Jeff Wells

..but it snags my attention anyway.

Earlier this month I posted a list of 20 safe bets to be released in 2026 — i.e., presumptions of quality based upon esteemed critical regard and/or aspirational histories. Most of these represent my idea of festival toppers or possible award-worthy titles, or both.

Within this list, the big festival attractions will almost certainly include (1) Alejandro G. Inarritu and Tom Cruise‘s Digger, (2) Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning, (3) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Entertainment System is Down, (4) Asghar Farhadi‘s Parallel Tales, (5) Anton Corbijn‘s Switzerland, (6) Lukas Dhont‘s Coward, (7) Pawel Pawlikowski‘s 1949, (8) Tony Gilroy‘s Behemoth!, (9) Paul Schrader‘s The Basics of Philosophy, (10) Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, (11) Joel Coen‘s Jack of Spades, (12) Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial, (13) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur, and (14) Martin McDonagh‘s Wild Horse Nine.

The Joe and Jane Popcorn titles include (1) David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino‘s The Adventures of Cliff Booth, (2) Chris Nolan‘s The Oydssey, (3) Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day, (4) Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael, and (5) Zach Cregger‘s Resident Evil.

Possible Standout Exceptions: (a) Ink (d: Danny Boyle) — Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch back in the old days, based on a James Graham stage play….yes!; (b) David O. Russell‘s Madden, biopic of football coach and commentator John Madden w/ Nic Cage, John Mulane, Kathryn Hahn, Sienna Miller; (c) Ben Affleck‘s Animals, political crime thriller costarring Affleck, Gillian Anderson, Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun; (d) Laszlo Nemes‘ Moulin, French resistance WWII drama w/ Gilles Lellouche, Lars Eidinger, Félix Lefevre.

As always, Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind remains a wild card.

Asking again: What am I missing?

1. Digger (d: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, p: Tom Cruise)
2. The Adventures of Cliff Booth (d: David Fincher)
3. The Oydssey (d: Christopher Nolan)
4. Disclosure Day, (d: Steven Spielberg)
5. Artificial (d: Luca Guadagnino)
6. Jack of Spades (d: Joel Coen)
7. The Entertainment System is Down (d: Ruben Ostlund)
8. Fjord (d: Cristian Mungiu w/ Renate Reinsve, Sebastian Stan)
9. Parallel Tales (d: Asghar Farhadi)
10. Minotaur (d: Andrey Zvyagintsev)
11. Coward (d: Lukas Dhont)
12. The Way of the Wind (d: Terrence Malick)
13. Resident Evil (d: Zach Cregger)
14. 1949 (d: Pawel Pawlikowski)
15. The Basics of Philosophy (d: Paul Schrader)
16. Switzerland (d: Anton Corbijn)
17. Michael (d: Antoine Fuqua)
18. The Social Reckoning (d: Aaron Sorkin)
19. Behemoth! (d: Tony Gilroy)
20. Wild Horse Nine (d: Martin McDonagh)

Anthony D’Alessandro’s Saturday box-office report for Deadline:

In four days, A24’s Marty Supreme will make more than Timothee Chalamet’s Christmas movie from last year, A Complete Unknown, did in 5 days, $26M-$27M to $23.2M.

Rivals are impressed by this number: It’s a period film about a ping-pong player from the Lower East Side, not an easy subject matter that creates a line to the multiplex, but it helps when you have the force of Chalamet in the campaign. The viral of it all sparked with the zoom sketch below. We already told you that the social media universe for Marty Supreme stood at 197M before opening across TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube; that’s with Chalamet standing atop The Sphere in Las Vegas. There was also a Marty Supreme blimp flying over Beverly Hills in further stunts.

When polled by Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak, moviegoers said the most influential form of advertising for Marty Supreme was social media (28%) and friends and family (19%).

Friday was $6.7M, -30% from Christmas Day’s $9.5M for a 3-day that stands at $16M-$17M at 2,668 theaters. Don’t be shocked if it’s higher, like a $17M 3-day and $30M 4-day. A24 has 70MM locations which are generating big bucks, and there’s some PLFs. Comp this to the previous Safdie Brothers movie, the zany gangster drama, Uncut Gems, which went wide over a 2019 5-day Christmas stretch with $18.8M. The Adam Sandler movie finaled at $50M.

The PostTrak definite recommend on Marty Supreme is a great 60% with 4 1/2 stars. Men over 25 are first in line at 36% followed by women over 25 at 27%, followed by men under 25 at 21% and women under 25 at 16%. 18-34 turnout is 66%. Even though women under 25 were surprisingly the smaller to show up yesterday, they love their Marty the most with a 94% positive and a 73% definite recommend. Diversity demos are 51% Caucasian, 23% Hispanic and Latino, 10% Black and 11% Asian American. Very good walk-up business with 52% buying their ticket same days. 50% went for Chalamet.

