The Next Picture Show

There are no shortage of adaptations we could pair with Joel Coen’s new THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH, but for our purposes the choice was always clear: Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 classic THRONE OF BLOOD is an ideal Next Picture Show companion piece for the way in which it takes what it needs from the original Shakespeare while changing the language, setting, and performance style, and cherry-picking elements...

Mamoru Hosoda’s new anime feature BELLE moves the classic fable of Beauty and the Beast into a futuristic VR world, but that’s not the film’s only major departure from its original source material. Although it contains some direct visual references and corollary characters to Disney’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, it’s ultimately concerned with different, more unruly emotions, which drives the story in un...

Mamoru Hosada’s new anime BELLE is the latest take on a certain tale as old as time, one that was previously enshrined in the animated feature canon with 1991’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, one of the touchstones of Disney’s storied late-20th-century renaissance. This week we crack open the clamshell VHS case on Disney’s version, in particular its labored-even-by-Disney-standards development process, its...

Our look back at 2021 in film concludes with Tasha, Keith, and Scott’s picks for films number five through one on their respective top 10 lists—or at least their top 10s as they stood at the tail end of December. All three acknowledge that the year offered several quality releases that on any other given day might have made their way onto one of these lists, but for the overlapping factors of time...

We’re kicking off 2022 by setting aside our usual format for a look back at 2021 in film, via that tried and true structure, the Top 10 list. Keith, Scott, and Tasha have each come to this two-part episode bearing their individual top 10 lists, as well as broader thoughts on a year in which established moviegoing models seem to be shifting more rapidly than ever. This week covers the films at the...

Guillermo del Toro’s new NIGHTMARE ALLEY is a first for the director, a film with no supernatural or fantasy elements at all, and yet it is still arguably more recognizable as a del Toro film than as a remake of the 1947 Edmund Goulding noir of the same name. Why this project, for this director, and with these actors? We’re joined once again by our friend and critic Noel Murray to hash out our var...

Guillermo del Toro has emphasized that his new NIGHTMARE ALLEY is not a remake of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 noir of the same name, but rather an attempt to more faithfully adapt the 1946 novel by author William Lindsay Gresham, about a carnival con artist who expands his hustle into spiritualism and subsequently opens himself up to disaster. Nonetheless, this week in preparation of our discussion of...

With less of a narrative focus on survival than DELIVERANCE, Jane Campion’s new POWER OF THE DOG takes a comparatively subtle approach to unpacking the nuances of toxic masculinity and the myriad ways in which it can poison relationships — but there’s nothing subtle about that ending and the way it makes everything leading up to it click into place. We dig into the power of POWER’s storytelling, p...

Jane Campion’s new POWER OF THE DOG includes a tense passage involving a banjo that plays as a nod to the 1972 John Boorman classic DELIVERANCE, but the two films’ shared thematic concerns go much deeper than banjo duels. Chief among those is the theme of toxic masculinity and its myriad manifestations, which we explore this week via DELIVERANCE’s four male archetypes and their misbegotten river a...

Rebecca Hall’s new PASSING takes a more restrained, internal approach to its story about racial identity and the rejection thereof than Douglas Sirk’s 1959 classic IMITATION OF LIFE, but the two films share an awareness of how style and subject matter can work hand in hand. We’re joined again this week by critic Odie Henderson to discuss how each film balances its messaging, storytelling, and styl...

Rebecca Hall’s new film PASSING centers on a complicated female friendship defined in part by semi-porous racial boundaries, a thematic throughline that pointed us directly to Douglas Sirk’s IMITATION OF LIFE — with an assist from RogerEbert.com critic Odie Henderson, who in his recent review of Hall’s film invoked Sirk’s 1959 melodrama, citing it as his #3 film of all time. We’re joined this week...

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO director and co-writer Edgar Wright is never shy about sharing and celebrating his influences for each new project, which in this case includes the other film in this pairing, Ingmar Bergman’s famously inscrutable PERSONA. We get into the connections between those two, including their portrayals of relationships between two women and their allusive tendencies, after digging into...

