Tuner (2025)

Daniel Roher's Tuner is surprisingly good. It’s a strong thriller with sound as its central element. The sound in Tuner is amazing. It’s a storytelling element that really allows the audience to identify with the protagonist and experience his pain and curiosity and vulnerability. I loved the music, too. Marius de Vries composed a lot of music for this. It’s not a score per se—the soundtrack is more jazz inflected than anything else—but he’s done thrilling work with the diegetic music in this film. 

I thought this was very well cast too. Dustin Hoffman is the perfect person to cast in this, and Leo Woodall (who I don’t think I’ve seen in anything before) is really excellent. 

The all important feature here though is the screenplay. In many ways it is conventional, but the writing is so good and the characters so well realized, that the whole thing feels novel.

The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

I checked my watch so many times.

The Mandalorian and Grogu was interesting for several minutes—maybe a quarter of an hour or so—when the helmet was off; we finally got some emotion from the protagonist. A short list of other things I liked:

The monsters in that pit were cool, as was the poisonous pink Cthulhu thing, plus it was in the water.

I liked Jeremy Allen White's character for the most part, although he has no depth whatsoever: I think he said "I'm not like my dad" about five separate times. 

There is a short but cool chase sequence after he escapes the fighting pit.

Mostly, though, this feels like something all of us have seen before. And if the Mandalorian was supposed to be somehow morally ambiguous (I thought I read that somewhere), what we get in this film is very, very clear good vs. very, very clear evil.

Also, PG-13 movies are an outrage. This movie is filled with violence from start to finish. Some of it is committed for almost no reason at all. The Mandalorian shoots up a bar to get someone's attention, killing (one presumes) many people. But it's PG-13 so we never see anyone suffer or die, we can just enjoy all the shooting and punching and kicking and stabbing without reckoning with the pain that might cause to the actual bodies of humans and animals. Fun for the whole family!

Disclosure Day (2026)

Disclosure Day is really good for a while. It’s mysterious and a little quirky, and Emily Blunt is stellar. Then the movie takes a really dumb turn toward religion, “empathy”, and saccharine Spielberg nonsense. This starts during Jane and Daniel’s discussion about whether people will stop believing in gods if they know there are aliens (pro tip: lots of people already don’t believe in gods), it continues with Jane’s unsubtle stigmata and her asinine call to her nun-friend, and it's truly brought home with an absurd monologue Colman Domingo is forced to deliver about how empathy is the solution to WWIII, an idea that Spielberg apparently actually believes. 

It’s a shame this went south, because I was having a good time for a while. In many ways, I think this is a more personal film for Spielberg than The Fabelmans. Disclosure Day actually explores the big questions that Spielberg has been asking in his films since the late 1970s. To wit: 

• How would knowing about alien life affect how we see one another? 
• Could it stop violence on earth or would it exacerbate it? 
• Would it take the place of a belief in a higher power? 
• Is believing in aliens the same thing as believing in a god? 
• How do we reconcile feelings of faith, certainty we know in our bodies, with the skepticism of those around us? 

These are deeply personal questions for Spielberg, and so I think he’s made quite a personal movie. I wish those questions were of more interest to me… If they were, I might have enjoyed where his movie went a bit more than I did. 

Side note: An actress named Courtney Grace plays a New York NBC anchor in the film’s final act who tells the world about what she’s seeing in the footage, and she gives an incredible performance. Cast her in everything, please.

Supergirl (2026)

Supergirl isn't hateful or anything; indeed Milly Alcock is quite charming, but the script is absolute nonsense. Even the real stakes that the movie sets up—Supergirl's dog will die in three days if she doesn't get the antidote—are obviously not a real motivation for the film's protagonist, since she clearly could have gotten the antidote numerous times from the dozens of brigands she beats up (it's preposterous there there would be only one vial of the stuff being carried by the main baddie).

