Tennis is, from a purely aesthetic perspective, the greatest popular sport. The outfits are chic – the courts are attractive in their clean lines and colorful floor. The sound a tennis racket makes when swung through the air, that beautiful “whoosh” of the netted stringbed is haunting and ethereal – the sound of a tennis ball colliding with a racket is a resonant “thwock!”, that dull thud both recognizable enough to track the ball’s movement and yet quiet enough to never pierce the ear. That’s not even to account for the classic tennis grunt – some people find this obnoxious and even unsportsmanlike, but I find it human, characterful, and honest about the extreme ardor of the sport.
That tennis grunt is essential to the soundtrack of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, with Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) sighing and shouting over the heartbeat Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross techno score. We do get practices and drills absent the soundtrack of, according to Reznor, “Unending homoerotic desire,” but the definitive soundscape of Challengers is that of a rave hookup. It might be Reznor and Ross’s best work – the shock of its juxtaposition with the subject matter quickly gives way to allowing the editing to create a film that could not exist any other way.
Challengers is a tennis love triangle between Patrick, Art, and Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, three of the most immediately iconic film characters in years. The truth is, the less you know going in, the better – you can wrap this paragraph, and then I’m sending those who haven’t seen it yet home. It is a deeply tense interpersonal drama, intensely erotic, very very funny, and psychologically thought provoking. Throughout the film, plot developments and character choices had me gasping, hiding my eyes behind my hands, and sweating like I needed a towel. The performances are three starmakers. And the collaboration between director Luca Guadagnino, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives, Beckett, Memoria, as well as Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria) and editor Marco Costa (Guadagnino’s previous film, Bones and All) have created a visual landscape that operates both within intelligent traditional storytelling and extremely adventurous visual games during the centerpiece tennis matches. Go see it on the biggest screen you can.
SPOILERS FOR CHALLENGERS PAST THIS POINT
I had read many descriptions of Tashi Duncan as America’s leading fujoshi going into the movie, but I actually don’t know if I submit to that reading of her character. Tashi certainly has a fetishistic streak, and the makeout scene early in the film indicates she’s just as happy as a voyeur. But I think, broadly speaking, it’s more that she has a fixation on vulnerable intimacy. However, she doesn’t have the social capability of turning off the monomania about tennis – tennis is where she is capable of making those intimate connections, and she cares more about that kind of communication more than she ever dares to think about off-court relationships. Getting these two “friends” to have this moment of wanting something more is the same thing she gets out of seeing that moment of “good fucking tennis” right at the movie’s ending. It’s why we don’t see her push to have them be in one another’s lives during the twelve years between Stanford and New Rochelle – her goal isn’t to matchmake. She loves these boys, but really, what she loves is a volley that breaks the walls down.
I love the way Zendaya plays Tashi – this character isn’t so far gone that she’s completely incapable of very normal and warm interactions, but she also has an incredibly low emotional threshold for weakness. She also utterly lacks boundaries when a fellow athlete comes into focus because, for her, the lack of boundary is why you play the sport. I love the way she plays the grief after she’s started to recover from her career-ending industry – I love the absolutely ridiculously self-satisfied face she makes watching the boys make out – I love the way she plays the intense anxiety of watching Art and Patrick play mean, awful tennis in the challenger final. Between this film, seeing Sydney Sweeney knock Immaculate out of the park, and Jacob Elordi smash Priscilla last year, I’m officially tempted to get on the Euphoria train despite the fact that it kind of sounds like one of TV’s greatest slow-motion trainwrecks.
I had already enjoyed Mike Faist in West Side Story, and had rejected Josh O’Connor’s Mr. Elton in Emma., so I’m not surprised by the bias I’ve landed on toward Art in the great debate of our time. I find it fascinating the way the class dynamics play out, with O’Connor always playing the low status despite Patrick’s access to upward mobility, with Art clearly having some money before stardom but also moving his mom in with him and Tashi to be with their daughter seemingly full time. Faist plays the insecurity of having been the second fiddle really wonderfully, and he plays the killer instinct of having claimed his own world with equal intensity. There’s a cocktail of “kinds of masculinity” discourse you can get into through close reading, but I like that Faist and O’Connor never let themselves be defined as “the good one” or “the bull” or “the rich one.” There’s so much nuance offscript to the way they’ve approached these characters – I think it’s really remarkable.
I love the decision to present this film in flashbacks surrounding The Big Game. Like Oppenheimer last year, I think it’s an absolute triumph in creating an emotional timeline that makes sense without becoming pat. I love that we see Art and Tashi’s daughter before we know if the kid is actually going to be Art’s – I love that we see the infamous serve gesture so early and then the Chekov’s gun goes off after we’ve seen betrayal (betrayal we can assume Art already knows about!) but with enough distance in the scene that we’ve moved on to another thought. There are so many cinematic decisions in this film I’m looking forward to sorting through over decades of watches and rewatches. It’s an instant masterpiece for me, and even though I’ve been working on another writing project you’ll get to see soon, I knew I wasn’t going to be entirely satisfied with a few sentences on Letterboxd. I’ll have more to say once I’ve gotten to see it again.
This was a very weird year in my life! We spent almost half of it in North Carolina, seeing only Avatar: The Way of Water and The Super Mario Bros. Movie in theaters during that time. Then we moved back to Madison, a city I haven’t lived in since 2016. I immediately fell back in love with the city’s movie scene and reconnected with old friends. That’s meant that I haven’t watched a ton of movies at home, primarily seeing things at free screenings at the university. My fellow UW Cinematheque regulars will recognize many of these films from the Madison Premieres series.
Because I publish these at the Oscars on purpose, I’ll say that this year I liked every nominated film for Best Picture that I’ve seen, even though I’ve left three of those off this list. Maybe they just did a very good job, or maybe I’m getting older. Past Lives is a brilliantly acted debut that is shaggy in a few places. Maestro is a weird-as-hell movie I might grow to love over the years, but I wish the marriage drama worked a little better for me. And Poor Things may be more style than substance, but I had a hoot watching Stone and Ruffalo especially in such good goofmaster spirits.
Each of these write-ups includes a reference to any streaming service members can watch the film on for free. With one exception, all of these films are available either on streaming services or VOD rental.
HONORABLE MENTION: The Pope’s Exorcist
Dir. Julius Avery
Netflix
The Pope’s Exorcist is not my #24 film of the year. I’m not sure The Pope’s Exorcist is my #30 film of the year. But I want to watch Russell Crowe play Father Gabriel Amorth in like six more of these perfectly paced perfect little movies for morons. He rides up on that little Vespa, sits and drinks whiskey while speaking in Italian, and the whole thing is going delightfully if a little calmly. Then the last half hour hits and we get a perfect Madcap Special Effects Extravaganza. The Pope’s Exorcist hits the lizard brain in a way even Branagh’s Poirot couldn’t quite manage this year.
A big “see you later” to Ferrari, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Showing Up, American Fiction, The Holdovers, All Of Us Strangers, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Beau is Afraid, Broker, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Eileen, Furies, Godzilla Minus One, In Water, John Wick Chapter 4, M3gan, Master Gardener, Napoleon, No Bears, Pacifiction, Passages, Perfect Days, Saturn Bowling, Shin Kamen Rider, The Crime Is Mine, The First Slam Dunk, The History of the Minnessota Vikings, and The Killer.
23. The Sweet East
Dir. Sean Price Williams
VOD
I saw The Sweet East much earlier than it’s ended up available to everyone else, so I know some people would probably call it my “first movie of 2024.” This is the most Chapo Trap House-brained movie I’ve seen in a long time, a picaresque fantasia of fringe politics and embarrassing yuppies. The first ten minutes make a pretty awful first impression with Talia Ryder’s Lillian being caught in a PizzaGate riff, but once that’s past, it’s pretty damned funny for the rest of its runtime. Simon Rex, Ayo Edibiri, and Jacob Elordi are probably the highlights of the extended supporting cast. The film, directed by Safdie Brothers and Alex Ross Perry cinematographer Sean Price Williams, looks fantastic and nails a lot of great visual gags throughout.
22. Priscilla
Dir. Sofia Coppola
Max
Sofia Coppola returns to the caged bird structure of The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette,The Beguiled, and, arguably, Lost in Translation. Cailee Spaeny as the titular Priscilla is asked to play a tough role, given she needs to be both our POV character and one who we understand has basically sacrificed all internal identity for years at a time. It’s not an especially kind film to Priscilla Presley given where it chooses to cut to black, but it’s an incredibly well-observed story about that sort of self-annihilation.
21. You Hurt My Feelings
Dir. Nicole Holofcener
Showtime
A writer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) telling her brother-in-law (Arian Moayed) that he hates her new novel. You Hurt My Feelings is marriage dramedy about imposter syndrome and “little white lies” and is my first Holofcener film. She’s the director of films like Enough Said and Walking and Talking, and it pretty well lived up to my understanding of her work. This film was a challenge to get through for me, the social discomfort being a sore anxiety spot for me. But I’m glad I pushed through! The back half is full of confrontations and reconciliations that shared something valuable about communication, cutting things off, and making value judgments. Dreyfus is very obviously suited to the material, which feels like a more dramatic approach to her classic TV work.
