Tonight, the 95th Academy Awards will determine 2022’s Best Picture (along with a host of other awards). I’ve been a somewhat poor moviegoer this year; until recently, I had seen only two of the Best Picture nominees. But that changed recently on an international flight, when I watched Baz Luhrman’s Elvis with Austin Butler (no relation) in the title role. I would say “starring,” but that’s not exactly true: For some reason, the movie is structured around Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s carnie-huckster manager. The Colonel is played by Tom Hanks in a fat suit, with layers of makeup and a bizarre southern/German accent. Focusing the movie on his character made little sense, either artistically or thematically. Combined with Luhrman’s frenetic style, this approach made Elvis a tough watch, even on a plane. Butler (also nominated for Best Actor) does fine as Elvis, though he plays more the myth of Elvis than the man; at this point, it may be impossible to play the man, so much has the myth taken over. Still, I hope the experience helped him prepare to portray Feyd-Rautha in Dune: Part Two next year. Below, you’ll find a selection of NR writers’ takes on (almost) all of this year’s Best Picture nominees.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Michael Brendan Dougherty finds the latest adaptation of Eric Maria Remarque’s World War I novel unsettling, but appropriately so:

It is difficult to watch. So was the original, and so was the controversial source material. But of course, the mutual suicide pact of the Western powers in World War should be bleak. If you have the stomach, I highly recommend it.

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

Armond White thought little of James Cameron’s long-gestating sequel to the 2009 smash sci-fi hit, where the humans are evil, the blue people are good, and it’s definitely not just Dances with Wolves or FernGully in space. “At a cost of $350 million, Cameron practices his own form of brainwashing deprivation,” Armond argued. The sequel made about as much as the original, but Armond was having none of it. “The Way of Water is predicated on an escapist mindset that prevents moviegoers from thinking (or expressing dissatisfaction). Ross Douthat was a bit more charitable, trying to find “a case for the seriousness of James Cameron’s Avatar movies” in their buried implication of a fallen humanity running up against an unfallen species on another world. But even this Douthat steel-man falls short; as appealing as the Avatar films’ visual spectacle may be, “even more than Marvel’s movies they have the feel of amusement-park attractions, amazing to experience but not something that you remember afterward for character, or dialogue, or theme.”

THE BANSHEES OF INISHIRIN

It would be hard to construct a film more micro-targeted to Michael Brendan Dougherty than Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inishirin, a highly allegorical drama set in a small Irish town while the Irish civil war rages on (literally, in the background). Though he judged it one of funniest films he’d seen in recent memory, he nonetheless resented its “hateful” portrayal of Irish history:

The Banshees perspective is that Irish history and politics is not much more than inexplicable violence, caused by the stupidity (Colm) and delusional grandiosity (Padraic) of its men.

Ross Douthat, not as qualified to discourse on this subject as Michael (who is?), nonetheless similarly concluded that too much of the movie “seems a bit too much like blarney.” And for Armond White, it was “an X-ray of contemporary malaise and a betrayal of Irish romance.”

ELVIS

Armond White shared my dislike of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, though he put it far more fiercely and eloquently than I could. In his view, Elvis cheapened the “phenomenon” of the King, turning him into a comic-book hero. And Butler himself may do “the alluring eyes, modest snarl, and loose-limbed jitterbug moves,” but he is “cartoonish and sentimental,” resembling “parody so much that a kind of tickled bemusement is the only way to respond to its blatant inauthenticity.” But White never had much hope for Luhrmann’s Elvis: “How could we expect that unreliable chronicler Baz Luhrmann to seriously represent Presley’s life story and simultaneous social changes, when the story of America’s cultural legacy is collapsing around us?”

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

The Daniels’ multiversal existentialist dramedy Everything Everywhere All At Once led the Oscar-nomination count, with eleven nods. In my view, rightly so: I found it unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, escaping my ability to find a good comparison for it:

Maybe it’s like a live-action adaptation of the Adult Swim cartoon Rick and Morty. Or maybe it’s like a combination of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Matrix, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Or maybe it’s like a five-year-old became an expert in theoretical physics and attempted to explain it to a three-year-old — or perhaps more like a fever dream of Stephen Hawking after he stayed up all night pounding energy drinks and watching kung fu movies. Or . . . oh, forget it. There’s nothing quite like EverythingEverywhereAll at Once. And I’m glad that, in this universe, both it and I exist, so that I was able to give it a watch. If, like me, you also exist, I heartily recommend doing the same.

