BEST PICTURE: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (Paul Thomas Anderson)(English Language Thriller) Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infinity, Benicie Del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall. When their enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunite to rescue the daughter of one of their own.One Battle After Another is Paul Thomas Anderson's first film in ages set in the present day, and partly for that reason, it grabs you and even smacks you in the face in a way that his other movies haven't. It's a prescient, mesmerizing, frequently hilarious and fearlessly political piece of work. It's also an action thriller staged on an epic canvas, with harrowing gunfights, daring rooftop escapes and poundingly visceral car chases, including one, staged on a rolling desert highway, that must be seen to be believed.
Leonardo DiCaprio has always been an underappreciated comic performer, and he hasn't been this funny or physically dynamic in a film since The Wolf of Wall Street. His character, Bob is, most of the movie running around in a plaid bathrobe and sporting a messy man-bun, desperately trying to find his daughter Willa, played by the remarkable young actor Chase Infiniti — a fitting name, since the rest of the movie is basically one relentless pursuit. He gets some indispensable help from Willa's extremely resourceful martial-arts teacher, played by a sensational Benicio del Toro.
Leonardo DiCaprio has always been an underappreciated comic performer, and he hasn't been this funny or physically dynamic in a film since The Wolf of Wall Street. His character, Bob is, most of the movie running around in a plaid bathrobe and sporting a messy man-bun, desperately trying to find his daughter Willa, played by the remarkable young actor Chase Infiniti — a fitting name, since the rest of the movie is basically one relentless pursuit. He gets some indispensable help from Willa's extremely resourceful martial-arts teacher, played by a sensational Benicio del Toro.
It's safe to say that Anderson thinks America is in grim shape, which is nothing new: In two of his best films, There Will Be Blood and The Master, he argued that violence, greed and religious hucksterism are part of the national character. Here he's given us both a gonzo vision of a nation at war with itself and a deeply resonant father-daughter love story
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BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE PICTURE: IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT
(Jafar Panahi) (Drama) Vahid Mobasseri Ebrahim Azizi
An unassuming mechanic is reminded of his time in an Iranian prison when he encounters a man he suspects to be his sadistic jailhouse captor. Panicked, he rounds up a few of his fellow ex-prisoners to confirm the man's identity.
By Justin Chang,NPR
When the Iranian director Jafar Panahi showed up at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it struck some who were there as something close to a miracle. For most of the past 15 years, since he was arrested in 2010 and charged with making anti-government propaganda, Panahi had been forbidden to travel outside Iran. He'd also been banned from making movies, though he got around that restriction with great ingenuity and continued to shoot films in secret. But then, in 2022, Panahi was arrested again and imprisoned. When he announced, seven months later, that he was beginning a hunger strike, many feared it would end with his death. Instead, he was released after two days and has been free to travel ever since.
It's an astonishing real-life story, one that, for tension and peril, may well rival the one that Panahi tells in his new film, It Was Just an Accident. This remarkable movie, which ended up winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, feels like a liberated work in every sense. In his recent, more under-the-radar films, like 3 Faces or No Bears, Panahi sometimes seemed to be speaking in code, or through layers of parable. But there's nothing cryptic or ruminative about It Was Just an Accident. It builds to a dramatic climax of lacerating emotional force — a sequence so intense, you can practically feel Panahi's rage burning a hole through the screen. His movie is a gripping and often shockingly funny revenge thriller that, as Panahi has said in interviews, was informed by the stories of people he met in prison.
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You Man-su, played by Lee Byung-hun (the Front Man in Squid Game). owns a glorious family house. He was born there, and as an adult he dedicated himself to buying and restoring it, so now it's a perfect woodland home for him, his loving wife (Son Ye-jin), and their two children. "You know what I think now," he muses at the opening of the film, as he barbecues an eel in the blossom-filled front garden. "I've got it all." Uh oh.....
Park fashions a macabre, moving black comedy that boasts the most rib-tickling serial-killing spree since Kind Hearts and Coronets. No Other Choice delivers everything from sly running jokes to hysterical knockabout farce. One botched execution attempt, during which music is playing so loudly that the potential killer and his potential victim can't hear each other speak, is a sublime physical-comedy set piece. And Park packs every scene with wit, visual flair, and telling personal details. He keeps revealing key fragments of Man-su's back story, and putting in colourful digressions concerning toothache, cello lessons, and a fancy-dress ballroom dancing party. Life goes on, after all, even when you're killing people. The genius of the film is that all of these miscellaneous elements add something vital to the scenario, and the gruesome parts, the poignant parts and the riotously silly parts fit snugly together.
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The protagonist, Agnes, in her matter-of-fact harmony with the natural world, is like an Elizabethan ancestor of Chloe Zhao’s contemporary American protagonists: the melancholy Lakota horsemen of Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2016), or the restless widow cast adrift in Nomadland (2020). The bookish William, meanwhile, is also recognizably a Zhao construct: as a new husband and father, struggling to write a play by candlelight, he is possessed by a stubborn sense of his vocation. No less than the gravely injured cowboy hero of The Rider (2017), brazenly chasing his rodeo dreams, William must do what he was born to do.
Zhao’s first three features were steeped in documentary realism, shot with a sturdy, windswept lyricism and abounding in nonprofessional actors. Then came her fourth picture, the clunky Marvel comic-book epic Eternals (2021)—a noble but self-evident failure, in which she channelled the visual and spiritual reveries of Terrence Malick, a longtime influence, in a vain attempt to transcend superhero-movie conventions. Hamnet is, inevitably, an improvement, though not exactly a return to form. It marks an unstable new mode for Zhao, a weave of subdued pastoral realism and forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism. The movie whispers poetic sublimities in your ear one minute and tosses its prestige ambitions in your face the next.
