ANORA

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

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.

It’s also very much a riff on the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman, a movie as beloved as it is quite rightly criticized as a vapid look at sex work. Anora takes the concept of a rich guy who woos a sex worker with the promise of riches in exchange for exclusivity, and makes it grittier, more real, with both more authentic joy and more authentic sorrow. Instead of a high-end Beverly Hills escort played by Julia Roberts, we get a no-nonsense Brooklyn exotic dancer played by Mikey Madison—who is a revelation in the role.

And in the case of Anora (Ani for short), the fairy tale begins to crack fairly early on. She’s on the job when she meets Ivan (a stupendous Mark Eydelshteyn), a young Russian man with money to burn. He buys a lap dance, then invites her to his giant home, and within days he’s asking her to be his “boyfriend” for a week. Within that week, he proposes to her, convinces her he’s serious, and flies her with some friends to Las Vegas, where they do indeed get married,

This is all extended setup, and it last probably a good hour into the movie: Ani being taken in by a whirlwind fantasy life moving so fast she doesn’t even have time to consider whether it’s too good to be true. All the while, Ivan has an irresistibly sweet, youthful exuberance that is easily mistaken for innocence. It’s just as easy to be taken in by it as a viewer as it is by Ani as a character, which is testament to Eydelshteyn’s performance.

It’s when Ivan’s parents catch wind of this marriage that things take a turn. He is visited by two men we would reasonably read as henchmen, working for Toros (Karren Karagulian), the handler hired by Ivan’s parents. But Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura Borisov) get far more than they bargained for when they come face to face with Ani, who is having trouble processing the idea, suddenly presented to her, that her marriage is a sham.

This turn in the plot, though, would in just about any other movie get scary and violent. Garnick and Igor, as it turns out, are not interested in violence—only in getting Ivan and Ani to sign paperwork to annul their marriage. It’s Ani who turns out to be unexpectedly wild, a young woman with ample experience not taking anbody’s shit, and she’s the one who get surprisingly violent. This is an extended sequence in Ivan’s house, and it is hilarious.

Garnick and Igor have such trouble containing Ani’s outbursts—which, to be fair, are reasonable under the circumstances—that Toros is forced to leave the performance of a baptism to assist. He’s astonished at how beat up Garnick and Igor are when he arrives at the house, and instead of being on board with Ani being tied up like he would be in most movies, he’s aghast. The other two struggle to convince him it would be a mistake to untie her.

Writer-director Sean Baker has made easily his best movie since his masterful 2015 breakthrough Tangerine. I wasn't quite as huge a fan of his next two films, The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2021), which were both very good but not quite as incredible as many other critics asserted. With Anora, Baker adds to a truly impressive body of work and, so far at least, makes possibly his crowning achievement. It’s beautifully shot, beautifully acted, expertly edited, and its sexual frankness only adds to its quality.

It doesn’t take long to find online discourse about whether Anora is “feminist,” which misses the point. This is not what the story is concerned about, but rather with telling a nuanced story of a stripper who is neither ashamed nor explicitly proud of her job. She’s just matter-of-fact about it, about the line of work she’s in, and even about the clear talent she has (and yes, pole dancing takes talent). I would argue that alone is a feminist take.

Anora exists in a fully realized world, which is both very specific and something you can’t look away from. And this is Ani’s story from start to finish, Ivan much more a part of it in the first half than in the second, during most of which Ani, Toros, Garnick and Igor are searching the city for him. Igor in particular proves a surprisingly tender character for someone clearly meant to be a villain, and how he relates to Ani over time evolves organically until he plays a part in the closing scene of the film that is bittersweet at best and tragically sad at worst. In either case, he’s the one character who offers Ani any truly genuine intimacy.

There’s a lot of sex in Anora, particularly in its first half, when Ani is falling in love with Ivan. The fantastic trick Sean Baker pulls off is that it’s never gratuitous, at least not in the context of storytelling—not even when Ani gives a kind of performance in Ivan’s living room usually reserved for a private room at the strip club. In every case, it moves the story forward, and has a refreshing frankness about how sex plays an undeniable part in people falling for each other.

There have been many characterizations of Anora as “Pretty Woman meets Uncut Gems.” I would push back a bit on that characterization, as Uncut Gems is an unbearably tense and stressful portrait of a gambling addict you’re desperate to see make the right decision even once and he never does. Anora gets somewhat similarly frantic in its second half, but it’s far funnier and nowhere near as stressful. What it does do, on the other hand, is end with a couple of extended, quietly profound scenes that really drive home the inability of Ani to escape the trappings of her social and economic class, no matter what gets disingenuously promised to her.

Anora is a movie that passes no judgment on any of its characters, even while plenty of them—especially Ivan’s parents–are passing judgment on her. Mikey Madison is a star among stars in this movie, all of them giving unforgettable performances, and this is a stellar movie I won’t soon forget,

The promise may be too good to be true but this movie isn’t.

