Finally, my thoughts on 'Anora' (and more!)

In lieu of confronting this year's news, let's discuss nine of last year's movies

Been forever! Hi, sorry, how are you? The good news is absolutely nothing has happened between June 2024 and February 2025¹, so we can pick up right where we left off: rage, raging against the dying of the light and taking full advantage of our AMC A-List subscription, which remains a great deal in a world full of bad ones.

(Full disclosure: most of what follows is cribbed directly from my Letterboxd, so if you’ve already read these capsule reviews, I apologize. If you haven’t, SMASH THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON, FAM.)

Anora

It’s become de rigueur in certain film circles to lambast Sean Baker for telling sex workers’ stories that “aren’t his to tell” — which maybe to some extent I get? I wouldn’t mind him moving off the subject after five straight movies. But filmmakers have themes, even obsessions, and especially when they’re able to mine them for work that 1) resonates and 2) thoroughly entertains, who are we to tell them where to focus their attention, or if they’re allowed to in the first place?

Thank god ‘Anora’ is as funny as it is, because if it weren’t funny it would (just) be deliriously sad — an impossible world, the deck absolutely stacked against strivers, however pugnacious they might be. Anora will always exist on the fringes, Anora will never know real comfort or ease, and the Ivans of the world will never need to even consider their role in this, let alone apologize.

Joker: Folie a Deux

Listen. I'm not going to defend this movie's shortcomings, which are legion:

• boring courtroom scenes

• boring jailhouse scenes

• musical numbers afraid to actually be musical numbers²

• omitting that one trailer shot of Lady Gaga air-humping on the stairs

• overall *wasting the triple-threat talents of one Ms. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta*

I'd hesitate to call 'Joker: Folie a Deux' *good*, or even altogether coherent! I want that on record. And yet I'm in awe of its fuck-you energy, honed into a literal shiv to the gut that assures I'll remember it far longer than I will any "better" MCU movie released since at least 'Black Panther' (2018). This movie is taking SWINGS and I for one applaud them.

Oh god am I an incel

Babygirl

Was expecting utter chilliness, detached cynicism wrapped in Discourse™️. Would you believe that ‘Babygirl’ is… tender? Funny?? It’s easy to sleep on Nicole Kidman but she consistently challenges herself to go deeper, bare more, and if that’s easy sexual imagery it’s because sex and self are so entwined in a way that ‘Babygirl’ fully embodies. Finally saw ‘Nightbitch’ the other week but even with that movie literalizing the human-canine transformation, this still has 2024’s best scene of a woman acting like a dog.

Nosferatu

Premiering on Christmas alongside ‘Babygirl’ was just a coincidence of distribution but they do make a compelling double feature: two stories about women hiding their base desires under a veneer of respectability (girlbossing; bodices), desperate for someone to match their freak, whether an intern in yellow Adidas Gazelles or an ageless Romanian demon.

‘Babygirl’’s is the more hopeful ending, suggesting that whatever wacky shit calls to you doesn’t have to define you. You can be a businesswoman, a wife, mother, and yes — also a Babygirl. In ‘Nosferatu’, you have to (SPOILERS for an adaptation of a 1922 film, based on a novel from 1897) die. Unfortunately! But maybe, surrounded by lilacs and crushed beneath the weight of your now dead but formerly undead lover’s sun-baked chicken legs, you’ve also made some level of peace with your own insatiable desires. On the whole, your widowed husband seems to get it?

A Complete Unknown

Perfectly fine performance by Timmy C here that could very well win an Oscar (and honestly that’s fine for an industry desperately in need of a generational handoff), just wish it was in service of a character I knew any better by the end of the movie than I did at the beginning. You could power a car with the number of “Bob, you’re a genius” and/or “Bob, you’ve just broken my heart” reaction shots this movie deploys in lieu of actual drama. It’s sort of like Cocomelon for Boomers.

The Brutalist

This one deserves — and will get, probably 7-9 months from now — a more comprehensive review from me but for now let’s just say ‘The Brutalist’ IS 100% that bitch, does deserve the hype, and alongside ‘Nickel Boys’ and ‘Dune: Part Two’ represents arguably the best in pure cinematic achievement this year. If this makes me sound like a filmbro³, that’s fine! Broken clocks, etc.

But the “power of cinema” angle also undercuts a movie that, like ‘Tar’ before it, suggests utter self-seriousness while delivering something that’s far more messily alive than that. This movie has everything:

• handjobs

• heroin addiction

• Joe Alwyn’s perfect mid-Atlantic diction

• discourse-generating scenes in Italian marble quarries

“I heard it’s too long.” Will you be at the theater for four total hours? Yes. I can’t dispute this. But 1) every A-Lister knows you can safely arrive 25 minutes into your screening, skipping previews and 2) you’re probably going to watch the Super Bowl this afternoon for just as long, and that won’t have this score:

Saturday Night

hagiography: (noun) biography of saints or venerated persons

It’s like they stretched the “Ice Cube laughing at his own ‘Friday’ script” scene from ‘Straight Outta Compton’ to 110 minutes. Not that ‘Saturday Night’ isn’t entertaining! Jason Reitman knows how to stage and shoot and pace a movie, and many of these performers find compelling layers under the parody assignment, especially Lamorne Morris (‘New Girl’) and Cory Michael Smith (‘May December’). If only the movie were interested in anything more than, you know, itself.

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A Different Man

Near-perfect indie movie. Sensitive to the subject of facial deformity without contorting itself to make a morality play about it; far more interested in the lengths we go to try and kill our best selves. (To that end — great double feature with ‘The Substance’.)

I’ve been largely ambivalent on Sebastian Stan for… god, ten years, but this finally solidifies him for me as one of our top-flight current actors. There’s no vanity here, there’s no posturing — just a guy weaponizing his talents (and looks) to fully embody the deforming effects of self-hatred. Maybe that’s something everyone learns to absorb in the MCU? Discuss.

Emilia Perez

Everybody talking about how “bad” this movie is when what we should be talking about is how it “makes no sense.” Thank you, Karla Sofia Gascon, for kneecapping this movie’s Best Picture chances so we never have to talk about either again!

1. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” voice: Deadpool, Wolverine, something something Charlie Sheen, Biden chokes, Go woke go broke, Hawk Tuah on the street

2. still a better musical than ‘Emilia Perez’, somehow!

3. a filmbrotalist, if you will