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Sinners.

D) Ryan Coogler (2025).

In a sawmill on the outskirts of Clarksdale, Mississippi that Elijah “Smoke” Moore and his brother Elias “Stack”, (both played in a double star turn by Michael B. Jordan) prodigal sons and veterans of World War and Chicago crime who have mysteriously obtained enough of a bankroll to purchase the land (from a known Klansman) and turn it into a juke joint featuring their cousin, the teenage preacher’s son and blues genius Sammie (Miles Caton radiating both adolescent cockiness and bluesman gravitas in a strong film debut), are parlaying for entry with a group of white folk musicians led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell exuding untrustworthy menace) who they will soon know as a vampire. He promises to leave if they can give him Sammie, whose music led him to the joint and then in a combination of plaintiveness and cynical hucksterism that recalls the slaver of Randy Newman’s “Sail Away” he makes his pitch “We believe in music and equality. Can’t we just for one night be family? I am your way out. This world already left you for dead. Won’t let you build. Won’t let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.”  It’s a satanic version of the promise America has made to black people since emancipation, a promise they have learned not to trust even as they determine to hold the country responsible for it, a promise that is at the center of Coogler’s wildly ambitious, blues-drenched horror film. Sinners has enough ideas for at least three movies. Ideas that don’t so much bump into each other but intertwine like snakes in a basket. The first hour, about Smoke and Stack preparing for the juke’s opening night (and introducing a cast, from Delroy Lindo’s alcoholic piano player, Hailee Stansfield a passing-for-white former flame of Stack, and Wummi Mosaku as Annie, Smoke’s Hoodoo practicing ex-wife, who are given a depth unusual for second bill horror characters) is saved from narrative sluggishness by the whip-smart pace Coogler establishes and by the charisma of Jordan as two men trying to live as free men – as Americans – for at least one night. It dovetails into Sammie’s portrait of an artist-as-young shaman where in a jaw-dropping sequence, he plays Blues licks described by Annie as “so true it can conjure spirits from the past and future and pierce the veil between life and death,” conjuring rock guitarists, African tribal drummers, Rappers and DJ (we don’t see them appear, they’re just suddenly THERE) out of his own mesmerizing singing and metaphorically burning down the house.

That it also summons the vampires who Coogler presents as both the embodiment of the Faustian powers that “the Devil’s music” is said to call up and the white culture both eager to take it’s power for itself and spread it through the land which gives the bloody climax a heft and weight that kicks the movie past bloodsucker cliché’s into the dark heart of a country that still deciding whether it’s cursed or not. It’s Coogler’s best film.

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Thunderbolts*.

D: Jake Schreier (2025).

Thunderbolts* opens with  Yelena Belova  (Florence Pugh in a star-making performance to rival Robert Downey) delivering an interior monologue logic decrying the lack of meaning in her life (“There’s something wrong with me. An emptiness. Just… a void”) in a Russian accent dripping with self-disgust, despair, ennui and  just a touch of mordant humor, while steeling herself to jump off the roof of a skyscraper. That when she goes over, a parachute opens and the Black Widow-trained assassin-for-hire finishes her thoughts while wiping out a laboratory filled with armed guards, she sets the tone of the best Marvel movie in years an action comedy about depression and shame that wears it’s cynical fatalism on its sleeve while withholding the promise of easy redemption.

Yelena doing the dirty work of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss whose amoral self-regarding charm makes her a perfect Marvel villain) a corrupt CIA executive facing down a congressional hearing concerning an abortive and illegal attempt to create a superhuman operative for a mysterious “Sentry” project. In an effort to get rid of loose ends, she sends Yelena and several other henchmen – Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) an assassin with photographic reflexes; Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen) who can turn intangible; John Walker (Wyatt Russell, channelling his father Kurt) a failed and disgraced former “Captain America”; and “Bob” (Lewis Pullman, channelling his father Bill even harder) – to a remote facility/deathtrap in hopes that they’ll kill each other after which the building will incinerate them. Instead, they escape, join up with Alexie Shostakov, (David Harbour boisterously stealing scenes) a former Soviet “super-soldier” and band together first for survival, then (after being contacted/arrested by Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes) to take down de Fontaine. When things go spectacularly wrong culminating in a monstrous being threatening to cast New York into a soul-killing “Void” the team has to step up as heroes, not with the obligatory and by now banal final slugfest (that happens earlier and is mercifully short) but by putting their meager supply of optimism and hope against the bleakness of their past. Since this is a Marvel movie that doesn’t so much end as proceed to the next chapter, they achieve a tenuous heroism that they may or not be able to sustain (and as a post credit scene suggests, may soon encounter a much less nihilistic kind). Superheroes who distrust the possibility of idealism and virtue? Sounds just about right for our time.

