→ March 20, 2025
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The Apprentice.

The Apprentice is a decidedly mediocre movie about a decidedly mediocre man. That man, who at the moment I write this is the President of the United States and is driving a serious constitutional crisis, is not boring, whatever you think of his behavior and professed beliefs. It makes it so hard to believe just how boring The Apprentice is, even when it’s trying its hardest to find something interesting in the story, often by humanizing its main character. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The story begins with a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) trying to buy a decrepit building near Times Square with the intention of turning it into a luxury hotel, against skepticism from all corners – including his father, Fred, a real estate developer himself and a dead stereotype of the father who never likes anything his kids do. Trump happens to be in a private club where Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) is holding court, and Cohn, hearing Trump has just been accepted for membership, calls him over to meet him, clearly seeing business opportunities for the future. Trump turns to Cohn to try to get a gigantic tax break from New York City, which was in dire financial straits at the time, and Cohn extorts a city official to make it happen, setting off a decade-long business partnership where Cohn teaches Trump the secrets of his success, much of which you can see in Trump’s last decade in the political sphere, including repeating lies long enough for people to think they’re true and to never admit defeat regardless of the evidence. Along the way, Trump meets Ivana (Maria Bakalova), seduces her with his money and apparent largesse, has a couple of kids we barely see, watches his brother Fred Jr. drink himself to death, and pays very little to no taxes anywhere.

I’m obviously no fan of Trump’s, but there is plenty in his life story to provide enough fodder for an interesting biopic. The Apprentice is more of a connect-the-dots picture of Trump, giving a more intriguing picture of the last decade of Roy Cohn’s life than it does of anything about its putative protagonist, and seeks to explain Trump’s rise as a truth-denying right-wing politician as the result of his father not giving him enough praise when he was younger, leading Trump to become the sort of striver for whom no victory is complete and no success is ever enough. It’s simplistic and hackneyed, and means that when both men are on screen, Cohn is always the more compelling figure – something that is helped by Strong’s better performance, while Stan’s performance is an impersonation, one where you can’t forget that it’s just Sebastian Stan in a bad rug enunciating certain words the way Trump does. (Stan getting a Best Actor nomination for this movie is really ridiculous. Ethan Herisse of Nickel Boys was far more deserving, to pick just one actor from another acclaimed 2024 movie.) You’re not that likely to forget that it’s Jeremy Strong as Cohn, but there’s more depth to the portrayal here, especially near the end of Cohn’s life, as he was dying of AIDS (or a related illness) and still refused to concede that he had the disease or even that he might not be heterosexual.

There’s a thread within the movie that attempts to humanize Trump by showing the dynamics of his immediate family, including a successful father who belittles Fred Jr. for choosing to become a pilot rather than joining the family business and then belittles Donald for failing to live up to (perhaps unreasonable expectations). Fred Jr. is an alcoholic from the get-go in the film, but the script implies that their father drove him to drink, and he’s really here just for the one scene where Donald refuses to help him before he dies from the disease. This thread seems to imply that Donald Trump was, at one point, a regular person with some empathy and the ability to feel things like grief, fear, and sorrow, but that an emotionally distant and abusive father pushed that out of him and created an insatiable need for the tangible trappings of success – money, power, fame, and women – that eventually led him to run for President.

The Apprentice also makes a regrettable choice in showing Trump raping Ivana, based on her accusation in her divorce deposition, a claim she sort of walked back later. The issue isn’t whether it’s true, but whether it belongs in the movie: It doesn’t say anything about Trump’s character we didn’t already know, and the film isn’t otherwise interested in much of anything about Ivana or her marriage to Trump, so the result is it appears that the scene is included just to be controversial or lurid. If the script had spent more time exploring their relationship, which often seems transactional in the depiction here, maybe there would be some justification, but Ivana is mostly a prop and Bakalova is largely wasted in the role anyway. It just comes off as cheap, lazy writing in a script that has very little time for any women characters.

