Kevrock’s 2024 Oscar guide

Best Picture

Nominations:

American Fiction

Anatomy of a Fall

Barbie

The Holdovers

Killers of the Flower Moon

Maestro

Oppenheimer

Past Lives

Poor Things

The Zone of Interest

Will Win: Oppenheimer.  Christopher Nolan’s literally brilliant opus is the kind of intelligent epic that used to win Oscars for David Lean (though it’s smarter). It also has the best gamble-that-plays-off-in-spades story since James Cameron’s Titanic. Even among the most impressive Best Picture slate in years it stands out. It doesn’t just deserve to win. If feels like it’s destined to.

Should win: Oppenheimer. All of the above but let me note the SAG award it won for best cast was more than deserved, where even actors in one scene roles (Casey Affleck! Gary Oldman!) do Oscar-worthy work.

Shoulda been nominated. Asteroid City. Not just because this deadpan humanist masterpiece is one of Wes Anderson’s best and most mature films, but it would be great to see how its tension between post-war optimism and post-nuclear anxiety would fare against Christopher Nolan’s pre-apocalypse vision.

Kevrock’s Oscar Guide – 2024

Best Director 

Nominations:

Jonathan Glazer – The Zone of Interest.

Yorgos Lanthimos – Poor Things.

Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer.

Martin Scorsese – Killers of the Flowers Moon.

Justine Triet – Anatomy of a Fall.

Will Win: Christopher Nolan - Oppenheimer. Nolan delivered a talking-heads epic based in the spectacle of ideas (with the exception of the beyond spectacular explosion of the you-know-what) that not only let him take the crown of smartest director of blockbusters from James Cameron, but to wear it better than he ever did. It also brought millions of people into the theaters, so there’s that.

Should win: Jonathan Glazer - The Zone of Interest. The strangest nominee in this category since David Lynch, Glazer took the “the banality of evil” (which by now is itself banal) and shoved it in our faces by delineating the dull lives of a newly prosperous family while, through brilliant sound engineering, letting us hear the gunshots and screams of the concentration camp that their patriarch runs, screams that they refuse to hear thereby bringing us almost subliminally into complicity. 

Shoulda been nominated: Todd Haynes for May December. Haynes uses the language of sentimental Lifetime movies not to normalize delusional pedophilia but to demonstrate its resistance to being normalized. And uses the scripts meta elements (a Lifestyle movie being made about the family started by a woman having sex with a 13-year-old) to set himself up as an untrustworthy narrator, but one who never treats his characters as anything but human beings.

Oscars 2024 Best Actress

Best Actress 

Annette Bening – Nyad

Lily Gladstone – Killers of the Flower Moon

Sandra Huller – Anatomy of a Fall

Carey Mulligan – Maestro

Emma Stone – Poor Things.

Will win: Lily Gladstone – Killers of the Flower Moon. With less screentime than the other nominees she’s still the soul of the movie and the reason why a black comedy about the incompetence of American Evil could also be a tragic love story about a strong woman and the weak man who poisons her.

Should win: Carey Mulligan - Maestro. As a renowned actress and a smart charismatic woman falling for a brilliant charming genius with eyes wide open to his only semi-closeted bisexuality, she captures what Joni Mitchell called “the dizzy dancing way you feel.”  And after many years when she starts to realize how many of the marriage’s compromises have been hers, she conveys the film’s inversion of Tolstoy – that happy marriages are unhappy in their own way.

Should have been nominated: Greta Lee - Past Lives. A Korean-American woman’s regret that the long-distance friendship she maintained with the Korean Boy she left behind as a child never got a chance to turn into love is a delicate thread to base a movie on but Lee turns ambivalence over choices long ago made into an elegy to love and country. The movie lives or dies on that thread and she keeps it alive.

Kevrock’s Oscar Guide.

Best Actor

Nominees:

Bradley Cooper – Maestro.

Colman Domingo – Rustin.

Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers.

Cillian Murphy – Oppenheimer.

