Ranking 98th Oscars Best Picture Nominees

Here is how I rank the Best Pictures nominees of the 98th Oscars in reverse order:

F1 (Joseph Kosinski) - Graded leniently [sic] because this took Avatar: Fire and Ash's place as the one popcorn movie amongst the nominees, thus freeing me from having to sit through that 197-minute beast or even having to think about it until this very moment (whoa! $1.484 billion at the box office - who knew?). F1 is Top Gun on the race track and every blockbuster beat locks in with such dreary clockwork that it feels like you're watching an architecture diagram for 155 hellassdamn minutes. Its sole ambiguity is whether or not Brad Pitt's abs are AI. C-minus

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) - Poor Things suggested Lanthimos was ready to join the human race. But I skipped Kinds of Kindness because I had to wash my hair. So I can't claim that his remake of Save the Green Planet! (Jang Joon-hwan, 2003) continues a regression. But it reveals him up to his old nihilistic tricks again. Purely as a thriller, this is aces; my heart was racing throughout. But I could see the twist at the end coming the moment the conspiracy was explained and I'm not bragging. What attracted Lanthimos to Save the Green Planet! was the opportunity to suggest that, hey, some incel conspiracy theorists may actually be right! And boy, aren't I a moron for toiling away at an overdue article that's kept me from blogging while chasing after reputable scholarly sources and actually writing an essay with my real intelligence. I'm such a silly billy. In fact, we're all such silly billies because all humanity gets theirs in the end which one must assume included other incels as well. As usually, where this all leaves Lanthimos is known only to the therapist one assumes he feels he doesn't need. C

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao) - I'm not a gambling man. But I think this will take the statue only because it's the most Oscary, putting the mid in middlebrow. A forgettable evening at The Theatre. If it gets some teenager into Shakespeare as Amadeus did for me and Mozart, then I applaud it. B-minus

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) - A bit too stilted and, well, Oscary for my taste. But a basically honest glimpse into the turmoil filmmakers can inflect on their families. B+

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley) - I'm not sure Denis Johnson's work makes for compelling film adaptations, e.g., Stars at Noon. This Netflix production of his 2011 novella throws in some Malickian nature mysticism but leans a bit too heavily on a "we're all connected" vibe that makes Oscar voters' hearts flutter. B+

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho) - Reviewed here. B+

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie) - Loved it. But it's a de facto remake of Uncut Gems. And Good Time. Maybe even Daddy Longlegs. It's time to branch out. Then again, Benny did just that with The Smashing Machine and came up with about a B+. Apparently, the over-amped intensity of their films is Josh's spiritual burden to bear. My advice is that their next collaboration should be a musical. A-minus

Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro) - I was stunned by how much I loved this, especially given all the pooh-poohing it received. Like the novel, it starts off rickety. But as soon as The Creature (a superb Jacob Elordi) takes over the narrative, I was enormously moved by his more-human-than-human plight. A-minus

Sinners (Ryan Coogler) - Come see me deliver my talk “The Real and the Electric Sh*t: Sinners (2025), Recordings, and Inscriptions of History” at SCMS in Chicago on March 28th! A-minus

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) - Not quite up to the polyphonic density of Licorice Pizza. But a far more subtle film than naysayers are allowing. As for the charge that Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) lacks narrative agency and has been arranged for the white gaze, I can't help but think of the last line of Rita Dove's poem "Canary": If you can’t be free, be a mystery (also the title of Farah Jasmine Griffin's 2001 book on Billie Holiday). For more, check out Kristen Warner's Threads thread here. A

2024 Best Picture Oscar Nonimees Ranked

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) - Ross applies the unlocked, myriad-faceted ways of seeing from his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening to this adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2019 novel and the worst I can say for it is that his phantasmagoric technique blunts the twist ending of the novel. But even that minor drawback has compensations for Ross demonstrates the capacious properties of Black sound and vision to vanquish the forces that attempt Black genocide. Grade: A

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) - Reviewed here. Grade: A-minus

Anora (Sean Baker) Whizzes by at roller-coaster speed until the devastating ending in which two atomized laborers try to find a connection and together wonder if they’ll be exploited for an eternity. Also, a sequel to The Last Showgirl avant la lettre. Grade: A-minus

