12th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival

The only thing that stayed with me from the otherwise unnecessary “Anchorman” sequel was Marion Cotillard and Jim Carrey as “the incredibly polite Canadian news team” concluding each sentence with a preemptive sorry. There was just something about those almost aggressive anticipatory apologies that tickled my funny bone. It’s one of the classic Canada jokes, right, a civility that a certain sort of American who will cut in line ahead of you at the supermarket and say that’s what freedom is would mock. And yet, considering that we, the United States of America, willingly gave the car keys back to a President with pudding where his brain should be and that now he has incited a trade war with our kindly neighbors to north in the manner of an imperious monarch who got indigestion from some pure Canadian maple syrup and decided to MAKE THEM PAY, I think it’s time we start being the ones to apologize upfront. Going forward, when talking to a Canadian, any and all Americans should be required to issue a preemptive “Sorry” of our own and Canadians should never have to say “Sorry” to us again until they have determined our national apology sufficient. On that note, here is the lineup for this year’s Not-at-TIFF, our annual alternative to the Toronto International Film Festival kicking off today in, well, obviously. Sorry.

All screenings theoretical.

12th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival 

Tu dors, Nicole. Even by the standards of my least favorite season, this summer has been wretched, and there are few movies that capture the somnambulant, nigh unbearable suspended animation of summer with as much style and dry wit as Stephane Lafleur’s 2014 French-Canadian comedy-drama.

Straight Talk. I have seen “9 to 5,” and I have seen “Steel Magnolias,” and I have even seen “A Smoky Mountain Christmas,” but I have never seen the late Dolly Parton’s 1992 romantic comedy in which she plays a small-town Arkansan who comes to the big city of Chicago and through some sort of humorous mix-up finds herself on a radio show dispensing advice and wisdom to so many callers. The reviews seem to have been mixed, but what do snooty critics like me know about anything? Dolly Parton as an uncredentialed radio psychologist sounds like the greatest movie ever made! 

Twice as Nice. Women’s professional basketball in the United States has not merely had to fight for relevancy but its very existence since the beginning, as Jessie Maple’s 1989 drama demonstrates. It’s not just that “Twice as Nice” starred real-life twin USC basketball stars Pamela and Paula McGee as fictional twins battling to be the #1 draft pick in a fictional women’s basketball league almost a decade before the WNBA was inaugurated, but that the movie itself was nearly lost forever until a 2015 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation ensured the literal film would be saved. Now, the WNBA has grown so much that specious forces have gone from outright ignoring it to co-opting it, exploiting the league to help foment a new version of the welfare queen and sucking all the joy from the Caitlin Clark Experience by using her as a cudgel in their never-ending culture wars. There was Russell and Wilt, and then Bird and Magic, but Clark’s foremost rival is shaping up to be The Discourse. If she can beat the formless, shapeshifting, malevolent Discourse, she really will be the GOAT.

Adaptation. I have no quarrel with Emily Wilson going scorched earth on Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey.” As the French are fond of saying, if you pay for your seat to the show, you reserve the right to criticize it. (Then again, Wilson appears to have attended a press screening.) The whole kerfuffle that erupted, however, interested me less than the bigger question of whether an adaptation should pay fealty to the work it is adapting, or whether the only limitation should be a filmmaker’s imagination. And no movie has better captured the toil and tricky nature of modifying one artform for another quite like Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s 2002 screen adaptation of Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” that in its meta knottiness lives the adapting ideal as breaking free of the original pan and doing your own thing. 

The Swimmer. Speaking of The Odyssey, here is a perfect movie for our moment, the 1968 Frank Perry-directed adaptation of a John Cheever book combining an Odysseus-like quest via suburban swimming pools by a narcissistic, hollowed-out has-been still toiling under the impression that he’s the bees-knees without realizing that emotionally, intellectually, and mentally he’s underwater. You sometimes see people speculate that Burt Lancaster’s WASP version of Odysseus is dead but that’s just because “The Sixth Sense” ruined message boards for the rest of time. He is alive and everyone in his orbit is forced to suffer his delusions of grandeur along with him. 

