Mentions | Issue 15
The largest-ever U.S. exhibition of work by Ai Weiwei quotes the artist’s famous line — “Everything is art. Everything is politics.” — but stops short of making a clear statement on protest or freedom of expression. The most instructive moment, at least during my visit, was supplied instead by one of the “touch stations” devised by the Seattle Art Museum, where grabby visitors can interact with samples of Ai’s materials. I watched as a young girl ran her hands over a slab of marble, then turned to do the same to the real artwork beside it. Her mother intervened and tried to explain the difference between the two, with little success.
E.L.
The 7,066 reviews of this contentious body of muddy water once offered a glimpse into the minds of visitors unconcerned with its name. The “most relevant” posts were filled with childhood snorkeling memories and vaguely spiritual musings; one satisfied customer wrote, “the Gulf has made us a part of her, and she is a part of us.” By contrast, a single-star review called the Gulf “a constant disappointment… a thirty-year-old son who won’t leave home.” Earlier this spring, Google archived all but one of these comments, leaving the note: “Posting is currently turned off for this type of place.”
P.A.
It’s never a bad idea to listen to the more-than-35-hour audiobook of Anna Karenina, but the version put out by LibriVox, a platform where volunteer readers narrate works in the public domain, is especially fun. Chapters are read by different people, and the vastly different levels of competence on display lend a touching, amateurish quality to one of the greatest books ever written. Come for the novel’s deft psychological portraits, stay for the global accents, the shameless name-dropping of several readers’ personal websites, and the staggering variety of ways to pronounce “Karenina.”
S.C.C.
The newly reopened Yale Center for British Art has received rave reviews, but I have yet to see any mention of the museum’s best feature: its bathroom. Forget Cecily Brown and J.M.W. Turner; say hello to Louis Kahn’s colossal concrete pillar, tracing a curve to the sink. The mirrors come with dressing room lights fit for a starlet (Madonna did, after all, visit the YCBA in April). The palette isn’t anything out of the ordinary — whites, grays, and the metallic reflections of the paper towel dispenser and trash can. Yet this blankness suits the room’s function as both a respite from the noxious gaze of self-proclaimed art critics and a backdrop for an Instagrammable mirror selfie to broadcast the fact that you are, after all, one of the dilettantes you despise.
N.K.
Andrea Arnold’s latest injects her usual working-class narratives with a dose of the surreal. Twelve-year-old Bailey, who squats with her dad and half brother on a council estate in Kent, meets Bird, a drifter who may or may not sometimes transform into a crow. A story that could be mawkishly sentimental succeeds by tempering its fairy-tale elements with enough brutal, haunting, and hilarious moments (suitably scored by electronic musician Burial). By the film’s end, its titular character’s shape-shifting barely seems remarkable. How strange is a bird-man after you’ve watched Bailey’s dad (Barry Keoghan) try to pay for his wedding by singing Coldplay to a psychedelic toad?
D.F.
A faithful adaptation of Herman Melville’s whale epic in 2025 would probably lead to a speech by JD Vance blaming wokeness for making Moby-Dick gay. Unfortunately, we won’t get the pleasure of correcting Vance on this one, since the Met’s operatic rendition abandoned the novel’s queer themes, among others, in favor of Ahab’s monomania. In the first scene, instead of seeing Queequeg and Ishmael share a bed in “the most loving and affectionate matter,” we get Queequeg awakening Ishmael with loud pagan rituals from across the hull. The opera seems to disagree with the novel’s claim that there’s “better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
J.B.
Harmony Korine’s 2009 black comedy about constipated Nashville dumpster divers, now on the Criterion Channel, follows a group of social outcasts wearing rubber old-people masks, literally humping trash — and any other object, inanimate or otherwise, they can find. Repulsive, crude, unapologetically aimless, and literally unforgettable, it exemplifies the once-revelatory aesthetic of the leading cinematic anthropologist of American muck. Sadly, in recent years, Korine has been producing a different kind of trash: something he calls “blinx,” a kind of techno-futurist post-cinema involving edgy infrared photography, giant baby faces superimposed on home invaders, and Travis Scott.
