Movies

Ron Howard’s Rush is one of those rare biopics that doesn’t just aim to commemorate a sporting rivalry but detonates it—the screen ignites with the combustive, contrary energies of two men locked in the dance of mortal ambition. It’s almost a shock to realize how few films about sports—especially Formula 1, that most hermetic and mathematical of sports—are ever this fevered, this alive. To watch Rush after the slick digital simulation of F1 (2025, all charisma and CGI with Brad Pitt doing his Chuck Yeager-for-the-Instagram-era routine) is to remember what the movies can do when they’re brave enough to embrace mess and contradiction, and to dignify sport’s delirium rather than just illustrate it.

Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is that rare confection—delicate in the details, unashamedly artificial, and yet so lovingly precise that each shot seems to have been placed by a court jeweler. Watching it, I found myself seduced, not by plot in the traditional sense, but by the madcap energy of images that kept assembling themselves before my eyes like intricate pastries in a display window. Every frame could hang comfortably—if not always respectfully—beside the garish masterworks of the fictional Zubrowkan aristocracy. To call Anderson’s style a signature is almost too tame; the man works in flourishes, borders, and uproarious symmetry, composing each sequence as if it’s to be beamed through time, immune to the half-life decay of fashion. I can say, with a degree of confidence seldom afforded to contemporary cinema, that The Grand Budapest Hotel will look as good—and taste as odd—in a century as it does today.

The first jolt of The Founder isn’t the sizzle of a burger hitting the griddle; it’s the smack of Michael Keaton walking into the frame like capitalism’s answer to a grinning shark. Keaton, who’s been on a late-career tear ever since Birdman, doesn’t merely play Ray Kroc; he seems to inhale him, then exhale an all-American fog of hustle, charm, and predation. If Daniel Day-Lewis gave us petroleum-slick ambition in There Will Be Blood and Jesse Eisenberg did the hoodie-clad math in The Social Network, Keaton supplies the ketchup-red swagger: a salesman’s smile that curdles, scene by scene, into something closer to manifest destiny with a milkshake machine.

There’s a peculiarly modern grandeur in the way The Two Popes pivots between the corridors of the Vatican and the haunted lamplight of Argentine history, but it’s not the stateliness of ancient marble: it’s the flicker of digital immediacy, the hum of a restless present intruding on institutional ritual. Director Fernando Meirelles takes a story marbled with centuries of doctrinal posturing and, with sly confidence, drapes it in the colors of both a Netflix true-crime doc and an old-master fresco. The contrast is invigorating, sometimes jarring—but rarely less than beautifully framed.

There’s nothing quite as dispiriting in cinema as a film that mistakes product placement for dramatic architecture, and with iHostage, director Bobby Boermans seems to treat the glass walls and minimalist spaces of Amsterdam’s Apple Store as if they lend themselves to the gravitas of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. But iHostage only proves that you can’t transcend your ingredients by virtue of logos and lighting alone. This movie—as colorless as the inside of an after-hours Apple showroom—manages to turn a genre built on suspense into an extended exercise in waiting for the Genius Bar to call your name.

It’s not often that a movie about numbers—balance sheets, bonds, the recondite alphabet soup of the financial world—feels like it could blow the roof off a theater. But with The Big Short, director Adam McKay, nimbly adapting Michael Lewis, tries to do precisely that. The film announces its bravura intentions from the opening moments: this isn’t just a disaster movie about the 2008 financial collapse, it’s a corrosive, postmodern vaudeville—with the housing market falling apart, and the fourth wall shattering right alongside it.

In The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi peels back the gold plating of 1970s New York to reveal an America composed of equal parts ambition and predatory cunning—think Gatsby’s green light flickering in the distance, but this time the dream has a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and the ghostly tutelage of Roy Cohn smoking in the corner. This isn’t just a biopic about Donald Trump’s rise: it’s an X-ray of the American id, and Abbasi seems determined to make us squeamish about what we see.

September 5 arrives on the screen as an urgent, bracing slab of historical drama—a kind of fevered docudrama pitched somewhere between the fretful hum of a 1970s control room and the icy dread pressing in from the world outside. Tim Fehlbaum’s direction plunges us into the back corridors of catastrophe: the Munich massacre at the '72 Olympics is no longer simply a horror recalled, but a media spectacle in real-time, filtered through the sweating brows and moral agonies of ABC Sports. Not since Lumet thrust us behind the cameras in Network have we felt the pulse of crisis with such claustrophobic vitality—and with almost as much queasy self-examination.

If Alex Parkinson’s Last Breath reminds us of anything, it’s that even the most harrowing true stories can be neatly packaged, pressed into narrative conformity, and, somewhere along the way, lose their vital spark. Parkinson, remaking his own 2019 documentary, attempts to fuse the cold sweat realism of survival thrillers like 127 Hours with the hallucinatory dread of The Abyss, but winds up stranding us not in the abyssal dark, but somewhere in the anodyne blue light of a well-meaning, mildly gripping genre exercise.

The Hundred-Foot Journey, directed by Lasse Hallström and released in 2014, serves up a delectable blend of comedy and drama, artfully adapting Richard C. Morais' 2010 novel. This charming film, produced by cinematic heavyweights Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, invites audiences into the vibrant world of culinary rivalry. Nestled in a picturesque French village, the plot unfolds around two restaurants positioned just a hundred feet apart—an Indian eatery, Maison Mumbai, established by the Kadam family, and an upscale French restaurant, Le Saule Pleureur, run by the formidable Madame Mallory. The film beautifully explores themes of cultural clash and collaboration, familial bonds, and the transforming power of food.