Cinema 2024: Best & Worst

Below are the ten most satisfying and memorable films I saw in 2024: 10. Dune Part Two A-   There's a slight irony to Dune Part Two being #10 on my top ten list for the year, given that I certainly engaged with this film far more than any other in 2024: I saw it three times in the theater, and have since seen it a fourth time streaming—I'd have seen it the fourth time in theaters too if the theatrical window were longer, but that all changed after the pandemic. Otherwise, this would have been the first film I saw four times in the theater since The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in 2003, 21 years ago. In other words, I really love this movie, and I like it perhaps more each time I see it. Upon first viewing, I loved it then, but was not immediately overwhelmed by a love for it, thinking maybe it did not quite live up to the hype. But when it comes to Dune, the joy is in the details, the more of which get picked up on with successive viewings. Appreciation for both of these films—which I now just think of as one, five-hour and 21-minute movie—only gets deeper with repeat viewing. Denis Villeneuve has done with both films what had previously been thought impossible: adapting what is arguably the most intricately epic science fiction novel ever written, and doing so with grand success. What I said then: The word “iconic” has been overused for decades. For this reason, I don’t ever use it. Maybe Dune Part Two is the exception that proves the rule. 9. Ghostlight A   A criminally overlooked drama that sneaks up on you with how moving it is, Ghostlight is a title that refers to the name of a community theater where construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) is acting in a production of Romeo and Juliet unbeknownst to his grieving wife and daughter. Dan is grieving too, and this film takes its time in revealing exactly what happened there, which is very much tied to a very stressful scenario in their present-day. Ghostlight is ultimately about the healing power of theater, both as performance and as seen by audiences, which is handled with a uniquely deft touch. This is a definite tear jerker though, so you'll want to keep tissues handy. What I said then: Ghostlight is secretly one of the best films of the year, because it feels like a “small movie” and yet it’s so much bigger once you wade into its gentle waves of emotional resonance. It exists in a cocoon of fondness for its own characters, no matter how flawed they are, and it’s impossible not to feel warmed by it. 8. Robot Dreams A   Every bit the delight it appears to be from trailers, Robot Dreams has charms to spare, both in its overt nostalgia for 1980s New York City and in its achingly adorable animal (and robot) characters. This is a love story, but a platonic one: a wonderful movie about friendship, which ends on a surprising but totally appropriate bittersweet note. There's a lot more going on here under the veneer of its sweetness, all of it conveyed without the use of any dialogue and with a deceptively simple animation style that belies its deep sophistication. What I said then: This is a movie that loves New York, and all of the characters in it. It loves Dog and it loves Robot, and it loves all the characters they meet along their respective journeys. It loves the art of storytelling and it loves animation in all its forms, and perhaps most of all, it loves us: the people watching the movie. 7. The Taste of Things A   Rare indeed is the film that succeeds in engaging the senses beyond sight and sound—this movie will make your mouth water, will make you vividly imagine, well, the taste of things.  It also gradually reveals itself to be a romantic love story, and one of a particular sort, where expressions of love, over a span of many years, are made through both the preparation of food and the consumption of it. This is the kind of film you give yourself over to completely, so that it virtually becomes a full-body experience. There are many different kinds of hunger, and The Taste of Things engages with all of them. What I said then: The meat based dishes—beef, veal, fish, you name it—still failed to make me salivate, in ways I am certain it will most audiences. And then Eugénie whips up this Baked Alaska dish and I nearly cried with desire: Holy fuckballs that looks amazing! And I don’t even like meringue. The men Eugénie serves this dessert to discuss the physics of how the ice cream stays frozen inside, and I was rapt. This was one dish with meringue I could imagine using as skin cream. I wanted to bathe in it. 6. Babygirl A   I have a slight difficulty here, as Babygirl is a movie I saw in the final weekend of the year—how much of my love for it, and my decision to put it on this list, is just recency bias? I won't know for sure until another year or so passes, but for now, I remain impressed by this film on every level: its explorations of sex and specifically kink the likes of which we rarely, if ever, see in mainstream movies; its exploration of gender power dynamics; its exploration of power imbalance and when it can be difficult to identify which party actually has that upper hand. All of this is packaged in a film with spectacular performances, particularly by Nicole Kidman in the lead role, all of it gorgeously shot and with perhaps the best editing of the year. What I said then: There is another key line, when Romy’s assistant (Sophie Wilde) says “I genuinely thought women with power would behave differently.” What [wrtier-director Halina] Reijn deliberately leaves unclear is the extent to which the implication there is or is not correct: is Romy behaving just like the other men in her position? We could argue about this for hours, and that, perhaps more than anything, is what makes this movie great. 5. Anora A   I never thought I would find myself comparing Anora to Dune Part Two, but there is a key point of contrast to be made, specifically regarding the hype: Dune Part Two lives up to the hype with repeat viewings; Anora lives up to the hype from its opening moments, and then never wavers throughout. Almost pointedly a 21st-century response to the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman, Anora grounds the proceedings with every aspect of its production, with equal parts grit and wit. Mikey Madison is a revelation as a stripper named Ani, who falls for the seductive matrimonial promises of Ivan (an equally stellar Mark Eydelshteyn), the recklessly romantic son of a Russian oligarch. Anora has everything you could possibly want and more, with an extended sequence involving bumbling Russian goons (including an excellent Yura Borisov as the unexpectedly empathetic Igor) that is absolutely hysterical, and then the film gradually settles into startling pathos. What I said then: It’s so rare, and so deeply satisfying, when a movie actually lives up to the hype. Anora is everything it promises to be and more. 4. Flow A   My Top Ten this year includes not one, but two animated films—which both feature no dialogue, and neither feature any human characters. A friend recently waxed poetic about all the layors of metaphor in this film, which . . . I guess I missed. Not that I didn't see depth (pardon the pun) in this; I guess the depth I saw was of a different sort. I have a tendncy to take things at face value, and that was what I did here—and still I was utterly taken with this, this tale of cyclical, Biblical flooding that has clearly extinguished human life and now finds a small group of animals sharing a boat and cooperating for survival. Most of them are wild animals, except for several roaming dogs, and the protagonist, a domestic cat. They are all voiced with recordings of the real sounds of their species, with the exception of the capybara (that sounds is actually of a baby camel), and they are animated to move just like their real-life animal counterparts do. This all makes it easy to nearly miss that they are, indeed, anthropomorphized and they are characters—it's just done with such effective subtlety, you've convinced yourself you're watching something realistic. How beautifully rendered all the animation is, with the use of the open-source software Blender, is a different conversation altogether. What I said then: I’m not sure I can adequately explain how much I loved this movie. Flow is not just the best animated film of the year by a mile, it’s within striking distance of being the best film of the year overall. Critics love to throw around the word “triumph,” but here it legitimately applies. This is a film that transcends any cliché. 3. All of Us Strangers A   There are many criticisms of All of Us Strangers, which glides back and forth between the physical and the metaphysical, that have objective merit. None of that matters to me, as this film spoke to me on a deep, personal level, a queer love story contextualized by intergenerational relationships, the enduring impact of AIDS on the queer community, and the missed opportunities for understanding between parents and their queer children. Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal make a cracklingly sensual onscreen couple, making it much easier to buy into the idea that this is a movie to be felt as opposed to understood. Best of all, the choice of songs make for a stellar soundtrack, with perfectly chosen pop songs I will never hear the same way again. What I said then: This is a movie I will be thinking about for a very long time, maybe for years to come. I haven’t been this in love with a mood-piece queer love story since Moonlight. Indeed, that film and All of Us Strangerswould make for a spectacular double feature. From end to end, it is beautiful and sad and cozy and charming and erotic and mysterious and bewildering. It would seem there is no end to the riches it has to offer. 2. Sing Sing A   People are not talking about Sing Sing enough, even though both Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin, who are both incredible, are likely to be nominated for Oscars. Limited release schedules often have a tendency to be bewildering, because this film could have gained a lot more traction in the cultural consciousness had it just been marketed differently. I'm just immensely grateful that I had a chance to see this film in its initial theatrical run in my local market in August, when I was deeply impressed by its gorgeous cinematography—shocking to see in a movie set in a prison—and its standout performances. Far more importantly and significantly, Sing Sing is a singularly towering achievement, blending fact and fiction by casting nonprofessional actors from the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program that this film depicts. (Maclin is one of them.) This film is both a testament to the success of such programs, and a deeply moving portrait of prisoners with a level of humanity far too often denied them. What I said then: Sing Sing absolutely nails every part of everything it sets out to do, from showcasing talent to telling a perfectly calibrated story that could have been corny or maudlin in lesser hands. 