The End of Oak Street (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery

Two things can be true at once: it’s great that an original film with blockbuster ambitions is currently in theaters, and I am so very tired of these filmmakers trying to regurgitate the types of movies that made them want to be directors in the first place. If I really dug around in here, I’m sure I could find some sort of interesting take: cosplay Spielberg hard enough and Jurassic Park will wind up on your front porch. But the film never has much desire to transcend its ‘80s throwback/ Amblin references (while much much better than Stranger Things, I still must direct a healthy amount of ire at Stranger Things). Where it does excel is in its identity as a movie where Anne Hathaway Shoots at Dinosaurs With a Rifle. What an incredible year she’s having, and what a total movie star performance she gives here - Shelley Duvall in The Shining mashed up with Ripley.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

IN SELECT THEATERS, RELEASING WIDE THIS FRIDAY
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Starring: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler

I’ve seen this twice now and remain a walking Jane Schoenbrun stan account. I am one hundred percent here for their continued journey of peeling back the layers on how formative media experiences (particularly of a genre bent) impact the lives and development of queer people. But while I Saw the TV Glow remains one of the towering achievements of the decade because of its raw, confessional intimacy, Camp Miasma trades in a vibe I can only describe as more “fun and flirty,” while not sacrificing any of the “I think I saw too many movies as a kid and it fucked me up” energy that’s now become Jane’s trademark. Some of the more arch, “satirical” moments fall flat, but ultimately no matter. Their particular depiction of the ephemera of nostalgia - not just the VHS tapes of the movies you loved as a kid, but the baseball cards, the arcade games, the press clippings, etc. - gives their movies a kind of millennial tactility that makes the experience of watching them akin to reaching back into your brain and digging up memories you didn’t even realize were formative. And that’s not even mentioning the film’s dear-to-my-heart fixation on R.E.M. and Counting Crows. All of their collaborators are in rare form again, and Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson are delectable as the flannel-shirt lesbian/ Norma Desmond coupling we didn’t know we needed. All in all, belongs in a 2020s “Camera as Killer” triple feature with Nope and (yes) The Fabelmans, bizarrely similar (and psychosexual) movies about how the lens transmutes trauma into identity.

Tony (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Matt Johnson
Starring: Dominic Sessa, Emilia Jones, Dagmara Domińczyk, Rich Somer, Stavros Halkias, Leo Woodall, Antonio Banderas

Boy, was I a sucker for this. Ostensibly a biopic about the formative summer in Anthony Bourdain’s life when he went to Provincetown and learned he wanted to be a chef, I doubt hardly any of this actually happened this way. But I found myself disengaging with the biography nature of the movie pretty early; it seems like Matt Johnson blessedly does the same, and at its best the movie settles into a hangout coming-of-age movie about a young dirtbag who stumbles into a kitchen with a bunch of goons and discovers what he wants to spend the rest of his life doing. Whenever plot rears its ugly head too much, things can get a little clunky, but Johnson has given this thing a real genuine foundation and sense of place, along with two of the best supporting performances of the year in Leo Woodall and Antonio Banderas.

The Wrong Girls (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Dylan Meyer
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Alia Shawkat, LaKeith Stanfield, Tony Hale, Zack Fox, Seth Rogen, Kumail Nanjiani, Kate McKinnon, Geena Davis

Stoner comedy starring Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat. Nothing to write home about positively or negatively, and houses a decent amount of future go-to KStew GIFs.

Cookie Queens (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Alysa Nahmias

A Spellbound-esque documentary that follows four Girl Scouts as they come of age during cookie season, Cookie Queens makes it hard not to fall for its subjects. I wanted to adopt all four of them, particularly little Ara, who enrolls herself in Pilates classes so she can cart her wagon of cookies around the beach and hock her wares, and Olive, a top seller whose stretch goals wind up being a major source of conflict. But there’s also a darker exposé buried here that director Alysha Nahmias seems uninterested in bringing to the surface, about how the Girl Scouts of America have essentially enlisted child labor to raise funds for their organization, promoting the teaching of work ethic and responsibility while ripping off these girls and stealing the small window of childhood typically reserved for play and socialization. That dark, unexplored underbelly, combined with the film’s reality TV-esque narrativization of these girls’ situations, wound up leaving a bit of a foul taste in my mouth.

To Die For (1995)

FIRST-TIME WATCH
Director: Gus Van Sant
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Joaquin Phoenix, Matt Dillon

This one regularly comes up as potentially Nicole Kidman’s best performance and, even though I still say it’s Birth, I now get it! She plays Suzanne Stone Maretto, an aspiring network news personality who manipulates three teenagers to murder her husband so she can ascend in her career, and she attacks the whole thing like she’s at the center of an inspirational biopic about a small town girl who makes good as opposed to the protagonist of a salacious true crime story. The movie is clearly ground zero for the sort of Craig Gillespie/ Adam McKay movies that are really not for me, and admittedly in the midst of the film’s flashily edited, documentary style opening act I was worried this was just another shallow black comedy that had been co-opted by the “Yas queen” Nicole crowd. But it’s a whole lot more; Gus Van Sant imbues the whole thing with a real grounded understanding of Suzanne’s rootlessness, as well as the psychological consequences of her illicit relationship with high schooler Jimmy Everett (Joaquin Phoenix, excellent in one of his first roles). I miss a Danny Elfman score; turns out putting his specific brand of Beetlejuice-y hell carnival music under a Nicole Kidman performance really works!

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

FIRST-TIME WATCH
Director: John Badham
Starring: John Travolta, Karen Gorney

Dares to ask the question “What if the most ‘he shoulda been at the club’ guy you’ve ever met actually ran the club and still was a hot mess?” I’d always heard this was darker than you’d expect for “the disco movie where John Travolta dances to The Bee Gees,” but yeesh!

The King of Staten Island (2020)

REWATCH
Director: Judd Apatow
Starring: Pete Davidson, Marisa Tomei, Bill Burr, Bel Powley, Maude Apatow, Steve Buscemi

And if I said this was Judd Apatow’s best movie, the biggest cinematic casualty of COVID, and that it should’ve gotten five acting nominations, what then?

Writer, director, actor and host of the podcast Wackadoodle Time Ellen Haun joins Kyle to chat Interiors, Woody Allen’s follow-up to his 1978 Best Director win for Annie Hall. Together, they discuss Diane Keaton’s hats, Mary Beth Hurt’s bob, and how Kyle’s aggravation at the recent Knicks/ World Cup sports monoculture moment made him realize that unfortunately Alvy Singer might be his spirit animal.

Every other Friday, I publish a deep-dive into the movies filmmakers made directly following their Academy Award wins for Best Director (their “Oscar Chasers,” if you will). I’ve begun with the most recent case (Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland follow-up Eternals) and will move back in time week-to-week.

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

-Edmund Gwenn

It’s true, by the way. Comedic artists have been justifiably patting themselves on the back with this mantra for decades. And while I would count myself in their company, I’d be willing to bet that at some point every one of them has seen some deathly serious work of art that made them go, “Man. I wish I could do something like that.”

That’s clearly a feeling that followed Woody Allen throughout much of his career, one which manifested with the follow-up to his Best Director win for Annie Hall. That’s Interiors, a polarizing riff on Ingmar Bergman that dispenses with all things iconically Allen: no jokes, no jazz, and no leading performance by the director himself.

At the time, the pivot was treated as an out-of-left-field choice. But to anyone who had been paying attention, it shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise. After all, Allen came up with the gang that wrote for Sid Caesar - Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart. These were Jewish intellectuals who were funny as hell but literate. Why else would Brooks be referencing Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and James Joyce’s Ulysses in the midst of sequences of Zero Mostel schtupping old ladies to fund a big gay Hitler musical?

Allen’s early work is littered with a similar sensibility - characters debate Kierkegaard and Nietzsche while donning Napoleonic garb in Love & Death, and much of Annie Hall’s backdrop is peppered with movie houses playing highbrow picks like Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise and Bergman’s own Face to Face.

Still, on a surface level, the zag is extreme. Annie Hall is one of the greatest comedies of all time - it’s a film of breathless invention both formally and thematically, featuring career-defining work from Diane Keaton as one of the most irrepressibly vivacious women in all of cinema. So I can’t necessarily blame critics and audiences for having a hard time swallowing a direct follow-up as drab and lifeless as Interiors, however much intentionality there may be behind it.

The film follows three adult sisters in an upper-middle-class family dealing with the aftershocks of their parents’ divorce. Diane Keaton is the eldest, a successful but tightly wound poet named Renata; Kristin Griffith is the youngest, a largely absent actress named Flyn; and Mary Beth Hurt is the adrift middle child, Joey. In their own separate ways, they try to navigate the mental decline of their perfectionist interior decorator mother Eve (Geraldine Page), a downward spiral exacerbated by her ex-husband Arthur’s (E.G. Marshall) second marriage to the lively and lovable Pearl (Maureen Stapleton).

The obvious comp is the Bergman one: the dysfunctional mother-daughter vibe, Gordon Willis’ austere framing, the sweaters. But perhaps the more apropos one is Chekhov; three sisters (one an artist, another a caretaker, another a lost intellectual) struggle with paralysis in the wake of change, the absence of a stable parental figure, and the intrusion of a dominant, energetic outside force. The clipped, minimalist dialogue (“The water’s so calm,” “Yes, it’s very peaceful”) feels like an active attempt by Allen to strip away all verbosity for an emphasis on subtext, trusting his actresses to bring depth and inner life through spareness rather than through his usual anxiety-ridden histrionic ramblings.

There’s even a Chekhov’s gun, in the form of Eve’s precious vases, which she’s often seen obsessively placing just so in every room, so as to assert her dominance of every physical and emotional space into which she enters. The second she’s first seen tinkering with one, you’re just waiting for it to smash. And smash it does, at the drunken dancing hands of Pearl during her wedding celebration. Mary Beth Hurt’s performance of Joey’s obvious disdain for the carefree shenanigans of Pearl, combined with her explosive lashing out once the vases break, is the intense climax of a film that mostly operates at a focused simmer.

At the time, Vincent Canby of The New York Times criticized the film’s debts to its inspirations:

It’s almost as if Mr. Allen had set out to make someone else’s movie, say a film in the manner of Mr. Bergman, without having any grasp of the material, or first-hand, gut feelings about the characters. They seem like other people’s characters, known only through other people’s art.

It’s not an unfair critique. Interiors reeks of a guy wanting to mimic his idols. And yet I think there is power in the imitation - in its depiction of strained sisterhood, in the navigation of aging and declining parents, and in the consequences of a controlled and stifling childhood. If that control stifles the usual charm of a Woody Allen flick, well - it’s just one movie, and good for him for stretching himself.

Even for those less interested in what the film has to offer, it’s clear Interiors was a necessary stepping stone toward the emotional complexities of later work such as Blue Jasmine or Crimes and Misdemeanors. Hannah and Her Sisters, arguably his greatest work, is as indebted to Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander as this is to Cries & Whispers. And while many would argue that later film allowed Allen’s voice to be fully absorbed into its influences rather than overshadowed by them, there’s a unique power to Interiors as a film about stifling made by an artist who’s, even inadvertently, stifling himself.

There’s much to criticize Woody Allen for, and yet a lack of ambition is not among them. Alas, audiences so seldom want to see the clown try their hand at something serious. Even despite many critics leaping to the film’s defense, and the Academy Awards nominating it in several categories, Allen later dismissed it as “a real bomb,” compared it to a melodramatic soap opera, and insisted that he “should have brought Pearl in earlier” - a testament to how artists, particularly comic ones, are often their own harshest critics.

Would Interiors be better regarded if it was yet another dramatic entry in a “serious” filmmaker’s body of work, rather than the oddball follow-up from the guy who made Annie Hall? Maybe.

But dying is easy, and comedy is hard.

Even tougher? Convincing people you’re capable of both.

Woody Allen won the 1978 Academy Award for Best Director, for his 1977 film Annie Hall. These were the other nominees, along with their Oscar Chasers:

• George Lucas, Star Wars (Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace)

• Herbert Ross, The Turning Point (The Goodbye Girl)

• Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1941)

• Fred Zinnemann, Julia (Five Days One Summer)

Writer, friend, former guest, and Greek mythology uber-nerd Thomas Constantine Moore rejoins Kyle to chat the #1 movie in the world - The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his Oppenheimer Best Director win. Together, they ponder Charlize Theron’s fishnet couture, Samantha Morton’s Pottery Barn abilities, and just how old Tom Holland is supposed to be in this movie.

Every other Friday, I publish a deep-dive into the movies filmmakers made directly following their Academy Award wins for Best Director (their “Oscar Chasers,” if you will). I’ve begun with the most recent case (Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland follow-up Eternals) and will move back in time week-to-week.

But surprise! This is the first new release I’m getting to cover under the Oscar Chaser umbrella. Since we’re on the other end of opening weekend, I wanted to get this out as soon as possible. Friday, I’ll be dropping a bonus podcast episode with more thoughts about the movie, with guest Thomas Constantine Moore. But here’s a special early drop of my essay. It should be noted, SPOILERS for The Odyssey.

Christopher Nolan has always loved the idea of a trick.

He flips a truck, rotates a hallway, crashes a Boeing 747 into a building - and does it all in-camera. His narratives twist and turn backwards and forwards through time with the dexterity of a close-up magician, always arriving at some sort of “Aha” moment - a “prestige,” if you will - the spinning top in Inception, the revelation of what Oppenheimer really said to Albert Einstein, that final look between Bruce Wayne and his old butler.

It’s why, despite his myriad and oft-discussed flaws - his leaden dialogue, his almost willful inability to craft a dynamic female character - audiences and critics will always show up for him.

It’s also why, in the wake of his Oscar coronation for 2023’s Oppenheimer1, it feels particularly noteworthy that he chose to make a movie about one of the oldest tricks in the book.

I’m sure we all expected Nolan’s staging of the Trojan Horse sequence to be a dynamic spectacle, and indeed it is. What we couldn’t have necessarily anticipated was his framing of it as a paradigm-shifting deception: the violation of Zeus’ law of hospitality that shattered the foundations of respectable civilization and set loose the world of distrust and corruption we’re still living in today.

His conception of Odysseus is not the cocksure tactical mastermind with whom we’re so accustomed from Homer, but a regretful old war criminal who climbed out of a wooden horse and broke the world - pouring “ten years of rage” into a city in a single night, transforming a fair fight into a slaughter.

The concept of “original sin” isn’t exactly new to Nolan; this is essentially a sequel to Oppenheimer, and arguably even Part Three of an unofficial trilogy about reckoning with the consequences of the past that began with Tenet. That film, released six years ago, has the most contemporary setting; The Odyssey, debuting this past weekend, would have taken place more than 3,000 years ago. Talk about a temporal pincer move.

I have to imagine Nolan’s selection of The Odyssey as his Oppenheimer chaser was borne largely out of the apex moment in which he found himself in 2024. He’d turned a three-hour movie about guys talking in rooms into an almost-billion-dollar blockbuster, not to mention one of the most inevitable Best Picture winners of the century. If there ever was a moment to cash in his blank check to adapt one of the vastest and most unfilmable stories ever told - not to mention the one that really started it all - this was it.

Nevertheless, there was tension in the selection. While he’s undoubtedly the most major and successful blockbuster filmmaker of the century2, Nolan has never made a fantasy. Everything he does is almost stubbornly rooted in reality; Interstellar was praised for its scientifically accurate depiction of a black hole, and he spent an entire three movies exhaustively detailing how Batman could’ve, like, totally been a real guy.

How he’d handle a giant Cyclops, a witch who transforms men into pigs, a six-headed sea monster, sirens, and a gaggle of gods who constantly intervene and manipulate the plot remained my chief question going into the movie.

The answer? He handles it mostly how you’d expect.

There is indeed a Cyclops, and a six-headed sea monster. But there’s no Zeus hurling thunderbolts from the clouds, no Poseidon emerging from the waves to conjure storms for Odysseus’ crew. Any hope of some sort of Ray Harryhausen-esque creature feature is dashed pretty early; one can imagine the field day Peter Jackson or James Cameron would have had with some of these setpieces, but Nolan has never been a filmmaker too preoccupied with the idea of fun.

This is initially a bit frustrating; there’s a rinse-and-repeat quality to the film’s first hour and a half, where Odysseus and his men wander onto one island after another, stumbling upon some threat which chases them back to their ship.

It’s around the moment when Samantha Morton strolls into the film as Circe and molds Himesh Patel and company into pigs, like Baba Yaga at the Pottery Barn, that his ultimate perspective comes thrillingly into focus.

His Odyssey is not a fantasy so much as a series of invasions - men stumbling into strangers’ homes (that Cyclops was really just chilling), and violating one rule of hospitality after another. The gods may punish them, but the root of their anger is always in human choice. The responsibility always belongs to the mortals.

Suddenly, Nolan’s more earthbound telling - set in a time of “apparent” magic rather than outright fantasy - feels less a copout than a deliberate reinterpretation. He’s never been a filmmaker interested in how fates dictate human events. It’s not aliens who are talking to Murph in Interstellar, it’s her father. The gods may have delayed Odysseus’ journey home, but it all stems from that central human violation that happened when he crawled out of the horse in Troy.

With Nolan, the beginning is so often the end and the end is so often the beginning. So it makes total sense that his conception of the creation of the atomic bomb as “the moment it all went wrong” would shift as soon as he started work on The Odyssey, solidifying this as both prelude and closer to the nihilistic “end-of-the-world” trilogy that has defined this decade of his work.

Both Oppenheimer and The Odyssey have hinge moments focused entirely on brilliant men experiencing the thrill of creation immediately followed by the devastation of consequence. Cillian Murphy’s expression as the sound drops out and he gazes upon the majestic mushroom cloud his cleverness has wrought is one of sheer awe, a triumph that curdles almost instantly into horror: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

The same happens with Damon when the specter of Agamemnon enters the city of Troy; a man’s ingenuity becomes the instrument of society’s downfall.

It’s tempting to shrink this all down to some sort of personal reckoning from Nolan after having legitimized superhero movies and changed popular cinema for the worse. The Dark Knight was its own sort of Trojan Horse, after all, bringing him a neverending stream of blank checks while also decimating the kind of high-budget studio dramas that used to actually challenge and provoke audiences, as well as entertain.

But that’s reductive of two works that are ultimately getting blockbuster audiences to reckon with the choices that got us to where we are today.

The world is in a very bad place, largely through the ingenious violations of savvy leaders who file “deception” under “strategy” - much like Odysseus. Many of our greatest filmmakers are in similar periods of looking backward at the sins of the past in order to provide mournful warnings of a future toward which we’re barreling. The same year as Oppenheimer, Nolan was nominated against Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, two films whose endings act as direct handshakes between past atrocities and the present.

The Odyssey does much the same, bringing Nolan - in his greatest act of time travel yet - back to the source of all storytelling, and - as he would argue - all of our current problems.

There’s no Rube Goldbergian bit of plot mechanics or narrative sleight of hand that can put the genie back in the bottle, and Nolan has argued repeatedly in his work that such fantasies are, in their own way, destructive. To quote Tenet3, “What’s happened happened.”

And while it may be tempting to read a certain hopefulness into the end of his Odyssey, it’s important to note that Nolan ends with a line even bleaker than the finale of Oppenheimer: .

“And dawn will break over the darkened world. And our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”

What little hope there is for us lies in resisting that forgetting - in remembering that a song can mask a requiem, a hero can commit great treachery, and something as innocuous as a trick can light the whole world on fire.

Christopher Nolan won the 2024 Academy Award for Best Director, for his 2023 film Oppenheimer. These were the other nominees, along with their Oscar Chasers:

• Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest (nothing yet)

• Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things (Kinds of Kindness)

• Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon (likely releasing next year)

• Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall (in production)

Friday: A bonus podcast episode on The Odyssey

August 7: Back to the regular schedule, with Woody Allen’s Annie Hall chaser, Interiors.

Every other Friday, I publish a deep-dive into the movies filmmakers made directly following their Academy Award wins for Best Director (their “Oscar Chasers,” if you will). I’ve begun with the most recent case (Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland follow-up Eternals) and will move back in time week-to-week.

“At a moment like this, it’s difficult to leaven pride with humility.”

So said Michael Cimino when he accepted the Academy Award for Best Director for The Deer Hunter in 19791. A year later, he released Heaven’s Gate, a nearly four-hour Western whose ballooning budget and catastrophic box office performance became shorthand for Hollywood excess. As the story goes, the film bankrupted United Artists and killed New Hollywood in one fell swoop, bringing an end to an age of unchecked auteur control and kickstarting the corporate blockbuster era we’re still living in today.

That’s the legend, anyway - a legend so enduring that, for decades, it’s eclipsed any understanding of what actually happens in the movie.

