Welcome to the Best Picture Showcase, a miniseries on THE MOVIES where I review each nominee for this year's Academy Award for Best Picture.

With each installment, I hope to answer the following:

1) What's the movie about?

2) What's it feel like to sit through the movie?

3) Did I like it?

4) Should it and will it win Best Picture? What's my current ranking of the nominees?

5) How can you catch this movie?

So a 3.5 hour drama about a Hungarian refugee escaping the Holocaust to 1950s Pennsylvania is a great place to start, right?

Brady Corbet's THE BRUTALIST works that artist's magic of making hyper-specific circumstances feel universal. This is a movie about a man who feels his life is robbed from him. In many ways, it was, and yet, that struggle between accepting his difficult realities of working back up from the bottom rung of the ladder & confidently striding with the experience and value earned over years of work designing buildings that stand the test of fascist regimes and war feels almost insurmountable. This is a story peeling back the layers of the American Dream, the reality behind the promise; it's hard not to feel, sometimes, as though we live in hopeful delusion regarding that journey to make our dreams into truth. It's a movie about the person made into the other, never acceptable to the dominant class outside of the immediate value they can provide. And it's all shot in breathtaking Vistavision film, capturing these grand moments in ways both timeless and timely. This is the kind of story we go to the theaters to experience: an epic that our HDTVs will, simply, never do justice.

Closing Song: "Library" - Daniel Blumberg, THE BRUTALIST (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

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I interview John Makens, the director of ART AND LIFE: THE STORY OF JIM PHILLIPS.

The 81-year-old graphic designer Jim Phillips may not be instantly recognizable, his art - the "Screaming Hand," the "red dot" Santa Cruz Skateboards logo, the myriad of custom skateboarding full-board decals, the cartoonish California outdoor mosaics, the rock posters for the likes of The Beatles & Neil Young - absolutely is. His art spans decades, hobbies and generations, cultivating the identities of skateboarding and surfing cultures in ways that inspire current public perception.

Makens and I discuss what makes Phillips special, how he and his crew animated Phillips' art within the documentary, how his relationship to Phillips evolved over the course of the doc's 10+ year production and more.

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Jim Phillips is an artist whose cartoonish mosaics of California outdoor life have informed public understanding and appreciation of skateboarding, surfing, hot rod and rock music cultures.

In ART AND LIFE: THE STORY OF JIM PHILLIPS, documentarian John Makens tells his story, from the times when Phillips sketched for fiberglas companies amidst a surfer party lifestyle to when Santa Cruz Skateboards & NHS brought him in to develop the first full-board designs that would first cement skateboarding's devil-may-care attitude and rebellious public perception in the '70s-'80s.

The "red dot" Santa Cruz Skateboards logo and the Screaming Hand are Jim's claims to fame, instantly recognizable to a subculture. However, Phillips, the artist, is not, despite also producing rock posters for the likes of The Beatles and Neil Young. Watching Phillips dig through drawers and cabinet to pull up old surfer magazines and prints is akin to traveling through time; the man is an anthropological nexus point, bringing together punks, skateboarders, hippies and gearheads alike.

What a life.

ART AND LIFE: THE STORY OF JIM PHILLIPS showtimes: https://artandlifemovie.com/

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On this episode of The Movies, I fulfill another listener request! My buddy Jarrett Barnard sent me a stone-cold classic to cover: 1978's DAWN OF THE DEAD, directed by George A. Romero.

Widely regarded as the best of Romero's DEAD franchise, this film about a group of survivors waiting out the zombie apocalypse inside a shopping mall is a hallmark moment for horror fans, beautifully blending slapstick and viscera before Sam Raimi & Peter Jackson took their proverbial batons and ran their legs of the race.

This movie's marked as a critique on mindless consumerism but I don't think Romero solely leaves the blame on the living dead. For as much as these folks rejoice in having a safe place to stay (relatively) zombie-free, the dopamine of having the world at one's disposal rapidly wears off. Even during the end of the world, we're rarely satisfied.

And in a post-COVID world, the way this society responds to a global threat rings eerily and depressingly familiar. We are fickle, stupid beasts, one mere bite, one bad day away from a blue face and a lust for flesh.

But hey, it's not all bad. Have you ever pied a zombie in the face? That shit's hilarious!

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Please assist animal shelters working to reunite pets with owners, treat injuries and take in evacuated animals due to the recent wildfires in L.A. County. Two lists of places you can support are down below:

https://animalcare.lacounty.gov/emergency-animal-shelter-information-los-angeles-county-fires/ - (This is the list I read from in the episode, which by the time of its publishing, has drastically reduced in size. I leave the audio as is because all the places I mention still need help. As of January 24, the Castaic Animal Care center is temporarily closed due to the Hughes Fire.)

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2025/1/7/palisades-fire/updates/36cabf7c-1843-4bea-bc99-851d9a6296d4#:~:text=Animal%20Evacuation%20Shelters&text=Agoura%20Animal%20Care%20Center%2C%2029525,216%20W%20Victoria%20St%2C%20Gardena

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The nominations for the 97th Academy Awards dropped yesterday morning to the usual flurry of praise and disappointment. (No BABYGIRL? Academy, you will ROT.)