Jeffrey Wright – American Fiction.

Will win: Cillian Murphy - Oppenheimer. Murphy gives a subtly diffident and reactive performance that balances fear and opportunism at the dawn of the nuclear age that turns into guilt and dread in its wake. And with a first-time nomination after decades of great work no one can say he’s not overdue. If Oppenheimer sweeps, he will likely get the statue.

Should win: Jeffrey Wright - American Fiction. Wright is just as overdue and gives just as nuanced a performance balancing sardonic bemusement with subliminal rage as an author frustrated at how much his race is expected to define his voice and whose alienation from his family is challenged by the kind of middle-class crisis that most fiction denies to Black Americans.

Shoulda been nominated: Morgan Freeman - A Good Person. As a recovering alcoholic whose sobriety is tested when his ex-daughter in law (who accidentally killed his estranged son) walks into his AA meeting, Freeman gives his best performance in more than a decade mixing saintly forgiveness with a hair-trigger rage that makes the movie’s title more about aspiration than heroism, and how the former can become the latter.

Oscars 2024 

Best Supporting Actress

Nominees

Emily Blunt – Oppenheimer.

Danielle Brooks – The Color Purple.

America Ferrara – Barbie.

Jodie Foster – Nyad.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers.

Will win: Da’Vine Joy Randolph - The Holdovers.  As a poor beaten-down black woman whose only son and hope was taken from her we expect a portrait of despair and we get that. But Randolph also displays the kind of warmth and intelligence that can turn pain into empathy. 

Should win: Da’Vine Joy Randolph - The Holdovers. Did I mention she comes up with some of the most scathing put downs in the film? (“ The Osgood kid? Yeah, he was a real asshole. Rich and dumb, a popular combination around here”).

Shoulda been nominated: Rachel McAdams – Are You There God? It’s me Margaret.  America Ferrara got nominated for a speech about how hard it was to be a woman that was Barbie’s centerpiece. (“You have to never be rude, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail…It’s too hard, it’s too contradictory, and nobody ever gives you a medal or says thank you.”) McAdams doesn’t get to say anything like that. As a 1970’s mother who gives up her art and teaching career to be a suburban housewife she just embodies it. 

Kevrock’s Oscar Guide. 

Best Supporting Actor.

Sterling K Brown – American Fiction.

Robert De Niro – Killers of the Flower Moon.

Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer.

Ryan Gosling – Barbie. 

Mark Ruffalo – Poor Things.

Will Win: Robert Downey Jr. - Oppenheimer Downey Jr. played a Salieri-like conceit as Lewis Strauss a physicist whose jealousy over a small slight early in his and Oppenheimer’s career leads him to take sweet revenge later on when fate puts the scientist’s career in his hands. It’s a transparent ploy to give the audience a hissable villain but Downey nails the quick-witted, small minded man who craves the place in history that his rival would give anything to give up.

Should win: Ryan Gosling - Barbie. He almost upends the movie by playing Ken’s character arc (plaintive suitor to patriarchal dictator to uneasy partner) with the same level of goofy charm. And delivers the film’s funniest line (“I’ll play the guitar at you.”) with a studied nonchalance that’s like a cherry on a dimbulb sundae.

Shoulda been nominated: Matt Damon - Oppenheimer. While Downey’s performance is an entertaining sideshow, the way Damon plays General Leslie Groves as a smart decent man over his head among geniuses who might destroy the world to save it, allows an actor who might be too good to ever win an Oscar for acting to become both everyman and audience surrogate.

KevRock's Oscar Guide 2024

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Nominations

Anatomy of a Fall – Justine Triet and Arthur Harari.

The Holdovers – David Hemingson.

Maestro – Bradley and Josh Singer.

May December – Screenplay by Samy Burch; Story by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik.

Past Lives – Celine Song.

Will Win – The Holdovers. A classic “little people” comedy about how a misanthropic teacher, a rebellious (and wounded) student and a grieving mother form a makeshift family one Christmas, the script isn’t nearly as sentimental as it’s premise and adds elements of tartness and real tragedy (amid a war that took the mother’s child and threatens the boys future) to what will almost certainly become a seasonal classic.

