→ April 8, 2025
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The Brutalist.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vast, sweeping character study rich with detail and allegory, powered by a tremendous (and Oscar-winning) performance by Adrien Brody as the title character, memorable and meticulous scenery, and one of the strongest scores of the year. It’s also far too often a slog, running three and a half hours, with too much inconsistency in the pacing and the level of specificity from scene to scene. (You can rent it now on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Brody plays László Tóth, a Bauhaus-trained architect in Hungary before World War II who is sent to the concentration camp in Buchenwald by the Nazis, while his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are sent to Dachau. Tóth survives the camp and immigrates the United States, where he works in his cousin Attila’s furniture store, although Attila’s Catholic wife clearly doesn’t approve. Attila lands a major renovation project for Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) as a surprise for his father, the wealthy Carnegie-esque Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), putting Tóth in charge. Tóth’s designs transform the library space, but Van Buren is enraged that his son made these plans without him, firing the contractors and refusing to pay. Attila kicks László out, which leads to him working as a manual laborer and living in a charity workhouse, while his previous use of morphine has devolved into a heroin addiction. Tóth’s design for the library ends up earning so much praise that Van Buren tracks him down and hires him for a major new project … and that’s all before the intermission, before Erszébet and Zsófia make it to the United States, before the stresses of the project and the exacting (and conflicting) standards of the two men begin to clash.

The Brutalist is a biopic of a fictional character, much like 2022’s Tár, that feels so specific that it’s easy to forget that Lázsló Tóth never existed. Brody is as good as ever – and I’d argue he’s always good, even in small roles like in Grand Budapest Hotel or Midnight in Paris – as the complex, tortured genius, who has some of the expected art-over-commerce philosophy, but also carries the weight of the trauma of his time in Buchenwald, his long separation from his wife, and his flight to a culture that is deeply foreign to him and that faces him with both its xenophobia and its antisemitism. Even in some of the film’s least believable scenes, his portrayal never wavers in the least, and he carries huge portions of the overlong script by himself.

The padding in The Brutalist is all around the edges, rather than entire scenes that needed to go (although the first scene of the Tóths in bed after their reunion probably could have been left on the cutting room floor). There’s a brief shot of László and some workers carrying a model of the community center he’s building for Van Buren up a flight of stairs into the mansion, probably lasting ten or fifteen seconds; the scene adds nothing, and there are tiny moments like that throughout the film that add up to make the film feel too long. Corbet, who directed and co-wrote the film, has a pace-of-play problem. It’s like he hired James Murphy as his editor.

Jones is somewhat lost here in a bad haircut and overdone accent, although the real problem is that her character barely exists outside of László’s orbit until her very last scene, when she acquires a force and gravity we haven’t seen before, underscored by the character’s infirmity and Jones’s own petite stature. (She’s nearly a foot shorter than Brody.) The movie isn’t about her, of course, but her absence is a huge shadow cast over the first half of the film, with László grieving the possibility of her death and then finding out she’s alive but can’t emigrate legally to join him, making the incomplete development of her character in the second half more obvious.

That’s generally a problem with the plot as a whole: the first half is itself a whole movie, and the second half isn’t. It’s the shell of a movie, but tries to pack in too much while giving it a similar level of detail, and that makes for irregular pacing and some portions that were just outright boring. There are also two sexual assault scenes, one entirely implied, one on-screen but shot from a distance, and neither is handled well – the first one is just dropped entirely, and the second has absolutely nothing to foreshadow it, making it seem like either a clumsy attempt at metaphor or just a very cheap plot contrivance to set up the denouement. After thinking about it what broader points Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold might have been trying to make, I’m leaning towards the metaphor argument: A huge theme in The Brutalist is how inhospitable Tóth finds the United States, a country that, then and now, has held great hostility towards people from just about any other country, and has a very long and shameful history of antisemitism that still exists today. The assault is an act of degradation and dehumanization, emphasized by his assailant’s taunts during the attack. I don’t think the scene fits in the least in the film, but that’s the best I’ve been able to make sense of it.