Unfortunately, Supergirl is also another offensively PG-13 violence-fest, in which hundreds of acts of violence are committed yet not one drop of blood appears onscreen. At one point, Kara even touches her head and says "I'm bleeding": in fact, she is not. There's no blood to see here. People don't actually get hurt in this movie. They just stop fighting. It's violence without consequences.

Matthias Schoenaerts is excellent as always, and Jason Momoa is fun. I also really liked Emily Piggford in a small role. And I love me some David Krumholtz, who speaks Kryptonian for his entire part.

He-Man

Masters of the Universe is so much better than it ought to be. The trick that Travis Knight's film manages to pull off is that it takes an ironic view toward He-Man and his universe while at the same time it revels in it. It's a clever ploy that doesn't always work, but works most of the time. The film, for example, constantly refers to the entire world of Eternia or whatever it's called as something invented by a ten-year-old. He-Man, Goddess Lady, Ram-Man, Fisto... it ends up being a series of very funny dad-jokes actually, and Idris Elba gives a really hilarious performance at the movie's center. 

Nicholas Galitzine is good, and (I can't believe I'm gonna say this but) Jared Leto is very, very funny—even though I couldn't have told you it was him. 

One very significant gripe: There wasn't nearly enough of that green tiger for my taste. I love big cats, especially when they're magical (I still think about that tiger in K-Pop Demon Hunters), and poor Cringer was criminally underused.

Deux Procureurs (2025)

Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors is an incisive and difficult-to-watch but compelling exploration of the banality of evil. This is not a thriller, really. What it is, instead, is an examination of a set of choices that fascism makes possible. The acting here is uniformly good—the eponymous two prosecutors are excellent—and the score is haunting and intriguing. This is a powerful screenplay and it's filmed well, though I admired Two Prosecutors more than I enjoyed it.

Grass Onion

You people all need to get it together. What is with the high rating on Letterboxd and all of the personal recommendations I got for this cookie cutter corporate nonsense throwback to Babe?

Baby, those talking barnyard animals were thirty years ago. And this is what they come up with? The fourth Benoit Blanc movie: Knives Out to Pasture. 

Dial M for Meadow. Mutton on the Orient Express. Heifer on the Nile. 

This should have gone straight to Netflix. Sentimental-ass talking sheep.

L'Étranger

François Ozon's L'Étranger (الغريب) is a faithful adaptation of Camus's novel, except that Ozon has turned much more of an emphasis on the colonial setting. I've always held that Existential and Absurdist writers—Beckett, Kafka, Ionesco, Camus, and others in this group—were deeply political. There is a tendency in criticism of this group of writers to focus on "the human", on "existence", on "the modern" (the exceptions here are Sartre and Havel and Mrożek; their politics were always apparent, evidently). But it seems to me that politics is never far from the minds of all of these authors, and politics are everywhere in Camus's novel, so I think Ozon's emphasis makes great sense. (Indeed, Camus's title, in French, might just as well mean The Foreigner as The Stranger.) 

I hadn't read The Stranger before this week—it seems crazy, I know; everyone has read it! But I went to religious schools until college, and Camus was not on our reading lists next to the New Testament. I have, however, read two or three of Camus's plays, and, of course, his essays on Sisyphus and on violence. But I loved this novel. I can see why it's such a classic.

As always, Ozon has made a sensual, deeply sexy film, with lush production design and gorgeous photography. The way the camera lingers on the man Meursault kills is wildly intriguing, and it feels like something dangerous the film adds to the narrative. This is a very, very good adaptation. Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, and Pierre Lotin (who have all been in Ozon movies before) are all great. And Swann Arlaud is fantastic as the misguided clergyman. 

