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Cliff (Michael Strassner, a Baltimorean who also co-wrote the script with director Jay Duplass) looks like any guy you might bump into at Rocket to Venus (yes, namechecked here): He’s in his 30s, bearded, with a bit of a paunch, a knit beanie, and a friendly, open face. Didi (Liz Larsen) is a post-menopausal woman—gasp!—an attractive one for sure, but not generally the stuff of romcom leads.

The film starts with Cliff attempting suicide in a very ham-handed fashion. (He tries to make a noose out of a belt; when he kicks away the stool, the belt promptly breaks, and he sighs in a “just my luck” sort of way.) I was a bit surprised by this opening, as the film had been billed as a comedy. Indeed, it is a comedy—a funny one at that—but definitely of the “lonely, disillusioned people finding each other” variety. Notably, it’s also set on Christmas Eve. If Planes, Trains, and Automobiles were a romcom, it might look a little something like this.

Cliff meets Didi after he breaks a tooth because she’s the only dentist who will see him on Christmas Eve. He’s something of an eager beaver—awkwardly trying to make her laugh as she works on his tooth, constantly filling the empty space with nervous patter. And Didi, a bit gruff and all business, seems alternately amused and annoyed with him.

“What’s the situation with needles?” he asks when he first arrives.

“The situation is that we use needles,” she replies.

While hopped up on nitrous oxide, he tells her she’s pretty, which she brushes off a bit too quickly. This is a woman who has not felt desirable in a while. Then Cliff accidentally wanders into the wrong room and overhears her on the phone with her adult daughter. Turns out, her ex, the daughter’s father, got married that morning at City Hall and is having a party that night to celebrate. The daughter apologetically asks Didi if she can bump their Christmas Eve plans to Christmas day. Cliff watches as Didi’s face falls.

Didi finishes putting in the bonding and tells Cliff to come back on Monday for the crown. This should be the end of their encounter—but the film comes up with a variety of fun, funny, and, okay, occasionally far-fetched ways to keep them together.

First Cliff’s car gets towed, which seems unlikely on Christmas Eve, and she has to drop him off at the impoundment lot, except it’s closed. From there, comic hijinks ensue. Then he insists on buying her dinner, especially once he finds out that there’s no food left at the party he was supposed to attend with his fiancée. (Yes, he has a fiancée. More on that in a bit.)

At first it’s clearly Cliff who wants to keep their flirtatious patter going. But at some point, after they wander around Hampden (Dylan’s Oyster Cellar, Rocket to Venus, and Miracle on 34th Street are all prominently featured) and crash her ex-husband’s wedding party, she’s the one who is energized and, yes, a bit turned on by their adventures.

They end up stealing her ex-husband’s crab boat and then he takes her to an improv show. You see, Cliff is an improv comic who hasn’t been able to find his groove since he gave up booze (he’s six month’s sober, presumably after the suicide attempt). But with Didi by his side, he’s able to recapture the magic of his “Baltimoron” character (who could be a cousin of Stavros Halkias’ Ronnie). This scene was one of my least favorite of the film, mostly because improv tends to make me twitch. Your mileage may vary, as the kids say.

So where is this fun, freewheeling day going? Are Cliff and Didi actually going to get it on? They sure have chemistry to burn.

I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that I felt a bit sorry for the hapless fiancée. She’s depicted as something of a downer, mostly because she’s worried that Cliff will try to hurt himself again. Can you really blame her? She seems like a bit of collateral damage in this mismatched love story.

Still, I really enjoyed the film. It often shows off Baltimore in its best light, giving us a hero shot of, among other landmarks, the Key Bridge, filmed just two months before it collapsed. It’s been a while since a film properly mythologized Baltimore. Seems like New York, Boston, and Chicago get all the play on that front. If you don’t get too frustrated trying to Google Map the various routes that Cliff and Didi take (from Federal Hill to Remington to Mt. Vernon to…Cherry Hill (?), not to mention a very roundabout route from Dylan’s to Rocket to Venus), it’s an absolute charmer.

An underdog romance for an underdog city. Baltimoreans (or Baltimorons, if you prefer) will fall in love with it.

Read my Q&A with writer/star Michael Strassner—who shares more on his upbringing, filming in Baltimore, and making the city a main character—here.

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As the new documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, makes clear, Buckley was a sensitive, curious, and creative soul. He scribbled song lyrics, thoughts, and drawings (some animated in the film) in a zine-like journal. He had a child-like fascination with the world. He was the kind of young man people fell in love with instantly, sometimes despite themselves.

Buckley also had a remarkable voice, similar to one of his great heroes, Robert Plant. (“Love, anger, depression, joy, and Zeppelin” was one of his mottos.) He took himself very seriously, as talented and artistically ambitious young men in their 20s tend to do—and the people in his life loved and indulged him in equal measure.

The movie, and Buckley himself, feels very much of its time—and not just because of those answering machine messages. He rose to fame in the early ’90s, in an era when selling out was the worst thing an artist could do. It was still a thing to be counterculture, as there actually was a dominant culture to rebel against. (Ah, those were the days.) Buckley also played with ideas of gender, much like Kurt Cobain. He wore a glittery shirt jacket on the cover of his album that the label found too feminine (he ignored them; the jacket and that cover are now iconic). Another one of his great heroes was Nina Simone and he occasionally tried to channel her in performances. He sometimes called himself a chanteuse.

It’s no wonder the skinny, beautiful Buckley, who made music that combined folk with heavy metal, art rock, and crooning jazz, has become a posthumous Gen X icon. But the truth is, while his album sold well in America, it was hard to categorize and he was overshadowed by the likes of Nirvana and R.E.M. But he did break through abroad, especially Europe, and, of course, his aching cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has become the definitive version of that song. (It rose to number one in 2008 after it was used in an emotional scene on The West Wing).

The great tragedy of Buckley is that he was always trying to separate himself from his famous musician father, Tim Buckley, who died of a heroin overdose at the age of 28. Jeff barely knew the man who took off to pursue his musical ambitions after getting a girl—Jeff’s mother, Mary Guibert—pregnant.

Jeff did eventually get to see his father perform and even spent a little time with him, shortly before Tim’s overdose. The loss of his father—first as an absentee parent and later in death—was a specter that followed Jeff throughout his life.

And he inherited not only his father’s fine features and mop of wavy hair but his voice and musical talent (“I have my father’s voice and my grandfather’s voice,” Jeff says shruggingly at one point, as if to emphasize the biology at play rather than some deeper connection). Indeed, he chafed at the idea that he was anything like his father. “With comparisons, I’m not understood,” he said.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, is a moving, if somewhat standard documentary featuring archival interviews with Buckley himself, lots of captivating footage of Buckley singing and recording, and a good number of intimate photos and recordings. There’s a wild sequence where Buckley climbs high onto the scaffolding above the stage when Led Zeppelin is performing in Glastonbury, freaking out his friends. Was it a death wish? An insatiable need to get as close to his idols as possible? (Buckley said he wanted to feel the vibrations of the music.)

Director Amy Berg talks to those who knew him: the somewhat eccentric Guibert, a coproducer on the film, as well as Buckley’s two most serious girlfriends, Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser, and members of his band. Even the great Aimee Mann is interviewed (she was friends with him, too, though he apparently wanted to be more) and she also tears up when reminiscing about him. Moore, who had been a downtown New York performance artist, left her career and her life in New York after Jeff’s death, which has clearly scarred her. Wasser, a musician, can’t help wistfully talking about what could’ve been. “We were so young,” she says, her eyes glistening.

We’re struck by that, too. His girlfriends and old bandmates are in their 50s—certainly not young, but not quite old—which is how old Jeff should be. Instead, he’s gone, having died at 30 in a somewhat mysterious drowning incident while he was in Memphis recording his (unfinished) second album. Although he was depressed at times and would make provocative statements like “I don’t see myself 10 years from now” and “I’m not going to last that long,” his loved ones insist it was accident, not suicide. It’s important for them to hold onto that belief—that he wanted to be here, to continue making music, exploring, creating, living. Instead, he is frozen in time—and in some ways, so are they.

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Lord knows he gets lots of the details right. The anti-maskers who insist they can’t breathe with a mask on. Those geniuses who wore masks but didn’t cover their noses. The six-feet distance rule that no one could quite measure correctly. The endless Zoom meetings and videoblogs. The long lines at testing centers and those draconian giant Q-tips they would shove up our noses to get samples. The constant flaring of tempers. And, of course, the outbreak of conspiracy theories (it’s biological warfare! It’s the Chinese! It’s the Russians! It’s Bill Gates!) that began to metastasize, auguring the conspiracy rich world that we are living in today. In one scene, I noticed several rolls of toilet paper neatly stacked on the floor of a character’s home. Aster doesn’t call attention to this cultural relic. It’s just there.

And of course, COVID wasn’t the only thing making America sick around that time—George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis and Black Lives Matter protests sprung up across the country. Everything felt het up, precarious, volatile.

Aster captures this time perfectly. What he doesn’t do, as least as far as I could tell, is give us a unifying theory of all this, something insightful and provocative to chew on. Instead, the movie has a, “That was totally nuts, huh?” quality. (On the other hand, perhaps that’s the only reasonable response to 2020.)

The film’s action takes place in the small New Mexico town of Eddington. Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is the anti-masker sheriff. Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is the “woke” mayor. Well, I should say, ostensibly woke. He may believe in masks and science but he seems perfectly happy to let a giant, energy sucking technology center start building in the center of town.

Aster has called his film a western of sorts, and the fact that these two men hate each other and often have to face off in nearly vacant streets six-feet apart from each other (no weapons in sight—yet) does contribute to that sense. Social distancing at the O.K. Corral.

While we see a bit of Ted’s home life—his wife left him and he’s raising a mildly rebellious teenage son on his own—the film mostly follows Joe’s journey. At the start of COVID, his bonkers mother-in-law, Dawn (Deidre O’Connell), moved in with him and his sad-sack wife, Louise (Emma Stone). Joe loves Louise with all his heart—it’s his most redeeming quality—but she’s drifting away, falling further and further down the conspiracy rabbit holes her mother introduces her to. And he loses her completely when she falls under the spell of a handsome would-be cult leader (Austin Butler) who spreads fevered tales of secret pedophile rings.

Early in the film, Joe decides he’s going to run for mayor and he festoons his sheriff’s truck with flags and anti-lockdown slogans with questionable spelling (“Your being manipulated”) and photos of Ted Garcia that read: “Get this virus out of office.”

At this point, Joe only has two employees left in his sheriff’s office: Guy (Luke Grimes), who is white, and Michael (Micheal Ward), who is Black. Guy insists that before the Black Lives Matter protest came to town, he barely noticed that Michael was Black. But now he can’t help but wonder whose side he’s really on. (So yes, Aster even nails those “Black Lives Matter made me racist” types, too.)

In the spirit of equal opportunity satirizing, I was amused by how Aster makes fun of the self-righteous teens who protest Floyd’s death while sheepishly apologizing for their own whiteness. “We need to shut up and listen to Black people!” yells one white boy to a crowd of BLM protesters. “Which I will do… right after making this speech! Which, uh, I have no right to give because I’m standing on stolen ground!”

That said, I was a bit puzzled by his introduction of Antifa late in the film. Instead of gently mocking the far right’s vision of Antifa as some sort of militant, ubiquitous force, he seems to buy into it. (It’s parody, sure, but hits differently from the other bits of parody that were so spot-on.) Just for the record, I should note that the final third of the film is extremely violent—like, Tarantino violent.

I can’t say I actually enjoyed Eddington—although I don’t think that was what Aster was going for. He wants us to feel uncomfortable (he succeeds) and he wants us to reflect on the craziness that we collectively experienced. I buy into the “tragedy plus time equals comedy” formula. But maybe not enough time has passed. And the fact that things today feel similarly unhinged doesn’t help matters. If you’re stuck in the middle of a cyclone, do you really need a movie that says, “Hey, remember the early days of this cyclone? Those were wild.”

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Told in three acts, in reverse, it’s about an ordinary man whose decency and willingness to live life to its fullest turns him into a folk hero (or perhaps a messiah, or perhaps just a regular guy—it’s a bit unclear).

Act 3 is the most interesting. It’s about a teacher named Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who is dealing with the apparent end of the universe. California is leveled by an earthquake. Around the world there are fires and tsunamis. The internet goes out, which is the worst part. (He bonds with the parent of one of his students about the disconcerting lack of PornHub.)

“Is this it?” everyone asks, adding, “This sucks.” (Because, really, what else can you say?)

Marty reconnects with his ex-wife, Felicia (Karen Gillan), because no one wants to spend the end of the world alone.

Marty keeps noticing billboards with a picture of some guy named Chuck Krantz that read, “Thank you for 39 years of service.”

He finds them especially curious because the man on the billboard looks about 39 himself. How can he be retiring? Is it an old picture? And it goes beyond the billboards: There are TV commercials (although the TVs eventually go dark), graffiti, and even sky writing that spells out, “We Love Chuck.” By the end of Act 3, the ubiquity of Chuck becomes even more god-like.

In Act 2, we meet the man himself, Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), an accountant. On a business trip, he stumbles across a busking drummer (Taylor Gordon, aka The Pocket Queen) in a busy town square and spontaneously starts to dance. He’s not just nodding along to the beat—he’s giving a performance, a one-man flash mob, until he is joined by another bystander, a woman named Janice (Annalise Basso) who just got dumped by her boyfriend and clearly needed this spontaneous exultation.

Act 1 is about Chuck as a little boy, orphaned after his parents die in a car crash and raised by his kindly grandparents. They are Jewish, which…uh, if they say so. (No one in the cast looks remotely Jewish.) I was stunned to realize that the Wilford Brimley-esque man who plays Chuck’s “zadie” is Mark Hamill, who’s actually quite good here. He can mensch it up with the best of them.

Director Mike Flanagan, a Towson University grad, seems to have intentionally cast major stars from years past, as if to give older audience members a sense of déjà vu. On top of Hamill, we have Mia Sara from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as Chuck’s “bubbe” (she’s the one who teaches him to dance) and Matthew Lillard of Scream fame as one of Marty’s neighbors. Similarly, the characters seem to have mysteriously overlapping timelines. Marty, looking exactly the same as he does in Act 3, is seen in Act 1, as a teacher at the school that preteen Chuck attends. An elderly mortician (Carl Lumbly), also remains unchanged from act to act. Time is a flat circle, or something like that.

The film has two much referenced heroes—Carl Sagan, with his vision of the universe as a calendar (each month contains millions of years and we are now on December 31, with either hours or a millennia to go) and Walt Whitman, specifically his poem, “Song of Myself” (“I am large, I contain multitudes.”)

