The Show Goes On: the 98th Academy Awards

The run-up to the 98th Academy Awards was frequently cited by Oscar prognosticators as perhaps the most unpredictable ever, at least among three of the acting categories (Jessie Buckley had Best Actress locked up virtually from the beginning). Yet, the awards season has become so long, that by the time of the actual Oscar ceremony itself, that unpredictability had looped back around, transforming so much surprise into predestination. Not even Sean Penn eschewing showing up at the ceremony to collect his Best Supporting Actor trophy for “One Battle After Another” was all that surprising. “Frankenstein” collected three Oscars, “Sinners” earned four, and “One Battle After Another” won six, including Best Picture, Best Editing (Andy Jurgensen made a two-hour-and-forty-minute feel like one, tops), and the inaugural Oscar for Best Casting. I would have voted for “The Secret Agent” in the latter, but Cassandra Kulukundis was no less deserving. For casting newcomer Chase Infiniti, yes, and for all the impeccably chosen faces comprising The Christmas Adventurers Club, certainly, but also for getting Eric Schweig back into the masterpiece-making business. I hope Schweig was there last night. If there was a true surprise at the 98th Academy Awards, it was Best Live-Action Short ending in a tie between “The Singers” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” It warms my jaded heart that the Olympics still allows ties, and it turns out, the Oscars warms it for allowing them too. 

Unpredictability, however, does not in and of itself make for a good Oscar show and the 98th was plenty good, fun and dumb, heartfelt and affecting in equal measure. Conan O’Brien returned as host after last year and can return next year, as far as I’m concerned, so ably has he filled this role; to paraphrase Sydney Pollack in “Michael Clayton,” he’s found a niche for himself. He’s good at his gig because he excels at taking the piss out of what he has just genuinely exalted and lets us in on the joke without making the whole thing a joke, not least because he really seems to love movies. The best bit of the night was sending up streaming movies that require dialogue to continually restate the plot for so many people listening as much as they are watching by recreating a scene from “Casablanca” as so comical exposition with a game Sterling K. Brown in the Dooley Wilson role. Honestly, he could have turned that into a recurring bit throughout the show. How about Conan and Jennifer Lawrence as “McCabe & Mrs. Miller?” True, the scripted banter between presenters was even worse than usual, which caused so many of those moments to drag, but then again, enlisting Nicole Kidman to present Best Picture was perfection. I know, she was there with Ewan McGregor to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Moulin Rouge,” but I saw it more as Kidman’s Pure Camp as AMC ambassador taken to its apex. She should be grandfathered into the role of Best Picture presenter for life. Kidman is here! Sit up straight!

Even if the outcomes skewed inevitable, how can you be bored when history is made? Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and, by extension, the first woman of the color to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography for “Sinners.” Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for the same movie and referenced the five Black men that won Best Actor before him, as well as Halle Berry, the only Black woman to win Best Actress, placing his victory in a historical context. No-show Penn joined the three-timers club, going to show once again that even if nobody seems to like him, everybody seems to like his acting. If Paul Thomas Anderson earning Best Director for “One Battle After Another” was not historical, it was momentous, one of our foremost modern auteurs finally, deservedly winning an Oscar. And when he mentioned his fellow nominees, I took heart in knowing that even if Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay for “Sinners,” that someday he will win for Best Director too. Nothing filled my heart with joy as much as Amy Madigan winning Best Supporting Actress for “Weapons.” At first, I really thought hers was just a happy-to-be-nominated deal, but somewhere along the way, momentum built, maybe because 40 years between nominations in a business where for women it can feel like it’s getting late early, as the sage Yogi Berra once said, she demonstrated that no, nuh uh, it’s never too late. Plus, it was an important, oft-forgotten reminder that she and Ed Harris are one of our Top 5 Celebrity Couples: not quite an indie Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, but something in that vein. 

As if taking presenter Jimmy Kimmel’s words to heart about documentary filmmakers being the truth-tellers, the winners for both documentary short and feature were the ones who most openly acknowledged the current political realities of our tumultuous world. Well, them and Javier Bardem who in presenting Best International Feature with Priyanka Chopra literally said “No to war and free Palestine” with what appeared to be a smile on his face. He wasn’t making light of anything, of course, but to my eye, appeared to be demonstrating how easy it is to simply say something while cheerfully communicating to multitudinous bad faith actors he knew were lying in wait: Come at me, bro. Whining about people being woke is just another way to bury your head in the sand. 