Overall: A

SING SING

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

Not to diminish the phenomenal performances or anything, but very early on in Sing Sing I thought to myself: I need to look up who the cinematographer was on this movie. It was Pat Scola, whose resume is rather diverse: he shot Pig (2021) as well as this year’s A Quiet Place: Day One. These were decently shot films, but honestly nothing truly special on that note. When it comes to Sing Sing, however, not only is it evidently by far the best film he has shot, but it should rightly put him in the sights of many talented directors to come.

If Scola doesn’t get nominated for the Best Cinematography, it will be a crime. Granted, there was no doubt a great amount of collaboration between him and this film’s director and co-writer, Greg Kwedar—here offering merely his second feature film, eight years after his debut, a film called Transpecos. (Side note: that film appears to have been fairly critically acclaimed in its own right, and I now wish I had even heard of it, let alone seen it.) But, it was Scola behind the camera, shooting a film set almost entirely, with the exception of the final scene, inside the maximum security prison that is this film’s namesake.

Few people would expect a film set entirely inside a prison to be shot so beautifully, but this becomes clear from the start of the story—and it sets us up for a beautiful story, based on a real theater program, and featuring a whole bunch of former inmates who had been a part of the program. This is the case with a majority of the cast, with the one notable exception of Coleman Domingo, whose own incredibly performance is undiminished by how much the inmate cast shines, especially Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin—who plays himself. Many of this cast plays themselves, in a way never seen in film before, especially so successfully. A few of them play fictionalized characters.

Maclin is incredible. So is Domingo. The rest of the cast is astonishing, considering the behind-the-scenes details. Sean Dino Johnson, who both plays himself and is also a board member for Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), which runs this program, gets a short monologue that is particularly moving.

Sing Sing could have easily been a documentary feature, and one just as memorable and affecting as a narrative film featuring these actors. But this film, as it actually exists, is far more in the spirit of the purpose RTA serves, which the film touches on: it teaches these men how to be vulnerable, how to harness their feelings in healthy ways, how to make it one vital aspect, among many, of their rehabilitation. Most crucially, it showcases these men doing exactly what they learned to do: act. This is an award-worthy ensemble if ever there was one. It’s too bad the Academy Awards do not have a “Best Cast” award—but the SAG Awards do, and they’d better take note.

In this story brilliantly fashioned to showcase all of this talent, John “Divine G” Whitfield (Coleman Domingo) is the unofficial ringleader, delving deep into these productions every season, but now hoping to present compelling evidence of his innocence at an upcoming clemency hearing. In one of the few parts actually played by established actors, the troupe director, Brent, is played by Paul Raci, playing a role similar to the one he played in the also-excellent 2020 film Sound of Metal. Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin plays a version of himself as an inmate who signs up for the program, a man putting on airs as a gangster but with surprising knowledge of Shakespeare, but with significant insecurities once he is accepted.

In the first meeting he attends, Maclin puts forth the proposition that they put on a comedy, because they all have enough tragedy in their actual lives. Whitfield, who has written a script his hopes they will use, is a bit disappointed, but Maclin clearly has a point. Honestly, I mention this mostly because after seeing the bits and pieces of the time traveling comedy play Brent then writes, I really wish I could go see this play in its entirety.

Which is to say: 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. At an hour and 45 minutes, even its runtime is perfect, after countless films of recent years, from blockbusters to dramas, becoming reliably overlong. The script, by Greg Bentley and Greg Kwedar—from a story developed by Kwedar and Clint Bentley along with both Maclin and the real “Divine G,” based on the book Break-in’ The Mummy’s Code by Brent Buell (the character played by Paul Raci)—is incredibly tight. It’s a work that could be studied as proof that extra time need not necessarily be taken to tell a profound story with lasting impact. Sometimes it’s limitation that bears perfection.

Sing Sing even gets its meta elements right, standing for both solid storytelling and growth through art at the same time. We see character development and human development at once, in real time. I haven’t even gotten how incredible it is to see an overused monologue from Hamlet performed in a way never seen before, from an unusual performer who delivers the lines with unique conviction and beautifully infusing it with a personality and background Shakespeare himself could never have dreamed of. Sing Sing is a miracle of a movie, gathering the parts of what should be tropes, and instead moving us all forward.

An “Eye” and a “G”: both divine.

Overall: A

ROBOT DREAMS

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

Robot Dreams is an utterly delightful, adorable animated feature without any dialogue and with an undercurrent of melancholy. It’s about friendship, love, and a meditation on the transient nature of relationships. It’s uniquely lush in spite of being almost exclusively set in cityscapes, with dark lines around rounded shapes filled with vividly solid colors that somehow combine to create a visual warmth.

Everything about it invites and envelopes you, even as the story takes unexpected turns. This is a universe filled with anthropomorphized animal characters, packed with endlessly charming visual details. “Dog,” the protagonist, wags his little tail any time something makes him happy or excited. He reads a copy of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary when he crawls into bed at night, making us wonder what a society of animals keeps as pets (which we never do actually see).

