Here’s a fun fact for all my fact fans out there! Three years ago when I “rebooted” my blog and started on the site we find ourselves on today, my first post was a review of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. It was one of those films where you thought, here is someone reaching the apex of their potential, a director/writer/editor truly blossoming and creating their defining work. In itself, that was a silly thought as Baker’s previous two films, Tangerine and The Florida Project are already recognised as innovative and masterful in their own ways, but the point remains that for me, Red Rocket was this gleeful victory lap of pure cinematic excellence. Reader, I don’t enjoy when I’m quite so spectacularly proven wrong, but in this case my lack of foresight has brought us to the Palme D’or winning film Anora.
As Baker always does with his films, Anora follows a character whose world is rarely the focus of mainstream films. Anora (who goes by Ani) is a sex worker in New York, working in a club every night to make ends meet with her friends and a few enemies . One day, she is requested to entertain a customer as she is the only girl in the club who speaks his language and is introduced to Ivan, a wealthy Russian who puts the boy into playboy. The two hit it off and quite quickly it becomes clear that this isn’t a case of a horny patron and the worker playing up the charm. Instead, after a week of what’s often dubbed “the girlfriend experience” (in which sex workers are paid not just for sex but also for their presence around the clock and at social events) Ani and Ivan elope in Vegas, smiles immovable from their faces. However, Ivan’s wealthy parents aren’t exactly pleased with their new daughter in law and seek to do all they can to get the marriage annulled. It cleanly splits the film into two parts, with one a breezy and romantic comedy, the other a more hectic and still comedic dive through New York. As a structure, I loved that. The first half gets to set up our characters very cleanly and introduces their world in a way that is almost too intense, before completely changing pace in the second half and bringing in both broader laughs and harder hits. Here, as he did in Red Rocket, Baker uses structure as an offensive tool to put the audience on the backfoot and it’s a tool more writers should learn to love.
If you’re going to name your film after your title character, you need to be sure that you’ve picked the right character to back. To little surprise, Baker knows exactly what he’s doing and in Mikey Madison he finds perfection. She may be familiar to you from Scream 5 or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the latter of which I found her performance somewhat unsettling in because of her young age. It was so chilling to see a psychopathic character that young, not least because of the violent end she meets, and by young I mean that Madison is my age. We share a birth year but fear not, we don’t share talent, because she is on fire here in ways that few young performers are, and certainly ways that no young writers are. I was reminded of seeing Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name, watching a performer come from seemingly nowhere, achieve acting bliss and demand almost every scene of a feature film. That’s exactly what Madison is doing, though carving her own trail with great vigour. To throw in another reference point, her portrayal of Ani reminded me of Julia Fox in Uncut Gems, both creating loud and volatile women who care far more deeply than they are given credit for. Not only does Madison get the gift of a deeper role than Fox had, but she also gets to bring a complexity to her character. Ani is fun and brash and loud, absolutely, but she is her anxieties too, she has faults that are never explicitly mentioned but that filter through to the audience via the decisions she makes. To be honest, with this screenplay I think Anora would have been a great character in anyone’s hands. With Madison though, we find ourselves watching a legendary figure emerge fully formed.
That’s not to underplay how great everyone else is too, Baker once again casting smaller actors or even non-professional actors to terrific effect. A few unknown faces who stood out to me were Lindsey Normington as a villainous colleague to Ani, Mark Eidelshtein as the sweet but stunted Ivan and a hilariously pathetic turn from Vache Tovmasyan as one of the goons sent after Ani. There were familiar faces too to delight in, like scene stealer Brittney Rodriguez from Red Rocket popping up to once again lay down the law. Karren Karagulian is credited in all of Sean Baker’s past films and I confess, I didn’t recognise him from any of them, but I love his work here as the overworked and under skilled Toros, a figure whose opening scene has some of the best laughs of the entire film. All the actors I’ve mentioned here do great work, but the one who comes closest to Madison’s sublime art is Yura Borisov. Funnily enough, I last saw him in the film Compartment No. 6, a film which I saw directly before Red Rocket at the 2021 London Film Festival (and on which I’ve also written a piece I’m deeply proud of.) Baker saw Compartment too and understood the range Borisov had, putting it to brilliant work in his first English language role. I don’t want to say too much about the character as he mainly factors into the last half of the film, but once again Borisov presents us with a character who is so blatantly presenting as one type of person that you don’t even question that this may be a façade for another type of person. No spoilers, you go and discover for yourself.
While I’m writing about the technical elements of a film, especially one I’m seeing at a film festival, I worry it can become easy for the whole thing to seem quite clinical, for me to make every film sound like a bit of an exam for how good a film watcher you are. If so, allow me to clarify that Anora is a hell of a lot of fun. Baker’s films have always been funny but with Ani being a much more (though not entirely) likeable protagonist than disgraced former pornstarMikey in Red Rocket, the laughs come with more certainty and ease. Her situation is ridiculous and the ridiculousness comes from outside her, so it’s comfortable to laugh along with her at the heightened stupidity of so much that happens. The laughs being more comfortable doesn’t mean that the film is a breeze though, it does get, for want of a better word, sticky. Ani’s profession means that there is an underlying tension to the whole film because of how cruel we know the world can be to sex workers, and with the emotional high point of a wedding coming in the middle of the film, you find yourself wondering how long things will stay this good. That feeling extends right through to the final scene, which I won’t spoil other than to say this; as it was happening I found the ending an anti-climax, yet as I was watching every other film I saw that day I kept thinking about how powerful the ending of Anora is. It reveals a fact about Ani that she has hidden well and it colours the rest of the film in shades you may not have considered. Baker knows how to end a film and with Anora he eschews comedy for absolute pathos.
Baker transforms a Take That song […] into a euphoric anthem that legitimately brought me to tears.
This should be the bit where I talk about the technical elements, but I don’t know if I can? I was so swept away by the pace of Anora that I forgot to remember I was watching a film. Broadly speaking, that’s only ever a sign that the technical elements of the film are pitch perfect. The cinematography from Drew Daniels proves that filming on celluloid will always make films pop out the screen at you, Baker’s editing allows the pace to ebb and flow in ways that allow the audience just enough time to relax and the music choices are absolutely inspired. There’s a lot of hip-hop in the film, exactly the kind of stuff that makes for good music during whatever it is they do in those clubs, but the rogue music choices are even better than the expected. A Tatu needle drop delighted but somehow, using alchemical magic, Baker transforms a Take That song (very specifically, a remix of the song from their cinematic jukebox musical that no one saw) into a euphoric anthem that legitimately brought me to tears. I do not know how he does it. This is a director working not even at the height of his powers but at the height of cinematic power, somehow finding time to do that and nod towards a character from Red Rocket with a billboard that will draw audience minds towards Showgirls in a knowing tip of the hat. Sean Baker has been a talent to watch for about a decade and if you hadn’t been paying attention, now is the perfect time to catch up.
Make no mistake, Anora is a crowdpleaser of a film, a comedy that makes you laugh hard enough that its deeper tendrils are burrowed deep and quickly. You should make your parents watch it, though I wouldn’t watch it with your parents unless they’re very cool about a lot of things that most parents are not. Through such an appealing comedy, Baker sneaks in a fully realised depiction of a sex worker with an interior life as rich as her exterior life is flashy, creating a nuanced portrayal of a group of people who are so often victimised and criminalised, especially in the UK. That’s punk rock as hell. If for no other reason, that should get you out the house and into the cinema for Anora when it releases in the UK on 1st November.
For those of you who don’t base their entire lives around film and are based near (enough) to London, you may not know that this week is the start of the 2024 London Film Festival! After a quieter edition for me last year while I moved house, I am back on it this year, using a press pass to its fullest in ways that my sleep schedule does not appreciate. You join me on day two and after five films, I’ve already got one to share with you that is very special. That film is Harvest.
Harvest is the third film from Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari and her first in the English language. In the film, villagers from a place of ambiguous location (but probably in Scotland) during an ambiguous time period find their lives falling apart at the same time that they are visited by outsiders. First a barn burns down and three strangers face the blame for it, finding themselves humiliated by the villagers. Then fingers start to be pointed at the cartographer who has recently appeared to capture the landscape. Soon though, things take an even greater downward turn as we meet the cousin of the Lord of this village, a man who has his own view on what the future of this village is. That is the broad strokes of the plot and in between those strokes, it doesn’t get much more detailed. That’s the charm of Harvest though, it’s properly mercurial. Eventually, you’ll find out who burned down the barn, but you’ll never know why they did it. At a point, you’ll find out why the strangers arrived, but it’s a real loose reason. You won’t ever understand what main character Walter’s deal is, but that’s a-ok with me. This is all fable, loose events that come together to explain how a village disappeared in the space of a week.
I’ve mentioned Walter, so let’s get into the cast, which was mainly actors I didn’t know. As Walter is Caleb Landry Jones, an actor I’ve known and liked for a while. He’s been in everything from Get Out to The Florida Project and Twin Peaks: The Return, even appearing in things I love that aren’t from 2017. Here, he gets one of his rare leading roles, properly embodying this creature married to his world. We learn a little about his history but never enough to truly understand him. Everything else you have to attempt to glean from Jones’ performance and good luck finding purchase on his slippery work. The cast around him are superb too. Harry Melling continues to distance himself from the Harry Potter franchise with another brilliant performance, effortlessly embodying a man with power who doesn’t really believe his power. He’s pathetic and that’s fantastic. Also fab are Rosy McEwan (who really makes me feel guilty for having still not seen Blue Jean), the perpetually underrated Arinzé Kene and a deliciously villainous turn from Frank Dillane. It’s such a great ensemble, with no one seeming out of place unless that’s exactly what they’re meant to do.
What [Williams] is doing, it turns out, is magic
While you get a sense of the performances and narrative over time, Harvest does its best to immediately strike you as strange. Tsangari comes from the Greek Weird Wave and despite tackling a Scottish period drama, she keeps the weird flowing here. What struck me first was the score, this bizarre prog rock inspired thing that immediately tells you all is not as it seems. Throughout, it veers in and out of the expected, hitting the usual strings of period dramas before heading straight back to prog rock nonsense. Pair that with the cinematography by Sean Price Williams and something special happens. You see, Williams is a cinematographer associated with the mumblecore of Alex Ross Perry and who also shot the brilliant Good Time. What is he doing on a period drama? What he is doing, it turns out, is magic. The camera is this little handheld 16mm thing, being chucked around the village and getting right up into the chaos that ensues, at one point even taking to the sky for a drone shot. Unbelievably, Williams even recreates a version of my favourite shot from Good Time, which sounds impressive before I tell you that the original shot involves a neon sign. Together, both sound and vision create an “out of place”-ness that pervades and absolutely refuses to let you be comfortable at any point during the film.
Another thing that prevents you feeling comfortable is the amount of reference points your brain will be bouncing between. The aforementioned cinematography goes away from Williams’ mumblecore roots to more closely resemble modern day Terence Malick. Where Malick uses his swooping camera to make profound statements on the world, Tsangari uses it to disorient and make you feel gross. It’s a simple swap but one that never failed to throw me off. I also kept thinking of a video game called Pentiment, a handy touchstone for any who are familiar. In the game, you are an artist in 16th century Bavaria who arrives in a small town and becomes embroiled in a murder mystery. One of the joys of that game is the sense of failure, in that you will accuse people of committing crimes and have no idea if you were right until after they are punished for these crimes. Another joy is this feeling of the modern hurtling towards the town, threatening to crush it underfoot. Both those and the anarchic humour played on my mind in Harvest and while I don’t take Tsangari as a gamer, I think it’s a useful reference point for an audience member approaching the film as far as tone and plot. The future is inevitable, but how will the unwashed masses face it?
My favourite thing about Harvest came packaged inside the building sense of tension that the film bestows unto you, which is this veiled critique on capitalism and the modern. If I may dust off my degree for a moment, there was a fantastic course I did on Transatlantic Literary Relations, in which we got pretty into the weeds about the roots of capitalism and what would become late capitalism. One of the things that I learned on the course was how maps can be a tool of the coloniser, placing a country in the centre of a map and artificially shrinking those who are to be colonised. It was a really striking revelation that stuck with me and still shapes how I see the world today, which again meant that Harvest set my brain racing. Quill, the cartographer, is a skilled artist of his craft and makes beautiful maps. However, these are a people without maps and the question starts to arise of what the purpose of these maps could be. I’ll not spell it out for you but it was this absolutely sick moment of “oh, that’s what this film is going to talk about” that made me start grinning ear to ear in the screening room. What a great surprise, what a treat of a turn in the tale. Sure, it’s an angle that is quite specifically up my street, but it’s only one puzzle piece of many in a film that is outstandingly rich.
I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of Harvest. I’ve not touched on the ritualistic nature of the villagers, talked about one of the most chilling character introductions where nothing actually happens, nor mentioned the strangest waterboarding scene I’ve ever witnessed. Instead, I leave these as gifts for you. As someone who didn’t particularly enjoy Tsangari’s previous film Chevalier and is yet to see her debut Attenberg, my expectations here were blown out of the water. Harvest is special, a rich film that is immediately rewarding and yet promises more if you let it inside. It currently doesn’t have a UK release date but it will be distributed by MUBI and I can only beg that you go and seek the film out as soon as it appears. I thought it was a real treat and the idea of there being films I might like more than this at LFF makes me practically giddy. Harvest left me intoxicated and deluded and I am grateful beyond words for that blissful experience.
