Here we go! It’s been a long road to this year’s awards season, with no shortage of shifting narratives along the way, but Sunday is the day of days. Precursor awards like the Golden Globes and BAFTAs have only further muddied the waters of the prognosticators, and the idiots who care about this stuff (see below) find themselves in the final stretch of Oscar season with more questions than answers for their ballots.  

Once again, those nominated for the 95^th annual Academy Awards represent an interesting mix of critical darlings, big-budget crowd pleasers, and everything in between, with Everything Everywhere All at Once leading the field with 11 nominations. Few people are predicting the kind of sweep that have characterized some of the ceremonies of old, however, with this year’s marquee categories representing some of the most competitive races in decades. A full list of the nominations is at the bottom, but to get a sense of what the Scene-Stealers crew is thinking about this crop of nominees, look no further.

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST SURPRISE OR SNUB IN YOUR OPINION?

Timothy English: I was really surprised to not see a nomination either for Viola Davis for The Woman King nor, especially, Danielle Deadwyler for Till. Viola was a beast in Woman King. If she was The Rock they would have let her do the coin flip at the Super Bowl, but she’s one of the best actresses in the game and she killed it in this flick. And Deadwyler delivered what I thought was one of the most powerful performances of the year. SNUBBBBBBED. And not enough love for RRR across the board, easily the most surprisingly entertaining movie of the year. It had bromance, war, subtitles, song fighting, leopard tossing. I’m going to watch it again when I’m done writing this, actually.

Warren Cantrell: In a year where Colin Farrell is having a McConaughey-like “aissance” it seems insane to me that a very good film he was in this awards season didn’t get a single nomination. Thirteen Lives found itself relegated to Amazon Prime territory: where statue dreams and potential audience awareness go to die. This is a shame, too, because the film is a well-made, riveting thriller by an A-List director (Ron Howard) who may have lost his fastball, but still has plenty of pitches to get you out. You’d think Farrell’s big year and Ron Howard’s status as an Academy vote-magnet would have been enough to put this in the discussion even if it had been mediocre, which it isn’t! Seriously: go watch Thirteen Lives!

Eric Melin: I was really rooting for Dolly De Leon to get a Supporting Actress nom for her brutally deadpan, hilarious work in Triangle of Sadness. It’s a movie divided in three parts, really—and she just walks away with it in the final third. I heard she’ll at least be on hand to introduce the film’s Best Pic nom, so that’s cool, but if she were nominated, she may actually have been able to pull off the upset win when the Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO) actresses undoubtedly split the vote. Instead, Angela Bassett will get a win here for her career.

Jonah Desneux: TWO blockbuster action sequels are nominated for Best Picture and a Marvel film is taking home an acting award, but no Nope anywhere at any time? An interesting (bad) choice to say the least. Same with how Decision to Leave went from Best Picture talks to being completely shut out. The lack of recognition in International Feature is still head-scratching. But you know what they say: The Devil works hard, but EO’s marketing team works harder.

Joe Jarosz: All Quiet on the Western Front has to be one of the quietest nominations in recent history. Not only was I surprised this was released in October (what? I only heard about it when the nominations came out), but that it was nominated for best picture? Outside of best picture, Guillermo del Toro should have received a Best Director nomination for his Pinocchio.

WHAT ARE YOUR BEST PICTURE PREDICTIONS? WHO IS THE FAVORITE, AND WHAT’S A LONGSHOT DARKHORSE YOU LIKE?

Eric Melin: With all its previous guild wins, EEAO is the odds-on fave. And I adore that movie and hope it wins. But it’s weird having it go in as the favorite. Let that sink in—the movie where the guy jams a trophy up his butt and high-jumps an office divider to travel the multiverse is the favorite. Upsets I’d be happy about: Banshees, Tár, Triangle of Sadness—all seem like fairy tales. The only two I’d be pissed about would be the underwhelming and completely repetitive All Quiet Redux and Avatar Deux.

Warren Cantrell: Best Picture seems like one of the only safe categories in terms of predictions, with EEAO cleaning up at pretty much every awards precursor. That’s what is going to be on my Oscar party ballot, but I never count the Academy voters out when it comes to making ridiculous choices in spite of all reason. If someone gave me 5:1 odds or better on Top Gun: Maverick winning, I’d probably take that bet.

Timothy English: Favorite: EEAO. The Banshees of Inisherin might have a shot if everyone gives EEAO the Ben Affleck treatment and votes for literally anything else because they just assume it has the votes. Longshot: Man…maybe Tár. I just love the fact Top Gun: Maverick is on this list because when I saw that I didn’t think oh hell, that Star Wars ripoff is a Best Pic nom for sure. But I think if anything is a longshot to knock off either of the previously mentioned, it’s the greatest female composer who never actually lived, Lydia Tár.

Joe Jarosz: Everything Everywhere All at Once should win but I could see The Banshees of Inisherin upsetting.

Jonah Desneux: Everything Everywhere All at Once is an unconventional film that will bring us a conventionally boring year. They’ll sweep the night like they have all awards season, including Best Picture. At least the team is fun to root for! Banshees could be a dark horse but at this time it’s more of a dark little donkey.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE CATEGORY OF NOMINEES?

Jonah Desneux: The Original Screenplay and Best Director nominees are the exact same this year (with a little Tony Kushner thrown in to spice things up). It’s a two-round showdown represented by a slew of existential films that were clearly written and directed during Covid.

Warren Cantrell: In a first for me, I think I’m most curious about the Adapted Screenplay category this year. Glass Onion is my favorite amongst that group, though Women Talking and Living are also great choices. If Top Gun wins this, I might just have a stroke, however.  

Joe Jarosz: The animated features. Pinocchio was beautiful, which shouldn’t be a surprise since Guillermo del Toro made it. But the other films are filled with a sweetness and depth not often seen in animated movies. There’s no wrong choice for a winner in this category.

Eric Melin: Both of the lead acting categories are badass, from top to bottom. (Here is where I implore you to search out the extraordinary Aftersun and To Leslie, and to try and remove the thought that the formally inventive first-person nightmare Blonde was ever meant to be “a biopic” so you can enjoy all of its craft). I can see why people thought Viola Davis not making Best Actress was a snub, but the fact of the matter is that all five of those actress’ performances are extremely nuanced and formidable. The Woman King may have been more physically strenuous (and it was a table-flipping triumph for representation), but it’s also pretty by the books, and just doesn’t stack up with the rest of them.

Timothy English: Both actress categories are awesome. Michelle Yeoh: I’m glad everyone is just now realizing how awesome this woman is. Cate Blanchett: also always awesome. Jamie Lee Curtis: legend. Stephanie Hsu is here to stay. Just saw her in Poker Face. She’s great in that, too. Hong Chau, loved her in The Menu and c’mon, she’s Pickles on BoJack. Respect. Really, in a year when there so many great candidates, unfortunately the biggest snubs are on the ladies side.

WHAT WILL BE THE BIG NARRATIVE GOING INTO THIS YEAR’S OSCARS?

Jonah Desneux: Tom Cruise will start the show by doing an insane stunt to promote the new Mission Impossible only to be outdone by James Cameron who will bring out a live Na’vi to introduce Best Supporting Actress.

Eric Melin: The producers are really excited to have blockbusters in the convo this year, so they’ll over-rotate on making a big deal of Cruise, James Cameron, and Wakanda Forever to keep viewers watching, while those movies will win enough craft awards for them to space them out and keep people interested. Diane Warren’s 14th song nomination—for an Eva Longoria movie, no less—will put everyone to sleep. The RRR Best Song performance will bring the fucking house down. There will be lots of multiverse jokes aimed at EEAO and Marvel. Hopefully Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t do a bit where he gets slapped by someone.

Timothy English: How much is Everything Everywhere All at Once going to dominate? It’s been a while since a movie just cleaned house at the Oscars. And I don’t remember the last time a movie came out in March and we all said, oh that’s winning Best Picture next year for sure. I said it, at least. It’s written down somewhere at least. What’s the over/under on how long until we get a slap joke? Oh, I can’t wait.

Warren Cantrell: Besides Will Smith? There’s been a lot of talk about Top Gun: Maverick “saving Hollywood,” but just how much those good vibes and Cruise’s campaigning pay off will be interesting to see. Like the kid brother that’s invited along to the big party but is expected to stay in the background and out of trouble, this one has just been sort of lingering in the background this awards season without kicking up too much of a fuss. It will be interesting to see if Academy voters are more sentimental than their predecessors.

Joe Jarosz: The lack of Will Smith jokes. We’ll learn after the broadcast that the Academy asked Kimmel to only reference it once…hopefully?

IF YOU WERE AN OSCAR LOBBYIST, WHO WOULD YOU BE CAMPAIGNING HARD FOR, AND WHY?

Joe Jarosz: Look, we know Top Gun is not going to win the best picture, but give it all the other categories to make it look like it made a big splash. It saved the movie theaters, didn’t it?

Timothy English: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Let’s GOOOOOOO!! I loved Pinocchio, too. Guillermo del Toro is a brilliant filmmaker and every one of his movies are a visual masterclass in iconic imagery. But the simplicity, originality, imagination and heart behind that damn shell with shoes looking for his family. It’s the kind of movie I hope aliens find in the future and think, “oh hey, humans weren’t too bad after all.”

Jonah Desneux: I wouldn’t have the heart to campaign against Ke Huy Quan but……Barry Keoghan and Brendan Gleeson are really good in Banshees.

Eric Melin: The Quiet Girl is a small, beautiful, devastatingly emotional movie that creeps up on you and has the unique ability to surprise the behemoth of the been-there, seen-it All Quiet “remake” or shall we say “reimagining that resembles its source material in title only.” Especially since Park Chan-wook’s jagged, challenging Decision to Leave wasn’t even nominated for Best International Feature Film—I’d be lobbying for The Quiet Girl. Like the equally remarkable Aftersun, it creeps up on you in the most surprising of ways.

Warren Cantrell: I wouldn’t be campaigning FOR anyone, per se, but against Austin Butler. I’d be pulling some backroom tabloid shit to plant stories about how he’s a shitty neighbor or a terrible tipper to get him out of the Best Actor discussion. He was fine in Elvis, but he doesn’t belong in the same discussion as the other four nominees, and he represents a terrible trend in Hollywood that’s essentially pre-stamping Oscar nominations for anyone taking on a music biopic. Literally anyone else, please.

LET’S SAY YOU ONLY GET ONE: WHAT’S YOUR HOT-TAKE PREDICTION?

Timothy English: Anything but The Whale, all night long for me, please. Look, I love Brendan Fraser and I’m down for his renaissance, but yawn. Hong Chau should have been nominated for The Menu. It was the one movie I saw the trailer for and thought, oh boy: here we go. Sorry, I’m that guy. And if Austin Butler wins and gets up there with his now ridiculous Elvis drawl and they don’t drop him through a floor of the stage I’m going to be really disappointed.

Warren Cantrell: I could see Steven Spielberg sneaking in a win if EEAO and Banshees splits the field in the Director category (definitely possible). I’m not sure if I’m ready to predict a win for him, but if there’s any big upset on Sunday, I think it’s here.

Eric Melin: Agreed.

Joe Jarosz: Last year, I wrote ” If Will Smith wins, he’s going to have the speech that people talk about for years.” Now is it the speech people are talking about, not really, but come on. I’ve got big shoes to fill from last year’s hot take. I know there are like 20 more Avatar movies coming out, but this is the last year we’ll see it as a Best Picture nominee. Yes, it was a beautiful movie, but I felt like I was watching the first one just with water instead of trees.

Jonah Desneux: Whether it be for a bit or for real, Jimmy Kimmel will get slapped this year.

Best Picture

Top Gun: Maverick

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar: The Way of Water

Elvis

The Banshees of Inisherin

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Fabelmans

Triangle of Sadness

Tár

Women Talking

Best Actor

Austin Butler, Elvis
Bill Nighy, Living
Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin
Brendan Fraser, The Whale
Paul Mescal, Aftersun

Best Actress

Cate Blanchett, Tár

Ana de Armas, Blonde

Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie

Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans

Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Best Supporting Actor

Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin

Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway

Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans

Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin

Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Best Supporting Actress

Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Hong Chau, The Whale

Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin

Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Best Director

Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin 

Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once

Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans

Todd Field, Tár

Ruben Östlund, Triangle of Sadness 

Best Adapted Screenplay

All Quiet on the Western Front

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Living

Top Gun: Maverick

Women Talking

Best Original Screenplay

The Banshees of Inisherin

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Fabelmans

Tár

Triangle of Sadness

Best Documentary Feature

All That Breathes

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Fire of Love

A House Made of Splinters

Navalny

Best Animated Feature

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

The Sea Beast

Turning Red

Best International Film

All Quiet on the Western Front (Germany) 

Argentina, 1985 (Argentina) 

Close (Belgium)

EO (Poland) 

The Quiet Girl (Ireland)

Best Cinematography

All Quiet on the Western Front

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

Elvis

Empire of Light

Tár

Best Film Editing

The Banshees of Inisherin

Elvis

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Tár

Top Gun: Maverick

Best Music (Original Score)

All Quiet on the Western Front  

Babylon  

The Banshees of Inisherin

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Fabelmans

Best Music (Original Song)

“Applause” from Tell It Like a Woman

“Hold My Hand” from Top Gun: Maverick   

“Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever   

“Naatu Naatu” from RRR   

“This Is a Life” from Everything Everywhere All at Once

Best Production Design

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar: The Way of Water

Babylon

Elvis

The Fabelmans

Best Costume Design

Babylon

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Elvis

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

All Quiet on the Western Front

The Batman

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Elvis

The Whale

Best Sound

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar: The Way of Water

The Batman

Elvis

Top Gun: Maverick

Best Visual Effects

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar: The Way of Water

The Batman

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Top Gun: Maverick

Best Live Action Short Film

An Irish Goodbye

Ivalu

Le Pupille

Night Ride

The Red Suitcase

Best Animated Short Film

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

The Flying Sailor 

Ice Merchants

My Year of Dicks

An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It

Best Documentary Short Subject

The Elephant Whisperers

Haulout

How Do You Measure a Year?

The Martha Mitchell Effect

Stranger at the Gate

Look, you don’t have to tell me about it: I was there. There wasn’t a lot going on for movie-crazed kids in Phoenix, Arizona circa June 1987, so when something as significant as Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting a seven-foot-tall alien emerged, a kid like me would hear about it. Never mind that I was just six years old, or that to watch a movie like Predator I had to sneak out of Harry and the Hendersons and into a packed theater of sun-bleached suburbanites: certain moments transcend age or even total comprehension.

This was a special time, mind you. In March of that year, Oliver Stone’s Platoon took home the Oscar for Best Picture, with critics and audiences alike celebrating the deconstruction of any remaining mythology surrounding the Vietnam War and America’s unrivaled military dominance. Hollywood, already scraping the bottom of the idea barrel for whatever cocaine dust remained in the cracks and crevices, realized it had to move beyond cold war villains and other boogeymen of the past. A famous joke amongst executives and industry folk at the time revolved around the fact that Rocky Balboa, having already defeated communism, would have to fight E.T. in his next movie. Joke though it may have been, a spec script by screenwriting duo Jim and John Thomas took this to heart, and after it passed through Hollywood’s sausage maker and came out the other end, Predator was born.

A big-budget slasher flick wrapped in 80s action clothing, the film premiered on June 12, 1987, the same day Reagan challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Living in the twilight of a world where Oliver Stone had ripped the guts out of this country’s swagger, when presidents and premiers traded toothless remarks instead of artillery shells, Predator appeared at a very special moment. The time of pissing contests between nuclear powers was over, with an action hero like Schwarzenegger so lacking in true, honest competition that he had to search for it off-world.

It was a broad sea-change not just for Hollywood, but the world writ large, and audiences and one particular six-year-old in Phoenix took notice. Over the next 35 years, three (soon to be four) sequels and two franchise crossovers cashed in on the magnificent legacy of having no time to bleed. With the release of Prey this week, an examination of what makes a good Predator picture is nothing less than essential.

