Category: Uncategorized

I’ve seen and reviewed all ten movies nominated for Best Picture this year, and from worst to best, here are my rankings with links to each individual review:

10. F1
9. Frankenstein
8. Train Dreams
7. Sinners
6. The Secret Agent
5. Marty Supreme
4. Sentimental Value
3. Hamnet
2. One Battle After Another
1. Bugonia

A noticeable pattern was the surprising pervasiveness of arthouse aesthetics. Other than Marty Supreme and F1, these ten movies feature little in the way of “normal” stories; viewers hoping for familiar characters and formulaic plots will be disappointed. I was happy to see this, but an abundance of risks also means a subset of misses, and there are several big misses on this list. Train Dreams, Sinners, and Frankenstein, especially, bite off more, structurally, than they can chew, leaving themselves open to the most dangerous question for character-deficient cinema: who cares?

Thematically, the films are diverse, but I detect one curious through-line: the hidden emotions of men. The drama of every film on this list except for Sinners, Marty Supreme, and One Battle After Another hinges on a late discovery that a previously inward male character (or monster) has untold depths of feeling. Is this an attempt at image rehabilitation post-#metoo? An attempt to rouse a generation of jaded, isolative young men? Is it, now that Trump and his boorish minions are back on television daily, a form of wish fulfillment?

The op-ed writers can sort that out. I’ll conclude, meanwhile, by hailing the best film of the year: Bugonia. By all accounts, it has no chance of winning the prize, but that might be because it hits too close to home for Hollywood: the maniacal anti-aging regimen of Emma Stone’s character, for example, could be Stone’s actual, real-life routine. One Battle After Another, the odds-on favorite and a good film in its own right, casts all of us as dormant revolutionaries, and maybe we are. But only Bugonia knows that it’s not just the economy and government that have been plundered; it’s our minds, too, which is why the world will watch the Oscars today with—like every gathering of the rich and famous now—an unshakeable skepticism, a tremendous disconnectedness, a kind of hatred, even. The bees are leaving; people are laying face-down, lifeless; someone must be to blame. And our celebrities, beaming for the cameras, sparkling on the red carpet, are giving exactly the wrong performance.

—-Jim Andersen

One Battle After Another finds Paul Thomas Anderson back in the literary world of Thomas Pynchon: underground revolutionaries, secret societies, lovable drifters, juvenile gags. It’s another win for one of the most consistent directors of our generation, although it falls a bit short of his masterworks: Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and Inherent Vice (the stronger Pynchon trip). Anderson loves his revolutionaries more than he loves revolution, which puts him at odds with Pynchon and privileges comedy, not social theorizing, as the movie’s dominant mode. But it’s hard not to enjoy these freedom fighters quarreling, worrying, and scheming their way out of trouble—and for those wanting a deeper viewing, it’s there. Like Kubrick, for example, Anderson zeroes in on the family as a downstream mirror for tyranny; the revolution only resumes once Dad stops being such a hardass. And like the Cohen brothers, Anderson portrays his anti-hippie as a touchy sheep in wolf’s clothing; not since Jeffrey Lebowski has a conservative villain been this pathetic. The real wolves—rich racists in Lacoste polos—are formidable, but even they can’t see that history isn’t linear: they’re on top now, but they might be surprised at what’s in store for them just over the next dip in the road.

Sentimental Value is the latest in the “film within a film” setup, and one of the most interesting. As usual, a troubled artist plots his magnum opus while his relationships with cast, crew, and family reflect back on each other in disturbing and funny ways. Birdman, Drive My Car, and Synecdoche, New York come to mind—excellent company, in my view—but this film plays its premise with a straighter face; one could even call it more serious. It’s certainly more emotional: it knows that children’s grievances against their parents will never be answered, met with eternal dodges and deflections, the slippery pride of former authority. (“Everyone’s mad at Dad, huh?” pipes Stellan Skarskgaard, berated by his daughters for a lifetime of negligence.) It also knows what the family’s deceased mother, a therapist, probably knew: that reliving the past requires both authenticity and distance. When a filmmaker tries to shoot a family story in his childhood home, things go haywire; when he renovates the house and casts his family as renditions of their own ancestors, he strikes artistic—and therapeutic—gold. The opening narration of this deft, layered family study, then, is a lie: houses aren’t people; things and places only displace wounds—offering only the distraction of their sentimental value.

Train Dreams is a melancholy tale about an ordinary man and his ordinary life. Trees, dogs, wives, sunsets, sad faces—there’s your movie. Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life is the model, but that film is tied together by complex theological wrestling; this and other Malick knockoffs, like 2020’s Nomadland, won’t touch that aspect, so their images remain stubbornly themeless: with no unifying philosophical core, shots of leaves are—just leaves. And there are a lot of leaves in this movie. A more apt comparison, then, may be Forrest Gump: the hero is a simpleton, and the movie wants to confer mythic status on his simplicity, to honor it as a forgotten, unappreciated wisdom; as with all things folksy, overthinking is the enemy—we’ve made life too dang complicated! The corollary to this worldview, though, and its fatal weakness in the age of technology, is skepticism toward actual wisdom, the learned kind, the kind that can be articulated in words or even actions. Neither come easy to Robert, so we’re left with only the space to ponder life, not the tools to do so; the movie is derelict in its responsibilities. Its one insight—which arrives, like everything in this film, through narration, not organic depiction—is that the world is beautiful. Granted. What else ya got?

