→ March 27, 2022
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Oscar picks, 2022 edition.

The Oscars are happening tonight, so once again, I’ve assembled a post with some loose predictions, my own picks for each award, and, most importantly, links to every one of these films I’ve reviewed. I’ve seen all of the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Cinematography nominees, and all of the films in the four acting categories. I still have one or two films left in the Animated Feature, Documentary Feature, and International Feature categories, and didn’t see any of the short films this year, although I’ll seek out the winners afterwards.

To be completely clear, I have zero inside information to inform these predictions. I read the same stuff you do, and don’t claim to know anything more than the average moviegoer. This is all just for fun – but I do have certain films I’d like to see honored, because I think when good films win important awards, it encourages studios to finance more good films.

Best Picture

Belfast
CODA
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story

What will win: Drive My Car

What should win: Drive My Car

What was snubbed: The Lost Daughter, Passing

So my real prediction is that The Power of the Dog doesn’t win – in essence, I’d bet the field instead. I know CODA is now the popular favorite, and it might win. It’s not that great a film, and the idea of a film about deaf people that centers the experience of a hearing person winning BP is not that great, Bob, but in a year without a clear front-runner, a fractured vote could give us a surprising result. I have argued with friends who care about this stuff for a few weeks that Drive My Car is at least undervalued by oddsmakers; the more international Academy electorate gives it a real chance, even though it’s probably no more than third most likely to win and maybe fourth. But I could also see it being first on a minority of ballots, and in a year where no single film runs away with it, it might sneak in there. I might be wishcasting, but I’d rather argue for a scenario that is unlikely but not improbable than just tell you something you already know.

I’d also like to point out that the two films I thought most deserved BP nods but didn’t get them were Netflix movies, and seriously, fuck you to whatever Netflix exec decided to put time and money into promoting Don’t Look Up for this award when they had two far superior and more deserving films right there. Passing didn’t get a single Oscar nod, and I put that squarely on Netflix’s shoulders.

Apropos of nothing, there is a small chance that CODA wins this and nothing else – it was only nominated for two other honors. No film has won Best Picture and no other Oscars since Mutiny on the Bounty in 1936.

Best Director

Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza
Kenneth Branagh, Belfast
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car
Stephen Spielberg, West Side Story

Who will win: Campion

Who should win: Hamaguchi

Who was snubbed: Denis Villeneuve, Dune

Villeneve shouldn’t just have been nominated over Branagh; he should be taking home this Oscar. I don’t think it would be remotely close, and I say that as someone who thought Drive My Car was the best movie of 2021. I didn’t think West Side Story was anything special, but Spielberg’s direction was not among its flaws.

Best Actress

Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter
Penelope Cruz, Parallel Mothers
Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos
Kristen Stewart, Spencer

Who will win: Chastain

Who should win: Colman

Who was snubbed: Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World

If nothing else, I am glad that awards discourse has coalesced around the idea that nominating actors for doing impersonations is at least not in the true spirit of these awards. Three of these nominees are portraying real people; four of the nominees for Best Actor are too, if you count King Macbeth, although in that case, they didn’t try to make Denzel Washington look like his real-life counterpart. In this category, Chastain and Kidman just aren’t very good – they’re imitating, but hardly acting, although in both cases the scripts are the main problem. I’d be fine with any of the other three winning. Reinsve’s performance absolutely sustained that movie, though, and she would have been my pick. Ben Zauzmer noted that this is the first time in the ten-nominee era that no film has gotten a Best Picture nomination and had its lead actress get a Best Actress nomination, and the tenth time in Oscar history. By the way, Cruz’s odds have been soaring in the last few days, and I’d be thrilled if she won, too.

Best Actor

Javier Bardem, Being the Ricardos
Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog
Andrew Garfield, tick, tick…BOOM!
Will Smith, King Richard
Denzel Washington, The Tragedy of Macbeth

Who will win: Smith

Who should win: Smith

Who was snubbed: Simon Rex, Red Rocket

My hypothesis on Red Rocket is that because director/co-writer Sean Baker non-professional actors for the vast majority of roles in his movies, the professional actors who vote on the nominees for acting categories might be disinclined to vote for his movies or anyone associated with them. The Florida Project was my #1 movie of 2018 but only got one supporting nod for Willem Dafoe, who was already a highly acclaimed actor and played a small role in the film. Rex had acting experience before Red Rocket but was never in anything good, and nearly everyone else in the film is a non-professional.

Anyway, Smith is almost certainly going to win, but Cumberbatch was great, too, and wasn’t doing an impersonation, which Smith definitely was (especially in imitating Richard Williams’ manner of speech).

Best Supporting Actress

Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter
Ariana DeBose, West Side Story
Judi Dench, Belfast
Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog
Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard

Who will win: DeBose

Who shold win: DeBose

Who was snubbed: Caitrona Balfe, Belfast; Ruth Negga, Passing

I’ve ranted about Balfe/Dench already, in the Belfast review. This category is considered by pretty much everyone to be the strongest lock of the night. I won’t even pretend to know any better.

