Kraven the Hunter (2024)

Honestly, I don't understand why Aaron Taylor-Johnson's abs aren't on the poster. They're definitely the most important feature of J.C. Chandor's Kraven the Hunter. 

While we're talking about it, this is the strangest J.C. Chandor movie. It has a cast like a normal J.C. Chandor movie—ATJ, Alessandro Nivola, Russell Crowe, Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, Christopher Abbott—and they're all pretty great. But then this is a superhero action movie extravaganza slash family drama and not serious at all. In fact, the chief problems with Kraven the Hunter are with the script. The dialogue is terrible, and some of the acting does not make it any better.

But, the action is great and the visual effects are pretty excellent. When Kraven the Hunter is doing action, it's doing a good job. This movie is rated R, and so the fights are bloody and very violent. But this is also very silly even though it wishes to be taken quite seriously at times.

Listen, the thing is, it's just not that bad. I think the critiques of this are unfair. It's a fine Marvel movie. It has a couple good monsters, and it has a fun lead. And other Marvel movies are just as dumb. 

Moana 2 – with 3 on the Way (2024)

I'm sorry to report, but Moana 2 is not good. The plot is deeply confused and it borders on utterly nonsensical. The animation keeps changing, too, which is weird. Whenever the characters are wet they look like they’ve been animated completely differently (maybe this is a technology thing; maybe it is a skill thing; but what it looks like is that Disney just didn't invest quite enough money into Moana 2). 

There also just some truly insane sequences involving typical gross-out humor with nasty fluids (kids love these kinds of jokes for some reason), weird theatrical animated sequences that I didn’t understand at all (there’s a strangely surreal musical number in which Maui cheers Moana up, and they are in a completely different world for some reason), and there are animate coconuts who seem evil but are good and know a great deal about poisons? I have no idea. At one point I leaned over to my companion and asked What is happening? 

This thing moves along with the logic of an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants or maybe I mean a Minions sequel. Much worse: the songs are forgettable. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Lin-Manuel Miranda. Does this mean I'm going to actually enjoy Mufasa: the Lion King? 

Wicked: Part I (2024)

Wicked: Part I is successful on all fronts. The first time Cynthia Erivo sang in this I let out a little cheer.

It’s so nice to hear a Hollywood musical sung well (Michelle Yeoh excepted—who gave her this part?)! This is something I complain about nearly every time I see a Hollywood musical (The Prom is one of the most egregious recent outings in this vein). But Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo sing very well, and it's just so good to hear a song in a movie well sung. In fact, I also liked that this movie never pretends not to be a musical like some Rob Marshall piece of junk or the truly absurd Color Purple from last year. This movie starts us off with a musical number and never lets up. It knows what it is and it sets us up to get it quickly

Wicked: Part I also looks great, it’s choreographed well, Paul Tazewell’s costumes are gorgeous, and it’s quite funny. The whole thing just works. To be honest, I didn’t even really notice that this movie is as long as it is (I only got slightly bored when we were being welcomed to Oz by Emerald City street theatre and the cameos from Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth kept going); this movie really moves very well, and it's almost always visually interesting.

But also... this is Wicked. For me, this means that there's really a rather hard ceiling on how good it could actually be. It's a series of winking in-jokes that were cutesy in Gregory Maguire's original novel and which I've always found really trite in the Stephen Schwartz musical. I'm also just, like, not a teenage girl. And I recognize that this film isn't really aimed at me. It is to John Chu's credit that his film doesn't try to be more than that. It leans into its material and does that to its absolute best. This is precisely what he should have done. And that more or less means it's only ever going to be middlebrow. (I might as well tell you that last year I ranked Wonka very similarly to how I rank Wicked this year.)

PS. Stacy Wolf was right about Wicked, and it’s very easy to see why it’s so available for lesbian and other queer identifications.

Gladiator II (2024)

Gladiator II doesn’t quite work in all the ways it wants to, but it works in a lot of those ways. This is a big, soulless spectacle in the vein of Ridley Scott’s most recent outing, Napoleon, but to be generous, Gladiator II is much much better than last year’s Ridley Scott film. Still, this thing is big and nonsensical and soulless, and one even has trouble figuring out who to root for. 

Gladiator II's ostensible protagonist, Hanno, tells us very little about what he wants, and so although we admire him, he is hard to love. There's also Pedro Pascal's general something-or-other, but he's not a character who makes much sense, actually. He strains credibility in that he's a ruthlessly bloody general working in the service of Rome who seems to have no ambition except to do the right thing. The film’s most compelling character is Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, and even when he’s behaving very badly, it’s difficult to turn on someone so charismatic. Perhaps this makes me more of an ancient Roman than a morally upstanding US American in 2024, but I would vote with Macrinus. He knows what he’s doing and he played the game well. 

There is more to say about Macrinus (who was a real emperor of Rome after he murdered emperor Caracalla). Denzel ate. He chewed. He feasted on this part. He’s a pleasure to watch. My companion thought Paul Mescal lacked charisma, but I don’t know. I thought he was fine. I blame Ridley Scott. The whole thing feels sort of bland and generic (and, frankly, if I remember correctly from 24 years ago, I think that was mostly true of Gladiator itself). Gladiator II is epic, though, and I enjoyed most of it. I like it when people quote Virgil and Cicero and Seneca. And it's fun to watch muscled dudes play with swords and fight wild animals. For me this was better than the critics said it was. I was not bored.

I have more to say. I’ll believe lots of things: gladiators riding rhinoceroses wearing bespoke saddles, fine; gladiators fighting starving baboons, fine. But sharks? Sharks??? In a naumachia? How? You’re telling me they caught a half dozen sharks from the ocean without injuring them and transported them from the sea (in what vessel?) and then let them loose in the Roman Coliseum after flooding it? I do not believe it.

