All 54 2023 Oscar Nominees, Ranked

In terms of predicting the winners for the 95th Academy Awards, it is considerably more difficult this year than it was in recent years. There are genuine horse races in most of the acting nominations, with only comeback kid Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once considered a lock for Supporting Actor. Outside of that race, the only other safe bets are "Naatu Naatu" from RRR winning Best Song, the German film All Quiet on the Western Front getting the win for International Feature Film, Avatar: The Way of Water winning for its beautiful visual effects, and Guillermo del Toro winning his third Oscar for his version of Pinocchio. Most other awards are anyone's guess, with several nominees in each category gaining momentum but not having the award in the bag. 

So many questions will be answered tomorrow: Will the younger, hipper Everything Everywhere All at Once prevail, or will the older, more establishment-friendly The Fabelmans pull an upset? Will the Academy award the sharp theatricality of Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin script or the popular absurdity of the Daniels' in Everything Everywhere All at Once? Will it be Top Gun: Maverick or All Quiet on the Western Front for Sound? Elvis or All Quiet on the Western Front for Cinematography? Babylon or (again) All Quiet on the Western Front for Production Design? Austin Butler or Brendan Fraser? Michelle Yeoh or Cate Blanchett? Jamie Lee Curtis or Angela Bassett or Kerry Condon? The only sure thing is that there will likely be no shocking moments at this year's ceremony like last year's...well, you know. 

I wish I could say something about how they're all good films, and I'd be perfectly happy with anyone of the winners, but alas, 2022 was not my favorite year for the movies. I have some thoughts. So, without further ado... 

54. Blonde

Actress in a Leading Role (Ana de Armas)

Blonde, the adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novel about a fictionalized take on the life of Marilyn Monroe, is grotesquely aggressive and almost unbelievably full of itself. It's truly a struggle to make it through to the end of this film; it must have taken me a week to do so, and the only way I could achieve such a feat was by eventually breaking up the viewing into installments of about five or ten minutes a day. Ana de Arnas, the film's star, has made a career of fantastic performances, but her work here as Monroe is not one of them. Oscar nominations for acting are often called out for celebrating not necessarily best acting but "most acting," and De Arnas's acting here certainly qualifies as the latter, with an enormous amount of screaming and crying, rinsing and repeating. Even if one is a fan of her performance in this film, it's hard to see how any of the other actors are doing any good, especially Xavier Samuel as Cass Chaplin and Evan Williams as Eddy Robinson. No other movie on this list seems to be trying so hard to be so bad like Blonde does. 

53. Babylon

Costume Design (Mary Zophres), Original Score (Justin Hurwitz), Production Design (Florencia Martin, Anthony Carlino) 

Babylon has often been described as "divisive" (even its director knows it is), but calling it that really begs the question: Who are the fifty percent of viewers who actually like such a film? A second-rate attempt to recreate what worked in Singin' in the Rain and a variety of other films that explored early Hollywood, there's not a single good performance in this film, and it must be said that this is the goofiest performance ever of Margot Robbie's career. Never before has a film so accurately summed itself up than in Babylon; in this case, it's Brad Pitt's Jack Conrad, who summarizes a film he's starring in as follows: "It's shit. Another giant swing toward mediocrity." Perhaps summing up Babylon that way would be too much of a compliment. 

52. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Animated Feature Film (Dean Fleischer Camp, Elisabeth Holm, Andrew Goldman, Caroline Kaplan, and Paul Mezey)

Now that I've got my complaints against Blonde and Babylon out of my system, I feel I've exhausted myself of complaining about some of these other films, but I still have at least some energy left to complain about the overrated bore that is Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Unlike with Blonde and Babylon, I am not plagued by the recency factor with Marcel the Shell with Shoes On in my lack of appreciation of this movie, a film about a talking shell being interviewed in a mockumentary. That does not mean I liked it a whole lot better. I was bored by Marcel the Shell with Shoes On almost as much as I was by Blonde and Babylon, and I really struggled to understand why everybody (or anybody) liked this movie; I liked nothing about it.

51. Bardo, False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths
Cinematography (Darius Khondji)

A lot of films directed by Alejandro Iñárritu can be on the insufferable side, but Bardo takes the cake. "Self-indulgent and pretentious" is how the Wikipedia article on it describes the reaction to the film. With a title like Bardo, False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths, how can it not be? It pretends to care if its audience recognizes how apparently self-aware and absurdist it is. The plot is meaningless, there is little (if any) emotional appeal to the film, and it's just a film directed by Iñárritu in which he's finally being called out for going overboard. 

50. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Animated Feature Film (Joel Crawford and Mark Swift)

The good thing about this totally unnecessary sequel is that its animation style, inspired by Akira and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and at times tonally influenced by Spaghetti Westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, is unlike anything else we have seen in the Shrek franchise, especially the first Puss in Boots film from 2011, which at that point already looked flat and stale. The bad news is that this follow-up is overly morbid, and there's not one laugh in the entire thing. Antonio Banderas has always been charming as this character, but it's not enough to save the film, especially from the annoying voice acting of Harvey Guillén. One would think that after almost twenty years, certain jokes would get old, but don't tell that to Dreamworks. They may have a new animation style, but it is literally the same jokes they were doing in 2004.  

49. Tell It Like a Woman
Best Original Song ("Applause" by Diane Warren) 

Tell It Like a Woman is an American-Italian anthology film consisting of seven short stories directed by women. In addition to the United States and Italy, other entries were filmed in India and Japan, and the cast includes actors like Marcia Gay Harden, Eva Longoria, and Jacqueline Fernandez. Unfortunately, it starts with a surprising misfire with a short directed by Taraji P. Henson and starring Jennifer Hudson in an unimpressive and distracting performance. Fortunately, some of the films are at least a little better, most notably one featuring Anne Watanabe as a single mother of two young children and their daily routines in Japan. The incomparable Diane Warren received her fourteenth nomination for Best Original Song this year, and although she finally received an Honorary Oscar last year (an award she had "been waiting a long fucking time for"), she is unlikely to win yet this year either. If she didn't win for songs like "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" and "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," she's not going to win for a song like "Applause." 

48. Elvis
Actor in a Leading Role (Austin Butler), Cinematography (Mandy Walker), Costume Design (Catherine Martin), Film Editing (Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond), Makeup and Hairstyling (Mark Coulier, Jason Baird, and Aldo Signoretti), Production Design (Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy, and Bev Dunn), Sound (David Lee, Wayne Pashley, Andy Nelson, and Michael Keller), Best Picture (Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormack, and Schuyler Weiss)

I was hoping we were long past the era of dry biographical films of entertainment legends, but I was wrong. Elvis continues this tradition and doesn't care if you're bored by it or not. Tom Hanks as Tom Parker is very odd, covered in Oscar-nominated makeup and really wanting you to know how many acting choices he made. (It hasn't helped him much. Hanks has received three Razzie nominations for worst acting this year, including for his performance in Elvis.) But the saving grace of Elvis is Austin Butler in the title role, just straddling the edge enough between originality and impersonation. At the end of the day, the film is yet another example of a movie that was way less interesting than its trailer.

47. Empire of Light

Cinematography (Roger Deakins)

Predictably, Empire of Light—taking place mostly in a lavish but deteriorating cinema in the early 1980s—is a gorgeous one to look at, with a color palate by Roger Deakins many will recognize from other films he has shot, though the film's story leaves much to be desired. It has a few big names (Olivia Coleman, Colin Firth) and a big director (Sam Mendes, who also wrote the screenplay), but it's unfortunately a bit of a bore, with overly showy performances and not much else. What exactly is the point of this movie? For the guy who gave us Road to Perdition, Skyfall, and 1917, it's fair to say that Empire of Light doesn't come close to matching his previous work.

46. The Whale

Actor in a Leading Role (Brendan Fraser), Actress in a Supporting Role (Hong Chao), Makeup and Hairstyling (Adrien Morot, Judy Chin, and Annemarie Bradley)

For those who think A24 can do no wrong, they may want to consider viewing The Whale. Surely, even those who haven't seen it have at least heard of it, mainly because Brendan Fraser, ever since he received a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival last September, has been all over the place promoting it. In The Whale, Fraser plays Charlie, a reclusive, self-loathing, six-hundred-pound man apparently eating himself to death and desperate to find redemption from his daughter, whom he abandoned years ago. You've likely also heard of the controversy regarding the film, namely the sort of seemingly empathetic but ultimately patronizing nature of this story directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Samuel D. Hunter, who adapted it from his 2012 play, and the fat suit. Beyond that, Sadie Sink's performance as Charlie's volatile daughter is basically the same note throughout the film's entirety. A consensus, however, is that Hong Chao as Charlie's nurse friend who cares for him is great; so, too, is Samantha Morton as his ex-wife. The Whale, which I suppose has its heart in the right place, left me feeling kind of dumbfounded, and I'd like to end by quoting Glenn Weldon's criticism of it all: "It's just a thread of self-righteousness, or a kind of delusional nobility, a kind of sense of, you're welcome." 

45. Night Ride 

Live Action Short Film (Eirik Tveiten and Gaute Lid Larssen)

Night Ride, the Norwegian short film directed by Eirik Tveiten, is a film that also has its heart in the right place. Tveiten told the New Yorker (whose YouTube channel you can view it) that the story is about everyone's responsibility to help those who are being harassed. Those are noble intentions, indeed, but the end result is one that left me feeling uneasy at times. Even if it didn't, the whole thing starts off so nonsensically, as a woman is too cold to wait for a tram that will park for half an hour, so she decides to steal it. If the whole film is about standing up to tormentors against vulnerable people, why start off that way? One thing I really enjoyed about the film, however, is Sigrid Kandal Husjord's performance as Ebba, the main character. 

44. Women Talking

Original Screenplay (Sarah Polley), Best Picture (Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, and Frances McDormand)

Women Talking is quite...talkative. Your mileage for non-stop dialogue will really help determine how much you like or don't like a film like this. Adapted for the screen by Sarah Polley from a 2018 novel by Miriam Toews about women in a Mennonite community debating whether or not to leave their homes after being brutally sedated and raped by men in their community (I really wish that no such event served as the inspiration for such a novel and film, but I regret to say that such a thing did happen), its strengths lie in the acting of its cast. Many have lauded its bigger stars like Rooney Mara and Claire Foy, but I would like to praise Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy as the community elders. Despite the commendable acting, the film can be quite boring.  

43. Living

Actor in a Leading Role (Bill Nighy), Adapted Screenplay (Kazuo Ishiguro)

Living is an unlikely film. It is a British remake of a somewhat famous 1952 Japanese film called Ikiru ("to live" in English), which was inspired by Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The story is about a dying bureaucrat (played here by Bill Nighy) who suddenly decides to devote his final days to actually improve the lives of regular people. But much like the original film, in my humble opinion, Living is dreadfully boring and overrated. True, there are a few moving moments when the protagonist decides to positively use what remaining time he has left, and Nighy, who's made a career of playing affable, larger-than-life characters, certainly gives us a different type of performance than we're used to seeing from him. But the non-stop whispering tone of his character only makes the film feel even more never-ending. 

42. How Do You Measure a Year?

Documentary Short Film (Jay Rosenblatt)

The documentary short How Do You Measure a Year?, directed by Jay Rosenblatt (who was also nominated in this same category last year for his experiences bullying a classmate in When We Were Bullies), is a film in which he has edited together footage of his annual interviews of his daughter, Ella, on her birthday from the age of two to eighteen. Ella is quite candid, though sometimes predictably bored (when she's an infant) and reserved (when she's a teenager), and she discusses some of the highs and lows in their father-daughter relationship. This whole experience surely makes for a therapeutic experience for the both of them. For the average viewer, though, I'm not sure it's worth the thirty-minute time investment.  

41. The Sea Beast
Animated Feature Film (Chris Williams and Jed Schlanger)

Look, I totally understand why many animators are furious at how the Academy sees them. I get it. But I have to sum up The Sea Beast by calling it not necessarily a cute film but one that will likely be enjoyed a lot more by its young viewers than their parents. What parents will like are things like the voice cast (namely Karl Urban and Jared Harris), who are mostly fine. But they may also shrug at some of the usual beats that are there: messages about how humans and not beasts of the sea are (or often are) the real enemies, we all have to respect nature, and things like that. However, The Sea Beast is undeniably one of the most forgettable of all the nominees this year, and it's in large part to the fact that the sea beasts aren't remotely interesting. Why not embrace some realism? Greenland sharks are estimated to live as long as 250-500 years, so why not have one of them be the sea beast at the heart of this film and not that awkward red thing?

40. The Ice Merchants

Animated Short Film (João Gonzalez and Bruno Caetano)

Each year, the Oscar-nominated animated shorts tend to have the most wonderful otherworldly animation, and The Ice Merchants, directed by Portuguese director João Gonzalez (his third film), is no different. The wordless film, about a father and son who parachute into town in order to sell ice, took Gonzalez about two years to make after starting it as a student project. Since then, the film has been on a roll, winning forty-four prizes at over one hundred festivals, including the Leitz Cine Discovery Prize for short film. Is it Oscar-worthy? Well, it's not my favorite of the five nominees. For one, the film is a bit impenetrable in its first half, with the unique animation not doing enough to make up for its flaws. Fortunately, the film, as its stakes rise during its climactic scene, eventually becomes more engaging.   

