Peter Debruge Chief: Last News

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic People tend to overuse the term “mind-blowing” when hyping sci-fi movies, but in the case of Flying Lotus’ visually audacious “Ash,” the word feels apt. Weak on plot but pretty as a sunset (on the whole human race?), “Ash” opens with a shot of the cosmic turmoil swarming inside the brain of an astronaut far, far away from earth, then pulls back abruptly, zooming out through her pupil to reveal the look of pure panic on the face of sole survivor Riya Ortiz (Eiza González).

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Pitched somewhere between science-fiction and fable, director Gabriel Mascaro’s “The Blue Trail” finds a beacon of optimism within its own dystopian view of the future. Set in the director’s native Brazil — and showcasing the astonishing natural beauty (side by side with decay) of the Amazon in every high-definition frame — the film centers a 77-year-old woman, Tereza (Denise Weinberg), in a society that has deemed anyone above the age of 75 an impediment to its economic success.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Boundaries are constantly blurring in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” the revolutionary mid-’80s film that became a Kander and Ebb musical, and that cunningly (and stunningly) morphs back to the big screen, courtesy of “Dreamgirls” director Bill Condon. Confined mostly to an Argentine detention facility in 1983, at the height of the country’s Dirty War, the show is the flip side of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita,” focusing on the brutal military regime that followed Eva Péron’s ouster.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Life peaked in high school for Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg), whereas then-sweetheart Roxanne Hall (Halle Berry) managed to escape dead-end New Jersey and travel the world. While he joined the local construction workers union, she joined the Union, a clandestine spy group about whom Roxanne blandly claims, “Half the intelligence community don’t know we exist, and the other half regret finding out.” A lazy wish-fulfillment fantasy from Netflix’s star-service department, “The Union” is actually the story of a reunion — Mike and Roxanne’s — set against the backdrop of a crisis we’ve seen one too many times in recent spy movies. For Wahlberg, the wish in question is wanting to be James Bond, which will never happen for the Dorchester-born American.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Different as they may be in all other respects, Hollywood studios and die-hard “Borderlands” fans have one thing in common: They’re both in it for the loot. You see, “Borderlands” is what’s called a “looter shooter,” meaning that players blast their way through exotic worlds (in this case, the heavily guarded and treasure-rich planet of Pandora) hoping to pick up goodies that will make their characters more powerful.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Trailers make “Fly Me to the Moon” look cute at best, when in fact it’s quite clever: a smarter-than-it-sounds, space-age sparring match of the Rock Hudson/Doris Day variety, in which the honest-to-a-fault NASA launch director responsible for sending Apollo 11 into orbit (a straight-faced Channing Tatum) goes head-to-head with a mendacious Madison Avenue spin doctor (Scarlett Johansson, delightfully wily). Set during the first half of 1969, director Greg Berlanti’s high-concept screwball comedy values chemistry over history, bending the facts to suggest a fresh set of stakes for the operation, where romance fuels a rocket to the moon.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Look up “cartoon villain” in the dictionary, and you’re likely to find a picture of David Zaslav. Since taking over Warner Bros. Discovery, he’s orphaned not one, but two feature-length Looney Tunes projects.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Located alongside a pristine alpine lake in the south of France, the Annecy Film Festival is considered a mecca by many in the animation community. It’s the kind of place you must visit at least once to meet others who wor­ship animation.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Death takes the most unexpected of forms in “Tuesday,” a sui generis debut from Croatian director Daina O. Pusić. Her strikingly original, if occasionally counterintuitive film brings the central idea of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” into the modern era — trying to stall Death, if only for a matter of hours — anchored by a committed performance from a curiously miscast Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Set during the Civil War, a long way from the front lines, Roberto Minervini’s “The Damned” continues the Italian helmer’s career-long examination of the rifts and affinities between overlooked segments of American society. Apart from one long, destabilizing battle with an unseen adversary, the portrayal is a relatively peaceful one, following a group of Union soldiers assigned to scout the Northwestern frontier in 1862.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Anyone who’s ever played tennis knows the game starts with love and escalates fast. In Luca Guadagnino’s hip, sexy and ridiculously overheated “Challengers,” the rivals are former doubles partners Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), best friends since the age of 12, who went their separate ways after both players fell for the same woman. Patrick got there first, but Art wound up marrying her — and their sense of competition has only intensified since.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Reviews will have to wait till the Cannes Film Festival kicks off on May 14, but it’s not too early for a critic to weigh in on this year’s lineup — or how it looks on paper, at least, and what the selection might say about the state of things. At the top of the press conference, festival director Thierry Frémaux noted that last year would be a tough edition to top.