Phantom thread

MOTHER MARY

2026

Written and directed by David Lowery

Spoilers: moderate

Life was a bitter cup for the saddest of all men (bomp-bada-bomp-ba-bomp bomp-bomp-ba-bomp bomp-ba-bomp dang-da-dang-dang-ding-a-dong-ding)

BLUE MOON

2025

Directed by Richard Linklater

Written by Robert Kaplow

Spoilers: for what, Oklahoma!? I mean, high, I guess

mother!

DIE MY LOVE

2025

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

Written by Enda Walsh, Alice Birch, and Lynne Ramsay (based on the novel Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz) 

Spoilers: moderate

Cardboard Science: Mr. Joseph Young as himself

MIGHTY JOE YOUNG

1949

Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack

Written by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, Willis O'Brien, and Ruth Rose

Spoilers: moderate

Love you. Go Giants.

CAUGHT STEALING

2025

Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Written by Charlie Huston (based on the novel by Huston)

Spoilers: moderate

Plutonian shores

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

2022

Written and directed by David Cronenberg

THE SHROUDS

2025

Written and directed by David Cronenberg

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

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

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: 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, belied by 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.

El mal

EMILIA PÉREZ

2024

Written and directed by Jacques Audiard

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

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

Walt Disney, part LIX: This is my family, I found it all on my own; it's little, and broken, but still good

LILO & STITCH

2002

Written and directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

Spoilers: high

The Encyclopedia Brown: You're a real down-in-the-earth girl

SADIE MCKEE

1934

Directed by Clarence Brown

Written by John Meehan, Bess Meredyth, E.A. Woolf, Carey Wilson, and Vicki Baum (based on "Pretty Sadie McKee" by Viña Delmar)

Spoilers: moderate

Limbic capitalism

INSIDE OUT 2

2024

Directed by Kelsey Mann

Written by Meg LeFauve, Dave Holstein, and Kelsey Mann

Spoilers: moderate

A lovely sort of death

THE TRIP

1967

Directed by Roger Corman

Written by Jack Nicholson and Charles B. Griffith

Spoilers: moderate, somewhat inapplicable