I'm Still Here (Walter Salles) A brutal but somehow relatively quiet account of Eunice Paiva’s quest for justice concerning the 1971 murder of her politician husband Rubens Beyrodt Paiva at the hands of Brazil’s military dictatorship. The multiple endings that push the story into several futures started to irk me until I realized what Salles was doing - bearing witness to the rich and accomplished lives Eunice and her family enjoyed despite rage-inducing tragedy. Grade: A-minus

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold) Now that Boomers got their anonymously directed Wiki-film on Bob Dylan’s betrayal of folkie purity, based on Elijah Wald’s brisk, fun Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, we need one about his betrayal of Boomer purity, one that, in the words of ILX user President Keyes, “covers the important parts of Dylan’s life: Kurtis Blow collab, We Are the World, Soy Bomb, lingerie commercials, Nobel prize, joining Twitter” to which Alfred Soto adds "...talking to Arthur Baker about producing Empire Burlesque" to which I'll add Self Portrait, Renaldo and Clara, lyrics that acknowledge the existence of Alicia Keys, posting a Machine Gun Kelly video on his Instagram, etc. Grade: B+

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet) A pungent take on the Jewish immigrant experience in America post-WWII. But the controversial epilogue is not the problem; it’s the random point at which the story breaks immediately before. Why end it with Erzsébet making Harrison’s abuse of László public? What happened to Harrison in the wake of this news? And why not dig deeper into what made László an architectural genius, meditating on process more or what made him stand out against other architects? In short, why did it have to be 215 minutes if such huge, compelling chunks of László’s life would be excised, leaving the feeling that the film is both too short and too long? Grade: B+

Wicked (Jon Chu) Too damn long. But I loved all the discourse around it - the memes, the straight boys performing friendship via its songs on TikTok, the girls who came dressed in full costume on opening day, the singalongs. This film was popular. Grade: B+

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard) Reviewed here.  Grade: B+

Conclave (Edward Berger) Typically mid Oscar fodder, more TV Movie of the Week than Cinemah. Docked a notch so I’m not tempted to watch it again. Grade: B

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve) Actually sustains interest across its length. But that’s still 166 damn minutes of humorless proper nouns to stomach. Are camp and world building at odds forever? Docked a notch so I’m not tempted to watch it again. Grade: B

 

2023 Best Picture Oscar Nonimees Ranked

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) - This is the kind of film American Fiction satirizes, bloated Oscar bait about the suffering of a disenfranchised group. Hell, even the title was pre-ridiculed by Daniel Clowes in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) - remember The Flower That Drank the Moon? But if it's gotta exist, let it be the work of a master. Scorsese's account of the slaughter of the Osage in 1920s Oklahoma is rich in novelistic detail and earns every moment of its 206-minute [sic] running time. And I'd say that this showcases a career-defining performance for Lily Gladstone if the exquisite Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016) hadn't already done so. A-minus.

Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) - I'd probably knock it down to B+ today. But I had it at A-minus when I reviewed it after Barbenheimer weekend.

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos) - I can't believe it either. Reviewed here. B+.

American Fiction (Cord Jefferson) - Tender, welcome evocations of Black middle-class quotidian existence vie with corny satirical jabs at white liberal well-meaningness, promising yet another two-steps-forward, six-steps-back prestige project. But then there's the ending which I initially loved because I thought Jefferson was offering us a pomo Choose Your Own Ending type of dénouement à la Clue. Watching it more closely a second time, I now realize it's more conventional than that. Still, it's looser and jazzier than most prestige projects ever get. I'm impressed. B+.

The Holdovers (Alexander Payne)  Like American Fiction, a film to curl up with at various points of the year - December for this one, July for the former. Reviewed here. B+.

Barbie (Greta Gerwig) - Reviewed here. B+.

Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet) - Solid. But only the ambiguity of "did he fall or was he pushed?" and its was-it-really 152-minute running time save it from a certain Investigation Discovery feel. Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022) covers similar ambiguities with more complexity and a better ventilated conception. It expands where Anatomy of a Fall implodes into its overly localized concerns. And Saint Omer is half an hour shorter. B.

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer) - One of the biggest disappointments of the year from a director capable of the very best (Birth, Under the Skin). Reviewed here. B-minus.

