A few weeks ago now, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the 2026 Oscars ceremony. And ya know what: I think they did a pretty good job! 2025 had a lot of great movies, and while TWIR Discord member Sebastian pointed out how frustrating it is that Awards season collapses a year into like 10-20 movies, at least this year those movies were all solid! There’s nothing like Emilia Perez here sucking out the air. 

But it inspired me to back a tradition from the YouTube days: ranking the Best Picture nominees. I’ve been working on this list since the day of the announcements, and the rankings have changed a bit over that time, sometimes in ways that surprised me (and one way that will offend at least one of you). 

But that’s okay. Unfortunately, because of the way my brain works, I’m going to be fairly negative about a lot of these movies before I say all the positive things I feel about them. But no matter how negative I seem, I like most of these movies at least a lot: I gave 7 ★★★★ or more on Letterboxd, and one more a hearted ★★★1/2. Even the two that I didn’t necessarily like (each ★★★) I wasn’t mad about having seen. 

Now without further ado:

#10: The Secret Agent 

The last movie I saw – literally the day the nominees were announced, so if you were worried about recency bias… nope! When I first saw that there was a beloved movie out of Cannes called The Secret Agent, I was like “Oh that’s fun” and then I saw a single still and thought “There’s no way this movie is about secret agents,” and I’m sad to say I was right. Director Kleber Mendonca Filho told Screendaily that he chose the name because it was “mysterious, exciting, and sexy,” and while I’ll grant him two of those adjectives, the only thing “mysterious” about this film is “why.”

Because there’s no mystery here: our protagonist, Marcelo (Wagner Moura) has already figured out the conspiracy, leaked it to the press, and is now under a sort of witness protection, because the people involved in the conspiracy are big mad about it. We the audience don’t know what it is for a while, because it takes a while for there to be a scene where Marcelo sits down and tells people (us) what’s what… and that doesn’t make for a particularly satisfying story. It’s frequently confusing, not because it needs to be but because it chooses to be. 

And also because there’s a weird fucking cat with two faces and shit? What the fuck is that about.

There are all these strange choices that I kept waiting to be justified and when the attempt at justification comes in the final minutes, I thought “Ohhhhh”... followed shortly by “Nope,” because it doesn’t earn that explanation. Spoilers for the next paragraph:

The revelation that this movie is a visual depiction of old cassette tapes being transcribed by modern-day researchers is a compelling one, because it allows the film to do some weird shit with structure and imagery. There’s a really dramatic jump in time that comes when a researcher switches tapes, and Marcelo gets No Country for Old Men’d presumably because she lost interest when she couldn’t hear Wagner Moura telling the story. That two-faced cat and especially the disembodied leg kicking a bunch of sexually active park-goers[*] are pieces of the story getting combined in the researcher’s mind in silly ways, which is theoretically compelling... but it doesn’t go far enough. You can’t just have two weird images and two jarring time jumps in 2 hours and 40 minutes and claim to be doing something. Make that researcher the protagonist and have this ancient political assassination become a mystery for her so it can be a mystery for us. Have characters do things that don’t make sense because the person imagining the story got confused. Lean into the bizarre shit. [*A Brazilian reader has told me that the disembodied leg was how an actual spate of violent attacks was described/covered during this era and I’m just being an ignorant American. Fair enough! Doesn’t change my argument tho: they couldn’t justify the cat.]

Unfortunately, The Secret Agent doesn’t commit to the bit. And so the bottom of the list it is. 

#9: Train Dreams 

Train Dreams is easily one of the most beautiful movies I’ve seen in years. It’s a joke to say “Every frame a [National-Geographic-award-winning photograph]” but it’s also really not a joke. From shot two – a POV of a falling tree – I was absolutely awed by the imagery. This is the only movie on this list I was not able to see in a theater, and that’s a damn shame. Though unlike an entry on this list whose enjoyment is likely dependent on the screen its seen on, I don’t think even a big ol IMAX showing would change my mind about this one, because it’s not spectacle, even as it’s spectacular. 

I had considered writing about the bleak double-feature Train Dreams would make with Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice (certainly snubbed this year): if you think about the opening of the former and the shot that plays over the credits of the latter, it paints a pretty rough picture. Train Dreams depicts the inexorable march of time through the adult life of a tree feller (if I had a southern accent that would be a great pun). And we are constantly reminded about the fleeting nature of life – how you and your loved ones and also just people you don’t know at all are here one minute and gone the next: the violence of an uncaring world. It is critical that we live in the moment with what we have and appreciate them and appreciate what’s around us because the world is beautiful. 

