No sport lends itself to film quite like baseball. It paces itself. It is ritualistic. It it is structured around the showdown between two men. Its stakes depend on the slow arc of a long season, a long-term investment rather than a short-term stimulus. There is no ticking clock, or bodies colliding, or exhibition of force. Instead, everything depends on a sequence of subtle gestures.

And if baseball is the perfect sport for film, Eephus is the perfect film for baseball. Chronicling the final game on a small town baseball diamond that marks the end of a long standing rivalry, Eephus explores realistic masculinity as a haphazard group approaches a melancholy farewell. The teams are populated with a set of eclectic personalities, loudly posturing how much they do not care to prove how much they do care, quietly grieving a loss they feel guilty to mourn in the first place. It is a game that they will not admit matters as much as it does, punctured with petty bickering only united by the fact that they never want it to end. It never was about baseball at all, but that’s also all that matters. 

Told over the course of a single game, Eephus is structured around the slow shift from afternoon to night, which comes more quickly than anyone expects. The film floats in a timeless limbo — overlapping period details keep the film from being locked to a specific era, but it’s unclear whether it is a nostalgic rejection of modernity or an inability to adapt to the present, a search for little things to memorialize something that is largely mundane. Eephus’s photography is ephemeral, but it captures things that are eternal: the warm halo of the fall foliage, the atmospheric grumbling that clings to the air, the echo of wood against leather.

The film focuses on little things that are an eternal part of the sport — they existed long before this rec league brought all these players together, and they will persist long after the last game is over — but they are the way to memorialize the game, making them almost divine and creating space for the melancholy everyone on the field is afraid to verbalize. The players’ fear is founded, in part, on the fact that almost all of them are too afraid to admit that it matters, but also because their game is giving way to something that, objectively, matters much more.

The field’s demolition isn’t making way for a new condo complex or parking lot or shopping center. The land will be used for a new public middle school, which will be the only one within a 25-mile radius. It is a genuine improvement to the community, and a loss that only twenty-some-odd aging ballplayers who play to empty bleachers will have to grapple with. They are not only isolated in this grief, but wrestling with the guilt of mourning a loss that doesn’t matter. It is a ritual lost for the sake of something better, but still lost nonetheless. 

Eephus gets its name from an almost obsolete kind of pitch, teased by one of the field’s more elusive players. A kind of trick pitch that supposedly hangs between the mound and the plate forever, until the batter loses track of time and the ball has already passed him. It is a gimmick, but it is coveted nonetheless, not as a feat of sheer force, but of simple deception. A disruption of routine that makes you realize you have been waiting so long for something that has already happened. Everything moves slower than you expect it to until it is already past you. 

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

Eephus was released on March 7, 2025, and is currently streaming on MUBI.

How do you build a time machine to visit an era we are still clawing our way out of? If there is any time we do not want to be nostalgic for, it is the one recent enough to blame our current hellscape on — and director Ari Aster decides to depict the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of Western Americana, twisting several genres to reminisce about a time that we are all still prisoners in the fallout of.

Eddington sits in perfect sequence with the rest of Aster’s work; not quite a horror film, but primed to be digested as such after his previous catalog of abject terror and paranoid delirium. If anything, Aster’s prior works feel like clinical trials for Eddington’s pointedly political catharsis, which sits right in the middle of his signature dollhouse nausea but cares about something beyond itself. 

Following the death of George Floyd and in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Eddington tracks a mayoral race between a people-pleasing liberal incumbent  (Pedro Pascal) and a conspiratorial conservative sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), while the impending development of the small New Mexico town looms in the background. It is a microcosm of pandemic neuroses combined into a pressure cooker that, despite all of its ingredients, avoids being needlessly reactionary or arrogantly centrist.

Despite lying somewhere between the political satire of Bob Roberts and the gritty Western tendencies of No Country for Old Men, Eddington isn’t interested in pleasing fans of either genre. It is a satire you don’t want to laugh at and a Western to reminisce upon nothing, focused on the concept that the paranoid fringe and the dominant politics inch closer to becoming one and the same. 

Eddington certainly is not a film for those who want the villain named in big red letters and put behind bars with a dunce cap, but it is a movie that manages to condemn conspiratorial politics by living right in the center of them and embracing their every fantasy. Initially, this ethos is blurry; in the first act, Joe is clearly uncomfortable with the QAnon adjacent rhetoric that his wife (Emma Stone) and mother-in-law spew. As time passes, all their frantic conspiracism turns out to be real and true, but its enactment is in no way an endorsement of those who wished it into this world. 

Aster ultimately brings to life many conservative fantasies; real change can be made by rugged vigilante violence; “The Left” is somehow capitalist and communist; progressivism is both only used by teenagers as social currency and also embodied by a faceless cabal of guerilla militants; all the theorized abuse of people and power is actually happening.  

And yet — none of these fantasies are true at all, because they are actualized by a protagonist who acts as the most pitiful mascot on the planet. Joe might be a messiah of right-wing conspiracism on paper, but he is a pathetic lunatic in a paranoid haze who only gets the power he dreamed of when his body and dignity are completely taken from him. All the abuse they have conspired about is actually true, but it’s “behind closed doors” in that it happens quietly inside every house on the block. The culture they strive to protect is a folksy facade for the dominance they seek to preserve. 

But the villains of Aster’s film aren’t the conspiracists who enact their own paranoid fantasies, nor are they the people that are gunned down in the process. What the film seems to condemn, above all else, are the forces who treat any of these people as expendable. Always looming in the backdrop of Eddington’s impending hellfire is the ambiguous data tycoon threat seeking to develop the town. They can set it all in motion and succeed simply by waiting it all out. The tension of the presence grows until everyone blasts each other to bits, and the faceless threat can win while plausibly saying they’ve got no blood on their hands. All is well in the dollhouse they built. 

OVERALL SCORE: 8/10

Eddington was released on July 18, 2025 and is currently showing in U.S. theaters. 

Before we get started — it has been months since I’ve written a film review, in part because I’ve been far too busy to see many new releases, let alone to write about them. But with summer comes a lull, so I plan on catching up on some new releases and, in turn, publishing my reviews for them. I’ve missed writing here a great deal, and I cannot wait to continue!

It takes maybe thirty seconds of The Phoenician Scheme (all but three shots) before we see someone sliced in half. An unnamed jet passenger is torn to pieces by a bomb intended for Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), a European mogul mostly in the business of cruelty, in a brief prologue that immediately sends Wes Anderson’s style into a tailspin.

The director isn’t a stranger to violence, but splattered blood and a severed torso is a swift departure from the abstracted slant his work usually takes. Physical violence in his films has often been stylized to the point of comic relief — a stabbing with lefty scissors that inexplicably results in a motorcycle in a tree (Moonrise Kingdom) or a citywide revolution spurred just to gain access to girls’ dormitories (The French Dispatch). Awkward, stilted physical comedy often offers a bit of levity for the raw emotional brutality at the core of his films.

Anderson uses this initial violent encounter as a tonal primer for the body of The Phoenician Scheme, the latest installment in recent existential pastiche that is less interested in its own story than it is in understanding the creation of it. Like Asteroid City before it, the film is a cross-section of Anderson’s own aesthetic, but at the opposite end of a philosophical spectrum.

While Asteroid City elevated artifice to the point of total collapse, The Phoenician Scheme simplifies it into intentionally rigid archetypes. The film follows Zsa-zsa after he appoints his eldest and only daughter, a devout nun (Mia Threapleton), as the heir to his fortune. Together they make pit stops on their journey through a Middle East dollhouse travelogue in search of financing for his largest international enterprise.

The story operates at a greater scale than Anderson has attempted before, but feels intentionally and narratively stagnant. Each episodic encounter is carefully introduced, enacted, and resolved, and stylistic layering simply acts as aesthetic dressing for a cut-and-dry narrative. Each character is a paradigm of Anderson’s usual archetypes: a broken father seeking to repair an estranged relationship, a deadpan young woman with strong moral conviction, and an awkward young male love interest with niche expertise wearing mid-century menswear, all forming an uncomfortable but endearing familial love triangle.

But while the characters fit the bill of the usual Anderson lineup, they feel almost intentionally neglected, overpopulated with quirks that can’t quite compensate for their total emotional flatness. It’s initially off-putting, and the first episode of the caper is so stilted that I began to wonder if the lazy “Anderson is a parody of himself” critics were right all along.

But slowly, The Phoenician Scheme begins to take form and the paradox of the film’s dense emptiness starts to crystallize. It is a complete cross-section of his style, elevating the usual dollhouse charm of his technique while dissecting all his tendencies down to their basic form. It’s not just overtly physically violent, but artistically cruel, dangling our favorite Anderson-isms in front of our faces but skeletonizing them in the process.

It’s no coincidence, then, that The Phoenician Scheme is one of Anderson’s most spiritual films. Zsa-zsa, who spends the whole film routinely escaping death, interrupts the absurd arbitrations of financial dealing with religious framing — a purgatorial trial for the future of his soul. The biblical tableaus are populated with a cast of Anderson regulars as prophets and other heavenly figures (including Bill Murray as God), but they hold an aesthetic melancholy that creates friction against the otherwise playful images.

