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Outtakes

First Reaction: 2025 Oscar Nominations

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Hollywood, hoping to find and spread a bit of cheer today, announced its nominations for the 2025 Oscars. We celebrate with them, because we’re thrilled for most of these nominees. Check out those Animated Features (once again, the best category in the lineup)! But, as usual, we have a handful of gripes.

Actress in a Supporting Role

Where is Danielle Deadwyler for The Piano Lesson? In fact, where is that movie? While we think it’s a contender for adapted screenplay (Virgil and Malcolm Washington), as well as perhaps lead actor (John David Washington), there’s no question Deadwyler (also snubbed for 2022’s Till—die she kick somebody’s cat or something?) should not only have been nominated but she probably should have won.

  • Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown
  • Ariana Grande, Wicked
  • Felicity Jones, The Brutalist
  • Isabella Rossellini, Conclave
  • Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez

Actor in a Supporting Role

This is a strong lineup, but Clarence Maclin’s performance in Sing Sing is a painful oversight. As much as we loved Norton, Pearce and Strong, Maclin was better than any of  them.

  • Yura Borisov, Anora
  • Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
  • Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown
  • Guy Pearce, The Brutalist
  • Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

The Piano Lesson over A Complete Unknown, but at least Sing Sing and Nickel Boys made the list.

  • A Complete Unknown: James Mangold and Jay Cocks
  • Conclave: Peter Straughan
  • Emilia Pérez: Jacques Audiard; in collaboration with Thomas Bidegain, Lea Mysius and Nicolas Livecchi
  • Nickel Boys: RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes
  • Sing Sing: Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley; story by Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clarence Maclin, John “Divine G” Whitfield

Writing (Original Screenplay)

No real complaints, but grateful to see September 5 get some love. This is a stacked category and some real masterpieces are going to go home empty handed.

  • Anora: Sean Baker
  • The Brutalist: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold
  • A Real Pain: Jesse Eisenberg
  • September 5: Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum; co-written by Alex David
  • The Substance: Coralie Fargeat

Music (Original Score)

No Challengers?! Being the best score of the year, we’d have bumped any one of these guys to fit it in. (Nice to see The Wild Robot, though.)

  • The Brutalist: Daniel Blumberg
  • Conclave: Volker Bertlemann
  • Emilia Pérez: Clément Ducol and Camille
  • Wicked: John Powell and Stephen Schwartz
  • The Wild Robot: Kris Bowers

Music (Original Song)

Disappointed again not to see Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross get any love here. “Compress/Repress” would have been our pick. We’d probably have given it the Diane Warren slot.

  • “El Mal” from Emilia Pérez: music by Clément Ducol and Camille; lyric by Clément Ducol, Camille and Jacques Audiard
  • “The Journey” from The Six Triple Eight: music and lyric by Diane Warren
  • “Like a Bird” from Sing Sing: music and lyric by Abraham Alexander and Adrian Quesada
  • “Mi Camino” from Emilia Pérez: music and lyric by Camille and Clément Ducol
  • “Never Too Late” from Elton John: Never Too Late: music and lyric by Elton John, Brandi Carlile, Andrew Watt and Bernie Taupin

Documentary Feature Film

Great list of films here. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and Sugarcane are our favorites.

  • Black Box Diaries
  • No Other Land
  • Porcelain War
  • Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
  • Sugarcane

International Feature Film

So happy to see Flow and The Girl with the Needle included here. Emilia Pérez is no doubt the front runner, but you should see all five of these.

  • I’m Still Here: Brazil
  • The Girl with the Needle: Denmark
  • Emilia Pérez: France
  • The Seed of the Sacred Fig: Germany
  • Flow: Latvia

Animated Feature Film

Brilliant films, top to bottom. Hard to even choose. The best thing you can do is to watch every one of them immediately.

  • Flow
  • Inside Out 2
  • Memoir of a Snail
  • Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
  • The Wild Robot

Film Editing

Challengers really needed to be on this list. We’d give it any of these slots except Anora.

  • Anora: Sean Baker
  • The Brutalist: Dávid Jancsó
  • Conclave: Nick Emerson
  • Emilia Pérez: Juliette Welfing
  • Wicked: Myron Kerstein

Cinematography

Finally, some love for Nosferatu. We’d liked to have seen Nickel Boys and The Bikeriders on here, probably instead of Maria and Emilia Pérez, although once again it was a remarkable year for cinematographers and all five of these films are gorgeous.

