'Superman' Is Here, What Did We Think?; Debating the 100 Best Movies of the Century; Lena Dunham's Return to TV

7:52Anne Thompson:No, I don't agree with that.

7:52Ryan Lattanzio:I actually didn't think it was silly enough or serious enough. It was somewhere in the middle between the two. I didn't buy that he would... He's a journalist at the paper of note. Like, you're not supposed to be that stupid. That's not making us look good.

8:08Anne Thompson:Well, no.

8:09Ryan Lattanzio:Also, when you're a journalist, you're not that... Gullible. Gullible and naive. I was going to say gorgeous. That too.

8:17Anne Thompson:That's why they had to slam the... They didn't bother with the glasses at all, really. No, they gave up on that. Yeah, that was good. No, but there was good chemistry between him and Rachel Brosnahan. And she's never looked more beautiful. I really was quite taken with her on this one.

8:30Ryan Lattanzio:A little motion smoothing on the face, I think.

8:33Anne Thompson:No.

8:34Ryan Lattanzio:I think a little motion smoothing on everybody's faces in this movie, no?

8:37Anne Thompson:Ryan, do they do it to everyone? Even when they're under 30? No, yeah. 35?

8:42Ryan Lattanzio:Did you see that teaser for the new season of The Morning Show? It was just completely... Oh, forget about them. Completely airbrushed. They're plastic now.

8:50Anne Thompson:They're completely plastic. So I did get to see this extraordinary movie that did win the Palme d 'Or at Cannes. It's a really cool movie because it starts out, your sympathies at the very beginning are with one character rather than another, and your assumptions about the other character. Let's say there's a smooth and elegant character and a more scruffy and angry and upset character who's tracking this guy with a limp, and you don't know why. And eventually you find out why, and you find out that your sympathies shift very radically to the other character and to a group of people that he pulls around him trying to identify this guy.

9:31Anne Thompson:Was he the guy who tortured them? It becomes very intense with a lot of angry yelling and debating as they all try to decide what is the right thing to do. You know, do they behave like the people that tortured them or do they try to rise above that and do something else? It's a really well done movie. It got a little heavy in the yelling in the middle.

9:55Ryan Lattanzio:So Jafar Panahi based this movie on his experiences being incarcerated multiple times in Iran, becoming basically embargoed for making films. You know, I don't know how familiar you are with his other movies, but Taxi is not a film, no bears. He's usually a main character in them by necessity. That's the way that the filmmaking operates. He has to be in it because he is barred from making narrative films. And so the movie then, in a way, becomes about his own filmmaking process of trying to make the movie in secret. And so this is his most kind of straightforward movie, I would say, in a while.

10:27Ryan Lattanzio:And closer to this sort of realist tradition that I think his earlier movies are really trying to rebuke. The realist tradition I'm talking of of someone like Oscar Farhadi. Panahi's movies usually have a kind of Brechtian quality where you are aware of the armature. I didn't have him here.

10:41Anne Thompson:This is a story.

10:41Ryan Lattanzio:Not at all. Yeah, exactly. You know, it kind of reminds me. I was thinking about this. Do you remember this Roman Polanski movie, Death and the Maiden?

10:48Anne Thompson:Hmm.

10:49Ryan Lattanzio:Which is about Sigourney River. I do remember that. It was a torture movie. Figuring out in South America that maybe this guy is her former torturer and what am I going to do about it?

10:56Anne Thompson:So the movie's going to open October 15th. Panahi has been traveling. He's been back to Iran. He's been traveling. He was in Australia. He was in Europe. and now he's going to go back to Iran again. And so the question is whether they'll, I guess they're letting him come and go. I hope there isn't going to be any problem bringing him back because we, you know, Neon is definitely going to be pushing hard for this movie.

11:17Ryan Lattanzio:And October 15th means we'll see it at New York Film Festival. I'm sure they'll bring him out for that. Telluride, possibly, we're thinking. Probably Toronto as well. It'll probably hit all of those. That's right.

11:27Anne Thompson:I'm sure it will be one of the top five international feature films at the end of the year. I'm not so sure whether it would make it to best picture. That's a big question for me. If it's a weak year, it's interesting. Gold Derby has started already. I actually went in and did my picks already. It's too early. It's silly. But I do the ones that I've seen. The only one I cheated on was Wicked because I saw the first one.

11:53Ryan Lattanzio:Everyone's assuming that's at the top of everybody's list.

11:56Anne Thompson:There's a lot of love for that. So I went in. Cynthia Erivo, sure. I mean, you know.