The one detail that even good iterations of the show have gotten wrong in the past, this version got right - the in-memoriam segment. Maybe losing so many vital names of the industry snapped the producers into focus, but for once they forewent yoking some other performer or performance to the segment and just let the segment speak for itself, buttressing it with brief commentary on some of the biggest names: so many tear-filled faces for Rob Reiner, Rachel McAdams testifying to Diane Keaton and her fellow Canadian Catherine O’Hara, and Babs on Bob (Barbra Streisand’s ode to Robert Redford). It was the first in-memoriam I can recall that truly let us linger on the names and faces and think about what they meant. It was heartrending, and wonderful, and in a way, made me even madder that the Honorary Academy Awards are shunted to their own ceremony months earlier. Why on earth would the Oscars not want Tom Cruise receiving his first Academy Award at the actual ceremony? That is to take nothing away from his fellow honorary award recipients Debbie Allen and Wynn Thomas, but my God, this is Tom Cruise; he was literally name-checked in this year’s Best Picture!  

Cruise has left significant footprints on the history of cinema and so, too, has Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s why it was so moving to see him finally be recognized by the Academy. Is “One Battle After Another” really his best movie? God, I don’t know and I don’t know that I can think of a more boring question today. In speaking after winning Best Picture, in fact, Anderson sort of summarized that point and the point I was trying to make on Friday by literally naming all five Best Picture nominees from 1975. “There is no best among them,” he said. “There is just what the mood might be that day.” I don’t know how my mood is going to be tomorrow, or the next day, or next month, or Oscar Sunday next year, but after that show last night, I gotta tell you, in a way I did not see coming, it’s pretty good. I guess there was some sort of surprise after all. 

(Big) Best Picture Questions

“Time doesn’t exist, yet it controls us anyway.” – Comrade Josh, One Battle After Another

What, exactly, do we want from the Academy Award for Best Picture? Should it be the movie that most captures the public’s imagination? Should it be the movie that makes the most money? Are those two things interchangeable or are they incompatible or are they somewhere in-between? Should it be a movie that says something? If so, what should it say, and how should it say it? Subtly or with great force? Should it take sides, or should it take no sides at all? Should it be topical, or should it be more universal? Should it be, simply, the best movie of the year? But how on earth do you quantify the best movie of the year? You think it’s “Oppenheimer,” but I think it’s “Barbie,” and it was “Barbie,” you’re wrong, sorry, but where does that get us? Do we really want art to be an ice dancing competition? But then, I’m not voting and you’re not voting; the Academy is voting. What does any of it have to do with us? Maybe they just want to reward the movie that gave the most people jobs.

Maybe what the collective “we” wants more than anything, though, is a Best Picture winner that stands the test of time. That is what so many lists sprouting up this time of year would seem to suggest, anyway, the ones counting all times the Oscars got it wrong, and the people telling you for the millionth time that “Goodfellas” should have won Best Picture over “Dances with Wolves” in 1990 would seem to suggest it too. But expecting 11,000 people to predict by majority what movie will measure up three or four decades from now is asking a lot. “The Last Emperor” swept the Academy Awards in 1987, winning all 9 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director, and yet, who remembers it, who talks about it? There was a whole “Frasier” episode about this phenomenon with the eponymous psychiatrist repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to watch and enjoy “How Green Was My Valley”: “It won five Academy Awards!” he bellows to the indifferent teenage clerk at the video rental store. “It’s a classic!” Twenty years later, that is how I feel about “Million Dollar Baby,” a movie that the culture at large discarded. Would I have told people in 2005 that “Million Dollar Baby” would last forever? I did tell people that! But whether something is timeless can only be measured with, well, obviously. “They come where they come from,” the esteemed Roger Ebert said in 2003 regarding this very subject. “You never know until they arrive.” To paraphrase Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” I’ve heard people say for years about certain movies that this one will endure, “trust me, when I know, I know, and when it comes to this movie, I know,” and they don’t.

