Shake Your Groove Thing

“SEE IT IN 70MM” scream the posters for Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. Dwarfing the movie’s title, and its star’s name (Amanda Seyfried), the poster is the most egregious and borderline insulting development in the “premium format” trend of the last few years. I have nothing against IMAX, but without a car in Baltimore City, there’s no way to see anything in IMAX. Photochemical film projection is dead and gone in the city as well, with zero new releases being screened on 35mm or 70mm, and only a couple of revivals per year at The Charles and The Senator. Both programs, curated by John Standiford, are as good as it gets given that they’re the only revival series in the entire city. As I’ve written before, the popularity of new releases and revivals inverted after the pandemic, and now you’re more likely to be boxed in during a revival of Jacques Tati’s Playtime or an Akira Kurosawa movie than the latest from Josh Safdie, Mary Bronstein, or Bradley Cooper.

A lot of people assume “revival” automatically means 35mm projection. The Charles’ program notes clearly state which films are projected via DCP, but most people don’t know what a “Digital Cinema Package” is, and anyone born after 2012 never experienced consistent photochemical projection simply by going to the movies. If you saw a movie before the 2010s, you saw it on film. There were a handful of digitally equipped theaters in the 2000s thanks to George Lucas, but the format didn’t take off until Avatar at the very end of the decade. Now, it’s been long enough that film can be marketed as a fetish commodity, a “premium format” discarded just over a decade ago because of all of its technical problems, inconsistencies, and expense.

Fine with me, but could you please train some fucking projectionists and send them to Baltimore? Maybe throw in a couple projectors, too. Not a single film print has screened at The Senator since Oppenheimer in July 2023. Seven years ago, I saw a pristine print of Robert Altman’s California Split there. That’s not happening anymore, and after a couple years of 70mm—and now VistaVision—hype, it still hasn’t left the coasts. Why can’t Baltimore be more like Chicago? They’ve got the Music Box, they have projectionists, they screen prints and DCPs. God knows the audience is here for photochemical: when I saw Playtime at The Charles in 2018, there were maybe 15 other people there; last week, it was nearly sold out, everyone totally in tune with the movie. Keep in mind this isn’t an anniversary or restoration release, nor is it a film that’s been cited by one of many Oscar hopefuls—it’s simply a classic of world cinema, an art form that more and more people are clearly interested in.

So films like The Testament of Ann Lee should be doing well. And it is: like The Brutalist, which Fastvold co-wrote with Brady Corbet, the movie was made for under $10 million and is practically guaranteed to make a profit. There was—surprise—“zero interest” from the American film industry, but Fastvold pulled it off in Budapest, just like Corbet with The Brutalist (Corbet co-wrote The Testament of Ann Lee with Fastvold and acted as second unit director). Searchlight Pictures screwed up by releasing the movie so late in the season (it opened in Baltimore last Friday), a decision which likely cost Seyfried a deserved nomination for Best Actress. Seyfried is currently promoting her sleeper smash The Housemaid and a nomination for Ann Lee isn’t just a gimme, it’s deserved: along with Emma Stone, Seyfried is among the best actresses of her generation.

While The Brutalist went over familiar ground in 1950s America, Ann Lee covers a more obscure period of American history and its people. Seyfried stars as Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker offshoot of the Quakers. Her story is broadly familiar: traumatized and abused in youth, she grows up, has visions, and, firm in her belief in God, takes all the earthly punishment she knows is coming her way. Dragged through the mud, an angry mob lifts her dress. “No phallus! What has the witch done with it?” Badly injured, she survives but dies a year later, a new martyr and a new saint for a religion which, as of 2025, has, according to the end credits, retained exactly two members.

The Testament of Ann Lee is thrilling and alive in all of the ways that The Brutalist was ossified and faceless—Corbet’s film was uninspired and full of nth generation copies of everything from the performances to the writing to the production design. Adrien Brody, who won Best Actor over Timothée Chalamet, gave a performance of a performance, and Daniel Blumberg’s score was big and bold, a performance of an “epic” score. It wasn’t tongue in cheek or Brechtian, it was just inert. It was a “fake movie” as much as anything on Netflix right now.

You can sink your teeth into The Testament of Ann Lee. It’s a real movie, not radical or revolutionary in terms of form, but not phoned-in or high on its own supply. The story of Ann Lee is interspersed with songs, all good, and some impressive choreography you’ve likely glimpsed in the trailers. None of it comes off as goofy or pretentious, unlike Hamnet, the Oscar movie Ann Lee most closely resembles in type and tone. But of course Chloé Zhao’s film is run-of-the-mill trash; Ann Lee, while not revelatory, deserves every nomination that Hamnet received.

Most of The Brutalist crew returns here, proving that that’s movie’s problem was Corbet. Fastvold’s vibrant widescreen compositions are preferable to Corbet’s indecision and lack of feeling, and she elicits a powerful and moving performance from Seyfried, who never once looks like she’s “acting.” Adrien Brody doesn’t usually bug me, but his performance in The Brutalist veered into knowing self-parody, as if the actor knew his younger director didn’t know any better. Hey, it worked out for both of them.

I liked the movie a lot, but don’t like being taunted by its poster. “SEE IT IN 70MM.” Okay, well, I’s like to, but I can’t. I’m not taking a Lyft to White Marsh. Why don’t you train some projectionists, burnish their formerly strong union, and make photochemical film projection a possibility in every major American city? Searchlight and everyone else going in on “premium formats” probably assume that most people don’t know the difference—you see the poster, you think you’re going to see the movie in 70mm no matter where you see it. They’re not sending their best down here—they’re not sending anyone at all. Fuck New York, fuck Los Angeles, and fuck Chicago too, because I’m pissed I can’t see film projected and you should be too. As my friend Monica Quibbits says, “MOOD.”

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith