This is kind of a sprawling piece, reacting to about a month’s worth of popular music and film. Unfortunately, to finish the piece, I’ll need to discuss the films Highest 2 Lowest (now available on VOD) and One Battle After Another (now in theaters) in-depth – if you’re cautious about spoilers, I recommend both films highly and to come back later.
Last month, my wife convinced me to attend Japanese pop artist Haru Nemuri’s concert at the Chop Shop in Chicago, one of few U.S. tour dates celebrating her new album, ekkolaptómenos. Nemuri’s music defies easy genre description, but “noise pop” with influence from riot grrl and nu-metal song structure would summarize it quickly. Her show was energizing, built on creating the crowd she wanted by encouraging a lot of audience participation and coming down from the stage to sing with us. Nemuri thanked us for being a safe audience for anarchism against fascism and bigotry, a place where the audience celebrated vulnerability, calls to free Palestine, with knowledge that touring in the U.S. under Trump is, to say the least, difficult.
We are past the phase of “interesting times” and find ourselves in violent times, with the United States government escalating violence domestically, at our borders, across the ocean in places like Gaza, even (cw: political violence) online. Like the violence of school shootings or civilian violence against public figures, these are largely not new campaigns, but they are escalating under current leadership. Not all art, or even good art, must respond to this moment – though if a film like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another or an album like Geese’s Getting Killed can do so, it does feel like a lightning bolt, doesn’t it?
While Getting Killed lacks One Battle After Another’s outwardly political theming, its wigged-out bombast is very much a companion. Life feels surreal, apocalyptic, absurd, and Cameron Winter’s wild vocals and abstract, absurd lyrics feel apropos as the soundtrack to painful nonsense. The arrangements themselves are upbeat, textured rock songs, sort of in that New York art rock T. Rex/Television space (you can find drummer Max Bassin citing both bands here) that stand out against the more patio-friendly rock of bands like Cindy Lee and Wednesday (both of whom I like a lot!)
Getting Killed manages to catch the zeitgeist of a freaked out world by giving it an escapism that isn’t so clean that it’s a processed, predigested foodstuff. I found Cameron Winter by accident four days before its release – I drove home from Chicago from that Haru Nemuri concert listening to new releases, and Winter’s (also great, more acoustic) solo album Heavy Metal happened to be the twelfth or thirteenth album in the lineup. After ten or so disappointments in a row, Heavy Metal shocked the system by being something new, a casual, intimate songwriting with an astonishing vibrato and voice. Getting into Geese a few days later only to see “they have an album releasing tomorrow” was a funny surprise, and it’s been a rush to get into them alongside so many other people.
In contrast, Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl has failed to meet the moment and displays that she does not have the quality control she once had. I did try to listen to The Life of a Showgirl – I have to agree that it’s flat out bad, the low whisper-singing on the verses and the octave jumps into the choruses more often actively annoying than they are familiar vehicles for verses, even on supposed highlights “The Life of Ophelia” and “Opalite.” And, yeah, I think “Eldest Daughter,” “Actually Romantic,” “Wood,” and “CANCELLED!” are embarrassing songs for a woman my age to release. But I say “tried” to listen to this album because so often, it’s just flat out boring music, and any distraction from the dog asking to go out and pee to a Discord ping is easy to pursue to escape listening carefully. Unlike many Swift agnostics, I think she’s had quality control issues as far back as 1989 – I’d happily drop the back half of that album. This is the first time where I can’t find anything as good as “The Tortured Poet’s Department” or “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” to highlight*. She only hit this new Drake-like insistence on releasing absolutely every scrap with Lover and the Taylor’s Version saga.
*i can at least be nice enough to say “ruin the friendship” caught my ear, but i can’t say i remember it after listening two or three times either
Someone asked for what reason Swift decided to write The Life of a Showgirl’s songs about fame, sex, high school, and mean girl shit when she frankly sounds so bored by it. There is, as made evident by her contemporary artists, more than enough to write songs about. I actually tend more toward Grace Spelman’s take, which is that writing about the peak of fame, exhaustion at touring, and being alienated from reality is a great subject for songs, but Swift’s approach lacks that personal touch. Instead, people are forced to project onto these vapid, self-annihilating songs as a derailment. Swift has been the subject of a lot of projection about her politics for years now, with her fairly limited political statements and her billionaire status. Suffice it to say I find it somewhat unproductive to care about what someone who doesn’t share their politics believes in private when they’re flying their private jet to go to the 7-11 or writing odes to reviling cancel culture.
The “bigger issue” I’ve seen proposed most consistently is that these songs lack any creative energy or mission – they feel like they were released to propagate the Taylor Swift machine. Swift continues to chase craven marketing stunts and alternate editions with exclusive tracks (the most recent count I saw put it at 32?) to up the price of participation in her album cycle from your monthly streaming subscription. Promotional materials for the album utilize AI generated imagery, and I complained enough on The Horizon Line about the way The Release Party of a Showgirl screwed up the theatrical rollout of new films. A recent Defector slam, Kelsey McKinney’s “No Good Art Comes From Greed,” quotes Dostoevesky to justify linking all of The Life of a Showgirl’s poor lyrics to her mercantile assembly line approach to releasing new music. McKinney declares “To create something, anything, good, takes time and desire,” that making art fast and for survival is going to lead to bad art.
This same idea is espoused in Spike Lee’s newest joint Highest 2 Lowest by Denzel Washington’s protagonist David King. A remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, Lee transposes the story to the record industry, David King replacing Toshiro Mifune’s shoe magnate with a mega-producer executive, Quincy Jones meets Jay-Z, mogul with an ear for hits. His wife (Ilfenesh Hadera) laments that King no longer seems enthusiastic about the music business, saying that when he listened to something good, he used to grin ear to ear while explaining why his was late to their dates. King seeks to buy back his record label Stackin’ Hits before it can be sold off to conglomerate ownership. He does this through a gambit of debt and promises,which are put in peril when he gets a ransom call from a kidnapper who claims to have his teenage (?) son. The film’s teaser trailer largely consists of a monologue King gives about the pressures that stack on star musicians before concluding on the sentence “All money ain’t good money.”
While many of the broad beats are the same as the Kurosawa film, Lee has altered the story, especially in the second half. If you haven’t, it’s worth seeing Highest 2 Lowest for yourself. The film is not perfect, certainly not as great as Kurosawa’s masterpiece, but it’s an exciting ride with an electric Denzel Washington performance, maybe my favorite performance of the year so far. In order to continue this piece, I need to discuss the film’s ending in depth – spoilers after the jump here until after the embed of “Trunks.”
I’m going to run down a synopsis of the back half, not because I assume you haven’t seen it if you’re reading this, but because I’ve interpreted the ending somewhat differently from other audience members. When King goes on a walk after the rescue of his chauffeur Paul’s (Jeffrey Wright) son (mistaken for King’s) and the loss of the ransom money, he puts on a playlist of songs by artists who’ve approached him for a record deal. He hears “Trunks” by an artist named Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky), and grooves smiling to it for about twenty seconds before remembering lyrics from the song Wright’s son overheard while captured, and believes he recognizes Felon as the kidnapper’s voice. He and Paul decide to take things into their own hands. King finds Yung Felon recording another song, “Both Eyes Closed,” and gives him advice on how to improve the track with some adlibs and stronger lyrics – after a back-and-forth about how it’s too late to give artistic feedback now, King and Paul apprehend Yung Felon, though Paul is blinded in one eye.
Yung Felon puts in a guilty plea deal, conditional on a conversation with King – this is a mirror to the end of High and Low, a last request as the kidnapper has received a death sentence after multiple murders. Before this conversation, we see a music video for “Trunks,” Yung Felon still in his orange jumpsuit, women twerking around him, and cuts to David King grinning and dancing joyfully. It cuts hard into the conversation – Felon proposes a record deal at Stackin’ Hits, saying that a collaboration between the now-valorized King and the man who took his ransom would be the biggest hit in the world. King informs him he’s no longer at Stackin’ Hits, looking to start something new – Felon insults him and asks why on earth he’d pursue “focusing on the music, when what’s more important than the money?” King rejects him, saying “All money ain’t good money.” He then goes to watch an audition by a young woman his son has recommended to him, a Best Original Song Nominee type ballad titled (for no clear fictional reason) “Highest 2 Lowest,” and King mugs his way through really listening to it before giving the monologue from the teaser.
Unlike some other viewers, I take this ending to be at least somewhat morally complicated. The fact remains that King relishes enjoying Yung Felon for nobody, and he is effectively in the spotlight for his family at the presentation of “Highest 2 Lowest.” For my reading, the part of him that is reveling in the power of music is lit on fire by “Trunks” and Yung Felon in a way that isn’t performative, isn’t aspiring to respectability or a better nature, and the performance of listening to “Highest 2 Lowest” (including being kind to the sort of performative, corny joke like “My father was a rolling stone – pun intended!” that nobody her age can honestly find funny, no?) is with lips pursed and head tilted, shouting “come on!,” never showing that beautiful Denzel smile until the song has hit its enormous conclusion and certainly never showing that same, dazzling grin.
Biased, I know, I’m biased – I’m bumping “Trunks” and “Both Eyes Closed” in the car, two of Rocky’s best tracks in years, and I would probably just as soon never hear “Highest 2 Lowest” again. But this is a film that, if not intentionally, can be read to admit that sometimes, great art comes from bad people with cheap motivations. King can never, realistically, take Felon’s proposal seriously – it would destroy his family, his relationships, and in reality, even 2-4 year prison terms can end a rapper’s career with an inability to tour or stay in the zeitgeist, let alone the twenty five Felon’s staring down. To make art with his family, who act like characters from a Lifetime original movie (and, arguably, have the actors to match,) he will have to settle for ballads Obama would forgo putting on his summer playlist to make room for charli xcx’s 365.
I understand the impulse to defend the production of art as a sacred, virtuous act, that the tainting of the grove with impure motives or methods will somehow lead to a decayed work. Even beyond the usual “is this TV show my friend” conflation of consumption as activism, artists and critics alike are broke, with fewer jobs, less revenue, fewer investments, and near-zero support from the state to produce work. The fact is that for most of us, there is no real financial motivation to create, and we do it purely for the love of the process itself. Even without getting into anticonsumerism and full political stances, the rejection of selling out often comes from a self-enforced acceptance that the sky is only the limit for those who start with the silver spoon, and the rest of us are really in it for the practice of making itself.
That desire also ends up being a double-edged sword. Returning to One Battle After Another, its focus on left-wing revolutionaries has led to many championing it as an invigorating call to action, a Truly Revolutionary Movie for our times. Backlash followed, not just from right wing commentariat sensationalizing hypothetical violence, but from farther-left radicals describing the film as both antirevolutionary and full blown COINTELPRO infiltration of leftist movements. I would describe it as none of the above. While I do think it has valuable thoughts about how we treat our allies and the people we aim to serve, as well as a willingness to believe in the titular battle after another, it’s less about What We Should Do and more what we choose to do in violent times. (The next paragraphs, through to the Twitter embed, contain light spoilers for the first two acts of One Battle After Another.)
