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“Wuthering Heights” (2026)

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Brandon has already written about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” and although I was forewarned, my own love for the source material meant that, sooner or later, I was going to have to check this hot mess out for myself. And what a mess it is! Not as hot as one would expect, though, given that the director’s stated intention with this adaptation has been to recreate the horniness that she presumes is the universal experience of all first time readers. The thing about ”Wuthering Heights” is that the text I found myself thinking about most often while watching it wasn’t the novel itself or any of the prior adaptations, but Wicked: For Good. In writing about that film, I posited that its greatest flaw is also its greatest weakness: it only exists as a commercial product because of its connection to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its offshoots, sequels, and adaptations as a brand. The first half of the play (and the earlier film that adapted only that opening half) is allowed to find all sorts of fun things to explore within the “canon” of Oz, since the only thing it carries over is the necessity that, at some point, the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch must eventually become enemies, in the public eye if not in reality. Everything else is fair game. In the second half of the play, which became For Good, every action exists in service of putting the characters from Wizard of Oz into the positions that they will be when Dorothy meets them upon her arrival in the fairy land, so characters march lock-step toward their places in the canon regardless of whether that works on a narrative, character, or even emotionally meaningful level. “Wuthering Heights” has the same problem. I’m not going to say it’s a bad movie because it’s a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which it most certainly is, but it’s a bad movie because it’s an attempt at adapting Emily Brontë’s novel at all. 

Widower Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), the tenant of farmhouse Wuthering Heights, returns home from the city with a young boy in tow, whom he “rescued” from a life of being abused by a drunken father so that he can come to the Heights and be abused by a drunken stranger instead. He gives the boy to his daughter, Cathy, who names the child “Heathcliff, after my dead brother,” and the two form a fast friendship. Also present in the household is Nelly, who as the bastard daughter of a lord is not entitled to recognition or shelter, but is welcome to act as the formal companion to Cathy; this relationship is challenged by Cathy’s burgeoning devotion to Heathcliff, who absorbs some of Earnshaw’s parental abuse. Some years later, Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) watch as a procession of carriages deliver their new neighbors, The Lintons, to the manor of Thrushcross Grange. Cathy, who has been raised with no mother and is thus somewhat as wild and unmannered as her lowborn foster brother, sneaks up to spy on Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his “ward” Isabella (Alison Oliver) and ends up injuring her ankle and being hosted at Thrushcross Grange for several weeks to recuperate. She returns to Wuthering Heights “quite the lady” and admits to Nelly (Hong Chau) that she has fallen in love with Linton and will marry him; she says aloud that she cannot marry Heathcliff because of their vast social class gap, and Nelly, knowing that Heathcliff has overheard this, keeps this information to herself. Linton and Catherine marry, Heathcliff leaves, Catherine becomes pregnant, and Heathcliff returns, at which point Catherine learns that Nelly allowed him to believe that Catherine didn’t love him. Heathcliff marries Isabella, but he and Catherine begin a brief, torrid affair that ends in tragedy. 

If you’re familiar with the novel (or any of its more faithful adaptations, although there are surprisingly few), then that synopsis undoubtedly feels strange to you. It’s like Brontë’s in some ways; the character names are the same and some of the larger events from the novel are present. The exclusion of Hindley, Cathy’s brother and Heathcliff’s primary tormentor (and thus also his wife and child), is very jarring, as is the complete absence of Mrs. Earnshaw. Earnshaw family employee Joseph has also been aged down and cast with a handsome actor (Ewan Mitchell), eschewing the novel Joseph’s characterization as a religious zealot and instead giving him the chance to engage in kinky, largely unseen BDSM with one of the housemaids so that Heathcliff and Cathy can observe them surreptitiously in a way that sets both characters’ sexual imaginations ablaze. Most adaptations focus solely on the Cathy/Heathcliff story and leave out the entire plot about the second generation that constitutes the entire second half of Wuthering Heights, so its excision here isn’t surprising, but knowing that it doesn’t need to take that into consideration, “Wuthering Heights” decides to instead have Cathy not only die, but miscarry her child with Linton, since there’s no reason to have a living child if the story isn’t going to continue. I also can’t fault the film for choosing to narratively manifest the “Nelly is the villain” theory. Although I have personally never accepted that in my reading of the text, it has become the prevailing literary lens for the novel’s academic criticism since James Hafley first posited this thesis in 1958. (If you have JSTOR access, his essay can be found here; it’s a good read even if you, like I, remain unconvinced.) 