This isn’t as difficult as it may seem, either. Certain pervasive and undeniable features have always defined your standard Predator flick, and how they were deployed in the existing 4-film (no Alien crossovers) canon can be quantified by way of an 8-point evaluation system. These eight categories are as follows:

• Kill Count (Active Killings Seen Onscreen)

• Kill Frequency (The Average Time Between Kills)

• Total Predators (More Predators > Less Predators)

• Acting Quality (Judged on the EGOT Scale for Top-Line Speaking Cast)

• Box Office (Gross over Budget Quantifier)

• Critical Score (RT/Metacritic/Cinema Score)

• Hand-to-Hand Melee Encounters (As Percentage of Total Runtime)

• Body Mass (As Defined by the 8 Top-Line Speaking Cast)

Using these metrics, we can objectively rate each installment in a broader effort to understand what makes these pictures so special in the first place. Like the Yautja, this will be a cold, dispassionate, disciplined investigation; it is one that looks at what it means to fly a film under the Predator banner, and the lessons the franchise has taught the world over the years: lessons that inform this very study, starting with…

Kill Count & Frequency

Predator (1987)

The original installment in the Predator franchise was a lot of things, but in a hurry wasn’t one of them. 35 years ago, no one knew what the hell a Yautja was, so director John McTiernan and the script by the Thomas brothers had to ease the audience into things. Invoking slasher genre tropes, the film took an unknown but familiar “menace” quantity and pitted it against the toughest, burliest, most sleeve-averse group of bad-asses Hollywood could assemble at the time: led by Mr. Big-Dick-Energy himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Establishing the setting and the players took a bit of time, however, which left Predator with an astonishing 21 minutes and 30 seconds without a kill (Jim Hopper’s Green Beret squad bought it off-camera). Ho-ly shit did it get busy from there, though. Once Dutch (Schwarzenegger) spied the execution of a hostage from afar, his boys racked up a couple of quick and quiet sentry kills that cleared the way for an astonishing 9-in-1 murder maneuver by the good Major himself. This kicked off an absolute orgy of unrestrained 80s violence that knows no peer (in the franchise, or Hollywood writ large).

From 24:33 (the truck bomb) to 27:36 (“knock knock”) there was a remarkable 50 onscreen deaths. This bears repeating: 50 in three minutes and three seconds, which accounted for 81.9% of the movie’s overall kills. Many of these came in clusters, like Painless’ first pair at 0:25:19, or Billy’s (Sonny Landham) grenade triple at 0:26:52, but what’s remarkable is the relative parity of mayhem between squad mates. Like a practiced basketball team, the kills moved and rotated through them like a well-passed ball, with every player getting some shots in here and there.

Granted, the film took almost fifteen minutes off between the final kill from this mass culling to Hawkins’ (Shane Black) demise at 0:42:02, and in the near hour from then to the credits rolling, there was just 6 additional onscreen deaths. At first glance the numbers do not appear even, but with 61 onscreen kills in 103 minutes, the numbers don’t lie. Predator clocked in at 1 kill every 1.688 minutes (or 0.592 kills a minute) with a frequency rate of 99.245 seconds between murders.  

Predator 2

A buck forty-three and it was on, that’s how serious director Stephen Hopkins took this assignment. As already discussed, Predator (1987) waited a veritable lifetime to get to its first kill, but not the sequel: no ma’am. Not two minutes into this thing and Predator 2 was already plugging cops like holes in a dam. Five of the LAPD’s finest dropped before the 4-minute mark, and by the time Lt. Harrigan (Danny Glover) shot half a dozen holes into El Scorpio (Henry Kingi) at the 10-minute hash, it was already up to 17 confirmed onscreen. 17 at 10 minutes in! Granted, this isn’t the kind of pace any film can maintain without driving its audience into a full-bore mental collapse, so it did eventually slow its roll. Indeed, Predator 2 wisely let its script breathe after that first burst and took a little time to introduce its characters and the crime-crazy setting of 1997 for narrative’s sake.

But it didn’t last. No, this one came to party.

There was a 12-minute break in the mayhem before a Jamaican hit squad ambushed a Columbian drug lord, whose murder kicked off a Predator kill spree that saw another 6 baddies dropped in the span of just 2 minutes. By this point one could begin to see a pattern, with the “City Predator” (Kevin Peter Hall) finding conflict in L.A., hopping in to mix it up, only for Lt. Harrigan and co. to then show up shortly after to deal with the collateral damage.

Yet even these pauses between set-pieces weren’t without a little background action, and this kept the audience’s bloodlust satiated at a remarkable pace (see also: Danny and King Willie’s murders). While there were clusters of kills that shortened the average time between executions (i.e., the police shootout at the beginning, the subway massacre, the dismantling of Keyes’ squad), this movie never let its audience go more than 16 minutes without a kill, with an average of 136.5 seconds between onscreen deaths.

That’s a frequency rate of a kill every 2 minutes and 16.5 seconds, which is just absolutely remarkable considering the overall average (42 total onscreen kills in 102 minutes is one kill every 2.42 minutes, or .411 kills a minute). Granted, it didn’t quite add up to its predecessor’s rate, yet as we’ll see in a moment, this wasn’t an easy bar to clear by any means.

Predators

Though pretty damn decent as far as the creativity of kills and its willingness to lean into its R rating, this one lacked where it counted the most: kill count and frequency. A decent entry into the Predator canon and fronted by an absolutely shredded Adrien Brody, there just wasn’t enough dead meat available on this alien hunting preserve to put it in competition with the rest of the franchise.

Although Predators started strong with the blind parachute jump and the unfortunate soul whose canopy didn’t deploy at 03:08, over 24 minutes passed before the next burst of mayhem. But the original Predator went over 21 minutes without a kill, how can one fault this for following in its hallowed footsteps? Well, for starters, because it course-corrected with just 6 kills during the film’s first action set-piece (compared to the OG’s 50), and racked up a total of just 18 kills in all.

Which…well…look: Predators did a hell of a lot right, paying homage to the franchise with several thematic and visual call-backs to the original, yet as far as kills and kill frequency, this one was wanting. Director Nimrod Antal made a valiant go of things by weaving in the deaths of Cuchillo (Danny Trejo) and Mombasa (Mahershala Ali) between the hunting dog and Noland (Laurence Fishburne) set pieces, but the gaps were just too large.

And while this one’s heart was in the right place, and proved to be a helluva fun watch, the stats just don’t lie. With just 18 onscreen murders in 101 minutes (two minutes shorter than the original, and one shorter than its predecessor), this one had a frequency of 5.46 minutes between kills, and an overall average of just 0.17 kills a minute, far below the last two installments, and miles behind the most recent entry.

The Predator

Finally, a Predator movie that realized this franchise requires more than just heroes and Predators: it needs anonymous dead-meat cannon fodder to keep things lively between scalpings. The first one had a camp full of South American soldiers, the second had Jamaican and Columbian narcos, and this one had private military stooges. This allowed for that perfect balance of main character attrition and near-constant blood-letting that gives the audience the kills it wants without depleting the main roster too quickly.

Like all previous installments with the exception of the gleefully impatient Predator 2, this one didn’t really kick into high gear for 20+ minutes. A couple of jungle kills aside right off the top, it wasn’t until 0:28:51 that the audience got a proper tour through the Predator abattoir. 16 baddies dropped in the next 9 minutes, with a few spurts to keep things lively until the next major bloodletting, which started at 1:15:12. Oh, and if you haven’t seen it or don’t remember, it went ever so fucking hard from there: racking up 17 kills in the next 3 minutes and 46 seconds (including a delightful 3-in-1 jeep decapitation maneuver).

It was just magnificent, and it amounted to 52 total kills in just 100 tidy minutes, with an overall average of 1 kill every 1.92 minutes (or 0.52 kills a minute), with an overall average frequency of 108.23 seconds between kills.

So, what does that data tell us?

Although there were some interesting variances in the figures, the data showed that more kills translated not just into a better overall average for the film, but as a boon to its frequency criteria as well. And while a movie like Predator 2 seemed to have better spacing between its kills (including starting strong from the jump), the fact that it came in a full nine bodies lower than The Predator dashed any chances of it moving ahead of its 2018 counterpart in the analysis.

Thus, when evaluating the four existing Predator films based on kill count and frequency, the ranking in this table sets them in order in both categories.

Total Predators

Sticking with the numbers, this next category was even more simple. This wasn’t hard: more Predators is better than less Predators. Fact.

As Mae West once said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,” and that’s a sentiment this purely scientific study felt compelled to get behind. The breakdown follows thus:

The original Predator was appropriately titled in the singular, with the onscreen appearance of just one Yautja: the Jungle Hunter.

A few short years later Predator 2 asked how many Predators is too many? To the benefit of audiences and mankind, they settled on 10.

Don’t believe me? Count ‘em!

There was the City Hunter that Lt. Harrigan battled, along with nine visible shipmates that appeared after the plucky human had smote their comrade. It was a brief appearance, but an important one that helped establish a wider universe and mythos for these aliens.

And while Predators did alright for itself with an entirely respectable count of four (three Super Predators, one Classic), it represented a step down for the franchise in this particular category. This was a dubious tradition the 2018 installment held true to with just two onscreen Predators, one Super/Ultimate and one Classic.

Which…look, having a bunch of Predators in your Predator film won’t save it outright, but it won’t hurt it, either. When in doubt: more Predators.

Acting Quality

If one evaluates the top-line acting talent of any given movie on the EGOT (Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony) scale and assigns point values to each award, then this also becomes quite easy to analyze. If we assign One point for a Grammy, two points for an Emmy, and three for either an Oscar or Tony (and a consolation point for an Oscar nomination without a win), then the data does the work for us, here. To wit:

Predator (1987)

Predator might have had the whole governor thing covered, but as far as awards hardware, it was lacking. Only the Austrian Oak himself represented in this category, with just a single EGOT-win under his belt (an executive producing Primetime Emmy for 2014’s Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series winner Years of Living Dangerously). But that’s it!

Predator 2 (1990)

A sneaky-competitive candidate, Predator 2 was more viable in this category than one might expect. Gary Busey’s nomination for The Buddy Holly Story gave this one a point, and another three for Danny Glover’s Academy Award as a recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Don’t look now, though, because Ruben Blades has nine, count ‘em, NINE Grammys! Mr. Blades’ contributions to Latin pop brings the total score for Predator 2 up to a whopping 13, where it enjoyed the top spot for only a handful of seconds…right before the awards buzzsaw that is Predators ripped through it like a Yautja Smart Disc.

Predators (2010)

Nothing less than an embarrassment of riches in this category, Predators had an EGOT Murder’s Row for its top-line cast. Laurence Fishburne alone racked up 10 points with three Emmy wins, one Tony, and an Oscar nomination. Oh, and in case you forgot, fucking two-time Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali was in this movie, too, accounting for eight total points (two Oscar Wins and an Emmy). If you combine that with Adrien Brody’s Oscar win, and Topher Grace’s Emmy, that’s a whopping 23 points for Predators!

Spoiler alert, none of the other three films come anywhere near this number. Respect.

The Predator (2018)

This is a real “A-for-effort” scenario. There were some fine actors and artists in The Predator, several of whom have already locked down awards hardware, but the fact that this picture has had only had a handful of years to earn its cast subsequent statues handicapped it. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine Alfie Allen, Jacob Tremblay, Trevante Rhodes, and even Thomas Jane getting something on the EGOT spectrum one day, but alas, it has not yet come to pass. Only the Emmys from Sterling K. Brown (two) and Keegan-Michael Key (one) allowed for points in this category, which saw The Predator with just 6 total.

Box Office

Money walks and bullshit walks, amirite? Although a Predator film shouldn’t be judged solely on its box office haul, the worldwide gross against production budget formula is an undeniable load bearing point upon which everything else can be evaluated within a larger analytical matrix. According to IMDb the details of all four installments are as follows:

Naturally, some of this was just a matter of good vs. bad timing. Predator 2, for example, came out in late-November 1990, where it had to do battle against awards juggernaut Dances with Wolves and one of the all-time highest grossing movies in history, Home Alone. On the flip side, Predator released in a somewhat thin action market in June 1987, where its primary competition was Beverly Hills Cop 2, released almost a month earlier. Similarly, when Predators dropped over the Fourth of July weekend in 2010, the other studios seemed to have abandoned the traditionally audience-rich weekend to its own devices. Perhaps it was the mistaken assumption that June drops like The A-Team, Knight and Day, and Jonah Hex would still be stretching their legs, but aside from Inception (released July 15), Predators didn’t have any real genre competition until the August 3 release of The Expendables.

And then you get The Predator, which really didn’t have any excuses to hide behind. Released on September 5, 2018, its only competition that weekend was The Nun, and neither saw any interlopers nudging in on their genre’s demographics until September 28’s release of Venom. Prior to September, a mostly dead summer that hadn’t seen a big hit since July 6’s Aquaman should have teed The Predator up for big returns from audiences starved for action, yet the movie just didn’t bring them out.

Thus, at the end of the day, all one has is the figures. This put Predator in the resounding lead in this category, followed by Predators, Predator 2, and The Predator (in that order).

Critical Score

This one’s a real kick to the teeth, no doubt. Although a few forward-thinking critics harbored some degree of appreciation for the original, the press traditionally haven’t been all that kind to the franchise. Roger Ebert admired the original up to a point, writing, “Predator moves at a breakneck pace, it has strong and simple characterizations, it has good location photography and terrific special effects, and it supplies what it claims to supply: an effective action movie.” He was less enthusiastic about the follow-up, however, writing, “The dialogue is foul and clinical, and the special effects, while expensive, are not interesting.”

And while Rita Kempley was a bit warmer on Predator 2, writing that director Stephen Hopkins, “keeps the pedal to the metal but never allows the explosive action to minimize the actors,” far more fell into the Ebert camp. Which is to say that in most cases, critics seem to spend much more time thinking about the world-building logistics of these films, and less about the escapist fun of watching giant bipedal extraterrestrials underestimating human bad-asses. This theme came up frequently in Ebert’s 2010 review of Predators, where he wrote, “Who runs this game preserve, and why?…Is it a wise use of resources to transport several mammals untold light years through space just so you can watch them getting their asses predatored?”

Yes, Roger. Yes it is.

And while the most recent installment, The Predator, did suffer under the constraints of a studio edit hack job (and a poorly conceived subplot concerned with autism), many of the same criticisms surfaced once again. Even so, the data is important, and thus we have the following:

Hand-to-Hand Melee Encounters

With one decision, just one exasperated resignation, a cherished and essential tradition found life. And it made sense, too. Just put yourself in Billy’s boots in Predator…go ahead, I’ll wait.  

By the time he ditched the radio and his rifle (1:14:25), Billy had not only encountered an actual murderous alien, but he had confirmed his worst fears in the most terrible way imaginable. This is like moving into a spooky mansion, suspecting that it’s haunted, and then watching actual ghosts slaughter your whole family.

The fragile human psyche just can’t be expected to handle something this off-book, and if there’s one thing all Predator films have in common, it’s a sense that every Earthling has a breaking point. For Billy, it was hearing the tortured screams of Dillon (Carl Weathers), whose death seemed to convince Billy that his own was inevitable. Tired of running, of being afraid, of relying on flimsy technology that seemed to have no bearing on the issue at hand, Billy stripped down and ditched everything except a fuck-off-big machete.

And by all accounts, Yautja really, really dig this. In Predator, the Jungle Hunter made short work of Billy hand-to-hand (1:15:40), yet seemed to enjoy that so much that he went back for seconds with Dutch, abandoning everything in his armaments rig except melee weapons. If we combine these two encounters, we get 75 seconds (Billy’s brief stand) + four minutes and 47 seconds between the Jungle Hunter and Dutch (starting with the former’s abandonment of his plasmacaster and ending with the arming of his wrist bomb). Combined, that’s six minutes and two seconds of hand-to-hand fighting in the original.

This seems like a healthy amount (5.8% of the overall runtime), yet it paled in comparison to what’s blessedly given to audiences in Predator 2, which devoted most of the third act’s back half to a melee duel. From 1:27:03, when Harrigan lost his laser-scoped hand cannon, to the conclusion of the spaceship blade fight at 1:35:25, the City Hunter and the good lieutenant spent 8 minutes and 22 seconds going at it hand to hand. And that’s not even taking into account the absolutely metal way King Willie went out when confronted by the “demon” he tried to warn Harrigan about. Like Billy, when King Willie was confronted by the monster that tickled his sixth sense, he more or less went insane and decided to square up with nothing more than a sword. Again, like Billy, the Yautja made quick work of his foe, but at least found a little respect for the species if this franchise trope is to be believed. These two encounters combined for a staggering eight minutes and 44 seconds. This represented 8.6% of the film, a very respectable number.

And while Predators paid tribute to the tradition of honorable combat between human and space hunter, it left far less room for it. Like Billy, King Willie, and Lt. Harrigan, by the time Hanzo (Louis Ozawa) faced off against the Falconer Super Predator, he’d had about all he could take. Once again, we saw a noble warrior tired of running, tired of being scared and waiting for death to come: deciding instead to make a fucking reservation.

