From The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield….

I’m personally afraid (very afraid) of female-created films that appear to be anguish- or pain- or persecution-driven. I’m speaking of a longstanding dread of mute-nostril-agony films that hurl me to the bottom of a terrible black pit. You know…films about this or that woman suffering from this or that oppressive situation a la Mary Bronstein‘s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling, Lynne Ramsay‘s Die My love, Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee, Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking, Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman….that line of country.

Does this mean I only want to see buoyant, ironic-happy-face, patty-cake Barbie movies from women directors or about female characters? Of course not. I’m a huge fan of Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette, Magnus von Horn‘s The Girl With The Needle, Ridley Scott‘s Thelma & Louise, Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, etc. There are dozens upon dozens more in this vein.

Once upon a time the Manhattan-based Gotham Awards, generally known for their lunatic wokey leanings, were more or less the east coast version of the Spirit Awards, and this meant that eligible films had to have been produced for $35 million or lower. (The Spirit budget cap is $30 million but close enough.) But the Gotham budget cap was removed in 2023 to allow for “a more inclusive submission pool” of potential nominees.

Which is how and why the masssively expensive, progressive-left-leaning One Battle After Another has been nominated for a Gotham Best Feature award. The other nominees are Bugonia, East of Wall, Familiar Touch, Hamnet, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You? (a mute nostril agony film if I’ve ever seen one), Lurker, Sorry, Baby (HE’s personal preference to win!), The Testament of Ann Lee and Train Dreams.

Sessue Hayakawa’s Colonel Saito: “I hate the Gotham Wokeys! They have no shame about praising woke bonafides and identity credentials while giving secondary consideration to achievements in film that are primarily merit-based…no shame about this! In 2023 they gave May December‘s Charles Melton their Best Supporting Actor award because of his half-Asian ancestry (his mother is Korean), and then they lied about this in the aftermath!

“The Gotham Wokey gangbangers are stubborn mules but they have no pride. They endure but haven’t the courage to stand up straight and tall for cinematic art. Plus they’ve blown off gender-based acting categories. I hate them…they’re propagandists!”

On top of which the Gotham Wokeys have failed to nominate Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value for their Best International Feature award…WHY? The nominees are Jafar Panahi‘s It Was Just an Accident (not good enough– won in Cannes for political reasons), Park Chan-Wook‘s No Other Choice, Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague (this should win!), Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling (another mute-nostril-agony contender) and Bi Gan‘s Resurrection.

The Outstanding Lead Performance Gotham Award will almost certainly go to Hamnet‘s Jessie Buckley, and the Outstanding Supporting Performance Gothamn trophy should be handed to either Sentimental Value‘s Stellan Skarsgard, One Battle After Another‘s Benicio Del Toro or Jay Kelly‘s Adam Sandler.

And that unalterable fact means that I’ll be obliged — okay, forced — again and again to sit through high-aspiring films that Variety ‘s Guy Lodge will praise to the heavens but which will also try my patience, at the very least, and may, in all probability, compel me to endure serious anguish and perhaps even misery.

The next film by Mascha Schilinski, director of the agonizing Sound of Falling, will probably subject me to great viewing difficulty. The next Park Chan–wook film will almost certainly cause some degree of suffering. Ditto the next cinematically ambitious smarthouse film from Brutalist helmer Brady Corbet, and definitely the next equally ambitious effort from Mona Fastvold, whose The Testament of Ann Lee put me through the ringer a couple of months ago at the Venice Film Festival.

Who are the other guaranteed pain-giving directors? All I know for sure is that they’re out there, waiting to lower the boom. And as William Holden’s Pike Bishop said in The Wild Bunch, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Because grade-A film festivals, of course, are generally dependable forums for the richest, most far-reaching and most delightful films emerging at a given moment. You can’t have one without the other. Suffering and deliverance go hand in hand.

Apologies for failing to quickly acknowledge and suitably mourn the death of Drew Struzan, the celebrated movie-poster guy who passed on 10.13.

I feel especially sorry for anyone who’s had to grapple with the cruel oppressions of Al Z. Heimer….poor fellow. Hugs and condolences to fans, friends and colleagues.

This said, Struzan’s big-studio posters, effective as they were, were solely focused on the mainstream sell. Which is what movie one-sheets are expected to do, of course — instantly sell the movie to the lowest-common-denominator dummies.

And yet the very best ones deliver the sell plus something else…something angular, striking, artful, unexpected. And in so doing they attract moviegoers who are (a) repelled by the generic and (b) looking for something edgy or atypical.

Here are three posters, no offense, that delivered something more…

Written by a good friend (a Los Angeles-based attorney) whom I’ve known since the early ’80s….

“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has a lot going for it. It bothered me but in a good way.

