The 91st Annual Academy Awards are tonight, and I have some notes.

Nominees are sorted in order, with the best of the year coming first. And since I was already doing what I want, there are ten best picture nominees and six for each following category.

(My own personal favorites may be different, but that’s an even more indulgent project.)

Enjoy the TOSCARS.

Best Picture
First Reformed
Roma
The Favourite
Shoplifters
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Cold War
The Rider
Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Annihilation
Support the Girls

Best Director
Alfonso Cuarón, Roma
Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite
Kore-Eda Hirokazu, Shoplifters
Chloe Zhao, The Rider
Marielle Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me
Paweł Pawlikowski, Cold War

Best Actress
Olivia Coleman, The Favourite
Sakura Ando, Shoplifters
Carey Mulligan, Wildlife
Regina Hall, Support the Girls
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Helena Howard, Madeline’s Madeline

Best Actor
Ethan Hawke, First Reformed
Bradley Jandreau, The Rider
Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here
and Bradley Cooper, he really did a great job in A Star Is Born

And those were the only great leading man performances this year, so we’ll fill the rest of the slots with two more great female performances:
Joanna Kulig, Cold War
Rachel McAdams, Disobedience

Best Supporting Actress
Rachel Weisz, The Favourite
Emma Stone, The Favourite
Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Elizabeth Debicki, Widows
Anne Hathaway, Ocean’s 8
Haley Lu Richardson, Support the Girls

Best Supporting Actor
Nicholas Hoult, The Favourite
Richard Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Armie Hammer, Sorry To Bother You
Daniel Kaluuja, Widows
Hugh Grant, Paddington 2
******* [This is my spot for Steven Yeun in Burning. Have I seen Burning? No not yet! So why is Steven Yeun here? Because critics I like liked him in this a lot, and I just bet I will too. To be continued once I actually see Burning.]

Best Screenplay
Deborah Davis & Tony McNamara, The Favourite
Nicole Holofcener & Jeff Whitty, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman, Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Steve McQueen & Gillian Flynn, Widows
Boots Riley, Sorry To Bother You
Paul Schrader, First Reformed

Best Cinematography
Alfonso Cuarón, Roma
James Laxton, If Beale Street Could Talk
Robbie Ryan, The Favourite
Łukasz Żal, Cold War
Alexander Dynan, First Reformed
Ashley Connor, Madeline’s Madeline

Best Editing
Joe Bini, You Were Never Really Here
Jaroslaw Kaminski, Cold War
Yorgos Mavropsaridis, The Favourite
Ben Rodriguez Jr., First Reformed
Sandi Tan, Shirkers
Peter Lambert, The Death of Stalin

Best Production Design
Fiona Crombie, The Favourite
Eugenio Caballero, Roma
Fernanda Guerrero, Dirty Computer
Keiko Mitsumatsu, Shoplifters
Marcel Slawinski & Katarzyna Sobanska-Strzalkowska, Cold War
Grace Yun, First Reformed

Best Score
Nicholas Britell, If Beale Street Could Talk
Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow, Annihilation
Ludwig Goransson, Black Panther
Jonny Greenwood, You Were Never Really Here
Alexandre Desplat, The Sisters Brothers
Erik Friedlander, Thoroughbreds

Best Original Song
It’s ‘Shallow’. From A Star Is Born. You know the one.

Best Costumes
Ruth E. Carter, Black Panther
Sandy Powell, The Favourite
Giulia Piersanti, Suspiria
Andrea Flesch, Colette
Deirdra Govan, Sorry To Bother You
Kazuko Kurosawa, Shoplifters

I don’t know enough/haven’t seen enough of the other categories to make judgements, but I do have opinions on things that aren’t awards but would be if I ran things:

Best Ensemble Cast
The Favourite
Shoplifters
Paddington 2
Support the Girls
Widows
Annihilation

Best Use of An Existing Song (so, Music Direction)
Elton John’s ‘Skyline Pigeon’ in The Favourite
Enya’s ‘Sail Away’ in Eighth Grade
Cynthia Erivo singing ’This Old Heart of Mine’ in Bad Times At the El Royale
‘Are You Washed In the Blood?’ in First Reformed
Rosie & the Originals’ ‘Angel Baby’ in You Were Never Really Here
Bill Haley & His Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in Cold War

Best Trailer
First Reformed
If Beale Street Could Talk
The Favourite
Sorry To Bother You
A Star Is Born
Suspiria

 

---

Note: Reviews for all of these movies can be found in the archives, with the exception of Support the Girls and You Were Never Really Here, which I just caught this weekend and haven’t had time to write up yet. Coming soon! They were both real good in REAL different ways.