1. National Anthem A   Here is a queer film that takes the culture and iconography of rural America, and claims it for its own—all without violence, without any overt queer trauma, all just a celebration of queerness, with a notable and unusual dose of gender variance and diversity. Just as there are many sides of mainstream America, so too are there many sides to minority communities, whose cultures also vary regionally. All of that is merely the backdrop of this wonderful story, about a young man of unspecified sexuality tentatively (Charlie Plummer) exploring gender expression as he finds himself welcomed by the rural queer commune where he's been hired to do construction work. There is just something about the warm tone and vibe of this film, with its ensemble cast of characters both learning and teaching new and different ways of loving each other and building community. This is the kind of movie I just want to wrap myself up in like a heated blanket. What I said then: I’m not sure I have fallen so hard so quickly for a film like this since Moonlight (2016). And while that film distinguished itself by showcasing queer Black characters, I would say the distinction with National Anthem, while centered on mostly White characters, is its beautifully shot showcasing of gender diversity. I will admit, there’s a lot here that is very personal to me. It would take me a while to think of the last film that so directly and deeply spoke to me. Five Worst -- or the worst of those I saw 5. Your Monster C   If you want perhaps the greatest example in 2024 of cinematic mediocrity, Your Monster easily fits the bill. It's doubly disappointing when a film with so much potential almost seems to be actively resisting its realization. A quirky story about a young woman who discovers a humanoid monster is actually living in her closet seems like it could be a kick in the pants—until you actually watch it, and discover it apparently has no idea what story it's actually telling or what it has to say. What I said then: Your Monster wants to be a quirky riff on the Beauty and the Beast story, and instead flounders as it becomes less and less clear exactly what writer-director Caroline Lindy, here making her first feature film, is going for. I found myself losing patience with its fuzzy plotting long before I had a chance to consider what the point of any of it was. 4. IF C+   The first of multiple would-be blockbusters on my worst-of list this year, IF had a budget of $110 million, earned $111 million domestically, and $190 million worldwide. I guess that makes it a success? Barely. It certainly did not meet the expectations of the studio, which clearly did not understand that they had an utterly baffling movie on their hands. Writer-director John Krasinski apparently felt that having several creative and/or funny Imaginary Friends ("IFs") is enough of a concept to coast on its own. I assure you, it is not—especially when the story establishes rules that it then does not bother to follow. If your response is "What?" more often than it is laughter, then you have a problem. What I said then: The fundamental problem with IF is the evident blank check Krasinski was given after his previous success, where no one else bothered to step in with some guard rails outside his own passion. This movie clearly means something to him, and presumably it made sense in his head. It has some fairly imaginative ideas in it, to be fair, but it also feels like it came from the imagination of someone who recently had a lobotomy. 3. Fly Me to the Moon C-   Fly Me to the Moon was the first of three movies I saw this year that were bad enough to make me angry. The fact that this one has actors in it who are at least charismatic is of little consequence. The way this film plays with the utterly stupid idea of faking the Moon Landing, however tongue-in-cheek it thinks it's being about it, is both exasperating and reckless. It was all I could think about, the budding romance between the two leads (Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum) holding little interest from the start and waning from there. What I said then: Let’s skip straight ahead to the moon landing, a pivotal event in this story. This was a real, historic event, a watershed moment, something everyone who lived to witness it never forgot. This was an unforgettable moment for everyone on the planet, but especially for Americans—something that seared itself into memories in a way that was on par with the assassination of President Kennedy, or the attack on Pearl Harbor, or 9/11. The key difference is that this event filled people with awe, gave them hope, and opened their minds to the idea of unlimited possibility. Has such an event ever happened again? Well, I can tell you this: Fly Me to the Moon takes something with massive historic import, and reduces it to a cheap Hollywood plot contrivance. 2. Borderlands C-   If Borderlands managed to impress in any way whatsoever, it was how it manages to showcase a bad performance by Cate Blanchett, who plays the lead in this abysmal, ugly, unfunny, downright uninteresting video game adaptation, a blight on the resumes of the four genuine stars in its ensemble cast (which also includes Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jack Black). Jack Black plays the only even remotely amusing character, and he's a robot named Claptrap—a name that would have been better used as the title for this movie. What I said then: The most frustrating thing about Borderlands is that it actually could have been good. Being silly doesn't inherently mean bad, but it needs just the right calibration. It’s not just that Borderlands is all spectacle and no substance. It’s that overall it rings hollow. The characters have all the dimension of video game characters left dormant, with no one even playing them—even while they move and speak. There’s nothing driving this story but going through the motions. At one point Lilith walks past an abandoned park merry-go-round and I wished I could have just spent two hours riding that instead. It would have been objectively more rewarding. 1. Red One D+   Of the few movies I saw this year that left me feeling active contempt for it, Red One absolutely takes the cake—getting the worst grade I have given a film in seven years (shoutout to 2017's Geostorm). The fact that I know multiple people who enjoyed this garbage movie only makes it worse. What is happening to people? There's a phrase my mother used to love to say: "There's no accounting for taste." I guess not. I guess some people are perfectly pacified into being entertained by every cheap visual effect, random CGI character, and incoherent action sequence imaginable just being thrown willy-nilly onto the screen all at once. This movie had so much going on, it deadened the senses, leaving only one logical reaction: utter boredom. God, I hated this movie.  What I said then: Red One is what happens when feeling dead inside becomes a feature film. I have never seen a movie with so much magic onscreen be so lacking in actual movie magic. I went into this thinking I was fully prepared, but ready to have a good time in spite of the poor reviews and lackluster response. Sometimes bad movies are fun! If only. Instead, Red One is so busy just being busy, it dulls the senses, and becomes a snooze fest. Believe me when I say that literally. I nodded off multiple times. During the periods I managed to stay awake, one of the five other people in the theater let out a loud snore. We’re all in this together, I guess. Complete 2024 film review log: 1. 1/7 American Fiction A-
2. 1/8 Society of the Snow B+ *
3. 1/9 All of Us Strangers A
4. 1/12 The Book of Clarence C+
5. 1/13 Mean Girls B
6. 1/16 Poor Things A- (2nd viewing)
7. 1/19 Orlando: A Political Biography B
8. 1/21 The Zone of Interest A-
9. 1/22 Safety Last! A- **
10. 1/23 American Fiction A- (2nd viewing)
11. 1/25 The Beekeeper B
12. 1/26 The Color Purple B *
13. 1/28 Origin A-
14. 1/31 I.S.S. C+
15. 2/12 Lisa Frankenstein B-
16. 2/16 The Taste of Things A
17. 2/19 Perfect Days B+
18. 2/22 Drive-Away Dolls C+
19. 2/29 Dune Part Two A-
20. 3/3 Dune Part Two A- (2nd viewing)
21. 3/8 Anselm B-
22. 3/12 Dune Part Two A- (3rd viewing)
23. 3/14 The American Socity of Magical Negroes B-
24. 3/16 Bad River B
25. 3/17 Arthur the King B+
26. 3/18 One Life B+
27. 3/19 Love Lies Bleeding B+
28. 3/28 Problemista B
29. 4/9 Monkey Man C+
30. 4/10 Wicked Little Letters B+
31. 4/16 Civil War B
32. 4/19 Housekeeping for Beginners A-
33. 4/20 Abigail B
34. 4/21 Sasquatch Sunset B
35. 4/29 Challengers A-
36. 5/7 The Fall Guy B
37. 5/10 The Queen of My Dreams B ***
38. 5/12 Stress Positions B+ ***
39. 5/13 Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes B+
40. 5/14 The Ride Ahead A- ***
41. 5/16 Merchant Ivory B ***
42. 5/17 I Saw the TV Glow B-
43. 5/18 Sebastian B ***
44. 5/19 The Summer with Carmen B ***
45. 5/21 Back to Black C+
46. 5/24 Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga B
47. 5/27 Babes B+
48. 5/28 IF C
49. 6/2 Evil Does Not Exist B-
50. 6/5 In a Violent Nature B
51. 6/7 Hit Man B+ *
52. 6/17 Inside Out 2 B+
53. 6/19 Tuesday B+
54. 6/20 Thelma A-
55. 6/25 Ghostlight A
56. 6/27 The Bikeriders B
57. 7/2 A Quiet Place: Day One B
58. 7/6 Kinds of Kindness B-
59. 7/8 MaXXXine B
60. 7/12 Robot Dreams A
61. 7/16 Fly Me to the Moon C-
62. 7/18 Twisters B
63. 7/21 National Anthem A+
64. 7/23 48-Hour Film Festival ****
65. 7/26 Deadpool & Wolverine B-
66. 8/1 Trap B-
67. 8/5 Kneecap B+
68. 8/9 Dìdi A-
69. 8/11 Sing Sing A
70. 8/13 Borderlands C-
71. 8/15 Alien: Romulus B+
72. 8/23 Blink Twice B-
73. 8/27 His Three Daughters B
74. 8/28 Between the Temples B
75. 9/2 Good One B+
76. 9/6 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice B-
77. 9/8 Longlegs C+
78. 9/9 Rebel Ridge A- *
79. 9/17 The Killer's Game C+
80. 9/24 The Substance B+
81. 9/26 Megalopolis C+
82. 9/28 The Wild Robot B+
83. 9/28 Will & Harper B *
84. 10/1 My Old Ass A-
85. 10/8 The Outrun A-
86. 10/9 A Different Man B+
87. 10/13 Saturday Night B
88. 10/14 Piece by Piece B
89. 10/17 Wakhri [One of a Kind] B+ *****
90. 10/19 We Live in Time B+
91. 10/19 Katlaa Curry [Fish Curry] B *****
92. 10/22 Goodrich B
93. 10/24 Your Monster C
94. 10/29 Conclave B+
95. 11/1 Godzilla Minus One B+ (2nd viewing)
96. 11/3 Emliia Pérez B+
97. 11/7 Anora A
98. 11/8 Blitz B
99. 11/9 Small Things Like These B+
100. 11/15 A Real Pain A-
101. 11/17 The Piano Lesson B+
102. 11/19 Red One D+
103. 11/21 Wicked: Part I B+
104. 11/23 Gladiator II B-
105. 12/1 Maria B
106. 12/3 All We Imagine as Light B
107. 12/6 Queer B+
108. 12/8 Flow A
109. 12/10 Y2K C+
110. 12/14 Nightbitch B
111. 12/15 The End B-
112. 12/27 Babygirl A
113. 12/28 Nosferatu B+
114. 1/29 A Complete Unknown B+ * Viewed streaming at home
** Re-issue (no new review, or no full review)
*** SIFF Advanced screening
**** 48-Hour Film Festival, Shobhit participating (no review)
***** Tasveer South Asian Film Festival

