With Mouse, Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson have made their third coming-of-age story. These artistic and life partners have carved out a niche with their tender portraits of characters coming into their sense of self and an accompanying awareness of those around them. However, after a pair of movies where that self-discovery happens later in life, Mouse is their first film centered on the genre’s usual subject: a teenager.

Set in 2002, Mouse draws on O’Sullivan’s experiences growing up in Little Rock, where she endured a tragedy similar to the one that befalls the film’s protagonist. The withdrawn Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) finds her world upended when her longtime best friend, the sociable Callie (Chloe Coleman), dies suddenly in a car accident. That loss leaves Minnie reeling and isolated until she finds an unexpected companion in grief: Callie’s mother, Helen (Sophie Okonedo), a British-born former concert pianist who no longer has an anchor in Arkansas.

Minnie’s journey through her grief still intersects with many familiar, if well-drawn, figures from the genre, such as a new crush (Iman Vellani’s Kat), a perceptive teacher (David Hyde Pierce’s Mr. Murdaugh), two peer rivals (Audrey Grace Marshall’s Cara and Addisyn Grace Cain’s Brandi), and her own compassionate but cantankerous mother (Tara Mallen’s Barbara). Yet it’s the unlikely bond that forms between Minnie and Helen—not quite friends, not just surrogate mother and daughter—that comes to define Mouse. This nebulous but authentically human relationship mirrors the jumbled nature of the grieving process itself.

I spoke with O’Sullivan and Thompson on the eve of Mouse’s theatrical release. Our chat covered how they create empathy through their filmmaking process, why intergenerational friendships are a staple of their work, and how the teenage soul stays the same across time.

Your work has such a grace that I almost don’t want to demystify it, but how and where are you building such empathy for your characters into the process?

Alex Thompson: It starts with you, Kelly, and the script. But we think about it a lot.

Kelly O’Sullivan: In my writing, I’m actually trying to grant the world the empathy that I struggle with, so it’s very active. The way that we think about it is that we always want the circumstances to be the antagonist, and that everybody is doing the best that they can, but nobody knows how in the really hard moments in life. It does start from that place of trying to grant everyone the grace that’s really hard to find in life.

AT: You can have a version of omniscience as a filmmaker, where you know and understand that Cara isn’t as bad as she seems. When we’re working with Audrey, we weren’t talking about Cara the villain or the mean girl. We were talking about her experience with grief. I remember moments in our earlier work where we both felt like we didn’t draw a person with enough complexity. I don’t think everything has to be woo-woo or that everyone has to be redeemed. It’s that we’re all complex, and it makes the film more complex when you let in those gray areas.

KO: Letting people be as wonderful and as terrible as they are in life.

You remind me of a quote from my favorite movie, Annie Hall: “You’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life.”

KO: Exactly, and there’s a bit of wanting to model how we can lean on each other. Connection is—and I say this as a person who sometimes struggles with connection—the only way through.

Kelly, how did you step outside some of the personal experiences that informed the core of Mouse and build in these beautiful moments with the adults? I think of the shame that Barbara feels when she realizes she’s invaded her daughter’s privacy during an intimate moment, or Mr. Murdaugh’s recognition that he needs to let Minnie work through her feelings on stage, even if the number is a bit of a train wreck. Teens so often don’t have that perception of the adults in their lives.

KO: Unfortunately, I’m an adult now, as much as I keep trying to deny it. I’m in my 40s, and whenever I think of myself as being a kid, then I actually interact with an 18-year-old, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m very different and very far away from that now.” I see where adults are coming from, and especially now, being a parent, you understand how impossible it is. That’s where all of my love for the Barbara character comes from. She’s doing the best that she can, but from a teenage point of view, of course she’s mortifying and embarrassing. Of course you’d want to go over to Helen’s house rather than Barbara’s house. But from an adult point of view, you really get where Barbara’s coming from. I feel like I’ve lived both sides of it now. I remember that teenage frustration, but I’m also in the teacher and parent shoes now.

AT: Something I never thought about, even when we were making Mouse, because our child was quite young, is that there’s no energy to spare for not being mortifying. That’s not a priority. There’s no time to be a cool parent. Barbara can’t begin to address the fact that Minnie is mortified by her. She’s too busy parenting and being a full person in the world.

This is somewhat unusual among coming-of-age stories, at least ones about teenagers, because most of Minnie’s relationships in the film are with adults. While there’s a central love story with a peer, how did this dynamic emerge and develop into such a focus of Mouse?

KO: It started as this idea of a trio with Callie in the middle and then these supporting characters in the background, people who’ve devoted their whole lives to being backup to her, both Minnie and Helen in different ways. Then, what would it be like if Callie were gone? How do those two people fall together? I wasn’t even really thinking about it in terms of peers versus adult relationships. It was the relationship that felt the most interesting to me, and of course there’s what we come to learn, which is that it’s not the same for them. Losing a friend isn’t the same as losing a child. But, for a while, they’re [both] unconsciously trying to replace Callie.

AT: I like the stickiness, too, of Helen and Minnie. That was always the moment in the script where I felt like, “Oh, this is a movie.” Helen’s presence, and the fact that it perhaps isn’t the right choice for either of them, felt deeply interesting. I haven’t really seen that before. I find the comparisons to Lady Bird interesting. I really like Lady Bird, and I think we have a similar mother-daughter relationship with Barbara and Minnie. But the fulcrum of the plot and the choices that these characters [are much different]. I love the world that Kelly has built around grief, and the way that we try to repress it, wash over it, or move through it. I think there’s a lot of wisdom there. Not that there isn’t wisdom in Lady Bird, but it’s such a different dynamic.

Intergenerational friendships and relationships are such a rarity in cinema, as in life, and there’s something thrilling—but, I imagine, also challenging—about how few standard narrative frameworks there are for them.

AT: What’s great about making movies is that you work like hell on the script to make it a document that can withstand pressure, and then you’re responding to what’s on the monitor every day and in every take. What you get with performers like Katherine and Sophie is this deep well of real-life complexity, not performed complexity or the affectation of depth. You get to watch these scenarios that Kelly has rendered so beautifully on the page play out in a thousand different directions. Maybe it’s challenging when we talk about the movie before it’s been made. But once you start making it, your reference point becomes the film itself, and this was such a gratifying movie to make because there was something to discover every day.

KO: I’m thinking about what you said about intergenerational friendships, and I’m realizing it’s in everything I’ve ever written. In Saint Frances, there’s a three-generation story with the mom going through postpartum depression. There’s also the lead character’s own mother. There are all these generations of women talking to each other and sharing experiences. I won’t even say wisdom, because I think the thing that’s true throughout is that the older generations are struggling just as much as the younger generations. That’s something that makes writing really fun, going back to this idea that nobody knows what they’re doing, no matter how old you are.

I feel like I’m just a quote machine today, but I think Lindsey Graham, of all people, made a smart observation about this: “When I was first elected to the House, I looked for the they who run things. What I finally realized is there is no they. There is only we, and we usually don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”

KO: Obama has a very similar quote where he was like, “I kept thinking that I would be meeting these really smart people as I ascended through the political sphere.” And then he was like, “And then you realize that the people in these high positions don’t know what they’re doing.”

AT: [laughs] I appreciate the pivot to Obama from Woody Allen and Lindsey Graham.

Setting the film in 2002 means reckoning with the different ways people experience and perform grief. Some of the shifts are obvious, like cellphones and social media warping the teenage experience. But did anything surprise you that might not have changed as much as we’d think?

KO: Chloe Coleman said the teenage soul stays the same, no matter the time period or generation. I found that refreshing and comforting. When it comes to relationships and the teen experience of first love, or loss, or feeling like an outsider, that feels unchanged. We have a little mention of homophobia, which I think has changed…but probably not as much as we think, especially in Arkansas. But aside from the cellphones and the technology, a lot of it is the same.

How did you describe the Little Rock of 2002 to the cast? The sense of place feels unique and distinct, but I assume that had to be articulated.

KO: The nice thing was that we shot in Arkansas. I didn’t have to explain much other than talking about how I didn’t know anybody in my high school who was out, and how different that is now. We talked about the undercurrent of Christianity being part of the soup that you grow up in, but we let them be in that space and absorb it. We cast a lot of locals, and through having true Arkansans in the film, Katherine was immersed in it all. Chloe, Sophie, David, and others who aren’t from there were immersed in it with people who live there.

There’s an interesting yin and yang between Ghostlight and Mouse, especially in how they relate to the theater. In one, it’s a way of becoming oneself; in the other, a way of escaping oneself. In one, the performers get to be good through some of the amateurishness; in the other, maybe not so much. Since their development processes were somewhat intertwined, was one informing the other?