Anora (2024)

Anora is easily Sean Baker’s best film. This is very funny; the editing is great. the performances are excellent, and the physical comedy is top-notch. Best of all, Baker sticks the landing. He’s terrible with endings, but this one works very well. Anora ends with empathy and care. 

Still, I kind of can't believe this won the Palme d'Or. This is a filmmaker who almost uniformly shows contempt for his characters, despite coaxing brilliant performances out of his actors. And yet, I was stunned by this film’s last few moments. They don’t make the movie into something great or anything like that—it's a rather silly farce with a stellar ending—but I was still stunned; I didn’t know Baker had it in him. 

It's worth saying, too, that the supporting performance by Mark Eydelshteyn is wonderful.

Bird (2024)

My good friend Dayne once said to me that an Andrea Arnold movie looks the way it feels—it’s one of the hallmarks of her brilliant filmmaking, and this statement characterizes Bird through and through. 

This movie is about feeling alone even when you’re not physically alone; it’s about trying to fit in, trying to make a way in the world. And Bird is also about the world, by which I mean the greater-than-human world of birds, dogs, horses, snakes, toads, and the way our human lives intertwine with theirs. And this is a film about magic and love and needing other people. 

Goddammit this is a great movie.

Give 'Em Hell, Harry! (1975)

Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! is a filmed evening at the theatre (it's TheatroVision), watching James Whitmore in his celebrated role as Harry S. Truman in Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! and there’s nothing cinematic about it. It’s clearly filmed for television, in fact, with blackouts timed helpfully for commercial breaks. Whitmore is great, of course, and the play is filled with the kind of generic liberal political ideas that most people agree with across the board. The whole idea is a kind of no-nonsense politics that at least feels reasonable. The audience in the theatre loves the show and applauds throughout at various clever stories in Samuel Gallu’s play. It’s a one-man show, though, and that can make for tiring viewing. Once I realized the gist of the thing about 20 minutes in, I got rather bored. It’s a clever note, but there’s only one note.

I don't think you can watch this film anywhere...? I watched it on a bootleg DVD, and I'm sort of surprised to find it's not streaming and there is no DVD.

Twisters (2024)

Twisters is a fun time. The script is absurd, but I had a good time. Glen Powell is a star. And Maura Tierney is really great. (This film does suffer from a severe and bewildering lack of Helen Hunt.)

My lord the script is stupid though. For some reason we are supposed to believe that these YouTubers aren’t really YouTubers but are actually like humanitarians in disguise? They don’t even chase the last tornado; they drive into the town it’s about to hit and try to save people’s lives? And people listen to them? Makes no sense. But I dunno. It’s hard to be mad at this. It’s loud and suspenseful and has a good soundtrack.

Kneecap (2024)

Kneecap is hilarious, wild, and supremely satisfying. I had a great time. And I fully feckin’ cried more than once.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)

Nu Aștepta Prea Mult de la Sfârșitul Lumii (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) is the bleakest of dark comedies. This is a funny satire from Radu Jude, delivered in his insouciant, constantly innovative and unexpected style. This is a very challenging film, and it offers its laughs and its critiques in an uncompromising and bold way. This is hardcore, even brave. 

Honestly I just fucking love Radu Jude. This is so hard to watch at times, but fucking hell it’s smart… so smart. There are so many amazing, bananas sequences. And just so much heartbreaking, cutting absurdity.

The Settlers (2023)

Felipe Gálvez's Los Colonos (The Settlers) is very intense. We begin with these gorgeous views of Tierra del Fuego. A Scottish mercenary working for a Spanish settler–colonizer maps a path to the sea and kills native people. The film analyzes colonialism in no uncertain terms – it is about extracting land and people, destroying life in order to transform both land and people into property. "Nation" appears in this film as a nonsensical concept in the first part of the movie (the same colonizer owns the land on either side of the national border between Chile and Argentina) and then in the movie’s third act, nation has become something insisted on by the colonizers, forming a new nation with “justice” and “truth” and “equality” for everyone. The concept is just as absurd in the third act as it is in the first. 

This film gets even better the more I think about it.

Boys on Bikes

In preparation for The Bikeriders, I wanted to watch a kind of legendary old British biker movie I had heard about called The Leather Boys from 1965 that has a homosexual twist (or a homophobic one, depending on how you're looking at things).

Well The Leather Boys is not nearly as gay as I wanted it to be. It’s actually a very typical angry young man/woman drama from the 1960s. Lots of married young people yelling at one another and living in tiny rooms when they shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. From the perspective of The Leather Boys, hanging out with the boys while riding around on bikes looks a lot better than going home to tea and baked beans from a can. But I’m not sure the movie really says anything about queerness or queer bike riders or any of that. This seems like a sort of strange addition to the angry young man genre. But it's clear that some of the men in the biker gangs just really don't do well with society—with going to college and getting a job and, like, raising a family and stuff—and then some of the men in the biker gang are there to wear leather and get their rocks off with other leather boys. Seems reasonable enough to me.

Anyway, that is how I prepared for The Bikeriders. And, well, it was fine. 

The Bikeriders is shot in a cool way—it reproduces a series of documentary photos taken by the (completely undeveloped) Mike Faist character—but I don't really understand what Jeff Nichols has to say about this gang of bikers. The character development for all of the men is pretty much nonexistent. We don't really know Austin Butler or Tom Hardy at all. Who are these guys? Why do they hang out together? What are they doing? They actually almost never talk about bikes, so it's probably not really that. But, then, they don't really talk about anything. They’re violent and awful and drink too much and fight for no real reason, but I guess we’re supposed to find that charming. But, like, why?? 

