2025 Awards Season Round-Up Part 1

 by Rob DiCristino

It’s that time of the year again!

Die My Love (Dir. Lynne Ramsay)

Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on special effects in Hollywood every year, and yet there’s no CGI superdog half as captivating as Jennifer Lawrence when she’s set to “feral and unhinged.” That’s the Jennifer Lawrence — the mother!, Silver Linings Playbook Jennifer Lawrence — that Lynne Ramsay is giving us in Die My Love, a midnight climb over the barbed wire of postpartum depression that, if our world is truly as just and fair as we imagine it to be, will earn Lawrence her second Oscar early next year. Grace (Lawrence) loves her new baby; she really does. She even loves her idiot husband (Robert Pattinson as stringy, white trash Jackson) after a fashion, but no love for another stands a chance in the face of the loathing she feels for herself. Ramsay’s sweaty, sexually-frustrated fever dream honors forebears like Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence while embracing Lawrence’s unique gift for deadpan sardonics, producing an angry, sloppy, and uncompromising cocktail that goes down like grain alcohol and burns just as fiercely.

Die My Love is in U.S. theaters now.

Blue Moon (Dir. Richard Linklater)

One of two Linklater joints to grace our screens this year, Blue Moon reunites him with Ethan Hawke for a delightful chamber piece about a night in the life of (sometimes) forgotten Richard Rodgers collaborator Lorenz Hart. The lyricist behind “The Lady is a Tramp,” and the titular “Blue Moon,” Hart was a flamboyant raconteur whose depression and alcoholism made him a great hang and a terrible collaborator. Set just after the premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, Blue Moon follows Hart (Hawke) into his favorite watering hole — manned by Bobby Cannavale, because every bar should be — for an evening of maudlin chitter-chatter, a dark night of the soul for an artist confronting his obsolescence: Rodgers (Andrew Scott) is better off without him. That young coed (Margaret Qualley) will never love him. But as long as he’s got a sympathetic ear — like Patrick Kennedy as E.B. White — Hart can write his own legend. Hawke is outstanding in a tricky part, exposing Hart’s frustrating contradictions without compromising his indefatigable dignity and grace.

Blue Moon is in U.S. theaters now.

A Private Life (Dir. Rebecca Zlotowski)

Somehow both way too French and not nearly French enough, Rebecca Zlotowski’s middle-aged whodunit A Private Life finds psychotherapist Lillian (Jodie Foster in her first major French-speaking role) wrapped up in a web of intrigue surrounding the alleged suicide of her patient, Paula (Virgine Efira) — for whom she has kept several sordid secrets — the suspicions of Paula’s jealous husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric) — who holds Lilian responsible for his wife’s death — and an impending lawsuit from Pierre (Noam Morgensztern), a former patient who demands reimbursement for years of sessions that failed to break him of his smoking habit. With her optometrist ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil as Gabriel) in tow, Lillian battles personal and professional demons on her way to revelations both predictable and underwhelming. A Private Life works best when Foster and Auteuil are mixing it up, but Zlotowski never takes full advantage of their chemistry, choosing dour self-seriousness every time she should be leaning into whimsy.

A Private Life hits U.S. theaters in January.

Christy (Dir. David Michôd)

It feels a bit early for Sydney Sweeney to be making her Oscar play, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, Hollywood’s undisputed It Girl has bulked up and made…down — I don’t know; whatever phrase we use when a beautiful movie star tries to look like a normal person — to tell the based-on-a-true story of women’s boxing legend Christy Martin, whose rise to prominence in the ‘90s was punctuated by her attempted murder by manager/husband, James (Ben Foster). Mostly a by-the-numbers underdog sports drama, the film springs briefly to life only in its last movement, especially in a genuinely harrowing sequence that finds Christy fighting James for survival. Sweeney acquits herself nicely enough — she’s best with Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brien, who co-stars as Christy’s frenemy Lisa Holewyne — but as we like to say around here, Christy is a movie that insists upon itself. Like Benny Safdie’s deeply unfortunate The Smashing Machine, it’s transparent Oscar bait presented with far too much cynical confidence to be given any serious consideration.

Christy is in U.S. theaters now.

Hamnet (Dir. Chloé Zhao)

“You have no character. You’re just handsome,” an underling tells Don Draper in a particularly cutting moment on Mad Men. It’s a great — and true — line, one I couldn’t help repeating to myself over and over again while watching Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Zhao’s film is a gorgeously-shot, beautifully-acted, delicately-scored knapsack of nothing, a movie that demands our sympathies but doesn’t have the slightest clue how to provoke them. Following William (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Shakespeare’s (Jessie Buckley) lives through their initial courtship, the tragic death of their son (Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet), to a staging of the play that bears his name (sort of), Hamnet looks and feels exactly the way an Oscar-bait costume drama should. But no amount of immaculate production design can fill the empty hole in its heart, and Zhao’s inability to close the colossal gap between these characters and her audience makes this entire exercise — Oh god, I’m going to do it; please forgive me — much ado about nothing.

Hamnet comes to U.S. theaters in limited release on November 26th.