Atlantis so thoroughly fails the Bechdel Test that its two female characters—the minimum required to pass the assessment—never even meet, let alone converse. Granted, they’re educated professionals who talk about their work and not guys. Even so, this film—set in Eastern Ukraine in 2025, “one year after the war”—focuses almost single-mindedly on men, especially those who are no longer in combat but remain in uniform, one way or another. Some keep ready for firefights by donning their old outfits on weekends, driving to a snowy ravine, and shouting their way through target practice—just in case, or because they don’t know what else to do with themselves. Others have moldering tatters of fatigues clinging to their bones when they’re dug out of mass graves.

This is male cinema, in capital letters—but as written, directed, photographed, and edited by Valentyn Vasyanovych, it’s also real cinema, made by an artist who has thought about why and how he’s showing whatever you see. You’re well into the picture, for example, before Vasyanovych stops confining himself to long, static shots, one per scene, and allows more frequent camera movement to begin—or, rather, permits the camera to ride in a truck with his protagonist, the war veteran Sergiy (Andriy Rymaruk), who has taken a part-time job driving down muddy, foggy, mine-infested roads in a grayish nowhere. It’s not just that these trips call for traveling shots; it’s that Sergiy, in the earlier part of the film, was going nowhere except into himself, furiously, obsessively, but now he is finally looking outward. Or consider the dizzying jumps in scale that Vasyanovych builds into some of his widescreen compositions: setting an apparently minuscule Sergiy in the foreground of the shot, on an apartment building roof that cuts across the frame, while the immense, shadowy jumble of a steel mill looms in the background. How far away is that factory, where Sergiy has been employed? You can’t tell. All you know is that it dwarfs him.

And when one of the women at last fulfills the destiny assigned to her from the start, melting into Sergiy as his redemptive squeeze? Even then Vasyanovych keeps his wits about him. The two are in the cab of Sergiy’s truck, which has broken down on one of those boggy roads and is being pelted by a downpour. As Katya (Liudmyla Bileka) moves closer to Sergiy, the camera, recording from outside the truck, also begins to move, dollying slowly forward until the torrent on the windshield becomes an impenetrable veil, shielding the kiss from view.

What brought these lovers together? Death. Having lost his job at the steel mill—which suffered one of the two possible fates of factories in this area, demolition or decommission—Sergiy is now driving a small tank truck on alternate weekends, delivering potable water to stations in the former combat zone. He encounters Katya when she flags him down—her van has stalled—and agrees to tow her to the morgue, where she hands over one of the unidentified corpses her volunteer organization disinters. It’s not exactly a meet-cute. Katya has to complete some documentation, so Sergiy (like the film’s viewer) sticks around for the autopsy. He’s helpful, too. Given his experience, he can tell the medical examiners that the method of killing suggests the victim was a captured sniper.

That might be one of the cheerier scenes in Atlantis. The action arguably becomes more grim after Sergiy joins the volunteer organization and accompanies Katya to haul seven or eight corpses out of a trench and bag them—Russian soldiers, Ukrainian soldiers, soldiers wearing the rotting insignia of the Donbass militia. Katya takes pity on Sergiy as a first-timer, offering him some scent to dull the stench. And after that, there’s yet another mass grave to empty. The autopsies, Katya explains, are the only means by which these people can still tell their stories. Some stories. The best the organization can do, it seems, is erect crosses labeled “Temporarily Non-Identified Defender of Ukraine.”

What perversity—apart from the pleasure of recognizing the work of a real filmmaker—makes me feel enthusiasm for this stuff?

At the risk of detracting from the specificity of Atlantis, a film so Ukrainian that it is the nation’s official submission to the Academy Awards competition, I’ll mention two ways in which the movie also speaks to my experience, and maybe yours. First, it’s a picture about heavy industry. Remember that? I do, from my youth in the shadow of US Steel, International Harvester, Wisconsin Steel, and more. There’s an exhilaration of might about steel mills, a power that’s geological in physical scale and elemental in the massive release of flame, steam, fumes, and molten metal. How often do you see that in the movies anymore? How often can you still see it in America? It’s vanishing in Atlantis, too—foreign owners are abandoning the mill, with the usual blather about there being no other choice, new times are upon us—but for Sergiy and the moviegoer, the hulking majesty remains in sight.

Second, Atlantis is about what’s left of a landscape after war: not just the pockets of corpses, but the poison. The reason Sergiy has to deliver potable water is because everyone in his part of the world is living not in the 2025 of speculative fiction but in what amounts to the dystopian present. People have fought for this terrain and, in fighting, made it unlivable. Atlantis offers you the deep if devastating satisfaction of seeing this truth squarely faced. By showing that Sergiy and Katya persist even so, Atlantis might also inspire your own stubborn loyalty to earth that’s been scorched, if not by soldiers then by our current warriors of social strife.

If that seems too sentimental, you might think about the alternative chosen by one of Sergiy’s combat veteran buddies, who dissolves himself in the smelting bucket. No unsightly remains are left to bury. There’s just an extra quart for the slag heap. Some Atlantis.

ighty-three years old at the time of this writing and not slowing down, Andrei Konchalovsky is now following the 2020 US release of Dear Comrades! with the US theatrical premiere, at New York’s Film Forum, of his 2019 historical drama, Sin. Except for being mordant and furiously energetic, the two films could hardly be more different.

The widely praised Dear Comrades! (Russia’s submission to the Academy Awards) is a black-and-white reimagination of a real event—the 1962 massacre of striking workers in the Soviet town of Novocherkassk—as seen through the turmoil of a fictional woman divided in loyalty between the party and her missing daughter. Sin, shot in glowing color at locations throughout Italy, is an exuberant fictionalization of a few years in the life of a historic figure, Michelangelo, covering the period from 1512, when he finished painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, to about 1520, when he reached a dead end in his commission for the Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence.

It’s a fascinating subject for Konchalovsky to take up late in life, considering that the high point of his early career was the screenplay he cowrote with Andrei Tarkovsky for Andrei Rublev. With Michelangelo as his protagonist, Konchalovsky has much more source material to draw from—or, looking at it the other way, to tie him down—than he did with Rublev, a central character who is all but absent from literary documentation and also missing from Tarkovsky’s screen half the time. In both cases, though, at the two ends of his career, Konchalovsky has projected himself onto an artist struggling with religious faith, the limitations of material conditions, and above all the demands of authority—or, in the case of Sin, two authorities. I wouldn’t want to insist on the analogy, but Sin is largely concerned with Michelangelo’s artistic and financial conflicts as he’s pulled back and forth between Florence and Rome and the successive political regimes of the Della Roveres and the Medicis—not unlike Konchalovsky, whose life has straddled the Soviet and post-Soviet eras and whose career has shuttled between Russia and the West.

If that sounds like heavy going, you should know that Sin participates joyously in the Monty Python tradition of “Bring out your dead!” movies. As Michelangelo makes his way through gorgeously recreated Renaissance streets and lanes, night soil keeps splashing from the windows overhead, chickens intrude on every situation, and random fits of overacting erupt on all sides. (When Michelangelo protests that the church has no right to censor his frescoes, a priest pops out of a crowd to scream, with a fresh grimace for each syllable, “How dare you speak that way to the Holy Inquisition?!”) The enjoyment of copulation is untrammeled by worries about privacy—here alone the film is circumspect, confining Michelangelo to the role of an observer—and conferences of his Buonarroti clan infallibly degenerate into fisticuffs.

Alberto Testone, who previously portrayed Pier Paolo Pasolini and may someday be cast in a biopic of Willem Dafoe, brings his deeply carved but sly and clear-eyed features to the role of Michelangelo, with disorderly dark hair and a two-pronged beard that make him faithfully resemble contemporaneous portraits. Testone’s performance, too, conforms to accounts written at the time: rude, delusional, angry, sordid, scheming, and so impetuous that he can break into an old-coot shuffle like Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. This is how you make a film about artistic heroism without a hero.

The adjective that Pope Julius II applies to this man is divino—but the word repeated most often in Sin is probably monstro. It describes the enormous block of Carrara marble that Michelangelo acquires, at an expense that includes a man’s life, and it describes the artist himself, whose talent is too immense for his self-starved body, his social station, or his own good. There are no excuses for the monster you meet in Sin, but neither is there a dull moment in his story.

resh out of the Sundance Film Festival comes Rodney Ascher’s A Glitch in the Matrix, which I might call a documentary if it assumed anything was out there to record.

The theme is the speculation—impossible to disprove and therefore both logically meaningless and nagging—that the world is a simulation. Some of Ascher’s commentators note the long history of theories that reality lies beyond our senses; they cite Hindu mythology, Plato’s allegory of the cave, and Descartes’s efforts to nail down the certainty of existence. But Ascher’s concern is with a distinct, fast-growing, and much more recent notion, encouraged by video games and vastly popularized by The Matrix, which assumes that the illusion in which we dwell is like an all-encompassing computer model.

Who or what has produced this illusion, or imposed it on us? Who, for that matter, is “us,” if the people you see (or the vast majority of them) are mere blips in your consciousness—“nonplaying characters,” in the language of computer games? Just how lonely are you, or do you want to believe yourself to be? Ascher provides a context for such questions, though no answers, by incorporating recorded excerpts of a speech that Philip K. Dick delivered in 1977 at a conference in Metz, in which he spoke about experiences that confirmed (in his mind) that his fictional themes of alternate realities and trompe l’œil worlds revealed a great truth. A reasonable person cannot simply dismiss Dick’s reading of his own stories and novels. They have become too popular and influential to ignore—witness the multiple, illustrative film clips that Ascher uses from Total Recall, Minority Report, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly. Witness the next level up from Dick in the simulation game—The Matrix—which provides the ultimately horrifying test case for Ascher.

Horrifying, but also funny—because Ascher playfully constructs A Glitch in the Matrix as a maze of borrowed footage (such as the Dick materials), video-game downloads, and new computer-generated imagery, so there’s little if any “outside” to the movie. The funniest, most teasing instances are his interviews with youngish men who believe in the simulation hypothesis, and who come before you in forms that might be altered, or perhaps are real. Who knows? One has the head of a metallic red lion and dresses in ancient armor. Another looks like the heavy-metal version of an Egyptian god and wears a tuxedo jacket with a pink bow tie. A third is a bulky but genial-looking extraterrestrial with reptilian skin When he absent-mindedly scratches his head in conversation, his fingers squeak against the transparent dome of his space helmet. You don’t feel that Ascher is mocking these people, perhaps because they speak with such earnestness and candor (and in some cases, interestingly, a background in evangelical Christianity).

They also admit, in one way or another, that for all their conviction, they’re stumped—though not as stumped as Joshua Cooke, the frequently bullied, Matrix-obsessed Virginia teenager who murdered his parents in 2003 and was shocked that the mess of his mother’s head was unlike anything he’d seen in the movie.

As someone who deeply hates The Matrix but revels in irreverent brainteasers, I welcome Ascher’s film, as entertainment and exegesis. Unfortunately, it doesn’t address one of the more pressing problems of consensual reality—the regime of “alternative facts” that is still with us. You can decide for yourself how the Trumpian big lie figures in simulation theory: glitch, or feature?

What’s that floating along the televisual stream to comfort and amuse us, as this brutal year flows toward its end? A much-touted exposé of old-time Hollywood, shot with an old-Hollywood look by David Fincher; a Steven Soderbergh fable about the literary life, with a Queen Mary 2 setting as posh as the cast and writer; an adaptation of an August Wilson play, ushered onto the screen with all due ceremony by George C. Wolfe. If prestigious credentials were the same thing as entertainment, we should all be chortling like 5-year-olds tearing at wrapping paper.

I’ll get to these fictions—Mank, Let Them All Talk, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—and also to Minari, a Korean American memory film that’s all the more worthy for its modesty. But before I do, here are notes about two year-end documentaries that truly felt like gifts, even though they’re about a Norwegian sow and the utter corruption of Romania.

Let’s begin with Romania. In late 2015, a fire in a Bucharest nightclub called Colectiv killed 27 young people, leading to protests that brought down the government. It was a small matter of the city’s having allowed the club to operate with only one exit and no authorization from the fire department. But that was just the first cause of the outrage. As the days passed, dozens of survivors died in Bucharest’s sole burn ward, not from fire-related trauma but bacterial infections. The patients’ families wanted them sent out of Romania, but somehow the transfer orders weren’t processed, while the Ministry of Health went on assuring everyone that the hospital’s standard of care was “as good as in Germany.”

This is the situation at the start of Collective, directed and photographed by Alexander Nanau and cowritten by him and Antoaneta Opris: a film that brings to mind those abysmal medical cases in which the biopsy of a lesion leads to the discovery of stage-four cancer. Using an observational style almost as strict as Frederick Wiseman’s, Collective follows the investigation conducted by journalist Catalin Tolontan and his colleagues at Gazeta Sporturilor—yes, it took a daily sports newspaper to uncover the truth—as they dig into the rate of in-hospital infections and progressively lay bare massive industrial crime, offshore financial chicanery, the sudden death of a prime suspect in murky circumstances, networks of bribes and kickbacks throughout the medical system, and at last the guiding hand of Romania’s political establishment.

Bad spirals down toward a seemingly bottomless worse, while you, appalled moviegoer, get to watch this helix of death from a front-row seat—two of them, actually. A startlingly candid new official, Vlad Voiculescu, takes over the Ministry of Health while Tolontan is still reporting, and in an astonishing turn of events he too permits the filmmakers to shadow him. It’s as if a documentary crew had been operating in Chicago in the early 1930s, and Eliot Ness had allowed it to tag along.

Now imagine that Al Capone had won, and you’ll intuit the force of Collective—a film rescued from despair only by the resoluteness of its truth-seekers, Nanau and his team included.

Documentaries are of course constructions, not naturally occurring formations; but an impression of naturalness, and even truth, can be rigged into a film if the means of expression are properly restrained. In Gunda, a remarkably fine meat-is-murder documentary, director Victor Kossakovsky studiously avoids color, music, and quick editing and so pulls you into a world that seems found rather than made—never mind that the cinematography, although black-and-white, is exquisite, the sound, though ambient, is cranked up until it’s tactile, and the shots, though patiently held, are chosen so cunningly that a simple change of viewpoint on a rooster can hit you like a plot reversal.

Filmed at sites in Norway, Spain, and the UK where animals are free to roam, Gunda devotes most of its running time to its eponymous sow and her litter, who are first seen, still glistening from the womb, as they tumble one after the other through the doorway of the rough-planked sty where their mother lies grunting. Kossakovsky devotes a quarter of an hour to an interlude in which roosters stride out of their cage and patrol a woodland, and about 10 minutes to the pasturing of a small herd of fly-pestered cattle. All the rest is a slow, rapt unfolding of the life of Gunda as she roots in the dirt, wallows, and pushes along the growing piglets with her snout, occasionally plopping over to let them scramble for her teats.

The shots are for the most part taken at ground level. (I imagine Kossakovsky must have abdominal abrasions from all that sliding over the terrain.) The attitude is wholly without sentimentality. You might try to project human emotions onto these animals, but Kossakovsky won’t let you, insisting by his close observation that you recognize their otherness. Roosters set down their feet at a pace that suits them, not you; cows address the troublesome flies by standing side by side and head to rear, as you and a friend would not, to switch each other’s faces with their tails; and Gunda ignores your idea of maternal care by stepping forward and indifferently crushing a newborn under her trotter.

This isn’t to say that Gunda is without feelings. At the film’s climax, humans enter the picture for the first time—still unseen, as are Kossakovsky and his crew, but made manifest by their machinery—after which Gunda is left alone to walk in circles. Is she puzzled, desperate, bereft, baffled, anguished? By this point, you should know better than to fantasize that you understand her. All you can be sure about is that this pig’s emotions are as real as yours and persist minute after minute—as yours do, too, with Kossakovsky’s camera silently following her around the deserted yard, and around and around.

learned from The New York Times Magazine that in the early 1990s, around the time that David Fincher directed Alien³, he suggested that his father, Jack, try writing a movie about Herman J. Mankiewicz and his work on Citizen Kane. The elder Fincher, a journalist and film buff, had retired and wanted to turn his hand to screenwriting. The younger Fincher encouraged him to reread Pauline Kael’s two-part essay “Raising Kane,” published in The New Yorker in 1971, which famously, or notoriously, sought to prove that Mankiewicz wrote virtually the whole of Citizen Kane and that Orson Welles had unjustly grabbed credit as co-author. According to Jonah Weiner in the Times Magazine, Fincher asked his father, “Is there a movie in Mankiewicz pulling this thing out of the ether and laying it out for this movie brat to make?”

Evidently there was a movie in it, because Fincher’s Mank is now in release. Why he didn’t go all the way and call it Mank! I don’t know, but I find the backstory curious. By 1992, the year of Alien³, Kael’s essay had been so thoroughly debunked that Jonathan Rosenbaum could devote an entire section of his editor’s notes in This Is Orson Welles to a summary of the evidence. By 1995, Welles’s most exhausting biographer, Simon Callow, had dutifully accepted in The Road to Xanadu the ample record of Welles’s writing on Citizen Kane. Yet in 2003, when Jack Fincher died, he was still plugging away at the one-author theory in Mank—then in its eighth draft, Weiner says—and it’s obvious that still more script writing has been done since, without David Fincher’s having backed away from the false premise.

None of this would matter, of course, except that a theme of political lies and mass media is at the heart of Mank. While the movie’s present-tense story takes place in 1940 in the high desert town of Victorville, Calif., where Mankiewicz is holed up writing the Kane screenplay, numerous scrambled flashbacks return the action to Los Angeles in the mid-1930s, and especially to the propaganda campaign that movie studio bosses and William Randolph Hearst mounted against Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial candidacy. It is a fact that MGM produced and distributed fake newsreels to undermine Sinclair. I don’t know that Mankiewicz, in his nonstop cynical flippancy, was the source of this idea, as Mank would have you believe, nor am I aware of his having been chastened by its success, saying to a colleague, as Fincher has it, that filmmakers “have a huge responsibility.” Very little in Mankiewicz’s biography paints him as the responsible type. But Fincher has already made one movie about the power of media to shape public life, The Social Network (2010), and I see no reason why he shouldn’t make another, especially after the ascendancy of Trump and his reign of “alternative facts.” I just don’t think Fincher should tackle this theme by propagating yet another lie.

Not that his image-making powers are so formidable this time. Although he gives Mank a handsome period look (more of that exquisite black-and-white cinematography) and adds a you-are-there thrill by occasionally superimposing typewriter characters over the picture, as if you were seeing a screenplay come to life, the most notable trait of the movie is its corniness. Witness the early scene where Mankiewicz and a gaggle of Paramount writers are summoned to a production conference and cover up for their lack of work by making up a story on the spot, relay style. It’s a gag that was old when the Bowery Boys used to pull it, winking at each other and the audience while the supposedly dumb stiffs (in this case, David Selznick and Jo Sternberg) helplessly fumfer. Or consider the moment when Mankiewicz’s German nurse, charged with keeping the hopeless drunk from dying of liver failure before he completes Kane, reveals that this supposedly heartless man has paid for an entire village to escape the Third Reich. Again, there’s a kernel of truth. Despite a spotty anti-Fascist record (nowhere near as solid as Welles’s, for what that’s worth), Mankiewicz did help to settle refugees—but did Fincher need to halt the movie and have somebody make a set speech about it, straight to the camera?

In the role of Mankiewicz, a great-bellied Gary Oldman rumbles and shambles to order, mouthing famous wisecracks and playing up the wounded-genius bathos, while Fincher cuts back and forth between time periods in increasingly short increments. The rhythm pushes an artificial urgency; the performance hits all the marks, without being called to deliver the depth and ingenuity with which Oldman can imbue even Gotham’s Commissioner Gordon. Granted, it all looks marvelous, and Amanda Seyfried is appropriately lovely, charming, and sad as Marion Davies. But questions remain: Why was this vaporous stuff pulled out of the ether in the first place, and which movie brat’s interests does it really serve?

shipboard romance between a distinguished American writer and her self-regard, Let Them All Talk stars Meryl Streep as a novelist sailing to England on the Queen Mary 2 to accept a rare and important literary award, accompanied only by a beloved nephew, two friends summoned after a lapse of many years, an agonizing work-in-progress, and a dark secret. Other flirtations are in progress as well: between the nephew (Lucas Hedges) and the writer’s agent, who is in a sense a stowaway; the openly inimical old friend (Candice Bergen) and any man on board who might have money; and Steven Soderbergh’s camera and the ship’s decor, which provides as lavish a playground as he’s had since the casinos of the Oceans movies. Add a screenplay by Deborah Eisenberg, herself a distinguished American writer, to structure the proceedings and give Streep’s character enough sensitivity to make your teeth ache, and you’ve almost got a movie.

I held on through thick but mostly thin for the fun of watching Streep and Hedges play busily off each other (like a tennis match between two many-armed Hindu gods) and for Dianne Wiest’s imperturbable performance as the surer, more simmering friend. And then, just in time, came the closing epiphanies, one after another. Were they a bit too short-storyish? Sure—but if, in retrospect, they didn’t requite the love of Streep’s character for herself, they let me yield her some love of my own.

Giving what has proved to be his posthumous performance, in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Chadwick Boseman looks shockingly thin and performs with electric vitality, bobbing, weaving, sometimes even pirouetting through the role of Levee, an ambitious, forward-looking cornet player raging to break loose from the country roots and “jug band” feeling of his job accompanying the queen of the blues. Boseman’s got the tragic lead and is running with it for all his magnificent skills are worth, though it’s Viola Davis who plays the formidable title role, decked out in a fatsuit while using enough of her own awe-inspiring gravity to bend the passing light of stars. The rest of the cast is equally excellent. I just wish George C. Wolfe had directed with a visual flair to match.

More satisfying than any of the above is Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, the autobiographical tale of a 1980s Korean family living in a trailer dropped into a field in Arkansas. Dad (Steven Yeun), despairing of wage labor in chicken hatcheries, has dragged everyone to this improbable spot because he’s determined to win independence as a farmer. Mom (Yeri Han) hates her newfound isolation and wants to return to California. Grandma (the raucously entertaining Yuh-jung Youn) comes to help and be helped but, lacking conventional grandmotherly skills, mostly contributes her saltiness. That leaves 7-year-old David (Alan S. Kim), the point-of-view character, and his sister (Noel Cho) to fling paper airplanes inscribed in crayon “Don’t Fight” at their parents, and hope for the best.

“The best” is not what they get. The outcome, after difficulties that are not wholly predictable, is simply a life with one another—grounded, caring, and also open to surprise. That’s how I’d describe Chung’s filmmaking as well. Out of an experience that’s as alien for his characters as it is for you, he quietly builds something that can serve as home.

When Sacha Baron Cohen sprang Borat on the American public in 2006, a midterm election year, I thought I was clever to observe that nimble, improvisational, disrespectful laughter had won a landslide victory over the deep emotions and classical filmmaking of Clint Eastwood’s World War II diptych, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. Like a blind seer, I had no idea how horribly right I was.

Since then, vast sectors of the audience have abandoned the movies—superhero sagas excepted—for the rapid, random snickers of meme swapping. Meanwhile, the kiss-my-ass attitude that I detected in the public’s embrace of Borat went on to transform the political landscape, though not as I’d hoped. It was Donald J. Trump, rather than any tribune of The Nation’s fed-up legions, who rose to bestride our narrow world like a Colossus of the Raised Middle Finger.

For these reasons, the release of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, 11 days before the 2020 elections, posed sharp questions. In a political landscape where the presidency had become a 24/7 Don Rickles set, was Cohen’s insult comedy a weapon against Trump’s or more of the same? And could any movie—even if perpetrated with jumpy rhythms and delivered digitally—compete in a new audiovisual environment made for 60-second attention spans?

To ask these questions is to fall, understandably, into the mountaineering fallacy: the notion that all works of art must rise to the challenge of their time. In defiance of this error, I will later recommend three fascinating pictures that could be made to speak to the present moment only if subjected to critical torture. For now, let me acknowledge that Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is focused so intently on the 2020 presidential election that its end credits include the admonition, in the title character’s phraseology, “Now Vote. Or you will be execute.” These are words to live by, always, but when read after November 3, they stamp a best-if-used-by date on a production that was conceived to mock Trump and his allies during the campaign and then marketed so that its culminating gotcha scene, a humiliation of Rudy Giuliani, was revealed as a teaser shortly before the final presidential debate. I imagine Borat Subsequent Moviefilm might retain some life in years to come. All the same, it’s a hybrid: part rollicking mockumentary and part get-out-the-base video, of a piece with Samuel L. Jackson’s “Vote, dammit, vote!” ad for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Cohen remains as savvy as ever about reaching audiences where they live, so it’s no surprise that discrete chunks of the movie can be plucked off like grapes from the stem. Within a day of the release, clips were already circulating on dozens of YouTube accounts and beyond, with leave from Amazon’s promotional department and to the benefit of the film’s electioneering. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm proved it could fit easily into today’s smartphone competition for eyeballs, but if this picture is to be judged by mountaineering standards, let’s note that it does not have the field to itself nor is it alone in trying to win hearts and minds through transgressive laughter. As Borat Subsequent Moviefilm acknowledges, in scenes about digital crap slinging and grassroots calls for violence—hey, can’t you take a joke?—Trumpworld has its own memes and sense of humor.

