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slipjig3Oh hey, look, Adam's dusting off his blog in March! Must be another pre-Oscars thing! *confetti*
After an off year when we watched bugger-all,hypnagogie have actually made it through all ten Best Picture nominees this time around. We've still got a few of the acting and screenplay titles to go through, but I'll be damned if I'm going to watch a bunch of movies and not blather about them, and so:
Bugonia — Say this for the guy: ain’t nobody out there Yorgin’ like Yorgos Lanthimos. First off, the acting is stellar across the board (Jesse Plemons should absolutely be on the list and Lanthimos may be the best thing ever to happen to Emma Stone), and the movie pulls off the tightrope act of keeping you guessing right up until its go-for-broke ending and equally go-for-broke denouement. Also, and this should not be merely implied, this thing is weird, in a way that I’m a little stunned at its nomination even with the love the director has gotten lately. Is it perfect? No, of course not. Is it well made? Yes. Is it unlike anything else you’ve seen this year? By a far march, yes. If you’re not into Lanthimos, this isn’t going to be the one to change your mind, but it’s a funky slice of gnarly dark-comic tension whose bubble I was happy to step into.
F1 — Remember, kids: the F in F1 stands for Formula! I mean seriously, why is this here? It’s one thing to honor a big, brassy ’80s-style action throwback when it’s Mad Max: Fury Road or Top Gun: Maverick, but c’mon, gang, this ain’t it. The worst offender is that screenplay, a factory-settings storyline applied to dialogue as thin and wooden as a balsa model plane kit, so blitheringly bad that even Brad Pitt and Kerry Condon and Javier Bardem couldn’t do anything with it. (Of particular note are the race announcers, so bored they can’t be bothered to hide that they’re strictly here for steak-fisted exposition delivery.) The race scenes are the attraction, and they’re fine, but I cannot think of one moment during them when I cared. I’m okay with one or two of the tech nominations—the editing and sound are indeed worthy—but go down the list of all 2025 releases and tell me you can’t think of at least a half-dozen that deserve this spot more. Yes, ragging on this nomination right now is lazy and trendy. There are reasons for that.
Frankenstein — Wow, what a pretty movie. I mean, seriously gorgeous. The production design, the costumes, the cinematography, the whole magilla. So visually stunning, such a vision. So why did it miss me the way it did? Don’t get me wrong, it’s really good, not sorry I watched it, but for all its efforts and its fine acting I had no emotional connection to it when the credits rolled. It feels like Guillermo del Toro may be sliding into the same trap that snagged Wes Anderson and Tim Burton: he developed a unique visual style to help him convey his stories, but as some point the stories slid into the background as the style took over. My main issue is with Dr. Frankenstein himself, or rather his journey—he’s set up for a redemption arc, but then they skipped the arc and handed him his redemption with no questions asked. One of the best adaptations of the source novel out there, but I still wish they’d let us in more.
Hamnet — Oh. My. Everloving. Gods. Movie of the year, movie of the last two years, possibly movie of the last three, and two weeks later I’m still at a loss for words. We’ll start with the acting: Paul Mescal was robbed, both of the Jupe brothers were robbed, and if Jesse Buckley doesn’t win best actress something has gone very, very wrong. From there we’ll talk about the writing (kitana-sharp), the direction (exquisite and delicate), the production design and cinematography (no clue why we’re not talking about those more), and finally how they come together for some of the purest filmmaking I’ve seen in a long while. Hamnet punched me in the gut a bunch of times, notably during That Scream, but it’s the last ten minutes, that startling moment when she reaches forward and the startling moment and catharsis that follows…just…my gods, in the running for best scene of 2025, and yes, I’m keeping in mind what it’s up against. See this movie. Bring Gatorade. You’re going to lose some electrolytes. (And to those film bros who hath shat upon this movie for being, and I quote, “manipulative”: one, when you’re a bunch of dudes saying it about a woman-made film with a female protagonist specifically about emotional matters, “manipulative” has the same ring as “shrill” or “strident,” i.e., it’s not the film you have a problem with; and two, if you don’t want your emotions manipulated, why are you watching movies in the first place?)
