briefly but memorably on the release of 1992’s WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT, but it’s much more focused on providing a bird’s-eye view of Tina Turner’s entire career, beyond the years she spent in a creatively fruitful but abusive partnership with Ike Turner. Watching the two films together, as we did for this week’s pairing, reveals how the films’ respective...

It’s rare that one of the films in a Next Picture Show pairing is directly addressed in the other film, but that’s the case with WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT and the new documentary TINA, two films with distinctly different approaches tackling a common subject: the life of soul music legend Tina Turner. This week we zoom in on Tina through the lens of Brian Gibson’s 1993 biopic, a film that treat...

Unlike the last unicorn in the eponymous 1982 animated film by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr., this week’s last-of-her-kind fantasy creature knows what happened to the rest of her kind, setting the new Disney Animation feature RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON off on a quest narrative that takes a much different shape than THE LAST UNICORN. We’re joined once again this week by John Maher to discuss RAYA’...

While the new RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON shares far more with its Disney Animation brethren than anything made by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, those filmmakers’ 1982 animated adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s THE LAST UNICORN shares RAYA’s interest in telling a story about humanity via the plight of a fantasy creature believed to be the last of its kind — it just goes about it in a much more idio...

Lee Isaac Chung’s new MINARI centers on a family starting over in the country, a theme that got us thinking about French director Claude Berri’s 1986 film JEAN DE FLORETTE, and how its concerns of agrarian hardship in general and water scarcity in particular echo those in Chung’s film. In this half of the pairing we get into JEAN DE FLORETTE’s unsparing view of an oft-idealized provincial setting,...

In Chloe Zhao’s new NOMADLAND, Frances McDormand’s Fern “drops out of society” not by choice, unlike the yuppie couple at the center of Albert Brooks’ 1985 comedy LOST IN AMERICA, but she proves much more adept than they at surviving (perhaps even thriving?) outside the mainstream. This week we bring NOMADLAND’s view of life on the road into conversation with LOST IN AMERICA’s satirization of the...

Chloe Zhao’s new feature NOMADLAND presents a “houseless” life on the road as a choice born half out of desperation and half out of curiosity about life outside the American mainstream, which called to mind the yuppie adventurers looking to “drop out of society” in Albert Brooks’ 1985 comedy LOST IN AMERICA. This week, Brooks’ film serves as the catalyst for another Scott-Tasha showdown, as we dig...

Though Emerald Fennell has cited Mary Harron’s AMERICAN PSYCHO as one of the inspiration points for her buzzy debut feature PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, there’s not a whole lot obviously linking the films in terms of protagonist, narrative, or even their respective satirical targets. But as we discuss in this week’s comparison, both woman-directed films are deeply concerned with ideas of male privilege...

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN writer-director Emerald Fennell has cited AMERICAN PSYCHO as one of her cinematic reference points when creating her first debut feature, which was enough reason for us to revisit Mary Harron’s 2000 cult classic ‘80s satire to see if there’s more to that comparison than the films’ shared taste for dark, dark humor. First up this week, we dig into AMERICAN PSYCHO’s inscrutable...

Among other accomplishments, Thomas Vinterberg’s new ANOTHER ROUND has unseated Alexander Payne’s SIDEWAYS as the ne plus ultra of funny films about sad men drinking their way through midlife crises. In celebration of that feat, this week we’re looking back at what made SIDEWAYS so intoxicating back in 2004, discussing the film’s many small moments that carry a wealth of character, what to make of...

Both Pixar’s new feature SOUL and Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 fantasy-romance A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH center on a soul gone missing from heaven’s ledger because he’s anxious to get back to his life on earth, but the journeys each of them takes to get there end up drawing different conclusions about the meaning of life. This week we’re joined again by critic and  812FilmReviews  founder Robert...

With the image early in SOUL of a conveyor belt ferrying new souls into the afterlife, the new Pixar film makes clear the thematic debt it owes to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1946 fantasy-romance A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. But there’s much more to the Powell and Pressburger film than that indelible image; in this week’s half of our pairing we dig into what lies beyond the stairway to...

Though David Fincher’s new MANK certainly makes the case for giving Herman Mankiwiecz more of the credit for CITIZEN KANE than he’s often received, it’s more interested in peeling back the layers of a complex character and exploring the many personal and cultural themes that found their way into KANE. That makes it all but impossible not to discuss the film in relation to the Orson Welles classic,...

It’s rare that a new film suggests a historical comparison point as strongly as David Fincher’s new MANK does, so we’re taking the bait and putting it in conversation with the film that is its raison d’etre: Orson Welles’ towering 1941 directorial debut, CITIZEN KANE. Is there anything new to say about a film frequently hailed as the form’s crowning achievement? Perhaps not, so in this half of the...

Writer-director Sean Durkin’s long-awaited followup to MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE, the new THE NEST casts Jude Law and Carrie Coon as an unhappily married couple in the 1980s who relocate their family to an isolated British country estate, a move that hastens the seemingly inevitable collapse of their family unit. Though the film is separated from the setting of Ang Lee’s 1970s-set THE ICE STORM by...

THE NEST, Sean Durkin’s chilly new drama about a marriage on the brink, weaves together its very 1980s setting and the issues afflicting its central family in a manner we found reminiscent of Ang Lee’s 1997 feature THE ICE STORM, which examines a similar sort of familial dysfunction through the lens of 1970s libertine values. In this half, we debate how well THE ICE STORM holds up another two deca...

DAVID BYRNE’S AMERICAN UTOPIA is a fairly traditional concert film — at least as traditional as a collaboration between David Byrne and Spike Lee can be — which differentiates it from Byrne’s vignette-based 1986 ramble TRUE STORIES, but both projects are indelibly marked by the musician’s mindset, clearly the products of someone who works intuitively and metaphorically. This week we attempt to par...

Spike Lee’s new feature-length document of David Byrne’s stage show AMERICAN UTOPIA seemed like a prime opportunity to look back on the the iconoclastic alt-rocker’s own 1986 directorial effort TRUE STORIES, which also uses the framework of Talking Heads songs to muse about the state of America and how humans seek and find connections in the modern world. In the first half of our Byrne double feat...