In less than 48 hours, I’ll begin the Oscar Blitz, and run a gauntlet for five weeks breaking down every category and nominee, as I’ve done every year that I’ve kept this blog up. As I write this, I still have 11 films from 2025 on my review backlog, not counting the nine I had to watch for the purposes of the Blitz itself, as they were left off my list until they were nominated in single-serving categories. In fact, I’m watching the last of those tomorrow morning. Suffice to say, I’ve got 20 total reviews to register, independent of the actual category breakdowns that start Monday. I’ll cover them all in weekend batches until we can finally close the book on the previous calendar.
In the interest of expediency, I offer the last installment of this year’s Netflix FYC rundown. Initially I was going to do the mini-series in four parts. The first two, for Animation and Documentary, I’ve already handled, and the plan was to do two more to cover English-language narrative features as well as foreign entries that made the International Feature shortlist. But time makes fools of us all, and even when I’m not working a full-time job, my schedule is still packed to the point of exhaustion, and I just don’t have the energy to do the 50-day marathon I did last year. Also, between those groups, there are only four total films, so it just didn’t make sense to split them up, especially since the two English films are both up for Best Picture and multiple other awards, while the two International submissions both ended their journeys at the semifinal stage.
So, before we get into the meat of the Blitz, let’s clear the Big Red N off our collective plates, shall we? This will wrap up the last of the multi-nominated films in advance, completes our look at the International Feature shortlist, and sets up a nice, easy schedule to take care of the rest over the next couple of weeks, so that maybe I can get back to regular coverage by the beginning of March. There are a lot of variables as to what that will look like once we get to it, but for now, we can at least have the satisfaction that something will soon return to normal.
Train Dreams
I saw this all the way back at AFI Fest last October, before it even got its Academy qualifying release and went to the streamer. The house was packed, the atmosphere was inviting, and once the screening was over (and before we got a lengthy Q&A session with the stars and director), there was an overwhelming sentiment in the room that this was a great film that needed to be seen on the big screen to appreciate its impact… so of course it went to the online platform that caters to idiots on their phones.
Joel Edgerton gives the finest performance of his career as Robert Granier, an intentionally unremarkable logger and laborer at the turn of the 20th century. Largely self-reliant since he was transported to the forests of Idaho as an orphan child, the entire point of the story is to serve as an extraordinary elegy to an ordinary person, like a more blue-collar version of It’s a Wonderful Life, only without divine influence. Robert is an uncomplicated man (saying he’s “simple” would imply a lack of intelligence and depth that betrays the character’s grace) who knows how to work with his hands, and who loves the world. He’s seen good times and bad, from highs like his courtship and marriage to the kindly Gladys (Felicity Jones) to traumatic lows like seeing a Chinese railway worker (Alfred Hsing) unceremoniously killed by racists simply for being foreign. It’s these experiences that delight and haunt his subconscious mind, hence the title.
Presented like a cinematic tone poem, the events of Robert’s life unfold like a series of gorgeous vignettes set against the backdrop of modernization, as it at first embraces Robert’s personality, then leaves him behind. He has an amazing peace of mind in building his home, raising his young daughter, and planning for a sound future as he departs each year for seasonal logging work. He befriends colorful characters like Arn Peeples (William H. Macy in what should have been a nominated supporting role), and finds satisfaction in a hard day’s work, whether it’s out in the woods or in the nearby town, where he occasionally supports his friend Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand), an indigenous store owner. But as time goes on, his few comforts are systematically stolen from him. His house burns down, his friends die in tragic accidents, and even his work becomes tiresome as technology and brash young loggers dismiss his age and experience. By the time he meets forest ranger Claire (Kerry Condon), he’s but a passenger in his own existence (ironic as he’s working as a carriage driver at this point). It’s all about connecting with the world around him, and how with each passing year, that becomes more difficult. Edgerton plays it all absolutely perfectly. He’s so good at portraying a grizzled American everyman that you forget he’s actually Australian.