The irony is difficult to miss. Heaven’s Gate is a film about the myths we tell ourselves to make history more palatable: an America that celebrates itself as a refuge for immigrants while simultaneously abandoning them to violence. But Hollywood wound up doing much the same to Heaven’s Gate, turning a messy industrial transition into a simple cautionary tale about unchecked directorial ego. The industry needed a scapegoat, and a movie about mythmaking became trapped inside one of Hollywood’s greatest myths.

But first: the legend.

Cimino first submitted the screenplay for Heaven’s Gate in 1971, under the title The Johnson County War. The subject was the same as the finished film: a little-known 1890 conflict in Wyoming during which wealthy cattle barons, organized through the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, hired a mercenary army to eliminate a death list of European immigrants they accused of cattle theft. It’s easy to see what about the story would appeal to the filmmaker who’d just won an Oscar for a movie about broken American promises2; the central conflict is a collision between the two visions of America still squabbling today: one of assimilation and one of the preservation of privilege.

United Artists passed. The script wasn’t drawing any bankable stars, and Cimino hadn’t yet proven himself as a commercially viable filmmaker. Cut to 1979, when The Deer Hunter bagged five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and Cimino was given the type of carte blanche that defined the final years of New Hollywood.

The ensuing horror stories are now infamous. Sets were built, then torn down due to minor imperfections. Hundreds of extras were arranged individually within vast landscapes, as if Cimino were composing a painting rather than making a film. The production fell behind almost immediately; by the sixth day of shooting, it was already five days over schedule. John Hurt had so much downtime on set that he was able to leave the production, star in The Elephant Man, and then return in time to finish his scenes.

Whether recounted as evidence of artistic devotion or unchecked indulgence, the stories accumulated into a single portrait: there was a dictator running wild in Montana and his name was Michael Cimino.

When production wrapped in March 1980, Cimino had shot more than 1.3 million feet of film, and the budget had ballooned from $11.6 million to $44 million. When he got back to Los Angeles, Cimino changed the locks on the editing room, prohibiting executives from seeing the film until he delivered a five hour and 25 minute cut. It was only “about 15 minutes longer than the final cut would be,” he told them.

Word of Cimino’s megalomania had reached the trades, which had been feasting on reports of runaway spending, endless delays, and a director gone mad. Add in allegations of animal abuse and by the time the film premiered in November 1980, its disastrous box office felt less like a surprise than the inevitable conclusion to a story to which everyone had already written the ending.

The critics were all too happy to join the pile-on, with The New York Times calling it “an unqualified disaster.” By 1985, UA executive Steven Bach’s memoir Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate transformed the production into Hollywood scripture, with the studio’s perspective on events serving as its Gospel.

The lesson? You, too, can go bankrupt if you give a director too much power. It’s not like the system wasn’t looking for an excuse to tighten the pursestrings after auteur-driven bombs like William Friedkin’s Cruising or Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart. And particularly with the success of Star Wars and Jaws, the industry was eager to embrace a new era of more commercially minded filmmaking. New Hollywood needed to go, Cimino simply handed the industry its executioner.

But is it actually that bad?

The short answer: absolutely not. This would all be much more understandable if, upon popping in the brilliantly restored Criterion disc, one were greeted by some sort of cinematic abomination - a Cats of the American West. But the truth is that Heaven’s Gate is mostly just a really long, gorgeous-looking movie3 that’s a little boring, with a few moments of genuine transcendence.

It’s true that narrative isn’t the film’s strongest suit; it’s 30 or 40 minutes in when Sheriff James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) finds out about the Association’s plan to murder 125 immigrants, yet he doesn’t warn the victims for another aimless two hours, by which point the killers are already closing in on the town. It’s true also that the love triangle between Averill, mercenary Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), and local madam Ella Watson (Isabelle Huppert) is an almost total non-starter, even despite the whirling dervish of a performance by Huppert.

But set all that aside and the film is a pretty stunning exploration of a single contradiction: not of an American loss of innocence so much as the coexistence of the country’s highest ideals and darkest impulses.

The characters are constantly looking back fondly on a simpler, more idealized time. “Do you remember the good gone days?” asks John Hurt’s Billy Irvine after years of disappointment and alcoholism.

“Clearer and better, every day I get older,” answers Averill.

It’s an exchange that captures the illusion right at the heart of the film. Heaven’s Gate knows “the good gone days” never really existed. Averill and Billy’s youthful optimism, dramatized in the Harvard commencement sequence which opens the film, embodies a 19th-century aspiration toward “the contact of the cultivated mind with the uncultivated” and the “high ideal” of educating a nation. Twenty years later, those cultivated elites have become the architects - or, in Billy’s case, powerless witnesses - of the class violence that underpins the nation’s self-image.

Cimino transforms that contradiction into one of the film’s defining visual motifs: a series of repeating circles. First, the dance at Harvard, where the country’s future leaders twirl inside their own bubble of privilege and idealism. Second, in the film’s greatest sequence, a ten minute roller skating scene where immigrants circle the rink in joyful communion to the strains of a fiddler-led jam session. Third, the climactic battle, in which those same immigrants are surrounded, hunted, and systematically murdered.

It’s a motif that points not only to the cyclical nature of history, but of how the “good gone days” have always existed right alongside our darkest - a sort of comprehensive vision that likely prompted Richard Brody to call Heaven’s Gate the definitive film about America over Fourth of July weekend - a far cry from the critical spanking it received nearly 50 years ago.

The legend lives on.

That reassessment of a once-flop is an interesting mirror of the film’s critique of rose-colored historical revisionism. It’s easier to admire the good within Heaven’s Gate from a 50 year distance, brushing aside the thornier context in which it was initially released. In this case, that’s maybe a good thing; it’s always better to evaluate a piece of art based on what it’s trying to do than how much it cost to make.

It’s worth noting that other auteur-driven projects with famously tortured production histories - Jaws, Star Wars, Titanic - aren’t remembered as cautionary tales. Commercial success has a way of erasing even the most horrific production nightmares. The blockbuster era had already announced itself as the way of the future, and would completely overtake the industry in the ‘80s. Whether Heaven’s Gate had wound up a success or not, it likely would have been the last gasp of New Hollywood. Beating it to death with “worst movie of all time” allegations only helped speed up the process, and pin the blame on the “villainous” Cimino.

It’s all very fitting for a movie about the stories we tell ourselves to make history simpler and more convenient. America remembers itself as a land of opportunity while forgetting the violence that’s accompanied it every step of the way. Hollywood remembers the death of New Hollywood as the inevitable consequence of one director’s hubris rather than an industry already drifting toward a more commercially minded, corporate brand of filmmaking. Contradictions are messy. Myths are easier.

So no, Heaven’s Gate was never a cinematic catastrophe. It’s an ambitious, uneven film whose frequent magnificence has long been obscured by its calamitous behind-the-scenes story. At a moment when immigrants are once again cast as threats and politicians increasingly promise a return to “the good gone days,” it feels a hell of a lot less like a period piece than a diagnosis.

Ask a film buff about the movie and they’ll likely tell you a story of how unchecked ego destroyed an industry, rather than one of America’s simultaneous capacity for compassion and cruelty. For decades, Heaven’s Gate has been remembered as a warning about excess rather than a meditation on contradiction. America has always contained both the roller rink and the extermination; Hollywood just preferred a simpler story.

Michael Cimino won the 1979 Academy Award for Best Director, for his 1978 film The Deer Hunter. These were the other nominees, along with their Oscar Chasers:

• Woody Allen, Interiors (Manhattan)

• Hal Ashby, Coming Home (Being There)

• Warren Beatty & Buck Henry, Heaven Can Wait (Beatty: Reds, Henry: First Family)

• Alan Parker, Midnight Express (Fame)

Gen Z is running the box office, the devil’s wearing Prada again, and RuPaul is the president.

Festival season is just around the corner, but 2026 is already a runaway train headed for the “Stormaganza” of the biggest box office year since COVID. The reason? Filmmakers are giving us singular genre offerings and audiences are showing up. Nearly every film on my list of recommendations below tells its story through some genre lens: we have a horror flick about the violation of consent, a sci-fi movie about the death of the monoculture, and an exploration of grief through a children’s movie about sheep.

That so many personal stories filtered through unique, artistic visions are hitting theaters as the battle against A.I. rages on can’t be mere coincidence. There are any number of ways to make a movie these days, as these films show, but all of them involve great ideas put forward by humans in collaboration, and then shared in the communal space of the cinema.

Here are my picks for the best movies of 2026, here at the 50 yard line.

17. Stop! That! Train!

Director: Adam Shankman
Starring: RuPaul Chales, Ginger Minj, Jujubee
Synopsis: Best friends and train stewardesses Tess and DeeDee trade their dreary shifts on the Stank Rail for the glitzy Glamazonian Express. However, when a catastrophic Stormaganza threatens to crash the high-speed train into Celebration, Florida, the duo in coach must join forces with the snobby first-class attendants, a hot but dimwitted co-conductor, and fabulous US President Judy Gagwell to save the day.

My take: RuPaul hired all the queens and Adam Shankman to basically remake Airplane! and make it gay. They had $10, a hot glue gun, and a dream, and the result is basically a 90 minute Drag Race acting challenge about a runaway train headed directly toward something everyone keeps calling a Stormaganza. Very very stupid, intermittently actually hilarious, and (to me) completely charming. Ru is actually giving an amazing performance and will be on my Supporting Actor ballot come the end of the year.

Where to watch: In theaters

16. Backrooms

Director: Kane Parsons
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
Synopsis: A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.

My take: The big story of the year so far is the box office domination of two 20-something YouTubers - Curry Barker, of Obsession fame, and Kane Parsons, who directed this A24-produced creepypasta. It’s a great moment for indie cinema (sorry, Grogu and Supergirl), but how’s the movie? On first watch, I’m a bit half-and-half on it. The stars of the show are the rooms themselves, a series of extremely creepy masterworks of production design that could easily support an entire run time of exploration. Unfortunately, Will Soodik’s screenplay bundles it all with the usual “it’s all about trauma” trappings. There’s a lot about loops and alcoholism and agoraphobia that feels both undercooked and on-the-nose, and a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-meets-David Lynch dinner scene struck me as dull cosplay. It’s all the more frustrating considering this isn’t really a movie that needed much of a plot; director Kane Parsons’ command of the actual backroom sequences is thrilling stuff - the execution of a horror idea so fully formed it feels like it’s always been around. I’m fascinated by this Zoomer preoccupation with liminal spaces, mixed with what struck me as a COVID-wrought anxiety of going outside (in one exterior shot, even the clouds feel like wallpaper). When the movie allows itself to be more experiential, all of this was tickling my brain even as I held my breath for what horrors might be lurking behind any corner. Even with the flaws, it’s an encouraging success story and the announcement of a major filmmaker.

Where to watch: In theaters

15. I Love Boosters

Director: Boots Riley
Starring: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, Demi Moore
Synopsis: A fearless crew of inventive young women turn shoplifting into a radical act of defiance.

My take: Keke Palmer essentially plays Robin Hood to a Merry Men-esque crew of female shoplifters stealing from a fast-fashion mogul and giving back to their community, in this surreal fantasia about capitalism, wealth inequality, labor exploitation, wage theft, class solidarity, collective organizing, consumerism, materialism, and LaKeith Stanfield as a demon who sucks the souls out of women’s vaginas. If it sounds like a lot, it is; Boots Riley, of Sorry to Bother You fame, has never had one idea when he could have 25. It’s all sort of designed to wear you down, but I’m never gonna be mad at such an exhilarating geyser of thought and visuals. His collaboration with production designer Christopher Glass and costume designer Shirley Kurata (Everything Everywhere All At Once) yields an eye-popping aesthetic of monochromatic hyper-capitalism, and I haven’t been able to get the Tune-Yards’ score out of my head. Wade through the madness and this is ultimately a fantasy about giving people back their time and energy. Nothing wrong with that.

Where to watch: Rent on Amazon Prime

14. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

Director: Baz Luhrmann
Starring: Elvis Presley
Synopsis: Long-lost footage from Elvis Presley’s legendary Las Vegas residency in the 1970s woven together with rare 16mm footage from Elvis on Tour, and 8mm from the Graceland archive, plus recordings of Elvis telling “his side of the story” rediscovered during Baz Luhrmann’s research for his 2022 film, Elvis.

My take: “Cool so I guess I’m obsessed with Elvis now!” I cried as I left Baz’s adrenaline-pumping concert movie-slash-doc hybrid on the King himself. I’m a sucker for when a filmmaker takes on a subject and then gets a little too into it, so the idea that Baz stumbled upon all this incredible footage while making his Elvis movie feels almost too good to be true. What he and his team have done to restore it all is a Herculean feat; it looks and sounds incredible - seeing Presley commanding a room this vividly 20 feet high in front of you can make any agnostic a believer.

Where to watch: Paramount + or rent on Apple TV

13. The Drama

Director: Kristoffer Borgli
Starring: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson
Synopsis: A happily engaged couple is put to the test when an unexpected turn sends their wedding week off the rails.

My take: I’m a bit of two minds about this one, while also firmly recommending giving it a watch. The Drama’s great victory is in the genuine laughs it’s able to wring out of its hot-button premise, in the tangled web of ideas rattling around inside its rom-com wrappings, and in the performances of Zendaya and Pattinson. Its “twist” (in scare-quotes because it’s more premise than spoiler, and yet I’ll stay vague) is ultimately used as an allegory for the ways in which intimacy can be challenged by finding too much out about your partner. But it’s also such a third-rail-licking jolt of provocation regarding a specific cultural topic that it’s a bit disappointing when the movie ultimately soft-pedals it for a third act that just feels like “general wedding chaos,” and resolves too easily with a nice sweet spot to land. It’s ultimately a really nice and empathetic movie, which is both admirable and frustrating given how blackly comic, uncomfortable, and genuinely thought-provoking it all begins. I thought often about the Mel Brooks quote, “If you’re going to go up to the bell, ring it.” This movie both does and doesn’t. Still, I like both of the movies in here - the one about a couple overcoming a hurdle the week of their wedding and the one about how a group of friends deal with one of their own’s horrifying secret. If Borgli doesn’t have the courage of his convictions to synthesize them into one, there are still plenty of fascinating and funny pieces here to chew on.

Where to watch: Rent on Amazon Prime

12. The Devil Wears Prada 2

Director: David Frankel
Starring: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci, Justin Theroux, Kenneth Branagh
Synopsis: Andy Sachs returns to Runway as Miranda Priestly navigates a new media landscape and Runway’s position within. The duo reconnect with former assistant Emily Charlton, now the head of a luxury brand that possesses funding which could ensure Runway’s survival.

My take: It is happening again. Twenty years after the first film was critically dismissed as a solid “chick-flick,” the sequel is being patted on the head as a decent, disposable bit of fan service. And while it’s true the more mediocre passages of The Devil Wears Prada 2 play like a (quite good) reunion episode of your favorite TV show (Hathaway, Streep, Blunt, and Tucci all slip back into their roles extraordinarily well), I’m a bit disappointed to see the film isn’t getting more credit for being a piece of pop entertainment genuinely attempting to reckon with the current media hellscape.

Sure, the gang’s all back. But they’re now at the mercy of tech-bros, failson CEOs, and consultants - bigger bads than Miranda Priestly could ever be. Budgets are being slashed, Miranda’s flying economy, and Runway is now just Instagram content to scroll through while on the toilet. Art, culture, and our protagonists are all on the decline, and there’s an insurmountable hopelessness at the center of the film that feels both true to 2026 and refreshing for what could’ve just been a glossy retread. When the movie’s operating on these terms, I found it a lowkey masterpiece of “ruined city” cinema, belonging in conversation with The Empire Strikes Back and Skyfall in terms of franchise movies that put their heroes on their heels, and with The Matrix Resurrections in terms of legacy sequels with something to say about the industry that bore them. Meryl, Anne, and Tucci stomping around to “Vogue” in a world where nobody cares about them feels like a pretty good summation of our current nightmare.

Where to watch: Rent on Google Play

11. The Sheep Detectives

Director: Kyle Balda
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Nicholas Braun, Nicholas Galitzine, Molly Gordon, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart, Bella Ramsey, Brett Goldstein, Hong Chau, Emma Thompson
Synopsis: George Hardy is a shepherd who reads detective novels to his beloved sheep every night, assuming they can’t possibly understand. But when a mysterious incident disrupts life on the farm, the sheep realize they must become the detectives. As they follow the clues and investigate human suspects, they prove that even sheep can be brilliant crime-solvers.

My take: This spring, Knives Out got absolutely bodied by a bunch of CGI sheep and Hugh Jackman in Farmer Hoggett mode. I assumed this was just some ass kids’ movie (see: the above poster for: why) until I saw an actual trailer and got a whiff of Paddington vibes. It’s never as funny as those movies, but it belongs in the same conversation as a family movie that doesn’t condescend to its audience and comes by its sense of sweetness and charm honestly. Craig Mazin’s script, loosely based on a German detective novel called Three Bags Full about sheep solving the murder of their shepherd, is one of the best of the year - a tightly plotted mystery that also has a bunch of farm animals reckoning with their mortality. Me and the dad sitting next to me were crying about the Winter Lamb, and I’m not embarrassed to say.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime

10. Hoppers

Director: Daniel Chong
Starring: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco
Synopsis: Scientists have discovered how to ‘hop’ human consciousness into lifelike robotic animals, allowing people to communicate with animals as animals. Animal lover Mabel seizes an opportunity to use the technology, uncovering mysteries within the animal world beyond anything she could have imagined.

My take: I had given up the ghost on Pixar ever since Toy Story 3’s (excellent and earned) final scene sent them on a decade-long mission to emotionally terrorize us, forgetting they used to do comedies that make us cry as opposed to movies engineered for tears that have a few jokes. Enter Hoppers, which begins as “Beaver-Avatar” and slowly turns into Baby’s First Body Horror Movie. They’re calling it the most fucked-up third act of a Disney movie since Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Where to watch: Disney + or rent on Amazon Prime

9. Mother Mary

Director: David Lowery
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, Atheena Frizzell, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Alba Baptista, Sian Clifford, FKA Twigs
Synopsis: Long-buried wounds rise to the surface when iconic pop star Mother Mary reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer Sam Anselm on the eve of her comeback performance.

My take: Two Chatty Kathys work it out on the remix in this pop girlie exorcism from the guy who brought you A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. This is the exact opposite experience of The Drama, boasting an overwrought and insufferable first half (Phantom Thread by way of Euphoria) that slowly gives way to something intoxicating. Its chamber piece form is an initially trying experience; Lowery’s bluntness with a visual metaphor can have an elegant, graceful power, with dialogue not so much. But like the central relationship between Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary and Michaela Coel’s Sam Anselm, the film has good bones, and as it drifts into a time and space-bending ghost story about ruin and repair, Lowery’s elemental filmmaking reveals the great depths within his simple setup. Not for everyone, but sure to reflect the experiences of anyone who’s wished for the fantasy of stitching back together a long-severed formative friendship. It’s a visual album for the resurrection of a friendship.

Where to watch: Rent on Amazon Prime

8. Send Help

Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Dennis Haysbert
Synopsis: Two colleagues become stranded on a deserted island, the only survivors of a plane crash. On the island, they must overcome past grievances and work together to survive, but ultimately, it’s a battle of wills and wits to make it out alive.

My take: Drag Me to Hell was released in 2009. Since then Sam Raimi has only made Oz the Great and Powerful and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, two career developments that seemed to signal that - how do you say - the GOAT was washed. How wonderful to report then that there’s something almost entirely regenerative about his latest, where he crash-lands on an island with Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien and lets his freak flag fly once more. It’s gooey, it’s gross, and it brings him back to his greatest talent as a filmmaker - gleefully beating the absolute shit out of his actors. O’Brien continues his Twinless trajectory of being one of the most surprisingly winning stars of his generation, and I do not mean it lightly when I say that McAdams is quite simply the best Raimi protagonist performance since Bruce Campbell. A blast.

Where to watch: Hulu, Disney + or rent on Amazon Prime

7. Obsession

Director: Curry Barker
Starring: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter
Synopsis: After breaking the mysterious “One Wish Willow” to win his crush’s heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.

My take: The runaway hit of the year is a Gen Z horror flick about the violation of consent - go figure! I keep surprising myself with how positive I am on this nasty little movie, as much in awe of its continued box office success as I am with Barker’s confidence to tackle something so wildly unpleasant and turn it into a hit. The bad reading of this is obviously “bitches be crazy, be careful wishing for a girlfriend because she might turn out to be a psycho.” And I don’t think the movie is so wildly skilled that it completely steers clear of that implication. But to me, the intent is evident: this is a horror movie about the toxicity of the soft boy. I thought early and often about (500) Days of Summer, another terrifying film about nice guy entitlement. A second viewing really revealed that the lack of internality for Nikki is the point; she’s been robbed of her autonomy and fashioned into a jacked-up manic pixie dream girl. Nevertheless, the movie is nothing without Inde Navarrette; the more you watch it the more you realize she’s playing a woman robbed of agency fighting for her life to get back to the surface - harrowing stuff and one of the performances of the year.

