Tom Salinsky

The last of the Best Picture nominees this year (for me personally) is arguably the one which is dominating the discourse the least. That’s not surprising given that it’s neither a hugely controversial offering likely to split the crowd, but nor does it really have a shot at the big prize. I’m Still Here is the latest from Walter Salles whose Central Station from 1998 I remember thinking was fantastic, and there’s a weird overlap here with Emilia Pérez. Jacques Audiard’s film takes the fate of the disappeared in Mexico and uses it as a lever to open up the morality of a former gangster now living life as a civilian – and as noted, it rather collapses under the weight of a lot of silly clichés at the end, regardless of what you think about the depictions of the Mexican people, trans people and whether or not you liked the songs.

Salles’s intentions are rather more sober and serious as he tells the true story of the disappearance of politician Rubens Paiva in Brazil in the 1970s – through the eyes of his wife Eunice, played by Fernanda Torres. And although Selton Mello does great work as the husband, as do the teen/child actors playing the kids, it’s Torres who carries this absorbing film bodily on her shoulders. From her early caution as friends meet in her home to consider action against the military regime, to her steely management of the armed men in her living room, to the trauma of her imprisonment, to her heroic efforts to rebuild her life, she’s amazing.

This is a simple, unfussy film which tells its story without flinching and without glorifying, but which never feels like a documentary. From the very beginning, every aspect rings true, and how lovely to see Fernanda Montenegro – Oscar-nominated star of Central Station – in a cameo at the end. Fernanda Torres is nominated for this film, but I assume Demi Moore has this sewn up. Obviously it has a shot at Best International Feature, particularly given the Emilia Pérez backlash – although Audiard still won at the BAFTAs, so who knows? I enjoyed this more than any of the other Best Picture nominees, apart from The Substance – but hold on, there’s another film coming.

I gotta be honest, I put on Sing Sing feeling a bit like I was going to have to eat my greens. I’ve loved Colman Domingo since first seeing him on Fear the Walking Dead, but there are so many trite, clichéd and frustrating ways to tell the story of prison-theatre-programme-leads-to-personal-growth-but-also-brings-up-trauma that I suspected this would rapidly fall over its feet and land in saccharine schmaltz or hysterical melodrama. Boy, was I wrong. This incredible movie dodges every single tired trope the second they appear on the narrative horizon, and every frame of this rings so perfectly and so affectingly true, that I should have guessed earlier that almost the entire cast are graduates of the programme in question and they’re all essentially playing themselves, with Domingo, Paul Raci and Sean San José the only ring-ins.

I don’t know how I would have experienced the film if I’d known that beforehand – I don’t think it’s intended to be a big surprise. But now I want to watch it again knowing that because the performances are even more incredible when you consider that for most of the cast it would be their first time on a movie set. So all the credit in the world to them, but also to director and co-screenwriter Greg Kwedar for marshalling these resources with such precision and empathy. Shot on 16mm, the feeling of confinement gradually shades into intimacy and the surroundings feel totally authentic from the very first frame. I’m calling it – this is my favourite film of 2024.

I also want to briefly consider Memoir of a Snail which continues Adam Elliot’s idiosyncraticly adult adventures in claymation, and which combines terrific voice performances from the likes of Sarah Snook, Jacki Weaver, Magda Szubanski and Kodi Smit-McPhee with tactile plasticine animation to create a grungily charming life-story. While not quite having the impact of Elliot’s earlier triumph Mary & Max, this is still very well done, but the Best Animated Feature category is very competitive this year and I don’t think it stands a chance next to The Wild Robot and Flow, as good as it is.

I’m also trying to see all the nominees for Best Animated Feature. Inside Out 2 is wonderful entertainment despite not being a patch on the original, which just emphasises what a tremendously strong piece of work the original is. Vengeance Most Fowl is Wallace and Gromit at very nearly their best, and one barely notices the absence of Peter Sallis. I’m very excited about Memoir of a Snail, having been knocked out by the same team’s Mary and Max some years ago. That leaves The Wild Robot and Flow.

In their different ways, these are both painterly CG animations about the collision between nature and the modern world, with a largely animal cast and driven by a singular creative talent. But despite these superficial similarities they function in very different ways, although I’m pleased to say I think they’re both terrific.

The Wild Robot is the latest offering from mad genius Chris Sanders, who was let off the leash back when Disney was earning All Of The Money to make Lilo & Stitch, possibly my favourite post-renaissance 2D Disney movie. After a period in the wilderness, he came back with How to Train Your Dragon, and also has (sigh) a live action Lilo & Stitch coming out soon. Meanwhile, he’s cast Lupita Nyong’o as “Roz”, a silicon help-meet who mysteriously washes up on the shore of an uninhabited island. With echoes of both WALL-E and The Iron Giant, Roz grapples with what her purpose is, and (having spent days learning their language) turns to various animal friends for help.

