hot movie review 2023

The Sexiest Movies of 2023

Featuring, but certainly not limited to: 'Magic Mike XXL ,' the ultimate Pornhub documentary, and multiple A24 films.

OK, let’s cut to the chase. You’re in the mood for a sexy movie, but you don’t want to scroll through a streaming queue, wondering which option is actually right for you. I get it—that’s boring! But open your mind, dear reader. Romance is everywhere if you look hard enough. So instead of opting for the most obvious options (no shade to Christian Grey), how about we try something new?

Greta Gerwig's Barbie is a modern adventure starring Barbie and Ken. This time, Ken only has a good day if Barbie notices him. If that’s not hot, then I don’t know what is.

After Everything

The final chapter of After Everything is as sexually charged as the films that came before it. In After Everything , Hardin travels to Portugal to mend his relationship with Nathalie. Why, you ask? He wrote a book about his ex, Tessa. As usual, tensions rise when business mixes with pleasure.

Amazon Prime

You Hurt My Feelings

What’s sexier than honesty? In You Hurt My Feelings , a writer's marriage is put to the test when she overhears her husband talking about her latest novel. The result is a comedic take on marriage and intimacy.

The Perfect Find

Sometimes, an unexpected suitor is all you need to heat things up. In The Perfect Match, Gabrielle Union stars as Jenna, a 40-year-old woman who hits rock bottom after she is fired from her dream job. While searching for a new gig, she begins sleeping with a younger man. But their rendezvous is cut short when she learns his mother is her new boss.

Watch on Netflix

To add—or not to add—a third? That is the question in Passages, a film about a gay couple whose marriage is uprooted after one of them has an affair with a woman. I won't spoil anything else, because what happens next will shock you.

In theaters

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One might not be an obvious choice, but it’s sexier than you’d think. The film follows Ethan Hunt (Cruise) on yet another mission to save humanity. While hunting bad guys, he falls for his teammate Isla Frost, which inevitably complicates their mission.

No Hard Feelings

This delightful romantic comedy follows Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a woman who’s trying to save her home from foreclosure. In a fit of desperation, she responds to a wealthy couple's ad asking for a young woman to “date” their 19-year-old son. After a quick interview, Maddie accepts the job, but there’s a catch: in order to secure her paycheck, she’ll have to take things a bit further than expected. (Don't make us spell it out, people.)

Magic Mike's Last Dance

I’ll say it: the latest Magic Mike film is the best of the series. Magic Mike’s Last Dance is both charming and hot , with a mix of sweat-worthy dance moves and witty humor that will keep you entertained from start to finish. The film reunites us with Mike Lane (Channing Tatum), who’s financially struggling after a shoddy business deal falls through. His luck changes when he meets Maxandra, a wealthy socialite, who hires him to run her new strip-club in London.

Watch on Max

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story

Pornhub is (unfortunately) known around the world as one of the leading porn distributers. Millions of people visit the site every day, but few know much about the adult entertainers who grace the screen. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story provides an exclusive look behind the scenes of the platform, while investigating the many scandals and trafficking accusations tied to it. The Pornhub Story isn't sexy in the traditional sense—but it is full of twists and turns.

Infinity Pool

OK, so maybe a gruesome horror movie isn’t the sexiest thing in the world. But... this one has an orgy. That counts for something, right? In all seriousness, Infinity Pool is a dark—and sometimes seductive—film that takes some gory turns. If that’s not for you, keep scrolling! If that's what you're into, prepare to see what happens when an idyllic vacation goes horribly wrong.

Watch on Hulu

Somebody I Used to Know

There’s something about a lost love that’s undeniably seductive. In Somebody I Used to Know, Alison Brie stars as Ally, a young woman who visits her hometown—where she runs into her ex, Sean. They spend the perfect day together, but their blissful reunion turns complicated when she discovers he's engaged to another woman.

Watch on Amazon Prime

Red, White, and Royal Blue

If you’re a fan of the enemies-to-lovers trope, this one’s for you. Red, White, and Royal Blue follows childhood foes Alex Diaz, the First Son of The United States, and Henry Windsor, The Prince of Wales. Despite their disdain for one another, Alex and Henry are forced to spend time together for a press stint—and fall in love along the way. Come for the sweet romance, stay for the steamy love scenes.

Bottoms (In Theaters)

This summer, comedians Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebri will star in Bottoms . The film follows two nerdy high schoolers: PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Edebri), who start a fight club so they can meet girls. Their horned-up plans take an unexpected turn... when the most popular girls in school start fighting each other.

Dicks: The Musical (September 29)

Dicks: The Musical might not sound like the sexiest film of the year, but there is something to be said about the allure of potty humor. Also, Megan Thee Stallion is in the film, which means Dicks is a certified hot-girl production. If you were wondering what it’s about, here’s the jist: two narcissistic coworkers learn they’re long-lost twins and plot to reunite their parents. Oh, and the raunchy title? Well, let’s just call it a play on words.

Maestro (December 20)

What? You don’t think a biopic is hot? Open your mind, friend. Some of the steamiest love stories have already happened. For example, take the romance between composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre. Their whirlwind romance is the subject of the upcoming film Maestro, which explores what happens when personal and professional lives blur.

All of Us Strangers (December 23)

All of Us Strangers is an upcoming romantic-fantasy film starring Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. Scott stars as Adam, a man who falls for his neighbor, Harry (Mescal). As their relationship progresses, Adam becomes overwhelmed by his past, and chooses to revisit his childhood home. To his surprise, his parents—who died 30 years ago—are somehow still alive.

MaXXXine (TBD)

The titles triple x should tell you everything you need to know, but if not, allow me to explain. MaXXXine is the third installment of A24’s horror trilogy, which stars Mia Goth as Pearl, a deranged woman who will stop at nothing to become famous. The first two films tracked Pearl’s deadly origin story, and MaXXXine is expected to conclude her bloody-tale. MaXXXine was originally set to premiere in 2023, but the date has been pushed until further notice. While we wait for updates, you can stream the first two movies, Pearl and X.

Watch ‘Pearl’ on Hulu Watch ‘X’ on Showtime

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The best movies of 2023

From ‘Tár’ to ‘Barbie’, this is our ranking of the essential films of the year.

Oh, we are so back. It took a few years, but 2023 felt like the year that Hollywood finally found its footing post-pandemic – which is ironic, considering Hollywood also shut down for large parts of the year. Before all the strikes hit, though, there were indications that the movie industry was coming back to life. There was the #Barbenheimer phenomenon, of course, which helped power the domestic box office to its strongest overall numbers since 2019. But in terms of pure moviemaking, the year was particularly strong. Martin Scorsese dropped another masterpiece , while Across the Spider-Verse made comic-book movies fresh again (at least until Madam Web , anyway). Past Lives made audiences swoon, while small-time charmers like Theater Camp , Scrapper and Rye Lane reasserted the vitality of indie filmmaking. And don’t forget the one about the dancing killer doll !

Overall, it was a great year for movies – even the Oscars were enjoyable. But what movies were the greatest? Here are our picks.

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Best films of 2023

1.  Tár

Call it 'A Portrait of the Artist In the Midst of Being Canceled’. In Todd Field's psychological character study, Cate Blanchett is Lydia Tár, a genius-level composer, EGOT winner and insufferable narcissist whose icy demeanor hardly fractures as accusations of sexual impropriety threaten to shatter her career. Blanchett's Oscar-nominated performance has rightly earned the lion's share of plaudits, but the superb acting is buoyed by Field's subtly off-kilter visual style, lending the ‘ripped from the headlines’ narrative a hint of Kubrickian uncanniness.

2.  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Building on the mash-up of animation styles that made Into the Spider-Verse so ridiculously vibrant and throwing in a multitude of new ones – stop-motion LEGO-mation, anyone? – this dizzying, dazzling sequel is the persuasive case for superhero movies than the played-out genre desperately needed. The Miles Morales version of Spidey, voiced again with a sense of wonderment and real soul by Shameik Moore, zooms across multiverses and meets several hundred parallel Spider-people in a personal quest with universal stakes. The gags and pop-culture references – delivered with trademark Lord and Miller irreverence – come so thick and fast, you’ll need several viewings to unpack them all. Which will not be a major burden with a movie this entertaining.

3.  Oppenheimer

Any year in which both the box office and the Academy Awards are dominated by a three-hour doomscroll through the life of the inventor of the atomic bomb should be considered a very good year for movies. It’s not just the tough subject matter that makes Christopher Nolan’s all-time-great biopic such a surprising blockbuster but the enormity of the themes contained within it: war, genocide, guilt, nuclear fission, the Red Scare, the Spanish Civil War, the apocalypse, love, marriage et al . Cillian Murphy, brilliant as J Robert Oppenheimer, wears it all in every line on his face, especially the ‘guilt’ part – he’s the walking embodiment of the phrase ‘your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’.

4.  EO

Thanks to Banshees of Inisherin , Triangle of Sadness   and this disarmingly powerful four-legged odyssey from veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, the humble donkey has become a cinematic colossus of late – a kind of doleful-eyed, carrot-chewing Brando. The genius of EO , which follows one little donkey across Europe, is in using its furry hero as a mirror to reflect back at us the state of the world in all its beauty, pain and ineffable sadness. It shouldn’t be half as bewitching and emotional, but honestly, it ruined us. 

5.  Killers of the Flower Moon

Are we starting to take Martin Scorsese for granted? Shut out at the Oscars, and made the butt of more hacky ‘movies are too darn long now’ jokes, his account of the murders that plagued the oil-rich Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma in the 1920s is nevertheless ‘just’ another late-period masterpiece from cinema’s greatest living director, a darkly atmospheric true-crime epic informed by one of America’s original sins. Scorsese’s usual gang of A-listers, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons, are all typically excellent, but the soul of the film is the previously unheralded Lily Gladstone as Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman quietly haunted by the suspicion that she’s allowed the devil into her heart, home and community. 

6.  Return to Seoul

A diaspora tale of real psychological acuity and emotional eloquence, this captivating drama perfectly articulates the hurt of a young adopted Frenchwoman as she returns to the country of her birth and struggles to reconcile with the past. French-Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou follows his brilliantly-drawn protagonist, the spiky, chaotic Freddie (Park Ji-Min), as she shrugs off Korean customs, her drunk-texting birth father and a continued sense of rejection from the mum who won’t acknowledge her in the hope of wrestling back control of her inner life. Like Freddie, it’s a film that will only grow in stature with the passing of time. 

7.  Anatomy of a Fall

Finding flaw in Justine Triet’s ( In Bed with Victoria ) brainy, provocative and elusive Palme d’Or winner is no easy task. It’s hard even to define it. Murder-mystery? Courtroom drama about an innocent woman ( Toni Erdmann ’s Sandra Hüller) suffering from institutionalised sexism? That question sits at its murky heart. A man falls from the balcony of his Alpine chalet and suspicion falls on his writer wife. Cue a forensic examination of a rocky marriage, as well as a knotty character study of a refreshingly complicated woman. Triet teases us with morsels of information that may (or may not) be important, like an arthouse version of Cluedo. Keep your wits about you and it’s one of the most satisfying cinema outings of the year.   

8.  Past Lives

Getting compared with Wong Kar-wai’s classic romance In the Mood for Love loads seriously unreasonable expectations on a first-time filmmaker. But Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song’s tender-hearted romance holds up to them purely for its emotional intelligence and wisdom and its sheer empathy for its characters. The central relationship plays out over several decades between Korean New Yorker (Greta Lee) and the childhood sweetheart (Teo Yoo) who never left Seoul, and the husband who struggles to give her space to explore her feelings. A love letter to two people and two cities – Seoul and New York – in all their messy glory, it’s one we’ll be revisiting in years to come.

9.  May December

• 4 out of 5 stars
• Recommended

Todd Haynes’ latest melodrama – the ripped-from-the-headlines story of a suburban woman, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), living in the shadow of an underage sex scandal – sounds maudlin. But Haynes, working off a brilliant screenplay from Samy Burch, injects the film with enough self-conscious camp to qualify as a comedy (at the Golden Globes, anyway), even as it explores heavy themes involving sexual power dynamics and self-delusion. It’s a complex, richly character-driven story, with Charles Melton quietly stealing scenes as Gracie’s now-adult partner and Natalie Portman as an oily TV actress preparing to play Gracie in an indie drama. But it’s hardly snooty – and the hilariously sensationalistic score is one of the year’s best running gags.

