→ June 2, 2025
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Sinners.

Twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, return from a few years in Chicago working for Al Capone to their hometown in rural Mississippi, where they plan to open a juke joint for their fellow Black Mississippians, with booze, gambling, and good old-fashioned Delta blues. It’s all good, profitable fun, at least until the white vampires show up, and the whole show turns into a battle royale.

Sinners, the latest film from director and writer Ryan Coogler, is that story – but a whole lot more, with layers upon layers of meaning below the surface of a film that starts out as a celebration and ends up a horror film, although it plays with the tropes of all of its genres. It’s imperfect, to be sure, but with some strong performances and incredible music, it’s an unusually good time at the theater among the sequels and the IP- and merchandise-driven pablum.

Michael B. Jordan stars as Smoke and Stack, oozing charm and panache, although the two characters are largely indistinguishable beyond their attire. They come home and buy a decrepit mill from the obviously racist (Boss) Hogwood, planning to turn it into their new juke joint. They ask their young cousin Sammy, also known as Preacher Boy (perhaps a nod to Samuel Sharpe?), to come play his guitar at opening night, only to discover that he’s become an exceptional blues guitarist with a deep, powerful voice – so powerful, in fact, that it calls out to the devil himself in the form of Remmick, an Irish immigrant and vampire who has already infected a married couple who are Klan members and who are more than happy to join him in an attempt to invade the joint and turn everyone inside.

There’s so much story here that that alone would make it one of the most interesting American films of the last five years; so many movies work with less plot and equivalent run times, yet Sinners seems to abound with story and subplot, to the point that crucial characters, including Stack’s white-passing ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, in her first significant film role since 2018) and Smoke’s ex Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), get a fraction of the back story they deserve. There are multiple movies’ worth of material and strong characters here, and Coogler knows it, playing with genre and tropes, starting the film out as a glorious celebration of Black culture and music, then turning very hard into a neo-horror film with revenge-fantasy elements that pits its white vampires against the Black heroes, literally surrounding them and threatening to burn the place down.

You can watch Sinners as is, without even considering the subtext beyond the obvious racial stuff – one of the film’s few moments of outright humor is when the vampires start talking about their belief in racial equity, and act offended that they’re not invited into the club because they’re white – but there appear to be layers upon layers of meaning below the surface. My first thought as the film ended was that the entire story might be a metaphor for the Tulsa Race Massacre, a real-life atrocity where Black residents of Tulsa built businesses that were profitable and part of the community, and white supremacists burned it all down and murdered dozens of Black Tulsans. But it could apply to all of Black history in the U.S. after the abolition of slavery, right up to our modern moment of a white minority seizing power to reverse decades of gains in civil rights. The blood-suckers aren’t just coming for the Black lives in that juke joint, but to feed off of the culture inside it, to profit from Black music and dance and traditions and leave the Black progenitors poor, wounded, or dead.

Jordan is going to earn much of the praise for his twin performances here, and he’s very good, but the two characters aren’t distinguished by much beyond their clothes; there are some references early in the film that imply that one of them is the more responsible of the two, the better business mind. The story just doesn’t do much with this, and the main distinction between them becomes their women, not anything innate to their characters. Steinfeld and Mosaku are tremendous in their supporting roles, as is Delroy Lindo as the drunk harmonica player who just wants to be paid in beer but ends up a voice of wisdom when calamity strikes. Sammy is played by a newcomer, Miles Caton, who boasts an outstanding, deep singing voice and apparently learned to play a mean blues guitar in just two months, and who delivers in what turns out to be the movie’s most pivotal role.

Sinners is overly ambitious in the end; as much action as there is, by the time it hit the two-hour mark I was ready for the conclusion – which it sort of telegraphed in the opening scene, a gimmick many filmmakers use that I really don’t care for at all. Let the ending surprise me, or at least let me come to it on my own terms. The largest action scene is very hard to follow between all of the very fake blood spurting everywhere (vampires, you know) and the dim lighting; I missed the fate of one of the characters entirely in the melee because I just couldn’t see. There’s also a mid-credits scene that I would say only sort of works – it’s sentimental where the rest of the film is anything but, yet it’s also true to some of the broader themes of the story.