39. An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It

Animated Short Film (Lachlan Pendragon)

For its clever concept and painstaking stop motion animation, student filmmaker Lachlan Pendragon (who also voices the main character) certainly deserves a nomination for this postmodernist tale of a bored office worker who is told by an ostrich that (you guessed it) the world is fake, and he starts to believe it. Why? The real-world dimensions of animation manifest in front of his eyes: he can see the green screen, his face starts to fall off, and there's even a human hand chasing him. The film's humor, which seems influenced by that of Taika Waititi (there's even an officemate of the protagonist who sounds like him) is copiously used here, and while it might not actually ever provoke laughter, it's humorous enough.

38. Ivalu

Live Action Short Film (Anders Walter and Rebecaa Pruzan)

Given the shockingly high rate of violence against young people in Greenland, it is understandable that Ivalu, about a missing indigenous girl, would be a harrowing subject. Sometimes the film is better when it allows the viewer to theorize about what has happened. At any rate, Ivalu proves yet again that it often is better to hire untrained actors for an experience of verisimilitude, as actor Mila Heilmann Kreutzmann as the protagonist really helps elevate the film.   

37. An Irish Goodbye

Live Action Short Film (Tom Berkeley and Ross White)

An Irish Goodbye is a poignant black comedy about two brothers who reunite in rural Northern Ireland after their mother's death. The two start to quarrel. Turlough (Seamus O'Hara) lives in London, while his brother, Lorcan (James Martin), wishes to remain on the family farm, but Turlough insists that he goes to live with their aunt. (Lorcan has Down syndrome.) They attempt to heal their bitterness with a bucket list, seemingly from their deceased mother. If films in this category are not playing on Netflix or YouTube, the winner of the five nominees is usually difficult to predict. Even though it was not my favorite of the five films nominated, it does seem that An Irish Goodbye, fresh off its BAFTA win last month, is the frontrunner, with Next Best Picture and Slant both predicting a win. The only one that could realistically stop it is...

36. Le pupille 
Live Action Short Film (Alice Rohrwacher and Alfonso Cuarón)

For much of this nearly forty-minute-long Italian film shot in Super 16 and 35 mm format about a group of girls at a Catholic orphanage celebrating Christmas, I was not sure if I liked it or not. I admire the film's resemblance to works like the 1993 adaption of A Little Princess (directed by Alfonso Cuarón, a producer of the film, who would nab his sixth win with eleven nominations if Le pupille wins), but the film's suggestions of a link between Mussolini's fascist Italy and Pius XII's Catholic Church are as wearisome as they were in Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio, with both films feeling like they are either clichés or missed opportunities. And the film's chortle about lacking a moral at the end is either a plus or minus, depending on your perspective. Still, it more or less is an engaging, lighthearted, somewhat nostalgic film that some might revisit often at Christmastime.  

35. To Leslie
Actress in a Leading Role (Andrea Riseborough) 

By now, everyone knows that one of the biggest surprises of these nominations was Andrea Riseborough's nominated performance as Leslie, an addict trying to rebuild her life after losing all her money and being ostracized by her family and community. I had seen the film late last year because I always try to see as many of the top 100 films of the year according to Rotten Tomatoes. (For 2022, To Leslie is currently ranked near the top at number eight.) Part of the surprise is that To Leslie is a pretty mediocre film, and Riseborough's performance, while not bad, isn't all that memorable, either. As you can imagine, there is a lot of screaming and crying and that sort of thing; it's very over the top in an Oscar-bait way, but the film did have many powerful friends. What may have added to everyone's shock and anger is that Riseborough's nomination helped deny Danielle Deadwyler of Till and Octavia Spencer of The Woman King a nomination, adding fuel to the fire of arguments that the Academy doesn't like to nominate Black women, and the subsequent investigation at the board meeting only made things more uncomfortable.    

34. The Flying Sailor
Animated Short Film (Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby)

The Flying Sailor, the third Oscar nomination for Canadian animation duo Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, is an animated short film inspired by a sailor's real-life experience during the 1917 Halifax Explosion that killed almost two thousand people. It shows us the sailor (naked for most of the film) going through a nearly eight-minute somersault through the air (perhaps into another dimension or form of life) while his life flashes before his eyes. The filmmakers used accounts of trauma and near-death experiences to help visualize this sailor's surreal voyage. It's a fascinating interpretation of this actual tragedy, and it's animated creatively, though it is also one of the more forgettable films on this list.

33. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

Costume Design (Jenny Beaven)

The third adaptation of the novel Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, this film might charm the socks off many due to its delightful acting from its star Lesley Manville and the Paris scenery, but it also has more than one moment that will likely make you roll your eyes, and the movie can be so bland that you might forget you watched it the very next day. (Beyond that, the better film of these types of sugary English movies from last year was The Duke, with Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren.) Still, it's anti-snobbery, pro-kindness attitude is a pleasant one. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is a love letter to dresses and the making of them, so Jenny Beaven, who (in addition to winning for A Room With A View and Mad Max: Fury Road), also won last year for Cruella, stands a good chance at winning for all those beautiful dresses. 

32. Turning Red
Animated Feature Film (Domee Shi and Lindsey Collins)

Pixar films—at least the best of them—will stay with you after just one viewing. I watched this film on Disney+ early last year (or was it in the summer?), and I confess to not remembering much about it. It doesn't really matter if I wasn't over the moon or not regarding Turning Red. Some of the criticism of the film was abnormally bone-headed, but many have noted the success Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell had at channeling the mood of early aughts pop music. 

31. Aftersun

Actor in a Leading Role (Paul Mescal)

About an eleven-year-old girl on a vacation at a Turkish resort with her father (who is going through a bit of a midlife—or quarter-life—crisis), Aftersun successfully secured a Best Actor nomination for its lead star, Paul Mescal, as the father. Mescal's performance is good and all, but the more impressive performance is that of Frankie Corio as Sophie, the young girl. The film has been a hit with the critics, ranking at number one in the Sight and Sound top-fifty list (I don't really care; their lists often come across as self-righteous and pretentious), but the first two-thirds of it are just the father and daughter on vacation trying to find ways to occupy their time. Much of the rest of the film has moments that I suppose are up to the audience to interpret, but this often comes across as gimmicky. Look, it's a good movie with two really strong performances, but even though it's only an hour and a half, it sometimes feels like it will never end.  

30. Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio 

Animated Feature Film (Guillermo Del Toro, Mark Gustafson, Gary Ungar, and Alex Bulkey)

I'm going to go ahead and trust Honest Trailers that Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio, the seventy-sixth adaptation of this famous tale in the past three years, is the best (or least bad) of the three versions from last year. The animation is great, no doubt, and it will likely win in this category. (Should Guillermo Del Toro win here, it would be his third Oscar. He also won in 2018 for producing and directing The Shape of Water.) There are some somewhat interesting attempts to update the story for a more modern audience, this time by adding villainous components of fascism and authoritarianism, favorite targets of Del Toro's. But this Pinocchio adaptation undeniably grows less interesting as it inches its way to the conclusion, and those songs are almost comically forgettable. Also, Finn Wolfhard's fake (English?) accent is very distracting.

29. My Year of Dicks

Animated Short Film (Sara Gunnarsdóttir and Pamela Ribon)

You have to give the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences credit for nominating a film titled My Year of Dicks. (I initially predicted the film's title, which provoked a series of giggles when Riz Ahmed announced it as a nominee on January 24, was a double entendre, and it is, but it's not the one I was expecting.) With rotoscope animation and narrative style that may remind many of the work of Richard Linklater, the cleverly titled coming-of-age animated flick written by Pamela Ribon and directed by Sara Gunnarsdóttir about a teenage girl in Houston's journey to lose her virginity while navigating a sea of disappointing experiences starts a bit shaky but eventually becomes simultaneously intense, chaotic, funny, relatable, and nostalgic. 

28. Stranger at the Gate

Documentary Short Film (Joshua Seftel and Conall Jones)

It's probably best if you know as little about Stranger at the Gate as possible going in to see it, especially because where it ends up is probably not where most would expect it. Therefore, it's difficult to fill up some sentences about a short documentary in which I'd rather not describe the story. Ultimately, though, I can say that this film is a reminder of all the good that can come out of peace, acceptance, and empathy. With that being said, despite its intriguing story, it is perhaps the least memorable of the five documentary shorts nominated this year. 

27. Top Gun: Maverick 
Film Editing (Eddie Hamilton), Original Song ("Hold My Hand" by Lady Gaga and BloodPop), Sound (Mark Weingarten, James H. Mather, Al Nelson, Chris Burdon, Mark Taylor), Visual Effects (Ryan Tudhope, Seth Hill, Bryan Litson, and Scott R. Fisher), Adapted Screenplay (Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie, Peter Craig, and Justin Marks), Best Picture (Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison, and Jerry Bruckheimer)

I am very happy that so many people took such great joy in a movie (the one that I think most people were expecting to flop but turned into the one that saved Hollywood). It's just that I couldn't help but being marveled by the thrills of the film while simultaneously feeling underwhelmed by it holistically. The screenplay, which is nominated, is at times laughable, like when Tom Cruise frequently tells his protégé to "do, don't think." But in the script's defense, it later humorously mocks itself in the film's best scene when that logic falls flat on its face as Cruise and Miles Teller shout at each other in the snowy forest. Still, it's remarkable that they made a sequel to an 80s action flick basically no one was asking for anymore and few, I think, had high expectations that turned into a mega-blockbuster and one of the most talked-about films of the year. The action sequences involving the jets are unlike anything any of us have ever seen on screen, and the Lady Gaga song is great. 

26. The Batman

Makeup and Hairstyling (Naomi Donne, Mike Marino, and Mike Fontaine), Sound (Stuart Wilson, William Files, Douglas Murray, and Andy Nelson), Visual Effects (Dan Lemmon, Russell Earl, Anders Langlands, and Dominic Tuohy)

The Batman tries really, really hard to outdo The Dark Knight. Writer and director Matt Reeves apparently even boasted to Christopher Nolan that that was his goal. Achieve it, he did not. The Batman works on some levels: The score by Michael Giacchino is memorable (yet a bit repetitive), though certainly not to the same level as Danny Elfman's or Hans Zimmer's from previous installments. The makeup effects are stupendous. And the good-cop-bad-cop detective story routine of Robert Pattinson's Batman and Jeffrey Wright's James Gordon is commendable. The performances in general, though, are a bit all over the place, with Colin Farrell as Penguin shining but Paul Dano as the Riddler giving us his most ridiculous performance ever. But much like Joker three years before it, The Batman (unlike most other Caped Crusader adventures) is completely devoid of any element of fun, and it increasingly is a big ask for its audience to tolerate its runtime. 

25. Avatar: The Way of Water

Production Design (Dylan Cole, Ben Procter, Vanessa Cole), Sound (Julian Howarth, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Dick Bernstein, Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, and Michael Hedges), Visual Effects (Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon, and Daniel Barrett), Best Picture (James Cameron and Jon Landau)

Thirteen years after the James Cameron-directed mega-blockbuster Avatar was released, we finally got our sequel (the first of four, apparently). What works with this follow-up, showcasing the Navi couple played by Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña and their four kids (one of whom is a teenager played very distractingly by Sigourney Weaver), is what worked in the first one: its universal themes and anti-colonial message, as well as its stunning visuals, especially the water-based ones. Some of Cameron's most fascinating works (like The Abyss and Titanic) have been about the sea, and this is no different. The film richly deserves to win in the visual effects category. What doesn't work in Avatar: The Way of Water is also what didn't particularly work in the first one: things like narrative and how patronizing the analogies to indigenous culture can feel. And at the end of the 192 minutes, I asked myself if I really had the stamina to watch three more of these. 

24. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Actress in a Supporting Role (Angela Bassett), Costume Design (Ruth Carter), Makeup and Hairstyling (Camille Friend and Joel Harlow), Original Song ("Lift Me Up" by Tems, Rihanna, Ryan Coogler, Ludwig Goransson), Visual Effects (Geoffrey Baumann, Craig Hammack, R. Christopher White, and Dan Sudick)

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever places considerable emphasis on mourning and grief given the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman in 2020. This is a strength of the film, as is its acting (for the most part), mainly Letitia Wright, who takes over the lead role; Dominique Thorne as a new character, a brilliant scientist; Tenoch Huerta as Namor, the anti-hero mutant leading a sea-based people against Wakanda; and Angela Bassett returning as Queen Ramonda, who could win this year for Supporting Actress. (A lot of attention was pade to Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler not being nominated, but one could also make a very strong case that Wright should have garnered more attention for her acting here.) The weak parts of the film are its unjustifiably long length, the unnecessary subplot involving characters played by Martin Freeman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and many of the action scenes, which are often the worst parts of Marvel movies. 

23. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

Short Animated Film (Charlie Mackesy and Matthew Freud)

There are a lot of platitudes about perseverance, kindness, "home is where the heart is," and that sort of stuff in this gorgeous adaptation of Charlie Mackesy's illustrated book about a blossoming friendship between a boy (Jude Coward Nicoll), a mole (Tom Hollander), a fox (Idris Elba), and a horse (Gabriel Byrne). But it's still a neat film. The animation, wonderfully hand-drawn remotely by 120 people in 20 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, is gorgeous, and because it's an Apple TV+ film, given their enormous success last year with CODA winning three Oscars (including Best Picture), I'd say that helps make The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse the frontrunner here. It's a great film to look at, but other than its didactic qualities for younger audience members, it's unlikely to stay very long in adults' memories.

