Mentions | The Oscars 2025
Dune: Part Two |
BEST PICTURE
Denis Villeneuve’s second Dune installment, set in the year 10,191, entertains on a planetary scale. But neither dizzying shots of astronautical soldiers nor colossal worms can save this adaptation from its failures on the level of human relation. Absent from Villenueve’s vision is any sense of what the imperial armies are warring over: profit. Gone is CHOAM, the Emperor-controlled corporation that owns the spice mined from the desert planet, as well as the Spacing Guild, whose agents jealously guard the secrets of interstellar transport. Instead, we get Timothée Chalamet’s Paul and Zendaya’s Chani, speaking in regular-ass Gen-Z American English and loving each other unconvincingly. Paulothée (he never sheds himself) wins the trust of the desert-dwelling Fremen — who feel like they were written by people who pronounce “Arab” with a long first syllable — by way of pure sincerity. Here is a Dune hardly distinguishable from the IP-laden Marvelverse; a story about the machinations of empire stripped of the expanded social possibility that good sci-fi promises, and transformed into yet another nuclear cry for Daddy. At least Lynch’s Dune was weird.
S.C.
A Complete Unknown |
BEST PICTURE
How many movies can one singer inspire, before the public gets bored? In the case of Bob Dylan, the answer is already well past the “Fourth Time Around.” Less formally ambitious than Todd Haynes’s 2007 I’m Not There, more deadpan than Martin Scorsese’s 2019 Rolling Thunder Revue, less oblique in its portrayal of the Greenwich Village folk scene than the Coen brothers’ 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis (a film supposedly based on the life of Dave Van Ronk, but whose dramatic ironies and interest stem almost entirely from our knowledge that, just offscreen, Dylan is about to completely change the game), and a whole lot easier to watch than the allegorical Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid or the unbearable Renaldo and Clara, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown sets out to answer a question no one had ever thought to ask: Is Timothée Chalamet too pretty to play Dylan? Chalamet’s (or Mangold’s) decision to go for an impersonation rather than a performance seems both odd and inevitable. But if the film lacks the weird bravura of Rolling Thunder’s camp fabulations and sly shuffling of the historical deck, it has the power of all great quest stories — and some lovely singing. Edward Norton is the perfect Pete Seeger. As for Dylan, his ruthless manipulation of his own image, and determination not to be a pawn in anyone else’s game, was already amply documented in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dont Look Back. But if A Complete Unknown isn’t the best Dylan movie I’ve ever seen — that would be the Pennebaker — I wouldn’t say it wasted my precious time either. Still, I’ll probably pass on the soundtrack and stick with the originals.
D.G.
Queer |
SNUB
Of Luca Guadagnino’s two films from 2024, his adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s short novel is the mawkish sibling: softer and more sincere than Challengers, less its own film than a paean to filmmakers past. But there are memorable moments in this love story about two expats: a cheeky “Come as You Are” needle drop; the lovers’ sweat-stained outfits, curated by Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson; Jason Schwartzman in a baffling fat suit. Guadagnino has wanted to adapt Queer since he was seventeen. For better and worse, you can tell.
A.G.
Anora |
BEST PICTURE
This banged-up Cinderella story is the latest Sean Baker movie to treat sex work and its dimly lit rooms as metonyms for the hustle required to survive in America. Baker takes a Safdie-ish turn to Brighton Beach, where his titular Uzbek American stripper lives next to the Q train until Vanya, a bong ripping oligarch’s son, proposes they marry. The bulk of Anora is one long chase scene spent with a motley crew of post-Soviet exiles — the delightful Armenian priest Toros and the kindly gopnik Igor — scrambling to locate Vanya, whose parents are dead set on rescuing him from his NYU international frat lifestyle. But in 2024, wouldn’t a lightly fictionalized Abramovich be better suited to Central Park Tower than Mill Basin? Mikey Madison’s accent is more Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street than Tashkent Supermarket, a nails-on-chalkboard experience for any Russophone New Yorker. For a movie whose breakout star has been hailed as the “Russian Ryan Gosling,” one would hope Baker could get the diaspora right. But no New York Russian would ever gaze out at Floyd Bennett Field and say, “nice view.”
S.S.
I’m Still Here |
BEST PICTURE
It is both a compliment and an insult to say that Walter Salles’s new film, about the 1971 disappearance of dissident Brazilian politician Rubens Paiva and his wife Eunice’s decades-long quest for justice, feels like a classic Hollywood activist drama. Eunice, played by Fernanda Torres in the best performance of the year, is a worthy successor to Erin Brockovich and Karen Silkwood, heroines of similarly well-acted, well-crafted, and politically modest biographical thrillers. Apart from one allegation of communism, duly rebutted, and a brief mention of Eunice’s later work on behalf of indigenous rights, I’m Still Here prefers not to dwell on the substantive ideological commitments of either the Paivas or their opponents in the Brazilian ruling class. At least Salles and his immense directorial talents are on the right side. How many other billionaire banking-fortune heirs can say that?