NOSFERATU

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: A
Editing: B
Production Design: A

Given that Nosferatu was directed by Robert Eggers, nothing in it surprised me. Had it been directed by someone else, some of it may have. Coming from Eggers, the closest thing to a surprise is how straightforward it is in narrative structure—no gonzo isolationist craziness or bizarre cutaways to Bjork in this movie. Still, Nosferatu indicates an odd sort of consistency to Eggers’s work, with great performances spread unevenly among the cast; stunning cinematography and production design; and writing that is competent but never great.

It must be noted, though, that Nosferatu really steps it up in the production design department. The Production Designer is Craig Lathrop, who worked on all of Eggers’s other films—and then, a bunch of others no one has ever heard of. Here, he designs a world of dark gothic horror that goes to great lengths to realize Eggers’s bent vision.

Mind you, this is a remake of a German expressionist silent film classic from 102 years ago: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. I have seen it one time, 19 years ago, at which time I declared Max Schreck’s depiction of Count Orlok to be “alternately grotesque and comical.” I did not even think to re-watch it prior to seeing this version, which I think was the right choice, as it would just invite inevitable but unnecessary comparisons.

This time around—this century—we get career villain Bill Skarsgård’s depiction of Count Orlok. One does wonder whether even this will come across as “alternately grotesque and comical” after another hundred years. Surely audiences in 1922 found Count Orlok to be simply grotesque, and that is absolutely the case with Skarsgård’s Orlock today. He’s beyond disgusting, covered in oozing bumps and sores, and a test of one’s patience to boot: he is the one character in the film speaking exclusively Dacian (with English subtitles), an extinct language from Southeastern Europe. That wouldn’t be so bad on its own, except that every single line is belabored, Skarsgård delivering each word in a slow, guttural and exaggerated accent. Get to the point, you ghoul! I’ll give him credit for incredibly well-kept, long pointy fingernails, though; someone get me the number for his manicurist.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this version of Nosferatu for roughly the first half of it. This film is stunningly produced and shot throughout, but the front half is very focused on an ambitious newlywed, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult, who spends pretty much the whole movie either nervous or terrified), being sent to a faraway land in 19th-century Germany to secure a real estate deal. I know many people who would get bored by this movie very quickly. I can’t say I ever got bored, but I did find myself wondering where it was going.

