For a tradition that is so ostensibly backward-looking—whether celebrating films from the prior year or steeping itself more deeply in more than a century of moviemaking—Oscar night is actually most useful as a barometer for what the industry is working through in that exact moment.

For most of this century, that has manifested as ever-accelerating neuroticism—about declining ratings and the collapse of the monoculture, about representation and the ugly power dynamics that have always permeated the industry, and, now, about the shrinking landscape of places you can go to get a film financed or even see one if you don’t want to sit on your couch.

The New York Times used the word angst as part of its recap of the ceremony. One film writer I’ve long followed characterized the proceedings as having a “funereal undercurrent.” These aren’t misrepresentations of the state of affairs, what with the ongoing fallout from streaming remaking consumption habits and yet another corporate merger sure to put many people out of work.

But it is, in my view, a touch too negative in its summation of Hollywood’s mood—missing a strain of pugilism that felt new to the Dolby Theater this year.

Host Conan O’Brien is there mostly to keep things silly and light. Yet, there he was Sunday night lampooning the streaming-born practice of recapping plot points for people absorbed in their second screen vis a vis Casablanca. Before that, he went hard in the paint on Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos for the part his company has played in both imperiling the moviegoing experience and in our deepening loneliness crisis.

There is a real edge to Conan’s mockery. Sarandos seemed to take it in stride, but if he turns out to be a thick-skinned tech CEO, he’ll be the first of which I can think.

None of this is to say that Hollywood’s existential crisis is imagined or even overblown. It’s quite real, and it has the potential to do a great deal of ongoing damage. The industry, though, didn’t seem quite as unsure of itself or as resigned to its fate as it has been in years past.

Perhaps it’s a death rattle, but on a night when a 39-year-old from Oakland took home a bunch of awards for a film that was as commercially successful as it was critically acclaimed in a month when one of the major studios announced it would lengthen its theatrical windows, I’ll choose cautious optimism, if only for a moment.

The 98th Academy Awards are in just a handful of hours, and like always we’ve got a whole host of thoughts and golden hot takes to help get you ready for the year’s biggest night in film.

Start with our list of the best films of 2025, which include a bunch of the films nominated this year:

Then go deeper than a paragraph or two with our discussion and pick for the very best film of the year. Spoiler alert: we’re right in line with what the predicition markets have.

And since the two favorites were both distributed by a studio that may not even exist by the time next year’s Oscars roll around, you could also read our article or listen to our podcast episode about all the drama with Warner Brothers.

Finally, I’ll be posting the hottest of takes as Notes as the ceremony unfolds, but in the meantime, here’s my ranking of the Best Picture nominees, Nos. 1-10. If I finish The Secret Agent before the ceremony I’ll be sure to update the order.

Ranking the Best Picture Nominees

1. Marty Supreme

2. One Battle After Another

3. Sentimental Value

4. Sinners

5. Bugonia

6. Hamnet

7. Train Dreams

8. F1

9. Frankenstein

(Still working on finishing The Secret Agent as you read this post.)

Enjoy the show, everyone. If nothing else, we’ve at least got Conan again.

Just like any other modern artform, cinema has always been concerned with what money and power does to the soul. One of the most beloved films ever made is pre-occupied with this concern. You don’t have to go back to the 1940s for this sort of meditation, though. Parasite, just named the best film of the 21st century by The New York Times, is about this very thing as well, even if—in being about it—it’s far more blisteringly furious than It’s a Wonderful Life.

It’s been more than a half decade since the release of Parasite, and I think it’s fair to say that the forces fueling the fury of that film have only grown. Filmmakers, in turn, have had more than ever to say about this subject over the past year. I would expect that to continue for the foreseeable future—both because it takes years to produce a film and because there is zero indication that our “culture of elite impunity” is changing.

Once upon a time (aka 2005), comedian George Carlin quipped that “it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it,” to sum up where we the people stand in relation to elites. His incisive pessimism seems to be getting proven right, but, that aside, I find it interesting that, over the course of the last 20 years, this kind of sentiment has leaped from a single countercultural comedian to—this past year—a number of celebrated films. The film industry, after all, has always had a close relationship with power, and defaults to having a vested interest in reinforcing it. That it can’t seem to ignore the pernicious nature of it now, as it is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, tells a tale about how bad things have gotten and shows the real limits of filmmakers to push back. In some ways, all film can do is illuminate, and illuminate it has.

I’m not sure I found any scene from the last year more haunting than the final one in After the Hunt, which brings Carlin’s quip to life. In it, Julia Roberts’ Alma and Ayo Edibiri’s Maggie sit across from the table at a diner years after both were embroiled in a #MeToo-adjacent sex scandal at Yale on opposite sides.

Where once they were lobbing accusations at each other, now they are downright collegial. Neither has paid any real long-term price for their actions despite both carrying real guilt. Indeed, both seem to have benefited materially.

They’re in the club. We ain’t.

The strange bedfellows found in the Epstein files—the Chomskys alongside Bannons—give this scene, and Luca Guadagnino’s film by extension, a remarkable prescience. A scandal only really matters if there are consequences for those involved. Otherwise, it’s merely a spectacle—an empty-calories kind of entertainment.

Other films from 2025 were far more absurdist in their handling of the so-called Epstein class. Bugonia turns Emma Stone’s would-be tech CEO in to a literal alien. Director Yorgos Lanthimos at once takes the doomerism lurking deep within the ostensible missions of Blue Origin and SpaceX seriously, and also has his version of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk lie and manipulate to escape culpability. Gee, I wonder where he got the idea.

Presumptive Best Picture winner One Battle After Another, meanwhile, uses a shadowy white supremacist organization called the Christmas Adventurers Club as a driver of the film’s overall paranoia. When even a would-be agent of the Club, Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, is disposable to those in power, we are, it would seem, all in grave danger.

If director Paul Thomas Anderson captures the paralyzing anxiety of living through such times, then whatever comes next cinematically might do well to diagnose what we can all do to change things. Sure, Benicio del Toro’s Sensei offers a scant bit of a hint, but One Battle After Another ends with its protagonist having barely scraped by, not with him delivering some kind of righteous accountability. Perfidia Beverly Hills’ letter to her daughter admits failure, and in the same breath hopes that “maybe” it will be different for the all-grown-up Baby Charlene. It’s a Wonderful Life, by contrast, uses community and virtue to deliver a decisive blow against the scheming of Mr. Potter.

In this context, it might be 28 Years Later, of all the films released last year, that offers the clearest warning about the status quo persisting. That film isn’t so much about a collective problem facing us as it is about our failure to respond appropriately. In it, a community mistakes self-imposed isolation—avoidance, in other words—for a solution to the threat. All that really does is make you more vulnerable when it eventually comes knocking on your door.

Netflix does not want you to see movies in a theater. Despite its origin story, it does not particularly believe in movies or film or “the cinema.” It believes in “content” and “engagement,” just like every other company in Silicon Valley. It is, in other words, a technology company, not an entertainment company, which is to say that its aims and incentives are even more perverse than that of the average Fortune 500 firm.

This feels worth making a point of in the wake of last month’s news that Netflix is attempting to complete the purchase of Warner Brothers—the most Hollywood of all the Hollywood studios—for $82.7 billion.

To be clear, it feels that way because the party line coming out of Netflix right now is that it won’t really mess with the WB operation, that, in fact, it might be Netflix coming around to the idea of theatrical distribution, just as it came around to the idea of cracking down on password sharing and incorporating advertising after saying it wouldn’t do those things for years. And this is a party line that is a huge part of the framing of the media coverage of this potential deal. Just take it from The New York Times …

In fairness to The Times, the analysis in the article I’ve screenshotted above ought to give its readers reasons for healthy skepticism:

In 2022, Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, said, “We make our movies for our members, and we really want them to watch them on Netflix.”

In May of this year, he called theatrical distribution “an outmoded idea.”

And in October, Mr. Sarandos said on an earnings call that the company’s goal was to “give our members exclusive first-run movies on Netflix.”

Oh, well — never mind.

But the headline here, along with the context that is being emphasized throughout the article, is a choice in and of itself—one that places Netflix on the continuum of an emergently powerful entertainment company as opposed to what it is, an emergently powerful Silicon Valley outfit.

What if the primary context for this proposed merger was not that of a Hollywood upstart that has reversed course a few times but instead more akin to Facebook’s anti-competitive acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp? What if enshittification is the lens through which all of this is viewed?

Well, we’d rightly assume that Netflix’s executives are lying through their teeth—that they are telling us, consumers, regulators, everyone, what we want to hear so that they can lock us in to a platform that increases costs in lockstep with a degradation of quality.

So, let me just say what The New York Times can’t (or won’t): Netflix is either lying to us or, if not, letting consumers believe what they want to believe. They have made no—none, zero—firm commitments to do things any differently than today. If a press release saying that “it expects to maintain … current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films,” counts as such, then you need to hear more lawyers discussing word choices.

We should take Ted Sarandos at his word, not the tortured, interrogated pablum of his legal department and public relations firm. He believes theaters are “outmoded.”

There is a possibility that the government bails us out. Paramount has lodged a competing, hostile takeover bid, and all three studios are bracing for lengthy fight before any potential deal is done.

Larry Ellison’s son, David, runs that studio, and the Ellisons are close with the Trump administration. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, is involved in the Paramount bid. Indeed, this is why many in the industry didn’t really see a successful Netflix bid coming.

Even if you set aside the Paramount bid and all the tangled relationships between Washington D.C. and Hollywood, there’s a very good antitrust case to be made, given that this would fold the biggest and third-biggest streaming service in to one.