For maybe the first 15 minutes of The Rider, I thought that it may not be the movie for me. “I’ll get up soon and make a hot toddy,” I thought to myself. Reader I never got up. This film had already grabbed me even then, I just hadn’t realized. I stayed in place, sat still, watching it, until the very end, and then finally moved to bend my head onto my knees and cry and cry. I felt like a clear Dakota wind might blow me apart but it was alright, the pieces of my slip-shod soul would just rest in the grasses with the broken reverent hearts of sorrowful cowboys forever more.

There’s a somewhat popular adage that directors who are not from a community somehow tend to be the ones to produce the truest works about it, their sensitivity unfettered from sentimentality. Of course this is only the case with the most empathetic and intelligent directors, which Chloé Zhao has just proven she is beyond a shadow of a doubt under a wide prairie sky, and I would like to add her to the Sean Baker list with full rights and privileges effective immediately.

Like Baker’s The Florida Project last year, the veritas nature of this movie’s production is astounding, even before combined with the care and insight this “outsider” director had in depicting a world that was not her own—all of this speaking to an absolutely gobsmacking amount of directorial talent) For only her second movie, Zhao, a filmmaker raised in the bustle of Beijing, stepped onto a remote Lakota-Sioux reservation in the American West, and worked with a cast of non-professional actors to craft an intimate, poetic Western on masculinity and identity, recreating for her cameras the real, lived story of her lead, young injured rodeo star Brady Jandreau (‘Brady Blackburn’ in the film).

This boy, this incredible boy, stepped in front of a camera for the first time in his life and turned in my second favorite male performance of the year, following only Ethan Hawke in First Reformed. He’s magic. I firmly believe that there are some people in this world who are Horse Trainers, and that their energy comes from somewhere in the earth and wind that the rest of ours doesn’t. Brady is the first person I’ve ever seen break an audience like he breaks a horse, with just a pure, quiet talent for drawing your attention, and holding it.

So it seems a spare and tender modern cowboy myth out of the Badlands is a movie for me after all.

I know….so little…about David Bowie and his whole scene, but I know about GLAMOUR and MELODRAMA, and from someone who signed in to this loopy queer rockstar wedding as a last minute guest of Bryan Ferry, whom I’d just met at an underground throwback cabaret singing smoky torch song versions of his art pop ’70s hits, I can only extrapolate what watching this must be like for the actual Bowie glitterati. Basically, wild. Wilde, also, apparently, as in Todd Haynes’ horny glam rock fantasia Oscar Wilde who was seemingly sent to our planet like some sort of Gay-El to bless us with a line of shimmering pop idols. I mean I probably only “got” about half of it, but I did love this dazzle-eyed Orson Wellsian music video of a movie, like I would.

If you would like to guess that the deliciously mysterious Jack Fairy floating through the story was my favorite character, be my guest as you would be correct. Later when I was reading up on the originals/influences on these characters I would have cause to search “young Brian Eno”, which was an additional gift Jack Fairy provided me. I enjoyed Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ alter ego Maxwell Demon more than his Brian Slade, which was probably the point. I just enjoy Ewan McGregor all the time, full stop. That man is always getting naked and grinning in movies and I respect that. Deeply surprised by Christian Bale in this, both because I didn’t know he was, and then when he wasn’t playing a morose journalist in the ’80s frame he turned into a crushingly needy and awkward young fanboy on the ’70s concert circuit, which I would never have expected was a role he had in him!

But the biggest surprise might have been later on Wikipedia, when I learned the band covering the Roxy Music songs was, to quote a skit from the sketch comedy group at my college with a similar plot point: “fucking Radiohead.” God what an outrageous project this movie was. Good show, everyone.

Jonathan’s and my most recent nerd-cinema outing was to go check out Paweł Pawlikowski’s latest black & white Polish film, baby! And I really, really liked it. I liked this a lot. I liked it while watching it, I liked it walking out of the theater into the cold (thematic!), and it’s now the next day and I might like it even more. This was easily the most romantic movie I saw from 2018—sorry, A Star Is Born, sorry Beale Street, come back to me when your characters are smoking hollowly on the snowy streets of East Berlin in 1951 waiting in vain for their lover to arrive so they can clandestinely cross the border into the west, because that’s the most romantic shit I know!!