But Train Dreams fucks all this up by adding truly the most irritating voiceover I’ve ever heard in a movie. Every so often out of fucking nowhere, an omniscient narrator pops in to say some inane shit that I assume was taken straight from the novel being adapted, and every single time it made me genuinely mad. A movie like this shouldn’t feel like it got notes from Netflix, like they added some bullshit in post because people might be watching on their phones and get confused that this movie about the passage of time has time passing in it. If it was a literal silent film it would be at least a slot higher, and if it was a sound film without the VO it’d be even higher than that.

But we got what we got, and what we got is #9. 

#8: F1

Here’s that spectacle!

Now, I’ll admit to feeling some philosophical (moral?) conflict about this movie not being number 10 because, to quote George Carlin talking about the 7th word you can’t say on television: “[It] doesn’t even belong on the list!” Which just… feels true, right? 

One assumes that it’s meant to be the “Popular Pick,” but there’s a movie on this list that made nearly $100 million more (in the US at least) than this one did. F1 is no Wicked, which was an absolute phenomenon. It’s not even a Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski’s far better previous film. 

But I think there’s an argument to be made that F1 deserves this particular nomination, because the Best Picture award is given to the film’s producers, and F1 may not be a great movie but it’s an incredible feat of logistics. If the logic of the Oscars is “Most” rather than “Best,” F1 has a credible argument for being at the top, because those producers pulled off a damn miracle. The movie feels extraordinarily authentic because they just got the ability to film during actual races – able to put the actors up next to the real racers in modified F2 cars on actual tracks. There’s incredible camerawork that involved building and networking some incredibly complex rigs. I dunno how much the custom iPhone camera was actually used (my guess is not much), but again we’re talking about “Most” and this is “Most” shit.  

And by being the most, we get true spectacle. Those racing scenes are amazing. In an IMAX theater, I fully forgot to breathe – something I haven’t done since the first time I watched Mad Max: Fury Road. Now, unlike Fury Road, after each race is a bunch of poorly written bullshit about uninteresting characters, but I accepted that as a moment to relax before the spectacle returned. And I think it’s likely the case that your enjoyment of this film is 1:1 correlated with the size of the screen on which it’s seen, because if your vision isn’t absolutely enveloped in the track – if your ears aren’t ringing from the engine roars, then I can’t imagine it even being good, and even on the largest screen in the world it’s never going to be great.

#7: Frankenstein

Numbers 9, 8, and now 7 are really defined by aesthetics. The grandeur of the mundane in Train Dreams; the technical prowess of F1, and now the sumptuous design of Frankenstein. 

This movie is exactly what you expect “Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein" to be. And I think the moment that really crystallized that for me was in watching the construction of this film’s “Creature.” Where other Victors von Frankenstein have put a new brain in an old body or maybe sewn some pieces together, this Victor hand crafts his creation from only the finest of corpses. Watching Oscar Isaac lovingly set the layers of sinew the way an overly ambitious parent builds their first child’s crib is somewhere between haunting and beautiful (two words that could describe virtually every GDT production), and like so many overly ambitious parents, the revelation that he actually doesn’t want a kid at all is heart-breaking – especially in that second half where we see the world through the Creature’s eyes. 

It’s been very cool to see where Jacob Elordi has gone with the Big Break he was given. Where Euphoria’s biggest breakout, Sydney Sweeney, has gone in a pretty chaotic direction and Hunter Schaeffer has not been able to show off much range, Elordi is teaming up with interesting directors (Sofia Coppola, Guillermo Del Toro, Emerald Fennel) who use him in interesting ways. It’s not entirely unlike the path Robert Pattinson followed, though Pattinson does just seem like a weirder guy than Elordi and also, like, most people? 

Robert Pattinson seems super weird (I liked Mickey 17 a lot, especially on my second viewing, though it’s hardly one of Bong Jon-ho’s best and I don’t really think it was snubbed and I know for a fact that Bong doesn’t care about its lack of nominations, so).

In any case, Elordi is extremely good in this. Everyone is, frankly. It’s really just a “firing on all cylinders” kind of movie where I was just engrossed start to finish and when it ended I thought “Hell yeah. Great job, team.” And sometimes that’s enough to get you to #7.