You have to assume our laws still have teeth, of course, and then you have to make a successful argument about the nature of both companies, but the risk to the deal is substantial enough that there are smart people who think this takeover bid is more about “freezing” a competitor than it is about taking market share, and that it is a strategic misstep by Netflix.

@theankler

The Ankler on Instagram: "Matt Stoller, the monopoly expert beh…

It would be lovely for that to be the case, but we’re so far through the looking glass here that I have zero expectations that something so obviously illegal would be treated as such by the Department of Justice.

And, really, that legal intrigue is beside the point if you love the cinema. Hoping Paramount, with an assist from Daddy Trump, prevails is a poverty mindset, as this piece by The American Prospect outlines.

The oligarchs and Trump hangers-on coming together to try to bully their way into giving Warner Bros. to Paramount instead of Netflix have different designs but will fundamentally lead to the same outcome: ruining Hollywood. A merged Paramount and Warner Bros., with Jared Kushner and a bunch of Middle East sovereign wealth funds behind the scenes of the financing, simply wipes out one major Hollywood studio entirely, just like the sale of Fox assets to Disney. We can expect the same drastic impact on theaters that the Netflix acquisition will have. Paramount+ is the number five streamer, and while not immediately presenting as drastic a consolidation as the Netflix bid, it still reduces options for consumers for streaming and for producers for bids for their services. There’s nothing much better here, and then you add in the MAGA attempt to control information flow through corrupting news media.

By the way, both deals lead to the creation of more debt. The Paramount proposal is predicated on a $54 billion bank loan, and the Netflix bank loan is $59 billion. For decades, failed mergers have created a wall of debt for Warner Bros., and a new wall of debt is being built through yet another merger.

FOR SOME REASON, THE PERVASIVE REACTION to this bidding war between Netflix and Paramount has been to choose sides, based mainly on your political persuasion. A Netflix deal, liberals believe, at least doesn’t put CNN and CBS under the thumb of Trump allies. To conservatives, that’s the promise of a Paramount deal. And in the Trump era of politicization of antitrust, we hear about secret meetings between the president and Netflix or Paramount executives, and gauge our preferences accordingly.

Yet this blinkered way of thinking about the economy, this idea that we simply must tolerate more Hollywood consolidation, and the best we can hope for is something that aligns in some way with our political beliefs, is completely wrong. Functionally it’s wrong, because state attorneys general can choose to use the Clayton Act to challenge either of these mergers, and they would have good precedent to block this attempt at monopolization. What the Trump administration wants is immaterial to the opportunity state AGs have to scrutinize either a Netflix or Warner Bros. deal.

But more than that, it presumes that Warner Bros., a historic American company that is doing about as well as it ever has, simply must sell itself. This “there is no alternative” mindset, sold by Wall Street for 40 years, has warped our thinking. Especially if the cable channels are split off, Warner Bros. can be a profitable company, with no need to indulge its executives’ dreams of a quick payout.

We can do better than “the best possible consolidation under the circumstances,” if we can just imagine for a second an outcome where the M&A people lose for once.

Truth be told, unless you’re under the age of 12, it shouldn’t take any imagination to conjure up the world we want.

We simply have to remind ourselves what happens when tech companies “disrupt” anything, whether it be taxicabs, vacation rentals, food delivery, news, or interpersonal relationships. In the end, we the consumers pay more for an inferior facsimile of what we had before while the workers starve.

Or, we can remind ourselves of what it is like to walk in to a movie theater that is busy and well taken care of on opening night—what it’s like to be alone together in a darkened room as our senses are thrilled visually and aurally.

It is not so far of a journey—just to the other side of COVID for most of us—to remember a good, all-encompassing trip to the theater. Hell, go to the right theater now, get a ticket for Avatar: Fire and Ash or Marty Supreme, and you can remember what it was like today.

I suppose the question becomes what are we fighting for, and how do we fight for it. In my view, the answer, in the context of Netflix’s moves specifically, is the theatergoing experience as we know it. There are many other things under threat, not the least of which is the creative class that is responsible for one of America’s greatest artistic and cultural contributions to the world. But it is Netflix alone that represents an extinction-level threat to movie theaters. Just listen to their executives.

Be self-interested for a second. Think about what it’s like to see a great movie in a crowded theater with friends and strangers alike. Think about Paul Rudd’s experience below, of seeing Avengers: Infinity War at the premiere of the film and anticipating the reaction to that film’s big moment.

@letterboxd

Letterboxd on Instagram: "Anaconda stars Paul Rudd, Jack Black,…

Then think about Ted Sarandos calling something like that “outmoded.”

There’s a fight to be had in the courts here, but most of us will be interested spectators as that plays out. We can hope that it works out in our favor and we can place a call or two to our elected representatives, but that’s about it.

But there’s also one to be had in the streets—the one where your local movie theater is. And there, we can all do a bit more, can’t we?

We can make a point of putting our butts in movie seats for all different kinds of films. As a bonus, we can shut off our phones and leave the close captioning off, since staring at your phone in a theater is still frowned upon, and the sound systems at your cineplex don’t have to compete with your dishwasher. It all might amount to swimming upstream, but the Barnes & Nobles of the world prove that downward trend lines don’t have to amount to fate.

A few weeks from now, my wife and I will watch When Harry Met Sally … as we have on every New Year’s Eve since we decided being out with the crowds no longer had any appeal to us.

We put our kids to bed and make French 75s, a totally incongruous cocktail choice for a middle-aged couple cuddled up on their couch and bedecked in athleisure. We time the start of the proceedings so that Billy Crystal is done telling Meg Ryan that he wants “the rest of his life to start as soon as possible” a few minutes before the real ball drops in Times Square.

It is a modest tradition, I suppose. Nevertheless, it has become one of my most cherished ones. When Harry Met Sally …, of course, has a natural tie-in to the holiday. But, mostly, its appeal is its warmth and unflinching optimism on the subject of love. It gets us to end every year laughing deeply together because the jokes are very funny, but also because they are told in service of real wisdom: friendship as the bedrock of lasting romance, patience as the ultimate virtue, flaws and imperfections being things not to get over so much as they are avenues for deeper understanding and admiration.

Why bother with movies at all? Because of films like this, which do nothing less than make you feel less lonely for a little while.

I am, of course, writing this because Rob Reiner, the director of When Harry Met Sally … and a passel of other films that are held in similarly high regard was murdered in his home along with his wife Michele over the weekend.

This is a shocking and senseless tragedy—one I am finding especially difficult to process, not just because of the nature of it, or because I love so many of his films, but also because Michele specifically is the reason that When Harry Met Sally … ended up ending the way it did.

Social media is flooded with clips of Reiner’s films and also many, many interviews. You don’t have to look far or hard to hear him explain that he changed the ending of When Harry Met Sally … after falling for Michele during the shooting of the film.

It is too plain to think of this as art imitating life. This is a real-life romance changing the course of cinematic history. Is When Harry Met Sally … even on the list of great romantic comedies without that ending—without Michele? What even is the archetype of romantic comedy without this film, just as it is? It would be something foreign, alien, totally different. It’s a good thing fate intervened.

This isn’t something I knew until this week. Sadly, now that I do, it makes what happened to Rob and Michele that much more heartbreaking.

One of the other clips I’ve watched a few times is of Reiner explaining that he learned it was possible to fuse elements of comedy, drama, horror, and so on in one piece, and that the pursuit of that is what animated him professionally.

This, I think, explains the broad appeal of his individual films as well as the remarkable range he displayed over the course of his career.

“That’s capturing the human experience,” Reiner says in the clip above, explaining what he aimed to accomplish with is work. “Because it’s tragic and it’s dramatic and it’s funny too. And if you can figure out a way to blend those things, then, to me, that is the most satisfying theater.”

Well, he did what he set out to do.

Even in his funniest films, there is darkness. Think, for example, of the arc of Buttercup, who becomes earnestly suicidal when she learns Westley is still alive and believes she’ll be forced to marry Prince Humperdinck. Or, sticking with The Princess Bride, consider the backstory and prime motivation of Inigo Montoya. It is funny how he explains his quest to avenge his father, but there is a real sadness in Mandy Patinkin’s eyes when he is delivering the explanation.

It is, of course, there in When Harry Met Sally … too.

“When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first,” Billy Crystal’s Harry tells Meg Ryan’s Sally. “That way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.”

This is right after they first meet, on their road trip from Chicago to New York. Harry is playing the part of worldly man lecturing naive young woman, and it seems in the moment that he must be telling a tall tale to make a point.

It is only much, much later—after Harry and Sally get together and then can’t seem to make it work—that we learn he was being entirely serious. Lonely in his apartment and lamenting the mistakes he’s made, we see him do the thing he claimed he did all those years prior, flipping to the last page of a book before turning all the way back to the beginning.

Harry really does have a dark side. We all do, don’t we? It’s confirmed in this one, small moment, and with that confirmation comes a new clarity about the stakes for these two characters in whom we have invested so much. Harry is staring at a dark prospect—an abyss of loneliness if he can’t figure things out with someone who is so obviously right for him.

It still plays for laughs, but When Harry Met Sally … is great because of its unique blend of the human experience. The laughs are just the veneer.

In a way, Harry’s compulsion for reading the last page first serves as a metaphor for his inability to focus on the things that really matter, yet are staring him right in the face. The ending isn’t really what makes a book good or bad. It’s just where it stops. The whole point of reading isn’t to finish, but to begin and then to keep going.

So it is with romantic partnership. And, so, it must sadly be said, it ought to be with Rob Reiner. His last page isn’t what matters. It's all the ones before it.