In familiar Edgar Wright fashion, the director’s new LAST NIGHT IN SOHO is brimming with cinematic allusion, but that self-reflexivity combined with a focus on a pair of similar-looking women whose identities begin to merge in uncanny ways brought us immediately to one of film’s most mysterious and scrutinized movies: Ingmar Bergman’s PERSONA. Broadly concerned with two women’s power struggle and...

Denis Villeneuve’s new DUNE (or, more accurately, DUNE PART ONE) begins the process of adapting Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name, which itself drew from the biography of T.E. Lawrence, the inspiration for another film concerned with “desert power” and messiah mythmaking: 1962’s LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. While the two films each slot into different genres — science-fiction and historical war s...

The 1965 Frank Herbert novel that gave rise to Denis Villenueve’s new adaptation DUNE drew direct inspiration from the life of T.E. Lawrence, the subject of one of cinema’s towering classics: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. David Lean’s 1965 film is a celebrated, Oscar-winning classic that’s become shorthand for “big screen epic,” but for every major set piece where Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence seems to consider...

When it comes to the cultural obsession with origin stories that’s led to the underwhelming Sopranos prequel film THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK, how much credit/blame should be placed at the feet of THE GODFATHER PART II as an originator of this storytelling fixation? That’s among the questions we consider as we parse our mixed-to-negative reactions to the newer film, and bring it into conversation wi...

The new  Sopranos -inspired film THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK is both a prequel and a follow-up to one of the most acclaimed and influential mafia stories ever told, a description that also applies to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film THE GODFATHER: PART II. Coppola’s follow-up to his 1972 smash has a prequel embedded within its flashback structure, but its dual narrative makes it much more than just...

Like HARD EIGHT, the new Paul Schrader film THE CARD COUNTER puts a professional gambler on the road to redemption via his relationship with a confused and volatile young man, in the latest iteration of Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Man” character. We unpack that character, along with CARD COUNTER’s view of him and his sins, with the help once again of critic and Schrader expert Vikram Murthi, before p...

The uneasy pact between a professional gambler and a young man from his past in Paul Schrader’s THE CARD COUNTER recalls the surrogate father and son at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut feature HARD EIGHT. Both films follow solitary men into dark casino halls, but on very different paths to redemption. For this week’s focus on HARD EIGHT, we’re joined by freelance critic and longtime fri...

Our recent pairing of Michel Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MINDS with Lisa Joy’s REMINISCENCE was actually a second-choice selection forced by the ongoing unavailability of the film we initially thought of as a slam-dunk companion to Joy’s new film: Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 thriller STRANGE DAYS, another noir-inflected science-fiction story concerned with the intersection of technology a...

Where Michel Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND used the conceit of a memory machine in service of a science-fiction romance, Lisa Joy’s new feature debut REMINISCENCE uses a similar device in service of a science-fiction noir, but despite their different genre footholds, both are naturally fixated on the idea of revisiting memories and what they can tell us about ourselves. Despite a...

Lisa Joy’s new REMINISCENCE turns on a techno-magical procedure that blurs the distinction between memories and reality, a conceit that immediately reminded us of ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. Michel Gondry’s 2004 film was one of our collective favorites back when it premiered, but do our memories of it hold up to the reality of a present-day rewatch? This week we re-examine our relations...

Like Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 musical folly ONE FROM THE HEART, Leos Carax’s new rock opera ANNETTE is not interested in playing it safe, whether that means, like Coppola's film, enlisting idiosyncratic musicians for songs that challenge movie-musical convention, or enlisting a puppet to play the titular role. We’re joined again this week by our friend Joshua Rothkopf to unpack which of ANNETTE...

As a self-consciously artificial musical about a troubled couple (among other things), Leos Carax’s new ANNETTE put us in mind of another original movie musical with little use for convention: Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 folly ONE FROM THE HEART, a famous flop that also represents a singular artistic achievement. We’re joined this week by critic and old friend Joshua Rothkopf to consider how this...

We just can’t resist discussing a new David Lowery film here at the Next Picture Show, and his latest, THE GREEN KNIGHT, gives us plenty to chew on, taking an alternately minimalist and maximalist approach to a story about honor, myth, and magic that takes place on the edges of King Arthur’s legend. Its bordering-on-abstract narrative stands in high contrast to the more expository approach seen in...