It's Just Like The Movies

She’s here! At last! I haven’t been watching movies at the breakneck pace I was last year, and some night notice this edition of the Fifties came out a bit later in the year than the 2024 edition. Still, I’d like to think the time spent really paid off, and while I’m smart enough to promise more writing on here again, I can at least say I’m proud of the stuff I’ve been working on. Thanks to the homies who I’ve been bouncing this piece off, and the folks whose love and support has kept me going. Love y’all too. And now that I’ve temporarily stopped being a sap, here’s The Fifties for 2025!!

Films Seen: Afternoons of Solitude, April, Ash, The Ballad of Suzanne Cesare, Black Bag, Bring Her Back, Caught by the Tides, Cloud, Deaf President Now!, Death of a Unicorn, Dreams (Sex Love), Eephus, The Falling Sky, Final Destination: Bloodlines, From Ground Zero, Ghost Trail, Grand Tour, Julie Keeps Quiet, Jurassic World Rebirth, KPOP Demon Hunters, Invention, Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matogrosso, Love, M3GAN 2.0, Magic Farm, Mickey 17, Misericordia, The Monkey, The Naked Gun, A Nice Indian Boy, Nonnas, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, One of Them Days, Pepe, The Phoenician Scheme, Predator: Killer of Killers, Presence, Seven Veils, Sex, The Shrouds, Sister Midnight, Sisterhood, Sinners, Souleymane’s Story, Surviving Ohio State, To a Land Unknown, The Ugly Stepsister, Viet and Nam, Weapons.

Picture

• Afternoons of Solitude, prods Albert Serra, Pierre-Olivier Bardet, Luis Ferron, etc. – Aestheticizes the torero’s bloody pageantry while stripping its machinations bare, weighing the glory of gore against the world’s biggest balls.
• April, prods. Ilan Amouyal, Archil Gelovani, Luca Guadagnino, etc. – A horror film, not always in form but palpable in the social alienation of Nina’s work and the hostility she faces for doing it.
• Caught by the Tides, prod. Shôzô Ichiyama and Casper Liang Jiayan – Could’ve just been a greatest hits compilation, but this experimental ethnography still finishes with a bead on contemporary malaise and its eye towards the future.
• From Ground Zero, prods. Rashid Masharawi and Laura Nikolov – Brave, humane, essential storytelling under impossible circumstances, ranging from personal testimonies to hideous parables.
• Ghost Trail, prod. Pauline Seigland – The gutsy potential of its premise is borne out fully by its narrative and stylistic risk-taking.
• Grand Tour, prod. Filipa Reis – A slippery yarn of how love defines us, an ode to so many forms of artistic expression, and a globe-trotting adventure buoyed by irreconcilable fear.
• Julie Keeps Quiet, prods. Gilles Coulier, Gilles De Schryver, Wouter Sap, Roxane Sarkovzki, and Delphin Tomson – Character study of one young woman’s reticence and responsibility that honors her inward-facing crises in form and focus.
• On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, prods. Ed Guiney, Andrew Cole, and Henry B.J. Phiri – Hypnotic, unspooling its communal indictment with the cool precision that comes from incandescent outrage.
• Pepe, prod. Nelson Carlos de Las Santos Arias, Pablo Lozano, and Tonya Valette – A perfect companion to last year’s Dahomey, reckoning with fraught global histories through indelible figures. Formally and structurally risky.
• Viet and Nam, prods. Bradley Liew and Bianca Balbuena – An unlikely companion to Parallel Mothers, as romantic and familial bonds are challenged by ethical quandries and national tragedies.

Runners-Up: If I was doing ties for this top ten, I’d have paired up Ghost Trail with To a Land Unknown, as two formally adventurous and well-acted stagings of the immigrant experience through a pulp filter. While I never considered Invention for a slot here, it’s stuck with me far more than I expected, and I imagine I’ll keep holding it with me.