I find it hilarious that Trump and his organization tried to stop anyone from showing or distributing this movie – there is nothing here we haven’t heard before, and if anything it shows him doing the stuff his adherents believe he’s good at, like making deals and running roughshod over his adversaries. The film did come out, and hit theaters, and earn praise and award nominations, and it didn’t make a whit of difference. Most people already have an opinion of Trump that is set in stone; if the Access Hollywood tape didn’t dissuade his supporters, this movie isn’t going to do anything, either. It’s just a mediocre biopic of someone who, at this moment, is busy trying to hollow out the federal government and use what’s left to target his real and perceived enemies. Maybe after he’s dead someone will make a better film about his life and motivations. This ain’t it.

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→ March 18, 2025
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September 5.

September 5 takes the story of the murder of most of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics and tells it from a novel perspective: that of the ABC producers and staff broadcasting the Olympics to the United States audience. The shift makes it as much a story about journalism and about the way people react to crises in real time as a story about the attack itself, allowing the film to hold the tragedy at arm’s length without trivializing its impact, and the result is a true thriller even if you already know all of the details of the ending. (It’s streaming free on Paramount+ or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

We begin behind the scenes with what seems like another day of coverage, watching Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decide to focus on the despair of one of the losing swimmers after one of Mark Spitz’s victories, along with a mundane argument about what events to air between Arledge and two of his lieutenants in the control room, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Baden (Ben Chaplin). Not long afterwards, several other staffers, including the translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch), think they hear gunshots, and soon afterwards the group learns of the attack and the first killings, leading to a series of decisions of how to cover the events – doing so with a staff and crew there to cover sports, not breaking news, and certainly not this kind of crisis – and how best to leverage their position to benefit ABC. The producers even resort to some subterfuge to get a staffer inside the police perimeter, stare down German authorities who storm the control room to shut them down, and try to learn the fate of the hostages – with the last leading to the one big mistake that the decision-makers make over the course of crisis.

I’m a sucker for a good journalism story, so September 5 is catnip to me, and this movie does an excellent job of keeping the tension ratcheted up to 10 while barely leaving the control room, driving almost everything through dialogue. The film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Oscars, and that’s its greatest strength – there’s no fat on this script, and even though the crisis unfolds outside of the room where our characters are, the film doesn’t lose the claustrophobic sense that comes with a movie in a single, enclosed setting. It’s also unusual in the way it creates so much tension through a story where none of the named characters are ever in any sort of peril

The script doesn’t quite pay sufficient attention to the human tragedy that drives the drama in the control room, however. There are some mentions here and there of individual athletes, and a discussion of the possibility that someone might be shot live on camera where his parents might see it, but by and large this is a movie about the people in the control room. You may argue it’s just not that kind of movie, or that its lean running time – which is just right for the story it’s telling – requires it to skimp on treating the tragedy as such; I think the script could have done more to humanize the events at its core, and in the process giving its characters more empathy in the moment, unless Arledge and Mason and Bader were all just extremely callous men in real life. (Marianne is the one member of the big four characters who isn’t based on a real person, but Benesch – who was outstanding in 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge – is so damn good here that I didn’t mind the fabrication one bit.)

The three actors portraying the three real-life ABC employees are all solid, but Magaro – who was excellent in a secondary role in Past Lives and as a mentally ill man in Showing Up – is the standout here, in part because his character has some more complexity and ends up confronting the biggest decision of the day, the one that happens to go wrong for the group. Sarsgaard and Chaplin are solid, but their characters can seem inert by comparison to Mason or Marianne, who show more emotion and seem more attuned to the human tragedy taking place just a few hundred yards away.

This movie is just too much in my wheelhouse for me to dislike it; I was riveted for most of its 90 minutes, once the attack begins and the movie just kicks into drive, never downshifting until the last few minutes. I can recognize its flaws with some separation from watching it, but I was probably as engrossed in September 5 as I’ve been in any movie I’ve watched from the 2024 cycle. It’s so well-told and well-paced that I never had the mental bandwidth to consider what might be missing.

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→ March 12, 2025
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Sing Sing.