The French Revolution. It was only after Sam Neill died, I am ashamed to say, that I learned he had starred as America’s greatest friend in liberty, my dawg, the Marquis de Lafayette, in a 1989 two-part international television historical drama, “La Révolution Française.” And though I am as hesitant to watch Movie Lafayettes as much as I am Movie George Washingtons, which is one of several reasons I steered clear of “Young Washington,” a movie starring not only Sam Neill as Lafyette but Jane Seymour as Marie Antoinette piques my interest. I mean, not even Meryl Streep has played Marie Antoinette and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. If you can play Marie Antoinette and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, then Karen Silkwood is a cakewalk.

Days of Thunder. Is Tom Cruise’s 1990 NASCAR movie good? Well, no. Did it require the sequel that was recently announced? God, no. But if I were rich and attending a benefit for an arts organization auctioning off a package to go see the “Days of Thunder 2” with Nicole Kidman (who will apparently and for understandable reasons not reprise her role from the original) and her girlfriends reviewing it aloud in real time and requiring me to sign a non-disclosure agreement to not repeat anything they say, buddy, I would break the bank. 

As always, on the eighth day we rest and watch a YouTube video. And at this year’s TIFF, Penélope Cruz will be receiving the Special Tribute Award for her “extraordinary and unique contribution to the world of film.” Oh, right, I apologize, Cruz will be receiving the Special Tribute Award, presented by CHANEL. Cruz, after all, has been a brand ambassador for CHANEL since 2018, just as she has been the brand ambassador for Emirates and its Fly Better campaign since 2023. And though it might speak poorly of the modern film industry, what’s true is true and what’s true is this: there is still no better Movie Star Moment from the 2020s than Penélope Cruz in the above Emirates ad. In that moment, she is not shilling for Emirates, no, she is remaking Emirates entirely in her image. 

Side Out. As a longtime Olympics devotee, attending one of those quadrennial sporting spectacles has always been high on my bucket list and I was recently able to procure tickets to four different events for LA28. One of my tickets is for beach volleyball. It felt appropriate given southern California being the spiritual home of the two-person version contested at the Games, and because the sport made its Olympic debut at the last American Summer Games in Atlanta in 1996. That was four years after it appeared as a demonstration sport in Barcelona and six years after C. Thomas Howell’s dramatic comedy “Side Out” which stands the test of time as the preeminent beach volleyball movie of our age by essentially being the only beach volleyball movie of our age. I also have tickets to handball and water polo, but those sports have even fewer movies than beach volleyball.

Independence Day. Sometimes I see the German-born dual citizen Roland Emmerich as cinema’s version of Roger Bennett, the dual British American citizen and soccer nut who in 2021 wrote a book as love letter to his chosen home. Emmerich had not yet obtained American citizenship in 1996, but you see the same sort of spirit in his magnum opus “Independence Day,” nevertheless, a corny, boisterous ode to American exceptionalism that even a partly cloudy patriot, to borrow the phrase of Sarah Vowell, such as myself yearns to believe in from time to time. Let’s close Not-at-TIFF by blowing this one up to 70mm and for two hours and twenty-six minutes believing with all our might.

Mid-Year Middling Thriller Update

Longtime and extremely loyal frustrated followers of Cinema Romantico know that we begin each new year with a middling thriller-only movie preview. The problem, however, is that not all upcoming release information is yet available in January. Last year, the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” was not announced until June. And so, with unbearably scorching temperatures, wildfire smoke blotting the sky, dangerous lettuce on the loose, and virtually everything else in the United States being so bleak and stupid, we thought it might be a fine time to re-peruse the release list and see what additional middling thrillers we have to anticipate. 