I’ll save more on the film for another time, as I don’t care to double the length of this piece, but there’s a continuity between One Battle After Another and Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice. Both films follow stoned post-radicals trying to navigate fascists and reunite with their loved ones. Unlike Inherent Vice, One Battle After Another’s Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) was not just a hippie but an active revolutionary in his past life as Ghetto Pat, explosives expert for the French 75. But after the movement is compromised by Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn,) he’s effectively in exile raising his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) while others have continued the work without him
Bob’s infirmed himself with copious substance use, social isolation, and a likely failure to get therapy after the departure of Willa’s mother, the revolutionary-turned-rat Perfidia Beverly Hills. When Lockjaw comes back, Bob’s utterly unprepared for the moment, though he at least trained Willa enough to get her to go along with one of his ex-75 compatriots. We see him link up with his daughter’s karate Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro,) one of the year’s best characters. He’s the semi-mystical leader of his own subversive movement protecting illegal immigrants from immigration enforcement, and his movement stands in contrast to the password-keeping, scrambling, seemingly unhelpful remnants of the French 75. Even Bob has to rely on a personal relationship to get any assistance – the 75 doesn’t even seem to offer general advice over the phone.
This dynamic, along with the portrayal of Perfidia, has led to some of the better conversation I’ve had about a “political” film in some time, with productive conversations about “opsec” and providing community care, about the film’s out-of-time timeliness, about how this film depicts and looks at black women, and thankfully quite a bit about the filmmaking itself. I’ve managed to dodge a lot of the worst bad faith criticism of the film in my personal interactions – people are pretty thoughtful in their praise and frustration! I think the film is still my least favorite of Anderson’s films since Magnolia, but it’s a Real Movie, one that rewards analysis without becoming a monolith of praise, one that is enriching and is enriched by thoughtfulness.
But I have watched some of the hyperbole about the film from the roadside, both positive and negative. It’s this same puritanical desire to have every work that is Genuine and About Something to be itself Pure and All-Good, and either defend the film from any criticism or diminish its very praiseworthy elements. I have a harder time begrudging this for One Battle After Another, which I consider a great and also enriching film, as compared to some objects of hyperbole from the past couple years. Still, this hyperbole helps no one – it, in fact,
I hate to drag a specific film, but Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist got halfway there before derailing itself, and it merited this same sort of hyperbole and mission-like theater attendance. Sam Bodrojan’s “Don’t You Want Some Good Fucking Food?: On The Brutalist” actually dislikes the film more than I do, but is instructive for how it collapses in on itself, especially in the back half. I laugh reading her describe the way the film hides from looking at architecture despite its subject, focused more on the creative process and the compromises of its characters than the beauty of what they make. I cherish the way she deconstructs the film’s non-statement on Israel, summoned in the second act and film’s finale but ultimately not coherent. But The Brutalist is a film I like more for having read Bodrojan’s words on the subject, not less. It got me to engage with the film’s themes and details in a way that I received in the theater but hadn’t fully interpreted – that processing with someone else’s ideas is one of art’s magic tricks.
Someday, my great paean to criticism itself as essential to enriching art, my argument that “critic-proof cinema” is hermetic and eventually lifeless compared to that which you can stick your hands in and muck about with and Elevate To Greatness, will be laid out for you to read. In the meantime, I’d like to argue that timeliness and political correctness can be great assets in art, but are not the sole purpose of art. Art exists to speak to our times – art exists to make us dance – art exists because someone very good at something wanted to make money on it. Even Taylor Swift has successfully done the latter, in my book – “Anti-Hero” is pure commercial pop drivel, sexy babies and monsters on the hill, and it also has an unforgettable, glossy, delightful chorus. Political, ideological, and motivational purity are not at the heart of “what makes good art.” Find whatever drives you to make something – just make a point of making it well.
P.S. Shortly after hitting publish on this piece, I read Madison area writer and film programmer James Kreul’s piece on One Battle After Another – it’s exactly the kind of criticism I’m praising at the end of this piece, and I think you should read it!
I’m nowhere near a Robert Redford completionist. Of his acting credits, I’ve seen thirteen – of the films he directed, only Quiz Show, a very good movie. My favorite is handily All The President’s Men, which he grants an intense control. Films ripped from the headlines often work in melodramatic performances that emphasize just how important, how monumental this story is, that it couldn’t possibly wait to be told, that This Is Not Normal. Redford is the antithesis of that approach – not that his Woodward doesn’t seem invested in uncovering the Watergate scandal, but in that he handles it thoughtfully, professionally, like it’s surgery.
The Candidate is probably my other favorite performance, especially poignant in this modern moment where our best and brightest Democratic nominees are effectively unsupported by their party establishment unless they’re willing to “moderate” their messaging. Redford is the ideal actor for the role – he simultaneously is charismatic and sincere enough to make the more poignant lefty political messaging feel earned and also beautiful and aloof enough to sell that he’s comfortable losing, his skin not really in the game until it is, that he hasn’t really thought through what will happen if he wins. And, though I have less to say about them, I love his Newman collaborations, The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Sundance, the film festival, is Redford’s ultimate legacy, and his ultimate contribution to film art. Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises founded the Utah/US Film Festival that would become Sundance in 1978, and his stewardship resulted in the largest annual film festival in America to this day. By the 90s, it had become the definitive home for independent cinema in the United States. Then, its discoveries included Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jim Jarmusch – to this day, they include Lee Isaac Chung, Jane Schoenbrun, Bo Burnham, Boots Riley, Eliza Hittman, and The Daniels. At a time when Hollywood was getting bigger, glossier, and more blockbuster-oriented, Redford was instrumental in creating a new lane for emerging filmmakers, smaller budgets, more human stakes.
You can count the number of times Redford cashed in across his career on one hand. His filmography, both behind and in front of the camera, is close to the ideal for a movie star of his caliber, with more paranoia thrillers, sports movies, historical epics, westerns, and oddball dramas than almost any actor of his generation. Even towards the end, he continued to make Real Choices, like the harrowing ocean survival film All Is Lost or the romantic nostalgia of The Old Man and the Gun. Redford is representative of the ideal of American cinema, everything it can do and every way someone passionate can contribute. I pray we see another as good as him soon.
I vaguely referenced The Tree of Life’s ending in my piece on Malick’s Days of Heaven, noting that extended denouement is how Malick allows the film’s story to end without closing off its emotional impact. I’d forgotten, then, that after the beach scene, that this film ends as it begins – in the dark, looking at unknown divine light. Loving The Tree of Life requires patience, as it is a film that repeats itself often, reflects on a single idea many times, and does so in poetic language and straightforward symbols. These work for me because they are real – both in that they are personal, often reflecting elements of Malick’s own life, but also because they are the kind of symbols people attach to in real life, a little pat and in a way that feels like they handwave specificity, but then in refinement the specificity emerges once again.
Look – it’s that kind of movie, it’s gonna be that kind of write-up. Some critic, I can’t place where I read it, wrote a story about meeting a truck driver who watched Yasujiro Ozu movies with his mother every Sunday. The story served as a warning against condescending to audiences, assuming “art films” were inaccessible to the masses and aren’t based in relatable everyday struggles. The Tree of Life is certainly relatable – it’s a story about fundamental questions about the Christian problems of evil, about class, about wrestling between your parents’ ideologies, about grief, and about coming of age. It’s not Godard’s abstraction, which demands familiarity with Brecht and Derrida and Marx in an essay film.
Any viewer is smart enough to get The Tree of Life. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to land with everyone. This nonlinear story about a boy named Jack O’Brien (Hunter McCracken, also Sean Penn) and his family, the later untimely death of his brother R.L. (Laramie Eppler), and Jack’s later adulthood malaise is interspersed with landscape photography and a CGI telling of the origin of life. It is, to say the least, light on action. Most of the story is based in Jack’s coming of age, which involves him reckoning with an increased assignment of duty by his hot tempered father (Brad Pitt,) concern for the temptation of evil, and burgeoning sexual desire. Malick warns against considering it autobiographical, but if the film is not filled with events from his own childhood, it is based in a lived reality of this community. A scene only in the extended edition takes place at Malick’s childhood boarding school.
Mother (Jessica Chastain) through a doorway.
Most of the internal emotion is told in soft spoken monologues. Many of these monologues are very blunt – the film’s most famous line of dialogue is Jack opining, “Father. Mother. Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.” The characters are almost overly expressive with one another, with Chastain’s face of disappointment or concern as Jack slams doors or stomps around a mask of performative distress – it’s hard to tell if she’s really so wounded by his turmoil or if she’s affecting a silent reproach until he’s willing to soften. McCracken holds his own in these monologues against Pitt and Chastain – it never quite has the lived in reality of Linda Manz in Days of Heaven, but this is a more heightened film anyway.
I previously thought Pitt’s turn as Jack’s father was Pitt’s career best performance, full of locked down rage and resentment that erupts violently and only settled upon working with music or machines. I still think it’s great work. Father over the course of the film is shown to have such a limited emotional range that it’s hard to compare it against his charisma nukes in films like Fight Club or Moneyball. He continuously states that being too soft, too virtuous is liable to get you walked over in this world – he characterizes his demanding expectations and swift physical reprimand as making sure his sons know how to be independent and get what they’re owed. He offers this wisdom as the law of nature, tough but rewarding. It’s challenging to watch him become the holy terror of this household, the children openly celebrating when he goes away on a trip, knowing what Pitt is like with his own children.
Meanwhile, Mother is stationed as serene grace, the vision of tolerance and gratitude, and represents the argument that the virtuous and generous lack for nothing. The film complicates this in a few ways – first, the death of R.L. exposes her naïveté in believing virtue is the shield of God. Secondly, her tolerance of Father’s abuse and failure to equip her kids to protect themselves from him lends credence to his argument, that you do have to be able to fight back to protect virtue to begin with. This is ultimately the spiritual debate this film is engaged in – crusade vs. tolerance, Nature and Grace. My wife framed it as understanding the two sides of Christ, the cleansing of the temple vs the forgiveness of the cross. Sometimes, I feel the depiction of the parents goes a little broad to suit this paradigm – while it’s aesthetically beautiful, I forgive anyone who rolls their eyes at the dream of Chastain flying among the wildlife like a Disney princess.
Dinosaurs.
Nature and Grace are each given monologues. Nature’s is actually given by Chastain, shortly after wondering “Why did my son die?” She delivers this monologue while we watch a scientific depiction of the birth of the universe, the beginning of life, and the age of the dinosaurs. For a film this explicitly about religion, this non-creationist genesis takes on the argument for intelligent design. We see two dinosaurs fight, as Jack and R.L. will, and see one of them spare the other after stepping on its neck, assured it is not a threat. Soon after, the asteroid strikes and the age of man will begin.
Jack’s coming of age also includes the arrival of his sexuality, and the transference of an Oedipal awakening onto a neighbor. We follow Jack on voyeuristic trips to peep through windows, and when the house is empty, he goes a step further. While it often can feel that sexual awakening stories are incidental in a greater neighborhood, this one feels instructive both thematically and aesthetically. It personalizes and isolates Jack’s grappling with sin – he can tell his Mother about vandalism or a scary encounter with other boys blowing up a frog with fireworks, but he can’t tell her about these feelings.
Lubezki and Malick’s camera is constantly in motion, and the blocking of actors and composition of shots is constantly creating interesting lines of motion. The moment one aspect of a space is obscured by a wall, a tree, or a camera movement, another detail opens up. It is inventing new beautiful images so frequently that it can be overwhelming. I would describe their work as aiming to give the viewer the eyes of a child, awestruck by every new thing in sight, teaching them ways to look for a divine, aesthetic beauty in every day situations. This is the purpose of the film’s approach to landscape photography, with canyon walls curling to reveal the beauty of natural law, mathematical reality creating beautiful, astonishing shapes and patterns. It uses this same eye on factories, churches, and houses, revealing the way mankind has imitated this mathematical vision. In Lubezki’s cinematography and Malick’s direction, I can see God.