If you’re not familiar with the novel, none of this may seem like it changes that much about the text, but I can assure you: it does. My distaste for the film could be said to be either (a) entirely predicated on, or (b) have nothing to do with my love of Wuthering Heights, by which I mean that I don’t particularly care that this is a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights—in fact, the number of faithful adaptations is rare, and I prefer some of the less faithful adaptations over the more detail-oriented ones—I just don’t think this needed to be an adaptation of Wuthering Heights specifically. It almost feels as if Fennell responded to critics’ dismissal of Saltburn as a lesser Talented Mr. Ripley by deciding to take her Wuthering Heights-inspired erotic fiction and—in an inverse of E.L. James filing the serial numbers off of her Twilight fanfiction and publishing it as Fifty Shades of Grey—direct an adaptation of that and call it “Wuthering Heights.” I’m not frustrated with this movie as a fan of Brontë’s; I’m frustrated with it as a movie lover, the part of me that just wants to go to the movies and have a good time. Where this ties into Wicked: For Good is that like that film, “Wuthering Heights” goes awry in having to fall in line with the text that it is branded, meaning that the film is inexorably tied to the text from which it takes its name, when liberating it from that title would have allowed this to go in more interesting directions.

Robbie is very good as Cathy (Elordi is fine), but our two lead characters are so boring. In the film’s second act, we get to see some of the home life of Heathcliff and Isabella, and it’s the best stuff in the movie. Instead of being a victim of Heathcliff’s abuse, Isabella is all-in on his weird degradation play; she gets off on sending letters to Cathy and Nelly lying about how horrid Heathcliff is to her while also clearly enjoying being chained up and treated like a dog. We’ve already gotten a clear look into her bizarre psyche earlier in the film, in which we learn that she has an entire room devoted solely to her hair ribbons, and we get to see her create a fun murder scene in miniature by venting her frustrations at Cathy herself on the doll she made of the woman instead, with a dollhouse tableau that’s as funny as it is disturbing. While sitting in the theater, I couldn’t help but think about how much better a movie “Wuthering Heights” would be if it realized that its most interesting character was Isabella, and the movie had been made about her instead. I fantasized about the film taking a sudden turn into being about Heathcliff realizing that Isabella truly could match his freak and the two of them falling for each other. “Wuthering Heights” could never go in that direction because it’s called “Wuthering Heights,” rather than “[Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi].” The first time that we meet Isabella, she’s sitting in the garden and delivering an excruciatingly detailed recap of Romeo & Juliet to Linton. For a moment, I really was naive enough to think that Fennell was going to do something truly audacious, and that the mention of the play would draw attention to something crucial that Shakespeare’s play and Brontë’s novel share: they are decidedly tragic, non-romantic stories that the general public perceives as romantic. Alas, this was not to be the case, and the director’s much-vaunted “audacity” was once again constrained to the erotic consumption of another person’s bodily fluids (and occasionally egg yolks). Ho-hum.

Where Emerald Fennell does allow herself to get really freaky with things that she adds from outside the text are the moments where the film does actually shine. When she first arrives to live at Thrushcross Grange, Cathy is ushered into a room that Linton has prepared for her by having the place painted “the most beautiful color in the world, the color of [Cathy’s] flesh.” As we enter the room, it looks tasteful enough, but as the camera moves closer we get to see that Linton has had the decorators recreate not only her freckles but the light, almost imperceptible blue veins beneath. It’s delightfully grotesque. The film also occasionally goes for utter camp in a few fine moments, with the standout being the scene in which Mr. Earnshaw dies, surrounded by a physically impossible stack of empty wine and liquor bottles. The film also features very beautiful tableaux; there are several nearly-still chiaroscuro images of characters lit solely by the natural light streaming through a window, calling to mind Rembrandt’s Anna and the Blind Tobit or the Rembrandtian A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room. Evoking the imagery of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is an easy go-to for Heathcliff’s return, but it’s also an effective choice. Visually, the film’s depiction of Thrushcross Grange having strong juxtapositions of white and blood-red are striking, even if the choice doesn’t seem to have a deeper meaning other than the most superficial symbolism. Any one of those things would have been a delight to see in [Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi], in which Fennell wouldn’t have felt the need to remain bound to “adapting” Wuthering Heights and instead been able to go full bore into the story she really wanted to tell. Instead, we have this disappointment.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Singles (1992)