I want also to share that Ozon’s film illuminated a moment for me from the novel that I hadn’t noticed before. When Marie comes to visit Meursault in the prison, and the two of them have to yell to speak to one another across the bars, there’s a young man and his mother standing next to them. They don’t say a word; they just look at one another. Until the guards force them to depart, then the boy says “Goodbye, Maman”, and the lady gives him a slow wave. It’s a small moment in L’Étranger that I didn’t notice much. In Ozon’s film this moment devastated me. Maman, is, of course, how Meursault always refers to his deceased mother, and in the film it seemed to articulate something Meursault hadn’t quite yet said. Goodbye, Maman. Tears immediately sprang to my eyes when this happened in the film. It’s a gorgeous little moment.

Totoro

My friend Michael and I both decided to watch My Neighbor Totoro last night for the first time. Michael is on a Japanese animation kick, and I'm going to see the stage production of My Neighbour Totoro in London in June and wanted to be prepared. Then we texted about it the next day. Here's what we said.

Michael: Just finished. I thought it was delightful.

Aaron: Yes, it was!! I love that cat bus. There was a little too much screaming little girls.

Michael: Oh I thought the whole time the screaming was going to be a fight for you.

Aaron: Little girls really do not need to scream that much. Hush up.

Michael: I was so immediately taken with Totoro, his little sprites, and their bus cat.

Aaron: Love that Totoro. And love his little leaf hat.

Michael: I didn't expect the plot to go in the direction it did. I expected more fantastical adventure and this was pastoral life interrupted by childhood fear. I also assumed Totoro would be a very different character. I can't remember the word for it, but his actions didn't seem to make normal sense. He was following his own whims and if he wanted to fly around on a top then baby, he was gonna. On a personal viewing level, it mattered a lot to me that the dad especially didn't scoff at the kids when they were insistent they saw Totoro. He honored it and said ok we better go show some respect!

Aaron: Your analysis here is wonderful. You're very right and I hadn't thought of all of this.

Michael: Tell me how it landed for you.

Aaron: In my viewing of kids movies recently I've been very preoccupied with the attitude the film takes. Most kids movies are not about the experience of being a child at all; they're about parenting. Totoro splits the difference by having two kids of different ages. 

Michael: This felt almost completely about the childhood experience. You're so right in the way the parental experience is so commonly the background reasoning behind plotting. 

Aaron: And Totoro himself is not the focus of this movie. The first supernatural figure we meet is the soot-mites, actually. And if we consider things that way, then the movie is much more about finding pleasure in the haunted house, learning to love ghosts, staying open to wonder and terror. Totoro appears at the bus stop when they're scared and lonely. He is a kind of embodiment of the scary figure in the dark or in the forest. But as it turns out, he's cuddly and helpful and magically gifted. (Contrast with the way Americans think about Jesus when they're kids.)

Michael: Oh that's such a good way to frame him. That lines up better with my surprise about him. He's unknowable, but it turns out to at least be in a fun way.

Aaron: What I love about Totoro (and maybe Miyazaki more generally) is its approach to the mysterious and unknown. He asks the child to head toward what scares her. In this case her mother's illness and a new house and her sister's absence.

Michael: I see that in a lot of his other work too. And the films don't demand the characters face those fears without flinching. The characters are allowed their breakdowns and acknowledgment of how overwhelming it all is. 

Guilty Bystander (1950)

It seems like most of the reviews on Letterboxd and other places say that Guilty Bystander is middling or disappointing. I feel precisely the opposite about Joseph Lerner's weird little film noir. In fact, it fairly blew me away. I don't think I've seen a noir quite this seedy before. The only thing I can compare it to for nihilism is Blast of Silence and that's from 1961 not 1950. The flophouses, the warehouses, and the bars in this are frankly disgusting. Even the bannisters are covered in some kind of muck, as we learn in one of the film's first moments; in Guilty Bystander cigarettes fall lazily from characters' mouths onto floors, and no one even stubs them out. This film is set in the underbelly of underbellies. There's an extraordinary fight sequence in which our anti-hero has to wrestle a guy with one arm because he's been shot. It's bracingly realistic, almost tedious. Guilty Bystander is no studio picture.