Best Supporting Actor

Ciarán Hinds, Belfast
Troy Kotsur, CODA
Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog
J.K. Simmons, Being the Ricardos
Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

Who will win: Kotsur

Who should win: Smit-McPhee*

Who was snubbed: Daniel Durant, CODA

I put an asterisk next to Smit-McPhee’s name because I think he gave the best performance of the year … but I am rooting for Kotsur here. He was great, and fun, and improvised a fair bit of his dialogue. I think having him win that award, and give his speech in American Sign Language for hundreds of thousands of people to see, will be powerful and important. He is the third actor with a physical disability to be nominated for an Oscar; the previous two were his CODA co-star Marlee Matlin, for Children of a Lesser God, and Harold Russell, for The Best Years of Our Lives.

Best Cinematography

Dune
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
The Tragedy of Macbeth
West Side Story

What will win: Dune

What should win: Dune

What was snubbed: Drive My Car

I could see a case for West Side Story here, but not one to beat Dune, which was just breathtaking in almost every way.

Best International Feature Film

Drive My Car (Japan)
Flee (Denmark)
The Hand of God (Italy)
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (Bhutan)
The Worst Person in the World (Norway)

I still haven’t seen Lunana, but I assume Drive My Car is winning this and have no objection. I’ve seen a few films from the shortlist that didn’t make the final cut, including Hive and A Hero, but wouldn’t argue for either’s inclusion.

Best Original Screenplay

Belfast
Don’t Look Up
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
The Worst Person in the World

What will win: Belfast

What should win: Licorice Pizza

What was snubbed: Parallel Mothers

My prediction is this is where the voters give one to Branagh, now that it seems to be an also-ran in every other category where it’s nominated – although a shutout is on the table. I know there’s some popular sentiment for The Worst Person in the World, but I can’t get past the way it reduces Julie’s story to whether or not she wants kids.

Best Adapted Screenplay

CODA
Drive My Car
Dune
The Lost Daughter
The Power of the Dog

What will win: The Lost Daughter

What should win: Drive My Car

What was snubbed: The Dig

A hunch here that the Academy will honor Maggie Gyllenhaal here after snubbing her for Director and snubbing the film for Best Picture. If it doesn’t win, then this one probably goes to CODA regardless of the Best Picture voting. I never wrote up The Dig, a lovely, small movie starring Carrie Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes, available on Netflix. We liked it quite a bit, but Netflix didn’t do anything to promote it, and the plot – a young English widow hires a local archeologist to excavate the ancient burial mounds on her property – isn’t exactly white-knuckles stuff, although it is based on a true story.

Best Documentary Feature

Ascension
Attica
Flee
Summer of Soul
Writing with Fire

What will win: Summer of Soul

What should win: Summer of Soul

I still haven’t seen Ascension or Writing with Fire, but I loved Summer of Soul and it seems to be a lock to win. Flee made history by getting nominations in this category, Best International Feature Film, and Best Animated Feature Film (which Encanto seems like a dead lock to win), but will almost certainly go 0 for 3. I don’t have a real snub here, but if you have Amazon Prime, My Name Is Pauli Murray is a very straightforward documentary about an extremely important civil rights lawyer who also struggled with her gender identity and sexual orientation in a time when the topics were completely taboo.

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→ March 22, 2022
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Don’t Look Up.

If you enjoyed Vice for its sledgehammer-to-the-forehead approach to its subject matter, Don’t Look Up, the latest film from director Adam McKay and his co-writer David Sirota, might be right up your alley. It is as unsubtle and unfunny as any soi-disant satire can get, lacking both the humor and the power of the genre in its rush just to tell you how smart it is, and in the process, it wastes an epic cast that includes five Academy Award winners.

The premise of Don’t Look Up isn’t actually that bad: Two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover that a comet 6 kilometers wide is on course to make a direct impact with earth, just off the coast of Chile, an extinction-level event that will wipe out all of humanity. They go to the feds, and end up talking to the President (Meryl Streep), who doesn’t take them seriously until she needs to distract everyone from a scandal. But when the CEO of an Apple-like tech company called BASH (Mark Rylance) who is also a major donor to the President points out that the comet holds over $100 trillion in rare metals critical to the technology industry, the plan to destroy the comet shifts to a plan to try to break it apart and mine it, much to the chagrin of the science community that believes destroying the comet is the planet’s only hope. (Cate Blanchett is the fifth Oscar winner in the movie, playing a vapid morning show host as a sort of Megyn Kelly clone.)

There is one funny joke in all of Don’t Look Up, and it has to do with snacks. Nothing in the actual plot, which is so thinly veiled a metaphor for climate change that it might as well be covered with Saran wrap, is handled in a humorous way. This isn’t actual satire. You don’t just move the chairs around and claim you refurnished the house. The writers here just changed a few details and then made everyone a genius or a moron, with nothing in between. The closest thing this film has to a real character is DiCaprio’s Dr. Mindy, who gets to evolve after his appearance on Blanchett’s morning show results in him becoming a heartthrob, both to viewers and to Blanchett’s character, with whom he cheats on his wife (Melanie Lynskey), another thinly-veiled commentary, this one on the corrupting power of fame and the conflict between telling people the truth and telling them what they want to hear. Even that seems to give this script more credit than it deserves, and it takes well over two hours to get to its eventual, obvious ending.

What’s most appalling is how McKay manages to get such awful work from otherwise capable, acclaimed actors. Rylance appears to have botoxed his upper cheeks into oblivion and affects a fey, high-pitched voice, while his character also has the social skills of a sea cucumber. Jonah Hill, playing Donald Trump Jr. by another name (the President’s son and also her chief of staff), is in full douchebro mode, and serves no purpose whatsoever except as a way to mock his real-life counterpart as an insipid misogynist. Blanchett’s co-host, played by Tyler Perry, is every bland TV personality who laughs too much and makes tasteless jokes about ex-wives.