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There’s a fun storytelling device in Susan Seidelman’s Sex and the City pilot that greatly added to the casual, Gen-X appeal of the show’s early seasons, before being dropped from its format entirely: the direct-to-camera confessionals. In early episodes of Sex and the City, main characters and single-scene players alike were introduced to the audience via street-interview soliloquies, adding to the show’s simulated confessional candor about modern New Yorkers’ sex lives. I used to assume that Seidelman staged those documentary-style interviews as a way to mimic the blind-item anecdotes of Candace Bushnell’s original “Sex and the City” newspaper column, maybe borrowing some visual language from reality TV in the process. In retrospect, that device may have been borrowed from an entirely different early-90s Gen-X relic, separate from the MTV Real World confessionals that they coincidentally recall. Structurally, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 grunge-scene dramedy Singles is a major stylistic precursor for the initial Sex and the City aesthetic, profiling the sexual & romantic lives of lovelorn slackers in the same confessionals-and-vignettes rhythms that Seidelman helped establish for the show. The differences between them are matters of perspective & tone. Singles is set in Seattle instead of New York, it’s cuter than it is raunchy, and its characters are idealistic twentysomethings looking for love instead of jaded thirtysomethings looking to settle.

The core friend group profiled in Singles are connected through the exact kinds of cultural hubs you’d expect to find in early-90s Seattle: warehouse concert venues, hipster coffee shops, and the single-bedroom apartment complexes that give the film its title. All of its characters teeter between remaining single forever and halfway committing to serious relationships, unsure whether they can trust each other or if their hearts are being played with in pursuit of sex. The women are universally adorable: Bridget Fonda as the plucky optimist, Kyra Sedgwick as the cynical pessimist, Sheila Kelley as the A-type stress magnet. The men are varying levels of dopey: Campbell Scott as the careerist yuppie, Jim True-Frost as the dorky wannabe, Matt Dillon as the true-believer grunge scene burnout. They clumsily mix & match as best as they can while struggling to maintain that classic Gen-X air of apathetic cool that shields all raw emotion behind untold pounds of oversized sweaters, flannels, denim, and leather. The story’s scatterbrained vignette structure sets it up to function as a kind of backdoor sitcom pilot à la Sex and the City or Melrose Place, appealing specifically to teens just a few years younger than its characters, itching to move out of the suburbs and live adult lives in The Big City. Instead, it had to settle for reaching those kids through its tie-in CD soundtrack, which was such a successful cash-in on The Grunge Moment that it’s much better remembered than the film it was commissioned to promote.

Singles is so performatively laidback & low-key that it’s easy to underestimate its accomplishments as a Gen-X rom-dram. Consider it in comparison with 1994’s Reality Bites, for instance, which is so overly concerned with signaling its rebellion against Corporate Phonies and the sin of Selling Out that it becomes a kind of phony corporate sell-out product in its own right. Crowe’s handle on the era is much more humanist, recognizing that no matter how much Gen-X pretended to not give a shit about anything, they were still just lonely kids like every other generation before them. Where Reality Bites cast Ethan Hawke as a hunky poster-boy for disaffected slackerdom, Singles cast Matt Dillon as a goofball parody of the same burnout musician archetype, inviting the audience to lean in and search for the lovable lug below his jaded surface instead of shoving his charms in our faces. Crowe’s background as a music journalist doesn’t hurt Singles‘s credibility either, as it allowed him to include progenitors of “The Seattle Sound” like Pearl Jam & Soundgarden onscreen to vouch for the movie’s authenticity. Having his characters awkwardly flirt at an Alice in Chains concert gives the movie just as much cultural & temporal specificity as having Carrie Bradshaw order a Cosmopolitan at a swanky NYC nightclub. Their desires & behavior are universally relatable, though, even if you weren’t around for grunge’s first wave; anyone who’s ever suffered through an uneasy situationship in their 20s is likely to see themselves in it, no matter where or when.

-Brandon Ledet

Eve’s Bayou (1997)

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“All I know is, there must be a divine point to it all, and it’s just over my head. That when we die, it will all come clear. And then we’ll say, ‘So that was the damn point.’ And sometimes, I think there’s no point at all, and maybe that’s the point. All I know is most people’s lives are a great disappointment to them and no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain. And if there is no divine explanation at the end of it all, well … that’s sad.”