This is pretty breezy, family-friendly, crowd-pleasing stuff, but an exceptional voice cast (including Pedro Pascal as a wily fox, Catherine O’Hara as a hilarious possum, Matt Berry as a neurotic beaver and Mark Hamill as a grizzly bear) and some absolutely gorgeous animation elevate this to classic status, and the script knows just when to go for the gag and when to pluck on your heart strings.

It reportedly cost around $80m which is cheap for a major CG movie. Flow was made for less than a tenth of that, and it’s almost impossible to tell. This Latvian animation was created by a tiny Latvian/Parisian team on consumer-grade equipment and tells the entirely worldless story of a tiny grey cat making friends (secretarybird, golden retriever and capybara mainly) in order to escape mysteriously rising flood waters. Again, the CG images have been given a painterly sheen, and whereas in the American movie, I’m convinced this is entirely for artistic reasons, here I think it may have been in part to conceal the relative simplicity of the digital models. But when the animation is so simultaneously characterful and accurate to the natural world, this seems like a pointless thing to quibble about.

My taste for magical realism, which at points strays in to surrealism, isn’t quite as well developed as that of director Gints Zilbalodis, but for the most part, this is a gorgeous, enthralling, sweetly beguiling story of friendship and adventure which never for a moment feels like dialogue would have added anything at all.

September 5

Tim Fehlbaum’s account of the Munich Massacre from the point of view of the ABC Sports team covering the Olympics makes an amazing trailer but only a pretty good film. Of course, it’s not the film’s fault that it’s been sold as something slightly other than what it is, but the differences between the white-knuckle, morally-queasy trailer and the rather more by-the-numbers actual movie raises questions in my mind about the wisdom of this approach.

It’s certainly an interesting piece of history, as has already been proven by Steven Spielberg who took a very different approach in his film Munich. In 1972, terrorists took nine members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage. By the early hours of the next morning, most of the terrorists and all of the hostages were dead. We follow the television crew who are used to talking over footage of swimming, long jumping and javelin events as they grapple with the reality that the are the only people able to tell the world what’s happening.

The pressure cooker environment is effective, and – as Billy Wilder observed – “audiences love ‘how’” so the stuff about having to smuggle film cans in and out of the Olympic Village, strapped to the body of a cameraman posing as a coach is fascinating. And there is tension, and there are interesting debates about whether the ABC coverage is influencing events for better or for worse, and whether ABC Sports president Roone Arledge is thinking more about innocent lives or about his own career.

The problem is that, of necessity, we only get access to either the plight of the hostages, or the actions of the German authorities, in fragments. So, we’re presented with a story in which innocent lives are at stake and a terrifying stand-off is taking place, but the film is trying to wring tension and excitement out of whether or not ABC will get access to the “bird” (satellite) or what form of words the anchor should use to (wrongly) announce that the hostages are alive and free.

It’s a decent TV movie, but I’m a bit disappointed and rather surprised to see it nominated for its screenplay. Still, in a world in which The Imitation Game wins a screenplay Oscar, anything is possible.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Also taking an unusual angle on events of global importance, but succeeding rather better is The Seed of the Sacred Fig, up for Best International Feature. The story of the making of this film by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof could be movie in itself, as the raw footage had to be smuggled out of the country and the director had to flee before he could be arrested. Thus, this film about Iran, shot in Iran, by Iranians and entirely in Persian ends up as Germany official selection for the Academy Awards.

Missagh Zareh is Iman, newly promoted within the Revolutionary Court, but beginning to have misgivings about the nature of his role. His daughters meanwhile have an even more rebellious streak to them, amplified by protests surrounding the death in custody of a young woman (not named as but clearly meant to be Mahsa Amini), leaving his wife caught in the middle. Where September 5 is constrained by its narrative framework, the effect of the shifting political sands on this ordinary family is very much the point, and as such the family drama and the huge global story reflect on each other in fascinating, disturbing and moving ways – no more so than when Rasoulof includes real footage of Iranian protests and police actions.

While the whole cast is excellent, I must make special mention of Soheila Golestani as Iman’s wife Najmeh who fiercely attempts to steer a clear path between her own morality, her love for her family and her practical need to survive and thrive. She’s constantly trying to give nothing away, but there’s always something going on behind her eyes.

