The Apprentice

This year’s Oscar-nominated movies are a snapshot of a short, peculiar moment in American history: the Kamala Harris era. The Harris era exhibited contradictory properties usually associated more with quantum physics than with Hollywood movies: it was both brief and nonexistent. It was an era designed for awards-bait cinema, movies with good intentions, serious, un-self-aware, lacking in Harris’s own campaign promise of “joy.” Made to counter superhero movies and other franchised content, the films of the Harris era often relied on third-act jump scares as dramatic devices. Defined by wishful thinking, these movies presented the triumph of the sacrosanct in difficult, intractable situations that in reality did not offer clear resolutions or even cause for hope.

Or, like The Apprentice, these movies succeeded only in making the monsters they scrutinized stronger. The Apprentice gave us an accurate young Trump (Sebastian Stan), a grotesque, self-aggrandizing rapist ready to throw over anybody for fame, wealth, and power. In Ali Abbasi’s film, from a screenplay by the journalist Gabriel Sherman, Trump’s rise is inexorable. He is a man of destiny, like Reagan in last year’s Reagan movie, but with no self-control, whose liposuctions and hair transplants we see performed onscreen.

To succeed, Trump must absorb the lessons offered to him by Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the shady, anticommunist lawyer held over from the McCarthy years. When we meet Cohn in The Apprentice, he is prowling the celebrity-studded world of crumbling 1970s New York with his entourage of attractive young gay men. By the end of the film he is a husk used up by Trump. Dying of AIDS at his Mar-a-Lago birthday party as the future President mocks him, Cohn, barely able to stand, has to make a speech praising Trump and the USA. Lit from below by sparklers decorating an American flag cake, he’s a figure in a horror movie extolling his master, Satan or Dracula.

“The Apprentice is first and foremost humanist, which makes it radically different from all the political noise,” said its executive producer Amy Baer, a Hollywood veteran, describing it as though it were Pather Panchali. It was not, though nor was it something made by “pretend filmmakers” that belonged “in a dumpster fire,” as an official Trump spokesman called it, unclear on how to use the phrase “dumpster fire” in a sentence. The film is, instead, a failed exposé. It will stand as a unique monument — a rebuke to the corruption of a past and future President that had no effect on anybody, but did get nominated for Oscars.

Conclave

As I write this, Pope Francis is in the hospital in Rome, likely dying of pneumonia. Right now the Holy Father is a type of pope we know well: the pope on his deathbed, not the Francis of The Two Popes, or the pope of The Young Pope, or The Pope with an Exorcist on His Staff. Conclave, which is about the election of a new pope, is therefore newly timely, like The Apprentice was, because of an upcoming election.

The wish of Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) in this movie is that God grant us “a pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on,” and after two acts of fairly riveting election intrigue from its high-powered international cast, Conclave’s third act delivers the opposite of the person Cardinal Lawrence envisioned. Instead we get the most sinless person in the universe, beamed in from Heaven. Cardinal Benítez (Carlos Diehz), an intersex future saint who has known war, famine, fire, and rain, and whom Jesus has looked down upon and blessed, will unite us all as the Pope of an Era That Didn’t Happen.

Edward Berger directs Conclave like he is a totally different filmmaker than the one who made the 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front. Unlike that film, this one is highly burnished and tightly wound, seemingly made by Fiennes and not the director. Cardinal Lawrence’s story is one of high competence and qualification passed over in favor of gauzy ideas, especially after the Sistine Chapel is damaged by a suicide bombing during the conclave. We learn that a canny and honest institutionalist like Cardinal Lawrence is not the right man for the job. His insight into reality disqualifies him.

“Hell arrives tomorrow when we bring in the cardinals,” Cardinal Lawrence tells another priest before the conclave, and then these men in red robes descend on the place like a force out of a Dune movie — there’s even a black box in Conclave, which also seems to take place on another planet where people in outlandish getups jockey for power as “the abyss calls out.”