Mid-Year Middling Thriller Update

The Brink of War, August 14. A historical thriller for the dad in your life of Reagan and Gorbachev’s 1986 Reykjavík Summit might be notable to most for the casting of Jeff Daniels as the former and Jared Harris as the latter but is most notable to the blog that believes Hope Davis should be in everything for casting Hope Davis as Nancy Reagan. That casting decision is why we are willing to overlook writer and director Michael Russell Gunn having exclusively worked in television, cinema’s little brother, up until now and that truly frightening Netflix-like sheen to the cinematography. 

Onslaught, September 4. A middling thriller about an Army sniper (Adria Arjona) living in a trailer park defending her family against a titular onslaught of genetically engineered super soldiers should star Hope Davis too, of course, or at least Marisa Tomei, who should also be in everything, but the casting of Michael Biehn and Reginald VelJohnson gives this one a cheerfully retro feel, like it was made in the 80s but accidentally got left on a shelf somewhere. 

The Mongoose, October 30. Hey! Look at this! It’s a Liam Neeson middling thriller co-starring Marisa Tomei! Hollywood is finally starting to get it! The plot description on IMDb reads more like the first sentence of the screenplay and, honestly, I get it because, really, what else do you need to know than this: “A highly decorated combat vet, Ryan ‘Fang’ Flanagan, is fleeing a murder scene at 130 miles an hour in a Mustang Shelby cobra GT 65.” LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Fix, September 11. Another Liam Neeson joint, because why not? This sounds a lot like “Triple Frontier,” J.C. Chandor’s not-entirely successful ex-military operatives pull a heist movie from 2019 but trading the South American jungle for Afghanistan. The crucial difference is that Neeson is playing a character named Larry and for reasons I can’t quite articulate but utterly feel, nevertheless, Neeson as a Larry tickles my funny bone. He’s definitely less of a Larry and more of a ‘Fang.’

The Runner, September 2. “Phone Booth” for exercise junkies.

Motor City, July 24. The screenplay for this 1970s-set revenge thriller was apparently on Hollywood’s so-called Black List, screenplays liked around town not yet produced, but to me this seems more like one more piece for the Shailene Woodley Was Blacklisted evidence pile. 

By Any Means, September 4. Imagine if Mark Wahlberg said, “Get me my own version of ‘Mississippi Burning.’” A movie like that could be the thinking guy’s movie for guys who like movies, or it could be a disaster of epic proportions. 

Masterplan, October 16. If Stanley Tucci asked me to help him steal the Mona Lisa, I would probably say yes.

The Whisper Man, August 28. A middling thriller of a widowed crime novelist, his retired police detective dad, and the son of a serial killer with a cast of Robert DeNiro, Adam Scott, Michael Keaton, and Michelle Monaghan is, well, exactly what it sounds like: prestige last weekend of August fare.  

Penélope Cruz: not in Bunker.

Bunker TBD. Speaking of prestige middling thrillers, Penélope Cruz starring as a wife who takes umbrage with her husband (played by her real-life spouse Javier Bardem) building a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire sounds like free agent LeBron James signing with the Charlotte Hornets. I wonder if the bunker will be more lavish than a Pe Emirates luxury first-class private suite? 

Above the Below / Above and Below. Upon reading about “Above the Below” (December 4), co-starring and co-directed by Idris Elba, in which three astronauts find themselves stranded at the bottom of the ocean after their space capsule crashes upon re-entry, I went looking for the trailer and found one instead for another 2026 middling thriller called “Above and Below” (July 29) in which two people are trapped beneath the ocean in a shark cage. Did I hallucinate? Are these two movies, in fact, the same and A.I. just caused one to accidentally morph into the other? I was going to make a joke that “Above and Below” might morph between now and then into “As Above, So Below” but that movie was already made in 2014. 