Marty Supreme — Should be called Timothée Supreme because it truly lives or dies on Chalamet’s shoulders. It does, in fact, live, because yes, Chalamet is that good, but also because director Josh Safdie keeps his wits about him. He’s doing his own spin on the familiar Coen Brothers’ loose-elbowed, let’s-see-what-happens-even-if-it-has-fuck-all-to-do-with-what-happened-last picaresque storytelling. That can either work or be annoying, and in the Coens’ hands it’s starting to grate on me a little, but Safdie pulls off the crucial trick of making it all the same story even when it veers wildly off the road, like a less depressing Inside Llewyn Davis, one of the Coen titles that does it well. And so as not to gloss over the obvious, Chalamet nails it, never disappearing into the character completely but owning it with every fiber of his being. Not gonna rewrite the history books, but just a fun, solid, only a tad Oscar-bait-y movie with a great performance at the center. I’ll take it.
One Battle After Another — My one potentially minority-opinion hot take here: One Battle After Another is overrated. I know, I know, I like Paul Thomas Anderson, too, and he’s ages overdue for an Oscar, but OBAA has issues, mainly that it lost me at the jump and had to travel a loooong way to get me back again. That first hour kills the movie for me: it acts as one protracted setup for what feels like the actual story, and it’s an hour where we’re given zero (0) likable characters. Yes, even Leo DiCaprio, who I eventually came to love but only after he’s been removed from the introductory brouhaha. We’re given a group of revolutionaries whose fight seems too generalized to actually get anything done (although immigration is the hook the film hangs its hat on) and whose master plan boils down to Do Chaos and Make Crazy, which leaves us no place to stand and on one to root for. Once our leads have settled down and we finally have a stable base to stand on, the chaos has purpose and stakes and we can fear for our heroes’ safety and applaud their bravery, but an hour into a 160+ minute film is too long to wait for that. And yes, there’s a lot of good in the last hour and a half, but I was so cranky and exhausted by that point that I had a hard time admiring it from any closer than arm’s length. Again, minority opinion, and I can live with that, but when this wins best picture I’ll greet the news with a weary sigh
The Secret Agent — Every now and then a movie comes along that feels like it was shipped directly from the 1970’s—not just because of the setting (this takes place in 1977 Brazil), but because they don’t really make movies like this any more. Language is going to give me a hard time conveying this, but The Secret Agent has the rhythm and scope of a New Hollywood title like Chinatown or Taxi Driver, a big story about small people in a world out of their control, only without the male-coded ick. The story digresses and digresses again without feeling lost, letting those moments on the borders immerse us in this place and time the characters don’t fully understand, let alone us. Wagner Moura’s performance is a masterpiece of quiet in the line of fire, conveying in the smallest of ways a man keeping his life together by his fingernails when he knows raising his voice will do no good. And in a year where so many films are made or broken by their endings, I have worlds of admiration for the denouement, where we’re given a tense and explosive climax and the end result, and yet are denied anything resembling closure, reminding us that this all was long ago and miles away and not ours to hold.
Sentimental Value — This was my movie of the year up until Hamnet, and I so so so badly want it to be recognized while worried that it’ll be swallowed up by the competition. For such a quiet film, small enough to cradle in your palm, there is so much complexity and layering going on here that I’ll need to watch it two or three more times before I grasp it all. It’s about home and art and grief and generational trauma and the need to connect and the need and want to create, a story of four characters living and one long gone in a net so tangled it feels like there are more threads than places to attach them. The acting, the acting, again the acting, and also the visuals and editing, and wrap the screenplay in silver and place it somewhere where the light will catch it. And also again with that ending, meta without winking at us, poignant without beating us over the head, perfect. I’ve been sleeping on Joachim Trier up to now, and now I need to go back and watch everything he has ever made. Highly recommend.
