→ 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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→ January 25, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 1/25/25.

I had two posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, on the signings of Anthony Santander and Jurickson Profar. My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball will go live on Monday morning; the content is all written but I am still tweaking the final order.

At Paste, I reviewed the game Gnome Hollow, a medium-weight family game of tile placement, set collection, and some market selling, along with gnomes. I liked it but I would say I didn’t love it.

I did send a short newsletter out to subscribers earlier last week; you can subscribe here for free and get the next one, which I hope will go out Monday/Tuesday to go along with the unveiling of the top 100.

As the social media landscape has lurched to the right, I’m posting links on several sites but only posting other content or answering people on Bluesky, so if you want to interact with me that’s the spot.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Molly White writes in her newsletter, [citation needed], about Elon Musk’s and the right’s war on Wikipedia, a source of information they can’t easily control.
  • An independent journalist is going to trial over her coverage of the police response to a pro-Palestine protest at Portland State University. Alissa Azar has already been convicted once for her work, as the police claim she’s not a journalist, but “antifa.” How convenient for them.
  • Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, said that defending democracy would amount to “abandoning its central role as a source of impartial information.” His comments, made to a former colleague of his now at Semafor, didn’t go over well.
  • Just days after a (so-called?) cease-fire in Gaza, Israel launched a major offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin. La plus ça change.
  • I hate to link to the dumpster fire that is Politico, but they have a good piece on how RFK Jr. might try to remove vaccines from the market entirely if he’s confirmed as HHS Secretary. And his buddy Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) might vote for him. If you live in Rhode Island, you need to call Sen. Whitehouse’s office on Monday morning.
  • Florida has benefited from net positive migration for years because of its weather, cheap real estate, and general economic growth. That may be changing, as more people left Florida in 2023 than any other state but California. Climate change and the state’s hard-right shift are likely causes.
  • My former colleague at the Athletic Lindsey Adler has a newsletter of her own now after she left the Wall Street Journal, and her latest issue, “Ten Years in a Crumbling Industry,” is an excellent look at her decade in (mostly) digital media and what it’s been like to work in a field that’s imploding around you like the Hamptons sequence in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
  • Character.AI has been in the media more for problems with its software, including one user’s suicide after he became obsessed with a chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen, than for anything good about the product. So why would any media brand want to partner with them?
  • Jeb Lund writes at Truthdig that AOC ’28 needs to start now – not necessarily because she’ll win, but because she is the right person to stand front and center as the leader of the opposition to the President. And I agree. I don’t think concerns about “electability” are even relevant any more; Trump should have been the most unelectable candidate ever, and he just won his biggest victory yet.
  • At Slate, Dan Kois writes about The Straight Story, David Lynch’s most conventional film, and an absolute fucking masterpiece.
  • Outgoing President Joe Biden commuted the sentence Leonard Peltier, who spent nearly 50 years in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit. The federal government withheld a ballistics report that showed the fatal shots did not come from Peltier’s gun, and no witnesses identified him as the shooter.
  • Support our troops! But don’t give them houses! Oklahoma scrapped a plan by the Veterans Community Project to build tiny homes for homeless veterans in Oklahoma City after neighbors objected. I bet they stand for the anthem, though!
  • Elon Musk made a Nazi salute at the inauguration, twice. We know that’s what it was because neo-Nazis online said so – and they loved it.
  • Greg Sargent of the New Republic says that Trump allies are conceding they don’t have a huge “mandate” after all. I’m not sure this means much if no one is willing to stand up to him.
  • The New England Patriots set up a Bluesky account and the NFL told them to shut it down. Then the league announced a new partnership with Twitter.
  • The Columbia Journalism Review has a story on how the White House press corps is looking forward to a second Trump term. It’s the most effective way I can think of to make someone hate the media. The people they spoke to do not care who’s hurt or what the long-term effects on the country might be, as long as their individual jobs are easier.
  • One of Trump’s barrage of executive orders tried to erase the existence of trans people. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake. No one benefits from this – certainly not the very women who such orders are supposed to protect, not as their rights to basic medical care are also under assault.
  • Another order froze pretty much all business at the NIH, which is going to seriously impact critical scientific research on things like cancer treatments and disease prevention. NIH, NSF, and other federal agencies fund all kinds of research into medicine, mental health, and other areas of science that have helped keep the American economy among the world’s strongest and driven continued improvements in global health. That’s all at risk now.
  • The American Association of University Professors put out a statement called “Against Anticipatory Obedience.” Do not comply in advance. It’s not hard to remember.
  • We have a new Fabio Lopiano (Merv, 3 Ring Circus) game up on Kickstarter, called Baghdad: The City of Peace. I love Lopiano’s games – they’re medium-heavy but manageable – and this one looks like it’ll have great art similar to that of Merv, which I own and have played just once but kept because it’s so gorgeous.
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→ January 7, 2025
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Kneecap.

