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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

Armand (2025)

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There is currently an American remake of Andrei Żuławski’s monstrous divorce meltdown Possession in the works, to be directed by Smile‘s Parker Finn and produced by Robert Pattinson. The project is both catastrophically misguided and totally understandable. Just a decade ago, it was difficult to access the 1981 political psych thriller through any official, legal means, which afforded it a kind of cult-curio prestige. The full-bodied mania of Isabelle Adjani’s performance in out-of-context clips in which she writhes in a tunnel while smashing her groceries against the concrete wall got passed around the internet enough that it gradually became a staple of online film culture, though, initiated by its copyright-infringing use in the Crystal Castles music video for “Plague.” A few expensive physical-media reissues & short streaming-platform stints later, and Possession is now an official part of the canon. There’s even enough evidence to argue that Adjani’s interpretive-dance tunnel freakout is the most influential movie scene of the current moment. It was cited as direct inspiration for at least three of last year’s biggest horror-heroine performances (Nosferatu, Immaculate, The First Omen), and now some poor actress will be tasked with retracing Adjani’s exact steps in a mainstream remake removed from its original cultural & political context — the final stage in legitimizing any once-subversive piece of art.

Adjani’s interpretive-dance freakout is now so cinematically ubiquitous that it’s influencing procedural dramas about tense parent-teacher conferences, not just horror flicks. The Norwegian film Armand is mostly structured as a stage play in a single primary school classroom wherein two couples argue about a physical altercation between their 6-year-old sons, as mediated by a timid schoolteacher and her hard-nosed administrative higher-ups. In the initial telling of the story, the titular child Armand is accused of having sexually assaulted his playmate in a school bathroom, an event that neither (unseen) child has the full vocabulary to communicate to the confused, horrified adults. Every parent and school employee has a hidden, selfish agenda in how they react to this crisis, which is slowly teased out in a web of secrets & resentments that link the two families far beyond the transgression they’re currently debating. It’s Armand’s mother Elizabeth who’s afforded the most complex internal life, though, as performed by Renate “Worst Person in the World” Reinsve. As the intensity of the parent-teacher conference escalates, she has a full psychotic breakdown that destroys all decorum by releasing something monstrously inhuman in the room, transforming a small-scale drama into a full-blown psych thriller merely by laughing & crying with violent intensity at unpredictable intervals. Armand might have gotten the title, but the movie is Elizabeth’s story.

It’s when Elizabeth steps into the school’s hallways & empty classrooms that the movie goes full Possession. The whispered rumors that spiral out of that closed-door meeting haunt her like vengeful ghosts as they echo off of every hard surface to the point of supernatural cacophony. Her public-figure role as a semi-famous actress combines with the scrutiny of her mothering technique to give her the feeling of constantly being pawed at from every direction, which is literalized by the imagined hands of fellow parents roughly groping her flesh in interpretive dance. The proceedings are coldly clerical in nature, but there’s an erotic violence to the tone that reverberates throughout the building, frequently turning moments of heated intimacy into physical abuse as parents & staff siphon each other off into empty rooms. Whether abuse is learned or inherited and whether you can ever fully separate truth from spin provide the film a thematic justification for what’s mostly just an excuse to rattle the audience, often through unexpected nosebleeds, fire alarms, and thundercracks. First-time director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is playing a game of tonal precarity here, unlocking something intangibly evil in a parent-teacher conference the way Possession unlocks something intangibly evil in a simple act of adultery or, more notably, a trip to the grocer. My comparing Reinsve to Adjani is probably doing her performance no favors, but she does hold her own among other recent actresses who’ve explicitly stated that’s where they’re drawing their inspo.

It’s entirely possible that no one making Armand had Possession in mind during production. As the nepo-grandbaby of Ingmar Bergman & Liv Ullman, Tøndel has plenty of under-the-surface menace to pull from just within his own family’s cinematic legacy. Where & when he chooses to break from reality in this psychological meltdown felt Possession adjacent to me, though, especially by the time the cast breaks into violent, abstract dance. By default, it’s a more compelling, interpretive use of Possession’s influence than any straight-forward Hollywood remake could be, regardless of whether the influence was conscious. The influence is unavoidable right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something new with it.

-Brandon Ledet