Actually, usually when people describe a movie as romantic a little vocal part of my soul goes “bah“, but that is because they so rarely mean THIS kind of romantic. They’re not often talking about passionate, foolhardy Polish artistes staring at each other in smoky music clubs and pulling each other into their arms in dilapidated buildings still pocked with bullet holes from the war and constantly leaving & coming back together & leaving again and increasingly fucked up about it. They’re not usually talking about movies that feel cold in a good way, cold like white satin, cold like an abandoned church roof broke open to the sky. They’re not talking about movies that end with a little inscription in the lower left: “for my parents.” Like Roma, the other beautifully shot black & white non-English film whose director is nominated for an Oscar, this story feels at once so, so personal, and like a great epic. Black & white was deployed so well this year. As was that 4:3 academy ratio also used in First Reformed, another bleak stunner right at the top of my list.

Cold War is a love story, but it almost feels a disservice to follow that with “set against the backdrop of the actual Cold War.” It is of the Cold War. It is a turbulent romance inextricably tied to several decades of politics, a love story that would have no heart without this history beating through it. The heart it does have, with this lifeblood, is fiery and forlorn and guarded, strange restless reckless secrecy combined with a fatalistic, foresworn abandonment to being tied to someone forever. And at only 85 minutes long, the economy of storytelling is at once bracing and elliptical, a spare, emotive saga spanning two decades in less than an hour and a half. That they can do so much in this time is due in large part to Łukasz Żal’s breathtaking framing, which makes each new shot feel like turning a page in an art book of an esteemed Eastern block photographer. Their previous film, Ida, was like this, too.

I liked Ida, but I love Cold War. I love its dramatics, its conversation on art & politics, the use of music (that song, oyoyooyy…), and watching Joanna Kulig at parties. I could watch just Joanna Kulig at parties for another 85 minutes.

Shoplifters took the top prize at Cannes this year. Historically, I gotta confess I’ve not been particularly drawn to see the Palm d’Or winners—an obscure, arty lot mostly by directors whose names you only start picking up after you’ve been kicking around the critic scene a spell. But the reviews of Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s latest were glowing, seeming almost as if their glow was an attempt to capture a glowing quality of the movie itself. Something warm, honest and feeling. It was being described as heartbreaking, but also very kind. ‘Tender’ is maybe the word for it. I only really glimpse at little pocket-reviews before I see something, and even those were enough to get this across. And I want to thank the people that wrote them, because I did go see Shoplifters, a whole gaggle of seven of us went in fact, and then stood around afterward chorusing praises.

We praised Sakura Ando as our first note, who is just….she’s phenomenal in this. A grounding, nuanced anchor and light. There’s a shot held straight on her face near the end that is easily the 2018 successor to Timothée Chalamet’s long take last year, as this person’s soul just falls open in front of you. And honestly it’s remarkable that she even is such a standout, when the entire cast is just exceptionally good. And that includes two kids! This is a movie about family—for all the twists and turns (such twists, what a turn), the thesis is always that simple—and they gathered the perfect ensemble to play out this tale. The web of relationships, and the singular universes of each individual, all get time and space in the graceful dance Kore-Eda has choreographed.

We praised that turn as well, which I’m not going to really get into much because you know my style! But it was necessary, there had to be consequences. I mean, from the premise: this is a story about a family of ragtag petty thieves who kinda half accidentally/half on purpose steal a kid. An abused little girl, but still, you can’t just steal kids! As one of my friends said, if this had just been a fun romp through illegality it wouldn’t have been as good. It wouldn’t have been as genuine. And what’s interesting is that even though there’s comeuppance and fallout, this isn’t a moralistic movie. Shoplifters isn’t going to tell you that anyone is right. In fact, it’s probably going to tell you that everyone is wrong. So let’s start there, and then move forward with compassion.

And at last we headed over to the food carts nearby, because we had started praising the noodles. This is the best Asian food porn movie since Crazy Rich Asians—a watershed year for this, apparently! It’s welcome. I love watching people enthusiastically eating on film, god do I ever. And it’s part of that warmth of this one. The family table, and the family humor. You gather, you joke, you break bread. This is how family is made. And sometimes a family is just a group of criminals sharing a paper bag of croquettes.

 

This was a stranger movie than I anticipated! Oddly, not sure if I loved it. That goes against brand.