20. Rotting in the Sun
Dir. Sebastian Silva
MUBI
I said “I’m definitely going to see Big Gay Beach Movie” the moment I saw this trailer. The trailer maybe was not representative of how much of Rotting in the Sun was at the Big Gay Beach, but good lord, did it not hold back on the Big Gay while it was at that beach! Instead, this film spends most of its time as a very funny meta-thriller about class dynamics and social media toxicity, with both Sebastian Silva and co-star Jordan Firstman playing versions of themselves that are not very kind portraits. It’s very funny, the thriller portion of the film is quite tense, and Catalina Saavedra still haunts me as Silva’s assistant and maid Vero.
19. The Adults
Dir. Dustin Guy Defa
VOD
Cringe comedy’s tough in film! I think of the apocalyptic cringe of something like Rick Alverson/Gregg Turkington’s Entertainment, where all you want to do is stop looking at the screen. The Adults is packing cringe comedy into drama, which forces the cringe behavior of this theater-kid sibling dynamic into diegesis. It ends up with some really funny moments as its core trio of siblings break into embarrassing inside jokes in front of other people, and then carry that awkwardness into their independent lives as well. This serves as a really special performance showcase, especially for Hannah Gross and Sophia Lillis, and even if the big heart didn’t quite land with me as hard as it did for some people I saw it with, I still really enjoyed it greatly.
18. The Settlers
Dir. Felipe Galvez Haberle
VOD
Haberle’s impressive debut western situates colonial violence against drunk black comedy. The Spanish and English worlds descend upon Patagonia in the form of a Queen’s soldier, a Texan cowboy, and the half-Chilean sharpshooter. Their job is to find safe passage from their Spaniard boss’s plantation to the Atlantic shore, and rack up a genocidal body count along the way. The first half of The Settlers manages an incredible mounting tension all building toward a pretty horrific sequence of violence, and then pulls back to a more intellectual cultural critique of these bloodthirsty profiteers. This is done in gorgeous landscape photography and with a rousing adventure film score by Harry Allouche, which sets the stage immediately for a film that starts rollicking and ends in despair.
17. Skinamarink
Dir. Kyle Edward Ball
Hulu, Shudder
Maybe oversold as “the scariest movie in years” for a lot of people, Skinamarink is now iconic as a verb or situation for “being trapped in a house you can’t leave with something you can’t see.” That’s crazy given just how abstract and experimental Skinamarink is as a film. Most of the dialogue is murmured by children who are often off-camera – some of it is subtitled but not all of it. There’s no real plot so much as an encroaching sense of dread and wrongness, an aesthetic darkness captured beautifully on such a low budget. Something cruel is happening and its evil only grows stronger as the film goes on. I certainly can’t recommend Skinamarink to everyone, but it’s such a singular, inventive film that it’ll likely be the go-to reference point for future Skinamarinks to come.
16. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson
Netflix
Visual imagination trumps everything else in this sequel to the still-overwhelmingly-great Into the Spider-Verse. Across the Spider-Verse never quite reaches its heights narratively, but pound for pound this is still full of many of the craziest animated images I’ve ever seen on screen. Steinfeld’s Gwen Stacy and Luna Lauren Velez’s Rio Morales also pack emotional wallops into expanded roles from the previous movie. There’s some shorthand I don’t like here, I think the “canon event” narrative device that became the movie’s central meme is outright kind of bad, and until the sequel I can’t say whether or not the Miles storyline is headed anywhere good, but I have confidence I’ll love looking at it most of the way through.
15. Bottoms
Dir. Emma Seligman
Amazon Prime
Goshdarn riot. The premise of Bottoms maybe sells “Gay Girl Fight Club” as a little more radical a concept than Seligman and Sennott were going for with the script. They’re really just making a broad comedy, closer to Hot Rod or Superbad, and maybe some people were disappointed by that. I thought everyone in this movie was really funny, from Ruby Cruz to Marshawn Lynch, and Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edibiri are so good together. I like that Sennott’s PJ is just, like, an awful friend, a shitty teenager that never really gets redeemed. The Avril needledrop is one of the best jokes I saw all year.
14. Anatomy of a Fall
Dir. Justine Triet
VOD, Hulu March 22
Stretching the definition of courtroom drama by allowing so much mistrial to occur that it almost begs to be a film set outside Earth, Anatomy of a Fall marketing itself on the phrase “Did She Do It?” is an extension of its commentary on the violence of a justice system. We watch Antoine Reinartz as prosecutor lambast Sandra Voyter’s (Sandra Huller) character and enter everything from art to sexuality into public record as evidence Sandra killed her husband. She, along with her attorney Vincent (Swann Arlaud, the hottest exhausted guy in a movie in 2023) interrupt regularly to attack the absurdity of a legal argument that ends up offering very little in the way of evidence.
This ends up forcing the film to be less of an actual legal procedural than a moral and ethical wrestling match, a determination within the self to decide whether legal theater can ever meaningfully determine guilt in any edge case, an understanding of the damage inherently done under these circumstances. The gravity of that damage primarily falls on Milo Machado-Gradner’s Daniel, the blind son who cannot look away from the dissolution of his world, a brilliant performance from an actor I hope we continue to see.
13. Knock at the Cabin
Dir. M. Night Shyamalan
Amazon Prime
The Twilight Zone, alongside this film, are at their best when they beg the question, “What if the things you 100% knew to be true were wrong?” Some people have found Knock at the Cabin’s apocalyptic stakes to be deflating the film’s tension, determining “well, the film only works if the apocalypse is coming and these stakes are too crazy, so where’s the tension?” I think that understands the film’s POV a little incorrectly. Instead, I think the tension comes from “how can the horsemen possibly convince anyone they’re right?” Bautista’s performance anchors that tension brilliantly, realizing so early on just how high the odds are stacked against them.
The history of a lot of the horror genre stems from the perspective of punishment – those who sin are persecuted by Great Evil, in karmic retribution. Beyond religious morality plays, that history extends into classic pulp horror comics and the 70s and 80s slashers. I think Knock at the Cabin very smartly understands how to reverse engineer that history into interrogating why those who already are most marginalized or persecuted bear the weight of that Great Evil’s wrath.
12. The Zone of Interest
Dir. Jonathan Glazer
VOD
Details are the substance with The Zone of Interest, a near-plotless film about the evil inherent to domestic class fantasy and the genocidal background noise of self-annihilation. The film sets itself against the silhouette of Auschwitz, and I think the big picture is the banality and decay. Not just “the banality of evil,” but also the banality of their imagined Good Life. These fascists living high on the hog are boring – they do boring things, they keep a boring garden, they have boring conversations. Their kids are shitty and mean – in real life, they grew up to be even shittier. They’re poisoning their imagined Garden of Eden, from the air filled with the fumes of death to the river filled with ashes and bones, from the flowers bleeding to their own bodies rebelling against them. Maintaining the fantasy of domesticity while slaughter sits in the background destroys us.
The absolutely horrifying score, by Under the Skin and Jackie composer Mica Levi, is the film’s greatest achievement – the end credits theme is one of the most horrifying pieces of music I’ve heard in my entire life.
11. Barbie
Dir. Greta Gerwig
Max
I’ve been team Gerwig since Lady Bird in 2017, so I had pretty high faith that Barbie would deliver, but I never predicted what exactly she’d do with The Barbies and The Kens. A movie this heavily seen is inherently going to be both underrated and overrated, and I’m probably doing both at once. I think Robbie and Gosling are so funny and so strongly in character in this film – it would deservingly be listed alongside either’s best performances. The “What Was I Made For?” Montage made me cry. The “Push” cover made me laugh so hard. I think Kingsley Ben-Adir was so phenomenal as Gosling’s Benvolio Ken, an underrated supporting turn in a movie full of strong ones. This movie’s a treat, one I’d happily toss on right now.
10. May December
Dir. Todd Haynes
Netflix
It’s crazy a movie about such an uncomfortable subject manages to be so much fun as May December. A poison pill unsurprisingly too weird for the actors’ branch at the Oscars, May December is either a very dark comedy or a funny drama, depending on which part you emphasize, “loosely” based on the Mary Kay Letournau case. The story of Charles Melton’s Joe Yoo is a devastating arc about someone reckoning with his exploitation and infantilization by his wife (Julianne Moore,) along with the intense repression of his feelings of inadequacy and inability to maintain healthy relationship boundaries. The story of Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth Berry is a pitch black satire about how artists dredge up other people’s pain to make spurious dramas that probably shouldn’t exist. Samy Burch’s screenplay and Haynes’s direction of performance both balance the trauma and the absurdity of the proceedings, and the film left me both uncomfortable and fully satisfied. The ending scene puts a perfect pin on a film that’s already won me over.
9. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (and Three More)
Dir. Wes Anderson
Netflix
At one point, I had all four of the Wes Anderson short films on this list because I really do think they all excel at different things. Poison, starring Dev Patel, is probably the funniest, with the performances from Benedict Cumberbatch and Ben Kingsley really matching phenomenal narration from Patel. The Swan has my favorite performance of the batch in Rupert Friend’s narrator, quietly furious, maintaining an emotional outrage that is devastating to watch. But it’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which hands off between Cumberbatch, Patel, and Kingsley, that has to be my personal favorite – all three deliver unbelievable material, of course, but it’s the short’s visual imagination that makes it my favorite. This isn’t Anderson’s first film that fully breaks the fourth wall to depict special effects or character arcs – The French Dispatch handing off from Tony Revolori to Benicio del Toro is still probably my favorite – but this is the most he’s ever embraced that style, and I think it works beautifully.