Where to watch: In theaters or rent on Apple TV

6. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

Director: Matt Johnson
Starring: Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol, Jared Raab
Synopsis: When their plan to book a show at the Rivoli goes horribly wrong, Matt and Jay accidentally travel back to the year 2008.

I had no idea who Matt Johnson was before two years ago, when he wrote, directed, and acted in the lowkey great BlackBerry. Now he’s back with a feature adaptation of the Canadian mockumentary sitcom series Nirvanna the Band the Show, which he created with friend and costar Jay McCarrol. This is IP with which I was unfamiliar, although it seems to be a sort of Canadian Flight of the Conchords situation, about two friends who spend their time hatching wild publicity schemes to advertise their improvisatory musical stylings. Whatever the case, the film they’ve made is a bit of a marvel of indie ingenuity. The rumored budget is around $5-10,000, and yet the film is a wild time traveling epic that’s part pop culture collage-part Jackass movie. Honestly the less said about it the better; I had been hearing about this film’s transcendence for about six months now from people I trust, and while I’m sure the “masterpiece” claims are a case of festival goggles, I still walked away tickled and impressed. It is, quite simply, about as much fun as I could possibly have with a movie doing possibly my least favorite thing - being nostalgic about Back to the Future.

Where to watch: Rent on Apple TV or Amazon Prime

5. Blue Film

Director: Elliot Tuttle
Starring: Reed Birney, Kieron Moore
Synopsis: Drawn by the promise of easy money and anonymous sex, queer camboy Aaron Eagle is shocked to discover a personal connection with the mysterious stranger who has paid for his company. Over the course of one night, the two men engage in a war of words and emotions as they wrestle with the impact of a tainted and shared past.

Queer camboy Aaron Eagle (newcomer Kieron Moore) heads over to the house of a stranger (Reed Birney) for some easy money and anonymous sex, and discovers a shocking and bizarre link to his past. The less said about what goes down in Blue Film the better, suffice it to say it’s one of the most provocative, emotionally and intellectually intense films I’ve seen in a minute. And not performatively so - writer/director Elliot Tuttle has a way with a taboo topic that feels genuinely challenging; this is a queasy, uncomfortable film that nevertheless glued me to the screen for its 82 minute runtime. A heat check of a debut, with Birney and Moore giving two of the best performances of the year.

Where to watch: Rent on Amazon Prime

4. The Invite

Director: Olivia Wilde
Starring: Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton,
Synopsis: Joe and Angela’s marriage is on thin ice. When they invite their enigmatic upstairs neighbors for a dinner party, the night spirals into unexpected places.

My take: Olivia Wilde is the comeback kid of the year, following up the disaster of Don’t Worry Darling with the smartest, savviest, and sexiest adult comedy in years - the sort of brilliantly observed capturing of human behavior and interaction that would leave Mike Nichols impressed, were he alive to see it. Based on a Spanish comedy called The People Upstairs, and clearly cribbing lovingly from Nichols’ film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the film mashes two modern couples up against each other for a night of fun and games. The script, by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, plumbs the depths of their relationships, tap dancing on the raw nerves and insecurities of even the most stable of partnerships. Sneakily impressive as a directing flex, with four of the best performances of the year.

Where to watch: In theaters

3. Disclosure Day

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo
Synopsis: A cybersecurity expert becomes a whistleblower after uncovering secrets about aliens, putting him on the run from a corporation. Meanwhile, a meteorologist experiencing strange phenomena joins forces with him to prove there’s life beyond our understanding.

My take: Every movie is a leap of faith. Hugo (Colman Domingo) talks about how Scanlon (Colin Firth) infantilizes people for “the crime of being astonished,” how he’s essentially policing wonderment. So it goes with the Cinema Sins crowd. Spielberg is not the monoculture anymore, nor do I think he’s arguing he *should* be here - merely that he, like the whistleblowers in the movie, should be allowed to gather us together, put images in front of us, and see who takes the leap.

‘Disclosure Day’ is an often goofy movie; nobody will be writing home about the script, and I will be making fun of the space twig that seems to do whatever the plot needs it to for the rest of the year. But I find the creakiness moving, even essential to the film’s text. And I promise that’s not hand-waving away the more rickety parts of the movie (again, the space twig!) it’s just that Spiely hasn’t made something like this in a long time, and I think the fact that it’s both a little “Grampy makes a Matrix film” and ultimately quite powerful is what makes it a necessary new entry in the story of his filmography.

People will call this stupid and naive; I heard more than a fair share of chuckling during my second watch with a packed crowd. And that comes with the territory; there’s a reason Spielberg doesn’t show us what happens *after* the disclosure - the reaction is up to us. For an audience member, there’s always going to be more of a risk taking the leap with a movie trafficking in this level of ridiculousness with *this* level of sincerity (people have made the Shyamalan comparisons, and it’s very apt).

For my part, I was more than happy to go along for the ride, and for me the risk paid off; I love the last half hour of this thing so much. This is really not a movie about aliens or World War III, but one about a 79 year old man wondering if he still has the power he had in the prime of his youth - to make the world stop, come together, and watch something. By the time that final sequence comes up, I think he’s proven he does. “You just have to give yourself over to it.”

Where to watch: In theaters

2. Blue Heron

Director: Sophy Romvari
Starring: Eylul Guven, Amy Zimmer, Ádám Tompa, Iringó Réti
Synopsis: In the late 1990s, a family of six settles into their new home on Vancouver Island, as internal dynamics are slowly revealed through the experiences of the youngest child, Sasha. Their fresh start is interrupted by the increasingly dangerous behavior of Jeremy, the family’s oldest child.

My take: Sophy Romvari’s directorial debut is a memory piece centered on her childhood growing up on Vancouver Island with her parents and three brothers, as her mom and dad try to figure out what to do about the increasingly troubling and dangerous behavior of her eldest brother, Jeremy. Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun really feels like it opened the floodgates on a new generation of filmmakers reconstructing their memories to figure out what they missed, what went wrong, and what they could’ve changed. The ways in which this movie turns in on itself and forges new paths in that terrain moved me immensely. More and more I’m finding the act of putting one’s memories onscreen to be one of the most powerful things an artist can do.

Where to watch: The Criterion Channel or rent on Amazon Prime

1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Director: Nia DaCosta
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O’Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry
Synopsis: Dr. Kelson finds himself in a shocking new relationship - with consequences that could change the world as they know it - and Spike’s encounter with Jimmy Crystal becomes a nightmare he can’t escape.

My take: Danny Boyle and Alex Garland rang fresh blood out of 28 Days Later with one of the best films of 2025. Now Boyle has handed directing reins to Nia DaCosta for another wild departure in this saga of societal collapse in the wake of the rage virus. There’s not even enough time to mourn the loss of Boyle’s madman visual sense, or the stirring emotion elicited in Years’ denouement; this is a franchise that reinvents itself quicker than you can say “Howzat.” Its latest evolution is a bizarre Brothers Grimm fairy tale by way of Iron Maiden, a metal rock album cover of a movie that pits the mind of a zombie against that of a sadistic fascist and posits which is more infected. Meanwhile, anyone begging for more of Ralph Fiennes’ melancholy orange Dr. Ian Kelson is sure to get their money’s worth. It looks like we are getting a third one in this trilogy, but even if it ended here, it would have been a full delicious meal. “The ritual has begun, Satan’s work is done.”

Where to watch: Netflix or rent on Amazon Prime

Every other Friday, I publish a deep-dive into the movies filmmakers made directly following their Academy Award wins for Best Director (their “Oscar Chasers,” if you will). I’ve begun with the most recent case (Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland follow-up Eternals) and will move back in time week-to-week.

In 2013, Meryl Streep went on Watch What Happens Live and was asked if she’d ever appeared in a bad movie. Without missing a beat, she replied, “Still of the Night.”

It’s a rare shots-fired moment from a typically diplomatic celebrity. Had I been there, I might’ve retorted, “Well, Ms. Streep, you were also in The Iron Lady.” But for whatever reason, that’s the movie that sprang to mind: the one she made with Robert Benton after they both won Oscars for Kramer vs. Kramer.1

Still of the Night is probably not a movie anyone has given much thought since its 1982 release, which may be her point. I guess we all at least remember the wig from The Iron Lady. But Andy Cohen’s response to the title is surely what 99 percent of people’s would be: “And what was that about?”

Streep replies, dryly, “Never mind.”

Never mind, indeed. It’s not a movie that’s inspired much in me since I watched it last week, other than the lingering question: can someone be considered a “Best Director” if they also made Meryl Streep’s worst movie?

But I digress. To answer Andy, it’s a noir, I guess - a Hitchcock homage that somehow feels more of a parody than Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety. There’s an auction in it, like in North By Northwest, and a bird like in - well - The Birds. That constitutes an homage, right?

It’s got all the visual panache of a thriller shot by the guy who made Kramer vs. Kramer, by which I mean it’s a remarkably sauceless exercise in style, a pretty boring movie about a psychiatrist (Roy Scheider) trying to solve the murder of one of his patients by reading old case files.

Streep plays the femme fatale, which quickly proves an even worse use of her talents than when Rob Marshall painted her hair blue and made her be the witch in Into the Woods2. The problem is that Meryl Streep remains the greatest actress of her generation precisely because of the way she can make a character’s inner life instantly legible. She’s transparent; just a head tilt or adjustment of her glasses is enough to let you know if she’s feeling trapped or aroused, suspicious or secretive.

But the whole point of a femme fatale is that she’s opaque; we don’t have any clue what’s going on with her, at least until the end. Meryl looks great in the movie, but putting her in the same hairdo as Eva Marie Saint does not a performance make. From the second she walks into Roy Scheider’s office, the jig is up. She’s too genuinely shaken by the murder of her lover to have killed him, and she has zero chemistry with her co-star. So the whole movie you’re wondering why he’s so obsessed with her and wanting to scream at him, “SHE DIDN’T DO IT! WRAP IT UP!”

Streep identified this problem in later years. “I didn’t know what I was doing in that,” she said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. She took the job because it shot in New York and she wanted to be close to her baby - and because she loved Benton and wanted to work with him again.

Benton loved her back. “She’s a wonderful collaborator,” he said.

He would know; she single-handedly gave Kramer vs. Kramer the depth of perspective that arguably won it Best Picture over films like Apocalypse Now and All That Jazz3. She objected to the screenplay’s treatment of Joanna, arguing that the character was being reduced to an “ogre” for leaving her husband and son. This led to multiple clashes with both Benton and her co-star Dustin Hoffman, where she fought for the justification of Joanna’s actions: a sense of suffocation and a search for identity.

“The more I thought about it,” she said, “the more I felt the sensual reason for Joanna’s leaving, the emotional reasons, the ones that aren’t attached to logic. Joanna’s daddy took care of her. Her college took care of her. Then Ted took care of her. Suddenly she just felt incapable of caring for herself.”

Benton resisted at first, but then acquiesced, letting Streep write her own courtroom monologue, where she lays these motivations bare. That the shift in perspective still feels somewhat perfunctorily grafted onto a movie whose allegiance remains with Ted4 is no knock on Streep’s writing, or on her legendarily vulnerable portrayal of Joanna’s remorse and newfound agency. The character is in Kramer vs. Kramer for 15 of its 105 minutes, and yet her performance on the stand is what most people remember.

It’s no wonder, then, that Benton wanted to work with her again, or that Streep wanted to further collaborate with a director who gave her such autonomy, particularly if it meant staying close to her newborn baby. These are perfectly understandable reasons to make a movie. They are not, unfortunately, reasons for a movie to exist.

When faced with wrapping up his Hitchcock ode, Benton resorted to the same trick that got him out of a jam on Kramer: he handed Streep a pencil and legal pad and asked her to write her character’s backstory. The result is a five-minute monologue about her father, an American ambassador in Italy, whom she was accused of pushing to his death. It’s perfectly well performed but ultimately pointless; why are we wrapping up this Hitchcock pastiche with some soulful speechifying from La Streep?

It all comes down to a lack of vision from Benton. Leaning on your collaborators is all well and good; in an actor-driven film like Kramer, it was wise to let Hoffman and Streep cook in their own separate ways. But doing a Hitchcock homage without any sense of style, a noir without any understanding of what makes the genre tick, and then asking your lead actress to write the ending of your movie… well, let’s just say that I can’t see Francis Ford Coppola or Bob Fosse doing that.

We all love Meryl Streep. But in Still of the Night, that isn’t enough.

Robert Benton won the 1980 Academy Award for Best Director, for his 1979 film Kramer vs. Kramer. These were the other nominees, along with their Oscar Chasers:

• Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (One From the Heart)

• Bob Fosse, All That Jazz (Star 80)

• Édouard Molinaro, La Cage aux Folles (Cause toujours... tu m’intéresses !)

• Peter Yates, Breaking Away (Eyewitness)

Every Friday, I publish a deep-dive into the movies filmmakers made directly following their Academy Award wins for Best Director (their “Oscar Chasers,” if you will). I’ve begun with the most recent case (Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland follow-up Eternals) and will move back in time week-to-week.

Just recently, I wrapped up the 1980s, and so wanted to take this opportunity to take a look back and rank all the films I’ve covered from least to greatest. Bear in mind that this list only represents my personal taste. Also note that Sean Baker, Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuarón, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and Christopher Nolan have not yet made their follow-up films.

41. The Search (2014)

Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Movie it chased: The Artist (2011)
Which is better: The Artist, unfortunately
Starring: Bérénice Bejo, Annette Bening
Synopsis: A woman who works for a non-governmental organization (NGO) forms a special relationship with a young boy in war-torn Chechnya.

Excerpt from my essay: It’s a total bummer, and also super boring. Like Paul Haggis’ similarly wearying Crash, it weaves together a few different storylines of competing self-seriousness; the boy’s sister is also looking for him, and winds up working in an orphanage run by Annette Bening, and a young Russian man gets inducted into the army and turned into a killing machine. It’s all shot with a desaturated hue that aims for Schindler’s List but evokes those sad ASPCA commercials where dogs look sadly at the camera and Sarah McLachlan sings “In the Arms of an Angel.” Also at one point, the little boy dances cathartically to the Bee Gees and I started my own search for cyanide capsules on Amazon.

40. Oliver Twist (2005)

Director: Roman Polanski
Movie it chased: The Pianist (2002)
Which is better: The Pianist
Starring: Barney Clark, Ben Kingsley, Jamie Foreman, Leanna Rowe, Edward Hardwicke, Mark Strong
Synopsis: When 9-year-old orphan Oliver Twist dares to ask his cruel taskmaster, Mr. Bumble, for a second serving of gruel, he’s hired out as an apprentice. Escaping that dismal fate, young Oliver falls in with the street urchin known as the Artful Dodger and his criminal mentor, Fagin. When kindly Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver in, Fagin’s evil henchman Bill Sikes plots to kidnap the boy.

Excerpt from my essay: I love Oliver Twist; it is, for all intents and purposes, my Dickens book. But there is no reason for this film’s existence; it can’t decide whether it wants to live in the crueler shadows of David Lean’s 1948 film or the sunny family vibe of the 1968 Oscar-winning musical. And anyway, both of those films exist, so why throw on this reheated Masterpiece Theatre slop?

I went into this rewatch (eek, re-watch) expecting to have some take on how Polanski’s experiences as a child living as an orphan and being shunted from foster family to foster family contributed to a uniquely specific understanding of young Oliver’s plight. I’d even wondered if the film might act as a sort of cursed but reflective statement on Polanski’s central dichotomy, being about both a survivor (Oliver) and an abuser (Fagin). But the fact is that this is just a rote, perfunctory adaptation of Oliver Twist; both versions I named above are not only far superior, but also not directed by sex criminals.

39. A Chorus Line (1985)

Director: Richard Attenborough
Movie it chased: Gandhi (1982)
Which is better: Gandhi
Starring: Michael Douglas
Synopsis: A group of dancers congregate on the stage of a Broadway theatre to audition for a new musical production directed by Zach. After the initial eliminations, seventeen hopefuls remain, among them Cassie, who once had a tempestuous romantic relationship with Zach. She is desperate enough for work to humble herself and audition for him; whether he’s willing to let professionalism overcome his personal feelings about their past remains to be seen.

Excerpt from my essay: What’s strange about that strategy is that the resulting film bears such little resemblance to the stage show that if this was my introduction to A Chorus Line, I’d think it was a pretty shitty musical. Gone is Bennett’s staging, replaced by drum-machine-scored MTV moves by Flashdance choreographer Jeffrey Hornaday. Also gone are two of the score’s most iconic numbers: Cassie’s solo dance number “The Music and the Mirror” and the montage sequence of “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love.” In their place, the bafflingly inferior “Let Me Dance For You” and “Surprise, Surprise⁴,” a song about… having sex in a graveyard?

Even the cast feels more like an anonymous assemblage of ‘80s-hot young’uns⁵ than the spiky ensemble of desperate and bloodthirsty pros Bennett had assembled on Broadway. One by one, each of them has their moment to butcher these Marvin Hamlisch-Edward Kleban tunes while Michael Douglas, playing the show’s choreographer, looms like a jaded gremlin at his tech table. At one point, he screams at them - “Can’t you talk?!? All of you, just talk to me, to each other!” - as though he’s become fed up at the very movie in which he’s been imprisoned.

38. The Passion of the Christ (2004)

Director: Mel Gibson
Movie it chased: Braveheart (1995)
Which is better: Braveheart
Starring: Jim Caviezel, Monica Bellucci, Maia Morgenstern, Sergio Rubini
Synopsis: A graphic portrayal of the last twelve hours of Jesus of Nazareth’s life.

Excerpt from my essay: The Passion of the Christ, on the other hand, trades not in faith, nor love, nor hope, nor forgiveness, nor truth - none of the things which Gibson claimed he was tackling when he set out to make it. It’s a morally bankrupt snuff film where Mel Gibson drags his purported Lord and Savior through the mud - beating, bludgeoning, and finally crucifying him all in order to scapegoat a group of people he loathes.

It’s cinematic hatespeak, an ultra-violent Hallmark movie made to rehash the same antisemitic bile he’d later slur into a police officer’s tape recorder.

37. The Postman (1997)

Director: Kevin Costner
Movie it chased: Dances With Wolves (1990)
Which is better: Dances With Wolves
Starring: Kevin Costner, Will Patton, Larenz Tate, Olivia Williams, James Russo, Tom Petty
Synopsis: In 2013, there are no highways, no I-ways, no dreams of a better tomorrow, only scattered survivors across what was once the United States. Into this apocalyptic wasteland comes an enigmatic drifter with a mule, a knack for Shakespeare, and something yet undiscovered: the power to inspire hope.

Excerpt from my essay: That this is all folded into a bizarre ego-trip for Costner, a level of self-hero worship that transcends whatever he was doing in Dances With Wolves, makes the film an even more bizarre curio. The film quite literally ends with the reveal of a statue of Costner, riding a horse and holding aloft a piece of - say it with me - mail, as though he’s the Paul fucking Revere of the USPS. At another point, after announcing himself as the Postman, Olivia Williams (in her film debut) is so magnetically drawn to his obvious sexual charisma (question mark?) that she asks him if he has good semen and then says “I’m only asking because I want you to make me pregnant.”

Thus proceeds a moment where her infertile husband begs Costner to cuck him so that they can have a child, a negotiation which leads to a sex scene where it’s implied that fucking Kevin Costner is so good that a woman can get pregnant riding him even though he has FALLEN ASLEEP.

36. Les Misérables (2012)

Director: Tom Hooper
Movie it chased: The King’s Speech (2010)
Which is better: The King’s Speech
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Rusell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Samantha Barks, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen
Synopsis: An adaptation of the successful stage musical based on Victor Hugo’s classic novel set in 19th-century France. Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing bread, must flee a relentless policeman named Javert. The pursuit consumes both men’s lives, and soon Valjean finds himself in the midst of the student revolutions in France.

Excerpt from my essay: Five minutes into his version of Les Miz, it becomes immediately apparent why this marriage of director and material was a bad idea. Hooper, who found Colin Firth’s gravitational pull so strong in The King’s Speech that his camera seemed to be perpetually sucked into the actor’s nostrils, finds a similar allure to every member of the A-list cast he’s assembled here. Thus, the film eschews any sense of epic scale for a gloomily tedious parade of extreme close-ups, where actors such as Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, and Eddie Redmayne snot and whisper their way through some of the most famous musical theater songs in the canon.

35. The Missing (2003)

Director: Ron Howard
Movie it chased: A Beautiful Mind (2001)
Which is better: The Missing
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, Evan Rachel Wood, Jenna Boyd, Eric Schweig, Aaron Eckhart
Synopsis: When rancher and single mother of two Maggie Gilkeson sees her teenage daughter, Lily, kidnapped by Apache rebels, she reluctantly accepts the help of her estranged father, Samuel, in tracking down the kidnappers. Along the way, the two must learn to reconcile the past and work together if they are going to have any hope of getting Lily back before she is taken over the border and forced to become a prostitute.

