Featured Reviews — Page 17

critic The Odyssey

The Odyssey Review: Christopher Nolan's Homer Is a Technical Marvel — and a Box-Office Event

★★★★½ 4.5/5

Shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film, Christopher Nolan's Homer adaptation is a genuine formal event — now confirmed as a record opening and audience favorite — even if the epic's scale occasionally outpaces its heart.

A staggering technical achievement, Nolan's highest-rated film with critics, and a rare A-CinemaScore blockbuster audiences are actively recommending. See it on the biggest screen you can find.

critic Anora

Anora Review: A Screwball Fairy Tale That Curdles Into Heartbreak

★★★★★ 5/5

Sean Baker's Anora begins as a Cinderella lark and detonates into something far sadder — a whirlwind of comedy, class fury and tenderness carried by a fearless, star-making Mikey Madison. The Palme d'Or and Best Picture were no accident.

Baker's finest film — a rowdy, big-hearted, formally exhilarating study of who gets to dream in America. An instant classic.

critic The Legend of Maula Jatt

The Legend of Maula Jatt Review: Pakistani Cinema's Thunderous Great Leap Forward

★★★★½ 4.5/5

Bilal Lashari's The Legend of Maula Jatt reinvents a Punjabi folk legend as a blood-soaked operatic epic — a watershed for Pakistani cinema, staged with staggering visual ambition and crowned by two titanic performances.

A roaring, gorgeously mounted mythic epic that vaults Pakistani filmmaking onto the world stage. Maximalist, thrilling and unmissable.

critic

Arcane Review: The Video-Game Adaptation That Became High Art

★★★★★ 5/5

Netflix's Arcane shatters the curse of the video-game adaptation with hand-crafted, painterly animation and a genuinely tragic story of two sisters divided by a city's class fault line.

A staggering technical and emotional achievement that redefines what animated television can be. Unmissable, whether or not you know the game.

critic The Brutalist

The Brutalist Review: An Immigrant Epic Built to the Scale of Its Ambition

★★★★★ 5/5

Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is a 215-minute, VistaVision-shot epic of immigration, art and the cruelty buried in American patronage — a monumental swing of a film anchored by a towering Adrien Brody.

A staggeringly ambitious old-Hollywood epic with a modern conscience — occasionally overreaching, but unforgettable. Major, muscular filmmaking.

critic I'm Still Here

I'm Still Here Review: Endurance as Quiet Resistance

★★★★★ 5/5

Walter Salles's I'm Still Here recounts a Brazilian family's survival under dictatorship through the steady, unbreakable presence of a mother — a restrained true story crowned by a luminous Fernanda Torres and a deserved Oscar for International Feature.

A quietly devastating portrait of grief and defiance, anchored by one of the finest performances of its year. Essential, humane cinema.

critic

Shōgun Review: The Epic That Dethrones the White Savior

★★★★★ 5/5

FX's Shōgun reinvents Clavell's doorstop novel by quietly shifting the camera off its English castaway and onto the Japanese court around him — a political epic told, at last, from the inside, in its own language.

A sumptuous, intelligent triumph that reclaims a colonial-era story for the culture it depicts. Prestige television at its most assured.

critic

Pachinko Review: A Diaspora Epic Told in Three Languages and Four Generations

★★★★★ 5/5

Apple TV+'s Pachinko braids decades of Korean diaspora history into a single family's endurance, colour-coding its Korean and Japanese dialogue to make the politics of language itself part of the drama.

A ravishing, deeply humane epic of survival and identity — one of the most ambitious and moving series of its era. Extraordinary.

critic

Breaking Bad Review: The Great American Tragedy in Chemistry Class

★★★★★ 5/5

Breaking Bad is the most rigorously constructed character study television has produced — a Western dressed as a crime drama, tracking one man's transformation from cornered everyman into apex predator with the merciless logic of a chemical reaction.

The benchmark against which all prestige drama is measured — flawlessly plotted, visually audacious, and morally uncompromising. Essential.