This one is going to show up in all of the awards talk later this year, as it was a resounding commercial success, hits on a lot of themes that the voters seem to love, and was made by an acclaimed director who only has two tangential Oscar nominations to date – one for producing Judas & the Black Messiah, the other for the original song from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I would be very surprised if we get to January and it’s not nominated for Best Picture, with a smattering of other nods, definitely for Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Score, maybe for Coogler’s directing or Jordan for playing two parts. Regardless, it’s the kind of movie that I love to see succeeding, because there’s at least some small chance that future projects like this, untethered to any IP or previous films, have a little more chance to secure funding. I liked Sinners a lot, but I doubt it’ll be my favorite movie of the year; that said, if it wins all the things, I won’t be upset in the least.

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→ May 26, 2025
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I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is the seventh of Percival Everett’s books that I’ve read, but the first for which I did some homework, watching four of Poitier’s movies to which I knew Everett alludes in the novel. This was hardly difficult, as only one of the movies (Lilies of the Field, for which Poitier won his sole non-honorary Academy Award) failed to hold up. I’m glad I went through the exercise, however, as it made reading Everett’s novel even more enjoyable. It’s a riot, and another incredible feat of imagination, and while it has its serious moments, it is Everett at his least serious among the books I’ve read.

The main character in I Am Not Sidney Poitier is named Not Sidney Poitier, which, as you may imagine, presents him with all manner of difficulties, including bullying in school. He is, however, quite rich, as his mother invested very early in shares of Ted Turner’s media company, making her one of its largest shareholders and, at her death, putting Not Sidney in Ted’s care, in a way. Turner himself becomes an amusing if caricatured side character, prone to rambling non sequiturs, but he makes for an entertaining conversationalist as Not Sidney tries to make his way through the world.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier proceeds into a sort of modern picaresque, as each chapter is a new adventure modeled after one or two of Poitier’s movies. Early in the book, for example, Not Sidney sets off for California in his car, choosing to avoid the interstates, and finds himself in a hick county in Georgia where he is arrested for the crime of being Black. He’s soon chained to a racist convict, and an accident gives them an opportunity to escape, which, if you haven’t seen it, is the plot of The Defiant Ones, which starred Poitier and Tony Curtis. Everett’s trick here is adhering very closely to the plots of several of these movies, often to the point of repeating key quotes (“They call me Not Sidney” might be the best), but then turning something inside out at the resolution.

Not Sidney drifts back and forth from his home on Ted Turner’s estates, including interactions with Jane Fonda, to these vignettes from films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (but with a family of light-skinned Blacks prejudiced against darker-skinned people), In the Heat of the Night, and No Way Out, the last of which appears in a dream sequence.

Everett’s gift for comedy shows itself more in wordplay and in the humor he mines from absurd situations, rather than some of the more situational and highbrow humor in books like Dr. No. The protagonist’s name is obviously a source of repeated gags at his expense, and Everett creates all kinds of improbable interactions that allow him to poke fun at something, whether it’s the movies he’s referencing or Black literature or really anything that crosses his mind. Everett has referred to himself as “pathologically ironic,” and I have never felt that more in his writing than in his novel, even though I think it’s the least serious or thematic of any of the seven I’ve read.

I will say I think I enjoyed this novel the most of the seven, but that doesn’t make it the “best” or my favorite. It’s the funniest, it was probably the fastest to read, and it’s endlessly rewarding if you’ve seen any of the movies involved. I did notice that it was lighter in tone and subject, which isn’t a criticism, but it’s a change of pace from James or So Much Blue or Telephone. The guy still hasn’t missed for me, though, and there are very, very few authors about whom I could say that through even four books.

Next up: Another of this year’s Pulitzer finalists, The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones.

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→ May 24, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 5/24/25.

My first Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects for this year’s draft, is now up for subscribers to The Athletic; I held a Q&A on Thursday to take questions about it and other prospects. I also posted a minor-league scouting notebook from my recent looks at Andrew Painter, George Lombard, Jr., Jhostynxon “The Password” Garcia, Mikey Romero, and others.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Diatoms, which has some incredible art and high-quality components, and almost plays too quickly – I wanted a few more rounds to keep building patterns.