The Brutalist is a proper epic, an ambitious film that tries to do more than almost any film I’ve seen in the last few years; the closest parallel I could think of was 2018’s Never Look Away, another long film covering a huge portion of an artist’s life, although even that one doesn’t try to tackle the giant themes Corbet and Fastvold cover here. Brody’s performance is remarkable – and I didn’t even mention how great some of his suits are, which would be useful information for me if I weren’t half his size – and the film looks like it should have cost as much as a Marvel movie. I’m holding it to a higher standard primarily because it’s over 200 minutes long, and if you’re going to ask that of your audience, you need to earn their attention repeatedly. I’m not entirely sure The Brutalist does that; even so, it’s a film to laud in the hopes it inspires more big swings just like it.

The Brutalist earned ten nominations at this year’s Oscars and won three, for Brody as Best Actor, for Lol Crawley for Best Cinematography, and for Daniel Blumberg for Best Original Score, deserving of all three of them. (I’ll note that 1) Tim Grierson pointed out to me that Blumberg was briefly the lead singer & guitarist for a British band called Yuck, and 2) the strongest competitors for those last two awards weren’t nominated, Nickel Boys for Cinematography and Challengers for Original Score.) Pearce is strong as Van Buren and certainly has enough to do that he was worthy of a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but Jones’s character isn’t that well-written and her performance within it is one of the film’s weak points; I would have much preferred to see her Best Supporting Actress nomination go to Julianne Moore for The Room Next Door. I have The Brutalist in my top ten for the year, with probably just one more worthy film to go (I’m Still Here), but I wouldn’t have picked it over Anora for Best Picture.

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→ March 10, 2025
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The Substance.

The Substance has a great concept for a sci-fi/horror film, and an even better theme. Writer/director Coralie Fargeat depicts Hollywood’s obsession with women’s looks and youth, and the patriarchy’s obsession with the same through an aging actress and fitness-show star who learns about a cheat code to become a 20-year-old version of herself again – but only every other week. It is such a shame that Fargeat had no idea what to do with the story once she got the setup in place; the second half of this movie is a literal and figurative mess, so much so that it’s appalling that this profoundly stupid movie got Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominations. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on Mubi.)

Demi Moore plays the idiotically-named Elizabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-ish figure who was once a huge star and now hosts a daily aerobics show, because I guess this movie is set in 1985 (although it never specifies when it’s set). On the day she turns 50, the show’s producer Harvey (as in Weinstein, because this film is just that subtle) fires her because she’s too old. (Harvey is played by Dennis Quaid, who hams it up as the role demands.) Elizabeth is so upset as she’s driving home that she gets into a car accident and ends up in the hospital, where somehow she doesn’t have any broken bones or internal bleeding or anything of the sort, but a creepy young nurse with ridiculously smooth skin slips her a flash drive that tips her off to a fountain-of-youth scheme called The Substance. She jumps through all kinds of hoops to get a hold of it – the film’s best sequences, really – and eventually tries it out: A second, younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) emerges, literally, and takes over the lead spot on Elizabeth’s show. The hitch is that each week, Elizabeth and this new her, who takes the name Sue, must switch places: one goes into a sort of coma, and the other gets to run around and be alive and such. But when one of the two decides to take a little more than the allotted time, the center cannot hold and things fall apart – including the plot.

The whole setup is pretty brilliant, like something from a modern Philip K. Dick fable. (PKD did write at least once about “anti-gerasone,” a serum that reversed the effects of aging.) The attention to detail in the way the whole scheme works, right down to the packaging of the various parts of the Substance, would seem to presage a really thoughtful, smart conclusion, regardless of whether it works out for Elizabeth. There’s a wide range of points this story could have made about how society as a whole and the media industry in specific treats women as disposable assets with early expiration dates. It applies to women on screen in films and on TV, even news and sports anchors, but also applies to general societal attitudes towards women, even in what is supposed to be a more equitable and enlightened era. (Or was, I suppose.) Men who are Elizabeth’s age see her as old, then fawn over and leer at Sue, including, of course, Harvey.

