The best in cinema confronts the times and comes
with a hefty dose of darkness these days
By Steve Pond
Portfolio by Platon
This has not been a time for celebration and cheer in cinema. How could it be? Hollywood came to the end of 2024 reeling from four years of a pandemic and strikes, battered by declining movie attendance and shaken by a bitterly divided culture, a troubling election and a natural disaster in its home city. In that atmosphere, the faces of our time are the faces of artists staring into a discomforting landscape and working to address it in their work. Mikey Madison in Anora: a sex worker who gets mixed up with Russian thugs. Colman Domingo in Sing Sing: an imprisoned man whose only moments of release come in a makeshift prison theater. Demi Moore in The Substance: a woman facing unendurable pressures to be youthful at any cost, even if she’s risking a descent into true horror. Adrien Brody in The Brutalist: a brilliant but haunted Holocaust survivor whose gifts are exploited by a condescending tycoon. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain: sibling cousins on a family vacation in the shadow of that Holocaust. Karla Sofía Gascón in Emilia Peréz: a transgender Mexican drug lord trying to escape a life of violence. Michelle Yeoh in Wicked: a conniving and powerful educator in league with a despotic ruler who is desperate to secure his power by finding people to demonize.
The performances and the films aren’t all so grim on the surface; if you were to go only by those descriptions, you’d hardly know that Anora is wildly comedic and that Emilia Peréz and Wicked are full-on musicals. But the undercurrents are there, because the best entertainment faces the times and comes with a hefty dose of darkness these days. That was true even before wildfires devastated the city that serves as home to the film industry, Los Angeles, only four days after most of these photos were shot at the Palm Springs International Film Awards.
Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
In 2003, Brody won an Oscar for playing a real-life Holocaust survivor in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist; more than two decades later, he returned to the awards conversation as a fictional survivor in Brady Corbet’s epic drama.
Mikey Madison, Anora
The raucous tale of a Brooklyn sex worker, Anora also delivered the year’s most exhilarating breakthrough for a 25-year-old actress from the San Fernando Valley best known for playing Pamela Adlon’s daughter in Better Things and being torched by Leonardo DiCaprio’s flamethrower in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Two
The Canadian director responsible for Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 keeps making bigger, bolder movies, culminating (for now) in the second part of his monumental adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi landmark.
Amy Adams, Nightbitch
Remember when Adams was the quintessential girl next door in movies like Junebug and Enchanted? You might forget all about those days after seeing her feral performance in Nightbitch as an overworked mother who gets positively canine when the sun goes down.
Timothée Chalamet, A Complete Unknown
The 29-year-old New Yorker has been on a fast track to stardom since early films like Lady Bird and Call Me by Your Name, but his last three movies—Wonka, Dune: Part Two and the Bob Dylan riff A Complete Unknown—have been a master class in bold eclecticism.
Nicole Kidman, Babygirl
She’s been a big star since Days of Thunder, To Die For and Eyes Wide Shut in the 1990s—and that kind of successful longevity is one of the reasons it feels so daring for Kidman to throw herself into Halina Reijn’s unnerving erotic thriller about a CEO who risks her career in a submissive relationship with an intern.
Colman Domingo, Sing Sing
The stage-trained Philadelphia native has broken through in a big way in recent years, starting with the HBO series Euphoria and continuing through the movies Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Rustin and Sing Sing, which only became possible when he agreed to work for the same pay rate as every member of the crew.
Demi Moore, The Substance
When she was in her 20s, people knew Moore as a movie star; in her 60s, they’re figuring out that she’s a damn good actress, too. The Substance, a horror movie with fierce feminism on its mind, needed a venturesome and fearless lead performance, and she delivered.
Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain
Eisenberg seemed smart and a little nerdy when he starred in movies like The Squid and the Whale and The Social Network. It turns out he’s also a smart, sharp writer-director who could take his family roots in Ashkenazi Jews from Poland and craft a sly comedy that nonetheless takes the measure of the horrors of World War II.
Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
In recent years, Eisenberg’s co-star has delivered a one-two punch that thoroughly erased his identity as Macaulay Culkin’s younger brother: First, four seasons as the needy Roman Roy in Succession, winning an Emmy for the show’s final season; then, his unhinged but affecting turn as what amounts to the title character in A Real Pain.
Ralph Fiennes, Conclave
After Schindler’s List and The English Patient, Ralph Fiennes seemed as if he’d be in the awards conversation every year—which is why it’s so startling to consider that his role as the tortured Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave is his return to the awards spotlight after almost 30 years.
Carlos Diehz, Conclave
The most mysterious cardinal in Conclave is also the most mysterious actor: The Mexican-born Diehz worked as an architect for 30 years and only thought about reviving his interest in acting after taking an online class during the pandemic.
Stanley Tucci, Conclave
The veteran actor from films like Big Night and The Devil Wears Prada had been more visible in recent years through his CNN travel/food show Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, but he and Fiennes are ideal scene partners in Conclave.
Isabella Rossellini, Conclave
Rossellini doesn’t have many lines in the papal drama—but if your mother was the screen legend Ingrid Bergman and your father the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, you’d also know how to command the screen without saying much.
John Lithgow, Conclave
Lithgow has been making movies since the mid 1970s and receiving nominations since the early ’80s, amassing a formidable resume and acquiring the skills to simultaneously feel commanding and anguished, which he does to great effect in Conclave.
Lucian Msamati, Conclave
Born in London but raised in Zimbabwe, Msamati had a long theater career before landing roles on Game of Thrones and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and in Conclave as a Nigerian cardinal whose downfall is a key plot point.
Michelle Yeoh, Wicked
The Mayalsian actress launched her career in Hong Kong martial arts films and broke through internationally in the likes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Memoirs of a Geisha … and then broke through again when she won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once and landed a key role in Wicked.
Zoe Saldaña, Emilia Pérez
Box-office returns say that Saldaña is the top-grossing actress of all time, with roles in the three biggest movies ever and four of the top six. But her Avatar and Avengers gigs don’t prepare audiences for the singing, dancing, rapping dexterity of her performance as a lawyer and fixer in Emilia Pérez.
Edgar Ramírez, Emilia Pérez
The women take center stage in Emilia Pérez, but Venezuelan actor Ramírez—whose resume is distinguished by meaty miniseries like Carlos and The Assassination of Gianni Versace—is a crucial third-act presence as the boyfriend of Selena Gomez’s character.
Selena Gomez, Emilia Pérez
Actress-singer Gomez has been doing double duty all awards season, making the rounds on behalf of the film in which she plays Emilia’s embittered ex-wife and in support of Only Murders in the Building, the comedy series in which she goes head-to-head with Steve Martin and Martin Short.
Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia Pérez
Born in Spain, Gascón moved to Mexico in 2009 to work in telenovelas—but her career took a turn after her gender transition in the late 2010s, leading to her role as the title character in Emilia Pérez.
CREDITS
Photographer: ©Photos by Platon
Visual Creative Director:: Michaela Dosamantes
Producer: Michele Murray
Executive Producer: Jennifer Laski
Photography assistants: Jason Willheim and Mike Foley
Special thanks: Palm Springs International Film Awards.
Locations: All talent photographed at PSIFA except nicole kidman and michelle yeoh.
Platon
A world-renowned portrait photographer, Platon has photographed more world leaders than anyone else in history. For TheWrapBook, he captured the “Faces of 2024” at the Palm Springs International Film Awards.