The Swampflix Oscars Guide 2025

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There are 35 feature films nominated for the 2025 Academy Awards ceremony.  We here at Swampflix have reviewed less than half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the overall selection with any authority.  We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including one of our own Top 10 Films of 2024. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but from what we’ve seen this year’s list is a decent sample of what 2024 cinema had to offer.

Listed below are the 14 Oscar-Nominated films from 2024 that we covered for the site, loosely ranked based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.

The Substance, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Coralie Fargeat), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Demi Moore), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Makeup & Hairstyling 

“Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is a fun little fable about the ageism, sexism, and self-hatred in pop culture’s obsession with the past – all embellished with surrealistic gore effects worthy of Screaming Mad George. Show up for Demi Moore’s mainstream comeback; stick around for funhouse mirror reflections on how being alive and made of meat is gross, how the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and how the things that self-hatred drives us to do to ourselves are the absolute grossest.”

Memoir of a Snail, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“A stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of Mary & Max: a stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness. I really like what Adam Elliot’s doing. He’s got a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to his work matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt … thankfully this time borrowing a little Jean-Pierre Juenet whimsy to help cut the tension.”

Dune: Part Two, nominated for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects

““This is a huge movie, just big and bold and broad and beautiful. It’s so captivating that even a week later, I still feel more like it was something that I experienced more than it was something that I saw; talking about it as a film almost feels like the wrong way to discuss it.”

A Different Man, nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling

“Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction.  Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role until Adam Pearson completely wrecks the whole thing in the funniest way possible.  It’s a great dark comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity.”

Anora, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Sean Baker), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Mikey Madison), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Yura Borisov), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing

“This sex-work Cinderella story is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour notes of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Both films are equally funny & frantic, but Baker has clearly decided he wants audiences to love him again after his brief heel era, and it’s impressive to see him face-turn to this opposite tonal extreme of his work without losing his voice.”

Nosferatu, nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, and Best Production Design

“Robert Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a grander, major-studio scale.  As a result, this cracked costume drama doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date).  It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way in a largely visual medium.”

Alien: Romulus, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“Pretty solid. The action sequences are fantastic (there’s a particular standout zero gravity sequence) and build logically upon one another, the introduction of a ticking clock in the form of the station’s deteriorating orbit is well-done and ups the stakes at exactly the right time, and the characters who have characters are interesting. Their interactions feel at home in this universe of films in which the night is dark and full of monsters but in which humans (and maybe androids) can find a connection with each other that makes the dual horrors of late-stage space capitalism and acidic organisms that impregnate and kill seem surmountable, if at great cost. A worthy sequel in an uneven franchise.”

Wicked Part 1, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress in a Leading Role (Cynthia Erivo), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Ariana Grande), Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects

“It would have been nice to have the film try to replicate the Technicolor-sais quoi of the MGM classic, but there’s still a lot to love here in the designs and the details. The costuming is fantastic, and at no point did I think that Oz looked boring or colorless, except in moments in which there’s an intentionality to the blandness that I find appropriate. Overall, it left me feeling elevated and effervescent, and I loved that, even if what we’re watching is the real time character assassination of our protagonist at the hands of an evil government.”

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film

“A frantic essay film about the CIA’s attempts to rebrand the Cold War as a ‘Cool War’ by deploying popular jazz musicians to distract from conspiratorial overthrow of the Congolese government in 1960. It’s a little overwhelming as the anxious sounds & stylish block text of vintage jazz albums play over news-report propaganda clips for 150 relentless minutes, but it’s an impressive feat of politically fueled editing-room mania nonetheless. It’s like a version of The Movie Orgy for lefty academics.”

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, nominated for Best Animated Feature

“Just as cute & funny as expected, but also surprisingly smart about its skepticism of easy-fix tech solutions like AI, in that it’s most critical of using that tech to eliminate life’s pleasurable tasks: gardening, making tea, petting the dog, etc.”

Conclave, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Ralph Fiennes), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Isabella Rossellini), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score

“I’m a lapsed Catholic in most ways except that I still have a huge soft spot for all the costumes & ritual, so this was an oddly cozy watch for something that’s supposed to be a kind of paranoid political thriller. It plays more like an HBO miniseries than an Important Movie for the most part, but those series are handsome & amusing enough that the distinction doesn’t matter much.”

A Real Pain, nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Kieran Culkin) and Best Original Screenplay

“Darkly, uncomfortably funny as a story about two men who love each other but have incompatible mental illnesses. I, of course, have whatever form of anxiety Eisenberg’s character suffers, which Culkin aptly describes as ‘an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late’.”

Nickel Boys, nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay

“If you end up watching this at home instead of the theater, I recommend using headphones. A lot of attention will be paid to the 1st-person POV of its imagery, but the sound design is just as intensely, complexly immersive. I wish I had more to say about what it’s doing dramatically rather than formally, but the technical achievement can’t be dismissed.”