Instead, we get a thoughtless, gross, and sloppy conclusion to all of that early promise. There’s an inexplicable rivalry between the two halves – which I interpreted as a commentary on women who step on or attack other women rather than standing together against the patriarchy – that leads each of them to try to sabotage the other during their waking weeks. And when one starts stealing time from the other, things go very awry, and it becomes clear that Fargeat never figured out the end of the story. The big concluding scene is a bloody mess, either way you want to interpret that phrase, and is also absolute nonsense: The hyperrealism that fills every part of the film outside of the use of the Substance is gone, and we’re no longer making or even pondering a point. We’re just covered in blood. There’s no further exploration of the entrenched misogyny across our society, or our obsession with youth and beauty. There’s no biting, satirical conclusion that takes down the Harveys of the world – or even the just normal, just innocent men who are probably contributing to the environment in all manner of little ways (and I’m not exempting myself here, either). Fargeat wrote herself into a corner, and instead of writing herself out of it, she just went for gore. I

Moore’s performance in The Substance earned her a Golden Globe Award and a SAG Award, as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress; I don’t think this was a close contest between her and Mikey Madison, who won the Oscar for her performance in Anora. Moore is very good, but there’s some sentiment in the plaudits; she’s not even in the movie as much as a typical lead performer. There’s some daring to the performance, certainly, and she also has to act out some pretty gross scenes that couldn’t have been easy. Qualley didn’t get anywhere near the same attention, but she’s excellent and essential to the movie – she has to play a sort of scheming ingenue, and in any of her scenes at the studio, especially anything with Harvey, she nails the look and demeanor of someone who knows how to manipulate the hell out of the idiot man in front of her. She’s not better than Moore in the film, but she could have gotten some supporting actress support.

This just isn’t a good movie by any definition I would use. It’s very smart and entertaining for about half its length, and then it falls apart. It’s not smart, or interesting, or even entertaining in the second half, beyond the tension because we’re watching Elizabeth-Sue heading for some kind of terrible crash. I’m almost offended that it got a screenplay nomination, because the writing is the whole problem here. The performances are good, the effects and makeup are fine, but the writing is just lazy. A big violent finish is the easiest and least thoughtful way to end a story. This story, and the women it’s ostensibly supporting, deserved better.

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→ March 3, 2025
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A Complete Unknown.

A Complete Unknown looked for all the world like another hagiographic biopic of a musician who deserved better, but, much to my surprise at least, it’s a solid and at least somewhat balanced portrayal of a short window of Bob Dylan’s life. It’s well-paced, gets the right songs in the right places, and brings two outstanding supporting performances. It’s just unfortunate the guy playing Dylan is so tied up in an impersonation that the portrayal says nothing remotely insightful about the main character. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.; I received a review code from the studio’s publicity department.)

The story begins with Dylan’s (Timothée Chalamet) arrival in New York City, upon which he tracks down one of his idols, Woody Guthrie, by that point in hospital as Huntington’s Disease had affected his ability to control his muscles. Sitting by Guthrie’s bedside is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who invites Dylan to come stay with him and his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune, in the film’s most thankless role), where Pete quickly realizes that “Bobby” has some talent. We follow Dylan through little shows in New York City coffee houses and in slightly larger spaces where Seeger gets him on the billing – which is where he meets Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) – and onwards and upwards until Dylan gets to play the Newport Folk Festival. His first two appearances there were huge successes, but when he returned as the headliner in 1965, at the point where he was incorporating more rock sounds and was about to release Highway 61, he found himself in conflict with the festival’s organizers and many fans while also at a major inflection point in his career.

