Stephanie Zacharek

Of the roughly 35 films I saw across 10 days, here are the standouts of Cannes 2025. In terms of the competition films, at least, this has been one of the most enjoyable, well-built slates I’ve seen in the 15 […]

In an early scene in Lynne Ramsay’s brutal, beautiful Die, My Love, we see Jennifer Lawrence crawling through a sunny, grassy field on all fours, low to the ground like a sultry panther, as we hear a baby crying somewhere

Raoul Peck is one of our most valuable documentary filmmakers. Instead of just presenting us with information, he shows us ways of seeing, inspiring us to look for patterns and connections we might not have seen otherwise. That’s the principle

Wes Anderson, who specializes in designing fancifully invented societies, probably doesn’t strike anyone as an angry person. But his espionage comedy The Phoenician Scheme, playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival, shows glimmers of something that might be

Some days it seems we live in a horrid world where the majority of humans couldn’t give a fig about art. How many people in that world are going to care about a 66-year-old black-and-white movie—one that, for anyone who

How many times in the past few years have you heard, or used, the expression “The pandemic broke our brains”? Particularly in less densely populated parts of America, plenty of government officials and citizens still hold a grudge over the

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the eighth film in the franchise and ostensibly its finale, looks, feels, and sounds like the sort of movie you need to see on the big screen. The powers that be at the Cannes Film Festival

In a movie climate where remakes tend to draw sneers of derision and claims that people have just gotten too lazy to invent anything new, Disney’s remakes of its own products are always a chief target. It should surprise no

Bong Joon-ho isn’t a subtle director, and he never has been. The ominous killer-on-the-loose thriller Memories of Murder, the sardonic creature-feature The Host, the futuristic downer Snowpiercer, the multiple-Oscar-winning class-war parable Parasite: all of these movies are over-the-top by design,

Depending on whom you listen to, as a society we no longer care about the Oscars: the movies are dead, long live streaming product. Or we care about the Oscars too much—don’t people know there are wars going on? Do