KO: I’m glad you picked up on that, because you’d be surprised how many people are like, “They’re both theater movies! They’re both about grief!” and only notice how they’re the same. But I think those differences are important. The way they feed into each other is that I grew up doing theater. I’m a theater kid and a theater actor. So when I’m pulling from my own experience, which I often am as a way to get to specificity, it’s part of how I understand the world. Doing theater was a huge part of my experience of high school, so that’s why it’s there. But the theater world is Callie’s world, so Minnie is going to move even farther away from it and find something totally her own. In Ghostlight, it’s not his world, but Dan moves toward it. [Theater] can be both a terrifying thing and an incredibly comforting thing, a place where you realize maybe you do want to become somebody else and a place where you get to be yourself.

How do you approach filming theatrical performance for cinema? There’s such a delicate balance between capturing what the creative expression means for the artist and how the audience receives it.

AT: It’s very boring, but you have characters who are watching, and so you photograph from their point of view, from the audience and the wings. We privilege those points of view, and those feel a little bit more objective. The subjectivity comes from what they’re feeling and what they’re giving the camera. For Minnie’s performance, and to a much lesser degree Cara and Brandi’s performance, we chose to put the camera up on stage and privilege the emotional experience of performing. The contortionist, the magician, the tap dancer—they don’t get that same treatment. We always start from who’s watching and whose point of view is important.

For instance, in the drama classroom, there’s an objectivity to the way we shot that on the zoom lens, just to offset the potential for it to feel like a heavy-handed moment. We were very conscious that it could be extraordinarily on the nose if we did it wrong, and so we basically were like, “Oh, this is sort of a doc. This is like D.A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company.” We shot that and then caught David watching in that moment, almost by accident. It’s actually a freeze frame. It’s like six frames per second because we didn’t have enough, so we slowed it down. We focus on who’s watching and what they’re supposed to be getting out of it.

The post Interview: Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson on ‘Mouse’ and Granting Grace to Others appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Gazing into the camera, her head cocked and a hollow stare on her face, Winifred Notty (Maika Monroe) introduces herself at the start of Zachary Wigon’s Victorian Psycho by proudly claiming that she’s “the sanest person I’ve ever met.” Ariel Marx’s score screeches to life, and a title card pops up on screen, its wryly prosaic chapter heading framed by an ornate gothic border. The moment is emblematic of Wigon’s follow-up to Sanctuary, which works at a hysterical pitch while winking at us about how hysterical it’s being.

Winifred is a governess preparing to begin her new job at the remote country manor of a respected English family. Mr. and Mrs. Pounds (Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson) are keen to have Winifred knock some formal education and good manners into their young children—although, in the case of their daughter, Drusilla (Evie Templeton), just the good manners will do. But no sooner has Winifred started than strange and sinister things begin to occur.

During a family dinner early in the film, Winifred hints at some unpleasantness at her previous jobs, though the full gory details are only revealed later. Yet it’s hard to see why Victorian Psycho bothers being at all coy, since the film never makes any bones about whom its title refers to or how cracked Winifred is. Monroe wears the same frozen expression for nearly the entire film, interrupted only by the odd manic twitch. We see Winifred do any number of unhinged things—from gaslighting the children to gobbling up human body parts—in the film’s opening stretch, and, unlike with Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, there’s rarely any question as to whether she’s actually committing evil acts or merely imagining them.

That lack of ambiguity makes Winifred’s journey toward a full-blown murder spree feel oddly perfunctory. Psycho is as psycho does, and we’re never invested enough in Winifred or her victims to be moved by her increasingly violent antics. That’s a shame because cinematographer Nico Aguilar gives the film a spooky, shadow-drenched atmosphere that might have been put to genuinely frightening use in a story with any real sense of peril.

Before the bloodletting begins, the Pounds make for reasonably enjoyable company, with Isaacs and Wilson both getting off some good, droll lines. But Victorian Psycho makes another odd decision in surrounding Winifred with characters who are as cartoonish as she is. There’s a kernel of thematic substance in Virginia Feito’s script, adapted from her own novel, an attempt to underline how psychotic mainstream Victorian society was, with its violently enforced social order and devotion to unfeeling propriety. But being surrounded by fellow caricatures gives Winifred no straight man to play off of and only highlights how one-note the character is. In the end, her madness reads less as an aberration than as a different stripe of the same lunacy.

All the while, the film works overtime to convince us that we’re watching a subversive penny dreadful full of wicked delights. Marx’s score continues to rend and howl, Winifred’s narration is full of bleakly ironic quips, and the camera is forever hurling itself into crash zooms and Dutch angles. Some of the directorial choices are cute, as when the camera whips back and forth between Winifred and Mrs. Lamb during a tense conversation like a nervous listener caught between the two, but the overall effect is wearying. It’s like a feature-length “she’s so crazzzzzy” meme, with every decision that Victorian Psycho makes seemingly desperate to convince you of how depraved and shocking the whole thing is. If only that were actually true.

The post ‘Victorian Psycho’ Review: Maika Monroe’s Murderous Governess Is All Wink and No Bite appeared first on Slant Magazine.

He may be king of the monsters and headliner of the longest-running film franchise, but Godzilla isn’t exactly a beacon of consistency. He made his premiere in Honda Ishirō’s 1954 classic Godzilla as an allegorical figure, warning of the dangers of nuclear technology, before eventually settling into the role of drive-in movie star and a hero for children, as well as those young at heart. That’s a somewhat unlikely legacy, especially considering that the original film ends with the creature’s unambiguous death.

Inspired by King Kong’s popularity in Japan, Godzilla’s filmmakers didn’t have the time or resources to execute the stop-motion movie magic that brought Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong to life (the 1933 monster adventure was re-released in Japan in 1952), but their resourcefulness and ingenuity resulted in a different kind of magic. Tsuburaya Eiji’s pioneering use of suitmation was not only instrumental in the film’s global success, it also transformed the field of special effects. As for Godzilla, he forever infiltrated our collective lexicon: As series expert David Kalat puts it, “Where would we be without the suffix ‘-zilla’?”

While the craftsmanship of these films was often lost in translation—particularly in the pan-and-scanning wrought upon them in the TV edits and videotapes through which they were most commonly seen for decades—their spirit was not. Like Godzilla himself, these films have endured, as the franchise is now in its fourth cycle, and with the exception of the Millennium series (which started in 1999 and ended in 2004), they’re inseparable from the periods in Japanese history during which they were made (and after which they’re named).

It speaks volumes that a series founded on the idea of healing would find success through massive collaboration. Indeed, as critical as Honda’s talents and wartime experiences were to the series’s thematic resonance and out-of-the-gate success, it’s difficult to imagine the franchise still going strong more than 70 years later without the contributions of Tsuburaya, original suit actors Nakajima Haruo and Tezuka Katsumi, and composer Ifukube Akira, among many, many others. Even the silliest among these films is a work of art, holding a mirror up to the audience and providing a much-needed catharsis that reality cannot. And with the arrival of Godzilla Minus Zero, we’ve updated our ranking of all the films in the franchise, from worst to best.

Editor’s Note: This entry was originally published on March 24, 2021.

44. Godzilla (1977, Luigi Cozzi, Honda Ishirō, and Terry O. Morse)

In a rare case of cinematic justice, this worst of all Godzilla movies is also the least widely seen. Luigi Cozzi oversaw this re-edit of 1956’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, dubbing it, colorizing it, and expanding upon it with additional material, ranging from snippets of other monster movies to actual atrocity footage, including one particular shot that may leave you feeling like you’ve just watched a snuff film. The crudely rendered colorization frequently appears to have been executed in random fashion, with little, if any, regard for the images beneath it, and the resulting sensory assault doubles as a betrayal of the source material’s themes and subtext. This Godzilla—known informally as Cozzilla—isn’t merely unpleasant, but also depressing.

43. Godzilla (1998, Roland Emmerich)

The first American Godzilla doesn’t lack for bad qualities, but the eponymous creature is not among them. Were this iguana-like re-imagining of Toho’s monster at the center of a better film, it would be better regarded as a CGI achievement, for everything from the textures of its scales to the personality imbued in its anatomy and body language. Unfortunately, despite the many digital artists pushing against the outside of the envelope, the film is an interminable slog, vacillating between soullessly pantomiming Jurassic Park and advancing an underdog narrative consistently bogged down by Roland Emmerich’s directorial arrogance, best exemplified by the cynical Siskel and Ebert surrogates who are meant to elicit chuckles throughout.

42. Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959, Oda Motoyoshi)

Many consider 1956’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, a heavily re-edited American localization of 1954’s Godzilla, to be an insult to the Honda Ishirō classic, but it’s a masterpiece compared to Gigantis, the Fire Monster. This Americanized version of Godzilla Raids Again was seemingly ready-made for Mystery Science Theater 3000, from its idiotic dialogue and condescending attitude toward the Japanese, to its superfluous, relentless voiceover. Most perplexing are the efforts taken to disguise the fact that this was a Godzilla film in the first place, given the erasure of the monster’s name and his iconic roar. Save for the vocal work of George Takei, Keye Luke, and Paul Frees, the film brings nothing of value to the Godzilla canon.

41. Godzilla: Final Wars (2004, Kitamura Ryūhei)

On paper, Godzilla: Final Wars sounds like a blast: a 50th-anniversary greatest-hits-style package that incorporates almost every foe Godzilla had faced to date, and then some. Watching it, on the other hand, is another story, as the film plunges headlong into a series of fatally monotonous kaiju battles with foregone outcomes. The sheer velocity of Final Wars fails as a substitute for compelling material, while the nods to The Matrix feel more desperate than cool. The climactic ceasefire rings hollow given how, up to this point, the film has treated many of its human characters less like people than punchlines, though Don Frye, as a grizzled commander, manages to offer up a nice slice of ham amid the gruel.

40. Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989, Ōmori Kazuki)

You have to give Godzilla vs. Biollante points for chutzpah: Godzilla’s nemesis here—part flower, part Godzilla, and infused with the spirit of a scientist’s deceased daughter—is among the most singular monsters in the series, and a beguiling, otherworldly special-effects creation to boot. Such unique beauty highlights how deserving Biollante is of a better and less forgettable film. Tonally incongruous, bordering on asinine, this first sequel of the Heisei era suffers not so much from director Ōmori Kazuki’s desire to have been making a James Bond film instead as from how erratically the espionage and kaiju genres have been integrated. Godzilla vs. Biollante should be fun and awe-inspiring, but instead it’s broad and kitschy in all the wrong ways.

39. Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Adam Wingard)

King Kong and Godzilla are two of the most metaphorically loaded characters in the history of cinema, originally intended as an allegory for the American slave trade and the devastation of Japan during World War II, respectively. It’s hardly incidental that these are both forms of white violence, but to hear Godzilla vs. Kong tell it, the characters are a giant lizard and ape, full stop. Adam Wingard’s film is a resonance-free affair that suffers from its thin characterizations and questionable stereotypes. There’s a timely parable about the marginalized fighting back against the forces of capitalism (in this case, Mechagodzilla) buried underneath the spectacle, but it’s one that its tone-deaf screenplay is uninterested in working out. Godzilla vs. Kong certainly looks pretty, but it’s as empty as the hollow earth that Kong plucks his giant axe from.

38. Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001, Kaneko Shūsuke)

This is among the ugliest-looking of Toho’s Godzilla films, and it’s almost certainly the meanest. Here, Godzilla is possessed by the souls of those killed in the Pacific War, angered by modern Japan’s denial of its past misdeeds, but the potential for real gravitas is lost in the weightless effects and perfunctory battle sequences. The human plot involving a journalist (Niiyama Chiharu) and her admiral father (Uzaki Ryūdō) resonates, but it ultimately fails to transcend the film’s generally cold attitude. The dispensation of Godzilla’s victims, whether they’re foolish or merely helpless, betrays a cynicism unbecoming of the franchise’s roots, and it doesn’t help that this newly designed Godzilla looks and moves like the patriarch from the ’90s Dinosaurs sitcom.

37. Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000, Tezuka Masaaki)

This film’s premise—scientists hope to neutralize Godzilla by shooting him with a miniature black hole—is sufficiently cool that I hope a future production recycles it. As it is, Godzilla vs. Megaguirus is largely forgettable outside of how cheap much of it looks. An opening skirmish between Godzilla and a battalion of bazooka-equipped soldiers, playing a kind of hide-and-seek game with one another, is the high point, showcasing a kind of fighting previously unseen in the series, and effectively setting up the main character’s (Tanaka Misato) trajectory after her superior perishes while saving her life. The CG effects are largely of the copy-and-paste variety, and, much like the narrative, bear little in the way of distinction or weight.

36. Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971, Banno Yoshimitsu)

Extending the anti-nuclear message of the series into an anti-pollution stance, Godzilla vs. Hedorah (also known as Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster) illustrates with nightmarish ease the devastating effects of treating the planet like a garbage dump, particularly in scenes where Godzilla’s newfound nemesis, emitting toxic fumes while flying above the Japanese mainland like a manta ray from hell, quickly reduces its victims to corroded skeletons. But these qualities are undermined by everything from a frustrating lack of consistency—Hedorah’s sludge kills humans on contact but leaves a kitten unharmed—to the incongruous efforts to make the picture more kid-friendly, including an animated sequence and the infamous moment where Godzilla demonstrates a heretofore unseen (and by-itself-memorable) ability to fly.

35. Godzilla Raids Again (1955, Oda Motoyoshi)

This first Godzilla sequel is reminiscent of King Kong’s own, Son of Kong, in that it’s clearly a rush job meant to cash in on the success of its predecessor. A second Godzilla is discovered on a remote island, fighting another monster, Anguirus. The two soon relocate their rivalry to the mainland, where the pilots who discovered them bear witness to their destruction before playing a key role in neutralizing the threat. Some shots of Godzilla, entranced by flares, are memorable, but from the cinematography to the performances to the special effects, virtually everything about Godzilla Raids Again feels perfunctory and undercooked. Only the final battle, in which victory is won in part by a kamikaze-like maneuver, delivers a much-needed dramatic kick.

34. Godzilla 1985 (1985, Hashimoto Koji and R.J. Kizer)

The American B-side to The Return of Godzilla, Godzilla 1985 expands and even improves on aspects of the Toho original, but it also shoots itself in the foot. Edited by New World Pictures in a manner that deliberately echoes 1956’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, this localized cut returns Raymond Burr to the role of Steve Martin, loses some extraneous human drama from The Return of Godzilla, and wisely deletes some of the original version’s less successful effects shots. In Burr’s climactic speech, the film finds a sorrowful heart of darkness. Pity, then, that it also changes a Russian character into a villain in an act of needless Cold War antagonism, and gracelessly hawks Dr Pepper during one of its most serious moments. Thank God(zilla) that Burr himself refused to take part in the advertising gimmick.

33. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024, Adam Wingard)

In the early scenes of Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Dan Stevens’s veterinarian extracts an infected tooth from Kong’s mouth. It’s an apt introduction to this neon-soaked extravaganza, which suggests the cinematic equivalent of washing down Pop Rocks with soda. While no less superficial than Godzilla vs. Kong, Wingard’s follow-up improves on its predecessor thanks to its joyous kineticism, diminished self-seriousness, and improved comedic back-and-forth among the human characters, channeling the weird, downright goofy energy of the later Shōwa-era entries. Childlike in its exuberance, it careens from hallucinatory sequences that rival the maximalism of the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer to gorgeously choreographed monster mashes, the latter highlighted by a striking tableau of the titular beasts and their newfound foes at the outset of a zero-gravity brawl.

32. Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973, Fukuda Jun)

The most cash-strapped film of the Shōwa era, Godzilla vs. Megalon is also the one most devoid of subtext, briefly alluding to underground nuclear testing as a motivating factor—for the citizens of Seatopia to unleash their beetle-like guardian, Megalon, as punishment against Earth’s surface dwellers—before easing into a comical series of battles inspired by the antics of the then-popular Ultraman. Here, Godzilla teams up with the human-built Jet Jaguar, who proves to have its own sense of good and evil, as well as the ability to change size at will. Save for an impressive set piece in which Megalon destroys a dam, the film illustrates Toho’s ability to work within the limitations of thriftiness, its earnest goofiness best summed up in the shot of Godzilla providing Megalon with a flying drop kick before flashing a celebratory fist pump.

31. Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991, Ōmori Kazuki)

Opening in flashback and introducing a novel time-travel element, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah rebounds from the wonky Godzilla vs. Biollante without quite hitting its stride. Humans from 2204 arrive in the present, promising to erase Godzilla from history, but an intriguing turn of events speaks to the inevitability of monsters in a world that’s embraced nuclear power. A trip to a WWII battlefield yields some of the more piecemeal effects work and cringe-worthy English dialogue in the series. But the performers are otherwise in fine form, and the third act delivers on spectacle, if only to a point, while references to contemporary Hollywood films underscore the feeling that the Heisei era was still struggling to find its identity.