If you’re looking for an explanation of the seemingly mystical powers of Chuck (or anyone else in the film), they never truly come, except in the notion that we contain and are contained within everything we’ve seen and every life we touch. In that sense, we are all eternal. If that sort of thing sounds powerful to you, or if you’ve ever unironically used the phrase, “Dance like nobody’s watching,” this is the film for you.

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Midway through Materialists I came to the somewhat depressing conclusion that writer-director Celine Song and I are simply not simpatico. I admired the intelligence and craft of her previous film, Past Lives—and thought it was a fresh take on the immigrant experience. But I turned on Greta Lee’s Nora when she ignored her husband, Arthur, at the bar, instead speaking in Korean to her childhood love, Hae Sung—and never fully recovered from that.

Nonethless, I was looking forward to Materialists, as I love the idea of an intelligent female auteur working in the romantic movie space and the film has gotten nearly unanimous rave reviews.

And yet…here we go again. For the second time, I just wasn’t jibing with what I saw on screen. If you’ve seen the trailer, you get the gist. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a successful matchmaker in New York. Her job is basically to manage the expectations of her clients—especially the female ones. “I’m not building a man in a lab,” she tells one (I’m paraphrasing). “I can’t make him to your exact specifications.” The women of New York, it seems, mostly want the same thing: a man who is rich, has most (if not all) of his hair, and is tall. (The appeal of tall men is a weirdly major plot point in Materialists). The men of New York also want the same thing: Someone younger than them and way hot.

Her job is to get these singles to somehow meet in the middle. And she’s good at it.

Early in the film, she goes to a wedding of one of her clients—with nine marriages under her belt, she is the most successful matchmaker at her firm—and meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the brother of the groom. He is handsome, rich, with a full head of hair, and, yes, tall. (Stands to reason, because he’s Pedro Pascal.) They begin to flirt—or, more accurately, he begins to flirt; she thinks she’s recruiting him as a client. (She calls him a “unicorn,” meaning he checks all the boxes: rich, handsome, nice, and available.) Just then, the cater waiter shows up, in the form of Chris Evans, with stubble, trying to look like a loveable schlub. Turns out, he’s a struggling actor, still living with two slovenly roommates, and Lucy’s ex. They broke up because he was poor. Lucy told him she “hated” herself for caring about his financial status, but she did.

So she begins to date Harry. She tells him, based on her calculations, she’s not good enough for him. He could bag someone better than her—younger, richer, prettier (puh-lease).

But I like you, Harry says.

Based on the trailer, I figured that Harry would be the guy she dated because of his wealth but Evans’ John was the one she really loved. And . . . that’s pretty much what happens. Except John is still the sweet, broke loser she broke up with for valid reasons and Harry is actually a great guy—a gentleman who woos her and, as we’ve established, really likes her.

There’s a major incident that is supposed to lead to Lucy’s awakening: One of Lucy’s clients, Sophie, is assaulted by the man Lucy set her up with. Lucy didn’t really think they were going to be a match, but she was getting desperate—Sophie was proving to be a tricky client, as she was of average beauty and average wealth, and was pushing 40. Lucy is understandably distraught over the news of the attack, all the more so when her boss shrugs it off as an unfortunate inevitability of the job. But I’m still not sure why this was the moment of epiphany for Lucy. It’s not her fault that this guy assaulted Sophie, nor does it send the message: Marry for love, not creature comforts.

(I’d like to take this moment to applaud Zoe Winters, who plays Sophie. She is heartbreaking in the role and her emotional rawness contrasts strikingly, almost jarringly, with Johnson’s somewhat affectless cool.)

So yeah, I just didn’t connect the dots in Materialists. Despite good acting across the board (or, more accurately, appealing movie star performances), I never bought it. I didn’t buy Captain America as a loser. I didn’t buy Dakota Johnson as a woman who would doubt her own desirability. And I certainly didn’t buy Pedro Pascal as the guy you take a pass on.

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Me? I love him. (I also love cilantro, but will need to do further research to determine a corollary.)

In fact, over the years, I’ve turned into something of a Wes Anderson apologist. I’ve at least liked all of his films and loved most of them. My favorites, because who can resist ranking him, are The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Royal Tenenbaums. My least faves are Isle of Dogs and The Darjeeling Limited—but honestly, there’s not a dud in the bunch. The complaint I’ve heard most often is that his films are cold, airless—all style, no heart. But I find his stories of misfits fumbling their way toward each other to be enormously touching. (If anything, I think his films can be accused of sentimentality.)

When I defend Anderson’s films, I talk about their uncanny beauty, their comic drollness, their affection for weirdos and outcasts and intellectuals; their stubborn cleaving to all things analog in a digital world. Yes, they are overly orderly—symmetrically placed little dioramas, composed as though they are meant to be viewed from above. Yes, his characters speak in a signature stilted deadpan, often while looking directly at the camera. Yes, his films will undoubtedly contain hand-written index cards or a general cataloging of things and a persistent nostalgia for the fascinations of the 20^th century, especially those discovered by a curious and precocious boy from Houston.

But, as Asteroid City, a meta film within a film about an alien landing in the desert, proved, he still has new tricks up his sleeve. His fastidious style is paradoxically flexible—it has the capacity to contains multitudes.

That said, when I saw the trailer for The Phoenician Scheme, featuring every Anderson tic in the book along with most of his regular troupe of actors, I grew concerned. This seemed more like a Wes Anderson parody than a Wes Anderson film. Had the auteur finally succumbed to the inevitable?.

I had sort hoped that, after his Asteroid City broke down the process of storytelling, Wes might go back to basics, play it straight, prove that he didn’t need his distinct style to tell a good story. In fact, he doubled down.

In the opening scene, we meet international businessman/scoundrel Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), who’s a passenger in a small, single engine airplane. There’s a thud and then an explosion. A bomb has gone off, taking out the back half of the plane and top half of his assistant, who was sitting in a jump seat. It’s a joke (I think)—the assistant has been sliced perfectly in half. Anderson even has to do gore in an orderly way.

The opening credits show Zsa-zsa, who has survived the assassination attempt, just as he has survived several others, lounging in the clawfoot bathtub of his regal bathroom. We literally see the image from overhead: the tub perfectly placed to the left of the frame, a small record player behind him, the toilet, with a black seat, and bidet which is being used as an ice bucket for a bottle of champagne (observed closely enough, every Anderson frame contains a little treat); two sinks, perpendicular to each other; and a stunning mid-century modern tile floor.

Just as the perfectly sliced-in-two assistant seems like a bit of self-parody, this overhead shot feels defiant. You think I’m not gonna do me? Dream on.

The Phoenician Scheme is a visual banquet, extremely funny, fast paced, and powered by an Igor Stravinsky score. (This music nerd was pumped.)

But I confess it left me wanting. That thing I always defend Wes over—the emotional connection I feel to the characters and the story—was missing.

I can usually see the direct line from Wes’ imagination to the film itself. The Life Aquatic obviously came from a boyhood fascination with Jacques Cousteau. The Royal Tenenbaums has Salinger’s Franny and Zoey as its muse. The Grand Budapest Hotel is about the cleaving to old world manners and beauty, something Anderson knows a thing or two about. Moonrise Kingdom is about precocious children and first love.

But what is Anderson’s connection to the story of The Phoenician Scheme—wherein the amoral oligarch Zsa-zsa tries to connect with his only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s kid), a nun-in-training, and determine if she’s worthy of his fortune. He also has nine small sons that mostly pop up as a kind of visual joke—hanging from banisters and crouched in balconies. (One is always shooting things with a bow and arrow.) But Zsa-zsa has no love or interest in these little boys. He only hopes to earn the affection and trust of his stoic daughter, whose mother died under suspicious circumstances (“They say you murdered her, Liesl says. “They who?” replies Zsa-zsa.) You see, despite his ornate home and trappings of wealth, Zsa-zsa is broke, or runs the risk of becoming broke if he can’t convince his associates to pay the “gap”—essentially the money he needs to become profitable on whatever his latest land-grabbing scheme happens to be. (Not only was I fuzzy on the details, I truly don’t think Wes cares about them.)

Accompanying Liesl and Zsa-zsa on their quest for unscrupulous business partners is the fussy and kind-hearted Bjorn (Michael Cera), who is an entomologist and tutor (not for the children, for Zsa-zsa himself). He instantly falls for Liesl. “Could you imagine falling love with a man like me?” he says, in his Andy Kaufman-as-Latka Norwegian accent.

So we move from set piece to set piece, as Zsa-zsa tries to secure funds. We meet a dashing prince (Riz Ahmed), a pair of midwestern brothers who are supernaturally great at basketball (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), a stern beauty whom Zsa-zsa proposes to just because he can (Scarlett Johansson), a cheerful American ship captain (Jeffrey Wright), and many more. Benedict Cumberbatch also turns up as Zsa-zsa’s brother, who may even be more of a jerk than he is.

There are planes crashes and an ongoing joke about giving out hand grenades as a gift, as though they are cigars There’s quicksand, because kids who grew up in the ’70s like Wes love quicksand. There are beautifully crafted shoe boxes filled with index cards because this is a Wes Anderson film, after all.

But I just couldn’t find my way into it. Is Zsa-zsa supposed to be a stand-in for Trump? Is this Anderson’s oblique way of addressing contemporary politics. (Or, with is 10 children, perhaps he’s supposed to be Musk…or both?). The thing is, we like Zsa-zsa, because he has his own version of a moral code and because he loves his daughter (if only his daughter) and mostly because he is played by del Toro, who is rakishly charming here. And frankly, I don’t want to see a Trump redemption story, if that’s even what this is.

Yes, there is something touching about Zsa-zsa’s relationship with Liesl and, of course, we root for the earnestly romantic Bjorn as well. And it’s funny watching Liesl get slowly but surely corrupted by her father. She begins to drink. Then she starts smoking a pipe. Then she accepts a gift of a bedazzled pipe. (Threapleton, who shares her mother’s round and open face, is wonderful here. She tries to resist the allure of her father’s exotic, chaotic life, but just can’t help herself.) But The Phoenician Scheme didn’t capture my imagination, nor did it enchant me the way other Anderson films have.

I was thoroughly entertained and left a bit cold. Is this what it’s like to not love Wes Anderson?

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Iris (Naomi Watts), a novelist and creative writing teacher, has been asked to take in the dog owned by her best friend, Walter (Bill Murray), who died of suicide.

“This is what Walter wanted,” insists Barbara (Noma Dumezweni), Walter’s third (and last) wife.

There’s no proof of this and, to be honest, it’s slightly sus that Barbara doesn’t like dogs, but Iris reluctantly agrees.

She heads to the shelter to collect Apollo. We already know from Walter’s colorful description of stumbling across Apollo in the park after a run that the dog is “giant.” But we don’t realize just how giant. The camera pans briefly to a cute pittie curled in the back of a pen. Nope. Not Apollo. Then out he comes—a magnificent, massive Great Dane. And not just any Great Dane, an absolute unit, weighing more than 150 pounds.

Did I mention that Iris lives in a small, rent-controlled Greenwich Village apartment?

A story like this could’ve gone many ways, including broad comedy, but that’s not the kind of movie The Friend is.

You see, Apollo is grieving, much like Iris is. He stares at her—or more accurately, beyond her—with big, mournful eyes that, frankly, resemble Bill Murray’s. (Although in Apollo’s case, one eye is blue and one is brown—the David Bowie of dogs.)

Although Barbara assured Iris that Apollo was well-trained and knew to stay off the furniture, he makes a beeline for the bed, where he splays out dejectedly. He won’t eat. He won’t play. He won’t use the elevator (at least Iris is getting her cardio). And he won’t let Iris on her own bed.

The only things that seem to give him comfort are Walter’s old Columbia University sweatshirt and having someone read to him, which Walter apparently did a lot.

Watching The Friend I couldn’t help but to notice that, although it’s mostly populated with women, it doesn’t pass The Bechdel Test, as all these women are always discussing Walter.

The film is a bit retro in that regard—Walter was supposed to have been a literary giant, and he’s constantly quoted, celebrated, and forgiven for his many sins, which include affairs and a grown daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), that he just recently introduced to the world.

And get this, Val and Iris are writing a book together called Letters which is, you guessed it, a collection of Walter’s letters. Although the film is based on Sigrid Nunez’s acclaimed novel of the same name, which came out in 2018, the whole feels very 20th century.

Hell, even Apollo is male. (I kid, I kid.)

Despite my concern with its Great Man Theory approach to storytelling, I did like The Friend quite a bit. It’s an example of my favorite genre—Manhattan intellectuals in life and love, dressed in lots of wool blends and tweed, as seen in the films of Woody Allen, Nicole Holofcener, and Noah Baumbach.

The film is very self-consciously literary—everyone’s working on a novel; they have a flashback to Walter giving a reading; and Samuel Beckett is quoted liberally.

Another tiny gripe: Walter is supposed to have been a genius, always dicey to pull off in a film, and we can mostly believe it. Murray, who is mostly seen in flashbacks as Walter, has that wise, rumpled, larger-than-life way about him that allows you to believe he was both a revered writer and notorious lady’s man. But some of the passages read from his books don’t pass the literary smell test. Would a literary giant truly say that someone was “sadly bereft”? (As an editor, I’d stet the word sadly and write REDUNDANT in red caps.)

But enough about Walter. This movie really is about Iris and Apollo, who slowly come to rely on each other. And kudos to Bing, who plays Apollo (and his trainers, I suppose—although clearly this dog is a natural). This is one of the best dog performances I’ve ever seen. The dog truly seems sad, then less so as he and Iris get closer, and then, in the final scenes, he limps! (Daniel Dog Lewis anyone?)

The central conflict of the film is that Iris isn’t allowed to have Apollo, or any dog, in her apartment. It’s hard enough to stow away a Chihuahua or a Yorkie. Try sneaking a Great Dane into your apartment. And since her apartment is rent controlled, her landlord is itching to get her out of there so he can jack up the rent.

There’s a cute subplot involving a kindly superintendent (Felix Solis) who keeps firmly telling Iris she needs to get rid of Apollo, even though he secretly loves dogs, too.

And that’s pretty much it. The film has pleasingly low stakes. Will Iris be able to reclaim her own bed? Will she start her novel again? Will she be forced out of her apartment? Will Walter’s second wife (Carla Gugino) come to accept Val, who was conceived very shortly after they split?

And since I’m whacking the film for its male-centric plot, let me give it credit for something borderline radical. Iris is in her late 40s, or so. Lives alone. Has no husband. And the film is okay with that. I’m loath to admit that, at one point, when she visits the office of a therapist (Tom McCarthy), I thought, “Could he be a love interest?”