And again, the Predator in question seemed to really vibe on this. It was a brief duel, yet a magnificent one, starting at 1:17:23 when Hanzo nudged the katana out of its scabbard, ending with his and his opponent’s death at 1:19:19. And while Royce did go mostly hand-to-hand in his final match-up with the Super Predator, Isabelle used her rifle to seal the deal, eliminating this encounter from consideration in this category. Just under two minutes out of 101 total represents 1.7% of the total film, and put this one firmly in 3^rd place, where it will remain due to the shameful near-abandonment of this trope in The Predator!

And really, there’s no excuse for this. The closest this film came to an honest-to-goodness hand-to-hand battle took place between the two Predators, and even this was suspect (OG Predator opened the tussle with a plasmacaster blast). Starting at 56:45 and wrapping up just 51 seconds later with an admittedly spectacular decapitation, this one gave audiences the least amount of hand-to-hand action out of the bunch (less than one percent of the total runtime).

Body Mass

“It’s important to pack on mass!”

-Mac, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

The last and most difficult category to assess with strict scientific precision, yet there’s hope for a fair accounting using a few baseline data points. To do so we start with Predator and the good Major himself. During his late-70s bodybuilding heyday, Schwarzenegger at 6’2’’ came in at 235 pounds in-competition, and roughly 260 when not. And while Arnold wasn’t in prime bodybuilding shape in 1986-87, he has remarked that he slimmed down roughly 25 pounds for his role in Predator, speculating that a special forces soldier would need to carry less weight. Thus, while his overall muscle mass didn’t compare to his competition days, assuming his resting Hollywood weight was slightly heavier than his body-building days, this put him at 265 pre-shoot, and 240 during.

Using this figure and Schwarzenegger’s height as our body mass Rosetta Stone, we can extrapolate reasonable estimations for the eight top-line speaking cast thus:

Using Arnold’s lean 240 lb. frame at 6’2’’ as the measuring stick, we can give Ventura an extra 10 pounds to account for two additional inches and less tone (using that same figuring for Landham at 6’3’’ and 240). At 5’5’’, Elpidia Carrillo gets a generous assessment of 110 pounds, as does Shane Black at 5’10’’ and 165, though what may first seem like a drastic muscle deficiency may well be the victim of comparison bias. Taking conservative estimates all around, this one still comes in at a cumulative mass of 1660 pounds for the top-line acting talent, a figure its sequel did indeed take a run at…

Unfortunately, there were no competitive athletes with archived stats top-lining Predator 2, so there wasn’t as solid of a cast baseline, here, yet the internet came through on heights, and the 8-actor sample remained constant. An impressive 6’4’’, Danny Glover was flat-out cut in this one, showing off his rippling midsection early in the picture during a shirt-change. If we call him 215, then Adam Baldwin’s thinner frame at the same height would put him at around 205, 5 pounds less than the older Kent McCord at 6’2’’, and Robert Davi at the same height. 6’ Bill Paxton never looked leaner than he did here, and while he didn’t pack on a ton of mass for the role, he looked like a healthy 175, 10 pounds less than Ruben Blades at 5’10’’. Rounding things out, Busey appeared to be a hanging a husky 230 or so on his 6’ frame, and 5’9’’ Maria Conchita Alonso, still in Running Man shape, probably came in at about 120 pounds. Although it wasn’t all muscle, mass is mass, bringing Predator 2 in at 1550 pounds, just one Elpidia Carrillo away from the top spot.

Finally: another competitive athlete in the cast! Predators featured former MMA champion Oleg Taktarov, who in his prime sported a fighting weight of 210 lbs. at 6’ tall. More than a decade removed from his octagon days, though still in decent shape, Taktarov seemed to be at around 225 in this picture, allowing for a decent baseline to evaluate the rest of the cast. An inch taller though considerably leaner and shredded, Brody looked to be a healthy 190 or so, right about what Mahershala was at 6’2’’ (though he appeared a bit less cut, and is accounted for at 185). Walton Goggins at 5’10’’ and Topher Grace at 5’11’’ seemed wiry and sneaky tough, but neither appeared to have packed on mass enough to get them over 155 or 160. Louis Ozawa at a trim yet beefy 185 balanced out Alice Braga’s diminutive stature at 5’7’’ and what looks (generously) to be about 135 pounds. And while Laurence Fishburne certainly did his part at what seemed to be about 230 lbs. on a 6’ frame, this one still ended up solidly in third place with a combined 1445 pounds of mass.

There was real hope for this one. Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, and Sterling K. Brown all have frames capable of stacking mass, yet even they couldn’t save this one’s overall category score against a pre-teen kid and 5’4’’ Olivia Munn. Jacob Tremblay couldn’t have been more than 90 pounds in this flick, and Munn was lucky to clock in at anything more than 110 without rocks in her pockets. And while Thomas Jane certainly seemed as if he was doing his part at what appears to be about 185 at 5’11’’, slight builds on Keegan-Michael Key and Augusto Aguilera ran this one out of serious consideration. Coming in at a combined 1340 pounds, net, that’s good enough for last in the overall ranking, and lightyears behind the OG vis a vis packing on mass.

So, it really was Predator in a runaway, here. The combination of rigorous off-screen training, diarrhea, and late-80s big dick energy brought the principle cast to a level of fitness and mass not seen before or since. Indeed, it was such a remarkable achievement that none of the subsequent installments have ever seriously challenged the original on these terms, though Predator 2 did have a stunning collection of tall actors that came within spitting distance of it.

Final Analysis

This investigation began with the supposition that data-driven analytics could determine not just the necessary qualifications for a great Predator movie, but that one could establish the best installment of the Predator franchise by studying these same metrics. Sticking to these figures and applying a straight mathematical average to each category’s ranking, the results are as follows:

So it is indeed the original Predator at the summit! If the data proved anything, however, it’s the fact that the original’s place on top of the franchise heap is no mistake or fluke. You don’t have to pitch a perfect game to beat the OG, as even Schwarzenegger’s best movie failed to lock down the first position in several categories. Deficient in awards hardware, total Predators, and even hand-to-hand combat, it still had enough gas to get it on the podium’s preferred position, though.

Yet that spot is not assured in perpetuity, as this investigation has provided a clear roadmap to unseat the champion. This seems easy enough: take the best parts of the original, improve upon them while increasing the stakes, and cruise to the bank. Although some sequels improved on things by adding more Predators, bringing in better actors, and increasing the hand-to-hand combat quotients, too often the essentials got lost in the shuffle of studio notes and focus group rewrites. This week we’ll all find out if Prey takes heed of these lessons, but if any enterprising, interested party is curious, the data is there for the taking.

This week saw the release of the nominees for the 2021 film season, and to no one’s surprise, the people who care about this stuff had some thoughts. Those nominated for the 94^th annual Academy Awards represent an interesting mix of critical darlings, big-budget crowd pleasers, and everything in between, with The Power of the Dog leading the proverbial pack with 12 nominations (pun absolutely intended).

There are several interesting contenders in the wings threatening to keep these races competitive, however, along with more than a few head-scratchers even the most seasoned minds at Scene-Stealers can’t quite explain. A full list of the nominations is at the bottom, but to get a sense of what the Scene-Stealers crew is thinking about this crop of nominees, look no further.

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST SURPRISE OR SNUB?

Timothy English: Hard to say a film with 10 nominations has a snub but Denis Villeneuve stands out in the Director category. And while I’m not sure I’d call it a snub, I’m actually surprised Spider-Man No Way Home didn’t sneak into the Best Picture category, especially after the failed attempt to create a Most Popular Movie award. Being the Ricardos probably shouldn’t have gotten 3 acting noms, but it’s hard to resist familiar names.

Warren Cantrell: Everyone is talking about Villeneuve getting snubbed for Best Director (and rightly so), but the fact that The Green Knight didn’t get a single nomination blows my goddamned mind. It almost feels aggressive at this point, like someone at the Academy just threw all those nominating ballots away because David Lowery pants’d them in middle school.

Jonah Desneux: The Green Knight getting shut out of all the technical awards is this year’s biggest blunder. With those visual elements, David Lowery must have pissed someone off to not receive any recognition. No offense to Free Guy, but how can anyone say that the Dumb Giant CGI Ryan Reynolds is better than the Roaming Giants in The Green Knight?

Logan Van Winkle: As with any year, these nominations have a lot to celebrate and a lot to complain about. For me, the biggest surprise of the day was Kristen Stewart getting in for Spencer. When it was released, Stewart seemed like the frontrunner for the Best Actress Oscar and yet, as we got closer, it seemed more and more likely that she would not even be nominated. It was a very pleasant surprise to hear her name called. Biggest snub of the day? Mike Faist missing out on a Best Supporting Actor nomination for West Side Story. I love J.K. Simmons but he has no business making this line-up for a mediocre performance in a mediocre movie (and I’m a Sorkin fan!) Beyond that, I have to shout out how excited I am to see Andrew Garfield nominated for Best Actor for Tick, Tick… BOOM! If I had a ballot, he would have my vote.

Christian Alec Ramos: Biggest surprise was J.K. Simmons and Judi Dench getting in. I’m shook. Lady Gaga and Jared Leto were shit in a shit movie: there’s no way that was a snub. 

Joe Jarosz: I bought into the hype that Spider-Man: No Way Home would get a best picture nod. But also, nothing for The Harder They Fall or In the Heights? All three were great ensemble pieces and I was surprised all three were left out.

Eric Melin: Neither Lady Gaga nor Jared Leto getting nominated for House of Gucci is hilarious. Those “snubs” and Ben Affleck’s “snub” for playing the good uncle in Clooney’s run-of-the-mill nostalgic piece The Tender Bar—I don’t think those should even be called snubs. It’s just that dumb narratives were being built up around them because of their star power: “Oh Ben is being honest about his failures and his love life in interviews…let’s start the comeback narrative.” Ugh. A real snub? Vincent Lindon should have been nominated for the single most pained performance of the year in Titane, a transportive, emotional, surreal movie from Julia Ducournau that was also snubbed for Best Foreign Language film.

WHAT ARE YOUR BEST PICTURE PREDICTIONS? WHO IS THE FAVORITE, AND WHAT’S A LONGSHOT DARKHORSE YOU LIKE?

Christian Alec Ramos: The Power of the Dog all the way but my heart is West Side Story. Netflix better get me a copy on Criterion STAT.

Eric Melin: For the most part, it’s such a weak field. The best two movies nominated are The Power of the Dog and Licorice Pizza, and since PTA’s newest is such a minor lark compared with the rest of his filmography, I’m going with Jane Campion FTW. It’s smart, subtle, assured, and serious.

Warren Cantrell: If only because they got the most nominations (including in the “big-5”), The Power of the Dog has to be the prohibitive favorite. It’s got pedigree, relevant social themes, period-piece shine, and the colossal power of Netflix’s marketing machine behind it. Belfast is the only real spoiler option for it, and even that seems like a longshot at this point (its momentum is ebbing).

Logan Van Winkle: This has been a two-horse race between The Power of the Dog and Belfast for a few months now. With The Power of the Dog leading nominations, I am inclined to think it is all but locked up in its favor now. Though if I am getting crazy and picking a dark horse to win, I would have to go with Don’t Look Up! It might seem insane, considering it only garnered four nominations and is a wildly divisive film, but it landed in Best Editing (Belfast couldn’t do that!) and Best Original Screenplay. Hollywood loves to pat themselves on the back and no choice would be a harder pat than this overlong film about an important issue. You can bet that if we hear “Don’t Look Up” following the words, “And the Oscar goes to…” I will promptly close my Twitter app before everyone sets it ablaze.

Timothy English: I feel like this is The Power of the Dog year. And Benedict Cumberbatch. They’ve been front runners pretty much since Day 1. Seems like the easy choice for the Academy. Checks off a lot of boxes on the “What is a Best Picture” checklist. Licorice Pizza may have a shot if it gets enough legit eyeballs on it.

Jonah Desneux: The Power of The Dog is this year’s front runner for a reason. It’s rare that Best Picture actually goes to the best film of the year, but Campion is going to pull it off. This one’s for you, Bronco Henry! As far as a dark house, maybe Scorsese’s endorsement for Nightmare Alley gives the noir some hope. It’s hard to imagine Guillermo del Toro taking home the top prize right after The Shape of Water, but it would make for a fun end on Oscar night.

Joe Jarosz: This year it is hard to predict a favorite. Nothing is standing out right now, but Nightmare Alley feels like a dark horse, even with Guillermo del Toro behind the camera.

Kate Valliere: I’ve seen nothing. House of Gucci was a bummer. Spencer was a bummer.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE CATEGORY OF NOMINEES?

Warren Cantrell: The Supporting Actress category is a tough one to handicap, which always makes for an interesting race to follow in the Cantrell household. Dunst seems to be a prohibitive favorite at this point, but almost nothing would surprise me come Oscar night. Dench is an easy pick for lazy Academy voters, yet DeBose has been cleaning up in critics circles and would be a peace offering to Spielberg and West Side Story (which will likely go home empty-handed otherwise).

Joe Jarosz: Animated. All are great films, although I would have switched out Flee with Ron’s Gone Wrong. Fingers crossed The Mitchells vs. the Machines takes home the win.

Christian Alec Ramos: Animated picture is lit.

Logan Van Winkle: Most years, my favorite category of nominees ends up being one of the Screenplay categories. This year, I’d have to say the best category of nominees is Best Animated Feature. There is not a bad movie in the bunch! The movie that most people would say is the category’s weakest, Raya and the Last Dragon, is actually my favorite of the nominees. I understand people get tired of Disney’s dominance in the category and I understand the frustration. Admittedly, it would have been nice to see something like The Summit of the Gods replace Luca. Even so, the five films in contention are all worthy of recognition.

Eric Melin: Probably Production Design. There were some truly beautifully designed movies this year and that’s a strong list.

Jonah Desneux: Production Design has heavy hitters across the board. Dune, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and West Side Story have vastly different looks that are outstanding in their own way. Each could easily win any other year, making this year difficult to predict.

Timothy English: Loving the Cinematography category this year. A lot of great looking films this year and I think the nominees this year truly exemplify the crop as a whole. This one could be anyone’s to win. Not sure there is a clean-cut favorite.

WHAT WILL BE THE BIG NARRATIVE GOING INTO THIS YEAR’S OSCARS?

Jonah Desneux: It was only four years ago that the discourse on if Netflix should be eligible for awards ran rampant online. Since then, the face of streaming has had 7 best picture nominations. This year they’ll take home their first Best Picture win with The Power of the Dog cementing their credibility.

Christian Alec Ramos: All we’ll hear about is the Campion vs. Spielberg and whose winning Best Actress. 

Eric Melin: 28 Years Later, the Oscar zombie sequel: Campion (The Piano) vs. Spielberg (Schindler’s List), the Best Director rematch. She’s a shoo-in to beat him this time. Also, Flee being nominated for doc, animated, foreign language – never happened before!

Timothy English: The diversity of films will probably get a nice big fat pat on the back from everyone in attendance. It’s nice to see a film like CODA get its share of deserved nominations. I’m sure a lot of people will be super impressed that Kristen Stewart got a nomination despite the fact she isn’t a very good actor.

Warren Cantrell: Ratings, hosting, and shaking off the stink of last year’s debacle. The Oscars really do seem to be at a crossroads in terms of viewership and cultural relevancy. Ratings are going to continue declining: the landscape of the format all but guarantees that. The question is whether the Academy will continue trying to tweak things to fight this inevitable death, or return to a sense of normalcy to placate the few die-hards still watching live?  

Joe Jarosz: If Will Smith wins, he’s going to have the speech that people talk about for years.

Logan Van Winkle: The big narrative going into this year is: Will the Fresh Prince become the Fresh King? Will Smith has been entertaining audiences in all sorts of ways for over thirty years. He has had a few shots at Best Actor but has never sealed the deal. This year seems like it could be his year. After a string of critical failures for most of the 2010s, I, for one, will be happy to see one of our last genuine movie stars get recognition from the industry in the form of a little gold man.

IF YOU WERE AN OSCAR LOBBYIST, WHO WOULD YOU BE CAMPAIGNING HARD FOR, AND WHY?

Joe Jarosz: Will Smith. Was he robbed for Ali? Maybe. He faces off against Denzel again 20 years later (Training Day vs Ali was 2002, funny timing).

Timothy English: Troy Kotsur for CODA. I thought there were a lot of great performances but he really stood out to me. He was funny, endearing, and his scenes really popped when he was on screen. I’d also love to see Flee cause a ruckus.

Jonah Desneux: I’d give my all to have Flee break down barriers in the animation category, like Parasite did for Best Picture in 2020. This category desperately needs a shake-up from the same Disney death fight year after year.