Normally it’s easy to spot which film will take the Best International Feature award – it’s the one also nominated in one or more other categories. But this year, we have both Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here nominated for Best Picture, and Flow nominated for Best Animated Feature, leaving only this and The Girl with the Needle without additional nominations elsewhere. But of the films in the Oscar conversation, I liked this more than pretty much anything else outside of The Substance and Anora.

Mysteriously not nominated for a single Oscar, despite its star walking home with a clutch of awards all over town, Hard Truths finds Mike Leigh back in Naked territory, giving us a portrait of a thoroughly unlikeable motormouth anti-hero and daring us not to fall in love. Marianne Jean-Baptiste does incredible work as Pansy, whose brittle Karen-ish behaviour to everyone around her barely conceals an inner core of deep pain and loneliness. This drives her husband and son into a near-silent fugue state of incomprehending stoicism, and contrasts strongly with her two nieces who won’t let a little thing like Sam Spiro being loathesomely patronising put a spoke in the wheels of their plans for a Mother’s Day brunch. Sitting in the middle is Pansy’s sister Chantelle, where Michele Austin is much less showy than Jean-Baptiste but who navigates a tricky path between optimism and despair.

As usual, Mike Leigh’s improvisatory and exploratory script-writing delivers complex and truthful characters and wonderful performances, but as sometimes happens doesn’t provide us with a neat structure or much in the way of climactic catharsis. That Mother’s Day brunch looks to be the scene where all the narrative threads come together, but it passes and leads to a faintly irrelevant coda, centring David Webber’s Curtley almost as much as Pansy, and sidelining Chantelle. For the first four-fifths, however, this is epic, often hilarious, frequently heartbreaking stuff and I can only hope it does better at the BAFTAs than it did in Hollywood.

Of rather less interest is Robert Zemeckis’s slickly experimental single-camera-angle movie Here, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and which reunited the director with his Forrest Gump team of screenwriter Eric Roth and lead actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. At least I think it’s them. For most of the running time they’re concealed behind a smear of de-aging (or up-aging) pixels, and it’s deeply to their credit that something resembling a performance manages to emerge from underneath all the digital shenanigans. This is especially true given that Roth hasn’t thought of anything remotely novel, insightful or even interesting for them or any of the other characters to say, so they just mouth Hallmark platitudes about how time flies or the future is coming as the narrative hyperactively pings from decade-to-decade seemingly at random. A couple of times, the juxtaposition of events from different periods in history brushes past something like wit, such as when a leaky roof is overlaid with a woman’s waters breaking, but these moments are the exceptions rather than the norm.

To facilitate the artifice of both the permanently locked-off camera and the huge time jumps, the whole thing was shot at Pinewood, hence the slightly disconcerting presence of so many familiar British TV faces from Michelle Dockery to Nikki Amuka-Bird to Kelly Reilly to Angus Wright to Ophelia Lovibond. All do decent accents (except possibly for Paul Bettany who seems permanently constipated) but it’s yet more artifice for a film that wants to be telling a sweet simple story about family, but which hasn’t figured out what the story is, or why we should care, or why it’s better to shoot it this way.

Nickel Boys is the first drama film from experimental documentarian RaMell Ross and it takes a grim story (from the novel by Colson Whitehead) and presents it in a very striking way which doesn’t always help. This is a very choppy, piecemeal film, in which short scenes end with hard cuts and material from other sources (and sometimes timeframes) is cut in unexpectedly. This I could have coped with, although some of the metaphors from the Apollo 8 mission and the Martin Luther King marches was a bit heavy-handed for my taste.

What I had a harder time with was the decision to shoot almost everything first person. Ross is smart enough not to be wedded to this technique, but he doesn’t stray from it often, and the idea presumably is to place us directly in the shoes of the main protagonist Elwood. We look out through his eyes and see the world that he sees. But drama is watching one person changed by another, and if we can’t see our protagonist’s face, we have to guess how he might be reacting. Near the middle of the film, Elwood’s friend Turner is also given the power of the point-of-view shot which means we can finally cut between two people having a conversation – but these conversations tend not to be the crucial ones, so we’re still stuck with only half the story.

In a second strand, taking place years after the boys’ incarceration, adult Elwood is shot over his own shoulder, so again we can’t see his face but now it’s harder to frame shots so that we can see who he’s talking to. A bit life Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, this struck me as an interesting formal experiment, but ultimately one which didn’t have the effect of immersing me more fully in the story – in fact just the opposite, it held me at a distance. That’s a shame as there’s much to appreciate here. This isn’t a true story, but it was inspired by ghastly places like the Dozier School which deserve to be exposed, and the Jim Crow era is a horrendous stain on American history, which some Americans seem only too happy to forget about.