12:01Ryan Lattanzio:A lot of love for a movie no one's seen.

12:03Anne Thompson:Yeah, exactly. So we'll see. We'll see. I should probably remain pure. But at any rate, if you think my lists look really weird, that's why.

12:12Ryan Lattanzio:Let's think about how many international movies are going to be in the Best Picture race. Because, yeah, sentimental value, that's locked in there. That's definitely.

12:19Anne Thompson:Sinners is at the top of all of everybody. Right.

12:21Ryan Lattanzio:Everyone's thinking that sinners could win. But we have a lot left to see.

12:24Anne Thompson:We have a lot left to see. There's some canned films that are, because I saw them, you know, I'm giving them some credence. Things like the Lynne Ramsey movie with the wonderful Jennifer Lawrence, that's going to fall away.

12:38Ryan Lattanzio:Everyone's got that on their list. I don't understand it. I don't either. They're going to need to make some editorial changes to that movie if it's going to be bad.

12:45Anne Thompson:Well, I've heard it went back in the editing room.

12:46Ryan Lattanzio:I heard that too.

12:48Anne Thompson:So I think they're planning, they're hoping to push the Panahi for the French entry. He's got papers in France. There's a lot of French money in it. So I think that's what's going to happen there. The other candidate would be something like Richard Linklater's New Bill Hough. Which is not going to happen over Panahi.

13:08Ryan Lattanzio:No, but Netflix has that one. So they're going to be pushing it for various other. They are.

13:12Anne Thompson:I love the movie. I love the movie. And I hope it has other Oscar potential. And I could see Panahi getting into director. I could see that happening.

13:21Ryan Lattanzio:Now there's multiple international directors.

13:24Anne Thompson:Joaquin Krier. You know, so Sentimental Value is the other big one that I think will do very well with Stellan Skarsgård and your lovely Renata. You know, she'll get in there.

13:33Ryan Lattanzio:And yeah, no, I mean, that one will be at all those festivals I just mentioned. And also, you know, the trailer that came out recently did reveal to people that Anders Danielson Lee is also in the movie, which, you know, was one of her love interests and the worst person in the world. And so people are really excited about that reunion as well.

13:52Anne Thompson:Oh, that'll be good. So I saw a couple of movies that are opening this week. One of them is M. Beth Davids' Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, which is based on a novel, which is why they've held on to this difficult-to-remember title.

14:05Ryan Lattanzio:The title is impossible. Yeah. No, I saw it on a screener during Telluride last year. I did like it. And this is M. Beth Davids' directorial debut. She wrote it.

14:16Anne Thompson:She directed it. There's no evidence that she's ever made a short or anything else. She has done writing in her spare time. She's an actress. You may remember her from Schindler's List. That was her big breakout role. But she's raised her children. Now she loved this book. She related to it because she had a similar experience when she moved to South Africa. And so she really identified with this, and she figured out to tell the story from the point of view of this little girl. I can't say how good this movie is. It's very good. It's very well made.

14:53Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, it's rare to see a story so rooted and so well told from the eyes of a child like this. And she's, you know, she's observing.

15:01Anne Thompson:Kind of a feral child.

15:02Ryan Lattanzio:She's a little bit feral. She's observing racism and violence in her extremely alcoholic mother in South Africa. The actress is named Lexi Venter. And there's an interesting story that you learned about her from your interview, which is that they basically could only shoot the movie three hours a day due to child labor laws, which kind of drove M. Beth Davids a little crazy.

15:21Anne Thompson:And it made her get what she needed. It was an interesting question of how that worked.

15:26Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. You know, I grew up on M. Beth Davids. I mean, I saw Schillner's List in middle school or something, and that's a movie that's dear to me now. But I knew her as Miss Honey from Matilda. That's right.

15:36Anne Thompson:She's in that.

15:37Ryan Lattanzio:Yes. Yes.

15:38Anne Thompson:She did have a few big roles.

15:40Ryan Lattanzio:And she's really good at Mad Men as well as Lame Price is White.

15:43Anne Thompson:That's right. And she did a lot of good TV. She's been more recently. She was on The Morning Show. She's not planning to go back to acting. She's going to pursue this, and I hope she does. It's rare. It is rare to see a movie this well done.

15:58Ryan Lattanzio:And by an actor. First time out, yes. It reminds me of Greta Gerwig a little bit, who really broke out with Lady Bird,

16:04Anne Thompson:you know having been working as an actress for years and years and years.

