if Hangover 2 director Todd Phillips is even 25% serious (which I doubt), the issue isn’t the film’s star monkey getting addicted to cigarettes during filming. It’s allowable, I feel, for an animal to develop a nicotine craving if it happens in the service of art. The issue is enablers (people on the crew of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo?) feeding the monkey’s habit by supplying him with smokes.

If I was better at persuading DVD publicists to send me freebies I might have seen some of the 24 films in the big fat Ford at Fox box set, which streets tomorrow. But I’m not (too much work) and I don’t have an extra $210 to blow, so thank fortune for the The Essential John Ford Collection (The Frontier Marshall, My Darling Clementine, Drums Along the Mohawk, How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath and Nick Redman‘s 93-minute doc, Becoming John Ford), which is only $35.

Although it may be the least of the five, Drums Along the Mohawk (’39) is the one I’m most eager to see. This is because it was shot in three-strip Technicolor at the dawn of the color era, and I can’t get enough of the semi-surreal look of this process. The colors almost look painted on, which they were in a sense. The result is something strangely luminous and “fake”, and yet strangely agreeable. Obviously produced from a crude technology, but that’s the fun of it.

To me, Henry Fonda has always been the monochrome middle-aged architect in Twelve Angry Men, mild-mannered and balding, but here he is with unlined, light-peach skin and thick jet-black hair and a young man’s anxiety. I know, I know…but I eat this stuff up. It’s so much fun to watch I can overlook the blustery cornball acting styles that are a hallmark of almost all Ford films. (Fonda and costar Claudette Colbert aren’t guilty of this in Mohawk, but almost everyone else is.)

The difference this time, apparently, is that the new Mohawk has toned down the poster-paint colors so it looks, to judge by the stills on DVD Beaver, a little less forced.

This is one of the meanest, most heartless pieces of analytical celebrity journalism I’ve ever read. I’ve never written anything this insensitive or pointless. You don’t pack it in if things aren’t working out. Maybe if you’re struggling or uncertain but not after you’ve already made it. What you do in a jam is redefine, rethink, reinvent. Quitting is completely out of the question. Anyone who suggests this is some kind of fiend.

I’m sure Anna Nicole Smith died of natural causes…not. The 39 year-old wackjob “collapsed and was unresponsive while staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe Hotel and Casino,” according to a story on Breitbart.com. Now she’s with (in a manner of speaking) Daniel Smith, her 20 year-old son who died due to “a lethal combination of Zoloft, Lexapro and methadone that led to cardiac dysrhythmia,” according to his Wikipedia biography. And she’s also “with” the deceased oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, whom she married in 1994 in hopes of getting a chunk of his family’s $400 million fortune when he died. They’re all up in heaven now. No more stress or uncertainty….just a sweet cosmic float from here to eternity. Seriously, people into damaging their bodies by whatever means are looking to die. It’s a passive-aggressive form of suicide.

If I were the presiding judge in the Nicole Ritchie driving-the- wrong-way-on-the-134 case, that dumb cooze would get 90 days in jail followed by a 60-day forced rehab under lock and key. No discussion …that’s it. If I’d been in L.A. I could have been been on the 134 and had a head-on collision; ditto one of my sons. I don’t care if I sound like a right-winger — she’s dangerous trash, a menace, a public enemy.

Word around the campfire is that Nicole Kidman‘s performance as celebrated art-gallery photographer Diane Arbus is the best thing about Fur. As for the film itself, some are using the A word, as in “arty.” Or as in, “It turned out a little artier than what some in the loop were expecting.”

In some circles “arty” means index-finger-up-the-butt precious, but shouldn’t an Arbus biopic, of all biopics, have a kind of art-gallery feeling? An aura of artified apartness? If I’d directed this puppy I would have shot it in 35mm black-and-white.
The director is Steven Shainberg (Secrretary), who worked from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson and a book by Patricia Bosworth. Picturehouse is releasing Fur sometime in November, following what I’m told will be a debut at the Toronto Film Festival.
Arbus commited suicide in 1971 at age 48. Why is it that the final acts in the lives of so many gifted 20th Century artists (Arbus, Harry Nilsson, Sylvia Plath, Jean-MIchel Basqiat) end on a black note? Suicide obviously lends a quasi-tragic dimension and also gives the biographer or screenwriter an “ending”, but there are few cliches as groaningly tiresome as that of the self-destructive genius.