I’ve now sent out two issues of my free email newsletter in the last two weeks, which I think counts as a streak.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read this month is this San Francisco Chronicle story by their food critic, MacKenzie Chung Fegan, about her experience eating at The French Laundry and how chef-owner Thomas Keller treated her. It is nuanced, thoughtful, and ultimately allows the reader to draw their own conclusions.
  • Matthew Cherry won an Academy Award for his short film Hair Love, which then turned into a book and an animated series on HBO Max. He’s now working on a new short film, an animated musical project called Time Signature, and has a Kickstarter up for it.
  • My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, reviewed a new video game called Despelote that is about sports but not specifically a sports video game. It sounds fascinating.
  • Two new boardgame Kickstarters this week: Tangerine Games has one for Sauros, a dinosaur-themed trick-taking and tile-laying game.
  • Board & Dice, which specializes in heavy Eurogames, has one for a new edition of Trismegistus, which is very highly rated on BGG but also has a game weight rating of 4.18/5.

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→ May 7, 2025
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Vermiglio.

Vermiglio was Italy’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, making the 15-film shortlist, and earned a nomination in the same category at the Golden Globes, although it is probably just too small and intimate to win against bigger competitors like I’m Still Here or Emilia Pérez. It’s a simple story of a family in an Alpine village in Italy near the end of World War II whose nephew comes home with the help of a deserter, Pietro, who then falls in love with their eldest daughter, an affair that has unforeseen consequences for everyone when he leaves to visit his mother in Sicily. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The patriarch of the family, who looks like someone asked an AI engine to make an Italian version of Sam Elliott, is the village’s schoolteacher, while his wife is the caretaker of their farm and does the majority of the work of raising the children. She’s already pregnant with their tenth child when Pietro arrives with Attilio, their nephew, who was injured and would have died had Pietro not carried him part of the way home. Pietro is extremely quiet, but settles in with the family and tries to help out around the farm while facing some backlash from other villagers because he’s a deserter and a southerner (there was, and still is, quite a bit of prejudice between northern and southern Italy, and in this case the village and Pietro’s home couldn’t be much farther apart). The eldest daughter, Lucia, falls for him immediately, although it also seems like she and the other girls haven’t exactly seen a whole lot of boys before, and Pietro is just an object of fascination. The next-oldest daughter, Ada, is pious to the point of parody, and writes out punishments for herself for anything she thinks is a sin – which, of course, doesn’t stop her from committing them. Meanwhile, Dino, their oldest son, chafes under his father’s strict rule, and wants to continue his studies while his father sees his son as the heir of the farm, and instead wants another daughter to be the scholar of the family and go away to boarding school.

Pietro and Lucia end up marrying before the film’s midpoint, and Lucia becomes pregnant almost immediately, which is about as much excitement as we get in the first hour-plus of Vermiglio, until they get word that the war has ended and he reluctantly leaves to go see his family. What follows is the one big event of the film, and it further exposes some of the cracks in the family’s dynamic, especially in how the father has ruled the house in the same way even as the children are reaching adulthood.

Vermiglio is a slice-of-life film without the traditional narrative arc, and even downplays certain events – the death of a child, an unexpected wedding – that would normally be high points in a movie. It moves at its own pace, allowing for more characters to move to the center and for the script to develop them, even secondary ones like Dino, whose ambition is crushed by his father’s domineering parenting style.

Indeed, the patriarch seems at first like a gentle sort, an intellectual who takes care of his family like an Italian Pa Ingalls, but over the course of the film it becomes clear that he’s the source of many of the family’s problems. He’s why they have too many mouths to feed, why they don’t have enough money to feed them, why his daughters are utterly clueless about the world, why his son drinks too much, and so on. He views himself as the lord of the manor and his wife and children as his serfs, which the film never points out explicitly, but rather demonstrates through large and small events that beset the family.

The excellent review of Vermiglio that appeared in The Guardian said the film had “an almost Hardyesque intensity,” just without the class struggles of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and I have no better comparison. Even though it’s set in the 1940s, it has the pastoral quality of all of Hardy’s novels that I’ve read, and the same sort of bleak outlook, and the same contrast between the two. Hardy was a prose master who wrote beautiful phrases about tragic people. Vermiglio is a beautiful, leisurely film, where some of the tragedies are quieter than others, that throws one small match into the window of a family’s home and waits for something to catch.