Here is a list of films Disney released this year in theaters (including Marvel Studios and Pixar, but excluding 20th Century Studios):

Captain America: Brave New World, Snow White, Thunderbolts*, Lilo & Stitch, Elio, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Freakier Friday, Tron: Ares, Zootopia 2

And, just for fun, here is a look at what’s coming from the Mouse in the year ahead:

Hoppers, The Mandalorian and Grogu, Toy Story 5, Moana, Hexed, Avengers: Doomsday

If you’re not depressed by that list, then I’m not entirely sure what you’re doing here. But, just to draw a line under it, that’s a total of 15 feature-length releases this year and next, only three of which are not some kind of remake, sequel or franchise extension. Elio—the only one of those three that anyone has seen—was a nice film, but it hardly stirred optimism of another Disney renaissance on the horizon.

The question I have is whether I, or anyone else, should hold a candle aflame at all. It seems I am not alone in wondering.

After Walt [Disney] died, his company became just one more Hollywood studio. For a few decades, it flourished as an entertainment conglomerate, but eventually the people running the Walt Disney Company lost the desire to try new things. They just rehashed formulas.

That business today puts all its energy on extending these tired brands. But it’s wise to remember what extended means in the finance world—it indicates that you’re out on a limb, and have lost any margin for error.

Walt Disney would be horrified. But what would he do if (through some Tinkerbell or cryogenic magic) he were made C.E.O. today?

I think we can answer that question.

• Walt would ditch the plans for sequels and prequels and spin-offs, and focus on fresh new concepts.

• He would hire people full of imagination and creativity—because he always did that.

• But he would be just as willing to adapt some story from an outsider or in the public domain—if that was more exciting or interesting. He didn’t need to own it, because he had confidence that he could do it better than anybody else.

• Even better, he would incorporate the latest technologies in his vision, and enter into partnerships with the most forward-looking companies in the world to realize his dreams.

• Above all, he would do this in a holistic, people-oriented way.

There are a few details I would quibble with here. First, I think the author, the great Ted Gioia, is underselling the spirit and the heights of the Jeffrey Katzenberg years. Second, I think if you’re going to celebrate Walt’s unparalleled vision for the future—and you definitely should—you have to pay tribute to his brother Roy who rehashed a whole lot of formulas in his day to enable WED Enterprises, the corporate vehicle for Walt’s next thing, whatever it ended up being from year to year.

Those really are quibbles, though. Ted is absolutely correct that the creator of Disney would be appalled by its current state.

I watched The Fantastic Four: First Steps this week. It’s probably the best of the 2025 releases. The production design is truly wonderful and the performances of each of the Four have some real soul. But, put in the context of Walt Disney’s legacy, it is astonishingly far from what the man stood for and what he built. There are many, many worse films out there. But this is still nothing more than a slick, clever repackaging of scores of films just like it. Like cotton candy, it is meant to taste sweet and then dissolve all in a moment.

The thing that I find so hard to understand is just why Disney, the corporation, is so milquetoast. What is to prevent it from resurrecting something like WED Enterprises and pursuing a radical vision for the future in parallel to what it is already doing. (I know, I know, it’s maximizing shareholder value, stupid.)

Or, as Ted puts it:

Some of you know that I’ve speculated about a merger between Apple and Disney. In many ways, that would represent a return to Walt Disney’s original E.P.C.O.T. vision. But there would be one big difference—both Apple and the Disney Corporation are fallen angels, who have lost their mojo.

But if you brought them together and returned to that initial vision of a healing, people-oriented partnership between high tech and entertainment, miracles might happen.

Alas, there’s no Walt Disney to oversee it. But maybe somebody else—not named Tim Cook or Bob Iger—could rise to the challenge. After all, the need is enormous.

Even more to the point, this abandoned vision of healing, human tech married to creativity is much better than any of the other available options for these companies. Best of all, we really don’t need magic—so Tinkerbell can put away her magic wand. We only need leadership and courage.

Maybe we can’t bring back Walt Disney. But he left behind a pretty good playbook, and an inspiring vision. Now’s the time for someone else to start again where he left off.

Look, there are a lot companies—especially almost all of them in Silicon Valley—that display outright contempt for their customers. To put it more bluntly, many firms hate human beings and view their relationship with them as purely extractive.

Disney isn’t one of them—not yet—and it needn’t ever be. Its birthright gives it license to be exactly the opposite—to engage in something far more ambitious than that of a middling quarterback trying to run out the clock.

“Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”

— Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another practically compels you to see it more than once. I haven’t, and yet know I will need to in order to appreciate all of its facets. This is not because it is inscrutable, but rather because its characters provide so many different angles of explorations. Its clear what this film is about—what buries it in your psyche are the various vantage points from which you can take it all in.

It’s no wonder that I spent most of my first viewing thinking about the action from the perspective of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson. He is, after all, the middle-aged white guy who isn’t a brownshirt. He has a daughter, too.

Unlike so many other characters played by DiCaprio over the years, Bob Ferguson is defined by a paranoid ennui. DiCaprio has looked this disheveled before—we do have The Revenant, after all—but it’s hard to think of a role where he’s seemed so insecure and lacked so much confidence in his ability to do just about anything well. It’s an interesting progression in DiCaprio’s on-screen persona (there’s probably a whole separate essay to be written on the subject), but it’s also quite a comment on where we are generally.

Here is Jack Dawson and Romeo, or even the imperious Jordan Belfort and Calvin Candie if you look at the other side of the coin, crippled to the point of near-inaction by depression and anxiety.

What drives it? What turned “Ghetto” Pat (aka “Rocketman”) in to Bob friggin’ Ferguson? Well, I’d argue it is the combination of disappointment in the kind of change a radical revolutionary movement can effect, watching the forward march of dark reactionary forces in response, and, most important of all, the deep vulnerability that comes with having a child to care for and protect.

I can’t claim “Ghetto” Pat’s radical bona fides—my life has not been remotely that bold or courageous or interesting—but there are many days when I share in his anxiety about just what the hell is going on and where all of it is headed. I spend a not-insignificant amount of my time feeling trapped between the notion that I should be doing more to bring about the world I want my kids to live in and worrying about what that might mean for my main job right now: keeping them safe and healthy.

For me, the anxiety is low-stakes and largely theoretical. For Bob Ferguson, it’s quite real. Steven J. Lockjaw is still out there, rising up the ranks and garnering commendations from the most powerful military force in human history.

I’ve had this running joke with family and friends that fatigue is, ironically, the thing that is most animating about my politics in this extended moment. The punchline is that I want to found a political movement or party simply called I’m Tired.

The irony, of course, is that I’ve been too tired to do anything about it yet, and I still am. Terrorist attacks, financial crises, the rise of authoritarians, a global pandemic, and getting up in the middle of every night to soothe infants, and toddlers, and kids do take their toll. I feel it myself, and I saw it all over Bob Ferguson’s face—I felt it every time he sparked something up to calm his nerves.

The “artificial intelligence” in Google’s search results (speaking of sources of anxiety) tells me that two of the reasons for a permanently altered state are “trauma” and “neuroplasticity and experience.”

As an elder Millennial, I have plenty of both, and so does Bob Ferguson. I have no earthly idea if that makes the two of us any different from previous generations upon their arrival at middle age. What I do know is that, hapless and exposed as I feel, I’m trying to choose a path like Bob’s—that is to say putting one foot in front of the other so that my children can have an opportunity to do the same.

Upon learning of the death of Robert Redford earlier this week, I thought of two of his performances straightaway: his role as “Our Man” in J.C. Chandor’s 2013 disaster film All Is Lost and his far more indelible turn as Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men.

Why those two? Well, they meant the most to me personally. I went to the very same journalism school as Carl Bernstein—the other half of the reporting partnership highlighted in the All the President’s Men—and that particular story, as portrayed in the book and the movie, remains the Platonic ideal of the profession I chose and subsequently left.1

All the President’s Men is as obvious as All Is Lost is not. The latter film is obscure—at least in the context of Redford’s career—but its simple setup, as-narrow-as-it-gets focus, and sparing dialogue left a different kind of mark. It showed me just how minimalist a film could be, while still being absolutely riveting. There is a vast ocean, a storm, a sailboat, and, eventually, a tanker ship. Mostly, though, there is Redford, keeping you glued to the proceedings even as he grunts and mutters his way through each scene, hardly uttering a word aloud.

I’ll leave it to others to more fully evaluate Redford’s on-screen persona. His always-twinkling eyes and ability to emit steel and stoicism without feeling too cold or distant are the qualities that, to me, always seemed to make him a fit for whatever it was he was doing.

But that, of course, was only part of his legacy. I could go on and on about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or all manner of other parts from his acting filmography—those two, in particular, were huge touchstones in my house, both as reference points for my parents and as introductions to the vast world of film that, well, preceded my birth. If I did go on and on about that, I’d be skipping his body of work as a director and his founding of the Sundance Institute, the non-profit that puts on the Sundance Film Festival every year. I’d even be skipping the fact that, to some younger people, he’s almost exclusively a meme—like one of the most famous ones.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of any person who has done more to shape movies in such a multi-faceted way, especially following the collapse of the studio system in the 1950s and 1960s.

Redford, of course, bridged that gap most visibly on screen. Butch and The Sting demonstrated what a hit was or would be as Hollywood got more fragmented and, frankly, grown up. But he also helped make it OK for actors to get behind the camera with his success as a director. And, perhaps most important of all, he championed independent film and independent artists through Sundance.