Eric Melin: Flee – How cool would it be for it to win Animated and Documentary? (Drive My Car will win Foreign.)

Warren Cantrell: Penelope Cruz for Parallel Mothers, if only to encourage people to seek out and watch Parallel Mothers, which is exquisite.

Logan Van Winkle: If I had any sort of sway with voters, I would be lobbying for West Side Story to win Best Picture. “The story has already won Best Picture,” “Spielberg shouldn’t have remade a classic,” “The movie was a box office failure.” SAVE IT! I do not care! West Side Story was the best film of 2021. In a career full of masterpieces, Spielberg has added yet another to the list. From beginning to end, Uncle Steven puts us on his back and shows us how good cinema can truly be when you have someone who cares behind the camera. No disrespect to any of the other films nominated, but I do not understand how one can watch Mike Faist snapping and dancing his way through New York City and not leave the theater wanting to give the film all 23 Oscars – eligibility be damned!

Christian Alec Ramos: The entire West Side Story team.

LET’S SAY YOU ONLY GET ONE: WHAT’S YOUR HOT-TAKE PREDICTION?

Eric Melin: Good lord…Kristen Stewart for Spencer! There was so much “controversy” over her getting snubbed at SAG (which awarded Gaga, Leto, and Affleck, BTW cuz they are a huge body with terrible taste) – Oscar voters will give her the win just to show how much cooler they are than SAG. Runner up: Chastain as Tammy Faye. Why? Colman, Cruz, and Kidman already got theirs!

Christian Alec Ramos: Nicole Kidman is a snooze in Being the Ricardos.

Kate Valliere: None, though I think it’s weird that the Being the Ricardos folks led the marketing campaign with Kidman instead of Simmons, who is an actual draw to watch it.

Warren Cantrell: Kenneth Branagh is going to win Best Director and it isn’t even close. Not that he was the best director of the year (or even amongst the nominees), but vote splits are going to drop this one in his lap.

Jonah Desneux: After all its acclaim and seven nominations, West Side Story will leave the night without a single statue.

Logan Van Winkle: Despite most people assuming that either Paul Thomas Anderson will win for Licorice Pizza or that Kenneth Branagh will win for Belfast, I will go on the record saying that Don’t Look Up will win Best Original Screenplay. Should it? Absolutely not. Will that stop The Academy? Absolutely not.

Joe Jarosz: Another low-ratings broadcast is going to force the Academy to add another category that brings more viewers in 2023.

Timothy English: One of the least interesting and inspiring Best Actress categories in a while. Kristen Stewart will win the award that should probably go to Penelope Cruz. Viewing numbers will continue to drop. Mainstream audiences will complain they’ve never seen anything nominated and next year they’ll add a special category for Disney/Marvel, and The Rock will host and announce all awards.

Best Picture

Belfast
CODA
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story

Best Actor

Javier Bardem, Being the Ricardos
Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog
Andrew Garfield, Tick, Tick…Boom!
Will Smith, King Richard
Denzel Washington, The Tragedy of Macbeth

Best Actress

Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter
Penelope Cruz, Parallel Mothers
Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos
Kristen Stewart, Spencer

Best Supporting Actor

Ciarán Hinds, Belfast
Troy Kotsur, CODA
Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog
J.K. Simmons, Being the Ricardos
Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

Best Supporting Actress

Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter
Ariana DeBose, West Side Story
Judi Dench, Belfast
Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog
Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard

Best Director

Kenneth Branagh, Belfast
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car
Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
Steven Spielberg, West Side Story

Best Adapted Screenplay

CODA
Drive My Car
Dune
The Lost Daughter
The Power of the Dog

Best Original Screenplay

Belfast
Don’t Look Up
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
The Worst Person in the World

Best Documentary Feature

Ascension
Attica
Flee
Summer of Soul
Writing With Fire

Best Animated Feature

Encanto
Flee
Luca
The Mitchells vs. the Machines
Raya and the Last Dragon

Best International Film

Drive My Car (Japan)
Flee (Denmark)
The Hand of God (Italy)
Yanna (Bhutan)
The Worst Person in the World (Norway)

Best Cinematography

Dune
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
The Tragedy of Macbeth
West Side Story

Best Film Editing

Don’t Look Up
Dune
King Richard
The Power of the Dog
Tick, Tick…Boom!

Best Music (Original Score)

Don’t Look Up
Dune
Encanto
Parallel Mothers
The Power of the Dog

Best Music (Original Song)

“Be Alive,” King Richard, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Dixson 
“Dos Oroguitos,” Encanto, Lin-Manuel Miranda
“Down to Joy,” Belfast, Van Morrison
“No Time To Die,” No Time To Die, Billie Eilish, Finneas O’Connell
“Somehow You Do,” Four Good Days, Diane Warren

Best Production Design

Dune
Nightmare Alley
Power
The Tragedy of Macbeth
West Side Story

Best Costume Design

Cruella
Cyrano
Dune
Nightmare Alley
West Side Story

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Coming 2 America
Cruella
Dune
The Eyes of Tammy Faye
House of Gucci

Best Sound

Belfast
Dune
No Time To Die
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story

Best Visual Effects

Dune
Free Guy
No Time To Die
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Spider-Man: No Way Home

Best Live Action Short Film

Ala Kacchu – Take and Run
The Dress
The Long Goodbye
On My Mind
Please Hold

Best Animated Short Film

Affairs of the Art
Bestia
Boxballet
Robin Robin
The Windshield Wiper

Best Documentary Short Subject

Audible
Lead Me Home
The Queen of Basketball
Three Songs of Benazir
When We Were Bullies

Iceman, written by John Drimmer and Chip Proser, directed by Fred Schepisi, hit theaters in the spring of 1984. It’s a quiet, contemplative sci-fi drama about a perfectly preserved prehistoric human discovered in the arctic and it made a little over $7M at the box office, garnering modest praise before fading from memory. Even now, its pages on Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes are curiously barren.

Trapped in a block of ice, the 40,000-year-old specimen is miraculously resuscitated as the film opens—a science-fiction setup that’s almost purely logistical. For that reason I’m not really interested in dwelling on the genre question. The film is technically science-fiction, and it’s often the case that the best examples of that genre defy conventions. But the reality is that the sci-fi aspect here serves as a springboard for a story about the past, and so it’s the past I’d rather focus on.

Less than a decade after the film’s release, the remains of what’s come to be known as “Ötzi”—Europe’s oldest natural mummy—were discovered by a hiker in the Alps (a stretch of them, in particular, located on the historically-contested border between Italy and Austria). Mummy being the operative word. The specimen in this case was not frozen, unchanged, but his body, his clothing, and the possessions he carried at the time of his death were all nevertheless remarkably preserved. His death was first assumed to be the result of exposure until his injuries and toolkit were examined, basically presenting a picture of a violent life that met an equally violent end. But like the genre question earlier, I’m not really interested in how he ended up there.

Iceman, a German-Italian-Austrian co-production, written and directed by Felix Randau and released in 2017, offers a decidedly cinematic interpretation of that man’s life, whoever he was, and the tragic course of events that led him to die there in the snow.

People wonder why there are so many movies and shows to come out in recent years set in the 1980s, and I think, aside from pure, shameless nostalgia, a major reason for that particular trend is that the 80s roughly marks the tail-end of a kind of romantic, pre-internet sense of loneliness that’s especially useful to storytelling. Stories about missed connections and great distances took on a graver, more poetic dimension than is even possible in a contemporary setting.

My 10-year high school reunion came and went a few years back, and, as far as I know, almost nobody showed up. Maybe a couple dozen people out of a graduating class of over seven hundred. If asked to explain it, I’d feel pretty confident in saying it’s largely a function of social media having simply obliterated any sense of mystery concerning the people you used to know. They’re almost always accessible to you now. What’s the point of a reunion in the face of that? It’s a little demoralizing to consider, but our lives have become less dramatically compelling in a lot of ways because the kind of loneliness that we experience is, more often than not, simpler to solve in practical terms and decidedly vista-free.

A sea voyage is more fraught than an international flight. Miles of distance between family and friends and years between points of contact is inherently more dramatic than a missed call. And a phone ringing in an empty house without caller ID to make sure you know it happened has greater stakes than a log of missed calls and follow-up messages, the device receiving them with you at all times. I’m not making a judgment about it one way or the other. I yearn for the dreamy solitude of my 90s childhood and am simultaneously grateful for easier access to the shit I consume. It is what it is.

In Iceman (1984), John Lone gives a powerful, committed performance as “Charlie” (an approximation of his stated name, Char-oo), a man separated from the people he knew and loved by tens of thousands of years. The plot machinations driving the film forward concern Timothy Hutton’s anthropologist’s attempts to shield Charlie from inhumane experimentation (some version of euthanasia and dissection, possibly something worse), his conviction that the world’s loneliest man deserves dignity and autonomy. The film raises its share of ethical questions concerning the “civilized” world’s intrusion into the cultures outside of it, the morality of constantly seeking to extend the human lifespan, religious liberty. Aside from a brief discussion of the (bullshit, non-) issue of overpopulation, all of this stuff remains relevant. The rest of the cast, including Lindsay Crouse, David Straitharn and Danny Glover, are all good, the arctic base coming across as thoroughly lived-in and authentic. But it’s Lone’s performance that makes it work, and his relationship with Hutton.

In 2017’s Iceman, the central character known to us as “Ötzi” (“Kelab,” Wikipedia tells me, in the film) is the chieftain of a small clan who, after returning home to find his people slaughtered, the mysterious religious artifact at the heart of their community stolen, sets out for revenge. His journey, imperiled and violent and full of scenes of basic survival, calls to mind something like The Revenant, and meets the challenge with smooth, assured camerawork and stunning locations. Early in the film we see the painful birth of a clan member and the immediate natural death of its mother, a set of somber funerary rites in a nearby cave. I can’t claim to be anything more than a layman on the subject, but all of this comes across as thoroughly researched and highly plausible. All it can ever be is speculation, after all. But at the very least, in terms of costume and hair and makeup, Kelab is a near-picture-perfect realization of what’s knowable about the real person, and Jürgen Vogel in an almost wordless performance conveys a wide range of emotion at every turn: the burden of responsibility, fatherly pride, dogged, single-minded vengeance, self-doubt.

There’s technical stuff in both cases worth mentioning: the characters in the 2017 film speak sparse dialogue in a dead language and it all goes by untranslated. Text in the beginning explains this choice, correctly indicating that it’s not at all necessary to understand the story. Each film has gorgeous visuals: ice and snow and winter skies, atmospheric forests. The moments of action in the later film are incredibly well-executed and shaky cam-free, brutal hand-to-hand engagements with crude implements playing out with real flourish and longer range encounters with arrows flying back and forth filled with genuine tension, the results in each instance being genuinely surprising and inventive.

These are both simple stories, emotionally heightened, slow-burning. And while not technically a part of this proposed double feature, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, his 2010 documentary about the unbelievably beautiful Paleolithic paintings discovered in the Chauvet Cave in France in 1994 that scratches the very same itch. Throw that in between viewings and let yourself soak in the exquisite loneliness.

The debut feature from writer/director Adam Stovall, A Ghost Waits, now streaming via Arrow, follows on the heels of last year’s acquisition by the venerable genre company of another left-of-center, oddly quirky, black and white fun take on genre cinema, The Lake Michigan Monster. It’s exciting to see a company known for restoring classic films like Deep Red, Re-Animator, and more to glory turn to championing independent productions which attempt to do something more.

Therefore, it was a real joy to speak with Stovall, as well as the lead actor, Macleod Andrews (who was also a producer) about the making of this fun and emotionally-driven film.

“Tasked with renovating a neglected rental home, handyman Jack (Andrews) quickly finds out why the tenants keep leaving in droves – this house is haunted. The ghost in question is Muriel (Natalie Walker), herself employed from beyond the veil to keep the home vacant. Against the odds, Jack and Muriel find they have a lot in common… pulse notwithstanding. Having found a kindred spirit in an otherwise lonely existence, they must fight for their newfound affection as pressure mounts for them each to fulfill their ‘cross-purposes.’”

Scene-Stealers: I keep seeing this described as a “years in the making” film. Exactly how long did it take to get it made?

Adam Stovall: I had the idea in like autumn 2015. And we finished it – as in stopped working on it – in last December, because it took about five years. Took about five years to make this baby.

What was the reason behind that?

Adam Stovall: We have no money. Yeah. It costs money. That’s a glib answer, but you know, it was that: it was the fact that we were doing everything ourselves. And also, it just took time to find the movie. We shot it in August 2016 and then, when I cut together the assembly, it was an hour and 50 minutes. It was not good. I mean, assembly cuts are pretty much never good, but it was like, “Okay, the ending works, but good Lord – the rest of it?”

Then, as we edited and as tinkered with it and and everything, suddenly it was like, “Oh, this seems really good.” We got it to a point where like, from minute 34 – basically from the moment Muriel enters the film on – it worked, but we hadn’t really earned it in the previous 33 minutes. So then, we had to go back and we had two sets of pickups to, to go back and like re-imagined the first act.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the story of Breaking Bad: the writers’ strike happened and forced them to hit pause and they took that time to look back through what they had done and decided not to kill Jesse Pinkman and it became this thing where – whenever they wrote themselves into a corner – they just looked at the show that they’d made and they would inevitably find something that was like, “Oh, you know what, we can use this.”

Then, it’s paying off stuff and it feels like we did it on purpose. We were re-imagining the first act and we were taking cues from what worked in the second and third – not that this is really a three-act structure – but we were taking cues from what worked later in the film. You know: payoffs that didn’t have an existing setup and figured out a way to make the setup so that the payoff looks like we planned it the entire time.

Given that there was so much work and – as you admit, Adam – it didn’t quite gel on screen, Macleod, what initially attracted you to this film?

Macleod Andrews: Adam and I met a couple years before shooting A Ghost Waits on the set of another film and while we were doing that film, Adam asked me to do a reading of one of his scripts – a stage reading – and I fell in love with his writing. From that moment forward, he and I tried to get films made and over the course of that, we became very close friends. And so, when Adam got some funding for A Ghost Waits and just wrote a script at breakneck speed, it wasn’t a question of whether I would join him in that endeavor or not. It was just, “When can you be there?” And I showed up.

Oh, I find that really interesting. I think the film that most folks might know you for is They Look Like People and Wyatt in that film is a 180-degree turn from, from from Jack in A Ghost Waits. Was that part of the appeal of getting to play this character who, even though he’s going through some personal stuff, everything just does not phase him. That’s one of the things that I appreciate about this film: the deadpan initial acceptance of Mariel.

Macleod Andrews: That’s something that I feel like only Adam can do and when I saw that in the script, I’m just like – you know, Adam and I share very similar sense of humor and once you go there and once you just say like, “All right, ghost: what’s she got for me?” and it just breaks all the rules. Then suddenly, there’s this wonderful tension of “Where are we going to go? What can we explore?” That’s so much fun. So, to speak to your observation: yes, that was one of the things I really loved about taking Jack on, is that he was very different from, from Wyatt and from Al who I played in the second film [Siren] that I made with Perry [Blackshear] and Evan [Dumouchel]. I was really looking forward to playing something a little closer to myself, a little more of a character who’s was a little bit more forthcoming and insouciant.

[Adam and Macleod begin singing the word “insouciant” to the tune of Phil Collins’ “Sussudio”]

You singing makes a very nice transition to my next question: that song – “Yellow Cotton Dress” by Wussy – plays a very strong role in the film. I’m assuming that was in the script from the beginning?

Adam Stovall: That song wasn’t originally there and the beat of him singing the song wasn’t originally there. We did that in the pickups, but music was always a key element to the film. I’ve always been a film nerd. Since I was eight years old, I knew I wanted to make movies. I just didn’t think I could, but when you’re an aspiring filmmaker, you spend a lot of time thinking about like, “What would my movie be like?” ‘Cause you also think like, “What makes a Martin Scorsese movie, Martin Scorsese’s? Why do I love Steven Soderbergh movies?”

We’re both existential people, Macleod and I, so there’s this “What matters?” and music really matters to me, so I always knew that music would be a key element of the relationship between Jack and Muriel. The idea was that he sings while he works: he just makes up songs, ’cause that’s the thing that I do. I just make up songs as I go about my day. It never landed – it was there, but when we would get notes back, it never really landed.

So we realized like, “Okay, we’re going to have to do something that’s a bit more overt.” And were we had the idea of, okay, let’s make him sing a song and then we just stole that scene from Stranger Than Fiction, with Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal, when he goes to her place and picks up a guitar and sings “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric and she falls in love with him. We just stole that, but – with the knowledge of how creepy it was that it was a ghost coming up on him – that seemed like a way to subvert what was there.