I am certain I could watch this movie again and discover many charming details I missed the first time around. One of my favorites is when Dog and Robot take a row boat ride in a lake, amongst many others doing the same. One other boat with two companions contains an elephant and a mouse, the elephant weighing down one end of the boat so heavily that the mouse is pushed high into the air at the other end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. “Robot” is our other main character, a companion Dog has ordered through the mail via a number provided in a television ad. “Are you alone?” the ad copy onscreen reads, and we have already gleaned that Dog is lonely. This was where I first noticed the penchant for background detail in Robot Dreams, actually: as Dog eats his TV dinner alone in his apartment, we can see through his window and again through the window of an apartment across the street, an affectionate couple (a cow and a giraffe, if I remember right) snuggling on a couch in front of their own TV, feeding each other popcorn.

These are details we, as viewers of the movie, notice first. But then Dog notices, and he longs for something of the same in his own life. Enter Robot, who never exists as a character to provoke any thoughts about robotics or AI or anything particularly science-fiction in tone or theme. He’s more like a platonic mail-order bride, and in the end he doesn’t even have any particular personality defects that might cause tension in Dog and Robot’s relationsip. In the end, it’s more about how things can change even between people who never love each other less, but due to circumstances beyond their control. It’s the unhappy accidents of life itself that get in the way.

Robot Dreams is an unrated film, but if it were to get an MPA rating, logically it would get at least PG—not because of vulgarity or violence, which this film really has none of whatsoever, but just because it could be a bit sad for small children. There’s a moment in Robot’s journey, something that happens to him, that broke my heart. And I’m 48 years old.

Well before that, though, we just watch an extended sequence of scenes with Dog and Robot’s blossoming relationship. They walk to the park, go roller skating, and go to the beach. This goes on long enough that I found myself wondering how and when some kind of conflict will enter the story, as there is no story without one. And this is one of the many great things about Robot Dreams: it checks off the obligatory story beats, but always in unexpected ways. In this instance, Dog and Robot get separated at the beach because neither of them realized Robot would rust if he went swimming. He is rusted frozen on the sand, too heavy for Dog to drag away after they have napped clear through evening, and the door through the fence barrier to the beach not only closes at the end of the day, but until the next spring! Dog is dragged away by a cop for trespassing, given no chance to try and repair and retrieve Robot, who then spends the entire winter under snow and ice, quite literally dreaming of ways he might get reunited with Dog (hence the film’s title).

Dog marks the date he can go back (June 1), but in the meantime is forced to go on with his life. He’s still lonely, he tries to make friends, with varying but never complete success. By the time June 1 actually comes around, circumstances have changed significantly for both of them. I won’t spoil it except to assure that Robot does not stay stuck in the sand forever, and this is actually part of their diverging fates that take Robot Dreams to its surprisingly bittersweet conclusion. It’s not often that a film ends with its characters not unhappy, but perhaps fated with a lifetime of wistful yearning for what could have been.

Through all of it, the story is told almost exclusively in a visual manner, the closest to any dialogue being characters snickering or hollering out, “Hey!” I suppose you could say Robot Dreams thus features “voice acting,” although not in a way that particularly showcases anyone’s talent. The story and the animation are what make this the wonderful movie that it is, along with the soundtrack: the only time we hear actual words being vocalized is in song, tunes played on the soundtrack or from a character playing a cassette tape.

Director and co-writer Pablo Berger sets the story in 1980s New York, a plainly deliberate choice that adds to the nostalgic tone. Everything seen onscreen is a celebration of what we see, right down to the teenage animal punks who flip off Robot as he walks by them (oh wait, I guess that one moment could be seen as a “vulgarity,” even though even that plays with charm). Many shots feature the twin towers of the old World Trade Center in the background, always lovingly rendered, just like everything else we see onscreen. 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.

Robot and Dog swim in a sea of innovative storytelling devices.

Overall: A

GHOSTLIGHT

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

Ghostlight is the kind of movie whose excellence comes at you gradually. In the beginning, it’s just a small family, two middle-aged parents dealing with the exasperating antics of a teenager, who is facing expulsion from school for her behavior, but if some cards are played right she might get only suspension.

The great thing about it is what seems at first to be so unremarkable about them all. Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) is not the precociously eloquent teenager seen in most films like this. She’s clearly genuinely smart, but the ways she acts out, the things she says, are meant only to disrupt, and since that takes little actual effort to do, what actually comes out of her mouth is often just plain dumb. She punctuates her mouthiness with annoyingly unnecessary profanity.

Her parents, construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) and teacher Sharon (Tara Mallen), actually aren’t that much different. They don’t resort to profanity, but resort to other things that are just as unhealthy, such as Dan’s violent outbursts or Sharon barely managing to communicate with either of them. The script, by Kelly O'Sullivan, takes some time to reveal exactly what this family’s damage is, and since the story unfolds this way I won’t spoil it here. Suffice it to say that they suffered a horrible tragedy, and they are actively engaged in a lawsuit against another family in response to it. This would qualify as another unhealthy approach to dealing with their trauma.

The real hook of the story here is Dan’s random invitation to join a local community theater troupe, which is putting on a production of Romeo & Juliet. He meets an ex-professional actor who is around his age, Rita (Dolly de Leon) when first she asks him to try keeping the noise down with his construction work. But later, after she witnesses one of his outbursts, she explains to him that “You looked like someone who might like to be someone else. For a while.”