  • The Brutalist: Lol Crawley
  • Dune: Part Two: Greig Fraser
  • Emilia Pérez: Paul Guilhaume
  • Maria: Ed Lachman
  • Nosferatu: Jarin Blaschke

Actor in a Leading Role

Not a ton of surprises here. All solid choices.

  • Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
  • Timothee Chalamet, A Complete Unknown
  • Colman Domingo, Sing Sing
  • Ralph Fiennes, Conclave
  • Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice

Actress in a Leading Role

Thrilled for the Demi Moore nomination. There were so many exceptional lead performances this year by women, and the one woefully overlooked all season was Jodi Comer in The Bikeriders. We’d have loved to see her make this list against the odds, but it’s tough to say whose slot she should have taken.

  • Cynthia Erivo, Wicked
  • Karla Sofia Gascon, Emilia Pérez
  • Mikey Madison, Anora
  • Demi Moore, The Substance
  • Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here

Best Director

Robert Eggers (Nosferatu) should have had James Mangold’s spot.

  • Anora: Sean Baker
  • The Brutalist: Brady Corbet
  • A Complete Unknown: James Mangold
  • Emilia Pérez: Jacques Audiard
  • The Substance: Coralie Fargeat

Best Picture

Nosferatu and Sing Sing instead of A Complete Unknown and Dune: Part Two. Thrilled to see The Substance and Nickel Boys recognized.

  • Anora
  • The Brutalist
  • A Complete Unknown
  • Conclave
  • Dune: Part Two
  • Emilia Pérez
  • I’m Still Here
  • Nickel Boys
  • The Substance

The 97th Academy Awards, hosted by Conan O’Brien, will air on ABC Sunday, March 2, live from the Dolby Theatre.

New In Theaters

Life During Wartime

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The Girl with the Needle

by Hope Madden

Were The Girl with the Needle any less gorgeous, less poetically filmed or liltingly told, the misery of 1919 Copenhagen might be too grim to bear. But somehow co-writer/director Magnus von Horn’s hypnotic storytelling bathes the nightmare in beauty, compassion, even hope.

Vic Carmen Sonne’s vacant expression gives Karoline an inscrutable quality that suits the character of a young seamstress coming to terms with more and more dire circumstances as WWI ends. Pregnant when her husband, long presumed dead, returns from the war, she faces difficult choices.

Each choice—always a hopeful step toward the promise of something better—is punished in time. Between the grimness of the wartime sufferings, the unreadable expression of the protagonist, and Michal Dymek’s gorgeous black and white cinematography, The Girl with the Needle conjures Václav Marhoul’s 2019 ordeal, The Painted Bird. But von Horn’s story rings with authenticity, partly because he treats the suffering with some distance and restraint, and partly because the story itself is rooted in true events.

Which, of course, only makes the tale that much more difficult. Bravo to the filmmaker and actor Trine Dryholm for treating Dagmar—the woman who represents Karoline’s biggest leap toward something better—the way they do.

Dryholm’s beautifully tormented, conflicted performance never veers toward cliché, or even toward sinister. Though her acts are unthinkably villainous—the stuff of legend and nightmare—they are rooted in a logic that feels honest to the character.

The dual performances transform this true crime horror story into a fable of mothers and children, of collecting and discarding family. Sonne’s childlike trust and Dryholm’s tortured caregiving further distort an image von Horn’s been twisting since his remarkable opening shots.

Mercifully, he ends his film and its portrait of family on a hopeful note. You won’t find much other mercy here, but alongside these powerful performances and mesmerizing storytelling, just a glimmer is enough.

Shudder Premiere

Face Off

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Grafted

by Hope Madden

Well, Sasha Rainbow knows for sure that there’s an audience for body horror enraged at the pressure to fit a certain standard of beauty. The fact that her feature debut Grafted will face constant comparisons to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is less of a positive note. (There’s even a scene of someone gorging on shrimp, I swear to God.)

Rainbow introduces us to Wei (played in youth by Mohan Liu) and her father (Sam Wang). Both father and daughter are marked with some kind of red tissue across their faces, and while working on a cure, tragedy strikes, and Wei is left on her own.