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→ April 24, 2025
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Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat marries the dark history of the United States’ assassination of Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba, done with the full consent of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskold and several other western leaders, with music from some of the great American jazz musicians of the time – as the U.S. was sending them on friendly missions to emerging post-colonial Africa. The contrast between this blue-note diplomacy and the vile, racist machinations of the CIA, President Eisenhower, and their co-conspirators makes it a tense, compelling watch, even though you probably already know how this ends. It was one of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. (I watched it free on Kanopy, which I can access through my local library, and it’s also on iTunes, Amazon, etc. for rental.)

The film has no narration but does use some on-screen quotes to keep things moving along, which allows the music to continue throughout almost the entire film. It’s a who’s who of mid-century American jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Melba Liston, and others, most of whom visited Africa on state-sponsored goodwill tours and/or became pan-African activists at home, tying the movement to U.S. civil rights efforts. (Gillespie’s quixotic campaign for President in 1964 gets prominent mention, even though it came three years after the Lumumba assassination.) The story begins several years before Congo’s independence, with scenes from independence movements across colonial Africa, speeches from African and American activists – including several from Malcolm X – and significant footage of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who became a champion for African independence movements because those groups often espoused socialist or communist ideology. Much of what plays out before Lumumba is elected happens at the UN, where we see speeches from Khrushchev and from ambassadors from Belgium, the U.S., and many non-aligned nations that had already obtained independence. The on-screen text also explains the importance of the Congo’s vast mineral resources, which at the time were led by huge uranium deposits that could be used in nuclear weapons, although today the emphasis has shifted towards coltan, a mixture of niobium (columbium) and tantalum that is extremely important to the manufacture of capacitors for electronic circuits – like you’d find in whatever device you’re using to read this.

This all sets the scene for the intrigue that ultimately led to the torture and murder of Lumumba by a rival leader, Moïse Tshombe, who led the breakaway State of Katanga. Tshombe was interested in power, and Katanga is the most resource-rich region of the country, so he had plenty of backers in the west. Days before Congo became independent, Belgium privatized the mining company Union Minière, taking the dominant force in the Congolese economy away from the native population and depriving the new government of a major revenue source – the final insult in Belgium’s seventy-year misrule of the territory and abuse of its citizens. Union Minière was based in Katanga, so Tshombe was the perfect stooge for the west, and was happy to oblige first through his political activities, smearing Lumumba as a communist, and then later through violence.

Throughout the film, director Johan Grimonprez (who is Belgian) intersperses the history of the conflict and subterfuge with the music, a jarring but effective choice that turns the whole endeavor into a visual fugue, with the music the counterpoint to the infuriating history on the other side. The struggle for independence across Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, went on just as Black Americans were fighting Jim Crow laws, and the response of the United States government in both cases was built on suppression and violence. At the same time, President Dwight Eisenhower, who apparently was an early proponent of assassinating Lumumba, tried to use American jazz stars to spread American culture to these new and emerging nations, calling them “jazz ambassadors” and sending them around the world to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, southern and eastern Asia, and to Africa. Louis Armstrong’s tour of the Congo, which appears to be the only time the State Department sponsored such a tour in the continent, turned out to be a cover for the CIA’s coup. Over 100,000 people showed up to watch him perform in the capital, then still called Léopoldville, while Lumumba was under house arrest; less than two months later, he would be dead at the CIA’s hands.

No country bears more responsibility for the now 65-year tragedy of the Congo, a fake nation with borders set up by Belgium’s King Leopold that has been beset by civil war for nearly all of its history, than Belgium does. Grimonprez gives more attention to the United States and the UN, but gets a few stabs in at Belgium, particularly in how Belgian leaders and officials tried to claim that colonizing the Congo was almost an altruistic affair, bringing civilization to a “less developed” people. Their colonial rule was one of the most brutal and damaging of any, a story hinted at here and told at great and gruesome length in Adam Hochschild’s tremendous book King Leopold’s Ghost.