What’s strange is that The Bikeriders just doesn’t have much of a point of view about them. I think I know why, too. The film almost completely avoids politics—there’s one part where a guy gets beaten up because he says he wants to become a cop and another where a guy says he hates “pinkos” who go to college—but the film doesn’t agree with any of this stuff. It’s just sort of presented for us. The same guy who hates pinkos tells us that he really really wanted to go to be in the Vietnam War, except that he didn't really because he got super drunk the night before and then slept through his alarm the day he was supposed to sign up. These biker guys are counterculture dudes, right? They hate cops and the government and having a job and the man. This is what I understand. They're violent, and they think cops and firemen are schmucks, which is why they flout the law and start fights and stuff. It’s the only real reason I can think of for their antiestablishment antics. And it must also be what ties the men together. But none of them ever talks about any of that. And the film doesn’t ask them to. 

Consider, for example, the gang going to Brucey's funeral. Why does the family send their flowers back? And why does the old woman spit in Johnny's face? There's literally no reason for these old folks to hate this group so much—as far as we know. Have they done something horrible that we don't understand? The screenplay, in other words, leaves a very large lacuna in the center of the film. The Bikeriders just seems sort of there, like a documentary that never presses its subjects on anything they say.

As for my homo-preparation for this movie, I was glad I prepped with The Leather Boys. There's this crazy erotic sequence in The Bikeriders when Tom Hardy asks Austin Butler to run the club after he quits (although he's not quitting, so the scene's purpose is actually just for Tom to tell Austin he's his favorite person). But the whole scene is firelit, and they are just so close together that it feels like they should be kissing. They didn't. And I'm not actually sure why they didn't.

Inside Out 2 (2024)

Miss Joy did not learn her lesson in the first film. So we need another movie to teach us all the same things. 

Inside Out 2 has three or four good jokes and a really funny reference to that famous 1984 Apple commercial, but this movie is really stupid. I was bored for most of it. 

Why must Pixar movies all be about forcing the child to explain herself, with making sense of the darkness within all children? In fact, Pixar now makes movies where they intensely project their feelings onto the kids in their films. I imagine these Pixar folks as really, really anxious parents, intensely worried about what’s going on inside their kids’ heads. They made a film about a teenager having anxiety, but of course teenagers didn’t make Inside Out 2. This is actually a film about parents’ anxiety about what their kids aren’t telling them. 

The clue to this is that we're supposed to identify with a rainbow of characters who are trying to take care of the teenager at the center of the film rather than the teenager herself, whose actions we consistently judge. And then the big lesson that Anxiety and Joy and the other emotions need to learn is that they have no control over who the teenager will grow up to be. At whom might such a lesson be directed? Right: parents.

The filmmakers show their hand at the end of the movie when we find that "This film is dedicated to our kids. We love you just the way you are."

If my impatience with all of this is exasperatingly obvious, it's because one of the arguments I make in my book Love Is Love Is Love is that animated films seem these days to be overwhelmingly about adults' frustrations with their children's inscrutability. I put it this way in my book:

Frozen and its sequels, in this sense, take part in a larger (adult) discourse within contemporary animated films – about children whose choices cannot be explained, who "act out," whose behavior is antisocial or mysterious or queer. Films such as Song of the Sea (2014), When Marnie Was There (2014), Inside Out (2015), My Life as a Courgette (2016), Your Name (2016), The Boss Baby (2017), Bao (2018), Over the Moon (2020), Soul (2020), Wolfwalkers (2020), Belle (2021), Poupelle of Chimney Town (2021), Luca (2021), Encanto (2021), and The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) represent the child as frustratingly obtuse and distant, its desires inscrutable, its thought processes impossible (for the adult) to access. These are, in other words, all films about the queer child, the child who resists growing up according to the approved path laid out by adults or, as [Kathryn Bond] Stockton puts it, the child who grows sideways. Unlike many of these films, Frozen appears to celebrate the idea of Elsa leaning into this sideways growth, even if the film’s narrative still insists that she illuminate – "show herself" – so that her darkness no longer remains a mystery. 

And if this makes you think that I'm calling Riley, the teenager in Inside Out 2, a proto-lesbian that is because of course I am. But, unlike the parents who made this movie, I see no reason to be so anxious about it.

Furiosa (2024)

George Miller made the very intelligent decision to give Anya Taylor-Joy around 20 total lines of dialogue in this film. Instead, the script allows the brilliant Chris Hemsworth to do the screenplay’s heavy lifting. This means that the film’s emotional center is almost non-existent and that the most interesting character is Furiosa’s nihilistic villain. In other words, there are both drawbacks and benefits to this. Taylor-Joy can’t actually carry a movie, and Miller needed Hemsworth to do this, but it makes for a very jaded, emotionless film. 

Anyway Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga is visually relatively boring – there is nothing visually new about this film compared to Mad Max: Fury Road; it’s visually identical to its predecessor. And one wonders, after all, what the point of all this is? (I wondered this with MM:FR – a film I didn’t like – as well, honestly.null) Revenge, blood, bullets, gore, oil, depravity. OK. But why? Obviously this universe is terrible and bloodthirsty and hateful. And obviously Miller believes our own universe is headed in this direction, but, like, what does the movie have to do with that?

Evil Does Not Exist (2023)

I liked Evil Does Not Exist (悪は存在しない) so much better than Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy! This is a mysterious, slow-building eco-thriller that had me thinking about it hours and hours after I watched it. The film is still bogged down by Hamaguchi’s penchant for long sequences of boring conversations in cars and other static locations, but weirdly those worked for me better in Evil Does Not Exist. And because the movie begins much more slowly and contemplatively, I forgave the long conversations in the car and at the community center. The ending is great!!

Alex Garland's Civil War

Civil War is a movie about journalism—it is not a movie about politics or humanity. And, in fact, it follows most of the tropes of those movies, just without any serious emotional depth. I hated this movie, and mostly I hated it because this movie loves war and plays to the audience’s enjoyment of violence. 

There is a case to be made that Garland’s film tries to make a movie about journalism in a war-torn country while also avoiding the usual Orientalist or paternalist gaze that those movies turn toward the places where the stories are set. I think that’s probably true. The movie does avoid that.

But the movie still gets off on showing the audience a war zone and asking us to enjoy the thrill of destruction, murder, death, and wholesale slaughter. 