#6: Bugonia

If you’ve subscribed to this newsletter, there’s a solid chance you’ve seen my review of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save the Green Planet!, titled “The 2003 Korean film we SHOULD be talking about” (in contrast to Oldboy, which is the 2003 Korean film we do talk about (slightly click-baity, I’ll admit (I also love Oldboy))). Which means you know that I freaking love that movie, an utterly singular work of absolute chaos that feels distinctly Korean in its hilariously violent tonal shifts. 

Introducing the film back at the screening I reviewed, director Ari Aster said “You stuff as much movie as you can without it breaking, and somehow this one doesn’t break.” He specifically cited it as an inspiration for Midsommar, and his movies have only gotten more stuffed since. (I’m sad I don’t get to talk about Eddington here, which was totally snubbed and something I would put above any movie on the bottom half of the list… including this one!)

So of course Aster would be a producer on its English-language remake, Bugonia, which was originally set to be the 48th entry on this “Directors Who Remade their Own Movies” Letterboxd list but ended up being helmed by the Academy’s favorite weirdo, Yorgos Lanthimos.

And it’s better for that. Bugonia takes the same premise – a man and his helper kidnap a major CEO and torture them because the man believes that the CEO is actually an alien come to exterminate the human race – but feels quite unlike its predecessor. And to some degree, that’s a matter of simplicity: Bugonia is much more tonally coherent: from start to finish, this is a pitch-black comedy/thriller with maybe-sci-fi elements depending on how you think about the “alien” stuff (are paranoid YouTube videos breaking down the logistics of interstellar travel and communication and whatever science fiction? arguably!). And that makes it much more accessible, which is good because somehow this story feels more immediate 22 years later. 

It is so much easier for conspiracy to proliferate than it was, and Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is a very specific sort of armed incel. He's more quietly dangerous: he wears a suit and speaks in a “professional” manner. He's trying to convince the person he kidnapped and chained up that he's a nice guy (one of the good ones) and he gets very angry when she sees right through him. So we don't really like Teddy or the type of person he represents…

But neither do we like Michelle the CEO (Lanthimos’s muse, Emma Stone), and given the kind of people that we know high-powered executives are… I mean, alien or not, she probably deserves it, right? Michelle would totally be in the Epstein files. And sure: the revelation of what her company did to Teddy’s mother makes his own motivations a little more suspect, but not in a way that makes you sympathize with his captive. Plus, she speaks to him in that condescending corporate jargon, which is itself a damn-near-alien language all its own (but I repeat myself).

Bugonia (more than its predecessor) is a film about power and consequences. Two significant changes this time around deal with Teddy's companion – then his girlfriend, here his autistic cousin (a stellar debut by Aidan Delbis) – and the cop who comes to investigate – now Teddy's childhood babysitter (podcaster/comedian Stavros Halkias, who said his family finally thinks he's successful because he's in a Yorgos Lanthimos film), and they radically reshape how we see this central figure while adding some thematic weight that's arguably missing from Save the Green Planet!

And I appreciate it! I think this is about as good as an English-language remake could be. It justifies its existence as a companion to the original that I look forward to seeing again at some point down the line.

But also, ya know, it's no Save the Green Planet!

#5: Hamnet

I was aggressively disinterested in Hamnet – even moreso than The Secret Agent, because it’s a real period piece: one that takes place centuries before electricity. Where a character in old-timey clothes yells out at the street from an old-timey window in an old-timey house “Who are you looking for” and the old-timey people on the old-timey street say “William Shakespeare” and I’m just like “Ugh.” I do love me some Billy Shakes, but I don’t need to see a damn movie about him! Certainly not one by Chloe Zhao, who I think is above all a deeply earnest filmmaker (one of the many reasons The Eternals was bad), and earnestness makes all the things I don’t like about the period even worse!

But then there was that review quoted in that marketing that said it was the best movie ever, and while obviously that’s a demented thing for someone to say in the immediate wake of seeing a movie (ignore my Letterboxd review of Everything Everywhere All at Once) followed by a whole bunch of people saying “I mean… no, but it is really freaking good.” At which point it seemed like I would have to get over myself and see what the fuss was about.