Shame on me. This is not that kind of film. Iris has one love interest in The Friend: a big, beautiful, sad-eyed dog.

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It’s the near future and resources in the “New World”—distinct from the barely habitable Old World (i.e. earth)—are scarce and childbirth is only granted to an elite few. If a couple wants a baby, they need approval from the government and must submit to something called an Assessment.

When we meet Mia (Elizabeth Olsen), a botanist trying to grow edible plantlife in her greenhouse, and Aaryan (Himesh Patel), a bioengineer trying to recreate animal life as virtual pets, they seem the perfect candidates for parenthood. Yes, their home is cold and remote—but that seems to be a thing in the New World: There are virtually no children. No real pets (the pets were all unceremoniously euthanized to save resources). And no foliage, beyond what Mia has growing in her greenhouse. Nonetheless, Mia and Aaryan seem loving and stable.

Then one morning, the stern looking Virginia (Alicia Vikander) shows up at their door. She’s their assessor. She immediately takes control of the house—asking Mia and Aaryan probing questions about their sex life and their relationship. She complains about her living quarters, so they give her the master bedroom. Curled up together in the twin bed intended for Virginia, they begin to have sex, only to notice Virginia lurking outside the doorway, watching them.

“I need to assess all aspects of your relationship,” Virginia says matter-of-factly. “Just imagine I’m not here.”

Things get stranger the next morning at breakfast when Virginia starts grinding salt crystals with a spoon and laughing. Then she begins banging her bowl against the table, instead of eating the food—oh, wait, she’s acting like a toddler.

But she had never told them she was going to morph into toddler—it just sort of happened.

How are Virginia and Aaryan to respond?

The thing is, babies are cute for a reason. Virginia is a grown woman, throwing tantrums. Must Mia conjure up maternal feelings toward this strange woman? And are she and Aaryan supposed to give Virginia the kind of physical affection one might give a small child? Won’t that get…inappropriate?

Aaryan, the more patient of the two, tells Mia to stay calm, even when Virginia is having fits. We signed up for this, he reminds her.

But I didn’t ask for this, she says.

The Assessment, like many a sci-fi before it, is about how far people will go to have, or save, a child. It has a creepily airless and insular quality that adds to the sense of dread. Director Fleur Fortune does a particularly good job of occasionally filming Mia and Aaryan through cracks in the door, to indicate they are always being watched. And then there’s that mysterious flashback (flashforward?) of a child drowning.

Things go slightly off the rails when Virginia throws a dinner party, meant to rattle Aaryan and Mia. A lot of complicated backstory is thrown at us—one of the guests was apparently in a relationship with Aaryan; another was a boss that Mia slept with—and frankly I couldn’t follow it all. (It does, at least, give Minnie Driver a chance to gleefully ham it up as a New World Karen.) There’s also an eerily self-possessed child, about 10 or so, in attendance. Her parents apparently passed the Assessment.

The Assessment is a provocative and sometimes squirm-inducingly funny sci-fi that gives its three leads lots of juicy material to chew on, with Vikander, in particular, turning her Virginia into a compellingly inscrutable, but not entirely unsympathetic, antagonist.

It will have you asking how far you would go to get a baby—and if you and your partner could pass Virginia’s sadistic test.

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I wanted to get that out of the way right off the bat because there’s so much uncertainty surrounding this year’s Academy Awards. Zoe Saldana is also almost definitely going to win Best Supporting Actress for her role in Emilia Pérez, unless her win is derailed by the controversy surrounding the film (more on that in a sec). And I’m feeling relatively comfortable picking Demi Moore as our Best Actress winner for The Substance.

But Best Picture? Best Actor? Best Director? A lot of these big categories are thrillingly up in the air. (You might even say their outcome is A Complete Unknown…*ducks.*)

It’s been a long time since we’ve had an “awards season” (one of the most cursed phrases known to man) so unpredictable. Just when you think you know which way the wind is blowing—Adrien Brody as Best Actor for his stellar work in The Brutalist, say—along comes a change in direction, like Timothée Chalamet getting an eleventh hour Screen Actors Guild nod for A Complete Unknown.

On top of that, there have been the aforementioned controversies. Some were clearly drummed up by competing studios (the disclosure that The Brutalist employed AI to zhuzz up Adrien Brody’s Hungarian accent), while others happened more organically: A journalist unearthed offensive tweets by Emilia Pérez’s Karla Sofía Gascón, the first trans woman ever to be nominated for Best Actress. Even before that, the film was controversial, with an increasingly loud online backlash for what many saw as its broad caricature of Mexican culture. (Not for nothing, the film’s director, Jacques Audiard, is French, and there are no Mexican actors in the main roles.)

Before those controversies emerged, Emilia Pérez was a veritable lock for Best International Film (its 13 nominations were most in this year’s field and made it the most nominated non-English film in Oscar history). Now it leaves the door open for an upset.

So, yeah, lots to chew on here. I’m going to do my best here with my predictions, but don’t put any money on my guesses. Except for Kieran. With him, go all in.

BEST PICTURE
Who will win: Anora
Who might win: Conclave, The Brutalist
Who should win: Anora
Final thoughts: As recently as two weeks ago, I was sure The Brutalist was going to win this thing. Then Anora won both the PGA and the DGA, making it a clear frontrunner. But, with the preferential ballot in play—meaning voters rank their choices—a much liked (if not quite loved) consensus pick could still snag the award. When you look at it that way, the universally loved Conclave—or hell, even Wicked or A Complete Unknown—could score an upset win.

BEST ACTOR
Who will win: Adrien Brody
Who might win: Timothée Chalamet
Who should win: Adrien Brody
Final thoughts: Chalamet was very good in A Complete Unknown and he’s been on an all-out charm offensive since the film’s release, hosting SNL (and serving as the musical guest), showing up to a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest, wearing some fly (and, let’s face it, some fugly) fashion, and all-in-all being the happy-go-lucky goofball that he is on his press tour. Will his winning personality, combined with the (nothingburger, in my opinion) AI controversy propel him to a win? I still think Brody’s performance was just too good to deny, so I’m sticking with my pick.

BEST ACTRESS
Who will win: Demi Moore
Who might win: Mikey Madison
Who should win: Fernanda Torres from I’m Still Here
Final thoughts: Moore sealed her fate when she gave a stirring acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. Yes, she’s quite good in The Substance and her winning would be the feel-good moment of the Oscars, but if we’re being honest here, she gives the fifth best performance in this group (which also includes Cynthia Erivo and Gascón).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Who will win: Kieran Culkin
Who might win: Tom Wambsgans?
Who should win: Edward Norton
Final thoughts: I wish this race had been a little more contested. Norton is a heartbreaking Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown and Jeremy Strong is riveting as that snake Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. But I can’t begrudge Culkin his win. A Real Pain is a special movie and he is its beating heart.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Who will win: Zoe Saldana
Who might win: Ariana Grande
Who should win: Zoe Saldana
Final thoughts: It was wonderful to see Saldana, an actress who has sometimes been buried under a sea of green makeup and CGI in films like Guardians of the Galaxy and Avatar, show the full range of her talents here. I think she has accrued enough momentum and good will over the years that her association with the now tainted Emilia Pérez won’t derail her win.

BEST DIRECTOR
Who will win: Sean Baker
Who might win: Brady Corbet
Who should win: Sean Baker
Final thoughts: I admire how Corbet made a searing American epic with a limited budget in The Brutalist—and I really loved that film—but Baker has been releasing banger after banger since 2015, and Anora is arguably his best film yet. It’s his time.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Who will win: A Real Pain
Who might win: Anora
Who should win: Anora
Final thoughts: Most prognosticators are picking Anora here so I’m deviating from the pack. I feel like the Oscars are going to want to reward Jesse Eisenberg, who is beloved.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Who will win: Conclave
Who might win: A Complete Unknown
Who should win: Conclave
Final thoughts: I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t love Conclave (although a few are a bit iffy on that surprise ending…I dug it). Feels like its year.

A FEW MORE PREDICTIONS:

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: The Brutalist
BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM: I’m Still Here
BEST EDITING: Conclave
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: The Wild Robot
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: Porcelain War

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It had all the hallmarks of an Oscar darling. Academy voters love epics, they love history, especially World War II—better still if the film is about the Holocaust. They love films about brilliant, tortured men. And if the film features a haunting, tour-de-force performance from its male lead? Start making room in that trophy case.

Now that I’ve seen The Brutalist, my opinion hasn’t really changed—I still think it’s going win. But it turns out the film is much weirder, more singular, more audacious than I ever expected it to be. For one thing, Corbet breaks his grand-scale film—shot in a stunning, mid-century hi-res technology called VistaVision—into small, sometimes shockingly intimate set pieces. Although it is never boring, its pace is defiantly unhurried. That haunted male lead, played by Adrien Brody? He happens to be a heroin addict, a snob, and a philanderer, among other things. The film is both better than I thought it would be, and less Oscar bait-y, if that makes any sense. It almost made me wonder: Have the Oscar voters seen it?

When we first encounter László Tóth (Brody), he is in the steerage compartment of a ship arriving at Ellis Island. He has broken his nose along the way—or so we’re told (with all due deference to the prodigious beak of Mr. Brody, it’s hard to tell)—which starts him on his path to heroin addiction. He is greeted by his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), who takes him home to live and work in his custom furniture shop, Miller and Sons, just outside of Philadelphia. (“Who’s Miller?” László asks. “I am,” Attila says, explaining that he Americanized his last name. He also invented make believe sons because Americans like “family businesses.”)

Miller and Sons sells sturdy, Shaker style furniture, which László regards with some disdain.

“What do you think?” Attila asks.

“Of the furniture?” sniffs László. “It’s not very beautiful.”

As we are soon to find out, before the war broke out and he was imprisoned in a concentration camp, László was a rising-star architect in Budapest, a progenitor of the Brutalist style. (The massive, minimalist structures represent permanence to László in a fragile world.) Now Attila has agreed to let him live in a spare room, adjacent to the workshop, as long as he helps out with the custom builds. Attila’s beautiful, gentile wife, Audrey (Emma Laird), isn’t super keen on this new tenant, and will ultimately be the thing that comes between the cousins. (Attila represents one choice available to the European immigrant Jew—assimilation as a survival tactic.)

László has a wife of his own, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), whom he assumed died in the war. When Attila tells him that she’s alive but stuck in Europe with László’s niece (Raffey Cassidy), László collapses in relief and joy. But getting Jewish refugees to the U.S. is challenging, bordering on impossible. So he must carry on with the real possibility he’ll never see her again.

After his falling out with Attila, László takes a menial job with a construction crew where he is reintroduced to captain of industry Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce, never better). They had met before, when László and Attila had built him a custom library, a surprise gift from his son (Joe Alwyn). Van Buren hated the library, designed by László with remarkable retractable shelves, and threw László and Attila out of the house. (He was also bothered that László had brought a good friend to help with the construction who happened to be Black.)

Now he has returned to László, a bit sheepishly. He has discovered that László was, in fact, a famous architect—a man of great distinction. Van Buren would never admit that he didn’t like or understand the library—he protests that his mother was sick and dying and he was too upset to fully appreciate it, but he wants to hire László for a job. He’ll be building a massive community center/gym/chapel on his property, allegedly in honor of his late mother but actually a monument to himself, and he wants László to design it. And thus begins the precarious relationship between the two men. Van Buren claims that he is intellectually stimulated by his talks with László, but he’s also quick to denigrate his tattered clothes and broken English. He’s seething with jealousy over László’s brilliance, but he’s repulsed by him, as well. And he’s a man who like to lord his wealth and power over everyone who meets. As you can guess, things will not go smoothly between them.

Eventually, Van Buren puts László in touch with a lawyer who can arrange to bring Erzsébet and his niece to Pennsylvania. And that’s the end of the first half. Yes, there’s an intermission in this three-and-a-half-hour film, which I welcomed (and I didn’t even need to pee). It’s nice to be able exhale and gather your thoughts a bit before the second half begins.

The second half focuses on László’s relationship with Erzsébet, strained for a variety of reasons, and the various roadblocks he encounters building Van Buren’s massive vanity project. (Art and commerce have never made for good bedfellows—and when you throw in László’s status as an enigmatic Jewish outsider, things are further complicated.)

The malevolence of both Van Buren and his feckless son comes into high relief in the second half—perhaps a bit too unsubtly.

The film’s epilogue, set in 1980, is another audacious choice as László, now an old man, doesn’t even speak in it. But it’s there where we come to understand the particular choices László made in his creation of Van Buren’s massive center. It’s not a surprise ending, per se, but one that adds a layer of depth and poignancy to all we’ve just seen.

The Brutalist isn’t just the front runner for Best Picture; Adrien Brody will likely get an Oscar for playing László, his second time for depicting a Holocaust victim. Look, the guy has a face built for tragedy—expressive and searching and gaunt, like a hollowed out Buster Keaton. And he’s captivating here, depicting all of László’s contradictions—his vanity, his brilliance, his desperation.

I’m not quite prepared to call The Brutalist a great American masterpiece just yet—I’ll need to see it a couple more times to make that call—but it is quite extraordinary. A deeply personal story told on a grand scale. A story about American monsters and American heroes—and how those lines can sometimes blur. If it does win Best Picture, the voters will have accidentally gotten it right.

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“Pressure is a privilege.” —Tennis great Billie Jean King
“Pressure makes diamonds.” —General George S. Patton Jr.
“Pressure sucks.” —Me, right now

I’m sitting on my couch feeling anxious, flushed, and slightly nauseated.

A bout with COVID? A nasty case of the flu? Nope, I’m just watching my beloved Ravens in the playoffs.

Here’s the crazy thing about the NFL playoffs: Every year, all you hope is for your team to get there and then, if the sports gods are willing, that they go on to win the Super Bowl. And never once, as you wish and hope and pray, do you think to yourself, “And if they DO make the playoffs, I will be a miserable wreck and in a state of complete and utter misery the entire time.”

Take Saturday’s game against Pittsburgh. It started out pretty comfortably. As the Ravens went up 21-0 at halftime, I actually felt some tension release from my body. We got this.

Then at some point in the third quarter, Pittsburgh QB Russell Wilson found a groove. He wasn’t just dinking and dunking his way down the field. He was getting big chunks of yards on majestic, accurate passes that landed perfectly in the outstretched hands of Steelers’ receivers. The offense had found a flow.

Suddenly, it was 21-7. Then the Ravens answered right back on a Derrick Henry 44-yard scamper and I yelled, “IN YOUR FACE!” at the TV screen.