10.  The Boy and the Heron

11.  Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

• Action and adventure

Tom Cruise’s willingness to do literally any bastard-mad thing to entertain us finds its purest expression in the seventh instalment of the consistently excellent Mission: Impossible movies. He sprints, freefalls, races and horse-rides through a series of gawp-worthy action set pieces, occasionally while handcuffed to Hayley Atwell’s terrified franchise newbie, all expertly executed by writer-director Christopher McQuarrie. And the plot? Hard to say, this being the first part of a Dead Reckoning twofer and with multiple strands yet to be tied together, but it’s smart-baffling in the best M:I tradition. Kudos, too, to charisma machine Esai Morales, who somehow makes dialogue about A.I. sexy as the superbad, Gabriel. Roll on Part Two .

12.  How to Have Sex

A sunkissed hangout movie that sours and spins out of control like the worst kind of night out, Molly Manning Walker’s debut is where bubblegum fun strays into a minefield of sexual assault, trauma and heartbreak. Terrific newcomer Mia McKenna-Bruce is Tara, a high-schooler celebrating finishing her exams with a mates’ holiday to Crete. On the menu? Booze, partying and saying farewell to her virginity. Enter the seemingly charming Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and exit all the good vibes. A coming-of-age drama they should teach in schools, How to Have Sex is not a bit less cinematic for its educational message.

13.  All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

• Documentaries

There’s so much going on in Laura Poitras’s doc, it speaks volumes for the quality of the filmmaking that it all hangs together so dexterously . Iconic photographer Nan Goldin is its subject, protagonist and guide, as the film takes in a tour of New York’s ’70s counterculture, ex-addict Goldin’s quest for justice against the odious Sacklers, the family behind America’s OxyContin epidemic, and the nuts and bolts of social activism. It’s moving, enthralling and artful – in every sense of the word.

14.  Rye Lane

Who said the romcom was dead? Putting an authentically South London spin to the Before Sunset formula of two strangers meeting, chatting and slowly falling for each other – ie with loads more chicken shops and Supermalts – Rye Lane is sparky, romantic and pisstakey in all the ways that London is. David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah provide charm, jokes and very relatable insecurities as two young Black Londoners, Dom and Yas – who slowly size each other up and – eventually – like what they see. Their Salt-N-Pepa karaoke scene is a mic drop moment in every sense. 

15.  Godzilla Minus One

Possibly the  angriest  Godzilla we’ve seen, this Toho reboot of the Japanese icon represents a triumphant homecoming for the kaiju after a series of murky and mediocre Hollywood blockbusters. Under the skilful oversight of VFX wizard Takashi Yamazaki, who writes and directs, the action beats are thunderous and the effects look great – and are always in the service of a surprisingly touching human story nestled amid the colossal destruction. One seaborne chase borrows from Jaws and isn’t embarrassed by the comparison. 

16.  Fremont

Played by real-life Afghan refugee Anaita Wali Zada, Donya is an interpreter forced to flee the Taliban and start afresh in America in this soulful, black-and-white study of loneliness and connection. With British-Iranian director Babak Jalali’s meticulous compositions and a faint, slackerish energy best embodied by Gregg Turkington’s drowsy, Jack London-loving psychologist who helps Donya tackle her undiagnosed PTSD, Fremont is not flattered by the Jim Jarmusch comparisons. It’s the kind of lo-fi gem that would have built a steady rep in the old days of video stores. It deserves to be discovered on streaming.

17.  They Cloned Tyrone

It got lost amid July’s Barbenheimer noise but this raucously entertaining, needle-sharp Blaxsploitation riff is ripe for discovery on Netflix. An almost uncategorisable mix of crime thriller, satirical comedy and near-future sci-fi, it’s the handiwork of a first-time filmmaker of real promise in Juel Taylor. He rescues the term ‘woke’ from the right-wing commentariat with a They Live -adjacent storyline in which John Boyega, Teyonah Parris and Jamie Foxx team up to uncover a conspiracy to control Black consciousness via… well, that would be spoiling one of the year’s best in-jokes. 

18.  The Fabelmans

It’s been an era of filmmakers recreating their childhoods on screen (and let’s face it, it’s mostly boyhoods we’re talking about), with Alfonso Cuarón, Paolo Sorrentino and Lee Isaac Chung all parlaying their own younger lives into Oscar-worthy dramas in recent years. But of all of these cine-reminiscences, Steven Spielberg’s feels the most alive to the possibility that it might even be misremembering or misinterpreting events – and thus it feels like the most guileless and honest of the lot. With Spielberg’s on-screen surrogate, Gabriel LaBelle’s Sammy Fabelman, to the fore, its many moments of hurt and wonderment are dazzlingly realised.

19.  Reality

Euphoria ’s Sydney Sweeney is electrifying as 25-year-old NSA translator Reality Winner, who was questioned by the FBI in 2017 over leaked documents relating to Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election. Tina Satter’s anxiety-inducing thriller expertly transfers her ‘verbatim theatre’ stage production ‘Is This a Room?’ into a kind of verbatim cinema, drip-feeding dread in a real-time recreation of Winner’s first interrogation. It’s signals the arrival of a singular talent in Satter, and offers further evidence of Sweeney’s brilliance. Oh, and that double meaning title? Chef’s kiss.

20.  Theater Camp

Borrowing equally from the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest and modern single-camera sitcoms like Parks and Recreation , this spirited little comedy is pretty far from being something you’ve never seen before. But writer-directors Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman have clearly studied those influences closely, and they obviously know the small-stakes art world they spend the movie affectionately mocking on an intimate level. Following the attendees of a theater-focused summer camp in the Adirondacks as they plot a last-minute tribute to their ailing founder (Amy Sedaris, who’s sadly not around much), it mines the inherent humour of passionate people whose ambition far outstrips their resources. Needling drama kids (and drama adults) is like shooting fish that have been shoved into a high school locker, and the movie does indulge in some fairly broad cliches, but it never feels cruel, and the biggest laughs often come from just how big-hearted it is. In this vicious age, niceness can go a long way – and Theater Camp is some very nice stuff.

21.  The Old Oak

British cinema’s own old oak, Ken Loach delivers a (possibly final) film as inflamed and vital as ever. Some would argue to its detriment, with the line crossed from social realism and into straight polemic in its depiction of a struggling northeast English community reacting to the arrival of a group of Syrian refugees. But Loach and his long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty aren’t here to spin subtle, elliptical yarns. The Old Oak is another clarion call inspired by real-life crises that are impacting working class people and that directness is its greatest strength. And throughout, the cast of first-time actors bring unvarnished warmth to its moving moments of human connection. Who else is making films like this – and who will make them when Loach finally hangs up his clapperboard?

22.  Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

What unexpected joy and wisdom this stop-motion animation delivers. Expanding a 2010 short and perhaps taking a cue from Aardman’s classic Creature Comforts , it introduces us to a sparkly little mollusc called Marcel (voiced by co-creator Jenny Slate) and her gentle Nanna Connie (Isabella Rossellini), left behind when their community of shells disappears overnight. Enter documentary maker Dean (Slate’s co-creator Dean Fleischer Camp) to join the quest for this missing shell utopia. Cute by never cutesy, and with a surprisingly sharp wit, it’s cinematic soul food that’ll have you going back for a second helping.

23.  Saint Omer

The directness of French filmmaker Alice Diop‘s courtroom drama – a film of long, unblinking takes and zero showy camerawork – shouldn’t be confused with simplicity. Knotty and morally challenging, Saint Omer traverses some of the biggest cultural fault lines of modern Europe – race, migration, religion – in its story of a young woman (Guslagie Malanda) accused of leaving her child to drown on a Normandy beach. It’s based on a real-life court case that Diop herself attended and her recreation engages both the brain and the heart. Just try shaking it. 

24.  Barbie

It was the biggest movie of 2023, and one of the year’s major pop culture events in general, but for all its world domination, Barbie ended up being one heck of a strange movie. Maybe we should have expected it – after all, with Greta Gerwig writing and directing, along with her husband, Noah Baumbach, serving as co-writer, you knew it wasn’t just going to be a film about, like, an inspirational fashion model. But who could have predicted the feminist fantasia we actually got? Set in a matriarchal land of living dolls, where everything is blissful and neon and perfect until the fears, insecurities and toxic masculinity of the real world encroach, it’s a wickedly smart, unabashedly silly satire smuggled to the masses inside a fuschia-coloured disco ball. Margot Robbie is pitch-perfect as ‘Stereotypical Barbie’, practically sparkling with cheery glamour even while suddenly plagued by thoughts of death and the reality of existing as a woman. And Ryan Gosling is possibly even better as the Kenniest Ken to Ever Ken, just radiating vacant himbo energy in every scene. It’s maybe not the best movie of 2023, but it’s the movie you’ll most associate with the year – and we don’t mind it one bit.         

25.  Women Talking

While not exactly an escapist night at the pictures, Sarah Polley’s tough, talky, ‘The Crucible’-esque feminist allegory all but dares you to reach for your popcorn. Sit up and pay attention, it demands – and anyone prepared to lean into its dialectics is rewarded with an elite group of actors (Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Frances McDormand and Ben Whishaw) debate a still-scarily-resonant case of sexual abuse in a religious commune. Faith, female rage and the meaning of forgiveness have been rarely chewed over with quite this simmering power.

26.  Passages

Characters don’t have to be likeable or good to be great.  Love is Strange  director Ira Sachs gets it, delivering a so bad he’s grand antagonist for the ages in self-centred Tomas. Portrayed by mercurially intriguing German actor Franz Rogow ​sk i ( Great Freedom ), he’s a Paris-based filmmaker and hot mess who’ll crack it at an actor for not walking down the stairs artfully enough. Thinking nothing of taking a lover –  Blue is the Warmest Colour  star Adèle Exarchopoulos – while leaving hubby at home (Ben W h ishaw), he ping-pongs between them, causing maximum damage to all three. But you can still see why they would. Beautifully written, framed and performed, it’s a thoroughly French, knotty affair.   

27.  Saltburn

28.  The Royal Hotel

‘It’s a mining area so you’ll have to be okay with a little male attention.’ As understatements go, the parting words of the recruiter who sets up American backpackers Hanna ( Ozark ’s Julia Garner) and Liv ( Glass Onion’ s Jessica Henwick) with a job pulling pints in a remote Aussie pub is a doozy. Director Kitty Green made the excellent post-Weinstein thriller The Assistant , also with Garner facing down some despicable bastards, and here she puts a feminist lens on a beery, blue-collar kind of male toxicity. Like the Outback tinnie-sploitation classic Wake in Fright , The Royal Hotel is a brilliantly nightmarish night at the boozer.

29.  Enys Men

There’s something haunting and ancient in the soil of Britain and it’s captured mesmerically in a trippy tale of isolation and disturbing plant life that plays like a druid’s cheese dream. It could only be the work of Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, whose debut drama, Bait , was a handmade treasure back in 2019. Here, he uses the same vintage aesthetic and 16mm cameras to craft a worthy companion piece to any of the great ’70s folk horrors, as Mary Woodvine’s botanist goes full The Lighthouse on a remote island. 

30.  Subject

This gripping, intelligent doc interviews the subjects of some of the most famous docs of recent years about their lives through a lens. The stars of The Staircase , Hoop Dreams and Capturing the Friedmans reveal what it’s like to be at the eye of a non-fiction narrative story, testimonies that are delivered with compassion and insight. Equally interesting on the issues of telling someone else’s story (duty of care, whether participants should be paid),  Subject captures the documentary form at a crossroads, hopefully finding its way to a more caring, culturally sensitive future. Filmmakers could do a lot worse than watch Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera’s engrossing film as a cautionary tale.

31.  War Pony

This social drama set on the Native American reservations of South Dakota reflects the outside status of America’s indigenous people in stark, emotionally searing terms. It follows two mostly-unconnected Lakota boys – 12-year-old Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) and 23-year-old Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) – as they eek out a life for themselves, living hand-to-mouth in grinding poverty but boyishly hustling like the heroes of an old Italian neorealist masterpiece. Co-directors Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, and their Native American screenwriters Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob, sweeten the tough stuff with hope and cautious optimism. Blunt yet lyrical, it’s a deeply rewarding watch.

32.  Alcarràs

A juicy organic tomato of a movie that deservedly won Berlin’s Golden Bear, Carla Simón’s channels the Spanish filmmaker’s own experiences growing up on a Catalan farm to give life to one hard-working farming family. A new landowner's attempt to install solar panels threatens the farmers' livelihood in a movie that succeeds as a family drama and a deconstruction of capitalism. With incredible performances from the non-professional actors playing stressed-out peach farmers, Simon crafts a worthy follow-up to her sparkling childhood memoir Summer 1993 . 

33.  Queendom

Agniia Galdanova’s gorgeously shot documentary captures both the desolation of Russia’s tundras and the bravery of Gena Marvin, a drag artist who’s as colourful as her hometown is grey. As Putin stirs up anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, she turns up to a paratroopers rally dressed only in duct tape the colours of the Russian flag. But behind her swagger there’s a softness, and Queendom captures so many quiet moments of faltering connection with her bewildered, smalltown family too. It’s painful and beautiful all at once.