Zsa-zsa has invoked widespread suffering, which, in his eyes, is all justifiable collateral for his enterprise. But for the first time, the stronghold of Anderson’s villain is real and deeply cruel, not a pantomime of an assumed evil (like the fascists in The Grand Budapest Hotel) but a mogul of famine and slavery.

This time, authoritarianism isn’t a moral backdrop for an escapist, endearing tale. Instead, Anderson’s usual archetypes are the backdrop for a political crisis of faith, for a soul on trial. The pastel colors and monotone-lighting-speed-ultra-hyphenated dialogue can’t keep the world out anymore. Whimsy is the chaser for, not the distraction from, a global market of cruel deal-making. It is a slow revelation that escapism might still be a manifesto for the worst ravages of capitalism.

If Asteroid City was an assurance of his emotions, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar was a fable for his constructions, The Phoenician Scheme is Anderson’s admission of guilt to accusations of emptiness and artifice. But this admission gives work a depth like never before. Despite a recognition of the mortality of his style, Anderson insists that cruelty itself is mortal as well.

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

The Phoenician Scheme was released on June 6, 2025, and is currently showing in U.S. theaters.

Now a month into 2025, I am taking a look back at my favorite films from the past year. We saw another great year for cinema, and while I continue to tackle new writing projects, I always strive to keep up with new releases and record my thoughts here. I’m thankful that my audience has continued to grow despite my sporadic publishing schedule, and I am incredibly grateful for each and every one of you for sticking with me. 

I usually publish this annual list on New Year’s Day, but this year, I decided to take a few extra weeks to catch a couple films that did not get a wide release until January — and I am glad I did, as several of them made it onto this list! But while I managed to watch more movies this year than any other, as always, I could not make time for every film I wanted to see. Some of the movies I missed include Nosferatu, Sing Sing, I’m Not Here, and The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Because of these blind spots this list is subject to change. I plan to watch and review these films as soon as possible, and if any of them should be included in this list, I will note the change in the individual reviews and update their placement on my Letterboxd list. 

Before the top ten, one last disclaimer: in any given year, there are always more noteworthy films than there are spots on this list. Honorable mentions for 2024 include Anora, Janet Planet, Challengers, I Saw the TV Glow, Kneecap, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, His Three Daughters, Conclave, The Bikeriders, and Dune: Part 2. Be sure to check out these omitted films in addition to the following movies.

10. “Daughters” — dir. Natalie Rae & Angela Patton

The only documentary to make it onto this list, Daughters — a film about four girls who get to reunite with their incarcerated fathers at a daddy-daughter dance — might seem poised to exploit the circumstances of both parties to manipulate the viewer’s emotions. Instead, the film manages the opposite effect. While incredibly small in scale, Daughters articulates the individual consciousness of its subjects and galvanizes the viewer to recognize how the carceral state not only survives, but thrives on the estrangement of family and community. Through a subtle but striking use of expressionistic visual grammar, Daughters posits that the silhouette of the carceral state will forever be entwined with the families that it separates, dividing shared truths to ensure the strength of its grip. Check out my full review here.

9. “Memoir of a Snail” — dir. Adam Elliot

In a year full of incredible achievements in animation, Memoir of a Snail managed to strike the deepest emotionally. An eerie, Edward Gorey-esque meditation on constant despair, the film follows Grace Pudel as a child and young adult. A girl who seems to be marching a parade of never-ending misery, she only takes comfort in collecting snail-related items, slowly trapping herself beneath the weight of the shell’s spiral. But Memoir of a Snail is never interested in justifying its miserablism — rather, the film constantly undermines it, always echoing a patient mantra which promises that while beauty may be invisible now, its inevitability is an incentive to keep going. Check out my full review here.

8. “The Substance” — dir. Coralie Fargeat

The framework for conversation about female beauty standards has exhausted itself. The Substance, one the biggest horror hits of the year, mimics these vague, timid conventions before obliterating them entirely — a hyperbolic whirlwind of flesh and fluid, purely provocative stimuli to prompt absurd revulsion. But between the overwhelming stupidity and excess of The Substance, the film leaves space for gutting moments of despair, which slowly come to feel like asymmetries in an overtly artificial world. Human moments become defects in a film hell-bent on decimating the dated standards of female empowerment, exhausting every trite metaphor of its meaning in a forced effort to create a new vocabulary. Check out my full review here.

7. “A Real Pain” — dir. Jesse Eisenberg

The story of two cousins taking a tour of Poland to honor their late grandmother, A Real Pain uses the fraught territory of Holocaust tourism to take comic jabs at how we wrestle with the grief of loss and the gratitude of survival. When our pain is so deeply mapped onto our bodies, it begins to feel menial, and in accepting the ubiquity of pain, we either hold it awkwardly close to our chests or use it transactionally to build relationships. But intentionally withholding or publicly performing our pain still keeps us at arm’s length from it, and existence within its shadow eventually prevents us from recognizing it at all. Mourning becomes mundane because it is a constant, and A Real Pain insists on reworking the social intricacies within an ever-present state of grief to prevent us from ever losing sight of our trauma. Check out my full review here.

6. “Kinds of Kindness” — dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

Outdoing last year’s Poor Things (which also earned a spot on my top ten list), Kinds of Kindness is a redux of Yorgos Lanthimos’s earlier and crueler aesthetics. A simple triptych with a recurring cast, the film considers the means by which love becomes control, taking a functional, utilitarian approach to capturing the body. The human form is simply a physical vessel for longing and for the perversions that result from it, but the film’s cruelty comes from a place of deep admiration for how the body moves and interacts. Kinds of Kindness not only provides a view of the destruction of the form, but it forces us to consider what comes after this abasement, revealing an appreciation for the human body and for those who value it enough to withstand its repeated destruction. Check out my full review here.

5. “Queer” — dir. Luca Guadagnino

The second of Luca Guadagnino’s two 2024 hits, Queer is a tactile depiction of writer William S. Burroughs — a lyrical chronology of a man tossed between overwhelming lust and intoxicating loneliness. Queer’s matte, cartoonish image of the world contorts in accordance with the ebbs and flows of its protagonist’s longing, an examination of the physical dimensions of human desire without ever leering at the public dimensions of deviance. As the film becomes increasingly distorted, we are no longer convinced whether this intense longing is a search for overwhelming feeling or a desperate attempt to forever flee from it. A psychedelic, tactual journey, Queer tracks the development of a desire fleeting and futile, but debilitating nonetheless. Check out my full review here.

4. “The Brutalist” — dir. Brady Corbet

Daunting in length and immense in execution, The Brutalist probes the conventions of Great American Projects and the exploitation inevitable to their construction. Following László Tóth, a Jewish architect from Hungary who flees post-Holocaust Europe to build a life in America, the film considers if its forced magnitude can condemn the follies of this kind of project by replicating them. Capturing the immensity of László’s creations in vivid VistaVision, The Brutalist reverse-engineers a nation’s narratives by pointing so intently to their craft that it undermines their very construction. No matter how much concrete we lay in honor of our exceptionalism, there is always the land that came before it. Where we see victorious conquest, there is always a tragedy in tow. Full review coming soon.

3. “La Chimera” — dir. Alice Rohrwacher

On paper, La Chimera might seem like something trapped in the formalities of contemporary indie darlings — an 1980s Italian period piece shot on multi-format film starring one of the year’s most popular heartthrobs — but the film is far from formulaic. Following Arthur, the leader of a group of tomborali (Italian tomb raiders), who is blessed/cursed with visions of the tombs, La Chimera considers the mechanisms of storytelling while teetering just on the precipice of death. The film tracks a loss by walking this edge, forcing a fractured and illogical conversation between past and present. Bereavement has a mystic power of detaching us from the living, so Arthur seeks conquest amongst the dead, detaching him from the living even more. Overtly told with the structure of a classic ballad, La Chimera is a touching and never-ending search for what was lost a long time ago.

2. “To A Land Unknown” — dir. Mahdi Fleifel

To a Land Unknown tells the story of two Palestinian cousins, now refugees in Athens, who have resorted to petty theft in hopes to buy fake passports to reach Germany. As their circumstances grow increasingly dire, the two increase the intensity of their crimes, eventually targeting other refugees and predicating their survival on the replication of their circumstances. But while its protagonists compromise their morality, To a Land Unknown never compromises its empathy, suggesting that these actions are not inhumane but instead are taken so their humanity can be more fully realized. The structure of brutality is so effective that it can force its victims to also be its conductors, multiplying its efficiency by pitting its wounded against each other and nudging them with a false sense of hope. While To a Land Unknown won’t get a wide release until February, I was lucky enough to catch it at the Boston Palestine Film Festival and I can’t wait to experience it again once it hits theaters next month. Check out my full review here.

