Day: September 10, 2025

…David Poland‘s Best Picture spitball roster would be an object of partial ridicule.

Forget Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein in this context.

Pleased and throttled as I was with F1, it doesn’t sufficiently sink in to primal undercurrents —- too super-mechanized and hyper-edited — to qualify as a Best Picture contender.

Is there anyone who’s looking forward to Wicked: For Good, much less anticipating a wowser blowout?

The second half of Sinners is vampire schlock, and it’s really, REALLY time to hit the brakes on identity campaigns.

Lanthimos’s Bugonia is minor.

I would love it if Weapons could somehow elbow its way into Best Picture contention, but the notion of Materialists having even half of a chance…please.

HE’s Likely Keepers (10)

Joachim Trier ‘s Sentimental Value (a high-pedigree family drama that really stirs and churns and delivers the whole soul package)

Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (haven’t seen it, having just returned from Milan a few hours ago, but almost all the formidable critics are panting and wagging their tails)

Richard Linklater Nouvelle Vague (an affectionate, close-to-perfect, time-travel valentine to Jean–Luc Godard‘s late ‘50s cinematic game changer)

Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt (so much more and so much better than what the woke scolds at the Venice Film Festival were stating in lockstep fashion…the measured, drip-drip, low key atmospherics are fascinating…the first major Hollywood prestige film to say “okay but wait a minute” about #MeToo theology)

Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet (haven’t seen it but the wings of the Telluride creamolas have certainly generated the right kind of cool Academy breeze)

Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (nobody’s seen it)

Noah Baumbach Jay Kelly (a smooth, 60ish movie star gets called on his bullshit, lets his guard down, tries to grapple…very industry-accurate, very Academy friendly)

Zach‘s Cregger Weapons (HE-approved elevated horror and a box-office smash)

Kaouther ben Hania‘s The Voice of Hind Rajab (devastating, ultra-topical Gaza gutslammer that indicts Israel and then some)

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite (rousing, Fail Safe-adjacent nuclear thriller that warns how technologically underserved this country is, how vulnerable our key strategists and leaders are under the surface, and how generally tinderbox-y things are out there).

…that “violence is as American as apple pie,” prominent people are saying, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder earlier today and with a totally straight face, that “there’s no place in our society for violence.”

There’s certainly zero tolerance for political killings, obviously, but if there’s any country in which there’s a “place” for this kind of appalling hate and nihilism, it’s this one. It’s a tradition, a virus, a disease that runs in the blood.

Kirk was 31 with a wife and young kids, and now he’s out in the cosmos, staring down at our blue planet and corresponding shitshow of a country, and muttering “what the fuck?”

Sidenote: I process everything in cinematic terms so please, no offense intended. But “taking it in the neck” is a term I’ve used from time to time, meaning aggressively criticized or condemned, hard and decisively. I was asking myself as I watched yesterday’s alarming Kirk shooting footage (which has since been digitally fuzzed over by everyone) on the Emirates Milan-to-JFK flight, I was asking myself when was the last time a major character (hero or villain) was shot in the neck. I’m thinking Charlton Heston‘s Taylor in Planet of the Apes — he’s neck-shot by a gorilla with a rifle, and can’t talk for a long stretch as a result.

Onboard wifi routinely craps out when crossing the Atlantic — I understand and can roll with that. What’s outrageous is being asked to re-sign and re-pay to activate it. Emirates will return the dough, I’ve been assured, but still…

With the 9.26 New York Film Festival showing of Luca Guadagnino ‘s After The Hunt fast approaching, keep in mind what recently happened to this fascinating, bravely ambiguous and certifiably un-woke drama about an alleged sexual assault incident on the Yale campus.

A sizable horde of Venice Film Festival critics clobbered this forthcoming Amazon-MGM release (10.10) for two…make that three reasons, and none of them honorable:

(1) Hunt adopts a posture of skepticism and/or uncertainty regarding a sexual assault charge leveled by Ayo Edibiri’s Maggie, a privileged, lesbian, allegedly mediocre student, against Andrew Garfield‘s Hank, a professor looking at tenure who suspects Maggie has plagiarized a term paper. This in itself is enough to warrant critical dismissal as the woke manual says filmmakers aren’t allowed to portray a progressive woman of color (and especially a non-hetero one) as possibly shady or seemingly hair-triggered in a standard mode of Zoomer alarmism.

(2) The film suggests what may have happened but refuses to clearly state who the proverbial “wrong one” might be. To some a film with an ambiguous attitude about a possible campus rape situation…this is also reason for dismissal as woke-leaning critics are nothing if not intolerant of a failure to morally condemn a suspected white-male sexual transgressor. Especially when the alleged victim is a woman of color.

(3) Guadagnino’s decision to use a classic Woody Allen font for Hunt’s opening credits is another woke no-no, as it signals not only a certain respect for and allegiance with the Woodman but a corresponding skepticism about Dylan Farrow‘s decades-old accusation of sexual molestation (i.e., having allegedly been fingered) against Allen. This is tantamount to Guadagnino waving a red flag at the bulls. I loved the Allen symbolism, but many wokeys go into flared-nostril mode when pro-Allen types reveal their colors.

Please re-read my 8.29 Venice review, and consider sone of the comments posted about World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy’s 8.29 piece about the negative reactions. Note: “Pierrot le fou” is mistaken about Ayo’s character being characterized as “having made up the assault”…the film implies that she may be faking it, but that’s all.

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