Luca Guadagnino’s CHALLENGERS is a ravenously sexy good time, the most fun I’ve had at a new movie in months. Zendaya, Josh O’Connor & Mike Faist all deliver power serves and the pounding techno score is an all-timer. Do not miss this. My The Hollywood Reporter review
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Lots of promising entries lined up for #Cannes2024 . Especially looking forward to new films from Sean Baker, Yorgos Lanthimos, Jia Zhangke, Karim Aïnouz, David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader, Andrea Arnold & Jacques Audiard. Not to mention Coppola & Miller
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CHALLENGERS, ‘70s style, with Olivia Newton-John, Helen Reddy, Minnie Riperton and Linda Ronstadt. Imagine the theme song

I prefer the IMAX poster for CHALLENGERS to the regular one. Even if it looks like a deodorant commercial

I’m ridiculously late to this party, but vacation finally gave me the time to devour Mark Harris’s superbly illuminating Mike Nichols biography. A book as erudite, entertaining and complex as its subject, packed with forensic detail about making movies and theater. Loved it

I’ve walked through this Orb-Weaver Spider’s web in my Bondi host’s back garden (and freaked out) three times. (Yes, quite stupid.) She industriously rebuilds every night and then rests by day, hiding from birds under hibiscus tree leaves while waiting for food delivery. Clever

Bondi Beach on a perfect late-summer morning

Patonga, just outside Sydney. Visiting friends in breathtakingly pretty places like this always makes me wonder what I’m doing in NYC

A suitably hypnotic poster for an unsettling stunner of a movie. Beautiful. Delighted to be quoted on this one

Alice Rohrwacher reaffirms her gifts as an idiosyncratic explorer of the liminal spaces between past and present in the beguiling LA CHIMERA, one of 2023's most memorably unique films, finally hitting U.S. theaters on Friday. My The Hollywood Reporter review
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On Stephen Sondheim's birthday, reposting my The Hollywood Reporter appreciation of the nonpareil genius composer, whose loss in 2021 hasn't in the least diminished his influence over American musical theater
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At least one good reason to look forward to #Cannes2024 . Hopefully there'll be more

Another glamorous Sydney neighbor

Loved watching Jeremy Strong & Michael Imperioli clash as brothers with conflicting agendas in Sam Gold & Amy Herzog's crackling Broadway revival of AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, an 1882 Ibsen drama that more than ever seems a play for our time. My The Hollywood Reporter review
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Rose Glass follows her superb horror debut, SAINT MAUD, with some hard-driving lesbian pulp fiction, LOVE LIES BLEEDING, now in theaters. My The Hollywood Reporter review of a movie that cranks up the potent KStew concentrate to 11
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New neighbor where I’m staying in Sydney. Gorgeous but quite imperious

Regina King brings power to SHIRLEY, John Ridley’s account of Shirley Chisholm’s historic 1972 run for president. But after the charged dialectics of ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI, I kept wishing King had directed this Netflix film herself. My The Hollywood Reporter review
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One of the most aesthetically beautiful and soul-stirring docs of 2024, on Criterion Channel from March 19

The depth of feeling in Bernardo Britto's near-future sci-fi, OMNI LOOP, crept up on me, as did the affecting work of two gifted actors who find harmony in their contrasting styles, Mary-Louise Parker & Ayo Edebiri. My The Hollywood Reporter review of the #SXSW2024 premiere
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Still thinking about Park Avenue Armory's ILLINOISE, the profoundly affecting expression of the joys and sorrows of youth set to Sufjan Stevens' beguiling concept album. Justin Peck is a genius. Can someone do 'Carey & Lowell' next? A fully-formed narrative begging to be dramatized.