Most of the best films made every year now hail from outside of the mainstream Hollywood machine. The film world is better for it—far more varietal and interesting—and Redford, more than any other single individual, is responsible for those kinds of films getting a real platform.

I’ve been on a comedy kick since the release of The New York Times’ list of the best 100 movies of the 21st century. As I wrote a few weeks ago, one of my big takeaways from it was a mixture of relief and delight that comedies of all stripes got their due - that there were far more screwballs than superheroes being celebrated.

So, I reacquainted myself with The Royal Tenenbaums and Anchorman and I Love You, Man, and then, feeling like I was on a roll, went for something newer: You’re Cordially Invited, a direct-to-streamer from this year, starring Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon.

To be honest, You’re Cordially Invited didn’t deserve a stint in the theaters. It had its moments, but, cinematically, it is a far cry from some of the other films that put me on this path. There wasn’t a single relationship in the movie that was believable, and so those few funny moments didn’t amount to something where you were rooting for the main characters to figure everything out. No one seemed to have any clue what to do with Witherspoon either, which seems like a mortal sin.

All the same, the fact that a comedy with two enormous, seemingly bankable stars couldn’t sneak in a few weeks at the movie theater, especially in a dead zone like January or February, tells a story all by itself. The Oscars have never figured out what to do with this genre, but, in the era of streaming, that seems to extend to the entirety of the film industry.

Yet no matter what the spreadsheets say - and I’m pretty sure that is what is driving Hollywood almost exclusively at this point - it feels like there is a tidal wave of pent-up demand for adult-oriented comedies that is going unmet.

As shaky as You’re Cordially Invited was, I wrote a version of the same review I write any time a comedy like this shows up on some streaming service: this wasn’t that good, but I am so starved for laughs at the movie theater at this point, that I’ll take whatever I can get.

I am just back from Europe and reveling in an interregnum between jobs, so, yes, I am thrilled to be digging in to The New York Times’ list of the 100 best films of the 21st century.

The list has been revealed in increments of 20 over the last five days, culminating in the very top this morning, as voted on by hundreds of critics and industry workers. I have to say it’s a pretty good advertisement for the wisdom of the (expert) crowds. Back around the time of the 2020 Oscars, I thought Parasite would be one of the movies we’d still be talking about years later. At least according to this list, I look like a prophet.

In an attempt to capitalize on my clairvoyance (or just because lists are fun to talk about), here are three other observations, followed by my own briefly annotated ballot.

The old boys’ club

If I’ve done my math correctly, just six directors account for almost a quarter of the films on the list. Those directors are Christopher Nolan (five entries on the list), Paul Thomas Anderson (four), Alfonso Cuaron (four), Ethan and Joel Coen (four), David Fincher (three), and Quentin Tarantino (three).

No, I’m not about to bring up #MeToo or wring my hands about how we need more female directors, though we certainly do. In fact, these are among my favorite directors, too. I’ve grown up luxuriating in their films, and three of my own list of 10 are directed by one of these gentlemen.

Instead, I’m here to comment nervously on the fact that so much quality has come from so few people over the last quarter century, and, uh, these guys aren’t getting any younger. Their average age is 61.8, and Christopher Nolan is the young buck of the group at age 54. They say film is a dying medium - they, not me - and it’s a little hard not to fret not just about the ages of this group, but how few of them there are, and how important they are as stewards of the craft and tradition of filmmaking. Nolan and Tarantino, in particular, aren’t just great filmmakers. They are also champions of making films in a certain kind of way.

Of course, you have to be of a certain age to rack up a bunch of entries on a list like this, and Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg are living proof that this group has decades of work ahead of them. But who are the younger names on the list (or not on it yet) that you’d bet on having similar success. Do they even make films? You’d shuffle your feet and mutter Gerwig or Coogler or maybe Eggers, and you’d hope, I guess.

Taking laughs seriously

I’m not sure anything thrilled me more than seeing Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit of Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan on the list.

These aren’t just “funny” movies, like, say, The Royal Tenenbaums. These are out-and-out comedies made for the almost exclusive purpose of being so silly they make your belly hurt. Sure, Borat makes a dark point about America, but it mixes its satire with outrageous slapstick that has absolutely nothing to do with advancing that undercurrent.

Best of all, they aren’t alone on the list. Superbad, Bridesmaids and Best in Show show that the people polled for this list take the genre seriously, which is something of which The Academy Awards sadly does not seem capable. The algorithmic era seems like it has almost destroyed comedies in this vein. Maybe this list will spark some reconsideration.

Death to the comic book film

Finally, it was hard to miss the almost total absence of the genre that has defined the movie industry financially in this century. There are, by my count, two comic book films on the list, Black Panther and The Dark Knight.

For all the disparity in investment, there are way more comedies on the list. Heck, there are more entries from Pixar Studios to account for than there are superheroes in tights. And then there’s this: Black Panther checks in at No. 96, meaning it almost didn’t even make the cut, and The Dark Knight hardly feels as if it is really of this ilk. That was more Christopher Nolan doing his own thing, quite independent from the cinematic universes crafted so carefully by the big studios. Does it even count?

Look, I don’t want to dance on the grave of the comic book film, exactly, though the lukewarm box office takes from Marvel Studios of late suggest that is the correct characterization of what’s going on here.

Instead, I would encourage you to think of comic book films like Westerns, a highly serialized and oft-disposable genre that once dominated an industry, but is now … well … just another genre.

Drumroll, please …

OK, here goes nothing with my own ballot, now submitted to the Times. I tried to focus on films that were both visceral and memorable upon first viewing and I really haven’t stopped thinking about since that first time. It is a much higher bar to clear than your usual year-in-review list.

Near misses include The Social Network, Anatomy of a Fall, Dunkirk, and Before Sunset, the last of which you could probably switch with In the Mood for Love depending on the kind of mood in which I find myself on any given day.

Probably needless to say, but, I found it pretty hard to put anything from the 2020s on my ballot. There really just hasn’t been enough time for those to marinate.

Industrialization and mass production. The fragility of the labor movement. The impossible double standard faced by working women. The very real cost and absolute absurdity of a moral panic led by charlatans in the government. The halting backward and forward progress of people of color as they fight for dignity and fairness in a system stacked against them. The darkness of a megalomaniacal sexual predator who stretches the rules to their outer limit in order to win at all costs.

Sure, I could be talking about the last 20 years, or the last 40, or the last century of American history. But this is a space devoted specifically to film, and there is a title up there at the top of this thing, so you might have guessed that I am actually making a somewhat vague reference to the Oscars.

Just before this year’s ceremony, I finished reading the book Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears by Michael Schulman. It charts the course of the cultural institution from its seemingly cynical beginnings (part of the Academy’s formation may have been a ploy to prevent craft unionization and the first Oscar ceremony lasted all of 20 minutes) to its glamorous, outsized, skepticism-inducing present. You know, the one where one of the most famous movie stars in the world slapped an almost-as-famous comedian on live television and many of us reasonably wondered if it was a publicity stunt.

Schulman handpicks the moments and the movements rather than opting for an exhaustive chronological history of the awards. And that structure and focus on the industry machinations behind the films being celebrated cast the Oscars in a new light.

The Academy Awards are ostensibly a celebration of the best films of the year. But very early on in the book Schulman acknowledges that the exercise of picking a Best Picture or Best Actor of the previous year is a silly one. Indeed, the very first line of his book says that the Oscars are “always getting it wrong.”

And that’s true, I suppose, if you focus only on the awards themselves. But widen your aperture, and the picture that begins to emerge is that of a body that has always been beholden to and simultaneously influencing of the forces that have shaped America writ large. The Oscars are at once a mirror, a window in to the near-future, and a magnifying glass refracting sunlight on to the rest of us. The Oscars do not reveal any truths about the movies they purport to celebrate, but they do reveal a great deal about the grander debates and discussion of which they are unquestionably a part.

This reframing of what the Oscars are all about gives them extra weight - elevating them from some sort of cotton-candy affair - and blunts the most valid criticism of them: that they perpetually get it wrong. If you begin to think of the Academy Awards as a historical record of how we thought and talked about and battled over films instead of a historical record of the very best films, then they are put in to proper perspective.

Suddenly, it’s not about whether Citizen Kane should have won Best Picture and more about how a wealthy man with a huge amount of control over the media was able to take some measure of revenge on a film he found unflattering, and how the studio system at the time was largely accepting because of the threat posed by the man who made the film.

Suddenly, we’re not relitigating Halle Berry’s performance in Monster’s Ball, and instead reconsidering the difference between recognition of great work and acceptance from your peers.

Suddenly, it’s not about whether Saving Private Ryan was robbed by Shakespeare in Love - we all know it was - and much more about an amoral man gaming a system that, because of decorum, no one in the establishment was willing enough to defend, and how that reticence enabled a theft.

These examples are, of course, snapshots from Hollywood’s past, but they are also directly relatable to this moment. These are timeless stories, to be sure, but they also reflect the fact that motion picture industry is so often just ahead of where the country will soon be.

The smug celebrity droning on about some social cause as part of their acceptance speech is an Oscar night trope - maybe the biggest one of all. But films, yes, even the ones celebrated at the Oscars, are most often a leading indicator of the mood of the culture. In that sense, Oscar night is as good at projecting where we might all be headed as it is bad at recapping the year that was.

What did we learn at the Oscars this year? Time will tell, of course. But it’s hard not to regard the triumph of Anora and the auteur behind it, Sean Baker, as part of a continuum of sweeping change within the broader industry.