If aging has taught me anything, it’s that for all their pomp and circumstance, the Oscars are as ephemeral as they are everlasting, and that they tend to capture fleeting moments in time more than they portend the future. “The Silence of the Lambs” became an unexpected pop culture juggernaut and lightning rod in 1991; “The English Patient” put an exclamation point on the 90s indie revolution in 1996; like Kevin Costner and “Dances with Wolves” before him, Ben Affleck and “Argo” were carried away on a sudden wave of goodwill in 2012. On a recent episode of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Michael Schulman noted that generally the Best Picture nominees of any given year indirectly evoke a larger cultural feeling reflective of their respective moment. Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution captured one of these moments in full detail, an awards season pitched between the last vespers of the Golden Age and New Hollywood. I will not launch into yet another impassioned defense of “Titanic,” but at the time of its Oscar triumph in 1997, William Goldman, a fervent admirer of it, was also foreseeing a future in which people wondered what the fuss had been all about. In the moment, everybody knows everything, but in the end, as Goldman said, [say it with me] nobody knows anything. 

Ah, and yet, during this very awards season, Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times has notified us that “Hamnet” will stand the test of time, and Matt Neal of ABC Radio in Australia has advised us that “Sinners” will stand the test of time. All this talk of time is funny because it was a central subject of several Best Picture nominees. “Train Dreams” advances the idea that we can only understand our existence through the rearview mirror; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s superb “The Secret Agent” demonstrates how history can become buried beneath the sands of time while “Sentimental Value” illustrates that time alone does not necessarily heal all wounds; in one breathtaking sequence, “Sinners” draws past, present, and future all together at once in the same room. “One Battle After Another” draws all those concepts together too. Rather than having a character say, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us,” as he did in his own “Magnolia,” writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson creates a vibe, to use the parlance of our times, that improbably blends the 1960s/70s and the present-day. And in adapting and remodeling Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland as the story of a burned out revolutionary and his burgeoning revolutionary daughter, PTA embodies the endless tide of the 250-year battle over America’s soul going in and out.

Whether “One Battle After Another” is better than “Sinners,” or whether it deserves Best Picture more, honestly, means less to me than how both movies suggest a way forward in an industry that has been stuck at a crossroads doubling as a cul-de-sac for years now. Both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” are event films with a pulse, pop moviemaking with a distinct auteurist bent, supreme craft and relentless energy intertwined with a deeper meaning. Of course, both movies were produced by Warner Bros., which is merging with Paramount, run by one our most prominent uncaring idiot sons, and the code that was just cracked might intentionally be lost forever, one more moment in time destined to slip through our fingers.

Harrison Ford: an Appreciation

A few months ago, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I started watching “Shrinking,” the Apple TV show in which Harrison Ford plays Dr. Paul Rhoades, the unlikely patriarch of a makeshift family of therapists in his practice and all the people in their lives. It is firmly in the “Ted Lasso” dramedy vein, one where the comedy can sometimes hinder the drama, and vice-versa, allowing difficult ideas to go down a little too easy, though such sentimentality is counterbalanced by Ford’s irascible vulnerability. Everything that Ford is blossoms in the role of Paul, so much so that the character’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s forcing him to confront his mortality feels on some level like it is preparing us all for the eventuality of Ford’s death. I don’t mean to be dark. There is something refreshing about such honesty in our age of longevity-obsessed bros and Ford, after all, is the one who thought Han Solo should be killed off all the way back in “Return of the Jedi,” demonstrating that he already knew in a way that so many do not that not everything is meant to last forever. What’s more, in recently accepting the SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award, Ford nodded at that reality too. “I am in a room of actors,” he began his acceptance speech by saying, “many of whom are here because they have been nominated to receive a prize for their amazing work while I’m here to receive a prize for being alive.” In that moment, taking a beat after the self-deprecating punchline for a deadpan stare, it was hard not to think: the old guy’s still got it. 

To a person of my generation, Ford is a big deal, having starred in touchstones whose names do not even need mentioning. Roles like Han Solo and Indiana Jones are iconic, but they became iconic later. He made them what they were, and he was virtually inextricable from them, and it’s why I’m almost positive that he was the first actor, nay, movie star whose name I really, truly knew. Now, the line on movie stars is that their persona tends to overwhelm the role, and while Ford’s characters almost always have that same gruff, laconic exterior, he creates interiors, too, as he did in the (more than middling) thriller masterpiece “The Fugitive.” He spends so much of that movie alone, and yet we also not only always know what his character is thinking but who he is. Ford’s pause before his character leaps off the dam turns a stunt set piece into an emotional leap of faith, the nexus of movie star acting. His craft tends to disappear before your eyes, which is why, I suspect, he never won an Oscar and was only nominated once; those fellow Academy actors like to see the acting. 