Like I said, that was that song wasn’t originally. There was something else. All these musicians are people that I knew, but I could never get this guy to answer an email and say that we had permission to use the song. And that’s fine when you’re just plug-and-play, but Macleod’s gonna sing this. It better be cleared. So, when he didn’t respond I reached out to Mark Messerly in Wussy.

I’ve known him since before they were a band. I used to do comedy in Cincinnati and for a while, I ran a show that was sketch and stand-up, but it opened with a musical act. I actually booked Wussy for one of them, and it was his very first show, opening for us. So I messaged Mark and was like, “Hey, can we use ‘Yellow Cotton Dress’ in the movie? And he said, “I’m pretty sure. Let me check with Chuck [Cleaver] and Lisa [Walker]” and 15 minutes later he said, “Yep.” And then we went to a pawn shop and bought a guitar so that Macleod could learn to play that song.

I love that story and that makes me very, very happy. So, single location films are very much a thing for low budget movies. I’ve talked with quite a few other producers and writers and directors and actors about the fact that it’s cheap. You can do it with just a couple actors and all of that. But the location in this film, it looks really good. The house has a lot of character to it. Was it all shot in one particular house?

Adam Stovall: The ghost realm stuff was not. Where Ms. Henry is, was an office in Curtis Visual Communications, which is a production company in Cincinnati. The little space that Muriel goes to with the exposed brick was my friend Corey’s condo. She’s just one of my best friends and we could shoot there for no money. She was down. So we used that, but outside of that? Yeah, everything’s in one house.

The haunting middle-management and the exploration of the various facets of ghosting, along with Macleod’s Jack asking a litany of questions to Muriel: was that an important part of the script from the beginning – the idea that you’re not just exploring a relationship between a person and a ghost, but the relationship of ghosts in general?

Macleod Andrews: Yes. Adam can speak to it better than I can, as he is the originator of that, I’ve walked through it enough that I could, I could do my version of it. That idea came from a web comic called Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, in which somebody asks, “What do you think is the most American movie ever made?” She says, “Ghostbusters. Here you have demonstrable proof that there is, in fact, an afterlife and all they talk about is growing a small business and dealing with government bureaucracy.

That sparked in Adam the thought of, “Oh yeah: if you meet a ghost and now know there is an afterlife, how do you not prod that and investigate that a little bit more deeply?” There are bigger things to worry about than just running away. No, you know, I’m gonna run back in because fascinating of questions, like, “Is there a God?” It’s not a thing that we had seen before, so that’s one of the things that, as soon as it came up, I was like, “Oh, I enjoy this. It’s interesting.”

Adam Stovall: There was originally a different ending and it was abandoned very quickly. I don’t even think it ever made it to the script stage, but the general idea of ghosts is that they exist because of unfinished business. They’re not able to pass on to the next world because something is keeping them here. I had an idea that played with that, but it wasn’t satisfying. I told a friend about it and we were both just like, “Oh yeah, you can’t do that. Like, people will get mad,” but that opened the door of like, “Oh, yeah: every ghost movie covers the same shit. Every ghost movie is unfinished business, but that’s not trauma.”

Not that it can’t be interesting, but it’s not interesting to me, because I’ve seen it so many times, it becomes really easy. What’s something that we can do to sit to stand apart while we cannot cover the same ground that other people have covered? So, all right, well: instead of her being tied to this house, because she died there or whatever – which is, of course, what Jack assumes – that led us to the bureaucracy element of “What if it’s just their job?”

Haunting is literally their job and if you have a job, you have a boss, you have coworkers, you have some bullshit employee of the month program that doesn’t actually do anything, but placates the labor force and keeps them from rising up, and suddenly it’s like, “Oh, I’ve never seen a movie do that. Let’s do that!”

A Ghost Waits is currently streaming via ARROW.

2020 will not be a year remembered for its films, but its films will be remembered as testaments of the perseverance of art. Theaters may have closed in March, but as it always does, cinema found a way to live on. Many great films have unfortunately been lost in the streaming shuffle, so it is up for critics, fans, and casual viewers to highlight their hidden gems of 2020. We can’t depend on traditional awards season to let us know what was good and what wasn’t (and we never should really), so it’s time to showcase our favorite films that got us through miserable times.

Much like the films of the ’30s that allowed audiences to escape the horrors of the Great Depression, 2020 films offered a similar relief, while sharing strong messages of needed social change and justice. While not every film on this list is political, many speak to the absurdities of life and the anger, joy, and fear of the people who live it. 2020 was a year of coronavirus and civil unrest, but its films continue to break down barriers showing that a diverse industry is possible and needed. As many known directors pushed their projects to a later date, the spotlight was on directorial debuts and rising stars. As we begin to transition into normalcy, the future landscape of film looks bright. Now let’s reflect on the films that provided the best of a very bad year.

12. Babyteeth

What could have been the summer’s indie darling with a successful arthouse theatrical run, Babyteeth has unfortunately been lost in the waves of the July streaming dump. With little to no advertisement, Babyteeth never got the shot to take its claim as the best romance of the year. The awkward indie teen love story has been seen many times, but never with such grit that Babyteeth delivers. An incredible color-pop palette illuminates characters that would traditionally be written off as background players. Director Shannon Murphy takes tropes we love, dirties them up, and brings upon an emotional wrecking in a way that many dramatic filmmakers can only dream about.

Brought to life with a neon bleak style and genuine performances, Babyteeth tells the story of star-crossed lovers and finding meaning in a meaningless world. Eliza Scanlen takes on the starring role of Milla, a terminally ill teenager who falls in love with Moses (Toby Wallace) an unpredictable drug dealer she meets in a moment of fate. The young love is far from conventional but in their raw intimacy, both actors show their charismatic talents and sensational chemistry with each other. Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn contrast the couple as Milla’s parents, who are rightfully wary of Moses, yet yearn for their daughter to find happiness by any means. The performances from the four stars of Babyteeth are being repulsively overlooked and if enough attention is ever given to the film, they are prime Spirit Award candidates. – Jonah Desneux

11. The Vast of Night

 The Vast of Night may have come out in 2020 but its roots are planted firmly in a bygone era. Set in New Mexico in the 1950s, The Vast of Night is a slow-burn science fiction film that feels right at home with The Twilight Zone episodes it is stylized to emulate. When a radio show is interrupted by a strange audio signal, a small-town DJ and a switchboard operator work together to figure out what could be the source of the interruption. The plot is relatively light but unfolds in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat. A lot of slow-burn movies receive complaints that they are too slow. By nature, they move at a snail’s pace. Despite the fact that The Vast of Night moves steadily, it builds and builds and builds in its tension and is never boring. 

The film works in the same way that those old Twilight Zone episodes still work. They are crafted so carefully and so thoroughly that you feel like you are a part of the journey every step of the way. What’s so special about this movie is that it is a debut from writer/director Andrew Patterson. When you consider how deliberately the film is paced and how well-choreographed its long takes are, it is truly astonishing that someone so young could pull off such a feat. Turn off the lights, pop some popcorn, and immerse yourself in the experience. – Logan Van Winkle 

10. The Forty-Year-Old Version

Radha Blank burst into the Hollywood scene in grandiose fashion with her film The Forty-Year-Old Version. Coming out of Sundance, Blank writes, stars, and directs a semi-autobiographical feature about a struggling New York playwright’s transition into the rap Community. Stuck teaching an after-school theater course at an underfunded high school, Radha struggles with her purpose as she turns the dreaded four-zero. Given a chance at mainstream success, Radha must let her play be dissected and altered into a piece of “poverty porn” to appeal to a white liberal audience. Struggling with defiling her vision and art by means to become more widely known, The Forty-Year-Old Version brilliantly captures Blank’s own internal conversations and the unfair expectations facing black artists.

The Forty-Year-Old version drips with passion, humor, and heartbreak. Wonderful performances from Blank and her incredible young cast raise the film above the independent status quo. From the energetic high-schoolers to Radha’s love interest D (Oswin Benjamin), The Forty Year-Old-Version is an engaging catalyst to showcase new talent. Stimulated by the freshness of the film, Blank successfully challenges the norms of greatness that we blindly accept to be true and explores where art’s meaning truly stems from. Ticket sales vs. artist integrity has been the greatest matchup for films since “cinema of attractions” came to be in the early days of Hollywood. Luckily for us, Blank lands a critical blow for filmmakers everywhere and she is now a must-watch director in the years to come. – Jonah Desneux

9. The Invisible Man 

The only film on the list that I saw in a movie theater, The Invisible Man, was one of the biggest surprises of the first half of the year. Although sharing the same name, this iteration of The Invisible Man has little in common with the 1933 film. Elisabeth Moss stars as Cecilia, a woman who has narrowly escaped the clutch of her abusive boyfriend. Once Cecilia is safe, she learns that her abuser has killed himself. In the days following, many strange happenings occur in her life and she becomes convinced that he is still around – somehow, some way. 

The Invisible Man works perfectly as a piece of entertainment. It’s scary, Moss is great, and it is just all around a well-made film. It works, perhaps even better, as an example of the trauma that abuse victims experience.Cecilia has to try to convince those around her of what she is experiencing but so often, they write it off. Director Leigh Whannel wisely puts the audience in the position of Cecilia. We see, hear, and experience everything with her. We feel the betrayal when Cecilia is not believed and the hopelessness when nothing is being done. The Invisible Man is one of the most effective horror films to come from a major studio in quite some time. – Logan Van Winkle

8. I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Charlie Kaufman’s highly anticipated adaptation of Iain Reid’s novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things finally came to Netflix in 2020 and responses were expectedly divided. Like all great things Kaufman, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a surreal rollercoaster that is less about the “why” and more about the “wtf.” Trapping viewers in a seemingly never-ending unsettling nightmare of absurdity, Kaufman raises his bar of how far he’ll go in toying with an audience. Frustrations have been expressed as the film presents itself as a jumbled mystery with no apparent answers, other than what is given in the source material. As the debates rage on, the humor and the point of surrealism’s non-existent point is completely missed. 

I’m Thinking of Ending Things stars Hollywood’s favorite Jessies, with Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemmons as a young couple who are on their way to meet Jake’s (Plemons) parents. Oh, and they might be the same person, and the person they are, are neither of them, or it’s both of them, or it’s one of them, or it’s a suicidal high school janitor, it’s confusing and utterly exhilarating. Kaufman weaves a convoluted web of unsettling imagery and tone. While not employing horror elements, Kaufman attempts to make his viewers uncomfortable with traditional tropes that slowly seem off and then unfold into utter chaos. While Kaufman never attempts to control the chaos by shaping a traditional narrative, he guides the film into being about the audience’s feelings, as opposed to what is on the screen. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is not a film for everyone, I’m sure Netflix recommended this to many people who turned it off before the first hour is up, but it is an excellent statement on how the cinematic narrative still has room to be played with. – Jonah Desneux

7. Promising Young Woman

Perhaps the most shocking directorial debut of the year, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman is a firecracker of a film. Carey Mulligan is Cassandra, who, in order to cope with a traumatic event from her past, spends her nights pretending to be drunk, often resulting in a “nice guy,” offering to take her home. When they attempt to take advantage of her, they get a lot more than they bargained for and just a taste of what they deserve. 

Promising Young Woman is a deeply sorrowful, darkly comedic take on the trauma experienced by women when living within a patriarchy. The men responsible for Cassandra’s trauma get to go on living their lives, while she is forced to live with and suffer underneath the weight of what they did. This is the reality for so many women and it’s because of that fact that the places that Promising Young Woman dares to go, may not sit well with every viewer. Admittedly, I was not onboard with the way the story zigged and zagged at first but once I hopped on its wavelength, I found myself fully invested in Cassandra’s journey. – Logan Van Winkle

6. The World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime

Don Hertzfeldt has been ruling the science-fiction genre with his World of Tomorrow series. Cinematic history is made with each abstract addition to the series and if your eyes haven’t been on Hertzfeldt, they better be now because he’s a name you’ll want to remember. Creatively painting the picture of our future with absurdity, stick figures, and emotionless narration, Hertzfeldt somehow makes the most emotionally exhilarating viewing experience in exploring the themes of what it means to be human. By stripping away the dramatics and expressions and focusing solely on the worlds the characters speak, the World of Tomorrow series brilliantly plays with the art form of animated film and how to tell stories.

The third addition to the series, The Absent Destinations of David Prime, progresses the series past its prior formula of having a clone, Emily, travel back in time to talk to a younger version of her original self known as Emily Prime. Instead, the film focuses on a grander narrative that no longer just explains Hertzfeldt’s universe but begins to explore it. Focusing on David Prime, Emily’s love mentioned in the previous short films, Hertzfeldt takes his audience across space and time as David attempts to receive a message left to him by Emily. As the characters move throughout with their emotionless expressions, Hertzfeldt puts on a rosy lens to explore the deeper feelings of love, rather than just seeing a smile on one’s face. The World of Tomorrow Three is a modern-day space epic for an emotionally broken future that may be absurd but inherently possible in many ways. – Jonah Desneux

5. American Utopia

In a year full of constant despair, David Byrne made his glorious and much-needed return to the concert movie genre with David Byrne’s American Utopia. The film is a recorded performance of the Broadway show of the same name, directed by Spike Lee. To watch David Byrne’s American Utopia is to experience David Byrne’s American Utopia. As someone who, before, would have called himself the casualest of casual David Byrne/The Talking Heads fans, I found myself completely sold by the end. The premise could not be more simple. Byrne, along with about a dozen other performers, sing and dance to some of his most popular hits over the years, as well as some new songs. 

There is something about David Byrne’s American Utopia that takes hold of you and doesn’t let go. The show plays out in a captivating way that utterly engulfs you and by the end, you find yourself in an almost dream-like sort of entrancement. Months after watching this, I find myself humming several of the songs – many that I have only heard the one time – and thinking back to Byrne’s quiet but profound musings on life in between songs. In a year that so badly needed joy, David Byrne’s American Utopia reminded me how good it feels to feel unbridled happiness while watching someone else’s art play out in front of you. My only regret is not being able to see this stage show live and in person. For now, this life-affirming recorded performance will have to do. – Logan Van Winkle

4. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets

One of the year’s most immersive films of the year brilliantly lies somewhere between fact and fiction. Without giving away any crucial details, the less you know the more exhilarating the experience. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is the year’s best experimental film. Documenting the last day of business of a dive-bar in Las Vegas, directors Bill and Turner Ross use the direct cinema fly-on-the-wall technique to capture the celebration, drama, and despair of the patrons who call townie bar The Roaring 20s their home away from home. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets submerges itself into the world of people who are written off as the rejects of society. As the film progresses their stories and thoughts are shared through conversations with each other, challenging the notion of the American Dream.

Part of the fun of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is researching the film afterward. Unraveling the mystery of the film’s creation is just as fun as watching the bar’s patrons have a sparkler party in the parking lot. The Ross Brothers employ cinema verite techniques not seen much since its heyday during the French New Wave. Exploring all the extreme emotions brought out by alcohol, a simple film brings about big moments rooted in normalcy. The viewing experience is almost as if you’re staring into a complex drunken fishbowl for its satisfying under two-hour runtime as the inhabitants of the bar stick with you long after the credits roll. Michael Martin steals the show as a failed actor who drinks himself silly from open to close each day at the bar and wonders what his future will hold once it is gone. There are debates about Martin’s merits as a person or an actor, but brimming with sincerity, I believe that Martin gives the greatest performance of the year. – Jonah Desneux

3. The Trial of the Chicago 7

I have to say something up front. There is literally nothing Aaron Sorkin could write that I will not absolutely eat up. I have tried and I have failed. I always succumb to the power of Sorkin. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is no different. Telling the story of 7 people on trial for their roles in the Chicago uprising during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Sorkin is right where he belongs. As a screenwriter, he is known for his snappy dialogue with back and forths performed so quickly they would fit right in at Wimbledon. 