T.T.
Bryan Johnson is widely known as a kind of aspiring vampire: a tech millionaire who regularly injects himself with blood plasma (including, on at least one occasion, that of his teenage son Talmage) to reverse his own aging. But in this Netflix documentary-slash-P.R.-vehicle, Johnson comes off less like a ghoul than a sad little boy whose messianic ambitions clearly spring from chronic loneliness. He does seem happy to spend all day go-karting with Talmage, who, much to his father’s distress, is about to leave for college. “Do you think he’ll be okay on his own?” an interviewer asks not the father, but the son. “I do worry about him,” says Talmage. Johnson inspires a similar kind of parental concern in the viewer. His body, the subject of so much of his attention, is sculpted but pale, impossibly lean, and oddly smooth. You’ll want to feed him.
A.L.
Thrilling stuff for history-buff dads who game: players in this addictive web simulation are politicians in the Weimar Republic trying, and usually failing, to fend off the Nazis. We begin in 1928, with Germany’s vibrant democracy in full swing. As it unravels, we’re presented with several options: patch things up with the revolutionary communists? Pander to the bourgeoisie? Unfortunately, it seems the key to foiling fascism is preventing the doddering octogenarian president (in this case the mustachioed Paul von Hindenburg) from running for another term. Ah.
B.S.
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Alive!, the career-making live album by glam metal giants KISS. But it’s likewise an opportunity to celebrate an alternative archive of the band’s theatrical stage presence: this bootleg compilation of frontman Paul Stanley’s delirious stage banter. With dubious sourcing but quality audio, presumably compiled far outside the purview of the band’s notoriously maximalist approach to copyright enforcement, it provides over sixty minutes of ’70s time travel experienced through groan-inducing double entendres, repetitive song intros, and goofy local call-outs. The guitarist otherwise known as “the Starchild” delivers it all in a glorious, demented Noo Yawk drag queen register, punctuated by strangely multisyllabic “Woos!” and “Alrights!” that defy both transcription and good taste. Stanley, a supposed Knight in Satan’s Service, turns out to be something more like a cock-rock politician, delivering a stump speech by turns mundane and electric.
A.G.
Finally, a reprieve from the self-consciously surreal workplace novel. Instead of nudging alienated workers around outer space (Olga Ravn’s The Employees), a supernatural factory (Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory), or a pirate ship (Hilary Leichter’s Temporary), Claire Baglin’s masterful debut, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, takes place in the terrestrial Normandy auto manufacturing districts of Baglin’s youth. One storyline, in which a child named Claire sees her father crushed by ill-paid factory work, nods to the nineteenth-century “social problem” novels of authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, who posited that industrialization prevented men from serving as good patriarchs. But a parallel narrative about teenage Claire’s fast food job pivots from the family to the individual, offering a Steinbeckian catalog of the occupational abuses endemic to unregulated temp work. Eschewing dystopia to revisit the moves of classic labor literature, Baglin asks — like the proverbial mom responding to her McDonald’s-craving child — why we make up bad jobs when we have plenty of workers’ rights violations at home.
I.C.
If the concept of a Canadian “national culture” conjures the same kind of despair as the terms “brand loyalty” or “singles cruise,” Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin should be applauded for jettisoning the idea entirely from the Winnipeg of his latest film. The main character, played by Rankin and sharing his name, comes home to a version of the prairie city transformed, by magical fiat, into a neighborly Persian community. In this Winnipeg, Farsi has replaced English and Tim Hortons employees serve tea from samovars. A shotgun marriage between the poetic-realist tradition in Iranian cinema and the city’s brutalist architecture proves to be surprisingly harmonious, a genuine multicultural love match. The English title evokes the film’s utopian sensibility, but it’s the unexpectedly unmetaphorical Farsi title that catches the movie’s humor: آواز بوقلمون translates to The Song of the Turkey.
J.C.
