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jezfletcher · 1 year

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The Oscars 2023

This year, I managed to watch all but one of the Oscar-nominated films before the ceremony, missing only the Documentary Short How Do You Measure a Year, although if the director's film from last year is anything to go by, this was no great loss. They were again an excellent set of films, and it was a very entertaining project to undertake once again. There's a reason I try to do this every year, even though it sometimes, during the month of February, feels like millstone around my neck. As usual, I'll count down the films from my favourite to least-favourite, with separate lists for the feature films and the shorts. I'll then fill out my Oscars ballot below, and I'm glad to announce that due to my 1993 short film Jez & His Brother Play Tennis And Struggle With Turning Off The Camera I've been granted membership of the Academy, so this year these votes count. Let's get into it.

1. Tár

Directed by Todd Field

A gripping, compelling and profound film from Todd Field and Cate Blanchett, following Lydia Tár, renowned principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonik (Blanchett), as she prepares to record and perform Mahler's 5th Symphony—a piece that has eluded her throughout her career. It's also about a great deal more than that: with a deep exploration of power, abuse and self-fulfilment. While it doesn't explicitly play out as a thriller, it is a psychologically intense film. Throughout the early stages we see glimpses of Tár photographed surreptitiously through a phone camera, superimposed with vaguely threatening texts. She receives suspicious gifts which she hastily disposes of. She takes drugs for anxiety prescribed for her wife. But the film never leads us down the obvious path here: we are given snippets of an incomplete picture, like fragments of a rehearsal, before Field allows the full orchestra to blast us in the latter third. There is so much that is virtuosic about this film—it is a career high performance from Blanchett, who is utterly thrilling and potent on screen. She commands our attention in way that almost feels against our will—she demands it; we comply. And it's often not easy being face-to-face with that level of intensity. The script from Todd Field is honestly incredible. There is an astonishing amount of detail and craft to it. The way the film unfolds is mesmerising in itself, but when you look backwards for all the links, you see what a complex beast it is. It's also the sort of film which would be fascinating to rewatch even soon after seeing it for the first time—if you can face it. This is true of both the sequences of great emotional upheaval, but also the clever and subtle characterisation which marks an extended opening sequence where Tár is being interviewed for the New Yorker. It could be extremely dry, but it's anything but: it's engaging, but more than that it provides us with an immediately fascinating portrait of the main character. I haven't even spoken about some of the other wonderful elements to this film. Nina Hoss as Tár's wife (and concertmaster of the Philharmonik—a stark fact later in the film) is also incredible in a more subtle but no less complex role. The music and sound design is sublime—and not just because of the moments we spend with Mahler's 5th Symphony. The choices throughout are careful and perfectly evocative—right down to the Besomorph track which plays over the credits. It only drops half a star because of the slight hiccup of the very final scene, which some others may have no problem with. But aside from that, it was a phenomenal experience. Despite it being among some strong competitors, Tár is without equal in the Oscars this year.

2. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Directed by Laura Poitras

A truly remarkable work of documentary, that sees stalwart of the form Laura Poitras reach new heights. We focus in on Nan Goldin: photographic artist, activist and former addict. It is in these latter two capacities that she takes up a fight against pharmaceutical giant Purdue. Furthermore, she levels her sights on Purdue's owners the Sackler family—well-known in the art world for their extensive philanthropy—for their profiteering off the opioid crisis in America. It is a wonderfully gripping and thematically manifold documentary. We see Goldin, and her activist group P.A.I.N., target art institutions that have accepted donations from the Sacklers (in particular those who immortalise the Sackler name). We see the group's legal fight against Perdue, and their activism to destigmatise drug use. But far more broadly, we take a deep and sometimes unsettling look into the life of our protagonist, told through her own photographs. These are uncommonly stark, candid, confronting and beautiful. Her subjects are the disenfranchised, the marginalised, the queers, the drug-users, the sex workers. But they come with a sense of intimacy and insight that's draws you in. These are the people who make up a community. Goldin shows us her world: These are the people who I live with, laugh with. These are the people I fuck. It is from this sense of community and solidarity that the film gets its power. One of Goldin's subjects is the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s—a period she and her community lived through with immense pain. It decimated their ranks and showed starkly how pitiless a government and its institutions can be. We move from the acute intimacy of her photographic portraits, and their sense of belonging, to a sense of being blown apart and scattered like shreds. You understand why Goldin, now, is so fervent that this not happen again. We also delve into the origins of who Goldin was. In particular, her relationship with her older sister who was repeatedly institutionalised by her parents. These same parents end up forcing the young Nan into foster care, with an unloving admission that they never wanted children anyway. It's delicate but soul-clenching how Poitras weaves this tale together in non-linear fashion. It becomes a profound portrait of someone's life, in a way that I've rarely been done before. And despite everything, it's a celebration too. It's a celebration done with glorious, no-fucks-given style. It's laying bare the agony and affliction of a life and showing us: "that's what life, what real living is built on. That's what life is".

3. Everything Everywhere All at Once

Directed by Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan

Another trip into the multiverse—the multiverse we actually want to visit again—with Michelle Yeoh as our favourite coin-laundry operator who may well have the fate of existence itself in her sausage-fingered hands. It took me two trips through Everything Everywhere All at Once to really appreciate it. Sure, the first time I had a whole heap of fun. I related to the thematic content about family, and the lure of the void when the universe itself seems meaningless. I enjoyed the visuals and the costuming and the spectacle. But I also had trouble shutting off the analytical part of my brain which was trying to work out the logistics of dimension hopping, as Waymond Wang frantically explains it piece by piece, and we're then hurled from dimension to dimension. The solution, you would think, is to not think. Let the mechanics wash over you and enjoy it for its story. Don't look too closely at the ideas of stochastic improbability that allow for jumping 'verses, lest they fall apart. In the meantime,you have a hell of a ride to jump on. In reality though, seeing it a second time allowed the logic of the world to settle down. It may not feel true, or real, but the internals of the film have a neat consistency that allowed me to relax. And once I relaxed I realised what a truly wonderful film this was when you just allow yourself to have fun. Taking a breath was what was needed, even though the film gives you very few opportunities for that. Michelle Yeoh is, of course, wonderful as Evelyn, and the second time around I saw the immense charm of Ke Huy Quan as Waymond—the first time, he was the source of too much consternation on my part. There's an intensity to the performances, but these characters have the stature to deliver emotional impact where required as well. Moreover, the second time around, I much more appreciated the utility of the absurd as a plot mechanic. Evelyn reaches more distant universes, branching off from our own long, long ago—Evenlyn is, well, Michelle Yeoh, martial arts film superstar, humans have fingers shaped like long hotdogs and play piano with their toes, a teppanyaki chef is controlled by a sentient raccoon. Statistically more-improbable actions are required for longer jumps, so characters act erratically, comically, launching themselves over a wall and onto a buttplug-shaped award statue. It's bizarre, but by the second viewing, the film earns it, and it makes internal sense. I've not even got into the richness of the editing and the cinematography. There's a wonderful nod to the films of Wong Kar-Wai, expressing the regret of missed opportunities in love, for example. It's all it needs to be technically to live up to its frankly astonishing conception. I could go on. Suffice it to say that it's a film that holds up as a spectacle, but rewards another viewing for all the details you missed the first time around: and I guarantee there will be some of those. What is better, though, is when you're not frantically trying to keep up, you can see it much more clearly. And there's significant emotional and thematic depth. That's what truly makes it a good film.

4. Close

Directed by Lukas Dhont

A truly intimate and heartbreaking film which follows two 13-year-old boys, Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) who share a deep friendship. When the two start high school, peer pressure and the perceptions of their relationship cause Léo to start pushing Rémi away. It's a really exceptional film, told with sparse narrative from meaningful but often quite transient moments—a discussion in the class room about the kids' hobbies, a shot of Rémi playing the oboe, the two racing their bikes on the way to school. It's that style of filmmaking which draws you in by making you pay attention to the clues, and when it has you right in close it punches you hard. It's also shot mostly in claustrophobic close-ups, usually of Léo's face, so we feel everything he goes through very profoundly. It's a remarkable performance from a young actor who has so much to do, and nowhere to hide. The film really rides on Dambrine, and his output is nothing less than extraordinary. It's also judiciously edited. It runs at well less than two hours, which means that it feels compact and coherent—it makes its point with room to breathe, but it doesn't overstay its welcome or ever feel like it's dragging. Overall, I really loved it, and it was one of the films over the past year that has had the most emotional impact for me. I look forward to seeing what more Lukas Dhont has to offer.