Director

• Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra – A live dissection, dispassionate and curious. Audacious formal strategies avoid easy declarations, letting the audience interpret their meaning.
• April, Dea Kulumbegashvili – Unique among recent abortion dramas in tone and style. Febrile, in-the-moment filmmaking reflects the urgency of this story, not just Georgia.
• Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes – Gomes again displays his unusual blend of classical and contemporary fascination, rendered via immaculate film craft.
• Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke – How do you assemble a contemporary, resonate narrative from twenty years of B-roll without being self-indulgent? Jia knows how, and it’s riveting.
• Viet and Nam, Truong Minh Quy – Resplendent negotiation of a private love besieged by cultural histories and terrors. Purloins from other East Asian masters, but displays an eye and tenderness all his own.

Runners-Up will be highlighting folks whose films weren’t represented in my top 10 or their alternates. Top marks to Kiyoshi Kurosawa for his precise control of tone in every shot and cut of Cloud. Surviving Ohio State wouldn’t rise above other lurid true crime exposes if Eva Orner didn’t have such a fully-realized point of view on so many virulent American norms.

Documentary

• Afternoons of Solitude, dir. Albert Serra – Serra’s dubious provocations find an ideal match in Roca’s shark-eyed flamboyance. Turns the human theatre into a zoological experience.
• Deaf President Now!, dir. Nyle DiMarco & Davis Guggenheim – Which could dig deeper into some intersectional politics but nevertheless offers a sturdy, galvanizing retelling of grassroots activism in action.
• The Falling Sky, dirs. Eryk Rocha & Gabriela Carniero de Cunha – Avoids being a simple ethnographic study or sensorily overwhelming tone poem. Not always penetrable, but the politics and artistry are formidable.
• From Ground Zero, various dirs. – Mix of mediums, perspectives, and outlooks convey their own message within a unifying portrait of Palestinians living under genocidal siege.
• Surviving Ohio State, dir. Eva Orner – Dissects so much poison in American masculinity, sports culture, and collegiate power structures, through smartly assembled and deeply humane storytelling.

Runners-Up: Union, the Amazon labor strike doc I reviewed out of NYFF, became belatedly available on the Criterion Channel while I was working on this piece (and thus should technically qualify), so consider it an honorary sixth spot even though it’s now one of the first ten 2025 I’ve seen. As far as films in festival-release limbo I’m not confident are actually “out” yet, everyone should keep an eye out for Sabbath Queen, Vacation Plantation, and S/He is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary.

Ensemble

• Eephus, Carson Lund – Dozens of distinct characters emerge in seconds from this mosaic of American malaise, delicately yet potently performed.
• A Nice Indian Boy, Breanna Amodia, Judy Lee, and Maia Michaels – Best romcom casting since The Big Sick? Tremendous chemistry between the main cast members, all of whom leap at chances for depth.
• On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Isabella Odofin – Central and peripheral role all sustain Nyoni’s tone while finding their own inflections on humor, tragedy, recrimination, and indiscretion.
• One of Them Days, Kayla Hamblin – Cast commits to broad archetypes and mines them for comic gold, without ever settling for just one note.
• Sisterhood, Quentin Hennebelle – How did they find so many charismatic teens for this? Everyone delivers complex, riveting work, be they teenaged newbies or longstanding adults.

Runners-Up: The nonprofessional athletes of Julie Keeps Quiet are uniformly skilled at conveying tangible, even inarticulate character detail through their postures, physicalities, and prowess on the court, were one of two major threats for my fifth spot. The other close call was Invention, with its metafictional casting conceits and the vivid performances from everyone involved. Dreams (Sex Love) gets top prize of its triptych for gorgeously contemplative acting, but all three are worthwhile acting showcases (with more evidence below!). The casts of Ghost Trail and To a Land Unknown match the lived desperations of their communities and the heightened tenors demanded by their respective thrillers. I wouldn’t call The Phoenician Scheme Anderson’s best cast, but he continues to prove how skilled he’s gotten at blending dissimilar personas to his style, and Therapleton is a fantastic find. Giving American blockbusters their due, the cast of Final Destination: Bloodlines are all plausible as a family going through it. Lastly, I do have to give the trio of marquee names in Jurassic World Rebirth credit for making their film as entertaining as it was.

