Is There Any Way in Hell Nikki Haley Can Stop Trump?

Is There Any Way in Hell Nikki Haley Can Stop Trump? The former governor could beat Biden. But Trump is ahead in New Hampshire by double digits. Can Haley pull off a miracle tomorrow? We asked her on the campaign trail. JOE NOCERA JAN 22 ∙ Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley makes a campaign stop to greet people at MaryAnn’s Diner on January 21, 2024, in Derry, New Hampshire. (Joe Raedle via Getty Images) MANCHESTER, NH — “Why in the world is Nikki Haley holding a rally in the middle of nowhere?” a talking head asked Katy Tur during her midday MSNBC show. It was last Tuesday, and Tur was in Manchester, New Hampshire. So was I, preparing to drive halfway up the state to a sprawling old resort in the White Mountains. In a snowstorm. The day before, Haley had been absolutely crushed by Donald Trump in the Iowa caucus. In her last Iowa speech, the former South Carolina governor claimed that her 19.1 percent finish meant that it was now a “two-person race,” between her and Trump—which was some bold framing given that she’d come in third, behind even Ron DeSantis. (By Sunday, though, it had become true with DeSantis dropping out.) The conventional wisdom said that if Haley didn’t win New Hampshire—or at least come close—she was cooked. With Trump at 50 percent in the polls, and Haley at 34 percent, she had to make up a 16-point deficit. And she had only six days to do it. With its history of making or breaking presidential candidates, New Hampshire has always loomed large in presidential politics. And yet Haley’s first big post–Iowa rally was in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a snowstorm. I could only shake my head as I slogged my way north. The Haley campaign had promised me an interview once I got to the Mount Washington Hotel and Resort in Bretton Woods—the same resort where the postwar economic order was settled in 1944. Slowed by the snow, I arrived shortly before we were supposed to talk. Haley strode smartly into a large, mostly empty ballroom where I’d been deposited by her team. If she was discouraged by the Iowa result, she didn’t show it. At her town halls in Iowa, I’d mostly seen voters kicking the tires. “I liked her okay,” a retired farmer told me after one event, “but I’m strong for Trump.” So where was she going to find enough Republican voters to overcome the brick wall of Donald Trump? Everyone knows that the typical MAGA voter is white, rural, and working class. But what constitutes her base? I'd vote for her. “I don’t have a base,” Haley replied. “I don’t just want a certain type of person. I want everybody. That’s the only way we’re going to heal our country.” She added, “That’s my whole thing. I know they’re saying, you know, ‘She’s getting independents to vote for her.’ ” Indeed, they were. Earlier that day, Trump and DeSantis, who was still sporadically campaigning in New Hampshire, had both attacked her for “infiltrating” (Trump’s word) the Republican primaries with Democrats and liberals to vote for her in open primaries. She rolled her eyes when I brought that up. Their “allegation” was true—but so what? “You have to want everybody,” Haley said. “It doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t change the solutions I think we need going forward. But it does mean that I’m going to treat everybody with respect. I’m going to let them know what I’m about, what I want to do, and how I want to do it. I’m not going to push people away. I’m going to bring people in. That’s what I did in South Carolina. You’re supposed to work on lifting up everybody, not just a select few.” When the interview was over, I headed upstairs to the large room where the rally was being held. I was astounded. It was nearing six o’clock, and there had to be a foot of snow on the ground by then. The roads were treacherous. Yet the place was packed—every seat was taken, and the standing room was six deep. And unlike most of the Iowa town halls I saw, there was real enthusiasm, with people laughing to each other about how long it had taken to get there in the storm. For a fleeting moment I thought: maybe this isn’t so hopeless after all. Nikki Haley takes pictures with supporters at a rally at Gilbert H. Hood Middle School in Derry, New Hampshire, on January 21, 2024. (Joseph Prezioso via Getty Images) One reason the MAGA faithful are so difficult to peel away is that they love the way their guy’s political career has been built on giving the establishment his middle finger. That’s what they want to do, too. The loss of good jobs, the flood of immigrants at the border, all that fentanyl killing their kids—they have grievances. And they blame the political establishment. Which is why they’re willing to ignore—or justify—Trump’s indictments, his instigation of the January 6 attack, and even his promise to be a dictator (at least on “day one”). The reason they’ll never warm to Nikki Haley is that, in their eyes, she is the political establishment. A politician who talks about the need for the nation to heal, or the value of compromise, or the importance of gaining support from Democrats—that kind of pre-Trump, old-school sentiment makes them want to puke. “Fuck her,” former Trump consiglieri Steve Bannon said last month at the Turning Point USA conference, perfectly summing up the MAGA sentiment. I sent Bannon a text, asking for more details. He was more than happy to oblige. Shortly before the 2018 midterms, he told me, he was giving a speech at Bloomberg’s London headquarters. Someone slipped him a note saying that Haley had resigned her position as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, a job she had held for the first two years of his presidency. “She couldn’t wait for three and a half fucking weeks,” Bannon said. “She did that to send a signal to the establishment: ‘I’m not with him.’ ” Now, she’s their candidate—“their vessel,” as he put it. He pointed to a fancy New York fundraiser she will attend at the end of the month: “It’s one of the most impressive attendee lists I’ve ever seen,” he said. He did not mean this as a compliment. The fundraiser has 25 co-chairs, many of them bold-faced billionaires, like Henry Kravis and Ken Langone. One of the co-chairs, Kristin Lemkau, a high-ranking J.P. Morgan executive, has raised money for Democrats in the past. (None of the co-chairs I reached out to was willing to speak to me on the record—not surprising given the threats Trump has made recently to punish wealthy Republicans who don’t donate to his campaign.) Nikki Haley makes a campaign stop to greet people at MaryAnn’s Diner on January 21, 2024, in Derry, New Hampshire. (Joe Raedle via Getty Images) Bannon described Haley to me as “slippery” and said that he was convinced that the establishment’s real goal is to position her to be Trump’s vice president. “They want to get her in the West Wing,” he said. “They’re gonna say Trump needs a