But the pleasure of looking past the trees to see the sun behind, even more beautiful, is framed by Jack’s sexual awakening as the same pleasure one gets looking through a window at an undressing neighbor. Malick seemingly indicts the same divine vision he’s offered us, perhaps a warning against the overtuned eye. I don’t think so, though – I think he is more just acknowledging the reality of receiving this gift of sight, that it will bring great joy but also tempt the voyeur. It is an aesthetic battle between the appreciation of the world and the aggregation of its spoils.
To put it bluntly, while I think this is a valuable spiritual conversation, I also think this is one hell of a Boy Movie. It does not really make much effort to fully take Mother’s perspective, and it offers us no other women’s interiority barring one barbed conversation between Chastain and Fiona Shaw, the boys’ grandmother. Like a lot of texts grappling with Christianity, it depicts women only in maternity and lust. Its understanding of gender is based in a version of complementarianism, and it is about as rigid a binary as imaginable.
Jack and Jack, in Jack’s vision of death and reconciliation.
It’s not like I expect a 68 year old Malick to be busting the binary back in 2011, and I don’t consider it a “flaw” of the movie. Rather, the film’s somewhat limited masculine perspective is instructive, a modern contextualization of spiritual debates that began when women were, as far as the Catholic church was concerned, dehumanized. It uses gender largely as a representation of a spiritual debate – and yet, internal struggle about that debate is more largely offered to men.
If you were not engaged in this film’s spiritual debate, and were not as aesthetically awestruck as I am throughout its generous runtime, I’d hardly fail you for not relishing the film’s climax, a vision by Penn’s older Jack at Revelation, the dead returning to life at the shallow sea. Jack reads to us the argument for Grace here, Penn bringing us to a culmination. At the end of the world, we will be reunited with everyone we ever loved, whether that is our dead brother or the boy who was burned in a house fire that one special summer. We will embrace and we will give ourselves to God. I find it a simple ending – I find it a profound ending.
I do not have the entire film codexed. Hell, my non-religious ass is missing major context and references to scripture. The nuances of the film’s uses of classical music are largely lost on me, too. It’s a film I expect to get more from every five or ten years. But if nothing else, I’ll always be entranced by that gliding camera, whether moving through Penn’s modern apartment or up the titular Tree of Life itself.
I have now said for years that I would happily go to a theater simply to see a montage of Wes Anderson costumes and production design ideas, and that the movies are good just happens to be a nice bonus. I advance the argument that Anderson should be considered among the most iconic and influential visual artists of the 21st century, alongside figures like Richter, Murakami, or (ugh) Koons. We see a version of his aesthetic, set in amber by The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom, permeating public spaces and being cyclically imitated on social media. The infamous signifiers, the collections of kitsch arranged as storytelling, the orderly, clean lines throughout a space framed as a symmetrical image, and the emphasis on uniforms and dress tweed are more widely recognized than the visual iconography of any other live action filmmaker.
The Phoenician Scheme marks some noticeable changes in this aesthetic toolbox. Alexandre Desplat’s original music is largely variations on one moody, portentous theme, and the needle-drops trade Serge Gainsbourg and The Kinks for Stravinsky and Beethoven. Longtime cinematographer Robert Yeoman (who has shot every prior live action Wes feature, and many of the shorts too) takes this movie off and is replaced by Bruno Delbonnel, whose signatures often include strong green tones and more muted colors. These are never more feature-forward than in one of the film’s opening scenes, in which our lead Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) meets his soon-to-be-cloistered daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) in the great foyer of their palazzo. It is an enormous, cold room, with nothing but a few paintings breaking up the slabs of gray-green, and more paintings sitting on the floor. Delbonnel gives the majority of The Phoenician Scheme this more muted palette, though later scenes are still sometimes flush with color.
Symmetry is broken at the start of The Phoenician Scheme rather than at the midpoint, when Zsa Zsa’s plane is blown open (with a blood splatter that made most of my audience immediately start cackling) and he’s forced to make a crash landing. Zsa Zsa is an unkillable cat and an unbeatable cad, the most ruthless and callous ultra-rich arms dealer in the world, and a combination of private and government interests will stop at nothing to see him either penniless, jailed, or dead. But even from the start of this film, he’s no longer capable of maintaining the rigid order that’s put him on top of this world, too physically beaten up and personally shaken down to keep the train on track. That’s reflected in his face, too, like in Bottle Rocket and so many Wes films before, cut up and bruised throughout the film.
Zsa Zsa Korda in the film’s opening credit sequence.
So, what is The Phoenician Scheme? Loosely, it’s a corporate “public works” investment built on exploitation and swindling (the film is unafraid to confront Zsa Zsa’s intent to use slave labor) that will, in 150 years, provide a resource-rich base of operations for Korda’s military-industrial empire. Unfortunately, Zsa Zsa’s enemies have successfully created an unstable market for investment, and the film is spent watching Zsa Zsa, Liesl, and oddball assistant Bjorn (Michael Cera) travel from investor to investor and solicit the funds necessary to cover “The Gap.” It sets up a satisfying episodic structure for the film, though maybe none of the episodes delighted me so much as the first featuring Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston. This episode in particular is so delightfully well-done, with so many perfectly timed jokes and such a strong commitment to not overstating any punchline, that I think it’s worth the price of admission on its own.
Anderson borrows a lot from the comedic language of his animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox here. There are deadpan repeated lines, a silent cartoon shrug repeated by multiple characters, and when action does arrive, the straight on close-ups and movement are so similar to the fight between Mr. Fox and The Rat that I immediately felt at home. Fans of the film are going to be repeating “Help yourself to a hand grenade./You’re very kind,” “Myself, I feel very safe,” and “Damnable! To hell!” in much the same way Fox encouraged “Take this bandit hat” and “Are you cussin’ with me?” to worm their way into your phrase book.
Like Fantastic Mr. Fox, I think that aesthetic sensibility supports the film’s emotional core. The relationship between Zsa Zsa and Liesl, and Zsa Zsa with his own peace, is a rich one, forcing them both to accept parts of themselves they’d rather push away without ever turning blame or judgment on Liesl for her reticence. Zsa Zsa’s been a poor father – hardly Wes Anderson’s first – but he’s also been a horrible person. Liesl, from the beginning, confronts Zsa Zsa with suspicion that he killed her mother, one of many women he’s reared children with (he has a horde of ten or so misbehaving, unwanted sons, some wanted and some not, a throng raised down the street except on Saturdays) and he furiously denies it. Over time, he comes to grips with his role in her demise, while also facing near-death visions of an afterlife where his soul is not measuring up to heavenly standards. Many have made comparisons to Powell & Pressburger – I don’t disagree.
Zsa Zsa, Liesl and Bjorn meet with two of the investors in The Phoenician Scheme.
There’s also the question of the film’s political angle. While many describe Wes Anderson movies as “not really about anything” except for being beautiful or funny, his last five or so films are quite political. The Phoenician Scheme is less about “politics” rather than the realpolitik of hypercapitalism, and Anderson uses securing funding as his mechanism for exploring that. I’m sure it’s quite relatable to Anderson, whose films manage to be made with incredibly star-studded casts for fairly low budgets and filmed where he can catch tax breaks for the arts. He portrays this world as being built almost entirely on interpersonal values and the merit of one’s word – Zsa Zsa doesn’t ever successfully find a contribution to The Gap by sweetening the pot or finding a mutually beneficial deal, he does so through emotional, interpersonal appeals. It’s unclear whether or not the near-death experiences and confrontations of his soul have changed his tactics, his execution, or his follow-through, or if the money’s always been this fake.
This review is built on examining the film in this more serious way because, well, I want to push back on the idea that this is a Minor Wes Anderson film, or that Wes Anderson films are all fluff. It’s a supremely funny film, and most people will come out of it laughing about Michael Cera’s incredibly funny character performance as Bjorn the assistant/insect tutor, Ivy League sweats, or the deadpan of Del Toro and Threapleton’s mile-a-minute dialogue. From the opening credits set to Apotheosis from Stravinsky’s Apollo, It’s a real treat of a movie, and I don’t mean to diminish that. I just have spent the last three days thinking about it on more than just those terms, and look forward to doing so for quite some time – and I wanted to put a rave out into the world before it leaves theaters.
Satoshi Kon, whose life ended prematurely to pancreatic cancer at 46, attained a legendary stature directing four films and one television series. His most acclaimed film is Perfect Blue, his debut, a gnarly thriller about pop stardom and internet stalking, an outrageously prescient work, and it carries his trademark mastery of character motion and facial expression. When a character eerily moves too quickly, too lightly, it alerts the sense of wrongness quickly. He takes that skillset next to Millennium Actress, a dreamlike “biopic” of a fictional actress inspired by Setsuko Hara, using abstract fantasy to bring narrative propulsion and metatextual emotional depth. Recently reclaimed (after a much better translation to English) is his Christmas film Tokyo Godfathers, which celebrates found family with a flair of more cartoonish animation. And his television series, Paranoia Agent, was likely the introduction for many people my age who saw the show on Adult Swim, a mystery show about serial assaults by a young man with rollerblades and a bat. Its shockingly episodic structure and willingness to dramatically change tone from episode to episode create a memorable and challenging arc, and it represents Kon’s most dreamlike narrative thus far.
Kon’s career concluded with the film Paprika, in some ways a summation of every piece of Kon’s filmography thus far. Paprika is a dream therapist, using a science fiction technology called the DC Mini to participate in psychiatric clients’ dreams and record the encounter, working through repressed anxieties and symbols to identify traumas or needs. Paprika is also the alter ego of scientist Dr. Atsuko Chiba, one of the lead scientists of the DC Mini development team, who is using the device before it’s officially market tested and fully “safe” to use. When it appears that terrorists are using the DC Mini to invade people’s dreams and cause nightmares, delusions, and havoc, it becomes the DC Mini team’s responsibility to track down the people abusing the technology before the program is shut down permanently.
The film begins with an extended dream sequence with one of Paprika’s clients, Detective Toshimi Konakawa, who is experiencing debilitating panic attacks he believes may be related to the murder case he’s working. This dream contains elements recognizable to film fans – the film draws attention to Tarzan, but it also quotes The Greatest Show On Earth, and, most directly, From Russia With Love and Roman Holiday. When Paprika asks Konakawa about movies because of these references in his dream, he shuts down, even more than when discussing the murder – his trauma lies there, and he’ll need to be pulled through his own past to remember why he’s so stuck.
After Konakawa’s dream, the opening titles play. If you’ve never seen them, you can watch them now.
I have probably watched these opening titles a hundred times outside of the movie. For my money, this two minute sequence might be the single greatest work of cartooning in animation history. There are so many emotionally thoughtful ideas expressed with incredible economy. The way Paprika can transport and transform herself by way of images is a delightful power fantasy, the ecstasy of the digital pen giving her flight, teleportation, transmogrification. She is omnipotent but not entirely infallible – we see her caught off guard by rushing cars until she can stop them. I love the detail of Paprika putting the jacket back onto the sleeping office worker, whose desk has photos of the woman he loves at home – this all-powerful being is a healing spirit. But then she also doesn’t have time for boring, boorish men, and the image of her four reflected, increasingly disgusted reaction shots is only outmatched by her heading out to the street to coast away on the t-shirt of a rollerskater. I love the music by Susumu Hirasawa, music that is optimistic and futuristic, music that is a little off-putting but also catchy. And, lastly, I love that the transformation of Paprika back into Atsuko happens gradually across multiple cuts, communicating their different personalities before Atsuko speaks a single word.
