A little late this year, but I still beat the Oscars!
honorable mentions:
(in alphabetical order)
BROKER - a companion piece to Shoplifters, this daydream of found family is funny and bittersweet, and Kore-eda’s shift to Korea leads to great collaborations.
HATCHING - if you found Turning Red too tame an allegory for female puberty, try the one with the baby bird demon. Such excellent creature effects!
KIMI - The Conversation meets Rear Window by way of Soderbergh having fun. Tight script, 90 minutes, plenty of style. A good new-fashioned thriller.
MAD GOD - Phil Tippett, the effects and creature designer behind Star Wars’ walkers and Jurassic Park’s dinos, drags us to gonzo hell—in stop motion!
WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR - lo-fi Creepypasta coming-of-age trans horror film. Feels like the crest of a post-postmodern wave.
15. Return to Seoul
Written and directed by Davy Chou
I’m sure Seoul would work with any gifted actor at its center—the script’s as sharp as it is personal—but Park Ji-min makes it hers and hers alone. As Freddie, a French adoptee searching for her parents in South Korea, she’s a sea of impulsions crashing against rocks and hard places. Her acting debut is maybe the year’s best performance: all the vulnerabilities of a liminal identity on scared, guarded display. As she white-knuckles the world she never grew up in, each step home is two back from knowing herself, and the ache of diaspora seethes through her painfully expressive face. Her work grounds the movie perfectly. Seoul’s cinematography, electric in one moment and subdued the next, is wise to follow Park’s lead.
Where to watch: Return to Seoul is still playing in select theaters. Its VOD and physical releases are yet to be announced.
14. In Front of Your Face
Written and directed by Hong Sang-soo
Another return to Seoul, this one older and a little bit wiser. Written, directed, shot, scored, and edited by low-budget poet Hong Sang-soo, In Front of Your Face stars Lee Hye-young, an icon of 80s Korean cinema making her first film appearance in years, as Sang-ok, a retired actress contemplating her first film appearance in years. The film’s naturalism and metafiction blend beautifully: Hong’s mastered this song by now, finding grace notes in the face of encroaching reality. In Front of Your Face is a quiet, attentive, and deliberately colorful film that finds simple sublimity in life being art. Lee Hye-young reads that dynamic between the lines, and oh how fluently.
Where to watch: In Front of Your Face is available to rent or buy on Apple TV.
13. Happening
Adapted by Audrey Diwan, Marcia Romano, and Anne Berest; directed by Audrey Diwan
Happening, which follows a young woman’s attempts to have an abortion in 1960s France, has drawn comparisons to the seminal 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and the more recent Never Rarely Sometimes Always, but the film differs from its reference points with an autobiographical tenor. It’s based on one of Annie Ernaux’s many memoirs, and writer/director Audrey Diwan takes extraordinary care to depict her pregnancy as remembered. These are hard memories to relive, as the film’s anxious score and desperate lead performance reiterate, but they’re vital to see in motion. From the frame’s unsentimental gaze on girls’ changing bodies to pacing that makes pregnancy a time bomb, Happening is a work of unsettling authenticity.
Where to watch: Happening is streaming on Hulu, AMC+, and DIRECTV and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
12. Inu-oh
Adapted by Akiko Nogi, directed by Masaaki Yuasa
From the director of Devilman Crybaby comes the best hand-drawn Japanese historical rock opera you’ve ever seen. Inu-Oh follows a blind, orphaned biwa player who, after befriending a deformed vagrant with a penchant for dance, forms a glam rock band that threatens to expose the evils of the Ashikaga shogunate. It’s as singular as it sounds. A blend of Japanese folklore and wacky fantasy, the film boasts distinctive animation to match: fluid, psychedelic, and idiosyncratic, a perfectly weird stage for singing truth to power. Inu-Oh is many things—a myth, a drama, an anime about political violence manifesting as demonic curses—but through it all blares the music as it grows from spectacle to rallying cry and counterculture to history.
Where to watch: Inu-Oh is available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
11. No Bears
Written and directed by Jafar Panahi
For over a decade, director Jafar Panahi has been a prisoner of the Iranian government for making films critical of the regime. But that hasn’t stopped him from making more—like 2011’s This Is Not a Film, which had to be smuggled to Cannes in a cake, and 2013’s Closed Curtain, an experiment in docufiction filmed entirely under house arrest. His latest act of guerrilla cinema is No Bears, which turns a surprisingly self-critical lens on his whole operation. His work still revels in rebellion—like an early scene where Panahi, as himself, almost illegally crosses the border—but No Bears is ever more concerned with the people in Panahi’s orbit. Self-reflexive and culturally clear-eyed, it’s a heart-stopping reflection on the power, possibility, and danger of the image.
