2025 Random Awards

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico’s annual awards for best achievements in all kinds of cool movie stuff. 

Best Line: “There’s always a reason to kill someone.” — Liam Neeson, The Naked Gun

Best Line Reading of the Year: “A few small beers.” — Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another

Best Monologue: Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. It is in fact, two monologues in one, the former arguing skepticism for religion, the latter reaffirming his belief, split right down the middle and letting the mystery be. 

Best Sequence: Sinners. Mid-movie there is something like Black music hootenanny that opens a portal to the past, present, and future, an exhilarating sequence that does something only the movies can do. (Runner-up: the last scene in “The Phoenician Scheme.”)

Best Title Card: Sirât. It takes a good half-hour to drop, the title card for this Spanish phantasm, and when it does, you feel the full effect of it being laid over the image of three vehicles racing across a vast desert that brings the title to life: “the metaphorical bridge in Islamic belief connecting Heaven and Hell, one thinner than a strand of hair.”  

The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expression in a movie): Sean Penn, One Battle After Another. When his Col. Steven J. Lockjaw is recruited into a cabal of white supremacists and reminded of their superior race, Penn does this thing with his face unmasking his character as someone craving an honor that he knows he does not deserve. 

The Annual Penélope Cruz Award (presented to the best hair in a movie): Chris Evans, Materialists. I cannot really describe the styling of Evans’s hair, I’m afraid, all I can say is that in a movie where his character and Pedro Pascal’s character are alternately vying for the affection of Dakota Johnson’s character, when I saw Evans in close-up smoking a cigarette with his caterer bowtie loosened and this haircut, I knew immediately that Pedro was toast. 

The Annual Then He Kissed Me Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): American Girl by Tom Petty in One Battle After Another. It is hard to think of a more ubiquitous classic rock song than Petty’s, deemed as being practically part of the literary canon at this point by The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. Yet, if Paul Thomas Anderson tagging his, shall we say, new American epic with it might sound obvious or easy, what’s remarkable is that given everything preceding it, the needle drop is wholly, movingly earned. In fact, after this, it should be retired, and no movie should ever get to use “American Girl” again. 

The Annual Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)? Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): Kill the Jockey. The name of our annual award is a little ironic in this case because it was Fred Astaire who demanded full body shots for dancing and the dance sequence near the beginning of this Spanish neo-noir is a full body dance sequence reimagined for people who cannot dance or are maybe just high on horse tranquilizers and whiskey.  

The Annual Keira Knightley Green Dress Award (presented to the best costume in a movie): One Battle After Another, Bathrobe. If Colleen Atwood does not win an Oscar for this movie, I’m gonna be pissed, people. From the navy sport coat and khakis that Sean Penn’s Colonel wears for his big meet and greet with The Christmas Adventurers, like he’s rushing Omega Theta Pi, to the cowboy boots that Benicio del Toro’s sensei slips on when the heat rises, it’s all on point. And though the Christmas Adventurer assassin (John Hoogenakker) conspicuously sporting Lacoste is, like, Best Costume in a Movie 1A, I cannot help reveling in Leo’s bathrobe, which is, like, Ali la Pointe rechristened as The Dude. 

The Annual Elevator Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): Buddy Guy, Sinners. His appearance ties the whole movie together.

The Annual The Godfather is the I Ching Award (presented to the best reference to another movie in a movie): Jaws in The Secret Agent. It is really something how writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho uses “Jaws” as a unifying force for all his themes and in doing so, squares the circle between arthouse and the Hollywood blockbuster. 

The Annual I Like My Brandy in a Glass Award (presented to the best drink in a movie): A House of Dynamite, Coffee with Eight Sugars. This is what General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) asks for which, I suppose, is what the head of U.S. Strategic Command might require when nuclear war is imminent. 

The Annual Now We Can Eat Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): The Naked Gun, Chili Dog. If you have not seen it, you do not deserve to have me spoil it. 

