They'd forget their precious gold if they had to dig their own

GOLD

1974

Directed by Peter Hunt

Written by Wilbur Smith and Stanley Price (based on the novel Gold Mine by Wilbur Smith)

Spoilers: moderate

Humphrey Bogart in Argument!... or Disagreement!... or Quarrel!... or Dispute!... or...

CONFLICT

1945

Directed by Curtis Bernhardt

Written by Robert Siodmak, Alfred Neumann, Arthur T. Horman, and Dwight Taylor

Spoilers: moderate (or a touch more than moderate, but, anyway, not high)

Walt Disney, part LXV: Keep moving forward

MEET THE ROBINSONS

2007

Directed by Stephen Anderson

Written by more people than I'd prefer to list (based on the book A Day With Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce)

Spoilers: high

When will you make an end?

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

1965

Directed by Carol Reed

Written by Philip Dunne (based on the novel by Irving Stone)

Spoilers: Michelangelo did, in fact, finish the Sistine Chapel ceiling

I know you've seen enough of the Falls for one trip, but don't cross us off your list

NIAGARA

1953

Directed by Henry Hathaway

Written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard Breen

Spoilers: moderate (maybe a teensy bit high, but one generally knows how these things go, right?)

No whammies

THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA

2025

Directed by Samir Oliveros

Written by Amanda Freeman, Maggie Briggs, and Samir Oliveros

Spoilers: moderate (though, in a grander sense, N/A)

Cardboard Science: You're a lovely girl, but lovely girls just don't run around worrying about non-existent sea monsters

MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR

1954

Directed by Wyott Ordung

Written by Roger Corman and Bill Danch

Spoilers: moderate

Walt Disney, part LXIV: At least I saw the wild before it disappeared

THE WILD

2006

Directed by Steve "Spaz" Williams

Written by Mark Gibson, Philip Halprin, Ed Decter, and John J. Strauss

Spoilers: moderate

Or, The Misdirects of Mr. Y

THE MYSTERY OF MR. X

1934

Directed by Edgar Selwyn

Written by Howard Emmett Rogers and Monckton Hoffe (based on the novel X v. Rex by Philip MacDonald)

Spoilers: moderate

The Encyclopedia Brown: I don't suppose I'll have to beg your forgiveness

CHAINED

1934

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by Edgar Selwyn and John Lee Mahin

Spoilers: moderate

The merry-go-round broke down

THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TUNES MOVIE

2025

Directed by Pete Browngardt

Written by many many many people, including Pete Browngardt

Spoilers: moderate

Walt Disney, part LXXXIII: Failure, then learning, then death

MOANA 2

2024

Directed by Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller, and David Derrick Jr.

Written by Jared Bush, Bryson Chun, Bek Smith, and Dana Ledoux Miller

Spoilers: moderate

Note that will eventually be removed: "part 83" is an approximate one, but it is where I believe this film will eventually fall once my not-so-diligently pursued retrospective catalog of Walt Disney animation is done sometime in the next couple of months; meanwhile, since I intended to be done with it before Moana 2 came out on streaming, even if I did not succeed in doing so, it's still best to treat it as just another entry in that series, something I've been sub rosa doing with all of Disney's new-release cartoons for the past two or three years anyhow

Cardboard Science: Not dead the way we understand death

CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN

1958

Directed by Edward L. Cahn

Written by Jerome Bixby

Spoilers: moderate

Walt Disney, part LXIII: Make pishee

CHICKEN LITTLE

2005

Directed by Mark Dindal

Written by Steve Bencich, Ron J. Friedman, Ron Anderson, Mark Kennedy, and Mark Dindal

Spoilers: high

Time just went

HERE

2024

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Written by Eric Roth and Robert Zemeckis (based on the comic book by Richard McGuire)

Spoilers: maybe high, more like inapplicable

Note: runs slightly long, but it was the most movie of 2024, whether we treated it that way or not

In the light, everybody needs the light

UNDER THE LIGHT

Jianrupanshi (Solid As a Rock)

2023

Directed by Zhang Yimou

Written by Chen Yu

Spoilers: moderate

Reviews from gulag: Guadagnino'd

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Reviews from gulag: Down with the Oscars (this isn't about the Oscars)