woman, and that she will bring in the non-MAGA votes Trump needs. And now she has Fox saying every morning how great she is because she’s got Rupert Murdoch too. If they succeed, it’ll destroy Trump’s second term,” he said. His goal, he said, was to make sure it didn’t happen. “I’ve led the jihad to keep her off the ticket,” he told me. “I’m proud of that.” At this point, of course, this is hardly a jihad he has to wage: the chances of Haley being Trump’s vice-presidential candidate are slim to none. In New Hampshire, Trump said that Haley lacked “presidential timbre,” and she would “probably” not be his vice-presidential candidate. Meanwhile, Don Jr. told Newsmax last week that Tucker Carlson was someone his father was considering. (Haley said that she is not interested in being on the ticket with Trump.) Bannon wasn’t quite done yet. “Nikki Haley,” he concluded, his voice dripping with contempt, “is the font of all evil.” Nikki Haley signs a baseball during a campaign event held at Gilbert H. Hood Middle School on January 21, 2024, in Derry, New Hampshire. (Joe Raedle via Getty Images) When I told Haley that MAGA leaders like Bannon viewed her as an elitist whom the coastal elites were hoping to use to regain power, she actually seemed a little taken aback. “I mean, I grew up in a rural town in South Carolina,” she replied. “You can say a lot of things about me but you can’t say I don’t understand what that life is like. I do understand that. The whole reason I was a Tea Party governor was because I understood exactly those people who felt unheard. That’s how I won.” Her self-image has always been that of the outsider pushing her way in, and forcing the insiders to change. As a child growing up in Bamberg, South Carolina (population: 2,977), she was the daughter of Sikh Indian immigrants; her father wore a turban. There were plenty of painful moments, she told Politico a few years ago. A Clemson graduate and an accountant who did the books for her mother’s thriving clothing store, she was a complete unknown when, in 2004 at the age of 32, she successfully ran against the longest serving legislator in the state. When she campaigned for governor in 2010, it was déjà vu all over again, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra. This time she had three opponents, all men, all with much higher name recognition. But she convinced Sarah Palin to endorse her—and it was game over after that. Her national reputation was cemented when, after a gunman killed nine African Americans in the Charleston church shooting in 2015, she convinced the legislature to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds without creating a partisan brawl. One can hardly call the United Nations ambassador an outsider, but she played by a set of rules that hadn’t been seen before in that sphere. When 128 countries voted to reject the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Haley hosted a reception—and invited delegates only from the nations that had sided with the U.S. Her husband Michael is an officer in the South Carolina National Guard, currently deployed in Africa. The Haleys were not wealthy. But when she left the UN, she landed a $350,000 book advance, and made speeches for a reported $200,000 a pop to organizations like Barclay’s, the giant banking concern, and Linden Capital Partners, a private equity firm. In other words, the establishment. Republican presidential candidate and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks to the media during a campaign stop at The Beach Plum on January 21, 2024, in Epping, New Hampshire. (Joe Raedle via Getty Images) Another of her vociferous critics, Rand Paul, says that the millions she has made on the speaking circuit is her payday “to become part of the team.” The Kentucky senator describes himself as “Never Nikki” because she is an interventionist who wants to keep sending funds to Ukraine and Israel to support their wars. Ann Coulter, the right-wing commentator, mocks her because she is the daughter of Indian immigrants. Gavin Wax, the conservative activist, recently told Politico that “There’s only one good thing about Nikki Haley. It’s that everyone in MAGA hates her guts.” And then, of course, there’s the former president himself, who has been throwing everything but the kitchen sink at her as he tries to finish her off in New Hampshire. “The people behind Nikki Haley are pro-amnesty, pro-China, they’re pro-open borders,” he said at a rally on Thursday. “She wants open borders, don’t kid yourself.” At a Trump rally in Manchester over the weekend, mention of her name was met with sustained boos by the crowd. “She’s made an unholy alliance with the RINOs, the Never Trumpers, Americans for no prosperity, globalists, the radical left communists,” Trump went on and on. He calls her by her first name, Nimarata, just like he once used to employ Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein. When I first started following the Haley campaign in Iowa, she treated Trump gently, clearly hoping she might be able to attract some of his faithful. (Her standard line: “I think Trump was the right president in 2016. . . but rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.”) When she landed in New Hampshire, though, she ratcheted up the criticism a notch. But she diluted that criticism by pairing it with what she claimed were Joe Biden’s flaws. Trump was too old to be president, just like Biden, she said. (Haley is a relatively sprightly 52.) And both men were “distracted by their own investigations and their own grievances.” As the week went on, with the gap between her and Trump still in double digits, she seemed to have given up trying to sweet-talk his supporters. When, at one appearance, Trump kept using her name instead of Nancy Pelosi’s, Haley saw her opening. “When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this—we can’t,” she said in the town of Keene on Saturday. She also started criticizing—finally—his coddling of dictators. “You don’t praise dictators and thugs who want to kill us,” she said in Nashua. “It’s not good for us.” Better late than never, I suppose. But it still raises the question: In the face of Trump’s unmovable base, where on God’s earth is she going to get enough votes? Nikki Haley greets people as she visits the Holy Grail Restaurant and Pub on January 21, 2024, in Epping, New Hampshire. (Joe Raedle via Getty Images) In most of the general election polls so far, Haley is far ahead of Joe Biden—by double digits in some of them. (Trump is neck and neck with Biden in those same polls.) It makes sense. When you meet Haley voters, you quickly realize that she appeals to people—whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents—who either never voted for Trump, voted for him in previous elections but can’t stomach him now, or lean toward Joe Biden but think he’s too old to tackle another term. They’re usually college-educated urbanites—and