The Screen Critic: An excellent Bob Dylan biopic, an epic Oscar contender, Nicole Kidman gets naughty and a cutting look at motherhood

Jan 30, 2025
Source: Getty Images.

Vividly capturing the rapid rise of a young Bob Dylan from nobody to folk hero, A Complete Unknown is an excellent biopic looking at his early years in New York.

Anchored by a terrific central performance by Timothée Chalamet, the film follows Dylan across the backstreets of the city where the counter-culture resides in crammed record stores and basement music venues.

With the help of folk legend Pete Seeger (Ed Norton in a winning turn) and country superstar Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) Dylan’s stature grows, as does his ego, which puts an edge on his relationship with singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro).

Blessed with A-grade production values and loads of great music (all performed by the cast), the film offers an immersive trip back in time to witness the formative days of a musical doyen who changed the course of music.

Awash in awards-season adulation, The Brutalist sees Adrien Brody put in a tour de force performance as László Tóth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who starts a new life in the promised land of post-war America.

Hired as an architect by industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), he gets to work on a giant community centre, the planning and building of which takes up a large chunk of the film’s whopping 215-minute running time. (Don’t panic, there’s a 15-minute intermission.)

Along the way, László learns some hard lessons about life in America, including ones about personal and artistic compromise.

While Brody is likely to win the Oscar for his marathon performance the film, which looks great – it was shot using the old VistaVision format – does have its lapses and sometimes feels like a prestige two-part TV movie.

The Brutalist is being touted as an event film but, to be honest, it might be worth waiting for it to stream when you can have as many intermissions as you like.

In Maria, Angelina Jolie takes on the mantle of portraying opera diva Maria Callas in a so-so biopic that looks at the last days of her life before she expired alone and loveless in her luxury Parisian home in 1977.

Her huge ego riddled with self-doubt, we are presented with a largely tragic figure who wrestles with performance fears as she reflects on her bumpy life, including her relationship with tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

Jolie works hard to bring Callas to life and does a fine job showing what a sorry wreck she had become at the end of such a stellar life.

Unfortunately, the overall film is fractured, with a stilted pace and clumsy attempts to use an imaginary film crew to show how mentally unbalanced Callas had become.

Whatever you think of her, you can’t fault Nicole Kidman for eagerly taking chances.

In Babygirl she plays a high-powered corporate leader who risks all – her career, her family, her dignity – to embark on a torrid affair with an intern.

Precisely why she does this is never really explained, apart from the fact established at the beginning of the film that she has a voracious sexual appetite.

Things get pretty wild as she engages with her young beau (Harris Dickinson), happy to degrade herself for the sake of an erotic high.

To her credit, Kidman gives it her all yet the film suffers from poor dialogue and a weak story that keeps you wondering why this grown woman is behaving so irrationally. And given what she’s risking, she certainly doesn’t seem to be getting much joy out of her trysts.

Still, if you’re after something naughty and mildly confronting, Babygirl could help you kill some time as you wonder where her company’s HR department is.

The truism that nobody said motherhood was easy gets a good going over in Nightbitch, a horror-tinged dramedy in which a newly-minted mum discovers just how much sacrifice is involved in raising a kid.

Amy Adams does a super job as the harried, perpetually exhausted mum who agreed with her husband (Scoot McNairy) to put her career as an artist on hold to stay home and raise their son.

Her frustrations build to the point that she senses herself changing – into a dog. It’s a metaphor, of course, and used well to give voice about her less-than-ideal experiences.

Based on the 2021 book by Rachel Yoder (a producer, as is Adams), the film gets a little repetitive but ultimately hammers its points with a satisfying mix of humour and drama that bravely refuses to turn the husband into a villain or the mother into a saint.

Nightbitch is hot on Disney+ right now. Check it out.

For more visit jimschembri.com with updates on X at @jimschembri

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