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They say that One Battle After Another is the most likely winner. 76 odds that one battle After Another is the winner. I'm going to tell you whether I think it should win, whether it will win. We'll get to that in just one second. One battle after another. This is the Paul Thomas Anderson pick with Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro among others. 0 out of 5 stars. I hated this movie more than I can tell you. I despise this film. I think it's awful. I think that the film is incoherent. I think it is discombobulated. It's a left wing piece of agitprop glorifying left wing violence. It's the biggest piece of dog the entire Basis of the plot is a left wing terror group that is run by a black liberation activist who is also having a sexual affair not only with Leonardo DiCaprio's kind of sad sack fellow revolutionary, but also being pressured into kind of not kind of an affair with a. With a white military officer played by Sean Penn who has a thing for black chicks. The entire world, in which one battle after another is run is run by a secret group of white supremacists who wear golf shirts. I mean, it's utterly unsubtle. It is ridiculous in the extreme. Extreme. People have praised the acting. I don't see why. The only decent character in the entire film is Benicio Del Toro, who plays a karate teacher who's also running an underground railroad for illegal immigrants. Somehow, and somehow this is good. So basically the movie is an ode to open borders, the evils of America, the evils of racism, a belief that radical terrorist activity is somehow justified by the evils of that system. There's nothing to recommend about this film other than Paul Thomas Anderson knows how to shoot a film. There's nothing to recommend this film. The acting is bad, the plot is bad, the characters are bad. Massive disappointment from Paul Thomas Anderson. And this thing has been nominated for a bevy of Academy Awards. Like tons of seven nominations at the Academy Awards, which is just ridiculous in the extre. Totally ridiculous. Again, it's a Christian nationalist, white nationalist movement that runs the entire country in one battle after another. And it's about a bunch of left wing radicals trying to overthrow that through the power of sex and murder. So if that's your kind of thing, then enjoy. But the politics are absolutely clear. It was based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, but it really bears little relation to the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland. It's not even sort of paranoid. It's obvious. There's no tact to it. There's no subtlety to it. So one battle after another. 0 out of 5 stars. Total trash. Okay, Hamnet. Hamnet is directed by Chloe Zhao, who of course is the director of Nomadland, which won an Oscar a few years back. Hamnet 2.5 out of 5 stars. It's not terrible. It's also incredibly slow and incredibly emotionally manipulative. So Hamnet is the story of William Shakespeare and his wife. His wife Anne Hathaway. Not the actress that was the actual name of Shakespeare's wife. His wife Anne is treated as sort of a witch who has magical powers in touch with nature throughout the entire thing. Because Chloe Zhao likes to Photograph trees and such. So she goes out of her way to have many, many nature shots in this thing. The basic plot is that William Shakespeare has some kids. One of those kids is named Hamnet. Hamnet dies of bubonic plague, and then he writes Hamlet as a way to immortalize Hamnet. And it basically details the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife from the time that they meet up until the time that Hamlet premieres. She is alienated from her husband from time to time because, of course, he is at Stratford and he's becoming more successful and she's still living back in the country, all of which is historically true. We don't know how alienated they were or really much about anything. And herein lies part of the problem with the movie. It's all speculative. Like all of it is speculative in the same way Shakespeare in Love is speculative. This is speculative. We actually don't know all that much about William Shakespeare's life, and we know even less about his relationship with his wife. There are suggestions that while he was at Stratford, he was playing around there. There's indications he's a great husband. You kind of portray him however you want in this movie. He's a fantastic husband, a fantastic father. She's miffed him for being in Stratford as opposed to at home, but also wants him to be there to fulfill his artistic longings. And the culmination of this movie, spoiler alert. Is the premiere of Hamlet, where she goes in thinking that he sort of exploited his son's death for art. And she realizes that he immortalized his son and their son by doing the play. And she believes that this sort of relationship in the play Hamlet between the old king and Hamlet is sort of a reflection of the relationship between William Shakespeare and his son. It's supposed to be moving. It's supposed to be beautiful. I just felt manipulated by it, to be honest with you. The performances are. Jesse Buckley as Anne Shakespeare is very good. I didn't think Paul Mescal had much to do as William Shakespeare. I thought Emily Watson actually as Mary Shakespeare, who plays William's mom, is maybe the best thing in the film. But overall, two and a half out of five, not in love with it. All right. Sinners, which for some inexplicable