Three of the canvases included in this career-spanning survey at Gagosian date back to the totemic abstract expressionist’s final productive decade, characterized by a stylistic break so forceful it suggests a crisis of identity. Gone is the dripping wreckage of the triumphant ’50s and ’60s. Instead, the ’80s works inhabit a vibrating cosmos of white void, black line, and warm color curvature that could plausibly be called serene. Explanations for this volte-face hover around the artist’s decision to quit drinking and, more ominously, his worsening Alzheimer’s. The latter led to an increased role for studio assistants in producing his canvases, and, towards the end of his life, a tight-lipped legal conservatorship over the artist and his estate. The taboo around these circumstances, and their glaring implications for these final paintings’ provenance, clearly serves the bottom line. At $300 million, de Kooning’s “Interchange” (1955) is the second-most expensive painting of all time. Even an untitled ’80s work of this later style fetched $385,000 in 1987 — none too shabby for an auction held a few weeks after Black Monday. But the exhibit’s suggestion of an “endless” continuum between these periods serves neither Kooning’s strange and majestic late canvases nor our understanding of the art-historical turn towards an aesthetics of asset management that haunts them.
R.M.
In Tom Noonan’s morose 1994 comedy, Jackie, an executive assistant at a law firm, invites her colleague Michael, a paralegal, over for dinner. Subverting the rom-com fantasy in which initial awkwardness gives way to love, Noonan’s characters remain completely unfathomable to each other — never more so, perhaps, than when Jackie prepares the main course: a sludge-like scallop dish, which she heats in the microwave before piling on Michael’s plate.
A.V.
Many beloved alt-weeklies have suffered from declining ad revenue and fallen into the hands of dimwitted financiers — think The Village Voice, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Boston Phoenix. Others, like St. Louis’s Riverfront Times, live on as horned-up OnlyFans zombies. The RFT once published exposés on topics like police corruption and the death of FBI-surveilled Ferguson protester Darren Seals. Now, the paper primarily runs A.I.-written sponcon with titles like “Lily Phillips Says She Used To Enjoy Extreme Sex Events For Fun Before OnlyFans” (since deleted) and “Man Starts Leaking Cholesterol Through His Pores: High Fat Diet Goes Very Wrong.” It’s a good thing no real news is happening.
D.T.O.
This typeface, which replaced Calibri as the default font for Microsoft 365 in late 2023, is supposed to be friendlier, more trustworthy, and better suited to high-resolution screens. But to my semiprofessional eye, it looks like a squashed version of its predecessor, as if someone dropped an anvil on all those humanist letterforms. (The characters are certainly wider; Aptos fits roughly thirty fewer words on a page.) The font’s recent success coincides with a change in its name. Rechristened for a town in Northern California that apparently “epitomizes the font’s versatility,” Aptos follows in the footsteps of fellow name-changers Norma Jeane Mortenson, Ralph Lifshitz, and even the British royal family, who became the Windsors only after ditching “Saxe-Coburg and Gotha” for being too German. “Too German” might also have been a problem for this typeface, formerly known as “Bierstadt.”
Z.G.
The third generation of this not-quite-dumb phone is purportedly smart enough to give directions, but not smart enough to send an email. Some skeptics have questioned the smartphone price ($799, or $599 for preorders), while others find the introduction of a camera and the promise of an optional digital wallet function to be a Bay Area bridge too far. The company, Light, has pointed out that its commitment to privacy means it doesn’t use cash from data collectors to defray costs; apparently, the uncompensated sale of personal information translates to consumer discounts. Or maybe the anti-tech tech guys are fleecing us. In any case, I’m willing to part with my Motorola RAZR V3 Pink (super rare) for $149 or best offer.
K.P.
Presenter-read advertisements, the last vestige of amateur podcasting, offer a glimpse into a show’s imagined audience. What can the selection of products hawked by former Obama aides teach us about the average liberal American male? That he wants to restore his gut lining by swilling cow colostrum in sungold apricot flavor, burn fat while lounging on his direct-to-consumer mattress in bamboo delicates, avoid hangovers that could impede productivity, eat chicory root inulin and tapioca starch cereal for dinner, and consume vegetables in powder form.