And perhaps worst of all is Meryl Streep, who mailed this one in and had it returned for insufficient postage. She’s supposed to be as corrupt as Trump, but manages to make the character less interesting, somehow. She’s venal in the most boring way, and while, yes, there’s a comeuppance coming that you will see an hour away, it’s not even that satisfying because the character is such a cipher, and Streep, who has certainly had fun playing offbeat or even unlikeable characters before, seems disinterested.

As for the film’s so-called point, whether it’s just about climate change or a broader argument about humans’ inherent tendency to avoid short-term pain even for long-term gain, this isn’t going to convince anyone of anything. It’s preaching to – or just yelling at – the choir, while talking down to anyone else who might be willing to hear an argument on the matter. The writers would rather tell you how smart they are and take your compliments than do anything that might make a difference. When the protagonist also turns into a rhinoceros, you’ve taken the farce too far.

—

This is easily the worst film nominated for Best Picture this year, of which I have now seen all ten. My personal top ten for 2021, which could still change a little depending on some movies I haven’t seen and a few that aren’t available yet, looks like this:

1. Drive My Car
2. Dune
3. The Lost Daughter
4. Licorice Pizza
5. Parallel Mothers
6. Summer of Soul
7. The Power of the Dog
8. Passing
9. Red Rocket
10. C’mon C’mon

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→ March 21, 2022
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CODA.

CODA has become the top underdog to win Best Picture after taking the top honors at the Screen Actors Guild and Producers Guild of America awards in the last few weeks, buoyed by Jane Campion tone-deaf comments at the Critics Choice Awards when The Power of the Dog won the top prize there. It’s definitely the feel-good movie of the year, and well-executed for its type, but it’s formulaic and predictable enough that it doesn’t belong in the Best Picture conversation despite its positives. (It’s available to stream free on Apple TV+.)

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is the CODA of the title – a Child of Deaf Adults, born hearing to deaf parents (Troy Kotsur, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and Marlee Matlin) and with a deaf older brother (Daniel Durant). The family lives in Gloucester, on the north shore of Massachusetts, and runs a fishing boat, for which they depend on Ruby as the one hearing member of the family, thus keeping them in compliance with Coast Guard rules. Ruby loves to sing, and if you can’t see where this going, you might not have seen a movie before. Of course, the music teacher at Ruby’s school (Eugenio Derbez) hears Ruby and suggests she apply to Berklee, offering to help her prepare for her audition, forcing her to choose between her family and a career.

As a coming-of-age story, CODA checks the right boxes, not least of which is the humor essential to this sort of narrative. Ruby’s parents are impossible, probably too much so to be credible, but because the film largely works from her point of view, it works because just about every teenager thinks their parents are impossible. Kotsur is fantastic, including a few scenes where he improvised some dialogue, not just in his scenes with Ruby but also in the subplot about the decline of commercial fishing in general and the way that the single buyer for fish at their port seems to take advantage of the family when Ruby isn’t there. (More on that in a moment.) Ruby is also bullied at school, in part because when she first started attending she spoke ‘funny,’ but also because her family fishes for a living, even though they are hardly the only family in town to do so – and, by the way, where exactly are the Gloucester accents? – which gets in the way of her crush on Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo of Sing Street), who the music teacher assigns to do a duet with Ruby, because of course he does.

CODA follows a pretty clear formula from start to finish, and you’ll see everything coming a mile away, right down to the big finish. It at least improves on the French original by casting deaf actors in the roles of the deaf characters, but this is still a paint-by-numbers script, and it centers the experiences of Ruby over those of her family members, as if to say that the burden of being a hearing person in a deaf family is greater or more important than the burden of being a deaf person in a hearing world. That includes some nonsensical scenes at a doctor’s office and in a court where Ruby translates for her father, even though the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the provision of an interpreter in both settings. This isn’t just a plot contrivance – it violates a federal law, and a half an hour or so north of Boston, this just isn’t going to happen. The doctor’s office scene is mined for Ruby’s embarrassment, but the courtroom scene is there just to underline how helpless her family will be without her there, and that’s both wrong and embarrassing for the screenwriters – who are hearing, by the way, and appear to miss the boat (pun intended) several times on deaf experience and culture. (Here’s a take from a deaf writer who found the film frustrating for that reason.) You know she’s going to nail the audition and get the guy and figure something out with her parents, because that’s just how these movies work.

The film does do many things right, starting with representation of deaf people in the first place, although I’d like to know where the family’s deaf friends, who are mentioned but never seen, are hiding for the entire film. This world is built by people without disabilities for people without disabilities, and if you have a disability of some sort, whether it’s mobility, sight, hearing, or something else, you will find the world has built extra obstacles for you because the easiest and cheapest path was to pretend that you don’t exist. Ruby’s family ends up playing an important role among the fishing community as they push back against an exploitative middleman and what they perceive as overregulation (for which they must pay directly), and that wouldn’t happen if Ruby weren’t there to interpret in both directions at one critical public meeting. It’s a sign of what’s lost to everyone when we marginalize any set of people, and shows the isolation of her family while also providing several humorous moments.