22. Argentina, 1985

International Feature Film (Argentina)

Of the five nominees for International Feature Film, Argentina, 1985, about the trials of military leaders of the dictatorship, is the most conventional; that's either a plus or a minus, depending on your perspective. One way or the other, there are two things that help the film shine: the film's occasional humor and the presence and Ricardo Darín's performance as the lead prosecutor. Other than that, Argentina, 1985 can unfortunately feel at times like, as Aisha Harris put it, a crowd-pleasing Hollywood-esque courtroom drama. How much of that you're into will vary from viewer to viewer. 

21. RRR

Original Song ("Naatu Naatu" by M.M. Keeravaani and Chandrabose)

RRR, the Indian epic action/musical flick, is sort of an on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand kind of film. On one hand, its action sequences, particularly in its first half, are thrilling. On the other hand, the film drags tremendously after the big palace attack, essentially feeling like one slow-motion sequence after the other, with CGI tigers aplenty. On one hand, its song "Naatu Naatu" (the frontrunner for Best Song) will long be remembered. On the other hand, none of the other songs will be. On one hand, Ram Charan's acting, especially with all his dancing, fighting, and just plain scowling, is impeccable. On the other hand, most of the other acting (especially all the British actors and their mustache twirling) might cause you to roll your eyes. To sum up, I think if RRR were ninety minutes instead of one hundred and eighty, thereby possibly allowing it to eliminate or at least minimize the aspects I didn't care for, I would've liked it a lot more. 

20. Glass Onion (I refuse to call it Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story because that is a stupid title.) 
Adapted Screenplay (Rian Johnson)

Minor spoilers below.

It was inevitable that Rian Johnson's follow-up to Knives Out, which also earned him an Oscar nomination, would be at least somewhat less interesting than the first. That is certainly the case here (and every other sequel nominated this year), though most viewers seem to love both films in equal amounts. In many respects, I don't blame them. Yes, I found myself considerably less interested in Glass Onion than in Knives Out, especially when it swerves in a completely different direction towards the end of the second act and suddenly becomes a lot talkier. That being said, it's still a murder mystery, which are usually neat, aren't they? The actors, especially Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc and Edward Norton as the Elon Musk-esque douche of the story, all appear to be having a blast. Janelle Monáe, though, despite how perfect she is, delivers a Southern accent that feels slightly off (to say nothing of Craig's fake drawl, which is becoming tiring), and most of those cameos are just distracting and unnecessary. But the film does get bonus points for providing a surprising and fitting final screen appearance of the late, great Angela Lansbury.

19. The Fabelmans

Actor in a Supporting Role (Judd Hirsch), Actress in a Leading Role (Michelle Williams), Directing (Steven Spielberg), Original Score (John Williams), Production Design (Rick Carter and Karen O'Hara), Original Screenplay (Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner), Best Picture (Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg, and Tony Kushner)

I suppose if you're the single most successful director in Hollywood history, you're allowed to make a biographical film after half a century in the profession. I guess you're also allowed to let that film go on, and on...and on. That's what The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical film that's a love letter to his coming-of-age experiences, his family, and his craft, ultimately does. Spielberg partisans will certainly be delighted, though, for everything you've come to expect from films he directs—the expression of wonder, the potent lighting, fights with fathers (and in this case, mothers)—and every anecdote we've heard from the master himself over the years, such as seeing The Greatest Show on Earth as a boy, making movies with his sisters or fellow Boy Scouts as actors, going through his parents' divorce, and being the target of anti-Semitic bullying, is all there. What's missing is much of the awe that has been so prevalent in many of his previous films; even his recent remake of West Side Story felt fresher. But what does really assist The Fabelmans is its superb acting, especially Gabrielle LaBelle and Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord as younger versions of Spielberg's stand-in character, Sam. This year's Oscar race for leading actress is a horse race between Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, but Michelle Williams as the mother should not be counted out. One more thing: My earliest memory of going to the movies was when I was six, and like little Sammy in this film, my mother mentioned to me before we got to the theater that I shouldn't be too afraid when watching the film. The movie? Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg.

18. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Documentary Feature Film (Laura Poitras, Howard Gertler, John Lyons, Nan Goldin, and Yoni Golijov)

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a documentary about the artist Nan Goldin, and it focuses almost equally on her formative years developing as an artist (including facts about herself she had never shared before) and her more recent years channeling her rage as an opioid survivor going after the powerful Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma. Both halves of the documentary are about equally interesting, though I suppose I leaned more towards the latter due to its timeliness and wanted to see more of that. Longtime fans of Goldin's, however, may likely feel the opposite. 

17. All That Breathes

Documentary Feature Film (Shaunak Sen, Aman Mann, and Teddy Leifer)

All That Breathes is one of many environmental films that could likely leave you feeling gutted by the end. Centering on two brothers who run a bird clinic as a side project in New Delhi, it's a beautiful yet sad documentary. The brothers are in dire need of support, as black kites, a gorgeous bird that serves an important ecological purpose but one that is apparently thought of as a nuisance, are increasingly falling from the sky due to the intensive pollution of the city. This pollution and the backdrop of violent Hindu nationalism that could threaten the safety of these two men and their families (the brothers are Muslim) create an atmosphere of foreboding in the film.  

16. The Quiet Girl

International Feature Film (Ireland)

The Quiet Girl has been on a mighty run since it debuted in Berlin last year. The debut of writer-director Colm Bairéad, it has gone on to become the highest-grossing Irish-language film of all time, as well as the first Irish film to be nominated for Best International Feature Film. It is also ranked number six on Rotten Tomatoes and number ten on Meta Critic for the top one-hundred films of 2022. The beginning part of The Quiet Girl, about a young, shy girl being sent away to a farm for the summer in 1981 to spend time with distant relatives, may require the patience of a saint, so it might turn off some viewers. However, it's worth the wait, especially to see the acting of the three main performers: Catherine Clinch as the main character, Carrie Crowley as her first cousin once removed, and Andrew Bennett as the husband.  

15. The Martha Mitchell Effect

Documentary Short Film (Anne Alvergue and Beth Levison)

Towards the end of the short (sometimes generic) documentary The Martha Mitchell Effect, we hear an archival interview in which Barbara Walters asks Martha Mitchell, the gregarious, genial, potent, and powerful wife of Richard Nixon's Attorney General and campaign manager, how she would like be remembered in the history books. Mitchell's answer is that she wants to be thought of as someone who served her country. She now is, in part thanks to this Netflix documentary. Like Cassandra long before her, Mitchell's warnings about Nixon and Watergate were dismissed as being symptoms of a supposed mental illness, which is how the term "Martha Mitchell effect" eventually came into being. I confess that while many older viewers may have memories (some fond and some not so fond) of Mitchell's time in Washington, I had never heard of her. (Maybe I should have—Julia Roberts started playing her on Gaslit last year.) Therefore, I'm very happy I got to see this documentary and learn about her. 

14. Triangle of Sadness

Best Picture (Erik Hemmendorff and Philippe Bober), Directing (Ruben Östlund), Original Screenplay (Ruben Östlund)

I've always had zero interest in taking a cruise, and that lack of desire was only augmented after viewing the Palme d'Or-winning satirical, eat-the-rich black comedy Triangle of Sadness, written and directed by Ruben Östlund, whose films often are the darlings of the Cannes Film Festival. The film follows a young couple going through ups and downs in three parts, but it's the disastrous cruise for the super-wealthy in the middle of the movie that features the best moments. With an ensemble cast that includes Harris Dickinson and Charli Dean (who tragically died before the film was released) as the couple, as well as Dolly de Leon, Zlatko Burić, Henrik Dorsin, Vicki Berlin, and Woody Harrelson, Östlund's sharp script contains more mature anti-colonial themes than Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: Way of the Water did, but other than the film's runtime, the only other major complaint I have about it is that if your appetite drives you towards this kind of anti-elitist satire, you're bound to get better quality with HBO's The White Lotus television series. 

13. Fire of Love

Documentary Feature Film (Sara Dosa, Shane Boris, and Ina Fichman)

Fire of Love may remind many of recent nature-lover documentaries, like Playing with Sharks about Valerie Taylor and Becoming Cousteau about Jacques Cousteau. It may also remind some of documentaries that depicted people doing remarkably brave things that many of us would find reckless or foolhardy, such as Grizzly Man, about a man living among wild grizzly bears, and the Oscar-winning Free Solo, about a free solo climber. Fire of Love, directed, written, produced, and narrated by Sara Dosa, is a marriage of the two kinds. The film centers on archival footage of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who appeared to love volcanos (and the thrill of being near them) just as much as they did each other. Despite the constant beauty of the flowing lava we witness in this archival footage, as well as the internal debates we may or may not be having about the risks of such work, the film is unlikely to stay with viewers (or at least with me) as the other two documentaries I'll discuss later.  

12. A House Made of Splinters

Documentary Feature Film (Simon Lereng Wilmont and Monica Hellström)

Going into A House Made of Splinters, the only thing I knew about it was that it was about Ukraine. Viewing it two days before the one-year anniversary of Russia's invasion, I assumed it would be a film about the tragic war. Yet this film does not center on the conflict, though it exists in its shadows. Instead, A House Made of Splinters, an international co-production between Denmark, Ukraine, Sweden, and Finland, focuses on the experiences of several children in an institution, run by a small group of women, twenty-five kilometers from the frontline. The institution houses children whose parents are struggling with alcoholism. Of the four children we see the most, the saddest scenes involve a teenage boy named Kolya, who, though he often gets in trouble with the police, is devotedly helping to raise his siblings in the absence of their mother, whom we only see in one moment as she tearfully embraces him and pleads with him to take better care of himself. It's a remarkable film, but be warned: For those who feel sorrowful from the frequent bad news coming from war in Ukraine, it might be best to avoid A House Made of Splinters.  

11. Navalny

Documentary Feature Film (Daniel Roher, Odessa Rae, Diane Becker, Melanie Miller, and Shane Boris)

Exciting hardly seems like the most appropriate word for a documentary about the attempted assassination and imprisonment of an opposition figure by the vampiric thug that is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, but there are a variety of scenes in Navalny, about one of the thug's most notable critics, that will stay with you, especially my favorite: Navalny and his associates coaxing a confession over the phone from one of his would-be assassins. It's a scene that borders on the surreal and absurd to the point where some (especially pro-Putin critics of Navalny) may shout to the heavens that the whole thing was staged. Critics of the documentary might say the film borders on hero worship, especially as it only briefly glosses over Navalny's previous controversial alliances with members of the far right in Russia. In terms of predicting the winner in this category, my hunch is that Navalny will win, in part because it's the best and in part because voters may be aching to publicly rebuke Vladimir Putin.  

10. EO

International Feature Film (Poland)

Like the documentary Cow from last year, EO, a Polish film inspired by the 1966 French film Au Hasard Balthazar about a donkey's trials and tribulations as it passes from one human to another, is a potent reminder of the cruelty human beings place on other species. Thus, animal lovers may understandably find some of these scenes too difficult to watch. Personally, I was mesmerized by just about every scene featuring the title character, and my heart ached as I watched the donkey appear helpless, confused, and lost. Viewers may also feel helpless, confused, and lost as they watch this movie, as so many of the human characters deliberately come in and out of the story without much explanation (we often don't see how EO comes under the supervision of a new person); some of these situations work, while some (like Isabelle Huppert's peculiar scenes in which she shows up and starts breaking dishes) don't. The camera tricks, like the powerful red hue that appears once and a while, also feel showy at times. But if one can forgive these flaws, one will be moved (and horrified) by EO.   

9. All Quiet on the Western Front

Cinematography (James Friend), International Feature Film (Germany), Makeup and Hairstyling (Heike Merker and Linda Eisenhamerová), Original Score (Volker Bertelmann), Production Design (Christian M. Goldbeck and Ernestein Hipper), Sound (Viktor Prášil, Frank Kruse, Markus Stemler, Lars Ginzel, and Stefan Korte), Visual Effects (Frank Petzold, Viktor Müller, Markus Frank, and Kamil Jafar), Adapted Screenplay (Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson, and Ian Stokell), Best Picture (Malte Grunert)

The second big-screen adaptation of Erich Marie Remarque's anti-war novel (which was eventually banned and burned by the Nazis) about the disillusionment and alienation Germany's Lost Generation suffered through during World War I, this one is surely better than the 1930 version, which took me several sittings to make it through. That version won Best Picture way back in the day, and while this version is unlikely to match such a feat, it still stands a chance of bagging at least a few Oscars. The sheer scope of this massive film, from its enormous production design to its potent score to its horrifying yet realistic makeup, is quite impressive, as are the powerful reminders of the horrors of war. The only major critique I have of the film is how derivative it sometimes feels; indeed, after a production like 1917 or even War Horse (both superior films set during World War I), one might question why they even bothered making a new All Quiet on the Western Front.    