Then Pittsburgh scored again—and quickly. I had barely blinked and it was 28-14.

Dear reader, I’d like to say that I was calm and realistic in this moment. We were up 14 points at the start of the fourth quarter. We had demonstrated that we could score on their defense. We have two of the best players of all time—Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry—in purple and black.

But in reality, what I thought was: Oh my God, if we lose this game after being up 21-zip at halftime, it will be the most upsetting, depressing, demoralizing sports loss since the infamous Billy Cundiff game against the Patriots (IYKYK).

Indeed, it wasn’t until the clock showed all zeroes that I was able to unclench my shoulders (and various other body parts) and breathe freely.

But was I jubilant? Ecstatic? High-fiving strangers in the street? No. I was upset that we had let them back in, given them hope. The Steelers had outscored us 14-7 in the second half. Did it reveal a softness in our secondary? A lack of killer instinct? Were we trending in the wrong direction?

If you had told me before the game that we would win 28-14, I would’ve been thrilled. But the pessimist in me worried. (I also worried about Lamar’s tender ribs. Love you as a runner, my dude, but stay safe out there.)

The post-season anxiety is always there, but it’s much more pronounced when your team is favored. Every time I hear some pundit picking the Ravens as Super Bowl champs (it’s a sexy pick right now), I scream, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” at my screen.

It’s not just that the Ravens are good and have something to prove, it’s the Lamar of it all.

Talking to my friend Travis, I confessed that I wanted the Ravens to win for the team, for Baltimore, for Harbaugh. But mostly I wanted them to win for Lamar.

The idea that the only way you can cement your legacy is by winning a championship is one of the more asinine tropes in sports—and yet it persists.

Despite the two (soon to be three) MVPs (don’t screw this up, AP sports writers), the all-time quarterback rushing record, the dazzling statistics year after year, Lamar still apparently has something to prove. The sentiment expressed over and over again is that he can’t win the big one. (Never mind the fact that we were one Zay Flowers goal line fumble away from being just three points down late in the third quarter of last year’s AFC championship game against the Chiefs.)

I want that monkey off Lamar’s back. I want Lamar to silence the naysayers, the doubters, the haters. Yes, I want this for Lamar more than I want it for myself.

Nonetheless, to quote Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada, I will gird my loins and watch Sunday’s game against the Bills. Was I hoping for Denver? Yes, yes, I was. (Especially since everyone will see this as some sort of referendum on Lamar vs. Josh Allen, even though Lamar already beat Allen earlier this year and his stats are demonstrably better in virtually every category. Aaargh.)

“To be the best you’ve got to beat the best” —Annoying people
“I prefer a weak opponent, thanks” —Me

Come Sunday, I will sit on my couch. I will pray to the football gods. I will wear the same outfit I wore last Saturday. I will have my throat in my mouth. My blood pressure will reach unhealthy levels. I will be in agony.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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If you’re not familiar with the phrase, it’s a Gen Z invention that argues that if two adults want to engage in all sorts of freaky-deaky behavior, let them! Role playing, handcuffs, leather. Whatever you’re into is cool as long as it’s consensual. Don’t kink shame, bro!

It’s important that this concept is a product of the TikTok generation because in Babygirl, Romy (Nicole Kidman), the imposing owner of an international shipping company, essentially kink shames herself. She is married to the lovely, and frankly hot, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), who is a director of Broadway plays. The film starts with the two of them having what seems to be tender, mutually satisfying sex. But not so fast. After they are done, Romy retreats to a private room where she masturbates to an S&M video. This is clearly a ritual for her. She gets off on being humiliated, dominated. At one point, she attempts to express this desire to Jacob by asking if he can cover her face with a pillow when they’re having sex. He can’t do it. “I feel like a villain,” he sighs. He’s a generous, completely evolved man—exactly what she doesn’t want in a lover.

Enter the hot new intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) who isn’t some S&M authority, like Christian Grey. He’s more of an extreme empath, who naturally intuits what other people want. He’s also a card-carrying member of the “Don’t kink shame, bro” generation.

So Samuel almost instantly figures out that Romy wants to be dominated. He’s attracted to her, wants to be with her, but also wants to please her—it’s in his nature.

So he starts ordering her around. At first, she balks: This is highly inappropriate. She’s the big boss, he’s a lowly intern. But, of course, she’s turned on, too. At an office party, he sends her a glass of milk, and watches her keenly from the bar, smirking. She hesitates and then drinks it down in one gulp, much to the astonishment of onlookers. “Good girl,” he whispers to her at the end of the party.

They commence an affair, with Samuel continuing to boss her around. The film makes it clear—this is not some anti-feminist fantasy where Samuel needs to cut the powerful Romy down to size. This is about him getting off on getting her off.

Both actors are wonderful here—Dickinson toggles between cocky den master and sheepish pupil. A few times he giggles because the scenarios are so ridiculous, but he’s trying here! As for Kidman, she has become one of our most fearless actresses. Maybe this was me beauty shaming (did I do that right?) but I used to think she had a coldness about her, an aloofness that made her unrelatable. How wrong I was. She fully commits here, allowing us to see the rawness of Romy’s desire and her shame. In fact, that cold exterior—perfect for her CEO character—makes her vulnerability, the overwhelming intensity of her desires that much more moving.

The funny thing about Babygirl is that, despite its taboo subject, it’s actually a very sweet film. Samuel is sweet. Jacob is almost painfully sweet. Romy’s two teenage daughters are good to her—even the ostensibly rebellious one. Now can we all stop kink shaming and get along?

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1. Anora

Pretty Woman but make it indie. A sex worker gets swept off her feet by the happy-go-lucky son of a Russian oligarch. Briefly, we allow ourselves to get carried away by their silly and sexy romance. Then the parents intervene, a group of (only semi-competent) Russian gangsters enter the scene, the Russian Prince Charming turns out to be a bit of a dud, and we find out just how feisty our heroine really is. Directed by Sean Baker, the Shakespeare of sex workers, reprobates, and loveable losers, and featuring a star-making turn by Mikey Madison in the title role.

2. Conclave

Director Edward Berger brings us the most audaciously entertaining film of the year. The pope dies and the cardinals are placed in seclusion—a conclave—to select their new leader. Egos run amok, battle lines are drawn, and everyone’s ambition rises to the surface. Ralph Fiennes is impeccable, as usual, as the cardinal in charge of the whole thing—trying to separate the righteous from the power-hungry. The twist at the end is satisfying, if a bit ridiculous. Pay close attention to the nuns.

3. Thelma

When 93-year-old Thelma (June Squibb, perfection) gets tricked by scammers, she takes matters into her own hands, inspired by her restless spirit and her love of Mission Impossible films. Her reluctant partner in crime is Ben (the late Richard Roundtree, wonderful), who tags along and tries to quell her more dangerous impulses. Meanwhile, her frantic family—including her slightly dim and doting grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger)—chases after her. But she doesn’t want to be rescued, she’s having the time of her life. And so are we.

4. A Real Pain

Ostensibly a film about a pair of cousins (Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) traveling to Poland to see the hometown of their grandmother who survived the Holocaust, Eisenberg’s film is actually about how we manage to live in a world full of suffering. Most of us compartmentalize, adapt, deny. But what if someone feels everything a little too deeply? That’s Culkin’s Benji. His outsized emotions manage to be the perfect foil to Eisenberg’s well-tempered repression. We watch the cousins fumble toward a mutual understanding and see Benji interact with the world—in turns annoying, delighting, and unsettling everyone he encounters.

5. A Different Man

Edward (Sebastian Stan) has Proteus syndrome, aka Elephant Man’s disease, and lives a quiet life of desperation. His beautiful new neighbor (Renate Reinsve) shows him kindness and he briefly misunderstands her intentions. Her rejection sends him spiraling—eventually to a doctor who claims to have a cure. He emerges a new man, a handsome one, who actually begins a tentative romance with the neighbor. But his world—and worldview—are disrupted when another man (Adam Pearson) with the exact same affliction arrives on the scene. This man has a joie de vivre—he charms the world with his friendliness and openness; he’s a lesson about embracing life in the form of a doppelganger. This quirky, smart, and slightly off-kilter film from Aaron Schmiberg is reminiscent of the early collaborations between Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman.

6. Emilia Pérez

Like nothing you’ve ever seen. A Mexican drug lord (enthralling Karla Sofia Gascon, in a dual role) recruits an overworked and underpaid lawyer (Zoe Saldana, never better) to arrange for him to get a sex change and start a new life. Once she has the surgery, she becomes a formidable but nurturing philanthropist who helps people find loved ones who died in the drug wars. But she pines for her two children so arranges to have them come live with her, along with her “widowed” wife (Selena Gomez), under the pretense that she’s the drug kingpin’s long lost sister. How long can she keep this charade up? Did I mention that Jacques Audiard’s film is a rock opera? I loved every cockamamie second of it.

7. The Beast

A sci-fi love story, of sorts, with three distinct chapters. In the framing device, set in the future, a woman named Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux, mesmerizing as ever) fears undergoing a process that “purifies” her DNA by conjuring and then eradicating memory of her past lives. She meets and is instantly drawn to a man named Louis (George MacKay) who shares her reservations about the process.

In a flashback to the turn of the 20th century, she’s a pianist and dollmaker who meets Louis at a party, where she confides in him that she has a dark cloud of dread hanging over her. In the middle memory, set in contemporary times, Louis is, shockingly, a deadly incel, modeled after Elliot Rodger. (Here, director Bertrand Bonello seems to be making a statement about the isolation and difficulty of real intimacy in modern society.) In the final chapter, we wait to see if she and Louis will undergo the treatment, thus losing their past-life connection. What does it all mean Honestly, I’m not sure, but I was absolutely riveted.

7. Will & Harper

Sure, it was jokey and gimmicky, not the kind of serious documentary that will win awards, but no film this year moved me more than this one, in which Will Ferrell takes a cross country trip to get reacquainted with his old best friend who has transitioned and become a woman. The film is generous, open-hearted, curious, and incredibly funny, much like Ferrell himself. It felt like the exact right film at the exact right time.

9. Challengers

Why aren’t there more films about tennis? Not only is the sport itself cinematic—all that thwacking and sweating and skidding across the court—it’s a showdown between two people, the ultimate war of wills. Ingeniously, Luca Guadagnino made his tennis film about two best friends (Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor) turned rivals who are both in love with the same woman, Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya). A threesome of sorts plays out off the court—it’s possible the young men are a little in love with each other, too. But on the court, they’re playing for nothing less than Tashi’s heart.

10. The Apprentice

Films are empathy machines, as Roger Ebert famously said. Which is why I was afraid to watch Ali Abbasi’s film about Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and his Svengali-like mentorship of Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan). It’s true, young Trump seems a little sheepish here, a little too eager to get out from under his father’s shadow, and almost something resembling sweet. But as Cohn teaches him the three rules of business combat: attack, attack, attack; admit nothing and deny everything; and claim victory no matter the outcome—he creates a monster in his own image.

Trump’s star surpasses his own and suddenly, the rapacious narcissist we all know emerges, treating the man who invented him like a mere rung on the ladder to success. Both performances are excellent—we watch Stan slowly become Trump, mannerisms and all, and Strong actually makes us pity one of the worst humans who ever lived.

Runners up (in alphabetical order): Ex Husbands, Good One, Hit Man, Janet Planet, Love Lies Bleeding, Messy, My Old Ass

*As of writing this, I had not yet seen a few highly praised films, including The Brutalist, Nickel Boys, and Hard Truths.

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The rumors go something like this: Twenty years ago, director James Mangold made Walk the Line about the life and times of Johnny Cash, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter. It was a critical and box office hit—Witherspoon even won the Best Actress Oscar. The movie was as traditional as it gets, starting with Johnny’s abusive childhood on a farm, and going on to depict his musical ambitions, his chaotic love life, his struggles with drugs and alcohol, and his career setbacks and triumphs.

Indeed, the film was so by-the-numbers, it prompted a parody, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which was both an uncanny simulacrum and a brutal takedown. There’s nothing like a good parody to make you realize how cliched a particular genre really is and once Walk Hard lifted the curtain its tropes, it seemed that the traditional biopic was doomed.

Not so fast! Biopics have merely evolved: Recent ones have largely eschewed the Wikipedia-style retelling of a biography, instead homing in on a particularly illuminating period of the subject’s life. I think that’s a good development, as it forces the filmmaker to reflect on what they think is important about the subject and why this pivotal time frame matters.

It’s fair to say that A Complete Unknown, Mangold’s new biopic of Bob Dylan, exists in a post Walk Hard world. We don’t have hazy flashbacks to Dylan’s childhood in Minnesota; there’s no framing device of present day Dylan, old and craggy, reflecting on his life. Instead, the film focuses on the period when young Bobby Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village with a guitar and a dream. It ends shortly after the infamous Newport Folk Festival where Dylan scandalized the assembled crowd and organizers by “going electric.” (Damn, America was cute back then.)

That said, there is nothing experimental or avant-garde in the storytelling here. It’s straightforward. Its pleasures come from seeing Timothée Chalamet channel Dylan, from its brilliant supporting cast (particularly Edward Norton as Pete Seeger—more on him in a bit), and from its painstaking recreation of the 1960s folk scene.

Let’s start with Chalamet, because that’s who you’re here to read about. Famously, he does all of his own singing and guitar/harmonica playing in the film—and most of the takes are live, because he wanted to capture Dylan’s rough and raw performance style. Only Dylan can really do justice to Dylan, but Chalamet comes close and his instinct to perform live was spot-on. He nails Dylan’s nasal, mumbly voice and he has his confident magnetism on stage as well as his hooded, cautious presence off of it. (Dylan is the rare celebrity who says he hates fame—and we believe him.) Chalamet seems every inch the brooding, tortured, formidable young talent. And the concert scenes rip.

Young Dylan gravitated to the folk scene, because he was a natural born singer-songwriter and because he idolized Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy). But in many ways, he wasn’t a natural fit. He simply wasn’t earnest enough—everything he did was suffused with irony. And he believed that for something to be beautiful, it also had to be a little bit ugly. He derides his musical—and sometimes romantic—partner Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) for having a voice that’s “too pretty.” “Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist’s office,” he sneers. Baez correctly calls him an asshole.

The foil to Dylan was Pete Seeger (Edward Norton)—as earnest and irony-free as they come. Pete meets Dylan when the young musician shows up unexpectedly at Woody Guthrie’s hospital room. (This, like many scenes in the film is an amalgamation of actual events.) Guthrie, already deep in the throes of Huntington’s disease, can barely communicate, but he bangs his nightstand with appreciation as Dylan belts out the homage tune, “Song to Woody.” Seeger, too, recognizes that Dylan is a special talent and takes him home to crash at his house for a while.

