Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Our new film critic, Amy Nicholson, has hit the ground running with a top 10 list for the year. And though there are some titles we did not talk about much in these parts during the year, such as “Smile 2,” “Hundreds of Beavers,” “How to Have Sex” and even Amy’s No. 1, “Dune: Part 2,” there are also some films that should be familiar to regular readers of this newsletter, including “Anora,” “Love Lies Bleeding,” “A Real Pain” and “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.”
As she put it in her introduction, “When I survey the cinematic landscape of 2024, all around me I see signs of life. Seven of the movies on my top-10 list come from first- and second-time filmmakers, a supermajority that augurs well for 2025 and beyond. Talent exists and it’s getting seen.
“A top-10 list shoulders the weight of representing both the best films of the year and the year itself. These are the stories that resonate now, the innovations that feel fresh, the trial balloons for where the art form is headed.”
The season for ‘Eyes Wide Shut’
Nicole Kidman in “Eyes Wide Shut,” which is playing at multiple venues around town over the next few weeks.
(Getty Images / Warner Bros.)
Though “Eyes Wide Shut” is a great movie to watch anytime year-round, we just can’t quit the perverse fun of it being thought of as a new Christmas-time classic. It’s playing at multiple venues around town over the next few weeks.
The film is an examination of marriage and jealousy that plays, at moments, as a comedy, an intense melodrama and even a paranoid erotic thriller. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are both at their absolute best as actors and movie stars.
Tonight it will be screening at the Gardena Cinema with actor Vinessa Shaw in-person. Shaw, who was only 21 during shooting, played the young woman Domino who takes Tom Cruise’s Dr. Bill Hartford back to her shabby student apartment after the evocative come on, “Going anywhere special?”
The film will also be at the New Beverly Cinema in 35mm on Dec. 19 and 20, then also on DCP at the Egyptian Theatre on Dec. 23.
It’s not always obvious, but “Eyes Wide Shut,” with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, is set at Christmastime in New York.
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Over the summer Glenn Whipp spoke to Kidman to commemorate the film’s 25th anniversary. (There is something extra fun in knowing that Kidman’s upcoming film “Babygirl” also plays with some of the same themes that “Eyes Wide Shut” did and is likewise set at Christmastime in New York.)
Kidman said that as Kubrick got to know her and Cruise better, he was shaping the script to them. As to what of herself became part of the character of Alice Harford, Kidman answered, “My boldness. I’m quite up-front and Alice becomes quite up-front, particularly when she was stoned … although that wasn’t me when I was stoned. I was just naturally like that. Up-front.”
In his original review of the film, Kennth Turan called it, “a strange, somber and troubling meditation on jealousy, obsession and (yes) sex and death. More European than Hollywood in tone, it’s half brilliant, half banal, but always the work of a master director whose output has gotten increasingly distant and self-involved over the years — and not always to our benefit. … When Kubrick, as in the dark and unnerving film-within-a-film orgy scene that is ‘Eyes Wide Shut’s’ centerpiece, cuts words to a minimum and uses pure cinematic technique to go to the core of his emotions, what results has the powerful, lacerating impact of inescapable nightmare.”
Jacques Audiard’s genre explorations
“A Prophet,” starring Tahar Rahim, will be screened as part of the Egyptian Theatre’s retrospective on works by Jacques Audiard. The French filmmaker’s “Emilia Pérez” is now playing in select theaters.
(Sony Pictures)
The Egyptian Theatre is launching a retrospective of titles by the French filmmaker Jacques Audiard now that his latest movie, “Emilia Pérez,” is in the thick of awards season. Much as “Emilia Pérez” mixes the crime thriller, musical and melodrama, Audiard has long been at his best when he is recombining genres.
After a successful career as a screenwriter, Audiard made his directing debut with 1994’s “See How They Fall,” which will screen in 35mm. His 2005 film, “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” a remake of James Taback’s “Fingers,” will also screen in 35mm, as will Audiard’s international breakthrough, 2009’s “A Prophet,” starring Tahir Rahim as a young Arab man drawn into the French criminal underworld.
Reviewing “A Prophet,” Kenneth Turan called it “an answered prayer for those who believe that revitalizing classic forms with contemporary attitudes makes for the most compelling kind of cinema.”
The Jacques Audiard-directed “Rust and Bone,” starring Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts, perhaps foreshadowed the extremes of his “Emilia Pérez.”
(Jean-Baptiste Modino / Sony Pictures Classics )
My personal favorite of Audiard’s films might be his 2012 romantic melodrama “Rust and Bone” starring Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts as two broken people who find each other. (Yes, this is the one that makes surprising emotional use of both a killer whale and Katy Perry’s “Firework.”)
For an article at the time, I had a delightful lunch at the Chateau Marmont with Audiard, Cotillard and Schoenaerts. Audiard explained the film’s relationship to genre — and perhaps foreshadowed the extremes of “Emilia Pérez” — when he said, “We had a desire to push it and sometimes take it to the other side. Because it’s risky, and that’s what melodrama is. In a melodrama you always run that risk of ridicule, always on the edge of being grotesque.”
