oscars

Worst Best Picture: Is Anora Better or Worse Than Crash?

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. Posts will be relatively spoiler free, but there may be some details revealed. Today’s installment is the 2025 winner Anora. Is it better than Crash?

It has been a few years since something truly shocking won. I’d say the win for CODA win was shocking, and I still think they got that one wrong even if they picked a movie most people at least sorta liked. That seemed like the recipe for this year, which is why I expected Conclave until the awards for Anora started pouring in.

I saw Anora in theaters and thought it would win when I saw it. I thought it had a messy second act and wasn’t necessarily perfect, but it was the kind of movie that wins Best Picture nowadays and that lead performance from Mikey Madison was undeniable. I bumped it down several rungs as I saw other movies, but right in that moment, it seemed like a lock.

I think the best movie of the year was The Brutalist and it isn’t particularly close. I’ve heard a lot of people say that the second half drags too badly and it’s a widely shared opinion to the point where I have to give it some level of respect, but I was floored by it from start to finish. I think it’s a towering achievement and there’s no level of hyperbole that’s too grand. It’s not the best movie ever, or anything silly like that, but it’s one of the most beautiful and I was awestruck by it, for hours and hours. It is long, and that is probably what did it, but if you’ve been waiting to see it let me implore you to do so.

I loved most of this year’s crop. Last year was a generational year for the Oscars, but I think there were only two bad movies that got a lot of love this year: Wicked and Emilia Pérez. I mostly thought Wicked was bloated and boring rather than bad and you don’t need me to tell you about the other one. They went a combined 4 for 23 on the night. Conclave and A Complete Unknown, two fine movies that have some pacing and structural problems but are beautifully performed, went 1 for 16. The story of this year was that Anora won big and most other movies won an award or two or got blanked, hard.

That’s unusual for the Oscars and I attribute it mostly to a lack of an obvious frontrunner. Anora ended up in that spot, but I don’t think most people were predicting such a haul or for some of these others to fall so flat. It speaks to me of a trend that’s been happening in the Oscars over the last decade or so of a rising middle, where the 5th and 6th options for Best Picture are much better than the middle rankings for most years in the preceding decade. The real accomplishment will be when they stop nominating bad or middle-of-the-road stuff, but it’s a big step forward that most everything nominated most years now is an actual stamp of quality and not a reward for box ticking.

So, Anora, where to start? Demi Moore not winning Best Actress is a big surprise, but Mikey Madison is an absolute gem in Anora. Director Sean Baker said that we wouldn’t have Anora without her supporting role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but I know her mostly from her work as the oldest daughter on the Pamela Adlon show Better Things. Madison’s character there is constantly rebelling against her mom and is designed to be frustrating, but realistic, and it actually brings a lot of range and heart to a show that sometimes could be difficult to watch. You can see a lot of that in her Ani character in Anora.

Anora is the story of a woman finding and losing love, but that’s a reductive read on it. I don’t think any summary will do it justice and it’s a movie everyone should watch, even if I don’t think it’s perfect. Much like Emma Stone last year in Poor Things, it’s a movie that needs the central female lead to be impossibly perfect in every scene for the whole thing to hold together. Madison gives the movie a tone that it wouldn’t have without her, brutally reflecting the world rather than being morphed or crushed by it. She is in almost every frame and needs to be, as every element of this world only matters because of how she responds to it.

Anora winning for screenplay and actress makes much more sense to me than for the overall award. Once Ani realizes her relationship with a Russian rich tyrant child isn’t going to actually be something meaningful, the movie becomes a search for him that eats up about half of the second act. This feels long and repetitive and I don’t think there’s any argument for it being a mistake to do it this way. You do need to feel the length, because it taking so long reinforces to Ani and to the viewer that he’s not wandering, he’s trying to not be found. That’s crushing more than some act of rebellion and it ultimately informs Ani’s response, but we surely don’t need this level of tension popping to do that.

There will be a lot of discussion about the ending. I don’t want to spoil it, but I think anyone who reads that as insulting isn’t reading it the way I do. The entire movie is about someone pushing against this idea of society’s easy answers, which I think is part of what makes this such a refreshing movie. The ending continues that idea. Your walls may or may not come down, but you know what’s actually being offered and what isn’t, and that’s the sad truth of Ani’s character and something I love about how she handles every situation.

I think Anora is the movie for the moment, which is why, like CODA, I guess, in retrospect, of course it had to win. I think The Brutalist, Dune Part 2, and I’m Still Here are better choices, but rewarding a realistic, furious, insistent response to a world that will never give you what you want or are worth is a message that resounds. The modern Oscars are more afraid of being wrong than interested in being right, and that not leading them to Conclave is my surprising moment of the night, but one that I can get behind even if I liked Conclave well enough.

The Best Part: Ani seducing her way into a guy’s heart (sorta) is a joy to watch, but it has to be the fight scene. After he runs away when confronted with his father’s goons she’s left to fend for herself like a wild animal in a trap. It’s incredible and that scene could have been a whole movie.

The Worst Part: I said it earlier, but the search for her husband goes on so long. In the theater I felt the weight of it and I actively felt it diminishing my love for a movie that I was starting to truly get into. It feels so crazy, especially after the ending, that they didn’t trim that down.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? We escape again, one more year, as Anora is much, much better than Crash. This year was looking dicey for a little bit, as Emilia Pérez was in so many discussions this year being compared to Crash! It is a truly awful movie with bizarre choices and terrible performances and ridiculous songs and offensive politics, no matter what you believe, and seems almost designed in a lab to make people angry, but even that I don’t think is as cynical as our namesake disaster. I would have entertained a discussion for Hillbilly Elegy, but Emilia Pérez, as bad as it undeniably is, has some moments and is clumsily trying to make a more elegant point. It does not do so, but this is a year where none of the options could have dethroned the king. Anora doesn’t come close.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or leave a comment on this page.

Worst Best Picture: Is Oppenheimer Better or Worse Than Crash?

This was the best year for the Oscars in decades. Top to bottom, this year’s films were better than any year in recent memory and you have to go back a very long time to start to get into years where, for the most part, the movies are excellent and the good ones win. That shouldn’t be as remarkable as it is, but this is the state of play.

Everyone brings their own perspective to the Oscars and that inherently makes a contest where we reward specific art as better than other art a silly premise. If Barbie reinvigorated your love of cinema then you are going to be frustrated when it does not do well during awards season. If you didn’t see Killers of the Flower Moon or Oppenheimer, then you are going to roll your eyes when the super-serious, over-the-top dramatic seemingly typical fare is nominated for everything. It helps to remember that when engaging with the reactions to the months of awards and the fallout, pun not necessarily intended.

The best movie that came out this year was The Zone of Interest, and I will go so far as to say that I think, maybe, it is the best movie ever made, period. I’ve never seen anything like that in a theater and I have never had something stick with me the way that movie did. I don’t think a lot of people saw it, compared to most of the stuff this year, and I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that would win, anyway. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge it and to encourage you to see it. I realize that talk is cheap and hyperbole is the bread-and-butter of this series, but at least today, I don’t think you can make a list of great modern movies without starting with The Zone of Interest.

But the reason I say this year’s Oscars are so special is that the Best Picture list, with the notable and specific exception of Maestro, is one of the best ever assembled. Nine of the ten pictures are worth your time and that, frankly, is a miracle. Maestro is a miserable, frustrating experience that seemingly forgets instantly that it is intended to be a movie about music. It was widely panned, somewhat because of Bradley Cooper’s level of earnestness that people do not seem to respect or believe, but I am still glad to see it blank the evening with zero awards. Bradley Cooper has made great work and will make it again, but we should not reward people for Doing a Lot of Acting. The last decade of Oscars is full of embarrassing stuff that looks a lot like Maestro, so part of me was a little surprised to see it flame out.

But after that, you’re left with a long list of great films to see. Even Past Lives, which I found a little slight and a little ridiculous with undeveloped characters, is sweet and seems to have worked for most folks that saw it. Movies like Poor Things and Anatomy of a Fall would clean up even more than they did in other years. American Fiction and The Holdovers are remarkable films with incredible lead performances. Barbie was a phenomenon for a reason. Killers of the Flower Moon would win it all in some years. This is just a very hard year and that’s very good news.

So, now, we come to it. It’s been inevitable for weeks, which does tend to take some of the shine off the apple. Oppenheimer is a fantastic, epic film. It made a billion dollars and it convincingly showcased both an atomic bomb blast and the horrors of living with making the world a demonstrably worse place. Christopher Nolan has made a lot of movies I’ve liked (and some other ones) and the cast here is second-to-none. It was destined for this moment and it was so obvious that it wasn’t even really that upsetting when Al Pacino just sorta blurted out that it won at the end of an, honestly, pretty good Oscars ceremony. Everyone knew this was happening and then everyone accepted it with grace when it did.

I saw Oppenheimer in the theater and it seemed fine, but it took a second watch to make it really click all the tumblers into place in my head. Once you’re prepared for the pacing and you’re watching Cillian Murphy’s haunted performance for what it is, it feels less like the movie you expect it to be and more like the movie it is. This is, sure, the story of a man who made a bomb and lost his security clearance and all that, but it’s more primal than that. This is the story of living with the consequences of you getting what you want. This is the final shot of The Graduate, but with global stakes and years and years to see it coming and do nothing to stop it.

It’s also an extremely brave movie in several respects. On the one hand, it’s insane that the bomb itself goes off not as a climax, but as another event that drives on what we’re actually talking about. On another hand, it’s insane how often we see what would be unimportant, secondary motivational conversations in another movie but are the actual damn plot in this one. Nolan proves a point, again and again, that “save the world with the bomb” is not actually as motivating as the personal, real, experienced stakes are for these characters. A character jokes with Murphy that the world is hostile to their kind and he half-jokingly proposes an answer of “physicists?” It would be a bold joke to be visited once, but it’s the core of the movie. We’re fighting Hitler, not just because Hitler is bad, but because of something more core to who “we” are.

It’s going to strike a lot of people as a boring choice. It did hit me that way, at first, but I think it’s worth sitting with it if you feel that way. I think what Nolan has done here is remarkable primarily because the premise of this is not really that interesting, but the thing he’s delivered is a shocking version of that premise. When you look back over the best modern winners, you find movies like Spotlight. There’s nothing about Spotlight that inherently seems like it would be memorable, but I still remember the transformative element of watching the reporters get frustrated over the coverage and the reality that they were going to struggle to enact real change against a monolithic entity. The ability to tell the basic story makes it a good movie, but the fact that you feel that secondary thing happening makes it a great one.