Director Clint Bentley ensures that we can bask in all of these moments, with cinematographer Adolpho Veloso (who also worked with Bentley on his 2021 film Jockey) framing nearly every shot as if it’s an expressionist painting, utilizing natural light and Academy ratio to their best effect. From the moment you watch a tree fall in a POV angle from a mounted camera, you know this is going to be a deeply intimate affair, almost its own sleeping fantasy. The soulful title track from Nick Cave (written after Netflix acquired the film at Sundance last January) is a near-perfect coda. We all have those periods in life where it feels like the world is abandoning us. I’m going through it right now, in fact. Train Dreams is a lovely ode to the value of individuals in those dark phases, letting them know that they’re not alone and not lost.
It’s just a shame that most people can only see it on a platform with a corporate ethos that feels like the exact opposite of that sentiment.
Grade: A-
Left-Handed Girl
Taiwan’s Oscar entry is a well-made portrait of a poor family pushed to the brink in a socioeconomic situation that none of us would want to find ourselves in. It’s at times sweet and sympathetic, which can make for some base level entertainment. But we have to be honest here. This is nowhere near Academy Award quality, and the only reason it even made the shortlist is because it was edited, co-written, and co-produced by Sean Baker, coming off his near-sweep of the ceremony last year for Anora.
The story focuses on a family of women who move to Taipei, where divorced mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) opens a noodle stand at a night market. She’s constantly at odds with her 20-year-old daughter I-Ann (Ma Shih-Yuan), who is rebellious and dismissive of her mother’s efforts and financial woes, particularly when Shu-Fen puts the family into further debt by paying for medical expenses and later the funeral of her estranged husband who abandoned them when I-Ann was a child. Both of them, however, try to set a positive example for five-year-old I-Jing (Nina Ye), who is incredibly impressionable. This is made particularly manifest when it comes to Shu-Fen’s parents. Her father, Wen-Xong (Akio Chen from Taiwan’s last entry, Old Fox), is ultraconservative and superstitious, shaming I-Jing for being left-handed, calling her “sinister” appendage the “Devil’s Hand” and forbidding her to use it in his house. This leads the child to believe that her left hand is possessed by evil, and that she’s not responsible for anything she does with it, so she begins casually stealing items from other shops with it. Her mother, Xue-Mei (Xin-Yan Chao), makes money by participating in black market immigration and adoption schemes, procuring counterfeit passports for those looking to essentially sell their children to the West.
So, long story short, everyone in the family is kind of fucked up. And just for good measure, I-Ann works at a betel nut stand, where apparently the saleswomen are meant to dress and act suggestively, and she’s having an affair with her boss, A-Ming (Teng-Hung Hsia), who of course conveniently omits the fact that he’s married, causing more drama when I-Ann reveals she’s pregnant. If you had any doubts that Sean Baker helped write this, you should be well disabused of that by now. Urban settings, soap opera-level drama and histrionics, and a focus on a sex worker (or someone adjacent to it)? That’s pretty much the entire checklist. Tell me the whole thing was shot on a shitty iPhone made in a sweatshop by less fortunate Asian children, and it’ll be complete.
There are some interesting ideas here, and the performances aren’t bad. There’s even some legitimate pathos in Shu-Fen finding a second chance at romance with another shop owner named Johnny (Brando Huang), and themes worth exploring when it comes to I-Jing’s interpretation of her grandfather’s outdated, sexist nonsense. But it’s mostly lost in the sea of soap tropes and naked attempts to seem more edgy and profound than the story could ever be. I mean, there’s this whole “deep secret” when it comes to I-Jing, and if you don’t figure it out within the first five minutes, you should go sit in a corner and wear a dunce cap. The fact that the film tries to treat this as some kind of super suspenseful twist is insulting to all our collective intelligence.
