Our Top 10 Films of the Year! Plus the Heated Race for Best International Feature

0:00This episode is brought to you by Sony Pictures Classics presenting Blue Moon, from Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Richard Linklater and starring Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, and Andrew Scott. On the night Oklahoma opens, legendary lyricist Lawrence Hart confronts his shattered confidence at Sardi's. The Guardian raves it's a sophisticated, satisfying tour de force, Ethan Hawke's finest hour. And The Hollywood Reporter calls it beautifully executed. Ethan Hawke mesmerizes. Blue Moon for your awards consideration in all categories, including Best Actor, Ethan Hawke, and Best Picture.

0:45Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast, bringing you up to speed on the latest goings-on in Hollywood. I'm Anne Thompson in Los Angeles. Today we will share our 10 best lists, long-awaited. At least I want to know what Ryan's is. look at who's weakening in the Oscar race after all the awards voting, and parse the international feature Oscar race. And this is Ryan Latanzio in New York. All right, so let's look at the international Oscar race, because actually this week people are voting. By the time this podcast runs, the ballots for preliminary voting and categories including international close, I think at 5 p.m.

1:24No, it's 5 p.m. Pacific on Friday, the 12th. And so there's going to be a short list of 15 revealed on Tuesday. And so the talk all along has been, are all five of these going to be neon movies? In the end, you're talking about the five final nominations. Yes, yes. But I think we will see all five of these neon movies on the short list. Those are. So we're talking about Jafar Panahi. It was just an accident. And that narrative is very strong because, of course, Iran recently sentenced him to prison again in absentia. And he's been traveling. He was in Marrakesh recently. And he's going to come back to the U.S.

2:07for the Critics' Choice and the Globes and everything. He's on the way. He's going to get a best picture, a best director probably because of this narrative. No, exactly. You don't like the movie that much. No, he's going to win now, I think, at this point, because of this narrative. There's no question in my mind. I don't know. I think Sentimental Value is the other strong candidate. And people do love that film, The Joaquin Trier. And it has four Golden Globe actor nominations. Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Rensby, and both of the supporting actresses got in. Yes, there were six categories, I grant you.

2:45But still, that's pretty strong. and it's gonna get director and screenplay and you know it's a it's a it's it's it's competing in multiple categories what are some of the spoilers for well I think the secret agent will get in there too these are that still the neon movies that won prizes it can and then the other one is Surat is doing very well Ryan people love Surat because they get to discover it it's new to them it hasn't been anointed ahead of time right whereas it It was anointed for us seven months ago. Indeed. It's old news to us, but we're jaded. But all right. What are the spoilers? The spoilers?

3:25Well, the other Neon movie is No Other Choice from Venice, right? Yeah, that should get in there on Tuesday. And then we have The President's Cake. It won the camera door. First time filmmaker. The other one would be The Left-Handed Girl, which Netflix is pushing from Taiwan, which is a very good movie. What do you think? That should get in there in the shortlist. That one's very popular and I believe it's streaming now. Not that necessarily matters, but it's one of the more widely seen ones. Actually, I think what I want to say is that this is one of the stronger international lineups in memory.

4:02I think it's just because I've seen more of them and more of them are accessible. And we're dealing obviously with a more international academy. um obviously the voice of hindra job uh which was nominated the globes likely one to get into the fifth slot yeah that'll get in there um we got well we talked about 2000 meters to andreevka last week from ukraine that also could get in there there's a lot of support for ukraine and as we've seen in the past docks and foreign those those can overlap so the honeyland people their movie the tale of Cillian is in both categories as well. As well. Yeah. What about Sound of Falling, the German entry?

4:39You know, this is one of the most, this one has a lot of exposure because it won the jury prize at Cannes, but it's a challenging movie that I don't, I mean, if anyone's going to go for it, it's going to be international. It might make the shortlist. It's Germany's entry. And it was very, I looked it up, but it had a very high rating on Metacritic. I mean, critics really, really like it. But I don't think that the overall Academy in the end will go for it. No, it feels like one of those movies that back in the day the committee would have rescued. Right. Right. I thought it was interesting that the Academy was sort of saying to me, we don't call them the committee anymore.

5:19The International Committee no longer exists, apparently. Comes with a stigma, I guess. Some 2 ,000 people have signed up for it, you know, whether they look at all 12 of their movies or not, that they're assigned. That's a lot of people opting in. I thought that was sort of amazing. All over the world. There's a lot of great movies in here. Some of them that I don't know that are going to make it in. I've advocated for the Colombian film, A Poet, which is very good. And also the Canadian film, which I'll be talking about a little later. The Things You Kill, which is excellent. Ah, a preview of Your Ten Best.

