Best Pictures #111: 2024 (97th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: I'm Still Here

by A.J.

Best Pictures #111: 2024 (97th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee:

I'm Still Here

“Then one day when we went by, [the house] was completely closed and there was police guarding it.” 

Is it wrong to call a movie about something so devastating and tragic wonderful? That is how I felt after watching I'm Still Here, based on the true story of the Paiva family and what they endured under the military dictatorship in 1970’s Brazil. It would be a disservice to use any of the cliched blurbs and one liners that typically get applied to movies based on true stories: triumphant; powerful; a story about the power of the human spirit. All of these things are true but I’m Still Here is so well-made and so deeply affecting that it stands above prepackaged praise or comparison to other movies. I would not have seen it if not for its Best Picture nomination, but I'm very glad I did because this is indeed one of the best pictures of 2024.

The movie begins with a portrait of family life that is simultaneously idyllic–not idealized–and average. They live in a nice house that is walking distance from the beach in Rio de Janeiro. Their house is filled with relatives and friends. One of the 5 Paiva children adopts a stray dog. The teenagers love rock music, especially The Beatles. They like books, make home movies, and take lots of pictures. The parents, Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and Rubens (Selton Mello) are gentle and warm. Also army vehicles drive by in the background of a day at the beach. The grownups talk about the big news story of a kidnapped ambassador. The oldest teenage daughter and her friends are stopped at a checkpoint, their IDs checked, car searched, and eventually sent on their way. Later she goes to school in London and the family gathers around to watch a home movie she sent of an English winter filled with exotic snow–her letter says that it feels weird not to go to the beach at Christmas. It is a wonderful family moment. Then men in regular clothes with guns arrive at the house and say that Ruebens has to come with them. He gets in a car and is never seen again.

Another movie, a lesser movie, would arrive at this moment sooner. After all, every screenwriting class and book says to make the first act as short as possible, 15-20 minutes, 10 if you can. By delaying the inciting incident director Walter Salles and screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega make this movie truly a story about a family–not an event–whose lives are disrupted and forever changed by outside forces in the form of political violence. It was also a wise choice to background the dictatorship and any sense of politics in the extended first act. We get lulled into a false sense of security. I think anyone who watches this movie will secretly hope like I did that we get to just spend the whole movie with the Paivas and whatever they get up to. This only helps to deepen the profound loss and irrevocable change dealt to the family.

In addition to a generous screenplay, the emphasis on characters and family life works so well because of the talent and skill on camera, especially in the incredible and wonderful performance of Fernanda Torres as Eunice. The brilliance of Torres’s performance is in her command of expression. She puts on a brave face for the children while conveying fear and uncertainty to the audience. Eunice endures so much, whether it is her being imprisoned along with her daughter, Eliana, and interrogated and played mind games with—thankfully both are released—or the less direct but no less stinging injustice of not being able to take money out of the bank without her husband, who is not legally dead. The low-key defiance of Eunice, while still ensuring the safety of her children, is unquestionably believable because of Torres.   

A subtle but important part of I'm Still Here is the production design and the costumes and hairstyles. Everything looks like old photographs of the 1970's; that is to say that the characters' clothes and hair, especially on the youths, looks more like the reality of the era. The hip pretty teenagers look like people trying to look like movies and magazines instead of looking like modern people with their hair and makeup done up in a glamorous, retro style. This is true for the adults as well. The same goes for the house and the cars.  Everything looks like it is lived in and used all the time. This goes a long way to setting this true story in a true feeling time and place. Walter Salles's own experiences growing up in Rio as a teenager at this time, especially knowing the Pavia family, no doubt played a major part in capturing the authenticity of this moment in time and these people. In an interview with Variety he recalls, “There was such a vitality to the house. It was a place we all wanted to drift through…Then one day when we went by, it was completely closed and there was police guarding it. You can imagine the shock.”