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Music has an almost magical way of transporting us back to the moment in our lives when we heard it: the pop song that underscored your first kiss, the one that played at your graduation and so on. In mopey, dopey YA weepie “The Greatest Hits,” writer-director Ned Benson takes that idea as literally as possible, treating specific tunes as triggers that launch Harriet (Lucy Boynton) back into her past, blowing her away — like that seated guy in the classic Maxell campaign — into the tragic former relationship with hunky Max (square-jawed future Superman, David Corenswet), who died in a car crash.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Movie buffs may recognize the name Gustav Möller because his debut feature, “The Guilty,” played Sundance, then went on to inspire an English-language remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The film famously took place on one end of an emergency services line, as an overcommitted police officer tried to rescue a distressed caller whose crisis wasn’t nearly as straightforward as it sounded.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Chances are, you know someone like “Quiz Lady” Anne Yum. As played by Awkwafina, this socially awkward young woman works a boring CPA job by day, doing her best to blend in with the gray walls of her cubicle.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Ultra-prolific writer-director, fiercely independent producer, pioneering entrepreneur, self-made studio chief. Any and all of these labels apply to Tyler Perry, though the one he chooses for himself is “Maxine’s Baby” — the same moniker that documentary duo Gelila Bekele and Armani Ortiz opted to give their motivational profile of the boundary-obliterating multi-hyphenate, who comes off disarmingly humble for someone who’s achieved so much.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Mousy and diminutive, to the point that she practically disappears beneath a frizzy bramble of brown hair, Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci) adores movies. In “Finally Dawn,” she stumbles into one, drafted into being a featured extra on a swords-and-sandals epic shooting at Cinecittà. Doing so makes Mimosa a potential target in a meandering true-crime-adjacent period piece inspired by the death of Wilma Montesi, which plays like an Italian spin on the Black Dahlia case.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Harmony Korine used to be a movie junkie, someone who’d watch anything and everything. These days, when people recommend a movie, “I’ll look at it and I feel nothing, like dead inside,” says the guy whose own films, from “Spring Breakers” to the controversial screenplay for Larry Clark’s “Kids,” are nothing if not disruptive. “Watching a lot of this shit, you really feel the algorithms,” he says the day before receiving the Pardo d’onore Manor prize at the Locarno Film Festival.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Next time someone wistfully insists, “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” why not point that nostalgic cinephile to the work of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon? The Belgium-based creative couple are almost single-handedly keeping the classic burlesque tradition alive on screen — if the word “single-handedly” can fairly be used to describe a near-silent comic duo with four hands between them, plus a growing company of collaborators (including dancer Kaori Ito) and a prosthetic arm with a mind of its own. In “The Falling Star,” Abel and Gordon bring their old-school comedic sensibility to what could loosely be described as a detective story, told in a film noir style punctuated with flashes of color: a red dress, a tiny green car, a bright yellow scooter.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Audiences who’ve attended film festivals or cultural events in the past few years have no doubt heard their share of land acknowledgements, in which the hosts make a point of recognizing the Indigenous tribes who served as the traditional custodians of the space on which they’ve gathered. Though intended to convey respect and awareness, these messages appear to have a kind of triggering effect on some people, who react as if witnessing the first step on a slippery slope to the more controversial idea of reparations. In “Lakota Nation vs. United States,” land acknowledgements are the main attraction, and reparations may well be the end goal. Co-directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli, this essential and largely unprecedented Native-issues essay film takes a head-on approach, citing “white fragility” and America’s general unwillingness to confront its treatment of Indigenous peoples as obstacles to resolving decades of unfair treatment. While the subject has been well-covered in other places, this lucid and ultimately uplifting documentary feels nothing short of definitive as the duo condenses a wide range of philosophical, spiritual and historical concerns into a thoughtful (and artful) two-hour package.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Dig deep enough through the eBay auction site, and you can still find Beanie Babies listed for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nobody’s buying them at that price, but it’s a reminder that there was a moment in the not-so-distant past when the cheaply made stuffed animals fetched outrageous sums. The phenomenon, while it lasted, was fueled largely by the illusion of scarcity, as collectors chased what they believed to be limited numbers of the highly coveted critters. Were they really so rare? “The Beanie Bubble” doesn’t have any particularly interesting insights into the craze, focusing instead on their inventor, disgraced self-made toy mogul Ty Warner, portrayed by Zach Galifianakis in one of the discomfort comedian’s most skin-crawling performances to date. Tonally, the movie walks a tricky line between easy-target satire and female-empowering corporate case study, falling into the overcrowded junk-culture nostalgia-porn category so recently represented by “Tetris,” “Air,” “BlackBerry” and “Flamin’ Hot.”