6:00I see. Yeah, there are people who like Belen, which is Amazon is behind, MGM and Amazon. And that's from Argentina. There are people who, I saw a movie called Father, which I liked very much. That's going to be a possibility for the shortlist. And there's some strong movies in there. uh people advocate for the japanese film kukuho which is gorgeous i've seen that yeah yeah um so we'll see the short list is 15 so there's going to be plenty of candidates on there but in the end it's going to be four neon movies and one other in my humble point of view i think and that and that other might be the voice of henry job just i think so i mean that was the talk of Venice between the standing ovation and the protests and the fact that I think Venice really marked a sea change in Hollywood in attitudes about Gaza.

6:59And one of the things I've noticed this year is that the people who are really serious about competing in the international race know that they have to raise the money to compete. And competing means getting people to come to see your movie, getting people to see the screenings. And they offer food. If they offer food, people will come. It is that simple. And so that costs money. And so that you see people booking the Soho house, which is like 40, or the Ross house, which is like$40 ,000 a pop. You know, that's a lot of money. And you have to pay the moderators, whether it's a journalist or you get a celebrity to do it.

7:37That's right. Exactly. Exactly. We have, I don't do many of them, but they do come up. Okay, so then the next thing we have to look at is the recent spate of awards groups. Off the top of your head, Ryan, what is the takeaway? Who's looking weak? Wicked for good is not getting a Best Picture nomination. I'm smiling. So what gets in instead? Probably another international movie. there's space maybe the secret agent yeah yeah i think brazil brazil has a huge voting block as we learned last year i mean i'm still here got in so no and this is because uh wicked for good managed nominations for cynthia arrivo and ariana grande and the music uh maybe something else i'm forgetting they didn't get into comedy musical which is huge yeah they ended up in the box office category and the truth of the matter is is that the box office is weakening at this point it's not the blockbuster that everybody thought so word of mouth isn't that good that's what happens when you split your movie in two you also split your dividends no they still made a lot of money well of course but they're not they're not crying in their beer at this point but cynthia arrivo's nomination is not secure at all.

9:06And partly because it's Ariana Grande's movie. And so she'll get in. But I was quite confident that she would win. And I'm no longer feeling so, so clear about that. I don't either. I mean, I still go back to when you look at that, she's her singing is amazing. But when you look at that performance, with the singing taken out of it, I don't think that her acting is that strong. It's just the singing. Yeah, I agree. With the comparison being another singing Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner of recent times, Ariana DeBose, her performance as Anita was very good when she wasn't singing. We're talking about West Side Story.

9:49Yeah, West Side Story. Okay, yeah, I agree with that. Some people like Ariana Grande's performance, I would argue. She's gotten some good reviews. I'm not so critical of her as you are but I'm critical of the movie you and I agree on that and so I was predicting that it would get in there for costumes again or production design again I'm not so sure about all of the crafts and everything else the other one that didn't make it at the Globes was Avatar Fire and Ash it got into the box office thing and it got VFX and that's the only nomination it got from the Critics' Choice Awards. Did enough people see it, though?

10:28Did it? I mean, you know what I mean? It was very late in screening. And what they did at the Critics' Choice was there was a ballot for all the different categories, both above the line and below the line. And you had to write in Avatar if you wanted to include it. I wrote it in in a couple of... I wrote it in for sound and for VFX, but other people... VFX was the only thing it ended up getting. Yeah, well, I'll report back on that one. Yeah, later. You're going to see it with your family at Christmas. And then the top 10 AFI did include Avatar and Wicked, but that's an American list. That list is American, and frankly, that list caters to the studios.

11:16The studio movies are always on there. They rarely go outside that box also because a lot of those people are on their board. I understand perfectly. So anyway, that's where we are. The other one, George Clooney is in and out. He didn't get Critics' Choice. He did get Globes, but they have more categories. And then the Jay Kelly didn't get what it should have gotten in both of those groups. So we're looking at Jay Kelly, as we predicted all along, falling out on the best picture race. OK, we get to do the 10 bests now. Yes. OK, so we're going to start with 10. And I'll let you go first. Your 10th film of the year.