Moviemaking has gotten more cosmopolitan and more democratic over the last decade. Wins for Moonlight and Parasite reflect that trend and hint that it will endure. Both films continue to enjoy near-universal acclaim - indeed I would argue that they are the two best Best Picture winners of the 21st century. Each was made cheaply and far away from the industry’s erstwhile center in Los Angeles.

Enter Anora, which doesn’t reach the heights of the other two films, but does take this trend to a sort of maximalist endpoint. Baker has eschewed the Hollywood mainstream in just about every possible way, combining a guerilla-style approach to the craft (one of his previous films was shot entirely on iPhones) with a gaze for characters, especially sex workers, who almost never end up being portrayed at all in Hollywood, much less end up being portrayed positively. Last Sunday, he became the first person to win four Oscars in a single ceremony.

Baker represents disruption to be sure - the kind that only feels possible in a world where the technology of filmmaking and of distribution makes it far easier to find an audience. But in his acceptance speeches, there was also a traditionalist streak.

“Filmmakers, keep making films for the big screen,” Baker said in accepting the prize for Best Director. It was hard not to notice that Quentin Tarantino, who has loudly advocated for the same thing for years, was the person who had just given him another statue.

Baker was expressing a strain of cinematic essentialism. A half-decade ago, it would have sounded desperate, the kind of plea uttered as a Marvel character crushes you under their foot. Now, it sounds like a battle cry where some sort of victory seems possible. Because while tech has made Baker’s success possible, it has also inspired mass disillusionment, and, by extension, appreciation for the way things used to be.

As ever, I would argue that the Oscars are a little bit ahead of the curve here, if anything. The culture is changing. Baker’s triumph - and his words in his moment of triumph - are a harbinger.

The Oscars are this Sunday night (tonight, as I am writing this), which, for a cinephile, means all of a sudden, everyone else wants to talk about the movies and compare their relative merits (yay!).

I’ve traditionally been cynical about the Academy Awards, and with good reason. But I recently finished Michael Schulman’s book Oscar Wars, and it’s changed my perspective quite a bit. I plan to write about that later this week. That plus the chance to see a personal favorite, Conan O’Brien, have a moment on a big stage has me looking forward to this evening much more than the last few years.

In the lead-up to the festivities, here’s my usual dump of links rounding up the past year in film.

• My erstwhile film website is still (still!) around for sole purpose of the annual best-of list put together by myself and dear friend Steve Cimino. We’ve been doing this for 12 years, and it’s as reliable as ever, although one of our favorite films of the year will have no presence at tonight’s ceremony.

• As usual, we pair that fancy-stinky-cheese of an experience with the fine wine of an audio format, in which we drink, make stupid jokes and pick our film of the year. Our track record remains unimpeachable, going back over those 12 years.

Is that all you’ll need to get through Sunday night? How am I to know?

Since we don’t do the list in order, here is my personal ranked top 10 as well as a ranking of the Best Picture nominees.

The best, ranked

1. Challengers

2. Dune: Part Two

3. My Old Ass

4. Anora

5. Rebel Ridge

6. Love Lies Bleeding

7. The Dead Don’t Hurt

8. Evil Does Not Exist

9. Civil War

10. Nosferatu

The Best Picture nominees, ranked

1. Dune: Part Two

2. Anora

3. Wicked

4. Conclave

5. Emilia Perez

6. The Brutalist, I’m Still Here, The Substance, A Complete Unknown, Nickel Boys (haven’t yet seen ‘em)

I’m planning to open up the chat this evening. See you then!

Near the end of Rambo: First Blood Part II, Sylvester Stallone angrily jams his signature survival knife in to a desk. He glares at a Washington bureaucrat who, in his estimation, has not done enough to rescue forgotten prisoners of war in Vietnam and growls two words.

“Mission accomplished,” he says.

What he really means, of course, is thanks for nothing. Stallone’s John Rambo has just done the job that this wimpy civil servant across from him was too cowardly to do himself, or even help with doing. It’s a moment of righteous anger that, taken on its face, makes total sense. The state powers that are supposed to be on his side have been worse than useless. Not only have they failed his comrades in the field, they’ve also stood in the way of what it will take to undo their failure. Where would anyone be without John Rambo?

Less than 20 years after Rambo spiked his knife in to that table and declared that the job was done, President George W. Bush stood aboard the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in front of a sign that parroted Stallone’s declaration exactly. Bush wasn’t angry, though. He was triumphant. This was his moment to declare victory in Iraq. Two years after 9/11, America could claim a victory of sorts in the Middle East, never mind that the architect of that attack was still quite alive many countries away and that a hard and horrifying road lay ahead.

The problem for Bush, and for the rest of us really, is that the credits didn’t roll after that moment. John Rambo has the luxury of quite literally walking away from all the destruction left in his wake. He doesn’t have to try and help rebuild a nation or repair any relationships. He doesn’t even have to sweep up a shell casing. Because of his military service and the skills he picked up in the special forces, he apparently has carte blanche to move fast and break things. So he does, and we catch up with him years later. The movies never show the aftermath, and so there is never any accountability for Rambo. That would be untidy, which is precisely what real life is.

So while Rambo walked away - on to a Buddhist monastery and eventually his next mission - the soldiers Bush sent to Iraq, along with all the people living there and in the surrounding region, were not so lucky. They presided over a descent in to insurgency and sectarian violence that is still roiling that country today. It turns out that ignoring the concerns of bureaucrats to undertake something that just feels good and right in the moment is a fast track to calamity, destruction, and death.

Of course, John Rambo doesn’t craft or execute foreign policy. He’s a tool at the disposal of the United States military. Any mission he undertakes is narrow, tactical and, because of his training, necessarily violent. He is a blunt instrument, and sometimes that’s what the world needs. But this gets to be a very dangerous place when political leaders adopt the mentality of such a blunt instrument.

Unfortunately, the Rambo mentality is as pervasive as its ever been among the right-wing political class. If the world feels as dangerous as its ever been, it is because so many in power fancy themselves as Rambo-like figures.

Consider for a moment a few additional ways the Rambo story echoes to the present moment.

Start with the origin story. John Rambo is, first and foremost, a victim. Unlike the fantastical, fabricated victims of the modern day right wing - from the bakers “forced” to make a cake for a gay wedding to the victim-in-chief whining any time he is held accountable for anything - he comes by it honestly. Our government has continually failed veterans - Donald Trump famously said the quiet part out loud by referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers” - and that is the jumping off point for First Blood.

Indeed, those failures are why Rambo ends up in a small Oregon town in the first place looking for his last living friend, and it’s why he is harassed by local law enforcement so severely that he ends up embracing vigilantism. It’s depressingly ironic, isn’t it, that Rambo’s victimhood leads to violence against the police just as Donald Trump’s victimhood led to violence against the police on January 6th? The permission structure seems to exist, regardless of the fact that Rambo is actually treated unfairly by the authorities whereas Trump is simply so incapable of accepting any sort of unfavorable outcome that he will embrace and promote mass delusion.

Rambo and Trump are also both emblematic of zero-sum thinking and a complete inability to grapple with humiliation and failure. In Rambo: First Blood Part II, Stallone asks his old special forces Colonel, Trautman, “do we get to win this time?”

Has there ever been a more pathetic, selfish line written in the history of film? Rambo, like Trump, is unapologetic about what he has done and is about to do, and there is a disturbingly large percentage of the population that seems to view that as a positive trait. There’s no introspection about our involvement in Vietnam - about the agency of the people of that country or the abject failures and betrayal of our own leaders during the conflict - there is only a crude, unquestioning loyalty to the mission that lies ahead. There is certainly never any chance that Rambo will consider the possibility that he might be part of the problem.

And so it is with the American right: Trumpism as a movement is at its core about never having to feel a shred of remorse for anything you’ve ever done or will do. Indeed, regret, reconsideration of your past actions, any sort of self-doubt is just weakness. And weakness is for the bureaucrats in the way - you know, the ones capable of considering a range of outcomes.

The Rambo movies are ultimately an immature sort of reckoning with our failures of the last half-century. First Blood has a very keen eye for the personal toll those failures have exacted, and is far and away the best of the three films. But the following two seem to conclude that, in the case of Rambo: First Blood Part II, even our failures can be erased with a do-over if we just find the right man, and that, in the case of Rambo III, sticking with that guy can solve literally any geopolitical situation.

They are, of course, spectacularly wrong in their convictions, and that is because for a reckoning to rise above its most puerile form - for it to actually be a reckoning - you have to gaze down both directions of that two-way street.

Rambo III takes John Rambo to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, where he teams up with the literal Mujahideen (a.k.a. the precursor to al-Qaeda and ISIS) to rescue Col. Trautman from prison and take down a sadistic Soviet commander. The film is dedicated to - no joke - “the gallant people of Afghanistan” and a painfully 1980s cover of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” blares over the closing credits.

In a better version of this world, this is the type of thing that would forever discredit both this film series and the John Rambo-like mentality that lends itself to the most harmful kind of magical thinking.

Unfortunately, we have this world, and a lot of people in it who seem to think that one man - a lone wolf - can fix not just our problems but those of the entire world. All we’ve lived through over the past two decades doesn’t seem to be enough evidence to marginalize this kind of worldview. That’s probably because that would require those who share it to consider any piece of information that is inconvenient. One wonders what it will take for the fever to finally break.

About two years ago, I wrote about the sensation that things were returning to normal at the movie theater after a global pandemic. I hoped then that that meant I would be getting back to my own preferred version of normal - lots of time in the theater - and some two years later, it has come to pass.

I saw three movies in the theater during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, and six from about mid-November on. There were sequels and prequels (Gladiator II, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King), a throwback musical with an Oscar pedigree (Wicked), an indie darling (A Real Pain), and high-concept genre fare (Nosferatu). This is how it used to be and how it is once again.

