Movies Up Close

It’s Oscar Sunday, and Movies Up Close’s annual rankings of the Best Picture Nominees are here. This year, I shortened my review format so that each review/analysis consists of only a paragraph of 200 words or less (except for Dune, which I wrote a full commentary about earlier this year). Each ranked entry is linked to its review on this site. Quite a few of these contain spoilers; you’ve been warned.

As usual, after the rankings I’ve included some brief commentary about the field as a whole.

Without further ado:

10. Emilia Pérez
9. Wicked
8. A Complete Unknown
7. Dune: Part 2
6. Conclave
5. Nickel Boys
4. The Substance
3. The Brutalist
2. I’m Still Here
1. Anora

Last year’s Best Picture field, as I wrote then, was maybe the strongest since the expansion of the field to ten nominees. This year’s, though, is one of the weakest. I didn’t extract any significant takeaways from movies 6-10 on this list, except, perhaps, in the case of #10, that one may escape justice for mass murder by switching their gender. Movies 7-9 simply lack the ambition for this kind of recognition: calling them crowd pleasers would be fair enough, but, just like people pleasers, you’ll get sick of them soon. (Where are all the Barbie stans now, huh?)

On the plus side, the top three on this list offer durable, challenging viewing experiences. I had to think hard about which of the three to award the top spot; they’re each deserving in different ways. But the intensities of I’m Still Here and The Brutalist, while formidable, taper as their runtimes go. Only Anora climbs in emotion throughout, culminating in this year’s most remarkable scene: a beaten down woman receiving perhaps the first kindness of her life—certainly the first from a man—a proof of goodness in the world, like Willy Wonka’s gobstopper, except Ani, closing her fingers around it, has, like the rest of us, no chocolate factory to bequeath; not even her body will do; she has only her own kindness to offer in return, which will never and can never be enough: for the first time ever, the transaction will never be finished, the rates never established, the money never counted. Breaking down in the closing seconds, she sees the gargantuan responsibility ahead of her—but this is life, or at least life outside the vicious influence of the ultra-rich, from which, like Ani, we would all do well to escape.

–Jim Andersen

Nickel Boys is an unusual adaptation with some bold directorial decisions. Not all of them worked for me, but originality is hard to come by, and this film about an atypical subject—friendship between young boys—told in atypical fashion—via first-person camerawork, as usually reserved for the likes of Michael Myers—stands as a welcome curiosity among the Best Picture field. My appreciation for it has grown in the two days since I watched it. In one scene, for example, the protagonist readies to receive a vicious beating, but the movie, instead of depicting it, cuts to a series of old photos of beaten boys, emphasizing the shared rather than the personal nature of his experience. I didn’t like that choice while I was watching, but now, I see that it was correct: this isn’t a story about violence, like 12 Years a Slave; it’s a story about memories: how the traumatic ones hold us down, and how the good ones—the ones about the people we love—lift us up. The film leaves things out, yes, but only because we’ve forgotten them. Even poor Turner, excavating his damaged mind, can only uncover, when it comes to the worst horrors, those cold, clinical photographs.

–Jim Andersen

I’ve now encountered the story of Wicked in its book, stage, and movie iterations, and none of them have made any sense to me. I can admire the new film for its set design, choreography, musical performances, and CGI visuals; unfortunately, these achievements are shackled to the latest rendition of the bizarre narrative that reimagines the hag from The Wizard of Oz as a bullied-teen-turned-leftist-freedom-fighter. In some scenes, a theme of intolerance emerges, suggesting serious designs. But the bulk of the runtime instead bops between random spectacles, finally hardening into an inscrutable mishmash of Harry Potter, High School Musical, and Jim Carrey’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! An intriguing opening, for example, promises a philosophical examination into whether wickedness is inborn or the result of one’s environment. But no such thing materializes: major ensuing sequences include two narcissists falling in love, a bookish girl receiving a lesson in attracting boys, and the casting of an ancient spell that makes monkeys fly. So…it was environment, I guess?

–Jim Andersen

The Substance isn’t, I suppose, very good—but dammit, I liked it anyway. A fable about the perils of remaking oneself to meet the wants of others, it aims to be a feminist Being John Malkovich, and in a smattering of memorable scenes, it succeeds. Unfortunately, the bulk of the film lacks discipline, judgment, and the basic plausibility that even sci-fi and horror movies are expected to provide. (Does this woman have any family, friends, or acquaintances?) I wish, too, that it would have opened itself up more broadly as a relatable tale for media-pressured women (and men) everywhere; instead, as its ill-advised finale makes disturbingly clear, its true interest is in the singular experience of aging Hollywood starlets. The Substance will therefore be remembered best in bits: my memory is already filtering the overlong narrative into a few compelling YouTube clips, generously forgetting the plentiful mistakes that douse the complete work’s Kaufman-esque aspirations and leave it an ugly, graceless, zombified resurrection of classics like Sunset Boulevard and, especially, All About Eve. But hey: it has those bits, doesn’t it?

–Jim Andersen

Conclave is a screenplay-driven film that, while smart, disappears into an unfortunate valley between realism and zaniness. Cardinals don’t behave like this; no one seriously believes that they do. Yet director Edward Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan won’t quite relinquish the premise that, yes, actually, they do—so their creation has neither credibility nor artistic flourish. Had they freed themselves of the constraints of accuracy, we might have had something as fun as Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite; had they doubled down on realism, we might have had the majesty that the subject matter demanded—think Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. But they’ve done neither: they’ve given us The West Wing with popes. Indeed, this movie’s true Holy Spirit may be Aaron Sorkin, whose influence suffuses characters, wondrously, miraculously, with liberalist speeches so rhetorically sound as to ensure, even for an otherwise unremarkable tale, access to the kingdom of award season success.

–Jim Andersen