Oppenheimer is not the best movie to ever win Best Picture, but it’s a real masterpiece that feels important and is important. It helps to watch movies like Maestro to understand why this particular magic trick is so hard. This is a movie where the main character goes out to a field to talk to literally Albert Einstein about literally math. This is not inherently going to be interesting, but the score spurs you on and the stakes feel tremendous without a lot of bullshit. Maestro is constantly telling you how important, how special, how meaningful all this is, but Oppenheimer trusts that you’ll sort that out on your own when you see it on the screen. Oppenheimer may not be an inspired choice for the award, but it’s a deserving one, and you have a handful of examples of what the bad version looks like, should you need them.

The Best Part: Cillian Murphy is incredible, splitting the difference between moody, too-smart asshole and worried, fearful nightmare. Best Actor has been a bit of a disaster for the last decade or so, with few exceptions, but this year it was so obvious and so excellent and especially in a rewatch you really notice how incredibly he sells the tonal shifts that make this movie work.

The Worst Part: I don’t think either of the women in Oppenheimer’s life get enough time to really shine. Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh are functionally barely in this movie. I don’t know that you really need to change anything and it’s already three hours long, but even on a rewatch it feels like so much is conveyed across a cast of fifty people and yet we really do not spend very much time at all with them.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Loads better. I’ve obviously slammed Maestro a lot here and I think it is a flawed movie, but even the worst stuff this year deserves some attention. Nyad is a weird experience because it is unwilling to confront the obvious lies in the real person’s story and May December did not work for me as a campy experience, but even those movies, messy as they are, are not worthy of the Crash comparison. This year’s Oscar crop is the best since 2007, I think, and that takes some of the fun out of this premise. I have faith, though. Next year, I bet we’ll see something truly horrid get nominated. I can’t wait.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

2023 in Review: Every Movie I Watched, Ranked

I have kept a “to watch” list for a decade now and I finished it in 2023. My goal for next year is to do less list making, which is a big challenge for me with the way my brain works. I watched 56 movies for the first time this year, which includes a few I had seen at a young age but didn’t really remember clearly. Maybe that’s cheating. I make the rules, here.

This year’s list includes a deep dive into the Sight and Sound list from 2022 of the greatest films ever made. Previously I’ve used lists like this as checklists, but I am really going to try to not do that next year. I want to watch what I want to watch. Some of that will be the acclaimed stuff and some won’t. We’ll see how that goes one year from today.

I am surprised at how few of these are new. Only five of these came out this year, but I liked all five of those. I am going to watch everything nominated for an Oscar as I typically do once they’re announced at the end of January, but otherwise I want to let the Criterion homepage guide me a little more than usual this year. I also aim to write more here, but we’ll see if that happens or not.

I hope you loved what you saw this year. Drop suggestions in the comments or just disagree with my takes. All are welcome.

As is tradition, let’s rank the new watches (also available as a list on Letterboxd, if you do such things or want to follow me there):

1	The Long Goodbye This is a crazy choice for my top spot, I know, but I would be lying if I picked anything else. An acclaimed director who has made masterpieces and bombs once said he sometimes makes movies and sometimes makes films. The Long Goodbye is a movie, not a film, and it is one of the best ones ever made. It’s a quintessential 70s film with Elliott Gould doing Elliott Gould stuff as an updated take on Philip Marlowe and it drips with style. This is among my favorite genres and I just cannot believe how hard this one hit me when I saw it. It’s not the accomplishment a lot of movies on this list are, but I truly did not enjoy any experience more than this in 2023.
2	News from Home Director Chantal Akerman is a legend but is more famous for another movie we’ll talk about a lot more later in this list. After seeing her masterpiece, I wanted to watch the other film she’d made that interested me and I think it is a tremendous amount more interesting. The premise of News from Home may not grab you, but resist that. It’s a series of shots of New York City paired with letters the director received from her mother in the early 70s, before she directed a movie a lot of people would contend is the greatest film ever made. The delivery method here is as incredible as the content itself, as you slowly get a picture of how these two relate and never see the other side of the conversation. This would seem pretentious or inessential in other hands, but I really was consumed by it as it ended. This won’t work for everyone, but if you think it might, you owe it to yourself to try this one.
3	A Man Escaped A masterpiece by one of the greatest directors of all time. A story of a jailbreak, but also of the power of pacing and how to show that locked-in feeling alongside the stolen moments it takes to do something methodically and not get caught.
4	Come and See I’d put this one off for more than ten years. It’s been called the most devastating and upsetting movie ever made. It’s been called the ultimate war movie to end all war movies. It is all that and more. I was horrified and upset and mesmerized. Pick a quiet moment and really engage with this one. It’s so violent and so dark but so worthy of your attention and your consideration.
5	The Banshees of Inisherin I don’t know if this will sparkle like this years later. The extreme display is very extreme and could seem silly if you didn’t truly care about the interpersonal conflict at the heart of this one. An obvious sister film with In Bruges given the cast, this is a totally different story with a lot of the same emotions. Male friendship gets a lot of play in discourse these days, both ironically and not, and I think this is a genuine way to talk about it even with a hyper-ridiculous consequence in the middle of it all.
6	Barbie I have very little to add to what has already been said. I couldn’t believe Barbie was what it was when I saw it. It deserves to be where it is on all the lists and it is a truly unique, surreal thing. I’ll be really interested to see what the Oscars do with it.
7	Asteroid City I think too much has been made of the style of Wes Anderson. It’s obviously the immediate takeaway, but that style is in service of something. Asteroid City is his best movie in years and I don’t really trust anyone’s opinion who writes it off as pretty meaninglessness. I saw few things that made me feel the way this made me feel this year.
8	Grand Illusion Jean Renoir is one of the most revered directors of all time, and I really did not get out of his other masterpiece what everyone else gets out of it. I was pleasantly surprised that La grande illusion had the opposite reaction. This is a war film about duty, station, and country, that’s also more complicated than a lot of the sweeping epics we still get nearly a century later. This is a great watch and doesn’t feel as weighty and plodding as some of the more complex class parables of the day.
9	Children of Men I put this off because people said it was heavy, but it’s on too many modern classics lists for me to avoid it. People are right, this is very upsetting and the ending is overwhelming. It’s great, but you know that, don’t you?
10	Black Girl There are terms like “world music” that inherently reinforce the centrality of our own, American experience in the way we view the world. Director Ousmane Sembène was asked if his films were understood in Europe and told the interviewer “Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts of Africa.” He said this in French and pointed out that he spoke their language, but they did not speak his. You can watch La noire de… in about an hour. I don’t know that there’s a better hour you could spend, if you truly are interested in broadening your horizons. I don’t pretend to have an awareness of African film, but this is a great place to start.
11	La notte I watched Antonioi’s trilogy for the first time this year and I liked La notte the best. This is the story of one day and night and the journey of all the years that lead people through one short experience that reflects so much more. I encourage any serious film fan to watch all three in order, but I got the most out of the middle one.
12	The Battle of Algiers A truly effective protest film and an impressive accomplishment in both scope and message.
13	Chungking Express After seeing other Wong Kar-wai films, I should not have been surprised at the twist of this one. Still, I was charmed and enthralled. This is a great one and one I’ll revisit.
14	L’avventura The first of the Antonioni trilogy is the most straightforward. A woman goes missing during an adventure. Two of the searchers have to determine what is too far to go to find her and is it okay to move on without her. Even beyond that, what does it mean to have moved on?
15	Eraserhead My slow march through David Lynch’s filmography continues. I was surprised to find that Eraserhead is even more inscrutable than I expected, even given the reputation. I love Twin Peaks a lot and always get something out of the director’s films, but there’s just so much in here that feels designed to not even really evoke an emotion. I loved the experience as a whole but the more I reflect on it the more pieces of it feel just disjointed and inexplicable. But the whole cannot be denied and is worth considering.
16	Daisies Daisies was not even on my radar before this year but I watched it on recommendation from the aforementioned list. It’s an insane, expressionistic journey where two women muck up the world around them and ponder their place in it. The ending here may strike some as heavy-handed, but I loved it and I felt like it drove home the point. Worth your time and quite a visual marvel.
17	Throne of Blood Even if you’ve seen a lot of versions of Macbeth, this one is a fantastic one. What a performance from a master, too.
18	Glass Onion I loved this a lot but I understand why some people didn’t. I was charmed by most of the performances and I really loved the mystery. I don’t really think you can ask for more than that here. I’d watch ten more of these.
19	La strada Deeply sad in the best way. An absolute gut-punch and a knockout set of central performances. An all-timer for a reason.
20	The Passion of Joan of Arc This is a lot of people’s pick for the greatest performance on film ever. Godard even had one of his characters go watch it and be moved by it as a centerpiece to one of his films. It holds up remarkably almost one hundred years later and it really is moving.
21	Cléo from 5 to 7 There are so many movies on the lists of great movies that detail the life of one woman in Paris in the 60s and 70s, but this may be the best of them. The story of one day’s wait for a vital test result is so much more.
22	The Boy and the Heron To be honest, this may be more style than substance. For a director who has given more to animation than almost anyone to ever live, that’s hardly a bad thing. Miyazaki’s latest (and last? maybe?) film is beautiful and shocking and surprising and, honestly, messy. It crams a lot of the story into the last 20 minutes and seems to have left a lot of people cold. There is deep emotion here and a lot to explore about grief, but I don’t think this will end up being one of the master’s best films. It is absolutely stunning to watch and is still a fabulous thing, it just doesn’t have the magic trick a lot of the best Studio Ghibli films do.
23	Contempt I liked a lot about this one from Godard, but I always find myself taking a second to remember which one this is. It’s similar to a lot of the other films about film from the time, but the central interpersonal problem here feels real and Brigitte Bardot is great in it.
24	Wanda There are a few movies that Criterion suggests all the time. This is one of them. I watched it totally cold and I recommend you do that, too. Barbara Loden made this largely as a one-woman army, directing, writing, and staring in it, and her character is so baffling but so relatable at the same time. There are a ton of movies like this, but few that embody this quality of a person forgotten by the world but still forced to engage with it.
25	Ikiru Ikiru is a classic and a top-ten movie on a lot of lists. I enjoyed it and I recommend it. Roger Ebert recommended rewatching it at different eras of your life and I can see the appeal. I have to say that this year was a strong one and I loved most of what I watched, so forgive a few masterpieces being down here in the 20s.
26	La dolce vita Similarly, forgive me, but it’s no insult to list it here. I obviously recommend you watch this if you haven’t, as it does a great job of going back and forth between agreeing with and mocking the protagonist. That’s a great trick that more movies about ennui could stand to steal.
27	A Woman is a Woman There’s a lot to love about this growing argument between Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo, two staples of the time that are great in everything, and I think parts of this jump off the screen and demand your attention. It wanders towards an ending that I don’t personally feel pays off the journey, but I did love the journey.
28	To Leslie I’m a huge Marc Maron fan and I think his performance here is great. The legacy of this movie is going to be the weird Oscar campaign, but it’s a really solid story about redemption and a small piece of the way we all take back our lives. I liked it a lot.
29	Hiroshima mon amour It’s too common to call movies “a vibe” but whew, this one is certainly that. Worth experiencing cold.
30	All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) I loved this when I saw it, but with a year to reflect it’s mostly in that first bit and some of the more shocking new scenes, like when an officer tears the names out of old uniforms to hand them to new recruits. We’re left to confront what we already know but is new to these people marching into a war often remembered in scale and scope beyond imagination at the time.
31	Shin Godzilla I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s just a really good watch.
32	Oppenheimer Probably the favorite for the Oscars this year, though time will tell. I think it has the same problem almost every Christopher Nolan movie has: pacing. It’s great, obviously, and the main performance is a standout, but I found it hard to love the back half as much as the front half. I think a lot of reductive criticisms are frustrated with the choice to hold the camera after the bomb itself, but rather than that I was just more frustrated with the drag you feel as the narrative dips and peaks over and over after that. I can’t imagine rewatching this, even though I think it’s a great film.
33	Nightmare Alley (1947) I loved the remake so much I figured I’d watch the original. It’s remarkably close, though I think the remake improves enough to make it a better film. This one’s great, though, and it’s a lot tighter.
34	Women Talking The message is important and the performances are strong, but there’s a real trend in the last few years of more great movies opting for this play-like design and it makes a film feel very structured and storyboarded to me. I appreciated this movie a lot more than I enjoyed the experience of watching it.
35	Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles This was Sight and Sound‘s new number one greatest movie ever made, so I finally blocked the time off and watched it. It is very divisive as a number one choice, but anything would be. It’s more interesting that it is divisive even as a classic. It inspires a lot of one-star reviews from viewers who want to see the greatest movie ever and are not ready to engage with an extremely long, extremely slow look at the daily life of a woman with just one slight difference from the average homemaker. The complaints about lengthy, wordless shots of a woman making meatloaf miss the point. That said, even as a movie designed to make you sit in the reality of those slow moments, it’s unbelievably slow and you need to be ready for what it means to engage with it. There’s a visible boom mic in the middle of an outdoor shot at one point, so standing this up as a perfect, unassailable film is a ridiculous endeavor. It all comes down to if you are moved by the climax (which you should be) and if you have the patience for the journey (which you might not). I think it’s hard to argue that making this the number one is a pretentious choice, but I’m glad I experienced it even if I didn’t always love it.
36	McCabe & Mrs. Miller I liked some elements of this but it was a little bit of a tough hang for me. I need to revisit this.
37	Amarcord Fellini at his most over-the-top. Fantastical and ridiculous on purpose. Parts of this are great, but whew boy, some of it is just too much for me.
38	Top Gun: Maverick I liked it fine. It’s exciting and a little forgettable.
39	Top Gun I hadn’t seen Top Gun since I was a kid and I did not remember it being like this. Parts of this are really wild to watch in 2023, but it really does still hit a few high notes.
40	The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart I loved The Venture Bros the show and the culminating movie does a good job tying up a lot of the story. Would be completely meaningless to anyone who hadn’t seen all of the show, so down a few rungs just because of the esoteric nature of something like this.
41	L’eclisse The third part of the Antonioni trilogy just didn’t work for me. The ending is supposed to be a masterstroke of arthouse cinema and I didn’t like it at all. I watched the last 20 minutes twice. Eventually I’ll revisit all three and maybe it’ll click then, but I think the first two are works of genius and the third one is a flicker at the end.
42	Andrei Rublev This three-hour, multi-chapter epic about faith and dedication really tried my patience. I loved Stalker and Solaris, but I had some trouble getting there with Andrei Tarkovsky’s more personal works (more on that later in the list). Some chapters of this really blew me away, especially the last one, but some parts of it felt difficult to sit through. I recommend it if you’re really interested in a faith journey but it really did feel very long to me at times.
43	Tokyo Story Every year there’s at least one undisputed masterpiece that doesn’t really click for me. I liked this movie a lot, but if I didn’t know the reputation I would never have guessed this is heralded as one of the absolute best movies ever. I wonder if I hadn’t known that if this would be higher or lower on my list? Probably higher, which makes me think I definitely should revisit it.
44	Imitation of Life Every old-timey story about race has some fascination to it for a modern audience and this is absolutely no exception. Some of this is remarkable, some of it is not.
45	Bug Watched as part of a series at my local arthouse theater where they’re showing every movie to ever get an F rating as part of CinemaScore’s audience rating card system. People were shocked and frustrated by the ending when they saw this and they were absolutely, real-deal right. The ending is a mess, though the overall feel and the strange devolution of this one is worth the runtime.
46	The Fabelmans The twinkly, not-at-all-realistic performances here are part of the point in how we remember our own past, but they’re super distracting and weird. Bonus points for David Lynch in a memorable cameo, but I could not get over how absolutely bizarre everyone is in this movie, even if that’s on purpose.
47	Elvis Austin Butler does a great job and Tom Hanks does a bad job. Way too long, but surprisingly better than expected, overall.
48	Gloria More weird than bad, but the child acting in this is, and I mean this, the worst I have ever seen in any movie.
49	TÁR The performance is strong, but the message here feels thudding and overwrought. I didn’t love it, but I have come around a little bit on it since my initial frustration.
50	Triangle of Sadness I love the first thirty minutes of this one and I think the last twenty or so is really strong, but the class consciousness message in the middle is so direct that it at times stops even being a narrative. There’s a lot here that’s funny and interesting but the connective tissue made me groan too often for me to not put this towards the bottom.
51	Avatar: The Way of Water Fine. Probably better than the first one, but also very much like the first one. Way, way too long.
52	Meshes of the Afternoon I don’t know what the right spot for this is. This is an all-time piece of short film but it didn’t have the desired impact on me. I try to watch a few short films every year and I did not really love this one. I know that’s probably on me, but it didn’t move me the way it moves other people.
53	Mirror Views on Mirror vary wildly, with people saying it’s either Tarkovsky’s greatest work or nonsense. I fall in that second camp. I will definitely revisit this because of my love for some of his work, but I found this to be impenetrable. I didn’t even hate it so much as resisted it. It happened, in front of me, and I continuously tried to consume it and was unable. It is easy to see a movie like that and say there is nothing to get (as I feel sometimes about true arthouse stuff like Last Year at Marienbad) but I know that can’t be true here, right? It demands another attempt.
54	The Whale I don’t really have anything to add to the discourse. It’s just overwrought, by a lot, and it just builds and builds until a truly insane, unearned ending that is shockingly weird. There are some interesting elements, but no, no dice.
55	Rudy I saw this as a kid and watched it one night this year when my wife wanted to watch it. It’s really bad. The message is a bad one and the delivery is even more twinkly than I remembered.
56	Blonde An easy choice for the last spot. Blonde is a deep insult to viewers and the reviews reflect that with near-universal disdain. That this earned an Oscar nomination is an indictment of the process and anyone’s appreciation of this film is an undeniable strike against them. Whenever I hate something this much I try to think about why that is, but here there are so many reasons it is difficult to engage with the contrary opinion seriously. It’s fully abusive, edging up to the point of torture porn as a piece of art, and is polemical in a shocking, distracting, unnecessary way. I have not seen many movies in my life as disposable and repugnant as this.