Yes, some sense of order has been restored, but with it has come serious existential dread.

Most of that cup was filled by the two Disney films, released within weeks of each other and each carrying the mantle of a beloved and original predecessor. They each have their own distinct problems.

Moana 2 looks nice enough to make you want to look up flights on Hawaiian Airlines, but without a single memorable song or coherent storyline, it’s a test of will to not start looking up flights right there in the theater. Mufasa: The Lion King is somehow a better film. This is probably because the guy who directed Moonlight and the guy who wrote f**king Hamilton were the biggest creative forces involved. They only make it a passable experience, and it won’t save you from learning things you never wanted or needed to know, like how Rafiki got his staff, how Pride Rock got its distinct shape, and why Scar is called Scar and is allowed to skulk around the Pridelands. Nor will it save you from Disney’s obsession with “live-action” versions of its animated classics, which, Pridelands or not, still can’t really get out of the uncanny valley, what with their regurgitated themes, aimless backstories and dead-eyed characters.

Taken together, Moana 2 and Mufasa: The Lion King feel like abominations perfectly suited for an age of meritless artificial intelligence hype. Just because a machine can create an image of a realistic-looking family of cats reading Tolstoy on top of a snowy peak doesn’t mean you should burn the Earth to do it. That’s not stopping anyone from using DALL-E, though, and I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything different from a Hollywood studio that has gone corporate, possibly irretrievably.

Of course, that’s not entirely fair. Disney, like every other major studio, has gone through fallow periods and made bad sequels before. Indeed, the period immediately following the release of The Lion King was littered with direct-to-VHS schlock riding on the coattails of newly minted animated classics. The existential dread isn’t bubbling up because a cynical and pointless prequel and a sequel got made.

No, it’s from looking around at the environment in which they got made. A few weeks before the dread set in, when I went out to see A Real Pain, the uncertain future of cinema as an activity that happens outside of your house came in to focus.

My wife and I had a babysitter and dinner reservations. In other words, we were on a schedule, which means the movie essentially picked us. We needed a relatively short, grown-up movie, and to find it we had to bypass two theaters much closer to us to make it work. The cineplexes were functionally only showing Disney stuff, Wicked, and Gladiator II. It’s not that bad sequels for kids and teenagers are getting made, it’s that that’s all there is out there. Three decades ago, the schlock had the decency to go straight to Blockbuster. Now, it opens for $50 million, and God help you if you want to see anything else.

Yes, all of the worst facets of late-stage capitalism have come home to roost fully in Hollywood. It stinks of institutional failure there, just like it does in our nation’s capital, and I am not sure there is any coming back from it.

Sometime in between my jaunts to the movie theater I stumbled across the clip below of thoughterati guy Simon Sinek breaking down the origins of so-called late-stage capitalism, tracing it back to a relatively recent Milton Friedman opinion piece that wound up becoming license for, well, for all of this.

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Simon is one of the good ones - at least from a thinking perspective - and he does a great job crystallizing all that is so, so, so wrong with the version of capitalism we have today. Namely: maximizing shareholder value above all else creates all sorts of rotten incentives that hurt workers and customers.

It means that there is almost no long-term thinking in the C-suite - no short-term sacrifices for future gains at the corporate level. This dynamic explains Hollywood just as it does every other part of the economy. It explains why Moana 2 and Mufasa: The Lion King could come out just weeks apart, make a whole bunch of money but also be met with relative indifference upon their release, and become practically forgotten even while both pictures are still showing in theaters.

We’re all consumers, I guess - pigs at the trough hungry for something, anything, while the farmers at the till forget to rotate their crops and exhaust their weary, dusty fields of intellectual property.

Disney is a publicly traded company, so maybe it just has to be this way until something bigger in the proverbial system is broken. But, I don’t know, it could also look to its own past for just a moment - to its own founder - and stand for something.

Just about everything that made Disney Disney in the first place - from Mickey Mouse to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Disneyland - was an existential financial risk. Walt did the dreaming. Roy made the numbers work even when bankruptcy loomed as a real threat. There’s no way you’d get to walk down Main Street USA if the Disney brothers had been worried exclusively about shareholder value. Now, here we are.

In short, Disney could stand for something. It even has a proper foil in Netflix, which is the true villain in this downward spiral facing film and television.

Were Disney to be the company that doesn’t do this …

Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)

… it might reinforce its brand promise and secure another generation of fans in the process.

Alas, courage, as we have been reminded over and over and over lately, is in short supply. To be courageous, it seems to me, you have to stand for something; you have to have a vision for the future. It’s simply not enough to not be something else. People sniff that out right away and they vote with their feet (or, in the case of our last presidential election, they vote by not moving their feet at all.)

There’s one other phrase associated with the institutional failure of the 21st century that keeps rolling around my head: too big to fail.

In the case of Disney, and indeed the broader Hollywood ecosystem, what we’re staring at here isn’t so much an extinction-level event as it is a faster-than-expected slide toward irrelevance.

In a few months, when you turn on the Oscars and hardly recognize any of the films nominated, it won’t be because the Academy is pretentious. It will be because the big studios hardly make anything worthy of celebration anymore. The Academy is wrong about much, but is right on this point.

As for me, I’ll be thinking of the crew of villagers who reluctantly joined Moana on her latest adventure in Moana 2. That group was unhappy and confused almost the moment they got on the open water. The only reason they were there to begin with was out of a sense of duty to someone in whom they have misplaced their trust.

You’ve probably already noticed this, but, uh, people are mad right now. Just as concerning as what is causing that anger is the fact that there seems to be no viable channels of recourse - no real way to hold the people responsible for making people mad accountable.

I’m not really here today to talk about the forces that got Donald Trump re-elected or why many people view the CEO killer as a folk hero. Instead, I’m here to talk about a scene in a film that encapsulates the decades-long dynamic that seems to have given rise to these troubling times.

Improbably, I’m referring to a moment in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist. The film charts the efforts of real estate developers who want to build a luxury glamping site in a remote mountain community in Japan. The community is unspoiled - spring water collected by its residents is used in locally made udon noodles and children walk home from school through the forest. A glamping site nestled somewhere in it might seem like a low-impact addition to the community, but the locals don’t see it that way.

This all comes to light during a seemingly banal scene in which the locals grill representatives of the real estate firm on their plans. It’s a town hall meeting - nothing more - but Hamaguchi lets it go and go and go, and the townspeople are quickly able to expose serious flaws in the plan. There are no plans to have a caretaker on site 24 hours a day, meaning city folk cutting loose could become quite disruptive. Far worse, the septic system is not adequate if the glamping site is at full capacity, and it is positioned in a place that could threaten a water supply so pure that residents can draw directly from it.

The residents are at once up in arms and diplomatic. The people sent to talk to them are middlemen. They have a video and platitudes and condescension. They collect notes for their boss and have no good answers - no answers at all - for the valid concerns being raised. Even so, an elder, and others in the crowd, seem willing to work with the developers, because what other choice do they have?

We’ve all been experiencing this for decades, so though Hamaguchi includes a follow-up scene where the middlemen share the townspeople’s concerns with their boss and the boss dismisses them almost, we hardly need confirmation that the fix is in.

Hamaguchi doesn’t pay this all off with an angry speech or revenge fantasy later in the film. Indeed, the townspeople go on with their lives, seemingly resigned to the fact that this glamping site will likely be ruinous. Instead, weird things start to happen. Everything is unbalanced, uncertain, and menacing - and mostly because these real estate developers won’t build a slightly larger septic system and put it in a less dangerous place. It’s absurd and short-sighted, and while the townspeople (mostly) aren’t angry, I was seething. I still am.

The truth is, we live in an age where powerful people piss on our legs every day and then tell us it’s raining. To be more accurate, they send other people - patsies - to deliver the forecast. We all know it, and it’s no mystery why people are so upset.

Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t really deal in that anger directly. Instead, it deals in the consequences of what happens when that anger has no obvious path. No wonder streams feature so prominently as a metaphor and no wonder the film’s conclusion is so dream-like, strange and unsettling instead of satisfying.

If you allow rage to build up, you sign up for it to be released in strange and unsettling ways.

As awards-season fodder goes, I was largely unimpressed by A Real Pain, which I got a chance to see this past weekend.

Jesse Eisenberg directed, wrote, and starred in the film, and there’s enough that’s interesting about it to be encouraged about him working behind the camera for years to come. Career trajectories aside, though, this is a film that merely plays footsie with some very interesting themes like how trauma is passed down through generations and what survivors, and survivors’ progeny, ought to do as they carry on.

A Real Pain never really sticks with any of these ideas - it never bores deeply in to them, though they are right there - and so it ends up being noteworthy as a first acid test for Kieran Culkin after his tremendous run as Roman Roy on the HBO TV series Succession.

In that regard, at least, it is a smashing success. Given a character who is equal parts depressed and charismatic, who is prone to wild and rapid mood swings, Culkin absolutely takes over the movie. Much of that is by design, and is a credit to Eisenberg, a big star in his own right, for convincing Culkin to be his counterpart.

Culkin’s character, Benji, is supposed to drown out his cousin David, who is played by Eisenberg. The tension between the two of them is central to the themes the film toys with unconvincingly, and there is more than a little bit of Roman Roy and his uniformly less lovable Roy siblings being played upon here. In the end, it almost feels too successful at establishing that dynamic. The film hums when Benji is doing pretty much anything. You laugh and light up when he is friendly and become alarmed and concerned when he is sullen or angry, and this isn’t because Culkin is overbearing or going too big. It’s because A Real Pain doesn’t have enough to say when Benji himself isn’t talking, and Benji is depressed and doesn’t know what he wants out life!