they’re also usually people who long for politics the way it used to be, before it became so ugly. (The one county Haley won in Iowa, Johnson County, is home to the University of Iowa. Her margin of victory was one vote.) One wealthy Democrat told me he was a Haley supporter because he was disappointed in Biden. “I think it’s time for us all to get over our sanctimony and back someone who is sane and reasonable. She’s thoughtful, she’s experienced, and she doesn’t bullshit. That’s enough for me.” Ozzie Palomo, the managing director of Chartwell Strategy Group, who has been raising money for Haley in New England, says that she is a “Republican who can set out a position without scaring people. Her ability to communicate without scaring half the country is a real strength.” A Republican friend in New York—someone who shocked me when she first came out as a Trump supporter—sent me an email saying that she believed that “after the events of January 6, Trump is disqualified from being president.” She added, “Nikki Haley has the potential to be something of a savior if there is an appetite for returning to a more traditional leader. Unfortunately, I don’t know if that’s the case. But I’m hopeful.” That’s the kind of voter Haley has to have. And in truth, there are far more people who can’t abide Trump than there are people who adore him. But if you’re a Republican, you can’t get to them until the general election. Unless, that is, you can convince independents to vote in one of the two dozen Republican primaries that are open to independents. (Some are open to Democrats as well.) That is the essence of Haley’s strategy. It’s the political equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, but it’s not crazy. New Hampshire has just such an open primary. People wait to hear former UN ambassador and 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley speak at a campaign event in Hollis, New Hampshire, on January 18, 2024. (Joseph Prezioso via Getty Images) Prior to the Iowa results, Neil Levesque, the director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, said he thought Haley might be able to pull it off. “I think she cuts through because she has a conservative message but she is a middle-aged accomplished woman. We have one of the most highly educated populations. She is the hardest-working candidate. Her campaign has touched a lot of people here.” He added, “In a small place like New Hampshire, it is a lot easier to gain steam if you have the right message”—which he thought she did. After Iowa, I sent a text to Levesque to ask if he had changed his mind. “No,” he texted back. “It’s a tough hill to climb if you look at the data.” But possible, I asked? “Of course,” he said. Jennifer Horn, the former chair of the New Hampshire GOP, thinks it won’t work. “Here in New Hampshire we always talk about independent voters coming in on primary day and voting in whichever party they want,” she told MSNBC. “And people always talk about, is something crazy going to happen? Is something big going to happen? And it never does. . . . I don’t see a huge influence on the number of voters Nikki Haley gets here.” When DeSantis dropped out on Sunday, he immediately endorsed Trump—no big surprise, of course. He took one last shot at Haley, calling her a member of “the old Republican guard of yesteryear—a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism.” Will his supporters gravitate back to Trump? That is the most likely scenario. As the days dwindled, New Hampshire remained a daunting climb. Nor will it get any easier when Haley heads to her home state of South Carolina, which holds its primary in late February and which Trump easily took in 2016 and 2020. The polls currently show her 30 points behind. Lindsey Graham, the state’s senior senator, lined up behind Trump early on. And on Friday, South Carolina’s other Republican senator, Tim Scott—whom Haley had appointed to his seat in 2013—gave Trump a full-throated endorsement as well. This has to hurt. A well-liked black senator, Scott’s endorsement could have been huge for Haley in her home state. For that matter, an endorsement from Chris Christie, who left the race just before the Iowa caucus, could be a big help, since his supporters were fervently anti-Trump. But the only comment he’s made about her came during a hot mic moment earlier this month when he said that “she’s gonna get smoked,” and “she’s not up to this.” (Neither Scott nor Christie returned emails requesting comment.) Yes, Haley has made mistakes—failing to acknowledge that slavery caused the Civil War was particularly cringeworthy—but she hasn’t let any of that slow her down. She had five town halls in New Hampshire on Friday, four on Saturday, and had seven—seven!—on tap yesterday. “Everyone expects it to be Trump in a walk,” Neil Levesque told me. “If she wins by one vote, it’ll be an earthquake.” At this point, even a close second would do the trick—she’ll have “beaten expectations,” as they say. South Carolina? She’ll have a month to remind voters that she was a competent governor who got things done. If she ekes that out, she then has Super Tuesday on March 5. And if she wins some primaries outright, and comes close in others, it’s suddenly a nasty, protracted fight all the way to the convention. The idea that there can be an alternative to a Trump-Biden rematch will have become real. Though the odds are against her, this is what she is banking on. I asked Haley if she was thinking that far ahead. No, she said. “What I do think about is managing my funds, making sure I have enough money to be on TV, and making sure that when we get attacked, I have enough to defend myself. But that’s as far as I think ahead. What I do think is: I want to be stronger in New Hampshire than I was in Iowa. I want to be stronger in South Carolina than I was in New Hampshire. I do think that far, but that’s about it.” She circled back to something we’d talked about earlier: that impenetrable Trump base. She wasn’t completely ready to give up on them yet. “For all the people who are saying, ‘How do you do it? How do you do it?’ Look, if I had listened to all those people, I wouldn’t have run against the longest serving legislator in a primary. I wouldn’t have run in a governor’s race as the Tea Party candidate. I wouldn’t have taken the stances that I take. I don’t let the polls guide me. I look at. . . What do normal people want to hear? What do they want? Does Trump have a stronghold? Absolutely. But my job is not to say, ‘Oh, I’ll never get them.’ My job is to let them know that I agree with a lot of those policies too. But there’s a better way.” Joe Nocera is a columnist for The Free Press, and the co-author of The Big Fail. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @opinion_joe. And to support more of our work, become a Free Press subscriber today: © 2024 Bari Weiss 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

