“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” exclaims the filthy rich Russian cruise patron Dimitry (Zlatko Buric) suddenly finding himself in a situation where his money is worthless. The shit-peddling — he sells manure, you see — oligarch quoting Marx conjures quite the shocking mental image, but his about face was anything but surprising. Only a few minutes prior the gregarious gazillionaire had been summoning the words of Reagan and Thatcher to defend his enormous wealth as a ship full of bourgeois relentlessly puked up thier overpriced dinners. Opulence and absurdity abound, but subtlety is of short supply in Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winning Triangle of Sadness.
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A lovelorn soul, a genie — or in this case Djinn — trapped in a bottle, three wishes. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least far back as the early 16th century when Antoine Galland began regaling eager listeners with the stories of Aladdin and his Magic Lamp. Certainly the cautionary tales of wish fulfillment date back even further. Storytelling has long been a cornerstone of the human existence and George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City) is hoping filmgoing audiences are still hungry for such tales with his new film Three Thousand Years of Longing.

All eyes on me. We live, now more than ever, in an attention economy. If you can’t catch someone’s eye immediately then they’re on to the next. Swiped left, scrolled up, you’re awash in ever expanding sea of content, marooned by whatever the newest outrage or shock is. No longer does the world focus on the work, the craft, it’s all spectacle, all the time. The appetite for attention is voracious and to quell it requires pushing beyond the boundaries of safe and natural. Spectacle for the sake of spectacle can be dangerous, Jordan Peele recognizes that with his third feature, Nope, he just can’t quite push that message through the artifice of his own attention grabbing blockbuster.

Loss is a strange experience. Someone, or something close to you is suddenly gone, their existence extinguished and, yet, they still occupy the minds and stories of everyone who ever knew them. The life of a lost one “can keep unfolding itself to you” as Mr. McCarthy tells a grieving Greg in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. But what if the lost love one isn’t a person and what if all their memories could be explored, like a diary for those left behind. These ideas set the stage for Kogonada’s After Yang.

“Nuns, why’s it always gotta be nuns” exclaims Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) in a clear riff on the famous Indiana Jones lament. Except Drake is not staring down hundreds of pythons, he’s standing in a quiet Spanish church as a friendly Sister walks by. Hewing far closer to Spider-Man in National Treasure than Raiders of the Lost Ark, no scene in Uncharted better represents the gulf between what it wants to be and what it actually accomplishes. 

Ask just about anyone and they’ll tell you that they want to do the right thing. An instinct for altruism is natural but it doesn’t always come from the purest place. Plenty of times good deeds and kind words are as much about self preservation as they are about real impact. As the most insidious voices have grown louder in the the last few years, so too have the performative ones denouncing them. With his directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg has a little fun with performative wokeness.

Nearly nine years have passed since the Coen Brothers wondered, on 700 screens nationwide, what their lives and art would be without each other. For as bleak and apocalyptic as their prognosis was, the simple fact remains, Joel and Ethan Coen are not Llewyn Davis. Of course the master filmmaking duo are individually talented, but if anyone needed the proof, The Tragedy of MacBeth, Joel Coen’s first solo effort is a visually stunning powerhouse.

Can good satire exist anymore? The common consensus is that the medium died years ago when Trump and other prominent real life targets of satirical work grew so ridiculous that they were the joke already. Shows like Saturday Night Live have no ideas other than mimicry to the point that they literally hired a comic (the very funny James Austin Johnson) most famous for his impersonations of the former president to just do impressions. If satire really did die when Trump descended that golden escalator, why does Adam McKay keep making films that ignore that reality?

Sean Baker has never had problems finding cinematic drama — and a deep well of empathy — in the lives of people on the brink. To large degrees, all of his films have revolved around well intentioned folks doing the best they can in the face of debilitating financial situations. Be it Sin-Dee (Kitana Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) working the streets of LA or Halley (Bria Vinaite) doing sex work on the side to keep a roof over her daughter Moonee’s (Brooklynn Prince) head, Baker’s characters clearly hold his respect. Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), the central figure of Red Rocket, is a new type of lead for the director.

Lin Manuel Miranda is having himself a year. Now, that statement would be true in almost any year since he burst onto Broadway with In the Heights back in 2008, but it is especially so now. Just in 2021 alone Miranda has: produced a big screen adaptation of In the Heights, starred as a musically inclined kinkajou in Vivo, written original music for Disney’s Encanto and, most impressively of all, released one of the best movies of the year with tick... tick… BOOM, his directorial debut.