Power Ballad has been out for a couple weeks now, but a month ago I had the opportunity to attend a pre-release screening where the director and stars did a Q&A. That was quite fun but it didn’t affect my opinion of the film itself. My review ended up a bit long because films that show glimmers of being good are interesting to work through and write about.

Also: this weekend sees the theatrical release of Karla Murthy’s documentary The Gas Station Attendant, in which the director retraces her relationship with her immigrant father. It’s a moving personal essay built upon a mix of home movies, recorded phone calls, and an impressive set of file footage. I covered it as part of DOC NYC last year; you can read my review here. The film plays at DCTV Firehouse Cinema in New York with Q&As throughout the week, with screenings in Houston, Austin, and San Francisco later this month.

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Power Ballad

Now playing in wide release.

Across four films over the past two decades, musician-turned-filmmaker John Carney has been telling the same story. Once, Begin Again, Sing Street, Flora and Son: all concern a working-class Dubliner (or Englishwoman, in one instance) who writes songs on their guitar and finds the collaborative act of making music to be a far greater reward than fame and fortune. Above all, these films advance an unyielding belief in the power of a song to change lives1. This may feel formulaic, but I’m not opposed when they consistently hit the right notes. In a way, Carney is the Haruki Murakami of music-driven indie dramas. His newest film, Power Ballad, is the first to falter.

This time around, the underdog musician is Rick Power (Paul Rudd), a middle-aged coulda-been who traded in a promising rock career for marriage and fatherhood. The American in Dublin now makes a living as a wedding singer, which is far from the worst way to be a working musician. (One of the film’s biggest pleasures is watching Rudd ham it up to reception staples like “Summer of ‘69,” though he does not slap da bass.) Occasionally his old ambitions resurface. After bombing another attempt at playing an original, his bandmate has to remind him: “We’re not the rockstars, Rick. We’re human jukeboxes.”

Into this semi-charmed life walks Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), a pop star haunted by his boy band past; he happens to be a guest at one of Rick’s gigs. After an impromptu Stevie Wonder duet, the two strike up a conversation and find they share a desire to make grounded, authentic music. An all-night jam session breaks out in Danny’s suite, the two playing their work to each other over a few beers and a considerable amount of whiskey. Danny takes a particular shine to a plaintive ode called “How to Write a Song Without You,” which Rick has spent years struggling to finish. The morning after, the two cheerily part ways.

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Six months later, Rick is at the mall when he hears a familiar melody over the speakers. It’s “How to Write a Song Without You,” but with a certain pop star’s voice. And it’s a smash hit. Danny may have gifted Rick a vintage Gibson the morning after their sing-cute, but he took something far more valuable.

As it rockets to the top of the Hot 100, Rick’s attempt at an amicable resolution is viciously rebuffed by Danny’s bulldog manager (Jack Reynor), with the pop singer claiming he came up with the song himself. Worse, Rick has no legal recourse, having never recorded a demo or written it down. Incensed, he sets off from Dublin to Los Angeles on a quest to get the credit (and royalties) that would change his life.

This is Carney’s most concept-driven premise yet, and for a while it works. It’s nice that Rick is at peace with having left his dreams behind, even if Rudd’s amiability doesn’t allow for a hint of resentment that could give his character an edge. And it’s a delightful bit of metatext to cast Jonas as a boy band kid who similarly struggled to transition to a mature R&B sound.

After Rick goes stateside, Power Ballad begins to fall apart, largely due to a screenplay that either needed more work or had a few rewrites too many. The LA stretch is far too compressed, with Rick and Danny’s inevitable reunion the result of a few too many leaps of logic. It doesn’t help that these scenes clearly weren’t shot in California. (Power Ballad was entirely filmed in Ireland; Dublin, it turns out, is a poor substitute for the City of Angels.) The stock footage used for exteriors is jarringly out of place. Carney’s never been a strong visual stylist, but there are some parts that look as if they were filmed on an iPhone, to say nothing of the computer-generated hot tub steam during a crucial scene.

The screenplay also struggles with Danny’s character arc. We see, early on, the moment that he starts the steal. His girlfriend Marcia (Havana Rose Liu) overhears him playing “How to Write a Song Without You” on his piano. She loves it; he says he wrote it for her. It’s her only scene in the film—a breakup is breezily announced during a montage—and her disappearance from the rest of the film appears to be the result of reshoots. Danny is steadfast that he didn’t steal his smash hit from Rick, but there are moments when the mask slips and you see him doubt his own version of events. Jonas plays this with an intriguing subtlety, but nothing much comes of it.

Is he a soulless villain or a co-lead who is misunderstood? Carney can’t decide and lands in a muddled middle. Imagine if, after they parted ways, Danny vanished from the movie. Rick still sees and hears him everywhere—on billboards, on his phone, on the radio—but the person remains forever out of reach. But this isn’t the story that Carney was trying to tell, so I won’t linger.

Carney’s films have never been musicals in the strictest sense—everything is performed diegetically—but the songs serve the same function, reflecting the emotional life of the character at that point in the story. This is the first time in Carney’s filmography that the original songs are largely ornamental. (This isn’t to say they are bad; the songs, written by Carney with frequent collaborator Gary Clark along with a contribution from Jonas, serve their purpose.)

The only song in Power Ballad that has any real bearing to the plot is “How to Write a Song Without You,” but the film is incurious about its effect on Danny’s musicianship. One imagines that its success pressures him to write more songs in this same vein. As he sings in the bridge, “this could be my albatross.” How to write a song without Rick? This dilemma isn’t so much glossed over as it is ignored. The power ballad is merely a MacGuffin.

More so than any of Carney’s prior films, Power Ballad feels like a cover version. His 2013 film Begin Again is also centered on a singer-songwriter who moves across the pond (in this case Keira Knightley comes to New York) whose brilliant song is stolen by a real-life pop star (Adam Levine, nicely cast as a douchebag) who blows it up to a wider audience than intended. Begin Again retains the kitchen-sink realism of Carney’s best work thanks to shooting in the streets of Manhattan, but it’s generally considered the weakest of his filmography. Thanks to Power Ballad, it’s now the second weakest, and these are the only two movies of his to be at least partially set in America2. Sometimes it’s better to stay home.

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The Festival de Cannes wrapped up a week ago but I’m still grieving. It’ll be at least three months before I get to see their buzziest titles. (Catch you at the New York Film Festival!)

In the meantime, I asked six people who actually went—filmmakers, critics, and dedicated cinephiles—to share their thoughts about the films they watched and the food they ate. There was also a Wildcard space for random observations. Here’s what they had to report.

Survey responses are organized alphabetically by first name. Big thanks to everyone who contributed!

Dan Schindel, Freelance Critic

Check out Dan’s Substack, It’s Been Said, where he writes about arts & culture!

Best Movie: All of a Sudden [directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi] in a walk. No one else can craft extended conversations and speeches that make me feel so much like Martin Prince playing the “My Dinner with Andre” arcade game, entranced and slamming the joystick toward “Tell Me More.”

Worst Movie: Avedon, Ron Howard’s biographical doc about the titanic photographer. Whenever Avedon gets to say anything for himself in the archival portions, you see agonizing glimpses of the much better movie that could have been.

Best Meal: Gaeng Phed Ped Yang at Tuk Tuk Thai - roasted duck in red curry with coconut milk, lychees, and pineapple. Exquisite spiciness and flavor mix.

Worst Meal: I judge the quality of any breakfast spot by its eggs benedict, so a place literally called So Benedict sets a high bar—a bar that it smacked its head on, knocking itself out. Watery eggs, bland Hollandaise sauce, and overwhelmed by the spinach on the bun.

Fun fact: The French restaurants in Cannes fucking suck.

Wildcard: Al Charq is a fantastic spot for Lebanese takeaway. You get a ton of food on a tray; since the place is usually so busy during the festival, I recommend taking it to enjoy on a bench in the lovely little Fontaine Leduc park.

Lauren Brodauf, Content Creator & Host of Post Credits Café

Best Movie: A Girl Unknown, directed by Zou Jing.

Synopsis: “A Chinese girl is passed between three families from the age of 6 to 18, receiving each time a new name and identity. As she searches for belonging and the possibility of love, she has to navigate between the weight of her past and the uncertainty of her future, until she finds her own way.”

Heartbreaking, beautiful both visually and story wise. Just loved it.

This is why I go to film festivals. Not a single person I know saw this but I scored a ticket last minute and figured I might as well check it out. This film will be one of my top five of the year, I can confidently say. With these small titles, god knows if they’ll ever be picked up by a studio for distribution, and if they are, it’ll be a while until it gets a release date. By attending film festivals, you can watch these works of passion from these lesser known filmmakers before anyone else.

Worst Movie: I saw seven films and none of them were bad at all! I’d say my least favorite was Fatherland, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. I’ve never been a fan of wartime period pieces. Sandra Hüller an ICON though.

Best Meal: Not a meal, but a dessert from a restaurant called Rosana. I have gone here for their berry cheesecake slice each of my four years attending the festival. Yum.

Worst Meal: I do not even know the name of the restaurant, it was just one of those insanely overpriced spots by the Croisette. I had a burrata and peach salad with a balsamic dressing and never in my life have I been served a burrata that is so dry it gave me cottonmouth. (And I have had, in all seriousness, approximately 40 different burratas in my travels thus far in my life.)

Wildcard: Meeting my podcast parents, Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins of The Big Picture Podcast. We talked movies for fifteen mins and it was pure bliss. Also, attending the festival for the first time as a member of PRESS!! For my own interview show!!(??) So blessed, truly. (They also had free Nespresso for us..say less.)

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Mark Asch, Freelance Critic

Best Movie: The Dreamed Adventure [directed by Valeska Grisebach]

Worst Movie: Sheep in the Box [directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda]

Best Meal: Pissaladière is a regional specialty consisting of flatbread coated in caramelized onions and topped with black olives and anchovies. I celebrate the end of the festival by enjoying one from one of the bakeries by the train station; if it wasn’t for the possibility that I might sit next to a respected colleague at a press screening, I’d eat it every day.

Worst Meal: If I’m writing between the 6 PM and 10 PM premieres, dinner is a baguette in the AirBnB that I certainly hope is less than 24 hours old.

Mimi, Mechanical Engineering Student from Munich

Best Movie: Coward [directed by Lukas Dhont]. The emotions!!

Worst Movie: The Unknown [directed by Arthur Harari]. I fell asleep.

Best Meal: After the Closing Ceremony, I got a Mojito ice cream from the shop next to the infamous Irish pub where everyone hangs after the festival!!

Honorable mention: The insane amount of plain baguettes I had everyday. And I managed to get Red Bull into the Lumière three times to counter my sleep deprivation!! And of course the countless free Nespresso cups in the Palais. (As you can tell, not much food but lots of caffeine.)

Best meal I saw on the screen: Chicken cordon bleu on the plane rides in John Travolta’s Propeller One-Way Night Coach.

I sat a few rows in front of Travolta during the premiere of his directing debut!! Prince Albert of Monaco was sitting right next to him and somehow he was the least important person in that theater. Nobody gave him any attention lol

Worst Meal: To cut costs we just cooked noodles with pesto everyday. So probably all the pasta and pesto 😭Also a Madeleine I snuck into the closing ceremony that almost got sniffed out by security…

Worst on-screen meal: The burgers in the opening scene of Sanguine 🤢

Wildcard: A friend of mine and I were invited to a film festival in Nevada by a very rich looking couple while waiting in line outside the Lumière. They even invited us to brunch at Dolce and Gabbana?? We sadly couldn’t attend but I still think they believed us to be way more important people than we actually are. (We were attending as members of our student cinema club.)

There’s also been a big scandal with Canal+ [a major French studio owned by a right-wing billionaire, which has threatened to blacklist 600 industry figures who signed an open letter critical of his political activities.] In almost any screening—though especially at the midnight ones—people were cheering on every studio logo. But when Canal+ appeared they were all booing while the cast and crew was present, there were also some “fascist!” screams and other French phrases that I didn’t get.

But best of all is always meeting old and new friends in Cannes :))

Other highlights: Being interviewed by Letterboxd and taking this big ass sign all the way home via Flixbus.

On attending the Closing Ceremony: I got a ticket just the day of and I didn’t really know what to expect.

There seemed to be way more security than at the usual screenings, and inside they provided water (fancy) in unbranded paper cups (not so fancy). You could also pick up an electronic translation device, which I conveniently lost in the first five minutes under the seat in front of me.

A girl in front of me bet €20 on Moulin winning the Palme d’Or, which had no prospects. She then bet more money on Minotaur which was doing numbers on Polymarket 😭😂 I still don’t know her thought process. [The Palme d’Or went to Fjord, while Minotaur attained the second place Grand Prix.]

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Nicolas Mouren, Screenwriter at Stories We Tell

Best Movie: El Ser Querido by Rodrigo Sorogoyen.

There are many runner ups such as Coward by Lukas Dhont, Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun, and All of a Sudden by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

Worst Movie: Sanguine by Marion Le Corroller. Very kitsch, not my style.

Best Meal: Ciro’s on the Plage du Majestic

Worst Meal: Pitaya (5 rue du 24 aout)

Wildcard: Jim Queen by Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athané. Midnight Screening, the reaction from the audience was electric. It felt like a concert!

Sydney, Brand Strategist

I had no accreditation, so I just went with a hope and a dream and I was able to watch movies via two programs open to the public: the Cinéma de la Plage [free outdoor screenings on the beach] and the Quinzaine des Cinéastes [Director’s Fortnight].

Best Movie: Death Has No Master [directed by Jorge Thielen Armand]

Worst Movie: I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning [directed by Clio Barnard]. A hot take according to Letterboxd reviews. [This also won the Quinzaine des Cinéastes audience award.]

Best Meal: Steak at L’Atrium!

Wildcard: The raw yearning and desperation on display from the well-dressed people standing outside of the Palais des Festivals, holding signs and asking those who passed by for just one ticket to that night’s biggest screening. There is a lot of beauty and sincerity in that. (I saw the most signs for Hope and Fjord.)

At the festival, films are fighting to be seen, [while at the adjacent Marché du Film] they are fighting to be made—it was a treat to witness! I initially felt a bit silly traveling to the festival without an accreditation, but seeing that display made me feel like I was in the right place 🙂

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In case you missed it, last year my buddy Byron attended the festival through the Three Days in Cannes accreditation, available to any movie fan between the ages of 18-28. Check out his dispatch:

The weather here in New York has been so weird. With multiple rounds of fake springs/second winters, I kept holding off on exchanging the winter coats in my closet for shorts and tees. With temps breaching the 90s this week, it would seem a safe time to make the transition… except it’s been so rainy and cold this weekend. My closet remains in suspended animation.

I’ve also been dealing with Cannes FOMO, as I’m sure many cinephiles have been. If you or someone you know attended this year, I’m conducting an informal survey of the best/worst movie and meal you experienced at the festival. A very quick five questions, get in touch if you’re interested in submitting something when Cannes is over:

I’ve already got some great responses, including this choice quote: “The French restaurants in Cannes fucking suck.”

As usual this column got absurdly long even though I moved all the California stuff to another post, but if you’ll believe me this excludes about a half of what I actually did.

In this edition:

• Five notable dinners in New York

• My favorite songs of the Spring season

• Notes on The Drama and wedding food

• Cool exhibitions in Chelsea

• It happened to me: I won the Shakespeare in the Park digital lottery

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Food Parties I Hosted in April

• Mỹ Documents Paperback Release at Orion Bar

  • My cousin Kevin’s novel got a paperback and he threw a party to celebrate the occasion. The whole family got involved: Amanda designed the flyer. Brian photographed the event. Eric came up with a food menu that featured “the absolute best fried catfish sandwiches,” which I hope we can bring out again. Olivia and I were line cooks. It was my first time on the fryer since my high school stint at Wendy’s; I think I acquitted myself well.

• Mesa Ăn Tối at home

  • The third installment of my Viet-Latin collaboration with John Carlo. (Formerly titled The American in Me… the new title is the Spanish word for “table” mashed with the Viet phrase for “dinner.”) Best menu yet!!! But the night itself was a blur. I wish I had better photos!

    • Pan de Bono (with rhubarb & guava compote) + Banh Mi Crostini

    • Shrimp Butter Arepa (with nem nuong and pickled cilantro stem)

    • Thịt Kho Tàu (Coconut-Braised Pork Belly and Eggs) with Papas Criollos

    • English Pea & Asparagus Ceviche (with bánh tráng and lemon verbena broth)

    • Cumin Crusted Pork Chop (with gai choy)

    • Fruit plate: Mandarins, black plum, guava

    • Sweet corn pastry in banana leaf tamale

Dining Out

A Restaurant Week (and Change) in New York

I went out to eat five times in the past week and a half which is really quite rare for me.

Superiority Burger w/ fellow Guts Magazine enthusiasts

I had been a couple times for dessert but never for dinner. My experienced companions steered me away from the burger (which is by all accounts mediocre—what’s the deal with that? If your restaurant is called Superiority Burger, the burger should be superior).

I really enjoyed the Yuba-Verde sandwich (tofu skins, chickpeas, broccoli rabe, mayo) as well as the house salad. But the sweets remain the star: that pearl pie is a thing of beauty.

Le Chêne w/ Frankie

Very expensive and the space is a bit too crammed to fully feel luxurious, but all hangups went out the window when I took my first bite of the showstopping pithivier. You may have heard about it. I’m a believer that if you’re gonna go to a French restaurant, you might as well ball out because the wallet-friendly places tend to be pretty bad and/or uninspiring.

Txikito w/ Nicole

Everything I ate was good (I love Basque cuisine) but the arroz meloso (with uni, wild shrimp, and enoki) is the one dish I’ll remember for some time. Txikito and Shukette singlehandedly make Chelsea a good dining destination.

Kabawa w/ myself

Once I saw that the New York Times officially deemed it the #1 restaurant in the entire city, I knew I had to get a reservation ASAP otherwise I’d never be able to go. My only regret about dining solo was that I didn’t get to try more dishes.

The format is prix fixe and you pick three dishes. I went with pepper shrimp, goat shoulder confit, and bolo di cashupete. Wholeheartedly recommend them all! The bread course is a buss up shot (Trinidadian roti) with an assortment of chutneys; the palate cleanser was a tamarind pod.

Usually “elevating” an ethnic cuisine means evaporating the big flavors and fiery spiciness that made it notable in the first place. Fortunately, nothing here strays too far from the more casual Caribbean fare that I’ve had before. The difference at Kabawa is that everything is extremely dialed in. The better descriptor is that this is calibrated.

Café Mars (Special itameshi menu) w/ Wilbur, Amy, Jade

I was influenced to come here by Hannah Berman’s newsletter. Very glad I took up the recommendation!

The quirked up Italian restaurant switched over to an all-itameshi menu this month (Italian/Japanese fusion). I haven’t dined at Bad Roman but it’s what I imagine it to be except the food is actually good and instead of twentysomething TikTokkers there are thirtysomething Tweeters/Skeeters.

The impression I got from Hannah’s piece, plus another friend who dined here last week, was that the menu can be hit or miss and that was borne out. While nothing I ordered was outright bad, a few things were just fine. But everything was interesting and it’s thrilling to encounter such risk taking in an unpretentious setting.

The overall experience is just so fun! You get a welcome pour of shiso kombucha! Martinis are served as jello shots! When you order the Tofu Time, things happen! The check comes in a greeting card! I recommend Café Mars for this alone. I’ll need to check out the usual menu soon.

There’s only a week left but my standouts were the ankimo mousse (with strawberries????) and kasuzuke asparagus (with a tofu made from pine nut milk????). We also really dug the pastas: a triple yuzu girelle and waves mentaiko with snap peas. These types of buttered noodles threaten to overwhelm but there was plenty of acid and sansho pepper to balance it out.

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Dining In

I didn’t host any big dinners at home, and travel disrupted my usual routine, but here are a few good things I cooked:

• This Chile Lime Roast Chicken recipe is now part of my rotation.

• I missed out on most of ramp season because I was in California (woe is me!) but I managed to make my favorite springtime frittata that combined the allium with asparagus and nettles.

• Ricotta! Pasta! alla! Vodka!

Music

I want to organize a Couchella party where each room is a different “stage” but I don’t know anyone who lives in an apartment large enough to support this. With enough distance from the initial discourse I think we can all agree that Justin Bieber’s headlining set was a nifty piece of performance art that mines digital native nostalgia and the parasocial relationship his fans have with him. It felt personal, or at least as personal as singing in front of 100,000 people could ever be.

Songs of the Spring

Lots of great new releases this spring! Here are twenty new songs that were frequently in rotation. As usual it’s a diverse mix including emo revival, Arab-Asian funk, and bookended by two Olivia Rodrigo songs.

Selected Notes:

• “Home” – Charlie Puth (feat. Hikaru Utada)

  • I greatly enjoyed this conversation between Fran Hoepfner and Larry Fitzmaurice about Puth’s new album, which takes the keyboard crooner’s music far more seriously than most. (Poptimism is alive and well on Substack!) It’s not about “why isn’t Puth a bigger artist [but] should Puth be a bigger artist.”

  • Also if you mostly know Utada as the “Simple and Clean” singer… listen to BAD MODE because you are in for a treat.

• “All of My Friends” – Jack Harlow

  • I know someone who is really into Harlow’s R&B era. Similar to Bieber’s SWAG in adopting a slow jam sound recorded in the world’s most expensive bedroom, but with fewer great songs. “All of My Friends” is a bop though.

• “Bandar Batavia” – Ali and Charif Megarbane

  • This comes from my favorite album of the season. Tirakat is a collaboration between an Indonesian funk trio and a Lebanese multi-instrumentalist, put out by the aptly named label Habibi Funk.

• “Berlin” – Quiet Light

  • My favorite new-to-me artist in a long time. It’s not too baseless to speculate that she is now repped by the same PR firm that launched Geese, because she snagged plum press hits to promote new album Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2. (Pitchfork review, Perfectly Imperfect, NTS guest show, Pigeons and Planes…) I have no insider info.

  • But I don’t really care because the music is great: Eurocoded electropop that taps into her Texan upbringing. And she’s been paying her dues over the past few years. She’s described by her new label True Panther as “a classically trained prom queen turned medical school student who draws as much inspiration from Shania Twain & Imogen Heap as Angelo Badalamenti & Harold Budd,” which is a hook almost as irresistible as the one in standout track “Berlin.”