J.A.
This new mob feature answers a question only a movie producer would think to ask: what would happen if you tried to make The Irishman without Martin Scorsese? Goodfellas producer Irwin Winkler hired some of the hottest talents of the early 1990s — director Barry Levinson (Rain Man), screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi (also Goodfellas), cinematographer Dante Spinotti (Heat) — and cast Robert De Niro (also Goodfellas, also Heat) to play both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, the film’s central gangsters. In 1974, when Winkler first bought the rights, this project might’ve been on the cutting edge. In 2025, it’s a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. The film is an hour shorter than The Irishman, but manages to feel an hour longer. Sometimes the greatest testament to an artist’s skill is how badly things go when they’re not around.
B.B.
Like Fleet Week for buckle bunnies, the Professional Bull Riders’ three-day event, sponsored by Monster Energy and the U.S. Border Patrol, brought 45 of the world’s best bull riders and their fans to Manhattan. The sold-out 2025 “Buck Off” at Madison Square Garden drew a distinctive crowd: out-of-towners in Farming Simulator merch alongside downtown types looking for a place to wear a cowboy hat with a little less irony than usual. The audience watched as human and bovine athletes (as the bulls are called) endured 135 dizzying rides — few lasting the qualifying eight seconds — before Lucas Divino, a seasoned rider from Nova Crixas, Brazil, claimed the nearly $46,000 purse. While the uninitiated may find professional bull-riding less overtly sexy than pop culture’s mechanical bull fantasy led them to imagine, there is something titillating about watching these small, durable men go bareback. Imagine the rider — often, a barely 150-pound twentysomething — as a jerky appendage, joined to the bull thanks only to the strength of his inner thighs and five firm fingers. Yeehaw.
S.A.A.
The work of Austrian theatermaker Florentina Holzinger, master of the crowd-pleasing abject and the so-called “Tarantino of Dance,” has previously featured cobalt blue vomit (Kein Applaus für Scheisse or “No Applause for Shit”), a spectator-splashing orgasm (A Divine Comedy), and a key extracted from a vagina (Ophelia’s Got Talent). Holzinger’s latest offers a churchly ritual wherein a chunk of one performer’s flesh is griddled and fed to another — a scene that, in Stuttgart, caused eighteen audience members to seek medical treatment for “severe nausea.” Undaunted, Berlin’s prestigious Theatertreffen festival named the play one of German-speaking theater’s ten “most remarkable productions” of the year. The U.S. might not be graced by Sancta anytime soon, but in February, Tanz — a grisly piece of dance theater that critiques ballet’s sexual fixation on women’s bodies by literally skewering dancers with meat hooks and dangling them from above — sold out its New York City run. Before Holzinger’s unholy power to transubstantiate metaphor into the scandalously corporeal, all heathens turn into believers.
S.I.B.
Alex Edelman’s one-man show about anti-Semitism opens with a decent bit about Koko the gorilla. But after getting that “benign silliness” over with, Edelman dives into the meat of his set: a Nanette-ian retelling of the time he crashed a neo-Nazi meeting in 2017. Though Edelman’s show hit Broadway in 2023 and HBO in 2024, it’s immediately obvious that the material was written years ago. Israel is rarely referenced, though Edelman does mention that his brother competed on the Israeli Olympic bobsled team. In subsequent interviews, the comedian has described his views on Israel as “heterodox.” Last year, when “the Israel-Palestine stuff” came up on Marc Maron’s podcast, Edelman said: “I’m obsessed with listening to it and thinking about it, but I’m not really sure where I stand yet.”
M.S.
Errol Morris managed to make a 93-minute film on the first Trump administration’s child separation policy without interviewing a single person directly affected by it. Instead, he focuses on the internal politics of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, lionizing the impotent civil servants who quietly expressed reservations behind closed doors. The only immigrants we do see — a mother and son crossing the border — are actors, their presence limited to a series of near-silent reenactments. Evidently, Morris saw white bureaucratic minutiae as the heart of the story. I guess I should have turned it off the moment I saw the words “MSNBC Films.”