The series will also feature Audiard’s Palme d’Or winning 2015 “Dheepan,” his offbeat 2018 Western “The Sisters Brothers” and the 2021 contemporary romance “Paris, 13th District.” The opportunity to see any and all of these films on the big screen is an exciting one.
Points of interest
‘Claudine’ in 4K
“Claudine” (1974), for which Diahann Carroll received an Oscar nomination for lead actress, will screen in 4K on Sunday at the Academy Museum. A fun fact for fans of 1970s R&B: The music in the film was composed by Curtis Mayfield and performed by Gladys Knight and the Pips.
(Criterion Collection)
Screening in 4K on Sunday at the Academy Museum is John Berry’s 1974 “Claudine,” starring Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones from a screenplay by Tina and Lester Pine. Carroll was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in the title role as a single mother struggling to raise her children who meets a good-natured garbage collector, played by Jones. Director Berry was blacklisted during the 1950s, and “Claudine” was his first movie made in America in more than 20 years. Music in the film was composed by Curtis Mayfield and performed by Gladys Knight and the Pips.
In his original review, Charles Champlin called the film, “an engrossing and effective movie which is somehow able to exist simultaneously as a high-spirited romantic comedy and as a fictionalized documentary grim and angering in its implications.”
Clea DuVall’s ‘Happiest Season’
Kristen Stewart, left, and Mackenzie Davis in the 2020 queer holiday rom-com “Happiest Season.”
(Sony Pictures)
On Wednesday, Vidiots will show Clea DuVall’s 2020 queer holiday rom-com “Happiest Season” with the director in person. The film has a genuinely stacked cast, including Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Aubrey Plaza, Alison Brie, Daniel Levy, Mary Steenburgen, Victor Garber and co-writer Mary Holland in the story of a woman (Stewart) who brings her girlfriend (Davis) home for the holidays when her parents do not yet know she is a lesbian. Many awkward misunderstandings ensue.
When the movie was first released, Tracy Brown spoke to DuVall, Stewart and Davis about making such a willfully cheerful and upbeat LGBTQ film.
As DuVall, also known as a performer in films such as “But I’m a Cheerleader” and the series “Veep,” said, “I’ve always been such a huge fan of holiday movies, but … if there was an LGBTQ+ character in a holiday film, they were always in the background or just sort of thrown in to diversify an otherwise ‘normal’ family. Once I had transitioned into writing and directing, I realized that I could be the person who made that movie, and it was this very powerful, inspiring moment.”
‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ in 4K
(Janus Films)
Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” with its beautiful score by Michel Legrand, is being re-released in a new 4K restoration to commemorate its 60th anniversary. It plays this week at the Laemmle Royal. The film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for five Oscars, stars Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo as young lovers and creates a style all its own through its dazzling use of choreography, color and singing. Though many films have attempted to capture its mood, one of the things that sets the film apart, as Kevin Thomas wrote, is that Demy and Legrand, “understood the difference between the romantic and the sentimental.”
Writing about the film in 2014 for its 50th anniversary, Kenneth Turan added, “Though ‘Umbrella’s’ visuals are candy-colored, Demy’s worldview is more bittersweet. Love is central here — this is a French film, after all — but who ends up with whom has more emotional complexity than you might expect from an all-singing pastel universe.”
In other news
Sundance 2025 program announced
Eva Victor in the movie “Sorry, Baby,” premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival
(Mia Cioffi Henry / Sundance Institute)
The Sundance Film Festival announced its lineup for the upcoming 2025 edition, running from Jan. 23–Feb. 2. Some of the most notable titles in this year’s edition are likely to be documentaries, such as Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s “Sly Lives! (a.k.a. “The Burden of Black Genius”), Amy Berg’s “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” Kim A. Snyder’s “The Librarians” and Barry Levinson and Robert May’s docuseries “Bucks Country, USA.”
Among the fiction features debuting at the festival will be Ira Sachs’ “Peter Hujar’s Diary,” Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Andrew Ahn’s “The Wedding Banquet,” Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You,” Eva Victor’s “Sorry, Baby,” Amanda Kramer’s “By Design” and Mark Anthony Green’s “Opus.”
With a presidential inauguration only a few days before the start of the festival and the impending news of a move to another host city both likely to dominate conversations, organizers are setting their sights on what they always have: staying true to Sundance’s long-held mission of celebrating personal artistic visions.
“If we do have an agenda, it’s to support artists and the voice of the artist,” said Kim Yutani, the festival’s director of programming. “And that’s always our North Star. We get a lot of pressure and we hear a lot of voices outside — there’s a lot of noise wherever we go. But what is always so grounding is the idea that we are supporting artists. Every time we start a film, that’s what we have in mind — what are these artists saying, what’s on their minds? How are they processing the world we live in through their work? And together we have this opportunity to see what’s on artists’ minds in any given year.”