When contemplating a sequel, especially one that comes out two decades after the original, you must ask yourself the following questions:

• Is it better than the original?
• Is it even in the same league as the original?
• Does it make a good case for its own existence?
• Does it give us a chance to spend time with some characters we’ve grown attached to over the years?

Regarding The Devil Wears Prada 2, my answers are, in order: No. Also no. Not really. And yes.
The original The Devil Wears Prada, which came out in 2006 and followed the adventures of the hopelessly unstylish (at first) young journalist Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) facing off against the formidable Anna Wintour proxy, Runway magazine editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), has turned into one of the quintessential comfort films. It’s the kind of film you can watch over and over again—and probably recite some parts by heart. It’s aspirational in a variety of ways: A young woman finding her voice. A formidable woman softening a bit, while demonstrating why she’s so formidable. A snooty but loving guncle (everyone’s favorite heterosexual gay man, Stanley Tucci). An arch nemesis turned reluctant ally (Emily Blunt). And fashion, all that glorious fashion.

Much has happened in the ensuing 20 years. Everyone agrees that Andy’s boyfriend (Adrian Grenier, who doesn’t appear in the sequel) was a dud. Miranda Priestly’s “cerulean blue” monologue—this film’s answer to A Few Good Men’s “you can’t handle the truth”—has gone viral. Oh, and print media is, let’s just say, not the powerhouse it used to be.

As the sequel starts, Andy is an award-winning investigative journalist whose newspaper has just folded. Meanwhile, Miranda has a crisis of her own—she wrote glowingly about a fashion brand that was revealed to use sweat shops and is now the subject of memes that vilify her, depicting her with a Pinocchio nose or dressed as a fast food worker with a speech bubble that reads, “You want lies with that?” (Films notoriously have a hard time replicating meme culture.)

Somehow, Andy is hired to be a feature writer at Runway magazine in the hopes that her famous journalistic integrity will send the right message to readers.

When Andy bounds into Miranda’s office on her first day back at Runway, she’s excited to finally be on the same footing as her old boss—indeed, she assumes that it was Miranda who put in the good word for her. Instead, Miranda turns to Tucci’s Nigel and says, “Who is this?…Do I know her?” (It’s a funny, albeit lazy joke.) And just for a second, all of Andy’s poise and confidence is out of the door. Briefly, she’s that gawky college grad wearing Marshalls sweater sets.

Part of the fun of the original was witnessing Andy’s makeover, but in this film, she’s fabulous from the jump, dressed in fitted blazers, oversized sunglasses, and stiletto heels. (Nigel quips, “Oh, look what TJ Maxx dragged in,” when he first sees her, but no one’s buying it.)

As mentioned, the dud of a boyfriend is out of the picture, but they give Andy an almost insultingly perfunctory love interest, an architect played by Patrick Brammall. (If anyone can explain his overarching role in the film, other than to remind us that Andy is still a catch—duh—please let me know.)

The film’s crisis, essentially, is how can they save Runway in a world of venture capitalists who buy up publications just to cut staff, reduce coverage, or worse. If in the original film Runway was all-powerful in its influence, reputation, and glamour—now it’s just a little sad.

Justin Theroux has a funny turn as Benji Barnes, a Jeff Bezos type who is dating Blunt’s Emily. He’s depicted as a big nerd who has been given the glam treatment by his stylish new girlfriend (who can’t get enough of his money but clearly despises him).

All the leads are still in good form—both in terms of performance and appearance (they are remarkably well preserved). Streep, in particular, makes great hay of Priestly having to cut back on things—how dare they make Miranda hang up her own coat (sacré bleu!) and fly coach (the horror!).

This is clearly one of those cases where all the famous people were game to do a sequel so they built a script to make it happen. Although only two writers are credited—Aline Brosh McKenna and Lauren Weisberg—it has the distinct feel of having been written by committee. The film is competently directed by David Frankel, who also did the original, although there are a few too many shots of Andy striding quickly through New York traffic for my taste.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a chance to hang out with our old friends and see some great clothing—and little else. For some, that will be enough.

Sometimes you’re glad a film was made simply because it allows a great actor to be great. Such is the case for The Christophers, Steven Soderbergh’s film about the relationship between an aging art icon and a forger, starring a wonderfully game Ian McKellen as disgraced painter Julian Sklar.

Julian is a feast of a character—prideful, scabrous, witty, and performatively cruel—and McKellen leaves no crumbs. It’s hard to distinguish between Julian’s public persona—first he was an enfant terrible of the art world, then a universally acknowledged master, then a canceled “Great Man,” and finally a professional grouch—and his private one. The lines have clearly blurred.

After his cancelation, which is alluded to but never specified (although hardly shocking since Julian says and does all sorts of inappropriate things), he retreated to his home studio—a massive duplex in London filled with canvases (some empty, some half-finished, some complete), palates, books, empty clawfoot bath tubs, dress forms, lamps, tapestries, and all manner of clutter (kudos to production designer Antonia Lowe for creating this exquisitely lived in and character-revealing home). He stopped painting, instead earning a (disreputable) living by doing Cameos (slapping on a beret, dropping a bon mot or two, and saying “happy birthday” or what have you) and acting as the Simon Cowell of the art world on a reality TV competition show called Art Fight. He pretends to be disdainful of it all—the consumerism of the art world, the shallowness of reality TV, the ludicrousness of those Cameos—but clearly part of him delights in those things, too.

Julian has two adult children—Barnaby (James Corden) and Sallie (Jessica Gunning)—whom he despises. Understandably so, they’re insufferable, but it’s hard to tell which came first—his disdain or their awfulness.

It’s their idea to hire a forger named Lori (Michaela Coel) to complete a series of paintings called the “Christophers.” These were Julian’s most successful works, made when he came out of the closet and fell in love with a young man, who eventually broke his heart. The third series of the Christophers has remained unfinished. Knowing that their father is old and in poor health, the siblings concoct a plan: Lori will apply for a job as Julian’s assistant while secretly finding and completing the unfinished works; then they will be “discovered” in the attic and sold for millions upon Julian’s death.

The gimlet-eyed Lori has a relationship with both Sallie and Julian. She was a classmate of Sallie’s at art school—we find out that Sallie made one feeble attempt herself to complete the Christophers and failed (we eventually see the laughably bad work)—and knows of her mediocrity. She also has an aversion to Julian, but we don’t find out why until later. She reluctantly accepts the gig.

Making her way through the (intentionally) complicated front door of Julian’s home and up the noisy staircase, she applies for the job as assistant. Mostly, she just listens as Julian holds court—“if you’re an artist I don’t want to know about it,” he says, while getting her name wrong (he calls her Lisa) and going off on a series of tangents. Lori’s skill is stillness, for the most part. She lets him monologue and pays close attention, missing nothing. Finally, impressed (mostly with himself), he hires her. One of her tasks will be to destroy the unfinished Christophers, which gives her perfect access to the works.

One day, Julian finds an article she published in an art journal that was brutally critical of him and his latter stage work. (She calls him bloviating.) He’s deeply offended, but he gains a new respect for her, even more so when she comes clean about his children and their plan for the Christophers. “What makes you think you could do [the forgery]?” he asks pointedly. She somewhat defiantly breaks down his work—describing how the thickness of his paint and the use of light conveys his moods, his feelings about Christopher. Her insight is undeniable. Suddenly, he seems to want to impress her and maybe even know her, although she remains intentionally opaque.

And this is my biggest problem with The Christophers—which I generally liked: Lori is a cryptic character to a fault. Does she hate Julian? Does she want his approbation? Is she growing fond of him through their work? Is this all some elaborate form of revenge? And why did she choose forgery? Yes, it’s hard to make a living as an artist—she works part time at a food truck—but not all struggling artists turn to forgery. Is it merely a skill she has, or does it say something about her as a person that she has not found her own artistic voice? The film never explores this.

As an actress, the brilliant Coel is a formidable foil to McKellen. It’s fun to watch them face-off, even as I did yearn to know more about her.

Additionally, the film feels a bit ambivalent about this once great man. Julian is clearly an asshole. His cruelty toward his children is inexcusable no matter how awful they are (casting Corden was a deft, if slightly nasty, touch). And Julian’s whole schtick is cruelty—discouraging and publicly humiliating the artists who earnestly share their work with him on TV. But he is undeniably entertaining, too. And, of course, there’s a good deal of vulnerability and even self-loathing just beneath the surface. I guess we’re supposed to feel that he deserves it all—the fame, the respect, but also the infamy and the subsequent isolation.

The Christophers is a great film-club-discussion type movie. I hosted a screening of it this weekend and there were lots of disagreement over Lori’s true feelings for Julian and vice versa—had she grown to love him? Did he see her as the daughter he wished he had? And what of the art of forgery? One clever audience member suggested that Soderbergh—the anti-auteur, who calls himself a cinematic “shapeshifter”—might have genuine respect for such powers of mimesis. Is there inherent value in excellent forgery? Insights into cancel culture and the commodification of the art world are less compelling. But I must say, I had a blast with The Christophers. In the end, it’s a script worthy of McKellen’s gifts—which, in turn, makes it a gift to us all.

The region’s OG film festival is back for its 27th year, from April 8-12 at the Parkway Theatre and other venues in Station North. As ever, the fest includes both original and revival features, shorts, and docs, with an emphasis on local and marginalized voices. Here are three reviews to whet your appetite.

HONEYJOON

This bittersweet comedy by Lilian T. Mehrel resists the urge to lapse into sentimentality at every turn. June (Ayden Mayeri) has traveled to a resort on the romantic Azorean Island with her mother, Lela (Amira Casar), a Persian expat living in England, to honor the one-year anniversary of her father’s death. When he was a young man, her father had traveled to the island and loved it. They have a picture of him on the shore looking pensive and handsome that they carry with them on the trip.

Lela is still grieving more explicitly—she had envisioned the trip as a time to cry and hug—whereas June wants the tenor to be more celebratory. The dynamic between the two is established quickly. Lela complains that June hasn’t unpacked yet, then urges her to cover up, her dress is too skimpy—a recurring theme.

One of the seemingly interchangeable handsome young resort workers that June flirts with takes their picture and remarks that they look like sisters. Lela smiles for the first time in a while; June’s face drops. June thinks Lela, who is obsessively following Iran’s “Women. Life. Freedom” movement and wants to tell everyone about her late husband, is a buzzkill. On a cliff, they encounter a couple on their honeymoon and take their picture. Then Lela begins unloading about her dead husband. “Don’t ruin their honeymoon!” June scolds.

June is right about this and a few other things—you can’t celebrate the brave women of the Persian uprising while simultaneously telling your (hot) daughter to cover up. Bodily autonomy is much of what they’re fighting for. But Lela is right too. The trip can’t just be fun—grieving is baked into the mix—and June can run from her grief but she can’t truly escape it.

A classic example of the film’s sly way of avoiding mawkishness: Lying in bed together—they are awkwardly stuck in one of the resort’s many honeymoon suites—Lela asks June to spoon her.

“I’m not dad,” June grumbles, but then, looking at her mother, so vulnerable, she yields. She hugs her mother from behind. As the camera pulls back, Lela farts.

The film is filled with bits of silliness like this—most work, a few feel a little cutesy (Lela has a habit of of mangling English idioms: “You were the Adam’s apple of [your father’s] eye” or “like apple, like tree.”)

The second half of the film is dominated by João (José Condessa), a chill and sneakily wise surfer dude who takes them on a tour of the island. June, of course, falls for him (and he for her). But the film is generous about acknowledging Lela’s sexuality, too. She misses her husband—she misses sex with her husband. And when one of the resort workers explicitly flirts with her, you can see she’s flattered, if not slightly tempted.

Honeyjoon is a smart, closely observed film about mothers and daughters and grief. It’s funny and sad in equal measures—just like life.

HONEYJOON screens on April 8 at 9 p.m. and April 9 at 5 p.m. at the Parkway Theatre. Director Lilian Mehrel will be in attendance for post-screening conversations. 

BARBARA FOREVER

Before Instagram and TikTok recorded our every waking move, there was the lesbian artist Barbara Hammer. Her films and art pieces were radical acts of self-exploration and transparency. To watch her films is to know every nook and cranny of her body and mind—literally. She was experimental in many ways—as both an avant garde artist and a queer artist whose work spanned decades.

As a young woman, she married a man and, already showing signs of her rebellious spirit, joined him on a cross country motorcycle trip. They landed in an artist’s community on the west coast, where she found herself “serving coffee” to her husband’s friends. She left him.

At that point, she was already carrying around a Super 8 camera and playing with different exposures and perspectives. Later, she met a lesbian couple—she claims she had never even heard the word “lesbian” before—and realized, hey, that’s me.

From there, her work became inextricably tied to her sexual identity. She filmed the bodies of naked women, often her own, and interviewed her many lovers, even those who were reluctant to be on camera.

Barbara Forever, directed by Brydie O’Connor, is a loving, even reverential, portrait of this remarkable artist, who wanted to leave a literal legacy of herself and those she loved, as captured on film.

The film opens with Barbara, probably in her mid-50s, fit and strong, flexing naked in front of the camera. Then we cut to a different Barbara—still naked, but bald from chemo, looking frail. And soon we see Florrie R. Burke, Hammer’s longtime partner, watching clips of her lover on film, a wistful look on her face.

Then we’re back to Hammer, now vital and young and fearless. With her spiky hair and round glasses, she resembles the artist Laurie Anderson (or perhaps vice versa). She takes another motorcycle trip around the world. She goes on the NY subway and interviews strangers. She roller skates. She disrobes, again and again—talking about what it is to be an artist, a sexual being, a human.

At nearly two hours, I found Barbara Forever a bit on the indulgent side. Then again, there were thousands of hours of source material to choose from—I’m sure whittling it down was a herculean challenge. And, much like her contemporary, Andy Warhol—an obvious corollary, though he is never mentioned in the film—Hammer was not afraid to bore her audience. She wanted her work to be poetic, hypnotic, transcendent. So perhaps this slightly too-long work makes sense. It’s immersive—just as Hammer would want it to be.

At the film’s end, we see Florrie Burke standing in front of a giant installation of and by her partner, who we understand has left this mortal coil. Hammer is naked, bald, seemingly walking through a kaleidoscopic pool of water, like an aquarium. It gives off the uncanny feeling that she’s being reborn—or has somehow transcended her human form. She’s not here anymore. And yet she will always be here. Barbara Forever.

BARBARA FOREVER screens April 11 at 5 p.m. MICA’s Fred Lazarus IV Auditorium and April 12 at 3 p.m. at the Parkway Theatre. Director Brydie O’Connor, producer Claire Edelman, and editor Matt Hixon will be in attendance for post-screening conversations.

MISPER

In the poker-faced Misper, our sad sack hero, Leonard (Samuel Blenkin), a clerk at a desiccated seaside hotel in the English countryside, does his daily rounds at a snail’s pace, methodically walking the halls as the camera patiently follows him. The hotel, called The Grand, is clearly on its last legs.