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TOP RUNNERS-UP:
SECRET AGENT (Kleber Mendonça Filho) (Thriller) Wagner Maura, Tania MariaAmid the political turmoil of 1977 Brazil, a technology expert is forced into hiding and seeks help from the underground resistance as he tries to flee the country with his young son.
By John Powers NPR
If you've spent any time in a dictatorship — I've had that happy experience — you understand why your high school teachers were always praising democracy. You quickly learn that authoritarian states are all about violence, inescapable corruption and a sense of free-floating anxiety. [Italics and bold print by Esco]
If you've spent any time in a dictatorship — I've had that happy experience — you understand why your high school teachers were always praising democracy. You quickly learn that authoritarian states are all about violence, inescapable corruption and a sense of free-floating anxiety. [Italics and bold print by Esco]
You get a masterful portrait of what that's like in The Secret Agent, an unsettling yet very enjoyable new movie by Brazil's leading filmmaker, Kleber Mendonça Filho. Set in 1977, near the middle of his country's two-decade dictatorship, this smart, brutal, often funny thriller uses the travails of one ordinary man to capture a reactionary era in its daily realities and surreal absurdities, its public cruelty and private decency. [Italics and bold print are by Esco]
The superb Brazilian actor Wagner Moura — who became famous in the U.S. in Narcos — stars as a research scientist called Marcelo, an innocent man on the lam for reasons we only learn later. He heads to Recife, a coastal city in northern Brazil, to pick up his young son from his late wife's parents and then flee the country together.
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SIRAT (Oliver Laxe) (Thriller) Sergio Lopez, Bruno Núñez Arjona
A father, accompanied by his son, goes looking for his missing daughter in North Africa
By Justin Chang, NPR
The Arabic word sirāt means "path" or "way"; in Islamic scripture, it refers to a narrow bridge that connects Paradise and Hell. That makes it a fitting title for the director Oliver Laxe's new movie, which is both exhilarating and devastating.
Sirāt is a survival story about several unlikely traveling companions making their way through a godforsaken stretch of the Sahara Desert. It carries echoes of countless earlier films, from the arid landscapes of a John Ford Western to the post-apocalyptic setting of Mad Max. But nothing about Sirāt feels derivative or secondhand. It's an astonishing piece of cinema. Laxe, a French-born, Spanish director, sweeps you up in the intense physicality of the dancing and the propulsive beat of the music, composed by the experimental electronic musician Kangding Ray.
Visually and sonically overwhelming; it's full of majestic desert vistas and propelled by that thrillingly percussive score. It's also a drama of extraordinary tension and, eventually, shocking tragedy, in which death has a way of striking when you least expect it. Remiscent of Georges Clouzet's '50's nail-biter, The Wages of Fear.
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SENTIMENTAL VALUE ( Joachim Trier) (Drama) Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleanas. An intimate exploration of family, memories, and the reconciliatory power of art. It follows two sisters in their reunion with their estranged father.
By Sophie Monks Kaufman, Sight and Sound
The director Joachim Trier explores the relationship between a disappointing dad and his two daughters. Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård, giving the performance of his life) is a director clinging to the belief that he does not need to directly confront his eldest daughter’s anger and, instead, can move the family unit on by casting her as the lead in his latest film.
A father, accompanied by his son, goes looking for his missing daughter in North Africa
By Justin Chang, NPR
The Arabic word sirāt means "path" or "way"; in Islamic scripture, it refers to a narrow bridge that connects Paradise and Hell. That makes it a fitting title for the director Oliver Laxe's new movie, which is both exhilarating and devastating.
Sirāt is a survival story about several unlikely traveling companions making their way through a godforsaken stretch of the Sahara Desert. It carries echoes of countless earlier films, from the arid landscapes of a John Ford Western to the post-apocalyptic setting of Mad Max. But nothing about Sirāt feels derivative or secondhand. It's an astonishing piece of cinema. Laxe, a French-born, Spanish director, sweeps you up in the intense physicality of the dancing and the propulsive beat of the music, composed by the experimental electronic musician Kangding Ray.
Visually and sonically overwhelming; it's full of majestic desert vistas and propelled by that thrillingly percussive score. It's also a drama of extraordinary tension and, eventually, shocking tragedy, in which death has a way of striking when you least expect it. Remiscent of Georges Clouzet's '50's nail-biter, The Wages of Fear.
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SENTIMENTAL VALUE ( Joachim Trier) (Drama) Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleanas. An intimate exploration of family, memories, and the reconciliatory power of art. It follows two sisters in their reunion with their estranged father.By Sophie Monks Kaufman, Sight and Sound
The director Joachim Trier explores the relationship between a disappointing dad and his two daughters. Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård, giving the performance of his life) is a director clinging to the belief that he does not need to directly confront his eldest daughter’s anger and, instead, can move the family unit on by casting her as the lead in his latest film.
A gorgeous, generous and gut-wrenching meditation about inherited familial suffering, it is simply grounded within movingly observed and performed family dynamics.The script co-written by Trier with longtime screenwriting partner, Eskil Vogt drums up characters with such breadth of personality that they can almost mask what’s eating them up inside.
After her luminous break-out turn in The Worst Person in the World, Reinsve proves that she has so much more left to show us. Here she uses her innately joyous screen presence – all lively expressive eyes, often blinking back tears – as the first layer of a character who, when cornered, is prone to withering outbursts and, when in despair, becomes very still.
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SORRY BABY (Eva Victor) (Drama) Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas HedgesSomething bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on... for everyone around her, at least.