reason. It's not inexplicable. It's political. Sinners has received 16 Oscar nominations. Ridiculous. The remake of from dawn till Dusk, with some blues music and some really bad racial politics. I'm gonna go on this one. In terms of enjoyment of the film, I'll go like 3 out of 5. So I did enjoy it more than Hamnet because Hamnet is both slow and depressing. Sinners is not slow and it is not depressing. It's just hideously ugly in its politics. I'll say it's incredibly dirty. It's basically X rated in its use of language and the way that people talk and the activities of the, the characters they're in, the racial politics undergirding the film are really, really ugly. So the basic premise of the film is that there is a set of twins, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who come back to the Mississippi Delta in 1932. They've been up in Chicago working for Al Capone. They come back down, they decide that they're going to open up, open up a blues joint. So they lease from a closeted member of the KKK A a barn basically and they decide to turn it into a blues joint. Now they're going to open the blues joint. It's going to be the locus of freedom. This is the place where black people can really be themselves and be free. And then it turns out that it comes under assault by vampires. And the vampires of course are supposed to be stand ins for white America. And like all of white America, like Irish America, KKK white America, like all white people, it's a race war. The movie's a race war. But it's between vampires who want to suck the blood out of black music and also physically suck the blood out of black people. Right, right. That is the basic idea. And black people, when they become vampires, they basically become tools of the man. So that is the racial politics of the movie. And the first act has nothing to do with vampires. It's pretty entertaining. It's really beautifully shot. Ryan Coogler does a really nice job of setting up the world. There are a couple of kind of banger songs that are in there. The music I like blues. I'm a sucker for the blues. So the music is pretty fun. And the future. There's one number where he does this sort of fantasy routine where the central character is not Michael B. Jordan, it's Michael B. Jordan's nephew who apparently has the magical power of uniting time and space with his music. And so there's a scene where he's playing the blues and black ancestors playing the drums show up. And then future rock stars playing the guitar. Charlotte, Jimi Hendrix kind of characters show up and he's dancing with the past and the future. And this is black music. And that's sort of the big romantic moment of the piece and then of course, it all falls apart. I don't think that the movie works really on a dramatic level and I think the politics are really nasty. But it's definitely watchable. It's definitely watchable. Sinners. So three out of five for sinners. Marty supreme, which came in as sort of an early front runner here and has nine nominations at the Academy Awards, but now is kind of being given short shrift, I think in a lot of the discussions here. Marty Supreme 3.5 out of 5 is written by Josh Safdie with Ronald Bronstein. Set in the 50s, it's Timothy Chalamet who turns in a truly terrific performance. Timothy Chalamet is really good in this. The basic premise of Marty supreme is that Timothee Chalamet plays this table tennis player named Marty Mauser, who's loosely based on another real guy named Marty Riceman. He wants to become the world champion at table tennis and basically he breaks all of his relationships and is terrible in pursuit of this, all the way up to, you know, trying to track down a guy who beat him at the table tennis championships in Britain and now he's trying to get to Japan and basically he's willing to do anything and exploit anyone. And so the movie is sort of a meditation on 1950s Jewish culture in a particular way. I thought that it's take on Jewish culture is pretty ugly. It's sort of apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz without any of the moral conflict or charm made clear. Kevin o' Leary actually turns in a pretty good performance here. The guy from Shark Tank, he has a big part in this movie and I was actually quite impressed by his acting. He plays Milton Rockwell, who's an influential businessman who's married to Gwyneth Paltrow's K. Stone, who's a retired actress with whom Chalamet is having an affair. Chalamet's character, Marty Mauser, is a complete scumbag. I mean, he knocks up a girl, tries to claim that it's not his, ditches her, goes and starts screwing an actress, treats her pretty poorly, tries to steal jewelry from her, like he's willing to do literally anything to get ahead. But the movie isn't really a meditation on how that makes him a bad person. At the very end, he ends up sort of self correcting. There's sort of a fairy tale ending where he defeats this Japanese player who's been playing with not a hard bat paddle. So in table tennis, when you play table tennis, there are kind of two paddles. That you've seen used. One is essentially a slab of wood with a little bit of covering. That's a hard bat. And then there is the very heavily foamed paddles that are used by this Japanese player. He's upset. He doesn't want. He thinks that's cheating because it allows you to create more spin on the ball. Chalamet apparently worked for five years learning to play ping pong really well. Like on set at Dune, he would bring out the ping pong table. And he