One guest compares it to The Shining. Another guest notes that the walls smell of bacon—but not, they clarify, in a good way. A new employee cheerfully calls it “a waiting room to the afterlife.” But there is, as director Harry Sherriff makes clear, a certain grandeur to its decaying beauty.

Leonard is an enervated character somewhat in the vein of Harold from Harold and Maude. On top of wandering morosely around the hotel, he sits morosely at the front desk and then spends time morosely in his spartan room. Indeed, the most avid thing he does is pine after a fellow Grand employee, Elle (Emily Carey). But even that is done somewhat tepidly.

“There’s that worried face again,” Elle says to him.

“That’s…just my face,” Leonard replies.

The film dabbles in David Lynch style surrealism—out of nowhere, Leonard stumbles upon the hotel manager, Gary (Daniel Ryan) singing karaoke to a tiny delighted audience—their smiles too wide, bordering on grotesque. (The hotel’s few guests are senior citizens, many of whom get a perverse satisfaction in complaining about its decline.)

Another member of the tiny staff seems to refuse to do work. She starts her day with a 45-minute cigarette break and sleeps in an empty room, snapping at Leonard not to bother her.

One night, Leonard gets up the nerve to ask Elle what she’s doing after work.

“Nothing,” she says expectantly. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he replies.

But that’s the extent of his nerve. They stare at each other for a painfully long minute and then she leaves. The next day, Elle has disappeared. The film is about how Leonard, and the rest of the Grand staff, deal with her mysterious absence.

Leonard becomes depressed. In a scene that incapsulates the film’s dark humor, he calls a mental health hotline. “If you need help, press the star key,” a voice intones. He looks at the phone in dismay: There is no star key.

The jokes are funny, but few and far between, and we are treated to many wide shots of people sitting around in awkward silence. The film flirts with all sorts of great ideas: how inaction can lead to crippling regret and how horrible the Missing Girl Industrial Complex can be—while all of England is luridly asking, “What Happened to Elle?” real people are hurt and suffering.

I wish the film had developed those ideas even more. That said, there’s certainly enough here for to me recommend, especially if you’re a fan of the deadpan and the exceedingly droll. But I confess I wanted to give Leonard, and indeed the entire film, a shot of adrenalin.

MISPER is set for closing night, April 12, at 7:30 p.m. at the Parkway Theatre. Director Harry Sherriff and writer/producer Laurence Tratalos will be in attendance for a post-screening conversation.

The Drama is a psychological horror film masquerading as a romcom. From the jump, something feels a little off about the “meet-cute.” At a coffee shop, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) sees Emma (Zendaya) reading a novel (The Damage by Harper Ellison, a truly excellent fake title and author). Taken with her, he does a quick google search of the book and approaches her.

“I love that book,” he says.

She ignores him. All of a sudden, he feels like all eyes in the coffee shop are on him, judging him for this hapless pick-up attempt. Time seems to freeze.

Finally, she removes her single earbud and looks at him. She explains that she’s deaf in one ear and had no idea he was even talking to her. They decide to have a do-over, a cute practice that is repeated throughout their romance. He sits back down and tries again.

Later, over dinner, he continues the ruse when she asks him for his thoughts on the ending of the novel.

“Is she dead?” Emma asks.

“Um, yeah, I think she’s dead,” Charlie says.

“And what about the mirrors?”

“Uh…the mirrors?…I think they’re, um, metaphors,” he sputters.

She stares at him, quizzically, until he finally comes clean: He hasn’t read the book. He just wanted to talk to her.

That lie, while seemingly innocent, was actually pretty dark: He wooed her under false pretenses, pretending to be something he wasn’t. Not necessarily a dealbreaker, but a red flag to be sure. What else would he lie about to get his way?

But here’s the thing: This film isn’t actually about Emma’s safety or whether or not Charlie can be trusted. It’s the opposite. You see, Charlie has told a tiny lie. Emma has been hiding a whopper.

IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED COME BACK AND READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW AFTER YOU’VE SEEN THE FILM!

Okay, so Emma and Charlie get engaged. They’re in love—and they’re happily planning their wedding. Over a tasting dinner of mushroom risotto and too much wine with Charlie’s best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and his wife, Emma’s maid of honor, Rachel (Alana Haim), they play an ill-advised game of “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” (I can’t emphasis enough how much you should never play this game.)

They go around the table, admitting some genuinely messed up things, until they get to Emma, who is quite drunk at this point.

“I planned a school shooting,” she says.

Charlie laughs nervously.

Then, with mounting horror, everyone around the table realizes she’s serious.

“I didn’t do it, of course,” Emma says quickly. But the damage has been done.

It’s Rachel, played with exquisite haughtiness by Haim, who storms away in disgust. As far as she’s concerned, Emma is canceled. The wedding is obviously off. And a freaked out Mike essentially agrees with her.

It’s up to Charlie to navigate his conflicting emotions. In the wedding speech he was writing, he extols Emma’s unimpeachable character, but now he thinks, does he ever know her? (There’s a wonderful scene where he begins editing out words like “kindness” and “empathy” in the speech.) He can’t reconcile the woman he thinks he is marrying with a person who would plan such an evil act.

So yes, The Drama is about the impossibility of really knowing someone. And I like the idea of a romcom morphing into a kind of “hell is other people” horror film.

But something about this film really put me off. It’s reminiscent of Tár, a film I actually loved that nonetheless had one glaring flaw. As we know, most so-called “geniuses” who get away with sexual predation are men, but Tár dared to ask the question: What if it was a woman? Flipping that paradigm seemed like provocativeness for its own sake.

It’s worse with The Drama, mostly because it’s not nearly the film Tár is. The majority of school shooters are boys. More specifically, white boys. Why on earth have a movie about a Black woman who considered such violence?

The answer is simple: It’s to center Charlie’s dilemma, his pain, his confusion. I knew without even checking that the film had been written by a man, writer/director Kristopher Borgli (Dream Scenario). The film is entirely from Charlie’s perspective as he drives himself slightly mad with uncertainty.

Pattinson, who burst on the scene playing a heartthrob vampire, has spent the rest of his career trying to undo that fact. He specializes in men on the verge of a nervous breakdown—I feel like I’ve almost never seen him in a film where he doesn’t twitch and sweat—so this is right in his wheelhouse. He’s good at playing Charlie’s increased agitation. Should he go through with the wedding or not?

The ever-captivating Zendaya has the trickier part because her inner life is intentionally opaque—that’s part of the puzzle of the film. We’re supposed to at least entertain the notion that Emma could actually be psychopath, not just a woman who had a troubled adolescence who briefly lost her way.

Zendaya does the best she can with this cryptic character, but I found the whole premise of The Drama off-putting.

Yes, the otherness of our lovers is rich material to mine. But the shock value of this film overpowered its ideas. (It’s like that old fashion insult: “You’re not wearing the jacket. The jacket is wearing you.”) By embracing an outlier and taking the premise to such an extreme, the film lost its grip—both on reality and my interest.

A mere two weeks ago, the Oscars for Best Actor and Best Actress were veritable locks.

Jessie Buckley was going to win for her earthy and primal depiction of Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet and Timothée Chalamet was assured a win for playing a live-wire ping pong hustler in Marty Supreme.

But it seems that being the frontrunner, with its attendant extreme scrutiny, is not the safest place these days.

In the past two weeks, Buckley’s The Bride opened to decidedly mixed reviews, with many critics calling her performance over-the-top and even a bit “cringe.” (I’ll believe it when I see it. She’s never given a bad performance in my estimation.)

Then, to add insult to injury, an interview with her resurfaced where she said that she forced her then boyfriend (now husband) to choose between her and his vindictive cat. (He chose her, smart man.) “I’m going to get canceled,” she said, prophetically. The claws came out, if you will. Hell hath no fury like a pissed off cat lover.

And then there’s Timmy. When Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor at “The Actor” (the annoying new name for the Screen Actors Guild award), a palpable sense of joy, even relief, filled the theater. The talented Jordan is universally beloved, an unproblematic king, as the kids say. Meanwhile, Chalamet has raised hackles by dating a Jenner and campaigning rather brazenly for the Oscar. Still, his work was undeniable in Marty Supreme. And for a while there, it did seem like the Oscar was his for the taking.

Then, in a conversation with Matthew McConaughey for Variety magazine, he said that ballet and opera are art forms “no one cares about” and that he much preferred to work in the medium of film.

Here’s my theory: The disappointment over his dating a Jenner and the disappointment over his remarks about these classical art forms are variations of the same thing. We want to see Chalamet as a sensitive artist, a Byronic poet, a deep thinker. We basically want him to be Elio in Call Me By Your Name.

Dating one of the world’s biggest influencers, a woman with 390 million Instagram followers, doesn’t quite jibe with that persona. The crack about no one caring about opera or ballet has a similar effect. Wait, isn’t Chalamet supposed to be the kind of soulful man who cries at the opera? (Elio would!)

I feel like people feel personally betrayed by Chalamet. But honestly, folks, he’s just a dude—and an undeniable product of the 21st century. He loves sports, hot women, video games, hip-hop and, yeah, he also happens to be a great actor. His off-hand joke about opera should not have set off an international crisis. But that’s what it did.

And the backlash to the remarks has had surprising legs—primarily because dance and opera performers and companies are seizing the moment to promote themselves. (Cleverly, the Seattle Opera offered a 14 percent discount to their production of Carmen with the code TIMOTHEE.)

Is this backlash enough to lose Chalamet and Buckley their Oscars? Well, it’s time to roll out my predictions of select categories.

BEST PICTURE
Who will win: One Battle After Another
Who might win: Sinners
Who should win: One Battle After Another
Anyone else have a shot? Hamnet has a very slim chance
Final thoughts: One Battle After Another and Sinners were my two favorite films of the year, so I’m good either way. Sinners is riding high on momentum after winning the Screen Actors Guild Award—ugh, I mean, “The Actor”—but it’s a genre film and those rarely take home the big prize.

Of course, it’s a sneaky genre film, a film about cultural vampirism masquerading as one about actual vampires, but still. In the end, I think the political urgency of One Battle After Another, coupled with the fact that people really like it (it’s great!), gives it the slight edge.

BEST ACTOR
Who will win: Michael B. Jordan
Who could win: Timothee Chalamet (It’s a very close race!)
Who should win: Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
Anyone else have a shot? Nah, it’s a two-man race unless Jordan and Chalamet cancel each other out, in which case I suppose Moura could slip in.
Final thoughts: Love me some Chalamet, but he has been VERY overexposed this year. Meanwhile, Jordan has kept his head down, done great work, and looked incredibly dashing while doing so. I think that The Actor win gave voters permission to choose Jordan.

BEST ACTRESS
Who will win: Jessie Buckley
Who could win: Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Who should win: Buckley
Anyone else have a shot? Not really.
Final thoughts: I think Buckley was such a frontrunner her recent stumbles haven’t hurt her. Plus, lots of people secretly hate cats. (I kid, I kid…)

BEST DIRECTOR
Who will win: Paul Thomas Anderson
Who could win: Ryan Coogler
Who should win: PTA
Anyone else have a shot? Nope
Final thoughts: Much of Oscar night will basically come down to Sinners vs. One Battle After Another and Best Director is no different. Both these men are generational talents. It’s just that Paul Thomas Anderson is 55 and has never won an Oscar. Meanwhile, Coogler is 39 and, presumably, has many gold guys in his future.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Who will win: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
Who could win: Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value
Who should win: The great Skarsgård gave the performance of a lifetime in Sentimental Value.
Anyone else have a shot? Honestly? Literally anyone but Jacob Elordi could win. I particularly think the beloved Delroy Lindo could ride the Sinners momentum all the way to gold. And Benicio del Toro almost stole the show in One Battle After Another with his particular brand of insouciant cool.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Who will win: Amy Madigan, Weapons
Who could win: Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
Who should win: Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value
Anyone else have a shot? Teyana Taylor from One Battle After Another, for sure. It’s almost a three-woman race.
Final thoughts: I almost can’t believe that Madigan is the frontrunner. Like I said, the Academy hates genre films. But she’s a beloved longtime actress and gave a hilariously iconic performance in Weapons that will be imitated by drag queens for decades to come. And running onto the stage, arms outstretched, a la the zombified children in Weapons, when she won The Actor just might have sealed her the win.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Who will win: Sinners
Who might win: Sentimental Value
Who should win: Sinners
Anyone else have a shot? I doubt it. This is Sinners’ lock of the night.
Final thoughts: In every sense of the phrase, Ryan Coogler can’t miss.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Who will win: One Battle After Another
Who might win: Hamnet
Who should win: One Battle After Another
Anyone else have a shot? I don’t think so!
Final thoughts: Sorry, this is getting boring. But One Battle After Another and Sinners are going to be trading wins all night.

A FEW MORE PREDICTIONS:
Best Cinematography: Sinners
Best Casting (new category!): Sinners
Best Editing: One Battle After Another
Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Frankenstein (huzzah, not Sinners or One Battle After Another)
Best Production Design: Frankenstein
Best Score: Sinners
Best Song: “Golden,” KPop Demon Hunters
Best Animated Feature: KPop Demon Hunters
Best Documentary Feature: The Perfect Neighbor
Best International Film: Sentimental Value

If you were to tell me that you watched Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and found it to be overwrought, obvious, and absurdly heavy-handed, I would have no choice but to agree you. Also, I kinda loved it.

Fennell is the kind of director who takes big swings; she risks embarrassment—of herself and her actors (who could forget Barry Keoghan masturbating on a grave in Saltburn?)—and yields big emotions.

You could watch Wuthering Heights and laugh at how over-the-top it is, bordering on camp. Or you could give in to those big emotions and gorgeous, extravagant backdrops.

It’s safe to say that Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a novel that lives in our collective imaginations. Even if you haven’t read it, you’ve probably seen one of the adaptations. And even if you’ve done neither, you understand the archetype of Heathcliff—powerful, masculine, smoldering, and untamed. What’s more, the book’s depiction of all-consuming love has created countless imitators (mostly to the detriment of young women, but I digress). Of course, there was much more to the novel than the love story—Brontë was making trenchant points about racism, classism, misogyny, and generational trauma. But that’s not what we all conjure when we think about Wuthering Heights. We see fog and rocks and fields of moorland grass; we see Cathy in tightly corseted dresses; we see Heathcliff atop a horse, with a billowing black cape. (Another thing we don’t see? The second half of the book, which has been all but ignored by the film and television adaptations.)

So Emerald Fennell has made it clear that is the Wuthering Heights of her imagination, the way she felt about the book when she first read it at the age of 14. That’s why she puts the title in quotes—it’s an interpretation, a sense-memory, a vibe. Her movie is much dirtier than the book—I don’t remember Healthcliff sucking on Cathy’s fingers after she masturbated in the novel—but not as dirty as some hoped/feared. Even if Fennell is too smart not to recognize that there’s something toxic and destructive about Cathy and Healthcliff’s all-consuming love, she is still trying to create a timeless romance, something 14-year-old Emerald would’ve swooned over. (The picture above is Cathy and Heathcliff after a funeral. He raises her black veil to kiss her, like she is some sort of cursed bride.)