Kotsur’s performance rivals that of Kodi Smit-McPhee’s for the best by an actor in a supporting role, and I’d be good with either winning the Oscar in that category on Sunday. Jones’s work might be flying under the radar too much, but she’s also excellent, with great comedic timing and a lovely singing voice that at least makes it plausible that her teacher would react to her singing the way he does. Derbez’s character is ridiculous, but he plays the hell out of it, and I challenge you not to like him as he leans into the artiste stereotype, flipping his hair and rolling the r in his name, Bernardo, for about ten seconds each time he says it. By the time she gets to the audition at Berklee, which you know the whole time she’s going to end up attending, the script just piles one absurd element on top of another to get to the desired outcome. It’s charming, but you’re just going to have to accept the unreality of it, and that’s a shame given the movie’s clear intent to put deaf people and deaf culture in the center of the story. It’s an entertaining film, but not a great one, better honored for its performances than for the script or the film as a whole.

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→ March 18, 2022
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Drive My Car.

Drive My Car has become the critical favorite of awards season, winning the best film prize from the LA Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Society of Film Critics, a trifecta that has happened six times previously, with the last four films to do so going on to win Best Picture. It spurred one of the best pieces I’ve read on movies in this, a  cycle, Justin Chang’s piece from late January arguing for the Oscars to nominate the film – his favorite of 2021 – for Best Picture. He was right, and the film did get the Best Picture nod it deserved, as well as nominations for Best Director and Best International Film. After Jane Campion’s tone-deaf, ill-timed comments at the Critics Choice Awards, which came just four days before voting opened, it might even have a chance to win the big prize.

Based on a brief short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car is a three-hour meditation on grief and recovering from loss, beautifully shot and acted, with a script that pulls great emotion from small moments and quiet interactions among its characters. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a stage director and actor whose wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) narrates stories she creates for him during and after they have sex. Shortly after Yusuke discovers that she’s cheating on him, he returns home to find her dead on the floor of a cerebral hemorrhage. Two years later, he’s invited to stage his version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a multilingual production, in Hiroshima, where his contract requires him to stay an hour away and use a driver, Misaki (T?ko Miura), to get him back and forth. These drives, and the conversations that take place in the car, explore the two characters’ traumas and share difficulty coping with their grief and guilt over what they might have done differently to prevent the tragedies in their pasts.

Drive My Car immerses you in its world, the one facet it shares with Murakami’s writing – it’s akin to living inside of someone else’s dream for three hours, thanks to the gorgeous shots of Hiroshima and the unhurried plot, which reveals its secrets naturally, as the relationship between Yusuke and Misaki develops and the two begin to confide in each other. Yusuke and Oto lost a child earlier in their marriage, which we learn in oblique fashion near the start of the film but without any explanation, which only adds to Yusuke’s guilt and grief over losing his wife – especially since he never had a chance to confront her about her infidelity. He ends up hiring the actor with whom she cheated to play the title character in Uncle Vanya, with what seems like ill intent, but after an intense conversation between the two in the back of the car where the actor tells Yusuke the end of a story that Oto had never finished, his view softens and he realizes there were things about his wife he never knew.

There are some strange plot contrivances that never quite pay off. Yusuke develops glaucoma in one eye, which he discovers after the condition causes him to get into a car accident, which you’d think would be reason enough for him to end up with a driver. Instead, the glaucoma never comes up again in the film, and the screenwriters concoct this bizarre contract with the theater to force him to use a driver – which he’s reluctant to do because of the importance of his routine while driving, right down to the car itself, which we learn is closely associated in his mind with his wife. Getting Yusuke a driver is central to the unfolding of the story, but the glaucoma could have been the reason for it – or it didn’t need to be in the film at all.

I have never seen or heard any performance of Uncle Vanya, so I read the Wikipedia summary of the play to try to understand what was happening on the stage within the film, as well as its connection to the overall plot. (There’s a brief scene near the start of the film where Yusuke appears in a production of Waiting for Godot, a story about two people waiting for a third, unseen person who never comes, talking endlessly about it, which seems like a more obvious parallel to the story of Yusuke and Misaki.) The actors in the play speak different languages and often can’t understand each other without Yusuke or his local assistant translating, with actors who speak Mandarin, English, Korean, and Korean Sign Language in the production, but despite diffident direction from Yusuke, several of the actors experience breakthroughs while working with the material, forming bonds with each other and connecting more with the characters, an allegory for Yusuke’s own resistance to exploring his own grief or just his own emotions. Two of the main characters in Chekhov’s play are stuck, pining for the same woman, the wife of Vanya’s brother-in-law, whose first wife (Vanya’s sister) has died. Vanya has dedicated most of his life to managing his brother-in-law’s estate, but realizes that he’s wasted his time on a man of limited ability and even less sense of the value of other people, all while waiting for a woman who is unavailable to him.

Much commentary about Drive My Car has focused on how well it translates the dreamlike nature of Murakami’s writing to the screen. The comments get it half right. This film does replicate the all-consuming aspect of Murakami’s work, but that’s found in his novels, not in his short stories; the stores in Men Without Women, the collection where “Drive My Car” appears, are scant, like shadows of ideas, and lack the texture or altered realities of most of his novels. The comments also constitute Burning erasure, as that film, the best of 2018, followed the same formula, extrapolating a wispy Murakami short story into a film well over two hours long that developed its characters (its men, at least) and created layers of back story and scene. Drive My Car does so as well, with strong performances by both of its leads, and offers a thematic and visual complexity absent from the story on which it is loosely based. It’s the best movie I’ve seen from 2021 so far, with just two Best Picture nominees (CODA and Don’t Look Up) and at least two significant international films (Playground and Petite Maman), and while the odds are still against it winning Best Picture or Best Director, it absolutely deserves both honors.