30. The Return of Godzilla (1984, Hashimoto Koji)

The Return of Godzilla serves as a direct sequel to the original 1954 movie, forgetting the existence of the 14 films between them and attempting to recapture the somber tone largely forgone in the interim. Godzilla’s destruction is more fearsome and cathartic here than in any of the prior sequels, commencing with an eerie point-of-view shot of the titan emerging from a fog bank, while the image of a red sky, produced by the fallout from a nuclear explosion, is indelible and haunting. The second half recalls the original film’s primary set piece in its unremitting destruction, but the elements pertaining to humanity and the Cold War don’t resonate much beyond their necessity to the plot. Absent a spotlight on human tragedy to underscore Godzilla’s purported demise, this entry impresses but ultimately fails to linger.

29. Son of Godzilla (1967, Fukuda Jun)

Son of Godzilla introduces Minilla, the first of several variations on a Godzilla offspring, and the next logical step in directing the series toward a younger audience. Thankfully, the film sidesteps the question of how the big fella reproduces, focusing instead on the amusing parental frustrations that Godzilla endures as he tries to teach Minilla how to defend himself against the giant spider and praying mantises residing on their island home. The rather lifelike movement of these creatures, essentially constructed as giant marionettes, ensures that they’re the stars of the film, especially compared to the unappealing design of Minilla and an inferior Godzilla suit. These are minor concerns in an overall charming ditty that honors the series’s protest roots via its human characters, namely scientists researching ways to combat global food shortages.

28. Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972, Fukuda Jun)

As the Japanese film industry underwent great transition in the 1970s, so, too, did Toho’s Godzilla productions. The resulting Godzilla vs. Gigan was a kaiju free-for-all, assembled with stock footage and music and reusing monster suits that were clearly in disrepair, trying anything and everything to keep things interesting—and mostly succeeding. The film is as entertaining as it is ridiculous, concerning itself with a plot by invading extraterrestrial cockroaches and portraying its protagonist monsters as “talking” to each other (with accompanying speech bubbles in the original cut, and actual dialogue in the English-language release, Godzilla on Monster Island). The design of the new foe, Gigan, is particularly inspired, with the buzzsaw on its chest giving Godzilla a run for his money in the bloodiest fighting the series had yet seen.

27. King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963, Honda Ishirō and Thomas Montgomery)

The American version of 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla recasts the original material into the mold of a more streamlined Universal monster movie, replacing most of Ifukube Akira’s score and re-contextualizing the narrative with an English-language news broadcast as a framing device. The result loses much of the original’s satire—pitting Godzilla and King Kong against each other as products vying for dominance in the marketplace—but that it remains apparent at all speaks to the intelligence and savvy with which the material was first rendered. The characterization of the humans is more restricted as a result of the heavy cutting, but the humorous dubbing matches the original’s comic tone, and the fun factor remains high.

26. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (2017, Shizuno Kōbun and Seshita Hiroyuki)

The first animated film in the Godzilla series wastes no time establishing an aura of despair. Having fled Earth in the wake of Godzilla’s destruction, humanity’s survivors have spent 20 years in deep space, searching for another hospitable planet. After opting to return to Earth—where, thanks to relativity, some 20,000 years have passed—they find that Godzilla’s supremacy has increased along with his size. Planet of the Monsters introduces new humanoid races, the Exif and the Bilusaludo, also refugees, whose technologies and motives will both aid and hinder mankind’s efforts to defeat the monster they created. What the film lacks in a proper conclusion, it more than makes up for with its dynamic battle sequences and jaw-dropping cliffhanger.

25. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974, Fukuda Jun)

Cashing in on the mid-’70s popularity of robots in Japan, the penultimate feature of the Shōwa era pits Godzilla against his robotic lookalike Mechagodzilla, the latest nemesis deployed by malevolent aliens seeking to take over the world, and one possessing an army’s worth of weaponry. Fukuda Jun’s final directorial effort of the series brings to bear all his talents, fully displayed in the film’s impressive (and explosive) set pieces and the exciting parallels drawn between the human drama and kaiju destruction. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla may not be a classic, but it feels like one, at least when it comes to the wonderfully weird King Caesar, an Okinawan deity who aids Godzilla in overcoming his metallic doppelganger.

24. Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999, Ōkawara Takao)

Godzilla 2000: Millennium’s semi-satirical tone and positive outlook suggest a Godzilla movie as helmed by Joe Dante. After the brooding conclusion of the Heisei era, this start to the franchise’s third phase supposes that none of the sequels from the previous 44 years exist, a choice shared by the next five films that allowed them to indulge in creative freedom. This is probably the most prototypical Godzilla film to the eyes of people who’ve never seen one: proudly silly, without any loss of conviction. The use of CGI is knowingly reflexive, too, as the villain—an extraterrestrial presence looking to steal Japan’s technology—reveals itself as a barely disguised riff on the monster from the 1998 American Godzilla.

23. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966, Fukuda Jun)

A step back from the increasingly higher stakes of the prior films, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (released stateside as Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster) shines a spotlight on serious topics while opting for the lighter tone of a James Bond adventure. A terrorist organization is enslaving Infant Island natives while developing nuclear weapons, the radiation resulting in Ebirah, an overgrown lobster, and ostensibly attracting Godzilla, who’s found sleeping in a nearby cave. This entry is unique in that it was initially intended as a King Kong vehicle, accounting for some inconsistencies in Godzilla’s behavior. Fukuda Jun’s skillful direction more than compensates for these relative flaws, and Satō Masaru’s score provides a refreshing surf-rock vibe for the film’s pleasures, from a very cool underwater fight sequence to Godzilla wielding Ebirah’s freshly dismembered pincer, to what may be the best mobile shrubbery gag in all of cinema.

22. Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018, Shizuno Kōbun and Seshita Hiroyuki)

Much of the original Godzilla’s tension rests on the fear of an arms race: that any weapon that could defeat Godzilla might give rise to even greater horrors. City on the Edge of Battle revisits this thesis in the form of Mechagodzilla City, an A.I.-created fortress powered by nanometal, at once the only thing capable of defeating Godzilla and a threat to all other life on Earth. The sense of encroaching doom is offset by the Houtua, a tribe of humans who’ve adapted to Godzilla’s presence, living happily and humbly. This middle chapter in the animated Godzilla trilogy is bold in many ways, perhaps most of all in its suggestion that, if defeating a monster requires sacrificing one’s humanity, the very concept of winning may no longer be viable.

21. Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975, Honda Ishirō)

A direct sequel to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Terror of Mechagodzilla saw the return of Honda Ishirō to the director’s chair and the series returning to its deeper, darker roots, all the while perpetuating the dynamic visual growth that can be charted through the Shōwa era. The introduction of Titanosaurus and subsequent fisticuffs with Godzilla employ various impressive point-of-view shots, highlighting that the filmmakers still had new tricks up their sleeves ahead of the series going into a decade-long dormancy. Takayama Yukiko’s screenplay is fraught with complexity, featuring an aggrieved scientist, Dr. Shinji Mafune (Hirata Akihiko), seeking revenge on his species and an ill-fated romance with direct ties to the central conflict. It’s fitting that Honda’s final directorial effort would end the first Godzilla era on a high note.

20. Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994, Yamashita Kensho)

A deliberate step back from the seriousness of the preceding films, Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla brings a new level of super-sized familial discord to the series. Some of Godzilla’s cells, accidentally released into outer space, have mutated and returned in the form of a powered-up clone, SpaceGodzilla, who proceeds to imprison the impossibly adorable Little Godzilla (formerly known as Baby Godzilla). These tensions, and a subplot concerning an effort to control Godzilla through telekinesis, remind audiences that these monsters also have inner lives, and that they’re capable of connecting to humans. While more stylized and artificial-looking than those of its immediate predecessors, this film’s miniatures and effects work provide a rousing throwback that nonetheless retains the maximized aplomb of the ’90s films.

19. Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002, Tezuka Masaaki)

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, like the 1954 original, derives much of its strength from depictions of moral strife and scientific hubris. The Japan Self-Defense Forces have constructed a new mech unit, Kiryu, around the skeleton of the original Godzilla, the very bones and DNA embedded in and connected to the JSDF’s modern weaponry. The results, of course, prove disastrous. Meanwhile, Akane (Shaku Yumiko), shamed by her part in the lives lost in an earlier battle, hopes to redeem herself as Kiryu’s pilot. The film’s human drama is delivered with refreshing conviction, and the battle sequences are appropriately awesome. Along with the direct sequel, Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S., this entry represents the peak of the Millennium era.

18. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019, Michael Dougherty)

Opening with a callback to the high point of its 2014 predecessor, this first Godzilla sequel of the MonsterVerse knows it has big shoes to fill, trying to match the scope and wonder of Gareth Edwards’s film while also adding more and bigger bells and whistles. To that end, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a nearly unqualified success, balancing a steady deluge of monsters with a cast of characters scrambling to stay ahead of the fray, but outside of a few moments, it doesn’t share the earlier film’s sense of scale. Still, it doesn’t lack for visceral beauty, most indelibly the image of Ghidorah perched victoriously atop a volcano, while the sequence in which Rodan wipes out a squadron of fighter jets may be the most singularly thrilling of the whole franchise.