Sinners — If Hamnet is Movie of the Year, Sinners is Event of the Year. How much is a miracle is this movie right now? In an industry running on a diet of franchises and existing intellectual property, along comes Ryan Coogler with a creation unlike anything else on the gods’ sun-battered earth, and everybody actually paid attention. I don’t even know what to say that hasn’t already been shouted from the hills, about the performances and the cinematography and the editing and the score and and and. Actually, I can’t go on without mentioning the music, not just because of what it is but how it’s used, bearing the weight of the story without crumbling into song-and-dance musical territory. It will shock no one to know what a sucker I am for the Power of Music trope, and my gods, does this deliver. My one quibble is another minority take, but I don’t think Coogler stuck the landing as tightly as some have said. The epilogue is nice and all, but I don’t know what gifts it gave us that the final onstage shot didn’t already deliver. (And bee tee dubs, it absolutely should not have been a mid-credit sequence. *flips off Marvel*) Sinners utterly obliterated the record for most Oscar nominations for a single film, and you know what? I think it deserves it.
Train Dreams — The cinematography has to come up, of course, so let’s start there: there isn’t a frame of Train Dreams that I don’t want to bask in, or sip like a cup of Earl Grey tea on a rainy day. In a way, the visuals are the story, and that is in no way a bad thing. I love a movie with patience, the willingness to forge a world and then just let us be in that world for a while. It’s a slow film, its story told at the speed of a life measured in its days rather than its minutes, and I am completely here for it. Again, though, we run into the ending, which weirdly has the same problem as Frankenstein, a film it couldn’t have less in common with. It’s another film about grief and recovering from it, and the grief is present like a grey cloud throughout most of the runtime, but he doesn’t come out the other side of grief so much as get pushed out unceremoniously by hands we don’t really see. The movie goes out of its way to show how he isn’t recovering, so we don’t get to share in the peace we’re told he has found. I found the journey of Train Dreams entrancing, but here we are at the final station, and I’m not clear on how we got here.
And now, for the tl:dr crowd, my ranking of all ten:
1) Hamnet
2) Sentimental Value
3) Sinners
4) The Secret Agent
5) Marty Supreme
6) Bugonia
7) Train Dreams
8) Frankenstein
9) One Battle After Another
10) F1
After an off year when we watched bugger-all,
hypnagogie have actually made it through all ten Best Picture nominees this time around. We've still got a few of the acting and screenplay titles to go through, but I'll be damned if I'm going to watch a bunch of movies and not blather about them, and so:Bugonia — Say this for the guy: ain’t nobody out there Yorgin’ like Yorgos Lanthimos. First off, the acting is stellar across the board (Jesse Plemons should absolutely be on the list and Lanthimos may be the best thing ever to happen to Emma Stone), and the movie pulls off the tightrope act of keeping you guessing right up until its go-for-broke ending and equally go-for-broke denouement. Also, and this should not be merely implied, this thing is weird, in a way that I’m a little stunned at its nomination even with the love the director has gotten lately. Is it perfect? No, of course not. Is it well made? Yes. Is it unlike anything else you’ve seen this year? By a far march, yes. If you’re not into Lanthimos, this isn’t going to be the one to change your mind, but it’s a funky slice of gnarly dark-comic tension whose bubble I was happy to step into.
F1 — Remember, kids: the F in F1 stands for Formula! I mean seriously, why is this here? It’s one thing to honor a big, brassy ’80s-style action throwback when it’s Mad Max: Fury Road or Top Gun: Maverick, but c’mon, gang, this ain’t it. The worst offender is that screenplay, a factory-settings storyline applied to dialogue as thin and wooden as a balsa model plane kit, so blitheringly bad that even Brad Pitt and Kerry Condon and Javier Bardem couldn’t do anything with it. (Of particular note are the race announcers, so bored they can’t be bothered to hide that they’re strictly here for steak-fisted exposition delivery.) The race scenes are the attraction, and they’re fine, but I cannot think of one moment during them when I cared. I’m okay with one or two of the tech nominations—the editing and sound are indeed worthy—but go down the list of all 2025 releases and tell me you can’t think of at least a half-dozen that deserve this spot more. Yes, ragging on this nomination right now is lazy and trendy. There are reasons for that.