8. Dad & Step-Dad
Dir. Tynan DeLong
VOD, NoBudge
Without any contest, Dad & Step-Dad is the funniest movie I saw all year. Colin Burgess (as Jim, the Dad) and Anthony Oberbeck (as Dave, the Step-Dad) deliver every line as such a fucking meal. The primary comedy comes from watching two dorks try to out-alpha one another, first passive-aggressively and later much more aggressively. But then there’s their thirteen year old son, Branson (Brian Fiddyment, decidedly not thirteen years old) who goes on his own hilarious journey. I’ve been saying lines from this movie every day since I saw it basically just to make myself laugh. If you enjoy the trailer, it delivers on that register for basically the entire running time. I’m gonna be shouting about this movie forever.
7. Afire
Dir. Christian Petzold
VOD
“What if a guy sucked?” That’s the central comedic question of Afire, which sets stuffy crumbum author Leon (Thomas Schubert, hysterical) to a Baltic beach resort where everyone else is having a good time. He’s sharing his holiday home with a photography student named Felix (Langston Uibel) and they’re meant to finish their major projects while enjoying the water. When they find out they’re double-booked with free spirit Nadja (Paula Beer,) Leon becomes inconsolable, rude, and simultaneously completely worthless as a writer. I grew to love these characters and the people they brought into the house for their strong senses of humor. When the stakes rise in the third act, it culminates in a really poignant character drama, but before that it’s perfectly set clashing personalities against one another to keep things awkward, funny, and always laughing at the right guy.
6. The Boy and the Heron
Dir. Hayao Miyazaki
Theaters (this is the only film listed not on home video yet)
I so excitedly bought the 2021 Bruno Navasky translation of Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live?, a wonderful book about a young Japanese boy named Copper with a vivid imagination who learns with his uncle and his friends at school about his place in the world. It’s a wonderful story, filled with humor, funny facts, and philosophical lessons aimed at teaching children how to be kind, relate to a world from which they’re sheltered, and take perspective. I bought it because it was the book Miyazaki was basing his next film on – after seeing The Boy and the Heron, I hope he considers going back and adapting it some day after all!
Explaining the plot of the film is to spoil it – broadly, there’s a grieving boy who loses his mother, and he encounters a fantastical mystery that leads to a world of discovery. There is certainly some thematic overlap between this and How Do You Live?, but The Boy and the Heron is the open wound of a person who feels that the world we’ve created is a self-defeating one that may need to be torn down before something can be built in its place. Its bold formal decisions challenge the style and narrative coherence of Miyazaki’s previous work, and it’s almost impossible to say with simplicity “what it was about.” I know that I still found it profound, exciting, beautiful, funny. One of the best things a film can be is a puzzle – not a film you watch and fully understand the first time, but one you try to piece together over many years. I look forward to rewatching The Boy and the Heron, hearing the astonishing Joe Hisaishi score, and discovering this film again and again.
5. Killers of the Flower Moon
Dir. Martin Scorsese
Apple TV
Of all the films on this list, this is the one I’m worried I’m still underrating. Killers of the Flower Moon offers up its own weaknesses – the much-discussed ending (which I adore) is an admission of culpability by Martin Scorsese. He and Eric Roth have taken David Grann’s book and done what they can to center the Kyle and Burkhart families but in the end, this film is hoping to start conversation, not to be the definitive text. I’ll say that if anyone’s earned the benefit of the doubt on that idea, it’s Martin Scorsese, whose work as a producer and whose World Cinema Project at the Film Foundation have meaningfully brought to life and preserved films from marginalized voices.
Setting aside the “shoulds” of this film, Killers is so powerful because it honors Mollie and Ernest as characters. It never forgives Ernest Burkhart his vile crimes, easily the least likable man I’ve ever seen Leonardo DiCaprio play, but it also understands that he believed himself capable of compartmentalizing “love” and money until one devours the other. The attention for the film has largely come down to Lily Gladstone’s performance, which is one of the best anyone has given. I actually think it’s become a bit overstated how much of her performance is dedicated to reacting and being soulful – her Mollie is so funny, so wonderful at leading Ernest through their courtship or gossiping with her sisters, so great at speaking her mind but then not belaboring the fight. Like Barbie and Oppenheimer, it also has an incredibly wide cast of supporting players – I’ll shout out Tantoo Cardinal as Mollie’s mother, who I think invests a lot of joy what could be an afterthought character.
4. Monster
Dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda
VOD
Monster’s advertising has largely highlighted the importance of different perspectives in understanding how a story is really to be understood, but the story it actually tells is more of understanding how the limits of our own perspective keep us from understanding the behavior we observe. The film tells the story of about one month of time – a fire burns down a hostess club, Sakura Ando as Saori uncovers that her son is depressed and believes it’s due to persecution at school, and then a rain storm builds to a climactic conclusion. We see this month or so three times, from different characters’ points of view. Only by seeing all three stories can we understand what’s really happened.
The worldview this film paints is a sinister one – we see decent people try to live decently only for them to be surrounded by people who come across as cruel, uncaring, possessed by a system of beliefs that cannot allow humanity through. Annie described that from the title and the extent of darkness on display, she anticipated a malevolent horror to unveil itself. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say this film remains firmly a drama, not a horror film, and any Monsters we see are terrestrial in nature, even as some of the film’s best characters dream of something bigger.
Hirokazu Kore-eda is growing to be considered one of our modern masters, with now five or six films I’d consider to be instant classics of Japanese cinema. Shoplifters, Kore-eda’s 2018 film, remains a shining beacon I look back upon with awe. There are sequences in that film that manage such an ingenious marriage of tone, performance, aesthetic, and philosophy that I maintain it’s one of the greatest examples of what a director can achieve. Monster speaks to me much more deeply than Shoplifters, and while it’s not as astonishing a feat of filmmaking, the depth to which it grabbed me from beginning to end was immense and powerful.
3. One Fine Morning
Dir. Mia Hansen-Love
Amazon Prime
At least since COVID quarantine began, I’ve been struggling a bit with focus and memory. My long-term recall, to childhood, has never been especially strong, but I have to make more of a conscious effort to write reminders to myself or I’ll forget what I’d planned to do these days. That feeling certainly lends itself to a sense of dread watching Lea Seydoux’s Sandra relate to her father, Pascal Gregory’s Georg, as he succumbs to the advanced stages of a neurodegenerative disorder called Benson’s Syndrome. The subject matter is something One Fine Morning approaches without the melodrama of imminent peril – Georg’s sorrow comes in the form of his loss of independence and clarity of thought, not because he’s harming or endangering himself.
This film also combats this sense of loss with new opportunities – the other primary story is Sandra kindling a romance with a married friend and trying to manage her daughter’s expectations about where that might be leading. The romance itself is not the most passionate, but that texture carries in Seydoux’s performance from scene to scene, and it ends up giving her one of her best characters I’ve seen. She’s funny, exhausted, literary, philosophical, bereft, sexy, angry – if I was going to recommend one film to understand why some consider her one of the best actors in the world, it would be this one. The sensitivity of Hansen-Love’s direction and screenplay combine to make a film that approaches aging and degeneration with the grace and levity to make its often sunny cinematography and romantic diversions feel less like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine and more like the natural course of life during transition.
2. Asteroid City
Dir. Wes Anderson
Amazon Prime
Asteroid City is a joyful parade of pleasures. Without spoiling it, Wes Anderson sets a grieving family into the small Southwest American road stop of Asteroid City to participate in a youth science competition – when Science Happens, they’re asked to quarantine with a hyperqualified Wes Anderson ensemble while the United States government puts its pants back on. There’s at least two or three layers of frame narrative put on top of this story, all of which I found delightful, but suffice it to say the world of Asteroid City is a play and we see its actors and creatives trying to figure out what it all means right alongside their characters.
This film is as gorgeous as anything Wes has ever produced, the red rock and sands creating a perfect backdrop for delightful costuming and set design. It’s so darn funny, from Jeffrey Wright’s General Gibson giving a hysterical autobiography on stage to Tilda Swinton’s Dr. Hickenlooper realizing the kid scientists outclass her, run laps around her and her team. There’s singing cowboys, deadpan Scarlett Johannsen, a scenery chewing Tom Hanks. It’s got the sort of emotional poignancy many of Wes’s films have, maybe closer to Moonrise Kingdom than the open wound of The Life Aquatic.
Right near the end, the film takes a turn into a back alley I hadn’t anticipated, and Margot Robbie makes a two minute appearance that is the best individual scene of acting anyone had all year. It’s a scene that’s funny but also one I can’t watch without crying. It recontextualizes everything the film has been about up til that point, all its metanarrative of “why do we tell stories and why do we tell them this way” and its satire and its comedy and reframes everything we’ve seen as the story of learning to remember why and how we live at all. I’m a sucker for Wes Anderson, and this is up there with any of his best.
1. Oppenheimer
Dir. Christopher Nolan
Peacock
Many of us who love Oppenheimer have spent a substantial amount of time discussing the film figuring out which of its many scientists and soldiers are at the top of your squad. From David Krumholtz’s citrus-slinging Isador Rabi to Tom Conti’s unflappable Albert Einstein, Jack Quaid’s bongo-bearing Richard Feynman to the Christmas gift of Kenneth Branagh’s Niels Bohr. Hartnett, Damon, Safdie, Clarke, DeHaan, Urbaniak, Thirlby, Modine, Peck, Ehrenreich, Blair – the Best Supporting Performance category at any given awards body could belong solely to performers from the film Oppenheimer, each bringing different energies to this massive ensemble project, different character philosophies. The fabric of the film is woven with guarded loving kindness, petty resentments, fatalist violence.
