Peter Debruge Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Four years ago, before COVID turned everything upside-down, a new Asian masterpiece world premiered virtually unnoticed at the Toronto Film Festival. I’m referring to “A Sun,” a multi-faceted Taiwanese family saga from director Chung Mong-Hong that seemed to shift and evolve as it unfolded, challenging what audiences though they knew about the characters.

Sophia Scorziello editor Benedict Cumberbatch stars as a rich London bachelor in the trailer for Wes Anderson’s upcoming short film “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” Adapted from a collection of short stories, titled “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More,” by acclaimed children’s fiction writer Roald Dahl, Anderson’s film premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival this year — prompting a four-minute ovation — and will release on Netflix on Sept. 27. “It’s hard to say whether Wes Anderson’s sensibility is perfectly suited to that of Roald Dahl or the other way around,” wrote Peter Debruge in his review out of Venice.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Early in his career, comedian Kumail Nanjiani did a bit about a new drug called “cheese,” which, if you break down the ingredients, turns out to be Tylenol PM mixed with heroin. “So really, it’s heroin,” he joked. “Heroin’s doing the heavy lifting.” That line was going through my mind as I watched “Pain Hustlers,” a garish and, yes, mostly painful Big Pharma satire from director David Yates, who (“The Legend of Tarzan” aside) spent the last 15 years making increasingly convoluted Harry Potter movies.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic While it’s easy to imagine lawyers screaming “objection, your honor!” to the exaggerated courtroom theatrics of “The Burial,” good luck convincing audiences that this David v. Goliath legal showdown between a small-time Southern funeral home operator and an unethical Canadian billionaire should have played out any other way.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Does it count as a white savior movie if the white character is the one who needs saving? In “Next Goal Wins,” the world’s top-grossing indigenous director, Taika Waititi, retells the story of how American Samoa went from having the world’s worst soccer team to, well, not the worst. While a white man was involved, the movie — which suggests how a film like “Cool Runnings” might be made with 30 years’ more cultural enlightenment — is mostly about how their coach (Michael Fassbender) needs an attitude adjustment. Come to think of it, that’s essentially the formula for most white savior movies.

