Current Releases

Some movies seek to scare. Others, to get under your skin. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, first screened at Sundance earlier this year, is the latter kind of film. Conjuring the Deep South in all its heat, music, and memory, the movie is a midnight sermon for the age of waking, a horror tale gasped out between clutches of air. It’s horror not as a novelty but an inheritance, a story about power and survival and the long American tradition of draining blood in the name of salvation.

Some films you watch, and some films you sit with—and Marty Supreme, projected on the screen of the Chinese Theatre, is emphatically the latter. Loud, jittery, often exhausting and, in a way that becomes more and more disconcerting the more you sit with it, strangely moving, the film is less a sports drama than a psychological study of obsession, ambition and the American need to be someone, at any cost. As such, it plays like a fever dream of postwar masculinity, filtered through mythmaking and millennial irony and anchored by a performance from Timothée Chalamet that is abrasive and magnetic and uncomfortably, deeply intimate.

Netflix’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery arrives not merely as the latest entry in Rian Johnson’s now-beloved series of whodunnits, but as a wholly immersive mystery that proves clever storytelling and richly drawn characterization still have cinematic power. The film, the third standalone chapter in the Knives Out saga, reunites us with Daniel Craig’s Southern-accented detective Benoit Blanc while expanding the world in surprising and deeply human directions.

I saw Wicked: For Good at Hollywood’s legendary Chinese Theatre (where The Wizard of Oz had its premiere in 1939), a setting grand enough to match the scale of this long-awaited final chapter in Universal’s lavish two-part adaptation. From the moment the film began—with that gorgeous vintage Universal Studios logo flickering to life—I felt the production tipping its hat to cinema history, reminding us that this universe has deep, shimmering roots stretching back to 1939.

HOLLYWOOD - It was a warm October afternoon in Hollywood, in the Egyptian Theatre, with the art deco ceiling casting shadows and popcorn scent in the air. Guillermo del Toro’s long-anticipated take on Frankenstein came to life. The instant the first lightning bolt flashed on screen was obvious. This was not just another “monster movie.” This was a cinematic resurrection. It was a love letter to Mary Shelley’s masterpiece and all the Gothic cinema that came in its wake.

LAS VEGAS - There’s no place like the Sphere. MGM’s 1939 Technicolor masterpiece has been reimagined for one of Las Vegas’s most dazzling new venues, and while purists may clutch their ruby slippers, the result is an undeniably spectacular experience that blends nostalgia with cutting-edge immersion.

HOLLYWOOD - It’s a rarity these days to witness a musical of ambition, one that doesn’t merely coddle its songs, but allows them to be vessels for fantasy, memory, and pain all at once. Kiss of the Spider Woman lands with some bumps, but also soars, thanks to the film’s central conceit: a film-within-a-film that opens the characters up to Technicolor glamour and flight, even as they are imprisoned in a place of brutal reality.