As a reality check, you might watch Daniel Lombroso’s documentary White Noise, produced by The Atlantic as a feature-length exposé of the alt-right and its normalization (kind of) through the rise of Trump. Released on multiple streaming platforms a couple of weeks before the elections, the film offers a prolonged, close-up look at three of the movement’s young social media adepts and self-promoters: white-power loudmouth Richard Spencer, conspiracy theory peddler Mike Cernovich, and anti-feminist, anti-immigrant YouTube poser Lauren Southern. I doubt you will think these specialists in short-form outrages are funny, but their followers do, finding mirth in the trio’s assaults on liberal propriety (or, as you and I might put it, human dignity). Unfortunately, I also doubt that you will learn much from White Noise, assuming you’re aware of basics such as the Unite the Right rally and Pizzagate, or that you are likely to fall in love with the film’s shambling narration and editing. The main achievement of White Noise is to engender a sense of dismay—as if you needed that.

Still, the film’s study of alt-right zanies has its uses. It can confirm for you, by means of comparison, that Cohen’s insult comedy is not just more of the same.

irected valorously by first-time-filmmaker Jason Woliner after a long career in television and scripted more tightly than the original Borat despite having been written by Cohen with eight others, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is at heart a tender story of father-daughter love. Never mind that the semi-feral Tutar (Maria Bakalova) is discovered under a layer of straw, rags, and facial grime in the corner of a barn, where Borat is astonished to learn she’s part of his, as he puts it, livestock. When he undertakes his ensuing knockabout journey through America, unwillingly accompanied by the adolescent Tutar, the incidents may be designed, one by one, to deride Trump’s supporters, but the plot is machined to forge emotional ties between father and daughter, until the two transform Kazakhstan into “a feminist nation, like US of A and Saudi Arabia.”

What unites the loose string of sketch-comedy episodes with the steady emotional arc? Satiric rage against the belittlement of women, which Cohen identifies as central to Trump’s strongman cult. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm scatters its assaults against other targets, too—assault rifle enthusiasts, casual racists, Jew haters, Roma haters, and coronavirus deniers all get their lumps—but the main enemy throughout is male supremacy, whether in the imaginary Kazakhstan or the America whose attitudes Cohen prankishly exposes.

Among the actually existing people who are played for suckers this time by a disguised Cohen and Bakalova: a coach for young women who want to sell themselves to sugar daddies, the operator of one of those “crisis pregnancy centers” that intercept women seeking abortions, a plastic surgeon who proposes making Tutar’s “titties” monumental, the guests of a debutante ball in Georgia (whose gentility in declaring young women marriageable is mugged by a traditional Kazakh fertility dance), and for the finale, old lech Rudy. The orange Sun King who reigns over this realm of pussy grabbing remains unseen, except for a Kazakh animated movie in Disney style and a full-body disguise worn by Cohen. Trump’s influence, nevertheless, is omnipresent.

Which brings me to a contradiction. The trick of the first Borat was to concoct an impossibly crude, depraved Kazakhstan and then, through the title character’s adventures, show America as its mirror image. The new Borat takes the same approach, but past a certain point the pattern breaks down. Even the QAnon adherents who shelter Borat in one sequence insist that women in America have the same rights as men and can’t simply be sold or gifted. Even the members of a Southern Republican women’s club, whose evening meeting is interrupted by a wandering Tutar, welcome this strange, uncouth figure with gentleness and respect, until she drives them to wonder if they shouldn’t call her an Uber. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm lays bare an American culture of misogyny, except when it doesn’t.

And then there are Jeanise Jones and Judith Dim Evans.

The first, who works as a babysitter, is hired by Borat to kennel Tutar for a day but instead decides to educate the young woman, convincing her with infinite patience that she is an independent human being with a mind of her own. The second, encountered in a synagogue, is a Holocaust survivor who offers Borat food and a kiss, while gently informing him that his Jew disguise is a little off. (The talons, for example—too much.) Watching these scenes, which provide contrasting images of a decent America, you might feel that middle-aged Black women and elderly Jews have problems of their own and should not bear the burden, as they do so often, of being deployed as exemplars of charity and understanding. Yet these are the real Jones and Evans (to whom the film is dedicated), responding as themselves to ridiculous, constructed circumstances, and though they are far more developed in their fellow feeling than most butts of Cohen’s impostures, they don’t stand alone in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

This is where Cohen’s insult comedy departs from Trump’s and the alt-right’s. (I should add Bakalova’s comedy as well. Though seemingly runtish next to the elongated Cohen, she thwacks herself off him and everybody else in sight with a headlong mummer’s energy that knows no embarrassment, only joy.) One side thinks it funny to demean and dehumanize. The other gives people latitude to shame themselves but also allows glimpses of the better angels of our nature.

I’m not going to kid myself that audiences are watching Borat Subsequent Moviefilm for the sake of its passing visions of kindness. People want to laugh their asses off at the dumb, the rude, and the grotesque, and they’re getting their money’s worth. What will be left of the movie, though, now that its electoral purpose is obsolete and even the most prominent of its political targets, such as Mike Pence and Giuliani, begin their inevitable fade-out from popular memory? After rising to the challenge of its moment, must this film fall off the peak and be forever buried in snow?

I think something does remain alive after November 3: hope in the power of decency, hope in women, and pride in constructing a fully thought-out 97-minute film, even if a lot of people no longer want anything but clickbait. That’s hardly enough of a foundation on which to rebuild America, but it’s more than we were owed by a British comedian and a young actress from Bulgaria, home of the world-famous Museum House of Humor and Satire.

f you cannot remember the last time a film deeply excited you, please do yourself a favor and watch Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, now available through various virtual cinemas, including Film at Lincoln Center’s. Marcello and his co-screenwriter, Maurizio Braucci, claim to have based their film freely on Jack London’s semiautobiographical novel, but except for relocating the action from Oakland, Calif., at the turn of the 20th century to Naples, Italy, in the 1970s (more or less), they’ve been stunningly faithful to London’s story of the intellectual and emotional awakening of a young proletarian writer and the personal and artistic catastrophe of his failure to awaken politically as well. By cleverly mixing tinted archival footage from London’s time into the re-creation of 20th century Italy, Marcello implicitly expands the title character from an individual case to a recurring type: the working man of exceptional talent and energy who struggles against all odds to educate himself and win a daughter of the bourgeoisie, only to discover in the end that “the world is stronger than me.” Marcello deserves credit for the bold conceptual move, but the true author of the movie might be Luca Marinelli, who plays Martin. With shoulders broad enough to bear the yoke of a two-ox team and a loose, slant-lipped smile that invites and offers confidences, Marinelli charges not only the character but the entire film with power, intelligence, and an allure that ultimately turns tragic.

Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come, available at virtual cinemas such as the Metrograph in New York and the Acropolis in Los Angeles, is a film of changing seasons and impressive yet fragile landscapes—including the facial topographies of the nonprofessional performers Amador Arias and Benedicta Sánchez, who play the main characters. Amador, in the story, is a taciturn, middle-aged man with sorrowful features that could have been carved with a pocketknife. Released from prison after serving a sentence for arson, he returns to his 83-year-old mother and her three-cow farm in the mountains of Galicia in Spain and settles into the annual round, meanwhile suffering abuse from townspeople who regard him as both an idiot and a threat. In the first half of the film, the neighbors get ready to accuse him of starting the next of the devastating fires that rage each summer through the woods. In the second half, as the screen explodes in flame, you hold your breath shot by shot to see Laxe and his crew daring to capture this inferno—while you wonder how any one man could be blamed for something so overwhelming.

Finally, moving on from the transhistorical drama of Martin Eden and the ecological cycle of Fire Will Come, you can go all the way to Neverland, otherwise known as the Three Treasures Temple, thanks to the new restoration of King Hu’s 1979 Raining in the Mountain. One of only two films that the master of martial arts sagas made in South Korea, Raining in the Mountain places Hsu Feng, as a thieving adventuress, amid towering vistas, labyrinthine architecture, balletic chase sequences and fights, and massed ensembles in color-coded costumes, all assembled for the sake of a folkloric fable and synchronized to a bang-up musical score by Ng Tai Gong. The experience is no more substantial than our transient world (to adopt the viewpoint of the story’s Buddhist monks), so why not escape to it? Raining in the Mountain is streaming exclusively at the virtual cinema of New York’s Film Forum.

The halal cart operator at 65th Street and Broadway used to get a lot of business from me in late September and early October, even though his fare, to be candid, was less than superb. (“How is that even possible?” passersby have heard me ask. “You ran out of falafel?”) But this year, with the New York Film Festival being presented online and at drive-in screenings, I had no need to sit on the steps of Alice Tully Hall gulping cheap meals between shows, and I missed my guy (may he survive these hard times). I missed even the heartburn and the crush in the lobby, the chairs that jiggle when someone shifts weight five seats down, and the smartphones that are never turned off. I missed old faces, conversations on the fly, and the hope, when the hall goes dark, that the next thing to spring into view will be a revelation. I missed feeding myself on films.

Displacement and loss were built into NYFF this year; and so it seems fitting that the selection that moved me the most, out of those I had time to stream at home, was Chloé Zhao’s quasi-fictional, quasi-documentary road trip to nowhere, Nomadland.

Zhao found her subject in Jessica Bruder’s book of the same title, which reports on older Americans who cannot subsist on their Social Security benefits and have lost their fixed abodes and so choose to travel the Great Plains and West in vans and campers, resting in RV grounds and the more congenial parking lots and picking up seasonal work along the way. In the movie version, Frances McDormand does not star as one of these people. Zhao has no desire to make her, or anyone, shine brighter than the shifting community of nomads or stand out from the texture of the landscape—shown in twilight and mist much of the time, but always changing and always enthralling. Nor does McDormand betray a shred of the self-regard that usually goes with a lead performance. Hair cropped short and plastered flat to her head, the lines around her eyes and mouth exposed to the light without embarrassment, McDormand listens as much as she talks, watches as much as she takes action, in the role of Fern, a widow whose town of Empire, Nev., became an empty shell after its sole employer, US Gypsum, pulled out. Zhao prefers to observe such abandonment rather than comment on it—except late in the film, when she articulates Bruder’s sociological themes with maybe a little too much punch.

She’s also inclined to let viewers decide for themselves that they care about the characters, rather than prod their sympathy with a plot. An understated drama do es gradually emerge, about a tentative attraction between Fern and another wanderer (the ever-reliable David Strathairn). For the most part, though, Nomadland captures you in the simplest and most difficult way possible: by catching you up in the rhythms of its people’s lives, the fullness of their existence (focused at one moment on plastic buckets of excrement, at the next on the night sky), and above all the interactions between McDormand and a cast of real nomads, bearing the indelible faces and voices they took years to earn. These people have no place to call their own, and yet they made Nomadland the most inhabited film in the festival.

he NYFF slate has a history of making room for fiction films that incorporate the real, and documentaries that play out with the fluidity of fiction. (Think of the work of Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami or the Hoop Dreams team. Think of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Agnès Varda.) Such hybridity was especially prominent this year—for example in I Carry You With Me, Heidi Ewing’s first narrative feature, made without her documentary codirector, Rachel Grady. It’s the story of life partners Iván and Gerardo, undocumented immigrants from Mexico who today, in middle age, run a successful restaurant in New York City and are longtime friends of Ewing. You see them as they are now, in unscripted moments at work and at home; and in extended sequences shot in Mexico, intercut with the present-day scenes like long, contrasting flashbacks, you see the actors Armando Espitia and Christian Vásquez re-create the lives of Iván and Gerardo as young men, clandestinely falling in love, deciding to take their chances in the US (first one, then the other), and struggling once they’re in New York to rise out of abject poverty. More than once during their hardest years, Iván and Gerardo say to each other, “They hate us here,” a galling judgment that continues to linger in the present day, with its punitive immigration policies. But hope, not despair, turns out to be Ewing’s theme. For all the sadness at the heart of the story she’s composed, love conquers all—and the young Iván turns out to be justified when he tells Gerardo that America makes room for talent.

Hope and love surviving against all odds is also the theme of the festival’s outstanding not-quite-documentary feature by Garrett Bradley, Time. A title that’s cunning in its brevity: she means “time to be served,” as in the 60 years without parole in Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary to which Robert Richardson was sentenced in 1999 for a desperate, botched armed robbery, but also “time passing,” as in the years of family life without husband and father that Rob’s devoted wife, Fox Rich, painstakingly recorded on videocassettes so he might see his children grow up. The videos also condense a kind of growing up for Fox over some 20 years, as she matures from an ebullient and love-struck young woman into the triple identity of a tough, poised entrepreneur with a used-car business, a motivational speaker advocating for criminal justice reform, and a tireless fighter for Rob’s release from prison.

Fox has a personality big enough to burst most documentaries, so Bradley wisely does not try to contain her. She combines material from Fox’s videos, to which she was granted access, with exquisite present-day black-and-white footage and a soundtrack of remarkable vintage piano music by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, creating a free-flowing montage that moves in response to emotion rather than the calendar. Grasping for comparisons, I might liken Time to RaMell Ross’s already-classic Hale County This Morning, This Evening as an impressionistic immersion into Black life in the South, or to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood as a daring humanistic experiment in making duration a subject in itself. But Bradley is her own artist. The big finale she’s devised for Time—cathartic, imaginative, almost shockingly intimate—makes something ecstatic out of the social justice documentary, while establishing her as one of the festival’s new standard-bearers.

One of the world’s already recognized standard-bearers, Gianfranco Rosi (Sacro GRA, Fire at Sea), returned to the festival this year with his astonishing Notturno, an almost handmade film for which he recorded the images and sound himself, traveling for three years among Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, and Yazidis on the war-ravaged borders of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Kurdistan. It’s a film of aftermaths. You witness only what remains from battle: black-draped women mourning in a now-empty citadel where their sons died, children making drawings for a teacher-therapist about the terrors of the Islamic State, patients in a psychiatric hospital rehearsing a play about war, a unit of Peshmerga women scanning the horizon, jump-suited former ISIS fighters crammed into a cell, a boy going out to the roadside each dawn to be hired as a day laborer for hunters (or poachers) so he can bring home a few coins for his mother and sisters. In the film’s no-time, these scenes, many of them recurring, don’t unfold so much as take place, filtering into Rosi’s disconcertingly elegiac landscapes of low horizon lines and muted light. He makes Notturno almost too pretty—but since he lacks the confidence in human resilience that infuses the work of some other NYFF directors, pretty is as much solace as he can give.

s for Steve McQueen: this year’s festival was all in for him, selecting three of the films in his made-for-BBC Small Axe series about London’s West Indian community from the 1960s to the 1980s. I caught two: the festival’s opening-night feature, Lovers Rock, about blossoming romance at a house party on Ladbroke Road, and Mangrove, based on the true story of a restaurant in Notting Hill that became a rallying place for its neighborhood and a target of relentless police violence. Neither of these films is a disaster, like McQueen’s earlier festival selection Shame or his barely competent gangster picture Widows. Neither rises above pretty good.

As the less ambitious of the two, coming in at just over an hour’s running time, Lovers Rock is also the better. Following Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) to the house party she crashes, where she catches the attention of smooth-talking Franklyn (Micheal Ward), McQueen is content to spend much of his time roaming through people packed into close quarters (with no space to back up, the camera can show little more than body parts) as they dance to the DJ’s anthology of early ’80s soul hits. The effect, though attenuated and far from novel, is steadily engaging. It’s also preferable to the moments of drama that McQueen has felt obligated to sprinkle throughout, each laboriously foreshadowed and then thuddingly achieved.

Mangrove is the greater disappointment, as the full-length picture addressing a more urgent subject. To be clear, there are many good reasons to revisit an episode of Black resistance to police repression in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But there are also many approaches to making historical films. In Polonius mode, I could list the sub-genres as spectacular, romantic, melodramatic, satirical, fantastical, counterfactual, crypto-contemporary, or (in combination) The Scarlet Empress. McQueen, unfortunately, pursues none of these, defaulting to the didactic. Why he thinks somebody elected him to be teacher I can’t say, but he has treated the exchanges of dialogue in Mangrove, and even the physiognomies of his chosen cast, as so many blackboards on which to print his lessons. In case you miss a block-lettered point, he pushes the actors to convert it into telegraphy. (In the role of a Black Panther leader, the usually electric Letitia Wright is forced to signal a moment of despair by wrinkling her chin up and down for half the scene, as if she were a 5-year-old trying not to bawl.) To compensate for this pedestrianism, or perhaps assert his claim to being a galleries-and-museums artist, McQueen then diverts your attention with showy but arbitrary shots: an overturned restaurant colander rolling endlessly on the floor, cigarette smoke pouring and pouring out of a man’s nostrils, the out-of-focus belly of a prisoner bumping back and forth against the lens. Considering that McQueen concludes this mishmash with a 40-minute trial sequence complete with heroic speeches, it’s clear that he hopes to be rousing—and I’m sure plenty of people will go along with being roused. When audiences want to stand up and cheer, almost nothing will stop them. Permit me to keep my seat.

And permit me to mention, in passing, two relevant but contrasting festival selections: Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance and David Dufresne’s The Monopoly of Violence. The first, another hybrid of fiction and documentary, follows the exhilarating and frustrating course of young Julian (Eric Lockley), who has received the bequest of his grandmother’s house cum Black liberationist bookstore in Philadelphia and is converting it, perhaps a bit ingenuously, into a radical collective, encouraged by his maybe girlfriend, Gwen (Nozipho Mclean). Made under the influence of Godard’s La Chinoise, a poster for which hangs on the kitchen wall, The Inheritance features lectures and testimonies from Black revolutionaries of the recent past (including veterans of MOVE), which Asili collages into the often amusing flailings of his fictitious collective.

Offering a perspective on an uprising outside the US—the yellow vest movement in France—The Monopoly of Violence confronts selected protesters, social scientists, and historians with large-scale video images of clashes with the police, eliciting the viewers’ readings of exactly what happened and how the dynamic of legitimate versus illegitimate violence has played out between the state and the public. Because it’s French, The Monopoly of Violence is roughly twice as theoretical as any English-language documentary would be, and twice as eloquent. It demotes McQueen’s lessons to kindergarten level.

ince I don’t want to make it seem as if this year’s festival had no regard for pure fiction, let me give thanks for Isabella, which as Matías Piñeiro’s latest foray into Shakespearean themes and the truth of playacting is as pure as it gets. This time, Piñeiro imagines that a self-serious Buenos Aires troupe is preparing to produce Measure for Measure. Mariel (María Villar), pregnant, broke, and perpetually blocked in her career, may or may not want to play the lead, may or may not trust the brother who is embedded in the troupe, and may or may not feel rivaled by her friend Luciana (Agustina Muñoz), who already seems to have landed the role. It’s all very labile and multilayered, and despite that is as fresh as the breeze.

Congratulations as well to Chaitanya Tamhane (Court) for his second feature, The Disciple, a subtly mordant tale about willing subjugation, generation after generation, in the world of Indian classical music. Making his film debut, the open-faced, watchful Aditya Modak plays 20-ish Sharad, twice oppressed as the son of an obsessively failed musician and the apprentice of a master singer who supposedly is too ascetic to accept worldly success. Making Sharad’s situation all the worse, he’s living in contemporary Mumbai. As a decade and more grinds on, Sharad’s persistence looks less and less admirable and more and more like holy foolishness, until at last he comes to a stop before modernity itself: the image of a blond model, her lips parted, who beckons to him in slow motion from a row of video billboards.

Two cheers for the flesh and one more for commercialism! The New York Film Festival serves neither of those masters, of course; but despite its high-mindedness, it has once again paid them their due, mixing pleasure with social conscience in its selections, and just a tad of low fun with intellection. I’m as satisfied as I can be, for now—but next year at the halal cart.

Haunted mansions are seldom built with the ghosts pre-furnished; yet there they were, the specters of Jim Crow America, already in residence when a spanking new spook house titled Lovecraft Country recently rose on a tract of HBO.

In keeping with a style of production that has flourished in the streaming era, with its high-end dramatic series and multi-episode movies, Lovecraft Country is designed and shot to make an earlier period look dewy-fresh. Not contemporary, mind you. You don’t see the 1950s of Lovecraft Country as you would if you were living in them, with the accretions of age built up to different thicknesses in objects wherever you turn. Here, anything vintage seems to have been manufactured to appear old from the start, for installation side by side with the up-to-date. It’s the same sort of not-past you see in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, where the re-creation of Manhattan in the early ’60s shimmers everywhere with a lighting and palette reminiscent of Hollywood comedies of the era. To call the purpose nostalgic would be a mistake. The effect, rather, is to de-authenticate even scenes shot on location, in a tacit revelation of the truth of creating movies and high-end series. Everything is assembled at once, into a present made to be seen by the camera.

Just so, the intense hues painted onto 1950s America in Lovecraft Country seem scarcely to have had time to dry, no matter whether you’re in an El-rattled apartment on Chicago’s South Side or at a diner on the main street of Klansville, Ind. The extraordinary Jonathan Majors (a lead actor who is himself still fresh to market) has dressed for this adventure in a T-shirt so white that it gleams, just like the moisture glistening in each of the thousand eyes embedded in a blob that at one point pursues Majors with malign intent. You’re familiar, of course, with sickeningly deformed nocturnal monsters—the characters in Lovecraft Country are familiar with them as well, from reading pulp fiction and watching horror movies—just as you and the characters are both long acquainted with other tropes in this extended film: an enigmatic letter, an ominous map, a journey into territory that proves to be unknowable. But just as the crew keeps the production looking uniformly, artificially present-tense, no matter at which date the action plays out, so too do the writers, producers, and directors succeed in making something novel out of a mishmash of scary thoughts from any number of eras. If the protagonists of Lovecraft Country can be described as Black people who have taken up residence in a just-completed, many-roomed haunted house, then the Jim Crow ghosts who came with the place still trail little white tags, which can be removed only under penalty of law (or worse).

ased on a novel in interlocking episodes by Matt Ruff, created by showrunner Misha Green, and executive produced by Green and others including Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams, Lovecraft Country has the expansive storytelling, varied settings, and showy camerawork that people commonly call cinematic. Rigorously restrained filmmaking can be cinematic too, of course, as fans of Straub-Huillet recognize, but that’s a conversation for another time. The point is, Lovecraft Country begins in a dream that’s half Paths of Glory and half War of the Worlds and is wonderfully faithful to both, then takes Atticus Freeman (Majors) by bus across M. Night Shyamalan territory (a sunlit yet chilling Corn Belt) to Freeman’s native South Side, conceived here as a nonstop festival of Black vitality. A rollicking block party is in progress; kids dance in the spray of fire hydrants. But disquiet lurks beneath the revelry. Atticus’s father has disappeared in strange circumstances. A disturbing letter suggests he might have gone to an obscure Massachusetts town with a name that recalls the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. (Atticus has always lapped up Lovecraft’s tales, accepting the author’s bigotry as the price of the thrills.) Resolving to find his father, Atticus takes to the road in a wood-paneled station wagon with his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), an author of guidebooks for the “Negro traveler,” and a lively but down-on-her-luck young woman called Leti (Jurnee Smollett), who seems to harbor secret troubles of her own. Then comes Klansville. Then comes the slug with the thousand eyes.

I am giving away very little of the plot when I tell you the slug and other terrifying things come almost as a relief. They break into the picture just when the trio has fallen into the hands of racist backwoods white cops. The nightmare creatures provide the opportunity for a hairbreadth escape; but, in another sense, they also provide reassurance. George and Leti, no less than Atticus, are deeply versed in the “weird tales” branch of popular culture. When a cop shows signs of metamorphosis after receiving a creature’s bite, George knows to tell the man’s uncomprehending partner, with authority and low-voiced self-control, “You… you… you need to shoot him.” And why can George hold it together so well? I suppose it’s not just because he knows his vampire lore. In the worldview of Lovecraft Country, Black Americans are accustomed to coping with a freakish, horrifying reality every day. Shrieking, bloodthirsty monsters pouring out of the Massachusetts night? Yeah, that too.

ith that in mind, I momentarily interrupt these thoughts about Lovecraft Country to reintroduce another movie about Black people taking the uncanny in stride: Attack the Block, the first feature of writer-director Joe Cornish.