The Free Press Goes to the Movies Grab the popcorn and get ready for awards season, as our team gives you the score on Maestro, May December, Poor Things, Priscilla, Napoleon and more. THE FREE PRESS JAN 6

 We at The Free Press love a good party—especially one that pretends to be about culture. So when we heard the Golden Globes is airing tomorrow (catch it on CBS at 8 p.m. ET), we rushed to the movies to check out some of the most talked-about films of the year. Or at least, the ones we talked about most. 

The U.S. box office boomed in 2023, grossing more than $9 billion, the most since the pandemic started. Thank you, Taylor Swift. And the Barbenheimer juggernaut, which we dissected in July—Suzy Weiss fell big time for Barbie; Oppenheimer blew Elliot Ackerman’s mind. Then, after the summer hitfest came a slew of buzzy releases, like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a favorite to win the Golden Globe for Best Picture, and a movie that became a family triumph for Free Press contributor Nancy Rommelmann. And don’t forget the boom in religious flicks; movies like Jesus Revolution racked up better numbers than most of last year’s Oscar nominees.  

Below you’ll find TFP’s own slate of superlatives. Sit back, grab the popcorn, and scroll down to hear our takes on some of the best films of the moment. And cast your votes for best drama, worst comedy, most erotic movie musical, or whatever else you saw this year, in the comments. 

Best Erotic Musical: Maestro by Ben Kawaller 

I was wary of Maestro. This is, after all, a film about Leonard Bernstein, the composer of the greatest musical of all time (West Side Story, if I even have to say this). I feared the Bradley Cooper biopic, in constantly reminding me of Bernstein’s most towering achievement, would fail that most basic of tests: Would I rather be watching. . . West Side Story?

Wisely, Cooper has limited the use of the WSS score to one well-placed sample that cheekily highlights the film’s central conflict between Bernstein’s long-suffering wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan, breathtaking), and his ardent homosexuality. He practiced the latter, the film suggests, at a level far exceeding his compositional output. At one point, an existentially frustrated Bernstein confesses, between drags of his ever-present cigarette, “Actually, when you add it up, there’s not much that I’ve created.”

