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I’ve been waiting for many weeks to dive into Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (Focus Features, 11.26), and tomorrow oh dear Lordy that climactic encounter will finally occur. Sunday, 11.16 at 1pm. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, for it may toll for thee.

Is it, in fact, a fair or at least a semi-justified thing to apply “porn” terms (trauma, grief, misery) to this Elizabethan tale of the troubled marriage between William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway (Jessie Buckley)? That is the question, oh my knaves.

Until HE has really and fully settled into Hamnet, this issue can never be truly clarified.

That said, I will not be approaching Hamnet with an attitude. When entering a theatre I am always open to a transcendent experience.

Tomorrow afternoon’s screening is important. The fate and the tilt of the 2025/‘26 Best Picture Oscar race will be affected one way or the other. On the face of it I’m more into the hypothetical fantasy of Hamnet beating the agitproppy One Battle After Another than vice versa.

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Does it have three great scenes? No. It has a few interesting or striking moments (like the finale) but forget “great”. I would’ve felt somewhat better if Emma Stone had side-stepped the head-shaving altogether. Jesse Plemons’ beekeeper/kidnapper is too greasy, and Aidan Delbis (i.e., Plemons’ moronic sidekick) is a blob of anti-matter. I “liked” or, you know, “respected” the Lanthimosian lunacy as far as it went, but Bugonia is minor.

And the fact — okay, not a “fact” but a realization that not only hit me in the stomach but came close to eliciting a tear when I saw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly in Venice several weeks ago…

The fact is that this currently streaming, faintly melancholy Netflix mood trip flick has only one great scene, or more precisely a great moment.

It’s George Clooney’s titular character not asking a question as much as voicing a plea (as well as a refrain from the opening scene) — “Can I do it again?” Who among us has never said this to themselves (or to God) each and every day since they hit their mid 40s or early 50s?

We’ve all fully understood for months that Emerald Fennell‘s Wuthering Heights (Warner Bros., 2.11) is going to deliver a fair amount of hungry, gasping, shuddering sexuality…fuck me hard and long, Heathcliff….slam my ham with overwhelming vigor, etc.

My first reaction to the trailer’s first closeup of 35-year-old Margot Robbie is that she’s too old to play Catherine Earnshaw, whom Bronte envisioned as a young lass in her early 20s. Plus she’s seven years older than 28 year-old Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliff.

Then again Robbie isn’t the first too-old Cathy — Merle Oberon played her in William Wyler‘s 1939 version when she was 38. Wyler’s Heathcliff, Laurence Olivier, was six years younger.

Plus Emily Bronte’s “Nelly Dean” is being portrayed this time by Vietnamese actress Hong Chau…a Vietnamese woman stirring the plot soup in the West Yorkshire moors in early 19th Century England?…I don’t think so! More bullshit presentism + nonsensical diverse casting for its own sake.

All hail the glorious menonfilmpod…@williammendoza, @adumbowerz, @Commihater, @ryancownie…brave men who are standing up to Criterion criminality as far as the teal-saturated Eyes Wide Shut 4K Bluray is concerned. HE to readership: Do you have eyes? Everything that was blue in previous versions is now tealed….even the formerly black cloaks of the orgy guys have been tealed….wake up!

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) dir. Stanley Kubrick

Top: Old Blu-ray
Bottom: New Criterion pic.twitter.com/x7kg9mlqcY

— Men on Film Pod (@menonfilmpod) November 12, 2025

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Corruption in plain sight…no evasions or apologies. Par for the course…shrug, right?

Changpeng Zhao Wiki page excerpt: “Zhao resigned as the CEO in November 2023 after the U.S Department of Justice alleged he violated the Bank Secrecy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months in prison in April 2024. Zhao completed his sentence by September of the same year. In October 2025, Zhao was given a presidential pardon by President Donald Trump. The pardon was given amid extensive business dealings between Binance and World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company owned by the Trump family.”

All murder victims and their families are proverbial ingredients in the same profoundly tragic equation. They wanted to live, and were horrified by the sudden malice and brutality that ended their existence, and their loved ones were gutted and devastated by the loss.

Thud.

Leo Tolstoy: “All murder victims are exactly alike, but each and every murderer is unique in this or that way.”

Posted on 10.20.25:

Last night I watched the first three episodes of Patrick MacManus‘s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, a new eight-episode Peacock series about the infamous serial killer from a suburb northwest of Chicago.

Gacy was a fat, gay sociopathic beast who had an amiable personality and liked dressing up like a clown, but who also murdered around 34 young men in the ’70s (mostly during the Jimmy Carter era)…he buried most of his victims in a crawl space under his home, and some under his garage’s cement floor. And he dumped a few in the Des Plaines river.

As long as McManus sticks to the Gacy investigation by the Norwood Park cops (and then the prosecution in the later episodes), Devil in Disguise is aces…gripping and fascinating and appropriately gloomy. It has story tension, realism, a strange Midwestern eeriness.

But when it starts veering into the lives of some of the victims and the anguish of their families after they’ve disappeared, you can feel the tension dissipating more and more…you can feel the narrative padding slowing things down.

HE to MacManus: We’d rather not familiarize ourselves with the young gay victims, and we really, really don’t want to deal with the grief of their parents. Bohhr-innnng! If you’d just stuck to the cops and the prosecutors and cut all the dramatic flotsam and jetsom, you’d have a perfect miniseries. Read the “investigation” section of Gacy’s Wikipage…it sucks you right in.

The girthy Michael Chernus, whose Gacy perf sorta kinda reminds you of John Candy in Uncle Buck and Planes Trains and Automobiles, is fairly great as this suburban monster.

The last time I wrote about Chernus was when he played the extra-marital boyfriend of Stephanie Allynne in a glum 2015 Sundance comedy called People Places Things. My basic thought was “why would the pistol-hot Allyne want to cheat on her husband with a not-all-that-handsome overweight guy?”

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Let’s start with One Battle After Another. Identify the three great scenes. The final chase and shoot-out sequence on the rolling hills highway…that’s one. The French 75 assault on the migrant camp at the very beginning…that’s two. The failed French 75 bank robbery…that’s three.

But are there any “bad” ones? Hawks said you can’t have any. At all.

Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks grading system. The legendary director is famed for having said that a really good movie (or a formidable Oscar-seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”

Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” I don’t want to sound unduly harsh or dismissive but I’m afraid that Ryan Coogler‘s writing and direction of the second half of Sinners…the blood-and-fangs section that begins with the arrival of the Irish vampires…I was increasingly annoyed all through that damn film. Honestly? I’m not a huge fan of the first half either.

How do the leading 2025 Best Picture contender films (numbering ten) rate on the Hawks chart? I’ll bang this out tomorrow.

I wish I could subject Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet to the Hawks test. All I’ve heard from admirers is that it ends with a really great scene (i.e., a performance of Hamlet inside the Globe theatre), but no one has mentioned two other standouts. Do they exist? I’d really like to know.