I’m going to talk here about three movies that a) are good, but b) about which I don’t have much to say.

The first is Le Pupille. It makes sense that I wouldn’t have much to say about it, because it’s a short by Alice Rohrwacher (who you will remember from a bunch of Italian arthouse films that range from very good to great). It’s apparently based on a letter (the kind you mail to people), and it tells a charming little Christmas story in a girls’ school at a convent in WW2 Italy. It’s on D+, and it’s tonally the kind of thing you’d expect to see a Disney logo on, with a very wholesome holiday vibe. But it’s made with Rohrwacher’s artistry, with a structure that’s less obvious than it could have been, and with a bit of a subversive edge, so it wouldn’t be out of place on a real service either.

Pro tip: D+ attempts to play it in English, but don’t let it; switch it over to Italian and put on subtitles, it works much better that way.

The second is Anora, and here it feels weird that I don’t have much to say. This is a full-length movie, and it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award, so you’d think it’d be this big towering masterpiece. And… it’s good! It’s fun, I laughed a lot, but it’s not just a fluffy comedy. Like, the characters have surprising depths, even ones that seem kinda minor at first; everyone feels real even in basically surreal circumstances. Genuinely recommend watching it, and think it would be broadly popular if movies like this were broadly popular anymore.

But it also didn’t wow me. Its charms are subtle, its vibe is slight, and it seemed like the kind of prototypical movie that you enjoy of an evening and then don’t think too much about later. Maybe I’m wrong about this, and it’ll rattle around in my head more than I think; wouldn’t be the first time. But as it is, it’s like 4/5 stars, very good but not great territory for me. It tbh feels a little weird that it got all that praise. This was really the best movie of the year according to both the jury at Cannes and the Academy? Huh.

The third is Showing Up, a Kelly Reichardt joint. The best of her movies — First Cow, Wendy and Lucy — have been great. This is… well, pretty good. It’s a story about an artist who has a show coming up soon. She’s more than slightly prickly, and gets in fights with her neighbor (a more successful artist who she’s clearly jealous of); she deals irritably with her family (her parents are annoying/embarrassing in that very recognizable parental way, and her brother is mentally unstable, which her parents are in denial about); and she nurses a pigeon her cat injured back to health.

It’s got a lot of nuance to it, but it’s a very slight character piece building up to the climactic show, which almost gets to a point of making the movie into something larger, but doesn’t quite get there. Good, but minor. But I wouldn’t be surprised if anyone who’s spent time at an art school feels more strongly about it.