He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
After parlaying her overnight success on HBO’s Euphoria into the blockbuster rom-com Anyone But You, Sydney Sweeney played against type in a string of movies that didn’t strike a chord with audiences. Her flop streak continued for a year, with underperformers such as the superhero dud Madame Web, the survival drama Eden, the neo-Western Americana, and the sports biopic Christy. The streak started with a direct-to-streaming thriller for which she received universal acclaim; the movie didn’t exactly break out at the time of its release, but it’s seeing a sudden spike on streaming following the return of Euphoria.
The controversial series premiered its long-delayed third season last week, and the timing couldn’t have worked out better for Sweeney. She’d just delivered her comeback vehicle, The Housemaid, which emerged as her highest-grossing hit. Also starring Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar, the twisty thriller was directed by Paul Feig. It grossed nearly $400 million worldwide against a reported budget of $35 million, and received positive reviews from critics and audiences alike. Sweeney is set to return alongside Michele Morrone and Feig for a sequel, which will also feature Kirsten Dunst.* The Housemaid* made it clear that audiences want to watch Sweeney in a particular kind of role. But you can’t fault her for trying to spread her wings.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
In 2023, Sweeney starred in the fact-based thriller film Reality, about Reality Winner, a whistleblower who leaked intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and received a five-year prison sentence for it. Winner was 25 years old at the time. The movie, directed by Tina Satter, was based on the actual transcript of the interrogation conducted by FBI officers before Winner’s arrest. A similar technique was used in last year’s Oscar contender The Voice of Hind Rajab, which featured actual voice recordings of a phone call to the Red Cross that a Palestinian child made before she was killed in Gaza. Reality holds a “Certified Fresh” 93% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads, “Reality’s narrow scope and gripping fact-based story add up to a riveting showcase for Sydney Sweeney in the title role.”
Reality was among the most-watched movies on the domestic HBO Max chart this week. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
Tina Satter, James Paul Dallas