Lead Actress

• Bring Her Back, Sally Hawkins – Weaponizes her innate sunniness to nasty, corrosive ends, and holds this shoddy script together through sheer willpower.
• Caught by the Tides, Zhao Tao – Building on echoes of herself, Zhao’s precision gives Caught its most tangibly human element, deepening the film immensely.
• Dreams (Sex Love), Ella Øverbye – Never registers as a passive bystander in her own life. Instead, she’s present and earnest, even when deep in thought or caught by surprise.
• Invention, Callie Hernandez – Whose desire to understand her late father is palpable throughout, but her prismatic watchfulness keeps us wondering about her too.
• Love, Andrea Bræin Hovig – A Rohmerian feat of relaxed, full-bodied acting, fully responsive to her co-stars while projecting a lively, reflective interiority.

Runners-Up: A belatedly competitive category, with the axed contenders opportunistically chosen from films I’ve honored in the ensemble category. We love spreading the love, so even if these queens aren’t nominated here, they’re still recognized elsewhere. Much love to Leah Aubert’s fiery, conflicted student in Sisterhood, trying to do right by her friends and her own moral compass without totally realizing the risks involved. A notch below her but no less impressive is Keke Palmer & SZA in One of Them Days, where both characters emerge as credible, hysterical figures in their own right, and a compelling friendship in the face some of some harried obstacles and a script that really imbalances who’s in the right for most of the film. Leah Myren in The Ugly Stepsister is left out in the cold here and my Ensemble lineup, but she deserves real credit for finding a complicit, (sym)pathetically cruel girl in her film’s gleefully mordant machinations. Slightly below these three, but still worthy of praise for maintaining the temperature of their films with color and humor, are Mia Therapleton in The Phoenician Scheme and Susan Chardy in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.

Lead Actor

• Ghost Trail, Adam Bessa – A wholly plausible agent, even as he maintains multiple planes of tension, despair, and mystery in his wiry frame.
• Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matogrosso, Jesuit Barbosa – Doesn’t so much carve out an arc as present a hot-blooded, three-dimensional personality demanding the right to express himself fully.
• Sex, Jann Gunnar Røise – So totally comfortable in his body and identity, helping to center Sex’s study of how external perceptions shape one’s sense of self.
• Souleymane’s Story, Abdo Sangare – Justifies and enriches his film’s Dardennes-style staging through his artful, full-bodied performance. Superb last scene.
• To a Land Unknown, Mahmood Bakri – Carries the weight of his choices and the determination to save himself as cleanly and powerfully as an Old Hollywood pro.

Runners-Up: A top-heavy category, piled high with smokeshows. Liam Neeson in The Naked Gun almost made my final five before becoming a very, very close sixth spot – sometimes he’s almost too bullheaded, but he’s deft and hysterical with all manner of stupid comedy, and his chemistry with Pamela Anderson is tremendous. Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17 was the only other actor up for consideration, for doing the inspirational work of bringing a ’40s noir goon into space, and for being the best of several acts of twincest among this year’s leading men.

Supporting Actress

• On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Elisabeth Chisela – Savvy management of character truths and early expectations, moving from garish theatricality to sober realities.
• Sisterhood, Medina Diarra – The MVP of a stacked cast, infusing charisma and fortitude into her character’s actions with the might of a genuine star.
• Souleymane’s Story, Nina Meurisse – Pushes the lead with sharp, precise strokes. Meurisse is substantive without ever intruding on Sangare’s spotlight.
• Viet and Nam, Thi Nga Nguyen – Carries the weight of her character and her country’s loses so unfussily in her body, allowing for deeper resonance and audience projection.
• Weapons, Amy Madigan – Surprises in her garish fronts, but even more impressive in how she treats Alex like an equal. Who knew this was in her arsenal?

