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I thought I had reviewed “Concrete Cowboy” during this past September’s Toronto International Film Festival, but no, I didn’t. That’s how underwhelmed I was by director Ricky Staub’s film, I didn’t bother writing anything about it. It has shades of familiarity in its coming-of-age genre tropes, and it’s all-too slickly delivered. The plot has a troubled teenager (Caleb McLaughlin) spending the summer in North Philadelphia and his estranged father’s (Elba) vibrant urban-cowboy subculture....

“I’m thrilled about it! It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It might be the wildest movie I’ve ever made, and that’s saying something. It’s out there. I wear a skintight black leather jumpsuit with grenades attached to different body parts, and if I don’t rescue the governor’s daughter from this state line where they’re all ghosts and bring her back they’re gonna blow me up. It’s just crazy. It’s way out there....

After Variety’s just-published 30 Documentaries vying for Oscar piece, for which I have decided to open up a prediction page for the Best Documentary Oscar category, I’m fairly certain that the doc form’s 90-year funk will continue again this year. Which is not to say that the docs themselves this year were underwhelming. Au contraire. Variety does miss out on mentioning “The Amazing Johnathan Documentary,” “The Brink” and “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese....

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Unlike Anne Thompson’s predictions in this category, I am not sold on either Dakota Johnson (Cha Cha Real Smooth), Keke Palmer (Nope), or Tang Wei (Decision to Leave) being legitimate contenders. So let’s scratch them off our list. Cate Blanchett (TAR) is almost a shoo-in to get nominated, and almost nobody has seen her performance. That’s how much of a great actress Cate the Great is. It helps that NYFF, in their description of Tar, solely, and weirdly, only focused on Blanchett....

McQueen’s last project was the ambitious “Small Axe” anthology series for the BBC which was composed of five films (three of them were flat-out great). Now for his latest film, titled “Blitz,” he’s tackling the Second World War. McQueen has in fact started production on “Blitz” in the UK, the film is based on his own original idea and takes place during the German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom in 1940....

If you had a gun pointed to my head, I still wouldn’t be able to tell you what’s Scorsese’s ultimate masterpiece: maybe it is in fact “Goodfellas,” or “Taxi Driver” or maybe “Raging Bull.” However, Spielberg clearly knows his. I must have already mentioned this in a previous post, or maybe not, but in my world there are 10 essential Scorsese films that should be seen by every cinephile worth his meat: “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas,” “Mean Streets,” “Casino,” “The King of Comedy,” “After Hours,” “The Age of Innocence,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “The Departed,” and “The Wolf of Wall Street....

Josephine Decker turned heads two years ago at Sundance with her experimental theater drama, “Madeline’s Madeline.” Although that film ultimately felt too overcooked for its own good, watching it, you felt like you were witnessing the coming of a major new directorial voice. Sadly, Decker’s latest, “Shirley,” is a step back, opting for a more conventional narrative, and it’s a meandering experience. Based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel, Decker tries to capture the spirit of author Shirley Jackson (a miscast Elizabeth Moss), a depressed literate genius with a bad case of writer’s block....

In “I Love My Dad,” Patton Oswald plays one of the worst fathers in recent film history. His suicidal son (played by Morsini) finally decides to block him from every social media outlet, which gives daddy the idiotic idea to catfish sonnyboy. He creates a fake Facebook amount, using the name and photos of a real waitress who works at the diner next door. With no driver’s license or any person who wants to drive him across state lines to meet his new crush, sonny boy asks dad to drive him....

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You won’t find that film, nor Top Gun: Maverick (#3) on my best of 2022 list. Au contraire, I find that the more the quality of studio filmmaking diminishes, now on a yearly basis, the more foreign-language cinema takes over as the very best film has to offer. Hollywood is in very dire straits right now, if the most critically-acclaimed major studio flick released is a sequel to “Top Gun” then we’re in trouble....