1. “Nickel Boys” — dir. RaMell Ross

I can’t remember the last time a film has as profound an effect on me as Nickel Boys. Beginning with a montage of simple sensory experiences shot entirely from first-person point of view, the film follows a friendship between two boys at Nickel Academy, a racist and abusive reform school in 1960s Tallahassee. Their friendship materializes through their shared first-person perspective, their opposing outlooks woven together into an intricate waltz of resilience that alternates between hoping to be remembered and accepting the oblivion of the fact that you definitely won’t be. As the past and present converge into one, Nickel Boys declares its emancipatory perspective through simple moments lived in real time — the subjective lyricism of singular lives clashing with the weight of their images as analogs for all those who have been erased by the unimaginable cruelty embedded within our state. Check out my full review here.

That’s all for my year in review — but keep an eye out for any forthcoming changes as I try to knock the last few 2024 films off my watchlist. Thank you so much to anyone who contributed to my writing this year, and here’s to a great 2025!

The camera cannot distinguish between bearing witness and gawking, because the instrument is at the whims of its audience. The images it creates are unconscious to whether they are tokens of reality or partners in the creation of a myth. How can we know if the images we capture will be folded into the status quo or recontextualize the very ground we walk on? Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross evaluates this dilemma of bearing witness by recognizing it as incomparable to being witnessed — in his words, “a psychological double-consciousness, where you’re both in it and on the outside of it.” Our ability to see is eclipsed by how we’ve been made to be seen by the world. 

Nickel Boys begins with a montage of simple sensory experiences from first-person perspective. A set of fresh sheets billowing over your head before coming to rest. The gentle tug-of-war between your hand and a balloon before you let the helium pull it upwards and bounce off the blades of a ceiling fan. Ross begins with simple tableaus of feeling before these textures are grounded into any narrative — long before we know whose body we are in, we know the feelings of this body intimately. 

While Nickel Boys rigidly remains within a first-person view, we come to know who it belongs to well: Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse). At first we only see him when he catches a glimpse of himself — warped in the shiny surface of his Nana’s (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) iron as it glides by, or frozen still in the reflection of a shop window as a dozen TVs go static on the other side of the glass. Then we come to know Elwood through what he sees, which is a world of potential. Men are setting foot on the moon and Dr. King’s words are echoing from a news broadcast. Elwood’s teacher sees the same potential in him, encouraging him to enroll in college classes and get involved in local civil rights activism. 

But Elwood’s optimism in what he sees cannot be divorced from how he’s seen as a Black man in 1960s Tallahassee, from the stick-figure flipbook of a lynching sketched into his history book to being passed by a truck with wooden cross tied to its flatbed which leaves a trail of sparks as it drags along the road. He also sees the torso of a cop standing next to the stolen car that he happens to be hitchhiking in, though the driver has told him to look away. 

After his subsequent arrest, Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy, an abusive reform school where he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), who’s been there for some time. Where Elwood is optimistic, Turner is disillusioned. Where Elwood wants to change Nickel, Turner knows there’s only a few ways out, and one of them is to be buried in an unmarked grave at the back of the estate’s property. Where Elwood lives hoping to be remembered, Turner has accepted the oblivion of the fact that he definitely won’t be.

As we get to know Turner, we are eventually granted his point-of-view as well. We see the friendship between the two boys slowly materialize, their shared reality tugging their opposing attitudes together into an intricate waltz of resilience that alternates between eyes always looking upward and eyes trained to the ground they walk on. We no longer have to imagine the body we live in by how it’s seen by others — without ever giving up the POV conceit, Nickel Boys allows us to understand Elwood and Turner through each other. 

But slowly, we realize that the two boys are no longer seen by others at all. They’ve been banished to an isolated facility by a carceral state that sees potential in their expendable bodies but no purpose in their being. Boys from Nickel vanish all the time without being seen by the outside world; Elwood and Turner’s gaze is the only account of each other’s existence. The simple visual poetry of Nickel Boys is a radical act of both seeing and being seen — the subjective lyricism of singular lives clashing with the weight of their images as analogs for all those who have been erased by the unimaginable cruelty embedded within our state. “There are Nickels all over this country,” says Turner. The monumental weight of each of their lives has been folded into a tragic, sparsely remembered archive, re-evaluated by periodically jumping forward in time to a man who always keeps his back to the camera — a man who goes unidentified until the past and the present come careening into one.  

Nickel Boys has countless moments of profound revelation, but they are derived entirely from its radical aesthetic approach. While interspersed with sobering archival montages, the film articulates its poetic, emancipatory perspective through single moments lived in real time. The instruction of the frame is not just a world seen and felt, but a body within the world. A document sits on a blank plain of paper-white while a body sees life slip past it in bands of brilliant color. Power is predicated on the ability to control what is seen and what is remembered — Nickel Boys places us into the bodies of those forced to be forgotten, galvanizing us with the simple invitation to pick an orange from a tree or gently turn a coin between our fingers. 

OVERALL SCORE: 10/10

Nickel Boys was released on December 13 and is currently showing in US theaters. 

Five-year-old Aubrey loves numbers, but not their meaning. She’s eager to share how she excels in school, how high she can count without making a mistake, how quickly she can do arithmetic. But the numbers aren’t just abstract sums she can recite. For Aubrey, they represent how many weeks she has to wait until she can see her father again, or how many years she has to grow without him until he returns home. “Seven’s a very close number to one,” she says at the beginning of the film, “but it's gonna take a long time ‘cause it’s in years.” 

In Daughters, Aubrey is one of many young Black girls who has spent her childhood without her father due to incarceration. The documentary focuses on four girls who are reunited with their fathers who are in prison through the Date with Dad program, founded by co-director Angela Patton, which gives the girls the opportunity to see their fathers outside of the context of a carceral environment during a father-daughter dance.

The four girls all understand the destruction of their fathers’ incarceration differently — some hold idyllic images of the fathers that they’ve been forced to never truly know, some resent their fathers individually, some hold a deep existential pain knowing that this punishment will never be individual, but instead reverberate through their entire community to ensure the endless ubiquity of it. In turn, in the weeks leading up to the dance, the fathers are given the opportunity to process the personal truths that are withheld from their daughters in their absence. The pairs share commensurate perspectives that can only be placed in conversation through the film’s editing — the prison system is designed to intentionally make face-to-face dialogue impossible, to prevent these shared truths from ever grounding themselves.   

Daughters is not concerned with the actions each father took to warrant incarceration, nor is it intent on exploiting the emotions of either party for narrative gain. The film understands that no one can do anything to deserve being treated as inhuman, nor does someone need to perform their emotion to justify the humanity that should be guaranteed by their existence. The camera imbues emotion through a respectful distance, allowing for a reflexive resonance without manipulating the real pain on screen. Our resulting pain is overwhelming but detached rather than lived, giving us the opportunity to feel every blow but affirming that our reaction as a voyeur will never be equal to the pain of the subjects. To us, the grief of lost time is felt through what is withheld, rooted in the real but abstracted as to not manipulate its subjects’ circumstance. 

The distance between subject and viewer is fundamental to the maintenance of an ethical emotional relationship between the two and is essential to the articulation of a structural understanding rather than an individual one. The subjects are not specimens held under a microscope; rather, the gap that the film leaves forces us to recognize how the severance of families creates the stratification of communities. 

The prison system is designed to appear as a means of deterrence, but the truth behind this myth is that social dominance is maintained not by deterring crime but instead through the consequences felt by marginalized communities. Prisoners are not paying a debt to society for their crimes — the true burden of punishment falls on their families, not just because of the emotional toll of their estrangement, but from the cycle that results from the dismantling of community. Prisons extract many things from their inmates (profit, time, labor), but their primary form of control is ensuring that the extraction of young men from their communities will guarantee the continuation of the cycle of crime. When fathers can’t touch or even see their families, is rehabilitation expected or even possible? Of course it isn’t, and it was never intended to be — the goal is the fracturing of their environment and the maintenance of the circumstances that assure crime in the first place. 

While the scope of Daughters is small, it manages to articulate that the silhouette of the carceral system will be forever intertwined with the families that it separates, which ultimately results in an acceptance of the immortality of the system. Before her father has been released, 10-year-old Santana has already accepted the fact that he will be sent back to prison, saying that she won’t even cry when it happens the next time. Incarceration has ensured that an acceptance of its inevitability runs deep through the communities that it destroys, and that even moments of hope will always lie in its shadow. 

When the night of the dance finally arrives, with each father and daughter in crisp suits and pretty dresses, they are forced to embrace in the cold windowless hallways that administer  their absence. Isolation dominates their reunion because it is bounded by the denial of touch. A change to this reality must begin at the root — planting new seeds, because pruning the same old trees will still always yield the same fruit.

Daughters was released on August 14, 2024, and is currently streaming on Netflix. 

Released just eight months after his widely-acclaimed hit Challengers, it is difficult not to think of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer as the B-side to the sun-soaked, psychosexual melodrama. The through-lines between the films are obvious — a sweaty, tactile pursuit of sexual conquest — but while Challengers wove youthful dynamics of desire and purpose into a tangible search for victory, Queer instead sees the relationship between the two as different sides of the same coin, fleeting and futile but so blinding that they reduce the real world into abstracted obstacles in the way of some hypothetical solace that is always just around the corner. 

Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novella of the same name, is less concerned with the narrative of its source literature than with the trajectory of a body as it develops and deteriorates. Functioning almost as a series of loosely linked vignettes, the film follows William Lee (Daniel Craig), a drug-addled American expat who becomes slowly entranced by a mysterious younger man named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) in 1950s Mexico City made of plasticine and chipped paint. 

Relying more on feeling than form, Guadagnino’s textured sketch of the city is deliberately more cartoonish and contrived than his standard mise-en-scene, but never at the expense of its subjects. Instead, the city (constructed with a combination of stylized sets, painted backdrops, and animated miniatures) is a tacit indictment of Lee’s psyche — a world of souvenir postcards come to life, a Play-Doh playground that exists for the whims of his pleasures. The world contorts itself around Lee’s morphing weariness and desperation, keeping pace with his mutating, dreamlike headscape. He oscillates between propulsive and animated staccato prose and the unrequited yearning of man who’s consigned himself to loneliness — in turn, his world operates in a tactual register that allows for both an easy transition into surreal psychedelia while lending restrained, hollow compositions a gutting power by contrast. 

At first glance, Lee seems intently in control of his conditions, the architect of his own environment, but as his infatuation with Allerton grows, his grasp on his own physical circumstance loosens. Allerton refuses to both tie himself down to Lee or to be delineated by a “queer” label, and Lee is increasingly willing to push himself to new levels of degradation (or inversely transcendence) in hopes that Allerton will see him as a genuine companion rather than a sexual experiment. 

The result is a poetic whiplash between moments of hypnotizing, overwhelming lust and blindingly tragic loneliness, like stepping from darkness into nauseating sunlight. As Lee’s form is distorted by the intensity of his longing, it becomes increasingly unclear whether he is searching for overwhelming feeling or forever trying to flee from it. His body is deteriorating, and is Allerton the distraction from the inevitable abyss or is he the force that pushes Lee to look right into it? 

The genius of Queer lies in its ability to read the physical form, to understand a language of longing from a time when that homoerotic desire could only be legible to a trained eye. Guadagnino is intently attuned to the phrasing of the human form, never trying to universalize Burroughs’ marginality but instead granting him unconditional empathy through attentiveness to sensation. We do not understand Lee through the public dimensions of his deviance, but through the physical dimensions of his desire, and the expression of such a desire that can not abide formal social contracts, but is so agonizing that it can reshape the body and erode the soul. 

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

Queer was released on December 13, 2024 and is currently showing in U.S. theaters. 

No one is quite as incompatible with the biopic as Bob Dylan and his kaleidoscope of manmade personas. He is a form resistant to formula, always in motion and propelled to mutation by external instincts to distill his image. Dylan’s many lives are fundamentally at odds with a glossy, mimetic journey to stardom — which is why it is not only surprising that A Complete Unknown was made in the first place, but that it comes after Todd Haynes did the impossible and captured the many reflections of Dylan, in all his truths and fictions, in the film I’m Not There.

Haynes has an unmatched aptitude for capturing the mythos of American stardom, and his correctly chose to see Dylan through fable. I’m Not There creates a melodramatic series of distorted reflections of the mysteries of Dylan’s many iterations — in Haynes’ words, a “poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity.” Haynes forgoes formal logic to capture the essence of the myth while still never veiling the faults of the man. 

A Complete Unknown is also concerned with Dylan as an enigma — how could it not be — but it doesn’t choose to speak his poetry in return. Instead, James Mangold’s highly anticipated biopic suffers from a bad case of Wikipedia-itis, a blow-by-blow account of Bobby’s life from when he first lopes down MacDougal Street to when he introduces the electric sound to the Newport Folk Festival stage. 

My unwavering loyalty to I’m Not There and my short temper with the biopic blueprint put me at odds with A Complete Unknown, and I’ll now admit that my predisposed impatience was partially unwarranted. For one, Timothée Chalamet understands Dylan with an unexpected nuance: while the story starts well after he’s left Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Chalamet’s Bobby is still burdened by the gap between the act and the actual. Chalamet’s real-life stardom might inhibit his Dylan from ever feeling like a “complete unknown,” but it perfectly interpolates the tension between his animas and the paradox of adopting a persona for an audience, only for that audience to demand a drop of the mask.  

While Chalamet is consistently captivating, it is Mangold’s ineptitude that keeps his character from existing beyond a serviceable impression. His operating formula simply cannot tolerate it, and without the capacity to handle Dylan, we’re left with a fine-tuned look and sound of the singer but an absence of his phrasing and ethos. Mangold’s tired devices maintain the enigma, but he seems to use the elusiveness of Dylan’s character as a scapegoat for a conceptual deficiency. 

The routine narrative of A Complete Unknown might not be as prismatic as Dylan himself, but the most obvious gap in the film’s conception of the character is its nearsighted concern with aesthetics. The film is only interested in Dylan’s “sound” and not his circumstance, presenting a politically and culturally isolated version of the man. He’s just a directionless contrarian who spent his early years puttering around the Village with his back to the world, more reactive to the ornamental women who rotate through his bedroom than any broader cultural circumstances.

A Complete Unknown introduces all of the era-defining events that are essential to understanding the real-life Dylan through the TV in his bedroom, reducing these moments of unrest to ephemeral satellites with a peripheral relationship to Dylan’s music rather than a formative one. In the film, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the shadow of the Beat Generation have no real sway in Dylan’s prose or politics. Instead they come to him from the comfortable distance of that little plasma screen, like Kronkite’s announcement of Kennedy’s death; or they are bounced off of other people in proximity to Dylan, like his girlfriend Sylvie’s (Elle Fanning) volunteer work in the Civil Rights field; or they float past him like apparitions, with about as much tangibility as a ghost (an Allen Ginsberg analog passes behind him at a party, or a battered copy of On the Road sits on his desk. Both go unmentioned). Even Dylan’s famous performance at the March on Washington gets the same passive treatment — a throwaway mention, a universally recognized moment kept at an archival distance. 

Dylan’s classic song “Masters of War” gets the most substantial nod in the context of global politics, suggesting that it originated during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thankfully, the threat of nuclear annihilation only lasts long enough for Dylan to draw an audience for a night, before it becomes a vehicle for his first hookup with Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). It’s gone by the time the sun rises the next morning. 

This anecdote canonizes a rumored origin of the song, and speaks to the broader philosophy of the film; in Mangold’s (limited) imagination, social unrest just introduces new marketing demographics to Dylan and can’t possibly have a more nuanced relationship with his changing personas. In Howard Sounes’ biography Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, he writes that Dylan once said he penned the song “simply because he thought it would sell,” a sentiment that Sounes believes was voiced just to provoke Joan Baez and not because Dylan’s primary focus was meshing with commercial interests. 

But Mangold runs with this sentiment, framing Dylan’s stylistic choices and changes as purely reactionary or commercially motivated. His morphing public character is portrayed as a result of petty personal politics, like adopting an electric sound to adapt to the British invasion and ruffle the feathers of his manager or undermining Pete Seeger’s (Ed Norton Jr.) interest to the integrity of the folk market (Seeger and Woody Guthrie both feature heavily, but their left-wing politics are also omitted). The edge of Dylan’s work is completely sanded away; he’s not disrupting any paradigms unless it provides an opportunity to enact some pathetic personal slight against his contemporaries or his audience. 

The film shows Dylan criticizing others’ music for being commercial or vapid — he compares Joan Baez’s music to “an oil painting in the dentist’s office” — but does nothing to convince us that he lacks the same vacancy, other than his ability to recognize it in others or the countless reverse shots of listeners in awe of his prophetic talent. 

It is impossible to say that the real Dylan’s artistic trajectory was not commercially motivated in part, but it is insidious to suggest profit and pettiness were his sole motivations while scrubbing away his connection to radical political milieus. The Newport Folk Festival might have seen going electric as pandering to the mainstream, but Highway 61 Revisited was beloved by more than just the charts, including Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Kwame Ture. Not only does the film not consider Dylan’s music as being forged from a place of protest, it does not consider the unrest that it might have motivated, or at the very least affirmed. Disruption beyond aesthetics is completely absent from the whole process. 

We can debate the authenticity of Dylan’s ethos, but history can speak to its influence, and A Complete Unknown does not really care to consider either. Instead, the film seems interested in keeping Dylan true to its title: an absent articulation of the eternal pathetic-cool-guy, with politics that are ephemeral and aesthetics that are immortal. 

A Complete Unknown was released on December 25, 2024 and is currently showing in U.S. theaters. 

No one’s grief is exceptional, so why burden each other with it? Because pain is a constant that comfort can seem intangible without, and proximity to pain fosters proximity to others. In fact, pain is such an important constant that we have manufactured ways to translate it into a tourist experience, a luxurious parade of horrors marketed as a means of resolving the internal dispute between our gratitude and our grief. 

Cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) have grown apart since their childhood, which was defined by their relationship with their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who has recently passed away. David has a wife, a kid, and a well-paying job, but is inhibited by a variety of awkward anxieties, while Benji has never settled into nuclear conventions and is disarmingly comfortable with social confrontation. A Real Pain sees them reunited as they embark on a guided tour of Poland in their grandmother’s memory, tracing the history of Jewish diaspora, expulsion, and genocide across the country’s landscape. 

