Spoiler Warning: This article contains major plot details and the ending of Sinners.

Sinners is a masterpiece. It is the best film I have seen in a very long time. After watching it three times, I still can’t get enough. And I’m not the only one who feels that way. Just this week, the Ryan Coogler-directed Southern Gothic horror film received a record-breaking sixteen Academy Award nominations.

Most films are either entertaining or thoughtful, but Sinners is both to an impressive degree. It has something for everyone, but the depth of its visual storytelling keeps me coming back.

As a social commentary, Sinners has a lot going on. Ryan Coogler’s presentation of black existence in America touches on everything from slavery and race to capitalism and music. Yet Christianity and the Blues are central to the story because the protagonist, Sammie (Preacherboy), must choose between them.

Since its release, online reviewers have debated whether Sinners is “anti-Christian propaganda,” as suggested by the American Christian rapper Lecrae. Sinners is unabashedly critical of Christianity — so much so that it is easy to understand why some viewers have dismissed it as “anti-Christian.” The film repeatedly frames Christianity as restrictive, oppressive, and spiritually inert when measured against the power of the Blues and Hoodoo spiritualism.

And yet, Sinners gestures toward something more complicated than outright condemnation. Coogler seems drawn to the unresolved tension between Christianity and the Blues, to the painful space occupied by those who, like Sammie, feel forced to choose between inherited faith and ancestral heritage. The film hints at reconciliation, but never fully commits to it.

To understand what Sinners is attempting and where it ultimately falls short, we first have to take its critique of Christianity seriously on its own terms.

Christianity Opposes Individual Freedom

Sinners’ most obvious critique of Christianity is that the religion opposes individual freedom and self-expression, especially as it pertains to art and music.

Sammie loves playing the Blues, but his father, a pastor, calls it a sin. It is music played “for drunkards and philanderers who shirk their responsibilities to their families so they can sweat all over each other.” As Sammie is leaving the church to perform at his cousins’ juke joint, he shows his resentment.

“I just wanna be free of all of this for a day,” he says, gesturing to the sanctuary.

During his opening performance at Club Juke, Sammie sings a song he wrote for his father called “I Lied to You.”

Somethin’ I been wanting to tell you for a long time

It might hurt you, hope you don’t lose your mind

Well, I was just a boy, ‘bout eight years old

You threw me a Bible on that Mississippi road

See, I love ya, papa, you did all you could do

They say the truth hurts, so I lie to you

Yes, I lied to you. I love the blues

The moral absolutism of the Christian faith causes Sammie to hide his musical gifts and lie about his love of the Blues. He cannot be his true self around his father and the church.

When Sammie returns to his father’s church after surviving the vampire onslaught at Club Juke, he is told to drop the remains of the broken guitar he clutches in his hand.

His father shouts, “Drop the guitar, Samuel. Put it down in the name of God! You tell them [pointing to the congregation]. My heart, my voice, my soul, belongeth to the Lord!”

Throughout the exchange, every shot features a cross in the background, just out of focus, to emphasize the tension among the Church, the Blues, and Sammie.

Production designer Hannah Beachler told Variety that the three crosses in the church represent the Holy Trinity and are exactly 33 inches apart, alluding to the age Jesus died. The scene portrays Christianity as demanding the subordination of the individual to God, resulting in a loss of self, which Sammie is unwilling to sacrifice.

Holding the broken guitar neck against his chest, Sammie leaves his father, family, and faith to pursue his love of the Blues. I cannot praise the film’s careful and intentional visual storytelling enough. Every shot has a purpose. The film encourages and rewards careful analysis, but it does not require it to be enjoyed, which is the hallmark of any great movie.

At the end of Sinners, the lack of freedom in Christianity is starkly contrasted with the freedom found in the juke joint and the Blues. Decades after the fateful events at Club Juke, Sammie and Stack reunite and agree that it was the best day of their lives. “Just for a few hours,” Stack says, “we was free.” Some argue that the explicit critique of Christianity is tempered by the fact that Sammie’s radical individualism is not without consequence.

“Son, you keep dancing with the devil,” Sammie’s father warns, “one day he’s going to follow you home.”

The preacher’s words seem prophetic as everyone at Club Juke, except Sammie, is doomed to die or cursed to live as a vampire for eternity. They pay for their “sins” and the unrestricted, hedonic freedom they so deeply desire. In the end, even if Sammie rejects the faith, don’t the warnings of his father and Christianity prove to be true?

On the surface, it is a very reasonable conclusion. But that interpretation becomes increasingly difficult to hold when we see Christianity and vampirism portrayed as two sides of the same coin throughout the film.

The Church & Vampirism as Systems of Oppression

Christianity and vampirism have been portrayed as antithetical in art and literature, especially in classic vampire stories like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vampirism is a selfish inversion of Christian self-sacrifice. Count Dracula takes our blood so he might live, while Christ gives his blood so we might live.

Sinners turns this traditional understanding on its head by subtly suggesting there is no difference between Christianity and vampirism. The opening scene plants the seed.

When Sammie enters the church, bloody and scarred from the events of the night before, his father beckons him to come forward. As Sammie’s father extends his hand, there is an immediate cut to Remmick, the vampire leader, holding the same visual posture. Sammie’s gaze sweeps over the church’s congregation; a flashback replaces them with the congregating vampires we see at the end of the film.

From the outset of Sinners, there is an implicit comparison being made between Christianity and the oppressive, bloodsucking nature of vampirism. Delta Slim explicitly drives the point home when he says, “The blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion. Nah, son, we brought this from home.” Like a vampire, the Church carefully forces its “salvation” on unwilling victims through manipulation and, if necessary, violence.

Mary, a name that evokes the Virgin Mother of Christ, reveals the connection we are meant to see between the church and vampirism. Remmick tells Mary he can save her. “I’m sad, is all,” Mary replies, “I don’t need no saving.” Against her free will and choice, Remmick “saves” Mary by turning her into a vampire, a true believer. Like the Virgin Mother, Mary carries a vampiric salvation and eternal life within her, and she plans to share it with everyone at Club Juke.

However, she cannot walk into the juke joint without permission. She must be invited in, ideally without arousing suspicion of her motives. The need for an invitation plays upon an established vampire troupe while also evoking images of door-to-door evangelists asking to enter your home and tell you about the Good News.

After Mary convinces Cornbread to invite her into the juke joint, she seduces and violently “converts” Stack, forcing upon him an eternal life he never sought. When secrecy is no longer possible, Remmick openly tries to manipulate the remaining patrons of Club Juke into willingly becoming vampires because their fate is already sealed in death. Remmick reveals that the sawmill was intentionally sold to the Smokestack twins by the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan to lure blacks into a “killing floor.”

He does not offer protection from the evils of the world. Instead, he attempts to use the fear of suffering and death at the hands of bigoted whites to manipulate his victims into joining his vampiric cult.

Similarly, the Church cannot or will not save them from suffering and death. On the contrary, it calls them into suffering and death with the promise of eternal life in the world to come. Remmick suggests that religion is a baseless hope used to support a malevolent system of manipulation and oppression. Organized religion, particularly Christianity, might be a lie.

Remmick says, “Long ago, the men who stole my father’s land forced these words [the Lord’s prayer] upon us. I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort. Those men lied to themselves and lied to us. They told stories of a God above and a devil below. And lies of a dominion of man over beast and Earth.”

Even if Christianity is true, its disciples abuse its teachings, using the fear of suffering and death and the hope for eternal life to manipulate and oppress others for selfish ends.

Sammie’s father spends his time in the church while his family and community pick cotton as sharecroppers. Remmick desires to appropriate Sammie’s ability to commune with his ancestors through music. Both use their position as arbiters of eternal life for personal gain.

Remmick offers an alternative to religious salvation, but the vampiric hive mind similarly requires the individual to disappear and become one with the collective. He proclaims, “We are earth and beast and God. We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I, to everything.” Sammie may live forever as a born-again Christian or a bloodsucking vampire, but he will lose himself and his ancestral heritage either way.

On the other hand, Blues and Hoodoo spiritualism offer a pseudo-afterlife by establishing and preserving one’s connection to ancestral “spirits from the past and the future.”

They provide fellowship and “bring healing to their communities” without placing demands upon the individual. Most importantly, they actually work.

Christianity is Powerless, but Blues & Hoodoo are Powerful

If the Church is merely another system of oppression, it follows that it has no spiritual power in reality. Sinners makes clear that the traditional Christian arsenal is useless against evil, suffering, and death. The Lord’s Prayer, the ultimate spiritual weapon in countless horror films, has no effect on Remmick. He even joins Sammie in its recitation. Deliverance does not come from the Word of God; it comes from Sammie’s guitar.

Hoodoo works where Christianity fails. A mojo bag protects Smoke from being turned into a vampire by his brother, Stack. Annie, who carries ancestral knowledge, becomes the only one who can help the group fight the vampires.

Even the afterlife is reframed.

After Smoke kills Hogwood, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and the gang of white racists, he begins to die from a wound he received during the firefight.

While Remmick and the Church ignore and even participate in systems of oppression to further their selfish ends, Smoke directly confronts an actual threat to black existence, namely, white supremacy. He defeats the film’s real antagonists. Perhaps as a reward for his pure, genuine sacrifice, Smoke sees Annie, dressed in white, nursing their child in a kind of beatific vision.

Despite scoffing at the power of Hoodoo and his connection to the spirits of his people, Smoke is reunited with the souls of his deceased family. Meanwhile, Mary and Stack are cursed to linger as vampires, denied reunion with their ancestors.

Sammie’s fate is more ambiguous. He leaves behind everyone and everything, connecting to his roots only through the Blues, a tradition that, like any art form, risks losing its purity over time.

Clarifying the Unbalanced Critique of Christianity

For a film that derides moral absolutes, Sinners seems hellbent on presenting Christianity as an absolute moral evil. Christianity is presented as oppressive, manipulative, and powerless. However, two scenes help to clarify the critique. There is an explicit warning that Smoke gives Sammie about playing at juke joints for a living, and an implicit desire for reconciliation between the Church and the Blues in a post-credit scene.

After Sammie finishes his initial performance at Club Juke, Smoke tries to convince Sammie that playing at juke joints isn’t a good, happy life. “Well, you got the talent. That’s for certain,” he says, “but all this ain’t no life for nobody.”

Outside the Church, Smoke is the only character in the film to warn against the Blues and the culture around it. He does not say it is not a life fit for some; he says it is a life fit for no one. He continues, “You like makin’ music? Make church music. You wanna leave, go on down to Mound Bayou. Live with the proper Black folks. Leave all this here improper shit to us.”

When Sammie refuses to heed the warning, Smoke threatens to kill his cousin if he finds him playing at another juke joint. While Smoke is not directly advocating for the Church, he similarly judges and condemns Delta Blues and its culture, suggesting there is some truth and, at least, practical wisdom to its teachings.

Playing Blues at juke joints as a lifestyle lacks true community, the kind of community Smoke recommends Sammie find at Mound Bayou. Blues and its culture offer a semblance of human community and fellowship, not their realities. Smoke acts as a counterbalance to the instability of not only the Blues but also other unstable elements in the film, such as his twin brother.

In addition to their clear difference in personality and mannerisms, the twins are starkly contrasted in color, representing the proper tension between themselves and the world throughout the film. Smoke is dressed in blue, while Stack is dressed in red, a color he shares with the atmosphere of the juke joint.

It is essential to see the constant balancing act at every level of the film, because it is a pattern we expect to find between Christianity and the Blues, but it is never fully realized.

Sinners is not anti-Christian in the blunt, reactionary way some critics suggest. Its critique of Christianity, particularly its relationship to Delta Blues and Black cultural expression, is far too thoughtful to be dismissed as propaganda. Coogler understands the importance of the Church, just as he understands the power of the Blues. He and his team stage their conflict with extraordinary creativity.

In an interview with the Grio, Coogler described Sinners in these terms:

“It has to do with that relationship that Delta Blues has with its kinda like twin sibling, gospel music.”

Blues music was the first American music to be referenced as the devil’s music. That judgment of the practitioners of the music and folks who engage in the culture around it is at the heart of this movie. That conversation and acknowledgement that we all are [sinners] and if you point the finger at somebody calling them a sinner, you also have to point the finger back to yourself.

Even the most religious person would admit that they’re a sinner; everybody is. It’s a term of judgment, but it’s also a term that’s welcoming as well. [In a] Christian context, that’s who Jesus spent the most time with.” But understanding tension is not the same as sustaining it.

If Sinners is truly about the balance between gospel and blues, restraint and release, Smoke and Stack, holy water and blood, then that balance ultimately collapses under the film’s own moral gravity. Christianity is given weight as an institution and as a historical force, but it is never granted real spiritual efficacy or moral defense.

Gospel music never heals, never saves, never meaningfully competes with the power of the Blues. The Church is acknowledged, but lacks vitality in the film. It exists primarily as an undefined structure of control, fear, and negation. That imbalance matters because it lessens the tragedy of Sammie’s choice. His struggle should feel agonizing, an authentic tearing between two living, breathing worlds.

Instead, the scales are tipped so decisively that his departure from the Church feels less like a loss and more like an inevitability. The film tells us he is choosing between faith and freedom, but it shows us freedom on one side and suffocation on the other. What should be a genuine spiritual dilemma becomes, in the final analysis, a predictable exodus.

And yet, Sinners is bold enough to hesitate. In the post-credit scene, it gestures toward something unresolved, something still aching. Sammie’s blues-inflected performance of This Little Light of Mine in his father’s church does not redeem Christianity, but it refuses to erase it.

It acknowledges that for Black Americans, the sacred and the profane have never been cleanly separated. The Church has wounded, but it has also healed. The Blues has liberated, but it has also unmoored. To borrow Sammie’s words, “I’m full of the blues, Holy water too.”

Sinners ultimately insists that salvation cannot be inherited, enforced, or imposed by fangs or by crosses. It must be chosen. However, by denying Christianity any real counterweight to the spiritual power of Blues, the film makes that choice feel less significant than it should. Gospel and Delta Blues are more like estranged relatives, and less like the twin siblings Coogler envisions.

The question is not whether Sinners condemns Christianity, but whether it allows it enough life to truly matter. That unresolved tension between what the film understands and what it ultimately affirms is not a failure of intent but a limitation. One that keeps Sinners from fully embodying the very balance it so brilliantly imagines.

Sinners is now available for purchase on physical media and for streaming on HBO Max. Rated R for strong bloody violence, sexual content and language.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service has long been the black sheep of the Bond series. Bond fans mostly agree that the casting of George Lazenby is the weak link in an otherwise strong entry in the series, one that has received appropriate reappraisals over the year.

Lazenby famously took over for Sean Connery after Connery had (visibly) tired of the role in You Only Live Twice. Despite the opportunity to reprise the role, Lazenby walked away from doing future movies, mistakenly believing that Bond would become an antiquated character in the 1970s.

OHMSS’s grounded action, sublime stunts, and emotional story arc have all aged the film extremely well. Director Peter Hunt does a masterful job of cutting around Lazenby’s stiff, awkward, stilted performance. Lazenby sells the action scenes well, but he looks exactly like someone who has never had to sit and deliver lines on screen before.

But would the movie have really been better with Sean Connery still in the role? I’m not so sure. OHMSS doesn’t just stick out because Lazenby is taking over the role from the original (and some might say definitive) Bond. It sticks out because it’s telling a story about a significantly different Bond.

From the jump, OHMSS doesn’t try to hide the fact that there’s a new actor in the role of Bond. Lazenby breaks the fourth wall with his famous quip, “This never happened to the other fellow,” just before the credits roll.

The film still goes out of its way to tell the audience that this is still the James Bond they know and love — like the blatant homages as Bond goes through his desk, pulling out prominent props from the preceding films. But Lazenby’s Bond feels different from Connery’s in tangible ways, beyond just the actor.

For a start, Lazenby plays Bond as significantly less confident in his own abilities and prowess. Connery’s Bond was the kind of man who was never out of ideas. Sure, he could be a little panicked, like when Goldfinger has him restrained with a laser pointed at his crotch, or when Red Grant has him on his knees at gunpoint on the Orient Express. But even when we come close to seeing his Bond lose his cool, Connery is still in control on some level, never doubting his ability to wriggle out of some new crisis.