Past Lives (Celine Song) - Even more localized than Anatomy of a Fall, a considerable feat given that the film concerns a woman who leaves her native South Korea to become a writer in the USA. Bittersweet if you don't think too hard about it. I just want to know if all the talk about 80,000 layers of fate and past lives and future lives is an apologia for ghosting. A much better film about the importance of living this present life: Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2015). B-minus.

Maestro (Bradley Cooper) - Ugh. And it looked so enticing on the New York Film Festival lineup. Panned here. C-minus. 

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The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)

I wanted to adore The Holdovers. This is the kind of warm, cozy film I can imagine someone keeping on in the background during that odd interzone between Christmas and New Year's Eve when those lucky enough to be off work have no clue what to do with themselves. Indeed, The Holdovers takes place across that very week when Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, gangly and totes adorbs) gets held over for the holidays with several other unfortunate students at the New England boarding school they attend. Largely as a result of his curmudgeonly behavior, classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is tasked with supervising the holdovers and much tension arises when he expects diligent study from the misfits under his care. Payne, along with screenwriter David Hemingson and cinematographer Eigil Bryld, deserve whatever Oscar nods may come their way for evoking moments when something could happen. With an empty campus as their canvas, the film's architects paint situations pregnant with possibility, to quote Margo Channing in a film underestimated for its warmth, including the possibility of sitting on your ass and doing nothing at all.

Would that the film progressed in such a lazy fashion. But alas, the lash of narrative progression must strike down upon us. It's ye olde vertically compelling, horizontally moribund problem of mainstream cinema once more. In a crusty deus ex machina, the group of holdovers gets broken up when one student's rich father arrives on campus via helicopter and airlifts all of the the boys save Angus to a ski trip. That leaves Angus alone with Paul as both Come To Terms With Things and Payne abandons the polyphonic density of, say, Paul Thomas Anderson's greatest film Licorice Pizza (2021) for story beats that march forward in lockstep. In a career-defining performance I hope/predict will earn her an Oscar, Da'Vine Joy Randolph airs out the proceedings a bit as Mary Lamb, a cook mourning the loss of her son in the Vietnam War. But the depth she provides is not enough to swerve away from the predictable spectacle of Paul finding a heart and Angus learning valuable lessons on the cusp of adulthood. Still, I expect to enjoy The Holdovers in fitful chunks around 2038 on whatever streamer is left standing long after they've all adopted ad-supported plans.

Grade: B+

Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023)

A film like this made sense in 1946 when Michael Curtiz told the story of Cole Porter as a brash heterosexual in Night and Day. For Bradley Cooper in 2023 to center a Leonard Bernstein biopic on bisexual Bernstein's marriage to Felicia Montealegre is no-steps-forward, six-steps-back Oscar-bait filmmaking. Bernstein's relationships with clarinetist David Oppenheim and musician Tom Cothran, for whom Berstein left Montealegre in the mid-1970s, are given offensively short shrift. The Bernstein-Montealegre marriage structures the entire film and so we get borderline homophobic synopses on Wikipedia such as "his homosexuality is diverted soon afterward, when he meets Felicia Montealegre." When Montealegre becomes ill with lung cancer, Bernstein returns to her and their three kids. Cooper places these scenes as the climax of the film, thus lending the impression that Bernstein's ultimate achievement was taking up his proper place within a heterosexual family unit. 

Even worse, centering such clueless representational politics results in a narratively unkempt film. Maestro comes across as a series of pins in a bulletin board - some musical sequences here, some discussions of craft there, one (can't have any more than one) coke-fueled gay party, all ever so briefly swirling around the heterosexual romance at the fulcrum. The only moments when the film comes alive are during the de facto (and welcome in this context) musical appreciation courses (e.g., when Bernstein is teaching conducting to a young acolyte) or when Cooper abandons the story altogether (the Mahler's Resurrection Symphony scene). A stunningly bad movie.

 

Grade: C-minus (upped a notch so I don't seem like a total crackpot) 

1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019)

What about this particular story or historical event dictated that it be filmed in "one take"? The gimmick turns Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) into a video game and, as such, I found it insufferably goal-oriented. There's a vaguely psychedelic moment in the middle where the hot-thank-gawd protagonist played by George MacKay holes up in a village on fire. It looked like a sound stage and I was fond of this brief bit of artifice in a film praised for its realism. But if Mendes has any insight into what makes WWI a unique disaster, then he's hidden it quite well under his dexterous camera movements. A dreary slog.