When it finally came down to a tournament of “Oppenheimer Guys” on Twitter, none could best Oppie himself. Murphy will likely take home his Oscar on Sunday – I’ve come to believe this is a generational performance since seeing it, the sort of incredible character work only comparable to Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. There is something to simply bearing the weight of this epic ensemble project, but it’s also a matter of maintaining both an emotional arc and psychological arc that tracks across the film’s diverging timelines. I relate to Oppenheimer’s frozen moments and autopilot martyrdom just as easily as I do his confusion at how other people experience his concept of fidelity.
I read this wonderful piece by Neil Bahadur as I was composing this and I was very struck by his argument for the film’s structural innovation. His words called to mind Cloud Atlas, which uses this sort of technique to draw parallels between different people across different plot lines and invoke a cosmic, psychic link between different storylines. Oppenheimer manages to use that emotional rhythm without ever summoning the question, “well, he didn’t know that yet, why did he do that?”
I haven’t rewatched the film – I don’t know that I’ll ever rewatch it at home, reserving it for the biggest screens imaginable. I remember my Barbenheimer day viewing. I remember the terror I felt in the theater. There is something I find deeply, elementally frightening about nuclear annihilation. I found it impossibly harrowing, but what I’ve taken home with me is the film’s many depictions of people, of love, of petty harm. It’s a painful film in many ways, but also one that makes the argument for why the pain is worth the fight.
A surprise retrospective, a lakeside screening of my favorite live-action film (behind only Masaaki Yuasa’s 2004 debut Mind Game), turned my Barbenheimer double feature into a triple. I do not know if the programmers intentionally sought out synthesis between Oppenheimer and Barbie when programming Obayashi’s 1977 cult horror classic House, but it remained an unmissable meeting point between the impossible girlhood of Barbie and the bloody indifference of Oppenheimer.
We began our journey at 10:30am with Oppenheimer in IMAX. This was earlier than I hoped – the AMC management clearly did not receive my psychic relays for an ideal post-lunch 1pm screening, and suffice it to say it left my vibes through lunch afterward in shambles and disarray. Nolan has made his match to Interstellar, two films about the end of the world with vastly different conclusions. Interstellar argues that human ingenuity will face the end of the world and through sheer force of will, warmth, and white-hot blinding love, it will conquer impossible odds and survive. Oppenheimer, instead, argues that human ingenuity and its failure to commit to any ideals will wreak the end of the world – if it has not done so already.
Without the magic tricks of wormholes, dream layers and larger than life comic book villains, Nolan pushes himself into a corner and turns out the best filmmaking of his career. Granted, he’s hired the best of the best in terms of collaborators. Hoyte van Hoytema and Ruth de Jong reunited for some of the desert photography we saw in last year’s best-looking film, NOPE, as Oppie and various companions ride horses through the New Mexico badlands and the Los Alamos Manhattan Project site. Ruth de Jong crafts wonderful, meticulous, memorable spaces alongside newcomer Emin Hüseynov, some based on historical record, others intentionally never recorded. Composer Ludwig Göransson was Tenet’s most valuable player, and he turns in breathtaking work here as well, ratcheting incredible tension and release as we build toward the Trinity detonation. Among the greatest editors alive, Jennifer Lame keeps these sequences legible and also disorienting.
It is insane a film this dour and this nihilistic is being sold as part of the greatest double feature in the history of summer blockbusters. Part of that is that when the pyrotechnics do go off, they maintain a wonderful balance of genuine spectacle and distinct horror. The Trinity test shredded my ego. It made me feel small within my seat. The aching pain of the remainder of the film, carried in Murphy’s once in a lifetime performance, withered me to a trembling husk. Most of my companions did not have such a hard reaction to the film. We made jokes about Joshes Peck and Hartnett, Branagh’s flexible accent work, and lamenting that the Pugh character is saddled with the film’s two worst scenes, the sex scenes no one quite knows what to make of beyond recognizing that it paints Oppenheimer and Tatlock as pseudointellectual assholes. We mostly loved the film.
The real Oppenheimer.
I really do think Murphy is walking an incredible tightrope in this film. To play a man so uncommitted to anything beyond forward momentum shatter upon completing his greatest achievement is difficult enough to make compelling, but on top of that, you have the fragmented timeline presenting ego death Oppie well before we’ve seen him at his most confident. He (and Nolan, and Lame) have managed to make a character arc that works both when considered chronologically and in the sequence the film presents, and they’ve done so without aggrandizing a character who is rightfully called a crybaby and criticized for his inability to commit to any values or moral scruples until he’s already done his worst. “You can’t commit the sin and make us all feel sorry for you,” Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer gets to state near the middle of the film – I don’t find myself ever feeling sorry for him, but once he can see what he’s done, it’s a scathing indictment of the world we’ve built since.
It’s not all the abyss. Nolan gets some hokey jokes in, fills the screen with fun characters, and builds a community that feel like they have genuine relationships, politics, ideas and ideologies. I agree with the sense that there was another hour of the film on the cutting room floor, only sacrificed to get that 70mm print out there, because there’s propulsion around these wonderful characters on the side who never quite get their chance to shine (specifically, Olivia Thirlby and Josh Zuckerman jump out as actors who might have had a bunch of material cut). Matt Damon, Robert Downer Jr, David Krumholtz and Josh Hartnett all get to bring some life back to the film – it’s a pleasure to see Alden Ehrenreich get to play off of a revitalized RDJ. The moment to moment thrills of reunions, breakthroughs, and “men sitting around a table making big decisions” are the stuff I knew Nolan had in him. It’s the ecstatic he reaches into here, and the nuance with which he engages in this film’s politics, that had me very much surprised.
A day that will be remembered.
We continued on to lunch, which took too long to come out, played with pets (including one very heavy cat,) and made our way to Barbie at 5pm. I connected Gerwig to Ang Lee in my review of Little Women, a film which shared a striking humanism and sensitivity for modest joy with the master Lee’s Sense & Sensibility. The most obvious analog to Barbie, then, would be Lee’s Hulk, a formally ambitious, visually impressive adaptation of a seemingly simplistic property that’s being interrogated with more thoughtfulness and purpose than previously. But Lee’s film’s interrogation is achieved by amping the melodrama of the film to a mixture of psychological character study and Greek archetypal mythic storytelling. It digs very deeply into the core relationships with a lot of grimacing and distress, and it offsets that discomfort with its incredibly striking visual sense.
Gerwig goes a different direction here, though I would argue it still matches that humanistic approach. For one, obviously, Gerwig’s film is a sex comedy about the absurdity of gender norms and a political farce about systems of power and oppression. While I think it still very much takes seriously the emotional states of Barbie, Ken, and the two “real world” leads Gloria (America Ferrera, who is really great!) and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) it’s not nearly as built upon the Trauma of The Absent Father or The Oedipal Crisis. It trades Freud and Sophocles for intersectional feminism and fragile masculinity, and I’d argue a more pop-focused Twitter rendition of those subjects than Lerner or hooks. (Which isn’t to say Gerwig isn’t reading those books, too – just that what ends up on the screen is broader, more digestible, and familiar to those of us terminally online.)
Stereotypical Barbie and Beach Ken.
But for another major difference between Barbie and Hulk, Gerwig steers clear of declaring a true villain. There are antagonists – Ferrell’s condescending “ally” profiteer, Gosling’s turn as the meatheaded version of Ken – but they never become anywhere near as unsympathetic as Nolte’s Brian Banner, a disgusting snake of a man. And that is, of course, very intentional – Gerwig has spoken about how this film’s feminism is a “rising tides” feminism examining how failure to understand how gender roles work and the standards they enforce sink everyone into the ocean. Gosling really is born to play Beach Ken, a sympathetic but deeply flawed man whose impotence and ignorance are so readily willing to channel into vengeful malice. It’s an arc we’ve been told plays out regularly these days, the alt-right pipeline that we’re told starts from men not being validated for the sexual desire.
It’s in this morass that Barbie sets itself, and it elegantly dances around getting mired in any real-world ugliness for all too long. The longest extended sequence of exploring these themes, Ferrera’s monologue, is somewhere between a “clap-rather-than-laugh” gag suited to the modern comedy scene of Hannah Gadsby and Bo Burnham and a tour de force acting moment for Ferrera. It worked for me, and it’ll work even better for the huge audience of people seeing this that aren’t embedded in daily queer lefty feminist close readings of mass media. By otherwise keeping things relatively compartmentalized, it’s able to keep its levity at the forefront, a lovely confection.
Barbieland!
While picking standout cast members aside from the leads is difficult – I really enjoyed Alexandra Shipp as Book Barbie, Rhea Perlman as Ruth, and Kingsley Ben-Adir as Benvolio Ken – it’s not hard to shower production designer Sarah Greenwood in praise. The Barbieland world looks genuinely incredible – it’s such a wonderful work of production design, and the amount of delight clearly put into making every visual choice work is really astonishing. It’s a degree of visual imagination I certainly wasn’t anticipating out of a Gerwig movie based on her prior work (though Little Women is a great looking film) and it was thrilling to see it come together so wonderfully. There’s also a couple sequences toward the end of the film that invoke the work of Donen and The Archers that I think are special both as staged and as conceived, and it’s really wonderful that they were able to get those scenes in front of so many people.