By Justin Chang, NPR
In 2019, Eva Victor began starring in a series of online comedy videos — short, absurdist riffs and rants, with titles like "when my husband gets me a Peloton for Christmas" and "me explaining to my boyfriend why equal pay makes actually no sense AT ALL!"
In these videos, several of which went viral, Victor played hilariously loopy characters who, in their fits of anxiety and anger, cleverly dismantled stereotypes about women. Now, Victor, who uses both "she" and "they" pronouns, has written, directed and starred in a thoughtful and tender first feature, Sorry, Baby. And although it's very much a drama, their offbeat comic smarts are all over it. That's all the more remarkable, considering that Victor's character, Agnes, is a woman trying to make sense of life after experiencing a sexual assault.
Victor knows how often trauma is exploited and trivialized in movies. And in Agnes, they've given us a character who sidesteps the clichés of trauma at every turn.
Victor's performance is a marvel — full of delicacy and nuance, yet firmly rooted in comedy. Humor is Agnes' natural way of engaging with the world; even when good things happen, like when she lands a coveted teaching job or learns that Lydie, her best friend, is pregnant, she can't help but punctuate her excitement with a joke.
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THE MASTERMIND (Kelly Reichardt) (Heist Drama) Josh O'Connor, Alana Haim
In a sedate Massachusetts suburb circa 1970, unemployed family man and amateur art thief J.B Mooney sets out on his first heist. With the museum cased and accomplices recruited, he has an airtight plan. What could go wrong?
By John Powers, NPR
Ever since The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston's 1950 film about a jewel robbery, audiences and filmmakers have loved heist movies. You get the precise laying out of the plan, the robbery itself, the roaring getaway and the moment that things go wrong — there's always a snafu. A good heist movie offers the exacting pleasures of both the crime — and the plot — unfolding like clockwork.
The clock comes unsprung in The Mastermind, the latest film from Kelly Reichardt, whose devoutly un-Hollywood movies are as admired by critics as they are underseen by the public. Working with a deliberate approach all her own, she here takes the classic heist story, gives it a few tugs and shrugs, and winds up with a funny, sad movie that gets stronger and more original as it goes along.
Reichardt has shown in movies as diverse as Old Joy (about two friends going camping) or First Cow (about milk thieves in the Old West), a granular approach which is far calmer and more oblique than her peers. Seeking to catch moments that flicker with the rising sparks of life, her camera is curious about things that may seem off the point — like a garrulous child yakking happily in the museum — or accentuates something we may not have fully noticed before. As J.B. waits for his cronies in the getaway car, we register not just his anxiety but his boredom.
O'Connor is a compellingly ambiguous actor. He doesn't insist that we love him, and he commands the screen just thinking. His gloomy-eyed J.B. never tells us what he's after, but we sense that he's one of those quiet men who feel trapped in middle-class life and are prepared to chew off their paw to escape it. Where many male directors might find this heroic, Reichardt finds it deluded and often comical. She can spot a narcissist at a hundred yards.
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HIGHEST TO LOWEST (Spike Lee) (Thriller) Denzel Washington, ASAP Rocky, Jeffrey Wright
When a titan music mogul is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.
By Justin Chang, NPR
Spike Lee has taken on a great Asian classic - Akira Kurosawa's masterful 1963 film, High And Low. The remake is called Highest 2 Lowest, and it's a Spike Lee joint through and through, a dazzling crime drama that boldly confronts issues of race and class, art and commerce, all set in a modern-day New York that pulses with music, color and life. It's blunt, a little messy and altogether glorious, and it couldn't be mistaken for the work of any other filmmaker. Kurosawa's High And Low was itself adapted from Ed McBain's 1959 novel, "King's Ransom." And so there's a full-circle logic to bringing the story back to the U.S. Lee re-unites with Denzel Washington, who gives one of his best recent performances as David King, a music executive known for having the best ears in the business.
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In a sedate Massachusetts suburb circa 1970, unemployed family man and amateur art thief J.B Mooney sets out on his first heist. With the museum cased and accomplices recruited, he has an airtight plan. What could go wrong?
By John Powers, NPR
Ever since The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston's 1950 film about a jewel robbery, audiences and filmmakers have loved heist movies. You get the precise laying out of the plan, the robbery itself, the roaring getaway and the moment that things go wrong — there's always a snafu. A good heist movie offers the exacting pleasures of both the crime — and the plot — unfolding like clockwork.
The clock comes unsprung in The Mastermind, the latest film from Kelly Reichardt, whose devoutly un-Hollywood movies are as admired by critics as they are underseen by the public. Working with a deliberate approach all her own, she here takes the classic heist story, gives it a few tugs and shrugs, and winds up with a funny, sad movie that gets stronger and more original as it goes along.
Reichardt has shown in movies as diverse as Old Joy (about two friends going camping) or First Cow (about milk thieves in the Old West), a granular approach which is far calmer and more oblique than her peers. Seeking to catch moments that flicker with the rising sparks of life, her camera is curious about things that may seem off the point — like a garrulous child yakking happily in the museum — or accentuates something we may not have fully noticed before. As J.B. waits for his cronies in the getaway car, we register not just his anxiety but his boredom.
O'Connor is a compellingly ambiguous actor. He doesn't insist that we love him, and he commands the screen just thinking. His gloomy-eyed J.B. never tells us what he's after, but we sense that he's one of those quiet men who feel trapped in middle-class life and are prepared to chew off their paw to escape it. Where many male directors might find this heroic, Reichardt finds it deluded and often comical. She can spot a narcissist at a hundred yards.