Good for Nicole Kidman, Blossom Films and her new first-look deal at 20th Century Fox, but the three films she currently has in development sound awfully mainstream, and two sound like sexy spritzy formula stuff….tripe for the girl who reads Cosmopolitan. There’s an adaptation of The Bachelorette Party by Karen McCullah Lutz (who shared screenplay credit on Legally Blonde…this should give you a hint) and a “Bourne Supremacy -style” spy thriller written by Simon Kinberg (Mr. and Mrs. Smith ) which will star Kidman as a female assassin….good God. (Nothing including worldwide nausea seems to get in the way of Hollywood’s fascination with professional assassins, a totally exhausted mainstream cliche if there ever was one.) No clues regarding Headhunters, written by writer-director Jez Butterworth (Birthday Girl), but obviously the underlying thinking behind the mission of Blossom Films is something along the lines of “this is a girls-only company, and we like sexy giggly glamour. Let’s stay away from anything too reflective of day-to-day life, and let’s keep the scripts breezy and commercial, and above all let’s try to help Nicole make lots of money. She’s already got her Oscar so we don’t need to mine anything too serious, and besides she’s pushing 40 and we all know what that means.” Per Saari, who previously worked for Robert Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises, will run Blossom out of an office on the Fox lot.

Nicole Holofcener’s Friends with Money, the Sundance Film festival’s debut flick, had two showings last night at the Eccles — at 6:45 and 9:30 pm. It’s now 10:10 am Friday and and I haven’t found one quickie review anywhere yet. C’mon, press contingent! …it’s a bit early in the festival to be dragging ass. (That means you, Indiewire.) Yesterday I asked a friend to e-mail me a fast ten-word review of Friends with Money — he responded with one. The film costars Jennifer Aniston, Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand, Jason Isaacs (who’s fantastic in Nine Lives, which will soon be out on DVD) and Scott Caan.

The decision by Nicolas Cage and wife Alice Kim Cage to name their just-born son Kal-el is…how can I best put this?…deranged. Can you imagine growing up knowing you’ve been named after Superman (i.e., his Kryptonian name)? This ranks with Frank Zappa naming his daughter Moon Unit and that dirty mangy dog in the Johnny Cash song naming his son “Sue.”

My hopes were up during the first three or four minutes of Bewitched because it starts out like Bell, Book and Candle, the 1958 film with James Stewart and Kim Novak.

Nicole Kidman, playing a cheerfully perky witch named Isabel Bigelow, says at the beginning that all she wants is to be loved in a normal everyday way by a regular “helpless” boyfriend who needs her. Not to be repetitive, but at this point I leaned over to Bill McCuddy, the Fox News anchor guy who was watching it with me last week, and I said, “This is Bell, Book and Candle.”

James Stewart and Kim Novak on DVD art jacket for Bell, Book and Candle; Novak’s November 1958 Life magazine cover promoting the film.

And almost as soon as I said this, Bewitched dropped this very relatable theme — an oddball exotic woman who wants to have a relationship with a regular schlub — and split itself into six or seven other directions and went all to hell.
It wound up being about personalities and letting Will Ferrell be Will Ferrell and the usual toxic (I think the standard adjective is “bubbly”) amusements that constitute your standard romantic-comedy-made-by-a-big-studio these days. It’s pure fizz, or is that giving the film too much credit?

And for this you can put the blame squarely on director and cowriter Nora Ephron and her cowriter sister Delia Ephron.
So a movie based on a TV comedy series from the `60s and early `70s, about an actual witch who just happens to get hired to play a pretend witch on a brand new remake of the Bewitched TV series. How coincidental is that?

This happens because the star of this new Bewitched series, an empty-cavity asshole actor named Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell), happens to run into Isabel at Book Soup (the West Hollywood book store) and falls for her right away, partly because she’s beautiful but mainly because she can do that Elizabeth Montgomery/ Samantha nose-wrinkle thing to perfection.

Here I am summarizing a totally inane plotline and hating myself for doing so and determined to stop right now.