This rousing blend of sci-fi and social critique has somehow managed to stay in the margin of consciousness of hardy moviegoers, despite a commercially disastrous release nine years ago. Not that Attack the Block cursed everyone associated with it. John Boyega, all of 19 when he played the male lead, went on to become a hero in the Star Wars movies, and Jodie Whittaker, the female lead, has since made history as the first woman into whom the Doctor has regenerated on Doctor Who. On that basis alone, Attack the Block is a monument of fantasy cinema. That said, a cumulative worldwide box office gross of $6.2 million, earned against an estimated production budget of $13 million, has left the film in a neglect from which it ought to be rescued, especially in a moment that has given us Lovecraft Country.

Set in a public housing project in South London, with the action happening amid the bonfires, mischief, and fireworks of Guy Fawkes Night, Attack the Block starts from the sort of one-line premise beloved of movie producers and the writers who pitch them. What if fearsome extraterrestrial invaders did not land in the boondocks—their usual point of entry for our planet—but instead came down on city streets roamed by low-income, mostly Black teenagers? It would be bad news for the aliens—as you see when Moses (Boyega), the alpha among a crew of five muggers, encounters the first of the aliens and promptly beats it to death. So far, so sharp and funny. I would not be fond of Attack the Block, though, if it didn’t advance far beyond the jokey limits of this story conference concept. Instead of insulting and dismissing an entire scuffling inner-city class, as it might have done, the movie gradually forges an alliance between these individuated kids and Sam (Whittaker), the young white project resident they’d robbed. More than that: The movie brings the aptly named Moses to an acceptance of his responsibilities that is heroic, in the most invigoratingly cartoonish way.

Directed with a pleasingly large repertoire of crane flights, on-the-run tracking shots, and shock cuts, designed and photographed so you see the age of things in their surfaces, and acted with a consistent drollery that extends to the aliens themselves (whose apelike locomotion was created by the celebrated creature-feature choreographer Terry Notary), Attack the Block makes the most of its budget (which at $13 million was actually on the modest side) while creating a near-exemplary study in pace, humor, and spurts of gore. But the most important distinction of this frolic is thematic. “They’re fucking monsters, aren’t they?” a white neighbor asks Sam, speaking about the young men who had mugged her, and by extension every other Black kid on the block. Without hesitation, Sam agrees. (As do the police—always there to hassle Black teenagers, but never around when you need help with a marauding alien.) After passing judgment, Sam spends the rest of the movie facing real monsters, meanwhile discovering the courage, strength, and loyalty of Moses.

This is the level on which Attack the Block itself might be attacked. You could argue that its presumed viewers are white, like Sam—because surely Moses and his friends don’t need 88 minutes of fantasy derring-do to learn they’re human. Then again, Black people know the burdens, external and internal, of living with the white world’s image of them, and so I’ve found that some Black viewers enjoy the vindication of Attack the Block. As James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you.” It is no frivolous satisfaction to feel a portion of that destructive belief lifted away, as one symbolic white person, at least, comes to say something different.

As for Lovecraft Country, its Black characters know damned well who the monsters are. They also know that your evaluation of America—whether you see it as a shining city on a hill or a vast, threatening terrain that might have been populated by H.P. Lovecraft—“depends on what your sense of reality is.” (So says an actor in an anachronistic voiceover, imitating Baldwin in his fabled Cambridge Union debate against William F. Buckley Jr.) Maybe that’s the justification for the production’s look of an eternal present. Lovecraft Country does not pretend to give you anything beyond a highly malleable “sense of reality”—one in which Black people contend against the products of diseased imaginations that have also pictured them as uncanny and nonhuman. The worst of it is, Atticus grew up loving those exciting, racist-born tales.

In Attack the Block, an unpretentious, brusquely made film full of humor, Moses breaks the constraints of what white people think of him. (The clinching moment, in the final shot: John Boyega smiles for the first time.) In the far more ambitious and elaborately wrought Lovecraft Country, Atticus Freeman has (in a certain way) accepted the invitation to live in a white man’s nightmare—and very few chuckles are to be had.

ichael Almereyda has given only one of his films the title Experimenter—his 2015 not-quite-biopic about the social psychologist Stanley Milgram—but the name fits them all, along with the writer-director himself. He has made, among much else, a study of early ’90s sexual mores shot with a toy camera, a languorous yet screwball vampire picture, a Manhattan business-world Hamlet (with Ethan Hawke in the lead and Bill Murray as Polonius), and a deeply felt and beautifully acted adaptation of Marjorie Prime, a melancholic sci-fi play by Jordan Harrison. Laurence Sterne famously wrote that if his reader were able to guess what was to come on the next page of Tristram Shandy, “I would tear it out of my book.” I sometimes wonder if Almereyda would burn the rushes of his next scene if he guessed what they’d show.

Restlessly inventive and willing to give almost anything a shot, Almereyda now turns his attention to yet another experimenter in Tesla, which resembles a fictionalized biography of the great inventor as a hippogriff looks like your housecat. Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), a daughter of one of Nikola Tesla’s investors, J.P. Morgan, narrates Tesla’s story while scrolling on a laptop computer. (She died in 1952.) Occasionally, she stops the film to admit that an incident didn’t happen as just enacted—for example, Tesla and Thomas Edison never quarreled over money while poking each other with soft-serve ice cream cones—and then calls for a do-over. Anne recalls having flirted with the awkward and withdrawn Tesla while roller-skating with him in a marbled foyer to a tune provided by a violinist who was also on skates, but I can find no more evidence for this episode than for the ice cream.

Ethan Hawke plays Tesla with a slight accent (a sibilant “s,” a lightly trilled “r”) and a soup-strainer mustache, his hair parted in the middle and perpetual worry furrowing his brow. Sometimes Almereyda poses him in front of projections of key sites in Tesla’s career (the high plains of Colorado, Niagara Falls), and sometimes he puts him inside roughly carpentered replicas of the inventor’s experimental stations. In this succession of odd circumstances, Hawke gives an inward-looking performance that emphasizes the alliance in Tesla of spiritual delicacy with globe-spanning ambition—an uneasy combination, which led to what might be called, at a minimum, eccentricity and isolation. Whether an element of Almereyda’s self-portraiture enters into this characterization is open to speculation. Tesla is based on Almereyda’s earliest screenplay, completed in 1982. Perhaps the author feels that, in some ways, he’s grown into it. I’m certain he’s had time to ponder the question Anne Morgan poses about Tesla: whether idealism can ever work hand-in-hand with capitalism.

Tesla is now available for streaming on the wireless services made possible by Nikola Tesla’s experiments. Viewers who want to see more of Almereyda’s work may visit the virtual cinema of Museum of the Moving Image, which is presenting a small survey through September 20.

Yes, people, I know. The concept of universal human rights is a time-bound, culture-bound idol, hammered out by the European bourgeoisie in a forge of hypocrisy. I will not bend the knee. But as a student of Marx, I also know that nothing useful ever comes into our world unless somebody invents it. Each day, in a purely secular spirit, I remember to thank the European bourgeoisie and Eleanor Roosevelt for having developed the idea behind the idol: the proposition that there ought to be enforceable limits to authority’s sway over every person, no matter where.

The annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival exists to enlighten and enrage audiences about one or two dozen current violations of those limits and to encourage hope by showing instances of resistance. The abuses fall into broad categories: injustices to women, the LGBTQ community, migrants, indigenous people, journalists, environmentalists, and (of special urgency this year, as ever) Black lives. The medium for exposing and countering the abuses, though, is particularistic to a fault. A camera records nothing but contingent details of the here and now—and so, unavoidably, the festival inverts the logic of its theme. “Human rights” posits an omnipresent, equally shared status whose dignity extends downward to the individual. The selections in the festival present granular cases, from which you’re expected to extrapolate upward to a generalized outrage.

In this sense, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival tests the limits of both authority and documentary filmmaking. Of these tests, only the first are explicit. Subject matter reigns supreme—and given its force, a viewer who instead chooses to foreground style may justifiably be considered a fool. For this reason, the organizers of this year’s festival did well to make Erika Cohn’s Belly of the Beast the opening night feature, because of what it reports about the widespread, programmatic sterilization of Black and brown women in California’s prison system. I, on the other hand, would arguably be wrong were I to mention the kitschy functionalism of Cohn’s filmmaking. Enough to say that she tells the story, and it’s an important one.

But then, if you don’t want to think about the nature and limits of documentary, what’s the point of organizing a film festival rather than, say, a festival of newspaper clippings? At its best, the Human Rights Watch event offers pictures that shake up your ideas about how right and wrong play out both in the world and on the screen.

Forced into the digital realm by the pandemic but still allied with Film at Lincoln Center and the IFC Center, the festival’s New York edition ran this year from June 11 through June 20. (Earlier screenings of the 2020 slate were held in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Toronto.) Here are notes on a few outstanding selections from the 11 features, which generally remain accessible on streaming platforms.

own a Dark Stairwell, directed by Ursula Liang, spoke to the festival’s moment as no other film could, with its account of the aftermath of the fatal police shooting in 2014 of Akai Gurley, an unarmed 28-year-old Black man, in the Brooklyn public housing building where he lived. The film even provided as happy an ending as such a story can have: The officer who shot Gurley became the first New York City cop in more than a decade to be convicted of a police killing. Although the indictment and verdict were shockingly exceptional, no one should deny the importance to Gurley’s community of merely hearing the word “guilty.” In a devastating coda to the film, recorded at a gathering on the second anniversary of Gurley’s death, Liang shows how various people shared in the mourning by coming forward, in heartbreaking succession, to testify about the police killings of their friends and family members.

As many other good documentarians have, Liang stuck with her story for years, gaining the trust and cooperation of her subjects. Where she truly distinguished herself, though, was in breaking from the heroes-and-villains framework that is standard in Marvel Universe movies and human rights documentaries. Gurley’s mother, valiant activist aunt, domestic partner, daughter, and neighbors, as well as the friend who loved him so much that he broke down weeping on the street—they’re all present in the film. But so, too, are the people who called for the case against the cop to be dropped, insisting (in the words of their placards) that this was a matter of “One tragedy, two victims.” The parallel protesters—they were careful not to turn into counterdemonstrators—were Chinese Americans, who asked why the only New York City police officer being called to account for the deaths of Black citizens happened to be a rookie, working an overtime shift, named Peter Liang.

I don’t assume it was a foregone conclusion that Ursula Liang (no relation) would also be able to win the confidence of these Chinese American protesters. In the event, though, she got access to not one but two groups: middle-aged leaders of established Chinatown institutions and a separate set of young leftists who joined in the demonstrations by African Americans. Amid the clashing banners and slogans, it was possible to agree that African Americans and Chinese Americans have both suffered from white supremacy and shouldn’t behave as enemies—but that was easier said than done. In the crowd scenes around police headquarters in Manhattan and at Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza, you see the curbside assertion that Peter Liang was a scapegoat and the rebuttal that scapegoats don’t fire guns; the earnest plea that Chinese Americans have suffered, too, and understand the grievances of Black people, and the rejoinder that mainstream Chinatown had never stepped up to show it. (But then, say some of the witnesses in the film, until around this time the Chinese American community had seldom shown up on the street even for itself.) To the degree that Down a Dark Stairwell offers heroes, you might find them among the people who resist simplification—the Black activist who refuses to chant a slogan against “model minorities,” the Chinese American organizer who forcefully reminds his peers after Peter Liang receives a light sentence that a man is dead and “We’re not celebrating anything.”

And villains? The description hardly fits Peter Liang, with his deficit of swagger and his shock at having killed. And though there was wrongdoing in the circumstances that made the killing possible—the fact that Gurley was taking the stairs because the elevator never worked, the fact that Peter Liang couldn’t see in the stairwell because nobody changed the light bulbs—you’d have to impute these faults to indifference and incompetence, not malice. Ursula Liang finds no villains in this story, only people who are vilified, like the Chinese American leftists who were slammed by their own community.

Unfortunately, the American landscape is thickly dotted with genuine villains, too many of whom are in uniform. We sorely need exposés of their crimes, and we’ve been getting them from smartphones and dashboard cameras. But I think we can also use a documentary as unusually clear-sighted as Down a Dark Stairwell—one that reminds us, in the words of a young Black man shown toward the end, that the powerful want us at war with one another.

oral and physical courage, endurance, intelligence, a capacity for self-sacrifice, and good judgment about when to deploy them—if these are the attributes of heroism, then David France’s Welcome to Chechnya is a documentary packed with heroes. You see them much of the time in sequences that were shot and edited like episodes of an action thriller, not for the sake of formal extravagance but because the characters were engaged in undercover operations with people’s lives at stake. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie as exciting and suspenseful, though as an honest work of documentary, it’s also humbling and dauntingly unresolved. Its heroes fall prey to exhaustion and sometimes abandon the field. The cause, at the end, has been advanced but perhaps won’t be won.

The theme of Welcome to Chechnya—LGBTQ activism in the face of mortal peril—is not new to David France, but the threat this film addresses demanded that he work in an entirely new way. In How to Survive a Plague (2012) and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), France chronicled chapters of queer history in the United States, relying to a large extent on astonishing montages of archival material. This time he had to create the archive himself, at personal risk, as he pursued a story he learned from a 2017 New Yorker article by Masha Gessen: the campaign by the Chechen government, with Moscow’s compliance, to purge queer people from this corner of Russia by means of round-ups, torture, and murder. It’s no use appealing to the authorities for protection and justice; the authorities are the killers. The only way to save lives is to spirit people out of the country, using the support of an international network of LGBTQ organizations and skills that the local activists had to develop from scratch: operating safe houses, conducting covert transport missions, negotiating behind the scenes for visas and asylum.

Studio-shot interviews with two of the principal rescuers—David Isteev of the Russian LGBT Network and Olga Baranova of the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives—alternate with direct-cinema scenes in the safe houses, where life can sometimes be mundane and at other times touching or harrowing. And then there are the clandestine images of transports in progress, shot on the fly by Askold Kurov with a tourist-grade video camera (battered to make it look harmlessly authentic) and a cellphone. Two of these operations frame the narrative of Welcome to Chechnya: the exfiltration of a 21-year-old woman with the pseudonym Anya, whose uncle learned she is lesbian and threatened to expose her if she didn’t have sex with him, and a 30-year-old man called Grisha, who was freed from prison and torture because he isn’t Chechen (he’d been arrested while in Grozny for work) but who, along with his lover and family, is being pursued by Chechen agents to make sure he doesn’t talk.

France does more to protect his subjects’ identities than give them false names. Through an extraordinary use of digital imaging, he also gives them different faces. A title at the start alerts you to this device. Then, because the technology is so persuasive, you forget about it—until a turning point, late in the film, when France without warning unmasks a character who has made the almost impossibly brave decision to file an official complaint. Political act and filmmaking method unite in a single moment to create the most stunning coming out I’ve ever witnessed.

It’s as transporting as any scene you would watch in a summer blockbuster, if any were being screened. But the point is it’s not likely to happen again. One person managed to step forward. The rest remain in hiding.

he facial recognition technology and machine learning that made possible the wondrous digital masks in Welcome to Chechnya come in for leery sidelong glances in Shalini Kantayya’s Coded Bias, a fine example of the globe-trotting, relay-team style of issue-based documentaries.

Leading a squad of expert commentators and carrying the baton in the final lap is Joy Buolamwini, a doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab. A thoroughly engaging movie character—young, bright, and breezy—she has put together a nerdy cool-girl style, featuring earrings that spell “Wakanda” and her own superhero identity as founder of the Algorithm Justice League. The attitude is unpretentious, the purpose deeply serious.

While working at MIT on a digital alias project, Buolamwini stumbled on a troubling fault in her program’s data set. The software had been fed examples of mostly white faces. It would not recognize her features as a face unless she put on a white mask. From this seemingly small glitch, she deduced a very large problem: Social prejudices are being built into algorithms of every kind, from the ones that target you with online ads, give you a credit score, or decide whether you’re an effective classroom teacher to the video surveillance programs used to tag you as having the face of a terrorist. A relatively small population of mostly white, male techies builds the data sets for all these algorithms. The result, as one of Buolamwini’s interlocutors says, is that “racism is being mechanized.”

With that as the premise, Coded Bias takes off to Brooklyn, London, Cape Town, Houston, and Washington, following other insurgent tech experts to their conferences, book-signing events, and street actions and spending maybe a little too much time watching their wheelie suitcases glide through airports. The argument occasionally wanders as much as the itinerary, to the point of running counter to Buolamwini’s mission. If you’re worried that police surveillance is a threat, why labor to correct the software and help it recognize you?

But in the end, as if with a ding, Coded Bias scores a match between problem and analysis. We are allowing the Silicon Valley class to feed garbage into machine learning systems, and guess what? Garbage is coming out.

I read without alarm the news that AMC Theatres will ban Universal films from its movie houses in retaliation for the studio’s decision to offer streaming and theatrical releases simultaneously. Never mind the question of whether the movie that broke industry protocol, Trolls World Tour, had the gravitas to usher us into a new epoch. When and how, I wondered, will most theaters reopen, and who will get up from the couch when they do? AMC’s threat, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, thundered like a squirrel vowing to get up and bite the semi that had flattened it.

Besides, this particular roadkill is more like a rat. I sorely miss going to the movies, but I don’t miss AMC, the chain that boasts of having been the first to squeeze pictures and their viewers into a multiplex bunker and the first to soothe its abused audiences (or put them into a diabetic coma) by building cupholders into the armrests. As much as any company, AMC has made moviegoing an affliction of tacked-on fees, useless seat reservations, somnolence-inducing recliners (designed to turn you into one of those blob people from Wall-E), and advertisements by the half hour. (Get to the show in time to watch them or else reason with the guy sprawled on the leatherette slab that was supposedly all yours.) And speaking of roadkill, let’s not forget the aroma, that complex and lingering mélange of rancid oil, high fructose corn syrup, and ammonia. If the people running AMC ever allow themselves a moment to reflect, they might recognize that the tender care they extend to their films and customers has done more than Covid-19 to make moviegoing an experience you don’t want.

The last time the industry suffered so severe a rupture in its exhibition methods was in the late 1940s, when the major US studios, no longer permitted to operate as a vertically integrated oligopoly, were stripped of their theater chains. The ripple effect from that decision changed almost everything about the movies, from how they were financed and where they were produced to the themes and aesthetics that eventually popped up on screens around the world. But after that transformation, which took a dozen years, the movies remained what they had always been: a novelty business, dependent on the public’s wanting to see whatever was going into the theaters next week. Today’s new regime of endless streaming is more radical in its impact—for AMC, Universal, all the other companies in the industry, and you. The release schedule withers, all sense of occasion is lost, and movie watching becomes an eternal now. Whether that will make for bliss or indifference remains to be discovered.

Hoping for bliss and survival, some distributors and art houses have banded together to confect a sense of occasion. They are streaming films on a rolling basis under the rubric of Virtual Cinema, with your modest fee evoking the bygone era of ticket buying and a portion of the revenue helping to preserve the struggling exhibitors. Sometimes, this arm of the eternal now can sweep true greatness into your living room, along with a reflection of your present condition. For example, Béla Tarr’s Sátátangó, in its full 439 minutes of desolate glory, just finished a run at the Virtual Cinema of Film at Lincoln Center. Like the Hungarian villagers in Tarr’s magnum opus, I, too, have felt cut off from the world recently and sunk in dilapidation. (How the words of the film’s drunken, reclusive, snooping doctor rang in my ears when he scratched into his diary that he had no more peach brandy and would have to leave the house.) The wonder of Sátántangó is that as the villagers’ abjection deepens toward absolute, the film becomes more and more exhilarating. But this isn’t a new exhilaration. Sátántangó is a 1994 film.

o, in search of novelty, I got busy pretending to attend a film festival. (You may apply as many scare quotes as you like to that sentence.) The event in question was the Tribeca festival, which began in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, thanks to Jane Rosenthal, Craig Hatkoff, and Robert De Niro, who thought the conviviality and excitement of collective moviegoing would help revive lower Manhattan. So it did—until the coronavirus came along. This year, Tribeca could offer only the simulation of an event, flickering on innumerable computer screens. Juries convened remotely. The press office sent out an e-mail about awards. Nothing happened that involved people out there.

Maybe I made the wrong decisions about which films to sample, but I felt that nothing was happening with the selections, either. Tribeca has always been a bit catch-as-catch-can in its programming—that’s how it goes when you inaugurate a festival within walking distance of a smoldering mass grave—but I found that plucking this or that item off an online roster led me toward aggravated indifference.

I clicked on Brea Grant’s 12 Hour Shift in the US narrative competition and was confronted by an exercise in sour, jocular violence and condescension toward Bible Belt hicks (there’s no polite way to express the attitude), set in an Arkansas hospital toward the end of the Clinton administration. Yes, the film turned out to be timely, but in an entirely negative way. At a moment when health care workers are exhausting themselves and accepting great personal risk, 12 Hour Shift asked me to chortle over the misadventures of a dope fiend nurse who trades in body parts.

The international narrative competition held more rewards, though none that seemed urgent. The winner of the Best Actor award in that section, Noé Hernández, gave a performance dripping with grunge, horniness, and arterial blood in Kokoloko, a fable set in Oaxaca, Mexico, about ineffectual armed militants and obsessive, possessive love. Gerardo Naranjo, perhaps best known for the flamboyant narco thriller Miss Bala (2011), directed Kokoloko with endless cleverness, making this present-day story look like a recently unearthed artifact of boxy 1960s cinema, complete with flares, scratches, unsteady zooms, stretches of leader, and mind-blown chronology. I might interpret the result as a satirical assault on a certain strain of rebelliousness in both film and politics, except that it’s less an attack than a reinforcement. The object of desire for Hernández and his not-so-militant rival is a young and frequently naked woman (Alejandra Herrera) whose function in this narrative can be described only in the passive mood. She gets pushed around and gets screwed.

The winner of the Best Actress award in the international section, Shira Haas, has much more to do in Ruthy Pribar’s Asia, playing a Jerusalem teenager wrapped in sullen and loving conflict and dependency with her single mother. The mom (Alena Yiv), a nurse who emigrated from Russia, is still young and full of life, despite the strains of her job and the obtuseness of men. The daughter, afflicted with a neurodegenerative disease, is becoming a pale shadow of the mother and rages against her fate. Ignoring the evidence that the film, too, is steadily degenerating, in its case toward melodrama, Haas gives the part her all, which is a lot. She’s got the skills and power of a LeBron James, packed into a frame that’s maybe half his height. But what was special or festive about watching Haas right then on Tribeca’s extranet? I could just as well have moved from the desk to the couch and seen her on Netflix, in Unorthodox or Shtisel.

ow that I’ve experienced the digital Tribeca festival, whatever discontent I’ve felt with the real-world version has faded. That said, I recognize there are useful possibilities in the merger of festivals and streaming. (There had better be, since that looks like a big part of the future.) Witness a film that premiered at the 2019 Tribeca festival, Lara Jean Gallagher’s Clementine, which is now screening in Virtual Cinemas (via the independent producer and distributor Oscilloscope) and is worth your attention, despite the year it’s spent on the shelf.

Neither of the film’s young protagonists is named Clementine, although they’re both treated by others as something fresh and juicy and are increasingly, painfully aware of being biodegradable. Karen (Otmara Marrero), perhaps 20 years younger than the famous painter who recently dumped her, drives up from Los Angeles to the ex’s lake house in Oregon, breaks in, and settles down for some clandestine brooding. She is interrupted, though, by a passing waif, Lana (Sydney Sweeney, in a performance that’s so spontaneous, it seems autonomic), who is even younger and more vulnerable and at first appears to be pliably credulous. Karen plays at being the older, famous artist. Lana plays into her story or maybe plays along. In the Kelly Reichardt mode of Pacific Northwest semi-queer cinema, towering pines rustle overhead as desires shift and intensify. What do these two women really want, except maybe not to be so young anymore, when they’re so unable to seize the power that’s supposed to come from youth? I liked getting caught up in their mirror games. And I like a movie with the line “How’d you get so good at eyeliner?” In just seven words, it tells you that Lana, the character who speaks it, is candid, curious, willing to learn, and has a workable sense of values.

Also from Oscilloscope and having its premiere online this month through Museum of the Moving Image is the 2019 Sundance Film Festival audience award winner, The Infiltrators. Directed by Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, it’s another film that comes off the shelf and into the stream at an apparently random moment, which seems all the more contingent because of the period of the action. The events the film narrates, in a bracingly deft merger of drama and documentation, took place in 2012, in that now almost unimaginable era of Barack Obama’s first term. But the story, sorry to say, remains as timely as ever. The Infiltrators is about the successful efforts of Marco Saavedra and Viridiana Martinez, activists with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, to get themselves locked up in the Broward Transitional Center in Florida, the better to help incarcerated undocumented immigrants win release and escape deportation.