34.  Joyland

It’s complicated enough when stay-at-home dad Haider (Ali Junejo) finds fulfilment as a backing dancer to trans performer Bibi (trans actress Alina Khan) in Lahore. When he also finds love with her, the fabric of his life – and his family’s – begins to unravel. Faced with Pakistan’s draconian censorship laws, Joyland had to struggle to the screen, but you’d never know it from its effortless humour, compassion and craft. A bold snapshot of Pakistani society, masculinity and gender in flux, it would feel progressive if it’d been set in Paris or Palm Springs. 

35.  The Eight Mountains

36.  Air

Does it sound like an unquestioning hymn to capitalism? Yep. Does it get close to deifying Michael Jordan? That too. But there’s something in Ben Affleck’s pacy, loose-limbed retelling of Nike’s efforts to sign a young Jordan from under the noses of more powerful rivals Adidas and Converse that blasts past any reservations. That secret sauce is a simple but infectious joy in sharp dialogue and characterisation that feels like a throwback to Hollywood’s ’70s golden age. It doesn’t hurt to have Matt Damon schlebbing-up winningly as Sonny Vaccaro, the Nike NBA savant willing to risk everything for Jordan’s signature, and Affleck himself in as a wonderfully droopy version of Nike founder Phil Knight. Championship rings for all involved.

37.  Scrapper

Not so much ‘magical realism’ as magical and realistic, Charlotte Regan’s debut paints in much brightest colours than you’d perhaps expect from a film about a young girl swerving social services in an east London estate. Full of big laughs, it’s a loose-limbed depiction of that girl, 12-year-old Georgie (the brilliant Lola Campbell), as she reluctantly reconnects with the dad she’s never met ( Triangle of Sadness ’s Harris Dickinson). The offbeat bond that develops between them is a reminder of Taika Waititi’s Boy , with Regan’s affection for her characters making for a movie with a generous heart and an irrepressible spirit.

38.  The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan

The best Alexandre Dumas adaptations in decades – sorry, Dogtanian and Paul WS Anderson fans – this swaggering French adventure flick has everything you could want from a swashbuckling caper. The improbably sexy cast has Eva Green as the pipe-puffing Milady, executing Cardinal Richelieu’s devilish scheme against a gauche monarch, the English, the Protestants and our heroes themselves, the Musketeers – here featuring a moody Vincent Cassel and a flamboyant Romain Duris. We came for the all-star line-up and stayed for the blur of sword fights, horse chases and smart storytelling choices. Roll on part deux later this year.

39.  The Beasts

A nerve-shredding modern Spanish parable that offers a gradually suffocating fog of xenophobia, resentment and envy, this year’s Goya Award winner is set among scrubby, hardscrabble farmsteads of Galicia. Inglourious Basterds ’ Denis Ménochet essays a brooding kind of restraint as teacher-turned-farmer Antoine in the face of increasing intimidation. Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s carefully constructed slowburn thriller is full of great performances, too, especially from Marina Foïs as Antoine’s dogged wife and Luis Zahera as the sinewy, menacing neighbour who hates everything the couple stand for. 

40.  Evil Dead Rise

41.  Revoir Paris

Fresh from Paul Verhoeven’s sexy nun psychodrama Benedetta , Virginie Efira takes things down a notch or two as the survivor of a Bataclan-style massacre at a Parisian bistro. Full of sensitivity in its depiction of the lonely path walked by a PTSD sufferer, French director Alice Winocour’s enthralling drama is alive with empathy. And it’s the Caesar-winning Efira who centres it all as a woman emotionally imprisoned by her trauma, with Benoît Magimel providing soulful support as a fellow survivor who helps her through. 

42.  How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Inspired by Swedish author Andreas Malm’s eco-manifesto, which suggested that non-violent protest was doomed to fall short in the face of the climate change catastrophe, co-writer/director Daniel Goldhaber and his diverse young cast ( American Honey star Sasha Lane is a standout) craft an urgent thriller exploring the personal toll of committing to an existential cause. The source text was dynamite, while this is more of a slow burn. But when it catches fire, it’s both a compelling thriller and a clarion call to action. 

43.  The Mission

‘There’s a fine line between faith and madness.’ That line in this enthralling doc is physical as well as metaphorical, and it’s crossed by zealous 26-year-old American missionary John Chau when he set foot on the Indian Ocean’s remote North Sentinel Island clutching a Bible in 2018. As Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, the co-directors of 2020’s equally thoughtful doc Boys State , chart, the evangelical urge to spread the Christian gospel resulted in Chau’s death at the hands of indigenous islanders who saw his very presence as an existential threat. And, as The Mission suggests, wasn’t it? As an elegy for a young man full of promise and a critique of the religious groups that sent him into danger, it’s powerful stuff.

44.  The Creator

• Science fiction

One of the low-key delights of the year has Gareth Edwards rediscovering his early promise after the bruising experience of Rogue One and the murky misfire that was 2014’s ​​ Godzilla . Sure, it adds a few noughts to the budget, but The Creator is more of a part with his excellent guerilla-style debut Monsters , combining clever visual effects with glorious real-world locations to build a believably dystopian futurescape and then embroider it with an intimate story of grief, surrogate parenthood and timely questions of identity. The plot, in which John David Washington’s broken-down ex-soldier bonds with an all-too-human superpowered A.I. (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), is Philip K Dick-meets-Apocalypse Now, with eye-popping Asian locations that make it a killer travelogue as well as a satisfying cerebral action-sci-fi.

45.  The Whale

It would have been so easy for Darren Aronofsky’s adapted-from-the-stage chamber piece to get swamped by its prosthetic, fat-suited artifice and one-location staginess. That it doesn’t is down to a career-best performance from international treasure Brendan Fraser. He makes you take grieving, apartment-bound college tutor Charlie, a man facing up to his own mortality, to your heart in just a few scenes, supercharging this fable of human frailty and reconciliation with endless empathy and emotion. We’re not crying, you’re crying. 

46.  M3GAN

A toy inventor ( Get Out’ s Allison Williams) creates a sentient A.I. doll with creepy eyes and the grip of an industrial vice as a companion for her bereaved niece. What could go wrong? J ust about everything, as this giddily mean-spirited Blumhouse horror charts. Despite having Saw ’s James Wan’s boody fingerprints all over it as co-creator, it reins in the nastiness in favour of big laughs, including some instantly meme-worthy doll dances. Roll on M4GAN. 

47.  Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

Cinematically, the fantasy genre has tended take itself very seriously, but   Dungeons & Dragons   comes at its swords and sorcery with a refreshing and exuberant irreverence. Writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein respect their role-playing tabletop game source material, but also mirror the sense of levity and improvised invention you get while playing it. With the help of an amiable ensemble, the jokes come as thick and fast as the FX-driven action. Game for a laugh, indeed.

48.  Broker

Hirokazu Kore-eda has a knack for taking gritty slices of social realism and sprinkling them with a kind of escapist stardust. Who else could turn the story of actual baby traffickers into a bubbly feel-nice yarn in much the same way Shoplifters parlayed hard-scrabble lives into a quiet heartwarmer full of wit and heart? Here he heads to Busan, South Korea, and borrows Bong Joon-ho’s old mucker Song Kang-ho to headline another touching, wryly funny tale of surrogate families. Charles Dickens would be proud to have written a character like Song’s larger-than-life adoption broker Sang-hyun.

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The 24 Best Films of 2023 We’ve Already Seen

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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While many film fans might still be catching up on the best films of 2022, cinema waits for no one: 2023 is mere hours old, and with the new year comes plenty of new films. Many of them we’ve already seen, including new features from some of our favorite filmmakers, offerings from fresh faces, and extended runs for some of 2022’s best films ( 2023’s best? who’s counting!).

This list includes films from everyone from Kelly Reichardt to Mia Hansen-Løve, Davy Chou to Sarah Polley, Paul Schrader to Lukas Dhont. Many of them premiered on the festival circuit in earlier months, building up plenty of goodwill (and anticipation) for a 2023 release. In short, they’re proven winners. Take a look at what’s to come, how to see it, and some snippets from our full reviews below.

For those of you eager to load up your movie-going calendar for the coming months, let this list of the best films of 2023 we’ve already seen be your guide, plus previews of our most-anticipated films and studio films directed by women .

Of note: This list only includes films we have seen that have a confirmed 2023 release date or have been picked up for distribution with 2023 release dates to be set. Because of the (continued) weirdness of the the current theatrical landscape, we are including films that had qualifying runs in 2022 but opted for wider release in 2023, all the better to serve a wide readership.

“Women Talking” (January 3, in theaters from UAR following limited release in December)

Adapted from Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name with fierce intellect, immense force, and a visionary sense of how to remap the world as we know it along more compassionate (matriarchal) lines, Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” never feels like it’s just 104 minutes of bonneted fundamentalists chatting in a barn, even though — with a few memorable, and sometimes very funny exceptions — that’s exactly what it is. Toews’ book could easily have been made into a play, but every widescreen frame of Polley’s film will make you glad that it wasn’t. She infuses this truth-inspired tale with a gripping multi-generational sweep from the very first line, which puts the violence in the rear-view mirror and begins the hard work of keeping it there.

“This story begins before you were born,” the film’s young narrator (Kate Hallett in the role of Autje) announces, passing these events down to a specific child while simultaneously framing them in the terms of a timeless moral fable — one set in an eternal yesterday that allows for an ever-possible tomorrow, despite the fact that it also belongs to a specific year in the not-too-distant past. As the story unfolds, Autje’s voice will ironically also be used in tandem with the fading sunlight outside the barn to help keep time and ratchet up the tension of the men’s threatened return. “We had 24 hours to imagine what kind of world you would be born into.”

The “we” she refers to is a voluble and unforgettable quorum comprised of eight people from two different families who’ve been elected to break the tie in the colony-wide vote as to whether the women should leave or stay and fight. A third option of forgiving the men and returning to the status quo is embraced only by the taciturn and terrified Scarface Janz (producer Frances McDormand, in a symbolic role with little screen-time), and rejected due to lack of support.

The factions are neither plainly divided nor set in stone. The curious and ethereal Ona (Rooney Mara) has her head in the clouds, and discusses their predicament with a philosopher’s abstraction even though the baby in her belly — a souvenir from one of her unknown assailants — would seem to be a most concrete reminder of what’s at stake. Boiling over with impotent rage and consumed by the helplessness that comes with it, the abrasive Mariche (Jessie Buckley) provides a natural foil. Ona’s older sister Salome (Claire Foy) takes that anger to an even greater extreme, and insists that the women should exercise their divine wrath when the men return. But should her teenage son, on the cusp of becoming a man himself, be counted as one of their ranks? 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Saint Omer” (January 13, in select theaters from Neon’s Super)

For her first narrative film, French filmmaker Alice Diop brings the rhythms of her documentary background to reconstruct a heavy, ripped-from-the-headlines story. In 2013, Fabienne Kabou left her 15-month-year old baby girl on a beach in Berck-sur-Mer to be claimed by the rising tide. Diop read about the story while pregnant and felt an intimate connection, one that she has written into “Saint Omer” through an alter ego.

Rama (Kayije Kagame) is a pregnant academic who decides to watch the court case of the mother on trial, here rechristened Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), ostensibly as part of her research into the most famous baby killer of all, Medea. Despite her academic interest, the mere act of witnessing Laurence’s trial gets under Rama’s skin, and lines of association between Rama, Laurence, Rama’s unborn baby, and her very real mother are blurred until the central tragedy of it all belongs to everyone.

There is a tradition of humanizing killers that is rarely afforded to Black women in the movies. For Truman Capote’s seminal non-fiction novel, “In Cold Blood” from 1959, he befriended two death-row prisoners guilty of shooting dead a family in Kansas, and turned the resulting conversations into a journalistic doorstop of a book as compelling and detailed as any work of fiction. What made the book so haunting was Capote’s refusal to be daunted by the monstrousness of what the two men had done.

“When You Finish Saving the World” (January 20, in theaters from A24)

A recent monologue night at New York’s Jane Hotel ended with actor Jesse Eisenberg telling a long and charmingly logorrheic story about the massive crush he once developed on a radical teenage leftist during the early 2000s. He was an ultra-neurotic Jewish kid who worshipped at the altar of Woody Allen, while she was a budding revolutionary who preferred the droll comedic stylings of Howard Zinn; her mom ran a woman’s shelter, her dad wrote fiery screeds in support of Nicaraguan liberation, and her new boyfriend memorized socialist flashcards in a cute-sad effort to hold a conversation with anyone in the family. It might be a while before he wrapped his brain around the difference between the Contras and the Sandinistas, but he desperately wanted to be the kind of person who knew what it was.