16:08Ryan Lattanzio:Greta Lee speaking of she's just announced that she's making her directorial debut. A lot of a lot of actresses are doing that now.

16:14Anne Thompson:Yeah.

16:15Ryan Lattanzio:The Kristen Stewart movie from Kent. That's true. Nobody's bought that yet.

16:18Anne Thompson:And Scarlett Johansson herself.

16:20Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah.

16:20Anne Thompson:That's called Eleanor the Great.

16:22Ryan Lattanzio:I haven't seen that one yet but I'll get to it. That seems very Toronto friendly. Totally.

16:28Anne Thompson:100%. Yeah. So you have seen a TV series that you wanted to tell me about, Lena Dunham's?

16:35Ryan Lattanzio:Yes, Too Much. Too Much. The Lena Dunham series, Too Much, but just premiered today. I've watched the entire thing. Well, okay, I am a really big... I am in the top percentile of girls fans. I love girls. I love girls. Girls even...

16:48Anne Thompson:Nora and I watched that together when it came out.

16:50Ryan Lattanzio:Oh, I agree. Everyone's doing a girls rewatch now, or they were doing one last year. I do a girls rewatch every year. it's become the successor to Sex and the City for me where it's like a show that's kind of just on a lot of the time as I'm doing other things and so Lena Dunham had some other projects that were hit and miss she did a show immediately after called Camping that she wasn't in she directed that movie Sharpstick that I don't know that either of us was a big fan of yeah it was pretty unbearable

17:16Anne Thompson:and she did the one that was really good though

17:18Ryan Lattanzio:Catherine Calberti and you liked that one which I never thought

17:21Anne Thompson:it was set in the medieval times it was really intense It was beautiful. It was well made.

17:26Ryan Lattanzio:And this show stars Megan Stalter, who I don't know if you watch Hacks or not, but she is a breakout of that. Before that, she's an internet comedian. She's basically a girl who is going through a really bad breakup. She works in the film industry. Her life hits rock bottom. She moves to London. She meets this sort of bad boy musician, who I don't really think is that bad, to be honest, but you can be the judge. It's played by Will Sharp.

17:49Anne Thompson:We like him.

17:50Ryan Lattanzio:White Lotus Season 2.

17:51Anne Thompson:He's one of those multi-talented people, sort of annoyingly good at everything that he does.

17:56Ryan Lattanzio:Also a good musician, as you learned from this show, because he's playing a version of Lena Dunham's husband, kind of, named Louis Felber, who's also a musician. There's a lot of autobiographical elements.

18:07Anne Thompson:So she's still married to another musician. Wasn't she married to...

18:10Ryan Lattanzio:She was never married to Jack Antonoff. Oh. But the guy who plays Megan Stalter's boyfriend in this is a bit of an amalgam of all of Lena Dunham's ex-boyfriends. But there's a lot of Jack Antonoff in that guy. And a little bit in the Will Sharp character, I would say. Anyway, it's 10 episodes. It's really like a tribute to Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary, those kind of things. I'm going to love it. Yeah, Four Weddings. She modeled it after kind of British rom-coms. Oh, I'm in. Oh, you're going to love it. And it's got Richard E. Grant. Naomi Watts is in there. Janisca Bravo. There's other people.

18:42Anne Thompson:Speaking of Janisca Bravo, she directed one of the best episodes on The Bear, episode four.

18:49Ryan Lattanzio:Of this season?

18:50Anne Thompson:Of this new season. That's interesting. It's a standalone episode that has to do with the Iowa Dibburi character getting her hair done. And Danielle Dudweiler plays the hairdresser. It's great. It's a great episode.

19:03Ryan Lattanzio:That's interesting because I heard from someone else on the staff that that was not a good episode. I haven't watched The Bear this season, so I'm going to catch up so we can... Yeah, we should do The Bear. We should put that on. We can really get into it.

19:14Anne Thompson:I haven't finished it yet.

19:15Ryan Lattanzio:But you have some TV to recommend as well.

19:17Anne Thompson:Oh, I fell into this series that's set in Scotland, written by Scott Frank. And I'm a big Scott Frank fan. I just, you know, I loved Queen's Gambit, for example. And he is adapting a novel. And it's about this guy played by Matthew Goode, this cop who gets wounded and comes out of it angry and just lashing out. at everyone around him. And you know what the arc is going to be. He puts a group together. He has to solve this cold case. And there's a parallel narrative, which is the cold case. It is a very dark, very well-made, very well-written, acted series. I was quite taken with it.

19:59Ryan Lattanzio:All right. Well, you said very dark, so I guess I know. I'll be watching that one.

20:03Anne Thompson:I have to say I've been watching a lot of violent series, but that's just the way it goes. All right. So what did you think of this New York Times list, the top hundred of the century?

20:15Ryan Lattanzio:It's interesting that Parasite was the number one choice. I think there's a little bit of recency bias there, I got to say, even though there were a lot of 2023 movies that were down further in a list like Anatomy of a Fall and Oppenheimer. I think for like the directors and the people that were pulled on this list. No critics. No critics. This Parasite winning Best Picture was a profound historical moment. It was the first foreign language movie to win Best Picture from South Korea. And then it was like, then a month later, we had COVID. And so it was like, it almost felt for a couple of years, like it was like the last great movie.

20:48Anne Thompson:It's imprinted in people's minds, but it's also one of the rare movies that is simultaneously hugely entertaining, very deep, has a lot of strong ideas in it. It's about something that's very relevant to our times, the disparity in income between the rich and the poor. And it was beautifully done. It's just one of those movies that captured the time, the zeitgeist perfectly.

21:14Ryan Lattanzio:And it's emotional. It delivers on emotion, which is very good.

21:17Anne Thompson:And it's funny. It's hilariously funny.

21:19Ryan Lattanzio:But looking at some of those top 10 movies, like, are people rewatching Parasite more than they are things like No Country for Old Men, which is a movie I watch like once a year, or There Will Be Blood, or any of these other movies? That did very well.

21:31Anne Thompson:That ended up on my top 10. That is on mine as well. I was a little bit annoyed that Christopher Nolan got five mentions. I don't mind PTA getting four, Alfonso Cuaron four, Joel and Ethan. They have this weird thing where Joel Cohen gets four and Ethan gets three. They did them together. David Fincher, three. Quentin Tarantino, three. And only ten women made the list. And they were all one each. You've got Tony Erdman. Mara Nott. And you've got the aforementioned Lady Bird, The Hurt Locker, which I put on my top 10, Trier.

22:06Ryan Lattanzio:Of course.

22:07Anne Thompson:And I was glad to see Fish Tank get on there.

22:10Ryan Lattanzio:I do. I love that one.

22:11Anne Thompson:That's a good one. Yeah, it's really good. I was surprised by that. Past Lives, Recency Bias again. And of course, After Sun. That was high on there. Charlotte Wells. And then Dayton and Faris. That's a husband and wife team who did Little Miss Sunshine.

22:25Ryan Lattanzio:Weird that that one did get on. I feel like that movie's kind of faded from...

22:29Anne Thompson:That's another example of a movie that was not only hugely entertaining, and it was written by Michael Arndt, one of the great screenplays.

22:39Ryan Lattanzio:Sundance twee a little bit, I would say.

22:42Anne Thompson:I would argue that that held on because so many people loved it.

22:45Ryan Lattanzio:You know, there's no Jane Campion on this list. I was really upset about that. You think, is the power of the dog on your top ten?

22:52Anne Thompson:No, I didn't put the power of the dog on my top ten. Okay, there you go. And there it is. So you have these people. You have all these 500 people, and it's fun. It's really fun to go in and dig into all their individual lists, which are way more idiosyncratic than the final list is. And you see that there's this consensus that was built by the mainstream, the ones that overlapped, the ones that concurred. It was all about the ones that everybody agreed on. So you looked at the top 100. How many have you seen? 98. Good. What am I? Three I missed.

23:25Ryan Lattanzio:Okay, so that's awesome.

23:26Anne Thompson:So The Gleaners and I, we both haven't seen that. And then I haven't seen Old Boy and Yee Yee.

23:31Ryan Lattanzio:And I've never seen A Prophet, the Charlotte Moodyard film, which apparently is on your top 10 list.

23:35Anne Thompson:It is. It is. I'm going to do my top 10. I think we both have No Country for Old Men.

23:40Ryan Lattanzio:Yes.

23:41Anne Thompson:I have A Prophet. I have The Tree of Life. You would disagree with that?

23:46Ryan Lattanzio:You know, I only saw it the one time in the theater and it didn't resonate with me. I just was very...

23:50Anne Thompson:It's so beautiful.

23:52Ryan Lattanzio:All this twirling around.

23:53Anne Thompson:I know. When you look at the subsequent movies, it takes away from it a little bit. But I think you have to just look at that movie as the one.

24:01Ryan Lattanzio:It's too late now. It's like self-parodic. Right. Just looking back at Tree of Life.

24:06Anne Thompson:Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Spirited Away. That's my animated film.