The Apprentice, nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Sebastian Stan) and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Jeremy Strong)

“A dirtbag sitcom featuring two talented actors playing two despicable ghouls. It’s not especially insightful as a political text, but it’s impressive as an acting showcase, which means it must be Awards Season again.”

-The Swampflix Crew

Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2024

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1. I Saw the TV Glow – A pastel kaleidoscope of teen angst, gender dysphoria, Buffy the Vampire Slayer nostalgia, and general melancholy. It’s impossible not to read Jane Schoenbrun’s VHS-warped horror of persona as a cautionary tale for would-be trans people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, but it hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, and community by disappearing into niche media obsession instead.

2. The Substance – Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is a fun little fable about the ageism, sexism, and self-hatred in pop culture’s obsession with the past – all embellished with surrealistic gore effects worthy of Screaming Mad George. Show up for Demi Moore’s mainstream comeback; stick around for funhouse mirror reflections on how being alive and made of meat is gross, how the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and how the things that self-hatred drives us to do to ourselves are the absolute grossest.

3. Love Lies Bleeding – Rose Glass’s muscular erotic thriller is not one for those with queasy stomachs. It’s a hot, sweaty, ferociously vicious work that’ll have you swooning over its synths, sex, and biceps until you’re feeling just as ripped, roided, and noided as its doomed but determined lovers.

4. She is Conann – Bertrand Mandico once again transports us to a violent lesbian fantasy realm, this time reshaping the Conan the Barbarian myth into a grotesque fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world. A cosmic swirl of glitter, swords, gore, fetishistic fashion, and deconstructed gender, nothing about it is logical, but it all makes perfect sense.

5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – Radu Jude made a three-hour, fussily literary art film about labor exploitation in the global gig economy . . . One that communicates through vulgar pranks & memes, setting aside good taste & subtlety in favor of making its political points directly, without pretension.

6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – Large-scale, uncanny CG mythmaking from one of our finest working madmen, George Miller’s latest manic blockbuster is a visual feast and a high-octane thrill ride that’s easily the equal of Fury Road. It’s truly epic, a mutant-infested Ben-Hur that trades in chariots for chrome.

7. The Taste of Things – A sweetly sensual romance about the joy of sharing thoughtfully prepared meals. It’s absurdly cozy & warm, likely the best movie about food since Pig. Also, Juliette Binoche is in it. It’s easy fall in love with a movie when Juliette Binoche is in it.

8. Mars Express – This is a great sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be animated & French. A noir thriller about an alcoholic detective pursuing the assassin of a “jailbreaking” hacker who liberates robots from synthetic lives of servitude, it’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood isn’t regularly making large-scale sci-fi like Blade Runner or Minority Report anymore, but it also distinguishes itself from those obvious reference points through futuristic speculation and sheer dazzlement.

9. Last Things – Billed as “an experimental film about evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks,” Deborah Stratman’s apocalyptic hybrid doc finds infinite significance, beauty, and terror in simple mineral formations. It recounts the story of our planet’s geology through an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life, aggressively anthropomorphizing ordinary rocks until an obscured origin myth emerges. It looks to the future as well, crafting a Chris Marker-esque sci-fi narrative about rocks taking over the Earth after humans end our current, destructive reign. Good riddance.

10. The People’s Joker – An impressively funny, personal comedy framed within the grease stain that Batman comics have left on modern culture, Vera Drew’s fair-use warping of copyrighted comic book lore to illustrate her own gender identity journey is pure brilliance and pure punk. Direct, rawly honest outsider art that hosts a guided tour of the secret batcaves of its director’s brain, it’s a marvel . . . except that it’s DC.

Read Alli’s picks here.
Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Hear Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew

Furious (1984)

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I’m generally positive on the current state of film culture, at least on the audience end.  Thanks to organizational hubs like Letterboxd, Discord, and the podcast circuit, it’s easier to find a wider cultural discussion on the niche cinematic artifacts I care about now than ever before in my lifetime, which leaves a lot of room for sharing & discovery outside the traditional print-media forum.  Growing up, my familiarity with movie titles was determined by video store curation and magazine articles, but now there’s an infinite supply of Movie Discourse to delve into in all directions, if you care to look.  It’s a blessing in terms of expanding the public library of accessible titles, but it can also be a little exhausting when it comes to those films’ analysis.  Pinpointing what every movie is really “about” (i.e. Grief, Trauma, Depression, Isolation, etc.) gets to be a little tiresome over time, since it feels more like solving a literary puzzle than indulging in the art of the moving image on its own terms.  Every modern film discussion tends to boil down to deciphering metaphor or interpreting the career-span mission statement of an auteur.  As a civilian with a movie blog, I’m among the guiltiest participants in that constant ritual, and I genuinely don’t know how to stop compounding the problem with my own inane analysis of every movie I watch.  How else could I justify logging all this stuff on Letterboxd?