Seeger is shown as having a wonderful life. His wife is a devoted partner, both personally and professionally. His children are adorable and loving. His home exudes an easy, familial warmth. But he is not the brilliant artist Dylan is. What’s more, he truly believes in the special power of folk music—a simple song, simply told, often with a humanitarian message. Dylan doesn’t outwardly scorn Seeger—he appreciates his talent. But he sees him as a bit of a relic and he finds the music corny. And Norton plays Seeger as sweet and sincere, humbled by Dylan’s talent and a little wounded by his artistic rejection. It’s a heartbreaking performance.

The film also focuses on Dylan’s love life. There are two central women in his life—Baez and Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a beautiful peace activist who brought a measure of comfort and stability to Dylan’s life, but didn’t get much in return.

It’s funny that this is one of the few films Chalamet has done where he’s a true romantic lead—Call Me By Your Name was a love story, but he was the one doing most of the pining (and he was a literal cannibal in Bones and All so does that really count?). Here, he is the object of desire—withholding, mysterious, creative, and a bit of a dick. Who among us has not fallen for that guy? (Even with the help of a slight prosthetic nose, Chalamet is more handsome than Dylan ever was. But honestly, it was Dylan’s brilliance and elusiveness that made him so alluring. And Chalamet captures those qualities well.)

Mangold is a an exceptionally competent director. You can sit back and know you’re in the hands of a true pro. But he does have a hard time avoiding cliché or facile mash-ups. The Civil Rights movement is merely a tiny backdrop to the film, although Mangold makes it very clear that Black artists approved of the young troubadour. (At least twice he has an established Black blues artist—Odetta, in the wings of the Newport Folk Festival, and the made-up bluesman Jesse Moffett, on the set of Pete Seeger’s public access television show, Rainbow Quest—nod approvingly as Dylan sings.) This strikes me as self-serving, a shorthand for really delving into Dylan’s relationship to Black music and the civil rights movement. And Mangold uses Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), clearly one of his heroes, as an avatar for artistic rebellion and integrity. (“Track some mud on the carpet,” he advises young Bob.) The pep talks he gives Dylan were likely fabricated.

The heart and soul of the film, though, is that relationship between Dylan and Seeger. And here’s where giving a film focus really does help. Because Norton’s open, searching face will break you. But it also reflects a larger cultural shift, away from a more decorous kind of counterculture, to one that was loud and rebellious and angry.

Do we understand Dylan better after watching A Complete Unknown? A bit. He’s a famously elusive figure (which Todd Hayne’s cleverly tackled in his experimental Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, by giving Dylan several different personas played by different actors). But the film’s biggest thrill is watching the formation of an uncompromising artist and getting a little taste of what it must’ve been like to wander into Gerde’s Folk City on a random night and see a young man in a snap cap who was about to change the world.

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I’m sorry. I know this will upset its legion of fans who have improbably turned Richard Curtis’ twee bit of fluff into an enduring Christmas classic. I can acknowledge it’s not without some merit. Merely juggling all those storylines takes a certain amount of skill. And the acting elevates the material to something almost bearable. When it first came out, I thought it was facile, slick, and shallow. Now I can add maddeningly retrograde to the mix.

It’s remarkable the kind of casual sexism that went unchecked in films that came out in the 21st century. But as is the case with any anthology-style film, some of the storylines are better than others—and a few are nearly…good?

What follows is my official ranking of the Love Actually storylines, from worst to best. This ranking is final and binding. I will accept no phonecalls at this time.

9. That One Guy Who Goes to America
I don’t need to tell you this is the worst storyline. You already know it. I think most people have memory-holed this storyline out of the film. In it, an extremely annoying guy (Kris Marshall) can’t get a girl in England so he tells a friend he simply needs to go to The States where there are hot women everywhere who will love his British accent. His friend tells him this is a terrible idea but he goes any way—and the joke is, he’s right.

When he arrives at a bar in Wisconsin, he’s immediately set upon by a group of beauties (including a young January Jones!) who invite him back to their apartment where—oops—they all sleep naked. Ha, ha, it’s like a porn film fantasy, but it’s real! He triumphantly arrives back in London with a beauty on his arm and—wait for it—he even brought a spare girl for his friend. It’s not outrageously sexist because it’s just a joke! Lighten up, ladies!

8. That Other Guy Who’s in Love With His Friend’s Wife
This might be controversial, as the moment where Mark (Andrew Lincoln) professes his love for Juliet (Keira Knightley) via cue card while her husband and his (alleged) best friend (Chiwetol Ejiofor) sits obliviously upstairs is one of the more iconic scenes in the film. But why? What is cute about that? Falling in love with your best friend’s wife sucks, but why did he need to tell her? (She already figured it out when she saw that he had filmed the wedding like some creepy stalker, with the camera trained exclusively on her.) And why make her a party in his deception? Not only does she lie and say there are carol singers at the door, she runs after Mark and rewards him with a little kiss. This man should not be rewarded for his disloyal, selfish behavior! He’s a bad person!

7. The Step Dad and Cute Kid Who Bond Over the Mystery of Girls
This one feels like a missed opportunity. A stepfather getting closer to his stepson after the death of the child’s mother? Get me a ream of tissues. But all poignancy is immediately wrenched from the scenario when we find out the kid (wee little Thomas Sangster, cute as a button) is not extra sad because his mother died, but because he’s in love with an American girl at school (again, with the American girls? It’s becoming a fetish) who doesn’t know he exists. Stepfather (Liam Neeson) and son bond over how to get the girl—it involves learning to play the drums and then ducking security to chase her through Heathrow, a crime that would probably get him 15 to life in the real world. The moral of the story? If you’re really, really persistent, the girl will come around. Bad moral, Richard Curtis!

6. Laura Linney Lusts After a Hot Co-Worker (Improbably Named Karl)
The best part of this is the little happy dance Laura Linney does right before she thinks she’s about to have sex with her colleague, Karl (Rodrigo Santoro). Also, Karl is stupid hot, despite his name. The worst part is when her boss (Alan Rickman) kind of orders her to hit on Karl. Paging HR!

5. Colin Firth’s Love Language
There are better examples of Colin Firth finding love on film (usually as some iteration of Mr. Darcy), but this little trifle will do. Firth plays a writer who finds out this his girlfriend is cheating on him with his brother (an unnecessarily sadistic touch) and takes refuge at a countryside cottage in France. There he falls for the stern, no-nonsense Portuguese housekeeper (Lúcia Moniz), and they are able to communicate without a mutual language. The final scene at the restaurant where he fumblingly proposes to her is cute, but no self-respecting director would film a scene where a couple kisses and onlookers cheer. Manipulation at its finest. (Love Actually does this twice.)

4. Prime Minister in Love
Much as Laura Linney saves her minor storyline with her little happy sex dance, Hugh Grant’s goofy dance throughout the halls of 10 Downing Street to The Pointer Sister’s “Jump (For My Love)” is this sections’ selling point. But this is one of those retrograde bits. So let me get this straight…he crushes on a staffer, leaves her alone with a smug and handsy U.S. President (Billy Bob Thornton) who hits on her, and then has her fired? And then he chases her around London—not to apologize but to profess his love? She should’ve told him to get stuffed. Instead, she apologizes.

3. The No Good, Very Bad Cheating Husband
Emma Thompson softly crying to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” when she finds out that her husband (Alan Rickman) is cheating on her might be the single most poignant moment in this entire film. And that’s why this one is ranked so high. But one thing that shocked me was the full-on evil temptress in Alan Rickman’s office. She was in pure homewrecker mode—a character that only exists to lure our hapless husband into her bed. When I talk about the film’s no-longer-acceptable misogyny, this “character” is who I’m talking about. (This section also features Rowan Atkinson as a maddeningly punctilious jewelry salesman, because of course it does. I believe it’s in his contract to be in all British ensemble comedies.)

2. The X-Rated Meet Cute
This one is essentially a one-joke gag, extended throughout the course of the movie—but it’s a good gag. A mild-mannered man (Martin Freeman) and woman (Joanna Page) are serving as “stand-ins” for a film that apparently features a whole lot of sex. With all the romance of doing their taxes, they pantomime various sex acts and fondle each other’s naughty bits, as the Brits would say. Along the way, this decorous duo falls in love.

1. Aging Rock Star Has One Last Hurrah
The funny thing about this segment is it’s almost a meta commentary on the film itself. Aging rockstar Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) puts out an ersatz, treacly version of his song, “Love is All Around,” changing the lyrics to “Christmas is All Around.” He knows it’s shit and grumbles and grouses his way through the press tour. Somehow, Mack’s candor about the cheap money grub of the song works. It becomes the number one Christmas single, which is apparently a big deal in England. (Bless their hearts.) And this is a case where the film strives for poignancy—and achieves it!—when Billy Mack realizes that the “love of his life” is actually his long-suffering manager, Joe (Gregor Fisher), with whom he actually wants to spend Christmas with. Okay, I cried.

To hear more of my thoughts on Love Actually, tune into WYPR’s Midday With Tom Hall on Monday, December 9 at noon.

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Musicals are having a moment. It’s an extension of fan culture—that is to say, culture—with musical theater nerds loudly and proudly staking their claim among the other fandoms on social media. When I went to see The Outsiders on Broadway, there was a large group of teenage girls screaming for Ponyboy and cheering in anticipatory excitement before all the big numbers. When I caught a preview of The Great Gatsby, the screams were so loud you would think star Jeremy Jordan was Harry Styles.

Certainly among the most enduringly popular musicals is Wicked, the girl-power reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, which made co-stars Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth stars—or at the very least, god tier among musical theater nerds.

Happily, Universal Pictures didn’t try to obscure the fact that Wicked is a musical, but that’s not to say the production was without controversy. Everyone agreed that Cynthia Erivo, who won the Tony for The Color Purple and was Oscar nominated for her turn as Harriet Tubman in Harriet, was perfect for the part of misunderstood witch Elphaba, but mega pop star Ariana Grande as Glinda? When there were deserving musical theater professionals out there in need of a big break? Additionally, the promotion was not above its own bait and switch. Never seen in the commercials and trailer is the fact that the nearly three hour film is merely part one. Part two is due next year.

Let’s get those “controversies” out of the way first. Ariana Grande is a marvelous Glinda—pampered, entitled, but secretly kind—like Alicia Silverstone in Clueless if she had pipes for days. Anyone who has seen Grande on Saturday Night Live already knew she was funny—and here, her stellar comic timing is aided by her adoring sidekicks played with gleeful “you can’t sit here” bitchiness by Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James. As for the film being a part one? I wouldn’t fret it. It ends perfectly. You feel satisfied with what you just saw, while eagerly anticipating the next installment.

So yeah, Wicked is good. Almost great, although I couldn’t quite warm up to all the CGI sets and backdrops. I understand that director Jon M. Chu worked hard to create a built environment, even going so far as to plant 9 million tulips to recreate Emerald City (reader: I thought they were fake). But, despite his best efforts, the film still has that slightly glossy, uncanny feeling of AI. Give me cheesy, hand-built sets any day.

Still there’s a lot to recommend here, as the film is filled with wit and cleverness and verve. Erivo, as expected, makes for a heartbreakingly vulnerable, yet fierce Elphaba, and her belting out of “Defying Gravity” feels like cinematic catharsis at its finest.

There are also excellent supporting turns, including Jonathan Bailey as the dashing but romantically conflicted Fiyero; Michelle Yeoh as the glamorous professor of the dark arts, Madame Morrible; the voice of Peter Dinklage as the wise and kindly goat professor, Dr. Dillamond; and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard. (I mean, of course, Jeff Goldblum is the Wizard of Oz. It’s casting as inevitable as it is perfect.) Also, look out for a few smartly placed cameos. (Can you say: Adele Dazeem?)

Directed and performed with flair and obvious affection for the source material, Wicked is a wickedly good time at the movies. And yes, I imagine it’s going to be popular, as I’m already thinking of shelling out 15 bucks to see it again.

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So it was a rather genius move for Eisenberg to cast himself against Culkin in the film he wrote and directed, A Real Pain. They are an “odd couple” to be sure, but while Neil Simon’s play was mostly a vehicle for laughs—the slob and the neatnik living together—Eisenberg is reflecting on no less than how humans process grief and come to terms with global atrocities.

Eisenberg’s David and Culkin’s Benji are first cousins who were once best of friends but have since drifted apart. This is largely because David has moved to Manhattan, with a wife and a mop-headed toddler son and a normie job (he sells banner ads on websites). Meanwhile, Benji is a bit adrift. He still lives in the basement of his childhood home, in Binghamton, NY. And he’s still reeling from the death of his grandmother, his “favorite person in the world.”

It’s the death of their grandmother that compels the cousins to travel to Poland, to see the home where she grew up before she escaped the Nazis. They also will pay a visit to the nearby Majdanek concentration camp, where millions of others didn’t benefit from “a series of tiny miracles” to survive. They join a tour group of mostly well-heeled Jewish people, led by the earnest and knowledgeable James (White Lotus’ Will Sharpe). In the group: a retired married couple (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy); a recent divorcee named Marcia (Jennifer Grey) seeking meaning in her life; and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism.

“Oh snap!” exclaims Benji when he finds out that Eloge is a genocide survivor. Everyone stares at him, but this is what Benji does—he expresses his feelings, loudly and without a filter. David finds himself apologizing for his cousin throughout the trip, but something curious happens—Benji’s brutal honesty and outsized emotions have a way of loosening the tour group up and bringing them to some greater truth. Marcia starts confiding in him. Eloge and Benji become real friends.

At one point, the tour visits a statue of Polish soldiers during the Warsaw Uprising. Benji wants to take a photo with the statue, pantomiming himself in battle. “That’s inappropriate,” David stutters, but Benji plows ahead, and soon everyone is joining him—all playing various roles (Eloge is a medic, using his scarf as a torniquet).

Next, at a Jewish graveyard, Benji tells tour guide James he’s talking too much. Just let them feel.

James is affronted and, again, David apologizes for his cousin’s rudeness, but later, James realizes that Benji was right about that—and about the fact that they should spend more time among actual Polish people—and he thanks him.

When the group finally arrives at Majdanek, they all do the solemn thing we do on such tours—walk slowly, hands behind their backs, their faces silently registering the shock. On the train ride back to the hotel, however, Benji is the only one who openly weeps.

Both Eisenberg and Culkin are playing variations of their well-worn personas, but neither has ever been better. Eisenberg’s David is so heartbreakingly familiar, a kind and fastidious man who has learned how to manage his fears and neuroses, but they’re always burbling just under the surface. And Culkin is a sheer life force as Benji—a human truth bomb, all id, no filter, equal parts charming and unsettling.