A Complete Unknown dispenses with the music biopic trope of some sort of adversity – usually drugs or alcohol – for the subject to overcome before the triumphant conclusion, likely because Dylan simply hasn’t had anything like that. The dips in his career were far less dramatic; the biggest one is probably his flirtation with Christianity, leading to a trio of albums that are generally considered his weakest, and all of that is more than a decade after the time period of this film. Instead, the script just lets the natural vicissitudes of the life of a rising musician define the narrative arc, such as his on-again, off-again affairs with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, playing a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo) and with Baez, along with his conflicts with music industry suits and the Festival organizers. The slope of the curve is always positive, but there’s enough variation here to keep the story interesting – and the music doesn’t hurt.

That said, there’s a clear choice here to portray Bob Dylan as some sort of pop star, and it doesn’t exactly work with the source material. This is Bob Dylan, not just any songwriter or singer or musician. He won a Nobel Prize. He’s been covered by over 600 artists, running the gamut from Jimi Hendrix to Adele to Ministry to Bryan Ferry to XTC to the Ramons to Guns ‘N Roses to Van Morrison (with Them). He’s one of the most influential songwriters in the history of recorded music, but there’s very little to indicate that in A Complete Unknown. The portrayal here, which has fans recognizing him everywhere and hounding him in the streets, doesn’t even seem to line up with his commercial results in the film’s time period; his first album to reach the Billboard top ten came out in 1965, near the very end of the narrow window the movie covers. Maybe he had screaming groupies following him around, maybe he couldn’t go out in public to see his friend’s band play, but that doesn’t seem to jibe with the facts or Dylan’s persona.

I’m writing this just an hour or two after the Oscars ended, and although I haven’t seen The Brutalist to comment on whether Adrien Brody was deserving, I’m not upset that Chalamet didn’t win. He’s doing an extended impersonation, and in his case, it feels like Timothée Chalamet impersonating Bob Dylan impersonating Timothée Chalamet. The scene in the elevator when he meets Bobby Neuwirth for the first time is cringeworthy, as Chalamet is trying so hard to mimic Dylan’s voice and mannerisms that it comes off as bad parody; Richard Belzer never sank to such depths. Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro are both marvelous in their supporting roles, however, and while neither had much of a chance, especially not Norton, they really help A Complete Unknown keep its momentum and its general atmosphere, Norton – as charming as I’ve ever seen him – in the first half, Barbaro in the second. There’s also a brief cameo by James Austin Johnson as an emcee, which is a brilliant nod to Johnson’s impersonations of Dylan on Saturday Night Live.

The film also completely ignores Toshi Seeger, even though she was a significant figure in several of the events the movie depicts. She helped set up the original Newport Folk Festival; she produced and directed the TV series starring her husband on which Dylan appears in the movie; she later won an Emmy for a documentary about Pete’s career. Yet A Complete Unknown barely gives her any lines, and in most scenes she’s busy frowning or scowling, with a near-constant expression on her face like someone has placed a rotten onion just below her chin. The film has one nonwhite character of any significance at all, and she gets whitewashed out of the story. There are a lot of details here that are made up or combined into single events, typical artistic license in this kind of film, but the erasure of Toshi Seeger is almost unforgivable. (The New York Times’ obituary for her has more details on her life and legacy.)

The screenplay for A Complete Unknown, adapted from Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!,does veer enough from the clichés of the genre to maintain enough narrative greed to power through two-plus hours without a big dramatic twist to overcome my two pretty significant reservations about the film. Chalamet plays well and sings passably, even when imitating such an oft-imitated voice, and the performances around him hold him up in the moments when he descends too far into impersonation. I recommend it with the caveat that it could have been so much more, especially in terms of delving into Dylan’s character, perhaps in the hands of a different screenwriter and lead actor.

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→ November 21, 2024
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Anora.

Writer/director Sean Baker has carved out a niche for himself with stories about sex workers that rely on a small number of well-developed characters and a strong element of time and place. Anora is his biggest film to date, showing that his eye for character and mood translate well even when the stakes of the story are much higher.