Sing Sing has no business being as good as it is. This movie sounds like it’s going to have more sap than a pine forest, and instead of devolving into sentimental claptrap, it tells its story in an understated way that doesn’t try to tell the audience how to feel or what to expect. Of all of the movies I’ve seen from the 2024 cycle so far, it’s not the best movie or close to it, but it’s the one I’m going to recommend to the most people, because it should have very broad appeal, and has the second virtue of actually being good, even if it’s a little superficial in the telling. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The story is set at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, and follows several incarcerated men who are participating in the prison’s Rehabiliation Through the Arts program, which holds workshops in several performing and writing arts in prisons across New York state. Divine G (Colman Domingo) is a fervent participant both as an actor and a playwright, and becomes the de facto leader of the acting troupe, which works with coach Brent Buell (Paul Raci) to stage productions every six months or so. The group’s dynamic is upset when another longtime inmate, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing himself), joins the classes and brings a new perspective while also learning to deal with his own frustrations and anger, while also becoming frenemies with Divine G. The film follows the dance between the two men as they try to find ways to first work with and then help each other, all as the group works to put on a show and both men try to gain their freedom through a difficult legal process.

The story was co-written by Divine G and Maclin, along with the two screenwriters who eventually wrote the script, with all four listed when they received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. (It’s based on an Esquire story by John Richardson called “The Sing Sing Follies.”) Once you know that, it’s hard to see the film in any other light – this is a pretty remarkable piece of storycraft that gets at some real character development from both of the two leads, more than you find in many movies or even novels. Both Divine Eye and Divine G have clear story arcs, and the interplay between their characters and their characters’ stories is the beating heart of the film. Domingo’s superb as always, and more than deserved his Oscar nomination, but Maclin’s performance is excellent as well – even if he’s playing a version of himself.

The main problem with Sing Sing is that it’s almost too positive. The story focuses on the theater program and shows very little of prison life outside of it. There are some scenes in the prison yard that depict some illicit business, but that’s about all we get. The inmates in the theater program mostly seem to have significant freedom within the prison, even in how they dress, and the audience only hears about the struggles of incarceration, rather than seeing any of it. That’s part of why it’s a feel-good movie – you’ll feel good about how successful and meaningful the arts program is, and you won’t feel bad about how terrible it is to be locked up for years, even more so for a crime you didn’t commit. Prison just doesn’t look that bad in Sing Sing and I don’t think that’s accurate.

Nearly all of the cast here comprises formerly incarcerated men who came through the program; Domingo, Raci, and theater actor Sean San José are the only exceptions I see. Most are playing themselves, but it’s still remarkable how easy these performances are – there was never a point where it was clear that someone wasn’t a professional actor, even the many cameos (including the real Divine G, who appears early in the film as another inmate who asks Domingo for an autograph). It adds to the verisimilitude of the film, of course, but also underscores the point about the value of the program, which I interpreted as an argument for the value of many kinds of social-development programs for incarcerated people. These programs, like the one in Daughters as well, reduce recidivism, which is supposed to be the goal of most incarcerations (rather than punishment, or vengeance, which is what our carceral system is really about). We’re seeing men – there are almost no lines spoken by women in the film at all – who went through the RTA program, got out, and haven’t returned. Their very presence on the screen is a feel-good story. The script probably should have delved a little more into the horrors of life on the inside, but that would have been a very different movie, too. I’m flummoxed that this wasn’t a bigger hit – it only made about $2.5 million at the U.S. box office, coming out last summer, then returning to theaters when it started earning award nominations. Critics loved it, and loved Domingo’s performance. The ending is upbeat, but not saccharine. CODA was a critical success and Best Picture winner with less. I’m hoping Sing Sing finds its audience now that it’s streaming, because it deserved more than it got.

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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 6, 2025
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Nickel Boys.

Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s outstanding, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys,  is a daring experiment that tells the stories of its two protagonists in first-person perspective, giving the viewer the unsettling feeling of being in the abuse-ridden Nickel “Academy” for Boys. It’s easily one of the best films of 2024, earning just two Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay), although the script’s fidelity to the novel ended up blunting some of the suspense of the film for me.  (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc., or watch it free on that MGM+ thing nobody has.)