Years later, she obtains a scholarship to a university in New Zealand and goes to live with her aunt (Xuai Hu) and cousin, Angela (Jess Hong). Try as she might, Wei (Joyena Sun) cannot fit in with Angela and her beautiful friends (Eden Hart, Sepi To’a), but she has other things on her mind—finishing her father’s research.

Rainbow, who co-wrote the script with Lee Murray and Mia Maramara, wraps social anxiety, assimilation, misogyny, sexual politics, the ludicrous nature of scientific advancement, racism, nationalism and more around Wei’s descent into madness, and it might be just too much to take on in 96 minutes.

Sun, Hong and Hart have fun, making the most of their onscreen personality swapping and Rainbow’s focus is most on target during these sequences. Jared Turner entertains as your typical vain professor, and To’a delivers enough empathy to give the film a touch of humanity.

But Grafted bites off more than it can chew. It too often feels unfocused, random, and superficial. It suffers not only in comparison to Fargeat’s film but to New Zealand’s pretty epic history of body horror.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad. There are some great ideas at work here, and every performance, large and small, brings its own weirdness to the screen. It’s certainly enough to keep me interested in seeing what Rainbow does next.

New In Theaters, The Screening Room

Screening Room: Wolf Man, The Brutalist, Nickel Boys and Much More

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Wolf Man, The Brutalist, Nickel Boys, Unstoppable, The Room Next Door, Back In Action, Every Little Thing, Night Call

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Pack Leader

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Wolf Man

by Hope Madden

A lot of people will go into Wolf Man with comparisons to the 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. original on the ready. For Leigh Whannell fans, threads common to his 2020 gem The Invisible Man are easier to connect.

That’s partly because his new lycanthropic adventure is not a reboot, remake, or sequel to the original film, and partly because the underlying metaphor bears a little resemblance to his last movie.

Thirty years ago, young Blake (Zac Chandler) and his frighteningly protective, militia-esque father (Sam Jaeger) go hunting in the deep, isolated, picturesque Oregon woods near their property. They find something, and it isn’t a bear.

Flash forward, and adult Blake (Christopher Abbott)—a doting father to young Ginger (Matilda Firth, named no doubt as nod to Ginger Snaps in an applause worthy move)—gets the paperwork. His dad is finally, officially considered dead. He went into the woods some years back and just never came out. Now Blake, Ginger, and Blake’s wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) need to head back to Oregon to take care of the old farm.

Abbott and Garner hold the film’s insistent metaphor in check even when Whannell’s dialog (co-written with Corbett Tuck) veers a little too close to obvious. Blake is a good man, a kind man, a loving father—could he have enough of his old man in him to mean violence to the women in his life?

Whannell’s instinct for horror set pieces and claustrophobic action wring that metaphor for all the tension it’s worth in the second act. But by Act 3, when the tortured love of a monster feels more akin to Cronenberg’s The Fly (due partly to Whannell’s writing, partly to Arjen Tuiten’s monster design), the allegory begins to crumble under its own weight.

Although many viewers may have already checked out due to that creature design.

There is a tidy little gift of thrills here, very traditionally constructed with limited complications, allowing for a bit more depth of character. But it all feels slight, and outside of some nifty bits of action, overwrought.

New In Theaters

More Room at the Top

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The Room Next Door

by Hope Madden

The films of Pedro Almodóvar often boast a mischievous wit that could, in other filmmakers’ hands, feel out of step with the source material. He seems able to infuse this magic into everything, no matter how serious or dire. Even his wonderful 2011 horror film The Skin I Live In possesses a whimsy that turns the bleakest moments into bold poetry.

The auteur’s latest, The Room Next Door, enters territory that pushes back against whimsy. The film follows the relationship between Martha (Tilda Swinton) and Ingrid (Julianne Moore), estranged friends who reconnect sometime after Martha’s cervical cancer diagnosis.

There are certain Almodóvar trademarks you can expect to find on full display. The Room Next Door is a movie about women, about intimate moments between women, about complicated relationships and enduring tenderness between women. It also boasts sumptuous color and vivid imagery evoking (sometimes quite intentionally) masterpieces of modern art. 

There is also, characteristically, more than a little melodrama. 

It is tough to imagine anything going amiss with that team of collaborators. This marks the first time the filmmaker has worked with Moore, and her first teaming with Swinton (who was showcased so gloriously in Almodóvar’s 2020 short, The Human Voice). The idea of spending a couple of beautifully framed hours with these three undisputed masters is endlessly appealing, no matter the subject. 

