Gangs of New York (2002)

Imagine your tenth favorite food. Not your top favorite, your tenth favorite. You love this food, but you don’t personally identify with it. You enjoy it a lot, but it isn’t incorporated into your being. This is something you have a few times a year, at the very most once a month. Now imagine that you eat this at least once a week, if not more like every other day.

That is the state of biopics in 2026.  From Walk the Line, to Bohemian Rhapsody, to this year’s Michael, Hollywood has accumulated a bevy of well-made and well-acted biopics that are perfectly enjoyable and maybe even inspiring.  A24’s Tony could not fit more perfectly into this collection.  But that is both a positive and a negative.  If you rarely see biopics, at most once a year, then this movie is going to come off as a tense, fresh, and well-crafted take on a celebrity’s life.  But if you keep up with movies on a regular basis and see, say, three to five biopics per year, this might feel a little bit like well-trodden ground. 

Tony shares a lot in common with recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.  Both films focus on a young white man, who possesses more arrogance than there are stars in the universe, involved with a young woman who fluctuates between despising him and being in love with him depending on how honest he is about his life.  There are notable differences, and certainly neither film can be accused of “recycling” when they are both based on real figures, but the story structure remains the same.  Both even take place in roughly the same region of the United States. 

Directed by renowned filmmaker, Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away is about a girl named Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragi/Daveigh Chase) on a journey to rescue her parents who have been turned into pigs. Her family had mistakenly wandered into the spirit world, and it’s up for Chihiro to get them all out.

Despite being only 10 years old, Chihiro is a strong and well rounded protagonist. She does whatever it takes to save her parents, including working at a bathhouse run by a witch named Yubaba (Mari Natsuk, Suzanne Pleshette).

This is a beautifully animated film that not only won many awards, but won for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy. Funny enough, I actually didn’t like the film when I first saw it — I was eight and dumb. But years later, I gave the film another watch and it became one of my favorite films. Maybe I didn’t like it at first because it was just so strange and different compared to other films I’ve seen. It was the first foreign film I watched and it got me interested in Japanese animation.