The acting is not great, however. J. Edward Bromberg gives a kind of low-rent Peter Lorre that works fine, but Faye Emerson is quite boring (one never truly believes she might be part of a double cross), and Mary Boland should really be a lot better than she is. But Kay Medford does excellent work here, and Sam Levene and Harry Landers are great in their smaller parts. Zachary Scott... well I don't think I've decided how I feel about him yet, mostly because I hate his mustache, but I think he might be good in this.

Guilty Bystander was restored from a print—apparently no negative exists anymore—through funding from Nicolas Winding Refn. I'm so glad it was. This is B-movie gold, and I found it to be a compelling portrait of New York petty crime. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it. 

Hamlet (2025)

I confess that as much as I love Riz Ahmed, I found this Hamlet baffling and frequently downright boring.

I’ll start with things I thought worked well. The play within the play, “The Mousetrap”, was really cool. It was intriguingly filmed and it was innovatively staged. I also loved the way Gertrude chose to drink the poison in the play’s fifth act. I loved the way the ghost spoke Hindi but Hamlet answered him in English.

Otherwise, however, I didn’t think this adaptation made much sense at all. We are in England but Elsinore is some sort of corporation or something, maybe a bank? And Fortinbras is the leader of a kind of occupy movement. Or something? Unclear. And anyway, the politics here have nothing to do with what happens in the story; they’re only decoration—a nod to a politics that Hamlet itself cannot deliver (being, after all, 425 years old and concerned with politics in Elizabethan England and not the one ruled by Charles III). 

This Hamlet (हेमलेट) dispenses with Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, dividing their lines up between Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, and Hamlet himself. This made for confusing character development to say the least. I wasn’t sure why anyone was doing anything in this. 

The screenplay is a real head-scratcher throughout. Some lines are invented from whole cloth—a fine choice, honestly, but I kept wondering why they kept any of the original text at all? The screenwriter (or director?) obviously found the Shakespeare lacking at so many points. Lines are altered, made (apparently) easier to understand (for whom? And really?). But why? Why does “the proud man’s contumely” need to be replaced by a newer phrase whereas “who would fardels bear” doesn’t? This happens dozens of times. Why replace one word or phrase but not another? Why change "when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin" to "when he himself might his quiet end make with a dull dagger"? Is quiet end so much clearer to newer ears? It's not; it sounds just as weird.

This 17th century language already doesn’t make any sense in 21st century English, so just commit to it! Or go ahead and rewrite the whole thing! Call it a translation. Set it in an England ruled by the formerly colonized. Or get a budget together and set it in the Mughal empire. Do anything you like! But this kind of patchwork Shakespeare, I find confusing. The new words don’t make the play any clearer, and to my own ears, these stray words that Shakespeare didn't write are constant reminders that what we are hearing isn’t actually the play at all. 

And don't get me started on the fact that they kept in the absurd "that's a fair thought to lie between maid's legs / Nothing" joke from act three. Why? Ahmed performs this (with the help of a phallus–microphone) with the kind of  hammy level of indication I'd expect in a first-year Shakespeare studio or a bad college production. Cringe-worthy stuff.

How does this Hamlet end, you ask? There’s no sword-fighting; Laertes and Hamlet just sort of look at each other and cry. There’s barely a confrontation! Why does Hamlet kill Laertes? I don’t get it. 

And then, of course, the film chooses as its final words… an invented non-Shakespearean line. And a very strange one at that: the king says "I loved your father". This is the most important line in the film? It's how Aneil Karia has decided to end things? Is the implication that perhaps the king didn't kill Hamlet's father after all? Are we supposed to be unsettled with ambiguity like with the ending of Lee Chang-dong's Burning? But if so, why has the king tried (successfully) to kill Hamlet? Why did he freak out during "The Mousetrap"? I just didn't understand this.