That Eisenberg obviously cared a lot more about the girl than any of her pet causes didn’t stop her from inviting him on a humanitarian trip to Central America a few months into their relationship, just as it didn’t stop her from marrying him a decade or so later, but the humiliation of trying to love someone on unilateral terms — for what you can take from them, with little regard for what they might need from you in return — seems to have scarred him all the same. That cringy dynamic was a major source of energy for the audio drama Eisenberg launched in the summer of 2020. It’s even more pronounced in the cuttingly poignant and cyanide-sweet movie he’s adapted from it, which stars Finn Wolfhard as a dopey live-streamer infatuated with the Karl Marx of his high school chemistry class, and sees Eisenberg continue a recent Sundance trend of famous actors delivering excellent debut features (Paul Dano’s “Wildlife,” Romola Garai’s “Amulet,” and Rebecca Hall’s “Passing” being three of many standout examples). 

“Close” (January 27, in theaters from A24)

Thirteen-year-old best friends Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) don’t know it yet, but this will be the last perfect summer of their lives. It’ll be the last summer when they share the same imagination, love each other without having to think about what it means, and run or bike everywhere as fast as they can so as not to waste a minute of it.

The clock is ticking. Even now, there are already intimations that Leo — his cherubic face as clear as Caribbean ocean water — occasionally seems to be on the cusp of some deeper awareness; after calming his friend’s busy head to sleep at night, Leo lies awake in the bed they share together and searches Remi’s face for hints to a puzzle that hasn’t presented itself to him yet.

When school starts, their classmates will snicker at the boys for being too close. Leo, who appears to be the more intensely affectionate of the two, will also be the one who pushes the other away. It’s Leo who seems to be growing afraid of the friendship that used to be his greatest joy — Leo who wiggles away from Remi when they lie on the grass during recess, and Leo who starts playing hockey with the other boys as if trying to skate away from something else. For those reasons and more, it will be Leo who the film about these boys continues to follow after something happens that changes his friendship with Remi forever. 

“One Fine Morning” (January 27, in NY and LA theaters from Sony Pictures Classics, following one-week qualifying run in December)

It’s a well-known fact that all French filmmakers are legally required to make at least one movie about an extramarital affair, but few auteurs have been better-suited to the task than the great Mia Hansen-Løve, whose raw yet ravishingly urbane character dramas (“Eden,” “Bergman Island,” “Goodbye, First Love”) thrive in the messy spaces where fear and excitement overlap — where loss and possibility are as inseparable from each other as a movie and the screen onto which it’s being projected. In fact, the light yet deeply affecting “One Fine Morning” isn’t even Hansen-Løve’s first crack at her national pastime, as the subject of infidelity has cropped up throughout her work, most notably in 2016’s exquisite “Things to Come.”

This time, however, she approaches that sticky situation through the eyes of the other woman, a widowed single mother whose stunning resemblance to Léa Seydoux could make any wedded man rethink their vows. A professional translator who’s come to think of herself as little more than a go-between for other people, Sandra (Léa Seydoux) has perhaps grown a bit too comfortable with her role as an intermediary; her skill at ferrying the same thought from one place to another often seems like it was developed in response to her fear of being stranded between them. 

“Baby Ruby” (February 3, in theaters and on VOD from Magnolia Pictures)

Despite its title, writer/director Bess Wohl’s debut feature “Baby Ruby” isn’t primarily about the titular infant. It instead takes interest in her beleaguered mother Jo (Noémie Merlant of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”), a lifestyle influencer for an online magazine. Her husband, Spencer (Kit Harington, “Game of Thrones”), is an “ethical” butcher. The pair, living in a lavish cabin, on paper, are the kind of seemingly perfect couple who put their idyllic baby pictures online to stir envy. They show the best parts of motherhood and sanitize the strain. But the bitter truth that Jo discovers is that you can’t hide the arduous parts.

The very idea of cinema showing the horrors and travails of motherhood isn’t new. It’s a trend gaining speed with films like “Kindred,” “Umma,” and “Lamb.” And yet, what separates Wohl’s film from everything else is how it dissects the performative exteriority of maternal life by using postpartum psychosis as a means to inflict the real-life terrors, paranoia, insomnia and hallucinations experienced by new mothers. 

“Body Parts” (February 3, in theaters and on VOD from Shout! Factory)

It’s been almost five years since the New York Times and The New Yorker published exposés of Hollywood’s ugliest open secret, that Harvey Weinstein was a sexual predator, taking the #MeToo movement worldwide and forever shifting the conversation around the film industry’s horrifying treatment of women. The flurry of similar allegations that followed has slowed to a trickle, but there are many women in Hollywood who want to keep the issues front and center. The message is loud and clear in “Body Parts,” a clever and damning documentary about the history of nudity, sex scenes, and women’s bodies on film. Objects become subjects in Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s sweeping yet focused analysis that exposes the truth about the power of images to shape the world’s views of women.

In a brisk 86 minutes, “Body Parts” mashes together interviews with the likes of Jane Fonda and Rosanna Arquette, analysis from film historians, intimacy coordinator trainings, and whirlwind montages from both classic and contemporary films. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and Guevara-Flanagan runs a tight ship. Though each piece could easily fill more time, the filmmaker shrewdly stays focused on the portrayal of women’s bodies, earning the film’s provocative title. The quick barrage of film clips acts both as handy filler and an almost dizzying background noise, illustrating the central thesis that these images are everywhere.

“The Blue Caftan” (February 10, in theaters from Strand Releasing)

When an aging couple operating a struggling Moroccan dress shop hire a dashing young apprentice, some of the first words out of his mouth are “I work fast.” That also describes the approach of “The Blue Caftan” director Maryam Touzani, who sets up its straightforward premise so quickly that you’d be forgiven for thinking you had the entire film figured out within five minutes. A closeted gay tailor, who fights with his wife about money, begins mentoring a young man who’s more beautiful than any item in his shop. Gee, what could possibly happen here?

But rather than use that premise to blow up the status quo, Touzani meticulously works backwards, illustrating that there was so much more to these relationships than we could have possibly guessed. Working with an intricacy that rivals that of the craftsman at the center of her film, the auteur crafts a surprisingly warm story that subverts expectations at almost every turn.

While “The Blue Caftan” is a film about a gay man exploring his sexuality, the love story at its core is really one between him and his wife. It’s about the friendship and understanding that can form over the course of a lifetime spent together, no matter how unusual the arrangement. As much as anything else, Touzani’s delightful sophomore feature is a defense of the institution of marriage, a reminder that each human soul is worth a lifetime of exploration to someone.

“Pacifiction” (February 17, in theaters from Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films)

What do you want when you already have paradise?

That question looms over Albert Serra’s singularly mysterious cinematic immersion into Tahiti, “Pacifiction.” The indigenous Polynesians living there would likely argue that this paradise hasn’t been theirs in a long time. Serra, the Catalan filmmaker behind such boundary-pushing works of experiential filmmaking as “Honor of the Knights” and “Story of My Death,” is yet another outsider coming to their shores, but he avoids the touristic travel-porn clichés of most movies set in some tropical locale. “Pacifiction” is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself.

Benoît Magimel plays De Roller, the High Commissioner for French Polynesia, still one of the “overseas territories” ruled from Paris as a vestige of France’s empire. He’s in virtually every one of the 163 minutes that make up “Pacifiction,” and he’s into everything: meeting with activist leaders, twisting the arm of a priest to endorse the opening of a casino, overseeing a surfing contest, giving advice to the dancers at a nightclub, serving as the welcoming committee for a visiting French admiral.

He’s all awkward charm, trying to be “one of the people” even as he serves a different master. De Roller wears his white suit, flowered shirt, and horn-rimmed sunglasses like armor: casual enough not to stand out too much in Tahiti but formal enough to show he means business. When an indigenous politician on another island tells him he should embrace the local culture more and wear a pareo, it’s obvious he will never do so. In another place, our High Commissioner would be wearing a pith helmet. 

“Return to Seoul” (February 17, in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics, following one-week qualifying run in December)

Few movies have ever been more perfectly in tune with their protagonists than Davy Chou’s jagged, restless, and rivetingly unpredictable “Return to Seoul,” a shark-like adoption drama that its 25-year-old heroine wears like an extra layer of skin or sharp cartilage. The film spans eight years over the course of two hours, but you can feel its bristly texture and self-possessed violence from the disorienting first scenes.

Played by plastic artist and first-time actress Park Ji-Min (who gives a towering performance worthy of the same attention that Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh will receive for their work this fall), the French-raised Freddie arrives in Seoul without context, which leaves us the fool’s errand of trying to “solve” her identity over a few too many glasses of soju with her new friends. Some clues are easier to decipher than others. While Freddie may have been born in the country — and carry what some of her drinking buddies agree is “a typical Korean face” from “ancient, ancestral” times — it’s clear that this is her first trip back since she was adopted as a child, and that she neither thinks of it as home nor speaks a word of the native tongue.

Less obvious is the agenda behind Freddie’s sudden return. Her flagrant disregard for local customs suggests that she isn’t there to get in touch with her roots, and when someone suggests that she contact the local adoption agency, Freddie doesn’t just change the subject, she completely transforms the energy of the film itself. 

“Emily” (February 17, in theaters from Bleecker Street)

Despite writing one of the most rugged and enduring novels in all English literature before her 30th — and final — birthday, Emily Brontë spent the whole of her life in a suffocating environment that saw her brilliant imagination dampened at every turn. It was dampened by the patriarchy scared of her talent (“Wuthering Heights” was of course published under a pseudonym), by the individual men who knew her personally, and even sometimes by her own sisters, two of whom survived childhood to become accomplished writers themselves. Vindicating as it might be that Brontë’s one great book is still read widely some 200 years later, her remarkable victory over death pales in comparison to the poetic irony of her legacy: Few authors of any age have ever so inflamed public imagination by the mere fact of their existence.

In that light, it’s easy to appreciate why Brontë’s life so naturally lends itself to the sort of film that long-time actor (“Mansfield Park,” “Bedazzled,” “A.I.”) and first-time filmmaker Frances O’Connor has made about her in “Emily,” a ravishing period drama that plays fast and loose with the facts in order to paint a portrait of the author that bleeds with the same heart-in-its-hands emotionality she had to suffuse into her work. 

“Palm Trees and Power Lines” (March 2023, in theaters and on VOD from Momentum Pictures)

Lea knows the difference between wrong and right. Wrong: The way dudes treat her mom. Wrong: Her friends running out on their bill at a local diner. Wrong: Getting into a strange man’s truck. But, as has forever been the human condition — and in the case of Jamie Dack’s uncomfortably honest “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” the teenage human condition — knowing is only half the battle, and Lea (a breakout Lily McInerny in a remarkable first feature role) is about to endure quite a battle indeed. Dack, making her feature film debut by expanding her 2018 award-winning short of the same name, uses a familiar tale to shed new light on the coming-of-age drama, and while many of the film’s beats are predictable, that often speaks to the discomfiting universality of the story at hand.

There’s not much going on in Lea’s life when we first meet her. Caught in the liminal space of a suburban high school summer — no school to worry about, but plenty of adult decisions looming — she spends her days listening to music, wandering her dusty neighborhood, and hanging out with her vivacious pal Amber (Quinn Frankel). Her mom (a heartbreaking Gretchen Mol) isn’t exactly a stellar role model, often sleeping in past her own wake-up time (it’s Lea who tries to wake her up), and her dad is nowhere to be found. The boys her age are self-obsessed, silly, even boring, and while Lea isn’t inexperienced when it comes to sex, it doesn’t seem like something she particularly enjoys, instead turning to it as yet another snoozy pastime. 

“Chevalier” (April 7, in theaters from Searchlight Pictures)

For a man who was very nearly lost from history — forcefully erased during his time and long after he’d passed away — Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges still managed to leave quite a footprint. Good luck choosing which of his many accomplishments to recognize first: his prodigious fencing talent, his exploits as the colonel of the first all-Black regiment in Europe, his incredible skill as a virtuoso violinist, the list goes on and on. In Stephen Williams’ “Chevalier,” it’s Bologne’s awe-inspiring work as a composer — so talented that he was often referred to as the “Black Mozart, an even funnier moniker considering the pair were contemporaries — that forms the center of an alternately raucous and staid biopic.