The Infiltrators is a noticeably modest production. A handful of actors, pressed into tireless, budget-conscious service, appear as walking synecdoches for an entire system of administration, guards, and immigration police. A found location—it looks like a middle school built in the 1970s—fills in for the prison’s corridors, offices, and common spaces. In another way, though, the film is almost dizzyingly rich. It mixes talking-head shots and archival video images of Saavedra, Martinez, and others with dramatizations in which these protagonists are portrayed by actors (including Maynor Alvarado and Chelsea Rendon). Such reenactments are usually a curse to documentaries, but here they produce a fascinating double vision, continually revealing the fundamental reality that every person you might see in lockup is a role player of sorts. Besides, this is a movie about immigrants who suffer for lack of documentation. What could be more appropriate than to issue them all a kind of cinematic fake ID?

s if to announce that the future is already here, WarnerMedia is introducing a subscription streaming service, HBO Max, on May 27. Following on the launch last year of Disney+ (which is pumping out old and new product owned by its parent company, including Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar movies), HBO Max will open the Warner Bros. vaults to offer as much Casablanca as anybody could want, as well as new items such as its debut documentary feature, the hot-button 2020 Sundance festival selection On the Record, directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering.

Having dedicated themselves for years to making substantial documentaries about survivors of sexual abuse—Twist of Faith (2004), The Invisible War (2012), The Hunting Ground (2015)—Dick and Ziering clearly have both the seriousness and the experience to explore yet another area of this subject matter, the excruciating dilemmas faced by black women who consider making allegations against black men. Centuries of terrible, bloody history militate against going public with such accusations. So does the imperative of community solidarity. And for any black woman above the age of 35, the trashing of Anita Hill resides in living memory as a cautionary example.

Dick and Ziering deal with all these issues, drawing on interviews with figures including Tarana Burke (who founded #MeToo), Kimberlé Crenshaw (author of the forthcoming On Intersectionality), and journalist Joan Morgan. But the central figure of On the Record, a compelling one, is Drew Dixon, a former music business executive who rose to considerable success in the 1990s working with hip-hop artists. Because the film is built around her allegations against her former boss Russell Simmons, who strongly denies Dixon’s accusation and all others that have been made against him, On the Record became a controversy of its own at Sundance, with charges thrown back and forth of attempted suppression and shoddy, tendentious filmmaking.

Some aspects of the movie give me pause. You can see that Dixon involved the filmmakers on the early side, in 2017, when she was still in the process of deciding whether to go public and was just beginning to speak with Joe Coscarelli of The New York Times. (At one point, during a phone call with Dixon, he asks whether he’s being filmed, then hangs up when the answer is yes.) You get an immediate sense of the agony of her choice, but with that comes an uncomfortable awareness of the limit that Dick and Ziering pushed against. Documentarians often come to their subjects as advocates—see The Infiltrators, for example—but in this case, through their early presence, Dick and Ziering went far in not just recording Dixon but also assisting her. At some moments, they also eat the poison fruit of documentary reenactment (there are repeated inserts of panning shots across somebody’s bed, in an apartment somewhere, to muscle up the story being told), and they rely to a wearying degree on footage that seems to come from a single sit-down interview with Dixon.

So I can’t tell you that On the Record is impeccable—but then, I don’t think it needs to be. It gives you more than enough intense portraiture, narrative drive, and thoughtful commentary to justify the decisions the filmmakers made. And if this combination of elements sometimes seems a bit out of balance, the allegations (believe them as you will) are upsetting in themselves. You shouldn’t sit there feeling stable.

Where will you be sitting if you choose to watch On the Record? Not in an AMC theater, obviously. This movie was never destined for on-the-hour screenings at AMC with or without its allegations against Russell Simmons. But only a few months ago, it might have been headed toward some smaller movie house where you could have talked about it with other people—some of whom might even have been strangers—and taken note of one another’s feelings. You also might have had a reason to put it on your calendar, before it could vanish from theaters. In the eternal now, it’s just one of a gazillion items in the HBO Max launch and will presumably dwell forever in the stream.

It’s not just an exhibition system that’s changing. Time itself changes, our sense of what’s immediately important changes, and the movies are going to change. Faced with this uncertainty, I can’t even say, as we did in the old days, “Watch for it near you.” It’s more like, “Keep clicking.”

I have twice reviewed films directed by Stuart Gordon—his adaptation of David Mamet’s play Edmond in 2006 and his gruesome fable about airheaded self-involvement and the will to survive, Stuck, in 2008—taking care to disclose that the filmmaker was a friend. This was fair notice but also a considerable understatement. Along with the other, far more prominent brothers, sisters, and whatevers of Chicago’s Organic Theater Company, I used to call Stuart not just a friend but Fearless Leader, in three-quarters jest. This was in the 1970s and early ’80s, before he got his hands on movie equipment, as he’d always wanted to, and made himself internationally famous with Re-Animator, the surpassingly grotesque, gory, and hilarious H.P. Lovecraft adaptation he devised with his old friend (and proto–Organic Theater conspirator) Dennis Paoli and William J. Norris. Given this information, you will not be surprised that I learned from Stuart how to make stage blood. (The best formula: McCormick red food dye titrated into Wisk laundry detergent, which imparts a lurid, purplish hue to the mixture and enables you to wash the costume in a sink between shows.) I learned a lot more as well; so much, in fact, that Stuart has loomed unseen over this film column since the day I began writing it. When I found out on the morning of March 25 that he had died—not of Covid-19 but heartbreakingly isolated from his family and friends because of the pandemic—the light of the present dimmed (not that it’s bright to begin with, here in my social-distancing quarters) as I spiraled into the past.

Which is where I see a lot of us now spending our time. Despite many journalistic speculations about how life will change after Covid-19, in everything from the conduct of elections to the stuff you run into at art galleries, these visions of the future are all bluff and guesswork. Nobody knows anything quantifiable—how long the pandemic will last, the eventual death toll, the magnitude of the economic damage, the time that recovery will take—let alone such phantoms as qualitative outcomes. As I write, I don’t even know when theaters will reopen or which film titles might be current as you read this, if you’re among the people with access to streaming services. I do know that fresh streaming releases will be ongoing, with films originally planned for the theaters and those meant from the start for the likes of Netflix or Amazon. But to judge from the preponderance of articles in newspapers and magazines, as well as the personal comments that reach me, people for the moment are less interested in cinematic novelty than in finding comfort or distraction in movies from the past.

In this, too, Stuart remains my teacher. In many ways a traditionalist, more friendly toward 1950s Warner Bros. and comic book illustrations than to the formal conundrums he encountered in 1970s art houses and art museums, he would have been perfectly happy to see people enjoying the oldies—but despite his well-earned reputation as a genre-loving fantasist, I think he would have loathed any sign that people were using films to retreat from the world rather than engage with it. My thoughts go back to a fanzine writer who emerged with me from a preview screening of Stuck. Eyes glittering and voice throbbing with joy, he cried, “Stuart Gordon makes the violence so real!” And that, in my experience of his combined ethics and aesthetics, was always the point.

Stuart loved his actors when they threw themselves breakneck into their roles, not simply because he wanted to goose the audience (though his taste did run toward big effects, as suggested by the title he was contemplating for his memoirs, More Is More) but because he thought people ought to feel that something was truly at stake in every moment. He hated nothing more in a show or a movie than to see actors expertly shuck and jive instead of caring intensely about the situation they were in, even if it was a mental duel between Lord Cumulus, Avenger of the Universe, and Chaos, Prince of Madness. When Stuart added a section of audience engagement to one of his shows, the actors had damned well better be in people’s faces, forcing an interaction and not miming their way through the house. When he watched other people’s work, he would be scathing—in a genial, belly-laughing way—whenever a director blithely skated past an inconvenience of plot or character rather than work it through on the grounds of the premise.

s with Stuart’s notions of how plays and films ought to be directed, so, too, with his sense of show business economics. He accepted grants for the Organic Theater when he could get them, but having begun his career at the University of Wisconsin baiting warmongers, censors, bigots, self-promoting local officials, violently repressive police, and any authorities who thought there was something wrong with running around naked, he distrusted government and foundation money. It could vanish easily, and if you depended on it too much, you were probably paying too little attention to the people who should have been persuaded to support your work: the audience. How honest were your defiant gestures—how real—if you expected an arts council to fund them? Stuart preferred to safeguard the work by running the Organic Theater like an old mom-and-pop business, with his wife and perennial star, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, sharing the risks and responsibilities.

Ma and Pa Gordon’s attitude could hardly have been more different from the trends that had been taking hold in the East Coast avant-garde. By the mid- to late 1970s, the nickel-and-dime, grassroots experimenters of the previous decade’s theater and film had begun to codify themselves into a semi-academic, grant-seeking, proudly anti-commercial circle, validated principally by themselves, their own press corps, and a growing team of institutional curators. I know I’m painting with too broad a brush, and I’m sure the scene didn’t feel so insular from within, but viewed from the shores of Lake Michigan, much of the work being done then in New York was notable for its combination of communal self-approval and condescending irony. Conventions and themes familiar to a general audience were good only for being tossed into one of several versions of a cerebral yet inexplicable postmodern mélange, where they could be mocked, “interrogated,” and turned into gibberish. The goal, as often as not, was admirably political, but the method amounted to an attempt to knock down existing power relations by semaphore, thanks to the breeze of your flailing arms. There was rarely any contact, just a shadowboxing battle royale among images and ideas, in which nothing was expected to be authentic except the status that the artists claimed for themselves.

By 1985, when Re-Animator staggered horribly into the world, this academic avant-garde lay helpless before Ronald Reagan and the resurgent Hollywood crudity that had triumphed with him. (For the full story of this dual ascension, see J. Hoberman’s Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan.) It was possible in this context for critics to receive Re-Animator with excitement but also difficult for many to see that Stuart, too, was practicing avant-garde filmmaking, though of a different kind. His cinema was as opposed to Rambo: First Blood Part II as anything you could see at the Collective for Living Cinema or Millennium Film Workshop and yet was immediately accessible to anyone with a strong stomach and a sense of humor. The path of least resistance, though, was to type Stuart as a happy, irresponsible schlockmeister, serving up thrills to a niche audience. The possibility that he had something to say and meant it sincerely didn’t much come into the conversation.

To be fair, people whose most important agenda was to break the death grip of patriarchy could be forgiven for thinking of Stuart’s work as rearguard rather than avant-garde. As an artist talking to and about the dominant culture in terms it could understand, he risked keeping dominant terms in place and might have expected people to call him on it. But when works of art touch on reality—real emotions, convictions, and sensations, along with elaborations of premises as if they were solid and whole, if gonzo—you might give artists some credit for being right-acting, even if they’re not explicitly right-thinking. Besides, what was so wrong-thinking in Re-Animator? It was a story about arrogance masquerading as benevolence, madness as a search for truth, and the gradual acquiescence of a well-intentioned, normatively thoughtless man in hideous crimes. Do you want to tell me that theme isn’t real?

uch has been said over the past weeks about the prescience of Steven Soderbergh and Scott Z. Burns’s 2011 Contagion, and with good reason. With Re-Animator in mind, though, I prefer to think about the Covid-19 movie that Stuart Gordon might have made, set in hospital corridors awash in body parts and bodily fluids, in the White House conference rooms where the situation is definitely under control, and in a corporate laboratory where someone is just sure of a lucrative solution. Much of it would be hilarious, except for the part that wasn’t. As Stuart said after Re-Animator was released, “Violence should horrify. If it doesn’t, there’s something wrong with it. It should not be seductive.”

Can I think of any recent movies in which something’s wrong? Easily. Take Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau, which has been much admired for using genre tropes (sci-fi, western, psychedelic splatterfest) for ostensibly political ends. Give Bacurau a chance. Watch it on a streaming service for its tale of rural Brazilians fighting back against an invasion of extortionate, murderous creeps from the Northern Hemisphere. Then ask yourself if the filmmakers’ attitude toward the country people is any better than paternalistic sentimentality; if genre mimicry should excuse a jolting, clunky visual style; and above all, if the film’s violence horrifies. When I watched Bacurau at last year’s New York Film Festival, I was appalled to hear the hall rock with cheers for each new butchery. Dornelles and Mendonça Filho gestured toward any number of actual social and political evils, but they clearly did not make the violence real to their audience

Something similar might be said of Craig Zobel’s recent US release The Hunt, which resembles Bacurau in a way that ought to unnerve the latter’s fans. Both have plots that involve murder for sport, with the predators in Zobel’s film being blue-state elitists and the prey red-state MAGA types. Well, bitter political animosities do divide the country, and Zobel (whose Great World of Sound is more deserving of your attention) has certainly pointed toward them. But his translation of this societal rift into a shoot-’em-up means what, exactly? Nobody can say, except that he’s put himself into the marketing category of “controversial.” The substance of his characters’ lives, the motives of their beliefs, melt away in the blood and guts being spilled for fun. So it goes, too, with Dornelles and Mendonça Filho. They send out a semaphore of political struggle but deliver pornography.

I shelter in isolation and brood too much on the past—as perhaps you do, these days—and long to encounter other people once more in a common space. Movies can’t spring us from this viral predicament, but now and at all times, the good ones can answer that need for connection. Even though they’re just light, shadow, and sound, films can lead toward a form of human encounter, in an equivalent of shared space, but only if the artists behind them desire it. That, too, is something I learned from Stuart Gordon. Because of him, I can never be satisfied with a movie merely because it signals a message I agree with. I need it to be made in such a way that I imagine someone bent over a sink, squeezing the last drops of food dye out of the costumes.

He made the love so real.

You might have to go back to Robert Browning to find another artist as steeped in historical reverie as Kelly Reichardt. Differences noted, of course: Browning dreamed himself into the minds of famous painters, princes of the church, and bloodstained noblemen, whereas Reichardt’s protagonists, when she finds them in the past, are the sort of people who may leave behind not even a name. They live and die humbly, and in a setting directly antecedent to hers—the Pacific Northwest, where she works—rather than in the warmth and color of a foreign land like Browning’s Italy.

Having little of the escapism of Browning’s poems, Reichardt’s historical films also forgo much of the robust action and probing psychology that put the drama into his dramatic monologues. She makes predominantly quiet, smoothly flowing pictures for audiences of a contemplative bent. Not that her new film, First Cow, lacks incident. At the beginning, in the present, two skeletons are sniffed out of a shallow grave by an inquisitive dog, and from then on, the backward-looking narrative is a construction of disastrously cascading dominoes: threats of murder, desperate flights, larceny, fraud, brain-shaking injury, and for good measure, some punitive home smashing. So dire is Reichardt’s vision of 1820s Oregon that child abandonment comes and goes as a passing curiosity.

And yet all this violence and suspense seems to happen at a slight remove, distanced from you not by anything as corny as a sepia tint but by the manifest action of Reichardt’s intelligence. When those skeletons are dug up in the present-day prologue, clawed out of the ground with bare hands by the foraging dog owner (Alia Shawkat, in a cameo role), she turns her face up and smiles with an expression entirely at odds with a discovery of bones. Why? My guess is that she’s a stand-in for Reichardt and is pleased to have a mystery to think about. The rest of First Cow might be interpreted as this young woman’s fantasy—or Reichardt’s—about how two men came to be buried side by side near the banks of the lower Columbia.

As in many good fantasies, unstated implications abound. They seem to hover just outside the old-fashioned 4:3 frame that Reichardt has chosen, denying you the panoramic vistas, and presumption of clarity, that you can get in a wide-screen western. As the story begins, you might intuit how the prologue’s wanderer could imagine a long-ago version of herself as Cookie (John Magaro), a soft-eyed, thick-bearded man wrapped against the cold in layers of old cloth—rags, really—topped by a large, limp fungus of brown felt. He, too, is a forager, gathering mushrooms to feed a party of beaver trappers, and if he isn’t as feminine as the person who will find his bones two centuries later, he nevertheless figures as a domestic appendage to the men he’s serving and who address him, at best, with dismissive brutality.

It’s past dark, and Cookie is hurrying to scrape together a meal from the forest floor, when he stumbles upon someone who will become his friend and business partner—and perhaps his lover, too, if it seems suggestive that the man is found naked. This is King-Lu (Orion Lee), another of the region’s beaver trappers, who by his account fell afoul of some Russians, killed one, and had to abandon his clothes while running for his life. Cookie covertly shelters the stranger for the night in his own tent before aiding the man’s getaway. It won’t be long before King-Lu turns up again, this time in the ramshackle trading settlement where the rest of the story plays out.

Deeper-voiced than Cookie, trimmer and more self-assured, King-Lu is also better traveled. He tells his rediscovered friend and new cottage-mate that the Oregon Territory is fresh in a way he’s never seen before. “History hasn’t gotten here yet,” he says as the two stride through the woods. “Maybe this time we can be ready for it.” The old, old story, told again as if from the beginning: Americans think they see the forest primeval, when what they’re looking at is their own naivete. Not innocence. King-Lu has killed, and with his encouragement, Cookie is about to steal, lie, and join in accumulating capital too quickly for their good. But bound in friendship or perhaps love, the men temporarily let themselves believe this land of abundance might provide enough for them, too.

All they have to do is siphon off a little generosity from the first cow in the territory.

Photographed by Christopher Blauvelt in the muted greens and muddy browns of perpetually overcast woods—and in a recurring nocturnal murk that at times seems illuminated only by one bovine eye—First Cow has a look of not just age but also estrangement. In this imagined world of sparse, scraggly grass and thick fern beds, gap-planked cabins and a handmade checkerboard, oil bubbling in an old cast iron pan and a neocountry guitar reverbing on the soundtrack, everything is pushed just beyond the norm. Characters dress more oddly, behave more bizarrely, and at times are shaped more awkwardly than in your received images of the Old West, with the native people both more and less habituated to the mixed lot of settlers than you might expect. In this way, too, Reichardt and writer Jon Raymond, her frequent collaborator, keep the action at a slight emotional remove. You’re always aware of the rift between yourself and this bygone, fabricated place.

And yet the central figures may feel closer to you than do Browning’s exotics. In a way that’s peculiar to the taste of our moment—or the taste of the art house fraction of us, at any rate—Cookie and King-Lu flatter the audience. They love each other as we think men should. They hold out against a society of which we don’t approve. Maybe that’s why, despite the tension of our knowing where these characters will end, the suspense in First Cow is frictionless. This world may seem alien, but the filmmakers’ attitude toward it is modern and makes the doom go down easily.

I’ve been happier with Reichardt when she has put me on the side of protagonists who weren’t so comforting, as she did, for example, in Wendy and Lucy. That said, when Reichardt left King-Lu and Cookie behind at the end, sometime before the worst would happen, her composure and discretion stole my breath. A view of these friends in repose, a pause that passes like a sigh, and imagination—hers, ours, Alia Shawkat’s—was left to fill in the rest. It wouldn’t be strange, at this blackout, if you, too, turned up your face and smiled.

’ve seen my share of exuberant movie violence, but there’s a trick with an umbrella in Diao Yinan’s cops-and-gangsters thriller The Wild Goose Lake that had me fumbling to clutch my stomach and skull at the same time—the stomach with nausea, the skull in astonishment. There’s also a new twist on an old ambush technique, executed with (let’s say) surgical speed, and for a lighter touch, an amusement arcade featuring a live severed head that sings. Yinan creates all this novelty and excitement for a movie that during the other half of its running time lets the ogling camera make passes at erotically charged actors, as they enjoy languorous, nocturnal cigarette breaks amid picturesque dilapidation.

Outside a train station on the margins of Wuhan, Zhou Zhenong and Liu Aiai soak in the rainy atmosphere and size each other up. He (played by brooding heartthrob Hu Ge) is a midlevel gangster who ordinarily would be out stealing motor scooters at this time of night but is now on the lam after shooting at a murderous rival and killing a cop instead. She (played by the slim, solemn, balletically erect Gwei Lun Mei) has come to this rendezvous in place of Zhou’s wife and so may be assumed to be a betrayer, an ally, a new love interest, a fellow victim of circumstance, or more likely, all of the above. The police have offered a very large cash reward for Zhou, so Liu might be making risky calculations. But then, so is Zhou, in the tradition of movie criminals who suffer nobly on their way to the fade-out.

Flamboyantly stylish but also obsessed with exploring the marginal geographies that its cops call “uncontrolled,” swooningly romantic but too dirty-minded and too generous to condemn Liu to the femme’s usual fate, The Wild Goose Lake satisfies all your genre needs and at the same time shatters them. The shards are pretty—and they’re very sharp.

o say that Ken Loach and his writing partner Paul Laverty have made another work of social realism is like saying the next Fast and Furious will have car chases. The only question is which problem of the English working class Loach and Laverty have dramatized this time. In Sorry We Missed You, the answer is the gig economy—or, to quote an elderly character who still remembers the years of standing up to Thatcher, “What happened to the eight-hour day?”

There is no longer any limit to the hours worked or the debts incurred by Ricky and Abbie (Kris Hitchen and Debbie Honeywood), a couple struggling to raise their children decently somewhere in Tyne and Wear. Abbie is on call from 7:30 in the morning to 9:00 at night as a home health care aide, paid by the visit and uncompensated for her travel time and expense. Ricky, no longer able to find jobs in construction, has unwisely leased a van and signed up to drive for a company called PDF (for Parcels Delivered Fast). By law, he’s an independent contractor. In reality, he’s more like a rat in a maze, except that rats retain the option to stop running and say, “Screw the cheese.”

I’m tempted to call Sorry We Missed You as old-fashioned as a chipped-flint hand ax, as a Child ballad, as Bernie Sanders’s wardrobe. That isn’t necessarily bad. It is dependable like the first, atavistically affecting like the second, and like the third comes wrapped around a powerfully held set of principles. It’s also imagistically coherent in a way that strenuously up-to-date movies, with their disdain for mere carpentry, sometimes don’t bother to attempt.

Loach develops the action through two motifs. One is the handheld digital device, both the parcel scanner that controls Ricky’s life on the job and the smartphone that everyone has to carry. Ricky and Abbie, always at work, flailingly resort to parenting by voice mail. Their teenage son lives on social media in a way that Ricky can’t accept. The frequent presence of phones in the back of Ricky’s van—and their high cost—kicks the plot into crisis.

Side by side with this high-tech motif comes imagery of bodily waste. Abbie spends the days and nights cleaning up incontinent old people. Their young daughter, affected by the stress at home, has reverted to wetting the bed. Ricky, lacking time in his grueling schedule to find public restrooms, unwillingly adopts the standard industry practice of relieving himself in a plastic bottle and ends up smelling like Abbie’s clients.

Piss, shit, and our immaculate information economy: Sorry We Missed You delivers them in a single package. If economy and appropriateness of means are marks of elegance, then this picture has the kind of elegance that does not go out of style. The performances, as always with Loach, are as solid as the bricks along Ricky and Abbie’s road. The filmmakers’ sympathies are warm and wide. They just don’t extend to those supposedly immaterial people who must be out there somewhere, sucking money through Ricky’s scanner.

easons you might allow someone to drag you to see the remake of The Invisible Man: Elisabeth Moss, staring into the camera as if she’s trying to push her retinal rods and cones through her corneas. Elisabeth Moss, twisting her mouth into a Möbius strip. Elisabeth Moss, committing as only she does to desperate anger, meanwhile giving an inappropriate little laugh in midsentence. Elisabeth Moss, pretending to fight for her life against the titular villain, when you can see she’s really just supine on the floor, waggling her arms and legs like a kitten.

In case that’s not enough, this new Invisible Man, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, puts Moss through many up-to-date horrors of middle-class life. She deals with hacked e-mail, a blown job interview, one of those intimidating concrete-trough washbasins you find in some chichi restaurants, and a conversation with a rich young self-approving lawyer. And the title character? He’s the worst nightmare of all: an abusive husband turned impossible-to-catch stalker.

In the source novel, which H.G. Wells subtitled A Grotesque Romance, the protagonist was a kind of 1890s technocrat: ambitious, greedy, resolutely private, and eager to gain a “thousand advantages” over “common people” by means of his scientific work. The irony: By separating himself from humanity, he became ridiculous and entirely vulnerable. Maybe that idea would still work for a contemporary version of the tale—better, perhaps, than Whannell’s revised theme. As deployed in this movie, invisibility is an inapt metaphor for the harms suffered by women in a willfully obtuse male-dominated society. Everybody here fully believes the heroine was abused. And though scientific fantasy does ramp up the stakes, you don’t really need it for a scary woman-being-stalked movie. What you could use, though, is grotesquerie, humor, visual wit, and a preference for atmosphere and suspense over splatterfest action. You know, everything James Whale gave the 1933 version.

I wonder, by the way, why a movie about something you can’t see needs to blow up its void to Imax scale. Yet here is today’s supermega Invisible Man, the film that asks, “If less is more, then should nil be enormous?”

