All the nominations are out! You can see my reactions to today’s Oscar noms on Twitter. (They are generally positive!) But I haven’t done an update of what I’ve seen in awhile. I still have a couple of big nominees to see, and a lot of documentary and foreign films to catch up with, but I’m excited that the BAFTAs give me an opportunity to share a few other favorites!
I really thought I had written notes about this after I saw it. (This will be an unfortunate theme.) But other than my poem (link below) I don’t seem to have recorded my response to this anywhere. Which may have been a problem, except for certain images of this are burned into my memory.
It’s not a Shakespeare adaptation, but Florence Pugh‘s protagonist has the bard’s twisted lady’s cold power (and misguided passion) and she conveys more with a lifted corner of a lip than many actresses do with a monologue. This is a thriller not for the faint of heart. (I honestly don’t know if I would have gone if someone had told me the whole plot.) But it, like Mudbound actually now that I think about it, does a great job of exploring the ways that various forms of oppression and power intersect, magnify, and counteract each other, often with violent, heartbreaking consequences.
You can read my poem about this film, here.
I somehow forgot to write notes about this beautiful film after seeing it this fall. Which is a shame, because I remember being overcome with its beauty and humanity. It’s a quiet, lovely story about an isolated, fuck up of a farmer (Josh O’ Connor), meets and falls for the soft spoken migrant worker he hires to help with the lambing (Alec Secareanu).
The plot synopsis could make it sound like a romance novel, but in the hands of writer director Francis Lee, its a nuanced portrait of a young man coming to terms with the fact that he may not be as stuck as thinks (and therefore he has to take some responsibility for his actions.) It’s also a beautifully shot portrait of a life connected to the land of northern England, something that is disappearing in our modern age. (The farm it was filmed on had been converted to a housing development before the movie was released in the states.) But more than any of those philosophical things it’s a love story and it’s a good one and you should watch it.
You can read my poem about this film, here.
I went into this knowing that the folks at the Next Picture Show were planning to pair it with Hichcock’s Rebecca and so I spent a lot of the movie making connections between these two stories, and they aren’t hard to find. This is a moody, tense story of a relationship between a quiet young woman (the new-to-me but luminous Vicky Krieps) and a persnickety, yet glamorous older man (the always fantastically compelling Daniel Day-Lewis). There’s even a steely, Mrs. Danvers character in the form of his sister, Cecil (the creepily stoic Lesley Manville).
But, this movie also has its own, unique strange beauty. Although the relationship machinations are often excruciatingly awkward, the world they take place in, a post World War II London fashion house, is sumptuous and captured beautifully by Paul Thomas Anderson. (Of course, because he is a genius.)
My boyfriend called this an “emotional horror movie,” complete with jump scares and almost unbearable tension. He found it much harder to watch than I did, but the description is apt. But I mean that as a compliment, not a moment of screen time is wasted and while their actions get increasingly crazy as time progresses they never fall into cliché.
Also, the score, by Johnny Greenwood, is a fantastic indicator of mood and motion. It may be my favorite soundtrack of the year. (And I’ve already added two other film scores to my phone this year, which I never do.)
You can read my poem about this film, here,
Well, this one is wild. Its jarring tone could definitely be off-putting, but I loved it’s freewheeling, winking style. Tonya Harding’s story is so strange that is a screenwriter invented it, we wouldn’t buy it. But Steven Rogers gets around that by acknowledging the purely subjective and “wildly contradictory” accounts of those involved in the infamous case.
The performances are all fantastic. Allison Janney and Margot Robbie of course, but my favorite may have been Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly. He best embodies the film’s quick careening from campy fun to chilling violence. He was a revelation for me.
Also, the skating scenes are great, and the soundtrack is outstanding.
You can read my poem about this film, here.
Michelle Williams is a marvel. She kept me interested in this mess of a movie, even as it went past the 2 hour a mark. To be fair, Christopher Plummer‘s last minute step-in is also a great turn, but this is really Williams’s movie and I’m here for that. (As for Mr. Wahlberg, I’ve liked him other things, but here he could be replaced by a cardboard-cut-out here and be equally compelling.)
I didn’t know much about the Gettys before this and their particular brand of conspicuous consumption and dysfunction is depressingly interesting, but I feel like Ridley Scott never decided exactly what he wanted the tone of this to be, so it felt a bit muddled.
You can read my poem about this film, here.
I was baffled by the gulf between the ridiculing critical response to this and the incredibly enthusiastic audience reaction. Well, after seeing it last night, I think I understand, but am now slightly baffled by the film itself. This is a good old-fashioned movie musical. It’s bright and shiny and filed with large production numbers.
Hugh Jackman is as charming and magnetic as always. Michelle Williams, though underutilized as an actress here, is luminously beautiful and can sing! The assembled “human oddities” Jackman’s P.T. Barnum collects are all talented. The duet between Zendaya and Zac Efron is genuinely moving.
But…um…I have about a million questions.
- Why didn’t they use the score of the already written, Tony- winning musical about P.T. Barnum?
- If this was set in the 1800s why are they dancing like they are in a Michael Jackson video? Or an old-timey installment of High School Musical?
- What are Michelle Williams and Rebecca Ferguson doing here? Give them something to do or don’t waste their time.
- Is it wishful, revisionist history to look at Barnum’s “freak shows” as spaces of empowerment for the marginalized? I’d like to read actual scholarship on this if anyone knows of any.
- But like, again, they could have had this song:
I Get a Bit Obsessive 