 I just want you to know that I resent having to make this video because last night I saw everything everywhere all at once and it is better than every single one of these movies and I'm mad that I'm talking about them instead of it. I will do my best to not let that fact color the way I read all of these words that I wrote before I saw what might just be the best movie the best the best one it's the best one there aren't a lot of traditions on this youtube channel even the annual reflection that I did on the first and second anniversaries didn't happen at year three I'm not sure anything has survived into a third year until now today we cement the week air reviews reviewing the academy awards best picture nominees as a thing that I do every year probably I wanted to do more to celebrate the award season I had planned full reviews of every best international nominee but when it came time I wasn't able to give worst person in the world the effort it deserved let alone all five so this is what I've got for you sorry one slight difference this year versus previous is that I have not actually reviewed any of the nominees prior to this so all of these opinions are nice and fresh for the channel also where I have historically gone in alphabetical order this time we're going in preferential order least to most loved I didn't actively hate any of these movies the way some people I know did and I would recommend most of them though none are as good as worst person in the world anyways I barely scratched the surface on most of these and the video is still too long so let's just get on with it there are several entries on the back half of this list that when taken on concept alone feel like pretty bad ideas of them I think one does a fairly good job handling it one does a not so good job handling it and then you've got king Richard the worst movie nominated for best picture in 2022 it is a perfectly serviceable execution of a baffling concept hey you know serena and venus williams two of the greatest tennis players of all time and women who broke all sorts of boundaries let's make a movie about their dad what the fuck I get that the sisters parentage played a key role in their eventual sport superstardom I get that Richard Williams wrote a 78 page plan for two children who hadn't been born yet that would turn them into all-time greats and and that's interesting that that worked out it's pretty wild that that's some cool stuff that would have been great to include in a movie told from the perspective of the sisters whose lives were prescribed prior to their damn conceptions will smith gives a great performance he'll probably win an oscar and I will be glad to see that will smith has an oscar because I had a willenium cd when I was a kid so you know lifelong fan right here but this exact performance would have been guaranteed a best supporting turn for him as well and it would have been a much more interesting performance because we would have been able to see how frankly fucked up the whole situation was like king Richard is told through the lens of a total weirdo so it's just accepted that this guy controlling his children's lives is good actually and that is a bad thing to take at face value actually yeah it's cool that it worked out but it it sure would have been nice if we saw Venus Williams growing frustration at her dad's control over her schedule instead of like her coaches so much focus is put on people who really shouldn't have been the focus of this movie to the point where they couldn't even tell the story of both of the women and so we're just told that Serena became the goat instead of getting any real sense of how that happened I don't understand it and I don't like it now before you go and get mad at me for having a better opinion than you know let me say that I actually think that Belfast is a better movie than the next entry on the list and would recommend it to more people but it also literally put me to sleep I had to like pause it about 30 minutes in on a Friday afternoon and then slept for two hours we're not for this video I don't think I would have finished it because I was just so bored I don't have a problem with slow movies many of this year's nominees are very slow and arguably the slowest is at the top of the list but this is the only one that is truly boring I had two distinct problems with the film one is that little boys are annoying and Belfast did nothing to convince me otherwise I don't know what that kid's name was but he sucks and I hated every single time the movie tried to tell me his story instead of his parents I don't care that the kid wants to do well in maths so that he can look at a girl or whatever give me more of the sweet sweet bitter familial conflict where the parents are trying to wrestle with the danger of their current location against the desire to stay within their community but also they're trying to work and make money so that this deeply uninteresting child can grow up to become an Oscar nominated film director but as much as I like those conflicts they still kind of didn't work for me because all of this feels so artificial Belfast feels less like a real place where people actually live than it does a couple of roads on a studio lot the buildings don't feel like houses but facades no one lives here so I couldn't connect with the idea that this family might be compelled to stay because they're not in a place and I get that it's trying to evoke this old-timey feel but they didn't do a particularly good job of that either like why was this movie shot digitally Kenneth Brenna has never shot digitally why was this his first one the movie is way too crisp for what it seems to be going for and I was never not aware of how modern this desperately trying to seem old thing really was a few people asked me to do a full review of don't look up and in the immediate aftermath of watching it I definitely had some things to say but before I could hunker down and start writing I read a bunch of takes far better than mine would have been on both political and artistic grounds so it didn't happen the best came from a pseudonymous max fisher at the Hollywood forever sub-stack it is not a movie about climate change it's a movie about twitter and specifically writer-director Adam McKay's experience on twitter and