Sing Sing

It surprised me that Sing Sing is the same story as Conclave. Set in an all-male environment, it too is a film of meetings, rehearsals, and hearings in which roles are assigned, forgiveness is denied or not, past secrets come out, some people rise to the occasion, while others fall by the wayside. The inmates in Sing Sing are part of a theatrical troupe allowed to put on plays in the maximum security prison where many of them are sentenced to life. John Whitfield (Colman Domingo), known as Divine G, is the star of this rehab program. Incarcerated, he’s become over the years a talented actor, playwright, and director, but he’s challenged when a younger, moodier actor comes along in the form of Clarence Maclin, known as Divine Eye, a natural, the Brando of the troupe.

Gap-toothed and intense, Maclin plays himself in this true story as direct from the streets. He does in fact become the star of Sing Sing, eclipsing Domingo, the lone professional among the convicts, who are also playing themselves. As in Conclave, the most qualified and deserving person gets passed over for the risky appointment of a younger, more exciting choice. Domingo the actor, as opposed to the actor he is portraying in the film, gives himself over to this decision and fades from the story. The irony is that without Domingo, Sing Sing would not have been made.

Fiennes was too shrewd to let this happen to him in Conclave. He plays right on top of the plot, refusing to be absorbed by the film or to be eclipsed by Benítez. In Sing Sing, the other guy is better, a more dynamic and volatile screen presence. Unfortunately, because it is a true story, we also see a lot of the play the inmates put on, a variety-show pastiche of Shakespeare, TheArabian Nights, and other things. I thought inmates put on Beckett plays. But no, the bad taste of theater kids has triumphed even among the most hard-boiled.

Wicked: Part I

Why are messages of inclusion so often delivered by people voted Most Likely to Suck the Air Out of the Room in high school? Wicked offers over two and a half inconclusive hours of just that, with Cynthia Erivo’s coy and self-impressed performance undermining the idea that anyone would ever marginalize a vast talent like hers just for being green. The film begins with a celebration of her death, and then she’s burned in effigy, Wicker Man–style. They really hate her, ha ha, but you will love her no matter what. At one point she actually pleads, “You think I want to care this much?”

The film’s light-pink and dark-green palette makes it look like Lilly Pulitzer was hired to design Hook. Jon M. Chu has directed it so dutifully that no musical number can become a showstopper, which doesn’t really matter because the film’s audience already knows the songs by heart. Heart, however, is what the film lacks. It contains nothing within a Kansas mile of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow.” There is no longing here, nothing sad. Emotions in The Wizard of Oz were anchored to Dorothy’s dream of a world in which her relatives and the people in her town could be other than what they were. Wicked’s longing is to be a Harry Potter movie.

Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard is underwritten considering that this was a novel before it was a Broadway show. He’s a Roy Cohn figure, seeking to mentor and exploit Elphaba in order to control Oz. Back in December, Adam McKay, the director of The Big Short, tweeted that Wicked is so “nakedly about radicalization in the face of careerism, fascism, propaganda” that “if America keeps going on the track it is I wouldn’t be surprised to see the movie banned in 3–5 years.” The actual track we are on with Wicked is that Universal is about to make a billion dollars from it. The track we got off is the one on which Kamala Harris said during a televised Democratic debate in September 2019, “Donald Trump . . . you know he reminds me of that guy in The Wizard of Oz, you know, when you pull back the curtain, it’s a really small dude?” Did we really think someone who couldn’t convincingly describe The Wizard of Oz could be elected President?

Emilia Pérez

Idiotic cultural appropriation is paid back to Netflix, the distributor of Emilia Pérez. Netflix sent the French Emily in Paris, the French sent back this film — the titles are practically the same. A Mexico-set musical about a transgender narco (Karla Sofía Gascón) who starts an NGO to help the families of people murdered by the cartels, the film actually stars Zoe Saldaña as Emilia’s lawyer and the facilitator of her gender-affirming surgeries. It is a thankless role, predicated on Saldaña taking seriously the idea that Gascón is, as a review in the Los Angeles Times had it, giving a “sensually charged portrayal [that] wouldn’t be out of place anchoring a classic Hollywood woman’s noir.” Sure, Tommy Wiseau could play Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, too, if you gave him the chance.