My favorite thing about this Nosferatu is on a meta level: I absolutely love that they released this gothic horror film on Christmas Day. As it happens, it’s actually set at Christmastime, the production design details very specific to the region and era, as are all the others. In one scene, we see a Christmas Tree, decades before the invention of Christmas lights, actual candles propped on its branches. All I could think about was how often houses caught on fire from Christmas Tree candles, but the characters had far more pressing matters to attend to.

Thomas’s young wife is the most key figure in the story, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) having been taken in her youth—depicted in a brief but terrifying opening sequence before the title card—and now being both possessed from afar and pursued by Nosferatu after he’s been summoned from his grave. Eggers unfolds this story with a fair number of horror movie jump scares and tricks uncommon in his other work, but makes up for this deceptive conventionality by offering some of the most horrifying and grotesque sights you’ll see this year. You won’t see a lot of it in the comparatively plodding first half, but trust me, they are coming. Whether that means it’s a worthy payoff depends on what you’re looking or in a movie like this. I mean, if you came to Nosferatu—or even a Robert Eggers film—expecting anything resembling wholesomeness, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Nosferatu has a curious history, though most of it is tied to the first film, which was the first film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever made. Stoker’s widow, Florence Balcombe, was angry about an unauthorized film based on the classic novel, sued, and won. The negatives and all prints of the film were ordered to be given over to her to be destroyed, but as we all know, the film survives, with restorations for home video beginning in 1981 and the most recent, for DVD and Blu-Ray, having been in 2006.

Eggers’s 2024 Nosferatu is a fascinating specimen in its own right for sure, but certainly not something that will be still discussed in the context of cinema history a hundred years from now—and the 1922 version absolutely will be. Just because the original has greater import to history and the more interesting backstory, however, does not mean it’s the better watch today. It creates a certain distance between itself and its audience—another hallmark of Eggers films—and is thus perfect for intellectuals with an affinity for horror. Trash, this is not, but is there also any real depth to it? I could not find any, beyond the layers that exist in its undeniable technical achievements.

Nosferatu is a breathtaking vision, both in terms of its visual design and its impressively sustained tension between fear and desire. If nothing else, this is a movie that delivers on everything it promises.

Nosferatu clearly remembers AT&T’s slogan from the eighties.

Overall: B+

BABYGIRL

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A+

Babygirl does not pull any punches regarding what it’s about: it opens with Nicole Kidman having an orgasm with Antonio Banderas. Or so it would seem!

That is to say, this is a very sex-forward film. It’s a very sex-positive film, which is good for everyone. It’s actually not that difficult these days to find high-profile, even mainstream movies that are frank and positive about sex, a trend I fully support. What makes Babygirl stand apart, how it goes an extra step that other movies do not go, is that it’s specifically kink-positive.

I’m not saying this has never been done before. Secretary came out 22 years ago, after all. The key difference is that James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal are nowhere near as big of movie stars as Nicole Kidman, or even Antonio Banderas, and never have been. Nor did that movie bother much with gender politics and power dynamics at all really, let alone handle them so deftly. Another key point is how much of a relief it is that Babygirl was written and directed by a woman—Halina Reijn on both counts, who previously directed (but did not write, though perhaps she should have) Bodies Bodies Bodies. Any movie about a woman with a humiliation fetish should absolutely be directed—and, preferably, written—by a woman.

Nicole Kidman gives a towering performance in Babygirl, which I fear may be overlooked by many just because of the subject matter. This is arguably her best performance in twenty years, although a couple others come quite close—it’s no revelation to say she’s an incredible actor. But she’s given something very new to do here, as a woman who can’t climax without very particular circumstances, and who only slowly comes to understand and embrace what’s going on in a healthy way.

This brings me to Harris Dickinson, who is hot as hell as Samuel, the subtly cocky intern who seduces Kidman’s Romy, the CEO of an Amazon-like tech company in New York City. Dickinson is the rare kind of package in the same vein as Timothée Chalamet or Colin Farrell before him: as talented as he is gorgeous. I’ve been impressed with Dickinson as a performer since his breakout role as a closeted gay teenager in Beach Rats (2017), and he was magnificent in Triangle of Sadness (2022). He is unlikely to become a superstar like Chalamet, but he’s poised to have a film career that is every bit as interesting.

Babygirl never tells us how old Romy is, though it’s easy to presume it’s somewhat younger than Kidman’s actual age of 57. She’s the mother of two teenage daughters, one of whom (Esther McGregor) is an exceptionally well-drawn young lesbian. Samuel is clearly meant to be in his twenties (Dickinson is 28), which makes the age gap between him and Romy somewhere between 20 and 30 years. Halina Reijn, as writer-director, spins a sexually tense tale between them with true finesse, never quite making clear the degree to which Samuel may or may not be threatening to Romy. What’s easy to forget, and perhaps deliberately so, is the inherent power imbalance between them, and very much in Romy’s favor. Samuel knowingly talks about how he could take everything from her with one phone call because he knows it turns her on. But who is really taking advantage of whom here? How threatening could he actually be to her, really? Reijn is very much playing with our expectations, taking advantage of our inclination to see the man as the one who is inappropriate. Neither of them is innocent here, but only one of them has the real power.

This is not directly related to, as many would assume, but is in conversation with Romy’s humiliation kink. Her husband, Jacob (Banderas), is a nice guy who cannot wrap his head around Romy’s specific sexual desires. He utters perhaps the most critical line in the film when he says of her suggestions in bed, “It makes me feel like a villain.” This sexual disconnect, having no bearing at all on how much Romy loves him, is the entire reason for her affair with Samuel, who has an innate instinct for her desires and takes advantage of them at the first opportunity. Conversely, again, it’s important to note that Romy allows it—something made explicit when she and Samuel have a conversation about consent that is unusually clarifying onscreen, and they even agree on a safe word. Incidentally, when I was thinking about Samuel’s seemingly borderline behaviors later in the film, it took a while for me to register that she could have used that mutually agreed-upon safe word, and never did.

I kind of love that Reijn cast a star as big as Antonio Banderas for the part of Jacob, which could arguably have been played by anyone and which in someone else’s hands could have been a thankless role. This is the kind of part that has been a bone tossed to older women actors for decades, although once you look deeper, you realize that Jacob also plays a critical role in this story. Samuel, tantalizing as he is, is just a catalyst for what is ultimately Romy and Jacob’s story. There is only one scene Banderas and Dickinson share, and it is fantastic, going in directions you never expect, in turn both furious and tender.

If you are super vanilla and don’t get kink at all, you’d best avoid Babygirl. If you are vanilla but have an open mind about people who are different from you, then you have just as much reason to see this incredible film as the rest of us. Babygirl is easily one of the best films of the year, and Kidman gives one of the year’s best performances. Romy is just the kind of complex figure perfect for an actor of Kidman’s caliber, a woman balancing the nuances of beauty standards for mature women in the highest levels of the corporate world, who remain rare indeed.

There is another key line, when Romy’s assistant (Sophie Wilde) says “I genuinely thought women with power would behave differently.” What Reijn deliberately leaves unclear is the extent to which the implication there is or is not correct: is Romy behaving just like the other men in her position? We could argue about this for hours, and that, perhaps more than anything, is what makes this movie great.

Move over Nicole, I’m next!

