David R. Walker

Posts Tagged ‘Mikey Madison’

97th Academy Awards took place on Sunday 2^nd March 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Oscar Winners 2025: Full List of Winners

Best Picture: Anora

Best Director: Sean Baker – Anora

Best Actor: Adrien Brody – The Brutalist

Best Actress: Mikey Madison – Anora

Best Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin – A Real Pain

Best Supporting Actress: Zoe Saldana – Emilia Perez

Best Original Screenplay: Sean Baker – Anora

Best Adapted Screenplay: Peter Straughan – Conclave

Best Cinematography: Lol Crawley – The Brutalist

Best Costume Design: Paul Tazewell – Wicked

Best Make up & Hairstyling: The Substance

Best Visual Effects: Dune Part II

Best Film Editing: Sean Baker – Anora

Best Sound: Dune Part II

Best Production Design: Wicked

Best Documentary Feature:  No Other Land

Best Documentary Short Subject: The Only Girl in the Orchestra

Best Original Score: Daniel Blumberg – The Brutalist

Best Original Song: Emilia Perez

Best Animated Feature Film: Flow – Latvia

Best Animated Short: In the Shadow of the Cypress.

Best Live Action Short Film: I am not a Robot

Best International Feature Film: I’m Still Here directed by Walter Salles – Brazil

The 78th Bafta Awards / The British Film Academy Awards

The 78th British Academy Film Awards, also known as the BAFAs, were held on 16th February 2025 at the Royal Festival Hall in London, honouring the best national and foreign films of 2024.

Best Film: Conclave

Best Director: Brady Corbet – The Brutalist

Best Actor: Adrien Brody – The Brutalist

Best Actress: Mikey Madison – Anora

Best Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin – A Real Pain

Best Supporting Actress: Zoe Saldana – Emilia Perez

Best British Film: Conclave

Best Original Screenplay: Jessie Eisenberg – A Real Pain

Best Adapted Screenplay: Peter Straughan – Conclave

Best Costume Design: Paul Tazewell – Wicked

Best Foreign Language Film: Emilia Perez

Rising Star Award: David Jonsson

Anora

Director: Sean Baker

Cast: Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov, Lindsey Normington, Mark Eydelshteyn, Vache Tomasyn, Karren Karagulian

Running time: 2 hours and 19 minutes

Film Rating: 9 out of 10

Tangerine and The Florida Project director Sean Baker returns with the utterly dazzling film Anora featuring a standout frenetic and motor mouth performance by Mikey Madison as Ani a wisecracking Manhattan lap dancer who gets naively embroiled in the romantic life of a young Russian playboy Ivan played by Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn. In fact Ivan is only 21 years old and a complete hedonist and party animal who falls for Anora and offers her enough cash to be his girlfriend for a week.

Sean Baker’s first part of Anora feels like a frenetic drug induced orgy of pop music, drinking, laptop dancing and lots of vigorous sex. As Anora and Ivan fall supposedly in love, Ivan withholds how influential and wealthy his Russian parents really are. Ivan lives in a massive mansion owned by his father in Brighton Beach in the Russian community of New York.

Anora’s dream of falling in love with a rich prince that can whisk her away to Vegas seems to come true. As they party and frequent all the glittering temptations of Vegas, they impulsively decided to get married in Vegas without informing Ivan’s parents.

Written and directed by Sean Baker, Anora is like Pretty Woman on acid, a hooker love story with enough lap dancers thrown in plus a cat fight to make this film truly entertaining and utterly watchable for all the crazy antics.

Then in a deftly crafted change of pace, the hedonist partying comes to an end when Ivan’s parents discover that their spoilt rich son has married a foul-mouthed hooker from Manhattan.

Into the fray are sent to Russian tough guys, Yura Borisov as Igor, who is exceptional in this role and Paul Weissman as Nick in which they try to tame Anora in the Russian billionaire’s plush mansion. A scene so explosive and almost comical that it is absolutely riveting.

Sean Baker loves to explore the dark frayed edges of humanity, the ugly and steamy side of sex, shady prostitution and how money plays a pivotal role in power dynamics within a decadent society. What Anora also does so beautifully is to show how Ivan just treats her as a female plaything until his parents fly in from Moscow to attempt to get the marriage annulled.