Ross Douthat was less impressed, while admitting that something may be wrong with him rather than with the movie for his lack of affinity for it. Noting that he liked much of it, Ross nonetheless concluded, “the movie takes the concept of the multiverse to dark, despairing places, and I found that journey horribly persuasive, and the love-is-all-you-need message at the end not enough of a path back.” Armond White did not do a full review of Everything Everywhere All at Once, but mini-reviews elsewhere indicate his (negative) view.

In his midyear film assessment, Armond argued that the movie “epitomized the faithlessness at the heart of comic-book culture” and “celebrates autism as insight.” In his annual “better-than” list, he contrasted it unfavorably with Father Stu (starring Mark Wahlberg):

Rosalind Ross directs Mark Wahlberg as Father Stuart Long, whose funny and moving religious conversion found real-life, real-cinema faith (Mel Gibson and Jacki Weaver complete the road-to-Damascus jubilation). But the Daniels team in Everything preferred cut-rate Buddhism over Christianity, wasting Michelle Yeoh in a chaotic, faithless, exhaustingly unfunny superheroine jamboree.

For good measure, he added elsewhere that “Everything Everywhere All at Once . . . distracts from Judeo-Christian tradition through video-game and graphic-art Gnosticism.”

THE FABELMANS

Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical depiction of his childhood did not win over Armond White, a great Spielberg respecter who believes the director has been led astray by screenwriter Tony Kushner. “The Fabelmans makes nice — the very aspect of Spielberg’s films and art that his enemies have always misjudged and denigrated. But since Spielberg is not a minor social climber angling for attention, it’s unseemly that he should peddle his own legend and then misrepresent it.” When the movie flopped after its opening weekend, Armond revisited it to explain why: It’s built around “a smug morality tale” that “is both anachronistic and antagonistic to the humanism that once drew generations of viewers to Spielberg’s vision of America and the world.” Ross Douthat was more generous, finding its childhood reverie relatable, and its message highly personal. The Fabelmans feels like a story in which a filmmaker who thinks of himself first and foremost as his mother’s son can’t help revealing just how much he’s like his dad,” Ross wrote.

TOP GUN: MAVERICK

I have been rhapsodic in my praise of Joseph Kosinski’s unexpectedly incredible sequel to 1986’s Top Gun. “In terms of both spectacle and emotional heft, Top Gun: Maverick exceeds its predecessor in every way, while lovingly building on it,” I wrote. Moreover, it is geostrategically significant, proving to Hollywood that a movie need not be released in China to succeed, and being most popular worldwide in the theaters of some of our closest allies. Ross Douthat was similarly impressed (while dwelling a bit too much on the silly fan theory that almost the whole movie takes place in a kind of afterlife):

This is a summer blockbuster in the classic style — its action sequences suitably implausible but still connected to the realities of skin and steel and sky; its breezy dialogue and male-bonding rituals unburdened by the heaviness of world-building; its plot a deliberate contrivance that still carries just the right amount of moral and even metaphysical weight.

Armond White was not so easily won over but acknowledged that the movie posed a kind of “test” to America’s ability to rehabilitate its own sense of self. “Maverick is only a middling entertainment, but it’s a significant gesture toward recovering a lost virtue — American nostalgia,” he wrote. But don’t expect the media to help in the salvaging: “Our hype-oriented media treating this vapid movie as a national holiday is unlikely to lift Hollywood out of its stupor.”

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

Ruben Östlund’s “cynical satire” didn’t win Armond White over, either. The movie “is divided into three sections, building to the no-surprise revelation that the white West is greedy, racist, sexist, and ideologically decadent.” Part model-industry satire, part cruise-ship nightmare, part desert-island-parody — each part proof that the director is a “fraud.”

TÁR

Todd Field’s music-conductor drama found a fan in Ross Douthat. He deemed it a true art-house movie, the kind of film “where you have to really pay attention.” It is, moreover, “interested in the psyche of the artist; the interaction between art and sin, genius and guilt; what gets stripped away in a crisis and what finally remains.” Yet, for Douthat, “what it really has to say is for you, upon whom its own artfulness is working, to decide.” Armond White’s decision? Derision. Fields, with Cate Blanchett (“the phoniest actress since Meryl Steep”) in the title role, creates “a histrionic wingding” that “cannot be taken seriously” yet insists that its story be told “solemnly.” In the end, “Tár’s exposé of modern artistic arrogance is arrogance itself.”

There you have it: National Review‘s take on this year’s nominees for Best Picture. (No National Review writer reviewed Women Talking; I guess that means we don’t pass the Bechdel Test.) We hope our readers are as slaphappy as we are to find out who comes away with the gold statuette tonight.