I'm Still Here is about depressing things but it is not a depressing movie. Receiving a death certificate after decades of legal fights may seem like a morbid triumph, but by this point we know how much it means. Eunice insists that her family smile in photographs, even for a news story about what they have suffered. Those smiles show that they are still a family, still together. Flashforwards deliver a sense of closure and may feel redundant, especially given the epilogue cards, but they are welcome moments. The final scene features an elderly Fernanda Montenegro (Torres’s real life mother who was the first Brazilian actress nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, also for a Walter Salles movie, Central Station (1998); her daughter is the second). It is a small but beautiful moment. This is the kind of movie that seems like homework or eating your vegetables. However, despite its subject matter I'm Still Here is not a chore to get through; ultimately you come away feeling thankful for the experience

Nominees: Maria Carlota Bruno and Rodrigo Teixeira, Producers

Director: Walter Salles Screenplay: Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega; based on I'm Still Here by Marcelo Rubens Paiva

Cast: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro

Production Companies: VideoFilmes, RT Features, MACT Productions, Arte France Cinéma, Conspiração, Globoplay

Distributor: Sony Pictures Releasing (Brazil), StudioCanal

Release Date: February 7th, 2025

Total Nominations: 3, including Best Picture

Other Nominations: Actress-Fernanda Torres; International Picture

Best Pictures #109: 2024 (97th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: A Complete Unknown

 by A.J.

Best Pictures #109: 2024 (97th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

A Complete Unknown

“Don’t think twice, it’s alright.”

If I wanted to show someone a movie that captured the appeal of the enigmatic and mysterious and prickly person of Bob Dylan, beyond just the songs he wrote and sung, I would show them Todd Hayne’s 2007 non-biopic I’m Not There, in which six different actors played Bob Dylan-like characters in different stories (Cate Blanchett as the sunglasses hipster Dylan who goes electric is the stand out of the film and received a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination). Director James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, based on the book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald, is a very well-made and entertaining, if standard feeling, film about the musician. This is technically a biopic, but it is less a biography than a dramatization of some of the events in Bob Dylan’s career from his beginnings in 1961 through the infamous and consequential Newport Folk Festival in 1965 where Dylan famously, or notoriously, “went electric.” 

Young Bob Dylan (Timothee Chalamet) arrives in New York to meet the legendary Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) at a hospital so empty and bleak it reminded me of the hospital where Michael Corleone had to save his comatose father from hitmen in The Godfather. (Guthrie had Huntington’s Disease but I don’t remember if this is mentioned). Guthrie’s regular visitor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) is there and offers the young musician a place to stay and introduces him to the burgeoning folk music scene. There is nothing of Bob Dylan before he arrives in New York. This isn’t an attempt to explain or understand Dylan—neither the real Dylan nor fans then or now would want that because the mystique, the poetic enigma, is the appeal of not Bob Dylan, but “Dylan.” They’re right of course. There are no scenes showing how or why he came up with his songs; such scenes would be hacky and feel blatantly false. A true feeling moment happens when Dylan confesses that he hates talking about his music because when people ask “where do your songs come from?” they’re really asking, why didn’t they come to me? An annoying moment comes when Sylvie (Elle Fanning, playing a composite character) finds a scrap of paper with lyrics from The Times They Are A Changin’ and recites them to a bashful Dylan. 

Whether he’s an annoying jerk (if you don’t want to be recognized then maybe comb your distinctive hair differently when you go out?) or a brilliant, innovative musician, Timothee Chalamet gives a great performance. He performed all of the songs live to camera, at the urging of co-star Edward Norton, and does a great job sounding like Bob Dylan, speaking and singing, without approaching parody. More importantly, he is believable as the kind of person who other people project their desires and aspirations onto and made people want to collaborate with him, be his mentor, his friend, his lover, even if he treated them poorly. Chalamet’s Oscar nomination may have been a foregone conclusion before the movie was even released, but it is still deserved. 

As good as Chalamet is, the real standouts are his co-stars, specifically Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, both of whom have also received Oscar nominations in the Supporting categories. Barbaro’s performance is especially noteworthy because this movie is so harsh to her character. In their scenes of conflict, as lovers or collaborators, the movie is firmly on Dylan’s side; after all he is the musical genius and she is just a singer (the movie’s sentiments, not my own). 