Lazenby plays Bond as much more emotional and self-doubting. There’s that fourth wall moment where he expresses some winking frustration at the audience after he’s initially spurned by Tracy. Beyond that, he seems to even doubt his own sexual prowess, conveying doubt in his ability to bed two women in the same night, quipping the second woman would “have to be” an inspiration for him.

But more significantly, Lazenby’s best moment in an otherwise flat performance comes after his escape from Piz Gloria. Desperately trying to evade capture, Bond gets lost in a crowd of skiers and Christmas party revelers. His Bond is downright scared as he’s visibly startled by a bear mascot in his face. When he goes to sit on a bench in the middle of a crowd, trying to blend in, he looks frightened, exhausted — even defeated. He’s only saved by the arrival of Tracy.

Finally, at the end of the film, his Bond looks appropriately devastated cradling Tracy’s dead body. Connery played his Bond like a man never capable of falling in love, a man who treated women as nothing more than disposable. But Lazenby’s Bond was actually capable of emotional investment in another person.

It’s a rare moment of humanity for an otherwise unflappable character. That sort of emotion would be built upon in the performances of later Bonds, especially Daniel Craig.

Casting Connery in OHMSS likely would have improved the biggest weakness in the film in that a lot of the film has to compensate for Lazenby’s stiffness. At the same time, though, it is a little difficult to envision his Bond acting with the same vulnerability. OHMSS might only really work because of the novelty of Lazenby’s performance. At certain moments, it feels like a radically different Bond.

Connery was an undeniably great actor with underrated range, and he does some really great work with Bond, especially in his earlier films. But for OHMSS and that specific Bond, maybe, just maybe, Lazenby was a better fit for the tuxedo.

The poster for John Carpenter’s iconic slasher Halloween has to feature prominently in conversations about the greatest movie taglines in history: “The Night He Came Home!”

Much like other great taglines — “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream,” “You’ll Believe A Man Can Fly,” “An Adventure 65 Million Years in the Making,” — Halloween’s conveys the fundamental appeal of the 1978 classic. The embodiment of evil has come home.

The numerous sequels to Halloween (read more here!) significantly diluted the terror of Carpenter’s original film. Viewed in isolation (without the familial connections or cultic curses), Halloween is a story about a faceless, inexplicable, relentless attack on what was supposed to be a safe haven. It was a story about an attack on the safety and security of suburban America.

Zach Cregger’s Weapons, one of the hits of the 2025 summer season, lent itself to numerous interpretations about what Cregger was trying to say about the state of contemporary America. It was an allegory about school shootings. It was about the impacts of COVID on children. It was about the failures of elder care.

But what Cregger does with Weapons is an update to the themes established by Halloween decades prior. At its core, Weapons is a story about the failure of parents in a bucolic American suburb to keep their children safe. The film plays on decades-old horror tropes about how the suburbs — places where families go for safety, peace, and security — contain their own danger.

Weapons’s grand reveal of its antagonist presents a monster that comes literally from inside the family. Aunt Gladys is introduced as a elderly relative in need of end-of-life care from a central character’s parents (although it’s fair to question whether she’s actually related to the family, or if this was just part of a spell or trick). She quickly takes over the household and bends the parents to her will, proceeding to launch her scheme to draw the children to her.

Cregger cleverly mixes the relatable issue of dealing with aging family members with his emerging brand of villainous elderly matriarchs. But underneath it is the sinister implication that the expectations placed on the parents — to open their suburban home to an elderly relative — completely upends their lives in unpredictable ways.

With how muddled and convoluted the Halloween franchise became, it’s easy to forget just how simple Carpenter’s first film was. Michael Myers isn’t presented as anything otherworldly or supernatural. He is simply the boy who lives down the street and snapped one day with no explanation. He stalks the main characters for no discernible reason, appearing to choose them by chance.

A scene at the beginning of the film drives this point home. When Dr. Loomis goes to a local graveyard, the graveyard keeper briefly recounts to him a story about a father who went insane and murdered his family in a nearby town, remarking to Loomis, “Every town has something like this happen.”

Indeed, Carpenter even positions the town of Haddonfield (named for a town in New Jersey) right outside of Chicago, a city with an extensive history of flights to the suburbs. His Haddonfield is also a mostly empty town, with few extras and empty streets surrounding the characters.

Both Carpenter and Cregger play on long-running themes about paranoia in the suburbs and threats to the nuclear family. For Carpenter, the threat comes from a member of that family. For Cregger, the threat comes from a malevolent force looking to take advantage of expectations of the family.

To be sure, there are a number of other quality suburban horror films that are worth visiting, including many in the haunted house and home invasion genres. But with Halloween serving as the formative slasher movie and Weapons providing the latest entry in the “prestige horror” genre, the pair make for a great double feature. To play on the tagline from Halloween: Weapons is the night everyone leaves home.

For Marvel Studios, this weekend’s news is anything but fantastic.

After a respectable $117M domestic opening, The Fantastic Four: First Steps cratered in its second weekend. No, seriously, it plummeted to earth like a Kryptonian spaceship (different franchise, I know). Week-over-week, the Matt Shankman-directed film dropped by a larger-than-expected 66%. That’s on par with Marvel’s prolonged string of creative and commercial failures, including February’s Captain America: Brave New World (down 68%), 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (down 70%), and 2022’s artistically bankrupt Thor: Love and Thunder (down 67%).

But that’s not the worst of it. On its second Friday of release, August 1st, the film grossed only $ 11 million. That is an 80% drop from its opening day just six days prior.

That’s right: eighty percent. For every five seats occupied in a theater last Friday, only one of those was peopled this weekend.

Not only that, but the Man of Steel is not soaring as high as many—myself included—expected. Even after a six-month, surround sound marketing blitz that criss-crossed the globe, James Gunn’s Superman is just closing in at $540M worldwide. While a domestic success ($305M as of Sunday), international audiences have largely rejected this most all-American of cultural exports.

It’ll be a miracle if it hits $600M when the last of the theatrical screenings wrap up.

The middling success of Superman and the commercial underperformance of Fantastic Four — the summer’s most anticipated movies — led me to an inescapable conclusion, one that I have quietly held since the aftermath of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.

The golden age of superhero movies is over.

Don’t believe me? Well, consider this:

Over six weeks in 2019, three superhero movies — Endgame, Captain Marvel, and Shazam! — were released. They collectively grossed $4.3 billion worldwide. Over the last eight months, four superhero movies — Captain America, Thunderbolts*, Superman, and The Fantastic Four have grossed a total of $1.6 billion.

Not only that, but, for the first time since 2011 (not counting 2020 due to the pandemic), the year’s highest-grossing superhero film will not break $600M worldwide.

Much like Thanos, the end of the era is inevitable.

The prognosis was written on the wall when Tony Stark snapped his fingers. “Okay, so where do we go from here?” Narratively and artistically, Kevin Feige and company have stumbled blindly through the Multiverse Saga. Coupled with an oversaturation of the marketplace, with two to three theatrical productions and several streaming programs being released annually, superheroes at the multiplex had no clear path forward — just a downward spiral.

Pure glutton of superhero movies since 2008 evokes similar moments of genre dominance in Hollywood history. Most famously, the musical and the western. The advent of sound in the late 1920s ushered in an unmatched reign of the Hollywood musical that reached its zenith with 1965’s The Sound of Music and floundered out of fashion with 1969’s Hello, Dolly! in the early days of the rougher, grittier New Hollywood. The western, a staple of silent films, peaked commercially in the mid-50s. While much more versatile than the musical, audiences grew to find the tales of Cowboys and Indians to feel more like fantasy as the world moved further and further away from the closing of the American West.

We find ourselves in a similar moment now. As my colleague Graham Piro has often remarked, most superhero movies are a reflection of our anxieties in a post-9/11 world. Now, nearly a quarter of a century after that tragedy, the world has started to forget what happened that day—and the narrative stakes that superhero movies have provided have lost their effectiveness. Audiences are tired of the same stories, the same “dramatic” stakes, the same weightless CGI action, and the same silly sky beams.

In December 2023, movie fans looked at the final box office in awe. For the first time in twenty-two years, the three highest-grossing films were not sequels. Adjusted for inflation, all three — Barbie, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Oppenheimer — grossed over a billion dollars. There was a hope that maybe the tyranny of spandex was lifting. It took another sixteen months or so, but it appears that time has come. The success of non-superhero blockbusters like A Minecraft Movie, Sinners, F1, and Lilo and Stitch, as well as smaller films like The Naked Gun, 28 Years Later, and Materialists, shows that neither Marvel nor DC rules the cineplex like they once did.

That’s good for the marketplace.

With Marvel and DC slowing down production, more movies can gain a foothold in the theaters, find their audiences, and (hopefully) achieve success.

The more successful movies we have, the more movies get made.

The more variety in those successful movies, the more variety we have in our theaters.

Now, I’m not going to prophetically declare that we’re about to enter some new Golden Age of Moviemaking. Nor will I celebrate the end of this era. For all the creative problems I have with most superhero movies, they have kept Hollywood financially alive for the last half-decade.

Plus, like musicals and westerns before it, superheroes aren’t going away completely. The next two-part Avengers film will undoubtedly roll in the money. As will Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But it’ll be harder to bring new audiences—younger audiences—into seeing these films when Marvel is competing with younger IPs like Minecraft.

That’s why Kevin Fiege and James Gunn would do well to pause, reset, and scale down. Put these heroes into smaller, more grounded genre pieces. 2026’s body horror-influenced Clay Face could go a long way in proving this hypothesis, much like Logan (western), Wonder Woman (romantic comedy), and The Dark Knight (crime thriller) before it.

Superheroes work best when they make us believe a man can fly. In 2025, we’ve become too accustomed to it. The enterprise has lost its joy, its wonder. What we need now is a cultural reset, some time off, so that we can rediscover that wonder again one day.

In the meantime, there are plenty of good movies that merit your attention.

Search the term “Great American Novel” online, and a Google-assisted artificial intelligence will spit out worthy titles: The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, Moby Dick, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Google the Great American Songbook, and you’ll recognize musical staples like “Over the Rainbow” and “The Christmas Song.”

But if you search “great American movie,” an odd assortment of classics, movies with the word “America” in the title, and even one picture that is now almost unavailable on any streaming service is presented.

For some reason, no canonical discussion of the Great American Movie exists.

Yes, the American Film Institute has ranked the 100 best American movies, but that is a separate conversation. To distinguish a picture as the “best” is to deem it the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality. Seeking out the “best” American movie is to find the most impressive and effective combination of the cinematic arts—story, performance, craftsmanship, etc. So, it’s unsurprising that Citizen Kane is often at the top of the list.

But the Great American Movie is different.

Like Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, or even Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the quest for the Great American Movie is defined not by technical or storytelling excellence. Rather, it's the search for the most effective exploration of America’s soul. Stick with me; this is not just an abstract philosophy here. This doesn’t mean the Great American Movie can’t be a masterwork in the cinematic arts and sciences (because it should be). But its primary motivation should be using those tools to analyze our history and purpose dramatically. If there is such a picture, it would reveal in every frame both the beautiful and the aspirational, the flawed and the uncomfortable.

There are three criteria for what makes the Great American Movie.

• Must take place in America;

• Must be produced by a predominately American production company;

• Must embody the American experience.

And as young as the art of filmmaking is, there already seems to be a clear contender for the title of the Great American Movie: The Searchers (1956, dir. Ford).

Don’t know this one? Well, you should.

Based on a 1954 novel of the same name by Alan Le May— itself inspired by the 1836 kidnapping of Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanche warriors— The Searchers tells the story of a middle-aged Civil War veteran and his nephew who spends years looking for his niece, abducted in a home raid by Comanche tribesman. It’s a film by a master craftsman at the height of his power. John Ford, at this point in his career, was already the most honored director in Academy history: The Informer, How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Quiet Man.

Starring John Wayne in an uncharacteristically dark performance, the film was a critical and commercial success upon release. It grossed $3.7 million domestically in its first year; Look magazine praised it as a “Homeric odyssey.” Admired on its release, it is now beloved. Spielberg, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, and Lean all have cited it as influencing their work. The American Film Institute named it the 12th greatest American movie and the greatest American Western. Entertainment Weekly agreed. Across the pond, the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine ranked it the seventh-best film of all time in a 2012 international survey of film critics. Their 2022 poll ranked it fifteenth. In 1989, it became one of the first 25 films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Like hundreds of movies released yearly, The Searchers easily checks two of the three requirements to be the Great American Movie. It takes place in America—Texas and the American southwest, to be exact—and is produced by an American production company (Warner Bros. and Ford’s Argosy Pictures). Easy peasy. But the third criterion, which weeds out almost all other pictures, save for The Searchers, is that they must embody the American experience.

Tons of ink have been spilled examining what exactly that experience is. So it’s fruitless to try to do so here. Suffice it to say that, generally speaking, the “American experience” is the search for political and social community and the societal struggle with racism.

We see the search for community play out across American history. The first European settlers saw the coastline of the North Atlantic as a safe haven from persecution in their homelands. To them, America was a religious community. By the time of the Revolution, thirteen separate colonies bonded together to become a larger political community. With the opening of the West in the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants and pioneers made the dangerous trek toward the Pacific in search of creating new communities where wealth and security belong to the strongest. The dominating sentiment behind all these movements? That the individual meant more than the state; that community was built on common interests and values, not the class status you were born to. This opened up the promise of America to everyone, but it has also been used as a bludgeon.

On the other side of the equation are the existing political and religious systems of the Native people. For three centuries, the Native peoples and tribes saw their communities threatened, eliminated, and, eventually, forcefully integrated into the ones brought over from across the sea. Tragically, those who came to America to escape persecution became the persecutors.

The Searchers offers a nuanced exploration of these themes and ideas, which are so subtle at times that they might as well be subliminal. It is not surprising that the Great American Movie would be a Western. As Richard Brody recently wrote for the The New Yorker:

Westerns are an inherently political genre, for the obvious reason that they depict (or distort or interrogate) American history. But they are also political in that they show the birth of the polis itself—the institutions of modern urban society, with their laborers, clerks, merchants, teachers, sheriffs, entertainers. Where philosophers from Plato to Rousseau sought to imagine the development of civil society from first principles, the makers of Westerns—John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh—showed it being created from the ground up, by hands-on labor.

Ford’s films, regardless of the genre, have an abiding interest in upholding the virtues of the everyman, their communities, and what holds people together. It’s seen in a microcosm in Stagecoach and transplanted to locations such as Wales and Ireland in How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man. To Ford, there is strength in a people’s union—and the West is the most natural canvas to explore it. In The Searchers, Ford and company spend valuable film stock exploring the customs and virtues of the frontier community, itself the greatest force for creating the American mythos.

For instance, the courtship between Martin Pawley and Laurie Jorgensen, while disjointed from the shocking urgency of the main storyline, gives us a glimpse into what it means to find community in desolate places. Here are strong-willed individuals, stepping out from the protection of society to build new communities in the way they see fit. It’s not hard to see where the myth of the West came from, or why it was perpetuated for so long. Yes, it’s a white Christian community, but that is a historical fact, not a comment on Ford’s own social or political views.

This community is shaken to its core with the arrival of John Wayne’s Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards—who lusts for his brother’s wife and abhors his nephew, Martin, for his one-eighth Comanche blood—and the raiding of the Edwards homestead. Murdered are Ethan’s brother and sister-in-law. Murdered are all the children, save for his niece, Debbie. Ethan, too, seeks community after many years away. The murder of his brother and the woman he pined for from afar destroyed that ideal he had hoped to return to. This says nothing, mind you, about the racism that animates most of his actions throughout the movie.

Figures like Ward Bond’s Rev. Capt. Clayton embody the tension felt in the community. While disgusted by the heinous acts Edwards commits, they feel powerless to stop him. Clayton and others abandon Edwards in his efforts, but that alone does not stop the search. When they do try to stop him, necessity and time demand they turn their attention to the Comanche.

And it’s here where the commentary around The Searchers becomes even more intriguing. In the twenty-first century, the depiction of the Comanche tribe and Native peoples has increasingly come under fire. Among them is the criticism that the portrayal of Comanche chief Scar by Henry Brandon, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed actor, is problematic. This is valid. The condemnation of the sequence in which Martin Pawley accidentally “buys” a Native wife is also entirely fair. I myself squirm at the scene, which belittles this poor woman for the sake of what, frankly, feels like an extended joke about the intelligence of her people. But disregarding the movie or its deeper meaning because the mores of the twenty-first century are widely different than those of the previous generations is a disservice to the art.