M.K.
In McSweeney’s Quarterly editor Rita Bullwinkel’s story of eight women boxers, a finalist for both the Pulitzer and Booker Prizes this year, the human body is described with the precision of a butcher: we hear about a “toned cut of meat” and a “thin smashed cutlet.” Bullwinkel is herself a former competitive water polo player, and her characters’ honed forms prove exacting both in their ability to land punches and to move the plot forward at a rapid clip. Meditations on God, motherhood, family, death, and ambition are nestled among hopes dashed and dreams realized in this lean, excellent novel — no Rocky, all Bullwinkel.
P.B.
In acclaimed Timbuktu director Abderrahmane Sissako’s latest feature, Aya leaves her unfaithful fiancé at the altar in West Africa for a new, emancipated life in Guangzhou. Here, the “Chocolate City,” so called for its large African émigré population, is scrubbed of complexity: no one speaks Cantonese, but foreigners all know HSK 4 Mandarin; cops are cool; Chinese antiblackness never infringes on the personal lives of the film’s invariably friendly, reasonable characters. Aya’s love interest, who owns the boutique tea shop where she works, dotingly calls her “Black Tea,” a nickname no Chinese person would ever come up with because even Google Translate knows that black tea in Mandarin is “hong cha” (“red tea”). It is not races that fall in love but real people, and unfortunately, Black Tea has none of those.
A.Z.
Spoiler alert: dense, data-packed tomes on global inequality are not especially funny. But journalist Claire Alet and illustrator Benjamin Adam try valiantly to make Thomas Piketty’s 2020 follow-up to the door-stopping Capital digestible and entertaining. Through a family saga spanning eight generations and a coda that takes the form of six proposals for modern-day participatory socialism, the book brings us on a journey from feudal lords to modern tax loopholes, replete with historical line charts lovingly rendered in panel form and factoids about quantitative easing delivered via speech bubble. The illustrations are striking, and Alet does a noble job of condensing Piketty’s academic Everest into something more like a hill. But there are only so many laughs to be had while a cartoon aristocrat in a top hat tells you that you’re poor.
V.N.D.
The global clothing behemoth Uniqlo recently opened the first North American location of its eponymous coffee shop, housed on the second floor of the company’s flagship Midtown store. The minimal seating and airport-like ambience may disappoint Manhattanites looking for a welcoming “third space”; this site was once a Starbucks, and little seems to have changed. But the coffee was fantastic, despite the barista’s reaction to my Americano order. (“That’s the one that’s espresso, right?”)
M.S.
The cloistered Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery are best known for their eponymous liqueur, but spend far more time sitting in contemplative silence than collecting herbal ingredients for your next cocktail. In 2005, the filmmaker Philip Gröning distilled six months of footage from the charterhouse into an intimate record of this “communion of solitaires,” scored only by the sounds of monastic life: deliberate steps thumping on wooden floors, electric clippers buzzing at the in-house barber. The result — appropriately austere and quite seductive — lulls the viewer into a peaceful certainty much like the monks’ own. And if you’d rather not wait sixteen years (as Gröning did) for permission to visit, fret not: a former charterhouse at nearby Sélignac offers a silent retreat in the mode of the “Carthusian lifestyle.” Those monks have made at least one concession to modernity: sign-ups are accepted via Google Form.
C.P.
Even if you’re not all that interested in what America’s Marquis de Sade has to say about art, books, and weird things on the internet, you’ll find useful advice and minor revelations on his self-titled blog, where he responds to practically every comment. Some of his observations run to the banal — that coke is expensive now, and sincerity is good — yet he still manages to surprise. In one response, he encourages the user Diesel Clementine to “adopt a persona and make a bunch of friends who like the persona and want to be friends with that person, and then, after your persona has been friends with them for a while, revert to who you really are and confuse them.” Couldn’t we all stand to live our lives a little more like one of Cooper’s depraved protagonists? I, at least, plan to start signing off messages the way he often does: “xoxo, me.”