12:02Yeah, so I'm going to go right for the abstruse and arcane right out of the gate. My number 10 is a film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, one of my favorite filmmakers, Japanese director, called Cloud, which Janice Films released this year, premiered at Venice last year. This filmmaker is a master of quiet, creeping dread. He directed a film called Cure in the 1990s that took influence from Seven and has been very influential for all serial killer movies. This movie is about a factory worker who's selling stolen goods online, becomes increasingly poisoned by this contraband life that he's living. Kurosawa tends to make these horror movies or these melodramas in Japan, but this one is an ode to American movies and an ode to Sam Peckinpah and ends in this sort of very sparsely choreographed cat-and-a-mouse shootout that is deprived of all the spectacle of something like one battle after another, which obviously will be on my list.

12:55It will come up later. My 10th is Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie's solo triumph. I went to see it a second time. They showed it and Timmy showed up along with the rest of the cast. I have to say that on second viewing, the movie is revealed to be really well made, really well directed, really well acted, all of the above. And I was very, I just settled in and had a good time on the second viewing. The first time I was pummeled, I felt like I had been beat up. And the people who I spoke to afterwards, they had a party at the Chateau Marmont. They were, they felt beat up. You know, you could see that they were still processing the movie because it goes by at a really good clip, you know, and it's, it just moves very fast.

13:50It's very propulsive. Um, but what I really, the reason I predicted that Timothee Chalamet would win Best Actor, uh, Oscar this year, as, as I still do, um, he really, um, calibrates this really shallow, awful, despicable guy All he cares about is winning this ping pong match at all costs. You know that he cares about the woman that he's involved with, who he's known his whole life. You do get that message, but it still doesn't matter. He's going to go for the ping pong first. And at the very end of the movie, he's redeemed. And I thought that it was very well handled by Josh Safdie and Timothee Chalamet so that he could actually win an Oscar for playing this awful person in a movie.

14:45Yeah, I love a character with no moral center. Obviously, that goes back to 70s, New Hollywood type of movies, which I think Marty Supreme is in concert with. I agree. I saw this movie a second time and it totally blossomed for me. I will say that Timothee Chalamet is being a little bit bane-glorious, if you will. He's not handling some of the PR comments. No, he needs to dial that down. And a lot of that is limited to planet Twitter. But there's a pattern of this. And this goes back to whatever. It was SAG. That he won. He said, I'm aiming for greatness. Yeah. And then he said that he's been giving consistently top of the line level performances in the last seven or eight years, which is a bold claim from someone of his.

15:32It's okay for it to be true, but it's not okay for him to say it. No, he needs humility. Yeah, but how would he have any? The world that he lives in is set up to burnish his shine at all times and in all places. He's young. He's still young. He hasn't turned 30 yet, or he just did. What is the birth date? He is going to be 30 on December 27th. I'm sure he will find a way to work that into his Oscar campaign. All right. So what is your ninth entry? number nine is a movie that i think was unfairly dumped in many ways which is heda directed by nia da costa uh actually you know what i'm going to qualify that i think amazon mgm has done a lot for for this film in the sense that i see a lot of interviews and they're advertising as well advertising it but it was in theaters for a week and i didn't i didn't i don't know anyone Back when it opened, there was no attention on it.

16:35It's only awards attention that we're picking up on right now. Yeah, they should have been pushing that one earlier. Because I think this movie is a hell of a time. Really great performances from Tessa Thompson and Nina Haas. And I love how Nia DaCosta reinvented this Henrik Ibsen play to make Haas' character a woman. It makes for all kinds of twisty, saucy, bisexual triangle madness. It's a really fun movie. I love it, too. I love Hedda. My number nine is 28 Years Later. Danny Boyle returns to this franchise, if you like. I don't know why. It seems to have receded into the distance because it opened earlier in the year.

17:22But it's one of the best made movies of the year. It is incredibly rich and dense and scary and visual and oral. And when you get to the mother played by Jodie Comer and you wreck it, you realize, you know, what her performance has been throughout the film. It's just great. It's great. 28 Years Later is one of the best movies of the year. It's one of the more saccharine entries in the 28 franchise. I don't agree with that at all. As Danny Boyle is wont to do. I am really hoping for Nia Dacosta to inject more nihilistic energy in the next movie, especially with Jack O 'Connell basically playing a Jimmy Savile type of person seemingly in this next movie.

18:02I'm really excited for how twisted that's going to be. That said, I think this movie has great cinematography. Well, it does. It does. And they did some innovative things with iPhones and other stuff. All right. What's your number eight? My number eight is a movie that premiered at Venice 2023 out of Georgia called April, directed by Dea Kolumbagashvili. This filmmaker who went through hell to get this movie made, which is about an obstetrician who's performing illegal abortions in a town that the filmmaker grew up in. And this filmmaker, while embedding herself back in her local community, watched a woman that she knew die in front of her.