The shot-on-video martial arts cheapie Furious is a huge relief in that modern context.  A subprofessional, no-budget production from wannabe Hollywood stuntmen before they worked their way into the industry proper, it’s the exact kind of vintage cinematic artifact you never would have encountered in the wild unless it happened to be stocked at your specific neighborhood video store.  Now, it’s accessible for streaming on several free-without-subscription platforms, backed by thousands of glowing Letterboxd reviews highlighting it as an overlooked gem.  Better yet, it’s a film that sidesteps the need for any concrete analysis, since its story was obviously figured out in real time during its month-long shoot, purpose or meaning be damned.  It’s all supernatural martial-arts nonsense that’s so light on plot & dialogue and so heavy on for-their-own-sake magic tricks that it plays less like a metaphorical puzzle to solve than it is a meandering dream dubbed direct to VHS.  Sleight-of-hand card tricks and droning synths pull the audience into the opening credits with a chintzy sense of mystery, followed by 70 minutes of incoherent action adventure across the cliffs and rooftops of sunny California, with no particular destination in mind.   Furious is much more concerned with convincing you that its stuntmen are jumping to their deaths from great heights or that its evil sorcerers are casting actual magic spells than it is concerned with filmic abstraction or metaphor.  It’s illusion without allusion, the perfect salve for modern film discourse.

In the opening sequence, a nameless warrior fights off attackers through some very careful cliffside choreo while attempting to operate what appears to be a magic tusk, as it spins like a compass.  It’s unclear where that compass is meant to lead her, since she’s soon overcome by combatant goons, who then bring the magic tusk to a sorcerer who runs a karate dojo out of a nearby 80s office building.  The fallen warrior’s brother leaves his own mountainside dojo to investigate and avenge his sister’s death, which throws him into the middle of a wide conspiracy involving wizards and, possibly, aliens.  Really, he just punches & kicks his way through a series of fights until he works his way up to the Big Bad, occasionally stopping to gawk at screen-illusion magic tricks, like the Big Bad’s ability to levitate or the main henchman’s ability to shoot live chickens out of his hands like bullets.  Nothing about Furious makes much linear, narrative sense, but its curio collection of spinning tusks, severed heads, flaming skeletons, and so, so many chickens has its own distinct sense of magic to it.  Our hero’s loopy revenge mission recalls the SOV surrealism of Tina Krause’s Limbo – Lynchian in the sense that they’re better enjoyed at face value than they are as 1:1 metaphors that can be unlocked through critical interpretation.  Furious just happens to feature more punching, kicking, and stunt falls than Limbo, along with more bright California sunshine.

The “remastered” version of Furious currently available on most streaming platforms still looks like it was dubbed over an already-used VHS, which only adds to its charm as a vintage martial-arts novelty.  Its narrative incoherence is also echoed in its editing style, in which every shot is either one beat too short or one beat too long, constantly keeping its rhythm off-balance.  The fight choreography is just as precise as the editing is sloppy, however, with each punch & kick sharply delivered on-target.  If I were to put on my 2020s movie blogger thinking cap, I’d say that the film’s narrative and editing incoherence reflects the protagonist’s hazy, disjointed mind as he recovers from the grief of his sister’s sudden death.  Really, though, the movie just kicks ass because the fights look cool and there’s a wizard who shoots chickens out of his hands.  It’s not that complicated.

-Brandon Ledet

Return to The Mannosphere

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It’s tempting to think that since online movie discussions have migrated from IMDb message boards to Letterboxd rankings and Film Twitter squabbles, communal tastes have skewed a lot less macho.  We’ve supposedly been working towards a more inclusive online movie nerd community, leaving behind the white-boy Film Bro days of the late 90s & early 2000s, when the taste-defining IMDb Top 100 was wallpapered with dorm-room-poster titles like Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and Memento.  You can still hear bellowing echoes from the Film Bro days of previous decades, though.  It’s just now wrapped in a protective layer of self-aware irony, with prominent Film Twitter Personalities exalting the “vulgar auteurs” of “Dudes Rock” cinema, clearing space for meatheads like Zach Snyder & Michael Bay in rankings among the modern greats.  It’s a mostly empty, flippant exercise, but a few genuinely great filmmakers do get swept up in the momentum of it – most notably Michael Mann.  Clearly, Michael Mann’s most creative, vibrant work was his initial run of high-style genre films in the 1980s: Thief, Manhunter, The Keep, etc..  However, those are not the Mann classics that vulgar-auteur apologists cite in daily conversation.  In true retro IMDb message board fashion, Mann’s name most often recurs during conversations about The Greatest Films of All Time in the context of two sprawling, macho crime pictures about dudes who rock: Heat & Miami Vice. To get a clear snapshot of how Film Bro culture is still alive & well in a post-Letterboxd world, you have to venture into The Mannosphere and spend some time with that hairy-knuckled pair. 