actually apparently has close to world class skills as a ping pong player to play this. And the scenes where they're playing ping pong are pretty great. Again, it is a fast moving film. Chalamet's performance is tremendous. It is compelling, but it's really ugly. You're there with a bunch of ugly people you can't root for. So the only sort of redeeming feature is that once he sort of achieves his dream of defeating this Japanese player, he does go back home and he sort of claims ownership of the child that he sired. And now the idea is, I think that he's going to become a responsible citizen, that he was willing to do whatever it took in pursuit of his dream, and now he's going to become a responsible citizen. And so I suppose that sort of, you know, any immigrant experience story in the United States is willing to break the rules until you become a legit member of society. Maybe that's the metaphor there. It's a very. At the very least, it's a thinker. At the very least, this movie makes you think it's got a moral take that I don't think is right. And I think again, it's kind of stereotypical and it's portrayal of Jews at the time, but it's definitely fascinating. I found myself thinking about it. So Marty Supreme, I think, is the best of these films. Just the spoiler alert. I think that in a fair artistic world, it probably win Best Picture. I don't think that it will because its politics are too unclear. All right, Begonia. So I know that Matt Walsh liked Begonia. I did not like Begonia. I thought that Begonia is rather dumb, frankly. So it's Yorgo's Lanthimos who is also responsible for such amazing films as Dog Tooth, the Killing of a Sacred Deer, and of course the Favorite and Poor Things, but neither of which I like. So I do not like his body of work. I think that he is. He's kind of the equivalent of Bong Joon Ho, the South Korean filmmaker. Who made Parasite and Mickey 17 and Snowpiercer in that everything he does is social commentary. And all the social commentary is directly on the nose. It's hitting you in the face with a brick. That is what Begonia is. So Begonia is a black comedy thriller. I'll give this like 2 out of 5 stars. Really did not like. The basic premise of the film is that there is a CEO of a pharmaceutical conglomerate played by Emma Stone, who's a favorite of Yorgos Lanthimos, and she's abducted by a conspiracy theorist named Teddy Gatz and his autistic cousin Don. These people are played by Jesse Plemons, who is, you know, he's great. I mean, Jesse Plemons is great in everything. He's a great actor. And Aiden Delbis, who is the autistic cousin who aids him in the kidnapping. And so basically they decide they're gonna kidnap this lady because they believe that she is an alien who's controlling all of their lives. And so the thing starts off as sort of a three hander between Emma Stone and these two characters. And the basic idea that you're supposed to take away is that they're crazy because they have all these nutty theories about how she's actually an alien who is infiltrating earth in order to undermine humanity and destroy humanity from the inside, and that she's going to call forth the Andromedans in order to destroy humanity or to use humanity for their own purposes. And so the whole thing is basically this conversation between her and Jesse Plemons. Now again, if this were a really interesting sort of conspiracy thriller about why conspiracy theorists think what they do, if we're sort of a half comedy, half drama about the fact that conspiracy theorists are in fact critical crazy and they think crazy things, which is true, that'd be one thing. But actually the, the conclusion that has come to is, of course, corporate America is a bunch of aliens who wish to suck from you their vital life forces because, spoiler alert, she is an alien and at the end she destroys all of humanity because the. Because she has concluded that human experiment has failed. This is the part where it's like, come on, really? This is where I compare it again to Parasite. It's. It's very obvious social commentary that, that I think is in the end, pretty dumb. All right, next on the list, the Secret Agent, a movie that I wanted to like but could not bring myself to. The Secret Agent is a Brazilian film. It is rooted in the 1970s during the Brazilian military dictatorship. I'll put this one kind of like at hamnet level. 2.5 out of 5. It kind of goes nowhere. It kind of goes nowhere. So the. The whole thing centers on a former professor named Armando who is trying to pick up his young son and escape the country because he's being targeted by corrupt figures inside the Brazilian government after his wife was essentially murdered for her politics. And he, you know, looks up stories about his ancestors. He ends up. He ends up running away, and eventually he ends up being killed. So it just. It didn't work for me. The drama doesn't really build in any real way. It's kind of flat, to be honest with you. They're better versions of films like this. So a film that's sort of similarly about politics of South America, that is a much better film. There's a film called the Secret in their eyes from 2009. It won the best foreign language film at the Academy Awards that year, and it was about the Argentinian regime and people working for it. And it's a much better film. So if you want to see a much better film about kind of a similar period in Latin American history, South American history, this is a better film. The Secret in Their Eyes. It's really dramatic. It's