I’m not saying this is a bad movie, only that it’s overly simplistic and pedestrian. There’s nothing in this that you wouldn’t see on a tired CW program. It looks nice enough, but is woefully lacking in substance, unless your entire cinematic ethos is to embody the male gaze and think of Ma Shih-Yuan the same way we were all meant to over Mikey Madison last year. There are worse things to do with your life, I guess, but it doesn’t make for awards-worthy entertainment without something more behind it. Anora had that extra something. Left-Handed Girl does not.
Grade: C+
Homebound
The final International Feature semifinalist comes from India, and it too probably made the shortlist due to celebrity endorsement, in this case Martin Scorsese as an imported executive producer. Based on a news article published in the New York Times in 2020 about two migrant workers trying to find their way home during the COVID pandemic, the film is an intriguing take on class/caste divides in India, as well as its national disregard for laborers, but like Left-Handed Girl, it’s also bogged down by General Hospital-style melodrama.
The story focuses on two friends named Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa), who live in a poor village in the northern part of the country. As the film begins, the two are applying to be police officers, taking a civil service exam to enter the academy. Less than 10% of applicants are chosen each year, but the pair believe in their skills, and most importantly, they feel that earning their badges will afford them the respect they’ve never had based on their upbringings (Shoaib is basically a second-class citizen because he’s Muslim, while Chandan is from a low caste, just above “Untouchables”). While there are laws in place to prevent discrimination, in practice there’s no way to alleviate the old prejudices in a country of over 1.3 billion people, and social mobility is basically unheard of. Becoming cops might be their only chance, though Chandan meets a young woman named Sudha (Janhvi Kapoor), who’s from a higher caste and taking the exam to hedge her bets, aiming for a college education to improve her station in life. As the two begin dating, she encourages Chandan to enroll as well.
The plot unfolds like a series of Odyssey-esque trials and tribulations, as systemic obstacles are put in the young men’s ways. It takes over a year and a half to get the results of the police exam, and only one of them passes, leading to a temporary falling-out. Chandan wavers in his commitment to education, pushing Sudha away. Both men take up work in a textile mill to get by, sleeping in a hovel with several of their coworkers and rotating rest schedules with the opposite shift. Shoaib finds some success as a salesman, but he’s continuously mocked and distrusted because of his religion. Debts are incurred based on their ability to pay from their prospective wages, only for the rug to be pulled out from under them. Shoaib considers working abroad in Dubai, but is wary of the rapacious and exploitative “Kafala” system, where in exchange for the job he has to surrender his passport so that he can’t leave. The list goes on.
Things come to a head in 2020. With the onset of COVID, the factory where the boys work is shut down by the government, along with most other businesses as the country is put on lockdown. Unable to earn wages, but still expected to pay the bills, they decide to smuggle themselves on a truck to get back to their village, so they can at least be with their families until everything blows over. The journey proves dangerously arduous, and the chances of survival decrease greatly as they go thanks to the speed of the virus and the population density in even the most rural communities.
In a lot of ways, the last act plays like Sirāt, which was ultimately nominated by the Academy. I prefer Homebound because when it comes to the purgatorial trek home, we at least have well-developed characters and an actual story that resolves itself. The subtext is much more focused on the socioeconomic factors that lead to Shoaib and Chandan’s desperation, which I feel is much more resonant. The pandemic was a unique catastrophe that we simply weren’t prepared for, and there were myriad mistakes made worldwide when it came to the response, ultimately costing millions of lives. India was one of the worst, ranking third in total deaths behind Brazil and the U.S. It’s almost as if all those countries were run by incompetent, self-serving idealogues or something. For India, the pandemic became a microcosm of all the inequalities the country has yet to properly address, including old biases related to ethnicity and caste, even when those systems are at least officially recognized as legally dubious. The fact remains that poor people remain poor, non-Hindus are considered “less than,” and few resources are devoted to helping the masses. One of the most poignant scenes of the film sees Shoaib and Chandan looking for transport when they’re caught after the state-imposed curfew. Rather than be taken home, they’re mercilessly beaten by the very police force they hoped to join at the beginning, an all too ironic confirmation of their elevated status.