I do have a nasty suspicion that the camerawork is designed at least in part to facilitate a final rug-pull which struck me as confusing and unlikely. Other people have found more thematic resonance in this, and maybe if I watched it again, knowing what was coming, I’d see that too, but I was too busy trying to work out the crossword puzzle which the film had set me to be truly moved or to appreciate the themes. There’s great work here from Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson and especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, but I didn’t get as much out of this as I expected or wanted to. I seem to be in the minority, though, so the failing may well be mine.

Sautday Night, Jason Reitman’s account of the final ninety minutes before the first episode of “NBC’s Saturday Night” went on the air is a work of obvious artifice, but it’s greatly to Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan’s credit that most of the backstory about events taking place outside of this very narrow window goes down very easily. There’s even a nice visual metaphor in one of the aspects of the film which I’d be prepared to bet never happened. This succeeds very nicely in making a somewhat trivial event seem of momentous importance, and the cast is having an absolute ball, anchored by Gabrielle LaBelle as the earnest, almost unflappable Lorne Michaels – but shout outs too to Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donoghue, Matthew Rhys unrecognisable as George Carlin, Nicholas Braun in a remarkable dual role and most deliciously of all JK Simmons as a revoltingly vulgar evocation of Milton Berle. Good fun and buoyed by an appropriately demented score from Jon Batiste.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Conclave – no, not enjoy: savour. It looks magnificent and Edward Berger continues his productively discordant partnership with composer Volker Bertelmann whose strident foghorning helped make All Quiet on the Western Front so evocative. We have some of this generation’s finest Old Men of Acting giving it everything they’ve got. And who wouldn’t want to peek behind the curtain of decision making at the Vatican? Decision making is one of the keystones of storytelling, whether it’s Chaplin being forced to eat his own shoe, Michael realising only he can take out McClusky or Han Solo coming back to save Luke Skywalker.

But this time, Berger isn’t adapting a classic German novel born out of the pain of a generation-defining conflict. This time, his source text is a Robert Harris page-turner – maybe not quite an airport thriller, but definitely aiming to build suspense and pass the time rather than leaving the reader pondering great questions about the nature of humanity and goodness. And if the characters in Conclave spend any time at all pondering such questions, they do it off-screen, as when they’re in front of the camera, they’re scheming and plotting in a way much more befitting Francis Urquhart or Malcolm Tucker. We know Ralph Fiennes’s earnest and studious Cardinal Lawrence is experiencing a mild crisis of faith because he tells us so – not because it’s dramatised in any particularly interesting way.

Yes, the plot did keep me guessing, but this is also sometimes to the film’s detriment, as the rules of the thriller to which it’s so wedded mean that the clearly-telegraphed penultimate twist must needs be topped by a final somewhat ludicrous twist. To be clear, this is partly the fun of what is a very entertaining and engaging film. It’s endlessly charming and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny to see these pompous clerics in their ornate robes sneaking a crafty ciggie, fiddling with an iPhone or hacking into someone else’s email. But the actual storytelling couldn’t be less interested in the philosophical debates about the future of the Catholic church, and is only just interested enough in the personalities of the main players to make the plot work.

That leaves us with the actors, and here Isabella Rossellini is effortlessly commanding, Fiennes and Tucci elevate the thin material they’re given and Lucian Msamati – whose Cardinal Adeyemi actually is given a little bit of depth and nuance – is very impressive. What baffles me slightly is why John Lithgow took the gig. I’m certain he doesn’t need the work and his character exists solely to wax his moustache and cackle evilly. A missed opportunity.

In terms of character depth, A Complete Unknown is sort of the opposite. Monica Barbaro manages to mine the flimsy screenplay and comes up with a complete character with a rich interior life seemingly from nowhere. Everyone else seems satisfied with doing impersonations and moving through the relevant Wikipedia entries until 140 minutes is up. Maybe that’s because Elle Fanning looks so completely lost – because her character is the only one that’s invented.

I came to this knowing nothing much at all about Bob Dylan, which meant on the one hand that I wouldn’t be huffing and fuming and nit picking as the inevitable artistic licenses were taken. On the other hand, that means things need to be explained to me to make the story work, and various things seemed to happen which were given profound significance without paying off in any meaningful way. Dylan’s first album is all covers. Why? Did they sell? How did he persuade the record company to let him record originals? Who are these two different round men who smoke cigars both of whom seem to be something to do with his management but neither of whom is ever introduced or seen to be making decisions which impact his life or career. Who’s this guy bullying his way into the recording session and ending up playing the organ? What, to be blunt, is the point of any of this, other than to check off events in the life of a famous asshole?