18:40And she knew the person who killed her and the chief of police who arrested that killer and attacked him. So it was a very personal project for her. And it doesn't feel like a social message movie. It's just a very extraordinarily arresting, dreamlike, beautiful piece of cinema that has haunted and disturbed me since I saw it almost two years ago, over two years ago. And she's never going to be allowed to make a movie in Georgia again. You know, that's how transgressive this movie is. And thankfully, she is working on a project with Ari Aster and Emma Stone's Fruit Tree. So that's great. So I think her next movie might be more Western accommodating because this movie is challenging, but it's very, very strong.

19:22OK, another one I haven't seen, she said. All right. My number eight is Blue Moon. I have to commend Richard Linklater. I could have put Novel Vogue in here too, one or the other. Just I didn't want to give up two slots to Richard Linklater. But it's, they're both great movies. They're both movies that no one else would have made. They're both movies that were in, you know, sort of simmering on the back burner for a really long time before they did get made. He was waiting, Linklater, for Ethan Hawke to become old enough to play Lorenz, the songwriter who's an alcoholic and on his last legs, his last short legs.

20:10and so Blue Moon is an extraordinary movie. I mean, no, it is just, you know, takes place all in one night, the night Oklahoma opens. There's a scene on the staircase between Lorenz Hart and Richard Rogers, and it is really amazing. Andrew Scott plays his former partner, who's trying to be nice to him, but he wants to celebrate his victory lap with Oklahoma, and it's the end of Lorenz Hart's career. It's the end of his life, really. And it's one of the saddest movies I've ever watched and I wept at the end of it. Yeah, I love that movie too. It's the best Linklater movie since boyhood. And I saw a tweet, I wish that I'd come up with this, saying that the movie is sort of about the chaos of showing up at your ex's wedding and bringing your rebound.

21:01I thought that perfectly encapsulated the vibes of this movie and that rebound, if you will, being Margaret Qualley. Okay, my number seven is, I mentioned this movie earlier, directed by Ali Reza Khatami. It is the Canadian entry and it played for a blip of a moment in theaters earlier this fall, which is called The Things You Kill. It won a directing award in world cinema at Sundance. It was shot in Turkey because Iranian censors rejected it. And it is about a literature professor who is seeking revenge for the possible murder of his mother. But the movie in the second half takes a very significant shift to become something more experimental and something that I pitched earlier as Lost Highway by way of Albus Kerstami.

21:49I will be really surprised, to be honest, if this makes the shortlist, because it's a movie that's really dwelling in symbolism and unease and hypnotic atmosphere and presents a really unusual, emasculated portrait of a Muslim man. It's a great movie. I'm gonna have to catch up with that one as well. My number seven is another mainstream title. It's Frankenstein. It's Guillermo del Toro. And I saw this one for a second time and I just, I don't know, maybe we take Guillermo del Toro for granted a little bit. He just consistently delivers the most extraordinary visuals, the most extraordinary stories.

22:30This movie was close to his heart. He's been trying to make it his entire life since he was a kid. He loved Frankenstein the monster. And the kismet that allowed Jacob Elordi to be the one, they were originally going to go with Andrew Garfield, but he wasn't available. They ended up with Jacob Elordi at the last minute. And he turned out to be a remarkable Frankenstein. And he's done very well with it. And I just found this movie extraordinarily extraordinarily beautiful and sad and just an extraordinary achievement for Guillermo del Toro. And I want to include it on my list. I admire the achievement of this movie.

23:13I feel like he might take himself for granted a little bit. I wish you would go back to something that's a little more dangerous and scary and risky, like Devil's Backbone or Kronos or even Pan's labyrinth the other thing i want to say about frankenstein for all of his touting of fuck ai and having real artisans craft people on the set um a tactility in the production design making their own fabric yeah but there's something about everything in this movie still kind of looks like cgi to me it it isn't but he uses it he still uses it i i i have to i know this sounds weird but But that whole opening sequence, that framing sequence in the Arctic with Mads Mikkelsen's brother playing the captain and all the stuff that they do to try to kill the beast that is attacking them that can't be killed and all of that stuff.

24:14I just loved all of that. That was my favorite part, the part in the Arctic. It was so well made. It was so scary. It wasn't scary to me because the beast is invincible. It doesn't matter what you hurl at the beast. He is untouchable. And to me, that took suspense and scares out of that scene. But whatever. But then the way that it ends up, you know, which is the scene between him and his father played played by Oscar Isaac. I was moved. I was moved by that. I thought it worked. I thought that whole arc and, you know, it's a father son story. Finally, a horrible father, a brutal, abusive father.