Overall: A

THE END

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+
Music: B

I went in to The End really wanting to like it. The premise is right up my alley—a postapocalyptic musical about a family fraying at the seams after twenty years in an underground bunker. “Bunker” is a bit misleading; Tilda Swinton’s character, here credited only as “Mother,” has saved priceless pieces of art from the surface, and decorated all of their walls with them. We get many close-up shots of painted skies and clouds, the closest thing we get to seeing real versions of such things in the entire film.

I get that many details are completely irrelevant to the plot of this film, but there were so many that defied logic that I found it distracting. We never see any exterior walls to this structure this family lives in—Mother (Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon), Son (George MacKay), Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), Butler (Tim McInnerny), and Doctor (Lennie James). These six have been living in this self-sustaining underground home for over twenty years. We know this because it was twenty years ago the last time anyone tried to come after them from the surface.

But now, a stranger has managed to penetrate, and is found unconscious, no one with any idea how she got in. I watched the entire film thinking they were in cavernous snow caves, only to discover when I looked it up after getting home that, apparently, they are deep down a salt mine. Still, plenty of questions remain unanswered. All we know is, the group tentatively agrees to take the stranger in. She is played by Moses Ingram, credited here as “Girl.”

Over time, this young woman reveals that she is the last surviving member of her family, and she begs to stay with these people because she cannot survive on the surface. She sure looks well fed, though—not fat, but perfectly normal. You’d think she’d be as emaciated as she was desperate, but these are not details director and co-writer Joshua Oppenheimer is concerning himself with. Instead, the story focuses instead on how her presence gradually reveals how this wealthy family has spent decades both lying to each other and kidding themselves.

Normally, I would be really into this, except that The End spends a lot of its extended runtime—148 minutes—with very little actually happening, aside from them singing, to themselves or to each other. Oppenheimer’s choice to make the singing fully unironic is a bold one I can respect. The singing abilities run the gamut; neither Tilda Swinton or Michael Shannon are very good at it; George MacKay and Moses Ingram are much better at it. What’s more, the limited setting allows for little in the way of variety: we either see people sining inside a home amongst the paintings, or out in the salt caves.

I just couldn’t quite connect with The End, and not for lack of trying. This is like a quiet family drama where the family members happen to break out into song. And what of the music, then? It’s serviceable. It’s not bad, but neither is it particularly catchy or memorable. The accompanying orchestrations are pleasant. Much like Emilia Pérez, the point of making this a musical is never readily apparent. I would propose that this film would be both a more reasonable length and more compelling without the songs.

The performances are solid across the board—something we can reliably count on with both Tilda Swinton (her somewhat distracting dark haired wigs notwithstanding) and Michael Shannon. There is real depth to mine in these strained relationships. I just found myself preoccupied with unanswered questions, such as where they get the eggs they eat from, when we never see any live animals down there. And if the stranger could survive that long on the surface, why do these characters never go up there? Surely there’s stuff they could scavenge. But I guess they are all committed to their insulation, as is this largely impenetrable movie.

A talented cast offers music without passion.

Overall: B-

NIGHTBITCH

Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

I’ll give Nightbitch this much: it’s deeply engaging from start to finish. Some of the time you may not quite understand what’s so compelling about it, or indeed what the overall point is, but it’s still engaging.

It’s also very, very odd. It’s a layered film, in that it has layers of oddness. One particularly odd thing is how it moves back and forth from being a little too on the nose, and being metaphorically opaque.

This is the story of a woman (Amy Adams) who turns into a dog, after all. It’s confusing to her at first, but ultimately becomes her means of being set free, specifically from her resentment toward motherhood being far more overwhelming than she expected. Why a dog? You got me there. It occurred to me that it was possible I was having a gendered reaction to this heavy-handed yet unclear metaphor—I cannot have children, so who am I to judge? Sort of to my relief, it appears that other critics’ reviews of this film are pretty evenly mixed between the genders, whether they quite liked it or they didn’t.

The script, co-written by director Marielle Heller, is far more muddled than the previous feature film for which she wrote the script, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. And if the script isn’t great, it matters less when everything else is great. Nightbitch opens with the mother and son at the grocery store, and when another young mom sees her and asks how she’s doing, she immediately fantasizes about unloading all of her frustrations. It is no doubt very relatable to just about any mother, but also filled with sentiments we have heard many times over. One might even be tempted to call it deeply unoriginal.

The curious thing with Nightbitch is that Amy Adams’s stellar performance makes up for far more than it ought to. She’s incredible in this movie—both as a frustrated mother, and as a woman turning into a dog at night. She bites into this role with no vanity, giving us a performance on film more memorable than anything she’s done in nearly a decade. Nightbitch is almost worth seeing just for her alone.

I’m glad I saw it, anyway. I’m not going to urge anyone else to rush out and see it. I do love that Heller is uninterested in taking any particular moral stance on motherhood: there is no judgment here, and if there is anything done deftly in this script, it’s the adorable little boy (played by twins, Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), who is never anything but a perfectly normal toddler. There are no “special needs” or unusually challenging behaviors that set the mother off the edge. He won’t fall asleep when his mom wants him to, just like virtually any other kid. This is about motherhood being overwhelming no matter what the kid is like, and Nightbitch exists only to empathize with that—and with the quiet cluelessness of a husband (Scoot McNairy) who assumes he’s being supportive while never truly seeing the burdens of parenthood that he rarely thinks to engage with.

All of that is what I understand about Nightbitch. It’s the whole dog business that throws me. She develops heightened senses, particularly of smell, and starts to attract other neighborhood dogs to her door, who bring her dead animals as offerings. She starts to deeply hate the household cat, which makes for a few moments of good comedy even if it’s a little weirdly off the mark: dogs tend to be very affectionate toward cats if they are part of the same household. There’s a particular group of three dogs that keep coming around, and I began to wonder if other women are turning into dogs too, and perhaps we are meant to understand these dogs are actually the three other moms that keep chatting up our protagonist at the storytime group she brings her son to. But, there is never any clarity on this.

I do wish Heller had drawn a bolder line between what might be merely in this mother’s imagination, and how “real” what she’s going through actually is. The mother tells her husband about strange hair growths, but never shows him the tail that starts growing out of her lower back, or the extra sets of nipples that appear on her abdomen. The husband just keeps moving along in blissful ignorance, which I suppose is part of the point.

There are no named characters in Nightbitch’s primary family, by the way—this is why I have not referred to any of them by name here. Amy Adams is credited as “Mother”; Scoot McNairy as “Husband,” and the different types of descriptors there seems very deliberate. The little twin boy actors are credited as “Son.” Even in flashbacks, Kerry O’Malley is credited as “Mother’s Mother.” There’s something to this, how family roles erase previous identities. Again, it could have been illustrated with greater clarity.

Mother does use the word “Nightbitch” at one point in the film, because of her getting snippy with the Husband in the middle of the night when it’s only reasonable he take a turn dealing with the boy. Heller then very much literalizes the idea, and turns Mother into a bitch. Maybe the idea is that being a bitch is surprisingly freeing—although, as a dog, Mother sure sprints through the streets in the middle of traffic a lot. If this happened in real life, she’d get run over by a car her first night out. Even this interpretation of “bitch” as a metaphor has no clean application, however, as Mother is only a bitch in the behavioral sense a couple of times. She turns into a dog to get some space away from the tedious frustrations of motherhood, which is pretty distinct from being a bitch. Then again, many people would judge such a woman to be a bitch whether it’s fair or not, so maybe I’m walking right back into the point here.

