Happy New Year, Polygon readers! 2024 is dead and gone; Long live 2025, or at least for the next… *looks at calendar* 361 days.
The year is off to a strong start with a slew of highly anticipated theatrical releases, including Steven Soderbergh's. PresenceLeigh Whannell werewolfand Den of Thieves 2: Panther. However, if you're looking for something to watch from the comfort of your home, there are just as many options to choose from, if not more! This month, we have a Christopher Nolan masterpiece that recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, Paul Thomas Anderson's breakthrough debut starring Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds, and arguably the best Batman movie ever made.
Let's dive in and see what this month has in store for us!
Editor's Choice: Interstellar
Image: Warner Home Video
Gender: science fiction drama
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain
It's been a decade since the initial and wildly successful launch of Interstellar. Now, just a few weeks after its return to theaters in IMAX and 70mm, it is on Netflix for you to enjoy as many times as you want. But if you haven't seen it recently and missed the theatrical revival, you should still revisit Nolan's galactic masterpiece.
There are many good reasons to give Interstellar another look, including the fact that it's probably even better than you remember. But in the years since oppenheimerit has become clear that Interstellar It marks an interesting midpoint in Nolan's career. The director has always been fascinated by time, but this is the first point in his career where he really begins to examine how time affects the humanity of his characters. It's a much more mature and dramatic approach to the concept than films like Beginningbut it's also a critical experiment on the path to making his Best Picture-winning biopic. —Austen Goslin
Gender: science fiction drama
Director: Lars von Trier
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexander Skarsgård
Lars von Trier Melancholia starring Kirsten Dunst (Marie Antoinette) as Justine, a young bride who suffers a depressive episode on the eve of her wedding. When a rogue planet known as Melancholy appears hurtling toward Earth on a collision course, Justine's sister Claire struggles to maintain her composure in the face of impending disaster, while Justine navigates a strange euphoric resignation that washes over her in the final moments. days of the planet. Melancholia is an achingly beautiful, bleak and heartbreaking journey through depression and ennui and one of von Trier's best films to date. —Toussaint Egan
Image:
Gender: heist drama
Director: michael mann
Cast: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Tom Sizemore
Michael Mann's 1995 crime thriller stars Al Pacino as Vincent Hanna, an eccentric and hypercompetent police detective caught in a tense cat-and-mouse fight, and Robert De Niro as Neil McCauley, a career criminal. It's a movie made up of moments and scenes that could comprise an entire third act finale in a lesser film. Here, they exist in a triumphant ensemble of carefully interlocking components, working together with the precision of a Swiss watch.
Pacino and De Niro give two of their best performances as a pair of obsessive workaholics whose mastery of their craft comes at the cost of everything they love or hold dear. Dante Spinotti's cinematography transforms the vast cityscape of Los Angeles into a brilliant expanse of lights flickering across the surface of a sea of total darkness, a den of moral inequity from which no soul emerges completely clean or unscathed. -TEA
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Image: Warner Bros.
Gender: superhero drama
Directors: Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm
Cast: Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Dana Delany
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm It's one of the best Batman movies of all time, period. Initially produced by Batman: the animated series Producers Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm as a direct-to-video feature film before being released in theaters, 1993s. ghost mask It pits the Dark Knight against a mysterious new enemy alongside his old enemy, the Joker. The film explores the character's inherent tragedy and history with a level of nuance and depth that few subsequent incarnations (live-action or otherwise) have successfully attempted since, evoking a portrait of fatalistic loss and heartbreak that endures to the present day. today. -TEA
Image: Warner Home Video
Gender: Drama
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds
There is no other movie like boogie nights. Paul Thomas Anderson's '70s-set epic is both one of the funniest films ever made and one of the most tragic.
The film follows nearly a dozen characters in and around the adult film industry just as the arrival of mass-produced home videos took over the old-world art that made them fall in love with the industry in the first place. Anderson presents each of these characters, and their complications and flaws, with care and love, building a beautiful world of found family and the occasional tragedy that can only occur when one era of art gives way to another. —AG
Image: 20th century studies
Gender: Sci-fi action
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton
This is a bit of a complicated recommendation, not because there is anything wrong with Minority Reportbut rather because it's the perfect starting point for recommending an entire series of films highlighted on the Criterion Channel this month: Surveillance Cinema. This characteristic of Criterion has to do with the state of surveillance and the characters who have the suspicion that they are being observed. Includes an excellent mix of absolute classics (THANK YOU 1138, The conversation, Double Body, Gattaca, The Truman Show) and movies you may not have seen before (The Anderson Tapes, death guard, Sliver, The end of violenceand demon lover).
Also included in this series is Steven Spielberg's film. Minority reportAnd what better place to start when talking about surveillance? This paranoid thriller follows John Anderton (Tom Cruise) in a near future where almost all crime is prevented by predictions from a few individuals with psychic powers maintained by the state. However, when the system accuses John of a pre-crime, he questions whether or not his society's justice system is completely fair and sets out to prove his innocence. —AG