Marty Supreme is playing best on the East and West with close to half the gross coming from those regions versus a norm of 39% compared to all other films in the marketplace. Overperforming cities are NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Boston, Toronto and more. The trajectory is showing that this Josh Safdie directed movie is playing more broadly than an art film. Regal Union Square is currently the top-grossing multiplex in the nation for the pic with close to $74k.

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Six and a half years ago…late May 2019…I think.

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Something’s Gotta Give (’03) is probably a better film that I’ve given it credit for over the last couple of decades.

This is a first-rate dinner table scene. Awkward discussion, truth grenades. Jack Nicholson and Frances McDormand (playing a brutally honest lesbian playwright) are especially good.

The film’s speed bump (a big one) is director-writer Nancy Meyers insisting upon the then-39-year-old Keanu Reeves‘s cardiologist character feeling serious romantic hots for the eternally attractive Diane Keaton, who was then 57.

A 39 year-old doctor might fall into a serious relationship with, say, a 45 year-old woman, or maybe even a 50-year-old if you want to push it. But not a 57 year-old, especially one who refuses to have “work” done (hence the incessant turtlenecks). There’s just no buying it.

Frances McDormand (around 45 or 46 during filming) looks so young here!

HE was out and about during last night’s snowstorm, which began around 6 pm Friday (12.26) and came down hard and heavy. Mounds and ridges of the stuff, 4″ or 5″ deep. Traffic necessarily slowed on Westchester County’s Hutchinson River Parkway and Connecticut 95 northbound, but the real problem wasn’t so much the snowfall (quite heavy with very little snowplowing going on) as the chickenshit drivers.

In a deluge of this intensity you have to keep your speed down to 25 or 30 mph for fear of skidding (everyone had their flashers on), but the 95 was congested as fuck — much slower than necessary because of all the pussies driving 10 or 15 mph, if that. I just pushed on through, bypassing this and that slowpoke as I changed lanes like a champ. Did I slip and slide a little bit? Yeah, but not to any scary degree.

JFK to Stratford usually takes a couple of hours — last night it took a little more than four. If I had kept pace with the wimps it would have taken five or longer.

When I dropped off the client (a Parisian dude) he shook my hand and said “good driver!” What he meant was that my wheel-and-breaking skills were appropriately cautious but Steve McQueen-ish, and that I don’t drive like a 85 year-old candy ass.

…in which I casually, briefly engaged with dozens upon dozens of Average Joes and Janes about this and that chit-chat topic…many times, over and over…and when the subject of the year’s best, most see-worthy films briefly surfaced, Joe and Jane had never even heard of the tip-tops….Sentimental Value, Marty Supreme, Hamnet, et. al.

It would have been one thing if these titles had stirred some level of Joe-and-Jane recognition, resulting in a vague interest in streaming these vaguely-familiar films down the road, but these and other titles drew a total effing blank.

Morever, no one had even heard of last year’s Best Picture winner — Anora.

I chatted with quite a few Yale University undergrads — exceptional, cream of-the-crop Zoomers! — and not a single one had heard of Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt, which is set in New Haven and within an elite Yale academic demimonde.

The finest films used to jar and sometimes electrify large portions of the populace. Moviegoing in general used to be an accessible, mass-interest thing, at least as far as the end-of-the-year Oscar chasers were concerned.

But the pandemic, streaming and woke-lefty instructional theology flicks (a fraternity to which One Battle After Another belongs) suffocated the golden goose. Movies have devolved into an elite cottage industry of concentrated but marginal cultural value, and the Oscars will be moving to YouTube in ’29.

I know, I know…the getting-smaller-and-narrower-and-less-vital trend has been apparent for many years, but 2025 was the year in which this numbing realization became inescapable. The mooks have mostly checked out, given up, lost that lovin’ feelin’.

And in this order. Yes, that’s correct — The President’s Cake is judged to be a better, more nourishing film that One Battle After Another

1. Josh Safdie‘s Marty Supreme (the finest, most adrenalized, most type-A-meets-grade-A film of the year….no politics, just pogo sticks)
2. Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value (generates honest current, nails it, gets nothing wrong)
3. Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet (60% to 70% of the dialogue is unintellligible — finale rules)
4. Zach Cregger‘s Weapons
5. Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake (brilliant, transporting)
6. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (the second most overpraised film of the year, the first being Sinners)
7. Kent Jones‘ Late Fame
8. Kaouther Ben Hania‘s The Voice of Hind Rajib
9. Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly.
10. (Special Feature Documentary Stand-Out) David Kittredge‘s Boorman and the Devil.

In the context of this highly divisive, incorrectly color-graded Bluray, the names Larry Smith and Criterion’s Lee Kline will live in infamy…talk about burnt bridges!