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Val Kilmer

1959-2025.

Reports of  Val Kilmer’s death had headlines touting Top Gun, Batman, sometimes Jim Morrison so it would be easy to downplay the eccentric and haphazard path of his career from the laid-back wunderkind of 1985’s “Real Genius” (substitute cybernetics for laser physics and he’d define Silicon Valley bros at least a decade early), to Christian Slater’s imaginary Elvis in 1983’s True Romance (“I like you Clarence, always have, always will” and “Shoot him in the head”), The great moment in Heat (1995) where the marriage of Kilmer’s bank robber and his wife (Ashley Judd) ends wordlessly with a gesture (stealing the movie from Robert de Niro and Al Pacino in the process) to his version of Doc Holliday in 1993’s Tombstone where he imagines the alcoholic gunslinger as Tennessee Wiliams might have written him. As Jim Morrison in The Doors (maybe the first rock biopic to become a supersmash) he gave a performance as deliriously over the top as Oliver Stone’s direction, which is saying something. In Batman Forever he might have been the most colorless version of the Caped Crusader but bookended by Jim Carrey’s at full volume and Tommy Lee Jones’ worst performance he was a Balm in Gilead. As for Top Gun’s Iceman he gave a convincing performance as the only guy in the unit who didn’t think Tom Cruise was all that, which made him not the audience’s surrogate but mine. And when he reprised the role 34 years later in Top Gun: Maverick unsparingly showing what time and throat cancer had done to his face, it was the only moving part of the whole movie. A good career. He wasn’t always my huckleberry but when he was, wasn’t he a daisy.

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Black Bag.

D: Steven Soderbergh (2025).

Steven Soderbergh could easily have called this smart and chilly spy story “Sex, Lies and Espionage.” It opens as George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) an MI6 intelligence officer is asked to investigate five people suspected of stealing a software code that could cause a disaster with casualties in the millions – a group that could include his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchette). The labyrinthian plot is almost impossible to detail without giving out spoilers but it involves two dinner parties that filter Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy through Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, tips on how to beat a polygraph, as well as the usual betrayals, murders and skullduggery. But Soderbergh is also interested in the mechanics of marriage, with spycraft used as a metaphor for the secrets husbands and wives keep from each other (the title is a phrase used by George and Kathryn to end any compromising discussion). The story comes across as Le Carre lite but Fassbender and Blanchette have a cool and intense chemistry (even playing cat-and-mouse they retain the respect and affection of a good marriage) and the movie gets great turns from Naomie Harris as an agency psychiatrist with a vengeful streak and Pierce Brosnan’s latest attempt (after 2001’s The Tailor of Panama and 2005’s Matador) to limn the darker side of James Bond. Not one for the ages but a decent genre exercise from one of our most intelligent directors. Good to know that with his 35th film (and the fifth since his 2016 “retirement”) Steven Soderbergh is still having fun.

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David Johansen

1950-2025.

He had the best hair and heart in rock’n’roll. He’s one of the two or three artists I think of when I think of NYC. I used to describe him as a cross between Mick Jagger and my aunt Barbara. His band, The New York Dolls was everything to me five years after they broke up. Since this is a film blog I have to mention how hilarious he was as The Ghost of Christmas Past in 1988’s Scrooged: “Attila the Hun…when he saw his mother…. NIAG-A-RA FAWLS!” Whatever you might think of the afterlife, I think he’s somewhere smiling down on us because I don’t believe a smile like that ever goes out.

Niag-a-ra Fawls indeed.

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Gene Hackman 1930-2025. 

When Gene Hackman played heroes such as his Oscar-winning Popeye Doyle, the detective chasing a shipment of heroin through New York city in the French Connection (1971) or FBI Agent Rupert Anderson trying to find the murder of three Civil Rights workers in Mississippi Burning (1988) he played them as flawed, angry train wrecks with little respect for the laws they enforced. When he played villains like Lex Luthor in the Superman movies or “Little” Bill Dagget, the sadistic sheriff of Big Whiskey, Wyoming he did so with an ironic glee as though nuking California as part of a land grab or graphically beating the crap out of a sick Clint Eastwood, was living the good life. Mostly he played some form of everyman even if everyman was a surveillance expert terrified that someone might out-bug him (1974’s The Conversation, maybe his best performance) or a pharmacy manager cheating on his wife with his son’s mistress in 1981’s All Night Long. He had an underutilized talent for pure comedy as in The Royal Tennenbaums (2001) where his con-man patriarch livened up Wes Anderson’s deadpan, or his uncredited turn as a Blind Hermit breaking bread with a monster in Young Frankenstein (arguably the funniest five minutes Mel Brooks ever shot.) He was a private eye in Arthur Penn’s 1975 Night Moves and a foreign correspondent in Roger Spottiswoode’s underrated 1983 Nicaraguan war film Under Fire but also a mafia lawyer in The Firm and an amoral Secretary of Defense in 1987’s No Way Out. And if this versatility came from an instinctive understanding of human complexity, it was the key to why over a more than 40-year career, even in kitsch like 1975’s Lucky Lady and 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure, I can’t think of any false moment, any false move.  RIP