The bottom line is that Ferrell is playing such a repulsively insecure twit and a run-at-the-mouth Hollywood phony that you can’t help but lose all feelings of empathy for Kidman’s Isabel because anyone being attracted to a guy with Jack Wyatt’s personality is fairly grotesque.

So with the foundation making no sense the whole thing is a waste of time, and that goes for the efforts of several appealing actors who’ve been given very thin, barely-written parts — Michael Caine, Shirley MacLaine, Jason Schwartzman, Kristin Chenoweth….although I’m sure they were well paid.

The only walk-on role that really comes through is Steve Carrell’s third-act cameo as Paul Lynde’s “Uncle Arthur.” Like I said a few days ago, if only the Ephrons had decided to weave Carrell into the film as a major character, etc.
There is one amazingly funny moment, when Isabel wrinkles her nose and causes a large chandelier to fall upon a character neither she nor we like. Radical! Then we realize the sequence has been one of those cheap-ass fantasy projections that isn’t really happening.
Opposite of radical!

(l. to r.) Elsa Lanchester, Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart.

The rule used to be if Larry King turned up in a film (i.e., playing himself interviewing one of the fictional characters), it sucked. The same rule applies today if the shamelessly unctuous James Lipton, the Actor’s Studio interviewer, shows up in the same way, which he does in Bewitched.

I need to stop the nitpicking and segue back to Bell, Book and Candle, which the Bewitched TV series was partly based upon (along with that Rene Clair comedy I Married a Witch, with Veronica Lake and Fredric March).

The basic idea behind John van Druten’s original stage play, which was first performed in 1950, was that seemingly weird people (i.e., quirky individualists) are like everyone else in that they want someone to love them in a very soothing and traditional way.
Gillian Holroyd, played by Kim Novak in the Richard Quine-directed film, has her exotic leopard-skin-leotard lifestyle and the power of witchery at her fingertips, and all she wants in the end is a cute stodgy guy in a suit to love her and make her feel the way we all want to feel.

Not a very hip idea, granted, but…well, don’t we? Don’t we all want love and security and spotless kitchens and tidiness, on top of great sex and the other stuff? The most peculiar and aloof among us want this…even if they won’t act on it, much less admit it.

Van Druten’s witches and warlocks living in Greenwich Village are, of course, stand-ins for the beats and bohemians of the late `40s and `50s. Screenwriter Daniel Taradash stayed with the basic metaphor. Novak’s Gillian, Jack Lemmon’s Nicky (Gillian’s goofily irresponsible younger brother), Elsa Lanchester’s Queenie…all of them mildly eccentric, anti-conformist, below-14th-Street types.

Kim Novak and “Piewacket” in Bell, Book and Candle. Was it Candy Darling or Holly Woodlawn who did that terrific imitation of Novak calling for Piewacket (“Pie! Pie!”) in one of those ’70s Paul Morrissey films?

At first Novak just wants to sexually sample the straight-arrow uptown book publisher Shep Henderson, played by James Stewart, which she manages by casting a spell. But then her vulerable side comes through and she falls in love with the guy. And to have and hold him, she is later told by Queenie, she has to give up her witchy powers and become like everyone else.

A metaphor for tedious Eisenhower-era conformity, okay, but also for the process of surrendering certain selfish perogatives and “giving it up” to make a relationship work.

It’s a widely understood theme, which is why Bell, Book and Candle, sappy as it may seem from your basic hipster perspective, is still performed in regional theatre companies today, and why the Columbia Tristar Home Video DVD of the film is still a mildly pleasant thing to sit through. You can feel what Kim Novak is feeling, what she wants. Hokey as it is, the story connects.

Plus it has a tasty supporting performance by Ernie Kovacs as an alcoholic writer. I love that the slurry-voiced, shaggy-haired Kovacs is in the bag for the entire film and is always scrounging around for “a little post-Christmas cheer.” And I love the way he chuckles when a realization hits him.

(There’s an article in how alcoholics in movies used to be reliable comic figures, or even portrayed as lovable because of their alcoholic personalities. Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou , Dudley Moore in Arthur, Arthur O’Connell in Anatomy of a Murder, etc.)