  • You, you used to be obsessed with me and now you don’t know / You call me from Berlin on your sister’s phone

  • Thanks to the DICE waitlist, I snagged a ticket to her show at Public Records a few hours before it started. (Great venue btw, terrific soundsystem in that concert room.) After getting through a technical hiccup, she launched into a set that spanned her so-far brief discography, singing to tracks cued from her laptop. Though her production is the main draw, her live vocals were quite strong, as evidenced by a cover of “Brooklyn Baby” that closed out the show.

Movies

In April:

• The first movie I saw at home: New Directors/New Films Shorts

• The first movie I saw in a theater: The Drama at AMC Empire

• The last movie I saw at home: Clue (1985)

• The last movie I saw in a theater: The Slow Business of Going (2000) at 2220 Arts + Archives (Hosted by Acropolis Cinema. Q&A w/ filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari moderated by Julie Delpy)

In May:

• The first movie I saw at home: Spaceballs (1987)

• The first movie I saw in a theater: Shanghai Express (1932) at Los Feliz 3 / American Cinematheque — happy AAPI Heritage Month!

• The last movie I saw at home: The Bride! It sucked!

• The last movie I saw in a theater: I Love Boosters at AMC Lincoln Square. What a hoot! There is an unforgettable eating scene that doesn’t involve food…

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Food & Film Pairing of the Month: The Drama & Wedding Food

Less of a drama than it is a contemporary comedy of manners, The Drama skewers liberal societal norms through Kristoffer Borgli’s Nordic eye. Bang-up marketing job by A24 to enshroud “the terrible secret that will ruin Robert Pattinson and Zendaya’s engagement” in mystery so that audiences would flock to the cinema to find out what the fuss was all about. It’s funny because knowing the specific premise beforehand really doesn’t matter because it’s not about what Zendaya did (or as it turns out, almost did but actually didn’t). It’s about how the people in her life respond to this revelation.

The inciting drama of The Drama occurs while the couple-to-be are at their wedding venue to taste test the dinner menu. They’re accompanied by the best man and maid of honor (who are also a couple… which is quite rare, at least from what I’ve experienced). The wedding planner is free-flowing with the orange wine while the foursome sample mushroom risotto… it’s in that environment where the trouble starts.

It is almost a truism that the food at American weddings will be serviceable at best. To be fair, it’s really difficult to serve individually plated meals to hundreds of guests while accommodating both dietary restrictions and restrictive palates. (No coincidence that all of the best wedding food I’ve had was non-European cuisine served buffet style.) But perhaps it is for the best that the dinner doesn’t outshine the couple. Always more memorable is the post-nuptial nosh: Cup Noodles offered outside the dancefloor, a late night trip to In-n-Out.

I don’t recall there being any insert shots that really show off the food being served, at both the menu tasting and the reception itself. But based on the limited information given and fleeting glances at what was on the table, it struck me as typical American wedding fare: seemingly refined but ultimately boring—much like the characters at the center of this Drama. And yet—milquetoast the meal may have been, that unhinged toast given by Alana Haim was anything but.

Some Gallery Exhibitions in Chelsea

It’s been a long time since I went to a bunch of gallery openings, which is always a great way to spend an evening without spending any money. These were the shows I dug the most, roughly sorted in an uptown direction:

• Lisa Yuskavage – Through June 26 – David Zwirner 19th Street

  • Seems to be the show of the season. I like that you can see sketches and iterations alongside the finished works.

• Gerhard Richter – Landschaften – Through July 10 – David Zwirner 20th Street

  • Richter’s gauzy landscape paintings feel like gazing back at a blurry memory. As sequenced in this exhibition, they give way to progressively glitchier abstract expressionism, the memories corrupting into a cacophony of noise and color.

• Doowon Lee – Doowon Arrives in New York with Too Many Animals – Through June 20 – ACA Galleries

  • As the whimsical title suggests, this show is an absolute delight. Mixed media (mostly paint) on wool canvases depicting frogs and tigers and fish and much more.

• Macarena Rojas Osterling – In The Whitewater – Through July 10 – Praxis

  • Meticulous linework interrupted by intrusive thoughts.

• Hyegyeong Choi – Tethered, Untethered – Through June 20 – Harper’s Chelsea 512

  • Judging from my Instagram stories, this is a very popular show.

• Firelei Báez – feet squelching on wet grass, nourished by uncertainty – Through July 31 – Hauser & Wirth 22nd Street

  • Annihilation (the movie version) plus colonial critique.

• Hélio Luís – Before the Light Fades – Through June 27 – Kutlesa

  • The night is purple.

• Kawayan de Guia – Excavations from the land of not so plenty – Through June 27 – Silverlens

  • Mixed media painting and sculpture from this Filipino artist contends with his country’s legacy as an outpost of the American empire with a cheeky sense of humor.

Theater

It’s Tony season! I haven’t seen enough of the contenders so I have no Tonys Takes besides rooting for Jellicle Ball to sweep. Shows I really liked are bolded.

• Thursday April 9 Cats: The Jellicle Ball w/ Kenji

  • Saw the initial Off-Broadway run a couple years ago and I’m glad that it’s now on Broadway, where it will hopefully live a long Jellicle life.

• Sunday May 3 Moby Dick w/ Elle

  • Got what I came for: avant-garde rock opera equally indebted to German Expressionism as it is to Herman Melville. I didn’t not dig it. Chasing transcendence in art is its own white whale.

• Tuesday May 12 Fallen Angels

  • Excellent physical comedy from Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara. Delightfully hammy at times but you can smell the dust on this century-old Noël Coward farce.

• Saturday May 16 Hamlet (National Theatre at BAM) w/ Ben

  • Really makes the case that Shakespeare should be heard, not read. Kind of weird towards the end with Jessie Buckley rushed to the front of the stage and reached out with her hand and the rest of the audience joined her.

  • All jokes aside, I really dug Hiran Abeysekera’s cheeky approach to the Prince of Denmark.

• Friday May 22 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare in the Park) w/ Brian

  • Two Shakespeares, both alike in modern costuming…

  • I won the Shakespeare in the Park digital lottery! For the first performance! I didn’t know this was possible!

  • Director Saheem Ali firmly sets his Romeo & Juliet in the here and now. Specifically at a border town of Nueva Verona, with two statues of the Virgin Mary imprisoned on the other side. (The set design, by Maruti Evans, does a lot of work to cement this contemporary setting.) Consequently, the Montagues and Capulets are warring Hispanic families, one aligned with empire, the other protesting it. Across this divide the classic tragedy plays out in both English and Spanish.

  • Given that it is in previews, I’ll withhold my criticisms until I get to read reviews and see how much (if any) has changed. For now, my off the cuff thoughts:

  • Francis Jue, as the Friar, is the MVP of this talented cast

  • There’s one specific line said in Spanish that is actually more legible than Shakespearean English—even if no habla español.

  • Specifically, it’s “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” the most misunderstood line in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. It’s easy for laymen like myself to think Juliet is asking “where are ya, Romeo?” but “wherefore” means “why” or “for what reason.”

  • So when this production’s Juliet instead asks “¿Por qué eres Romeo?” the meaning is crystal clear to the contemporary audience. Even if you don’t know Spanish, you know “por qué.”

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Good Things I Read

• How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really? by Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

• How to Measure the Good Life by Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker

  • A pair of book reviews I enjoyed, the first for its prose, the second for its withering takedown of Arthur C. Brooks’s reinvention from conservative pundit to self-help guru.

• Was F.W. Murnau A Giant? An Investigation. by Marya E. Gates

• Memorial Park: An interview with writer and curator Minh Nguyen by Terry Nguyen

  • Minh Nguyen curated last year’s series of Vietnamese cinema that ran at Metrograph, which I sadly missed completely, but reading this interview influenced me to buy her book.

• “Rate Your Happiness” (Fiction) by Catherine Lacey, The New Yorker

  • Very fun to have read this short story while in San Francisco: “Someone was always pitching their startup to someone else, and people were always on a jog, but almost no one was ever walking to a particular destination, and those not jogging were isolated in their hermetically sealed S.U.V.s, forever trying to park. …while all the men appeared ergonomically outfitted to climb a cliff face but were instead commuting to their office jobs.”

• Tony Leung’s Smoldering Cool: The Hong Kong–born icon on drinking with Wong Kar-wai and what he wanted to change about Marvel’s Shang-Chi by Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

  • There have been a lot of Tony Leung interviews from his Silent Friend press tour. I read a handful of them and this was the most wide-ranging and insightful.

• I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America by Caity Weaver, The Atlantic

  • Another Caity Weaver banger!!! Her writing is just such a treat. Do not skim this!

April Grog Log

Keeping track of the day’s first alcoholic drink.

Plus two Wine Time gatherings: Best Supporting Grape (hosted by Byron) and Park Wine (on a sunny but not humid day in Fort Greene Park!)

1. Barbichette Nuit Blanche 2023 at home

2. To Øl Snuble Juice at home

3. Tonello Marachelle Frizzante 2024 at Byron’s (Wine Time)

4. “La Danza del Fauno”, Rosso Toscano, Podere Gualandi 2022 at Dan’s

5. Maine Beer Company Spring Kölsch at Eric and Diana’s

6. Nothing

7. Soju and Terra at Orion Bar

8. Indeterminate white wine at MoMA (ND/NF Opening Night Party)

9. R&Daiquiri at Oddball

10. Nothing

11. Titos at Liane’s

12. Viet 75 at home

13. Cedric Garreau Garo’Vin Lunatic 2022 at home

14. Nothing

15. Collective Arts Life in the Clouds Hazy IPA at an airport bar in LGA

16. North Coast Scrimshaw at Airbnb (Citrus Heights)

17. Heineken at dad’s house (San Jose)

18. Regale Chardonnay 2022 at Regale Winery (Los Gatos, Pauline’s wedding)

19. Gin & elderflower cocktail at Wendy’s (SF)

20. Brooklyn Kura Kita Shizuku at Dorothy and Lester’s (SF)

21. Green Curry martini at Tallboy (Oakland)

22. Fieldwork Blackberry Parfait at Fieldwork Mission Bay (SF)

23. Nothing

24. Precision Circumference Chardonnay 2024 at Terra Mia (Paso Robles, Sangeet)

25. Woodford Reserve at Terra Mia (Paso Robles, Groom’s cabin)

26. Flor de Luna at Neat (Los Angeles)

27. Tej at Messob (Los Angeles)

28. Alain Girard & Fils Domaine des Brosses Sancerre 2023 at Sravya and Akshay’s (Los Angeles)

29. Brewyard Citra Bang IPA at Park’s Finest BBQ (Los Angeles)

30. Nothing

A KitKat pic as a thanks for making it to the end

April was a whirlwind and a reset. I was in California for nearly three weeks, going from Sacramento to the Bay to Paso Robles then finally down to LA. The reason for the trip was two weddings on back-to-back weekends. (Yes I’m in my early thirties, why do you ask?)

One of them was an Indian wedding and with all respect to the other couple whose marriage I celebrated, I never want to attend a non-Indian wedding ever again. Everyone looked so good in their saris and kurtas, the DJ mixed Bollywood bangers with the usual classics, and the food is legitimately terrific. As a groomsman I helped lead the baraat which was awesome. Less awesome was having to learn a choreographed dance with the guys. (We were told that it would just be 40 seconds. When we were sent the video to practice from, Dmitri immediately responded “I didn’t know 40 seconds could be so long.” I think we did pretty well but I haven’t seen any video of our dance and I never want to.)

I was pretty busy that whole time I was in California but it still felt like a respite from life in New York, because I’ve barely spent a night in since getting back. And on Sunday I head out of town again to visit Slovenia and Barcelona. I’m already tired!

There’s a whole other post in the chamber about what I’ve been up to here in New York, but for now here’s a partial roundup of what I did back in my home state: the food I ate, the meals I cooked, the drinks I drank, and even the movies I watched in LA.

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Dining Highlights

Besides the usual—In-N-Out after the flight, a California burrito, Viet food, and a sandwich with Dutch Crunch bread—and some lovely home-cooked meals from my parents, these were the best things I ate.

Post-wedding In-N-Out (San Jose)

We thought we’d stand out in our suits and dresses but the place was full of post-prom revelers. It was really cute to see the kids hanging out!

Mazra (San Bruno)

Never trust a Middle Eastern restaurant that says their kebab platter feeds 4-5 people. It feeds way more.

Tall Boy (Oakland)

A cocktail bar that takes its craft seriously but has a casual attitude. Basically a West Coast Bar Snack. On your way to Curbside Creamery for a post-drink ice cream you’ll pass by that ugly Alysa Liu mural.

Rintaro (San Francisco)

A damn good izakaya. There was a squid dish that came with… apples? And it was a weirdly good pairing? Great sake program too.

Ariscault Bakery (San Francisco)

Nothing better than a morning pain au choc with a view of the Bay.

South Indian wedding catering from 8Elements (Paso Robles)

This was my first time attending an Indian wedding and holy shit the food was legitimately great. Better yet, they supplied all four meals that weekend. The sangeet had a dosa station!

My inner kitchen nerd was piqued by the catering setup. With the caterers traveling three hours from San Jose and no access to a kitchen on-site, everything was prepped in a commissary in a nearby town, with anything that had to be fired à la minute cooked in the vendor’s parking lot. The dish pit was set up there too, with a plastic sink hooked up to a hose. (This was nuts!)

Rancho Nipomo BBQ (Nipomo)

Santa Maria tri-tip!!

The Park’s Finest (Los Angeles)

Filipino BBQ on the edge of Lincoln Park. The Wednesday “worker’s special” is the move as you get a sample platter of nearly the entire menu.

A bunch of fruit from the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market

I stuffed all the empty space in my suitcase with FRUIT! Strawberries, a pomelo, calamansi, ice cream beans, mulberries, the best cherries I’ve ever had in my life. I only regret not bringing back even more.

Literally every taco (Los Angeles)

It had been ten years since last setting foot in LA, and my first time without family. I pretty much ate tacos every single day because the scene here is so special. Before going to the airport for my red eye flight home, I had six tacos and zero regrets.

• Taco Chidos (Venice) in a Whole Foods parking lot. Best al pastor I’ve had in my life??

• Baja California Tacos (Palms) for the fish tacos.

• El Ruso #1 (Echo Park) in an Albertson’s parking lot. Sonoran-style with flour tortilla. The salsa is incredibly spicy.

• Tacos La Güera (Northeast) on the side of the road. Second best al pastor I’ve had in my life. The suadero wasn’t bad either.

• Tacos La 26 (Downtown) which has a whole parking lot to itself. This was to me the quintessential LA taco. You sit on the back of your car and eat them. Not the greatest in the world but incredibly cheap. I got the al pastor, suadero, buche, and a classic asada.

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Related Reading: In the back of my mind I was doing a lot of comparisons between NY and LA dining, so it was fortuitous that this landed in my inbox during my trip:

Rare Medium

The Trends Defining New York and LA Dining Right Now

People love to compare New York and Los Angeles dining scenes. It’s a bit overdone, often redundant (everyone knows Mexican food is better on the west coast), and usually misses the point. But, it’s also kind of fun because there are always small aspects that are ever-changing…

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2 months ago · 35 likes · Juliette Sibley and Scout Ziegler

Cooking in My Friend’s Kitchens

I was crashing on friend’s couches while I was in California, and in an effort to repay the favor while saving money/calories from eating out so much, there were a few days that I made lunch. It was a fun challenge, working in an unfamiliar (and sometimes unequipped) kitchen, and figuring out what I could make.

All these recipes were winners in my book.

• Chicken Pho Noodle Salad (Phở Gà Trộn)

  • Pho takes a long time to make but this slop bowl variant lets you take a few shortcuts to make this something you can knock out in an hour. Store-bought chicken stock is fortified with the usual spices and extra chicken.

  • Instead of using boneless chicken parts (ew) I doubled the recipe and used a whole chicken—including the head/neck/feet—which considerably boosted the collagen.

• Skillet Gnocchi With Miso Butter and Asparagus

  • The rare ten-minute recipe that actually does take ten minutes (if you make the miso butter first, which is easily prepped in advance).

• Miso-Chile Asparagus With Tofu

• Spinach Ricotta Lasagna

  • Akshay and Sravya let me use their apartment to host a dinner gathering… on a Tuesday night. In LA. Apparently this is simply not a thing that people do in LA, but I got six people to come and it was a lovely time!

Plus: as a groomsman I was tasked with helping to prepare one of the wedding cocktails. So the night before the American ceremony I was in the groom’s cottage roasting a bunch of Anaheim chiles, jalapeños, and serranos to infuse in tequila, to be used in a spicy margarita. It got rave reviews!

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The Hollywood Rep Scene

I don’t usually watch movies when I’m on a trip, but I made it a priority to check out some theaters in Hollywood. My overall impression, scanning through the repertory listings, is that the focus tends to be more on “the classics” and less so on esoterica. And geographically the theaters are much more sprawled out but that’s just LA for ya. I don’t think you can really string together multiple rep houses in one day unless you’re really devoted. Meanwhile in Manhattan, you can easily walk from the IFC to Film Forum to Anthology.

• The Academy Museum is absolutely worth a visit (I didn’t expect to get so emotional when seeing the Oscar that Billy Wilder won for directing The Apartment) and they were in the middle of an Akira Kurosawa retrospective (I saw a print of Dodes’ka-den).

• The nonprofit/itinerant group Acropolis Cinema put on a retrospective for Greek weird wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari. I saw her debut feature The Slow Business of Going at 2220 Arts + Archives, which included a Q&A between the filmmaker and Julie Delpy (!!!).

• Over at Los Feliz 3, there was a “Film by the Foot” showing from American Cinematheque. The ticket price of the 35mm screening was determined by the literal length of the film. The Friday matinee was Shanghai Express. It need not be said that the yellowface is a relic of its time; I thought the selection was an ironic way to ring in AAPI Heritage Month.

• Alas, I didn’t have time to go to the AMCs in Burbank and The Grove.

If you live in LA, check out Wine Cellar Cinema, a new microcinema inside a wine shop. They launch on June 19 with a package of short films!

Wine Cellar Cinema

The Cellar is Almost Open...

If you have recieved this as an email, it’s because you’ve been added from the VINTERTAINMENT Substack, seeing as this is very much an extention of our Wine and Movie endeavors…

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a month ago · 15 likes · 6 comments · Dave Baxter and Dallas

Other Notable LA Things

• Navigating a labyrinthian apartment complex that reminded me of Backrooms

• A quick sauna/cold plunge sesh in Venice

• Looking at art for free (The Broad, ICA, Hauser & Wirth)

• A Friday evening at the Natural History Museum (I learned that rocks are really cool, thanks to an enthusiastic and knowledgable docent) followed by KBBQ and karaoke.

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Photos of the dogs whose couches I crashed on

The legendary Tony Leung has a new movie out, and to celebrate the occasion, Film at Lincoln Center put together a retrospective of his best-known work. It’s a running joke that showing In the Mood for Love is essentially a stimulus package for independent cinemas, but nearly every screening—from much-loved Chungking Express to the more obscure Cyclo—was sold out.

I was out of town during the bulk of the series, but I came back in time to see a print of Lust, Caution, which I had watched before but not in a theater. The rewatch confirmed to me that it is one of Ang Lee’s masterpieces, right next to Crouching Tiger and The Ice Storm, and Leung’s trademark vulnerability brought complexity to his first role as an outright villain.

I also attended the “Evening with Tony Leung” special event, which promised an in-depth conversation with the actor about his storied career. This being his first visit to New York in twelve years, this was the hottest ticket in town. You may have heard that not every attendee was satisfied, especially if you are subscribed to /r/NYCmovies. I’ll just say two things:

1. Conducting an interview in front of an audience is a unique skillset that not everyone working in the film space can master1

2. The plague that is stage door culture has spread beyond Broadway

Leung was there to promote his new film, which I had the opportunity to screen in advance of its stateside release. My thoughts are immediately below, followed by a spotlight on the traditional German dishes featured in the movie.

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Silent Friend

Now playing in NY at Film at Lincoln Center and the Angelika, with expansion to other markets beginning May 15.

When Silent Friend was unveiled as part of last year’s Venice Film Festival, many cinephiles were excited by the cast list: Tony Leung and Léa Seydoux, two titans of international arthouse cinema, were starring in a project together. I was certainly intrigued, but reports out of the festival revealed that their characters communicated only through video calls, stretching the definition of “sharing a scene.” Knowing this beforehand spared me some disappointment, but I was surprised to find that the real star of this picture wasn’t a human actor, let alone Seydoux or Leung. As it turns out, the titular silent friend is a ginkgo tree.

Our breakout star was planted nearly 300 years ago, on the grounds of a university in Marburg, Germany. While many other plants are featured2, it is this tree around which the Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi has structured her tritemporal narrative, in which three people from different time periods are transformed by their relationship with this singular ginkgo.

The film begins in the near past: Tony, a visiting neuroscience researcher (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), is suddenly marooned in Marburg thanks to the COVID pandemic. With no other company besides an immensely terse groundskeeper (Sylvester Groth), he begins to wonder if his experiments on consciousness could be extended to plants. (Seydoux appears, via aforementioned Zoom calls, as a pioneer in the field of botanical sentience.) The opening scenes establish Tony as someone who is considered and observant, and Leung is perfectly cast for this kind of watchful stillness, even if the film doesn’t ask much more from him.

Before long we are flung back in time, to the beginning of the 20th century. In the same location, a budding scientist (Luna Wedler) who is the first woman accepted into the university, finds the botanic gardens to be a temporary reprieve from the academy’s entrenched misogyny. We’re then brought forward to the more equitable 1970s, when a student (Enzo Brumm) cares for his crush’s geranium plant and discovers that it may be capable of more than providing window dressing.

After establishing these different stories, Enyedi freely cuts across them. We’re never unsure which era a scene belongs to since they each have a distinctive visual format: black & white in 1908, grainy 16mm in 1972, and crisp digital in 2020. Occasionally there are more oneiric passages consisting of close-up photography and 3D renderings that bring us into the world of the ginkgo tree. The juxtaposition of these timelines suggest an eventual convergence into something profound. But like a toiling researcher, I kept waiting for a revelatory insight that never arrived.

Leung is one of our greatest living actors, but he had only appeared in Asian productions until 2021, when he made his Hollywood debut in a Marvel movie. Silent Friend marks his first time working in Europe. In both of these foreign films, he’s tasked with little more than letting the audience project onto him their memories of his most famous roles. During a talk he gave at Film at Lincoln Center, Leung recalls asking Enyedi what she wanted from his performance, to which the director replied, “I just need you to be there.” That speaks to Leung being a natural fit for the role, which was written specifically for him. At the same time, it inadvertently exposes the hollowness of this kind of Euro arthouse film, in which a commitment to observational restraint comes at the expense of dramatic payoff. And that’s the root of the problem: of the three protagonists, only Tony gets an arc that approaches a satisfying resolution. The two past strands show promise but never bloom. But consider the ginkgo: this species of tree can live for three millennia. What’s a century to this silent friend?