There’s some real weight to that maybe though, when Nightbitch is arguably—and admirably—Marielle Heller’s most ambitious work to date, but also her most challenging to make clear sense of.

Bitch please.

Overall: B

Y2K

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

Y2K is really fun, for about twenty minutes. The opening scene is super fun, very deliberately tugging at our weird nostalgia for AOL Instant Messenger or the sound of dial-up modems. The first thing we see is computer screen activity, multiple AIM chat windows open at once, as well as a window showing a video clip of President Clinton (or, as a character later calls him, “President Blowjob”) commenting on the spectre of the Y2K bug.

Our introduction to Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) is fun, especially as they chat in Eli’s bedroom while they wait for a topless photo of a woman to load in horizontal sections on his computer screen. Of course, the gag is a bit undermined by all the action going on with his computer screen in the opening shots, without any glitches whatsoever.

Still, Eli and Danny are perfectly endearing characters. We briefly see Eli’s parents, who talk a little awkwardly about Eli finding someone to kiss at the stroke of midnight. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, you see. When Eli’s mom kisses him on the cheek, he makes a face perfect for setting the tone of a modern teen comedy.

Danny is preoccupied with one of them getting laid. Eli pines for a popular girl, Laura (Rachel Zegler). Pretty standard teen comedy stuff, most of it relatively charming, none of it particularly clever. Booksmart, this is not. Eli and Danny hang out for a few hours before deciding to go to a New Year’s Eve party. It takes just slightly too long for this movie to get to the critical moment, the stroke of midnight.

Y2K has a pretty great conceit, a revisionist history take on what millions feared when the date flipped over to the year 2000. In this movie, the computers really do go berserk. For a good ten minutes, machines start taking people out at the party, in amusingly gruesome ways. Panic ensues, lots of people die, it’s actually pretty entertaining..

And then? Just as quickly as the action starts, Y2K, a movie with tons of potential, runs out of steam. It uses up all of its ideas in a matter of minutes. A small group of kids escape the party house, and find a place with no electricity to hide out. A lot of the rest of the movie takes place in settings where no technology present, and it feels less like an active narrative choice than a way to stay within a seriously limited budget. We get one shot of a burning cityscape from the top of a hill—which is used, very economically, twice—and, in the same scene, one shot of two planes crashing into each other mid-air.

But here’s where Y2K really fails. First-time feature director and co-writer Kyle Mooney could have mined this concept for comedy gold, finding myriad ways for glitchy machinery to cause havoc, even without slapping on a tired “collective consciousness AI” idea onto it all. The computers and machines not only become sentient villains, they literally bind together to become humanoid junk-parts robots with computer monitors as heads. Seriously? Yes. A couple of times, a dude-bro avatar type figure comes onto screens and talks to the kids. Even the 1992 sci-fi horror trash fest The Lawnmower Man had more clarity of theme.

Mooney was born in 1984. He would have been 16 years old when Y2K happened. You’d think he’d have done enough research—and even memories—to come up with something better than this. The kids, such as they are, are of course high school characters played by young adults. Jaeden Martell is 21. Julian Dennison, once the breakout child star of Hunt for the Wildepeople, is 22. He also costarred in both Deadpool 2 and Godzilla vs. Kong, so at least he’s had some genuine box office success. He’s also the most interesting character in Y2K, only to be dispensed with in the first half of the film. I won’t spoil how, although there’s no good reason for you to watch this movie anyway. Unless you want to see Danny’s almost-clever resurgence during the end credits.

In any case, none of these young actors were even born when Y2K happened. They’re all taking direction from a guy who was 16 years old when it happened. Either these things are relevant to the many ways this film is lacking, or Mooney just isn’t that good a writer. He’s an adequate director; he gets endearing performances out of his young stars, anyway. In the meantime, Mooney attempts just coasting on millennial references and a late-90s soundtrack, complete with a leaden appearance by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst as himself. Once these references move away from specifics of the era’s technology, they just stop working.

Otherwise, Y2K can’t quite settle on a tone, and it certainly can’t decide on a direction. To say it sags in the middle would be an understatement. I found it both boring and tedious by that point, although to its credit, at least it was always better than Red One, easily the worst movie I’ve seen this year. Y2K is only the eighth-worst movie I’ve seen this year, so at least it has that going for it.

You’re not ready for this. You don’t want to be ready for this. It’s too stupid.

Overall: C+

FLOW

Directing: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A+
Animation: A+

I’m not sure I can adequately explain how much I loved this movie. Flow is not just the best animated film of the year by a mile, it’s within striking distance of being the best film of the year overall. Critics love to throw around the word “triumph,” but here it legitimately applies. This is a film that transcends any cliché.

There are so many impressive things about Flow, it can be difficult to decide where to begin. How about the animation: Latvian director and co-writer Gints Zilbalodis, and his team, rendered the gorgeous animation entirely with the open-source software Blender. He also never makes clear what created the specificity of the world presented therein, with its undercurrent of haunting melancholy which is still somehow also beautiful: the characters in Flow are all feral or wild animals, inhabiting a world once inhabited by humans, recently even, but we never see any. The closest to a human character we see is a humanoid statue, and beyond that, the remnants of artistic carvings left inside a house that a cat has been using for shelter.

We never get any indication that the cat ever knew the human who once lived in that house, although we see wood carvings of cats mid-project, evidently abandoned. Finished cat carvings, most only slightly bigger than the live cat we follow in Flow, dot the yard in font of the house, right down to the bank of a passing river. The human artist was apparently quite obsessive about cats: we briefly see a cat statue so huge it has scaffolding around it.

This live cat is the closest thing Flow has to a protagonist. It encounters other animals, some more than once, but the cat is the only animal we always follow: from the opening scene of it considering itself in the reflection of the river water, to the closing scene of it doing the same. In between those bookends, we discover that there is a cyclical nature to either the world’s climate or its geology—or both—wherein the area floods to a massive degree, and then after several days, the water recedes. The cat moves to different areas of higher ground after getting swept away by a massive flood which is then followed by steady water rise, until it is trapped atop the aforementioned giant cat statue.

A drifting sailboat luckily passes by, and the cat manages to make its way onto it. Much of Flow is spent with the cat on this wooden boat, which already has another animal on it: a capybara. Over time, a sort of team of animals amasses on the boat: a ring-tailed lemur; a secretarybird; a yellow Labrador Retriever; eventually the rest of the pack of dogs that Lab has been running with—which, of course, complicates the group dynamic on the boat.

Unlike other animated films of this sort, there is no dialogue in Flow: none of the animals talk. This is an excellent choice. They do, however, make vocalizations, which are used to flesh out a personality, of sorts, for each animal. With only one exception, recordings of the species’s actual vocalizations were used for each animal we see in this film. Only the capybara stands apart, as the recordings they got from one at a zoo did not work well for the capybara’s personality in this film, so they used a baby camel’s sounds instead.