There was no bigger box office star in the 80s, and there were only a handful of box office stars in the 90s who were bigger, but as the industry changed in the new millennium, turning its attention to superheroes and more youth-oriented franchises, it was hard not to feel Ford’s star dim. He spent a couple decades starring in vanishing middle-class movies that felt like they were transplanted from the 80s and 90s (“Firewall,” “Morning Glory,”) and hawking bottled nostalgia in the new Indiana Jones movie and the new “Star Wars” trilogy. Where once he helped to create something new and invigorating, now he seemed to struggle from lack of a better idea. In 2010, one line in the “Extraordinary Measures” trailer turned him into a meme, and it felt like a demarcation between generations, one that remembered who he had been and one that wasn’t sure what to make of this curmudgeonly old coot. He finally conceded in 2025 and appeared in “Captain America: Brave New World,” the fourth movie in the “Captain America” series. Reviews were mixed.

That movie was an extension of a TV series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” evoking the blurring lines between the big screen and the small screen in our current entertainment landscape, a reality that Ford seemed to acknowledge by returning to scripted television for the first time since his big break. I don’t want to turn this into another movies versus TV debate, but I had always hoped that Hollywood could mount one more movie project worthy of Ford to give him a proper send-off. Yet, appropriately for someone essentially self-taught as an actor, he manifested that send-off for himself in his SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech. In briefly remembering his own career while noting the whole purpose of SAG in the first place as protection and fellowship, he gave something that sounded a lot like a Hollywood farewell address. Even more than that, it was how he gave it. We live in an era of attention-seeking bluster and noise and yet, here was Ford with an innate master class in acting on camera, effortlessly drawing and holding the attention of everyone watching without raising his voice or over-exaggerating, epitomizing a movie star’s sense of presence. The pictures have gotten smaller, that’s indisputable, and Ford is living proof, but in that moment, he still felt larger than life. 

1995 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited

The 90s were a boom time for movie soundtrack compilations and 1995 was the peak. The #1 selling single on the Billboard Hot 100 was Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” culled from the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack, while the #4 selling single, Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” was included on the “Batman Forever” soundtrack. Other big Billboard hits of the year like Diana King’s “Shy Guy” and Dr. Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” came from the “Bad Boys” and “Friday” soundtracks, respectively. The “Friday” soundtrack spent two weeks as the top-selling album in America and the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack was the top-selling record for all of September. Oh, but there was so much more.

There were soundtracks with contemporary appeal, like those for “Empire Records” and “Mallrats” reflecting the era of alternative rock, and soundtracks with a historical pull, like “Dead Presidents” collecting so many great old R&B and Soul tunes that it released a Part One and Part Two. The Parker Posey-fronted cult classic “Party Girl” would have been unthinkable without its club-ready soundtrack while the “Boys on the Side” soundtrack was like proto-Lilith Fair. I requested for the latter for Christmas in 1995 and though Bonnie Raitt’s “You Got It” was the big single, as a Sheryl Crow stan, I most enjoyed her giving the Derek and the Dominos slice of blues-rock “Keep on Growing” a pop bent. (Wait, I have to stop and listen again right now. We continue.) Raitt’s song was a cover too, of Roy Orbison, and that brings me to my point: virtually none of the music I have mentioned was eligible to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Covers are disqualified. That’s why Whitney Houston could not be nominated, never mind win, for her globe-conquering “I Will Always Love You” from “The Bodyguard” in 1992, remember. Songs not written specifically for the movie itself are ineligible too, which disqualified “Kiss from a Rose,” plucked from Seal’s eponymous album released a year earlier. Songs that include samples are also ineligible which is why “Gangsta’s Paradise” in addition to “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” and “Shy Guy” could not make the cut. In a year where so much current pop music bled over into the movies, so much of it could not be recognized, leaving a Best Song category that looked like so many Best Song categories before it, not quite five unsalted crackers lined up in a row but close. And that is why I am here to reimagine this category if I, and I alone, were the judge and jury. Because what a category it could have been. 