Worst Best Picture: Is Everything Everywhere All at Once Better or Worse Than Crash?

The discourse around the Oscars hasn’t changed all that much in my lifetime and it doesn’t look to change all that much. The problem, as I see it, is the Oscars only matter if they are relevant to the average viewer and they only stay relevant if they are both an indicator of greatness and a reward for it. That means you need to have some level of trust in their consensus but also you need to think their nominator process is a barometer in the first place.

The folks behind this whole thing showed their cards recently with a play at making a category for movies people actually watch, which is an old-school criticism tied in with the whole “Oscar bait” discussion. They walked that back because that’s a dumb idea and it makes them look dumb, but it does speak to a world where all ten of the top ten grossing films of 2022 in America were superhero movies, sequels, or both.

A24, the production company behind Everything Everywhere All at Once released exactly one movie, that one, in the top 50 grossing films of last year. That puts them one behind Crunchyroll, the anime streaming service. The world has changed. None of this matters. It still is part of the larger Oscar conversation, but it muddies the waters enough that the Oscars cannot seem to figure out what they want to be or for whom they want to put on a broadcast.

This year’s broadcast was, compared to the last decade or so, smoother, and, I think, better than it usually is. Almost everything you’d expect to happen more or less happened. The surprises were minimal and, in retrospect, make sense. All Quiet on the Western Front won a bunch of (deserved) technical or smaller awards. Brendan Fraser and the team behind his makeup won for The Whale. Other than that, Everything Everywhere All at Once essentially won everything majorly significant it could and people more or less seemed to both see that coming and accept it.

The point of this series was originally to drag Crash, which is a movie I have always found frustrating, but also to try to find a better understanding of what the Oscars do for us as a film audience. There are movies nominated every year that I would not otherwise see that I see only because of this process. I have that to thank for some surprising experiences this year, like the very weird Elvis biopic that I mostly liked and the atrocious, vile Blonde which I think was far and away the worst movie of the year and a low point for this entire endeavor.

I think this is the function of the Oscars in 2023. Your life probably looks pretty different than it did five years ago, when you might have gone to see more movies out in the world and taken some chances on different fare. Maybe I’m projecting, but that was true for me, and now I’m not as likely to turn on The Fablemans on a Tuesday. I appreciate the nomination process as a shortlisting of things to maybe try, if nothing else.

I think this year they got it right, too. My personal favorite movie nominated was The Banshees of Inisherin, but that’s not the kind of movie that wins this award. With the power of hindsight the last decade or so looks a little shaky, but there are also some all-time greats among Best Picture winners. How will we remember this one?

Everything Everywhere All at Once was such a sweep and so consistently a frontrunner that I don’t know how much I need to say here. Everyone said to see it cold and they were right, so I may take the lazy path here and tell you that’s the right recommendation. I think the odds of you reading this but not knowing more about it are slim, but if that’s you, just go watch it.

I’ll focus more on the place it occupies in film than the plot. Essentially everyone I know who saw it loved it and the critical consensus is near absolute. The New Yorker called it cynical, which in the context of their review makes sense but is akin to calling water dry. It’s a movie about optimism, or at least finding a way to cope with the inherent difficulties and failings around us. It’s a movie about a lot more things than I have space to talk about, which is part of why so many people loved it. It feels like it can be all things to all people, which gives it a sense that it’s talking to you no matter what you need to hear it say. That universality and that blank-slate quality of the main cast as they switch back and forth across multiple universes and different versions of themselves is what that single reviewer found alienating. In the larger world, it’s what people have grabbed onto and it’s how a really weird, specific movie feels like a slam dunk for a such a usually traditional award.