A plot recap, if it’s been a while: Cathy (played by Charlotte Mellington as a girl) is a motherless child being raised in the moors by her alcoholic, gambling addict father (Martin Clunes, excellent). One night, he impulsively brings home an illiterate boy (Owen Cooper) who was being beaten on the street by his caregiver. The maids and cooks in the modest home are irritated by the foundling’s presence—one more mouth to feed—but Cathy is delighted. She immediately dubs him “Heathcliff”—she has essentially named and claimed him. “I’ll never leave you!” she says. They run in the moors, play on the rocks, and Heathcliff endures beatings to shield Cathy from her father’s rage. They grow into hot young adults, now played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and soon their preternatural connection becomes an all-consuming sexual and romantic passion. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” says Cathy. Then the obscenely wealthy Mr. Linton (Shazad Latif) moves in next door and Cathy, understanding that her father is destitute and there’s no future with Heathcliff, agrees to marry him. Heathcliff, taking this as a personal rebuke, rides away on horseback and returns five years later, a wealthy man. Their five years apart have only intensified their love.

Fennell directs Linton’s home with what can only be called Baz Luhrmann-esque fury. It’s a garish and grotesque display of wealth and Cathy is stuffed into bright red dresses, dripping with heavy jewels. The contrast between the gilded mansion and the wild, natural world of the moors is, well, one of those slightly embarrassing things I was talking about. It’s like, girl, we get it. Nonetheless, Fennell knows how to the direct the hell out of a shot, whether Cathy is standing next to the wallpaper Linton made to eerily emulate her flesh or sitting on the edge of a cliff, waiting for her beloved to return.

Let’s address the controversy over the casting. It’s quite clear, in my mind at least, that the Heathcliff of the novel is a POC. He’s literally described as a “dark-skinned gypsy” and a “little Lascar” (slang for sailors from the Indian subcontinent). And yet, in film and television he has been depicted by no less than Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes, and Tom Hardy. Only director Andrea Arnold chose to cast a Black man as Heathcliff in her 2011 adaptation, and good for her, but it didn’t stick.

Fennell maintains that Elordi looks the Heathcliff from the cover of her worn paperback—and I can believe it. It says a lot about whose stories get told and passed on in our culture that most of us assumed Heathcliff was a dark-haired white man.

Putting the racial blunder aside, Elordi is, indeed, a magnificent Heathcliff. He’s a physical specimen—otherworldly handsome and brutish, even (or perhaps especially) with Heathcliff’s long hair and straggly beard. When he comes back from his self-imposed exile, his hair is short and his beard is shaved; he’s wearing fancy clothing (including a hoop earring and an anachronistic gold tooth), but he’s still something of a gorgeous brute. (Why do you think Guillermo Del Toro cast him as a hot Frankenstein’s monster?)

Some have suggested Margot Robbie, in her mid-30s, is too old to play Cathy, who is supposed to be a teenager. They downplay her age in the film, at one point calling her “nearly a spinster” (although, I imagine that would be, like, 21 in 1847) but it doesn’t really matter. Robbie, in fact, does have the kind of beauty men fight over, and she’s a great actress, expressive and keen. Crucially, Cathy and Heathcliff are both kind of dicks, so it’s important that they are played by charismatic movie stars, otherwise their love affair would be unwatchable. And the chemistry between them is, as the kids would say, straight fire.

So there you have it. Wuthering Heights is not faithful to the book, but it is faithful to what the film aroused in young Emerald Fennell’s imagination. It’s a remarkable thing to be able to evoke the passions of a young female bibliophile. The resulting film is a bit silly, very sexy, visually decadent, and, yes, wonderful.

In Albert Birney’s new film, OBEX, set in 1987, the Baltimore-based filmmaker plays Connor, an agoraphobic of sorts, who spends his days petting his dog, Sandy, and interacting with his many screens. There are TVs in every room, including three stacked on top of each other in the living room, as well as a bookshelf filled with VHS tapes, a dot matrix printer, and a bulky Macintosh computer.

His life is orderly and not without pleasure. He really loves Sandy and sings karaoke to her at night. And he has a job, promoted via classified ad in a computer magazine, where he offers to “Draw you on my computer.” All the while, the cicadas are making a racket outside and driving him a little batty.

But everything changes when he buys an “interactive” computer game called OBEX, featuring a light demon named Ixaroth. At first, the game seems hopelessly rudimentary—he trashes it after a few minutes of play. But then the “interactive” aspect kicks in and Ixaroth enters his home and steals Sandy, forcing Connor to venture out to save his best friend.

With OBEX, Birney has created a bewitching, Alice in Wonderland-like fairy tale about a mild-mannered man forced to step away from the computer screen—and become the star of his own hero’s journey.

We recently chatted with Birney about the film’s inspiration and themes, as well as his dog Dorothy’s big debut.

OBEX is shot in black and white. Were you thinking of The Twilight Zone when you made it?
Yeah, Twilight Zone was a very important show for me. I’d watch it every day when I got home from school on the Syfy Channel. So that’s definitely very deep in the well of my influences. The other big one, which is a film I revisit every couple years and get inspired by, is David Lynch’s Eraserhead. And then the other inspiration, for the second half of the film [when Connor goes on his quest], was Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man with Johnny Depp—the psychedelic Western. Both films are black and white. Certain projects, when they start to take shape in your head, they just tell you what they look like.

The film is essentially about us “living in our computers,” which is very much the reality now. So why set it in 1987?
In 1987, I was five years old, which is kind of the age when you become aware of films and computer games. So I had all these very formative experiences. Of course, today, we have so many screens, we’re constantly looking at them, but this [era] felt like the origin of that. Also, I’ve often found inspiration from old objects and strange artifacts. I love going to thrift stores and junk shops. So I went to a local junk shop and I found two old Macintosh computers, just sitting in a box. And they were priced to move. I didn’t think twice. I just bought them.

And then, a friend had one of these old printers, so I borrowed that. Another friend was getting rid of some TVs, so I grabbed those. And same with the VHS tapes. There were all these things that were just discarded because, you know, they’re obsolete, and I started putting all those things together, and the character and the story came through them. That’s how I usually work.

The star of the movie is obviously Sandy, played by your rescue, Dorothy. Did you know she was such a great actress?
Everyone says I should get her in commercials or other movies. And I’m always like, she is not trained at all. I think this was just the perfect vehicle for her, because we shot it at my house and what she loves to do more than anything else is sit next to me on the sofa or on my lap. If we needed her to bark, we would just knock on the door. If we needed her to look a certain way, we would squeak a squeaky toy. I think, at some point she sensed that she was part of this little team, and we were moving through it together.

She’s insanely cute. What kind of dog is she?
She’s a bulldog, chihuahua, pug—we call her a bull chug.

The cicadas are another major character. You started filming in 2021 when they were out in full force.
Yeah, at that time, I didn’t even have the idea of the movie yet, but I knew, okay, if I want to use these bugs, I need to film them now, because it’ll be another 17 years before they come back. And in our neighborhood—we’re just a little north of Hampden—you’d be walking down the street and they would land on you, just dive bombing.

The shot where Connor takes the garbage out and looks at the garbage and there are cicadas in there? That was just because there were actual cicadas in my garbage can. I started filming it. It was like, I don’t know what this is yet, but I should document it. And then that laid the groundwork for the stuff we filmed a year later.

And that constant cicada buzz? Is that real or a special effect?
I recorded that sound in 2021. It’s real. It was kind of deafening.

Speaking of which, you’re known for your MacGyver-like special effects. What were some of your favorites from the film?
The simplest one is stop motion. So when the cicada crawls underneath the door and Sandy comes over and eats it, that’s just me moving a dead cicada along the floor, inch by inch. Another moment was when Ixaroth is moving through the house and the walls are oscillating a little bit.

My friend, Matt, figured out this thing where, if you had a TV screen laying on its back playing footage from the movie and put a fish tank on top of it and then vibrate the water with something like a speaker, the footage would kind of undulate. And I love that, because it was done very organically and analog. People might think, oh, that must be some sort of modern effect. But it was literally just us filming the footage through moving water.

This is your first time starring in one of your own films. What made you decide to play Connor?
There was definitely a thought of trying to find someone else to play him, but I just kept coming back to the idea that, this is my house, my dog, and it was inspired by all these memories of mine. And it just felt like, if I found someone else to do it, I would always be a little bit annoyed, or nitpicking the performance, or just wishing that I was doing it.

I’m also not like Connor in some ways, but there’s definitely some overlap: I love being at home with my dog and watching movies and being on the computer. And some people, when they watch the movie, they’re like, you know, Connor’s all alone, but he doesn’t necessarily seem too lonely. He’s got a routine that he seems kind of happy with. And I think that’s often how I feel, where I can go days or even weeks sometimes just in my own little world here, and, you know, that’s okay.

Putting the dog in peril was a masterful stroke.
Adopting Dorothy changed my life—just having this dog and this love that suddenly flows out of you. It felt like this would be something that would make sense for Connor, because then he’s not totally alone, and he can talk to her. And then, of course, that becomes the major plot point of like, okay, now she’s the reason he needs to get out of the house and go on this mission to rescue her—this classic quest to rescue the one you love.

OBEX will open locally on Jan. 23, at The Rotunda’s Warehouse Cinemas.

Sure, high school can be a minefield, but real ones know that middle school (or junior high school as they called it back in my day) is where the true horror lies. This is the case for both genders, but it might even be worse for boys, who have the looming threat of physical violence to go along with those surging hormones and fear of social ostracization.

If you look at any bunch of 12 and 13 year old boys, you’ll see all shapes and sizes, some still looking very much like rosy-cheeked children who get tucked into bed at night, and others looking like small men, having sprouted up after puberty, with underarm hair, pimples, deeper voices, and a confusing new preoccupation with sex.

Director Charlie Polinger takes this tumultuous time and turns it into actual body horror in his new film, The Plague. The action takes place at a camp for water polo, which seems less like an actual camp and more like somebody’s nightmare version of one. It’s set at a cold, almost Soviet-like school, with long, empty hallways, military-style sleeping quarters, and a sauna that the boys, oddly, share with the occasional adult. The water polo coach (Joel Edgerton) is kind and a little dumb and in no way ready to handle the physical and emotional destruction his young charges are capable of.

The film’s first shot, a beaut, is underwater—a series of squirming and pumping legs, looking more like sea creatures than boys. Polinger leans into the rowdy, even feral nature of these children—it’s Lord of the Flies Goes to Camp. Our hero is Ben (Everett Blunck), a sensitive child, still baby-faced, but already lanky and tall. His sensitivity makes him a natural target for bullies, but he’s lucky—at first at least. He’s not the lowest kid on the social pecking order. That distinction belongs to the stoic Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), who is accused of having “the plague,” causing the rest of the boys to squirm and scatter when he comes too close.

The inventor of this plague—a precision tool of social ostracization—is a pint-sized sociopath named Jake (Kayo Martin), who is cute and confident and casually cruel. “It’s similar to leprosy,” Jake explains, pointing out that Eli’s rash goes beyond mere teenage acne. “It’s some plague shit. Turns your brain into baby food.”

Jake is cordial enough with Ben, but he immediately clocks him as a potential object of prey.

“Say ‘stop’!” he demands of Ben, in front of the other 7^th graders.

“Sop,” lisps Ben cautiously, as the boys howl.

From that instant forward, Ben is nicknamed “Soppy.” (A 7^th grader’s ability to find the thing you are most insecure about and mock it remains undefeated.)

Ben is all too aware of Jake’s capacity for social ruination and he regards Eli as a cautionary tale.

But, admirably, Eli manages to remain true to himself—dancing and singing along with a cardboard Betty Boop doll he has made and quoting science fiction films in funny voices. He’s precocious, genuinely odd, and exists somewhere between accepting his fate and believing he might actually deserve it.

“Don’t come near me,” he whispers to Ben. “You might catch it.”

As for Ben, he intellectually knows that the plague is made up but also fears he might catch it. He keeps inspecting his body in the mirror. Is that a pimple or…?

For a while, things go on like this until Ben can’t take it anymore—the cruelty toward Eli is simply too much for his tender heart. So he tentatively befriends Eli, even slathering on Eli’s rash cream, and you can guess what happens next.

The Plague is a clever film, utilizing a horror-film score (human voices chanting, gasping, and moaning in eerie fashion) and directed with cold polish by Polinger. The three lead boys are remarkable. As Ben, Blunck is so pained by the cruel world around him, he will positively crush you. Rasmussen is both off-putting and strangely heroic, bent but not broken by his tormentors. (Here is where Polinger’s lack of sentimentality shines through—sometimes the unpopular kids were, in fact, weirdos). And Kayo Martin’s Jake might be the best of them all—a mop-topped imp with a rakish grin, a natural leader whose charm can turn to menace on a dime.

I admired The Plague but I confess that after a while it got repetitive, having run out of things to say. Still, it’s a slick and nasty piece of work—and I mean that in the best possible way.

The Plague is opening at AMC Columbia on Friday January 2.

Timothée Chalamet has been acting a bit strangely lately. It started last year, when he won the SAG Award for A Complete Unknown and said in his acceptance speech that he wasn’t just aiming to be good, but wanted to be one of the all-time greats. This behavior continued during his press tour for Josh Safdie’s ping pong odyssey, Marty Supreme. “I’m doing top-level shit,” he said during one interview. “It’s been seven, eight years I’ve been handing in top-of-the-line performances.”

There is something off-putting about this level of bravado and ambition especially when it’s applied to an art form which isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be—about scoring wins and besting your competition. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was kind of refreshing, too. False humility is as bad—hell, it’s worse—than Chalamet’s WWE-style boasting. The actors who pretend to rise above it all, the ones who say, “Oh gosh, I didn’t even realize I got an Oscar nomination; I was in my garden when I got the call from my manager”—truly work my nerves. (Girl, please. You were glued to your TV surrounded by your publicist, your dietician, and your glam squad.)

That said, at some point, I began to wonder if what Chalamet was doing was merely schtick. He’s proven himself to be an incredible self-promoter—remember when he turned up to the Timothée Chalamet Look-a-Like Contest? (He lost.) Could all of this bragging and grandstanding be some sort of meta promotion for the film? Might he be the first actor to take The Method all the way through the press tour?

I think the answer is yes and no—which is possibly what makes Chalamet the perfect actor to depict Josh Safdie’s patented brand of manic New York city hustler.

In a way, Chalamet has always been this nervy, hopped up kid from Manhattan. He’s street smart, like all New York kids (yes, even the privileged ones) and he absorbed a lot of New York hustle culture, which is all about perpetual motion and grandstanding and faking it till you make it.

This is Josh Safdie’s first film made separately from his brother, Benny (who made some waves of his own this year with the more conventional sports biopic, The Smashing Machine) but it feels exactly like the brothers’ early work, Good Time and Uncut Gems.