Cooper—transformed by a prosthetic schnoz—is transfixing as Bernstein, and his screenplay, co-written with Josh Singer, is a swiftly moving, often devastating chronicle of a life (two lives, really) both audacious and unshakably confined by mid-century morality. It’s also an unsparing depiction of the ruthlessness of time: one image, late in the film, of a far-too-old Bernstein at a nightclub, still utterly in thrall to youth, drugs, and sex, ranks for me among cinema’s most crippling sequences. To be fair, I’m not sure if anyone else in the theater let out an audible sob.

Interestingly, that moment follows a scene, perhaps intentionally calling to mind 2022’s Tár, in which a 1980s Bernstein coaches a young (black) student in conducting. The film’s audience holds its breath: Are we about to watch an egomaniac decimate a mere mortal?

It gives little away to reveal that no, we are not. Like Lydia Tár in the moment of her undoing, Bernstein is uncompromising, teasing, and affectionate (very affectionate, it turns out). Unlike Lydia Tár, he gets away with it. The mutual warmth, Bernstein’s palpable joy in teaching, and the unremarkable fact that his students view him as a master, turn the scene into a eulogy for a bygone era. And the junior conductor’s obvious delight in Bernstein’s sexual touch, despite how pathetic it all looks, is just one of the film’s many contradictions that add to its depth.

Is Cooper’s film as good as West Side Story? Well. . . nothing is as good as West Side Story. But Maestro, which ingeniously incorporates some of Bernstein’s other most iconic compositions, is a brilliant work of art in its own right. It gutted me.

And the soundtrack is, of course, transcendent. 

Best French Film with American Accents by a British Director: Napoleon by Oliver Wiseman

I was told I had to review a film about a megalomaniac bent on world domination. But when I discovered that Wonka breaches my ban on watching musicals, I was forced to go in another direction. And so Napoleon it was. Instead of Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of a ruthless master of the chocolate universe, it’d be Joaquin Phoenix as a misunderstood man of the people.

Most critics loathed Napoleon. So did the public, judging by its 59 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The haters are half right. Is Napoleon perfect? No. But Ridley Scott’s historical epic is a valiant and entertaining attempt at the almost impossible task of depicting the man Hegel described as “world history on horseback.” 

A frequent complaint about this much-anticipated movie is that it strays too far from the truth. To be sure, the film’s historical inaccuracies are many and flagrant. Napoleon was not there when Marie Antoinette was beheaded. He did not meet his wife Joséphine at one of the bals des victimes held to celebrate the end of the Reign of Terror. He did not order his troops to blast cannonballs at the Egyptian pyramids.

To these complaints, Scott’s response has essentially been Who cares?

And he’s right.

Historical drama is not history. His job is to tell a story, not report the facts. If you expect a history lesson at the movies, that’s on you. 

What you’re guaranteed is the epic satisfaction of big-budget battle scenes, Joaquin Phoenix working his mesmerizing, if slightly predictable, magic (who knew the Joker, Johnny Cash, and Napoleon were so similar?), and a surprising number of laughs.

One final, important data point: the French hate Napoleon. They were never likely to take well to a British director getting Hollywood A-listers to shout “Vive la France” in American accents. Oh well. Most offensive to the French, however, is the fact Scott portrays Napoleon as a flawed leader and—quelle horreur!—bad in bed.

All this Gallic whining is a very good sign; it’d be far more worrying if Scott had made a movie the French actually liked. 

Best Bad Romance: May December by Emily Yoffe 

May December is a movie about sex that’s not sexy. Instead, director Todd Haynes has made a movie about making movies.

Before seeing May December, it helps to know the real events that inspired it. It’s based on the life of Mary Kay Letourneau, a married elementary school teacher and mother of four, who in the 1990s began a sexual relationship with her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau, when he was twelve years old and she was thirty-four. She went to prison, gave birth to Fualaau’s two children, and after her release, they married. Letourneau died in 2020 of colon cancer at age fifty-eight. 

In May December, Letourneau becomes Gracie (played by Julianne Moore) and her husband is Joe (played by Charles Melton). When the movie begins, they are more than two decades into a marriage that has produced three children, the youngest a pair of twins ready to graduate from high school. The film takes place during a visit by an actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), who has come to study Gracie. Elizabeth, who is the age Gracie was when she embarked on the relationship with Joe, is hoping her portrayal of Gracie will propel her from television star to serious film actress.

Although the Letourneau scandal is the scaffolding of May December, Haynes’s focus is the psychological interplay between the two women. We watch Elizabeth’s efforts to embody Gracie, a process both enabled and resisted by the older woman. This doppelganger effect is one of many references to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 classic Persona, about a similar relationship between an actress who has fallen silent and the nurse sent to tend her.

May December unfolds as a series of set pieces filled with simmering tension and subtext—only occasionally do emotions spill over. Portman plays an actress who is not a good enough actress to hide her voraciousness and ambition. Moore’s Gracie is invested in a daily portrayal of domestic bliss, even if at night she descends into crying jags her husband is tasked with comforting.