We’re only a few years removed from the fish monster love story movie winning, but it helps to remember that the Oscars have been very safe for most of their history. There are surprises, even going way back, but usually it’s a movie for everyone. Arguably, the real success of Everything Everywhere All at Once is that still being true and reflecting the world we actually live in even with visuals and experiences that are impossible and fantastical.

Will this seem weird ten years from now? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. The Oscars are at their best when they reflect the times accurately and it would be impossible to imagine anything else winning this year. I can’t even come up with what the contender would be, though I’m not saying this won by default. It deserves to be “the movie” of 2022, which is what the Oscars should be doing. Sometimes that’ll mean it’s a big deal to people who don’t care about the Oscars, but sometimes it doesn’t. Nomadland was the right choice two years ago, but did anyone ever mention it after that? I think we’re in for a different experience with this one.

The Best Part: The boldness of the whole thing is an easy choice here, as is the cast. This is the first movie in decades to win three of the four big acting awards in the same year. Everyone in it, down to the minor characters, is notably great. Couldn’t pick just one.

The Worst Part: I have not found that anyone shares my feelings on this, but some of the more extreme elements of slapstick fell flat for me. I think it says more about me than the movie, though, as that’s what a lot of people loved the most.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It’s better, by a huge margin. I legitimately am not sure if Blonde is, and honestly it probably is worse, if I’m on the spot. Nothing nominated for the big award comes close this year, but it’s comforting, in a way, to see the Academy still does love to nominate something that flat out sucks every single year. Refreshing to see that even as they want to build a big tent, they stick with their roots.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

2022 in Review: Every Movie I Watched, Ranked

Over the last near-decade, this site has been a place for me to talk about movies as I watch “the canon,” whatever that means, and 2022 was the first time since I started doing this that we got a release of the Sight and Sound list of director and critic top films of the decade. I’ve seen most of the list and I’ll try to see the rest in 2023. We’ll go over the relevant ones here, probably.

Last year I said I’d write a lot more in 2022 and I didn’t. Let’s try again. What more can you do? The only post here in 2022 was my annual review of the Best Picture winner, which this year was Coda. I thought it was fine. It’s probably in the middle of the pack, which hits strangely because the majority of recent choices were so strong. This year, who knows? We’ll review it when it happens, in addition to probably some other Oscar stuff when we get closer to it.

I saw 48 movies for the first time this year (some are new, some are just new to me). I didn’t write about most of these, so this is as much as I have to say, for now. Some of these will make the Oscar nominations, so we’ll revisit some then, as well as some of them in the context of the Sight and Sound list. For now, some brief thoughts.

As is tradition, here they are, ranked:

1	The Worst Person in the World This movie lost the two Oscars it was nominated for to Drive My Car and Belfast and I think, for my money, it’s significantly better than both of them. I also think that’s not going to be most people’s experience and I don’t think it’s really fair, but it is what I feel. When I walked out of Lady Bird five years ago I felt the same way I did after The Worst Person in the World. This is a story that’s not about my experience and a character whose background doesn’t look all that much like my background, but there are human, undeniable elements that I’ve never seen told this way. I don’t know if everyone who sees it will love it or identify with it or admire it or anything else you need to do in order to rank a movie like this as the best film of the year, but there’s nothing on this list I loved more.
2	Everything Everywhere All at Once This will be most people’s top film of the year and I think it deserves it. I don’t have anything to add that you don’t already know. It’s great, but statistically, you already know that. Not all of the slapstick worked for me, but the structure and the tone really make that a minor complaint, and a personal one. What will be interesting is to see if it makes waves at the Oscars. I couldn’t tell you, but I’ll be curious to see if the hype can carry a strange film through our most resistant-to-strange critics. That said, a few years ago they gave Best Picture to a movie about a fish monster love story, so who knows?
3	Decision to Leave I saw this with three people who disliked it. I don’t think “divisive” is the right word, but more “alienating.” There’s not a lot happening in Decision to Leave and the motivations of the characters, specifically, can be frustrating. People don’t act like this in real life, but they also aren’t homicide detectives, usually, so their personal stakes are lower. I think what I love about Decision to Leave is it shows the people around the two central characters and how they frustrated, lost, left to their own conclusions, about two people who become fixated on what they see as how the world works. What’s on the screen in Decision to Leave might be too sparse to be a truly great film for everyone, but I took away something I really liked.
4	Nightmare Alley I struggle to explain why I liked Nightmare Alley so much. It lost all four Oscars it was nominated for, flopped at the box office, and seems to be mostly forgotten already, but I thought it was such a fantastic noir. Maybe I’m a sucker for the genre, but even once you see the ending coming, the knot it leaves in your stomach feels so well-earned. It’s too long, but it feels like that could be said about a lot of movies, and it’s not for everybody, but that definitely feels like it could be said for everything now. If you want something haunting with some strong performances, this is it.
5	The Asphalt Jungle Sterling Hayden is my favorite actor and John Huston is one of my favorite directors, but I’d somehow never seen the classic The Asphalt Jungle until this summer. It’s just a perfect film about a heist gone wrong. There are a half-dozen of these on the list of top films, depending on your list, but this is one of the best and it works just as well today.
6	The Wonder I would rank The Wonder in the top half of my list regardless, but it makes my top ten because of a device I don’t really want to spoil. It’s the story of a religious “wonder” who doesn’t need to eat because of faith and a community that wants to believe versus a world that wants to debunk. The story is worth your time, but it turns over in my head because of a structural choice that I want to leave undescribed. You can’t miss it. Why tell your story that way? And do you believe the simple answer, or is that something more?
7	Drive My Car Drive My Car starts with an incredible opening hour that, over time, becomes a satisfying, but less interesting, conclusion. I loved it, obviously, but I can’t immediately think of another movie with an arc like that. It’s worth seeing and I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise, but it’s really, really fascinating, it’s just slow.
8	Do the Right Thing This is too low on this list for a timeless masterpiece, but that’s why this isn’t an objective list. There are probably only one or two movies on this list that rival this for “importance” and if you see one thing here you haven’t seen, it ought to be this one. I don’t know why I’d never sat down to watch the whole thing and I’m glad I took a Tuesday night and just did it.
9	The Thin Man The origin of the Nick and Nora that give their names to the famous cocktail glasses, The Thin Man is a screwball detective story that’s still funny almost a century after release. I really encourage people to check this out, as it’s breezy and funny and silly and it will really surprise you.
10	Sweet Smell of Success This is one of those movies that’s on every list of essential films and I’d always thought I’d seen it, but I hadn’t. It’s a story about the press and celebrity, but it’s mostly a masterclass in dialogue. It’s snappy and funny but it doesn’t require the caveat a lot of pre-60s “snappy” films do in that you’ll follow it with today’s sensibilities. This is the quintessential version of the form for “biting” dialogue and Burt Lancaster gives an unforgettable performance.
11	Blue Velvet I love Twin Peaks more than I love David Lynch’s film work, so I drug my feet on watching Blue Velvet. I’m sorry I did, because I think it’s really something, as dumb as that is to say in 2022 about one of the best-loved “horror-adjacent” films of our time. Why are people like this, you’ll be forced to ask, but more than that, what could possibly happen next?
12	The Power of the Dog It’s a shame that most of the discussion of The Power of the Dog is wrapped up in a dumb culture war discussion, because I think there’s a more interesting discussion to be had about it. It’s another tortured, understandable, but frustrating protagonist who offers us a glimpse into darkness. There’s something to be learned from why we seek stories like that.
13	The Northman Speaking of the above, The Northman is a similar story with a shocking twist. The visuals and the brutality of The Northman will get all the play, but that twist is worth admission twice over. See it, if you can handle the blood, and see it cold.
14	The French Dispatch Your interest in and your patience for Wes Anderson will determine how much you like this. I think that’s overstated, usually, as most of them have a more universal appeal than the style suggests, but this one is definitely extreme. I liked it and I recommend it, but it will try your patience if you struggle with Anderson’s whole deal in the slightest.
15	Putney Swope I was inspired to watch Putney Swope by the comparisons to one of the final episodes of Atlanta that aired this year and to the excellent Sorry to Bother You. It’s obviously inspirational to both, but it’s also fascinating to watch it for what it was at the time. It’s breezy — honestly, a little exhausting to watch, it clips along so quickly — and it’s worth your time, especially if you don’t know what it is.
16	Moana I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it yet. It’s cute! I know! Get off my back!
17	Belfast I liked Belfast, charming, wistful, brutal, hard, and all. I found I didn’t have anything else to say about it, immediately as it ended, but I think it nails what it aims to do, which is a huge accomplishment for any movie.
18	Blade Runner 2049 I love Blade Runner, the original, but I have learned over time that it’s less important to me than it is to other people who like movies I like. I really, truly love it, but I don’t find myself coming back to it or obsessing over the universe. I think that leaves the door open for me to enjoy this sequel more than the average person. It’s flawed and I think someone hating it has room to do so, obviously, but I enjoyed it for what it is.
19	La Jetée La Jetée is twenty-eight minutes long. Go watch it. Don’t read a thing about it. I think this is realistically too low and in the future, this will only go higher on my list. I can’t stop thinking about it.
20	The Bob’s Burgers Movie Bob’s Burgers is the only non-serialized show that I still watch on regular television. I love the world and I thought this movie did a good job with it. There’s really not much more to say than that.
21	Bullet Train I struggle sometimes with movies like Bullet Train. I saw Logan Lucky a few years ago and genuinely felt like it might have been the best movie of the year. It’s obviously not, with shaggy elements that take away from the heist, but it made me feel the same way Bullet Train did. The parts that work end up working so well that it hides all the mess. I realize this isn’t a very good movie, really, but it’s an effective one, which is important for a genre flick.
22	West Side Story I don’t know that we needed a remake of West Side Story, but it’s a fine one.
23	The Tragedy of Macbeth I didn’t intend for this to be the middle point or so, but it feels right. There’s enough here that it’s an interesting version that feels classic and modern at the same time, but I can’t imagine ever watching this again or wanting anything else out of it.
24	Alphaville There is much to be learned from Godard’s sci-fi-nightmare-world of Alphaville and it’s a classic piece of the genre’s history, but at times it feels more like a piece of history than a film to watch today. I suggest everyone see it, but it falls into a category with films like Playtime to me, where the lessons of the originals have been somewhat usurped by the generations that came after it if you see them first.
25	A Woman Under the Influence Fans almost always list A Woman Under the Influence as the best Cassavetes film, but I don’t think so. I think it shows the worst of the director (overlong scenes that accomplish the same thing again and again, improvised-or-hopefully-improvised inane small talk) as well as the best (two central performances that drive the whole thing, strange-but-memorable side characters). Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands are excellent, but this is so, so long, and critics at the time thought it was a lot. Over time the tone on Cassavetes has settled on “genius” and I do think his films are worth a watch, you will feel the weight of the cruft that people tend to explain away.
26	The Rules of the Game This is frequently listed as one of the best, if not the best, movies of all time. That urges one to put a movie very high on a personal list, but at the risk of sounding dim, I found it a little slow for a modern audience. You have to step outside of your current world and you have to view a movie like this for what it was when it came out, but realistically it’s a much more interesting movie to study and to learn from than it is to watch.
27	Coda This is the only one I wrote about at length this year, which you can read above. As I’ve said before, and with some distance now, it’s a fine film. It still feels “safe” to me, which is not really a fair criticism, and you could do significantly worse.
28	See How They Run A forgettable, but funny, little mystery we watched on a whim one weeknight. It’s fun, but you don’t need to see it.
29	Ali Ali came out the same year as Training Day, so Will Smith was never going to win his Oscar for this one, but it’s also interesting to see the choices made around Smith’s performance. Roger Ebert said this film lacks what made the real Ali so fascinating and maybe that’s true. Ultimately I think there’s too little of the best parts of Smith’s performance here, but it’s not a bad biopic.
30	Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai I’ve always wanted to see this one because the premise is so weird. At the end of the day, too many people have to say “Ghost Dog” with sincerity for it to not feel a little silly and most of the supporting performances are distractingly bad. There’s an incredible character and performance at the center, however.
31	Hour of the Wolf A lot of the reviews of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf sum up how I feel about it: difficult, stark, and a regression. It’s very scary and very weird, but I don’t think it accomplishes in me what it sets out to, which may be a personal problem, but doesn’t seem to be based on the response.
32	Parallel Mothers I can’t really justify putting this as low as I have. It’s a fine film. I need to see more Almodóvar films.
33	Licorice Pizza I don’t think Licorice Pizza ever accomplishes getting you to forget the premise and it needs to in order to feel charming. I liked parts of it but it just feels very weird all the way through.
34	L’Atalante I know it’s a classic and it’s a sin to put this below many of the movies above it, but you don’t get points for influence on this list. It’s a fine watch in 2022.
35	Night on Earth The thing about a movie that’s made up of vignettes is you have to like all of them. The Helsinki segment of Night on Earth was one of my favorite things I saw this year and the Rome one was one of my least favorite. The average here isn’t as high as the high points, which leaves the film feeling uneven to me.
36	tick…tick…BOOM! I liked a lot about this one, especially Andrew Garfield’s performance, but I found a lot of this really exhausting to watch.
37	The Eyes of Tammy Faye Most people seem to be on the same page about The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and I agree that the central performance is interesting and the movie is not.
38	Being the Ricardos Some of the absolute worst Aaron Sorkin moments you’ll ever see are in Being the Ricardos, including a number of scenes where characters talk to each other in ways people do not talk to each other, again. I think I have a higher tolerance for this than most people but even I was just overwhelmed by this one. I think the performances are fine, and J.K. Simmons is incredible, even for him, but it’s just not enough to make this one worth overcoming the frustrating script.
39	King Richard It is not worth going into again, but the choice to tell this larger story about this character was always going to be a hard hurdle to clear, and I don’t think this movie clears it.
40	Spencer There’s a scene in the middle of Spencer where two characters explain themselves to each other and I found it exhausting and on-the-nose. I love the visuals and the weird, Rebecca-esque haunted nature of Spencer, but I don’t think it makes good use of screen time.
41	The Dead John Huston’s last movie views largely as a filmed play about a holiday dinner party on a snowy night. The shocking reveal and final moments are the emotional core of the story and I have to say they don’t hit me as hard as they seem to hit other viewers. I think there’s a lot of little set pieces here I liked, but I walked away a little unsatisfied.
42	Faces I have watched almost all of Cassavetes’ films for this website at this point and I think Faces is the true test of if you like his work or not. I loved a few scenes but struggled during moments like a lengthy song where Seymour Cassel sings various lines about meat. A lot of Faces reminded me of Husbands, which also feels indulgent and long, but I’d compare this more directly to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There’s a key difference, but they’re both stories about strife in the home and where it leads on a single night.
43	Sans Soleil Sans Soleil is frequently cited as one of the best films of all time. I found it tremendously boring and repetitive and I cannot come up with something nice to say. I’ll have to see it again, given the legacy, but I bounced off this almost entirely.
44	The Matrix: Resurrection A bold choice up top that never really pays off. If the point is that making more Matrix movies for an audience that wants a very specific Matrix movie is a fool’s errand, what’s the possible justification for the second half? Even if it’s a joke within a joke, which I choose to think it is, watching that joke is not worth your time.
45	Shadows Cassavetes’ first film is only for the truly devoted. There’s an interesting story about race, but it’s a tough watch compared to his later works.
46	Don’t Look Up A lot of people really hated Don’t Look Up. It feels like a continuation of Vice to me, where there’s a political message that is muddied by some intense “choices” and some sanctimony that makes it hard to take the thing seriously as a work of art.
47	The Lost Daughter I struggle to explain why I rank this so low. I found it so joyless, so odious, so negative, but I also understand those aren’t really criticisms of the movie. It’s a bit like saying you don’t like all the war in Saving Private Ryan. I think it requires a second watch at some point because I feel like I’m grasping at straws somewhat, but I just was so defeated by my first viewing that I cannot recommend anyone spend time with this.
48	Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence of Utena I’m mostly a lapsed anime fan from my teenage years. There are a few “foundational” shows from my youth that I always meant to make time for and this year that was Utena, a groundbreaking work and a beautiful, complex story about growing up and sexuality. The movie is a bizarre disaster, nearly unwatchable and unfollowable. The show is a sprawling story with a million things to unpack and explore, but the movie is just so supremely strange and divorced from what makes the show worth your time that I have to put it dead last. There are people who feel it’s essential, but it left a sour taste with me after a show I really got a lot out of.