Dan’s organic integration into this play, in which they are forced into the backward yet somehow charming representation of teenage leads played by middle-aged actors, proves to be a way for him to process his deeply repressed emotions.

It only occurred to me just now to consider how often Shakespeare’s work featured a “play within a play,” and eventually we see a fair amount of this Romeo & Juliet in production in this film: another play within a play. Clearly a concept that dates back four hundred years, but here co-directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson do something very different with it: we see the performance of this play acting in real time as a visceral metaphor for the grief the actors themselves are going through. To see the nuance performed in this context, particularly on the part of Keith Kupferer, is breathtaking. Shakespeare’s writing alone is moving enough, and on top of that we see Dan finally acknowledging his own grief in his delivery of it.

In another person’s hands, the performance of Romeo and Juliet by older actors might come off as corny or cheap. Here, it’s deeply moving. So, yes, Ghostlight is in its way a tearjerker, but it has plenty of levity as well. I got several good laughs out of this movie. But whether it’s comical or tragic, there’s an unusually grounded representation of these characters, all of whom look, and act, like regular people. No one in this film looks like a movie star, and that is as it should be; if they did, it wouldn’t work. This especially applies to the rest of the characters rounding out the cast of the Romeo & Juliet production, most of them older people pursuing theater as a hobby. There’s a couple of younger men too, because when it comes to community theater, it takes all kinds. But without a younger woman, Rita gets the part of Juliet, simply because she gave the best read at her audition.

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.

A genuinely new take on Romeo & Juliet is an impressive achievement indeed.

Overall: A

THE TASTE OF THINGS

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

It’s been said that you shouldn’t watch The Taste of Things on an empty stomach—and that is precisely what I did. And then I sat through this lengthy, gorgeously shot, expertly choreographed opening sequence of an elaborate dinner getting prepared in a large, late-nineteenth-century French kitchen.

Here’s the thing. If you are a carnivore, you might have greater need to heed such a warning: there is a lot of meat and seafood prepared in this movie. I am, however, a vegetarian—I don’t even eat seafood. I could appreciate the vividly shot food, clearly actually cooked on set, on a purely aesthetic level, but it certainly didn’t have me salivating.

Here’s what it did do. It made me think, a lot, about the way we eat our food. It made me long for a meal prepared with such intricate care, from ingredients sourced from the garden right outside the door. The film’s opening shot, in fact, is of Eugénie (a luminescent Juliette Binoche, still a genuine stunner at age 59) harvesting produce straight out of the dirt. We throw phrases around like “farm to table” as though it’s a marketing concept, and then we witness it occurring onscreen in this movie, almost in real time. And here, in the real world, 140 years after the setting of our movie, we pass our days eating food made quickly or cheaply or, in most cases, both.

The Taste of Things is populated with characters for whom flavor is more important than anything. I marveled at the technical proficiency already achieved by the 19th century, the myriad combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques, and the amount of time that it takes—and took—to master all these dishes.

As I said, 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.

The Taste of Things is about much more than vividly shot food preparation, of course. At its heart, it is a love story, between Eugénie, a longtime cook, and Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), the restauranteur Eugénie worked for for many years. They now live together in a kind of perpetual romance, Dodin regularly proposing to her, and Eugénie regularly insisting she prefers things as they are. Their love and affection is quite overtly represented in the deeply rooted history and skill in the food they share. This includes both cooking and eating it, although Eugénie does most of the cooking.

There is a bit of sadness thrown in, and I won’t spoil exactly what that is, although it gets alluded to pretty early on, in the middle of the aforementioned, extended opening sequence. It’s easy to focus on that sequence, because of the incredible blocking and choreography and camera work, but most scenes in this film involve cooking, and without exception the food is shot with a cozy, loving eye. Beyond the focus on the food, the story is deceptively simple. But it stays with you.

There is a somewhat curious separation of genders in this film, and the heavy focus on Binoche notwithstanding, I kind of wish there were more women in it. Besides Eugénie, the only significant female characters are two younger cooks who work with her: Violette (Galatéa Bellugi), who evidently has relatively mediocre still; and Violette’s niece, Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), who has an astonishing, precocious talent for gastronomy. Dodin, for his part, has a group of about five men friends who populate many scenes, often to pontificate on the prepared food or to provide support to Dodin, as needed.

But, it all comes back to Eugénie and Dodin, every other character serving their story. One of the great many things I love about The Taste of Things is the way it naturally veers away from any of the typical film tropes. Just because of the way I’ve been conditioned by decades of movie watching, I kept expecting one of the apprentice cooks to trip while climbing the many staircases in the house, or for one of the men to creep on young Pauline. But, nothing of the sort happens in this story, which is only about two character who are, as Dodin puts it, “in their autumn years,” and their earnest devotion to each other. Sometimes the simplest stories are the most moving and beautiful, and this is certainly one to savor.

Don’t insult this movie by eating cheap popcorn while you watch it!

ALL OF US STRANGERS

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

How do I adequately convey how much I loved All of Us Strangers? How do I even explain what it’s about? Except, perhaps, to say it’s a beautifully melancholy, queer love story with an emotional through line that cuts deep?