The characters packed into the streetcar of calamities that is Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole seem remarkably cheerful as they rattle along on the movie’s bloodied tracks—or if not cheerful, then accepting, if not accepting, at least numb. The blows they receive to body and soul strike so early and often in the plot, after having piled up so terribly in the backstory, that it’s futile to pick any one as decisive. (In that sense, Beanpole makes the very concept of spoilers a joke.) Just say that the setting is Leningrad, the time autumn 1945. You understand at once that if these people seem to react strangely to their daily journey from disaster to catastrophe, it’s because they’ve already endured everything.

In a military hospital, patients who have gathered around a tiny visitor playfully ask the boy what sound a dog makes, then shrug when he fails to join in the game. Of course, say these famine survivors, where could he have seen a dog? For your part, you wonder where else these men could still see a child. The entire ward has assembled to marvel at this one’s existence.

Death has become so omnipresent here that it’s a subject more for negotiation than mourning. When a staff member dies, the lean, hollow-cheeked officer-surgeon who runs the hospital, Nikolay (Andrey Bykov), pulls aside one of his nurses, Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), to tell her he’s going to leave the matter unreported. He’ll keep his lamented colleague on the books and pass the food ration on to her. He knows it’s needed for Pashka, her canine-ignorant starveling.

At this point, it’s not clear what other bargains Nikolay and this nurse may have made with each other. All you know is that Iya, the beanpole of the title, is young, reed-thin, a head taller than anyone around her, and so translucently pale that her eyelashes shine as if covered in frost. She is the first person—you might even say the first object—to appear in Beanpole. The movie opens on a medium close-up of her standing immobile in the middle of the hospital laundry, her eyes blank, her mouth agape, with a steady, high-pitched whine on the soundtrack conveying the only thing in her head. “Frozen,” the other nurses say when Iya falls into this state. She comes out of it, eventually. She smiles at them, hardly even embarrassed, and goes back to work.

One evening a short, dark opposite number to Iya—her friend, nemesis, helper, debtor, and soon-to-be creditor Masha—shows up unannounced and bangs on her door, with half the residents of the communal apartment crowded behind to gossip and advise. Still buttoned up in the sparsely decorated uniform she wore to Berlin and back, Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) walks in on Iya with a suitcase of assorted items for personal use or possible barter, an unstoppably assertive monologue, and a life-is-shit smile. Even from your seat in the theater, you can smell the layered odors of musk, damp wool, and autumn chill wafting off her. When fresh evidence emerges about life’s devastation—it takes only five minutes—Masha’s response is to keep smiling and calmly order Iya to get dressed. They’re going dancing.

he indomitable Russian spirit? Spare me. That would be too polite a cliché for the Masha-Iya dynamic, with its cycles of rage and paralyzing despair, bottomless guilt and self-loathing, the will to survive and the flinging away of any emotion that might impede survival. These are all understandable—no, rational—responses to Beanpole’s exhausted world: its ocher plaster, yellowish light (washing through an atmosphere of melted wax, you might think, or nutrient-deprived urine), and bright, frequent nosebleeds, and its textures of damp tile, limp hospital bandages, and patched-together wallpaper (here a picture torn from a reference book, there a scrap of journalism). Compliant, perpetually dazed Iya would seem to be the helpless innocent in this setting, except for what you eventually see her do. Masha would seem to be the bossy cynic who respects only her own gut, except that a significant part of that belly turns out to be gone. Which is to say that moral judgments are possible in Beanpole—you make them in every scene—but are as slippery as the lies the characters continually tell one another and as disorienting as Balagov’s occasionally dizzying shots.

In case that dizzying business makes it sound as if he is merely trying to be clever or provide the latest confection of cinematic miserabilism, let me give the credentials of Beanpole. Balagov trained with Alexander Sokurov, from whom he apparently learned never to set the camera down anywhere without thinking and never to use an image on which he wouldn’t stake his life. (His accomplice in making these images is cinematographer Ksenia Sereda, who, like Balagov, is not yet 30.) The screenplay, which Balagov wrote with Alexander Terekhov, was inspired by Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history The Unwomanly Face of War. Her book, of course, gives a collage effect, whereas Balagov and his collaborators want to steep you in an invented, progressively deepening totality. What unites the two works is a sense of contact with emotional realities as absolute as they are extreme.

Despite the suffocating pressures of physical pain and death in Beanpole—or rather because of them—the most overwhelming of these emotions is the yearning for new life. Again, let’s not make sentimental pretenses. This concerns sex, about which Masha has no illusions and Iya feels only dread. One of the women, having accepted a nighttime ride from strangers, hauls the shy, hesitant driver right over the seat for a hump. The other, having been told to wander off for a walk with the driver’s friend, returns him to the car with a broken arm. Differing needs, let’s say. But as Leningrad descends into winter and Masha becomes ever more insistent, she forces a devil’s bargain with Iya, much as the surgeon Nikolay did. Sex, like death, is a matter for negotiation.

Many critics have rendered judgment on Beanpole as it has made its way through festivals, gathering prizes on the way toward a US theatrical release that began in New York, at Film Forum. On due consideration, though, I feel my task is not to judge this movie but to live up to it, an aspiration that I can’t hope to realize. Maybe the best way to fail is to summarize Beanpole by saying it’s about an old world that is still experiencing death pangs postmortem and a new world that can’t be born, no matter how its surviving members struggle to revive. Of course, this précis is inadequate in two ways. It does no justice to the enthralling intensity of the relationship between Iya and Masha (and the conviction of the actresses, who are making their screen debuts), and it offers no insight into why a team of young filmmakers has chosen this subject matter.

On one level, that question isn’t hard to answer. As the Shoah is ever-present to many Jews, so can the siege of Leningrad be a continuing reality to Russians—including Sokurov, for example, who returned to this ground zero even in Francofonia, when the film he’d been commissioned to make was supposed to be about the Louvre. Perhaps Balagov and his collaborators share this sense of responsibility toward their history, but I suspect something else is going on as well in Beanpole, as revealed by a telling absence in the production design. Although the film goes to near-obsessive lengths to re-create Leningrad 1945 and ’46, all the images of Stalin and Lenin are missing. I consider this omission to be a clue, not an erasure. To paraphrase a too familiar line from Faulkner: The past isn’t communist in Beanpole. It isn’t even past.

Whatever emotions the characters experience in the meticulously reconstructed world of Beanpole, the filmmakers would seem to confront in post-Soviet Russia, mutatis mutandis, as if Putin’s image might fill the void left on screen. (Indeed, Sokurov shut his film foundation last July, citing the “unfriendliness and aggressiveness” of Putin’s Ministry of Culture.) Imagine that a dead world is still in agony, a new world cannot be born, and even so, people of Balagov’s generation need to go on.

But this suggestion is only speculative and too abstract for the experience of the movie. The best summary of Beanpole would be not a statement of theme but an image. I’ll choose one from early in the film, when Iya carries little Pashka onto a jammed streetcar and Balagov cuts to their point of view. Crammed into the rear, the two see their reflections smiling at them from the window, fogged by the car’s humidity into a twilight dream. It’s a rare moment of happiness in Beanpole, called up out of poverty itself. It’s heartbreaking.

s the great documentarian Patricio Guzmán approaches his 80th year, he continues, as always, to serve as a witness to repression and resistance in Chile, past and present, but he has taken on another role as well, which he might not have anticipated in his youth. He now has accepted the burdens of a poet. The astonishing and relatively late addition of beauty to truth in his work began in Nostalgia for the Light (2010), which discovered stunning correspondences between the astronomers who work in Chile’s Atacama Desert, peering deeply into the universe’s past through their telescopes, and the mourners of Pinochet’s victims, who sift on hands and knees for the remains of corpses dumped in this remote vastness. Guzmán subsequently moved from the desert to Chile’s coastline and archipelago in The Pearl Button (2015), which found its political and poetic subject in water.

In The Cordillera of Dreams, Guzmán completes what turns out to be a trilogy. He focuses his camera and thoughts on the third great geographical feature of Chile, the Andes, which he says he never thought about in his youth or even bothered to look at because “the cordillera was not revolutionary.” Now, returning as an expatriate, he wonders if the mountains might be enduring repositories of Chilean memory—like the survivors of the dictatorship, or artists, among whom he now claims a place.

The memories and reflections begin with sublime flyovers of the Andes—too easy a sight with which to thrill an audience if Guzmán did not immediately complicate the effect. He also shows Santiago from above and moves from soaring vistas of the mountains to tight close-ups of cracks in the rocks: vertical surfaces whose network of lines seems like a pattern for the horizontal street grid. Improving on this visual conundrum, Guzmán makes it seem as if a panorama of the mountains could be magically glimpsed through the passing windows of subway cars, then reveals what you have been seeing is a hyperrealist mural in La Moneda station. The only time most people in Santiago bother to look at the Andes, he remarks in voiceover, is when they’re in the subway. As if to ensure that moviegoers don’t make the same mistake, he takes his camera to Spain to visit the studio of Guillermo Muñoz Vera, the semi-expatriate artist who painted the mural.

From Muñoz Vera, Guzmán moves on to visiting other artists in his search into the “mystery” of the Andes and how the mountains might be “the gateway to an understanding of present-day Chile.” So he interviews the sculptors Francisco Gazitúa and Vicente Gajardo, who live in the Andes and make works from its stone. They take the conversation further, into thoughts about the Andes’ traces of an ancient, ongoing, indigenous culture—which many Chileans prefer to ignore—and about the emotional effect of the massive, enduring mountains, which make people feel both protected and isolated.

With that, Guzmán is off: revisiting places in Santiago that he hasn’t seen in decades (including the house where he and his friends worked on The Battle of Chile), interviewing people about their childhood memories of the 1973 coup and subsequent years of state terror, and speaking with the author Jorge Baradit about the psychological myths that drove the Pinochet regime, with its notion that political opponents were inhuman embodiments of evil and so had to be destroyed. (Talk about wanting to feel both protected and isolated.) All this leads to the artist who figures in the movie as Guzmán’s alternative self: the videographer Pablo Salas, who did not become an expatriate but remained in Santiago, recording at great risk more than 35 years of street demonstrations, including (no matter who was in power) the brutal responses.

Nothing fundamental has changed, Salas says. Pinochet’s institutions remain in place. The official line about the dictatorship is one of denial. (Mistakes were made.) Meanwhile, neoliberal policies have transformed much of Santiago into a landscape of corporate high-rises, which, seen from the air, look like a cheap glass-and-steel cordillera. The rows of black plastic video boxes threatening to crowd Salas out of his home are also a mountain range of sorts: a towering monument of memories, and a growing one. Guzmán shows devastating excerpts from the recordings, dating as far back as the early 1980s, and goes with Salas to street protests today—a documentarian recording his alter ego in the course of recording.

The Cordillera of Dreams is ultimately a movie about the path not taken and the history that cannot be undone. It strains at times to link this theme to the Andes—the metaphor is neither as ready to hand nor as compelling as the one Guzmán had in Nostalgia for the Light—but the import is more personal. Toward the end of an invaluable career, upon completing a trilogy that now stands like a bookend to the three parts of The Battle of Chile, he has amply earned the right to speak of himself. There he is, metaphorically, at the end of The Cordillera of Dreams, figured in the mountains as a lone, tiny rock climber making his way up the immense face of history.

By turns a fugitives-on-the-run thriller, bickering-lovers comedy, jukebox musical, American South travelogue, and Black Lives Matter manifesto, Queen & Slim runs through almost every genre except holiday movie and yet emerges as an outstanding film of the season. I give credit for this success to the deliberately mismatched stars, Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith, who engage mercurially with each other even though the first is made to look like a liquid-eyed church deacon on his way home from Wednesday night meeting and the second like a Dolce & Gabbana model who wandered onto the wrong set. Principal credit also goes to screenwriter Lena Waithe and director Melina Matsoukas, who makes her feature film debut with Queen & Slim after a long career in music videos and television, including the remarkable “Thanksgiving” episode of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, cowritten by and starring Waithe.

If I mention the movie’s origin is in a story cowritten by James Frey, it’s to complete the proper acknowledgments while banging with all deliberate speed into the hurdle known as authenticity.

We’re talking about the James Frey whose book A Million Little Pieces, peddled as a shock-inducing memoir, turned out to be that drabbest of literary products, a first novel; the pink-cheeked Frey whose roots in African American experience presumably sank only as deep as was possible during a youth in the wealthier enclaves of the corporate Midwest. To the degree that Queen & Slim feels right to African American audiences—and to judge from the warm critical response, the degree is high—none of the praise would go to Frey, according to current strictures on the ownership of subject matter. Maybe his major contribution to Queen & Slim was limited to the initial concept, which seems to have traveled intact from treatment to script in the phrase “black Bonnie and Clyde.” If so, there’s still a catch. The truths that Waithe, Matsoukas, and the actors movingly imbue into Queen & Slim are necessarily mingled into the stream of Frey’s sensationalism. So, too, are the fantasies that the main creators indulge.

Let’s begin with the truths. Queen & Slim opens at night in a crisply observed Cleveland diner—Matsoukas has a rock-solid sense of camera placement—which serves as the unromantic setting for an equally drab Tinder date. Dressed in an immaculate white turtleneck and matching slacks, the woman poses her long frame stiffly in the booth with the air of someone enduring a self-imposed ordeal for which she has less patience than she’d expected. She clearly feels herself to be the intellectual, social, and economic superior of the man, who has shown up with a hopeful demeanor, modest blue sweater, prominently displayed necklace cross, and haircut that could use some cleaning up. Hunched forward more often than not, he exasperates her by saying grace over his low-price meal, which he’s too humble to return to the kitchen even though the eggs were fried instead of scrambled.

Matsoukas and the actors give themselves leisure from the start to establish a sustained push-and-pull rhythm—strong pushes on Turner-Smith’s part, half-defeated but persistent pulls from Kaluuya—and to let you savor the ironies and unspoken implications that Waithe has built into the dialogue. The scene breathes. So does the following one, though in increasingly sharp gasps, when a traffic stop by an overbearing white policeman turns deadly. The non-couple’s almost instantaneous decision to flee together may strain credibility—given a moment to think, Turner-Smith might realize she has a lot to lose, even in this terrible situation, and could be making things worse for Kaluuya—but the movie doesn’t grant that moment to her or to the viewer. Besides, the cop’s menace is all too real, and her mistrust of the criminal justice system makes sense both for the character and for any moviegoer who reads the papers. The new acquaintances take off, bickering all the way, and the movie takes off with them.

Many shots ensue of taillights disappearing into the distance along a lonesome two-lane blacktop, and many varieties of black music—’70s soul, contemporary Christian, electric blues—filter into the scenes, coming from the car radio, the soundtrack by Devonté Hynes, and whatever surroundings the characters enter. The impression you get, as the locations shift through Kentucky, Louisiana, and Georgia toward Florida, is of a grand tour of the heartland of black America: a country within the country, as Queen & Slim conceives it, where the fugitives are widely recognized and idolized by their people while being relentlessly pursued by the outside forces of white authority.

Matsoukas, Waithe, and the actors keep the movie feeling grounded as it opens into this wider territory, even during a few odd moments when the characters seem to communicate by telepathy. (They just look at each other, and their words magically resonate on the soundtrack.) But for all that, the movie does not entirely escape the preposterous. As inevitably as Harry will meet Sally, as surely as Donald Trump will lie, the ill-assorted fugitives at last fall into each other’s arms, with a turquoise Pontiac Catalina as their love boat. That’s the film’s harmless bit of artifice. In a more egregious act of fantasy, the movie cross-cuts between this consummation and a street protest against police violence, with a demonstrator’s explosion of murderous rage coinciding with the orgasm. Icky on many levels, including the factual, as any accurate history of Black Lives Matter will attest.

But the creators of Queen & Slim are not going for accuracy or history. They are aspiring to create a legend—the tale of black Bonnie and Clyde—and are prepared to hold hands together, Frey included, to walk into that sunset. Despite a few misgivings, I don’t fault them for wanting what they want. They have filled their mythmaking with more of a sense of life than I could have hoped for. I’ll leave the question of its authenticity for others to decide.

lso icky in its way—joyously, programmatically icky—and utterly obsessive about the way certain white Americans are obsessed with African American athletes, Benny and Josh Safdie’s Uncut Gems is the story of a middle-aged merchant in New York’s diamond district and his manic pursuit of various big scores. Sometimes the hustle involves paying an accomplice to steer NBA players to his claustrophobic shop, where he flogs gaudy wristwatches. Sometimes the play is to pile one more risky sports bet onto his pyramid of losses, hoping to hit before the goons catch up. Grandest of all is the scheme to auction an opal-encrusted rock he has just had smuggled to him from Ethiopia in the intestines of an iced fish.

According to the merchant, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler, furnished with a dyed-black goatee and ratlike prosthetic teeth, a bejeweled ear stud, and a high-roller’s leather jacket), the rock is worth a million dollars. But consider the anatomical vehicle through which the piece entered the country, the views the Safdies have given us of the geological bowels in which Ethiopian miners labor and bleed, and the way the film has introduced Howard through a live video feed of his colonoscopy—right up the business end. This character is not just running toward the biggest stack of cash he can grab. Something in his guts keeps him running away from the certainty of death.

A holiday movie of sorts, if you accept that the celebration is Passover, Uncut Gems, like the Safdies’ previous Good Time, is a street-smart New York film about chasing around on an adrenaline high with time running out—a film full of breaking glass, rasping security-door buzzers, and pursuers with the mugs of concentration camp guards, presided over by a “crazy Jew” (in the words of his NBA wrangler) who seems to think he’ll die if his patter drops below 90 miles an hour. Characters crowd one another, the camera (in the masterly hands of Darius Khondji) crowds the characters, and the music by Daniel Lopatin occasionally breaks into a gamelan-inspired clatter to remind everyone to hurry the funk up.

It’s a movie that wrings sadistic humor out of a doorman’s routine question about whether anything’s in the trunk of Howard’s car (there was indeed an earlier load, and it was unfortunate) and builds suspense out of moments so small as a walk to the end of the driveway with the garbage cans. The standard response in this pitiless movie to the statement “I feel like an asshole” is “You are.” The appropriate way for Howard to thank his girlfriend for tattooing his name on her ass is to wail, “You can’t even get buried with me now.”

Is there a purpose to this marathon of sleaze, in which your pace may lag behind the tireless Safdies’? Does Uncut Gems show you anything beyond the universality of exploitation? I would argue that Howard, as embodied by Sandler with complete, fearless conviction, is an idiosyncratic but meaningful example of the American entrepreneur: in this case a physically unimpressive man enamored of the majesty of basketball stars, a highly cerebral man with no better use for his brain than to figure the angles, a Jewish family man who would pawn his wife and a Torah scroll for a hot night in a casino. The point is, this irredeemable character is human—and with furious cunning, the Safdies get you to feel for him in his rush toward the end.

o paraphrase Leo McCarey’s remark about Bing Crosby, Saoirse Ronan can do no wrong in front of a camera. She is reason enough to watch Greta Gerwig’s new version of Little Women, a genuine holiday movie, in which half of the main character’s memories seem to be of Christmases with her family in Concord, Massachusetts. An actress who can convey a full inner life even when standing silent and immobile, as she did much of the time in Brooklyn, Ronan in Little Women gets to run, romp, dance, clown, shout, argue, and eventually throw herself into the arms of the smoldering Louis Garrel, who in this remake plays Friedrich Bhaer to the star’s Jo March. Add Laura Dern as Marmee—she looks as if she really could be Ronan’s mother—and Meryl Streep in a ripe, small role as Jo’s terror of a wealthy aunt, and you have your year-end entertainment picked out, if you like this kind of thing.

With all respect to Gerwig, whose Lady Bird was one of the delights of 2017, I like her Little Women but prefer Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, which has a more straightforward screenplay by Robin Swicord and the not unimpressive cast of Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, Kirsten Dunst, Claire Danes, and a promising young man named Christian Bale. You can learn a lot by watching Armstrong’s beautifully made adaptation of the novel; it’s a veritable graduate course in classical cutting on action.

Gerwig, by contrast, is a director of the jump-cut era, and as the screenwriter has chosen to leap back and forth in time. Jo is forever drifting off to sleep and living through flashbacks—her own, her sisters’, maybe the next door neighbor’s—and then waking up in a present where the characters have grown and changed, though you haven’t seen exactly how. There’s a method to this decision. Gerwig has chosen to focus the story firmly on Jo’s struggle to become a self-respecting author (in effect, to become Louisa May Alcott) while explicitly disavowing the convention that would make marriage this young woman’s goal. I can only applaud and wish the film a stupendous opening weekend.

After that, I hope, Gerwig will get together with Ronan and her very good younger male lead, Timothée Chalamet, and make another heartfelt, nervy contemporary story—one in which the message doesn’t have to be spoken aloud to the audience, twice.

ush, dreamy, and tearjerking in the best way—which is to say, harshly and with full respect for physiological inconvenience—Karim Aïnouz’s Invisible Life is opening in the United States for a theatrical run as Brazil’s 2020 Oscar entry for foreign language film. Set in a lovingly reconstructed 1950s Rio, it’s a fable of two beautiful sisters: Eurídice (Carol Duarte), who aspires to study piano at a conservatory in Vienna, and Guida (Julia Stockler), who elopes with a passing Greek sailor (never the wisest life choice) and returns, alone and pregnant, to have the door slammed in her face. Ironies abound and are sustained over decades as the sisters search blindly for each other. One submits to male domination; one escapes from it, after much difficulty, into a microscale working-class matriarchy. Both suffer with a fierceness in their eyes that’s nothing less than magnificent.

But as fables go, nothing I’ve seen this season beats Jérémy Clapin’s animated feature I Lost My Body. Based on a book by Guillaume Laurant and a script cowritten by him, I Lost My Body is the tale of a poor, lonely young orphan—a pizza delivery man, pining for a spunky librarian—intercut with the adventures of a severed hand that’s scuttling and scurrying through Paris. The hand is at once droll, ingenious, and creepy. The character animation, done in a flat-planes style reminiscent of Alex Katz, is elegantly engaging. This is wonderfully imaginative filmmaking, put to the service of a story that’s melancholy, hopeful, and (except for the loose eyeball that gets stomped) clear-sighted.

n the films she’s directed so far, Marielle Heller has shown a talent for creating characters who wrap you around their fingers—the middle ones, lifted to the world at large. “Defiant,” “needy,” “furious,” and “reckless” might be some of the adjectives you’d apply to Minnie in The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), with her aching loins and cartoon brain, or to Lee and Jack, who drink, insult, and hoax their way through Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). Heller’s instinct is to see situations through the eyes of these people but then step a little to the side for a parallax view, in which the damage done momentarily jumps closer to the center of the frame. Without sentimentalizing bad behavior—till now, anyway—she has remained close to her troublesome characters, encouraging your feelings toward them to verge on the warm and fuzzy.

Which is why it’s not entirely strange to find Heller going full-on cardigan zip-up in her third feature, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a fictionalized, PG adventure of Fred Rogers. Written for the screen by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, based loosely on a 1998 Esquire article by Tom Junod, Beautiful Day in effect plunks one of Heller’s difficult people into the middle of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, where the beneficiary (or victim) of this experiment confronts an unrelenting niceness that would have made Lee and Jack puke.

I’m sure the film will be best known and appreciated for Tom Hanks’s impersonation of the story’s unfailingly kind and understanding hero. (Spoiler alert: Hanks is good at this.) But the central character, in whom Heller concentrates her tartness, is Lloyd Vogel, a fictional Esquire reporter unhappily assigned to write a 400-word blurb about Mr. Rogers and flummoxed to find that this subject, alone among television’s products, is precisely as advertised.

Registering incredulity, exasperation, and mounting ire as Lloyd is Matthew Rhys, who is also good at this sort of thing. In his own long-running stint on television, in The Americans, Rhys spent much of the last two or three seasons eating his guts out in remorse and disillusionment. Here he shambles about in much the same spirit: uncombed, unshaven, draped in the sort of long raincoat that can signal trouble outside a schoolyard gate, and with a right eye badly discolored from his most recent bout of hotheadedness. Add to this that Lloyd lives in a downtown Manhattan alley, and you might say Heller makes him the human equivalent of another PBS kid-show figure, Oscar the Grouch. Beautiful Day is the story of how Fred Rogers wrestles for this man’s soul, in the gentlest way possible, and at last teaches him to get happy.

Heller takes Lloyd as her focus, but to a degree that’s uncommon for her she does not make him the governing consciousness of the movie. Keeping faith with the themes of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, she instead watches Lloyd in sympathy and amusement as he loses his struggle against the unbeatable power of corniness. The movie’s best scenes win you over by flaunting their sweetness, as when the passengers in a New York subway car recognize Fred Rogers and spontaneously break into his theme song. The whole democratic polis joins in—middle-school kids, cops, some burly guy in a watch cap, and a delighted Rogers himself—all except Lloyd, of course, whose embarrassment grips him like gastric distress. You feel bad for him; but you also get a touch of the pleasure reserved for the blessed in heaven, as they watch the damned writhe in hell.