I did like the scene with Jesse Plemons. It’s taut and interesting, and it’s also politically sound, by which I mean that that sequence makes a smart anti-war case. The rest of the movie thinks guns are fun.

Also, have you all heard of Joe Dante's film The Second Civil War? It's much better than this business.

Challengers (2024)

Challengers is the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross show. 

Actually, look, everyone in this is a star. And they’re all sexy as hell. And this is shot gorgeously. And the editing is fucking brilliant. And the script is just a silly sports melodrama, but it doesn’t matter because it’s so perfectly made and exquisitely directed. 

The fucking shot when everyone is turning their heads back and forth to watch the ball and Zendaya just is staring straight ahead??! Perfection.

I know not everyone will love the ending of this movie, but what I love about the ending is the way that Challengers moves into the realm of the metaphorical more and more steadily as the match goes on until it just exists purely as metaphor and refuses to go back to the real. It's so great.

The Fall Guy

This is a great time from start to finish. The jokes are funny and they’re delivered very well by an excellent cast. The fights are so much fun. Really the whole thing is just a blast. The thing is, Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling are fucking stars, and they just run the whole thing perfectly.

This is very much like David Leitch's last movie, Bullet Train, which I also thought was a very good time.

Mars Express

This movie is visually stunning with absolutely exquisite worldbuilding; this is a very smart movie about AI. It’s the kind of intelligent, generous, and humane exploration of AI that we need. But Mars Express is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants action–crime thriller that kept me guessing and surprised me constantly. Great stuff.

Housekeeping for Beginners (2024)

Housekeeping for Beginners (Домаќинство за Почетници) is good. Goran Stolevski is an interesting filmmaker who really has a way with writing characters. I wish this film surprised me a bit more, but although it started off with some twists that were very interesting it moved into more familiar territory in act two. Still, I liked this despite its rather conventional ending.

Monkey Man (2024)

I love Dev Patel. I think he’s beautiful and I think he has good ideas. I’m glad he got funding to make this very very expensive movie, and I’m glad he made this movie. I’m glad lots of people went to see this movie. But I did not like this movie. 

Monkey Man is so slooooow, and then all the revenge killing is fun and brutal and just kinda disgusting but definitely fun. Then it goes back to being so slooooow. The revenge plot was unclear, and I found the monkey man kind of hard to root for. I did root for him, don’t get me wrong, and like sure, cops are awful, but I do find it difficult to root for a man who will just kill literally anyone. The information about motivation for the revenge was given to us so slowly I just couldn’t get behind the force of it. And anyway why now? This guy looks about 30. What’s he been doing with his time?

Also, there's a little army of hijras? Who are like really violent and happy to kill people while wearing sequence gowns? I'm lost.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

Holy shit! Looking for Mr. Goodbar is pretty incredible. It’s so intense and intriguing. It’s a fascinating character study and a pretty extraordinary portrait of female freedom amid a deeply misogynist world. It also has truly great performances from Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Tuesday Weld, William Atherton, and Tom Berenger. 

 The ending is… shocking and kind of insane and I feel completely stunned. 

 Honestly this is good. I know a movie like this could basically not be made today, but that’s what makes it so interesting. I am not at all sure why Goodbar is out of print, but you can't find it streaming anywhere and it's never been released on DVD.

Femme

Femme is an ancient Athenian tragedy disguised as a psychological thriller. It did some things very well. I was constantly afraid of violence erupting at any moment so it was very tense watching. I like this film’s point of view and politics, too. I thought it was pretty smart. Some of the plot is not really believable, though, if I’m being honest (you’re telling me this violently closeted man went to a bathhouse?), and Femme takes a bit too long to get where it is inevitably going.

Godzilla x Kong: the New Empire

When I originally saw the trailer for Godzilla x Kong: the New Empire I thought Wait didn't we already see this movie? Everything in the trailer looked like something from Adam Wingard's 2021 offering Godzilla vs. Kong. As it turns out, this is a sequel to that movie, and it has new monsters if not new visuals.

 

I love monsters, so yes I went to see this movie, but I didn't like Godzilla vs. Kong, so I also went in knowing what I was going to get and expecting it to be nonsense. The monsters were cool. I was especially into the new pink Gojira and the Ice Princess Gojira. But y’all this movie is so dumb. The script, especially, is so. fucking. dumb. Honestly the most fun part of the movie was making jokes about it with my companion.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but Mothra shows up as a kind of hippy Grandmother Willow in act three, and Brian Tyree Henry’s explanations of the faux-Indigenous science and engineering in this movie are so stupid they make Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs seem like Oppenheimer by comparison. 

 One thing I did find cute: Godzilla curls up to sleep in the Coliseum. I guess we know how often he thinks of the Roman Empire.

Oscar Nominations 2023: 9 of 9 (with Final Predictions)

I just barely squeezed through! Neon finally released Perfect Days for VOD on Tuesday, and so I was able to watch it last night. None of these movies will win on Sunday, but they are our last three:

Perfect Days

1 nomination

• International Feature: Japan (Drive My Car, Shoplifters, Departures, The Twilight Samurai, Muddy River, Kagemusha: the Shadow Warrior, Sandakan No. 8, Dodes'ka-den, Portrait of Chieko, Woman in the Dunes, Kwaidon, Koto, Immortal Love, The Burmese Harp, Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto, Gate of Hell, Rashomon)

Director: Wim Wenders

Cast: Yakusho Kōji, Nakano Arisa, Yamada Aoi, Emoto Tokio, Asō Yumi, Ishikawa Sayuri, Miura Tomokazu, Tanaka Min