Mind you, I say this as a gay viewer, and this is incredibly relevant. I can’t help but wonder how the response to it might be different among audiences that are not gay men. I am certain anyone open to the experience of this film can be deeply moved by it, and even have an intricate, nuanced understanding of what the characters are feeling. But for me, in a way few other movies ever have, this story wrapped my very soul into a warm embrace.

Will I love this movie as much upon rewatch, I wonder? There’s only one way to find out.

In the meantime, I must say there is plenty of All of Us Strangers that evades straightforward understanding. That is beside the point. You need only to feel it. And boy, did I.

Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) are two gay men, living in the same London high-rise apartment building. It must be a new building, very few other people living in it, as they discuss how distractingly quiet it is living there. We really never see them interact with anyone else in the building, only each other. When a fire alarm has Adam exiting the building, he sees Harry’s silhouette in his sixth-story window, looking down at him. After Adam returns to his unit on a much higher floor—with spectacular, panoramic London views—Harry knocks on his door, drunk, and introduces himself.

Adam and Harry’s steadily blossoming relationship expands beyond that first meeting, which is tentative, cautious, a bit shy. They don’t hook up immediately. They do a bit later, though, and it’s some of the most beautifully shot and tender, gay sexuality I’ve seen onscreen since Moonlight (2016). It’s both highly erotic and genuinely moving—a feat of narrative execution that has me tempted to call director and co-writer Andrew Haigh a cinematic magician.

And All of Us Strangers is indeed magical, even when it defies logic, and quite deliberately so. The story of Adam and Harry runs parallel to the story of Adam and his late parents, who died in a car crash when he was twelve years old. And yet, he takes a train across town to his childhood home—and finds his father (Jamie Bell) and his mother (Claire Foy) there, the same age they were when they died, somehow unsurprised to find their son coming home, now a grown man they had never actually gotten to see grow up.

Mum and Dad have an understanding that about 35 years have passed, but have no knowledge of what has transpired in that time. Their knowledge and relative ignorance remains stuck in, we can only estimate, about 1988. And as premises go, this is a little out there, because All of Us Strangers never makes explicit exactly what’s going on, and there’s a physicality between Adam and his still-young parents during their visits that negates any idea of them as conventional ghosts. It’s a little more like they exist as flesh and blood, but in a different dimension.

What it does allow for, however, are conversations Adam never had a chance to have with his parents otherwise. He comes out to them both, in separate conversations. It’s notable that his mom has a more complicated, slightly more negative reaction than his father, who is much more quickly accepting—a scenario that defies the stereotype of gay experience, and is likely more common than many realize. This, among many other conversations Adam has with his parents, packed a unique emotional punch for me, and so far as I could tell, I was crying before most of the rest of the people in the theater.

All of Us Strangers features gorgeous cinematography, and is edited with unparalleled finesse, transitioning between Adam with Harry, and Adam with his parents, with seamless grace. There’s a sequence in which Adam and Harry go out dancing, do some drugs, and then proceed into a sort of montage of domesticity, with the club music continuing uninterrupted through it all. It’s beautifully executed.

There is a bit of a twist at the end, very directly related to Harry, which ultimately had me baffled. It calls into question a great deal of what has been seen beforehand, but then, there is even a moment when Adam asks his mother, “Is this real?” The answer, evidently, is that if it feels real, then it is. And All of Us Strangers is all feeling, which therefore makes it real. Adam tries to introduce Harry to his parents, and for most of this sequence, Harry seems to be the only one existing in a grounded reality. This is now a film that will allow things to be that simple.

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 Strangers would 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.

Nowhere to go but up: together,

Overall: A

MAESTRO

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

There’s a scene somewhere in the middle of Maestro, when Leonard Bernstein has an argument with his wife, in a large Manhattan room with the door closed. The camera remains distant, so we watch both of the characters in a wide shot, for the duration of their argument. There are no close-ups of either one of them, in the manner you would typically expect of a scene like this. It’s actually much closer to the real experience when you witness people arguing in person: you don’t get close into their personal space, and yet the tension in the room reaches you as though there were no distance at all. It’s a very unusual style of shooting, and it works perfectly, punctuated at its end by a sort of visual gag, an overture—if you’ll forgive the term—toward the heightened experience of moments like this.

It might be my favorite scene in the film, one of countless great scenes. Honestly I’m not sure I could even count the ways I loved the experience of watching Maestro. I expected to like it, and to say it exceeded my expectations would be an understatement. I’m gushing so much over it now, I fear it may make readers set their own expectations either impossibly high, or with an unfair amount of skepticism. I can only speak my truth: I loved this film.

I have said many times how seldom I like biopics that cover decades in a person’s life. It’s just not possible to distill someone’s life story within the space of two hours. Along comes Bradley Cooper, to whom I can only say: I stand corrected.

Thus, perhaps more than anything, Maestro is a triumph of editing. It begins in 1943, when Bernstein was working as an assistant conductor but had to fill in at short notice when the conductor came down with the flu; and it ends just one year before his death in 1990—which means the story spans 46 years. And yet, every single scene has much to say about Berstein and his life, and fits together to make a holistic picture of a man’s life.