When I first started writing my blog, I kicked it off proper ten years ago with a big double review of two massive Summer blockbusters that I had recently seen. Those films were, as you may have guessed, Guardians of the Galaxy and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. By chance, both these films turned out to be formative for their own reasons and ten years on, both still provide a lot to chew on. So, let’s review them again! I’m a much better reviewer today than I was ten years ago (you would hope, with a film degree under my belt) and like I say, these are films that do still deserve to be discussed for their place in Hollywood’s output. The question is, how have they aged? Both were 9/10 films for me a decade ago, can the talking raccoon movie and the talking monkey movie live up to the heights a 14 year old Henry held them up to? What a bold and provocative setup, I really do have a Film and English degree.
Guardians of the Galaxy
Guardians of the Galaxy is the 10th film released as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). For context, the recently released Deadpool and Wolverine is the 34th, which doesn’t even include the 12 seasons of TV that have also been forced onto us. In case it wasn’t obvious, the MCU was in a very different place in 2014, with only one Avengers movie having been released and the sense of a grand ending still very far off. Still, the films were beginning to knit together, characters crossing over between films and each plot becoming more important to understanding the next. If Guardians of the Galaxy felt refreshing in 2014 for being disconnected from the narrative of the MCU, you have no idea how good it feels in 2024.
Ironically, the plot itself is weak, appropriating the feel of a space opera without quite committing to the scale that these stories go for. A bunch of misfits are brought together in an unlikely string of events, team up and stop a baddie from using a stone (what we now understand as an Infinity Stone) to blow up a planet. Considering that the past ten years have given us a faithful and bombastic Dune adaptation, it’s hard not to feel cheated by the world building that is in service of nothing in particular. However, the lack of an impactful plot doesn’t feel like a sticking point against GOTG, as its strengths are plentiful in other areas. In particular, the core characters are very well realised. Part of this feeling is certainly the context of these characters having a multi-film arc across the GOTG trilogy and last two Avengers films, but there’s a lot of work done here. My fondness for Rocket, Drax and Yondu is certainly based on the later films, but Groot’s characterisation is remarkably and instantly brilliant. He gets a handful of moments of quiet compassion, in which he very literally gives part of himself to others, and all of these scenes were profoundly beautiful to me. That’s such a silly thing to say about the MCU now but James Gunn and his team of writers really knew what they were doing.
Peter Quill is also shockingly well characterised for a superhero lead. We immediately understand the trauma he holds from never facing the death of his mother and that pathos gives a purpose to the now iconic “Awesome Mix.” The album has been such a phenomenal success in its own right, topping album charts, being the must own CD for every teenage boy of the time (including me) and also helping introduce a lot of classic rock to a new generation. What this success obfuscates though is the importance of the mixtape to Peter. These songs have been the only thing linking him to his home planet for over twenty years and he must have listened to them thousands of times. The music also helps establish Peter as a loser, in a way that is hugely endearing. Compare, to take a random example not chosen with any cruelty, to Deadpool and Wolverine. Both films feature a dance scene over the opening credits but take very different routes to create a very different effect. For Deadpool, our main character is seen doing a very well choreographed dance to “Bye, Bye, Bye”, a song that I don’t think it’s unfair to say is bad (and was also much better utilised in the opening credits of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket.) In GOTG however, Quill dances badly to “Come and Get Your Love”, a fantastic song that was not much remembered since the time of release. Where the Deadpool scene is played entirely for comedy (a comedy which, not to keep kicking the dead horse, does not land), GOTG uses a scene that is comedic to also tell us the importance of music to Quill and express the dorky side that exists alongside his adventurous persona. For my money, it’s the best character introduction in the entire franchise and I doubt we’ll get something as simple and efficient again.
To wrap up the chat about the cast, this is a very well cast film which managed to make stars of its smaller names and use well the bigger names. We love to hate Chris Pratt these days but coming fresh off Parks and Recreations, Peter Quill was the perfect role for him and the one he would deserve to be remembered for if he didn’t love cashing cheques so much. Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel give genuinely impactful performances with just their voices, Cooper himself bettering everything he did before and since, with the exception of A Star is Born. It is also clear on a rewatch that Dave Bautista was immediately the real deal. He gives a gravitas to Drax that is apparent the second he appears on screen, yet allows his immaculate comedy skills to slowly flourish throughout the film. In any just world, he should be the biggest actor in the world, though I do love his dedication to strange passion projects in recent years. One other thing that feels strange in context is the appearances of Glenn Close and John C. Reilly, actors who never appear again in the MCU but pop in here to have a quick bit of fun. They should be better than this but their willingness and sense of game is warming. Good for them for taking the money and running.
It’s not all positive. GOTG has a lot of the issues that have since come to characterise much of the MCU and its imitators. As I said, the plot is a bore and lead villain Ronan the Accuser is a fantastically dull villain. None of that is Lee Pace’s fault, he is simply given nothing to work with beyond a character who wants to blow up planets. As such, when the third act gets plot heavy it chugs along and loses the great pacing of the past two acts, which is a shame. Also a shame are the lessons Hollywood took from the success of GOTG. One immediate thing Hollywood settled on was turning their ensemble films into jukebox musicals of sorts, with the most notable offender being the 2016 nightmare Suicide Squad, a fetid pool full of ideas that blended like oil and water. Ironically, it would be Gunn himself who would come in and redeem that franchise with The Suicide Squad, a definitive improvement that showed what a difference clarity of vision makes. Even as recent as this month, Borderlands proved that studios want GOTG but aren’t interested in an actual cinematic vision if the noise is loud enough.
I think the other big lesson that studios took from GOTG was that audiences wanted cool wacky adventures in space. Don’t get me wrong, I am broadly in favour of that but there has to be some kind of heart. Recent MCU disasters like Thor: Love and Thunder and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania prove that simply setting a bunch of nonsense somewhere new doesn’t make a film feel new. Audiences are smarter than they seem, but treating them like idiots makes them feel like idiots. It makes them like Deadpool and Wolverine. The irony of this big speech about lesson learning is that one person did learn from GOTG: James Gunn. He wrapped up the gang’s adventures last year with a third feature and gave the Guardians their best outing yet. Whether he brings that magic to the new DC Universe is yet to be seen, but if nothing else he left Marvel on a high note that they seem determined to squander.
In a twist that seems predictable to any who understands the passage of time, Guardians of the Galaxy doesn’t enchant me the way that it did when I was 14, yet it is still an easy high watermark for the MCU. We didn’t know how good we had it, but we also didn’t know how good Gunn specifically would treat us throughout the trilogy. Considering the mental, financial and emotional damage caused by the MCU and other attempted rivals, it is frankly shocking that I can still find it in me to love this film, yet I do. Despite being such a commercial product, it has at its core a beating heart and no amount of capitalist nonsense can cover that, not then, not now, not ever.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was my first Planet of the Apes film. I saw it in a double bill with GOTG because a friend who I had also seen it with was going along to Dawn. I had no expectations, walked in with open arms and now I am the biggest Planet of the Apes fan you know. As I now appreciate, Dawn follows on ten years after Rise, in which the Simian Flu has wiped out most of the human population of Earth and Caesar is leading a tribe of apes who live just outside what used to be San Francisco. One day they encounter a group of humans, who broadly seek no violence but just want to reactivate the dam so they can get electricity back. Both sides agree to let the dam be worked on, but there is dissent within both groups. For the humans, Carver is actively hostile towards the apes and blames the Simian Flu on them, despite the name arising from experiments performed on the apes. For the apes, Koba is rightly angry at the humans for testing on him before the outbreak, but wishes to escalate things and kill the remaining humans who could harm the apes again, whatever the cost. It creates a very strong divide in each camp between those who seek an alliance and those who wish to destroy their rivals and it is a powerful momentum that propels the film.
It sounds silly if you’re not in the know on your Apes lore but the core narrative of this film is one that is deeply political. The entire franchise has always been political, focussing on how power changes hands and what those new hands do with the power they have. In the case of Dawn, the focus is on how the paranoia and selfish desire of a handful of individuals corrupts the greater whole. If you’re familiar with a little show called The News, you might have spotted this recently. Hate figures like Nigel Farage, Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson create an enemy for people to fear, rile those around them into a violent fury and then plead dumb when this typhoon of bigotry becomes a deadly weapon. Like with all films that are “more relevant now than ever though”, it is less predictive of the future than it is reflective of the past. Humans have always been malleable at the hands of charismatic villains, in this world apes simply are too. Another unintended resonance is the Simian Flu angle of it. In the vein of hatred there is the bigotry aimed at those the flu is named after, like how COVID-19 was euphemistically called the Chinese Virus by Trump, again not foresight but a reflection of history and events like the Spanish flu. The Flu is also compelling though because of having lived through the COVID-19 pandemic. Our virus wasn’t as deadly as this cinematic version so we recovered, but the lingering memory of former bustling spaces becoming liminal is still strong. I’m not going to claim Dawn is unique in this, The Last of Us pulled off a similarly affecting gambit the year before, but it is nevertheless affecting.
Our assembled cast is one that initially appears low-key, but all do roundly wonderful work. The humans are broadly expendable but solid. Jason Clarke is good enough to earn good will that has sustained him until now, Kodi Smit-McPhee gets to lean into his usual quiet loner thing and would I be being too much of a contrarian if I said Gary Oldman is better here than he was in his Oscar winning performance in Darkest Hour? He is wonderful, a quiet figure whose paranoia seeps into the film slowly, yet who is clearly still wracked by guilt. All the humans are in fact, it stood out to me this time, all our characters are plagued with survivors guilt over being the only one of their family to survive. It makes the humans weak and vulnerable in a way that still allows us to root for them against pre-established and broadly heroic characters.
These apes though… Man oh man are they fantastic. Andy Serkis really does bring to life Caesar with ease and his performance makes a difference, especially when compared to the unremarkable lead at the heart of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. He gives all his films a grounding and this central film in the trilogy is where he is tested most deeply. Deeply underrated though is Toby Kebbell as Koba. Just after Dawn, Kebbell would have a legendarily bad run, starring in Fantastic Four (2015), Ben-Hur (2016) and the over-hated Warcraft, films for which he became a punching bag. He’s done great work since though, in A Monster Calls and Kong: Skull Island, so is clearly a talented actor stuck in some rubbish films. He is phenomenal here. Koba flits between two modes, either pathetic and weaselly or violent and demanding. In some scenes, he flips between the two in an instant, terrifying humans who witness him. He is a better villain than almost anyone the MCU presented before or since and Kebbell is a huge part of it. Also worthy of a shout is Karin Konoval who plays Maurice. In a weird parallel to Groot, Maurice is a gentle character whose power is in his small moments, like when he reads Alexander’s book. Every single time he appears on screen, whatever is happening gets 10% better without fail. Once again, great job Karin Konoval, we all love Maurice.
None of this talk about great apes would be possible though without the special effects surrounding them. Ten years ago, it was pretty much the selling point of these films and while photo-realistic special effects come as standard these days, Dawn still impresses. The worst you can say is that it looks like a video game but when you consider the outlandish level that video games are now capable of, it starts to sound closer to a compliment than it ever has. Crucially, the CGI never bursts believability. In every single scene, I believed that these fully computer generated characters were real. Even today, that is not an easy bar to clear and Dawn does so effortlessly. Accompanied by music that knows when to stick close to Jerry Goldsmith’s timeless feel and when to veer into Zimmer-esque action, as well as cinematography that is drop dead gorgeous at all times, few films since have felt as good as Dawn. Fewer still, if you rule out Matt Reeves’ other films.
The reason I keep coming back to Dawn though, both to watch and to discuss, is how versatile a film it is. It has the political layer I was talking about, creating interesting characters on which we can see a sociological struggle play out, working on interesting levels. The whole modern series, in fact, has been very smart on even very little things, like the evolving meaning of what was Caesar’s bedroom window, into a sign for hope and a sign that can be hijacked. That is a fantastic thing for the film to have. However, it is also an absolutely banging action film. Do I need to do more to sell you on the action other than saying “there is an ape on horseback dual wielding assault rifles?” I hope I don’t, otherwise I have failed to curate my readership base properly. The point is, the action is amazing and contains shocking weight for characters who only exist digitally. Having now seen what Reeves can do with The Batman, no one doubts his action credentials, but for the dedicated, Dawn showed early what impressively awesome action he can create with a camera, a deep CGI budget and a dream. That siege on the human camp, in particular, is a display of sheer screen shaking bombast that requires cinematic viewing and must now be turned down so the volume of ape violence doesn’t spook the neighbours.
The magic of these modern Planet of the Apes movies is their versatility. Where the old ones were political parables that often thrilled, Dawn signalled a shift into action and parable existing hand in hand, where one cannot exist without the other in a beautiful symbiotic harmony that somehow still allows room for warmth. Honestly, where Guardians wasn’t quite as wonderful as I remembered, Dawn was even more so. It is a true example of spectacle that has something to say and a film that feels out of place in Hollywood even ten years later. We were and are blessed to live in a world where Dawn of the Planet of the Apes exists.