Excerpt from my essay: The problem, of course, is that Howard is no John Ford. There’s a world weariness that cuts through Ford’s picturesque images which Howard just doesn’t possess; through his eyes, even the Grinch is more a dopey clown than the contemptuous Christmas-hating grump of whom Dr. Seuss wrote. That sort of sunny poptimism is admirable, I guess, but it’s also a shit match for a Western. Once things actually get going in The Missing, it has the unmistakable feeling of a kid playing “Cowboys and Indians.” There’s a frustrating lack of nuance which, despite the employment of Indigenous actors and an authentic use of the Apache language, feels significantly less progressive than Ford’s handling of the same subject matter 47 years prior.

In Howard’s film, there are good Apaches and bad Apaches. The good Apaches help the white people, while the bad Apaches run a sex slavery ring and are lorded over by a one-note witch doctor type who casts spells upon the night air and wouldn’t feel out of place in an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess. Contemporary reviews expressed particular disdain for the “political correctness” of centering this story on a woman (hello, early aughts sexism!), but the truly progressive move would’ve been to make Blanchett more in line with Wayne’s Ethan of The Searchers. Let her be the morally gray, vengeful, racist antihero that men have been playing in this genre since the dawn of cinema, a Lydia Tár of the frontier as opposed to the scrappy woman with a gun whose mildly problematic ideas are handwaved away so as not to make her too unlikable.

34. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Movie it chased: Schindler’s List (1993)
Which is better: Schindler’s List
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard
Synopsis: Four years after Jurassic Park’s genetically bred dinosaurs ran amok, multimillionaire John Hammond shocks chaos theorist Ian Malcolm by revealing that he has been breeding more beasties at a secret location. Malcolm, his paleontologist ladylove and a wildlife videographer join an expedition to document the lethal lizards’ natural behavior in this action-packed thriller.

Excerpt from my essay: No, The Lost World isn’t very good at all. Its hackneyed plot is sort-of based on Michael Crichton’s 1995 sequel to the original Jurassic novel, at least until Spielberg gets bored with it and decides he actually wants to make a movie about a T-rex rampaging around San Diego just because. It begins with a sweaty bit of exposition that not even Richard Attenborough can sell, about how there’s actually another island where the dinosaurs were cloned before being transported to Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm⁵, catastrophically promoted to leading man status here, is sent to help document the dinos in order to protect them from a more malevolent InGen which hopes to create a new park.

Gone is the original’s exploration of technology and its limitations, of hubris and scientific ethics. In its place is a half-hearted bit of environmental messaging, rendered largely inert because the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were never meant to represent animals or nature, but instead the twisted products of man’s desire to play God. The review writes itself: Spielberg and the studio “were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

33. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016)

Director: Ang Lee
Movie it chased: Life of Pi (2012)
Which is better: Life of Pi
Starring: Joe Alwyn, Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, Garrett Hedlund, Vin Diesel, Steve Martin
Synopsis: 19-year-old Billy Lynn is brought home for a victory tour after a harrowing Iraq battle. Through flashbacks the film shows what really happened to his squad – contrasting the realities of war with America’s perceptions.

Excerpt from my essay: But most of the time, it really does look like a big budget episode of The Young and the Restless on fast forward. On set, actors couldn’t even wear makeup because it would be so nakedly visible in such high definition, a golden example of how the clarity of Billy Lynn’s images ultimately becomes a hindrance, exposing every minor bit of artifice. It’s a good reminder that movies are, above all else, fake. And to capture that falseness with technology aimed at replicating such lifelike photorealism weirdly makes it all feel even faker. Pointing a 4K high frame rate camera at an actor saying lines like “Have you not had your morning glass of shut up” doesn’t necessarily help. But at a certain point, I’m admittedly also just counting the pores on Steve Martin’s face, or fixating on how unnatural and alien the background actors look miming conversation with each other.

Our eyes have been conditioned to expect movies to look a certain way, and it was never going to be possible to completely override that conditioning with one two hour film, even if it does betray an admirable level of ambition on Lee’s part. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a big swing and a miss, but a big swing nonetheless, exactly the kind of fascinating failure one should attempt after winning their second Oscar for Best Director.

32. Havana (1990)

Director: Sydney Pollack
Movie it chased: Out of Africa (1985)
Which is better: Havana
Starring: Robert Redford, Lena Olin, Alan Arkin
Synopsis: During the revolution, a high-stakes gambler arrives in Cuba seeking to win big in poker games. Along the way, he meets and falls in love with the wife of a Communist revolutionary.

Excerpt from my essay: By contrast, there’s a zest and vitality to the night life street scenes of Havana, a pulse and rhythm to Dave Grusin’s Latin-jazz-infused score, not to mention a whole rogue’s gallery of Casablanca analogues for Redford to bump up against: Lena Olin gives her best Ingrid Bergman as seductive revolutionary Bobby Durán, Raul Julia (woefully underused) is the Victor Laszlo, Alan Arkin even gets to lend his particular brand of bemused to a casino manager who’s basically the Claude Rains to Redford’s Bogey. Add in a guy named Baby Hernandez and Richard Farnsworth as someone called The Professor, and the whole thing feels ready to spring into a 1950s Guys and Dolls of sorts - Jack’s looking for action but the heat is on, will he win the game and get the girl before the revolution starts? Yet somewhere around the midpoint, it all flatlines as the film’s pacing devolves to sludge and focus shifts exclusively to the flaccid romance of its two leads.

It’s not even that Olin is bad. But in past ventures, Pollack had pitted Redford against Hollywood royalty such as Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, and Meryl Streep, a murderess’ row into which Olin doesn’t necessarily fit. As the film depends more and more on her chemistry with her leading man, the two actors do little to justify how this apolitical hustler would be so utterly transformed by a woman he met a mere 72 hours ago, particularly when he still found time for a threesome on night two.

31. The Revenant (2015)

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Movie it chased: Birdman (2014)
Which is better: The Revenant
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter
Synopsis: In the 1820s, a frontiersman, Hugh Glass, sets out on a path of vengeance against those who left him for dead after a bear mauling.

Excerpt from my essay: If anything, The Revenant is a better comedy than Birdman, however inadvertently. This is essentially an extended episode of Jackass, with Leo as Johnny Knoxville. He gets mauled by a bear, nearly drowned by rapids, and burned with a flaming stick, all in subzero conditions. He strips down and sleeps in a horse carcass, is thrown off a cliff, and eats raw bison liver for real (Raw. Bison. Liver). At the end of the film, Leo literally looks straight into the lens, tears in his eyes, as if to say, ‘Please, Academy. Please let this be the one.”

30. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022)

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Movie it chased: The Revenant (2015)
Which is better: Bardo
Starring: Daniel Gimenez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani
Synopsis: A renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to his native country, unaware that this simple trip will push him to an existential limit.

Excerpt from my essay: Iñárritu is no stranger to this type of overcranked faux profundity. When a critic calls Silverio’s work “pretentious” and “pointlessly oneiric,” covering up “mediocre writing,” the lines could be lifted directly from reviews of the filmmaker’s own past work. And accusations of Silverio’s latest film feeling “stolen” and “plagiarized” play like Iñárritu getting ahead of any criticisms of a movie so indebted to 8 ½, All That Jazz, and Wild Strawberries that it feels more rip-off than homage.

Reading the comments is fair enough, but Iñárritu’s impulsive sniping at the haters (see: Silverio literally pushing a “mute” button on said critic) would come across more playfully charming if the critiques didn’t feel so accurate. I liked Birdman at the time, less so The Revenant, but the years haven’t been kind to either (more on them next week). Were that not the case, and had these films not been so over-rewarded in their respective years, it might be easier to sympathize with Iñárritu’s insistence at being some sort of misunderstood truth-teller. As it is, much of Bardo feels like a tantrum, his second movie in ten years where his protagonist gets to smugly dress down a critic for not liking his stuff.

29. The Milagro Beanfield War (1988)

Director: Robert Redford
Movie it chased: Ordinary People (1980)
Which is better: Ordinary People
Starring: Rubén Blades, Richard Bradford, Sônia Braga, Julie Carmen, James Gammon, Melanie Griffith, John Heard, Carlos Riquelme, Daniel Stern, Christopher Walken, Chick Vennera
Synopsis: The accidental breakdown of an irrigation valve launches a hot confrontation between the mainly Latino farmers in a tiny New Mexico town and the real estate developers and politicians determined to acquire their land for a golf resort.

Excerpt from my essay: It’s by no means a perfect film; Redford never quite gets a handle on its sprawling cast and competing tones, and while its Bacurau-esque tale of a community fighting for their place in the world is plenty stirring, the last half hour is riddled with awkward anticlimaxes. But it’s fascinating as an Oscar Chaser, both a wild genre swing from a stalwart of realism and the first (and boldest) truly political piece Redford would tackle as a director. Ordinary People is great, maybe even underrated (and Timothée Chalamet, say thank you to Timothy Hutton). But its greatness lies in its superb writing and rich performances. It’s otherwise a conventionally shot, small-scale film about three WASPs and a Jewish psychiatrist.

Contrast that with Milagro, a rambunctious, tonally adventurous film centering mostly on a cast of unknown Hispanic actors, something no other major studio was doing in 1988. It’s an unruly combination of ensemble comedy, political satire, and folklore, featuring an abundance of bilingual dialogue and an opening sequence in which a sombrero-clad angel dances through town playing a concertina, like something out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel.

28. Valmont (1989)

Director: Miloš Forman
Movie it chased: Amadeus (1984)
Which is better: Amadeus
Starring: Colin Firth, Annette Bening, Meg Tilly, Fairuza Balk, Siân Phillips, Jeffrey Jones, Henry Thomas
Synopsis: Set in Baroque France, a scheming widow and her lover make a bet regarding the corruption of a recently married woman. The lover, Valmont, bets that he can seduce her, even though she is an honorable woman. If he wins, he can have his lover to do as he will. However, in the process of seducing the married woman, Valmont falls in love.

Excerpt from my essay: All this to say that I think I ultimately prefer Forman’s take on the material, which isn’t to say Valmont is a particularly excellent film or at all near the top echelon of its maker’s filmography; its attempts at comedy are mostly a miss, and it could certainly use a bit more venom in its bloodstream. But it is ultimately a more humane work, one that realizes the true darkness of the text is in the societal cages in which its characters are imprisoned.

27. Nightmare Alley (2021)

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Movie it chased: The Shape of Water (2017)
Which is better: The Shape of Water
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, David Strathairn
Synopsis: An ambitious carnival man with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychologist who is even more dangerous than he is.

Excerpt from my essay: Alas, there’s little transgression on display in the del Toro version; this is really The Shape of Water 2.0, a glossy, art-directed-within-an-inch-of-its-life genre exercise that feels like open season for any critic accusing the filmmaker of being more a stylist than a dramatist.

Del Toro has the same story but none of the Hays Code restrictions of the Goulding film. Yet there’s nothing disturbing or bracing about his take on this tale. Where Goulding plays successfully in grit and realism, del Toro falls back on his signature Gothic fairy tale aesthetic; where the original’s violence is all in selfish acts of human cruelty, the remake settles for blood and gore, Grand Guignol flourishes for a narrative that was always more of a hard-boiled noir.

26. Wall Street (1987)

Director: Oliver Stone
Movie it chased: Platoon (1986)
Which is better: Platoon
Starring: Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah, Martin Sheen, Hal Holbrook, Terence Stamp
Synopsis: A young and impatient stockbroker is willing to do anything to get to the top, including trading on illegal inside information taken through a ruthless and greedy corporate raider, whom takes the youth under his wing.

Excerpt from my essay: Played in an irresistible Oscar-winning performance by Michael Douglas², who tap-dances all over his catchphrase-heavy dialogue - “Money never sleeps,” “I bet on sure things,” “The most valuable commodity I know is information” - it’s no wonder he was wrongheadedly adopted as an aspirational figure by the worst kind of people, and why the 2008 financial crisis would be laid at the feet of those Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would dub “The Children of Gordon Gekko.”

It’s a testament to Stone’s creation, and to Douglas’ star turn, that the character endures as both icon and indictment. There’s a cheeky insidiousness to Wall Street that could’ve played more satire than polemic; one can imagine a more biting film that sees Gekko turn Bud Fox fully to the dark side, allowing the audience to find the poison in the taste of victory as opposed to drowning us in the moral of the tale.

25. The Doors (1991)

Director: Oliver Stone
Movie it chased: Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Which is better: Born on the Fourth of July
Starring: Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kevin Dillon, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, Michael Madsen, Billy Idol, Kathleen Quinlan
Synopsis: The story of the famous and influential 1960s rock band and its lead singer and composer, Jim Morrison.

Excerpt from my essay: It’s definitely an experience, capturing the vibe and psychic weather of a time rather than forming any sort of deep or cohesive portrait of a man, let alone a band. In a 2019 interview about the film, Stone noted that Manzarek had wished for a film more focused on the expanding consciousness of the ‘60s, while he (validly so) was fixated on that era’s darkness - Vietnam, yes, but also the turbulence of the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr…

“Jim reflected it,” says Stone, “America couldn’t handle it. He was an avatar.”

It’s not a bad take, and if anyone’s going to tell the story of a tumultuous decade through the prism of an artist attempting transcendence while spiraling out of control, Stone’s not the worst guy to do it. The problem is that the film never earns that macro view, opting instead for an endless parade of scenes of Morrison being drunk, high, cruel, or belligerent. Some of this is oddly captivating (the Miami performance), some of it camp (Nico blowing him in an elevator), much of it upsetting (pulling a knife on Meg Ryan or trapping her in a closet and lighting it on fire). The chaos becomes monotonous, and doesn’t present a very favorable view of Morrison himself; as much as the film is magnetically drawn toward the man, it seems to have little interest in depicting him as anything more than a confrontational, self-destructive asshole with a death wish.

24. 127 Hours (2010)

Director: Danny Boyle
Movie it chased: Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Which is better: 127 Hours
Starring: James Franco, Amber Tamblyn, Kate Mara
Synopsis: The true story of mountain climber Aron Ralston’s remarkable adventure to save himself after a fallen boulder crashes on his arm and traps him in an isolated canyon in Utah.

Excerpt from my essay: Just as Ralston was pinned by the boulder, it felt like Boyle was tying an arm behind his back and seeing if he could still land a swing. Where Slumdog was epic and sprawling, this would be intimate and static, one guy in one location for 90 minutes. In that way, it’s a bit disappointing how “Boyle-ian” 127 Hours winds up being. After all, he’s no Chantal Akerman; this isn’t Jeanne Dielman, 23 Bluejohn Canyon.

But it might’ve been more interesting if it had been, if Boyle had really forced himself to get rid of his usual bag of tricks and sit with Ralston in the canyon for the full runtime. As it stands, he’s constantly cutting to outside Bluejohn, until the film becomes a feverish montage of flashbacks, hallucinations, splitscreens, and dream sequences. That’s all well and good, and there are a lot worse directors to watch flex for an hour and a half. But it is funny that in a movie so focused on one man, the flashiest performance is actually from Boyle himself.

23. The Sheltering Sky (1990)

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Movie it chased: The Last Emperor (1987)
Which is better: The Sheltering Sky
Starring: Debra Winger, John Malkovich, Campbell Scott, Jill Bennett, Timothy Spall, Éric Vu-An
Synopsis: An American couple drift toward emptiness in postwar North Africa.

Excerpt from my essay: What’s striking is that both The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky represent a director wrestling with mammoth texts, yet they approach the interiority of their subjects in completely opposite ways. While they both sport objectively stunning photography by Vittorio Storaro and scores by Ryuichi Sakamoto (again, great gowns), Last Emperor flattens the life of its protagonist into a storybook pageant; meanwhile, Sheltering Sky takes an austere work of despair and at least attempts a humane treatment of its characters.

Bertolucci’s real interest is the marriage. These two are essentially a George and Martha of the Sahara; they are ardent admirers, but not lovers. And though he’s a bourgeois prick and she’s “determined to be intransigent,” there’s an enormous amount of empathy endowed to their central connection-slash-disconnection. If there is a through-line Bertolucci has carved out of this gnarled text, it’s in their slow, asymmetrical journey toward understanding one another - one too late, the other with just enough time to matter.

22. Flags of Our Fathers (2006)

Director: Clint Eastwood
Movie it chased: Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Which is better: Million Dollar Baby
Starring: Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach
Synopsis: There were five Marines and one Navy Corpsman photographed raising the U.S. flag on Mt. Suribachi by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945. This is the story of three of the six surviving servicemen - John ‘Doc’ Bradley, Pvt. Rene Gagnon and Pvt. Ira Hayes - who fought in the battle to take Iwo Jima from the Japanese.

Excerpt from my essay: I’d forgotten, however, how fervently anti-propaganda it is. Clear away the sappy brothers-in-arms drama and this is really a rageful indictment of the politicians who manipulated the men in the photograph to further fund the war. Forced into participating in a tour to sell war bonds, they’re made to climb a giant papier-mâché replica of Mount Siribachi, on top of which they’re expected to restage the planting of the flag. “If that doesn’t open their wallets, nothing will,” says a Treasury Department fat cat played by no less than John Slattery.

It’s the sort of mustache-twirling statement Mr. Burns might say on an episode of The Simpsons, but boldly underlines Eastwood’s long-standing distrust of the systems which grind down honest Americans every day, the same systems he’s still criticizing (to varying degrees of “Get off my lawn” energy) in films like Juror #2, Richard Jewell, and Sully.

21. King Kong (2005)

Director: Peter Jackson
Movie it chased: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Which is better: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Starring: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Colin Hanks, Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis
Synopsis: In 1933 New York, an overly ambitious movie producer coerces his cast and hired ship crew to travel to mysterious Skull Island, where they encounter Kong, a giant ape who is immediately smitten with the leading lady.

Excerpt from my essay: Having Naomi Watts doesn’t hurt, of course, and the way she tracks Ann’s journey from down-on-her-luck actress to a protector of this creature is the film’s most substantial and successful change. It’s nice to have Serkis as Kong, as well, even though it can be more difficult to see the bones of his performances than it is with Gollum, just by virtue of him more closely resembling a weird little goblin man than a giant gorilla. Whatever his contribution, the creature itself is a stunner, and the scenes between him and Watts expand on the emotionality that’s always been at the heart of Kong, turning a one-sided fairly predatory relationship into a genuinely moving bond.

Elsewhere, well, sometimes the boring take is just correct: it’s just too damn long. Jackson received a ton of criticism when he made The Hobbit and bloated a 300 page children’s book into three two and a half hour movies, but Kong is really ground zero for these types of indulgences. Love Jamie Bell as I do, I just don’t care about Jimmy the abandoned teenager, nor Captain Englehart and Lumpy the cook. Whereas Jackson and his cowriters were able to mine an exhaustive amount of detail to create richly drawn, full-feeling characters in the Rings movies, there’s just not enough “there” there in what is ultimately a pretty simple story about a group of people who go to an island, discover a giant ape, and bring him back to New York City where all hell breaks loose.

20. Eternals (2021)

Director: Chloé Zhao
Movie it chased: Nomadland (2020)
Which is better: Nomadland
Starring: Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie
Synopsis: The Eternals are a team of ancient aliens who have been living on Earth in secret for thousands of years. When an unexpected tragedy forces them out of the shadows, they are forced to reunite against mankind’s most ancient enemy, the Deviants.

Excerpt from my essay: Seven millennia of human history is a tough thing to parse even without the introductions of ten major characters we’ve never met before. And sure, the Tinker Bell-esque Sprite makes me wildly uncomfortable every time she shows up, and sure, Brian Tyree Henry’s character apparently did Hiroshima. But for me, the straight-faced, un-winking sincerity of all of this is ultimately more of a feature than a bug, coalescing into something vaguely resembling audacity, particularly within the Marvel brand. Likewise, Zhao’s Malick-inspired visual sense actually does manage to poke through several times, lending the film a lyricism and scale that sets it apart from virtually every other Marvel offering, even if Feige’s outsized amazement at the in-camera beauty of on-location, naturally lit sequences felt like an accidental confession that he didn’t realize a movie need not look like A.I. rendered toilet water.

All this to say that the parts of this movie that feel like Superhero Tree of Life are all right by me. And by the time Gemma Chan’s Sersi has been on the receiving end of one of cinema’s most extreme info-dumps and the film transforms into a movie about bummed out robots struggling with the existential crisis of whether or not to kill God, I’m sorry but I’m going to be a bit won over.

19. Mickey 17 (2025)

Director: Bong Joon Ho
Movie it chased: Parasite (2019)
Which is better: Parasite
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo
Synopsis: Unlikely hero Mickey Barnes finds himself in the extraordinary circumstance of working for an employer who demands the ultimate commitment to the job… to die, for a living.