Those films were about strivers and con artists who were also kind of losers. In my capsule review of Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler plays a diamond broker who is addicted to gambling, I said: “It’s honestly a nightmare—a nervous breakdown of a movie that never allows you to catch your breath….The Safdie brothers film [Sandler] like a shark that needs to keep moving to survive.”

I honestly could have cut and pasted that review for Marty Supreme, but there are a couple of key differences. For one, it takes place in post-war Manhattan, beautifully and painstakingly recreated by master production designer Jack Fisk. And Marty Mauser (loosely based on real ping-pong legend, Marty Reisman) actually is talented. He is one of the best ping pong players in the world, if not the very best, as he’ll tell anyone within earshot.

When the film starts, he’s peddling loafers and pumps at his uncle’s shoe store. Of course, he’s a good sales person, too—he knows how to lay on the charm. His uncle just wants to promote Marty to manager and be done with it, but Marty explains that he’s only working there to raise money to compete in the upcoming British Open. Marty’s mother (Fran Drescher) also wants him to stop pursuing this ridiculous table tennis dream and settle down like a normal Jewish son. She keeps faking a debilitating illness over the phone in an attempt to get him to come home from whatever tournament he’s playing in. (You can’t con a conman—he never buys it.)

Marty has a girlfriend, of sorts, named Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who is married to a dullard named Ira (Emory Cohen). In the first scene, she and Marty have a quickie in the supply closet and she gets pregnant—a detail that will animate much of the film.

Marty never has enough money to get where he wants, he’s always scheming and stealing and hustling—but he’s monomaniacal. It’s all about ping pong. Even sex and love are secondary to the game he’s obsessed with. (When Rachel tells him she’s pregnant he makes it clear he wants no part of raising a kid.)

I never thought I’d be writing this phrase, but I wish the film had even more ping-pong scenes. Whether he’s at a tournament or hustling some backroom players in a bowling alley with his buddy Wally (Tyler the Creator)—it’s a joy to watch Marty play. Ping-pong players are marvels of speed, hand-eye coordination, and leaping ability and when Marty’s on his game, it’s electrifying. (After months of rigorous training, Chalamet performed all the table tennis scenes himself, without a body double. Top level shit, you might say.) Marty is obnoxious, of course, when he plays—shouting, cursing, crowing—but he’s gracious when he wins, which is most of the time, wrapping his opponent in a bear hug. However, at the London Open, he finally meets his match, a steely-eyed Japanese player named Koto Endo (Koto Kowaguchi) who surprises Marty with his thickly foamed paddle and lightning fast reflexes. (Unsurprisingly, Marty is also a menace when he loses, cursing at the refs and falsely calling out Endo for cheating.)

While in London, staying at a fancy hotel he can’t afford (he charged it to the International Tennis Table Federation, against their express objections), he lays eyes on aging movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) who’s gearing up for a play (her comeback), and decides to pursue her, just because. He does so with the same dogged determination and unearned confidence with which he does everything else. Somehow it works and they become lovers.

Kay is married to a wealthy businessman named Milton Rockwell, played by Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame. (I confess I spent the entire film trying to figure out what movies I’d seen this excellent actor in before—was he in The Irishman? A season of The White Lotus? It was a bit of a head slapper when I finally googled him.) Rockwell offers to sponsor Marty but he’s the kind of man who likes to lord his wealth and privilege over the little guy—and he’s a sadist, as he proves in one particularly memorable scene.

One of the other major plot points involves a gangster’s German Shepherd that Marty has somehow managed to lose—and it’s not clear who will kill Marty first, the dog, the dog’s new gun-toting farmer owner (Penn Jillette, in an amusing cameo), or the gangster himself.

Some have argued that Marty is an asshole and that his quasi-redemption at the end of the film is unearned, but I don’t see it that way. I think Marty is part asshole, part mensch (classic example: He steals a chunk of an Egyptian pyramid…to give to his mother as a gift). His Jewish family, still traumatized by the Holocaust, has lots of love and lots of tsuris—just like Marty himself. Note how Marty always offers a sincere “I love you,” as he rushes out of any room.

In case I wasn’t clear above, Chalamet is fantastic in this role. It may very well be his best work yet, in a career filled with excellent performances. You could make the case that Safdie’s film allowed him to evolve into his purest form—the antsy, quicksilver street hustler who was in there all along.

“I feel like the gift of my life is to focus on this acting thing the way Marty Mauser is locked in on ping pong,” he recently told Vanity Fair.

Mission accomplished, Timothée. Mission accomplished.

At the movies, 2025 was the year of the disappointing, absentee, or otherwise inadequate father.

In One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Pat Calhoun is too brain fried to be of much use to his kidnapped daughter. In Jay Kelly, George Clooney’s titular movie star all but ignored his children as he doggedly chased his own fame. Ditto for Stellan Skarsgård’s Gustav Borg, a successful director who suddenly rues his lack of closeness with his adult daughters, in Sentimental Value.

There’s also Paul Mescal’s “Will” Shakespeare in Hamnet, too busy writing masterpieces, I guess, to be of any use to his family when catastrophe strikes. The same goes for Joel Edgerton’s lumberjack father in Train Dreams. In The Secret Agent, Wagner Moura’s Armando is hiding from the dictatorial government and therefore incapable of raising his young son. And in 28 Years Later, Aaron-Taylor Johnson’s Jamie is idolized by his boy, until the kid discovers his father is not the man he thought he was.

Draw your own conclusions as to why movies are preoccupied with the lack of strong and moral father figures right now.

Dud dads aside, it was a solid year in film, but not quite a great one. Generally when I write these lists, recency bias takes over and I gush a little too hard (I’ve looked back at a few past year-end lists and cringed over the hyperbole). That’s not the case this year. I admired all these films a lot, but didn’t fall madly in love with any of them. (Maybe the opposite will happen and they will grow in my estimation as the years go on.)

Anyway, with that somewhat uninspiring preamble (sorry!), here are my favorite films of 2025. (In some cases, I excerpted from my own reviews.)

10. 28 Years Later

Danny Boyle’s latest installment of the “28” series is a classic coming of age narrative that just happens to be set in a zombie apocalypse. In this one, an isolated small town lives uneasily in the shadow of the zombie’s turf. Periodically they send out their men into enemy territory to kill zombies and get supplies.

Against the will of his sickly mother (Jodie Comer), young Spike (Alfie Williams) accompanies his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) on such an expedition. Spike idolizes his father—until he discovers some shattering truths. Eventually Spike and his mother venture into zombie land, hoping to find a cure for her sickness—there, they encounter zombies, of course, but also the eccentric Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who collects human skulls as a way of honoring the dead—or so he says. Part two arrives next month. I can’t wait.

9. The Baltimorons

The Baltimorons was released in September, but real ones know it’s a Christmas film, with a major scene set on our own Miracle on 34th Street. It’s a May-December romance about two misfits who fit perfectly together.

Baltimore native Michael Strassner, who co-wrote the film based loosely on his own life, exudes an everyman, teddy-bear charm and Liz Larsen, as the dentist he falls for, has an earthy, funny sex appeal. The film is directed with heart, humor, and style by Jay Duplass, but it remains clear-eyed about its characters, never succumbing to sentimentality. Baltimore approves. My review.

8. It Was Just An Accident

In the latest offering from Iranian master Jafar Panahi, a mechanic (sad-faced Vahid Mobasseri) overhears the distinctive footsteps of a one-legged man and becomes convinced that he was the notorious jailer, “Peg Leg,” who tortured him when he was a political prisoner. He aims to kill him, but needs to be sure, so he knocks the man out, throws him the back of his grimy old van and tracks down other fellow prisoners to see if they recognize him. He ends up driving around with a motley crew of his fellow dissidents (including one wearing a wedding dress) as they try to hatch a plan.

The prisoners have moved on with their lives, to an extent, but are still easily triggered and haunted by the very thought of Peg Leg. These are good people contemplating doing a terrible thing—and the longer they drive around weighing their options, the more absurd their quandary becomes.

7. Blue Moon

Richard Linklater has given another plum role to his longtime friend and collaborator Ethan Hawke, and it might be the veteran actor’s best performance yet. He plays the lyricist Lorenz Hart, who watches in horror as his longtime collaborator, the composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), has an unqualified triumph with Oklahoma!, the musical he wrote with his new librettist, Oscar Hammerstein. It’s not just that Hart’s jealous—although he is. It’s that he finds the Hammerstein work to be lowbrow kitsch—it insults his pride and his sensibilities.

The film, set over the course of one night, shows Hart to be a bitter alcoholic whose rapier wit is still very much intact. Bobby Cannavale is Eddie, the devoted bartender who tries (in vain) to keep Hart away from the hard stuff, and Margaret Qualley plays the beautiful college student Hart is romantically obsessed with, despite the fact that he’s gay. Blue Moon is a melancholy, mordant character study anchored by Hawke’s captivating performance.

6. Lurker

A parasocial relationship runs amok in Alex Russell’s sly psychological thriller, which plays like The Talented Mr. Ripley for the TikTok age. Would-be videographer Matthew (Theodore Pellerin) obsesses over pop star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) but, on a chance meeting, he plays it cool, pretending not to know him. When he gets invited backstage, and then to the star’s sprawling mansion, Matthew is elated—and he’ll do anything to stay in Oliver’s inner sanctum. But Oliver is selective with his attention, wielding it like a weapon.

When Matthew is cast out of Oliver’s entourage, he becomes desperate. The film is a canny exploration of social media and celebrity and the blurring of lines between our private and online lives.

5. Sorry, Baby

Something really bad happened to Agnes (lovable newcomer Eva Victor, who also wrote and directed the film) and she’s trying to keep her shit together, while living in the same college town where it happened. Keeping her grounded is her best friend and confidante (Naomi Ackie)—the film is ultimately an homage to female friendship.

Yes, there’s a bad man at the center of this film, but there are good ones, too. Agnes’ sweet neighbor, who is romancing her in his own sheepish way (Lucas Hedges) and, in one of the most poignant scenes of the year, a kindly cafe owner (John Carroll Lynch) who see Agnes crying in her car and gives her a comforting ear and a sandwich.

4. The Secret Agent

It’s 1977 in Brazil, during the military dictatorship and there is a spirit of bacchanal in the air. People have a lot of sex, often in public, dance like nobody’s watching, and some wear elaborate, even spooky costumes (the film is set during Carnival). But death is everywhere—also in public—and everyone seems to be either corrupt or corruptible.

In this world, we meet a good man (Wagner Moura) just trying to survive. Kleber Mendonça Filho fills his film with beauty, absurdist humor, and despair. My review.

3. Sentimental Value

An estranged father and daughter (Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve) are more alike than they care to admit. They use their art—he’s a director and she’s an actor—as a means to express themselves, but are completely useless when it comes to communicating in real life.

When Skarsgård’s Gustav Borg asks his daughter to star in his latest film, she refuses, despite his supplications. Left with no choice, he hires an American starlet (Elle Fanning), hoping that by filming in the family’s rambling old house—the keeper of the family’s secrets, history, joy, and shame—they will channel some greater truth. My review.

2. Sinners

In Ryan Coogler’s remarkable film, music is a powerful tool. It can make people dance, lust, lose control; it can bring people together, evoke the past and future, and even summon dark forces. When twin bootleggers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan, making it look easy) open their juke joint in 1932 Mississippi, they have no idea what horrors they are about to unleash.

Coogler combines the Southern Gothic vampire film with a reverent and rousing history of Black music—making a film that is scary, propulsive, and unforgettable.

1. One Battle After Another

Leonardo DiCaprio channels his inner “The Dude” as a reluctant revolutionary who must rouse from his drug-addled torpor to find his kidnapped daughter (Chase Infiniti, a star).

Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is filled with political intrigue—and one helluva car chase—but it’s best seen as an absurdist action comedy. The extended sequence of DiCaprio’s Pat Calhoun—frantic, bumbling, in a bathroom and beanie, desperately trying to charge his phone while under attack—is a masterful comic set piece.

Other all-stars: Sean Penn as a crazed and disturbingly pervy military man; Teyana Taylor as Pat’s girlfriend, a committed revolutionary who’s way more badass than he’ll ever be; and Benicio del Doro as the preternaturally cool “Sensei,” who runs an underground network for undocumented immigrants.

One Battle After Another is that rarest of things these days: an auteurist film made with a big studio budget. Savor it. My review.

Honorable mentions: Frankenstein, Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man, The Mastermind, The Plague, Train Dreams

As of press time, I had not yet seen Timothee Chalamet’s much praised Marty Supreme.

If you are the type of moviegoer who spends the first part of any even remotely complicated film whispering, “Wait, I’m confused. Who is that man? Have we met him yet? Am I supposed to know who that is?”—first of all, stop being that guy. Second, perhaps Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is not for you. For a while, you have to simply luxuriate in the film’s vibes—which are considerable—before its many disparate elements come together.

It’s 1977 in Brazil, during the military dictatorship. The opening credits tell us this was “a time of great mischief.” This may be misleading. Yes, there is a spirit of bacchanal in the air—the film takes place during the week-long celebration of Carnival in Brazil, after all. People have a lot of sex, often in public, dance like nobody’s watching, and some wear elaborate, even spooky costumes. But death is everywhere—also in public, it’s fair to say (at one point a man is shot dead in a barber shop and they immediately light candles around his body as though it’s perfectly routine) and everyone seems to be either corrupt or corruptible.

The film starts with a spectacular set piece. Our hero, the electrical engineer Armando—played by Wagner Moura in a genuine star turn—has arrived at a desolate gas station along a dusty strip of road. As he pulls up in his jellybean-yellow VW Beetle, he sees a dead body decomposing under some cardboard. “Don’t mind him,” nonchalantly says the attendant, a sweaty man in an open shirt. You see, the man tried to steal some gas, was shot by another employee (who immediately fled), and now the attendant has been waiting for the police to come pick up the body. Armando fills up his tank and, lo and behold, the cops arrive. But they’re not here to collect the body, which they regard with only the barest curiosity. They’re here to shake down Armando for whatever he’s worth and are disappointed to discover that he has no violations in his car (a missing fire extinguisher is apparently an easy trap that he doesn’t fall into). He offers them a pack of cigarettes instead and drives away.

Armando is heading to an apartment complex for political refugees in the town of Recife, where he is greeted by one of the film’s most memorable and lovable characters, Dona Sebastiana (scene stealer Tania Maria), a 77-year-old chain smoker, probably 90 pounds soaking wet, and an absolute sparkplug. She brings Armando inside, introduces him around, points out the pretty tenant, a dentist she’s sure he’ll start sleeping with (she’s right), and generally hovers protectively. She’s the matriarch of this house of misfits—including a Somali couple escaping their country’s brutal regime and a young gay boy kicked out of his home—and presides over it with gruff charm.

Armando is in Recife for a reason. His wife has died—under murky circumstances but almost certainly killed by the dictatorship—and Recife is where his kindly in-laws are raising his young son, Dominic, until it’s safe to reclaim him. Dominic’s grandfather is a projectionist at the local theater where, at the moment, The Shining is playing. (On the marquee outside we also see a faded poster for Bob, Carol, Ted, & Alice.) And little Dominic, having seen the poster for Jaws, has become obsessed with sharks, spending his days drawing their massive teeth in his notepad. (Jaws was obviously a childhood favorite of Mendonça Filho’s, too, as sharks play a somewhat outsized role in his film.)