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HIGHEST TO LOWEST (Spike Lee) (Thriller) Denzel Washington, ASAP Rocky, Jeffrey WrightWhen a titan music mogul is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.
By Justin Chang, NPR
Spike Lee has taken on a great Asian classic - Akira Kurosawa's masterful 1963 film, High And Low. The remake is called Highest 2 Lowest, and it's a Spike Lee joint through and through, a dazzling crime drama that boldly confronts issues of race and class, art and commerce, all set in a modern-day New York that pulses with music, color and life. It's blunt, a little messy and altogether glorious, and it couldn't be mistaken for the work of any other filmmaker. Kurosawa's High And Low was itself adapted from Ed McBain's 1959 novel, "King's Ransom." And so there's a full-circle logic to bringing the story back to the U.S. Lee re-unites with Denzel Washington, who gives one of his best recent performances as David King, a music executive known for having the best ears in the business.
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In Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s latest drama, set in and around a Belgian maternity home, several teen-age moms seek to break through cycles of poverty, addiction, and neglect.
By Justin Chang, New Yorker
Over roughly three decades, the Dardennes, now in their seventies, have built a filmography of such remarkable artistic, dramatic, and political consistency as to suggest a single cinematic consciousness in two bodies. In their breakthrough work, La Promesse (1997), they spun a taut realist thriller about a scrappy Belgian teen-ager, an exploiter of undocumented immigrants whose first stirrings of conscience began with the simplest thing: a promise he made, and refused to break, to a dying man. With that film, the Dardenne brothers effectively extended a vow of their own to the audience, one founded on closely held principles: sharp-edged realism, keen observation, and, crucially, extraordinary speed. A typical Dardenne movie runs about ninety minutes and spans, at most, a few days of narrative time. (The labor-rights drama Two Days, One Night, from 2014, is hardly their only film that could have borne that title.) A protagonist’s history matters, the filmmakers know, but life’s most significant confrontations—the ones that reveal who we are and what we’re made of—have a way of assailing us in an instant.
Over roughly three decades, the Dardennes, now in their seventies, have built a filmography of such remarkable artistic, dramatic, and political consistency as to suggest a single cinematic consciousness in two bodies. In their breakthrough work, La Promesse (1997), they spun a taut realist thriller about a scrappy Belgian teen-ager, an exploiter of undocumented immigrants whose first stirrings of conscience began with the simplest thing: a promise he made, and refused to break, to a dying man. With that film, the Dardenne brothers effectively extended a vow of their own to the audience, one founded on closely held principles: sharp-edged realism, keen observation, and, crucially, extraordinary speed. A typical Dardenne movie runs about ninety minutes and spans, at most, a few days of narrative time. (The labor-rights drama Two Days, One Night, from 2014, is hardly their only film that could have borne that title.) A protagonist’s history matters, the filmmakers know, but life’s most significant confrontations—the ones that reveal who we are and what we’re made of—have a way of assailing us in an instant.
Decades later, the Dardennes’ impact on cinematic realism can scarcely be overstated, and they have, to some extent, been eclipsed by their own much revered influence. Their jagged techniques, absorbed by filmmakers the world over, have softened; they still follow their characters about in handheld long takes, but gone is their habit—deployed most radically in “The Son, their masterpiece from 2003—of zeroing in on the back of a protagonist’s ear. Even so, they have never come close to breaking faith with those essential principles. At the heart of their work is the question of what we owe one another—what decency spurs us to do, and at what cost. In The Son, a carpenter weighs the possibility of avenging his child’s murder. In The Kid with a Bike (2012), a hairdresser is compelled, by forces beyond her understanding, to intervene on behalf of a young boy who has no one else. The realities of poverty, neglect, racism, and violence are harsh constants in the Dardennes’ working-class universe, but the filmmakers believe no less intently in the persistence of goodness—a force that is all the more powerful, they insist, for the stubborn unpredictability with which it can take root.
Goodness is not hard to find in Young Mothers. The film is set in and around a maternity home in Liège where the staff look after their charges, all teen-agers, with tough-minded compassion.
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By Justin Chang, NPR
During the pandemic, the Chinese director Jia Zhangke, like many of us, had a lot of time on his hands. He began sifting through a personal archive consisting of footage that he had shot since 2001. He ended up weaving much of this footage — some of which we've seen before — into a gorgeous and lyrical feature, called Caught by the Tides.
We're used to seeing archival material in documentaries, but this film is something far rarer and stranger: It's an archival drama — an entire narrative composed from two decades' worth of discarded scraps.
The movie uses this unfamiliar method to tell a familiar Jia story, about a passionate and tough-minded woman, played by the great Zhao Tao, the director's frequent collaborator and off-screen wife. Over several years, this character, whose name is Qiaoqiao, experiences romance and heartbreak and winds up adrift, traveling a 21st-century Chinese landscape that is forever in flux. This flux has become the great subject of Jia's career; he's deeply attuned to the winds of social, economic, political, technological and even geographical change sweeping through his country.
Through the entire film, Zhao Tao never says a word — a bold choice that perhaps made it easier for the director to shape a narrative out of the raw material. Zhao doesn't need the dialogue; she has the radiance and emotional eloquence of a silent film star.
We're used to seeing archival material in documentaries, but this film is something far rarer and stranger: It's an archival drama — an entire narrative composed from two decades' worth of discarded scraps.
The movie uses this unfamiliar method to tell a familiar Jia story, about a passionate and tough-minded woman, played by the great Zhao Tao, the director's frequent collaborator and off-screen wife. Over several years, this character, whose name is Qiaoqiao, experiences romance and heartbreak and winds up adrift, traveling a 21st-century Chinese landscape that is forever in flux. This flux has become the great subject of Jia's career; he's deeply attuned to the winds of social, economic, political, technological and even geographical change sweeping through his country.