Nickel Boys starts by following Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a bookish young Black man in Florida in 1962 who ends up arrested as an accomplice to a theft he didn’t commit and is sent to a segregated reform school, based on the real-life Florida School for Boys, which was only closed in 2009 after decades of reports of abuse, rape, and murder of the children imprisoned there. Elwood becomes an easy target for some of the bigger, tougher boys there until a longer-term inmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson), comes to his aid, and the two become friends. When the pair see all of the corruption and violence going on behind the scenes, they hatch a plot to try to get the abusive school leader removed from power. Scenes from 1988 are interspersed through the film, showing Elwood, now an adult living in New York City, running his own moving business, eventually running into a former classmate from the institution and hearing how many others have died or fallen into substance abuse since they were “graduated.” We also see Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in the beginning of the movie before Elwood’s arrest, in her attempts to visit him and use a lawyer to get him released, and in some of Elwood’s flashbacks to his life before Nickel.

This is the first full-length feature from director and co-screenwriter RaMell Ross, who directed the Oscar-nominated short Hale County This Morning, This Evening in 2018, making it even more impressive that he  chose to film it in first-person perspective, and to do so from the viewpoint of two different characters. There are several scenes we see twice, which naturally changes the way we interpret the events we’re watching, and even in scenes we see once the shift in perspective can be disorienting – deliberately so, mimicking the sense that the student-inmates must have had in an environment where punishment, including getting “disappeared,” could be arbitrary and capricious. The intense focus on only what Elwood or Turner could see means that the audience’s understanding of how brutal and corrupt the school leadership was is entirely defined by the boys’ understanding of the same. We might suspect it more than they do, of course, but the evidence comes to us through their eyes, so that their disbelief – especially that people in positions of authority could so blatantly ignore the rules and act unfairly – is more palpable.

That this film missed out on the Best Cinematography category is the great snub and mystery of this year’s Oscars; I understand the movie wasn’t that widely seen, but it got a Best Picture nomination, so enough people saw and appreciated it for it to land one of those spots even over some films that (I think) were seen as more likely to make the cut. The cinematography in this movie is everything; it is the defining feature of the film, and it elevates a story that was already fantastic to another level, making this one of the very best movies of the year. The two leads give excellent performances, but I can see the argument that both are too understated to become awards fodder, not when they were competing against impersonations and dancing lawyers and the like.

Nickel Boys is ultimately an experience, or a movie to be experienced, something that I seldom saw in this movie cycle; Anora, which won Best Picture and a slew of other honors, is one of the others, and I’d say the underrated A Real Pain is as well. All three movies draw you into their stories in the early moments and never break the spell until the final scene or two. I was at a slight disadvantage here, because I read the novel and remembered the twist, so the gut-punch moment that comes late in the film didn’t land the same way with me. That’s not a criticism of the film, but a comment on the particular experience I had in watching it. However, Ross made an editorial choice at the very end, after the resolution of the main narrative, showing some real-life images and footage that, unfortunately, did break the spell for me before we hit the credits. It was the only misstep for me in what was otherwise a superb film and tremendous directorial debut, one that I hope is a harbinger of more great work to come.

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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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→ February 28, 2025
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All We Imagine as Light.

All That We Imagine As Light might be better known for the controversy over its exclusion from the Oscar nomination than for the film itself; India’s film board, which has a history of dubious choices in this regard, declined to submit it as the country’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, instead submitting a comedy called Laapataa (Lost) Ladies. That film did not make the Academy’s shortlist, further enraging supporters of All That We Imagine As Light, and leading to some recriminatory comments from the Indian film board, including some cheap shots at this film and its director, Payal Kapadia. Much of this is the result of the Academy’s one-film-per-country rule, of course, but after India also passed over RRR two years ago, the criticism of their selection process seems to have some merit. (You can rent All We Imagine As Light on iTunes, amazon, etc.)