Did I mention the cast of characters is enormous? It’s hard to enumerate them all—but they include a corrupt police chief, an even more corrupt government efficiency expert (think DOGE), as well as hit men of all varieties. There is also the case of the “hairy leg” pulled from a shark, but justice for the shark, who was merely feasting on the remains of some poor victim of a hit. The hairy leg becomes an ongoing bit throughout the film—an urban legend, a surrealist joke, and a character unto itself.

The Secret Agent is a feast of sorts, overstuffed and beautiful, funny and sad. It’s about how life can go on in the midst of brutality—and how that kind of brutality brings out the best and the worst in people. Chill out, adjust to its rhythms, and you will be richly rewarded.

We all know it’s lame for sports fans to complain about refs. Generally speaking, calls go both ways. And if you’re in a position to have a single call make or break you, you haven’t done enough to win the game.

And yet…

The overturned Ravens touchdown on Sunday’s game against the Steelers was a particularly brutal act of referee malfeasance. Even if you never complain about refs, we’ll make an exception and allow you to in this case. Had the refs not reversed that call, the Ravens would have won the game, simple as that.

To recap: With the Ravens down 27 to 22, and with all the momentum on their side, Lamar Jackson threw a 13-yard pass to tight-end Isaiah Likely who caught it, took three steps, and then dropped the ball. Boom. Ravens touchdown. 29-27 Ravens, with 2:47 left to play and our defense on fire.

There was such pandemonium in the stadium that people didn’t even hear—or comprehend—when referee Alex Moore overturned the call. (It didn’t help that his mic was broken due to “technical difficulties,” the NFL said.)

He said no touchdown, because the receiver needed to take a third step and make a “football move”—aka one of the most subjective terms in football.

As many pointed out on social media, why does a player need to make a “football move” when he’s already in the end zone?

Announcers Tony Romo and Jim Nantz were flabbergasted. So were many folks on X. Let it all out, Baltimore!

And to the Steelers fans who admit that we were robbed (not that they’re complaining), mad respect for the solidarity.

They say write what you know, which is probably why there are so many damn films about Hollywood. The latest navel-gazer, Jay Kelly, is about an aging movie star (played, not coincidentally, by aging movie star George Clooney) reflecting on his life and his choices. The film is directed with care and style and generous (if occasionally gimmicky) wit by Noah Baumbach and the performances by both Clooney and Adam Sandler as Ron Sukenick, Jay’s long-suffering manager, are excellent. But a little part of me was like, remind me again why I’m supposed to care about this vain multimillionaire and his extremely niche problems?

Having just wrapped his latest film, the 60-year-old Jay is having an existential crisis, of sorts. It has dawned on him that he spent so much time building his career, his life is empty. He’s neglected the two most important relationships of his life, namely with his daughters. He doesn’t really know who he is beyond the glamorous façade and he has no real friends, other than Ron, who is on the payroll.

If you’re thinking this all sounds a bit familiar that’s because a very similar film came out of Norway earlier this season, Sentimental Value. I’m not going to make broad generalizations about American vs. European films—especially since Baumbach is the spiritual successor to Woody Allen who was deeply influenced by the European greats—but suffice it to say that the Norwegian one, which focused mainly on the inner lives of the abandoned daughters, was better.

The crux of Jay Kelly is that our titular hero is always surrounded by a coterie that includes his manager, a stylist (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script), a bodyguard-cum-butler, a publicist (Laura Dern), and various other hangers on, but he’s supremely lonely. (An on-going joke has Jay complaining he’s always alone just as his bodyguard hands him a cold drink.)

And Ron is beginning to reassess his devotion to Jay. He’s given the better part of his life to this man—willing to drop any other commitment, including to his own children, on a dime to attend to him—but was it all worth it? Are they even friends?

“Friends don’t take 15 percent,” Jay snaps to Ron during one particularly bruising fight.

But at least Ron still has his family—although his wife (Baumbach’s real-life partner Greta Gerwig in what amounts to an extended cameo) blames him for their daughter’s almost debilitating anxiety. Jay, however, is essentially on his own. His oldest daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), has all but given up on him. “You know how I know you didn’t want to spend time with me?” she asks him bitterly. “Because you didn’t spend time with me.”

Oof.

And he now he finds himself desperate to connect with his younger daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), who is about to embark on a European vacation with her friends before she goes to college.

Daisy has more fondness, or at least more patience, with her dad—she finds him amusing—but she isn’t going to suddenly disrupt her life to spend time with him. She heads off on her own.

Jay Kelly occasionally employs an A Christmas Carol-style structure where Jay revisits pivotal scenes of his life. One comes after he finds out that the director who gave him his first big break, Peter Scheider (Jim Broadbent), has died. Jay is indebted to Schneider, or should be, at least—and they’ve remained friends. But one of those flashbacks has Schneider begging Jay to do his latest film, as he needs the money. With a kind of cold efficiency masking as kindness, Jay refuses him. We see this a lot with Jay. He is good at indicating friendship and generosity of spirit, but there’s no substance behind his cheer.

At Schneider’s funeral, Jay reconnects with his old acting school roommate, Timothy (Billy Crudup). Turns out, despite his eagerness to grab a beer, Timothy despises Jay—blames him for stealing his life. It is, in fact, not an exaggeration. In another flashback we see cocky young Jay (now played by Charlie Rowe, not quite convincingly) snatch an audition for Schneider’s film right out from under Timothy (Louis Partridge), even using Timothy’s own improvements to the script that Timothy was too shy to incorporate. (The suggestion here is twofold: Yes, Jay stole from Timothy. But also, Jay had the kind of ballsiness to make those embellishments to the script. When he tells Timothy he didn’t have what it took, was he possibly…right?)

Finding out that his old friend, about whom he has warmly nostalgic feelings, actually hates his guts is another turning point for Jay. He’s more determined than ever to repair his relationship with Daisy—perhaps his last hope for redemption—so decides to track her down in Europe, using a lifetime achievement award he’ll be receiving from the Tuscan Film Festival as his excuse.

In one of the film’s most irritating scenes, he is forced to take a train from Paris to Rome with the actual little people, who are depicted as kindly, salt-of-the-earth types; a train full of Mrs. Clauses and Geppettos. Jay watches them, moist-eyed, thinking this is what he has missed in life. It’s beyond patronizing, although Baumbach adds a small dose of reality when someone points out to Jay that the people are on their best behavior because they’re in front of a movie star. Later in the train ride, Jay pulls a Tom Cruise and catches a purse snatcher—it’s a clear inside joke as Clooney even does Cruise’s intense, arm pumping run to catch up to him. Jay is hailed as a hero, but even that is complicated. The man who stole the purse isn’t a hardened criminal but a family man off his meds. (Again, it felt like Baumbach was fighting against his own impulses in that scene.)

Recently, after watching Jerry Maguire for the first time in years, I complained that they didn’t make middlebrow films like that anymore—that is, smart and satisfying, if somewhat facile, films for grownups. This is definitely that. And there’s excellent here work from Clooney, who gives arguably his best performance ever in this a meta dissection of his own career and of the strange paradox of having a life that belongs to everyone but yourself.

[WARNING: HERE COMES A SPOILER OF SORTS BECAUSE I WANT TO DISCUSS THE FINAL SCENE]

Jay Kelly is ultimately a film about a man living with the consequences of his own narcissism but the final scene, at the Tuscan film festival, does hedge its bets a bit: We see a montage of Jay/Clooney’s films and it brings tears to his eyes. He was great. He did move people. It was a wonderful life, in its own way. He’s so touched by what he sees on screen that he reaches out for the hand of a loved one—but there’s only Ron, so he clutches his hand instead. It’s both sad and kind of beautiful. The film has sneakily been a love story between these two hollow men the whole time.

There’s something about Paul Mescal’s earnest, hopeful face that invariably brings me to tears. In fairness, maybe it’s the residual effect of Aftersun, truly one of the most heart-crushing films I’ve ever seen. But before Aftersun there was Normal People and after it, All of Us Strangers, both equally gutting. The man merely has to cast a sad—or worse still, wistful—look and I’m a total wreck. Damn you, Mescal!

So, despite having not read the Maggie O’Farrell novel it is based on, I went into Hamnet well stocked with Kleenex, expecting a tsunami of emotion. I knew it was about William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, whose death was the inspiration for what is arguably the playwright’s masterwork, Hamlet. (We learn right away that Hamnet and Hamlet are interchangeable names.) I also knew that it co-starred Jessie Buckley, who may not have quite the instant access to my tear ducts that Mescal does, but is certainly one of the finest actresses of her generation. What’s more, the film is directed by Chloé Zhao, whose soulful films are filled with striking imagery and depth of feeling. (Her Nomadland was my favorite film of 2020.)

So why did Hamnet leave me cold?

I appreciated the film’s pastoral beauty and the two leads are, unsurprisingly, excellent. But I couldn’t really make the connection between the man I was watching on screen and the greatest English-language playwright of all time. Even in Amadeus, the obnoxiously boyish and hyperactive Mozart exudes a kind of manic genius. In Hamnet, Shakespeare—or “Will” as he’s called here—seems more like a simple country school teacher. Early in the film he lays eyes on Agnes (Buckley), who is stomping through the woods with a hawk on her arm, and runs after her—abruptly abandoning the two little boys he is tutoring. He follows her into a barn where she touches his hand in a probing sort of way—turns out she’s a seer of sorts, who can divine the future with her touch—and they kiss. My first thought was: Do they already know each other? Is this a game where they pretend to be strangers? But no, they actually are strangers and we’re supposed to believe that there is something so elemental and inexorable about their love that it can’t be stopped.

The film is thoroughly imbued with that blend of mysticism and naturalism.

Agnes, it turns out, is the half-sister of the two boys he is tutoring (her own doting mother died in childbirth when she was still a little girl and her step mother is basically of the wicked variety). Because of Agnes’ love of nature, her way of communicating with wild creatures, and her ability to make potions and see the future, she is derisively nicknamed “the forest witch”—an outsider in her own home and village. As for Will, we don’t learn much about him other than that he hates his abusive drunkard of a father. But he barely speaks, something that even the quiet Agnes remarks upon. In response, he says he’s better at storytelling than conversation and recites the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, expertly, of course. But that’s it. We hear he’s a writer, but we rarely see him write, nor does he seem consumed by ideas or language. The film is so concerned with the beauty and brutality of nature, it misses the intellectualism and wit that powered Shakespeare.

Agnes and Will have three children—their eldest, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and twins Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). Agnes gives birth to Susanna alone in the woods, near the opening of a cavern, bracing herself against a tree stump during contractions. When she is found by Will, holding the baby, she is smiling, fully content. But the next time she gives birth she is forced to do it inside against her will by Will’s compassionate but no-nonsense mother, played by Emily Watson. The boy comes first and then, surprisingly, comes Judith, his twin, who is nearly stillborn. They wrap the infant up, trying to take her away but Agnes refuses to let her go, virtually willing the child back to life. The twins become inseparable—male and female carbon copies of each other, even occasionally swapping clothes.

It is sickly Judith whom the family frets over and worries about, especially when she is stricken with bubonic plague a disease that has been decimating villages. But in a cruel twist, it is not Judith who dies of the plague, but Hamnet. (Judith tells her mother that, in the ultimate act of sacrifice, Hamnet beseeched the gods to take him instead of her—and I think we’re supposed to take that literally.) At the time of the boy’s death, Will is in London, working on his plays. So Agnes is alone with her surviving children as she wails and begs and curses the gods over the body of her motionless son. When Will comes home, he is too grief-stricken to console Agnes, or even speak. The child’s death creates a wedge between the couple. So Will leaves again and retreats into his art.

Most of Hamnet has been visual and visceral—scenes of nature, scenes of the brutality of childbirth and illness, scenes of a content, pastoral family life. (In this sense, the film is very much like Train Dreams, a similarly swoony if dramatically inert film about a simple homesteader and his idyllic family life.)

However, the film’s final scenes, the ones that take us out of the awe and fury of nature and depict the premiere of Hamlet that Agnes reluctantly attends with her brother, Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn), are its best—stirring and literary and meaningful. The overhead shot of Agnes and Bartholomew pushing their way through the eager crowd to get to the front of the stage is a masterclass of filmmaking. The stage production itself is riveting—Noah Jupe, the real-life brother of Jacobi, plays Hamlet, and Mescal, as Will, plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father, covered in white powder and tattered white robes. Agnes, her body pressed against the stage, reaches out to the dying Hamlet, her eyes filled with ecstatic tears. She’s both healed and transported by this monumental work of art. It’s breathtaking. But I didn’t quite see how we went from that home, that family, and that child’s death to this remarkable play. Yes, I cried. But it felt like an unearned catharsis. I wanted to see the film that warranted this powerful final scene.

After watching Rebecca Miller’s riveting five-part documentary on Martin Scorsese, Mr. Scorsese, I found myself feeling sorry for Scorsese’s eldest daughters, both born when he was still a striving young man. Their father was an obsessive artist, sometimes fueled by cocaine, always fueled by an all-consuming passion for cinema and filmmaking. He was, essentially, an absentee father. His films were his real children. (He’s now long sober and a doting dad to his youngest daughter, Francesca.)

This trajectory tracks in Sentimental Value, the brilliant new film from Joachim Trier (The Worst Person In the World), about a filmmaker who chose moviemaking, and its attendant glory, over his own family. Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, a director of some renown (if not quite Scorsese-level renown) who all but abandoned his two daughters to follow his career.

When she was a child, his younger daughter, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), played a role in a WWII drama that he directed. She recalls, poignantly, that it was the best time of her life—never before had her father lavished her with so much attention and praise.

Now Agnes and her older sister, Nora (Renate Reinsve), are adults and essentially estranged from Gustav, who divorced their mother and barely came around after that. Nora, it turns out, was the one who became an actress. She’s a brilliant stage actress but suffers from pre-show anxiety, needing to be coddled, coaxed, and managed before finally delivering a bravura performance. Nora is single—she’s having an unsatisfying affair with a married stage director—and leads a somewhat lonely life. Agnes, a historian, has a richer life with a husband and an adorable tow-haired young son, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven), whom both she and Nora dote on.

The other character, if you will, is the rambling family home, where generations of Borgs have lived. (We are shown that various eras of Borg kids discovered that, if you poked your head in the upstairs furnace, you could clearly hear the adults talking downstairs.) If Nora and Agnes’ childhood was disrupted by their parent’s constant arguing and eventual divorce, young Gustav had a far worse childhood: His mother was arrested for being a member of the Resistance and taken to prison where she was tortured. She later killed herself.

So while the family home holds much beauty and life and love—Triers makes a point of showing us laughter, and frolicking children, and messy dinners in the kitchen—it also carries trauma. And its four walls become a metaphor for the kind of family legacy that is impossible to escape.