Anyway, Kieran Culkin has been doing this acting thing for a long time, but this still felt like a big moment - a bridge to a new era of his career. He’s been a child star, a brooding youth, and a standout in one of the best ensemble casts on television in the last decade or so. Now we have proof that he can carry a big-ish movie in middle age.

As frustrating as film as A Real Pain is in toto, it also makes perfectly clear that Culkin can do pretty much anything he wants with his post-Succession career and it will be worth monitoring. That’s not always a slam dunk for actors coming off of an iconic role in a beloved TV show. Television seems more prone to generating an unshakable attachment to certain characters than film, and Succession is certainly in that category.

So, it’s Culkin’s world. I am hoping he’ll do more, but it’d be hard to begrudge him if he follows through on what he says in this recent interview with The New York Times.

Culkin is just a year older than me, seems devoted to his family, and, of course, got a close-up view of the wreckage that fame can cause from his brother. He might be a budding superstar, but I suspect he’ll be more of a welcome, but slightly too fleeting presence on screen going forward.

It took almost all of 2024, but there is now zero doubt about what film will come to define this year, at least in the short term. It’s Wicked of course, which is well on its way to finishing at the top of box office standings for the year less than two weeks after its release. Its clout extends well beyond the financials, of course. There aren’t many films - certainly none released this year - that can get four New York Times columnists to opine at length about everything from the message to the broader societal meaning of its popularity, but we now know Wicked can.

For my part, I don’t have any grand take on the it film of this year - not yet at least. I enjoyed Wicked very much, which is a credit to it as I am not really its target audience. It does feel like a bit of a Rorschach test whether you’re a cinephile or just have a cultural axe to grind. After all, it’s simultaneously sort-of recycled intellectual property and yet a quite original and distinctive retelling of one of the most familiar cultural touchstones of the 20th century. There’s probably no stronger signal of its cultural penetration and its range of interpretation than the fact that MAGA types are split, some viewing it as woke trash and others seeing Elphaba as a stand-in for Donald Trump and a victim of the deep state. These people are aggressively wrong (as usual), but the very fact that they are talking about it and can’t agree says it all about how central this is to the zeitgeist.

We’ll be talking about Wicked clear through until March, so while I form a more considered opinion, here are three stray thoughts on the film after my first viewing.

1. It’s not the music

The music has been on repeat in our cars/house since we saw the film the day after Thanksgiving. That’s not exactly a surprise with two pre-teen girls who, unlike me, absolutely are the target audience. What is a surprise, to me at least, is how unmemorable most of the music is. Yes, yes, “Defying Gravity” soars and “Popular” is a confectionary delight, but unlike, say, Hamilton there is almost exclusively musical filler in between the signature numbers.

That might come off as a criticism, but in reality it is a credit to director Jon M. Chu and the rest of the behind-the-scenes people who translated this from Broadway to major motion picture. After all, it’s hard to change the music when adapting it for the screen, but just about everything else can be interpreted, expanded upon, and given a pastiche of production value that’s not possible on the stage.

Wicked looks great, from the costumes to the heavy index on practical production design to the use of wide shots to add scale and spectacle (see below).

@stagerunnerlaYou’ve seen the movie, now see where and how it was shot. This is how they made Wicked (Sources: ABC AU, AU Review, IndieWire, The Ankler, House Beautiful) #wicked #wickedmovie #filmmaking #behindthescenes@Alex | Pop Culture Brain

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It is also perfectly cast. Michelle Yeoh might have offered the flattest performance, and anytime Yeoh is the weak link in a cast, you’ve got a really good cast.

2. The Wizard and Guh-Linda are characters for our times

Much as Wicked is a radical retelling, it doesn’t change much with the Wizard. In fact, part of enjoying it is appreciating its willingness to point out the obvious fact that the Wizard is a total charlatan, fraud, and coward.

The Wizard of Oz doesn’t deny this fact. Instead, it breezes past it in the name of getting Dorothy back to Kansas. But, again, the Wizard is a total fraud! He relies on style over substance and brings nothing of value to the table. This is a terrific insight in its own right - certainly enough to merit a re-examination of the whole story - but it feels especially relevant as the once and future President of the United States prepares to retake office. He is a charlatan, fraud, and coward in the exact same vein as the Wizard.

Guh-linda, meanwhile, played so brilliantly by Ariana Grande, suffers from the kind of Main Character Syndrome that feels less politically bent but still universally applicable in these times. Everything is about her - how she feels, what she has overcome, and so on. She’d love social media.

3. Really? Two parts?

Perhaps the most disconcerting moment of the entire film is in the opening credits, when it’s revealed this is just Part 1. I’m told by reliable sources I’ll be quite tickled by the second part, but having committed almost three hours to this story already and having seen what I’m told are the two best musical numbers, I’m not exactly thrilled that there’s more to come.

We have a full-blown editing crisis in television and film - mostly the former and not the latter - and I’ll be carrying that baggage in to next year’s conclusion.

Like any good cinephile, I have some cardinal rules when setting my own expectations for a film. The Planet of the Apes reboot series, which began in 2011 and is still going strong in 2024, stands as a personal proof point that there are always exceptions.

This year’s entry, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, is probably my least favorite of the bunch, but it is still excellent, still well worth your time, and, perhaps most notably, cements how surprisingly good the whole series is.

Let’s start with this: for a series this well regarded and financially successful, there is an astonishing lack of continuity among both the acting and directing talent. Rupert Wyatt directed the first film (he’s got almost nothing else of note in his filmography). Matt Reeves, whose C.V. fits more snugly with this kind of fare, directed the next two. Enter Wes Ball - he of Maze Runner fame - for Kingdom and the series didn’t really miss a beat, even as it leaped forward several generations in the story and, in so doing, left the great Andy Serkis and his character Caesar behind.

Indeed, Serkis is the only star that has defined the series. There has been plenty of star power to be sure - James Franco, Brian Cox, John Lithgow, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell, Woody Harrelson, William H. Macy - but other than Serkis and Toby Kebbell, that power has been contained to a single entry in the franchise.

So, we’ve got a hodgepodge of directing talent and only one real star across the collection of films - and, by the way, its a star whose face isn’t known to your average moviegoer and who isn’t even in all four of the films.

All of this is thrown in to the blender of what is effectively a series of prequels. The original Planet of the Apes series, which starred Charlton Heston, looms large, both in film history and over this reboot. So, too, does Tim Burton’s hideously terrible remake of the original from the 1990s, which, among its many sins, counts none worse than casting Mark Wahlberg as its star.

This prequel thing is probably the biggest of my cardinal rules violated by Planet of the Apes. There isn’t much I am more suspicious of these days than franchise fare that goes back in time to explain how something later in the franchise came to be. So often, prequels end up solving mysteries that no one needs solved, all in the name of squeezing every last dollar out of a piece of valuable intellectual property. A prequel is the surest sign of some studio executive trying to make the most cynical buck possible. It’s just that that’s not so with Planet of the Apes.

Some of this is probably down to the fact that Apes actually has a true mystery at the core of its world-building as opposed to being some contrivance meant to extend I.P. further than its meant to go. Unlike, say, Star Wars, which turned a single throwaway line of dialogue in to an entire movie, the very mythology of Apes is defined by the moment Heston stumbles upon the Statue of Liberty, a revelation that disorients (it’s been Earth all along?!) and poses all sorts of questions (what happened on Earth?!?!).

Conversely, the mystery is more or less solved by the first two films in the current series. Apes endures most of all because it is science fiction at its best. Through both the apes and the humans, it holds a mirror up to our worst impulses as a species as well as the qualities that make us worthy of redemption. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes isn’t about how Earth was transformed so much as it is about who gets to keep cultural memories and how hard it is to escape the clutches of tribalism. As the last decade has shown, these kinds of arguments remain painfully unresolved even as the technology at our fingertips grows exponentially more sophisticated.

Having just watched Deadpool & Wolverine a few days before Kingdom, it’s hard not to juxtapose the two films. Wolverine, he of the X-Men, is bedecked in his yellow suit for the first time on film. But that yellow suit amounts to hollow nostalgia. He’s thrown in to yet another multiverse film alongside the ironic detachment and irritating fourth-wall breaking of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool. At its best, X-Men, just like Apes, holds up a mirror to human nature and poses questions about what we owe to each other as we hurtle in to an unknown future. In the case of Wolverine and X-Men that best feels a frustratingly long way off.

It’s true that Planet of the Apes might not have an iconic star or a big-name director, but for more than a decade, it’s been able to keep the main thing the main thing. So long as that’s true, it will remain compelling.

One of the first things I remember being struck by in the first journalism class I took at the University of Maryland back in 2001 was that members of The Washington Post’s editorial board (at least at the time) took the appearance of neutrality so seriously that they didn’t vote in elections.

It’s hard to overstate the power of this anecdote when relayed to a room full of eager 18-year-olds. Here are people at the absolute peak of the profession you’ve chosen to pursue setting aside the most basic and most dearly held right in a democracy for something seemingly even more noble. If we don’t participate directly in democracy, the logic goes, then our words can serve in a different kind of way. Even back then, you didn’t choose journalism for the money. So here’s a powerful story to tell yourself about why to pursue it anyway. Here’s why it is a higher calling. If you buy in to the ideals of the American tradition, you can serve the public and carry on that tradition - a sacrifice that connects the past to the present and shapes the future.