Today marks the tenth anniversary of me writing this blog. It hasn’t always been this exact site, we’ve jumped around as I’ve tried to change and evolve with the times and I’ve drifted from weekly to fortnightly to whenever the energy emerges, but all the same I’ve been doing this funky thing for ten years. As someone cresting the age of 25, there’s not a lot I’ve been doing for ten years that isn’t breathing, eating or urinating, so writing is a big deal! For anyone who has been here for ten years, thank you. Anyone who has been here for five years, thank you. One month? You’ve done your best, there’s a lot of lore to catch up on, but thank you nonetheless.
To celebrate, we’re going simple; a top 7 list that celebrates my favourite films from the entire time I’ve been writing. Some of them have had reviews but I’m not linking to them because to be completely honest, the idea of reading things I wrote when I was 15 fills me with a level of dread that I’m still working out how to convey in words. If you’re desperate, seek them out, but I’ll be giving you my thoughts the whole way and my thoughts have also evolved a lot over the last decade. With all this said, it’s time for honourable mentions!
Gone Girl
David Fincher took a novel with an already excellent narrative and spun it into one of the best thrillers ever made. It is sick, it is twisty, it is some of the best stunt casting in history and if you ever meet a woman who calls it one of her favourite films, she is either a keeper or plotting to take your kidneys.
Interstellar
For most of the last decade, I’ve felt the need to defend the notion of “love is stronger than gravity and time.” I no longer want to defend myself, because anyone who doesn’t believe in the unbearably sincere heart at the centre of one of the coolest sci-fi films yet made does not deserve my time.
Mad Max: Fury Road
You know that scene in Mad Max:Fury Road where the camera pans along the convoy of cars, constructed out of trucks and bikes and nonsense, eventually landing at the guy who is playing a guitar that shoots fire? That scene alone is why this is one of the best films of the past decade.
La La Land
Again, despite there being so many people who love La La Land, I feel an inherent need to defend my adoration of it. It is big and bold and a little bit stupid, but crucially it is a blast of joy directly into my heart that I watched five times while it was in cinemas. That can never mean nothing for a musical agnostic.
Call Me By Your Name
Okay, again, I should defend myself about this film starring Armie Hammer and focusing on a relationship with a hefty age gap. I do again refuse. Watching this film transports me to a place of pure sensuality where I drift into Italian landscapes, peachy platters and languorous stares. It announced Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet to me and both have continued to impress.
The Lighthouse
The Lighthouse has been one of my biggest growers of the past decade. I was interested by it at first but left it low on my Best of 2019 list, before becoming swamped by love for it during the pandemic. That love is yet to waver and I’ve still not seen anything that comes even close to this madcap spectacle of boys, beans and bottoms.
Uncut Gems
For a film that is structured to both resemble and create anxiety attacks, Uncut Gems sure is a film that has brought me comfort. It’s all you could ever want. Funny, tense, unpredictable, gleeful and home to not just Adam Sandler’s best performance but what still remains one of my favourite performances by any actor ever. Stunning.
Now on to the actual ranked bit!
7. Parasite
Not to spoil the rest of the list but Parasite is a fascinating entry on the list as it’s the only film here that won Best Picture at the Oscars (or the Palme D’or at Cannes for that matter.) So exciting was its win that in celebration, it made me throw my back out and be in quite a lot of pain while Bong Joon-Ho was grinning the happiest grin I have ever seen. The only thing that equalled his level of joy was mine after watching Parasite. Everyone loved to say that you should watch it knowing as little as possible but it was actually the rewatching that made this film reveal itself as an all time masterpiece. What initially appears to be an interesting thriller about how capitalism keeps us all down gets to develop into that kind of bonkers space that Korean thrillers are great at occupying (without needing to get into the extremity that other Korean films can often descend into.) It also feels like a weird compliment, but Parasite is the film that got a lot of people watching subtitled films for the first time in their lives. This opened a whole world of cinema up for a lot of people and for that alone, we should celebrate it. That doesn’t have to be the only celebration though because again, this film is awesome. If you still, still, haven’t seen it, just do it tonight. Please, you have no idea what a fun time you’re missing out on until you try.
6. Lady Bird
We’re entering a phase of very emotionally charged films that I am deeply connected to and will find tough to rationalise. First of them is Lady Bird. I saw this film at a very specific time in my life. To see a film about a young adult finding themself in the year before going to university in the year when I had myself just gone to university was somewhat shattering. Lady Bird’s world wasn’t mine, yet I felt like I belonged there. The way that Greta Gerwig, directing her first solo feature film, created a film full of love that itself inspired love is intangibly wonderful. Saoirse Ronan does very gentle work in the lead role too, being borderline imperceptible in crafting someone who is utterly and entirely believable. A huge debt is also owed to Jon Brion’s spritely score, which spends most of the runtime zipping us between scenes, before coming in with some last minute sucker punches. The easiest way of explaining the impact that Lady Bird had on me is by saying that it made me visit Sacramento. While in California on a holiday, I knew Sacramento had to be somewhere I visited and I spent my three days visiting as many of the beautifully unremarkable locations from the film as I could (as well as watching two of the other films on this list, Uncut Gems and a film yet to come!) For most, Lady Bird is a great film. For me, it will always be that little bit more special than for most.
5. Petite Maman
It was tough not to put Portrait of a Lady on Fire on the list, a film that attempts to rewrite film language and sculpt a new way of telling stories about neglected cinematic lives. What softened the blow for me was the unshakable knowledge that Petite Maman would absolutely be on the list. This film is special, genuinely. In less than 80 minutes, Celine Sciamma tells us everything about childhood, the intangible magic of the everyday and the strength of parental bonds across time. The story is simple. A young girl’s mother disappears after the death of the family matriarch and while wandering the woods, the young girl meets another almost identical young girl. As it turns out, this is a younger version of her own mother, brought here through means both mystical and unexplained, and the two spend the film hanging out with each other. They play, they go on adventures, nothing remarkable occurs whatsoever. Yet in that lack of the remarkable is where Sciamma strikes and the simple surface of the film allows a very deep emotional connection. The use of music is sparing but impactful once used, the cinematography presents a sci-fi concept in a fully believable way and I genuinely believe that this film has one of the single best cuts in any film since Lawrence of Arabia. Of all the films on this list, I think this is the film that may have passed you by and if so, it will take you no time at all to remedy it and make your heart overflow with love.
4. Arrival
I was going to do a whole “Arrival is more than just a sci-fi film” thing, but I immediately want to shoot that down as an idea. Arrival is as great a film as it is precisely because it’s a sci-fi film, using the language of that genre to make grand and legitimately profound statements on language as a broader concept. If somehow, all these years after release, you still don’t know where Arrival takes its story, I won’t be the one to spoil it for you, it’s too much of a treat to interfere with. However, even if you did know the trajectory from the start (or if you picked up on the clues quicker than I did) the film is immensely satisfying, a colossal but exquisitely deatailed puzzle box that is aching to be opened. As I said, each piece is perfect. Amy Adams gives the performance of her career, Bradford Young’s cinematography perfectly compliments the design of the world and the structure is such a marvel that its Vonneguttian delights are bound to sneak up on you. When I first saw Arrival, I thought it was seriously impressive, an awesome film and one that gave me hope for the future of sci-fi (not for nothing, Villeneuve has become the face of go for broke sci-fi this past decade.) On reflection now, Arrival is special. It clarifies things for me. I understand what I want out of sci-fi because of it, I understand what I want out of stories because of it and I know what I want out of my life because of it. I also wail like a banshee because of it, in an ending that ironically only gets better the more I see it.
3. Little Women
I’ve never cared for those deluxe recliner chairs that certain cinemas have. I think that they basically encourage you to think of comfort instead of thinking of the film you’re here for and promote a disinterest in anything beyond the experience of “luxury”. The one time I didn’t feel this was when I was watching Little Women in a recliner and was laid back in a way that meant I could cradle myself as the tears, the beauty and the sheer joy took over my body. For someone who instinctually rejects period dramas and has never read the Lousia May Alcott source novel, Greta Gerwig’s adaptation won me over within seconds. The way Gerwig changed the structure so that two time periods run alongside each other and allows for the maximum emotion at every single moment of the film is a simple change but one that becomes revelatory. Every moment of joy is maximised, every sorrow as bitter as can be, yet the world is perpetually exquisite. I genuinely don’t think there is any fifteen minute stretch I can make it through without crying, whether from sorrow or joy. Everyone is at a perfect pitch, all being a little too ridiculous for their worlds, all falling down just so perfectly onto each other. Saoirse Ronan is once again sublime as Jo, a character I still don’t know if I want to be or want to be with, Timothee Chalamet is the perfect level of pathetic and Florence Pugh gets to be stuck up in a way that never annoys. Words don’t really convey the fullest extent of the power Little Women holds. Even phrases like “my little women,” “and I’ll watch” or “I just think that women…” barely convey my point, though it doesn’t help that I get misty eyed just writing them. Women! Rad! I need to stop writing this one or I’ll be sobbing over a keyboard.
2. Paddington 2
I remember the first time someone tried to tell me how good Paddington 2 is. It was my first year film lecturer and he was absolutely raving about it, coming into our seminar flabbergasted (flabbergasted in the way that only a man called Benedict can be flabbergasted) that none of us had seen it yet. This stuck in my head when the campus cinema had their screening and so with scepticism, I bought my ticket and took my seat. Safe to say, I’m not a sceptic anymore. What some would write off as a bit of a meme now, a nice film that’s unremarkable, is still secretly a genuine masterpiece. Paul King refused to let the shackles of the label “a film for children” stop him in making a film that has ranked (for me) above films by Scorsese, Fincher and Sciamma. The script is air-tight, featuring constant call backs to earlier in the film and refusing to let any end be loose by the end, helped by a game cast of “it’s them, from that” faces that are sure to delight every Brit. It also helps that the film is relentless in its ambition to spread joy, a pursuit that will moisten the eyes of the hardest sceptic. Once upon a time, that was me. Now I’ve talked about five films in a row that make me sob. In a very real way, Paddington 2 marked a changing point in how I view cinema. I abandoned my pretensions and opened my heart to films that I could otherwise have closed myself off from. If Paddington 2 had done that despite its quality I would still owe it a great deal. When it has changed me as a person and is a film of honest to God perfection? Well, it’s marmalade sandwiches and smiles all around.
1. Whiplash
Yeah yeah yeah, I talk about how much I love Whiplash all the time, grow up and get over it. It genuinely is that good and any scepticism on your part is your loss alone. I’ve rewatched Whiplash a few times now, always going in with the mindset of “well surely it can’t be as good as I remember, I’ve put too much pressure on it in my own head and it will now be merely fine.” Each time, I have been wrong. Whiplash is, on the surface, a thriller about a drummer chasing greatness and the lengths to which he’ll go for it. It’s a common trope, other films of the same era like Black Swan also had very good takes on this concept. While Whiplash does have some really strong and well realised themes though, it is as good as it is because it’s the best thriller I’ve ever seen. The tension is unbeatable, with even the lulls serving as moments that make the audience worry about what may happen next. Sharone Meir’s tight and sickly cinematography pair with the percussive pace that the drums give us, setting the stage for one of the all time great film performances. I am of course talking about J.K. Simmons as Fletcher, an unrepentant monster who pushes all of his students beyond breaking point. He is the great and eternal mystery that keeps the legacy of Whiplash alive, in that the constant question of the film is “why is he doing this?” and “is his cruelty worth the greatness?”
One of my favourite scenes in this film (of which there are many) is one in which Fletcher and our protagonist Andrew have a relaxed conversation at a bar. It’s a moment where Fletcher lets his guard down and starts to open up to Andrew about why he pushes his students like he does. Suddenly the mask comes off the monster and we can understand why he does what he does. Or so we think. Going into the final showdown, Fletcher once again turns on Andrew and the safety that we felt we had is cruelly revoked. It all builds into what I can confidently refer to as my favourite final scene of any film, a scene which I struggle to watch and not give a standing ovation to, cringe as it sounds. Damien Chazelle has done brilliant work since Whiplash (his masterpiece of mess Babylon could easily grow on me over the next few years) but he has never yet hit this level of perfection. His other films have had moments of perfection, perfect elements, but never since have they been so well wrapped in such a tight and satisfying ball, aimed directly at the viewers heart. Ten years on, there are still very few films as good as Whiplash, so lets hope that we can get even a hint of this cinematic brilliance from the next ten years.
As a bonus, how about some of my favourite TV, video games and albums of the past decade while we’re here?
TV
Twin Peaks: The Return – Call it TV, call it a long film, it doesn’t matter what you call it. Nothing has been the same since Twin Peaks: The Return and even after all this time, we are only just starting to see films and TV that have taken its radical message to heart.
O.J.: Made in America – Again, doesn’t matter how you categorise it, O.J.: Made in America is one of the best documentaries ever made. It has the sprawl and length of a great YouTube video essay but the rigour, research and restraint of a project from true professionals.
Nathan for You – Cringe comedy has never been quite this sublime, as Nathan Fielder stretches the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction in ways that are hilarious until they’re terrifying, before they lurch right back to hilarious.