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Tasting Notes

The most amusing runner in Silent Friend involves Tony Leung’s reaction to traditional German dishes. At a welcome dinner in Marburg, he eats a hefty plate of Schweinshaxe, a slow-roasted, crispy pork hock served atop a bed of potatoes, all washed down with the local bier. This does not agree with his gut biome and that night he throws up on the ginkgo tree. (I’m sure he apologized later.)

Having never been to Marburg, I have no idea which restaurant they filmed in, but based on my (likely faulty) memory of that scene, I trawled Google Maps for restaurants near campus and I think the location is Restaurant Ratsschänke.

Towards the end of the film, during a conciliatory supper, Tony is served Himmel und Erde, which translates to “heaven and earth.” It’s a mixture of mashed potatoes and mashed apples, topped with caramelized onions, and served with a couple links of blood sausage. Having become better acclimated to Germany, there is no post-meal vomit.

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Typically I would recommend an eating establishment in New York that would pair well with this movie, but frankly I haven’t found a German restaurant that I actually like. Maybe the cuisine is the problem…

As for myself, I’ve been in California for the past two weeks and change. The highlights of what I ate will be in my next end-of-month report!

The Last One for the Road

Opens today in NY at Film at Lincoln Center and IFC Center, with expansion to more markets in coming weeks.

There is no better substance than alcohol for bringing a group of dudes closer together—when it’s not tearing them apart. This charming Italian film from director Francesco Sossai captures this tension while keeping the tone relaxed. (It turns out we don’t have to go full Cassavetes.) “È l’ultima?” is a constant refrain for Doriano and Carlobianchi, two middle-aged buddies who are perpetually one last drink from ending the night. In this particular slice of their lives, they’re up late to pick up a long lost friend from the airport. To pass the time, they drive around the rural plains of their native Veneto.

Hopping from one bar to the next, the pair search for a satisfying final sip, but they never quite reach the point of satiety. During one stop, they meet Giulio, a lovelorn architecture student, and take him along on their journey. This chance encounter will alter the young man’s philosophy on life and love.

The film’s Italian title, Le Città di Pianura (The City of the Plains), refers to a conversation between Giulio and Doriano midway through, which reveals Sossai to have motivations for his film that go beyond providing nice vibes. Standing before a Renaissance-era painting of the Veneto region, Giulio notes that it places Venice next to the River Po while “ignoring the cities on the plain between them.” The painting is made in the capriccio style, which juxtaposes buildings and landscapes in a manner outside of reality. Today, the land largely serves as a backdrop that one zooms past on a high-speed rail, just as ignored as it was centuries ago.

Sossai’s homage to the commedia all’italiana is a lovely little yarn, told with the whimsical realism of Aki Kaurismäki—Allora Kaurismäki, if you prefer—and textured with a musty film grain and sludgy rock soundtrack by the Italian honky tonk musician known as Krano. Just don’t attempt to recreate this film’s roadtrip on your own!

Tasting Notes: It’s one grappa after another for this trio, which they spike with coffee come sunrise. They alternate the liquor with beer. Variations to this rotation during their adventure with glugs of kalimotxos out of a plastic water bottle and sips of daiquiris mixed by a handsome Count. He adds in two drops of Pernod, which was apparently a trend back in the day. Remarkably, no one gets visibly wasted in this film; the characters drink just enough to keep a light buzz going, a level of moderation I am always trying to achieve.

Foodwise, Doriano and Carlobianchi speak warmly of their favorite restaurant and their favorite dish is snails over a bed of polenta, which I hope to cook soon as I love polenta. But when they take Giulio to Mery’s, they find it boarded up. The film ends with a couple scoops of gelato: limone and fior di latte. Doriano got a different flavor than what he had ordered, but keeping with the film’s casual air, he’s cool with it. His remark echoes my own when it comes to The Last One for the Road: “I expected a bitter flavor but in the end, it’s sweet.”

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Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)

Now playing in limited release.

Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (known for international arthouse faves La Ciénaga and Zama) makes her first foray into documentary with an examination of how the founding cruelties enacted by her country against its indigenous population have persisted to this day. It begins with a chronicle of the criminal trial of three mining surveyors who are accused of murdering the leader of the Chuchagasta indigenous community during a dispute over land ownership.

Without losing sight of the people affected by that incident, Martel expands beyond the initial true crime framework. Ever since the establishment of Argentina’s modern bureaucracy, tribal lands have been bought and sold without any benefit to the people living on them. An ostensibly neutral government continues to uphold colonial-era conquests; as one native notes, “paper doesn’t question the pen.” And as the killing of the Chuchagasta chief shows, bureaucratic violence is only one bullet away from reverting to its corporeal form.

Martel makes her point of view known from behind the camera—though it’s pretty tough to “both sides” the issue at hand—and the film is indisputably potent. Drawing from her body of work in narrative cinema, she leads you to her intended conclusion without being overly didactic.

Last weekend saw the conclusion of New Directors/New Films, an annual festival of, ahem, new films from new directors. This collaboration between Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art is always a highlight on the spring movie calendar.

This year’s ND/NF lineup boasted 24 features; I had the opportunity (and, more crucially, the time) to screen ten of them, along with half of the short films1. Here’s what I thought about everything I saw, presented in no particular order.

(And if you saw anything at the festival, let me know what you thought!)

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Leviticus

Opening Film. Screens April 8 & 9. Opens in theaters June 19 via Neon.

The films in this festival tend to be on the artsy side, so I was a bit surprised that this year’s Opening Film selection turned out to be a relatively straightforward horror film. This isn’t my typical thing, but I’m glad to have seen it because Adrian Chiarella has made a very effective debut feature.

The plot centers on an illicit romance between two teenage boys in an insular Australian town. Niam (Joe Bird) just moved there with his single mother (Mia Wasikowska), while Ryan (Stacy Clausen, essentially an Aussie Connor Storrie) is the pastor’s son at their fundamentalist church. Out of boredom, the two hang out in an abandoned mill, and their awkward horseplay soon morphs into a proper makeout session. When their sexualities are found out, the pair go through a strenuous exorcism. There are supernatural side effects. The Devil begins to stalk both of them, luring them in with temptation by taking the form of the person they desire most: each other. Isolated by their homophobic community, Niam and Ryan must figure out whether staying together will lead to salvation or perdition.

Chiarella doesn’t really strive to make an “elevated” horror film, which is for the best because Leviticus is genuinely frightening—and not just because of a few well-placed jump scares. Tight craft and deft motifs keep things interesting beyond surface-level thrills, and the teen romance is stark in its tenderness amidst the cruelty. Special attention is paid to the oil refineries and petrol stations lurking on the edges of this backwater down under. Hellfire doesn’t just come to the Earth’s surface. We summon it.

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Aro Berria

Screens April 9 & 10. Seeking distribution.

A different kind of exorcism occurs midway through Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe’s film, though to opposing ends. While the “deliverance healer” in Leviticus aims to sever his victims’ connection to their bodies, the men and women in Aro Berria seek a positive form of liberation. Set in 1978, the film tracks a group of disenchanted leftist metalworkers in the Basque Country who, dissatisfied with the latest union contract, join a hippie commune. (The title is Basque for “New Age.”) Blindfolded in a windowless, orange-painted room, the converts engage in esoteric dances, sustained floor writhing, and what appears to be a version of primal scream therapy. This sequence lasts ten excruciating minutes, and there’s more where that came from.

Aro Berria is more or less a reenactment of a real-life community’s practices, and Gorostidi successfully conjures the spirit of a bygone era. (Photographs from the actual commune are displayed over the end credits.) But to me, the experience was more akin to witnessing a cult indoctrination. My overriding thought was that leftists aren’t taken seriously because they do weird stuff like this. All of which is to say this film was really not for me, though I did take pleasure in the sun-dappled cinematography during the outdoor scenes. How wonderful it would be, Basque-ing in a perpetual golden hour.

Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest

Screens April 18 & 19. Seeking distribution.

I had just finished watching Aro Berria before launching into this next film, so I shuddered when it began with a depiction of a European hippie summer camp. Fortunately, the happenings were not nearly as esoteric and it was but one part of an artist’s globe-spanning quest to find community.

Born in Beijing and based in Berlin, filmmaker and artist Viv Li is the kind of global citizen who struggles to find the place where she truly belongs. Back home, she bristles at her family’s traditional attitudes. (There’s an amusing moment where Li’s aunt is convinced that the United States created the virus to weaken China, a mirror image of American’s homespun conspiracy theories.) The art scene in Europe is accepting, particularly when it comes to her queer identity and vegan diet, but she discovers cultural assimilation is a one-sided affair. During a trip to New York to see friends, she vents her frustrations with loneliness, with a brief moment of catharsis at the top of Luna Park’s ferris wheel.

This sort of self-reflexive documentary is by definition navel-gazing, but Li approaches the material with aplomb, playfully cutting across locales in a way that mirrors her own internal whiplash. It helps that the filmmaker herself is such a charming subject. Aided by an amiable soundtrack of German and Chinese pop music, Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest feels like we’re directly tapping into its maker’s stream of consciousness. The film ends without a tidy resolution, but she comes away with a better understanding of her two cultures. Comparing the West to China, she observes, “We’re both brainwashed, but in different ways.”

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Chronovisor

Screens April 10 & 11. Opens in theaters this fall via Grasshopper Film.

In 1972, Father Pellegrino Ernetti, a Benedictine monk and respected musicologist, announced the existence of the Chronovisor, a machine that allows its user to view an objective record of anything that has ever happened. (The idea is that everything we do emits particles, and thanks to the law of conservation of energy, the Chronovisor recovers signals from the ether.) His claim to have witnessed the resurrection of Jesus Christ through this device caused a stir in the Italian press. But the scant proof provided was swiftly debunked. The Chronovisor was sealed in Vatican archives; its creator would die in obscurity, decades later.

In 2026, Columbia philosophy professor Béatrice Courte (Anne-Laure Sellier, a real-life academic) comes across a brief mention of Ernetti and his Chronovisor. Intrigued, she launches into a line of scholarly inquiry that comes to consume her. The Chronovisor was dismissed as a fraud, its inventor along with it. But what if it actually worked and the Vatican, afraid of the implications of laypeople learning the truth behind the Bible, orchestrated a cover up?

While the premise could be right at home with The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, what directors Kevin Walker and Jack Auen have to offer is not a globe-trotting pulp thriller starring Tom Hanks. Its adventurousness lies in its formal technique: it is a deskbound, lo-fi conspiracy thriller in which the viewer watches Béatrice read a bunch of old academic journals in beautiful private libraries and her well-appointed East Side apartment. It is one of the most compelling movies I’ve seen this year. I’m still trying to figure out what alchemy the directors were doing to make it so.

As we read alongside Béatrice, we hear excerpts from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets, which turns her research process into a grand voyage2. The archival material—books, journals, magazines—spans multiple languages; English translations are superimposed over the text to highlight relevant information. I figured that these were expertly fabricated, but it turns out that nearly all of them are authentic and the result of original research on the part of the filmmakers. Chronovisor is, at once, an ode to the tactility of analog media and the bleary frenzy of the late-night internet rabbit hole—all based on a real conspiracy.

This was by far the best movie I’ve seen at ND/NF and I haven’t stopped talking about it! The festival screenings have already passed (sorry) but New Yorkers have another opportunity to see it before the fall release! It’ll be playing at Anthology Film Archives on May 2, as part of Prismatic Ground, with a director Q&A. Anthology reminds me of some of the old buildings at my old college. It’s kind of the perfect venue for this film. Tickets here.

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Maddie’s Secret

Screens April 12 & 13. Opens in theaters June 19 via Magnolia Pictures. Filmmaker John Early has curated a repertory series at Metrograph: Thrust It!: The Films That Inspired Maddie’s Secret.

I’m always skeptical when an actor jumps into the director’s chair for the first time. The results too often betray a loose grasp of cinematic grammar. Even worse, sometimes they are merely a vanity showcase. Fortunately, John Early’s satirical melodrama is an exception. In addition to writing and directing Maddie’s Secret, he also stars in the titular role in drag, which is never remarked upon within the world of the film. The initial chuckles during my screening quickly faded once everyone realized that Early’s performance was meant to be taken seriously if not literally.

At the beginning of the film, Maddie is a lowly dishwasher at the test kitchen for a Condé Nast food brand. (It is, of course, a thinly veiled stand-in for Bon Appétit.) Although she struggles to be noticed at work, she has a best friend alongside her in the dish pit (Kate Berlant) and a loving husband (Eric Rahill) to come home to. After a video about an eggplant omelette smashburger launches her into social media stardom, the disruption to her routine triggers a relapse of her childhood eating disorder. Maddie ends up having quite a few secrets to keep.

Early nails his parody of the 1990s “movie of the week,” complete with a cheesy muzak score and soft fill lighting, but the film flattens when it crosses into reverent homage. Coming to the rescue during those moments are well-deployed supporting players, including Berlant as the toxically co-dependent BFF and Conner O’Malley in the role of a horndog creative director.

Tasting Notes: You bet I started taking copious notes of all the dishes in the film. I’ll try to write a bit more about this for the theatrical release, but the most underrated satirical element has to do with Maddie’s signature style: a Californian riff (or ripoff) of Asian cuisines3. Let’s see if I can reverse-engineer her eggplant omelette vegetarian smashburger, which is based on the Filipino dish Tortang Talong.

And of course, there’s fertile ground with unpacking the irony of being a food influencer who has to stay in shape for the camera. A bit different situation but my mind went to Pete Wells having to reset his eating habits after stepping down as the restaurant critic at the New York Times.

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Erupcja

Screens April 11 & 12. Now playing in NY & LA via 1-2 Special, with further expansion to follow.

Reviewed in a separate post, in case you missed it:

Two Seasons, Two Strangers

Screens April 17 & 19. Opens in NY at Metrograph April 24 via Several Futures.

One would think that the definitions of “new directors” and “new films” would be straightforward, but as far as this festival is concerned, they appear to be quite malleable. Sho Miyake isn’t a particularly new director: four years ago, his film Small, Slow but Steady was programmed at this very festival. (It’s a lovely movie that is true to its title.) Two Seasons, Two Strangers is his fifth feature overall. And the contours of its bifurcated narrative—two strangers traveling to isolated locales in a futile attempt to outrun their melancholy—are pretty much the same as The Height of the Coconut Trees, which screened at last year’s edition of ND/NF. In that sense, this is not a particularly new film either.

This pedantry wouldn’t matter if Two Seasons, Two Strangers were a better film. Adapted from two of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s manga, the story begins in a dilapidated fishing village, with a beachside meet-cute between a young man and a young woman who bond over their respective sadnesses. Then comes a narrative beat switch. Struggling with writer’s block, a Korea-born screenwriter escapes to snowy Hokkaido, where a stay with an isolated innkeeper rejuvenates her creative practice while reframing her perspective. These twinned tales of solitude contain plenty of potential, but it never quite achieves the resonance they deserve.

Despite these shortcomings, the gorgeous cinematography is an undeniable virtue. Framed in the square-ish Academy ratio, the recurring multiplanar landscape shots belie the smallness of human drama when set against the heights of mountains and the vastness of the sea. It’s in these moments that Miyake’s film, to borrow the title of his previous work, is small, slow, but steady.

Brand New Landscape

Screens April 15 & 16. Seeking distribution.

Yuiga Danzuka’s quietly ambitious debut uses the story of a fractured family to explore the alienation and displacement wrought in the name of urban renewal, as well as the coincidences and contradictions essential to life in a big city. A chance encounter between workaholic architect Hajime (Kenichi Endo) and his estranged son Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) resurfaces their long-suppressed grievances, while also giving Ren the opportunity to reconnect with his distant sister (Mai Kiryu).

Hajime has returned to Tokyo to spearhead a controversial redevelopment project that would force out the area’s unhoused population, in an echo of his star-making work designing Miyashita Park, a shopping complex in Shibuya. Danzuka inserts archival footage of the homeless encampments that used to be there. (I’ve been to Miyashita Park. Admittedly, it’s very nice.) It’s an inspired intervention, if incomplete in execution. Hajime is a fictional character, and the family drama doesn’t quite connect to how the twinning of contemporary architecture and capitalism has led to the domestic space becoming as transactional as the built environment. This only really comes together at the very end, when Danzuka makes an onscreen dedication: “In memory of my mother and the city.”

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If On a Winter’s Night

Screens April 14 & 15. Seeking distribution.

Urban alienation is also the subject of this Delhi-set neorealist drama by Sanju Surendran, though here the causes are India’s hierarchical society and economic precarity. A young couple, both artistic strivers, have migrated from Kerala to Delhi in search of better opportunities. They soon find that the language barrier between Malayalam and Hindi is the least of their problems.

The premise is very similar to All We Imagine as Light, and its director Payal Kapadia is an executive producer on this project. While it’s great that her majestic film seems to have inspired a new generation of Indian filmmakers, the comparison does not work in Surendran’s favor. Quoting the title of Italo Calvino’s most famous work for this film’s English-language name suggests a playful postmodernism that simply isn’t there. More descriptive is the original title, Khidki Gaav, which is simply the name of the South Delhi neighborhood where the film is set. Surendran has a keen observational eye, but the overly listless pacing hampers what ought to have been a more propulsive story.

Do You Love Me

Screens April 10 & 11. Release plans TBA by Icarus Films.

A note at the beginning of Lana Daher’s non-chronological essay film cautions that its mixture of disparate works may confuse the viewer. But “this disorientation is part of the journey. Welcome to Lebanon.” Built from 150 fragments of existing media—including film, music, and found footage—this history of life in Daher’s home country is a feat of archival research not unlike the journey undertaken by the directors of Chronovisor.

Working with editor Qutaiba Barhamji, Daher intermixes scenes from documentary and narrative cinema across the past 70 years, with each sequence interrogating different tropes in Lebanese media. The cumulative effect is a portrait of how entrenched conflicts in the Middle East and sectarian divisions in Lebanese society have affected ordinary living. In Beirut, time and history don’t exist in a linear fashion. It loops and loops, constantly threatening to collapse in on itself. That Do You Love Me had its New York premiere amidst Israel’s relentless bombing of Lebanon only underscored this destructive cycle.

Daher leans heavily on nostalgic music, and it’s highly effective. One memorable sequence is soundtracked by “Monday, Tuesday... Laissez-moi danser,” a French-language disco song from 1979 that was a huge hit in Lebanon. “Day after day, life slips away… / Let me dance, sing freely all summer.” Juxtaposed against scenes of destruction and displacement, the joyous tune becomes a song of resistance.

This was the only public ND/NF screening I managed to attend this year. Given the political situation, the audience was eager to receive this film. There was a sustained standing ovation for Daher after the Q&A. The director noted that during the recent premiere in Beirut, the audience could hear an Israeli drone buzzing. At first, she thought it was a sound effect she forgot she had added, and thought it was a smart choice. Then she realized the border between cinema and reality was more porous than she imagined.

Can I make a confession: On my way to the theater, the breakdown of “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul got stuck in my head. (“A-do, do you love me? / A-do, do you love me, baby?”) I wondered if this song would appear in the film, but I can report that it does not. (For starters, Abdul is not Lebanese, but of Syrian Jewish descent.) Rather, the film’s title is taken from a 1978 pop classic by the Bendaly Family, the chorus of which was recently interpolated by Palestinian singer and rapper Saint Levant. The “you” in “Do you love me?” may be Beirut itself, or the wider world.

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Shorts Programs I & II

And last but not least, a quick word on the short films programmed at New Directors/New Films, half of which were made available to critics. Somewhat surprisingly, most of these were more plot-driven than I’ve come to expect from this festival.

• The mundane aftereffects of institutional cruelty are captured in Division (directed by James Paul Dallas), a brief documentary in which the filmmaker helps an absent friend pack up his apartment over video chat. Revealing the reason is saved for the very end.

• I haven’t seen much of the What We Do in the Shadows TV series but apparently it’s quite gay. Those looking for more of the same should seek out Time to Go (Renzo Cozza), a surprisingly sweet sketch about a vampire in Argentina who meets a nice guy and begins to doubt the ethics of killing his Grindr hookups for their blood.

• While I admired the punk sensibility of Unleaded 95 (Emma Hütt and Tina Muffler), in which a trio of German sapphics fight, fuck, and fuss on the day of a bachelorette party, the short felt like it was straining to be a longer feature.

• My favorite of what I watched was Taxi Moto (Gaël Kamilindi), a tenderly metafictional fantasia. After a filmmaker has a shoot in his native Rwanda suddenly cancelled due to its gay subject matter, he pivots to film the script in Paris. He meets a prospective actor and the two spend the day walking and talking. They discuss the precarity of queer life in Africa, the balance between compromise and censorship, and the friction of a storyteller returning from the diaspora. Reminiscent of Before Sunrise, the vibes are strong—the 16mm cinematography is lovingly gauzy—and so are the ideas being advanced.

• The most directly personal short of this bunch was Buckskin (Mars Verrone), a tribute and testament to the filmmaker’s grandfather, the first Black man to join the U.S. Forest Service. Though technically a documentary, there are no traditional talking heads. Instead, Verrone points the camera at his weathered hands, the Forest Service mug that has accompanied him to the twilight of his life. Avant-garde interventions take the form of archival clippings superimposed over serene shots of Californian redwoods. While her grandfather muses on what we leave behind for future generations, both on a familial and global scale, Verrone takes note of the fallibility of memory in old age.

One is a French New Wave/mumblecore indie that stars Charli XCX. The other is a documentary that follows avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson as he embarks on an ambitious project. In addition to sharing a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, both feature a man whose grand plans are waylaid by extenuating circumstances.

Also: a quick word on Kogonada’s newest film, which has been undeservedly pilloried, and some recs for Polish food in Greenpoint.

Erupcja

Now playing in NY & LA, with further expansion to follow.

Most people who have heard of Erupcja know it as “the other new movie that stars Charli XCX,” and will probably have two questions. For starters, is she any good as an actor? (I’d say so; Charli is decidedly not brat here, but her naturalistic, subdued performance befits a naturalistic, subdued film.) And how exactly do you pronounce “erupcja,” anyway? (“Eh-roop-tsyuh,” per a helpful press agent. Or “ɛˈrup.t͡sja” if you can parse IPA.)

