IT'S MOVIE SEASON. Have a plan.

Anora, Conclave, Emilia Perez, and Juror #2, plus six more to watch for

People, the time is upon us when movie studios cram all of their upper-middlebrow prestige picks into one three-month span so they’ll still be remembered by Oscar voters. It sounds like a dumb reason, but every year something wonderful seems to come out in the spring or summer and by EOY it’s like it never existed—the lovely Sing Sing will likely be this year’s poster child—so I grudgingly get why studios would rather ride natural momentum to nominations vs spend a fortune on ad campaigns. Though things have changed somewhat in recent years! If you can release a talky three-hour biopic about a nuclear scientist in July, make money, and win awards, all things seem possible. For now, though, it’s time to get your shit together and have a plan, because movies are coming at you fast. Here are reviews of four that are already in theaters, plus six more that I’m excited about.

Conclave, Edward Berger

This movie about a bunch of cardinals locked in the Vatican to battle it out over who will be the next Pope is some HIGH-GRADE JUNK. It is beautifully made, wonderfully acted, non-campy, and essentially meaningless. There is no particular reason for it to exist. Your more bluestocking friends may come out saying ‘Hmm, it really gives you something to think about!” Shut up, no it doesn’t. The much ballyhooed twist ending that’s meant to make you go “Oooooooh, PROVOCATIVE” is…mostly just kind of random? (If you’ve seen it, think about it: is Fienne’s decision really groundbreaking, or even all that risky?)

What I’m saying is that I loved every second of Conclave. Every time they failed to elect a pope I was like “yesssssss” because it meant the skullduggery and whispering and bitchery and Isabella Rossellini side-eyeing everyone in sight could go on a bit longer. If you told me Norman Jewison made this in 1983 immediately following Agnes of God and they just forgot to release it till now, I might believe you. That’s the kind of peak middlebrow it is. Also, it’s surprisingly funny at times. Go immediately, my child.

Bonus Oscar predictions: Ralph Fiennes is getting nominated for sure, and could even win based on “he’s owed” feelings. (Not that the performance isn’t good—it is.) Isabella has a very small but impactful role and could get a supporting nom a la Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown, but I don’t see her winning. I’d love to see a Stanley Tucci nom, but am not holding my breath. Best Picture is likely and you know, it could be the kind of consensus pick that actually wins.

Anora, Sean Baker

This year’s Palme d’Or winner is sort of the Unca Jahms of comedy. It’s a good time at the movies that is also pretty fucking stressful. The title character (who goes by Ani) is a tough, 23-year-old exotic dancer from Brighton Beach who meets and impulsively marries the 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch. That’s the first hour, which is never less than entertaining but also a little inert, like the movie can’t stop clearing its throat. Then, the boy’s parents get wind of the marriage and instruct their local emissaries, including an Armenian priest/fixer and his mafia-adjacent brother, to have it annulled.

The boy caves immediately, but Ani decides to fight back, and this is where Anora achieves liftoff as a frenetic, madcap comedy with a pervasive undertone of menace and creeping heartbreak. I’m in awe of director Sean Baker’s control of a pretty tricky tone, and of how the story gradually widens from its rom-com beginnings to one about a bunch of people who are shady for sure, but fundamentally just trying to do their jobs and survive. The movie’s shifting alliances end in a crushing scene that reminds you that this brass-balled, ferally self-protective sex worker is also a kid whose heart has just been shattered. It’s devastating and also, I think, a little hopeful.

Side note: in these own-voices days, it’s so interesting to me that Sean Baker, a cis-het white guy, is out here making movies from the perspective of exotic dancers and black trans sex workers (Tangerine) and washed-up porn stars (Red Rocket) and little girls living in cheap motels (The Florida Project) and no one seems to yell at him. I think the key is that his films are so incredibly specific. Anora is about this one girl named Ani, not young women who strip for a living. The Florida Project is about one six-year-old girl who lives in a motel, not childhood poverty.

Bonus Oscar predictions: all I know for sure is that Mikey Madison will be nominated for the title role and it’s hers to lose. I walked in not particularly fond of her work and within the first thirty minutes she joined the short list of actors I will watch in anything. Otherwise…I don’t know, man. This is a wonderful film crammed with great supporting performances, especially Yura Borisov as the Russian tough who is sent to subdue Ani and gradually becomes her protector. But between all the sex and the constant profanity and the stress of Armenians and Russians yelling at each other, it’s pretty darn un-Oscary. It may share the Uncah Jahms fate: lots of attention, plenty of critics’ awards, no Academy love. Whatever happens, it’s a major career step forward for Baker, Madison, and Borisov.