The Traitors UK – It feels weird to put a reality show on this list, but when it’s as perfectly sculpted as The Traitors it’s tough to complain, especially when greeted with the joy of the normal people who populate the UK version. The plot twists in this would be outlandish if they were plotted but as unscripted TV it is dynamite, and a testament to the power of appointment TV.
Taskmaster – Five comedians get set a silly task and then get shouted at based on how badly they do. That’s the simple set-up of a comedy masterclass, in which no matter whether you’re presented with faces familiar or not, you are set to giggle loudly and constantly for a solid hour.
Albums
Melodrama by Lorde – Being nineteen is statistically speaking one of the hardest things in the world and that hyperbole exists entirely because of Melodrama. Lorde’s second record took all that was already great from her first and sent it into the stratosphere, in which every emotion could exist at its most powerful forever.
We Will Always Love You by The Avalanches – We Will Always Love You feels like a mixtape that we sent into space for aliens to discover, in the hope that we can teach other lifeforms the variety of our experience on life. Across an hour of sensational songs, The Avalanches take us on an odyssey and it is one I have retaken over and over again.
brat by charli xcx – brat is the newest anything on this list, but I would feel stupid if I didn’t already describe it as an iconic album of this era. The brat era is only just getting going too, with new remixes always dropping, but if Melodrama was a defining album for my late teenage years, brat is a defining album for my mid-twenties.
Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast – I feel very safe when I put on Jubilee. After my friend George recommended it to me, I couldn’t stop listening. The album is beautiful and joyful, but also strangely sad in places unexpected. Every time I come back (and it is often) I find something brand new to love.
Be The Cowboy by Mitski – Like many people during the pandemic, Mitski did an Irish jig on my heart. For me, Be The Cowboy is her opus, an unstoppable bull in a china shop full of my emotions. I love it deeply and for my own safety, I cannot listen to it too often or I will start eating drywall.
Video Games
Disco Elysium – No world I’ve entered has been quite as well written as Disco Elysium, which is a relief as it’s a game built almost entirely of text. Like my favourite novels, it’s not so much scenes or characters that occupy my dreams, but an atmosphere, a feeling of growing dread and nausea in a world unlike our world in fewer ways than we hope.
Baldurs Gate 3 – Where Disco Elysium is amazing because it’s a dense world to pick apart, Baldurs Gate 3 is an equally dense world that positions itself as a play area. If you can dream it, you can do it, and you’ll be delighted to discover that everyone else who played it dreamed and did completely differently to you. Plus, how can you not love that rotating party that follow you through the game?
Slay the Spire – For sheer hours dropped, Slay the Spire rivals even Animal Crossing: New Horizons for me. This rouguelike deck builder has had many imitators but nothing has come as close to this perfection, through which I can constantly battle with a smile on my face.
Hades – Rougelikes have had a real moment in the past decade, with the crowning jewel being Hades. Supergiant Games took all their skill in character design, music and narrative and applied it to a gameplay loop that I got stuck in for a long time. To this date, my longest single session of gaming is for Hades, a blistering 13 hour day spent grinding the dungeons while I ignored Uni essays.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – For sheer joy, nothing beats Mario Kart and the deluxe release of Mario Kart 8 gave us everything we could want from the franchise. The racing was slick, the tracks were sick and it was immediately accessible to anyone whether this was their first or fiftieth race. It is perfection and a ninth game has a lot to prove.
Maxxine is the culmination of a weird little trilogy made by Ti West and starring Mia Goth, one which we’re missing a catchy name for but which regardless consists of X, Pearl and now this. If I’m completely honest, neither of the first two films properly clicked for me like they did for others. I knew people who argued that X was some kind of subversive genius but I found it at its most satisfying when eschewing subversion for gory kills. Pearl I found even more hard work, a formless piece that hinges entirely on the threat of something cool happening and then also Mia Goth’s performance. Both I enjoyed overall but neither felt special. I expected the same from Maxxxine. I got something much more interesting, by which I mean worse.
The story here follows on directly from X, with Maxine working in the adult film industry in LA and auditioning for horror films. She gets a big part in an exciting horror sequel and we follow her getting ready for that. A series of murders is happening at the same time, targeting those around Maxine, all in the shadow of this satanic panic stuff that actually was a big thing in the eighties. Into that realm is also thrown a private detective who is chasing down Maxine and putting pressure on her about the events at the farm in X. The thing is, the plot does feel like the way I’m describing it, disparate strands just floating around until eventually there’s a big sloppy mess at the end. I could forgive the plot being a bit of a mess for a while as it was just a vehicle for set pieces, but once the end slaps us in the face with narrative, you can’t help but feel insulted.
[Kevin Bacon is] channelling Foghorn Leghorn by way of Jake Gittes from Chinatown if he was the human villain in a Muppet movie.
A big sloppy mess of plots requires a big sloppy mess of casts, all of whom seem to be from different films. We have the ever elegant Elizabeth Debicki playing a tough but fair director, Lily Collins showing a misunderstanding of the Yorkshire accent that is usually only reserved for Americans and Michele Monaghan getting to play a hard boiled cop for her two scenes. Two rise above the crop though. Naturally, having been in all three of these now, Mia Goth is getting pretty good at this thing. She has a wonderfully cinematic face, full of weird angles that you can’t look away from and given absolutely nothing, she is able to spin something. My favourite performance though, for some reason, is Kevin Bacon. He gets to play the private investigator, channelling Foghorn Leghorn by way of Jake Gittes from Chinatown if he was the human villain in a Muppet movie. I don’t understand what he’s doing or why, but when he crawls into a scene, his stench of corruption briefly turning the film into a 4D experience, I sat up. In this big confusing gumbo of a film, Bacon is a gift.
And now we get into my real beef with Maxxxine. The film, to its genuine credit, looks and sounds amazing. All of the people who worked on the production, visual effects and sound work for the film have knocked it out the park recreating the scuzzy feel of the world. Obviously, I didn’t spend a lot of time in LA during the eighties due to reasons involving my birth and lack thereof, but the important thing is that it feels authentic. It reminds me of other films made in that time, drenched in the stench of the time, like a good and nasty Brian De Palma film. Unfortunately, this is the root of the issue. Maxxxine is not a Brian De Palma film but it really believes it is.
[Maxxxine] will satisfy those who are vaguely familiar with the films of the time but if you’ve seen even one De Palma film […] you’re going to find the film empty.
For those who haven’t trawled the dusty shelves of eighties erotic thrillers, Brian De Palma is the mind behind such trash as Dressed to Kill, Phantom of the Paradise and most importantly for this review, Body Double. His films are full of nudity, violence and a general feeling that you wouldn’t want to watch this with your mother. I know for a fact that Ti West is trying to make a De Palma film because of how much he cribs from Body Double, whether it’s the focus on Hollywood, the gloved killer (which De Palma himself took from giallo films) or most egregious of all, a sequence soundtracked by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. West plays “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” over a disco scene in a move that pales when compared to the excessive brilliance of De Palma taking five minutes out of Body Double to walk onto the music video of “Relax.” It’s the kind of pointless yet intoxicating move that even a lower budget film like Maxxxine would get test-screened out of it, and it’s also the kind of thing that means we still talk about Body Double decades later. Maxxxine has no such scene and it’s making me worry if posting the review a week or two after release is delivering the review into a world where this film is already irrelevant.
I don’t know if Maxxxine is terrible, that’s what makes this review tricky. Weirdly, the film I keep comparing it to in my head, more than any Brian De Palma film, more than any 80s slasher, more than even the previous two films in the trilogy, is Joker. Very specifically, the reason I kept thinking about Joker was the reliance that Maxxxine has on reference points, to the point of almost parody. Cast your mind back five years, remember how the conversation with Joker was mainly “you’ll like this if you haven’t seen The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver.” I think Maxxxine is the same. It will satisfy those who are vaguely familiar with the films of the time but if you’ve seen even one De Palma film, one giallo film, one straight to video slasher, you’re going to find the film empty. This quote from David Schmader rattled around my head in the aftermath of my viewing, where he says of Showgirls “the subtext is stunning until you realise there is no subtext.” That is Maxxxine. It wears the clothes of a film that’s about something but underneath is merely cheap thrills that are neither cheap enough nor thrilling enough to disguise from the lack of aboutness. And again, the film insists upon itself constantly. It opens with a Bette Davis quote and then closes with “Bette Davis Eyes”, it is desperately trying to seem to be about something when it is deeply and genuinely hollow.
My final question is one that is for the people who have already seen the film, because it’s a point that confounds me; how are we supposed to feel about Maxine as a character? Are we meant to like her? Feel sorry for her? Are we meant to think she’s a great actress? That last question in particular was in my head the whole time because of the opening audition scene. Maxine does a great performance in that audition, but it’s clearly for a film that is terrible, hence them asking to see her breasts and the script having the line “she addresses the camera through her trauma”, a clunker of a line so clunky that even Ti West couldn’t have put that in by accident. Is she meant to be some lost talent forced to work in low rent horror sequels? Or are we meant to be judgemental of her past? She seems ashamed of it and is trying very hard to erase any trace of what happened in Texas, so is she an evil figure? Pearl complicates the conundrum because is that West trying to draw parallels between a murderer and a survivor? Are the two one and the same? Is he spending so long with his head in the sand of subtext that he has failed to include any actual text? It all feels like a mess, one of those trilogies that, when the three films are taken as a whole, weakens each individual product.
So yeah, Maxxxine! It’s pretty rubbish! If you want a handful of wacky performances and a few cool gore scenes and literally nothing else, this will sort you out. However, in the time it took for me to write this review, Longlegs came out and showed that it’s not as hard to make a good horror film as Ti West makes it seem. If you saw the other two in the trilogy, sure, I guess watch this one. If you didn’t, the homework is not worth it and your time would be better spent getting a copy of Body Double and feeling authentic eighties sleaze, not this off brand, sugar-free, “Professor Peppy” knock-off of a film.
Last week, I asked people on my Instagram, you people, what you wanted to see me review next. Did you want to see me review The Beast, a complicated and heady movie that immediately became my favourite of the year? Or did you want me to review the fourth Bad Boys movie? By now, the answer is probably obvious, but I have the last laugh here, because I think you all expected this to be a rant. You expected me to get so worked up at this silly action movie and start swearing and doing all that nonsense. My friends, the joke is on you, as I have found myself with an inexplicable fondness for the new Bad Boys films.
Let me explain. I think the first two Bad Boys films are pretty repulsive, films that have a great deal of unearned swagger and show all the worst instincts of Michael Bay. Bay has done great work away from these films (for whatever reason, I am infatuated with The Rock and Ambulance), but everything I don’t like about him is on very full display. That’s what made the third film, Bad Boys for Life a surprise for me. Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah took the reigns and injected a surprising amount of life into the franchise, while stripping away the worst urges that tainted the franchise before. Adding to the fondness is the fact that I saw this film in Florida with my housemate Maysam, a genuine Florida man, minus all the negative connotations of the label. I couldn’t say for sure whether the swaying factor was that these new directors knew what they were doing or that I was getting into that Florida spirit, but I found myself enjoying it, as did Maysam who described it as “almost as good as Uncut Gems.” The point being, you thought I had no love for these films, when in actual fact, I have a little bit. Looks like you just got out played by the player.
Anyway. That was four years ago and it would be an understatement to say that things are different now than they were in January 2020. I’m no longer in Florida, Arbi and Fallah had the Batgirl movie ripped from their hands in the cruellest way imaginable and Will Smith… Well, he did a thing that if nothing else, is responsible for the funniest thing Judd Apatow has ever written. We’ve all had a few setbacks. But when you find yourself in bad times, you know which specific type of boy to call… Bad.
I had to start a new paragraph because I had no idea how to recover from that joke and there was no smooth and easy way to segue into telling you the plot of Bad Boys: Ride or Die. Instead, I’m just placing it down in front of you, blatant as can be. The plot is, not what you’re here for. Mike and Marcus both find themselves thinking about their place in the world, whether from brushes with death or the arrival of some holy matrimony. However, it all goes awry when some terrible plot is revealed to frame their former captain and send the two men on the run. As I said, plot isn’t crucial, though some credit is due. This film leans a lot on plot points from the previous film and when those are coming, it does remind the audience of crucial details. Some might call that lazy writing, I call that helpful, because I forgot who most of these people are. Ultimately, the film understands that you’re not here for narrative depth and that all double crosses can be predicted from the second an actor walks on-screen, so it does just enough to hang everything else off.
To which we may ask: what is hanging off that flimsy plot thread? The main response is, charisma from our two leads, the thing that brings many people into these films yet conversely makes a very good attempt at pushing me away. I should be transparent: I don’t like Will Smith or Martin Lawrence. It’s nothing personal against the two of them and it has always been this way, I just don’t enjoy either of their star personas and have never seen a film that proved me wrong hard enough to not be a fluke. That feeling remains in this, the fourth Bad Boys film. Smith and Lawrence do nothing you haven’t seen from them before, but by design. Fans want this. Fans like this. I see Martin Lawrence gurning his way through every scene and roll my eyes, I see Will Smith posing all tough like with a gun in each hand and my heartbeat drops a BPM or two. This is fine. Lots of laughs and indeed lmaos were had in my screening and good for them. This is just not a dynamic I’m invested in, whether they’re wittily trading barbs or wistfully staring at that sweet Miami skyline.