But I could have stood a bit of confusion about the finer points of the music industry if the character work had been stronger. Timothee Chalamet is a fine talent and has clearly worked incredibly hard to summon up Dylan’s manner and musical abilities. But if we aren’t given any insight into who he was and what he wanted, then the entire exercise seems futile. Early on, I appreciated the measured pace and there were some nice moments between Chalamet’s puppy-dog 20-year-old Dylan and Edward Norton’s avuncular Pete Seeger. But after the first half hour, this turns into Folk Hard: The Bobby Dylan Story with a dedication that seems almost demented.

Eight down, two to go.

And they’re off. The starter’s gun has been fired for this year’s Oscars race, and while it wasn’t hard to predict most of the films appearing in most of the categories, there were still some surprises. Chief of these is that the most nominated film is Jacques Audiard’s bonkers transgender Spanish language gangster musical redemption fantasy Emilia Pérez which can count thirteen mentions. This is to a certain extent artificial, but even if you discount Best International Feature and ignore one of its two Best Original Song mentions, it would still top the list with eleven, just ahead of The Brutalist and Wicked, both with ten.

Together with strong showings in the directing and editing categories, that suggests that the contest for Best Picture is between those three, but I think Emilia Pérez will struggle to convert a lot of its chances and I also wouldn’t rule out Conclave, which might not have as many pluses as some of its rivals (and only garnered eight nominations, tying it with A Complete Unknown), but it doesn’t have any negatives – it isn’t weird, it isn’t a musical, it isn’t TikTok friendly and none of its characters were revoiced by AI.

Let’s rundown the Best Picture nominees and I’ll give you some further thoughts.

Anora was a delightful surprise when I took myself off to see it earlier this year. Sean Baker is a very fine filmmaker indeed and the promise he showed with The Florida Project is fully flowering here (I didn’t see Red Rocket but I’ve heard good things). I don’t think this has much of a chance of winning Best Picture, but it’s the kind of movie which could pick up a screenplay award as a sort of consolation prize.

The Brutalist is about as compelling as a 200-minute movie about architecture could possibly hope to be. Adrien Brody is amazing and the guest cast almost uniformly strong. I wasn’t always convinced by Felicity Jones, AI or no AI, but this is a huge and very Oscar-friendly achievement, and currently the bookies’ favourite. I just wonder whether it’s a bit too weighty to have lots of people putting it at the top of their ballots. Full review here.

A Complete Unknown looks great, provided it can avoid enough Dewey Cox clichés, and Timothée Chalamet can usually be relied upon to elevate weaker material. I’ll try and see it very soon.

Conclave likewise has passed me by and looks like hand-milled Oscar bait, but I think that voters who want serious and meaningful will prefer The Brutalist and those who want something with a bit more flair and dash will go for Emilia Pérez – but then maybe Conclave will come through the middle? Against that, Edward Berger hasn’t been nominated as Best Director, which must hurt the film’s chances.

Dune: Part Two feels like it’s here to make up the numbers. I don’t have any particular fondness for the Duniverse, but I went to see both movies on the big screen and I had a good time. I don’t entirely know if the effort required to create them is appropriate to the entertainment value I derived from them, but I don’t have any real complaints about either. The chances of a science-fiction sequel winning Best Picture however are slim to say the least.

And you might think that a similar calculation applies to Emilia Pérez but with nominations for two of its cast, its director, its screenplay and its editing, it must be in with a shout. The bookies have it just behind The Brutalist which sounds right to me – and there’s quite a jump in price, so you could clean up if you got it right.

Of I’m Still Here and Nickel Boys I know almost nothing, but I will – as usual – attempt to see them on a big screen before the first Sunday in March. The Substance I’m delighted to find on the list, as it is already one of my favourite films of the year, and I found it utterly compelling. Full review here.

Lastly, we have Jon M Chu’s Wicked (shorn of its “Part One” suffix) which I thought was one of the best stage-to-screen musical adaptations I’ve seen recently (not quite as good as Matilda though). And yes, a lot of the set-ups will have to be paid off next year which isn’t ideal, but as vastly elongated first acts of musicals go, this is exemplary. Review here.

In other categories, Best Actor looks like a straight fight between Adrien Brody and Timothée Chalamet, Best Actress looks nailed on for Demi Moore, likewise Kieran Culkin is getting a lot of attention for A Real Pain, and Zoe Saldaña will surely win for Emilia Pérez even if that film is shut out elsewhere. Likewise, Conclave must have a good chance at winning Best Adapted Screenplay even if it is not given much love in other categories.

And speaking of films not given much love, it’s a double Guadagnino shut-out with no nominations at all for either Challengers or Queer, and it looks like Nicole Kidman humped all those rugs for nothing as Babygirl has been completely overlooked. Some Academy watchers also expected to see mentions for Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas, and Denzil Washington for Gladiator II, which only gets a nod for its costume design. There was also a lot of enthusiasm for Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl, but not from the Academy.