This is very good. It is a simple, quiet film (the main character, Hirayama, hardly speaks at all) about approaching each day with happiness. We do not know, really, what has happened to Hirayama before the film, and though we gradually learn a bit about his previous life, we mostly just spend time in the present. This, of course, is what the film is about, and Hirayama greets each day positively and richly. While I was watching this film, I felt like I got it, like the film's ideas made sense to me, but I think Perfect Days is better and better the more I think about it. It is sticking with me, and asking me to think more deeply about what it showed me. This is a very good movie.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #27 out of 82

Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teachers' Lounge)

1 nomination

• International Feature: Germany (All Quiet on the Western Front, Never Look Away, Toni Erdmann, The White Ribbon, The Baader Meinhof Complex, The Lives of Others, Sophie Scholl: the Final Days, Downfall, Nowhere in Africa, Beyond Silence, Schtonk, The Nasty Girl)

Director: İlker Çatak

Cast: Leonie Benesch, Eva Löbau, Michael Klammer, Rafael Stachowiak, Sarah Bauerett, Kathrin Wehlisch, Leonard Stettnisch, Anne-Kathrin Gummich, Katharina M. Schubert, Uygar Tamer, Özgür Karadeniz, Tim Porath, Kersten Reimann

İlker Çatak’s film is a modern nightmare of right and wrong set in a middle school. It’s truly terrifying. We watch a young, righteous teacher navigate between moral choices but seemingly misunderstand the human beings in her community. The Teachers' Lounge is a tense, ticking time bomb of a movie structured like one of Asghar Farhadi’s films, where a seemingly small injustice spins the characters out of control and into a terrifying world. The Farhadi structure is important here, because the way İlker Çatak and Johannes Duncker's script works is really modeled after movies like A Separation and The Salesman, but I don't think Çatak works his way toward finality of any kind, and the end of The Teachers' Lounge is unsatisfying. It is an exciting ride, though, with its taut, horror-film score and its building tension. Good stuff.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #47 out of 82

Io Capitano

1 nomination

• International Feature: Italy (The Hand of God, The Great Beauty, Don't Tell, Life Is Beautiful, The Starmaker, Mediterraneo, Open Doors, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, La Famiglia, Three Brothers, Dimenticare Venezia, The New Monsters, A Special Day, Seven Beauties, Scent of a Woman, Amarcord, Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, La Ragazza con la Pistola, The Battle of Algiers, Marriage Italian Style, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 8 1/2, The Four Days of Naples, La Grande Guerra, Kapò, Big Deal on Madonna Street, Nights of Cabiria, La Strada, The Bicycle Thief, The Walls of Malapaga, Shoeshine)

Director: Matteo Garrone

Cast: Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall, Issaka Sawadogo, Hichem Yacoubi, Doodou Sagna, Khady Sy, Venus Gueye, Cheick Oumar Diaw, Joe Lassana, Mamadou Sani, Bamar Kane, Beatrice Gnonko, Flaure B.B. Kabore

This definitely tugged at my heartstrings, but it felt like an Italian movie from the 1990s. Très romantique! It has a kind of triumphal, soaring, beat-the-odds quality that I associate with a kind 1990s filmmaking. This is a grueling portrait of young men attempting to leave their home in Senegal for what they believe will be a better life in Italy. The odyssey from Senegal to Mali to Niger to Libya is insane and almost unimaginably dangerous. And then there's the boat ride to Italy, which is also nearly impossible. This is an extraordinary portrait of young men (and the many, many other people who the film pictures only briefly), who are not given the freedom to move through the world, who are restricted by government violence and militamen, who are exploited by grifters because governments do not let people move freely. Still, the movie didn't quite work for me because it treats all of these things rather like small obstacles for our main characters that don't need their own interrogation. The world these young men have to navigate has been created by irresponsible governments in all of these countries (including Italy), but because we focus on the boys – their wonder, their difficulties, their tenacity – Garrone's portrait of this world takes on a romantic hue. Io Capitano is very well made, but this kind of thing is not what I want from Matteo Garrone and his usual portraits of crime.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: 2024 release – unranked

My earlier Oscar posts for 2023:

1. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Maestro

2. Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, American Fiction

3. Napoleon, Past Lives, Nyad, Society of the Snow

4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, The Creator, Rustin, May December

5. The Color Purple, El Conde, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

6. Animated Features

7. Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Golda, American Symphony, Flamin' Hot

8. Animated Short Films

My Predictions for Sunday:

• Best Picture: Oppenheimer
• Best Director: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
• Best Actor: Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
• Best Actress: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
• Best Adapted Screenplay: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Barbie
• Best Original Screenplay: David Hemingson, The Holdovers
• Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
• Best Supporting Actress: Da'Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers
• Best International Feature: United Kingdom, The Zone of Interest
• Best Animated Feature: The Boy and the Heron
• Best Documentary Feature: 20 Days in Mariupol
• Best Film Editing: Jennifer Lame, Oppenheimer
• Best Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema, Oppenheimer
• Best Production Design: Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, Barbie
• Best Original Score: Robbie Robertson, Killers of the Flower Moon
• Best Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran, Barbie
• Best Sound: Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers, The Zone of Interest
• Best Visual Effects: Nojima Tatsuji, Shibuya Kiyoko, Takahashi Masaki, and Yamazaki Takashi, Godzilla Minus One
• Best Makeup & Hairstyling: Mark Coulier, Nadia Stacey, and Josh Weston, Poor Things
• Best Original Song: Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell, Barbie
• Best Animated Short Film: War Is Over!
• Best Documentary Short Film: The ABCs of Book Banning
• Best Live-action Short Film: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Oscar Nominations 2023: 8 of 9 (Animated Shorts)

Here are the five animated short films. (I've decided to skip the documentary short films and the live-action short films – they're always so bad, and I've already suffered through Golda and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.)

War Is Over!

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Dave Mullins

This is a sweet fantasy in the realm of Joyeux Noël, where the soldiers from both sides in World War I have a relationship with one another and don't really want to kill one another, but the warlords and the ruling class push a war. In this little film, the men play chess by writing their moves on paper and then sending a pigeon to the other side (this is not actually possible, but for the sake of this fantasy, I guess we accept it). Anyway, this is sweet but very much a fantasy, which is why I guess I expect it to win.