It’s clear that Benji feels too much, is honest to a fault, takes up too much space. He would be exhausting to be around, a “real pain.” But Eisenberg is also suggesting that our ability to compartmentalize grief, to take in the horrors of the world without being leveled by them is not always a good thing. And thus we get the double entendre of the title: Sometimes it’s important to sit with that real pain.

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But what if I told you that Edward Berger’s Conclave was one of the most exciting and best films of the year—a tense and beautifully shot procedural filled with intrigue, surprise twists, double-crosses, and almost incalculably high stakes.

Early in the film, the stage is set. The pope has died and while many high-ranking clergymen fuss over his death bed, only one seems to truly be in mourning. That’s the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), whom we find out later had recently tried to resign his post—without success. Maybe the pope knew he was going to die, Lawrence speculates, and he wanted someone he trusted running the conclave.

A conclave, for the uninitiated, is a special election of a new pope by the Cardinals. That deal with the smoke billowing out of the Vatican until we get a new pope? That’s the conclave.

And if you think it’s a peaceful and stress free process, may I direct your attention to HBO’s Succession?

Four candidates emerge early on. There’s Stanley Tucci’s Bellini, the self-described liberal of the group, who wants the Catholic church to continue its progress on social issues. There’s Adeyemi (Lucien Msamati), who would be the first Black pope, but has some skeletons in his closet. There’s the entertainingly loathsome Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who vapes like he’s in some South Beach nightclub and believes that the Catholic Church should regress to its traditional ways—Latin liturgy, no women in the church, no gay marriage. (Tedesco makes the mistake of assuming Lawrence shares his values. When he casually mentions what a disaster it would be if Adeyemi becomes pope, Lawrence radiates with visible disgust.) Finally, there’s the seemingly mild-mannered Tremblay (John Lithgow), the moderate choice—but what to make of the rumors that the pope asked for his resignation shortly before he died?

As Dean, it falls on Lawrence to oversee the conclave, but there is a complicating factor—the cardinals are in lockdown, and therefore he has no access to outside information that might help him get to the bottom of the various rumors.

The first of many votes comes in and there are a few surprises: For one, Lawrence gets a few votes, even though he made it clear he wasn’t interested. Adeyemi is in the lead, with the other three main contenders fairly far behind. And there’s an even a more surprising vote bringing up the rear—for the humble Benitez (Carlos Biehz), a newcomer to the Vatican who had been serving a dangerous Catholic ministry in Afghanistan and had been secretly made a Cardinal by the pope.

The similarities to American politics, to all politics for that matter, are strictly intentional. Tucci’s Bellini pretends to be a reluctant candidate, but secretly craves the job. Tremblay is so blinded by ambition, he’s lost his moral compass. And as for Tedesco, his motto may as well be, “Make the Vatican Great Again.”

All the cardinals are so grasping they can hardly believe that Lawrence means it when he says he doesn’t want to be pope. They accuse him of secret ambition and sabotage, when he’s actually only seeking someone worthy of the job. (That said, he does have a papal name picked out: John. It’s that old aphorism about American politics: “Something happens to a man when he looks in the mirror and sees a president.”)

Although I was a fan of Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, I found its score a little jarring (intentionally so, but still…). Here, the jangly and stuttering sounds of a string quartet perfectly enhance the tension. The film is shot beautifully in a recreated Vatican—all long halls, secret chambers, and light-filled sanctuaries. (The film’s recreation of Sistine Chapel is impeccable.) But there’s a sense of claustrophobia, too. The cardinals are perfectly cloistered. It might as well be the 17^th century up in there.

All the acting is top notch—Castellitto in particular is a riot—but Ralph Fiennes is nothing short of masterful as Lawrence, a good man caught in the maelstrom of these red-robed men and their outsized ambition, all while grieving the pope and suffering his own crisis of faith. And look for a quietly powerful Isabella Rossellini as the all-seeing and all-knowing Sister Agnes.

Conclave is gripping from beginning to end. It’s one of those movies that reminds you why you love movies.

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None of this is intended to short shrift Pugh, who is an absolute delight—a singular talent and earthy beauty who has rightly taken Hollywood by storm. Girl is no slacker in the charm department herself.

So it is with some disappointment that I tell you that We Live In Time lives up to its dopey name. It’s muddled and half-baked, even though the two actors give it their all and, yes, do convince us they’re an actual couple.

Here’s the basis of the title: We are all shaped by our past, cleaved to our present, and unaware of our own future, the film argues, and only when we see all three at once do we get the full measure of a life. Not exactly revelatory stuff. Director John Crowley and writer Nick Payne toggle back and forth between Garfield’s Tobias and Pugh’s Almut at various stages of their relationship. One minute they’re an established couple with a daughter, Ella. One minute they are meeting (not-so) cute when Almut runs Tobias over with her Mini Cooper. One minute we are finding out that Almut’s cancer has recurred, although we didn’t know she had cancer to begin with.

All this is fine. I mean, I didn’t find it especially confusing, as some have complained, although Garfield looks exactly the same throughout—same fabulous head of tousled hair, same concerned face, same wire-rimmed glasses that he trots out to look extra emo. They could’ve at least given him a goatee or a haircut or something to help us navigate the timelines. (Thanks to chemo, Almut occasionally has a shaved head.) But it doesn’t really add anything to the film. I didn’t learn much more about the couple or their motivations because of the shifting timeline—if anything, it felt like a bit of a cop out. Just when things start to go below surface level, poof, we’re in a new year!

Also, the film has been falsely advertised to a certain extent. It’s not a story about Tobias and Almut so much as a story about Tobias reacting to Almut. She’s at the center of the film: her pain, her willfulness, her triumphs, her choices (or lack thereof). All Garfield has to do is look at her—at various points moist-eyed, adoring, befuddled, and, yes, concerned.

This is a bit of a gender reversal, I suppose. In most films, it’s the woman who is forced to be “put upon” and “long-suffering” as the husband, our hero, goes off and commits various acts of derring-do. But it’s a telling gender reversal because Almut doesn’t go on adventures: she gets cancer and has a child, all while guiltily navigating a career as a star chef.

Early in their relationship—too early, perhaps—Tobias tells her that he wants to have children and that her stated uncertainty on the matter could be a dealbreaker. She lashes out, cursing at him, telling him he’s putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on her. (Facts.) Their relationship progresses, but when she gets her first cancer diagnosis, she has to choose between a complete hysterectomy (meaning no chance of getting pregnant) or a partial one, which would be riskier but allow her to conceive. She chooses the latter and the film makes sure we know this was her decision . . . but was it? He’s the one who really wants kids.

Mixed in, we have lots of cozy, classic British rom-com scenes—Almut teaching Tobias to make eggs (you crack them on a flat service, she instructs); the two of them on bumper cars; the two of them getting it on in candle-lit rooms; scenes of smelling herbs and lemons in their painfully quaint garden; the obligatory scenes of Almut peeing on a stick as Tobias watches, concerned, until the happy pregnancy news comes through, etc.

The big conflict of the film has to do with Almut secretly entering international cooking competition Bocuse D’Or when she should be home resting during her cancer treatments. Her logic: If she’s going to die, she wants Ella to remember her for doing something great. But the film itself is ambivalent about this decision—one day, Almut’s so distracted by the menu preparation she leaves Ella waiting outside school in the rain. Is this a moment of female empowerment or a selfish choice by a mother who doesn’t quite love her daughter enough? The film isn’t sure. (But kinda, secretly, deep down thinks she’s a Bad Mom ™.)

In one of the timelines there is a brilliant set piece involving Almut giving birth in a “petrol station” bathroom (hey, it’s England). It’s an extremely funny and touching scene—both Garfield and Pugh act the shit out of it—but it fits in with my overall concern about the film. Garfield’s Tobias wants a child and Almut eventually agrees. But it’s not Tobias on the dingy floor of that station, hands gripping the sink, pushing for dear life.

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One day, the comedian/actor Will Ferrell gets an email from his old friend, a former head writer for SNL and one of the first people to truly recognize Will’s talent. She explains that she’s transitioning and now goes by the name Harper Steele.

This is a bit of a shock to Will. For one, in her old life, Harper was something of a guy’s guy—a drinker of cheap beer, a fan of the open road, a curmudgeon. Also, she’s 61, which seems late in life to make such a big change. Will never saw this coming. But that’s because Harper hid her true self so well.

It’s Will’s idea that the two old friends should take a cross-country road trip to get reacquainted with each other. It’s important for Harper that Will meets the real her, a new person—still flawed, still scared but a better, more honest version of her old self. Nothing is off limits. Any questions can be asked. Yes, you can ask why it took so long. Yes, you can ask about her boobs. (Of course, Will will make a Nordstrom “Rack” joke.)

So the two friends climb into a Grand Wagoneer—the actual perfect car for a road trip—and set off.

This trip is meaningful for Harper in many ways. Back before she transitioned, she used to love road trips. Partly this was because she simply loved Americana—road stops, honkytonks, Wal-Marts. But also, we learn, because she would allow herself to wear a dress on the road—always with a pair of trousers in the back seat in case she was stopped by a cop or the like. And later, in one of the film’s more touching sequences, we discover that she bought herself an absolute shithole of a house—a stained mattress, graffiti on the walls, creaky floorboards—in the middle of nowhere. A place to hide. But also, what she thought she deserved.

So the road trip is allowing Harper to test the open road as her true self. Will is there as a buffer. Harper worries she won’t be accepted in her new gender, especially in places like Texas and Iowa, but Will is accepted everywhere.

At one point, they stop at a dive bar on the road and Harper asks Will to stay in the car. She’ll call him if she needs him. She wants to do this on her own—she needs to do this on her own. She walks into the bar—there’s a Confederate flag on the wall—and introduces herself to some locals. They start chatting. She calls Will: Come in and meet my new friends.

Will is such a goofy guy, and the two friends have such an easy rapport, cracking jokes and giving each other good-natured crap, that much of the trip has a loose, almost giddy feel. But while many are accepting of Harper, not all goes smoothly. They meet the governor of Indiana at a Pacers game, only to discover after the fact that he had signed an anti-trans bill into law. They go to an all-you-can-eat restaurant in Texas and are met with derisive stares (followed, inevitably, by cruel and transphobic tweets—thanks, Elon).

In both case, Will castigates himself. He should’ve taken better care of his friend. Harper assures him that what he’s doing for her is a gift.

I found Will’s openness to Harper almost unbearably moving. He compliments her—tells her she looks pretty. He is comfortable hugging her and crying in front of her. This is real masculinity, in my eyes. Men, take notes.

A few former and current SNL cast members show up: There’s a dinner in New York with Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, Tim Meadows, and others. Harper talks about how she no longer feels safe walking alone in an alley.

“Welcome,” says Fey.

“Does it ever feel safe to walk alone in an alley?” Meadows cracks.

They go for a hot air balloon ride with Will Forte, who says he’s honored to be part of their journey, and there’s a funny bit with an anticlimactic champagne popping.

They call Kristen Wiig and ask her to write a theme song for their trip. It needs to be jazzy, upbeat, with elements of country, and it should also make you cry. She has two days.

The film, of course, ends with Wiig’s creation, “Will and Harper Go West,” which is as funny and delightful a ditty as you might hope. (And yes, it made me cry.)

Oh, how I wish the transphobes of this world could watch this film and see how wonderful empathy is. It costs nothing. It broadens one’s understanding of the world and the humans who populate it. And it makes everyone feel good.

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In that film, our young hero was death obsessed and suicidal until a life force in the form of Gordon’s Maude lifted him from his malaise and taught him how to find mischievous and rebellious pleasure in life. The two commenced a love affair. The fact that Maude was 79 is, well, why it’s a cult classic.

Strangely, few films have replicated its particular formula. Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples is, rather explicitly, an homage to Harold and Maude, albeit a super Jewish one.

When we meet Ben Gottlieb (professional sad sack Jason Schwartzman) he’s going through a personal crisis that doubles as a metaphor—he’s a cantor who can’t sing. We find out that his novelist wife died earlier that year and, after moving out of the home they shared and moving in with his meddlesome lesbian mothers, he’s been a shell of a human—morose, passive, morbidly depressed.

Then along comes Polly, er, Carla (Carol Kane), who was Ben’s music teacher when he was a kid. She doesn’t recognize him at first, not so much because he’s aged, but because he’s lost his spark. Only when she sees a picture of Ben grinning on his driver’s license—before his wife’s death—does she place him.

She’s visiting Ben because she wants to be bat mitzvahed. She explains that she’s a recent widow who wants to fulfill her childhood dream. At first Ben says no, for reasons not completely clear. (As a cantor, he well knows that you need not be 13 to be bat mitzvahed.) But Carla hectors the rabbi (Robert Smigel), who relents. So Ben commences coaching Carla, who begins to chip away at his sadness. What Carla does (quite explicitly, in one drug-fueled encounter) is reintroduce Ben to who he used to be, the confident young man brimming with possibility. Figuratively and literally, she helps him regain his voice.

This material is a little mawkish, so Silver goes out of his way to make the film as edgy as possible, with some jangly handheld camera work, some dirty talk in a car next to a cemetery, and some unnecessarily grotesque closeups of Ben and Carla sharing a burger. Sometimes this works, as in during a disastrous family dinner scene toward the end of the film, but sometimes it feels gratuitous.

Of course, Ben’s moms (Dolly De Leon and Caroline Aaron) have no idea that he’s spending so much time with a little old lady. They keep trying to set him up with people. They invite a doctor to the house. At first, Ben thinks she’s a psychiatrist, which he reluctantly agrees he might need, only to discover that she’s a plastic surgeon. “You think I need work done?” he asks, confused. She’s a single doctor, one of his moms points out. Later, a woman shows up at the temple. She’s here for their Jdate, she says. Needless to say, Ben doesn’t have a Jdate account.

So yeah, Ben’s mothers are meddlesome yentas. It’s something of a Jewish stereotype that I wasn’t super keen on, although it’s mitigated by the fact that Silver himself is Jewish. Similarly, the rabbi, a cheater at golf who keeps Ben on as cantor because his moms make a sizeable donation to the temple, is another borderline caricature. At least the rabbi seems to have a genuine fondness for Ben—so much so that he wants to set him up with his daughter (Madeline Weinstein), recently dumped by her fiancé, and as much of “a mess” as Ben is.

She arrives to town and she’s pretty and a little quirky (she sheepishly does a terrible impression of Katharine Hepburn) and seems interested. By this point, Ben is much less zombified, thanks to Carla—and we think we know where this is going. Until we’re not sure.