really compelling. I just. The Secret Agent left me absolutely flat. It kind of went nowhere for me. So, again, two. Two out of five. All right. Train Dreams. So Train Dreams is basically a bunch of pretty pictures with very little plot. It's kind of a Terrence Malick film that's not directed by Terrence Malick. It was directed instead by Clint Bentley. Again, two out of five. The film didn't do much for me. It's basically the story of a guy named Robert Greiner who lives near Idaho, and it's about his. Basically his whole life, and how he builds a cabin with his wife, who's played by Felicity Jones, and then his wife and his child are killed, and it follows him throughout his life, and nothing actually happens. He goes and he lives in the cabin, and life progresses, and that's kind of it. Nothing happens for the whole movie, so I. Not my thing. All for the pretty pictures. I'm very much driven by sort of character and plot when I watch films. And this one didn't have much of either. Had some character, a little, but he's kind of a cipher. And again, that's not because I don't like the pieces of the thing in isolation. Lots of pretty pictures. The. The acting is good. It just left me completely cold. I'm a Big Joel Edgarton fan. I really love him as an actor, but the movie just didn't do much for me. All right, F1. F1 is a three out of five. It's a weaker version of Top Gun Maverick. A much weaker version of Top Gun Maverick. It's Brad Pitt, it's Carrie Condon, Javier Bardem again. Basically, the plot is the same as Top Gun Maverick. Driver comes back to teach the youngins a thing or two, and I'm in. Like, I enjoy it. I enjoy the F1 of it. For F1 fans, my guess is that they probably are slightly annoyed by it at times because basically the way that Brad Pitt keeps winning is by bending the rules and. Or cheating, like. Like creating crashes and such. Nonetheless, it's entertaining. It holds your attention, but in a better year, there's no way this gets nominated for anything. So, like, two and a half out of five. 3 out of 5. 3 out of 5, maybe. All right, Frankenstein. This is my most disappointing film of the year, Truly. I thought this thing is going to be great, right? It's Guillermo del Toro classic fiction. It's a period piece with monsters and everything else, and instead, Guillermo del Toro sort of weirdly makes the Frankenstein monster a sex pot, which is kind of a weird choice. The movie is shockingly slow. The visuals are beautiful, but the character development and the thematic development don't actually seem to work in any real way. It's. I wish I could say I loved it. I just didn't. I think we have yet to see the definitive Frankenstein film. And again, the cast is. Is fine. Oscar Isaac is Victor Frankenstein. Jacob Elordi, who's now in every single movie, is the creature. Mia Goth is Oscar Isaacs girlfriend. Christoph Walls is in a supporting role as well. So it's a really, really good cast. Obviously, again, there are some changes, certainly, to the original plot that are unnecessary. One of the things that it does, it gets rid of the central conflict of the novel. The central conflict of the novel in Frankenstein is the desire of science to turn Godlike and the fact that without God, human beings are basically just piles of meat that do bad things. That's essentially the argument that Frankenstein makes. Mary Charlie's Frankenstein. And instead there's kind of a weird military subplot that happens. It just. It doesn't work. It just doesn't work. I wish it did. It doesn't. Two out of five for Frankenstein. All right, finally, sentimental value, which is the obligatory actors are important movie that we get every year. Sometimes it wins, if you remember. All the way Back to Birdman, which won Best Picture, which was all about. Actors are very important. Sentimental value is also about. Art is very important. Actors are very important. 2 out of 5. Big Meh directed by Joachim Trier, who actually is a good director. It follows a couple of sisters and their reunion with their estranged dad, Gustav, and stars Elle Fanning as well. Basically, the whole movie is about how the daughters are estranged from their father. They live in a particular house. The dad is a famous director. He wants to use this house that he has inhabited since he was a child in order to film a movie that's essentially about his life. Again, it does nothing for me. The acting is fine. I don't find any of the characters particularly compelling. They're all kind of unlikable. I know it's a lot to ask that we like at least one character in a movie, but it is my requirement that we like at least one character in a movie. This, by the way, is my problem with Marty Supreme. I'm not sure you like one character in the whole movie. All the characters are terrible. So it's interesting, but it's not exactly rewatchable. You're not rooting for anyone, per se. Well, same thing is sort of true here. And of course it's incredibly self indulgent about the power of art and acting. And listen, I love art, I love acting, I love movies, I'm a huge movie buff. But these sort of constant self referential attempts to treat the creation of art as the highest good is, I find it, on a moral level, somewhat annoying. All right, so if I were to pick a Best Picture this year, it would probably be Marty Supreme. I think it's a very mediocre group of films overall. I didn't see anything this year that I thought was better than these, but I thought it was a very weak year for movies, frankly.