Kneecap tells the story, loosely, of the founding of the popular Irish-language rap trio of the same name, with the three members playing themselves. It’s mostly fictional and entirely hilarious. (It’s on Netflix in the U.S.)

The band Kneecap has risen to significant prominence in both their native Northern Ireland and in Ireland over the last decade, but this biopic blends truth with fiction, although writer/director Rich Peppiatt told NPR that the wilder stuff is the truth and the “mundane” stuff is fabricated. The two MCs switch between Irish and English, between pro-Republican and pro-Irish language activism and rhymes about drinking and drugs, rapping over beats that draw more from the golden age of hip-hop than anything in the last 30 years of American rap. Their second album, Fine Art, featured guest spots from Fontaines D.C. vocalist Grian Chatten and British rapper Jelani Blackman, and the song “3CAG” became a top 10 hit on Ireland’s pop chart.

Kneecap’s script creates some structure around the group, from member Naoise’s father being an ex-Republican paramilitary who faked his death to avoid arrest to a story about how the two rappers connected with their schoolteacher DJ. The throughline, and the real heart of the film, is the rapid, organic rise in popularity that came from their live gigs and a protest campaign that got one of their first songs played on an Irish-language radio station across the island. It has some of the trappings of classic up-from-obscurity music biopics, but avoids many of the tropes of the genre – the drug use is almost entirely comic, rather than leading to some sort of tragedy or downfall; the band doesn’t break up only to come together at the end; there’s a love interest that doesn’t divide the band or otherwise derail them.

The trio’s ascent has been rapid enough that the screenplay instead layers on a political story, from Naoise’s father, played with brilliant understatement by Michael Fassbender, to a Northern Irish police officer who believes they’re dangerous activists, to run-ins with a group called Radical Republicans Against Drugs. Nearly all of this is made up for the movie, and it’s just about all funny even when there’s a serious subtext like the suppression of native Irish language and culture in British-ruled Ulster. The three members of Kneecap are natural performers, to the point where I thought for much of the film that DJ Próvaí was being played by an actor when he’s just playing himself.

The Irish Film & Television Academy submitted Kneecap as the country’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, and it made the December shortlist of 15 titles. Only one Irish film has ever made the final list of nominations, 2022’s The Quiet Girl (which is fantastic), but Kneecap appears to have a real shot to become the second, and I’d be thrilled if it means more people seek this movie out. It’s a riot, and it’s something novel – it’s not a straight biopic, it’s not a parody or a mockumentary, and it’s about a specific culture that was mostly new to me (I mean, I’ve watched Derry Girls). And because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, or seriously at all, the underlying theme of pride in one’s culture and language is far more effective than it would have been if they’d played it straight. It’s not going to beat Emilia Perez for the Oscar, but it’s a way better film.

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→ December 3, 2024
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A Real Pain.