1995 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees (winner in bold):

Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas - Music by Alan Menken and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Dead Man Walkin’ from Dead Man Walking - Music & Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen

Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? from Don Juan DeMarco - Music & Lyrics by Bryan Adams, Michael Kamen & Mutt Lange

Moonlight from Sabrina - Music by John Williams and Lyrics by Marilyn Bergman

You’ve Got a Friend in Me from Toy Story - Music & Lyrics by Randy Newman

Of course, we are required to remember right up front that Best Original Song is strictly limited to original songs in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means that “God Moving Over the Face of The Waters” by Moby in “Heat and “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley in “Strange Days” are ineligible. Add, say, “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia in “Casino,” “Come Here” by Kath Bloom in “Before Sunrise,” and, of course, “Techno Syndrome” by The Immortals in “Mortal Kombat” and, my God, what a category. Alas.

In researching this post, I was shocked to learn that the “Don Juan DeMarco” soundtrack was initially slated to include a duet recorded by, get this, Tori Amos and Michael Stipe. That song, “It Might Hurt a Bit,” was not included and never released, shunted for a Bryan Adams ballad that despite featuring preeminent flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia still, in the end, feels like a Bryan Adams ballad. And arriving as it did on the heels of both “Robin Hood” and “The Three Musketeers,” this one was like the dishwater left in the sink after all the dishes have been cleaned. Enough was enough, alright, Academy. It was time to move on to other things. Like Salt-N-Pepa’s body-positive “I Am the Body Beautiful” off the “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar” soundtrack that as best I can tell, deployed a wholly original beat which would have made it eligible. 

Ok. Time to address the elephant in the room – my main man, Bruce Springsteen. His theme for “Dead Man Walking” is solid. His musical spareness in this era could sometimes get the best of him, but it works well for this one, and though he cribs one lyric from his own songbook, he splits the difference with one that is just classic Bruce: “Sister, I won’t ask forgiveness. My sins are all I have.” But the truth is, Springsteen wrote a similarly themed sort of song the same year, “Highway 29,” that is vastly superior, as was his Oscar-winning Best Song two years prior, “Streets of Philadelphia.” And anyway, while “Dead Man Walking” is a very good movie, “Clueless,” strange as it might sound to compare them was better and deserved a Best Picture nod and the principal song of the “Clueless” soundtrack, Jill Sobule’s “Supermodel,” which was, in fact, written for the movie and therefore eligible under the Oscar’s rules, deserved a Best Song nod too. Springsteen is out and Sobule is in.

I am tempted to include “Ask for You” from the “Higher Learning” soundtrack, Raphael Saddiq’s bop that got all the way to #19 on the Billboard Hot 100, but I can’t bring myself to leave off “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” the foundational linchpin of “Toy Story” and the whole subsequent series. Of the actual nominees, that probably should have won, and it will be the only song to retain its nomination, even if I suspect that Randy Newman would tell me to keep it if he’s not getting the retroactive win. 

The easy listening of “Moonlight,” meanwhile, is barely worth a mention, reminding me of a line from Public Enemy’s “How to Kill a Radio Consultant”: “When ‘A Quiet Storm’ comes on I fall asleep.” The winning “Colors of the Wind,” meanwhile, is fine, I guess, but mostly just riding the coattails of the Disney songs that won this same award three of the four years preceding it. Because there is one soundtrack that some astute readers may have noticed I had not yet mentioned: “Waiting to Exhale,” a Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds-produced record so good that it was #1 on the charts for five weeks in early 1996, earned 11 Grammy nominations, and even forced self-proclaimed dean of the rock critics Robert Christgau to grudgingly grade it an A-. That none of its songs were nominated speaks to the 68th Academy Awards nominating but a single black nominee in all categories, leading to natural backlash, fury, and protest, much of it spurred by the recently deceased Jesse Jackson a couple decades before #OscarsSoWhite. I mean, no one could even mount a bad-faith argument about the American cultural meritocracy when it came to the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack because if that were true, the album would have had two nominations in this category, at least. 

The lead single was Whitney Houston’s “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” which was nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys and was #14 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for 1996. It was a quality song, you don’t need me to tell you that, but remember, I’m judge and jury here and I’m giving the first spot to TLC’s “This Is How It Works.” Because I love the song, of course, and also because I like imagining a bunch of white septuagenarian and octogenarians watching a performance of a song by three black women coaching their men through sex while a person in the production room sits there the whole time on panicked edge like Beaker with his finger hovering over the broadcast delay button. It might have been the greatest five minutes in Oscar history. Alas. 

