2025 marks my sixth year completing the Oscar Death Race, a little community of people setting out to watch all of the films nominated at the Academy Awards that year. I also make an effort to review as many of the nominees as possible, to placate my own obsessive desires. This year, I got extremely close to doing full-blown reviews of each nominee. I probably could have done it to but, simply put, ran out of energy a little bit. Here are four reviews for films I saw prior to the Oscars. I'm recycling all of these from my Yearly Retrospective but decided to collect them here simply for ease. If you want to read my full review of "Alien: Romulus," you can find it here. See you tomorrow at 7PM EST for my yearly live-blog of the ceremony!
A film with a great many things to say about how we perceive ourselves, how we are perceived by others, what others truly value in us, what society values in appearances, and to what degree an author owes their inspiration anything. It's also a hilariously dark, surreal comedy with fantastic performances from Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson that only grows more nightmarish as it goes on. I wasn't crazy about the crash-zooms in the cinematography though.
The cliché of all modern CGI family films including a realistic depiction of a panic attack is fulfilled here, though at least it's a natural extension of the story's themes. The depiction of Anxiety is well done, the new emotion not being portrayed as a villain so much as an overwhelming overcorrection. The other new emotions mostly result in some cute jokes. Honestly, this sequel might be funnier than the first, thanks to some extremely amusing sight gags about Riley's secrets. Yet, much like the first, I still feel like the central metaphor is oddly strangled and the teenage girl isn't as fleshed-out as you'd expect considering the story takes place in her head.
I admire the grubby, hand-made quality to the stop-motion animation, as well as the grotesque-cute character designs. The script itself I'm less certain of. The entire film walks a very unsteady line towards sympathizing with its often depressed, mistreated characters and playing their eccentricities and misfortunes for dark laughs. The misery the characters experience is so non-stop that the film often feels like a slog on the wat to a hopeful, life-affirming ending.
By adding a little painterly smearing and naturalistic lighting, this is made so much prettier than it would've been otherwise. “The Wild Robot” definitely needs that additional visual flair, since its story – full of wacky animal sidekicks and an obvious moral about the challenges and compromises of parenting – is nothing especially new or novel. The dynamic between the titular machine and the gosling she adopts is still awfully adorable. Chris Sanders never doubts the emotions in his films, despite how formulaic they may be. This went almost its entire runtime without introducing a single person.
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