I’m not saying Bell, Book and Candle is a deeply profound thing, but if the Ephron sisters had focused on van Druten instead of swizzle-sticking the formula of an old TV series that was basically about domestic female empowerment (all Samantha has to do is wrinkle her nose and all predators are stopped in their tracks), they would have at least had something.

They would have had an adult love story about a recognizable emotional tendency or current instead of what Bewitched is now, which is nothing.

But if they’d gone this way they couldn’t have used Will Ferrell as the book publisher be cause he can only play insecure boobs, and one of the main reasons they made this film was because Ferrell sells tickets to young men, so they kept Ferrell and booted Bell, Book and Candle and went for the easily identifiable TV series hook and everyone cashed their checks, and this is why almost everything made by a big studio these days stinks.

Scrappy Guys

I first saw Scott Caan’s Dallas 362 during the ’03 Toronto Film Festival, and now it’s finally getting a New York opening this Friday (6.24) at the Village East. It’s played here and there around the country (Ohio, Austin, Los Angeles) and hasn’t exactly caught a wave, but it’s a tangy, smartly written, nicely performed first film.
That’s not damnation with faint praise. I’m just giving it a solid B-plus and saying it’s worth seeing because Caan gets a whole lot of things right. It’s partly a middle-American Mean Streets and partly a dark relationship comedy. It’s got spunk, personality and at times a wack sense of humor, which is nearly enough to take the film across the finish line in itself.
It’s a low-budget male relationship movie, which yanks it out of the running right away as a date movie. And except for a pair of older boomer-aged characters played by Kelly Lynch and Jeff Goldblum, it’s mostly about some fringe-y, wild-ass GenX types with self-destructive behavior patterns. And we all know that demimondes of this sort tend to play best with esoteric DVD renters.

Not surprisingly, and to some extent autobiographically for Caan, Dallas 362 is a dear-dad movie. It contains echoes of the writer-director’s relationship with his father, actor James Caan, although Scott casts himself in a second-lead role and gives the lead to Shawn Hatosy, a squatly-built young actor with Irish skin and small dark-brown eyes that made me think of that Michael Caine line in Get Carter — “piss-holes in the snow.”
Hatosy is better than adequate in Caan’s film, but he doesn’t have star chemistry. Caan, who does — he’s always had an effortlessly grounded macho prescence and a ready-to-pounce intensity — should have played the lead, and Hatosy, good as he is in Rusty’s shoes, should have played Dallas.
It’s interesting that it’s Caan who’s front-and-center in the release poster with Hatosy standing behind him.
Rusty (Hatosy) and Dallas (Caan) are a couple of L.A. guys in their mid 20s who are always getting into bar fights. They keep telling themselves it’s always the other guy’s fault, but they’re obviously into rage. Rusty, who’s slightly more stable than Dallas, is pushed into therapy sessions by his mom, Mary (Kelly Lynch), with an amiable, pot-smoking psychologist named Bob (Jeff Goldbum), who also happens to be her new boyfriend.
For the first 30 to 45 minutes, the movie is mainly about kicking around, chasing girls, meeting this and that edgy character, and getting banged up in pool halls and juke joints at night.
Dallas’s day job is collecting money for a bookie, but he’s working on two plans to rip off rich guys in their homes — one being the bookie he works for, and the other a guy he won’t know anything about until the night of the job.

Rusty, meanwhile, starts getting in touch with his feelings during his therapy sessions with Bob. One revelation is that he’s pining heavily for his dead father, a rodeo rider who died after being gored by a steer, and wants to follow in his footsteps.
Another is his deep kinship with Dallas, whose loyalty and fearlessness makes Rusty feel safe, he says, even though Dallas is obviously pulling him in the direction of chaos.
The going-to-Texas dream has a roadblock in the form of Mary, who doesn’t want to endure another rodeo tragedy and has told Rusty to forget it.
What kind of 24 year-old doesn’t follow his dream because him mom says no? Maybe the kind who hasn’t quite realized what that dream exactly is…yet. But once Rusty achieves clarity on this, he starts edging away from Dallas, who is determined to pull off the two home invasion robberies despite his friend’s disapproval. Rusty is appalled at his friend’s recklessness, in fact, but he decides not to stand in his way either.
The real-life parallels or references? The younger Caan is obviously following in his father’s footsteps, both as an actor and a director,. James Caan was on a very reckless personal streak in the ’80s. He also had a liking when he was younger for outdoorsy macho stuff, including bronco riding, if I remember correctly.