Pitching 90s Movies as Broadway Musicals

Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter noting in the run-up to America’s 250th anniversary for The New York Times that one of this country’s greatest inventions was the musical felt unfortunately ironic given that Michael Paulson reported the same month for the paper record that the musical was in trouble, just as he had reported the same thing in September of last year. The high cost of production and theater rental are just a couple of the reasons cited by Paulson for Broadway’s struggles, and this iffy status in the grand scheme goes a long way toward suggesting why there are fewer original musicals and more musicals based on movies; pre-existing intellectual property can provide a built-in audience. As such, an adaptation of 1987’s “The Lost Boys” was nominated at the most recent Tonys for Best Musical just as an adaptation of 1992’s “Death Becomes Her” was nominated the year before that; the musical adaptation of 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!” won in 2020/21 and is set to close at the end of this summer which no doubt will not help box office statistics. Adaptations of “La La Land” (2016) and “The Princess Bride” (1987) are reportedly in the works as is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s of Walter Hill’s 1979 thriller “The Warriors.” Whether this is good or bad, I can’t say; it seems more like sheer necessity. And if it is, I thought, well, why not try to help? What am I here for in my (un)official capacity as pretend producer if not to proffer fake pitches? And since the 90s are back, I also thought, well there is our intellectual property – the decade itself! Here then are a smattering of possible 90s movies to transform into surefire Broadway musical hits! You’re welcome. (I apologize.)

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. I think this comedy-drama failed because it wasn’t a musical in the first place; that title just sounds like a musical.

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Ditto. They remade this 1991 comedy in 2024 to no great effect and that’s because it was always supposed to be a musical: just imagine the title song.

There’s Something About Mary. I mean, this is set up for music and lyrics by Jonathan Richman, right?

Quick Change. And if Jonathan Richman would prefer something completely (relatively) new, then let’s pitch him a musical of “Quick Change” because Richman writing music and lyrics for a sort of stuck-in-place musical about three bank robbers who can’t get out of New York sounds up his alley too.

Bowfinger. This 1999 comedy should have been a bigger hit and maybe we can make it one on stage by reimagining a motley crew of Hollywood outsiders filming a movie around an unwitting movie star as a motley crew of Broadway outsiders staging a musical around a star of the stage. How would such a thing even be possible? Eh, we’ll work that out later. And while I am tempted to say the unwitting Broadway star could be Brian Stokes Mitchell as himself, let’s instead finally give David Alan Grier his role of a lifetime.

The Pelican Brief. It’s high time we bring John Grisham to The Great White Way. 

Pacific Heights. A thriller in which a psychotic tenant who won’t leave is transformed into an uproarious comedy, as it was always meant to be, about how nobody can afford to buy a home.

The Fugitive. A “Miss Saigon”-ish tragedy in which Dr. Richard Kimble and U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard realize they are soulmates. 

Enemy of the State. A “Jersey Boys”-like romp told from the perspective of so many youthful NSA agents as they begin to question the nature of the surveillance state.

Clear and Present Danger. A “Camelot”-inspired retelling of the Jack Ryan legend and his utopian Central Intelligence Agency. 

A Simple Plan. “As sure as the night is long / a simple plan goes wrong.”

Empire Records. Is it possible to make an anti-jukebox musical jukebox musical? Let’s find out!

The Big Lebowski. Boy, would I love to see Donny’s version of “Mister Cellophane.”

Clerks. A musical set entirely in the Quick Stop sung by amateurs with improvised choreography.

My Ten Second Song Opening Salvo Non-Sequential List

I do not have a picture of my first car, a Bimini Blue Metallic 1993 two-door Ford Tempo, for blog purposes because that was so long ago, kidz, you couldn’t take a picture of your first car with your phone. Your parents, maybe, could take a photo of it with their Canon, but you, yourself, could only take it with a disposable Kodak camera from Walgreens, if, that is, you wanted to pay for one rather than use that money to buy the Jagged Little Pill compact disc. (The photo above of a 1993 Ford Tempo interior is pulled from Google.) Somewhere, yes, there are a few photos of my nominal Tenacious Tempo, including one of it parked in front of the Rose Bowl a quarter-century ago this year, but those are tucked away in an old school photo envelope. Back then, you had to be there to be there. Anyway. 