Today, I list the Best Picture nominees along with their other nominations, discuss some other movies that jumped out at me and set the stage for the Best Picture Showcase.

Before the ceremony on March 2nd, I'll be covering each of the 10 nominees on the show, ranking them along the way.

You ready? We're over the hump of awards season and the ride down is a furious, bumpy thrill. Let's do it!

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On this episode, I interview BIRDEATER directors Jack Clark and Jim Weir. The movie, about a bride-to-be invited to her fiance's unhinged bachelor party, has taken Australian audiences by storm since its Sydney Film Festival premiere in 2023. Featuring at Melbourne International Film Festival & SXSW, the movie's garnered audience and critical praise, culminating (as of the time I write this) in a nomination for Best Indie Film at the 2025 AACTA Awards (think Australia's combined Oscars and Emmy shows).
The film starts its limited American theatrical/digital run this week so what better occasion is there to bring Clark and Weir onto the show to chat about their nuanced, chaotic, delirious pressure cooker of a thriller? For such a passive aggressive movie, these guys are really amiable...
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Watch BIRDEATER in theaters -
Albuquerque: Guild Cinema
Austin: Alamo Drafthouse Mueller Austin Mueller 
Boston: Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport
Chicago: Alamo Drafthouse Wrigleyville
Columbus: Gateway Film Center
Dallas: Alamo Drafthouse Denton
Denver: Alamo Westminster
Los Angeles: Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Los Angeles 
Los Angeles: Laemmle Glendale 
New York: Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan
New York: IFC Center
Phoenix: Harkins Gateway Pavilions
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Watch BIRDEATER on digital - JANUARY 17th
Apple TV
Fandango at Home (US)
Google Play (US & CA)
Microsoft Movies & TV (US & CA)
Prime Video (US)

In Jack Clark and Jim Weir's BIRDEATER, a Aussie bride-to-be (Shabana Azeez) is invited to her fiance's (Mackenzie Fearnley) "bucks party" - a bachelor party to us in the States, but god, doesn't that just sound cooler?

She's not alone, as one of the boys also brings his girlfriend to this cabin in the Outback, but it's more of a friend-of-a-friend situation. Drinks flow, silliness inflates, but that's the thing about these kinds of nights: There's always a point of no return. The alcohol tips secrets over the edge. Once those come out, it's like trying to suck toothpaste back into the tube. It just can't happen.

What results is a nervous death of a thousand cuts. Every conversation grows tense, regardless of who's speaking to whom. Passive aggression becomes a de facto state and no one's coming out of this party socially unscathed. Hostile, squawking jazz pairs with a bipolar camera designed against comfort. It either swirls wildly around its subjects like a cracked-out carousel or stops still, unflinchingly observing the most excruciating social crucifixions.

And yet, this movie isn't A SERBIAN FILM, MARTYRS nor anything of that explicitly vicious ilk. What unsettles about BIRDEATER is how much these people inevitably remind me of folks I know. These portrayals bound between shifting perspectives and ideologies to a degree that makes it seem Weir and Clark refute each other's concerns about these people in real-time.

The movie debates itself on matters of social hierarchy, emotional abuse, consent, otherism and the simple, yet debilitating matter of leaving your '20s with something constructive to show for it, despite your hedonistic, paranoid, terrified efforts to the contrary.

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Watch BIRDEATER in theaters -

Austin: Alamo Drafthouse Mueller Austin Mueller 

Boston: Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport

Chicago: Alamo Drafthouse Wrigleyville

Columbus: Gateway Film Center

Dallas: Alamo Drafthouse Denton

Denver: Alamo Westminster

Los Angeles: Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Los Angeles 

Los Angeles: Laemmle Glendale 

New York: Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan

New York: IFC Center

Phoenix: Harkins Gateway Pavilions

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Watch BIRDEATER on digital - JANUARY 17th

Apple TV

Fandango at Home (US)

Google Play (US & CA)

Microsoft Movies & TV (US & CA)

Prime Video (US)

Sticking with a season-opening tradition, here are the 2024 movies that stuck with me! These are the films I thought about on drives to work and during showers, the ones about which I'd wax poetically to any captive audience I could muster. They made me weep and cackle. They made me whoop with joy. Art requires reflection; this is the cinema I reflected upon most last year.

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BABYGIRL dir. Halina Reijn - available in theaters

THE BRUTALIST dir. Brady Corbet - available in theaters nationwide starting Jan. 17

DUNE: PART 2 dir. Denis Villeneuve - available to stream on Max & Netflix

THE FIRST OMEN dir. Arkasha Stevenson - available to stream on Hulu

HAPPY CAMPERS dir. Amy Nicholson - available to stream on Apple TV and rent on Amazon Video

HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS dir. Mike Cheslik - available to stream on Tubi, Pluto TV, Amazon Prime

LISA FRANKENSTEIN dir. Zelda Williams - available to stream on Amazon Prime

LOVE LIES BLEEDING dir. Rose Glass - available to stream on Max

MONKEY MAN dir. Dev Patel - available to stream on Amazon Prime

NATIONAL ANTHEM dir. Luke Gilford - available to rent on VOD and purchase on Blu-ray

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