Since Heller plays moments such as these more for humor than insight, you’re free to enjoy the considerable lift they give your spirit. When you get to the big reconciliation scene, though, the one toward which all moments in the film converge, you might want to ponder not the state of Lloyd’s soul, but Heller’s.

Having risen in the night to feed a bottle to his infant son, Lloyd is distracted by the voice of his father (Chris Cooper), a ne’er-do-well trying to make amends at the end of his life, who calls out from the adjacent sickroom. Heller, too, seems distracted by the call. First, she neglects to have Lloyd pick up the bottle when he comes from the kitchen; she simply makes it materialize in the next room. Then she allows Lloyd to get so caught up in redemptive conversation with his father that he puts the baby down to sleep in the carrier, unfed. Flimsiness betrays flimsiness; the gaps in direction read almost like Heller’s confession of the falsehood of the scene’s emotional breakthrough, its essence as wish fulfillment.

This isn’t to say that I’m disappointed in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Any movie that ends with a little plastic hearse driving up to a toy cemetery has done well enough for me. But I’m worried for Heller. She is part of a too-small cadre of women directors working their way up in the business and has now shown the first sign of compromise. It’s not a terrible one, and I think she must be fully aware of what she’s done. (There are moments in A Beautiful Day when she all but footnotes the deeper, thornier material in Morgan Neville’s moving 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) Still, I wonder if a kind but firm-minded person, with or without a cardigan, might sit down with Heller to ask, “How did this job make you feel?”

hen I turn from Heller to Todd Haynes and his new film, Dark Waters, one abiding lesson of film history comes home: Compromise is not always bad. The substantially true story of Cincinnati-based attorney Rob Bilott and his years-long struggle against DuPont—first to discover, and comprehend, that the chemical company had poisoned a vast population, and then to force some small level of restitution—Dark Waters began as a project of its star, Mark Ruffalo, who learned about Bilott through a New York Times Magazine article by Nathaniel Rich. Ruffalo and the production company Participant commissioned Matthew Michael Carnahan to turn Rich’s article into a screenplay and only then acted on the less-than-obvious inspiration to recruit Haynes to direct.

Haynes has dealt with the subject of environmental toxins before, in Safe (1995). Many people think of that film as strong and even trailblazing, but it’s also a picture that would make the young man in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite exclaim, “It’s so metaphorical!” A genre-bender and intellectual gamesman who puts his faith in the substance of style, Haynes is as much a production designer as a director. He also likes to write his own scripts, which have tended to wrap quotation marks around “reality.” By bringing Dark Waters to Haynes, Ruffalo and Participant asked him to break with his ingrained practice: to make clear, credible exposition his priority and shoot from the heart in Ohio and West Virginia, on actual locations, instead of in his visions of older movies.

To his credit, and theirs, Haynes agreed enthusiastically. With the help of a screenplay revision by Mario Correa and the assistance of his favorite cinematographer, Ed Lachman, he has made Dark Waters a direct, compelling, and damning procedural drama, one that respects the emotional ordeal of Rob Bilott as much as it builds the case against the managers of DuPont.

Perhaps the first thing you notice about Dark Waters is not the compromise Haynes has willingly made in his style but the self-sacrifice Ruffalo has endured in his movie-star image. Dialing his charisma down even lower than he did in Spotlight, Ruffalo wears his hair in a dorky flop, pads his face toward pudgy unrecognizability, hunches meekly in many of his scenes, and allows other actors to tower over him—not only the immense Tim Robbins as managing partner of the corporate law firm where Bilott works, but also Anne Hathaway as Bilott’s pious and sometimes impatient wife, Sarah. The portrait that emerges is of a man who is very smart—he has just made partner at Taft Law when the story begins—but also socially awkward, emotionally insecure, and forever hoping to escape the stigma of his origins in small-town West Virginia. It’s a nightmare come true when a lumbering, baseball-capped farmer from back home (Bill Camp) shows up at the office without an appointment, to bellow with more vowels than consonants that he needs Bilott to examine the evidence of malfeasance he’s carrying around in a cardboard box.

As Bilott’s investigation gets tentatively, almost apologetically under way, so do subtle signs of Haynes’s meticulous care as a director. Without drawing attention to what he’s doing, he repeatedly positions the camera above his low-status hero. Even in the many scenes of Bilott driving, you peer down at him through the windshield. Meanwhile, Haynes and Lachman put as many sheets of glass as possible on the screen, along with their reflections, turning Dark Waters into a visual essay on transparency and its absence. The film’s world lacks sunshine—literally. At all hours of the day, scenes at the afflicted farm in West Virginia have the colors of winter twilight.

Without being at all intrusive, these artful touches punch up the moments that give Dark Waters its life: the faithfully messy scenes where Bilott and his wife come clean with each other; the passages through modest neighborhoods, decaying streets, and rural back roads, observed precisely and without condescension; the horror-movie revelations, sometimes on grainy video, of medical and veterinary anomalies. Maybe this all sounds standard for a whistleblower picture, right down to the sequence where Bilott shuts himself in a room to dig through dusty, disorganized heaps of evidence.

But take a look, for contrast, at another real-life tale about an obsessed whistleblower pursuing his lonely quest over the years: Scott Z. Burns’s The Report. I should say at once that The Report takes a worthy place among the other fictionalized exposés Burns has made, sometimes on his own and sometimes with his frequent partner, Steven Soderbergh. He’s taken on the nuclear industry in Pu-239; agribusiness in The Informant!; the intersection of environmental degradation and epidemic illness in Contagion; and shadowy international finance in The Laundromat. With The Report, which he wrote, directed, and produced, Burns brings to light the CIA’s adoption of torture as standard procedure following the 9/11 attacks, and the determined efforts of both the Bush and Obama administrations to keep this information out of the public record. In other words, thank you, Scott Burns. But now, let’s examine the details.

The Report is essentially the story of a man who sits in a fluorescent-lit, underground office, typing on a computer. This is Daniel J. Jones, the former FBI analyst who served as a staffer to Senator Dianne Feinstein on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, for which he researched and wrote a massive history of CIA torture that emerged in 2014 only as an executive summary, at a mere 525 pages. How to make this labor appeal to an audience? Burns relies on star casting, justified by Jones’s reputation as a dashing fellow, and puts lanky, smoldering Adam Driver in the lead. Unlike Ruffalo in Dark Waters, Driver uses every charm he’s got in The Report, including many opportunities to shout in righteous indignation. Abetted by Annette Bening in the role of Dianne Feinstein, this resourceful, thoroughly likable actor does everything he can to keep you emotionally engaged while leading you through the story’s maze.

But more is needed. Burns really grabs you only when the horror becomes vivid, during flashbacks to tortures conducted by James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen (a blustering Douglas Hodge and T. Ryder Smith), psychologists who sold their nonexistent expertise to the CIA at the cost of $81 million and multiple lives. Burns also gets himself going when he swipes at Kathryn Bigelow and Marc Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty—one notable item in a campaign to bamboozle the public into thinking that torture had produced uniquely valuable information and was therefore, under the terms of John Yoo’s notorious legal finding, not inherently criminal.

I’m deeply glad that film culture now has an anti-Zero Dark Thirty. I just wish Burns’s reliably brusque style had worked better for the story he chose. The Report feels like something you have a duty to see, or (better still) recommend to a Fox News–watching uncle. Dark Waters is similarly obsessive, but it’s a whistleblower movie you want to see.

or sheer entertainment, though, there is little now in the theaters that tops James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari. Granted, it has the psychological complexity of a baseball card, and its theme of he-man individualists defying corporate bureaucrats will not rock your world. It also feels twenty minutes too long, which is a problem for a movie about speed. Mangold might have remedied the fault just by cutting his repetitive views of a tachometer needle edging toward 7,000 and a foot stomping the clutch.

On the other hand, Ford v Ferrari features Christian Bale doing wonders as race-car driver Ken Miles. You get the lean, hollow-cheeked Bale this time, who just by tilting his head one way or the other can seem amused, curious, satirical, or royally pissed off. Matt Damon is equally good as former driver and race-car designer Carroll Shelby, who (strangely enough) is as devoid of a personal life in this telling as Miles is richly endowed with a wife and son. Why Mangold and his writers made that choice, I don’t know. They make up for it, though, with Phedon Papamichael’s wildly kinetic cinematography and a turn by Tracy Letts as a bloated, overbearing, cries-like-a-baby Henry Ford II. Good, clean fun.

This year, Film at Lincoln Center dedicated the New York Film Festival to the memory of Agnès Varda, which felt right in two ways. First, of course, was the recognition of Varda’s decades-long association with the NYFF, up through a farewell work, Varda by Agnès, screened in the main selection. But even more important, considering the tenor of the movies I’ve watched recently in the festival and beyond, was the spirit of her work, justly described by the NYFF with the much-overused term “radical.” Many people are afraid to look at the dark side of life. Varda wasn’t one of them—see Vagabond, for example. But neither was she afraid to look at the bright side—the capacity of people to sustain and renew themselves, take pleasure in the world, and support one another—or to show the bright and dark together, as she did in Le Bonheur.

Not only intelligence and skill but also wholeness, strength, honesty, curiosity, love: These are some of the qualities that infuse Varda’s cinema. Then there’s Joker.

I wouldn’t waste a paragraph on the damned thing, except it was the only movie anybody outside the NYFF talked about in early October and for unfathomable reasons was also invited into the festival for a special screening. The antithesis of Varda: darkness visible as a fashion statement, Nietzschean despair for dummies. Worst of all, the burden of holding an opinion about Joker has now become obligatory. All right: I say director Todd Phillips can dump two cups of Taxi Driver into a bowl and slop in a cup and a half of The King of Comedy, but that doesn’t make him Scorsese. He can stir the goop with visual tricks from Se7en and Fight Club, but that doesn’t make him Fincher, either. And he can try adding political import with a dollop of V for Vendetta, but that doesn’t improve the mess, because V for Vendetta, like Joker, is mindless crap.

Now let’s move on to The Irishman—this year’s opening night selection in the NYFF—which unfortunately showed that sometimes even Scorsese isn’t Scorsese.

He is one of the greatest artists of our era and understands 50 times more about film than I ever will. Of course, the festival would invite him to come with a major new historical drama, based on the author Charles Brandt’s reconstruction of the death of Jimmy Hoffa. The subject seems ideal for Scorsese and (better still) has brought him together with Robert De Niro for their first feature since Casino almost a quarter-century ago. That’s why it pains me to say that the reunion is part of the problem.

In effect, The Irishman picks up where Casino ended, with De Niro (here playing the Mob hitman Frank Sheeran) in senescent retirement. Auteurist self-reflection intrudes at once on narrative plain meaning, and continues to do so when The Irishman flashes back to the roadside meet-cute, long ago, between Sheeran (then a truck driver) and his future boss, Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). The year is 1957 (a local movie house is showing The Three Faces of Eve), which means Sheeran probably would be in his mid-30s. De Niro and Pesci are in their mid-70s. No image-smudging technology can disguise that fact, or keep you from thinking about Goodfellas instead of Sheeran and Bufalino.

The only time you lose yourself entirely in The Irishman is when Al Pacino, as Hoffa, blasts through the posing and reminiscing with the movie’s one all-out, from-the-gut performance. (There’s no dissonance in this case between actor and character. Hoffa was an old-style stump speaker.) Sometimes all the brooding over actors and motifs from past films makes you feel as if Scorsese is engaged in a conscience-stricken meditation on his career. (I don’t know why he’d be conscience-stricken, but the frame story is confessional.) At other times, you wonder what happened to his famed momentum. Made for Netflix, the three-and-a-half-hour Irishman conforms to Sarandos’s Law: Stories expand to fill the time allotted for streaming. In this case, the picture plays as if it were meant for a three-season series, with all of Season 2 dedicated to Frank Sheeran schlepping messages back and forth between the Mob and Hoffa.

Bookending the festival in the closing-night slot was another solemn, overinflated period crime drama: an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn, written, directed by, and starring Edward Norton. Set in a nostalgically recreated 1950s, when cars were cars and men wore hats, the movie aspires to be a kind of New York Chinatown, with racist urban renewal projects substituted for water exploitation, something like Tourette’s syndrome (rather than a sliced-up nose) as the outward sign of the gumshoe’s inner wounds, and a showily oneiric visual style replacing Polanski’s head-snapping rigor. Also, the performances can’t compare. Norton is an excellent actor, but I have to conclude he needs a director who will give him less love than he’s given himself, or the other cast members for that matter. (Willem Dafoe is goosed into giving something I hadn’t thought possible from him: a bad performance.) With Gugu Mbatha-Raw in the Faye Dunaway role, as the love interest with a mysterious past.

part from choosing these opening and closing pictures, the festival’s selection committee programmed an unusually high number of crime pictures this year, maybe in response to supply. It seems that some of the directors the NYFF follows have been reinvigorating themselves by taking on the self-discipline these stories can impose.

Arnaud Desplechin turned away from the baroque, Hitchcock-obsessed narratives within narratives of his recent Ismael’s Ghosts—a brilliant and beautiful film, but exhausting—to make a contemporary police procedural set in the dirty, narrow brick lanes of his native Roubaix. Based on documented investigations but realized in the impassioned, sorrowing spirit of its title, Oh Mercy! (chosen no doubt from the Dylan album that features “Everything Is Broken”), the film is a tour de force for Roschdy Zem, an engrossingly self-contained Obama lookalike who plays Roubaix’s police captain, and for Léa Seydoux as a scuffling single mother who gradually falls under suspicion of a Christmas Eve murder. Mostly nocturnal, and largely shot in probing close-ups, Oh Mercy! is less concerned with discovering who committed a crime than in establishing precisely how it happened and understanding why. You’ve heard of a pitiless gaze? Desplechin’s is the opposite.

After several years of semimystical woolgathering, Marco Bellocchio has pulled himself together with The Traitor, a decades-spanning fictionalization of the life of Tomasso Buscetta, the Sicilian “man of honor” who testified against the Cosa Nostra in a series of landmark trials. In remarks at the public screening, the grave and burly Pierfrancesco Favino, who plays Buscetta, asked the New York audience not to think of The Traitor as a genre movie, because for Italians the subject is all too real. Fair enough. The high points of The Traitor don’t involve gunfire, screeching cars, or door-bursting squads of cops (though you’ve got those, too) but rather the extended confrontations at trial between Buscetta and some of the men he’s accused. You might call these scenes highly theatrical for the way the gangsters dramatize themselves and fabulate, but they’re actually about the dangerous moment when someone insists that playacting come to an end.

Even Corneliu Porumboiu, the most oblique and quizzical writer-director of the Romanian New Wave, has tried his hand at a caper movie, picking up his ordinarily protoplasmic pace while channeling his imagination toward questions of where the loot is hidden, and who’s double-crossing whom. Still, he’s Porumboiu, so the channels swerve strangely and circle back. Starring Vlad Ivanov as a police detective who is deeply corrupt (or maybe not) and Catrinel Marlon as a criminal femme fatale (named Gilda, of course) who will betray the cop (or not), the film has the English title The Whistlers because the criminals for no good reason rely for coded communication on a language of whistles developed in the Canary Islands. The landscape of the Canaries makes a lovely change from Bucharest, and the scenes of the cop learning to whistle are little masterpieces of deadpan comedy. That said, I thought the movie was mostly hot air.

Not exactly a true-crime story but moving with the speed and efficiency of the best espionage thrillers, Wasp Network is a return to order, and urgency, for another perennial festival favorite, Olivier Assayas. As he did with his earlier, magnificent Carlos, Assayas throws himself headlong into telling a story about the deeds and emotional make-ups of people engaged in extralegal political intrigues; in this case, Cuban agents who infiltrated anti-Castro groups in Miami in the 1990s. For a factual account, you might turn to the film’s source material, Fernando Morais’s The Last Soldiers of the Cold War. Assayas can’t be footnoted, but he gives you impeccably crisp direction, a wide scope of action, an exceptional cast—Edgar Ramírez, Wagner Moura, Penélope Cruz, Gael García Bernal—and some enjoyable misdirection. This is, after all, a tale about liars.

o far I’ve focused on festival selections that fall more or less comfortably into categories. You know the rules; you know how well the filmmaker is playing within or against them. These genre pictures make up most of film history, and sometimes (as I’ve suggested) even the headiest directors need to get back in touch with the demands they make. They belong in the NYFF. But a NYFF that showed only genre movies would have no reason to exist.

Here are some of the selections I really liked.

Challenging and unpredictable, when not outright daring you to punch it in the face, Nadav Lapid’s extraordinary Synonyms offers an alarming new take on the themes of drifting youth and soured identity. Yoav (Tom Mercier) is a strongly built, twentyish Israeli who has “escaped” his country (much as his grandfather escaped Lithuania, he says) and is now knocking about Paris, wearing a hideous, borrowed overcoat and speaking an absurdly bookish French. He’s done with Hebrew. For the pretty young French couple with whom Yoav falls in, he’s what lawyers would call an attractive nuisance. For the Israeli mission, where he somehow lands a security gig, he’s trouble at home. For Lapid, he’s the vehicle for one narrative provocation after another. My favorite: Yoav’s sudden explosion into a tabletop performance at a disco, where he dirty dances with a croissant.

After too long a fallow period, Pedro Almodóvar has returned to form, or even improved on it, with Pain and Glory, the most candidly autobiographical film he’s ever ventured. A bearded, shambling Antonio Banderas, his eyes downcast and expression guarded, plays Almodóvar’s stand-in, a filmmaker suffering from depression, idleness, and multiple physical ailments. So he tries heroin. While drifting in and out of memories of childhood (the church school where all he did was sing; the cave-like house where his impoverished family took shelter; most of all his mother, so warm and protective that she’s played by Penélope Cruz), the scagged-out protagonist also risks encounters in the present with two men who have troubled his past. To call the filmmaking fluid is to belabor the obvious; in its imagery, the movie is practically an essay on hydrology. More to the point, Pain and Glory is an unsentimental but radiant and faultlessly sustained emotional journey from futility and near-isolation to reawakening. I think Varda might have loved it, especially the funny parts.

Noah Baumbach’s excellent Marriage Story—which is actually the story of a divorce—revisits territory this filmmaker has explored before, notably in 2005’s The Squid and the Whale. That movie was a drama about a break-up told from a son’s point of view. Marriage Story is the tale of an increasingly nasty break-up as seen by the parents: an avant-garde New York theater director (Adam Driver) and his actress wife (Scarlett Johansson), who wants to return to her native Los Angeles and independent, paying work. Their young son (Azhy Robertson) in effect controls both but is often treated as if he’s part of the background, while the foreground fills up with lawyers (Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta), court officials, staggering dollar figures, and disputed residences. One of the most straightforward movies in this year’s NYFF, Marriage Story was shown as the festival’s centerpiece selection, where it made a strong case for being direct—so long as the film is also honest, wised-up, and mature about the messes we make of our lives.

Finally, to cite a movie that fits into no category but its own: Vitalina Varela is the latest evocation by the Portuguese master Pedro Costa of the lives of impoverished Cape Verdeans—nonprofessionals who more or less play themselves, within scenes that are dreamlike in appearance and yet absolutely concrete. This time, the lead performer and title character is someone whose husband ran off decades ago, leaving her alone and unsupported in Cape Verde. As the film begins, she arrives in the outskirts of Lisbon for his funeral, getting there three days too late. “Go home,” people advise her. She says she’s waited all these years to come to Portugal and isn’t about to leave. What follows is less a story than a collage of incidents, many unexplained and some imagined, crossed with a theological disputation with a despairing parish priest. The camera focuses on Vitalina with hallucinatory precision; an almost theatrical wash of area lighting makes fragments of buildings loom out of near-blackness; incidental colors smudge faintly on walls, as if in a Twombly painting, or shout from the shirts on a clothesline; and the noise of unseen babies crying, or broadcasts nattering, hovers just outside the scenes, suggesting an ongoing life that has paused within the frame. Vitalina Varela begins with a procession leaving a funeral, ends in a graveyard, and in the middle puts you in touch with something absolute in its main character’s experience. It is a film with no commercial prospects whatever. It is the reason we have a New York Film Festival.

Well, that and Parasite—but that’s another story.

 2ny movie series that includes Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite has already exceeded expectations—so I’m going to declare the 57th New York Film Festival a success even while I’m still catching the screenings. I’ll have more to say about the selections after the festival has wrapped on October 13. For now, here’s a hint—infinitely modest—of what you can expect of Parasite at the NYFF, or soon after when it’s released in theaters.

Watch out for the way Bong opens the movie, like a devilish chess master pretending to play along conventional lines. Here, crammed into a semi-basement apartment in Seoul, is a comic family much like others you’ve seen—gruff father, blunt mother, hip and attractive adult daughter and son—all scuffling to stay fed. Here, too, is the sort of scheme you’ve often followed, in which sympathetic rogues lie and cheat their way into the graces of the rich. The son sees an opportunity to gain employment in the home of a wealthy family; the others soon follow, deploying ruse after ruse, until you flatter yourself into thinking you’ve understood the position and are a little ahead of Bong.

Sucker. He’s planted traps all over the board. He’s thought up complications that will squeeze you until you squeal. As soon as the middle game starts, you realize you’re helpless before his onslaught, and happily so—even though happiness is exactly what this exquisitely devious movie will deny its characters. Call Parasite a satire of high and low, if you like—it’s certainly concerned with hierarchies of class and their embodiment in the architecture and geography of Seoul—but don’t imagine you’ll escape untouched. That’s the real story of Parasite, in two words: Nobody escapes.

Not that the Parks’ tastefully magnificent home looks like any kind of dead end when Ki-woo Kim (Choi Woo-sik) shows up to claim a tutoring job under slightly false pretenses. An immaculately detailed International Style box set behind a substantial wall and a glistening lawn, the house is all free-flowing, open-plan space and floor-to-ceiling windows: perfect as a showplace for the Parks’ immaculate lives and Bong’s ingeniously unfolding choreography. By the time you reach this ostensible Eden, you’ve already seen a more likely site of confinement: the bug-infested coffin of hopes where the Kim family abides in the narrow, crowded streets far below. There, the windows are no more than a grimy band set at pavement level, admitting the stench left by drunks who use this cul-de-sac as an open-air pissoir.

No wonder Ki-woo wants to get into the sunlight and a cushy gig with the Parks, alternately educating their teenage daughter and flirting with her. No wonder his sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) bluffs her own way into the luxury of a job with the Parks, as an art therapist for their 9-year-old son. (Ki-jung knows all about art therapy; she Googled it.) So it goes, through one underhanded trick after another—until one dark and stormy night, when the Parks have left on a camping trip and the Kims think they’re alone in paradise.

As Ki-woo likes to say whenever he comes upon a striking turn of events, “It’s so metaphorical!” What happens next in Parasite is metaphorical, all right. It’s also metonymic, symbolic, allegorical, and terrifyingly out of control—for the Kims, I mean, but not for Bong, who puts his scam-artist family through a breakneck sequence that gives you great filmmaking not by the moment or minute but the solid half-hour. It starts with the unexpected ringing of a doorbell, proceeds through alternating episodes of Grand Guignol cruelty and dirty-minded farce—imagine a treacherous staircase, a noxious peach, some not-so-private sex, and a teepee, not to mention a mock North Korean newscast—and concludes, much later and far below the Parks’ home, in an unstoppable deluge of filth.

Bong is by now an acknowledged master of continuous action. Think of the emergence of the monster from the Han River in The Host, the onward-driving battles through the train in Snowpiercer, the shopping-mall rampage of the giant pet pig in Okja. But he’s never before created a sequence that’s so uncanny and yet so grounded in the mundane. The contrast between high and low expands to become outsized and dizzying, but the social vertigo it represents is already built into the hillside topography of Seoul. The horrific deluge has been present in potential since the first shot of a drunk peeing on the street; the Tales From the Crypt motif is already implicit in the Kims’ dismally ordinary below-grade apartment. The visual correlate of this merger of fact and fantasy glows in Hong Kyung-pyo’s cinematography, which dwells obsessively on the surface of every material: stone, wood, glass, concrete. The images make even the shafts of light in the Parks’ house seem tangible—and therefore bursting with a promise or threat beyond themselves.

You might say something similar about the dialogue, which remains plausible even while rising toward hyperbole, like the speech in comic books borne aloft in balloons. When the Kim family’s patriarch, played by Bong’s wonderfully rumpled signature actor Song Kang-ho, speaks about the wealthy, he does so as poor people may do at times, with a terrible forbearance that helps him live with himself. Mrs. Park, he comments, is rich, but she’s nice. To which his wife (Jang Hye-jin) snaps back that Mrs. Park is nice because she’s rich. Money’s like an iron, she says: It takes out the creases. The son finds himself similarly at odds with his sister when he pauses in the midst of catastrophe to wonder what his affluent, college-educated friend Min would do in this situation. It’s a reasonable question—to which the sister shouts, “Min wouldn’t be in this situation!”