Debbi Morgan performs that speech in Eve’s Bayou while staring blank-eyed into the Louisiana nightscape. She then catches herself, realizing that she’s been talking to a small child instead of just pontificating into the night air. That intergenerational relationship is the core of this 1997 supernatural melodrama, in which a 10-year-old mystic-in-training (Full House‘s Jurnee Smollett) learns how to make sense of her psychic visions and magic intuitions under the guidance of her Aunt Mozelle (Morgan). Its plot synopsis sounds like it could belong to a Teen Witch-style coming-of-age comedy for kids, but Eve’s Bayou instead frames a decidedly adult world through a child’s eyes. Its witchcraft isn’t used to present playful wish fulfillment for youngsters, but to dredge up heaps of generational pain from the murky bottom of Louisiana swamps so it can finally rot in the sun. The film opens with an adult Eve Batiste recounting her small, Black community’s history as a slave plantation, then announcing that she’s going to tell the story about the summer she killed her father, in 1962. Naturally, most of the story that follows involves a young Eve observing & reacting to her father’s adult (and adulterous) behavior as the audience anticipates that foretold act of violence, but the heart of the story is more about her characterization as the next-generation mystic learning the ways of the world from her Aunt Mozelle.

Writer-director Kasi Lemmons describes her debut feature as autofictional, characterizing the young Eve as “a little bit me, a little bit Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.” Although raised in St. Louis, Lemmons has vivid memories of visiting relatives in the Deep South (Alabama, not Louisiana) that she felt compelled to illustrate onscreen here, mixed with fictional stories of a philandering town doctor she created for a proof-of-concept short film titled “Dr. Hugo”. Lemmons’s biggest champion, Samuel L. Jackson, stars as that town doctor and town bicycle: little Eve’s doomed-to-die father. Lynn Whitfield plays the matriarch, frequently and credibly described as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” suffering silently as her husband makes his professional & romantic rounds around town while she raises his three kids at home. Eve’s teenage sister Cicely (Meagan Good) takes after their mother’s practiced poise, but the younger Eve is much more resistant to being tamed and instead learns how to interact with the world from her Hoodoo-practicing aunt. The world is split in two between the sibling sets of both generations: a world of magic vs. a world of rational thought. It doesn’t matter which of those worldviews eventually wins out, though, since the end result is a foregone conclusion by the opening narration. Her father will die, and the painful familial secrets hidden by social niceties will eventually come to light.

The mysticism of Eve’s Bayou is more about subjective perception than about supernatural action. Eve and her aunt cannot change the world through supernatural means, but they can see parts of it that others are blind to. Their psychic visions are illustrated in surrealist black-and-white montage, with standalone images of spiders, clocks, and dirty needles superimposed onto the swamps just outside their homes. Lemmons positions the act of conjuring this imagery through cinema as a form of witchcraft, explaining in dialogue that memory is itself “a selection of images” and that the modern world is “haunted by the past.” In the Southern ghost story tradition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she invites the ghosts of the past to enter the story through the technological conduits of cameras, mirrors, and word processors. Every individual character’s memory, no matter how rationally minded, is positioned as a kind of supernatural realm in that context, and she does her best not to exclude any one version of the truth in her ambiguous telling of the circumstances behind the doctor’s death. The only character who doesn’t get their say is a disabled uncle who cannot speak due to his cerebral palsy symptoms, so his own memories and accounts of the truth are confined to his own mind. Like the audience, he can only observe, but he’s got a much more direct vantage point in seeing What Really Happened in the lead-up to the tragedy.

Speaking of memory, you might not remember that Eve had a disabled family member in her home, since a producer asked to have him removed from the original 1990s theatrical release, thinking that he would jeopardize the film’s commercial appeal by making audiences “uncomfortable.” The uncle’s place in the story was then later restored in a “Director’s Cut” released in the 2010s, also restoring the film’s core theme of the magical subjectivity of perception & memory. The initial choice to remove him is indicative of the many ways in which the film’s commercial appeal was misunderstood in its initial 90s release. Besides Samuel L. Jackson backing the film as a producer & star, critic Roger Ebert was likely its most vocal champion in the industry, concluding his 1997 review with the declaration that, “If it is not nominated for Academy Awards, then the academy is not paying attention. For the viewer, it is a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams.” Eve’s Bayou was not nominated for any Academy Awards. It made enough money to register as an indie-level hit, but it still didn’t lead to much of a professional windfall for Lemmons, who spent the most of her remaining career as a director-for-hire in the impersonal world of studio biopics. It’s easy to guess why this movie didn’t attract major studio backing, why Lemmons didn’t become a blank-check auteur, why Lynn “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” Whitfield didn’t become a Hollywood superstar, and why Ebert’s Oscars predictions went nowhere: in a word, racism. Still, it continues to shine as a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams without straying from mainstream filmmaking sensibilities, even when working outside mainstream filmmaking funding.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #255: The Top 12 Films of 2025

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Welcome to Episode #255 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss their favorite films of 2025.