Anora is the given name of Ani (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer at the club HQ in New York whose life is turned upside down when Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, shows up in the club, asking for a girl who speaks Russian and throwing around $100 bills. Vanya is 21, seldom sober, and living the high life, often literally, on his father’s ruble. He buys a week of Ani’s time, flies to Las Vegas with her and several friends, and then marries her at a Vegas chapel, complete with a 3-carat ring. The fun and games end when one of Vanya’s handlers tells him that Vanya’s parents are flying to the U.S. for force an annulment and bring the prodigal son back to Russia to join his father’s business, taking the film in a darkly comic direction that only further underscores how little agency Ani has in her own life.

Ani is a flawed heroine, looking out for herself at every turn because it’s clear no one else would; she’s 23 and effectively on her own, living with her older sister, with a mother in Florida who appears to be absent from her life and no mention of any other family. Ani squabbles with her boss and some of the other dancers over mostly petty matters, but when she’s cornered, she’s vicious – often appropriately so – because she has so little to call her own. She lives a precarious existence, both in finances and in safety, as most sex workers do, a fact that is only underscored when Vanya’s handlers, including the amoral Orthodox priest Toros, show up and force her to help them find the fugitive Vanya in a mad and often funny chase across the city. When the resolution comes, Ani takes control in the only way left available to her, although in the end it becomes clear to her (and the audience) just how little she has.

Each of Baker’s prior two films revolved around a strongly written character played extremely well, with a plot good enough to move the pieces along and get the character to the right conclusion. Ani is just as well-written as The Florida Project’s Mooney or Red Rocket’s Mikey, and Madison gives the best performance of the trio, but the story does suffer a little under the strain of the second half. The plot strains credulity at a few points to either increase Ani’s helplessness or to amp up the comedic aspects, although the courtroom scene – one of those less believable moments – did deliver some big laughs.

Baker’s The Florida Project was my favorite film of 2017, and his follow-up Red Rocket made my top ten in 2021, but neither received the plaudits that Anora has so far. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and is atop most of the Oscar prediction lists right now (although it’s still early days), while Madison appears to be a strong favorite to win Best Actress. I’ve seen just four of the Best Picture contenders, and this is easily the best, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I see something better. It isn’t up to the level of The Florida Project, and is more ambitious than Red Rocket without the latter’s taut story. Madison, though, is a revelation – I’ve never seen her before, but other than her overdone Noo Yawk accent, she’s delivers the kind of performance that deserves all of the awards. The contrast between Madison’s tiny stature and Ani’s big, smart-assed, and foul-mouthed personality perfectly encapsulates the struggle the character faces as a woman in a misogynistic world, working in an even more misogynistic industry, trying to make a living in what may be the only way available to her.

Anora lacks some of the stronger secondary characters who popped up in Baker’s previous two films as well, making this even more of a character study than either of them was. Mark Eydelshteyn plays Vanya as a Russian cosplaying as a louche Timothée Chalamet, and the character turns out to be disappointingly one-note and is usurped in the second half by the film’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Garnick and Igor. Vanya’s parents, especially his mother, are caricatures. Even Toros, who contributes some humorous moments because of his desperation to get the marriage annulled before Vanya’s parents walk off the plane, literally leaving in the middle of a baptism to go find him, turns out to be just craven, nothing more.

Which ultimately adds up to Anora being merely very, very good, when Baker has been transcendent before. Mikey Madison takes a great character and plays it to the hilt, keeping you on her side even when you don’t like or understand what she’s doing, in a performance that will probably see me actively rooting for her to win everything this winter. I wish the characters around her were more interesting and less idiotic.

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→ November 20, 2024
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Emilia Pérez.

