Movies are like houses: they are very expensive and almost everyone under the age of 40 will never have one of their own.
...Let me try again. Movies are like houses! in that Tom Cruise is going to do his absolute best to die in one.
Once more, with feeling. MOVIES are like HOUSES! I would like to be in one of my own, maybe with Jamie Bell or something!
Ok, but seriously. Movies...are like houses. In that they take years of hard work and effort to make from dozens or even hundreds of people, depending on the size of the house, and everyone' contributions are vital, even if the work the plumbers and roofers and tilers do often gets overshadowed by the architects and interior designers. We all love movies (or if you don't, you need to leave this space immediately, go to a theater, and stay there until you agree), but none of the movies we love could exist without the efforts of the artists and craftspeople below the line pouring their lives into their work. So today, in thanks, I'm going to wax effusive about all the work whose creators will never be interviewed on a talk show but deserve to be anyway. Crafts are great, and the only thing I love more than being surprised by fun and innovative craft choices in movies is writing too many words celebrating them. (This is not actually true, but I am trying to turn a phrase.) So let's dive in!
(Note: all pictures should enlarge if you click on them.)
Production Design
5. Hedda
(source)
Tastefully opulent interiors for the newly about-to-be-destitute! A wild assembly of wallpapers that look like they've benn copied from your dreams (or nightmares)! Decadent gilded cages to psychologically torture your secret lover in!
4. Sinners
(source)
Abandoned mills become homespun juke joints! The 1930s delta finds new, undead life! Vampires do their best to cover both locations in lots of blood!
3. No Other Choice
(source)
Plants like architecture and architecture like plants! Comparing your mansion to the mansions of your job competitors in hopes that yours is a little nicer! The perfect greenhouse for doing corpse topiary in!
2. Frankenstein
(source)
Mad scientists' brains turned inside out! Intricate, period-accurate(ish) props for all your crimes against humanity needs! Like if a Hot Topic goth teen's dizziest daydreams became manifest and then Jacob Elordi ripped someone's jaw off inside them!
1. Marty Supreme
(source)
An immaculate vision of 1950s New York that feelslike both accurate reconstruction and hazy memory! Rooms and veneers as regal and dilapidated as the faces that inhabit them! 'Immersion' is kind of an overused buzzword but it exists to laud movies as immersive as this one!
Honorable mention: Fantastic Four: The First Steps
Costume Design
5. The Ballad of Wallis Island
Cozy and ornate knitwear, my true achilles heel! Bright, character-defining colors and the drab beige coats to match them! A collection of some of the worst t-shirts on earth!
4. The Ugly Stepsister
Gowns like traps, or jokes, or both! Silk fantasias spun by worms who are in the process of eating your dead father! Ornamentation for all the horrible and terrified birds in your life!
3. Sinners
Snazzy Capone-era suits and mustard vests! Gorgeous afterlife finery! All the reds, whites, and blues you could wish for, and all the blood and violence that accompanies it!
2. One of Them Days
1. Frankenstein
Honorable mention: Kiss of the Spider Woman
Visual Effects
5. F1
Cars! Cars going fast! Cars going upside down! Lots of boys playing with their cars!
4. Tron: Ares
Colors! Robots! I have never been able to turn down a light-cycle in my entire, very dumb life!
3. Superman
A Man of Steel who feels grounded in actual reality (and maybe actual steel)! A fully CG dog with a shitty personality! Mayhem, but arguably more mayhem than usual!
2. Predator: Badlands
1. Avatar: Fire and Ash
There's nothing I can say about these movies' visual effects that you don't already know and believe! They exist in no small part as a reason to do visual effects innovations! Maybe a questionable premise for a movie, but a fantastic display of visual effects craft work!
Honorable mention: Mickey 17
Makeup and Hairstyling
5. Novocaine
To what extent do you enjoy lots of blood and gnarly wounds? I hope it's a lot, because that's just about all this entire category is about to be. Starting here! See Jack Quaid get turned into a brutalized potato!
4. Until Dawn
Wacky practical effects! Gross little face worms! Rotting ladies! Everything you'd look for in a fun afternoon!
3. The Ugly Stepsister
have you ever wanted to change your appearance? Watch this movie and see all five natural steps (braces, breaking your nose, pulling things out of your face, horrors, riding off to Sweden with your cooler younger sister)!
2. Weapons
1. Frankenstein
A new and exciting Frankenstein look in the year of our lord 2025! Period makeup and Christoph Waltz's horrible melting face! Making Jacob Elordi sit for full-body makeup for 11 hours straight and having the end result still be something we'd all still take out for a nice dinner!
Honorable mention: Superman
Film Editing
(I've tried to add clips to illustrate what I admire about these movies, with possibly mixed results.)