Right, time for me to book some movie tickets. See you back here soon.

The Brutalist is a long movie, and that tends to please Oscar voters. Shot on VistaVision (35mm film passing through the camera sideways), with heavyweight themes, a powerhouse cast, a rumbling score, an interval and an overture, it is seemingly hand-milled, weapons-grade Oscar bait. This would be far more frustrating if it was a less interesting film. In fact, my chief complaint after 200 minutes of screentime is that it ends abruptly.

It does teeter on the brink of wilful obscurity towards the end, as the actions of powerful tycoon Harrison van Buren (Guy Pearce, seemingly cos-playing as Brad Pitt) make less and less sense and the respective fates of László Tóth and his family are barely sketched in during the coda. But for much of the running time, this is engrossing powerful stuff with a great sense of place and character, and a detailed and sensitive portrayal of loss and ego from Adrien Brody.

The choice of VistaVision is interesting too. On a big screen, this doesn’t gleam. The oppressive Philadelphia weather combines with the grainy film stock to create an image which glimmers and glooms, but that only adds to the constant eerie threat of potential danger, as this once-feted architect tries to claw his way up from the bottom of the heap in which he finds himself. Adding to the disquiet is the use of sound, with odd phrases, noises and rumblings often drifting in from the edges of the screen, adding to the feeling that we aren’t being shown something, we’re peering in on it.

Felicity Jones doesn’t get much to do alas – third billed but she only really appears in the second half, and there are disquieting rumours about AI being used to autotune her accent and Brody’s, but what shocks me most is that someone let sitcom actor Brady Corbet loose with $10m to make this epic. Don’t get me wrong, on the whole I’m very glad they did, I just can’t understand what the pitch would have been like.

And I could say similar things about Emilia Perez, Jacques Audiard’s film about which I’m going to be circumspect as I knew very little about it going in and I’d love you to be as surprised as I am. It’s a startling combination of some incredible fresh and original material, wrapped in some equally incredibly clichéd plot twists. Zoe Saldaña is absolutely electric as under-appreciated lawyer Rita Mora Castro, whose dealings with the mysterious Emilia Pérez gradually lead her to become embroiled in Mexican cartels, politics, corruption and eventually violence.

Selina Gomez shows a little more range here than she typically does on Only Murders in the Building, but this is Saldaña’s show, especially during the musical numbers. Look out for her rendition of “El Mal” at all the awards shows. The last half hour is by far the least interesting, as the plot can only be resolved by means of overfamiliar gangster and action movie tropes, but the journey that got us there is a real shot of cinematic adrenaline.

Also filling up a big screen and making terrific use of sound is the third screen version of Nosferatu, originally shot by Murnau in the silent era as a way of ripping off Dracula without having to pay any royalties. I hadn’t seen this or the Klaus Kinski version, so I felt a little as if I hadn’t done my homework. Following a little subsequent research, it seems as if writer-director Robert Eggers’s chief concern was to shore up plot holes in the existing iterations. This leads to a very handsomely mounted production, full of committed performances (Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily Rose-Depp, Willem Dafoe and especially Emma Corrin) but it ended up not feeling very much. Rather as if I’d played through a really atmospheric and well-done computer game rather than been told a deeply personal story. Extra points for Simon McBurney as Herr Knock who knows that this part has no top for him to go over and goes absolutely for broke.

My eye was caught by the new glossy Day of the Jackal with Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch but I felt the need to watch the earlier versions first. The 1973 original  with Edward Fox is absolutely brilliant, with Fox’s icy charm perfectly evoking Frederick Forsyth’s meticulous assassin. Ranged against him is pretty much every British male character actor who graduated since the turn of the century, and a few European ones as well, notably Michael Lonsdale who’d go on to be one of James Bond’s most impressive opponents (albeit in a film which few people rate highly).

What’s especially fascinating about this version is how stripped down it is. Fox is going to bump off Charles de Gaulle. Lonsdale has to stop him. There are no subplots, there are no detours, and very notably nobody gets in Lonsdale’s way. He gets every scrap of support available to him, through official and unofficial channels, nobody tells him he’s “on thin ice”, or “he’s becoming obsessed” or he’s got “48 hours to wrap this thing up.” And even with that, he only just manages to stop Fox in time – Fox even manages to get a shot off but misses. So far from robbing us of tension, this lean, streamlined approach makes the Jackal seem like a far more formidable foe.