This does not go against Barry Jenkins’ brand. It is very clear this is the same director who made Moonlight—the lyricism, the gorgeous score, shots painted with colors almost too beautiful to believe, shots close on beautiful black faces as if the camera is caught suspended on a musical note, as if we’re wondering who is holding whom in contemplation. But I feel now like the people who didn’t go in for Roma, who say: I appreciate its technical mastery of filmic beauty, but it just wasn’t in my stars; it left me a little cold. Roma took my heart. Moonlight took my heart. If Beale Street Could Talk didn’t quite.

This is not to say tears didn’t bloom in my eyes at moments, because they did (Regina King, ohh Regina King). But there was something about the line deliveries in this one I think, this slow cadence that kept me just a hand’s breadth apart, thinking “old stage play” for some reason, even though the performances could hardly have been less traditionally theatrical (those close-ups! film was invented for those close ups! this is a movie!) (I do love it by the way, when a director’s great love for cinema seeps into their works—Jenkins’ characters asking one another if they want to go see a movie, Cuaron’s actually going, last year Del Toro’s living above a film house…)

Ultimately, how I really know the peaks and valleys of my feelings just didn’t find the right register with this one, is that far and away the most profound emotional moment I experienced was when, miracle of miracles, Diego Luna magically appeared onscreen with nothing more to do than be a kind dear lovely restaurant owner for a few moments, the kindest dearest and loveliest you ever saw, and so overcome was I with how much I love him that I genuinely collapsed a little onto my friend’s shoulder. Diego Luna is the most charming man I think I have ever seen. He is like a living candle.

Anyway this has been my hopelessly inadequate review of Barry Jenkins’ poetic adaptation of the James Baldwin novel If Beale Street Could Talk, in which Diego Luna appears for about a minute and a half. In 2019 we own our melt points, and this one of mine (Diego Luna).

I would have seriously sworn that at least one of those “Spider”s in the title was a “Spidey.” A (top-notch) element of this movie’s tone that we’ll get into.

Anyway: I went to go see the new animated Spider-Man movie with my dad when I was home last week, because my dad has loved Spider-Man since he was a kid, and I’d heard that this movie was actually incredibly good. People were praising the inventive animation, which always piques my interest (listen the Pixar movies look flawless, but they all look the same), and I had also just learned that it’s by the guys who got their start making Clone High, and eeeeverything else I was hearing about the tone fell into place. Would you like to watch a beautifully visualized Miles Morales Spider-Man movie by the creators of Clone High? You absolutely would, if you are me!

Into the Spider-Verse is bouncingly meta and self-referential without ever being less than completely in love with all this. It joshes on comic book (and specifically Spidey-verse) conceits because it just loves them so hard, an artistic approach I find very relatable. It’s funny and quippy and playing with tropes, but the story is always this really sincere depiction of a dorky Afro-Latino Brooklyn teen trying to find his place in the world. He sings along terribly to hip hop on his headphones and speaks Spanglish with his mom that’s not even translated, and it’s all just so wonderful and genuine. It’s a movie utterly oriented in this kid’s cultural context in the world, without being about that, which is a remarkable feat to pull off. Especially while it’s simultaneously a rollicking superhero action movie, a spry and clever genre comedy, and a flat-out gorgeous piece of visual art.

Here’s my blisteringly hot Marvel take of 2018: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a better comic book movie than Black Panther. Because Spidey-Verse is the best comic book movie I’ve ever seen. This one finally realizes the aesthetic and narrative potential of the American superhero film genre that began almost a dozen years ago, which is a movie that renders a classic hero story fresh and newly meaningful, while capturing that beloved punchy, graphic look and exhilarating movement unique to the medium of comics. It actually seems pretty silly in retrospect that it took them this long to realize that of course these things should be animated. Great animation like this, the kind whose style is thoughtfully and creatively designed to be in service to and conversation with the kind of story it’s telling, can deliver jaw-dropping moments in a way live action never will, because they’re just different forms—but in a way that’s not so different at all from great comic books.

And Spidey-Verse also features a sweatpants-wearing, existentially tired 38-year-old hot mess dad bod Peter Parker, which is truly what is making this a four-quadrant success because every worn-out adult is just like, “yeah.”