The shame is that Kapadia’s feature-length debut is a lovely film, following two women from Mumbai out to the country, where they go to help a local woman who has been evicted from the flat where she has lived for over 20 years because she has no papers to prove her residency and developers are throwing her out. Prabha is a nurse whose husband via an arranged marriage now lives and works in Germany and hasn’t called her for over a year, while her roommate, the younger Anu, has a clandestine affair with a young Muslim man, Shiaz, which neither Anu’s Hindu family nor Shiaz’s would approve. Prabha’s colleague Manoj, a doctor at the hospital, is clearly interested in her, but she demurs because she’s married.

This is a leisurely film, one that sprinkles in some bits of daily life without fully explaining them or connecting them to the main story. Prabha receives a gift in the mail without a name attached, and while we might infer where it’s from, it simply doesn’t come up again. Once the two women follow their neighbor to the rural village where she’s returning, however, there is at least some tension, as Shiaz follows Anu to continue their rendezvous, and Prabha discovers what’s really going on behind her back.

The film has the coveted 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with 145 reviews, and it feels like a movie that critics should love. It has a simple story with a small set of characters and goes deep on the two main ones, allowing them to develop over the course of its two hours in a very natural fashion, with absolutely nothing extraordinary or unbelievable in the plot to break its spell. Yet beneath this ease is a precision in movement, direction, scene, even music, with songs by the late Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose estate granted Kapadia the rights to use her songs. It has the feeling of a model ship assembled in a bottle: It is such a small thing, yet the labor and patience required to put it together are evident if you just look for it.

That said, I’m probably a lot lower on All We Imagine as Light than most professional critics – I recognize the skill and the care taken to make it, but it is quite slow, and my unquiet mind was wandering a bit in the middle third or so. (Also, just watching it made me feel hot. I don’t know when exactly in the year it was filmed, but everyone looks very uncomfortable. I would not survive long in India, clearly.) I wanted to connect more with the two characters, but the film is demanding a little more of the audience than I could give. I recognize this is my issue, not the movie’s. It’s easy for me to say “this could have been 20 minutes shorter,” but when I offer that criticism, I usually have specific content I think the director or editor should have cut. Nothing here feels extraneous, though. Its pace is the natural result of its story, and it took just shy of two hours to tell it. Your mileage may vary.

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→ February 27, 2025
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Memoir of a Snail.

Memoir of a Snail is almost too much of a bad thing: Its protagonist, Grace, suffers tragedy after tragedy in her life, confirming her fears about the world to the point that she’s left entirely alone as the film begins and she starts telling her life story. It is so beautifully told, however, that it holds itself together just long enough to get to the finish line, where it all comes together in an ending that brings hope with just a touch of sentiment. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Memoir of a Snail is the second full-length film from writer/director Adam Elliot, who apparently has a reputation for these sort of bleak stories. It follows Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), who we see as an adult at the beginning, watching her closest friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver), die of the most old age. Grace then steps outside to the garden, where she releases one of her pet snails, Sylvia, and then begins to tell the sad story of her sad life, from her birth with a cleft lip, for which other kids make fun of her for years, to when she and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) became orphans – their mother died giving birth to them – and then their miserable lives in separate foster families. Gilbert ends up with an evangelical Christian family near Perth, where he’s forced to work on the family orchard and to speak in tongues while praying, while Grace ends up with a pair of nudist hippies who eventually just abandon her. Her life gets worse and worse, other than her friendship with the eccentric Pinky, who buried two husbands in tragicomic circumstances, but has a devil-may-care approach to life and is determined to have a good time.

Pinky’s death is, naturally, the spur that Grace needs to leave the house and go live her life for the first time, although how we get there is part of the magic of the film. There’s probably one tragedy too many – one of them definitely had me shout “enough!” at the screen – but there is so much exploration of Grace’s feelings that she ends up one of the best-developed characters in any film this year, live-action or animated. It also means that when she gets a happier ending, the film has earned it, even the one slightly implausible bit (which you will probably see coming) that makes her happiest of all of her new fortunes.