Emilia Pérez has so much going for it that it seemed like a can’t miss – it’s a musical, it’s a redemption story, it’s about a trans person coming out and finding themselves, it’s a comedy. Unfortunately in trying to be all of those things, it ends up almost nothing at all. It’s an incoherent babblefest, salvaged only a little by its three main performances, notably that of Zoe Saldaña. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

Saldaña plays Rita, a lawyer in Mexico who is disgusted by her work as a defense attorney, as she’s helping defend a man who killed his wife by arguing that she killed herself – and she doesn’t even get the ‘glory’ of arguing the case, as she writes the words and her dim-witted boss gives the big speech. She’s then contacted by the cartel boss Las Manitas, who reveals that he wants to come out as a trans woman, including undergoing gender confirmation surgery, and wants Rita to make all of the arrangements – including faking his death so she can begin a new life as Emilia Pérez. (She’s played in both incarnations by Karla Sofia Gascón, a trans actress from Spain.) Las Manitas was married, however, to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two kids, and after transitioning, Emilia decides she can’t live without her children, so she poses as a wealthy cousin of Las Manitas and invites the them and their mother to come live with her, which goes off the rails when Jessi takes up again with her old lover Gustavo. Meanwhile, Emilia decides to make amends for her past by helping relatives of people presumed killed by drug cartels find out their loved ones’ fates, using her money and her connections to the underworld, becoming a popular hero for her efforts and her criticism of the authorities.

That would be enough plot to fill a ten-part TV series, but not only does Emilia Pérez try to pack it all into two hours, it does so in song. There are sixteen songs in the film, some of which are actually quite good (“El Mal,” sung by Saldaña during the gala dinner, is a real standout, and she nails it), although I’m not sure if “Vaginoplasty” ever really needed to see the light of day. The result is that a plot already stretched to translucency ends up so shallow that the film never actually says anything – even though it seems to think it has a lot to say.

The kernel at the heart of the story is fantastic: A drug lord fakes his death, comes out (privately) as transgender, establishes an entire new identity as a woman, and becomes a crusader against the violence of the drug trade and the government’s war on the cartels. That’s all this film needed to be an epic satire of the current state of Mexico, and Gascón would have been up to the task, as she’s perfectly menacing as Las Manitas, then entirely credible as a remorseful Emilia who uses the same determination that made her a successful criminal to become a serious reformer – even though the violent resolve is still there in reserve.

This isn’t that film, starting with the decision to make Rita the main character rather than Emilia, even though Emilia is in the title. Rita’s just nowhere near as interesting as Emilia is, not through any fault of Saldaña’s, but because she’s written so austerely, while Emilia is the one truly three-dimensional character in the film. Her trans status is more of a detail; it makes the plot work, but it’s not a part of why her character is so interesting. Emilia has the emotional depth and range that the other characters lack, and she should have been the central character, but the script has no interest in, say, exploring her emotional growth, or just her change of heart, or perhaps questioning whether she really understands the wrongs she committed. There’s a faint implication that she was just so deeply unhappy that it drove her to bad acts, but that’s pretty facile (if that’s even what writer-director Jacques Audiard intended) and I think could even lean into the whole “queer as mental illness” myth.

Saldaña is as good as she can be with a poorly written character, and when she sings and dances – she’s a trained dancer, which I admit I didn’t know until after I watched the movie – she owns the scene. Her songs look like scenes from a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, in the best way: she grabs the camera with both hands and won’t let go until the song is done. And she gets just about all of the best songs, which is ironic with a pop singer elsewhere in the cast. It’s fun to see Gomez playing a vixen, even if the film doesn’t give her much time to vamp it up, and she barely gets to sing at all. She and Gascón are wasted by roles that don’t really make enough use of their talents.

The result is a film that is oddly boring for one that has some comic elements, a lot of song and dance, and eventually a big action scene. That last bit isn’t even that well earned, and leads to an ending that is an inexcusable copout where Emilia is no longer even in control of her own fate. That conclusion also underscores just how superficial Emilia Pérez ultimately is as a film: It has so little to say that it was completely fine resolving its plot with a figurative lightning bolt from the sky to wrap things up. What a waste of an opportunity.

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