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Anora won the Academy Award for Best Picture but radically differs from traditional winners. Although Midnight Cowboy (1969) officially remains the only X-rated Best Picture, Anora should be X-rated for its explicit sex scenes. In an upset, Mikey Madison won Best Actress and Sean Baker won Oscars for Director, Original Screenplay, and Film Editing. Madison plays a nightclub stripper and prostitute who doesn't think she's a prostitute. Her tryst with the spoiled son of Russian oligarchs turns wild when his parents object to their marriage. In press interviews, Madison claims to be a shy and insecure actress, but you'd never know it from the profane and sordid role she plays. Mark Eydelshteyn is perfect as the man-boy son who alternates sex romps with videogames. Their "romance" trounces Hollywood norms. This film and Parasite, the Best Picture of 2019, paint disturbing views of wealth disparity and moral decay.

Emilia Pérez drew fire from diverse critics but is one of the year's best pictures. Conservatives attacked French writer/director Jacques Audiard for casting a transgender woman as a transgender woman. The film premiered during a U.S. election year when MAGAs made scapegoats of trans people to help return Donald Trump to the presidency. On the left, LGBTQ+ critics attacked the film's portrayal of transexuality. Mexicans mocked the bungled Spanish dialogue and harsh depictions of their culture. It didn't help that trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón spewed venom on social media. Controversies aside, this musical drama is innovative and interesting. Gascón plays a Mexican drug-cartel leader whose identity crisis is multidimensional. Zoe Saldaña plays an ambitious lawyer. This film takes surprising turns and was nominated for an impressive 13 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Actress (Gascón), and Supporting Actress (Saldaña).

A Complete Unknown dramatizes Bob Dylan's rise to fame from his 1961 arrival in New York to his electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Timothée Chalamet has wide latitude to play the reclusive Dylan in private moments, but his decision to play guitar and sing live on set (instead of lip-syncing or studio recording) was much more risky. He aces the test completely. So do Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, although no one can match Baez's diamond voice. Dylan lightly edited the script, and it's generally accurate, even when he's an asshole. Exceptions: Seeger wasn't present when Dylan visited the dying Woody Guthrie, and the hubbub over Dylan's electric-rock set at Newport is overdone. But this microscopic biopic vividly captures the early 1960s zeitgeist when American folk music began fading to the roar of amplified rock — and when Dylan risked rejection by marrying his poetry to the new sound.

Nosferatu remakes the original 1922 silent film and Werner Herzog's 1979 version. Writer/director Robert Eggers brings gloomy Gothic atmosphere to this horror thriller based on Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. In the tradition of Max Schreck in 1922 and Klaus Kinski in 1979, Bill Skarsgård plays Nosferatu the Vampire as a gruesome undead creature sharing nothing but appetite with the suave Bela Lugosi in Hollywood's 1931 reimagining. Nosferatu's obsession is Ellen Hutter, a newlywed prone to violent nightmares, haunting visions, and demonic seizures. Lily-Rose Depp (Johnny Depp's daughter) plays her to perfection. The superb supporting cast includes Willem Dafoe as a vampire hunter. Eggers' screenplay stays close to the 1922 and 1979 versions but overstretches the last act. Still, it's a brilliant homage to its antecedents that could stand alone without them.

Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy critiques reckless corporate commerce and rampant consumerism. It targets online impulse shopping, fast fashion, planned obsolescence, unrepairable gadgets, unrecyclable plastics, wasteful overproduction, and disposable products. In part, it's satirically structured as a corporate training video teaching how to maximize profit without regard to downstream effects. Interesting interviews include the former brand president of Adidas, a former Amazon user-experience (UX) designer, and the CEO of iFixit. Although this documentary reveals nothing new, it explains the unsustainable symbiosis of today's corporate and consumer cultures.

The Substance is too often hailed as a critique of ageism presented in the now-popular body-horror genre. Actually, it's an extreme body-horror creepshow that incidentally critiques ageism. If the former theme were the point, this disturbing film would finish about 30 minutes sooner, before it ends with a gross orgy of blood and gore. As for the ageism angle, Demi Moore plays a middle-aged Hollywood star rudely fired in favor of a younger babe. But the babe is her clone, the spawn of a mysterious black-market drug. When the babe abuses the drug, her has-been self devolves into a horrid freak. Although Moore was nominated for an Oscar and perhaps deserved it, the extremity of this Grand Guignol reprise probably disgusted the Academy's voters.

See more mini-reviews: I'm Not a Robot ... Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl ... Will & Harper ... Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley ... Megalopolis ... Cunk On Life ... The Greatest Night in Pop ... Lee ... Apollo 13: Survival ... Lisa Frankenstein ... Civil War ... Unfrosted ... The Bloody Hundredth ... Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces ... and hundreds more!

