Movie Reviews
‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’ Review: A Legend Opens Up in Nanette Burstein’s Engaging HBO Doc Based on Rediscovered Audio Recordings
A celebrity from the age of 11, Elizabeth Taylor was practiced at public relations for almost all her life, so there aren’t many personal revelations in Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes. But Nanette Burstein‘s elegantly constructed documentary, mostly in Taylor’s own words backed by illuminating archival images, works as a lively bit of film history about movie stardom in the volatile 1960s as the studio system was fading and the media exploding.
The film — which premiered at Cannes in the Cannes Classics sidebar — is based on 40 hours of recently rediscovered audiotapes, recordings Taylor made in the mid-1960s for a ghost-written memoir (long out of print). It was the most frenzied moment of her fame, when she was coming off the paparazzi-fueled scandal that was Cleopatra. Taylor, who died in 2011, recalls her many marriages — four when she made these recordings, since she was on the first of two to Richard Burton — and her career, from her start as a child in Lassie Come Home (1943) through her Oscar-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
The Bottom Line An entertaining if unsurprising time capsule.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Classics)
Cast: Elizabeth Taylor
Director: Nanette Burstein
Writers: Nanette Burstein, Tal Ben-David
1 hour 41 minutes
As she did in Hillary, about Hillary Clinton, and The Kid Stays in the Picture, based on Robert Evans’ autobiography, Burstein stays out of her celebrity subject’s way. Taylor’s voice is playful, almost girlish. Occasionally she is blunt, but more often seems cautiously aware of being recorded. Richard Meryman, the Life magazine reporter doing the interviews, is heard asking questions at times, but Taylor is firmly in control, at least on the surface.
Beneath that you can tell how beautifully Burstein and her editor and co-writer, Tal Ben-David, shaped the visuals. The archival photos and news clips offer a telling backdrop of images and sound bites, often more informative than what Taylor says — from shots of crowds filling the streets of London to see her on the day of her second wedding, to the actor Michael Wilding, to film of her in mourning black at the funeral of her beloved third husband, the producer Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash. The visual exceptions are the clichéd, recurring establishing shots of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder, next to a martini glass.
Moving chronologically, Taylor begins with her desire to act even as a child. Photos from that time offer a reminder that she was always astonishingly beautiful. These early sections are fine but bland. She was too young to be married the first time, to Nicky Hilton, she says, and the second marriage just didn’t work out. George Stevens gave her subtle direction and bolstered her confidence when she made A Place in the Sun (1951). When she made Giant with him five years later, he berated her, telling her she was just a movie star and not an actress, a charge that often dogged her.
Taylor becomes sporadically more biting as the film goes on, displaying a sharp-tongued wit and personality. That is particularly true when she talks about her marriage to Eddie Fisher, the first of her marital scandals, covered endlessly in tabloids. It was public knowledge that Fisher and his wife, Debbie Reynolds, were the Todds’ best friends. Shortly after Mike Todd’s death, Fisher left his wife, whose image was always cheery and wholesome, for Taylor. “I can’t say anything against Debbie,” Taylor sweetly says on the tape, and without taking a breath goes on, “But she put on such an act, with the pigtails and the diaper pins.” She says of Fisher, “I don’t remember too much about my marriage to him except it was one big frigging awful mistake.”
Burstein includes some enlightening sidelights from that period. A news clip of the recently married couple has them surrounded by journalists on the steps of a plane, with one reporter asking Fisher about his bride, “Can she cook?” Even as a tease, who would dare say that now?
That fuss was nothing next to Cleopatra (1963), now notorious as the film so over-budget it almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox, and the set on which Taylor and Burton, each married to other people, indiscreetly sparked to each other from the start. The Vatican newspaper weighed in on the affair, disapprovingly. Taylor says her own father called her “a whore.” In one of the film’s more telling scenes, she says of their affair, “Richard and I, we tried to be what is considered ‘good,’ but it didn’t work,” a comment that at once plays into the moralistic language of her day and resists it. These signs of Taylor’s savvy awareness of herself as a public personality are the film’s most intriguing, if scattershot, moments.
The film also shows how besieged the couple was by the paparazzi, at a turning point in celebrity culture. Occasionally other voices are heard in archival audio, and in this section George Hamilton says of the press, “They were not going for glamour anymore. They were going for the destruction of glamour,” suggesting a longing for the old pre-packaged studio publicity days. But Taylor herself is never heard complaining. A realist, she made hiding from the paparazzi into a game for her children so they wouldn’t be frightened.
The recordings end at the point where she is assuring Meryman that she and Burton would be together for 50 years. The film then takes a quick trot through the rest of her days, including rehab at the Betty Ford Center and raising money for AIDS research. But the last word should have been Taylor’s. There is a private Elizabeth, she says. “The other Elizabeth, the famous one, really has no depth or meaning to me. It is a commodity that makes money.” The movie star Taylor is the one who most often comes through in the film, but that is engaging enough.
Movie Reviews
Super Duperr Movie Review: A wild ride filled with laughter and emotion
The Times of India
Apr 07, 2026, 3:24 PM IST
3.0
Super Duperr is a riot in all senses of the word. A wild ride filled with laughter and emotion it presents an unusual matchup of traditional and modern values.Rohit (Lalit Prabhakar) and Isha (Vidula Chougule) are a young couple trying to make their mark in the entertainment industry. They take their relationship to the next level and purchase a flat in Mumbai with their savings. It is here that they realise that they have fallen for a scam when the same house is sold to and currently occupied by a rural family. What follows is a series of clashes and learning moments that test the morality of both parties. The story is a fun take on a series of real world scams and as such has a very interesting premise. The Sameer Asha Patil film however chooses to take a detour in favour of certain stretched out gags and slow motion shots. What could have been a deep exploration of the two worlds colliding, ends up being a formulaic checklist of a wedding song, an action sequence and a few slapstick gags. These are passable of course, but the ho-hum nature of the story’s progression feels under utilized. Super Duperr does offer impactful emotional sequences, notably the equation between the parents (Shashank Shende and Nirmiti Sawant) and his eldest son (Hrishikesh Joshi). The music and cinematography are well executed and add abundantly to the viewing experience. Super Duperr set a rich tapestry only to ultimately doodle in a corner. While it could have benefitted from adding more inter-family interactions, it remains a good watch for this weekend.