Grade: C+ 

Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)

Gerwig's arty play with time keeps the material fresh even for those intimate with the property. Every bit of preciosity is balanced with a grim set of limits and compromises. The moral? Hell isn't, in fact, other people, including a slew of cute boys (Timmy! Louis!) who admire smart women. And Laura Dern has firmly settled into Hollywood actor royalty. She's remarkable. All that and it's a hit (of sorts)! For two hours, the world seems right. 

Grade: A 

East Lynne (Frank Lloyd, 1931)

East Lynne is best remembered today as one of the few generally unavailable films to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The UCLA Film & Television archive holds the only print known to exist. For decades, it circulated in a hideous bootleg with the last reel missing. But an intrepid lover of film captured that last reel during a MOMA screening (I think) and now a composite version exists on YouTube until the copyright police force it down. It's still rough looking. But that detracts not a bit from the primal melodramatics on display.

The 1861 sensation novel by Ellen Wood on which the film is based had long since become a melodrama ur-text by 1931. In fact, Lloyd's version was the eighth [sic!] produced not including parodies and poorly disguised copies. All of which was part of the mini industry Wood's best-seller created. Its numerous stage adaptations were so successful that the line "Next week, East Lynne!" signified a guaranteed seat filler after a flop. The great Tod Slaughter, famous for portraying the melodramatic archetype of mustache-twirling Pure Evil, produced many productions and noted, "No other play in its time has ever been more maligned, more burlesqued, more ridiculed, or consistently made more money."

The most captivating aspect of the film today is how precisely it hits so many of the beats of classic melodrama, namely, a woman entering a hostile household (usually, as a result of class clashes) and a mother who must abandon her child. In the former register, it recalls films like The Shining Hour (Frank Borzage, 1938) and Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) and perhaps a bit of Laughter (Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast, 1930), especially when East Lynne borrows a scene in which a character dons a bearskin. In the latter register, one feels echoes of Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925), Madame X (Lionel Barrymore, 1929), and Final Accord (Douglas Sirk, 1936). And let's throw in a dash of Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) for seasoning. As always with narratives so deeply set into a culture's psyche, it helps to ask why we keep (kept?) telling ourselves these stories over and over again. A fantasy of class mobility on one end and the possibility of being a woman and not a mother on the other, for starters. 

Grade: A-minus

Ranking Best Picture Oscar Winners

This was not a pleasurable exercise. The only thing worse than a bad movie is an okay one. The lies Argo tells (along with the expert thriller mechanics with which it does so) enraged me more than a dutiful Wikipedia article like Spotlight. But that rage has stuck with me over the last decade whereas I would've flunked a quiz on Spotlight a month after I saw it. And so it goes with the vast majority of Best Picture Oscar winners.

I didn't get a chance to rewatch all of these. But those I did changed in estimation only a peg or two. So I'll never know if Braveheart, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, etc. are sitting in their appropriate buckets. Somewhere south of a B-minus is charitable enough (waves hand). I also didn't get a chance to review all the rewatches. But I've provided links to those I did. I'll probably get the most questions about No Country for Old Men. I've long since dispatched it as "Halloween for adults" so will leave it at that here (waves hand once more). As for that one film I refuse to watch, I saw the first Lord of the Rings installment and found it pitilessly dull. Sorry - I cannot stand world building. And even fans acknowledge that the win was less for that particular installment than the series as a whole so why bother? In effect, I saw the first three hours of a ten-hour epic and I'm more than fine with that.

Finally, while I've been watching all the Best Picture noms since 2016 (an "unnerving" project, as my friend Noah told me this week), I will not be watching the others. Skippy (huh?) and Nicholas and Alexandra (zzz) and District 9 (that was nominated?!?), I look forward to forsaking you with some desperately needed Paul Sharits. 

A+

All About Eve

How Green Was My Valley 

A

Parasite  

Midnight Cowboy 

Rebecca

Sunrise (for the pedants)

Amadeus

A-minus

Unforgiven

Casablanca

The Hurt Locker

Moonlight 

Nomadland 

The Best Years of Our Lives

Lawrence of Arabia 

The Broadway Melody

The Last Emperor

West Side Story

All Quiet on the Western Front

B+  

Mutiny on the Bounty

Gigi

Chicago

Million Dollar Baby

Schindler’s List

It Happened One Night 

Cimarron 

You Can’t Take It with You

Gone with the Wind

Ordinary People

The Apartment

The Shape of Water

Titanic 

The Silence of the Lambs

The Lost Weekend

All the King’s Men

Wings

On the Waterfront

Annie Hall

The Life of Emile Zola

The Godfather  

Out of Africa 

In the Heat of the Night 

The Greatest Show on Earth

B

The Great Ziegfeld

My Fair Lady 

Oliver!