That’s about three-quarters of the way through the dark and stormy night, with worse still to follow. But as morning comes, bringing sunshine that now seems jeeringly bright, and the characters move into place for the climax, you begin to feel once more as if you can see what’s coming next. This time, you’re not mistaken. Parasite has gone into the end game; the final moves feel inevitable.

But even as the logic plays out, Bong pulls a twist out of the position, this time startling you, paradoxically, by using understated observation rather than satirical excess. Having dramatized the struggle of rich versus poor in wildly lurid terms, he brings the conflict to its dreadful conclusion with the simplest, smallest, most everyday gesture possible. One man sniffs disapprovingly at another.

And that’s mate.

ust because Brad Pitt plays a role doesn’t guarantee his character will be omnicompetent. Goofballs, flakes, screw-ups, and the occasional self-tortured demigod have also figured in his repertoire, to excellent effect. Still, Cate Blanchett may have summed up the prevailing attitude toward this perpetually underrated actor—underrated as in taken at face value—when she saw him in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and groaned, in exasperated surrender, “Oh, God. You’re perfect.”

In Ad Astra, James Gray plays with this image, and exploits it, by casting Pitt as astronaut Roy McBride, an action hero who never fails and for just that reason suffers in endless, lonely silence. Roy is a guy who can tumble off a needle-like International Space Antenna somewhere in the mesosphere and come to ground minutes later all but unharmed. (No spoiler alert; this is how the movie introduces him.) He can battle shrieking, ravenous beasts, outrun and outgun lunar pirates, wrestle an out-of-control spaceship into line, and when necessary prevail single-handed against multiple assailants who ought to know better than to mess with Brad Pitt. Still, it makes him deeply sad to kick ass. Even the knowledge that he’s rescued an entire crew from incineration doesn’t lift his mood but leaves him gazing to the side in sorrow and a prettily arranged raking light, giving Gray plenty of time to capture the pain in middle-aged eyes that have gone beyond crinkly to wrinkled.

How is it that Brad the Unconquerable (or, if you prefer, Roy McBride) performs his duties so impeccably—including their distasteful public aspect of strutting around as an alpha astronaut—while feeling shriveled inside and cut off from humanity? Why are his only heart-to-heart conversations the automated psych evaluations that Space Command makes him undergo, in which he blandly lies to the computer and is told, once again, that he’s good to go?

The answer may have to do with the burdens of living up to the audience’s expectations of Brad Pitt. (Gray forces me to consider a movie-about-the-movies interpretation by constructing Ad Astra out of reminiscences of older, better films.) Or the solution may concern Roy McBride’s father (Tommy Lee Jones), an ideal who is doubly beyond reach: because he is by far the most legendary of astronauts, and because 16 years ago he capped a lifetime of neglecting Roy by disappearing on a mission somewhere around Neptune. The father is godlike, and like God he is absent.

He might also be threatening an apocalypse. Discharges of antimatter-driven energy have recently been pulsing toward Earth from Neptune—so we are solemnly informed, without the good-humored winks that accompany, say, discussions of the warp-inducing capability of dilithium crystals—and the effects are threatening Life As We Know It. The joyless son must accept orders to venture far into the cold vastness of space and attempt to contact an even colder father with whom he has no connection.

Assuming you go to see Ad Astra, I will leave it to you to decide whether Tommy Lee Jones is Ahab or the great white whale. It’s enough to say there’s a long, dangerous voyage, a struggle, and a confrontation with the infinite. And then comes something that Melville doesn’t float amid the shivers of the Pequod, but that Gray and his co-screenwriter Ethan Gross have been patiently, laboriously filtering into the movie all along: a moral. Two morals. Several morals. As presented in IMAX, Ad Astra may be the largest needlepoint sampler ever to hang on a wall.

Why, by the way, should IMAX be part of the package? Ad Astra has outer space vistas and other elements of spectacle—borrowed, as I’ve mentioned, from the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity, and even Soylent Green—but I’d estimate about a third of the images are close-ups of Our Brad of Sorrows. It’s fine that moviegoers pay to see that face, but why at such inflated prices and dimensions? Part of the reason, I suppose, is that Gray wants evidence of the actor’s age and apparent weariness to help carry the film’s meaning. But another part of the reason is that Gray has chosen to make Ad Astra as if it were an illustrated lecture. Pitt’s narration explains in voiceover what his character thinks and feels about everything, while the pictures, often reduced to an accompaniment, pass by in compensatory gigantism.

As a James Gray fan, I’m disappointed, not just in him but in the alarmingly enthusiastic reception this hot air balloon has received. A very smart writer-director who loves movie traditions, Gray has created astonishing, deeply felt, and above all intelligent revivals of 1920s melodrama (The Immigrant) and the jungle exploration epic (The Lost City of Z). In Ad Astra, unfortunately, he’s revived another tradition—not sci-fi adventure, but addressing the viewers as if they can’t keep up.

peaking of long, perilous journeys and parental ties: Film Forum in New York has just given the US theatrical premiere of Hassan Fazili’s Midnight Traveler, the story of an Afghan family’s three-year, 3,500-mile trek toward provisional refuge in the European Union. Like Ad Astra, the film concentrates on relationships and emotional states as much as on outward action. Unlike Ad Astra, Midnight Traveler tells a story that actually happened and was recorded not on IMAX equipment but by the family members themselves, using mobile phones.

The family had this much of an advantage: Before setting out on the smugglers’ route, both Fazili and his wife Fatima Hussaini were already filmmakers. As intellectuals and artists open to tolerant currents in Islam, they also had a disadvantage: The Taliban had issued a death sentence against Fazili for establishing the Art Café in Kabul, which catered to both men and women. After being deported from Tajikistan, where the family had taken temporary shelter with friends, their thick slab of an asylum application having gone nowhere, Fazili and Hussaini decided they had no choice except to risk an illegal crossing by way of Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Serbia with their young daughters Nargis and Zahra in tow.

The story they recorded together—Nargis and Zahra shot video, too—is one of privation and dangers, but even more of the bonds of marriage and the resilience of youth. Some of the strongest moments are the most joyful: Nargis laughing at the way the Bosporus splashes her feet; Zahra frolicking in the snow at a Serbian refugee camp (which looks like a group of barracks but was by far the cleanest, safest, most supportive place the family stayed). Until the family is shut in a transit zone in Hungary—a real prison environment—there are also moments of beauty captured on the fly. And even there, Fazili has painfully lovely memories, shown in an impressionistic montage.

Emelie Mahdavian edited those montages and all the rest and wrote the film, having helped Fazili at long distance throughout the journey and consulted with him after the family reached Serbia. This highly selective collaboration makes Midnight Traveler a constructed documentary if not a quasi-fiction. Think of it as being just across the genre line from Michael Winterbottom’s extraordinary 2002 reenacted documentary of East-West migration, In This World. Contrasting methods, and more than a dozen years’ time difference—but both are essential films, about a story that needs to change and hasn’t.

Maria Semple’s novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a product that soothes as it softens. The collage-like form gives an impression of cleverness with minimal strain, its faux-documentary excerpts labeled so carefully that readers need never puzzle to fit them together, its author scarcely troubling to disguise her hand while sliding from one narrator to the next. The book’s satirical passages and intermittent parodies are similarly challenge-free, characterizing their targets as having too much money and pretension or too little, too ostentatious a set of beliefs or none at all—which is to say, lying safely outside the thick part of the bell curve where a popular novelist finds her audience. As for the theme of a woman’s creative urges being dammed up by years of marriage and child-rearing, until the pressure threatens to crack her insides and flood everyone around her, a few madcap, picaresque adventures and snap reconciliations effect both the heroine’s liberation and a return to familial order. It’s certainly not a worthless novel. I live with two people who enjoyed it. But if we still have museums a hundred years from now, and books, a curator might tuck a copy of Where’d You Go, Bernadette into the vitrine labeled “The Literature of Reassurance, 2000–2020.”

Richard Linklater, by contrast with Semple, is an experimentalist to the core, despite having just made an appropriately fresh-scented, easy-to-apply film version of Bernadette. Even when taking on a commercial project, Linklater has usually sneaked a twist into his filmmaking, as when he put together an actual kids’ band for School of Rock, which made the picture into a quasi-documentary. His best movies—including the Before trilogy and the incomparable Boyhood—were shot as forays into unknown time. At the far edge of his work—A Scanner Darkly—he’s been the only filmmaker (Ridley Scott included) to risk a faithful approximation of Philip K. Dick’s writing, overlaying the real and the imagined in a single set of images, until the audience is almost cross-eyed with the strain of comprehension.

With Bernadette, though, he’s played it straight. If you like the novel, Linklater will give you what you’ve paid for, minus some incidental plot complications that would only have been in your way. If you haven’t read the novel, he will treat you to the story of a forceful, eccentric, tortured woman in her middle years who at last pulls a Houdini on the straitjacket of her life—a rather stained and moldy straitjacket at that—which you know from the start must come off. You’ll laugh. You’ll be reassured. You’ll even shed a happy tear. Thank God Cate Blanchett did the movie with him.

Linklater has previously worked with some excellent actresses, but none with Blanchett’s magical ability to pull bouquets of line readings out of her ears, her elbows, the thin air. As Bernadette Fox, an anxiety-ridden, reclusive, but infinitely sharp-witted architect who hasn’t designed anything for 20 years, Blanchett does full justice to the character’s suffering—manifested in her wary sidelong glances, moments of panicked stiffness, and blurts of sarcasm—while reveling in the innate energy that makes this woman such a strangely volatile depressive. Blanchett rambunctiously gargles her closed vowels to show Bernadette’s an American, throws her arms and voice high in the air to race through a recitation of complaints to an old friend, drops into a rasping yet purring contralto when she wants to send out a zinger, and never deigns to consult anyone’s sense of rhythm but her own. She’s reluctant to go on a cruise to Antarctica with her teenage daughter and husband, she says, because it would “require me to be surrounded by… ” then lets the pause tease you until she’s ready to come out with a clinching, tickling “peo-ple.” The character’s unease is palpable, but so is the fun Blanchett’s having.

That’s crucial—not only because the movie is meant to amuse but because it’s often as much a comedy of misbehavior as is its current competition, the preadolescent gross-out Good Boys. Bernadette is of course less raunchy, and far less ignorant, than the middle school kids who are the vehicles and butts of the humor in Good Boys. Even so, a lot of Where’d You Go, Bernadette is devoted to wringing laughs from the character’s insouciant slovenliness, habits of self-medication, foul-mouthed assaults on propriety, and wanton destructiveness. She achieves her greatest success in the latter category by allowing her garden’s retaining wall to crumble, sending a deluge of mud into the home of a neighbor (Kristen Wiig) whose only offense is being clean, orderly, chipper, and a little too rah-rah at the school where Bernadette, too, is a parent.

Given that the movie is entirely on Bernadette’s side, you’re free to enjoy the mess. Despite her many faults, Bernadette maintains a loving, warm, singing-in-the-car relationship with her daughter Bee (a delightfully alert Emma Nelson), can list a MacArthur award on her CV (unlike the neighbor, whose credits are apparently limited to Christmas cookies), and is not played by Wiig, who is busy throughout deploying her finest exasperated flibbertigibbet shtick. Let her drown in the muck!

But there’s another side to Bernadette as well, involving grief and frustration, into which Linklater invests rather more conviction than does the novel. Semple sketches a tale of woe in one section of the book but then edges away quickly. Linklater hooks the audience with some introductory slapstick and then has the guts to allow the sorrow to seep in. The pervasive sadness eventually makes good on the damp, peeling rot of the old house that Bernadette shares with her very patient husband (Billy Crudup), converting this dilapidation from a sign of quirkiness to a condition of the soul. Blanchett, too, gradually seems to bring the gloom inside her, no longer hiding impishly behind the character’s feistiness and big, round sunglasses balanced on the most prominent cheekbones in show business, but playing Bernadette’s guilt and dread with naked honesty. Linklater made a comparable transition from raucousness to sustained solemnity in his previous film, the funereal road movie Last Flag Flying. In Bernadette, he’s done it even better.

But then it’s over—because the plot kicks in, Bernadette’s picaro adventure to Antarctica takes off, and with a wash of turquoise polar light all is forgiven, forgotten, healed, and made whole. Somehow Kristen Wiig no longer deserves a mudslide—she’s nice! Billy Crudup no longer seethes with worry and recrimination—he’s contrite! Emma Nelson will not break Bernadette’s heart by growing up—she’ll remain the good child forever! And (spoiler alert) Bernadette is happy. By abandoning her home and family, she miraculously gets them back, and with them a revived career.

I don’t think wish fulfillment has ever disregarded my wishes more thoroughly. I had bought into both the brio and the gravity of Blanchett’s performance, the underlying desperation and the raised middle finger violence. I had been carried along by Linklater’s storytelling, with its deepening shadows. What I wanted was a resolution that would be true to the art in this movie—because the film is ostensibly about an artist’s need to create. What I got was a shell game.

Plus some gorgeous vistas of icebergs and ice shelves. Their presence, according to the story, helps redeem Bernadette. Just between us (spoiler alert), they’re melting.

n Give Me Liberty, a film by Kirill Mikhanovsky and Alice Austen that’s as independent as its title, the average shot shows the interior of a rickety medical transport van as it rattles at inadvisable speed along miles of pot-holed streets in Milwaukee, its seats jammed to overflowing with a mixed lot of the challenged (physically and developmentally), elderly, Russian-speaking, criminal, or some combination of the above, all being bounced, shaken, and moved to voluble protest or song while the driver radios lies to his dispatcher and guns into the next turn. I take this to be the filmmakers’ image of the American polity, proposed cheerfully and lovingly but with full awareness of our flaws. We’re not a melting pot, but more of a diesel-fueled corn popper on wheels.

Set over the course of a single winter’s day, cast mostly with nonprofessionals collected here and there, and directed as if Mikhanovsky was trying to keep his camera one location ahead of the bailiffs, Give Me Liberty motors along behind young Vic (Chris Galust), the slender, fine-featured, 20-something driver who provides the film’s point of view. It’s the perspective of a thoroughly acculturated Russian immigrant who has nothing in life but his work and a crate of old vinyl. Vic rooms with his dementia-stricken grandfather, perhaps on the down-low, in what appears to be subsidized housing and scrambles with great responsibility to serve the overload of variously needy clients who are his substitute for a social circle.

Over the course of the film’s exceptionally chaotic day, Vic’s schedule gets shot to hell and his circle expands. His grandfather and about a dozen other elderly Russians demand to be transported to the funeral of one of their friends—an unwanted complication that fills Vic’s van with squabbling, fussy, accordion-playing people. Their entirely unofficial addition to his passenger list sets Vic at odds and then in complicity with Tracy (Lauren “Lolo” Spencer), a smart, self-possessed, wheelchair-using young client from the black side of Milwaukee, and introduces him to a loud, brashly convivial interloper, Dima (Max Stoianov), a Russian with a boxer’s physique, bloody knuckles, and no proven connection to the dear “aunt” whose funeral he insists on attending.

Death looms over the story, obviously—not only the death of the old friend, whose interment and boozy wake provide a riotous centerpiece to the picture, but the deaths at police hands of residents of the black neighborhoods, which have taken to the streets in protest. More generally, Vic deals every day with infirm people who are still clutching at life, and with people who are vital but too often hidden from mainstream eyes: the adults at Milwaukee’s Eisenhower Center—a training and work facility for people with disabilities—who appear in the film as themselves. They’re all in “the land of the free.” So the dialogue reminds us, without irony—and so does the talent show at the Eisenhower Center, where one young man’s act consists of lifting his arms in the air as a boom box plays “Born in the USA.” The question for Vic, after he’s spent a wild day taking care of everybody else’s needs, is what he wants to do with his own freedom.

Give Me Liberty harbors no illusions of domestic tranquility. A mourner may claim that in the former homeland “we all lived together in peace,” but the others at the graveside are meanwhile arguing about whether to sing in Russian, Belarussian, or Yiddish. Lovers are betrayed in the course of the film, brothers are arrested, and one highly dubious alliance is formed. We may also assume that the next time Vic takes out the van, the shocks will still be terrible and the streets bumpy. No matter. America will lie open before him—Milwaukee, at least. Here it is as Mikhanovsky and Austen see it, in dowdy, frozen, spread-out, contentious glory: a gift to Vic, even if he’s only starting to realize it, and a gift to you.

landscape film, a group portrait, and a reflection on words—the power they can represent, and the power that is sometimes used against them—Marjoleine Boonstra’s documentary The Miracle of the Little Prince takes off from the fact that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince has been translated into more than 300 languages. Among them are a growing number of tongues that have been suppressed or otherwise endangered. Boonstra travels to meet some of the translators of Le Petit Prince who are engaged in linguistic rescue missions, listens to them speak about their lives, and learns how this artfully simple fable soaks up meaning from vastly different circumstances.

Reasonably enough, she begins where the book is set, in North Africa. There, with the Moroccan mountains in the background, Lahbib Fouad talks about translating the text into the Berber dialect of Tamazight—the only language he had known until he was sent to school and told to his shock that he had to learn something called Arabic. He and his friend the poet Omar Taous describe Le Petit Prince as “a mirror to the Berber people.” It was natural to translate the book, Fouad says. He knows a lot of words for things in the desert.

A world away, in the snowy north of Finland, the translator Kerttu Vuolab also recalls being deprived of her language at school—she speaks Sámi—saying she felt as if her throat had been slit. In her loneliness, she discovered Le Petit Prince. “The book became my friend, and still is.” In El Salvador, Boonstra shows Jorge Lemus consulting with three grandmothers to refine his translation into Nawat, a language whose ban was enforced with a massacre in 1932. There is no pre-Columbian word for “rose,” Lemus notes, pointing to a difficulty in the translation, but is proud to say that the rose in the fable symbolizes Saint-Exupéry’s Salvadoran wife, Consuelo. As for Tashi Kyi and Noyontsang Lamokyab, Tibetans exiled in Paris, they struggle to retain their language while having lost their country and their families. It’s not far-fetched to say they’re like the Little Prince himself, trying to make friends in the desert while thinking about his home on Asteroid B-612.

Sitting in a world capital, writing in an English that’s spoken almost everywhere and is just as widely abused, it’s easy to despair of literature and to dismiss as sentimental the idea that a book might speak to people in many different conditions. Boonstra has evidence to the contrary. It’s worth listening to—in Tamazight, Sámi, Nawat, Tibetan, or any tongue you can name.

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a film about footwear—tooled cowboy boots, white plastic go-go boots, loose and low suede boots that walk their way into scenes while being tracked by a low-minded camera. It’s about the view from fast-moving cars—a pale yellow Cadillac Coupe de Ville, an MG with enough dashboard controls for a Pan Am jetliner—and about the luxury of Pan Am travel back in the day, and the voices of that day on radio and television—pop songs, jingles, newscasts, sales pitches, and multiple forms of disposable drama layered thickly onto the soundtrack. You could say these artifacts—these love objects of Tarantino’s antiquarianism—are present to establish the ambience of Los Angeles in 1969. Or you could describe them more accurately as elements necessary for a cleansing through bloodshed.

This thirst for sanguinary redemption may be secular—we’re talking about Tarantino, not Martin Scorsese—but it should not be ignored, since it’s both the theme and the method of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. The characters, many of them show business types, speak with pleasure about violence, whether spontaneously praising the films and TV shows they enjoy (“I love that stuff—y’know, the killing”) or reciting the lines written for them in these productions. As a scripted gunslinger reminisces at one point, “People died that day,” to which his old pardner replies, “Yeah, but we had a good time.”

For Rick Dalton, the fading star played by Leonardo DiCaprio, the assumption that people enjoy witnessing sudden, painful death is nothing less than a career foundation. Rick’s greatest success was in a long-since-canceled television series, Bounty Law, in which the manhunter he portrayed invariably preferred “dead” to “alive” and elicited the audience’s agreement with a raffish wink to the camera. In this, Rick’s persona isn’t far different from that of Christoph Waltz’s character in Tarantino’s Django Unchained, as the bounty hunter who just can’t resist pulling the trigger on a man he dislikes—played, as it happens, by DiCaprio—and so sets off the mayhem that ends that movie on such a note of buoyant optimism. You might say that in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood Tarantino reflects on a general American desire to be entertained by slaughter and on his own role in satisfying that appetite.

He reflects, and he also delivers, slowly ratcheting up the foreboding of a massacre and then releasing the tension in an ecstasy of stabbing, shooting, chomping, bashing, and charbroiling. The twist—which makes this movie a self-critique, a horror story, or a head-spinning act of cultural revisionism, depending on how you think about it—is that the bloodlettings promised are the Manson family murders of August 9, 1969.

Well, some people have been observing the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, others commemorating Woodstock. Leave it to Tarantino to want to spend the summer of 2019 revisiting the Manson killings. Fair enough. No one denies their significance, whether as the outrage that ended the ’60s (as Joan Didion famously wrote) or as a crime that especially chilled the show business community in Los Angeles. The question is what Tarantino makes of the months leading up to these murders, as experienced by a fictionalized Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and by two invented characters at the house next door: Rick and his stunt double, chauffeur, handyman, and confidant, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).

he term “stunt double” ought to be enough to alert you to the symbolic possibilities of Rick’s relationship with Cliff, a man who is (as a voice-over says) more than a brother and less than a wife. You can, of course, take these two characters at face value: one an alcoholic almost-was now sinking into the oblivion of bit parts on episodic TV—his weakness betraying itself in a slight stammer, a hacking cough, an embarrassing forgetfulness about his lines, and a tendency toward furniture-smashing bouts of self-pity—and the other a grinning, loose-limbed, seemingly easygoing rake who has accepted the transition to being Rick’s gofer because no one will hire him anymore to perform stunts. But the irony of Tarantino’s casting two of the world’s biggest stars to play has-beens might tell you not to take the characters too literally. So, too, should Tarantino’s talent for explicating genre films—for example, the suggestion he threw out several years ago that the rivalry in Top Gun between Tom Cruise’s and Val Kilmer’s characters makes that movie the story of a man fighting his homosexuality.

Let’s take “double” seriously and imagine Rick and Cliff as one person: a fumbling outer man whose face is known to the world (though less and less) and an inner man who is secretly powerful, as well as grim and enraged (when no one’s looking). You can sense the dynamic in a remarkable sequence early in the film, in which Rick dismisses Cliff for the day—saying goodbye while making hollow, gratuitous boasts about owning a house in the Hollywood Hills—and Cliff drives off into the twilight, very quickly and recklessly, his expression suddenly not relaxed and jocular but severe as he speeds toward his own home. It’s a banged-up, isolated trailer behind a drive-in theater in Van Nuys. This must be what Rick is like inside: a man who never escaped the emotional constraints of poverty and feels that he dwells, literally, in the shadow of the movie business.

As Tarantino gets deeper into the movie, the possibilities inherent in Cliff’s function as stunt double become more admirable and also more frightening. When Cliff was still practicing his trade, he would perform the feats that Rick only seemed to do, and even now, he moves with a competence that Rick can’t approach. Given the menial task of fixing Rick’s television antenna, Cliff straps on a work belt (very useful for holding a can of beer) and bounds up to the roof in three leaps, no ladder required. Meanwhile, in the dressing room of a TV western, Rick is soaking his face in ice water, hoping to make himself presentable to the director and makeup artist. Rick is about to play yet another deadly villain, this one to be given the facial hair and fringed leather jacket of a hippie (to make the show more relevant). It’s a crummy job, but Rick desperately wants to please everyone—so much so that when a hilariously precocious actress does a scene with him and tells him when it’s over that he just did the best acting she’s ever seen in her life (she’s 8), Rick breaks down and weeps.

Cliff, by contrast, doesn’t give a damn about pleasing anybody, and though he professes nothing but disgust for hippies, he spends a little time with some real ones. Following a whim, he finds himself introduced to members of the Manson family at the abandoned movie and television ranch they’ve taken over. For reasons that are understandable but that he enjoys far too much, he beats one of them to a pulp. Cliff has that kind of competence, too.

hile DiCaprio and Pitt are acting out this increasingly pathetic and dangerous duality on the margins of the movie business—DiCaprio performing with a self-abasing commitment to everything needy and worthless in Rick, Pitt with a swagger that makes Cliff an attractive menace—Tarantino cross-cuts to his fictionalized Tate to evoke the wonders of being on top in the final days of old-style Hollywood.