In this void, one would hope a strong supporting cast would jump in to save the day for me, but alas Smith and Lawrence try their best to strong arm them out the way as well. Rhea Seehorn is cruelly wasted in a gruff turn, Tiffany Haddish turns up to do her shouty thing for a scene and our old friend DJ Khaled returns to atone for his crimes. Two actors do get to shine though. Dennis McDonald returns as Reggie, the quiet boyfriend of Lawrence’s daughter, and he gets a genuine stand out scene that is a culmination of all the bullying the franchise has handed him. Clear runaway though is Joe Pantoliano, who does the best acting in the film despite his character dying in the last entry. He keeps popping up, whether in old videos or hallucinations, and serves as a reminder of how much we all love Joe Pantoliano. Wasn’t he great in The Matrix? Didn’t you enjoy trying to work him out in Memento? Isn’t it fun to point at the screen whenever he appears and go “hey look it’s Joe Pantolinao?” The answer to all of those is yes. He’s a veteran character actor who never seems to get enough flowers and if he appears in every Bad Boys film as a ghost for the rest of his life, I’ll be happy.
I was saying earlier that this new era of Bad Boys is one that I find less repellent than the old one and while the lack of leering is welcome, we still find energy and personality through the cinematography. Again, this isn’t me dunking on Bay, you don’t make a film like Ambulance while resting on your laurels, but Adil and Bilall have a real dynamism to the way they throw their camera around that Bay’s BB films just didn’t have. Think of the smoothness of the fight scenes in a film like John Wick: Chapter Four. Think about how precise the camerawork and blocking is in those, how we’re neatly led to the action at all moments. Now think about what it would look like if the camera operators had downed two cans of Red Bull and started lobbing the camera between each other. Congratulations, you’re now picturing Bad Boys: Ride or Die. It’s not quite as slick or masterful as any of my beloved Wick flicks, but the energy is certainly infectious and while messy, I can’t say I wasn’t entertained. I had to reach for my pocket ibuprofen once or twice, sure, but I was giggling regardless.
The big issue though, and the thing that stops me enjoying these new films any more than I do, is that there are only ever three things happening on screen. Either there is action, there are quips or there is wistful staring at that sweet Miami skyline. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, there is more than one of these things happening, but never all three. I had this realisation about half an hour into the film (which to be fair, is close to seven hours into the franchise) and it coloured everything I saw after. Oh, this is an action scene. Oh great, now they’re quipping. Oh cool, some quips and some shooting. Oh well, now time to look at that sweet Miami skyline. You become entirely detached from the film and just start losing yourself in the concept of a Bad Boys film. Is this a universal complaint? No, almost certainly not. However it was something that just ate and ate at me, through decent action scene and decent quip scene and decent staring at that sweet Miami skyline scene. By the end, cinema itself felt deconstructed. Maybe this is the Bad Boys film that the late Jean-Luc Godard would have vibed with.
All in all, it’s alright! If you like the Bad Boys films, you won’t be let down. If you haven’t liked any of the last three, you won’t be converted. And if you haven’t seen any Bad Boys films, why on Earth are you starting with this one? It has enough energy to whittle away an evening, but not enough to lodge firmly in your brain. That said, if there is a fifth one, trust and believe that I will be there again, opening weekend, ready to savour that sweet Miami skyline.
By this point, Luca Guadagnino being attached to a project is enough to have it skyrocket to the top of my Must Watch list. Since that first time seeing Call Me By Your Name on New Years Eve, I knew I had encountered a director who created special worlds. The release the following year of his polarising (but ultimately marvellous) Suspiria remake confirmed it and in 2022, Bones and All truly sealed the deal. Wherever Guadagnino went, I would follow (eventually follow, my unwatched copies of I Am Love and We Are Who We Are still look at me with very sad eyes.) The point I’m getting at is, whatever film Guadagnino made next I would watch, even if it was about something I don’t care about like, say, sports. Lo and behold, his next movie is about tennis. But, in a brave and Italian twist, Guadagnino asks us: what if tennis was sexy?
Challengers is the story of “what if tennis was sexy” but also unfurls into a great deal more. We follow a triptych through a 13 year period in which they fall in love, play tennis, fall out of love, stop playing tennis and eventually, find themselves playing tennis. I’m being glib but the impressive thing of the story isn’t necessarily the events of the story but the way they play out. From the opening five minutes, we get the basic idea of the plot. Two close friends fall in love with the same girl (who is forced out of playing tennis into coaching it by an injury), she ends up with one of them as he becomes a professional tennis player while the other fades into obscurity, but the two are reunited at a pivotal match for both their careers. Real simple set-up. But, the skill of the film is in its structure and how it bounces between its timelines like a ball in a tennis match (I am the first person to notice this, thank you for appreciating how smart I am.) While I was initially worried that it would get tiresome returning to the same tennis match and bouncing forwards and back from the past, what the structure actually does is layer meaning upon the initial premise. A simple tennis match becomes a fraught battle in which two former friends may be about to finally destroy each others lives, powered by lust, capitalism and pride. It’s a structure that I think will lend really well to multiple viewings but even on a first viewing, the constant build of narrative information creates a whirlwind of emotional meaning.
Obviously, that emotional connection with the narrative is only really possible because the characters that the narrative is built around are so strong, as individual units and as combinations. In fact, usually with these sorts of reviews I start by talking about the main character, an attribution that Challengers proudly rejects. These are three characters given equal weight and so I guess I’ll just run through the cast in the order they’re credited. Zendaya plays Tashi Donaldson, former tennis pro and current tennis manager/expert/wife. She is the catalyst for this passionate friendship implosion and gets two separate and magical introductions. In the modern day section of the film she’s a cold and steely figure who stands out as much in a crowded stand as she would if the crowd were disappeared, but then in the past she is a force of nature, bursting onto the court and into men’s hearts with a casual fury that bewitches. Having not seen Euphoria, I’m not that familiar with Zendaya as an actress, basically knowing her exclusively from sandy movies with large worms and spice lords. Clearly though, she has gotten good at picking the right directors to work with, because her star power and weapons grade “it girl” charisma are neatly fitted into the world of a rising tennis starlet who no one can look away from.
Speaking of our lookers, let me introduce you to Mike Faist as Art Donaldson. He caught my eye in West Side Story and was my favourite part of it, this tortured dream-boat of a boy who seemed destined for something magical. And now, here he is, making magic on screen yet again. Because we first meet Art as a professional tennis player, he has an easy power and swagger that you see with pro-sports people, but whenever we flash back, he’s still believable as a lanky loser with the possibility of doing something greater. He’s paired with Josh O’Connor as Patrick Zweig, also getting to play both against type and into fun. In real life and most of his other roles, O’Connor is a stone cold sweetie. He’s shy in interviews, talks about how much he loves Ratatouille and for all intents and purposes seems to have escaped from Pixar’s film. Here however, Patrick gets to be a real dog. There’s a grin O’Connor gives him that is a dirty, cocky, real arrogant kind of confidence that is also absolutely magnetic. Part of you wants to hate him, the rest of you is disappearing from your body in that long strand of drool hanging out your mouth. We really once again find ourselves up against the kinds of performances whose magnetism, charisma and sheer watchability are beyond analysis. Considering these are three actors I was familiar with before the film, I was astounded by how much they all disappeared into character.
If we’re talking about any of the technical elements of this film, we have to immediately talk about the musical score of Challengers, provided by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Reznor comes from the band Nine Inch Nails and Ross is a producer who has been rolled into the NiN fold, but the two have become most famous for their film composition. Their most beloved work by film nerds at large (including yours truly) was for The Social Network, for which the pair won an Oscar, though they certainly haven’t been slacking since then. Four more collaborations with David Fincher, one more with Guadagnino and working on my ultimate soft spot Empire of Light come to mind as highlights, all before we even mention their second Oscar win for Soul. The two have range and Challengers proves it again. They take us to Gone Girl by way of Troye Sivan, Charli XCX and Sufjan Stevens all before getting lost in the mosh pit of the gay club. In lieu of breathlessly explaining the film to my partner after sprinting home from the cinema, I just played her the first track on the soundtrack and she instantly knew what this movie is. What is especially impressive about that fact is that while the score tells you what movie you’re in, it also delicately wrong foots you emotionally. Music theory was never my strong suit so indulge me here, but these delicate piano notes that sound initially mournful ascend in ways you weren’t expecting, leading to this bizarre euphoria rising from the dust. Those tracks then pair up with a central motif which returns across the film, layering in noise and meaning like butter in a lovely flaky pastry. At this point, I wouldn’t be too shocked if it’s my album of the year, such bangers does it contain.
And that would all be enough. I promise, I would really be happy with a film if that was everything I got from it. But there’s so much more, which I promise I won’t linger on too long because I know brevity isn’t my speciality. The cinematography is beautiful, getting right up into the faces of characters in very sensual ways and then doing bonkers stuff. Challengers is one of those movies where every shot is the best possible way of visually telling the story and oh lord was I hooting and hollering. There is a POV shot near the end of the film which sounds like the kind of thing that should cause motion sickness, yet is actually a case of absolutely sick visual brilliance. These are weaved together with an editing that allows the pace to never let up. As I said earlier, the structure could threaten to slow the film but the way everything slots together in the final piece is magic. We slowly get to know everyone and as the film moves along, the pace keeps quickening. There’s a brief moment where we slow down for a stormer of a storm and then bam, a frenetic final act that will make you want to scream with joy. For a film that isn’t particularly short, I could have immediately gone into a second screening and left that too with as much energy as the first round.
You’re probably not shocked after all that to hear that I think Challengers is one of the best films of the year. With the way UK distribution works, we’ve had an excellent start to the year and with a potential drought of films coming up, this is the kind of heart pumping, chest bashing, serotonin overload of a film to keep us sustained. Try and catch it while it’s still in cinemas but otherwise, just pre-order that blu-ray now, you are gonna want to come back to this forever and savour an ace movie.
Hello! I am here to talk about the Oscars, because they’re dumb and pointless and don’t matter, which is why they’re so exciting and fun and feel like they matter. I usually do a predictions list before the nominations come out and sometimes I’ll pair that with a final one that predicts the ultimate winners. This time though, I figured I’d skip the first part and just try to go all in on these final predictions, giving a shot at predicting every category! What a weird and pointless endeavour! Still, what better way to celebrate the Oscars than with a time consuming and pointless venture? Each category will have my prediction for what will win and we’ll slowly add onto that. For a category like Best Documentary Short, I will probably struggle to find all the nominees, but in categories I’ve seen all the entries for, expect to see both “Should Win” and “Should Have Been Nominated” along with maybe some written words! We’re gonna have a lovely little mix of some speculation and some unasked for opinions, so buckle in and just scroll to wherever is most interesting for you!
Best Documentary Short Film
Will Win: The ABCs of Book Burning
Best Live Action Short Film
Will Win: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
The other films are going to struggle to compete against a name as high profile as Wes Anderson and while I’d have preferred a different short from this anthology, it would be a nice win and a funny little way for Wes Anderson to finally get an Oscar.
Best Animated Short Film
Will Win: Letter to a Pig
Best Documentary
Will Win: 20 Days in Mariupol
Should Have Been Nominated: Kokomo City
For a category in which so many great films can be made, I always despair a little at Best Documentary for choosing to reward the topic more than the film. Take last year, in which Navalny won over All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a move that clearly only happened because no one saw either film. By that same merit, 20 Days in Mariupol is a slam dunk for the win, a look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine which is a conflict that us snobbish Westerners can all agree on and not one of those “complicated” ones. I’ll be honest, I haven’t seen any of the films in this category, documentaries often take longer to make it to UK shores than other categories do, so my snobbishness could well be unfounded. 20 Days seems like some genuinely good journalism and documenting of an ongoing and very real issue, it’s just not the kind of documentary I’m usually interested in. The kind of thing I’m interested in is Kokomo City. It’s a documentary that is a series of interviews with transgender sex workers, which gives an in depth and compassionate look at an underground scene but does so with a sense of levity and a genuine artistry. If you didn’t see it, seek it out, it’s the kind of film that an award like this should point attention towards!
Best Visual Effects
Will Win: The Creator
Should Win: Godzilla Minus One
Should Have Been Nominated: Oppenheimer
Even though I think The Creator is the worst film of the selection, its visuals are stupendous. On a budget that’s impressively low, the VFX crew created a world you fully believed in, even if its storytelling let it down. My choice though would be Godzilla Minus One, an even cheaper movie that is a magical thing to behold. Godzilla looks just as good as (and often better than) the American interpretations and you believe every second he’s on screen. Easily the most baffling omission though is Oppenheimer. I guess because they emphasised how many of the effects were practical, people believed it didn’t fit the category. But, a practical effect is still a visual effect! It’s a weird reverse of that thing where the original Tron was ineligible because they used computers for the effects. Bonkers! More impressive, it’s one of the few categories where Oppenheimer didn’t have a presence and yet it still feels like it was done dirty.