Norton’s great success with his portrayal of Pete Seeger, more than performing the music, also live, is in making his unbelievably kind and positive version of Seeger believable. Norton hasn’t played a character this optimistic and positive since Sheldon Mopes in Death to Smoochy, where he played another kind character who believed that music could change the world. 

James Mangold also directed the great Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005), a film so good that it could only be topped by the brilliant music biopic parody to end all music biopics, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, but the problem is that Hollywood kept making music biopics, A Complete Unknown included. As a Johnny Cash fan, the moments that made me perk up were the scenes of Dylan exchanging letters with Cash–I immediately recalled the scene in Walk the Line where Cash can’t remember what he did with the letter to that “young folk singer” because he wrote it on a paper bag because when he was drunk. I nodded approvingly. Much easier to notice is Mangold recycling an entire scene from Walk the Line in which Cash and June Carter play Dylan’s It Ain’t Me Babe while Cash’s wife Vivian looks on with heartbreak and anger. Here Dylan and Baez sing It Ain’t Me Babe while Elle Fanning’s Sylvie looks on, but emotions just aren’t there. Another element of Walk the Line that Mangold reuses, but to positive effect, is shooting concert scenes from the stage or backstage allowing for the spotlights to create brilliant silhouettes. 

Johnny Cash shows up at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where Dylan is about to displease the organizers and most of the audience when he “goes electric” and changes music history. Boyd Holbrook gives a great performance as Cash, playing him somewhere between comic relief and as an alternative mentor–someone who also bounced between genres while maintaining a rebel persona. He holds out his guitar to Dylan and Dylan taking it won me over. So Dylan wins again.

Dylan sours on Seeger and Baez because he has outgrown the whole folk scene, but no explanation or catalyst is given, just a jump in time and change of clothes and hair. The unknowability of “Dylan” becomes like a crutch because any flaw in Dylan’s character or change in behavior can be chalked up to the “unknowable genius” angle. Yes, no one can pin down why a creative person is creative, but at a certain point that becomes a cop out. You can probably guess what the final image of the movie will be; Mangold tries to draw it out and then, yes, it happens, epilogue cards and all.

Nominees: Fred Berger, James Mangold and Alex Heineman, Producers

Director: James Mangold

Screenplay: James Mangold and Jay Cocks; based on Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro

Production Companies: Searchlight Pictures, Veritas Entertainment Group, White Water, Range Media Partners, The Picture Company, Turnpike Films

Distributor: Searchlight Pictures

Release Date: December 25, 2024

Total Nominations: 8 including Best Picture

Other Nominations: Director-James Mangold; Actor-Timothée Chalamet; Supporting Actor-Edward Norton; Supporting Actress-Monica Barbaro; Adapted Screenplay-James Mangold and Jay Cocks; Sound-Tod A. Maitland, Donald Sylvester, Ted Caplan, Paul Massey and David Giammarco; Costume Design-Arianne Phillips

Best Pictures #108: 2024 (97th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: The Brutalist

by A.J.

Best Pictures #108: 2024 (97th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee

The Brutalist

“Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?”

The Brutalist begins with a powerful and most memorable image: refugees cramped and huddled on a ship pushing their way topside to their first view of the United States: the Statue of Liberty upside down. This chaotic, joyous sequence is among the best in the 3 1/2 hour movie, which includes an intermission. The rest of this epic length immigrant story about art, the post-second-world-war world, and the American dream comes close but never quite lives up to this brilliant opening.

The upside down view of the Statue of Liberty belongs to the fictional architect László Tóth, a Hungarian Jew and survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, played by Adrian Brody. After a brief stay in New York he arrives in Philadelphia to live and work with a cousin, played by the always good Alessandro Nivola, who immigrated years before, changed his name from Molnar to Miller, converted to Christianity, has a pretty blonde wife, and a small furniture business. He seems to be living the ideal immigrant life but none of it feels right to László, including the style of furniture. László’s opportunity to shine and be creative again comes when they are hired to renovate the library of a wealthy American businessman, Harrison Van Buren, played by the always good, but especially good here, Guy Pearce. Years pass and Van Buren tracks down László, now shoveling coal, to hire him to build a massive community center for the suburb of Doylestown, Van Buren’s getaway. With a few phone calls and letters Van Buren brings László’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece from Hungary to live with László on the Van Buren estate. Van Buren does this not so much for their well being but to make László a happy worker and show off how he can make seemingly anything happen.