8. Everything Everywhere All at Once

Actor in a Supporting Role (Ke Huy Quan), Actress in a Lead Role (Michelle Yeoh), Actress in a Supporting Role (Jamie Lee Curtis), Actress in a Supporting Role (Stephanie Hsu), Costume Design (Shirley Kurata), Film Editing (Paul Rogers), Original Score (Son Lux), Original Song ("This Is a Life" by Ryan Lott, David Byrne, and Mitski), Original Screenplay (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), Best Picture (Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, and Jonathan Wang)

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the movie I'm rooting for. I want it to win Best Picture. I want Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan (and maybe Jamie Lee Curtis) to win for their acting. David Byrne already has an Oscar (for co-writing the score for The Last Emperor), but how cool would it be if he won again? I want this film to sweep the Oscars. A science fiction comedy about a middle-aged Asian mom fighting her way through a multiverse should win the top prizes! And yet, I was a lot more underwhelmed by this hit than everyone else seemed to be. To be clear, I find its premise rousing and the first half particularly enticing. But then the movie's schtick gets old. It becomes overly quirky, in my opinion. It's weird for the sake of being weird. I can remember quite a bit about that first half; I remember almost nothing from its second. For a variety of reasons, Everything Everywhere All at Once deserves to win in most of the categories its nominated in; that doesn't mean I loved it.

7. Causeway

Actor in a Supporting Role (Brian Tyree Henry)

In Causeway, Jennifer Lawrence (a producer of the film) plays a veteran who was wounded in Afghanistan and is struggling to adjust back to life in New Orleans. While adjusting, she develops a friendship with a mechanic played by Brian Tyree Henry, who is nominated for Best Supporting Actor. One could certainly make an argument for Henry winning the Oscar for his work here. Like many of the films nominated this year, the story may not stick with you, but the acting will. Along with Lawrence and Henry, other commendable performances are by Linda Emond, Jayne Houdyshell, and Stephen McKinley Henderson. Lawrence is just as great as she always is in this low-key but multi-faceted performance, but I came away thinking a lot more about Henry, and I'm greatly looking forward to his future projects.

6. Haulout

Documentary Short Film (Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev)

Haulout focuses on a marine biologist in the arctic observing a walrus haulout. We first see these walruses the first morning he sees them (presumably), and the images and sounds feel like those seen and heard in otherworldly works of science fiction. These scenes are totally mesmerizing, but something is off. For starters, one wonders why the walruses are there, and why their numbers are so large. Soon, the culprit becomes clear: global warming. The walruses (at a peak of 100,000) are hauling out on the coast due to more limited ice, which they have always relied on for rest. The consequences are dispiriting. Both Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev were born in the Russian arctic and are now based elsewhere (Arbugaeva in London and Arbugaev in Moscow), and yet the viewer can sense how important this story is to them. Fifteen years after the Oscar-winning climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth left viewers shocked and yet filled with hope that something could be done before it was too late, Haulout features no such optimism or call to action, only the facts and a marine biologist's melancholy.   

5. The Elephant Whisperers

Documentary Short Film (Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga)

Given the fact that everyone loves elephants, especially baby elephants, I think most viewers would be quite enamored with The Elephant Whisperers. About a couple raising two orphaned elephants in the Mudumalai National Park in India, this tender documentary is a great watch. Just about every frame of the film features elephants, and yet this is one of the most humanist motion pictures nominated. So much of it acutely focuses on much of the human condition: life, love, death, learning, and (like Haulout, EO, and All That Breathes) the consequences we are placing on this planet for other species. The elephants do a lot of the heavy lifting (again, almost everyone loves elephants), but director Kartiki Gonsalves deserves a lot of the credit for crafting such a moving documentary about this couple and their work. It's my favorite of the five nominees in this category. 

4. The Banshees of Inisherin

Actor in a Leading Role (Colin Farrell), Actor in a Supporting Role (Brendan Gleeson), Actor in a Supporting Role (Barry Keoghan), Actress in a Supporting Role (Kerry Condon), Directing (Martin McDonagh), Film Editing (Mikkel E.G. Nielsen), Original Score (Carter Burwell), Original Screenplay (Martin McDonagh), Best Picture (Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, and Martin McDonagh)

I might be the only person on the planet who didn't like In Bruges, the last time Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and writer-director Martin McDonagh worked on a project together, so I was delighted that I (mostly) liked The Banshees of Inisherin, the tragicomedy about two friends in 1923 Ireland who suddenly aren't friends anymore and the violent repercussions of their split. This film, with its nihilistic tone and dialogue-heavy scenes, isn't for everyone, but even if people don't care for the story or the film's pace, they should be in awe of its sharp, theatrical script and its performances, particularly the four Oscar nominees. And once you see the film, you'll forever wonder if each of your fingers is worth talking to really boring people. 

3. Close 

International Feature Film (Belgium)

Close is a sensitive coming-of-age film that explores a deeply intimate—and possibly queer-coded—friendship between two teenage boys named Léo and Rémi (played by Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele, respectively) whose friendship starts to unravel after some invasive questions by classmates who insist they're not being mean, which is followed by other teasing and then outright bullying. There is certainly a turning point in the film which potentially could alienate a chunk of its audience; Peter Debruge at Variety complained that the film is "so subtle and sensitive in the first half" before becoming "devastatingly false" and "incredibly, unwelcomely different." That may be a tad harsh, but I suspect it's how many will ultimately feel. Despite that, the acting is superb. Most of the films on this list featured phenomenal acting, but Close probably leads the pack, with Dambrine's being my favorite performance of all the films on this list.  

2. Tár
Actress in a Leading Role (Cate Blanchett), Cinematography (Florian Hoffmeister), Directing (Todd Field), Film Editing (Monika Willi), Original Screenplay (Todd Field), Best Picture (Todd Field, Alexandra Milchan, and Scott Lambert) 

Tár is only the third film Todd Fields has directed, and yet it's the work of a master. The film has so many things to say about debates over wokeness, cancel culture, power, and gender, and in weaker hands, things could have become too convoluted and preachy. True, some have been turned off by what the film may or may not be saying on these issues (Richard Brody in the New Yorker called it "regressive"), and Cate Blanchett's performance as a (some might say monstrous) conductor may take a bit of getting used to, but it is an effective one, and other members of the cast deserve praise, as well: Nina Hoss as Sharon, a violinist and Lydia's wife; Noémie Merlant as Francesca, Lydia's assistant; Sophie Kauer as a cellist and Lydia's new favorite; Julian Glover as Andris, Lydia's mentor; Mila Bogojevic as Lydia and Sharon's daughter; and in only one (very memorable) scene, Zethphan Smith-Gneist as a student Lydia tangles with. And unlike Everything Everywhere All at Once, which grows more taxing as it progresses, Tár gets better and better. Tár is not a perfect film (it wasn't even one of my favorites of last year), but it is one of the very best of all the nominees.

1. The Red Suitcase

Live Action Short Film (Cyrus Neshvad)

The Red Suitcase, directed by Cyrus Neshvad, is surely the best of the nominated live action short films and one of the best films I've seen in a while. The film is about a sixteen-year-old Iranian girl played by Nawelle Ewad who is sent to meet her middle-aged husband (Sawkaw Gorany) in an international airport in Luxembourg by her father. Scared and unable to communicate with anyone in French, English, or Luxembougish, she hides from the man she's been sold to and tries to escape the airport unnoticed. The film's cat-and-mouse nature sometimes endangers it by engaging in material beneath it, and if the filmmakers weren't careful, it probably would have gone there. But Neshad's direction and Ewad's acting are masterful, and it avoids such pratfalls. The film's championing of a scared teenage Iranian girl going against her conservative family's expectations of her makes this a very timely film, obviously, due to the recent revolt of Iranian women and their supporters, and (much like the Iranian government's brutal retaliation of protestors) the dichotomy between this girl and her "husband" is a painful one. The Red Suitcase is an eloquent reminder of the continuing struggles of women and girls in Iran for their rights, and I hope more people see it to be aware of their fight. I also hope it pulls an upset and wins the Oscar.  

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Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

 What is a movie that's so bad, it's good? For many, there are some movies that are just so awful, so dreadful, so pathetic that the reaction paradoxically is joy and laughter. The most common example tends to be The Room, the Tommy Wiseau...I don't even know what to call it. Drama, I guess? Sure, drama. The Room became so trashed that its ridicule helped lead it to cult status, raucous midnight showings, and even a Hollywood film about its creation.

Many have argued that Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, the 1964 sci-fi family film often regarded as one of cinema's worst ever, is one such film that's so bad, it's good. I disagree. It's just bad. I didn't like The Room, but I understand that it's likely because I watched it by myself. What's the fun in that? But even with a large, participatory, stoned audience to join me, I can't imagine liking Santa Claus Conquers the Martians any more than I did. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is basically what you would expect it to be: one of the most bizarre movies you can watch in the public domain (or any domain, for that matter), more 1960s than if an episode of The Monkees and an episode of Batman had a baby that was addicted to dropping acid and wore bell-bottom jeans.

The film opens with a catchy yet awfully annoying song titled "Hurray for Santy Claus!", written by Milton DeLugg, who at one point was the musical director for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. After the credits and song finish, we're on Mars, where two Martian children in green clothes and green face paint sit fixated on their TV sets. Kimar, the king of the Martians played by Leonard Hicks, notices that all the children of Mars are glued to the TV sets watching "Earth programs," unable to express love and act as children (or at least Earth children; how very speciesist of the film). After seeking the counsel of the wise, 800-year-old sage Chochem (Carl Donn), Kimar becomes convinced that the Martians must journey to Earth and take Santa (played by veteran actor John Call) back to Mars to bring happiness to all the young Martians.

The best-laid plans of green men often go awry, and things quickly do as soon as they take orbit. Comic relief characters like Dropo (Bill McCutcheon) and the villainous, hawkish Voldor (Vincent Beck) often get in Kimar's way, as do two young Earth children named Billy and Betty (Victor Stiles and Donna Conforti). Kimar calmly explains to the kids that they're from Mars and they're looking for Santa, and Billy calmly replies that they can find him at the North Pole. That should be the end of that, until Voldor convinces Kimar that they must take the two of them back with them before they "alert the authorities." Along with Santa, the children are imprisoned and taken to Mars.

As you can tell, it's unlikely that most of those involved took this too seriously (though Beck and Hicks really commit more than they should). However, Paul L. Jacobson, who produced the film and wrote its atrocious script, could have at least tried a little harder. There are odd, topical (at the time) jokes (Santa confuses Blitzen with Nixon, for example) and copious amounts of uncomfortable laughing from literally every character, making everything seem even stranger. Admittedly, it is a bit humorous when the Martians finally reach Earth and see thousands of Santas on the city streets, and they're not sure which one is the real deal. I think that was the only part I liked.

Since being rediscovered for an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the early 1990s, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians sometimes appears in movie trivia. For example, the movie marks the film debut of singer and actress Pia Zadora, seventeen years before the Golden Globes controversy, when some allege her millionaire husband at the time essentially bought her win for New Star of the Year Award for the panned erotic crime drama Butterfly (the same role in which she won Worst Actress at the Raspberry Awards). Additionally, believe it or not, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians features the very first on-screen portrayal of Mrs. Claus (played here by Doris Rich), just three weeks before the character appeared in the much more famous and respected animated program Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on NBC. Finally, the film shares some of the same stock footage as Dr. Strangelove, so that's something.   

But those interesting bits of trivia cannot save this film. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is the rare movie I watch and just have no idea what I'm watching. It may seem like I'm kicking a movie while it's down, or that perhaps I shouldn't pick on such a movie that had no intention of being taken too seriously, but what I've written is not unfair. Apparently, Jacobson really, truly thought he was on to something here and that he knew how to make a great flick for kids. He did not. It's not clear what people thought of it at the time because there were not many reviews of it when it premiered. One, though, from Howard Thompson of the New York Times, actually more or less praises the film. "Adults may find it square-cut as cheese," he wrote. "But let's face it. From now till you-know-when, the youngsters are all that matter." That may be true, but surely they deserve better than Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

This review originally appeared at the Public Domain Film Review on December 25, 2020.  

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Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (And a List of the Best Weird Al Songs)

It might puzzle viewers of the opening moments of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (now streaming on Roku) as to why "Weird Al" Yankovic is being rushed into a hospital for emergency treatment due to a drug overdose. According to the real-life Al Yankovic, he's never taken drugs. So what gives?

The teaser trailer released earlier this year might have given the impression that Weird would be a standard musical biopic. The official trailer later, however, started to hint that things were not quite as they seemed. Did Weird Al have a romantic relationship with Madonna? Was he battling with drug abuse and alcoholism, as musical biopics demand? For the real Weird Al, the questions very much delighted him, as he revealed on Twitter. Yankovic has since clarified that he met Madonna for "like, forty-five seconds" backstage at an awards event in 1985. For me, though, I don't think the joke really sunk in until the very end of the trailer, in which Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Yankovic, shoves his cigarette into a music executive's hand. While it would be much more entertaining to watch the film not knowing that it is meant to be a parody of musical biopics (it makes sense that it does, of course, since Yankovic has made a career of parodying other songs), by now everyone knows this is not a serious film, though it plays as one. Weird is a spoof of those hackneyed Oscar-bait musical biopics (looking at you, Elvis) that we're all tired of.

Inspired by the viral success of Eric Appel's fake trailer for a Weird Al biopic nine years ago at Funny or Die, this film starts with a musical score sounding like it's right out of movies of a simpler time (think Forrest Gump, Beethoven, and The American President). The movie shows us Al as a young boy living a simple suburban life. But as a teenager, he just wants to play the accordion (what a rebel), an instrument his father angrily dismisses as the "Devil's Squeeze Box." One of the film's funniest lines is when the police return young Al to his parents and tell them, "I'm afraid we found your son at an accordion party." Despite his parents (played by Julianne Nicholson and Toby Huss) attempting to steer him away from his dreams of writing songs ("in an extremely specific genre of music," he tells them) and more towards a respectable career path, like his father's job at a factory in which nobody has any idea what is made, Al remains determined to write new words to songs that have already been written. 