The idea that this galoot would be unrecognizable to even her children requires a special suspension of disbelief. Therefore the director, Jacques Audiard, had to include a song about it called “Papa,” in which the kid has an inkling that is soothingly dispelled by Emilia herself. If the film had anything of a fairy-tale element to it, which it does not, a scene like that might have worked. But everything in Emilia Pérez is too easy, a neoliberal cakewalk. It’s the kind of movie in which Emilia makes sure to assure us her NGO is “not a replacement for public services.” The film is a preposterous nightmare of first-world self-regard.

Beyond being an insult to Mexico and to the aborted film careers of trans performers like Candy Darling, Emilia Pérez is also an insult to French musicals, rendering the achievements of Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand into distant, unrecoverable memories. It is an astounding phenomenon that so many American critics praised this film, and Gascón’s performance in it, before Gascón’s long series of hateful tweets was revealed to the world.

At the end we are supposed to believe Emilia has become a martyr. An effigy of her with a bleeding hand and missing fingers, too obviously phallic for anyone to comment on, is carried through the streets to sainthood. This final transformation is more vainglory than ascension. The reality of Emilia Pérez is too stark: once a cheeseball, always a cheeseball.

The Substance

Coralie Fargeat’sThe Substance is another French fantasia of North American life, this one set in a place where the French are more comfortable than Mexico: Hollywood. As in Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, people in the contemporary Los Angeles of The Substance drive 1960s Ford Mustangs, sip cocktails, live in places with huge windows, try to get acting jobs, answer weird ads. A dark feminist satire that is also a big play for Hollywood acceptance, Fargeat’s movie criticizes the exploitation of women’s bodies and their disposability as performers as they age by using large, splashy servings of gore and Margaret Qualley’s ass in high-def. The movie has its cake and eats it, too, and also smashes it and gets it all over its hands and smears it on its face.

The film is too long for its one concept, which is that Elisabeth Sparkle, a middle-aged actress played by Demi Moore, can buy and inject a serum that allows her to split into a younger version of herself, Sue (Qualley), who could be called Su Tissue like the singer in the Suburban Lawns because she is born from the sinew of Elisabeth’s body, emerging through her spine and out her back, which then requires thick black stitches to sew up. This wonder drug comes with responsibilities, as fluids from the two bodies must be carefully extracted and managed, there are time limits on the use of the younger body, and side effects develop if the schedule is ignored.

Of course the lure of youth, which as we know is wasted on the young, proves too much. Elisabeth’s toothsome counterpart is so telegenic she becomes a TV star on a morning exercise show. Predictably, dancercise is not a path to happiness. As things begin to melt into big gobs of chicken fat, Fargeat takes us on a trip through the history of fairy tales, 19th-century horror literature, and 1980s movies that used lots of crazy prosthetics before the term body horror came into overuse.

Fargeat is relentless and tiring in combining Hansel and Gretel and the David Cronenberg of The Fly and Naked Lunch with movies like Street Trash and Society, with Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Nutty Professor and Freaky Friday if Darren Aronofsky had directed them, The Wasp Woman, and on and on, often in arty, spare Kubrickian compositions. Soon Elisabeth starts to look like the Ice Cream Man from The Pink Opaque, and the whole movie becomes a reenactment of the Triangle of Sadness puking scene but with menstrual blood. The final image is graphically arresting but exhausting to contemplate. It’s at least four things at once: a Medusa head, “they had faces then,” “some of us are looking at the stars,” and the poop emoji left on the street.

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I’m Still Here

Walter Salles’sI’m Still Here, from Brazil, has the virtue of dealing with political repression and state-sanctioned murder in a mature, adult way, but it does so by making it immediately relatable to people with families who live in big apartments in gentrified parts of town.