5. Weapons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sId4bb0cio0 (some spoilers)
4. Marty Supreme
3. Caught by the Tides
2. Final Destination 6: Bloodlines
1. One Battle After Another
Honorable mention: No Other Choice
Lots to love this year, from Weapons' whip-smart and impeccably timed edits selling both its horror and its comedy to Marty Supreme's frog-boiling tension that only increases as the movie continues (something that's a little hard to capture in a clip but really hits in the full context of the movie). Caught by the Tides' editing achievements are also hard to convey in clip form, but cutting together a movie out of archival footage across decades is a real feat. Final Destination puts in such strong work, nary a stray hair out of place until everything is suddenly out of place everywhere and on purpose--incredibly well-constructed work. Still, first place belongs this year (and pretty much any other year too) to One Battle After Another, which has some of the most electric and consistent I've ever seen in a move, all while jumping and skipping through different emotional moods and vibes every 30 seconds. The first time I saw this movie, I remember feeling a little cheated by the finale because I'd thought that only about an hour had gone by so far, when two and a half hours had flown by without me even noticing.
Cinematography
5. Die My Love
American pastoral gone awry! Alternatively sickly and verdant greens and over- an under-exposed faces! Seamus McGarvey should be the only person from now on who's allowed to do night scenes--this is how you make blues look vivid and dark!
4. Sinners
Deeply saturated colors and shadows like dreams! Embers that catch the eyes of something in the night! Rich golds and whites to illuminate the best (and last) party of your life!
3. 28 Years Later
Makes it on the basis of that night scene alone, but lots of other great qualities! Expressive and gritty in equal measure! The 'sent from my iPhone' of movies, but complimentary!
2. Happyend
1. One Battle After Another
Burnt umber desert tableau! Teal fantasias of central and/or northern California! Kinetic action sequences that lose none of their coherence or their beauty!
Honorable mention: The History of Sound
(I have to say that this category was almost impossible to narrow down to five; all of these top six are really gorgeous.)
Original Score
5. One Battle After Another-Johnny Greenwood doing what he does best--going both very big and very little with pianos, wacky synths, and unexpected melodies.
4. Marty Supreme-upbeat anachronistic synths and increasingly stressful beats for all your ping-pong/chicanery needs.
3. Sinners-such a fun mix of folk instrumentation, electric guitars, orchestral moments, and some actual-ass traditional heavy metal thrown in there whenever the vampires show up. So much of this movie's energy is due to Ludwig Göransson and friends beating the shit out of their instruments.
2. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain-Why has no one else been talking about this score? So unexpected and diverse, big and ridiculous and propulsive one second and then lush and lovely in the next.
One track for some wild saxophones and choral motifs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5SyDdyGbyk&list=PLlqTwE544yIX4IJEzPrVxAa0zaSOmT_4o&index=11
And one lovely track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eja9WqKk6xE&list=PLlqTwE544yIX4IJEzPrVxAa0zaSOmT_4o&index=5
1. 28 Years Later-a brain-melting combo of atonal chaos, percussive beats, pop rock, and the kind of melodies that will ensure you'll duck beneath your seat so that no one can see you weeping buckets at the silly zombie movie.
Ugh, just listening to this makes me want to tear up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PJIqmObrmo&list=PLRW80bBvVD3VZUKG2pKCshjyLCakN25Fk&index=21
Seriously, Alexandre Desplat could never: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POSqTXclLaQ&list=PLRW80bBvVD3VZUKG2pKCshjyLCakN25Fk&index=23
Honorable mention: The Plague
(Seriously, what a great category this year!)
Sound Mixing
5. Sinners-just the right blend of music, mayhem, and the dusty ambient life of just trying to have a nice time while both of those things are happening. The shoot-outs are a crisp as the blues riffs, both sounding like the first time in your life you've ever actually heard something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge3FMwsK9sM (big spoilers, lots of violence)
4. Final Destination: Bloodlines-I mean, for the Skyview disaster alone--everything pushed to 11, screams and fireballs and shattered glass rising coming at you like waves, or maybe laughter at a really good show--but the rest of it is no slouch either. Patient, whimsical sound work that plays with the audiences expectations before dropping a piano on their heads.
3. Plainclothes-pushes the movie's aesthetic exploration of surveillance and low-fi 90s video grunge just as hard as the editing and format choices do. Anxiety made tangible and audible through waves of static, surging voices, and sudden silences.