Through the entire film, Zhao Tao never says a word — a bold choice that perhaps made it easier for the director to shape a narrative out of the raw material. Zhao doesn't need the dialogue; she has the radiance and emotional eloquence of a silent film star.
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By David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
The long and rewarding collaboration between Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater stretches back 30 years to Before Sunrise, continuing with the other two parts of that superlative romantic trilogy, filmed at nine-year intervals, Before Sunset and Before Midnight. While that project spanned 27 years, the actor and the director also spent more than a decade shooting Boyhood for a few days at a time, once or twice a year. Their intimate knowledge of artistic symbiosis adds a poignant underlay to Hawke and Linklater’s reunion on Blue Moon, a transfixing character study that X-rays the shaky skeleton of a creative partnership of comparable duration.
Written with wry humor and perspicacity by Robert Kaplow, whose novel was the basis of Linklater’s 2008 feature, Me and Orson Welles, the new film again is set in the world of Broadway and expands on theater lore in illuminating personal ways. While Linklater never tries to gloss over the static nature of the setting or the theatricality of material that could easily be a play, he’s a director who has few equals when it comes to keeping a talk-based movie buoyant, a skill that the Before trilogy honed to perfection.
Andrew Scott has less to say as Hart's ex-theatrical partner, Richard Rodgers, but he’s such a sensitive actor that he can convey the rush to the composer’s head of a fresh professional triumph, while also showing kindness and even generosity to the collaborator to whom he freely concedes that he owes his career.
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A LITTLE PRAYER (Angus MacLachlan) (Drama) David Strathairn, Jane Levy
A man's messy attempts to solve his grown children’s problems. He tries to protect his daughter-in-law when he finds out that his son is having an affair.
By David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Bill and his daughter-in-law, Tammy, searching souls beautifully played by David Strathairn and Jane Levy, are, as she puts it, kindred spirits, but that’s not to say they’re fully in sync. Their bond is the heart of writer-director Angus MacLachlan’s understated film, yet so too is the gap between what Bill wants to believe and the way things are. At the helm of his third feature, after Goodbye to All That and Abundant Acreage Available, MacLachlan examines generational bonds and rifts, the fallout of trauma and the opportunity for change. As in his screenplay for Junebug, the film that put him on the map as a film writer and made Amy Adams a star, the setting for this comparatively restrained tale of family secrets is North Carolina.
A man's messy attempts to solve his grown children’s problems. He tries to protect his daughter-in-law when he finds out that his son is having an affair.
By David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Bill and his daughter-in-law, Tammy, searching souls beautifully played by David Strathairn and Jane Levy, are, as she puts it, kindred spirits, but that’s not to say they’re fully in sync. Their bond is the heart of writer-director Angus MacLachlan’s understated film, yet so too is the gap between what Bill wants to believe and the way things are. At the helm of his third feature, after Goodbye to All That and Abundant Acreage Available, MacLachlan examines generational bonds and rifts, the fallout of trauma and the opportunity for change. As in his screenplay for Junebug, the film that put him on the map as a film writer and made Amy Adams a star, the setting for this comparatively restrained tale of family secrets is North Carolina.
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MARTY SUPREME (Josh Safdie) (Drama) Timothee Chalamet, Odessa A'zion, Gweneth Paltrow, Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of ping pong greatness.LITTLE AMELIE OR THE CHARATER OF RAIN (Vallade and Liane-Cho Han) (Animated Drama). Lily Gilliam, Lucille Ainsworth, Francesca Calo. Amélie, a Belgian child in Japan, explores life with her companion Nishio-san. Her third birthday becomes a turning point, marking the beginning of life-altering events that shape her understanding of the world.
By Jordan Mintzer, Hollywood Reporter
Scientists have proven that the human brain develops more rapidly from birth to the age of 5 than it does at any other time in one’s life. And yet when it comes to movies, there’s probably no other period harder to depict on screen. Films like Look Who’s Talking and The Boss Baby have certainly tried and, to an extent, succeeded in capturing the joys and chaos of infancy and toddlerhood. But they rarely manage to channel that age’s sense of discovery, mystery and terror.
In the charming new French animation flick Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (Amélie et la métaphysique des tubes), those feelings are front and center in a story that favors sensations over storytelling, plunging the viewer into the brain of a child waking up to the world around her for the first time. The twist, so to speak, in Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s feature debut, is that the child in question is a Belgian girl growing up in rural Japan in the 1960s — a place filled with countless natural wonders, but also marked by the scars of a major war that haven’t quite healed.
Adapted from an autobiographical novel by Amélie Nothomb (Fear and Trembling), the film feels at times like Terrence Malick meets Hayao Miyazaki for tykes, combining playful subjectivity with surreal flights of fancy. But it also maintains a narrative throughline that’s simple enough for any kid to follow, showing how its titular heroine literally emerges from her bubble to discover the pleasures and dangers of real life.
By Jordan Mintzer, Hollywood Reporter
Scientists have proven that the human brain develops more rapidly from birth to the age of 5 than it does at any other time in one’s life. And yet when it comes to movies, there’s probably no other period harder to depict on screen. Films like Look Who’s Talking and The Boss Baby have certainly tried and, to an extent, succeeded in capturing the joys and chaos of infancy and toddlerhood. But they rarely manage to channel that age’s sense of discovery, mystery and terror.