The first half hour of this cautionary tale sets up the perfect life of Rubens and Eunice Paiva (Selton Mello and Fernanda Torres), a husband and wife with five beautiful children who live in a spacious, multifloor, book-lined apartment in Rio. Rubens is a former liberal politician now working as a civil engineer, and he is part of a cell that helps radicals opposed to the repressive military government that ruled the country in the 1960s and ’70s. It is 1970 as the film begins, and the kids are into Tropicália, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, Godard and Antonioni movies. They dream of cultured, Europeanized lives, but the dictatorship is cracking down in response to a series of kidnappings by the radicals. Rubens is swept up in this, taken from this happy home, and never seen again.

This is a true story, based on a book by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Rubens and Eunice’s son. The military police hold Eunice and the rest of the family hostage in their apartment and then take Eunice and one of her daughters (Luiza Kosovski) in for questioning. Fernanda Torres’s performance as Eunice is one of great tribute to this woman who spent decades searching for the truth about what happened to her husband. She and the children have to move because they can no longer afford their place, she gets a law degree, becomes a fighter for Indigenous rights, and leads a long, distinguished life as a human rights advocate.

Her happy ending comes, years later, in two parts. The first is that she finally receives Rubens’s death certificate, proving he’d been killed by the dictatorship. The second is that in her eighties, suffering from Alzheimer’s and confined to a wheelchair (and now played by Fernanda Montenegro, Torres’s mother, also a distinguished actress and movie star), she sits alone in the living room at a family gathering and sees a documentary about Rubens on TV while everybody else is out on the patio reminiscing.

This section of the film is designed to elicit warm-but-bittersweet feelings of familial love, and to demonstrate that there is always hope that the truth will come out. But it makes TV the ultimate validator of history, which it is not. Even Brazilian baby boomers must know that. The ending
is tragic — a silent old woman watching television alone when something about her murdered husband happens to come on and no one notices it but her.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Mohammad Rasoulof’sThe Seed of the Sacred Fig is a more immediate, less aestheticized, and not at all nostalgic version of I’m Still Here, set in the present, and banned in Iran, where it was made and from which Rasoulof had to escape to get the film shown. Written in response to the 2022 state murder of Mahsa Amini, who was killed by the Guidance Patrol for not wearing a headscarf, and the subsequent
protests that erupted, Rasoulof’s film indicts his country by describing the slow descent into paranoia and violence of a man (Missagh Zareh) who works as a judge for the Revolutionary Court.

Iman’s actual job is to rubber-stamp state executions, and taking this new position has moved his family up in the world. He and his wife (Soheila Golestani) and their two daughters (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki) now live in a bigger place, so when his daughters begin to follow the news of the protests and timidly become involved in them, he and, at first, his wife put a stop to their activities. When he seemingly misplaces the handgun he’s been issued, he turns his family’s life into one of accusations and recriminations, mimicking what is going on outside their window as the protests grow. Soon he loses the trust of his new colleagues at court, who begin to monitor his activities, increasing his sense of isolation and paranoia.

Iman whisks his family off to his abandoned childhood home in the arid mountains, where he puts them on trial for stealing his gun. Sana (Maleki) emerges as the savior of her family, taking heroic action to protect them from her father’s increasing madness. This section of the film calls for bravura performances and strives for the elemental quality of a 1950s Anthony Mann western, which it doesn’t quite achieve. Rasoulof needed to call on an inner Sergio Leone here, but perhaps the nature of the way the film was made, hidden from the eyes of the government, didn’t allow time for that. The shock ending and cut to news footage of the Amini protests is a Kiarostamian move that brings the film back into reality, but its indictment of Iranian patriarchy and repression was already clear.

September 5

A stand-in forOctober 7 that is also a tribute to American sports coverage, Tim Fehlbaum’s movie about the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics applies “the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat” to geopolitics. The fact is that ABC Sports messed up their coverage of this hostage crisis, calling it for peace before nine Israelis were killed in a shoot-out at the airport between West German police and Black September, as the Palestinian group called itself. Five of the Palestinians and one cop died, too. In September 5, we do get a re-creation of the most infamous image of 1970s terrorism, the black-and-white photo of the kidnapper in a ski mask and sweater on the concrete balcony of a hotel, his head and body tilted down as he looks over the railing.