Those who would ignore The Searchers’ scathing exploration of racism because of these elements are the same who would discredit Huckleberry Finn’s condemnation of antebellum slavery because of its uncomfortable use of the n-word. For a piece of art to be listed among the “Great Americans,” it has to confront the harshest realities of our past. Chief among them is racism. It has to be ugly and unsettling. After all, many parts of our shared history are. Holding up the bad equally against the good, we see in the greatest American art the promise and pitfalls of being a democratic people, one centered around the “proposition” (to quote Mr. Lincoln) that all people are created equal.

The Searchers warns what the absence of that proposition does to the heart of man. Imperfectly told by today’s standards of Native representation, the potency of Ethan Edward’s arc cannot be denied. His five-year odyssey of unequivocal hate is populated with horrific acts too numerous and gruesome to mention, the least of which is his grotesque treatment of Martin Pawley. Here’s one instance:

For most of the picture, it does not seem interested in punishing the character for his vile acts. Ambivalent might be the right adjective. Yes, characters like Pawley and Ward Bond’s Rev. Capt. Clayton attempt to stop him from carrying through his most horrific acts of madness, but no sentence is handed down. But that in no way means Ethan’s madness goes unpunished. Take a moment to watch the final scene of the movie.

Having saved his niece, Ethan receives no absolution. His madness drove everyone away. And, although he accomplished his mission, he finds no forgiveness for what he did along the way. The community he returned to at the beginning of the film—the one Ford spent so much time and film stock giving us a glimpse into—eventually leaves him behind.

Ford’s ending of The Searchers does not vindicate the actions of its racist protagonist. It gives him a punishment worse than death. In the first clip from the movie, Ethan maliciously shoots out the eyes of a Comanche corpse killed during a gun battle. Comanche tradition believes that without eyes, they cannot enter the spirit land and must wander forever between the winds. Ethan’s hatred and bigotry towards the Comanche, his rejection of human equality, blinded him. The film’s ending condemns Ethan to the same fate as the one he gave that Comanche corpse—to be exiled from his community and wander the West aimlessly and alone.

The rejection of equality is the rejection of community. The worst of America destroys the promise of her best. And for her to be the best, she must confront and cast out the worst. As filmmaker Domino Rene Perez wrote for the British Film Institute:

The iconic image of Ethan Edwards framed in the doorway, the expanse of the West stretching behind him, is as lyrical as it is telling. A relic of the past, he cannot cross over the threshold into the civilised world. He has helped to preserve a world he cannot be a part of any longer. Racist and unyielding, Ethan is not likeable and his redemption seems impossible. But Ford holds audiences in his visual and narrative thrall to the very end so that when the door shuts on Ethan, it's hard not to think about those who get left behind when the world moves on.

The Searchers is a deeply ambivalent movie until the last shot. Framing John Wayne in that doorway turns the movie into what Scorsese has called “a ghost picture,” and turns an ambivalent story into a counterculture exploration of the evil lurking in the heart of America. With The Searchers, Ford poetically exposes the noblest and ugliest parts of this curious political project, making a movie that is deeply political, deeply human, and uniquely American.

Its problems in the twenty-first century notwithstanding, Ford and company hold up a mirror to our nation and its history. In The Searchers, we see America for what it is: a beautiful contradiction. Majestic and awe-inspiring, dark and corrupted, ambivalent and moral.

That is why it is the Great American Movie.

Reader, what do you think is the Great American Movie? Let us know in the comments below!

Here at Cinemantics, Amazon’s purchase of creative control of the James Bond franchise inspired us to take a trip through the highs and lows of the 25 film series. It just so happens that May marks the 62nd anniversary of the release of Dr. No, so what better way to commemorate the event than with a retrospective on the Sean Connery years?

Watching the initial run of Sean Connery’s Bond movies is one of the more fun trips through cinematic history. The first film, Dr. No (1962) is Connery doing a toned version of Ian Fleming’s sixth novel in the series — almost like Connery doing Bond as a John le Carre novel. The fifth, You Only Live Twice (1967), cements the official shift of Bond from a toned down spy into the larger than life symbol of the British Empire we know and love today.

So much of Dr. No focuses on Bond’s actions. There’s the great dialogue-less sequence of Bond sweeping his room for bugs upon his arrival in Jamaica. Or the famous poisonous tarantula sequence where we get to see Connery really sweat under pressure. Or Bond lying in wait playing cards while he waits for his target to walk into his trap. The low budget comes through at moments, but Dr. No is a great toned-down film that shows the audience Bond’s competence in spy craft. The iconic moments still sing, but it’s the film’s required restraint that gives it real staying power.

If Dr. No is Bond doing le Carre, From Russia With Love (1963) is Bond doing Hitchcock. The franchise’s second entry is arguably its best. From Russia With Love holds up stunningly well thanks to tight, focused directing from Terence Young and a sharp screenplay from franchise mainstay Richard Maibaum. Take the moment when Red Grant and Bond face off in the train car. In a masterful bit of visual storytelling, Bond manipulates Grant into opening the booby-trapped briefcase as his way out of a seemingly hopeless situation. It’s a brilliant bit of maneuvering by Young and shows Bond outthinking his opponent, which isn’t always the route the franchise takes. And Connery’s desperation is palpable as he engages in a gambit that’s his only chance of survival. It’s the finest bit of acting Connery does as Bond: he does everything with his eyes as he searches for options, tries to hide his genuine fear, and works to stall Grant. It’s the finest single scene in the franchise and set a high bar for all that follows it.

Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), and You Only Live Twice all progressively move the franchise away from the spy craft and towards the bombast the middle portion of the series became known for. Goldfinger expands the scope of the series with a huge third act set-piece that marks the climax for a movie that feels, and looks, bigger in every way. It’s pound-for-pound the most entertaining of the Connery Bond films, a movie that’s more about the images on screen than about any story beats. This focus causes the third act to flat narratively after a strong first two-thirds (outside of the Bond/Oddjob fight). The whole climax hinges on Pussy Galore’s change of heart after sleeping with Bond, which feels, at the very least, weak on a narrative level. But the set pieces still amaze and the film never lags, giving us some of the most recognizable iconography in the whole series.

While Goldfinger is arguably the most iconic film in the franchise, Thunderball is the archetypal Bond movie. (The book was famously the object of a decades-long intellectual property battle between Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory.) The plot, featuring a ransomed nuclear weapon, would later be parodied in the Austin Powers series, and the film clocks in at a (then) whopping 130 minutes. It’s big and it’s bloated — the film’s tagline, “Here comes the biggest Bond of them all!” feels quite appropriate. The underwater action does hold up well, and credit to the film for trying to make good the prior film’s treatment of Pussy Galore by featuring the two most interesting female leads of the Connery era between Domino and Fiona Volpe.

You Only Live Twice marked the end of this initial Connery run, and Connery fittingly begins the trend of Bond actors going out with a whimper. The third act set-piece in the volcano is a fantastic bit of large-scale action filmmaking. But the first two acts are languid and lack any real forward momentum, and Connery seems to just be going through the motions. And the less said about the subplot featuring Bond “becoming” Asian, the better.

The Connery era contains the most variety across its five initial films. Consecutive Bond films wouldn’t feel this different until 20 films later, when Daniel Craig takes over. Of the five, I don’t think there’s any doubt that From Russia With Love holds up the best. I could quibble with putting either Dr. No or Goldfinger second, but I’ll give the edge to Goldfinger because of how instantly recognizable so many moments from that movie are. Coming up a close fourth is the bloated Thunderball, which does a lot of things well, but lacks the momentum of Goldfinger and the tight focuses of Dr. No and From Russia With Love. And a distant fifth goes to You Only Live Twice. But we’d meet Connery’s Bond again…

Initial ranking:

1. From Russia With Love

2. Goldfinger

3. Dr. No

4. Thunderball

5. You Only Live Twice

SPOILER DISCLAIMER: This article contains major spoilers for ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 and the video game The Last of Us Part II. If you haven’t watched the show or played the game and wish to experience the story unspoiled, consider revisiting this piece after doing so. Proceed at your own risk.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We are, first and foremost, a movie Substack. Do not expect television commentary to become commonplace. Caleb and his wife recently welcomed a baby girl to the world, so television is all they have time for. Thanks for understanding!

WRITER’S NOTE TO THE EDITOR: You leave my wife and children out of this! Every path has a price, and The Last of Us had it coming.

EDITOR’S NOTE TO THE WRITER’S NOTE TO THE EDITOR: Bite me.

On Wednesday night, after we put our kids to bed, my wife turned to me and said, “Let’s finally watch The Last of Us Season 2!” I took a deep breath and nodded. I wasn’t excited. How could I be? As someone who played the games, I knew what was in store for us.

I won’t pretend I loved The Last of Us Part II like its predecessor. I have profound memories of playing through The Last of Us into the late-night hours, sustained by pizza rolls and the incredible story that unfolded before me.

As the credits rolled, I sat in complete silence, tears welling up in my bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes. I never knew a video game, of all things, could move me so deeply. I can’t say the same about The Last of Us Part II.

Yes, it is ambitious. Its themes are thought-provoking. Its production quality is unquestioned. It is acted exceptionally well. But, its story is flawed and executed poorly—pun intended! Unfortunately, the same can be said about the show so far.

I could gripe about the story: the overreliance on deus ex machinas, the uncharacteristic character decisions, the pacing that will bore you to death one moment and put you in a neck brace the next, and the contrived, unnatural connections we are told to have with characters throughout the story.

Since 2020, the story has divided fans of the games, and I imagine it will similarly divide fans of the show. Whether or not The Last of Us Part II is a story worth telling is irrelevant because it has already been told.

My complaint is the overcommitment to a non-linear storytelling structure and how the story is presented to us as the audience.

The decision to jump through time and introduce key narrative elements out of order undermines the emotional weight and thematic depth of the story, especially in a TV series format.

Before I launch into my grievances, let me be clear about two things.

I am not opposed to non-linear storytelling. Many movies and TV shows, including Memento, Arrival, Pulp Fiction, and HBO’s season one of Westworld, use non-linear story structures well. There are certainly others.

I also admire writers who take risks. At least The Last of Us writers pushed the boundaries in an era of story “retelling” that either remakes the next classic Disney film left in a dwindling pile of source material or resurrects some beloved movie from the '80s so it can be peddled to the next generation of moviegoers.

That said, being bold doesn’t make a good story. When non-linear storytelling misses the mark, it can be confusing, annoying, and disastrous.

We are linear, storytelling creatures, living our lives step by step, with one event following another. The linear story of our lives, the story we tell ourselves, is how we process reality, make sense of our experiences, and understand those around us.

Like our ability to recognize humanlike VFX that fail to cross the “uncanny valley,” we have an intuitive sense for storytelling. By design, non-linear storytelling disrupts the natural, linear flow we deeply understand and experience.

When done well, non-linear narratives can create mystery, build tension, further develop characters, and give us insight into multiple perspectives of the same story.

Unnecessary or poorly executed non-linear narratives can confuse the audience and dilute the emotional impact of themes and characters.

The creative decision to force The Last of Us Part II into a non-linear structure ultimately does a disservice to the themes and characters, especially when adapted for television.

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As the opening credits for Season 2 began, I suspected the show would follow the game's non-linear structure, but I was curious how it would be adapted to the new format.

Would it stick to the structure of the source material? Abandon it entirely? Or find an alternative narrative order to better fit a TV series? The initial scenes of the new season confirmed my suspicion, but left me confused.

Season 2 opens by reminding us of Joel and Ellie’s conversation at the end of Season 1. Joel lies by swearing that the Fireflies couldn’t produce a vaccine from Ellie’s immunity to the cordyceps. Ellie reluctantly accepts Joel's word, and they go to Jackson together.

In the next scene, we are introduced to Abby. Not only are we introduced to her from the outset, but we are also given the driving force of her character, which is killing Joel.

Wait, seriously? Sure, we don’t know precisely why Abby wants to see Joel suffer and die, but it's obvious she is a Firefly seeking revenge for Joel’s murderous rampage at the end of Season 1.

The decision to establish Abby’s character and motivations immediately undermines one of the significant benefits of adopting non-linear storytelling: mystery.

In the video game, we are introduced to Abby’s character as she and the group reach the outskirts of Jackson. We have no context for her or the group's reasons for coming to Jackson, and we are left to wonder about their motivations even after Unhappy Gilmore does a number on Joel’s head, leaving him dead and mangled in a pool of his blood. Oh, yeah, Joel dies, by the way.

While the game’s non-linear approach still undermines the potential weight of Joel’s death, in my opinion, it was certainly shocking.

The show, however, undercuts the emotional force and shock value of its non-linear structure by revealing Abby’s motivations upfront.

When Abby and Joel miraculously run into each other in the show, we know conflict and, at the least, an attempt on Joel’s life is around the corner.

Why commit to a non-linear structure only to abandon its usefulness at a crucial moment like Joel’s death?

The scene introducing Abby also signals to the audience that we are meant to feel sympathy for her, which feels contrived and unnatural.

We have no connection to Abby yet and won’t for who knows how many episodes, but we are implicitly told that we are meant to connect with her, now or in the future.

Given the non-linear structure, it is no surprise that the show will attempt to form these connections through various time jumps to fill in the gaps.

Why is Joel and Ellie’s relationship strained? Flashbacks! Who did Joel kill that set Abby on her path of revenge? Time jumps! What have Joel and Ellie been doing for four or five years since returning to Jackson? Queue the “A Few Years Earlier” title cards!

Don’t get me wrong. I look forward to these moments, especially those between Joel and Ellie. They were the best parts of the game, and I am sure they will be the best parts of the show. The issue is the lack of linear context and overall story cohesion.

Season 1 of The Last of Us proved that a non-linear structure can be very effective. In Episode 3, Long, Long Time, we follow Bill and Frank's relationship from the beginning of the outbreak to Joel and Ellie’s arrival at their homestead, where our main narrative occurs.

The non-linear structure benefits from its brevity and focus on Bill and Frank. It’s a heartbreaking episode and a masterclass in storytelling.

Now, imagine that the episode starts with Bill and Frank at the end of their lives. They’re old and sick. Rather than leave one or the other to survive the terrible world alone, they choose to leave this mortal coil together of their own accord.

They are about to drink their poisoned wine when… flashback! Only then do we see their relationship and the events that precede their ultimate demise together.

Can you imagine how different that episode would be? The culminating moment of Bill’s and Frank’s relationship would lose its power and meaning.

The presence, not the absence, of all the context and events that precede Bill’s and Frank’s deaths allows us to understand and react to their experiences, making the pivotal moments of their story all the more meaningful.

By comparison, Joel’s death is deprived of essential context and preceding events, severely limiting its potential power and meaning.

The non-linear structure of The Last of Us Part II and Season 2 aims to offer multiple perspectives on the story, shifting between Ellie and Abby to show how their lives and choices aren’t so different. I get it.

Aren’t protagonists and antagonists different sides of the same coin? Don’t we love because we hate, and hate because we love? Aren’t we all just parallel lines endlessly drifting through the void, only to be caught in the eternal return of the same?

Who's to say! I’m still waiting for my flashback to find out, damn it.

Am I saying I could have done it better? I guess so.

Television, by its nature, is very different from video games and films. With limited time per episode and seasons broken up over several weeks and months, The Last of Us Season 2's non-linear structure feels jarring, underwhelming, and a bit exhausting.

The viewer must attempt to piece together a story of disconnected beats, narratives, and perspectives to walk away with something whole that they can feel emotionally and consider intellectually.

At least, I hope so. If the goal of the story is emotional apathy, moral ambiguity, and general confusion, it succeeds.

To make matters worse, we must wait for Season 3 before anything from Part II is remotely resolved. Season 1 of The Last of Us established a tight, emotional narrative that was linear and complete. If Part II or Season 2 never existed, you would never be the wiser.

By contrast, Season 2's non-linear structure demands that viewers hold onto these unresolved and disparate threads of a story for months, if not years, until the new season arrives.