Luckily, this cast is up to the task of performing Sorkin dialogue. And what a cast it is! You have Eddie Redmayne, you have Mark Rylance, a little bit of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, sprinkle in some Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen, then let’s top it off with some Michael Keaton while we’re at it. The craziest part is that’s not everyone! There are still three or four names I could list that would almost certainly make you let out a full, “hell yeah!” Like a lot of Sorkin screenplays, though, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is not perfect. Things are wrapped up a bit too nicely and it may help to avoid looking up direct comparisons between the movie and real-life events. Nonetheless, it is a hugely entertaining movie that hearkens back to the sort of courtroom dramas of the 1990s that Sorkin excels in writing. – Logan Van Winkle

2. Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Sorry, First Cow but Never Rarely Sometimes Always holds the title of 2020’s ultimate minimal masterpiece. In her debut role, Sidney Flanigan puts on an internal tour-de-force performance under the direction of Eliza Hittman. Flanigan plays Autumn, who opens the film exposing her soul by singing in front of her entire school. Right away Flanigan rips away personal space and decency from Autumn by having the viewer watch Autumn at her most emotional. After discovering she is pregnant, Autumn travels to New York alongside her cousin (Talia Ryder) to have an abortion she can not legally have in her small town in Pennsylvania. 

The film excels in its subtle nature and voyeuristic tone. Not giving answers all at once, the film is a cruel mystery that the audience is left to unpack through slight clues given in conversation and the numb expression on Autumn’s face. Dialogue is minimal in the film, but one of the most talked-about scenes of the year comes from the gut-punching conversation in the clinic that the film’s title derives from. The film expertly haunts its characters and viewers with the presence of men, creating a genuine fear that you would have watching horror. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is the antithesis of a small film with a big impact and everyone involved deserves an abundance of praise. – Jonah Desneux

1. Boys State

If David Byrne’s American Utopia was a source of joy in this nightmare of a year, Boys State offered a much more sobering reality. Boys State follows the happenings at a one week camp that takes place every year across the nation. In almost all fifty states, hundreds of high school juniors attend Boys State. Hosted by the American Legion, the purpose of the camp is to build a mock government. Attendees are divided into counties, cities, and political parties. They run for office, introduce bills, debate said bills, and even pass laws that are to be followed throughout the week. As someone who actually attended the Missouri version, I can confirm that the whole thing is an intensive, albeit kind of silly, experiment. 

This riveting documentary follows the 2018 Texas Boys State. Wisely, the film’s directors, Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, chose to focus on only a handful of the attendees. We follow these young men as they navigate the week, run political campaigns, and ultimately win or lose in their race for public office. The experiment works perfectly as a microcosm for the nation’s current political state. Despite being in high school, these boys run campaigns that range from ruthless and terrifying to earnest and optimistic. The movie is absolutely captivating in an unexpected way. In less than two hours, we are introduced to and care about these people like we know them personally and are as invested in a fake election from 2018 as we were with last year’s presidential election. Knowing that these children, quite literally, are our future fills the soul with a mixture that is equal parts full of hope as it is dread. #StevenGarzaForPresident – Logan Van Winkle

Out Tuesday, Dec. 15 on VOD, Digital HD, DVD and Blu-ray from RLJE Films.

Director/writer Jeffrey A. Brown‘s feature debut, The Beach House (on VOD, Digital HD, DVD and Blu-ray from RLJE Films Tuesday, December 15), is a slow-burn turn from relationship drama to creeping cosmic horror. After appearances as part of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Chattanooga Film Festival, Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival, and Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival, Brown’s film has generated a lot of acclaim, and for good reason. The Beach House is the Lovecraftian terror for which I’d long hoped, but had yet to see fully realized onscreen. It’s absolutely one of my favorite horror films of the year, and so, I was thrilled to get a chance to hop of the phone with director/writer Brown to discuss how this excellent piece of small-budget terror came to be.

One of the things that’s been noted a lot about The Beach House is that it does a lot with a little. It’s a one setting film, so what was the process of crafting this tale and making it seem as big as the ideas are with the budget and locale as small as they are?

I’ve been doing locations on movies for 20 years. I come from very small films – it’s where I cut my teeth – and I don’t believe that budget equates quality. I root for the underdogs. I really like lower-budget movies like Coherence and Upstream Color – these very intimate small films that were low budget and had these big ideas. That was really part of the gestation of it: to try to accomplish that. Sometimes, as much as I like them, I am disappointed in a lot of indie dramas where they have these four characters in one location and it’s like, “They laugh, they cry, we learn a little something about life, and call it a day” and and I wanted to kind of take that concept and really push it as far as you can.

We can still have the four characters, one location but let’s think about the origins of life on the planet and hopefully planting those seeds in the audience when they’re watching the movie. It’s not just characters being chased by creatures – I love that, too – but it’s like, “Where is this coming from?” and to try to give it not a sense of reality, but a grounding in something to pique the the audience’s interest. I hope that somebody would see it and then be interested in what the characters are interested in and and what they’re talking about, because I’m interested in that stuff. I find it fascinating.

I still read lots of  pop science books because I’m not in college anymore, so I’m not going to read text but it’s just my natural curiosity and I’d hope that the curiosity of the characters would instill a sense of curiosity in the audience, so it all is intertwined.

Were you going for a Lovecraftian vibe – also, I feel a little Junji Ito-type stuff in there, as well – or is that just what came out as as the film was being put together visually?

Lovecraft was definitely in there. I mean, he’s come up kind of way more than I ever thought he would. I think I’m going to owe that to Color Out Of Space coming out around the same time. I think Color Out Of Space actually shot after we shot The Beach House. That, I think is at least the third version? There was that one movie with Boris Karloff that’s awful from the ’60s [Die, Monster, Die!] and then The Curse – which is actually I think pretty underrated  – from the ’80s is also Color Out Of Space.

I think we were we were cutting the movie and the editor’s like, “Hey, I hear they’re making Color Out Of Space.” Like, “Oh, great. Who’s making it?” and they’re like, “Spectrevision,” and they did Mandy and I love Mandy, so it was like, “Fantastic! Who’s directing it?” “Oh, Richard Stanley.” So, it was like, “Oh my, god. Really? Like, this year?”

I think it’s brought some associations but I definitely think there’s something in the water – pun intended – in terms of climate change and global pandemics and other types of afflictions that are that are affecting people. I think that movies, and especiallly horror films are the id of whoever’s making them, so I think that that was coming through.

Lovecraft, if you look up his definition of what a “weird tale” is, The Beach House is pretty much exactly it. It was from reading a lot of his fiction and then others like William Hope Hodgson and Arthur Machen and – who wrote The Willows? Algernon Blackwood. It was taking those ideas and then applying it to a contemporary setting which is what I hadn’t seen in a movie before: what could a contemporary cosmic horror film look like or what could it be? Then, on top of it, how can we do that without a big budget?

Sometimes I feel that directors are correcting movies. I love John Carpenter but I’m not crazy about The Fog. I love the opening sequence of it. It’s, to me, the best thing about the movie and then it doesn’t quite work for me, so I was like, “Well, what would what would I want The Fog to be?” Similarly, The Mist is another one that comes up a lot and we probably had 1/40th or even less than the budget of The Mist, so how can we convey some similar ideas that Stephen King was writing about in that and The Tommyknockers into four characters and maybe a half million dollar budget or whatever it wound up being. 

It was always gonna be a small movie and I wanted to make a movie that you couldn’t make with a big budget so that it wouldn’t be a square peg in a round hole where the whole time we’d just be like, “Man, it’d be great if we had 20 million dollars!” It’s like, “We’re not gonna have 20 million dollars. We have this small amount of money. Let’s make the best movie we can for that amount of money.”

It seems that, because so much of the movie hinges on the character of Emily, that casting the role must have been a very uh important thing for you. How did you come to cast Liana Liberato in the part?

I think with a lot of of things there’s a lot of luck involved. Timing is another thing. We shot for essentially three weeks, three and a half weeks and so, it kind of went down to the wire. With Liana, I met with several actresses and Liana really came after it. She’s a great actress. I really learned a lot about acting from her – and from all the actors. They all come from very different places and experience levels. Liana has been acting for over a decade. She’s been acting since she was a kid. Jake Weber is a very experienced actor. Maryann [Nagel] comes from a totally different background than either of them and. Noah [Le Gros] is, I think, older than Liana but hasn’t been acting as long, so they all come from very different things.

It was very hard to cast Emily because I had some particular things that I didn’t want the character to be. She had to be able to really express her intelligence and and not be like some movies, where you watch and this one character is a rocket scientist and you’re like, “Yeah, no way.” I think that Liana does that very very well: she just sells every line. You know she knows what she’s talking about in the course of the movie. That was the most important thing.

She’s totally photogenic and she is a great, almost athletic actress. Physically and mentally, she just embodies the frame and the scene. It’s like she’s not acting – she’s being, which is what the best actors do.

Director Antonio Campos held a Q&A with reporters ahead of the release of his latest film, The Devil All The Time. Scene-Stealers was able to take part in the roundtable discussion and learned more about the filmmaking process that went into the period drama that stars Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson.

Here’s what was discussed:

You worked closely with the author Donald Ray Pollack on the adaptation. Was there any specific changes from the novel that you fought to bring your vision to life?

Campos: Well, what I’ll tell you what really kind of, I think, it turned into my favorite scene of the movie is in the end, there’s a confrontation that happens between Arvin, Tom Holland‘s character and Rob Pattinson plays Teagardin, and in the book, it happens in this remote little corner where Teagardin takes his victims, and we, we switched it into the church and we changed the dynamics so that you almost start the scene off as though this young guy has come in to confess to this preacher, and then you realize that the intention is way more dangerous than that. And so, you know, that was one example of how we took a note from Don and then just played with it and sort of kept the essence of the scene the same, but just kind of made it a little bit more dynamic and cinematic in a way.

What are your thoughts on Bill Skarsgård’s comments that the film is not necessarily a comment on religion, as much as it’s a comment on what people do with religion?

Campos: I mean, I think that’s beautifully articulated by Bill, who is such a wise, wonderful soul. You know, it really is about extreme believers in religion in their faith, and the dangers of that because, you know, all these characters are screaming to the heavens looking for answers and what they get in return is silence and in that void, they fill it with an answer themselves. And it is a person who is traumatized or delusional, they can fill it with a dangerous answer. And so, the film is exploring the dangers of extreme religion and how people in power can take advantage of people’s faith and manipulate them. That’s what we’re exploring. The film isn’t anti-religion. It is it is more comment on the dangers of religion in the wrong hands.

In terms of the adaptation process, both juggling all those characters throughout, but also introducing them in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the viewer. That has to be a challenge?

Campos: It’s definitely a challenge, juggling this many characters. What we have to do with this movie was to sort of like, introduce characters in the periphery and let them be known by the audience, so that when they come back, you’re like ready to go with them. And that’s kind of why you have to cast some of these actors with recognizable faces. Because if you go and you’re like, oh, that’s Jason Clarke, oh, that’s Riley Keough, you go, they’re going to be in this movie again. There’s just something subconsciously that’s happening when you’re watching that go down. So, without doing very much, you’re like, oh, that’s a character that’s gonna be part of the movie. And then, when they come back, you’re like, ready for it. So, it’s about how do you kind of like pepper the other characters in before their story lines sort of take over. And then also making sure you cast them with someone that’s either going to be memorable or someone that you are familiar with, that you know is going to come back.

It felt like Robert Pattinson just kind of took it up another notch, like a like a step above everyone else. Was that a choice you guys made together, or was that all him?  

Campos: We always wanted Teagardin to have like this other worldly quality, like a big entrance, like he’s designed to come into the movie and shake it up. Like when Teagardin comes in, you’re just like, you know you’re settling into this other storyline. You’re getting to know Tom Holland’s character and Eliza Scanlen’s character. And then you’re like, what’s gonna happen? Where is the danger? Where’s the danger and then Teagardin shows up. So, we always knew that Teagardin kind of was like this force, that kind of shape who picks up the rest of the movie. And because he’s from so far outside the realm of the the movie, like so far outside of West Virginia and Ohio, he had, he had so much freedom to kind of like just run with that character and go. And I really was like, just go as just go as far as you want to go, like just swinging for the fences. And if I ever had, like, if I have to rein it in, we will, but like, I just love performances like that. And that was really sort of the mandate across the board. I think everybody in this film pushes themselves into places that they might not have gone before. Like, I think Sebastian Stan’s Bodecker is like, it’s just amazing. I mean, he’s doing stuff that is just kind of like that is swinging for the fences and he transforms his body and everything and says, so everybody was kind of like just that. I tried to do give everybody a sense of freedom to go and have fun with their characters.

QWhat scene were you the most proud to do that you were like, man, I really flexed all of my talent and hard work and everything?

Campos: Simple. For me. It’s this one scene that I just think is like my favorite, one of my favorite things I’ve ever directed, which is the face off in the church between Tom and Rob. From the moment that we wrote it to just every step of the way of shooting it, of directing the actors, because it was like theater. You know, it’s just two people sitting there looking at each other, having a conversation making something that we designed. You know, when you have these kind of very simple setups, you really kind of spend so much time designing it. So that every shot, every moment, just kind of feels really rich. And then in that scene, my wife is the editor and we worked on that in some way. Like every day for eight months, like I, I went to bed thinking about that scene, I woke up thinking about that scene. It was like this obsession. And then in the sound mix, we were like obsessed with every detail of them sitting with the sound of the chair, their clothes, the rattle the gun, and then the score. Just really nailing the score the kind of ride the music takes you on through that scene. So that is the scene that is like, I think the most complex in terms of its design, and in some ways, the simplest in terms of its setup. So, I really, I really love that scene, and I think that’ll be one of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever made or been part of making.

Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies is out on VOD today.

We were big fans of director Danny Wolf‘s three-part documentary series which released earlier this year, Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All Time, so when we saw that he had turned his eye toward creating the first-ever film to trace the 100-year history of onscreen nudity, we knew we had to check it out. Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies is a fascinating and illuminating look at how social mores have changed, as well as how the industry itself treats the subject. Therefore, it was really great to speak with director Wolf about his recent spate of work, and the art of presenting underrepresented topics onscreen.

This is your fourth documentary for the year, so good on you, sir.

Well, yes, technically though Time Warp is three volumes. It just came out so long. I mean, it was six and a half hours, so we had to turn it into three volumes. So, yes: technically four docs but genre-wise, two.

There is some overlap between some of the guests that are in Time Warp and some of the guests that are in Skin. Did you conduct some of these interviews simultaneously, where you covered a lot of ground?

No, not at all. When I was doing Time Warp – which took two years to shoot because there’s 115 interviews – we weren’t thinking about Skin. Skin came up towards the later end, so Amy Heckerling, I went back to interview again. Malcolm McDowell, I went back to interview again. Erica Gavin, I went back to interview again – and they were all cool. I mean, they’re all willing to do it. I think Martha Coolidge from Valley Girl was the only one I used a line from her Time Warp interview in this one.

You say that Skin came up towards the end of working on Time Warp. Did it come out naturally, given the sheer amount of skin on display in so many of those genre pictures?

No, actually the executive producer of Time Warp is Paul Fishbiin and he is friends with Jim McBride, who’s Mr. Skin, and some point when we were shooting or editing Time Warp, Jim and Paul said to me, “No one’s ever done a documentary on the history of nudity in the movies,” and I’m like, “No! You gotta be kidding – every documentary’s been done about everything.” No, believe it or not, no one’s ever done like a definitive, historical look at nudity. I’m like, “Well, we better jump on that, because someone’s going to do it.” That no one’s done it, I couldn’t believe it.

So, we kind of rushed to get it going and start our research and get the cards up on the wall as fast as we could before someone else did it. We’ve got a couple documentaries we’re going to do next. Same example: we can’t believe no one’s done two other topics. In the age of everyone making documentaries, it’s hard to believe not everything’s been done. I just looked the other day and there’s no documentary ever on Neil Diamond and there’s no documentary ever on Barry Manilow. That might be their decision, but sometimes you go, “How has no one done a documentary on Neil Diamond?”

In terms of the the tone of Skin, you walk this very fine line between acknowledging the purient nature inherent in talking about naked people on a gigantic 35-foot screen but also really humanizing the story of these these actors, as well. Was that a decision that you made going into this or did it sort of evolve over the course of speaking with everyone?

Absolutely. That was a decision. I asked the same questions, generally, to everybody and one was, “How did doing nudity impact your personal life and how did it impact your career?” That’s the question where you start getting the really personal, interesting stories, like Erica Gavin from Vixen talking about, “After I went to the premiere of Vixen and saw myself on the giant screen, I didn’t like the way I looked,” and she became anorexic because of it and almost died – went down to 70-something pounds.

You really get interesting answers just when you ask, “What did nudity do to your personal life or how did it, in fact, affect your career?” Those two questions, we got a ton from, but we really just wanted to lay out kind of a definitive historical, educational – but fun – story. You have to have the nudity from the beginning to the #MeToo today. The one thing we just said starting this was, “We can’t make something exploitative. This can’t be a breast fest. No one’s going to watch it if it’s exploitative.”

