In a sane world, Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière’s The Count of Monte Cristo would be a no-brainer as any country’s Oscar submission in the Best International Feature Film category. A critical and commercial juggernaut, the film boasts a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score from the site’s top critics and has captivated audiences across France, selling nearly 8 million tickets and becoming the second-highest-grossing domestic film of the year. It even outperformed major Hollywood blockbusters there — yet it’s been shut out of the film industry’s awards season. We’re a long way from sanity, but more on that later.
Anchored by Pierre Niney’s searing performance as Edmond Dantès, The Count of Monte Cristo revitalizes Alexandre Dumas’s epic tale of betrayal, revenge, and redemption. Niney doesn’t just play Dantès — he becomes him, channeling a raw, unrelenting intensity while layering in moments of piercing vulnerability. The supporting cast is equally superb: Anaïs Demoustier’s Mercedes radiates quiet strength, while Anamaria Vartolomei’s Haydée adds a powerful emotional resonance. Yes, some of Dumas’ sprawling narrative and character development is inevitably pared down to fit the film’s three-hour runtime; tantalizing glimpses of missing subplots linger. Yet what’s left is so riveting, so full of life, that you’re left longing for an extended director’s cut — a rare sentiment for a film of this scale.
Building on its narrative and performance strengths, The Count of Monte Cristo dazzles as a visual spectacle. Filmed across historic landmarks in Southern France and the sun-drenched landscapes of Cyprus, the film bursts with rich, vivid colors that vividly enhance Dantès’s epic journey. Nicolas Bolduc’s cinematography seamlessly blends modern techniques with classical elegance, transforming Dumas’s tale into a sumptuous tapestry. The shadowy claustrophobia of Dantès’s prison contrasts sharply with the gilded opulence of his rise — a visual arc as layered as his emotional transformation. While a few slow-motion sequences veer into The Matrix territory, these fleeting indulgences hardly detract from the meticulous craftsmanship. Jérôme Rebotier’s lush, swelling score grounds the spectacle in raw emotion, propelling the story with operatic intensity. It’s no wonder Cannes greeted it with a twelve-minute standing ovation.
Its triumph makes its omission from the awards circuit all the more bizarre, and frankly infuriating. The snub was cemented when France’s eleven-member Oscar selection committee — appointed by the powerful Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC) under the oversight of the Ministry of Culture — chose Jacques Audiard’s grotesque Emilia Pérez over The Count of Monte Cristo. While it’s easy to fault the freshly minted members of the board, they’re merely pawns in a rigged system. Distributors like Netflix, which acquired the rights to Pérez in the U.K. and North America, lobby these quasi-governmental institutions on their ability to churn out awards, turning the selection process into a cynical exercise in marketing prowess and influence peddling.
The decision also reeks of ideological box-checking masquerading as cultural prestige. “Latinx”? Check. Trans? Check. Cinematic excellence? Nowhere in sight. About the only thing Emilia Pérez excels at is convincing industry insiders of its supposed importance. By every available metric, the film is a misfire, unable to hold a candle to Monte Cristo in both acclaim and box office success: It limped to 33rd place in French ticket sales, stumbled into tenth place in its opening weekend in Spain, and has a middling 76 percent Rotten Tomatoes score from critics — audiences, less easily duped, slapped it with a dismal 63 percent.
One sure way to tell that Netflix is fully aware that it is peddling garbage is that Emilia Pérez did not have a Mexican premiere nor will it debut in theaters in Mexico (where it has been met with brutal scorn among those who have seen it) until after the Oscar nominees are announced — an obvious tactic to avoid an embarrassing box office bomb in the very country where the story takes place. This isn’t the kind of movie that builds a nation’s cinematic legacy; it’s the kind that Netflix has forced down the throats of awards voters trapped in its “For Your Consideration” marketing echo chamber.
In this circus, silver screen sewage like Emilia Pérez racks up accolades by greasing the necessary palms and pandering to the en vogue ideological sensibilities that make Hollywood insiders feel virtuous, even as they alienate the very minorities they purport to represent. It’s a living embodiment of the hypocrisy Cord Jefferson brilliantly captured in American Fiction: Works of genuine merit are shoved aside so elites can pat themselves on the back for “uplifting” minorities, when in reality all they’ve done is reduce them to caricatures.
The good news is that, even as we wade through a swamp of cultural rot, Delaporte and de La Patellière’s Monte Cristo proves that talented artists are still crafting damn fine films worthy of our time. That’s why, when a work this invigorating, meticulously crafted, and universally resonant breaks through the noise, we owe it to ourselves and our cultural heirs to run, not walk, to our nearest theater.
Americans may not have invented cinema, but we elevated it into a universal language that connects humanity — a cornerstone of our cultural heritage. If we don’t champion true artistry like The Count of Monte Cristo in theaters, we’ll be left with nothing more than a factory line of soulless streaming slop like Emilia Pérez that gets dumped into our “content” troughs as though we’re mere lines of code in some marketing department’s algorithm. Enough is enough.
It’s obvious why The Count of Monte Cristo was snubbed. The question is: What are we going to do about it? The time to reclaim the cinema’s soul is now. I’ll see you at the movies.