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Best Director

Sean Baker – Anora

Brady Corbet – The Brutalist

James Mangold – A Complete Unknown

Jacques Audiard – Emilia Perez

Coralie Fargeat – The Substance

Will Win: Sean Baker.

Anora’s buzz is still growing and among five of the most ambitious movies in this year’s awards season, it is the only one to fully realize its ambitions and Baker will benefit from that.

Should Win:  Anora

Anora continues his string of bittersweet comedies about some of America’s most marginalized citizens is his coming-out party as one of this country’s too-few auteurs.

Shoulda Been Nominated: RaMell Ross for Nickel Boys.

Ross’s ambitions, which are nothing less than to get the fullness of existence itself into a motion picture are on full display in this story of two African-American teenagers in the sadistic care of a corrupt reformatory. At this point Ross bids fair to be a less pretentious version of Terence Malick.

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Best Picture

Anora

The Brutalist

A Complete Unknown

Conclave

Dune: Part Two

Emilia Perez

I’m Still Here

Nickel Boys

The Substance

Wicked

Will Win: Anora.

It’s funny when it’s not wrenching. Has plenty to say about the wealth gap without hitting you over the head with it. A romcom where the girl doesn’t get the guy but comes out of it stronger. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like it so it’ll do well in ranked voting. This feels like the one.

Should win: Nickel Boys.

I suspect voters will give this one a miss because of the POV camera which might have kept its leads from acting noms(Never mind that it was the most sophisticated use of the technique to date). But it’s look and its rhythms give it the look of something new and exciting. I’d bet money that Ramell Ross makes his way into the Oscar conversation again.

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Best Actress

Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba Thropp) in Wicked.

Karla Sofia Gascon (Emilia Perez/Juan “Manitas” Del Monte) in Emilia Perez.

Mikey Madison (Anora “Ani” Mikheeva) in Anora.

Demi Moore – (Elizabeth Sparkle) in The Substance

Fernanda Torres (Eunice Paiva) in I’m Still Here

Will Win: Demi Moore.

The Substance is all about a fear of aging (which isn’t limited to women) that certainly pervades Hollywood. And it’s a comeback for Moore who gets to have a shocking capper to an exceedingly mediocre career.

Should Win: Mikey Madison.

A star is born. Madison gives a tough and profane performance as a young woman conscious of her worth fighting for love, sure, but also for a dignity that a time of runaway economic disparity would deny her. Giuletta Masina would be proud.

Shoulda Been Nominated: Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths.

An Afrobrit working-class housewife with no filter starts her day with a rant of pain and anger that never lets up but Jean-Baptiste lets us see the sliver of self-knowledge that her misanthropy smothers turning a character anyone would walk, if not run from if we saw her on the street into someone we can’t look away from.

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Best Actor

Adrien Brody (Lazlo Toth) – The Brutalist.

Timothee Chalamet (Bob Dylan) – A Complete Unknown.

Colman Domingo (John “Divine G” Whitfield) – Sing Sing.

Ralph Fiennes (Cardinal Thomas Lawrence) -- Conclave

Sebastian Stan (Donald Trump) – The Apprentice.

Will Win: Adrien Brody.

Holocast survivor? Check. Genius? Check. Junkie? Check. Okay, Brody does manage to put flesh on this collection of tropes in search of a character. He’s Oscar comfort food.

Should Win: Colman Domingo.

As the playwright/actor who runs a prison theater troupe while doing his time. And during a clemency hearing in which his talent and his rehabilitation are used against him, he turns a controlled breakdown into the best performance by one of our greatest (and bravest) actors.

Shoulda Been Nominated: Sean Penn in Daddio.

As a cabdriver commiserating with a woman having a bad breakup (and over 100 minutes, slowly opening himself up) he channels Eugene O’Neill without embarrassing himself.