Should Win: May December. A family story without any adults in the room, Burch’s script dissects the familial dynamics of a household that started when an emotionally disturbed teacher seduced a 13-year-old boy. And when a narcissistic  actress looking to play the mother in a Lifetime movie embeds herself with the family heedlessly sparks a crisis that may destroy it, we realize that the film itself rests on shifting sands.

Shoulda been nominated: Strays – Dan Perrault. Easy to see why this wasn’t nominated. It’s about dogs but too gross and crude to be shown to kids. It tanked at the box-office and got tepid reviews from critics. Plus it stars Will Ferrell (voice). That doesn’t keep this majestically obscene tribute to canis lupus familiaris in all their butt-licking couch-humping glory from being the funniest movie of the year.

Kevrock’s Oscar Guide 2024

 BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Nominations

American Fiction – Cord Jefferson. Based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett.

Barbie – Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Based on characters created by Ruth Handler.

Oppenheimer – Christopher Nolan. Based on the biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Poor Things – Tony McNamara based on the novel by Alasdair Gray.

The Zone of Interest – Jonathan Glazer. Based on the novel by Martin Amis.

Will win: Oppenheimer. The heft of the book and film match its subject and through three hours and scores of speaking parts (and a timeline almost as fractured as Nolan’s other films) the screenplay never loses its theme – the heroic efforts of a brilliant scientist and born leader to produce a weapon that could end the bloodiest war in history before some of the most evil men in the world can come up with their own version of it, and how he lived to see those efforts make the world more dangerous than he could ever have imagined.

Should win: American Fiction. Jefferson didn’t just adapt Percival Everett’s great novel about one man’s icy satirical rage over the portrayal of his race in fiction. He translated it from a wicked satire of ghetto cliches into a plea for a multiplicity of Afro-American stories without sacrificing the books sardonic tone. And the scene where Monk is trying to make his fake characters into even bigger cartoons, and they talk him out of it is as good a demonstration as any of how American fiction works.

Shoulda been nominated. Spider Man: Across the Spider-Verse –Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.  Lord and  Miller’s script follows what seems to be millions of alt-universe Spider-Men (Spider-Punk!) in an interdimensional story that holds its contradictions better than Everything Everywhere All at Once did. It also enters in elements of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, as well as a critique of stiff-necked comics fans, all in a story about fate, free will, star-crossed lovers and (of course) power and responsibility that’ll touch your heart as your head spins. And it’s only part two.

Drive-Away Dolls.

D: Ethan Coen (2024).

Drive-Away Dolls is a queer road-trip comedy that uses a dildo as a McGuffin and directly references some of Sam Peckinpah’s and Quentin Tarantino’s most violent scenes and it’s a delight. Margaret Qualley (sporting a Texas drawl that’s distracting for a bout thirty seconds) is Jamie, a free-spirited lesbian who has just been kicked out by her cop girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein performing a charged-up movie-length slow burn) after one infidelity too many. When her best friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan doing yeoman straight-person duty) plans a weekend birding trip to Tallahassee. Jamie tags along and turns it into a tour of southern lesbian bars. She also convinces Marian to use what turns out to be the least competent drive-away service in history which gives them a car with an EXTREMELY illegal cargo that sets a couple of mob enforcers (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson as a gonzo version of Tarantino mob henchmen). 

The film is more screwball farce than black comedy involving a congressman (Matt Damon), the 1960s groupie band The Plaster Casters and an irritable chihuaha. It has just a touch of drive-in disreputability and more than a little buddy-movie heart. Reccommended.

The Zone of Interest.

D: Jonathan Glazer (2023).

The Zone of Interest opens with a pastoral view of a brook where a well-off family gathers for an idyllic day out. We see them mostly from a distance, though as we follow them, we learn a few things.  The father Rudolph (Christian Friedel) has rapidly moved up in government service to a position of great responsibility and is still climbing – he is about to be put in charge of an exciting new project. The mother Hedwig (Sandra Huller) maintains their country estate and tends a beautiful garden. They have loving children and devoted servants. But the servants are terrified prisoners, there are traces of human remains in the brook, the father is Rudolf Hoss whose job is running the Auschwitz concentration camp and the project is part of the Nazis Final Solution. 

The film, which could easily have milked the premise for obvious ideas on “the banality of evil” instead becomes an almost subliminally disquieting horror film. We see the family going about the mundane events of a nuevo Bourgeois household (a visit from an in-law, a we-might-have-to-move plot development right out of Meet Me in St. Louis) while muffled screams and shots are randomly heard in the background. It’s a little while before it becomes clear that those noises are for us – the characters don’t, maybe won’t hear them -- and after a while, they recede into the back of our minds as well. And the characters are so blissfully inured to the horrors they live with it comes as a shock when Hedwig scolds a servant by implying that staying in her good graces is all that’s keeping her from the gas chambers. Frazer ingrains evil’s banality so subtly into the fabric of ordinary life we might start to wonder about the out-of-sight horrors that could be supporting our completely normal existence, that we don’t have to see. The Zone of Interest is the space between It Can Happen Here and It Already Is. 

I have a confession. But first I want to emphasize that none of us is perfect, y’all without sin etc. Everybody has some secret shame that if exposed should be penalized with nothing more stringent than forgiveness. Except this. This is worse. Okay here goes (deep breath):

I DON’T THINK THERE WERE ANY OSCAR SNUBS.

Nope. Not even Barbie. Despite Greta Gerwig’s masterful shepherding of what is so far Mattel’s greatest movie, if Zone of Interest (which I haven’t seen yet) is a dog, I’ll give Jonathan Glazer’s place to May/December’s Todd Haynes. Ditto for Robie who was almost perfect (But what’s up with her still using the Harley Quinn accent?). If Nyad isn’t up to snuff I’ll just slide in Past Lives’ Greta Lee.

It was that kind of year. Lots of good movies and for a change most of them got at least some kind of Oscar nod. But. There were those orphans and also-rans that came up all the way short. No nominations. Let’s honor them, okay?

In other words, it’s time for KEVROC’S ANNUAL BEST MOVIES THAT DIDN’T GET EVEN ONE LOUSY NOMINATION list!

Asteroid City. Wes Anderson had a short-lived Oscar vogue in the last decade with  Best Picture nominations for Moonrise Kingdom in 2013 and  Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014, but this year the consensus was that this deadpan dramatization of the tension between postwar optimism and post-nuclear domination which defined the latter half of The American Century was just a collection of the director’s tropes instead of a humanist masterpiece. It should have been nominated if for no other reason than to give a push to “Dear Alien (Who Art in Heaven)” for the Best Song award it deserves. (But hey, Wes got a Best Live Action Short nod for The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar).

A Good Person. Zach Braff’s directorial rep as the King of Emo, not to mention an early release date kept Oscar voters from this story of two addicts struggling not to relapse in the face of their lives’ biggest tragedy, that gave Morgan Freeman his best role in years and reaffirmed Florence Pugh’s status as the best actor of this decade.

All of Us Strangers. A simple dreamlike plot (a depressed gay man meets his soulmate, and simultaneously gets to see his long-dead parents) becomes a soul-wrenching mystical reverie brought to life by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell as the parents, Paul Mescal as the troubled soulmate and Andrew Scott, who gives a performance so exposed and vulnerable that if it went any further he’d literally shed his skin.

Monica. A trans woman (Trace Lysette) reconnects with her family and is taken for a nurse by her demented, homophobic mother (Patricia Clarkson). It sounds like Joan Crawford doing an Almodovar film but director Andrea Pallaoro goes for subtlety and nuance over camp drama in this quiet gem. Lysette should have been talked about more.