Runners-Up will be listed in alphabetical order, as all of these women were on this list at one time or another. Naomi Ackie in Mickey 17 earns top honors among an uneven cast for her impassioned, heart-on-her-sleeve rebel/activist. Pamela Anderson in The Naked Gun is saucy and spry with her comedy, every bit as hilarious as Neeson with great chemistry to boot. Tess Degenstein’s realtor is the only surefire performance in The Monkey, overplaying her semi-sweet charms in a Coen-y register. Keyla Monterosso Mejia brings so many variations of professional contempt and open mockery in One of Them Days. Salma Takaline is as dexterous with personality and tough choices as her costars in Sisterhood, giving such heart to a character often talked over. Lastly, two ensemble efforts: a combined bouquet for Selome Emnetu, Anne Marit Jacobson, and Ane Dahl Torp for making their insights, watchfulness, and inner conflicts so riveting in Dreams (Sex Love); and to Lorraine Bracco, Susan Sarandon, Talia Shire, and Brenda Vacarro in Nonnas, who give this misbegotten film all the heart they can muster in less screen time than you’d hope for – the whole movie should’ve been them sharing stories over lemoncello.

Supporting Actor

• Ghost Trail, Tawfeek Barhom – Who implies a ferocious history, yet manages a tight balancing act of withholding information and feeling out Bessa’s agent for common ground.
• Misericordia, Jacques Develay – Never sheds his unassuming exterior, even as he reveals a steely conviction, making his ambiguities all the more fascinating to ponder.
• A Nice Indian Boy, Harish Patel – Movingly nails the subtlest self-exploration of the main cast, as he negotiates the gulf between loves felt and expressed.
• The Phoenician Scheme, Michael Cera – An absolute delight, boldly hamming up this already ridiculous man while committing fully to his character’s impassioned spirit.
• To a Land Unknown, Aram Sabbah – A John Cazale performance, wearing Reda’s well-meaning heart on his sleeve even as a gentle melancholy and susceptibility weigh him down.

Runners-Up: Delroy Lindo in Sinners, Tom Burke in Black Bag, and Yoshiyoshi Arakawa in Cloud all deserve love for their standout, utterly unflashy work amidst crowded ensembles and complex genre plays, providing tangible figures and audience-gratifying entertainment from their tertiary roles. Close behind them is James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ supportive, supremely competent executor in Invention, becoming an oddly comforting presence as he lays out the terms of a strange life in such black-and-white terms. Rounding out this category are Keith William Richards and Russell J. Gannon for their finely etched turns in Eephus, who stand out amidst a gallery of memorable faces, Alex Wolff’s sensitive portrait of an airhead narcissist in Magic Farm, and Adam Lundgren’s gleefully demented Dr. Esthetique in The Ugly Stepsister.

Original Screenplay

• Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa – No one else knows how to wield surreal, nightmarish escalations of human absurdity like Kurosawa.
• Dreams (Sex Love), Dag Johan Haugerud – Ideal synthesis of intellectually self-conscious writing and messy human emotion. Allows for complicated consideration
• Eephus, Carson Lund – Loose, noodly structure successfully built upon dozens of pristinely etched interactions.
• On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Rungano Nyoni – Keeps revealing new layers and dimensions to character and cultural conflict. Never didactic, despite bold rebukes.
• Pepe, Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias – Imagines a world-altering life through unpredictable points of entry, emphasis, and identification.

Runners-Up: Although Sex and Love are not as formidable as Dreams (Sex Love), they deserve similar credit for their mix of heady concepts and fine-grained human behavior. Am I undervaluing Grand Tour’s jaunty, melancholic yarn as written, for the crimes of being so beautiful and resplendently directed? Much to consider, alongside Misericordia’s intriguing repetitions and disruptions, Ghost Trail’s layers of mystery, the multiple narrative threads propelling Seven Veils in unexpected directions, and Surviving Ohio State’s dense cataloguing of systematic injustice and individual testimonies.