I wish they had just taken the entire text of Shakespeare’s play and given it a rewrite. Just make a whole new script; use the plot of Hamlet and make it do what you want it to do and do that well. Instead, we get a faux fidelity to the Shakespearean original that isn't faithful at all: a no-fear Shakespeare and a nearly incomprehensible plot.

How to Make a Killing (2026)

John Patton Ford's movie should have been so much more fun. Zach Woods, Topher Grace, and Ed Harris seemed to know what movie they were in—and this was the real potential of How to Make a Killing: a series of hilarious and flamboyant heirs that our hero kills off in various humorous ways before he kills the big bad at the top.

Unfortunately that isn't how How to Make a Killing shakes out. Ford has overburdened his comedy-thriller with loads and loads of sentiment and moralizing. It felt like I was watching a movie made in the 1980s when Hollywood apparently thought that all of the capitalists who voted for Reagan need to be told that what "really matters" is family and having someone to love you, and that money isn't everything if you can't enjoy it. Giving this film a moral center corrupted this movie from the inside out.

But the real killer here is that How to Make a Killing just isn't very much fun despite the obviously winning presence of Glen Powell. Topher Grace and Zach Woods get some good laughs here, but although it was not his fault at all, this was a dreary Glen Powell vehicle and didn't live up to its considerable promise.

The Drama (2026)

Kristoffer Borgli's film is a romantic comedy, first and foremost. And it works very well as that, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. (Jeremy Levick had me cackling.)

The Drama tries for something more than this, though, and it mostly succeeds, skewering today’s culture of moral superiority. It also manages to be a really intriguing critique of our American eroticization and affection for guns and gun violence. I’m not sure the film does more than open these topics, but I guess I’m not sure it needs to. 

I certainly haven’t left a theatre talking with my companions quite this much in a while. It gave us lots to chew on: What would you do? How would you feel? Why didn't he recover more quickly? We would feel very differently if it was him and not her, wouldn't we? 

The one thing that I think we can all agree on is that Alana Haim’s character is the worst person—and the worst thing that character did is much worse than the worst thing anyone else did. I am of two minds about the horribleness of Alana Haim's character, though. On the one hand, it feels good to feel morally superior to her. She's just so awful, and so clearly in the wrong about everything. On the other, it seems to me that one of the film's central points is, perhaps, that we ought not to be so invested in moral superiority as such.

In any case, I quite enjoyed The Drama. It's worth seeing and it's worth talking about.

Oscar Nominations 2025: Post 11 of 11 (with Final Predictions)

1. Sinners, One Battle after Another, Sentimental Value

2. Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Hamnet
3. Bugonia, The Secret Agent, Train Dreams

4. F1, Blue Moon, It Was Just an Accident

5. Sirāt, Avatar: Fire and Ash, K-Pop Demon Hunters

6. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Song Sung Blue, Weapons, The Voice of Hind Rajab

7. Arco, Elio, Zootopia 2, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

8. Animated Short Films

9. Live-action Short Films

10. Jurassic World: Rebirth, The Lost Bus, Kokuho, The Smashing Machine

The final three films in this year's slate of nominees are:

Den Stygge Stesøsteren (The Ugly Stepsister)

1 nomination

• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Emilie Blichfeldt

Cast: Lea Myren, Ane Dahl Torp, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Flo Fagerli, Isac Calmroth, Malte Gårdinger, Ralph Carlsson, Cecilia Forss, Katarzyna Herman, Adam Lundgren, Willy Ramnek Petri

This is a wacky, funny, and rather disgusting retelling of a story you know very well. The Ugly Stepsister is really, really gross, and I spent a good portion of it just like Flo Fagerli in the image above—with my hands over my eyes hoping I wouldn't have to watch toes being cut off or blood gushing out of eyes. But listen, that's what this is about. It's also a particular brand of feminism that we've seen recently with The Substance, where the desire to skewer beauty standards has led us into true gross-out territory. I'm not sure if it reads to me as feminist, honestly, but whatever. It's good at what it's trying to do, anyway. It definitely grossed me out, and it has an amusing, horny, wicked approach to the Cinderella story. Knowing that it's going to get more and more disgusting also created a particular kind of Hitchcockian dread for me as an audience member, and I spent much of my movie holding my breath and filled with anxiety about the damage that would be inflicted on these poor young women.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #77 out of 98