All the tropes are deliberately there in this biopic, including the one in which the musical protagonist suddenly wows the unexpecting crowd by belting out a tune out of nowhere. It starts with Al hearing "My Sharona" on the radio while making sandwiches and suddenly coming up with "My Bologna," then later again at a pool party hosted by his father figure, Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson) in a cameo-a-minute scene in which Al is challenged to spoof "Another One Bites the Dust." The result: "Another One Rides the Bus." At this point, it should be pointed out that there are "nuggets of truth," as Weird Al has called them in recent interviews, sprinkled throughout the film. "Another One Rides the Bus" is (obviously) an actual parody from 1981, which became an underground hit and was featured on his first album two years later. He also did, in fact, record "My Bologna" in a public restroom.  

From there, Weird Al faces a meteoric rise. But again, in this fictitious alternate universe, things are upside down. No finer example of this (other than dating Madonna, wonderfully played by Evan Rachel Wood as a villainess desperate for the "Yankovic Bump" that her records would receive if he would just parody one of her songs–oh, and all the parts with Pablo Escobar) is when Al releases "Eat It." Look, Weird Al Yankovic has released a lot of great songs that are actually originals and not parodies, and it's a pity that the public isn't as well-versed these songs, like the epic and absurd "Albuquerque" or the intense "Hardware Store" or the cathartic "Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me"—a song that speaks for us all. But everyone knows that "Eat It," with its obvious similarity to "Beat It," is not an original. Here, in this topsy-turvy world, it's the other way around. In Weird, "Eat It" comes first, and "Beat It" (the song by "that kid from the Jackson 5?") comes second, infuriating Al Yankovic, who at this point wants to be taken more seriously. 

For fans of Weird Al, especially the hardcore ones who likely know the originals mentioned above, Weird is a must. Those who have listened to his songs over the years as he turned songs like "Jeopardy" into "I Lost on Jeopardy" and "Lola" into "Yoda" will most likely enjoy it as well. Even those who have absolutely no idea who Weird Al Yankovic is will probably at least enjoy it a little. I did. However, there are problems with it, mainly with how late it is. The inevitable comparison of the film is to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the 2007 comedy starring John C. Reilly lampooning films like Ray and Walk the Line. "The wrong kid died," the line from Dewey's dismissive and cruel father, was far funnier than any of the father-son dynamics we see here. And the zenith of Weird's absurdity, as it shifts into a parody of action films of the 1980s, is a low point. Ultimately, especially as it inches through its third act, it simply becomes more and more smirkable and chuckable than downright hysterical.

Radcliffe, though, delivers one of his best performances, as does Wood. They definitely have comedic chemistry. They both can sing in real life, so it's unfortunate we don't get to hear them sing a few tunes here. And Weird Al's new song for the movie (titled "Now You Know") is one of his best. I just wish I enjoyed the rest of the movie as much as I did this new song.

The Best Weird Al Songs:

50. My Baby's In Love with Eddie Vendor
49. I Think I'm a Clone Now

48. I Love Rocky Road

47. Mission Statement

46. (This Song's Just) Six Words Long

45. The Brady Bunch

44. Happy Birthday

43. King of Suede 

42. Word Crimes

41. Midnight Star

40. That Boy Could Dance

39. The Biggest Ball of Twice in All of Minnesota

38. Alimony

37. Polkarama! 

36. Polka Your Eyes Out

35. Now You Know

34. Good Enough for Now

33. Dare to Be Stupid

32. Isle Thing

31. My Bologna 

30. Fun Zone

29. UHF

28. Christmas at Ground Zero

27. Nature Trail to Hell

26. Polka Power!

25. Smells Like Nirvana

24. Perform This Way

23. Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies 

22. Dog Eats Dog

21. Slime Creatures From Outer Space

20. One More Minute

19. Handy

18. The Hot Rocks Polka

17. Talk Soup

16. Foil

15. Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung

14. Fat

13. Jurassic Park

12. Yoda

11. Eat It

10. White and Nerdy

9. Sports Song

8. Hardware Store

7. Attack of the Radioactive Hamsters from a Planet Near Mars

6. Albuquerque 

5. Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me

4. I Lost on Jeopardy

3. Like a Surgeon

2. Amish Paradise

1. The Saga Continues

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Prey

"The animals who play with the most abandon are the predators."

"But surely prey are almost never safe enough to play."

-Brenda Cooper, Edge of Dark 

All Native peoples have legends and stories about the sky, according to Lee Grayson, and in some groups, "children moving into adulthood go into nature to look at the sky for life-changing visions." But what if what a youth saw in the sky wasn't simply a vision serving as an impetus for her hero's journey but also a sign that something unearthly and dangerous was about to come for her? Such a danger has been featured several times before: with Navy SEAL Arnold Schwarzenegger and crew in Central America, with L.A. detective Danny Glover, and two (or four, if you count the Alien vs. Predator movies) more films, all featuring that omnipresent clicking noise of the Predator. 

Prey, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, is the latest Predator movie. The last one was the Shane Black-directed film The Predator, but with reshoots, mixed reviews, and a MeToo controversy, it might have been the last time we would see the towering menace and its thirst for human trophies. However, the creature returns in a prequel surprisingly set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719, and for many, surprisingly or not, Prey has been the best. This time, one of the Predators is up against not Arnold and his SEALs or Detective Glover (or Adrien Brody or Boyd Holbrook and on and on) but a Comanche tribe, specifically a young woman named Naru, played by Amber Midthunder. 

Predictably, everyone around Naru wants her to be domestic, yet she yearns for traditionally masculine roles, such as being a hunter like her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), a leader in her tribe. Her brother can be supportive, but not fully; ultimately, he decides she is not ready to go out and hunt whatever it is that she claims to see in the sky. Yet she and her dog Sarii (played by Coco) secretly follow her brother and the other men to rescue one of their members who was attacked by a mountain lion. Along the way, however, Naru sees troubling signs of a creature far worse. There are warning signs all around her: a dead snake, gigantic footprints, and that disturbance in the sky she mistakes for a sign that she is ready to begin her trial. 

Naru and her tribe are in danger due to both kinds of aliens: one from outside their world and one from across the ocean. The latter are French fur traders, and the usual beats are there: They slaughter the buffalo the Comanche rely on, Sarii's tail gets trapped in one of their foothold traps, and they capture one of the Comanche men and torture him. The film uses the horrid behavior of the fur trappers to potently remind audiences what happened on this continent. The film makes clear that the real predators were Europeans. 

I'd like to quote Jon T. Coleman's book Vicious: Wolves and Men in America to help understand Naru as a character in relation to the Predator. According to Coleman, "Vulnerability—not hunger, not anger, and certainly not spite—is the key to predator-prey relationships. The skill and viciousness of the hunter matters less than the size, speed, strength, health, and ferocity of the hunted...Predators eat the mild and weak because those are the animals they can catch and kill." This is not to suggest that Naru is always invulnerable throughout the story. At different times, she is in profound danger. She even makes mistakes. But she also possesses the driving force of her own ambition to prove herself that helps keep her alive. The scorn she receives from male members of her tribe and the skepticism and frustration from her mother (Michelle Thrush) only augment her drive. True, she might use vengeance against other humans occupying her space, but against her nonhuman hunter, she will also weaponize her size, speed, and strength. Along the way, it certainly helps that she knows medicine and can help the injured. In essence, she is one of the most badass characters we've seen on the screen in a while. 

There are exciting moments throughout the film involving a variety of other predator-and-prey creatures (snakes, mountain lions, wolves, rabbits, deer, and even a bear), all set against the backdrop of gorgeous locations in Calgary. Our protagonist will find herself in at least some of these trials and tribulations, and she faces them with wide-eyed grit. While watching, though, you might forget that you're not simply viewing a period piece involving a Comanche young woman, but you're also watching the latest installment in a thirty-five-year franchise. The Predator, as most of us have seen, is a tall, incredibly robust creature with technology far more advanced than everything humans have been able to throw at it. In Predator back in 1987, he was played by the seven-foot-tall Kevin Peter Hall, and with hours of Stan Winston-created makeup effects featuring terrifying mandibles, Hall as the Predator made for a formidable foe against Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, and others. Here, an ancestor of that first monster is played by actor and former basketball player Dane DiLiegro. The technology DiLiegro's Predator uses may be more primitive than that used in films that take place centuries later, but it is still more potent and deadly than anything his opponents have. 

Despite how exciting and thrilling this sci-fi/action/horror/thriller can be, it's a little surprising and even fascinating that 20th Century Studios, Disney, and the others involved with the production would agree to try something like this: to take a franchise that got off to a great start way back in the Eighties (and then featured mediocre-at-best attempts to recreate the magic) but now make something totally familiar yet fresh. I imagine director Dan Trachtenberg, screenwriter Patrick Aison, and others might have faced a skeptical audience as they tried to persuade the powers that be that this would be a worthwhile project and worth the risk. Fortunately for them, the risk paid off: Prey is currently ranked among the ten best films of 2022 on Rotten Tomatoes, and it became Hulu's biggest premiere ever.  

It's not too surprising that the franchise took a big swing by making the film a prequel and setting it three hundred years ago. It's not surprising because Trachtenberg has a track record of taking such risks, like when he verged away from the found-footage monster horror of Cloverfield to make its sequel (10 Cloverfield Lane) a human-based thriller set entirely in a bunker. What is more surprising is that this well-known commodity features a mostly indigenous cast. Prey comes at a time of greater indigenous representation in the U.S., with Deb Haaland's appointment as the first Native American cabinet secretary in history and the FX teen comedy-drama series Reservation Dogs gaining rave reviews being notable examples. Yet these examples exist in the backdrop of disappointing but unsurprising statistics: According to Reclaim Native Truth, Native American characters make up no more than 0.4 percent of characters in film and television.

Prey, whose production team took steps to make sure what was on screen was historically accurate (including the tooth-brushing scene and horses, for example), even features a dubbed version in Comanche. I first watched Prey when it was released last summer. When I rewatched it, I did so with the version that was dubbed into Comanche, and I was happy that the dubbing was not as distracting as I thought it would be. It's least distracting in Midthunder's scenes. Speaking of Midthunder, she's the best part. Her acting is top-notch, and whether it involves her going toe-to-toe with the Predator, standing up to the men in her tribe, or constantly running, she's great. It seems unlikely (though possible) that we will see her Naru again; if anything, the owners of this franchise will likely do what has always been done: try something new. But there are hints that a sequel could be hidden throughout the film (including a neat Easter egg). I don't think there should be a direct sequel involving these characters, but if there is, I look forward to seeing Naru and her trusty dog companion once again.   

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Angela Lansbury

"When they talk about the Golden Age of Hollywood," Geoffrey Rush asked Dame Angela Lansbury in his toast to her at the 2013 Governors Award in which she "at long last" received an Oscar, "aren't they just talking about you?" That's not hyperbole. When one thinks of 20th-cinema in the United States, one certainly thinks of iconic figures like Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Paul Newman, Orson Welles, George Cukor, Spencer Tracy, Danny Kaye, Cecil B. DeMille, James Earl Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, and Judy Garland. The common denominator of them all is that they worked with Angela Lansbury, who died today at the age of 96, in her legendary career, which began in 1944 when she was just 17 years old.

Playing the flirtatious and rather rude Nancy Oliver, a housemaid of the couple played by Bergman and Charles Boyer, she turned 18 on the set of that first film of hers (the Hollywood remake of Gaslight) and then became one of the few performers to get an Oscar nomination for a debut performance. In the film, Lansbury immediately presented to audiences her remarkable versatility and an ear that worked like a sponge, assisting her in her ability to do a variety of accents, a trait that served her well not only in Gaslight but in a whole host of films from The Long Hot Summer in 1958 to Nanny McPhee in 2005.

Her post-Gaslight features saw her in roles that were the complete opposite of Nancy: playing the kind, older sister of Elizabeth Taylor's character in 1945's National Velvet (which started a life-long friendship between the two) and singing for the first time on screen in 1946's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which earned her a second Oscar nomination. Alas, Dame Angela never did nab a competitive Oscar, even when she was thought to have been a shoo-in for her villainous portrayal as Mrs. Iselin in the 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate. (She lost to Patty Duke for her performance in The Miracle Worker.) Awards success surprisingly evaded her through much of her career. Fans of Murder, She Wrote (the hit TV series where she played the sleuth Jessica Fletcher for 12 years) might be surprised to learn that she was nominated for an Emmy every year the show was on air, but she never once won.

However, the theater crowd always gave her the prizes she deserved. The final days of the old Hollywood contract system gave her steady work, like the musical Western The Harvey Girls (a movie which gave her the distinction of being the only actor to get a fight scene with Judy Garland, to my knowledge), the Biblical epic Samson and Delilah, and the beloved Danny Kaye comedy The Court Jester, but she remained a bit player before shifting to television and theater. Despite a flop with her first Stephen Sondheim collaboration Anyone Can Whistle in 1964, she became a much bigger national star and gay icon with her performance in the title role of Mame in 1966, earning her first of five Tony Awards. She also won for Dear World, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Blithe Spirit.