5. Glass Onion

Directed by Rian Johnson

I dearly loved Knives Out; I spent my first time watching it with hearts in my eyes, absolutely rapt and delighted with every trope and subversion. I have to admit there was a little part of me which was apprehensive of whether Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig could recapture the magic with this sequel. It took very little time for me to realise that I could relax, that this was a film to equal the original. Before long I'd left behind the part of me that wants to analyse or unravel it as a film. It was a relief to know I could just enjoy it. And enjoy it I did. This was another film filled with exactly the same kind of loving deconstruction of the whodunnit, and filled with wonderfully captivating characters. Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc is of course wonderful again—perhaps more so as we get to learn more about him as a character, including his flaws and idiosyncrasies. But he is aided by another excellent ensemble: Janelle Monae in particular is stunningly good; electric and magnetic on screen as she works through her character's various modes. Edward Norton plays Musk-esque billionare Miles Bron with a charismatic smarminess, Kate Hudson & Kathryn Hahn are both thrillingly repellent, and Dave Bautista has a really wonderful time as an obnoxious right-wing Twitch streamer. On top of this, Johnson has provided us with yet another thrillingly compelling mystery, which, like Knives Out before us, manages to waylay us at numerous points (including providing the most wonderfully banal red-herring I think I've ever seen). It means that (I'm sure) rewatching the film will be as much of a treat as watching it. This, combined with some wonderfully leftfield production choices (the Philip Glass "bong" was just a constant delight), means that this will stand apart as another glowing entry in Johnson's oeuvre. Where this perhaps even exceeds its predecessor is in the way it sharpens its satire. There's a perceptive and timely skewering of the billionaire class in this film which gives it much more heft than you would believe for such an thrillingly entertaining story. It improves significantly on the general sense of "wealth and entitlement makes you bad" of its predecessor to take some very pointed jabs at particular instances of conspicuous excess. But of course, you can also just ignore this and go along for the ride. I'm so pleased we've got at least one more Blanc mystery coming our way, and based on the success of these, there's probably a long future for the franchise. I only hope it doesn't rob us of whatever brilliant new idea Rian Johnson would have come up with next.

6. Aftersun

Directed by Charlotte Wells

I've taken my time in writing up this film, because it really needed some time to percolate and settle in my brain. In a rather impressionistic style, it recounts a holiday in Türkiye for 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her soon-to-be 30-year-old father Calum (Paul Mescal). Told partially through snippets of home-video footage, which get woven in with the main narrative, it also has flash-forwards to Sophie as an adult of Calum's age, and dimly lit shots of Calum dancing at a kind of dark rave. The film has a deeply felt sense of melancholy to it—a sense that the bright sunny beaches of these foreign climes are a garish cover for something darker. Calum is determined to be a good father, and has a strong relationship with his daughter. And yet there's a strong sense of distraction to him—something he can never quite remove, but that he's good as masking. It's a fine, and remarkably subtle performance from Mescal to achieve this. The form and the narrative also helps—it's told in sometimes contextless snippets, much like how you might play back an old video tape of your own holiday. This allows director Charlotte Wells to focus on little interactions between Calum and Sophie in isolation, to introduce something that seems irrelevant but which takes on poignancy as the film progresses. I'll admit that it wasn't until right at the end that the wave of all these little pieces eventually enveloped me, but when it did I was crushed by their accumulation. It's a really quite masterfully done thing—Sophie looking back on this time with her father; the sense of melancholia; adult Sophie's new baby; the dancing in the rave—they combine to form a powerful final realisation. Overall, it was a film that really required some thought, and a little bit of reflection. But once I had that I realised that it was likely one of the most masterful films of the year.

7. The Quiet Girl

Directed by Colm Bairéad

A very subdued and, yes, quiet film about a young girl who is sent away from her family to live with distant relatives for the summer, while her mother has her next baby. There's a fairly alarmingly insouciance from her parents who discard her into the arms of strangers, and the naturally shy Cáit is even more wary of her new surroundings. But over time, we learn gradually more about the couple who take her in. We learn (or suspect) more about Cáit's regular home life, and we start to see something that might be a better life for her. It's very much a film that doesn't give you a lot of information—I love this mode of filmmaking, where things are conveyed with a look, with a word said or unsaid, with a little detail in a character's dress, or the way they hide food for later, when there may not be food to be had. I find it wonderfully engaging, because you're constantly on the lookout for the next clue, and as a result you get fully engrossed in the story. The newcomer Catherine Clinch is wonderfully understated as Cáit, and manages to hold the whole film around her—it's a performance that allows the climax to have maximal impact because of all the work that was done before it. Similarly good are Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett as the Matthew & Marilla pair who take her in. It's probably not a film for everyone—but if you like sparse, deliberate and ultimately quite devastating filmmaking, it is certainly one I'd recommend.

8. Top Gun: Maverick

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

I think it's fair to say I was deeply skeptical of this film. Top Gun, for all of its impact at the time of its release, was not the kind of film that was calling out to be revisited, and didn't have the depth of character and world-building to make another visit more than a nostalgia trip. Moreover, there is undoubtedly a role for this film to play in the insidious propaganda of "war and glory", and of the US military being the righteous force for good in the world. But if you can put all of this aside: as a piece of cinema it is a deeply successful one. And in almost all ways it very much outstrips its predecessor. For a start, there's something far more interesting about Maverick's character in this one. He has had a long career as a test-pilot; always with something to prove, always with an oppositional attitude that has stopped his career progression. When he's given one last shot as an instructor at the Top Gun academy, he comes in as a much richer individual. It would be easy to squander this potential though by box-ticking references to the previous film: instead, we are thrown into a far more nuanced world coloured by history and interpersonal conflict. Rooster (Miles Teller) is one of Maverick's students, and the son of Goose, whose death Maverick still feels responsible for. Iceman (Val Kilmer) is now the naval commander who has shielded Maverick's career, but is fighting a life-ending illness. Maverick connects with an old flame, but does so with a lifetime of experience behind him. It's all far more interesting than it had any right to be. Mostly, though, this was a fantastic example of a style of film-making that has been largely superseded by effects and super-heroes. There is something thrillingly real about the stakes here—this isn't about the destruction of the known universe: it's about a man with a mission and his ability to do it against the odds. We care not because we are navy fighter pilots, but because it's an analog for something we face, and something we care about. It's really wonderfully shot as well. It no doubt has a great deal of CGI to it, but it also has a huge amount of genuine heart-thrumming action sequences that are shot using live aircraft. There's something that connected me to it in a much more physical way, and it was far more thrilling as a result. Overall, I genuinely fully enjoyed this film, and that was with a lot of psychic barriers that I'd thrown up before I started watching it. It was honestly joyful that my skeptical expression gradually lessened and eventually turned into rapt entertainment. It's very good film-making.

9. The Fabelmans

Directed by Steven Spielberg

I was pleasantly surprised by this film. From Steven Spielberg, based on his own childhood and family, and in particular focusing on his love of movie making, it has the leaden weight of "Oscar bait" hanging from its presumably elongated neck. But in fact it was a remarkably engaging film for its extended running time, and for all of its introspection. We follow Sam Fabelman (the Spielberg analogue, portrayed by Gabriel LaBelle) as he and his family move across the United States following his engineer father (Paul Dano). Accompanying them is Sam's mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and his father's friend "Uncle" Benny (Seth Rogen). Sam develops a love for making and editing 8mm films with help from his friends, and faces the challenges of being a Jew in a sometimes anti-Semitic society. It would be too easy to say this is the film that Spielberg has been waiting his whole career to make. And it's not that. But he's astute enough to realise that there's a good story in the telling of his life, and he engaged the right people to help him do it. Tony Kushner co-authors the script with Spielberg, John Williams writes the score. He's assembled a genuinely excellent cast, with the standouts being Michelle Williams as Mitzi, and amusing one-shot cameos from Judd Hirsch and David Lynch. LaBelle is also a workhorse, having to propel most of the film along its length. And there's good drama extracted from what could have been anyone's family history. There's nothing all that remarkable about the story itself, but in the telling there's a really good understanding of how to keep an audience engaged and entertained. There's something charismatic about everyone on screen, even as they're showing their faults and humanity. It's a delicate thing to get right. I really think we're seeing a resurgence from Spielberg in his latter career. As much as this film might be seen as navel-gazing from him, he's honestly manage to craft something worthwhile and universal from something quite personal. Moreover he's at a stage where he's earned the ability and the right to do that.

10. RRR

Directed by S. S. Rajamouli

A wonderfully joyous, and undeniably bananas piece of Tollywood filmmaking, RRR is an epic that ties together friendship, betrayal and the fight for Indian independence. We follow two historical figures of Indian resistance, Komaram Bheem, and Rama Raju, imagining what it would have been like if they were best buddies. Bheem is in Delhi to rescue a child from his village, stolen by the frankly evil English governor and his wife, while Raju is an undercover police officer trying to stop him. For various reasons, neither of them know this about the other, and they end up effectively falling in love. It's honestly quite sweet. Then come the twists, revealed in typically melodramatic fashion. For all of this, it does feel like a somewhat simple film. The plot is in many ways straightforward, and it's not trying to be a film with some deep, fundamental meditations on the human spirit. This is a film designed to be about watching your heroes on screen just be badass and kick some butt. There are some frankly wild set pieces in this, including the introduction to Raju, where he singlehandedly fights an entirely rampaging mob in his search for a criminal, a wonderful musical number (set to the song which is up for Best Original Song at the Oscars) where Raju and Bheem have to out-dance those rich, snobby English, and a jawdroppingly bonkers scene where the two use a menagerie of captured wild animals in a plot to create chaos in the governor's mansion. It's just a film that can do that. It has no qualms about absolutely suspending believability for the sake of spectacle; it goes as big as it can and then just goes a little bit bigger to tip it over into the ridiculous. It makes it, in so many ways, so stupid, but it's also remarkably freeing for the audience. You might want to pull it apart, but you're too busy just enjoying it, and that makes someone like me realise that if you get the entertainment right, you really just want to stop nitpicking. Turns out, a film can do whatever the hell it wants. That's a wonderfully refreshing experience.