E.B.
Babygirl |
SNUB
Nicole Kidman, the CEO of a company that makes horrifying warehouse robots, has never had an orgasm with her husband. Enter: hunky Harris Dickinson, who opens her up to the erotic world of chugging milk and fetching hard candies on all fours. Of all the improbabilities in this intermittently earnest plea for sexual acceptance, the most far-fetched is that Kidman’s husband, an avant-garde European stage director, is shocked at the very notion of his wife’s BDSM proclivities. Clearly, the filmmakers haven’t spent much time in the theater.
B.L.
The Girl with the Needle |
INTERNATIONAL FEATURE
All the predictions that reproductive rights would dominate November’s presidential election might have more relevance, in the end, to the Academy’s ballots. Case in point: this riveting, gorgeous, anti-natalist historical gothic that somehow secured a nomination for Best International Feature Film. Magnus von Horn’s post-World War I Copenhagen teems with war-mangled bodies, industrial pollution, class strife, and endless suffering heaped upon women’s flesh, all of which feels less past than prescient. In another prophecy of the contemporary, kindness is a commodity rarer than narcotics, though two third-act gestures leave open the possibility of empathy in even the gloomiest times. It would be unwise to prognosticate an Oscar win, given the dark tenor and ambiguous morals of this brutal gem. But I can safely put it in my top two baby-killing movies of 2024.
J.S.-G.
Gladiator II |
COSTUME DESIGN
It was a rainy day in London, and with nothing to do, I walked forty minutes to the nearest theater to see Gladiator II on opening weekend. The only available ticket, according to the digital self-service screen I was tapping on, had a wheelchair icon. I found an employee and asked if I could buy that seat; the theater staff said I’d have to wait until the movie started to be sure no one else needed it, skipping the trailers. I killed some time at a nearby pub and returned to purchase the ticket. I settled in with popcorn and a Diet Coke just as the title sequence ended. Then, a woman tapped my shoulder, claiming the spot. It turned out I had bought the wheelchair space, which had no seat, and that I was actually sitting in her adjacent seat. Embarrassed, I apologized and left. I saw it one week later at Cobble Hill Cinemas. Worth the wait!
K.R.
Nickel Boys |
BEST PICTURE
RaMell Ross’s first dramatic feature tells the story of Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, two black teenagers at an oppressive Jim Crow era reform school, in something of a novel format. Shot mostly in first-person POV, the film combines scenes from the boys’ school days with flashes forward. An adult Curtis, now the owner of his own moving company, grapples with his traumatic past as unmarked graves of murdered students are found around the campus. A late-breaking twist injects some uncertainty about what we’ve seen, and whose eyes we’ve seen it from. But the story’s nauseating sense of horror and grief emerges with crystal clarity despite, or because of, Ross’s experimental style — as when the protagonist moves an out-of-use bedframe from the home of a recent widower, who then asks: “But where will we rest?” That said, I did look up the plot synopsis on Wikipedia immediately after leaving the theater.
S.B.
Nosferatu |
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Every third shot in Robert Eggers’s gothic-to-a-fault remake seems to land on either a comically evil heptagram or a close-up of Lily-Rose Depp vomiting blood. With the worst accent since Nicole Kidman’s performance in The Northman, Bill Skarsgård — part hussar, part Pepé Le Pew — threatens a fictional German village with a boatful of rats. Nicholas Hoult, Depp’s cuckolded husband, fends him off with all the mettle of a desk clerk. Eggers’s message, that suppressed female libido constitutes an existential threat on par with the Black Death, is writ large enough to be read from space.
E.V.
Emilia Peréz |
BEST PICTURE
Why are movie-musicals so challenging to pull off? Director Jacques Audiard’s melodrama — which follows a Mexican cartel boss who enlists a distressed lawyer to help her disappear from her wife and children so she can medically transition — provides an array of answers, from an ugly abundance of on-screen tears to novelty-dish-towel-worthy lyrics. (“Changing society changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society.”) The movie’s color-grading changes as its characters traverse the globe, bringing to mind a series of Instagram filters (“Paris,” “Oslo,” “Lagos”). The greatest threat to its Oscar chances, though, may be the recently unearthed trove of racist tweets from lead actress Karla Sofia Gascón. Word has it, Gascón still plans to attend the ceremony. If nothing else, that should make the Oscars more intriguing than this movie.
C.I.
