SeanC

After a somewhat underwhelming start to awards season at the Golden Globes, Anora emerges with the steel chair to batter its opponents and become the award season frontrunner, winning DGA, PGA, and the Critics Choice Award for Best Picture (though weirdly, nothing else at that ceremony) in one weekend.

Wonderful moment at the European Championships for Niina Petrokina, winning her country's first-ever women's Euros medal (a gold, at that) on home soil. Unrelatedly, for those who don't follow Canadian junior nationals (the nerve!), 12-year-old winner Lia Cho's free skate has now accrued over 101,000 views on CBC's YouTube, which is a gigantic number for a non-Olympic performance.

Rule of thumb is generally at least 2.5 times the budget, counting marketing costs.

Relative to its budget, it wasn't a success, unfortunately. Now, who knows what PVOD, streaming, etc. have added to revenues, but its theatrical returns alone weren't enough to make it a hit.

I know Chalamet and Barbaro were really playing (they had years to prepare due to production delays).

Robert Eggers fulfills his childhood wish of doing his own version of F.W. Murnau's seminal German Expressionist film Nosferatu (and thus, by extension his own version of Bram Stoker's Dracula). This was originally supposed to be his second film, and a reunion with The Witch leading lady Anya Taylor-Joy, but due to a half-decade's worth of production delays, it is his fourth film and starring Lily-Rose Depp. Overall, pretty good. The only real argument I could make against it is that it never really surprises, but then, it's a remake of an earlier film/adaptation of one of the most widely-known novels ever written, so I'm not sure it ever could have. That it was less of a novelty than Eggers' first three films was baked in. There was a lot of skepticism when Depp was cast, but I figured Eggers warranted the benefit of the doubt, and indeed she was quite good here. Also liked seeing him bring Ralph Ineson back for a significant role -- I'm not sure any actor that he has cast has ever fit his period aesthetic approach better, not even Anya.

That's a very common version of the Clark Kent workplace persona.

It's clearly supposed to look goofy (totally comics-accurate).

With stage pacing (i.e., lack of transitional content between setpieces, a lot of stuff more told than shown).

Short-ish overview of the filming of "Popular". Mainly fun to hear Chu discussing how the production crew had to operate all the props in the room, such as the suitcases and the chandelier. A much longer feature on the set design. They spent months growing all the flowers that we see briefly in the opening sequence.

I wouldn't say there's padding, there's things to make the sequences more cinematic. Stage and screen having different rhythms. Based on this film, even if you were to make some cuts, I don't see how you could do the whole musical as one movie without it approaching four hours.

She’s also an Academy Award nominee.

There was no requirement that this role be played by a black actress. Erivo is a Tony Award winner and one of the more acclaimed musical actresses of her peer group.

The full version of "What Is This Feeling?" has been posted by the studio:

I was a teenager in the mid-2000s. Wasn't a theatre kid, but I listened to the soundtrack plenty over the years. I've made a number of trips to NYC over the years, but never actually saw Wicked in my trips to the theatre, as I tended to prioritize limited-run productions, so this was my first time seeing the actual story fully dramatized. Overall, I thought this was pretty good. Chu already showed he knows his way around a production number, and he delivers here with all the big setpieces, and with most of what goes on in between. You can tell this was Grande's dream role (as she has said many times), and she delivers. Lots of people didn't think she could do this, and to some extent I guess she only has herself to blame for foregoing acting for over a decade in favour of pop stardom. They really went big on the cameos, in a way that unavoidably took me a bit out of the movie when they first happened, though the audience I was with loved it.

With regarding to this:

Sean Baker's latest film, the winner of the 2024 Palme d'Or, and poised to be his most commercially successful feature to date by some way, as well as possibly his big awards breakthrough. As someone who has liked Baker's work to varying degrees, but often come away with at least one prominent niggle about a given film (or, in the case of Tangerine, finding it mostly annoying but with an unforgettable ending), I would provisionally cite this as his best work to date. While not flawless (I might agree with the critique offered elsewhere that the middle of the film perhaps goes on a bit too long), it's funny, emotionally affecting when it wants to be, and centered on a great lead performance. That performance is Mikey Madison (probably heretofore most recognizable to filmgoers for getting a memorably extended demise at the hands of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) as the title character, a Brooklyn exotic dancer who finds herself hired by Ivan, the immature son of a Russian oligarch. Embarking on an extended bacchanal that culminates in a marriage proposal, she soon finds herself in a sticky situation as Ivan's parents react poorly to their son's imprudent match and dispatch a frustrated subordinate and his two minions to help sort the situation out. The above may sound like the film turns into a thriller, but that is not really the case. For the most part, Anora is set in a decidedly comic register, with Madison's brassy heroine and the henchman trio's antics supplying a fair number of chuckles, both from verbal and physical humour. As with Baker's other films, the details of the setting and of the lives of the characters feel very authentic, even when (as here) the scenario at times feels like a particularly ribald screwball comedy. The ending of the film cracks into a different emotional space, again powered by Madison and an affecting supporting turn by Yura Borisov, who quietly sneaks up on you over the course of the second half of the story. If Baker has always been concerned with America's working poor and strivers, here for the first time he brings the overarching villains of the piece into the picture: the ultra-wealthy, embodied by the Zakharov family.

Freud feeling very vindicated by that final scene. Selina reference! I wonder if that means we could see Sofia again. Oswald looking more like the classic comics Penguin at the end was genuinely unexpected.

With the death of the Pope, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is tasked with presiding over the conclave to select the new pontifex maximus. While Lawrence is aligned with the liberal faction of the recently deceased pope and his presumed ideological heir Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), alternative candidates include ultra-traditionalist Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), social conservative Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), and moderate conservative Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow). Shenanigans ensue, involving, among others, a mysterious new cardinal created in secret by the prior pope (Carlos Diehz) and a nun who gives a lot of meaningful looks (Isabella Rossellini). As has been widely remarked in the reviews, this is a lot more pulpily entertaining than you might initially expect. It's a fun movie, very well-acted and well-made. Some of the Oscar buzz surprised me to an extent (the Academy has certainly recognized worse), but based on the box office this is a successful film for adults, and those tend to get an invite to the table. I think Fiennes' character's spiritual crisis is a bit thinly sketched, but he's terrific in the role and his more managerial concerns are well-depicted. I'd never seen Castellitto before, but he's a real scene-stealer in his heel role (and with a particularly fun use of a vape pen as a prop).

Two Mormon missionaries (Yellowjackets star Sophie Thatcher and The Fabelmans supporting scene-stealer Chloe East) walk into a trap set by a man who's out to prod them about the nature of religion, the latest A24 feature film. Thatcher and East both come from Mormon backgrounds, which adds a nice air of authenticity to the characterizations. Both are very good, but Grant steals the show here (and is set up to) in a flashy villain role that makes great use of a lot of his rom-com mannerisms with a more sinister edge.

David Ehrlich's review called this the first McQueen film that feels like it could have been directed by someone else; I'd modify that statement, as you can see a lot of the director's familiar interests and themes, but he's also trying to do a more populist version of his own filmmaking. The scenes focused on Ronan feel closer to a 'normal' McQueen film, generally, but the scenes following the kid feel like McQueen trying to access his inner Spielberg -- which I don't think ever fully gels. I knew a lot of the reviews used the phrase "Dickensian", but I wasn't prepared for the whole segment that is just a straight Oliver Twist riff, complete with a Nancy, a Fagin, etc.

From hugging her son she’d have had a fair bit of gasoline on her too. She burned up a bit too quickly there, but rolling on the ground wouldn’t have done much.

Sofia's bringing a new Marxist philosophy to running the mafia. Unless Mrs. Maroni has a nasal problem, I'm not sure how she didn't pick up on her son being doused in gasoline.

This sort of romantic drama lives and dies by actor chemistry, and Pugh and Garfield have it, so We Live in Time works pretty well. The film is told non-chronologically (at least for the first two thirds or so), which I have seen reviews debate the value of because there’s no grand structural reason for it, but I think it’s fine to just use that approach, which I think does serve to make moments that could be cliches feel a bit less so (such as the scenes where there’s relationship strife over whether Pugh’s character is interested in having children, when we’ve already seen that they eventually have one).

Stella and Plaza have only slightly more resemblance than did Tony Revolori and F. Murray Abraham in The Grand Budapest Hotel, but as the latter film showed, if the performances are good it doesn't matter terribly much. And they work well opposite each other here, while the script is both sensitively written and pretty funny when it wants to be. A pleasant and all-too-rare instance of a Canadian director actually getting to make films set in Canada when working outside the Canadian film industry.