Often, Lansbury was a part of a great ensemble (and she was often the best part), and sometimes, frankly, she was the only good thing about a production, like in the biographical film Till the Clouds Roll By or the Disney musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks, one of the few films in which she played the lead. Despite Bedknobs and Broomsticks being a weak attempt at recreating the magic of Mary Poppins (she's also brilliant as the Balloon Lady in the 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns, by the way), Bedknobs and Broomsticks comes across as flat and uninspired, but Lansbury brings it to life with songs like "Substitutiary Locomotion." 

Murder, She Wrote is another example of her being the best part of something. The plot, rhythm, and style of each of the 264 episodes were largely the same, for better or worse. Sometimes it was difficult to keep up with all the clues, sometimes the murderer's motive made no sense, and sometimes it seemed the writers were bending over backwards to surprise viewers with who the culprit really turned out to be. But in just about every episode, she was fantastic. The show's bookend episodes, for example, in which Jessica would host and narrate an episode that had nothing to do with her and her sleuthing (making her a minor part of the story), serve as reminders of just how much she carried that show.

It was Murder, She Wrote that most likely served as many Millennials' introduction to Angela Lansbury, primarily for it being a show our grandmothers loved. Actually, in addition to that, I have a very vivid memory of watching her in the 1978 adaptation of Death on the Nile with my grandmother in which Lansbury gets shot in the head as she was about to reveal who the murderer was. (She once joked that she was "a great dier" on screen.) Between these two murder-mystery pieces of pop culture, I recognized even at the age of four or five that Lansbury was in fact the voice of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast, which might remain her most beloved performance on the big screen. With her beautiful singing of the film's Oscar-winning title song, she would become a permanent part of history.   

And a permanent part of us, as well, with all the memories we have of her playing such fantastic characters. She was a natural, among the very best of the Golden Age of Hollywood. There will never be another actor quite like Angela Lansbury.

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Happy 60th Birthday, Mr. Bond: All 25 (+3) James Bond Movies Ranked

Sixty years ago, on October 5, 1962, audiences were first introduced to the British secret service agent, James Bond, the screen adaption of author Ian Fleming's "blunt instrument," a man just as much a promiscuous playboy as he was a capitalist cold warrior crisscrossing the globe on a whole host of adventures. For a variety of different reasons, the first Bond film was not an adaption of Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale, but Dr. No, an adaptation of the sixth novel. More on that later.

Premiering at the London Pavilion and then the rest of the United Kingdom a few days later, Dr. No, produced by Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, directed by Terence Young, and starring Sean Connery, made its way to North America seven months later in May 1963. That first Bond movie wasn't as critically successful as one might imagine, with Time calling James Bond a "hairy marshmallow" (whatever that means). The film also predictably found enemies at both the Vatican and the Kremlin. But it had just enough fans, including President John F. Kennedy, who had it shown at the White House. Dr. No was the fifth-highest grossing film of the year.

The world's most famous Scotsman, Connery, went on to play the character six more times (including an unofficial entry that's included in the ranking below). He was followed by actors from Australia, England, Wales, and Ireland. Everyone has their favorite (most usually say Connery), but for me, they were all terrific. The films they appeared in? Not so much. Some were good, some were bad, and some were ugly. They have been ranked frequently over the past decade or so; below is mine:

28. Casino Royale (1967)

Believe it or not, Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel, has actually been adapted for the screen three times, not one, with the second being when producer Charles K. Feldman got his hands on the film rights for the novel in 1962. Feldman failed to come to an agreement with Broccoli and Saltzman on adapting the story for the screen, and by that time, the Bond franchise had already taken off without the very first story, so Feldman felt he couldn't compete with the official Bond films starring Sean Connery as 007. The result is that this Casino Royale is a spoof of James Bond films and not a faithful adaptation; it is also one of the least funny, most nonsensical, and most arbitrary motion pictures in history, coming across like a mismanaged collection of four bizarre films squished into one (with no less than five directors). Beyond that, while it would be an understatement to call James Bond a creep, never before had the character (played here by 56-year-old David Niven) gotten into a tub with a 17-year-old who bathes him. Even without the creepiness (and racism) of the film, none of the story makes any sense. For a reason I cared little to invest any amount of brainpower to understand, this "Sir James Bond" Niven plays becomes the new M and has a host of other spies be renamed James Bond, including one played by Peter Sellers and another played by Ursula Andress (who was also in Dr. No). While the legends surrounding the on-set rivalry between Orson Welles as Le Chriffe and the chaos-causing Sellers are intriguing, nothing else about the film is. 

Best part: Orson Welles?

27. Casino Royale (1954)

It may come as a surprise to Bond lovers, but Sean Connery technically wasn't the first James Bond (and the first James Bond wasn't even British). That honor goes to U.S. actor Barry Nelson, who (with a square face and aw-shucks personality) gave Bond (played here as a CIA agent and often called "Jimmy") a self-effacing persona rather than a dapper one. The first adaptation of the novel Casino Royale was on an episode of the CBS anthology series Climax!, which was able to adapt the novel after CBS paid Ian Fleming $1,000 (roughly $11,000 today). Nelson (who later jokingly called himself "00-one-and-a-half") took the part so that he could play opposite Peter Lorre, who more or less phones it in as Le Chiffre but is still more interesting to watch than everyone else. Nelson also noted years later that "the Bond thing wasn't all that well known" at that point (only one year after the novel's release and eight years before the cinematic release of Dr. No). That's ultimately the problem with this hour-long adaptation, a live, sometimes clunky Bond prototype before Bond was a thing. It's probably a must-watch for Bond fanatics and possibly pop culture buffs; for everyone else, it's a bore and should be skipped. 

Best part: Peter Lorre, even though he doesn't appear the least bit interested.

26. Die Another Day (2002)

The Batman and Robin of the Bond franchise, Die Another Day is an outlandish, absurd, and pathetic entry meant to celebrate what was then Bond's fortieth anniversary. Why is it so bad? So many reasons. It starts, though, with some interesting material about the geopolitics of the West's missteps in places like North Korea and Cuba, though it all brings back uncomfortable memories of the Bush administration's hawkish neoconservative policies. But at around minute forty-five, things go haywire. That's when we get lots of goofy stuff about face transplants, invisible cars, lasers, glacier-surfing, and ice palaces. Much of the acting leaves a lot to be desired, too. Toby Stephens as Gustav Graves is quite possibly the worst Bond villain ever, and he probably would have been better suited in a spoof of Bond films. Die Another Day is Rosamund Pike's first film, so she shouldn't be blamed for such a forgettable performance, but Halle Berry (as the NSA agent Jinx, who nearly got her own spinoff) literally won an Oscar during the filming, so it's disappointing that she's also so uninteresting in the film. This is the final of Pierce Brosnan's four Bond films. From there, he went on to distance himself as much as possible from the Bond image in an eclectic array of films like Mamma Mia!, The Matador, and The Ghost Writer.  

Best part: I have no idea.

25. Never Say Never Again (1983)

Never Say Never Again was writer and producer Kevin McClory's long-awaited swing at a Bond movie once the courts sided with him. The whole legal drama is a long, complicated story, but the gist of it is that Ian Fleming went to work on creating the first Bond film with Jack Whittingham and McClory. Eventually, however, Fleming decided to put the story the three of them created onto the page with Thunderball, his next novel, without informing McClory or Whittingham, who tried to stop the publication. After a lengthy court battle in which Fleming's health deteriorated, Fleming was ordered to credit Whittingham and McClory, with McClory gaining control of the film rights (including the rights to SPECTRE, which is why the organization stopped appearing in Bond films until McClory's heirs sold the rights to Eon Productions). McClory came to an agreement with the Bond producers in which he would be credited as the sole producer of Thunderball but would not be allowed to adapt the story for another ten years. Then, after another legal win, McClory was free to make his own Bond movie. Yet another win was scoring Sean Connery to return as Bond eleven years after saying he never would play the character again (hence the title). Finally, Warner Bros. released the film in 1983, pitting it against Eon's Octopussy, starring Roger Moore. Octopussy would be the winner at the box office, but Never Say Never Again was more of a critical darling, then and now. Why? I have no idea. Thunderball is boring as hell, but not as boring as Never Say Never Again, which ultimately just feels as if someone sat McClory and Irvin Kershner (the director) down and explained to them what Bond films were, and then they tried to replicate it. Never Say Never Again is monotonous, the acting is awful (especially Edward Fox as an over-the-top M and Rowan Atkinson showing up for comic relief), and it really makes you appreciate the formula of the Eon films. 

Best part: Other than the somewhat engaging final showdown between Bond and Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera), the only remotely interesting thing about this movie is the behind-the-scenes legal drama. Fun fact (I guess): Connery was trained by Steven Seagal, who broke Connery's wrist.  

24. Thunderball (1965)

There isn't all that much to write about Thunderball that wasn't just covered in its remake (see above). I felt almost an equal amount of boredom with both films. I will share one personal anecdote, though: Luciana Paluzzi as Fiona Volpe being shot in the back during her dance with 007 is the first memory I have of James Bond. (Quite a morbid memory of the franchise.) Years later, I watched the whole thing. I didn't like Thunderball the first time; I didn't like it the second time, either. Despite its high praise (it is currently ranked the sixth highest-rated in the franchise on Rotten Tomatoes), this is probably the most overrated installment. As is the case with Never Say Never Again, the five-decade history of the legal battle behind it is far more interesting than anything in the final product. Aside from that drama, there's nothing special about Thunderball. The opening scene is absurd, the jet pack is laughable, the villain is forgettable, and there's nothing there that we hadn't seen in the previous three movies (except a bunch of underwater stuff).

Best part: the theme song sung by Tom Jones.

23. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

There are only so many ways one can write "this franchise is offensive," but it is a recurring theme when discussing these films. In particular, essentially every early Bond film (especially the Connery ones) was insulting in some ways; sometimes, the movie would be racist, sometimes it was sexist, sometimes it was offensive in other ways, and sometimes all of the above. Here, in Diamonds Are Forever (Connery's first time back as Bond since 1965 and the first Bond of the '70s), it's all of the above. Even if it weren't for that, it is increasingly dull and weird as it moves along. The plot is something about a diamond smuggling operation that Bond has to investigate being run by Bond's arch nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (who's not in the novel), here played in a very camp performance by Charles Gray (who also appeared in a different role in You Only Live Twice). Diamonds Are Forever definitely was a big swing back in the direction of silliness after the much more somber On Her Majesty's Secret Service; at the time, Saltzman and Broccoli (who considered other actors—including Roger Moore—before acquiescing to the studio's request to bring back Connery for a then-record of $1.2 million) probably felt that it was a necessary course correction after the cool reaction to the previous installment. A more recent consensus, however, has emerged and totally disagrees.

Best part: Putter Smith and Bruce Glover as the henchmen Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint, respectively, and Lana Wood as Plenty O'Toole.

22. Octopussy (1983)

There are some good parts of the goofily titled Octopussy (adapted from the series of short stories by Fleming called Octopussy and the Living Daylights): There's a fight on a train, the return of Maud Adams (in a new role as the titular character), and Bond traveling to India and cleverly outsmarting the villain, an exiled Afghan prince (awkwardly played by non-Asian French star Louis Jourdan) who is working to disrupt the detente between the West and the Soviet Union. Other than that, it's a weird movie. If Steve Berkoff chewing up the scenery as a Russian general intent on implementing Soviet superiority is your thing, you've got plenty of that here. There's a new M in the film, too: Robert Brown, who played Admiral Hargreaves in The Spy Who Loved Me; it's never stated if this is the same character. Brown took over the role after Bernard Lee, who played M in eleven films from 1962 to 1979, died in 1981. Brown provides just as good a job in the role as Lee did before him. Unfortunately, though, most of the film is a bore, with Bond doing the Tarzan call being a particular low point in the franchise. The film's jaw-dropping stunts that feature Bond pitted against the henchman Gobinda (Kabir Bedi) on top of an in-flight airplane are tempered with fight choreography that's comically bad. Ultimately, Octopussy is the worst Roger Moore Bond film.

Best part: the plane stunts.

21. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

Tomorrow Never Dies is about as forgettable a Bond film as possible. While it's a neat idea to have a Bond villain who makes many think of real-life villains like Rupert Murdoch, it's considerably less interesting to watch the usually brilliant Jonathan Pryce do a lot of mustache-twirling while playing such a character, in this case a media mogul named Elliot Carver who wants to create military havoc between the UK and China in order to eventually get exclusive broadcasting rights in the latter for one hundred years. It's a rare, almost pathetically bad performance as he waltzes around detailing his plans to whomever will listen. The only saving grace for the film is Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin, a Chinese Ministry of State Security agent who works with Bond to stop Carver. Yeoh and Pierce Brosnan make a pretty good team, but they're not enough to save the film from being anything more than a hackneyed action flick of the 1990s. 

Best part: Michelle Yeoh.