Excerpt from my essay: Bong gets a lot of mileage out of these early sequences, but as much as he could relish gleefully disposing of Pattinson and spitting him back out for his next job, there’s a mordant bitterness to his staging that results in a series of tableaux that inevitably invokes Chaplin’s 1936 own screed on the systems that transform humans into cogs in a wheel, Modern Times. Like Chaplin, Bong is keenly aware of the tiny behavioral ways societal hierarchies demean and dehumanize. And it’s not that long a walk from Parasite’s rich father rolling down the window so as not to smell his driver, to the team of technicians hardly paying attention as the latest Mickey comes flopping naked out of the human printer onto the floor.

This particular preoccupation, which winds its way through Bong’s entire filmography, makes Mickey an ideal protagonist for him, one who carries the idea of dehumanization to its furthest degree. Likewise, Pattinson, never afraid of a big swing, is the perfect candidate to maintain the balance of absurdism and humanism required to steer the film away from being a mere mean-spirited live-action Road Runner cartoon. It’s funny when he murmurs “Thank you” as he’s being tossed into an incinerator in a body bag, but it’s also lowkey heartbreaking, so clear is the vision of this man whose deck is so stacked against him that he can’t comprehend a world where he’s worth more than a reheatable sack of meat. It’s no surprise, then, that the most engaging parts of the film are the ones related to the rooting factor of seeing Mickey’s journey of finding value in himself.

18. Dick Tracy (1990)

Director: Warren Beatty
Movie it chased: Reds (1981)
Which is better: Reds
Starring: Warren Beatty
Synopsis: The comic strip detective finds his life vastly complicated when Breathless Mahoney makes advances towards him while he is trying to battle Big Boy Caprice’s united mob.

Excerpt from my essay: Tracy is at its best when Beatty and editor Richard Marks simply let the music and imagery take over: Sondheim on the soundtrack, Storaro’s dynamic panel-like compositions dissolving into one another like oversized comic splash pages. In the 36 years since Dick Tracy premiered, there have been well over a hundred comic book movies, yet remarkably few have attempted to translate the actual visual grammar of their subjects to the screen with this level of commitment or imagination.

17. Road to Perdition (2002)

Director: Sam Mendes
Movie it chased: American Beauty (1999)
Which is better: Road to Perdition
Starring: Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stanley Tucci, Daniel Craig
Synopsis: Mike Sullivan works as a hit man for crime boss John Rooney. Sullivan views Rooney as a father figure, however after his son is witness to a killing, Mike Sullivan finds himself on the run in attempt to save the life of his son and at the same time looking for revenge on those who wronged him.

Excerpt from my essay: Visually, Road to Perdition is a marvel. Of course, it helps to have the novel’s graphics as inspiration, but Mendes was reportedly incessant in paring back the text, working with cinematographer Conrad Hall to tell this story through pictures as much as possible.

Hall is undoubtedly the MVP of the film, shooting it as a series of Edward Hopper paintings, all muted grays and blues, dramatic tracking moves, reflections, and so SO much rain. The centerpiece sequence, a fateful confrontation between Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) and his boss-slash-adopted-father John Rooney (Paul Newman, in his last onscreen role⁴), reaches a level of visual poetry I’m not sure Mendes has ever achieved again. And a minor little piano duet between Hanks and Newman says more about fathers and sons than any words could, even as it exists as its own metatextual passing of the baton from one generational movie star to another.

16. Burn After Reading (2008)

Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Movie it chased: No Country For Old Men (2007)
Which is better: No Country For Old Men
Starring: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, Brad Pitt
Synopsis: When a disc containing memoirs of a former CIA analyst falls into the hands of gym employees, Linda and Chad, they see a chance to make enough money for Linda to have life-changing cosmetic surgery. Predictably, events whirl out of control for the duo, and those in their orbit.

Excerpt from my essay: It’s a convoluted set-up, as Rube Goldbergian in its construction as the best Coen offerings, but in the end what it boils down to is quite simple: we are all a bunch of ants running around pursuing our own self-interests, with little idea of what it’s all adding up to. The Coens often implement this God’s eye view in their filmmaking, but it’s literalized here with opening and closing shots presenting an aerial perspective of the CIA headquarters, which zooms out into the far reaches of space^. Each of these characters is ultimately a name in a file shoved into a desk drawer, itself a mere blip in a galaxy of inconsequential and random affairs.

At least it’s fun while it lasts! There’s an argument to be made that at the time, this was the starriest cast assembled for a Coen Brothers film, and they’re all having a blast playing a bunch of absolute morons, particularly Pitt and Clooney. This was Clooney’s third collaboration with the Coens, rounding out what they called at the time his “trilogy of idiots².” Somewhat surprisingly, It’s the first and only for Pitt, whose meathead Chad carries on the Anton Chigurh tradition of bad haircuts in Coen films even as he steals every scene he’s in. He’s the comedic high point of the movie, a bleached blond himbo goon that sends Ryan Gosling’s Ken back to the meme-ready hell from whence he came.

15. A Perfect World (1993)

Director: Clint Eastwood
Movie it chased: Unforgiven (1992)
Which is better: Unforgiven
Starring: Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern
Synopsis: A kidnapped boy strikes up a friendship with his captor: an escaped convict on the run from the law, headed by an honorable U.S. Marshal.

Excerpt from my essay: I’d never seen this movie, and as it started I was disarmed by its gentle road movie construction; had Clint really gone and made Green Book with a kid? But of course, he’s never been one for mawkishness, and as the film progresses it becomes as dark and damning as its predecessor. What begins as a winning buddy picture where Costner puts on a charm offensive and a little boy runs around dressed as Casper the Friendly Ghost, ends as another Eastwood tragedy about the cycle of violence and how heroism is an antiquated notion.

The chief difference, of course, is the inclusion of the kid. Played by T.J. Lowther, Phillip is an absolute cutie-pie. But it’s a testament to Eastwood’s direction that he becomes neither a wise-talking Our Gang scamp nor an overtly adorable cherub milking “Aww”s from the audience. He’s the eyes of the movie; I thought of Oliver Twist multiple times, the young innocent thrust into a world of criminals, struggling to process a new lexicon of human behavior. When Costner reaches for his gun, we see Phillip flinch; when a family is threatened, he starts to weep. He’s the innocence that’s lost in the wake of violence, the consequence made flesh.

14. Contact (1997)

Director: Robert Zemeckis
Movie it chased: Forrest Gump (1994)
Which is better: Contact
Starring: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Angela Bassett
Synopsis: A radio astronomer receives the first extraterrestrial radio signal ever picked up on Earth. As the world powers scramble to decipher the message and decide upon a course of action, she must make some difficult decisions between her beliefs, the truth, and reality.

Excerpt from my essay: It’s the type of pitch Zemeckis likely spent the first decade of his career making, but now he was on the other side of the table. After Gump, he could do anything, and Warner Bros. knew it, handing him $90 million and complete creative control to make a brainy space movie for adults - a Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan passion project rescued by him (and Gump) from development hell.⁴

You’d think that $90 million would go to some spectacular visual effects setpieces, but despite the price tag, Contact is almost unequivocally Zemeckis’ most restrained film. One of his chief demands was the deletion of a climactic sequence where aliens descend from the sky to prove their existence to the human race - exactly the kind of bravura sequence over which you’d expect someone like him to salivate. But while the film has its share of show-offy grace notes - an opening “oner” that pulls back from Earth and through the cosmos, the famous mirror shot - this is a film more concerned with the philosophical than the pyrotechnic. Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Arrival, or Interstellar, this is the sci-fi of ideas, not explosions.

13. Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Director: Clint Eastwood
Movie it chased: Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Which is better: Million Dollar Baby
Starring: Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido Nakamura
Synopsis: The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it.

Excerpt from my essay: War films are always exploring the senselessness of death, but perhaps none more than this one. If there’s a voice of reason to be heard amidst the futile death march, it’s Ken Watanabe’s Lieutenant General Kuribayashi, who’s sent to take command of the garrison and instantly rebels against the suicidal inclinations of the Japanese command already in place, training his focus on a more pragmatic approach that will hopefully inflict mass American casualties and at least minimize Japanese deaths. It’s tough to not see him as a bit of a Clint analogue, the strong, silent type bucking the system, soldiering on with a steady hand all while treating his subordinates with the utmost respect and empathy.

Empathy is ultimately the chief language with which Clint is dealing here, and a characteristic that seemed to be his modus operandi in this era of his filmmaking. Million Dollar Baby is, after all, a film made by a then-Republican about a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body. After its success, he was teed up by no less than Steven Spielberg for his own Saving Private Ryan, and chose instead to split the budget and make two films working in tandem to reveal the implicit bias war movies have long created for Americans. And all this from the Man With No Name.

12. Lust, Caution (2007)

Director: Ang Lee
Movie it chased: Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Which is better: Brokeback Mountain
Starring: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Tang Wei, Anupam Kher, Joan Chen, Wang Leehom, Shyam Pathak
Synopsis: During World War II, a secret agent must seduce and assassinate an official who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai.

Excerpt from my essay: Discarded by all of the men in her life, with such an absent opportunity to understand and receive love, and such a desperate desire to do so, it’s little wonder that Mr. Yee’s attentions, sadistic as they are, become an acceptable substitute for what she needs. Chia Chi allows herself to accept abuse as love, but there’s no romance present in the film, just two bodies jamming themselves up against each other, one with a desperate heart longing for connection, the other a monster getting off on the perceived delight of his prey.

I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to engage with such grim subject matter as this, and even I question the utility of such a blunt statement about the subjugation of women, particularly when all one needs to do is turn on the news to face such awful truths. But I do think there’s value in empathy, and Ang Lee has always had that in spades. His portrayal of Wong Chia Chi, combined with Tang Wei’s stunner of a performance, is a three-dimensional, sympathetic vision of a woman trying to find love in a world where she’s relegated to the role of a pawn.

11. Avatar (2009)

Director: James Cameron
Movie it chased: Titanic (1997)
Which is better: Titanic
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver
Synopsis: In the 22nd century, a paraplegic Marine is dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission, but becomes torn between following orders and protecting an alien civilization.

Excerpt from my essay: The 3D isn’t a gimmick, it’s a narrative tool. With these images dominating your entire field of vision, it’s easier to surrender. And after an hour of gobledegook about flux vortexes, Eywa, and unobtanium, the nonsense starts to feel like home. Call it Stockholm Syndrome, but when I saw the Hometree blown to smithereens by evil military goons Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang, I was as surprised as anyone to find myself sobbing behind my stupid little 3D glasses.

That’s kind of Cameron’s superpower. Despite his lack of nuance in the dialogue and character development department, he understands the primal emotions that have drawn us to stories since the dawn of time - love, loss, family, home, and the struggle between good and evil. More importantly, he knows how to translate that into pure, kinetic cinema.

10. Avalon (1990)

Director: Barry Levinson
Movie it chased: Rain Man (1988)
Which is better: Avalon
Starring: Armin Mueller-Stahl, Elizabeth Perkins, Joan Plowright, Aidan Quinn
Synopsis: A Polish-Jewish family comes to the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. There, the family and their children try to make themselves a better future in the so-called promised land.

Excerpt from my essay: The film makes a lot of hay out of these generational shifts - the bittersweet transition from Old World traditions to modern American life. “We’re getting further and further from Avalon,” says Sam, and nearly every scene contains some small fracture along those lines. The older men bristle at the younger generation complaining about the heat; Eva refuses a ride home from her daughter-in-law because she doesn’t believe women should drive; Sam has a minor blow-up when his sons Americanize their names (“Who says names should be easy to say? What are you, a candy bar?”); and ornery Uncle Gabriel throws a fit after arriving late for Thanksgiving dinner, screaming a line I fear I’ll be quoting for the rest of my life: “You cut the toikey without me!”

Many films have explored the broken promises of America to immigrants, but there’s a piercing quality to the way in which Levinson eschews familiar topics of prejudice or discrimination for a focus on the erosion of that early dream through a thousand tiny heartbreaks and family disputes. This is ultimately a keenly observed film about the melancholy of change and progress. The initial optimism of Sam’s arrival fades to the morose reflections of a lonely senior citizen in a nursing home, a raucous family Thanksgiving gives way to silent dinners in front of a TV.

9. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Director: Anthony Minghella
Movie it chased: The English Patient (1996)
Which is better: The Talented Mr. Ripley
Starring: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Davenport, James Rebhorn, Sergio Rubini, Philip Baker Hall
Synopsis: Tom Ripley is a calculating young man who believes it’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. Opportunity knocks in the form of a wealthy U.S. shipbuilder who hires Tom to travel to Italy to bring back his playboy son, Dickie. Ripley worms his way into the idyllic lives of Dickie and his girlfriend, plunging into a daring scheme of duplicity, lies and murder.

Excerpt from my essay: I’d argue the gloss is the point. Whether or not Minghella meant it as a subversion, it’s crucial that Ripley is a gorgeous movie about gorgeous people doing gorgeous things in a gorgeous place. This is the fantasy that Tom Ripley is chasing - the Italian villa, the playboy lifestyle, all sexy jazz clubs and fitted tailoring.

I am not, to my knowledge, a psychopath. But I am a) gay and b) not rich. So when fellow poor homosexual Tom steps into this absurdly affluent wonderland, I very much agree that I too would like to go to there. Minghella’s gorgeous location photography and affinity for glamorous sensuality - the same features that made The English Patient a sleepy awards juggernaut - become something sharper here, a tool for getting into the mind of his protagonist. Most of us have never murdered someone and (fingers crossed) never will, but we can all agree that it’d be nice to eat fancy food, wear fancy clothes, and fag out with Gwyneth Paltrow.

8. Philadelphia (1993)

Director: Jonathan Demme
Movie it chased: The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Which is better: The Silence of the Lambs
Starring: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen, Antonio Banderas, Joanne Woodward
Synopsis: Two competing lawyers join forces to sue a prestigious law firm for AIDS discrimination. As their unlikely friendship develops, their courage overcomes the prejudice and corruption of their powerful adversaries.

Excerpt from my essay: It’s infuriating, actually, that after a decade of gay loss falling on deaf ears, it took a mainstream film starring Tom Hanks and helmed by a straight director to make people listen. But that’s unfortunately sometimes how things work, and I must admit that upon rewatch I felt almost incalculably moved that a filmmaker as extraordinary as Demme cared enough to create something with the sole intent of reaching across the aisle and humanizing what many straight Americans saw as threatening and unfamiliar.

And anyway, Demme could direct a lobotomy and it would be compelling. There’s an invisibility to his work, to his collaboration with actors and his understanding of how music can evoke mood or emotion without ever crossing over into the maudlin. Nobody made a scene feel alive like him; there’s a reason why Stop Making Sense remains the greatest concert film of all time, and why the most moving aspects of his film about a man dying of AIDS are the ones brimming with vitality.

7. Shutter Island (2010)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Movie it chased: The Departed (2006)
Which is better: Shutter Island
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow
Synopsis: World War II soldier-turned-U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, but his efforts are compromised by troubling visions and a mysterious doctor.

Excerpt from my essay: It’s fascinating just how much the genre bent of the entire film fades away for me with each rewatch. The influences are obvious, and Marty is indeed having a ball lurching about the shadows of his creepy little mental hospital island, conjuring up the sort of nightmarish hallucinations that would fit right at home in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

But I was struck on this viewing by how much Shutter Island really is the tale of an attempted act of kindness between a doctor (Kinglsey’s Cawley) and a deeply damaged man who’s become a prisoner of his own delusion (DiCaprio’s Laeddis). The manner in which Dr. Cawley dignifies this delusion, handing Andrew a toy gun and essentially letting him LARP around the island for a few days in an attempt to help him regain his sense of self, is a moving olive branch in the midst of a cast of characters hellbent on defining Laeddis as a violent murderer.

6. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Movie it chased: The Hurt Locker (2009)
Which is better: Zero Dark Thirty
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton
Synopsis: A chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May, 2011.

Excerpt from my essay: Much of the first 30 to 40 minutes of the film lingers on these brutal sequences, where CIA intelligence officer Dan Fuller (Jason Clarke) waterboards, beats, and forces Ammar to wear a dog collar, all in the name of getting to bin Laden. Anyone who could watch this stuff and feel like Bigelow was endorsing these methods is clearly not paying attention, and it’s frankly quite obvious retrospectively that the outrage from Capitol Hill was less about feeling like the movie was pro-torture and more wanting to shut down Bigelow after she’d aired out their dirty laundry in what was supposed to be the flag-waving movie about how great it was we killed Osama bin Laden.

Bigelow wants us to know that we did torture, and perhaps more complicatedly, it may have actually led us to bin Laden. The film deals with this murkiness effectively; much of the plot is relegated to hunting down bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. The moment when Ammad volunteers Abu Ahmed’s name is a key turning point in the film; only when he’s removed from his cage, sat down, and offered food, does he wind up cooperating. Was it as simple as that all along? Or would he have not succumbed had he not been subjected to several prior sessions of brutal torture? Bigelow doesn’t editorialize, and lets us sit in that discomfort; these are the means by which we reached our end goal… but was it worth it?

5. Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Movie it chased: Traffic (2000)
Which is better: Ocean’s Eleven
Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner
Synopsis: Less than 24 hours into his parole, charismatic thief Danny Ocean is already rolling out his next plan: In one night, Danny’s hand-picked crew of specialists will attempt to steal more than $150 million from three Las Vegas casinos. But to score the cash, Danny risks his chances of reconciling with ex-wife, Tess.

Excerpt from my essay: It’s the modern day Rat Pack, the last of its kind. By the end of the decade, Marvel would change the game so that it would forever be “Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man” as opposed to “Danny Ocean is George Clooney.” This was really the last time a group of characters were defined by the movie stars playing them, as opposed to the stars being defined by the characters.

That sad revelation gives a twilit melancholy to Soderbergh’s already gorgeous staging of the film’s penultimate moment, as the gang gathers at the Bellagio Fountains. With “Claire de Lune” on the soundtrack, each of them peels off one by one, with a wistful Reiner the last to leave. It’s a pitch-perfect curtain call, for the film, for this era of populist cinema, and for Soderbergh’s time at the top of the mainstream.

COMING FRIDAY: My deep-dive into A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to his win for Saving Private Ryan and one of the best films of the century.

4. First Man (2018)

Director: Damien Chazelle
Movie it chased: La La Land (2016)
Which is better: First Man
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Christopher Abbott, Ciaran Hinds
Synopsis: A look at the life of the astronaut, Neil Armstrong, and the legendary space mission that led him to become the first man to walk on the Moon on July 20, 1969.

Excerpt from my essay: I’ll admit, I didn’t see First Man in theaters. You probably didn’t either, because it looked fucking boring. Turns out a marketing campaign featuring a stoic Ryan Gosling in an astronaut suit, smoldering under a generic title doesn’t exactly breed passion, and that indifference was probably a major contributing factor to the film flopping at the box office and underperforming come Oscar time. Anyone potentially interested in “the new movie from the La La Land guy” was likely turned off by what looked like a snooze, and the flag-waving sect of Americans who’d typically salivate at something like this had already been discouraged by the Fox News outrage over Damien’s erasure of the planting of the American flag on the moon.

It’s an unfortunate loss on everyone’s part, because what Damien made is both an exhaustively authentic document of the years leading up to Apollo 11 and a film profoundly uninterested in adhering to any of the conventional biopic trappings. It’s a haunted, delicate, and somber work that, despite being the only entry in his filmography thus far which he didn’t write, somehow feels the most personal, with Armstrong serving as an avatar for a filmmaker who’s both an unimpeachable technician and a control freak who often gets in his own way.

3. Roma (2018)

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Movie it chased: Gravity (2013)
Which is better: Roma
Starring: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Jorge Antonio Guerrero
Synopsis: In 1970s Mexico City, two domestic workers help a mother of four while her husband is away for an extended period of time.

Excerpt from my essay: There’s a clear-eyed power to the way he uses his skills as an image maker to fashion the film’s unique perspective, which, while focused entirely on Cleo, remains his own. Adult Alfonso is observing these memories from a more mature vantage point, one which pushes what was foreground for Child Alfonso into the periphery, and what was peripheral to Child Alfonso into the foreground. It’s a simple but powerful choice from the guy who made the 3-D space movie, a marshalling of the forces of a major streaming service to partake in a $15 million exercise in empathy.

That empathy extends to everyone in the film. Early on, there’s a scene where the character standing in for Cuarón’s father gets in a car and rides off. Cuarón recalls his direction was a simple one: “You drive away and breathe easily for the first time in years.”

Upon reflection, Cuarón said, “I realized I’d just shot the scene where my father abandoned my family.”

2. Broadcast News (1987)

Director: James L. Brooks
Movie it chased: Terms of Endearment (1983)
Which is better: Broadcast News
Starring: William Hurt, Albert Brooks, Holly Hunter
Synopsis: A high-strung news producer finds herself in a love triangle between a talented but self-doubting reporter and a charming news anchor who embodies the growing trivialization of news that she is determined to fight against.