All of these emotions are brought forward into the film, a film whose plot is hard to follow on a first viewing but whose emotions and vibes are immaculate. Elements of the shared dreaming were later made more familiar to American viewers by Inception, but it is otherwise a very different film – where Inception views dreams as a magic trick that works best as convincing its targets that the dream is really happening, a heist performed by experts looking to fool their client into believing the pitch, Paprika instead embraces the artifice in search of something grander. Postmodernism is often applied to works about dreams because their inherently abstract plotting bring to mind questions of identity and The Cogito, but Paprika goes a step further to embrace the communal and political aspect of postmodernism. If modernism is defined by the death of institutions, Paprika’s vision of postmodernism proposes that as the foundation for building the impossible.
Maybe the most iconic dream image in Paprika is the “dream parade,” the dream of a delusional patient where a parade of toys marches toward some unknown goal. The parade has its own terrifying electronic theme song. It also has a trademark nonsense poetry, one which starts somewhat incomprehensible but becomes a rhythmic series of absurdist social commentaries over the course of the film. The collection of toys represents different eras of traditionalism, from daruma and hina dolls to retrofuturistic robots and anatomical dummies. Eventually, cartoon characters and yokai join the mix – the clash of the Golden Age of Hollywood references and the electronic music of the postmodern title sequence returns again in the parade dream, and the battle between progress and conservation ends up being essential to understanding the film’s mystery.
Detective Konakawa, caught in a dream parade.
This might make the film sound really intellectual and, well, boring – again, like the title, these ideas and emotions are generally presented simply as part of the action rather than in the endless dialogue of other philosophical films. These dreams are seen in thriller scenes of investigation and action, Atsuko exploring potential sites of danger, Paprika trying to identify potential dream invaders and fighting them off in fantastical chase sequences. The more impactful dialogue in the film is emotional – one wonderful scene between Konakawa and Paprika’s boss is them reminiscing over being in college, “when we used to talk about our futures.”
I’m going to wrap up this section because I’ve got a spoiler wall coming. Paprika is, since Tokyo Godfathers’ recent translation, often the bottom ranked of Kon’s films. I’d say this owes to two primary criticisms I’ve seen – the first is related to its portrayal of Dr. Kosaku Tokita, the primary inventor of the DC Mini and a very obese and childish character. While I have come to peace with Tokita’s character, there are undeniably jokes about his body that are fatphobic and meanspirited – Kon’s biggest flaw, across all his work, is how he handles unconventional bodies, generally marrying psychology and body in ways that can feel cruel. The second is general criticisms of the film’s plot and final act, which are confusing and can feel loose. In the spoiler section, I’ve identified a reading of the film that helps me understand both of these aspects, and I hope they help those of you who’ve seen the movie and are scratching your heads. But outside of the film’s relatively divisive final act, the very final scene of the film, which closes on Detective Konakawa, is one of the kindest and most wonderful endings to a film I’ve ever seen. I love Paprika. Rest in peace, Maestro.
SPOILERS FOR PAPRIKA
Let’s talk about the very climax of Paprika – we see the dream parade arrive in Tokyo. Paprika has been swallowed by the toy robot Tokita, and Detective Kanakawa has allied with the Radio Club bartenders, who have come to the real world through the spread of the dream. Kanakawa and the bartenders come across the great pit of despair.
Just before the Chairman emerges in his dark hole, Atsuko appears to Tokita to dream. She dreams of finally confessing her love for him, that the fact that he “swallows everything” is what makes him so much fun. Her coldness and cruelty at his childishness and obesity is what she thinks she’s “supposed” to feel about this genius savant. But in her mind, there is no one else. The dream then continues on, once the chairman appears, and Atsuko becomes the child who swallows everything. Through this dream, she vicariously experiences the thrill of eating it all up, the muck and the dreams, until she grows back to her adult, complete self. Finally completing this fantasy, when they wake up, Atsuko can finally be warm and loving toward Tokita, and they announce their marriage just before the credits roll.
It’s through this dream that Atsuko is able to finally make peace with herself and love Tokita. There is a subliminal thread of crosswired jealousy and romantic feeling throughout the DC Mini team. Tokita is at the center of the team, and his childishness allows him to focus on his creations, but he is also approval-seeking when it comes to Atsuko. Himuro is not envied by anyone, and we never hear his character’s true voice, but Osanai claims Himuro is jealous of Tokita as the head inventor – Himuro is also covetous of Osanai’s romantic affection, with Atsuko calling out Osanai “selling his body for the DC Mini” to him. Osanai himself is sexually fixated on Atsuko, but also is jealous career-wise of both Atsuko and Tokita, stating as much openly, even in his colleague persona. Chief Torotaro is in love with Paprika, and finds himself torn between his allegiance to Atsuko and her alter ego. But Atsuko herself only really thinks of Tokita, and her frustration, affection, admiration, and envy can only be sorted out by her experiencing a dream of his euphoric gluttony, much the same way Detective Kadokawa can only process his guilt by defeating the trauma in the dream.
This lingering thread also finally helps me close the loop on Tokita’s obesity. The romance between these characters never quite clicked for me, and the resolution of this nightmare image that goes unremarked upon really left me grasping for meaning and coming up short. Now, the understanding of this physical rejection as a barrier for Atsuko’s unspoken feelings about Tokita’s contradiction helped anchor his obesity as more than just a joke. Atsuko can’t see for herself the sort of therapeutic observation that Paprika can offer her clients – that she’s diverting a vulnerable, kinder feeling by affecting a societal cruelty against Tokita and herself. We’ve seen Konakawa resolve his arc just before the dream crashes into reality – I now understand the way the remainder of that dream concludes Atsuko’s.
“But what about the rest of it?”
After Atsuko saves the world, Konakawa receives Atsuko and Tokita’s wedding notice with a laugh. He’s already resolved. He leaves work and sets off for something to do. Posters for Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Satoshi Kon’s unmade The Dreaming Machine decorate his walk. This scene, to me, is an impossible dream of imagining how we can reclaim our lives, the real power fantasy being the belief that we can, in fact, be anything, do anything, and find community. It imagines, after all the fantasy we’ve seen, that an equally powerful fantasy to saving the world is saving ourselves. Just before the film cuts to credits, Konakawa walks up to the box office and requests: “One adult, please.”
There are people who will tell you this was “a bad year for movies.” Those people are being lazy or incurious. I’m not sure it’s possible for there to really be a bad year for movies if you are a person who watches films from around the world, films of all budget levels, films in all genres, documentaries, animated films, etc. Even 2020, which saw COVID-19 take a sledgehammer to a schedule full of movies best seen in theaters, still saw a remarkable slate of documentaries and wonderful dramas like Let Them All Talk, Da 5 Bloods, and Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology.
But, no, this was not an all-star year. There are a handful of master filmmakers who released 2024 films, but those that weren’t given a limited release in January of 2025 released to pretty divisive reactions. Instead, this is more of a rebuilding year. People have been projecting doomsday at the death of the New Hollywood directors who top their lists like Spielberg, Scorsese, and Schrader. A look at this year’s best films highlights a new class of exciting filmmakers who have many years ahead of them, actors who are getting roles which unfold a new level of their talent, and an audience that is seeking out these films and beginning to take their fresh talent seriously. And these “best films” are not weaker for that fact – you just have to go looking a little deeper.
You’ll see a few Oscar players in my lineup – I also saw a few more. There is a lot I like about Anora, but I found the “driving around” portion of the film interminable and unfunny, and I think that really hampered my willingness to engage in anything more intelligent it might be trying to do. I have nothing nice to say about Emilia Perez other than that it is beaten out as the worst movie I saw last year by Aggro Dr1ft, my first theatrical walkout in a decade of logging movies on Letterboxd. The Brutalist is the latest in a sad group of movies that montage past their ostensible subject so they can be a more conventional drama about something less interesting, but I loved Daniel Blumberg’s anthem and Lol Crawley’s nighttime photography. I gotta shout out Scoot McNairy, Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro in A Complete Unknown, a movie I enjoyed mostly because a character would play a song and about a minute later someone else would join in and start playing with them midway through – they brought humanity and energy to characters that could have been so much more stock. And, of course, our future best picture winner Madame Web, whose web connects us all, was disqualified for this list because it was clearly originally released in 2003.
A hearty “see you later” to All We Imagine As Light, Between the Temples, Bird, Blitz, C’est Pas Moi, Dahomey, Exhuma, Hard Truths, Hundreds of Beavers, I’m Still Here, Kinds of Kindness, La Chimera, Look Back, Love Lies Bleeding, Maria. Nightbitch, REFORM!!!, Rebel Ridge, Riddle of Fire. Strange Darling, Stress Positions, The Bikeriders, The End, The Imaginary, The People’s Joker, The Room Next Door, and The Substance, among many others.
HONORABLE MENTION: My dad never told me I love you
Dir. Adrien Caulier YouTube
I couldn’t quite figure out where to place this short, but I wanted to introduce people to it. I don’t personally absorb much from photo albums – maybe that’s why I admire the presentation of this complex relationship Adrien Caulier portrays in My dad never told me I love you. Caulier explores his grief in a meditative way, and the formal technique highlights an emptiness that cannot be filled by memorabilia.
24. T Blockers
Dir. Alice Maio MacKay Shudder, VOD
A major year for trans cinema between T Blockers, I Saw the TV Glow, and my still-unseen People’s Joker and Stress Positions, T Blockers is microbudget horror about finding Nazi creeps with brain parasites and righteously beating their heads in. Even for a 75 minute movie this gets so loose you’re begging for every tangent to be some new way forward but the core charm and pissed off retaliation is so strong that it makes for a perfectly solid entertainment. I’ll be looking forward to catching up with the other horror by director Alice Maio Mackay, who seems to have developed a pipeline for making movies quickly outside a system that can say “maybe don’t make the movie about killing transphobes” and win the argument.
23. Civil War
Dir. Alex Garland Max, VOD
In terms of base pleasures, Alex Garland’s Civil War is well acted, loud, full of ironic and high energy needledrops, and occasionally strikes a high-contrast colorful look that is visually striking. I really like Kirsten Dunst’s performance as war photographer Lee, almost as much as Stephen McKinley Henderson’s performance as the mentor who should’ve known better than to come along on the trip into enemy territory and Jesse Plemons’ one-scene performance as Sergeant Patriot Genocide. Cailee Spaeny’s solid as the naive rookie who insists on tagging along, though I probably saw more discussion of her really good pair of jeans than her performance. This film is not really an action movie or schlock, at times operating on a level of dramatic stakes I might call “ponderous.” But I’ll offer a fair warning that in terms of political satire or commentary, this has very little to say, either. If there are greater ideas on offer, they’re the self-reflexive impulse of Garland meditating on why people still see value in telling stories in a world that seems to be falling apart.
22. Only The River Flows
Dir. Wei Shujun VOD
A small town murder mystery where the crime itself is running away from being answered, Wei Shujun is already on his fifth feature film and yet none before Only the River Flows have been seen by anyone I follow except the wonderful Ryan Swen. Our lead detective (Zhu Yilong) is being told to stop looking for the “real” killer because everyone has accepted the first suspect, and his refusal to settle is costing him so much sleep that reality and fantasy seem to be conflating. Cinematographer Zhiyuan Chengma is able to deliver a classical, sludgy 16mm look that lends with the more surreal sequences in the film’s back half, but you have to be ready to tolerate a metatext about writer’s block and trying to tell the real story even when the obvious one is right in front of you.