If you are unfamiliar with the architectural style of brutalism, you will remain so because there is no scene explaining it or why László’s style is so striking and different. There’s only one scene where László talks about what his architecture makes him feel—it’s built to last—and Brody makes the most of it. In small moments like this and bigger ones, Brody’s performance, his best in recent years outside of a Wes Anderson movie, is a major part of what sustains The Brutalist through its runtime. Brody has earned an Oscar nomination for his performance and rightfully so. 

Guy Pearce, who has had a long and impressive career with performances to match, whether he is the do-gooder cop in LA Confidential or the tough guy action hero in Lockout (AKA Space Jail) has finally earned major recognition and also a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Pearce plays Van Buren as entitled and insidious as any supervillain, only he is far more disturbing and unsettling because he feels so realistic. Felicity Jones seems to get short shrift at first, and perhaps she does. Erzsébet used to report on foreign affairs in Hungary before the war, but we learn this only in passing. Her frustration with her new job—which Van Buren conjured up to keep her from distracting László—writing a "women’s column" is also dealt with only in passing. However, the climactic confrontation with Van Buren—an intense scene of pain and triumph through defiance—belongs to her. Jones’s performance, combined with the score and camerawork, make this another of the strongest scenes.

The liveliest scenes by far are of László designing and building. While still working for his cousin he creates a post-modern (brutalist) chair. The camera looks up at him as sparks fly into the bottom of the frame. This image was wisely used as the poster. Another memorable scene, perhaps the most visually stunning, is the awe inspiring sight of the world renowned marble quarry at Carras, Italy where entire sections of a mountain have been cut out and removed. The brilliant Oscar nominated cinematography Lol Crawley and score by Daniel Blumberg are at their best in these scenes, but unfortunately there are not enough of them. There is simply not enough brutalism in The Brutalist. 

The conflict between László and his ultra-wealthy, demanding, and unrealistic patron should be the main driving force of the movie but it is only one of many threads. There is also the immigrant story thread; the Holocaust survivor thread; the post-war American dream thread. Then there is the story of a marriage. When act two begins after the intermission, László is overcome with emotion at being reunited with his wife, but then their dynamic becomes hard to pin down. Is the strain they feel now a result of the trauma of the war and Holocaust? Or were there troubles in their marriage before the war? There is also László’s heroin addiction which seems to be a problem only when the movie needs it to be and forgotten about the rest of the time (I have no personal experience with the terrible drug but films like Trainspotting have led me to believe that a heroin addiction is not quite so manageable.). 

I really enjoyed director Brady Corbet's previous film, the strange portrait of a fictional pop star played by Natalie Portman in Vox Lux. There are aspects of The Brutalist that are unfortunately less strange and more odd. The use of a newsreel, whether authentic or created for the movie, to explain the idea of Pennsylvania is odd and unnecessary. Audio of an old newsreel explaining the dangers of heroin as László is on a bender is honestly more amusing than anything else. An epilogue set at the first Biennale in Venice in the 1980’s that raises more questions than it answers is another odd choice. The screenplay co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold has the makings of an epic tale but lacks focus. So The Brutalist presents the surprising conundrum of a 3 ½ hour movie being both too long and too short. 

Nominees: Nick Gordon, Brian Young, Andrew Morrison, D.J. Gugenheim and Brady Corbet, Producers

Director: Brady Corbet

Screenplay: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold

Cast: Adrian Brody, Guy Pierce, Felicity Jones

Production Companies: Brookstreet Pictures, Kaplan Morrison

Distributor: A24

Release Date: December 20th, 2024

Total Nominations: 10, including Best Picture

Other Nominations: Actor-Adrian Brody; Supporting Actor-Guy Pierce; Supporting Actress-Felicity Jones; Director-Brady Corbet; Original Screenplay-Brady Corbet,Mona Fastvold; Cinematography-Lol Crawley; Editing-Dávid Jancsó; Production Design-Judy Becker (production designer),Patricia Cuccia (set decorator); Original Score-Daniel Blumberg

Best Pictures #107: 2024 (97th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee: Nickel Boys

by A.J

Best Pictures #107: 2024 (97th) Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee:

Nickel Boys

"This is just one place. There are Nickels all over this country."