Excerpt from my essay: The Internet calls it a love triangle, although I think it’s a testament to the film that this descriptor wouldn’t be one of the first twenty ways I’d describe it. It’s a movie about the pressures of maintaining integrity in a rapidly trivialized media space; about the thrills and stresses of handling intense, adrenaline-driven jobs; about how the friends you make when you’re young and hungry are the ones with the biggest imprint on your life; and about Holly Hunter throwing heat for two hours and twenty minutes.

It is, simply put, intoxicating stuff; Jane is at once an aspirational pillar of ambition and smarts, and a complete pain in the ass. She knows what footage to get and just how far down to the wire to take a deadline. She also starts every day sobbing her brains out. When an executive sarcastically tells her that it must be nice to know better than everyone else, she responds with disarming world-weariness, “No… it’s awful.”

1. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Movie it chased: Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Which is better: A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Starring: Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O’Connor, Brendan Gleeson, William Hurt
Synopsis: David, a robotic boy—the first of his kind programmed to love—is adopted as a test case by a Cybertronics employee and his wife. Though he gradually becomes their child, a series of unexpected circumstances make this life impossible for David.

Excerpt from my essay: I don’t want to spoil the finer details of this last act; suffice it to say that at the time, many saw A.I.’s coda as a Spielbergian cop-out, an imposed happy ending that undercut the dark melancholy of what had come before. In recent years, the perception has swung so far the other way to the point of potential over-correction, with many arguing the film’s final moments are the bleakest in Spielberg’s entire oeuvre. Here in 2025, I’d argue it’s actually all true; the film’s sun-drenched finale is laced with both an artificial uneasiness that feels distinctly Kubrickian, and a cathartic emotionality only the guy who made E.T. could conjure. On previous watches, I’ve found the film’s ending a bitterly dark illusion; this past watch, I sobbed.

The film, much like the man who made it, contains multitudes. It’s the great irony of Spielberg that he spent the first half of his career inventing the type of movie that would cannibalize the ones he’d be interested in making in the second. A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, Munich, Lincoln, and The Fabelmans all belong in conversation with his greatest works, yet defy easy categorization. They’re knotty, deeply personal, often melancholy, but audiences still have a habit of dismissing them as “more Spielberg schmaltz” even when their depths, nuances, and contradictions are nakedly apparent to anyone who sits down to watch them in good faith.

Tomorrow: Robert Benton’s follow-up to Kramer vs. Kramer - Still of the Night, the Meryl Streep movie even Meryl Streep dunked on.

Toy Story 5

IN THEATERS
Director: Andrew Stanton
Starring: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, Conan O’Brien, Tony Hale, Craig Robinson, Shelby Rabara, Scarlett Spears, Mykal-Michelle Harris, Matty Matheson, John Ratzenberger, Wallace Shawn, Blake Clark, Jeff Bergman, Anna Vocino, Annie Potts, Bonnie Hunt, Melissa Villasenor, John Hopkins, Kristen Schaal, Ernie Hudson, Bad Bunny, Keanu Reeves, Ally Maki, Alan Cumming

I was hooting and hollering for Hoppers earlier this year for seemingly reminding Pixar that they used to make comedies that made people cry as opposed to movies hellbent on making people cry that have a few jokes in them. That all gets thrown out the window with this film, the latest and least entry in the Toy Story franchise. It’s a Jessie movie, which would be all well and good if everything covered here wasn’t already handled, far more economically and emotionally, in Toy Story 2. But yeah, it’s just all so earnest and goopy (most of the “comedy” is Conan O’Brien playing some sort of potty training toy), and the studio seems to have forgotten that these movies used to be about a bunch of smart alecks. The ending of the third one still moves me, but I fear it’s ruined Pixar forever. They can’t even let the iPad villain just be a villain, probably because they need to sell actual toys of her at Walmart. And Taylor Swift taking over songwriting duty for Randy Newman is kind of the movie in a nutshell - “generic yee-haw earnestness” as opposed to mordant cuddliness.

Blue Film (2026)

NOW ON VOD
Director: Elliot Tuttle
Starring: Reed Birney, Kieron Moore

Queer camboy Aaron Eagle (newcomer Kieron Moore) heads over to the house of a stranger (Reed Birney) for some easy money and anonymous sex, and discovers a shocking and bizarre link to his past. The less said about what goes down in Blue Film the better, suffice it to say it’s one of the most provocative, emotionally and intellectually intense films I’ve seen in a minute. And not performatively so - writer/director Elliot Tuttle has a way with a taboo topic that feels genuinely challenging; this is a queasy, uncomfortable film that nevertheless glued me to the screen for its 82 minute runtime. A heat check of a debut, with Birney and Moore giving two of the best performances of the year.

Michael (2026)

NOW STREAMING
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Jaafar Jackson, Nia Long, Juliano Valdi, KeiLyn Durrel Jones, Laura Harrier, Jessica Sula, Mike Myers, Miles Teller, Colman Domingo

As bad as every bad music biopic you’ve ever seen, with the added caveat that Jackson’s family and estate spends nearly every moment where Michael isn’t performing surrounding him with children as if to say that was all very normal. Sinister stuff.

Obsession (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Curry Barker
Starring: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter

I wanted to go back to this, mostly just to see what the hell is going on with its Titanic-esque hold on the box office. I’m still (pleasantly) baffled; this played even MORE grim and upsetting than it did for me the first time. There’s an easier, less challenging version of this movie that Curry Barker resists at nearly every turn, and the fact that it is so gnarly and bothersome (not to mention inviting of so many bad and bad faith takes) takes absurd confidence and is a major testament to him.

The bad reading of this is obviously “bitches be crazy, be careful wishing for a girlfriend because she might turn out to be a psycho.” And I don’t think the movie is so wildly skilled that it completely steers clear of that implication. But to me, the intent is clear: this is a horror movie about the toxicity of the soft boy. As with my first viewing, I thought about (500) Days of Summer early and often, another terrifying film about nice guy entitlement. The lack of internality for Nikki is the point; she’s been robbed of agency and fashioned into a jacked-up manic pixie dream girl. But the movie is also nothing without Inde Navarrette’s performance; the film’s scariest moments are the ones where the real Nikki is fighting for her life to get back control of her body.

Female Trouble (1974)

RE-WATCH
Director: John Waters
Starring: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Edith Massey

Happy Pride lol. Maybe the thing I love most about John Waters is that, even though he’s a gay elder statesman, any sentimentalization of his work would be not only dishonest, but impossible. Pink Flamingos may feature a singing anus and the consumption of dog feces, but I’d argue Female Trouble is him at his most vile and confrontational. Revisiting these great early films of his, shot on 16mm, really drives home how unbelievable it is that Divine just grew up down the block from him; he’s a fucking nightmare and a star in this. I’ll always prefer the first half more than the second; something about Divine as a young Dawn Davenport smoking cigarettes in her high school bathroom and demanding cha cha heels for Christmas is just so fucking funny, and I’m always going to prefer Waters giving his muse a Douglas Sirk moment as opposed to the star’s more iconic “Drag Queen as Godzilla” appearances. Still, even though a little of the back half goes a long way, it’s never not a thrilling distillation of all things Waters: trash as art, filth as beauty, crime as celebrity, elitism and heterosexuality as poxes on society. I’ve always loved the way he used Edith Massey in his movies, and that she gets to say one of his great lines in this: “I worry that you'll work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries. The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life.”

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

RE-WATCH
Director: Robert Benton
Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Jane Alexander

Trucking along into the 1970s with Oscar Chaser, so had to revisit the 1979 Best Picture/ Best Director winner. Complicated feelings about this one - wonderfully acted, made me cry, and I’m sure it was plenty progressive at the time with its “awww the man is playing the ‘maternal’ role” vibe. But it just really stacks the decks against Streep’s character; it’s maybe the greatest testament to her power as an actress (and an advocate for her characters) that she so painstakingly and effortlessly communicates Joanna’s humanity and inner life every time she’s onscreen, even though the script has this undeniable “can we please just make this woman the villain” energy. It must also be said that even though this winning Picture is fine, I guess, Robert Benton beating both Francis Ford Coppola and Bob Fosse for Apocalypse Now and All That Jazz, respectively, is actual theft.

The Terminal (2004)

RE-WATCH
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tucci, Chi McBride, Diego Luna

Spielberg hangover. One of his worst movies. Tom Hanks is basically Eastern European Paddington living in an airport in this largely twee bit of “We are a nation of immigrants” cinema. There’s a little fun to be had with Spielberg’s transformation of the ecosystem of JFK Airport into a playground, but overall this is the type of movie people are referencing when they throw around “Spielberg” as a pejorative.

Disclosure Day (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo

WARNING: SPOILERS

Every movie is a leap of faith. Hugo talks about how Scanlon infantilizes people for “the crime of being astonished,” how he’s essentially policing wonderment. So it goes with the Cinema Sins crowd. Spielberg is not the monoculture anymore, nor do I think he’s arguing he *should* be here - merely that he, like the whistleblowers in the movie, should be allowed to gather us together, put images in front of us, and see who takes the leap.

‘Disclosure Day’ is an often goofy movie; nobody will be writing home about the script, and I will be making fun of the space twig that seems to do whatever the plot needs it to for the rest of the year. But I find the creakiness moving, even essential to the film’s text. And I promise that’s not hand-waving away the more rickety parts of the movie (again, the space twig!) it’s just that Spiely hasn’t made something like this in a long time, and I think the fact that it’s both a little “Grampy makes a Matrix film” and ultimately quite powerful is what makes it a necessary new entry in the story of his filmography.

People will call this stupid and naive; I heard more than a fair share of chuckling during my second watch with a packed crowd. And that comes with the territory; there’s a reason Spielberg doesn’t show us what happens *after* the disclosure - the reaction is up to us. For an audience member, there’s always going to be more of a risk taking the leap with a movie trafficking in this level of ridiculousness with *this* level of sincerity (people have made the Shyamalan comparisons, and it’s very apt).

For my part, I was more than happy to go along for the ride, and for me the risk paid off; I love the last half hour of this thing so much. This is really not a movie about aliens or World War III, but one about a 79 year old man wondering if he still has the power he had in the prime of his youth - to make the world stop, come together, and watch something. By the time that final sequence comes up, I think he’s proven he does. “You just have to give yourself over to it.”

Stop! That! Train! (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Adam Shankman
Starring: RuPaul Chales, Ginger Minj, Jujubee

RuPaul hired all the queens and Adam Shankman to basically remake Airplane! and make it gay. They had $10, a hot glue gun, and a dream, and the result is basically a 90 minute Drag Race acting challenge about a runaway train headed directly toward something everyone keeps calling a Stormaganza. Very very stupid, intermittently actually hilarious, and (to me) completely charming. Ru is actually giving an amazing performance and will be on my Supporting Actor ballot come the end of the year.

Leviticus (2026)

IN THEATERS THIS FRIDAY
Director: Adrian Chiarella
Starring: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Jeremy Blewitt, Ewen Leslie, Davida McKenzie, Nicholas Hope, Zamira Newman, Mia Wasikowska

Basically a horror movie about praying the gay away. Two twinks get caught smooching and then start getting pursued by a gay ghost that’s out to ruin their lives. Totally solid, although stretches its metaphor a bit thin by the end. Great handjob scene!

Toy Story 5 (2026)

IN THEATERS THIS FRIDAY
Director: Andrew Stanton
Starring: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Greta Lee, Conan O’Brien, Tony Hale, Craig Robinson, Shelby Rabara, Scarlett Spears, Mykal-Michelle Harris, Matty Matheson, John Ratzenberger, Wallace Shawn, Blake Clark, Jeff Bergman, Anna Vocino, Annie Potts, Bonnie Hunt, Melissa Villasenor, John Hopkins, Kristen Schaal, Ernie Hudson, Bad Bunny, Keanu Reeves, Ally Maki, Alan Cumming

Yes, I saw it. Review embargo lifts tomorrow.

Ordinary People (1980)

FIRST-TIME WATCH
Director: Robert Redford
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, Timothy Hutton

Covered Redford’s Oscar Chaser, The Milagro Beanfield War, last week, so naturally also had to watch the movie for which he won Best Director. It’s really, really good; every scene, you’re just nailed to the screen, it’s all just so well written, observed, and performed. Timothy Hutton winning Supporting Actor is obviously insane; HE IS THE LEAD. But I’ll never begrudge the win, he is so very special in it, Timothée Chalamet say “Thank you,” etc. Mary Tyler Moore playing this challenging woman is as ballsy as it is criminal Donald Sutherland wasn’t nominated (ever!)

I don’t recall a time before I knew about Steven Spielberg. He’s the father of the modern blockbuster, cinema’s dad, and (I’d argue) bizarrely one of the most underrated filmmakers of the 21st century. His newest film, Disclosure Day, hits theaters this weekend, along with an abundance of takes about how it fits into his body of work.

For what it’s worth, here’s my personal ranking. Sorry, Duel, but theatrical features only.

34. Always (1989)

The only real skippable film in his entire body of work. A remake of a 1943 movie Spiely apparently loved as a kid called A Guy Named Joe, this is essentially about Richard Dreyfuss dying and coming back as a guardian angel to hook his best friend up with his wife. Strange stuff verging on self parody.

33. The BFG (2016)

Spielberg reunited with E.T. scribe Melissa Mathison to adapt Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novel about a big friendly giant who delivers dreams to children and loves to fart. It’s a weird match of source material and director, and not much of a movie. Mark Rylance as the titular giant isn’t necessarily bad, but to listen to him drone on about frobscottle and and snozzcumbers is to enter the realm of the insane.

32. The Terminal (2004)

Tom Hanks is basically Eastern European Paddington living in an airport in this largely twee bit of “We are a nation of immigrants” cinema. There’s a little fun to be had with Spielberg’s transformation of the ecosystem of JFK Airport into a playground, but overall this is the type of movie people are referencing when they throw around “Spielberg” as a pejorative.

31. Ready Player One (2018)

Plenty of smart people have gone to bat for this one, and in a way I kinda wish I could join them. But the only thing really interesting to me here is the idea of Spielberg reckoning with the nostalgia hellscape he’s helped create. It looks a lot better than most of the nonsense like this we get these days, but it also winds up just as mind-numbingly exhausting. I give it a few bonus points because, given his relationship with Stanley Kubrick, the Overlook Hotel sequence does feel like a particularly bizarre strain of his daddy issue preoccupation.

30. 1941 (1979)

Spielberg’s first flop, and valuable really only in that context. Somehow the guy got it in his head that he should direct a live action Looney Tune, and the result is a “comedy” where a bunch of loud, seemingly funny things happen and yet the laughs never seem to come. The only real good stuff concerns his first attempt at staging a musical number, and a running bit where Robert Stack goes to see Dumbo.

29. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

A hackneyed sequel sort-of based on Michael Crichton’s 1995 follow-up to the original Jurassic novel, at least until Spielberg gets bored with it and decides he actually wants to make a movie about a T-rex rampaging around San Diego just because. The review writes itself: Spielberg and the studio “were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” A second Jurassic film was always going to make a ton of money, and while it didn’t need to be remarkable, it could have at least been something. But barring a few set pieces where Stevie comes thrillingly to life (namely, a literal cliffhanger featuring a van), this is largely a listless and dull affair, an experience so deflating that, perhaps most damningly of all, I completely forgot Julianne Moore was even in it.

28. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Contrary to what the fanboys might tell you, him getting nuked in the fridge is actually the good part! Crystal Skull starts fairly strong with a fun opening set piece and the introduction of villainess Irina Spalko (thank you Fabelmans for retrospectively revealing Spielberg GAVE CATE BLANCHETT HIS MOM’S HAIRCUT IN THIS MOVIE). But the “bad” starts piling up real soon - Shia LaBeouf, John Hurt acting insane, the ants, Shia LaBeouf. It’s not necessarily a shitty idea for Indy to advance from the ‘30s adventure serials to ‘50s cold war paranoia and a “saucer men from Mars” aesthetic, but the execution is just a total drag. Shia swinging with those monkeys? Woof!

27. Hook (1991)

This is probably one of the most important movies in my life in the sense that it surely was my first Spielberg and I surely am the monster I am today because I was the kid who not only dressed up like Captain Hook and endlessly mimicked Dustin Hoffman’s entrance, but also was like “Did you know that the pirate who gets thrown in the boo-box is played by Glenn Close” to all my friends, as though a bunch of four year olds have any idea who Glenn Close is. So I will admit this one is incredibly formative, while at the same time acknowledging that it does just kinda blow. Some of the London Maggie Smith myth-making stuff is good, Hoffman and Hoskins are great, and especially in the early stages Spielberg just can’t help but frame and stage some moments so magnificently that even here, it reminds you why he’s the man. But while The Fabelmans does make all of his movies retrospectively better, turning Peter Pan into a daddy issues movie is just so deeply lame. He really seems out of his depth as soon as he hits Never Land; the whole thing looks like a mini golf course, and while I know a lot of ‘90s kids love the Lost Boys, I just don’t vibe with the big take being “they’re skateboarders now.”

26. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

Hands down Spielberg’s nastiest movie, and I can’t say it particularly suits him. Cultural criticisms aside, there’s just a mean streak to this entry that’s never gonna be my cup of tea. “Anything Goes,” mine cart sequence, and Harrison Ford in the one-sleeve-ripped-off-look innocent. Very glad Spiely met Kate Capshaw on this, but eject Willie Scott into space please.

25. Amistad (1998)

Post-Schindler failed Oscar bait from Stevie, existing at the apex of “well-intentioned,” “of its time,” and “kind of boring.” It’s about the legal battle that ensued from a slave ship uprising in 1839, and features John Williams at his gooey-est. The main appeal is the stacked ensemble of actors, most of all Djimon Hounsou, Morgan Freeman, and Anthony Hopkins serving up an entire ham sandwich as John Quincy Adams.

24. War Horse (2011)

Probably the biggest punchline in Spielberg’s entire filmography, and yet I kinda like it. It’s exactly what it sounds like: what if there was a horse that experienced World War I and changed the hearts and minds of everyone he ran into? It’s giving elevated Disney movie to a certain extent, and yet still manages to be plenty stirring and emotional, if you can stop laughing at how everyone kinda wants to fuck this horse. Regular Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kaminski shoots the absolute hell out of it; the No Man’s Land scene has never left my memory, for better or worse.

23. The Color Purple (1985)

Still tied with The Turning Point for having the most Oscar nominations without a single win (11), Spielberg’s screen adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel came under fire by Black filmmakers like Spike Lee at the time for being handled by a white director. Truth be told, Spielberg wasn’t the guy for the job. The movie’s a bit too sunny and schmaltzy, and while he’s always been a prudish filmmaker, his unwillingness to dramatize the lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug Avery is a major downside. Still, nothing can diminish these performances, in particular Margaret Avery, Oprah, and Whoopi Goldberg, who should’ve won Best Actress for this but would have to settle for a make-up win for Ghost the following year.

22. The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

The real fourth Indiana Jones movie. Spielberg teamed up with Peter Jackson to make his only animated film, an adaptation of the famous (to some freaks) Belgian comic strip, and the resulting film is one of his most underrated. As much of a set piece factory as Raiders, this is Spielberg just completely in his bag as a visual storyteller, and the motion capture animation has aged far better than, say, The Polar Express.

21. The Sugarland Express (1974)

Spielberg’s first theatrical feature, and a valuable tether to Disclosure Day in that it’s the only other movie he’s made (Duel aside) that really could be described as a chase. Goldie Hawn and William Atherton hit the road as a mother and her jailbird husband, kidnapping a cop so they can rescue their son from his foster parents in Sugar Land. It’s fun to see Spielberg this stripped down, and the scenes with Hawn, Atherton, and Sacks in the car are a great reminder that for all of his visual mastery, he’s always been a great director of actors. Notable also as the first collaboration between Spiely and one John Williams.

20. Empire of the Sun (1987)

Christian Bale gives maybe the single best screen performance by a child as an orphaned privileged English boy growing up in a Shanghai prison camp during World War II. The second and best of Spielberg’s awards season try-hard movies between his run as a hitmaker and his coronation with Schindler, when he was trying to prove himself as a serious filmmaker and not just the guy who made Jaws, Raiders, and E.T. Things get a little too whimsical in the back half, but the opening sequences are some of the most harrowing Spielberg ever did. See: the scene of Bale discovering what happened to his family for: how it’s done.

19. The Post (2017)

It’s hard to believe that Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep had never gone toe-to-toe onscreen before The Post. As with most of Spielberg’s late-career output, it would be easy to dismiss this one as a bit of dry prestige about the Washington Post’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. But the film’s rush to production gives the film a fleetness and energy that marries the weight of Spielberg’s prestige fare with the youthful vitality of a Raiders or E.T (as ever, he is a master of blocking). The stacked cast has everyone from Sarah Paulson to Bob Odenkirk, Jesse Plemons to Matthew Rhys. But the pure star power of Hanks and Streep is the engine that makes the whole thing run. The moment where Streep decides to go to publication is one of the best of her career.