Best Film Editing
Will Win: Jennifer Lame for Oppenheimer
Should Win: Thelma Schoonmaker for Killers of the Flower Moon
Should Have Been Nominated: Johnathan Alberts for All of Us Strangers
Controversially, editing films that are really long is really impressive! Anyone can snip away at a film to get it to 100 minutes, but it takes a true master to make a long film flow with the ease of a film half its length. Both Jennifer Lame and Thelma Schoonmaker have done some of the best editing work I’ve ever seen, in ways both really big and really small. Truthfully, either of them could win and either of them would really deserve to win, I just wanted an excuse to mention them both in conversation. They edited films made by cinematic visionaries but those visions would have been nothing without the editors. Similarly, the ghostly power of All of Us Strangers comes from its editing. We slip between faces and images of faces in ways that blur time and identity and all ultimately come together to form this powerful emotional core. Intangibility of all kinds powers the film and a huge portion of that comes in how the editing slots together these intangible little things into a big thing that is coherent despite being ephemeral. What I’m saying sounds like nonsense but it’s editing that is almost impossible to describe, such is its inherently brilliant and cinematic nature.
Best Costume Design
Will Win and Should Win: Holly Waddington for Poor Things
Should Have Been Nominated: Stacey Battat for Priscilla
Three of the films in this category are the obligatory period drama picks, in which artists very successfully recreate looks from the past. I don’t mean to diminish their work but again, it’s not the kind of thing I get excited for. Barbie is a more interesting shout, in which everything has to look like something that a doll would wear, but Poor Things is an undeniably perfect choice here. Not only is there a period element in the Victorian setting, but there is this little bonkers thread that makes every dress, every suit, every weird pair of shoes pop. It’s a slam dunk choice. I would have enjoyed some love for Priscilla though, it is a film so precisely constructed in that way that all Sofia Coppola films are. With Priscilla’s outfits being an important part of the confinement of the film, they have to be perfect for the film to work and they truly are perfect. It could never surmount Poor Things but a nomination would have been appreciated.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Will Win: Maestro
Should Win: Poor Things
Should Have Been Nominated: Talk to Me
CHAOS WIN: Golda
So, this is a weird little category. As an award, it usually goes to one of two things; either a superhero movie or a biopic with a “transformative performance.” This year, it will be the latter, for weird and controversial reasons. Bradley Cooper is unrecognisable in Maestro, sure, but it hinges on this weird issue of a very pronounced fake nose. Much of the work is subtle, but that nose draws attention and it may just win the statue. The much worse version of this and my easy chaos pick is Golda, in which Helen Mirren wears a fake nose to play a political figure in the Israeli government. It is everything Maestro was criticised for and worse, just a terrible terrible film to talk about at a time when Israel are committing the crimes they’re committing. Fingers crossed it doesn’t become an awful footnote in Oscar history. What would deserve this is Poor Things, a film which has the perfect blend of obvious and squelchy effects (god bless Willem Dafoe’s face) and tasteful makeup work on Bella that evolves as she does. It seems like it and Oppenheimer will split the technical categories so my fingers are crossed here. A little recognition though for Talk To Me would have been a treat. Squishy monster effects never seem to get the appreciation they deserve and oh, what squishes we were gifted.
Best Cinematography
Will Win and Should Win: Hoyte van Hoytema for Oppenheimer
Should Have Been Nominated: Dan Laustsen for John Wick: Chapter Four
I don’t know how the hell El Conde got nominated, but at least that weird film with a blood sucking Margaret Thatcher gets some notoriety for the rest of time. I also don’t know why Maestro is in this category. Is it because it’s black and white? That’s pathetic. Killers of the Flower Moon is very pretty in places and Poor Things uses great cinematography to show off sensational production design (more on that soon) but this is absolutely an award that Oppenheimer has to take. Whenever I think of Hoyte can Hoytema, I think about him lugging around these huge IMAX cameras on these shoulders, a physical endeavour that he overcomes for the sake of creating some of the most beautiful images ever seen. And yeah, it’s easy to make space stuff look pretty, but making guys in rooms talking look engaging? That is an art and one that he will certainly be rewarded for. It wouldn’t beat Oppenheimer because there is clearly no better cinematography this year, but a nomination for John Wick: Chapter Four would have been a treat. These set pieces are stunning and succeed in looking beautiful while still keeping the action visible and coherent. Again, that sounds simple but I cannot imagine the logistics or planning that go into one of these sequences, let alone ten of them in a single film. Stunning stuff that still isn’t as exciting as blokes in rooms talking bombs.
Best Production Design
Will Win: Barbie
Should Win: Poor Things
Should Have Been Nominated: Asteroid City
Very good stuff going on in the category this year. Barbie is naturally the headline, which I think is helped by that whole “the world ran out of pink paint” thing that went on for a while. It is obviously brilliantly constructed, but I think it struggles to compete with Poor Things. A lot of its behind the scenes stills have shown a lot of green screens, but they’ve also shown unspeakably lavish sets, built with intricacy and care. Barbie would deserve the award but the world of Poor Things is such an alien world (especially compared to the world of dolls) that you have to fully believe in the world to let anything get in. Speaking of aliens though, show a little love for Asteroid City! I know it’s a cliché to say that Wes Anderson films are beautiful but God, this is a stunner. Plus, it’s entirely about construction and storytelling, so thematically it has to be on point! Anyway, a robbed film, we all treated it too harshly.
Best Sound
Will Winand Should Win: The Zone of Interest
Should Have Been Nominated: John Wick: Chapter Four
At one point, Oppenheimer had a shot with this award but the tide has turned. The sound is immaculate and again, it has to work for the film to work, but The Zone of Interest is an all timer. The sound of the film has to tell a separate story to the visual component of the film, which is so much more complicated than it sounds. Words are not strong enough to talk about what has been achieved so all I can recommend is that you check it out for yourself and feel absolutely terrible for a week! To go lighter though, I would have loved some appreciation for John Wick: Chapter Four. Action films are great because of how satisfying and cool the sounds of people being punched or shot or kicked in the face are and few films feature as much punching or shooting or kicking as John Wick. You can listen to the film and truly believe that you heard a man roll down two flights of stairs and that is the kind of movie magic I believe we should celebrate.
Best Original Song
Will Win: “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie
Should Win: “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie
Should Have Been Nominated: “Dear Alien (Who Art in Heaven)” from Asteroid City
CHAOS WIN: “The Fire Inside” from Flamin’ Hot
The nominees in this category mean that a film about the creation of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is now an Oscar nominee. Wild. If it wins, anarchy. In reality though, it’s a Barbie competition. The Academy love Billie Eilish so they’re very likely to reward her again for her (admittedly great) song that soundtracks the big emotional moment at the end of the film as well as the credits. While the film ends, it’s the song that sticks with you. However, I and many others love the deeply silly “I’m Just Ken”, a song which channels the melodramatic torment at the heart of the silliest man of the year. Somehow it still makes me giggle after all this overexposure, which is a marvel in and of itself. Call me a broken record, but I think Asteroid City should have been nominated. The “Dear Alien” song is a catchy and silly ditty which, unlike many nominations that often appear in this category, actually exists in the world of the film. I would always so much rather have that than just a song to play over the credits.
Best Original Score
Will Win and Should Win: Ludwig Göransson for Oppenheimer
Should Have Been Nominated: kwes. for Rye Lane
Again, this is one of those categories where there are a few nice options, where Poor Things could be a really cool winner… But nothing can stand in the way of Oppenheimer. I obviously love Ludwig Göransson for his work on Community and the fact that he has gone from this little sitcom that was always on the edge of cancellation to a colossal blockbuster without missing a beat remains genuinely impressive. It’s also a propulsive score that powers the audience through what could so easily be a challenging film and yet isn’t. I can’t imagine Oppenheimer without it. Another score that is a part of the films personality is the one for Rye Lane by kwes. Rye Lane is a film that is fun, such a breeze and very (without sounding completely cringe) cool, which the score amplifies. It is the perfect music for walking around and chatting and again, Rye Lane doesn’t exist in as perfect a form it does without that score.
Best International Feature Film
Will Win: The Zone of Interest
Should Have Been Nominated: The Taste of Things
I feel bad because I haven’t really done my dues with this category. It’s always tricky to catch the international films before the ceremony and so to be frank, I haven’t. To counteract that, I won’t say what I would pick, because I’ve only seen one of the films. That film though, The Zone of Interest, seems set to take the category. It is, after all, the only film in this category that is also nominated for Best Picture, its odds not hurt by the fact that it is also excellent. It will also be the first time that the UK picks up the prize in this category, enjoy that trivia nerds. I would have loved to see a nomination for The Taste of Things though. For those who don’t know, countries can only nominate one film to represent themselves and France chose Taste over Anatomy of a Fall, which also got nominated for Best Picture. This has resulted in a huge and slightly messy war in which Taste has been an unfortunate casualty, doubly unfortunate because it’s an incredible film! It’s this beautiful and meditative study on food and love and the space where those two blend into a tasty sauce, which I have been raving about since October. Please, I urge you to give it a chance, as long as you don’t do it on an empty stomach. It is such an underappreciated treat that is at risk of being lost to the footnotes of film history.
Best Animated Feature
Will Win and Should Win: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
This will be a quick one because I also haven’t seen much of the category, but that’s not going to slow me down too much because the two I have seen are the two that make up the competition here. It is coming down to either The Boy and the Heron or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Boy has a chance because Ghibli have never won this award before and with what is allegedly Miyazaki’s last film for the company, this would be the perfect time to reward him and Ghibli. However, the film is very abstract and requires you to work for it and I don’t know if all the people voting will appreciate that. Spider-Verse is the much easier film and a film which, admittedly, I prefered. It has its frustrating cliffhanger ending and the animators weren’t well treated, but God, what a picture. If you want to celebrate how far we can push animation, this is the most interesting case Hollywood has made for the medium since… Well, the last Spider-Verse film.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Will Win: Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach for Barbie
Should Win: Tony McNamara for Poor Things
Should Have Been Nominated: Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon
After all the hubub about Gerwig not getting a Best Director nomination for Barbie, expect her to take Adapted Screenplay. I’m saying this like it’s a foregone conclusion but actually, this is a pretty competitive category, full of worthy winners. Poor Things, American Fiction, Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest would all deserve the win, with Poor Things just barely edging out the competition for me for the simple reason that I find the dialogue very funny. But man, would it have been so hard to nominate Killers of the Flower Moon? This is such a large and complicated story which is somehow wrangled into a film that is not just watchable but compellingly so. I think it is witchcraft on all fronts and should be rewarded for that magic.
Best Original Screenplay
Will Win: Celine Song for Past Lives
Should Win: Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik for May December
Should Have Been Nominated: Ari Aster for Beau is Afraid
Past Lives only got two nominations but has this warm feeling behind it, where the people who love it just absolutely adore it. I wasn’t quite as infatuated but also I had the feeling that this was a film I could return to and constantly pick up more from. Many are rooting for either Anatomy of a Fall or The Holdovers, but I just have this gut feeling that Past Lives could take it. What will not win though is May December, a film that is nominated by basically a miracle. It is such a tricky story and very emotionally complicated and I cannot even fathom how you go about making a film about this topic that works. And while it never stood a chance, Beau is Afraid being nominated would have been incredible. Ari Aster poured his weird little heart out onto the page and created a film that is, without question, an Ari Aster film. It did not work for most people but it really worked for me and to be honest, I think how much it didn’t work for a people is a sign that this film had real impact. It’s a bonkers mess but weirdly works. Sue me, I would put it here.
Best Supporting Actress
Will Win and Should Win: Da’Vine Joy Randolph for The Holdovers
Should Have Been Nominated: Rachel McAdams for Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Of all the categories this year, this is the one which is least likely for an upset. For the entire awards season, Da’Vine Joy Randolph has been clearing up and you know what? Totally deserved. Her role is amazing, she elevates the film and all her speeches have been awesome. I look forward to her winning this, it won’t be a shock but it’ll be a lovely moment. Apologies to the other nominees, no one else is coming close. Someone who could have come close though would have been Rachel McAdams for Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I believe this film is really going to stand the test of time and man, if America Ferrara is getting nominated almost solely on the back of that speech in the middle of Barbie, McAdams has a version of the speech which is so much smarter and more heartbreaking and has these beautiful layers going on that people of all ages and genders will gravitate to. She’s ace, should have snuck in here and then also lost to Da’Vine Joy Randolph.
Best Supporting Actor
Will Win: Robert Downey Jr. for Oppenheimer
Should Win: Mark Ruffalo for Poor Things
Should Have Been Nominated: Charles Melton for May December
I find this a slightly weird category to write about because for me, I just can’t understand how Charles Melton is not only not the frontrunner for this award but isn’t even nominated. Not only is his performance better than any of the other ones in this category but it is also my favourite performance of the year full stop. You watch him on screen with this sick feeling in your stomach and see a boy trapped in a man’s body, failing to get out or even be fully seen. If you haven’t seen May December, watch it just for Melton’s performance, it is that good. Anyway, everything after that is quite underwhelming. By now, Robert Downey Jr. has the award in the bag, but some silly little guys could stand to cause an upset. Ryan Gosling was great as Ken and Mark Ruffalo plays a version of that character, turned up to a brilliantly nauseating level. Ruffalo would be my pick, but Gosling is more likely to come in with the upset if for some reason Downey Jr. doesn’t take the trophy.