The film has many pleasures, but the greatest has to be the return of Carol Kane, a seminal figure in ’70s and ’80s film and television, famed for her frizzy blonde hair, squeaky voice, and impeccable comic timing. I’m happy to report that she still looks great—and her acting is better than ever. (This is a performance that deserves Oscar consideration, although she might have to settle for an Indie Spirit nod.) To add some poignancy to the proceedings, her Carla once aspired to be a singer and even released an album. We see its cover—a hazy, period spot-on photo of a luminous young Kane, just as we remember her.

Between the Temples is often funny, sometimes uncomfortable to watch (intentionally), and, despite its flaws, quite moving. All hail the manic pixie dream senior.

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With her cascading blonde hair, long legs, and toothpaste-commercial smile, Blake Lively is the epitome of the sun-kissed California beauty. It was actually a little far-fetched that she played some sort of Upper East Side princess in Gossip Girl—she’s surf boards and Laguna Beach all the way. But we bought it, mostly because her primary purpose on that show was to be the foil to the jealous Blair, who wanted the effortless charm that Lively’s Serena possessed.

In It Ends With Us, based on Colleen Hoover’s wildly popular novel (as seen on TikTok!), Lively does not have blond hair, but a mess of cooperative red curls, the sort that exist far more often in romance novels than real life. She wears flowy, artfully mismatched clothing—I spied some Magnolia Pearl, notorious for their expensive schmattas; she also seems to favor these architecturally complicated chainmail boots. She opens a flower shop in Boston, straight out of a “Bohemian Flower Shop” Pinterest board. It’s all a little ridiculous. It seems like cosplay.

Lively’s incongruous casting is a perfect metaphor for the film, which also seems to be suffering from an identity crisis.

At first, It Ends With Us seems like a love story. Lively’s Lily Blossom Bloom—yes, the film makes fun of the name, which feels like cheating since they’re the ones who gave her the name—meets hunky neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who also directs) on a rooftop. (For the record, they also make fun of his soap-opera-ready name. Again, YOU NAMED HIM THAT.) She’s up there contemplating her father who just died, but whom she didn’t really love. (More on that in a bit.) Ryle comes on the roof to vent about something—he assaults a chair. Knowing that the film was ultimately going to be about domestic violence, I thought this was a good touch. They’re showing that he has a bad temper. And yet, for a while, Ryle is nothing but a dreamboat. Although he’s a notorious playboy, he vows to change his ways for Lily. He’s doting, sincere, patient. There’s a minor road block once it’s discovered that Ryle is the brother of Lily’s best friend, Allysa (Jenny Slate, here to save us). But their love cannot be stopped! With Allysa’s blessing, Ryle and Lily get married.

Okay, but let’s back-up a bit. In flashbacks, we also see glimpses of Lily’s first love, a homeless boy named Atlas (stop laughing). In those flashbacks, Lily is played by Isabela Ferrer and Atlas is played by Alex Neustaedter, who both only glancingly resemble their older counterparts. The flashbacks here are doing a lot of heavy lifting: They’re showing us Lily’s first love and showing us that Lily’s father beat Lily’s mother and eventually Atlas, when he discovers the boy in bed with his daughter—but they feel perfunctory. Baldoni seems much more interested in the scenes depicting Lily’s adult life (maybe because he’s in them?).

And then Ryle hits Lily. It kind of comes out of nowhere. This film would’ve been notably better if they’d established Ryle’s violent tendencies—getting jealous at a bar, maybe, or being enraged when his much-loved Bruins lose a game. Yes, we saw him assault that chair on the roof, but that was it. Beyond that, he was Prince Charming. Ryle gaslights Lily (and to a certain extent us) into thinking it was an accident. (The film intentionally holds back on showing us the extent of his violence until later on.) Lily covers her bruise with some makeup and they go out for dinner with Allysa and her affable husband (Hasan Minhaj). The waiter looks kinda familiar? You guessed it, it’s Atlas, all grown up now and sporting a non-threatening beard (he’s played as an adult by Brandon Sklenar). He’s not just their waiter, he’s the restaurant’s owner and chef. (He is the Swiss Army Knife of convenient plot contrivances.)

Atlas sees the hastily covered bruise on Lily’s face and immediately groks what’s going on, even if she refuses to see it. He and Ryle fight and this is the beginning of the end, as Ryle becomes consumed by jealousy.

I experienced a fair amount of cognitive dissonance watching It Ends With Us—it plays like a sun-dappled romance that suddenly turns violent. (Apparently some people, expecting it to be an uncomplicated love story, felt deceived by the sudden change in tone.)

I appreciate the fact that this is ultimately a film—and book—about ending the cycle of violence. We’ve evolved past the “fall in love with your rapist” trope, thank goodness. But it feels like they want to have their cake and eat it, too, here—a hot romance with beautiful people and a “you go, girl” film about a woman rejecting her violent lover. And then there’s Atlas—chef, waiter, restaurant owner, former homeless kid turned bearded king—waiting in the wings. Is the answer to leaving your abusive husband having a better alternative on deck?

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The biggest twist in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest, Trap, is that there is no twist. I mean, there are plenty of surprises along the way, but the central premise—that our normie suburban dad protagonist, Cooper (Josh Hartnett), is in fact the knife-wielding serial killer nicknamed “The Butcher”—is established right away.

I’m trying to imagine what the film would be like if we didn’t know this fact, if we simply thought Cooper was a caring dad who had taken his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a Lady Raven concert only to discover that the show was doubling as a massive manhunt for The Butcher. If we worried that Cooper and Riley might come into to contact with this maniac. If we feared for their lives?

But no, the trailer makes it quite clear that Cooper is our guy. Knowing this adds a meta layer of humor to the film, even before the (relatively swift) reveal. For example, it’s funny out of the gate when Cooper refuses to speed to the concert, telling Riley, “We’re not going to break any laws!”

Indeed, Cooper seems like nothing more than a doting dad, learning teen slang (“crispy” means good, but no, “extra fried” doesn’t mean very good, Dad, duh) and proudly recording Riley’s dance moves on his phone (she knows all the Lady Raven choreography by heart).

But he starts to notice a massive police presence and gets twitchy. He befriends a T-shirt vendor named Jamie (Jonathan Langdon, giving great everyman) and asks him what’s up. Jamie leans in, conspiratorially, and says that he’s not supposed to say anything, but the whole concert is actually a set-up to catch The Butcher. Cooper’s face goes white.

He then immediately checks a live feed on his phone of some poor schmuck named Spencer whom he has trapped in a basement.

Yup, he’s The Butcher.

From there, it’s a cat and mouse game, as Cooper tries to evade the police (they have every exit covered and are also randomly hauling in fathers in for questioning) while also trying to keep up happy appearances with Riley, who is having the time of her life.

Finding out that our apparent hero is actually a stone-cold killer puts the audience in a strange spot. For a while, at least, we find ourselves rooting for Cooper to escape—and we’re entertained by his clever evasions and diversion tactics.

And the humor, now mixed with a kind of underlying menace, continues throughout. Cooper is confronted by an aggressively flirty PTA mom whose daughter has snubbed Riley. Will Cooper murder her to avenge his daughter (or simply because she’s annoying)? Later, Cooper finds himself alone in the storage room with Jamie, who is opening boxes of T-shirts. “Here, hold this,” Jamie says, handing Cooper the box cutter. Dude just handed The Butcher a box cutter!

Shyamalan directs all this like the pro he is, taking us from the swirling activity on the stage to the jam-packed stands to Cooper’s paranoid face as we watch him make split-second calculations whenever he encounters a new threat.

As for the actress playing Lady Raven? Earning her spot on the Mount Rushmore of nepo-babies, she’s none other than Saleka Shyamalan—yup, M. Night’s daughter. (Arguably the man created an entire film to give her a chance to perform). But here’s an actual twist: she’s good. In fact, compared to the fake boy band in The Idea of You (which I liked!), she’s quite believable. And she wrote all the film’s catchy, radio-ready songs. Some families get all the talent. Saleka is a bit less successful in the latter part of the film when she gets off stage, not necessarily because she’s a bad actress (time will tell) but because the film’s final act is laughably preposterous. The less said about it, the better.

Still, that first hour is tight—tense, funny, scary. Edge of your seat stuff. And Hartnett is great here—turning on a dime from dear-old dad to psychopath in wildly entertaining fashion. I am so here for the Harnett-aissance. It’s also wonderful to see Hayley Mills—yes, that Hayley Mills—as the FBI profiler who can anticipate The Butcher’s every move. She mentions, in passing, that The Butcher probably has OCD. About half an hour later, we see Cooper fastidiously fix a lopsided towel in a bathroom, even as he’s on the run. It’s that kind of attention to detail that makes Trap so satisfying. Turns out, knowing who The Butcher is the whole time makes for killer fun.

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In neither case is there a chyron under the interviews noting that both of these interviewers’ careers were about to be upended by their own sexual abuse and harassment scandals, but those of us watching know. The irony is rich. And it’s everywhere.

Sorry/Not Sorry isn’t about Rose or Lauer, but in a way, it is, as Louis C.K. becomes a stand-in for the kind of highly admired man who routinely abused his power. It’s about how men like Louis get away with this kind of behavior—about how difficult it is for victims to respond “correctly” in the moment of the abuse and how unrewarding, if not ruinous, it is to come forward in their aftermath.

I confess that what happened with Louis was particularly upsetting to many women, including myself, who admired him greatly. He was a uniquely incisive, funny, and honest comedian and auteur who talked about his own gender in less than flattering ways. (His famous assertion that men were the greatest threat to women became infamous after the sexual misconduct scandal emerged.) We thought he was an ally—self-deprecating, and a bit of a sad sack, rueful about his own worst sexual impulses but wise and empathic enough to resist them. Turns out, he was something much worse: A faux ally, who used his public reputation as a good guy to gain the trust of unsuspecting women.

Mones and Suh interview many of the female comedians who were victims of Louis C.K., including Jen Kirkman, who remembers the first time she met him. He was already somewhat established—although he was about to get much bigger—and she was a newbie. He gave her a lift to the hotel they were both staying at and, along the way, talked about his various sexual conquests. Kirkman recalls being taken aback by his behavior, wondering, Is this normal? Is it an initiation of sorts? After all, comedy is a boy’s club. Was he testing to see if she could hang with the fellas? Later, she ended up in the corner of a bar with him and he asked how she would feel if a man masturbated in front of her. She thought he was being hypothetical, maybe working on a bit. He laughed at her naivete and made it clear he was talking about himself. Right now.

There were other incidents: He invited Kirkman to be his opening act, a career-changing proposal, but with the strong suggestion she would need to sleep with him to stay on the tour. (She declined.) At another time, he whispered in her ear backstage, “I’m going to f**k you one day.”

None of this was encouraged or welcomed by Kirkman.

He never did drop trou and masturbate in front of Kirkman, but he did many times in front of many other female comedians, always asking for permission first and taking their stunned silence as consent.

That’s the thing about this kind of behavior: It always catches women off guard, shocked into a kind of stasis, maybe even questioning their own reality, as comedian Abby Schachner did when she heard Louis C.K. masturbating over the phone one day as they talked shop.

And then, if they do come forward, they’re the ones who get blacklisted or mocked. Dave Chappelle cracked on stage that Schachner could’ve simply hung up the phone and said she had a “brittle-ass spirit.” And that’s always the line: Why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you say no? Why are you so uptight?

One of the most intriguing aspects of the doc is that Louis C.K.’s behavior was an “open secret” in the comedy world and beyond. This is the way it was before the #MeToo movement. The path of least resistance, especially among those who served to benefit from Louis C.K.’s success, was to ignore the whispers, or pretend you didn’t know, or think, “It’s not my problem.” It was also apparently known that Harvey Weinstein abused the casting couch (although some of the stronger allegations, like rape, were not widely known) and that Bill Cosby drugged and sexually abused women. These open secrets were given oxygen during the #MeToo movement. It was a painful reckoning, but long overdue.

After five female comedians accused Louis C.K. of sexual misconduct in a New York Times article in 2017, he acknowledged that they had told the truth and wrote an open letter in response. It was a thoughtful letter, where he seemed to really understand what he had done—taken advantage of the power imbalance, jeopardized these women’s careers, and put them in an untenable position. It was a self-flagellating letter, consistent with his standup routine, although notably, he never actually said, I’m sorry.

I remember after I read that letter that I felt a little better about him, that maybe he really did get it. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen,” he wrote. And then he did.

In Sorry/Not Sorry, the comedian Michael Ian Black asks the question, “How do we deal with this?” The worst of the bad actors go to jail or have rendered themselves completely unhireable. But what do we do with the Louis C.K.s—men who did objectively horrible things but who are perhaps not deserving of permanent shunning.

Here’s my two cents (not that anyone asked): If society deems the act worthy of punishment, but not worthy of permanent exile, there is a path back. The path back is showing genuine contrition. The path back is learning from your mistakes. The path back is using your platform for positive change.

But that’s not what Louis did. Nine months after taking a “step back,” Louis C.K. did a surprise set at the Comedy Cellar, but he was no longer the contrite, self-reflective man from his “apology” letter.

Instead, he cracked jokes about what had happened and suggested that he merely had an embarrassing kink that had been revealed to the public. The acknowledgement that he had abused his power and damaged women’s careers was a distant memory.

Since then, his career has thrived (he even won a Grammy), although he has now become a hero of the right, as he’s leaned into his status as a victim of cancel culture. He has surely lost many female fans—and many male ones as well. But as one fan lining up for Louis’ Madison Square Garden show sheepishly says, “Everyone lives with a certain amount of hypocrisy and this is the amount that I’ve allocated for myself.”

Sorry/Not Sorry is available on VOD.

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But as soon as Daniel leaves, Thelma always takes off the bracelet. It’s uncomfortable, and she likes her independence, even though her license was taken away a few years ago. She misses driving, she says longingly at one point.

When Thelma gets a phone call from “Daniel,” who says he’s in prison after getting in a car crash and tells her to wait for instructions from his lawyer, we gasp, immediately knowing what’s up.

“You sound funny,” Thelma says to fake Daniel.

“I broke my nose,” he says. (Not so fun fact: Scammers are already using AI to create realistic voice simulacrums of our loved ones, so we’re all screwed.)

Next she speaks to the “lawyer” who says she needs to get $10,000 in cash to a P.O. Box right away.

She finds the money, tucked away in book shelves and under the bed, and puts it in an envelope. As she slowly slides the money into a mailbox, we watch, in horror: Nooooooo.

But it’s too late. The money has been sent.