These choices make Flow particularly stand apart from films like WALL-E, which is basically a silent film in its first half but introduces cartoon humans in its second half; or Bambi, which 80 years ago innovated natural-world movements in animation but still featured talking animals. To be clear, Flow does anthropomorphize its animals, a reasonable choice as otherwise we’d just be watching a bunch of adorable animals drown or get eaten. It must be stressed, however, how subtly Zilbalodis does this: each of the animals move and vocalize only the way their species actually does in the real world. And then, the secretarybird and even the cat are using the rudder to steer the sailboat for some time before it even registers that’s what’s happening.

There is no villain in Flow, only the constant specter of danger—particularly for the cat, who falls out of the boat and into the water far more times than any small child would likely want to see (there’s a reason this film is rated PG). Given the cat is the primary character, I was sure we would get to the end with it alive and well—or would we? There is only one moment where Flow gets mystical, the cat and the secretarybird suddenly floating into the air toward a swirling celestial sky. I really wondered if we were supposed to be witnessing their deaths. I’m still not quite sure when it comes to the bird.

I see no need to dwell on it, though. Flow is a stunning achievement just in how easily it locks in its audience, from start to finish, without any dialogue beyond real animal noises. I found everything about this film utterly mesmerizing, and by turns suspenseful, sad, occasionally funny, and heartbreaking. One could call the dogs comic relief, they are such doofuses sometimes. But they only ever act like dogs, aside from occasional teamwork in an attempt to help another animal. Until a bunny hops by anyway.

There’s even a whale, who gets comparatively limited screen time and yet it has a story arc, just like any of the other animals. The whale is just as susceptible, if not more so, to the perils of rapidly rising and receding waters as any of the others. I spent a lot of time watching this movie either dazzled or with my heart in my throat. The visual achievement cannot be overstated, particularly the cinematography, where the “camera” is constantly swaying back and forth or swirling around the action, giving it very much the feel of something that was actually captured on camera. And after a tightly edited 84 minutes, the story comes full circle, with the strong suggestion that what all these animals have gone through, they will likely go through again. I don’t want that for them, but I am eager to turn right around and watch this film again, many times over.

Times of crisis make strange bedfellows. Or boatfellows.

Overall: A

QUEER

Directing: B+
Acting: A
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-
Special Effects: B-

I’m not sure I can fully explain what the hell is going on in Queer, which starts of relatively normal and progressively moves into a definitively wackadoodle space. There is very much a sense that this was what director Luca Guadagnino was going for, and in his hands, I felt totally okay just letting go and falling into his very specific atmosphere.

This is a director who has made films I adored (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers), films I have hated (Suspiria), and movies I’ve had a mixed reaction to (Bones and All). Guadagnino is a man for all seasons, a man for all tastes. There are people who adored the titles I hated and people who just didn’t get the ones I adored. He even directed a meandering but beautiful limited series for HBO called We Are Who We Are which I would highly recommend. So where does Queer fall on this spectrum, one that stretches wider than it does for most directors?

Queer is very specific, and with me at least, it elicited a very specific response. This may be the most bemusing movie I’ve seen and so very much enjoyed the experience. There’s something truly nebulous about the script, adapted from the William S. Burroughs novella of the same name, by Justin Kuritzkes. I have never read any of Burroughs’s work, but by all accounts the tripiness the story gets further into as it goes on is characteristic of his work. I’m not sure I need to read any of it. I trust the capable hands of Guadagnino in shaping an adaptation.

It’s notable that both Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, who play the two leads, are straight actors playing queer characters. One might be tempted to call it regressive, except that Guadagnino himself is gay, and evidently these were the actors he wanted. If straight actors must be cast for gay parts, it makes up for a lot if the director is openly gay. And I cannot stress enough that Daniel Craig’s performance in this film is incredible. His William Lee is an aging gay man biding his time in 1950s Mexico City, engaged in casual sex but quick to infatuation, and singularly vulnerable and insecure. Craig’s portrayal is at once unique and broad, specific and heartbreaking. William is a man who seems in search of something to fill a void in his life that his era just cannot accommodate.

The one thing I genuinely struggle to get on board with in Queer is Jason Schwartzman, giving an admittedly delightful performance in the deeply unfortunate use of what appears to be a fat suit. I’m having a hard time finding specific confirmation that this is indeed a fat suit, but given how thin he is in recent photos, I’m not sure what else we can conclude. And there are definitely genuinely fat actors who are just as talented as Schwartzman and could have given just as good a performance. On the upside, his character, Joe, is not only also queer, but is only ever seen making out with hot young guys. So at least we’re seeing a fat guy onscreen who can get it.

Speaking of which, there's some unusually frank depictions of gay sex in this movie–another point in its favor. Daniel Craig looks amazing at age 56—25 years Drew Starkey’s senior. But Euguene, played by Starkey, is an independent and almost aloof young man, barely acknowledging William’s obvious yearning for him.

And here is where Guadagnino’s dependably delicate touch comes in handy: at no point does Queer feel like some kind of gay version of Lolita (it helps that Eugene is well out of his teen years). A great deal of time passes with very little seeming to have happened, even though a great deal is happening onscreen, with oddly but effectively focused cinematography, great performances, and great finesse in editing. There is no question some will be bored by this movie. I was fully compelled at all times, even when it shifted into areas I could not fully grasp.

Queer takes a hard turn in that direction as it explores William’s drug use, and specifically his search for a root that he’s told will give him telepathic capabilities. The story is split into three “Chapters” and then a particularly impenetrable epilogue; the third chapter is titled “Lady in the Jungle,” the title character there being a sort of slicked-back woman with long greasy hair who looked incredibly familiar but was nearly impossible to place: it turned out to be the amazing Lesley Manville.

It’s in this third act when William, with Eugene right there beside him, goes on a bit of a wild trip, on the drug they’ve traveled out there for. Guadagnino pivots to what is essentially an interpretive dance on ayahuasca, the two shirtless men moving in and out of each other, quite literally: we see a hand passing underneath the skin, or their two torsos barely melting into each other. It is at once romantic and unsettling, unlike anything I have ever seen. I suppose it could be seen as a comment on two people truly connecting, but sometimes with Guadagnino, you just have no idea and perhaps you never will.

This is one filmmaker where, depending on the vibes anyway, I am okay with having no idea. I couldn’t tell you precisely what Queer is going for. Guadagnino is capable of such mystery in ways both deeply unsatisfying and deeply satisfying. For me, this round was pretty satisfying. If nothing else, he has a gift for molding thoroughly realized characters who elicit your compassion and interest. Queer is certainly not perfect, not least of which because of several scenes with pointlessly obvious CGI (background landscapes of South America; a near-miss attack from a viper). Still I’m glad to have gone on its journey, and would happily do so again.

Insecure vulnerability and comfortable confidence intersect in Queer-ness.

Overall: B+

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

All We Imagine as Light is the most critically acclaimed wide-release movie of the year, so I went in primed to love it. Since I liked it just okay, that rendered it kind of a letdown.

Maybe there’s something I’m just missing. Maybe I’ll watch this again one day and think: What was I thinking? This is a masterpiece! But I doubt it. I’ll be too busy watching other new movies. This is a good example, though, of how stupidly caught up I can get in the score at review aggregate sites like MetaCritic. A “Must-See” score of 94? It must be amazing! No, not really.