My first car returned to my mind a few weeks ago when I listened to the most recent episode of Rob Harvilla’s Ringer podcast where he explores seminal 90s and 00s songs. In this one, his subject was Bush’s “Glycerine,” framed through the lens of songs you listened to specifically on the radio while aimlessly tooling around in your car but more specifically than that, the first ten seconds of those songs. “You internalize the first ten seconds of hundreds of alternative rock songs,” Harvilla explained, “and you create subconsciously, or consciously, a taxonomy, a hierarchy, an emotional ranking of all these ten second opening salvos.” Oh, I created one, Rob, believe me, I did. Mine, however, is not ranked. Because they are all number one. 

What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? R.E.M. Harvilla was specifically talking about alternative rock stations and the truth is, I was less interested in alternative rock of the era than my peers were and more likely to be listening to – ye gods – pop radio. (Or my rap cassettes. Truthfully, no first ten seconds of any song elicits a Pavlovian response of being in my first car more than the horns of “Steve Biko (Stir It Up)” by Tribe Called Quest, but as per Harvilla’s rules, this post is strictly limited to songs I also heard on the radio.) But if any alternative rock song could have been said to perk my ears up, it was this one. Peter Buck’s guitar sound is generally described as jangly, but to me, it will always be about this monster riff.



Creep, TLC. “Waterfalls” was a bigger hit and the one I remember on the radio most, but the radio version often excised Left Eye’s rap, cutting the song’s heart right out, and I always liked “Creep” just a little bit more anyway. And so, any time one song on Q-102 ended and “Creep’s” opening horn samples appeared, I felt like Mike Pace had just read my numbers in the Iowa Powerball lottery.



If It Makes You Happy, Sheryl Crow. Central Iowans of a certain age who doubled as “Seinfeld” fans will recall there was this local TV personality who would always talk over the end credit scenes during “Seinfeld” re-runs on KDSM-17, may god have mercy on her soul, just as it always seemed to me that radio dee-jays talked over the opening riff to “If It Makes You Happy.” I hated this, but at the same time, it turned the opening ten seconds into this low rumble just underneath the standard-issue patter about nobody-cares-what, like some dumb tourist you just met at Old Faithful still jabbering while you can feel the geyser getting ready to unleash, innately communicating that in just a moment, in just ten blessed seconds, life was about to be soooooo good for four-and-a-half minutes more. 

Just A Girl, No Doubt. I mean, hey, man, this riff changed my life. And no, I don’t want to talk about Gwen Stefani in the year of our lord, 2026, that’s got nothing to do with this. 



All You Wanted, Michelle Branch. This was late-era Tempo, after the Phoenix summer had nearly killed it, just sort of eking out its final days back in central Iowa as I was just sort of grasping at the straws of life. And though the opening salvo to this one is not thunderous, that’s what I liked about it, how the first ten seconds seemed to clear the sky in advance, leaving a figurative rainbow glittering just outside my windshield as I ratcheted up the volume and then the thunder crashed and I sang along (so long as no one else was in the car with me).  



Wonder, Natalie Merchant. She’s been gone from the pop scene for so long that sometimes I forget how big a Natalie Merchant fan I was back in the 90s, and though she did not frequently compose the kind of songs that would immediately reach out and grab you, on this one, she did. Indeed, in an industry where guitar gods are too often just that, gods, testosterone-addled gods, I always liked that when Merchant broke away from the 10,000 Maniacs and went solo, she had a woman, Jennifer Turner, slinging the axe. I don’t know enough to know what Turner is doing in that opening riff to “Wonder.” It’s like a sunnier, more understated version of shredding, or something. It didn’t knock me sideways, this opening, it instantly infused my heart with euphoria. And in the course of researching this post, I discovered a Merchant performance of this one on David Letterman’s Late Show in 1996 with Turner over her right shoulder and going to proverbial town on her chosen instrument, I have watched it, like, 46 times, and despite everything happening these days, truly, the world never stops being full of wonder. 