17. King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962, Honda Ishirō)

King Kong vs. Godzilla serves as both a foundational metatext for the series’s growing self-awareness and a blueprint for the sequels to follow. A pharmaceutical company’s advertising director, Mr. Tako (a wonderful Arishima Ichirō), hopes to boost the ratings of the TV program they sponsor and decides to steal the headlines from Godzilla by pitting him against Kong. Before long, bets are placed. Leaning into the ridiculousness of its premise, the film plays the human elements for laughs, while portraying its monsters as larger-than-life wrestlers. In downplaying the seriousness of what these monsters represent and letting the viewer’s guard down, their climactic battle on Mount Fuji arguably allows for greater catharsis.

16. Godzilla Minus One (2023, Yamazaki Takashi)

A fusion of intelligent drama and crowd-pleasing spectacle that puts the bulk of its effects-driven contemporaries to shame, Godzilla Minus One reboots the series in expert fashion, unfolding over the end and aftermath of World War II and bordering on an outright remake of the original movie. But the scales here are tipped further: Japan, still reeling from nuclear attacks and firebombings and hamstrung militarily by international politics, is weaker, while this iteration of Godzilla is far stronger than his nearly 70-years-older predecessor. What Godzilla Minus One lacks in comparison to the existential dread of the 1954 production, it nearly compensates for with sheer visceral terror, deftly interrogating the values of postwar Japan while painting Godzilla as an amoral wrecking ball heaving its way through the populace. Most savory are the juxtapositions of restrained silence and thunderous destruction, the latter movingly complemented by composer Satō Naoki’s harrowing, Ifukube-indebted war march.

15. All Monsters Attack (1969, Honda Ishirō)

All Monsters Attack (a.k.a. Godzilla’s Revenge) is a delightful riff on Alice in Wonderland in which the proverbial rabbit hole is the imaginative mind of a child. While the film relies heavily on stock footage from previous films for its monster sequences, this cost-saving measure also speaks implicitly to the fact that this is a Godzilla movie about Godzilla movies, dreamt of by Ichiro Miki (Yazaki Tomonori), a bullied latchkey kid who gets caught up in a plot with thieves hiding out nearby. As Godzilla teaches his son, Minilla, to stand up to Gabara—a catlike monster unique to this film, and who expert Richard Pusateri hilariously describes as sounding “like a small car that cannot start”—Ichiro learns to stand up for himself. In either its Japanese or American version, it’s profoundly cool how unconcerned this film is with appearing so.

14. Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992, Ōkawara Takao)

Echoing the franchise’s earlier entries, Godzilla vs. Mothra distills the kaiju tropes to their essence and deftly balances the wonderful, the silly, and the sublime. Ōkawara Takao’s first time at bat directing a Godzilla film is an unqualified success, merging lavish production values with finely tuned performances bereft of camp. Here, a basic morality tale about corporate greed run rampant acts as the catalyst for a series of expertly staged monster smackdowns, culminating in an act of great sacrifice. When a foolish CEO kidnaps Mothra’s fairies—here known as Cosmos—for use in an advertisement campaign, Mothra, Godzilla, and newcomer Battra, a dark deity purposed with protecting the Earth, intervene. As per usual, much property damage ensues.

13. Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003, Tezuka Masaaki)

Unique among the titles from the series’s third era in that it serves as a direct sequel to both the preceding film and the 1954 original, Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. merges state-of-the-art practical effects with storytelling steeped in a deep regard for the legacy of the franchise. Mechagodzilla is being repaired following damages suffered in Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, but Mothra warns, by way of her fairies, against further use of the original Godzilla’s remains. Tokyo S.O.S. never forgets the tragedy of Godzilla, and affords great dignity to its characters, who repeatedly accept death as the cost of doing what’s necessary. It’s also among the most beautiful entries in the franchise. Returning director Tezuka Masaaki delivers a master class in bridging the scale between kaiju destruction and human melodrama.

12. Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956, Honda Ishirō and Terry O. Morse)

Across this American localization of Godzilla, the insertion of new actors into the original material is far from seamless, and there’s an insensitivity, however unintended, in how some of the Japanese dialogue is used interchangeably (in his Criterion commentary, David Kalat likens this to the “wah wah” noises made by the adults in the Peanuts cartoons). But Godzilla, King of the Monsters! amplified the humanity of the Japanese people barely a decade removed from WWII, and the main character added for Western audiences, Raymond Burr’s newspaperman Steve Martin, is mostly limited to being a feckless observer of the destruction indirectly wrought by his own homeland. The reconfigured narrative appropriately channels the bleakness (and structure) of film noir, and even the sporadically dubbed dialogue yields one of the best lines of the series. This Godzilla broke down countless barriers for international cinema, and its box office success secured Godzilla’s status as a worldwide star for decades to come.

11. Destroy All Monsters (1968, Honda Ishirō)

Originally intended as the final Godzilla movie, Destroy All Monsters benefits from one of the series’s most indulgent budgets—one that, despite the film’s box office success, would see an increasing reliance on stock footage in future installments—but even more so from the innumerable skills that Toho’s artists had honed across the prior eight films. Honda Ishirō, returning from a two-film hiatus for his sixth Godzilla production, makes what must have been an incredibly complex shoot look easy, deftly cutting between events around (and beyond) the Earth, sometimes with multiple planes of action unfolding simultaneously, including pyrotechnics, as nearly all of Toho’s kaiju are unleashed on the world by alien invaders intent on world domination. The climactic fight—pitting ten against one—is a barnburner.

10. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1993, Ōkawara Takao)

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla so seamlessly melds monster smackdowns with human melodrama and just a smattering of smirk that the effect is practically Spielbergian. The sense of scale is awe-inspiring: A series of compositions juxtaposing Godzilla against natural landscapes, reminiscent of daguerreotypes, evokes an Olympian god on Earth ready to pass judgment, while an early scuffle between Godzilla and Rodan suggests the notion of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Satsuma Kenpachirō, with the aid of the film’s effects specialists, delivers an eerily expressive (and possibly series-best) performance as Godzilla. That the film plays things relatively straight helps with the introduction of Godzillasaurus, a.k.a. Baby Godzilla, whose presence anchors the proceedings at the human level.

9. Godzilla: The Planet Eater (2018, Shizuno Kōbun and Seshita Hiroyuki)

Most Godzilla movies rest on the assumption that defeating the monstrous reptile so that civilization might return to business as usual is a worthy cause. But Godzilla: The Planet Eater suggests that maybe it isn’t. Following the disastrous results of the events in City on the Edge of Battle, Haruo (Miyano Mamoru) must face the consequences of having possibly handed victory to Godzilla, but little is as it seems. The Planet Eater is the most visually compelling of Toho’s anime trilogy (especially with the introduction of an old foe in a new form), but it lingers most for its cutthroat idealism, similar to that of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, and the final, post-credits sequence is among the most stirring and hopeful of the series.

8. Godzilla Minus Zero (2026, Yamazaki Takashi)

While Godzilla Minus One brings to mind the quicksilver effectiveness of a popcorn forefather like Jaws, this viscerally and emotionally punishing sequel might be described as channeling the likes of Day of Wrath. Godzilla Minus Zero is by far the loudest entry in the franchise, and that’s metaphorically true even when the decibel levels are near, well, zero. Bookended by sequences of staggering destruction, the struggles endured by its human characters speak to how the effects of violence cascade over time. Director Yamazaki Takashi’s command of scale is impressive enough, but it’s the intimate moments—from parents making promises they know they may not be able to keep to nightmarishly understated body horror—that really stick.

7. Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964, Honda Ishirō)

The first genuinely great Godzilla sequel, Honda Ishirō’s Mothra vs. Godzilla would also be the last film of the Shōwa era to depict the big lizard as an antagonist, subtly shifting the portrayal of villainy onto humanity’s avarice. Washed away by a violent storm from its island home, Mothra’s egg shows up in Japanese waters, where a pair of capitalists enact a scheme to profit off of it, oblivious to the dangers involved. The film’s simple but effective morality lesson is best exemplified in the sequence where the two schemers, fighting over a pile of money instead of fleeing to safety, perish in the wake of Godzilla’s destruction. The advances made in the series’s production values make Mothra vs. Godzilla a special effects landmark, while cinematographer Koizumi Hajime’s prodigious use of the widescreen frame brings to mind John Carpenter’s early work. The U.S. release, titled Godzilla vs. the Thing, is similarly worth seeking out, especially for the Frontier Missile Cruisers sequence, deleted from the Japanese cut.

6. Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965, Honda Ishirō)

Invasion of Astro-Monster is noteworthy in that it’s the first Godzilla movie to be co-produced by an American studio. Practically speaking, this means that whether you’re viewing the Japanese or American cut (titled Monster Zero or Godzilla vs. Monster Zero), the film is partially dubbed, as co-leading American actor Nick Adams performed his lines in English on set. Creatively, this crossover speaks to the film’s themes of unification. The citizens of Planet X have deceived the people of Earth into letting them “borrow” Godzilla and Rodan in order to battle Ghidorah, who’s taken up residence on their home planet. The simplicity of the plot provides a fertile ground where the rest of the film’s qualities—from its gorgeous set design and color schemes to the breathless cross-cutting of its final act—can flourish uninhibited. Godzilla’s infamous victory dance doubles as the victory lap this joyous entry deserves.

5. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995, Ōkawara Takao)

Death and resurrection are in vogue in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, the conclusion to the second Godzilla era: Prehistoric creatures revived a half century ago by Dr. Serizawa’s oxygen destroyer are wreaking havoc and growing, Godzilla’s body is overheating and on the brink of nuclear meltdown (threatening the Earth with it), and the multiple deaths suffered by Godzilla Junior (formerly Little Godzilla) have taken on biblical proportions. Ifukube Akira’s mournful score, the last he ever composed, serves as a fitting bookend to a career and an era, but the film also makes a point of having a blast—a handful of nods to James Cameron’s Aliens are both organic and earned—before breaking your heart. The kaiju equivalent of a funeral dirge, Destoroyah honors and elevates Godzilla’s legacy. Like its pyrotechnics, its pathos packs a wallop.

4. Shin Godzilla (2016, Anno Hideaki and Higuchi Shinji)

The first of Toho’s films to completely reboot the series, Shin Godzilla is the 2016 equivalent to the 1954 original, channeling the traumas of the 2011 Tohoku and Fukushima Daiichi disasters and presenting the titular monster, first and foremost, as a public health crisis. Unlike the relatively straightforward military battles common to the series, Japan’s public officials must here navigate complex legal channels hand-in-hand with both their own military and other world governments in order to quell the rapidly evolving reptilian threat. This incarnation of Godzilla is arguably the most frightening one to date, unleashing more damage in mere moments than in some entire films’ running times. Directed with aplomb to spare, Shin Godzilla is a sobering reminder of nature’s ongoing supremacy.

3. Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964, Honda Ishirō)

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster not only perfects the series’s monster-versus-monster formula, it boasts what may be the most purely enjoyable sequence of any Godzilla film before and since. It adeptly weaves an espionage plot into its monster-mayhem fabric, lessening the emphasis on the series’s signature subtext about the threat of nuclear war without stepping away from it entirely. A prophetess warns the masses that the people of Earth must awaken to their duties as citizens of the universe, and so, too, must Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan learn to set aside their differences in order to overcome a common enemy (but not before an awfully big game of passive-aggressive volleyball). Ghidorah features standout work from all involved, yielding some of the best performances ever given by its cast of monsters.

2. Godzilla (2014, Gareth Edwards)

After the failure of Roland Emmerich’s 1998 film of the same name, stakes were high for this second go at an American Godzilla production. Steven Spielberg’s influence looms large over the film, given that its characters have more than a few close encounters with tensions of the nuclear kind, but Godzilla reigns even larger. Here, he’s again a deity—usually unseen, yet always present. The film’s jaw-dropping H.A.L.O. jump sequence—all apocalyptic chiaroscuro, juxtaposing lilliputian humans against monsters too massive to even fit in the frame—brings to mind nothing less than Dante’s journey through hell, and when that scene references Stanley Kubrick by way of György Ligeti’s “Requiem,” the moment feels earned. It achieves true grandeur, partly through a deep appreciation for trauma’s lingering effects, and partly by eliding empty spectacle for something more personal, almost kabuki-like, never more beautifully so than in a cut from a bellowing Godzilla to the image of a child asleep, next to their dinosaur toys.

1. Godzilla (1954, Honda Ishirō)

If Georges Méliès’s effects extravaganzas gave cinematic form to dreams, Honda Ishirō’s monumental Godzilla is a manifestation of hellish nightmares. Despite its dated special effects and baked-in visual artifacts (the latter resulting from the use of easily damaged film stock), the film still feels fresh. A walking metaphor for America’s military power, Godzilla is presented as sheer force, a wrecking ball impervious to the weapons that spawned him. The film emphasizes his wild, reptilian brutality, but still leaves room for empathy when he meets his match in the form of the anguished Dr. Serizawa (Hirata Akihiko), who’s developed a powerful new weapon but fears the potential of another arms race. Few films have come close to matching Godzilla’s metaphorical weight, especially the apocalyptic plow of its second half, where it channels the catharsis of a nation still reeling from the unspeakable. This wasn’t the first kaiju film, but it remains the holy text of the genre, an antiwar masterpiece that combines the full potential of science fiction and cinema in an achievement of savage beauty and uncompromising humanity.

The post Every Godzilla Movie Ranked appeared first on Slant Magazine.

A24 has released a second trailer for The Debut, Jesse Eisenberg’s follow-up to A Real Pain, and this time it’s built around a single line. Julianne Moore plays Mona, a meek New Jersey housewife who lands a bit part as a building superintendent in the fictional musical Nosy Neighbor, and her big line is just two words: “Rent’s due.” Paul Giamatti’s Jerry, the production’s luridly exacting director, won’t let her stop saying them until she gets it right.

Slant’s Kyle Turner, who caught the film at the New York Film Festival, singled out that scene as its most memorable, “a wild, uproarious identity crisis,” and credited Moore’s “virtuosic” performance with giving the musical comedy its emotional footing.

Eisenberg wrote and directed The Debut, and he also wrote its music and lyrics and appears in the film. Halle Bailey, Bernadette Peters, Colton Ryan, and Eldar Isgandarov co-star, and Emma Stone and Dave McCary produced through their Fruit Tree banner, alongside Topic Studios. The trailer closes on a line that’s bound to get a laugh from anyone who’s ever sat through a community-theater production: “Can I make a confession? I hate musicals.”

The Debut opens December 11 and expands nationwide on Christmas Day.

Watch the trailer below:

The post ‘The Debut’ Trailer: For Julianne Moore, the Rent Is Due in Jesse Eisenberg’s Musical Comedy appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Virgilio Villoresi’s Orfeo is in some respects a faithful adaptation of Dino Buzzati’s pioneering 1969 graphic novel Poem Strip, going so far as to bring individual panels meticulously to life. And yet, by expanding the narrative to meet the demands of commercial cinema, it departs from the poetic structure of its source material.

The story, such as it is, riffs on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Set in an Art Deco-encrusted world with a vaguely midcentury air, it follows Orfeo (Luca Vergoni), the pianist at a bar called Polypus, who falls in love with Eura (Giulia Maenza) and, after she dies, goes after her into the “Afterworld” on a futile quest to bring her back. His descent mobilizes some gripping surreal set pieces that combine animation with live action à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Despite the injection of a backstory not present in Poem Strip, neither Orfeo nor Eura amounts to much more than a mythical type. Eura, especially, is little more than a pretext for a hero’s journey. A zest for dancing the cha-cha-chá is perhaps her most distinctive trait.

The film’s visual style is dialed up to the point of irrelevant intensity, detached as it is from the narrative arc. The hyperactive camera is at one point mounted on a serving tray. Whip pans and freeze frames recreate the panel-to-panel progression of a graphic novel—pretty frenetic editing just to show off some interior décor. That said, Villoresi and cinematographer Marco de Pasquale bring tremendous technique to bear in setting some of Buzzati’s most arresting panels into motion. In one shot, a moon melts like Camembert down a spire of red sandstone. In another, a skull-faced dragoon pierces Eura’s favorite gramophone record with a saber.

These are stunning images in isolation, but what they’re in service of besides technical demonstration isn’t always clear. At times they look designed more with the trailer in mind than the film itself. One exception is the scene in which the iconic living suit coat from Poem Strip, a sort of demon bureaucrat who tries to tempt Orfeo away from Eura, possesses his body to play the piano. It’s more affecting for involving Orfeo’s character. Someone who ordinarily plays the piano with pleasure, he’s forced to play against his will, reduced to an instrument himself.

Where Buzzati appropriates what, in 1969, was a contemporary Pop Art aesthetic, warping it with an infernal surrealism into something unprecedented, Villoresi draws on the playbooks of past avant-gardes. He refreshingly shuns computer animation for stop-motion and miniature sets, yet the characteristic tactility of stop-motion is somehow diluted, so that it all too often resembles a computer-animated simulation anyway. This may be a byproduct of the 16mm film stock, which shrouds details in a sort of haze, or of an almost allergic aversion to ugliness. Ruthlessly expunged of the quotidian, Orfeo can come off as overly polished, even sterile.