Air. This crazy-entertaining celebration of the marketing synergy of Michael Jordan and Nike got Oscar-overlooked because a whole movie devoted to a celebrity spokesperson deal is maybe just a little too on-the-nose. But it had great work by Chris Messina, Jason Bateman, a Macchiavellian Viola Davis and especially Matt Damon who might be too good an actor to ever win an Oscar for it.

Passages. Ira Sachs examination of why-good-people-love-irredeemable-pricks is a high point in the careers of Adele Exarchoupoulos and Ben Wishaw but was a breakout star vehicle for Franz Rogowski playing the kind of prick who has a one-night stand and is so smitten he can’t wait to tell his husband all about it.

Blue Beetle. You know the superhero movie is in trouble when this crackerjack film about a reluctant Latino champion of his family and community (and whose sidekicks include a Zapatista-veteran grandmother) could only find a fraction of the audience it deserved.  And the line “Now is when we cry” made me cry.

Strays. All apologies to Poor Things and American Fiction, but this profane and scatological tribute to couch-humping, trash-eating dogshit producing (and eating) canis lupus familiaris was the funniest movie of the year.

Bottoms. Even beating out this gloriously tasteless and bracingly absurdist tale of high school lesbians who start a fight club to meet chicks that would win the Jean Hersholt humanitarian award if they renamed it for John Waters.

Taylor Swift: The Eras tour. The Academy’s prejudice against performance films is understandable. Certainly the struggle against dictators in Uganda and Invaders in the Ukraine are more important than a superstar juggernaut’s latest step on her way to world domination. But I’m not the only one who became convinced that the juggernaut was a real (and major) artist. And flashing on the closeups of random fans experiencing pure ecstasy was as moving as anything I saw this year.

The Color Purple.

D: Blitz Bazawule (2023) 

Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple was one of the most successful books of the eighties because of the web of Grimm darkness and inspirational light that the author wove as deftly as Dickens. It told the story of Celie, a young poor girl who is raped by her father (who takes and sells the children produced) and is sold into marital slavery to an abusive farmer who beats her and uses her sexually (and runs off her sister Nettie the only person who ever loved her). But when she has an affair with Shug, a wise bisexual blues singer with a philosophy that mixes Gnostic Christianity with New Age Deism something awakens in her, she gets a new sense of herself and the happy endings never stop coming. When Steven Spielberg adapted the novel in 1985, he upended the novel’s balance towards sunniness and light, downplaying the cruelty (and lesbianism) and too often recalling the rose-colored slavery of Gone With the Wind. Now Ghanian filmmaker Bazawule has a new musical version that feels like a Deep South theme park that tells the nothing-but-inspirational tale, the darkness turned into mere shadow (and the affair little more than a peck on Celie’s cheek) all hardships overcome with impeccably choreographed dancing and the kind of faux-gospel singing that wins on American Idol (Fantasia Barrino, who plays Celie, won a season). It’s dispiriting, like moving from spirituals to high-stepping rhythm without ever encountering the blues.

When I was eight years old and living in Columbus, GA, my parents decided to save on a babysitter and take the kids along to a drive-in showing of In the Heat of the Night which had just won a Best Picture Oscar. Even through my always-taxed attention span I got that racism was bad and that the small towns that surrounded me were full of it. Also that Sidney Poitier was one of the coolest men who had ever lived.

Sometime before or after, I got to see The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming which is even hazier in memory, but I got that Cold War fear made people look ridiculous and that we could, and should get along.

When I was twelve and living in Hawaii on the island of Maui which had just opened its first decent movie house (the old theater was a grindhouse and had rats. I know, I get misty-eyed just thinking about it) we all went to the other side of the island to see Fiddler on the Roof which was the best movie I had ever seen. The tragedy of Tevye’s attempt to hold on to the traditions that defined him (and the inflexibility that cost him his youngest daughter) amidst the antisemitic social forces that would sweep his world away, as well as the indomitability that would carry his culture to wherever he would find himself. It’s hard to think of how Topol said, “May God be with you,” without tearing up.