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Best Supporting Actress

Monica Barbaro – A Complete Unknown (Joan Baez)

Ariana Grande – Wicked (Galinda “Glinda” Upland)

Felicity Jones – The Brutalist (Erzsebet Toth)

Isabella Rossellini – Conclave (Sister Agnes)

Zoe Saldana – Emilia Perez (Rita Mora Castro)

Will Win: Zoe Saldana.

Saldana is terrific as a cynical attorney seduced and corrupted by a transexual drug lord and a win would be consolation for the film’s meltdown for comments made by star Karla Sofia Gascon.

Should Win: Isabella Rosellini.

Rosellini plays a nun at the Vatican in a role that keeps her in the background and almost wordless just like nuns in the Catholic church. But when she does speak it’s No in Thunder.

Shoulda Been Nominated: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Nickel Boys.

As the grandmother of a boy sent to a segregated and oppressive reform school she does all her scenes in front of a POV camera where her grief and humilitation all but melts the screen. 

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Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Yura Borisov – Anora (Igor)

Kieran Culkin – A Real Pain (Benji Kaplan)

Edward Norton – A Complete Unknown (Pete Seeger)

Guy Pearce – The Brutalist (Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.)

Jeremy Strong – The Apprentice (Roy Cohn)

Will Win: Kieran Culkin.

Culkin benefits from category shenanigans – he is essentially a co-lead with Jesse Eisenberg. Happens all the time as studios throw leads into what is considered a less competitive category. But Culkin role as an aging slacker whose charm is inextricable from his desperation would have more than held his own

Should Win: Kieran Culkin.

The irony is Culkin’s performance would have more than held his own in the lead actor category. In supporting, (with the possible exception of Succession co-star Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn), he stands head and shoulder over the other nominees.

Shoulda Been Nominated: Jesse Plemons in Civil War.

Although Beatrice Straight (Network), Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love) and Anne Hathaway (Les Miserable) seem like they only had one scene, nobody has ever won Supporting for a one-and-done. But Plemons black hole turn as a militant whose confusion is even more dangerous than his racist malice should have found a place here. More than once he had a starring role in my nightmares.

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Best Writing (Original Screenplay)

Anora – Sean Baker

The Brutalist – Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold

A Real Pain – Jesse Eisenbert

September 5 – Moritz Binder and Tim Fehlbaum

The Substance – Coralie Fargeat

Will Win: Anora.

Baker’s screenplay got the Writers Guild of America award and first or second place in most of the major critics awards which puts him in the catbird seat.  A script that reads like Fellini and Preston Sturges collaborated on it (with touchups by Vittorio de Sica) would certainly get my vote. Except for…..

Should Win: A Real Pain.

Maybe the best City Mouse/Country Mouse story ever told and for anybody that loved a charismatic, doomed relation even as his shadow dimmed their light, a catharsis. All during a Holocaust tour of Poland. And it’s funny.

Shoulda Been Nominated: My Old Ass – Megan Park.

A great coming of age story that treats teenagers with both respect and empathy but doesn’t shy away from the bad decisions they make, even if they’re given advice from their future selves. Until a teenager makes a very wise decision indeed that will break your heart as it puts a smile on your face.

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Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

A Complete Unknown – James Mangold and Jay Cocks. Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! By Elijah Wald.

Conclave – Peter Straughan. Based on the novel by Robert Harris.

Emilia Perez – Jacques Audiard. Based on his opera libretto Emilia Perez and the novel Ecoute by Boris Razon.

Nickel Boys – Ramell Ross and Joslyn Barnes. Based on the novel by Colson Whitehead.

Sing Sing – Greg Kwedar, Clint Bentley, Clarence Maclin and John “Divine G” Whitfield. Based on the book The Sing Sing Follies by John H. Richardson and the play Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code by Brent Buell.

Will Win:  Conclave.

There’s not a shred of proof that the producers paid Pope Francis to take a dive thus putting this middlebrow pulp melodrama over the top but it sure looks fishy. The screenplay won a Golden Globe, A BAFTA and a critics choice award and it’s the official choice of people who want an Oscar movie to got-damn look like a got-damn Oscar movie.

Should Win: Sing Sing.

One of the best pictures about prison is also one of the most open-hearted celebration of theater, it’s possibilities (and limitations) in combatting the boredom, loneliness and despair that so many prisons are designed for.

Shoulda Been Nominated: Hit Man – Richard Linklater and Glen Powell.

Based on a magazine article by Skip Hollandsworth. The lightest noir and darkest romcom imaginable about a mild-mannered philosophy professor who gets a job impersonating a contract killer for a New Orleans Police sting operation and has a high old time until he meets an abused wife looking for revenge and the hunter gets captured by the game. A true story, except when it isn’t, the film suggests what Francois Truffaut learned from Alfred Hitchcock.