Where to watch: No Bears is still playing in select theaters. Its VOD and physical releases are yet to be announced.
10. Decision to Leave
Written by Park Chan-wook and Jeong Seo-kyeong, directed by Park Chan-wook
Park Chan-wook follows up his erotic thriller The Handmaiden with something a little more restrained—but restraint can be sexy too, of course, especially with the leash of the law involved. Decision to Leave finds Park going Hitchcockian noir, pairing a lovestruck detective with a neo-femme fatale who may or may not have shoved her husband off a cliff. The sexual and dramatic tension the two generate could power a small city indefinitely. Tang Wei in particular is superb as Song Seo-rae, who lends an old archetype a mischievous uncertainty. The film is redolent with want, secrets, and loss, and through Park’s precise yet playful lens—focus pulls and match cuts and split diopters, oh my—it frames tortured love in pointillistic detail.
Where to watch: Decision to Leave is streaming on Mubi and available to rent or buy on Apple TV and Amazon.
9. The Eternal Daughter
Written and directed by Joanna Hogg
This one needs some context. Joanna Hogg’s previous films, The Souvenir Parts I and II, tell the semi-autobiographical story of a woman navigating adulthood and coming into her own as a filmmaker. Hogg’s stand-in for herself, “Julie Harte,” is played by Honor Swinton Byrne (Tilda Swinton’s daughter), while her mother “Rosalind” is played by Tilda herself. In The Eternal Daughter, mother and daughter Rosalind and Julie Harte (the same characters? Who knows!) are both played by Tilda Swinton, and Julie must face the pain and limitations of making a film about her mother. Layers on layers on layers. And through them bleeds the atmosphere of a true Gothic horror—for what’s scarier than disappointing the parent inside your head?
Where to watch: The Eternal Daughter is available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
8. All the Beauty and the bloodshed
Directed by Laura Poitras
A documentary that sees the forest in the trees, Bloodshed filters the opioid crisis through the life of photographer Nan Goldin, who founded the advocacy group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) after falling victim to Oxycontin addiction. Director/journalist Laura Poitras traces Nan’s current role—a creative force against the opioid-hawking Sackler family—back through her repressed adolescence and photography of queer culture during the AIDS epidemic, arranging through mosaic a life of art and empathy as activism. The film mourns the ghosts of the American unwanted and charts a poignant throughline between communities of survivors: when the powerful benefit from your wasting away, recovery is a work of art. And it’s hard fucking work.
Where to watch: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed comes to HBO Max on March 18th.
7. The Banshees of inisherin
Written and directed by Martin McDonagh
Friend breakups are hard, but they’re even harder when they’re happening to the most affable Colin Farrell you’ve ever seen. Banshees, a vicious Irish fable about friends falling out, reunites In Bruges duo Farrell and Brendan Gleeson just to tear them apart again. The two luxuriate in McDonagh’s rhythms, dancing through wordplay with an extempore fervor that leaps from comic to acerbic to caustic. The incongruities of McDonagh’s work are harsh as ever—spite and ire set against soft light and lush greenery—and used here to evoke the Irish Civil War, bottled up and allegorized as a friendship compromised. It’s no bastion of subtlety, but it’s poetic, perverse, and goddamn hilarious.
Where to watch: The Banshees of Inisherin is streaming on HBO Max and DIRECTV and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
6. tár
Written and directed by Todd Field
TÁR is an ornate psychological drama about an abusive conductor; TÁR is a bone-dry black comedy about high-art impropriety; TÁR is a gripping thriller inside a mind beset by downfall. TÁR is multifarious because its director gives it space—tonal, subtextual, and physical space. Field shoots wide and long, staring unblinkingly at his protagonist from an anthropological distance, as if examining the behavior of the narcissist behind the glass; simultaneously, apparitions in the frame and soundscape take us inside her head. Cate Blanchett’s performance, tying it all together, is one of passion, hubris, and denial, immense and colliding, earning our fascination without a shred of our sympathy. Her tremendous depth and dissonance fill in the story’s shades of grey.
Where to watch: TÁR is streaming on Peacock Premium and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
5. Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood
Written and directed by Richard Linklater
Apollo 10 1/2 marks Linklater’s return to animation after 16 years away, and it sure is nice to see him at the rotoscope again. The movie opens on NASA recruiting a fourth grader for a top-secret test run of the Apollo 11 mission, which is fun and all, but what’s even more fun is how the story detours. In a delightful structural gambit, the narrator pauses the story after five minutes to get into an hour of background, transforming fantasy into biography and the moon landing into a sociopolitical and metaphorical reference point for coming of age in 60s America. The animation rebuilds the period down to the details, knowing that you can't grasp human history outside all its little contexts. Brilliant, warm, funny hindsight—featuring the dulcet tones of Jack Black!
