Steve Pond
Steve Pond
Steve Pond’s inside look at the artistry and insanity of the awards race, drawn from more than three decades of obsessively chronicling the Oscars and the entertainment industry.
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‘EPiC’ Review: Baz Luhrmann Doesn’t Need Austin Butler to Make Another Rockin’ Elvis Movie
TIFF 2025: The director’s new film, which stands for “Elvis Presley in Concert,” mixes live footage with rehearsals, backstage moments and Elvis’ own voiceovers
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‘The Lost Bus’ Review: Paul Greengrass Turns Up the Heat in Visceral Wildfire Story
Toronto Film Festival: Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera star in a headlong piece of terrifying real-life action
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‘John Candy: I Like Me’ Review: Colin Hanks’ Affectionate Documentary Opens Toronto Film Festival
Toronto Film Festival: A crowd-pleasing festival kicks off with a generous and goodhearted doc about a crowd-pleasing Canadian icon
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‘A House of Dynamite’ Review: Kathryn Bigelow’s Riveting Thriller Is a Nuclear Nightmare
Venice Film Festival: The director’s story of a potential missile launch aimed at the U.S. delineates the inner workings of the national security apparatus with a muscularity that is all her own
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‘The Smashing Machine’ Review: A Calm Dwayne Johnson Anchors Raw Martial Arts Drama
Venice Film Festival: Benny Safdie’s debut as a solo director has plenty of bloody fights, but it’s more interested in what comes after
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Venice and Telluride So Far: Awards Season Arrives With Monsters and Ghosts as ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘Hamnet’ Make Waves
The first fall festivals have showcased a variety of Oscar contenders, Guillermo del Toro and Chloé Zhao’s films foremost among them
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‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ Review: Paul Dano Is the Only Quiet Thing in This Big Satire About Putin’s Rise
Venice Film Festival: Jude Law plays the Russian president in Olivier Assayas’ film, but Dano holds things together as a mysterious mastermind
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‘Calle Malaga’ Review: Spanish Legend Carmen Maura Charms Her Way Through Moroccan Crowd-Pleaser
Venice Film Festival: Writer-director Maryam Touzani takes a situation that could be milked for drama and outrage and treats it with lightness and charm
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‘Motor City’ Review: Shut Up, We’ve Got an Action Flick Goin’ On Here
Venice Film Festival: Director Potsy Ponciroli has set out to tell a bloody revenge story with (almost) no dialogue at all
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‘Hamlet’ Review: Riz Ahmed Is a Not-Very-Melancholy Dane in Revved-Up Adaptation
Telluride Film Festival: Director Aneil Karia’s adaptation is a visceral, streamlined and furious journey through the text, leaving a lot out and speeding up what’s left
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‘Frankenstein’ Review: Guillermo del Toro’s Passion Project Is Monstrously Moving
Venice Film Festival: The director hijacks the flagship story of the horror genre and turns it into a stunning tale of forgiveness
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‘Below the Clouds’ Review: Italian Documentary Explores Gorgeous, Haunted City of Naples
Venice Film Festival: Gianfranco’s doc is a tone poem paying tribute to a region that is suffused with beauty in the shadow of enormous loss
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‘Broken English’ Review: Marianne Faithfull Gets a Dark, Complicated Documentary
Venice Film Festival: The film from Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth s part documentary, part art project, part philosophical treatise, part celebration and part provocation
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‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Review: Is This the Anti-‘Bohemian Rhapsody?’
Telluride Film Festival: Scott Cooper’s film, starring Jeremy Allen White, is a bracing and moving antidote to beefed-up, heavily fictionalized rock biopics
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‘Highway 99 a double album’ Review: Ethan Hawke Throws a Long Party for Merle Haggard
Telluride Film Festival: Hawke’s three-hour documentary features more than two dozen performances of Haggard’s songs by Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams, Rosanne Cash and more