The film’s title comes from the Polish word for “eruption,” which happened on Mount Etna in August 2024. Meanwhile, Ohio-born filmmaker Pete Ohs had arrived in Warsaw to make a movie. Arriving with half of an outline and a small group of collaborators, the day’s scenes were written each morning in collaboration with the four principal actors.

The story centers upon the friendship between Nel (Lena Góra), a Warsaw local who inherited her mother’s flower shop, and Bethany (Charli XCX), visiting from London with her boyfriend Rob (Will Madden). The bond between the two women subsists on brief but intense reunions. They only see each other every few years or so, but every time they do, a volcano erupts somewhere in the world. Surely that has to mean something. (Surprisingly, this is not a metaphor for sex; their relationship stays strictly platonic. I’m not sure whether that comes as a relief or is frustratingly underexplored subtext.)

During the course of the film’s brief runtime, there is a scuttled marriage proposal, an ill-advised night out at the club, and a fortuitous encounter with an amiable American painter (Jeremy O. Harris, the award-winning playwright recently liberated from a Japanese prison). The principal concern appears to be taking the common desire for relationships to be the result of fate and dismantling that notion. We find out that volcanoes erupt, on average, once a week. An extraordinary friendship may be quite ordinary. And perhaps a steady, low-key boyfriend is the right partner for a 365 party girl.

Overall, this is a pretty solid movie, but its methods lead to it feeling a bit too unpolished. This scenario seems to have deeper layers to explore, but the improvisation inherent to this filmmaking process does not lend itself much to introspection within the story. Equally indebted to the French New Wave and American mumblecore, Erupcja is much like visiting a European capital for the weekend: a fleeting pleasure where the potential for further profundity remains unresolved.

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Tasting Notes

Rob makes reservations at some fancy looking spots in Warsaw. He and Bethany never end up eating at either: Kieliszki na Próżnej, which has a Bib Gourmand, and Opasły Tom, which was noted by the shadowy organization behind those “World’s 50 Best” lists. Next month I’ll be in Warsaw for a few hours on an extended layover. Maybe there will be time to dine at one of those restaurants.

The most notable food actually consumed on-screen? Buckets of KFC.

I did my research: According to Setlist.fm, Charli XCX has performed four times in Warsaw, Poland, but zero times at Warsaw, Brooklyn.

She did make a brief appearance at the now-shuttered Schimanski nightclub, on the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. The latter, you probably know, is a historically Polish neighborhood whose community is on the verge of becoming vestigial.

I asked my buddy Byron, who lives in Greenpoint, for his favorite Polish spots:

• Pierozek – Best quality (I second this rec, especially the cheap infused vodka shots)

• Karczma – Best vibes

• Pyza – Best value

• Kiszka – Best deli/butcher. Look no further for kielbasa.

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Zi

Screens April 30 at the Museum of the Moving Image for a New York premiere. Seeking distribution.

In many ways, Erupcja reminded me of Zi, the new “back to basics” film from director Kogonada.

After breaking out with Columbus and After Yang, he made a foray into big-budget filmmaking. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, which starred Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, was widely considered to be a misfire. In response, he decamped to Hong Kong with a crew of close collaborators to make a movie. Like Ohs, he largely wrote the story on the fly.

The sci-fi inflected plot follows a violinist (Michelle Mao) who is plagued with visions of her future self. While anxiously awaiting the results of a neurology test, she makes a fateful encounter with a lonely American expat (Haley Lu Richardson) on her own quest for belonging. As with Erupcja, the French New Wave influence is apparent. The inciting incident in Zi quotes Cléo from 5 to 7. But Kogonada also owes a considerable debt to Wong Kar-Wai (as every artsy movie set in Hong Kong does) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I had the chance to watch this a couple months ago during virtual Sundance, and it currently has one of the lowest Letterboxd ratings of the entire lineup. I think I’m one of the five people who unreservedly love it. But it was built in a lab to appeal to me: sad hotties wandering through a neon metropolis where the protagonist finds catharsis by singing karaoke.

If this write-up piques your curiosity, Zi is receiving its New York premiere on April 30, thanks to the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival. Kogonada, Mao, and producer Christopher Radcliff will be in attendance. I don’t believe this has yet secured distribution, so it may be awhile until you get another opportunity to watch.

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Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars

Now playing in NY at the BAM through April 23.

No, this is not a movie about the mid-aughts folk duo who had an apparently acrimonious breakup.

This 1985 documentary, directed by Howard Brookner, follows experimental theater director Robert Wilson during his attempt to mount what would have been his magnum opus: a six-part opera tied to the Los Angeles Olympics. The ambition is admirable, but the endeavor collapses amidst a fundraising shortfall; it was not, it turns out, safe and sound. Adding insult to injury, the Olympics themselves wound up with a budget surplus ten times the amount that Wilson needed.

Gazing upon the concept art for the thwarted project, his best laid plans destined for a storage unit, Wilson laments, “Imagine all this, for something that didn’t happen.” For someone who creates some very avant-garde stuff, he comes off as remarkably relatable. He does care about his art being seen by the widest possible audience. There are a lot of documentaries that track the making of a grand artistic project; what makes this one so remarkable isn’t just that it was unsuccessful, but it was halted by capitalist forces.

This new restoration premiered at last year’s New York Film Festival as part of the Revivals section. And it truly was a revival: long unseen, the original negative was lost after Hurricane Sandy. Brookner’s nephew located a surviving 16mm print and audiotapes containing the soundtrack.

Go deeper: If you’re intrigued by Wilson’s work, as I am, his production of Moby Dick is being performed at the BAM from April 29 to May 3.

“2026 is the new 2016” was (is?) a big enough social media trend that it has its own Wikipedia article. This newfound nostalgia may befuddle those who associate that year as The One When Trump Won, but I think it applies specifically to those precious months before the election. Summer Sixteen, as Drake immortalized it, is one I do fondly remember because I reached some personal milestones. I graduated college, started my first big boy job, and lived on my own for the first time.

But one event was more life-changing than the rest. Ten years ago, I visited New York City for the very first time.

The trip came together pretty quickly. I wanted to do a graduation trip on the cheap and I had cousins living in Boston and New York. My other cousin Eric, then a freshman, was down to join me. (I finished college a quarter early so we went during his spring break.) Boston was fine. It was those five days in New York that really made an impact. Both of us live here now.

I recently dug up the journal I wrote during the trip1 and it was funny to read, in between me crashing out over a crush, how quickly I fell in love with this city:

• Day One: “NYC reminds me of SF, only supersized and harder to drive in.”

• Day Two: “The city has an intoxicating pull, with the promise and mystery of being in a sea of people and events.” (21-year-old me thought he was a poet or something?)

• Day Three: “My desire to one day live here has grown more…. One is constantly on the cusp of being swallowed by New York.” (See above note.)

• Day Five: “It’s now time to return to my boring old life. 🙁”

When I realized that March marked a decade since our trip, I proposed to Eric that we spend a day retracing part of our itinerary. Ten years older and twenty pounds heavier, I was curious to find out how much has changed and how much remains the same, for both this city and me.

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NYC 16/26

It was a very warm, very bright Saturday, which was pretty ideal when our plan was basically “walk to a bunch of places.”

Eric and I began our day at Kevin’s old apartment in Park Slope, where we had stayed during our first trip. He’s lived in three different places since. Then we went to Bergen Bagel and ran back our first bagel orders: sausage egg and cheese on everything, toasted, yes salt pepper2. I had written in my old journal that it was “worth the $5 for sure.” A decade later, the same sandwich costs $8.49, and that’s cheaper than the going rate these days.

From there we trekked over to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade (still my favorite sightseeing spot in the entire city) and compared a photo we took ten years ago to how the view looks today: there’s a few new buildings in the Lower Manhattan skyline and Pier 17 is no longer under construction. One of the piers in Brooklyn Bridge Park was bare concrete; now there’s a big lawn with lots of trees. (At this point our buddy David joined us, and other friends came and went throughout the day.)

Then we went to Times Square, the heart and soul of the Big Apple, and on our way to The High Line we walked right by Rudy’s, which opened before any of us were alive, and not somewhere we went on our old trip. But Eric had somehow never been and we were there. I used to drink here pretty often when I first moved here, drawn in by the $3 pints, which are now $4, but the hot dogs are still free.

Besides the bagel, we didn’t feel particularly drawn to eating at the same places we did on our trip. Some of them have long since closed: Momofuku Ma Pêche, Gallito’s Kitchen, Barbonchino. Under the influence of Master of None3 we ate at Parm and it was a highlight of the trip. But since then it’s fallen off. Throughout the day we ate at a couple places that weren’t open ten years ago but have become new favorites: Los Mariscos in Chelsea Market (which opened later in 2016) and Mixteca/Tacos 1986 (opened last year).

It was funny, this tour wasn’t nearly as nostalgia-inducing as I thought it would be. What were once novel attractions have become familiar sights. They’re kind of just places now, and once we got into Greenwich Village I thought more about all the new memories I’ve made in the decade since that first visit.

Around this point, the day pretty quickly morphed away from rehashing an old itinerary that was planned by two people who were barely adults. We let intuition guide the way, encountered friends new and old, and complained about what was and shall never be again. In short, it was a typical day (and night) spent in New York. And as Eric pointed out, “what the city means to us is still the same” as it was ten years ago. We just happen to live here now.

It was more interesting to talk about what we didn’t do, knowing what we know now. We didn’t go to the usual touristy food spots: Katz’s, Joe’s, Russ and Daughters. We didn’t walk the Brooklyn Bridge, nor did we explore Chinatown or the Lower East Side or the East Village. We did see Washington Square Park. I have aged out of hanging out there but it’s nice to walk through and see the youths hanging out and skateboarding around the fountain.

At the time, Eric was under 21 but one of his friends was an NYU student who knew which bars didn’t card and she took us to one of them. Headless Horseman, next to Union Square, was where Eric had his first drink in a bar. It has since closed. I remember it being a pretty chill place where I sipped on a Guinness and a cocktail. The cobblestone building itself was very distinctive. It felt like being in a 19th century alehouse.

The building is still there, and it’s still a bar, but it’s now called The High Note. I’m not sure if the bar changed or we did, but man this place really sucked. It was loud and super bro-ey and there weren’t any visible menus, so we asked what beers were on tap, to which the bartender replied “the taps aren’t in use” which is a little insane. So we just called for gin & tonics and they were… not good. We drank them as fast as we could and left.

After trying and failing to find a bar in the East Village where we could sit down and relax with our friends, we took a car to Bushwick for a nightcap at Orion Bar. Eric lives around the corner from there and it’s become his local. We downed a shot of soju and a can of Terra beer—to get us up to ten drinks consumed that day, in honor of ten years—then called it a night.

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Music

For one last dose of 2016 nostalgia, see below for my most-listened to songs of that year. These are the songs that accompanied my drives between Sacramento and San Jose, the last of the college parties I hosted, and my late-night gaming sessions4. In the interest of radical transparency, the playlist is unabridged. Feel free to judge me.

When it comes to March of this year, it was a really good month for new releases! The long-awaited BTS album is mostly fine (Ryan Tedder is a pox on pop) but I really dug the new records from Underscores and Charlie Puth.

My favorite new album: “Tirakat,” by Charif Megarbane and Ali. It came my way thanks to NPR’s New Music Friday.

Here’s the description from Habibi Funk Records:

Tirakat brings together Jakarta-based trio Ali and Lebanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Charif Megarbane in a collaboration shaped by long-standing cultural exchange between Indonesia and the Arab world. Ali’s blend of 1970s Indonesian psychedelic funk, Melayu traditions, disco grooves and Arab melodic forms meets Charif’s long-running exploration of cross-regional sound, rooted in a shared musical vocabulary rather than genre.

Concerts

First shows of the year!

• Tuesday March 3 – Mitski, Sex Week at The Shed w/ Giselle

  • I wasn’t sure what The Shed would be like as a concert venue but it was one of the nicest I’ve been to. It’s clean, there’s lots of bathrooms, and there’s good acoustics. Also rare: after the show ended they opened the emergency exit doors on the sides for easy egress. I really hate when venues like Brooklyn Steel make everyone funnel back out through the entrance where the fire doors open right out into the street.

• Tuesday March 24 – Joyce Manor, Militarie Gun at Brooklyn Paramount w/ Karen

  • Brooklyn Paramount is also very nice, and very conveniently located. I hadn’t been to a proper rock show in a very long time and I missed the energy. There were like a dozen crowd-surfers who repeatedly got carried to the front of the stage. They’d be escorted back out into the pit, then in due time they would get right back up there.

It Turns Out I Love Cold Plunges

So I went to Othership, the culty, clubby sauna at the vanguard of New York’s trendy bathhouse scene. I admit I was skeptical of the whole affair—my ideal of wellness is two fingers of scotch—but the experience lowkey changed my life. (Winnie organized a big group outing for her birthday. Thank you, Winnie!)

The sauna part I can take or leave, but submerging my body in an ice-cold pool of water? Incredible. Most of my friends could barely last a minute, meanwhile Robin and I kept going back for five-minute sessions. The health benefits seem entirely made up and that’s fine. I just think it feels good and it makes me alert.

A key reason why I enjoyed this so much was that this wasn’t a guided class, but an open-format night at the sauna. I’m sure this has already been written about in The Cut or whatever but this was one of the few spaces where people were entirely offline. Not a phone in sight, and even clocks were scant. Just replacement-level house beats and sweaty people and a good time. (Not for nothing, they should host speed dating events in Othership, but I get the feeling that these hip saunas attract the worst kind of people. There were a lot of manbuns.)

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Movies

• The first movie I saw at home: Wuthering Heights (1939), which is somehow even more emo than the Emerald Fennell version. But the best Wuthering movie I saw last month was a Japanese adaptation from 1988.

• The first movie I saw in a theater: Goat, a very heartfelt movie with silly animal puns and sight gags. Shame that the editing is paced for people with ADD.

• The last movie I saw at home: Two Seasons, Two Strangers, for forthcoming New Directors/New Films coverage.

• The last movie I saw in a theater: Amadeus (1984), first time viewing. F. Murray Abraham gave a surprise introduction. He was there to watch this and Scarface, which he’s also in and played earlier that day at the MoMA, and the staff asked if he’d want to share some words with the audience. Very cool!

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Food & Film Pairing of the Month: Project Hail Mary, Hoppers, and Instant Ramen

As far as I’m concerned, Project Hail Mary was a Project Hell No. It’s 2016 nostalgia in movie form. The obvious antecedents—Arrival and Interstellar and Ad Astra and First Man—are not uniformly perfect, but they strove to offer more besides stunning images and science geekery. They were about something. This movie is as empty as deep space. (Not to mention the protagonist’s noxious characterization: a guy whose only flaw is that the world didn’t recognize his genius.)

But I really dug Hoppers. Disney/Pixar animation has been slumping but this was a positive step towards a rebound. The second act of this film is genuinely unhinged and weird in ways I don’t want to spoil. While the political/environmentalist message winds up neutered into a lukewarm lesson about bridging partisan divides, it’s built around a terrific human character. (Fun fact: Mabel is voiced by Piper Curda, who plays one of the kids in May December.) My one gripe: for a film set in Beaverton, Oregon, there is a conspicuous lack of Nike footwear.

The protagonists of Project Hail Mary and Hoppers both live off of instant ramen, though they eat it differently. We see Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling’s science teacher turned astronaut) slurp out of a Cup Noodle a handful of times, which I suppose is an efficient meal to have on a spaceship. Back on Earth, Mabel munches on an uncooked block of Top Ramen, a nod to her Japanese American heritage. Dry ramen was a very popular snack among us Asians when I was in fourth grade. We’d pour the seasoning packet into the bag, then break up the ramen into pieces and treat it like very crunchy chips.

I personally cannot remember the last time I ate Instant Ramen. I made Chapaguri with steak a bunch of times in 2019-2021, thanks to Parasite, but it has been years since I touched a canonical Cup Noodle.

Good Things I Read

• Lost City: How the Soul of a City Vanished: Very Slowly, Then All at Once by Robert Simonson, The Mix with Robert Simonson

• ‘There’s a problem with the sauce’: Times Square taqueria’s salsa sparks lawsuit by Walter Wuthmann, Gothamist

• How Gin, Wax and Heat Guns Make Onscreen Meals Look Delicious: The ‘Hamnet’ food stylist Olivia Somary reveals the tools of her trade by Adrea Piazza, The New York Times

• Behind the scenes of Alysa Liu’s Olympic victory tour and her new level of fame by Marcus Thompson II, The Athletic

• A visit to True/False Film Fest (and also back in time) by Delia Cai, Deez Links

• Opening Up to Foie Gras by Alisha Miranda, Guts Magazine

• A Brown Peoples’ Version of White Peoples’ Lives: The gleeful inauthenticity of South Asian Italian cuisine by Sharanya Deepak, Vittles

Theater

• Saturday March 28 The Wild Party (NYCC Encores!)

  • Getting Betty Boop (Jasmine Amy Rogers) to headline this R-rated Roaring Twenties-set musical is a casting coup.

Dining In

Cooking for Friends

• Saturday 2/28, Sunday 3/1, Sunday 3/8 - Annual Oscars Dinner

  • This wasn’t really “for friends” since it was a ticketed event and a good chunk of guests were friends of friends, but I’ll list it here, why not.

  • For that third dinner I actually had time to make a proper family meal, and I need to always ensure we have a full meal before every event I host, because we were in a much better mood on this day. I took the unused chicken parts (as well as duck and chicken livers) and marinated them in buttermilk overnight and then deep fried them all.

• Monday 3/9

  • “Turducken” Pho (made from bones and poultry parts unused from the Oscars dinners)

• Sunday 3/15 - Oscars Watch Party

  • I made black hummus and muhammara for Avatar: Fire and Ash and served a couple leftovers from the dinner parties: pão de queijo plus chips and salsa verde. And I ordered Domino’s.

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Cooking for Myself

There were a lot of random meals scrounged together from leftovers and unused ingredients from those Oscars dinner parties and pho night. The fanciest thing I made was a lox chirashi, using Shalom Japan’s recipe published in the New York Times. It’s really good but my palate is not meant for meal prep: I had to eat this four days in a row and was tired of it after the second day.

After the Oscars were exorcised from my fridge, I cooked a couple bean stews. A recent shipment from the Rancho Gordo Bean Club included ceci neri (black garbanzos), which are fairly obscure. I’ve certainly never heard of them before. They boast a lot more fiber and iron than normal chickpeas, and take quite a bit longer to cook. I used some to make the black hummus for my Oscars watch party, and the rest I made into a stew with swiss chard that was quite delicious.

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Dining Out

There were four times I had set plans to eat at a restaurant, all of which were during the last week of the month.

• Cuerno w/ Caro

  • Steakhouses are not my usual genre of restaurant—we actually do have steak at home—but it turns out a Mexican spin is all I needed to enjoy it. This is the kind of place where you’ll balk at spending $12 on a taco until you eat it and think to yourself, not bad for a minor splurge. (Highlights: hamachi crudo, taco richi, arrachera [skirt steak]).

• Bé Bếp Pop-up at Bar Americano w/ Eric, Diana, Aeron, Lance

  • Ever since Ha’s Dac Biet settled down into brick and mortar, chef Phoebe Tran’s Bé Bếp concept has become the best Vietnamese pop-up in the city; I think I’ve been to three of her events and they’ve always been the dining highlight of my month. A recent Wednesday in Greenpoint was no exception: I still think about the bánh tiêu, which came with an insanely sumptuous compound butter mixed with crab tomalley.

• Grandma’s Home w/ a bunch of people (Winnie’s birthday)

  • An upscale Chinese restaurant in Flatiron that can accommodate a large group. It doesn’t hurt that it’s pretty good!

• Chama Mama (Brooklyn Heights location) w/ David, Sam, James, Elle

  • Some time ago, I would dine at the original Manhattan location fairly regularly and it was nice to see they have expanded. Adjaruli khachapuri is uniquely suited for brunch.

Incidental meals have put me in a very Mexican time in my life: Taqueria Ramirez (still great after all these years), Yellow Rose (same), Son del North (a much-needed burrito after a couple cocktails)—including aforementioned Los Mariscos and Tacos 1986, this month proved to me that anyone who still says New York has bad Mexican food just has no idea what they are talking about.

And the other day I was doing some Chinatown grocery shopping and walked past the new L’Industrie location in Little Italy. There was no line so I had to buy a slice; I don’t make the rules. It’s actually kind of annoying that even after years of immense popularity, it remains one of the best pizzas in the city. (Here’s my occasional humblebrag that I’ve stumped for them ever since I first moved here, when it was still a bit of a secret. It didn’t really explode in popularity until post-COVID.)

In memoriam: Eric showed up for work on the last Friday of March, only to find out it would be his last shift. Lower East Side cocktail den Chinato is now closed thanks to certain shenanigans from the new owner.

On the last day of the month, the staff hosted a friends & family party to give the establishment a final sendoff. I thought the vibe would be funereal but it was more like a wake. “This was the sixth place that has closed on me,” remarked one grizzled bartender. “I feel like the Angel of Death.” Many drinks were served and memories were shared, but conversation quickly turned to future plans. It had only been a few days but folks already had other gigs lined up. Such is the transience of this industry.

RIP, Chinato. You were a good bar.

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March Grog Log

Tracking my first alcoholic drink of the day.

1. Unico Yuzu vermouth & Soda at home

2. Nothing

3. Nothing

4. Bichi “Listán” 2023 (leftover/half-glass) at home

5. Nothing

6. Nothing

7. Nothing

8. Carnaval do Marcelo at home

9. Bojo do Luar Deu Bode at home

10. Nothing

11. Nothing

12. Like a Virgin at Chinato

13. Paper Planes Trains and Automobiles at Ruth

14. Nothing

15. Brooklyn Brewery IPA at home

16. Nothing

17. Nothing

18. Brooklyn Kura Lunar Shiboritate at home

19. Nothing

20. Rockaway Black Gold nitro stout at The Emerson

21. All American Shot and beer combo at Rudy’s

22. Lagunitas at Whiskey Trader

23. Shiner Bock at Yellow Rose

24. Floral Daiquiri at Rockwell Place

25. House Vermouth at Bar Americano (Be Bep pop up)

26. Lychee Colada at Spring

27. Matic Wines Šipon 2021 at Olo’s

28. Master Gao Baby Jasmine lager at Grandma’s House

29. Georgia 1991 at Chama Mama

30. Nothing

31. Karma and Friends at Chinato (Last night for friends & family)

Another week, another round of artsy movies to review! It’s nice that every movie I’ve covered lately has been pretty good. I’m still perfectly cranky with some other movies I’ve watched; I’ll drop my take on Project Hail Mary soon enough.