Movie Reviews
Why Critics Despise The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (But Audiences Love It)
The verdict is in, and critics have widely panned The Super Mario Galaxy Movie while audiences have universally praised the family-friendly sequel. This follow-up to the fan-favorite The Super Mario Bros. Movie has been in theaters for about a week since its debut on April 1, and it has already had the best box office opening in 2026, earning more than $190 million over its 5-day domestic weekend. Worldwide, it has amassed $372 million, making it the fifth largest global opening ever for an animated film. Despite the movie being a massive box office hit, however, the review scores are terribly low for the video game adaptation, and there are several reasons why.
Fans vs. critics on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
As of April 6, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has a mediocre 42% Tomatometer score from a total of 175 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes while holding a fantastic 89% Popcornmeter score from over 5,000 verified user ratings. That’s a stark 47-point difference between critics and users.
A similarly wide disparity can be found on Metacritic as well, where the sequel has a “generally unfavorable” Metascore of a 37 based on 45 reviews, despite it earning a “generally favorable” user score of a 7.9 (basically, a 42-point difference).
This gulf between professional reviews and user reviews for this sequel likely isn’t too surprising by fans of the original 2023 Super Mario Bros. movie. That film earned a 59% Tomatometer but a 95% Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes, and it has “mixed or average” 46 Metascore but a “universal acclaim” user score of 8.1.
To be fair, the range of critic scores for the film is vast on Metacritic, with about seven reviews above a 60 and fifteen reviews below a 40. ComingSoon’s Jonathan Sim give it a “Good” 7 out of 10 rating, noting that “it doesn’t necessarily deepen the emotional or narrative complexity of the franchise, but it refines what worked before amplifies it on a grander scale.” However, many other reviews are far less kind, particularly the 0 out of 5 rating from The Times that calls the film “ugly, overbranded, lifeless digital marketing vomit” and a review from Vulture that says it’s like being “asphyxiated in a ball pit filled with candy.”
Meanwhile, multiple user reviews on Metacritic are shocked at the reviews. One called the low Metascore “absolutely ridiculous,” while another asked readers to ignore the critics altogether. A different user wrote, “It’s wild to see professional critics giving this a zero. It feels like they’ve never actually picked up a controller.” And to that person’s credit, we did find that a few critics who gave low scores admitting that the film wasn’t meant for them or that they had never played a Mario game before. Indeed, the movie is chock full of Nintendo references and easter eggs, something that Mario fans will appreciate far more than anyone who doesn’t know or care about the difference between a Super Mushroom and a Fire Flower.
More broadly speaking, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has more than several traits that critics tend to dislike but that audiences enjoy. The first is that it’s a quick-paced, action-packed film, which features a handful of battles with Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Princess Peach, Toad, Fox McCloud, Bowser, Bowser Jr., and Wart. Another is that it’s a comedic adventure with cartoonish gags that are age-appropriate for kids and humorous to Mario fans who are in on the joke. On top of that, the film is a family-friendly video game adaptation, a genre that doesn’t usually score well from critics. A Minecraft Movie, another box office smash that earned $960 million worldwide (and also starred Jack Black), was equally slammed by critics with a 47% Tomatometer but lauded by audiences with an 84% Popcornmeter.
Taken altogether, the movie was almost made in a lab for reviewers to despise and for audiences to praise as a nostalgic love letter to Nintendo. Regardless, despite how critics feel, they’ll need to brace themselves for more, since the Nintendo Cinematic Universe is looking like it will come sooner than later.
Movie Reviews
I Know Exactly How You Die – Review | Indie Slasher | Heaven of Horror
Watch I Know Exactly How I Die on VOD
The director of I Know Exactly How I Die is Alexandra Spieth, who ensures a tight pace and some gorgeous shots. She previously directed Stag and created and starred in the web-series [Blank] My Life. The screenplay comes from Mike Corey, and I do really like the plot and evolution of this story.
As already mentioned, the star Rushabh Patel is the executive producer. As a result, this movie is billed as “Rushabh Patel’s I Know Exactly How I Die“, which I am not a fan of. Unless Rushabh Patel is famous in ways I am not familiar with – nor is IMDb, as this is his first and so far only credit there.
This is like people wondering if Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is connected to Stranger Things, because the media keeps referring to it as a new show from The Duffer Brothers. Sure, they produced it, but Haley Z. Boston created the original story and wrote the screenplay. And she’s not even a newcomer.
Okay, rant over, but I just don’t understand the marketing and press decisions of it all.
Anyway, as already mentioned, the practical effects in I Know Exactly How I Die are gorgeous. Any slasher fan should enjoy the concept of the plot as well as those amazing practical effects. And yet, you will have to endure a little terrible CGI, but this is an indie production, so budget restraints come into play. Of course, so does choosing the best talent, and that did not happen for CGI here!
I Know Exactly How You Die is out on VOD from April 7, 2026. You can rent it on Digital HD from your preferred platform, including Prime Video and Fandango at Home. The film will also be available on DVD.
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