Instead of pushing animation into new territory, Villoresi seems content to mimic the work of Jan Švankmajer or the Brothers Quay—but without the critical, despairing edge of either. The avant-garde here is more of a posture or a set of signifiers for citation than a method for inventing new forms of image-making. What’s most disappointing is that this approach undercuts a theme the film itself is at pains to inculcate: Orpheus loses Eurydice because he can’t let her go, and yet Villoresi clings to long-established aesthetic modes.

It may seem harsh to fault Orfeo for succumbing to the ubiquitous tendency to ignore the vulgarities and complexities of the present and fetishize the results—not the spirit—of an experimentalism that gave life to new yet enduring visions. But if the imagination is allowed to atrophy from disuse, future artists and their audiences will have nothing to look back on from our time but safe imitations of artworks from bolder eras.

The post ‘Orfeo’ Review: Virgilio Villoresi’s Underworld Looks Back Too Fondly on the Avant-Garde appeared first on Slant Magazine.

With less than three weeks to go before The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth takes over IMAX screens, Netflix has finally spelled out what its stuntman is being paid to do. The streamer this morning released the film’s second official trailer, which played exclusively ahead of last weekend’s IMAX re-release of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, the 2019 film that Slant’s Sam C. Mac deemed Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus out of Cannes.

Fincher’s last feature, The Killer, turned out to be a surprisingly funny assassin thriller, and the new trailer suggests a similarly dark sense of humor. Brad Pitt’s Cliff is scraping by behind a bar and in a projection booth when an agent (Elizabeth Debicki) summons him on behalf of a TV star (Scott Caan) who does his own stunts and has a very different job in mind. The real gag comes at the end, as Cliff improvises a pitch for a TV show that amounts to a plot summary of the movie we’re watching. Carla Gugino, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Peter Weller also turn up.

Here’s Netflix’s official description: “It’s 1977, eight years since Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) encountered the Manson family in Quentin Tarantino’s parallel history of 1969, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. In The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, directed by Fincher from a new script by Tarantino, the fairytale is over. Los Angeles no longer needs a hippie-slaying stuntman the way it did. But Hollywood will always have problems, problems that can only be solved by someone with Cliff’s unique (occasionally extralegal) abilities.”

The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth opens exclusively in IMAX theaters on November 25 for a two-week run, before arriving on Netflix on December 23.

Watch the trailer below:

The post David Fincher’s Quentin Tarantino-Penned, Brad Pitt-Starring ‘Cliff Booth’ Gets New Trailer appeared first on Slant Magazine.

It’s often said of period pieces that you can see the money on screen. In A. Rimbaud, what you can see—very much by design—is the lack thereof, as Patrick Wang strips cinema down to its rudiments, flying in the face of the idea that immersion is a function of verisimilitude. No frame of the film could be mistaken for “reality,” and what results is surprisingly intimate, treating the viewer as present and active, like the audience at a live performance.

A. Rimbaud ambitiously sets out to tell the entire life story of its title subject. Wang doesn’t content himself with the poet’s heavily mythologized youth as an enfant terrible who moves to Paris, has a love affair with Paul Verlaine, and alters the face of literature. He gives equal time to the years after Rimbaud abandons poetry to serve French colonial interests in Africa. But where a typical biopic would rely on eye-wateringly expensive sets, hordes of extras, and CGI, here every scene is shot in a black-box theater, with Blake Draper as the sole actor.

Wang conjures the Gare du Nord, for instance, out of a clock and a signpost. Draper, in a wide-brimmed hat, stuffs his pipe and lights it with the strike of a match. Everything else is down to the sound design: train whistles, birdsong, the flap of pigeon wings, the clop of hooves on cobblestones. In such moments, the viewer is entrusted with imagining what isn’t directly shown, and for the first hour and a half or so of A. Rimbaud, the charisma of Draper’s performance makes this a light and diverting task. When his dialogue doesn’t quote directly from poems and letters, it retains the flavor of Rimbaud’s way with words.

Draper not only breaks the fourth wall by speaking directly to the camera, but at one point even bobs it up and down to simulate a nod of assent. It’s easy to feel as though we’ve been given front-row seats to his inner monologue. All the other “speaking” parts are played by musical instruments, such as a viola for Verlaine and a box lyre for King Menelik II. Again, we’re trusted to imagine what people are saying based on the tonality of the music. Rimbaud’s celebrated “derangement of the senses” is evoked through some sub-24-frames-per-second shots and tilting camerawork. In the film’s most moving scene, Rimbaud recites “The Drunken Boat” while lying on his back, upside down in the frame and looking up at the overhead camera.

If this black-box approach is perfectly suited to the bohemian phase of Rimbaud’s life, it starts to feel monotonous, even slightly claustrophobic, after his radical break from poetry. On the one hand, it’s admirable of Wang to give equal screen time to the years of his subject’s life that a Hollywood treatment would likely have ignored. On the other, the formal choices are at odds with the conventional bourgeois type Rimbaud has become. Monologues about his salary are a far cry from “unbelievable Floridas / Mingling with flowers panthers’ eyes and human / Skin!” A sober boat indeed. It doesn’t help that Draper’s world-weariness in this section isn’t as inspired as the exuberance and hubris he brings to the teenage Rimbaud.

Precisely because the film doesn’t pivot stylistically as it does narratively, its attitude toward what some have seen as Rimbaud’s betrayal of poetry, and others as his embodiment of it, isn’t readily discernible. Maybe it’s fitting that, like Rimbaud himself, the film’s provocative stylistic flourishes start to look banal when overstretched. The reliance on monologue, for instance, may make sense for a character who never quite reaches maturity, but it also verges on tedium as the viewer is less and less often placed in the position of an interlocutor or confidant.

Without a marked formal shift to match the character’s embrace of social convention (or, more charitably, his reinvention), what at first felt so fresh goes stale, as A. Rimbaud drifts from the cinematic toward the theatrical end of the spectrum. The desire for more camera movement, more impressionistic editing, perhaps a touch of animation—anything to refresh the senses—goes unsatisfied as we approach the three-hour mark. Wang has made an undeniably daring intervention into the period piece and the biopic, but the novelty wears off too soon, and A. Rimbaud never quite amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

The post ‘A. Rimbaud’ Review: Patrick Wang’s Bare-Stage Epic Exhausts Its Novelty Too Soon appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Mike Leigh has said that Tender Loving Care will likely be his final film, and if it is, the 83-year-old is bowing out on a high: In September, it took the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival, along with the jury’s screenplay prize and a lead performance award for Kate O’Flynn, a recent Emmy winner for Widow’s Bay. After stops at Telluride, Toronto, the New York Film Festival, and the BFI London Film Festival, and with four Gotham Award nominations in hand, the film now has its first trailer, courtesy of Bleecker Street.

O’Flynn plays Amy, a child protection worker who moves in with her best friend and fellow social worker, Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), after a breakup, just as her aging parents (Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson) are hit with a crisis of their own. Here’s Bleecker Street’s official description: “As the demands of work and family begin to converge, a social worker and those closest to her discover the strength found in compassion, community, and one another. Set in post-Brexit England, Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care is a richly observed portrait of resilience, humor, and the enduring power of human connection.”

The film picks up a thread left dangling at the end of Leigh’s Hard Truths, which closed with Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s furious Pansy facing the prospect of having to care for someone else. Slant’s Brad Hanford, who caught Tender Loving Care at the New York Film Festival, found it a compassionate study of care and class, and a sunnier affair than some of Leigh’s bleaker work.

Tender Loving Care opens in New York and Los Angeles on December 11.

Watch the trailer below:

The post ‘Tender Loving Care’ Trailer: Mike Leigh’s Golden Shell Winner Checks in on Britain’s Caregivers appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Tinto Brass, the Italian director whose name became synonymous with erotica of a distinctly playful and unabashed stripe, and who spent decades disowning the most notorious film, died on Wednesday in Rome. He was 93. His wife, Caterina Varzi, and his children, Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass, confirmed the death to the Italian news agency ANSA.

Born Giovanni Brass in Milan in 1933, he was one of Italian cinema’s most restless modernists at the start of his career. His first feature, Chi lavora è perduto, premiered at Venice in 1963 and garnered positive notices. Over the next few years, he became something of a genre-hopper, making the western Yankee, the London-set pop thriller Deadly Sweet, and the surrealist comedy L’urlo, which competed at the Berlin Film Festival in 1970. La vacanza, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, won the Venice critics’ prize for best Italian film in 1971.