Will win: Animated Short Film

Could win: N/A

My rating: #4 out of 5

Ninety-five Senses

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess

Cast: Tim Blake Nelson

Easily the best film of the group, this beautiful movie is an exploration of the five senses by an older gentleman who tells us things he knows about the five senses. More is revealed about the man as the film progresses, and we learn about him and the choices that he has made – and about the choices he hasn't made but have been made for him. The film is a powerful, extraordinary description of human being, of bravery in the face of death, and of the terrible power of the state. I absolutely wept, and I loved this so much. It deserves to win, and maybe it will.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Animated Short Film

My rating: #1 out of 5

Pachyderme (Pachyderm)

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Stéphanie Clément

Cast: Christa Théret

This is a story of a young girl staying with her grandmother and grandfather in the country. It's mysterious and scary, and takes us to unexpected places. The animation style is beautiful but slightly surreal, almost in a kind of art nouveau kind of way. We experience things with the young protagonist and aren't sure what's real or not. The film clarifies at the end, though, and we understand what has been happening and why the surrealism is there, as well. The movie moves in dream logic, and that logic is smart and well crafted and beautiful.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Animated Short Film

My rating: #2 out of 5

Letter to a Pig

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Tal Kantor

Cast: Alexander Peleg, Moriyah Meerson, Ayelet Margalit

I will have the most to say about this movie, perhaps. In Tal Kantor's movie, a survivor of the Shoah escaped from the Nazis and hid with pigs. The pigs protected him, and so he has written a letter to the pig, which he reads to a bunch of kids in a Jewish school. In the letter, however, he begins to spout racist hate, saying other people are no better than animals, and he seemingly forgets that he began by praising an animal. The children take this in with varying levels of boredom, but we move into a fantasy in which they find a pig and torture it. The film then shifts again and the pig gets younger and younger and younger until the protagonist – a young girl – pets the pig, snuggles with it, and then lets the pig go. In other words, the plot of Letter to a Pig is very interesting! But the film is not, actually, and I liked it the least of all of these. The reason for this is that the animation is startlingly ugly, and I'm not sure why. The people are partially drawn and drawn to be uglier than usual. There are parts of each body that move into a kind of beautiful realism, but those are frequently just a hand or a strand of hair. Mostly we're stuck with ugly drawings of people doing awful things. It's a film with a central idea that I really liked, but I just could not enjoy this. 

Will win: N/A

Could win: Animated Short

My rating: #5 out of 5

Our Uniform

1 nomination

• Animated Short Film

Director: Yegane Moghaddam

Cast: Moghaddam

This is perhaps the simplest and most unassuming of the films. Yegane Moghaddam's movie is animated on clothes, which you can see in the still above. She tells the story of growing up in Iran and being required to cover her hair. Even more, the film is about the ways that we separate girls from boys, and transform them into "females" instead of people who might have a future and be anything they wish. This is not an exciting or bold movie in any way, but it is simple and clear and charming, and I enjoyed it.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #3 out of 5

More posts coming soon:

1. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Maestro

2. Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, American Fiction

3. Napoleon, Past Lives, Nyad, Society of the Snow

4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, The Creator, Rustin, May December

5. The Color Purple, El Conde, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

6. Animated Features

7. Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Golda, American Symphony, Flamin' Hot

9. Perfect Days, The Teachers' Lounge, Io Capitano

Oscar Nominations 2023: 7 of 9

We are scraping the bottom of the barrel, nomination-wise, with these five films. These are traditionally the categories that include the worst films, but we will start with a movie that I think everyone liked:

G Minus One (ゴジラ-1.0)

1 nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Yamazaki Takashi

Cast: Kamiki Ryūnosuke, Hamabe Minami, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Andō Sakura, Sasaki Kuranosuke, Yamada Yūki, Aoki Munetaka

This was pretty good. Godzilla looks really amazing in this—he’s a kind of perfect throwback to 1950s Gojira without looking too cheesy—and the script explicitly links the fight against G to Japanese national performance and postwar economics. I found the non-action sequences a little long though, and they telegraphed too much about the final showdown to the audience ahead of time, so it didn’t have the surprise it should have. But, look, I love Godzilla/Gojira (I love monster movies in general), so I enjoyed all of the time I got to spend with the big guy. It's just that Kamiki Ryūnosuke sure did spend a lot of time crying in this. So many tears!

Will win: N/A

Could win: Visual Effects

My rating: #38 out of 81

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

1 nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Sean Gunn, Chukwudi Iwuji, Will Poulter, Maria Bakalova, Elizabeth Debicki, Sylvester Stallone

I liked the plot of this. It’s smart for a while. But the third act really drags, and at one point I was like oh god there’s still another hour?? I’m into the film’s approach to animals, but at one point the whole thing just becomes too preposterous. And also I didn’t know who a good thirty percent of the characters were. There’s a dog that speaks English? A whistling dude? And they fly a kind of planet-ship with its own ecosystem and gravity? Who lives on this ship with them and why? I don’t know. The stakes of this were lost on me. I get that these Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are made for people who understand the lore a lot better than I do and who, I presume, have seen the other films more recently than I have (the last one came out literally 6 years ago—I’m supposed to remember it?), but I do wish this studio would make its films more accessible to people who aren’t steeped in their lore. But I do love Bradley Cooper. I love him in everything, and I love him in this.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #66 out of 81

Golda

1 nomination

• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Guy Nattiv

Cast: Helen Mirren, Camille Cottin, Liev Schreiber, Lior Ashkenazi, Rami Heuberger, Rotem Keinan, Dvir Benedek, Ellie Piercy, Henry Goodman, Ed Stoppard, Dominic Mafham, Ohad Knoller