Born in the French “overseas department” of Guadeloupe in 1745, Bologne’s life was complicated from the start: he was born the son of a wealthy planter and an enslaved teenager who served as his own maid, and though his father acknowledged him and even supported him, the younger Bologne was always doomed to be an outsider no matter where he was. As Williams’ film — only the director’s second after his 1995 debut “Soul Survivor” and an enviable run of TV directing gigs — kicks off, our on-screen Joseph (played by the always-electric Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is busy beating back his outsider status with insane talent and a brash attitude to match.

“R.M.N.” (April 7, in theaters from IFC Films)

Chekhov’s gun has seldom fallen into hands as steady and menacing hands as in Cristian Mungiu’s poorly titled, expertly staged “R.M.N.,” which finds the elite Romanian auteur extrapolating the personal tensions that gripped his previous work (e.g., “Beyond the Hills” and the Palme d’Or-winning “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days”) across an entire Transylvanian village. The result is a socioeconomic crucible that carefully shifts its weight to the same foot that Mungiu always loves to rest on your throat; a slightly over-broad story of timeless xenophobia baked full of local flavor and set right on the cusp of a specific moment in the 21st century.

The film begins far away from the snowy hamlet where most of it takes place, as the bull-headed Matthias (Marin Grigore) unceremoniously quits his job at a German slaughterhouse by head-butting his boss for calling him a “lazy Gypsy.” And so, with few other options and the cops on his tail, Matthias returns to the financially dispossessed hometown where he left his young wife Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) and their young son Rudi (Mark Blenyesi), who’s refused to speak ever since he saw something in the woods outside their house.

“Master Gardener” (May 19, in theaters from Magnolia Pictures)

Paul Schrader proudly has little concern with how likable he, or his work, is. For his fans this is part of the joy, finding delight in his prickly Facebook posts and reveling in the black, gnarled heart beating at the center of much of his oeuvre. After the recent existential nightmare of “First Reformed” and last year’s stunningly cruel psychodrama “The Card Counter,” which also premiered on the Lido, Schrader returns to Venice to receive an Honorary Golden Lion award and regale the audience with another gritty tale of redemption. He spoke about “Master Gardener” with his signature nihilist wink and told IndieWire, “This one is going to piss people off. Obama’s not putting it on his top 10 list.”

It is with those expectations, and knowing how dark Schrader is capable of going, that his loyal audience will be bracing themselves for cruelty when “Master Gardener begins. But, while the central character’s arc will likely launch a dreaded “discourse,” there is a tenderness to “Master Gardener” that may prove its biggest surprise.

Joel Edgerton plays the title role as Narvel Roth, a reserved and meticulous gardener who runs the grounds of the grand Gracewood estate along with a small but committed team. The estate is owned by Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver) who swans into every scene with a perfectly coiffed helmet of hair and WASPy panache. Their concerns may seem of little consequence, talking about preparations for a gala and the orchids they plan to auction off, but the oedipal tension between them is immediately unnerving. Outside of the opening credits, which feature time-lapsed flowers vividly blooming against a black backdrop, the gardens themselves seem cold and drained of color. Even trips to supposedly spectacular gardens feature dusty-toned hedges and the browning stems of conspicuously pruned roses against an overcast sky. 

“The Blackening” (June 16, in theaters from Lionsgate)

“The Blackening” is the first great horror parody of the post-“Get Out” era. The scares may be underserved, but the laughs and Blackness commentary make this a thrilling rollercoaster of a film. Based on 3-PEAT Comedy’s 2018 Comedy Central digital short of the same name, it asks a simple question: If the Black character is always the first to go in a horror movie, what happens when the whole cast is Black?

In the original short, a serial killer forces the group to sacrifice whoever is Blackest in order to save themselves. Directed by Tim Story (“Shaft”), the film expands the concept to lampoon every other horror trope and cliché. We start with a remote house in the woods — not a cabin, it’s a gorgeous home — with, of course, a creepy basement. There’s a horribly racist board game, The Blackening, which has a big blackface figure as a mascot. The game is simple: Answer questions about Blackness or die. 

“Showing Up” (TBD 2023, in theaters from A24)

“First Cow” may not have been anywhere near as soul-devouringly sad as “Wendy and Lucy,” but that bittersweet frontier comedy about two friends who get milked to death while trying to make an honest buck was still bleak enough to leave me very scared for the heroine of Kelly Reichardt’s latest film about desperate people and the animals with which they run afoul. Or, fowl, as the case may be in the director’s feathery “Showing Up,” a slight knowing smile of a movie starring Michelle Williams as a stressed-out Portland ceramist with a pageboy haircut who reluctantly finds herself nursing an injured pigeon during the most important week of her not-quite career.

The good news is that nobody gets buried with their best friend or has to leave them behind; this isn’t the kind of movie in which people die so much as one where everyone wears overalls and André Benjamin plays the patient kiln master at an Oregon arts college. The bad news is that a deadline might be even more distressing for certain types — namely, an insecure sculptor whose landlord (Hong Chau) is so busy rocketing to local fame with her large-scale installation work that she doesn’t seem to care about fixing the hot water. 

“De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films)

A metal pincer travels through a dark red tunnel tearing at a foggy white membrane, reminiscent of a futuristic space vehicle burrowing through the bowels of a stylishly realized alien planet. In reality, this is inner space not outer, with minute cameras within the human body bridging the gap between documentary and arthouse sensibility.

The moving image has always existed in parallel in both art and science. “2001: A Space Odyssey” told of humanity’s potential across the solar system and, a year later, cutting-edge technology captured Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. But, as a doctor in “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” reminds us, art has its limits and “the challenge is not to foresee the future but to make it possible.” While filmmakers for over a century have experimented with narrative structure, computer-generated imagery and the boundaries of imagination science to map distant planets and tunnel through organs, giving us a new understanding of our anatomy and facilitating surgical procedures with godlike capabilities. 

“Carmen” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics)

Located somewhere between a classic opera, a modern dance piece, and a deadly fever dream — between the timeless beauty of ancient myth and the modern nightmare of America’s current immigration policies — Benjamin Millepied’s “Carmen” is stretched across a few too many borders to ever feel like it’s standing on solid ground. And yet, it’s undeniably exhilarating to watch one of the world’s most accomplished choreographers team up with one of its most virtuosic composers (Nicolas Britell) for the kind of aggressively unclassifiable movie that would never exist if not for these two artists reaching beyond their disciplines to create it themselves.

Loosely inspired by Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera of the same name — so loosely, in fact, that Millepied thinks of his film as less of a re-telling or adaptation than he does a version of Bizet’s tragedy from a parallel universe — this “Carmen” moves the action from the southern tip of Spain to the northern cusp of Mexico, pares the source material’s busy story down to the brink of abstraction, and transmutes its soaring arias into defiant ballets of freedom. Imagine watching Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Julie Taymor’s “Titus” double-projected on the same screen and you might have a vague idea of the strange no-man’s land that Millepied’s debut feature begins dancing across from the moment it starts. We begin in the Chihuahuan desert, where a proud flamenco dancer named Zilah (Marina Tamayo) summons a ferocious storm from the flimsy wooden board underneath her feet as cartel goons draw their guns on her.

A few moments later, Zilah’s thundering steps — the wild heartbeat of the film to come — are replaced by the sound of a single gunshot. Newly orphaned, her beautiful daughter Carmen (“In the Heights” breakout Melissa Barrera, more than cementing her star appeal) has no choice but to make a break for the border in the desperate hope that she might find refuge at a California nightclub owned by her godmother. 

“Rodeo” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Music Box Films)

Julia (an astounding Julie Ledru) has no interest in half-measures. Her dirt bike gets stolen? Time to steal someone else’s. She needs gas for that new bike? Take it off the first dude who looks her way. She wants some quick cash? Smash and grab a truckload of fancy bikes and literally just ride away with her new fortune. Nothing is out of the reach of her sticky fingers, but even lone wolf Julia hungers for companionship, and in Lola Quivoron’s visceral “Rodeo,” she gets it — at a price.

“Rodeo” is a heart-pounding, wholly unique ride, punctuated by incredible stunt work from Ledru and the rest of the cast — shepherded by veteran stunt expert Mathieu Lardot, who has worked on everything from the Jason Bourne franchise to the “Mission: Impossible” films — and possessed by a kinetic, high-energy drive. Some crafty Hollywood executive will likely pitch an Americanized version as one part “Titane,” one part “Fast and Furious,” and one part “Girlhood,” but Quivoron’s feature debut is so singular, so thrilling, that it will hopefully escape without being sucked into the remake machine. 

“Am I OK?” (TBD 2023, streaming on HBO Max)

Mid-way through Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne’s warm-hearted feature directorial debut “Am I OK?,” stars Dakota Johnson and Sonoya Mizuno, playing long-time BFFs in the middle of a crisis, take part in the kind of knockdown, drag-out argument that only people who really love each other could have. The expletives fly fast, the needling remarks about sensitive subjects come quick, and absolutely no one leaves the fight happy. It’s the sort of experience anyone who has a best friend is likely familiar with, though the details of how and why Lucy (Johnson) and Jane (Mizuno) are arguing are very specific, the result is immediately recognizable, understandable, and heartbreaking.

“Am I OK?” isn’t just a smart comedy about a pair of pals upended — sort of — by the admission that one of them is gay, it’s also a generous examination of female friendship, a dead funny skewering of L.A. culture, and a refreshing new spin on the sex comedy to boot. It’s got something for everyone, a crowd-pleaser with the kind of plotline that might scare off a handful of audience members (too bad for them, really). Aided by Johnson’s very charming comedic turn and Mizuno gamely taking on a prickly role (plus Notaro as, and this would be hard to make up, the doyenne of a retreat dedicated to a hammock-based lifestyle), “Am I OK?” joins a growing body of female-focused friendship films (“Bridesmaids,” “For a Good Time, Call…,” “Girls Trip,” just to name some recent standouts) without backing down from its interest in exploring sexuality, pleasure, and identity. 

“Sanctuary” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Neon’s Super)

A sharp and silly and deliriously romantic single-location saga about a hotel chain heir (Christopher Abbott) who’s blackmailed by his long-time dominatrix (Margaret Qualley), Zachary Wigon’s “Sanctuary” unfolds like a kinky cross between “Punch-Drunk Love” and an Off-Broadway play. The results are delightful and exasperating in almost perfectly equal measure until a last-minute hail Mary ends the movie on such a high that even its hoarier stretches seem like they were worth the walk in hindsight.

It starts with color swirls and a heart-stirring Ariel Marx score that sounds like it could be the overture of a musical; it ends with a rush of blood to the head. In between, it’s sustained by its performances. Not just the go-for-broke performances from two of the most inherently watchable young actors of their time, but also those of their characters, both of whom are so trapped by their parts in life that their kinky role-playing sessions together have become a lifeline that neither one of them may be able to live without. At a certain point, who they pretend to be with each other might be more honest than who they are on their own. 

“Enys Men” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Neon)

A woman walks along a clifftop towards a stone cottage, the only structure as far as the eye can see. Struggling against the wind, she inches her way up a hill, trudging through the undergrowth, a reminder that grief slows the world down. Time and liminal space stretch and strain, minutes take longer to pass, the horizon reaches further away. It is lonely, it is mundane, and it is cruel. “Enys Men,” the latest film from British arthouse director Mark Jenkin, manifests grief as a a literal island, with its sole resident walking through its rituals with grim determination.

The film, for all its experimental form, wears its central allegory on its sleeve. One of its few lines of dialogue is heard through a crackling radio explaining, “The abandoned island of Enys Men has become a monument of grief,” and our protagonist known only as The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) walks through each day’s routine with eerie detachment. The film begins in April 1973, and we meet The Volunteer checking on a bunch of long-stemmed white flowers with glowing red stamen, all growing from an otherwise barren clifftop.

Each day, The Volunteer notes the status of the flowers with “No Change” jotted down in a ledger, but as the first day of May approaches, it is evident that something is shifting. With each passing day, the dread is subtly amplified, the flowers grow, the presence at the bottom of the well becomes more tangible. Much like with Jenkin’s striking tale of Cornish fishermen “Bait” and parenthood dramedy “The Midnight Drives,” the films operate based on a dreamy internal logic that is never made explicit. 

“Biosphere” (TBD 2023, in theaters from IFC Films)

Toward the beginning of “Jurassic Park,” while debating the efficacy of the rigid confines of Isla Nublar’s foolproof dinosaur containment and control system, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm ominously intones the now iconic line, “Life finds a way.” This line is referenced numerous times, first directly and later more obliquely, throughout “Biosphere,” the directorial debut of producer Mel Eslyn (“The One I Love,” “Room 104”). Led by Sterling K. Brown and Mark Duplass, it follows two men as they cope with being the last humans alive on the planet and the evolutionary changes that nature throws their way.