While David and Benji are foils to each other by nearly every metric, they are in the company of people on a spectrum of different Jewish archetypes — Marcia (Jennifer Grey), an affluent Brooklynite mother confronted existentially by having become a “lady who lunches”; Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), a retired couple who have consigned themselves to travel; and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawian), a Rwandan convert to Judaism whose relationship to genocide is lived rather than lineal. 

Through this collection of stereotypes and neuroses, A Real Pain directly questions the complicated ethics of becoming a spectator to one’s own trauma, voluntarily treading the same path that millions took to extermination while still always separated by a literal or metaphorical pane of museum glass. Benji is the only one who ever questions this dynamic, pointing out his disgust with their first-class voyage along the same train tracks that their ancestors traveled to their death, or calling out the tour guide for his imposition of anthropological monologuing at sites of mourning. 

David is subsumed by embarrassment during Benji’s outbursts, seeing his eccentric critiques and emotional vulnerability as an attempt to burden strangers with his own baggage. David understands pain as universal, but sees its ubiquity as grounds to process it internally in hopes of avoiding inconvenience to others. But Benji’s refusal to swallow his grievances or compartmentalize his pain allows him to use it as a currency for intimacy, sometimes destabilizing social constraints but always giving a voice to the unspoken tension that grows heavier by the day. 

Benji’s emotional honesty slowly transforms from endearing vulnerability to a tormented desperation to perform his pain as loudly as possible. In his efforts to undermine the tendencies of Holocaust tourism, he proves that he too cannot live in his own skin, though he’s a lot better at hiding it than David. By using his pain as a functional means of social transaction, he constantly keeps it at arms length, never willing to truly confront it along any internal axis. 

As A Real Pain considers David and Benji’s contrasting emotional compartmentalization, it also confronts the countless paradoxes that exist when bearing witness. The exhibition of a past genocide to mediate our internal disputes can so easily be manipulated to build consent to carry out another, and always existing within the shadow of trauma might inhibit our ability to recognize it at all. 

The visual grammar of A Real Pain is stiffly posed but aggressively candid, capturing its landscapes with a sobering neutrality that is jarringly disproportionate to the weight that each tableau holds. Through this asymmetry between the overwhelming presence of emotion and aesthetics that forcefully withhold it, cinematographer Michal Dymek allows each image the capacity to be intensely painful or immensely pedestrian. What is mourning to one is mundane to another — stones as a symbol of remembrance might become a tripping hazard, and the glistening lights of a concentration camp are eventually folded into the city skyline. 

These complexities of composition once again underline the paradoxes of processing grief. Our anxieties and agonies are mapped onto every part of us, sometimes in extraordinary ways, but mostly in menial ones, and it's hard work to truly process or even feel the weight of our past. But it’s work that has to be done, even if we don’t know what resolving it looks like, even if resolution is a real pain.

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

A Real Pain was released on November 1, 2024, and is currently showing in US theaters.

“Life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards.”

This is the mantra that underlines the entirety of Memoir of a Snail, a deceptively depressing stop-motion film that chronicles the misfortune of a woman throughout her childhood and young adult life. It’s a parade of despair that constantly eclipses itself, and hope only presents itself through reflection. The film declares that we might only be able to understand our experiences in retrospect, but the promise of future revelation is what will keep us going.

The clay takes on the minatory charm of Edward Gorey, brought to life to enact the never-ending misery that befalls Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook). After her mother dies during childbirth, she and her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are left to care for their paraplegic father, battling myriad threats from his alcoholism to school bullies. But when he dies in his sleep, they are forced into separate foster families — Grace is sent to a kind couple who often abandon her in favor of swinging, and Gilbert is subjected to the abuse of the matriarch of a fundamentalist family who operate a church and rural apple orchard. 

As Grace’s life becomes increasingly grim, she turns to hoarding snail-related items, spending all she can on her obsession and eventually resorting to theft. Her comfort slowly turns to entrapment, and she, much like a snail, is insulated and burdened by an ever-looming weight always over her shoulders. 

But while it seems like Grace is forever trapped within a snail’s spiral, the calamity of her story is never used to rationalize pessimism. Instead, Memoir of a Snail’s ethos is patient and sympathetic — the beauty may be invisible now, but the promise of its future presence is an incentive to keep going. There is a simple radiance to accepting a lack of clarity, exemplified by Pinky (Jacki Weaver), an eccentric woman who befriends Grace at the library and whose past includes playing ping pong with Fidel Castro and sex in a helicopter with John Denver. 

Pinky’s presence is what prevents the spiral from collapsing in on itself, a tangible expression of the triumph that persists alongside a lifetime of scars. The intensity of Memoir of a Snail’s cloudy and cluttered bleakness allows for a thorough enthusiasm in its a resolute march towards joy. The forward movement of time and emotion is uncompromising, and even if we can’t understand anything now, there’s beauty in knowing that there’s beauty ahead. 

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

Memoir of a Snail was released on October 25 and is currently showing in U.S. theaters.

It is probably the world’s greatest understatement to say the Catholic Church has a reputation that’s less than pristine. But for director Edward Berger, this reputation does not serve as fodder for a hyperbolic thriller. Rather, he undercuts the expectation for a sensational scandal, instead focusing his thriller on the petty jockeying for power amongst the clergy that takes precedent even during the Church’s most solemn moments. 

After the Pope dies, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), currently undergoing a crisis of faith, is tasked with organizing a papal conclave to elect a successor. The top contenders are Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a kind-hearted and humble American; Tedesco (Sergio Castellito), noted for his Italian identity; Tremblay (John Lithgow), who holds a sense of superiority over the other candidates; and Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a stalwart of conservative values who seeks to be the first Black pope. There is also the surprise addition of Benitez, a Mexican cardinal working in secret out of Kabul, whose arrival prompts confusion and suspicion amongst the rest of the clergy.  

Once the conclave is underway, the universal gravity of the decision gives way to pulpy whispers about the secrets that each candidate holds close. Each of the candidates has a skeleton in their closet, or daming documents to be swept under the rug — except for the benevolent liberal Bellini, who’s hesitancy about his own capabilities is exactly what prompts Lawrence’s adamance about his candidacy. 

Conclave abandons any high-minded or ecclesiastic tendencies to instead create a simple fable about maneuvers of power: those most deserving of authority have the moral clarity to not seize it by any means necessary, but this ambivalence might just make the space for the reinstatement of authoritarianism. It’s a film that’s moral standing might crumble if it wasn’t supported by an ensemble of rich performances, each embodying the simple didacticism of their respective roles while resisting the urge to reduce them to caricature. 

Conclave keeps itself at arm’s length from any genuine criticism of the church, and justifiably so — within a pulpy, populist melodrama, there’s an understandable apprehension to express any overt condemnation of the process or its relationship to secular elections. Instead, the film steeps the institution in the drama of cheap reality TV, using soapy gossip amongst the clergy to offset the rigid ritualism that paints its backdrop. The film is a papal Mean Girls, depending on the allure of its scandal to counteract its paper-thin theological or political scrutiny. 

Conclave does make an attempt to probe the purpose of the church, but all of its criticisms are superficial acknowledgments of the ridiculousness of the premise. Instead of being overt, Berger communicates the antiquities of the selection process through routine disruptions to the film’s ornate liminality. The unchanging nature of the ritual makes the film’s era indistinguishable from any other, and we become lost in its timelessness, only to be locked back into place by ephemeral signifiers of our present day — a desktop computer, the elevator’s automated voice, or a cardinal vaping during a break in the conclave. 

These moments of temporal whiplash are composed with a simple elegance, commensurate with the rest of the film’s polished visual grammar. While the clergy may be devolving into catty tête-à-têtes, Berger’s camera maintains a classical beauty. There is a constant, almost comical austerity to Conclave, mocking the ritualistic relics of the Church while its members squabble like schoolchildren. 

These simple touches poise Conclave for a greatness that it never quite achieves because of its continued commitment to a basic moral sermon. The film does not entirely forfeit its potential, but it sacrifices sincerity in the name of its bombshell narrative twists that only serve its liberal pabulum. A promising premise gets lost in overt allegory, but Conclave is a gripping romp nonetheless. 

OVERALL SCORE: 7/10

Conclave was released on October 25, 2024, and is currently showing in US theaters. 

Sean Baker has always used distance for the sake of intimacy. His brand of narrative vérité is characteristically non-judgmental — the camera as a wandering eye that lends its gaze to those not usually granted the power to dictate their own image, or even to exist within its line of sight. But this calculated distance is limited in what it can capture. Baker may be concerned with the material circumstances of America’s disenfranchised, but he never identifies an arbiter of these realities, lending him the ability to play as a political middle-man — a role that he loves.

But Anora is an exception. The premise is in tune with all of Baker’s classic tendencies — Ani (Mikey Madison), a sex worker from Brooklyn, elopes with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of a Russian oligarch, setting off his family and sparking a legal (and physical) brawl — but Baker discards his characteristic political pliability and identifies a tangible, structural villain. 