11. The Banshees of Inisherin

Directed by Martin McDonagh

The Banshees of Inisherin is wonderful black comedy, based around a simple premise but delving into deep truths. Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) are long time friends living in a small village on an island off the Irish coast. When Colm suddenly decides he no longer wants to be associated with Pádraic any more, it causes Pádraic a crisis of self, and starts an increasingly dark feud between the two. Martin McDonagh has a truly wonderful handle on tragicomedy. It's a style he's very good at, and he uses it to good effect in this film. It's easy to laugh at the peculiarity of the situation and how it's presented, but it's also a way to unmask themes of depression, of rejection, of seeking purpose in one's life. Brendan Gleeson has a subtle but powerful role to play in this—while there's some truly wonderfully and more overt performances from Farrell, and from Barry Keoghan as Dominic, the son of the local garda. There's also some truly wonderful cinematography showing off the harsh beauty of the isle, matched to Carter Burwell's score, and to the plaintive folk tunes that Colm writes. I found the film less successful in its symbolism with regard to the Irish Civil War. It felt heavy-handed, and ultimately a little reductive. If you ignore the parallels McDonagh is trying to draw, then it's fine as a backdrop—the cannons firing on the mainland provide atmosphere rather than commentary on the relationship between Pádraic and Colm. But it's a shame, because it's clear that the message was supposed to be deeper. Overall though, it was a very engaging film—sometimes tragically hilarious, sometimes hilariously tragic. If nothing else, it's another example that McDonagh can craft entertaining but poignant films, even across very disparate styles.

12. Empire of Light

Directed by Sam Mendes

I genuinely enjoyed this rather understated film from Sam Mendes, which seems to have been critically ignored or worse this Oscars season. Olivia Colman plays Hilary, the duty manager of a cinema on the south coast of England in the early 1980s. She's lonely, possibly depressed and forced into fleeting sexual encounters by her boss Mr. Ellis, played wonderfully against type by Colin Firth. Her life changes when she befriends her new, young co-worker Stephen (Micheal Ward). As much as I was afraid this was going to be a movie about the movies, a long tired tradition, this was about a lot more. It was about mental health, and taking chances, about regret and purpose. It was about race and politics in the country of Thatcher. It was nostalgia for the past and a warning for the present. Quite aside from the thematic content, it was also beautiful to look at. Mendes's love of the cinema as an object is on display here, and his eye for detail in production design and photography was wonderfully transporting. I also genuinely liked the script, which was understated but never vague. Hilary is vivacious in all her various guises (even those where she's flattened by lithium), and Olivia Colman is once again magnetic in her role. It is, to some extent, rather ambivalent about mental illness, but Hilary is never unsympathetic. I found Stephen's character a little thin, however, which makes him feel more like a concept than a person—a target for racism, but used to some extent as a plot device rather than to really empathise with the victims of racism. I also found some of the changes in perspective a little jarring. For the most part, our focus is Hilary, and the story is seen through her eyes alone. But later, we start to examine more of Stephen's life, and we start to get scenes solely from him—it's something that takes us out of the interiority and claustrophobia of the earlier parts, perhaps intentionally. But with Stephens character being never fully fleshed out, it means that it feels like these scenes are stretched for emotional content. But overall, there was much to like in this film. The cast in general is excellent—I'm waiting for Toby Jones to get his late-career leading role that earns him an Oscars nod, for instance—the script is mostly very good, and it's overall largely a joy to look at. I think it's a lot better than it's given credit for.

13. Causeway

Directed by Lila Neugebauer

A very solid film, in the subdued story-telling style of independent cinema. Jennifer Lawrence plays Lynsey, who is forced to return home to New Orleans from Afghanistan after suffering a brain injury in an explosion. We see her gradual recovery, and the development of her relationship with James (Brian Tyree Henry) whom she meets by chance. It's a fine, and mostly understated film, as Lynsey and James help each other process their traumas. Lynsey also has to reconcile her life in the military, which gave her a sense of purpose, and an escape from her family life, with the reality that she may now be stuck in this city forever. A vital part of this conflict comes from Linda Emond, who is extremely good as Lynsey's unreliable mother. The film is only up for a single Oscar this time around, and that for the performance by Brian Tyree Henry, who is indeed extremely charismatic and intriguing on screen. Lawrence is, by comparison, more staid, but she well captures the military stiffness that forms Lynsey's shield. It's also a well-crafted script, which places pieces of the puzzle down gradually—allowing them to create the film's narrative drive and emotional impact. A poignant scene towards the end between Lynsey and her brother really draws the whole thing together. It's the sort of filmmaking I really enjoy, and while we've seen similar things to this before, this is a fine example of it. And when you get a fine example of something that you generally really enjoy, you can be sure that it's a successful experience.

14. Navalny

Directed by Daniel Roher

The "documentary as thriller" is alive and well, as shown by this remarkable effort by Daniel Roher focusing on the assassination attempt of Russia's main opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Focusing on the investigation of his poisoning after the fact, while in exile in Germany, Navalny and his team seek to unravel a conspiracy. While the investigation is genuinely fascinating in many ways, and provides a taut narrative about how close Navalny came to death, it's also wildly entertaining. There's an element of farce about how the Moscow4 (as they're dubbed, for amusing reasons) set about the assassination attempt, and their eventual coverup. A particular sequence where Navalny himself prank-calls the suspected perpetrators is honestly one of the most jaw-dropping scenes I've witnessed in many years. It also attempts to provide a realistic portrait of Navalny himself. He's a charismatic man, with a good sense of humour and rapport with his staff. But to be honest, the depiction overall is fairly burnished. While it asks some difficult questions of him, it never really grapples with things like his association with racists and Nazis early in his career. His answers—revolving around the need to build a coalition, and that Russia is still only in a nascent place where it comes to human rights anyway—are evasive, and make me wonder who a future President Navalny might end up being, and whether he will truly herald a break from the world of strongmen and oligarchs. Still, it's a fascinating piece of filmmaking, and a thoroughly engaging one. As far as documentaries go, you rarely get one that has as much intrigue as a scripted political drama. Roher handles the story with much more finesse and skill than other recent attempts (for example, Icarus). That's worth a lot.

15. EO

Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski

A fascinating and ultimately quite dynamic adaptation of Au Hazard Balthazar follows the titular EO, a circus donkey, through various misadventures after the circus is closed down. It's a simple premise, but it allows the director Jerzy Skolimowski to explore little snippets of humanity (good, and most certainly bad) through a natural framing device. There's a reason why you use a donkey for this type of story. They have a natural sense of despondency to them, but a willingness to accept what the world imposes upon them. They're strong, but servile. I feel like humans have a natural empathy for them in a way that we don't for other similar animals, and this allows them to be a powerful conductor for emotion. The soundtrack is another important element in this film's impact. It has extremely striking musical cues to punctuate the action, in particular brash horns which mimic donkey's cries (and, of course, the name of our protagonist). There's always a sense of turmoil, of impending doom, or perhaps a sense of representing the interiority of the donkey's psyche—in contrast with his placid exterior. Plot-wise, it is undoubtedly a little meandering, as EO moves from one situation to another, often with rather contrived methods of escape. After a while it feels like it's repeating itself, and in some ways it seems as though it's marking time until it can progress to its conclusion. Skolimowski is, however, a peculiar director, and one who couches his messages in fairly oblique imagery. We get travel sequences bathed in blood-red lighting, segments involving robot dogs dealing with a similarly uncaring world, drone shots that fly among wind-turbines. There's a suggestion that there's a powerful message all the way through, but it's not until the final scenes that we get any kind of certitude about what he's telling us. It was at times a perplexing film, but by the end there was a sense that that was at least partially the point. While we might not agree with Skolimowski's world view, was can at least appreciate the potency of it.

16. A House Made of Splinters

Directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont

A bittersweet documentary about a Ukrainian institution for children—a temporary one that acts as a safe place before children, often neglected by their parents, get moved to a more permanent home. There's a sense of hope and love within these walls, but never a sense of belonging. Children will be moved on: perhaps to a foster carer, perhaps to a state-run orphanage. Perhaps, if they're lucky, to a relative who can adopt them. We focus on the lives of some of the children as they face these challenges. Most have alcoholic parents—some leave them alone for days while they go on binges, leaving them to fend for themselves. Almost all still have the deep, unflinching attachment to the homes they know, despite this. There are some tales of optimism, and some of desolation. The older children may have been here three or four times. Some are reaching their maximum stay length and will be moved to a far less caring environment as a permanent solution. Some try to run away. Some sneak out to smoke, or find community with criminals. But, starkly, most are just children, doing child-like things. They make friends, they play, they draw, they go to school. Perhaps their conversation slips every now and then ("my parents used to make me drink beer, did yours do that too?"), but maybe they're just looking for something normal. There's also something poignant about focusing in so tightly on this place, when all we generally see of Ukraine nowadays are the broad strokes of the war with Russia. It takes us inside, and in some ways removed from the war, to show us something intimate and human. That can be a very powerful thing.

17. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Directed by Joel Crawford

A very enjoyable animated feature, that harnesses the caricature of Antonio Banderas's Puss in Boots and turns it into a journey of discovery, when he realises he's burned through 8 of his 9 lives and can no longer live his swashbuckling devil-may-care life. Initially finding himself at a home for abandoned kitties, he eventually reunites with Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) and they team up to carry off the ultimate heist. The plot is serviceable enough, and the cast of characters are enjoyable, including "Goldie" and the 3 Bears (now a crime syndicate), Big Jack Horner, determined to harness magical powers for himself, and Perrito, the eternally optimistic therapy chihuahua. They provide enough substance to allow the film to explore its themes about the chances you get in life, the small moments you can take along the way, and the importance of family, both traditional and found. It's also beautifully animated—taking a hybrid approach in action sequences to give them a wonderful comic-book style. It manages this while still feeling true to the origins of the character in the naissance of 3D animation. But it's a choice that elevates this film while also softening some of the more violent sequences. Most importantly, I saw this film in the cinema with my 6yo and my 2yo and both of them sat rapt and engaged for its full length. If that's not a success then I don't know what is.

18. All That Breathes

Directed by Shaunak Sen

A very deliberately paced documentary that follows the tale of two brothers who run a wildlife shelter for injured black kites in Delhi. The brothers, guided by Islamic teachings, see this work as charity specifically called out as good works in the Quran. They fund their venture with the meagre profits from their business producing soap-dispensers, but seek external funding and training from abroad. But the documentary develops as the story does. It becomes less about the brothers and more about the country. We hear political messages blasted through loudspeakers. We listen to debates on religious freedoms. The family off-handedly discuss their passports, the spelling of their names on their documentation, whether that might cause them trouble. We see the ever increasing number of birds which they care for, the pollution in Delhi, the rains that flood their workshop with sewage. It's meditative. We get long tranches of footage of the wildlife that is now integrated with the city in India—monkeys climbing across the electrical wires, kites feeding off the landfill, frogs illuminated in the night lights of the road. It gives us plenty of time to reflect on what we're seeing, and the many ways we are interconnected. It's not altogether that gripping, and it has no intention of ramming a message down your throat. Its design is to be persuasive in a far more subliminal way, to guide us towards a conclusion that it wants us to make—parallels between its strands that we can make our own decisions about. This can be a very effective way to make a point. Overall, I thought it was a fine piece of film-making. While it wasn't as compelling or impactful as many others this year, it showed a great deal of craft and subtlety.

19. Elvis

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

An undoubtedly very stylish picture from Baz Luhrmann, Elvis tells the tale of The King himself, through the framing device of his long-time manager Colonel Tom Parker. Parker is portrayed by a prosthetics-enhanced Tom Hanks, while Austin Butler takes on the mantle of Elvis. You can see from early on why Butler was cast: he is a pretty magnetic performer, and he has the physical swagger of Elvis when he's performing, as well as being a good vocal match. But, partially due to Luhrmann's always ostentatious direction (he has a habit, for instance, of skipping over things that might be plot relevant in favour of pure spectacle), transferring his swagger to the rest of Elvis's life-story makes it lose a lot of its humanity. Instead, the film tried to be overtly political: in some ways, this is a refreshing surprise given it could have been all style and no substance. And in other ways, it almost feels like a necessity. How can you grapple with the concept of Elvis without examining the debt he owes to the blues, and to the Black folk who brought it to life. It's done in some subtle and some less-subtle ways: from blending Elvis's music with the likes of contemporary musicians such as Denzel Curry, to making the assassination of Martin Luther King a plot point of the film. But the film really struggles when it tries to examine the human drama. There's conflict between Presley and Parker, of course, which has its moments of true tension. But there are also scenes, such as the breakup of Elvis and Priscilla where Luhrmann is out of his comfort zone and Butler is not up to the task of making us feel something. Despite its unwieldy nature though, or perhaps because of all of the manifold pieces jammed together, it ends up feeling like a reasonable portrait of a flawed individual, complete with his contradictions and uncomfortable truths. It was nothing if not A Show.

20. All Quiet on the Western Front

Directed by Edward Berger

It's been almost 100 years since the last time All Quiet on the Wester Front won a Best Picture Oscar, so you can understand why the time might be right to try it again. We follow Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) an idealistic German youth who joins Germany's war effort with the promise of conquering Paris in weeks. Instead, of course, he's forced into the reality of trench warfare as he watches his friends and comrades die around him. There's no doubt this is a very grim film. It's a hard watch, and very deliberately so. Like the book before it, it is a fervently anti-war film—it shows the brutalities of war starkly and up very, very close. One minute the soldier next to you is chatting to you, the next second they're dead. This is how it is. We see the affect this has on Paul as he develops from wide-eyed youngster, to battle-hardened machine—it's a quite excellent performance from Kammerer to develop this journey. In a change from the 1930 version, there's a parallel story in this film about the armistice negotiations between Germany and France. I wasn't entirely sure about the purpose of this, as it often took us out of the action right as the tension was building up (although perhaps that was the purpose—it's hard enough to watch without being mired in it). It did however show us the disconnect between those in power and those who were actually losing their lives, and Daniel Brühl as the German politician in charge of negotiations had a quiet pain in his performance. I do feel like this kind of film is one to be endured rather than enjoyed, but I do understand the desire and the drive to make films about the horrors of war. It would be too easy to forget what war really means, and perhaps another reminded is just what the world needs right now.

21. The Batman

Directed by Matt Reeves

Let's put aside my concerns about whether we need another Batman film, let alone another Batman franchise running concurrently with the existing Batman franchise, shall we? We can take those as read. If we can manage that, then The Batman is honestly quite good fun. Focusing on Batman as "world's greatest detective", this is effectively a neo-noir, as Batman tries to unravel a series of high-profile murders among Gotham's underworld. It uses its comic-book trappings as a foil, but it would almost be as effective were it shot in black-in-white with Batman as a 1940s Chicago flatfoot. It is actually executes a rather effective plot, as the Riddler taunts and ultimately ties Batman into his plans, while the city police grudgingly use Batman's extra-judicial methods to assist the investigation. It's also the film which perhaps best explores the paradox at the heart of Batman: what is it that causes this reclusive billionaire to become a vigilante. How is this helping the city he says he's helping? How does it hurt it? How does Batman himself cause the same problems he's trying to fix? That's not to say it's overly deep philosophically, but it at least engages with the problem. Robert Pattinson is honestly wasted in the role, but he brings his dark charisma to it anyway, and in an always eclectic career, he's found another strange direction to go in. I also quite enjoyed Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman, although it's a starkly under-written role. And there's a certain thrill from the unceasingly grim production design and shadowed cinematography. All up, I genuinely did enjoy it a good deal. But, admittedly, to get to this point, you do have to ignore the question of its relevance and necessity, plus you have to grapple with its bloated almost 3-hour running time. These are certainly things that make me pause from embracing it wholeheartedly.

22. Argentina, 1985

Directed by Santiago Mitre

Julio Strassera (Ricardo Darín) is a public prosecutor, who is responsible for leading cases brought before the Argentinian court of appeals. After the military's most recent dictatorship is toppled, the prosecution of the former leaders falls to him—a weighty task that involves threats to him and his team, a lack of cooperation from other established lawyers and, ultimately, perhaps even the fate of Argentinian democracy. It's an interesting historical portrait—especially its depiction of the instability of Argentinian society which is used to the brutal rule of the junta. There's a sense of emerging from oppression and bringing things into the light—but it also exposes the fear that's associated with doing that. People might have feared and despised military rule, but its absence is in some ways also an unfamiliar threat. I did find, however, that it was a little underwhelming as a legal drama—and that's largely how it's both billed and performed. After all, the majority of the film is set inside the court room. There's very little in it that's surprising in the way the argument rolls out: which is fine as a historical document of what was probably a long, technical trial. But it didn't really engage me in the plot. It doesn't try to do this, of course—it's more interested in making observations about the state of Argentinian society at the time, and the gradual understanding of the crimes of the dictatorship. Overall, though, it was certainly a solid film, with a good deal to recommend it. But it didn't really manage to feel like the gut-punch of a film it might have been if it took us on a little more of a ride.

23. Women Talking

Directed by Sarah Polley

The women of a Mennonite community somewhere in the United States discover that the men have been drugging and raping them over many years, and they resolve to make a stand. When a vote is tied between leaving the colony or staying and fighting the men, a small group of women are chosen to decide for the whole. The film then revolves around the hayloft where they convene to discuss the fate of the community—11 women, and the young male schoolteacher who, as one of the few left who can write, is tasked with keeping the minutes. What follows is an interesting but perhaps not particularly novel investigation of feminism—the women, often downtrodden in this conservative society, go about deriving the tenets of gender equality from first principles, coming to see through a basic truth about fairness and kindness that they only have one option. It's an interesting exercise, but in some ways it's not a particularly gripping one. I found the script a little leaden at times—it skips around without a lot of rhetoric power, and too often finds itself bogged down in theology. This is necessary given the setting, of course, but it often means it finds itself in cyclical patterns that feel self-perpetuating. There's the potential for this thematic material to be devastating, raw and powerful, and I really feel as though it never reached an emotional climax worthy of it. I thought the performances were fairly solid, although I also found the characterisation lacking distinction—Claire Foy, Rooney Mara and Jessie Buckley's characters all blended into one for me, leaving the older women and Michelle McLeod's Mejal the most fully formed. Better is the understated performance from August Winter as Melvin, a transgender man who looks after the colony's children—their performance is subtle but marked with pain. Also good is Ben Whishaw as the schoolteacher, August, in particular towards the end of the film. Overall though, it felt like a film that was so full of potential that it couldn't realise. Sarah Polley is a director I genuinely love, and this should have been an absolute golden moment of cinema for me. So even though it was interesting, solid and well made—that still feels a little like a disappointment.