There are some occasional misfiring bits in Dallas 362, but nothing too bothersome. There’s a scene in a diner between Hatosy and a beautiful blonde stranger who walks in with lust (or something very close to that) in her eyes. Rusty tells the blonde he’d like to “save ” her by carrying her away, but can’t right now. Then he leaves without asking for her phone number, or giving her his. What the….?
The opening credit sequence — a series of black-and-white photos portraying Dallas and Rusty’s raucous nighttime adventures — is magnificent.
Bottom line: Dallas 362 is a highly assured debut of a new writer-director with a genuine sense of style. Caan’s dialogue is extraordinary at times, and he gets top-notch performances out of everyone. The result is far better than most of the mainstream pics playing at your local plex. Naturaly, given all this, it’s had some difficulty finding its audience.
Here’s the site .

Grabs

8th Avenue and 22nd Street — Sunday, 6.19, 5:45 pm.

1st Street South facing west from Bedford Avenue — Monday, 6.20, 8:40 pm.

Wendy Chamberlain and James Leet, gracious co-owners of Videology (308 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11211), easily the hippest and most refined video store in the Williamsburg area — Monday, 6:20, 8:55 pm.

Hands belonging to a certain widely-admired, acrobat-trained actor born in Bristol, England. Letters on matchbook do not signify the initials of the character he portrays in a certain well-known thriller (from which this closeup still is derived) as much as they allude to the character’s ethical-moral state as the film begins.

Most New Yorkers know this, I’m sure, but this world-famous roller coaster at Coney Island is rather small in scale and a bit of a relic. Riding the damn thing seemed pretty thrilling to me, but my hardcore 15 year-old son Dylan says the Cyclone doesn’t cut it alongside the much scarier rides found in today’s extreme amusement parks. Plus it lasts only two minutes (if that). The fare is $5 bucks — it’s worth $3.

Dies For Our Sins

The long-awaited Criterion Collection DVD of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar hits the shelves on 6.14, and there’s no excuse for not going out and buying this sucker now and keeping it close for the rest of your life.
This is a great, transcendent film because it conveys and seems to truly inhabit that sense of primal serenity and all-knowingness some call God.
Set in rural France, shot in black and white and released in 1966, Au Hasard Balthazar is about the sad life and death of a donkey.

Balthazar is loved by few (a teenager named Marie, played by Anne Wiazemsky, is his most devoted soul-mate), and is mostly treated with cruelty. This poor saintly animal goes through all kinds of hell and indifference. Beaten, worked to the bone, sold and resold, shat upon.
But as critic Jim Hoberman once wrote, the film’s real concern “is the state of being. Crowned with flowers, spooked by firecrackers, struck without cause, Balthazar bears patient witness to all manner of enigmatic human behavior. This expressionless donkey is the most eloquent of creatures — he is pure existence, and his death, in the movie’s transfixing final sequence, conveys the sorrow that all existence shares.”
I’ve seen Bresson’s masterpiece twice — once a year and a half ago at the Nuart, and once in the late ’70s. I remember after my initial viewing sad and heartbreaking it felt, and how I was so turned around by the idea of a donkey being presented as the bearer of our sins — a mute observer, martyr, sufferer.
If it sounds religious to you, then so be it. I know I felt the presence of “God” (a remnant in my head of some kind of sentimental, lamenting, all-penetrating cosmic heart) in this film very clearly.
Absolute masterpieces don’t come down the pike very often. It was voted one of the 20 greatest films of all time by the critics and filmmakers who voted in 2002’s British Film Institute’s SIGHT AND SOUND poll. Film lovers have been extolling its legend for decades.