The Annual French Connection Award (presented to the best car chase in a movie): One Battle After Another. A rollercoaster not just in the loop-de-loop sensation, though it does involve vehicles traversing rolling hills in rural California, but in how it makes your stomach drop from what is at stake. 

Best Shot: The Ice Tower. A runaway orphan, Jeanne (Clara Pacini), has snuck on to a movie set where a cinematic version of Hans Christen Anderson’s The Snow Queen starring Marion Cotillard’s capricious Cristine in the eponymous role is being filmed. And when Jeanne first sees Cristine, she is hidden, peering through a crack in the wall in the middle of a scene being shot, and looking up as she does so, as if at a movie screen. Cristine, though, senses this hidden interloper, pauses for a split-second, and then looks down, catching Jeanne in the act of peeping, like the fourth wall has been broken, an almost reverse “Purple Rose of Cairo,” not just dissolving the barrier between movie and viewer but shattering that attendant voyeuristic sensation into a thousand pieces. When Cotillard looked down, reader, I gasped, terrified as much as I was entranced; it was a movie shot embodying every movie fan’s greatest dream, and greatest fear, as if Jean Harlow had noticed me watching “China Seas” and remarked, “Say, whatcha doin’ there, fella?” It will haunt me forever. 

Best Movie Performances of 2025

Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another. The performance of the year in so much as del Toro achieves the supreme movie actor state of just being.

Liz Larsen, The Baltimorons. Larsen innately embodies a movie that is all about living in and responding to the moment by appearing to make it all up as she goes along. 

Marisa Abela, Black Bag. In a movie where so many other actors are deliberately programmed and theatrical, Abela’s uninhibited vulnerability is the necessary contrast, bursting free of the pan and doing her own thing. 

Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent. In playing someone pretending to be someone else for his own safety, Moura’s guarded but soulful turn effortlessly emits the emotional and mental toll taken not just from living a lie but from being unable to be yourself. What’s more, like Michael B. Jordan in “Sinners,” he is also giving two performances, though in an entirely different way, with a cameo essentially wrapped inside his own lead performance in which he conveys a wistfulness for what he remembers and a true sadness for what he does not.

The 2025 Ruffalo: It is tempting to award this year’s Ruffalo to Nina Meurisse for doing so much to lock “Souleymane’s Story” into place through nothing more than one scene at the end, except Meurisse won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress, which goes against the breezily defined criteria of Wesley Morris when he concocted the unofficial Ruffalo for the late web site Grantland a decade ago as a way to reward actors not only playing the background a little bit but not being nominated for anything. And though I also considered giving this year’s Ruffalo to Billy Crudup for “Jay Kelly,” briefly breathing wild life into a film that frequently feels devoid of it, stealing a movie, as he does, still seems slightly counterintuitive to the nature of this award. So, let’s give the 2025 Ruffalo to Gaby Hoffmann for “The Mastermind” instead who in just a few flourishes, really, provides the necessary contrast to Josh O’Connor’s protagonist, a rock to his pitiful tumbleweed blowing in the wind.

Top 5 Movies of 2025

Given how awful 2025 was from a pro-decency, democracy, and intellect perspective, it’s all the more ironic that it was such a good year for movies. Indeed, while my Best Of movie lists in the 2020s have been sporadic, this year I felt even extra compelled to make one, and though I easily could have slotted in 10, well, my heart told me to stick with 5. Because to my way of thinking, this Top 5, reader, is as good as the movies get.

(Click on the title to read my review.)

Top 5 Movies of 2025

5. Sinners. Ryan Coogler’s would-be impossible mashup of “From Dusk Til Dawn” and “Lightning in a Bottle” might be too long and not entirely hang together but is such a feat of sheer moviemaking that I could not care less. 

4. The Baltimorons. In returning to the director’s chair for the first time in 13 years, Jay Duplass takes the famed improv comedy mantra of “Yes, and” and then hilariously, wrenchingly lives it for an hour and forty minutes. 