Worst Best Picture: Is CODA Better or Worse Than Crash?

I assumed this would be about The Power of the Dog, so much so that it’s been what I’ve been thinking about for the last few weeks as I watched the final nominated films I hadn’t seen yet. Every year I try to watch everything nominated for the big awards just for the heck of it, but also to be sure that no matter how big a surprise the winner is I can be ready to compare it to Crash. As we do each year, once.

I’ve been updating this list yearly since 2014, when I watched all 86 existing Best Picture winners in the same year. CODA is not the biggest surprise, but I do want to note for posterity that The Power of the Dog really seemed like the choice. Before we talk about all that, let’s talk about the Oscars themselves.

Will Smith and Chris Rock will, rightfully, I guess, dominate the discussion of the ceremony, but it’s worth noting how weird and slow this year’s event was before the one moment everyone will remember. Only three movies won more than one award all night, and even those were under unique circumstances. Dune won six technical awards, The Eyes of Tammy Faye won for makeup in addition to Jessica Chastain, and CODA took home a screenplay award in addition to the supporting award for Troy Kotsur and the big prize. There wasn’t much of a theme to the evening, beyond the Academy’s desperate, awkward attempts to get people to like them with audience polls that allowed them to show clips from movies they have absolutely no interest in discussing otherwise. This does not bode well, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Of the ten movies nominated for Best Picture this year, only three made money in theaters: Belfast (on a relatively small budget and thanks to the subject matter), Drive My Car (thanks to the smallest budget of anything nominated), and Dune. There’s really no comparing everything else to Dune, which cost as much as the cheapest five of them but made twice as much as everything else combined. There’s also no real use for metrics like this in 2022, but I mention it because it’s one of the few comparison points we have left. Critical scores are equally challenging, for similar reasons. Audiences universally loved King Richard and West Side Story, but they were mostly seen on streaming services. Almost everything lost money this year, but that’s just the way of all things, now.

I mention all this because it brings us to the state of the Oscars in 2022. The criticism has always been that “Oscar movies” aren’t what people really go see and they aren’t really representative of film in general. The discussions of superhero movies and streaming replacing theaters got extra complicated in a world where people didn’t go outside for months, and now the Oscars are left with the same old criticisms, but even more complicated reasoning behind them. I don’t know what this whole thing looks like in ten years, but it certainly does not not look promising.

I think the best movie of the year was The Worst Person in the World, which was nominated for two awards and lost both. It’s depressing and difficult, but it stuck with me and it will be what I remember from this year. I liked The Power of the Dog and expected it to win and I thought Drive My Car and even Nightmare Alley were great. I thought all ten performances in the lead acting categories were great, even if I didn’t like the movies universally. But as I look over the list of eighteen movies that got nominations in the categories for screenplay, acting, directing, and the main one, I feel like the story of this year is a much lower ceiling, though a much higher floor, than most years.

The problems with Don’t Look Up are well documented elsewhere and outside of the lead performances, I didn’t really like The Lost Daughter, Spencer, King Richard, or, and maybe especially, Being the Ricardos. But even those films have charms or magic to them, in their way, and they deserve your time. There’s nothing truly, solely bad nominated this year, which sounds like a low bar, but is one the Academy does not always clear. But on the other hand, I think only a few films at the top of the list are really essential. West Side Story is fine. Most of these are fine.

That’s the year that CODA should win Best Picture. There’s nothing on the list that demands your vote, so you, as a voter, end up thinking about how everything made you feel. CODA is sweet, which helps, and it’s a story you probably haven’t heard before. It’s the story of a Child Of Deaf Adults, or CODA, named Ruby, whose parents and brother work full-time fishing and selling what they catch. Ruby loves her family but she wants to be more than their interpreter. She wants them to be independent, but also to live as a unit. She wants to fit in, but also to find something unique that’s hers. It’s a relatable story hidden within something totally new.

Troy Kotsur won an Oscar for playing Ruby’s father and Marlee Matlin, certainly the most famous deaf actor I can name, is great as Ruby’s mother. The couple drives more of the film than Ruby does, honestly, as we see them as full human portrayals of a married couple and a working couple, rather than just as characters to show us how the deaf community engages with the world. Ruby’s brother is also deaf, but the scenes where he goes to a bar and tries to fit in but also be himself feel more like what you expect to happen in a movie like this. CODA is most effective when it’s surprising, including a loud off-screen sex scene that embarrasses Ruby and becomes an even more ridiculous discussion in front of her friend from school.