The fall festival season is upon us. I’ve narrowed down the hundreds upon hundreds of films that will likely screen in September (and October) at Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York to the bare essentials. The result is 30 movies that show great promise, from esteemed filmmaker like Inarritu, Baumbach, Spielberg, Field, Aronofsky, Dominik, Schrader, McDonagh, Guadagnino, and Panahi. Of note: This list will likely get updated when Telluride and Toronto announce....

In fact the rapturous love for “Bohemian Rhapsody” (full disclosure I had many problems with the film), which probably stemmed from fans of Freddie Mercury and Queen willing the film to be better than it was, caused film Twitter to erupt into meltdown, with fans piling hate on those who slammed the movie. The best embodiment of this entire conversation is The Telgraph critic Robbie Collin’s twitter feed following his piece ‘why you’re all wrong about lousy Rami Malek-from his harshest critic’ just before the actor took home Oscar gold....

If you have a Netflix subscription, you can catch James Franco’s excellent “The Disaster Artist,” now available to stream on the platform, which is a fictional recreation of how Wiseau came to make “The Room.” However, don’t expect “The Room” to stream on Netflix anytime soon. According to Wiseau, the streaming giant doesn’t want to showcase the disasterpiece. On social media, when asked if Netflix plans to stream “The Room,” Wiseau’s reply was short and sweet, he simply tweeted, “Netflix said no....

IndieWire’s Tom Brueggemann has all the numbers in his, as usual, excellent assessment of box-office performance. Suffice to say, it’s just been an off-year, the quality of movies this year, quite frankly, stinks. Yes, I have a list of 15 or so movies that I would highly recommend, but I watch a lot of stuff, I’m not the average moviegoer, also mainstream critics tend to dictate a lot of the indies that will become successful based on their glowing rave reviews, but this year critics have been, err, off in their herd-like assessments....

Firstly, Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” which wrapped production last October, is sitting out the year. No word yet on the reasons why, but, according to a well-informed festival programmer, it’s aim is a 2023 release. It might have to do with extensive VFX work, but it’s pure speculation, others will point out to Bill Murray’s recent controversy. The highly anticipated film stars Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, Adrien Brody, Bryan Cranston and Jeffrey Wright....

“We saw this opportunity based on user demand, beyond just offering paid movies. Can we do ad-supported movies, free to the user?” said Rohit Dhawan, director of product management at YouTube [via Adage]. “It also presents a nice opportunity for advertisers.” So far, around 100 movies are available for ad-supported viewing on YouTube. “They are now a TV network,” CTO and Co-Founder @innovid Tal Chalozin said [via Adage]. “They bring the audience and the distribution....

As perVariety, it seems like a ‘course correction’ is most definitely happening for the final chapter: “Disney, one party wages, is in the pole position since the company has a strong foothold with Abrams thanks to his work in the “Star Wars” universe as a writer, executive producer, and director. He’s currently working on “Star Wars: Episode IX,” which has been billed as a course correction at Lucasfilm after spinoff films like “Solo” failed to meet the label’s high commercial expectations....

It’s been a disappointing start to life for the year’s first Comic Book Movie, as Warner Bros’ Margot Robbie led “Birds of Prey” fell below both industry and studio expectations. The film sees Robbie reprise her role as Harley Quinn (who she played in 2016’s “Suicide Squad”). And while this is objectively a far far superior film to Ayer’s 2016 mess, that film did take home over $130M in its opening weekend, whilst Quinn’s new outing, alongside Jurnee Smollett-Bell’s Black Canary and Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Huntress, to name a few, came in around the $33....

Enter “Captain Marvel”: A 1990s-set Marvel film that serves as their first prequel, it also is their first superhero movie with a female lead (“Wonder Woman” was DC). If you’re going to do that might as well hire Oscar-winner Brie Larson to play Carol Danvers, a pilot with superpowers. Here’s my problem with this latest Marvel extravaganza: the plot has something to do with a galactic war between two alien races....