If I really was going to make the comparison to another film’s success, Barbie isn’t Hulk, nor is it Josie and the Pussycats or Clueless as I’ve seen some people say. Barbie is Austin Powers course-corrected to ensure audiences actually get the joke this time. Austin Powers is an archetype of the sex machine hero of the patriarchy turned into a freaky little goblin, and by 2005 half the male audience just wanted to be Austin and actually would ask women out loud if they “make them horny, baby.” I think Gerwig tunes this film so that everyone understands that while we love to see the Kenergy, we do not want to be Ken. Ken doesn’t want to be Ken. Ken’s going to be Kenough instead.
Also, uh, good soundtrack on this one.
At this point, I was pretty tired. We’d partied a little too hard the night before Boppenheimer anyway, and eating only one meal and some cheese curds was not a recipe for success. But Obayashi’s House is a longstanding personal favorite, and like when I saw Zardoz a few weeks ago (I went long on that one too,) it felt like a personal welcome back to Madison gift for me to see it on a big screen surrounded by friends who’d never seen it before. It was relatively low stress to be reunited with it again, and it really did feel like the appropriate meeting point of the two films I’d seen already.
Obayashi’s history in advertising brings forward the comparisons to Barbie in a visual flair. We see absurdist comedy with stop-motion mechanics, animated backgrounds to live action sequences, flashes of sparkles and color that almost always get a laugh from the audience. But our characters, too, are stereotypes of girlhood popular in the booming shojo market of the period. There’s three named for their personalities, Gorgeous, Fantasy and Sweet, and four named for their hobbies, Melody, Prof, Kung Fu and Mac. Based on how fun Kung Fu is in this film, it’s too bad we never see Karate Barbie in the Gerwig film.
Left to Right: Kung Fu, Melody, Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Prof, and Mac.
These seven friends are planning their summer vacation, when Gorgeous is thrown for a loop. Her father is remarrying eight years after her mother’s death – unfortunately, he’s kept this a secret until the last minute, and introducing his new wife throws Gorgeous into a tailspin. She decides to cancel her family vacation and invite her friends (whose plans were thrown off by an unexpected pregnancy) to her Auntie’s house. This all plays out like a slice of life comedy, not unlike some of the TV dramas still being made today. There are cut-ins, zooms, even title cards clarifying all the names about twenty minutes in. It’s really, really charming stuff, and it lends a layer of safety and camp to the proceedings long before the horror begins.
But the tropes of these friends also end up playing them against one another, never in ways where they are openly fighting, but in ways where they occasionally diminish or dismiss one another’s concerns, limiting their expression. There’s a great scene where the other characters are trying to think logically and exactly mimic Prof’s gait and gesticulations – it’s cute, but also shows how much confidence they lack in themselves. Prof also gets hit with a “you’re so pretty without your glasses” remark that doesn’t register with her as meanspirited, but it is striking. Mac is probably the hardest to swallow – her thing is eating too much, and the other girls make comments about her weight (which she objects to frequently!) Fantasy really gets the worst of it, constantly having her witnessing the supernatural horror which will swallow them up as her daydreaming and imagining things. If these roles weren’t so defined, they wouldn’t be so easy to entrap – and Auntie’s magic snares don’t have to work very hard to pull them to their dooms.
The first piece of inspiration for this movie – Obayashi’s daughter being afraid of a “killer mirror.”
House’s connection to Oppenheimer may be a little more subtle, but it’s a matter of understanding the horror of the film. In an early sequence, Gorgeous shares the backstory of her Auntie in the form of a silent film all the girls watch together. She’s a young woman who became affianced to a young doctor in a small town. The young doctor is drafted into World War II – he promises to return to her, and she promises to wait for him. When he’s shot down, she decides to wait for him for the rest of her life in the titular house, and after her sister is married, she waits alone. And she’s really, truly alone – the last time Gorgeous has seen Auntie was ten years ago, when Gorgeous’s mother was still alive. When Auntie receives the note of her lover being missing in action, we see blood fall from her hands and a baby cry – we hear this baby’s cry again late in the film, during the climax, when a deep blow has been done to the ghost running the house.
This backstory frames the film’s central haunting as a tragedy. After the war, this widows who survived her dead was paid no real mind – if her pain prevented her from simply finding another willing man, she was isolated and abandoned. In a moment where Fantasy frames this devotion as romantic, the film cuts to the atomic bomb. Obayashi himself was a child of Hiroshima, losing all his friends in the bomb at age 7. A diary found toward the end of the film reads, “There are no young women in the village now. I’m all alone.” This is ambiguous, as it may have been written before Auntie died and became the witch-spirit haunting the old house, or it may be after she’s eaten all the young women who were left. This violence against Auntie, the lack of care paid to unmake this single-minded devotion, creates a cycle of violence and misogyny which leads to her quite explicitly becoming a predator upon the virginal women who she entraps in the house. It is a chain reaction, the violence begetting violence beginning with the war and ending upon seemingly kind, innocent young women who know nothing more than the basics of history book lessons in school.
The train scene.
It is this sadness which underlies House’s scares, and yet Obayashi maintains incredible levity throughout the film. The visual invention on display and his incredible management of tone (including the expert use of whiplash) is the anchor through what is, admittedly, a story told in bizarre sequence and, underneath the effects, a pretty sad conceit. The aforementioned sequence in which Gorgeous tells her Auntie’s story is preceded by a child reading a picture book about the trains of Tokyo – it zooms in, and briefly, the film becomes animated in the style of the picture book, zooming along past Mount Fuji. When the background changes to a grassy glade, Sweet leans in to ask Gorgeous about her Auntie – they talk about this in front of the animated background, beginning the story, before cutting to Auntie’s story. There’s dancing skeletons, carnivorous pianos, bucket-butt slapstick, butt-biting and cats, cats, cats.
The fact remains no one else could possibly have made House. In order to replicate the feeling of it, they had to release two epics on a single day. Anyway, do Oppenheimer before Barbie. You’ll need the Kenergy before going to bed.
Half the film lists from this past year have made bold statements about the state of movies. I don’t really have those same thoughts. The movies I love continue to be made, are in production now, are being greenlit. The movies I don’t love continue to make most of the money, but maybe that’s just called turning thirty. The fact is that in 2021, many of my favorite filmmakers made new films, almost all of those films were great, and I had the opportunity to see many of them in a theater if I had wanted to do so.
It feels good to be back at the movie theater. I did not see most of the movies on this list in a movie theater. I’m not sure I typically see most of my best-of list in a movie theater. This isn’t some comment on the state of streaming vs. theaters, or on my own taste. I like my couch. My dog’s here, and if I need to get up and go pee, I won’t miss the climactic death of the film’s leads (as happened at my screening of one of this year’s best films.) My couch is where I’ve watched masterpieces by Tarkovsky, Keaton, Varda, Dunye, Antonioni, etc. And yet it feels good to be back at the movie theater. Heartbreak really does feel good in a place like the movie theater.
While I do keep a spreadsheet with my best actor, best director, best documentary, etc. etc., my picks are hardly so out there that they require special notice. I will identify those when I name the movies that gave me them. Of all the movies that can’t make this list, I’m saddest that Escape Room: Tournament of Champions and Malignant slipped away – as far as movies I’d recommend for pure fun, those are the two that I’ve smiled about over and over again.
As for the films I’m saddest I haven’t seen, and hopefully will catch up with someday: I hope to love F9, Memoria, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Saint Maud, Earwig and the Witch, Malmkrog, The Woman Who Ran, French Exit, The Voyeurs, About Endlessness, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, A Hero, Cry Macho, All Light Everywhere, The World to Come, Procession, Belle, The Truffle Hunters, The Night House, Bad Trip, and Azor. No, I did not see Spider-Man: No Way Home. I let Endgame be my offramp from the MCU – 22 of those were enough for me.
21. Dune
Dir. Denis Villenueve HBOMax
After repeatedly sharing my distaste for Villenueve’s previous science fiction, I have to be nice to Denis – my fear that he’d sell out Dune’s integrity for emphasis on the Bene Gesserit witches or Game of Thrones-esque scheming were unfounded. Villenueve’s approach to adapting Dune may be humorless, but, for example, allowing Rebecca Ferguson to take such a risk in humanizing the role of Lady Jessica really speaks to him understanding the core tension of the material. I still prefer Lynch’s take, but Villenueve’s Arrakis has such incredible mystic power. I hope he can bring it home in part two.
20. Beckett
Dir. Ferdinando Cito Filomarino Netflix
The fact that Beckett, one of the most fun films of the year, has been completely buried is a tragedy. A political thriller about a guy (John David Washington) having the worst “vacation” of his life in Greece, this is just fuckup cinema at its finest. What anchors this film is its incredible team – shot, edited, and scored by some of the business, Beckett had me more and more excited as it went along, to the point where its ultimate political message fell aside to just rooting for this sad, broken, constantly frazzled man unwilling to die. If they announced a Beckett 2, I’d be there day one.
It’s crazy that this is the point in the list where the ranking becomes sort of irrelevant – from here on just up to the top 5, every film does exceptional things, and in five years, I could see myself mixing and matching this entire remaining order.
19. West Side Story
Dir. Steven Spielberg
HBOMax
Modernizing West Side Story feels like a foolish errand, and smarter,more appropriate people than me have written about how this film, while better incorporating Spanish, is still failing Puerto Ricans. Beyond that, there are choices I would not have kept – holding I Feel Pretty directly after the rumble without an intermission feels too sharp, moving Gee, Officer Krupke before the rumble makes the second half pretty dour, no matter the metatext Somewhere’s beauty is as a duet!! – but they belie my love for this damn show, and the old Robert Wise film, too. Spielberg’s direction here is often breathtaking. It’s hard to beat the dance at the gym, which is maybe the best scene Spielberg’s captured since the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But…he manages to come close, from the reflective puddle shot in Maria to the street dancing of America.
