The 2003 South Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! is reimagined in characteristically batshit fashion by the idiosyncratic Yorgos Lanthimos in this chilling and absurdist farce. It marks the director’s fifth collaboration with double Oscar winner Emma Stone, after The Favourite, Bleat, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness, and reunites him with the latter’s lead, Jesse Plemons, too, in a story about two conspiracy theorists who kidnap a high-powered CEO, convinced that she’s an alien hellbent on destroying the earth.
The Smashing Machine
The Safdie brothers are, for the moment, going their own way: After making Good Time and Uncut Gems as a duo, Josh Safdie is now focused on the Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow ping pong movie Marty Supreme, while Benny Safdie is turning his attention to this rip-roaring portrait of MMA fighter Mark Kerr (a prosthetics-swathed Dwayne Johnson). Beside him, through the triumphant victories, crushing losses, and struggles with substance abuse, is his devoted wife, played by Emily Blunt—a Jungle Cruise reunion I never saw coming.
A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning auteur behind The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and Detroit, returns with a prescient examination of our contemporary geopolitical hellscape: When a missile is launched at the US, the race is on to determine who is responsible and how the White House should respond. In charge? The likes of Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Jonah Hauer-King, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Kaitlyn Dever, as they confront a potential nuclear catastrophe and the precarious world we’ve created with our dependence on atomic weapons.
The Wizard of the Kremlin
Another politically charged polemic, Olivier Assayas’s account of Putin’s rise to power, adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s recent novel of the same name, sees none other than Jude Law transform into the deathly pale, dark-suited KGB officer-turned-president. Paul Dano is his (partly fictional) spin doctor, pulling the strings at the heart of the Russian government, while Alicia Vikander, Zach Galifianakis, Tom Sturridge, and Jeffrey Wright complete the impressive ensemble. As the boundaries blur between truth and lies, news and propaganda, nationalism and imperialism, we’re given an unnerving insight into Russia’s turbulent recent past, as well as its incredibly troubled present.
No Other Choice
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