I should have trusted the feeling I had when I watched the trailer. I could find nothing in there that looked particularly worth getting excited about. This is not to say that I can’t find incredibly quiet movies—a huge amount of the dialogue in this film is delivered barely above a whisper—to be deeply impressive. It’s just that this movie, in particular, I am a bit at a loss when it comes to the universal praise it’s getting. Side note: the MetaCritic user score of “Generally Favorable” 7.1 out of 10 is much more in line with how I felt about it.

Which is to say, I don’t have any harsh criticisms of it either. This is just another example, of many films that critics gush over but audiences aren’t nearly as impressed by. There is a perennial divide between the intellectualist consumption of film critics and the populist tastes of audiences, and once again, I find myself falling somewhere in the space between.

And it’s not like I am incapable of gushing over films that general audiences don’t really connect with. Consider TÁR (2022), a film I loved. But there are key things that sets that film apart, including its cinematography, its editing, and most significantly, a stunning performance by Cate Blanchett. I suppose it’s not really fair to compare that to All We Imagine as Light, an international independent film with naturalistic actors totally unknown to American audiences.

I should note that this does not mean they are unknown at all. The lead actor, Kani Kusruti, has more than forty other acting credits. She plays Prabha, a nurse working in Mumbai a year after the husband she was arranged by family to marry went to Germany to work and now no longer even calls her. Her younger and more carefree roommate, Anu, is played by Divya Prabha, who has 16 other acting credits. They work at the same hospital, along with Parvaty, the hospital cook played by Chaya Kadam, who has 60 acting credits. Parvaty is a widow who is getting forced out of the home she’s lived in for 22 years because she has no papers to prove her residence, her late husband having never discussed it with her, and now developers want to build on the land.

I was pretty compelled by the framing of All We Imagine as Light at the start, writer-director Payal Kapadia opening with tracking shots of everyday life in the crowded streets of Mumbai. This is accompanied by anonymous voiceover voices, each in a different language, sharing their impressions of life in that particular city. The differing languages serves to underscore the cosmopolitan nature—if still strictly from the Indian subcontinent—specific to Mumbai. It’s an effective setup for a film primed to be a uniquely accurate portrait of a city, which is the kind of thing I tend to be really into.

Once that introductory vignette is done, it cuts to Prabha, commuting on one of Mumbai’s ubiquitous trains. We only very slowly get to know her, and her living situation, her job, her absent husband, her young roommate who asks her to cover rent this month. There is an aspect of this film using just a few characters to convey a sense of living in the city, and it is indeed done very well—if quietly, and at an incredibly measured pace.

Somewhat surprisingly, only the first half of the film is set in Mumbai. When Parvati decides to stop fighting the developers and move back to her coastal home village 150 miles south of Mumbai, Prabha and Anu help her move, turning it into their own trip to Ratnagiri. This is comparatively very remote, green, serene, and near the beach, and it’s where the second half of the film is set. It’s also where All We Imagine as Light briefly turns into a kind of fantasy on Prabha’s part, and after such gritty realism it had me momentarily very confused.

There is also a subplot regarding Anu engaged in a romance with a young Muslim man named Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), and I had slightly mixed feelings about its fairly rote “forbidden love” aspect. There’s a scene in which Anu is going to sneak out to Shiaz’s neighborhood when his parents are gone to a wedding, but in order not to attract unwanted attention she buys a burka to wear as a disguise. How do Muslim audiences respond to this, I wonder?

If nothing else, I must say that All We Imagine as Light is executed with tenderness above all, a deep empathy for its characters, particularly the three women around whom the story revolves. These details are all very much in the film’s favor, which is sprinkled with several moments of quiet profundity, occasionally quite memorably framed as a picture. I found very little to criticize in this movie. I just couldn’t connect with it as something enduringly special.

This is much how I looked watching this movie. Well, I wasn’t wearing a sari.

Overall: B

MARIA

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Maria is the third in a trilogy of films by Chilean director Pablo Larraín about famously tragic women of history, and in a way it comes full circle to connect to the first of them, Jackie—which I adored, enough to make it my #2 film of 2016. Jackie had been about Jaqueline Kennedy, later Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, having married Aristotle Onassis in 1968—right at the end of his eight-year partnership with famed opera singer Maria Callas.

The film in the middle of this trilogy, Spencer, I also adored, enough to make it my #1 film of 2021. As you can imagine, this meant I looked forward to Maria with eager anticipation, even though I was far less familiar with Maria Callas than either Princess Diana (the subject of Spencer) or Jackie Kennedy. There’s just something about Pablo Larraín’s style that speaks to me. And I am fully aware that he is an acquired taste: the three films in this trilogy have had diminishing critical returns (their scores on review aggregate site MetaCritic are, in order of release, 81, 76, and 65), and even Natalie Portman’s performance in the best-reviewed of them, Jackie, proved divisive.

In any case, I went in primed to love Maria based only on it being a Pablo Larraín film, but also having faith in Angelina Jolie’s performance as the title character. Indeed, the acting is by far the best thing about it, including Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher as Maria’s butler and housemaid in the last years of her life, tragically cut short in 1977, at the age of 53.

And yet, in spite of some lovely cinematography by Edward Lachman (Carol), neither that nor the excellent performances could make Maria speak to me in quite the same way as both Jackie and Spencer did. All of the characters speak in placid, nearly hushed tones, which all contributes to a tone of a famous woman not so much in decline, but whose life is winding down. Maria is over reliant on medication, which gives her occasional hallucinations, the only time Maria slips into the stylized, dreamlike quality I loved so much in Larraín’s previous films. I’d have loved more of that, although to be fair, no artist should be expected to deliver the same thing over and over again.

It’s just that the script, by Steven Knight—who also wrote Spencer—isn’t quite as compelling. It’s the acting, and the cinematography, and to a degree even the editing, that do a lot of work to make Maria rise above a story that isn’t all that memorable. Maria has moments of greatness, and certain scenes that are undeniably great, sometimes even exceptionally well written. It just lacks a certain consistency in its storytelling.

Much of the framing of Maria entails a reporter and a camera man, coming to Maria’s apartment to interview her at a time when she is attempting to re-strengthen a once famous voice that is now in decline. When she tells her butler a camera crew is coming, he asks her, “Are they real?” Even by the time the film ended, I could never quite figure out whether we were supposed to take them as real, or a figment of Maria’s imagination. I suspect the latter, but would have liked more clarity. The reporter, incidentally, is played by Kodi Smith-McPhee, who has previously made deep impressions with his performances in the likes of Let Me In (at age 13) and The Power of the Dog. Here his ample talents are relatively wasted, even as he manages a subtly oddball sensibility opposite Angelina Jolie.

Many will find Marie to be slow and plodding, I suspect. Larraín is clearly being very deliberate here, and it’s something I can appreciate—to be clear, I never drifted away or lost interest while watching this movie. I just came to it expecting and hoping for something exceptional, and got something that, overall, was not. There has been some chatter about Jolie competing for Best Actress, and this would be deserved, but I struggle to imagine this film gaining enough traction for that to happen. I still enjoyed Maria, but largely because I am a fan of the director and the star, and less on the merits of the film itself, which works better contextualized as part of a trilogy—and one that ends on a comparatively weak note. This is a film beautifully constructed in multiple ways, but about a person who, this time around, likely means far more to the filmmaker than to the audience.

Sometimes great composition alone can’t reach the heights of greatness.