We made a very conscious effort all the way through to include all the history: to interview authors and critics and experts about the Hayes Code and the pre-Code movies and really make it thorough. It’s easy to do things chronologically. It was easy to go from the ’60s to the ’70s, because things were changing. Political and social changes obviously predicated a more liberal attitude to nudity so that, we wanted to cover. Really, all we set out to do was make something historical and definitive and not just a breast fest.

In terms of it not being a breast fest, the one thing the the one thing I noticed missing from this is what’s become a joking trope: for some reason, in ’80s and ’90s action films, it seemed like every male action star had written into their contract that there was supposed to be a butt shot.

That’s funny we didn’t. That’s not something I thought about putting in, but you are right.

You do tackle like male nudity and what’s intriguing about it is that the way that it is portrayed on screen is that frequently, male nudity is used in a comedic way as opposed to a salacious way. I’m curious as to what your view on that is. Is it just the male anatomy is inherently hilarious?

I think that nobody wanted to see male anatomy. Males and females go to movie theater. Male likes to look at female because it’s a beautiful body. Female likes to look at female. Then when you go and see a man, usually men don’t want to see men naked and women generally don’t want to see men naked. The ratio for the longest time was mostly all-female until really the late ’60s, when it opened up with Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy.

Then John Voight’s doing nudity and Robert De Niro and then Bruce Davison, who we interviewed. It kind of became more acceptable, but I just think male nudity was just not something studios were interested in putting in their movies. That wasn’t something that was going to drive anyone to a movie — people would go see Sophia Loren and people would see Brigitte Bardot and people would see Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield.

The ’80s were known for the teen sex romps or just movies that were, essentially, as you you referred to earlier, “breast fests,” and really feature heavily in Skin, so was it important to you that you get someone like Mamie van Doren because she goes back so far? Was it difficult to find people who had a perspective on this beyond like within the last 30-35 years?

Yeah, it was. You cast a really wide net of who you’re trying to get and there were a lot of names we didn’t get that I would love to have interviewed like Kathy Bates, Kathleen Turner, and Julianne Moore, but you can’t get everyone. Brigitte Bardot, we were we were close to getting. With Mamie van Doren and Erica Gavin, the older you get, everyone has their own experiences.

When you talk about the teen sex comedies it’s all pretty much the same. The stories are kind of the same. For distribution, you have to have nudity in those movies. As Martha Coolidge said, “When I did Valley Girl, I had in the script three scenes of nudity and Atlantic Releasing said we’re not going to distribute your movie unless you have a fourth,” and she had to add at the last minute, a nude scene with E.G. Daily, which E.G. Daily didn’t sign up to do. That wasn’t in the script. They had to have a long conversation with the agents about adding it and making sure it looked good and it was artistic and everyone was happy and then it ended up in the movie.

Certain movies – like the teen sex comedies and the horror films of the early ’80s or the women in prison films – there was an expectation of nudity, because that was your distribution. Doing a women in prison movie, there’s of course going to be a shower scene. As Sybil Danning said, “You would not get foreign distribution without it,” so everyone knew what they were getting into in those days.

Given that Skin and Time Warp both look at under-explored aspects of cinema in a really deep way and you gather like all of these really intriguing people, is that why you’re already working on two new documentaries? Has each one fed the next?

No, but you hit on the head what I love doing in these things and that is I like the actor or actress you wouldn’t expect to see interviewed. If it was all Julianne Moore and and Jennifer Lawrence and Reese Witherspoon, where they have all these big names, it wouldn’t be as interesting. I think it’s cool to have Camille Keaton for I Spit on Your Grave – the people you would never expect to see and hear their stories. That’s what makes these cool. Who would expect Ken Davidian from Borat to pop up in a documentary about nudity in the movies?

But why wouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t we include him? Here’s one of the most famous, hysterical, comedic nude scenes in probably the last 30 years, so why shouldn’t Ken Davitian tell his story and talk about the nudity he did? I think the most fun I have is is that element of surprise. You never know who’s going to pop up next: “Oh, I can’t believe Mariel Hemingway is in this and she’s talking about Personal Best! I would have never thought of that.”

But, again: why shouldn’t it be in there? Yeah, I mean, if I had Sharon Stone, that would be cool. We had Gina Gershon in Time Warp, but I would have liked to have Gina Gershon talk more about Showgirls and the nudity in this, but it’s it’s hard to get everyone. You try, but you can only get who you can get. But, if you’re a film freak, to see Diane Franklin from Last American Virgin now, today talking about it? That’s cool to me. Kristine DeBell from Alice in Wonderland? Where else is she appearing or talking about her acting?

That was one of my favorites. I was going to remark on the fact that Diane Franklin speaks really frankly and openly and honestly about the whole thing. It seems like almost everyone you spoke with was very forthright and honest and I wonder if it’s that they’re at that point in their career now where they’re just like, “I’ve got nothing to lose, so I’m gonna lay it all out.”

Sean Young syndrome, basically: “It doesn’t matter what I say, so I’ll just say it.” That’s why I love interviewing Sean Young, because she has no filter and if she has a problem, she’ll say she has a problem. That’s the people you want to interview: the ones that are not going to edit themselves or hold back or not kind of tell it like it is.

Everyone we interviewed was great and had no issues with any of the questions asked and had no issues talking. I mean, they knew what our documentary was, so they knew the kinds of questions that they were going to be asked. Some asked for the questions in advance so they knew what they were going to be asked, but even when Bruce Davison does Last Summer in 1969 which is one of the first male frontal nudity films, he couldn’t have been happier to talk about it and his experiences. You wouldn’t expect to see Bruce Davison pop up in a documentary about nudity, but male nudity to us was important to talk about and that’s why Malcolm McDowell is so great – to have that male perspective.

If you’re a fan of genre cinema, actor Munro Chambers is a rising star. After growing up, appearing on Canadian television series, he came to the attention of many fans when he appeared in 2015’s retro-action post-apocalypse sci-fi horror film, Turbo Kid. It was an utter joy to watch Chambers take on hoards of mutant freaks. Then, last year, the actor appeared in one of the best small-ensemble black comedies we’ve seen in years, Harpoon, wherein his character undergoes transformations both physical and emotional, really making for a bleakly hilarious viewing. We spoke with Munro Chambers by phone about his career, and the intricacies of Harpoon.

Is it a requirement that all Canadian actors have to appear on either Degrassi and/or Corner Gas?

Yes. It is written in the contract. There’s a birth certificate clause that you see and you must be a part of it. [laughs] No, not at all. It’s just like any community. It’s a small community, and it’s a great show that has a lot of characters, and a lot of great ensembles. So, when you’re young – or even your late 20s and 30s – at some point, you’ll get on it.

You got your start in television and it seems like you’ve continued that on, but it seems like you’ve been steadily ramping up the films you’ve appeared in over recent years. What’s that process been like?

It’s wild. In my experience, it wasn’t something I ever chose. I like to see where things fall and just to kind of ride the wave, so when I when I was very very young, it started off with TV, and then it was a lot of films. Then, when SARS hit Toronto, there was a big gap there where nobody really worked in Toronto. There were some in Vancouver, but a lot of productions didn’t come didn’t come here, so there’s a little gap there where I didn’t work.

Then, out of nowhere this audition for TV sitcom on Family Channel came up, and then from that just sprang an eight-year span of doing television through The Latest Buzz and Degrassi and some other things. Everything after Degrassi is kind of leading to a job that just kind of came up, which was Turbo Kid and from that kind of sprung off films.

I think it’s nice – at least in my personal experience and in my career and the way it’s gone for me – is that it’s nice to not be like, “Oh well, now I’m choosing film,” because because it’s so unpredictable, this industry. Just ride the wave and enjoy it. I’ve been very very very fortunate that one’s kind of led to the other and some really great projects of falling into my lap.

Is it that Turbo Kid being a genre picture has led to other genre pictures or is that also something you’re choosing to work towards?

I think Turbo Kid spawned it. It wasn’t something that I chose. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. In specific genres, like with the horror/thriller side, I never had truly a great desire. There was a couple ones where I’d love to be the antagonist, or would love to be the villain, but I just never thought I’d ever get cast in those roles – especially with Knuckleball and Harpoon, I just never thought I’d ever get cast.

The fact that people were giving me that opportunity to try that out, and to flex muscles I feel like I’ve worked on over my career, was a real joy, but Turbo Kid is really what spun that. That was the one that kind of initiated the genre films, especially the indies that have just been so much fun. I find with the genre – the “genre” genre –  in that corner of the industry, there’s so many unique scripts out there, and not one is like the other or similar with little tweaks. It’s a lot of freedom to be creative and to be bold and to do something different, and that’s something that I’ve always aspired as an actor.

When you say you didn’t think you would get cast in something like Knuckleball or Harpoon, what do you mean: is it because those characters are a little less black-and-white than some of the other parts you’ve played?

A friend of mine put it towards me that was an incorrect interpretation of the way I perceive myself. As an actor, you always try to transform into something else. You put yourself in their shoes and imagine yourself as this, that, and the other, but there’s always a little bit of that third eye that looks at yourself: “Yeah, well, I’m not really that,” and so they got a little bit into that where I thought, “Maybe I’m not scary enough, I look a little too young, look a little this, look a little that,” and then when these roles started to come my way – Michael Ironside is a very good friend of mine, and he said to me, “That’s only your interpretation that you wouldn’t be cast like that and some of the people may not, because it’s opening the door to it.”

But, even [Michael] Peterson said he had a different idea for [Knuckleball‘s] Dixon, until we started really playing with it so, to be given that opportunity to try different things, it’s just your own interpretation, and then they get to make the tough choice of if they want you or not, and luckily for me, it worked out well.

The reason we’re talking is Harpoon and Harpoon is a film in which, what you think the characters are at the very beginning, shifts and then shifts again, and then shifts some more. Was that part of the appeal when you read that script: that you get the opportunity to play a very fully fleshed-out character?

100%. I really love characters that are just more than just meets the eye. I love the imagery of an iceberg, of what’s below, and then what’s on the surface. All three of these characters have that. Maybe they show you something at first and then, over and over, more layers are peeled away, and there’s something completely different. That was the same thing with Dixon – the same thing, a little bit more turbid, where he’s more black and white a little bit.

I was always amazed by actors that had a complete range in their catalog of performances, so the main one I always go to is Robin Williams. How he did do Mrs. Doubtfire and then The Fisher King? That just amazed me. Then, you look at Gary Oldman, and you look at Glenn Close, and these incredible actors that are just, like – how did they do that? How can they touch so many ranges, where they make you laugh and smile and cry and feel fear and grief and do all that? Anything that kind of leads towards that, I’ve always wanted to jump to it and Harpoon had that.

Part of Harpoon‘s appeal is this narration by Brett Gelman. It’s interesting, because you get like a lot more backstory on the characters than you usually get for people in most films. Did reading that narration help you in developing Jonah?

Yeah, absolutely. It always helps.  That’s the beauty of film, opposite of of TV – where when you’re doing episodics, if you’re starting it off and they do the pilot and then it leads on, you don’t get the ending story. You don’t get how it fully ends or the beginning, and you don’t know, so with the film, you get everything – or mostly – but it definitely helped.

The dialogue that Brett Gelman did in the original scripts was kind of a little bit different than what it ended up being, which it usually does, but Rob Grant had such a such a clear mindset of how he wanted these characters and their history. When we were doing rehearsals before the filming – which I think was two or three days in Calgary – we really hashed it all that out, and we actually were able to give our own interpretations, and throw in our our own mindsets.

I’m like, “Oh, what were we like when we were kids? What were our interactions? Me and Emily [Tyra]: when we had that night? Let’s dive even further into how that night happened and went. Maybe there was times before where it almost happened.” It was a really creative process. It wasn’t just like everything on the page – it was that we actually got to be involved.

One of the things I find really fascinating is, when I was reading the backstory on the production of the film, is that it’s a film that takes place in very warm, lovely weather, and you shot the majority of the interiors in Calgary. How does that affect your performance, when it’s freezing cold outside but you’re having to pretend that it’s in the middle of a very lovely ocean?

Well, the studio was heated, to a degree, but when we’re running through certain takes it was easier. It was weird. It was wild. They did such a great job with set dec and making it look great, like little things with the way the sun would peel through the windows. I don’t know what it was. When they call action and slaps, you just do it. There’s no easy way about it.

For me it was a little easier, because my character – if you haven’t seen this, spoiler alert – loses a lot of blood, so there’s certain things that the body goes through that could mirror being cold or freezing. There’s parallels there, so it’s like, “Okay, if I’m feeling this, well, I’ll just use it,” and then you kind of add a little bit more – especially when you’re covered in blood – but, no, it definitely helped with everything.

Also, just it helped with that isolation, We were all in it together, and we were all just kind of fully invested and so, even if we were cold, or if we were a little bit under the weather, the production did a great job to make sure it wasn’t too cold, but it was a lot of fun.

Speaking of losing a lot of blood, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the the violence in this film, especially towards you. Pardon my language, but you get fucked up in this movie. Harpoon begins with you just getting the shit kicked out of you. It seems like this  – and, to an extent in Turbo Kid – you play characters who get knocked down a lot?

Yeah, I don’t know why that’s been kind of like my spell for the last five years, where I’ve died a lot. I think I’ve had like, six deaths in five years, but you know, it’s always fun, because as an actor, it’s so vulnerable. With the words, “I love you,” “I need you,” “I miss you,” or “I hate you,” those are things you can say, and they’re really really tough, but when you’re being beaten down like that – especially with Turbo Kid, where he has to show his strength, and for this one, where he’s trying to hide his secrets, and he’s trying to do it for what he believes is the greater good – oh, it’s fun, when you have someone like Chris [Gray] who’s just throwing haymakers.

Once again it is time to gather together and watch wealthy, attractive people hand each other tiny statues made of gold! Yes the Oscars are here and Scene Stealers is joining together yet again with Screenland Armour to host the best viewing party of them all this upcoming Sunday, February 9th.

We will have trivia, fabulous prizes and as always a running Oscar Ballot to compete and see who can best predict the voting hive-mind of the Academy. The chaos of this bizarre and wonderful industry awards show is some of the most fun we have every year and we are excited to celebrate with you all again!

The Kansas City Oscar Party 2020 will once again be at the incredible, locally-owned Screenland Armour, complete with food and cash bar.

WHEN: Sunday, February 9th starting at 6pm 

Where: Screenland Armour, 408 Armour Rd, KC MO

COST: FREE.99

( And why not throw in a link to the Facebook Page to Invite Friends)

Now this is gonna be a long night, so as always we have our Ballot Competition for incredible memorabilia.

Follow THIS LINK ===> http://tiny.cc/OscarParty2020 < or scan the QR code belowand begin the fight for fabulous prizes!

To enter: FILL OUT THIS ONLINE BALLOT

Get to the party early to grab a seat — and make sure your ballot is turned in ONLINE before 7pm when the show starts!

FAQ

How do I play? FILL OUT THIS ONLINE BALLOT and turn it in before 7pm. Hard copies of the ballot will NOT be accepted.

How do I remember what I picked? Print off this PDF ballot and mark down your picks as you make them. Follow along at the party to see how you are doing. (Just remember to disregard the short film categories, since we don’t count them for the party.)

Can I fill out more than one ballot? Yes, but only two. Two ballots can increase your chances of winning. Also, some people will fill out one the way they actually want the awards to go and another to try to win the game. It’s a good strategy.

Can I show up late to the party? As long as your ballot is submitted in online before 7pm, you are good. But you must be present to win something. All winners must be present at the end of the night to take home prizes.

See you all Sunday, let’s get ready to play.

“1917,” Sam Mendes’ look at a secret mission during World War I, was named the Best Film of the Year by the Kansas City Film Critics Circle.  The film also took home honors for Mendes’ direction and for its cinematography. “1917” and “Us” were the only films to receive multiple awards, with “Us” star Lupita Nyong’o being named Best Actress, while the film was chosen to receive the Vince Koehler Award for the year’s Best Science Fiction, Fantasy or Horror Film.

Each year the Kansas City Film Critics Circle, the second oldest critics organization in the United States, votes on their choices for the group’s James Loutzenhiser Awards.  2019 marks the 54^th time the group has passed out its awards.  The South Korean film “Parasite” was named the year’s Best Foreign Film while “Toy Story 4” joined the first three films in the series by also being named the year’s Best Animated Film, an amazing achievement.