Both women—especially when interacting with Joe—are master manipulators. As Joe, Charles Melton gives a breakthrough performance, as he comes to realize he sacrificed his childhood first to Gracie, and later to his own children. He delivers a potent performance of pathos and loss, giving emotional weight to a movie that often feels like it’s keeping the viewer at arm’s length.

Throughout the film, lest you start getting drawn into the story, Haynes jolts you into awareness that you’re watching a movie through the loud, staccato, and intrusive score. That’s intentional. The music is taken from the mostly forgotten 1971 film The Go-Between, another story about sexual violation, deceit, and a sensual older woman’s exploitation of a schoolboy. 

Best Eye Candy: Wonka by Kiran Sampath 

I initially thought Wonka was going to be a 2023 remake of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. But Paul King’s Wonka isn’t a remake at all. It’s Willy Wonka’s origin story—the musical version. Who asked for that? I don’t know. But I loved it.

The story follows young Willy, a broke orphan raised in the jungle who, like every other person on the damn planet, dreams of becoming a chocolatier in the big city. During his first night on the town, Willy—who is illiterate because he “focused his studies almost exclusively on chocolate”—ends up enslaved in an innkeeper’s basement. 

That’s where he meets his best friend, called Noodle. Noodle dropped down the laundry chute as a baby and also ended up a captive of the innkeepers. She’s “damaged” and upset because nothing rhymes with her name. (She’s so upset, she sings about this—although later they discover some rhymes.) 

With the help of Noodle and Co., Willy manages to create a market for his chocolates. The city delights in his confectioneries made from the “mallow marshes of Peru” and the “bittersweet tears of Russian cloud.” But then the local chocolate cartel gets threatened by its peasant competition. Mrs. Bon Bon calls the police. The police chief, who is bribed by the cartel, orders all his officers to ban Willy from making chocolate.

Everyone, from the cartel to the chief of police to the church monks, wants Willy to fail. They fine him for daydreaming, dishearten him, disgrace him. They extort him—offering to bail his friends out of slavery in exchange for his exile to the North Pole. And then, there’s a try at homicide.

But this is America—or at least, somewhere like it—and sometimes an illiterate orphan born in the jungle really does make it. 

For an hour and 56 minutes, I was charmed by a world where it rains gumballs and commoners eat giraffe-milk macaroons. Where Hugh Grant is an orange Oompa Loompa nicknamed Shorty Pants and Timothée Chalamet is brought back to his theater-kid roots, earnest and endearing, singing and dancing like a pro.

The movie is a sugar rush for the eyes and a reminder for the soul: hold on to your imagination. That’s where paradise is. 

Best Fairy Tale-Turned-Horror Show: Priscilla by Margi Conklin

Watching Priscilla is like being trapped for two hours in an uncomfortable box. That’s likely how director Sofia Coppola wants us to feel, watching the story of an innocent teenager who became a kept woman, imprisoned by a king in his castle. 

When Priscilla Beaulieu is cherry-picked by Elvis Presley at a party on a German army base, she is just 14 to his 24. And seeing Cailee Spaeny, who plays Priscilla—all tiny, fragile, and doll-like—next to Jacob Elordi’s Elvis, a six-foot-five hunk of burning machismo, is enough to make you squirm. 

But I couldn’t turn away. This hypnotic movie had me transfixed. 

If, like me, you don’t know Priscilla’s backstory, it’s a shock. When she’s 16, her parents allow her to leave the family home and live on the grounds of Graceland. While he tours the world and beds other women, she goes to Catholic school by day and wanders the halls of his mansion by night, alone and friendless, pining for her man. 

Her life is a monotony until Elvis comes home, and then it’s a whirlwind of drugs and guns and shopping and heavy petting (he won’t have sex with her until their wedding night). He is often lonesome and moody and cruel to Priscilla, choosing what she wears, telling her to dye her hair black, forcing her to stay sequestered when he goes off to Hollywood to shoot movies.

Finally, they marry and Priscilla makes love to her man. But after she gets pregnant on their wedding night, he spurns her almost immediately.

You know why she puts up with it. She’s stuck, and in love with a god. But Elvis, a man loved by every woman on the planet at one point, could never truly love her, the movie suggests, because he never loved himself.

Based faithfully on Priscilla’s memoir, Elvis and Me, the fairy tale is actually a horror show, first wrapped up in creamsicle colors, then turning sharper and more realistic as she wakes from her dream, faced with a grim choice.

Ultimately, the movie is about Priscilla’s liberation from Elvis. The final scene is a triumph and you root for her. But at the same time, it fails to satisfy when we all know this isn’t the ending for real-life Priscilla, who will forever be known as Elvis’s wife and never break free from the Presley curse.

Best Foreign Porn: Saltburn by Suzy Weiss

Saltburn is a story about coveting thy neighbor’s sick castle. 