Challengers |
SNUB
Watching any movie from the front row often feels like walking underneath the giant Calvin Klein billboard on Houston Street. This is especially true for the sporty, shirtless, chiseled Challengers; in the packed theater, I saw all the actors as giga-chads, and my head whipped back and forth like that of a real-life tennis spectator. Luca Guadagnino’s ménage à trois was fun and truly stylish, but it’s newly notable for being completely snubbed at the Oscars. Not even Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, whose score brought the movie to Berghain, got a nod. This is most likely the fault of a long-delayed release and a milquetoast press tour. But my preferred explanation is that the movie suffered from its own trafficking in highly recognizable icons. A bisexual love triangle; Zendaya; tennis; Loewe? All middlebrow meme bait, which swallowed rather than enhanced the movie’s subtleties and strangeness. (At a certain point last summer, you could post any photo of three people and caption it “Challengers.”) The Calvin Klein billboard — and, for that matter, Wicked — has no such problems. It knows that if you’re going to be iconic, you’d better be substanceless and huge.
E.S.B.
Wicked |
BEST PICTURE
According to millions of TikTok videos, we all have an inner child within us who needs healing — an idea popularized in 1990 by self-help wizard John Bradshaw and elaborated by psychologists like Lucia Capacchione, whose book on the subject included prompts for drawing with crayons. Today’s online inner-child healers, who dole out “prescriptions” for playing with toys, have made the concept so ubiquitous that it has traveled all the way over the rainbow to Oz. In an ill-placed interlude that weakens the natural crescendo of “Defying Gravity,” Elphaba sees her younger self reflected in a CGI’d building’s exterior as she plummets towards the ground. Only by reaching out does she regain the strength to fly—a confusing message for anyone familiar with the very adult disillusionment she will undergo in November’s Part Two. Unfortunately, my inner child is a theater nerd, so I wept.
L.W.F.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État |
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
In this panoptic account of the CIA’s 1961 plot to murder democratically elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, viewers get an unusually clear window into the quotidian activities of Western intelligence operations as they kill and maim to preserve the capitalist world order. Desperate for uranium from the mining hub of Katanga, wary of newly independent African nations’ potentially powerful U.N. voting bloc, and terrified by Khrushchev’s call for “death to colonial slavery,” the U.S., the U.K., and Belgium reran the oldest gambit: divide and conquer. Some of the details might seem too on the nose, if the film didn’t draw so deeply on archival material. High-ranking intelligence officers reminisce candidly, with lines like: “He said, ‘I have been instructed to provide you with some poisons.’”
N.M.-R.
The Brutalist |
BEST PICTURE
In the epilogue to Brady Corbet’s historical melodrama, the niece of Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth introduces her uncle’s Biennale retrospective by explaining his artistic signature: a “hard core of beauty” expressed within stark, cavernous structures. Entombed in the concrete tower of a pastoral Pennsylvania community center — whose fitful construction drives the film’s plot — is a marble altar sparkling with reflected skylight. It is an effect that justifies the two decades, one lawsuit, and millions of dollars required for the center’s creation. Corbet takes three hours to portray Tóth’s transformation from a diffident émigré to an American visionary, a man who survives rape, addiction, and discrimination and emerges a hardened, indomitable maestro. Tóth then cements his legacy by building angular churches and synagogues for Connecticut aesthetes.
B.D.
Conclave |
BEST PICTURE
The words sede vacante, announcing the death of the sitting pope, launch the recondite system by which cardinals elect pontiffs — a squalid ordeal, per Edward Berger’s feature. Through dialogue peppered with abstruse phrases like in pectore and abyssus abyssum, the film underscores the cardinals’ effete remoteness, and the persistence of Latin in the Western Rite. The ensuing plot points feel rote and unmotivated: a love child, bribery, a terrorist attack, reactionary cardinals, Ralph Fiennes’s quasi-Washingtonian reluctance to serve. Commonwealth viewers will leave baffled by the lengths these clergy members will go to avoid the most radical outcome: an English pope.
P.H.
Dahomey |
SNUB
Mati Diop’s latest documentary trails 26 royal artifacts on their journey from France to Benin, interweaving glossy unboxing shots of bronze and wooden statues with footage of a debate among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi about the politics of restitution. While some herald the return of these objects as a cultural cure-all, others eye them suspiciously as nationalist props in a Fanonian pantomime. Triumph of justice or liberal coup de grâce? Diop resolves the matter by endowing one of the artifacts with an auto-tuned voice, which croons that all these objects ever wanted was to come home and make Benin whole again.
P.K.
The Substance |
BEST PICTURE
An aging fitness instructor (Demi Moore) in health-obsessed L.A. takes a drug that spawns a younger, better version of herself (Margaret Qualley), and the two begin to battle for supremacy. From the awkward title cards and jump cuts to the montages of slick bodies and chickens, the film isn’t scary so much as grotesque. It’s been touted as a feminist parable, but Moore’s insistence on destroying her younger, better self makes it seem more like an excuse to watch two hot women fight. After 130 minutes, I found myself hoping a better, shorter version might take over the movie too.
G.B.