The film ends with Lumumba’s death and the turning of sentiment on the part of the jazz ambassadors against the U.S. government, although there will still a few more such tours into the early 1960s. There isn’t so much a conclusion here, as the stories of the Congo and the CIA’s involvement in coups and assassinations would continue for decades, and the U.S. does still occasionally send musicians out on goodwill tours, if not quite to the same level as they did in the late 1950s. It’s an important slice of history, not just for Africa but for the United States as well, a reminder of the great power we can wield through the impact of our culture and the value of our diversity, and the great evil we can do when we do not hold the powers that be accountable for their actions.

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→ April 21, 2025
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I’m Still Here + top films of 2024.

I’m Still Here won the Oscar for Best International Feature this year and earned nominations for Best Picture – becoming the first Brazilian film to do either of those things – and a nomination for Best Actress for Fernanda Torres, who delivers a commanding performance as a woman trying to hold her family together after the disappearance of her husband in the police state of Brazil, 1971. Based on the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens was arrested, tortured, and murdered by the secret police, it shows their beautiful, happy family, and the ways in which Eunice has to swallow her fear and grief to move forward and raise their four children without him. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

As the film opens, we see just faint signs of the terror to come, including a scene where the Paivas’ eldest daughter, Vera, is in a car with friends when they come up against a police roadblock. They’re forced out of the car and roughed up a little as the cops search for “terrorists,” mostly people suspected of engaging in any sort of activities opposing the dictatorship. Rubens is a former congressman who participates in clandestine, peaceful activities like passing letters to families of disappeared people – dissidents or innocent people – and coordinating with other like-minded people. They don’t seem to see any risk in their actions, but, of course, one day the secret police come knocking, taking Rubens away and barricading the Paivas in their house for what appears to be a day or two, after which they then take Eunice and another daughter in for interrogation as well. (Vera has gone to study in London and live with another Brazilian family that fled the country out of fear for what was coming.) The daughter is released in a day, but Eunice is kept for nearly two weeks, during which she’s tortured and asked to inform on her husband.

Eventually, she’s released, and begins to try to fight through the judicial system first to find out where Rubens is, and then later to get the state to admit they kidnapped and killed him. At the same time, she has four children, three girls and a boy, to raise, while the house’s breadwinner is gone and she finds herself unable to even cash a check because he can’t sign it or call to confirm. The hour or so spent in this time period is by far the strongest, as it focuses entirely on her, and all of the burdens placed on her as a mother, a de facto widow, a dissident, and more. It could be a metaphor for modern motherhood and all of the things we ask mothers in western societies to be, including how we ask them to hide or subjugate their own feelings to take care of their families (which reminded me of Jess Grose’s excellent book Screaming on the Inside), although I don’t know if that was intended, since the source material is the Paivas’ son’s memoir, a best-seller in Brazil about ten years ago.

After about 100 minutes, the film jumps forward 25 years to 1996, when Eunice gets word that the death certificate for Rubens has been found. By that point, she has returned to school and become a lawyer, while also making a name for herself as an activist for the families of the disappeared, making this a public event as well as a deeply personal one. Then we get a second flash-forward to shortly before Eunice’s death, a scene that is sentimental and doesn’t need to be in the film at all, although it allowed director Walter Salles to reunite with actress Fernanda Montenegro, who starred in his acclaimed 1998 film Central Station … and who happens to be Torres’s mother.

Torres just is this film; the whole endeavor hinges on her performance and she is superb. Any time she is on screen, she owns it – and the glory is in how subtle Torres’s performance is. There are no big, showy scenes, no giant outbursts, no soliloquies. Had she won the Oscar over Mikey Madison, I wouldn’t object; they’re the two best performances I saw in any 2024 movie, regardless of gender. No other character has half as much to do or matters a tenth as much to the credibility of the story. Once Rubens disappears, you’ll probably suspect we’re not going to see him again even if you don’t know the true story, at which point the script hands everything to Torres and asks her to carry it … which is pretty much what life did to Eunice Paiva, come to think of it.