18. Disclosure Day (2026)

Spielberg’s latest begins with a shot of two wrestlers slamming into each other and ends with a moment of societal connection. Whether his vision of a disclosure day, when we learn all there is to know about our interactions with extraterrestrial life, is ultimately too Polyanna-ish is going to depend on the viewer. And sure, much of the sci-fi tech and world-building feels a bit like “Grampy made a Matrix movie.” But so much of this is a breathlessly propulsive chase, anchored by one of Emily Blunt’s best performances. I look forward to a deepening appreciation and understanding of all that’s in here, but what struck me most upon first watch was how Disclosure Day is, above all, a Spielbergian fantasy about a world where everyone stops what they’re doing and watches something together.

17. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Forgive me, fathers of the world, if I’m underrating this one a little bit. This is the 1998 war epic that earned Spielberg his second Best Director Oscar, even despite famously losing Best Picture in an upset to Shakespeare in Love. The Weinstein “whisper campaign” at the time was that the film boasted a spectacular opening half-hour, dominated by an immersive recreation of D-Day (one of the best things Stevie ever did), but that the rest of the film wasn’t anything special. It’s a criticism with which I don’t necessarily disagree; the vérité style of that opening is a tough act to follow, and the “saving private Ryan” plot line does verge a bit on the pedestrian. But the story of a bunch of soldiers risking their lives to send one guy home is ultimately quite a true-to-Spielberg method of exploring the futility of war. The cast is also aces, led by Tom Hanks in the pinnacle of his collaborations with Spiely, and overall the film is a welcome and necessary reminder of the horrors so many men faced on the battlefield; however hackneyed, the “Old Man Damon” coda always manages to move me in thinking about the myriad men who had to re-enter civilian life with those atrocities as part of their memory.

16. Bridge of Spies (2015)

The “dad movie” sector of Spielberg’s 21st century-output has largely been occupied by muted tales of American exceptionalism, far from the swashbuckling idealism and boyish wonder of his early films. Tom Hanks has been along for the ride in several of these outings, the Jimmy Stewart to Spielberg’s Frank Capra, but that comparison has never been more apt than in this 2015 Cold War drama about an American insurance lawyer hellbent on giving a Russian spy his fair day in court. Another of those seemingly easy bits of patriotism that reveals something more interesting and darker at every turn. Mark Rylance upset Stallone for Supporting Actor for his performance here; I was furious about it at the time, but now I agree it’s absolutely the right choice.

15. West Side Story (2021)

It seemed an impossible task, bordering on the unnecessary. But this remake of our great American musical, by one of our great American filmmakers, makes the case for its existence, and its necessity, almost instantly. Yes, it almost completely peters out after the exit of Mike Faist (so incredible, he made Riff the best part), and no, it’s never been the emotional pummeling that the original is. This is mostly a massive flex from Spielberg and Janusz, featuring some of the best breakthrough performances of the 2020s, but it’s extremely successful at that. I imagine Tony Kushner was like, “We’re cutting ‘Krupke’ though, right?” And Stevie said, “Lemme see what Janusz and the boys come up with.”

14. War of the Worlds (2005)

The great 9/11 movie. Unburdened by the genre trappings of H.G. Wells’ novel, Spielberg laces his tale of a country faced with an overwhelmingly devastating invasion with a bleak parade of nightmare imagery: rivers overflowing with corpses, a runaway train on fire, and (in a sick ode to The Wizard of Oz) a door opening onto a red hellscape fertilized by human blood. Until Top Gun: Maverick, it was Tom Cruise’s highest-grossing domestic film, but it’s also the one where he has a full-on panic attack realizing that he’s covered in the ashes of disintegrated people. The second half (particularly anything with the son) is a bit deflating, but for much of the run time this is Spielberg’s most terrifying film.

13. Munich (2005)

Inarguably the most brutal, unsparing, and intense film Spielberg ever made, and the one that strikes a chord most with our current moment. It centers on the retaliatory operation of the Israeli government to recruit a group of Mossad agents to track down and execute the members of the Palestinean terrorist group who murdered eleven Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Essentially a three hour film about a new father becoming a ruthless killer, and about how revenge eats itself up. Spielberg puts his thumb on the scale in the last shot, but I think he earns it.

12. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

My favorite of the Indy movies as a kid, and still a total blast. “He chose… poorly” is as good as “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” and Sean Connery and Harrison Ford realizing they both fucked the same woman is, unfortunately, cinema.

11. Minority Report (2002)

It’s true that Spielberg’s adaptation of the Philip K. Dick story The Minority Report was filming long before September of 2001, but its depiction of societal paranoia and surveillance, where futuristic cops can arrest people just for knowing they’re going to commit a murder, hit the zeitgeist in a chilling and uncanny way. We love a muted screed against an America abandoning its principles, particularly when it’s the backdrop for a pulpy, man-on-the-run flick starring Tom Cruise, a phenomenal Samantha Morton, and Colin Farrell in one of his breakout performances.

10. Jurassic Park (1993)

The first of many on this list that can basically be summed up by throwing one’s hands up and saying “I mean… it’s [Insert Movie Title Here].” Groundbreaking technical and CGI innovation, one of John Williams’ most iconic scores, and the still-mindblowing fact that it released the same year as Schindler’s List make this an essential fixture of the top 10 here. 1993 represents a prime snapshot of the incomparable versatility of Spielberg, but Jurassic marks the last time, to date, that he made a big, playful blockbuster that can also be counted among his best works. At its heart a Frankensteinian parable about hubris, Jurassic Park begins as a masterclass in childlike wonder, before it pumps the gas, lets the dinosaurs run amok, and becomes one cinema’s most exhilarating rollercoaster rides. There’s a reason the kitchen scene with the raptors has been endlessly imitated, and why none of this film’s sequels have ever measured up to the sublime populist excellence of the original.

9. Catch Me If You Can (2002)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, every Spielberg movie benefits retrospectively from seeing The Fabelmans, but perhaps none more so than this one. A cat-and-mouse game between FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) and con artist Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), Catch Me If You Can is often remembered as a bit of a lark. But there’s an undercurrent of melancholy that might surprise viewers upon rewatch; this is essentially the story of a scared little boy who flies off on adventures to protect himself from the cold hard facts of life - a more effective take on Peter Pan than Spielberg’s own Hook, with Leo giving one of his best performances as The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Hanks is no slouch either, shedding leading man status and reminding us all that he is, ultimately, a character actor. Meanwhile, this has got to be my favorite Walken of all time.

8. Lincoln (2012)

Sorry to this Saving Private Ryan, but this is the greatest “dad movie” Spielberg ever made. Eschewing any sort of cradle-to-the-grave format to focus entirely on how fucking hard it is to get a bill passed, Lincoln is far more than the incredible Daniel Day-Lewis performance at its center. It’s the most John Ford Stevie ever went, boasts Tony Kushner’s finest screenplay, and is filled with a total murderer’s row of character actors (seriously, upon rewatch, you won’t believe who’s all in this thing). I quote the “NOW, NOW, NOW” scene all the time, and I cannot stress enough how much I love how everyone in this movie is wearing blankets all the time because the White House is COLD. For maximum viewing pleasure, turn it off before the last few minutes.

7. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

An almost incomprehensible collection of iconic moments, setpieces, performances, and musical motifs. George Lucas married his love of ‘30s serial adventures with Spielberg’s love of Lawrence of Arabia and desire to make a Bond movie and the results speak for themselves. One of the most entertaining movies ever made.

6. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

1977 was a banner year for science fiction in film, with defining efforts from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg completely reigniting the genre and paving the way for the types of movies made to this very day, for better and worse. But if Star Wars is a zippy romp through space, then Close Encounters is the more serious-minded, majestic of the pair. It’s as much a film about childlike wonder as any Spielberg has ever made, but there’s a mysterious, haunted quality to its view of the extraterrestrial. It’s one of his slowest, coldest, and most cerebral films, and yet one can’t help but find the personal in the tale of an obsessive man building models in his kitchen and attempting to connect to some cosmic force larger than himself. The final sequence stands as one of his most defining, a visual and aural symphonic depiction of two species communicating that could only be delivered by a master.

5. Jaws (1975)

The movie that made Spielberg Spielberg, and still one of the great films of all time. A tense thriller, a slasher, an adventure, and a hangout movie between Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw, there’s been plenty of ink spilled on all that makes Jaws Jaws. And yet forever and always, my favorite scene will be the moment when Scheider’s son is imitating him at the dinner table, a distinctly Spielbergian grace note no one else would think to include.

4. The Fabelmans (2022)

The pandemic of Old Masters Reflecting On Their Childhoods Through Film seemed like it might continue with this one. But to dismiss The Fabelmans as yet another bit of “magic of cinema” propaganda is to miss its point almost entirely. Here is a film about how one of Our Great American Filmmakers, upon seeing his first movie as a child, was not smitten but traumatized! How his innate sense of where to put the camera led him to capture his mom cucking his dad, and how his God-given talent for giving an audience what they want somehow inspired him to frame his anti-Semitic high school bully not as a villain, but as an Olympian god. Perhaps the biggest revelation in this already revelatory film is how Spielberg so inextricably links cinema with pain. “It’ll tear your heart out!” proclaims Judd Hirsch’s showstopping Uncle Boris in a mid-movie scene that plays less as a pep talk and more as a curse. It’s the curse of the outside observer, the one who’s planning the shot while his grandmother is dying or his parents are announcing their divorce, the one who sits anxiously behind the projector calculating what gets laughs, what gets cheers, and what makes an audience cry. In the telling of the end of his parents’ marriage and the beginning of his career as a filmmaker, Spielberg peeled back the layers on his signature mix of darkness and escapism, and gave us its Rosetta Stone.

3. Schindler’s List (1992)

So obviously one of the greatest American films of all time, with three of the greatest performances as well (Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Ben Kingsley). For anyone stepped in Spielberg’s filmography, it never ceases to amaze just how different this one feels from everything else. The stark, documentary-style black-and-white lens must have felt like lighting out of a clear sky in the context of his career up to this point. But even now, the whole film feels like the one he was most born to make - clear-eyed and somber even as it possesses the same entertaining architecture that typifies his greatest works. I’ll never forget the first time I watched it, and I still try to make time for it every few years; it is a profound and essential film.

2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

25 years later, that first credit onscreen is still shiver-inducing: an Amblin/ Stanley Kubrick Production. Released in 2001, A.I. Artificial Intelligence was the result of a multi-decade collaboration between Spielberg and Stanley Kurbick - a cracked glass slipper of a fairy tale about a robot programmed to love. Dismissed at the time of release, the years have been exceptionally kind to this one. In 2024, IndieWire named it the best film of the 2000s, just ahead of Mulholland Drive. As the Late Spielberg era has filled out, the film feels less outlier and more lynchpin, a bold and challenging work about the responsibilities all creators have to what they bring into the world. I don’t want to spoil the finer details of the last act; suffice it to say that at the time, many saw A.I.’s coda as a Spielbergian cop-out, an imposed happy ending that undercut the dark melancholy of what had come before. In recent years, the perception has swung so far the other way to the point of potential over-correction, with many arguing the film’s final moments are the bleakest in Spielberg’s entire oeuvre, a jagged hug in place of a “happily ever after.” Here in 2026, I’d argue it’s actually all true; the film’s sun-drenched finale is laced with both an artificial uneasiness that feels distinctly Kubrickian, and a cathartic emotionality only the guy who made E.T. could conjure. The film, much like the man who made it, contains multitudes. I’m putting it at number two, but I have a feeling that, much like its subject, it will be the one that outlives us all.

1. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1984)

I doubt I’ll ever think of any other movie than this as the defining film of Steven Spielberg’s career. A suburban boy provides shelter for an alien, initiating one of cinema’s most primal tales of friendship. Spielberg is the king of filling the frame with life, but perhaps never better than here, from the dynamically staged opening scene of a single mom trying to corral her smartass kids and order a pizza, to the remarkable puppetry that gives the titular character its soul. I wrote earlier here that Christian Bale gives maybe the best child performance ever, but duh! It’s Henry Thomas as Elliott. And in a career of career-best work, John Williams laid down his most iconic theme, which much like the movie begins delicately and unassuming before blossoming into a magnificent work of soaring emotion. To watch E.T. is to surrender to the full power of a cinematic master who always understood that sometimes a genre filter can be the best way to get to a universal truth. In the final act, Spielberg wrings every conceivable kind of tear from his audience, as the movie careens seamlessly from devastation to elation, from fist-pumping joy to a remarkably powerful feeling of loss. E.T.’s brief time on earth teaches Elliott, and all of us, life’s two most essential lessons: how to love and, when the time comes, how to say goodbye. “I’ll be right here,” he says, and it’s true. Always.

Every other Friday, I publish a deep-dive into the movies filmmakers made directly following their Academy Award wins for Best Director (their “Oscar Chasers,” if you will). I’ve begun with the most recent case (Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland follow-up Eternals) and will move back in time week-to-week.

Few directors could come straight out of the gate with something as strong as Ordinary People.

Even fewer would follow it up with a magical realist fable set in a small Hispanic community in northern New Mexico about water rights, land development, and beans.

But Robert Redford always existed at the intersection of art and activism, even in his acting choices. Jeremiah Johnson carried an early ecological sensibility, The Candidate dissected the machinery of modern political campaigning, and All the President’s Men remains one of the great films about the underdog. So when Redford won Best Director in 1981 for his debut feature1, it made sense he’d follow it up with a film that would synthesize all these themes into one project - arguably the most stylistically adventurous and ideologically direct film he would ever make.

That movie was The Milagro Beanfield War, based on a 1974 novel by John Nichols. It’s not a movie I’d seen, much less heard of, before starting this project. Surely that had nothing to do with its clunky mouthful of a title, or the poster, which makes it look like some sort of prequel to Newsies.

Alas, although my most abiding thought while watching this movie was that it actually would make a great musical and that Lin-Manuel should get on it stat, Christian Bale and Ann-Margret are nowhere in sight.

In their place is a comic fable about a fictitious northern New Mexico village fighting to preserve its land and way of life from developers eager to turn it into a golf resort. When a hotheaded local mechanic illegally diverts the developers’ water to irrigate his tiny beanfield, it sparks a community-wide revolt, roping in everyone from Sônia Braga as a fiery gas station owner, John Heard2 as a socially conscious lawyer, and Christopher Walken as a ruthless state investigator hired to stop the uprising (he wears a truly giant cowboy hat).

It’s by no means a perfect film; Redford never quite gets a handle on its sprawling cast and competing tones, and while its Bacurau-esque tale of a community fighting for their place in the world is plenty stirring, the last half hour is riddled with awkward anticlimaxes. But it’s fascinating as an Oscar Chaser, both a wild genre swing from a stalwart of realism and the first (and boldest) truly political piece Redford would tackle as a director. Ordinary People is great, maybe even underrated (and Timothée Chalamet, say thank you to Timothy Hutton3). But its greatness lies in its superb writing and rich performances. It’s otherwise a conventionally shot, small-scale film about three WASPs and a Jewish psychiatrist.

Contrast that with Milagro, a rambunctious, tonally adventurous film centering mostly on a cast of unknown Hispanic actors, something no other major studio was doing in 1988. It’s an unruly combination of ensemble comedy, political satire, and folklore, featuring an abundance of bilingual dialogue and an opening sequence in which a sombrero-clad angel dances through town playing a concertina, like something out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel.4

These quirks, never really explored again by a typically earthbound Redford, were initially seen as liabilities by Paramount, who worried that the story was “too regional,” a wild critique by a studio so enthusiastic about the material that they practically purchased the novel’s rights upon publication. Author John Nichols chronicles the film’s tortured development process in an essay entitled “Night of the Living Beanfield: How an Unsuccessful Cult Novel Became an Unsuccessful Cult Film in Only Fourteen Years, Eleven Nervous Breakdowns, and $20 Million.”

He talks of an endless parade of Hollywood types, each claiming they understood the novel better than the last, and of executives wanting to make the story more “universal” by downplaying the community’s Hispano identity, softening the politics, and stripping away many of the magical realist grace notes.

Nichols had his issues with the finished film, but only speaks highly of Redford, identifying him as the one Hollywood figure with both the power and the inclination to remain true to the New Mexican setting, retaining the central spine of the story as one of community identity, local tradition, and resistance to outside power.

But then again, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. As much of a stylistic outlier as the film is for Redford, it’s right at the intersection of everything he always cared about as an artist. Just as Butch Cassidy mourned the death of the Old West to modernization, the guy who played the Sundance Kid was consistently drawn to stories about individuals struggling to preserve their integrity against larger systems. The fight to retain dignity and identity runs through nearly all of his best work, from Ordinary People to Quiz Show, right through to the creation of the Sundance Institute itself, his attempt to carve out space for independent voices beyond the pressures of the studio system.

But there’s something so refreshingly direct about the way he explores these ideas in this film. 40 of these write-ups in the bag and it’s become abundantly clear that a director’s Oscar Chaser says a hell of a lot about the stories they’re really interested in telling. Strange, shaggy, and ultimately anticlimactic as it may be, The Milagro Beanfield War feels like the purest and most ambitious expression of Redford’s artistic values - a film that fuses his interest in community, identity, environmentalism, and resistance to institutional power into a single unruly package. In the process, he proved that diverse casting, unconventional source material, and a dancing angel with a concertina can be just as valid a vehicle for exploring ordinary people.

Robert Redford won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Director, for his 1980 film Ordinary People. These were the other nominees, along with their Oscar Chasers:

• David Lynch, The Elephant Man (Dune)

• Roman Polanski, Tess (Pirates)

• Richard Rush, The Stunt Man (Color of Night)

• Martin Scorsese, Raging Bull (The King of Comedy)

Scary Movie (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Michael Tiddes
Starring: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Farris, Regina Hall

Really, really bad. It’s been 13 years since the last one, and yet the Wayans Brothers spend the majority of the run time making generic punching-down (and unfunny) jokes about woke culture as opposed to the myriad horror movies that have come out since then. Saw this with a packed crowd and you could hear a pin drop. Perhaps worst of all, not a single Trap joke!

Masters of the Universe (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Travis Knight
Starring: Nicholas Galitzine, Camila Mendes, Alison Brie, James Purefoy, Morena Baccarin, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Kristen Wiig, Jared Leto, Idris Elba

I was completely unfamiliar with this IP, and yet saw this with the littest crowd. It was as though all of the He-Man stans in the entire universe were packed into the AMC Village yesterday afternoon. Hooting. And. Hollering. The movie itself is fine, way too long. It’s more Barbie than MCU-coded, which even this Barbie agnostic will cop to preferring. Charming in the sense that the hero is a jacked guy in a loincloth and it’s mostly played straight, and fun in the sense that Alison Brie says “Lord Skeletor” a bunch.

Propeller One-Way Night Coach (2026)

NOW STREAMING
Director: John Travolta
Starring: Clark Shotwell, Kelly Eviston-Quinnett, Ella Bleu Travolta, Olga Hoffmann

John Travolta’s directorial debut is an hour long feature about the first time he ever flew. Essentially a movie about how he wants to fuck a plane. A+ autistic cinema.

North By Northwest (1959)

ESSENTIALLY FIRST-TIME WATCH
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis

I’m on an AFI 100 list blindspots kick, and this was first up. It’s such a blast, Bond before Bond. I remembered the set pieces - Mount Rushmore, the crop duster scene which really is just one of the best directed sequences ever put to film. But I didn’t remember how fun and sexy the dynamic between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint is, nor how great a baddie James Mason makes.

City Lights (1931)

FIRST-TIME WATCH
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Starring: Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Florence Lee, Harry Myers, Al Ernest Garcia

Ditto on the AFI list. It truly takes about five minutes of watching this movie to get the whole Chaplin thing - he’s obviously the master of physical comedy, and yet so much of what makes him funny is how great he is at simply processing information. The final scene is of course gorgeous, a testament to him being one of our great unsung actors. But the key to his comedy is in his genuine reactions to the world around him; the mixture of confusion and determination on his face when he thinks his pasta has morphed into a balloon streamer is hall of fame stuff.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

RE-WATCH
Director: John Hughes
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Mia Sara, Alan Ruck

Unexpected rewatch of one of the all-time comfort movies. Happy 40th anniversary, king! Remains undefeated, but this was also maybe the first time I’ve watched this since I’ve felt more like a grown up than a kid, and I cried like three times. Hughes really created the defining “carpe diem” avatar in Ferris, and nobody else could play him but Broderick. I can’t believe Alan Ruck gave this performance, it’s always hit me really hard. Perhaps the great movie about youth. Shake it up baby, etc.