In the charming new French animation flick Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (Amélie et la métaphysique des tubes), those feelings are front and center in a story that favors sensations over storytelling, plunging the viewer into the brain of a child waking up to the world around her for the first time. The twist, so to speak, in Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s feature debut, is that the child in question is a Belgian girl growing up in rural Japan in the 1960s — a place filled with countless natural wonders, but also marked by the scars of a major war that haven’t quite healed.
Adapted from an autobiographical novel by Amélie Nothomb (Fear and Trembling), the film feels at times like Terrence Malick meets Hayao Miyazaki for tykes, combining playful subjectivity with surreal flights of fancy. But it also maintains a narrative throughline that’s simple enough for any kid to follow, showing how its titular heroine literally emerges from her bubble to discover the pleasures and dangers of real life.
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SLY LIVES! (Questlove) (Musical Documentary) Sly Stone, Larry Graham
The life and legacy of Sly and the Family Stone, exploring and celebrating Stone’s prodigious talent, but also an attempt to understand his downfall, and to place it in the wider context of being a black artist in America, with all the obstacles and traps that are placed in the way.
Should you somehow still doubt that they were groundbreaking, a dozen or so talking heads can attest in detail to the exact acres of ground they broke. It’s a music doc that takes its music-doc responsibilities seriously.
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OVERRATED
By Caryn James, BBC
Marty Supreme is as fresh, funny and exhilarating to watch as its hero...He scams, lies and steals from everyone, including those closest to him, to get to ping-pong tournaments. And he is not some clichéd loveable scamp, but an arrogant, entitled guy. He's not movie-star glamorous, but a scrawny young man with a pencil moustache and blotchy skin. Most surprising of all, Chalamet's on-screen charm, the character's bravado and the film's wit are captivating even when Marty's behaviour is at its worst.
But the film eventually becomes as frantic and hyper as Marty, deliberately piling up outrageous twists, including gunshots and a ceiling that collapses. It almost all works. One flaw in this two-and-a-half hour film is that it runs two-and-a-half hours. Some sequences seem like indulgent detours.
And at the end, unaccountably, the film descends into the creakiest of sports-movie clichés, with not one but two big matches in which trite glances at a changing scoreboard and audience reactions tell us who's winning. A pat, sentimental ending follows that. A film this bracing and original deserves something much more inventive.
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OVERRATED
HOUSE OF DYNAMITE (Kathryn Bigelow) (Thriller) Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson. When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.
By Justin Chang, New Yorker
By Justin Chang, New Yorker
Kathryn Bigelow is justly hailed as a great action filmmaker. She’s less appreciated for her skills as a portraitist, and specifically a portraitist of highly intelligent people doing extraordinarily difficult, complex, high-stakes work. Zero Dark Thirty (2012), a tough-minded thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, made a grimly focussed study of a C.I.A. analyst embracing her killer instincts to the full extent that her job demanded. The Hurt Locker (2009), set during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was less a conventional war picture than a coolly engrossing rendering of a genius technician who found himself exactly where he wanted to be, dismantling bombs around Baghdad with devil-may-care nonchalance. Here was a guy—and here, too, was a filmmaker—who knew how to handle an explosive. Few other American directors better understand the authority that restrained realism can bring to bear on life-or-death material, or the way that character reveals itself through action.
That’s why the nuclear-countdown thriller, A House of Dynamite, feels like such a bewildering misuse of Bigelow’s talents. The movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford. It’s one of those hyper-adrenalized control-room affairs: a clock ticks away in the background, everyone speaks in chunky government acronyms, and a worst-case scenario plays out on multiple fronts, from the first lines of defense to the upper corridors of power.
That’s why the nuclear-countdown thriller, A House of Dynamite, feels like such a bewildering misuse of Bigelow’s talents. The movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford. It’s one of those hyper-adrenalized control-room affairs: a clock ticks away in the background, everyone speaks in chunky government acronyms, and a worst-case scenario plays out on multiple fronts, from the first lines of defense to the upper corridors of power.
A House of Dynamite yearns to be a contemporary Fail Safe or Seven Days in May, a speculative nail-biter for our times. But, when the experience was over, the only alarm mustered was for Bigelow—a creeping fear that she had gone to battle with mediocre material and lost. In another crucial respect, A House of Dynamite, feels like a decisive break with Bigelow’s recent work. Her previous two films were both slammed for their uses and representations of violence: Zero Dark Thirty was accused of bending scenes of torture into a defense of torture, and Detroit (2017), an underappreciated drama set during the civil-rights era, was criticized for exploiting the very horrors that it sought to condemn.
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OVERRATED
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OVERRATED
SINNERS (Ryan Coogler) (Thriller/Horror) Michael B. Jordan, Wunmi Masako, Delroy Lindo
A supernatural period thriller set in 1930s Mississippi following gangster twins who encounter regional horrors upon returning home.
By Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
Ryan Coogler is the film-maker and hit-maker who started in social realism with his debut Fruitvale Station, became the Wakandan emperor of super heroism with Black Panther and put some punch back into the Rocky franchise with Creed. Now he dials up the machismo and the craziness with this gonzo horror-thriller mashup, a spectacular if more-than-faintly hubristic movie appropriately named Sinners – though there are one or two saints dotted around – set in the prewar deep south.
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For the first half, it is pretty much a realistic period adventure in which the twins’ outlaw anti-heroism functions in a believable world. They are the bad guys, and yet we can’t help but notice the good in them, or least the understandable survival instinct – and then the real demons show up, which makes these real-world issues irrelevant.
For many, the movie could as well do without the supernatural element, and I admit I’m one of them; I’d prefer to see a real story with real jeopardy work itself out. But there is energy and comic-book brashness – and a notable real-world cameo in the post-credits sting.
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A supernatural period thriller set in 1930s Mississippi following gangster twins who encounter regional horrors upon returning home.
