Image courtesy of NEON
And we’re back. Sorry to keep you waiting; I was forced at gunpoint to lose myself in Elden Ring.
This will also be the last thing I write for this site, which has been a difficult, loaded experience, but more on that a later day. For now, the
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
(in alphabetical order)
ASTEROID CITY - Wes Anderson’s out-there manifesto for why he makes art (and what he’s trying to capture when he does it the way he does).
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE - Anti-capitalist, ecoterrorist agitprop in the body of a suspense thriller. Also a hands-on learning activity.
LA CHIMERA - Rohrwacher’s magical neorealism is a balm for the soul. She and editor Nelly Quettier have near-Scorsese/Schoonmaker synergy.
LOVE LIFE - A romantic relationship rent apart by tragedy; an arms-length slow dance between love and grief. Really gorgeous color work here.
SUZUME - The first third—where Suzume and her boyfriend-turned-sentient-chair chase a divine trickster cat across Japan—is just sublime.
15. SONNE
Written and directed by Kurdwin Ayub
I don’t think this has distribution yet, so consider this my plea to all the kind young studios out there. I know you want this, NEON.
Sonne follows a Vienna-born Kurdish girl and her two white friends as they go viral for singing and twerking in hijab to “Losing My Religion.” Their video collides with several shifting paradigms—the centrality of Islam to the Kurdish diaspora, the value of provocation in culturally blended spaces, the role of social media in teen identity—and Ayub concentrates these shifts into one girl’s day-to-day, building a roaring inner life in a storm of changing worlds. The film feels especially clued-in to its moment, evoking through mosaic the rapid cultural crisscross of the content age. I hope it gets the attention it deserves.
Where to watch: Maybe at your local festival, hopefully one day everywhere. Seek it out!
14. THE PLAINS
Written and directed by David Easteal
The Plains is nearly entirely just one man’s commute. He leaves work ‘round 5, calls his mom, calls his wife, and maybe gives a coworker a lift home, talking their lives the whole way. Repeat the next weekday. Three hours of the same drive over and over—a hotbed for sneaky transcendence. It’s quintessential slow cinema: the zoned-out awareness of staring out a windshield lulls you into hypnosis, keeping your eyes and ears glued (lest we hit a car!) while freeing your mind to wander the conversations, which teem with fears and foibles between the lines. It’s well-written, semi-biographical, and unexpectedly emotional: what we learn from all the talking makes the few shots outside the car hit like a truck.
Where to watch: The Plains is streaming on MUBI.
13. ANATOMY OF A FALL
Written by Justine Triet and Arthur Harari,
directed by Justine Triet
A very sharp, very mindful courtroom drama that lives in the space between the facts and the truth. When the husband of a well-known novelist is found dead beneath his attic window, all eyes laser in on his wife, who was the only one home when he fell. Every facet of her character—her writing, her sexuality, her drinking, her careerism—is strictly cross-examined, calling into question her complex rhymes and reasons as we learn to understand her better. It’s the kind of human mess that makes any verdict reductive. The film’s form is equally resistant to answers: echoing the look of documentary as the facts continue to blur, it plays with the very notion of “seeing the truth.” Its centerpiece spousal argument is among the best recently filmed.
Where to watch: Anatomy of a Fall is available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms and will be streaming on Hulu on March 22nd. Depending on where you live, it may also be enjoying a theatrical rerelease.
12. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4
Written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch,
directed by Chad Stahelski
It’s nice to see a real John Wick after the latest dispatch of imitators. We’ve seen vampire hunters, bullet train passengers, and Santa Claus don Wick’s distinct clothing, from long tracking shots of MMA gun ballets to piecemeal lore reveals of tapestries of backstory, but nothing holds a candle to the now-Homeric Wick. This thing opens on Laurence Fishburne reciting the inscription above Dante’s gates of hell and then match cuts from a blown-out match to the desert sunrise like Lawrence of goddamn Arabia. It oozes mood and style from minute one. And the color work is as skillful as the action—Stahelski named Bertolucci and Wong Kar-Wai as visual influences, and it tracks. And Keanu Reeves falls down several flights of stairs. Now that’s a picture!
Where to watch: John Wick: Chapter 4 is streaming on Starz and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
11. RYE LANE
Written by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia,
directed by Raine Allen-Miller
A most formally assured debut and one of the strongest rom-coms in years. It’s gorgeous, first off—between its distinctly wide lensing, city life pillow shots, and mind-melting color design, it paints the sights of South London with the pulse the city deserves. It’s so lushly shot—if it went on longer than 80 minutes, I couldn’t have stopped myself from flying straight to Heathrow. Its energy is infectious. The leads are great alone and great together, the score is vibrant and propulsive, the production design is full of weird ideas (see the above mouths), and there’s a big English cameo hiding behind a food stand. Allen-Miller directs the hell out of this script, turning a bright but inevitable romance into something lyrical and unforgettable.