Best Actress
Will Winand Should Win: Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon
Should Have Been Nominated: Vivian Oparah for Rye Lane
Best Actress is maybe the most competitive of the big five categories this year, coming down to two absolutely brilliant performers giving some of the best performances we’ve seen this decade. This two horse race isn’t to diminish the other actresses in competition, the other three are all great performers who did pretty great work across their careers, but imagine trying to beat Lily Gladstone or Emma Stone. The two have been handing the baton between each other since November and about a month ago, Stone seemed like the one to beat. Her role in Poor Things is a very strange one, but it’s a strangeness she’s allowed to lean into and make really funny. A role this comedic is rarely celebrated this much and that’s awesome! But, Gladstone has been my choice since the moment I saw Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a more typically dramatic role, but one that she nails. Her eyes contain emotions that her face isn’t allowed to process and her body carries generations of weight that can never be off loaded. I am bad at talking about why acting works, I just think she’s amazing and this would be an amazing win for the Native American community, topped with what would be a very emotional speech from Gladstone. Indulge me though (you know, for a change), Vivian Oparah should have been nominated for Rye Lane. She got a surprise nom at the BAFTAs, but clearly no Americans saw the most gleefully romantic movie of this year or most other years. Both our leads deserve props for what they do, but Oparah gets the more dramatic arc and is hiding her emotions for much of the time, letting them all build into a really joyous finale. She’s ace, keep an eye out for her in the future!
Best Actor
Will Win and Should Win: Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer
Should Have Been Nominated: Andrew Scott for All of Us Strangers
CHAOS WIN: Bradley Cooper for Maestro
Can we all agree that it would be hysterical if Bradley Cooper wins this? It feels like Cooper basically handpicked the role for himself to win an Oscar and everyone could smell it and has refused to give him a single award this year. But if he does sneak in? I will piss myself with laughter, it would make the Oscars such a farce. Anyway, this was another two horse race for a while, but Paul Giamatti has since lost steam with his performance in The Holdovers. He’s lovely and warm, but he cannot compete with Cillian Murphy. IMAX as a camera format is almost exclusively used for big landscapes and spectacular action, not close ups, but in Christopher Nolan’s hands he make’s Murphy’s face the biggest face you have ever seen. In that face though, magnitudes. You read the world in his face, from ambition to terror to anguish. He’s fab and those terrible people with Peaky Blinders tattoos will enjoy an extra large can of lager to celebrate his win. Someone I thought genuinely could have had a chance getting nominated was Andrews Scott for All of Us Strangers. He gives one of those wonderful performances that blossoms as the film continues, where every new scene reveals something about his emotional state that you hadn’t considered before. By the time the film wraps up, you realise quite how much was on Scott’s shoulders (which is even after you realise he only has three co-stars) and also he’s great because he made me cry. A big omission here, but one that I think would still lose to Cillian Murphy.
Best Director
Will Win: Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer
Should Win: Martin Scorsese for Killers of the Flower Moon
Should Have Been Nominated: Raine Allen-Miller for Rye Lane
After 25 years as a filmmaker with a track record that makes his contemporaries blush, Christopher Nolan seems primed to finally take home his first Best Director Oscar. For Oppenheimer, it’s fully worth it, a film which required an untold amount of wrangling to make coherent, let alone compelling. In what is an incredibly strong category (one in which I genuinely don’t think you could or should squeeze anyone out to make room for someone like Greta Gerwig), Nolan is the clear favourite for once. I would love to see Scorsese take it though. He has still only won this award once after ten nominations and Killers of the Flower Moon feels like the apex of a career already full of highlights. I feel similarly about it as I do Twin Peaks: The Return, in that I hope it isn’t the last thing we get from a legendary director, but it would be a phenomenal final note to end on. Say it with me though, justice for Rye Lane! I am a broken record and refuse to be fixed! Raine Allen-Miller has created a film that appears deceptively simple, but is such a gentle balancing act to perfect that she deserves immense credit. In the same way that Richard Linklater rarely gets the credit he’s due for choreographing the Before trilogy, Allen-Miller makes it look easy. Crucially, she also makes it feel new, a film that is indebted to the Before trilogy but not some mere imitator. It feels like in every scene, she picked the most interesting way to visually tell the story and never once made the wrong choice. I cannot wait for what she does next, but I also am forever grateful to her for giving us Rye Lane.
Best Picture
Will Win: Oppenheimer
Should Win: Killers of the Flower Moon
Should Have Been Nominated: The Taste of Things and Rye Lane
CHAOS WIN: Maestro
Alright, finally here. You have scrolled all the way down to read this one, past hours of work I spent writing, just to get my thoughts on Best Picture and to that I say: yeah, fair enough, let’s not waste anymore time then, eh? Maestro is by far the worst film on this list and while I would struggle to actively call it bad, it is a film that has no vision, no perspective and no real reason to exist outside of winning an Oscar. It would be an unbelievably funny win, a historic “how did that happen” moment and part of me almost wants it for the surprise. With that discounted though, we’re left with nine really solid nominees. American Fiction is a funny drama that’s about prejudice but also how that competes with how to actually live a life and then also a bunch of great jokes about being a writer. Anatomy of a Fall is an incredibly smart courtroom drama that’s less about whodunnit and more about what goes into what we believe about whodunnit. Barbie is a blockbuster that had no right being as great as it was, sneaking subversiveness into an impressive corporate product. The Holdovers is one of those “movies they don’t make anymore” movies that is warm and lovely while never sugarcoating the dark bits, more fit to be a holiday classic than it is a major contender in this category. Past Lives is a gorgeous and complex drama about two people and their feelings, the kind of thing that is set to resonate deeply with quite a few but also bounce off just as many people. Poor Things is far too weird and far too excellent to be a contender at this ceremony and somehow is. What a miracle it is, though your parents would do well to watch it when you’re not around. Finally, The Zone of Interest is a film that we are destined to talk for decades and is in real conversation with what the future of cinema could look like, of course it won’t win because it is too good for that.
Which leaves us with two. As I’ve been saying throughout this post and in my best of the year list, Killers of the Flower Moon is a masterpiece. It is a sprawling western epic about a true American evil, in which traces of joy are slowly infected by a darkness that has left neither me, nor America. In the process of doing so, it is also a display of some of our great film artists working at the top of their game, across editing, cinematography and acting to name but three. In every single way, it is the greatest film of the year and my favourite. Unfortunately, it seems to be about 26 minutes too long for most people, so to Oppenheimer it goes. To be fair to it, it really does feel like the movie of 2023. Not only did it gross an obscene amount of money at the box office, but it was beloved by critics across the globe, got audiences back into cinemas and showed the importance of large format cinema projection. It’s quite wonderful and deserves the win, which is good because I can’t see anything beating it to the finish line. Get this prediction in to all your friends to sound smart and then hey, boot up your lovely pristine TV and rewatch it, to absolutely blow the tits off your neighbours once the bomb drops and decimates your speakers. That’s the true magic of cinema.
You may have noticed, we’ve skipped over best album and best TV show this year. That’s my bad, I’ve been in a writing slump and for those interested, I’ll have my rundown of some of my favourite of both at the end of the list. I know it’s mainly me who beats myself up over that but considering I don’t often share my opinions on those things, I wanted to just throw them out somewhere. ANYWAY! Movies! Aren’t they rad? It has genuinely been an excellent year for films, especially if we go by the UK release calendar. Like sure, films like Poor Things and Evil Does Not Exist are worthy of the list but when you see what made the cut, you won’t be so mournful. As I said, we’re doing UK release dates, feature films only and for obvious reasons, only films I’ve seen. I saw over 100 so we have a good pack (and the full list is here for anyone who wants to get angry over nothing) and I’m even allowing myself some extra honourable mentions because of how many films I loved this year. That is it for introductions, let’s rock and roll!
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
The thing about Guardians is that it is so much bigger than a swansong for a trilogy of lovable rogues, because it manages to also be an accidental swansong for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was the only success for the company this year and also the only one that deserved to succeed.
Eileen
Big controversial choice for me, because no one else seemed to fall under Eileen‘s spell. However, this thriller on a road to nowhere had me totally under its seductive spell for the whole breezy runtime.
All The Beauty and The Bloodshed
There are very few documentaries as profoundly moving as this one, a dual tale of Nan Goldin’s life and her battle against the Sackler family, in which the personal and political are inextricably connected. The telling of the tale doesn’t slack though, demanding the audience watch at every moment.
The Killer
David Fincher proves again that he has a wickedly dry sense of humour, in this hitman tale that doesn’t sacrifice thrills for a chance to wryly play The Smiths. Again, not a popular choice, but I’m very happy to see Fincher having fun again.
May December
Kudos to Todd Haynes for a balancing act that few others could complete, in which comedy and media satire are balanced with a heart-breaking tale of abuse. Charles Melton should be winning awards for this role every year for as long as we do awards.
Talk to Me
For a horror film, this is basically everything I could ever ask for. Thrills are paired with proper scares, complimented by some deliciously and realistically unlikable characters, all of which absolutely barrel towards an ending as bone crunching as it is inevitable.
Blackberry
Matt Johnson has made his most mainstream film yet, without losing any of his personality. Blackberry could so easily just be a Canadian riff on The Social Network but it has much more fun and is clearly a film that is so excited to simply exist.
Asteroid City
Justice for Asteroid City! Both this and The French Dispatch have been criticised for being “just Wes Anderson doing his thing again,” which is brutally unfair. No Anderson film before has made me cry which Asteroid manages while creating some of the most beautiful artifice we’ve ever had on screen. He is an artist at the height of his powers and Asteroid City is yet more proof of that.
Beau is Afraid
Love it or hate it, good luck forgetting Beau is Afraid. From the opening scenes in which we meet “Birthday Boy Stab Man,” through to the… I suppose testicular is the best way to describe the ending. Either way, Aster got a blank cheque and God bless him for running with it into hell.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
I feel hesitant to give a film which is so blatantly half of a story a higher placement, but Across the Spider-Verse was one of those truly exciting cinema experiences that worked on every technical level (once it was sound mixed properly.) Fingers crossed part two comes out, doesn’t disappoint and is made with minimal employee exploitation.
John Wick: Chapter Four
This is one of the best action films I’ve ever seen and still just barely misses out on the top seven of the year, that’s how good a year this is! Where I usually love a film with a bit of restraint, John Wick: Chapter Four is a three hour buffet of action that never stops and never once becomes less than captivating.
Anyway, huge selection of honourable mentions done, it’s time to get to the actual Top 7! If you thought those films were good, wait until you see these.
7. Rye Lane
Romcoms are, broadly speaking, one of my least favourite genres of film. Favourites stand out but generally, if Richard Curtis has been near it, I’m unlikely to warm even slightly to it. Rye Lane though is special. It exists within that mould that Curtis laid, but makes it feel modern, fresh, like an actual film about actual people! Obviously, there’s the part of that which relocates the action from the rich realm into the slowly gentrifying area surrounding Brixton, yet relocates in a way which still maintains the feeling of love for location. That’s not the only updating though because, at risk of sounded both pretentious and vague, Rye Lane just feels so well built. Scenes are presented in abstract form to create the most exciting presentation, music gently tinkles behind conversations that are about everything and nothing and the setups are paid off in ways to make you hoot and holler. Oh, it’s also 82 minutes long. There are six films I ended up loving more than Rye Lane but there were none that made me love love as much. Everything in my life felt better each time I saw it and it is the very easiest recommendation on this list. If you only come away from here with one new film on your watchlist, make it Rye Lane.
6. Oppenheimer
Judging by the box office, you almost definitely saw Oppenheimer. To be very honest with you, I do regret my time with Oppenheimer, because I only saw it once. It feels like such a rewardingly dense film that one viewing seems like a bit of an insult. Even in that fleeting three hour encounter though, what is on display is stunning. Nolan has made many absolutely brilliant films before and while Oppenheimer is a continuation of that craft, it feels distinct. What seems on the surface to be a telling of one man’s life story blossoms out into a grander tale of politics, science and ethics, in which there is no black and white. Again, you probably saw it! And that’s amazing, that an obtuse but well crafted and serious drama managed to draw in almost a billion dollars at the box office (and may yet make it there.) It is a rare instance of one of the greatest films of the year also being the most successful.
5. Barbie
Speaking of! You definitely saw Barbie, which made eight Barbillion dollars. Even more of an achievement than that though, Barbie was actually a really great film! I’ve loved all three of Gerwig’s solo directorial films and what is so great about them is that all three feel like films made by the same person. Admittedly, I think Barbie is the weakest of the three but considering that Lady Bird and Little Women are not just films I love but are also cornerstones of who I am as a person, third place can still be great. And it is! Barbie is so so much fun and one of the films on this list that I rewatched very soon after first watching, because it filled me with this absolute lightness. We can talk around it or try and be snobbish about it, but that gleeful lightness isn’t an easy thing to create and kudos to Gerwig for doing it in a way that seems effortless (if you ask the Academy Awards, it maybe seemed too effortless.) It’s hard to know what else to say. It’s Barbie! It was everything, or it was just Ken, but it has rightfully defined cinemagoing for many people this year.