Elliotuses stop-motion animation in his films, with a style that naturally calls to mind Tim Burton’s work in the genre, with elements of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey in his characters’ appearances. They’re cute in a grotesque sort of way, especially Grace with her ridiculous snail-hat (it has two ping-pong balls on wires or pipe cleaners, painted as eyes) and Gilbert with his Harry Potter-ish hair. They’re weird, and that makes it easy to see why they’d be bullied and ostracized, and why they’d feel alone and scared of the greater world. It’s also easy to empathize with them, and root for them in their Dickensian circumstances, because he depicts them as real enough to keep them from becoming pathetic. Snook’s voice performance is also fantastic, so much so that she won Best Lead Actress at this year’s AACTA Awards, the Australian equivalent to the Oscars, with Weaver winning for Best Supporting Actress, both over actors who appeared in live-action films.

Best Animated Feature is the only category in this year’s Oscars where I’ve seen all of the nominees, and that’ll probably still be true on Sunday night. I expect Flow to win, as it won the Golden Globe and won the Best Animated Feature – Independent award at the Annies (the most significant awards for animated productions), but this isn’t even a close call; Flow is fine, but has no dialogue and very little story, just some beautiful animation work and a bunch of animals who turn out to secretly be civil engineers. It would be my second choice, with The Wild Robot third, Inside Out 2 second, and the very disappointing Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl last, because it just wasn’t funny at all.

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→ February 24, 2025
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Shot in secret in 2022-23, The Seed of the Sacred Fig was banned in Iran and its release abroad led to arrest warrants for the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, after which he and most members of the cast fled the country. It’s a nearly three-hour epic film that starts out as a political drama, morphs into a sort of psychological thriller, and ends up as almost an action film, as we follow a single family during the 2022-23 protests against the theocratic regime, unrest that takes this apparently quiet household and shatters its peace and the fragile mind of its patriarch.

Iman was a low-level investigator for the Islamic dictatorship that has ruled Iran since 1979, and as the film begins he’s been promoted to a more senior investigative role, one that will pay better, grant him better housing, and that also gives him a gun, invoking Chekhov’s rule. His family doesn’t know what he does for work at first, but he tells his wife Najmeh, and the two of them then have to explain to their two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, that they must be particularly rigid about following the laws, including wearing the hijab (which was at the root of the protests) and avoiding posting pictures of themselves on social media. Rezvan’s friend ends up injured by the police while the two are leaving a university building, and Najmeh helps patch the friend up briefly while getting her out of the house before Iman knows she’s been there, but this is just the undercard for what’s to come: The gun goes missing, and Iman assumes the culprit is in the house. That shifts the entire tenor of the movie to one that looked outward to the brutal police response to the protestors into one that looks inward at how Iman’s new job, where he is rubber-stamping dozens if not hundreds of executions per day, has warped his inner self and made him into a tyrant who will gladly repress the women under his command at the slightest provocation.

The fact that it was filmed in secret only underscores the movie’s broader themes of how authoritarian regimes destroy the fundamental bonds that hold us together, with family above all: They turn neighbors against neighbors and family members against family members. Iman has no reason to distrust or suspect his compliant wife or his daughters of anything until the government sends him home with a metaphor. He and his wife are both true believers in the regime and in their Islamic faith, while their daughters, who have access to social media and can see that the government is lying to them, want the same kind of freedoms that the protestors are fighting for. The conflict in their home mirrors the conflict in Iranian society, and when Iman goes around the bend and begins terrorizing his family after their address and his picture appear online, he resorts to increasingly harsh and inhumane tactics to force their obedience, with somewhat predictable consequences for everyone. The final moment and image are further loaded with symbolism, as the hollow foundation beneath one character’s feet gives way, arguing just how tenuous the power of a dictatorship truly is.

This is easily one of the best films I’ve seen from 2024, even if it drags a little in the final third, as Rasoulof seems less adept at managing the action sequences than he is at the psychological thiller bits; there’s a long section where several characters are chasing each other through some ruins, but you could easily put the Benny Hill music over it and it would work just fine. The shift from the macro lens to the micro one is just brilliant, as the script sets up the context with real footage from the protests, making especial note of just how much the violence came down against women (in a country that already is one of the most repressive in the world when it comes to women’s rights), before moving to the family drama, where it becomes increasingly clear that these three women are just serfs who exist at the whim of their father. It’s a brutal and unstinting look at Iranian society; no wonder the authoritarian clerics didn’t like it.