Adapted Screenplay

• The Falling Sky, Davi Kopenawa – Immerses and educates us in the Yanomami tribe’s practices through imagery and observation as often as dialogue, posited not as a “lesson” but a manifesto.
• Final Destination: Bloodlines, Guy Busick, Jon Watts, and Lori Evans Taylor – The family ties conceit and resulting melodrama gives this template new, sad emotional stakes, without losing track of its black comedy sensibilities.
• Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho – Squanders a lot of goodwill as it progresses, but Bong’s earliest, most original ideas about personhood under capitalism are worth treasuring.
• The Naked Gun, Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, and Akiva Schaffer (and Seth MacFarlane?) – An incredible gag session, nailing sustained set pieces and delirious one-offs, with some timely skewering of all involved.
• A Nice Indian Boy, Eric Randall – So wise on how people sabotage and sustain their loves, and the importance of sharing your heart with those who ask for it. Funny and generous with key characters.

Runners-up: Nothing really, unless we want to be really stretchy and count The Ballad of Suzanne Cesare for its meditation on the life and writings of its titular subject, or The Ugly Stepsister’s fairytale restaging. Still, all the more reason to watch more films with adapted screenplays as the year goes on – I eagerly await a couple powerhouses to knock Mickey 17 far, far away from this list by the end of the year.

Cinematography

• April, Arseni Khatchaturan – Handheld cinematography makes even “immobile” shots nauseatingly seasick. 35mm’s depth of frame sustains vast and claustrophobic energies.
• The Ballad of Suzanne Cesare, Alex Ashe – Flexibility with dreamy and hard-edged lighting gives metafiction layers real weight, and makes the actors look utterly radiant.
• Grand Tour, Guo Liang, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom & Rui Poças – Otherworldly blending of century-old film styles to contemporary grammars, as wielded by this era’s masters of the craft.
• Sister Midnight, Sverre Sørdal – Drolly stylized, sure, but constantly surprises with camera movements and color palette, echoing Uma’s unpredictability without losing control.
• Viet & Nam, Son Doan – Unspeakably beautiful, without reducing its characters to eroticized blanks or Vietnam to a dank background. But my god, who knew a coal mine could look like space?

Runners-Up: Only The Falling Sky and Afternoons of Solitude offered real competition when finalizing this lineup – the former’s feat of pungent atmospherics and the latter’s oversaturated colors are diametrically opposed feats of audience immersion and identification with their subjects. Had bluish received a proper release by now, it might have actually taken a slot here, though I have no idea who it’d bump out. But things being what they are, this five was very easy to put together, and will likely hold strong for a while.

Editing

• Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra & Artur Tort – So many ideas are conveyed through its extended longueurs and negative-space gambits.
• Caught by the Tides, Lin Xudong, Matthieu Laclau & Yang Chao – Because the whole project would flounder if the editing wasn’t up to snuff, but this team is bold with aligning footage, evoking historical and cinematic montage.
• Final Destination: Bloodlines, Sabrina Pitre – A series peak for tense (mis)direction, nightmarish momentum, and morbid comedy, expertly punctuated throughout.
• Grand Tour, Telmo Churro & Pedro Marques – Maintains a necessary, whimsical fleetness, even when it hypnotically dilates on a lost soul’s sorrow.
• On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Nathan Nugent – Precise cuts create the sense of single scenes or shots having their own discretion realities, even as they slowly bleed into each other like a bad secret.

Runners-Up: To a Land Unknown impressively stages every scene, maximizing the tension through judiciously timed cuts. Ghost Trail, edited by French genius Laurent Senechal, has not one ounce of fat on it while still leaving room for its own genre thrills.

Sound Design

• Bring Her Back, Pete Smith, Brendan Croxon, Emma Bortignon & co. – Individual effects and overall mix are viscerally upsetting, amplifying the mot tactile sounds of a body being torn apart.
• The Falling Sky, Toco Cerqueira & Guile Martins – The best formal asset to Falling Sky’s depiction of indigenous resistance in spiritual and material registers.
• Julie Keeps Quiet, Gustaf Berger, Boris Debackere & Matthias Hillegeer – Expertly uses diegetic sound to dramatize the granular shifts in Julie’s state of mind without becoming solipsistic or blunt.
• Pepe, Leandro de Loredo – Creates a unique voice for its star subject, rich in mythic history and a singular life story.
• Seven Veils, Jesse Fellows, Steve Munro & Daniel Pellerin – Does justice to opera, the rehearsal process, and area-specific soundscaping. Artful entangling and separation of memories, dreams, and stagecraft.