Where to watch: Apollo 10 1/2 is streaming on Netflix.
4. Saint Omer
Written by Alice Diop, Amrita David, and Marie NDiaye; directed by Alice Diop
Saint Omer, Diop’s eighth film, is her first narrative feature, but in spirit and form it invokes the embeddedness of documentary. The film is inspired by the real-life infanticide trial of Fabienne Kabou, which Diop herself attended (perhaps out of a felt connection—like Kabou, Diop is the Parisian daughter of Senegalese immigrants). By making the film’s protagonist, Rama, a self-insert—she’s a writer observing the trial who shares a background with the defendant—Diop bends the narrative into a cousin of documentary, interrogating the trial through the lens of her presence. Omer drifts in and out of Diop’s mind through montage, sound, and well-timed reveals, grounding our empathy in the particulars of her own. The film doesn't disclose its basis in truth, but its fixation on what's shared between author and subject tells us everything we need to know.
Where to watch: Saint Omer is available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
3. Aftersun
Written and directed by Charlotte Wells
It feels like a home movie, it breathes like a home movie, and it hits with the sneaky devastation of a home movie watched alone in the dark when you’re twenty years older. Aftersun joins a young father and his 11-year-old daughter on vacation to Turkey, one armed with a video camera and the other with barely disguised depression. The strength of their performances registers first: Paul Mescal is a muted scream, just at his limit of trying to be okay, and Frankie Corio delivers one of the most profound child performances in recent memory. But perhaps most astonishing is the film’s final act, which, after a divinely paced buildup, erupts into a marvel of editing that traverses time and sense memory to spin the whole thing into elegy. The film blooms as something lightly experimental, but its cumulative power is something else entirely.
Where to watch: Aftersun is available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
2. Everything Everywhere All at Once
Written and directed by Daniels Kwan and Scheinert
There’s a negative review of All at Once that stands out to me. It reads—and I’m half quoting, half paraphrasing here—“I want the version of this movie that doesn't coat everything in super-heroics and understands that a story about an immigrant family struggling with generational change while at the end of their financial rope is enough.” I get it, I do, but Everything’s whole thing is being more than enough. It’s about facing the day when you live a glance at the phone away from every meaningless tragedy; it’s about the shame of money trouble when the system swears you’re not a billionaire because you’re not the best version of yourself; it’s about the noise—the big, unstoppable rockslide of realities that compete for our attention and fracture our identities while we’re struggling to pay the rent and hear our loved ones. Maximalism is an ideal language for All at Once: how else to extol the joys of the cards we’re dealt but to aggrandize the noise and find meaning still? That the film does so with staggering creativity across its production and effects design, deeply felt performances from all its main cast, and some of the most evocative shot, lighting, and color composition this side of arthouse is a miracle. It’s a hugely silly, strikingly humanist triumph, and though I understand not loving it, I’m so glad I do.
Where to watch: Everything Everywhere All at Once is streaming on Showtime and DIRECTV and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
1. Hit the Road
Written and directed by Panah Panahi
Hit the Road is the directorial debut of Panah Panahi, son of political dissident Jafar Panahi (of the aforementioned No Bears), and god what a strong first showing. Borrowing an approach from his father (and from his father’s mentor, the late legend Abbas Kiarostami), Panahi sets much of Hit the Road in and around a car, a symbolic safe space from the powers that be in contemporary Iranian cinema. The film follows a family on a covert road trip to the border, where the parents hope to smuggle their eldest son to a better life while keeping their youngest none the wiser. It’s in their endeavor to keep things light for the kid that the film finds its tonal mirror: scrambling for sweetness in the desert of reality. Panahi nails this balance by diffusing Iranian neorealism—that documentary-like attention to political materiality—with bursts of magical realism, offering moments of escape where it can’t offer hope. It moves with perfect tragicomic rhythm: editors Ashkan Mehri and Amir Etminan know what every cut is doing, and in the still moments, DP Amin Jafari crafts breathtaking tableaus of love amid agony. Hit the Road is a stunning debut, a gorgeous heartbreaker, and the wiliest, tenderest emotional roller coaster. Kiarostami would be proud.
Where to watch: Hit the Road is streaming on Showtime, hoopla, fuboTV, Kanopy, and DIRECTV and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
And that’s the ninth year in a row I’ve written one of these. See you next year for our 10th anniversary.