I haven’t gone to a movie in a theater this full in longer than I can remember, probably since living in New York. But the historic non-profit on the east side was the only cinema screening Roma in all of Portland, and probably, like me, people had seen just one week of showtimes on the webpage, and knew this could be their only window. The main auditorium seats nearly 400, in front of a huge screen where I’d seen Dunkirk last year in 70mm. The 6:30pm showing the day before had sold out, a Tuesday. And what I can’t figure out is if this artificial scarcity creating packed houses is all part of Netflix’s plan. It seemed as if pressure from the film community and Alfonso Cuarón himself led them to agree to a limited theatrical release of Roma, the first time they’ve ever done that for one of their movies, though maybe they’d actually counted on this all along. But what they want are awards, and they don’t need audiences for that, they just need Academy member votes, and half of them will watch everything on screeners anyway.

What I do know is that when Ted Sarandos released that absolutely hilarious statement in response to Netflix be being banned from Cannes (pop the artisanal popcorn and read Alissa Wilkinson’s primer here, if you haven’t been avidly following this drama all year), in which the head of Netflix literally said the words “we are 100% about the art of cinema,” they were indeed lying as badly as it seemed. Because anyone who truly cared about ‘the art of cinema’ would never have bound a movie like Roma to be primarily released on a streaming service. I hadn’t seen a movie in a theater that full in ages, nor have I recently seen something that more OUGHT to be seen in a theater. Not even the last one I saw on that same screen.

Every shot in Roma is like a photograph that makes you stop in the middle of the gallery. Every camera movement is like panning over a tapestry. Even if it weren’t for such a rich depth of field that my breath would catch in my throat watching it, the sound design alone asks to please be played in a theater, please let as many people as possible experience this intoxicatingly immersive 360 degree soundscape that had my friends and me thinking for a moment that there were birds up in the rafters, or that someone had opened the door behind us, to a street in Mexico City in 1970.

Roma is a deeply realist movie, that Cuarón made about his childhood maid and nanny, rendered with a near-surrealist visual language that makes it feel like a mythic saga, or a movement of music, or a dive into water. The movie follows Cleo, a young indigenous housekeeper, through a tumultuous year of her life that happens to coincide with a very troubled year in Mexico’s history, the two twining together during the most heart-clenching sequence in the movie, in which I just started crying, overwhelmed by the tidal swell and pull of it all.

It’s a beautiful movie, a gorgeous movie. It reminds me of Ida, not simply for also being shot in lyrical black and white, but because both are unhurried films that follow watchful, quiet female leads. The natural critique of Roma is that Cleo is too quiet, and that this speaks to a lack of imagination or empathy on Cuarón’s part, that he defaulted to the trope of the strong & silent help. But to me, nothing about this movie felt so thoughtless, feeling instead infused with such specificity and care and personal feeling. It’s rare that I’ve seen something so clearly made for someone, out of deep love, and sure, mystification, but in the universal experience of how the souls of those we love are always somehow a vaster sea than we’ll ever be able to fathom. The mysteries of the human heart, the beauty and trauma of a passed time, and the sounds of a child’s memories of Mexico.

This year’s Paddington 2 is so ridonkulously well-reviewed that I had to watch both it and the first installment of the Paddington franchise, also known as the British children’s movies where Ben Whishaw voices a 3 foot 6 digitally animated bear in a red hat. GUESS WHAT, THEY’RE CHARMING. Thought they couldn’t possibly be as charming as all that, but the people are right, they are! These movies are really awfully sweet, and just this side of doable on the kids’ film silliness axis. Whenever they start to lose me with too many slow motion pratfalls of computer generated animals sailing paws-over-teakettle, one of the incredibly winning actors swoops in being so gosh darn delightful that you feel like sunshine is gonna start pouring out of your screen. Sally Hawkins alone could probably stave off your seasonal depression.

That’s what sets these movies a notch or five above much contemporary children’s fare I think, the genuinely clever dialogue performed by actors who aren’t phoning it in, no, this cast brought their own phones, which they’d made themselves (tin cans bedazzled with rickrack and paper flowers and steampunk gears, and love). I mean there’s a reason the the LA Film Critics Association just named Hugh Grant their runner-up for Best Supporting Actor of 2018 for his marvelous work in Paddington frickin 2, and it’s not “for the lols.” I mean it is for the lols, but the lols he’s given us; a Lols Award granted in sincerity.