The BFG (2016)

RE-WATCH
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Mark Rylance, Ruby Barnhill, Penelope Wilton, Jemaine Clement, Rebecca Hall, Rafe Spall, Bill Hader

Take it from me - no matter how much your Spielberg senses start tingling this Disclosure Day week, there’s no need to revisit this one. One of his worst movies, and concerning behavior from all involved.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

RE-WATCH
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O’Connor, Brendan Gleeson, William Hurt

This, however, remains a masterpiece and maybe his best movie. Here’s my Oscar Chaser essay about it.

Backrooms (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Kane Parsons
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell

Two 20-some year old YouTubers won the weekend at the box office, with Curry Barker’s Obsession clearing 100 million in its third weekend and Backrooms almost hitting that milestone in its debut. It’s a great moment for indie cinema (sorry, Grogu), but how’s the movie? On first watch, I’m a bit half-and-half on it. The stars of the show are the rooms themselves, a series of extremely creepy masterworks of production design that could easily support an entire run time of exploration. Unfortunately, Will Soodik’s screenplay bundles it all with the usual “it’s all about trauma” trappings. There’s a lot about loops and alcoholism and agoraphobia that feels both undercooked and on-the-nose, and a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-meets-David Lynch dinner scene struck me as dull cosplay. It’s all the more frustrating considering this isn’t really a movie that needed much of a plot; director Kane Parsons’ command of the actual backroom sequences is thrilling stuff - the execution of a horror idea so fully formed it feels like it’s always been around. I’m fascinated by this Zoomer preoccupation with liminal spaces, mixed with what struck me as a COVID-wrought anxiety of going outside (in one exterior shot, even the clouds feel like wallpaper). When the movie allows itself to be more experiential, all of this was tickling my brain even as I held my breath for what horrors might be lurking behind any corner. Even with the flaws, it’s an encouraging success story and the announcement of a major filmmaker.

I Love Boosters (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Boots Riley
Starring: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, Demi Moore

Keke Palmer essentially plays Robin Hood to a Merry Men-esque crew of female shoplifters stealing from a fast-fashion mogul and giving back to their community, in this surreal fantasia about capitalism, wealth inequality, labor exploitation, wage theft, class solidarity, collective organizing, consumerism, materialism, and LaKeith Stanfield as a demon who sucks the souls out of women’s vaginas. If it sounds like a lot, it is; Boots Riley, of Sorry to Bother You fame, has never had one idea when he could have 25. It’s all sort of designed to wear you down, but I’m never gonna be mad at such an exhilarating geyser of thought and visuals. His collaboration with production designer Christopher Glass and costume designer Shirley Kurata (Everything Everywhere All At Once) yields an eye-popping aesthetic of monochromatic hyper-capitalism, and I haven’t been able to get the Tune-Yards’ score out of my head. Wade through the madness and this is ultimately a fantasy about giving people back their time and energy. Nothing wrong with that.

Blue Heron (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Sophy Romvari
Starring: Eylul Guven, Amy Zimmer, Ádám Tompa, Iringó Réti

Sophy Romvari’s directorial debut is a memory piece centered on her childhood growing up on Vancouver Island with her parents and three brothers, as her mom and dad try to figure out what to do about the increasingly troubling and dangerous behavior of her eldest brother, Jeremy. Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun really feels like it opened the floodgates on a new generation of filmmakers reconstructing their memories to figure out what they missed, what went wrong, and what they could’ve changed. The ways in which this movie forges new paths in that terrain moved me immensely. More and more I’m finding the act of putting one’s memories onscreen to be one of the most powerful things an artist can do. One of the best movies of the year.

Disclosure Day (2026)

IN THEATERS JUNE 12*
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo

Yes, I saw it. Yes, it’s under embargo. Watch this space.

Something Borrowed (2011)

FIRST-TIME WATCH
Director: Luke Greenfield
Starring: Kate Hudson, Ginnifer Goodwin, John Krasinski, Colin Egglesfield, Steve Howey

I love a Kate Hudson moment and had heard for some time that she’s quietly great in this. I guess she is, but the movie is a total head-scratcher about cheating between a wildly uncharismatic couple. A cursed object in that John Krasinski is the best thing in it.

Titanic (1997)

RE-WATCH
Director: James Cameron
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Danny Nucci, David Warner, Bill Paxton

Every now and then you just gotta hop back on the Ship of Dreams. It remains just about the best pop culture object we’ve got. If aliens landed and were like “What is a movie? I’d probably show them this.

Every other Friday, I publish a deep-dive into the movies filmmakers made directly following their Academy Award wins for Best Director (their “Oscar Chasers,” if you will). I’ve begun with the most recent case (Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland follow-up Eternals) and will move back in time week-to-week.

In the end, there was just no beating Batman.

When Warren Beatty’s adaptation of the 1930s comic strip Dick Tracy started production in 1989, the very idea of a comic book movie still seemed like folly, light-years away from the box office juggernauts of today. That all changed when Tim Burton’s Batman arrived that summer, shattering records and becoming the highest-grossing film of the year. Michael Keaton’s brooding heroism, Jack Nicholson’s macabre take on the Joker, and Anton Furst’s German Expressionist set design established a darkly operatic template the genre would follow for decades. By the time Dick Tracy premiered a year later in 1990, it felt instantly behind the times.

With his sharp fedora, chiseled square jaw, and two-way wrist radio, Tracy was a straight-laced Boy Scout at a time when audiences were gravitating toward edgier, more morally complex characters. Where Burton dealt in shadows, Beatty made a living, breathing newspaper comic strip: drenched in ketchup reds and mustard yellows, populated by a Boschian rogues’ gallery of prosthetic-swathed villains, and set against a cityscape of stunning matte paintings. In the shadow of the Dark Knight, it was all seen as a disappointment. Today, it feels like a glimpse at an alternate path for the comic book movie.

That path stretches back to 1975, when Beatty first expressed interest in bringing Tracy to the screen. Only 37 at the time, he had already established himself as one of the vanguards of the New Hollywood movement, not only starring in the groundbreaking Bonnie and Clyde, but spearheading the entire production. The rights to Dick Tracy would elude him in that moment, but the years that followed only cemented his reputation: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, and eventually Heaven Can Wait, which made him the first person nominated at the Oscars for producing, directing, acting, and writing in the same year. He repeated this feat with his 1981 epic communist romance Reds1, winning Best Director even as Best Picture went, shockingly, to Chariots of Fire2.

Meanwhile, Dick Tracy bounced from Universal to Paramount to Disney, changing hands from directors such as Steven Spielberg, John Landis, and Martin Scorsese, and stars like Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, and Mel Gibson. By 1988, Beatty had found his way back to the material, optioning the rights himself and signing a deal with Disney to direct and star, provided he kept the budget under $25 million.

He did not.

A profligate king, Beatty soon had the budget ballooning to $46.5 million, with another $48 million poured into an aggressive marketing campaign. Several McDonald’s tie-ins, T-shirts, and a Madonna album later, the film’s $162 million worldwide gross looked less triumphant than merely respectable.

Still, there’s something romantic about the extravagance of it all. Dick Tracy feels like one of the last of its kind in this way, a major studio film sparing no expense to execute the mad vision of its director. And while Beatty’s meticulous craftsmanship might seem at odds with the pulp nostalgia of Tracy, there’s a tender kinship he feels with his hero’s plight as a workaholic suddenly wanting to settle down with a family. Two years after the film’s release, Beatty would set aside his own hectic career and playboy lifestyle to marry Annette Bening3. It’s no wonder he once admitted:

“Tracy kinda touches me.”

That context helps color the stuff between Dick, his long-suffering girlfriend Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly), and an orphaned scamp known simply as The Kid (that’s Charlie Korsmo, of Hook and What About Bob? fame). But while Beatty has described the film as “gentle,” nobody would mistake Dick Tracy for a model of emotional depth or narrative clarity. The script - credited to Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. with extensive uncredited rewrites by Beatty and Bo Goldman - is largely a convoluted gang warfare plot centered on villain Alphonse “Big Boy” Caprice, an elephantiasis-afflicted gangster played by Al Pacino, who got a Supporting Actor nomination4 for kick-starting the drag era in which he’s currently still thriving.

The chief appeal here has always been the production itself. With sets by Richard Sylbert, costumes by Milena Canonero, and cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, the film painstakingly recreates Chester Gould’s original drawings and aesthetic. Beatty restricted the color palette to highly saturated primary colors - reds, yellows, blues, greens - evoking the primitive paint-by-numbers printing techniques of 1930s newspaper comics. Storaro framed everything in strip-like panels, with very little camera movement, while visual effects supervisors Michael Lloyd and Harrison Ellenshaw created more than 50 hand-painted matte shots on glass, optically composited into the live-action footage, with no CGI.

The result is a singular visual experience, accompanied by a rollicking Danny Elfman score and five original songs by none other than Stephen Sondheim. “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man),” performed by Madonna in sultry cabaret mode as femme fatale Breathless Mahoney, won him his Academy Award.

Tracy is at its best when Beatty and editor Richard Marks simply let the music and imagery take over: Sondheim on the soundtrack, Storaro’s dynamic panel-like compositions dissolving into one another like oversized comic splash pages. In the 36 years since Dick Tracy premiered, there have been well over a hundred comic book movies, yet remarkably few have attempted to translate the actual visual grammar of their subjects to the screen with this level of commitment or imagination.

Burton’s path was a fair choice, but it’s led us to further and further devolution of the genre onscreen: CGI slop, green-screen sets, and films acting as brand management rather than the singular visions of an auteur. To revisit Dick Tracy is to see another possibility entirely - one where comic book movies embraced stylization, artificiality, graphic design, and heightened theatricality rather than apologizing for them.

Beatty, meanwhile, has only ever directed two other movies, yet has never entirely let go of his favorite detective. Twice, he’s appeared as Tracy in bizarre TV specials and interviews, presumably to maintain control of the rights, while continuing to hint at the possibility of a sequel. Whether a modern Dick Tracy follow-up would work is another question entirely. Audiences didn’t care much about the character in 1990, and they certainly don’t now. And contemporary blockbuster filmmaking leaves little room for the kind of handcrafted eccentricity Beatty favored here.

Still, there’s something undeniably pure about the way he approached this two-dimensional character with affection and a madman’s maximalism. I wouldn’t begrudge the guy one more shot at the yellow coat and fedora - nor would I be especially surprised if he put them on again… sooner or later.

Warren Beatty won the 1982 Academy Award for Best Director, for his 1981 film Reds. These were the other nominees, along with their Oscar Chasers:

• Hugh Hudson, Chariots of Fire (Greystroke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes)

• Louis Malle, Atlantic City (My Dinner with Andre)

• Mark Rydell, On Golden Pond (The River)

• Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark (E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial)

June 12: We finally close out the 1980s with Robert Redford’s win for Ordinary People, which he followed up with something called The Milagro Beanfield War.

Director/writer and Titanique on Broadway associate director Billie Aken-Tyers rejoins Kyle to speak on Richard Attenborough’s follow-up to his Gandhi Best Director win, the quite-bad film of A Chorus Line. Together, they affirm that Richard Attenborough will always be Ian Malcolm and Santa to them, investigate Michael Douglas’ choreographic (and oral sex) abilities, and do a deep-dive into that time Billie was on a British reality TV show casting Dorothy in a West End production of The Wizard of Oz.

Every other Friday, I publish a deep-dive into the movies filmmakers made directly following their Academy Award wins for Best Director (their “Oscar Chasers,” if you will). I’ve begun with the most recent case (Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland follow-up Eternals) and will move back in time week-to-week.

Sometimes, they just hire the wrong guy for the job.

By 1985, the movie musical had long been dead. New Hollywood had crashed the party, replacing Oliver with Bonnie and Clyde, the sunny optimism of Oklahoma with the knowing cynicism of Nashville, and hills that were alive with the sound of music with mean streets and midnight cowboys.

That boom of creativity and growth helped just about every genre of film… except for the musical. And soon producers were forced into making bizarre matchups: Sidney Lumet wound up with The Wiz; John Huston directed Annie; Miloš Forman took on Hair1. But of all these misbegotten pairings, there’s none so dire as Richard Attenborough’s disastrous film of A Chorus Line.

Passion project this was not. While the Academy had just rained Oscars on Attenborough for fulfilling his career’s ambition to make a film of the life of Mahatma Gandhi2, Chorus Line was a strict for-hire job. Universal had acquired the rights in 1976, just months after the show debuted on Broadway. It seemed a smart move at the time, given the instant phenomenon that the show became, but the sale began a hellish, near-decade long struggle to figure out how to make the musical work onscreen.

The initial move was to hire the show’s creator, director, and choreographer Michael Bennett, whose revolutionary approach to the musical’s creation still seems inextricable from the show’s success. Bennett was one of the great Broadway director-choreographers, in the vein of Bob Fosse or Jerome Robbins. Aside from Chorus Line, this is the guy who gave us Dreamgirls and “Turkey Lurkey Time” from Promises, Promises. He choreographed Company and Follies, co-directing the latter with Harold Prince, all before dying of AIDS complications at the far too young age of 44.

It was his idea to start not with a libretto or a score, but with a series of workshops digging into the internal lives of New York City dancers. Part group therapy, part interview, part rehearsal, these sessions would ultimately give rise to A Chorus Line as we know it: a musical about dancers auditioning for the ensemble of a Broadway show. There was no set, just a bare stage marked with a white chalk line, and the spectacle arose only from the cinematic flow of Bennett’s choreography and from the immediacy of the cast’s personal recollections, many of which came directly from the performers themselves.

When offered the movie, Bennett recognized the challenge of bringing the piece’s simultaneous theatricality and intimacy from stage to screen, and pitched a metatheatrical version filmed on a soundstage centering on actors auditioning for the Chorus Line film (I would like to see it). Naturally, the studio turned it down, and the can was kicked further and further down the road, until 1984, when it wound up with Attenborough, who, according to screenwriter Arnold Schulman, settled on the most boring take possible: he “tried to photograph the play.”3

What’s strange about that strategy is that the resulting film bears such little resemblance to the stage show that if this was my introduction to A Chorus Line, I’d think it was a pretty shitty musical. Gone is Bennett’s staging, replaced by drum-machine-scored MTV moves by Flashdance choreographer Jeffrey Hornaday. Also gone are two of the score’s most iconic numbers: Cassie’s solo dance number “The Music and the Mirror” and the montage sequence of “Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love.” In their place, the bafflingly inferior “Let Me Dance For You” and “Surprise, Surprise4,” a song about… having sex in a graveyard?

Even the cast feels more like an anonymous assemblage of ‘80s-hot young’uns5 than the spiky ensemble of desperate and bloodthirsty pros Bennett had assembled on Broadway. One by one, each of them has their moment to butcher these Marvin Hamlisch-Edward Kleban tunes while Michael Douglas, playing the show’s choreographer, looms like a jaded gremlin at his tech table. At one point, he screams at them - “Can’t you talk?!? All of you, just talk to me, to each other!” - as though he’s become fed up at the very movie in which he’s been imprisoned.

I don’t blame him. Even aside from these cosmetic deficiencies, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the material. In an interview, Attenborough described A Chorus Line as “a story about kids trying to break into show business” - a soundbite that led Kelly Bishop, the original Sheila on Broadway, to almost “toss [her] TV out the window,” saying -

“I mean what an idiot! It’s about veteran dancers looking for one last job before it’s too late for them to dance anymore. No wonder the film sucked!”

Such a misconception transforms the thrilling opening number “God, I Hope I Get It” into an airless, protracted slog, instantly paling in comparison to Fosse’s similar but superior opening to his masterpiece All That Jazz. The softening continues with the show’s iconic eleven o’clock number, “What I Did For Love,” Hamlisch and Kleban’s acid-tinged anthem to the “sweetness and the sorrow” of the sacrifices inherent in the pursuit of an artistic dream. Attenborough, natch, blandly reframes it as a literal-minded actual love song.

It’s the same lack of nuance that ultimately makes Attenborough’s Gandhi a watchable, yet sauceless piece of hagiography. In addition to his great achievement of non-violently leading India to independence from British rule, the Mahatma allegedly held plenty of racist and patriarchal stances. Yet any rough edges are sanded away onscreen to form the kind of “triumph of the human spirit” film that won awards in the 1980s.

There is triumph in A Chorus Line, yet Attenborough seems ignorant of the cost. The film retains the show’s final image - the titular line kicking for eternity - yet the blood has been drained. Bennett’s genius onstage was to spend two hours highlighting the individuality of his ensemble members, before transforming them into an anonymous mass of bodies melded into one - dreams achieved, but for what?

Dancer, choreographer, and theater director Graciela Daniele said it best: “To get a job… to be on Broadway… is to be in an assembly line…

“That was the genius of Michael. He gave the audience what they expected. What he meant was something else.”

I’m not sure what Attenborough meant by adapting A Chorus Line for the screen. But the ultimate irony is that it became an assembly-line product itself, stripped of the invention and humanity that made it such a singular portrait of the agony and ecstasy of being a dancer.

In other words - God, he didn’t get it.

Richard Attenborough won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Director for his 1982 film Gandhi. These were the other nominees, along with their Oscar Chasers:

• Sidney Lumet, The Verdict (Daniel)

• Wolfgang Petersen, Das Boot (The NeverEnding Story)

• Sydney Pollack, Tootsie (Out of Africa)

• Steven Spielberg, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)

Next week, barring a flood: A bonus A Chorus Line podcast episode with past guests Billie Aken-Tyers and Sam French.

May 15: Chariots of Fire wins Best Picture, but Warren Beatty wins Best Director for Reds and follows it up with one of the most fascinating Oscar Chasers, Dick Tracy.

The Sheep Detectives (2026)

IN THEATERS
Director: Kyle Balda
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Nicholas Braun, Nicholas Galitzine, Molly Gordon, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart, Bella Ramsey, Brett Goldstein, Hong Chau, Emma Thompson

This past weekend, Knives Out got absolutely bodied by a bunch of CGI sheep and Hugh Jackman in Farmer Hoggett mode. I assumed this was just some ass kids’ movie (see: the above poster for: why) until I saw an actual trailer and got a whiff of Paddington vibes. It’s never as funny as those movies, but it belongs in the same conversation as a family movie that doesn’t condescend to its audience and comes by its sense of sweetness and charm honestly. Craig Mazin’s script, loosely based on a German detective novel called Three Bags Full about sheep solving the murder of their shepherd, is one of the best of the year - a tightly plotted mystery that also has a bunch of farm animals reckoning with their mortality. Me and the dad sitting next to me were crying about the Winter Lamb, and I’m not embarrassed to say.

Heat (1995)

FIRST-TIME WATCH
Director: Michael Mann
Starring: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Tom Sizemore, Diane Venora, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, Mykelti Williamson, Wes Studi, Ted Levine, Jon Voight, Val Kilmer

Somehow I’d never watched this before, and dear God can I not wait to watch it a million more times. The “De Niro and Pacino working together onscreen for the first time but they’re really only in two scenes together” element really can’t be understated. As their characters’ cat-and-mouse game plays out, the weight of their respective filmographies adds an almost unbearable level of magnetism until they’re finally sitting at a diner opposite each other. It’s a perfect deployment of movie stardom. The rest of the movie ain’t no slouch either - a tight-as-a-drum three hours spent following a crew of obsessive professionals around Mann’s atmospheric take on Los Angeles. The bank robbery exceeded the hype, and everything with Kilmer is so good. I understand why film bros haven’t been able to shut up about this for thirty years; it’s basically hypnotism for boys who like movies.

West Side Story (2021)

RE-WATCH
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Mike Faist, Brian D’Arcy James, Corey Stoll, Rita Moreno

I never tire of throwing this on, even if I don’t wind up watching the whole thing. The truth is that after Mike Faist leaves, it almost completely peters out; this has never been the emotional pummeling that the original is. It plays best as a directorial flex with some phenomenal debut performances, but it’s extremely good at that. Every Spielberg movie is a masterclass in blocking and camera movement, but the collaboration between him and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski feels absolutely electric here. There’s a shot with reflecting street lights in a puddle that still feels like a minor miracle.

Ella McCay (2025)

RE-WATCH
Director: James L. Brooks
Starring: Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Lowden, Kumail Nanjiani, Ayo Edebiri, Spike Fearn, Julie Kavner, Rebecca Hall, Albert Brooks, Woody Harrelson

“A psychic injury caused by emotional shock, the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed. An injury to the brain.”

Kyle is joined by filmmaker, actress, and James L. Brooks detective Isabel Pask to discuss Brooks’ ‘Terms of Endearment’ follow-up, the 1987 film ‘Broadcast News.’ Together, they dive into Polly Platt’s contributions to the Brooks oeuvre, theorize as to what madness could have brought him to Ella McCay, and (because Kyle didn’t get this out before the Oscars), their preferences in the Timmy v. Leo Best Actor race at this year’s Academy Awards.