Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

A Complete Unknown

5/1/2025

A-

Directed by James Mangold

Starring Timothee Chalamet, Melissa Barbaro, and Ed Norton

Review by Jon Kissel

Sitting down for a new musician biopic is a semi-annual tradition, and after so many that haven’t learned the ironclad lessons of Walk Hard, the expectation is not high. Of the several that come out every year, most aren’t trying to do anything more than reinvigorate sales of the musician’s catalog. The many movies like it are what makes A Complete Unknown so surprising. James Mangold’s depiction of Bob Dylan has the high-profile cast and the music and the scenes of casual artistic inspiration, but it’s also sad and knowing, both about the time of its setting and the nature of celebrity. This is as good as the musician biopic gets.

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Babygirl

4/16/2025

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B

Directed by Halina Reijn

Starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson

Review by Jon Kissel

Sopranos creator David Chase did a DVD commentary over the iconic Whitecaps episode, where Tony and Carmela finally erupt after years of infidelity and dissatisfaction. While their fights are brutal and nasty, Chase says they could’ve been worse, as their sexual relationship stays out of it, which implies that that’s where he thinks all the most humiliating and hurtful ammo lies. Among other things, Halina Reijn’s Babygirl embodies Chase’s thinking, as it begins with a potentially marriage-destroying anecdote between Nicole Kidman’s Romy and Antonio Banderas’ Jacob. After they have sex, Romy sneaks away to masturbate, leaving post-coital Jacob oblivious in their bed. Otherwise happy together, this thing hangs over their marriage, ready to drop should the moment call for it. Reijn writes Romy as a secret pervert, in sharp contrast to the put-together CEO that she presents to the world.

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Nosferatu

4/16/2025

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B+

Directed by Robert Eggers

Starring Lily Rose-Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Willem Dafoe

Review by Jon Kissel

Whatever the opposite of presentism is, that’s how Robert Eggers makes his films. It’s a perfectly fine choice to apply the standards of today to whatever time period a film is taking place in, but it’s not for Eggers. He instead immerses himself in the norms and cosmology of his setting, with the present as some far-off place that has no bearing on the onscreen proceedings. This is irresistible for history-inclined viewers like myself, and Eggers reconstructs his direct pipeline into my brain with Nosferatu. A remake of the 1920’s classic, itself adapted from Bram Stoker, the film is drowning in period detail, era-appropriate lighting, and the ironclad beliefs of 19th century Germans. It’s their perspective which Eggers molds the film around, and that perspective is terrified of the occult, the mysterious east, and female sexuality.

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Anora

2/21/2025

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A-

Directed by Sean Baker

Starring Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn

Review by Jon Kissel

Sean Baker reaches a career crescendo with Anora, his Cinderella-meets-Uncut-Gems modern fairy tale that embodies the idea that movies are magic tricks. The viewer knows that they are sitting in a theater or at their home watching actors being filmed in a chaotic production setting that has no relationship to what’s happening in the camera, but they’re transported anyway to feel what the actor is feeling and take in what the director is pointing the camera at. Everyone agrees that it’s an illusion, and everyone plays along. That agreement is at the core of Anora’s story, where a Brooklyn stripper gets entangled with a Russian oligarch scion. He knows that she’s in the customer service industry, and she knows that he knows. Is there ever that magical cinematic transition of transfixing teleportation, where the falseness fades away and something else takes its place? While the viewer waits and watches for that moment onscreen, they feel it themselves over and over again through Baker’s anarchic, full-bodied, invigorating filmmaking.

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Megalopolis

2/20/2025

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C-

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Starring Adam Driver

Review by Jon Kissel

If a director makes three or four of the greatest American movies, he can do whatever he wants. For Francis Ford Coppola, that’s meant toiling in his own shadow, never coming anywhere near the quality of his several masterpieces. He’s also built a filmmaking dynasty and founded a wine empire, the latter of which enabled him to produce and direct what will likely be his final film. Megalopolis has been in the works since the 70’s, when Coppola saw the parallels between the Cataline Conspiracy of the Roman Republic and contemporary America. Though that historic incident has been reconsidered by historians in the time Megalopolis was on Coppola’s mind, his film loosely about it hasn’t undergone the same level of reexamination. The combination of Coppola’s inability to rediscover the magic of his 70’s output and the surface-level examination of both Roman history and present-day America makes Megalopolis a mess of such grandeur that it’s impossible to predict what will happen next. This nine-figure stream-of-consciousness is worth watching if only for its head-scratching quality, and the unique combination of Coppola’s soft-brained earnestness and therapized self-examination.

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A Complete Unknown

A-

Babygirl

B

Nosferatu

B+

Anora

A-

Megalopolis

C-

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