“It bothered me to see Springsteen struggling with memories of family dysfunction. The brooding, deeply bruising alcoholic father (Stephen Graham) whose downcast moods seemed to define the household…little Bruce quietly observing and fearing this seething dog of a dad. But after coming off the road and a triumphant tour supporting The River, he seemed barely functional in his personal life. A composite version of a New Jersey girlfriend’s frustrated yearning for a serious relationship with the elusive rock star is a classic example of seeking someone who is obviously unavailable. He isn’t overtly cruel or philandering, just mostly missing in action.

“The muse of music constantly beckons. Springsteen putting together what would become Nebraska in his safe-space bedroom. Jamming with his friends at the legendary Stone Pony in Asbury Park. The sometimes uncomfortable sessions with his musical team struggling to transfer the sound of his home recordings to something that can be commercially released. It shows in miniature the misgivings of the record label and even perhaps his manager, Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), with this unexpected and seemingly ill-timed musical direction, emerging at a moment when global stardom was in reach if Springsteen would just write some hit songs.

“The tunes that would comprise Born In The USA were mostly in the can but would have to wait a while. The dark themes of Nebraska had to come first as Springsteen needed to exorcise his childhood demons, etc.

“We live in a cynical time. An earnest film about a rock star’s struggles with depression and the release of an acclaimed-but-long-ago album may not resonate all that widely or deeply in 2025. There is also an incongruity in the wide release of a $55 million dollar film where the principals did significant publicity in the service of memorializing a small record by a musician whose mantra for it at the time was: no press, no singles and no tour. Perhaps the movie should have been downsized and followed those instincts.

“Then again, there’s a big difference between releasing a movie into today’s over-saturated media world and releasing a record in 1982 which would get attention just because of the name of the artist and his place in the zeitgeist at that time. We all waited impatiently back then for every new Springsteen record. Bruce’s big era lasted from the ‘mid 70s to the early aughts, and that’s fine. Nearly 30 years. Leave it there. Feel good about that.”

Here’s a starter.

Read more

In his Bugonia review, New Yorker critic Justin Chang offhandedly admits that Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt wasn’t critically trashed by for its cinematic shortcomings but for political-cultural reasons — for being “noxiously reactionary.”

My Critics Choice membership was stupidly, hysterically terminated in March 2021, and with it HE’s advertising income. Thanks, fellas! I’ve known from the get-go that the people who called for my professioonal death in the wake of this absurd, sickening episode were primarily brittle, progessive-minded, industry-based women (fellow female Critics Choice members, publicists, trans biomales).

But until this morning I’d never considered what happened to me in scholarly, professorial, concisely written, delightfully articulate and on-target terms.

Consider Helen Andrews‘ “The Great Feminization,” posted on 10.16.25.

It is understood, of course, that the vast majority of HE commentators will ignore the substance of this article and just attack Andrews based upon their dislike of or disagreement with this or that excerpt. Some of you might want to actually read it.

Excerpts:

“All cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis: Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

“If wokeness really is the result of The Great Feminization, then the eruption of insanity in 2020 was just a small taste of what the future holds. Imagine what will happen as the remaining men age out of these society-shaping professions and the younger, more feminized generations take full control.

“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.

“Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

“The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.”

Helen Andrews’ address delivered at NatCon 5 in Washington, D.C. on 9.2.25:

I don’t know the detailed financial particulars behind Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, but I do know that this modestly-scaled, indie-flavored period drama (set in 1982) cost $55 million to produce, and that’s just fucking ridiculous.

If I was a studio chief and this Scott Cooper-directed feature had been pitched to me at that budget, I would have thought about it for 40 or 50 seconds and said, “$55 million for a movie about a depressed, New Jersey-born rock star recording a no-frills album in his bedroom? Even with great reviews a film like this might earn $25 or $30 million theatrical…maybe. Bruce’s heyday was 40, 50 years ago. This film would lure aging white GenXers and boomers and that’s all. Figure a way to make it for $17.5 million all in and maybe we can talk. Okay, I might approve $20 million but not a cent higher.

“Oh, and the guy who plays Springsteen needs to sorta kinda look like him…right? Jeremy Allen White looks nothing like him. Ridiculous. White-as-Springsteen is as bad of an idea as casting Paul ‘hawknose’ Mescal as Paul McCartney or Joseph fucking Quinn as George Harrison. Seriously…take the needle out of your arm.”

“Build a $300 million, 90,000-square-foot gilt ballroom — which will overshadow the central edifice — while the government is shut and people have been thrown out of work; plaster tacky gold all over the Oval; sue everyone willy-nilly; put foes through legal torture; send troops to American cities; shrug off due process and blow alleged drug runners out of the water.

“’We the People’ is quaint. Now we are governed by the whims of one person.

“Congress is adrift. The White House is a shipwreck. Trump is marauding in the Caribbean. James Comey and Letitia James are being forced to walk the plank, and next up could be Jack Smith and Adam Schiff.

“We are awash in nautical metaphors as the president plunders and pillages. He’s a pirate — and not the fun Halloween kind.”

–from Maureen Dowd‘s “Burnin’ Down the House“, 10.25.25.