Michaela Zee “Haunted Mansion” is ready to spook Disney+ customers in October. Disney’s kid-friendly horror comedy, which is inspired by the classic theme park attraction, will hit the streamer on Oct. 4.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Just when you thought Nicolas Cage’s filmography couldn’t get any weirder, along comes Kristoffer Borgli’s “Dream Scenario” to mess with your head. Cage plays a character you probably wouldn’t notice in real life: Paul Matthews. Schlubby, balding, in wrinkled pants and brown leather loafers, he’s a tenured professor at a university you’ve never heard of, droning on year after year about collective consciousness and the wisdom of the herd.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In Cord Jefferson’s idea-dense “American Fiction,” no one wants to publish literary professor Thelonious Ellison’s latest novel. Thelonious — or “Monk” to his friends — has delivered a modern reworking of Aeschylus’ “The Persians” (hardly bestseller material to begin with), but all the industry can see is the color of his skin.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Finestkind,” the name of both Brian Helgeland’s new film and the high-line fishing boat Tommy Lee Jones captains within it, is one of those words that New Englanders find hard to define, but seem to have no trouble using in a sentence. It means quality — of fish, of people, of principles — and it sets the bar for the shaggy family portrait Helgeland crafts around two half-brothers wrestling with their place in the blue-collar New Bedford community. The movie, alas, is just so-so, tripping over its own feet for the first couple reels until such time as the siblings cross the Northern Line to (illegally) dredge for scallops in Canadian waters, and then it gets good.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Memory” feels like the “Silver Linings Playbook” of Michel Franco’s career: an unexpectedly accessible romance between two damaged human beings, from an independent director who’s been known to put characters through some of life’s most punishing indignities. The previous film of Franco’s that it most resembles is “Chronic,” though the tough-love auteur spares us the bummer ending this time around. In that movie, he followed a hospice nurse through his rounds, then abruptly cut to black when the guy was sideswiped by a car.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic What are the odds that two openly gay cut-ups doing a raunchy half-hour musical comedy routine in a Gristede’s grocery store would somehow convince “Borat” director Larry Charles to turn their show, “Fucking Identical Twins,” into a feature-length A24 movie? You’d stand a better chance playing the lottery than predicting the path “Dicks: The Musical” took to reach the big screen — which is exactly why this twisted cross between “The Parent Trap” and “Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy” seems destined for cult status. The absurdist brainchild of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, “Dicks” is an unapologetically puerile, hard-R novelty that’s just lo-fi enough to maintain its underground cred.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic More often than not, Hayao Miyazaki’s heroes have been young women — from Ponyo to Princess Mononoke, mischief-seeking Kiki to the two sisters spirited away by furry forest guardians in “My Neighbor Totoro.” That’s the most obvious departure the anime maestro’s fans will notice in “The Boy and the Heron”: It’s about a boy, Mahito Maki (voiced by Soma Santoki), grieving the loss of his mother during wartime. He’s surrounded by women, but this quest falls on the shoulders of a character who’s reportedly closer to Miyazaki than any of his previous protagonists.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In “Origin,” Ava DuVernay weaves a centuries- and continents-spanning narrative feature around the ideas of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson, who rejects the word “racism.” It’s not that she doesn’t believe that racism exists; rather, she doesn’t think that racism alone can explain the inequity in human society — the way America’s founders could have written “all men are created equal” and meant something so different. As Isabel Wilkerson, the protagonist (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who is based on Isabel Wilkerson, the author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” puts it to her editor (Blair Underwood), “Racism as the primary language to understand everything is insufficient.” And later, to her sister (Niecy Nash-Betts): “We have to consider oppression in a way that does not centralize race.” The book “Caste” was Wilkerson’s answer to that challenge, drawing connections between discrimination in the United States and how Nazi Germany invented a social hierarchy to justify the Holocaust, which she links in turn to the rigid system of caste in India.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic If the prospect of being stuck in a New York City taxi with two characters for roughly 90 minutes doesn’t sound like your kind of movie, then you’re seriously underestimating “Daddio” writer-director Christy Hall’s ability to keep you riveted for the entire ride. There’s a challenge you could give any first-time filmmaker: Using a yellow cab as the only location, make a film that challenges people’s expectations of how men and women relate to one another.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s not easy to upstage Martin Luther King Jr., but that’s exactly what leading man Colman Domingo does in “Rustin,” a movie named for the civil rights pioneer who gave King the platform to speak his most famous four words: “I have a dream.” That day, Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the man standing just over King’s right shoulder — quite literally, his right-hand man — was one Bayard Rustin.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic I have seen the future of cinema, and it is “Aggro Dr1ft,” a neon-hued outlaw eyegasm from the director of ”Spring Breakers.” There will likely never be another film like it. Even so, it’s clear that Harmony Korine’s immersive iridescent plunge into the world and psyche of a serial killer points the way down fresh avenues for the medium to explore.

Marta Balaga Venice Film Festival’s red carpet swapped glamour for politics on Saturday, hosting a flash mob in solidarity with the Iranian people, fighting against repression, as well as filmmakers who are being oppressed – and arrested – because of their work. Such as “Leila’s Brothers” director Saeed Roustaee, recently sentenced to six months in prison for showing the film in Cannes. He has also been banned from making movies.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Don’t let the word “bike” fool you. In Jeff Nichols’ “The Bikeriders,” the wheels in question are choppers — good, all-American motorcycles, built from the ground up by tough guys in leather jackets — and the “club” they’re a part of is really more of a gang.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Flannery O’Connor saw folks in a way few writers did. She saw through them, past their petty prejudices and hollow pieties, to the less civilized selves they so desperately tried to keep under wraps.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s almost cosmic, the way kids start out as nothing more than a twinkle in their mother’s eye. Then they’re born into heavenly little bodies, orbiting the adults who made them like tiny moons, until such time that they overcome their parents’ gravitational pull. So it is with “Janet Planet,” one of those intensely personal portraits of childhood that we’ve come to expect — and appreciate — from A24, the indie studio behind “Moonlight” and “Lady Bird” and “Aftersun” and “Eighth Grade” (the example this one most resembles).