The small, transparent network logo that used to appear in the corner of TV screens was called a “bug,” or “the bug,” and it was invented by ABC Sports during this armed standoff, we learn here. That was the highlight of the movie for me. I’d always wondered about that. In the end, September 5 is a tribute to Nielsen ratings. Nine hundred million people watched this tragedy unfold on live TV. Now that TV news has become unprofitable for the entertainment conglomerates that own it, and the Olympics are viewed piecemeal across many platforms, the film can be seen as nostalgic longing for a time when terrorism got everybody to watch the same thing at the same time. That is not what movies are for.

No Other Land

Part of the reason the Palestinian documentary No Other Land still doesn’t have an American distributor may be that it shows up as useless the computer-generated nonsense of Hollywood and European films about inclusion. If big-budget film producers are happy with those, and writer-directors like Adam McKay call them radical, so what? What good are they? What have they changed?

No Other Land was made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four filmmakers headed by Basel Adra, a young Palestinian man from Masafer Yatta, in the West Bank, a place being forcibly evacuated by Israel under false pretenses. The Israelis claimed the army needs the land for military training, but that was later revealed as a lie. Palestinians were evicted, their houses bulldozed as they watched, to make room for settlers. The film, which was shot from 2019 to 2023, records this in great detail. As usual, the settlers come off as violent and dangerous, the most insane people on Earth, which in 2025 is saying something.

The more of this documentation, the better. Much of it was shot by Adra on his smartphone. The film stalls when Adra and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist and a codirector of the film, pause for discussions about Abraham’s presence in the village (though those scenes, and all the scenes of Adra’s daily life, are beautifully shot by codirector Rachel Szor). A useless, showy visit to Masafer Yatta by Tony Blair and his entourage is a highlight of the film and a low point of this history recorded by Adra, a textbook pseudo-event that changes nothing.

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Nickel Boys

I admit that I’m not convinced that the decision to shoot Nickel Boys primarily in point-of-view shots really works; and I confess that the film’s beautiful, sunny cinematography and its extreme earnestness are not aspects of any movie that I ever appreciate the most. RaMell Ross’s previous film, the documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), struck me as more moving and more filled with mystery, and the last film I saw that was shot by Jomo Fray, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023), I found more unexpected and original. And while a film as sincere (and long) as Nickel Boys can’t be called a commercial play, Ross still shocked me when he recently mentioned he’d work for Marvel Studios if he could help educate them. Has he talked to Chloé Zhao lately?

The clips included in Nickel Boys from The Defiant Ones (1958) made me want to rewatch and re-evaluate that most liberal of 1950s white vs. Black dramas, which I did, and I found that — as with so many movies — time has improved it because it was made with so much more serious-mindedness and professionalism than most Hollywood films today. The ending isn’t great, and Nickel Boys does do something serious to correct that. In the same way, the use of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Funtown” speech was a signal that the movie was going to purposefully deny any kind of fun to its main character, Elwood (Ethan Herisse), which it most certainly did do.

Shots of a cake knife scraping against the side of a bowl to get the frosting off it are as memorable in Nickel Boys as the story, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as Elwood’s grandmother, has to do the same kind of acting that Audrey Totter had to do in Lady in the Lake in 1947, that previous POV adaptation of a novel that also dropped the The from the title. It is very hard to not overdo it when acting directly into the camera as if it is a person you are speaking to. And then to hug it? This was a risky proposition all around. That Ross and Fray have managed to make it work and have created a film unlike any other proves it was a risk worth taking. Yet I still want that two-shot of Elwood and Turner (Brandon Wilson) in the cafeteria of Nickel Academy, a place they never should have ended up. Some things in life you don’t get.

The Brutalist

It seems to be generally understood by everyone who has seen it that The Brutalist is a deeply confused film that touches greatness by mixing disparate elements that have no business being together, and that its success or failure in the mind of any individual viewer depends on how much they are personally offended by any one of those elements. Just in describing the character Adrien Brody plays—a Hungarian architect named László Tóth, who is a student of the Bauhaus, a Jew, a concentration camp survivor, a refugee, a heroin addict, a rape victim, a possible Zionist with a Black best friend, a great artist, and a stroke victim—it is possible to understand where all this could go very wrong, except in the minds of people who give out acting awards.