Bresson wasn’t into manipulating audiences. He began as a painter and was very conscious of unity and precision. He was into pruning down and purifying his films. He would never fake anything. He’s known for austere camerawork (he always used the same 50mm lens, which most closely replicates how the world seems to the naked eye), eschewing theatricality, and making sure his actors never gave “performances.”
Bresson’s best-known classics besides Balthazar are Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket. My second favorite Bresson is L’Argent (’83), his final film, made at the age of 81.
Bresson died five and a half years ago, at age 98. There are several easy-to-find Bresson websites, but here’s one of the more thorough.

More Grabs

I don’t know how good this fabled 8th Avenue seafood restaurant is (but I can guess) — what matters here is how cool it looks from the outside.

Bedford Ave. and South 1st Street, looking east — Monday, 6.20, 8:35 pm.

8th Avenue and 19th Street (or so I recall) — Sunday, 6.19, 5:40 pm

What does it matter when this shot was taken? Who cares? Even the slightly off-focus look I was going for didn’t pan out (too soupy-looking) and I almost didn’t run this as a result. But I like that glare effect from the subway car lights.

Why do people flock to Coney Island? It takes forever to get here by subway (just under an hour from Williamsburg) and believe me, it’s not much when you finally arrive. It feels crampled, provincial, unexciting…a ’60s time-capsule park. You’re ready to scoot fifteen or twenty minutes after you get there. Taken Sunday, 6.19, 2:50 pm.

Dining-car art by Claude Gazier (www.claudegazier.com).

Heralding the upcoming release of Das Comeback, which will open in Germany on 9.8.05. It will open in most other European countries on this day or on 9.9. It will also open around this time in Argentina, where it will be called El Luchador (“The Fighter”), according to a director friend from Buenos Aires.

Here once again is HE’s best spitball roster of 2025’s strongest, most distinctive films…40 in all.

This is not about the likelihood of big box-office but about films that people may feel riveted, disturbed, challenged, gobsmacked or turned on by, or might even feel compelled to nominate for awards.

HE readers went to sleep on my previous list of 32 or thereabouts, so I’m giving it another shot.

If I’ve left any seemingly important films out, please advise.

3.10, 9 am update: Having just added Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza‘s Warfare (A24, 4.25), yesterday’s list of 38 titles is now 40.

Please consider the 40 and select ten films that you suspect will most likely emerge as the year’s hottest (i.e., well-reviewed, award-calibre, most talked about).

And just for fun, identify the film that seems (emphasis on the “s” word) most likely to win the Best Picture Oscar in early ’26.

1. Kathryn Bigelow‘s Untitled White House Thriller (Netflix), about coping with an incoming missile. Written by Noah Oppenheim, pic has been in post since last December. Willa Fitzgerald, Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Greta Lee, Tracy Letts, Moses Ingram, Anthony Ramos, Brian Tee, Jonah Hauer-King, Kyle Allen, Jason Clarke.

2. Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly (Netflix), a coming-of-age comedy-drama, directed and co-written by Baumbach with Emily Mortimer. Costarring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Riley Keough, Billy Crudup, Jim Broadbent, Isla Fisher, Greta Gerwig, Eve Hewson, Stacy Keach, Mortimer, Charlie Rowe, Patrick Wilson, Lars Eidinger.

3. David Mackenzie‘s Fuze, a British heist film that sounds extra-good. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, Sam Worthington, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Saffron Hocking, Elham Ehsas, Honor Swinton Byrne.

4. Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, a comedy-drama directed by Joachim Trier, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eskil Vogt. Costarring Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, Cory Michael Smith.

5. John Carney‘s Power Ballad (Lionsgate), about a conflict between a rock star and a wedding singer. Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Jack Reynor, Havana Rose Liu, Sophie Vavasseur.

6. Darren Aronofsky‘s Caught Stealing (Sony, 8.29). “Burned-out ex-baseball player Hank Thompson (Austin Butler), forced to navigate a treacherous underworld he never imagined”…too wordy. Costarring Zoë Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Will Brill, Bad Bunny, Griffin Dunne, Vincent D’Onofrio.

7. Scott Cooper‘s Deliver Me from Nowhere (20th Century, sometime in the fall). Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen in another boomer nostalgia pic, focusing on the recording of Nebraska (’82). Costarring Stephen Graham, Odessa Young, Paul Walter Hauser, Gaby Hoffmann, Johnny Cannizzaro, Harrison Gilbertson, Marc Maron.