24. Triangle of Sadness

Directed by Ruben Östlund

In so many ways, I had a great time with this film. Director Ruben Östlund has a great skill with a kind of dark, depressing satire taken to logical and artistic extremes in some of his previous work, in particular The Square. Triangle of Sadness sees him move to English-language cinema for the first time, and it feels like there's rich fodder here for him to lampoon a fresh segment of society. We first meet Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), two models, who are together "for the 'gram", and have squabbles over money, gender roles and manipulation while attending one of Yaya's fashion shows. It's a prologue to the main story, which is set on an exclusive luxury cruise. Carl and Yaya run shoulders with oligarchs and retired arms dealers, while waited upon by the staff of the boat, lead by Paula (Vicki Berlin), and the captain of the vessel (Woody Harrelson) who spends most of his time drunk in his cabin. The unfortunate thing about the film is that it really struggles to hone its satire to a meaningful point. It is in so many ways a giddy and hilarious experience, especially as the ship eventually suffers a series of disasters that causes the social order of the cruise to invert. The characterisation and dialogue is honestly wonderful, and it makes individual scenes very entertaining to watch. But by the end of the film, I was expecting a punch—something to really drive the satire home; to make a bigger point about our own current societal inequality, or to provide some kind of call to action. And nothing really manages to provide it. But that, I guess, is not Östlund's way of working. His tool is a mirror, not a scalpel. "Here are some sardonic observations on society", he says, "it's not my job to figure out how to fix them." But this also means that the film ultimately feels shallow, especially after some reflection on what I was meant to take away from it. Still, I was entertained. And that's worth something. It's just disappointing when it could have been so wonderfully trenchant at the same time. That's when the film would have had real impact.

25. Turning Red

Directed by Domee Shi

I so often love the start of Pixar films, which do such a good job of selling their concept. In this case, it's the story of a teenage girl who discovers that excess emotional stress turns her into a giant red panda. It's beautifully juxtaposed with the turbulent time which is puberty, while examining life from the perspective of a young person growing up and making their own way in the world. The problem with this, and certain others of recent times, is that it doesn't really know what to do with it when it needs to create tension and resolve the plot. In this case, it's only really the climax and resolution which fails for me at least, but it still feels as though Pixar has to go big for some reason, when there was something honestly perfect and sweet about keeping the film out of the astral plane and focused on a young girl and her group of friends trying to get tickets to a pop concert. If you ignored that, it's a really lovely film with a lot of heart. But sometimes, smaller is better. The 6yo loved it though, so really, what do I know?

26. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp

A sweet film and a small film, Marcel The Shell With Shoes On is a mockumentary following our titular shell (Jenny Slate) who lives with his grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini) in a house that is regularly rented out on AirBnB. When the most recent tenant, Dean (the director, Dean Fleischer Camp), arrives and starts documenting Marcel's life, we learn a tale of sadness and ingenuity, as we learn of the loss of Marcel's family, and his life caring for his grandmother. It is not, in fact, a particularly deep film, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have emotional impact. Marcel is a poignant character, steadfast and resourceful, but tinged with a sense of tragedy, and there's something genuinely touching about his depiction, and the portrayal from Jenny Slate. I found the mockumentary format a little disorientating though. Marcel, through Dean, becomes a YouTube sensation, in a metafictional nod to Marcel's genesis, and the insertion of the director always feels a little bit awkward. It is, in some ways, what makes the film feel unique, and what also connect Marcel's world to our own. But the charm of the film lies not in the framing, but in the characterisation. The rest is a distraction. But overall, as far as animated features go, this was a pretty entertaining one, and one with more depth than many you come across. I was surprised, but my 7yo who I watched this with really loved it, and I think that makes it a grand success.

27. To Leslie

Directed by Michael Morris

I knew not much about this before watching it, other than Andrea Riseborough's nomination for Best Actress at the Oscars was a "big surprise", and highlighted the weird processes that go into campaigning-but-not-campaigning for the award. It turns out, it's a drama about alcoholism, featuring Riseborough as the titular Leslie: a woman who meanders through the ghosts of her past, after squandering her lottery winnings on partying hard for many years. She eventually ends up in her home town, where she is largely rejected until she meets Sweeney (Marc Maron) who offers her a job at the local motel. Honestly, the main beats of the story are well-worn in the pantheon of cinema. This is a tale of addiction and recovery that we've seen done many times before—and in some ways it's been done a lot better. It's still at times affecting, which I guess is why we keep seeing this type of story. In large part, it's successful due to a performance from Riseborough that is indeed excellent. She manages to inhabit Leslie with a believability that's striking on screen. Less successful though is her eventual redemption arc: we spend a lot of time feeling pity for Leslie, but rarely optimism. So it feels as though there's a slight disingenuousness about where the story ends up going, especially her relationship with Sweeney, the man who succeeds where Leslie's dearest friends and family have failed. I think to a large degree the script is the issue—it spends a lot of time on the characterisation of Leslie, but little time in developing its narrative in a way that would make more dramatic sense. This is particularly true of the very rushed ending, which provides us with a disappointingly abrupt tonal shift. But it's hard to deny that Riseborough is the star, and in my opinion, she deserves the Oscar nomination. Surprise or not; getting this film in front of the eyeballs of the Academy is probably all that was needed to make that happen.

28. Fire of Love

Directed by Sara Dosa

An interesting documentary chronicling the lives of Katia and Maurice Krafft, two married volcanologists, who dedicate their lives to their study. It's pieced together from the vast amount of footage the two filmed as part of their work, and from their home movies sharing their lives. There's a thrill about being so close to the volcanoes here—the Kraffts had a reputation for being more daring in their approach to volcanology than many of their peers—and the pictures of lava, eruptions, and ultimately the "grey volcanoes" that become their speciality are compelling. The director of the film also does a reasonable job of piecing together the home movies into a narrative about their lives. Less successful is the the narration, which is written with bombast—poetic in some ways, but offputting at others—and delivered with idiosyncratic style by Miranda July. It makes some effort to cover the patchwork nature of the visuals, but the seams are still visible a little too often. As such, while it feels like a bit of a treat to see this imagery in a feature film, I wasn't so compelled by the feature and the way it was presented as a whole. It attempts to make it greater than its raw material—but when your raw material is exploding lava, maybe you don't need to make the attempt.

29. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Directed by Guillermo del Toro

This is by far and away the best adaptation of Pinocchio I've seen, even as (or perhaps because) Guillermo del Toro takes liberties with the scattered plot of the original. Pinocchio is a wooden boy carved in a drunken fit of depression by Geppetto, mourning the loss of his own son in the First World War. Brought to life by a wood sprite, Pinocchio is never the son Geppetto has lost, and follows his own meandering path. It's obviously a very beautiful film—made with exquisite stop-motion, and lit in golden hues that make it aesthetically pleasing from start to finish. There's also a sense that this is a labour of love for Del Toro—everything is done with meticulous craft. But we get pretty quickly to the fundamental problem with the three (? more?) adaptations of the story we've had in the last few years, which is that the story of Pinocchio kinda sucks, despite some (if not all) of its themes being quite moving. This film does a little better here than some others—especially its focus on what it means to be a "real boy", replacing one who was lost. But there are things, like the sense of repeated punishment Pinocchio receives for being "a bad boy", which feel stuck in the late 19th century. They're fundamental to the story in some ways, so it always feels as though they're going to pollute any adaptation. However, this film works at other levels. Aside from the beautiful animation, the transplantation of the tale to the inter-war era of Benito Mussolini allows Del Toro to explore some of the darkness at its core in a political context, although this is only partially successful. It certainly makes it a more meaningfully dark film than a Pinocchio story often is. For these reasons, I do consider it a fairly successful adaptation—but I still have a deep problem with the source material, and I really hope that this film is "good enough" to stop people attempting to remake it for a while.

30. Living

Directed by Oliver Hermanus

I've seen Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru many years ago—enough that I only vaguely remember the story, but I do still remember its emotional impact. Living, based on Kurosawa's work, with a new screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, moves the story to post-war England, where career bureaucrat Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) learns that he has only months to live, and seeks to find his life's purpose in the little time he has left. The problem I had with this film was that it did seem all too familiar. Afterwards, I went and read the synopsis of Ikiru only to discover that yes, basically every single beat of the plot is followed in chronological order. It's not so much a rewrite as a transplantation, although Ishiguro's dialogue and characterisation is undoubtedly strong. The fact remains though, the setting of mid-century Japan, and mid-century England has a similar level of emotional repression—so the characterisation is common to both. Bill Nighy is genuinely very good in this role, but it's not really a career-defining one. It would in some ways be a rather forgettable film without him though—if it's not a grand highlight, it's at least a punctuation mark, and his presence elevates what could have been a rather flat remake. One of the main issues of making this so closely aligned with the original, though, is that while they're set in a similar time period, the age in which they were made is very different. You can't really ignore 70 years of cultural change, and making this film in 1952, and making it in 2023 is a very different proposition. That makes this film feel naive and static to some extent. I suspect that although it has bestowed the title of "Oscar nominee" on the great Bill Nighy, in a few years, this film will be nothing more than a footnote.

31. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

A disappointing but undeniably beautiful film, Bardo sees Alejandro G. Iñárritu turn his focus inwards and outwards at the same time, in his attempt to make what seems an autobiographical film into one with something to say about universal truths. Unfortunately, it feels very self-absorbed, and rarely has any insight beyond the inner world of his main character. Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a Mexican documentarian. His latest film, which provides Bardo's subtitle, is a divisive work of docu-fiction that has been seen as both his crowning achievement and his inevitable downfall. As he prepares to accept a lifetime achievement award, he reflects on his career, his lost child, and his bipartite life, split between Mexico and the United States. It plays very much with style and form as a way to explore a character's internal state, and it is in some ways quite ambitious in what it's trying to do. Gama frequently experiences surreal waking dreams in which symbols and events from his past are made concrete. It reflects his documentary fiction, in which he tries to blur the lines of reality, but much less successfully than the film-within-a-film supposedly does. Gama feels very much like a self-insert from Iñárritu, and watching it often feels like reading someone's angsty, faux-profound diary that he perceives as an unfathomable work of genius. But it's beautifully realised. The cinematography is wonderful, combining beautiful work with light, and long tracking shots which require some real technical skill to choreograph and pull off. There is a real sense of wanting to capture on film the wonder of Mexico, and this is achieved in grand style. Unfortunately, Iñárritu seems to have reached that point in his career where he tries to dive too deeply into introspection. I feel like he should remember that his films need to be entertaining to people other than himself. The fact that he doesn't makes for a film that's difficult to digest, and ultimately probably quite forgettable.

32. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Directed by Ryan Coogler

This film has a very heavy burden on its shoulders. The loss of your main star, and in tragic circumstances, is a difficult thing to write around for a start, but it also forces the film to honour Chadwick Boseman's legacy intrinsically. As a result, it's quite a leaden film. Its pace is much slowed as the characters deal with their grief. It feels like it tries hard to match the emotional response we all had when such a bright star was taken from us in real life. And as a result, it's a film that really struggles to come to terms with its actual plot. The plot, when it finally arrives almost halfway through the film, concerns another mystery nation who also has a source of vibranium, formed by Mesoamericans who took to the oceans prior to colonisation. It tries very hard to replicate the themes of the first film, and it's partially successful, leaving aside the fact that we've seen them before. The story though is largely forgettable. It moves away from the ideas of isolationism versus outreach that were so powerful in the first film, and settles more on a standard "threat of war" motif that is much less morally complex and engaging. Performances are reasonably good across the board, although I found Letitia Wright very much weighed down in her lead role—it's a part that doesn't suit Shuri so well, even a Shuri who is grieving for her brother. Angela Bassett is great as an under-utilised Ramonda, and deserves her rare MCU acting Oscar nom. And the technical side of things is of course very good, although I found some of the set pieces depressingly formulaic, especially having seen films like RRR recently. So overall, I think it probably does its best under difficult circumstances. But I remember feeling this sense of uplift and joy at the way the first film was put together. I feel like this one still has the skill behind it; it's just working with a significant handicap.

33. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

Directed by Anthony Fabian

I do love Leslie Manville, and so I thought this film might be greater than it seemed on the surface. Mrs. Harris (Manville) a war-widow who works as a cleaner for the wealthy, falls in love with a Christian Dior dress she sees at the house of one of her clients. When she unexpectedly comes into a windfall of cash, she travels to Paris to get one of her very own. It's a paper-thin plot, and as much as it tries to embellish itself with issues of class, it never feels genuinely substantial. The streets of Paris are not the romantic fantasy you might expect, but are instead filled with garbage as the ébouers of the city are on strike. Manville is dismissed at the couture house out of hand until she shows great wodges of hard currency. These suggest the fringes of another, better plot that never eventuates. In the end, there's a remarkable conservatism to it. It's a fairy-tale, not a social statement—and the ultimate goal of the film is wish fulfilment rather than a sense of revolution. Meandering through fairly minor obstacles, Mrs. Harris will eventually get her dress, we can be assured of that. Perhaps she learns something along the way; perhaps she teaches something to those rich snobs. But maybe not. I also had a real problem with the filming. Shot in stark digital, it looks like a documentary, or an on-a-budget TV show more often than not, and that jars with the perception of it as a period piece. I know this is just my own expectations colouring my view: but there's constant cognitive dissonance when everything genuinely looks like it was shot in the 2020s, but is supposed to represent post-war Europe. Manville is a great actress, and she deserves more opportunities to shine. But to be honest, I was disappointed that this is the vehicle she got to do it in. She, and we all, deserve better.

34. Babylon

Directed by Damien Chazelle

This film starts out incredibly strongly—it has a massively vibrant, chaotic and unhinged party scene, complete with deaths, debauchery and an elephant. It's a riotous piece of direction. Knowing the film was 3 hours long, I said "if this film never leaves this party, I'm going to be okay with that". It would be a wild and bold decision. Unfortunately, not only does this not occur, the film turns into that most disappointing of things: "A Salute To The Movies Themselves!". Attempting to show the seamy underbelly of early Hollywood, it falls instead into the easy trap of filmmakers for decades, which is thinking that a story about themselves is intrinsically interesting. We've seen it too many times before. Damian Chazelle does have some skills in the intensity of his production, although his trademarks are starting to get a little too obvious, especially when you put this film side-by-side with La La Land. It gets tiresome after a while, and even Chazelle seems to admit that he can't maintain the pace of the film for its very long running time. Margot Robbie is quite good as the rising silent film star who can't hack it in a changing world (although explicitly juxtaposing her with a screening of Singin' in the Rain is way too on-the-nose), as is Diego Calva as a rising studio producer. Brad Pitt largely sleepwalks through his role, but there's a surprisingly scene-stealing turn from Tobey Maguire as a criminal mobster. But overall, the film didn't hang together nearly well enough as a whole. It feels a little bit like it was being pulled one way into a grotesquerie—a depiction of the fall of Babylon implied by its title—and in another way into a standard Hollywood story about itself. If it had've just stayed to the excesses and energy of the former, I probably would have liked it a whole heap more.

35. Blonde

Directed by Andrew Dominik

Based on the fictionalisation of Marilyn Monroe's life by Joyce Carol Oates, Andrew Dominik's Blonde tells a condensed and dramatised version of Norma Jeane Mortensen's life; from her childhood, longing for a father who may never have existed in any tangible way, to her stardom and eventual death. There was honestly so much, on the surface, that was going for this film. We have a really quite electric turn from Ana De Armas as Marilyn Monroe, navigating a tricky path between melodrama and parody. We have Dominik's distinct visual style, evoking tropes of Hollywood's Golden Age, and whip-fast editing to make the film feel pacier than its length. And although I've not read the source material, I assume it probably has some depth to it that can be explored. Unfortunately, while the visual style is striking, and Ana De Armas manages to cut a strange figure in the middle of it, much of the rest of the film is quite poor. A lot of the problems come from the script, and the personification of Monroe as a perpetual child seeking to build the family she never had. It's patronising both to its subject and to the audience, as we see again and again how the pattern repeats. It's also wildly exploitative—including some really grossly overdone sex scenes that border on abuse (and seriously did we need quite so many leering close-ups of her iconic scene in The Seven Year Itch? No we did not). There's also a really clunking, bordering on offensive treatment of abortion. This is magnified horribly later when Monroe gets pregnant again—the framing of her pregnancy with reference to her earlier abortion is wildly problematic. To quote from my notes I wrote during the film: "You are a fuck for framing it that way you absolute shit of a movie." But like I said, there were some qualities to the production which worked for me—much better than some other films this Oscars season—even when the director picks odd times to switch between fantasy and realism. As much as it feels like Dominik is trying to reconcile Monroe's public persona with her personal life, it ends up feeling like he's taking the most outlandish take on the latter to generate drama. Finally, I'd just like to say that the bottles of beer Adrian Brody carries down to the beach are clearly empty and that annoyed me. Boy I hope someone got fired for that blunder.

36. The Whale

Directed by Darren Aronofsky

A deeply troubled and troubling film. Brendan Fraser launches himself back to our screens as Charlie, a severely obese man who teaches English classes online among visits from his friend Liz (Hong Chau), who is also his nurse, his estranged daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) and a young missionary who chances upon Charlie when preaching door-to-door (Ty Simpkins). There's honestly the core of a good story here. Charlie left his family to start a relationship with a young male student, who subsequently died. Ellie is still angry at his abandonment. Liz tries to convince Charlie he needs more medical attention than she can provide. And everything is tied together with a recurring essay on Moby Dick, which Charlie has some unexpected attachment to. But it's really hard to overlook the fatphobic heart of the film. Brendan Fraser is honestly quite sympathetic as Charlie, but he's also a caricature in a fatsuit. Aronofsky really goes out of his way to make Charlie as physically repulsive as possible, in a kind of gleeful voyeurism. It's a really awful way of portraying the character—the goal is, I suppose, to have the audience have to grapple with our supposed prejudices. But it's really done in bad faith. While the title is arguably a reference to Moby Dick, it's also clearly designed to be provocative in the same way. The nail in the coffin is the fact that this would have been a successful film were Charlie not portrayed with the same sense of vulgarity. Would this have been just as emotionally resonant if they didn't put Brendan Fraser in a fatsuit? Yep. So why does Aronofsky do it? We can draw our own conclusions. It also suffers from the fate of plays which are adapted for the screen—a sense of claustrophobia and a separation from the naturalism you can get from film. It's a series of vignettes as characters enter, stage left. While the performances are good across the board (Hong Chau definitely deserves her Best Supporting Actress nod, and Samantha Morton makes a very good late appearance as well), there's still a slightly stilted quality to the convenience of having them turn up, one by one at Charlie's apartment. But the point is, there's something deeply unpleasant in its soul—and that really very much limits my enjoyment of the film. It could have been so much better.