It is not necessarily a bad sign for a movie to have a gimmick, whether it is being done in one take (Aleksandr Sokurov’ Russian Ark), or only seeming to be one take (Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Birdman), or being shot over time as the actors age (Richard Linklakter’s Boyhood). The gimmick of Nickel Boys, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Colson Whitehead, is that the film is shot entirely from the first person point of view of both of its main characters. I'm not sure that the dual POV enhances the experience or substance of the movie but it at least does no harm. Thankfully there is more, much more, to Nickel Boys than its gimmick.

Set in the Jim Crow Florida of the 1960s, the story follows Elwood from his early childhood with his adoring and caring grandmother played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor to him being a teenager (Ethan Herisse) given the opportunity to attend college classes at a technical school. He just needs a way to get there and unfortunately hitches a ride from a stranger in a flashy stolen car and Elwood’s future goes from bright to bleak. Instead of prison Elwood is sent to the Nickel Academy. On the surface it is a reform school and home; it certainly seems that way looking at the boys on the white side who are pretty happy playing football, but things are different on the segregated black side which more resembles a work camp or prison than a school. Elwood befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson) who has been at Nickel longer and has a hardened, cynical, if not realistic, outlook while Elwood retains a sense of social justice. 

Director RaMell Ross, in his confident and impressive feature film debut, has a great sense for effective storytelling, especially in knowing what of the abuses to show, what to hold back, and what to imply. It is a wise choice to present the Nickel as an insidious thing because it lures us into the false sense of security that many of its “students” surely felt. When Elwood and Turner overhear the Nickel headmaster (Hamish Linklater) ask a student to take a dive in the boxing match we know that only bad things will happen. Flashforwards show an adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs) reading news stories about graves and bodies being uncovered on the grounds of the since closed academy. More affecting than any depiction of abuse or violence is a flashforward of Elwood meeting another Nickel survivor, Chickie Pete (Craig Tate), at a bar. Their session of “remember when” turns dark and terrible when Pete recalls the abuse he and others ensured. It is a brief but moving performance by Tate and Ross knows this is all we need to understand what the Nickel boys endured and survived.

Perhaps even more than the difficult subject matter, the dual point of view perspectives might be the most difficult barrier to entry for audiences. Other movies shot from a first person point of view have certainly given me headaches and confusion. However, here Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray use a delicate touch and after the opening sequence of Elwood's childhood the cinematography finds a nice rhythm and is easy to follow. The shifts between Elwood and Turner are easy to keep track of for the most part. Scenes of them talking to each other end up being no different from conventional shot-reverse-shot camera work. The flashforwards have the camera behind a character's head and some confusion may ensue but astute viewers may pick up on Ross's decision for this new perspective. Another shot of the grandmother remains confusing–whose perspective was that?

Nickel Boys is an arthouse film I suppose, even so it remains accessible and moving while conveying the horrors and trauma endured by black youths at such "schools" (Nickel Academy itself may be fictitious but it is based on very real counterparts). There are interstitial moments that I can only assume are in the imaginations of the characters based on bits of news they hear (these serve to let the audience know the passage of time). Still, the impression I got was that Ross is less concerned with impressing audiences than telling a story in an affecting way. The human story is strong and does not become lost in the method, but I have a feeling that Nickel Boys is more likely to be remembered and studied for its cinematic techniques and experimental approach. Nevertheless, this film has stayed on my mind while other 2024 Best Picture nominees have not.

Nominees: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Joslyn Barnes, Producers

Director: RaMell Ross

Screenplay: RaMell Ross & Joslyn Barnes; based on The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

Production Companies: Orion Pictures, Plan B Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Louverture Films

Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Release Date: December 13th, 2024

Total Nominations: 2, including Best Picture

Other Nominations: Best Adapted Screenplay-RaMell Ross & Joslyn Barnes

13 Nights of Shocktober: Interview With the Vampire

 by A.J.