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→ March 14, 2022
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West Side Story.

StevenSpielberg had wanted to film a new version of the 1957 musical West Side Story, which was first adapted in 1961 in a film that won Best Picture, for several years before filming began in July of 2019. This new version, with a script by Tony Kushner that hews more closely to the original stage play at several points, was delayed by a year due to the pandemic, but came out in time to be eligible for this year’s Oscars, earning seven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Ariana DuBose. It’s better than the 1961 film in some ways, worse in others, making it a perfectly fine film that nobody actually needed.

The framework of the story is the same as that of the first film: Two gangs of street toughs are engaged in a turf war on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the largely Puerto Rican Sharks and the white Jets, led by Bernardo (David Alvarez) and Riff (Mike Faist), respectively. Tony used to be in the Jets before he went to jail, and is trying to go straight now that he’s home, but at a community dance where both gangs arrive with their girls, he meets Bernardo’s sister, Maria (Rachel Zegler), and the two fall immediately in love. Tony works at Doc’s, which is managed by Doc’s Puerto Rican widow (Rita Moreno), who advises him against pursuing Maria while helping him learn some Spanish phrases. Bernardo isn’t happy to see his sister with a white guy, and wants her to marry his friend Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera), while Bernardo himself is with Maria’s friend Anita (DuBose). The two gangs decide to hold a “rumble,” a fight that ends up leaving two dead and has disastrous consequences for the star-crossed lovers.

I’ll save the biggest problem for last, but one major flaw in this version of West Side Story is that Ansel Elgort sucks. He wasn’t good in Baby Driver, where he barely had to do anything, but he’s awful here in every way – he’s stiff, uncharismatic, and dull, and his singing is the worst of any major character. Casting him was a poor choice, underscored by how much better Faist is as Riff – he’s a rascal, but has all the charm that Elgort lacks, and he owns every scene the two have together. Zegler is far better as a singer and actor than Elgort is, and unlike most of the cast, looks close to the age of her character. In general, the women in the film outshine the men, and the Jets’ big number, “Officer Krupke,” is one of the songs that’s clearly inferior to that of the original film.

There are some small differences from the 1961 film that do improve the end result, not least of which is employing Latinx actors as the Sharks and their girlfriends. The original had Natalie Wood, the daughter of Russian immigrants, in the lead role as Maria, and George Chakiris, the son of Greek immigrants, as her brother Bernardo. Both used comically bad accents that sounded more like mockery than imitation. Zegler and Elgort do their own singing, which neither of their counterparts did in the 1961 film. The character of Anybodys, a tomboyish Jets wannabe played by Susan Oakes in the original, is now much more fleshed out here, depicted as a trans man and played by iris menas, a nonbinary and trans actor. It’s a win for representation, but also adds substantially to the story, with Anybodys the character who gains the most in depth and screen time between the original and the remake. The audio quality is improved, of course, although sometimes that works against the singers, such as the men in “America,” whose vocals sound tinny, especially in comparison to the women on that song.

West Side Story can’t escape its fundamental, ontological problem: There is no good reason for this film to exist. The story is the same. The songs are all the same. The choreography is the same – perhaps captured more effectively by better camerawork and modern technology, but it’s still the same old song and dance. Elgort is a dud, a poor actor and mediocre singer whose hold on Maria is hard to believe. It’s a nostalgia play for Spielberg, and I’m sure 20th Century/Disney thought it would be a huge moneymaker, although that was foiled by the pandemic. For this film to get seven Oscar nominations while the superior In the Heights got zero – not even one for a song! – is a travesty.

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→ March 9, 2022
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Belfast.

Belfast nabbed seven Oscar nominations this year, including nods for Best Picture, Best Director, and both Supporting acting categories, which seems like a decided lack of ambition for the voters. It is a perfectly fine film, pleasant and funny with enough of a serious underpinning to make it more than just a slice-of-life story, but there just isn’t that much to it, and if anything, the Academy whiffed on the one category where it deserved a nomination – Best Actress.

Belfast follows nine-year-old Buddy, a Protestant boy in 1969 in the titular city, the capital of Northern Ireland and the main site of the sectarian violence known as the Troubles that had begun just a few years previously. Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan) works in England, only returning home every few weeks, so Buddy spends most of his time at home with his mother (Caitrona Balfe) and grandparents (Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench, both of whom got Oscar nominations). He goes to school, where he has a crush on the smartest girl in the class, Catherine (Olive Tennant – yes, David’s daughter), and gets into trouble with his degenerate cousin, Moira, whose only role in the story is to shoplift. Buddy’s father also has to deal with the Protestant thug Billy (Colin Morgan), who insists that he must come to fight on the Protestant side or be considered a traitor and a target. When the August 1969 riots come to their quiet street, the situation becomes untenable, and forces the family to decide whether to stay in the neighborhood where they’ve always lived or take a job offer in England.