It starts in familiar territory: an awkward but brilliant boy, Oliver Quick—played tightly by Barry Keoghan—dropped onto the groomed grounds of Oxford, is desperate to fit in with the sparkly crowd. Their king, Felix Catton, languid and at home in the world, played by an eyebrow-pierced Jacob Elordi, takes a liking to Oliver. After Oliver regales Felix with a trauma tale of his drug-addled parents and poor upbringing, Felix invites him to stay at his posh family’s stately manor for the summer. 

The next two hours are at turns sinister, dreamy, voyeuristic, homoerotic, and regular erotic, but never boring.

Felix’s mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) gets the best lines of the movie: when a character commits suicide, she quips, “She’d do anything for attention.” Or after Oliver is surprised to learn her daughter has an eating disorder: “Well, exactly! Hasn’t even helped. Complete waste of time.” 

Oliver, meanwhile, is obsessed with Felix and his dreamy life in all its hedonism and pomp (his family wears black tie for weeknight dinners). But the tables are turned when Felix takes Oliver on a surprise trip to see his poor, downtrodden mother, and discovers that Oliver has kept a shocking secret.

“Look, I just gave you what you wanted. Like everyone else does,” Oliver says to Felix during a confrontation at his birthday party. “Doesn’t this just prove how much of a good friend I actually am?” 

There’s been a lot of nit-picking over character believability and plot holes in this movie, which is probably valid. But director Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) has delivered something shocking, original, and fun. 

For all the talk of blue bloods being cold-blooded, Saltburn is about the hot-blooded outcome when envy and desire become one.

Worst Propaganda Film: Leave the World Behind by Olivia Reingold

My happy place is in bed with an apocalyptic thriller on my laptop (yes, I’m a cord-cutting millennial with no TV). The bleaker, the better. 

But the genre has been dead for a while. 

We sadists could only be tided over by HBO’s (now Max) sublime The Last of Us for so long. So when the holidays came, and we were surrounded by our families—puke—we needed an apocalyptic pick-me-up more than ever. 

The only thing on offer is Leave the World Behind, the new Netflix drama about the end of the world—if it is indeed ending (its major innovation is to keep you guessing on that front). But beggars can’t be choosers, so I reluctantly watched the film on the lowest volume possible, careful not to wake my three-year-old nephew asleep in the next room. 

It’s an okay way to spend two and a half hours. If you’re a junkie for this stuff, you’ll take anything. But it’s not the good stuff—it’s no Children of Men or Cloverfield. The parts I like show the characters trying to figure out how this is all happening​​—who could be attacking us and how do we get medicine now? It’s worse when it veers into social commentary, like the time a young black character (played by Myha’la) bristles at a comment a white New Yorker (Julia Roberts) makes about her hair. I grit my way through a few scenes that have the dynamic of a Karen-BIPOC showdown. And a handyman, played by Kevin Bacon, gets the QAnon treatment, although it accidentally flatters him, since he’s the only one who knows what the hell is going on.

Perhaps it makes sense that the film is a product of Barack and Michelle Obama’s production house, Higher Ground, which is dedicated to “elevating new and diverse voices in the entertainment industry.”

Obama, if you’re reading, please don’t let the social justice warriors come to the apocalypse next time. I’d like to think that if the world is burning, no one cares about microaggressions anymore. 

In 2024, I’d like movies to take us back to apocalypses in which groups decide whether or not to team up with strangers based on how many cans of beans they have, not if they’re people of color.

Keep the wokes out of my culture. Make the apocalypse scary again. 

Worst Movie to Watch with Your Grandparents: Poor Things by Francesca Block

Few things are cringier than watching graphic sex scenes in a movie theater while sitting next to your grandma, but that’s where I found myself when I jovially invited my family to join me for a viewing of Poor Things, the sci-fi comedy nominated for seven Golden Globes.

The film is based on a 1992 book of the same name by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, which I now have no intention of reading. 

It features Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), the body of a socialite who has been implanted with an infant’s brain, as she discovers herself (and her sexual desires) in a fantastical version of what I think is Victorian-era London. 

Willem Dafoe plays the surgeon/mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (who the characters aptly refer to as “God”), whose face looks like a patchwork of skin grafts sewn together like a rag doll. God enjoys melding together different animals and body parts, and Bella is his next, most unpredictable, project. 

Bella starts out as a child—portrayed in black and white film—stomping around the mansion, throwing tantrums and giving in to her bodily impulses. But she quickly grows up, learning 15 new words a day and discovering that there is an outside world she wishes to explore. 

Despite God’s trepidations, Bella joins Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, who sports a fabulous mustache and an accent I couldn’t place) on an adventure full of saturated colors and constant sexcapades (which Bella calls “furious jumping”).

Bella encounters the world as it is: whimsical and warm, full of adventure and opportunity, but also pessimistic and cruel. Her naivete is at times refreshing, her boldness admirable and amusing. It’s oddly satisfying to watch her break free from the control of others—as long as you can suppress the strange voice in your head telling you this film appears to be glorifying pedophilia and convincing you that sexual promiscuity is the only path to true enlightenment. 