The Secret Agent is an unsatisfying movie by design. The tale, ultimately, of a nation’s new generation sifting through records of its gravest modern chapter, its uneven narrative flow and tonal detachment mirror the patchwork of a curious, frustrated historian. I admire these structural risks, and the craft is admirable all around, but a viewing challenge like this needs intellectual payoff, and the bounty here is just too weak. Its main lesson is that the study of historical evils, drudgery and all, toughens us up, such that we might stand down similar evils in the present. The point is well taken, but it’s slight, and it’s been made many times before, including in last year’s I’m Still Here, another Brazilian film that covered such similar ground that the two films could pass for remakes of one another. The lesson is also a tad self-serving. The secret weapon against fascism, you ask? Slow, fragmented, historically accurate stories. You’re welcome!

Hamnet is the story of Shakespeare’s fictional wife, Agnes, a devotee to nature and all its powers, who sinks into depression after the death of her son. She’s resentful of her husband, too, whose city business kept him away while it occurred. (Men and their little projects—they’ll never understand.) But wait: William’s new creation has the town talking, and when Agnes witnesses its familiarly-named protagonist struggling with and accepting death, she knows what it’s really about. Maybe there’s not such a gulf between the endless rhythms of nature and the timeless compassion of great art—and, phew, maybe husbands have feelings after all. Of course, to the extent that this movie actually believes that Hamlet is a convoluted, masculine attempt to grieve, it’s wrong. But notice, as Hamlet dies, the audience’s reaction. Not only Agnes but everyone reaches out to comfort him: watching this grand tragedy, they all feel something; they all know, as she does, what it’s really about, and they’re all wrong, each in different ways. The masterpieces hold everything and everyone; no interpretation has authority; like nature, they belong to all of us. A celebration of that shouldn’t be missed, so I place this film among the year’s best—an emotional and meditative modern achievement.

One of the worst Best Picture nominees in recent years, F1 is less a movie than a feature-length commercial meant to drum up American interest in Formula One racing. And even in this regard, it’s dishonest—a wild misrepresentation of the sport that features drivers intentionally crashing into one another without consequence, cars launching into the woods and bursting into flames, lady engineers banging their drivers after discussing aerodynamics, and more. It’s like calling a movie PGA, then showing Happy Gilmore. But I can begrudgingly tolerate sensationalism; what really rankles me about this production is its corporate complacency: even its cliches, which are many, function not to lower the bar for accessibility—their usual and understandable role (if not for an Oscar contender)—but to give the movie a fake reason for existing beyond the obvious one: absorbing sponsorship cash. While movies about rogue bad boys are always paradoxically the most predictable, rarely has the irony extended this unbearably into basic integrity: after spending two plus hours emblazoned with a dozen brand names, vrooming past signs for Qatar Airways, Brad Pitt concludes with the line: “It’s not about the money.” The driver doth protest too much.

The Phoenician Scheme is another masterstroke from Wes Anderson, his third in five years (The French Dispatch; Asteroid City). Excluding Scorsese, he’s our greatest living American director, and when it’s all said and done, I think he’ll be the more important artist.

This latest output is a tad more subdued than his previous two, but it shares their meticulous commitment to style—detractors be damned—and their fabulous subject: the outrageousness of our inflated self-perceptions. His variations on Cervantes (always complete with their own Sancho Panzas) are a tonic to our fantasy-obsessed popular cinema, which keeps bombarding us with the message, better suited for children, that we can do anything. We can’t, of course, so I scratch my head at those who accuse Anderson of lacking humanity: he, more than any director, forces humanity upon us, reminding us, usually comedically, that we’re not the superheroes or celebrities that we’ve made ourselves out to be. The Phoenician Scheme winds down in a restaurant backroom, a single lightbulb above, a deck of cards on the table, smoke in the air, egos finally dissolved… Wes Anderson, robotic? Watch the movie again.

–Jim Andersen

One can view the Mission Impossible film series as a recurring effort to entertain audiences while making the least amount of logical sense possible—and of all eight entries, perhaps none stretches the gap as far as The Final Reckoning. Things start out uncertainly: the movie’s first half is strangely devoid of action, its only seeming purpose to add, via never-ending exposition, myriad layers of incoherence and inconsistency to the exciting things that are about to happen in the second half. Why, exactly, does The Entity want to destroy the world and hide in a South African bunker? Why would the IMF risk allowing it into the bunker, when they know that, otherwise, it would never carry out its nuclear threats? Why does Gabriel flee the bunker when Ethan has the MacGuffin he desperately wants—and why does Ethan not simply give it to Gabriel in midair, considering that he originally wanted Gabriel to have it? Why are they trying to kill each other on planes when they supposedly want the same outcome, and the destruction of either’s MacGuffin would mean catastrophic defeat for both?

But none of this matters. Not even the inexplicable first part of the film—an hour of my life sunken like the Sebastopol submarine—matters. Thanks to the reliably awesome action centerpieces provided (eventually) by Tom Cruise and company, it’ll remain a guilty pleasure for years to come.

–Jim Andersen

I’m Still Here is an intimate, subtle film about the emotional toll parents absorb on behalf of their children—especially in times of danger and violence. Fernanda Torres’ performance as Eunice, the wife of a former congressman murdered by Brazil’s military dictatorship, is the best I’ve seen this year. It’s a performance that combines passion with restraint: when the news of her character’s husband’s death inevitably arrives, she doesn’t fall into hysterics; after all, the kids are right around the corner. And when she announces that the family must move to Sao Paulo—a signal to the older children that their father may never come home—she continues with a heroic, “Pass the salt.” Sheltering her kids from horrible realities, though, has its price: later scenes reveal that, while they’ve grown up to be successful and well-adjusted, Eunice will never move past her husband’s disappearance—that it was, tragically, the central event of her life. People are not replaceable; families are not rebuildable. It’s apolitical messages like these that often make the most powerful political statements—in this case, a timely reminder to oppose those who would devalue human life from perches of leadership.

–Jim Andersen