Branagh can be a heavy-handed director, but he works with a lighter touch here that reminded me of his work on Much Ado About Nothing, where he hammed it up as Benedick but largely let his actors (and the outstanding dialogue) do the work. Other than the decision to make this film black and white, a showy choice given the year in which the film’s events take place, Branagh stays out of the way, and the script has just one scene that doesn’t work (the club, although it was surprising to hear Dornan can sing), while the rest of the film provides the contrast between the mundanity of quotidian life and the stress of knowing that the place you were made is now less safe for you and your kids. It’s a slight film, but strong for its size, and gets in and out in about 90 minutes, just right for this sort of story. I just keep coming back to the film’s total lack of ambition – I’d say it’s like a novella, rather than a novel, but it’s not a matter of its running time (or page count). Belfast isn’t trying to do anything. It has very modest goals and it executes them well.

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→ February 23, 2022
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Nightmare Alley.

Nightmare Alley took home a Best Picture nomination despite tepid reviews for a movie that ended up in that echelon, with unfavorable comparisons to the 1947 black-and-white version that director Guillermo del Toro chose to update. For fans of noir cinema, however, this is a fantastic melding of that genre’s conventions with del Toro’s visual style and meticulous placement, one that I found incredibly entertaining up until the rather predictable, on-the-nose ending.

Adapted from a 1946 novel of the same name, Nightmare Alley follows the path of a con man named Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), who we see burning down a house with a body in it, without any explanation given, and then who walks off a bus and into a carnival, where he ends up with a job. On his first night there, he sees the carnival geek, whose role is to bite the heads off live chickens and drink their blood as entertainment for the carnival’s patrons. Stanton learns the art of cold-reading from other carnival workers, and falls for one of the other carnies, Molly (Rooney Mara). The two take off together and form a mentalist act for a dinner theatre show in Buffalo, where they encounter Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett) and her wealthy client, the latter of whom believes Stanton can communicate with his dead son. Stanton hatches a plan to con that client and other wealthy men in the city by using information from Dr. Ritter, offering to split the money with her, but it goes awry when another client, Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), wants more than Stanton can provide.

The film looks incredible, as you’d expect from del Toro, although this time around he has no supernatural elements to work with – the monsters are inside the characters themselves, so to speak. The city of Buffalo has never looked so vibrant and glamorous, and even the carnival has a grim beauty under the lights, when the show is on. The film is set in 1939, with a depression on and war beckoning, but you’d never know it except when the characters mention the war in passing, with opulence everywhere once we get to the big city – especially Dr. Ritter’s office, with walls that appear gold-plated and a recording apparatus that looks like it came from the science fiction stories of that era.

Del Toro also coaxes some great performances from a loaded cast, not least of which are those of Cooper and Blanchett. Cooper earned more Oscar buzz for the two minutes he’s on screen in Licorice Pizza, but there’s far more to this character and Cooper plays it so effortlessly that perhaps we’re starting to take him for granted. Blanchett is marvelously inscrutable as the good doctor, with unclear motives and fungible ethics; her actual interest in Stanton is obscured until their final scene together. David Strathairn and Toni Collette do their usual, understated thing as the pair who pretend to be psychics at the carnival, while Willem Dafoe leans into his creepier side as the carnival’s operator, although he unnerves less through malice than through his lack of empathy for anyone else. There’s a great cameo from Mary Steenburgen in a one-note role as well. Mara, unfortunately, is as flat and toneless as ever, making it hard to see what Carlisle sees in her, and almost as hard to sympathize with her when he leaves her in the lurch.

This film looked like it was going to end in one of two ways, and del Toro chose the one that’s telegraphed early on in the film, which is true to the novel’s ending but feels so overdone – foreshadowing is great, but the amount of time this script spends telling you where it’s going to end up gives the ending the aftertaste of an artificial sweetener. It contrasts with the film’s refusal to be explicit with background details, including Carlisle’s and Ritter’s pasts, and what drives each of them to do what they do. There’s a recurring symbol of the corpse of a baby that Dafoe’s character keeps in his trailer, but it’s never fleshed out in any way, with a lot of speculation (this one is pretty good, with a small spoiler involved) but nothing concrete, and it felt more like del Toro being del Toro, rather than something that added to the finished product.

I enjoyed Nightmare Alley for its noir vibe and some of the very strong performances, but I can’t believe this is one of the top ten movies of the year – it’s more style than substance and it failed to stick the landing. It’s not as good as Parallel Mothers or The Lost Daughter, neither of which took a Best Picture nomination, just to pick two that I’ve already seen. It took a Best Cinematography nomination as well, but of the four nominees I’ve seen, I’d rank it fourth for that category. It’s also nominated for Best Costume Design and Best Production Design, however, and seems worthy of both honors.

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→ February 17, 2022
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Dune.

Dune could have gone wrong so many ways, but the biggest risk in converting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic to the big screen was always the plot. The novel’s setting is iconic, from the desert planet to the sandworms, yet the complexity of the story around the Christ-like Paul Atreides stood out as the greater challenge, the one aspect of the book that couldn’t be addressed with CG. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune does a remarkable job of distilling the first half of the book into a single, accessible story that simplifies the plot without overdoing it, while also providing the look and feel that have helped make the novel an enduring classic of its genre.

(Disclaimers: I love the original Dune novel, so much that I read all five of Herbert’s increasingly terrible sequels, but have still never seen the David Lynch film adaptation from 1984.)