We are four episodes into Season 2, and Abby has hardly been mentioned or on screen since she sent Joel’s head tumbling down the big, green fairway in the sky.

How are we as the audience supposed to engage with her character if there is nothing to engage with almost halfway through Season 2? Is she a psychopathic villain we are meant to hate? A misunderstood victim we grow to understand?

I assume we will find out, but in the meantime, we’ve been introduced to a host of other new characters, factions, and narratives. It is difficult to know where our minds and hearts are supposed to focus.

Extending the story across multiple seasons will only make it harder for viewers to stay connected to the characters and their motivations, diluting the impact of the show’s most pivotal moments.

I am happy to be proven wrong as the show unfolds, but the true meaning of Joel’s death will have to be explained in a non-linear structure or left entirely unexplained. Both present problems for our ability to truly consider and feel the weight of the themes and characters.

We will have to wade through Ellie’s and Abby’s various perspectives and past experiences throughout countless episodes and, at least, another season before we can comprehend Joel’s death. By then, I worry that any sense of Ellie, Abby, or Joel as characters in that pivotal moment will be lost upon us.

A linear structure would have allowed the show to continue building the relationship between Joel and Ellie, exploring the four or five years between the events of Season 1 and Joel’s death.

This narrative path could have deepened the audience’s emotional investment in their bond, showing how it was tested and strained over time but never broken, ultimately making Joel’s death even more devastating.

Don’t get me started on the decision to replace Tommy with Dina as the second witness to Joel’s horrifying death! That was another story element the video game got right over the show.

I understand the show needed Tommy, a familiar character, at Jackson for the zombie invasion set piece, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Still, it is another example of sacrificing story for spectacle.

Anyway… we could witness Joel and Ellie’s relationship grow and change in a linear structure. Season 2 could end with Abby’s appearance and her murder of Joel.

It would preserve the emotional weight of that moment, allowing the audience to feel the shock and horror of his death as if we were Ellie. That is what we are meant to feel, the depth of Ellie’s remorse and sorrow.

Instead, the non-linear structure makes us Ellie with amnesia. We are still expected to feel her pain and anger in that terrible moment, but without any of the important memories that make Joel’s death so meaningful.

That’s why Joel has to undergo a brutal and grotesque death. It’s the only way we, as the audience, can feel much of anything without the preceding events that make it whole for the characters it defines, namely Ellie.

His body has to be destroyed because there is no soul, no deeper connection, no matured relationship immediately present for us to mourn then and there beyond what Season 1 established.

I felt the devastation of Joel’s death in Episode 2, but only because I knew the whole story. I have all the pieces to make that moment really matter.

Much like my wife’s reaction to Joel’s death, anyone unfamiliar with Part II’s story is likely more confused and annoyed than sad and angry.

In Season 3, the story could shift focus to Ellie’s quest for revenge, juxtaposed with Abby’s motivations and the larger cycle of violence and revenge they both experience and perpetuate.

Offering a serious, convincing attempt at restructuring The Last of Us isn’t why I am writing. Any linear structure would better serve the themes and characters, whatever that specific structure might look like.

I am just disappointed to see the story and characters unnecessarily subordinated to style and novelty, which aren’t the reasons we fell in love with The Last of Us in the first place.

Of course, who am I to offer criticism, let alone story revisions? After watching Episode 2, my wife responded, “Well, I may not be worthy to cast the first stone, but I will certainly get in line.”

I am also getting in line, along with many other fans, I imagine. But, I’ll trade in my stone for a pitching wedge.

Using today’s vernacular to describe something from the past: Movies just hit different when I was a kid.

I came of film-watching age in the mid-1970s in the heyday of the Walt Disney live-action films when we cut our cinematic teeth on high-quality gems like Escape to Witch Mountain or The Apple Dumpling Gang. Trips to the movies were reserved for events like a weekend at Grandma’s or a sleepover with your cousin, and if adult parties are being honest, they were used for babysitting. Drop the kids off at the mall theater, leave them with some popcorn money, and engage in retail therapy while the kiddies settle back for the adventures of Pete and his dragon.

I really didn’t see that many movies as a kid. Like I said, it was different. Parents didn’t take their families to the movies to watch a film together. (Not the ones in my house, anyway.) I’d venture to say we didn’t see more than one a year. At that time, we had five TV stations, and VCRs and cable movie channels weren’t even in our dreams yet. You had one shot to see a movie, and that was it. Maybe it would show up on TV on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon years later, but aside from watching The Wizard of Oz every Thanksgiving, movies were a one-and-done affair. And due to the quality of the kids’ movies at that time, they were largely forgettable anyway.

Back then, there were kids’ movies and adult movies, and ne’er the twain shall meet. My dad did not see The Cat from Outer Space, and I did not see The Sting. (The rare exception to this was when we had a family outing to a drive-in to see Jaws the same summer we went to the beach for the first time, which was the worst parenting idea of all time.) In my small suburban town, there was an old movie theater in what used to be considered the downtown and it was reincarnated as a “dollar show” where they showed second-run movies. On one glorious night, my dad dragged me along with him to see American Graffiti. I won’t pretend that I understood the film or its plot, but it was an honest-to-God grownup movie that seemed very similar to Happy Days, a TV show that was consuming American life at that point . . . and seeing a Happy Days-esque film on a big screen with a giant tub of popcorn with my dad was a moment not soon forgotten.

June of 1977 rolled around and it set itself up to be my greatest summer yet. For starters, I hit double digits. While this afforded me exactly zero privilege in the world, being ten felt a lot older than being nine. I was ready for big things and big things were indeed coming. That summer began a year of what I still think of as My Own Personal Golden Age of Cinema and thus began my lifetime love affair with the movies.

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That summer, my uncle took my cousin, my sister, and me to see the big new movie that everyone was talking about: Star Wars. And there was no messing around with the mall theater. We were going to the Showcase by-God Cinemas on Springdale Pike. There’s no way to adequately convey the excitement about this because it seems trivial now in an era of surround sound and stadium-tiered recliner seats. The Showcase Cinemas had four screens. FOUR! And it was a stand-alone building in a part of town I had never been to. This was living large. We loaded up in the green GTO and headed to the theater and were met with complete devastation: it was sold out. This was also prior to online ticket sales. You see, in 1977, one just had to show up at the box office and hope for the best. It was no can do for Star Wars that night. We were crushed. But Uncle Eddie had taken charge of three children that night – two of whom had ADHD – and he was not about to entertain us himself. So he made us a promise to see Star Wars the next weekend and we bought tickets to another show. (Incidentally, that’s what we called them then. Not movies. Not films. Shows.)

The consolation prize? Smokey and the Bandit. It was a fair trade. That movie came out amid the CB radio and trucker craze in the mid-70s and there was nobody hotter than Burt Reynolds at that time. We hooted and hollered and clapped when the 1977 Trans Am jumped the bridge, and we laughed when Buford T. Justice emerged from the truck stop bathroom with toilet paper stuck to his sunglasses. It was a big time and I still have a nostalgic fondness for that film. If I’m channel-surfing and it’s on, I’ve gotta watch.

But I digress.

Uncle Eddie was a man of his word and we piled back in the GTO the following weekend for round two of our quest to see Star Wars and this time we were successful. There we sat in the uncomfortable seats with the popcorn and the Jujyfruits and the big pop and when the lights went down, we could hardly contain ourselves. What happened for the next two hours completely blew our minds and changed our lives. The second that opening scroll started rolling on the screen seemingly from over our heads, we literally turned around to see where it was coming from. We had NEVER seen anything like that. And that was just the beginning. Everything we saw and heard was new. The special effects. The John Williams score. The droids. The land cruiser. The light sabers. WHAT IS HAPPENING??? The ADHD children didn’t blink for the entirety. The closing credits rolled and the audience erupted into applause. It was a new day.

There are many film moments that take my breath away every time, but none more so than the moment Darth Vader walks through the mist on that ship. My God -- my heart still races when I watch that scene. There was a viral clip a couple years ago of a little girl dressed as Rey watching a parade of Star Wars characters at Disney World. As they passed, they came right to her and she waved at them all. Darth Vader walked right up and stood inches from her and she didn’t even flinch. I nearly passed out. We went to hear the Columbus Symphony play the live score along with a screening of The Empire Strikes Back a couple years ago and someone dressed as Darth Vader came walking through the crowd in the lobby and I broke out in a cold sweat.

I’m sorry for the Star Wars fans in the generations behind me.

There are just some things about those films you can never understand. You’ve grown up with special effects. You really can’t grasp that NOTHING had ever looked or sounded like that before. The anticipation of waiting for The Empire Strikes Back was agonizing. I can’t recall another sequel I’ve longed for in quite that way. And, boy – it did not disappoint. I’ve watched a million more films since then and there has never been a bigger plot twist than learning Darth Vader is Luke’s father. I can’t even put it into words. This was way before the internet and spoiler alerts. A couple hundred of us walked into that theater not knowing our minds were about to be blown and we collectively gasped. (If you’re a sci-fi nerd, watch the early 2000’s run of Battlestar Galactica and report back to me when you get to the second biggest plot twist of all time. Only this time, you can hit pause and sit with your disbelief. With Empire, we just had to gasp and then move on with life.)

There was no going back after that. I was Darth Vader for Halloween. My cousin had Star Wars sheets and curtains. When Return of the Jedi was released on Wednesday, May 25 the year of our Lord 1983 and the last day of my sophomore year of high school, my friends and I got shut out of the late-night show and waited in line for over two hours to see the one at midnight. We ordered pizza and sat outside the Showcase Cinema – this time in Louisville, Kentucky – and ate on the sidewalk next to the velvet ropes.

Star Wars was – and is – serious business for me.

My cousin, uncle, sister, and I still talk about the initial viewing like it’s a historic event. “Remember when we went to see Star Wars and it was sold out and we had to see Smokey and the Bandit instead and we had to wait a week?” Good times. It was the first time a movie felt like an event. It was the first time a movie transported me. It’s the first movie that permeated American pop culture. I like to brag that I’ve seen every single Star Wars movie first-run in the cinema like it’s a badge of honor and not something that ages me. I have literally grown up in that world.

My love for that film runs deep because it ignited my love for ALL film.

Whats your first memory of discovering ‘Star Wars?’ Was it the original 1977 film, or perhaps an installment in the prequel or sequel trilogies? Let us know in the comments below — and May the Fourth Be With You!

1998 saw the world of animation come to a profound crossroads. For the previous sixty years, Walt Disney Pictures — which had effectively heralded the medium to popular audiences with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — had held a creative monopoly on the art form. The films in the studio’s vault speak to just how singular Disney was in animation, from Fantasia and Peter Pan to Bambi and Dumbo; from Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty to Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. For over half a century, no one, not one single studio or animation house, came close to rivaling the House of Mouse.

Then came Pixar. With the release of 1995’s Toy Story, the little studio that could leapt beyond the confines of traditional cel animation and released the first computer-generated animated film. Pixar expanded what it meant to be an animated film.

Hollywood scrambled to integrate Pixar’s computers into their existing projects. CGI itself had been available and used throughout the 90s, but now animation houses were left with the realization that the stories that could be told had multiplied tenfold. Plus, the audiences responded with their wallets in historic ways to Toy Story. Some studios held firm to cel animation, valuing the storied tradition of the last half century, while others threw the baby out with the bathwater in pursuit of the newest “fad.” By 1998, the question became: what path would Hollywood take? Traditional or computer?

All of this is prologue to 1998’s The Prince of Egypt. Produced and conceived by Steven Spielberg for his newly formed production company DreamWorks, this animated take on the Book of Exodus exists at the crossroads in the history of animation; at the moment the baton was passed. Primarily hand-drawn while using computer animation to enhance the grandeur of the more divine aspects of the story, Prince of Egypt’s artistry makes the film feel timeless.

I watched the film (no pun intended) religiously as a child. My mother can attest that the tale of Moses always resonated with me, even as a kid. In fact, I went as Moses for Halloween for several years in a row, armed with replica Ten Commandments that I would throw down from the top of the stairs! Growing up, the Broadway-caliber songs and Sunday School lessons kept me watching. As time has passed, I have returned to the movie yearly around the Easter and Passover seasons like it is some spiritual well in the desert. Every time I have drawn for water, I find myself refreshed, inspired, and increasingly moved.

The most sure-fire sign of a good movie is that you enjoy it every time you watch; the sign of a great one is that it gets better with age. Many can claim to be good, but few can truly be called great. And, frankly, no other animated movie deserves that title more than The Prince of Egypt.

There are a myriad of factors that I can rattle off the top of my head for why I believe this film is above and beyond any movie of its kind: the artistry, the show-stopping songs by Wicked’s Stephen Schwartz and its companion score composed by a never-better Hans Zimmer, and the cast. Oh, the cast! Just read off these names and try not to be impressed: the late Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, Steven Martin, and Martin Short. It’s hard not to audibly say, “Wow.”

But what interests me most is not any of those elements, although they are part and parcel of the film’s enduring appeal. Rather, it’s what the movie says. The score, visuals, and cast are how the movie says it; but what the movie says is unlike anything any other mainstream Hollywood movie has attempted to say. The audience gets its first glimpse into what that is with its first image: a simple title card that appears over the first notes of Zimmer’s lush and dramatic score.

Prince of Egypt is bookended with disclaimers of faith. Exceedingly rare for Hollywood. Before the movie even begins, the title card does three things: It acknowledges the religious traditions influenced by this film (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), recognizes the story’s integrity to those traditions, and promises to honor them in good faith while ensuring the movie itself is as entertaining as possible for wider audiences. Such a mission statement is rare in movies, even more so regarding movies that explore religion.

On the other end of the picture, after the closing credits, it simply ends with three verses of scripture from the three Abrahamic texts:

Now, being palms up, as a practicing Christian, this resonates with me more than it does audience members who do not believe in the Abrahamic God or any deity for that matter. I also fully recognize that this affects my perception of the movie. But the power of the movie is that it goes beyond my faith or the faith of over half the world’s population. There is a reading of this film that is noticeably secular but deeply human. The film’s songwriter Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Godspell, Pippin) has been quoted as saying that early in its conception, Spielberg said the movie was to be “a brother story.” To quote Schwartz:

It was Steven who said that he wanted it told as the story of [Rameses and Moses] who grow up together, who love each other, two young men of privilege, and then their destinies take them in the direction where they become antagonists; [a] ‘can their love overcome that?’ kind of thing.

Prince of Egypt explores the nature of faith through the story of two brothers. In doing so, the film humanizes the divine, makes the metaphysical physical, and transforms a Sunday School story into relatable familial drama — but it does so without belittling or mocking the faith! If one has religion, it’s a reminder of the power of faith in oppressive, tumultuous times. If one has no faith tradition, it’s a character study of two men whose paths put them in conflict with each other. It’s empathetic and sincere in exploring both ideas, distinguishing itself as an animated movie with truly universal appeal.

Such thematic bravery is rare in animated fare, especially in Western filmmaking. Hayao Miyazaki’s films such as Spirted Away and My Neighbor Totoro, as well as other Japanese animated fares like Grave of the Fireflies, stand out in contrast to most American productions because they are not afraid to be adult in the subject matter. Prince of Egypt follows in that tradition.

Inherent in the book of Exodus is also the theme of freedom. Enslaved by the Egyptians for generations, Moses’s quest to liberate the Jewish people from tyranny and lead them to the Promised Land has been a defining text for Jews through the ages as well as other oppressed groups, including the enslaved in the Antebellum South. It teaches believers that through faith we find freedom; that hope is often the greatest tool we have against oppression. Just read the lyrics for the film’s Oscar-winning mega-hit, “When You Believe.”

It should be no surprise that Spielberg wanted to tell this story as one of the first projects for DreamWorks. The mature themes of this animated film are made more evident if Prince of Egypt is viewed in the tradition of his own 1993 classic Schindler’s List and the acclaimed stage musical Fiddler on the Roof. In these texts, we see the theme of Jewish (and human) resilience. In a heated moment between Moses and his blood brother Aaron, Moses spells this out plainly:

Pharaoh has the power. He can take away your food, your home, your freedom. He can take away your sons and daughters. With one word, Pharaoh can take away your very lives. But there is one thing he cannot take away from you: your faith. Believe, for we will see God's wonders.