Emilia Perez, Jacques Audiard

Okay, so: Rita (Zoe Saldana) is a Mexico City lawyer summoned to a secret meeting with Manitas, the leader of a notorious drug cartel. He wants to become a trans woman, he tells her. Can he hire her for a staggering amount of money to make all the arrangements? She says yes, his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and young children are spirited off to Switzerland and made to believe he is dead, and we pick back up several years later, where Rita runs into a tall, elegant woman named Emilia Perez at a dinner party. Huh, I wonder if they’ve ever met before! As it turns out, Emilia (played by Karla Sofia Gascon) also wants to hire Rita for a important task. How about that! And we’re off to the races.

Oh, and it’s a musical.

I am flummoxed by this one. It made a huge splash at international festivals, and I can see why, based on audacity alone. This is a bona fide melodrama, full of color and portent and emotions so big the characters can only express them in song. I sure as hell was never bored by it, and I left kind of enthralled with Zoe Saldana, whose career I haven’t followed closely.

It’s just that by the second half, I realized I had no idea why any of the characters were making the choices they made. Emilia, a vastly wealthy woman, has become a feminist icon for her NGO dedicated to recovering the bodies of Mexicans murdered by the cartels. But why did she decide to spend the rest of her life this way? Is she atoning for the past? We can only guess. Jessi the widow is flinty and sharp, yet also ready to take a lot of fairly obvious deceptions at face value. Does she really not suspect? And how does she get from that place of naïveté to the fairly shocking acts of the final half hour? We can only guess. Thinking back, I wonder if I’m discounting the movie overall because it falls apart so badly toward the end. If so, that’s fair. Audiard is no promising newcomer and it’s fair to ask that he control his material.

As for the film’s politics, actual trans and queer people have insightful things to say about them, and most of it didn’t occur to me while watching. Or at least not in political terms. But I did wonder why Manitas and Emilia feel like completely different people with completely different personalities, as though gender transition could turn a ruthless drug lord into Mother Earth. That is not how it works, AFAIK! Honestly, the film’s treatment of trans life is so shallow and binary that it seems more like a handy plot device than anything arising from character, just an excuse for Manitas to be unrecognizable as his former self. In a world with lots of trans representation in movies, I could probably shrug this off as just dumb. But we’re not there yet, and so it seems important not to fuck it up.

There’s lots more to read on Emilia Perez from a trans and queer perspective, and the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t sit well with me. But also, it’s just bad storytelling.

Bonus Oscar predictions: Geez, IDK. This might be a case of festival fever, where attendees lose their shit over a movie and then it opens in the real world and everyone else is either underwhelmed or actively pissed. The Saldana and Gascon performances are terrific and I would not begrudge them nominations just because their director did a bad job. Saldana is really the lead, but I suspect the studio will campaign her in Supporting and Gascon as Best Actress to avoid them cannibalizing each other. Gascon is a trans actress, so any nomination is bound to produce whining about “men” taking over the women’s categories from the usual suspects, which is exhausting in advance.

Juror #2, Clint Eastwood

Twenty years ago this film, a courtroom drama in the tradition of The Verdict or Twelve Angry Men, would have been a solid hit. In 2024, I had to drive to eight miles to the only theater in King County showing it, and I had to move fast because it’s only getting one week in theaters. Look, I know Clint Eastwood’s recent films haven’t been profitable, or even particularly good. But this is a terrific movie, probably his best in two decades, and I’m sad to see the studio dump it, especially as it will very likely be his last film. At least he’s going out strong.

To set you up for watching it on streaming: Juror No. Two stars Nicholas Hoult as Savannah magazine writer and recovering alcoholic Justin Kemp, who is called for jury duty on the trial of a man accused of killing his girlfriend in a drunken rage. Justin would rather not be serving, especially with his wife (Zoey Deutch) in the third trimester of a high-risk pregnancy. He hopes for an open-and-shut case with a speedy verdict. And when the jury begins deliberations, eleven of them walk in ready to convict. There’s just one holdout: Justin, who has started to suspect that he might actually be the person responsible for the woman’s death. Can he save an innocent defendant without destroying his own life?

(I know Nicholas Hoult is a bona-fide grownup actor now, but this song still plays in my head every time I see him onscreen. Not a complaint.)

