Peter Debruge Chief: Last News

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Cinema, as an artform, relies on two tools — sight and sound — to fool us into believing that all five of our senses are being stimulated. That makes Léa Mysius’ more-intriguing-than-successful supernatural thriller, “The Five Devils,” a very curious animal indeed, since it focuses on a young girl with an exceptionally strong sense of smell, a phenomenon its director can show but never properly reproduce. Eight-year-old Vicky (Sally Dramé) would be right at home as one of the young mutants in an “X-Men” movie, so hypersensitive are her olfactory skills. A future perfume designer perhaps, the frizzy-haired kid spends her free time collecting odoriferous scraps from her life and environment and storing them in neatly labeled jars. When her mother Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) discovers Vicky’s gift during a walk in the woods, she blindfolds her daughter and tries to hide under a pile of wet leaves. Sniffing the air, Vicky manages to locate Joanne almost immediately.

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.”

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Check out the brain on Barbie! Sure, she’s just a doll, but that doesn’t mean she has to be an airhead. Therein lies “Lady Bird” director Greta Gerwig’s inspired, 21st-century solution to bringing one of America’s most iconic playthings to life on the big screen. Combine that with the casting of Margot Robbie in the title role, and “Barbie” is already starting out on the right, perfectly arched foot. So what if this high-concept comedy falls a bit flat in the final stretch? Barbie’s strength as a brand comes from her aspirational appeal. While some have rightly criticized the doll for setting unrealistic beauty standards, Barbie also showed girls they can do and be anything, as different models have portrayed her as president, a rocket scientist, even trans. You know who else sets unrealistic beauty standards? Movie stars. Like Barbie, they serve as role models, which is what makes Gerwig’s take on the ultra-popular toy line so darn smart. Robbie might be a dead-ringer for Barbie, but her moxie powers the performance. Gerwig has made the kind of family film she surely wishes had been available to her when she was a girl, sneaking a message (several of them, really) inside Barbie’s hollow hourglass figure.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Here’s the funny thing about “The Little Mermaid”: Ariel spends most of the film wishing she were human, wondering what it’s like to go walking around on those … what do you call ’em? But practically every girl who sees the movie dreams of swimming in the opposite direction — which is to say, they want to be mermaids … or else an animated Disney princess. “The seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake,” as the song goes, and the most important thing about remaking this particular favorite for a fresh generation is maintaining the fantasy that any of us can be Ariel, when in fact, it takes a one-in-a-million talent like Halle Bailey to fill those flippers on-screen.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Poor Beau. Nearly half a century on Earth, and he’s never really lived. Sure, he was born — that much director Ari Aster depicts from Beau’s point of view at the outset of his wildly self-indulgent and frequently surreal third feature, “Beau Is Afraid,” lingering long enough to witness the infant’s umbilical cord being snipped — but what has Beau done with his life since then? Can it be said that he ever really developed an identity apart from his successful single mom, Mona Wasserman, who haunts the film for the better part of three hours before finally revealing herself? Not since “Psycho” has an off-screen mother loomed so large over a film’s protagonist, played here by Joaquin Phoenix, cowering from the world. The Hitchcock comparison could be misleading, since Aster (who helmed indie studio A24’s two most successful horror movies, “Hereditary” and “Midsommar”) makes a surprising tonal shift away from traditional nightmare material for this deranged road trip, which follows Beau cross-country — and through several substitute families — to face his intimidating Jewish mom.