(I don’t think this film has a chance at the Best International Feature Film Oscar this year, for which it’s one of the five nominees, as I’m Still Here is also in that category and has a Best Picture nod as well, which probably means it will end up taking the spot everyone assumed would go to Emilia Perez before that film’s implosion in the last few weeks.)

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→ February 18, 2025
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Hard Truths.

Mike Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets & Lies was a breakthrough for the British writer-director, earning him Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay along with nods for both of its leads, including a then relatively unknown actress named Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The two reunited last year for Hard Truths, a film delayed several years by the pandemic, this time putting Jean-Baptiste in the lead role as quite possibly the literal Worst Person in the World in a story that just barely scratches the surface of why she is who she is. (You can rent Hard Truths now on Apple and Amazon.)

Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy Deacon, who we first see as she is obsessively cleaning her house, taking time out to scold and denigrate both her 22-year-old son Moses and her husband Curtley, both of whom seem unable or unwilling to defend themselves against her verbal onslaughts. She takes the same misanthropic attitude into the world, starting fights with a furniture store employee, other patrons in a grocery store, and, eventually, her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin). Chantelle first appears to be the opposite of Pansy, as she’s bubbly, outgoing, and trying to move forward where Pansy complains about likely imagined health ailments and uses them as excuses not to leave the house. Even Chantelle’s household is livelier; her two adult daughters live with her, and we see them acting silly and loving, where Pansy’s house is sterile and ruled by fear.

Most descriptions of Hard Truths describe Pansy as ‘depressed,’ but that’s not how the film depicts her; there is, at least, a hell of a lot more going on here. The script gives all sorts of little clues that maybe she’s anxious, or has a phobia of germs or dirt, or has OCD, or something else, but avoids any sort of diagnosis or other facile explanations for how she acts: The point is that this is who she is, not what a piece of paper might say. The only tangible cause we learn that might explain some of Pansy’s behavior is that her mother, Pearl, died five years earlier, and Pansy has still not processed or faced this. She has unresolved feelings about how her mother treated Chantelle differently, and the role Pansy was forced to play in the family once their father died. She fights Chantelle over the latter’s annual visit to their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day, using it as an excuse to belittle her son and husband for failing to acknowledge her on the holiday (which may not even be true, as it’s clear she’s not a reliable narrator). She’s also beset by nightmares that are never explained, another subtle hint that there is much going on below the surface that we can’t see – as the bromide goes, you never know what someone else is going through. It doesn’t excuse the vicious things she says to strangers or family members, or the way she responds to innocuous comments as if they are hidden insults or provocations for fights, but it underscores that even a seemingly irredeemable, one-note character may be more complex than they first appear to be.

Hard Truths is more a character study than a traditional film, as the narrative is slight and there is very little resolution for anyone, certainly not for Pansy. Chantelle and her daughters have their own struggles and obstacles – we see slivers of everyone’s lives even though Pansy’s life is the dominant plot strand – but they muddle through, and they’ll likely continue to do so. Both of her daughters have pretty lousy days at work when we first see them, yet when they meet for drinks afterwards, neither lets the setbacks affect them – perhaps confiding too little in a sibling, a person who is likely to accept you for who you are and will probably take your side in any conflict, but better than taking their anger over injustice in one area and lashing out at someone else as a result. The result of the focus on character is that this is a movie where very little happens, so the main cathartic moment is expository rather than explanatory. That won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, whether you want Pansy to get her comeuppance (she doesn’t) or turn around and apologize to everyone (also, she doesn’t) or realize that the real treasure was the friends she made along the way (I’ll let you figure that one out). It’s such a well-written story of unpleasantness, with Jean-Baptiste – who really should have earned a Best Actress nod over Karla Sofía Gascón – giving such an intense portrayal of a woman whose inner spring is so tightly wound inside that the slightest touch makes her explode, that the meager plot didn’t matter much to me in the end, even if I perhaps wanted a little more in the resolution.

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