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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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!

There’s no mystery about the winners and losers of last night’s Oscars. It’s an awards show. There were actual winners (yay, Anora!) and actual losers (oof, Emilia Pérez). But the show itself had winners and losers, too, and I’m here to break it all down.

WINNER: Old People
The awards started at 7 p.m. EST and ended around 10:30. I actually got a full night’s sleep after the show. Huzzah! Never go back, Oscars, or else people over 45 will never forgive you.

WINNER: Conan O’Brien
The lanky redhead was in danger of becoming a has-been (thanks for nothing, Jay Leno) but his popular podcast has made him a hot commodity again, so kudos to (Baltimore’s own!) Bill Kramer, CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for hiring him.

From the moment he was introduced as “Four-Time Oscar Viewer Conan O’Brien” (after crawling out of a gaping hole in Demi Moore’s back—you had to be there), he was nearly flawless—funny with just the right amount of irreverence, only briefly and tactically political, and quick with quips.

A few of his best lines:

• “A Complete Unknown, A Real Pain, Nosferatu…these are just a few of the names I was called on the red carpet.”
• “I loved The Brutalist. I didn’t want it to end. Luckily, it didn’t.”
• “In Babygirl, Antonio Banderas plays a man who can’t give his wife an orgasm. He said it was the hardest role he ever played. You should’ve come to me, Antonio.”
• “This is Latvia’s first Oscar win [for Flow]. Ball’s in your court, Estonia.”

And, finally, of Anora:

• “Americans are glad to see someone finally stand up to a powerful Russian.”

WINNER: Timothée Chalamet
No, he didn’t actually win the Oscar—that went to Adrien Brody for his astonishing work in The Brutalist. But he kind of won the night. Dressed in a canary yellow tux (he made it work, except for the overly long pant hem…is this going to be a thing?), he lorded over the ceremony like the main character—a kind of twink Jack Nicholson.

He was referenced multiple times in Conan’s monologue and, since he was sitting up front, he was able to hug and slap hands with the various Dune II winners in technical categories as they passed him en route to the stage. He even played a part in a very funny bit involving Adam Sandler, who came dressed in a “fluffy sweatshirt” and gym shorts, and who pretended to leave in a huff when Conan O’Brien called him out for being underdressed.

But before Sandler left, he made a detour to Timmy’s seat, shouted the now famous “Chal-a-mayyyyy,” and kissed the young princeling on the head.

WINNER: Kieran Culkin
Again, this is not about the fact that he literally won, although that was nice. It was his excellent and hilarious acceptance speech that makes him a winner. First, he sang the praises of his old co-star Jeremy Strong in a Succession-worthy sea of f-bombs that had to be bleeped out of the broadcast.

One of the few things that made it on air? “I’m not supposed to single anybody out, but you were great.” (Awww.) Then. he went on to tell a hilarious story about his doubting wife, Jazz Charton, who told him she would have a third child with him if he won an Emmy (he did) and then, jokingly (or so she thought), told him she’d agree to a fourth child if he won an Oscar.

As Jazz mugged her dismay perfectly from the audience, Kieran said, “Ye of little faith…I love you and let’s get cracking on those kids.”

LOSER: People Who Like Film Montages and Clips (i.e., All People)
I, for one, love a good film montage. Back in the olden days, the Oscars were filled with them. Then some meddling exec decided that they took too much time out of the show, or were too expensive to produce, or didn’t appeal to the 18-25 demographic, or whatever, and we barely have them anymore. Newsflash, the people who watch the Oscars like movies and they like to see scenes from movies! It’s a bad sign when the best film montage of the night came from a Rolex commercial.

LOSER: The Oscar Nominated Songs
Nobody sang them. At this point, I’m not sure I’ve even heard most of them.

LOSER: 16-Time Best Song Loser Diane Warren
Too soon?

WINNER: Men’s Fashion
Baggy pants notwithstanding, Timmy looked great. Colman Domingo, resplendent in red (and also exuding main character energy), looked great. Andrew Garfield in a brown suit with a silk brown shirt looked dangerously great. Dare I say, the men were bringing it even more than the women?

WINNER: Selena Gomez
She had the best dress of the night IMO. (With June Squibb, most fly nana in the game, coming in second.)

LOSER: Adrien Brody’s Girlfriend
Please tell me my dude did not hurl his gum at her as he approached the stage to collect his Oscar.

WINNER: When Harry Met Sally Fans
Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan on stage together—you love to see it. “I used to work here,” cracked Crystal. And then, in a reference that surely warmed the hearts of fans, he said, “When you want to be an Oscar winner for the rest of your life, you want the rest of your life to start right now.” I smell a sequel. (No, really. They also did that mayo commercial during the Super Bowl. This can’t be a coincidence.)

LOSER: The Oscars’ Proofreader
During the award for Best Screenplay, they flashed bits of dialogue on the screen in typewriter font. This was the snippet they shared from September 5:

BADER: If, I’m saying if they shoot someone on live television. Right? Who’s story is that?

Spot the spelling mistake, kids! (In the screenwriting category, no less.)

WINNER: Independent Cinema
Anora, my favorite film of the year, took home 5 Oscars—four for writer/director/editor/producer Sean Baker and an upset win for star Mikey Madison. Flow, a Latvian film made for $4 million on open-source software, got an upset win for Best Animated Feature. And No Other Land, a film about the Israeli occupation of Gaza that has yet to secure a U.S. distribution, won for Best Documentary Feature. The final words of the show, before Conan’s send off, were said by Sean Baker: “Long live independent cinema!”

LOSERS: People Who Used My Picks to Vote On Their Oscar Pool
Sorry fam. I went an uncharacteristic 7-13 on my predictions this year. I took a couple of fliers on potential upsets that didn’t pan out (A Real Pain for Best Original Screenplay and Porcelain War for Best Documentary) and went with the herd on predicting Demi Moore for Best Actress. Hey, at least I guessed correctly that the great I’m Still Here would win for Best International Feature.

WINNER: This Skeet by Ken Jennings

SUPER DUPER LOSER: Hulu (And By Extension, Those Watching Hulu)
It was a much heralded deal this year that the Oscars would finally be livestreamed on Hulu. But there were a couple of problems. Those who watched the pre-show needed to log out of that feed and onto the feed of the main broadcast. “What time does the show start?” innocently asked my friend Stone Cold Jane Austen at around 7:30. She had been watching the pre-show and had no idea the actual ceremony had begun.

But that was a mere palate cleanser for the true disaster of the night: For many Hulu subscribers, the live feed cut off at 11 pm, a full half an hour before the show ended and before Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Picture were announced. Even Diane Warren was like, “Wow, what a bunch of losers.” (Still too soon?)

WINNER: Netflix
The Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight was no longer the biggest debacle in the ongoing experiment known as live streaming TV.

WINNER: All Of Us
Quibbles notwithstanding, it was a great show—entertaining, heartwarming, funny, well-paced, with a few gasp-worthy upsets. In my house, it was exactly what the doctor ordered.