Night 6: Vampire Night

“I’m going to give you the choice I never had.”

Interview With the Vampire

There are only a handful of vampire movies that are so influential that they change the way people think about the undead creature and how they are portrayed in future movies. Among them are F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and the 1994 big screen adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Interview With the Vampire.

Anne Rice’s novel, first published in 1975, not only had the vampire as the main character, but the vampire wasn’t a villain. These vampires have complex personalities: moody, brooding, and profoundly sad. The novel and movie are best described as drama rather than horror; the characters undergoing an existential crisis just happen to be vampires. 

As the title would suggest, the story is structured as an interview taking place in the present day (early 1990’s) between a radio journalist (Christian Slater) and a mysterious pale man who claims he is a vampire. Perhaps the journalist is putting together the most macabre episode of This American Life. The vampire is Louis (Brad Pitt) and he tells the story of his life as a vampire. This was a major role for Pitt that would help launch him to superstardom, but it is Tom Cruise as the charismatic, dastardly vampire Lestat who gives the standout performance. The casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat caused uproar and controversy at the time, which was quite a feat in the pre-internet era. His movie star persona seemed at odds with the character of Lestat who is more or less a villain in this story and anti-hero in later Rice novels. Rice was very publicly against the casting of Tom Cruise. She went as far as advocating for fans of the book to boycott the movie and saying that casting Cruise as Lestat was like casting Edward G. Robinson as Rhett Butler. However, after seeing the finished film she would publicly retract her protests and even took out a full page ad in the New York Times praising Cruise’s performance. In Cruise’s career, this performance really does stand out. It’s one of the few times he's played a villain and one of the few times he’s really gone broad with a performance, which is just what the movie needs. Lestat shows the appeal of being a vampire: he embraces having no remorse, overindulging in luxury and the superiority he feels as an immortal. Pitt’s Louis bears the weight of conscience and remorse and the disadvantages of immortality. Each character is overbearing in their own way, but since Lestat is the more lively of the pair his impatience with Louis feels surprisingly welcome, and adds some humor.

In a moment of weakness Louis attacks and feeds on a small girl and Lestat turns 12 year-old Claudia into a vampire child. Kirsten Dunst’s performance as Claudia is brilliant, proof of her innate abilities as an actress. They form a vampire family and these scenes are amusing in a dark comedy sort of way. These happy times are short lived and Louis and Claudia leave for Paris in search of other vampires and answers to their questions about their own existence.

There is a strong and blatant streak of homoeroticism throughout the film between Louis and Lestat and later between Louis and the old world vampire Armand (Antonio Banderas). A newer adaptation would explore this more, in fact, the recent TV series, very loosely based on the book, does just that. However, here the subtext is so loud that a more explicit or direct portrayal does not seem necessary. It’s obvious that Louis and Lestat are in a relationship, however toxic. When Lestat turns Claudia into a vampire it comes across like having a child to save a failing marriage; this turns out to be a mistake for both humans and vampires. 

There is a fair amount of violence and horror effects, but because of the overall tone of the movie they hit differently than in a straightforward horror movie. They are usually punctuated by humor or sadness. Only in the climax, which almost feels like an action scene, are the horror effects played for shock. Special effects master Stan Winston (whose other credits Terminator 2, The Monster Squad, Batman Returns, and Jurassic Park) created the vampire effects and makeup. When Claudia attempts to murder Lestat by poisoning him and slitting his throat, Winston and the effects team built an emaciated animatronic Tom Cruise that writhes dying on the ground. This effect remains impressive even today. 

This is a brilliant movie worthy of the lasting influence it has had on vampire stories and horror in general. You can watch it with a horror hesitant viewer since it is more of a drama than outright horror. Thanks to the well-played, deep emotions on display it has a great effect on a wide swath of people. No matter how many other versions or remakes, even if they are good, Interview With the Vampire will stand alone, unchanging and forever captivating.

Interview With the Vampire is available to stream on Max and free on Tubi.