To truly return to the macho Film Bro 2000s, you obviously have to start with 2006’s Miami Vice.  Consciously updating the titular television show’s extremely 80s style of crime-thriller filmmaking that he himself helped create, Mann leans into the flat, digital aesthetic of the early aughts in this undercover cop procedural, again attempting to define the visual style of a new decade.  As soon as Maxim babes go-go dance to Linkin Park in the opening minute, it’s clear that you have to harbor nostalgia for the bro-down flip-phone cheapness of the 2000s to appreciate Mann’s Miami Vice, or else you will continue to suffer for the following two hours.  Colin Farrell & Jamie Foxx play undercover cops who work to manufacture a grand mid-deal bust, aggressively grumbling through a series of anticlimactic phone calls & meetings but occasionally taking breaks to order mojitos and ride on “go-fast boats” to a butt-rock soundtrack provided by Audioslave.  Before the climactic drug deal inevitably goes wrong and concludes in a shootout, it plays like a DTV action movie without any action scenes, as if Mann had blown all of his squib & explosion budget on movie-star casting & SD cards.  Miami Vice is a lifeless, hideous film about men who greatly respect each other and work tirelessly to protect the women they’re currently sleeping with.  Mann’s embrace of the era’s jarring shift from celluloid textures to digital imagery was daring but unfulfilling; there’s no reason why a $150mil production should resemble an overlong episode of Cheaters.  He did pave a path for more successful actioners to indulge in the uncanniness of modernity, though, getting way ahead of titles like Tenet, Ambulance, and Gemini Man.  He’s undeniably a visionary, even when his vision is an ugly one.

1995’s Heat is a much more pleasant journey into The Mannosphere, one that will remind you that the major titles of the Film Bro canon aren’t individually “bad” by default; they’re just collectively limited by an overbearingly macho perspective.  Nearly three hours long and supported by a cast so stacked it has room to include Bud Cort, Henry Rollins, and Tone Loc, Heat feels like the final word on a very specific category of macho 90s thriller (in which I suppose Point Break was the first word).  Its cat & mouse game between a criminal mastermind (Robert DeNiro) and the harried detective on his tail (Al Pacino) is familiar in tone but epic in scale and sharp in detail, starting with an impeccably well orchestrated armored-truck heist and then spending the next couple hours provoking & profiling its many players (including actors as varied as Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, William Fichtner, Dennis Haysbert, Hank Azaria, Tom Noonan, Danny Trejo, Wes Studi, Jeremy Piven, and even a few people who aren’t men).  Unlike in Miami Vice, there are multiple action sequences in Heat, with plenty standoffs & shootouts keeping the adrenaline up between scenes of gruff cops & criminals venturing home to protect & bed their respective women.  Devoted fans of Mann’s Miami Vice will notice plenty of overlap with this earlier draft’s visual techniques, especially in its uneasy handheld closeups and in an awkwardly green-screened conversation held against the artificial backdrop of Los Angeles city lights.  Heat has all of the Dudes Rock virtues of Miami Vice without looking like a syndicated daytime TV series that couldn’t afford to shoot all of its scripted gunfights.  It’s even got Val Kilmer as a pretty-boy co-lead with awful hair, telegraphing Farrell’s role in the later, inferior film.

None of this reportage is helpful to the Mannsplainers of the world who are already deeply entrenched in The Mannosphere.  I’m only speaking from a place of curiosity about why these two particular titles continually come up in the current film discourse, despite feeling out of step with the general mood of post-Film Bro movie culture.  As a pair they’re instructive in how that culture has changed in the past couple decades, even though they land with opposing effects.  To get a sense of how much better the current cinematic landscape is now in comparison with the artless, bro-infested aughts, check out Miami Vice.  To get a sense of what might have been lost as we left that Mannscape in the rearview, check out Heat, which is an even more engrossing, entertaining thriller now that we’re not living in a world where every acclaimed movie appeals to the same audience. 

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #230: Juror #2 & 2024’s Honorable Mentions

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Welcome to Episode #230 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna continue our discussion of the Top Films of 2024 with some honorable mentions, starting with Clint Eastwood’s courtroom thriller Juror #2.

00:00 Welcome

01:30 Nine Months (1995)
04:05 John Tucker Must Die (2006)
08:41 Unlawful Entry (1992)
12:00 Nosferatu (2024)
19:10 Babygirl (2024)
27:07 Last Summer (2024)
31:13 Look Back (2024)

37:53 Juror #2 (2024)
1:03:17 Civil War (2024)
1:23:35 The Front Room (2024)
1:40:00 The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2024)

Hanna’s Top 15 Films of 2024

  1. I Saw the TV Glow
  2. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
  3. The Substance
  4. Longlegs
  5. Furiosa
  6. Anora
  7. Mars Express
  8. The Taste of Things
  9. Civil War
  10. Love Lies Bleeding
  11. She is Conann
  12. Sometimes I Think About Dying
  13. The People’s Joker
  14. A Different Man
  15. The Beast

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

Alli’s Top 5 Films of 2024

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1. Love Lies Bleeding

I love this queer, 80s bodybuilder crime thriller. It’s got such a subtle horror and fantastical style to it that just builds and builds until you get a truly magical ending. Both of the main characters are terrible people who you know are super toxic for each other, but you want them to have a happy ending anyway. Kristen Stewart plays another lurking weirdo of a character, Lou, who becomes a Renfield for Katy O’Bryan’s manipulative, aspiring bodybuilder, Jackie. It’s a hot, sweaty, violent mess of a movie. I’m glad we have a movie about terrible gay women getting away with murder. 

