
Wolf Man, Leigh Whannell, and the Universal Monster Problem
Leigh Whannell's January 2025 Wolf Man cost about $25 million and grossed about $36 million globally. The film is not the disaster the numbers suggest. The strategy around it is.

Leigh Whannell's January 2025 Wolf Man cost about $25 million and grossed about $36 million globally. The film is not the disaster the numbers suggest. The strategy around it is.

Sean Baker's Brooklyn fairytale won five Academy Awards on the strength of two minutes of silence in a parked car. The film is more interested in what that silence costs.

Kristoffer Borgli's A24 feature used Nicolas Cage as the vehicle for a media satire that landed in late 2023 and has aged, through 2024 and into 2025, into a specifically sharper object than the reviews initially registered.

Eighteen months after Coralie Fargeat's prosthetic-heavy fable drew both Oscar nominations and walkouts, the strange alchemy of The Substance has only clarified. The film is less about Hollywood than it looks, and more about what we're allowed to say with bodies on screen.

Eggers' remake was received with admiration rather than fervour, a proper film from a proper filmmaker. Sixteen months later, it looks like the serious piece the year needed, and the one we were too cool to love properly at the time.

John Crowley's third collaboration with A24 runs the ten-year relationship in a non-linear shuffle, and the shuffle is what makes the film survive its cancer-drama premise. Just barely, but it does.

A year after The Brutalist swept its technical categories and divided audiences, its length has stopped looking like a gamble and started looking like the point. An argument for the long film in a short-film decade.

A year after Sean Baker's fourth feature took five Oscars including Best Picture, the predictable backlash has arrived on schedule. Here's why the Academy, improbably, got it right.

Eighteen months after Todd Phillips' much-hated sequel opened to a $37 million weekend and a 30% audience score, it is time to autopsy the corpse. The film isn't good. It also isn't quite what you've been told.

Two years after Challengers arrived in its pastel pressure-cooker, the film's trick is clearer: it is not really about tennis. It is about what love looks like when three people are too competitive to admit they love anything but competition.
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