Norman Jewison would have his moments after that.  A Soldier’s Story was a first-rate murder mystery that also searingly looked at black-on-black racism. Moonstruck is one of the funniest screwball comedies since the genre’s heyday (with maybe the best everybody-gathers-in-a-room climaxes ever). And The Hurricane brought a second act (with a great performance by Denzel Washington) to a story that I thought was fully told by Bob Dylan years ago. He carved out a respectable career as a reliable Hollywood hand with a legacy that was too middlebrow to raise him high in anyone’s pantheon.

But any real epitaph would have to be written by the child who saw a few movies that helped him think about the world and his place in it and taught him that some movies are different, and some of them make you.

RIP, auteur.

American Fiction.

D: Cord Jefferson (2023).

American Fiction, like the great Percival Everett novel that it adapts (Erasure, buy it), grounds an outraged literary satire in an utterly prosaic family drama. Jeffrey Wright (In a peerless performance of bemusement underlaid with bitterness) plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison a professor (on enforced sabbatical over his refusal to teach Flannery O'Connor without using racial epithets) and novelist whose latest book (“The Phoenicians”) is being rejected for not being “black” enough. While at a literary seminar in Boston he walks into a reading by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) whose novel “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto” (“YO! Sharonda! Girl you be pregnant again?”) has become a best-seller by pandering to urban black stereotypes. Affronted, he writes his own novella, (under the name Stagg R. Leigh) called first “My Pafology” then “FUCK” (“just to rub their noses in it”) which to his even greater disgust becomes a publishing sensation. 

 At the same time a family tragedy leaves him a caregiver for his elderly mother (Leslie Uggams) who is sinking into dementia, without much help from his brother Clifford who has recently come out as gay, and even more recently went through a nasty divorce (Sterling K. Brown balancing hilarious fecklessness with pathos). Cord Jefferson’s script and direction is able to merge the can-you-top-this escalation of Monk’s hoax with the quieter story of his struggle to reconcile with his family (the kind of universal struggle, it is implied, that literary culture denies to “black” characters). I wish the film was longer so as to contain more of the book’s ironies (a few more dramatizations from Monk’s parody book might have helped – the one we see is a pip). And some of the depictions of (white) literary mavens skirt their own easy-target stereotypes (though a member of a literary panel talking about connecting with black culture while ignoring the only black panelists brings one of the film’s biggest laughs). At it’s best, the movie suggests a William Baldwin determined to beat Preston Sturges at his own game. Recommended.

Poor Things.

D: Yorgos Lanthimos (2023).

Poor Things opens with a scandalous premise. A pregnant woman (Emma Stone) commits suicide by jumping off a bridge and is resurrected by surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Defoe sporting a Scottish accent and scars worthy of Frankenstein’s monster and looking like he’s in hog heaven) who transfers her unborn child’s mind into her body, through a process that involves wires and lights and screams “Don’t ask us to explain this.” With the help of his perpetually befuddled (and lovestruck) assistant Max (Ramy Youssef) he raises “Bella” as a daughter but also as a social/science experiment. Stone portrays her as a rapidly developing creature of impulse, Id, and unbridled libido, with a curiosity that soon turns into rebellion against 'God’s' attempt to keep her pent up in his home/lab. It’s a tour-de-force comic performance as she moves from a spasmodic toddler to an increasingly rebellious adolescence (the childlike delight on her face when she discovers masturbation, or “working on myself to get happiness” is priceless). After she escapes the lab and runs off with unscrupulous lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo taking caddishness to delirious heights) on a sexual tour of a hilariously flamboyant world that Lanthinos presents as an art-deco theme park, her innocent blitheness about such matters as fidelity, money, and Victorian mores recalls Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. She’s a screwball Candide.

The film stumbles a little when the now fully-developed but still innocent heroine is presented as a font of wisdom and virtue (and Candide starts to sound too much like Forrest Gump). The movie starts to move from a deliriously tasteless farce into a comedy of manners, and loses too much of its fizz. But at its best it’s like a Masterpiece Theater version of John Waters.