I’d be much higher on this film if it weren’t for the fake sentimentality. The flick lasts for two hours, but it could easily have cut out a half hour and missed nothing of import. I don’t need to see Shoaib and Chandan fighting at the end of the first act. I don’t need to see Chandan and Sudha arguing over whether or not they actually love each other because they have different employment priorities. I don’t need 20 reminders that Shoaib’s father has a bum hip and needs a replacement. It’s not as bad as in Left-Handed Girl, but it does weigh the film down and make those two hours feel closer to three. There’s something to be said for efficiency and giving the audience enough credit to acknowledge that we get what’s going on. Sadly, this style of storytelling is much more in line with Netflix’s new model than what we’d all consider effective. Is this a good film? Yes. Should it have been nominated? No. Would it have even made the shortlist without Scorsese’s influence? Also no.
Grade: B-
Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro has been dreaming of making an adaptation of Frankenstein for pretty much his entire career, and his efforts have certainly paid dividends, with the film garnering nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor for Jacob Elordi. It is often a wonderful thing when an amazing director gets to make a movie his way, largely on his own terms, and this case is no different. Is this one of the best films of the year for me? Perhaps not, but it is solidly entertaining and beautiful to look at.
There are some stylistic decisions to quibble with here and there. The set design is incredible, like pure distilled del Toro (with some deliciously grotesque animatronics), but then he opts for CGI exteriors that look awfully cheesy. The roles of Elizabeth Harlander (Mia Goth) and William Frankenstein (Felix Kammerer) are vastly expanded compared to Mary Shelley’s novel, which is fine, but the execution is kind of botched because it’s in the name of sexualizing the Creature (Elordi) and creating an odd “will they/won’t they” dynamic, like a gothic version of The Shape of Water. For whatever reason, the ship in the Arctic is a Danish expedition to quixotically cut through the northern ice, led by a captain played by Lars Mikkelsen (brother to Mads), instead of a scientific voyage led by the Brit Robert Walton, and somehow the Creature is strong enough to lift the tonnage of the entire vessel. There are some odd choices.
But for the most part, del Toro nails the heart of the story. A combination of reverence and resentment for his father and mother (Charles Dance and a veiled, semi-obscured Goth) are what drive Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) in his attempts to conquer death. He chews the scenery throughout (and again, it’s gorgeously off-putting scenery), but there is a discernable, logical passion to his pursuit. There’s genuine pathos in Victor’s patron, Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), creating an urgency in the project that leads to tragically cut corners. There’s an intriguing moral and ethical discussion around what Victor’s doing beyond the basic idea of death being a natural end (or worse, a right reserved for God alone). There’s a lot here that makes this movie engaging, rather than just being content on a streamer.
The most important, of course, is in capturing and emphasizing the humanity of the Creature. Jacob Elordi does a tremendous job showing the growth of the character, no better exemplified than in the sequence with the old blind man (David Bradley). There’s more tenderness and sophistication in their interactions than in a million beefcake shots that make Mia Goth want to remake the entire Ti West X porn/horror trilogy. This does make for some tonal whiplash from time to time, though. Del Toro goes to great lengths to reinforce the theme that the Creature is more empathetic than Victor, but then he turns on a dime to make the Creature a superhuman killing machine filled with an unquenchable rage and the strength of 1,000 men.
In the end, I think del Toro accomplished his goals, and he made a really solid movie. It’s got his signature style and offers some intriguing interpretations of the classic novel. I just wish he’d dispense with the “fuckable monsters” motif.
Grade: B+
***
That does it for this year’s look at the biggest streamer’s attempts to commandeer the Oscars and destroy the theatrical model. I’ve still got a bunch of films to clear off as we get into the Blitz at full force. It’s gonna be wild.
Join the conversation in the comments below! Have you seen these films? Do you agree with their nominations, or lack thereof? Am I the only one who wonders if Mia Goth got cast in a gothic horror film on name alone? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
I Actually Paid To See This 