Without focusing on just one moment in the man’s life, Bradley Cooper, who directed and co-wrote this film, instead focuses on Bernstein’s relationship with his wife, Felicia. More specifically, how his bisexuality affected their marriage. And the thing is, before watching this film I knew very, very little about Leonard Bernstein, but hey, wait a minute, he was queer? Well there’s the perfect doorway for me to leap right through—suddenly I’m very interested.

There has been a fair amount of coverage and discussion about Cooper’s decision to cast himself in this role, playing a Jewish man, wear a prosthetic nose, also playing a man who was queer. These are the things that increasingly invite crticisim: why not cast an actor who was actually both Jewish and queer? I still have no answer for that. I can only say this: Cooper’s performance is so astonishing, all of those concerns just fluttered right out of my head. I suppose it helped that he cast Matt Bomer, an openly gay actor, to play one of the objects of his affection.

Cooper is hardly new to making movies that left us wondering why we needed it, only to find it surprisingly accomplished. A Star is Born (2018) was the fourth version of that story on film, and in my opinion, turned out to be second only to the very first one, released in 1937. It also signaled to the world that, as both a director and an actor, audiences had long underestimated his abilities. Maestro goes even further, and cements Bradley Cooper as one of the great actors of his generation. I spent my time watching this film alternately marveling at Bradley’s incredibly lived-in performance, and being practically unable to believe it was really him. There’s “disappearing into a role,” and then there’s Bradley Cooper in Maestro. The fact that he did that while also directing the film is arguably the most amazing achievement I have seen in film this year.

And yet: we must not glean over the stellar Carey Mulligan as Felicia, in a performance without which Maestro would simply not work. She may not make the same kind of dramatic physical transformation as Cooper, but she stands as every bit his match onscreen. Her top billing, above even Cooper himself, is wholly justified. I have long loved Carey Mulligan as an actor, and she has never been better, in a part that in lesser hands may have been pitiful. Here, she strikes a fascinating figure, as a woman who goes into a marriage with a man whose proclivities she is perfectly aware of, and then, over time, discovers she overestimated her ability to tolerate them.

The scenes depicting the early years of Leonard Bernstein’s life and career are shot in beautiful black and white, and I think I may need to watch again to get a better sense of why the point at which it switches over to color was chosen. At the moment, I am unsure about that, and it’s the only thing about Maestro I can even come close to being critical of—except that, everything else works so well, I simply don’t care.

Maestro was edited by Michelle Tesoro, whose previous credits are mostly in television (including the spectacular limited series The Queen’s Gambit), and I am fully convinced she deserves the Oscar for Best Editing—setting aside roughly ten minutes of end credits, this film ends at an even two hours. And, with so much of a man’s life to convey, Maestro employs several unusually clever visual transitions from one scene to the next, a character walking through a doorway and suddenly they are on a new set. In every case, it’s an organic transition that propels the narrative forward, always serving the story.

Before today, perhaps the only thing I might have known or remembered about Leonard Bernstein was that he composed the music for West Side Story—as it happens, he also composed the score for On the Waterfront, for which he received his single Oscar nomination (but did not win). He’s also credited as the composer of the score for Maestro, which is indeed scored with many of his compositions. One scene even features a section of the West Side Story overture, and these musical choices are also consitently, expertly chosen.

Leonard Bernstein was the first American composer to receive international recognition, something I learned merely by virtue of watching this fantastic film. To have Bradley Cooper tell it, however, the most interesting thing about him was his marriage to Felicia, something unconventional especially for the time: they were married from 1951 until (spoiler alert!) Felicia’s death in 1978. They had three children, who don’t get prominence in this film and yet they are given appropriately vital presence, all of them in some way a reflection of the consequences of how Bernstein chose to live his life.

In the end, however, at least as far as Bradely Cooper is interested, it was about his genuine love for Felicia. I don’t have a clue how true to life the events in Maestro are, which I don’t see as especially relevant—we’re dealing with ideas and themes here, conveyed through immensely compelling characters. It does go to a very sad place toward the end, which only left me marveling at the man’s emotional—and romantic—range. Whether or not Leonard Bernstein was a good man is not really something Maestro is concerned with, which is to its benefit. He is a deeply fascinating, towering historical figure, and all we can ask for is that a biopic like this do him justice. Mileage among viewers may vary, but for me it all came together in perfect harmony.

This is actually Bradley Cooper, if you can believe it.

Overall: A

THE HOLDOVERS

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

It would seem that director Alexander Payne and star Paul Giamatti are a reliably magical combination. I loved their last collaboration, 2004’s Sideways, and two decades later I love The Holdovers just as much—if not even more so.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a film so thoroughly heartwarming. There’s something about the script, by first-time feature writer David Hemingson, with its characters who are cynical and wounded, but we only get to watch them work through those challenges. Where other writers would give their characters a sudden, renewed hardship or mistake to overcome or get past at a prescribed point in the story, in The Holdovers you only continue growing more fond of them. There is nothing flashy about this movie, and yet its storytelling is deceptively unconventional.

Payne does like to give his movies odd little flourishes, as in this one, set in the year 1970, and given utterly 1970s-style production company logos at the start of the film, complete with visual graininess to make it look like a film that was actually shot fifty years ago. At first I thought this was a little unnecessarily cutesy, but Payne successfully plants you into the fully realized world of this movie.