Tom Wilkinson obit

The most affecting vengeance killing I’ve ever seen was Matt Fowler (Tom Wilkinson) shooting Richard Strout (William Mapother) in Todd Field’s 2001 In the Bedroom. That Strout had murdered Wilkinson’s son and the movie was mostly about the deep and devastating grief he and his wife were quietly enduring as the killer was released on bail and on track to receive a reduced sentence. That Fowler had formulated a plan to kidnap and kill Strout, and bury his body in the Maine woods was a shock but Wilkinson made it seem fated. And although he tells his friend and cohort, Willis, he shot early because “I couldn’t wait,” Wilkinson’s face showed that his revenge brought him no satisfaction and would show him no peace. It was just something that needed to be done because he couldn’t bear it being undone.

He also played Arthur Eden, the attorney whose guilt-ridden breakdown (“I am Shiva, the God of Death”) and subsequent murder, curse George Clooney’s Michael Clayton with a conscience (2007), and Gerald Arthur Cooper, the factory foreman in denial and despair in the Oscar-nominated The Full Monty (1997). But those were just the highest points in a film career that only really started in middle age and encompassed over 130 roles from literary classics (He jump-starts the plot of Ang Lee’s 1995 Sense and Sensibility) to superhero movies (a mobster in Christopher Nolan’s  2005 Batman Begins). He played  General Cornwallis in Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot (2000) and Lyndon Johnson in Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), and benefactor of Shakespeare (1998’s Shakespeare in Love) and Johannes Vermeer (Girl With a Pearl Earring). One of the best. RIP

Maestro.

D: Bradley Cooper. 2023.

 There’s a reason Carey Mulligan, playing Felicia Montealegre, a renowned actress who married legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (director Bradley Cooper) in 1951, has top billing over the film’s ostensible subject. Maestro is less a biopic (and can be surprisingly perfunctory about Bernstein’s accomplishments as when he walks into a room declaiming “Well I finally finished ‘Mass’!”) than a love story that deserves to be called “Scenes from a Marriage.” Mulligan fully captures a smart charismatic woman who with eyes wide open falls for a brilliant, charming genius whose bisexuality is only semi-closeted and forms a life and family with his and her contradictions, and Cooper matches her, playing Bernstein as an artist with an intuitive understanding that his art and life demands he be everything he is.  As director Cooper peerlessly delineates the heady rush of finding the perfect person. The couple’s courtship is a heady black and white rush that is like a sped-up version of Before Sunrise and also captures the dynamic vivacity that Bernstein bought to his composition. And when many years later as, amid a happy busy life (and the film’s switch to color), Felicia starts to realize how many of the marriage’s compromises are hers, Cooper doesn’t let the film even suggest their union was a “sham” or “cover” marriage or that they were never the most important person in each other’s lives. For two exhilarating, painful hours they become the most important people in ours.

May December.

D: Todd Haynes (2023).

If Bradley Cooper looks at an unusual marriage with rose-colored compassion, Todd Haynes employs a forensic pathologists scalpel to dissect the family started by Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore balancing affection and delusion) when at 36 she had sex with  13-year old Joe (Charles Melton, heart-rendering in a breakthrough performance) was imprisoned for child rape, and had their first child behind bars, after which she left her previous family and married him when he turned 21. They became tabloid-famous (the script is loosely based on the Mary Kay Latourneau story) and after things died down have achieved something like normality (aside from the occasional turd-sent-in-the-mail type of harassment) when Elizabeth Berry, a television actor hired to play Gracie in an independent film, (Natalie Portman) embeds herself with the family as “research” sparks a crisis in which love is inseparable from exploitation. And since Portman (who functions as a stand-in for the filmmaker) unsparingly depicts Berry’s own turns from empathy to perverse manipulation of the family, Haynes suggests the film itself isn’t to be trusted. He keeps the movie on shifting sand as we watch a family story without any adults in the room.