20. Licence to Kill (1989)

Licence to Kill, the first original title for the series and the last Bond film for several longtime contributors to the series, such as director John Glen, actor Robert Brown, and producer Cubby Broccoli, took the series into terribly gritty territory. The movie, far from the science fiction adventure of Moonraker or the romance of The Living Daylights, sees gruesome scenes of sharks chewing off legs, explosive decompression, and a man being shredded alive. Thus, the movie makes for a humorless, dull, excessively violent two-hour slog. Timothy Dalton, in his second and final outing as James Bond, looked like he was as disinterested as the audience, or (as Richard Corliss at Time put it) "for every plausible reason, [Dalton] looks as bored in his second Bond film as Sean Connery did in his sixth." The film struggled in the United States, where it was up against other major summer blockbusters like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Batman. Who could blame audiences for staying away? At its core, it's just a bad attempt at an '80s action flick. 

Best part: Benicio Del Toro as the henchman Dario.

19. The Man With the Golden Gun (1974)

The good news is that The Man with the Golden Gun, Roger Moore's second outing as Bond, is not nearly as bad as I remembered it. However, it is still a flawed film. Like Moore's first Bond film (Live and Let Die), the plot is mediocre, the chase scenes are boring, and this film (the ninth in the series) doesn't add much to a franchise at a time when it must have been feeling stale. True, there are some neat things, like the martial arts fights and the shipwrecked RMS Queen Elizabeth serving as covert headquarters for MI6. There's also the best part of the film: Christopher Lee as Scaramanga (more on him later). Much of the specific criticism has been about Britt Ekland as Goodnight, Bond's assistant in the field (who, of course, is seduced by him). Goodnight is meant to be comic relief (Clifton James as a vacationing J.W. Pepper from the previous film for some reason also returns for comic relief that misfires), but the humor about Goodnight often materializes in the form of "women, amiright?" type of jokes, as Goodnight clumsily messes up practically everything. Other criticism has been made about Hervé Villechaize as Nick Nack only serving the film as one ableist joke after another. I would also add that this is one of the most male-gazey of all the Bond films, with several scenes of Bond creepily gazing upon naked or nearly naked women. Now, about the good things: it's mainly Christopher Lee as Scaramanga. Lee, a step-cousin of Bond author Ian Fleming, is incredibly suave and debonair here in one of his most celebrated roles. He's the first villain to challenge Bond's ego and arguably false sense of justice and morality. To Scaramanga, both he and Bond are assassins, and talented ones at that. "To us, Mr. Bond," he says. "We are the best." 

Best part: Christopher Lee.

18. Live and Let Die (1973)

With Sean Connery out of the official Bond films for good, Roger Moore (who had been considered for the part two previous times) entered the franchise as the third official James Bond. It's a night-and-day difference between Connery's last official showing and Moore's first. In Diamonds Are Forever, Connery was out of shape and charismatic but apathetic. In Live and Let Die, Moore was a breath of fresh air, possessing noteworthy chemistry with his costar, Jane Seymour as Solitaire, and beginning the films' approach to treating the character and all his adventures in a lighter way. Moore would claim that none of these situations in the films are realistic, so why pretend that they aren't? For some, this was blasphemous, but for others, it really worked. Regarding Live and Let Die, the film can be a bit boring (particularly those chase scenes, which are usually boring in Bond films), and there are other problems, as expected, such as what Zina Hutton called "the stereotyping of Black people, the co-opting of and misappropriation of diasporic religions and cultures, and the ridiculous preoccupation with virginity and women's sexuality." Critics then and now have also complained that Yaphet Kotto as Dr. Kanaga, the Caribbean prime minister who plans on flooding Harlem with heroin for free to create a monopoly, is uninteresting. Kotto, however, while being a bit uneven from start to finish, is a joy to watch, in my opinion, as are his henchmen: Julius W. Harris as Tee Hee, Earl Jolly Brown as Whisper, and Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi. The role of Kanaga is a step away from a more hackneyed villain like Blofeld. Live and Let Die may be boring at times, but with its delightful new star, its utilization of blaxploitation, and its electrifying rock and roll opener, it all feels so new.  

Best part: the McCartney song, one of his best in a long list of exceptional songs over the past sixty years.

17. Spectre (2015)

How can a Bond film start so spectacularly and end so spectacularly dull? Spectre pulls off such a feat. With an epic, wonderfully choreographed and executed opening during the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico City, Spectre starts like few other Bond films before or since. It ends, however, with a gigantic yawn, punctuated by a villain and backstory nobody wanted. Christoph Walz (five years after winning an Oscar for playing a terrifying Nazi in Inglorious Basterds) was a natural choice for the next Bond villain, but he had big shoes to fill and didn't fill them. Dave Bautista is an effective henchman, but for an actor who so brilliantly uses his voice in the Guardians of the Galaxy films to be lacking any dialogue is a missed opportunity. Spectre also inches its way towards the problematic treatment of women that was largely lacking in Casino Royale. In the case of Quantum of Solace, Bond's creepy sexual manipulation of Fields is so inappropriate that Gemma Arterton now regrets taking the role, while in Skyfall, it was the film's (and Bond's) treatment of Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe) and his cold reaction to her death that reminded us of his lack of humanity. In Spectre, the initial excitement of having a woman close to Bond's age (played by Monica Bellucci) was quickly dashed when we saw how spine-chillingly horrid his behavior towards her is. Beyond that, like most Bond films, Spectre—at almost two and a half hours—is way too long, and it really grows stale after Bond and Dr. Madeleine Swan (Léa Seydoux) escape from Austria. There's still more than an hour to go after that.

Best part: the Day of the Dead opening.

16. No Time to Die (2021)
If Spectre left me feeling like the franchise was scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas, No Time to Die simply confirmed it. To be clear, No Time to Die is a finer film than its immediate predecessor, and it's not necessarily a bad one. But at two hours and forty-five minutes, it really pushes the limits for an audience member's patience to watch essentially the same formula and the same beats and the same basic schtick that had been employed twenty-four previous times for the past sixty years. Fortunately, there are some slight innovations and some "big swings," if you will. For one, Lashana Lynch takes over the 007 title in a fine performance but one that Jourdain Searles wondered why existed at all, comparing her to being "lit like a ghost haunting the movie," which seemed especially unnecessary given Searles' (accurate) prediction that Lynch would not be the official new 007. Yet it's refreshing that with Lynch, Ana De Armas, and a returning Léa Seydoux performing more complex (or at least less objectified) women, Bond here is finally not the creep he was in literally every one before it. He's still an assassin, however, as villain Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) frequently reminds him, and he's still in a movie that doesn't realize how badly it is overstaying its welcome, and the gratuitous violence only increased my desire to see this never-ending franchise end.

Best part: Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell's Oscar-winning song.

15. For Your Eyes Only (1981)

Trying for a more serious and realistic plot after some far-fetched adventures in previous Moore-as-Bond films is For Your Eyes Only, the first of five Bond films directed by John Glen, who also edited On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker. Unfortunately, like most Bond films, the plot is overly convoluted and the film drags from time to time, with numerous different action sequences—some involving sharks, some involving ski chases, and some involving rock climbing—appearing better on paper than on film. Julian Glover (who was previously considered for taking over the role of James Bond) plays the bad guy here, a Greek smuggler working for the KGB, but he was ultimately a more interesting villain in Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Harry Potter films than he was here. By this point, however, Moore was fitting seamlessly in the role, and every bit of dialogue he delivers is how it should sound. He wasn't as agile as Daniel Craig, but by this point he very much was James Bond, charming, intelligent, handsome, but very much a cold-blooded killer. Another highlight is the humorous ending scene involving Margaret Thatcher (played by comedian Janet Brown, who often impersonated Thatcher).

Best part: the pre-title sequence, the one in which a man in a wheelchair bearing striking resemblance to Blofeld (who couldn't be called that because the producers had lost the rights to the character in court) and is disposed of by Bond in a helicopter, signifying what must have been producer Cubby Broccoli extending a middle finger to Kevin McClory, as if to say Bond films could easily survive without Blofeld. 

14. The World Is Not Enough (1999)

The best part of The World Is Not Enough (the Bond family motto, according to On Her Majesty's Secret Service) is Sophie Marceau as the manipulative, cunning oil heiress Elektra King. In her performance, she hits all the right notes. To date, King is the (spoiler alert) only lead female Bond villain in its history, and it's a pity because the relationship between her and Bond is so intriguing. After King exits the picture, it's hard to stay motivated to finish the film, mainly because Robert Carlyle as Renard, the other main villain (a man who feels no pain because of a bullet lodged in his brain), isn't particularly interesting. Other than Marceau, The World Is Not Enough is about as mediocre of a Bond film as there can be. It's not bad like Die Another Day or Tomorrow Never Dies, but it's not as good as GoldenEye. 

Best part: Other than Marceau's performance, the best part of the film is Desmond Llewelyn's final moment as Q, the part he played seventeen times.

Q: "Now pay attention, 007. I've always tried to teach you two things: First, never let them see you bleed."

Bond: "And the second?"

Q: "Always have an escape plan."

13. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Using the title of a Fleming story but not the story under his orders (Fleming was reportedly stung by the negative reviews of his book, one in which Bond does not show up until two-thirds of the way through), The Spy Who Loved Me, while better than the previous two, goes on for a bit too long and has an increasingly bland climax. Other parts of the film, however, work. For example, Curd Jürgens as Karl Stromberg does his best to infuse at least something interesting into a somewhat stale Bond villain, this one a rich man who aims to create a new world by destroying the old one with nuclear weapons. The villain, a repeat in many ways of villains of Bond past, works because Jürgens works. Otherwise, Stromberg is forgettable, like much of the film. However, the film is still watchable, and watchable doesn't necessarily mean bad. One segment of The Spy Who Loved Me that has remained one of the most notable moments is Bond's famous ski jump performed by Rick Sylvester. All is quiet as he spectacularly descends for twenty-one seconds off Mount Asgard, and then the Union Jack parachute bursts open as the scene is punctuated by Marvin Hamlisch's brassy arrangement of the famous theme. Note the danger of such a stunt, too. One of his skis nearly sliced the parachute, which would have severely jeopardized Sylvester. 

Best part: the title song (one of the best songs in cinematic history).

12. You Only Live Twice (1967)

Of all the Bond films that served as inspiration for the first Austin Powers movie in 1997, You Only Live Twice is probably the largest source. With flesh-eating pirañas, peculiar character names like Kissy Suzuki (Hama Mie), and Donald Pleasence as Blofeld (the first time we see his face, sporting a pronounced scar and a bald head), this film continued Bond's adventures away from the the slightly more realistic and low-key drama of From Russia With Love and into farcical territory. Critics at the time, too, seemed to have started to grow tired of the Bond stuff, with Roger Ebert complaining that "the formula fails to work its magic." Beyond that, it's just as patriarchal and naturally sexist as the previous films (with a screenplay from Roald Dahl, of all people, who included lines like, "Why do Chinese girls taste so different from the others?" and moments of Bond getting a soapy bath by a few Japanese women after he's told that "in Japan, men come first, women come second"—another thing Austin Powers had fun with). Still, You Only Live Twice is an improvement over Thunderball, and all the Japanese scenery is lovely. Fun fact: At one point, Bond fights a henchman played by Peter Maivia, the maternal grandfather of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.  

Best part: the car chase involving a metallic helicopter followed by a rooftop fight.

11. The Living Daylights (1987)

The story of how Timothy Dalton came to be James Bond is almost legendary. Dalton had once been considered to replace Connery as Bond, but he decided he was too young. After Moore was ready to leave, many actors were considered to replace him, including Sam Neill, but Cubby Broccoli chose Pierce Brosnan, whose show Remington Steele was about to end. When the announcement of Brosnan as Bond had brought a sudden new interest in the show, NBC decided to renew it, thereby ending Brosnan's chances (temporarily) and finally allowing Dalton to take over. Dalton's Bond is a fascinating one, and he told interviewers at the time that he went to the source material to find a Bond audiences hadn't seen before. Whereas Moore was more than willing to smirk and almost wink at the camera, Dalton looked like a stone-cold killer. Given how much audiences have appreciated Daniel Craig's ruthlessness as the character these past years, it's fair to say that Dalton was ahead of his time. Additionally, Dalton here occasionally has the jokes of the Moore Bond as well as the sensitivity of the Lazenby Bond. He has genuine chemistry with Maryam d'Abo as Kara; for once, it seems Bond actually has a crush on someone and wants to be with them longer than one night. And other than a possible fling that's hinted at in the beginning, Kara is the only woman Bond spends time with. Rita Kempley even guessed in the Washington Post that Bond "probably also practices safe sex." This isn't to say he's not a "sexist misogynist dinosaur" like he was called in a later film; he very much is, especially (in one of the series' most despicable moments) when he forcibly removes a woman's top in order to distract a guard. The villains also are a series low point: Jeroen Krabbé as a renegade Soviet general is a weird, bumbling attempt at comic relief, and Joe Don Baker (who was much more interesting later in the series as a cagey CIA agent) is odd as a war-mongering arms dealer. Finally, the film's romanticizing of the mujahideen hasn't aged so well decades later.   

Best part: Dalton's debut performance and the stunt work as Bond and Necros (Andreas Wisniewski) fight in and outside a plane flying high above Afghanistan. 