That could be an alternate title for Revelations of Divine Love, a DIY chronicle of spiritual searching and fulfillment in the Middle Ages, which I discuss below. Also reviewed: Living the Land, a naturalistic chronicle of wheat farmers in rural China in the early 1990s (out in next week), and Kontinental ‘25, Radu Jude’s sly morality comedy about ordinary Romanians contending with late-stage capitalism in the 2020s.

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Revelations of Divine Love

Opens March 27 in NY at Anthology Film Archives for a one-weekend run, alongside a director-selected series of films set in the Middle Ages. Further screenings at various NY venues will be held throughout April, and a Seattle run begins April 15 at Northwest Film Forum.

There’s a pretty stark difference between “religious movies” and “movies about religion.” The former category, also known as “faith-based films,” tend to be little more than Evangelical propaganda underwritten by right-wing millionaires. (Not that I’ve actually watched any; I try not to be in the business of misery.)

Movies about religion, in contrast, are more likely to have artistic merit. The best of them explore universal subjects that resonate with even the most secular of viewers. But recent entries in this canon view their subjects at a distance; I found The Testament of Ann Lee to be curiously incurious about faith, as both an interior and a collective experience. In that context, it was refreshing to encounter Revelations of Divine Love, which was directed by Caroline Golum on a shoestring budget. Centering on the life and work of the 14th century religious figure Julian of Norwich, the film treats its central figure’s notions of spirituality earnestly and seriously.

When we first meet Julian (Tessa Strain), she’s being sealed into a cell. A bishop administers rites while a laborer builds the wall that will shut her in for the rest of her life. But this isn’t The Cask of Amontillado—Julian has chosen to become an anchoress, someone who sequesters herself from wider society to devote her life towards God. She stands with confidence, her piercing gaze looking out as the last stone is placed.

She has good reason for such conviction: around the age of thirty, Julian fell severely ill and was close to death when God revealed Himself to her through a series of visions. Her account of these “showings” is considered to be the earliest surviving book in the English language that was written by a woman. (The film borrows its title from this collection of writings.) Not much is known about Julian’s life—it might not even be her real name; she lived in St. Julian’s Church in Norwich—and Golum (who wrote the script with medieval scholar Laurence Bond) provides informed speculation to fill in the blanks.

Despite being a bootstrapped production—the budget was only $100,000—the film provides an expansive insight into a proto-feminist figure of medieval Christianity. Perhaps I watch too many movies about organized religion being used as a tool for persecution, because I found it remarkable that when Julian tells her priest about her divine visions, he simply believes them to be true. But that must have been the case in reality; otherwise, how would she have had the support of the church to become an anchoress?

Though Julian is sealed in an austere cell, she is not fully isolated from the world. Nuns bring her food every day, while townsfolk line up to catch a glimpse of this cloistered woman through a small window. In turn, she offers them counsel and prayer. Sometimes there are unintended consequences: her advice to a farmer frustrated with high taxes inadvertently sets off a peasant riot. This being the Middle Ages, Julian bears witness to upheavals both personal and societal—uprisings and plagues and the like—all the while remaining steadfast in her belief of God being a force of love. Her ministry is one of positivity despite hard times: “God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall.” She remains equally committed to life as an anchoress; she could ask the bishop to unseal her at any time. The only exception to feeling like she was born for this life comes when her mother appeals for her to come back home. Julian was not the only one who made a sacrifice.

Throughout the film’s fleet 75-minute runtime, we see Julian write what would eventually become Revelations of Divine Love. It wasn’t always smooth sailing. Water seeps into her cell when it rains, jeopardizing her manuscript, and as the years wear on, she finds it harder to decode the meaning of her initial visions, asking “how can all things be well when sin is still common?” Despite these lofty concerns, watching the film is overall a calming experience. The reverie of a score, composed by Zachary Koeber, consists of medieval instruments set against new age synths, and the charming sets and costumes come off as Ren Faire in Ridgewood. (Remember the $100,000 budget.) Those used to total verisimilitude in their movies, upon encountering such handmade textures, may be left a little wanting. But they should keep in mind one of Julian’s key proclamations: “seeking is as good as beholding.”

Tasting Notes

One of Julian’s visions involves the humble hazelnut, which becomes a recurring motif throughout the film. God tells her “it is all that is made,” to which she reflects: “In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it.”

Later, one of the nuns in the abbey receives honey from her family’s apiary, which the sisters use to make spiced cakes and candied fruits. For a more modern rendition of medieval English fare, try King Arthur’s version of honey cake, or better yet, this recipe for a Hazelnut Honey Spice Cake with Caramelized Apples. Whatever you do, garnish each slice with that singular hazelnut. Drink it with the blood of Christ: perhaps a Sauternes, though that dessert wine may be too indulgent for the likes of an austere anchoress.

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Further reading: For Hell Gate, friend of the newsletter Dan Schindel interviewed Golum about making a medieval movie on a shoestring budget. Other friend of the newsletter Chrissy Griesmer also spoke with her last year for the “Medieval May” issue of film zine 4R Press (PDF, page 14).

In case you missed it: I interviewed the chef who provided craft services for this production!

Living the Land

Opens April 3 in NY at Film Forum, with expansion to select markets to follow.

A year in the life of a family in rural China unfolds in a patient, documentary-like manner in Huo Meng’s remarkable sophomore feature. Living the Land is set in 1991, a period of rapid modernization that flung China away from an agrarian society towards a technological one. But out in the provinces, it’s as if industrialization never even occurred. Farm labor is still done by hand, and people prefer to use the lunar calendar.

Movies with this general form—naturalistic immersion, long observational takes, sociological intent—are typically described as “slow cinema.” And that label applies here, but once you’re in its rhythm, this film feels anything but. The camera is almost constantly panning across the landscape, reflecting this restless time in history, and Meng composes his frames with the precision of a painter. Moments of nostalgia—sun-dappled wheat fields, a popsicle purveyor travelling via bicycle—are undercut by a clear-eyed view of hardscrabble reality. Meng won the Silver Bear for Best Director at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, and I can see why.

Exposition is doled out piecemeal, but you get just enough to understand the dynamics between this multi-generational ensemble of characters. Three of them get an emphasis in the plot: Xu Chuang, a ten-year-old whose parents leave him behind as they set off to Shenzhen in search of more lucrative work, Xiuyang, his young aunt who contends with an unwanted marriage proposal from a wealthy government official, and his great-grandmother, the matriarch of the family who feels increasingly like a relic of the past.

Living the Land doesn’t go as far as to openly criticize the government—various state institutions produced the film—but it is an undeniably discordant portrait of those affected by the changes happening at the turn of the century. (If you want to reach for an easy comparison, think Jia Zhangke script directed by Hou-Hsiao Hsien, with visual inspiration from Millet.) Meng hails from the same province where the film is set and grew up during this time, making this project feel like one of remembrance and reanimation. I sometimes struggle with these kinds of international arthouse movies, but it’s hard to dismiss this as one where nothing happens, because everything is.

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Kontinental ‘25

Opens March 27 in NY at Film Forum, with limited expansion to follow. Adapted from previously published NYFF coverage.

Romanian troubadour Radu Jude has been rather prolific of late, with two of his films having toured last year’s festival circuit. Dracula and Kontinental ‘25 were made in concurrence with each other, with the latter film coming about when Jude felt the need to make a “more down-to-earth film” compared to the maximally bizarre, AI-fuelled Dracula. (I reviewed it last year. It’s a hoot.) Though it was shot using iPhones in just ten days, Kontinental ‘25 doesn’t feel too out of place with his other of-the-moment chronicles of absurdity. It may feel like a retread of his prior works, but I’m not tired of that yet!

This time around, our agent of late capitalism is local bailiff Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), who oversees an eviction of a homeless man that ends in tragedy. Though not legally liable for the outcome, she’s wracked with moral guilt. Through conversations with various people in her life—a co-worker, her mother, a former student, her priest—she attempts to find an ethical framework that can absolve her complicity in enforcing laws that serve capital, not people. It’s quite the crash out.

In a departure from Jude’s usual Bucharest setting, Kontinental ‘25 takes place in Cluj, the commercial center of Transylvania. (This being a natural result of shooting Dracula at the same time.) The most memorable location is Dino Land, an uncanny animatronic Jurassic Park that offers a refuge from the bustling city streets. Perhaps the funniest image in the entire film is of Orsolya kneeling and reciting the Lord’s Prayer while a pterodactyl crows and gesticulates in the background. The Transylvania setting also allows Jude to touch on the active prejudices between Central European ethnicities: Orsolya is a member of the country’s Hungarian minority, and jokes about the vices of Romanians and Hungarians alike are freely volleyed.

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It’s not every day that someone I personally know is listed in the end credits of the movies I watch. So it was a delightful surprise to recognize the caterer for Revelations of Divine Love, which receives its New York theatrical release this weekend at Anthology Film Archives.

Directed by Caroline Golum, the film is about the life and work of Julian of Norwich, a 14th century anchoress whose collection of religious writings (from which the film gets its title) is the earliest surviving book in the English language authored by a woman. Made with just $100,000, it’s a bootstrapped production that nonetheless provides an expansive insight into a proto-feminist figure of medieval Christianity. (I’ll publish my cheeky little review of it very soon.)

A film about spiritual nourishment requires its crew to also be physically nourished. Craft services are an underrated consideration when making a movie—happy bellies beget happy attitudes.

Jenn de la Vega is a chef, cookbook author, and founder of Family Party Catering. (And she’s a big movie buff herself—she co-hosts a podcast called The Cinema Chefs.) Revelations of Divine Love was her first time providing craft services for a feature film, after having worked on a handful of indie shorts and student films. Tasked with serving breakfast and lunch for anywhere between 12 to 25 people for ten shooting days (over the course of five weeks), she resolved to make food that was not only affordable and easy to serve, but also healthy and flavorful.

Based on the menu, I think she succeeded:

I met Jenn earlier this year at my friend Annie’s birthday party/tart potluck1 (also known as a “tarty”). As a semi-amateur chef myself, I had so many questions about what goes into feeding a film set, especially for a scrappy project like this one. There’s a lot more I wanted to know about her work in general; perhaps we’ll have a separate conversation in the future.

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In the Service of Craft

This interview was conducted via email. It has been edited and condensed.

What inspired you to get into craft services?

Crafty is usually an afterthought when it comes to making a film budget. When I was doing some cooking shows for an unnamed culinary TV pilot, I was given McDonald’s and a stale bagel over the course of twelve hours. (Which feels illegal?) I started doing this because any simple food I make would be better than a stale bagel.

I’m also a wedding caterer, so I have an ever-changing inventory and crafty is a great way to use everything up.

How did this particular job come to you?

I am old friends with Caroline Golum, who directed this film. We met when she was curating Cinebeasts screenings circa 2008 in cool, urban places. She is so magnetic and we found ourselves intersecting over the years in creative spaces.

The menu looks incredible. It’s certainly a far cry from the plain meals that Julian and the nuns would eat in the movie. What was your philosophy, both overall and for individual days?

Things you couldn’t get at Dig Inn or Sweetgreen, but still channeled in that format so there was no cross-contamination of allergens or dietary preferences. I rotated a grain, a cooked vegetable, a fresh veg or fruit, protein, and a cool sauce to make lunch bowl buffets. I tried not to repeat items within the same week so it always felt new.

Do you recall any particular dishes being a big hit with the cast and crew?

The harissa chickpeas, adobo pulled pork, and bún chả bowls!

Did you do everything on your own, or were there staffers to assist?

Staffers! Wow, I wish. To keep everything within budget, I did it all myself.

Tell me about your setup for serving these meals. What did you have to work with, and what did you have to bring to the set?

I coordinated with the producer, Kate Stahl. She had already set up a crafty table for all-day snacks and coffee. I came in on the first day with four Sterno set-ups2. Then I packed it away and put it under the table, bringing it back out each day for lunchtime.

I did all the prep and primary cooking off set. I would bring breakfast in the morning at call time, take the subway back home, cook lunch, then take a car back to set. Luckily I live in Greenpoint/East Williamsburg, so the drive was twenty minutes each way to the soundstage in Ridgewood. If there was traffic, I would feel like I ruined everyone’s day being five minutes late, but that was never the case. There was a sense of gratitude every time I was there. Folks were happy to have fresh, hot food.

Caroline did notice toward the end of the shoot that I had stopped frying the tortilla chips myself. You really can taste the love.

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Revelations of Divine Love was your first time doing crafty for a feature production. What did you learn from this experience that carried forward to future gigs?

It’s okay to repeat some dishes from day to day. I didn’t need to be “extra cheffy” and that took a lot of pressure off. I can now pack up better, which makes all the difference for traveling with food. I have better, sturdier gear and figured out how long dishes take me to cook.

I’ve since catered for a larger feature—on location in the woods upstate—and about a dozen indie shorts.

Producing an independent film and running a restaurant—or catering business—share some fundamentals: in particular, the creativity and resourcefulness demanded when working within tight budgets and even tighter deadlines. Were there any nifty ways you stretched your budget?

Catering budgets are absolutely a creative challenge. I often buy in bulk and have a vacuum sealer for saving half a case of pork shoulder, for example, and freezing it for another day. But cold food storage becomes an issue if I buy too much up front. I stock up on various kinds of rice, quinoa, grains, and pasta so that I can mix and match with whatever produce is on sale. And a good sauce can really make a difference. I don’t do too many additions or multiple garnishes—microgreens are expensive!—and keep it simple with either a single fresh herb or crispy fried onions.

For breakfast, I mostly do scrambled eggs because every other preparation takes too long at 4 AM, and I need to be done quickly. I’m often the first one awake, besides the location manager or unit production manager, because I need to be RTS (ready to serve) before most people arrive to set.

Finally, is there anything else we haven’t covered that you’d like to share?

Caroline doesn’t do anything by halves. I walked around the set and could not believe they fit so much in that space. Some of the extras were my friends, so it was cool to feed them, too. I don’t think I ever told them, but I was also on deadline for a cookbook I was working on, so some of the dishes I made during this shoot were inspired by those recipes.

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Now that the Academy Awards have been handed out, we can now turn the page on the 2025 movie year. (Almost: I still haven’t published my own list of the best movies of last year! But I’m almost done putting that together.) The end of Oscars season always sees an onslaught of arthouse releases, and I’ve got quick word on a couple of them below. Both are very very different but happen to center on the unexpected bonds that form within the depths of grief.

I got 18 out of 24 of my predictions correct, with my biggest hit being in Documentary Feature and biggest miss coming from Live Action Short. Owing to a tie, there were two winners in that category and I still managed to pick a loser!

I had 24 of my friends over on Sunday for a watch party, and I placed first in our ballot competition despite not getting the most winners correct. This is because I used a cool Oscars pool website that weighted your score based on Kalshi’s prediction odds1.

While I did not bet any real money on the Academy Awards this year, my friend Jason did. (We spoke about Oscars gambling earlier this year.) He agreed to share the end result of his bets (ahem, “predictions”).

• Action: $8,000

• Implied odds: 53%

• Accuracy: 7 of 12 categories

• Return: $14,000

• Profit: $6,000 (75%)

Compared to last year he did better on profit but worse on accuracy. Jason placed last-minute bets on Stellan Skarsgård and Teyana Taylor, a bad move in retrospect. The sole reason he turned a profit was a prescient bet on Sinners winning Cinematography2, but with a 75% overall return, I don’t think he can be too upset.

I asked Jason what he learned from this year’s outcomes:

There’s no value to betting early aside from grossly mispriced categories (like F1 in Sound). Next year I am going to wait until at most one month beforehand instead of two months. The information gained between then is too valuable and people still don’t really bet well.

I also think the changes to the voting rules, where Academy members must affirm they saw every film in a given category, makes copycatting the results of precursor awards like SAG more prevalent—we saw that with acting, so momentum becomes even more important.

He also gave me this nugget:

My mad man of a friend trusts me too much and put $1,000 down on Sentimental Value winning International Film and Sinners in Cinematography. Safe to say he’s happy. But he’s a fiend. During the show, he wanted to put all the winnings back on Sinners for Best Picture and I had to tell him not to.

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Dead Lover

Opens March 20 in NY at IFC Center, March 26 in Los Angeles, and more markets in April.

A couple days ago I watched Wuthering Heights. Not the one from Emerald Fennell, which I saw opening weekend and feel no particular desire to revisit. Rather, it was a Japanese adaptation from 1988, directed by Yoshishige Yoshida. What sets this version apart from the dozens of other Wutherings is that it pushes the source material’s psychosexual subtext to previously unseen extremities. The novel has an infamous scene where Heathcliff digs up Catherine’s grave and gazes at her still-intact face. (This comes from the second half of the book, which is omitted from almost every adaptation.) But this movie goes further: fully insane, he takes the coffin home with him and plans to fulfill his carnal desires with her corpse. It becomes his undoing.

The protagonist of Dead Lover, an unnamed Gravedigger, is similarly desperate to once again be with her, ahem, dead lover. Fortunately, she need not stoop to full-on necrophilia. Taking after a different classic of Gothic literature (that also got a new Hollywood adaptation starring Jacob Elordi), she attempts to resurrect him through a series of alchemic experiments.

That’s a lot of effort to exert on a man, but there’s a good reason. On account of her profession, Gravedigger has such a foul odor that no one wants to be near her. This really dampens her romantic prospects, until one day she meets someone who is turned on by her smell. Thus begins a passionate love affair, one that cruelly ends when the Lover perishes in a shipwreck. All that’s left of him is a severed finger, which Gravedigger manages to re-animate with the help of reptile blood. You can do a lot with one finger, but she resolves to give him a full body. Needless to say, the consequences are unintended.

Dead Lover is the sophomore feature from Grace Glowicki, who wrote, directed, and starred. In front of the camera, she gives her Gravedigger a frantic energy and a spirited Cockney accent, seemingly inspired by Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd and/or Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Behind the camera, she gives her film an utterly distinct aesthetic sensibility. The sets were constructed on a black box soundstage; with characters lit by spotlights against a pitch dark background, everyone and everything is enshrouded in a permanent nightfall. The grainy cinematography (shot by Rhayne Vermette on 16mm film stock) evokes both DIY experimentalism and German expressionism, while prog pop compositions from U.S. Girls amp up the gonzo mood. Further adding to the homespun nature of the project, every member of the four-person cast, with the exception of Glowicki, inhabits multiple roles. Handmade and heartfelt, Dead Lover is a cult curio about love, loss, and the unlikely connections made in the bleakest of moments.

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Tasting Notes

Attendees at this weekend’s Q&A events in New York (or next weekend in LA) will be treated to special “Stink-o-Vision” presentations of Dead Lover. They’ll get a scratch-and-sniff card to use throughout the movie. Having watched this at home, I missed out on that olfactory experience. Perhaps I could have re-created Gravedigger’s stench by slicing a durian fruit or popping open a tin of surströmming, that infamous Swedish pickled herring, and then pressing my face into a bed of dirt.

There are certain foods known for having off-putting smells, and certain people who are more sensitive to them than others. I have a friend who can’t be in the same room as blue cheese. But to paraphrase viral academic Ally Louks, there is a politics to smell. The scent of kimchi is revolting to some. For others, it’s culture3.

Further Reading: Marissa Goldman interviewed Glowicki about this movie for Nothing Bogus, a Substack devoted to independent filmmaking. And on page 24 of 4R Press’s Shocking Summer zine (PDF), you can find a conversation about Dead Lover between Skinny Wicky and Relby Raw, which I assume are pseudonyms.

Miroirs No. 3

Opens March 20 in NY & LA. Adapted from previously published NYFF coverage.

After surviving a deadly car crash with barely a scratch, conservatory student Laura (Paula Beer) convalesces in the isolated home of Betty (Barbara Auer), who witnessed the accident. The crash killed Laura’s boyfriend, but if she’s grieving, she doesn’t make it known. An encounter with Betty’s estranged husband and son reveals that they too are also dealing with loss in their own strange way.

At this point, enough critics have pushed back on an initial dismissal that this new film from Christian Petzold is a minor work. It’s now considered to be at least medium tier. The title provides the key of how to view this film: as one movement in a larger series. (Though this is Paula Beer’s fourth time starring in a Petzold movie, not the third, and to be fair, the Ravel composition that gives this film its title was written in F# minor.) Miroirs No. 3 does feel a lot like a short story: it’s diversionary and fleet, but satisfying just the same. Features a typically German sense of humor, as dry as the rieslings consumed at the dinner table.

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Tasting Notes: Laura’s specialty in the kitchen are Königsberger Dumplings, and the family makes a plum cake using fruit plucked by the river. It was made with yeast dough but Betty’s son prefers shortcrust pastry.

How’s this for movie marketing: This weekend sees the release of two NYFF selections: Miroirs No. 3 and Dry Leaf. Screenslate is hosting a “cinema showdown” between the two filmmakers: a friendly football (soccer) match on the West Side of Manhattan. It goes down tomorrow (March 21) and is open to the public.

I’m hosting a watch party and I’m making some movie-themed snacks:

• Pão de queijo (The Secret Agent)

• Black hummus & muhammara with pita chips & crudité (Avatar: Fire and Ash)

• Tortilla chips & salsa verde (One Battle After Another)

• Popcorn (obviously)

Some friends and I also concocted some custom movie-themed cocktails, which I’m excited to serve. For mains, I’ll be ordering Domino’s. (I think we can tie this one to If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, especially if I rip the layer of cheese off the pie.)

It’s probably a little late, but this is my big list of food & drink ideas if you need inspo for tonight:

Final Oscars Predictions

Unsurprisingly I’ve changed some of my picks and adjusted confidence ratings since nominations were announced January 22. I think this table should be easy to parse:

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What My Dinner Party Guests Thought of This Year’s Contenders

As I introduced each dish during my ten-course Oscars dinner, I polled everyone at the table about their thoughts on Best Picture race.

First, here’s what was the most watched:

So this was a decently well-informed crew! I asked people to see at least five of the nominees in advance of the dinner. But like the real Academy, there was no way to truly enforce this and a couple people were really just there to enjoy the food. (Which is very nice!)

I also asked everyone to go around and name what they think will win, their favorite, and their villain. Here are those results:

A couple people offered bonus villains, including but not limited to:

• Timothée Chalamet’s press tour

• Gracie Abrams, for taking Paul Mescal off the market

• Diane Warren

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for not giving any nominations to No Other Choice

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Short Words on the Shorts

I had planned to do a full review of the Oscar-nominated short films but it fell by the wayside. So here are my quick hits. If you haven’t seen them yet, you got some time to squeeze them in! Links take you to the film if they’re freely available on YouTube/Vimeo.