Where to watch: Rye Lane is streaming on Hulu.
10. SHOWING UP
Written by Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt,
directed by Kelly Reichardt
After the expansion-era First Cow, the poet laureate of the Pacific Northwest (I’m the first person to call Kelly Reichardt that; don’t bother looking it up) returns with a hardship to outdo the frontier: making art amid the endless hurdles of existing. Michelle Williams, a Reichardt protagonist for the fourth time now, plays Lizzy, a Portland-based sculptor in quotidian purgatory. Her performance, frumpy but present, is a nonverbal soliloquy, exuding the struggles of the art life through grimaces, groans, and dwindling supplies of grit, a living emblem of the drudgery of creation. And yet each little uplift she encounters on the way—caring for an injured bird, coming around to an imperfect sculpture—makes creation, in all its attendant struggles, essential.
Where to watch: Showing Up is streaming on Paramount+, FuboTV, and Hoopla and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
9. WALK UP
Written and directed (and produced and shot and scored and edited) by Hong Sang-soo
The second of three films about managing the art life that end in “Up” on this list (just kidding, only two, but imagine!), Walk Up follows a handful of creatives in a four-floor apartment across four relaxed afternoons (that’s four stories across four stories for the rhymingly inclined). Hong’s usual trademarks are accounted for: low-budget verisimilitude; long, static takes of drunken conversation; a filmmaker character channeling Hong’s neuroses (Kwon Hae-hyo in the role for the fourth time now); implicit displays of uncomfortable truths. These may be familiar grounds, but the pathos is in the details. Through a series of well-placed time jumps, the film builds to the truths we understand in retrospect: the excuses we made, the people we missed, the places we left in balancing work and passion. It’s multilayered and so human it’s embarrassing.
Where to watch: Walk Up is available to rent or buy on Vudu, AppleTV, Google Play, and YouTube.
8. SKINAMARINK
Written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball
The discourse over Skinamarink was beyond “love it or hate it”—it was “you’ll either die of boredom or have waking nightmares for days on end.” I fall closer to the latter camp, squarely in the “why the fuck did I miss this in theaters!?” group. We can only hope for a cult classic rerelease.
The best way I can describe Skinamarink is a paranormal(?) home invasion seen through the eyes (and barely developed mind) of a child. It’s bracingly experimental, made up of dark, obscured close-ups of disparate corners of a house and haunting lo-fi soundscapes of droning and hushed screams. It’s like a movie made in the editing room out of coverage of children’s nightmares—a pointillistic masterclass of formal disorientation. Watch it on mushrooms.
Where to watch: Skinamarink is streaming on Shudder, Hulu, and AMC+ and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
7. FALLEN LEAVES
Written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki
The most “nice little movie” of anything on here. It’s a dryly funny, 80-minute rom-com about two lonely Finns (one unemployed, the other alcoholic) going on a movie date and trying to keep in touch. The performances are charmingly deadpan (Janne Hyytiäinen, in the immortal rom-com role of protagonist’s best friend, strikes a consummate straight-faced silliness); the color grade is intoxicating, awash in warm primary colors; the soundtrack is diverse and inspired; and the whole thing is a cinephile’s daydream—finding out what movie the two are watching in the promotional stills was the hardest I’d laughed in days. It’s all lovely little perfectly tuned drollery. Plus a very cute dog!
Where to watch: Fallen Leaves is streaming on MUBI and available to rent or buy on Amazon, AppleTV, and Vudu.
6. MENUS-PLAISIRS - LES TROISGOIS
Directed and edited by Frederick Wiseman
The most “très bien” movie of anything on here. Menus-Plaisirs is a four-hour documentary about La Maison Troisgros, a legendary French restaurant that’s maintained three Michelin stars for over 30 years. Behind the camera is Frederick Wiseman, one of our greatest living documentarians (certainly in the running for the greatest) and a keen-eyed chronicler of complex institutions. His dive into Troisgros is mouthwatering and mind-blowing: you’ll see every ounce of effort and each pinch of care that goes into these dishes, from the granular processes of the vineyard and cheese cave to the trained chaos of creation in the kitchen. The film turns every ingredient over in its hands until the meals transcend the sum of their parts—holistic, communal, manifold and beautiful.
Where to watch: Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros is streaming on PBS.org.