Initially, the tension lies between the newlyweds and Ivan’s absurdly wealthy family, who see the marriage as a vicious blow to their international optics. But once they send out a horde of henchman to talk sense into Ivan, the triangulation of the dynamic shifts, and the film takes a slow turn to show that Ani has far more in common with the other countless employees sent to do Ivan’s family’s dirty work than she ever will with Ivan himself. 

The scope of Anora shifts, turning from a roller-coaster ride of a singular circumstance into an exercise in cathartic class solidarity. The excess of Ivan’s life is exhilarating, but the lavishness tarnishes into something bland and bleak. The superfluity becomes dismal and noisy, no longer representative of a newfound freedom but rather a nauseating ability to exercise absolute power. 

Within this dreary opulence, the camera often stands at a distance, using low wide angles that ask for tentative permission to observe, undercutting any voyeuristic tendencies that are invited by its presence. This radical lack of judgment renders Anora as a vehicle for a great performance, and Mikey Madison certainly delivers, articulating her character as fiery and endlessly textured, never reducing her to naivete or delusion as she becomes further entangled in her whirlwind relationship with Ivan. 

But Madison’s stunning performance cannot fully distract from the fact that it sometimes feels like she’s fighting an uphill battle against the film’s desires to use her as a vehicle for a reflexive macro about our social sympathies. Baker’s characteristic lack of judgment occasionally deprioritizes her interiority and paints her as blankly representative by intentionally never pursuing curiosity about her character. 

Anora then begs a crucial question: is an anti-critical gaze enough? By closing off its main character to emphasize our lack of entitlement to her, is she then only defined by what she exists in proximity to? Is Baker’s distance polite or disinterested?

Anora’s circumvention of its main character mostly seems to serve its final scene, in which the false shallowness of her internal self suddenly gives way and we are presented with a gutting catharsis. But the distance the film maintains until this moment shows Baker’s lack of faith in his own ability to create emotion except when following an extended period of intentionally withholding it. Comprehensive and developed emotion should not be restrained simply for the sake of catharsis, and Baker’s instinct to do so leaves his titular character incomplete. 

This dilemma does not dissolve the rest of Anora’s power, but it does reveal an unfortunate shortcoming in Baker’s style — to him, political clarity and character depth are mutually exclusive. In order to delve into authentic emotion, Baker maintains political abstinence; but if he wants to consider something broader or structural, it comes at the expense of his characters being treated as little more than vessels in this exercise. This false dichotomy does not ruin Anora, but it inhabits the core of it, preventing the film from ascending to something greater.

OVERALL SCORE: 8/10

Anora was released on October 18 and is currently showing in US theaters.  

If you are trapped within a structure maintained by violence, to what extent are you forced to use that violence as currency in order to escape it? This is the question posed by Mehdi Fleifel’s first narrative feature, To a Land Unknown, which paints an honest portrait of a brutally transactional world. The film follows two Palestinian cousins, Reda (Aram Sabbah) and Chatila (Mahmood Bakri), refugees in Athens, who have resorted to petty theft in hopes to buy fake passports to reach Germany. 

As their circumstances as refugees grow increasingly demanding, the two must escalate the severity of their crimes in an attempt to attain the future that they dream of. Pickpocketing and petty theft turns elaborate and inward, as the two eventually target other refugees also seeking asylum, replicating the same exploitation they’ve been subjected to in order to escape it. 

To a Land Unknown is a deeply empathetic film, but this empathy is not predicated on a sentimental standard of moral purity that its characters must uphold. Drawing upon the syntax of Midnight Cowboy and The Kid, there is no deluded expectation that Reda and Chatila can only earn their humanity through a begrudging acceptance of their circumstances. Instead, To a Land Unknown affords them this empathy unconditionally, even when the two are disillusioned as consequence of their own moral degradation.

For much of the film, Reda and Chatila are able to compartmentalize their identity based on their actions. Their dignity exists on a different plane, untested by the morally questionable strategies they employ — if anything, these actions are only taken in order for their humanity to be more fully realized. Their status as subjugated excuses the moments when their survival hinges on the emulation of this subjugation. 

To a Land Unknown performs a careful balancing act; it does not compromise its empathy as its protagonists begin to question whether their morality has stayed intact, and simultaneously never articulates this unconditional empathy in the form of a plea. As the film occupies an increasingly ambiguous space, it does not devolve into generic questions about moral turpitude when forced into a position that, for once, requires them to perpetrate the cruelty. Instead, the film suggests the structure of this brutality as so effective that it can force its victims to also be its conductors, multiplying its efficiency by pitting its wounded against each other and nudging them with a false sense of hope. 

The naturalist approach of the film underlines this thesis, patiently capturing the protagonist’s movements as to never treat their bodies as specimens in a spector’s exercise in empathy with the oppressed. Critic Catherine Bray describes this technique in her review for Variety as a “strategy that helps keep the audience connected to the specifics of their story, rather than being overwhelmed by statistics or numbed by the sense of impotence that a panoramic view of the injustices faced by the likes of Chatila and Reda might inspire.” 

While intimate, the composition gives each of the actors the breathing room necessary so as not to frame their performances clinically, striking a balance in delineating their experience as both singular and structural. The patient metonymy of the film’s compositions focuses on simple movements of being, using the isolated gestures of the body to stand in for the universal totality of their experience. 

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

To a Land Unknown was first released on May 22, 2024 at Cannes Film Festival and is awaiting a wide release. 

In Rumors, Guy Maddin asks perhaps the least contested question of all time: what if our global leaders were bumbling, disorganized narcissists who wander aimlessly through nebulous crises that they don’t have the skills, let alone the interest, to solve? It’s a malleable sentiment that can be made to fit almost any political agenda, especially when its characters take no firm political stances of their own — at least, none that pertain to any tangible material reality. 

This kind of apathetic, nonpartisan pandering is hardly ever compelling, but somehow Maddin manages to make the film revelatory by devolving into a stale tedium in service to his thesis. After Joker: Folie a Deux, it’s refreshing to see a film that knows it's wasting your time but does so as a means to an end.

Opening with the members of the G7 summit posing for a photo op with a decomposing corpse, Rumors hits the ground running with its satirical jabs. Its first act watches the politicians meander through the motions of addressing an unnamed global issue, treating the crisis as a piece of menial busy-work. The leaders are all abstracted caricatures of their real-world counterparts: there’s a controversy-ridden dreamboat of a Canadian prime minister (Roy Dupuis), a fading American president with (weirdly) an unmistakable British accent (Charles Dance), and Cate Blanchett even tries her hand at a cardboard Angela Merkle with a touch of Lady Di. But as the sun sets, a soapy, feverish fog rolls through the meadow they’ve been leisurely strolling through, and the leaders can’t seem to find their way back to civilization. 

The rest of the film unfolds at a dream-like, meandering pace. Sporadic conflicts never really manifest themselves as tangible threats: perhaps because Rumors doesn’t care for its characters enough to let us be troubled by their defeat, but mostly because each problem is either off-the-deep-end absurd or so completely dull that only the most inept protagonists would ever struggle to solve it. The leaders are oddly unfazed by a giant, pulsating human brain in the middle of the woods, but crossing a river poses a challenge because they only know how to swim backwards. They brush off a horde of masturbating, exploding zombies, but can’t recognize gibberish incantations as simply the Swedish language.

It’s in these odd, episodic fever dreams that Rumors really finds its footing, but despite its absurd wit, the film struggles to say anything particularly abrasive. It spends most of its runtime wandering through a weird satirical purgatory, with its neon psychedelia rendered as strangely pedestrian when played against its generic satirical digs. 

It’s strange, then, how this cartoonish and apocalyptic nightmare feels somewhat sedate. Every distorted conflict never shocks and the wooden emotions of the film's all-star ensemble render the film oddly unprovocative. Despite the increasing absurdity, Rumors shows no real movement. There’s simply nothing to be said. No elaboration on its own points, no conclusions to its own arguments, and no punchlines to its own jokes — just aimless, circular wandering as the world decays. Which perhaps is the point.

OVERALL SCORE: 6/10

Rumors was released on October 18, 2024, and is currently showing in US theaters.

Until recently, I operated under the belief that no film is a waste of time. The mileage of a movie’s influence certainly varies, but at the very least, any viewing experience will enhance your understanding of the nuances of your taste. Joker: Folie à Deux fundamentally challenged this philosophy — a pathetic exercise in retribution, articulated by director Todd Phillips as a stitled apology for accidentally being taken way too seriously in a medium for which he has no talent.

Joker (2019) was never a film poised for a sequel. While Phillips presented a semi-competent exploration of an isolated man’s growing resentment, the film never deeply interrogated any material realities beyond scolding. Despite its frictionless political stakes, Joker was adeptly acted and constructed, succeeding mostly because it was costumed in the ideas and aesthetics of much better films (namely Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, which both derive part of their power by making socially and politically textured judgements). 