What is the Best Line in Casablanca?

In last year’s Oscar-nominated “Blue Moon,” holding court at Sardi’s, celebrated Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) cites the best line in the 1942 winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture and stone cold classic “Casablanca” as “Nobody ever loved me that much.” And I thought, “Is it? Is it the best line in ‘Casablanca?’” It’s the line Rick (Humphrey Bogart) says to Annina Brandel (Joy Page) the Bulgarian newlywed who has taken up with the dastardly Captain Renault (Claude Rains) in the hope of securing letters of transit for she and her husband to escape to America. It’s a line that echoes Rick’s “I stick my neck out for nobody” because, in fact, he winds up sticking his neck out repeatedly, including for Annina Brandel, just as, in fact, someone did love him that much. Of course, “I stick my neck out for nobody” is a standard-issue observation given extra oomph by the surrounding context while “Nobody ever loved me that much,” as the fictional Hart suggests, stands more on its own. And that poses an essential question: is the best line in “Casablanca” one that is the best line unto itself or one that is in some sense elevated by attendant circumstances like the situation or the actor? 

AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes from June 2005 included six lines from “Casablanca,” the most of any movie, doubling the two second place finishers, “Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of the Oz.” I’m willing to bet that if you give it a minute, you can figure out which six lines made the cut, and that you can figure out those six do not include “Nobody ever loved me that much.” It also does not include what Lorenz Hart cites as the movie’s worst line: “A precedent is being broken.” He’s wrong about that one. The worst line is Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) imploring her French Resistance folk hero husband (Paul Henreid): “Victor, please don’t go to the underground meeting tonight.” But then, even that line, as David Denby once noted for The New Yorker, is “adorably terrible.” “Casablanca” is nothing if not the utmost expression of Hollywood hokum and that line exists as a little reminder that even if the movie proved eternal, no one really thought it was made to last.

The highest-ranking “Casablanca” line on AFI’s list, checking in at #5, is Rick’s recurring, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Famously, that line was improvised by Bogart himself, culled from poker lessons he gave Bergman, while the next “Casablanca” line on the list, checking in at #20, the immortal wrap-up, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” was suggested by producer Hal Wallis. And that’s interesting because otherwise, “Casablanca,” which was based on an unproduced play and written by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, is such a writer’s kind of movie, as witty in its dialogue as it is shrewd in its structure.

Indeed, part of the problem with the AFI’s list is that in some cases, the best lines require the accompanying lines to unlock their full verbal luminescence. Rick’s “I was misinformed” doesn’t sing without the preceding bit about having come to Casablanca for the waters just as his “I’m a drunkard” doesn’t come through without the German Major Strasser’s (Conrad Veidt) antecedent inquiry about Rick’s nationality. Heck, Renault’s, “That makes Rick a citizen of the world” right after Rick’s “I’m a drunkard” could qualify too. And though “Blue Moon’s” Lorenz Hart notes the economy of “Nobody ever loved me that much,” contrary to what screenwriting courses might teach you, sometimes a little extravagance pays. 

Yvonne: “Where were you last night?” 

Rick: “That’s so long ago I don’t remember.” 

Yvonne: “Will I see you tonight?” 

Rick: “I never plan that far ahead.”

On other hand, Ilsa’s famous (and famously oft-misquoted) line, “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By,’” which was #28 on AFI’s countdown, is made memorable not so much because of the inherent wittiness of the line so much as how the line encapsulates and conjures the feeling surrounding it. Ditto “We’ll always have Paris” (#43). Renault’s “Round up the usual suspects,” meanwhile, is planted early in the screenplay and then paid off with great dramatic flair at the end. It might have only been #32 on AFI’s list, but I am inclined to say contrary to the fictionalized Lorenz Hart, that it might, that it just might be the best line in “Casablanca.” 