Ray (Brown) and Billy (Duplass) are the only residents of an apartment-sized bio-dome after some unknown catastrophe appears to have annihilated all other life on Earth. It’s implied eventually that Billy, once the American president during a time of crisis, may have had a hand in whatever it was that went down before the start of the movie. Ray, on the other hand, is haunted by the memory of a birthday party magician who made a bowling ball appear out of thin air.

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, what's love got to do with it.

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“Number 47 and Number 49. A continent between them.” Twice in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” Kazim Kahn ( Shazad Latif ) tells his lifelong friend Zoe Stevenson ( Lily James ) that even though they grew up next door, sharing a treehouse—and a first kiss—the Muslim Pakistani-British and white British worlds are very far apart. That is never clearer than when Kaz tells Zoe he is engaged but does not know yet to whom. 

What he means is that he has agreed to the Pakistani custom of “assisted marriage.” It is no longer called “arranged marriage” because it is a hybrid. Kaz’s parents did not meet until the wedding. But in today’s more modern version, the parents are very much involved but the couple does get a chance to spend some time together to determine their compatibility before the ceremony. 

Zoe is surprised that her old friend is not hoping for what his culture calls a “love marriage.” She certainly has no interest in the handsome, kind, funny young veterinarian her mother ( Emma Thompson , having a blast) wants her to marry. Yet, Zoe has her own conflicts around love, with a history of relationships so short-lived none of them qualifies as likely to stick around long enough to watch an entire TV series together. When she tells fairy tales to her nieces, she switches the ending. In her version, Cinderella breaks glass ceilings instead of losing a glass slipper. And the princess would rather have a cool talking frog than a boring old prince.

Zoe is an accomplished documentary filmmaker (although it's hard to imagine her making a professional film with one small camera, doing all of her own filming, sound, and editing). Producers have no interest in her proposals for films about tragic topics. She impulsively suggests a documentary about her friend’s progress in finding a bride. The producers perk up and suggest titles like “When Harry Was Forced to Meet Sally” or “My Big Fat Arranged Marriage.” Zoe has a better idea: “Love Contractually.” Kaz reluctantly agrees, and Zoe starts following him with her camera to a meeting with the jovial matchmaker to an awkward mixer to a “love at first Skype” meeting with Maymouna ( Sajal Ali ), a bride prospect in Lahore, a shy law student, and then to their wedding.

The movie comes from Working Title Films, the studio behind classic rom-coms like “ Love Actually ,” “ Notting Hill ,” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” and it acknowledges, pays tribute to, and steals a bit from those and some Hollywood favorites as well. Zoe tells the producers she plans to interview couples for context and commentary like the ones in “When Harry Met Sally.” As in that film, those moments are some of the most memorable. This one has familiar beats but appealing performers, better dialogue, and more depth of character than many more formulaic movie romances. 

It also benefits from the authenticity brought to the story by director Shekhar Kapur and first-time screenwriter Jemima Khan . At one point, Zoe’s film is criticized for bringing the “white gaze” to a project about Pakistani culture. That is a sly dig, pointing out just what this movie is not. For those in the audience who, like Zoe, might consider “assisted marriage” as “a medieval chattel swap,” Kapur's film provides a nuanced view, comparing the 55 percent divorce rate for Western “love marriages” to the 6 percent for “assisted.” The appeal for Kaz, in particular, is understandable. We learn that his family has had no contact with his sister since she married outside their faith and culture. He cannot bear putting them through that again. They speak of “falling into like and walking into love,” and Kaz says, “It’s just a different way of getting there.” 

But assisted marriage is not idealized. Kaz and his mother and father each give the matchmaker different priorities, and his mother's are explicitly colorist. She does not want her son’s bride to be “too dark,” looking for a “wheat” skin color. His father says he should not look for that "click" or spark, but Kaz is hoping the “bespoke 3D halal Tinder” will find him someone he can love.

No one will be surprised by the story's conclusion. But "What's Love Got to Do With It?" is so well supported by the lead-up, including sympathetic treatment of the romantic partners who don’t work out, that it earns a happily-ever-after ending.

Now playing in theaters. 

Nell Minow is the Contributing Editor at RogerEbert.com.

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What's Love Got to Do with It? (2023)

Rated PG-13 for strong language including a sexual reference, some suggestive material and brief drug material.

109 minutes

Lily James as Zoe

Shazad Latif as Kazim Khan

Shabana Azmi as Aisha Khan

Emma Thompson as Cath

Sajal Ali as Maymouna

Oliver Chris as James

Asim Chaudhry as Mo

Jeff Mirza as Zahid Khan

Alice Orr-Ewing as Helena

• Shekhar Kapur
• Jemima Khan

Cinematographer

• Remi Adefarasin
• Guy Bensley
• Nitin Sawhney

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Review: ‘Flamin’ Hot’ entertainingly prints the legend

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Just as fiercely as the red slurry on Flamin’ Hot Cheetos sticks to one’s fingertips, the apocryphal legend that Richard Montañez, a Mexican American maintenance worker turned inspirational leader, invented the spicy variety of the popular cheese puffs adhered to the collective consciousness. Montañez’s campaign to promote his supposed entrepreneurial accomplishment has resulted in numerous public appearances, book deals, and now a biopic that marks the feature directorial debut of multi-hyphenate Eva Longoria .

Last year, however, The Times published an investigation probing the veracity of Montañez’s claim . Internal records from Frito-Lay and the account of another employee officially tasked with developing the fiery snack in the late 1980s categorically disprove his involvement in its creation or even in naming the product.

The man who didn’t invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos

Richard Montañez has for years told a story of how he dreamed up Flamin’ Hot Cheetos while working as a Frito-Lay janitor. The archival record, former employees and Frito-Lay itself say otherwise.

May 16, 2021

Based on Montañez’s 2013 memoir, “A Boy, a Burrito and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive,” the screenplay by Linda Yvette Chávez (co-creator of “Gentefied” ) and Lewis Colick takes the subject’s version of the events as fact for a larger-than-life fictionalized account, which, like Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s recent “Bardo,” could also bear the title “False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.”

On screen, actor Jesse Garcia ( “Quinceañera” ) plays Montañez with an unwaveringly winsome attitude. The performance traces his youthful days involved with gangs in the 1970s to his transition to a responsible family man eager to land a position at the Frito-Lay Rancho Cucamonga plant and beyond. Flashbacks with Garcia’s Spanglish voice-over walk us into episodes of racial discrimination in Richard’s childhood, his father’s abuse, and his lifelong romance with wife Judy (played by Annie Gonzalez).

In a standout role for an actor regularly seen in more serious parts, Garcia is an utter joy to watch. His disarming lack of cynicism and optimistic disposition while in Richard’s shoes compel us to wish the humble character’s grand aspirations materialize. May “Flamin’ Hot” serve as testament to Garcia’s range and ability to lead a cast. Meanwhile, a marvelous Gonzalez rides a similar wavelength of cheerful determination. A scene where Judy steps in to defend Richard from the judgment of his headstrong father, Vacho (Emilio Rivera), and another where he credits her for his success brim with earnestness.

Tonally, “Flamin’ Hot” plays like an heir to Chicano classics such as “Blood In Blood Out” or “My Family,” which eschewed emotional subtly, yet dignified the Mexican American experience with uplifting themes of pride and unity. Longoria and her actors lean into the cheesiness, pun intended, but not without winking at us in flights of imagination that communicate a layer of calculated mischief. Take as proof the amusing moments when Richard daydreams about corporate suits fighting each other using street slang.

Disney neglected it. Critics panned it. ‘Blood In Blood Out’ became an L.A. classic anyway

The film stumbled at the box office 30 years ago but was saved from obscurity by Latino audiences, who reclaimed it as a cornerstone of their representation in cinema.

April 23, 2023

Previously behind the camera on a few TV episodes, Longoria fully flexes her ability to guide an ensemble into emotionally cohesive scenes. Despite a heavy reliance on snappy, musically driven montages, the end result is visually polished, with bright saturated colors and occasional narrative flourishes that add an unexpectedly idiosyncratic zest to the picture, effectively separating it from staler biographical affairs. Yet, while “Flamin’ Hot” entices us to want to see more from Longoria the director, its reverential demeanor toward a corporation for merely considering the input of its workers as valuable disappoints.

Richard’s ascent from the factory floor to the rooms of power, as told in “Flamin’ Hot,” entailed great tenacity: first asking his superiors to pronounce his last name properly, then shadowing seasoned machinist Clarence (Dennis Haysbert) and distilling his own knowledge of Latino consumers into a blend of chilies to coat an array of Frito-Lay products, before ultimately breaking the chain of command and taking his concept directly to CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub).

Platitudes pave Richard’s personal and professional growth here, but even so, the intention to instill a sense of self-worth and the life-changing potential of perseverance feels noble. Rather than succumb to the white majority’s otherizing perception of his identity, Richard weaponizes the stereotypes, in this case Latinos’ preference for potent flavors, in his favor. At its core, the premise sustains that triumph is only worthwhile if earned without compromising your authentic self. Given the disputed details, this now seems a tad ironic.

No one denies the magnitude of Montañez’s rise. That alone merits commendation. But the contested part of his self-enshrined legend, the origination of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, is probably the factor that persuaded book publishers and film executives to invest in his story in the first place. In other words, “Flamin’ Hot” the movie might not exist if not for that claim. That the on-screen Richard repeatedly claims to have embellished how events unfolded reads as an admission of guilt or an acknowledgment that versions may differ.

Taken solely as a product of make-believe, however, and detached from the controversies of the source anecdote, “Flamin’ Hot” turns out to be a surprisingly enjoyable crowd-pleaser. It mostly works because Garcia, Gonzalez and Longoria agree on a poignant, yet not sanctimonious approach that crystallizes the specific fortitude of mining hope from dire struggle.

‘Flamin’ Hot’

Rating: PG-13 for some strong language and brief drug material. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes Playing: Available on Hulu

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• <i>Flamin’ Hot</i> Is Not Exactly a True Story, But It Gets Chicano Culture Right

Flamin’ Hot Is Not Exactly a True Story, But It Gets Chicano Culture Right

Flamin’ Hot , Eva Longoria’s feature directorial debut, is not a factual history of the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto—nor is it meant to be.

Instead, in diving into the story of Richard Montañez—the man who claims to have invented the cult favorite spicy snack— Flamin’ Hot tells an acutely human story of a man trying to break generational cycles and start life anew.

Releasing June 9 on both Hulu and Disney+ (becoming the first new movie to do so), Flamin’ Hot is based on Montañez’s first memoir, A Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive . Jesse Garcia plays Montañez, unemployed and selling drugs before he was hired at Frito-Lay.

In Montañez’s telling, he invented a chile slurry with his family that would become the spice base for the eventual Flamin’ Hot Cheeto. Frito-Lay has denied these claims, according to the Los Angeles Times , citing interviews with former employees and the company’s archival record. But Flamin’ Hot worries less about these details and concentrates on the significance of Montañez’s story: While working for a company that largely kept Latinos out of the C-suite, he broke through with tenacity, tailoring the flavor to his community. In both the movie and real life, he climbed the chain of command, eventually becoming the vice president of multicultural sales and community promotions for PepsiCo.

Flamin’ Hot is, however, authentic when it comes to what its director, Longoria, has said matters most : cultural specificity. Linda Yvette Chávez , the co-writer of the film, thoroughly revised a draft of a script written by Lewis Colick into Longoria’s vision, massaging in the Chicano culture of Southern California in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.

How Flamin’ Hot nails cholo and Chicano culture

Montañez never graduated high school—he was not fluent in the corporate jargon of the Frito-Lay executive suite. In the movie, he translates what he imagines Roger Enrico, CEO of parent company PepsiCo, and the other bigwigs might be saying about an economic downturn into a language he does understand: cholo .

“The corporate suite at Frito-Lay felt like gangsters throwing down in a drug den,” Montañez narrates. “‘Cause let’s be real, that’s pretty much what C-suiters are: gangsters with money. Enrico was pissed.”

“He was like, ‘You pendejos are out here tellin’ me these little punks like Nabisco and Eagle Snacks are getting more feria than us?” Montañez continues, pretending to be Enrico. “Biting off our territory, and youse estúpidos OK with that?’”

“And this gabacho was all, ‘Nah, big homie,’” Montañez says, as another executive. “We still got the good stuff. Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos. People still dishin’ out lana for the classics, bro.’”

“What?” Montañez interjects, as himself again. “You need a cholo translator? All right, I got you.”

“‘So sales are down?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Unfortunately.’ ‘Yeah, that’s what it looks like right now.’”

Montañez would have been fluent in the language of gangs and hustling, Chávez tells TIME. “These guys are hustlers, just like him,” she says. From Richard’s perspective, “this is probably how it went down in the room, and they probably threw down about everything. And letting them each be a different type of character from that cholo culture and world.”

