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Oscar 20626

I’ve not seen the whole Best Picture shortlist, but I’ve seen most.

  • Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025)

The least interesting of the Lanthimos films I’ve seen – apparently a remake of Jigureul jikyeora! (Save the Green Planet!, 2003) in which Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap medical CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), convinced she is an alien. Your allegiances waver and like all of the films I’ve seen from the shortlist it needs a trim. There’s a rather inevitable left turn and we fall into camp.

  • Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025)

Steven Spielberg is a lover of Peter Pan and yet Hook (1991) seemed to suggest he didn’t get it. del Toro seems to fall into the same flaws here – Shelley’s classic and abused novel, although the Universal and Hammer versions create a mythos that is tangential to the novel. Here we shift the action to the mid-19th century (and yet dynamite has been invented already), add an abusive back story for Victor (Oscar Isaac), shuffle Victor’s relatives and the syphilitic Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz). Jacob Elordi is watchable as ever as the Creature – he’s clearly rehearsing Heathcliff – but his ability to push a ship free of ice strains credibility rather than his muscles. The Arctic setting is just a fingers up at purists.

  • F1 (Joseph Kosinski, 2025)

Best Tony Scott tribute act, judging by the trailers, but an advert for a sports industry rather than the US military. Not seen, so I could be missing some subtlety.

  • Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025)

Overrated adaptation, in which a neglected historical figure is shown how to feel by William Shakespeare.

  • Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025)

A rather fun screwball comedy, in which Marty (Timothée Chalamet) attempts to raise the money that will allow him to attend and win the world table tennis championship. The sport is mostly a metaphor, as Marty faces setback after setback. Abel Ferrara gives great cameo and it’s worth pondering the universe where this was called Wiff-Waff and directed by Ken Loach.

  • One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

I’ve largely avoided Anderson after Magnolia (1999) – which my memory tells me I saw the same day as either The Green Mile or Eyes Wide Shut and left me vowing never to see another film. So, this came as a pleasant surprise. “Ghetto”  Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) has long since retired from a career of revolutionary crime and has been left to look after a daughter Charlene (Chase Infiniti) – but now Col. Steven K. Lockjaw is on his trail This goes to unexpected places – not least being a Thomas Pynchon adaptation (ish).

  • O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)

Another film about confronting the past – former academic Armando (Walter Moura) returns home to reconnect with his son and to search for details of his late mother. But there is soon a bounty on his head. There’s a complicated time structure – which I’m not sure adds up – and some surreal moments of black comedy. Definitely a contender.

  • Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier, 2025)

Possibly Trier’s least interesting film to date but I’d be happy for it to win – probably my favourite on the short list. Stage actress Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) refuses her father Gustav’s (Stellan Skarsgård) offer of a starring role in a quasi autobiographical film and he goes all Vertigo in casting an American starlet (Elle Fanning).

  • Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

It feels a long time since I saw this – Michael Jordan as twins sets up a Deep South bar and makes some enemies who are even more dangerous than the local White community. Some beautiful set pieces and stay for the credits – shame the Native American subplot didn’t go as far as it could have done.

  • Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025)

I blinked and missed this – in part because the blurb didn’t sound like what I wanted to see. I’ll catch some time, maybe.

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Machine Learning

Molly vs the Machines (Marc Silver, 2026)

It is a relief that I was in my mid-thirties before social media hit me — I am, in a dubious phrase, a digital immigrant.

I suspect some of the systemic racism, sexism and homophobia, I would have been soaked in and probably expressed would put me in cancellation territory. The (large) dormitory village where I grew up was hideously white — there was a Black technician, but I don’t recall any Black pupils. Ethnic diversity was for takeaways and corner shops, or something in the (not very) big city. It wasn’t quite a monoculture, but the only access to alternate lifestyles was in print. I am/was overweight, which was added to the litany of low key bullying.