24:52But nonetheless, that's where it had to go. Yeah, I will say Jacob Elordi is great in this movie and definitely the sexiest Frankenstein's monster. He still manages to look great, even under all of those prostheses by Mike Hill. My number six is Urchin, directed by Harris Dickinson. One of the best. I would put it as maybe the well, I have another directorial debut on this list. One of the best directing debuts of the year. Just when you think Harris Dickinson can't possibly be good at everything. He delivers a fully formed directorial debut right out of the gate with Frank Delane, kind of playing a version of the David Thewlis character in Mike Lee's Naked.

25:38Though here he is a homeless drug addict who is falling down one more time again and again, barely seeking redemption, making one bad decision after another. And yet Harris Dickinson, because of his writing and directing, manages to make the character sympathetic and compelling nonetheless. It's a great movie. It's a great movie that you and I both loved out of can. Yeah, just heard more. I have another best first film, which is not on my 10 best. I'm just giving it that category, best first film. And I'm just going to stick that in right now. And that's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, which is a movie that was at Telluride a year ago.

26:19And it's M. Beth Davids' screenwriting and directing debut. She's also, she's an actress. You may remember her from Schindler's List and other films. Matilda, Miss Honey. That's right. So she's really amazing in this. I mean, this is an amazing movie that I, it's an adaptation of a book. And I just, I just think everybody should go see this thing because she, she really nailed it. My number six is One Battle After Another. I finally get to Paul Thomas Anderson. and I actually have a screening of that so that I get to see it a second time, which I'm looking forward to. I cannot wait to see what this one does on the second viewing.

27:02I think this movie is not only a great performance from Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn and Tiana Taylor and Chase Infinity, the great discovery. It's a father-daughter story. It's a story of a deadbeat kind of deadbeat is the wrong word a story of a kind of slacker a kind of dude you know inspired by by uh the the the great big lebowski you know the the the net the that uh wardrobe choice with with with the uh uh bathrobe is very much from from that movie um i just want it it is a very tight, very taut, very, and again, another movie that was been in development for years, that finally came together.

27:53And the other story that I love about this movie is that the person who is getting nominated, along with Leo and Chase and Sean, is Benicio del Toro. And the story of how he came on set and had a whole set of ideas for what he should do with his sensei character, and they just stopped production and built sets and did what he wanted to accommodate his ideas. And that just tells you something a lot about how PTA can run with it when he needs to. It's just a great movie. It's funny, and it's intense, and it makes sense emotionally. And it's also about what's going on in our country in a way that nobody could have predicted, and therefore it deserves to do very, as well as it's doing, by the way, it is the front runner for the Best Picture Oscar.

28:44That's something we learned from all the different awards groups last week. Yeah, I mean, I think if you were paying attention, I think we could have predicted what the movie is gonna reflect about the current times. I digress. I will come back to One Battle in a minute. I'm right there with you on it. My number five is Pillian, directed by Harry Leighton. I couldn't quite figure out. This is one of those ones where they did a qualifying release and then it's coming out in January. But whatever. Here it is on my list because I think this is the best directing debut of the year. You have Alexander Skarsgård as a leather dom who is in a relationship that begins as sort of BDSM transactional with Harry Melling and then evolves into something different that's more tender and romantic.

29:30This is really it's like I wish this movie were coming out at Christmas because it almost feels like a Richard Curtis kind of a movie. It's really that has that cozy rom-com vibe, but with graphic gay sex in it. It's a great movie, and I almost put it on my 10 best list. It was close. It was very close. My number five is Hamnet. Chloe Zhao's Shakespearean drama, family drama. dominated, as she obviously chose to do, by the performance by Jesse Buckley. It's an earthy, incredibly primal performance, childbirth, death, love, everything. And she's not and intellectual. Her husband is Shakespeare, played by Paul Meskel.

30:21And as great as Jesse Buckley is in this, and Chloe Zhao worked with the writer Maggie O 'Farrell to write the script and create this immersive period world. I mean, these people are wearing dirty clothes. They have dirt under their fingernails. It's all very believable. The part that Paul Meskel plays is actually more difficult, I think, and more problematic even. And so it is a fascinating duality that Chloe Zhao creates. And it comes to an extraordinary conclusion at the Globe Theatre, at the very first performance of Hamlet, inspired in this story by the death of the child Hamnet. And I commend this.