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Las night I re-watched Matt Tyrnauer‘s seven-year-old Studio 54, and it still delivers a great high for those who were young or youngish and occasionally clubbing and quaaluding back in the late Jimmy Carter era. It feels really soothing and heartwarming to revisit that bacchanalian atmosphere of yore, and it’s also a great Christmas movie in a certain sense.

The first half (i.e., before the downfall) delivers a robust high….the feeling is just as rich and levitational as the one you get from watching Alistair Sim‘s Scrooge (a.k.a. A Christmas Carol).

Studio 54 wasn’t just an immersive alternate-reality trip on West 54th near 8th Avenue — it was Shangrila. Swirling sounds, dancing until 2 or 3 am, possible sex, cocaine, nocturnal delights, quaaludes, drinks and that pounding thump-thump-BUHMP-BUHMP.

Oh, to have been a young buck in ’77 and ’78 and get waved through by Steve Rubell himself and then run into the levitational coolios (rock stars, journalists, models, authors, actors, producers, politicians) in that cellar-level salon…sniff, snort, stop it, you’re dreaming.

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I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Tyrnauer’s film is a fascinating, well-told tale — exciting, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad — that invites you to really sink into a mad Manhattan era (mid ’77 to early ’80) that was a real bacchanalian sweet spot — post-pill, pre-AIDS, sexual liberation and an abundance of cocaine and quaaludes (and the operational assistance of the beloved Edlich Pharmacy).

A few weeks ago it hit me why I’m so affected by Studio 54, above and beyond the nostalgia. It’s because it uses a brilliant up-and-down narrative strategy that works as a metaphor for how briefly youth lasts and how suddenly the best of times can end, and how two crafty fellows — Rubell and Ian Schrager — foresaw and caught hold of a special hedonism in the air, a certain what-the-fuckness that happened at just the right time and in just the right way, and all under the cultural auspices of a somewhat prudish and puritanical peanut-farmer president.

And for the first time ever, Schrager actually pokes his head out, sits down and talks to Tyrnauer about the whole saga, start to finish, no holds barred.

Tyrnauer’s strategy for the first hour is to give you a great contact high with the saga of Studio 54’s success — the cinematic equivalent of dropping a Lemmon 714 on an empty stomach.

Then it shifts into wistful melancholy as he relates how Rubell and Schrager struck it enormously rich only to see the whole thing collapse less than three years later. Their version of Studio 54 (it re-opened in 1981 under Mark Fleischman and continued for five years) launched in April of ’77 and closed in February ’80, right after which Schrader and Rubell went to jail for tax evasion.

Schrager recovered and went on to great success as a boutique hotelier; Rubell died of AIDS in 1989 at age 45.

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For the 47th or 48th time, The Shining gives good eerie here and there, but it’s never been scary. Creepy or ominously unnerving is fine, but “scary” is a very precise and deeply unsettling thing…an ansty-cold feeling in your blood and bones. On top of which Jack Nicholson‘s kabuki-like performance as Jack Torrance is a helluva lot “funnier” than Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson, lemme tell ya.

Roughly 45 and 2/3 years ago, I took cartoonist Chris Browne to an early press screening of The Shining. The old Warner screening room at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, I mean, on the eighth floor. Plush, nicely carpeted, 103 seats.

Browne, who passed on 2.7.23, began drawing his dad’s “Hagar the Horrible” strip in ’88, and was quite the guy in cartoonist circles.

It was a long-lead screening (sometime in late March of ’80) and we were lucky to see the slightly longer version of The Shining, the one that ended with Overlook manager Barry Nelson visiting Shelley Duvall in a hospital room after Nicholson’s frozen-icicle death.

Like Steven Spielberg after his initial viewing, I wasn’t all that knocked out. It was only years later, having watched The Shining for the eighth or twelfth time (who remembers?), that I realized it had seeped into my system and taken hold in some curious way.

A few critics were there at the March ’80 screening along with Buck Henry (glasses, tan baseball cap), Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen.

As soon as the lights came up Browne whipped out his sketch pad and, in the space of two or three minutes, drew a cartoon of Henry and his friends in their seats, their eyes wide with terror and with little piss puddles on the floor below. Browne went up to Henry in the downstairs lobby and showed him the drawing. I can recall Henry’s dryly bemused expression with absolute clarity.

Yesterday I wrote Chris on Messenger and asked if he still had that drawing. If so I asked if there was a chance he could scan it and send it my way. Or, failing that, if could he re-draw it and send it along. (As noted, the original only took him three minutes to draw it inside the screening room.) Chris graciously agreed to re-draw it but (a) without McDowell or Steenburgen, and (b) without the pee puddles. So here’s Buck again, and here’s to the lightning-fast creative derring-do of Chris Browne.

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