37. Tell It Like a Woman

Directed by Taraji P. Henson, Catherine Hardwicke, Lucia Puenzo, Mipo O, Maria Sole Tognazzi, Leena Yadav, Lucia Bulgheroni & Silvia Carobbio

An extremely fractured anthology film of barely related shorts with the vague theme of "women", which isn't really a theme, and which I only had to watch because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science's songwriting division has an obsession with Diane Warren. The song which garners Warren her 14th nomination (without win), Applause appears awkwardly in the film and then two or possible seven times over the closing credits. The shorts are extremely variable. The first two, (Pepcy & Kim, and Elbows Deep) are really undercooked. They look and feel like they were rehearsed and filmed in a day between other projects, despite (or perhaps because) they had some big names in them. What's more, both of them have a cringe-inducing PSA-style "this was based on a true story can you believe it!" finale where they introduce you to the real hero behind the film. I was very concerned early on. They fortunately get a little better from here. Lagonero follows a generic Woo Girl-Boss character (Eva Longoria) who returns to her home town in Italy after her estranged sister dies. It at least looks like it had some effort put into its production. A Week in My Life is a softly observed portrait of a single mother in Japan juggling all the elements of her life. It was quite sweet, and definitely one of the strongest in the anthology. I found the next film, Unspoken, perhaps the most resonant and coherent—it's the kind of thing that felt like someone with a true love for the short-film form had control of it. It was nicely shot, and well-contained—with just enough story to make it interesting, but not too much as to make it feel like it suffered too shallow a treatment. Sharing a Ride takes us to the streets of Mumbai, where an affluent cosmetic surgeon shares a rickshaw one day with a transgender model and finds herself conflicted. Thematically, it was perhaps the most interesting, but it was really weirdly handled and it felt like there was little control over the end result. It's also the first instance of Applause and it really feels like it was crowbarred in, when they could have left it as the first music cue over the credits instead. Finally, we have a jarring switch to mid-tier computer animation for Aria, a low-rent, wordless sci-fi about character punching out of their little pink- and blue-coded boxes. As much as it tries to be profound, it ends up too obvious and very disappointing. Overall, it's really not a film—and the anthology element is largely meaningless. I suggest it's better to pick and choose the best parts, and leave the rest on the side of the kerb for an early morning pickup.

38. The Sea Beast

Directed by Chris Williams

This was certainly a film that was eligible for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars. It's longer than 40 minutes, it's animated, and it got a cinematic release in the Los Angeles area. Unfortunately, apart from that, its qualifications for the nomination is has received are much less tangible. Sea beasts have been ravaging human ships for generations, and Captain Crow is one of the bravest hunters of the beasts; he particularly seeks a great red beast who attacked him in his youth. When his adopted son ends up being trapped with the beast, he forges a friendship and I'm just going to trail off because I'm getting a bit bored. I think what many people were crying out for was How To Train Your Dragon, only the dragon is sea-bound, the writing is worse and the characterisation extremely bland, and lucky for you The Sea Beast delivers on this score. It's a film we've seen before, only it's been done less well. Clutching at nice things to say about it, I will say that they've done an excellent job of rendering the water of the oceans. They swirl and foam with remarkable realism. But it's often quite a jarring effect that doesn't work with the fairly straightforward CG animation of the characters, ships and beasts. In fact, it ends up feeling a little bit like someone came up with a great new algorithm to simulate water, and they built a film around the technology using whatever rudimentary building blocks they had. Yeah, overall, this was a bit of a stinker for me. It's very much making up the numbers in the Oscars nominations this year, and I can guarantee you there were at least three or four other films that met those minimum eligibility requirements which would be more worthy in this one's place.

39. Avatar: The Way of Water

Directed by James Cameron

I really don't know where to start with this film. I was deeply skeptical about the whole principle of an extended Avatar series even before I sat down to watch what was a 3+ hour long behemoth. The original was a film that everyone saw once and then immediately forgot about. Perhaps it had some die-hard fans, but I don't think anyone ever really took it seriously as a major piece of filmmaking after the initial hype died away. First up, I found it a frankly breathtaking piece of arrogance from James Cameron that he just threw us back into this world, what, 13? years after the original, knowing honestly that no one really cared enough about this film to rewatch it, and just expected us to remember these characters. There's no recapitulation; there's not even a sense that we're learning about how the characters have grown or what their relationships are like. We get a quick-fire "Sully and Ney'tiri (I had to look up the name) have had some kids cool now back to the CGI", and that's it. But this is emblematic of one of the main problems with the whole film. It's so, goddamn, boring. And the reason is that I just didn't care about these characters—the film spent no time at all (and goddamn, it had so much time it could have spent) making me relate to anyone? The closest you get is a sense that "these are the good guys, these are the bad guys—and you don't want to root for the bad guys, do ya?". That's what the entire emotional affectiveness boils down to. There are, sure, action sequences and glossy water rendering, but these are things which tug at the eyes and not at the soul. Moreover, the script was bananas bad, and I don't at all place the blame on this on the heavy lifting I was expected to do in remembering Avatar 1. There are plot devices which are introduced and then just never mentioned again. Pandora is supposedly being prepped for human habitation, seemingly as a flimsy excuse to put the Na'vi and the humans in conflict again. There's some elixir derived from the Pandoran whales which can provide human immortality—this is brought up once and then nothing further in the film relies on it. Generously, you could say that these are just presaging things that will become more relevant in the next (oh god!) 4 or 5 Avatar films that are already in the pipeline—but in this film they stuck out like the scene in The Room where Tommy Wiseau's mother says she has cancer and everyone just goes on their merry way. One thing the original had going for it was its contribution to CGI—in particular the processing of facial features of the actors onto their Na'vi counterparts. But this is no longer cutting-edge, and it honestly feels like this wasn't significantly better 13 years on. It's amusing to compare this to the much more expressive and evocative style of something like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish which took deliberate steps away from very finely-grained feature rendering. But, as I said, the greatest sin of this film is that it was so dull. So, so, so, so dull. And even now, just two days after I saw it, I can feel the details of the film starting to elude me. I just didn't care what was going on—why should I expend the effort to remember it. My brain has already decided that the plot of The Way of Water is not at all useful information to retain. And the fact that I had to sit through 3 hours and 12 minutes of tedium for so little result ends up making me angry and sleepy. And, to count down the short films, which where we have an entry missing. There just seemed to be no legitimate (or even semi-legitimate) way to watch this in Australia this year. I was extremely pleased that this year we had cinematic releases of the Short Film packages in Sydney—they played at many of the independent cinemas around the city, but only the Live Action and Animation categories. I would have made a special visit to see the Documentaries as well, even though I managed to find the other four by other means. As always, these were a very worthwhile outing, and I'm really so pleased that the Academy continues to honour short films. While there were some questionable choices this year, if the alternative was to not have these categories at all, I know what I'd choose.

1. An Irish Goodbye

Directed by Ross White, Tom Berkeley

A charming black comedy that follows two estranged brothers who return to the family farm after their mother dies. Lorcan, the younger, has Down syndrome and needs care that his mother can no longer provide. His brother lives in London and has no desire to become his guardian. When they stumble upon a wish list of things their mother wanted to do before she died, they resolve to complete the list before going their separate ways. It's a sweet film, and a funny one, despite having a lot of depression and grief in its core. It's about reconnection and grappling with the past. It's obviously about loss. It's also just enjoyable in a way that many of the others in this year's list were not—there were some excellent films that were hard to watch; tense films, films with dark themes, perplexing films. This was heartening and crowd-pleasing, and I think it was also perhaps just the most well-made.

2. The Red Suitcase

Directed by Cyrus Neshvad

A tense film about a teenage girl who arrives solo from Iran to Luxembourg to marry a stranger in an arranged wedding. Her anxiety and reticence match with her fear and naivety in a foreign land as she attempts to find an escape. It's a fine short film—and one which gets the stakes just right. It's thrilling because we learn just enough to care about this character, without getting bogged down in exposition. That's a hard line to walk in a short film, given the limited time you have to work with. There was perhaps a few moments of convenience in the film, where things just fell in a slightly improbably way—although there was certainly no unambiguously happy ending to be had, despite the fact that she manages quite frequently to make an escape at just the right moment. I still think it was one of the stronger films from this year's Live Action shorts contingent. It certainly shows a film-maker with good control of the form.