Frankenstein — Wow, what a pretty movie. I mean, seriously gorgeous. The production design, the costumes, the cinematography, the whole magilla. So visually stunning, such a vision. So why did it miss me the way it did? Don’t get me wrong, it’s really good, not sorry I watched it, but for all its efforts and its fine acting I had no emotional connection to it when the credits rolled. It feels like Guillermo del Toro may be sliding into the same trap that snagged Wes Anderson and Tim Burton: he developed a unique visual style to help him convey his stories, but as some point the stories slid into the background as the style took over. My main issue is with Dr. Frankenstein himself, or rather his journey—he’s set up for a redemption arc, but then they skipped the arc and handed him his redemption with no questions asked. One of the best adaptations of the source novel out there, but I still wish they’d let us in more.
Hamnet — Oh. My. Everloving. Gods. Movie of the year, movie of the last two years, possibly movie of the last three, and two weeks later I’m still at a loss for words. We’ll start with the acting: Paul Mescal was robbed, both of the Jupe brothers were robbed, and if Jesse Buckley doesn’t win best actress something has gone very, very wrong. From there we’ll talk about the writing (kitana-sharp), the direction (exquisite and delicate), the production design and cinematography (no clue why we’re not talking about those more), and finally how they come together for some of the purest filmmaking I’ve seen in a long while. Hamnet punched me in the gut a bunch of times, notably during That Scream, but it’s the last ten minutes, that startling moment when she reaches forward and the startling moment and catharsis that follows…just…my gods, in the running for best scene of 2025, and yes, I’m keeping in mind what it’s up against. See this movie. Bring Gatorade. You’re going to lose some electrolytes. (And to those film bros who hath shat upon this movie for being, and I quote, “manipulative”: one, when you’re a bunch of dudes saying it about a woman-made film with a female protagonist specifically about emotional matters, “manipulative” has the same ring as “shrill” or “strident,” i.e., it’s not the film you have a problem with; and two, if you don’t want your emotions manipulated, why are you watching movies in the first place?)
Marty Supreme — Should be called Timothée Supreme because it truly lives or dies on Chalamet’s shoulders. It does, in fact, live, because yes, Chalamet is that good, but also because director Josh Safdie keeps his wits about him. He’s doing his own spin on the familiar Coen Brothers’ loose-elbowed, let’s-see-what-happens-even-if-it-has-fuck-all-to-do-with-what-happened-last picaresque storytelling. That can either work or be annoying, and in the Coens’ hands it’s starting to grate on me a little, but Safdie pulls off the crucial trick of making it all the same story even when it veers wildly off the road, like a less depressing Inside Llewyn Davis, one of the Coen titles that does it well. And so as not to gloss over the obvious, Chalamet nails it, never disappearing into the character completely but owning it with every fiber of his being. Not gonna rewrite the history books, but just a fun, solid, only a tad Oscar-bait-y movie with a great performance at the center. I’ll take it.
One Battle After Another — My one potentially minority-opinion hot take here: One Battle After Another is overrated. I know, I know, I like Paul Thomas Anderson, too, and he’s ages overdue for an Oscar, but OBAA has issues, mainly that it lost me at the jump and had to travel a loooong way to get me back again. That first hour kills the movie for me: it acts as one protracted setup for what feels like the actual story, and it’s an hour where we’re given zero (0) likable characters. Yes, even Leo DiCaprio, who I eventually came to love but only after he’s been removed from the introductory brouhaha. We’re given a group of revolutionaries whose fight seems too generalized to actually get anything done (although immigration is the hook the film hangs its hat on) and whose master plan boils down to Do Chaos and Make Crazy, which leaves us no place to stand and on one to root for. Once our leads have settled down and we finally have a stable base to stand on, the chaos has purpose and stakes and we can fear for our heroes’ safety and applaud their bravery, but an hour into a 160+ minute film is too long to wait for that. And yes, there’s a lot of good in the last hour and a half, but I was so cranky and exhausted by that point that I had a hard time admiring it from any closer than arm’s length. Again, minority opinion, and I can live with that, but when this wins best picture I’ll greet the news with a weary sigh
The Secret Agent — Every now and then a movie comes along that feels like it was shipped directly from the 1970’s—not just because of the setting (this takes place in 1977 Brazil), but because they don’t really make movies like this any more. Language is going to give me a hard time conveying this, but The Secret Agent has the rhythm and scope of a New Hollywood title like Chinatown or Taxi Driver, a big story about small people in a world out of their control, only without the male-coded ick. The story digresses and digresses again without feeling lost, letting those moments on the borders immerse us in this place and time the characters don’t fully understand, let alone us. Wagner Moura’s performance is a masterpiece of quiet in the line of fire, conveying in the smallest of ways a man keeping his life together by his fingernails when he knows raising his voice will do no good. And in a year where so many films are made or broken by their endings, I have worlds of admiration for the denouement, where we’re given a tense and explosive climax and the end result, and yet are denied anything resembling closure, reminding us that this all was long ago and miles away and not ours to hold.