Jesse Eisenberg has come into plenty of acclaim as an actor, but A Real Pain, his second turn as a director and writer might herald an even brighter future on that side of the camera. He co-stars in this taut, funny, thoughtful film with Kieran Culkin, who gets the better character here and plays the absolute hell out of it, relegating Eisenberg to straight-man status for large stretches of the story, as Culkin seizes the film by the throat and refuses to let go.

The two men play cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), who meet up at an airport at the start of the film as they embark on a weeklong tour of Poland that is focused on the history of Polish Jews, including a visit to a concentration camp, after which the two will peel off on their own and visit the house where their recently deceased grandmother grew up. Both were close to her, but Benji was especially so, and he has struggled to cope with her death. The two form a classic odd couple, as David is successful, straitlaced, anxious, and extremely worried about Benjy; while Benjy is outspoken, charming, unbounded, and seems to lack a purpose in life.

The two are joined on a tour by the recently divorced Marsha (Jennifer Grey), a man who fled the Rwandan genocide as a boy and later converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan), and a somewhat older Jewish couple with an ancestor from Poland who came to the U.S. well before World War II (Daniel Oreskes & Liza Sadovy). The tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), isn’t Jewish, for which he seems to apologize in every other sentence, and he takes his job as guide extremely seriously.

Benjy is the smoke bomb thrown in the middle of the group, as he swears constantly, asks uncomfortable questions, and generally speaks his mind even in situations where decorum might call for him to say less. He’s the conscience of the story, though, saying what needs to be said, even if his delivery could use some work. David, of course, is appalled by much of his cousin’s behavior – including Benjy smuggling cannabis into Poland – but also envies Benjy’s apparently carefree attitude and the way that other people gravitate so much more strongly to his cousin, something that’s especially apparent as the two men say goodbye to the tour group to go to their grandmother’s hometown.

The visit to the Majdanek concentration camp, which fleeing Nazi forces failed to destroy as Soviet troops approached, also provides Eisenberg with one of his strongest scenes as director. The imagery is so potent that it requires very little dialogue, and you would expect these people to be nearly silent in their discomfort, horror, grief, and so on. The shots of the tourists walking by the gas chamber are brief, but so strong, and when it’s followed by James’s explanation that the blue stains on the walls are the residues of the hydrogen cyanide gas used to murder Jews and other inmates at the camp, it ties back somberly to something Benjy said earlier to the group that at the time might have seemed histrionic. The script ends up validating Benjy many times over, without exactly excusing some of his more boorish actions.

Culkin is on another level here, way beyond the solid performances he gave on Succession; Benjy is far more interesting and nuanced than Roman, who was an entitled and often gross little prat, and didn’t have a lot of redeeming qualities or even a good reason for why he was the way he was. Benjy is such a rich, intelligently written character, and Culkin plays him perfectly, making it clear why he is the life of the party while also showing that that’s something of a façade. He’s much better than Eisenberg, who plays that character he nearly always plays, the nebbish, fast-talking guy who doesn’t seem to have feelings; there is one scene, at a restaurant, where Eisenberg gets the floor, and we finally see inside David, and the film could probably have used a little more of that. Sharpe, who was so good in Giri/Haji and very good in The White Lotus, is excellent in a smaller role, nailing his interactions with Benjy so that you feel his discomfort and understand the evolution of his reactions over the course of the tour.

The only film I’ve seen in this cycle that was better than this is Anora, and that’s largely because that film is more ambitious; A Real Pain is tight and trim at 90 minutes and wastes none of it, doing what it set out to do and dropping you back at the airport before you know what hit you. Culkin seems like a lock to get a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and I really hope this ends up with a Best Picture nod or, at worst, a Best Original Screenplay nomination for Eisenberg. It’s better than Conclave and so much better than Emilia Pérez, just to name two movies that have better current odds for a Best Picture nod. I can not imagine I’ll see ten better films from 2024 than this.

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→ November 26, 2024
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Blitz.