But. In the end, the faux retroactive Oscar can only go to one song off the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack, and it goes to Toni Braxton’s. If you ask me now, 30 years later, to explain what 1995-96 sounded like, well, I might just play you Toni Braxton’s “Let It Flow.” 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Nowhere to Hide (1987)

“Nowhere to Hide” ends with a car chase in which a helicopter is chasing a car, which is just how you want a mid-80s conspiracy thriller to conclude, but what stuck with me more was when in the middle of an earlier car chase, ex-Marine Barbara Cutter (Amy Madigan) is forced to change a tire when one goes flat. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen that before: a mid-car chase tire change. And whether a spare could hold up under car chase conditions when the pursuit continues, well, I was less concerned with that than how the episode demonstrated Barbara’s cool resourcefulness. It’s one element that did not feel straight off the shelf, as so much of “Nowhere to Hide” does, one part “Commando,” one part “Hard to Kill,” one part “Rambo.” Why there is even a macabre nod to the space shuttle Challenger in so much as this conspiracy thriller turns on a defective military helicopter C-ring. 

The last one is being investigated by Barbara’s husband (Daniel Hugh Kelly), promptly killed when he gets close to the truth, and right in front of his and Barbara’s young son, Johnny (Robin MacEachern). That distinguishes “Nowhere to Hide” as an 80s movie, alright, quite happy to blend gruesome violence with a tender mother/son relationship. Granted, the son is often treated less as a character than a plot device, unwittingly toting around both the C-ring waiting to expose the truth and the homing beacon that ensures he and his mom can never get too far away from the bad guys, but Madigan’s emotional ferocity makes you believe all this is happening, nevertheless. It’s why even if one part of me thinks “Nowhere to Hide” could have used more Michael Ironside as Barbara’s survivalist Vietnam-vet brother, another part of me knows nothing would surpass Madigan embodying Barbara’s maternal hysterical strength, changing a car tire in lieu of lifting a car. 

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

When the credits rolled on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” I noticed that Josh Safdie, of the erstwhile Safdie Brothers, served as one of the producers. That felt right to me because the preceding 114 minutes felt like an unrelenting, claustrophobic, close-up heavy Safdie-like joint. That is not to divest writer/director Mary Bronstein of her auteurist imprint. Bronstein made “Yeast” in 2008, back when the Safdies were just starting out, and it, too, was an unrelenting, claustrophobic, close-up heavy joint. I say all this to contextualize what you go through in watching “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” which is not about addicts, or petty criminals, or a fanatical table tennis player, but a mother, the hardest job in the world. That’s sort of what Bronstein’s movie is, a dramatic thriller about motherhood, starring Rose Byrne as Linda, taking care of a young daughter with a feeding disorder that necessitates virtual round-the-clock care. Bronstein chooses never to show Linda’s daughter in a full shot, reducing her almost entirely to a voice. That choice is disorienting and effective, as if taking the notion of an unbreakable bond between mother and daughter and shattering it, amplified through the frequently intense close-ups of Linda and the cacophonous, unrelenting sound of her daughter’s voice, evoking the strange feeling of loneliness that comes on from never ever having the chance to be alone.

Linda is virtually on her own as a caretaker because her husband Charles is a ship captain who is always away at sea. Stop and think about that for a second. It’s funny, albeit in the darkest way possible and as such, indicative of the darkly comical streak coursing through “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” one furthered in Linda’s occupation as a therapist, dispensing psychoanalysis even as both the script and Byrne cultivate the air of someone who looks like she’s on the couch even while she’s in the chair. She finds herself treating a new mother, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), suffering from postpartum depression and an absent husband, and who thinks Linda is failing to meet her needs just as Linda herself receives treatment from a colleague (Conan O’Brien) who she is convinced is failing to meet her needs. A rare foray into legitimate acting, O’Brien is quite good, though in so many ways, Bronstein helps to sculpt his performance. By yoking the movie so resolutely to Linda’s point-of-view, it is difficult to surmise her reliability as a narrator, and how much her colleague’s brusque, even dismissive, attitude is the reality of what is occurring of merely her perception. “What is it you’re so sure I can’t help you with?” he asks at one point, a breathtaking moment that feels like a moment where we might be seeing him unadorned…but we can’t be sure.