In between all the chaos and the amazing acting, is Igor, a quietly spoken Russian man who’s only desire is to really protect Anora from this ruthless excessive family and while she initially dismisses Igor as just another kind idiot, she soon discovers an unexpected saviour.

Anora is perfectly filmed and directed, a Cinderella love story told in reverse with a feisty heroine who battles her way through a world of competitive sleaze, highlighting with illumination how an immigrant community can hang onto the shredded scraps of the dystopian American dream.

Experience Anora, watch Anora, it is truly a revelatory film and deserved the Palm d’Or at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Anora is not for the faint hearted but it is a viciously taut tale of one girl’s survival in the face of adversity, mistrust while battling her own conception that her sole purpose in life is just to please men.

Superbly acted by Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov, Anora is highly recommended viewing for mature audiences who appreciate a gut wrenching ending.

Anora gets a film rating of 9 out of 10. Utterly compelling and crazy. See it to believe it.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Leonardo di Caprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Dakota Fanning, Maya Hawke, Timothy Olyphant, Austin Butler, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Margaret Qualley, Damon Herriman, Mikey Madison

Running Time: 2 hours and 41 minutes

Film Rating: 8 out of 10

Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay for Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, writer and director Quentin Tarantino returns to the big screen with his 9^th feature film the brilliantly titled Once Upon a Time in Hollywood starring Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant) and Brad Pitt as buddies actor Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth in a fictional tale set in Los Angeles in 1969.

1969 was the year that the real life film director Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by the followers of the Charles Manson cult which shocked the American film industry to its rotten core. Charles Manson is played in the film by Australian actor Damon Herriman.

Firstly two disclaimers: this is an extremely long film and secondly it’s really only aimed at serious movie buffs and serves as Tarantino’s ode to the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age before the film making industry got taken over by corporations, sequels, digitization and streaming.

Tarantino artfully pays homage to the act of buying a ticket and going to the cinema in a rather poignant scene when the young actress Sharon Tate superbly played by Oscar nominee Margot Robbie (I, Tonya) actually pays to watch a film she is starring in at a Westwood cinema.

The rest of this marvelously meandering film belongs to the two major stars, DiCaprio who is superb as the washed up TV actor Rick Dalton who is desperately trying to make a Big Screen comeback but lands up starring in a string of Spaghetti Westerns in Rome.

Oscar nominee Brad Pitt (12 Monkeys) is phenomenal as the stunt double past his prime Cliff Booth in one of his best onscreen performances yet especially the gorgeous scene when he takes his shirt off on the roof of Dalton’s Hollywood Hills mansion in the scorching Californian sun to fix the TV aerial.

Booth also inadvertently stumbles across the hippie cult followers of Charles Manson in an abandoned studio lot in Chatsworth, California featuring some great cameos by Dakota Fanning (Ocean’s 8, War of the Worlds) as Squeaky Fromme , Oscar nominee Bruce Dern (Nebraska) as George Spahn and Margaret Qualley (The Nice Guys) as the seductive hippie hitchhiker Pussycat.

Tarantino expertly captures the zeitgeist of Los Angeles in 1969 at the peak of the counter-culture movement with lurid production design by Barbara Ling and costumes by Oscar nominated costume designer Arianne Phillips (Walk the Line, A Single Man, Nocturnal Animals, W. E.).

With some expertly placed cameos including Oscar winner Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman) as hot shot producer Marvin Schwarz and Damian Lewis as real life star Steve McQueen.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is slowing moving in the first two acts of the film, while the third act is phenomenal especially the hippie flame throwing sequence.

Tarantino could have quickened the film’s pace in the beginning to actively propel the narrative forward but he is a notorious auteur and not interested in packaging films to please audience expectations.

Unbelievably, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood did get a standing ovation at its glittering film premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival so Tarantino did something right.

This film gets a rating of 8 out of 10 and accurately portrays acting as artifice.

This is not Tarantino’s best work but written and directed in the vein of his crime thriller Jackie Brown, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood is strictly recommended for Tarantino fans and those that enjoyed Pulp Fiction, Django Unchanged and Inglourious Basterds.