The film’s action really kicks off after Nora and Agnes’ mother—Gustav’s ex-wife—dies. Gustav was a somewhat unexpected (and unwelcome) guest at the reception. Shortly after, he approaches Nora with a proposition. He’s written a film for her. No one but her can star in it, he insists. It’s his first film in 15 years. And because of his age, it is likely to be his last.

But Nora’s resentment runs deep—deeper than Agnes’, as it turns out. And she says no. Indeed, she doesn’t even bother to the read the script, as he pleads with her to do.

At a retrospective of his work, Gustav meets the American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a fan, who fawns over him. He offers her the role that his daughter turned down. The film is about a mother who commits suicide after her young son goes to school, but Gustav keeps insisting it’s not about his mother. In further blending of life and art, he decides that he will film his swan song in the family home.

Gustav spends lots of time with Rachel, who has insecurities about the role, especially when he suggests she dye her blonde hair brown, like Nora’s. Should she talk in a Norwegian accent, she asks. Is he sure that an American is right for the role? Can he explain why the mother chooses to kill herself? You have to find the answer yourself, he says. There is something distracted in his direction. We can tell his heart is not quite in it.

Meanwhile, Agnes has been letting Gustav come around more. At her mother’s memorial gathering, Agnes had to introduce a shy Erik to his grandfather. Now the little boy runs straight into his grandfather’s arms.

But Nora remains aloof. We can see that she and her father are quite alike. Neither can express their feelings particularly well—they throw their emotions into their art.

Gustav throws himself into his project, perhaps seeking the rush he found as a young man. He insists that only his former cinematographer shoot his new film but when he visits his old partner, he’s shocked to see that he’s an old man now who uses a cane. Gustav mumbles some excuse about the studio wanting to pick the film’s DP and backs away. What he’s really horrified by, of course, is his own mortality.

Sentimental Value is about regret and trauma and the things left unsaid. It also asks some pointed questions about art: Gustav is a great filmmaker. And Nora is a great actress. Was the collateral damage of their hopelessly fractured relationship worth it? And is there a way they can learn to communicate, if not directly, perhaps through their art?

I was a huge fan of Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (I called it “loose-limbed and insightful” while naming it my sixth favorite film of 2021) and I think this film is even better, a masterwork. Clearly, Trier has found a muse in Renate Reinsve, who has a bewitching economy to her work, a way of saying more with less. (Sometimes Scandinavian understatement can be a balm.) And Skarsgård has never been better. There was a time, clearly, when his Gustav was bedding young starlets. Now he is more of a father figure. The irony that he is a better father to Fanning’s Rachel than he ever was to Nora or Agnes is not lost on us. He still shows his mischievous, raconteur side, but now he wears his sadness and regret like a cloak. And Trier, who has two young daughters himself, directs the whole affair with beauty and pathos and wit. His deeply humane film is an object lesson: You don’t need to be monomaniacal to make great art.

Sentimental Value opens this weekend at The Charles.

The Maryland Film Festival starts tonight at the Parkway Theatre and runs through Sunday, Nov. 9. It’s an exciting lineup of features, docs, shorts, and experimental works, many with Baltimore roots. Here are two must-see films you should aim to catch:

I WAS BORN THIS WAY

Baltimore native Carl Bean should be a household name. I was utterly captivated and inspired by his story, told with great care and affection in the new documentary, I Was Born This Way—and was rather stunned that I’d never heard of him before.

As a child in Baltimore, he endured unspeakable trauma (molestation by an uncle, the death of his young mother, ridicule and condemnation from his family and peers for being gay) and found solace in two things: music and the church. He was a gifted singer and loved to impress all comers with his vocal prowess.

The church, which was joyful, with music and love, should’ve been a sanctuary for Bean. But he knew he was gay at a young age and the church rejected him, telling him he was going to hell.

In the 1960s, he moved to New York, got a job as a stockboy at Macy’s, and began singing gospel with friends, including Dionne Warwick. He built enough of a reputation as an excellent baritone that Motown Records eventually came calling.

R&B music was giving way to disco and they had a song for him to sing—a gay anthem of sorts called “I Was Born This Way.” (Yes, Lady Gaga, who is interviewed here, credits the song for influencing her single of nearly the same name.)

The song became a hit—blasted in discotheques across the country—so much so that he could’ve continued making more hits, but he had other plans. He wanted to spread the gospel of inclusivity and love.

When the AIDS crisis hit his community, he became a priest so he could visit the dying and give hope and comfort to them, as well as their parents, who in some cases felt a wave of unspeakable relief that a preacher was by their child’s bedside. (So just to reiterate—the man became a priest so that he could tend to those dying of AIDS.) He also started an organization called the Minority AIDS program and founded a gay-friendly ministry, the United Fellowship Church.

In a cruel twist, he had encountered racism in the gay community, just as he had encountered homophobia in the Baptist Church. At times, he felt there was no place where he really belonged. So he created that space for himself and others.

Baltimorean Sam Pollard, who directed the film, tells Bean’s story through a mixture of semi-realistic animation and interviews with not just Bean, but many of his friends, family, and admirers, including Questlove and Warwick.

The film’s framing device has bon vivant extraordinaire Billy Porter tracking down an early demo of not just “I Was Born This Way,” but its never-before-heard B-side, “Liberation.” The film ends with Porter singing that song along with Bean’s old recording. It feels uplifting and celebratory. A fitting tribute to a man who committed radical acts of joy.

I Was Born This Way screens at the Parkway Nov. 9 at 5:30 p.m. 

RICKY

Ricardo “Ricky” Smith (Stephan James) has been dealt a horrible hand. At 15, he was arrested for robbery and attempted murder—his friend, the mastermind behind the heist, successfully averted the police—and he spent 15 years in jail.

Now he has emerged a man-child who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone, can’t drive, and has had very limited experience with sex.

The world, it seems, is conspiring to keep him from living a full life away from prison. He loses one job when threaten a background check, almost gets robbed (and possibly shot) by a couple of gangbangers, and has to avoid the many drug dealers and bad influences in his midst.

He has powerful female figures in his life: His God-fearing mother, who lays hands on him and evokes the holy spirit; his no-nonsense parole officer (Sheryl Lee Ralph) who reminds him that she’s not his friend and definitely not his mother (while secretly caring deeply about him); and a woman from the mandatory support group for returning citizens he attends, who shows him kindness but perhaps wants more than he’s capable of giving.

James’ portrait of this man at a crossroads, not sure how to live in the world or even if he deserves to live in it, is heartbreaking and fearless. And enormously gifted director Rashad Frett, a Baltimore native who won the 2024 Maryland Filmmaker Fellowship Award, doesn’t shy away from his hero’s pain and darkness. Ricky doesn’t make eye contact, is quick to anger, prone to zoning out when people are talking to him. No, the world is not on his side, but he needs to be on his own side.

Ricky can be a frustrating film to watch, but that’s the point. This isn’t about neat Hollywood endings. It turns out, when our hero gets out of prison, that when the real struggle begins.

Ricky screens at the Parkway on Nov. 8 at 7:30 p.m. Director Rashad Frett will be in attendance.

Luca Guadagnino’s campus drama, After the Hunt, starts with a clue as to where its heart truly lies. The film’s opening credits uses Windsor typeface, aka the Woody Allen font—a sly homage to the disgraced auteur.

But the film itself seems a bit more ambivalent than those credits would suggest. On the one hand, it’s clear that Guadagnino, along with screenwriter Nora Garrett, believes that today’s college students are hopelessly coddled, ever searching for safe spaces, or a “warm bath” as Julia Robert’s Alma, a philosophy professor at Yale, derisively puts it. The general sentiment of Alma and many of her colleagues is, toughen up. Be more like we were when we were young—handling life’s indignities and cruelties with a stiff upper lip (and a stiff drink, if necessary).

But the film also seems to recognize that this younger generation might be onto something. Why should they put up with abusive adults? Why shouldn’t they demand accountability for bad behavior? And if you ignore or suppress a painful incident it just might haunt you for life.

The painful incident in question is this: After a graduate student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), attends a party at Alma’s apartment—the professors like to have a handful of grad students in attendance as a kind of worshipful audience—she gets a ride home with the garrulous Hank (Andrew Garfield), also a philosophy professor. They are both a bit drunk as they stumble from the party, giggling companionably.

The next day, Maggie tells Alma that Hank went up to her apartment and assaulted her.

This is complicated in a few ways: Alma has a very close relationship with Hank—one might suspect it was romantic were they not flaunting it in front of Alma’s husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) at the party. They wouldn’t be that obvious if they were actually lovers, would they?

Also, Maggie, who is a lesbian, is hopelessly devoted to Alma—she even dresses like her. Frederik teases Alma for how much she loves to bask in Maggie’s adoration. And the relationship between them has become a bit parasocial, even obsessive, on Maggie’s part. (For the record, I love Edebiri in The Bear, but I do feel she’s a bit miscast here. Maggie is restrained, serious, so Edebiri’s wonderfully off-kilter charm is not put to use.)

Alma would prefer not to get involved in the incident, but she doesn’t really have that option. Maggie is her student, Hank is her friend, and the alleged incident took place after her party.

After the Hunt is the kind of film that reminds one how difficult is to pull off this kind of “he said, she said” mystery. We’re not supposed to know if Maggie is lying—she has a few reasons to dislike Hank—until the very end. And Alma’s behavior is also elliptical. She has the occasional crippling stomach pain that, for reasons unknown, she doesn’t get treated and she keeps a mysterious photo of a man and a news clipping in an envelope taped under her bathroom sink.

But all of this crypticness ultimately hurts the film. We feel like we are watching these characters through frosted glass—it’s hard to get to know or care about any of them when their motivations are so opaque. This is even true of Stuhlbarg’s Frederik, who has a habit of playing extremely loud music to get on Alma’s nerves (shades of Anatomy of a Fall, a far better film about a domestic mystery) but who also seems to be devoted to his wife.

Flaws and all, After the Hunt is sort of my jam. I love Guadagnino and his sensual, well-appointed films for grown-ups. I love films and books set on college campuses (indeed, I just finished reading Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, a novel that is uncannily similar to After the Hunt but in a much more satisfying way). And I love Julia Roberts. It’s great to see her in a role like this, playing the sort of uptight, brilliant, alluring character that Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett seem to have cornered the market on. (Yes, it’s also impossible not to see shades of Tár in After the Hunt. It doesn’t help the film that it draws comparisons to so many better works of art.) Roberts is more than up to the task—perfectly capturing Alma’s dueling self-loathing and self-regard.

I hate to use the word pseudointellectual—it’s a meaningless word, a la pretentious. But it does seem to apply here. The film is ostensibly about thorny moral and societal questions but it equivocates and doesn’t grapple with them in a penetrating way. And the film’s intellectuals don’t really talk like intellectuals—philosophy professors don’t actually sit around debating which famous philosophers were the biggest assholes; they talk about the plum tart recipe in the Times they made last weekend or the latest Netflix movie.

I’m never going to say no to seeing Julia Roberts—and the rest of this strong cast—in a Guadagnino film, I just wish it were a better Guadagnino film.

Rejoice! Paul Thomas Anderson has saved cinema! Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but his new film, One Battle After Another, is a breakthrough. As though it were 1975 and not 2025, Warner Bros. took an auteur, gave him free rein and a big budget, and said, “Do your thing.” And man, did PTA do his thing.

At nearly three hours long, the film is a roller coaster ride—literally and figuratively. It’s exciting, funny, audacious, and politically trenchant. As is his wont, Anderson borrows a lot from Robert Altman and a bit from Stanley Kubrick, while in this case throwing in a touch of Quentin Tarantino and even Wes Anderson. The film is also loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland, but it’s a creation all of PTA’s own—a combination of the kind of loosey-goosey, shaggy film style he demonstrated in Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza with the disciplined craft of Phantom Thread and There Will Be Blood. In other words, the auteur is firing on all cylinders. It doesn’t hurt that he has Leonardo DiCaprio, America’s best living actor as his lead. (Fight me!)

DiCaprio plays “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, a reluctant member of a resistance group called The French 75. He’s an explosive expert—good at creating diversions—but he’s not a committed revolutionary. He’s tagging along with his lady, the fierce true believer, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). When she gets pregnant, he wants to slow things down a bit, settle into a domestic life, but she wants no part of it. Her devotion to the cause—various causes in this case, mostly involving protecting immigrants from inhumane treatment at the hands of an ICE-like agency—is too deep. One of the most memorable images of the film is Perfidia, extremely pregnant with her belly on full display, shooting a machine gun. “Bitch, I feel like Tony Montana!” she shouts.

Fast forward 16 years later and “Ghetto” Pat, now in hiding and going by the name Bob, is raising their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) on his own. By his own admission, his brain has been fried by drugs and alcohol, but even in his desiccated state, he’s a protective and devoted father. (He even tries to understand the pronouns of Willa’s nonbinary friend. “They, them, Dad,” Willa sighs. “Why is that so hard?”)

Trouble comes in the form of Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a sadistic military man who had an encounter with Perfidia years earlier and has become dangerously obsessed with her. He is now being recruited by a powerful, cloak-and-dagger white supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club (“Hail St. Nick!” is their greeting) and needs to find Bob and Willa to tie up some loose ends from his past.

Bob has no desire to get back in the game, but when Lockjaw kidnaps Willa, he goes into dad-bod Rambo mode. Sporting a bad goatee and a flannel robe—soon to be as iconic as The Dude’s Pendleton sweater—and carrying a 1G (and therefore untraceable) phone that is desperately in need of a charge, he goes after her.

He gets help from the super Zen local karate teacher known as Sensei (Benicio Del Toro) who also runs a so-called “Underground Railroad” for Latin immigrants. (The vastness of Sensei’s network will prove to be useful to Bob down the road.)

Anderson is dealing with larger-than-life archetypes here. Bob is the hapless father desperate to find his daughter, played by DiCaprio with a hilarious franticness and touching pathos. Sensei is the unflappable resistance leader, brought to life by an effortlessly cool Del Toro. Lockjaw, played by Penn with a bow-legged gait and a maniacal look in his eyes, is the perverse villain. Dazzling newcomer Chase Infiniti is the beautiful, free-spirited daughter with more than a touch of her mother’s moxie and defiance. Regina Hall also memorably plays a member of the French 75 who is as committed as Perfidia but with a gentler touch.

It’s impossible to overstate how much fun this thing is, with twists and welcome detours along the way. And the filmmaking! Such verve. Such confidence. Whether Anderson is filming that already famous undulating chase scene, following Bob’s desperate attempt to charge his phone through the chaos, or showing us that top secret Christmas Adventurers Club with their Patagonia Vests and smug bonhomie, you know you’re in the hands of a master.

Movies are so back, baby!

The New/Next Film Festival is back, baby! From October 2-5, the WYPR-founded fest—now in its third year—invites cinephiles to view a variety of expertly curated independent features, documentaries, and shorts at the Charles Theatre.

If you need some help choosing which screenings to catch, here are a couple of reviews to consider.

