The week in film: Emma Stone shines in Poor Things, plus the greatest gangster movies
A collection of The A.V. Club's top movie stories from the week of December 4
Poor Things review: Emma Stone comes to life in a feminist masterpiece
Director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer) is not what one might call a conventional filmmaker, crafting his films with deadpan line delivery that enhances the surreal quality of their premises to lay bare fundamental truths of the human experience. His previous collaboration with screenwriter Tony McNamara, The Favourite, was perhaps as grounded as Lanthimos gets, but his penchant for distorted wide angles and understanding complicated, hopelessly entangled relationships made the film a highlight of his filmography. Now the creative duo have reunited for an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s superb 1992 novel Poor Things, resulting in a film that is simultaneously Lanthimos’ strangest—no small feat in its own right—but also perhaps his most humanist. Read More
The 20 greatest gangster movies of all time, ranked
Gangster movies are loaded with inherently alluring qualities: the vicarious thrill of watching an antihero buck the establishment and take what they want with impunity; the glamorous trappings as a funhouse mirror version of the American Dream; the familial metaphors of dynastic crime families; the antisocial buzz of viscerally violent acts; even the straight-and-narrow validation of watching an amoral figure fall from ill-gotten grace. Read More
Wonka Review: Timothée Chalamet concocts a delightfully infectious confection
The point of co-writer/director Paul King’s musically oriented origin story Wonka isn’t to answer the question of how a budding candy maker became the mercurial, withdrawn weirdo we met in the pages of Roald Dahl’s book Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and on screen in both 1971’s Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory and 2006’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Rather, it’s to tell a character-enriching backstory capturing a time when Willy Wonka’s initial big dreams changed the world for the better. That’s a smart path considering the former narrative track, seeing a beloved Willy Wonka morph into a world-weary, workaholic recluse, would be a flat-out bummer. Read More
Hayao Miyazaki movies, ranked from “nice and chill” to “this will ruin your day”
At this year’s Golden Globes, when accepting his award for Pinocchio, Guillermo del Toro defended the art of animation by arguing that it is “a medium” and not “a genre for kids” (an argument he stands by so much that it’s now his Twitter bio). Few filmmakers who illustrate (so to speak) that truth as clearly as Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki—one of the world’s most esteemed directors, animation or otherwise, and one who del Toro recently compared to Mozart and Van Gogh. Read More