Diane Warren: Relentless

1 nomination

• Original Song - "Dear Me": Diane Warren (The Six Triple Eight, Flamin' Hot, 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: Bess Kargman

For your consideration, Diane Warren in Original Song. This is a 92-minute Oscar campaign film. As a film, I'm not really sure how to evaluate it. I guess it's designed as a kind of character study. Warren is sure a quirky figure. And she has, indeed, written some very good pop songs in the last forty years. Some of the big names who get dropped in this movie don't appear, which is a little odd and unfortunate—no Céline, for example, and no Beyoncé (despite both being listed as in the cast in several locations)—but I guess what's even weirder is that the people who do appear (Gloria Estefan, Common, Jennifer Hudson, Toni Braxton, Jerry Bruckheimer), don't have much to say about Warren herself. They just sort of repeat what the rest of us already know about how many hits she's had and how much they wish they'd written the songs themselves. There's a really intriguing moment/scandal, when Trisha Yearwood and LeAnn Rimes took one of Warren's songs to #1 and #2 because they had competing versions of the same tune. This happened in 1997/1998 and the film mentions it but then moves on immediately without delving into what was going on with Warren at the time, why she did what she did, what the fallout was, etc. In any case, I think the film just misses a lot of opportunities for us actually to learn about who this woman is. Instead, the movie opts for Oscar campaigning. At the film's end we even get a title card that says she's been nominated for the Oscar 15 times; no mention of the Grammys or Emmys she's actually won. Indeed, no footage from those ceremonies. This movie has its eye on the Oscars. What's so weird to me about all of this is that despite Warren's obvious desire to win an Oscar, she hasn't actually tried very hard to win one, and she hasn't learned how to win one in the last two decades, nor does she seem to be able to analyze the situation. There's an entire, extended sequence about the song she and Gaga wrote for a documentary called The Hunting Ground in which it appears that she thought she was going to *finally* win that year (this was in 2016). Diane Warren: Relentless behaves as if Warren was a real contender that year, but she wasn't. The James Bond movie Spectre had it sewn up, and everyone knew it. No one saw that documentary, and although the performance onstage that year at the Oscars was very powerful, Warren was never going to win that Oscar. Diane Warren is nominated every year, sure. This is her seventeenth nomination, and she's been nominated 11 times in the last 12 years; that's all good and well. But she's only trying to get nominated—not win. The movies she's writing for haven't been memorable since Pearl Harbor in 2001. Not one of the recent nominations is from a movie that was a big deal. For each of them, Warren's nomination is the film's only nomination. If she really wanted to win an Oscar, she'd beg the studios to let her compose a song for a big Oscar-bait blockbuster—one of the Avatars, or a new Spielberg movie, or something directed by Guillermo del Toro. She writes songs for movies no one sees! I'm sure she'll be baffled as to why she didn't win yet again this year.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: Not ranked (but this is a bad movie)

Viva Verdi!

1 nomination

• Original Song - "Sweet Dreams of Joy": Nicholas Pike (1st time nominee)

Director: Yvonne Russo

This is a meandering documentary that doesn’t know what story it has to tell or whom to follow. I’m actually quite confused by the way it works. Some of the people in the film died over seven years ago, though the film behaves as if they’re still alive—until the final credits when we realize they passed many years ago. But the real issue is that this should probably have been a 20-minute short and it has no business being a 75-minute feature. It repeats itself frequently, and we rarely learn anything new after the film’s opening sequences. It’s directed without intention, as if the filmmakers collected footage for a decade without having any idea what they were going to do with it and then produced this scrapbook of a feature as a way to honor their subjects. Don't bother.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: Not ranked (but this is a terrible movie)