N.W.
Mentions | The Oscars 2025
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.
S.C.
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.G.
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.
A.G.
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.”
S.S.
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?
E.B.
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.
B.L.
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.
J.S.-G.
It was a rainy day in London, and with nothing to do, I walked forty minutes to the nearest theater to see Gladiator II on opening weekend. The only available ticket, according to the digital self-service screen I was tapping on, had a wheelchair icon. I found an employee and asked if I could buy that seat; the theater staff said I’d have to wait until the movie started to be sure no one else needed it, skipping the trailers. I killed some time at a nearby pub and returned to purchase the ticket. I settled in with popcorn and a Diet Coke just as the title sequence ended. Then, a woman tapped my shoulder, claiming the spot. It turned out I had bought the wheelchair space, which had no seat, and that I was actually sitting in her adjacent seat. Embarrassed, I apologized and left. I saw it one week later at Cobble Hill Cinemas. Worth the wait!
K.R.
RaMell Ross’s first dramatic feature tells the story of Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, two black teenagers at an oppressive Jim Crow era reform school, in something of a novel format. Shot mostly in first-person POV, the film combines scenes from the boys’ school days with flashes forward. An adult Curtis, now the owner of his own moving company, grapples with his traumatic past as unmarked graves of murdered students are found around the campus. A late-breaking twist injects some uncertainty about what we’ve seen, and whose eyes we’ve seen it from. But the story’s nauseating sense of horror and grief emerges with crystal clarity despite, or because of, Ross’s experimental style — as when the protagonist moves an out-of-use bedframe from the home of a recent widower, who then asks: “But where will we rest?” That said, I did look up the plot synopsis on Wikipedia immediately after leaving the theater.
S.B.
Every third shot in Robert Eggers’s gothic-to-a-fault remake seems to land on either a comically evil heptagram or a close-up of Lily-Rose Depp vomiting blood. With the worst accent since Nicole Kidman’s performance in The Northman, Bill Skarsgård — part hussar, part Pepé Le Pew — threatens a fictional German village with a boatful of rats. Nicholas Hoult, Depp’s cuckolded husband, fends him off with all the mettle of a desk clerk. Eggers’s message, that suppressed female libido constitutes an existential threat on par with the Black Death, is writ large enough to be read from space.
E.V.
Why are movie-musicals so challenging to pull off? Director Jacques Audiard’s melodrama — which follows a Mexican cartel boss who enlists a distressed lawyer to help her disappear from her wife and children so she can medically transition — provides an array of answers, from an ugly abundance of on-screen tears to novelty-dish-towel-worthy lyrics. (“Changing society changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society.”) The movie’s color-grading changes as its characters traverse the globe, bringing to mind a series of Instagram filters (“Paris,” “Oslo,” “Lagos”). The greatest threat to its Oscar chances, though, may be the recently unearthed trove of racist tweets from lead actress Karla Sofia Gascón. Word has it, Gascón still plans to attend the ceremony. If nothing else, that should make the Oscars more intriguing than this movie.
C.I.
Watching any movie from the front row often feels like walking underneath the giant Calvin Klein billboard on Houston Street. This is especially true for the sporty, shirtless, chiseled Challengers; in the packed theater, I saw all the actors as giga-chads, and my head whipped back and forth like that of a real-life tennis spectator. Luca Guadagnino’s ménage à trois was fun and truly stylish, but it’s newly notable for being completely snubbed at the Oscars. Not even Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, whose score brought the movie to Berghain, got a nod. This is most likely the fault of a long-delayed release and a milquetoast press tour. But my preferred explanation is that the movie suffered from its own trafficking in highly recognizable icons. A bisexual love triangle; Zendaya; tennis; Loewe? All middlebrow meme bait, which swallowed rather than enhanced the movie’s subtleties and strangeness. (At a certain point last summer, you could post any photo of three people and caption it “Challengers.”) The Calvin Klein billboard — and, for that matter, Wicked — has no such problems. It knows that if you’re going to be iconic, you’d better be substanceless and huge.