What other movies dare explore these ancient themes so successfully without being alienating? What other films dare to do so in what has historically been accused of being simply a children’s medium of storytelling? There’s no denying that it’s odd to say an animated kids movie about the book of Exodus (possibly the second most retold story in scripture) is some profound text of faith and brotherhood, but it is. It really is.

This ancient, human tale and its universal themes of faith, brotherhood, and resilience are heightened by the craftsmanship. All good storytellers serve the narrative at hand. What makes the visual and musical language of the film so evocative, and so unique in the pantheon of animation is that it is striving to be worthy of something bigger than all of us. Yes, this is my faith talking, but knowing the people behind this production I do not think this is a stretch to make these claims. In aspiring towards the greatest good and truth made known to us mere mortals, we can go further than we would without it in our sight.

The Prince of Egypt aspires for the divine, appeals to the masses, and lands firmly on its feet leaps and bounds beyond all of its predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. With Prince of Egypt, Hollywood has done His wonders.

P.S. — If you want a great ambiance video to play while grinding away at your 9 to 5, I highly recommend this one:

Reader, what do you think? Do you think there’s a case for ‘The Prince of Egypt’ being the best animated movie of all time? If not, what do you think is? Let us know in the comments below!

HBO’s Deadwood and its coda Deadwood: The Movie (aptly named) is a series about transformation. Set in the 1870s during the lawless days before the Dakota Territory’s annexation, it charts the evolution of a muddy, blood-soaked mining camp into an American town governed by law, commerce, and the nobler ambitions of the human spirit. This transformation, the brutal taming of the frontier, is encapsulated in the show’s opening credit sequence. It distills Deadwood’s core themes into a single visual narrative through a subtle, masterful juxtaposition of images.

The most potent of these images is the unbridled, powerful, and wild stallion charging through the wilderness into the heart of the developing town of Deadwood. It is an image rich with symbolism: the untamed West within and without is a force of nature soon to be subdued, distorted, and ultimately erased by the advancing tide of civilization.

The sequence begins in mud and fire, products of a society being born. There is a hard cut to striking shots of the natural world—lush forests, sprawling landscapes, and a galloping stallion. The horse embodies the wild, unregulated freedom that defined the American frontier before law arrived in places like Deadwood.

It is no accident that the stallion stands alone; the West was an era of rugged individualism, where survival often depended on cunning, strength, and force. The untamed beauty of the stallion parallels the untouched wilderness, evoking a land still beyond the grasp of human control. However, the West cannot remain untamed forever because most human beings cannot abide and thrive in such a state.

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The sequence soon alternates between the stallion’s unrestrained sprint and the rapidly expanding camp of Deadwood. We see gold being sifted, men swinging pickaxes, whiskey being poured, and rough-hewn wooden structures forming the framework of a town. The swift contrast of the wild horse with these images of human endeavor suggests an impending collision where nature and lawlessness will inevitably yield to governance, commerce, and the institutions of civilization.

Then comes the defining moment. The stallion, having charged through the wilderness, arrives in Deadwood’s muddy thoroughfare. Its reflection shimmers in a puddle—a distorted, fleeting image of its identity. The wild stallion, still physically present, is now merely a reflection, a shadow of itself. The mud, a blend of nature and human presence, absorbs the reflection of the stallion until it vanishes. The stallion's disappearance signals the impending end of the Western frontier as the forces of order, industry, and law take hold. What was once wild, natural, and free is now subdued and confined within the structures of human society.

This symbolic transition lies at the heart of Deadwood’s thematic concerns. The series does not romanticize civilization but presents its arrival as often ugly, violent, and morally ambiguous. Law and order in Deadwood are rarely imposed through idealistic principles and democratic processes but rather through ruthless pragmatism, bloodshed, and compromise.

As the stallion disappears into the mud, the noble myth of Western expansion dissolves into a murkier reality where men like Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock must advance the private and public good of Deadwood. These figures do not bring order out of nothing; they bend the chaotic nature of man within and the world without to their will, often through accident and force rather than reflection and choice. The frontier is not so much tamed as repurposed, its baser instincts and passions redirected into the relentless march of American expansion and man’s inherent desire to dominate.

By the time the credits fade to black, the transformation is complete. The stallion is gone, leaving behind the fledgling town where order is often violently forged from lawlessness. The West, once wild, is evolving into something new. Whether this transformation is a triumph, a tragedy, or both is a question Deadwood leaves us to decide. However, the credits provide an unavoidable dilemma: the exceptional ambitions and talents needed for founding society must often vanish to keep it.

‘Deadwood’ and ‘Deadwood: The Movie’ are written, created, and produced by David Milch and stars Ian McShane and Timothy Olyphant. They are rated TV-MA and streaming on Max.

The gold derby has entered the final lap—and I couldn’t be happier.

Due to the dual Screen Actors and Writers Guild of America strikes in the summer and fall of 2023, production on many 2024 projects halted; many even saw their release dates delayed to this year. The result has been a frankly less-than-stellar year for the movies and, for this article, a less-than-stellar awards season.

Yes, the French-produced musical crime drama about a transgender Mexican drug cartel leader, Emila Pèrez, leads the nominations with thirteen (a near record), but that does not guarantee it will win. Critically respected, Pèrez’s public reception feels the equivalent of the Trinity test site after the first atomic bomb was dropped. It’s a movie the world loves to hate for good reasons.

Even if the movie was interesting, had catchy songs, was staged well, or was, to be blunt, any good, it would still be a lightning rod of controversy. Firstly, Mexicans derided the movie for insulting their culture; secondly, the transgender community condemned the handling of the titular character as they believed in reinforced negative stereotypes of transgender people; thirdly, the director has had several of his quotes taken out of context which suggested Spanish is the language of the “poor.”

Then there are the resurfaced tweets by the film’s leading actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, which I’ll let you research on your own time.

Outside of Emila Pèrez’s unfathomable path to dominating awards season, the narrative from September through February was that there was no clear front-runner in many categories. Critics and aggregators could not agree on who would take home Best Picture: Would it be Pèrez or the flashy, technicolor musical Wicked? Would it be the cold and impressive The Brutalist that swept the Golden Globes or the twisted, modern-day Cinderella story Anora that won the Palm d’Or at Cannes? Or would it be the papal thriller Conclave, which won the BAFTA for picture and the ensemble award at the Screen Actors Guild? There were points in the last four months where each was the leading contender.

Then there were the other categories! Bradey Corbet (The Brutalist) and John M. Chu (Wicked) earned the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for direction. At the same time, Sean Baker (Anora) emerged from the back of the pack to pick up the Directors Guild of America medallion. The lead actor category is a toss-up between the reserved Adrian Brody, who has won several precursors, and Timothee Chalamet, who played Bob Dylan in the 8-time nominated A Complete Unknown and has its devoted fans thanks to his unorthodox campaigning methods.

And while all of these movies have their fans, I, for one, am just disappointed. Moviegoers had an abundance of riches in 2023. The top-three box office earners were all non-sequels for the first time in twenty years; we saw increased output from female directors, leading to one of the highest-grossing films of all time; we reveled in an eclectic and compelling mix of auteur hits and indie favorites. It felt like a perfect encapsulation of what movies can provided the world. And this year kinda shows us the opposite.

Ideally, the Academy Awards are a chance to celebrate the movies we love and those that move us. But in a year where there was little to love and so little that moved us, what can there be to celebrate?

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Best Picture

Anora — PREDICTED WINNER
The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Pérez
I’m Still Here
Nickel Boys
The Substance
Wicked

Best Director

Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez

Sean Baker, Anora — PREDICTED WINNER

Brady Corbet, The Brutalist

Coralie Fargeat, The Substance

James Mangold, A Complete Unknown

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown — PREDICTED WINNER
Colman Domingo, Sing Sing
Ralph Fiennes, Conclave
Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Cynthia Erivo, Wicked
Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia Pérez
Mikey Madison, Anora
Demi Moore, The Substance — PREDICTED WINNER
Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Yura Borisov, Anora
Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain — PREDICTED WINNER
Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown
Guy Pearce, The Brutalist
Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown
Ariana Grande, Wicked
Felicity Jones, The Brutalist
Isabella Rossellini, Conclave
Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez — PREDICTED WINNER

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

A Complete Unknown (Screenplay by James Mangold and Jay Cocks)
Conclave (Screenplay by Peter Straughan) — PREDICTED WINNER
Emilia Pérez (Screenplay by Jacques Audiard; In collaboration with Thomas Bidegain, Léa Mysius and Nicolas Livecchi)
Nickel Boys (Screenplay by RaMell Ross & Joslyn Barnes)
Sing Sing (Screenplay by Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar; Story by Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar, Clarence Maclin, John “Divine G” Whitfield)

Writing (Original Screenplay)

Anora (Written by Sean Baker) — PREDICTED WINNER
The Brutalist (Written by Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold)
A Real Pain (Written by Jesse Eisenberg)
September 5 (Written by Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum; Co-Written by Alex David)
The Substance (Written by Coralie Fargeat)

Who do you think will win this year at the 97th Oscars? Let us know in the comments below!

The closing credits of 2021’s No Time to Die promised that, as always, “James Bond will return.” But just when that “will return” will be has been an open question.

Thursday’s news that the Broccoli family is stepping down as the creative honchos behind the Bond series came as a shock. Until that announcement, the James Bond films were a unicorn in Hollywood. One producing family effectively oversaw the entirety of the 25-film, 60-year-old franchise.

According to Variety, Amazon eventually wore Barbara Broccoli, the daughter of legendary producer Albert R. Broccoli and the woman with nearly sole creative control of the Bond films with the retirement of co-producer Michael G. Wilson, to cede creative control of the franchise to the corporation. (Although the $1 billion-plus payday probably didn’t hurt.)

The positives of the move: The chances of getting a new Bond film in the next two to three years increase exponentially. The franchise had been locked in a stalemate since No Time to Die, as Broccoli and Amazon (which bought MGM, the studio that owned the Bond film rights) were in a standoff over the creative future of the tuxedo’d spy.

The Bond franchise is no stranger to behind the scenes issues derailing a regular release schedule: Look no further than the six year gap between License to Kill and Goldeneye caused by a takeover of studio United Artists and creative problems, or the trouble Skyfall had getting to cinemas after MGM went bankrupt around 2010.

But waiting indefinitely in a rapidly shifting media market could have been a death knell for Bond as a bankable character. Is some Bond better than none? Is more (or Moore) better?

The negatives emerge from those questions. Amazon reportedly was not been shy about referring to the franchise as “content,” evidently eyeing an interconnected universe modeled after the Marvel Cinematic Universe or after whatever Disney is attempting with Star Wars. The bare bones are there—it doesn’t take much imagination to envision spinoffs featuring a young Q or Moneypenny in the field.

But what made the Broccoli control of Bond so remarkable was two things: consistency, and restraint.

The Bond franchise worked for so long because it made a deal with its audience, and consistently delivered. The films followed a formula: A menacing villain, beautiful leading women, gadgets, cars, action scenes (or “bumps” as Cubby Broccoli called them), exotic locations, general male wish fulfillment. With some exceptions, the films were never quite runaway hits. But they consistently delivered solid returns on their investments, and weathered the rise and fall of countless other franchises.

The Broccolis showed an impressive amount of restraint. For the series’ creative missteps, they always had an intuitive sense of when to course correct. After all, the grounded, more worldly Daniel Craig films emerged after the bombastic and ridiculous Die Another Day—a film widely derided by fans of the series, but a film that was also the highest grossing Bond film at that point in the series! Lesser producers could have just doubled down on the formula. But the Broccolis could tell that the series needed a fresh direction.

The family never gave into the temptation to turn Bond into the basis for a shared universe. When other franchises were racing to copy Marvel, the Broccolis stuck to their tradition of keeping Bond a strictly one-at-a-time cinematic experience. There’s likely gold to be struck in spinoff films and television shows. But the Broccolis understood that Bond’s primary appeal is on the big screen, and doing more would dilute the brand.

That’s exactly the risk that Amazon’s takeover poses. Turning Bond into another piece of grist for the content mill would compromise one of our oldest and most remarkable film franchises. It would take a series that allowed itself to take significant creative risks while working from a familiar formula to become just another player in the streaming wars.

Even when a Bond film is bad, it’s always worth watching. There’s something to be enjoyed — take Christopher Lee’s performance in The Man With the Golden Gun, the Mexico City opening of Spectre, or the joy of seeing Connery return to the role in Diamonds Are Forever. And the Broccolis deserved trust for being able to reinvent the franchise for the 2020s after successfully reinventing the franchise numerous times before.

Perhaps No Time to Die—a film that features the death of James Bond—is a fitting end for the 25-film reign. Perhaps the franchise needed to bow to the realities of modern Hollywood economics. Perhaps this is the only way: The economic equivalent of Bond stopping the countdown clock with 007 seconds left to the complete end of the franchise.

There’s no doubt that expanding Bond beyond the films to streaming will dilute the brand and frustrate long-time fans. Amazon will likely also shy away from the franchise’s rougher edges to make Bond more appealing to a larger audience. But after years of inaction, I’ll take some positive momentum. Maybe, just maybe, when the lights go down and Monty Norman’s iconic theme booms through the theater, this will be worth it. One thing’s for sure: I’ll be there opening night, vodka martini in hand.

The Muppet Christmas Carol has evolved from a nostalgia trip to a bonafide millennial Christmas classic. After being received somewhat coolly on release and underwhelming during its initial box office run, the 1990 film found a second life on VHS (where I first watched it as a child) and a third life on streaming. It’s now widely acknowledged as, at the minimum, a worthy entry in the Christmas Carol canon, and fodder for excellent social media content. At most, however, it’s the best Christmas Carol adaptation because, by making Charles Dickens (played by Gonzo the Great) a main character, it directly incorporates Dickens’s beautiful prose into its dialogue.

I fall into the latter interpretation. I think the film is absolutely brilliant with not a single misstep over the course of its 90-minute runtime. It’s my number one priority to rewatch every Christmas because there are so many little touches to appreciate. The film, the first made by the Muppets producers after Jim Henson’s death, feels like a real labor of love. It absolutely deserves the reappraisal it has received.

Even if you don’t have time to sit down and watch the whole thing this holiday season, you can just as effectively enjoy the film’s soundtrack, which is more extensive than the songs found in the movie. But if you have even less time and can’t listen to the full soundtrack, then just stick to the songs in the movie. Here is a handy ranking to guide your Christmas listening:

Not ranked: The Christmas Scat and the Finale (When Love Is Found)

These two aren’t ranked through any fault of their own. They’re just too much of reprises of previous songs to qualify for this list.

7. When Love Is Gone  

Famously cut from the initial theatrical release for being too sad for kids, When Love Is Gone plays an important role in Scrooge’s character arc. But it grinds the whole film to a halt and the lyrics are a little nonsensical. The story behind this song is more interesting than the song itself. Brownie points for Michael Caine’s singing, though.

6.) Bless Us All

Arguably the most forgettable song in the whole film, Bless Us All isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just … a little boring. There’s no dynamism and the entire focus of the song being on the goodness of Tiny Tim (who did NOT die!) gets old pretty quickly. Plus, it takes the focus off the scene-stealing Mrs. Piggy as Mrs. Kratchit. It does serve an important purpose for Scrooge as it makes him see the Cratchits’ capacity for gratitude. It isn’t a high point.

5.) Marley and Marley

“Marley and Marley” is a perfect mid-tier song. It’s visually striking, has a very amusing conceit (the joke of naming Jacob Marley’s partner Robert Marley only dawned on me after several rewatches), and is even a little scary for the kids in the audience! It’s also the best example of the script directly incorporating dialogue from the book. “Marley and Marley” a perfect introduction to how the film will later balance humor and darkness, and effectively sets the stakes for the story.

4.) Thankful Heart

The finale song lands right in the middle of this ranking because it’s impossible to dislike. You’ll be beaming the whole time. Its middling finish is more of a reflection of how good the next three songs are. Caine’s energy is infectious, and the energy and spirit of the song is a wonderful and much needed resolution to the darkness of the Ghost of Christmas Future. It’s also a very effective way of tying characters together from all three eras of Scrooge’s life. And the confrontation with Miss Piggy (excuse me, Mrs. Cratchit) that follows this song is one of the funniest moments in the film.