More than two decades later, I am troubled by the ideals that that story was meant to encapsulate. The flaws in it have been visible for quite some time, even prior to the Donald Trump era, which has laid bare so much institutional failure. Of course, I thought of it when Jeff Bezos abruptly intervened to prevent the Post from publishing an endorsement just weeks before the 2024 presidential election. Truth is, it was already floating at the front of my mind because of Alex Garland’s Civil War.

Garland’s film, which depicts a present-day America at war with itself, isn’t for the faint of heart. There is a secessionist force closing in on a military victory over a third-term president, untethered from reality, surrounded by a shrinking circle of loyalists. It is grim and violent, and, because it looks like only a slight distortion of our current reality, it is deeply unsettling.

At the heart of film are a small group of journalists documenting the final days of the conflict - headed toward Washington D.C. to capture the final words and actions of a soon-to-be deposed leader. Lee Smith, played by Kirsten Dunst, is the cold, determined driver of their mission. She’s a legendary war zone photographer, and waiting for her, it would seem, is the crowning achievement of her career. Tagging along with Smith is Jessie, played by Cailee Spaeny, an aspiring Lee Smith.

Jessie holds a mirror up to Lee by trying to learn the tricks of her trade. There are horrors all around - brutal fighting, mass graves, torture - and at every turn Lee admonishes Jessie for not having the stoic toughness to dispassionately document it all through the lens of her camera, even when, for example, what she’s documenting is a man wielding an assault rifle and posing proudly in front of two mutilated bodies hanging from the ceiling of a building. Lee is perpetually tired and emotionless as they move through an American war zone toward the capital. The 18-year-old me would have appreciated this facade a lot more. Someone has to show things as they are as neutrally as possible. This is the role of the fourth estate - to inform - and what is more compelling or more informative than photographs. I don’t need to invoke the old maxim about how much pictures are worth, do I?

Garland doesn’t buy the facade Lee has put up, and, speaking for the 41-year-old version of myself, neither do I. A series of flashbacks show just how brittle that facade is - how much unprocessed trauma she has as a result of this worldview. Jessie, like any impressionable young person, doesn’t see the damage that facade has done to her hero. As a consequence, even though Lee seems to be on the verge of crumbling in to a thousand pieces, the outward story she has told herself and others is being absorbed and adopted by her protégée.

In the film’s climactic scene, Lee and Jessie wind up in the White House as it is being stormed by secessionist forces. Lee is exactly where she set out to be. But the close quarters of a firefight turn deadly. She shoves Jessie out of the way, saving her but going down in a hail of bullets. Jessie presses on and is in the room when the president is captured. She stops the soldiers from summarily executing this apparent tyrant, but only so she can ask him for a quote.

“Don’t let them kill me,” he says. She gets the soundbite, then steps out of the way, and moments later, he’s dead.

There is so much meaning tied up in this sequence. For example, is it fair to ask Lee, or any human being, to give up so much in the pursuit of her craft? Decades ago, I would have said yes, that’s the job. Now, I think that any job that asks you to essentially dehumanize yourself in pursuit of it needs to, well, think again about the ideals to which it aspires. Isn’t it time to re-examine the arch-documentarian streak taught in journalism schools? There are severe limits to the notion of “capturing things as they are” as it is practiced in the journalism of the present day. Recording the final words of a president as he is about to be executed seems like the absolute apex of newsworthiness, but what does it really add to the story we see unfolding? Not much at all, I would argue. Indeed, Jessie stopping the execution just to ask the question manufactures a moment that otherwise probably wouldn’t have taken place. It puts her in the story.

Of course, journalism as an institution isn’t wholly to blame for the decline of its standing in society. Many of the issues which have plagued it are not new or even solvable. If you think rich men consolidating and controlling media outlets is somehow specific to our moment, you need an education and should probably start with Citizen Kane. Similarly, technology as a disruptor of media ecosystems is an ever-present fact of life. The damage didn’t start with Facebook and Twitter.

But journalism isn’t blameless. To be specific, it has, in my view, become overly concerned with the conventions of the craft, and that has often come at the expense of the real story. Put another way, do the last words of a president about to be executed by a rebel military force matter in this case? Jessie has effectively inserted herself in to a story that doesn’t actually need her in it to be told.

Donald Trump, of course, has exploited this vain weakness of the media to great effect for more than a decade. He says crazy things all day long, and mainstream journalists have still not yet figured out how to best handle it. They spend some of their time fact-checking him or reaching out to opponents or campaign officials for comment. They spend still more of their time going to diners in Trump country and asking patrons why some of those crazy things he says resonate with them. Everyone is quoted accurately, and yet no one really learns anything. It’s all palace intrigue and fact-checking.

Needless to say after Trump’s election this week, journalism, like many other institutions, must evolve. In some ways that means abandoning conventions that have become dogmatic. Yes, there is a difference between requesting comment from a corrupt government official and allowing them to have 50 percent of the space in the story you are trying to tell.

In other ways, it must get back to a soul that has been a bit lost in all those meta-stories told about the noble sacrifice at the heart of the profession.

A few years after that introductory journalism course, I took a history class about the Vietnam War. In it, I learned that the Tet Offensive was actually a military victory for American and South Vietnamese forces. For all the spectacle of the war being brought to the South by insurgent forces, it didn’t achieve its military objectives. Of course, that’s a fact that belies the real story. Wars aren’t won only on the battlefield, and, anyway, understanding why they’re being fought is as important as who is winning.

One gets the sense that today’s journalists would have reported that exclusively military version of the story, using casualty figures and maps of territorial gains to buttress sound bites from press conferences and anonymous sources inside the Pentagon. In fact, we know they would. All we have to do is look back to the War on Terror. Of course, doing so means missing the real story - the one the great Walter Cronkite honed in on immediately. Most of the people in Vietnam really, really didn’t want us to be there, and the American military had obscured that fact up until that point. They lied to the nation about our progress there, and that was a much bigger deal than who won or lost ground.

The character of Lee Smith is, in some ways, the logical endpoint of the approach to journalism that Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow and Woodward and Bernstein made famous if you learned all the wrong lessons from them. Lee is documenting the horror of the moment, but not really doing anything to tell the bigger story, which is how this happened at all. Sadly, Lee’s protégée Jessie doesn’t offer us much optimism that the next generation of journalists will be able to evolve effectively.

Not quite two years ago, I started playing tennis.1 My reasons for picking up a racquet were humble and practical. It was a thing to do with my dad, a way for an ex-basketball player to get a good sweat with less constant physical hazard and without always needing to find five friends.

It didn’t stay that way for long. Coming up on my two-year anniversary, I’m now playing at least two or three times a week and taking lessons regularly. I played my first competitive match just last week. I’ve got a bag stuffed with racquets and grips and dampeners. I’ve made a pilgrimage to the U.S. Open and watch the pro tour almost every weekend. I didn’t plan to become obsessed with this sport - especially not at age 40 - but I am fully in its thrall.

So, yes, of course I went out of my way to see Challengers. Truth be told, though, the promise of a bit of cinematic tennis was a small bonus. Director Luca Guadagnino’s name on the marquee was much more of a draw. I expected that, like most films that involve sports, tennis would be a mere backdrop. Major League is a romantic comedy that happens to have some baseball. Remember the Titans is a historical drama propelled by football. Challengers, I assumed, would be an erotic thriller with a side of topspin forehands and serves down the T.

And, sure, it does have some titillating moments. There is a love triangle at the heart of the story - one that is a lot more, ahem, equilateral than you might anticipate. But, much to my surprise, it is also a deeply tennis-oriented film. Challengers is firmly about tennis with a side of sexual intrigue, not the other way around.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about why I’ve fallen so hard for tennis. The textbook answer, I suppose, is that it blends raw physicality and power with grace and athleticism and higher-plane mental strategy in a way no other sport can. The deeper-lying psychology, I think, is that at the peak of your powers in tennis, you can rip a curling ball past your opponent, land it just inside the baseline, and, for a moment, feel almost like a god. Moments later, you can do it again, or you can make an astonishingly simple mental or physical error that reminds you of your human frailty. This duality, for me at least, is at the root of the sport’s allure. You work and work and work for your next god-like moment, while at the same time always risking humiliation. No matter how much of a god you are, a humbling moment awaits.

Challengers understands the fundamental nature of the sport it profiles in a way few other sports movies ever have. The never-ending quest for sublime moments on the court, even as despairing dissatisfaction lurks animates each of the three characters. It explains why Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan - her own pro career ruined by a catastrophic knee injury - pushes her already successful husband Art toward one last run at a Grand Slam title, despite his legacy (and their finances) being secure. It explains why Patrick Zweig carries on at the lowest levels of pro tennis well past his prime, chasing the potential he showed as an elite junior. And it explains why, when the credits rolled, the first thing out of my mouth was, “what a profoundly unsatisfying sport,” followed by a wry smile.

Very early in the film, a young Tashi tells Patrick that he doesn’t understand tennis - that it’s a “relationship.”

“For about fifteen seconds there, we were actually playing tennis,” she says, referring to her opponent on that day. “And we understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It's like we were in love. Or like we didn't exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.”

This, of course, could be read as a pure metaphor for the relationship between her and Patrick and Art. The power dynamics of a tennis rally can mirror those of a relationship - the tension of a sustained back-and-forth cut, finally, by a ferocious winner or an unforced error.

It’s also possible to read it without any subtext at all - to point to this sentiment as a distillation of why this sport is so intoxicating - why I’ve spent thousands of dollars learning it over the past few years and why Tashi Duncan just can’t let go, even after her and her husband have earned millions.