3. The Secret Agent. It is remarkable just how much Kleber Mendonça Filho X-ray of Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship of the previous century is also such an absolute blast to watch, evincing living one’s life as the ultimate act of resistance.

2. The Mastermind. Is “The Mastermind” Kelly Reichardt’s masterpiece? Eh, sorry. Got a little too excited there, but still. I think of it that way because “The Mastermind” doesn’t break new ground for her, necessarily, but also is nothing like a retread, more a drawing together of all her previous themes and expressed with full confidence and control that renders something equally poignant and pitiful, funny and sad. The first Reichardt movie that feels like a magic trick.   

1. One Battle After Another. If a movie’s meaning is conveyed as much through aesthetic as narrative, as the late film theorist David Bordwell persuasively argued, then “One Battle After Another” is a full-bore triumph in which costume design, production design, music, acting, sound, and editing all say as much as the screenplay. In her acceptance speech after winning Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes for her performance in “One Battle After Another,” Teyana Taylor said, “Love is an action, not a word.” She was talking about how she seeks to live her own life, but she may as well have been talking about the movie itself. Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant collision of genres, ideas, and tones is about a lot more than love, but everything it is about is expressed innately through its action, a high-wire headlong rush of cinema that starts and then just goes, and never stops going, and is, in fact, still going as it ends.

Top 10 Movies of 2023

My favorite moment at the recent Emmy Awards was not anything that happened during the Emmy Awards themselves. No, it happened seconds before the Emmy Awards began, in the traditional last-ditch red-carpet interview, in this case with Natasha Lyonne, nominated for Comedy Series Lead Actress for “Poker Face.” The interviewer asked for Lyonne’s favorite television shows to which Lyonne, at the ceremony to honor achievement in television, remember, said she didn’t really watch much TV, preferring old Hollywood movies. Then she looked right into the camera, and as if suddenly being clued into her wavelength, the cameraperson zoomed in on Lyonne, right into her close-up, who then said, simply, “Cinema.” I feel like I often want to cosmically high-five Natasha Lyonne, so let’s say, in that moment I wanted to cosmically double high-five her.

Cinema.

For several months I had planned, I really had, to include the “Fishes” episode of the comedy-drama Hulu television series “The Bear” in my Top 10 movies of the year. Not just to stir the pot but because it was really that high in quality, and because in running six minutes over an hour, coming across self-contained, and playing like the unofficial sequel to “The House of Yes” (1997) it felt akin to a movie. In recent years, it would have made the cut. In this one, it didn’t. I had to sacrifice the bit. 

The last proper year-end Top 10 on Cinema Romantico was 2019, before the world partially ended. I concocted a year-end Top 10 in 2020, but that was a list tailored emphatically to 2020, untraditional, anything goes; more than half the ten weren’t even from 2020. The last two years, in 2021 and 2022, by the close of December, I felt mentally bankrupt, unable, or maybe just unwilling, to go through the exercise of the Top 10, although that also partially stemmed from feeling like I just hadn’t seen enough movies, and that not enough movies were worthy of a year-end list. In 2023, though, I did, both see enough movies and think enough worthy of a list, meaning one was in order. 

True, the industry is still in a state of flux, and still in the middle of shaping itself, I think, into something we will not be sure of until it’s already here, and the effects of the necessary SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes are still waiting to be felt where release dates are concerned. But if nothing else, where the movies themselves, and only the movies themselves, were concerned, 2023 was alright. (Click on the title to read the full review.)

Top 10 Movies of 2023

10. The Adults, Dustin Guy Defa

All the world’s a stage, with an indie bent.

9. Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese

America as a mafia state. 

8. Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt

An indelible, and thorny, ode to the struggle of making art.

7. Barbie, Greta Gerwig

Would that all blockbusters were this creative, and this joyful, and this alive. 