24:10Ryan Lattanzio:These are all good.

24:11Anne Thompson:There are only four animated films. The other three are Pixar.

24:14Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, Ratatouille, Wall-E. And Up.

24:17Anne Thompson:Mad Max Fury Road.

24:19Ryan Lattanzio:You'd have that on there.

24:21Anne Thompson:And The Hurt Locker. had to have one woman director in there at least. And then Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Parasite, I Succumb, and Melancholia.

24:32Ryan Lattanzio:Well, I don't have any women directors on mine because I tried to be honest about what were my favorites, but Melancholia is on mine. That would probably be my number one or two.

24:40Anne Thompson:I love it.

24:41Ryan Lattanzio:No Country for Old Men, Synecdoche, New York.

24:44Anne Thompson:No.

24:44Ryan Lattanzio:Yes. I love that movie. There's like four Michael Hanukkah movies that I was trying to figure out which one I would put on there. And it's like between Caché and The Piano Teacher, but I'm going to go with The Piano Teacher.

24:54Anne Thompson:I was going to put Amor on there.

24:56Ryan Lattanzio:Well, Amor was on the top 100 list. It's interesting about Amor is because I think a lot of people see it as Hanukkah's heart softening a bit, but I actually think that he's still manipulating the audience.

25:06Anne Thompson:Oh, he's tough.

25:07Ryan Lattanzio:So I had two David Lynch movies, Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive.

25:12Anne Thompson:Oh, Ryan.

25:13Ryan Lattanzio:Both of them are on there. Those are two of my favorite movies ever. Yi Yi, which is a movie that you haven't seen that I actually didn't see until a few years ago. I saw it at Philmont Lincoln Center. It played, and I just became obsessed with it. It's this huge saga of a Taiwanese family, but it's like any melodrama, and it's almost soap operatic in some ways, but directed by Edward Yang with more of a spare approach. I picked an Epichepong Wirosethical movie, Tropical Malady. I had to put a gay movie on there in some way, and that's, I think, the most interesting one, but that would be on the 500.

25:46Anne Thompson:And it's made it to the top 100.

25:48Ryan Lattanzio:Or I thought about maybe putting Weekend on there, but I went with Tropical Malady, Inside Llewyn Davis, which was on the top 100 list, and Gone Girl. So you had two Coen brothers. I did. I had two Coen brothers.

26:00Anne Thompson:See, I looked at Gone Girl, and I thought, why is that on the list? I don't even get why anyone would put it on the list. That movie has - Gone Girl is not that good.

26:10Ryan Lattanzio:Oh, that movie is dear to my heart.

26:12Anne Thompson:It's a good, solid thriller. I like it. It's well made. Everybody's good in it. It's just not elevated in any way.

26:18Ryan Lattanzio:It's very elevated, and it's deeper, and it's darker than you remember, I think. And it's because it really takes a very cold knife to the whole facade of American marriage and the marriage industrial complex. It's a very deep movie, and I think there's so many series and films that have tried to imitate it since then, and there's nothing quite as good. And it's like David Fincher directs with a pair of tweezers, and I think this is his most entertaining and best executed version of that.

26:50Anne Thompson:It may be his most entertaining movie, but it may not be his best movie. I am excited that they're going to do a sequel to The Social Network, and they might even bring back Jesse Eisenberg.

27:00Ryan Lattanzio:But it doesn't sound like they're bringing back David Fincher in any form.

27:03Anne Thompson:No. And then the other thing I'm excited about is David Fincher directing the Tarantino script. with Brad Pitt coming back.

27:12Ryan Lattanzio:And on Netflix. That's right. Possibly just to streaming. I don't even know if they're going to push to have it in theaters. I don't know that David Fincher really cares about that that much.

27:20Anne Thompson:No, he might if there's Oscars involved. He might. There's such an enormous awards complex at Netflix that if there's a chance, they'll probably pursue it. It doesn't kill them to put it in a theater for a week or two.

27:34Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I guess they did that with The Killer, the last Fincher movie that I don't really think had much of a chance at the Oscars. And then, well, Manc, we all watched on our computer or TV at home. And that movie was intolerable to me. Well, thanks for coming into the New York office, Anne. It was great seeing you here. Next week, we're going to have Marcus Jones on to talk about the Emmy nominations, because those are happening on Tuesday, July 15th.

27:57Anne Thompson:And I'll be traveling, so I'm going to miss that one. But I'll be back for the one after that.

28:02Ryan Lattanzio:Well, we'll see you then.

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