Ruby wants to learn to sing. There’s really no way to say this without being a little mean, but this is really all done poorly. Her mother asks her if she only wants to sing because her family is deaf. Her choir director tells Ruby she needs to be dedicated and decide between her family and her art. She is too shy to sing but wants to do it, just to show the world her voice. Almost all of this is said, explicitly, and sometimes more than once. Several reviews of CODA make reference to the fact that there are two separate culminating concert moments. You constantly feel as a viewer that you’ve seen this story before, which gets away from what makes CODA an interesting choice and a unique story.

Audiences and critics largely loved CODA, but it’s hard to get away from the parts that feel like a TV movie. The sum of the parts is worth it and it’s not a bad choice, given how much there is to love about the performances and the view it grants to a world unfamiliar to a lot of us, but I feel like this one will not age well. There are so many moments that are in so many movies you’ve seen, down to the moment the teens realize they are ready for adult life as they jump off a rock into water, that it feels weird to give this the award they gave The Godfather. I think some risks would have made this a way better movie, but not one as many people would have liked. Overall I think it’s a net positive to hear this story and to elevate it, even though I think I’d like to see the same thing with a little bit fewer stock story beats. They probably did the right thing here, which reflects more about the direction the Academy is headed than any number of viewer polls ever could.

The Best Part: The performances here are excellent. Matlin and Kotsur will get all the attention and probably should, but no one is bad in this. The choir teacher has a really thankless part here, just exactly what this role would be in a Hallmark movie, but Eugenio Derbez does a great job with it.

The Worst Part: I really, really do not like how much this feels like a quickly turned-out holiday classic movie, like a Netflix original or a Hallmark film. That’s overstated and it’s not that bad, but something about the cheery, plucky vibe of the whole thing just really lives in that space for me.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? The family feels real. The performances feel genuine. This should feel even better to me than it does, but I have trouble getting there. I think this is a middle-of-the-pack film in the available choices this year and I think it’s probably in the bottom half of the full list of winners. That said, it’s miles better than Crash, as was everything nominated this year. Part of me was rooting for Don’t Look Up (only for this post), because at least that comparison is interesting, but I’m glad that CODA won. I think most people liked it more than me and it’s generally a fun watch. And above all else, there’s something really cool about seeing a story that’s genuinely, real-deal new, even if the beats of the hero’s journey there could use a little bit of polishing.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

2021 in Review: Every Movie I Watched, Ranked

Welcome to my review of 2021, where I have ranked all 53 movies I watched for the first time this year. This excludes about two dozen movies I rewatched, which feels like cheating, in some way. The Third Man is still my favorite movie of all time and I watched Kiki’s Delivery Service twice this year. Both are great, but I’ve seen them lots of times. This is about movies, new and old, that I experienced for the very first time in 2021.

For those I wrote about as part of my series where I look for the Best Movie of All Time or, in the case of Nomadland, as part of my series about comparing every single Best Picture Oscar winner to Crash, I have linked to the corresponding post. For all of them I have provided some reasoning for their placement.

1	Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time The conclusion to Neon Genesis Evangelion has been in production for so long that it felt like the end would never actually happen. The fact that the critical and fan response was almost universally positive to the final piece of a revered cornerstone of a strange subculture is a marvel in itself, especially when you consider how often the reverse happens. It’s become expected that the ending to anything will disappoint, to the degree that even if this was just okay, that might be enough. It’s far better than okay, though I couldn’t recommend it to anyone that doesn’t already know what I’m talking about. If you’ve ever been even mildly curious as to what Evangelion is, this final part of a four-part film remake of the original show is absolutely worth your time. If not, this is too weird for me to suggest you start here. That said, I could not have dared to believe the ending would deliver the way this one does. I’ve come back to it four times this year and I find something new every time. When placed against “normal” cinema, it’s hard to say what to make of this, but as a singular thing it is almost remarkable beyond description.
2	Persona Still sticks with me. One of the greatest movies ever made. I also can’t imagine enduring it again right now, for what that’s worth. Whew.
3	Stalker This one’s grown on me. I loved it, obviously, but I like it even more when I think about it offhandedly. I really recommend this one but I also get that it may not be for everyone.
4	In the Mood for Love The sequel is much, much lower on this list.
5	Dune One of the only new movies I saw this year, somehow. Excellent, though it really will depend ultimately on how part two works out.
6	Weathering With You I need to watch this again. It’s forever tied to Your Name, one of the single most successful animated movies of all time, and I think that comparison puts it in weird space. I watched Your Name again this year and it’s certainly a better movie, and an all-time film, but I love the charm of this one.
7	Nomadland Still agree this was the right call for Best Picture and it’s rare that the feeling persists through the year.
8	Starship Troopers Almost hard to watch this during the Trump years and what’s come after, but worth the experience. Do you want to know more?
9	Mystery Train I want to watch more Jim Jarmusch films in 2022. What’s your favorite?
10	Another Round It’s rare that you just know you’ll never watch a movie again and still love it. The experience of this one is too trying to revisit it, but one time through I think it’s really worth anyone’s time.
11	Le Samourai I recommended this one to a few people and I watched it twice this year, which is not common for me. Maybe the most approachable movie on this list, which feels weird to say but may be true.
12	The Father Will forever be remembered for the dumb Oscars ceremony this year, but should be remembered for a haunting performance by Anthony Hopkins.
13	Solaris (1972) I prefer Stalker, by the same director with similar themes, but the ending here will knock you out.
14	Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets I never hear anyone talking about this one, but the experience of being in a weird bar with weird people, especially as we spend time at home and lose this sort of strange experience, feels very novel now.
15	Dick Johnson is Dead I don’t agree with some of the approach of this movie but I love what they made. You don’t have to 100% love everything about a movie to respect it and to marvel at it.
16	Sound of Metal I read Drew Magary’s book about having a traumatic brain injury this month and it made me appreciate this movie even more. Highly recommend both.
17	No Sudden Move I watched this again on a whim. Loved it even more the second time. There’s not really all that much to it, it’s just a great watch. Matt Damon’s performance here deserves more love, too.
18	Uncut Gems I could never watch this again, but what an experience to do once.
19	Johnny Guitar I do love Sterling Hayden, but this is already fading from my memory. That first 30 minutes is great, though.
20	First Cow Feels even more slight now than it did when I finished it. The perfect example of a fine film but not one that’s going to set anyone on fire. I think that’s fine, though, right?
21	Opening Night I watched several interviews about the ending to this one. I really recommend it just to see where it goes.
22	Minari I’m really glad Youn Yuh-jung won the Oscar for this one. It would have been a tough year for it to win anything beyond that, but that’s still something.
23	Bande à part I don’t even know if I recommend this one, but this feels like the right spot on the list. This isn’t the actual middle, but there’s a big difference above and below this line.
24	Borat Subsequent Moviefilm I stand by my review of this as a film. There’s much more going on here than in the first one. It feels crazy to say that, but I really believe it.
25	Promising Young Woman I don’t think I nailed this review. This is a daring movie about a daring subject and it’s really fantastic. I think as a man in America, this one’s important not just to see, but to consider deeply. The surface is obvious, but there’s even more than that.
26	Vivre sa Vie I love the parts I love, and this one’s a classic, but the chunk towards the end is emblematic of how people feel when you say “well, it’s a French classic, and…”
27	Judas and the Black Messiah This is a great example of asking you to go deeper on what you think you know about a real story. The performances are great, but I especially love LaKeith Stanfield. I think this is his best role other than Sorry to Bother You, which is a masterpiece.
28	Snowpiercer I’d never seen it and watched it on a whim. Even better than I expected. Tilda Swinton is something else.
29	The Death of Stalin I loved it, but not as much as In the Loop. I think In the Loop is one of the five best comedies ever made. This one’s much darker and almost as funny, but I couldn’t help comparing the two.
30	The Seventh Seal A classic for a reason. Better than you’d expect, especially if you’re worried it’ll feel detached and snooty.
31	RoboCop Another one I’d somehow never seen all the way through. I watched this because of how much I loved Starship Troopers. This feels equally relevant now, which is not a new take on my part, but it isn’t quite as interesting to me personally.
32	Once Upon a Time in the West A classic western with some classic performances, but it drags a lot and it’s hard to not view the problems with it through a modern lens. This is too low objectively, but it’s the right spot for me personally.
33	Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World This is probably controversial and it’s not intended as a slight, I just had my expectations set wrong for this one. It’s a pretty perfect piece of filmmaking and it deserves the reputation it has. Some element of every person’s rankings is personal preference and I’d still say everyone, regardless of who they are, should see this.
34	After Hours Uncut Gems for another generation. Exhausting, but intentionally. Makes me tired just to think of it.
35	Blowup I do not like Blowup as much as other people. I’m fine with that.
36	PlayTime I think the first segment of PlayTime is a true marvel. It’s pretty shaggy, though, and it makes the same point over and over. I get why it’s a masterpiece, but watching it now the enjoyment graph goes in the wrong direction: I loved it, then I thought it was fine, then I liked it.
37	Licorice Pizza The newest film on this list. I think there’s a lot to like here, but I never really got over the central conceit. It’s going to be interesting to rewatch this and to see what people think when it goes into wider release.
38	Across the Pacific A racist movie from a racist period. Some pretty good Bogart stuff. You can probably skip it.
39	The Trial of the Chicago 7 Sorkin at his most Sorkin.
40	Minnie and Moskowitz Someday I picture myself being cornered in a conversation by someone explaining to me why the love story in this one is actually magical. I’d welcome that conversation, sorta, because I love little pieces of this one but I really just do not like the love story. I get it that problem is part of what you’re supposed to want, but no thanks.
41	Mank I said all I’ve got to say in my review, but the core is that this is not the story of Citizen Kane, even if it’s pretty interesting to watch one man fall apart.
42	Bringing Up Baby One of the 100 greatest movies ever made on almost every list, but just doesn’t hit me right. I need to see it again and will, eventually.
43	Wonder Woman 1984 I also watched the first one again this year and loved it, again. I just don’t think the sequel works, largely for the reasons everyone else does.
44	2046 The sci-fi pieces of this one are unwatchable, both boring and off-putting. I really, really love the other segments, but the thing doesn’t stich together for me.
45	Un chien andalou I don’t even know where to put this. It’s central to film history but it’s also exactly what it is. It feels like a cheat to put it anywhere. It’s either the best or worst movie ever, I guess, though I do think you should watch it if you haven’t.
46	The United States vs. Billie Holiday The central performance is excellent, but that’s it. The story is a mess and it’s not very interesting to watch. The reviews were negative. It’s just not a very good movie, as simple as that.
47	I’m Thinking of Ending Things I am more interested in this movie than almost anything down here at the bottom of the list. Jesse Plemons was on WTF with Marc Maron recently and admitted that the whole cast had to ask, during filming, what the movie was about. All of them, not just a few, had no idea what the purpose of what they were making was or what to make of the ideas. I really do not like the final product, but how interesting is that? There’s a lot in here that is worth getting out of it, which is why it’s usually better to make a weird failure than it is to make a boring success, but I really just get a sour taste in my mouth when I think about it.
48	Titane This is going to win a million more awards this year and maybe it should. It’s not terrible, but I really feel like there is an Emperor’s New Clothes element to this. It is possible to not like something strange for reasons beyond not getting it.
49	The Nowhere Inn I love everyone involved here, but this would work better as a short than it does as a movie.
50	Solaris (2002) The remake robs the original of everything that makes it worth seeing. Not even worth watching this, even if you love or hate the original.
51	Last Year at Marienbad The ultimate Emperor’s New Clothes movie, to borrow the line from above. Some reviewers seem to think anyone who loves this is kidding and I can see that. It’s possible to read even the positive reviews as negative, given the way they have to talk about the sparseness and ambiguity. It’s an interesting movie, but I hated it.
52	RahXephon: Pluralitas Concentio I watched all of the anime RahXephon this year because people compare it to other things I like. It is terrible and the movie connected to it is even worse. It is barely possible to parse this as a story. I would not recommend this to anyone, for any reason.
53	Hillbilly Elegy The worst movie I saw this year and worse than anything I can remember in recent years. A strong contender for the worst film I’ve ever seen. A dark, terrible message delivered poorly. It is a negative force in the world that this exists, which makes it worse than movies that are constructed more poorly. Meandering, internally conflicting, and intentionally dishonest, with a brutal, cruel ending. I would recommend you watch any other movie, no matter what, twice, instead of this once.