Brody’s exceptional Greek tragedy mask of a face is perfect for a role like this, more tortured with age than it was in The Pianist in 2002, a movie in which somehow he had fewer issues than in this one. He can now fully inhabit the soul of a man carrying each and every one of the world’s problems on his bony shoulders without appearing callow. His callowness made The Pianist more entertaining, but The Brutalist has pretty much dispensed with entertainment, even though Guy Pearce’s gleeful turn as a pompous American industrialist livens things up, until it doesn’t anymore.

Brady Corbet’s films seem to be designed to impress viewers with high art allusions and to suck them in with Lol Crawley’s exquisite cinematography at the same time as they announce they are for some other, more deserving future audience, just as Tóth’s work is. What saves them is their clear element of madness. There is something really insane about these films, something beautiful (as in the marble quarry scene) but opaque, which Corbet and his co-screenwriter wife, Mona Fastvold, often subvert and ruin (as in the scene after the marble quarry scene).

During the speech at the end of the film made by Tóth’s niece (Ariane Labed) as she picks up an award for him — one of many scenes that drove architects and writers about architecture around the bend, if I am using the proper architectural term when I say “bend” — she announces about Tóth’s buildings that “the inherent laws of concrete things such as mountains and rock define them. They indicate nothing. They tell nothing. They simply are.” That isn’t true of Tóth’s work, which is revealed in the film to be ideological and full of hidden meanings related to his imprisonment in Buchenwald. And I can’t think of anything less true of Corbet’s movies than that, either. But making such an outrageous claim will definitely get me to see his next one.

Flow

If animated cats, dogs, and lemurs are your thing, Flow is the movie for you. Thankfully these animals don’t talk and it isn’t a musical. Instead, this story of climate change reminds us that after nature has finished with mankind, no one will ever have to hear Josh Gad sing again.

A Real Pain

A journey from New York to Majdanek with the most annoying person in the world, the effusive but morose, joyful guilt tripper Benji (Kieran Culkin), here being indulged by his rigid, neurotic cousin, David (Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed). Early in the film, at the airport, David surreptitiously tosses in the trash a yogurt Benji has bought for him, which led me to dislike David for the rest of the film and to immediately understand that by the end he would get an important life lesson about privilege from his emotionally incontinent cuz.

A Real Pain is well directed, but the scenes in Poland had me wishing for a Kieślowski Dekalog film about pride with American tourists really fucking up in a life-ruining, terrible way, which is not at all what happens here. The two boy-men honor their late grandmother with a visit to her old place of residence, there’s lots of contemplative Chopin on the soundtrack, and Eisenberg gave a good part to Jennifer Grey. These nice boys in their nice movie made me miss Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, and Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, in their talky two-handers, in which dudes with opposite personalities and worldviews get together for meals and hash things out in a melancholy and uncertain way. It even made me miss Old Joy, which is a true downer of a movie even without a stop at a concentration camp.

A Complete Unknown

Bob Dylan is to Pete Seeger as Donald Trump is to Roy Cohn in this version of The Apprentice, the same story of discarded mentorship. A Complete Unknown is the positively charged interpretation that mirrors the negative one about Trump; both dramatize the same kind of relationship. Seeger and Cohn come from the same red-baiting era, one (Seeger) on the side of good, the other (Cohn) evil, and Seeger, we learn early in A Complete Unknown, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the kind of semifascist panel run by Cohn for Senator Joseph McCarthy. (Seeger was found guilty of anti-American subversion, but won his case on appeal.)

Ed Norton plays Seeger as a musician and activist so kind and patient he could be Mister Rogers, the folk scene his West Village neighborhood. When he meets Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan, he knows he has a star on his hands, just as Cohn knew that about Trump in The Apprentice. Like Sebastian Stan in that movie, Chalamet makes his Dylan an evil genius chosen by history to succeed. A devilish self-made modernist unconcerned with the truth, he makes his story up as he goes along. Chalamet’s performance is a success, a real feat of acting in which he thoroughly inhabits Dylan-ness without slipping into parody, speaking in a voice that’s somehow as distinctive as Bill Skarsgård’s in Nosferatu without losing himself in it.