But the subject and how to grapple with it does keep the film from entirely succeeding. Act 1 becomes a stagey slog of exposition, full of contrivance to allow the entire backstory to be laid out. There’s also a clumsy b-story involving a former lover (John Turturro). Once the film begins to build a lovely atmosphere that lets its leads shine, these moments with Turturro feel like abrupt, unwanted distractions.

Jarring storylines is nothing new in the Spanish filmmaker’s canon, but perhaps the language barrier limited his ability to conjure the necessary magic to balance things. 

The Room Next Door is no failure, not at all. It offers a beautiful meditation on mature female relationships, loss, acceptance, and an incredibly smart philosophy on the fight against death. But with the boundless talent involved, it left me wanting more.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Frightful Homecomings

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They say you can’t go home again. Horror filmmakers are more apt to say that you shouldn’t. For our latest episode, we look at some of horror cinema’s most memorable homecomings.

5. Coming Home in the Dark (2021)

Making his feature debut with the road trip horror Coming Home in the Dark, James Ashcroft is carving out a very different style of Kiwi horror than the splatter comedy you may be expecting.

A family is enjoying some time alone in the countryside when approached by two armed drifters. A car passes without incident. Mandrake (Danielle Gillies, chilling) say, “Looking back on today’s events, I think this will be the moment you realized you should have done something.”

Riveting, tricky storytelling to the last shot keeps you on your toes.

4. Salem’s Lot (1979)

Novelist Ben Mears decides to focus his next book on that creepy old Marsten House from his hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. At around the same time he arrives, townspeople start dying and disappearing. It could only be Ben, or the antique store owner Richard Straker, who bought the old Marsten hours in the first place.

Tobe Hooper’s miniseries version of the Stephen King novel is still the best retelling. So many individual images stand out: the kid at the window, the Count Orlock (original) style vampire, the always saucy James Mason.

3. Possum (2018)

Sean Harris is endlessly sympathetic in this tale of childhood trauma. Philip (Harris) has returned to his burned out, desolate childhood home after some unexplained professional humiliation. His profession? Puppeteer. The puppet itself seems to be a part of the overall problem.

I don’t know why the single creepiest puppet in history—a man-sized marionnette with a human face and spider’s body—could cause any trouble. Kids can be so delicate.

Writer/director Matthew Holness spins a smalltown mystery around the sad story of a grown man who is confused about what’s real and what isn’t. The melancholy story and Harris’s exceptional turn make Possum a tough one to forget.

2. The Orphanage (2007)
Laura (Belén Rueda) and her husband reopen the orphanage where she grew up, with the goal of running a house for children with special needs – children like her adopted son Simón, who is HIV positive. But Simón’s new imaginary friends worry Laura, and when he disappears it looks like she may be imagining things herself.

A scary movie can be elevated beyond measure by a masterful score and an artful camera. Because director Antonio Bayona keeps the score and all ambient noise to a minimum, allowing the quiet to fill the scenes, he develops a truly haunting atmosphere. His camera captures the eerie beauty of the stately orphanage, but does it in a way that always suggests someone is watching. The effect is never heavy handed, but effortlessly eerie.

One of the film’s great successes is its ability to take seriously both the logical, real world story line, and the supernatural one. Rueda carries the film with a restrained urgency – hysterical only when necessary, focused at all times, and absolutely committed to this character, who may or may not be seeing ghosts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7FD6tR6zOc

1. Halloween (1978)

The night he came home.

No film is more responsible for the explosion of teen slashers than John Carpenter’s babysitter butchering classic.

From the creepy opening piano notes to the disappearing body ending, this low budget surprise changed everything. Carpenter develops anxiety like nobody else, and plants it right in a wholesome Midwestern neighborhood. You don’t have to go camping or take a road trip or do anything at all – the boogeyman is right there at home.

Michael Myers – that hulking, unstoppable, blank menace – is scary. Pair that with the down-to-earth charm of lead Jamie Lee Curtis, who brought a little class and talent to the genre, and add the bellowing melodrama of horror veteran Donald Pleasance, and you’ve hit all the important notes. Just add John Carpenter’s spare score to ratchet up the anxiety. Perfect.