But I will indulge myself a moment, because today I watched Robert Zemeckis's Here—the boldest Goddamn movie of the year, in its way, just a real achievement, and one that deserves a full review—but perhaps just as importantly, I also watched I Saw the TV Glow, the third feature (second anyone's heard of) from Jane Schoenbrun, the follow-up to their torturously boring and bad We're All Going To the World's Fair; and, in tandem, they very briefly restored my faith in the state of cinema, one being a fearless late-style swing from a tottering master that does some truly new shit, the other being the kind of redemption I genuinely want to see from a filmmaker who might've burned me terribly in the past, but is willing to evolve towards good, exciting work.  And this feeling was shattered, because 2024 now bears the ineradicable stain of producing Anora as America's putative Best Picture of the year, and now it's all just a bunch of morbid considerations about that whole "state of cinema" thing: the possibility that Zemeckis might never make another movie (because hardly anybody's seen Here and I do not think its reputation will grow going forward); the possibility that Shoenbrun's literal physical well-being could be jeopardized, let alone that of their career; and the certainty that Sean Baker is going to go on to keep making the worst motherfucking movies in the world for decades and decades to come.

Anyway, we'll get to I Saw the TV Glow, but I also watched Marielle Heller's Nightbitch, and now they're together, because they're both obtuse horror movies or something.  I'd say it's because they're both about nighttime, but I believe Nightbitch takes place mostly, like at a 3:1 ratio, during the day.  Oh, whatever, it's fundamentally arbitrary.

NIGHTBITCH

It's not clear whether it was Nightbitch source novelist Rachel Yoder, or its writer-director Marielle Heller, or its coterie of producers, but clearly it was decided that what women needed was their own 1994's Wolf, though I certainly can't tell you what all these women thought women must've done to deserve that.  And, somehow, the results are even less impressive: both Wolf and Nightbitch are using a story of canid transformation as a means of actually pursuing a fantasy about middle-aged rebellion and rejuvenation, and, as we weigh each film against the other, Nightbitch ought to have an advantage, because it's at least not embarrassed of being a fantasy movie like Wolf was; yet it's counter-intuitively interested in being a fantasy movie even less; and while Wolf is surely not good at "being a werewolf movie," and does not deliver on the genre pleasures which a movie about Jack Nicholson playing a werewolf has blatantly promised, at least it did have Jack Nicholson fucking a woman half his age and pissing on his corporate rival's shoes, whereas Nightbitch isn't concerned with the genre pleasures of either the werewolf movie or those of the middle-aged rebellion story.  For the long, repetitive middle half the most Amy Adams's (oh boy) unnamed mother (credited thusly, though I could've sworn she received a name) ever gets out of being a human dog, or a rebellious middle-aged woman, is... well, I guess let's just say that Heller must actually hate cats, but at least the storytelling in the corresponding sequence of Can You Ever Forgive Me? suggested she understood the concept of not hating cats.  Her movie's "nighttime" photography isn't as risibly bad as Mike Nichols's.  Let's give Heller that much.

Reviews from gulag: Police abuses

Well, it's probably not the most inappropriate connection I've drawn between two films, but we are trying to do an end-of-year wrap-up here with barely 48 more hours to go before it's moot, so that's what we're going with.  Today's subjects: I'm Still Here and Hit Man.

I'M STILL HERE

Ainda Estou Aqui

I'm Still Here, concerning the extrajudicial murder undertaken by the Medici-led military government in Brazil that triggered the mid-life ascendance of famed human rights lawyer Eunice Paiza to prominence, is exactly the kind of movie you'd guess it was from the "I'd never heard of it till it was nominated for Best Picture" thing it's got going on, and even then you'd probably ask "of the movies broadly like it, why this one?", though a more charitable response would be "why not?"  Maybe it's because it looks alright, albeit mostly by virtue of being shot on film (a 35mm so grainy I thought it was 16, and now I'm a little unsettled about it); maybe it's because it couldn't possibly offend anyone, though it does come off categorically anti-military coup, and I think that's just awfully closed-minded of it.