Nope. Honestly, after Guy Nattiv won an Oscar for his horrible live-action short film Skin, I don't know why anyone would give him money to make a movie. Well, they didn't give him much—Golda was definitely made on the cheap—but still. This movie is awful. In many ways, this is basically the same movie as Rustin. It’s a kind of live-action Wikipedia entry with questionable filmmaking, a terrible screenplay, and famous actors in the roles of recognizable historical figures. Golda just has ultra conservative politics instead of Rustin’s vaguely left-of-center politics. What's almost totally insane about the movie is that it has no connection to soldiers or battles. This is a movie about a war that has no soldiers even as characters; instead, Nattiv gives us the battle sequences with blurry animated footage that is actually impossible to follow. At one point, we watch a battle in a windowless control room, and the score is completely gloom and doom, and we stare at Golda Meier, and she looks miserable, and I thought for sure that things were going very poorly for the Israeli military, but then everyone starts cheering and celebrating. Apparently I was supposed to understand the weird animated footage I had been watching to be a positive thing. It's a mess. There's no reason to watch this movie.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #81 out of 81

American Symphony

1 nomination

• Original Song – "It Never Went Away": Jon Batiste (Soul) & Dan Wilson 

Director: Matthew Heineman

This was not interesting. I think maybe it’s because the film really doesn’t give us access to Jon Batiste, the man at the movie's center at all. In many ways it’s a very cold look at Jon Batiste. Like, obviously the filmmaker loves him, but he doesn’t seem interested in getting any deeper into what makes him tick or what moves him and mostly just stays at the level of oh wow this man is very cool. I mostly feel like not very much happened in this movie, if I’m honest. I mean, sure, there were events, but they are transmitted to us more like news than a personal journey. Jon Batiste gets married, his wife has cancer, and the two of them cope with that together—and also frequently apart. He also works on composing his symphony, although we really don't see any of this process and don't know anything about the music or how he figures out what the music sounds like. I really just don't know anything about this guy after this movie. It feels really odd.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Original Song

My rating: Unranked

Flamin' Hot

1 nomination

• Original Song – "The Fire Inside": Diane Warren (Tell It like a Woman, Four Good Days, The Life Ahead, Breakthrough, RBG, Marshall, The Hunting Ground, Beyond the Lights, Pearl Harbor, Music of the Heart, Armageddon, Con Air, Up Close & Personal, Mannequin)

Director: Eva Longoria

Cast: Jesse Garcia, Annie Gonzalez, Emilio Rivera, Vanessa Martinez, Dennis Haysbert, Tony Shalhoub, Pepe Serna

This is a movie about a guy who came up with a brand so he could sell more chips. The brand succeeded, and so did he. We are in a very strange moment of capitalism in which viewers are expected to root for a brand. The issue with this movie, though, is simply that not one thing in it feels authentic. The acting is terrible, and the whole thing just feels completely fake. Flamin' Hot occasionally leans into its mythmaking silliness, but not enough. It believes its own story way too much to work. I did like the part where Montañez tells his father off; movies always want to tell us that family is the most important thing, so I appreciated that. I also thought that Montañez's little boy was super cute. We needed more of him. But mostly Eva Longoria's film is a flamin' hot mess. Of course, that doesn't much matter when Diane Warren has written a song for your movie. You're gonna get nominated anyway! Warren has been nominated nine out of the last ten years for the Original Song Oscar, and Flamin' Hot marks her fifteenth nomination. She has never won, and I'm beginning to suspect she never will. The music branch just nominates her every year. I expect to be writing the same thing next year. The reason she's never won, though, is that if you look at the movies she's been nominated for in the last ten years you also won't find anything good. The movies themselves are bad, and she has to know it. I find the Diane Warren nomination to be a very strange annual tradition.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #78 out of 81

More posts coming soon:

1. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Maestro

2. Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, American Fiction

3. Napoleon, Past Lives, Nyad, Society of the Snow

4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, The Creator, Rustin, May December

5. The Color Purple, El Conde, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

6. Animated Features

8. Animated Short Films

9. Perfect Days, The Teachers' Lounge, Io Capitano

Oscar Nominations 2023: 6 of 9 (Animated Features)

For some reason, each of the animated feature films only received one nomination. Usually one or two get an Original Score nomination or an Original Song nomination, and sometimes screenplay nominations or even Best Picture, but not this year. The other key thing about 2023 – and every year – is that you can generally expect the movies to be split between the studios. This is why there's almost always a random Netflix nominee you've never heard of, one nominee from Japan, and another nominee from Europe in addition to the big studio usual suspects from Disney–Pixar and Dreamworks. I assume this is because the Animation branch votes in blocs. Anyway, here are this year's five nominees.

Spider-man: across the Spider-verse

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

Cast: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Jason Schwartzman, Oscar Isaac, Brian Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Velez, Jake Johnson, Issa Rae, Karan Soni, Shea Whigham, Greta Lee, Amandla Stenberg, Jharrel Jerome, Andy Samberg, Jack Quaid, Rachel Dratch, Ziggy Marley, Jorma Taccone, Daniel Kaluuya, Mahershala Ali, J.K. Simmons, Donald Glover, Elizabeth Perkins, Kathryn Hahn, Ayo Edebiri, Nicole Delaney, Antonina Lentini, Atsuko Okatsuka, Peter Sohn

This is very very cool for all of its running time. It's unexpected and interesting, and it has more surprises up its sleeve than you can basically ever imagine. The animation for this film – as with the original – is inventive and almost shocking. It places different styles next to one another in such a brilliant way that it makes the totally incongruous seem natural. In many ways this is just a genius piece of moviemaking and more-than-worthy sequel to the first film, Into the Spider-verse. But... and this is a very large but... the ending drove me nuts. I went with a friend, and when it was over we looked at one another and said "shame about the ending". The filmmakers opt for a cliffhanger, but it feels inept, and because I wasn't expecting a cliffhanger, I was very disappointed by this choice. Still, this is a good movie, and I would say it's the favorite to win the Oscar (though it is not what I'm going to predict). Also, I have a question: when all of the spideys are in the world with all of the spideys instead of in their home-worlds, who's guarding the home worlds? They're just all hanging out in a different dimension and leaving their worlds to go to hell? I wouldn't mind this idea so much except that this Spider-man series sees the world as intensely dark and filled with peril. To take this series at its word, the world is on the absolute brink of ruin and evil. Anyway, it's something I've been wondering.