10. A View to a Kill (1985)

One of the laziest examples of groupthink in the decades-long discussion of Bond films and their rankings is to dismiss A View to a Kill, Roger Moore's final outing as James Bond, as one of his worst when in fact it's one of his best. On Rotten Tomatoes, it is listed as the second-worst Bond film, surpassed by only the 1967 Casino Royale. (They're not alone in their criticism. Due to the violence of the film, particularly as the villain massacres a group of men, Moore himself found it to be his least favorite Bond film.) Moore, who was fifty-seven during the time of filming, may have started to phone it in a little, but he very much still was Bond at that point, from my point of view. He's accompanied by one of the best songs (the title song by Duran Duran, which is still the only Bond song to have reached number one in the Billboard Hot 100), one of the best villains (the one and only Christopher Walken as Max Zorin, the corporate head/Nazi experiment/ex-Soviet agent/psychopath who plans on destroying Silicon Valley), and one of the best henchmen (Grace Jones as May Day, Zorin's lover and a deadly assassin). Walken as Zorin, in particular, is a delight. 1985 was a time sandwiched between his work in more serious art films like Annie Hall and The Deer Hunter and when he started to become better known for his typical shtick—namely due to his unique voice—after movies like Pulp Fiction. I'd argue that A View to a Kill is one of his most enjoyable performances. As for the film holistically, I still don't understand why most people don't like it. As good as The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only are, they drag in a way that A View to a Kill does not. Fun fact: Alison Doody as one of Zorin's henchwomen and Dolph Lundgren (who was dating Jones at the time) as a KGB agent both make their film debut in this movie.

Best part: Christopher Walken, Grace Jones, and Duran Duran, staples of the '80s.

9. Moonraker (1979)

The most controversial choice on this list might be putting Moonraker, the spy-fi Bond movie (the one where he goes to space) that is considered one of Roger Moore's worst, as Moore's best. Have at me, haters! Look, Moonraker does have its flaws, where the whimsical nature of Moore's Bond era starts venturing into parody, the gadgets saving him at every turn, and the python scene being totally absurd. But it's also the rare Bond film that really tries something different, and I think it mostly works. Loosely adapting Fleming's novel about Bond trying to stop industrialist Hugo Drax (played in the film by Michael Lonsdale) from destroying London with a nuclear bomb, the film takes the setting not simply from only being in London but also to Italy, Brazil, and (of course) to space as the producers tried to capitalize on audiences' post-Star Wars science fiction crave. For those who detest the fact that Bond chases Drax and his henchman, the returning Richard Kiel as Jaws, into space to Drax's Moonraker station, there are still almost two hours of all the stuff they loved in Bond films, including thrilling stunts, like the exceptional skydiving scene that opens the film. And while being a tad boring at times, Moonraker ultimately progresses at a brisker pace than either The Spy Who Loved Me or You Only Live Twice.

Best part: Derek Meddings' Oscar-nominated visual effects, John Barry's score, Ken Adams' sets, and Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax.

8. Quantum of Solace (2008)

Quantum of Solace, the last Bond film to use an Ian Fleming title (though it has nothing to do with Fleming's story), is usually regarded as one of the least-liked of all the Craig Bond films, probably because it's wedged in between his two best (Casino Royale and Skyfall). This is at least partly unfair. Among the strengths of the film are a decent song sung by Jack White and Alicia Keys and an interesting geopolitical plot involving a philanthropist named Dominic Greene (played by Mathieu Amalric) as the CIA (which often comes across in a positive light in Bond flicks) contentedly watches him destroy Bolivia as long as they get their due. Supporting actors like Olga Kurylenko also do well. And the film's relatively short length at 106 minutes in a franchise of overlong movies is refreshing. But what harms the film is its typical use of adrenaline; the opera scene in which Bond spies on members of Quantum is far more interesting to watch than any of the action scenes. I first wrote about Quantum of Solace as a university student for my school's newspaper. My opinion of it largely has not changed since seeing it years ago, yet in the long run, it's one of the more underrated entries. 

Best part: the opera scene.

7. Dr. No (1962)

Dr. No is the very first official Bond film, and it obviously set the stage for the next twenty-four films. While lacking some of the more familiar ingredients of the franchise (the movie opening to the Bond theme and then "Three Blind Mice" instead of a big ballad audiences would later expect being the most obvious), the film does include elements fans would become used to: exotic locations (in this case, Jamaica), gorgeous women (played here by Ursula Andress, Zena Marshall, and Eunice Gayson), the famous Bond theme—written by Monty Norman or John Barry (we'll never know)—and a menacing villain (Joseph Wiseman as the titular character). Of course, the film also introduced us to the more ignoble traits of the franchise, like the morbid quips about a violent death ("I think they were on their way to a funeral"), racism (several Chinese characters are played by white people), and Bond's excessive drinking. Finally, for those who have always known the Bond films to be high on adrenaline and action, the unhurried tempo of Dr. No might come as a disappointment to some, but to others, it may be a breath of fresh air.  

Best part: the introduction to James Bond—the very first time he says the iconic line—as he's smoking a cigarette and dominating in a game of baccarat.

6. From Russia With Love (1963)

Let's go ahead and get the bad parts out of the way first. It's hard to tell which of the first two Bond films is the one that hasn't aged so well; just as Dr. No has its issues with the depiction of women and non-white people, so, too, does From Russia With Love, with probably the most notable example being a bizarre, cringeworthy fight between two Romani women, a scene in which modern-day critics have called out for its "hypersexualization/objectification of Romani women," while others have called it a "culturally insensitive sojourn typical in early Bond films." This is not the only objectionable scene in the film, but it's the most frustrating. If you can forgive the film for that and its other sins (like its intricate plot and Bond slapping a woman), you will likely note some of the reasons why it remains one of the most acclaimed of the 25 films. Like Dr. No, its calmer pace may frustrate some, but to others it's a welcome pause from the non-stop action of later Bond movies, and it gives the film a slightly more authentic, mature vibe, particularly as Bond's stalker, Donald "Red" Grant, finally catches him on the train. (Robert Shaw's performance as Grant is one of his many iconic performances.) The film's screenplay by Richard Maibaum also wisely removes the homophobia and biphobia of the novel while also depoliticizing the story a bit (remember that the film was released only a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis) by having the fictional SPECTRE and not the real-life SMERSH be the main villainous organization while keeping the book's clever (if confusing) story.

Best part: Bond and Grant's confrontation in the train.   

5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

On Her Majesty's Secret Service immediately reassures us that this Bond universe we've become familiar with will continue. Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell, and Desmond Llewelyn all appear in the first moments respectively as M, Moneypenny, and Q (who appears in two scenes, though none of them involve him handing out gadgets to Bond, as the filmmakers wanted to try a different, more realistic approach that more closely followed Fleming's novel). But from there, we get a much different Bond film. For one, Sean Connery is nowhere to be seen. Instead, he's replaced with the Australian actor George Lazenby, who was a newcomer to acting. In the film, Lazenby is joined by the legendary Diana Rigg, whose performance as Tracy di Vicenzo makes her arguably the finest Bond girl. Telly Savalas replaces Donald Pleasance as Blofeld, who apparently has forgotten that he met Bond in the previous film, as he doesn't recognize him. (The filmmakers scratched a planned scene involving Bond getting plastic surgery and just decided to ignore the continuity error.) Contemporary reviews of the film were harsh, especially towards Lazenby. Modern-day reviews, however, have been much more favorable. Directors Steven Soderbergh and Christopher Nolan have both called it their favorite Bond film, with the latter using it as an influence for Inception. I'm totally dumbfounded as to why contemporary critics of the film were so disparaging toward Lazenby. I think it's a terrific performance. In many ways, he's better than Connery (cheekily referred to as "the other fellow" in the opening scene). Lazenby's Bond—when he's scared, when he doesn't know what to do, when he falls in love and then becomes heartbroken—is a far more interesting portrait. Anyway, the story goes that Lazenby's agent convinced him that James Bond would not be able to survive the cinema of the '70s, and so he walked away from the offer to appear in many more Bond films. Lazenby has frequently mentioned that this was a mistake. It's one of the great disappointments of the franchise that he didn't appear in more.

Best part: John Barry's beautiful score incorporating the film's famous song (sung by Louis Armstrong).

4. Skyfall (2012)

Skyfall was Eon's attempt to start to bring Bond back to the familiar territory of the franchise as the Craig era marched closer to the "Bond formula." Despite this, the film was still able to find a way (similar to Casino Royale) of making the whole ride seem much more fresh than it had been a decade before. As of this writing, it was the final time the studio was able to pull off such a trick. This success is perhaps mainly due to the direction of Oscar-winner Sam Mendes, who brought along frequent collaborators like composer Thomas Newman and cinematographer Roger Deakins. Together, the work they created here (such as the opening chase in Istanbul, the fight on the Shanghai skyscraper, the battle at the Macau casino, or the pursuit in the London Underground) feel original and exhilarating. What further helps Skyfall is the swan song performance of Judi Dench as M, a Moneypenny (Naomi Harris) with action, the new Q (Ben Whishaw), Adele's Oscar-winning title song, Ralph Fiennes' first appearance in the franchise, and Javier Bardem's chilling performance as Silva, a frightening psychopath with some serious mommy issues. Furthermore, the winks and nods to Goldfinger, GoldenEye, and others on the series' fiftieth birthday are clever. 

Best part: Bond chasing Silva in the London Underground.

3. Goldfinger (1964)

Goldfinger is considered by many to be the Citizen Kane of the Bond movies. This is the film that established the essential formula that more or less has been used since: start with an opening where Bond needs to destroy something (usually something not related to the main plot), and immediately follow up with a big, loud ballad ("Goldfinger," by John Barry, Anthony Newley, and Leslie Bricusse, sung by Shirley Bassey); get an assignment from M and toys from Q; meet beautiful women (played here by Honor Blackman, Shirley Eaton, Tania Mallet, Nadja Regin, and Margaret Nolan); order a vodka martini—shaken, not stirred; defeat the villain and his henchman while quipping about it ("He blew a fuse"); and save the world. But all of that stuff is less interesting than the finest parts of the film, which are its quieter moments: the golf game, for example, or the drive through the Ursern Valley in Switzerland, and, of course, Bond nearly being sliced in half by a laser. It's one of the few times we really see Bond sweat and not know what to do; indeed, he's panicking. "Do you expect me to talk?" he shouts out to Goldfinger. "No, Mr. Bond," comes the mocking reply. "I expect you to die." That line is perfectly delivered by Gert Fröbe, who gives the franchise its very best villain. Ten years ago, I ranked Goldfinger as the best of the Bond movies. Goldfinger currently sits at number one on Rotten Tomatoes' list of Bond movies, and Roger Ebert also called it his favorite. What has changed for me? Likely my awareness of the problems of the movie, namely its racism (while less racist than the novel and the previous two films) and the single worst moment in all the films: Bond's unquestionable rape of Pussy Galore. 

Best part: "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die."

2. GoldenEye (1995)

GoldenEye was the first Bond film I ever watched from start to finish. I was nine years old (a bit young for a Bond movie), and between that and the constant hours playing the Nintendo 64 game adaptation released two years after the film, I was fascinated from the start. GoldenEye, the first Bond film after the end of the Cold War and the first to be produced by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson (the children of Cubby Broccoli), was a breath of fresh air after a long six-year absence of the character. It was meant to be a project for Timothy Dalton, but it fell into development hell as MGM and United Artists became embroiled in legal trouble. With the long delays, Dalton parted ways, thereby allowing Pierce Brosnan a second chance at the role. In addition to a perfect debut as the character, Brosnan is supported by a pretty good cast that includes Sean Bean as the villain, a former 00 agent; Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp, the sadistic Georgian henchwoman (with a very non-Georgian accent) who asphyxiates men to death with her legs; Izabella Scorupco as a programmer who survives the GoldenEye blast (and who provides some of the finest acting of all the Bond girls); Joe Don Baker as a crusty CIA agent in Moscow; Robbie Coltrane as a gangster/ex-KGB agent; Gottfried John as a traitorous Russian general; Alan Cumming as Boris, the "invincible" programmer; the returning Desmond Llewelyn as Q; Samantha Bond as Moneypenny; and Judi Dench's debut as M. The film also has a killer song written by Bono and the Edge and performed by Tina Turner. GoldenEye has its flaws, mainly the senseless, sometimes comical violence and the absurd opening, but the film holds up remarkably well almost thirty years later.  

Best part: the tank ride. 

1. Casino Royale (2006)

After Eon Productions was finally able to get its hands on the rights to Casino Royale in 1999 after Sony exchanged them for MGM's rights to Spider-Man, Fleming's first novel was finally ready after so many decades. With Pierce Brosnan leaving the role after his contract for four Bond films finished, two hundred actors were considered to replace him, with one of them being Henry Cavill, who was seriously considered for the role, but his young age prevented him from landing the part. Despite a bizarre backlash to the casting of Daniel Craig (with fans throwing a fit over a blond Bond—even though Roger Moore had blond hair), Craig proved that he was a far more toned, athletic, and brutal Bond than what we were used to. Martin Campbell, just as he had helped resurrect Bond a decade earlier with GoldenEye, was back at the helm, and his direction offered a nice shot of energy in the arm, even if some of the action pieces (namely the chases in Madagascar, Miami-Dade Airport, and Venice) drag the film on for twenty minutes too long. (As good as Campbell's direction is, it certainly would have been something to have seen Quentin Tarantino's version.) Beyond Craig's BAFTA-winning performance, Judi Dench's return as M, and the undeniable chemistry Craig and Eva Green as Vesper Lynd had, the other main attraction of the film is Mads Mikkelsen's perfect performance as Le Chriffe, perhaps Bond's greatest foe. 

Best part: the poker game.

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