3. Stranger at the Gate

Directed by Joshua Seftel

An honestly fascinating documentary short, about an ex-soldier who grapples with deeply entrenched Islamophobia after his return from 25 years of fighting the war on terror. The structure of the film is really quite wonderful—you think it's going to be a very different story to the one it ends up telling, and while this feels a little manipulative after the fact, it's hard to deny that it massively increases the power of the film as a result. One of the more engaging documentary shorts I've seen this year.

4. The Martha Mitchell Effect

Directed by Anne Alvergue, Debra McClutchy

A fascinating short documentary on Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Richard Nixon's attorney-general. While Nixon's cadre was openly antagonistic to the press, Mitchell, a strong supporter of the president, manages to engage them and others with her energetic style, and uses them to the advantage of the administration. Then, Watergate happens, Mitchell starts to question the president (and her husband), and she's used as a pawn in a damning game of coverups and gaslighting. It's a portrait of a woman who was falling very much outside the mould of what a proper political wife should be, and how she was punished for it. The "Martha Mitchell Effect" of the title becomes the name of a phenomenon where someone is proven right after being thought crazy or deluded—and it does a good job of examining this prominent example of it. I found it a very engaging documentary about a compelling individual, about whom I knew nothing before watching it.

5. Ice Merchants

Directed by João Gonzalez

A beautiful, wordless animated short, following a father and son who deliver ice from their house high on a mountain top to the village below each day. It has a pleasing sense of the surreal to it, and very handsome artwork in a hand-drawn style. It also seems to try to want to say something about climate change, and consumerism, but it's heavy-handed on the first point, and muddled on the second—to the extent that I'm not entirely sure what it was trying to say (if anything). But it's enjoyable on its own terms, and at a bite-size 11 minutes, it's easily digestible as well.

6. My Year of Dicks

Directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir

A really quite wonderful short film, about a teenage girl and the sequence of boyfriends she has over a year. It's drawn in an engaging rotoscoped style that's both expressively realistic and able to be used for artistic embellishment—it's the kind of animation the Oscars tends to love. Better is the engagement with the vagaries of teenage life—that sense of wanting to grow up too fast, but also the fear of it, of making mistakes that will shape you into the adult you will become. It manages to do all of this with quite a short running time. I enjoyed it a great deal, even if it was perhaps not as inventive as some of the other examples in this category this year.

7. Le Pupille

Directed by Alice Rohrwacher

A fascinating and perplexing film which takes place in a Catholic orphanage in Italy over Christmas during World War II. In exchange for prayers from the orphans for loved ones away in battle, the townsfolk give food items for the orphanage's Christmas lunch. But it also deals (in wonderfully ironic fashion) with what it means to be good or bad, and even in a world with fairly stark boundaries drawn on this count, we see the innocents, and the nuns, show questionable judgement when it comes to morality. Chief is the Mother Superior, played wonderfully by Alba Rohrwacher whom I mostly know from the films of Laura Bispuri. Stylistically, it's one of the most inventive of the shorts this year as well, telling part of the story through a letter, and through song, while we get rapid-fire editing to juxtapose scenes for satirical purposes. It was also, by the end, a little unsatisfying. I suspect there's something to "get" more than I did—perhaps, for instance, it's more poignant if you grew up with strict Catholicism. But it was good enough to just come along for the ride as well.

8. The Flying Sailor

Directed by Amanda Forbis, Wendy Tilby

A very quick-fire short, about a sailor tossed in the air by a massive TNT explosion who has moments, tumbling in the air, to reflect on his life. It's really beautifully animated with a free-form style that nonetheless manages to feel a little like rotoscoping, with fleshy rendered humanity superimposed on ethereal backgrounds. It's not, perhaps, the most narratively interesting of the Oscar-nominated shorts this year, but I found it honestly rather beguiling.

9. Ivalu

Directed by Anders Walter, Pipaluk K. Jørgensen

A beautifully shot short film about a young Greenlander girl who is searching for her runaway sister. It shows some really wonderfully stark imagery of the island, including its glaciers, tors and bays, and even extracts beauty from the desolation of things like an abandoned military facility. Story-wise I found it a bit predictable, marking fairly well-trodden territory. It also had a disappointing choice to not rely on implication as heavily as it might have—in the end, the reveal is made explicit and the film loses some of its power. Still, it was pleasant to look at, and had some interesting thematic resonance. It could have been truly devastating though with a few changes.

10. An Ostrich Told Me The World Is Fake And I Think I Believe It

Directed by Lachlan Pendragon

An amusing metafictional tale of an office worker who begins to believe that he's a stop-motion animation character when he notices all of the parts of his world that don't make sense. It's clever in some ways, from its framing to its sense of deadpan humour. I think it also wants to be be seen as more profound than it is, which is a fatal flaw when it could be happy being an amusing diversion. But if you don't look too hard at it, you can enjoy it for what it is. It at least has a real spark of originality to it, which is worth a lot.

11. Haulout

Directed by Maxim Arbugaev, Evgenia Arbugaeva

An interesting, almost dialogue-free short about a marine biologist studying walruses in the Arctic. He arrives at a desolated hut, wanders around a bit getting himself set up, until one day he opens the door and all you can see are walruses for miles and miles. This is the "haulout" of the title, and it's quite a remarkable thing to capture on film. The film also makes some belated comments on climate change and the melting of ice floes, which have made the migration and haulout much more extreme year to year. But the film's strength is in its imagery, and it's a good thing that it largely manages to just sit and allow that to wash over us.

12. Night Ride

Directed by Eirik Tveiten

Dang. I really wanted to love this film, and early on there was a wonderful sense of dark comedy as a woman semi-accidentally steals a tram and takes it for a joyride (including picking up passengers). Unfortunately, the plot pivots on a nasty instance of transphobia, and it's patently unnecessary—although the trans character is sympathetic and we are definitely on her side, it's a depiction we really don't need, especially in this time of anti-trans rhetoric. The most annoying thing is that there are other ways you could provide the beats to the story, and keep the good parts. But this was a deliberate choice made by the filmmaker to not do that, and that's a problem. This unfortunately means this is The Whale of the shorts this year.

13. The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse

Directed by Peter Baynton, Charlie Mackesy

First up: this film is gorgeous. It is a beautifully rendered delicate pencil-and-watercolour style which allows for motion and naturalism. I genuinely loved looking at it. Unfortunately, the film otherwise is extremely glib. It follows a young boy who is looking for "home", and meets the titular animals along the way. These animals share little snippets of trite wisdom which vaguely relate to their current state: "honesty is never boring", "asking for help isn't giving up; it's refusing to give up", "home is where it's warm". It makes the film feel like a pocket-sized book of koans rather than an actual story. There's also a strangely common mode of voice-acting in these British shorts of late (I'm reminded of Robin Robin from last year's Oscars), where everything has to be soft-spoken to the point of being devoid of emotion, which adds to the general sense of lassitude. Tom Hollander as the mole is the worst offender here, but I found Gabriel Byrne as the morose horse similarly lacklustre. But it is beautiful to look at. If you just enjoy the visuals, you can probably ignore the fact that otherwise it's a threadbare tapestry of aphorisms.

14. The Elephant Whisperers

Directed by Kartiki Gonsalves

A disappointingly banal tale of a man and a woman working for India's Park Service caring for orphaned elephants. While the work is interesting enough, it falls into the fatal trap of projecting humanity onto the elephants; a problem we've seen recently in other films like the facile My Octopus Teacher. It also does a poor job of actually engaging with the work that the carers do—it largely focuses on the concept of the elephants being their children, but doesn't address obvious questions like "why do all the elephants have chains around their legs?". I suspect there's a reasonable answer (e.g. "at this moment in their recovery, were they to escape to the forest they'd likely die"), but the fact that the documentary doesn't want to engage with these obvious questions means it feels shallow. Not to mention that there would be an interesting engagement to be had about the nature of care. Honestly, this was one of the more disappointing shorts I saw this year, and it really didn't work for me on any level. All that's left is my Oscars ballot, so why don't we do that? As always, I'm limited to just the nominees in the category, which often means I end up voting for something that doesn't seem like the right fit, or else is for a film that I actually didn't like that much. But roll with me here: Best Picture: Tár Best Director: Todd Field (Tár) Best Actor: Paul Mescal (Aftersun) Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (Tár), although I understand why this is a tight tussle with Michelle Yeoh this year Best Supporting Actor: Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once) Best Supporting Actress: Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All at Once) Best Original Screenplay: Tár Best Adapted Screenplay: Glass Onion Best Animated Feature: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish Best International Feature: Close Best Documentary Feature: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed Best Documentary Short: The Martha Mitchell Effect Best Live Action Short: An Irish Goodbye Best Animated Short: Ice Merchants Best Original Score: All Quiet on the Western Front Best Original Song: Naatu Naatu from RRR Best Sound: Top Gun: Maverick Best Production Design: All Quiet on the Western Front Best Cinematography: Tár Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (fight me, The Whale) Best Costume Design: Everything Everywhere All at Once Best Film Editing: Everything Everywhere All at Once Best Visual Effects: Top Gun: Maverick There we go, I'm done for another year. Have a read, let me know what you think on Twitter. Tomorrow, I undertake th e most underwhelming part of this whole project: watching the actual Oscars ceremony.

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