if you think of it through that lens it is definitely a lot more interesting it isn't good necessarily but but interesting because it's not actually interesting as the allegory for climate change that McKay proclaims it to be as Matthew Eglacius notes in his also-on-sub-stack piece about the film don't look up provides a woefully inaccurate view of the actual politics going on the movie obsesses over the media and celebrities as though the reason the arctics are currently as warm as we've ever recorded them being is because we care about Ariana Grande's love life and and also seems to believe that there is some silver bullet plan that everyone agrees is good but isn't happening because of big tech instead of like the fossil fuel industry I mean sat satire inevitably simplifies complex subjects but don't look up goes past simple to just dumb like my overriding feeling when the credits rolled was sure I guess because I didn't have anything unique to say every idea is old and played out it's almost as though McKay felt like he was in a race to out ridiculous the real world and in the process just lost sight of the message and yet I actually enjoyed the act of watching it more than I enjoyed watching Belfast I like watching talented people be talented and this movie has so many talented people giving frankly more effort than the project deserves so I mean that was that was nice I guess but you know movies also feature talented people being talented the the next seven on the list so just watch those instead everything going forward is something I liked at least a lot they may be in an order but all of this is a recommendation and I mean to start with how am I not going to recommend the latest Paul Thomas Anderson I'm hardly the world's biggest PTA stan and at this point I will probably never get around to seeing Magnolia no matter how good film bros tell me it is but even with the movies that I don't like as much I can't deny his craft and licorice pizza sees that firing on all cylinders no one could think that Belfast was actually made in anything but our current decade but if someone told me that licorice pizza was a lost film from the 70s I would have at least considered believing them it's a it's a vibes movie I just got vibes for days of course the film doesn't come without controversy and while broie deschanel said basically everything I would want to but better here's a summary of my thoughts I went in knowing that it was about an illegal age-gapped relationship though I had wrongly gendered the participants as it turns out the 25 year old is a woman while the 15 year old is a boy and it's important to call them such because like who is that not following the half year age plus seven rule lady but it's not as though the movie just treats this as a as a good cool thing there there is no actually illegal activity I think there's plenty of weird fraternizing and some scenes that sure did make me uncomfortable there in that movie theater but again it's treated as weird and is meant to be uncomfortable which is good I really hated the ending though and by ending I mean literally the last 10 seconds if the whole thing ended one line of voiceover dialogue earlier than it did it would probably be at least one or two slots higher on this list but it left a real bad taste in my mouth still you want to talk about talented people being talented so many scenes bring in random people you've definitely seen before doing some genuinely fantastic work and like is it all strictly necessary no but it's all about the vibes and when it feels this good just hanging out who's gonna mind a little meander in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school my local summer theater put on a production of west side story I played Tony and I was fine you can see a few scenes on youtube in a heck of low quality and I honestly don't know if the off-keyness was actually me or just the bad recording but it's been more than 10 years since that mattered anyways until recently that was my only experience with the musical I never saw the original film and though I had gotten tickets to see the 2020 revival Broadway shut down before I got the chance so when I heard that Steven Spielberg was directing his first ever musical and it was a new adaptation I was excited and sure enough it was fucking wild but specifically for me and probably not as much for you like aside from the fact that I saw it at the movie theater on the corner of 68th street and Broadway in Manhattan New York where much of the film takes place each new scene brought with it a flood of memories mostly good with the occasional not so much it was honestly a little difficult for me to focus on the movie at times because I was so caught up in my own little world and what a deeply unpleasant teenager I was anyways well we had to spray tan white kids to play Puerto Ricans Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner decided to really lean into the culture of these characters adding Spanish dialogue and refusing to subtitle it for those of us who couldn't be bothered to pay attention in high school Spanish this choice goes a long way towards making these sharks etc feel like actual people and less like scary outsiders who the jets might justifiably hate now the jets are the bad guys here they always were really but this movie leans into it it's kind of fucked up how relevant it all feels keeping the same framework but just amping up the tension like seven percent my only real issue other than Ansel Elgort not being particularly good at any level is that is that he's really just too old Romeo and Juliet works because their children and children do stupid things like think that they fell in love at first sight and that their world will end without the person that they've just met adults don't do that and if they do the rest of us cringe about it both romantic leads in this movie are explicitly adults and highlighting that undercuts a lot of the drama by making what happens to them pathetic sad instead of emotional sad but also come on this movie is a stunning and sumptuous spectacle from a man who understands the basic tools of filmmaking as well as anyone who has ever existed Steven Spielberg directs the shit out of this movie and makes it look easy it is an audio visual treat and it would have