James Mangold’s film is as great as Hollywood musical biopics get. As with all of them, including his Johnny Cash and June Carter movie, Walk the Line, now twenty years old, the question is how much of it is really memorable beyond the superficial but not at all easy feat of getting it right, which Jay Cocks’s screenplay does manage. Johnny Cash appears in A Complete Unknown, played here by Boyd Holbrook, not Joaquin Phoenix, linking the two films across two decades.

Cash is central. We hear him in voice-over before we meet him as Dylan reads his letters. He’s more important to Dylan than the two women in his life, Elle Fanning’s Sylvie and Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez, because being accepted by the most badass white musician alive means a kind of recognition that only the gods can confer. Baez is a competitor who Dylan knows can’t write songs as good as his. To her face, he calls them “oil paintings at the dentist’s office.” It doesn’t sting because A Complete Unknown has established that Joan only slept with him because of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an example of the film’s attitude toward history.

Sylvie, as ignored and sad-faced as she becomes, sums up this movie and the whole adventure of Hollywood movies like this one, when they work. She compares Dylan to a French performer they saw on Ed Sullivan once, who could spin multiple plates on sticks and keep them all going at the same time. “I kinda like that guy!” says Dylan. “Yeah,” Sylvie responds, “it’s fun to be the guy. But I was a plate.”

Anora

The first section of Sean Baker’s Anora is fast-paced, sexed up, and makes you want to know what’s going to happen next, as stripper and escort Anora (Mikey Madison, called Ani) marries her john, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), wastrel son of wealthy Mill Basin Russians. In the second section Vanya scampers off, but we lose the Ani we’d come to know, as she sits passively in the back seat of a car, dragged around by Vanya’s father’s fixer (Karren Karagulian), who’s hunting for Vanya but yells at strangers in restaurants for no reason, wasting screen time. In the third section, Vanya’s horrible parents (Aleksei Serebryakov and Darya Ekamasova) show up and demand Ani accompany them to Vegas to have her marriage to Vanya annulled. They drag her onto a plane with transparently idle threats I could not believe she fell for. In the end, the oligarchs win, and Baker presents us with a hopeless world in which the only solace is fucking in grandma’s car.

I don’t know any Brooklyn girl who would’ve gotten on that plane. Ani doesn’t even have a prenup. The parents offer her $10,000 to piss off, but she’s already made $15,000 off a week with Vanya. Pretty sure she can do math. Mikey Madison calls to mind a roster of Brooklyn actresses, starting with Barbara Stanwyck, who wouldn’t have put up with any of that. The 1930 Frank Capra movie Ladies of Leisure has a very similar plot to Anora, and even though it contains one of Stanwyck’s more passive lead roles, she still maintains her dignity. Madison is “the kind of woman that makes whole civilizations topple,” as somebody says about Stanwyck in Ball of Fire (1941), but here nothing topples. And when the Russian mother takes Ani’s brand-new sable coat, a gift from Vanya, and throws it in the face of a Las Vegas courthouse worker and lets this random woman keep it, I didn’t believe it for a second. Wilder and Brackett would have crumpled that up right after they typed it.

Dune: Part Two

This second Dune movie — who knows how many more there will be — begins with bodies being burned in a pile and exudes a general ambience of old-style fascism, which it combines with tropes from 1950s cardboard Roman epics and Youssef Chahine’s 1963 Saladin film, which is incredibly dull and which I watched once out of boredom. It strives for a Langian Nibelungen-ian quality that it is too glacial and pompous to grasp, even in the black-and-white gladiator sections with eyebrowless Austin Butler refusing to take drugs or use AI to kill his opponent. How many gladiators do we need in movies? As the Lang films prefigured German fascism, the Dune films prefigure some kind of North American fascism, but they also seem like ads for a fictional French-Canadian oil conglomerate that is destroying the planet.