And it took a bit, honestly: Jessie Buckley and Paul Mezcal are expectedly excellent, fully engrossing me in their story… but even the Eggers-level authenticity didn't get me invested in the setting – a shame since Zhao uses a lot of extreme wides that emphasize it over the performers. I fundamentally disagreed with many of the shot choices, feeling like I was watching a play from a bad seat… and, like, I live in New York City. If I wanted to see a play from a bad seat, I’d sit in the Broadway nosebleeds thank you very much. 

And yet Hamnet starts the top half of the list, because none of the above matters in the face of two towering achievements. The first, a reaction to a character's death, hit me so hard I thought “Is this the most effective bit of performance I've ever seen?” And then the entire last 10-15 minutes happened, and I thought, “No, maybe this is the most effective bit of performance I've ever seen.”

So yeah: this movie has two of the most effective sequences in recent memory, 

more immediate and affecting than anything in any of the other movies I’m talking and also not talking about here (though some stuff in the #1 slot comes close). I cannot emphasize enough the effect they had on me, and that just obliterated every criticism I had.

Also, thank fucking God this isn't just a movie about being Shakespeare the tortured artist as he abandons his family to be famous in London. We've got enough stuff like that.

But you know what we ain't got enough of?

#4: Sinners

The true popular pick! While F1 made more money globally, Sinners made a whole lot more domestically and was the kind of phenomenon we haven't seen since Barbenheimer. 

Like, my sister saw Sinners in the theater. My sister doesn't see anything in the theater.

And there's a lot of meta-textual stuff going on with this movie: Director Ryan Coogler notably got a very good contract that made a bunch of suits complain about bthe death of cinema or some shit because in 25 years he will get the rights from Warner Bros/soon-to-be Netflix: it will truly be “A Ryan Coogler Film.” Coogler himself has pointed out that this deal is not entirely unique, but you don't have to think too hard to know why the reaction was so vicious: He's Black. Unapologetically so. He doesn't Dress White or Speak White. And that makes the White executives – who you just know would have loved to own plantations in the Antebellum South – so mad. They want to own him and his art and wouldn't you know it that's literally what the fucking movie is about. 

Life imitates art imitates life.

But putting all that aside, this is one of the coolest movies to ever be up for Best Picture. It just oozes that particular adjective and is obviously great in a way that anyone can appreciate.

Who doesn't want to see a pair of twins – both played by Michael B. Jordan – show back up at their old stomping grounds to open a juke joint only for an Irish vampire to start fucking things up? Losers. And you're not a loser; you subscribed to my newsletter! You're less cool than Sinners, but you're pretty damn cool. 

Sinners is big, bold, bloody, and even a bit sexy. Seeing it in IMAX70 with the expanded aspect ratio for the action scenes but most importantly the music scenes was incredible. The tracking shot through time is extremely cool, obviously, but gosh that Irish dance hit so hard when the legs are the size of a house.

(Side note: Is this the first time IMAX film has been, like, visibly “color corrected”? I have seen most of the movies shot on that format, and none look like this one. Cool stuff.)

Plus, it’s got those deeper themes for anyone who wants to engage (this vampire being Irish is very significant!), but even the dumbest dude on the damn planet will have a good gosh dang time. Really, it's everything you want from a night out at the movies, and it's cool as hell that this is now the most-nominated movie in Academy Award history – beating the previous record held jointly by All About Eve, Titanic, and… La La Land by two. And I think it’d be even cooler if it won, because an unabashed popcorn horror movie has never been Best Picture and even if Sinners is not the Best Picture of the year, it would stand out among its peers far more than the three films I think are better.

But there are three films I think are better.

#3: One Battle After Another 

I came to One Battle After Another pretty late in the discourse cycle, because it released the day I left America for a month, and I didn’t want to spend any part of my trip in a movie theater. This meant I saw the headline reactions – the Letterboxd scores and YouTube titles – without even knowing the basic premise. And so I knew I was going to like it, because I am a millennial white man who went to something film-school adjacent, meaning my life has been defined by Paul Thomas Anderson movies (I’m lying (I didn't see most of his movies until my late twenties or 30s and watched two of them for the first time in the last few weeks) but that doesn't really matter). And I did super extremely like it.

But.