Still, I can't help but think it's sort of wrongheaded, as a matter of its overall narrative strategy.  Which isn't to let the tactics off the hook: take, for instance, the extended pre-inciting incident first act that's just this naturalistic slice-of-life for a Brazilian family, one that I assume was this large and of this composition in real life, because there are, like, at least three more children than the actual film can handle in its extant configuration (something the film even sub rosa acknowledges in numerous ways throughout, for instance being noticeably relieved to have gotten rid of the eldest daughter by way of a long trip abroad once her function of "being a politically-conscious teen" and "providing some almost nauseatingly-shaky Super 8 home movies" has been accomplished), but this is a slice-of-life that has no goal whatsoever besides impressing on you that bad things can still happen to nice people.  And they are, for sure, nice: with the obvious exceptions, it seems like it'd be cool to be in this family, and live in their cool beach neighborhood, and enjoy the 70s Brazilian lifestyle of wearing underwear or overclothes but not both simultaneously, but this does not, by itself, make them all that interesting to watch.  (And as long as we're talking small stuff, then the constant reference to period pop cultural signifiers is a routine example of the movie's naturalistic tolerance of dead air—I assure you, I do get that it's right at the transition to the 1970s.)

The brood

CUCKOO

2024

Written and directed by Tilman Singer

Spoilers: moderate

Reviews from gulag: Am I out of touch? No, it's the Academy who's wrong

As we approach the 97th Academy Awards—as with all Oscars ceremonies—it's incumbent upon the dutiful film fan to at least make some good faith effort to try to see an appreciable fraction of the Best Picture nominees.  (This is what has been described to me as "a prison of my own making," but if I didn't live in such a thing, whose would I live in?)  It has been a harder task this late winter than maybe it's ever been for me, thanks to a somewhat moribund populist film industry and an Academy that has responded, contrary to their apparently abortive attempts to remain remotely culturally relevant, by veering as far out from the actually-popular culture as it has in years.  It's a particular pity with 2022 and 2023 right there in the rearview mirror, perhaps the highwater marks for any modern—like, post-70s at least—efforts from the Academy at trying to care about what actual audiences care about.  Hey, at least The Substance got nominated for BP.  It ain't gonna win, and I don't know why I ever got it into my fool head that it would, except for that whole "moribund populist film industry" thing and, other than Dune: Part Two I guess, it's the only film with what feels like to me any legitimate cultural impact to have been nominated that also has any right to be there.  (I am speaking incredibly out of turn about Wicked, I guess, and I will disclose that, though I feel pretty confident about it.)  I'm increasingly worried it won't win anything for which it was nominated, which is going to be miserable for me, and then that misery's going to be compounded once the Internet gets mad about it and that anger takes its inevitable form.

In any event, this made for one glum Sunday, and at this point I cannot say with certainty I will continue this quest—with Wicked, for obvious reasons; with Nickel Boys, because I'm not sure I'm interested enough in the two and a half hour race-in-America movie inspired, formally, by video game let's plays, and I think it's not even about cool boxing matches like I thought it was, what the hell; with I'm Still Here because, uh, it's all the way over there; and with A Complete Unknown, because ha ha ha, oh my God, no I'd rather not.  (These movies are also all between 138 and 160 minutes long.)  But I do feel a little bound to do so.  Not to be alarmist, but consider that the 97th Academy Award ceremony could be the last one to take place in a real country.

And yet, despite having been charged with that awesome responsibility, and confronted with that fearsome possibility, they gave us this anyway.  Thhpt.  Here's Conclave, The Brutalist, and Anora, which I somehow did in precisely reverse alphabetical order (because it's also in the order in which I liked them).

CONCLAVE

This is the shortest Best Picture nominee for 2025, in all but one case the shortest by a lot.  It's still 120 minutes long.