I can only take so much messiah talk in science fiction, especially when it’s coming from Javier Bardem and Timothée Chalamet, both of whom I generally like, but here all I could think about was that they’d played Desi Arnaz and Bob Dylan. Did those two ever meet? This movie takes place in the year 10,191, and once I knew that I kept wondering if movies from the 10,180s and 10,170s were better. Anya Taylor-Joy shows up, a refugee from Furiosa, a much better film set in a much more interesting desert wasteland in a time closer to our own. On the other hand, there is a scene in Dune: Part Two where we learn that the Fremen’s food is too spicy for some people.

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David Lynch

The death of David Lynch in January unleashed a great outpouring of love from cinephiles and other fans unlike anything that has ever happened when any other great film director died. It was immediate and massive, encompassing hundreds of written tributes, hundreds of thousands of posts online, piles of flowers at the Bob’s Big Boy where Lynch ate every afternoon for years, with similar tributes at the real-world locations from his work: the Deep River apartment building in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) lived, the café in North Bend, Washington, that the world knows as the Double-R Diner from Twin Peaks.

This spontaneous, worldwide homage to Lynch and his work gave the lie to Hollywood’s refusal to back his films and TV series, proving once again that they only make what they want to make. Does anyone actually think that unfilmed Lynch screenplays like One Saliva Bubble or Ronnie Rocket would have done less well than such unnecessary garbage as last year’s Madame Web, AFRAID, or Borderlands? And every Lynch film has grown in stature with time.

It’s important to remember that even as Hollywood was ignoring Lynch, much of the mainstream, middlebrow critical establishment in the US was also disparaging his work. It wasn’t just that it was too weird. It elicited really hateful reactions from Siskel & Ebert, among others. At the New Yorker, one of the film critics instantly dismissed Twin Peaks: The Return as soon as the first episode ended, tweeting that Lynch had been superseded by Wes Anderson, and their TV critic simply refused to watch it, while at the same time insisting it was TV, not cinema. Even the highest-browed American, Fredric Jameson, who died four months before Lynch, saw in his work some kind of threat, writing against him in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by calling his work “evil.” Just last summer, Phillip Lopate’s latest collection of his film criticism, My Affair with Art House Cinema, came out, and included a piece on the inadequacy of Mulholland Drive in which this dean of American film critics described Lynch as “prone to jejune self-indulgence, capricious phantasmagoria, and vulgarity.”

Such big, dismissive words! As for me, my mind was blown open by Blue Velvet when I saw it college-aged in first run in 1986 at the Nickelodeon Cinema in Boston with my then-girlfriend. We could not speak when we left the theater, so rattled were we by this terrifying new thing that had come into the world (the same summer and fall as Down by Law, She’s Gotta Have It, Big Trouble in Little China, and Something Wild). This filmic world of smashed TVs, diners, wood paneling, the ominous hum of electricity, and rose-pink wall-to-wall carpeting was not, as some viewers may now think, an alien place. It was the actual America of that time, put on screen by David Lynch in a way no one had ever seen before.

I was working at the Nickelodeon then and I wanted to learn to be a projectionist. The guy who ran the booth would let me come in and watch him make up the reels for the platters, and I heard Blue Velvet as much as I saw it. I know every line in it, the famous ones of course (“Do it!”), but also things like “If you want to spray for bugs, it causes us no pain” and “Oh, you’re from the neighborhood?” and “I’ll go one, two, three, four,” which have really stuck with me.

“Hell arrives tomorrow when we bring in the cardinals.” Seeing Conclave, which also features Rossellini, this same season in which the Los Angeles wildfires shortened David Lynch’s life recalls something else Laura Dern says in Blue Velvet: “There is trouble until the robins come.” As for the Oscar-nominated movies of 2025, a line that Bob, the director in Mulholland Drive, not the all-pervasive evil presence from Twin Peaks, says to Naomi Watts comes to mind: “I mean, it was forced, maybe, but still humanistic.”