21. Janet Planet
Dir. Annie Baker Max, VOD
Lacy (Zoe Ziegler,) 11 years old, bails on summer camp to go home with mom, Janet (Julianne Nicholson,) and spends the summer watching Janet fall in and out of three weird relationships. The debut film of acclaimed playwright Annie Baker, Janet Planet offers two of the best performances of the year, and watching these characters try to figure out the changes in their relationship as Lacy becomes more aware and adult is a pleasure because Baker never condescends to either character. Janet is a sometimes frustrating mother, and she’s a granola hippie in ways I find unrelatable, but she never is really positioned as negligent or disinterested – she’s loving, and when she and Lacy are talking, she’s so warm and thoughtful. And Lacy is a sometimes annoying or frustrating kid, but she’s never diminished as “a weird kid from hell,” either. Of the three relationships, my favorite is the one with Sophie Okenedo, an old friend getting out of a theater troupe/cult who doesn’t seem ready to get her life together either.
20. Hit Man
Dir. Richard Linklater Netflix
Hit Man offers two great chapters. The first is the SNL demo reel for Glen Powell, who is playing an undercover informant disguised as the “ideal” hitman for the vengeful strangers who summon him to various diners or empty lots. It’s a ridiculous, over-the-top series of impressions and characters, and while simple, it’s very entertaining. The story arrives when Powell’s hitman job leads him toward a new girlfriend and he has to continue to play the role. Things get complicated, and when they peak in an exchange involving Notes app, this movie takes off in a sequence that must have been a thrill to write and develop. In between those two parts of the movie, Richard Linklater takes a loose, hangout approach, and it mostly settles on enjoying Glen Powell’s actual best performance in the movie as a neurotic nerd.
19. Immaculate
Dir. Michael Mohan Hulu, VOD
Last year, I gave an honorable mention to The Pope’s Exorcist for being perfectly pleasurable before nailing the final twenty minutes. Immaculate is significantly more tense before its third act, offers some memorable and colorful imagery, and then goes just as hard in the third act. Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) joins an Italian convent and quickly finds herself pregnant – unsurprisingly, things get sinister fast. I’m sold on Sweeney, who auditioned for a failed version of this script a decade ago and bought the rights herself to make with director Michael Mohan (who previously worked with her on The Voyeurs.) I think she’s great in this, playing a balance of apprehensive fear and resignation before the scream queen horror arrives. When you throw on a random horror movie, this is basically the platonic ideal.
18. Conclave
Dir. Edward Berger Peacock, VOD
Probably best described as “Succession with cardinals and less cussing,” Conclave is one of the most entertaining dramas of the year. That description sells it slightly short, though, as Edward Berger and cinematographer Stephane Fontaine sometimes capture high-contrast mannerist images, and Volker Bertelmann’s use of bass string plucking is a stylish evocation of older mysteries. Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence leads a collection of expert character actors through the papal conclave election, and the twists of who’s scandalized and who’s willing to sell out are great, soapy fun.
There’s a reason the film has found its strange connection as a meme object for the queer community – its characters are archetypical, reminiscent at times of anime characterization or reality show contestants. The film finds itself somewhere between a moving, insightful grappling with the culture war within the Church – where there’s more and more tell of young reactionary priests who would prefer to cut the music and not even face the congregation, and congregations returning to women wearing the veil – and a more crowdpleasing work of liberal values showing their virtue. I have to make especial note of Sergio Castellito as Cardinal Tedesco, maybe the slimiest and most bigoted of the film’s holy men, who plays his villainy with a shit-eating grin and a puff of the Most Valuable Vape.
Chime is a horror barely-a-feature with a simple premise – a cooking instructor (Mutsuo Yoshioka) is told by one of his students about their obsession with a ringing chime no one else can hear, and to his horror he starts to hear it too right before terrible things begin to happen. In forty five minutes, Japanese horror legend Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse, Sweet Home) creates three or four indelible sequences with incredibly simple aesthetics, instead using solely great performances and incredible blocking. There’s a horror reaction in this that’s one of the best single acting choices in any movie this year. It’s quickly clear that even if nothing horrible has happened yet, things were off before the cameras started rolling – not knowing which pieces are going to feed back into the narrative left almost everything feeling portentous. Fair warning that this is a mystery that remains enigmatic – the lack of resolution is part of the point here, maybe reminding me of nothing more than Junji Ito’s “The Sad Tale of the Principal Post.”
16. Dune Part Two
Dir. Denis Villeneuve Max, VOD
Dune Part Two is a marked improvement over Villeneuve’s first, with Javier Bardem getting to play a great comic relief version of Stilgar and Greig Fraser capturing a far more colorful Arrakis than before. Rebecca Ferguson, who stole the first film as Lady Jessica, hands off her expanded role to Zendaya as Chani, and Zendaya nails the repulsion when Paul Atreides takes on his role as Lisan Al-Gaib. This film would potentially make this list for the Giedi Prime sequence alone, and Austin Butler as Feyd Rautha is one of the best villain performances in years. I adored the inky-black photography, the framing of Butler and Lea Seydoux, the punctuation of Butler stumbling out “What do we do?” like a cowed child. But, I say again – I still prefer the Lynch film!
15. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Dir. Rungano Nyoni Wider Release March 7th
I haven’t seen director Rungano Nyoni’s previous film, I Am Not A Witch, but I’ll have to go back after being pretty swept up by On Becoming A Guinea Fowl. The film has been misrepresented as a black comedy – it opens with a dead body in the middle of the road and a Supa Dupa Fly costume, but it becomes clear very quickly that this is a film about family trauma and sexual abuse. That isn’t to say the film doesn’t have a sense of humor – more than anything, it reminded me of Sean Baker’s Tangerine, which veers between farcical cartooning and intense emotional violence. The performances of the women in this family, especially leads Susan Chardy and Elizabeth Chisela, navigate the film’s humanist despair and its righteous anger by keeping things light and restrained, their characters talking shit, pushing the action forward, and taking moments of rest. As a study of complicity and unwillingness to confront the crimes of the dead because they loomed large in our lives, it remains an effective study of how respectability can perpetuate oppression.
14. Red Rooms
Dir. Pascal Plante AMC+, Shudder, VOD
Red Rooms has largely been sold to me as a tech update of Videodrome, our protagonist Kelly Anne (Juliette Gariepy) following a high-profile murder trial into the dark web. This isn’t quite accurate, though – unlike Cronenberg’s films, this avoids body horror or graphic gore, instead operating almost entirely in implication and reaction. We see people watching snuff – their reactions (or lack thereof) tell us what we need to know about what we’re hearing and what we need to know about them. But the real journey is meeting Kelly Anne, whose motivation and internal life remain so distant as to transform from enigma to sociopathy, the Patrick Bateman of true crime. In some ways, this is closer to Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, where the violence’s presence as mostly verbal makes things more uncomfortable. Almost the entire film exists as a character study of this protagonist, and while there are times I felt I lost the internal logic, it’s gripping throughout.
13. Babygirl
Dir. Halina Reijn VOD
Babygirl is arguably the most misunderstood movie of the year, with too many people watching it expecting either lurid hardcore sexuality or something coherent to say about sexuality and sociological gender roles. I don’t think it’s even really pretending to do either – Babygirl is about a sexually frustrated middle-aged executive who carries an immense amount of shame around her fetish (this isn’t a spoiler, it’s the opening and premise of the movie) and pursues it in unhealthy escapism. Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson both sell the lack of familiarity and comfort in their affair while also selling the pleasure and empowerment it’s bringing them – Dickinson in particular is remarkably elusive, not because it feels like he’s mysterious, just because it feels like he’s really opaque. You never know whether he’s going to get frustrated and shut down or whether he’s continuing his power play. I love the music in this movie, both the score and its weird vocalizations and the needledrops. It’s kind of vanilla, kind of shallow, but I had fun and enjoyed its character study. Even just on a camp level, I enjoyed getting to watch Kidman make the 😲 emoji face and wear beautiful outfits. I wish it ended better.
12. Queer
Dir. Luca Guadagnino VOD
I was prepared, at some level, to separate the art from the artist with Queer, but I wasn’t expecting to have to separate the art from the other art. The William S. Burroughs novella Queer is combined here with elements of Junkie, neither of which I’ve read, but also with elements of Burroughs’ life and David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. In Queer, Bill Lee is a gay heroin addict who becomes fixated on a young man – in most ways, Lee is an analogue for Burroughs, who briefly went by the pen name William Lee. Burroughs wrote the original manuscript of Queer while awaiting trial for the “accidental” murder of his wife in a William Tell stunt. Cronenberg brings this and other elements of Queer into his Naked Lunch – Guadagnino extends that conversation into Queer, directly lifting shots and rhythms from that film.
It is a funny, queasy, often deeply uncomfortable film. Daniel Craig is remarkable as Lee, equally terrifying and pitiable, a man who was handsome a decade prior and doesn’t know he’s too wasted to get away with being such a prick. I think the way this plays out as a film about what happens when we chase queerness back into the dark and allow old creeps to be our guides through this world is just as relevant as it was in the gentler Call Me By Your Name. Jason Schwartzman is remarkably funny as a furry little hobbit of a man who also gets far more play than Craig’s Lee. If this film is lower than the sum of its parts, it’s because I really hated the epilogue, which drove the links to Burroughs and Naked Lunch too far for me.
Perhaps the most frustrating casualty of the strikes of ‘23 sliding the slate forward, Challengers and Queer deserved their own distinct awards runs by the brilliant team director Luca Guadagnino has assembled. Like Challengers, I love the screenplay written by Justin Kuritzkes, who is sharply funny, so elegant at drawing distinctive characters, and is careful with withholding information. I love the cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the genius who shot my previously beloved Beckett and Memoria (as well as Challengers and Trap this year!), whose visual language creates a dreamlike city of expats living in lush, painterly light. I love the costumes by Jonathan Anderson, who in both Challengers and Queer creates distinctive modern wardrobes that both feel immediately recognizable and also visually iconic. I love the music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, working in a subtler mode compared to their Challengers score, but one that helps create the intense loneliness of Bill Lee’s exile.
I’m not sure when I was a teenager watching Rejected on YouTube that Don Hertzfeldt would become, almost inarguably, America’s greatest working animator two decades later. Between his feature film It’s Such a Beautiful Day and the wonderful World of Tomorrow trilogy of shorts, he’s demonstrated incomparable insight into generational trauma, the ever-warping detachment of memory, and the increasingly isolated modern world. ME takes these themes and applies them to a musical short film, replacing his often very poignant dialogue with the pulsing beat of Brent Lewis’s Drumsex and classical aria. That doesn’t leave ME too abstract – rather, it’s maybe the most straightforwardly funny film and directly political he’s made since his film school work. I don’t want to spoil what happens – Hertzfeldt’s own advertising for the film is deservedly enigmatic – but I can say that Hertzfeldt’s animation has rarely been more expressive or better edited.
10. A Different Man
Dir. Aaron Schimberg Max, VOD
A film which threatens to be too clean and manages to disorient over and over again, Schimberg’s A Different Man offers a New York City that feels disjointed from time entirely. Sebastian Stan’s Edward lives in a shitty apartment when he’s not starring in altogether awful ads, the limit of the work he can get with his advanced neurofibromatosis between frequent surgeries. Miserable, he receives an opportunity to pursue a miracle cure right as he falls in love with his new neighbor (Renate Reinsve) – when the cure works, he takes a new lease on life, only to meet another man with the same condition that lives the life he wishes he had all along.