6. Asteroid City, Wes Anderson

Artifice and emotion, indivisible. 

5. Ferrari, Michael Mann

“The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” for the Antonioni crowd, or something.

4. Priscilla, Sofia Coppola

A 60s love song gone wrong. 

3. Reality, Tina Satter

It not only bends reality, ahem, back in on itself by literally transcribing it (the movie is culled entirely from the interrogation transcript of Reality Winner), it is a formal triumph, visually invigorating despite the limited location, and with two turns by Sydney Sweeney and Josh Hamilton that deserve to be mentioned among the best of the year.

2. Full Time, Éric Gravel 

In which the ingredients of everyday life are all you need for a, quote-unquote, pulse-pounding thriller.

1. Fallen Leaves, Aki Kaurismäki 

Transcribing the human condition to screen. Perhaps it’s dangerous, or just foolish, to deem any work of art as perfect, so I dunno, let’s just say this one never seems to step wrong.

2023 Random Awards

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico's annual awards of cinematic randomness.

Line of the Year: “I don’t play him as an alien, actually. I play him as a metaphor. That’s my interpretation.” - Jeff Goldblum, “Asteroid City”

Best Terminology of the Year: Mojo Dojo Casa House, “Barbie” 

Best Monologue of the Year: Ayo Edebiri, Bottoms. As a high school senior unlucky in love, Edebiri brings the house down in a wild, wandering, sixty-second monologue comically embodying that singular sense of teenage defeatism in which she envisions her whole life as being over before it has even truly begun. 

Best Dog: Fallen Leaves. A canine that is not a plot device, nor one to engender cheap sentimentality, but a manifestation of the idea that dogs are balms for our broken spirits. (Honorable Mention: the dog in “Showing Up” demonstrating how dogs always manage to lie down in exactly the wrong spot, and how we don’t really mind.)

Best Shot: Priscilla. I can’t seem to source the full image, which is unfortunate, but even half the image will do, with Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) himself leaning over the teenage Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) with one arm pressed up against the wall, like the wall is her high school locker, and transforming a kind of model image of youthful romantic reverie into a brewing nightmare. 

The Annual Ruffalo Award (presented to the best unnoticed performance in a movie): Summer Joy Campbell, Bottoms. Ayo Edebiri is hilarious, so is Rachel Sennott, and Ruby Cruz steals the movie, really, but it is Joy Campbell who best harnesses director Emma Seligman’s penchant for eye-level shots by rendering them a window into her scorned soul. (Honorable Mention: Indira Varma & Charles Parnell turning information drops in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning” into gleeful art.)

The Annual Elevator Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): Margot Robbie, Asteroid City. The most gasp-inducing moment in a movie that is a play as a television documentary is when all three of these layers suddenly give way to a fourth layer, a scene on a balcony, or two balconies, that is, one of which Robbie’s character steps out onto as she becomes nothing less than the living, breathing embodiment of the old writerly adage to Kill Your Darlings. 

The Annual Yosemite Sam Award (presented to the best Looney Tune in a movie): Margot Robbie, Barbie. Emma Stone is garnering considerable acclaim for the physical expressiveness of her turn in “Poor Things,” and it’s well deserved, but Robbie’s physical expressiveness as the living fashion doll was equally exemplary, never more than the scene when her character is fleeing the Mattel Execs. Even now I feel as if I can’t hope to express what Robbie does except to say that without the aid of effects, she seems to animate herself, her arms and legs moving with an exaggerated fluidity that improbably comes across independent of her own body. 

The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expressions in a movie): Michelle Williams, Showing Up. It’s not just one facial expression, even if a few of the withering glares she affixes Maryann Plunkett, playing her character’s mother slash boss, because who wants to work with their parental figure, are side-splitting, but all the facial expressions. Because this performance - this movie - is made from Williams’s facial expressions, a working, or maybe just struggling, artist appraising life all around her. 