We also want to thank Derek Stewart for sharing his short film Possum with us! If you didn’t get to join us for Fright Club Live, give yourself the gift of his amazing animated short:

New In Theaters

Perspective

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Nickel Boys

by Hope Madden

You’ve never seen a film quite like RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys. The filmmaker, with an inspired Jomo Fray behind the camera, delivers a visual poem of tragedy, resilience and American history.

Ross, along with Joslyn Barnes, adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, but brings such human and humane treatment that the nonfiction roots cannot be ignored. Whitehead wrote about the Dozier School for Boys—the same American institution that fueled Tananarive Due’s horror novel, Reformatory. But Ross does not mine the institution’s 110-year history of dehumanization, abuse and murder for horror. Instead, he shows us how powerful that evil was by allowing us to see it through the eyes of two best friends.

You might find point-of-view filmmaking in bursts in other films—Michael Myers watching his sister through the eye holes of his Halloween costume, for example. But Ross never deviates, never leaves the most intimate and personal perspective of the events unfolding. His camera represents either the view from Elwood’s (Ethan Herisse) own eyes, or his best friend Turner’s (Brandon Wilson).

Elwood’s a good kid, smart, kind, and devoted to his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and we see what he sees in lyrical bursts: a party in his childhood, his grandmother praying for him, successes and trials at school, an opportunity to begin college while he’s still in high school, the approach of white police officers, incarceration, the first small piece of kindness offered by a fellow teenage inmate.

And then, for the first time, we truly see Elwood because the camera becomes that one friend, Turner. This is not Turner’s first run-in with the law. He’s begrudgingly protective of the innocent Elwood. 

The perspective shift, the elements of Whitehead’s novel that made it seem too difficult to adapt, becomes Nickel Boys’ greatest strength. You cannot watch this film and distance yourself from the injustices or from the small joys. This remarkable subjective intimacy is what made Ross’s documentaries so magical and moving—you come away with a personal relationship with the film and its subject because you have born witness as the subject.

Wilson, Herisse and Ellis-Taylor guarantee that the style is more than gimmick, bringing their characters so tenderly to life that their story will devastate you. The story of a school that dehumanized and murdered Black young men for over 100 years should do that.

New In Theaters

Greatest Show Monkey

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Better Man

by Hope Madden

A great deal about Better Man—Michael Gracey’s biopic of English pop star Robbie Williams—astonishes. Not always in a good way, but it’s tough not to admire a big swing.

Williams narrates his own story, and though that’s his voice—cracking wise, soliloquizing and dropping profanities in equal measure—that’s not his face. The musician, whose tale is told from grade school to present day, appears onscreen as a chimpanzee. He’s a biped who dresses the part; CGI built on the work of Williams, Jonno Davies, Carter J. Murphy, and Asmara Feik as well as a host of dancer stand-ins for each age range. But from the opening voice over to “the end,” the only time you see Robbie Williams is in historical snapshots over closing credits.

Why? A metaphor, that Williams is everybody’s monkey but not his own man? Or a gimmick to draw attention away from the otherwise standard biopic beats that make up the film?

A bit of both.

At issue is that Williams’s biographical information so closely resembles, well, every other famous person’s? That can’t be correct, but it certainly reminds one of (if movies are ever to be trusted) Elton John’s, Johnny Cash’s, Amy Winehouse’s, Dewey Cox’s: problematic father figure whose love is conditional, drug and alcohol abuse, a loved one taken for granted until it’s too late, undiagnosed depression, questionable romantic choices.

Gracey distracts from formula with a CGI primate, although he might have been just as successful relying on his own impressive instincts for staging a musical number. The longtime music video veteran, whose The Greatest Showman remains inexplicably popular, wows with inspired choreography/editing/CGI work in song after song.

Strong support work from Alison Steadman, Steve Pemberton, Kate Mulvaney, Damon Herriman and Raechelle Banno keep the film feeling human. Indeed, Better Man is at times deeply touching.

But it’s long. And it feels every second of that two hours and fifteen minutes. Much of the film could easily have been pruned. There’s no doubt Williams, in his depression and drugged out stupor, did betray each one of the people we spend screentime with, but we didn’t need to see all of them. It was an indulgence by way of apology, admirable but cinematically tedious.

Still, the climax is a heartbreaking, exceptionally cinematic moment: schmaltzy, earned, boisterous and moving. Does it go on one moment too far? Yes, it does. But it was great while it lasted.