Working with a sense of humor that bounces between the irony of Dostoevsky and the simple pleasure of a good Simpsons episode, this is the funniest movie I’ve seen this year. A Different Man navigates heftier subject matter like representation and ableism with a willingness to go for the joke and yet always maintains its tension. The Umberto Smirelli score and Anna Kathleen production design maintain a sinister undercurrent to Edward’s machinations. I’ve never seen Stan better playing both the empathetic frustration of Edward’s emotions without any ego about the dark and often stupid places the character goes. And Adam Pearson has rightfully become the centerpiece of discussion of this film, an instantly charming socialite who is also constantly one-upping Edward at every turn.
9. The Beast
Dir. Bertrand Bonello Criterion Channel, VOD
If you need one more dollop of the Lynchian to cap off your mourning of film’s greatest dreamer, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast contains an overt love letter to Lynch’s style. Bonello begins The Beast as an adaptation of Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle with a science fiction frame, and in that it is a gorgeous, sincere, tragic story of someone whose existential dread has swallowed their dream of love and happiness. The gauzy camerawork gives these scenes the soft lighting of rococo, and the production design of this sequence is rich. Lea Seydoux plays her usually catlike coldness, unknowable but alluring, and if you’ve not seen her in a film before, it tells you everything you need to know about her persona.
But in his next trick, Bonello transposes that story out of time and reincarnates it in Los Angeles, resurrecting elements of Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Twin Peaks The Return to set the lead lovers at odds. The two leads, Seydoux and George MacKay, are two of the best performances of the year, communicating so much with posture and expression that their characters are afraid to say aloud. And yet most impressive is the way Seydoux plays the relative comfort of that Los Angeles storyline, logically aware something is off but emotionally unguarded from whatever that might mean.
At some level, this is the most frustrating film for me in this top ten, because it gets a little too cute with its homages and its metaphors and at times drowns itself in pastiche. When it’s working, it is one of the more profound and beautiful films of the year. I hope I grow to love it even more over time.
8. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Dir. George Miller Max, VOD
[this is an abridged version of a longer piece i’d drafted about Furiosa and was never quite happy with. Hopefully, it entertains you now.]
Furiosa is a fun action film full of bewildering stunts and perfectly choreographed action sequences, unbelievable color underneath revving engines and fiery explosions, and Chris Hemsworth as Dementus devours the whole hock of ham. I enjoyed watching Anya Taylor Joy in the role despite not thinking Furiosa is all that strong a character – I appreciate the way the film shows Furiosa as a resourceful survivor from the beginning of her journey, always looking for the best path to her goals rather than that being a response to her life in Immortan Joe’s Citadel.
The merits of the film are both somewhat self-explanatory on the screen and hard to discuss without watching multiple times. Instead, what I want to talk about is Furiosa’s wasteland. Fair warning that this will contain spoilers for the film, though I doubt anything I say will spoil the experience.
Dementus, Octoboss, and the gang.
Furiosa starts us in The Green Place, a place of abundance. We see men in The Green Place’s town, we see horseback riders, and we see wind turbines. In Fury Road, The Green Place has become the stilt-walker swamp. It’s hard to imagine scavengers not finding them more often. The scavengers we do see, Toejam (David Field) and his gang, ride to Dementus’s tent camp. That tent camp eventually rides to round up other scavengers, including the torture game we see in the gang battle that recruits Mr. Norton (Elsa Pataky’s second role.) Tent camps are not considered civilization – when we return to Fury Road’s trifecta of The Citadel, Gastown and the Bullet Farm, there is “nothing else out there.”
And this world is defined by vehicles driving at relatively high speeds. Even being relatively conservative, the V8s and rigs likely drive around 45 miles per hour across hard desert (metric, that’s roughly 72 kmh.) East to west, that leaves modern Australia roughly 55 hours across – keep in mind that the oceans are not what they were. In describing her journey to Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke,) Furiosa states they’ll drive three days east from the Bullet Farm, and then “take the bikes the rest of the way.” This is far enough that The Citadel, Gastown, and the Bullet Farm don’t find The Green Place.
Either they’re right that nothing else is out there, it’s too expensive to explore that far out safely, or they found The Citadel and are encouraging those in their circle to stay within the world The Three Fortresses create. The Three Fortresses operate on barter economy – rigs drive between (including that of Praetorian Jack) and deliver food from The Citadel, guzzoline from Gastown, and ammo/weaponry from the Bullet Farm. We don’t get a ton of visibility into life as a warboy, even while Furiosa is in disguise. “Witness” is the primary reward structure – valiance potentially leading to promotion within the ranks.
Praetorian Jack and Furiosa in the rig.
When I isolate how this world works economically – how it creates this system of trade and political control by Immortan Joe and his designated allies – it starts to become clearer how this world’s design operates and the story it’s telling. The world of Fury Road and Furiosa is one where control of resources and information control are one and the same. Dementus never gives away to Immortan Joe that The Green Place exists, and Furiosa only shares that knowledge with Praetorian Jack. But pursuit of other territory is never part of Joe’s goals. Joe is portrayed as a rapacious and tyrannical fascist, with his domination focusing primarily on the brides and his warboys.
Some post-apocalyptic stories, like the Fallout games or Stephen King’s The Stand, operate as colonial resets. The political allegiances have been obliterated, and unincorporated territory is open again for reclamation. Wars play out between factions seeking to claim control. The “evil” faction is the one that allows subjugation, debauchery, or enslavement. The “good” faction usually seeks to reinstate the status quo of liberal democracy, or maybe create a small sense of collectivism. In Zardoz, we see a world where the subjugators reshape the world in their service, their tabernacle separating immortals from the “brutals” farming and cultivating resources. Others offer an Eden – find the Green Place, save your people.
Furiosa, and Mad Max Fury Road, don’t really operate that way. The story is not about returning to The Green Place because Furiosa wants to claim it for her people. Furiosa’s initial drive is about returning to family and virtue for the individual. Her journey is about learning that the evil subjugators who have removed her from a paradise have actually earned the vengeance she wreaks upon them; and, she learns that their victims merit consideration. This film tells a story about learning to tend to your own neighbors, even in a homeland you despise, rather than solely serving oneself.
We are in a time of global political turmoil. Rising far-right fascism, theological or purely narcissistic, surrounds us on every continent. People I admire are once again scanning for emigration, trying to find places where social movements are at least moving in the right direction. With the prior film, Fury Road, the story may have told a fairly surface-level “fuck you” to misogynist slavers and fascist cults of personality, considered the idea that we might be too late to return to paradise, and relished in a conclusion that asked us to consider the ideal life in a broken world. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga pulls the myth back and begs us to recognize the sacrifice our epic hero makes, her monomaniacal escape drive kicking back toward empathy and real heroism to protect the victims of evil.
Some Dementus vs Warboy action.
7. Trap
Dir. M. Night Shyamalan Max, VOD
The most perfectly designed of Shyamalan’s films since The Sixth Sense, Trap is a wildly entertaining identity game. The Butcher (Josh Hartnett), that freaking nutjob that goes around chopping people up, is taking his daughter to a tween pop concert, and the feds know The Butcher is there and have turned the whole concert into a trap. Watching Hartnett assess the extent of his opposition while a pretty realistic depiction of a C-list pop concert happens in the background is pure candy, and the sudden outburst of violence or jokes at Hartnett’s corny dad persona are equally blissful. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s stellar year never made me laugh harder with a camera movement than a pivot to a piano in the film’s second act.
But then on top of all that, this is a film with so much to pull apart, from meditations on fatherhood, ostracism, depersonalization, the validity of anger, and structural choices that inform our opinions on fame, policing, pathetic violence. It operates on a meta-level of Shyamalan working with his daughter Saleka, who plays the pop star Lady Raven in the film, and asking questions about how family and “personal projects” are ethically kept separate. (On that note, I also think Saleka’s performance has been wrongly dismissed – I think she’s believable as a stage kid, and her music is believable for the kind of audience she attracts!) It’s both as fleshed out and as entertaining a film as he’s ever made. After the last three, I think he’s really reclaimed his title as a master filmmaker.
6. Evil Does Not Exist
Dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi Criterion Channel, VOD
Since I last wrote about Ryusuke Hamaguchi when he took the top slot on my top 21 of 2021 with Drive My Car, he’s only grown in my estimation as a storyteller. His prior films, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Happy Hour, and Asako I & II all solidified his mastery for stories of mistaken identity, complicated friendships, and people aspiring for profundity when play would have been more socially acceptable. Evil Does Not Exist largely eschews Hamaguchi’s comforts in art and artists. It is, instead, a film about gentrification and its threat to a small rural town, with a talent agency trying to lay claim to a COVID-era development grant and build a glamping site. The flashy urbanites are set instead as the outsiders looking to displace our heroes’ way of life, even if the agents sent to negotiate the development are well meaning. Hamaguchi and the cast treat both the locals and these agents with love and humor, recognizing when they are being difficult or manipulative without diminishing their empathy.
But perhaps his biggest departure is in tone and presentation. This is a film with long periods of quiet, originally conceived as a silent companion to Eiko Ishibashi’s gorgeous score, where you watch tasks like chopping wood or collecting spring water. The most dramatic scene in the first half of the film is a town hall meeting discussing the glamping site, one which recalls similar “confrontations” in films like Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall more than traditional drama. But when the stakes raise in the film’s climax, there was something terrifying and desperate that Hamaguchi has not tapped into elsewhere, and the title’s ominous and confrontational title takes shape in a way I’ve been wrestling with all year.
5. Nosferatu
Dir. Robert Eggers Peacock, VOD
The most baffling response I’ve seen people have to Nosferatu is to dismiss it as a “technical exercise.” I think it’s because I know Eggers’ history – that Nosferatu is his longest running passion project, that he adapted it for the stage in high school, that that play became his first professional production at the Edwin Booth Theater in New York in 2001, that he was going to make this film after The VVitch if The Lighthouse hadn’t taken precedence. The exacting control over this film’s visual language isn’t dispassion or validation – it’s decades of monomania come to fruition. Eggers is the historical reader’s ideal filmmaker. His desire to play with tropes and familiar subjects and return them to the culture from which they sprung reminds me so much of discussions with two of my favorite instructors Jeffrey Steele and Ron Harris, who shared their love of Herman Melville and Christopher Marlowe while refusing to mythologize them as unrelatable or inhuman.
But, even setting aside motivation, I simply think Eggers made a thrilling and gorgeous film. I can’t sing the praises of every performance without making this altogether too long, but I agree that Lily Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard should be taken as especially remarkable for their portrayals of Ellen Hutter and Count Orlok. Their approaches to those characters are so remarkable both in their physicality and their voices, and I especially think they compare favorably to Winona Ryder and Gary Oldman in Coppola’s adaptation of Dracula. Unlike that film, there is no romance to Eggers’ fated – they are doomed to one another, and the “appetite” Orlok identifies is one of despair and plague. It’s real monster shit, and it fucking rocks.