Paul Giamatti is a peculiar movie star, a guy with a storied career, and an undeniable charm and screen presence that belies his longstanding frumpy look. Now at the age of 56, he’s perfectly cast as a longtime rural private school teacher with a lazy eye and a penchant for solitude. This is the kind of part we have seen a zillion times in movies, and Giamatti manages to make Paul Hunham utterly his own. Paul has a warmth to him that surfaces naturally, under the right circumstances.

In particular, the circumstances here involve him being roped into chaperoning the “holdovers” of the movie’s title: five kids who are unable, for various reasons, to go home for Christmas break and have to spend it at the otherwise abandoned school. One of these kids is Angus Tully, played by impressive newcomer Dominic Sessa. The school these kids attend has a lot of students from very rich families, and when one of the “holdover” kids gets invited home for a ski trip and invites all the other kids, Angus is the only one whose parents can’t be reached, leaving Mr. Hunham and Angus to themselves, alongside grieving school cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, currently more likely than anyone else in this film to be nominated for—and win—an Oscar).

It’s difficult to put into words how wonderful I found The Holdovers. It filled my heart. I tried to think of other descriptors that could work. There’s an element of sweetness, I suppose, but that’s not really what the movie is. Maybe “wholesome” is the right word. Yes, I think that’s it: many “feel-good” movies of the 21st century are self-consciously bawdy with a “wholesome” subtext that just rings false. The Holdovers is the kind of movie that is never bawdy although it can be slightly vulgar when it wants to be, and it gets its tone of wholesomeness exactly right. It brings to mind old family dramas like Terms of Endearment—except movies like that are what I would call “comic tearjerkers,” and The Holdovers is neither as comic (although it’s often funny) nor nearly as much of a tearjerker (although I did cry a little).

It would seem that Alexander Payne is in a class of his own. His movies are about the people who connect in spite of familial challenges of almost pointed specificity. These characters are expertly drawn, complete people. The best I can tell you is to watch The Holdovers and see for yourself. Maybe it won’t bowl you over, as it’s not designed to be. But it spoke to me at a deep level.

An unlikely trio make for a cozy found family of wounded souls.

Overall: A

ANATOMY OF A FALL

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

Anatomy of a Fall is a spectacular specimen of cinematic craftsmanship. At 151 minutes, it does seem at first to move at a somewhat labored pace, and between that and the fact that the dialogue is in three different languages, this film won’t work for everybody. I would argue that it works for anyone with an appreciation for cinema that is elevated to high art through writing, editing and performance rather than dazzling visuals.

Mind you, the visuals in Anatomy of a Fall should not be underestimated. There’s a tracking shot early in the film that had me thinking, Why the hell are we suddenly going through the house from the point of view of the dog? Much later, during the second half of the film that is dominated by a trial, seemingly out of the blue we hear a clear recording of a recent argument between the woman accused of murder and her dead husband—and, at first, all I could think was, How is this happening? Who the hell recorded this?

I learned quickly enough that no matter what questions arise in Anatomy of a Fall, I need only to put my trust in the filmmakers—co-writer Arthur Harari, and especially director and co-writer Justine Triet. The early scenes in this movie seem to skirt the edges of inconsequential, but later prove important. This isn’t a “whodunnit” so much as a “did she do it?”, but in any case all the details we see onscreen are important.

As the title refers to, everything hinges on the discovery of Samuel (Samuel Theis), husband and father, dead in the snow outside the family home in Grenoble, having evidently fallen from the third-floor, attic window of the house. The key players in this mystery are wife and mother Sandra (Sandra Hüller, incredible); 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner, excellent); and of course, Samuel himself. Although a fascinating element of the storytelling here is how little we actually see Samuel onscreen. Aside from two scenes in which we see his dead body, he has only two flashback scenes, only one of them with his own audio—a visualization of the aformentioned argument, which ultimately cuts back to the courtroom when the audio becomes violent but ambiguous. In the second, Daniel is recounting a conversation with him in the car, and we see him, but his lips match Daniel’s voice quoting him as he tells the story. Beyond these spare examples, Samuel exists only in the abstract, as we follow Sandra and Daniel as they face Sandra being put on trial for murder.

I feel compelled to mention the dog, Snoop, again. I don’t want to get too close to spoiler territory here, but Snoop ultimately becomes one more key player, a pivotal part of the final days of the trial, the details of which make that earlier tracking shot from the dog’s perspective make sense. I’ll tell you that Snoop is fine in the end, but there is still a scene in the film involving him that is arguably the most horrifying in the movie, and if you love dogs, watching it might prove tricky. Side note: I can’t speak to any such intentions on Triet’s part, but this sequence is also provocative in regards to the notion that, when push comes to shove, people are more important than animals.