Steve McQueen’s Blitz is the Oscar-winning director’s first feature film since the underrated 2018 film Widows, which, among other things, introduced some filmgoers to the scene-stealing actress Cynthia Erivo. While McQueen has a knack for handling tough subject matter and building tremendous tension in his films, Blitz suffers from an unusually stolid approach, without strong characters to anchor it or to balance out some stilted dialogue. (It’s streaming on Apple TV+, which you can also get through Amazon.)

The main story arc of Blitz follows George (Elliot Heffernan), the young son of single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan), at the beginning of the bombing of London in World War II. Rita chooses to evacuate him, but George decides to jump off the train to the countryside and try to make his way back home. The film then drops him in one situation after another to demonstrate, Zelig-like, various actual events from the war (like the flooding of Balham Tube station) or to allow the film to make some social commentary (especially since George’s father was Black). It’s almost picaresque in style, with far fewer comic elements, as George goes from peril to peril, while the film occasionally flashes back in time or shifts to show us Rita working in a factory or, too late in the film, learning that he’s gone missing.

The plot of Blitz is packed, which makes it so hard to fathom how it could feel so little urgency. There are individual scenes where George and/or others are in mortal danger, but he’s obviously going to make it out of each one of these jams, and the film doesn’t really invest enough time in George’s character to make something more interesting out of these scenes – such as wondering how he’ll figure out how to get away from a kidnapper. (The answer to that is also not very interesting.)

The whole movie seems to happen at arm’s length – we don’t get to know any characters very well, not George, not Rita, not her father (Paul Weller, better known as the leader of The am), not anyone. There’s a big scene in a restaurant with a band playing, with a couple of Black singers and an all-white audience; we don’t know any of these people and they’re not named, so when a bomb hits and kills them all, it feels like documentation, not an actual loss. It’s all the worse because this is based closely on another actual event: The Café de Paris was a major theatre club in London that was bombed in 1941, killing 34 people (but not everyone), including the bandleader Ken “Snakehips” Johnson. In Blitz, it’s used as a prop, as George ends up helping loot the corpses, not as a commemoration of the loss of lives.

This pattern of fictionalizing a series of real yet disconnected events from the Blitz hits a low with the character Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a Yoruba ARP Warden who finds and befriends George. Based on Ita Ekpenyon, a real Nigerian man who served as an ARP Warden because at 46 he was too old to fight, Ife delivers a speech in a shelter when a white couple shows their prejudice against an Indian family. This is loosely based on something Ekpenyon did, but in the film, it is so abrupt that it feels false – we have no reason to think Ife is this strong a person, and he disappears from the film soon afterwards, leaving the impression that he was there just to deliver those few lines. (The dialogue here is so awkward that I thought the whole thing must be fictional, only to learn after watching the film that it was based on actual events.)

Ronan is a decorated actress for good reason, and might even get some award nominations this year for her role in The Outrun, but she’s wasted here on a character who doesn’t have a whole lot of definition to her. Heffernan is the only actor who gets much to work with, and to his credit, he’s quite credible, never simpering or pathetic, and sometimes even convincing you he’s a little snot who should be sent to bed without his pudding. There are a few cameos here beyond Weller – Stephen Graham shows up as a Faginesque leader of a group of looters – but no one has enough screen time to do much beyond mug for the camera.

If I sound disappointed, well, yeah, I was. I loved Widows, and having visited the fantastic Churchill War Rooms in London in 2022, I was very interested in the film’s subject and time period. Unfortunately, this is a disjointed effort that is salvaged a little because it’s shot so well and because Heffernan is pretty compelling as the one consistent presence. I’ve found at least four reviews (the NY Times, the BBC, the NY Post, and the Harvard Crimson) that referred to the movie as “Dickensian” or otherwise said it could be compared to Dickens, but I don’t think that’s a compliment. That style of novel, where a character bounces from adventure to misadventure and meets a cast of eccentrics along the way, isn’t well suited to serious material. Grafting a bunch of deadly events on to it means that the audience never has time to process what’s happened, and never builds any emotional connection to or investment in the people on screen. McQueen is capable of much better.

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→ November 21, 2024
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Anora.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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