Also, there’s a cat named “Happy Meal.” Enough Said.

2. Last Things

I love a good geology documentary, okay? Then you add in a Chris Marker-esque narrative about rock beings taking over the Earth after humans have had their destructive reign. There are so many beautiful images of rocks, so many interesting experts talking about geological evolution (absolutely fascinating!!), and so much hypnotizing French narration. 

Rocks were here before us, and they will be here long after we’re gone. Yes, we’ve gradually changed each other but, ultimately, they’re winning the “How bad can everything get while still surviving?” game.

3. I Saw the TV Glow

This movie is a kaleidoscope of nostalgia, gender dysphoria, teen angst, and general bad vibes. For some reason, in my head, I want to call it pastel angst-core, which is a cringy phrase that I hope never catches on. Two misfit teens, Owen and Maddy, bond over a show called The Pink Opaque (yeah, it’s a good Cocteau Twins reference), a supernatural teen horror featuring a protagonist named Mr. Melancholy. As Maddy and Owen’s friendship progresses, the line between the show and real life blurs. Maddy, having completely taken the show as true, abandons her life and runs away. Owen stays. He lives a boring “real” life: dead end job, boredom, depression. The Pink Opaque is not what he remembers, or has Mr. Melancholy trapped him?

4. She is Conann

Okay, I think when making this movie Bertrand Mandico entered my brain and just picked out the cool parts where I think about swords, glitter, gross gore, and amazing clothes. It truly is the movie that most encompasses my style goals. (Although, there’s a glitter ban in my house per my partner’s request. *sigh*) Conan the Barbarian is reimagined through the ages as a woman. She fights through other Barabarians to claim her place at the top, becoming a stunt woman with no regard for safety, a war criminal, and finally a rich billionaire patron of the arts with investments in mines, oil, and everything evil. Having a female main character strips the Barbarism concept of masculinity and boils it down to its roots: unimaginable cruelty by human hands, which has no gender. Also, there’s a paparazzo dog demon named Rainer who wears really cool jackets, and pants after Conann through it all. It’s a fever dream of blood, once again glitter, and really cool fashion. 

5. Hundreds of Beavers! 

Jean Kayak makes Apple Jack. In a beaver related accident his entire apple orchard burns down, and his distillery explodes. He is left to fend for himself during a brutal midwestern winter, eventually becoming a fur trapper, who falls in love with a shop keeper’s daughter. Then, he hunts down and gains a grudge against, yes you guessed it, HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS. All of this is done in the style of early silent slapstick comedies, while also mixing in some more modern jokes and videogame references. Oh yeah, no animals were harmed in the making of this movie, because literally every animal is played by people in mascot costumes. Basically, this is a movie full of silly madness and Looney Tunes style visual gags. It goes so many places and not a single one is somber or serious. Truly a movie that exists to just be a silly adventure, and I appreciate it for that.

-Alli Hobbs

Mirage (1965)

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Much like its amnesiac protagonist, Mirage is lost in time.  A major studio noir directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Gregory Peck, it’s got the professional pedigree of a movie produced decades earlier, except when it comes to the grimier details of its era’s loosened morals.  Mirage walks like a stylish 1940s crime cheapie but talks like post-Code 1960s sleaze, with disorienting references to orgies & suicide and a score composed by Quincy Jones.  It echoes the political paranoia of its contemporaries like Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate, and yet its official designation as a “neo-noir” feels like miscategorization.  It’s a legitimate, bona fide noir that lost track of where it belongs in time, so that the trippier psych thriller touches that color the corners of its black & white frame register as an out-of-bounds intrusion that the can’t be fully reconciled.  That dissonance makes for exciting tension as you constantly forget and are reminded of when it was made, and just how much more vulgarity Hollywood could get away with then.

Gregory Peck stars as an amnesiac who has to solve the mystery of his own identity before he’s shot dead.  He is literally in the dark at the start of the film, as his office building experiences a sudden blackout at the precise moment when the last two years of his life have leapt out of his memory.  It’s also at that exact moment when a fellow tenant of the building has leapt to their death on the concrete below, represented in gory detail by insert shots of a watermelon falling to New York City pavement.  Guided by candlelight, Peck navigates his way out of a handsy crowd of hot-to-go office girls and attempts to go about his day in the fresh air of Wall Street sidewalks.  Only, he can’t fully remember what shape his day usually takes, and he’s weirdly agitated by any questions that prompt him to think about his personal life or his past.  Scared, he seeks context clues about who he is from a skeptical psychiatrist, a former lover who’s scared to fill him in (Diane Baker, modeling jewels by Tiffany & Company according to the credits), and a doddering, in-over-his-head private detective (Walter Matthau, in the comic relief role).  The answer to the question of his basic identity is a last-minute twist with its own specific, detailed politics, but most of the movie is about the question itself, hinged on a declaration that “If you’re not committed to something, you’re just taking up space.”