Broadly speaking, the genius of Anatomy of a Fall is how it skirts any of the details that might give us concrete answers about Sandra’s guilt or innocence—we are left to struggle with the same questions as the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), or Sandra’s old lawyer friend brought in to defend her (Swann Arlaud), or the judges, or the jury, or indeed even Daniel. There’s a moment in the film when Daniel is told that sometimes, when there are two possibilities that seem equally plausible, but it can’t be both, you just have to make your own choice. Such is the case with Anatomy of a Fall, which answers all the right questions and the right times, but also has just the right amount of ambiguity, leaving just enough questions unanswered to keep you guessing.

If you have limited patience with subtitled foreign films, Anatomy of a Fall might be a workable compromise: because Sandra is German and Samuel is French, but neither has mastered the other’s language, they speak to each other at home in English, making that the spoken language roughly half the time—even though it’s technically a French film. Rarely do you see films in which so many characters so casually switch back and forth between languages, sometimes from sentence to sentence. Here, it also proves to be a pertinent plot point, a source of resentment between Sandra and Samuel, as is the decision to relocate the family from London to Samuel’s hometown in France.

What this brings us back to is how, in Anatomy of a Fall, every detail matters. Sandra Hüller’s performance in particular is stellar in its ambiguity, easily gaining empathy but with an undercurrent of doubt, obstinately stoked by the prosecuting attorny, and indeed the inconclusive evidence itself. When all this ambiguity is the result of such deliberate intention, the result is a masterful achievement.

There’s a lot more to discover beyond the margins.

Overall: A

A THOUSAND AND ONE

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A
Cinematography: A
Editing: A

The film industry has such a long history of churning out mediocrity and retreads of the same tired concepts, there are times when one wonders if it’s even possible for anyone to come up with anything original anymore. And then, every once in a while, a film comes along with such a singular vision that it can restore faith in the power and potential of cinema.

A Thousand and One is one of those films. Rarely does such a vividly drawn portrait so effectively occupy the gray areas of life and history. In this case, writer-director A.V. Rockwell proves to be such a talent with a first feature film that I can’t even say she has potential. She’s already realized it. I can only say that I already breathlessly await whatever she makes next, and if she doesn’t have a vastly accomplished career ahead of her, we will have all been criminally deprived.

I loved everything about this movie, which is set in New York City in three different parts: 1994, 2001, and 2005. Rockwell isn’t so much interested in specific pivotal moments in New York historty—no mention of 9/11 here—as she is painting a portrait of a city in flux, bringing changes that do no favors to the characters on whom she focuses. A Thousand and One, whose title refers to the apartment number where young mother Inez (Teyana Taylor, a revelation of rough screen chemistry) and her son Terry live, is packed with establishing shots of Manhattan and Harlem, many of them high drone shots, for once never used to show off. Each shot serves the story here, giving us a sense of place, along with carefully curated clips of mayor speeches of the time. We hear pontifications on so-called “improving people’s lives,” while we see, for instance, a young teen Terry become subject to the city’s infamous “stop and frisk” program.

It’s rare that I am this impressed by a film’s overall casting, but it must be called out here. Terry is depicted by three different young actors: Aaron Kingsley Adetola as him at six years old; Aven Courtey at thirteen; Josiah Cross at seventeen. Each actor has a distinct manner and presence, and yet they perfectly complement each other as the same character at different ages, different stages of his development as a quiet, withdrawn young man, almost embarrassed by his own intellect. I was deeply impressed by all of them.

Still, Teyana Taylor is the star performer here, from the jump as a young mother who, instead of leaving her son to the foster care system, takes him home with her shortly after her release from jail. We learn she is 22 years old, and as an older woman gives her a break and rents a room to her, she admonishes her to “act like an adult.” All I could think about is how young 22 really is. Inez makes decisions that are very bad on paper, but are easy to empathize with.

And then: while we rightly expect the abduction of the young boy to bring quickly tragic consequences—we actually see Terry grow up with her. Over time, the building begins to crumble with age. The single White character with any real lines is a new landlord who is deceptively helpful at first, ultimately telling Inez she’ll need to “clear out” for a month or two in order for the necessary repairs to get done.

Near the end, A Thousand and One takes a shocking turn that I truly did not see coming, and which poses a sudden challenge to that aforementioned easy empathy. Things aren’t quite as surprisingly simple as it seemed to be, for eleven years. It’s rare that a film covering such a time span is so precisely well told, but editors Sabine Hoffman (Passing) and Kristan Sprague (Judas and the Black Messiah) are masters of their craft.

This film features characters audiences never get to see in cinema, lived-in neighborhoods of Black communities with multidimensional individuals as compelling as they are flawed, earnest and uncertainly principled, both products of and transcendent of their environments. Terry finds himself with a stepfather who is clearly much older than Inez, named Lucky (William Catlett), who makes some very common mistakes but is never villainized. He is only ever nurturing toward Terry, and you can’t help but root for the relationships between all three of these characters to work out in one way or another.

Out of everyone, it’s Inez who comes closest to being a villain, and yet we seem to understand every decision she makes, even potentially dangerous ones. A Thousand and One isn’t quite a tale of redemption, but rather one of hard-won love and affection. “Damaged people don’t know how to love each other,” Inez says to Lucky. “That’s all.” Except there’s more love around her than she realizes, and plenty to go around for films like this one.

Broken people try to keep their creations intact.

Overall: A