0:00 Welcome
04:00 Honorable mentions
29:30 KPop Demon Hunters
39:00 Rats!
46:00 Weapons
53:00 Misericordia
1:02:08 The Ugly Stepsister
1:10:00 The Plague
1:22:00 Eephus
1:28:40 Marty Supreme
1:44:55 When Fall Is Coming
1:52:22 No Other Choice
2:04:22 The Phoenician Scheme
2:13:25 One Battle After Another
2:38:08 Box office

Hanna’s Top 20 Films of 2025

  1. No Other Choice
  2. One Battle After Another
  3. Marty Supreme
  4. The Phoenician Scheme
  5. Rats!
  6. Sinners
  7. Boys Go to Jupiter
  8. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
  9. Eephus
  10. The Ugly Stepsister
  11. Sirāt
  12. Weapons
  13. Bring Her Back
  14. The Long Walk
  15. Cloud
  16. Die My Love
  17. Companion
  18. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man
  19. The Naked Gun
  20. Hallow Road

James’s Top 20 Films of 2025

  1. One Battle After Another
  2. Marty Supreme
  3. The Plague
  4. No Other Choice
  5. Eephus
  6. Sirāt
  7. Sinners
  8. Rats!
  9. Final Destination: Bloodlines
  10. The Phoenician Scheme
  11. The Ugly Stepsister
  12. KPop Demon Hunters
  13. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man
  14. Vulcanizadora
  15. Companion
  16. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
  17. The Surfer
  18. Boys Go to Jupiter
  19. Presence
  20. Hallow Road

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

FYC 2025: Cozy for the Holidays

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Every FYC awards screener mailed to critics this time of year includes severe legal verbiage about how they are to be viewed, warning against obvious transgressions like online piracy and more grey-area faux pas like watching soon-to-be-distributed titles in the presence of family & friends. Given that these screeners tend to flood critics’ inboxes in the holiday stretch between Thanksgiving & Christmas, it’s safe to assume that second warning is widely ignored. Critics, film journalists, and awards pundits often travel home with armfuls of FYC DVDs and e-mail inboxes overflowing with screener links that they’re supposed to review at the exact moment that they’re also supposed to be spending time with family. There’s going to be some unavoidable bleedover there. While more harrowing titles like Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You & Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love might be saved for a late-night laptop watch once the house has gone quiet, it’s inevitable that softer, more amiable fare like Mike Flanagan’s Life of Chuck or Celine Song’s Materialists will make its way to the living room TV at one point or another while the family is enjoying being cozy in each other’s presence. I do wonder how that home-with-the-family programming narrows down what critics & awards voters make time for during the annual holiday-season screener push. It’s gotta be easier, for instance, to sneak in a viewing of the latest Rian Johnson murder mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, in a shared living space than, say, Radu Jude’s 3-hour, semi-pornographic A.I. shitpost Dracula. Cozy living room viewing isn’t necessarily the enemy of art, though, and there are plenty of worthwhile new releases that won’t alienate or horrify onlooking relatives who are just trying to enjoy some Thanksgiving leftovers without being psychologically scarred. I even found myself drifting toward the cozier end of the screener pile over this past holiday week, saving the freakier, more esoteric stuff for when my family was napping in the other room.

Without question, the coziest option from this year’s holiday screener deluge was Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — a movie so pleasant & unchallenging that it’s functionally an episode of television. Workman costume drama director Simon Curtis goes overboard mimicking crane shots with drone cameras in every exterior scene to convince the audience that we’re watching a real movie and not a TV special, but anyone who’s still keeping up with this series knows why we’re here. The only reason to watch The Grand Finale is to catch up with old friends from Downton Abbey‘s heyday, checking in on beloved characters like kitchen-comrade Daisy, surprise power-player Edith, and village moron Mr. Moseley for what the title promises will be the final time. Showrunner & screenwriter Julian Fellowes is shamelessly working on autopilot here, borrowing the A-plot conflict (in which longtime Downton queenpin Lady Mary struggles to maintain her social status after the public shame of becoming a divorcee) from the second season of his more current project, The Gilded Age. Both that A-plot conflict and the B-plot villain (an obvious confidence man who is emptying the pockets of the Granthams’ American cousin, played by an overqualified Paul Giamatti) are brushed aside with about 40 minutes of runtime left to go, so that the movie can get down to its real business: saying goodbye . . . for now. I have a hard time believing The Grand Finale will prove to be all that final in the years to come, as it’s likely Fellowes & company will find other ways to squeeze a few more dollars out of the Downton Abbey brand now that its theatrical-film cycle has officially run its course. To my discredit, I’ll also keep watching these addendum episodes to the show for as long as he keeps making them, since I’ve spent enough time with these characters by now that they’re starting to feel like actual family, especially now that they’re no longer in danger of anything permanently damaging ever happening to them again. All the big shocks & deaths are behind us; the future is looking purely, unashamedly cozy.