Mirage is not only lost in time; it’s also somewhat lost to time.  With no current streaming distribution and no physical copies in the New Orleans Public Library system, the only reason I stumbled across the movie is that I found a second-hand DVD at the thrift store.  Its modern obscurity is partially due to its reputation as the B-picture leftovers of Stanley Donan’s Charade, which employed a significant portion of its creative team (Matthau included).  It’s much better recommended as either a late-to-the-game paranoid manhunt noir from a director & star who could’ve made a more stripped-down version of the same picture twenty years earlier, or as an early-to-the-game paranoid psych thriller akin to Fincher’s The Game from thirty years later.  Mirage‘s visual aesthetic is typical to 1940s noir, and its blasé relationship with sex & violence is typical to the 1960s cocktails set, but its cross-cutting head trip identity crisis is untethered to any specific era.  It’s a movie that purposefully dislodges the audience from linear-timeline logic to create a sense of displacement & unease, which is an effect that’s only intensified the further we’ve drifted from its own temporal context.

-Brandon Ledet

Pillow Talk (1959)

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Rock Hudson was an enormous presence in Old Hollywood, and I don’t just mean as the personification of movie star handsomeness or as an archetype of “open secret” closeted gay celebrity.  He was physically enormous, towering over his co-stars at 6’5″ with a burly lumberjack build to match his cartoonishly square jaw.  Somehow, that imposing figure never really stood out to me in the romantic dramas of Hudson’s prime, starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Giant or Jayne Wyman in All that Heaven Allows.  Where he becomes most glaringly imposing is in his career-pivot to comedy in 1959’s Pillow Talk, which features several gags about his gigantic build.  Pillow Talk gawks at Hudson’s enormous body as he struggles to squeeze it into bathtubs and sportscars that were designed to house mere mortals, then concludes on a gag where he carries co-star Doris Day’s pajama-clad body through New York City streets like a firefighter rescuing a small child while she kicks her feet in petulant protest.  Tony Randall looks even mousier in comparison with that towering wall of beef as his ill-equipped romantic rival, posing next to him like a civilian fan taking photos with their favorite professional wrestler – physically mismatched to great comedic effect.

Hudson plays a jolly fuckboy giant in Pillow Talk, a skyscraper cad.  His meet-cute with Day involves a shared partyline between the two mismatched lovers’ NYC apartments, which Day is never able to use because Hudson is constantly tying up the line wooing a bevy of short-term lovers.  That partyline etiquette premise is just as relatable to kids today as their absurd romcom-trope professions: Broadway songwriter & interior decorator, respectively.  Day is understandably annoyed by Hudson’s playboy antics, describing him as a “sex maniac” in her request to the phone company to break up their partyline.  Meanwhile, Hudson is frustrated by Day’s immunity to his fuckboy charms, diagnosing her with “bedroom problems” during one of their shared-line squabbles.  According to romcom law, the pair are obviously destined to couple up by the end credits, but it takes some Three’s Company-style sitcom hijinks on Hudson’s behalf to make that happen.  He invents a flimsy naïve-Texan-in-the-big-city persona so that he can date her in person, which mostly amounts to Hudson doing a half-assed John Wayne impersonation while “aw, shucks”ing his way through several low-stakes dates.  Meanwhile, Day experiments with being overtly sexy onscreen for the first time in her career while maintaining a sense of cocktail-hour class, which is mirrored in her character’s struggles to loosen up enough to finally solve her “bedroom problems” once & for all.  Tony Randall also hangs around as their ineffectual third wheel, landing none of the successful smooches but most of the successful punchlines.

Pillow Talk precariously teeters between a more buttoned-up, euphemistic era of Hollywood screenwriting where characters are described as “bothered” instead of “horny” and the looser-morals Hollywood to follow where characters brag about bedding & marrying “strippers” in free-wheeling locker room talk.  If it were directed by Frank Tashlin in the mode of Rock Hunter or The Girl Can’t Help It, it might’ve been a perfectly anarchic, amoral comedy, but workman director Michael Gordon keeps it all at an even keel (likely just happy to be working again after being blacklisted for Communist ties).  In our collective memory, it’s lingered as cutesier and tamer than what Gordon delivered in reality, as evidenced by its ironic, post-modern homage in Peyton Reed’s 90s send-up Down with Love.  Like most comedies, a lot of Pillow Talk‘s individual punchlines have not aged well politically, especially when punching down at date-rape victims, racist stereotypes, and fat-bodied uggos.  Still, its willingness to offend leads to one of its more metatextually interesting gags, when Rock Hudson briefly indicates that he is a closeted homosexual so that Doris Day will up the stakes of their sexual contact to test his orientation.  In that moment, he’s a known-to-be-closeted actor playing a hyper-straight himbo slut who’s only pretending to be closeted so he can bed even more women.  The open discussion of that perceived queerness feels wildly out of sync with the Hays Code-era Hollywood glamor of the film’s Cinemascope extravagance, which twinkles in every one of Doris Day’s gowns & jewels, as spotlighted in the opening credits.