The plot was revisited in 1997 with Michael Caton-Jones behind the camera, replacing Fred Zinnemann, Bruce Willis slightly miscast as the Jackal and Richard Gere hopelessly miscast as ex-IRA sniper Declan Mulqueen. All the hysterical personal dramas I didn’t miss in 1973 are back here and this is pretty much all by-the-numbers nineties thriller cliches which would have gone straight to DVD if it hadn’t been for the star power of the cast. One famous scene in which Willis offs a young Jack Black is the only noteworthy thing. Forsyth hated it and it was just called “The Jackal” to acknowledge that this wasn’t really much to do with his novel.

And now we have a ten part series which moves the action to the present day, moves the target to a Musk style tech billionaire and greatly expands the narrative. Redmayne finds a deep seam of ruthlessness which is rather disturbing and Lynch – who I wasn’t convinced by in No Time to Die but who I thought was amazing in Matilda – is stunning as Bianca, by turns friend to the fallen, hard-bitten meeting room warrior, and bad ass machine gun toting bitch. Expanding such a slender storyline comes with risks, but the 1973 film exemplifies the motto “audiences love how” and the new team, led by showrunner Ronan Bennett have taken that to heart, with a whole other mission for the Jackal which is just as thrilling as the main hit, a subplot which digs into the Jackal’s own emotions without undermining his impact as a force for evil, and a surprisingly open-ended conclusion. Recommended.

Also coming at the tale end of a series of iterations of the same narrative comes Wicked Part One – the musical film of the stage musical of the novel inspired by the musical film of the novel. I adore the 1939 Judy Garland film and sat down to watch the musical with some trepidation, but I greatly appreciated the cleverness of the story as well as the soaring songs. Now Jon M Chu (In the Heights) has directed a movie version which takes about as long as the stage show without the interval to deliver just the first half of the story – but fuck me I’ve never had 160 minutes whip by so quickly.

All of the the things which are assumed to have taken place off-stage, all the gaps we the audience have to fill in between the songs, all the emotional beats which aren’t quite fully illuminated come into crisp sharp focus here, and those amazing songs land perfectly, thanks to the gorgeous staging, perfect pacing and astonishing lead performances from Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera. Shout out too to the hilarious Jonathan Bailey who has a damn good go at stealing a film which the two stars already have completely locked down.

And I just have time to mention that I’ve now finished watching the first series of Blake’s 7 thanks to the recently released Blu-ray box set. I have only vague memories of watching this when it was first on, chiefly involving Paul Darrow swaggering around in a slightly absurd fashion. In this first series, his calculating, self-centred Avon makes the perfect foil for Gareth Thomas’s passionate and idealistic Blake, and the best episodes combine wonderful character work with tight plotting and a real attempt to summon up a science fiction world. Yes, there is a lot of plastic and tinfoil in the sets and costumes, no not all the guest cast are up to snuff, but I was absolutely engrossed for all 13 episodes nevertheless.

Nostalgia sells, whether it’s Michael Keaton reprising his role as Batman in The Flash, Harrison Ford reprising his role as Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny, Michael Keaton reprising his role as Batman in Batgirl, Harrison Ford reprising his role as Deckard in Blade Runner 2049 or now Michael Keaton reprising his role as Beetlejuice in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Who cares that you first played the role when you were mid-thirties and now you’re early-seventies? There’s nothing the public likes more than a legacy sequel. Despite the fact that of the movies mentioned above one was shelved, three lost money and only one – the one under discussion – looks like the studios’ familiar-IP, target-the-boomers, stay-safe strategy has actually worked.

How amazing then, that it’s the film I liked the least out of the ones listed above?

Blade Runner 2049 is a bit ponderous, but it’s a decent stab at a follow on to an all-time classic that didn’t need it. Dial of Destiny flails about a bit but includes some impressive sequences. The Flash is a mess but has a certain amount of charm. Obviously, I haven’t seen Batgirl. But this? The long-awaited follow-up to the 1988 film which solidified the star status of Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, which made stars of Michael Keaton, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman? The beloved cult favourite which spawned an animated spin-off, multiple video games and a Broadway musical? This is a trainwreck.

The original’s storytelling is both brilliantly original and elegantly streamlined. Happy couple Adam and Barbara die in a freak accident and end up with their dream house haunted by the living. To drive out the new arrivals, they enlist the help of a demon but that help comes with strings attached. It makes only as much sense as it needs to (the vagaries of how life after death works are conveniently hidden behind a hilariously hard-to-parse handbook), the performances are top-notch, and Burton hasn’t yet fallen victim to the leaden paced staging which sank the almost-wonderful Mars Attacks (and often plagues both his Batman films).