18. Undine
Dir. Christian Petzold
Hulu
The third Petzold film in a row to make my year-end list, if Beckett resembles Hitchcock doing North by Northwest, Undine resembles Vertigo. Fate and fantasy intermingle in the love life of Paula Beer’s Undine, but it’s in the staggering unreality of regular life that Undine hits hardest. Watching her speak about Berlin’s urban development only to lose herself in the scale model midway, or attending the bottom of a nearby lake with Franz Rogowski’s Christoph to visit the legendary giant catfish Big Gunther, there is a powerful feeling that the world is too big and majestic to comprehend. The back half retains some of the myth’s tragedy without adapting it beat for beat – like every Petzold I’ve seen, its ending hits a powerful melancholy.
17. The Souvenir Part II
Dir. Joanna Hogg
VOD
Hogg’s prior film, 2019’s The Souvenir, depicts a semi-autobiographical romance with a manipulative addict that ends in grief. I didn’t connect to it – while it was honestly made, I found it uncharismatic. But it was always conceived with this second film in mind, a sequel film in which the fictional version of Joanna Hogg makes a fictional version of The Souvenir, and the process of sorting through her love and pain. This film has more room for light slipping back into Julie’s life, including an electric reprise from Richard Ayoade (a high point of the first, too, but even sharper and more fully drawn here,) funny scenes with Joe Alwyn and Charlie Heaton, some rich and warm visual experimentation that (to me) recalled The Archers and Derek Jarman. That added warmth gives the tragedy of the first film room to hurt deeply. I’m excited to revisit the first eventually and give it more credit, as this film would not work as well if it weren’t earned by the first.
16. Parallel Mothers
Dir. Pedro Almodovar
VOD
Without wanting to spoil this film, because a lot of the fun is in discovering winding corridors, few directors on earth are as good at framing the way love and betrayal can make having the conversations you need to have incredibly complex without taking the film into hysterics. There’s a subdued quality to this almost soap-opera story that makes the film feel quite He uses this emotional, personal story between two women as an anchor for his more targeted political commentary, a conversation about denial individual and national. Cruz would rightfully win on Sunday for her funny, well-rounded, never withdrawn performance.
I was predisposed to like the “nun sexploitation thriller” by the director of RoboCop and Showgirls, but I’m not sure that description is entirely appropriate. Verhoeven didn’t make an exploitation film, really, but a film about the punishment of believing Too Deeply meeting its match in mania and self-aggrandizement. Protesting the film’s sexual content seems absurd when the film is based on a true account of the persecution of sexuality in the Catholic Church. But also it is actually sexy, and it’s also almost as funny as RoboCop, and it’s also gross and outrageous and righteous in its violence and sexuality. It’s among the most fun movies I watched all year.
Contending with the lore of Paul Schrader, the cardshark misogynist who posts incessantly on Facebook while writing forty years of incredible screenplays, is not something I’m equipped to do here. The Card Counter barely even uses his knowledge of poker as it explores the subculture of gambling as the small talk between the scenes of the film’s real target – the torture committed in the name of the United States at Abu Ghraib. The Card Counter explores how perpetrators surviving a system of abuse become classical Bickle-esque time bombs. Oscar Isaac gives his best performance in eight years (since his incredible work in A Most Violent Year) as the dead man walking William Tell.
13. The Last Duel
Dir. Ridley Scott
HBO Max/Hulu
Unfortunately, every clip of The Last Duel I can find sells this movie as miserable and grim – which erases just how funny parts of it can be. Marketed all wrong as a kind of combination #MeToo reckoning and period piece, I know all too well the reasoning behind this film earning deep vitriol. The Last Duel doesn’t quite fail Jodie Comer, but I can’t vouch for the film’s success on her behalf, its politics about sexual violence too pat and its characterization of her lead too neat. More interesting as a study of fraternal attitudes than feminist activism, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck started their careers under Harvey Weinstein’s wing, and this film successfully portrays the way their boys club culture sweeps evil under the rug. Interrogated, too, is Damon’s weird lack of charm: when Ben Affleck groans, “he’s no fucking fun!,” it feels true to the man’s distasteful descent into disconnected bigotry and crypto endorsement. Both men, really, are doing career best work here – Ridley acquits himself well, too, and surpasses that in the titular Last Duel, which is one of the most grueling and visceral action sequences I’ve seen in a long time.
12. No Sudden Move
Dir. Steven Soderbergh HBO Max
A crime comedy about a fiasco robbery from the director of Ocean’s Eleven should be a slam dunk crowdpleaser, so of course it swiftly vanished from esteem. The fisheye lenses, the Tommy Newman score, the deep bench of supporting performances – it’s almost easy to take Soderbergh for granted, as he’s made one of the best films of the year nearly five years running now (I except 2018’s Unsane but include this year’s Kimi already) and all of them have come out on HBOMax or Netflix instead of in theaters. But, really, Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, David Harbour, Brendan Fraser, these stars all make meals of their roles in this just as smaller names Amy Seimetz and Bill Duke do. The ultimate reveal that this is also part of a broad Brockovich-esque corporate conspiracy is the sort of icing on the cake that shows why Soderbergh is one of the best working. He recognizes the way power appreciates power from the streets to the suites – a surprise supporting role that appears toward the end of the film puts a great exclamation mark on this thesis.
11. The Worst Person In The World
Dir. Joachim Trier
VOD
I recently heard this film described as subdued, like “a collection of moments that wouldn’t normally be considered movie-worthy.” This, I think, is insanity. The Worst Person in the World has at least five scenes that are so incredible each would be reason enough to revisit the film twenty years from now on its own. The party where two people “don’t cheat” is one of the sexiest scenes I’ve seen in a movie in years. The film’s first breakup, incredibly real and well acted. A TV interview gone wrong, electric and real. The lead performances from Renata Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum – three of the absolute best of the year.
10. The Green Knight
Dir. David Lowery
Hulu/Showtime
Fog, haze, and hard light define the aesthetic of The Green Knight, setting itself firmly in the selective memory of Boorman’s Excalibur. I know some people feel this didn’t cohere to a greater whole for them, but I really treasured the way this characterized Dev Patel’s Sir Gawain. Lowery expands with fantastical interludes that highlight the psychedelic danger of the Arthurian world and anchor his interest in Gawain’s sexual encounters with Alicia Vikander’s Essel. The ending is a proper “best of both worlds” moment, a study of fatalism against bravery.
9. Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon A Time
Dir. Hideaki Anno
Amazon Prime
For starters, no, you cannot dive straight into this last chapter of the Neon Genesis Evangelion story. The anime saga about children piloting giant robots (that turn out not to be robots) has come to a head with Thrice Upon A Time, the fourth film in the “rebuild” saga. These films represent a different kind of remake. These films start quite literally shot-for-shot adapting the TV anime, but, slowly, small changes butterfly effect until massive alterations to the timeline send the second half of this story into entirely new directions. This finale takes Evangelion somewhere it never had space for – it creates hope for kindness and life surrounded by the monstrous apocalypse at the heart of this series. The Evangelion saga has remained among the most visually impressive, well-acted, emotionally intense animated works for over twenty five years – somehow, this final film still manages to surprise.
8. Annette
Dir. Leos Carax Amazon Prime
Dumb guy pitch for Annette – for like two hours, the most outrageous shit imaginable happens and is also a rock opera. In this world, babies sing and fly, sex is an act of reverent sacrifice, comedians twirl around in a boxer’s robe and unleash verbal abuse on their audiences. There’s murder, sex, music, dance, comedy, a halftime performance at the Hyperbowl. Simon Helberg of The Big Bang Theory gives maybe one of the five best performances of the year as an accompanist and conductor. And underneath all of that, Carax swirls dreams, self-doubt, grief, power plays, and parenthood’s obligations. Of every film this year, this is the most audacious.
7. Old
Dir. M. Night Shyamalan
VOD
“The beach that makes you old” is an incredible concept for a movie. But it isn’t an obvious fit for a summer horror movie – rather, it better fits an existential drama, one about how bodies affect our relationships to one another and ourselves. Shyamalan finds a balance between his stilted, mannered dialogue and intense emotion while still including a handful of really greasy-handed grossout horror gags. There’s an incredible anger in this film at the feeling that we lost the best years of our lives for reasons totally out of our control that I found very relatable. The film is directed with an incredibly athletic pacing and top shelf cinematography by Mike Gioulakis, without which the story could not have such heart. I recognize that this film is too ridiculous for some people, that the dialogue doesn’t work, in the same way Twin Peaks The Return and Showgirls chase people away. But, boy, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I saw it.
6. Licorice Pizza
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
VOD
Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman are my paired favorite performance of the year – they both excel when they’re apart, but they also could not exist without one another’s presence. Cooper Hoffman is a magician. The son of maybe my favorite actor of all time obviously had this role tailor-made for him, but he still manages to summon up incredible life for Gary Valentine, from limitless charm to bewildered fear of a sudden end. Alana Haim, meanwhile, plays such forward arrested development, richly funny while also playing insecurity and occasional petty meanness. Their relationship, obviously one we’d condemn in real life, still feels wholly real, mutual, frustrating, and yet clearly we see why they come back to one another. Full of brief supporting turns that had me howling with laughter (one discourse-dominating omission aside), Licorice Pizza could do the same as every other PTA and eventually steal this whole list.