4.The Royal Hotel
When I first saw The Royal Hotel, I didn’t realise that it wasn’t really going to have much of a ripple out in the world. I saw it at Cambridge Film Festival and was so electrified that I assumed on release, it would just be an absolute hit. It then… just kind of wasn’t, I can only assume because no one saw it. Because if you did see The Royal Hotel, I can’t imagine feeling anything other than exhiliration. It’s the story of two young American women who, while on holiday in Australia, find themselves working in an outback pub to make up a bit of extra cash. Stuck in the middle of nowhere though, they’re at the mercy of a murder of men, all of whom have an element of sketchiness to them. The rest of the film plays out as a queasy thriller with this pulpy edge, in which very little happens all while a sick feeling builds. The women may not be actively threatened but there is a lingering air of bad. Something bad could happen. Something bad might happen. Surely, something bad is about to happen. That feeling never really disappears, despite moments of respite, and the film delivers on that by having an incredibly satisfying finale that left me breathless as the credits rolled. If The Royal Hotel somehow escaped you, I really recommend a trip. It’s thrilling and a little bit pulpy, but always the right side of good taste and with this lingering dread that I absolutely loved.
3. Tár
The best film about a composer from the last year and it’s not even close! Tár is an absolutely swaggering work that is immediately imposing. It’s a long film about classical music that starts by making you sit through the entire credits and then listen to the lead character literally lecture you on music. This is all some wicked foreplay though, as Todd Field slowly ratchets his film up to pace. What you’re actually watching is the study of a woman who is falling apart because of things she may or may not have done, but is definitely capable of. Calling it a dissection of cancel culture way undersells the final product, which while included is just a fraction of what we’re going to explore. Lydia Tár is such an intricately drawn character, both from Field’s screenplay and an all timer performance by Cate Blanchett. Together, these two create someone who is repellent yet enticing, despicable yet admirable, awesome yet very much not awesome. The momentum of Tár comes from our fascination with Lydia Tár and watching her spiral into… Something, even after all this time it’s not worth spoiling the ending. Needless to say, it is an ending that is already pretty legendary and reveals a wicked glimmer of comedy that was hiding throughout the film. For such a dense work, that tease of humour at the end sent me back to the film very quickly and I absolutely adored my second viewing, even more than the first one. Maybe on the surface, Tár seems like this big serious film about classical music and cancel culture, but once you step inside you will be rewarded for your patience by a ghostly atmosphere that crumbles into mania. It it a riot. The best film about a composer from the last year and it’s not even close, it bears repeating!
2. Babylon
Hehe. Damien Chazelle does it again, at least for me. Since his second film Whiplash, I’ve been an adorer of Chazelle’s films. La La Land made me realise I can love a musical, First Man was the kind of unconventional biopic that I’m perpetually thirsty for and the aforementioned Whiplash remains one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Fair to say then, my anticipation is always high for a new Chazelle film and when that film is a three hour ejaculation that celebrates some of the best (and worst) years of Hollywood, anticipation grows yet higher. Unlike most of the viewing public though, Babylon easily met those expectations. Sure, its flagship party scenes really are special, these festivals of debauchery that (while not especially shocking) are a hell of a lot of fun, but there’s something greater going on. There are these warring emotions happening, in which we are both eulogising what the film industry was and also not shying away from how horrible a time it was for pretty much everyone. Scenes become a dialogue between grief and celebration and the audience is pulled in uncomfortable ways that have stayed with me for the year since I saw Babylon. Crucially, the film does all this while also being incredibly funny. One scene in which a battle is filmed is an absolute riot and features the best Spike Jonze cameo outside of Jackass. I know that the three hour runtime and the 18 BBFC rating both seem daunting, but they’re only in play because we have so much to do here. We have to laugh, we have to cry, we have to write a powerful eulogy to cinema as we know it. All of this is to be done before we get to the most divisive ending on this list where brilliant endings are something of a speciality. For me? It’s a home run, an ending so brazenly sincere as to fly past cringe and into genuinely amazing. Put it on tonight, gather round the family and make up your own mind (please don’t get the family together for this, lol, I cannot be responsible for that again.) I hope you love it as much as I do but I can’t expect everyone to be capable of this much love for something this wonderfully stupid.
1. Killers of the Flower Moon
We find ourselves now at a number one entry that surprises even myself. Don’t get me wrong, I was very excited for a big new Scorsese film, but how can someone who made classics like Goodfellas and modern bangers like The Wolf of Wall Street be expected to top himself? Like this! Again, Killers of the Flower Moon hasn’t made itself an easy pitch by being three and a half hours long and about (depressingly real) atrocities committed upon the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, but fortunately what they did to balance that out is make the best film of the year. It is this absolutely incredible sweep of a story, which begins as a man falling in love with an Osage woman and descends into this wretched court case about whether an act of genocide has been committed or not. It is basically the ultimate in feel bad film, tempered only by the joy you feel in getting to watch some of the best filmmaking you’ve ever seen. Scorsese is working on levels that are both immediately impressive and also basically subliminal, making me start to physically shake in my seat as the evil on screen starts to course through my veins.
All of this manages not to overshadow all the stuff on the surface that is immediately and undeniably excellent. The performances range from merely great to absolutely iconic, where actors with great faces get to play on the greatest canvas there is. Robert De Niro gets to capitalise on the last decade of friendly granddad roles by twisting benevolence into evil, Leonardo DiCaprio gets to play a level of dumb where you’re constantly guessing if he doesn’t know or doesn’t care what’s happening, and then there’s Lily Gladstone. Her eyes contain a beauty and a pain that should never have to coexist, but which speak to a darker truth about the intertwined nature of both. She shouldn’t have to but her face speaks to an entire fading culture of people in ways that have haunted me mercilessly. Even a cameo at the end of the film is a performance that brought me to tears, bringing together the narrative of the film while also dissecting true crime as a genre and our complicity in it. Again, in a year of amazing endings, this was one that appeared out of nowhere and somehow summarised with grace the three and a half hour movie I’d just seen, as well as the great American project. People who are much smarter than me have struggled to appropriately appraise Killers of the Flower Moon, so I won’t keep you here any longer, other than to say that this is an absolutely major work from an artist who has made a habit of creating an absolutely major work at least once a decade since the 1970s. Do not miss it.
Favourite TV Shows
Physical 100 – A great format for a reality TV show, made all the better by competitors who were committed to the love of the game and of each other. The greatest sportsmanship you could ask for.
Drag Race (US15, All Stars 8, Sweden, France 2, Down Under 3, UK 5, Canada 4) – I think I might do a longer post on all things Drag Race soon but as the franchise gets bigger, it has often gotten better too. Of all the seasons, I’ve been so happy with the fourth season from Canada, it’s a version of the show that deserves so much more love.
Taskmaster – Sam Campbell from series 16 won my heart, but series 15 of the perennially perfect Taskmaster has been one of the best yet, with a cast that would fight for every single pointless point.
Beef – I love a good limited series, and so while I’m obviously annoyed at the possibility of a second series, what we got of Beef was ace. Complicated character dynamics built to an unexpected place, where I only hope we remain.
Black Mirror – I think I’m the one person left who will still defend Black Mirror, but I must do it, like clockwork! This season, the big standout was “Loch Henry,” a profoundly upsetting episode that feels like Brooker pointing the biggest middle finger possible at Netflix.
Succession – For many, the obvious choice of best of the year, a consensus which I’m hard pressed to disagree with. “Connor’s Wedding” hits hard for all the obvious reasons but “America Decides” was the episode I kept coming back to, a nauseating crash to Earth as the Roy siblings meet the consequence of their actions.
Favourite Albums
10,000 gecs by 100 gecs – For a while, this was the album I would play when I started work at 9am. If you know the album, you know why that is insane, but I am very comfortable in that insanity.
the record by boygenius – Three artists in their prime, coming together to make an album where the best of every artist is fused into something beautiful. Whether you’re screaming in pain or ecstasy, this was the album for you.
Fantasy by M83 – I am always so glad to be in a world where M83 are making more music. Their soundscapes make me so happy and their testament is always in their endurance.
The Last Rotation of Earth by BC Camplight – BC Camplight is basically the only cool taste in music I have, so I like to shout his name nice and loud when I can. He’s awesome! Listen to him, this is the best one yet!
The Age of Pleasure by Janelle Monae – Going back and listening to this album in December was bleak, but The Age of Pleasure makes complete sense when the sun shines and a drink is in your hand. I can’t wait to go back.
The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski – I cannot believe that in a world where I have a girlfriend (humble brag), Mitski is still capable of making an album that caters to my emotional needs, gentle and sublime it is.
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan – If we’re talking just sheer weight of bangers, no album has been as great a heavyweight champion as this, god bless girly pop music.
Something to Give Each Other by Troye Sivan – The biggest shock this year for me was Troye Sivan not only making an album this good, but also filling it with samples this outrageous that all (without exception) work completely.
Guts by Olivia Rodrigo – After an album as good as Sour, Olivia Rodrigo had plenty to live up to. In many ways, Guts is superior and even in the ways it isn’t, it’s so impressive that complaints are totally pointless.
Desire, I Want to Turn Into You by Caroline Polachek – I discovered this album just as the year ended and it consumed me for a week. These are songs that are laced with something beautiful and have the addictive qualities of something evil. Going back in almost feels dangerous.
I’m playing Skyrim right now. I know what you’re thinking, “oh, I love replaying Skyrim, I can always go back to it” and you are wrong. I am playing Skyrim for the first time ever. Hopefully that gives you an idea of the scope of my backlog and why I’ve played very little this year, not even a single one of the Game of the Year nominees at the “prestigious” and “real” The Game Awards. There’s a lot to play! I don’t have the time or money to keep up with all these new releases and so I quite simply don’t try. But! I always have room in my heart for sweet little indie games (as evidenced by my game of the year every year for the past few years) and 2023 has been no exception, in that our winner has proved to be exceptional. This year, that game is Cocoon.
Cocoon doesn’t begin by offering you much of a story. It doesn’t end by offering you much of a story either unless you’re willing to think in abstract terms, WHICH I AM. You are an insect-like creature who crash lands on this beautiful desert planet. You’re not given a goal but naturally, you’re going to explore and learn what everything does. This switch moves that platform, this button reveals a new path, classic puzzle game stuff. Eventually though, you’ll approach a platform which, when activated, kicks you out of this world and into a grey reality. In this world, your previous world is now a ball which you can carry around and use for new puzzles. At this point, I’m going to recommend that if you don’t know what this game looks like you check out a quick trailer, because I’m good with my words but we’re dealing with concepts that words can barely explain. It’s worlds within worlds in which the worlds you no longer inhabit are puzzle solving tools in the worlds you do inhabit.
This all sounds quite mind bending and that’s for a very simple reason; it is. But, the genius of the game is that it takes you towards these difficult and confusing concepts very gently. There are no tutorials in the game, only exploration and experimentation. There’s an obstacle in your path that stops you from progressing, so try a new way to go around it. Exit your current world, head into a different world, pull a new item from there and use it to progress in the old world. It’s a method of puzzle presentation that never holds your hand but guides you ever so gently towards solutions in ways that made me literally gasp and shout at the screen. I felt consistently rewarded for my understanding of the game and for picking up new mechanics, remembering old and fusing them in new settings. All of this is to say that I have no idea how to write about the actual gameplay of a puzzle game! Puzzles! Pick up orbs, enter orbs, game!
The look and sound of the game is also absolutely perfect. The actual scale of these worlds is impossible to ascertain (as the ambiguous little ending seems to tease), which the visuals lean into. You seem to be a little bug creature traversing through little worlds, but even as you leap out into bigger worlds, the scale still prevails. Your worlds are all a little bit bigger than you, looming just a bit above you on top of oceans that are just too deep to swim in. Between all the chaos, it creates some coherence. I say chaos, the worlds all have designs that are distinct enough to make sure you’re never confused as to which thing was where. Just by colour, the distinction is simple. Red world, green world, purple world. You know what they do in other worlds, you know where you left it and you know what you’ll need to return to do. When the puzzles themselves are this brain bending, simplicity in design is a gift.
Finally, as is often crucial for indie games, Cocoon can fairly easily be finished in one sitting. If you need to take a step away and clear your brain between tricky puzzles, by all means go for it, but it rewards memory of things that have come before. It doesn’t hang around so long that you’re forgetting the earliest lessons it taught you, instead leaving on a high which, again, gestures towards a narrative for those who are interested. As a lover of puzzle games for most of my life, Cocoon hit all the spots I needed and wanted it to. It was a treat that I want to distribute to everyone and if puzzle games are even slightly your jam, it is a game that you owe it to yourself to play.
Honourable Mentions:
Sea of Stars: I’m someone who never gravitates to RPGs but Sea of Stars grabbed me regardless. Its throwback presentation appeals to someone unfamiliar with where we’re throwing back to and I can’t wait to keep discovering more.
Solar Ash: Though I had some issues with moments of traversal, Solar Ash excels because it just feels great. It’s a sci-fi skating game by way of Shadow of the Colossus, which works so much better than it should with that premise.
YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!: The worst named game I played this year is also super fun, which makes recommending it annoying. It’s a series of games based on those fake mobile game ads you see, but where the games are real and actually fun! Drop in drop out fun, I can’t stop returning to it.
The Quite Nerdy Blog 