3.) Scrooge

Scrooge is catchy, extremely funny (the old ladies “nah” gets me every time), dynamic, and a perfect introduction to Michael Caine’s Scrooge. This one works both in the story as it effectively demonstrates Scrooge’s reputation as a stingy, selfish miser, and it also works in a meta-context, as it positions Caine as a real part of this world inhabited by muppets. Withholding his visage from the audience until the last moment is also stroke of genius. The scene’s momentum, the clever lyrics (“But there's nothing in nature that freezes your heart like years of being alone / It paints you with indifference like a lady paints with rouge / And the worst of the worst, the most hated and cursed is the one that we call Scrooge” is Oscar-worthy), the whole thing just sings.

2.) One More Sleep ‘Til Christmas

You can make compelling cases for this one to be number one, especially because you can (and should) listen to it on Christmas Eve! While “One More Sleep” is not number one on this list, I think it’s the best pure Christmas song in the film. It’s not the show-stopper that claims the number one spot, but it’s a beautiful ode to the significance of Christmas to a character defined by his gratitude. There’s such passion and creativity in every single shot of the rats cleaning up the office while Kermit sings — a truly beautiful moment of family. “It's the season when the saints can employ us / To spread the news about peace and to keep love alive” is a fantastic line.

1.) It Feels Like Christmas

The showstopper. The central set-piece. The thesis statement of the film. After the one-two gut-punches of “Marley and Marley” and “When Love Is Gone,” “It Feels Like Christmas” gives us the biggest production in the film. In comes the Ghost of Christmas Present to get Scrooge to start to see the joy in celebrating Christmas, and its expansive character list contrasts brilliantly with “Scrooge.” It’s dynamic, it’s action-packed, and it feels like the most cinematic set-piece in the film, concluding with a fantastic crane shot that shows the charming extent (and limits) of the film’s set. Caine’s endearingly awkward physicality reinforces Scrooge’s transformation from a sore thumb to an integral part of the fabric of the film’s world. It is the summer of the soul in December indeed.

UPDATE 12/25: Due to an editorial oversight, “Thankful Heart” was omitted from a previous version of the article. We regret this grave error. This article has been updated.

Reader, what’s your favorite song from ‘Muppets Christmas Carol’? Let us know in the comments below!

As we barreled head-first into the Year of our Lord 2024, there were two movies so daring in conception that they immediately catapulted to the top of my most anticipated movies list. On paper, these two projects had a lot in common. Both were ambitious, self-funded passion projects written and directed by Oscar-winning mavericks. Both were provocative in their ideas, populated by impressive, sprawling ensemble casts. Both were tricky business ventures labeled as box office poison. Sadly, that’s not where the similarities end.

The movies in question, Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, were unmitigated disasters. My most anticipated films of the year were, in fact, the worst of the year.

Sadly, I was not alone in my disappointment. Collectively, both movies grossed a catatonic $51.7 million worldwide. The release of Horizon’s second chapter, originally scheduled to be released six weeks after the first installment, was put on ice. Nearly six months later, there is no word on whether audiences will ever see it. Funding on parts three and four has allegedly dried up. Coppola’s self-funded disaster found staunch defenders on Film Twitter, but audiences balked at the confounding premise and execution. It recouped only a tenth of its budget—before marketing costs were considered. It is one of the costliest failures in box office history.

With the advent of a new crop of directorial standard bearers—Nolan, Villeneuve, Gerwig, and Peele, to name a few— the importance of the last few New Holywood directors has come into question. A decade-long decline in audience interest, critical reception, and commercial viability surrounding recent projects threatens to tarnish their legacies. As Spielberg and Scorcese have revitalized their careers, the former with his five times Oscar-nominated, one-two punch of West Side Story and The Fablemans and the latter with the acclaimed crime western Killers of the Flower Moon, their contemporaries flounder.

As morbid as it is, it’s hard not to look at the failures of Horizon and Megalopolis as nails in the coffin. Here is Francis Ford Coppola, the filmmaker who had arguably the greatest run in film history, brought down to levels of commercial failure that not even 1982’s doomed romantic musical One From the Heart could fathom. And here is Kevin Costner—the movie star turned director who triumphed over Scorsese and Goodfellas at the 1991 Academy Awards— cashing in on his television fame only to learn the hard way that audiences aren’t invested anymore in what he has to say. And while the question is easy to ask, the answer is harder to parse (you can blame the click-baiting title on me).

Obviously, not all the Greats need to retire.

However, it’s high time some look in the mirror and consider how they want to spend their remaining years and resources.

Coppola and Costner make for a fascinating Plutharcian comparison. Both men made their careers—and owe their greatest achievements—to big, self-funded risks. When no one else was willing to bet on them, these two bet on themselves. The hellish grandeur of Apocalypse Now, often considered the greatest war film ever made, almost sent the five-time Oscar winner into bankruptcy as a disastrous production went from five months to 238 days. A first-time director, Costner invested $3 million of his own money to produce Dances with Wolves, which has since been credited with revitalizing the dormant genre. Their gambles paid off, and their “follies” became the stuff of Hollywood legend.

However, their successes were only matched by the number of failures. Costner notoriously followed up Dances with an unmitigated bomb in The Postman. Coppola’s One From the Heart almost singlehandedly bankrupted his studio, American Zoetrope, forcing this Master to do paycheck jobs to survive. I’m not a betting man (except for one time that Caleb and I bet on horses down in Louisville) but I know that when you bet everything on yourself every single time, you’re inevitably bound to lose it all at some point.

Time after time, the two men creatively dug their heels in and kept coming up short. Then, after several critical and commercial disasters, their names vanished from directing credits and marquees. Apart from three experimental, arthouse films, Coppola’s last wide theatrical release was in the year I was born, 1997’s The Rainmaker. Costner stopped directing in 2003. In those twenty-plus years, the two men separately (yet oddly in tandem) developed sprawling epics that played into the legends that sprang up in the wake of Dances and Apocalypse Now. Once again, they would risk it all creatively and financially.

The dramatic productions of 2024’s auteur disasters have been so well documented for so long that it’s a waste of ink to recap them for the average audience. At the very least, most people who have a Facebook account know that Costner departed Taylor Sheridan’s hit show Yellowstone to focus on directing his four-part epic. Recently, Costner’s Yellowstone character met an unpleasant end, naked just feet away from the toilet. This is undoubtedly a mountain-sized middle finger to the show’s star who abandoned his prior commitments. That’s even without mentioning the $33 million that Costner himself invested!

Coppola, on the other hand, sold the majority of his famous wine business to fund the entirety of Megalopolis’ $120 million budget. When filming did commence in Atlanta, it wasn’t long before industry bulletins started reporting on allegedly toxic working conditions. Coppola, notorious for his manic persona on the set of Apocalypse Now, was allegedly “unprofessional” on set. Several female extras accused him of sexual harassment, accusing the filmmaker of kissing e and forcing them to sit on his lap, and that, without an HR department on set, no adequate response occurred. Coppola has denied these claims, and some of the on-set extras have defended him. A libel suit is ongoing.

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Sadly, even if the productions of Horizon and Megalopolis had gone smoothly, the movies still would have sucked. The reasons? Ego and unchecked power. With creative control, as well as a lack of oversight from any Hollywood studio to offer cost-effective solutions, Coppola and Costner had no one pushing back. There was no one to say “no.” On their sets, they were gods. After all, why wouldn’t they be? These are the men who redefined genres for the twenty-first century, picking up accolades and acclaim for their big swings. Not only that, but they viewed themselves as visionaries: Coppola, presenting a prescient view of a utopic world that could be saved by dialogue and goodwill, and Costner, creating an episodic kaleidoscope of Western Expansion that both validates and condemns our past.

But if they viewed themselves as gods, in reality, they were both Icarus. Flying too close to the sun, and with no one to tell them “no,” they made bloated, self-congratulatory disasters. When the box office receipts and reviews started pouring in, the last of their goodwill in the industry melted away. They crashed to earth. What comes next after they pick themselves up has yet to be determined.

It’s hard for me to sit here and write that artists shouldn’t make art. Over the course of the few hours that I’ve been writing this blog, the Latin motto of MGM Studios kept coming to mind: Ars Gratia Artis.

Art for the sake of Art.

Artists should be allowed to reach for the stars, to stumble, and to fall. They should also be allowed to pick themselves up and find new ways to tell the stories closest to their hearts. Not to blend work and life too much, but it’s one of the great benefits of having the Free Speech Culture we do in this country. Someday, God willing, I hope I could be afforded that chance if I were to make a creative misstep.

Costner would benefit by returning to a smaller story, like 2003’s Open Range. But it’s much harder to look at where Coppola is and argue that he should pick himself back up and keep making movies. Lawsuits and allegations aside for the moment, the self-inflicted disaster of Megalopolis feels unlike anything the movies have seen in decades. Decadent, discombobulated, and detached from reality. In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, it feels even more like a misguided Liberal pipe dream that woefully misread the political tenor of the moment. Time might be kind to the immodest fever dream, but it neither inspired the masses nor brought them back to the theaters. In fact, it alienated people.

Art for the sake of art is the beau ideal for filmmakers. But it must also be remembered that movies are, at their purist, a populist art form. A director’s next project depends on how well the people respond, critically and commercially. While filmmakers like Coppola can survive a blow or two to the hull, they cannot endure the constant lambasting like the one ol’ Francis received in the aftermath of Megalopolis. At some point, a movie has to make money. Neither Horizon nor Coppola’s sci-fi counterpart managed to do so. The solution for Costner is to send Horizon to HBO as a four season television show and make smaller theatrical efforts. For Coppola, the time might have come to close the curtains.

This wasn’t a fun write. It’s hard to suggest that the man who made The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Rumble Fish, and produced classics like American Graffiti should stop directing. It might be comparable to suggesting a fish stop swimming or humans stop breathing. But time marches on, and no one is immune to its ever-forward trajectory. At 85-years-old, I hope Coppola can look back at what he’s given the world and be at peace with the artistic treasure trove he has left us.

Encouraging him to return to the director’s chair would be elder abuse.

The End of the Tour (2015, dir. James Ponsoldt) is a biopic as peculiar as the cult-favorite author it portrays: David Foster Wallace.

Rather than delving into every detail of Wallace’s life, the film focuses on the final leg of his Infinite Jest book tour. It’s less about biography and more about the dynamic between Wallace and his interviewer, David Lipsky. The two men share a first name and a vocation as writers, but little else.

On the surface, not much happens. Most of the film is simply a conversation between the author and the journalist. Yet their dialogue reveals complex, layered personalities and quietly compelling tension.

Wallace oscillates between moments of vulnerability and intellectual monologues, offering glimpses of his inner life. Lipsky, by contrast, remains guarded, rarely reciprocating the personal revelations. Wallace’s loneliness emerges in his attempts to connect with Lipsky, while Lipsky stays focused on his goal: crafting the best possible story.

Lipsky’s approach isn’t inherently wrong—he’s a journalist doing his job—but his detachment feels cold when paired with Wallace’s tender neuroticism.

The real magic in the film is paring an unusual author like Wallace with an ordinary guy with career ambitions like Lipsky.

Lipsky’s transgressions—if you can call them that—are ordinary, even predictable. He’s a social climber, willing to do whatever it takes to advance his career, a not-uncommon archetype in literary circles.

What becomes increasingly clear throughout the film is that both men envy each other. Lipsky covets the fame Wallace achieved with Infinite Jest—a level of success his own novel never reached. Meanwhile, Wallace seems to envy Lipsky’s social ease and charisma. Lipsky wants Wallace’s fans; Wallace envies Lipsky’s friends.

Like the flawed, searching characters in his fiction—petty criminals, addicts, and others caught in cycles of dysfunction—Wallace is portrayed as a complicated, achingly human figure.

The End of the Tour doesn’t attempt to tell Wallace’s whole life story. Instead, it captures him in the spirit of one of his own creations: neurotic, troubled, and startlingly beautiful. It’s a refreshing take on a genre too often obsessed with canonizing saints or condemning villains.

‘The End of the Tour’ is now available to rent on Amazon Prime. Rated R for language including some sexual references.

Ignore its tepid Rotten Tomatoes score. “Surf’s Up” is a tour de force. 

While surfing — ha — YouTube, I realized I had access to the movie for free. I braced myself for cringe. Let me be clear: Media I enjoyed in middle school doesn’t tend to hold up in adulthood. Can I handle discovering this beloved childhood relic is Bad, Actually? I asked myself. I wasn’t sure. I dove in anyway. 

I’m relieved to report the water was fine. Honestly, better than fine. Turn’s out, the movie is really, really good. In its hour-and-a-half runtime, “Surfs Up” imparts a subtle yet sophisticated message about competition and craft — and does so with style and humor.

At the heart of “Surf’s Up” is the relationship between Cody (Shia LaBeouf), an impulsive young penguin who dreams of surfing success, and Big Z (Jeff Bridges), a washed up ex-professional surfer who everyone thinks is dead — and who Cody idolizes. Through a series of events at turns comical and strange, Cody winds up face-to-face with his hero on the remote beaches of Pengu Island just days before the annual Big Z Memorial Surfing Competition. Here, he has the golden opportunity to learn from Z in time to challenge Tank Evans (Dietrich Bader), the island’s returning surfing champ and all around “Dirty Trashcan Full of Poop.”

There’s just one problem: Z has no interest in competition. He believes surfing should be done for its own sake, not for a shiny trophy. He’s so adamant about this, in fact, that for years he has completely cut himself off from the rest of the world.

What follows is a push and pull between Cody, who wants Z to teach him tangible technical skills yesterday, and Z, who wants Cody to lighten up and learn to just, like, ride the waves of life, man. Finally, Cody gets chill-pilled: Despite himself, he starts having some fun, and it translates to better surfing. 

The subtext is, of course, that success in itself is an empty goal. To reap the true rewards of an activity, we must learn to hold it loosely and enjoy it for its own sake.

If this were a different movie, that tidy mindfulness lesson capped off with a dance party set to Sugar Ray, might be the end. But this is a film nuanced enough to contain both poop jokes and meditations on meditation, and the full lesson it imparts is less trite.

It communicates it by turning its lens on the motivations of Big Z when, even after all the learning-to-let-go of it all, Cody still wants to do the contest. This makes Z angry, and the argument that follows exposes a dark truth: Beneath Z’s beach bum demeanor is a person — er, penguin — who’s afraid. Afraid of being seen as a failure for disappearing after his final surfing appearance, afraid of making an effort again and feeling humiliated. In this respect, Cody, who believes in giving activities his all even when it ends in disappointment, has something to teach the old man. 

I won’t spoil the ending (though you’ve had almost two decades to watch it), but I will say this. In exploring the differences between Cody and Z, “Surf’s Up” interrogates whether we should strive to perform our craft at the highest level, using it to engage with the world, or embrace a more ascetic path, deepening our appreciation for an activity in meditative solitude. To that question, it leaves viewers with a resounding “it depends,” ultimately advocating a balance between Z’s contemplative approach and Cody’s bullish ambition, between solitary self-confinement and desperate validation-seeking. With its final scene of Cody blissfully riding the tube of a wave with his friends looking on, it implies that between these two extremes is something like “flow,” what the late psychologist Mihaly Czikzentmihalyi describes as a state of both effortlessness and control.

“Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake,” wrote Czikszentmihalyi. “The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.”

At the same time, “Flow is hard to achieve without effort.” “Competition is an easy way to get into flow.” 

The reminder is as timeless as it is poignant. It’s not hard to get so caught up in a particular vision of success or of oneself that we forget why we do what we do in the first place, turning activities we love into chores or coping mechanisms. Whether we write novels or ride waves, flow offers a path forward and back — to the joy and challenge of just doing. 

That a 17-year-old children’s movie about surfing penguins can convey this nuanced truth — with humor, wit, and visuals that still hold up — is nothing short of a cinematic triumph.

The split screen is as old as cinema. It is a combination of two or more shots presented simultaneously, whether visible or invisible to the audience. There are a wide variety of uses for the split screen.

Like convincing five year old me that Lindsey Lohan shared the silver screen with her actual, identical twin in the 90s remake of The Parent Trap.

Besides duping small children into believing falsehoods for many years of their lives, the split screen can be used to achieve certain visual effects, create complex shots, present multiple perspectives at once and numerous other creative applications.

StudioBinder has an excellent breakdown of the technique, and even mentions the particular use I wish to explore, namely the split screens featured in Requiem for a Dream.