Listening through the Blank Check miniseries on Jane Campion’s films this winter, The Power of the Dog is maybe Campion’s most straightforward film since The Piano. For how ambiguous its story can be, it’s a film that takes great pains to make sure you understand how to feel about each character as you’re watching. It’s also probably the culmination of her work and her best film? Compared to other Campion films, this one operates more on an architectural ecologic level, where the takeaways for the film aren’t necessarily as direct on the story so much as the ways characters respond to one another’s circumstances. The little moments of characters alone doing soft stims – Cumberbatch blowing bubbles, Smit-McPhee rubbing his comb, the tragic fate of Dunst’s Rose – belie a film about seeking input in a lonely, quiet world. I relate to the way this film portrays how difficult it can be to sit with your thoughts.
4. On-Gaku: Our Sound
Dir. Keiji Iwaisawa VOD Easily the most obscure film on my entire list, On-Gaku Our Sound is a crowdfunded anime film almost entirely made by its director. That independence allows him to make an extremely funny anime about a high school delinquent trio that decides to start a…masculine “rock” band that blows almost its entire animation budget on rotoscoping incredible musical sequences. It’s not a deep film, though it does address concerns of burnout, stage fright, and the trap of rejection. Its heights are largely in how hard it made me laugh and the fact that the final musical performance in this film is just the best work of animation I’ve seen in a film since Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. I could watch this thing a hundred times.
3. The French Dispatch
Dir. Wes Anderson HBO Max
My friend Jack Read pointed out the moment in The French Dispatch where after a life of violence, the two actors portraying the mentally disturbed violent convict Moses Rosenthaler trade places. Tony Revolori, seated in his cell, looks straight at the camera – Benicio Del Toro enters from behind, taps his shoulder, and takes his place in the chair, is given Moses’s signature necklace, and Revolori walks off camera. It’s a sweet moment only Wes Anderson seems to trust he can include in a film – it’s a technique you might see in staged theater, but by creating a film that exists in aesthetic reality rather than any one logic, he can depict it without derailing anything he has happening.
Artist convicts, student revolutions, food critics getting wrapped up in kidnappings – at first blush, the soul, comedy, and artistry of The French Dispatch overwhelmed my ability to study the way Wes Anderson’s new anthology looks at the role of police brutality, oppression, and the role of a free press, but at this point, I’ve gotta say it’s just the whole package. Jeffrey Wright’s food critic is my MVP, great as he’s ever been, evoking both Orson Welles and James Baldwin without ever betraying that both could be egotists. I would have been happy to see this in a theater anyway just for the shot of the cats of Ennui and the illustrated covers of The French Dispatch in the credits – Anderson remains maybe the most influential and iconic visual artist of the 21st century, and there’s no reason style can’t be substance. That it’s Wes Anderson’s best live action movie since The Life Aquatic was a pleasant shock.
2. The Matrix Resurrections
Dir. Lana Wachowski HBOMax
The moment I saw the trailer, I said “this is gonna be the greatest film of all time.” It…wasn’t quite that great, but it was a hell of a lot closer than I feared. The first act of this film is as on-the-nose a media satire as anything in Speed Racer, but Keanu plays the emotional reality of a day-in, day-out loop with outsized honesty and a great sense of humor. The “White Rabbit” montage is maybe the definitive pandemic scene in a movie. As this extends into its more science fiction second and third acts, it extends to come to the universal thesis of Wachowski films – love conquers all, and when there is The One, there are always those who carry him.
And, of course, as Lana Wachowski has said, this is a film about contemplating stepping off the platform. An incredible moment of this film is about how survival inspires survivors. I deeply connected to the way this film addressed the despair of cognitive distortions that make a world seem totally empty and the suicidal impulse of meaninglessness. I saw it a little later than a couple people who wrote incredibly on the subject. I’ll link them here.
Sometimes, it really is just obvious. Hamaguchi’s three hour low key drama about a staging of Uncle Vanya and the secret things we keep inside is just the best film of the year. The core narrative of the film expands on Haruki Murakami’s short story in which a driver and passenger discussing the passenger’s relationship with his deceased unfaithful wife and the man he caught her having sex with – Murakami’s story is blunt, frustrating, uncut Murakami tabloid gossip. Hamaguchi gives all four of these leads far more humanity, depth, their own secrets and histories. The performances in this film are full with everything I want to see in a performance.
And yet it’s the portion of the film that is entirely Hamaguchi’s invention that really blew my heart open – the multilingual performance of Uncle Vanya, attempting to break open the barriers of theatrical convention, characters conversing without conversing. I can’t intellectualize why this depiction of people working so hard together to make something new spoke to me so deeply – multilingual theater as a real concept dates back decades, as you can find searching for thesis statements on the subject. But this film dramatizes that production, addresses the difficulty that can come with condescension between different languages (especially towards mute languages – a powerful conversation midway through the film is between our Japanese protagonist and a speaker of Korean Sign Language) and never takes for granted that this vision would be “easy.” It moved me very deeply – the final performance is the most moving scene this year in film. I finished these three hours and thought to myself, “I could watch this again in its entirety right now.”
After an amazing year of over 500 flicks, it took me an age to narrow down the best films of 2015. What an astounding year we’ve had. I may narrow this down to a top 10 eventually, but, for now, it’s a beautiful top 15. The order, of course, will trade as months or years go by.
I’ll be catching up later with A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Contemplating Existence, Shaun the Sheep, The Russian Woodpecker, Peanuts, The Big Short, Anomalisa, The Assassin, Taxi, and 45 Years, along with many others over the rest of my life. Though there are another five or ten films that could make this list (and may, someday,) the true honorable mention goes to Don Hertzfeldt’s WORLD OF TOMORROW, a great short film which warms my heart more as time passes.
I linked to my Letterboxd list in an earlier post, but I realized I’m planning to let that Letterboxd list be edited at some point. So this will be the standing record of my favorite films of 2015. Since the original version of this text, I’ve seen Anomalisa. It’s fantastic, and equally worthy of placement, but I like what I have here.
15. Bridge of Spies
Spielberg’s film is one of his most understated successes; part Le Carre glare-off and part Capra-esque morality fable, the film works equally well as entertainment and political statement. The Coens’ touch, perhaps simply to have the running joke about “this cold,” remains one of the subtlest and most entertaining details in a film this year. I think that joke works thematically to exemplify that maybe everyone is so eager to get their job done in the first place that they don’t stop to think if they’ve done it right until they’re on the precipice of its completion. Hanks and Rylance excel, and the film’s levity helps establish the film as one of the best of the year.
14. Clouds of Sils Maria
I can’t deny the performances of Binoche and Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria, a film which portrays the critique found in, say, Birdman, as simultaneously vital work against juvenility and pure cynicism. Similarly to Carol, its sexuality exists on its periphery, allowing excellent dialogue, performance, setting, and filmmaking to make the film’s statement. Hazier and more abstract than many of the films on this list, I suspect rewatching Clouds of Sils Maria may shoot it higher along.
13. The Revenant
This poor flick is clouded by Academy Awards, talk of difficult shoots, and Birdman. It ought not to be. DiCaprio doesn’t give the best performance he’s ever given (that remains Django Unchained) but he gives an excellent one, with physicality enough to make the film’s mostly non-verbal second act a treasure to take in. The natural lighting results in a beautiful film, and the supporting turn from Hardy fills in a movie with a gap. As a revisionist Western, it does enough to favor the Native Americans to escape offense. It’s not even the most profound Western of the year, but it is one of the most enjoyable Westerns I’ve seen, and one of the most astounding as filmmaking.
12. Furious 7
The Fast & Furious movies continue to be a highlight of my movie year. I watched Fast Five and was impressed by the amount of fun I had; I saw it because I won a t-shirt in a trivia competition. I watched all of the films in preparation for Fast & Furious 6, which I quite enjoyed, but was a little disappointed by upon first viewing. This year, for Furious 7, I rewatched Tokyo Drift, Fast Five, and F&F 6, and I enjoyed the last much more this time. But I’ve yet to enjoy any of these films like Furious 7, an insane romp which explodes off the screen with enthusiasm, invention, and delight. Furious 7 is a ride filled with small great elements like fights with Ronda Rousey and Tony Jaa. But the bravery comes when it includes moments like the graveyard scene, in which Walker says from the grave, “No more funerals.” I’ve never seen a film include its own in memoriam; the last frames of that sequence are so moving, so light, that the bold stroke works. Furious 7 eschews the line between fact and fiction, ingratiating the audience into the Toretto family and then honoring the audience’s need to grieve.
11. Sicario
Some people will watch Sicario and determine the path to hell is laid with best intentions. They’re missing the point; that justice is not the best intention when you make a deal with harbingers of doom, and that passion replaces clarity when we take the sword of justice into our own hands. Flagrant disregard for the law throughout Sicario creates a chaotic zone so toxic as to seem unsolvable. I walked out of Sicario red-eyed, not from tears, but from high-wire anxiety. The best use of Denis Villenueve’s talent for tension yet, Sicario is the first of his films that I would want to rewatch; I hope I will continue to find new volume in it over years.
10. Ex Machina
From my review: “Ex Machina is simultaneously a film of this moment and a film which can last beyond it; its concerns about the objectification and domestication of women, its depiction of the hypermasculine domestication by web technologists of its consumers, and its concerns about levity in a time of moral panic all should hold some resonance for many years and spin from our very current concerns. One of the better dramas of the last several years, Ex Machina has that special touch where a screenwriter discovers that they, too, can direct, as well as the directors who have ever held their work, and they may begin to discover their own autonomy.” I haven’t come up with anything more succinct than my writing about this fun Alex Garland flick. A24 makes the coolest movies in the world.