One line conspicuously missing from the AFI list is Captain Renault’s “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!” I suspect that if AFI redid its 100 quotes today, this one would make the cut, having become so prominent between the aged and the yutes alike as a wearily comic catch-all for our golden age of political blinkering and shrugging corruption. It’s a great line on the page, but Rains brings it home by providing just the right amount of ersatz incredulousness.

I like a well-crafted line, but what I love most is written line alchemizing so impeccably with an actor that it sounds as it were improvised even though it was not. And Bogart, as was his way, has all manner of such lines in “Casablanca.” There is his riposte to Strasser when the German Major tries to goad him by suggesting the Third Reich could invade New York. “Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you try to invade,” Rick replies as Bogey gives it this glorious ring of twinkly insolence. Or how about when Rick and Ilsa recall their last meeting on the day the Germans marched into Paris. “I remember every detail,” he says. “The Germans wore grey; you wore blue.” That line is too good to be true, just like a memory, but that is how Bogart says it, calling up a memory from the recesses of his mind. And brings us to the line that curiously brought up the rear of all the Casablanca entries on AFI’s list.  

On paper, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” sounds a little flowery, a little forced, not necessarily something a person might be inclined to say in the real world. But then, this is the movies, and who wants to talk like the world? This line is not only one that Bogart takes possession of with a pained, intoxicated slur, giving it the ring of drunken poetry, while also effusing a crucial hint of hydrogen psychosis, it is the one that more any other illuminates movie dialogue not as something to replicate the way people talk in the real world but, like the movie itself, as something beautifully, romantically larger than life. It’s the best line in “Casablanca.” 

Ranking Crimson Tide Supporting Performances

The Will Leitch Newsletter is one of the few Substacks I subscribe to, not least because his divergent interests tend to dovetail with mine, and I have appreciated how so far in 2026, he has not shied away from almost always prefacing whatever he wants to write about with addressing the present American outrages. These are extraordinary times in the worst way and acknowledging it does not feel redundant or sanctimonious but like a necessary refusal to normalize. This country has normalized way too damn much in the last decade and such normalization, I would argue, is a huge part of why we are where we are right now. Even so, such brutal preambles can wear a person out, and a few weeks ago, Leitch introduced his latest lament of the nation by writing, “Believe you me: I’d rather be…ranking Kelly Reichardt movies.” The ensuing week he noted that a reader from Saint Paul, Minnesota, epicenter of the current American crisis, wrote to say that he could really use Leitch ranking Kelly Reichardt movies right now. And so, as Leitch wrote, he scrapped his previously planned post about the American media’s coverage of the current President’s quote-unquote movement during the last ten years to instead rank Richard Linklater movies to clear his head.

To my clear head, well, I’m not going to rank Richard Linklater movies or Kelly Reichardt movies. I love them both, but this blog’s brand is a bit more irregular. And because I’ve had the movie year 1995 on my mind recently because of a post I am planning to have coincide with the upcoming Academy Awards, I’m going to rank supporting actors in that year’s action-thriller “Crimson Tide” in which a submarine captain (Gene Hackman) and his XO (Denzel Washington) battle over whether to launch nuclear missiles with war imminent or to find a way to retrieve a half-finished message that might confirm war has been aborted. And though it is made in the image of its legendary two leads, “Crimson Tide” is in the (more than) middling thriller hall of fame because it is chock full of dudes (and one dog).

Ranking Crimson Tide Supporting Performances

10. Viggo Mortensen. If it seems odd that an actor as accomplished as Mortensen might be so low on this list, well, thing is, the supporting roles as conceived and written in “Crimson Tide” require the actors to infuse a sense of personality more than create a character and Mortensen is more a create-a-character kinda guy. So, he’s fine, he’s perfectly fine, and his laconic voice sounds fantastic aboard a submarine, and he really smokes those cigarettes, it’s just, in this context, I’m looking for something else. 