Dune follows the familiar template of the ‘chosen one,’ a story arc that stretches back to the Bible and continues now in YA fiction, most notably the Harry Potter series. The messiah here is Paul Atreides, the teenaged son of the Duke Leto Atreides, who rules the planet Caladan, and his concubine Lady Jessica, a member of the cultish spiritual order the Bene Gesserit. Paul exhibits unusual mental abilities from an early age that indicate that he may be the savior foretold by the Bene Gesserit’s prophecy. The story opens when the Emperor orders the Duke to take stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the drug known as spice or mélange, which also happens to be an essential element in interstellar travel. The present rules of Arrakis, House Harkonnen, are not especially keen to lose their powers, leading to armed conflict that puts Paul on the run and in charge of his own destiny.

Villeneuve’s decision with his co-screenwriters to split the book into two films, hoping the first would fare well enough that the studio would greenlight the second, paid off twice – it did do well enough that we will get a sequel, and I would argue that it only did that well because it didn’t try to cram a densely plotted 500-page novel into a 150 minute movie. There’s so much room to breathe here that Timothée Chalamet gets far more screen time to give a little depth to Paul’s character, while Rebecca Ferguson, as Lady Jessica, may be an even bigger beneficiary, as some of that character’s most important scenes would almost certainly have been cut in a single-film adaptation. Paul’s character comes alive more in the second half of the book, once he’s on the run with the Fremen people, which leaves a modest void in a first-half movie for another central character to fill, and Ferguson does so with the film’s best performance.

The cast of Dune is incredible on paper, although the result is more “I can’t believe they got Charlotte Rampling!” than “I can’t believe how great Charlotte Rampling is!” Oscar Isaac is here. So is Javier Bardem. Stephen McKinley Henderson, who you know by sight even if you don’t know him by name. And there is some value in having these very famous people, any of whom can command a scene by themselves, in smaller roles. They don’t get quite enough to do – not even as much as Jason Momoa does in a memorable turn as Duncan Idaho.

The film does look amazing, though. Villeneuve is no amateur at worldbuilding on the screen, and this is the Arrakis of the page, whether in wide shots or close-ups, feeling vast and foreboding and terrifyingly dry. You’ll find yourself craving water watching this film. Many of the special effects are impressive, especially those showing the various flying vehicles on the surface of the planet, but there’s just as much wonder in the sword fights or the scenes showing troops massed in formation when the Atreides arrive on Arrakis to take control.

Dune ended up with ten Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but not Best Director, which surprised me given how much Villeneuve had to put together here even taking the script (which he co-wrote) as a given. I’m not surprised at the lack of acting nominations, given how many people and named characters in the film, and how little depth most of them get even in a film that’s a solid two and a half hours. Ferguson might have had an argument for a supporting nod, but that’s probably it. My guess is Dune wins a bunch of technical awards – ones it may very well deserve – without taking Best Picture or Adapted Screenplay. Of the four BP nominees I’ve seen so far, though, I think it’s my favorite.

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→ December 31, 2021
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Licorice Pizza.

Licorice Pizza, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson, feels like the work of an entirely different writer than PTA’s last film, Phantom Thread. Where that movie was tense, quiet, often creepy, Licorice Pizza never stops moving – in one sense, almost literally, as the two main characters spend a substantial portion of the film running, often in less-than-sensible shoes. It’s a beautiful, quirky, and funny coming-of-age story. I just wish so much of its greatness wasn’t undone by a pointless racist gag that PTA could have excised without losing anything.

Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a precocious almost-16-year-old actor and would-be entrepreneur who spots Alana Kane (Alana Haim) when the photography company she works for comes to his school for picture day. He tries to flirt with her, despite the ten-year age gap, and somehow coaxes her into meeting him for a not-date date at the absurdly named but extremely ’70s restaurant Tail o’ the Cock, where he’s on a first-name basis with the staff and is treated like a VIP. Gary tries to get Alana some movie and TV work, while she tags along with his venture to sell waterbeds, and the two continue to move along as if they don’t actually have feelings for each other, even though we know by the time the movie ends, they have to get together somehow.

Hoffman and Haim carry this movie, Hoffman in particular, with his effortless charm and a self-aplomb way beyond his years. The age gap between them – which is larger than the one that had certain folks upset in Call Me By Your Name, although that criticism was probably about something other than their ages – is less evident on the screen, because Gary is developmentally advanced for his age, while Alana is still quite immature. The latter point especially shows up in scenes at Alana’s home, where she still lives with her parents and two older sisters, all played by Alana’s actual family (quite well, in fact – her father is a riot), and she’s very clearly the baby of the bunch, twenty-five but aimless. She hangs around with Gary and his friends, even though she knows it’s “weird,” in part because they give her a way to stave off adulthood. Because Hoffman plays Gary as this worldly teenager who understands more of adult ways than just about any teenager I know, which is built into the character’s story (and that of the real-life actor, Gary Goetzman, on whom PTA based Valentine), the love story between the two comes off as more innocent than it might otherwise.

The unsung hero of Licorice Pizza might be the costume department. Films set in the 1970s often shove that decade’s regrettable fashion choices in the viewer’s face, but Licorice Pizza instead leans into the better side of ’70s fashion. Haim is a fashion plate, wearing some gorgeous prints across a series of short dresses that wouldn’t be out of place today aside from the oversized collars. Valentine doesn’t have quite as much fun, but the white suit and fuchsia shirt he dons near the end of the film couldn’t come from any other decade.