The segmented comic book framing of Pillow Talk‘s 1st-act phone calls conveys a modern, chic playfulness, while every one of its punchlines are underscored by stale, goofball sound-effects.  During a dual bathtub scene, its two near-nude stars play footsy at the barrier between their respective frames, so that you get a full view of their muscular gams, and yet they’re not allowed to consummate that mutual desire until they agree to marry at the end.  It’s a 1960s sex comedy made within the bounds of a 1950s romcom that’s not allowed to openly joke about sex.  None of this truly matters, though, since the main selling point is the spectacle of its two main stars.  Doris Day’s uncomfortable transformation into a Hollywood sex symbol makes for great comedic tension against Hudson’s rock-hard leading man physique.  Meanwhile, Hudson’s massive body is a spectacle unto itself, one that every woman onscreen instantly swoons over . . . Except, of course, for the one he loves.  It’s a dynamic so charming that it led to two more romcom pairings of those stars in Send Me No Flowers and Lover Come Back, both of which brought Tony Randall along for the ride to ensure no chemistry was lost.

-Brandon Ledet

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

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There is something grotesque about the way cultural institutions are preemptively leaning further right-wing in anticipation of the second Trump administration. Trump’s second term has not started yet, but companies like Disney & Meta are already self-censoring in anticipation of a hard-right shift towards moral censorship, which likely makes business sense given Trump’s public alignment with “anti-woke” shitposter Elon Musk. Usually, being designated The Richest Man in the World encourages billionaires to hide from the public in shame while executing their political influence in private, but Musk has instead elected to purchase himself a prominent role in Executive Branch politics, demanding to be liked in addition to being feared. He’s openly rigging the system to be more favorable to his regressive worldview, which is something the wealthy are supposed to do behind closed doors. There’s nothing new to the cultural strong-arming through obscene wealth that Trump & Musk are indulging in right now, except in the extent of their shamelessness to do so in full public view. If nothing else, you can already see their personality & tactics viciously satirized as far back as the 1940s comedy The Devil and Miss Jones, which itself preemptively apologizes & kowtows to “The Richest Men in the World” . . .  before mocking them mercilessly.

As early as its opening credits, The Devil and Miss Jones is clear about the moral stance it’s going to take in the eternal Class War. Charles Coburn is introduced as The Richest Man in the World by a title card that dresses him in a devil costume, with the flames of Hell roaring behind him. His comedic foil—Jean Arthur as a humble department store clerk—is then introduced dressed as a heavenly angel, complete with wings & halo. Then, a written letter from the producers apologize to The Richest Men in the World for that satirization, begging to not be sued for defamation since it’s not meant to target any one Wealthy Ghoul in particular (a tactical move that Orson Welles would have been wise to borrow for his satirization of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane that same year). Part of the reason they can get away with the transgression is that the ultra wealthy of the time mostly had the good sense to hide from the public. Or, that’s at least Coburn’s approach as a millionaire businessman who’s so obscenely rich he’s no longer sure what actual businesses he owns. In the opening scene, he’s horrified to discover that an effigy of his likeness was hung & burned outside a department store by its unhappy workers, which made the front page of the daily papers. Only, those workers have no idea what he actually looks like; they just know (and curse) his name.

Coburn weaponizes his anonymity by posing as a regular worker at the department store, so that he can single out the dissidents on his payroll for mass firing. His attempts to unionbust from the inside quickly go awry when he discovers that the ground-level workers are wonderful people, and that middle-management are the true social pariahs. Jean Arthur is especially adorable as the titular Miss Jones, who adopts the Undercover Boss out of pity because he is absolutely abysmal as a salesman. Coburn is dragged to an underground union-organizing meeting after his very first day, so that he can be paraded as an example of how pathetic elderly workers can become in old age once they outlive their usefulness to their corporate employers. Without all of his wealth strong-arming his Yes Men into doing his bidding, Coburn proves to be a low-skill, low-intelligence loser, which is a characterization the movie doesn’t back down from even as his fellow department store workers help him stay on his feet so he can make a living. When his true identity as the company’s owner is revealed to those kind souls, he’s met with the same reaction that greets Monstro Elisasue at the end of The Substance; they recoil in horror at his monstrosity, disgusted with themselves from socializing with someone as grotesquely inhuman as the 1%.

Directed by Marx Brothers collaborator Sam Wood, The Devil and Miss Jones is a hilarious class-differences comedy about how labor unions are pure good, the wealthy are pure evil, and everyone loves a day at the beach. It may indulge in a little “We’re not so different after all” apologia in depicting its cross-class culture clash, but its politics remain sharply observed throughout. Even Miss Jones’s romantic infatuation with the department store’s most ardent labor-union rabble-rouser has its nuances, as the movie criticizes the unchecked machismo of Leftist men by having him blab pigheaded phrases like, “A woman’s place in the world is to tend to the male” while she scoffs. The main target of its political satire is, of course, Coburn’s obliviousness as a wealthy ghoul, repeatedly humbling his sense of superiority among the unwashed “idiots” and “morons” in his employ. It feels especially pointed that even when those workers attempt to sweeten the fine wine he brings along to their Coney Island beach day with a splash of Coca-Cola, it’s not quite enough to overpower the bitterness. Its class & labor commentary has aged incredibly well, so it’s somewhat a shame that its cultural reputation as mostly persisted as a footnote to the porn-parody title The Devil in Miss Jones, directed decades later by Gerard Damiano.