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Nickel Boys.

D: Ramell Ross.

It was disconcerting to hear that the film adaptation of Colson Whiteheads great novel about the friendship of two Black teenagers trapped in an abusive reform school in 1962 Florida would be shot in a camera POV style letting us see through the eyes of its two main characters. But director Ramell Ross, (whose transcendent Hale County This Morning This Evening, was one of the best documentaries of recent years) uses the camera as an actor and witness. We’re put in the head of Elwood (Ethan Henrisse), a bright idealistic student on his way to a technical college (with hopes to join the Civil Rights movement) when he hitches a ride with a man who stole a car, is arrested as an accomplice and sent to the Nickel Academy a segregated reformatory that uses them for convict labor and employs beatings (and worse). He befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson) a tough and embittered kid who knows how to survive. The POV camera catches the boys friendship in a way that a full shot couldn’t and gives us an intimacy that highlights their isolation (and also highlights a supporting role by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwoods grandmother who has a scene opposite Elwood and one facing Taylor that recall Agnes Moorehead in The Magnificent Ambersons) even as Jomo Fray’s cinematography finds an ironic beauty in the raw lushness of the deep south. Pain amongst beauty featured in Hale County as well. It might be Ross’s great subject.

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The Substance.

D: Coralie Fargeat.  

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Moore), Best Original Screenplay, and Makeup and  Hairstyling.

The Substance is an underpopulated, underwritten overlong and over directed body horror film that might have been a good ten-page EC comics story. Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a former Oscar-winning (for what?) star who, as she got older, could only get work hosting a TV exercise program. When, at 50 she ages out of THAT (the film takes the view that the audience for daytime workout shows is men looking for hot young chicks) she is contacted by a shadowy organization looking to sell her The Substance, a drug treatment that promises a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of yourself.” She signs up for it (in the time-honored manner of horror movie heroes making stupid decisions) and “Sue,” a gorgeous twentyish woman (Margaret Qualley) emerges from a slit on her back. Both women are given certain rules that one of them will be unconscious while the other takes her place, they will have to regularly take a “stabilizing fluid,” and never eat after midnight (Wait, that’s Gremlins) or they will “deteriorate.” And, since Sue, who takes over Elizabeth’s show (this is looking worse for Liz by the minute) thinks rules are made to be broken, for the next hour or so we get to see Demi Moore’s body go through nightmarish decay as the two actresses enact a Grand Guignol version of All About Eve that eventually transforms both of them into increasingly mutating monstrosities.

This could be fun to watch in a Cronenberg-ish way except that it takes fooooreever, there are really only three characters in the movie (Dennis Quaid as a sexist and oleaginous TV producer who is filmed like Baz Luhrmann couldn’t stop saying “More Oil”), and the cobweb-thin script allows neither Moore nor Qualley to make their characters more than one-note ciphers. There’s nothing to Elizabeth but fear of aging, nothing to Sue but naked ambition and neither actress (nor their director) even suggest either of the characters share a consciousness. It becomes the story of how one stupid woman becomes two stupid women and then a grotesquerie of a woman and somehow Fargeat presents it as a feminist fable. Can a woman be a misogynist? 

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I’m Still Here.

D: Walter Salles. 

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Torres), Best International Feature

As I watched I’m Still Here, the story of a family living in a time of political instability I couldn’t help but feel a sense of dread as I watched the idyll of a happy family sharing a lovely afternoon in their beachside home amongst friends in Rio de Janeiro. It’s 1970. Ruben Paiva (Selton Mello) is a former congressman who left in 1964 when a coup installed a military junta and is recently returned. The talk is loosely political in a gossipy way though some of the men are furtively supporting expatriates. Shortly afterwards, Paiva will be taken into custody by armed guards for interrogation and will never be heard from again. Later his wife Eunice (a tremendous performance by Fernanda Torres) will soon be detained and tortured for twelve days, and his daughter Eliana will be held for 24 hours and will spend the next 24 years in a state of uncertain grief. Some of that dread came from Salles' skill at foreshadowing (an opening shot of a military helicopter, a random ID stop of some teenagers where anything could go wrong) but some of it is that, unlike similar stories in movies like Cry Freedom (set in South America) Burnt by the Sun (1930s Stalinist Russia) and Persepolis 1979, we can’t watch with the distance that all of that happened somewhere else, somewhen else.  We’ve lost the protective net of 'It Can’t Happen Here'.

The audience leaving the theater was the quietest I’ve seen in recent memory.