In terms of predictions, I believe it was the Times’s Kyle Buchanan who said that he just imagines what the most basic Academy voter would choose in these categories, and predict that.

Animated

Pretty typical mix of nominees, with old-school styles staking out a contrast to 3D animation. The ascendance of French animation has been apparent to anyone following this category: Butterfly is generally considered to be the “best” of this year’s bunch, with impressionistic painting telling the story of an Algerian Jewish swimmer whose life takes him from contending at the Olympics to surviving Auschwitz.

(Canada and Ireland have also invested in independent animation, and it shows here. Meanwhile, Disney/Pixar have been MIA since the 2020 film year.)

But it’s the simplest film, Retirement Plan, that tugged at my heartstrings the most. Domhnall Gleeson narrates a “when I retire, I will…” essay that will hit home for anyone whose plans for life have been postponed by an obligation to work. And that’s why I think it’ll win.

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Live Action

This crop of nominees breaks a recent precedent: not a single one involves a child in peril. We’ve come a long way from 2019. I remember seeing that package in a theater and it was so funny to witness the audience (myself included) become openly hostile to what we were seeing on screen. We even have an SNL-style comedy sketch, Jane Austen’s Period Drama, in the mix!

Commonalities emerge between various pairs of the live action short contenders: performing arts as a vital form of personal expression, chafing under societal repression, and punny titles.

Two People Exchanging Saliva seems to be the fan favorite, at least on the internet, and for good reason. In a dystopic world where physical intimacy is outlawed, a saleswoman at a Paris magasin forms an illicit connection with one of her customers. Black and white, French, sapphic—this is a So Sad So Sexy vibe. The maid from Portrait of a Lady on Fire stars in it and the dystopic world is fully realized.

I liked that one a lot, but my personal favorite has to be The Singers (on Netflix). In a gruff dive bar, an impromptu singing competition breaks out, with $100 and a case of beer on the line. As someone who advocates for the life changing magic of pouring your heart and soul into karaoke, this was firmly made for me. Knowing the background of its making makes it even easier to appreciate. That guy who went viral for singing “Unchained Melody” at the subway station? He stars in this, as do similar male singers who were briefly famous on the internet. And the music supervision... how the heck did they get the rights to all these songs??

Hewing to the “basic means best” heuristic, I think the winner tonight will be A Friend of Dorothy, which I found to be treacly. Won’t hurt that it has the British star power of Miriam Margolyes (the titular Dorothy) and Stephen Fry (a friend of Dorothy, to be sure, but not the friend referred to in the title).

Documentary Short Subject

The Documentary Branch of the Academy has a type. They prefer works that highlight social issues around the world while demonstrating little tolerance for experimental fare. Of the three short film categories, this was the biggest slog to get through.

I don’t really have a favorite in this category. To that end, the most tolerable were The Devil is Busy (on HBO Max) and All the Empty Rooms (on Netflix) because their artistic simplicity is outweighed by topical salience. (They are about an abortion clinic in Georgia and the victims of school shootings, respectively.) I think All the Empty Rooms will win tonight, given the combination of Netflix backing, the subject being a well-known CBS News anchor, and the inarguable activism on display. But Geeta Gandbhir has the potential to win two Oscars tonight: one for her feature The Perfect Neighbor and another for co-directing The Devil is Busy.

Throughout the past few years, there has been a nominee in this category that can also be described as an avant-garde nature documentary (One such short, Nuisance Bear, was expanded to feature length. It just premiered at this year’s Sundance.) Perfectly a Strangeness (on The Criterion Channel) gets points just for being different from the other four nominees: it’s a wordless, plotless story that follows a trio of donkeys in the Atacama Desert. Think EO except nothing bad happens. (Thankfully!) Beautiful imagery, but I found the throughline to be lacking.

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Further Oscars Reading

• When COVID Almost Canceled the Oscars: An Oral History of a Most Surreal Night by Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter

  • Really great reporting, plus a reveal of the speech Chadwick Boseman’s widow would have given, had he won that posthumous Best Actor award.

• Pulling Bolts Out of the Ferris Wheel by A. S. Hamrah, n+1

  • This just got published this morning so I haven’t read it yet, but A. S. Hamrah’s annual criticism of Oscar movies is always essential reading.

• He’ll Scan Your Ticket and Offer Commentary on the Movie You’re About to See at AMC Lincoln Square by Caitlin Kitson, West Side Rag

  • Not actually about awards, but if you’ve ever had your ticket scanned by Jeffry at the AMC Lincoln Square, you know he deserves an Oscar for Best Cinema Usher.

With the 98th Academy Awards just around the corner, here are food and drink pairings for some of this year’s nominated movies and short films! Whether you’re hosting a watch party for a crowd or settling into the couch by yourself, it’s not too late to put these ideas into action. (Though I recognize this would have been more helpful a week ago.)

Most of these ideas came about as I was brainstorming for my ten-course Oscars dinner party. In case you missed it, here’s my recap of how that all went down:

Best Picture Nominees

Bugonia

At my Oscars dinner party, I served a custom-made ice cream made with buckwheat honey. If you have an ice cream maker, David Lebovitz has a good recipe for this. And if you don’t, Van Leeuwen sells a honeycomb ice cream, which sounds great—but there’s no honey in it. (Rather, honeycomb toffee is mixed in.) I was at the grocery store the other day and saw other brands selling different forms of ice cream made with real honey, usually with berries.

The characters of Bugonia didn’t eat anything nearly as sweet. Jessie Plemons was microwaving frozen meals, guzzling Coca-Cola, and slicing Pepperidge Farm coconut layer cakes. The tense dinner table faceoff with Emma Stone occurs over spaghetti and meatballs.

To drink: The Bee Sting is a classic, and this Honeysuckle cocktail is a solid daiquiri riff. Use hot honey in the syrup to make it just as spicy as Yorgos Lanthimos.

F1

So I don’t think we actually see anyone eat during this movie. But you can match the luxury nature of Formula One and load up on caviar. This is your opportunity to pretend you’re an oligarch. Here’s a guide on buying and serving sturgeon roe; my favorite way to eat it is with potato chips and crème fraîche. Or just do caviar bumps for true high-low decadence.

To drink: The official champagne of Formula One is Moët, but previous sponsor Ferrari Trento (no relation to the auto manufacturer) still has their specially-branded F1 bubbly floating around at certain wine shops.

Ferrari is also the name of a classic shooter, made with equal parts Fernet and Campari. American F1 drivers are uncommon (there aren’t any currently competing), which makes Brad Pitt an anomaly. You could make a Ferrari “Americano” using domestically produced alternatives. I’m partial to Faccia Brutto’s Fernet Pianta and Aperitivo.

This is also a great opportunity for a mocktail. I don’t have any specific ideas but whatever you come up with, call it the Designated Driver.

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Frankenstein

The Turduckenstein I prepared for my dinner party was extremely fitting. If you wanna try this at home, I just published the method. It’s a bit of a project!

To drink: Gothic and dark are the key words. Brandy or absinthe would be a great match. A classic cocktail with the perfect name does exist: Corpse Reviver No. 2.

If you want to go chaotic, you could Frankenstein something by pouring a bunch of different spirits and liqueurs and juices together. (This is sometimes known as Jungle Juice.) If the constituent parts have different specific gravities, your glass would have an interesting/horrifying layer of fluids.

Hamnet

You can go punny here and serve a big ham. Or lean into the rural English forest vibes: apples and mushrooms and nettles are suitable. If you want to simulate the experience of living in 16th century Stratford-upon-Avon, perhaps a Jessie Buckwheat porridge.

To drink: A Witch’s Brew of some kind would be great: perhaps spiced cider spiked with London dry gin. (This has the benefit of being easy to serve at a party if you have a crock pot.)

Marty Supreme

Like the actor who plays him, Marty Mauser is a Jewish kid from Manhattan. He wants to be the best ping pong—sorry, table tennis—player in the world. He’ll do whatever it takes to get to Tokyo, where his biggest nemesis awaits. Inspired by this cross-cultural connection, I looked up the menu at Shalom Japan, a Jewish-Japanese fusion restaurant in Williamsburg.

For my own dinner, I made their okonomi-latke, topped with ikura to represent Marty’s orange ping pong balls. Some of their other recipes have been published online, including the matzah ball ramen and lox chirashi and would be show-stopping dishes.

Other ideas I had for my dinner party but didn’t use: a sweet potato korokke coated in Cheeto crumbs, orange sorbet (scooped in ping pong ball size), or orange mochi. Clearly, the color orange was on my mind.

But if you want something really easy, mandarins or a box of Wheaties are equally on theme.

To drink: Martini Supreme, however you want to prepare it. Garnish with an orange ping pong ball, or if you wanna get fancy, carefully place a droplet of vegetable oil on top of the martini, then a droplet of St. Germain or dry curaçao on top of the oil (any orange-colored liqueur will do). Then you have a little orange sphere floating on your drink!

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One Battle After Another

Carne asada is the way to go.

To drink: This is a great movie to build a drink menu around. A few small beers is easy: pick up a case of Modelo cans and you’ll be driving like Sensei in no time.

The French 75 is another easy reference. If you want to lean into the California of it all, use St. George Terroir Gin, which has strong notes of fir, bay laurel, and fennel.

And if it’s cold wherever you live, serve eggnog with a candy cane and call it the Christmas Adventurer’s Club. I am a huge fan of Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s tequila-sherry eggnog, but you can use your fave recipe.

The Secret Agent

Pão de queijo is a natural fit for this film, which has similarly become the pride of its nation. Anything Brazilian is a fit here, especially pastéis de bacalhau, which we briefly see two hitmen snack on upon arrival in Recife.

To drink: Is a Caipirinha too on the nose? I don’t think anyone is complaining!

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Sentimental Value

A refined Norwegian film deserves an equally refined Norwegian dish: smørbrød. (The Danish spelling, smørrebrød, is more familiar to most.) Bake or buy a loaf of authentically dense rye bread, then smear (smør) each slice with butter. One popular assortment of toppings would be gravlax, cucumber, pickled ramps, lemon zest, and dill. But the sky’s the limit!

As an alternative, prepare a cheese plate with knekkebrød, a crispy rye cracker.

To drink: Stellan Skarsgård drinks a lot of whiskey in this movie. (I’m guessing it’s scotch.) If dark liquor ain’t your thing, Phil Ward of Long Island Bar workshopped a Nordic Gibsonfor Robert Simonson: “made partly with aquavit and garnished with a cocktail onion and a celery ribbon.”

Sinners

Perhaps the most obvious (and delicious) food pairing among all the Best Picture nominees is the fried catfish and collard greens served at the juke joint’s opening night. To be authentically Southern, bread the fish in cornmeal and braise the collards with plenty of smoked ham hocks. Ward off the vampires with garlic aioli and hot sauce.

To drink: “We got whisky, Irish beer, Italian wine.” You can also riff on the La Louisiane, offering two half-pours that swap out the spirit: one with a smooth rye, the other with Laphroaig or other peated scotch. Call it the Smoke & Stack.

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Train Dreams

I was really satisfied with the Bûche de Joël served at my dinner party. (Joel Edgerton plays a logger. Get it??) Another idea I strongly considered was porchetta, which is similarly log-shaped and rustic. Serve that with morel mushrooms and salad to round out the meal.

To drink: If there was ever a movie that would pair with an Old Fashioned, this is it. Drop in some hinoki bitters. If you need a whiskey rec, Woodinville bourbon is distilled in Washington, where the film was shot, and it’s decent. Personally I preferred the Redwood Empire Pipe Dream, which was too perfect a name to pass up. (I conducted a taste test and people’s favorite was split down the middle.)

Faccia Brutto created a Manhattan riff called the Sawtooth, which uses their Amaro Alpino in place of vermouth. (If you can’t access their products wherever you are, another alpine amaro should suffice. Try Alta Verde or Braulio.) To say it is spirit-forward is an understatement; this is a compliment.

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Other Nominated Films

Although these didn’t make the Best Picture cut, I dare say some of the food and drink ideas here are much better. (Just like the films, in some cases.)

Arco

Skittles: taste the rainbow.

To drink: Make it a party with Skittle shots, which I used to drink a lot back in college. Oof.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Make a fiery red muhammara. Make hummus with black chickpeas and black sesame tahini. Swirl the two together on a plate. Boom. Fire and Ash. I’ll be making this for my watch party on Sunday. Seared squid optional!

Blue Moon

To drink: By my count, Ethan Hawke drinks six neat pours of bourbon in this movie (which takes place over the course of a couple hours). The label of the well whiskey reads “Old Frontier Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey,” which is not a real brand. But the design combines elements of Old Forester and Bulleit. (Personally I prefer Bulleit but both are great choices.)

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

To drink: To re-create the Rose Byrne Experience—chug a bottle of white wine, smoke a bunch of weed, and get nightmarishly cross-faded. The film is set in Montauk, and Long Island makes some wines that are good and affordable. Channing Daughters is a reliable winery, and I really love Paumanok’s Chenin Blanc.

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It Was Just an Accident

Persian pastries, of course! In New York City, Sofreh Cafe would be your best option unless you can venture out to Jersey. (If anyone coming to my watch party is reading this and you bring a box of goodies from Sofreh Cafe you will have my undying loyalty.)

To drink: Back Home Beer is a Brooklyn-based brewery inspired by the founder’s Iranian roots.

Kokuho

To drink: The title translates to “National Treasure” so you gotta pair it with some good sake.

KPop Demon Hunters

This is a layup, because the Huntr/x ladies love their Korean snacks. The official branded Shin Ramyum is a good start, and Netflix published a full accounting of the food featured in the movie. You could make a terrific spread just based on this movie. Wash it all down with a little soda pop.

To drink: Soju and makgeolli, of course.

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

Amélie is awakened by the taste of Belgian white chocolate, and beyond that there’s a few cooking scenes! Nishio-san, the housemaid, prepares a tasty-looking okonomiyaki. But in one scene, food serves as a metaphor for the fraught relationship between West and East. A curious Amélie asks Nishio, “raconte-moi la guerre.” While making a pot of curry (a dish introduced by the British), Nishio recalls the firebombings dropped on her village, represented by chunks of carrots falling into a stew. A pot of rice overboiling, slicing the head off a mackerel: all of it recalls painful memories, but it is also a mark of resilience.

Sirât

Ketamine.

The Alabama Solution

To drink: Dave Baxter at Vintertainment proposed some wine pairings for this documentary, including a street legal "prison wine."

The Lost Bus

To drink: For this dramatization of the 2018 Camp Fire in NorCal, grab a vintage of the same year from nearby Napa or Sonoma. Wildfires can affect the grapes, giving them a “smoke taint” that some find off-putting. It’s a real concern for winemakers in impacted regions.

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The Smashing Machine

To drink: I never got around to creating one, but “The Smashing Machine” would be a great name for a cocktail. Find a way to make the Whiskey Smash your own. Maybe use The Rock’s tequila brand?

Weapons

Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and way too many hot dogs.

To drink: “Vodka soda. Garnished with lime, obviously” is a note I wrote down but I genuinely do not remember why.

Zootopia 2

Donuts and animal crackers.

To drink: An alcohol pairing for a kid’s movie feels inappropriate.

A Friend of Dorothy (Short Film)

Del Monte canned prunes, but I’m not sure why you’d want to eat this. Unless you are also an elderly Englishwoman named Dorothy.

The Singers (Short Film)

To drink: A domestic macro lager that you knock back before unleashing a killer cover of “Amazing Grace.”

Two People Exchanging Saliva (Short Film)

To drink: Chicha beer is an ancient Andean beer brewed from masticated maize. (That’s a fancy word for “chewed up and spit out.”) Egyptian mint tea would be a great non-alcoholic sipper.

Perhaps the biggest showstopper during my ten-course Oscars dinner was what I deemed the “Turduckenstein.” It’s an assemblage of chicken, duck, and turkey, organized in the shape of the perfect creature. It is not the most optimal way to serve roasted poultry, but it looks pretty damn cool.

The dish was conceived of as a pairing with Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein, which was a Best Picture nominee, but it would be right at home with any horror or gothic-themed dinner party.

It’s fairly easy to recreate if you’re experienced with roasting poultry, but it is time consuming to put everything together. For expediency, I won’t describe all the nitty-gritty; for additional context, I’ve linked to various sources throughout the instructions. (If you haven’t broken down and roasted whole poultry before, please get some reps in before putting this on your dinner menu.)

If you actually make this at any point, please send me photos!

I tried to use Substack’s new native recipe editor but it doesn’t allow for links within the instructions, and formatting options are limited, which makes it pretty useless for this specific case.

Recipe: Turduckenstein

Makes two creatures, which should be enough to feed 10-12 people as a main.

Equipment

• 2 half-sheet pans and wire racks

• A very sharp knife for slicing

• Poultry shears

• Meat thermometer

• Sauté pan or skillet

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken (Ideally with head and feet attached. You will find this in your local Chinatown supermarket.)

• 1 whole duck (Ideally with head and feet attached. Alternatively, buy two duck breasts and two confited duck legs.)

• 2 turkey wings (Ideally cut into 3-inch pieces, but whole wings are fine.)

• 2 yellow or white onions

• 2-3 oranges of any kind (blood oranges would be cool)

• Salt

• Olive oil

• Optional: microgreens (I like Farm One’s micro mustard greens.)

For the Cumberland sauce:

• 1 orange

• 1 lemon

• 1 cup Ruby port

• 1 12 oz jar of red currant jelly

• Dijon mustard

• Ground ginger

Plus:

• Additional ingredients for duck leg confit, depending on which method you choose. (See below.)

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Method

The day before

• Break down the duck and chicken

  • Use poultry shears to separate the necks and feet from the carcass.

  • Then butcher into six parts: two each of the legs, breast halves (bone-in), and wings.

  • Hold on to the meaty giblets, such as heart and gizzard, as you’ll use them in the confit. Save the liver, backbones, and fat trimmings for other uses. (Duck chicharróns are incredible.)

• Start the process for the counterfeit confit, which begins with an overnight “cure.” Do this to the duck legs and any meaty chicken/duck giblets (such as heart or gizzard.)

  • If you have the time you can do a proper duck leg confit or sous vide faux-confit, but note this takes a few days.

The morning of

• Follow the counterfeit confit instructions to slow roast your duck legs, wings, and meaty offal. This will take a few hours.

• Dry brine the chicken parts, duck wings, turkey wings, heads, and feet:

  • Set a wire rack in a half-sheet pan, then place the aforementioned poultry parts on the rack. Scatter a generous amount of salt all around the meat. (You can use a calculator if you really want to but don’t overthink this.)

  • Place the pan in the fridge, uncovered. Let it hang out for at least four hours, up to twelve hours.

• Score the duck breasts, following Step 1 of these instructions. Put the breasts in a container and stash in the fridge.

• This is a good time to make the Cumberland sauce, but you can and should do this further in advance so you have fewer things to do today.

To evening you are serving this

• Preheat your oven to 425ºF with a rack set on the top-third. Let the dry-brined poultry parts sit on the counter for 45-60 minutes so they can come up to temp.

• Meanwhile, prepare your sheet pan

  • Slice your onions into thick slices, about 1.5 inches wide. Toss some olive oil on a sheet pan and then scatter the onions everywhere, then place a wire rack on top of the onions

  • Slice the oranges into rounds and place them on top of the wire rack.

  • On top of each citrus slice, place the poultry parts, except for the chicken breast.

  • Drizzle everything with olive oil.

• Roast the poultry parts

  • Place the sheet pan in the oven, on the top-third rack.

  • Take the confited duck legs & giblets out of the fridge so they can warm up a bit.

  • After 20 minutes, take out the sheet pan. Flip the turkey wings over, drizzle with olive oil, and rotate the pan.

  • Set more citrus slices on the wire rack if you have any, then place your reserved chicken breast halves on them. Do the same with the confited duck legs, and duck wings. (If you’re out of orange slices, that’s fine, just place directly on the wire rack.) Drizzle these with olive oil.

  • Place the sheet pan back in the oven.

  • After 15 minutes, take out the pan and place the confited giblets, if using, on the wire rack as well.

  • Start checking the internal temperatures of each piece. The desired targets are below. If anything hits the target before the other pieces, remove them from the oven, set them on a cutting board, and loosely tent with foil. The entire roast should take roughly 45-60 minutes, but follow temperature, not timing.

    • Turkey/duck/chicken wings: 170F

    • Chicken breast: 155F

    • Chicken legs: 195F

    • (The duck legs are already fully cooked, so we’re just looking to warm them up and brown the skin. If needed, you can get a better crisp using a broiler or butane torch.)

  • Ensure everything rests for at least ten minutes.

• Cook the duck breast

  • After the giblets go in the oven, you should start cooking the duck breast on the stovetop. Follow these instructions from Steps 2-4.

  • If you nail the timings, this should be done roughly around the same time as the roasted poultry is finished and they can all rest together.

• Warm the sauce

  • Meanwhile, warm up your Cumberland sauce on the stovetop, covered, over low heat.

Assemble your creature

• Carve chicken breast halves from the bone.

• Slice the chicken and duck breast.

• Scatter the onions, now lusciously roasted in chicken fat, on a large serving board.

• Place breast and legs on the board in a mismatched fashion. For example, if your chicken breast is on the left, place a duck leg underneath it.

• Piece everything else—wings, offal, head, feet—together in a somewhat artful way.

  • I like to place the heart and gizzards in anatomically correct locations, hiding underneath the breast slices. Slide an orange slice inside the beak for some flair.

• Optional garnishes: scatter microgreens and the roasted orange slices around the Turduckenstein.

• Set on the table, with the warmed Cumberland sauce on the side.

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The clocks sprung forward by an hour on Sunday, marking the end of a miserable season. I refer, of course, to awards season. It also happened to be the day I wrapped up this year’s edition of my Oscars dinner.

To celebrate the 98th Academy Awards, I created a menu where each of the ten Best Picture nominees received a thematic food pairing. I’ve done this for five years and counting, and it’s always the biggest event I host. The hours spent brainstorming, budgeting, prepping, and serving this culinary celebration of cinema is a lot of work, but it’s always worth it when I get to the end of the night and I see the looks of satisfaction on my guests.

And it’s so nice, I did it thrice! I usually do two dinners but this year I did a third Encore service. There were 38 guests in total.

Before diving in, I want to give a big thanks to the team that made this event possible. Aaron was by my side for all three nights as sous chef. Eric, Aeron, and Olivia each served as service assistants for a night. They kept the dishes clean and ensured plating was pretty. Byron and Aaron devised the non-traditional wine pairings. Desserts were made by Dan and Karen. None of this happens without them.