(Cannot find a single clip of this movie on youtube that doesn't change the audio)
2. Warfare-striking how aggressively this movie uses silence and the weight of empty rooms to rachet up its tension. Whole stretches of nothing but breathing and listening to the world around you, all of which makes the sudden violence sound like the voice of god.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aflRfK0gmJU (just in a clip, it doesn't play that well, but the cumulative effect of the sound work in the context of the full movie is really impressive)
1. If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You-oh hey, were you interested in immediately having a panic attack? If so, just watch any scene from this movie. Astounding weaponization of sound, the punishment of other people's voices at every minute of the day like waves, and all the other ways sounds eat your identity. Felt like running a marathon, or maybe like being eaten by bears, or maybe both at the same time--a real test of endurance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHccUV8-Hlg (Uh, maybe don't click on this if you're not interested in watching a (fake) hamster get run over by a car)
Honorable mention: Caught by the Tides
Sound Editing
5. Predator: Killer of Killers-that's right, there were two Predator movies this year, and while both had gnarly sound work, I'll tip my hat to the deranged clash of futuristic weaponry against Viking helmets, katanas, and WW2-era aircraft in the animated movie.
4. Avatar: Fire and Ash-while it's true that I'm feeling the Avatar fatigue as much as (...or perhaps slightly less than) the average person, I can't deny that Pandora is still an absolute wonder to listen to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg97s_te-Ak (not the best showcase of the movie's sound effects, but it's literally the only clip I could find that wasn't recorded inside a movie theater, so.)
3. Warfare-like the sound mix, the effects in this movie go along way to make onscreen combat feel fresh--jet screams and secretive little sniper pops and the punishing baseball bat thunk of a tank.
3. 28 Years Later-all the stomach-churning zombie squelching you could ask for, not to mention the butcher shop thwacks of violence, the fires of hell (or perhaps something better) as they burn flesh from bone, and the unforgettable thump-thump-thump of an alpha coming to rip your spine out.
2. Final Destination: Bloodlines-like every other aspect of this movie, the sound effects people on Final Destination had great--and mean--sense of humor. I dare you not to laugh/cringe/physically recoil at the alien chestbursting sounds when a very special piercing starts ripping out of a very special place. It's gross, it's evocative, it'll make you never want to go inside a hospital again. Live-action Looney Tunes, with all the big comical whacks and bumps that go with it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJsZNmoMPDk (spoilers and violence)
Honorable mention: If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You
Original Song
5. "Hana"-Little Amélie or the Character of Rain-I don't know if my music tastes are changing, or movie music is, but for the past couple years I've had trouble filling out this category with movie songs I really love. But this little ditty from Little Amélie is warm and sweet and a nice way to end the movie.
4. "I Lied to You"-Sinners-this would be at the very top if we were judging this category based on the sequence, not the song--and don't get me wrong, this song is good! It's a great take on 30s delta blues. I do think, though, that the visuals themselves lift this song higher than it'd go on its own.
3. "The Mighty Crabjoys Theme"-Superman-is this song both canonically bad in the world of the movie and also not great in real life! Probably! But it's so dumb and joyous that I just can't turn down. Like Clark Kent, I was also a little too into pop punk in my teens, and we're both (probably) better for it.
2. "Golden"-KPop Demon Hunters-has it been a little overplayed by this point? Maybe! Is it still a bop? Absolutely!
1. "Pale, Pale Moon"-Sinners-for some reason, this is the unloved child of Sinners' original songs, and I just don't get it, as this is a certified banger, a wacky fusion of traditional instruments/sounds and modern sensibilities, and is incorporated in an interesting and propulsive way in the movie itself. It's great! Someone give it a statue!
Honorable mention: "Last Time (I Seen the Sun)"-Sinners
And that's it for this year! And thank goodness, because I have been doing way too much these past few days and my brain/fingers/tragic little soul could use a break. I will be more vivacious for these next year! For now, the victory is just that I have actually managed to write them. As always, I'm thrilled and thankful that y'all have followed me on this dumb journey. These lists aren't much, but they're mine, and I will keep churning them out 'til the heat death of the universe (or the regular death of me, whichever one comes first). I'll be back sometime next week (hopefully) with Oscar predictions, but for now I'm gonna spend five minutes weeping quietly to myself and then get on with all the other things I need to do.
For those playing along at home, here are the movies that showed up the most on my lists:
Sinners-12
One Battle After Another-6
Weapons-6
28 Years Later-5
Final Destination: Bloodlines-5
Sinners set a record for most Academy Award nominations last month, and here it's gone and tied for my personal awards record too--only Mad Max: Fury Road before it has reached 12 nominations from me. Being a really well-crafted movie in a somewhat disappointing movie year is a solid recipe for record-breaking, it seems.
As for wins, One Battle After Another came out on top with three trophies (Director, Editing, and Cinematography), while three movies find themselves in a tie for second place, each with two wins: Weapons (Picture, Supporting Actress), If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Actress, Sound Mixing), and Frankenstein (Costume Design, Makeup).
And that's that! As always, thanks for reading!