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s hard to say whether Wes Anderson’s sensibility is perfectly suited to that of Roald Dahl or the other way around. Whichever it may be, the “Fantastic Mr. Fox” author’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” seems to have found its ideal screen incarnation in the “Fantastic Mr.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic We’ve all seen our share of stories about inspirational teachers. “The Holdovers” is dedicated to the opposite sort: a hard-ass named Paul Hunham whom everyone hates. The feeling is mutual, as Mr.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The best scene of “Call Me by Your Name” has nothing to do with fruit, but a frank father-son conversation. Brittle to the point of breaking, Timothée Chalamet sits on the couch, arms crossed, resenting his dad for acknowledging the source of his anguish. “You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special, what you two had was,” Michael Stuhlbarg tells the boy.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s the moment of truth for Emerald Fennell, whose “Promising Young Woman” established the actor-turned-auteur (last seen playing pregnant doll Midge in “Barbie”) as a formidable new filmmaking talent. Building on the barbed sensibility she established with “Killing Eve,” the writer-director’s zeitgeist-throttling feature debut lured audiences like a bright red candy apple, leaving them with plenty to debate after the cyanide-laced sugar high wore off.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Just who is the Equalizer? Despite a hit TV show in the 1980s and another with Queen Latifah still running, that title has become synonymous with Denzel Washington, who returns as government-assassin-turned-vigilante Robert McCall. Billed as the final chapter in a trilogy, “The Equalizer 3” sees McCall finding community in a picturesque part of Italy and being forced to protect its people from the mafia. The film also reteams Washington with director Antoine Fuqua for the fifth time (following “Training Day,” “The Magnificent Seven” and the two previous installments), and their comfort with one another ensures a seamless action movie that might not attract new fans, but should play well to those already fond of this franchise.

Tatiana Siegel “Cat Person,” which launched with a bang at Sundance, will be released in theaters on Oct. 6 through Rialto Pictures. The wild thriller — which stars Emilia Jones (“CODA”) and Nicholas Braun (“Succession”) as a couple whose signals cross, leading to disturbing interactions — made its world premiere to a huge response at the festival in January.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In out-there Estonian comedy “The Invisible Fight,” a clueless Russian border guard somehow escapes a surprise attack by three formidable Chinese action figures — gravity-defying kung fu warriors who swoop in out of nowhere, blasting Black Sabbath on their bright red boombox — so he does what anyone in his position would do: He resolves to become an Orthodox monk. Huh? “I guess God has other plans for you,” a less-fortunate comrade wheezes with his dying breath, setting up one of the oddest plots audiences are likely to find on the art-house circuit this year.

Michaela Zee Craig Schulz, the son of “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz, is hopeful a new movie based on the comic strip will happen.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It would come as no surprise to learn that “Back on the Strip” started out as a “Magic Mike” parody. I’m not saying that it did. (The main character is named Merlin, not Mike, after all.) But what else could explain the bizarrely literal premise of an ensemble indie comedy in which our hero is a wannabe magician who heads to Vegas hoping to be the next David Copperfield, only to wind up shaking his wand for a Chippendales-style male dance revue instead? What makes “Strip” so consistently funny for most of its too-long two-hour running time isn’t Merlin’s lame prestidigi-dream (that part feels like co-writers Chris Sanders and Eric Daniel have been watching too many Nickelodeon movies) but the sorry state of his fellow dancers: a has-been crew called the Chocolate Chips.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “Essential Truths of the Lake” is the last thing most people would expect from Lav Diaz: a direct follow-up to his previous film, “When the Waves Are Gone.” It’s not a sequel, per se (this one actually comes earlier), but they are connected, with a third movie featuring the same disillusioned police detective in the works. The Filipino filmmaker, whose pokey social critiques run anywhere from three to 11 hours, established the character of Lt.