International fame came to him with Salon Kitty, a 1976 drama about a real-life Berlin brothel that Nazi intelligence used to pry secrets from its clients. Brass reunited Ingrid Thulin and Helmut Berger, who played the mother and son in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, and hired Ken Adam, whose production design Slant’s Eric Henderson called “never less than brilliant.” Henderson placed the film “somewhere between The Night Porter and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS,” and noted that Brass “seems to have made a career out of extrapolating ‘ass’ from ‘class.’”

Then came Caligula, the Penthouse-financed epic written by Gore Vidal and starring Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, and Peter O’Toole. Producer Bob Guccione recut the film without Brass’s consent, adding hardcore inserts and cutting much of its political and comic material. Brass asked for his name to be removed, and the 1979 release credits him only with “principal photography.” It remains the most notorious film to bear his name.

Starting with The Key in 1983, he committed fully to the cheeky erotic comedies, among them Paprika, All Ladies Do It, Monella, and Trasgredire, that made him a household name in Italy and a fixture of late-night cable everywhere else.

Brass suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2010 and was slowed by a series of strokes in his later years, but his early work had lately been getting a second look. In September, the Venice Film Festival held a pre-opening screening of a new 4K restoration of Deadly Sweet, by Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and festival director Alberto Barbera said it was “completely reductive” to see Brass only as an erotic filmmaker.

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Among its virtues, John Wilson’s The History of Concrete may come to be seen as the first New York movie of the Zohran Mamdani era. It certainly helps that the DIY filmmaker, best known for his series How To with John Wilson, has since teamed with the mayor on a video highlighting another prominent feature of the city’s architecture: sidewalk sheds.

Yet it’s more than this convenient partnership that cements (pun intended) the status of Wilson’s feature directorial debut as a movie of the moment. The artist’s love of eccentric people, coupled with his attention to how they create a unique sense of place, reflects the broader sense of urban renewal and civic pride sweeping New York. Armed with his usual observational verité camera and droll voiceover narration, Wilson quickly breaks open his exploration of the titular building material and transcends its initial subject matter.

The filmmaker’s attempts to see if he can fit his pet themes and fascinations inside the vessel of a Hallmark movie’s house style, which he studies at a WGA-provided seminar during the 2023 writers’ strike, might initially seem like an ironic dare. But across many episodic explorations and digressions that converge brilliantly by the close, The History of Concrete balloons into a larger and genuinely sincere look at the infrastructure—both physical and interpersonal—that undergirds contemporary life. From New York’s City Hall to the dive bars in the filmmaker’s own Ridgewood neighborhood, Wilson’s journey invites viewers to share his gaze and look with care upon the essential but often neglected elements that form the bedrock of society.

I had the pleasure of moderating one of many sold-out Q&As with John Wilson during the breakout theatrical run of The History of Concrete. Our post-screening discussion covered how the documentary’s story arc emerged from the footage, what appeals to him about second-person voiceover, and why limitations prove so central to his creative process.

You joke that you still don’t have a logline for the film, but we can see the themes and subjects that fascinate you. How do those emerge in the shooting, and how much becomes apparent subconsciously as you’re putting it together afterward?

It’s really amazing what you can do with Adobe Premiere. Everything really comes together in the edit. I think I was shooting just different buildings and sidewalks for a year, and it wasn’t really yielding much. All the pitches were going very poorly. We pitched maybe 10 or 12 different times; I really minimized how rough this was on my self-esteem. But after about a year, I decided to open it up and add the more meta elements of the filmmaking, and that really helped me out. I was able to just look through all my old footage from the past year and a half and think, “How could this fit?” And then I was like, “I’m just gonna do the most fun version of this that I can think of with my resources.” So that’s when I flew to Ohio. That last shot at Chef Boyardee’s grave was the last shot I filmed, and I shot it on Christmas Eve by myself.

You don’t necessarily have any taxonomy or organizational system for the footage, right? It’s all just sifting through and choosing what strikes you?

I think I had a bit more structure during the show. You can tag yourself crazy and make it very easy to search, but that doesn’t really give you [what you want]. It’s like when you’re using Google Maps, and you’re like, “All right, I want to go here.” Then it takes you there, and everyone else the same way. But if you try to freestyle a bit, you end up finding other stuff along the way. If I were to keyword search “dog,” sure, a bunch of dogs would come up, and that might help. But I just have a big sequence with all my favorite 10-second clips of everything I’ve ever shot, and I scan back and forth through that constantly. You make all these associations that you wouldn’t otherwise, and you get inspired in ways that you wouldn’t normally get inspired.

The edit does such a great job of following that discursive thought process as you articulate this idea, and it feels very coherent and lucid as it’s playing out…

It feels coherent?!

It follows intellectually, even as it’s not necessarily in a straight line. You leave yourself room to explore tangents. But how did you and your editor, Cori Wapnowska, ultimately crack the structure and find a way to order the footage?

The structure was really evolving until the last possible moment. It’s the kind of thing where you need to shoot and write at the same time. I put in the Hallmark stuff a little later, maybe a year into the two-and-a-half-year process. You can see as I begin to shoot and talk to people that I’m thinking of the Hallmark stuff a lot more. I was too shy to talk to anyone for the first year, because it would mean I was committing to something that wasn’t fully what it was going to be.

There’s a very smooth and schematic feel to a lot of documentaries today, but there’s something about your film and your work that feels so human. You leave in the vocal fillers. There are pauses. There are tangents. But it doesn’t feel like we’re watching a rough draft, so how do you balance that homespun quality with something that feels like it has some polish?

It’s an iterative process. You keep going over the same things again and again, just trying to figure out the strongest way to craft a joke or find the flow between things. I just want to do the stuff that I’m not allowed to do at work, and that was the stuff that inspired me the most. The way I shoot things is very much about trying to have as much information in the frame as possible. I feel like a lot of the time, when I was shooting commercial stuff, it would just be done a very particular way. The work was always a release for me from the oppressive commercial forces that I think video production puts on an artist in the system.

Fans of your show How To with John Wilson will obviously recognize the second-person narration, which was inspired by the instructional videos that gave that series its initial structure. Beyond force of habit, what do you like about using “you” rather than “I,” even though this film isn’t just an extension of the show?

I started making tutorial videos to lampoon the idea of an expert. I find anyone who’s confident about anything kind of funny. In the tutorial format, if you watch “how to repair your coffee machine” or something like that, they do use the second person a lot. I like playing with that because you’re given a normal instruction, but then, what if you were given an abnormal instruction and were told that you’re doing this or you feel this way? It makes you analyze what you’re seeing a bit differently. I think it hits you emotionally in a unique way where you, as the viewer, need to figure out whether or not this is actually you and whether or not this applies to you. You’re also doing the math in real time about the distance between whether that’s something you would do and whether that happens. That’s where a lot of comedy comes from.

How are you calibrating the comedy of the narration, both in terms of how it maps to the images that we’re seeing and in the words themselves? You can swing between being very observational and practical about what we’re seeing, but then it can also shift into being very philosophical.

I like to surprise myself if I ever feel like I know what’s coming next. I try to shock myself out of that somehow by putting in something that’s either visually taboo or has some kind of honesty that shocks you out of just watching something that’s purely informational. It’s different with every scene. I have a bunch of stuff that I pre-build, little triptychs and larger poems of stuff that’s similar. You have all these patterns, and so whenever I have writer’s block, I can just go into this workbench and try to figure out what might work as a transitional moment and make that as funny as possible while still being a journey into whatever you’re watching.

We live in an age where AI algorithms, among any number of things, zoom ahead to the finished product and ignore or hide the process of creation. You remind us that the process itself is its own form of product, and it has tremendous value.

I was watching someone who had just made a beautiful video, and she was like, “I’m glad that I could use [AI] for my music video so I can have big car explosions and all this stuff that I wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise.” And I’m just watching and thinking, the limitations should be the thing that gives it life. That’s a lot of the way that I make work. From a fixed perspective like mine, that’s the limitation, and I’m only so strong. I can only hold the camera for so long. There are a lot of limitations that create tension, poetry, and a lot of cool stuff that you may not try to embrace when you’re just trying to use AI to basically mimic a more expensive thing that looks like it has production value or something. I don’t want to completely shit on something that’s a creative tool, because I think it can be used interestingly sometimes. But I think the way people think about what kind of shortcut it’s giving them is incorrect.

How do you think about making those limitations visible to the audience, and what might just need to stay behind the scenes?

I met this guy who was talking about the overpopulation of jellyfish on the Jersey Shore that had something to do with development, but I ended up cutting that because it was a bit redundant. The one bit of it that’s still in the movie is all the names of the boats. I set those aside as a funny but serious thing. I wrote that section about sand only based on the words on the boats.

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