4. Megalopolis
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola Pending Rerelease
I have tried a couple times to write about Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and I keep getting stumped. I keep attempting to describe what the movie is, which is best answered by watching the movie, and not why I care. People who know my film taste probably recognize my propensity for audacious, colossal epics that others might describe as “a money pit of terrible ideas executed terribly,” “a deranged freak-fantasia,” “a personal vision writ extremely large,” or “a glittering cultural trash pile.” I find these films often challenge the preconceived notions we have about storytelling, adventuring into a selfhood that no one can quite replicate, and many can’t enjoy without the remove of “camp” to offer guard against the life-altering substance at the film’s core. Sometimes, I’m lucky enough to see these films reclaimed by a larger cultural movement. But I’m also okay maintaining my small community of like-minded jellicles who keep the concept of a cult film alive.
At the expense of other details, I must highlight the performances. Adam Driver as architect, city planner, and artist Cesar Catalina is able to wring a charismatic, compelling presence out of an impossible character. Catalina’s motivations and ego are constantly in a storm, and he veers wildly between theatrical monologues (his first contains the entirety of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be”) and monotonous deflection. It is solely through Driver’s hand that this becomes a character we understand and care for. Aubrey Plaza is his closest match as the venal and lusty Wow Platinum, really leaning into the comedy of her character’s femme fatale role and heightening the work of everyone around her. I enjoy almost everyone else – Jason Schwartzman in particular gets two of my biggest laughs of the year – but those are the two I consider really especially remarkable.
Let’s talk about Megalon.
Megalon is the liquid metal unobtanium Cesar Catalina has synthesized to construct Megalopolis, his utopian project. It’s unclear exactly what Megalon is made from, if it requires the harvesting of some raw material, if it has any definitive physical properties. At one point, Cesar divulges how he came across the core of Megalon in mourning his suicidal wife, a woman he’s suspected of having murdered and – despite his “innocence” – blames himself for killing. Megalon is pure inspiration – it is galvanized imagination fired by dissatisfaction, grief, guilt, and mania.
This sort of broad, literalized emotion makes Megalopolis one of the year’s most vital films. In a bravura sequence at the beginning of the film’s second act, Driver’s Cesar plays the drunken fool for the paparazzi and falls into a near-catatonic fantasia of self-indulgence. The editing rhythms that take over for this scene are energizing and hypnotic, while Cesar’s world is falling apart in the gladiatorial arena. It works on an ecstatic emotional level, battering you with broad comedy, sex, drugs, garish CGI, bizarre line readings, and deeply sincere half-statements about believing in a better future.
In text, Megalopolis does not argue well for itself. I mean, it’s very entertaining, with most of the viral moments being very intentional jokes. It’s often visually striking in the same way as 2000s CG can be, reminiscent of the Star Wars prequels, Southland Tales, and Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams. Every five minutes, you will go, “Wait, what the fuck, did that really just happen?,” only for the next five minutes to surprise you yet again. It is a somewhat exhausting rollercoaster ride you will not soon forget.
But in trying to assess what it all builds toward, I can only offer the generosity that the now-elderly Coppola recognizes he does not have the answer to utopia. He is a conflicted, bitter, old man who tried to make his own movie studio where the safety and conservative values of the major Hollywood slates had no reach – he was destroyed almost immediately, and watched as those who reflected his own values were destroyed along with him in favor of Reaganism and neoliberalism. He cannot envision the way forward – Megalopolis is his plaintive cry that somebody at least continue to ask the right questions.
3. Nickel Boys
Dir. RaMell Ross MGM+, VOD
In the purest argument of representing an evolution of film as a medium, nothing makes as clear an argument as RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, an adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel about exploitation at an abusive reform school. The film utilizes a remarkable first person perspective, taking the point of view of protagonists Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), a technique usually restricted to individual scenes or found footage films like The Blair Witch Project. This is a radical choice in adaptation – the novel is told in third person, and its prologue lays out the nature and degree of evil the characters will face at Nickel Academy. It is so long before we first see Elwood’s face, and when we finally do, we realize how other people perceive this character’s energy, a little off putting, a little vulnerable, a little sad.
Then Nickel Boys starts taking advantage of these two perspective characters to disorient us further – we start seeing dreams, scenes of waking up in the middle of the night, entering a room and not knowing whose eyes we’re in. This feeling of not knowing what character perspective we’re in would simply not be possible without this perspective. It is similar to how I discussed Game of the Year 1000xResist, which also uses its core premise to tell a story in a way that would not work another way. In an early scene where Elwood’s grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, in the year’s best true supporting performance) visits Nickel, we’re excited for a moment only before we realize we’re in Turner’s head, and Elwood is not allowed to see her. Their scene together is intimate, uncomfortable, and devastatingly sad, and it takes on extra intimacy and potency because of the formal technique that anchors it.
Nickel Boys does not linger in violence or its peak moments of trauma. I think Ross recognizes that this point of view could heighten this film into new extremity, into misery pornography, into a radical provocation of how important it is not to look away from racial violence. But I think, structurally, Ross instead highlights the characters in moments of hope or connection – sometimes, that hope is deflated in the very same scene. Our protagonists observe a moment where a friend’s dream of athletic victory is ripped away from him – just before that, they’re telling one another about their families, Elwood’s copy of a Jane Austin novel, what life should be. It cares about these characters, and caring about them is showing them outside of just instrumentalizing their trauma.
The technique is hardly the only wonderful thing about this film. All the performances are uniformly excellent. The film, while covering exploitation, makes space for joy and community, and it does so by celebrating life that cannot be extinguished rather than by romanticizing their circumstances. Ross uses his history as a photojournalist and documentarian (he previously directed Hale County This Morning This Evening) to create sequences of gorgeous imagery that might feel indulgent if they were not so gorgeous or personally resonant. It is rare to see a film simultaneously do something so experimental and also nail every classical element alongside it. Ross has instantly declared himself a filmmaker of importance – Nickel Boys will survive regardless of how first person perspective evolves because it tells its story with confidence and care.
2. Challengers
Dir. Luca Guadagnino Prime Video, VOD
Even better than I gave it credit for being, I had been underrating the film as almost hermetically sealed, but there are other characters who arrive for a spotlight scene outside our main trio. Burgess Byrd is so funny as the woman in New Rochelle with the Dunkin’ Donuts, a little starstruck because she remembers Patrick from his junior doubles match with Art. Christine Dye is as good as the hotel clerk Patrick tries to sleaze for a room – ditto for Hailey Gates as the real estate agent trying to maintain enthusiasm for Patrick’s tennis career despite just wanting to bone down. But everyone’s there to serve Tashi, Art and Patrick, and it’s their relationships that are just perfectly tuned throughout. Kuritzkes really proved himself this year as having an incredible sense of character between Challengers and Queer – I’m so excited that the Potion Seller guy has become a brilliant screenwriter – he’s already got three more projects lined up, and I can’t wait to see any of the three.
I ended up getting to see Challengers again as part of Annie’s birthday celebration this year, and perhaps the greatest treat of Challengers is realizing that every single scene is another “oh, right, This Part!” scene. When match point arrived and the fireworks started going off, I started crying from an ecstatic sense of delight, not wanting the film to ever end. There is nothing in cinema this year that matches the finale’s pleasure, its perfect storytelling, its audacious technique, the delightful “Match Point” track by Reznor & Ross. The final shot hit, the final cry erupted. The credits rolled, I leaned back, and I wanted a cigarette.
1. I Saw the TV Glow
Dir. Jane Schoenbrun Max, VOD
This is an instant all-time favorite. It has left an insurmountable impact on my life. In a time when I feel more exhausted than ever before by a desperate world, I take strength from Maddy begging us to love ourselves enough to be willing to give up the sludge and be authentic. I have been trying to find a post for a while now, from maybe a decade ago. It declared that when queer people come out as queer, they must understand that their family, their community, their government may reject them – they are fugitives existing outside of the status quo. This can ultimately be taken as inspiring, that every queer hero you’ve ever had survived to change your life, but it does not invalidate the real violence and abandonment queer people have experienced, either. This film grapples with that violence and what it means to be a fugitive and thrive as your true self.
The feelings I have toward I Saw the TV Glow remain so intense that I have a hard time thinking about this film without getting emotional all over again. I want to say thank you to my friends who have heard me talk about the film and watched me choke up again without razzing me about it. I want to thank Jack Haven, who I did not make a lot of space talking about in my original piece and whose words ring back in my head as rejoinders to remain inspired rather than afraid, and whose social media presence is just so fucking cool. I want to thank Jane Schoenbrun for coming up with a language that I find so essential in understanding my own experiences, the way Jordan Peele added to the lexicon with “the sunken place” and “third term Obama voters.” And I want to say thank you to Annie, who has been so profoundly loving when I talk about encountering waves of not knowing how to dress, how to present, how to feel like myself.
Lynch was not a filmmaker first. He’d gone to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as a painter, and only began filmmaking out of a desire to see his paintings move. His first “films,” Six Figures Getting Sick and The Alphabet, are mixed media exhibitions that, even after the rest of his strange and wonderful career, come across more as museum pieces than cinema. Six Figures Getting Sick, notably, was originally presented on a sculpture “screen,” complete with plaster heads bubbling out of it. Working contemporary to Warhol and the evolution of video art, Lynch diverted from that path with the AFI funded The Grandmother, which signalled many of his anxieties, thematic concerns, and stylistic flourishes from the very start.
But my favorite of these early shorts is actually The Amputee, a two minute film (with two different takes, on two different filmstocks) in which an older woman writes an opaque letter about a convoluted series of relationships. It’s a very simple, one shot film, where the titular amputee is played by Catherine Coulson, better known as Twin Peaks’s Log Lady. Coulson was working behind the scenes on Eraserhead when they decided to shoot The Amputee as a film test – she’d been brought on board with her husband Jack Nance, though they divorced before Eraserhead debuted. This short, to me, is emblematic of the way Lynch works with fellow artists, takes these little diversions, and discovers something magical. While Eraserhead is this moral shock, this exorcism of Lynch’s demons around city life and the family unit, it’s The Amputee that paints the way forward as an empathetic look at the frustrations of internal life and the gaps between people.
Lynch described himself as an absent husband and father, saying himself in Room to Dream that “film would still come first.” The safest way to stay in Lynch’s life was to be an artistic collaborator first and a friend or lover second. His loyalty to Coulson and Nance was lifelong – perhaps the most profound moment of David Lynch’s final mainstream work, Twin Peaks: The Return, is Coulson as The Log Lady, eulogizing herself. Her words come to me regularly, reminding me “about death – that it’s just change, not an end,” words that I’ll be thinking about for many days to come. Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Grace Zabriskie, Sherilyn Fenn, they all joined Lynch’s repertory family. Jack Fisk, Angelo Badalamenti, and Mary Sweeney, among many others, were collaborators over several decades. When he became largely homebound with his emphysema, sometimes the greatest collaborator was his own family.
“What Is David Working On Today? 5/5/22,” in which David shares the barn he made to teach “Farm” during COVID isolation.
One of the greatest things about David Lynch was that, so long as the art was not “taken away from him,” he did not consider any of his artistic endeavors unworthy of love and attention. When David Lynch fell in love with Flash animation, he made Dumbland, which is not some intellectual exercise but is just as puerile and funny as anything on ebaumsworld or Newgrounds. When David Lynch made a barn for his daughter, he shared it with the world. When David Lynch did daily weather reports, he did it with pride, and when he had to stop, he did so apologetically because he knew they brought people joy. Some people voiced frustration with David highlighting an announcement only for it to be more experimental music with Chrystabell – but it’s his love for all this creation that made him the man who never thought twice about taking the personal path.