Besides low-stakes costume dramas, the epitome of cozy movie programming is Studio Ghibli animation: My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, the classics. There weren’t any cozy anime titles left on my to-watch pile this year (although I will continue to sing the praises of Naoko Yamada’s rock ‘n’ roll sleeper The Colors Within to anyone who’ll listen), but thankfully French animators came through with a close-enough equivalent in the children’s sci-fi fantasy adventure Arco. Hayao Miyazaki’s career-long fascination with pastoral nature and the miraculous mechanics of flight are echoed in this story of a future society that supplements their cloud-city farm work with time travel technology that requires them to fly in rainbow arcs. The youngest member of that family, Arco, gets stranded alone in the past, where he meets a girl his age who’s living a similarly restricted, overparented domestic life. They go on their first truly independent adventure together, ultimately at the expense of losing time with their family. The animation is consistently cute, and the dual-timeline sci-fi worldbuilding opens the otherwise small story up to moments of grand-scale wonder. Between this, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, and Mars Express, it’s starting to feel like there’s a nice little new wave of sci-fi/fantasy films forming in French animation studios right now. Mars Express is a little more Blade Runner than Arco or Sirocco, which skew a little more Ghibli (making them less distinct in the process) but they’re all pleasant & enchanting enough in their own way. The semi-retired Miyazaki can’t issue a new Boy and the Heron dispatch from the back of his chain-smoking brain every year, so we’re going to have to settle for his closest equivalents if we don’t want to end up rewatching Kiki’s Delivery Service every time we get cozy under a blanket. Arco ably does its job in that respect, helping keep traditional animation alive in our own CG Disney dystopia.

It’s possible that Arco might earn an Oscars nomination for Best Animated Feature and the latest Downton Abbey episode might score a stray Best Costume Design nod elsewhere, but it’s difficult to imagine that either awards campaign will result in any statues. To find a genuine awards contender in the FYC screener pile, you do have to go a little dark & serious, which can be challenging if you’re trying to keep things cozy around your family. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value was already automatically going to be in awards consideration after the previous attention earned by his breakout hit The Worst Person in the World, but it’s got an especially good chance given how eager it is to please instead of alienate. At times, Sentimental Value is very simply a nice movie about a nice house. At other times, it is simply a sad movie about making a sad movie. It’s the perfect programming selection for the holiday season if you’ve got a few adult members of the family who need a break from the kids’ incessant rewatches of KPop Demon Hunters & Minecraft Movie, especially if they have the luxury of time to visit an actual brick-and-mortar theater outside of the house. Reinate “Worst Person” Reinsve returns as Trier’s muse, playing another thirtysomething who can’t quite get her shit together. This time, she’s a Norwegian stage actress on the verge whose touchy relationship with her estranged film-director father (Stellan Skarsgård) comes to a head when he writes a screenplay for her to star in. When she firmly declines, an in-over-her-head American movie star (Elle Fanning) takes the part instead, inadvertently stirring up decades’ worth of familial tragedies & betrayals. The movie is largely told from the POV of the family home, where the autofictional meta drama is going to be filmed, which opens the story up to a larger family history than the simple father-daughter conflict that I’m describing. It’s all very warm, solemn, and sophisticated in the exact way you expect an awards-season drama to be, and I’m sure its demonstrative good tastes & behavior will be rewarded in the months to come.

Being cozy isn’t everything; it’s not going to earn Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale any statues. It might help Sentimental Value‘s awards-season chances, though, especially when its closest new-release equivalent on the scene right now is a gut-wrenching drama about grieving the death of William Shakespeare’s young child. You’re a lot less likely to put your family through Hamnet than taking them to see a movie about a modern-day father & daughter repairing their relationship through some light art therapy, which helps attract awards-voter eyes to the screen.

-Brandon Ledet