9. Tangerine
I don’t know if Tangerine would have made the same impact upon me had I not seen it in a theater. Something about seeing this story, this camera, these actresses on a big screen validated Tangerine as something more than “a cool thing shot on an iPhone.” I’m glad I watched it in a venue separate from where I might watch DJ Khaled’s SnapChat story or read about Zola. I hope I still would have found it entertaining, empathetic, multilayered, and worthy of its commentary on sex, poverty, cultural baggage, and hegemony. Some are still furious that Kitana “Kiki” Rodriguez and Mya Taylor were not nominated for acting awards. I think they should have been up for Best Original Screenplay; my belief in the entire project comes from their belief in their portrayal.
8. Carol
This premise sounds like it was practically designed to sweep the 2016 Oscars; in reality, it’s a miracle that it wound up excellent, and the forgotten Freeheld helps exemplify exactly where its statements about sexuality could have become too political. Instead, Carol works as a political act by being an expertly made romance drama which lets its lesbian romance speak as its own political statement. The film works best as a character drama and as an aesthetic accomplishment, with some of the most beautiful filmmaking and scoring I can recall. A taut screenplay lets it stick as a remarkable achievement; Blanchett and Mara develop career performances in their work off one another.
7. Room
I really need to get around to Abrahamson’s Irish films; his prior film, Frank, is an empathetic film which achieves sublimity with its closure. Room is equally empathetic and sublime from the start, but it doesn’t lose steam once its denizens escape Room. Larson is an actress I’ve found compelling since her brief turn in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but it’s with this film that I turned into a fan. Her and Tremblay, together, work within the limited confines of Room and make it wholly compelling. When they leave, Abrahamson gives the film the brain it needs to stay moving. The structure of this is so effective, the emotional depth so fantastic. And the final moment, a treasure.
6. When Marnie Was There
There is no shock that Studio Ghibli winds up on my list once more. My favorite film studio made sure that each of its directors’ last features would be each of their best work, and When Marnie Was There is certainly the best film directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi as of 2015. The film’s best element is its lead character, a young artist named Anna. Anna is one of the studio’s most fully realized characters, and I fell wholly into her story of love and loss. If this is the last official Studio Ghibli film, they’ll have gone out as well as imaginable; I look forward to wherever Yonebayashi makes movies next, and I hope they have the same degree of empathy as this great film.
5. Mad Max Fury Road
What can be said about Mad Max: Fury Road that hasn’t been said already? That it would probably entertain those who think they’re done with action movies in a post-The Dark Knight world? That it, when looked at as a series of scenes or great images, works in ways unimagined when you just watch it as a sort of lore factory? That, somehow, it uses the orange and blue color palette of the modern blockbuster to reach an apex of visual filmmaking? Watch Mad Max: Fury Road. We can all keep watching Mad Max: Fury Road. It will always be here.
4. Spotlight
Spotlight is, essentially, perfect. Spotlight is activist and emotional and empathetic while remaining dispassionate, complex, not exploitative. The story of the exposure of the Boston Catholic Church as a brotherhood of secrecy and permission of child molestation reveals so much about how the brain should work. Schriber’s character, who demands a full and complete dismantling of the system because the Boston Globe has the power to do more than expose bad priests, is a model for how the individual has intense power. Spotlight is entertaining in that it is enjoyable to watch people do their jobs well; it is emotional in that it respects those on its sideline. I have naught but praise for Spotlight, and it should not just be a model for how to handle ensemble drama, but a model for how to handle one’s own life.
3. The Hateful Eight
I expected to find myself wholly disappointed by The Hateful Eight. Another Western, and one less obviously political than Django Unchained? It seemed a wasteful half-step. But no Tarantino film has better transformed the idea of what a Tarantino film might do; the film rewards not surface level analysis but deep meditation and immersion, having far more to say by saying several things less emphatically. We’ve become accustomed to genre movies screaming themes at us without subtlety. The Hateful Eight pulls them into an ensemble of figures who conflict with one another, making a muddy collection of ideas that actually reward using one’s brain. Each performance is astounding; Jennifer Jason Leigh obviously makes a mark, but how about Jackson’s great work, or the astounding performance from Bruce Dern? Rarely has the violence itself in a Tarantino film felt so criticized. This feels like his film that looks at all the misery in his work over the years and bothers to make it clear that this violence is not that of Randian evolution but of the end of the world. Some justice.
2. Magic Mike XXL
Industrial welding. Magic Mike XXL utilizes the first film’s focus of the lack of glamour and stability in sex work and hangs this cloud over a more joyful film about all of sexuality’s greatest gifts. The convenience store. Some zany antics support the smiles, body positivity, gender dynamics, and comments on self-transformation that make Magic Mike XXL a magical experience for almost any viewer. Rome. There is a moment where this film transforms into a sort of odyssey, and the remaining encounters each are so progressive and beautiful as to make me laugh and cry all over again. Heaven. And with the last half hour, I knew I had a new favorite comedy on this earth. Magic Mike XXL is better than the film we need; it’s the film I love.
1. The Look of Silence
I was aware there would be no hope in seeing anything better than The Look of Silence as soon as I saw that it existed. Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing shows a destroyed nation where its executors still hold power over the subjugated survivors, and the documentary evokes Werner Herzog (an executive producer on both films) as it heightens Indonesian genocide to divine tragedy. The essential antidote is The Look of Silence, a film which returns to earth and places an optometrist named Adi as a sort of vigilante investigator into his own brother’s death in those genocides. The latter evokes the other executive producer, Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) as it chases down those involved in Adi’s brother’s killing, but does not lose sight of the prior film’s gorgeous cinematography. If The Look of Silence were fiction, it would be receiving the same criticisms as Bridge of Spies, called a Capra-esque morality tale that sits as too unbelievable to be successful. As reality, the confrontations Adi has with those who perpetrated the genocide, or those who willfully enable their family members who did, are some of the boldest filmmaking I’ve ever witnessed. The Look of Silence is the year’s best film.
When I saw Into Darkness about a month ago, I expected I’d enjoy something else less by this point in the summer. But, due to my failure to see some of the summer’s larger “disappointments” (again, I haven’t seen them,) Into Darkness remains my summer bummer.
To be blunt, large parts of the movie are still pretty cool. Aside from the moments where Dan Mindel properly conveys thematic statements through cinematography, it’s the parts where characters just talk to each other. Whether comedic or dramatic, it’s usually very, very engaging. The characters that receive focused are well executed and generally well acted. They’re snippy, funny, and have fantastic chemistry, and they’re occasionally capable of engendering some real pathos.
Shining amongst the examples is an early scene where Kirk winds up in a long elevator ride with Uhura. They’re about to set off on their primary mission for the film; Uhura, off-handedly, asks the captain if everything’s all right; everyone else thinks he looks kind of exhausted. Even before the tragic events that lead to the mission they’re embarking upon, Kirk was drinking himself into a stupor; Kirk has since been “put upon,” to underemphasize things. He says he’s fine.
Then, he doubles back to say “no, I’m not okay.” He explains that one of his beloved crew has quit and that he’s full of self-doubt and grief and has no idea what he’s doing; we’re witnessing the makings of an anxiety attack or depressive breakdown. It’s a fascinating moment in a film thus far bereft of these deeply emotional scenes. To top it all off, Kirk is arguing with Spock, who Uhura is dating at the time. She vaguely implies that she and Spock aren’t exactly sailing smoothly either. Kirk takes this as a moment for his own bravado, joking about the idea of having a lovers’ spat with Spock.
This is the last we will see of Kirk’s self-esteem issues, grieving, or anxiety. In fact, apart from a follow-up conversation in regards to Spock’s fight with Uhura, this is the last deep angst we’ll see out of any of our characters that doesn’t come in the form of a right hook. Somewhere, a writer had a pathological arc for Kirk to become the bold captain we know him to be, but all traces of it but this one scene are struck from the script.
On the one hand, I want to congratulate them for even including a hint of that level of complexity; on the other, I chastise them for not making the more interesting film. What’s even left to beg for? Apparently, Iron Man 3 offers multiple nervous breakdowns that don’t facilitate the plot, and The Dark Knight Rises gave Christian Bale more screentime with a broken back than he got wearing a cowl. Prometheus, a film filled with ambition, made its budget back more than threefold. An ambitious, cerebral, empathetic megahit is entirely possible.
It’s not like J.J. Abrams is incapable of making something with heart; Super 8 is a perfect example of his repartee on full steam, without a massive budget to bog him down. And when Into Darkness abandons its more seriously interesting character arcs, it becomes a lot harder to forgive the empty plot, ridiculous fanservice, marginalization of all non Kirk/Spock/Cumberbatch characters, boring action, and truly awful ending. Delving into that stuff would require seeing the movie, and, unfortunately, I don’t plan to make that happen any time soon.
I’ll leave on a hopeful note, though. A similar note of humanity come in an early scene in which Spock accepts his oncoming (and subverted) demise. The score and cinematography aspire to the same heights Prometheus achieved last year. These short bursts of pure empathetic filmmaking reminded me of what the Star Trek film series can be; hopefully, with the somewhat unremarkable performance of Into Darkness domestically, a scaled back budget will force the Abrams understudy who takes over to really study what truly works about these first two films.
All My Friends 