Will win: N/A

Could win: Animated Feature

My rating: #34 out of 78

The Boy and the Heron

(君たちはどう生きるか)

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Cast: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Ko Shibasaki, Aimyon, Yoshino Kimura, Takuya Kimura, Keiko Takeshita, Jun Fubuki, Sawako Agawa, Karen Takizawa

I really, really liked this and it's the highest ranking of the animated features for me this year. It's surreal and imaginative and beautiful and striking and magical. This is also an extraordinarily adorable take on the multiverse and the ways that grief fragments the experiences of our lives. I say adorable because this vision of the multiverse (and we had a few this year with Past Lives, The Boy and the Heron, Spider-man, and Robot Dreams) thinks about the different ways that loss affects us, and the different ways that those we love and lose can live on within us or around us. This is a film about family and legacies, but it's also about how we process the loss of a loved one. And it does that in typical, surreal, Miyazaki fashion, with goose-stepping parakeets and shattering castles and souls reborn. This is wonderful.

Will win: Animated Feature

Could win: N/A

My rating: #13 out of 78

Elemental

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Peter Sohn

Cast: Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie del Carmen, Shila Ommi, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Catherine O'Hara, Mason Wertheimer

This is cute. It’s completely predictable in every imaginable way, but it’s kind of irresistible anyway. This is, first and foremost, a story of immigrants and growing up with immigrant parents, and although it would seem to indicate some kind of specific allegory for the immigrant experience of one group, it's trying to do something more inclusive and, perhaps (I'm not quite sure) more interesting. It's intensely clever in its world building, and I liked much of it, especially the world itself. It definitely has its problems, though. For one thing, the main character, "Ember", spends most of the film as an anxious ball of fire (if you will), and she's uptight and kind of annoying. The young water-man who loves her, "Wade", is perfect and understanding and does all of the right things. This makes for a movie that is off-kilter. She is hard to like and he is easy to like. I think it's just a kind of basic androcentric position that filmmakers often take. I think my other problem with movies like this (predictable romantic comedies, I mean... or maybe I mean animated movies that are aimed at young people) is that “doing the right thing” is so obvious. The audience knows what the right thing to do is way before the characters figure it out. This makes us feel good as viewers, of course – we are so much wiser than these fools/kids on the screen – but I find it very boring. And nothing like real life. And more often than not, parents are not quite as open to change as these narratives would like to imagine. But, hey, this is a fable about fire-people and water-people, so we can live in the fantasy.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #60 out of 78

Robot Dreams

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Pablo Berger

Cast: Ivan Labanda, Tito Trifol, Rafa Calvo, José García Tos, José Luis Mediavilla, Graciela Molina, Esther Solans

This is much better than the cuteness of Elemental. Pablo Berger's film is a very cute story about coping with loneliness and meeting a friend instead. Or perhaps it's about falling in love instead of friendship. Actually, yes; it's about falling in love. There are several wonderful things about this. First, it's done as a film without dialogue; there's sound, of course, so it isn't a silent movie, but the whole thing is done without anyone talking. Second, this movie is called Robot Dreams, and it is quite literally that. It lives in the multi-verse world that so many of this year's films live in, where we are inside the dreams of a robot for some of the film's running time. These dreams are sweet and sad and sometimes wonderful. The whole thing is inventive and delightful, and then it takes a turn in the third act. This turn is nothing short of extraordinary, and because I wasn't expecting it, I still feel surprised by the wistful regret and wisdom that Robot Dreams offers its audience. It's a really lovely movie. Now, let's talk about release dates. I do not understand why a distributor would release a movie for a single week in theatres in December so that it can qualify for the Oscars and then not release the film in wider release during the six weeks it's nominated. Literally Robot Dreams will never be as popular as it is right this second, and yet Neon is planning to release the movie in May or June well after either The Boy and the Heron or Spider-man: across the Spider-verse will already have taken home the Animated Feature Oscar. Why? What is the logic here? It makes absolutely no sense to me. So, anyway, this is impossible to see on either a big screen or a streaming service right now, and actually it makes me kind of mad. (Mind you, I'm annoyed with the distributors of Io Capitano and Perfect Days, too; Cohen Media is doing this in addition to Neon.) And I really don't like bootlegging things – they actually deserve my money – but I got frustrated and found the movie here.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #49 out of 78

Nimona

1 nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Nick Bruno, Troy Quane

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy, Lorraine Toussaint, Beck Bennett, RuPaul, Indya Moore, Julio Torres

Oh dear. I wrote my thoughts on this already here. This is very gay, and I'm glad it's very gay, but it's also predictable and boring and has some "very important" lessons it's interested in teaching us. No thanks. As much as I like gay things, I would like them to be better than this.  I will say that I love Riz Ahmed and I love this very gay cast (except Chloë Grace Moretz; I haven't forgiven her for this really offensive act of outing she pulled in 2018), but Nimona is not a good movie. My friend Caleb says that the original graphic novel is very good, and he even mailed me a copy, so I'm gonna read that and hope it's better than this nonsense. I recommend that you do that too.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #76 out of 78

More posts coming soon:

1. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Maestro

2. Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, American Fiction

3. Napoleon, Past Lives, Nyad, Society of the Snow

4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, The Creator, Rustin, May December

5. The Color Purple, El Conde, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

7. Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Golda, American Symphony, Flamin' Hot

8. Animated Short Films

9. Perfect Days, The Teachers' Lounge, Io Capitano