The real defining characteristic of Joker was its animated cultural reaction and the intense fear with which the film was received. Before its release, it was promoted as a dangerous rallying cry that would radicalize a generation of isolated young men, when in reality it was merely a fairly timid and directionless film that condemns insurrection just as much as it condemns material conditions that motivate it.

There’s probably no way to fold an arthouse-epigone-turned-national-security-threat-fluke back into a successful franchise, but when you’re handed a blank check for a sequel, you might as well try. But Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t interested in reiterating any of the qualities that lent its predecessor success. Instead, the film launches itself into a two-hour humiliation ritual — an agonizing and contemptuous procession, knowingly unjustified in its existence but determined to take us all down with it. 

In Joker: Folie à Deux, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) isn’t a vigilante symbol or a heroic martyr whose incarceration galvanizes the masses. He’s a pathetic outcast, humiliated and haunted by his accidental fame, easily manipulated by anyone who affirms his fantasy of martyrdom, like Lee (Lady Gaga). Now, he’s on trial for the events of the first film, articulating his defense around the conceit of his dual identity as both Joker and Arthur. 

Phillips treats his main character with utter contempt and a complete lack of sympathy, reinventing his symbolic power to be completely inseparable from humiliated delusion. Joker: Folie à Deux clearly has no patience for idolatry of its eponymous character, using the testimony from the witness stand as a means of regurgitating the events of his origin story. But these objective accounts are antipathetic and revisionist — his story told through another’s eyes is pitiful, cruel, uninspiring and mundane. 

As Joker: Folie à Deux works overtime to eradicate any of the glamor of its predecessor, it simultaneously ensures that its own plot is fractured beyond the point of reclamation. The complete lack of commitment to any tonal or narrative consistency renders it punishment by proxy for the audience, not a condemnation of Arthur but rather a punitive measure towards anyone who ever bothered to take him seriously. 

As the bait-and-switch courtroom gimmick as a collective punishment falls on its face, Joker: Folie à Deux doesn’t even care to attempt to construct an interesting procedural. Any time the trial conceit becomes overly demanding, Arthur launches into a guerilla musical number, a mocking affront towards anyone who bothers to invest themselves into his story. He’s not even a comedian anymore, just a lifeless vaudevillian so deeply entrenched in his own power trip that the spectacle becomes tedious. 

As the audience sinks lower and lower in their seats, and the film continues its procession of monotony, Arthur’s first iteration in Joker grows more and more distant, replaced instead by an insufferable and pathetic nuisance. He doesn’t go out with a bang, or even fade away — he simply crafts his own irrelevance through self-sabotage. Phillips utterly decimates the character, turning cult-like followers into faceless ghosts who float by his windows, shattering all of his symbolic power until even his perverse maxim — “that’s entertainment!” — can never ring true. It’s just a waste of time, and that’s all, folks. 

OVERALL SCORE: 3/10

Joker: Folie à Deux was released on October 4, 2024 and is currently showing in US theaters. 

In March, I wrote about our current hostility towards curiosity and how we are socialized to only engage with art that is insular and unchallenging, art that accepts cultural boundaries and reaffirms the parameters of our expectations. American cinema is so rife with anti-intellectualism that we’ve labeled those who bother to watch, let alone enjoy, films that dare to indulge in (and expand) their medium as pretentious snobs. 

My experience of watching Megalopolis plainly affirmed how ubiquitous this hostility is. A packed theater erupted and jeered at every other line, performing their ironic enjoyment or their fundamental disgust by throwing a tantrum in response to even the least provocative moments. The audience left no space for contemplation or sympathy for the film — just verbal, joking resentment. 

It’s hard to meet Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Megalopolis in the middle. There’s too much to grasp onto, though somehow not enough, and it only maintains its balance by the momentum of Coppola’s commitment. His pure enthusiasm for the project, funded entirely by his own wine-making fortune, is translated into an overwhelming amalgamation of countless influences, confusing its own words through its intense aesthetic overlap. 

Nothing about Megalopolis is cohesive or smooth — its central figure, scientific mogul Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) resolves nearly every immediate conflict presented to him in his epic dispute over the utopian future of New Rome with Mayor Franklin Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), never to be bothered by them again. But there is a compelling consistency in its pure ambitiousness that prevents it from collapsing, rendering it as less of a narrative and more of a variety show with a broad moral undercurrent. 

But just when you feel as though you can’t see past the film’s mess and chaos, Coppola sculpts moments of singular beauty, daunting scale, or simple humor, personal touches within an otherwise feverish and fable-like blur. Even in his preachy, hybristic, senseless utopia, one can find something to believe in, a reason not to doubt the messiness of his dreamy universe. 

It is in these moments where Coppola’s thesis shines. In all of its hypothesizing about a utopia, Megalopolis mobilizes the audience not to enshrine its image of the future but instead to fight for a future of their own. Coppola doesn’t care if we accept his vision, but he forces us to reckon with the full potential of the medium by presenting a collision of composite ideas that push the boundaries of cinema forward. 

In all its pandemonium and chaos, the question that Megalopolis asks us is quite simple — is it possible to lose faith in our own future? By working outside the restrictions of studio demands, Coppola asks us why we’d even bother to continue if we believe that we’ve exhausted our ability to imagine and innovate. The flashiness of his utopia demonstrates the freedom inherent in the ability to work outside risk-averse and profit-centered parameters, to take chances on creative potential. Megalopolis is far from the future that it longs for, but by blurring every single line it draws, it forces us to reckon with something beyond, or at least to consider our resentment to the curiosity that it prompts. 

OVERALL SCORE: 6/10

Megalopolis was released on September 27, 2024, and is currently showing in US theaters. 

For years, examinations of female self-perception through film have led audiences in circles. We got the farcical monologuing of Barbie, the malleable self-actualization metaphor of Poor Things, the preachy, controversial antics of Don’t Worry Darling, and the list goes on. While these films reach varying degrees of success in their craft and commentary, all of them exist within the well-formed boundaries of conversation of the female body — that the guidelines by which women must operate in society are infantilizing while simultaneously entirely unattainable, propagating a cesspool for absolute destructive physical and moral standards. 

The Substance not only hates these standards, but hates everything the film industry has say about them. To what extent has our “reclamation” of these harmful criteria simply positioned us as more active participants in the culture that subjugates us? If all that has changed are the parameters of the kind of female body that is commodifiable, then the only shift has been the optics of consumer-product relationships, and what real change does that shift provide? 

Coralie Fargeat’s new horror film addresses these questions with a resentful lack of subtlety, articulating the need for a revolutionary new framework through a rudimentary, contemptuous, and messy demand for change. When aging TV aerobics star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is fired to be replaced by a younger up-and-comer, she decides to accept a cryptic proposal to try “the Substance,” a miracle drug that creates an “other self” — a younger, more desirable physical figure for you to live within. The only catch is that one must respect the balance, alternating between the original body and the new form every seven days without exception. 

Desperate to escape to a younger self that she has grown to both worship and resent, Elisabeth uses her “other self,” Sue (Margaret Qualley), to become the replacement host of her now-revitalized televised aerobics class. But although Sue and Elisabeth live lives of contrast, the Substance reminds them “REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE”;  one consciousness is split between two bodies and every decision made by one body is also attributable to the other. 

The Substance’s cameras feel particularly leering, scrutinizing bodies with an extremely close gaze and pairing this surveillance with a viscerally exaggerated soundscape. These techniques demand the viewer feel not only the bodies on screen, but their own and to be acutely aware of each bone, each hair, each muscle. From the onset, the audience is forced to experience every shift in their seat, every swallow, and every blink as an affirmation of what they see on screen.

This intensely tactile mise-en-scene makes The Substance just as textural as it is visual, progressively rendering all of its imagery as a stimuli for nausea, from its plasticine commercial aesthetics to its abundance of pure disgustingness. The film is only concerned with the surface, in every sense of the word — the camera frames Elisabeth’s body exactly in accordance to the increasing duality of her self-perception, accentuating her newfound fame and increasing obsolescence until she is pulled to a breaking point. 

The aesthetic and ideological shallowness of The Substance is far from accidental; its permanent residence in hyperbole and logical idiosyncrasies accentuate just how low the bar is when it comes to commentary on female beauty standards. With a lethal intensity, The Substance mimics the dated, vague aesthetics often found in these types of commentaries, before driving them into the ground and rendering them useless.   

Before devolving into utter absurdity and revulsion, The Substance allows for a few moments of isolated yet gutting despair, as Elisabeth tries and fails to make peace with her body as it is without resenting the face she sees in the mirror. While these moments are devastating, they start to feel like asymmetries or defects in the film’s plastic aesthetic. Fargeat forces us to experience the most human moments as out-of-place and destabilizing, because she has programmed the audience to accept a shallowness that presents interiority as a sin against its engineered, glossy surface.

By its conclusion, The Substance establishes its utter contempt for the considered cursory metaphors that monopolize the cinema of female empowerment. The film does not seek to add to the conversation, reclaim the genre, or even find a place within it; it wants to decimate our entire vocabulary on the subject. Embodying a relentless stupidity in its assault on polite conversation, the film appropriates the imagery of acclaimed projects on female empowerment and exhausts them of their meaning so we are forced to reconsider the terms by which we demand change. An entire symphony blaring one note until the keys break and the strings are forever out of tune. 