Thelma calls her daughter, Gail (Parker Posey), who gets a bit frantic herself. She tries Daniel’s number, but he doesn’t pick up. Then she tells her husband, Alan (Clark Gregg), who calls their son again. This time, he picks up, groggily. He was just sleeping.

They go to the police, but it’s fairly useless, because it was sent via regular post.

When the police officer explains that scam artists find private information—Daniel’s name, for example—on social media, Thelma moans, “How can Zuckemborg let this happen?”

To the family, it’s an unfortunate incident, but one they can easily put behind them. But Thelma is outraged. She wants her money back.

She’s doubly frustrated when she hears her family discussing her in an adjacent room—maybe it’s time to put Grandma in a home, they’re saying.

“I just lost my wallet,” Daniel says, defending her. “Are you going to put me in a home?” (From there, the conversation immediately pivots to whether or not Daniel has arranged to get a new driver’s license, because it’s extremely dangerous to drive without one, and he needs to get on that right away. I am related to these people.)

Fueled by a sense of injustice—and a newfound appreciation for Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible—Thelma sets out to find the scammers and reclaim her money.

There’s only one problem: She knows the family won’t support her mission and she can’t drive. So she goes to the retirement home where her friend Ben (Richard Roundtree, wonderful) lives and, after a bit of small talk, steals his motorized scooter. He steals another scooter and chases her around the center. She and Ben come to an impasse—but not before a head-to-head collision—and he reluctantly agrees to tag along on her mission.

One of the many ingenious things about Thelma is it’s treated like a (low-stakes) Mission Impossible film, with snappy, caper music accompanying Thelma’s every move. This starts with the chase scene at the senior center—that scooter corners like it’s on rails, by the way—and continues when Thelma outsmarts her family, who are now frantically searching for her, by tossing her Life Line bracelet over a fence. (An aside: Fans of The Daytrippers will delight in seeing Parker Posey driving in the back seat of another family vehicle on a quest.) But the film’s greatest set piece comes when Thelma finds herself in an extremely cluttered antique store hoping to confront the bad guys. Ben is waiting outside, wearing an ear piece (actually, his iPhone, set to hearing aid mode), and he guides her, as though she’s Tom Cruise navigating lasers next to a priceless safe. When she lands with a thud on a bed in the store and rolls off it like a cat burglar, I lost it.

On top of the delightful performances by its entire cast and those winking action sequences, Thelma is genuinely one of the funniest films I’ve seen in a while.

At one point, Daniel makes his way through the retirement home, looking for Thelma.
“Grandma?” he yells out—and several hopeful voices reply, “Yes?”

There’s a running gag where Thelma bumps into people who look familiar, and they cheerfully try to figure out their connection. Mutual friends? No. The same synagogue. No. The sly joke is that when you hit 93, everyone looks familiar.

Another good joke also captures the poignancy of this film. The workers at the retirement home ask Thelma’s family if she has any ailments.

Well, she had valve replacement, hip replacement, a double mastectomy, and has a slow-growing brain tumor, they say. Besides that, she’s fine.

Getting old is not for the faint of heart, the film reminds us. But if you approach life as the great adventure it is, you’ll leave with no regrets.

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The thing is, I had uttered those very words myself. From Top Gun: Maverick to the romcom Anyone But You to the upcoming (and unnecessary) Twister remake, it did seem like Hollywood was shoving this guy down our throats. Yes, Anyone But You was a surprise box office hit, but I felt like too many people were attributing its success to Powell, when I thought costar Sydney Sweeney was the real secret weapon. I found him to be both bland and smug as an actor, a combination that reminded of none other than Ryan Reynolds. (Spoiler alert: I’m not a fan of Ryan Reynolds.)

But there was his mom with this sign, which said a lot. It said he has a sense of irony about himself. And it said he has a good relationship with his mom. So I softened.

Then I saw Hit Man—which, after a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run in a few select cities, is now streaming on Netflix—and I had to cry uncle. For starters, Powell is credited as the co-writer of the film, along with director Richard Linklater. That’s…hot. Also, he’s undeniably great in it, displaying acting chops that had heretofore been hidden to me (or maybe I’d just overlooked them).

Yes, it’s a doozy of a role, designed to make its lead actor look good. But you still have to ­pull it off—and Powell does that and then some.

Remarkably, the film is based on a real person, although the details of the story are made up. When we first meet Powell’s Gary Johnson, he’s got wire glasses and stringy hair and he sports cargo shorts. He’s a philosophy and psychology college professor by day and police IT guy by night. As he talks about Nietzsche’s concept of living passionately, one of his students mutters under his breath, “You drive a Civic.”

Indeed, Gary leads a very quotidian life. He’s a birder, who also has a couple of cats, and he doesn’t date much.

Even working for the police department isn’t especially sexy. He’s the guy in the truck making sure the wires are picking up audio and video correctly as they monitor a cop named Jasper (Austin Amelio), who is pretending to be a hit man for hire. That is, until one day Jasper gets suspended for roughing up a suspect a bit too zealously and Gary’s supervisor, Claudette (Retta), turns to him and says, “I’m thinking you’re up.” Gary stares at her, slackjawed: “I’m up?”

But there’s no time to spare. The mark—that is, the suspect who called up the department’s fake hit man—is waiting in a diner. Gary has listened in on countless such sting operations, Claudette reminds him. Plus, there’s no one else, except for Gary’s co-worker Phil (Sanjay Rao), who balks at the idea. (“Tried it years ago. Almost got killed,” Phil says—not quite words of encouragement.) So, against his better judgment—or maybe because he’s secretly yearning for a passionate life—Gary wires up and heads into the diner.

What he discovers, both in the diner and at several other such sting operations, is that he’s a very good fake hit man. Not only does he stay calm under pressure, but his background in philosophy and psychology allows him to read the mark and figure out exactly who they want him to be. It’s quite funny as he goes from Russian tough guy to fancy Eurotrash to gun-loving good ol’ boy. (The only thing all of Gary’s hit men have in common is that they all like pie. “There’s no bad pie,” is Gary’s motto, which is pretty solid, as mottos go.) And Linklater brilliantly ushers us through those encounters—first a scene at the designated meeting spot, then a brief conversation, an exchange of money, and a jump cut to the suspect’s baffled mug shot after their arrest. Foiled by Gary again!

The film maintains that hit men don’t actually exist—they’re just something we see in movies. (Is that true? Mind blown!) But people want the concept to be real, want to believe that they can make a single phone call and all their problems will magically go away. The wish fulfillment aspect of it is almost poignant and Linklater and Powell lean into that.

When Gary is hired by the beautiful Madison Masters (Adria Arjona), he decides she wants a confident, cool hit man named Ron. Which his exactly what he becomes. Ron wears sunglasses and a rugged leather jacket. His hair is slicked back. He’s got a roguish stubble. It’s Ron who convinces Madison not to off her abusive husband, but instead, to use the money she was going to pay him to move out. It’s against the rules—he’s there to catch the bad guys, not become their life coach—but he can’t help himself. He’s taken with her and believes her to be a good person.

And even though Gary broke protocol, both Phil and Claudette become enamored by Ron, too. They agree that while Gary is a mild-mannered nerd, Ron is an extremely doable stud.

So, as Ron, Gary begins to romance Madison—also an ethical no-no, needless to say. And he starts becoming Ron in real life.

“When did Mr. Johnson get so hot?” one of his students whispers. Turns out, Ron was inside Gary all along. He just needed to tap into him. This mirrors the Kantian concept Gary is teaching about the self being a construct.

Yup, Hit Man has romance, a bit of action, philosophy, and tons of clever humor. It’s a delightful film, nearly perfect on its own terms, and it’s an important one, too—it made me a Glen Powell believer.

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Buffy is my all-time favorite show. To me, its blend of humor, horror, teen (and, eventually, young adult) angst, and romance has never been surpassed. I watched it in a manner similar to I Saw the TV Glow’s protagonist, Owen (a heartbreaking Justice Smith.) I had missed the first three seasons, so I caught up on DVDs loaned to me by my friend Geoff. (In the movie, Owen watches on video tapes.) I remember that on the season three stack of DVDs, Geoff had scribbled, “Holy s&@$!” (IYKYK.) After that, I was able to watch in real time, in weekly installments. (This is how we used to watch television shows, children. Like barbarians.)

But here’s the thing. I was in my twenties when I first started Buffy, not a teenager. I’m not sure how I would’ve reacted differently to the material if I were a kid or searching for my identity in any way. It might’ve been more transformative—it might’ve grafted on me differently.

I say this because it took me a while to adjust to the gloomy, arty, lo-fi mood of I Saw the TV Glow. To me, the most outstanding aspect of Buffy is its sharpness, its wit, its heightened sense of irony. (And the hotness of vampire Spike in a leather coat, but I digress…)

But I can imagine to a young queer person, the show’s idea of outsiders having a divine purpose, being able to combat demons (actual ones, standing in for the metaphorical ones), and being part of a special secret sisterhood would be quite heady. (Later, the show explicitly honored its queer fanbase by making cute-nerd-turned-hot-witch Willow gay.) That’s the side of Buffy that I Saw the TV Glow writer/director Jane Schoenbrun, who is transfeminine, leans into.

Our action takes places in a small, nondescript suburban town, possibly named Void (the kids go to Void High). Young Owen (first played as a 7th grader by Ian Foreman) meets fellow outsider Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and she turns him onto The Pink Opaque, a show about two girls psychically bonded in their quest to vanquish a moon-like “Big Bad” named Mr. Melancholy. The show is explicitly based on Buffy, in terms of tone, title font, indie rock score, and various other similarities—Buffy also called its season-long antagonists Big Bads.

We see little clips of the show, starring Helena Howard as Isabel and Lindsey Jordan (Baltimore’s own Snail Mail!) as the cooler, tougher Tara. Funnily enough, the actress who played Tara on the original Buffy, Amber Benson, has a very sweet cameo here. But The Pink Opaque’s Tara is more like Buffy’s authority-defying Faith; Isabel is more a stand-in for Buffy herself. And the characters are meant to mirror Owen and Maddy. (Both Owen and Isabel are half-Black and the more cautious member of the duo.)

Maddy and Owen watch The Pink Opaque in her wood-paneled basement, with a huge aquarium bubbling beside them. Upstairs, her parents fight. Maddy’s father is abusive. Owen’s mother was doting, bordering on helicoptering, but when she dies of cancer, Owen is left in the care of his taciturn father, who spends all day watching TV. (We see him on the coach, as the flickering lights of the television dance across his motionless face.)

It’s Maddy who wants to leave home. Owen is too fearful. And then, just like that, she vanishes, leaving only a burning TV behind.

Is there something demonic going on in their small town, as Maddy posits. Or is it “just the suburbs,” as Owen responds sadly.

Maddy was empowered by The Pink Opaque to go off on her own hero’s journey. Owen, stuck permanently in his hometown, wastes away. (He narrates the film, from childhood all the way through middle age.)

I Saw the TV Glow is filled with beautiful, evocative images—not just the constant glow of television sets, but a billowing, tented planetarium the students build in school; a sensory-numbing amusement park, with more of those ever-flickering lights; and the tattoo-like, neon pink birthmark the Pink Opaque duo have inscribed on their necks. In one of the film’s most tender and intimate scenes, Maddy painstakingly draws the pink birthmark on Owen’s neck.

The film is also quite scary, in exactly the way Buffy could be—not with fancy special effects, but by tapping into something genuinely nightmarish and sinister. (Another Baltimore connection: local filmmaker Albert Birney helped with the construction of the monsters.) I do wish it were funnier, but that’s what made Buffy important to me—not Schoenbrun.

It’s telling how much I Saw the TV Glow, which is mostly set in the late ’90s, feels like a period piece. There was a time when television was crucial, unifying. Schoenbrun understands that, yes, we can be mesmerized, even zombified by these glowing images, but they’re not here to condemn television. They’re here to pay tribute.

Sometimes, a TV show could be a portal to a better world. Sometimes a TV show could save a life.

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Hathaway has always been a beauty, but in her younger years, she also convincingly played gawky (see Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada). There’s nothing gawky about her now. She recently wowed me in a femme fatale-ish role in the criminally underseen Eileen. She had an allure, a kind of gravitas in that film that reminded of no less than Cate Blanchett.

Here, she’s leaning into her Julia Roberts era—electric smile, gobs of charisma, and a kind of cozy and confident sex appeal.

Her character’s young lover, Hayes Campbell, is the lead singer of the boy band August Moon. He’s played by rising star Nicholas Galitzine, who is indeed charming and hot, although not totally convincing as this boy band stud. Galitzine has a kind of sensuous, heavy-lidded beauty that tends to appeal to, well, older women. Most boy band members have a cutie-pie androgyny. (Also: Those fake tattoos? Unconvincing!). One thing that is convincing: August Moon’s super catchy, radio-friendly music, written by songwriters Savan Kotecha and Carl Falk. And Galitzine has a respectable singing voice.

The Idea of You is directed with breezy affection and confidence by the always reliable Michael Showalter (The Big Sick). No, it doesn’t have the snappy cleverness of Notting Hill—what does?—but it should appeal to folks craving an intelligent and sexy romcom.

Hathaway plays Solène (!), a gallery owner who’s still reeling a bit from a recent divorce and the sting of turning 40. Her big-shot lawyer ex-husband, Daniel (Reid Scott), cheated on her with a younger woman at the firm, who now seems desperate to become besties with Solène (who understandably scoffs at these overtures). Solène, refreshingly, has a good relationship with her 17-year-old daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin).

It’s because of Izzy that Solène is at Coachella—Daniel bought Izzy and her friends all-access passes to meet August Moon. (It’s actually a minor, but clever detail that Izzy’s preoccupied father doesn’t realize that she hasn’t been into August Moon since the 7^th grade. These days, she prefers the likes of St. Vincent.)

Solène encounters Hayes backstage after a meet-cute involving a trailer mistaken for a bathroom. He’s immediately smitten. She thinks he’s attractive, but harmlessly so. He’s a baby! Later, Hayes dedicates a song to Solène from stage. Again, she’s amused, but doesn’t think too much of it—until he shows up the next day at her gallery and promptly buys all of the art. (He insists he has an empty house and likes Solène’s taste.)

They have lunch, they kiss; they spend more time together. They begin having an affair. She worries she’s too old for him. He worries he’s “a joke” as a musician. They lift each other up.

And then there are conflicts. I won’t go into them all, so as not to spoil the movie, but they involve things like internet trolls, paparazzi, and the effect all of this is having on Izzy. Will they make it or won’t they?

The Idea of You so deftly avoids cliches, I wasn’t totally sure until the very end.

The Idea of You is now playing on Prime Video

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