been a lovely capper to a shockingly prolific year for Hollywood musicals if only anybody actually saw it speaking of which actually very little to say about nightmare alley other than that I really liked it it's the kind of movie you don't see much a weird mid-budget project that may be based on a novel but really is basically an original Guillermo del Toro has just been doing his own thing for the past few years not really concerned about where the rest of the industry is trending and I love that for him he won an Oscar and decided to make this a bleak fairy tale 1940s with style for years and of course it is because del Toro is good as fucking making movies and he made this one good as fuck unfortunately we can't talk about nightmare alley without talking about the fact that I didn't even know nightmare alley was a thing that existed until it was already in theaters at which point I saw a single poster in a single subway station and was like wait Guillermo del Toro has a new movie which is to say the Disney of it all fuck Disney the acquisition of fox by the house of mouse was obviously a bad thing for the industry and you can really feel that in the way that both nightmare alley and west side story were kind of fucking buried just as you can feel it in the fact that the erotic psychological thriller deep water which was co-produced by the studio formally known as 20th century fox was completely pulled from theatrical release and unceremoniously dropped on hulu now to their credit searchlight pictures has continued to acquire and distribute some interesting and niche films since the acquisition so I don't know what their mistreatment of del Toro's latest is actually about but fuck them for doing it anyway nightmare alley is great and disney is terrible did you know that in 2010 the new zealand government made it effectively impossible for film crews to unionize by turning them into independent contractors the so-called hobbit law took power out of the hands of workers because hollywood wanted a pretty place that they could do all of the things that they're not allowed to do domestically because of the gosh dang labor movement and while the law was revised in 2019 to technically allow collective bargaining although you know without the ability to strike aka have any real power in the bargains I sure was sad when I learned that and it puts a bad taste in my mouth anytime I see a hollywood production taking place over there which is to say those mountains in the power of the dog look less like montana than they do exploitation but that's just a fun fact for you to chew on doesn't really have anything to do with jane campion's latest film it's a when this seemed destined to win the big prize this year until its director said some things she shouldn't have and soured it for everyone this was the last of the nominees that I saw less than a week ago actually I put it off because I heard it was a pretty tough movie to watch but also because I don't like westerns and while I would eventually realize that it's not really a western it sure looks like one and that's most of the problem for me like many on this list the power of the dog is a slow burn and for a while I was almost bored not belfast bored but not sure where it was going in a way that I hadn't yet piqued my interest but then it started to feel different tense unnerving the stillness became eerie and it continued to transform before my eyes until literally the final shot at which point I understood what it was that I had just watched and wow what a ride I appreciate the first half a lot more in retrospect and I have no doubt that a second viewing knowing where it's all going will reveal all sorts of little bits that will just make it even better it may not be my top choice but I'd feel real good about this one winning the big prize although weird people who make ward predictions their business think that the wins have changed towards a movie that's just a little bit more my thing I watched kota on my laptop on a northeast regional amtrak train it's not a great environment for movie watching there are frequent loud announcements and stops every 20 or so minutes so people can get on or off the train it's annoying and despite that kota made me tear up three separate times the film follows ruby a child of deaf adults and the only hearing person in her family of four who wants to be a singer and it turns out is pretty good at it but she has to leave her family and become her own person in order to see that dream come to fruition it's basically every coming of age story ever a really good incarnation of that same story and also there are deaf people in it which in the context of the movie doesn't really feel like a big deal but obviously it is I mean if it weren't for that kota wouldn't be up for an oscar let alone a potential frontrunner but since it's being recognized more for its representation than for the fact that it's a really good coming of age movie I can't not mention that it is somewhat controversial in its portrayal and look no community is a monolith you cannot say that ex group of people feels why way because you're talking about humans and humans have wildly different opinions about basic tenets of reality so like nah but the response to this film from actual deaf people does seem split one of my patrons is married to a deaf person and apparently they loved it others don't there's a viral tweet thread by jenna become a writer sensitivity reader and perhaps most critically a deaf parent of a hearing child and she hates the way this movie portrays deaf competence and while I sort of disagree in the sense that I don't think the plot contrivances make the rossie family actually seem as helpless as she says it does and the one I don't personally feel this way so it's unrealistic that this character would is just always a bad argument to make in any situation her general point that the movie doesn't really acknowledge the legal frameworks that exist to help people in some of the sorts of situations we see depicted as well as her questions about how things were going in the family before ruby was able to sign on their behalf are good ones fair enough it would be nice if those things had been addressed and I'm sure that there are ways that the movie could have done it without completely