I don’t want to catalog what the films and Twin Peaks mean to me right now – I’d like to give them all the space they deserve, each a treasure worthy of being unpacked on its own, each not painting the full picture of who this man is to me. I named my newsletter The Horizon Line after his final on-screen appearance as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. As I shared in my Blue Velvet piece, Lynch’s work is at the heart of so many of the relationships I have in my life. He is at the fundament of my worldview and identity, my belief in a person’s ability to grow, my belief that the inexplicable can also be human. Like many, every time he made a public statement or new work of any kind, I was happy to hear his voice again. I’ll miss him so dearly.
Watching Shelley Duvall’s 70s work, I find myself confronted by an unvarnished truth. In a movie like 3 Women, Duvall plays both the underlying frustration and the surface level facade of genial perfection with equal honesty. Neither should qualify as a spoiler – compare first this clip of Millie’s genial side, and then this one of a milder snap. There is a truth to what many consider a mask – it is a presentation of the idealized self, sure, but our ideals can also be part of us. Duvall performs a psychological complexity that many misunderstand. The ugly things we say are not truer than the kind ones just because our politeness holds us from saying them. The things we say to wound based out of rash impulse are not inherently “more honest” than the ones we use to glide above anger and social mismatch. I think Millie is being honest in both clips, and it’s given to us as the audience to read her reaction to Mildred (Sissy Spacek) for what she’s feeling.
Duvall’s Millie, like many of her characters, isn’t psychologically complex because she’s an obvious intellectual. If anything, Duvall’s characters are often defined by a sort of cluelessness, either by living simple lives or ignoring red flags. Part of it is just that she’s damned funny. She was funny in Nashville as an outrageous boy-crazy It Girl flown in from L.A. Funny as the disreputable (and insightful) Countess Gemini in Jane Campion’s otherwise po-faced The Portrait of a Lady. Funny as the Astrodome tour guide who hooks up with Bud Cort’s Brewster McCloud in her first on-screen role. But she was also funny in real life, in profiles like the 2021 THR piece Searching for Shelley Duvall, a profile in which she dispels some of the more despairing images of her struggles with mental health and trauma. (I’m saving thoughts on The Shining for its own piece, but Duvall is the real masterful performance in the film. Suffice it to say that I believe her repeated account that Kubrick was warm and friendly and that the work of making The Shining was emotionally exhausting for almost everyone involved.)
Duvall in Vogue.
Maybe more than anything, the throughline of Shelley Duvall’s canon confronts our understanding of who gets to be iconic. Part of it is the colorful aesthetic that defined her personal fashion – it’s no surprise looking at her combinations of color and pattern that she’d become invested in children’s programming and fairy tales. That aesthetic means a lot to me. Looking at some of Duvall’s choices of clothing invokes a sense of comradery. It’d be too simple to call it “camp,” but there are choices in her makeup and her wardrobe that expand my own sense of queer euphoric fashion.
It’s also her choice in roles, bringing that complex version of emotional vulnerability to characters of all classes, levels of status, and ranging from victims of abuse to literal cartoon characters. I haven’t seen a couple of the landmark Duvall films. Many of my friends mourning Duvall have posted scenes from Robert Altman’s Popeye, a reclaimed gonzo blockbuster adapting the classic cartoon – it’s hard to imagine a more obvious Olive Oil. Two of her 70s Altman collaborations, Thieves Like Us and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, remain on my queue. I’ve heard a lot of love for her work in the original live-action Frankenweenie, and I’ve seen none of her children’s programming at an age I’m old enough to remember. I’m thankful for a little more Shelley Duvall on my horizon. I’m glad she passed celebrated by her friends and community for all the beauty she brought into the world.
Above is the trailer I made for the 1974 film Zardoz when we at WUD Film screened it about a decade ago. If you’ve never seen it, that’s my pitch. I really haven’t felt a need to adjust it. If that sounds fun, please watch Zardoz before reading any more.
Every time I’m reunited with Zed, Consuela, May and Friend, I find myself thinking two conflicting thoughts:
1. This really isn’t that abnormal for New Wave science fiction or post-Tolkien fantasy fiction, its concerns of sex, godliness, immortality, colonialism and the dangers of both capitalism and collectivism, post-humanism, and embrace of pseudosciences and philosophy. A man believed to be born of relatively low status is actually the chosen one who will destroy the evil empire – he makes allies within the enemy, becomes a powerful superman, and ultimately conquers.
2. This is pretty wild in terms of presentation, formally adventurous, but also just thrilling and unique in its tone and performance – nothing is quite like Zardoz. Everything along this hero’s journey takes place in ways that are extremely unexpected, and the film’s conclusion is a shockingly ambivalent revenge play bordello of blood.
I think that balance is struck in Boorman’s comfort with a tale “most satirical,” as Arthur puts it in the intro. Oh, yes, it all “takes itself so seriously,” except for the whole “he draws on his own mustache and beard and flies around in a stone head because he was inspired by a children’s book” thing. It’s “playing itself straight” and also has an extended soapy titties “how do boners work” gag.
Zed in the Tabernacle.
All these things work within the same general framework because Boorman knows that life is silly, technology is silly, and therefore embraces just how absurd things would get with the boredom of eternal life. Friend being our first anchor into Eternal society is key for that reason – he gives us the frame with which to watch the rest of the movie, one Zed himself has been hunting for because Eternal society is the only thing he could not possibly learn about in all his reading.
The more I pull at any given question in the film, there’s character logic and thematic reasoning to back it up. The fixation on boners is a great gag because Eternal society went to space and abandoned sleep to try to answer The Big Questions about God, love, emotion, and happiness, and now they’re so cowed they spend their days meaninglessly meditating at second level and trying to figure out boners for the tenth time. The stuff about the dangers of collectivism also stems from the origin of the Vortex – founded by capitalists who taught their children to harden their hearts to suffering, usurped by those heartless children who watched the founders realize the error of their ways, then turned back outward into the world to create an oligarchy. This place bred and led itself into oblivion.
The Apathetics, who have lived too long and lost to psychic warfare.
The pacing of the film rewards multiple viewings. There’s an extended almost-wordless sequence of Zed first exploring the Vortex’s mills – this is enjoyable because Connery is very funny being scared by jack-in-the-boxes and projected videos, but it’s even more fun when you know what The Vortex is and how it’s giving away the sham much earlier than the rest of the film. Friend takes a while to figure out, but on rewatches, he instantly pops, his arc already in motion at the start of the film. Watching Consuela’s arc over the film, from total monotone (“you’re hurting me.”) to more and more emotional outbursts, it’s a great performance. Connery and Rampling both really are great in this – they’re asked to do some impossible scenes and they sell them.
And, yeah, it’s a fuckin riot of silly stuff, too. Any of the mirror falling, jumping around, fantastical editing, psychic violence and the video trial of Satan, the entire reveal of the book sequence – this stuff is, I assume, meant to be laughed at. There’s a lot of funny stuff in this movie! I think most people, even if they’re not capable of getting on its wavelength thematically, can enjoy its pretty solid pacing for memorable scenes, its wonderful aesthetics, its sheer volume of small breasts, and its laugh out loud absurdity. I tend to sell it on that absurdity, knowing many will not come along to celebrate what is, in my book, one of the great works of cinematic science fiction.
The short film version of Bottle Rocket, available in higher quality on the Bottle Rocket Criterion disc.
BOTTLE ROCKET Dir. Wes Anderson 1996
These notes originally ran to supplement UW Cinematheque’s screening of Bottle Rocket on July 25, 2014.
Though Wes Anderson is best known for the diorama-and -dollhouse-like sets of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and the almost literal dioramas and dollhouses of the stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox, viewers will see the intricacy of production design and specificity of detail pared down in Anderson’s first feature film, Bottle Rocket. The story of bumbling would-be bandits who happen to be would-be brothers grants us a naïve and vulnerable look at the filmmaker’s relationship to his home territory and fellow dreamers.
Bottle Rocket marks the feature debut of screenwriter/actor Owen Wilson, who co-wrote the script with Anderson. The two lived in a small home and shared two beds with the other two Wilson brothers, Luke and Andrew (also debuting as protagonist Anthony and John “Future Man” Mapplethorpe, respectively). Anderson and Wilson would write three films together, culminating with The Royal Tenenbaums. They stopped writing together as Wilson became in higher demand as an actor, and Anderson’s films took a somber turn, beginning with his meditation on irrelevancy with The Life Aquatic (co-written by Noah Baumbach.)
Not until The Life Aquatic would an Anderson film be as sun-drenched as Bottle Rocket. Few films look as warm in their depictions of summer without saturating their oranges and blues; Bottle Rocket instead highlights its yellows, from Dignan’s jumpsuits to the bedsheets of the motel. Few turn of the century filmmakers captured yellows and warmth with the same enthusiasm as Anderson and his go-to cinematographer Robert Yeoman.
Though Bottle Rocket’s visual style is less meticulously staged than its successors, the production design is outstanding. The trademark Anderson handwritten insert – Dignan’s seventy-five year plan – utilizes multiple colors of markers not to reflect Dignan’s inability to plan the heist quickly, but rather his highly capable organization (note that only headers and prefaces appear in blue, whereas actual “plans” appear in red). However, don’t mistake that organization for capability; Dignan’s plans remain vague, often suggesting simple ideas like “odds” as keys to living successfully. Consider that the scenes at the Mapplethorpes’ house were filmed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s John Gillen Residence, a home designed by an architect out of time for a Texan geophysicist.
Though laughs permeate all of Anderson’s films, Bottle Rocket is consistently funny. The majority of the staff deliver these lines casually and conversationally, making the absurd seem normal, nondescript. None relish the opportunity more than James Caan, who chews his way through a rejection of Anthony and a total shutdown of Future Man in his first ten minutes on screen as Mr. Henry. Given a short amount of time in the film, Caan chooses to make the most of what he’s given.
I claim the true star, of surprise to no one who has seen the film, is Owen Wilson’s Dignan, the excitable obsessive and one of Anderson’s iconic characters. Hungry for adventure, he wants to live on the edges of normal life, an outlaw with a heart of gold. He rejects the simple, the casual, the conversational, always “calling his gang” with a birdcall or launching into another layer of his scheme, alienating himself to the point of ignoring his friends’ happiness. But, unlike the self-destructive Max Fischer of Rushmore, Dignan refuses to advance without his companions. Though he storms off angrily, one request from Bob to be on the team is enough to make Dignan declare his one ultimatum; the slightest hint of interest from Anthony is enough to make Wilson flash a beautiful smile. Without the combination of Wilson’s belief in the character’s beauty and his failings, both in the writing and the acting, Bottle Rocket could not exist in its current form.
The film performs a balancing act. It is about the naïveté, adventurous spirit, and social ignorance of Dignan and his love for friends and brothers. Simultaneously it carries the “Born to Run” spirit of living in a town too small for one’s dreams. Each viewing, I have come away feeling differently about its core, though Dignan runs away with my affection each and every time.
The final heist is as ridiculous as an amateur heist could be. It is truly amazing that Bottle Rocket and Fargo were both released in the first months of 1996 and that one film could not have directly inspired the other. How else could the absurd misconduct of Dignan and Steve Buscemi’s Carl Showalter reflect the same ridiculous misunderstanding of the importance of masks and the value of awareness? But where Fargo damns its kidnappers, facing the darkest elements of their psyche, Bottle Rocket absolves them. Dignan/Wilson’s last lines in the film foreshadow the fall from innocence Anderson and Wilson would explore in their next, more well-regarded film, Rushmore.
All My Friends 