In 2022 we’ll be doing some different stuff around here, likely some larger discussions of film with fewer Best Movie reviews. We’ll watch the Oscar nominees when they come around, as we always do. We may try some new stuff, too.

Hope to see you in the new year!

Is Judas and the Black Messiah the Best Movie of All Time?

This is Best Movie of All Time, an eternal search for the greatest film ever. Read the full archives here.

Less than a year before his death, William O’Neal was interviewed for what would become an iconic PBS documentary about civil rights called Eyes on the Prize. Lakeith Stanfield plays O’Neal, the informant who ultimately led to the death of Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers, in Judas and the Black Messiah. The full text of O’Neal’s interview is worth reading, but the most critical piece is this, which he gave as an answer to what he’d tell his son about what he did:

I think I’ll let your documentary put a cap on that story. I don’t know what I’d tell him other than I was part of the struggle. That’s the bottom line. I wasn’t one of those armchair revolutionaries. One of those people that want to sit back now and judge the actions or inactions of people when they sit back on the sideline and did nothing. At least I had a point of view. I was dedicated. And then I had the courage to get out there and put it on the line. And I did. I think I’ll let hi–let history speak for me.

William O’Neal was arrested for stealing a car and the FBI cut a deal with him by asking him to infiltrate the Black Panthers. The film portrays O’Neal as an opportunist who is conflicted, but not that conflicted, and follows the standard blueprint to some degree for informants. History has spoken for O’Neal, who died in an accident that was ruled a suicide but might not have been, but this may not be a story you know. Fred Hampton has a minor role in The Trial of the Chicago 7, and both that movie and this one have added relevance as America slowly, somewhat, starts to have conversations about race and police.

Both films present the reality that the government and the police feared the civil rights movement and sought to infiltrate it to discredit and destroy it. O’Neal drew a distinction between the FBI and “the police,” saying the former is dignified and positive and the latter is more complicated, but I don’t think most people feel this way or have this complication in their mind. O’Neal’s mind is important, however, especially where it doesn’t match what the viewer would feel. We’re seeing a betrayal, but we must understand William O’Neal to know what he’s betraying.

Daniel Kaluuya won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, which is true madness. It’s an amazing performance, arguably the best of the year, and it’s a movie about Fred Hampton, who he plays. The Academy is really bad at this distinction between the acting categories. Recent winners Brad Pitt for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Mahershala Ali for Green Book are leads, certainly, but probably were slotted into the supporting category to assure their victory for strong performances. My favorite bit of trivia about the category is that Sylvia Miles was nominated for a single scene in Midnight Cowboy where she is on screen for less than ten minutes. Her “support” in that film is a few lines and a joke, albeit a good one. According to the Oscars, that’s about what Kaluuya did here. We should get back to the topic at hand, but it’s important to note how strong his performance is and how strong Stanfield’s is, as well. Them winning both categories wouldn’t be unthinkable, but slotting them both into supporting would be strange if it weren’t the kind of nonsense the Academy does every year.

Judas and the Black Messiah presents William O’Neal as apolitical, which seems to match how he saw himself. He infiltrates the Black Panthers because the FBI asks him to do so and pays him to keep doing it. Where he is conflicted it’s generally because he realizes the FBI isn’t really protecting him. During a shootout with police, he has to appear to the Panthers to be on their side but can’t risk anything that would actually get him hurt. The police don’t care that he’s a “good” Panther. O’Neal wants to quit, but he doesn’t want to quit because he’s actually being swayed by Hampton’s politics. There is some suggestion that he feels remorse, which the real O’Neal certainly did, but it’s mostly around the brutality of the FBI’s intentions. I think the suggestion of the film and O’Neal’s legacy, at least as he tells it, is that he wasn’t a true believer but that doesn’t mean they should kill Fred Hampton.

Fred Hampton, on the other hand, believes. Our introduction to Hampton shows him speaking to a group and demanding that true power requires force and sacrifice. He turns off an audience member by insulting religion and passive resistance as a viable option. As the story progresses and more people take to the streets with guns, we see this put into action. Hampton says in a speech that he knows how his life will end. There’s a powerful inevitability to this story from the very start, both from the title’s insistence that one will betray the other and deliver death and from just the way these things work. The powerful stay powerful and despite the song, the times are not necessarily changing.

Kaluuya really is incredible as Fred Hampton. His speeches are rousing and his slumped, exhausted portrayal “behind the scenes” of his very public life tell us that this is all taking a serious toll. During a meeting with a Chicago gang, Hampton responds immediately to what he knows will be the takedowns of his approach. This kind of writing feels stilted in The Trial of the Chicago 7, but here we see Hampton playing revolutionary speeches over and over again and honing his rhetoric. We have reason to expect he would act this way, which is a small thing but the kind of thing that makes the character feel lived rather than written.

O’Neal is written as an opportunist, as we’ve established, but Stanfield plays him scared. This is a great choice, as it shies away from the bluster that is the defining element of a similar relationship in The Departed. Jesse Plemons continues his career of playing terrifying characters as nice guys as the FBI agent. The real O’Neal looked up to this agent and insisted until his death that he thought the FBI were the good guys, but the film complicates this and offers a slightly more sympathetic view. There’s a case to be made that O’Neal said that because he saw that the FBI could and would kill him for saying otherwise, so it gets a little complicated to say if this choice is a true one or not. It serves the film to show us the FBI agent as a little unsure and O’Neal as a lot more unsure, but we have to accept this as something we can’t know in the real version.

This story is a tragedy, which the film never hides from. Obviously it’s a man’s death, but it’s a million other small tragedies. O’Neal is a complicated figure who saw himself as part of the revolution despite doing more to hurt it than help it, but even that is a statement that needs some unpacking. Judas and the Black Messiah has a point of view, but it does a great job presenting a complicated subject with only a small finger on the scale. It is possible to walk away from this with a true picture of what happened but to also have feelings about how the central figures may have felt. That should be table stakes in a true story, but so many films feel the need to demand one “maybe” was the definite fact that it makes this a revelation.

Is it better than the last movie we looked at? Yes, it’s better than The Trial of the Chicago 7, another historical film that was up for awards this year. Both films show the government’s attempt to crush a reasonable, necessary revolution for civil rights, but The Trial of the Chicago 7 is far too cute. Judas and the Black Messiah has more space to develop the leads, who are so obviously leads, again, and a more complicated view of what happened. There’s a moment in The Trial of the Chicago 7 where a similar opportunity arises and Aaron Sorkin bulldozes it. This is the better script and the better film because of the time it takes to breathe and sit with something complicated.

Is it the best movie of all time? No, we will stick with the iconic Persona, but I do think it probably should have done better at the Oscars. Nomadland is, I think, an easier to execute story and maybe a better movie, but the more I sit with Judas and the Black Messiah the more I am persuaded. Both look at parts of modern America that we don’t want to admit are part of modern America. I think years from now this will still feel like something great from this year and the performances, especially, will ring out for a long time. The Academy has bigger problems to address than how it organizes the award categories, but man, if you watch this and feel like Daniel Kaluuya is “supporting” one really must ask what a “lead” in this movie would look like.

You can watch Judas and the Black Messiah on YouTube ($19.99 at the time of this writing) or Amazon Prime ($19.99 at the time of this writing). You can recommend a movie to me for this series through email at readingatrecess @ gmail.com or on Twitter @alexbad and I will watch it, no matter what. Try to pick something good.

Is The Trial of the Chicago 7 the Best Movie of All Time?

This is Best Movie of All Time, an eternal search for the greatest film ever. Read the full archives here.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is the least strange thing that was up for an Oscar this year. It was nominated for six awards and lost all six, which is not unheard of, but the one surprising detail is that it didn’t win for writing. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote and directed it, has been nominated three times before but only won for The Social Network. Maybe it’s not strange that he didn’t win given that history, but this felt like the Most Writing, at least, and that has to be worth something. Emerald Fennell won for Promising Young Woman, and should have, but it’s surprising to see the Academy agree with that.

Aaron Sorkin complaints are a little predictable in 2021, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t appropriate. I loved Sports Night and The West Wing like everyone else and I think The Social Network is great. You can pick a ton of other pieces of work from his career to highlight, but I still think his best work is the very strange, but necessarily strange, Steve Jobs. The script is designed to sell a tightly wound, intense person as the centerpiece that holds things together and to then unravel to show us how that isn’t always true. The performances are strong, but it’s the script that makes it go. There are none of the problems that dog The Theory of Everything or a million other “real” stories from the era. It’s way too tight, but so was Jobs himself. It works because the style fits the subject.

This gets to the complaints. Sorkin can apparently only do this one thing, though he does it to such a degree that he’s made a career out of it. Sorkin wrote The Trial of the Chicago 7 more than a decade before he directed it and it feels like it, at times. Every creative person has their “tells” and the Sorkin dialogue is his. There are unbearable moments in The Trial of the Chicago 7 and the entire movie feels relentless. It does what he wants it to do, which is what makes it an unquestionable success. It’s simply a matter of taste of if that is what you, the viewer, want it to be, that will determine if this is good or not.