undercutting the drama it's a shame they didn't but I have seen comparisons to green book and those are fucking absurd and can only have been made by people who haven't seen green book a movie wherein a historical white man explains to a historical black man how to eat fried chicken because comedy you know what kota does for comedy it has ruby's father make her translate him signing about how hot his wife is to a doctor who told him to ease off the sex it's great this movie is great spider man no way home is a good movie a very good one even I had more fun watching it than I did any other marvel movie in 2021 partially because spider man is my favorite marvel character but mostly because spider man is my favorite marvel character as a direct result of me seeing the samurai me spider men as a youth and so getting to see my spider man be a spider man again was pretty fucking cool and though I never saw the amazing spider man I do like Andrew Garfield so that was like unexpectedly delightful I bring this up one because basically everything great about that movie has nothing to do with the marvel cinematic universe or even disney in general so fuck disney but also because the idea that spider man no way home deserved any oscar nominations other than the fee effects one it received is fucking absurd maybe marvel will get a best picture nom someday but first they should make better movies they're good but they sure as heck ain't the best dune is and it's a reminder that incredibly expensive effects heavy science fiction movies about white boy saviors can absolutely get awards recognition beyond the technical stuff they just need to be good enough to deserve it I wrote a smiley face here because the idea of a seething marvel fan smashing their keyboard to complain in the comments that I no longer read is funny to me but being honest I know that I'm preaching to the choir here anyways dune is so fucking good especially in IMAX I didn't know that nearly half of the movie was going to fill up the entirety of AMC Lincoln Square's 80 foot tall IMAX screen none of the promotional materials even at the IMAX theater showed that we would have more there was mention of IMAX formatting but it wasn't shot with IMAX film so I don't know I didn't expect much and then the second shot filled my entire vision and huge swaths of the film would continue to do so it's fascinating to me that the home video version of the film is entirely in 2.4 to 1 and they didn't have shifting aspect ratios for the scenes that were done differently I can't even fathom how much time and money went into creating effects for the select group of people lucky enough to see it on a 5x4 screen dune is true spectacle an exceptional example of world building that doesn't get bogged down in needless exposition giving you only what you need when you need it did I understand everything that happened the first time around no of course not but I understood what I needed to how the characters related to each other and what they wanted it's just solid fucking storytelling and look I will cop to being a Viennese stan he is right up there near if not at the top of my list of best working directors his ability to take these enormous films and make them feel really special and like they came from a clear creative vision and not a gosh damn boardroom is admirable everyone is killing it the production design magnificent the visual effects stunning the sound oh my god the scene where Paul and Jessica are being kidnapped and get to really unleash the voice on their captors was the coolest thing I saw on screen in 2021 and probably cooler than anything I saw offscreen if we're being honest but it's also just one amazing moment in a movie chock full of them hats off glasses raised dune's amazing but it's not as good as drive my car look science fiction spectacle is cool and all but true cinema is three hours of watching a Japanese man sit in the back of a car and listen to a recording of his dead wife reading lines from Uncle Vanya and that may sound like a joke but only a little bit drive my car is an exceptional little film and one that I think benefits greatly from being seen in a theater I know I have talked about slowness a few times but this movie is really slow and I don't think it's too slow and I was never bored but I know that it would not have had nearly the effect on me had say I watched it on an Amtrak northeast regional train it is a movie that you need to sit with and commit to and if you do you will be handsomely rewarded I've never seen or even heard of anything like the theatrical production at the center of drive my car where each of the actors speaks Chekhov's original Russian lines translated to their respective spoken or in one case sign language Japanese Mandarin Korean Korean sign language Tagalog Malay around and around all practiced in rehearsals run in English the same story being told across cultures proves the universality of these experiences it doesn't matter who is saying what how emotions transcend language and super titles can fill in the gaps or subtitles as everyone who sees the movie will eventually need for one or most of the 10 different languages spoken or signed the one inch tall barriers that Bong Joon-ho talked about at the Oscars two years ago are actually a uniting factor here I'm not sure there is a single person on earth who could experience this narrative fully without them and that's kind of cool honestly I don't know this is a movie that makes you contemplate how you communicate and connect the role that language and art have in the way that you see the world it's not a pretentious film but it's a heady one and if you're not willing to seriously engage with what it's showing and telling you you'll probably be left cold but if you commit to it you will find that it's emotional core burns white fucking hot and there's nothing you can do but feel everything thank you so much for watching thank you particularly to my patrons my mom my cat cat Saracota Benjamin Schiff Anthony Cole Elliot Fowler Greg Lucina Kojo Phil Bates Willow I am the sword Maddie Zimmerman Claire Bear Taylor Lindy's angiomedicine design and the folks who'd rather be read than said you like this video great if not too bad you want to see more please subscribe hope to see in the next one