I would have given the Best International Feature award to The Seed of the Sacred Fig, another film about life under an authoritarian regime, but this was the second-best of the nominees and of all eligible films I saw from 2024. And, if you’re curious, here’s my mostly-final ranking of the best movies I saw from 2024. I haven’t seen No Other Land, but I think that’s the only film out there from the 2024 cycle that might crack this list. I’ve seen 43 movies in total that were Oscar-eligible or were released to streaming in 2024, to give you some perspective; #43 was The Apprentice.

1. Anora
2. Nickel Boys
3. Nosferatu
4. A Real Pain
5. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
6. The Brutalist
7. September 5
8. Hard Truths
9. Sing Sing
10. Daughters
11. Kinds of Kindness
12. Memoir of a Snail
13. I’m Still Here
14. The Room Next Door
15. Sugarcane
16. Challengers
17. I Saw the TV Glow
18. All That We Imagine As Light
19. Kneecap
20. Rebel Ridge

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→ April 17, 2025
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The Girl with the Needle.

The Girl with the Needle was Denmark’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making the final cut to be among the five nominees even though it presents real-life serial killer Dagmar Overbye, who took payments from desperate women to adopt out their babies, only to murder the infants instead, in a somewhat sympathetic light. It’s dark, strange, and extremely creepy, playing out like a horror film where the main character is never truly in danger herself. (It’s streaming free for Mubi subscribers, or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a garment-factory worker in Denmark during World War I, married to a soldier who she presumes is dead, as there’s been no word from him in a year. She’s evicted from her rooms when the film opens, but when goes to her boss to try to get help obtaining widow’s benefits, he takes advantage of her and she becomes pregnant. Her husband returns from the war, disfigured from battle, and she sends him away because she believes she’s going to marry her boss. He reneges, of course, and she loses her job, after which she tries to perform an abortion on herself with a giant needle while in a public bath, only to have Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) stop her and potentially save her life. Karoline has the baby with Dagmar’s help, at another job the older woman helped her find, and she pays Dagmar to give the baby to another family; when she can’t pay all of what she owes, she goes to work in Dagmar’s candy shop and helps convince other women to give their babies up as well, until she becomes suspicious that Dagmar isn’t what she seems.

The story itself is sort of beside the point; Dagmar is a real person, apparently quite infamous in Denmark as the serial killer with the most known victims in the country’s history, so clearly the film will end somehow with her arrest. Instead, director and co-writer Magnus van Horn focuses on the relationship between the two women, telling the New York Times that he chose to find “finding the humanity in these horrible deeds,” which is a bold strategy, given what Dagmar was doing. (There’s no direct violence in the film; the only murder that takes place on the screen is hidden from our and Karoline’s view.) That choice means that the film can only succeed or fail on the quality of the script and of the two lead performances.

The two women, both decorated actors in Denmark, deliver strong, compelling performances, particularly Dyrholm, who can be completely terrifying but also capable of surprising, often sudden bouts of empathy. The script depicts her murders as the result of a nihilistic view of the world, where in her mind these babies would go on to lives of suffering, poverty, and abuse, and a belief that she is actually helping the women she’s conning. (I couldn’t find any evidence that the real Dagmar Overbye was like this; her defense at trial was that she was abused as a child as well.) She’s initially cold to Karoline, helping her in some tangible, discrete ways, before eventually taking her in and bonding with the younger woman, as does Dagmar’s young daughter, Erena.

Van Horn lays the atmosphere on a bit thickly, however, and it ends up diminishing the film by going too far. The entire film is shot in black and white, and the streets are filthy – sooty, muddy, diseased, anything you can think of to increase the sense of bleakness and despair. The beginning resembles a misery-porn remix of Fantine’s story in Les Misérables, to a predictable level, until Karoline attempts the abortion, after which the story becomes something new and much more interesting; the first third or so of the movie is nothing you haven’t seen before. It needs Dagmar’s character to at least give us something new, even if it’s shocking; because Dyrholm plays her as someone who appears to exist on both sides of the edge of madness, the moment she arrives in the film the pace picks up, while it also allows us to get away from a story that keeps kicking Karoline in the teeth. Two hours of that would have been unbearable. Once the real plot begins, it’s still dark and unsparing, but a far more intriguing story, and a better watch due to the two strong leads.

(I still haven’t seen the winner of the Best International Film category, the Brazilian film I’m Still Here, but it’s loaded up for my next flight; of the other four, I’d put this second, behind the German submission The Seed of the Sacred Fig.)