E.S.B.
According to millions of TikTok videos, we all have an inner child within us who needs healing — an idea popularized in 1990 by self-help wizard John Bradshaw and elaborated by psychologists like Lucia Capacchione, whose book on the subject included prompts for drawing with crayons. Today’s online inner-child healers, who dole out “prescriptions” for playing with toys, have made the concept so ubiquitous that it has traveled all the way over the rainbow to Oz. In an ill-placed interlude that weakens the natural crescendo of “Defying Gravity,” Elphaba sees her younger self reflected in a CGI’d building’s exterior as she plummets towards the ground. Only by reaching out does she regain the strength to fly—a confusing message for anyone familiar with the very adult disillusionment she will undergo in November’s Part Two. Unfortunately, my inner child is a theater nerd, so I wept.
L.W.F.
In this panoptic account of the CIA’s 1961 plot to murder democratically elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, viewers get an unusually clear window into the quotidian activities of Western intelligence operations as they kill and maim to preserve the capitalist world order. Desperate for uranium from the mining hub of Katanga, wary of newly independent African nations’ potentially powerful U.N. voting bloc, and terrified by Khrushchev’s call for “death to colonial slavery,” the U.S., the U.K., and Belgium reran the oldest gambit: divide and conquer. Some of the details might seem too on the nose, if the film didn’t draw so deeply on archival material. High-ranking intelligence officers reminisce candidly, with lines like: “He said, ‘I have been instructed to provide you with some poisons.’”
N.M.-R.
In the epilogue to Brady Corbet’s historical melodrama, the niece of Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth introduces her uncle’s Biennale retrospective by explaining his artistic signature: a “hard core of beauty” expressed within stark, cavernous structures. Entombed in the concrete tower of a pastoral Pennsylvania community center — whose fitful construction drives the film’s plot — is a marble altar sparkling with reflected skylight. It is an effect that justifies the two decades, one lawsuit, and millions of dollars required for the center’s creation. Corbet takes three hours to portray Tóth’s transformation from a diffident émigré to an American visionary, a man who survives rape, addiction, and discrimination and emerges a hardened, indomitable maestro. Tóth then cements his legacy by building angular churches and synagogues for Connecticut aesthetes.
B.D.
The words sede vacante, announcing the death of the sitting pope, launch the recondite system by which cardinals elect pontiffs — a squalid ordeal, per Edward Berger’s feature. Through dialogue peppered with abstruse phrases like in pectore and abyssus abyssum, the film underscores the cardinals’ effete remoteness, and the persistence of Latin in the Western Rite. The ensuing plot points feel rote and unmotivated: a love child, bribery, a terrorist attack, reactionary cardinals, Ralph Fiennes’s quasi-Washingtonian reluctance to serve. Commonwealth viewers will leave baffled by the lengths these clergy members will go to avoid the most radical outcome: an English pope.
P.H.
Mati Diop’s latest documentary trails 26 royal artifacts on their journey from France to Benin, interweaving glossy unboxing shots of bronze and wooden statues with footage of a debate among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi about the politics of restitution. While some herald the return of these objects as a cultural cure-all, others eye them suspiciously as nationalist props in a Fanonian pantomime. Triumph of justice or liberal coup de grâce? Diop resolves the matter by endowing one of the artifacts with an auto-tuned voice, which croons that all these objects ever wanted was to come home and make Benin whole again.
P.K.
An aging fitness instructor (Demi Moore) in health-obsessed L.A. takes a drug that spawns a younger, better version of herself (Margaret Qualley), and the two begin to battle for supremacy. From the awkward title cards and jump cuts to the montages of slick bodies and chickens, the film isn’t scary so much as grotesque. It’s been touted as a feminist parable, but Moore’s insistence on destroying her younger, better self makes it seem more like an excuse to watch two hot women fight. After 130 minutes, I found myself hoping a better, shorter version might take over the movie too.
G.B.