I also knew that many of the more public-facing folks who didn't like it were Black, people like F.D. Signifier who I don’t always agree with but deeply respect. So that was there in the back of my mind… for all of five minutes before it came straight to the forefront as I was faced with the film’s first POV character: Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a member of the French 75 – a radical organization that frees immigrants and blows up buildings and cool stuff like that. She’s got a bomb-making boy-toy played by Leonardo DiCaprio named Ghetto Pat (cuz he likes Black women), and she really, really likes sex. Like, there’s a lot of sex and sex-adjacent action in the first 30 minutes of this movie. (Not all of it consensual, which is its own whole discourse that's worth digging into if you think it was.)

Yet Perfidia is not a real revolutionary: She likes holding up military men and planting bombs and all that, but when push comes to shove, she only cares about herself. And it’s fine to have a protagonist who’s in it for the wrong reasons just as it’s fine to have your movie about revolutionaries not be revolutionary. 

But man Perfidia sucks. And unlike the other POV characters in the film (who are also self-centered in ways that get people hurt if not killed)), there’s nothing to her but the fact that she sucks. Teyana Taylor is great at playing bad people (see: A Thousand and One), but she struggles to find humanity in this character. In the end, Perfidia’s just a rat, consigning her crew (and family) to death or constant fear of it. 

(And this turns out to be a particular spit in the face of Black Liberationists, because it sullies the image of actual revolutionary Assata Shakur, who Taylor was explicitly inspired by in the development of the character and shares some superficial similarities but was, critically, not a rat. Here’s that F.D. Signifier link again.)

So you take that and also the whole weird monologue by a character named “Junglepussy” (which is made so much weirder when you learn that actor is a musical artist who goes by the name Junglepussy (whose lyrics are used in the film, including “This pussy don't pop for you”), which Paul Thomas Anderson put in because he liked her music so much) and, I dunno, you should read Black Girl Watching’s “One Fetish After Another”.

Yet half an hour in, Perfidia walks across the border to Mexico and out of the movie, at which point One Battle After Another becomes plausibly my #1 of the year.

I’m deeply jealous that Paul Thomas Anderson and Ari Aster both got to work through their clearly-complicated feelings about the present moment in expensive movies starring household names. OBAA goes down a lot more smoothly than Eddington does, but they obviously come from the same place. The trailer has two of the bigger eye-rolling moments, but the “they/them” argument is probably beat-for-beat a conversation Anderson has had with his own child, and the revelation that the dismissive hotline operator telling a guy who had Done Things that he needed to read up on the texts is also a graying white man is an extremely good payoff.

It's these side characters who really bring the world to life as they demonstrate different forms of power and values and movements. We have the Klan-descendents that I have already used multiple times to explain what “WhiteAngloSaxonProtestant” really means. We have the former French 75 who went into hiding but have not fully remained hidden and do still care about the cause. 

And we’ve got Sensei and his network: Benicio Del Toro’s most compelling performance in quite some time is also just such a good example of what true community action looks like. The way he facilitates it all (and the calm with which he does it) is genuinely inspiring and extremely funny when placed beside Leo’s frenzy. I’d watch a ten-episode spin-off about Sensei for sure.

Also, this movie looks so good. That final car chase? chefkiss.gif

#2: Marty Supreme 

Living close to a movie theater offers me the very specific benefit of being able to go to late-night showings during the week without being a total wreck at work the next day. I can go home, immediately go to sleep for a few hours, then wake up and head on over to an 11 PM screening of e.g. Marty Supreme… but even if I’m reasonably awake during these times, it does require the movie to be a certain level of exciting to keep me engaged past 1 AM on a Tuesday.

And Marty Supreme is nothing if not exciting. 

Which sucks for one half of the Safdie Brothers, because each released their debut solo feature in the same awards season, and it’s quite clear who the more compelling filmmaker is. Where Benny’s The Smashing Machine failed to do much more than remind us what The Rock looked like when he had hair (fittingly, its sole Oscar nom came for Makeup and Hairstyling), Josh’s Marty Supreme whipped up a frenzy. And rightly so.

What first promises to be the story of a ping pong prodigy (Timothee Chalomet) quickly turns into something so much darker and stranger. After being utterly destroyed by a Japanese player who uses a technique Marty doesn’t understand, he makes it his mission to get to Japan so that he can play the man again and win. So he needs to get money… but also his need to get money takes him in a million other directions, including pulling Gwyneth Paltrow (reminding us why she’s famous) into an affair away from her husband, played by Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary AKA Mr. Wonderful AKA Sam Bankman Fried’s Biggest Supporter. 