By Peter Bradshaw, Guardian
Ryan Coogler is the film-maker and hit-maker who started in social realism with his debut Fruitvale Station, became the Wakandan emperor of super heroism with Black Panther and put some punch back into the Rocky franchise with Creed. Now he dials up the machismo and the craziness with this gonzo horror-thriller mashup, a spectacular if more-than-faintly hubristic movie appropriately named Sinners – though there are one or two saints dotted around – set in the prewar deep south.
-----
For the first half, it is pretty much a realistic period adventure in which the twins’ outlaw anti-heroism functions in a believable world. They are the bad guys, and yet we can’t help but notice the good in them, or least the understandable survival instinct – and then the real demons show up, which makes these real-world issues irrelevant.
For many, the movie could as well do without the supernatural element, and I admit I’m one of them; I’d prefer to see a real story with real jeopardy work itself out. But there is energy and comic-book brashness – and a notable real-world cameo in the post-credits sting.
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BEST DIRECTOR: PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON (One Battle After Another)Widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential directors of his generation. Known for his technical virtuosity and deep explorations of the American character, his work often features themes of dysfunctional families, loneliness, and the search for connection. "In modern American cinema, Paul Thomas Anderson is a...filmmaker who, having directed his first feature nearly 30 years ago, has...continued to command mid-sized budgets for original, adult-targeted drama about people. Anderson has spent most of his career following complex characters across a changing America — more specifically California — from fledgling oil towns at the beginning of the last century to sprawling urban centres today, along the way taking in 1950s cults, counterculture conspiracies and, in his latest film, One Battle After Another (made on his biggest budget so far), post-Recession race relations and revolt." - Brogan Morris (BFI, 2025)
Jafar Panahi (Foreign Lang Picture) (It Was Just An Accident)
Panahi’s work is deeply rooted in neorealism, often focusing on the struggles of women, children, and the impoverished in contemporary Iran. Because his films frequently critique Iranian social and political structures, many of them have been officially banned in his home country. as of April 2026, has recently returned to Iran despite facing a one-year prison sentence.
Park Chan-Wook (Comedy) (No Other Choice)
Stylistically bold, often visceral explorations of revenge, morality, and human obsession. He rose to international fame with his "Vengeance Trilogy"—Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), the cult Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005). "The South Korean director specialises in drawing real emotion out of outlandish fantasies. Violence or lust is almost always transgressive in Park’s work, and often comes with a disturbing twist." - Kambole Campbell (Little White Lies)
Oliver Laxe (Thriller) (Sirat)
Premiering at Cannes in competition, Sirat marks Laxe’s fourth time on the Croisette. His debut You Are All Captain earned him an award in Directors’ Fortnight in 2010; he won a prize for his 2016 Critics’ Week film Mimosas and another for the gorgeous Fire Will Come, which premiered in 2019 in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Sirat is the director’s first film in competition, a charged meditation on grief and possibility in a world edging toward collapse. David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Kleber Mendonka Filho (Thriller) (Secret Agent)
Mendonça Filho’s gift for exploring Brazil’s complex sociopolitical realities in idiosyncratic ways was already apparent in Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius, and especially Bacarau, an anti-colonialist Western in which UFOs hover over a remote village mysteriously wiped from the map. But this new feature is his strongest yet and deserves to lift him into the ranks of the world’s top contemporary filmmakers. The previous work that now feels almost like a companion piece to The Secret Agent is the elegiac 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts, about the director’s childhood home in Recife and the now-vanished movie palaces where he found his calling. The seven years he spent making that film while poring over city archives is a significant part of the seed from which this new movie sprouted.
Joachim Trier (Drama) (Sentimental Value)
One of the constants in the intimate films of Joachim Trier is his ability to bring out the very best in his actors. With emotional acuity, he mines their inner lives for truths that seem subcutaneously to connect his cast to his characters. Actors don’t so much play roles in the Danish-Norwegian director’s work as live inside them. His transcendent 2022 feature, The Worst Person in the World, is both a romantic comedy and an anti-rom-com, a close study of a woman navigating a messy transitional period, alive with intergenerational insights and foibles most of us can recognize from some point in our lives.... As always with Trier’s films, its depth of feeling sneaks up on you without announcing itself.David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Josh Safdie (Drama) (Marty Supreme)
Signature Safdie. Streetwise spirals into chaos centered on charismatic hustlers with gambling addictions. Films like Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019) have made Josh and Benny Safdie the leading practitioners of a strain of engrossingly anxious American cinema, finding the moral conflicts in dog-eat-dog schemes in their tales of New York. Josh Safdie’s first solo directorial project without his brother Benny, Marty Supreme follows suit. Beatrice Loayza, New Republic
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BEST ACTOR (FEMALE) JESSIE BUCKLEY (Hamnet)Buckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along. There’s something so sonorous in her low, melodic voice that in the moment when she loses it entirely, in silent, screaming paroxysms of grief, it smacks you right in the gut. Alissa Wilkinson, NY Times
Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Jorney) Foreign Language Drama
Zhao Tao (Caught by the Tides) Foreign Language Drama
Son Ye-jin (No Other Choice) Comedy
Chase Infiniti (One Battle After Another) Thriller
Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I Would Kick You) Drama
Eva Victor (Sorry Baby) Drama
Son Ye-jin (No Other Choice) Comedy
Chase Infiniti (One Battle After Another) Thriller
Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I Would Kick You) Drama
Eva Victor (Sorry Baby) Drama
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BEST ACTOR (MALE): TIMOTHEE CHALAMET (Marty Supreme)
Marty Supreme is Chalamet’s show, and he dominates it, incarnating Marty’s callow enthusiasm while also lending it an edge. Marty is a born performer; the hustle itself is a performance that depends on an elaborate pretense of playing badly, which he persuasively amplifies with a show of whiny kvetching. His shameless publicity-seeking involves wheedling, bragging, blustering, or just plain lying with a straight face....Chalamet embodies Marty’s arrant showmanship with an evident joy in performance, exactly as Marty himself schemes not only shamelessly but jubilantly. Richard Brody, New Yorker
Stellan Skarsgard (Sentimental Value) Foreign Language Drama
Marty Supreme is Chalamet’s show, and he dominates it, incarnating Marty’s callow enthusiasm while also lending it an edge. Marty is a born performer; the hustle itself is a performance that depends on an elaborate pretense of playing badly, which he persuasively amplifies with a show of whiny kvetching. His shameless publicity-seeking involves wheedling, bragging, blustering, or just plain lying with a straight face....Chalamet embodies Marty’s arrant showmanship with an evident joy in performance, exactly as Marty himself schemes not only shamelessly but jubilantly. Richard Brody, New Yorker
Stellan Skarsgard (Sentimental Value) Foreign Language Drama
Lee Byung-hun (No Other Choice) Comedy
Wagner Moura (Secret Agent) Thriller
Michael B. Jordan (Sinners) Thriller
Leonardo DiCaprio (One Battle After Another) Thriller
Denzell Washington (Highest to Lowest) Thriller
Josh O'Conner (Mastermind) Drama
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BEST SCREENPLAY: PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON (One Battle After Another)
Josh O'Conner (Mastermind) Drama
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BEST SCREENPLAY: PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON (One Battle After Another)
Anderson’s primary source is Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, “Vineland,” about a former hippie, Zoyd Wheeler, nursing a hell of a Reaganite hangover. Anderson handles the text far more loosely than he did Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice,” which he adapted for the screen in 2014. In replanting “Vineland” in the acrid soil of the present day, Anderson wisely dispenses with flashbacks entirely. The characters barrel forward from first frame to last, wired into the urgency of the now. Justin Chang, New Yorker
Jafar Panahi (It Was Just An Accident) Foreign Language Drama
Chan-wook, Kyoung-mi, McKeller&Lee (No Other Choice) Comedy
Ryan Coogler (Sinners) Thriller
Eva Victor (Sorry Baby) Drama
Kleber Mendonca Filho (Secret Agent) Thriller
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BEST EDITING : ANDY JURGENSEN (One Battle After Another)
Cristobel Fernandez (Sirat) Thriller
M. Brownstein & J. Safdie (Marty Supreme) Drama
Sang-bum & Ho-bin (No Other Choice) Comedy
Michael Shawver (Sinners) Genre-Thriller
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Cristobel Fernandez (Sirat) Thriller
M. Brownstein & J. Safdie (Marty Supreme) Drama
Sang-bum & Ho-bin (No Other Choice) Comedy
Michael Shawver (Sinners) Genre-Thriller
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BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: AUTUMN DURALD ARKAPAW (Sinners)
Enveloping IMAX visuals, That aspect extends into the sumptuous textures and saturated colors of Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s magnificent, big-canvas cinematography (the film was shot on both 65mm IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70);
Adolpho Veloso (Train Dreams)
Michael Bauman (One Battle After Another)
Łukasz Żal (Hamnet)
Darius Khondji (Marty Supreme)
Enveloping IMAX visuals, That aspect extends into the sumptuous textures and saturated colors of Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s magnificent, big-canvas cinematography (the film was shot on both 65mm IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70);
Adolpho Veloso (Train Dreams)
Michael Bauman (One Battle After Another)
Łukasz Żal (Hamnet)
Darius Khondji (Marty Supreme)
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Arguably the most invaluable contribution behind the camera of Marty Supreme is the granular period recreation of the great veteran production designer JACK FISK, both on soundstage sets and New York locations. It’s like flipping through a gorgeous photography book of the city in bygone days, high and low. David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Arguably the most invaluable contribution behind the camera of Marty Supreme is the granular period recreation of the great veteran production designer JACK FISK, both on soundstage sets and New York locations. It’s like flipping through a gorgeous photography book of the city in bygone days, high and low. David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
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BEST MOVIE SCORE Kangding Ray (Sirat)
Laxe indulges in languorous shots of people dancing to techno, blasted from a set of large outdoor speakers, in a small pocket of the desert. Their bodies sway to the rhythmic thumps of the hypnotic music, composed by the French artist Kangding Ray. His score is complemented by Laia Casanova’s stellar sound design, which turns the ambient noises of the desert into their own soundtrack. Laxe displays a considered understanding of the cathartic self-expression inherent to techno and raves specifically. Lovia Gyarki, Hollywood Reporter
Ludwig Goransson (Sinners)
Ludwig Goransson (Sinners)
Jonny Greenwood (One Battle After Another)
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SIGNIFICANT DOCUMENTARYS
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SIGNIFICANT DOCUMENTARYS
My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
Julia Loktev documents independent journalists in Moscow facing government crackdown as Russia invades Ukraine, capturing their fight for speech amid risks of being branded "foreign agents" and the country's drift towards authoritarianism.
Cover-Up (Obenhaus and Poitras)
Seymour Hersh has been at the front lines of political journalism in the United States. Hersh's breakthrough reportage has brought to the public's attention many of the most damning constitutional wrongdoings and cover-ups.
The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir)
A minor disagreement between neighbors in Florida takes a lethal turn, with police body camera footage and interviews probing the aftermath of the state's controversial "stand your ground" law