Below is a complete list of the winners of the 54^th Annual James Loutzenhiser Awards:

BEST FILM: “1917”

ROBERT ALTMAN AWARD FOR BEST DIRECTOR: Sam Mendes for “1917”

BEST ACTOR: Adam Driver in “Marriage Story”

BEST ACTRESS: Lupita Nyong’o in “Us”

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Joe Pesci in ‘The Irishman”

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Da’Vine Joy Randolph in “Dolemite is My Name”

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Rian Johnson for “Knives Out”

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Greta Gerwig for “Little Women”

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Roger Deakins for “1917”

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: “Toy Story 4”

BEST FOREIGN FILM: “Parasite” – South Korea

BEST DOCUMENTARY: “Amazing Grace” and “Apollo 11” (tie)

VINCE KOEHLER AWARD FOR THE BEST SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR FILM – “Us”

TOM POE AWARD FOR THE BEST LGBT FILM: “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”

At the beginning of the year, The Nightingale became a must watch at the Sundance Film Festival and has now finally made its way into theaters across the country. Many have eagerly awaited Jennifer Kent’s follow up to her acclaimed debut The Babadook and the writer/director succeeded at making her second showing a strong one. The Nightingale is one of those rare films that leaches into the audience’s mind as an emotional experience, opposed to an entertainment event. The film is all at once educational, thrilling, at times humorous, soul crushing, but most importantly honest. The Nightingale is cinema at its most confrontational. The film demands audiences to not sweep uncomfortable history under the rug like we are prone to do.

The film is set in the Tasmanian wilderness in the early nineteenth century. The conquered area is ruled viciously by British soldiers who take whatever they desire without serious repercussions. Under the command of the soldiers are convicts and the remaining aboriginal men and women of the land. Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish Convict has served her time and attempts to gain her deserved freedom from a vile British Officer (Sam Clafin). It is in this instigating incident that Kent steers away from censorship in place of a haunting reality. When there is no justice to be found for Clare, she is determined to gain it on her own. With an unlikely partnership with Billy, an Aborginal tracker (Baykali Ganambarr) the two set out to right the wrongs that have become them and discover the inherent faults in the “us vs. them” mentality that they have grown accustomed to. 

Even though the subject matter is dark, Aisling Franciosi lights up the screen as Clare in a career-defining performance. In fully committing to the character, Franciosi adds the authenticity that the film strives for, as she embodies the song bird to perfection. I was privileged enough to speak with the star to find out her experience in such a demanding role. Franciosi opened up about her process in becoming Clare and gave her assessment on the importance of the film. With much conversation surrounding The Nightingale and if crossed a line, it is crucial to hear from the woman who experienced it all first hand.

How did you come into this role? It’s obviously a very intense part, so I’m curious about your preparation after the discovery and what drew you to it.

I was sent the script much like any other project by my agents. I read it and was instantly drawn to the writing. As an actor you read tons of scripts and it’s rare for one to jump out quite like this one did. I’ve heard of it happening and you really do you know within the first 15 pages. So this is really my at-instant love affair with a project. It appealed to me because it wasn’t geared towards entertainment; it was geared towards telling an important story and dealing with very big and important themes, so that really appealed to me. Obviously working with Jennifer Kent was a huge draw. Frankly as well,  just as an actor getting the chance to play a character like this; they do not come along all that often, so I really wanted to try and prove myself and just show that I could do more than what I have been doing. 

You’re right, there’s a lot of material to deal with in many different ways. I mean just the sheer scope of the performance and what you have to go through, but also thematically it’s very heavy and sensitive. Between getting the role and shooting, nine months past and within those nine months, actually even before I got the role, I was already just devouring books on convict history, colonalism, PTSD, violence against women, sexual violence. Basically getting my hands on every piece of research I could that I felt could play into the role. Obviously I was guided to a certain extent by Jenn and what to do for that. Then once I got there to Australia, I spoke with a clinical psychologist. I met with real rape victims. I met with women who worked in centers for domestic abuse and sexual violence, and then on a practical level, learned how to horse ride and shoot a musket and chop wood. There was a lot; there was a lot to prepare.

Was there anything specific in your preparation that really helped you get into those very brutal scenes? I feel like that would be a daunting task for anyone. Did you have the one breakthrough moment that you felt as ready as could possibly be?

I don’t know if there was a moment I knew I was ready as can be, but I definitely know that people sharing their stories with me about their experiences and talking with the women at the center for domestic violence abuse, I instantly felt a massive weight of responsibility. Responsibility to be as authentic as possible in those scenes and also honor the people who’d been good enough to share their stories with me. I find it really moving that people were willing to share their stories for the purpose of telling ours. That in itself even when I think about it just gets me a little bit emotional. That definitely helped and I’m sure all the research I had done. Documentaries and interviews I watched really set into the emotional well. And of course as an actor you draw in your own experience, and you draw on your own trauma, and also sometimes your imagination. It’s all a combination, but definitely the thing that really stuck out with me the most was people’s generosity and bravery in telling me their stories. I’ll never forget that.

You said that you had that big responsibility and I think you handled it incredibly well. It’s a very important film and I think the discourse that’s happening with it right now is from the people who it might be a little too intense and then those who say it needs to be watched for its honesty. What do you personally see as the importance of the film for those who can handle the subject matter?

There are a few things we show with our film. We’ve become very desensitized to violence. I think there is a really interesting discussion happening around violence and I find it quite fascinating to watch removed from it all. People talk about the violence in our movie. Well, I just came out of a movie that came out recently that’s a massive film and there’s a scene that’s incredibly violent, so bloody, really in-your-face violent and people were laughing at the screen. I’m not judging them. I can get it because it’s framed in the way that kind of makes it comical, which is fine in one way. But in another way, it’s kind of dangerous. The fact that we can sit back and look at someone with whatever it is that’s happening to them and laugh, I think just shows that we’re so used to violence being part of the entertainment side of cinema that we can’t then handle it as well when we see the emotional ramifications. I think that our film is emotionally extremely violent, but I don’t think graphically it’s extremely violent. Ours is not graphically violent in the way we’re used to on screen. It really goes for you emotionally. It highlights how emotionally damaging violence is, and how hard it is, and makes us really face up to what you’re doing to a human being when you inflict pain or suffering or violence on them. I think that that’s something that people are struggling with a bit because you know it’s uncomfortable to watch. It’s confronting. It’s harrowing. And if you’re going into the movie theater for entertainment, that’s not what you’re gonna be getting with our film. You’re going to be getting a study of violence, a study of why it is to be human, and how important it is that we realize that we need to become more empathetic with each other and how important it is for us to evolve as a society of the world. That’s definitely something I think is really important.

I think highlighting the horrors of colonialism and really looking at them in order to be able to move forward. I think you have to with any kind of history, acknowledge it first in the clear light of day for what it is. That aids healing on a much deeper level, but in order for that to happen I do think you have to look at it without it being sugar coated. I think this film does this and also looks at the fear of the other and how we’re really way more similar than we are different. Clare initially is racist; she’s a product of her upbringing. She’s a product of her society, so she is of course going to be racist at the beginning of the movie. It’s deplorable, but she is, and through the journey she goes on with Billy, her eyes are opened. He’s also sexist towards her at the beginning. Everyone has their prejudices of course. She as a white person towards an aboriginalist is terrible at the beginning, but she goes on this journey where they’re forced to realize that they’re both human beings, that they both have traumas that aren’t necessarily comparable, and I really don’t think that our film conflates feminism and racism in the film. I don’t believe that because Clare has to come to realize that she was prejudiced and was blind to the plight of the aboriginal people. She’s really taught that by being with Billy and he’s ultimately the one that leads her to save herself, and save her humanity, and can choose humanity for her own survival, but again it’s Billy that leads her to that conclusion. She goes on an arch, on a journey, and a character is entitled to have an arch whether it be uncomfortable or not.  

Possibly the most important element of the story is that we tell the story of the aboriginal history. Our story deals with the aboriginal people of Tasmania, but this is the first time this story of the Tasmanian Aboriginal has been put on screen. It’s important for us to remember that because I don’t think it’s even taught properly in Australian schools, let alone anywhere else. There’s a lot, there’s a lot. As I said, the importance of empathy and clinging onto and not perpetuating the circle of violence, but as you say that there’s that there’s a lot to take from it.

How has this performance of a character with such a divisive mindset possibly influenced your future and how you look at roles?

I think it was more so with the project then just Clare specifically. One of the really nice things I discovered was how liberating it is at the end of a project like The Nightingale. I went into it wholeheartedly ready to give it everything. I gave it everything. I know I couldn’t have given it anymore, like I literally couldn’t give anymore. To be able to work like that is amazingly liberating because when it comes out, well I’m certainly finding with this experience, I don’t really, not that I don’t care what people think, but I’m not emotionally vulnerable to people’s opinions. What I mean by that is if people love it, I’m like “cool,”  but if people don’t like it, I also don’t find myself being attacked by that feeling, I just go, “Okay, yeah, it wasn’t for you.” That’s something that I would love to try and do as much as possible going forward with my career. To choose projects I completely believe in because no matter what happens then, whether they go the way that you hope they do or they don’t, you know that you went into it for all the right reasons and because you believe in it. So that’s definitely something I will try to take with me going forward

Last quick question not related to the movie, but just about yourself.  What’s a movie that you love that you would recommend anyone reading this to watch?

Two of my favorite films just off the top of my head, I mean I have so many I don’t think I could choose one, but one film that really had an impact on me was Magnolia, PT Anderson’s Magnolia. That really struck a chord with me because I came into film education pretty late. What I mean by that is that I didn’t grow up watching tons and tons of film. So I was already I think twenty when I kind of started trying to educate myself in film and that was definitely one  stuck out for me. Just the emotional intelligence and all the performances was something that I really was drawn to. I also love Barton Fink. I think it’s my favorite Coen Brothers film. I just love the kind of dark humor, and I also just love John Turturro’s performance in anything usually.

[Rating: Rock Fist Way Down] 

Mexican folklore contains some of the scariest stories around. As a child growing up with a father who taught Spanish for a living, and being invested in my own Hispanic heritage, I have a good knack for these stories and why they are told to frighten others.

Dear old Hollywood however, in their attempt to make more money rarely invest the time or effort to do them right. To them, every Mexican folk tale has to be scary with no hints of why. Just scare the shit out of people and don’t provide a lot of context as to why others are scared. They have to draw audiences in with taglines like “the creepiest thing ever” or “it will scare you pants off.”

As the official sixth entry into The Conjuring cinematic universe, The Curse of La Llorona (directed by Michael Chaves)  takes a Mexican legend probably no gringo has ever heard of, and modernizes it so people get a basic (mis)understanding through the standard jump scares and cryptic shamen B.S. Not for one second did I find myself scared through the lame tactics this film offered and many times, my eyes were rolled in a fit of annoyance at how dull this movie could actually be.

The movie starts in a random year during the 1600s, showing a woman drowning her children. Flash-forward to the 1970s when Anna Tate-Garcia (Linda Cardellini), a social worker in Los Angeles, is sent to investigate a woman, Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velasquez) who hasn’t been sending her children to school. It’s discovered Patricia has her children locked in a closet, but for what reason? When Anna has no choice but to remove the children from the home, Patricia freaks out and warns that her children are in danger.

Spoiler alert: they die after seeing an entity dressed in a wedding gown. When the bodies are discovered, Anna is warned again by Patricia of “La Llorona,” a spirit who drowned her children and in the afterlife, is set to find more children to replace her own. Hearing the weeping of La Llorona (“the crying woman” roughly translated) is sure to lead to some sort of doom. At this point, Anna’s children Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen) are confronted by the spirit and marked (the curse) making them the next victims to be preferably drowned. Being the typical skeptic she is, Anna can’t understand what “La Llorona” even means or relates to her family, despite Anna seeing strange things happening all around her home. A priest gets involved because why not, and he sends her to a Curandero (shaman or healer) Rafael (Raymond Cruz) who despite really not serving any purpose to the plot of the movie, agrees to help Anna and her kids get rid of La Llorona (Marisol Ramirez) and the curse, saving them from being killed.

I hated this movie.

I don’t think there was any doubt I would have ever liked this movie beforehand just knowing and growing up with the legend of La Llorona. Is The Conjuring universe going to take every legend and relate it back to themselves and that damned evil doll of theirs? This didn’t have to open in the 1600s with no explanation as to why a random woman was drowning her children. It could have easily shown Patricia’s children getting killed as the opening scene and used flashbacks to tell La Llorona’s past, using it as the legend goes as to keep kids home after dark.

A lot of the issues I had with this was the writing. Using the phrase “My husband was the religious one, not me” is so overtly bad because everybody uses it. Of course the protagonist will have little to no religious ideologies because it forces her to believe in the paranormal, but the film doesn’t really do anything to change her ways of thinking, at least not out loud. The use of the curandero is used more as a way to get the family to see La Llorona rather than to help them. It also doesn’t help that Rafeal is such an awful character in both writing and acting, mostly using the family as bait. I got tired of him so fast.

Filmmakers like the use of a spiritualist, particularly Mexican ones (i.e. Paranormal Activity, which uses the same tactics as in this) because cleansing the house with an egg and the many religious artifacts are “spooky” to most audiences. This film series also has a really bad way to set up jump scares. The best horror films have them when you least expect them, or don’t. This movie silences everything so only the noise of the audience snickering occurs and then the scare happens, people scream and laugh and ultimately it happens about 20 more times.

The overall biggest drawback for myself is the representation of Hispanics onscreen. There’s not enough movies that have positive images of the culture, language, and ideologies of amazing people and when movies do happen, they’re independently released and not many see them or many are animated which isn’t always bad.

Maybe the biggest issue is to not cast non-Hispanic actors in lead roles like in this movie. Sure, the legend of the crying woman probably isn’t the best use of “positive images” but still this could have been something more in how it was written and presented to an audience that knows nothing about the story. Heck, even the trailer had to have a voiceover pronouncing the title.

Whatever the case, The Curse of La Llorona is a sad excuse for a horror movie. This universe it is set in is only going to get bigger, more jump scarier and less and less thought provoking or worth while, drowning itself in a pool of its own tears of redundancy.

[Rating: Rock Fist Way Up]

As a parent, I’m forced to watch most of my movies at night. That’s usually not that big of a deal, unless I watch something like Hotel Mumbai, a film that kept me up for hours after watching it because of how riveting this story of survival is told.

There’s a saying at the Taj Hotel that the “guest is God.” That was evident in November 2008, when terrorists attacked the hotel, killing 31 people. It’s estimated that 250 people were rescued, and the film shows that number would not have been so high if it weren’t for the bravery of the hotel’s staff.

Among the dedicated hotel staff is renowned chef Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher) and a member of his wait staff, Arjun (Dev Patel) who both chose to risk their lives to protect their guests.

This hotel was targeted because of the clientele of its guests. We follow David, Zahra, their newborn and their nanny, Sally (Armie Hammer and Nazanin Boniadi, and Tilda Cobham-Hervey, respectively) as they begin their honeymoon in paradise and watch it end in hell. David and Zahra are at dinner when the terrorist attach begins. Not knowing what is happening with his child, David leaves his wife in order to make sure their newborn is safe.

After killing everyone in the hotel lobby, the terrorists go room to room, floor by floor, shooting and killing guests. I’m going to reference being a parent again real quick because as Sally is protecting the newborn, and hiding with him in the closet, praying he doesn’t start to cry, I was on the edge of my seat, my heart racing, hoping nothing bad would happen to them. Director Anthony Maras was able to create one of the most intense scenes I’ve seen in a movie in the past five years.

Let’s revisit that phrase uttered by the hotel staff for a second. “The guest is God.” The staff of the hotel are all Indian, the guests are people of power and wealth. When we first meet Arjun, he’s getting ready for work in a shack of a home. He would never be able to stay at the hotel. Once the terrorist attacks are underway, some of the guests appear visibly agitated and scared. They don’t know the difference between Arjun’s beliefs and what the terrorists believe, they just see skin color.

While hiding in a secluded area of the hotel, an older white woman asks chef Oberoi if he could get Arjun remove his turban. She doesn’t know the significance behind the turban, just that it reminds her of the bad people. Arjun doesn’t get upset. No, he calmly walks up to the woman and peacefully describes why he wears a turban and the importance of it to his people. But, he says, if she wishes, he’ll remove it. The guest is God and the staff went to go great lengths for them to see that.

Reviewing movies allows me the pleasure of watching all kinds of films and somehow this week, I was able to watch Dev Patel in two different roles, The Wedding Guest being the second film. I’ll admit, neither of these movies would be my first choice if I’m going to the theater. But I’m glad I was able to watch these two movies, especially Hotel Mumbai. The beauty of the Taj Hotel and the bravery of the staff juxtaposed with the horror of the terrorist attack equals an amazing story that needed to be told.