I don’t like Kevin O’Leary (see: SBF’s biggest support, etc.), but I’ll be damned if he isn’t really fucking good in this movie. Filling out the supporting cast with non-actors is definitely a Safdie trademark – Kevin Garnett is similarly excellent in Uncut Gems – and we see others pop up, like Tyler the Creator and even Penn Freaking Jilette (who I recently saw at Radio City for Penn & Teller’s 50th Anniversary show). 

But the real reason that Marty Supreme is higher than OBAA on this list despite the fact that I have frankly a lot less to say about it is because it soars where OBAA falters. Marty sucks even more than Perfidia Beverly Hills does: there is absolutely nothing redeeming about him (at least Perfidia blew up some buildings and freed some immigrants)... but he has a specific drive. He needs the world to know that he is the #1 ping pong boy. 

And there is nothing he won’t do to make that happen. He doesn’t care at all what carnage and mayhem will be left in his wake… and I mean those things literally! This movie is wild. A friend of mine complained that I didn’t warn her how absurd the whole thing is, which is a character flaw on her part (smile.emoji) but it’s definitely true that I never once predicted where this movie would go next, nor how low Marty would be willing to go to get what he wants. He’s a truly loathsome individual surrounded by other loathsome people, and yet it’s all utterly transfixing. 

Where Uncut Gems is a panic attack, Marty Supreme is a shot of epinephrine. I was so amped that when the credits rolled at 2 in the fucking morning on a flipping Tuesday, it was another hour before the adrenaline fully wore off. So good.

But not the best.

#1: Sentimental Value 

Where every other placement on this list was malleable, there was never a question that Sentimental Value would be at the top. Joachim Trier does not miss. There’s a reason Thelma was on my “Best of the Decade,” standing in for an extremely popular brand of movie that it is universally better than.

Here, he takes on another popular brand: the movie about people who make movies. Seemingly every storyteller eventually takes their crack at it, and 2025 had three in the run-up to Awards season (though neither Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly nor Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vauge received any Oscar noms). But while I genuinely enjoyed getting the glimpses of the way things happen behind-the-scenes, the making of the movie within the movie is really not that important. 

Sentimental Value is at its heart a family drama: Nora (a typically excellent Renate Reinsve) is a mostly-theatrical actress whose father is a respected-but-now-kinda-washed-up film director (Stellan Skarsgard). And this director, Gustav, shows up one day and tells Nora that he wants her to be in a movie he’s written. Which is weird, because Gustav didn’t show up for anything! He was a terrible father, and Nora wants absolutely nothing to do with him… and Nora’s sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) is caught in the middle of this, as is her son Erik. 

And in Gustav’s frustration, he ends up connecting with an American actress played by Elle Fanning – who was repping Sentimental Value and Predator Badlands simultaneously because I guess she’s got a really fucking good agent – and gets Netflix funding and etc. etc. for putting her in Nora’s role (but he really wants to work with Nora).

Drama, etc.

Coming at the top of this list, it’s funny how slight that description makes Sentimental Value feel: there are no car chases or gunfights or (physical) injuries of any kind. Hamnet is the only thing that’s close, but it’s more in-your-face in its drama and also there’s the 1500s of it all. 

Yet it’s that comparative slightness that I think makes the film so effective, because again: this is a family drama set in right now. The difficulties these characters face are our difficulties. And so it’s easy to see yourself in at least one and probably several of them. 

Though if you believe in the power of art and especially if you aspire to make it, then the movie hits on a whole other level. Because Gustav isn’t just trying to get his daughter to be in a movie that he made because he thinks she’s a good performer (tbh, it’s not clear if he thinks that at all because he doesn’t see her stuff): the part was written for her, because it is a movie about his family, being shot in the home that they grew up in… and there’s so much wrapped up in that history, in the nooks and crannies of an aging structure. As we learn more of the story, the more melancholic it all becomes. 

And then we see how those ideas are squeezed by the realities of production and of the frailty of humans, and it’s frustrating and heartbreaking (oof that meeting between Gustav and his former cinematographer)... but when it all pays off in the end? Holy fucking cow man. It sticks that landing so goddamn hard I wanted to cheer in the theater. 

Bravo to literally everyone involved in this project. Gosh fucking damn. #1. No question.

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