8. Edward Berger‘s The Ballad of a Small Player (Netflix). Synopsis: When his past and debts start to catch up, a high-stakes gambler laying low in Macau encounters a kindred spirit who might hold the key to his salvation,” blah blah. Colin Farrell, Tilda Swinton, Fala Chen

9. Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (Paramount, 5.23).

10. Joseph Kosinski‘s F1 (Warner Bros., 6.27). Brad Pitt, Damson Idris (black dudes can’t die!), Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Javier Bardem, Kim Bodnia, Shea Whigham.

11. Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael (Universal. 10.3.25). Reportedly sanitized life of the late Michael Jackson. Jaafar Jackson, Juliano Krue Valdi, Colman Domingo, Nia Long, Miles Teller, Laura Harrier.

12. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (Warner Bros., 8.25). Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, Sean Penn, Alana Haim, Teyana Taylor, Wood Harris, Benicio del Toro.

13. Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt (Amazon MGM, 10.10.25). An academic setting obviously indicates some kind of anti-wokester, anti-Zoomer drama…right? Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny.

14. Josh Safdie‘s Marty Supreme (A24, 12.25) — a ‘50s period drama about a ping-pong champ. Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tyler the Creator, Odessa A’zion, Penn Jillette, Kevin O’Leary, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhard.

15. Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest (remake of Akira Kurosawa‘s High and Low, a kidnapping-ransom drama that I’ve never liked). (No date, A24 / Apple TV+)Denzel Washington, Ilfenesh Hadera, Jeffrey Wright, Ice Spice, ASAP Rocky.

16. Ari Aster‘s Eddington (A24). A “contemporary western with a darkly comedic attitude.” Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Clifton Collins Jr.

17. Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein (Netflix, November)….again? Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer, Lars Mikkelsen.

18. I’m not including James Cameron‘s Avatar: Fire and Ash (20th Century, 12.19) as it’s just another episode in the Avatar series, and is solely about selling tickets.

19. Will Nia DaCosta‘s Hedda, a “reimagining” of Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 stage play, be shot as a Victorian period drama or as a contemporary thing? Tessa Thompson, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, Nina Hoss, Nicholas Pinnock, Finbar Lynch.

20. Kenneth Branagh‘s The Last Disturbance of Madeline Hynde…as an ardent non-fan of Branagh’s Belfast, I feel very concerned about any film that he’s directed and written. Jodie Comer, Patricia Arquette, Michael Sheen, Tom Bateman, Vicky McClure, Michael Balogun.

21. Celine Song‘s Materialists (A24, no date). “A Manhattan matchmaker’s lucrative business is complicated when she falls into a toxic love triangle that threatens her clients,” blah blah. Beware!!! Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoe Winters, Dasha Nekrasova, Louisa Jacobson.

22. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (Sony, 5.9) appears to be a serving of guaranteed agony. The words “American romantic fantasy” are death to me. Directed by Kogonada from a screenplay by Seth Reiss. Starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, w/ Lily Rabe, Jodie Turner-Smith, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Billy Magnussen, Sarah Gadon.

23. Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Bugonia (Focus Features, 11.7)….aaaggghhh! “Two conspiracy-obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company (Emma Stone), convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying the earth. Costarring Jesse Plemons, Alicia Silverstone.

24. Paul Greengrass‘s The Lost Bus (Apple TV+). “A bus driver has to navigate a bus carrying children and their teacher to safety through the 2018 Camp Fire, which became the deadliest fire in California history,” etc. Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez, Ashlie Atkinson, Spencer Watson, Danny McCarthy.

25. Wes Anderson‘s The Phoenician Scheme (Focus Features, 5.30). “Dark tale of espionage following a strained father-daughter relationship within a family business beset by morally gray choices”…that’s a mouthful!. Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Bill Murray, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Benedict Cumberbatch, Scarlett Johansson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rupert Friend, Willem Dafoe, Bryan Cranston.

26. Bong Joon-ho‘s Mickey 17 (Warner Bros., 3.7.25). HE has long had a problem with Bong Joon-ho, and we’ve all heard about the prolonged release-date delays — originally slated for 3.29.24. Critics will cream over it, no matter how problematic it may or may not be. 3.10 update: It stinks!