"Requiem for a Dream" is a novel by Hubert Selby Jr., adapted to film by Darren Aronofsky.

The story follows four individuals whose lives are consumed by their addictions, illustrating how the characters' hopes and dreams become nightmarish realities as they spiral further into their dependencies.

It is a film I will never forget and never watch again. Its message is powerful and disturbing.

We all are susceptible to addiction and its consequences because it comes in many forms that often play into our hopes and dreams.

Whether it is obviously dangerous like drugs or seemingly innocuous like television, addictions, both big and small, can corrupt the good we seek in our dreams and find in our realities. 

Aronofsky’s camera work and editing is unlike any other film I have ever seen. Much could be said about the various techniques used to enhance the storytelling and the relationship between characters, but his unique use of the split screen stood out to me. 

Within the first few minutes of the film, a visible split screen appears between Harry Goldfab and his mother, Sara. It is jarring and takes you out of the film, but I suspect it is intentional.

Harry and Sara argue through a closed door, which functions as the split in the screen, creating the two different perspectives we as the audience simultaneously witness.

Sara locks herself in a closet away from Harry as he steals her television set. The TV is chained to the radiator because Harry has stolen and sold it numerous times to get money for drugs.

Harry yells at his mother for hiding and chaining up the TV because it makes him feel guilty for his actions.

The split screen allows us to view Harry’s and Sara’s reactions at the same time, but it is also a literal divide that represents the fractured nature of their relationship.

The next use of the split screen is the famous shot that StudioBinder mentions in their video overview of the technique.

Harry Goldfab and his girlfriend, Marion, share an intimate face-to-face conversation as they lie next to each other in bed.

At first, the scene appears to be staged as a single shot since Harry and Marion are mere inches away from each other. As Harry and Marion reach out to caress each other, the dissonance of the shot becomes apparent.

The appearance and disappearance of disembodied hands at the center of the shot reveals a split screen.

Harry and Marion are shot individually and stitched together despite being close enough to warrant a single shot of them.

Like the split screen that reveals the division between Harry and his mother, another literal divide foreshadows the growing distance in Harry’s and Marion’s relationship over the course of the film.

Harry and Marion express their love for each other, and they dream about opening a store in the city together.

Their love is genuine, and their hopes are pure. All they need is some money and a bit of luck to turn their dream into a reality.

Their shared drug addiction, however, stands between them.

In their greatest moment of intimacy, the split screen reveals that Harry and Marion are as close as can be yet so far away from each other at the same time.

The distance between Harry and Marion grows literally and figuratively as their addiction corrupts their love, hopes and dreams.

The state of their relationship follows the timeline of the film, beginning in the bright, lively summer and ending in the bleak, dead winter.

In another famous shot, Harry and Marion are high and stare at the ceiling as they lie facing away from each other, surrounded by photographs they saved as inspiration for their store.

The potential reality of their dreams are all around them, but they cannot see them or each other. 

As their money and drug supply begin to dwindle, withdrawal and desperation set in.

Harry suggests that Marion proposition her lascivious shrink in exchange for money because it is their “last chance to get back on track.”

Seeing no other way to escape their hopeless situation, she reluctantly agrees. Marion succeeds, but she is angry, ashamed and disgusted.

When Marion returns to her apartment, she sits on the other side of the couch opposite Harry. They sit in silence, unable to look at each other.

Their addiction and the terrible, debasing sacrifices it demands creates a rift between them, which grows as their supply of drugs inevitably runs out again.

Despite the money Marion acquired, there are no drugs for them to buy on the streets.

Blaming the world and each other, Harry and Marion fight over their bleak situation.

Yelling and screaming, Harry searches for something to write on.

He grabs a picture of him and Marion in front of the store they dreamed of owning.

On the back, he writes down the number of a drug dealer only interested in selling his product in exchange for sexual favors.

He hands Marion the photo and storms out of the apartment. It is the last time they ever see each other.

Harry goes on a roadtrip to Florida in an attempt to score drugs while Marion goes through withdrawal in her apartment alone.

As time passes and the symptoms of her withdrawal grow worse, she stares at the photo of her and Harry in front of the store.

She flips it over and looks at the drug dealer’s number.

Their picture and the phone number on the back of it symbolize how close our dreams and nightmares are to each other. 

A single choice, big or small, can be all it takes to change life for better or worse.

The characters of Requiem for a Dream show how addiction destroys human freedom.

Any all consuming dependency corrupts the will to choose what is good.

Eventually, the only thing left to do is what you do not want to do. You come to love what you hate, regardless of the consequences.

You are split, divided against yourself, as illustrated by the fractured screens in Aronofsky’s film.

For anyone who knows me, this article is inevitable.

Since the beginning of the Cinemantics project about sixteen months ago, I’ve teased out and professed my love for the Indiana Jones franchise. The brain child of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, these movies have had a seminal impact on my life and my love of the art form. You can read more about that below.

And while the franchise does not carry the same luster today as other products of the late seventies and eighties, the impact the films have had on popular culture reverberate far beyond name recognition. Box office receipts total $2.4 billion, fifteen Oscar nominations, and honors from the National Film Registry and American Film Institute. In 2007, Harrison Ford’s performance in Raiders of the Lost Ark was ranked as the second greatest movie hero of all time by the AFI.

Four decades of imitators, rip-offs, and wannabe successors in adventure genre (from Tomb Raider to The Librarian television movies to the video game franchise Uncharted) reach for the efficiency and pure entertainment of the Spielberg-Lucas spectacles. But none reach it.

So, in the name of “content, content, content,” it was only a matter of time until I took a few hundred words to rank the Indy movies. Are the people clamoring for this? Probably not. Do I care? Definitely not.

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5. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

This movie haunts me. You see, Dial of Destiny is a cinematic specter. It exists but doesn’t. It has the shape of the previous thing, of the thing we love and remember, but is itself nearly translucent. We see through the $300 million budget and bloated runtime. We see through the unnecessary characters. We see through the shoddy effects. Like the ghosts of lore, seeing the shape of the past makes us languish for what we lost. Watching the madcap horror of Temple of Doom on the big screen this month made this point painfully clear.

As an audience, we damn the passing of time and curse the changes it wrought on the heroes once thought to be immortal. But it’s not just the loss of previous Indy adventure’s substance that we mourn, but an entire era of filmmaking.

As the world looks up to the stars and wonders in awe of what the future will bring, Jones is stuck in the dirt with the relics of the past he’s spent his life studying. Like its titular character, Dial of Destiny wants to be in the tradition of tactile Hollywood. Yet it looks up to the digital era in envy, yearning to be in the firmament again. The film teaches that it’s okay to be content with the world moving on and find peace in our lives. The irony is that the filmmakers forgot that lesson. In making Dial, first-time Indy director James Mangold overcompensated. They nobly tried to produce a film that wanted to make you pine for the days of yore but leaned too heavily on the digital tools that swept away Old Hollywood in the first place. They used the weapons of destruction as a means of resurrection. The result? A bittersweet mirage we see straight through. It’s a decent adventure, a thoughtful coda, an overwrought elegy, and an exhumed corpse.

Now, this doesn’t make Dial a bad movie. It makes it deeply complicated and flawed. The three standout sequences (featuring Tangier, an underwater expedition to a wrecked Roman ship, and the bonkers, time-traveling finale) are in the grand tradition of a classic Indiana Jones adventure. They are so good that it frustrates this audience member to see the rest of the movie not live up to the heights. Others disagree, which is fine. But no matter the many frustrating flaws, Dial has an incredible heart. At its best, this final adventure is a thoughtful coda to Hollywood’s greatest hero. When the movie struggles under the weight of orchestrated digital chaos, Harrison Ford shines bright: gruff and surprisingly soulful. At 80, his dedication to this character shows that not only was this the role he was born to play, but it was the one he loved playing. And, even when we wanted more from the movies, we loved when he played it.

4. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Divisive when released, Crystal Skull is better than everyone remembers. One only needs to re-watch the twenty minute escape from Russian forces at Area 51 to be reminded of that. It captures the verisimilitude and ingenuity of the original trilogy. It’s fun, focused, and features some great practical stunts.

It also produces one of the standout visual moments of the franchise: of Indiana, older now than in his Nazi fighting prime, looking up at the atomic cloud that hovers over him. Firmly in the atomic age, a man out of step with time. Visually, it elicits more than anything in Dial. While infamously hesitant to return to the fourth adventure, Spielberg feels at home here in the opening minutes of the picture. The image also sets up one particular line of dialogue that I think of often, one that hints at a more provocative and somber film that never was: “We’ve reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.”

Sadly, what could have been the epilogue to Indy’s adventures just becomes another generic romp as the movie charges into the third act, devolving into a CGI slog. If he felt at home in the opening warehouse set piece or the motorcycle chase through academia, then Spielberg is a stranger by the end as he tries to reign in the digital chaos. Writer David Koepp brushes past the provocative questions of age, morality, and the purpose of history in the atomic age to focus on a flying saucers and the “space between spaces.” These thematic oversights help inform the best parts of Dial of Destiny but, ideally, we wouldn’t have needed it.

Crystal Skull was doomed to be divisive. It was the most high-profile legacy sequel in Hollywood at the time. Released the same year as Iron Man and The Dark Knight, seven years before The Force Awakens, and three years after the prequel series ended with Revenge of the Sith, it really marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, setting up the internalized tension that permeates Dial of Destiny. Internet trolls, review bombing, franchise purists were in their infancy and cinematic universes and franchise gluttony were still over the horizon. Over the summer of 2008, while Marvel and Christopher Nolan were praised for upending the system, Spielberg and company were unfairly chastised for playing with the recipe for everyone’s favorite comfort food. And while some of the ingredients were wrong, the recipe still tasted basically the same after all these years.

3. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

Everyone has a rough patch. When confronted with challenges, it is often recommended that one tries therapy of some kind. Temple of Doom offers another remedy. The movie suggests that, instead of therapy, one should channel their anger, rage, and heartbreak into making movies. Who knows, you might just make the darkest blockbuster of all time.

Infamously, both Spielberg and Lucas were going through ugly (and expensive) divorces while development began on the second Indy adventure. Uninterested in bringing back the Nazis as the primary villains, the collaborators made the curious choice to make this a prequel to Raiders instead of a true follow-up. This granted the duo—as well as American Graffiti writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz—enormous creative liberty to craft a version of the character that, in many ways, contradicts and grows to become the one we meet in the original. These creative choices and personal anguish collide here in deeply disturbed, surprisingly funny, and exhilarating ways.

The Indiana Jones we meet covets “fortune and glory” over preservation or humanity. In the Bugsby Berkley-inspired opening, Harrison Ford descends down the staircase of Shanghai nightclub in a white tuxedo reminiscent more of James Bond or Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca than the hero we met in 1981. And perhaps Bogart’s Rick is the best comparison to this Indiana Jones: a deeply ambivalent American abroad who comes to realize that he cannot stand idly by.

Technically, the movie is still a wonder to behold. I recently watched a theatrical re-release at my local movie theater, fully opening up the scope and sound of the picture in a way that VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, and digital all failed to capture. While the set pieces of Raiders were revelatory and the emotional impact of Last Crusde is singular, the ingenuity, staging, and pure entertainment of the final thirty minutes are the most impressive in the franchise.

Mind you, this is not a fun movie at times. It’s scary even to this day. The infamous scene where a man’s heart is ripped out of his chest still leaves you unsettled as the chorus of chants and drums crescendos menacingly. As an audience member, this movie can make you feel like you too drank the Blood of Khali. But with one wink to Ke Huy Quan’ Short Round deep in the third act, the movie signals to both him and the audience that the nightmare is over. Now, its time to have some fun: the iconic introduction of the Indiana Jones we know and love, the mine cart chase, the bridge collapse. Alone, it’s a perfect popcorn movie. That makes the fact that its only the third best even more of an indication of the franchise’s success.

2. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

The brilliance of the third Indy adventure is that the fabled Cup of Christ—the Holy Grail—is not the movie’s real MacGuffin. It’s merely a decoy, much like the glistening and bejeweled chalices in the chambers of the last of the Knights Templar.

No, the real MacGuffin is the strained relationship between Indiana Jones and his crotchety professorial father (an iconic turn from Sean Connery). So affecting is their shared arc that it feels feeble to attempt to offer some fresh take never-before encountered. Aside from a few standout moments in Dial of Destiny, no Indy movie is as a moving as this one.

After the breakneck action and madcap horror of Temple of Doom, the set-pieces in Last Crusade feel tame in comparison—and that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s admirable. Following the arc of the character over the first two films, Spielberg and company craft a visual language and fighting style that feels like the maturation of what we saw in Raiders. It less about spectacle and more about character. Crafting the fight scenes—including a great opening set-piece featuring River Phoenix— around the comedic sensibilities of its two leading men, the movie gives audiences the chance to understand them as individuals and as an odd-ball pairing both verbally and non-verbally. To top it off, the brilliant dialogue (famously punched up by Tom Stoppard) is reminiscent of a buddy comedy more than a grand adventure tale.

Of all the franchises, Indy remains the most unique in one key aspect: each film is different in tone and theme. Raiders is a classic adventure, Temple of Doom is horror, Last Crusade is a buddy comedy, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is science fiction, and Dial of Destiny is a mortality tale. Leaning into the lightheartedness of the father-son dynamic, Spielberg, Lucas, Ford, and Connery craft a sincere and touching movie. It’s no wonder why it often is in contention for the franchise’s best.

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

If you know me, there was only one movie I would ever put at the top of the list.

The cultural and cinematic impact of Raiders of the Lost Ark has set a bar so high that no film—not even its sequels—has lived up to it. As a pure movie, it might just be the best ever made. The highest grossing movie of 1981, this adventure fable earned a remarkable eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. The AFI ranked it as the 66th greatest American movie of all time. In 1999, the National Film Registry announced its preservation in the Library of Congress.

Spielberg’s composition and pacing is at its best here in this tale of a secular, world-weary archeologist (an all-time great Harrison Ford performance, ranked as the second greatest movie hero of all time by the AFI) who must battle Nazis to find the mythic Ark of the Covenant. Each scene is beautifully staged, each performance rich and lived-in, and every action set piece raised the bar even higher for the next five decades of imitators.

Coming shortly after the titanic successes of Jaws and Star Wars, the first of the joint efforts by Hollywood’s wunderkinds represents the perfect blend of 80s-Amblin spectacle and the actor-driven movie moments that recall the Golden Age Hollywood. It embodies the sensibilities of two very different eras to produce a film singular and timeless, feeling as fresh and exciting today as it was forty years ago. To paraphrase Rolling Stone, it's as perfect a piece of pure, uncut entertainment as anyone has produced in the last few decades. It also is incredibly thoughtful, exploring the blurry line between science and religion and the concept of Divine Intervention—all while dragging its titular hero behind a moving truck and evading snake infested catacombs.

This globe-trotting adventure turned pulp entertainment into high art — and the character into a legend. Four decades and four sequels later, Raiders of the Lost Ark still stands at the pinnacle of moviemaking.

Reader, how would you rank the Indiana Jones movies? Let us know in the comments below!

In The Virginian, the inaugural novel of the Western genre, Owen Wister praises the meritocracy and even the aristocracy of the wild west.

“[We] decreed,” Wister writes, “that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, ‘Let the best man win, whoever he is.’ Let the best man win! That is America's word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing.” 

With these words, Wister introduces one of the greatest themes (and problems) examined in the Western: the great individual who towers above the rest. I’m speaking, for example, of the image of greatness that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance presents in Jimmy Stewart’s Ranse Stoddard (as well as the reality of that greatness as found in John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon), or even Wayne’s other portrayal of the capable, perhaps all-too-capable Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.

Greatness is no simple thing, as each of these characters proves. Sometimes these “giants” aren’t simply good (even if they are masters of the effectual), but no matter what, there’s something to be admired in them, something greater than life. And if, as my good friend Tyler MacQueen argues, The Searchers is the Great American Movie, then it is so at least in part because it explores Wister’s seemingly contradictory claims about equality and greatness in the American experience.

One thing that few Westerns explore, however, is how this very American question relates to previous models of greatness. Is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards different or the same as the Greek Achilles, who dragged Hector’s corpse before the walls of Troy, or the Roman Brutus, who plotted against his friend to save the Republic he held so dear? 