Montañez and his wife, Judy (played by Annie Gonzalez), were cholos : young Mexican Americans who belonged to an urban gang subculture. (Colloquially and on the street, chola and cholo culture is known for its trademark aesthetic : pencil-thin eyebrows, lips with a dark and defined liner , cruising lowriders, stylized tattoos.) But then Montañez got a job at Frito-Lay’s plant in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. and things started looking up.

“I grew up with cholitos in my family,” Chávez says. “I see them in three dimensional ways, and so does Eva. When you create from a place of love, you’re gonna get a nuanced representation of that. So that’s where I write from in everything that I do, allowing us to be flawed and complex and also beautiful.”

Chávez, perhaps best known for co-creating the series Gentefied , about three cousins fighting to keep their grandfather’s Boyle Heights taco shop in business, is the daughter of two immigrants from Mexico, and grew up in Norwalk, Calif., a deeply Latino city in Los Angeles County. Longoria, for her part, was born in Corpus Christi, Texas to two Mexican parents. Montañez was born into a Mexican American family near San Bernardino and was raised in and around a migrant labor camp outside of Los Angeles.

When Chávez joined the project, she met first with Montañez, at his house in the Inland Empire, a region next to Southern California. His whole family was there, kids and grandkids, and they’d jump in to fill in any gaps in the story. Richard felt like her dad, she says: a working-class man who worked in factories and dealt with racism. Judy felt like her mom, her prima , “the women in my community who are always holding it down.”

She felt “a sense of relief from them, to sit down with a Latina director and a Latina writer and say, ‘OK, we can turn off the code-switching, and we can be us, and we can tell you truly what we went through,’” Chávez says. “‘Because just looking at you, I know that you know my experience.’ They’re right. I do.”

How Flamin’ Hot handles the muddled story of the spicy Cheeto

While Flamin’ Hot has been well-received (it won the headliner audience award at South by Southwest in March), the details of Montañez’s story have raised eyebrows. In two memoirs— A Boy, a Burrito, and a Cookie and Flamin’ Hot: The Incredible True Story of One Man’s Rise from Janitor to Top Executive —and countless speeches, Montañez has said that he invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

But in May 2021, while the film was in development, the Los Angeles Times published an investigation in which Frito-Lay denied that he invented the snack. According to the Times , a separate team within Frito-Lay came up with the creation. “We value Richard’s many contributions to our company, especially his insights into Hispanic consumers, but we do not credit the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or any Flamin’ Hot products to him,” the company said in a statement. He did, however, work on Sabrositas, a line of products pitched at the Latino market in the Los Angeles area.

Less than a week later, PepsiCo, Frito-Lay’s parent company, backtracked. “The information we shared with the media has been misconstrued by some,” the company said in a statement . “We attribute the launch and success of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and other products to several people who worked at PepsiCo, including Richard Montañez.”

Longoria and Chávez agree: They didn’t set out to tell the history of the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto. The film does, however, acknowledge a group in the Midwest that was designing a spicy snack to be sold in inner-city mini-marts at the same time, which aligns with the official record.

“So much of his story, especially when you watch the film, is how do you get people to value your worth, give you your worth and your credit?” Chávez says. “And for BIPOC people, it’s been a journey for all of us. Sometimes history is skewed. And sometimes those people in positions of power have the privilege to skew that history.”

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‘Flamin’ Hot’ Review: Neon Dust, Hollywood Corn

The actor Eva Longoria’s feature directing debut is a fictionalized account of the birth of a spicy, profitable snack.

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By Lisa Kennedy

“Do I have initiative?” Richard Montañez (played by Jesse Garcia) asks his wife, Judy (Annie Gonzalez), in the dramatic comedy “ Flamin’ Hot ,” directed with affectionate brio by the actor Eva Longoria. Montañez, on whose memoir this fictionalized story is based, is eyeing an application for a job at the Frito-Lay facility in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. While he’s stumped about that word — “initiative” — soon enough he’ll embody it, as he goes from being a janitor to becoming a family man behind a Cheetos flavor that extended the snack maker’s reach, launching Montañez’s marketing career.

Garcia and Gonzalez possess poignant chemistry as the economically struggling couple. They first meet as children. He, a child of farm workers, is being bullied in the lunchroom and at home; she has a bruise that suggests they might have more in common than simply being the brown kids at a predominately white elementary school. Montañez’s youth is recounted in a sometimes boastful, sometimes self-deprecating, always upbeat voice-over that softens the edges of his childhood, which include routine bigotry and outright racism, but also brutality and judgment from his father, Vacho (Emilio Rivera).

Montañez came of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the pride and resistance of the Chicano Movement, while adjacent, were not central to his upbringing. Instead, as he tells us in an account that swings from the present to the past, from the biographical to the fantastical, he found friends in a gang. It wasn’t until Judy got pregnant that the pair agreed that things had to change.

From the moment he enters the Frito-Lay facility, Montañez is a dogged learner, asking questions about chemical processes, wondering about an extruder, even celebrating an industrial power washer. His curiosity aggravates his supervisor (Matt Walsh), worries the friend who helped him get the gig (Bobby Soto) and breaks down the defenses of an engineer (Dennis Haysbert) who knows the facility inside out, and who becomes Montañez’s initially suspicious mentor.

The titular flavor, it seems, didn’t happen overnight. Montañez’s stint begins in the mid-70s and takes off in the early ’90s, when the facility faces hard times. An executive, Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub), coaches the beleaguered work force to “think like a CEO.” And the ensuing scenes — of Rich landing his hot idea, inspired by the Mexican street corn elote — charm as intended. “It burns good,” the wee-est of the Montañezes (Brice Gonzalez) proclaims as the family samples seasonings.

Longoria, working from a screenplay by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez, sprinkles lessons in self-esteem throughout. (The movie is Longoria’s feature directing debut.) And the women here — including Montañez’s mother and Judy — are more than run-of-the-mill catalysts. Still, should it come as a surprise that a movie this puffed up has a dusting of flavors that might not be real ? If you read too deeply about the ingredients that went into “Flamin’ Hot,” you might find enough confusion over whether Montañez actually invented the flavor (as claimed) to make your conscience mildly cramp.

Flamin’ Hot Rated PG-13 for some strong language, and drug talk. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Disney+ and Hulu .

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Flamin' Hot Reviews

For her debut as a director, Eva Longoria chooses a heart-warming assertion of the reality of dreams coming true.

Full Review | Aug 19, 2023

Top to Bottom the film will put a smile on your face

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 22, 2023

Director Eva Longoria has a good eye for comedy. It gets a little sentimental and a little hokey at times, but I still enjoyed this movie

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 21, 2023

Though Montañez's claims have since been contested, the controversy does not diminish the joy of Longoria's film. It's a story of an immigrant's triumph in a society where the odds are always systemically stacked against him.

Full Review | Jul 14, 2023

Whether or not the story behind “Flamin’ Hot” is entirely true, it’s entertaining and charming, which is a tasty combination.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 10, 2023

[Flamin' Hot] is not a slog, but it’s surprisingly bland for a movie about a snack that is supposed to be painfully spicy.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jun 27, 2023

The suspense and drama of the commodity biopic work without the need for either accuracy or mystery.

Full Review | Jun 22, 2023

All the performances are good...It’s too bad it didn’t go to theaters because we would have sold a lot of hot snacks at concessions

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 22, 2023

It’s an interesting story, if you’re the sort of person who’s inspired by tales of meritocracy in corporate America. It’s hard to imagine who else this movie is supposed to appeal to.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 21, 2023

In what could be this year’s ultimate version of “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” director Eva Longoria has taken on the story of Montañez and does plenty of service for it when considering how likable this movie is.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 21, 2023

Despite the spicy subject matter, Flamin’ Hot is a run-of-the-mill biopic.

Full Review | Jun 17, 2023

Flamin' Hot may have a relatively simple plot for a biopic, yet it remains an endearing film that stays with you.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 16, 2023

Very inspiring tale with wonderful performances from Jesse Garcia and Annie Gonzalez

Full Review | Jun 16, 2023

As scripted by Lewis Click and Linda Yvette Chavez, the film is equal parts outrage, uplift and comic schtick.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jun 16, 2023

Saluting blue-collar ingenuity and work ethic through a proud Latino lens, this crowd-pleasing biopic finds its inspirational aims offset by embellishments and cliches.

We all want to feel as appreciated as we know we should be. It’s why these types of movies hit that warm-and-fuzzy spot, even when they’re little more than serviceable and enjoyable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 16, 2023

A less talented director would have taken a straight-forward approach. But Longoria turns her creative juices up into overdrive.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 15, 2023

I wish Flamin’ Hot had opted to pursue the obstacles as more than bumps on the way to Richard’s success. This story works better than I had thought it could have, but it needed a little more intensity.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 15, 2023

Just as Air briefly transformed Nike — valued at that time at $900 million — into the underdog, Flamin’ Hot convinces you that one man’s quest to sell a unique flavour of a very unhealthy processed snack is somehow tied to his cultural identity.

Full Review | Jun 15, 2023

Director Eva Longoria brings a sureness of touch and warmth to the story, with Jesse Garcia putting in a winning performance as a God-loving working-class hero who overcomes the temptations of petty crime and easy money for the sake of his family.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 15, 2023

Flamin’ Hot movie review: Why Flamin’ Hot is the most inspirational film of the year

By ricky valero | jun 2, 2023.

Flamin’ Hot from Searchlight Pictures is set to become the first movie to release on Disney+ and Hulu simultaneously. Is it worth watching? Absolutely! Below, I share why  Flamin’ Hot  is the most inspirational film of the year.

"When the world treats you like a criminal, you become one."

What if I told you the man who created the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos was an ex-criminal without a high school diploma? You’d probably think I was lying to you or you’d Google it the moment I told you about it. Richard Montañez was a man who had the odds stacked against him from the time he was born and came up with the revolutionary idea while struggling to make ends meet.

"I want food that tastes like home."

This isn’t your prototypical biopic, as this one is infused with love and passion for sharing this incredible journey of not just one man, but a family. You can watch this movie and learn so much about resilience, passion, and fighting, but the underlining story that I loved was how Richard’s wife stood by his side no matter what. Without her, Richard never would have made it.

Everyone in front of and behind the camera understood the story that they had, and that includes a star-making turn by Jesse Garcia as Richard Montañez. Montañez was someone with this infectious personality that when he was on, everyone else around him was as well, and Garcia delivered all of who Montañez was and more. He was charming, loveable, relatable, and easy to root for because Garcia brought that to life. The same can be said for Annie Gonzalez, his scene partner as Richard’s wife, Judy. While Garcia had the meat of the story, Gonzalez brings so much heart to Judy opposite of Richard, elevating the film tremendously.

The movie Flamin’ Hot is filled with so much heart and soul

Eva Longoria hits a home run in her directorial debut, and a lot of that has to do with being handed a brilliantly written script from the team of Linda Yvette Chávez and Lewis Colick. Longoria has been in this business long enough to understand an important project, but even more to know where the camera needs to be at the right spot at every moment. I can’t wait to see what she has in store for us in her next feature.

Overall, with an entire team working from top to bottom to make this thing with so much passion and heart, it resulted in one of the best movies of 2023. It’s such an inspirational journey that will inspire so many people. Flamin’ Hot is beautiful and will have you in tears, so have the tissues ready.

Flamin’ Hot hits Disney+ and Hulu on June 9, 2023.

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Flamin’ Hot review – under-seasoned Cheetos biopic sticks to the formula

The man who invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos gets his time in the sun but Eva Longoria’s by-the-numbers drama leaves questions

A film telling the story of a Mexican American janitor who went on to create a $1bn snack brand fits into Hollywood’s current cultural and creative moment rather perfectly. It’s been a time both of exploring the dramatic origins of everyday products and services (from Nike’s Air Jordans to BlackBerry to Tetris to Uber) and of finding more ways to tell diverse stories outside of a prohibitively limited lens, a lens that’s been particularly limited for Latino characters.

Despite Latino audiences over-indexing at cinemas in the US (in 2021, they had the highest per-capita attendance, averaging 1.7 visits a year compared with 1.3 for white audiences), there remains a disappointing dearth of big-screen representation (a report last year showed that just 5.2% of leads in film were Latino or Hispanic). Ahead of this summer’s landmark DC adventure Blue Beetle, centering a rare Latino superhero, Eva Longoria has found an unlikely success story to propel her to the title of film-maker, having cut her teeth on television. Her small-screen tutelage is hard to shake in this earnest and at times efficiently entertaining, yet also rather plodding rags-to-riches tale that aside from the odd flourish, feels very much like a TV movie.