The Annual When Strangers Do Meet in Far Off Lands Award (presented to the best Meet Cute in a movie): Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. Reminding us why writer/director Christopher McQuarrie is the master of working around Tom Cruise’s inherent sexlessness, he turns the airport hunt for a MacGuffin into a frisky, unofficial first date between his leading man’s IMF agent and Haley Atwell’s pickpocket.  

The Annual “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)” Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): The Adults. True, the dance in “Poor Things” is also great, but that dance feels like a lateral move, in a manner of speaking, from the 2018 “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in The Rain)” award winning dance in “The Favourite.” What’s more, the “Poor Things” dance just sort of exists unto itself whereas the dance of three siblings in “The Adults” not only quotes my favorite movie dance, but it also joyfully encapsulates and puts a button on a movie exploring the nature of performance.  

The Annual Ruby Slippers Award (presented to the best prop in a movie): Minifridge, Barbie. One quick image in the movie’s remarkable “Parallax View”-like montage of the patriarchy (Montage of the Year) in which a minifridge door is thrust open, functions like a wormhole, the Tannhauser Gate from a dude’s tailgate cosmically tunneling back to his college dorm. 

The Annual Penélope Cruz Award (presented to the best hair in a movie): Adam Driver, Ferrari. It’s more than a little ironic that the Annual Penélope Cruz Award goes to someone in a Penélope Cruz-starring movie that is not Penélope Cruz. But then, “Ferrari” is a Michael Mann movie, and if there is one thing we know about a Michael Mann protagonist, even if his life is falling down all around him, his hair will still look good. 

The Annual Keira Knightley Green Dress Award (presented to the best costume in a movie): Josh Hamilton, Reality. Sometimes the grim reaper comes dressed not in a black cloak but an unflattering short-sleeved shirt straight off the clearance rack at Kohl’s.

The Annual Cinema Paradiso Award (presented to the best cinema scene in a movie): Fallen Leaves. The deadpan Scandinavian version of the “Platoon” scene in “The Naked Gun.” 

The “Now We Can Eat” Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): The Iron Claw. Three brothers shoved into the front seat of pickup truck, tooling down the road, blasting Tom Petty, shoving fast food into their mouths, it’s the happiest moment, really, in a sad, sad movie. Youth has rarely seemed so ravishingly wasted on the young. 

The Annual “Then He Kissed Me” Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): Crimson and Clover by Tommy James & The Shondells in Priscilla. That eternal tremolo guitar has never sounded so foreboding.

The Annual “Best of My Love” Award (presented to the second-best use of pop music in a movie): Don’t Do Me Like That by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in The Iron Claw. See Also: Best Meal.

The Annual Tour Eiffel Award (presented to the best image of The Eiffel Tower in a movie): Full Time. When a single mother forced to spend the night in a seedy motel in Paris because she can’t get back to her home in the faraway suburbs due to a transit strike wakes up to see motel art of the famous open-lattice iron structure perched along the Seine and then goes to the window to see the city waking up in the alley below, it’s a pertinent reminder of how the City of Light looks to everybody else. 

Best Movie Tweet: See Below. For the “Michael Clayton” hive. If you know, you know. RIP Tom Wilkinson. 

Top 10 Movies of 2020: Specifically 2020 Edition

It’s the end of the year and that means end of the year lists. Of course, this is the end of 2020 which, it goes without saying, though I’ll say it anyway, was a weird, miserable year. Many of the movies that were supposed to be released in 2020 had their release dates moved to next year. Movie theaters were shuttered across the country, some indefinitely, some permanently. What strange, new, possibly bleak future awaits the entire industry is subject to whenever we manage to extricate ourselves from this unrelenting pandemic. I watched 2020 movies, sure, many of them, if not as many of them as I would have in any other year. I liked some of them a lot. But now, as my inbox is flooded with year-end screeners, I feel, frankly speaking, burned out on streaming and just burned out in general, less inclined to watch new movies than ever. A typical year end list through this lens feels not so much impossible as something closer to a lie, not the kind of list to match the mood. Perhaps if this was another blog, another publication, subjected to an editor’s exacting standards, we’d have to play by the hoary rules. As it is, this blog answers to no one but itself. Here, in alphabetical order, are the best movies I watched in 2020. 