5. MAY DECEMBER
Written by Samy Burch, directed by Todd Haynes
Where to even start with this? There’s the backstory, based on a true story, of a teacher who “fell in love with” (heavy on the quotation marks) her 13-year-old student, bearing his children while serving time for child rape and later marrying and settling down with him when her prison sentence ended. Then there’s the main story, set 20 years later, when an actress playing the teacher in a film about the scandal flies out to her subject’s home to research the role up close. Clearly May December is going for something self-reflexive—some metatext on how movies adapt true crime stories. And it is that, to an extent. But it’s also a lot of other things, and those things are frankly bonkers. It’s a wry parade of formalist symbolism; it’s a pitch-black cringe comedy about fictionalizing a child sex crime, walking one of the trickiest tonal tightropes you could possibly release on Netflix; it’s a highbrow, bad-taste satire of any film that would dramatize these events with a straight face. It’s fucking wild. And full of great performances. And the year’s best family movie!
Where to watch: May December is streaming on Netflix.
4. KOKOMO CITY
Directed and edited by D. Smith
Black trans sex workers in their own freewheeling words. D. Smith, a hip-hop and R&B producer who was shut out of music when she transitioned, makes her filmmaking debut with an essential documentary, letting four vulnerable sex workers unload their minds on screen. Smith makes a strong impression as an editor, echoing, expanding, or ironizing her subjects' words with music and montage of endless jazzy energy. There's a real outcast scrappiness that anchors the film’s form; it moves from feeling to feeling like electricity. So much to mourn, so much to take pleasure in, and so much spirit to soak in, not least the baroque beauty of the black-and-white cinematography. It’s funny, it’s raw, it’s galvanizing.
Where to watch: Kokomo City is streaming on Paramount+ and FuboTV and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
3. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING
Written by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen,
directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Barbenheimer was fun and all, but it crushed Dead Reckoning at the box office, and for that I will never forgive it. Neither Barben nor heimer can touch the sense of balance that Reckoning achieves: its action is sheer virtuosic spectacle, an exhilarating triumph in camera and stunt work, so full of ideas and verve that every last set piece soars. A slapstick car chase through Rome that takes a beat for a dick joke? Fantastic. A giddily elaborate train wreck inspired by Buster Keaton’s The General? Sublime. But maybe even more impressive is the tonal balance, which channels Mission: Impossible in all its forms: the cornball cheese of the TV show(s), the spy thrills of De Palma’s original, the meticulous staging of the McQuarrie run; it’s all earnest, and it all gels. And it’s so fun. Despite the movie’s shortcomings—leaden exposition, some shot-on-digital ugliness—it’s easily the most fun I had in theaters last year.
Where to watch: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning is streaming on Paramount+ and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.
2. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
Written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese,
directed by Martin Scorsese
The late period of one of cinema’s greatest masters keeps on stunning. The film tells the true story of the Osage Reign of Terror, a series of murders wrought by a cabal of wealthy whites to steal money and land from their native Osage neighbors. The highest praise I can offer Killers (outside more detailed thoughts in a longer review) is that despite being in some ways a very messy movie—it even concedes its own limitations as a work of popular art, which is vital and discerning but not absolving—it’s still a more clear, singular, and deeply affecting vision than most movies most years. At its heart it’s a film of reckoning: with the inevitable ends of American racism, with the lenses through which history sees these stories, and especially with death, which the film approaches with equal parts terror and grace. Like The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon is just as spiritual a work as Silence, this time seeing outward through the lives of others even as Scorsese gazes heavenward.
Where to watch: Killers of the Flower Moon is streaming on Apple TV+ and available to buy on multiple VOD platforms. It may also be enjoying a theatrical rerelease.
1. R.M.N.
Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu
RMN is the Romanian acronym for nuclear magnetic resonance, the method behind MRI scans, except instead of mapping the body, R.M.N. maps the body politic, putting the racism of a small Romanian village under scrutiny. That’s not an excellent reason to call the movie R.M.N., but I promise it’s better than its nondescript title. It’s loosely based on the Ditrău xenophobic incident, in which nearly 2,000 villagers petitioned their town hall to deport three (3) immigrant workers. Director Cristian Mungiu, a morbid practitioner of Romanian social realism, layers the setting from nature to nurture: the half-Romani protagonist, himself a victim of racism, joins the campaign against the Sri Lankan migrants; his son, a silent witness, sees how his father has learned to survive; a town hall scene, in a 17-minute fixed shot, charts intertwined synapses in the hive mind of hatred; and the village is shot like a postcard prison—enwreathed in mountains, shrouded in snow, an inescapable echo chamber of rock and hardened hearts. The tenor of the film is crushingly lonely, and in that it finds a core of Eastern European racism: the sheer, brutal, toxic cold of tribalism. R.M.N. sees it through from diagnosis to death, and the images uncovered are crucial.
Where to watch: R.M.N. is streaming on Hulu and AMC+ and available to rent or buy on multiple VOD platforms.