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→ April 11, 2025
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Nosferatu.

I came into Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu knowing relatively little of the lore behind the story; I’ve read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but had never seen any adaptation of it, not even the 1922 silent film of which this is a remake. It’s about as spot-on a gothic horror film as I’ve seen … maybe ever, really, with sound effects that will curdle your soul and a strong-as-always performance from Nicholas Hoult as the tragic real estate agent Thomas Hutter. (You can stream it free on Peacock or rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Eggers’s screenplay adheres closely to the 1922 story, which changed several substantial elements of the Stoker novel, altering some major plot events and making the story darker and more violent while removing much of the sexual subtext in favor of more physical horror. Hutter is a young, ambitious real estate agent whose wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) has a psychic connection to the monster Nosferatu, who poses as the Romanian Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and demands that Hutter visit him to sign the contract for Orlok to purchase an estate in Wisburg, where the Hutters live. Thomas has no idea of the grip the vampire has on his wife, other than that she has intensely realistic dreams and a history of sleepwalking and seizures, but he is terrified by Orlok and realizes that he’s some sort of undead or otherwise unnatural creature during his brief stay at the castle. Upon his return home, he finds that bubonic plague is spreading through Wisburg, along with a huge number of rats, but the occultist Prof. Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) sees that this is not a medical disease but a spiritual one and leads the effort to find Orlok and kill him once and for all to save Ellen and the surviving townspeople.

The story is somewhat beside the point in Nosferatu and even in Dracula, as neither even has a real protagonist; the main character is the vampire, and he’s off screen (or page) for large portions of both works. He is everpresent, often working through his acolyte Knock (Simon McBurney) or just spreading fear because we know he’s coming for Ellen and know of the destruction he’ll wreak when he arrives. It’s all atmosphere, amplified by the way Eggers always shows Orlok in shadow, or from the back, so that we very rarely see him clearly until his final scenes in the film, when we see just what a deformed monster he has become; we hear Orlok much more than we see him, with Skarsgård speaking in a slow, guttural, overenunciated accent that sounds like he’s moonlighting (pun intended) from his job as the lead singer for a melodic death metal band from Gothenburg.

Most of the best scenes in the film don’t involve Skarsgård at all, though; he’s scarier when we don’t know when he’s coming or what he’s up to. McBurney is just as horrific, because he is utterly insane; we know what the vampire is doing, but Knock is unpredictable and his violence is all the more shocking for it. (He’s the equivalent to Renfield from Stoker’s novel, but here Knock is Hutter’s boss and appears at first to be a mild-mannered real estate man, more like an accountant or a barrister than the asylum inmate that Renfield is when he first appears in the book.) Rose-Depp’s main function in the movie is to appear terrified, which she does well, as she’s the only character who understands all along what the true nature of the threat is. For most of the film nobody believes her, including her best friend Anna (Emma Corrin, underutilized here), except for Dr. Von Franz, the man everyone else thinks is a crank, further underscoring Ellen’s terror – she knows he’s coming, she knows she is inextricably bound to him, and everyone thinks she’s a hysterical woman.

Nosferatu sounds great, by which I mean it sounds absolutely awful, especially if you watch it with headphones. You may never want to eat again after hearing this movie. I would imagine sales of black pudding plummeted after this film hit theatres. Some of this is obvious – you wouldn’t expect any less from a scene where a vampire feeds on a victim – but even when Hutter is eating dinner at Orlok’s castle, every bite or sip feels like a menace. It’s a crime that this film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, didn’t get anything for sound; three of the five nominees in that category went to musicals or films about music, which seems to exclude films that rely on other forms of sound, which Nosferatu did more than almost any other movie in 2024.