Top 10 Movies of 2020: Specifically 2020 Edition

The August Virgin (2020)

In evoking the languid atmosphere of a few hot August weeks in Madrid, director Jonás Trueba, who co-wrote with his star Itsaso Arana, equates Finding Yourself with an earthly miracle. 

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020)

The Ross Brothers’ not-really-a-documentary documentary reimagines the edge of the earth of ancient times as the last 24 hours of a Las Vegas dive bar, or something. 

Dark Waters (2019)

I want more Diane Lane Goes To Pretty Places movies, certainly, I have not been shy in professing that, but do you know what I really want? I really want more movies like “Dark Waters,” pop filmmaking with a serious auteurist bent. 

The Edge of Democracy (2019)

Less a documentary, really, than a personal essay, Petra Costa brilliantly, sorrowfully suggests democracy is less a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives, than an impossible dream always waiting to come true. 

Infinite Disco (2020)

Let’s be real, I was probably never happier all 2020 than I was during Kylie Minogue’s livestream concert in early November to promote her new album “Disco.” 

Last of the Mohicans (1992)

In my single experience, your favorite movie just pops that much more during a pandemic. 

Monterey Pop (1968)

With live music effectively canceled in 2020, I rejoiced in going back to Monterey Pop. Turns out Janis Joplin singing “Ball & Chain” was the prototype for Ally singing “Shallow.” 

Roman Holiday (1953)

Entertaining and affecting, affecting and entertaining, two Movie Stars acting and two actors being Movie Stars, director William Wyler utilizing an impeccably crafted screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton to visually tell the story, yeah, I’m pretty sure “Roman Holiday” is the perfect movie.

Tokyo Olympiad (1965)

I’ll think about the Olympian eating a sandwich at the Olympics during his Olympic event for the rest of my life.

The Vast of the Night (2020)

Evokes the simultaneous terror and wonder in simply listening and looking up.

A Few of My Favorite Movie Shots in 2019

And though I typically refrain from saying anything about my favorite shots of the year, just letting them speak for themselves, this last shot, my favorite shot of the year, culled from and culminating Jennifer Kent’s “The Nightingale”, might appear in and of itself, as nothing special, just a sunrise, looking out across the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It’s not just the shot, though, as none of these are, but how it marries its themes to the image, laying bare the one bromide that frustrates me the most – that is, The Sun Still Rose. Culminating an arduous 136 minutes, set sometime in 1820s Tasmania, during The Black War, when British colonists were essentially committing genocide against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, this shot sees the sun rising, true enough, and ferociously asks, “Yeah? So what?”

Top 10 Movies of 2019

Hi. These were my favorite films of 2019, ranked from 10 to 1. Typically I include burbs providing insight into my choices, but all my blurbing energy went to the end of the decade list and it’s the second day of 2020 and, as expected, I’m already exhausted. So you can just click on the title to find the review if you seek further enlightenment, or confusion. And because a few of these I saw late in the season, I have not yet had time to sketch my thoughts. In those cases, I have linked to a review from another critic that I think gets it right (reviews written, respectively, by Adam Nayman, Stephanie Zacharek and Carlos Aguilar). When my reviews are metaphorically penned, and when time permits, I’ll go back in and change the link, though by then 125 years in Internet Years will have passed and so what but why not.

Top 10 Movies of 2019

10. Blinded by the Light

9. Pain and Glory

8. Atlantics

7. Marriage Story

6. The Irishman

5. Transit

4. Little Women

3. Colewell

2. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

1. Her Smell