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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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
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‘No Other Choice’ Review: Park Chan-wook’s Black Comedy Is Really Black and Really Comic
Venice Film Festival: The Korean director’s take on unemployment turns downright homicidal
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‘After the Hunt’ Review: Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri Face Off in Hot-Button Campus Drama
Venice Film Festival: Luca Guadagnino uses a formidable array of actors to explore woke culture in a twisty, stylish way
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‘Jay Kelly’ Review: George Clooney Is Damn Good at Playing a Pampered Movie Star
Venice Film Festival: And Noah Baumbach is back to nailing that tricky balance with a film that moves like a comedy but has a lot on its mind
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‘Ghost Elephants’ Review: Who but Werner Herzog Could Lead Us on This Mystical Search for Giant Pachyderms?
Venice Film Festival: As usual, Herzog finds the poetry in nature and looks beyond the facts to the myths and legends that make them worthy of his attention
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‘Mother’ Review: Noomi Rapace Plays Mother Teresa in Odd, Bold Drama
Venice Film Festival: “Mother” quite deliberately takes a small slice of a large life and treats it in ways that are both contemplative and assaultive