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

The Substance was released on September 20, 2024, and is currently showing in US theaters.

Disinterest in the political status quo, specifically the mechanisms that regulate the system, is a developed political instinct itself: apoliticism is a component of contemporary politics. In Alex Garland’s Civil War, political agnosticism is not predicated on indifference — rather, it is played as if it is noble, feigning superiority by rising above divisiveness and partisanship. The film creates a post-January 6 imagination of an apocalyptic, divided America, but refuses to flesh out the political or social context that fractured the country. The film justifies its barren politics by using them as a vessel to explore objective journalism, abandoning any explicit political or social stance in search of the truth.  

Civil War follows a team of reporters and photographers making their way to Washington D.C. in hopes to interview the president (Nick Offerman), after “The Western Forces,” a well-organized army whose history and purpose are not fully described, are in the process of succeeding and the country is embroiled in civil war. Our perspective on the journey to the capital is framed by the experience of two photojournalists — an experienced war photographer, Lee (Kirsten Dunst), and an ambitious newcomer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). 

By using photojournalism as a tidy (and convenient) means of visualizing a story, Civil War is poised to explore the impossible obligation of neutrality and the extent to which maintaining journalistic integrity is a useless and paradoxical exercise when reporting is treated as a product. But Garland does not consider these questions for long, instead using journalism mainly as a mechanism for abstaining, a way of forgoing any ideological commitment with the guise of integrity. The film manipulates any engaging conversation on the ethics and exploitation of capturing an image to posture timid politics about the violence humans are capable of.

Civil War comes close to developing a thesis at times, mostly due to all-around stellar performances that deepen the otherwise vapid narrative. Dunst and Spaeny both effortlessly capture how the search for “the shot” creates a sensationalized fantasy, making it increasingly difficult to frame the situation without fetishizing the subject. But rather than giving both actors breathing room to interpolate these realizations, Garland forces heavy handed devices into what should be patient moments. Jessie, naive and young, shoots on black and white film, while Lee, experienced and jaded, captures her images in color — catch the metaphor?

Civil War is closest to being productive when it considers the violence inherent in the shot — how different is it from a gunshot when it's immediately weaponized to exacerbate American fears? — but the film loses all its momentum because it is ultimately only interested in being a thought experiment, a hypothetical about an apocalyptic future America.

But all of Alex Garland’s images are not hypothetical — burning cities, bombings, and mass graves are facts of everyday life, specifically for Palestinians in Gaza  — and many of those who document them are not professionals who place themselves in these environments. Palestinians are forced to be the documentarians of their own genocide, a circumstance which Garland does not recognize in his fantastical apocalypse. Images can be weaponized to justify intense violence, but they also allow for a reclamation of one’s story. Garland may have succeeded if he had instead focused on the immense power of being able to dictate an image, rather than forming a half-baked meditation on the tangibility of objectivity. 

Promising ideas are simply pawns in Garland’s pretentious moral exercise that declares that complete noncommittal to any relevant ideology is a noble artistic endeavor. By displaying effect after effect while never condemning or even identifying a cause, Civil War implies that conflict reporting is blind to politics, a simple observation of facts with incredible distance to morals and ideology. 

OVERALL SCORE: 5/10

Civil War was released on April 12, 2024, and is currently streaming on Max.

Following the critical and commercial success of last year’s Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness is an abrupt return to form, reverting to the simplicity of his original unorthodoxy. Lanthimos has always played with the human form, but while Poor Things and The Favourite did so within a lavish tableau, Kinds of Kindness reduces itself to the austerity of sterile modern structures. This return to simplicity elevates Lanthimos’s signature meanness, rendering his examination of the corrosion of the body all the more palpable.

Kinds of Kindness is structured as a triptych, with each narrative exploring the extent to which love is control — how our dedication to others guides us towards self-degradation. With a recurring cast appearing in different roles, the film allows for an array of familiar Lanthimos collaborators to flex their chops in a variety of complementary characters. The brevity of each story is key to their potency, as the shortened runtime forces the narrative to constrain itself, while the audience must accept that they will be completely alienated and receive no thorough explanation or satisfaction. 

Without the comfort of a feature runtime, Lanthimos warps reality without allowing time for deliberation. Inside of the film’s stripped down milieu, his imagination of the world strikes a balance that blends the familiar and the aberrated — recognizable emotions motivate entirely alien behaviors. It’s the world as we know it, governed by absurdist laws. 

Though the imagery of Kinds of Kindness is unlike Lanthimos’s recent ventures, his techniques stay fairly constant. His liberal use of the wide angle is familiarly claustrophobic — the expanse of the angle pinches the corners of the frame, and as the film grows increasingly unsettling, your eyes instinctively dart to the edges of the screen, only to see them shrinking away and folding into each other as the subject occupies the center. 

In contrast to the wide angle, the camera often frames bodies at intensely close range, forcibly omitting faces and heads, fracturing the form into individual parts and framing them through a utilitarian lens. Rather than exploring the limits of the body for social aim, as in Lanthimos’s recent films, Kinds of Kindness takes a carnal, functional approach to the destruction of the form. In this film, bodies are captured and treated as meat, physical vessels for the perversions of desire. 

What makes Kinds of Kindness particularly propulsive (when contrasted to Lanthimos’s previous work, with the exception of The Favourite) is its focus not only the destructive desire for admiration, but what manifests after that destruction. Does the abasement allow for love to develop in a richer, truer form? Does it result in a hostile emptiness, or a gateway for further cruelty to oneself and others? 

As the film’s animalistic hostility increases with each narrative, the care that motivates such cruelty becomes increasingly apparent. Displeasure pushed to its limits makes way for care coming from a much more thoughtful place, and though it may manifest itself in vile actions, the intentions are pure albeit blinding. Kinds of Kindness reveals itself as not only Lanthimos’s most reactive, but his most loving — his signature meanness comes from a deep concern for the human form, artistic and physical, and a genuine appreciation for those who care enough in return to withstand it. 

OVERALL RATING: 9/10

Kinds of Kindness was released on June 21, 2024, and is currently streaming on Hulu.

This review contains spoilers. 

Since his run of critically acclaimed hits nearly 25 years ago, director M. Night Shyamalan been consistently categorized as a maker of dumb-but-fun cinema — great for a good time, but lacking the depth to hold up to serious critical scrutiny. The prevailing attitude is that Shymalan’s work is entertainment for its own sake, which can be enjoyed only when turn your brain off and forcefully disregard any critical consideration. 

But while Shyamalan’s work might be reduced to the class of pure entertainment, it is far from anti-intelligent. Since the release of Old three years ago, he has been operating with an acute awareness of his position within the cultural conversation and a naked transparency about his relationship to the medium. While his last film Knock at the Cabin turned inward to grapple with the restricting expectations created by a consistent directorial canon, Trap shifts its focus to dissect the mythos of the villain. 

At first glance, Trap seems to follow a fairly basic formula; a cat-and-mouse thriller through which tension is built by its claustrophobic single-location premise. A manhunt at a concert involving a daughter trying to escape the crowd into the spotlight, and a father desperately trying to retreat into the masses to evade an ever-watching eye. Despite its endless movement, Shyamalan’s expertise in blocking keeps the audience on course, preventing the narrative from devolving into a trite cycle of creating, then thwarting, danger. 

Shyamalan conducts his entire film as an act of sleight-of-hand — a single fluid motion, openly artificial but enthralling regardless. The gimmick might seem like a failed attempt at naturalism, but it is an intentional venture into the uncanny, exploring the terror of a character’s failed attempt to juggle conflicting lives. Beyond exploring the well-tread territory of a serial killer’s compartmentalization of identity, Trap shows us the terrifying paranoia of its collapse.

In capturing the disintegration of distinct personas, Shyamalan leans fully into the mythos of a killer, not relying on the guise of pseudoscience and exploring a specter rather than a specimen. Shyamalan’s magic act is in full effect, never feigning reality while always maintaining sincerity. His imagination of a killer is almost supernatural — an impossible construction of two separate lives, carefully orchestrated to never meet despite operating within the same body.

As Shyamalan explores this interior relationship, he constantly alters the power dynamics of each scene — who is commandeering the space and what simple sleight-of-hand reshapes the tension to trap another character. Shyamalan builds a balancing act of a thousand ever-changing boxes, collapsing and twisting them to the point where they barely seem to operate within reality.

Because the film is intentionally irrational and absurd, examining the credibility of Trap’s logic is a pointless exercise, for it is far more concerned with its relationships than its reason. It is a work of misdirection, using the spectacle of illusion to explore the irrationality of love and the versions of ourselves we create to protect those we care about from seeing the whole truth. While Trap sacrifices logic and continuity for the sake of unabashed theatrics, it never sacrifices earnestness, resulting in a thriller so simple yet so satisfying you cannot even be bothered to peek behind the curtain. 

Trap was released on August 2, 2024 and is currently showing in US theaters.