Oscar contenders, Mentioned
Extremely abbreviated reviews of the 2025 nominees
“If one reads the newspapers or listens to the news,” host David Niven told the crowd at the 1974 Academy Awards, “it is quite obvious that the whole world is having a nervous breakdown.” The British actor might have been about to launch into a speech about the meaning of art during times of upheaval, but it’s hard to say for sure. He was interrupted by a naked man running across the stage.
The streaker, Robert Opel, had snuck into the ceremony by posing as a journalist before disrobing. “Isn’t it fascinating,” Niven ad-libbed, “to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?”
Fifty-one years later, the world seems again on the verge of breakdown. Nevertheless, on Sunday, Conan O’Brien will preside over a parade of actors in very nice gowns and tuxes. In this week’s Mentioned, we present a special package of extremely abbreviated reviews of Oscar films. And lest you be tempted to rush the stage in defense of your favorite unnominated movie of the year, we’ve included some snubs, too.
Dune: Part Two
BEST PICTURE
Denis Villeneuve’s second Dune installment, set in the year 10,191, entertains on a planetary scale. But neither dizzying shots of astronautical soldiers nor colossal worms can save this adaptation from its failures on the level of human relation. Absent from Villenueve’s vision is any sense of what the imperial armies are warring over: profit. Gone is CHOAM, the Emperor-controlled corporation that owns the spice mined from the desert planet, as well as the Spacing Guild, whose agents jealously guard the secrets of interstellar transport. Instead, we get Timothée Chalamet’s Paul and Zendaya’s Chani, speaking in regular-ass Gen-Z American English and loving each other unconvincingly. Paulothée (he never sheds himself) wins the trust of the desert-dwelling Fremen — who feel like they were written by people who pronounce “Arab” with a long first syllable — by way of pure sincerity. Here is a Dune hardly distinguishable from the IP-laden Marvelverse; a story about the machinations of empire stripped of the expanded social possibility that good sci-fi promises, and transformed into yet another nuclear cry for Daddy. At least Lynch’s Dune was weird.
Shreya Chattopadhyay
A Complete Unknown
BEST PICTURE
How many movies can one singer inspire, before the public gets bored? In the case of Bob Dylan, the answer is already well past the “Fourth Time Around.” Less formally ambitious than Todd Haynes’s 2007 I’m Not There, more deadpan than Martin Scorsese’s 2019 Rolling Thunder Revue, less oblique in its portrayal of the Greenwich Village folk scene than the Coen brothers’ 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis (a film supposedly based on the life of Dave Van Ronk, but whose dramatic ironies and interest stem almost entirely from our knowledge that, just offscreen, Dylan is about to completely change the game), and a whole lot easier to watch than the allegorical Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid or the unbearable Renaldo and Clara, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown sets out to answer a question no one had ever thought to ask: Is Timothée Chalamet too pretty to play Dylan? Chalamet’s (or Mangold’s) decision to go for an impersonation rather than a performance seems both odd and inevitable. But if the film lacks the weird bravura of Rolling Thunder’s camp fabulations and sly shuffling of the historical deck, it has the power of all great quest stories — and some lovely singing. Edward Norton is the perfect Pete Seeger. As for Dylan, his ruthless manipulation of his own image, and determination not to be a pawn in anyone else’s game, was already amply documented in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dont Look Back. But if A Complete Unknown isn’t the best Dylan movie I’ve ever seen — that would be the Pennebaker — I wouldn’t say it wasted my precious time either. Still, I’ll probably pass on the soundtrack and stick with the originals.
D.D. Guttenplan
Queer
SNUB
Of Luca Guadagnino’s two films from 2024, his adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s short novel is the mawkish sibling: softer and more sincere than Challengers, less its own film than a paean to filmmakers past. But there are memorable moments in this love story about two expats: a cheeky “Come as You Are” needle drop; the lovers’ sweat-stained outfits, curated by Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson; Jason Schwartzman in a baffling fat suit. Guadagnino has wanted to adapt Queer since he was seventeen. For better and worse, you can tell.
Annie Geng
Anora
BEST PICTURE
This banged-up Cinderella story is the latest Sean Baker movie to treat sex work and its dimly lit rooms as metonyms for the hustle required to survive in America. Baker takes a Safdie-ish turn to Brighton Beach, where his titular Uzbek American stripper lives next to the Q train until Vanya, a bong ripping oligarch’s son, proposes they marry. The bulk of Anora is one long chase scene spent with a motley crew of post-Soviet exiles — the delightful Armenian priest Toros and the kindly gopnik Igor — scrambling to locate Vanya, whose parents are dead set on rescuing him from his NYU international frat lifestyle. But in 2024, wouldn’t a lightly fictionalized Abramovich be better suited to Central Park Tower than Mill Basin? Mikey Madison’s accent is more Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street than Tashkent Supermarket, a nails-on-chalkboard experience for any Russophone New Yorker. For a movie whose breakout star has been hailed as the “Russian Ryan Gosling,” one would hope Baker could get the diaspora right. But no New York Russian would ever gaze out at Floyd Bennett Field and say, “nice view.”
Signe Swanson
I’m Still Here
BEST PICTURE
It is both a compliment and an insult to say that Walter Salles’s new film, about the 1971 disappearance of dissident Brazilian politician Rubens Paiva and his wife Eunice’s decades-long quest for justice, feels like a classic Hollywood activist drama. Eunice, played by Fernanda Torres in the best performance of the year, is a worthy successor to Erin Brockovich and Karen Silkwood, heroines of similarly well-acted, well-crafted, and politically modest biographical thrillers. Apart from one allegation of communism, duly rebutted, and a brief mention of Eunice’s later work on behalf of indigenous rights, I’m Still Here prefers not to dwell on the substantive ideological commitments of either the Paivas or their opponents in the Brazilian ruling class. At least Salles and his immense directorial talents are on the right side. How many other billionaire banking-fortune heirs can say that?
Erik Baker
Babygirl
SNUB
Nicole Kidman, the CEO of a company that makes horrifying warehouse robots, has never had an orgasm with her husband. Enter: hunky Harris Dickinson, who opens her up to the erotic world of chugging milk and fetching hard candies on all fours. Of all the improbabilities in this intermittently earnest plea for sexual acceptance, the most far-fetched is that Kidman’s husband, an avant-garde European stage director, is shocked at the very notion of his wife’s BDSM proclivities. Clearly, the filmmakers haven’t spent much time in the theater.
Bill Lattanzi
The Girl with the Needle
INTERNATIONAL FEATURE
All the predictions that reproductive rights would dominate November’s presidential election might have more relevance, in the end, to the Academy’s ballots. Case in point: this riveting, gorgeous, anti-natalist historical gothic that somehow secured a nomination for Best International Feature Film. Magnus von Horn’s post-World War I Copenhagen teems with war-mangled bodies, industrial pollution, class strife, and endless suffering heaped upon women’s flesh, all of which feels less past than prescient. In another prophecy of the contemporary, kindness is a commodity rarer than narcotics, though two third-act gestures leave open the possibility of empathy in even the gloomiest times. It would be unwise to prognosticate an Oscar win, given the dark tenor and ambiguous morals of this brutal gem. But I can safely put it in my top two baby-killing movies of 2024.
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
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