It’s hard not to get at least mildly involved though in the story of Richard Montañez, as he grows up as a kid balancing his Mexican-American identity in 60s California while being targeted at school and physically abused at home. Longoria, and the screenwriters Linda Yvette Chávez and Lewis Colick, keep things light even as Montañez (now played by Jesse Garcia) falls into a life of crime with his partner Judy (Annie Gonzalez) by his side. The arrival of a baby forces them to reconsider but an unwelcoming job market, one especially unwelcoming for someone who looks like Richard, makes life a constant struggle. When he gets a job as a janitor at the local Frito-Lay factory, he takes the opportunity with all the enthusiasm he can muster, smiling through various indignities and grateful to be providing for his family.

Mopping floors and cleaning equipment isn’t quite enough, though, and when business starts to crumble with a recession-impacted market and a string of layoffs, Richard comes up with an idea, a way to cater to the underserved Latino market, to make the Cheeto … Flamin’ Hot.

There’s some obvious mirroring here, the adaptation of a story of someone striving to appeal to a growing yet underappreciated demographic attempting to do the exact same thing, and while the recent trend of business origin stories has been hit and miss to say the least, it’s at least refreshing to see someone who isn’t a straight white man progress within industry (2020’s Madam CJ Walker series Self Made felt similarly vital, if ultimately superior). The film neatly recognises the importance of food as cultural identity and the authenticity that should come with parlaying this into a just business proposition – but while there’s an easy underdog tale here to cheer on, it’s not quite as compelling as the makers seem to believe. Similar to Ben Affleck’s Air (a film that would have worked far better had Viola Davis’s force-of-nature mother been the lead), it all feels a little too minor, a Wikipedia page writ medium.

Because even the most magnetic moments (a montage of Montañez and family crafting the perfect chilli sauce, a late-stage grassroots marketing campaign) become dubious with even the lightest bit of research. These films, when done even half-correct, compel one to dig further into the facts, to learn more about the reality of the situation and it doesn’t take long to discover that Flamin’ Hot became the centre of controversy as soon as it was announced. The Los Angeles Times ran an investigation that found that Montañez’s involvement with the creation of the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto has not just been overstated but has been fully fabricated. Since then, a he said, they said back-and-forth has left the situation even foggier (the script was slightly tweaked to recognise the work of a separate team working on a similar project with one of the writers saying “enough” was true for it to work and it shouldn’t be seen as a documentary) and so the facts remain a mystery.

One accepts a certain amount of creative license with “true stories” and Montañez’s rise from the bottom to the top is undeniable regardless of his level of involvement with the snack in question, but taken as fact or fiction, the film just isn’t enough of a meal. It’s cheerily done and competently made but broadly sentimental to a fault, the strings being pulled too visible for the film’s many coerced moments of emotion to really work. For a film all about the importance of heat, it’s frankly lukewarm.

Flamin’ Hot is now available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere

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Flamin' Hot

This is the inspiring story of Richard Montañez who, as a Frito Lay janitor, helped disrupt the food industry by channeling his Mexican heritage to turn Frito Lay snacks into an iconic globa... Read all This is the inspiring story of Richard Montañez who, as a Frito Lay janitor, helped disrupt the food industry by channeling his Mexican heritage to turn Frito Lay snacks into an iconic global pop culture phenomenon. This is the inspiring story of Richard Montañez who, as a Frito Lay janitor, helped disrupt the food industry by channeling his Mexican heritage to turn Frito Lay snacks into an iconic global pop culture phenomenon.

• Eva Longoria
• Lewis Colick
• Linda Yvette Chávez
• Richard Montanez
• Jesse Garcia
• Annie Gonzalez
• Emilio Rivera
• 104 User reviews
• 70 Critic reviews
• 58 Metascore
• 7 wins & 8 nominations total

• Richard Montañez

• Judy Montañez

• Vacho Montañez

• Concha Montañez

• Clarence C. Baker

• Roger Enrico

• Tony Romero

• Hector Morales

• Lonny Mason

• Young Richard
• (as Carlos Sanchez)

• Lucky Montañez

• Young Lucky Montañez
• (as Carlos Solorzano)

• Steven Montañez

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia Richard Montanez : Appears during the montage of giving away bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos. He wears a navy blue plaid shirt at a family picnic party.
• Goofs When Richard Montañez is looking up Roger Enrico's phone number in the 1992 Frito Lay Company Telephone Directory, the telephone number shown has a 469 area code. That area code didn't come into being until 1999.

Lonny Mason : You better pray for a miracle, Montanez. Because before this is over, one way or another, you won't have a job.

• Crazy credits The Searchlight Pictures fanfare is played in a Mexican musical style.
• Connections Featured in Half in the Bag: Fool's Paradise and The Corporate Product Biopic Trend (2023)
• Soundtracks Las Nubes Written by Juan Hernandez Almaguer Performed by Little Joe & La Familia Published by San Antonio Music Publishers, Inc. Courtesy of La Familia Enterprises, LLC (TDI Records) By arrangement with The Orchard

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 39 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Best Movies of 2024: Best New Movies to Watch Now

Welcome to our guide of the Best Movies of 2024, featuring every Certified Fresh movie as they come in week by week!

In April : Challengers , Abigail ,   Arcadian , Scoop , Wicked Little Letters , Civil War , Monkey Man , The Beast , and The First Omen .

In March : Love Lies Bleeding and Problemista , both from A24 . One Life , starring Anthony Hopkins. Ordinary Angels , starring Hilary Swank. In horror, we got You’ll Never Find Me and  Late Night with the Devil , the latter which also tops our best horror of 2024 list . Dialogue-free animation Robot Dreams and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World jockeying for the top spot here.

And what about February ? Dune pretty good, thanks for asking. Part Two went Certified Fresh within an hour after the reviews embargo lifted on February 21st. With it outclassing the first Dune , we took a look at 20 sequels that got better Tomatometer scores than their originals . Otherwise, things got freaky with horror film Stopmotion and the comic zaniness of Hundreds of Beavers taking the crown for the best-reviewed of the year.

We didn’t have a blockbuster January like we did in 2023 ‘s, when genre surprises M3GAN and Plane went Certified Fresh. But Daisy Ridley got her post-Skywalker win with Sometimes I Think About Dying . Mads Mikkelsen re-teamed with his A Royal Affair director Nikolaj Arcel to find The Promised Land. With The Crime Is Mine , Francois Ozon is getting career-best reviews, and his 10th Certified Fresh film over the past decade-and-change. And Netflix scored with The Kitchen , Orion and the Dark , and Good Grief .

Robot Dreams (2023) 98%

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) 98%

The Crime Is Mine (2023) 98%

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023) 98%

Molli and Max in the Future (2023) 98%

Late Night with the Devil (2023) 97%

Io Capitano (2023) 97%

Tótem (2023) 97%

The Promised Land (2023) 96%

Challengers (2024) 95%

Hundreds of Beavers (2022) 95%

Fitting In (2023) 95%

Love Lies Bleeding (2024) 94%

Limbo (2023) 94%

Driving Madeleine (2022) 94%

Dune: Part Two (2024) 93%

Femme (2023) 93%

The Settlers (2023) 93%

About Dry Grasses (2023) 93%

La Chimera (2023) 92%

Cabrini (2024) 91%

Orion and the Dark (2024) 91%

One Life (2023) 90%

Stopmotion (2023) 90%

The Kitchen (2023) 89%

Monkey Man (2024) 89%

Problemista (2023) 88%

Disco Boy (2023) 88%

Abigail (2024) 84%

Arcadian (2024) 85%

The Beast (2023) 85%

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Ordinary Angels (2024) 85%

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The First Omen (2024) 81%

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Wicked Little Letters (2023) 80%

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Scoop (2024) 77%

Suncoast (2024) 76%

Good Grief (2023) 76%

Self Reliance (2023) 72%

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Flamin’ Hot: A Spicy Tale of Innovation and Inspiration (Movie Review)

If you’ve ever wondered how a janitor could turn a simple snack into a global sensation, then grab a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and buckle up! “ Flamin’ Hot ” is a fiery tale of innovation, inspiration, and the power of believing in oneself. Directed by Eva Longoria, this 2023 biographical drama tells the true story of Richard Montañez, a Frito Lay janitor who disrupted the food industry and created a pop culture phenomenon.

The Flamin’ Hot Story

“Flamin’ Hot” takes us on a journey from the humble janitorial corridors of Frito Lay to the high-powered boardrooms of the snack industry. Richard Montañez, played with heart and grit by Jesse Garcia, is a janitor with a vision. He sees potential in a simple, unflavored Cheeto and, inspired by his Mexican heritage, creates a snack that sets the world on fire – the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto.

The film’s narrative is as spicy as the snack it’s named after, filled with moments of triumph, setback, and perseverance. It’s a story of an underdog who, against all odds, changes the course of snack history. The supporting cast, including Annie Gonzalez, Emilio Rivera, and Dennis Haysbert, bring depth and authenticity to this inspiring tale.

Cast & Crew

A closer look.

“Flamin’ Hot” is more than just a rags-to-riches story. It’s a testament to the power of creativity, cultural heritage, and sheer determination. The film explores themes of identity, class, and the American Dream, all through the lens of a man and his spicy snack.

Eva Longoria’s directorial approach is both empathetic and engaging, effectively capturing the struggles and triumphs of Montañez’s journey. The performances are commendable, particularly Garcia, who embodies Montañez’s spirit and determination with a captivating authenticity.

Behind the Scenes

The film’s technical aspects enhance the storytelling. The cinematography captures the stark contrast between Montañez’s humble beginnings and the glitzy world of corporate America. The sound design and editing create a dynamic and engaging viewing experience.

The soundtrack, filled with vibrant Latin music, adds a layer of cultural richness to the film. It sets the tone, complements the narrative, and contributes to the overall mood of the movie.

The Elephant in the Room

However, it’s important to address the controversy surrounding the film . Frito Lay has disputed the accuracy of Montañez’s story, claiming that the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos was a corporate effort. This controversy adds a layer of complexity to the film and may affect viewers’ perception of the story.

While the film presents Montañez’s version of events, it’s essential for viewers to be aware of this dispute and form their own opinions. After all, every story has multiple sides, and “Flamin’ Hot” is no exception.

My Thoughts on Flamin’ Hot

In a world where it’s increasingly difficult for a film to truly captivate my attention, “Flamin’ Hot” managed to do just that. The story is as captivating as a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is addictive. The characters are as interesting as the snack’s fiery red color, and the narrative flow kept me engaged from start to finish – a feat that few recent films have achieved in recent years.

The film’s narrative style brought to mind echoes of “Goodfellas”, my all-time favorite movie. There’s something about the way the story unfolds, the way the characters are developed, that reminded me of the classic Scorsese film. Minus the murder and mayhem, of course. It’s not every day that a movie about a spicy snack can evoke such comparisons!

As for the controversy surrounding the film, I find myself rooting for the underdog. Perhaps it’s the romantic in me, or perhaps it’s the allure of a good David vs. Goliath story, but I’d like to believe that Richard Montañez’s tale is true. After all, who doesn’t love a good underdog story?

The performances in the film were another highlight. Jesse Garcia, who plays Richard Montañez, delivers a compelling performance, and his interactions with Clarence, played by Dennis Haysbert (yes, the All State Man), were particularly enjoyable. However, I must admit, every time Haysbert appeared on screen, I couldn’t help but think of car insurance commercials. A bit distracting, perhaps, but certainly no fault of the film – just the quirks of my brain!

READ MORE: A MAN CALLED OTTO REVIEW: TOM HANKS SHINES AS A GRUMPY OLD DUDE

My Final Verdict

Rating: 4/5 stars.

In conclusion, “Flamin’ Hot” is a spicy blend of inspiration, innovation, and controversy. It’s a film that celebrates the power of an idea and the determination to bring it to life. Despite the controversy, the movie offers an engaging and inspiring viewing experience.

Whether you’re a fan of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or just love a good underdog story, “Flamin’ Hot” is a film worth crunching on. So grab a bag of your favorite snack, sit back, and let this fiery tale of innovation and inspiration light up your screen.

You can watch Flamin’ Hot exclusively on Hulu . Check it out, then stop back and let me know what you think!

Tony has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Phoenix and over 11 years of writing experience between multiple publications in the tech, photography, lifestyle, and deal industries.

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Cookie and Privacy Settings

We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.

Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.

These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.

Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.

We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.

We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.

These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience.

If you do not want that we track your visit to our site you can disable tracking in your browser here:

We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.

Google Webfont Settings:

Google Map Settings:

Google reCaptcha Settings:

Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:

The following cookies are also needed - You can choose if you want to allow them:

You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.