It’s been a kind of coup in the 2025 Hollywood awards season — a Brazilian film almost no one had seen was nominated for two Golden Globes, with Fernanda Torres winning Best Actress in a Drama, and then getting nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Actress for Torres, Best International Feature, and Best Picture.
I’m Still Here is entirely worthy. It tells the true story of the Paiva family, a couple and many kids living in a gorgeous house near the Rio De Janeiro beach in the early ’70s, Dad (Selton Mello) was a former left-leaning politician, which the right-wing authoritarians in power at the time didn’t like. They sent men down to take him away, leaving wife, Eunice (Torres), to take care of the kids and figure out how to continue without her husband. The casting is astonishing — the kids never fail to convince as a family, while director Walter Salles and his production designers convincingly recreate the ’70s with a lot of brown and orange set dec and stylish polyester garments. The illusion of the era complete, the depiction of the deep trauma of what this family went through is part modern tragedy, part cracking Costa-Gravas-esque political thriller. (▲▲▲▲)
Universal Language is a difficult film to describe, which is to Matthew Rankin’s credit. He’s the Winnipeg filmmaker who gave us The Twentieth Century, an experimentalist, and a Guy Madden acolyte. This, his second feature, imagines Winnipeg in winter as if it was a dreamed by someone who spent half their life in Manitoba and half in Tehran, a peculiar amalgam.
The populace mostly speak Persian when they’re not speaking French. The urban landscape is brutal, ugly, and unforgiving, but this isn’t some bleak drama, more a light, quirky comedy where the signifiers of Canadian culture — like the Tim Horton’s — all have signs in Persian. This is a film undoubtably interested in exploring community and human connection, but it’s also determined to keep its audience at arms length from its characters. Fascinating to see something so unique, but also a challenge to engage with a cinematic dialect so frustratingly oblique. (▲▲▲)