Alice-Heart
3 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Alice-Heart, written and directed by Mike Macera, is about that liminal space between childhood and adulthood, when you crave independence and a meaningful creative life, but don’t quite know who you are yet. Also, you’re broke.

Appealing newcomer Lissa Carandang-Sweeney, who also produces, plays our heroine, Alice Heart (yes, that’s her full name—and it’s what everyone calls her)—an aspiring writer and student at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

On the first day of class, she does something impulsive: She calls out her performatively Luddite creative writing teacher for being an asshole. He kicks her out of class. Then, in rapid succession, she drops out of college, gets dumped by her pseudo-evolved boyfriend (Adam McAlonie), and gets cut off financially by her Filipino mother.

She’s rescued in a way, by her next door neighbor, Tony (Tony McCall), a shaggy freelance photographer who clearly loves her but plays it cool. He lets her stay with him while she sorts thing out. They get fried chicken together, he photographs her, and they talk about the people in their lives who have betrayed them—mostly ex-lovers.

Alice Heart tries to get back in the creative writing class, but the teacher is recalcitrant, until she gets some dirt on him and essentially blackmails him. (I’m team Alice Heart on this one—a teacher’s ego shouldn’t be so fragile he can’t accept an apology from a desperate student.)

There are other men in her life who do her dirty: a cocky editor at Simon & Simon publishing house, who mocks her for bringing in a class assignment as an example of her work. A friend of Tony’s who wants to buy a photo of her for less than savory reasons. And that ex-boyfriend, who manages to briefly win her back, because women that age never seem to learn the first time.

Filmed in black and white and rather conspicuously low budget, Alice-Heart is a throwback to the kinds of films I watched when I was a kid, back when the indie film movement was in its infancy—films like Hal Hartley’s Trust, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks.

Not much happens, but the characters feel real and relatable—and you do want Tony and Alice Heart to realize they’re perfect for each other. The penultimate shot of the film has the wistfulness of The Graduate.

Alice-Heart screens on Sunday, October 5 at noon.

American Theater
3.5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

When I first watched the trailer for Nicholas Clark and Dylan Frederick’s American Theater, I assumed it was a mockumentary, in the style of Waiting For Guffman. It was all a bit too on-the-nose: a troupe of conservative and/or “canceled” actors and dancers staging an immersive outdoor musical production of the Salem Witch Trials. They were calling their play—wait for it—The Salem Experience.

Christopher Guest himself could not have made a film this trenchantly satirical. But better still, the film occupies that Guest-like sweet spot of loving its characters as much as it spoofs them.

Leading this unlikely troupe is Brian Clowdus, a charismatic, gay director with Corky St. Clair-style delusions of grandeur. He was once the director of a theater company that specialized in these interactive outdoor performances—one was Titanic: The Musical, naturally—but he was forced to resign in disgrace after he was accused by multiple people of being a racist and a sexual predator.

The film doesn’t take a stance on those accusations, and Clowdus, of course, claims he was the victim of a “witch hunt.” He also does the thing so many “canceled” people before him have done—he goes full MAGA, even running for Congress as a gun-loving, Trump quoting conservative.

Indeed, almost everyone in the troupe is MAGA, and some say they lost work or were cast out of their friend groups because of it. They wear their political defiance, literally, on their bodies. One sports a tee-shirt that says, “Slow the Spread (of Socialism),” another wears a cap emblazoned with the words “Fake News,” and Clowdus drinks from a thermos that reads, “Leftist Tears.”

They talk a lot about how they feel like outsiders in the artistic world and, as is the case with all good documentaries, you grow to understand their perspective—even if you don’t agree with them. These are the kind of people who believe the expression “Black Lives Matter” is racist because it excludes white people. Bless their hearts.

Clowdus reveals the hypocrisy of his MAGA beliefs in a telling moment. He boasts that Mike Pence called in to a gay conservative convention he attended to thank them for their support. “One of his charities is a Christian camp that does conversion therapy,” someone counters. “Well, that’s bad,” Clowdus says, laughing sheepishly. “I can’t get into that.”

At its core, American Theater is a backstage drama with all its attendant chaos and uncertainty. Actors are not off-book. The pyrotechnics keep failing. One “witch” dangles too loosely from the noose tied to the tree, looking more ridiculous than deadly. The sound guy cues “Sleigh Bells” instead of the eerie music meant to launch the show.

Will the show go on as planned? And will the protesters who are planning to assemble actually show up?

The Salem Experience had a (extremely) limited engagement in Georgia. I’m kind of jealous of the people who saw the extravaganza in person. They can say they were there. But at least we can say we saw the movie.

American Theater screens on Friday, October 3 at 9:20 p.m.

WeWork for artists seems like something of a no-brainer, but it requires lots of elements to come together. You need a big space, with tons of light (artists love light). You need a visionary team who can usher the space into existence. And you need some start-up cash to even get it off the ground.

Enter the American Can Company’s new BLIFTD—pronounced “be lifted”—a 15,000-square-foot, industrial-chic studio/work/event venue operated by Baltimore-based artists Jeffrey Kent and Nicole Clark, and supported by an investment from local developer Jeremy Landsman.

Folks in Baltimore’s art scene are already well acquainted with the striking Kent—bald, tall, and unspeakably cool—who is not only a wonderful artist, art dealer, and curator himself, but has long been a mentor to aspiring artists.

He recognized the genius of Amy Sherald before she was Amy Sherald, showcasing her early work in his old Howard Street space, Sub-Basement Studios. He also nurtured the talents of rising art-world star Jerrell Gibbs, who now has a studio at BLIFTD and will have his first hometown solo exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art next year.

It was Jeremy Landsman, of Reba Holdings development company, who reached out to Kent. Back in the day, Landsman used to hang out at Kent’s studio and loved the feeling of being around art and artists. So when he and his partners bought the Can Company last year, he knew he wanted to recreate that feel.

“Our goal was to bring culture to the project,” he says. “To bring good energy to the space.”

The second floor of the Can Company main building had most recently been used by tech companies Yahoo and OrderUp. Landsman essentially donated the space to Kent for the first year or so and asked him to cultivate a community art space. That was last October.

Shortly after that, Kent partnered with fellow artist Clark. Brainstorming with Landsman, they decided upon the shared studio model. Artists can choose long- or short-term spaces. There are smaller studios behind closed doors and an open space that feels a bit like a college art department. Everywhere, there are giant canvases, brushes, palettes, and paint. Sometimes there is loud music.

The space, which takes up the entire second floor, also has an option for non-artists to come do work, maybe just wanting to catch a creative vibe. And they will rent out the space for parties—as long as people promise to be careful around the art. Thanks to Yahoo’s former presence, there is even a DJ station and a movie screen.

Another key to BLIFTD’s success is manager Alexis Tyson, an artist and aspiring gallerist who is the most poised and accomplished 23-year-old you’ve ever met. While still going to school at UMBC, she works as an exhibition coordinator and project manager at The Peale museum, while also running the daily operations of BLIFTD.

“Someone’s going to steal her from us,” cracks Kent. Tyson’s own boldly colorful canvases are on easels in a corner of the studio.

Most of the artists at BLIFTD share Kent’s Basquiat-like style—thick paint, large canvases, unruly swirls of color. Clark says that there’s an informal “teaching aspect” to the place—with artists, especially Kent, sharing techniques, ideas, and even supplies.

Kent notes that this collaborative spirit is part of this town’s artistic DNA.

“This place isn’t dog-eat-dog at all,” he says. “That’s just the vibe of Baltimore.”

And now it’s the vibe at the Can Company, too. Landsman knows he’s running a for-profit, but truly thinks it’s good for business: “If you take care of the arts, the arts will take care of you.”

I am firm believer that dog people should have dogs. This belief has gotten me through the death of my quintessential mutt Maggie (“What breed is she?” I innocently asked the vet. “All of them,” he replied) and the needy, clingy, soulful Harriet, who followed. But when Oscar died, I wasn’t sure I could do it again.

I’d raised him since he was a pup, just a slippery, squirmy little guy who had two modes: extreme chaos and sound sleep. Eventually, he calmed down (a bit) and his true personality shined: silly, neurotic (he had random fears like thresholds and windy staircases), cuddly, and loyal. I live alone, so it’s not a lie to say that Oscar got me through COVID—he was a four-legged lifeline.

So, when Oscar died at the age of 15, I wasn’t sure I could do it again. His death hit me hard—I wailed so loudly I feared the neighbors would call the police.

But dog people have dogs.

Six months after Oscar died, I dipped my toe into the adoption pool again. The Instagram algorithm already knew my type—scruffy and small.

My feed was filled with doe-eyed, pert-eared terrier mixes, along with various descriptions of their personalities: high energy, fearful, not recommended for families with small children, etc.

I saw Gus—then named Chocolate Chip—on PetFinders.com. He was 14 pounds, black and brown, with fur that was alternately scruffy and fluffy (scluffy?). I thought he looked a bit like Toto from The Wizard of Oz.

He had been abandoned in a construction site in Austin, Texas, along with two other dogs. One of the dogs got hit by a car and died. The other two, Gus and a blond terrier type named Rosemary, got scooped up by local shelters.

I applied for Gus like I was applying for a high-stakes job. The shelter, Dizzy Dog, wanted to make sure I wouldn’t return him. “What behavior would you find unacceptable in a dog?” they asked. “Smoking?” I cracked. They did a virtual tour of my home, confirmed I had a gated backyard, and there was an extended phone call where I learned the “3-3-3” rule of what to expect when your dog first arrives: Three days of fear and uncertainty; three weeks of settling in; three months when they realize they’re here to stay and begin to show their true personality.

Then I did a Zoom call with Gus’ foster mom, Amanda. (Gus sat in the back of the frame munching on a bone, as if protesting the very concept of a virtual meet-and-greet with a dog.) My adoption application was approved and it was time to ship Gus halfway across the country to come home.

I was told to meet the transport truck at the White Marsh Royal Farms.

“Sounds sketchy,” I told the adoption agency. “It’s for easy access on and off the highway.” I arrived early, as is my wont, and wasn’t sure I was in the right place until I saw other hopefuls emerge from their cars with leashes and squeaky toys.

Finally, the truck, neatly stacked with dog crates, pulled up and Gus was the first to come out.

I had given myself a pep talk not to take it personally if he was scared, didn’t take to me right away, hid in his crate, or even if he snapped at me.

He’s been traumatized, I reminded myself. He needs time.

Instead, he melted into my arms. When I put him down on the grass, he promptly pooped. An angel and a genius! I could lie and say there was a long adjustment period, that the 3-3-3 rule was a handy guide, but that just wasn’t the case.

Gus was sweet and loving and well-behaved from day one.

I was told that I shouldn’t have him sleep in the bed with me for the first week or so—to allow him to establish his crate as his own safe space. The first night, I dutifully dragged Gus’ crate to my bedroom, put him inside, and turned out the light. He began to whimper. The great “Don’t Let Gus Sleep in the Bed With You” experiment lasted for all of two minutes. He’s been sleeping with me ever since.

Six months into our relationship, Gus is just the best little guy, my ride-or-die. I talk to him about Oscar sometimes. They would’ve liked each other.

A post script: Remember Rosemary, the dog who Gus was found with? Well, she stayed in the family. A month after I adopted Gus, my sister, Felicia, who had lost her adorable poodle-mix Ruby just a few weeks before Oscar died, adopted Rosemary, now named Gertie. Who doesn’t love a happy ending?

Read more staff stories about the furry (and feathered) loved ones in their lives in our Baltimore Pet Lover’s Guide.

The concept of soulmates is, admittedly, far-fetched. This idea that there is one perfect person out there for you in all the world and that the universe will strategically align itself to bring the two of you together is the stuff of fairy tales. And yet…spend some time with husband-and-wife musicians Dan and Claudia Zanes in their cozy Baltimore County home, and you might become a believer.

They’re both musicians and multi-instrumentalists. They both champion the transformative power of music—not just in an abstract way, but in practice. (They bring their music to the neurodivergent, the unhoused, the sick, the elderly.) They both love Haitian culture—which makes sense for Claudia, as her people are from Haiti, but less sense for Dan, who is a white guy from New Hampshire.

They love folk music and the blues there’s a giant painting of Lead Belly in their living room. They love to entertain, so much so that they turned their garage into a theater—a place for people to gather and perform and just be together.

Although Dan is 63 and Claudia is 45, they share a similar vibe—a kind of relaxed, cheerful, hippie-ish warmth. And, as I quickly discover, they physically gravitate to each other, too.

When setting up for this interview, we assemble in their living room, where there is one large couch and one comically small love seat. Claudia immediately sits on the love seat and gestures for me to sit on the couch. Then Dan sits next to her, leaving me alone on the expansive couch. Then, their dog, Rezi, a supremely floppy sheepdog/poodle mix, jumps on the love seat and curls up on top of them. One big happy, albeit cramped, family.

Although they met in Brooklyn in 2016—by then, Dan was married and divorced and had a grown daughter—they discovered that they were actually born 18 miles apart in New Hampshire.

Okay, universe, we get it.

When I ask if music brings them together when they have a fight, they exchange a curious look. Then they chuckle. “We don’t really fight,” Dan explains.

But before there was Dan + Claudia Zanes (the name of their touring band), there was Dan Zanes and Claudia Eliaza, two people who were, perhaps, destined to meet each other.

CLAUDIA
Claudia Eliaza was born in New Hampshire but her family was from Haiti and her home was a hub for New Hampshire’s surprisingly large Haitian community. There was always Haitian food on the stove—like diri kole (rice and beans), often mixed with chicken, fish, or goat—and the sounds of Creole music and language emanated throughout the house.

“I joke that I really didn’t know I was raised in the U.S. until I went to school,” says Claudia.

Claudia showed an aptitude for singing and all kinds of music-making as a child. She sang at home. She sang at church. She sang at her mostly white school—although she immediately noted that the music the kids were singing there was very different from what she heard at home.

She says she didn’t have much of the immigrant’s sense of being “othered,” because a “strong sense of Haitian pride” was instilled in her at a young age. Plus, when her school friends came over, they were immediately taken with the food, music, and warmth of the Eliaza home.

A formative moment was seeing gospel singer Shirley Caesar on stage in Boston. “That blew my mind,” says Claudia. “Just witnessing how this woman could bring these people together, and to feel this emotion pouring out of her, and how it was connecting with the audience—that impacted me greatly.”

She ended up attending the prestigious Berklee College of Music, where she studied music therapy and started thinking about music as a universal language.

“I was very interested in the healing modality of music, how music can be used to connect us, to set apart our difference, and bring us together in a unifying way,” she says.

She was still singing—jazz music in particular—but uplifting and healing people through music became her life’s calling.

After graduation, she began practicing music therapy. She tells a story of a nonverbal little girl who came to her practice—the child was 7 or 8—who spoke her first words during a music therapy session. Her parents were as stunned as they were elated. Similarly, she found that aging adults with dementia could connect to and be soothed by music in a way that nothing else could.