Hoult is excellent here, as he is in pretty much everything, although even his character isn’t that well-developed, and the acting as a whole is probably the one weak point of the film. Ellen is a damsel in distress who only develops any sort of agency at the very end of the film, so Rose-Depp doesn’t have a lot to do, and spends most of her time on screen looking terrorized (with reason) but not doing much else. Dafoe seems like an obvious choice for a mad scientist, but that works against him here – he is so obviously Willem Dafoe, and is the only actor who doesn’t really do a proper accent for his character, that he isn’t terribly convincing as a character whose main job is to convince everyone, us included, that he isn’t mad. It’s also not a film that depends on the performances to work its dark magic, as Eggers creates such a bleak, foreboding atmosphere, and then layers increasing degrees of shocking violence on top of it, that it works extremely well throughout without getting as much from its actors as it might have. I’ve got one more major 2024 release to see, but this is easily in my top 5 from last year.

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→ 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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→ April 3, 2025
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The Room Next Door.

Pedro Almodóvar waited until his 23rd feature film to make his first one in English, released the same month as the Spanish director turned 75. The Room Next Door, an adaptation of part of a Sigrid Nunez novel, is an intense movie about friendship and duty, driven by two outstanding performances by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, a sort of women-centered parallel to his 2022 film Pain & Glory. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Ingrid (Moore) is signing copes of her latest book when an old acquaintance reaches the table and informs her that their former colleague Martha (Swinton) has cervical cancer. Ingrid visits Martha, whom she hasn’t seen in many years, and the two begin spending more time together, as Ingrid realizes Martha is quite lonely, with only an estranged daughter remaining of her family. When a promising treatment turns out to be unsuccessful, Martha decides to end her life on her own terms and asks Ingrid to accompany her to a house in the country, so that Martha knows someone who cares about her is in the room next door as she dies. Ingrid ends up agreeing, and the remainder of the film follows the two women through the last few weeks of Martha’s life.

There are only three characters of any significance in The Room Next Door, with John Turturro appearing as Martha’s former husband and Ingrid’s former lover, putting all of the pressure on Swinton and Moore to carry the film – and, naturally, two of the greatest actors of their generation are up to the task. Swinton’s performance is the more surprising of the pair’s, as she’s largely understated throughout the film; she’s played big or weird or both so often in recent years that it’s a treat to see her dial it back like this. Martha’s insecure and maybe neurotic, but resigned to her death, in contrast to Ingrid, whose latest book is about her own crippling fear of dying, and Swinton gives the character the right combination of nervous energy with a touch of irascibility. Ingrid is the more straightforward character, although Moore’s challenge is navigating the wide range of emotions she faces across the film – it’s clear at the start that she and Martha were never that close, or at least Ingrid didn’t think they were, so she ends up growing fonder of Martha as Martha’s death becomes inevitable and the favors she asks become more significant.

(As an aside, I realized after watching this that I’d never seen Michael Clayton, the 2007 film for which Swinton won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress – still her only Oscar nomination – so I watched it. That performance is also quite understated, and also one of her best.)

The production itself is lavish, visually and metaphorically. Nearly every scene pops with strong, vivid colors, even more so when they head out of the city to a luxurious house in the woods, with gorgeous shots of the forest just beyond the house’s deck. Almodóvar has a long history of using red for its symbolic value; the door to Martha’s room is red, and she wears deep reds many times in the film, while the chaise longue where Ingrid usually reclines on the deck is also red, certainly an unusual color (and fabric) for outdoor furniture. (Martha lays on the green one.) There’s also a sense of wealth and even abundance throughout the film that cuts both ways –these are two privileged women who can afford to do this and, for Martha, face the potential consequences; yet the contrast between this lush setting and the inevitability of Martha’s death underscores that all the money in the world can’t change the fact that we’re mortal.

The estranged daughter does appear near the end of the film, providing a brief but somewhat telling coda that gives a little more insight into Martha’s character – and into Ingrid’s as well. We know Martha’s going to die before the end, but rather than concluding on the most morbid note, or with something clichéd like a funeral, the story ends with a conversation and a scene on the deck that connects to an earlier scene. Both scenes include passages from Joyce’s short story The Dead, while earlier Martha and Ingrid also watch John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation – laying it on a bit thick, I suppose, although it is considered one of the greatest short stories written in the English language. Almodóvar has settled into a mellower groove as he’s aged, dispensing with the sort of shocking elements that helped make his reputation as an avant-garde filmmaker while he focuses more on character development and dialogue. The Room Next Door is (at least) his third straight film in this vein, and I think it’s the best of the trio thanks to the two lead performances.

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