Cocktail Hour

The evening began with a cocktail reception, where we served two specially crafted drinks. Aaron came up with the Carnaval do Marcelo to go with The Secret Agent: a black tea-infused whiskey sour sweetened with hot honey and guava. That was a huge hit, as was a fizzy French 75 riff in honor of One Battle After Another. It used St. George Terroir Gin, with strong fir and fennel notes reminiscent of a redwood forest. We called it the California 75.

Those wanting something simpler could opt for a few small beers.

While guests sipped their drinks and shared their movie takes, I passed around the first dish of the night!

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Pão de Queijo (The Secret Agent)

Fermented manioc starch. Minas cheese. Guava paste.

Brazil’s famous cheese bread was a natural fit for this film, which has similarly become the pride of a nation. Inspired by John Carlo’s pan de bono from a previous dinner collaboration, I placed a cube of goiabada inside each bun. We also passed around Romeu e Julieta skewers.

I followed Sohla El-Waylly’s recipe in Serious Eats, but used real-deal Brazilian ingredients purchased from the aptly-named Brazilian Market NYC.

Champagne & Caviar (F1)

Osetra Classic. Buckwheat blini. Crème fraîche.

On the morning that the Oscar nominees were announced, three different people texted to ask what I would do about F1. It wasn’t obvious at first, but I then thought of Kate Wagner’s infamous exposé about the wealth and power embedded in this sport.

Why not, for a moment, pretend we are oligarchs too?

I have to give special thanks to the Great Blizzard of ‘26, because the caviar vendor I had in mind did a one-day flash sale: 50% off anything and everything. Shoutout to Number One Caviar for this insane deal.

Originally I was going to serve 125 grams at each dinner, enough to give each person a couple blini. But now that my caviar budget (lol) was worth twice as much, I had to decide between upgrading the quality or doubling the quantity.

You can guess what I chose…

Wine pairings:

• Ferrari Trento F1 - ® Limited Edition ‘Miami’

  • The winemaker has no relation to the car brand, but for a few years this was the official sparkling wine of F1. (It is once again Moët.) Being made in Italy, it is not champagne, but alliteration outweighed accuracy and the branded bottle was fun to pass around. The bubbly was a little sweet and honestly not the best pairing with caviar. But again, branding!

• Delacroix, Brut Blanc des Blancs

  • This is my go-to sparkler. Dry, crisp, and it’s only $12 a pop.

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Okonomi-Latke (Marty Supreme)

Potato hash. Cabbage. Bean sprouts. Ikura. Bonito flakes.

Like the actor who plays him, Marty Mauser is a Jewish kid from Manhattan. He wants to be the best ping pong—sorry, table tennis—player in the world. He’ll do whatever it takes to get to Tokyo, where his biggest nemesis awaits. Inspired by this cross-cultural connection, I looked up the menu at Shalom Japan, a Jewish-Japanese fusion restaurant in Williamsburg. Their okonomi-latke is an occasional special, and the recipe was published in the Times which was rather convenient. (I have a lot of notes because the recipe wasn’t tested well, as the comments pointed out1.) That the ikura resembles the now-iconic orange ping pong balls in the film was merely a bonus.

A critic friend gave me a few dozen official Marty Supreme™ ping pong balls, so I gave them out as a party favor.

Wine pairing:

• Orange Pét-Nat, Vinha da Malhada - 2023

  • Gotta match the color of the movie’s marketing! Slightly acidic and decently aromatic, it was a good transition from the sparkling white wine from the prior course and meshed well with this fried cabbage and potato pancake.

Smørbrød (Sentimental Value)

Rugbrød. Acme Royal Cut Smoked Salmon. Pickled ramps.

A refined Norwegian film deserves an equally refined Norwegian dish. I baked a loaf of authentically dense rye bread, with each slice smeared (smørred) with butter and topped with Acme’s smoked salmon (shoutout to Fish Friday!), cucumber, pickled ramps, lemon zest, and dill.

Wine pairing:

• Florèz Edelzwicker - 2023

  • I’m a big fan of what James Jelks is doing at his winery2. His spin on the archetypal Alsatian blend was a punchy counterpoint to the earthy rugbrød, with a brightness that matched well with the citrus and pickle flavors.

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Fried Catfish (Sinners)

With braised collards, hot sauce, black garlic aioli.

Although the planning doesn’t happen until the weeks leading up to the dinner, brainstorming is a yearlong concern. Every time I watch a movie I take note of any prominent food or drink scenes, just in case they emerge as an Oscar contender. Smoke and Stack serve fried catfish at their juke joint opening, so the choice for the Sinners dish was obvious.

Each piece of fish was dipped in buttermilk laced with Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco (crucially, it was not marinated!), breaded in cornmeal, then fried in a cast iron pan. Collards were stewed with a generous amount of smoked ham hocks, and to ward off the vampires, I made a black garlic aioli to be used as a dip.

Big ups to Aaron for holding down on the fish fry! I turned this course over to him and he knocked it out of the park.

Wine pairing:

• Partida Creus VN Vinel-Lo - 2022

  • A chilled light red blend, showcasing trepat, a grape native to Catalunya. The producers are an Italian couple who set up shop in Pendès. This kind of viticultural immigration is rather, well, foreign but the product speaks for itself. This wine was by far the crowd favorite.

Carne Asada Taco (One Battle After Another)

With avocado, radish, salsa verde. Charred scallion and lime on the side, obviously.

Another easy choice. Like the film, this course is a tribute to California’s dusty border towns and arid Central Valley highways. Bavette and/or flank steaks (depending on what the butcher had each week) were marinated for roughly six hours before searing to medium doneness. (Less cooked and it’s too chewy, which we learned the hard way on the first night.) This was the toughest course to execute: while the steak cooks, I’m warming up the tortillas. Meanwhile my sous and assistant are setting up all the toppings so that we can quickly assemble a dozen tacos at the same time.

California Mexican cuisine usually favors flour tortillas, ideally made with lard. The problem is that it’s exceptionally hard to get such tortillas in these parts. I tried making some from scratch and my test batch didn’t work out at all. While I’m pretty good at getting up to speed on new techniques, I didn’t think I could master this in one week so I went with store-bought corn tortillas, which are more reliable to work with.

This choice of grain was the only compromise. I’m especially impressed with how the carne asada turned out; the recipe I linked above is a keeper.

Wine pairings: These Mexican reds come from Baja California, a wine region close to the border.

• Bichi “Listán” - 2023

  • Funky, acidic, and smoky. We were concerned it would be a little too out there but people went nuts for it. Listán Negro is quickly becoming one of my favorite grapes.

• L.A. Cetto, Petite Sirah 2022 & Casa Jipi, Nebbiolo 2023

  • There was a bit of a break between the tacos and the next course, a prime opportunity to open a second bottle. (Each night got one of these two options.) Both are lighter than the Listán Negro, perfect for sipping while the flavors of the carne asada lingered. The Nebbiolo was an especially big hit.

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Mushrooms & Maple Glazed Vegetables (Hamnet)

Mushroom medley. Carrots. Cabbage.

Took inspiration from Agnes’s forest witch vibes.

A mix of fungi, including maitake (aka hen of the woods) and foraged hedgehog and yellowfoot chanterelles, were sautéed in ghee3 and served alongside carrots and cabbages roasted with a maple (ham) glaze.

During this course, guests mused on the nature of daylight and argued the virtues (or lack thereof) of Chloé Zhao’s film. It got especially spicy during the Encore dinner.

Turduckenstein (Frankenstein)

With Cumberland sauce.

That’s right—three different birds, pieced together to form the perfect poultry. Half a duck, half a chicken, turkey wings, with heart and gizzards tucked underneath. The turkey and chicken parts were roasted, while the duck breast was seared and duck leg confited. Head and feet were essential for presentation, so I went to Chinatown for some meat shopping. The duck I got wasn’t eviscerated, and it was my first time encountering this. It was fun to pull out the entrails and maybe I should have saved them for display.

If you want to try this at home, here’s the method:

In a nod to the novel’s 19th century English origins, the Turduckenstein was served with Cumberland sauce, which is made from red currant jelly, ruby port, and citrus. It also happens to look like blood. Though this sweet, glazey sauce is typically served with Christmas ham, it worked wonders with the poultry, especially when set against crunchy and spicy mustard microgreens from Farm One.

Wine pairing:

• Abbots Table, Owen Roe 2022

  • A delightfully sanguineous bottle to round out the night’s wine pairings. A mix of Zinfandel, Cab Franc, and Cab Sauv from Washington’s Columbia Valley. Fortunately it was an elegant blend, not a Frankensteined one! The label evokes the eras of both Shakespeare and Mary Shelley.

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One Caviar Bump After Another

“Guys, we have too much caviar.” Something had to be done.

Before transitioning from savory to sweet, we all got a big hit of buttery brine.

As I quenelled the glistening Osetra onto the back of everyone’s hands, one person remarked, with some horror, that they felt like the bad guys in a movie!

Folks were rather shy about receiving so much caviar during the first dinner. (No complaints from me, as that meant more for me and the staff!) But everyone at the Encore dinner was quite ravenous. I had an entire 500G tin to go around for that one4.

Sadly, next year’s dinner will not offer such massive amounts of caviar, unless another massive blizzard strikes or a caviar purveyor sponsors me (please).

From here on out, service was smooth sailing because the desserts needed zero preparation. Like any good head chef, I outsourced the sweets to trusted friends.

Beehive Ice Cream (Bugonia)

Crafted by Dan Schindel. Andrew’s Buckwheat Honey. Honeycomb Toffee. Honeycomb.

Jesse Plemons is an amateur beekeeper whose concerns with colony collapse disorder and impending ecological disaster launch him into a rabbit hole of extraterrestrial conspiracy theories. Yorgos Lanthimos may be adapting a two-decade-old Korean film, but it speaks to our current moment of disinformation and societal mistrust. One thing is certain: if humanity suddenly vanished from this earth, the bees would do just fine.

Friend and fellow critic Dan Schindel makes ice cream in his spare time, so I enlisted him for this Bugonia pairing. Inspired by David Lebovitz, the custard included a local buckwheat honey from Andrew’s Honey (a delightful coincidence that the apiarist and I share a name) and honeycomb toffee was mixed in.

Each dessert coupe was graced with a piece of honeycomb and a dazzle of Maldon flakes, necessary to counter the sweetness.

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Bûche de Joël (Train Dreams)

Crafted by Karen Yang. Chocolate chiffon. Cherry. Mascarpone. Pistachio cream. Chocolate ganache frosting. Meringue mushrooms.

The protagonist of Train Dreams is a logger played by Joel Edgerton. So the name of this cake is a pun5, but it also evokes the forests of Eastern Washington, where the film was shot.

I was lowkey banking on Wicked to be nominated again so I could reprise the amazing pink & green cake made by friend and pastry extraordinaire Karen Yang, but I was glad I was able to relate one of these Best Picture nominees to a cake. And it was so, so good.

Unfortunately she wasn’t available to make a third cake for the Encore, so for that night I made a chocolate hazelnut tart with a graham cracker crust, topped with candied Japanese citrus peels. It’s like a Ferrero Rocher in pie form. While not as special as the bûche, it was just as decadent.

Amaro service: Carried on with the piney forest vibes with the digestifs, offering up a variety of amari and one whiskey. Matchbook Distilling’s Day Trip Strawberry Amaro is a perennial favorite, especially for those who shy away from astringent bottles like Faccia Brutto’s Amaro Alpino. When I was at Astor I encountered a bourbon called Redwood Empire Pipe Dream. I had to get it on account of the name; as a bonus it’s a pretty good whiskey!

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Some Reflections

Last year I served 21 people, spread over two nights, and it was the best dinner yet. I thought then that I had stretched the capabilities of what could be done in a New York City apartment, but this time I pushed the envelope even further. This menu was the most technically complex I’ve ever executed. The okonomi-latke proved to be more finicky than anticipated, three courses in a row were a chain of à la minute cooking, and it was only on the third try that timing the vegetables and chicken roasts worked out.

Each service had its own distinct atmosphere. Our first night had a frenetic “let’s put on a show” energy, but there were longer gaps between courses than I would have liked. The next day was much smoother, since most of the prep work from Saturday was carried over. Usually this night is pretty chill but this mix of guests was equally game to drink! Sunday was also the one dinner that we followed up with karaoke. (Naturally, I kicked it off with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”)

Then there was the Encore dinner, held a week later. Since this was our third go at it, we were a lot more comfortable. But expectations were certainly higher, with everyone having seen pictures from the first weekend. And I had never met about half of the people at the table this time around, which made me a bit nervous. Thankfully everything ran smoothly, and this group had the spiciest movie conversations! There were passionate Hamnet defenders and staunch One Battle After Another detractors.

Although I couldn’t participate in most of the discussions, it was edifying to listen in. Film discourse is plainly on the decline, especially on the internet. Perhaps the solution is to rebuild it in a more intimate setting, in person and offline. The dinner table is a fine place to start.

You may be wondering about the price of this Oscars dinner. Each ticket was $98, plus $35 for the largely at-cost wine pairing. I try really hard to keep the prices as low as possible while maintaining a decent margin, though the compensation wasn’t quite commensurate with the time investment by myself and the staff. There’s a delicate balance because if I charge more, that makes it less accessible and comes with higher expectations with both pacing and plating.

And while I’d love to host these Oscars dinners in a commercial space or partner with a restaurant, that costs associated would be prohibitive. I would need sponsorships to grow this thing beyond my apartment. (Which I am definitely open to… I’m just really bad at getting the word out… so if you want to sponsor/collaborate on any of my future dinner events, get in touch!)

Any Questions?

This was a pretty exhaustive/exhausting recap, but feel free to ask me anything about this dinner!

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The brutally cold weather of January continued well into the next month. I’m stingy with turning on the heat so my power bill was “merely” $200. February started off fairly quietly for me, at least before I spent a long weekend in Arizona where it was very warm and very lovely. When I came back I immediately began planning my annual Oscar’s dinner parties and that has taken over my life for the past two weeks. I’ll be putting together a full recap next week!

In the meantime, here’s a selection of what I was up to in February. As this is basically a journal, everything is loosely written, mostly just lists, and nothing is meant to be taken seriously.

Desert Special

In the middle of February I flew to Arizona for a joint bachelor/ette party. I used to be skeptical of the very concept of a combined bachelor party but came around to it pretty quickly. I’m equally close with both bride and groom, and their respective friends mostly all knew each other. I did eat out a few times, mostly before and after the main event.

• Dog Haus Biergarten (Phoenix)

  • It was decently cheaper to fly in the night before and get a motel room than it would have been to come on Friday, so that’s what I did. This was one of the few places open past 10 PM, and a couple cold beers and a pair of desert dogs was exactly what I needed after the flight.

  • Used to snack-sized glizzies, I ordered two hot dogs and quickly found out that this was a mistake because they were absolutely loaded. The dogs are served on a bun of three King Hawaiian rolls, left unseparated. I’m gonna have to steal that innovation.

• Pizzeria Bianco (Phoenix)

  • An exceptionally popular pizza spot in downtown Phoenix with a James Beard Award. A couple friends told me I absolutely had to go here, even though fancy pizza isn’t hard to come by in New York. Since I was by myself I was seated almost immediately, while families of four had to wait an hour.

  • I got the Rosa, a white pie topped with red onions and pistachios. And it was indeed excellent, though I did get tired of the very oniony flavor two-thirds of the way through. To be fair, it was a 12-inch pie and I ate the entire thing. I should have asked for a 50/50 with something else.

• Fry Bread House (Phoenix)

  • Also a James Beard award winner. I would lovingly describe the fry bread here as an upgraded Taco Bell: the slightly sweet bread is topped with your choice of protein along with cheese, refried beans, and various other accoutrements. Your hands will get messy. I loved it.

• In-n-Out (Phoenix)

  • God bless the west.

• El Pollo Suprema (Tempe)

  • A half mile or so from ASU is a cash-only Mexican joint. The combo plate is the thing to get here: roast chicken and tri-tip, Sonoran style, served with pinto beans and salsa. Absolutely delicious and reminds me of the kind of Mexican food I’d eat back in California.

• Pedal Haus Brewery (Tempe)

  • Closed out my time in Arizona with more cold beer, and paired with a green chile burger, because you gotta stick to the regional specialties. Then I took a Waymo for the first time (it’s weird) and flew back home to New York.

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Miscellaneous Things

• Finally finished Heated Rivalry and yeah it’s terrific! Keith hosted a marathon on Super Bowl Sunday, and the last episode ended just in time to watch the halftime show. I went home right after Bad Bunny and had never seen the subway so empty since COVID.

• For his birthday, my friend organized an ikebana class! Very much outside my wheelhouse but it was very fun.

• Moments at the Winter Olympics that nearly moved me to tears (these are almost all figure skating lol)

  • Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier’s ice dance, complete with Starry Night dress.

  • Alysa Liu’s short and free skate programs, obviously.

    • Side note, this is something I thought of way too late but there were quite a few film scores/songs used bv various skaters, and that would have been fun to analyze. The evil French duo skates to the score from The Whale, an equally evil movie.

  • The extremely unserious figure skating exhibition gala, though the tears were from laughter.

  • One non-skating moment: snowboarder Choi Ga-on going from being stretchered off the halfpipe to coming back and getting the Gold. An incredible storyline. I love the Olympics.

• Did you know that you can change the color of the spires on One World Trade? There’s an app (invite only apparently) that lets you take over the colors for a couple minutes. It costs $10 each time you do it, which sounds ridiculous until you’re at a party and you and your friends are controlling part of the Manhattan skyline.

• The most consequential thing to happen to me last month was that I lost my water bottle and had to buy a new one. I did a bit of research but stuck with my trusty Contigo, as it fulfills my very specific requirements: I have to be able to drink it one-handed while walking, and it can’t have a straw attached to the lid, because the attached straw gives me the ick. Usually I’m filling my water bottle also with one hand (like at a non-automatic water fountain) and am scared of the straw touching something.

Movies

Too busy preparing a movie-themed dinner to actually watch a lot of movies, much less write about them.

Funny that February saw two movies prominently featuring pup play. I thought Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights was very messy but I couldn’t help but be swept up in all the tortured romance and yearning. The Charli XCX songs do a lot of heavy lifting. Pillion was quite lovely, but you can feel the constraints of a low budget indie production. This film is a good example of how these kinds of films may lack certain insert shots or interstitial scenes to really underline the emotional arcs of the characters.

• The first movie I saw at home: zi, to kickoff the at-home virtual Sundance marathon I did with a couple friends.

• The first movie I saw in a theater: Send Help, which was a fun if fleeting time at the movies. What if there was a beach that made you bold?

• The last movie I saw at home: Oscar Nominated Short Films, probably the worst crop in a few years.

• The last movie I saw in a theater: Log in Belgium (2021), a pandemic diary in which Past Lives star Teo Yoo inadvertently reveals why most actors are not good filmmakers. He strives towards the New Wave but stays firmly planted in navel gaze. It’s just as (un) insightful as every celeb vanity project these days, but at least there’s no pretense that any of this is unmediated.

Food & Film Pairings of the Month

Send Help — Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien are marooned on a deserted island off the coast of Thailand, and somehow they eat very well. This movie would make for a very fun themed dinner: snapper, sashimi, Thai banana tostones, baby octopus skewered with coconut chunks. And don’t forget the smoked barramundi topped with lemongrass relish, mango salsa, and poison berries! It’s a big upgrade from the sad desk lunch that Rachel McAdams would prepare for her office job: smearing tuna salad on multigrain bread while talking to her parakeet and glugging white wine straight from a one-liter bottle.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die — The opening scenes of Gore Verbinski’s anti-AI time-loop sci-fi thriller are set in the iconic Norms diner on La Cienaga Boulevard (you may recognize it from that Ed Ruscha painting), with a bottle of Cholula hot sauce prominently displayed in one shot. If you want to re-enact Sam Rockwell’s entrance, you only have until the end of the year because they’re going to turn the building into a Raising Cane’s… I personally would not replicate this, but you could assemble the “last supper” of Twinkies, Hostess Snoballs, and red wine that segues us into the third act.

Log in Belgium (2021) — This film is most effective when it captures that early moment of cursed, unhinged quarantine meals. Marooned in Antwerp, Yoo heads to the grocery store only to find every shelf empty (except for the vegan stuff, which is hilariously untouched). In his rental apartment he manages to make mandu, but lacking ingredients to make a proper dipping sauce, he improvises one by combining vegan mayo and ketchup (my friend audibly gagged). We next see him assemble a bagel sandwich with red bean paste and cream cheese.

After a few weeks he’s back in Korea. Unlike the restrictive lockdowns in Europe, people are free to gather, and his in-laws throw a massive welcome home feast. It’s incredibly enviable. Odeng soup, bulgogi, kimbap: all the Korean classics. Later Yoo shows off his home chef abilities, preparing bossam for his friends. I would love an invite.

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Dining In

Cooking for Friends

• Sunday 2/1 (Virtual Sundance Marathon)

  • Recipe tests for Oscars dinner: Carne asada tacos, Pão de queijo

  • Watched the two highest rated movies out of Sundance: Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! And Josephine, and the two lowest: zi and Run Amok. Surprisingly… I liked the latter two more, but all four were very good.

• Friday 2/6 (Olympics Opening Ceremony)

  • Indulged in classic Milanese cuisine to kick off the Olympics!

  • Osso buco (with some beef cheeks swapped in because I had some on hand), served atop Risotto alla Milanese

  • Wine pairing: Barolo “La Morra,” Ciabot Berton 2020

• Sunday 2/15 - Ben & Sravya’s Bachelor+ette Party (in Arizona)

  • The Food Lab’s No-Boil Baked Ziti

    • This is a terrific recipe if you’re in a rental home and making food for a crowd. Doesn’t require a sharp knife or even a large pot (the pasta is soaked before baking). You can use jarred sauce. Just have to buy some aluminum baking dishes at the supermarket.

  • On the grill: pre-marinated carne asada (thank you Safeway), summer squash, onions, bell peppers, corn.

• Monday 2/23

  • Poultry Pho

    • Followed Andrea Nguyen’s recipe for pho ga, but used the turkey, duck, and chicken bones I had saved from Thanksgiving. With 10 pounds of bones I had enough broth for 12 big bowls and had 7 people over, which gave me five days of leftovers. It was nice to do a casual, low-key thing the week before the massive production that is my Oscars dinner.

    • “Having friends for dinner” means enlisting guests to pick the meat off the bones, prepare the herb plate, and put side dishes together.