PTA also populates the film with many real-life characters from Hollywood of the time, including Sean Penn as the legendary actor William Holden (thinly disguised as “Jack Holden”), and Bradley Cooper in an absolutely ridiculous (and very fun) turn as producer Jon Peters, with whom Cooper worked on the remake of A Star is Born. Benny Safdie appears as city councilman Joel Wachs, on whose campaign Alana works near the end of the film. If you listen carefully, you’ll catch the voice of John C. Reilly in an uncredited role as another real person. Most of this works to add color to the film, accentuating its sense of time and place, although the Holden segment goes on longer than it needs to.

That racist gag, though. John Michael Higgins plays a real person, Jerome Frick, who owned a Japanese restaurant in the LA area called Mikado. In the film, he appears once with his Japanese wife, and speaks to her in slow, exaggerated English with a mock-Asian accent. He appears again, later, with a different Japanese wife, and pulls the same shit. There is a punchline there, at Frick’s expense (turns out he’s just an ignorant asshole), but I’m not sure any punchline could justify that lead-up. It appears that Jerome Frick’s second wife, Hiroko, was a fluent English speaker, yet PTA only has the two women speak Japanese in the film. Perhaps this was some complicated way to mock the real-life Frick – and, for what it’s worth, the punchline itself is funny – but few if any viewers will be in on the joke, and the whole thread adds precisely nothing to the film. It’s a shame that either nobody called PTA out on it, or, more likely, that he just ignored them. The Hollywood Reporter just published a longer piece on the controversy this morning, which links to a November interview with PTA where he tries to defend it as true to the time period.

If that bit were cut from the movie, Licorice Pizza would be just about perfect; it’s still my favorite of the movies I’ve seen so far, even with the bitter taste of that failed gag. The chemistry between the leads is so strong – both should be in the running for Oscar nominations, and both scored Golden Globe nods already – that almost everything around the two of them melts away. Maybe there will be a director’s cut that spares us those objectionable scenes, because the rest of this movie is wonderful.

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→ December 30, 2021
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The Power of the Dog.

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is the closest thing we have this year to a Best Picture front-runner, although its status as favorite rests on the slimmest of margins according to Gold Derby. It appeared first on more critics’ year-end lists than any other film, and received more second-place votes than any other film received first-place votes except the acclaimed Japanese-language Drive My Car. Based on a 1968 novel of the same name, it follows a tense family drama on a ranch in Montana in 1925, with long, expansive shots of the landscape alternating with close-ups of characters, an auteur’s film that builds on several great performances and the slow burn of its plot.

Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is one of the ranchers, a tough guy who refuses to use the bathtub inside the house he shares with his daintier brother George (Jesse Plemons), whom Phil thinks is soft and often derides as “fatso.” George falls for the widow who runs the local inn, Rose (Kirsten Dunst). Rose has a son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who speaks with a lisp, makes paper flowers, and generally acts and looks un-masculine, earning him the ire of Phil, who mocks and bullies the boy, a situation that only worsens when George marries Rose, moving her into the ranch while Peter attends boarding school. Phil bullies and torments Rose as well, driving her to drink, so when Peter returns from school, the situation threatens to boil over.

Campion directs the hell out of this movie. It cuts both ways; there are moments in this film when you just know it’s being directed, especially some of the lingering shots on characters’ faces (or sometimes hands) that last a few frames too long. It works for setting scenes, in the incredible landscape shots, or for framing segments like Phil’s awkward conversation with his parents and the state’s governor, shot from behind Phil with the other characters all facing the camera beyond him. There’s a solo scene with Phil on the side of the river that is so overwrought that it took me completely out of the movie. It may be the kind of direction that wins awards, but I prefer a subtler touch.

The acting shines across the board, starting particularly with Dunst, who does the most with a limited but critical role as a suicide widow who becomes the victim of Phil’s bullying, losing herself in drink and seeing her relationship with her son deteriorate in the process. Cumberbatch delivers, as he always does, although I found his American accent a little forced – but given some of the character details, that might be deliberate. Smit-McPhee may have the most to do, even though it’s a supporting role, as his character is the only one that truly evolves over the extent of the story, and the one we understand the least at the beginning, as Peter is far more than a weak, effeminate mama’s boy.

Much commentary on The Power of the Dog has revolved around the ambiguous ending – which isn’t ambiguous at all. You might argue that what comes next is uncertain, as is true in just about every movie, and the argument that what came before the film starts is now uncertain is even stronger, but there’s no doubt in my mind what happened at the end of the story. It simply casts what preceded it in a different light, and that is one of this film’s strongest attributes. You can see this ending coming if you watch carefully, but once it occurs, it should change your interpretation of the first ¾ of the film – and even some of what we were told about its prehistory. (If you want to discuss that part, throw it in the comments – I just don’t want to spoil anything here.)

I haven’t seen enough potential nominees yet to say what nominations the film and its people deserve, but it definitely feels like a movie that voters will support. It’s a movie that puts its movie-ness out in front of you, especially in the direction, for better and for worse. I think this is a very good movie, a B+ if I assigned letter grades (as my friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch do on their superb podcast), but could have been an A- or better with a different director, someone whose fingerprints were less evident in the finished product. In hindsight, it’s the sort of film I should have loved – cowboy noir, in a sense – but that I respected and liked instead.

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