27. John M. Chu‘s Wicked: For Good (Universal, 11.21.25). Same crew as before — Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, etc.

28. Andre Gaines‘ The Dutchman (no distrib — debuting at SXSW on 3.8). Sexual intrigue between harried black businessman (Andre Holland) and whitey-white chick (Kara Mara). Co-adapted by Gaines and Qasim Basir, based on same-titled 1964 play by Amiri Baraka.

29. Mimi Cave‘s Holland (no distrib — opened at SXSW on 3.9) Small town Michigan woman (Nicole Kidman) suspects husband (Matthew Macfadyen) may be living a double life. Costarring Gael García Bernal, Jude Hill, Rachel Sennott.

30. Julian Schnabel‘s In The Hand of Dante. Synopsis of Nick Tosches‘ same-titled 2002 book: “An interweaving of two separate stories, one set in the 14th century in Italy and Sicily and featuring Dante Alighieri, and another set in the autumn of 2001 and featuring a fictionalized version of Tosches as the protagonist. The historical and modern stories alternate as Dante tries to finish writing his magnum opus and goes on a journey for mystical knowledge in Sicily.” Oscar Isaac as Nick Tosches / Dante Alighieri, w/ Jason Momoa, Gerard Butler, Gal Gadot, Sabrina Impacciatore, Franco Nero, Martin Scorsese.

31. Jonathan Kent‘s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Ed Harris, Jessica Lange, Ben Foster, Colin Morgan, Ericka Roe.

32. Jonah Hill‘s Outcome (Apple TV+). Black comic satire about social-media harpooning of big movie star (Keanu Reeves). Costarring Jonah Hill, Cameron Diaz, Matt Bomer, Susan Lucci, David Spade, Laverne Cox.

33. Steven Soderbergh‘s Black Bag (Focus Features, 3.14). London-shot cloak and dagger with dry Soderbergh attitude….right?

34. Michel Franco‘s Dreams. Rich Anerican socialite Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) blows off, fucks over her younger Mexican ballet dancer boyfriend (Isaac Hernández)

35. Richard Linklater‘s Blue Moon (Sony Classics, May ’25) — The last few months in the life of composer Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke). Depression, alcoholism, closeted sexuality. Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale. Opened in Berlin on 2.18.

36. Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a period drama about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (‘60). Linklater will no doubt attempt to replicate the mood and spirit of Godard’s playful zeitgeist–shifter, a relationship piece about a small-time, Humphrey Bogart-emulating felon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his American-born, pixie-cut girlfriend (Jean Seberg). Linklater’s costars include Zooey Deutch, Guillaume Marbeck, Aubry Dullin.

37. Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet (Focus Features, no date) — Fictional tale about Mr. and Mrs. William Shakespeare coping with the death of their son. Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Joe Alwyn, Emily Watson.

38. Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Bride! (Warner Bros., 9.26). Feminist take on James Whale‘s The Bride of Frankenstein. All men are scheming, wounding pigs! Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening.

39. Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare (A24, 4.11). Based on Mendoza’s Navy SEAL experience during the Iraq War in 2006 and shot in real time. Only 94 minutes!

40. Ethan Coen‘s Honey Don’t (Focus Features, May ’25). Another lesbian caper flick a la Drive Away Dolls. Set in Bakersfield, pic focuses on a private investigator (Margaret Qualley), a cult leader (Chris Evans), and a “mystery woman” (Aubrey Plaza).

Last-minute 3.10 additions:

(41) Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman (Paramount, 10.3). Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dubst, Ben Mendelsohn.

(42) Jim Jarmusch’s Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, an anthology film with Cate Blanchett, Vicky Kreips, Adam Driver.

(43) Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (A24), a biopic of former MMA fighter and wrestler Mark Kerr.

The last year in which Nicole Kidman‘s AMC Theatres turned a profit was 2018 — $110M in the black. They lost $4.56B in 2020, $1.27B in ’21…pandemic. They lost nearly a billion in ’22 ($974M), a mere $397M in ’23 and $352M in ’24…closer and closer to breaking even! AMC’s total 2024 revenue was $4.6B.

Every time I go into an AMC theatre, it’s between 15% to 20% filled….if that. Then again I avoid idiot-level movies.