NOW is the time when the most “important” movies of the season are released before the end of the year in order to qualify for Oscars. By “important” I mean big budgets, big stars, big filmmakers, big themes. I have been waiting for something really BIG.

It didn’t turn out to be Daniel Day-Lewis in ANEMONE who was his usual mesmerizing self in the otherwise derivative and emotionally muddled ANEMONE written and directed by son Ronan who borrowed Paul Thomas Anderson’s playbook for the film’s climax. It wasn’t Jennifer Lopez who sang, danced, and dressed herself into a frenzy in the flaccid, overlong KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN compared to the haunting 1985 nonmusical film which won William Hurt a Best Actor Oscar.

It wasn’t quite DIE MY LOVE starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as a lunky-in-love couple who move from NYC to an isolated farmhouse in Montana where they have a baby whom they don’t name, then watch their sex life disintegrate as she devolves into what might be postpartum psychosis. Pattinson is excellent as the frustrated and increasingly infuriated husband. J-Law delivers a killer, over the top performance, marked by wet and wild physicality, and the surefire unloading of scorching one-liners.

 

DIE MY LOVE is a depressing film, neither an examination of psychosis nor a character study, but rather a woozily-shot wallow in what it feels like to dissociate and spiral into despair. Lawrence’s character who might have been a loose cannon before she ever had a baby, but who was apparently a writer–though we never see her write–does not make use of any of the tools at her disposal while her ailing mother-in-law (played by the luminous Sissy Spacek) looks on bearing batches of emotional  brownies.

I had high hopes for the latest from “Poor Things” filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and his muse Emma Stone in BUGONIA (which title refers to a myth–look it up). The film is idiosyncratic, tonally unique, superbly acted, but just shy of provocative. Stone plays a hyper “Type A” CEO who’s kidnapped by a monomaniacal conspiracist and beekeeper played by the exceptional Jesse Plemons (the latter day Philip Seymour Hoffman?) along with his developmentally-challenged cousin played by autistic actor Aidan Delbis in his feature film debut. The duo have deduced Emma’s CEO is the royal ruler of a race of aliens planning to destroy earth.

It’s hard to doubt them, given Stone’s wired, bug-eyed performance highlighted by her head being shaved to prevent her from using her hair to contact the mother ship! The film is a seriocomic take on socio-political division, governmental and corporate corruption, family abuse, societal breakdown, environmental decay (i.e.bee colonies are dying) all leading to, well, alienation. It’s all true of course, thus blurring the lines between the good guys and the bad guys in this scenario. Look for inverted references to Spielberg’s bicycle-riding hero in ET, and stand back for a resounding kick in the pants of an ending…. definitely worth seeing.

One film thus far has hit my sweet spot: the darkly comic, dysfunctional family, action thriller: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER by the masterful Paul Thomas Anderson and very loosely based on another book by Thomas Pynchon (VINELAND), a recluse who writes about paranoia, conspiracy, and the elaborate power structures which ensnare us. Trailer HERE!

Shot in VistaVision with its wider/higher resolution, we feast on the action including one nausea-inducing car chase and a cast to die for: a hilarious Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson a washed up member of THE FRENCH 75– a band of revolutionaries AND a cocktail–who is living paranoid and “high” off the grid, raising his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) when his past drags them both into action.

White nationalist Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn who’s practically foaming at the mouth) kidnaps Willa forcing Bob out of his fog but still in his bath robe back into the fray against an ascendant “Christian,” authoritarian, racist, military-industrial complex to rescue his daughter and mend their relationship. But not before he gets on the phone needing help in a life or death moment, trying to remember his French 75 membership password while battling a receptionist who just won’t put him through!!!

A robust supporting cast is put to dynamic use including: Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Tony Goldwyn, Alana Haim. This is a non-stop, suspense-filled, spot-on satire about revolution, love, and parenting while carrying the cultural load each of us inherits and passes on. It’s about dysfunctional families mirroring divisive present day political forces supercharged by the chaos and complexity of modern life. PTA nails a tone just this side of surreal–frightening and funny– when we forget just how close to the edge of absurdity we now live in 2025. SEE THIS!