Sentimental Value — This was my movie of the year up until Hamnet, and I so so so badly want it to be recognized while worried that it’ll be swallowed up by the competition. For such a quiet film, small enough to cradle in your palm, there is so much complexity and layering going on here that I’ll need to watch it two or three more times before I grasp it all. It’s about home and art and grief and generational trauma and the need to connect and the need and want to create, a story of four characters living and one long gone in a net so tangled it feels like there are more threads than places to attach them. The acting, the acting, again the acting, and also the visuals and editing, and wrap the screenplay in silver and place it somewhere where the light will catch it. And also again with that ending, meta without winking at us, poignant without beating us over the head, perfect. I’ve been sleeping on Joachim Trier up to now, and now I need to go back and watch everything he has ever made. Highly recommend.
Sinners — If Hamnet is Movie of the Year, Sinners is Event of the Year. How much is a miracle is this movie right now? In an industry running on a diet of franchises and existing intellectual property, along comes Ryan Coogler with a creation unlike anything else on the gods’ sun-battered earth, and everybody actually paid attention. I don’t even know what to say that hasn’t already been shouted from the hills, about the performances and the cinematography and the editing and the score and and and. Actually, I can’t go on without mentioning the music, not just because of what it is but how it’s used, bearing the weight of the story without crumbling into song-and-dance musical territory. It will shock no one to know what a sucker I am for the Power of Music trope, and my gods, does this deliver. My one quibble is another minority take, but I don’t think Coogler stuck the landing as tightly as some have said. The epilogue is nice and all, but I don’t know what gifts it gave us that the final onstage shot didn’t already deliver. (And bee tee dubs, it absolutely should not have been a mid-credit sequence. *flips off Marvel*) Sinners utterly obliterated the record for most Oscar nominations for a single film, and you know what? I think it deserves it.
Train Dreams — The cinematography has to come up, of course, so let’s start there: there isn’t a frame of Train Dreams that I don’t want to bask in, or sip like a cup of Earl Grey tea on a rainy day. In a way, the visuals are the story, and that is in no way a bad thing. I love a movie with patience, the willingness to forge a world and then just let us be in that world for a while. It’s a slow film, its story told at the speed of a life measured in its days rather than its minutes, and I am completely here for it. Again, though, we run into the ending, which weirdly has the same problem as Frankenstein, a film it couldn’t have less in common with. It’s another film about grief and recovering from it, and the grief is present like a grey cloud throughout most of the runtime, but he doesn’t come out the other side of grief so much as get pushed out unceremoniously by hands we don’t really see. The movie goes out of its way to show how he isn’t recovering, so we don’t get to share in the peace we’re told he has found. I found the journey of Train Dreams entrancing, but here we are at the final station, and I’m not clear on how we got here.
And now, for the tl:dr crowd, my ranking of all ten:
1) Hamnet
2) Sentimental Value
3) Sinners
4) The Secret Agent
5) Marty Supreme
6) Bugonia
7) Train Dreams
8) Frankenstein
9) One Battle After Another
10) F1