Tom's Inflation Calculator includes the latest U.S. government inflation data for 2024 plus alternative data sets. It's free and should run automatically in your web browser after clicking on the link above. By using historical data and forecasts, it can adjust U.S. dollar amounts for retail price inflation either forward or backward in time for any years between 1665 and 2100.

Tom's Inflation Calculator also includes the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index, which the Federal Reserve uses to guide its monetary policy. My inflation calculator is the best on the Internet!

Are you baffled by a technical term or acronym you've never seen before? Or just curious about the latest techie slang? Tom's Computer Dictionary may have the answer. From "AAC" to "zoo virus," it defines more than 900 terms in plain language. Learn to speak geek!

Tom's one-paragraph reviews of more than 1,900 movies and documentaries, including shorts, silents, independent productions, and experimental cinema. Special attention to old classics, film noir, science fiction, and horror thrillers!

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Unseen Photographs
of Haunted Franklin Castle

Franklin Castle is said to be Cleveland's most haunted house. Now you can see rare interior views I photographed in 1980 while guided through this spooky 1881 mansion by a ghost hunter. My photos have never been seen before! I shot two rolls of film that dark night, including infrared film in an attempt to capture phenomena beyond the spectrum of human vision. Follow this link to Franklin Castle as it was in 1980 — and will never be again!

On this page you can listen to rare recordings of English-language shortwave-radio broadcasts from Radio Havana in Cuba. In April 1972, I recorded these shows from an antique radio and learned about propaganda. One recording is "The Voice of Vietnam," with news of the Vietnam War from the communist side. Another is "Post Office Box 7026," which answers questions mailed by listeners from all over the world. These echoes from the past are historical, interesting, and amusing. The MP3 files will play in most web browsers.

"Partially Buried Woodshed" was an unorthodox earth artwork created in 1970 by Robert Smithson at Kent State University in Ohio. After an arson attack and decades of deterioration, only traces remain, and new campus buildings and parking lots occupy the site. I took numerous photographs of the artwork while it still existed in 1975–76. Now you can see a few, never before published.

Do you want to learn the most common major and minor guitar chords? Instantly transpose songs from one major key to another? Find out which major and minor chords go together? Play scales in any major key? Learn the notes on the fretboard? It's easy! And it's free! Just print Tom's Guitar Cheat Sheet.

 Nessie

 The First
 Photography
 Videogame!

Nessie is credited as the first videogame in which players use a virtual camera to take pictures of things inside the game. I created Nessie in 1984 and published the program's source code in a book for Atari computer users. It's a nonviolent game in which the goal is to take a clear picture of the legendary Loch Ness Monster. For the first time, here's the story behind the game's creation.

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Index to Tom's Articles

Here's an index to more than 500 of Tom's articles in Microprocessor Report, the insider's guide to microprocessors, networking chips, and mobile-phone chips. Learn about embedded processors, microcontrollers, digital-signal processors, and related topics. (TechInsights subscription required to read most articles.)

ROTator is an applet that lets you encode and decode text in the popular Internet format known as "ROT 13." Lots of other programs do that, but my applet goes further by allowing you to encode and decode text in any rotational letter-substitution format. You can shift the letters left or right, and you can shift them by any number of letters from ROT 1 to ROT 26. Use my all-new JavaScript version (recommended) or the original Java version.

How safe is your system from hostile Java applets? Find out with JSecure, one of Tom's free applets. JSecure harmlessly tests the security manager of your Web browser or applet viewer by trying to access information from your computer's operating system and hard disk. Try it today!

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BYTE Magazine Articles

Here's an index to more than 180 of Tom's computer articles from BYTE Magazine published from 1992 to 1998. (BYTE ceased publication with the July 1998 issue.) All of my articles are available online and some include the original photographs and figures.

• Tom's Mini Movie Reviews. Snappy reviews of recent movies, like those in the blue column at left. Reviews that scroll off the column land on the Mini Movie Reviews page.

• Shutterbug Articles. More than a dozen of Tom's photography articles from Shutterbug magazine are now online. Learn how to personalize your film speed, banish dust from your darkroom, make postcards, find the best deals on used cameras, create special effects with open flash, and more.
• The Death of BYTE Magazine. In 1998, after 23 years of operation, BYTE Magazine was folded by its new owner. To learn the inside story about what happened to the world's second personal computer magazine, see Tom's Unofficial BYTE FAQ.
• Tools for Web Builders. The hardware, software, programming tools, and books used to build this web site. Some tools may be useful to you, too.

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