-Brandon Ledet

Babygirl (2024)

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After hearing early reports that it was not included in the pre-show package, there was a perverse thrill in seeing Nicole Kidman’s infamous AMC ad precede my local screening of her new erotic melodrama Babygirl.  It felt like getting away with something, much like how her CEO character in the film gets a thrill out of sleeping with a much younger intern.  However, no matter how much “heartbreak feels good” in a place like the corporate multiplex, it’s never felt nearly as good as the mind-shattering orgasms Kidman simulates in the film’s corporate skyscraper offices. I say “simulate” with some uncertainty, given the actor’s pull-quote confessions that she occasionally had to pause production because she didn’t “want to orgasm anymore,” an intimate experience that left her feeling “ragged” by the time the shoot had reached completion. All of this extratextual Nicole Kidman press is clouding my mind as I try to write about this movie because it’s a movie that’s partially about the actor’s icy real-world persona. Her frustrated CEO character is constantly coached by a PR team about how to present herself to the public, like an actor prepping for a press junket. During one crucial sequence, she’s plucked, injected, and flash-frozen to sculpt her already-gorgeous body into fighting shape, so she can be the public face of an upcoming, all-important product launch. The movie would mean significantly less if Kidman had not been cast as its titular babygirl, since it constantly invites you to import details from her real-life public persona into her character’s fragile ferocity as a public figure. That’s what makes its steamy, taboo sex scenes feel like genuinely vulnerable exposure for the actor – not necessarily their vulgarity.

The source & authenticity of orgasms are very important in Babygirl. The movie opens with Kidman having traditional Movie Sex with her hot, age-appropriate husband (a salt-and-pepper Antonio Banderas), simulating orgasm in their luxury-apartment marital bed. When the husband rolls over, Kidman sneaks off to her private home office to achieve the real orgasm he warmed her up for but was otherwise unable to assist. Notably, she finishes herself off to BDSM pornography, making it clear at the start of the film that she already knows exactly what she wants in her sex life; she just doesn’t have the courage to voice it. This status quo is interrupted by the hiring of a young, tall, strapping intern played by Harris Dickinson, in whom Kidman immediately detects a Dominant Vibe. It’s immediately clear that the high-powered CEO and the bratty, fresh-out-of-college bro beneath her will be having a torrid office affair, but Kidman’s inability to voice exactly what she wants from him delays the consummation of their mutual lust. Babygirl is not the usual self-discovery kink story wherein a dormant submissive discovers a newfound sexual appetite, à la Secretary or Fifty Shades of Grey. It also goes out of its way to not pathologize Kidman’s interest in the kink-play power dynamic of simulating submissiveness when she’s truthfully a high-powered Business Bitch. It’s more of a kink coming-out story, wherein Kidman knows exactly wants but has to work up the courage to ask for it. Too bad she has to have dirty motel room sex with a confused, vulnerable employee to break out of her vanilla rut, since she’s already married to a hot Daddy type who directs stage plays for a living; the irony is that he’s extremely well suited for the job but remains an untapped resource.

All of this dramatic tension is released (and released and released) through a series of successfully thrilling sex scenes between Kidman & Dickinson, who establish a convincing sexual rapport as well-matched but poorly trained kinksters. Unfortunately, the impact of those scenes does not reverberate through Babygirl‘s attempts at corporate & familial drama elsewhere. When Kidman & Dickinson negotiate power dynamics in seedy nightclubs & motel rooms the vibes are electric; when attempting the same negotiations in empty offices & apartment hallways half of their lines feel coldly ADR’d, registering more as a ventriloquist act than a dramatic performance. I kept leaning towards the screen, straining to see if their mouths are actually moving. However, any time I found myself questioning the thematic choices to link Kidman’s kink journey to her religious-cult upbringing, her rebellious daughter’s queerness, her sympatico relation to a wild dog in need of training, to Girlboss cultural politics, or to the soundtrack’s absurdly on-the-nose needle drops, the movie would pause for another fantastic sex scene that felt alive, authentic, and rich with nonverbal power negotiations. It’s a wobbly balancing act that director Halina “Bodies Bodies Bodies” Reijn only gets away with because the actors she cast are extremely hot. Kidman & Dickinson’s undeniable hotness are just as important to the text of Babygirl as the alien impersonablility of Kidman’s AMC ad, the audience-teasing hints at her on-set orgasms, and the obscure, high-end cosmetic work that presumably goes into keeping her physically preserved and camera-ready. The movie works best when it vaguely gestures at these things—not when it makes declarative statements about sexual & corporate power—letting Kidman & Dickinson’s physical chemistry do the talking.

-Brandon Ledet