This is beset with problems, right from the off. The opening sally with Monica Bellucci staple-gunning herself back together is deliciously macabre, even if we’ve seen the visual before in countless other Burton joints (she’s a blend of Edward Scissorhands, Emily the Corpse Bride and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, probably others). But rather than presenting a problem for anyone we care about, her character listlessly orbits the main plot of the film, endlessly repeating her signature packing cube death-for-the-dead routine, before turning up at the finale in time to be very easily despatched.

And you can say the same about all the various plot strands, of which there are far too many, none of them intersecting in interesting ways, so the overall effect is like switching channels between about five different (or rather indifferent) unrelated Beetlejuice sequels. Did you prefer the pitch about how Lydia is getting married to a douche who doesn’t believe she can see ghosts? How about Lydia’s daughter Astrid having the hots for a dishy demon in a tree house? Can you bring yourself to give a shit about Lydia’s daughter’s dead dad, who was killed at sea? Or would you rather we spent time with Delia, trying to reunite with her husband who was killed… (checks notes) also at sea, it seems. Tell you what, how about we have an actor who used to play a cop on TV who now runs the underworld police? No? What if we could get Willem Dafoe? Honestly, it feels like the studio got half-a-dozen different pitches and just said yes to all of them.

Only Keaton, Ryder and O’Hara return for this go-around. Glenn Shadix died in 2010, and recasting Otho seemingly wasn’t considered. Davis and Baldwin were presumably too expensive and/or old (and Baldwin has his own misfortunes to contend with) – but the Maitlands are discarded with about the lamest line of barely-even-exposition I’ve ever heard – “they found a loophole and moved on,” which felt like a real “fuck you” to a loyal audience and a pair of terrific actors who were at the centre of the original. And obviously, we can’t be giving Jeffrey Jones any work, so – very wisely – almost the first thing the film does is to write-out Charles Deetz…

…and then depicts the character’s last moments with a Claymation puppet of Jeffrey Jones…

…and then has pictures of Jeffrey Jones on various bits of props and set dressing…

…and then makes Charles Deetz’s funeral a significant setting and plot point…

…and has another actor in a revolting half-eaten costume run around the underworld sets while someone impersonates Jeffrey Jones’s voice…

Excuse me? This is how you make sure that nobody watching this film has cause to remember what Jeffrey Jones was arrested for in 2002. And 2004. And 2010. What the actual fuck?

And for a film presumably made for fans of the original (surely no-one else would sit still for the hour or so it takes for this slovenly movie to finally generate any kind of forward plot momentum) it’s remarkably bad at sticking to the few rules established in the first one, and sometimes the writers seem to mis-remember what happened to Lydia vs what happened to Barbara. Lydia knows that “home home home” will get her out of Beetlejuice’s world (which only Adam and Barbara would know) but doesn’t know that when you’ve let Beetlejuice out, you have to put him back (which surely would have been one of the things Barbara told her at the same time as she told her about “home home home”).

And the one thing we surely all know about how being dead works in Beetlejuice films is that upon dying, you are translated back to the place you will be haunting with only an unreadable handbook for explication. Yet, everyone who dies in the sequel (Charles Deetz, Delia, and seemingly Richard, Astrid’s dad) is taken straight to the afterlife waiting room instead. And as more details pile up about exactly how the afterlife works, it starts to become banal and ordinary, instead of the fascinating and inexplicable glimpses which were all we were afforded last time. Nothing exemplifies this more than a bored looking Michael Keaton re-enacting a particularly dull episode of The Office with a small army of shrunken head underlings. This is what I wanted from the long-awaited return of The Ghost with Most – a bonkers subplot about new HR processes.

Among the slurry there are a few bright spots. Justin Theroux is having fun as Lydia’s sleazy boyfriend (although a little of him goes a long way). Burn Gorman is rather a treat as the pragmatic Father Damien. Beetlejuice himself isn’t overused, and although he isn’t always used effectively, when he is, the film does come to life – such as in the very funny couples counselling scene. And although we do get a rendition of Day-O, by and large the musical palate has shifted to soul and disco, which is a great way to freshen up a familiar idea. Although the lack of tension when Astrid is being taken away on the Soul Train is extraordinary (and Jenna Ortega is never given anything interesting to do). Finally, the end of the second film is essentially identical to the end of the first one – only not set up as well.

This is barely a film at all. It’s a dozen different ideas for things that could happen in a Beetlejuice sequel slopped into a cauldron and ladled out in an arbitrary order. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that, of all directors, Tim Burton isn’t really in command of the storytelling here, but he’s hardly stretching himself as a visual stylist either. This was a film I was really looking forward to, but sad to say, it’s not only dead on arrival, rigor mortis has firmly set in.