More Oscar posts:

1. Sinners, One Battle after Another, Sentimental Value

2. Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Hamnet
3. Bugonia, The Secret Agent, Train Dreams

4. F1, Blue Moon, It Was Just an Accident

5. Sirāt, Avatar: Fire and Ash, K-Pop Demon Hunters

6. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Song Sung Blue, Weapons, The Voice of Hind Rajab

7. Arco, Elio, Zootopia 2, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

8. Animated Short Films

9. Live-action Short Films

10. Jurassic World: Rebirth, The Lost Bus, Kokuho, The Smashing Machine

Final Oscar Predictions

Best Picture – Sinners

Director – Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle after Another

Actor – Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

Actress – Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

Adapted Screenplay – One Battle after Another

Original Screenplay – Sinners

Supporting Actor – Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value

Supporting Actress – Amy Madigan, Weapons

Film Editing – F1

Cinematography – Train Dreams

International Feature – The Secret Agent

Documentary Feature – Mr. Nobody against Putin

Production Design – Frankenstein

Original Score – Sinners

Costume Design – Frankenstein

Casting – Marty Supreme

Sound – F1

Animated Feature – K-Pop Demon Hunters

Visual Effects – Avatar: Fire and Ash

Makeup & Hairstyling – Frankenstein

Original Song – "Golden", K-Pop Demon Hunters

Animated Short – Butterfly

Documentary Short – All the Empty Rooms

Live-action Short – A Friend of Dorothy

Oscar Nominations 2025: Post 10 of 11

1. Sinners, One Battle after Another, Sentimental Value

2. Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Hamnet
3. Bugonia, The Secret Agent, Train Dreams

4. F1, Blue Moon, It Was Just an Accident

5. Sirāt, Avatar: Fire and Ash, K-Pop Demon Hunters

6. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Song Sung Blue, Weapons, The Voice of Hind Rajab

7. Arco, Elio, Zootopia 2, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

8. Animated Short Films

9. Live-action Short Films

This year's nominees are:

Jurassic World: Rebirth

1 nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, Ed Skrein, Adam Loxley, Niamh Finlay

For some reason this is a movie about sadness? Like, everyone, in Jurassic World: Rebirth is so sad and unhappy, and it was really difficult for me to invest in any of these people. This has some cool sequences, but it’s such a downer. It’s Jurassic Park as a disaster film, and because it approaches its subject matter earnestly, this means feeling every loss in the disaster and taking time to mourn the fallen characters whom we never got to know in the first place. The leads are competent—Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, and Rupert Friend are all great and perfect in their parts. But there’s also an annoyingly earnest B-plot, with four actors I’ve never seen before. They all do a fine job, but Gareth Edwards doesn’t introduce them to us until 25 minutes into the movie, so they feel like an afterthought for the rest of the running time, though I think Edwards thinks they’re supposed to be the emotional center of the movie or something like that. The whole thing is ridiculous. And the big bad at the end is disgusting-looking. Mostly, though, I just don’t understand why an adventure–monster movie needs to be so deeply invested in processing depression and lack of fulfillment. Why couldn’t this be more fun? Why make a monster movie that’s a drag? This ends up being one of the worst movies of the year.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #95 out of 98

The Lost Bus

1 nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Paul Greengrass

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez, Ashlie Atkinson, Kimberli Flores, Levi McConaughey, Kay McConaughey, John Messina, Kate Wharton, Danny McCarthy, Spencer Watson

Fellow visual effects nominee The Lost Bus is an infinitely better film than Jurassic World: Rebirth with a bigger movie star, but this was an AppleTV+ film and so almost no one saw it. This is very very unfortunate because The Lost Bus is really strong. It’s a fast-paced action film that mounts tension expertly and beautifully pays off. McConaughey and the rest of the cast are excellent, but the star here are the extraordinary effects and the sure hand of Paul Greengrass, who has been giving us great politically focused action movies for two decades. It's a movie about climate change without being a movie about climate change, and it highlights the very hard work that real firefighters, schoolteachers, and other real people (not politicians or finance executives) did to save lives during the Paradise fire in California. This movie's great. Unfortunately none of us can watch it on big screens. 

