Domee Shi directed one of the best Pixar shorts, Bao, and her first feature as director is really funny and sweet, and kind of feels like a refreshing change of pace from Pixar's last few movies. Mei is such a charming character and the way her bond with her friends was the heart of the movie is really touching, but I also just thought the story and the way they subverted the usual beats of a "adolescent has a weird supernatural secret and tries to hide it from everybody" story and had the fun little twists where every kid at school knew and she made money off of it. 

It's hard to say that this is groundbreaking or novel in any way, but it is Steven Spielberg's first musical and sort of his first remake (I guess technically it's just the second adaptation of the stage musical, but it's much more an homage to the 1961 West Side Story than his War of the Worlds was an homage to any previous adaptation or anything). And it is thrilling to see such a pure display of craftmanship, just his command of camera movement and colors and choreography and the old school movie musical emotion of it all. It made me an instant fan of Ariana DeBose and Mike Faist and Rachel Zegler, and I really wish Ansel Elgort wasn't in this but he didn't get in the way too much. 

This is also kind of a love letter to musical theatre, but to be more precise it's a sopping wet celebration of theater kid energy. I only have kind of a passing familiarity with Rent, but just the idea that Jonathan Larson died so young, right before his play made its Broadway debut and became an enormous success, it's heartbreaking stuff. And it's kind of remarkable that he made this autobiographical play that could be adapted into a sort of hybrid biopic by someone else who made a huge impact on Broadway at a pretty young age, Lin-Manuel Miranda. It can be kind of an exhausting, relentless movie, but I admired the creativity of how it's put together and Andrew Garfield's performance. I don't know enough about Broadway to recognize all the cameos and stuff, but I liked seeing Andre De Shields in there, I worked with him recently and he's incredibly talented. 

I have watched a lot more foreign language films and series in the last few years than ever before, and I'm excited that things like Drive My Car and Parasite have gotten into major categories at the Oscars in recent years. But I will admit that I'm probably still too much of a philistine to fully appreciate Drive My Car. By the end the meaning of the story started to sink in, but it's almost 3 hours long and a whole lot of the time I just felt a little confused and occasionally bored and had to read a plot summary to make sure I understood everything that had happened. 

I really found Pablo Lorrain's Jackie impressive, felt like a very textured and intimate sort of biopic of a a historical figure. And Lorrain arguably brings the same level of craft to Spencer, but unfortunately Kristen Stewart's Diana is maybe 1/10th as good as Natalie Portman's Jackie O. (for that matter, Johnny Greenwood's Spencer score is maybe 1/10th as good as Mica Levi's masterful Jackie score). Kristen Stewart is known for being in really successful bad movies and for giving good performances in small movies, and Spencer is her first real awards season contender. But I've only ever her seen her be good in supporting roles (Panic Room, Still Alice) or terrible in movies that wouldn't seem to really demand that much of an actor (American Ultra, Happiest Season). In any event, I didn't even buy her as English, let alone as one of the most famous English people of the past century. And I hated that pretentious little "a fable from a true tragedy" chyron at the beginning of the movie. Timothy Spall's really good in it, though, he's the one who should've gotten an Oscar nod.