Perhaps it would take a very different sort of movie to examine this question—indeed, it might take a musical to settle the score.

Let me explain.  

My wife recently introduced me to Stanley Donen’s wonderful Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. In the musical, Adam Pontipee (played by Howard Keel) arrives in a small Oregon-territory town with a clear mission: to find a wife who can cook. He meets Milly (played by Jane Powell), who agrees to marry him and move to his backwoods cabin up in the mountains. But Milly soon learns there’s a catch: Adam and his six brothers all live in the same cabin, and they expect Milly to do all of the chores.

Milly, being the industrious and clever woman she is, decides that the fastest way to get out of her predicament is to teach these mountain men how to court a lady and then marry them all off to her friends. The Pontipee brothers, after all, are stronger, smarter, and more handsome than their townsfolk competition—they are the spitting image of rugged Western greatness, the natural aristoi of America. 

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But things go awry—though I won’t spoil how. When their marriages don’t materialize, these once great men are reduced to a miserable group of schoolboys swinging axes in the snow in this beautifully choreographed scene:

Not one to abide his brothers’ misery, Adam steps in with a suggestion (and, I have to note, with my wife’s favorite song of the whole movie). He’s been reading one of Milly’s books lately—Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—and he has an idea: why don’t they go and kidnap the women, just like Romulus the founder of Rome kidnapped the Sabine women (something that he humorously mispronounces as “the sobbin’ women”)?

Adam doesn’t want his brothers just to be great men; he also wants them to emulate the great men of ages past. Adam’s rustic presumption is that the greatness of yesterday is the same as the greatness of today—meaning that the great individual of America is no different than the great individual of ancient Greece, Rome, or Byzantium.

The kidnapping is successful, but the scheme fails. Adam and the boys return to find that their new guests really are “sobbing women” and are by no means “overjoyed,” contrary to their earlier musical number. What’s more, Milly lays into them all, but most especially Adam:

“You’re gonna’ eat and sleep in the barn with the rest of the livestock. Now get out of here. I’m ashamed of ya’… you too [Adam]… do you think those girls would marry them now? … You think a wife is just a cook and clean. You got no understandings you’ve got no feelings. How could you do a thing like this! When I think of these poor girls sick with fright and their families crazy with worry, I can’t abide to look at you!”

While Milly confronts Adam for his selfish actions, a blurred portrait hangs on the wall behind her right shoulder:

Ultimately, she storms off and leaves Adam stunned on the porch. Adam, unable to sympathize with Milly or the kidnapped girls, considers himself the injured party and flees to a hunting cabin farther up the mountain, where he waits out the winter.

When spring arrives and Adam returns, he finds that Milly has had a child—his child, a baby girl (or, as my wife would say, “perhaps his child!”; but I leave that for another review). He enters the cabin to talk with Milly and, as he kneels by the crib, the portrait that was previously over Milly’s shoulder during their fight is now clearly shown in the background. Behind Adam, clear as day, hangs a rudimentary portrait of a Lincoln-like figure, somewhere between the chromolithograph in the U.S. Treasury Collection and Willem Frederik Karel Travers’s portrait of the president.

While the Lincoln-like figure is blurred at Adam’s lowest moment—the very moment he most embodies the heroes of ages past—the image becomes clear at Adam’s redemption, when he comes to accept that he’s wronged Milly, the families in the town, and the kidnapped women.

The changes in the visibility of the portrait mirror the development of Adam as not just a great individual, but most especially a democratic one. For example, Adam explains that he changed his mind on the Roman-style kidnapping because he, after reflecting on his own family, finally recognized the humanity of his fellow citizens. He shares this particularly democratic realization with Milly while standing over their child:

“Thinking about the baby… [and] about how I’d feel if someone came sneaking in and carried her off. I’d string him up the nearest tree ‘n shoot him down like I would a thievin’ fox.”

These words betray a universal perspective far more befitting the great emancipator Abraham Lincoln than the narrowly proud or civically minded actions of an Achilles, a Romulus, or a Caesar. The affectionate bonds of family let Adam step outside of himself and allow him to recognize the key republican insight: “all men are created equal.”

This kind of realization would have been—and indeed was—foreign to those Greek or Roman men. The “papa” of the wild west is in no way the pater familias of Rome. The softening of Adam’s heart at the birth of his child therefore reminds us of a peculiar truth about democracies. As Alexis de Tocqueville says in his famous Democracy in America, 

“In America, the family, taking this word in its Roman and aristocratic sense, does not exist… one sees what there used to be of the austere, the conventional, and the legal in paternal power disappearing, and a sort of equality being established … It is therefore not by interests but by community of memories and free sympathy of opinions and tastes that democracy attaches brothers to one another. It divides their inheritance, but it permits their souls to intermingle. The sweetness of these democratic mores is so great that even partisans of aristocracy allow themselves to be taken by it, and after tasting it for some time, they are not tempted to return.”

And while this musical emphasizes the loving and intimate nature of the democratic family, it also (in true Tocquevillian fashion) highlights the greatness of the democratic woman. It is Milly who shows the brothers the importance of love, Milly who teaches Adam how to sympathize with another, Milly who cooks and cleans and helps Adam with the chores, and Milly who comforts the kidnapped brides. And, what’s more, the only classically educated character in the whole movie is Milly.

In fact, the very quality that draws Adam to Milly is her greatness. When he first sees her, she is chopping wood behind the inn that she works at. After Milly goes indoors, Adam peers through a window and sees a suitor propose to Milly—a suitor that she immediately grabs and throws to the ground without a second thought. Adam then joyfully sings: “simple and sweet—and sassy as can be! Bless her beautiful hide, yes! she’s the girl for me!” 

The grand insight, then, of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is that even the great individuals of the American west are still democratic individuals to their core—and, what’s more, that greatness is expressed in a particularly egalitarian way: Milly’s greatness doesn’t just benefit Adam, it helps him to find his own greatness, too.

When it comes to Westerns, we’re found of noting how great men leave society on an adventure into the great unknown. The Western, in presenting an environment analogous to the state of nature, helps us to consider the relationship between heroism and law.

But in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, we see how the cowboy and the mountaineer are still democratic heroes. We see that even when we travel deep into the howling wilderness, we still carry democracy with us in our bones.

Search the term “Great American Novel” online, and a Google-assisted artificial intelligence will spit out worthy titles: The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, Moby Dick, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Google the Great American Songbook, and you’ll recognize musical staples like “Over the Rainbow” and “The Christmas Song.”

But if you search “great American movie,” an odd assortment of classics, movies with the word “America” in the title, and even one picture that is now almost unavailable on any streaming service is presented.

For some reason, no canonical discussion of the Great American Movie exists.

Yes, the American Film Institute has ranked the 100 best American movies, but that is a separate conversation. To distinguish a picture as the “best” is to deem it the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality. Seeking out the “best” American movie is to find the most impressive and effective combination of the cinematic arts—story, performance, craftsmanship, etc. So, it’s unsurprising that Citizen Kane is often at the top of the list.

But the Great American Movie is different.

Like Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, or even Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the quest for the Great American Movie is defined not by technical or storytelling excellence. Rather, it's the search for the most effective exploration of America’s soul. Stick with me; this is not just an abstract philosophy here. This doesn’t mean the Great American Movie can’t be a masterwork in the cinematic arts and sciences (because it should be). But its primary motivation should be using those tools to analyze our history and purpose dramatically. If there is such a picture, it would reveal in every frame both the beautiful and the aspirational, the flawed and the uncomfortable. 

There are three criteria for what makes the Great American Movie.

• Must take place in America;

• Must be produced by a predominately American production company;

• Must embody the American experience.

And as young as the art of filmmaking is, there already seems to be a clear contender for the title of the Great American Movie: The Searchers (1956, dir. Ford).

Don’t know this one? Well, you should.

Based on a 1954 novel of the same name by Alan Le May— itself inspired by the 1836 kidnapping of Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanche warriors— The Searchers tells the story of a middle-aged Civil War veteran and his nephew who spends years looking for his niece, abducted in a home raid by Comanche tribesman. It’s a film by a master craftsman at the height of his power. John Ford, at this point in his career, was already the most honored director in Academy history: The Informer, How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Quiet Man.

Starring John Wayne in an uncharacteristically dark performance, the film was a critical and commercial success upon release. It grossed $3.7 million domestically in its first year; Look magazine praised it as a “Homeric odyssey.” Admired on its release, it is now beloved. Spielberg, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, and Lean all have cited it as influencing their work. The American Film Institute named it the 12th greatest American movie and the greatest American Western. Entertainment Weekly agreed. Across the pond, the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine ranked it the seventh-best film of all time in a 2012 international survey of film critics. Their 2022 poll ranked it fifteenth. In 1989, it became one of the first 25 films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Like hundreds of movies released yearly, The Searchers easily checks two of the three requirements to be the Great American Movie. It takes place in America—Texas and the American southwest, to be exact—and is produced by an American production company (Warner Bros. and Ford’s Argosy Pictures). Easy peasy. But the third criterion, which weeds out almost all other pictures, save for The Searchers, is that they must embody the American experience.

Tons of ink have been spilled examining what exactly that experience is. So it’s fruitless to try to do so here. Suffice it to say that, generally speaking, the “American experience” is the search for political and social community and the societal struggle with racism.

We see the search for community play out across American history. The first European settlers saw the coastline of the North Atlantic as a safe haven from persecution in their homelands. To them, America was a religious community. By the time of the Revolution, thirteen separate colonies bonded together to become a larger political community. With the opening of the West in the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants and pioneers made the dangerous trek toward the Pacific in search of creating new communities where wealth and security belong to the strongest. The dominating sentiment behind all these movements? That the individual meant more than the state; that community was built on common interests and values, not the class status you were born to. This opened up the promise of America to everyone, but it has also been used as a bludgeon.

On the other side of the equation are the existing political and religious systems of the Native people. For three centuries, the Native peoples and tribes saw their communities threatened, eliminated, and, eventually, forcefully integrated into the ones brought over from across the sea. Tragically, those who came to America to escape persecution became the persecutors.

The Searchers offers a nuanced exploration of these themes and ideas, which are so subtle at times that they might as well be subliminal. It is not surprising that the Great American Movie would be a Western. As Richard Brody recently wrote for the The New Yorker:

Westerns are an inherently political genre, for the obvious reason that they depict (or distort or interrogate) American history. But they are also political in that they show the birth of the polis itself—the institutions of modern urban society, with their laborers, clerks, merchants, teachers, sheriffs, entertainers. Where philosophers from Plato to Rousseau sought to imagine the development of civil society from first principles, the makers of Westerns—John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh—showed it being created from the ground up, by hands-on labor.

Ford’s films, regardless of the genre, have an abiding interest in upholding the virtues of the everyman, their communities, and what holds people together. It’s seen in a microcosm in Stagecoach and transplanted to locations such as Wales and Ireland in How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man. To Ford, there is strength in a people’s union—and the West is the most natural canvas to explore it. In The Searchers, Ford and company spend valuable film stock exploring the customs and virtues of the frontier community, itself the greatest force for creating the American mythos.

For instance, the courtship between Martin Pawley and Laurie Jorgensen, while disjointed from the shocking urgency of the main storyline, gives us a glimpse into what it means to find community in desolate places. Here are strong-willed individuals, stepping out from the protection of society to build new communities in the way they see fit. It’s not hard to see where the myth of the West came from, or why it was perpetuated for so long. Yes, it’s a white Christian community, but that is a historical fact, not a comment on Ford’s own social or political views.

This community is shaken to its core with the arrival of John Wayne’s Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards—who lusts for his brother’s wife and abhors his nephew, Martin, for his one-eighth Comanche blood—and the raiding of the Edwards homestead. Murdered are Ethan’s brother and sister-in-law. Murdered are all the children, save for his niece, Debbie. Ethan, too, seeks community after many years away. The murder of his brother and the woman he pined for from afar destroyed that ideal he had hoped to return to. This says nothing, mind you, about the racism that animates most of his actions throughout the movie.

Figures like Ward Bond’s Rev. Capt. Clayton embody the tension felt in the community. While disgusted by the heinous acts Edwards commits, they feel powerless to stop him. Clayton and others abandon Edwards in his efforts, but that alone does not stop the search. When they do try to stop him, necessity and time demand they turn their attention to the Comanche.

And it’s here where the commentary around The Searchers becomes even more intriguing. In the twenty-first century, the depiction of the Comanche tribe and Native peoples has increasingly come under fire. Among them is the criticism that the portrayal of Comanche chief Scar by Henry Brandon, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed actor, is problematic. This is valid. The condemnation of the sequence in which Martin Pawley accidentally “buys” a Native wife is also entirely fair. I myself squirm at the scene, which belittles this poor woman for the sake of what, frankly, feels like an extended joke about the intelligence of her people. But disregarding the movie or its deeper meaning because the mores of the twenty-first century are widely different than those of the previous generations is a disservice to the art.

Those who would ignore The Searchers’ scathing exploration of racism because of these elements are the same who would discredit Huckleberry Finn’s condemnation of antebellum slavery because of its uncomfortable use of the n-word. For a piece of art to be listed among the “Great Americans,” it has to confront the harshest realities of our past. Chief among them is racism. It has to be ugly and unsettling. After all, many parts of our shared history are. Holding up the bad equally against the good, we see in the greatest American art the promise and pitfalls of being a democratic people, one centered around the “proposition” (to quote Mr. Lincoln) that all people are created equal.

The Searchers warns what the absence of that proposition does to the heart of man. Imperfectly told by today’s standards of Native representation, the potency of Ethan Edward’s arc cannot be denied. His five-year odyssey of unequivocal hate is populated with horrific acts too numerous and gruesome to mention, the least of which is his grotesque treatment of Martin Pawley. Here’s one instance:

For most of the picture, it does not seem interested in punishing the character for his vile acts. Ambivalent might be the right adjective. Yes, characters like Pawley and Ward Bond’s Rev. Capt. Clayton attempt to stop him from carrying through his most horrific acts of madness, but no sentence is handed down. But that in no way means Ethan’s madness goes unpunished. Take a moment to watch the final scene of the movie.

Having saved his niece, Ethan receives no absolution. His madness drove everyone away. And, although he accomplished his mission, he finds no forgiveness for what he did along the way. The community he returned to at the beginning of the film—the one Ford spent so much time and film stock giving us a glimpse into—eventually leaves him behind.

Ford’s ending of The Searchers does not vindicate the actions of its racist protagonist. It gives him a punishment worse than death. In the first clip from the movie, Ethan maliciously shoots out the eyes of a Comanche corpse killed during a gun battle. Comanche tradition believes that without eyes, they cannot enter the spirit land and must wander forever between the winds. Ethan’s hatred and bigotry towards the Comanche, his rejection of human equality, blinded him. The film’s ending condemns Ethan to the same fate as the one he gave that Comanche corpse—to be exiled from his community and wander the West aimlessly and alone. 

The rejection of equality is the rejection of community. The worst of America destroys the promise of her best. And for her to be the best, she must confront and cast out the worst. As filmmaker Domino Rene Perez wrote for the British Film Institute:

The iconic image of Ethan Edwards framed in the doorway, the expanse of the West stretching behind him, is as lyrical as it is telling. A relic of the past, he cannot cross over the threshold into the civilised world. He has helped to preserve a world he cannot be a part of any longer. Racist and unyielding, Ethan is not likeable and his redemption seems impossible. But Ford holds audiences in his visual and narrative thrall to the very end so that when the door shuts on Ethan, it's hard not to think about those who get left behind when the world moves on.

The Searchers is a deeply ambivalent movie until the last shot. Framing John Wayne in that doorway turns the movie into what Scorsese has called “a ghost picture,” and turns an ambivalent story into a counterculture exploration of the evil lurking in the heart of America. With The Searchers, Ford poetically exposes the noblest and ugliest parts of this curious political project, making a movie that is deeply political, deeply human, and uniquely American.

Its problems in the twenty-first century notwithstanding, Ford and company hold up a mirror to our nation and its history. In The Searchers, we see America for what it is: a beautiful contradiction. Majestic and awe-inspiring, dark and corrupted, ambivalent and moral.

That is why it is the Great American Movie.

Reader, what do you think is the Great American Movie? Let us know in the comments below!