Hugh Grant—as washed-up cravat-wearing mad stage actor “Phoenix Buchanan”, yes indeedy—is not the only thing that makes Paddington 2 the X2 of its series. As mentioned these movies are not lacking in great performances, or fabulous villains for that matter—the first Paddington boasts a gleefully severe Nicole Kidman as a high-heeled evil taxidermist. But there are a couple things Paddington 2 does a little differently. One, they lean more overtly into their Wes Anderson For Tots sensibility, particularly in the prison section, and it pays off handsomely. Two, they raised the number of speaking roles played by non-white actors from zero to I-eventually-lost-count. In a year marked by cultural watersheds like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians, I hope we don’t even have to state a case anymore for why this not only matters to audiences, but also intrinsically improves on the classic movie forms, creating something richer for the representation. And especially in a series like the Paddington films, with their clear immigrant narrative and steadfast ethos of acceptance and inclusion, this was the missing piece this franchise needed to become the very best version of itself. As Aunt Lucy says: if you’re kind and polite, the world will be right.

The Favourite is a sumptuous, mordant, slapstick lesbian love triangle meets Stuart royal court drama in which everyone is a morbid hilarious bitch. This is, mm probably my MOVIE OF THE YEAR. Maybe the movie of the year? I’ve a good few to go still, but this one is such a fucking diamond. It’s as if Yorgos Lanthimos, my adored weirdo Greek auteur of The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Lobster, wondered what would happen if he stirred Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall into a pitcher of Armando Iannucci shows, strained out every pip of male POVs, then poured the whole lively cocktail over a block of dry ice carved in the shape of a duck named Horatio. God or maybe a rabbit. (The rabbits.)

What’s probably gonna anoint The Favourite as so many Lanthimos fans’…favorite.. is that it’ll be the easiest one to recommend to others, but doesn’t feel like he’s “gone mainstream.” It’s not that it’s a milder Yorgos, just looser, meanwhile the narrative structure has never been tighter—really successful adjustment of his sliders! It’s still deadpan and arch, but his dear Rachel Weisz can now explore a greater range on that scale freed from what had become the characteristic but essentially restrictive Lanthimos Monotone. It’s still abruptly violent, but now it’s the bloodless, physical comedy jolt of Nicholas Hoult just brusquely shoving Emma Stone into a ditch.

Incidentally, Nicholas Hoult should be nominated for an Oscar. The women are all already going to be and they deserve it, three terrific actors turning in the the kind of performances where you exclaim “she’s never been better!” Olivia Coleman, long one of our most stupendous performers, is the absolute heart of the movie, delivering both the greatest laughs (my audience was losing it) and the truest pathos (my audience was losing it!). Rachel Weisz feels like she’s just striding along at the top of her ever-stunning game, rendering a hilarious, powerful Machiavellian beauty into an end product I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, she’s almost like a glib duchess pirate? Incredible, and also *whew* [fans neck a little]. And Emma Stone is pitch perfect in a wickedly fun charm-to-cruelty ascent so suited for her talents, gradually transforming her always exemplary #relatable clarity of expression into the comedy villainy I think she’s somehow never played? (Glad Hollywood seems to have finally clicked in to this direction for her.)

Ahh but see this is the thing, The Favourite is so abounding in Great Performances that you get talking about how good all the ladies are and nearly forget to talk about Nicholas Hoult! Who kills here. He’s wearing a curled powdered wig as big as he is, a full face of makeup at all times, and this entire concoction would seem to physically bear him to the floor were he not held sniffily aloft by the BIGGEST attitude. A hapless ineffectual fop (every man, duke, and lad in this movie is this way) who insists on trying to wheel & deal anyway against a mad queen and two grade A geniuses, god Hoult is just….a delectable treat.

This movie is also a true delight to simply look at. It’s beautiful, with this in-camera high contrast I found so aesthetically soothing. Gorgeous, slightly off-key period costumes (those laser-cut chokers!) in so much deep navy-blacks and cream-whites, against a naturally chiaroscuro lighting theme drawn from large tall windows pouring in streams of bright grey natural light, and what I realized must be the period-appropriate contrast of inky dark interior palace hallways with no electricity to counter the lack of windows, just a scattering of amber candles. Truly one of the aesthetic flexes of the year is the DP shooting the Queen’s bedchamber hung in dense ornate tapestries with a fishbowl lens—the kind of odd, art anachronism I do love in my historical films, thank you.

Anyway, The Favourite: SUPPORT THE GIRLS. (Which I will also see soon I promise.)