This movie wasn’t my cup of tea, and I have no intention of ever seeing it again or recommending it to anyone I know. 

But to my surprise, when the credits started to roll, my grandma turned to me, her eyes wide and bright, and declared it “genius,” even “Machiavellian.” The woman with blue hair sitting behind us in the theater agreed, and then told me she just loves Mark Ruffalo. Make of that what you will. 

Best Period Thriller on the Edge: The Zone of Interest by Peter Savodnik

The best part of The Zone of Interest is what you don’t see: the Jews, the selections, the gas chambers. You can hear it and you can listen to other people talking about it. But you can’t quite make it out. 

If Schindler’s List was an attempt to recreate in granular, mawkish detail the experience of the Holocaust, the unstated thesis of The Zone of Interest is that that experience cannot be recreated, that any attempt to do so reduces the suffering.

Instead, director Jonathan Glazer parachutes us into the bucolic world adjacent to the world of Auschwitz-Birkenau: the villa inhabited by commandant Rudolf Höss; his wife, Hedwig; and their five children. The lovely two-story house; the garden; the pool. The surreality of an upper-middle-class German family doing ordinary things—eating dinner, going to school, going to bed, having a drink—while an extraordinary evil is perpetrated next door. We can’t see the horror. We are confined to the penumbra of it.

Of course, that’s where the interesting things happen. 

Inside the inferno is pure darkness. Outside, far away, is innocence or, at least, plausible deniability. 

But along the edge of evil, inside the proverbial zone of interest, in which characters close their windows to prevent the ashes of dead Jews from leaving a film on their kitchen counter—that is where the inner tumult, the fear of what will happen to one’s soul, plays out.

The commandant and his wife—dubbed “the Queen of Auschwitz”—maintain the steeliness we expect. They seem incapable of any human impulse. Rudolf Höss, played brilliantly by Christian Friedel, oversees the world’s most efficient killing machine. Hedwig Höss, played by the charmless and very believable Sandra Hüller, pretends not to know what her husband does while letting on that she knows exactly what he does. At night, after the kids are in bed, he has sex in his office with Jewish women who may soon be gassed, and then rinses off in an underground bathroom.

But there are barely perceptible wrinkles: Höss’s mother-in-law, while visiting, glimpses a smokestack in the distance billowing flame and smoke; soon after, she leaves without a word. Höss, toward the end of the movie, appears to glimpse the future—in which being a Nazi is the worst thing anyone can be—and then retches. (This anticipates Höss returning to the Church at the end of his life and apparently suffering an existential crisis—shortly before his execution.)

There are, as Glazer knows, as Martin Amis, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, knew, many “zones of interest.” None are as cinematic as the paradise that Höss built. All are shot through with the same wonderings and nightmares. They are the places on the outside, but really, they are where the action takes place. They are where we discover who we are

Best YA Prequel Adaptation: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Julia Steinberg

I first read The Hunger Games as a teenager—the same age as the children (called “tributes”) who fight to the death in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. 

Now I’m 21 and still enthralled by the series.

The latest film from the franchise, which takes place 64 years before the first Hunger Games installment, is the prequel story of Corialanus “Coryo” Snow, who becomes the president of Panem, the dystopian successor to the United States, and is the antagonist of the original series. 

Snow, portrayed by 28-year-old Tom Blyth, is the heir to one of Capitol’s aristocratic families, which is now in decline. The prequel explores his rise to power as an Academy student who plans on returning his family to their former wealth and glory. Instead of using test scores to decide who will receive a prestigious scholarship to the university, Capitol leadership tells 24 top students that their mentees’ performance in the 10th annual Hunger Games will determine who receives the award. 

Snow, who has the highest grades but no money to afford the university, is determined to win, despite being paired with the tribute with the greatest odds of losing—Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler). In classic YA fashion, the two fall in love, though the relationship is facilitated by Snow’s ambition. 

Snow is successful because he realizes that spectacle is everything. He earns the ear of Head Gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis) by proposing that, to boost falling viewership in the Capitol, the audience must have a connection with the tributes. For example, Snow coaches Lucy Gray to sing to gain the attention of Capitol viewers in exchange for gifts sent to the arena. 

But Snow’s attachment to Lucy Gray reminds us that this handsome schemer is responsible for the deaths of thousands both through his role as a gamemaker and through his eventual leadership of Panem. As the audience roots for Snow’s success, we are alienated from his future crimes—it’s hard to root against a hot young actor versus an old man (with apologies to Donald Sutherland, who plays Snow in the original film series).

Ultimately, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes falls into the very trap that Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins masterfully highlighted in her trilogy. While her series offered a postmodern reflection on spectacle, the movie never steps far enough away from its own fireworks to make the same critique. But, if you want to lean into the spectacle, it's a great way to spend two and a half hours.