Social media allows the weight conscious to see many more images than the glossy magazines I could have consumed. Perceived self-image is magnified, trauma added to trauma, cyberbullying not only endemic, but no further away than the mobile in your pocket. It’s never easy being a teen, but I’m glad I’ve got it out the way with when I did.

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Huthering Weights

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
“Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell, 2026)
Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

When I was clinging onto the idea of teaching English Literature, I got three part time gigs teaching nineteenth literature. This was ironical, because as an undergraduate there was an notable gap in my Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (and up to about 1990) that was Victoria Literature. Inevitable I had to teach three different Dickens and three Eliots, but Emily saved me by only having a single surviving novel.

I suspect my only knowledge of it was Kate Bush (which I had seen) and a Cliff Richard musical (which passed me by).

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A Bishop is Born

Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper, 2025)

I saw John Bishop a few times at the Carbuncle — when he didn’t have to postpone for TV double bookings — and he was fine, if not in my top ten lives comedians. There was a backstory even then — he had abandoned some kind of sales job for another role on the road. The deeper story is that he had become estranged from his wife, inadvertantly did a comedy open mic in Manchester and realised he was good at it. One night, his soon to be ex-wife was in the audience and was someone shocked — but like what she saw and they were reconciled.

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I Feel Sorry For Joe Alwyn

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025)

Hamlet (Aneil Keira, 2025)

I guess I confess to having not read the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, so I don’t know why of the clumsinesses are Hollywood additions. Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) is the stuck at home wife in the 1590s, whilst hubby William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is gallivanting around Shoreditch and the South Bank. All she has to look forward to is childrearing and his second-best bed.

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Silk Hats

Turner Prize 2025 (Cartwight Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, 27 September 2025-22 February 2026)

I’ve got to the Turner Prize exhibition, in London every year for a decade and to the off-metropolitan ones sometimes — Gateshead, Coventry, Margate, Liverpool, Eastbourne, although not Hull as it had closed for the ceremony to be set up. Bradford looked doable and could be combined with sidetrips to Wakesfield and Leeds, indeed Leeds was the place to stay.

(Vague memories of a trip to the Science and Media Museum, Bradford, as a child and another trip in the 1990s, and one of those involved Muppets, and I’d done three hours in February to see some Hockney. This was an hour too much for a grey and beige city marshalled by roadworks.)

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Stuff Happened

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened (Whitechapel Gallery, 11 October 2023–14 January 2024)

Born in Verdun, France, in the 1960s, Eisenman practices in Brooklyn and I’m very glad I caught this just before it closed – although a more awake me would have spent longer and a more alert me would have made the link to Ridykeulous at Nottingham Contemporary. (I seem to keep missing stuff here – maybe it’s just the wrong part of not central London. But engineering works led me, via the Dulwich Picture Gallery and Rubens to Blackfriars and the District Line…) It formed quite a contrast from the relative elegance of the Rubens oil on panels – especially as the theme of that exhibition was to evade the Rubenesque – and I felt much more in a R. Crumb/George Condo/Philip Guston tradition of the grotesque.

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Best Art Expotitions of 2023

Because “best” is such a subjective term, I’ve tried to spread my picks of gallery going across the calendar year. I’ve left out returns to museums in Amsterdam and Oslo (the Munchmuseet’s postwar American exhibition was great), and the long walks through MoMA, the Met, the Frink and the Whitney (although curiously one of two bijoux exhibitions at the Morgan Library was unexpectedly useful). A few themed shows – the surrealism at the Design Museum, the RAA’s southern America – might have made it in, but didn’t.

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Manhattan Haunts

So, if you are being pedantic about it, I’ve now had my third visit to New York. The second one was transferring planes at JFK and I seem to recall it was either a run between terminals or a six hours delay.

The first time was a day trip from just after the SFRA conference in Schenectady.

Sidebar: on the way there I changed planes at Boston Airport – where my parents met – and asked the security guards if they wanted me to Xray my luggage. Sure, they said, if you want to.

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