Tom’s movie reviews
I get tired of reviewers who try to make themselves look smart and their readers feel stupid by ascribing deep meanings to Hollywood movies that have no meanings whatsoever. Example: “Beneath its chaotic narrative, (movie name) deftly interrogates the postmodern condition.”
That’s one of the many reasons I rarely—once a year, at most—spend money to see a movie in a theater. Still, I try to stay informed about the latest films, especially around Oscar time, so I can fake it when someone brings up the nominees in conversation.
Over the last two months I have watched five films nominated for the most recent round of Oscars — two on planes, one on Hulu, one in the stateroom of our cruise ship (by the end of that one, I wanted to jump overboard), and one on Amazon Prime. All were awful. Beyond awful. And none had any message I could discern.
Below are my reviews of the three worst, along with a fourth the Academy ignored—one of the best movies I’ve seen in years.
The Oscar-nominated films are listed in descending order of awfulness. I saved the great one for last. You can watch it right now on Netflix.
CONCLAVE
8 Oscar nominations | Winner: Best Adapted Screenplay
Synopsis: After the death of the Pope, the cardinals arrive at the Vatican to choose his successor. They are surprised when a cardinal they’ve never heard of, the Archbishop of Kabul, shows up and announces he was secretly appointed by the late Pope.
As Conclave unfolds, the leading contenders scheming for the job reveal themselves to be corrupt and evil. After many ballots, the conclave chooses the guy from Kabul, who takes the name “Pope Innocent.”
Just before the credits roll, Innocent tells the Dean of the Cardinals (Ralph Fiennes) that he is intersex, e.g., under his cassock he has both male and female reproductive organs. He says the late Pope was aware of his condition.
Viewers are left wondering: Will the other cardinals, once they learn the truth, strip Innocent of his title and send him back to Kabul? Or will they allow this kind, gentle, godly man/woman to lead the Church into the gloriously woke future God no doubt envisions for it?
Despite its serious, solemn pretensions, Conclave makes Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle look like Citizen Kane.
ANORA
6 Oscar nominations | Winner: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and more
Anora has already been forgotten—like that Korean film that won Best Picture in 2020. Can you remember its name? I don’t, and I doubt most members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, the people who voted for it, do either.
Synopsis: A Brooklyn stripper/prostitute with a seven-word vocabulary — four are variations of the F word — Anora is hired by Vanya, the 21-year-old drug-addled video game-addicted son of a Russian oligarch. Anora and Vanya impulsively get married. Anora quits her job — she finally has money and the security that comes with it.
When Vanya's parents in Russia get wind of the marriage, they order their goons to break it up.
In a scene that goes on for what seems like hours — the Omaha Beach landing in The Longest Day didn’t last nearly as long — the goons invade the couple’s mansion as Anora hurls f bomb after f bomb at them and effing vows to remain Mrs. Effing Vanya.
Vanya’s parents fly over in their jet and demand an annulment. His mother calls Anora a whore. That hurts her feelings. Anora agrees to end the marriage and cries. The End.
Mainstream reviewers called it “brilliant.” I’m with the Reddit commenter who said watching it felt like licking the floor of a strip club after hours. Not that I’d know. Whenever I go to a strip club I’m home in bed by 11, well before closing time.
THE BRUTALIST
10 Oscar nominations | Winner: Best Actor and more
Brutalism is an architectural style popular from the 1950s to the 1970s that was often used in public buildings.
Synopsis: After WWII, a Hungarian-Jewish survivor, Laslo Toth (a fictional character played by Adrien Brody), arrives in the US. Before the war, Toth was a talented architect. His first American project, the library of a rich industrialist, is a failure, considered too outside-the-box. Depressed, Toth turns to heroin. Once the industrialist learns Toth was considered a great architect in Europe, he hires him to design a memorial to his late wife.
Toth gets clean, begins work, is fired, becomes an addict again, is rehired but remains addicted. While visiting a quarry to choose stone for the memorial, the industrialist rapes Toth who, naturally, continues working for him. At long last, the memorial is completed.
The aha moment: After Toth’s death, while accepting an award on his behalf, his niece reveals that the dimensions of the memorial, a massive building atop a hill, were inspired by the size of the cell in which Toth was imprisoned during the war. Viewers are supposed to get goose bumps by equating the proportions of the cell as we imagine it because it was never shown, to those of the memorial building and … what?
Be glad we wasted 3.5 hours watching this overwrought nonsense? Not on your life.
Fun but useless fact: The name Laslo Toth stuck in my craw — I knew I had heard it somewhere. When I googled it, I was reminded he was the guy who vandalized Michelangelo’s Pieta at the Vatican in 1971. I rarely forget names of people who were in the news fifty years ago; only the names of people I met a few minutes ago.
And now, on to a movie with a bona fide hero who — get this — actually made the world a better place. Spoiler alert: It’s not from Hollywood. It’s from Norway.
NUMBER 24
0 Oscar nominations | Prize it should have won:: Best Picture for viewers with IQs of 70+
Shot in black and white and now streaming on Netflix, Number 24 is the true story of Gunnar Sønsteby, Norway’s most decorated WWII hero, whose codename was Number 24.
Synopsis: Sønsteby, an unassuming twenty-something accountant, joins the Resistance after Norway’s occupation by the Nazis, and quickly becomes a legend. He blows up bridges and arms factories, prints counterfeit money to fund the Resistance, assassinates Nazi collaborators, and somehow eludes capture again and again.
The story cuts back and forth between his youthful wartime heroics and a lecture he is giving at a college as an elderly man. A student challenges him about the death of a relative who may have been a collaborator. The discussion that ensues is a compelling exploration of morality, justice, and the true cost of freedom.
Number 24 is patriotic, thoughtful, tightly written—and it made me proud to be Norwegian. Which I’m not. It’s that good.
I suggest watching it in its original Norwegian language with English subtitles. You’ll have the option of hearing the dubbed voices of English-speaking voiceovers, but the original language version will enable you to hear the voices and nuance of the actors that dubbed movies can’t deliver. You might even learn a word or two of Norwegian.
Though it was eligible, Number 24 wasn’t nominated for any Academy Awards. It should have swept the Oscars but, because it didn’t deal with topics Hollywood loves like intersexuals, stripper/prostitutes and drug addicts, it didn’t.
But it will sweep you off your feet.
Coming soon on tomdryden.com: TV series to stream this summer.