Runners-Up: Afternoons of Solitude uses its off-screen crowd for great ambiance, remixing their cheers into almost ghostly surges. The mix of luscious scoring, era-appropriate soundtracking, karaoke renditions, and antique musical performance in Grand Tour and Caught by the Tides allows both projects to feel appropriately out-of-time even as they conjure very specific milieus. Ghost Trail offers such a sturdy, unpretentious sound mix I wonder if I’m undervaluing it, but the negotiation of action, detective, and interiority are a praiseworthy feat.

Score

• Black Bag, David Holmes – A slinky, pleasurable throwback. Keeps teasing a simpler pastiche before busting out an unexpected accent or composition to really spice things up.
• Ghost Trail, Yuksek – Resists big crescendos or denouements in favor of a steady, stomach-churning momentum, all the better to keep us on edge without knowing exactly why.
• Presence, Zack Ryan – Classical instruments work marvelously against the film’s ultra-modern filmmaking gambit, endowing emotional resonance where none might otherwise exists.
• Sex, Peder Kjellsby – The characters try articulating themselves so precisely they struggle to say anything; The music cuts through with pure, sometimes inchoate expressions of emotion.
• Sinners, Ludwig Göransson – Who again succeeds at transforming a tricky narrative conceit into a central musical theme. Kinda show-offy, but boy does he earn it here.

Runners-Up: We can consider Peder Kjellsby’s citation for Sex to be hand in hand with his compositions for Love and Dreams (Sex Love), but since I spent the longest time working out why the score for Sex was so sticky despite initially resisting it, that’s the one being honored. Otherwise, I know I liked the scores for Mickey 17 and The Phoenician Scheme as I watched them, but I’ve had a hard time remembering them since.

Production Design

• Drop, Susie Cullen & Kevin Downey – The best kind of Hitchcockian throwback, drenched in ornate glamor and replete with paranoia-inducing caverns and angles.
• Grand Tour, Thales Junqueira & Marcos Pedroso – Sets possess the ruddy reality of good research and the grand artificiality of a movie set, bolstered by great location scouting.
• Mickey 17, Fiona Crombie – For futuristic designs on class exploitation and the inner machinations of a colonizing spaceship that somehow feel fresh even when much else doesn’t.
• The Phoenician Scheme, Adam Stockhausen & Anna Pinnock – Because the batting average for this team’s collabs with Anderson is just stratospheric, expanding their sensibilities with every new milieu.
• Sinners, Hannah Beachler – Arkapaw’s camera does her no favors, but Beachler’s clean-lined, fortified architecture is an ideal meeting ground for character, thematic, and generic goals to groove.

Runners-Up: Not a particularly crowded field so far, though I mostly stand by my lineup. The Ugly Stepsister’s garish, eye-catching period designs extend to its grand castles and the ever-degrading funerary setup for dear old dad. Final Destination: Bloodlines was a close second to Drop for indelible restaurants and upsetting sets – the sky needle and grandma’s hideaway are two of the year’s most memorable locales. Bring Her Back was another near-miss for Sally’s house, soul-sapping to inhabit despite her attempts at hospitality. I can’t say Carol Spiers’ work for The Shrouds affected me all that much, but I’m happy for those of you it made an impression on.

Costume Design

• Black Bag, Ellen Mirojnik – Provides the most reliable route for characterization and titillation – you can’t wait for the clothes to come off, but then again, they look so good.
• Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matogrosso, Gabriella Marra – Fashions succinctly evoke Matogrosso’s era and artistic niches. We love objectifying gay fashions and briefs that barely do their jobs.
• One of Them Days, Kairo Courts – Keeps finding new outfits and accessories to stick its leads in, mismatched but still harmonizing in spite of it all. Flatters her stars and gives bit roles real punch.
• Sinners, Ruth E. Carter – Is there a cultural epoch Carter can’t dress in legible, creative detail? Barely-glimpsed roles and realities have as much texture as leading players.
• The Ugly Stepsister, Manon Rasmussen – A grab-bag of European fashions, fantastically accented, yet color and cut reflect real strategy to its worldbuilding.