But it is, accordingly, also one of the comparative few that seems rightly-sized, and this helps it, this thing that's pulpier than it thinks it is and would likely be better if it were much more.  Despite its theatrical pedigree, director Edward Berger (of the year-before-last's most superfluous-seeming Best Picture nominee, the Netflix-distributed All Quiet On the Western Front) has delivered a film that looks "of streaming," but perhaps appropriately so, these crisp, sharp images from cinematographer Stefane Fontaine, of these semi-identically-dressed men standing or sitting in these sterilized surroundings, belying the enormity of their institution's history and their readily-acknowledged potential for cruelty, deciding the fate of their religion.  (And so Suzie Davis's production design and to an only slightly lesser degree Lisy Christi's costume design—because it's even more baked into the setting, though I did get a kick out of attending to its subtle variety—are both pretty reasonable Oscar nominees.)  The story is very easy to summarize: the pope's dead and a conclave has been called to elect a new one.  The College of Cardinals convenes in Rome under the administration of their dean, British cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), and thus begins the struggle between the liberal factions (fronted by Stanley Tucci), and the conservative factions (Sergio Castellito, dressed up like Guillermo del Toro for some reason), and the even more conservative factions, albeit representing the long-deferred possibility of an African pope (Lucian Msmati), and, finally, the factions of a mostly-ideology-free, just-wants-to-be-the-pope desire (John Lithgow).  Meanwhle, there are terrorist acts afoot outside in Rome and conspiracies afoot within the Vatican, and there's some secretly-ordained cardinal no one's ever even heard of, from, get this, the archbishopric of Kabul (I feel like the practicing Catholics in an "archbishopric" should run into, at least, the double digits; Carlos Diehz), who keeps picking up what I assumed were protest votes.  Lawrence, against his own nature, will have to intervene to unravel the webs of intrigue that have been woven, and put his thumb on the scale more than he'd have ever liked.

Welcome to the world of tomorrow

MOLLI AND MAX IN THE FUTURE

2024

Written and directed by Michael Lukk Litwak

Spoilers: moderate

El mal

EMILIA PÉREZ

2024

Written and directed by Jacques Audiard

Spoilers: moderate

Colder war (you know, because it's in space)

I.S.S.

2024

Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite

Written by Nick Shafir

Spoilers: moderate

Have you tried a little discretion, prosecutor?

ARTICLE 20

Di er shi tao

2024

Directed by Zhang Yimou

Written by Li Meng and Wang Tianyi

Spoilers: moderate

Every movie really is at least one person's favorite

ONE SECOND

Yimiaozhong

2020

Written and directed by Zhang Yimou (based on the novel by Geling Yan)

Spoilers: moderate

Hanumania

MONKEY MAN

2024

Directed by Dev Patel

Written by Paul Angunawela, John Collee, and Dev Patel

Spoilers: moderate

The girl without dinner

CHICKEN FOR LINDA!

Linda veut du poulet !

2023 eux/2024 nous

Written and directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach

Spoilers: moderate

Is this a God dam?

HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS

2024

Directed by Mike Cheslik

Written by Ryland Tews and Mike Cheslik

Spoilers: moderate

The clown is down: It's just me and you, remember? It's just me and you, and we're in the same business—we make people happy

TERRIFIER 3

2024

Written and directed by Damien Leone

Spoilers: moderate

The clown is down: Look, I get it, dude, the whole creepy silent mime gimmick? I mean, it's very effective—and the blood is a nice touch also

TERRIFIER 2

2022

Written and directed by Damien Leone

Spoilers: moderate (at least I don't think it's high)

Hundreds of beavers

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS

2024

Directed by Ethan Coen

Written by Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen

Spoilers: moderate

The clown is down: Is there any kindness in you—somewhere in your heart?

TERRIFIER

2018

Written and directed by Damien Leone

Spoilers: moderate

There is nothing so ruinous to good character as to idle away one's time at some spectacle

GLADIATOR II

2024

Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by Peter Craig and David Scarpa

Spoilers: moderate (arguably high, but not if you've seen the first three minutes of the movie, I'd think)

The clown is down: See, it's just a scary movie

ALL HALLOWS' EVE

2013

Written and directed by Damien Leone

Spoilers: moderate

The land after time

FLOW

2024

Directed by Gints Zilbalodis

Written by Matiss Kaža and Gints Zilbalodis

Spoilers: moderate

Love is inferior to you

NOSFERATU

2024

Written and directed by Robert Eggers (based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker)

Spoilers: moderate, but it's also Nosferatu, which is also Dracula, so... you know

Wait, did I need to have seen Juror #1 first?

JUROR #2

2024

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Written by Jonathan Abrams

Spoilers: moderate

Thirteen women

THE BOSTON STRANGLER

1968

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Written by Edward Anhalt (based on the book by Gerold Frank)

Spoilers: N/A

Good for the goose

THE WILD ROBOT

2024

Written and directed by Chris Sanders (based on the novel by Peter Brown)

Spoilers: moderate

Light up your face with gladness

SMILE 2

2024

Written and directed by Parker Finn

Spoilers: moderate