9. Eric Bruskotter. The role is a little obvious, a lunkhead on the wrong side of things, but boy, does Bruskotter bring that lunkhead to life.

8. Tommy Bush. At the end, there is a small but critical part requiring an actor with enough stature to make you believe he possesses more authority than Gene freaking Hackman which is why “Crimson Tide” fills it with Jason Robards. (It is also why Robards is ineligible for this list.) But there is another small, if less critical, role near the beginning that also requires someone to appear as if he has more stature than Gene freaking Hackman. So, what are you going to do? You don’t have enough in the budget for another Jason Robards. Credit, then, to casting director Victoria Thomas for choosing a seasoned character actor like Bush, and credit to costume designer George L. Little for putting him in some J.T. Walsh glasses, and for Bush just sort of allowing this broader framework to impress the necessary longstanding authority with doing much of anything at all. 

7. Happy Lab. The Jack Russell terrier that is the loyal companion of Hackman’s character gets all the pub, but it’s this dog, as Washington’s canine counterpart, that gets my vote as Best in Show. 

6. Danny Nucci. He was something of a going concern in the 90s, as his Wikipedia entry attests, the first sentence under the career tab noting, “During the 1990s, Nucci played characters who are unceremoniously killed off in three blockbuster films – ‘Eraser,’ ‘The Rock,’ and ‘Titanic.’” Ah, but in “Crimson Tide,” he sticks around to the end, and more than that, does a solid job in evincing the small arc of a petty officer who comes into his own.

5. Matt Craven. For a long time there, in the 90s and even into the aughts, any movie that needed an asshole, whatever the variety, Craven was near the front of the rolodex. I was recently rewatching parts of “A Few Good Men” for obvious reasons and there was Craven, called in for one scene to be the livid military lawyer who’s had it up to here with Tom Cruise and he nails it. And he nails the asshole in “Crimson Tide” too. At the end, right when nuclear war is averted, Craven has his character get this get look (see above) that is a little disappointed, like he would have gone to war to be right. That’s the stuff.

4. George Dzundza. More than the other supporting characters, Dzundza’s is written with a sense of ethical and moral complication, and he carries it with great anguish. 

3. Marcello Thedford. Yes, reader, you might notice Steve Zahn in the background of this shot, and he is not the only known quantity in a smaller role. There is also Ryan Phillippe, Scott Grimes, and Rick Schroder. None of them, though, leave as big an impression as Thedford. Not just in this pictured moment where he does a little dance-karaoke to Martha and the Vandellas, but in an earlier scene where he expresses true geniality toward the Gandolfini and Mortensen characters right before they have fun with him by dressing him down. There are precious few moments of levity in “Crimson Tide” and quite possibly the two best involve Thedford.  

2. James Gandolfini. As with virtually all his pre-“Sopranos” work, you could see Gandolfini already had “it” in “Crimson Tide,” clear as day, by which I mean both an electricity and an intensity. Whether it’s believable behavior for a naval supply officer or not, I don’t really care, but when the stuff hits the fan, I love how he plays the part as something like a sneering prizefighter trying to goad you into throwing a punch after the bell. His single best moment, though, comes before the stuff hits the fan during an officer meal when Hackman’s character superciliously asks Washington’s to summarize his thoughts on the nature of war and Gandolfini smirks (see above) in this way that implies “Ok, hotshot, show me whatcha got” with more animosity than most characters get when they are throwing a punch. 

1. Richard Valeriani. There are a thousand things I love about this movie, but one of the things I love most is that it frames its big introductory chunk of exposition as a faux CNN report filed from the deck of an aircraft carrier by the real-life reporter Richard Valeriani. That’s inspired. Valeriani was on Nixon’s enemies list, his wife Kathie Berlin told The New York Times when her husband died in 2018, and he kicked off one of the greatest (more than) middling thrillers ever made. What a career.

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.