Everything Everywhere All at Once

12 Years a Slave 

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) 

Slumdog Millionaire

Terms of Endearment

The Departed

Rocky

A Man for All Seasons

Dances with Wolves 

Gentleman’s Agreement 

Hamlet 

Marty

An American in Paris 

From Here to Eternity 

The Godfather Part II 

American Beauty

Driving Miss Daisy 

The French Connection

B-minus

Green Book 

Platoon

The Sound of Music 

The English Patient

Gandhi

Rain Man 

Shakespeare in Love

C+

Grand Hotel

The Deer Hunter 

Kramer vs. Kramer  

Going My Way 

Cavalcade 

Spotlight

The Sting 

CODA    

C

The King’s Speech

No Country for Old Men 

Mrs. Miniver

The Artist

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Chariots of Fire

C-minus

Ben-Hur

Patton

Gladiator

A Beautiful Mind

Braveheart

D+

Forrest Gump

D

Tom Jones

F  

Crash

Argo 

Around the World in 80 Days

Refuse to watch:

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 

                                                                                 

2022 Best Picture Oscar Nominations Ranked

The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg) - Astonishing. For the first time in his career, Spielberg traffics in an ambiguity that keeps this semi-autobiographical legacy film unpredictable. The scene in which the beach-blond jock confronts Spielberg stand-in Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) may be the director's best ever for the baffled and contradictory responses it's elicited. And just when you think the dénouement is going to lock into Horatio Algeresque step, Sammy walks up to his new Hollywood apartment not in triumph but in the midst of a full-blown panic attack. Not counting A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the man's best film since Minority Report if not 1979's underrated 1941. A

Tár (Todd Field) - A film designed to be debated into perpetuity. Like a good poststructuralist, Field destabilizes the center of each scene (including the exquisite ending) and maintains an edifice of free play throughout. I haven't discussed a film so much in years, especially with people who aren't avid filmgoers. A

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann) - Reviewed here. A-minus

Women Talking (Sarah Polley) - A film designed to plunge Armond White types into apoplexy. I admired the severe visual palette and compressed intensity of this "act of female imagination." A-minus

Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) - Vertically, yet another facile skewering of the rich and heartless. Horizontally, it shifts gears so many times that it gives whiplash to the viewer and, one must assume, Östlund himself given how he finishes it all off with a hilariously perverse non-ending. A-minus

All Quiet on the Western Front (Edward Berger) - Not sure what to do with this remake of the 1930 Best Picture Oscar winner. It's effectively anti-war, sure. But why was it remade now? B+

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniels, 2022) - They spent so much time on this multiverse concept that they forgot to tell a compelling, non-cookie-cutter story. Once the rules of the multiverse were laid out, you could see how the rest of the film was going to lock into its narrative beats with dreary predictability. B

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh) - Reviewed here. B

Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron) - I rolled my eyes about two dozen times at this "three-hour land acknowledgment" (to borrow Tyler Austin Harper's words in Slate). But I have to begrudgingly concede that Cameron brings off his colossally dorky vision with brio and keeps all 192 of those minutes moving briskly. B

Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski) - Marginally more digestible than the godawful original. But it's essentially a remake so yeah, no. My Xmas 2022 screening of it is mercifully fading from memory to make for contemplation of much more substantial films such as Myra Breckinridge, Reform School Girls, Massacre at Central High, The Ritz, The Cassandra Crossing, etc. (to choose some recently digested titles). D+

My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)

Pros:

1. Those gorgeous, eternal songs and the fecund musical universe it engendered. Read Tim J. Anderson's two chapters about the myriad recordings of the numbers and how they trained America in a new form aesthetic discernment in his terrific Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For one such spirited-and-then-some version, check out Lypsinka's take on Marilyn Maye's take on "Get Me to the Church on Time" here.  