I MEAN, COME ON. How is this film not playing in every mall in the United States? This is what we call a foursquare, blue-chip MOVIE. The premise may be far-fetched, but Eastwood’s unfussy (maybe a bit too unfussy) style and Jonathan Abrams’s script keep it feeling grounded, as do understated performances by Hoult, Toni Colette¹ as politically ambitious prosecutor Faith Killebrew, Chris Messina as the defense attorney and Faith’s law-school pal, and J.K. Simmons as a juror who knows more than he’s saying. (There’s also a little bit of Kiefer Sutherland as Justin’s AA sponsor, who also happens to be a lawyer.) It all builds methodically but swiftly to an ending that genuinely surprised me; I anticipated where it was going, but expected it to get there via a very different route. Along the way, Eastwood definitely has some points to make about the justice system, convenient biases, and what it takes to redeem a checkered past. But he doesn’t hit them too hard. This is about the pleasures of a good story, told by consummate professionals. I can virtually guarantee you will enjoy it.

Bonus Oscar predictions: I guess it could get a screenplay nom but even that seems unlikely without studio support.

And now, for an even ten, here are six more movies I’m champing at the bit to see before year’s end:

1. Blitz, Steve McQueen. Early viewers say that McQueen’s Dickensian WWII film, inspired by an archival photograph of a young black boy among children being evacuated to the countryside, is formally conventional by his standards, even staid. I DO NOT CARE. McQueen has earned the right to tell me any story he wants, any way he wants to tell it, and if I don’t like this one then I’ll just get over it. Anyway, people dismissed Widows, one of the great social panoramas of the past decade and a sly treatise on the economics of childcare, as a conventional heist movie. So people can be pretty dumb.

2. A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg. This looks to be one of those classic dramedies a la Sideways or Lost in Translation, where a small number of people are thrown out of their comfort zones and talk/fight a lot about it. This time around, Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are cousins on a tour in Poland, where their grandmother lost her life in the Holocaust. Writer/director Eisenberg plays the Eisenberg character (anxious, tightly wound, responsible). Culkin, who’s getting huge Oscar buzz, plays the Culkin character (mercurial, hyper verbal, baked). The trailer is irresistible.

3. The Brutalist, Brady Corbet. It’s a 3.5 hour film, complete with intermission, about mid-century architects played by Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce. It roared out of nowhere to take the Silver Lion at Venice. Corbet, a former child actor, seems to take himself very seriously as an auteur, if press conferences are any indication. The two halves are shot in such different styles that some viewers regard them almost as separate films. TAKE MY MONEY, PLEASE. My body is presently in a Minneapolis coffee shop, but my spirit is camped out in front of the theater in my best architect cosplay. Adrien Brody is being called a lock to win Best Actor, and this is intriguing to me because after delivering one of the most star-making performances I’ve ever seen in Summer of Sam, Brody then proceeded to mostly irritate the living hell out of me for 20+ years. I started to get interested in him again via Succession and Asteroid City. Maybe The Brutalist can seal the deal.

4. Queer, Luca Guadagnino. I’ve been ride-or-die for Luca since his first film, I Am Love, and for Daniel Craig since back when he mostly played nerds and bohemians. So I’m all over this adaptation of a William Burroughs novel that I have never read and probably never will. It’s described as a romantic drama about an American expat (Craig) in 1950s Mexico City who becomes infatuated with a younger man. But friends who’ve seen it say that while that description isn’t wrong, there’s a lot more going on, including some sort of epic hallucinogenic experience that takes up a good chunk of the second act. The trailer is stunning and, I think, makes it pretty clear that this is more of a character study than a romance per se.

5. All We Imagine As Light, Payal Kapadia. My favorite international directors, like Asghar Farhadi and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, don’t make films that seem designed to educate Western audiences about Modern Problems in My Country. There’s no hand-holding. They just tell the stories they want to tell, and the rest is up to you. I love their lack of interest in pandering. From everything I’ve heard, Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, about three women friends who work as nurses in Mumbai, is in that same vein, and I’m very happy to possibly have a route into naturalistic Indian film that has eluded me to date. (BTW, All We Imagine As Light was the first Indian film since 1994 to show in Cannes’s main competition. 1994!!!!)

6. Babygirl, Halina Reijn. National treasure Nicole Kidman heard the manosphere debating “the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female” and said “I think I’ll make an erotic drama about a woman in a BDSM relationship with a man half her age. Oh! and let’s release it on Jesus’s birthday.” The trailer is glorious, early word is ecstatic, and best of all, ardent fans don’t agree on what genre it is. Romance? Thriller? Comedy? The only consensus is that it’s fucking great. Anyway, you know I’m all about sexual chaos², so obviously this is essential Christmas viewing for me.

1. It didn’t dawn on me till later that Collette and Hoult were having an About a Boy reunion, at which point I squealed out loud.

2. Or, uh, you do now!