That unreliability extends to the hole that opens in the ceiling of Linda’s apartment, flooding the place, and forcing her and her daughter to evacuate to a seedy motel. She keeps returning to the apartment, anyway, transfixed by the hole, and whether this is pure symbolism or something more supernatural is a question that Bronstein is content to leave unexplained. Those dueling sensations coalesce in Byrne’s mesmerizing turn, in equal measure conveying realism and madness, comedy and horror, and inviting as much disdain as empathy; you don’t necessarily like the destructive decisions she’s making even if you understand why she’s making them. Whether you take the conclusion to be real or imaginary, it can’t help but feel telegraphed, from a thousand movies before it as much as “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” nodding toward it the whole way. It also doesn’t much matter because Byrne sweeps you up and carries you along, making it feel as if Linda herself is being swept along by some unstoppable current, increasingly unable to fight against it, as if no longer living life but left wholly at its mercy. 

F1 the Movie

Like a Hollywood movie studio from the golden age running back a hit formula, producer Jerry Bruckheimer simply re-enlisted the same directing and writing team – Joseph Kosinski and Ehren Krueger, respectively – behind “Top Gun: Maverick” for last year’s “F1 the Movie” and then transplanted it from Naval Fighter Weapons School to the auto racing world of Formula 1. After all, in structure and in spirit, “Top Gun: Maverick” was essentially a sports movie, and so the same formula proves a natural fit in the world of open wheel racing. And if that means you know narratively what’s coming the whole way through, well, there is something reassuring in that, like an F1 driver who knows every turn of every track, when to brake, when to go, what line to take. We’re here for precision maintenance and reliability, not revelation. Not that “F1 the Movie” is wholly unrevealing. I confess, I’m less a connoisseur of auto racing than I am of movie stars and what fascinates me most is not the Formula 1 of it all but how Brad Pitt, who doubles as producer, filters his persona through Formula 1. 

Pitt is Sonny Hayes, a one-time F1 wunderkind who has been wandering in the racing wilderness ever since a terrible crash. After helping a racing team to win 24 Hours of Daytona, carving space for a Shea Whigham appearance that is all too brief, Sonny is called to his adventure in a laundromat, a nice locational touch evincing his nomad tendencies, by Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem), a one-time teammate who now runs a struggling F1 team that his board is in danger of selling lest they win one of the season’s remaining races. Sonny is not just there to drive, of course, but to bump heads with his rookie teammate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), to fall in something approximating love with team technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), and to be Essentially, “F1 the Movie” is just “Talladega Nights” in reverse, with a hotshot American invading Formula One rather than the other way around, illustrated when Sonny first meets Ruben’s team, walking down the track in long shot, as if emerging from the desert. He might as well be wearing a cowboy hat. This shot made me laugh out loud which I mostly mean as a compliment.

Much of “F1: the Movie” takes place on the track, of course, and Kosinski and his production team, cinematographer Claudio Miranda, composer Hans Zimmer and the sound department create a spectacular series of racing scenes, evincing the on-track frenzy as sensory explosions of sight and sound, music and racing crew chatter and TV commentary and car sound effects all layered on top of one another, furthered in close-ups of the drivers waging all-out war against g forces just in trying to turn the wheel and this all-encompassing, stomach-dropping sensation of speed, of always being one brief moment away from losing control even as the drivers somehow almost always maintain it while navigating their way between cars. And all of it builds to one astonishing final moment that to its immense credit, is less about a narrative result than a feeling, one in which the notion of being out of control seems to loop back around and improbably meet being in complete command, like a dream where you’re running and your feet don’t touch the ground but if you were driving a car at high speed instead. It’s so good that you wish the screenplay did not underline what is transpiring with dialogue. Alas.

If the scenes on the track are sometimes spectacular, those of it are strictly painted by numbers. There is no tension in any of the interpersonal relationships because the characters are all archetypes and because the character of Sonny flouts the single most hard and fast rule: he never changes. He is virtually the same person at the end as he is at the beginning. Chris Stapleton’s song “Bad as I Used to Be” epitomizes it, but believe it or not, Sonny most evokes a Kate McKinnon line when she played Hillary Rodham Clinton back on Saturday Night Live: “flawed yet perfect.” Sonny is vincible, but also invincible, not always right, but never wrong, all brought home in his observation that when you lose, sometimes you win. When he has the winning hand in a game of cards with Joseph but declines to show them to let Joseph win instead, there are no points for exclaiming, “I knew it,” because, of course, you did; we all did; that’s Sonny Hayes. Even the eventual revelation of his perilous physical nature is mostly brushed aside, exemplifying how Sonny spends the whole movie walking between raindrops, and I could not stop wondering if Brad Pitt thinks of himself as someone who walks between raindrops too.