I think people are too hard on Sorkin, usually, but this movie really make me question that defense. I liked it, broadly speaking, but I don’t remember the last movie watching experience where I was that aware I was watching a movie. Characters never take a moment to listen to each other. Everyone barrels into every scene already talking and leaves still talking. It feels unnecessary to belabor this point because if you know anything about Sorkin you already expect this. He wrote his version of this story and then directed it. It ended up as you’d expect and everyone liked it enough to nominate it but no one liked it enough to let it win anything.

The Chicago 7, which were 8 before they were 7, were men on trial for inciting a riot after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Sorkin met Steven Spielberg and agreed to write the screenplay after hearing the story, but ultimately he had to direct it after several directors moved on from the project. It all came to fruition when a cast of lots and lots of strange, but great, people joined Sorkin and told the story. Eddie Redmayne is surprisingly great as the straight-laced Tom Hayden who just wants everyone to take this whole trial seriously. Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong play the buddy duo of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin who want to get high and make jokes. Mark Rylance brings a lot of humor to a simple part as the defense attorney for the group. The list goes on and on and on.

I won’t mention everyone, but Frank Langella as the crooked judge who famously likely lost this case for the state, ultimately, by going over the top in courtroom antics that the audience will find ridiculous but mostly happened, really steals the show. Cohen was nominated for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Daniel Kaluuya, who somehow was not the lead of Judas and the Black Messiah, but you could pick a lot of these people and call them the best performance here. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is convincing as the state’s lead dog trying to nail the group. The term “ensemble cast” is obvious, but it’s rare that it’s this big. I just don’t have the room to go into everyone, but even the smaller parts here are carried with serious weight, down to essentially a cameo from Michael Keaton.

All of these truly excellent performances are why you should watch it, but Aaron Sorkin is why you maybe shouldn’t. If you aren’t buying what he’s selling already, you’re going to hate this. It’s even more of what he always does and it really does come over and over like body blows. The one-liners are constant and the writing is so tight it chokes any moment you might reflect on the seriousness of the situation. The story is already grand, but not necessarily one everyone will already know, but Sorkin really does pound it into a tight cube with insistent, witty dialogue. Every individual line is perfect, you could not dispute any of this, but the result of them all chaining together makes everyone feel like someone pretending to be a person.

Which they are, right? It’s only a real complaint when you compare it to everything else you’ll see this year and, really, every other year. Sorkin cannot let go and let the movie be more than a movie. He can’t let people make mistakes and catch those genius accidents. Everything is so perfect that you’d think someone painted the frames. It’s not that it’s beautiful, though it looks fine, it’s that it’s paced like someone cut every syllable together and sweat over the perfect final version. It doesn’t feel as totally starry-eyed as The West Wing, though the ending is a little too twinkly, but it just isn’t as messy as it should be.

It’s still pretty solid and it’s extremely watchable, but it’s just the best possible version of what Sorkin seems to be interested in making. It all feels disposable, though, but that may be the nature of a courtroom drama. There are familiar beats to these stories that lose their weight once the verdict comes down. There is a version of this that complicates the characters further and paints history as complicated and as grainy as it actually was, with more complex arguments than Hayden and Hoffman debating political power as voting through a clear, direct, heavily pointed at modern lens, but that isn’t what Sorkin wants. He got what he wanted by writing and directing, and the result is a very watchable, very tiresome, very perfect version of what he wanted to make. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Is it better than the last movie we looked at? No, Persona has a strong case to be the best movie ever made. This is not the best work that anyone involved in it has ever made, except Eddie Redmayne, who I don’t really like in anything else.

Is it the best movie of all time? No, because it failed the last check. I do think it’s fine, if the review didn’t make that clear, I just think Sorkin is capable of more than this. I think we’re capable as an audience of making connections he refuses to let be subtle. I think if you pull out any two minute clip of this movie you will be impressed, but the entirety of the whole thing feels insubstantial. I diagnose the problem as the too-tight writing, but I’d love to hear what other people think. It’s not a bad movie, just a missed opportunity, and only one I call out because what is there is good, but could have been great.

You can watch The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix. You can recommend a movie to me for this series through email at readingatrecess @ gmail.com or on Twitter @alexbad and I will watch it, no matter what. Try to pick something good.

Worst Best Picture: Is Nomadland Better or Worse Than Crash?

Now that the majority of this site is something other than this feature, I feel like I need to reset this. A few years ago I watched every single Best Picture winner and compared them to Crash. I’m now updating it once a year to add a new movie after the Oscars each year. Now that Nomadland has won, I have to ask the question I’ve now asked almost one hundred times: Is it worse than Crash? In recent years it seemed like an increasingly silly question, with Moonlight and Parasite winning and ranking among the best films to ever get this honor. Green Book showed that the Academy still has some Crash in them and that the old habits would die hard. Nomadland is a great movie, not as good as those two but better than many of the movies on this list, but still, we do this once a year so let’s get on with it.

This year everyone will talk about the Oscars because they messed up. I’m sure much will come out by way of explanation, but it seems likely that the producers felt like Chadwick Boseman would win and thus having Best Actor close out the night would be a dramatic ending. It’s unheard of in recent memory to not close with Best Picture, so that is the only possible explanation. Anthony Hopkins winning for The Father will overshadow everything else. Would it still have if they hadn’t changed the order this year? Probably, but not to this degree. I love the Oscars for what they could be — a celebration of Hollywood and an increasingly global recognition of excellent film that you should see — but they continue to fall short of that. For all the progress and all the greatness of the last few years, and even that has been inconsistent, this year’s was a mess of unforced errors. I think they largely got the major categories right, in my opinion, but in a way that no one will find satisfying.

The story won’t be Nomadland, but it should be. The film won three Oscars, the most of the year, which is in turn the least for a top competitor in many years, and won Best Director and Best Actress on top of the main prize. This is the first year since 2016 that I think nothing truly awful was nominated for Best Picture, but the top of the category was less crowded than usual. This felt foretold, which may contribute to the deflated feeling after the ceremony. It will all be about that Best Actor mess, but I try to keep this series focused on legacy and on the future. And on Crash, but we’ll get to that.

Nomadland is the story of what you do in America when you have no more options. The film shows real “nomads,” or people who live out of vans and RVs and work seasonal or otherwise temporary jobs to survive. Much has been written about Fern, Frances McDormand’s character, working at Amazon but only saying the pay is great and that she wants to come back to the work. There’s an enormous social conversation going on about Amazon workers being forced to work in impossible conditions and the consequences of globalization and capitalism. The argument is that by mentioning Fern’s role in this but not using the platform to condemn it, you’re doing a disservice. I get this argument, but I feel like it misses the point of Nomadland.

Fern’s husband dies and the mine in their company town closes. These are catastrophic losses that threaten to unravel the things at the center of Fern’s world. She has to learn to cope, both logistically to cope with the actual challenges of loss of income and loss of her physical home and metaphorically to cope in a world that’s unexpectedly empty. Fern tells one of the nomads late in the film that she felt like she couldn’t leave because she had to stay. Fern doesn’t condemn Amazon because the lesson of her life was that dedicating one’s self to work, whether it’s in a positive, affirming sense or a frustrated, raging sense, is to ignore what’s right in front of you. Fern chooses an epiphany about the “now” of life and the missed opportunities by not moving and being open. It’s a coping mechanism, sure, but it’s also an entire philosophy. You could view this cynically, but I don’t walk away from it that way.

The best movie I saw in the last year was Another Round, which was nominated for Best Director but lost to Nomadland, though it did win Best International Feature Film. Another Round and Nomadland have similar messages. Both films want you to find something life affirming, but they want you to do it yourself. I would really encourage you to watch both of them, as they have incredible lead performances that are largely in the eyes and the way the actors take in situations. Nomadland is an incredible film that came out in a very weird year and beat a lot of really great pieces of art. Minari, Judas and the Black Messiah, and Promising Young Woman were all excellent and any of them could have won this year.

The Oscars have a long way to go, which I feel like I’ve included in this series every year since we caught up to real-time. They have managed to make a product that effectively no one really likes, as they lean into what conservatives condemn as the same old Hollywood “issues” stories but don’t lean far enough to make consistently clear real statements or to hold a true perspective that any other viewer would appreciate. They continue to do things that any viewer could tell them will be met poorly, like speed up the “In Memoriam” section during a year of a global pandemic. They do a better job of picking nominees, but put on a performance that drags during boring sections and then spends less than five minutes on three categories 99% of the audience is locked in to see. They still take three hours to do all this, even after removing most of the “film” that they are supposedly there to honor.

Five years ago, the Academy honored Spotlight and ten years ago it was The King’s Speech. The wheel of time moves very quickly and I’m worried Nomadland will get missed under the weight of the weird ceremony and, uh, the end of the world that seems to keep looming. Frances McDormand spoke passionately at the ceremony and asked people to go see movies again and to really make an effort. Really, that’s what the Oscars should be doing, albeit less directly than she had to do it. This should be about getting you excited to see these movies and honestly, you should be excited with this year’s crop. Almost everything nominated this year is great, if not a little better than great. I’m sure the ratings will be bad and the response will be worse, but even as the Oscars lose their shine more and more, the films they mean to bring attention to deserve it. Just not Hillbilly Elegy.

The Best Part: Towards the end of the story, Fern revisits the closed town she left before the narrative started. We hear about Empire a lot, but only see it in these closing moments. There is so much storytelling done with the visuals and the absence of humanity that it feels like a scene from a movie about the apocalypse. Really stunning stuff.

The Worst Part: It takes a little bit to get going and does feel pretty slow. This is a contemplative story, a “movie for grownups” I guess, and calling a story about the modern world that finds a way to make you think without reading as preachy “slow” feels reductive, but it really does become something outstanding once Fern speaks with the real nomads.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It is better and everything nominated for the big award this year is better. I thought Mank was the worst of the eight Best Picture nominees, but even that has some charms. There were a few movies nominated this year for the other awards that weren’t perfect, but the only movie nominated for anything this year that would give Crash a run for the money is Hillbilly Elegy. It’s written from the same miserable worldview but with even fewer things to say. I think it’s a worse movie, on message and on craft, and while it obviously couldn’t win and wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, I’m saying for posterity’s sake that it would have killed this whole exercise because it would have dethroned the legend. Nomadland is a thoughtful work of art, but the Academy still wanted to make sure to throw one nomination, at least, to something miserable and frustrating.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Reading at Recess

A blog about things we do when we're supposed to be doing other things.

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