• Tuesday 2/24

  • Okonomi-Latke recipe test for Oscars cocktail workshop (plus salt-broiled mackerel)

For Myself

I didn’t really cook anything just for myself, as I had intentionally given myself tons of leftovers from when I had friends over. In practice this meant a whole week each of eating tacos, osso buco, and pho. Which sounds fun until reaching day five.

Dining Out

There were three times I made set plans to eat at a restaurant. Incidental meals like pre-show dinners don’t count.

• Karazishi Botan w/ Sravya

  • First bowl of ramen since visiting Japan and it was perfect for a rainy night.

• House of Joy w/ Olivia, Jaidan, Marcus, Brian, Amanda

  • Been a long time since a proper dim sum! There was a big table of old men who had a large bottle of whiskey on the table. It was almost empty by the time we left.

• Askili Orchard w/ Vickie, Daniel

  • Apparently Georgian food is getting trendy again? For good reason as it’s a great cuisine. Highlights: cabbage tolma and the Cornish hen from Guria, which is deboned and “fermented” (I asked the server about that process and am still unclear), then grilled and served with a sweet-smoky mix of sauces and spices.

During a Chinatown shopping run, I finally got some pastries from Elbow Bread. While the challah croissant was just messing with perfection (it’s just a dense croissant), I was much more compelled by the everything-seasoned bialy and chocolate babka.

Music

Maybe it’s just me but the past three months were not particularly compelling for new music. Bruno Mars’s new album is a total dud IMO, the anodyne production sucks the life out of every song. Bright spots were the new records from Joyce Manor and Mitski (it really grew on me, especially after seeing her play some of it live).

These are fifteen new songs I really liked this winter, plus two older tracks I heard on NTS Radio mixes, both of which happen to be covers.

Some favorite NTS Radio mixes:

• Maï-Linh - Tết Special: sounds from Vietnam

  • “For Tết, the Vietnamese Lunar Year, Maï-Linh finally dives into the Vietnam of the 60s and 70s — soul, blues, jazz, folk, prayers and intimate ballads. A journey guided by patience, devotion, and quiet emotional depth.”

• The Early Bird Show w/ Yawning Portal

  • Two hours of classical music!

• Radio 1’s Essential Mix - Danny L Harle (BBC Radio)

  • You need to be in the UK or have a VPN to stream it, but would I get in trouble if I accidentally linked to a rip?

Theater

Anything I particularly liked is bolded.

• Wednesday 2/4 - The Dinosaurs

• Thursday 2/5 - High Spirits

• Wednesday 2/18 - Hate Radio w/ David, Sam, Ben R, Rosa, Paul, Alex

• Thursday 2/19 - Chinese Republicans w/ David, Alex, Liane, Jacky, Corinna, Chi, Andrew

  • You met me at a very Chinese Republican time in my life…

Good Things I Read

• The reporter who tried to replace herself with a bot by Ella Markianos, Platformer

• The Internet that Made Clavicular by Minh Tran, coulda been at the club (Substack)

• Frederick Wiseman: Forced Perspective by Esther Rosenfeld, Rodent Reflections (Substack)

• What Do They Eat at Awards Shows (and Why Do We Care)? by Kyle Buchanan, The New York Times

  • Like many, I’ve been intrigued by the photos of bad food that Buchanan would post as he attends all the pre-Oscar awards ceremonies. My dinners are certainly better quality, but not as Ozempic-friendly.

• The Professor of the Lower Senses by Ruby Tandoh, Vittles (Substack)

  • On Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the food writing legend who inspired the fictional book that was adapted into The Taste of Things.

• When ‘Anora’ Becomes ‘Anorak’: The Art of Wrong Movie Titles by Matthew Huff, The New York Times

• Alysa Liu Just Changed Figure Skating Forever by Chris Schleicher, Slate

What I’m Looking Forward to in March

• Warmer weather… please?

• Marilyn March at the MoMA, with a decently comprehensive retrospective.

• Ten years ago this month, I visited New York for the first time with Eric. We’re going to spend a day retracing some of our steps from that fateful trip.

February Grog Log

The first alcoholic drink I had every day, and where.

1. Vina Zorzal Graciano 2021 at home

2. Nothing

3. Nothing

4. Nothing

5. Nothing

6. Rossojbleo, Gulfi 2023 at home

7. Tiki experiment at Steven and Minh’s (Cocktail coalition)

8. Brooklyn Kura Number Fourteen Aged 1.5 Years at Keith’s

9. Nothing

10. Nothing

11. Earthquake (cocktail) at home

12. Wren House Spellbinder Hazy IPA at Dog Haus Biergarten (Phoenix)

13. The Shop Church Music Juicy IPA at Pizzeria Bianco (Phoenix)

14. Windmill Winery Chardonnay at Windmill Winery (Arizona)

15. Michelob Ultra at the Airbnb (Paradise Valley)

16. Backpacker NZ IPA at Pedal Haus Brewery (Tempe)

17. Nothing

18. Cantine Europa Sensale Nero d’Avola 2024

19. Nothing

20. Hennessy VSOP at Terence’s (Tet Dinner)

21. Neon Lights at Nomad Tea Parlor

22. Nothing

23. Tinto Tradicional, Fronton de Oro 2022 at home

24. Louisiana cocktail at home

25. Chestnut makgeolli slushie at Take 31

26. Nothing

27. Nothing

28. Leftover Brooklyn Kura sake at home

My friends at 4R Press just published a new issue of their zine! I contributed an essay to “Medieval May,” and this time I have a piece in “Faculty Fall.” But it took awhile to get finalized so now it’s Faculty February.

An issue devoted to films about faculty wouldn’t be complete without hearing from faculty who teach film. So I spoke with my friend Matt Prigge, a Senior Editor at The Week who also teaches Film Studies at New York University, and re-arranged our conversation into an essay format. We had to cut a few bits out due to print space, so here’s the extended version of the piece. You can read the full zine, with contributions from a bunch of talented writers and artists, here:

4R Press: Faculty Fall (PDF)

The Language of Teaching Film: An Interview with Matt Prigge

A version of this piece was originally published in 4R Press, Issue #5, Faculty Fall. As told to Andrew Truong. Edited by Chrissy Griesmer and Jake Maher.

I fell into teaching by accident. I started off as a film critic in the mid-90s, back when the Internet was still this nascent information superhighway. I had a blog on Geocities in a section called Hollywood Hills. My reviews weren’t very good. I’m glad they’re not available anymore. Eventually I got hired at the dearly departed Philadelphia Weekly, and that began my career as a professional critic, which lasted twenty years at various publications. Then I was laid off from a job I’d held for a number of years as their film editor and chief film critic. I got a little burnt out.

During that first job in Philadelphia, I had this early midlife crisis and needed something to do besides write for that alt-weekly. So I went to grad school and earned a master’s degree in cinema studies. At the time I had no real plans about what to do with it, but years later that degree opened the door to teaching. A friend of mine was a professor at NYU and he needed a fill-in for one of his classes. He knew I was looking for work and hooked me up. And that’s how I became a professor of film. I usually do three courses a year; it’s something I do on the side to supplement my regular income.

Now I’m coming off my eighth year of doing this, which is wild. It feels like it just started but at the same time, I kind of forget what it was like not to be a professor. I model myself a little after Barbra Streisand in The Mirror Has Two Faces, where she’s a literature professor at Columbia and does this stand-up style routine. I don’t do exactly that, but I try to make it entertaining and slip in jokes that may or may not get a laugh.

The main course I teach is The Language of Film. It’s a crash course in film grammar—mise en scène, cinematography, editing, sound—and we go across different genres. Documentary, the Italian Neorealists, the French New Wave, avant-garde stuff. The goal is to teach students visual and cinematic literacy, so that they become more active viewers and break down movies in ways they might not have thought about before.

There’s usually twelve films on the syllabus. Certain ones are mainstays. I open every term with Rear Window because it trains my students to be aware of their gaze and introduces semester-long concepts. Hitchcock always works; everybody seems to like him. It’s fun to sit there with them when they watch it. They gasp at the same part: when Grace Kelly breaks into Raymond Burr’s apartment and flashes the ring and doesn’t see him coming back in.

Sometimes I show things that I watched when I was a student myself. In undergrad, a professor had us watch a clip from True Stories, the Talking Heads/David Byrne movie. It was the “Love For Sale” sequence. My students today have barely heard of this movie. Maybe they’ve heard of Talking Heads because of Stop Making Sense.

I mix it up sometimes if a film isn’t clicking. One recent movie that did not go well was The Last Laugh by F.W. Murnau, which has gone over well in the past, but this summer they kind of rebelled. Not angry, but they said it wasn’t very good, like two-and-a-half stars on Letterboxd. I had to make a polite, semi-forceful case for why it’s a very good film. They came around a bit, so I’m not discouraged from showing it again.

They also rebel against some of the avant-garde films I show, like Mothlight. There’s no sound, and they’re like, “How do I process this?” I think I finally got a class to enjoy that one. Andy Warhol’s Empire sometimes goes well; I show one or two minutes and say, “It’s just one minute.”

I once looked myself up on Rate My Professors and I’m not actually on there, which is great. I haven’t checked ever again. If I am now, no one has said anything, and don’t tell me. Ignorance is bliss.

The types of students vary by semester. Fall classes are usually freshman film majors; this is a required course for them. Summer and January term, which is an entire semester crammed into the three weeks before spring, are usually non-film majors or high school students testing out what it’s like to take college courses. They’re all film curious—they like movies and want to learn about them. But I mostly keep the same approach with them as the film students.

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Spike Lee is probably the most well-known member of the NYU film department, but I’ve only seen him twice in the building. I think he’s avoiding me because I did a terrible interview with him once.

Compared to when I first started teaching, my students today barely make a sound during screenings, which I thought was kind of weird. My theory is that they were raised during the pandemic and they’re not used to the experience of hooting and hollering, of talking back to the screen.

What does surprise me is how they don’t really react against material that could be seen as problematic. There’s this idea that young people automatically reject anything that’s really old because the social mores are different now. But they’re actually curious about that. I’m not showing Birth of a Nation or anything like that, but a few times I’ve given trigger warnings and they seem to almost roll their eyes. Maybe this is a flawed test case, because it’s NYU.

Really, I’m just surprised that they like anything that I show them. Not that I think they won’t, but I showed Persona over the summer, and I was expecting them to be a little bored. But they were really into it, and the discussions we had were really interesting. Sometimes, students will say something that I’ve never even thought of, about movies that I’ve been showing for years.

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Professor Prigge’s Favorite Faculty Movies

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Syllabus: The Language of Film, Summer 2025

Required textbook: David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Jeff Smith’s FILM ART: AN INTRODUCTION 13th Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2024.

Section 1: The Basics of Film Form

1. Introduction: Filmmaking as the Act of Looking – Rear Window (USA, 1954, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 112 mins.)

2. Mise-en-scène – In the Mood for Love (Hong Kong, 1952, dir. Stanley Donen, 102 mins.)

3. Cinematography – The Last Laugh (Germany, 1924, dir. F.W. Murnau, 90 mins.)

4. Editing – Daisies (Czechoslovakia, 1966, dir. Vera Chytilová, 75 mins.)

5. Sound and Image – A Man Escaped (France, 1956, dir. Robert Bresson, 101 mins.)

Section 2: What to Do with the Basics of Film Form

6. Structure and Narrative – Singin’ in the Rain (USA, 1952, dir. Stanley Donen, 102 mins.)

7. Documentary: Style, Genre and “The Real” – The Gleaners and I (France, 2000, dir. Agnès Varda, 82 mins.)

8. Animation: Metamorphosis and Meta-Physics – My Neighbor Totoro (Japan, 1988, dir. Miyazaki Hayao, 86 mins.)

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Section 3: Revolutions in Film Form

9. Neorealism – Killer of Sheep (USA, 1977, dir. Charles Burnett, 80 mins.)

   1. Optional: Bicycle Thieves (Italy, 1948, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 89 mins.)

10. Art Cinema and the French New Wave – Shoot the Piano Player (France, 1960, dir. François Truffaut, 81 mins.)

11. Alternatives to Narrative Cinema / The Avant-Garde – Persona (Sweden, 1966, dir. Ingmar Bergman, 83 mins.)

12. Digital Cinema, the Future of Movies, and Pulling It All Together – Citizen Kane (USA, 1942, dir. Orson Welles, 119 mins.)

Last month I talked to my friend Jason (last name withheld for privacy reasons), a management consultant who has never lost money in his seven years of betting on the Academy Awards. We spoke about his investment-based approach, early picks, and how prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarkt differ from traditional sportsbooks. It got a lot of traction thanks to Official excerpting it in their weekly roundup, and it’s still worth a read if you haven’t gotten to it:

That interview took place in early January, after the Golden Globes but before the actual nominations were announced. In U.S. political terms, this was after the Iowa caucuses but well before Super Tuesday. Now that the primaries are over and we’re in the final phase of this Hollywood election, it’s a good time for a follow-up conversation. We took stock of how his initial bets have panned out, the juicy category he’s thinking of jumping into, and whether or not you should bet on a tie happening.

Paid subscribers get full access to his updated analysis, as a treat:

The 98th Academy Awards ceremony takes place on March 15. This is three weeks from now. Jeez.

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Another Interview With the Gambler

This interview, which has been edited and condensed, was conducted on February 19, nearly a month after Oscar nominations were announced and the Director’s Guild handed out their awards. The two biggest precursor awards, the British Academy and the Screen Actor’s Guild, have yet to be handed out. After that, the odds will solidify.

How’ve you been, Jason? It’s been over a month since I saw you.

I’ve had crazy work travel. I was in London for a week. The week after that I was in San Francisco. The week after that I was in Poland and London. And I was back in San Francisco last week. Next week I’m going to Chicago and then San Francisco.

The life of a consultant, I suppose. A lot has happened in the Oscars landscape since our first interview, particularly now that the nominees have been unveiled. Has anything changed?

A lot has happened, but I don’t know if a lot has changed. I think this might be one of the most straightforward Oscar races in recent history. I’m eager to check the historical odds to see if this is true1. Across the board things have solidified toward favorites in a way that is unusual.

Even in categories where maybe when we talked a month ago it was a little bit more of a coin flip, it’s gone toward a favorite, and in some cases a heavy favorite.

How do you feel about your picks overall?

I feel pretty good, better than I did last year. But the odds aren’t as good so I’m not putting as much money down. It was a fraction of what I put down last year. But I look forward to being surprised.

Just to recap, what bets did you place in January?

I bet on eight categories. All my positions have improved, with one giant exception.

One Battle After Another for Picture—the odds strangely got worse so I doubled down this week, we’ll talk about that. I also bet on this for Editing.

Chalamet for Best Actor. KPop Demon Hunters for Song.

Sinners for Original Screenplay—that one’s moved well. Paul Thomas Anderson for Director—that one’s also moved well.

F1 for Sound, I got in at 40%. It’s at 80% now.

And then International Feature Film—we don’t have to talk about it—

You called it for It Was Just an Accident.

We’re gonna start with my miss? We’re not going to start with my seven hits?

It is dead2. I’m still a little befuddled by it, to be honest. I think they completely botched the For Your Consideration campaign.

I think the healthy lesson is this: under no circumstance do you put money down on this category until the nominations come out.

Did you sell3?

No. It’s so low that it’s not really even worth selling. At this point I’m holding on for the chance that there is a late push. I’ve just written it off in my mind.

I’m not sweating it too much because the two picks that I really liked were It Was Just an Accident for International Feature, which was trading around 40%, and then F1 for Sound, which was also trading around there. And that one is like 80-something now. That should more than pay for the International Feature bust. In my head, they cancel out.

What percentage of your portfolio was on International?

About 10%. I really liked this bet. The only reason I didn’t put more money into it was because Kalshi wouldn’t let me without changing the odds.

Besides that one exception, you sound pretty happy with holding on to your current bets. Is there anywhere that you’re doubling down and putting in more money at this stage of the game?

I thought One Battle After Another was a lock for Best Picture. Somehow the odds have gone down. It was 82% on Kalshi when we talked a month ago. It is now 74%. That is the only bet where I doubled down so far. I put in the equivalent of 15% of my original portfolio.

I think what’s happening here is a lot of casual betting. Second highest odds is Sinners. I think that might be a reaction to that film setting the record for nominations. That is a gigantic trap. And then third place is Hamnet at 9%, which is 9% too high.

I actually did the math on this. If you had $90,000—which is the maximum that you’re allowed to bet on this category right now—and you just put it on “no” on Hamnet, you would make more than you would get from a high-yield savings account. So if you’re thinking about putting money in your high-yield savings account, just put it on Hamnet to lose the Best Picture Oscar.

A part of me hopes this take ages really badly and Hamnet somehow wins.

I think the readers who follow your advice will doxx you. So we should do a quick disclaimer: none of this interview should be construed as investment, betting, or financial advice. This is purely for entertainment value. You are responsible for whatever decisions you make.

[sarcastically] And Kalshi is not a gambling platform.

One thing we didn’t get to talk about last time was portfolio allocation. How do you decide how much money you’re actually putting in, both as a whole and splitting across each category?

Hopefully you don’t have enough money in this that you actually have to worry about adjusting risk and stuff. It’s not like a stock portfolio. We talked about this a little bit last time. It depends why you’re in it. Are you looking for the thrill? Are you looking to make some money? How much money do you need to be happy?

With me, I’ll put money down on the things I generally like to see win anyway. If I make a meager sum, I’m pretty good with that. I’m not going to go crazy or anything. With that in mind, I do care about balancing. I look at the adjusted odds of the things I have. That lets me go a little riskier and maybe play in some categories I wouldn’t have played in in a vacuum. That tends to mean putting a lot more money into the popular categories.

I’m starting to wonder if, in this new age of Oscars betting being open to everyone, the most popular categories are getting more populated with casual bettors.

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That’s a really good point: where more people are betting, you’re getting people who are less informed.

And that’s the whole reason I even do this. It’s not sports, where you have really sophisticated bettors using algorithms and stuff. I’m still taking advantage of some market inefficiencies.

Are there any categories you haven’t bet on yet but are a potential opportunity?

There is one, Sinners in Cinematography. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to go in. It’s low odds but good value, if that makes sense. I’m thinking, “How much fun do I want to have?”

About a month ago it was a three-horse race between One Battle After Another, Sinners, Train Dreams. One Battle After Another has kind of gone to the slight favorite. It’s around 52% right now. We talked a lot last time about my downballot theory that it is a One Battle After Another year, so that would make sense.

But if you look at odds over time, it gets a little bit suspicious. A month ago, Sinners was around 40%. At one point it became the heavy favorite at 60% but it’s gone down by half. That shift towards One Battle came after the Director’s Guild Awards went to Paul Thomas Anderson. But best directing is not best cinematography.

And there’s a great storyline around the cinematographer of Sinners. She’d be the first woman ever to win. I don’t think that on its own is a good enough reason to award or bet, but combined with the craft itself—“Hey, this might actually just be the best-shot movie of the year”—you could talk your way into it.

It’s at 30% and that is probably a little too low. It should be 50%. So I think if you were brave—or bored, which I kind of am—you might go in on Sinners. But I haven’t put any money down yet. If the odds go down more, I’m going to get really tempted.

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You usually make bets three different times—January, early February, and then a week before the Oscars. Are you planning to do that last minute betting round again?

I’m keeping an eye on Editing. The first thing I look for is doubling down—categories that I liked before and liked enough to get into. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The things that I like are probably going to be the things that I’m already in on.

Other than that, I just track the odds across the board. See if any of them change in a way that I disagree with or that I think are interesting. But I don’t think that’s going to happen this year.

I was expecting to put more down last week. I was ready to, and then I just couldn’t find the bets, besides doubling down on Best Picture. That’s why I’m a little shy on going in for cinematography, because I’m thinking, man, am I just bored?

Would anything change your position on Timothée Chalamet? We talked about him a lot last time around.

Michael B. Jordan winning a SAG award would change a lot of things. But he’s like the third person now that we’re saying could upset Timothée. A month ago, we weren’t even talking about him. We were talking about Leo.

I think short of Kendall Jenner—is it Kendall or Kylie? I always mix them up. Whichever one he’s dating, short of her doing something crazy like starring in a Coke commercial where she solves racism, I don’t see Timothée not getting it4.

Kalshi lets you bet on a tie—not which two films tie, just a tie in general. Would you recommend this?

I wish I had a clever, thoughtful answer other than no, don’t do it. I just looked it up: it’s happened six times in the history of the Oscars. I’m surprised it’s happened that often.

What if I just want to put 10 bucks on a tie in every category, just to see what happens?

You would lose all your money.

Final question. I’m pretty sure Kalshi will put up prop bets closer to the ceremony, like how long the telecast will be, or what Conan O’Brien will say in his monologue. What prop bet would you feel comfortable putting money on?

Number of times ICE is mentioned. I think there’s a sweet spot between three and ten.

You have a more optimistic viewpoint on Hollywood getting controversial than I do.

I am also considering the non-proper noun “ice.” Just cold.

Doesn’t count.

It’s not a real category anyways.

Thanks again, Jason, for chatting with me and sharing your wealth of knowledge.

It was a very long way of saying not much has changed.

All odds taken from Kalshi as of February 19 and compared to the odds on January 8, when Jason made his initial analysis.

Obvious pick, OK odds

Category: Best Picture

• Pick: One Battle After Another

• Confidence: Very High

• Analysis: It’s going to be One Battle After Another, but somehow the odds don’t reflect that. I doubled down here on what was originally a modest bet. Don’t be fooled by Sinners setting the record for nominations; plenty of movies have come into the night leading in noms and leaving with only a handful of awards (Screenplay and Score are likely, and perhaps Cinematography). This category smells like casual bettors; Hamnet is sitting at 7% and Marty Supreme at 2%. If you have $90k just lying around, you can put it on ‘no’ for Hamnet and come out with a cool $4k a month from now. Honestly as safe as a High Yield Savings Account.

• Odds: 74% ⬇️ (from 82%)

Good pick, OK odds

Category: Film Editing

• Pick: One Battle After Another

• Confidence: High

• Analysis: I had been keeping an eye on this category all month hoping to double down around the 60s, when suddenly it jumped to 75% after the DGA Awards (which is probably outside of my appetite). Editing corresponds heavily to the “down the ballot” effect. Also a case here where the spoiler has shifted, in this case from Marty Supreme to F1. In a vacuum this is a good category to get into, but with Best Picture the way it’s looking right now, I’d rather put my money there.

• Odds: 69% ⬆️ (from 66%)

• Prior verdict: Good pick, good odds

OK pick, good odds

Category: Cinematography

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