Runners-Up: A much more crowded field than its spiritual sibling Production Design. Grand Tour and The Phoenician Scheme nearly beat out One of Them Days for their dapper tailoring of distressed individuals, but the girls got their bag in the end.

Makeup & Hairstyling

• April, Ludmila Iakobashvili, Sopo Machavariani & Kristyan Mallett – Because the flesh-woman is strikingly designed and executed, a poignantly unsettling embodiment of the lead’s self-image.
• Bring Her Back, Winbi Trang Nguyen & Larry Van Duynhoven – Less artful than Talk to Me but rides its own skilled line between penny dreadful grotesquery and medically plausible gore.
• The Phoenician Scheme, Heike Merker & Valeska Schitthelm – Anderson’s trademark fastidiousness leans gracefully into silent-film styles, for eccentric and debonair effects.
• The Ugly Stepsister, Thomas Foldberg & Anne Cathrine Sauerberg – For all the gleeful satirizing of beauty standards, the prosthetics look incredibly realistic, amplifying the body horror of the rudimentary surgeries.
• Weapons, Leo Satkovich & Melizah Anguiano Wheat – Makeup and wiggery aide Gladys in her pantomime of garish, scatter-brained femininity, without preparing us for her real face or gross undoing. Great with Wong, too.

Runners-Up: Sinners delivers an all-too-rare fusion of star glam and compelling horror effects, and made a very close bid for this list, as did the character-revealing styles in One of Them Days. Cate’s unit in Black Bags is one of the year’s most defining wigs, while Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matagrosso does justice to it lead’s increasingly outlandish stage presence and the mouth-watering beauty of its cast.

Visual Effects

• Final Destination: Bloodlines, Nick Lawson, etc. – Sometimes the green-screen seams show through, but the grotesque black comedy and varying scales of the death traps are beautifully executed. That opener!
• Mickey 17, Isabella Abrams-Humphries, Jake Calcutt, Bela Brozsek, etc. – The film’s most consistent craft element, making the woolly bug beasts, icy new planet, and multiple Pattinsons textured and visually engaging.
• The Naked Gun, Tex Barnett, Jen Picard, J. D. Schwalm, etc. – So many jokes would flounder if not for the VFX team finding the right mix of tangible and stupid to stick the landing.

Runners-Up: The one category I arbitrarily decided to limit to three nominees, leaving the proficient blockbuster skill of Jurassic World Rebirth, M3GAN 2.0’s robot fights and impromptu dance breaks, and the eccentric stop motion animals of Sister Midnight to all sit grumpy on the curb and wonder why their luck ran out. Maybe next time, divas.

Nomination Tally:

5 – Grand Tour, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.
4 – Afternoons of Solitude, April, Caught by the Tides, Ghost Trail, Viet and Nam.
3 – Bring Her Back, The Falling Sky, Final Destination: Bloodlines, Mickey 17, Pepe, The Phoenician Scheme, Sinners.
2 – Black Bag, Dreams (Sex Love), Eephus, From Ground Zero, Julie Keeps Quiet, Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matagrosso, The Naked Gun, One of Them Days, Sex, Sisterhood, To a Land Unknown, The Ugly Stepsister, Weapons.
1 – The Ballad of Suzanne Cesare, Cloud, Deaf President Now!, Invention, Drop, Love, Misericordia, Presence, Seven Veils, Sister Midnight, Surviving Ohio State.

Thanks again for reading. Y’all know the drill: What are your own favorites from this year, who have I missed, where would the wise cinephile go next. I know TIFF just wrapped up, meaning a lot of shit is on the way and no one can remember any films released before September. Still, any recommendations are always appreciated, and I hope this list gets people to watch some titles they’ve never heard of, or have been meaning to get to. Sharing is caring goddammit!!