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #21 out of 98

Kokuho (国宝)

1 nomination

• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Lee Sang-il

Cast: Yoshizawa Ryo, Yokohama Ryusei, Takahata Mitsuki, Terajima Shinobu, Kurokawa Soya, Koshiyama Keitatsu, Tanaka Min, Ken Watanabe, Nana Mori, Takahiro Miura, Ai Mikami, Masatoshi Nagase, Shimada Kyūsaku

Epic! At three hours this is a bit of a prohibitive watch, but it's filed with excellent performances and—especially—some wonderful kabuki on film. The central figure in this is a bit of an enigma, and perhaps because the film jumps temporally as much as it does, we get less insight than we probably should into who he is. We get much, much more insight into his partner's world, the man who is not nearly as good of a kabuki performer in the film. Yokohama Ryusei is wonderful in this. The movie itself is messy, but it kind of doesn't matter. The whole thing is immensely compelling. (Incidentally, Kokuho means national treasure, which makes sense in the context of the film, but of course one could never call this film "National Treasure" in English.) One more thing: it's odd that gender doesn't come up at all in this movie except for two little moments at the end of the second act and beginning of the third. An audience member assumes that Kikuo is a woman and wishes for something more but then becomes violent when he understands that he's a man; then two scenes later two men refer to a 90-year-old onnagata as "the old lady" but then correct themselves. These are intriguing moments, but the film itself does nothing with them. Lee Sang-il is simply not interested in the complex gender experience of these men who play women onstage. And I guess that's a little weird to me, but the movie's definitely still worth watching.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #32 out of 98

The Smashing Machine

1 nomination

• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Benny Safdie

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten, Lyndsey Gavin, Zoe Kosovic, Oleksandr Usyk, Satoshi Ishii, James Moontasri, Yoko Hamamura, Paul Cheng, André Tricoteux, Marcus Aurelio, Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu, Jerin Valel, Raja Flores

This is a weird film. It’s weird because—in the first place—it’s a sports film that really avoids quite a few of the sports-movie tropes, and this makes the movie better than those movies but not quite as satisfying emotionally as most of them. It’s also weird because—in the second place—Safdie is invested in us having complex feelings about his characters and the things they do, and we aren’t used to that. I don’t know, though… for me this was good but not great. It has some excellent elements—the sound is incredible, the score is so great, the makeup is amazing—but much of The Smashing Machine consists of melodramatic, petty fights. And those were not very interesting to me. (Except for this one moment when The Rock smashed a door in a room where there really should not have been a door in the first place.) In any case, The Smashing Machine doesn't build tension the way a usual Safdie Brothers movie would. This is a true story, and its dependent on its real subject matter, but I suspect that the screenwriter amped up the Emily Blunt part so the actress could have more to do. This works well for Emily Blunt, but it makes the movie a good deal less enjoyable; she really shouldn't be the focus of this movie.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #44 out of 98

All 2025 Oscar posts:

1. Sinners, One Battle after Another, Sentimental Value

2. Marty Supreme, Frankenstein, Hamnet
3. Bugonia, The Secret Agent, Train Dreams

4. F1, Blue Moon, It Was Just an Accident

5. Sirāt, Avatar: Fire and Ash, K-Pop Demon Hunters

6. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Song Sung Blue, Weapons, The Voice of Hind Rajab

7. Arco, Elio, Zootopia 2, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

8. Animated Short Films

9. Live-action Short Films

10. Jurassic World: Rebirth, The Lost Bus, Kokuho, The Smashing Machine

11. The Ugly Stepsister, Diane Warren: Relentless, Viva Verdi!