In 2013 she became the director of the arts nonprofit Community Music Center of Boston. She was the center’s first Black female director. She thought she had fulfilled her destiny—but the universe has a way of surprising us.

DAN
Dan Zanes could have—and in some ways, should have—been a conservative guy. Again, he grew up in preppy Concord, New Hampshire, and even went to the famed Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for two years.

But music was always a passion. He went to the library and took out records—Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan. (He bristles when I mention A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic—and Claudia laughs in a “don’t get him started” sort of way. Seeger, he notes, was much more than this folk music naif and Dylan was much more than this “genius jackass.”)

Still in high school, he worked at a summer camp where folk artists would come through and perform for the kids. Part of him couldn’t resist being the snickering cool guy on the outskirts of the crowd with his fellow counselors who preferred rock and roll. But part of him—the real par —was genuinely touched by the music-making and the way it brought joy to those kids.

He attended Oberlin and immediately started a band. If you’re of a certain age, you’ve probably heard of them—The Del Fuegos. They were a big deal in ’80s indie rock.

Dan says alternative music at the time was easing away from the post-punk scene of The Cure and New Order and onto more roots-style rock. The Del Fuegos, which Dan formed with his brother and two of his Oberlin classmates, fit in neatly to a new scene that included X, The Blasters, Los Lobos, and, later, REM. In 1984, Rolling Stone named them “Best New Band.” They began to tour, starting in grubby clubs and ending up in large concert halls. Dan served as the primary songwriter and lead singer.

“It was like the folk music I listened to as a kid,” Dan says. “Just louder, faster, and sloppier.”

He reflects on that period in his life: “It was a great way to spend my 20s,” he says. “I would say I wasted my youth, but it wasn’t really a waste. It was an incredible experience.”

That said, the rock-and-roll lifestyle took its toll—drugs, alcohol, you name it. “I’m grateful that I’m alive,” he admits. By the time he was 27, Dan realized that rock-and-roll debauchery just wasn’t for him. The Del Fuegos broke up and he did a big reset—including sobriety. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, got married, had a daughter named Anna (now the editor of Alternative Press magazine), got divorced.

He was worried that having a daughter would keep him from playing his music. But then he realized that he wanted to play the kind of music Anna would enjoy. He recruited some high-profile friends—very high profile, like Sheryl Crow and Suzanne Vega—and started a new project, Dan Zanes and Friends, that brought rootsy folk rock to kids.

As frontman, Dan, sporting colorful suits and a mop of punkish, unruly graying hair, played guitar and danced with silly glee. It was music for kids that the whole family could rock out to—and that was the point.

“People thought I was going to be singing, like, ‘The Farmer in the Dell’ for these kids. In fact, it was just an updated version of the folk records that I had listened to as a kid.”

In 2007, Zanes and Friends’ Catch That Train! won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Album for Children. He’d already had two solid musical identities—indie rock superstar and kid rock icon. But the most meaningful was yet to come.

DAN + CLAUDIA
On Labor Day weekend in 2016, Claudia was in Brooklyn visiting her friend Pauline Jean, a jazz vocalist. Jean said she knew someone that she thought Claudia would click with, a guy who did music for families named Dan Zanes. The name did ring a bell—Claudia thought maybe she had used Dan’s music in her therapy practice.

But when she and Jean arrived at Dan’s East Flatbush home, she figured she was remembering the wrong guy. She was picturing a white guy. And Dan lived in this West Indian neighborhood and, as she approached the house, she saw a giant Haitian flag flapping in front of the house. Then she saw Dan on the porch playing the ukelele.

“I was like, ‘What?’” laughs Claudia. They went inside and she was amazed to see Dan’s extensive record collection of Haitian music—music her dad used to play.

“Suddenly I was very curious,” she says. “‘Who is this human?’”

They began singing together.

“I was immediately taken with Claudia,” Dan says. “And when you sing with someone, you see them in a different way than if you’re just, say, having a cup of coffee or a meal together. You really see the person.”

“Music is a beautiful way to see into the soul of someone,” agrees Claudia.

Dan was utterly transfixed. “I just knew Claudia was the person I had been dreaming about my whole life,” he says. “Her laugh is, you know, intoxicating to me. I just pictured us making music together and being together.”

Claudia was equally taken with Dan, although romantic feelings came later. After all, Dan was nearly 20 years older than her. And there was the slight inconvenience that she was still living in Boston. But the more they played together, the closer they got, and eventually there was no denying the feelings that were there.

A year later, Dan asked Claudia to come help him babysit a friend’s kid for a while. When they got there, there “happened” to be a guitar case in a trashcan, which had a guitar in it. Dan began to play “I Only Have Eyes For You.” He was joined, spontaneously it seemed, by neighbors, one on the guitar and the other on the violin. Claudia had no idea she was being pro- posed to.

“I’m thinking, ‘Wow, New York is amazing. People just play music all the time!’” she says, laughing.

She began recording the serenade on her iPhone, inadvertently capturing the moment when Dan got down on one knee for posterity.

From there, she moved to New York. For a while, they lived there together, making music, honing their connection. Dan had always been interested in the healing power of music, but with Claudia at his side, it became more of a mission.

When they found out about Maria Lambros’ project, Our Joyful Noise, they knew they wanted to be involved. Lambros, a professor at the Peabody Institute, runs a nonprofit that brings music to unexpected places—halfway homes, prisons, cancer and Alzheimer’s units. Participating in Our Joyful Noise drew the couple to Baltimore.

“We felt like Baltimore was this really special place, with people doing exciting things and creating and dreaming,” says Dan. “It felt like what Brooklyn was in the ’80s and ’90s.”

So they moved here.

“Dan and Claudia are extraordinary musicians who are truly at the heart of Our Joyful Noise,” says Lambros. She quotes a staff member at Saint Luke’s Youth Center’s After School program for at-risk youth, who described the Zanes as a “great big musical hug.”

For a while, the couple lived in Reservoir Hill, making good friends with the tight-knit community of Black artists and intellectuals who live in that neighborhood. Kaye Wise Whitehead, host of “Today With Dr. Kaye” on WEAA, has had them as guests her show and collaborated with them on a variety of community projects.

“They are beautiful people,” she says. “And when I say ‘beautiful,’ I’m not talking about physical appearance. I’m talking about the love they have for the city, the connection they have with young people, the way they carry the reputation of Baltimore and its ‘artivism’ forward.”

The Zanes were—and still are—active participants in Baltimore urban life, but eventually the clarion call of greener space won out and, in 2023, they moved to the county.

To be clear, this is not a cookie-cutter townhouse, but an adorable Victorian set on a half-acre, with a porch and an enclosed deck and bohemian-chic furnishings—Turkish throw rugs, brightly painted walls, velvet couches. Claudia is the one with the green thumb—and there are plants hanging from the ceiling and resting on every available surface, adding to the sense that something wild and vital takes place here.

The performance space they built was simply an extension of their lifestyle. They love bringing people together, especially musicians, so why not create a space to perform and jam? Theirs is a house meant to be enjoyed and shared, much like Claudia’s house when she was growing up.

So far, as Dan + Claudia Zanes, they’ve traveled around the country performing, released two albums together, continued their work with Our Joyful Noise, and were commissioned by the Kennedy Center to write a sensory-friendly folk opera called Night Train 57.

Betty Siegel, the director of the Office of Accessibility and VSA at the Kennedy Center, was wowed by their commitment to the project. Sensory-friendly, she explains, is just a matter of giving children autonomy. If they want to bang on a chair during the performance, that’s fine. If they want to cover their ears, that’s fine, too.

“And Dan and Claudia were in from the start,” she says. “They really wanted the opera to include all children, all people, all families. They’re just about the nicest, most innovative, most artistic musicians you can ever hope to work with.”

Oh, and for the record, Siegel also got the sense that the couple were “fated to be together.”

In the end, if the universe did bring them together for a reason, it was to spread joy.

“There are so many terrible things happening in the world,” Dan says. “We can’t control everything but we can control our little corner of the world. So we’re just going to focus on the good. On what we can do in the here and now.”

In 2021, almost a decade after moving from Towson to California to pursue a career in acting, Michael Strassner was steadily working, but not quite crushing it. He joined The Groundlings, the famous Los Angeles improv troupe, and had some success there. He came this close to being on Saturday Night Live—callbacks and everything. He got small parts in major TV sitcoms (he played Nick Offerman’s brother in Parks and Recreation). But he hadn’t really had his big break.

That is, until the writer-director-actor Jay Duplass (one half of the acclaimed Duplass brothers) followed him on Instagram. Strassner seized the day and sent him a DM. The two met, got along famously, and decided to make a film together.

The result is The Baltimorons, an underdog romcom about the relationship between Cliff (Strassner), a newly sober 30-something improv actor loosely based on Strassner, and Didi (Liz Larsen), a middle-aged dentist. (Read my full review, here.)

The film, which is entirely set in Baltimore, was a huge sensation at SXSW and will soon be playing in the town that inspired it. The sold-out Maryland premiere, featuring a Q&A with Strassner and Larsen, will take place at The Senator on Sept. 10, with more showtimes at The Charles and other local theaters to follow.

Ahead of the local premiere, we caught up with Strassner to discuss his love of comedy, how the film came to be, and giving Baltimore the star treatment it deserves.

Tell me about your background. Where did you go to school—which, since you’re from Baltimore, you know means high school.
I know, indeed. I’ll do the whole pipeline. I went to Hunt’s [Church] originally, then Riderwood, then Immaculate Heart of Mary for middle school, and Loyola Blakefield for high school.

How did you get into performance?
I kinda got my first itch for theater at Immaculate Heart. I got to be Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Hugo in Bye Bye Birdie, even though I wanted to play Conrad. And then off to Loyola—I did a little bit of sports there, but I just always loved doing theater. I was part of the Blakefield Players. I went to East Carolina University for a year and then I transferred to University of Maryland. I was originally a business major and then I realized, this is not what I want to do. I want to be an actor. And so I changed to theater. And by February of 2012 I was out to L.A.

I had assumed your background was improv and comedy. But your background was acting.
Right after college, I went to L.A., and that’s when I started doing improv and sketch comedy. Before that it was all theater and plays. If I’d done my research a little better, I would’ve realized that my heroes came from the Chicago scene: Bill Murray, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, John Belushi. They were all Second City people. But I was in L.A. and I was like, well, who else do I love? Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig and Phil Hartman. Well, I guess I’ll do The Groundlings.

While you were at The Groundlings, you got an opportunity to audition for SNL.
A rite of passage, truly. It was 2016 or 2017 and I tested with my friend, Heidi Gardner, who ended up getting it, of course. We did a showcase in L.A., then they brought three of us out to New York and then back to L.A., and then we came back for our final test in New York. It was very surreal. Lorne Michaels was there eating popcorn. They say it’s a rough room, but I did get some laughs, so I felt good about that. And I was like, “Okay, this is it!” And then it wasn’t.

Is there a feeling not getting SNL might’ve been a blessing in disguise?
One hundred percent. I was not sober at the time and I feel like if had gone there while I was still in active addiction, I never would have survived. I would’ve ended up like one of my heroes.

You started getting some small roles on major sitcoms. And then what?
In 2021, two things happened: I saw that Jay Duplass followed me on Instagram, and I had a short film that I wrote and I was hoping to find an actress for it. And I thought, “I’ve heard this guy helps out people. Let me send him my script in a DM.” …Six months later Jay replied. He wrote, “I’m super old. I don’t know how Instagram works, but send me your script.” And then he said, “Come over to my house.” And I was like, “I’m a stranger on the internet! You’re a celebrity. Why are you giving me your address!” [Laughs] And we had lunch.

You later made the short and sent him a copy, which he liked.
Yeah, he took time out of his day. And this is the kind of stuff that doesn’t happen in L.A. At least it doesn’t happen for me. It’s really a testament to Jay and Mark at Duplass [Brothers Productions]. They really want to help the next batch of independent filmmakers.

Over time, you told Jay your story, including your sobriety journey, and one day he said, “Let’s make a movie.”
Yeah, he said, “Hey man, I really want to turn your life into a movie. You want to do it?” And I was like, “Yes, please.”

You guys wrote The Baltimorons together. Was the plan always for you to play Cliff?
When we were writing it, I asked Jay, am I gonna act in it? And he was like, yeah man, you’re going to be the star.

This is a cliché, but it really did feel like Baltimore was a character in the movie. Was that intentional?
Yeah. I mean, we really wanted to make it a true love letter to Baltimore. I just love this city so much. I tried to have these authentic Baltimore things throughout. Natty Boh was super nice that they gave permission to use their stuff, and Berger Cookies. And the city is filled with so many people who are willing to help. I had so many extras who were my family and friends. People just took time out to help and it was the most beautiful thing. Places like Rocket to Venus and Dylan’s [Oyster Cellar]. We were like, “Can we use these locations?” And they were like, “Of course!”

I feel like Baltimore doesn’t always get this treatment. It’s usually Chicago and Boston and New York that are mythologized like this.
I grew up watching John Waters. I grew up watching Barry Levinson. I think what David Simon has done is great, but it never really shows the city in the best light. I feel like this city has so much more beauty and that it’s time we show it again. And we have our, like, Woody Allen Manhattan shot of the Key Bridge, which is my favorite shot, truly the most beautiful shot of the movie. We got that two months before it fell. It’s such an honor to have that in there. And 34th Street [also featured in the film] is a place that I grew up loving as a kid. I’m a Christmas nut, so the fact that we were able to, just like, shoot on 34th Street was like the coolest thing in the world.

So, speaking of John, has he seen the film yet?
He has. He came to the Provincetown screening and that was really cool. He sat in the back row, and he even stayed for the Q&A and was super sweet and kind. And he asked a question. He said, “How did you get to shoot on 34th Street? I’ve wanted to shoot there for forever!”

You have amazing chemistry with your co-star Liz Larsen.
It was immediate. We just kind of fell in love with each other in a platonic way, which was a blessing because if she and I aren’t vibing the movie [fails].

Tell me about the SXSW screenings. Your whole family and lots of friends, many of whom were in the movie, came.
My dad and step mom came to one screening and my dad is just going throughout the whole entire movie saying, “Oh, there’s Alison, there’s Lauren, there’s Dell, there’s Marty.” And I’m like, Dad, it’s not a private screening. You can’t just be saying everybody’s name you’re seeing in the movie!

Let’s talk about the title, Baltimorons. That’s kind of an inside joke for locals. Are you concerned some might take it the wrong way?Well, that’s the name of Cliff’s sketch group [in the film]. But if I didn’t come from Baltimore, I wouldn’t be caught dead naming the film that.

Coming home to shoot this film must’ve been quite a heady experience for you.
I mean, the best thing that’s ever happened to me is my sobriety. But number two is shooting this movie in Baltimore. You know, the fact that I got to come home to make my first movie as a lead, it was truly an honor. We would leave the set sometimes at 5 a.m. and I just remember driving past M&T Bank Stadium as the sun was coming up, and I’m like, this is my dream. It doesn’t get better than this.

Read my full review of The Baltimorons, here.