2. The sick, gay-ass costumes and art direction of Cecil Beaton. I want never to leave the "Ascot Gavotte."

Cons:

1. The godawful, received, arbitrary, compulsorily heterosexual ending which George Bernard Shaw would've hated.

2. The length. Gawd, post-1960 Hollywood cinema makes my ass itch!

3. The direction. Cukor pulls off some elegant swirls. And I appreciate the perversity of rendering this a de facto inscription of the Broadway show. But lawd, is the camera heavy in that tumescent, Oscar-pandering, post-1960s Hollywood way! Cut! Track! Show me one (1!) fourth wall!

4. Audrey Hepburn. To state the obvious, she acquits herself admirably but Julie Andrews would've smoked her. 

Grade: B

Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976)

Talia Shire gets deuglified so that she can take up her proper place on the sidelines of the story. Burgess Meredith delivers the second act "You coulda been a contender instead of a bum" speech. New Hollywood grime covers up classical Hollywood corn. So on and so on and scooby dooby dooby. 

Grade: B

The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973)

SPOILERS but who could possibly care?

I've written about the tendency of 1970s Hollywood filmmakers to inflate their genre pics into white elephant art. But I didn't anticipate I'd be throwing The Sting, a film I hadn't seen in probably 40 years, onto the pile. What a slog! It starts out as a promising example of the gambling film, a favorite genre probably because gambling has always seemed so butch and beyond me. All the proper nouns, especially names like Horse Face Lee and Suitcase Murphy, and card terms (slice it to the side, horizontal ponies*) announce themselves as standards of traditional masculinity that I will never attain. It's a turn on, in a way. But lawd, why did this thing have to be 129 minutes? The pace slows in the last third to accommodate, you guessed it, compulsory heterosexuality, a waste of time in a film that couldn't care less about women. The entire Loretta (Dimitra Arliss) subplot could be excised. Hooker (Robert Redford) pining for her serves only to postpone the sting to the last ten minutes of the film. And could the sting be any lamer? The earlier card game on the train is far more intense. We know Hooker and Gondorff (Paul Newman, with inhuman eyes) can't die. So when we see them get shot, the "sting" is blunted. This was the best picture of the year according to Oscar? Come back, The Exorcist, all is forgiven.

Grade: C+

*I made those up. 

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022)

One doesn't want to be ungrateful since The Banshees of Inisherin is quantum leaps better than Martin McDonagh's previous outing, the juvenile, execrable Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). Still, it suffers the fate of so much Oscar bait before it - all its roads lead to a Message. It starts off as a promising Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976) variation. During the Irish Civil War in 1923 on the fictional isle of Inisherin, two long-time friends have a sudden falling out. Colm (Brendan Gleeson) wants nothing more to do with Pádraic (Colin Farrell). When Pádraic presses for a reason why, Colm tells him that he's boring. Furthermore, any attempts at rekindling the friendship will result in Colm cutting off one finger per attempt. Since Pádraic keeps pressing the matter, Colm starts to lose fingers, each bloody stump thrown against Pádraic's door to prove Colm means business. Unable to move on from Colm's toxic behavior, Pádraic devises his own violent retribution.

Gleeson and Farrell inhabit their characters with a depth worthy of an Oscar which I predict Farell will win. Not only do we feel Pádraic's pain at being ghosted but we grasp Colm's longing for a more meaningful existence than that available mindlessly chatting with Pádraic at the pub every night. Colm is older so he's feeling his last act approach which provides further justification for his coldness, devastating and just plain mean though it is. 

As the war rages on in the background, though, it's clear McDonagh meant the absurdity of the central conflict as an allegory for the Irish Civil War. Instead of recognizing Pádraic as his brother, Colm cuts off his nose to spite his face (or fingers to spite his hand). But that's about as deep as McDonagh takes it. A colleague suggested that to pin the traditionally female designation of banshee on Colm and Pádraic upholds Siobhán (Kerry Condon), Pádraic's sister, as a voice of reason and marks the moment when she leaves in disgust as the point at which the film descends into irreversible tragedy. But all of this is implied in the phrase "Civil War." It remains unclear what exactly McDonagh is trying to say about the event. I knew nothing about the Irish Civil War going in and I know a teensy bit more now. And as always with these kind of eat-your-veggies projects (like, oh, Spotlight), I'd much rather read the Wiki about it, especially given dutiful, by-the-numbers direction which stymies any desire for further exploration.

Grade: B