No matter whether Sharon’s husband, Roman Polanski, is by her side—and it makes Rick frantic to know he’s living next door to Polanski, the hottest, most presumably unapproachable director in the world—she succeeds in having fun. At night she parties at the Playboy Mansion—its name comes on the screen in huge letters, in the magazine’s logotype—where she dances joyfully with Mama Cass and is ogled by an envious Steve McQueen. During the day, she gets high at home and grooves on Paul Revere & the Raiders or goes shopping and is delighted to see that a theater is showing one of her movies, The Wrecking Crew with Dean Martin.

You might think a woman with these habits must be pampered and ready for the tumbrel—which was how the Manson family saw her—but in Robbie’s performance, she’s all charm and ingenuousness. Like Rick, Sharon wants nothing so much as to be recognized—which you understand is why she asks for free admission to The Wrecking Crew, not to save 75 cents but for the pleasure of making herself known. And when it turns out that she has to tell the movie theater’s employees who she is, she doesn’t mind this proof that her status as a celebrity is really very low. She poses cheerfully for a picture—standing next to a lobby card, as the cashier instructs her, so people will know who she is—and then settles in to enjoy the movie with her bare feet draped over the seat in front of her. Every time the audience laughs at something she’s doing on-screen, she’s thrilled. It doesn’t matter to her that her role in the film, as she’s explained without shame, is “the klutz.” She has no pretensions.

If Sharon embodies the glories of the old Hollywood, then Rick is not only right to want his part in them but also innocent in his desire. She’s the pure soul nurtured within a notoriously avaricious, back-stabbing industry. She lives to make others happy. The dramatic irony of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is that the audience knows, as she does not, that the Manson family is coming closer and closer, and the nearest witnesses are two men who scarcely deserve her proximity.

ut why do Manson’s followers want to commit murder on Cielo Drive? The lone man in the crew, Tex (Austin Butler), is satisfied to know that Charlie gave them orders. But Tarantino leaves it to one of Charlie’s waifs, Sadie (Mikey Madison), to deliver the real answer, in a drug-fueled tirade. They grew up watching television, she says, and all they ever saw on TV was killing. Now it’s good to kill the pigs who taught them to kill.

So much for Tarantino’s self-critique. If the people who object to movie and TV bloodshed are mindless, vicious killers, then the case against media violence is worthless. On to the climactic gorefest!

But I think this reading is too simple. To get a better sense of what Tarantino might be up to, you need to recall that the Manson murders had nothing to do with taking revenge on filmmakers who devalue human life. The goal, as later teased out by authorities, was to spark a race war.

Which leads me to an interesting anomaly in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. There are almost no black faces to be seen. The writer-director who can scarcely walk to the corner grocery without having Samuel L. Jackson’s company, whose previous film was about the endlessness of the Civil War and whose film before that was a revenge drama about a runaway slave, has made a movie that’s all white (except for a handful of character actors cast as TV-western Mexicans and Mike Moh as Bruce Lee). Of course, Tarantino has no obligation to match the demographic balance of 1969 Los Angeles. He’s creating one of his alternative histories, not a work of realism. But the question remains: Why did he make this choice, especially when the Manson family’s racist motives are so well known?

To answer the question, you need only look at who gets redeemed.

The publicity department at Sony Pictures has solemnly enjoined me from revealing what happens, but I think I can say, without violating confidentiality, that the movie concludes with Tarantino’s heartfelt repudiation of ’60s youth culture and validation of the affluent straights, whether found in the movie studios, around the pool at the Playboy Mansion, or in the hangout of two hippie-hating, middle-aged, secretly brutal white men who feel they’ve been deprived of their better days. When people like these made the movies, they blithely represented the world as if it were essentially white. When Tarantino rescues their once-upon-a-time Hollywood from history’s dustbin, he makes their world white, too.

But even though Tarantino fantasizes that this bygone Hollywood at its best was pure, his rescue operation is not. As much as he loves the products the industry used to pump out—he’s filled this picture with little parodies of them—he also understands the moral and political conflicts that lie at their heart. You might say he loves them because they were vehicles of those conflicts. To locate the conflict at the core of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, I would note that Tarantino announced the movie in July 2017. Maybe he’d been mulling it over for a while—but it wasn’t until the Trump administration had been in office for half a year, giving everyone a solid idea of its racial agenda, that Tarantino decided to launch the project.

What he created is a genuinely enthusiastic tribute to American entertainment in 1969, as well as a sad and moving farewell to those who never made it in the business. But it’s also a hair-raising, present-day evocation of what America ought to be, as hallucinated by angry, violent, resentful white people. When you see all those shots of boots walking through the scenes, enjoy the period style. But also notice the dirt on the ground. Think of who’s being stepped on.

The latest big-think article about the future of film—I mean, the Future of Film—recently landed on my doorstep with the Sunday New York Times: “Will the Movies Exist in 10 Years?” According to the unfortunate headline writer charged with summing up the answers that two dozen people gave the Times, “The visions range from crisis to hope.” Dog bites man!

I can’t imagine any other art form being subjected to silliness of this magnitude. Even during the summer culture-page doldrums, would the Times devote four full pages to the question of whether drama, poetry, the visual arts, dance, or music will exist in 10 years? The difference with film, I suppose, is that its birth was regarded as a technological marvel whose usefulness was uncertain (“The cinema,” Louis Lumière supposedly said, shortly after he co-presented the first public screening, “is an invention without a future”) and whose artistic possibilities wound up being developed, in large part, through a rationalized system of industrial exploitation. This history consigns me to a world in which the babble of technobloviation and the beeping of chip readers will always drown out discussions about the art of film.

To be fair, the editors of the Times publish more film criticism, week by week, than almost anyone else. But then they turn around and actually pay someone to ask, “Can anything beyond blockbusters succeed in theaters?” (please define “succeed”) and “Will the streaming era force us to rethink the Oscars?” (please define “us” and explain to me again why I should care about the Oscars, because the last 120 times I didn’t get it).

I am not one of the subheadline’s “biggest names in Hollywood”—hell, I’m not even one of the biggest names on the 500 block of Eighth Avenue in Manhattan—and I have no forecast to offer. But here, for what it’s worth, is my reading of the present of the movies, or at least some of the movies I found recently knocking around in the theaters.

o start with one of those blockbusters that alone can succeed: Toy Story 4, directed by Josh Cooley and written by a bunch of people, mostly Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom, confronts difficult, even painful questions in the animated lives of its characters, old and new. Can Woody, voiced again by Tom Hanks, face a likely future of abandonment in a closet? Can Forky, voiced by Tony Hale, accept the joyful responsibility of being the new favorite toy of its child, who slapped it together from discarded odds and ends in a kindergarten classroom, or will this weird little agglomeration continue to long for the comfort of its native wastebasket? In other words, how should we feel about artifacts that have outlived their usefulness or were crafted without purpose from leftovers—things like Toy Story 4?

I have it on good authority that when Disney decided to produce Incredibles 2, writer-director Brad Bird went to his former collaborators and said they had to make the picture, or else the company would go ahead without them and screw it up (or words to that effect but stronger). Only a curmudgeon would complain that the latest Toy Story sequel has screwed up the original idea. The many chases are as ingenious as ever (in premise improvisational, in practice engineered to the last pixel), the new characters are vivid in modes ranging from goofy to sinister, and the principal imagined settings (an antique shop and a carnival) keep the eye happily overloaded. That said, it would be frivolous to pretend that this fourth Toy Story has anything to add to the previous three or exists because of anything other than a commercial imperative. It differs from the grotesque, ungainly Forky in being astonishingly well crafted—and yet it, too, cries out confessionally that it arose from the refuse bin.

By contrast, Mindy Kaling’s Late Night comes onto the screen as if waving cue cards about its goals. Equality! Inclusion! Respect! And better sexual opportunities for people of all skin colors and body types without overstepping the bounds of monogamy, which would be bad! If Kaling were not so disarming and endearing a performer (her piping voice, attentive-schoolgirl carriage, and roving eyes combine to make you believe the impossible, that she’s ingenuous and at the same time devilishly witty) you’d fall over in exhaustion before she finished listing her agenda. As it is, you readily transfer onto the movie the goodwill she generates toward herself and her semiautobiographical character, Molly Patel: the only woman—and the first woman of color—to penetrate the writers’ room of the story’s network talk show.

The film’s effect is pleasant but the outcome foreordained. Although Molly’s antagonist, the show’s veteran star, is a supposedly formidable person played by Emma Thompson—the actorly equivalent of a full orchestra compared with Kaling’s plangent harmonica—there is never a moment’s doubt that this brittle and humorless comedy legend will not just accept the awkward, inexperienced, endlessly sincere Molly but will change because of her. But who says the star has to change, other than a corporate villain who is conveniently wheeled in at the start? What inner need mandates a reformation project? The answer, sorry to say, is missing.

Unlike Molly, Kaling is an experienced television writer, and in the tradition of episodic TV, as distinct from movies, she is incurious about Thompson’s character or even her own. It’s enough for her to posit that Thompson suffers from chronic depression and maintains a stiff pride in her high standards. How? Why? Sorry, no time to bother with details. Or plausibility, for that matter. (Faced with the threat of losing her career, Thompson makes a speech about the indignities she suffers as a woman of a certain age in Hollywood, which would be scathing and funny, except that the character is not an actress and works in New York.) As for Molly, there’s no time in Late Night even to visit the family members who supposedly dominate her but amount to just another plot stipulation on the way toward a meritorious ending. Add to these superficialities the TV-friendly, stop-and-start rhythm of Kaling’s script and Nisha Ganatra’s direction—including the personal-growth checkups, in which characters pause to state exactly what they think of each other—and you have a comedy in which an Indian woman must struggle to prove herself, but not all that hard, crossed with a behind-the-scenes drama in which people strain for excellence while the movie they live in cuts every corner.

Which is to say that Late Night is charming enough but could have been more. If it turns a profit at the box office but doesn’t clean up, maybe that’s because, as the big names say, a midbudget, character-driven, issues-oriented picture can no longer succeed in theaters—or, alternatively, because a picture of that description ought to be a little better.

I might say the same about the comparably budgeted, teen-women’s-empowerment movie Booksmart, though greater revenues have flowed toward this picture, thanks to a plot full of adolescent misadventure and hot touches of gross-out humor. A comedy about nerdy best friends trying to cut loose on their last day and night in an affluent Los Angeles high school, Booksmart benefits from the lead performances of Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever—loose, unembarrassed actresses playing chronically mortified kids—and from the direction of Olivia Wilde, who in her first feature film behind the camera exerts the command of narrative rhythm that escapes Late Night. I did not feel that Booksmart wasted a moment of my time. But I can’t say it has the nuance, ambition, or grace of another recent teen drama, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (same budget, more or less, but much higher profit, despite its seriousness). And although Booksmart flirts intelligently with the sexual politics of the present moment, it doesn’t begin to approach the daring of Amy Heckerling’s 1982 Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which can match any 2019 release for sex, drugs, and loud music but also deals head-on with a subject that almost no mainstream filmmaker today cares to address: abortion.

as American film that much freer in the early Reagan era? Of course not. But I think a sense of diminished artistic possibilities has now set in, quite apart from all the thumb sucking about streaming services and the YouTube generation. You see the horizon contract even in the work of filmmakers who have good reason to know better—Jim Jarmusch, for example, whose 2016 Paterson was worldly wise, perhaps even disillusioned, and yet thoroughly lovely, generous, kind, and imaginative. You might have expected his new film, The Dead Don’t Die, to have at least a bit of that warmth, given that he cast the film almost as a reunion of old friends: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Iggy Pop, Eszter Balint, Sara Driver, and Steve Buscemi, among others.

But if Jarmusch is bringing together the people he loves, it’s evidently to say goodbye. The world comes to an end in this zombie-movie mash-up, and so does his filmmaking, which disappears up its own meta. By the time Tom Waits, as the voyeur and quasi narrator Hermit Bob, delivers his summing up—a sermon on the suicidal consumerism of humanity (or that portion of it living in America)—and the characters go to their predestined doom in an old Pennsylvania cemetery, beneath a full moon swimming in a poisonous blue aura, this most indie of productions has waved as many placards as Late Night while crying out like Toy Story 4 about its own futility.

Yes, it’s easy to despair and maybe even reasonable to do so. But if a favorable economic forecast, stable technology, and a shoo-in social agenda were the preconditions for making art, even the walls of Lascaux and Altamira might be bare. Despite what the biggest names in Hollywood have to say and despite the pessimism (temporary, I hope) of Jarmusch, people continue to make movies, some of them excellent. Go watch Joe Talbot’s extraordinary The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which is sad and beautiful, as a Jarmusch character once said. And join me at the multiplex for Stuber, starring Kumail Nanjiani as a put-upon Uber driver, and Dave Bautista—the Guardians of the Galaxy guy with the body and face of a wrestling champion and the soul of Oliver Hardy—as (more or less) Dave Bautista. American cinema lives.

notice, though, that American film is the only kind worrying the wise people in that New York Times article. The possibility of a cinematic future beyond America seems to have escaped them. So let me tell you, briefly, about the gorgeous, fascinating, continually problematic documentary Honeyland, which comes from the rural highlands of Macedonia, thanks to the directors Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska. It’s actually two films in one: an empathetic portrait of a woman living a traditional life in isolation, poverty, and independence, and an allegorical narrative about the encroachments of modernity.

At its heart is a woman of Turkish background, Hatidze Muratova, who in her early 50s is bony, stooped, and as wiry as an endurance runner. Apparently almost the last resident of a settlement of stone buildings that now sit in ruins, she lives without indoor plumbing or electric light in a single-story house that she shares with a dog, several cats, and her bedridden, half-blind mother. Hatidze’s only other companions are bees, which she finds and tends in the wild—in the cleft of a rock, behind the wall of an abandoned house—and cultivates in rows of conical hives woven from branches. Every once in a while, she collects honey and honeycomb—“Half for me, half for you,” she tells the bees—and makes the journey to Skopje, where she hawks her wares at the market stalls, picks up a treat for her mother, and indulges her vanity by purchasing a package of hair dye.

These scenes would be thoroughly absorbing if you weren’t always wondering what was happening outside the frame. Consider the first astonishing image of Hatidze gathering honey, when she walks along a narrow ridge, high over the valley, to uncover a hive on the side of a cliff. Where were Stefanov and Kotevska standing? There seems to be no room for them on the ledge, but somehow they didn’t just photograph Hatidze but caught her from two setups.

These questions multiply as the narrative takes hold. One day a caravan drives into the ruined settlement, and a boisterous family of nine, also Turkish by background, begins to set up house. (Did Stefanov and Kotevska just happen to be visiting that day? Or did they help create this event?) The ensuing scenes of Hatidze getting along happily with the children might have unfolded naturally, but when the paterfamilias, Hussein, starts asking her about this beekeeping business, are you watching him broach the subject for the first time? Or did the filmmakers perhaps ask him to sit down with Hatidze and show how their conversation went?

And what about that burly man who visits Hussein and urges him to sell honey in large quantities? How come the filmmakers were around—and Hatidze wasn’t—for a discussion that would cause so much trouble?

I don’t mean to imply that Stefanov and Kotevska have been underhanded. The tradition of semistaged ethnographic films goes back to Nanook of the North. But then, Honeyland doesn’t play as ethnography. It’s more like one of Abbas Kiarostami’s highly sophisticated narratives cast with nonprofessionals—with the difference that Kiarostami was open about making fictions infused with the grit of rural life, whereas Stefanov and Kotevska appear to be recording a documentary, which by chance tells a tale of encroachment and endurance that will appeal to urban audiences on the international circuit.

I like Honeyland, and I accept Stefanov and Kotevska’s right to make a splendid-looking film, under circumstances that must have been extraordinarily difficult. Still, when I consider all the doubts they’ve left swarming about the picture, I have to say, “All right. But half for you, half for me.”

he frame-up, prosecution, and years-long imprisonment of the young men from Harlem—boys, really—who became known as the Central Park Five might be described as a miscarriage of justice, in the sense that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a nuclear mishap. In a 2012 book on the subject, Sarah Burns peels back layer after layer of misconduct, negligence, and willful blindness by the New York City police and Manhattan district attorney’s office—layer after layer of lynch-mob excitement among much of the white press and public—until the underlying rawness bleeds into the semblance of an officially conducted hate crime. For those who want to look at the facts coldly, a PBS documentary film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, also released in 2012, is available for streaming.1

Circumstances have changed in some ways, but the story is as appallingly timely as ever. In a 1989 New York City electric with fear and racial animosity—the fear sparked by high levels of street violence, the racial animosity stoked by reckless politicians, journalists, and loudmouths—the rape and near-fatal bludgeoning in Central Park of a young, white, affluent jogger mandated immediate government retribution. And the government had candidates ready-made for punishment: a large, loose gaggle of dark-skinned kids, many of them raucous, some violent, who had been roaming the park that night.2

To convert five of those kids into felons required only brutal police interrogations, pursued without respect for either truth or rules of conduct, combined with the hell-bent agenda of the head of the Manhattan DA’s sex crimes unit, Linda Fairstein, who seemed to regard material evidence as a mere encumbrance. To win convictions required only the bumbling of multiple disorganized defense attorneys, combined with a public atmosphere poisoned by tabloids and your Eyewitness News team. The man who raped and almost killed the jogger was left free to roam while five boys, ages 14 to 16, went to prison for years for a crime they did not commit, then struggled painfully after release to resume their lives. In 2002, after new evidence emerged and the district attorney’s office reexamined the case, New York State Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada vacated the convictions.3

That’s what you can learn—and seethe over—by watching the documentary, reading the book, or sitting down in a library to study other available sources. What can you get by turning on Netflix and watching When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s four-part dramatization of the story?4

sense of duration, for one thing. Everything about the case was bound up with the passage of time—the contested number of minutes when the jogger and the five could have been in proximity, the unconscionable number of hours endured by unaccompanied minors under police browbeating, the anxiety-ridden weeks of preparing for trial, the years that the accused ground out in prison and their families in devastated homes. Pass from the what of the subject to the how of its representation and you see that a consciousness of duration also dominates the movie. (Let’s call the production by its rightful name, not the Netflix category “limited series.”) Everything in the film’s working-out is conditioned by DuVernay’s having about three times the length of a normal feature in which to tell her story.5

The luxury has been good for her. A filmmaker of laudable ambitions but occasionally tendentious means, which can leave her straddling the line between solid and stodgy, DuVernay has used her extra time with a flair she has too seldom exercised before, sprawling when she wants to draw out suspense or deepen emotion, telescoping when she wants to cut short your breath.6

It’s crucial, for example, that you experience the excruciating length of the police interrogations. DuVernay dwells on them for much of Part 1, cross-cutting freely to show you the differences among the boys and their families and the near sameness of the sense of futility that closed in. In some ways, it’s her tendentious side that moves her to prolong these descents into despairing false confessions. By getting you to feel how resistance cracks into acquiescence, she rebuts the government’s case even before her on-screen prosecutors present it. But perhaps more important, the lengthily elaborated interrogations enable her to bring off a quiet coup at the end of Part 1: the scene where the accused boys are at last put together in a glaringly lit holding cell—for some, it’s the first time they meet—and apologize for having implicated one another.7

Even more affecting are the fluid, time-collapsing transitions in Part 3, in which she pans across scenes in prison and transforms the youths, one by one, into bulked-up men. The device in itself is not novel. But the way it makes the pit of your stomach drop away is expertly judged, with DuVernay allowing enough of a pause after each shock so you can almost recover before she hits you with the next. Here she has no message to deliver, no argument to advance. Her main purpose is emotional: to make incalculable sorrow real, again and again.8

With two of her characters, though—Raymond Santana Jr. and Korey Wise—DuVernay expands time for yet another purpose: narrative complication. Wise was the only one who had reached the age of 16 at the time of the rape and so was tried as an adult and sentenced to the full hell of a penitentiary. Santana was the only one who broke the law after his release on probation—broke it for real this time—and was thrown back into prison. These distinctions give DuVernay good reason to focus on Wise and Santana and an opportunity to make the grand structure she’s designing a little more eclectic and asymmetrical through the addition of two stylistically distinct spaces.9

In the narrative room reserved for Santana (played as an adult by the long-faced, tensely coiled Freddy Miyares), DuVernay tells a tale about the victory of frustration over prudence. Taken in upon parole by his endlessly loving, hopelessly ineffectual father (a touching John Leguizamo), Santana has to endure the insults of a furious stepmother, the indignities of quarters suitable only for a child, and the almost laughable system of barriers erected between felons and the jobs they need. When Santana eventually chooses to push back, he does so in a high-risk form of resistance that DuVernay presents as less than admirable and almost heroic.10

Santana gets extra attention, but DuVernay nevertheless intercuts his extended story with those of three of the other judicial victims. But for the fifth, Wise, she holds back, teasing the viewer for a long time with his absence and then devoting the majority of Part 4 to a sustained narrative of his suffering. I might summarize this tale as the temptation of a saint in the wilderness. Of the five, Wise was the least prepared mentally and emotionally to endure even a juvenile prison, let alone Riker’s Island and Attica. DuVernay makes his experiences into a story of bafflement, fear, deliberate self-isolation (Wise prefers solitary confinement to the dangers of the general population), and retreat into fantasy. It’s also a story of grace, as manifested through the unexpected kindness of a white guard, and of the persistence of a heartbreakingly fragile hope.11

arratives about holy fools are notoriously difficult to pull off. I attribute the profound success of this one to DuVernay’s faith in a remarkable actor, Jharrel Jerome. (You might remember him as the teenage best friend in Moonlight.) He is the only member of the cast who plays his character as both a child and a man. If that sounds difficult, imagine doing it without betraying for even a moment that you’re giving a performance.12

To return to my original question: What you get from DuVernay’s film is an almost physical sense of presence from Jerome. Beyond that, you get sharp, indelible characterizations across the board (especially Niecy Nash as Wise’s mother, Delores; Aunjanue Ellis as Yusef Salaam’s mother, Sharon; and Michael Kenneth Williams as Antron McCray’s tortured father, Bobby). You get an account of the Central Park Five case told as if from within the families—which means told not just with unshakable knowledge that this miscarriage is no aberration but also with a crushing grief among the adults and a sense of guilt about their inability to shield their children. When They See Us delivers all this with a new level of directorial expressiveness from DuVernay, enriched by the moodily nuanced cinematography of Bradford Young.13

And then, of course, there’s the tendentiousness. DuVernay’s screenplay (assisted by Robin Swicord and Attica Locke) does not entirely resist the impulse to score points. Many of them are scored against Fairstein, played by Felicity Huffman in a late-’80s version of western villain wardrobe (her raincoat might as well be a gunslinger’s duster) and a scowl that could raise bloody welts. In case you don’t understand why five dark-skinned kids are about to be immolated on a prosecutorial altar, the dialogue written for Fairstein will tell you. The word “animals” comes up. The remark “We are not in control” leaves the definition of “we” unspecified and screamingly obvious.14

I don’t want to make excuses for Fairstein. I just want to point out that a filmmaker more certain of her audience and her own powers might have modulated the late scene in which a new prosecutor, charged with reexamining the case, sits down with Fairstein just long enough to excoriate her, speaking ostensibly for herself but really on behalf of the filmmakers, the audience, and all right-thinking people. And it’s not enough for the character to mouth accusations of malicious, deliberate incompetence. DuVernay makes her open a bag and pull out some of the best-selling thrillers that Fairstein wrote in a second career.15

It’s too much. Whatever wrongs Fairstein committed, she had a right to try her luck at being an author. And you can say this much for her novels, as distinct from her case against the Central Park Five: They were labeled as fiction.16

t once artfully coy and unabashedly confessional, Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir is a memory film about all-consuming, disastrous first love, set in the England of the early 1980s. It’s exceptionally fine and as paradoxical as any movie I’ve seen in a while—wholly submerged in the skin of its young protagonist, an apprentice filmmaker named Julie (Honor Swinton Rose), and yet as coolly distanced as the Hitchcock movies Julie hears about when she shows up for film school. The clash of perspectives would be enough to make you cross-eyed if Hogg didn’t resolve them so exquisitely in a strange and strangely calming view of a landscape that repeats throughout the film—hardly even a landscape, you might say, but a picture of the sky with a few treetops poking up at the bottom of the frame. I should point out that this view, too, is designed as something of a puzzle, but I’ll get to that later.17

For the moment, let’s consider a different kind of clash. The Souvenir begins with a succession of black-and-white still photographs of the decayed shipbuilding town of Sunderland, overlaid with the sounds of a radio interview with a young woman—Hogg back in the day?—describing a film she’d like to make there. She has in mind the story of a poor young boy and his obsessive, fearful love for his mother, who he knows must die someday. As The Souvenir jumps into its narrative, you quickly learn that this is Julie’s film-school project and that nobody believes she can make it work. Julie is a daughter of the landed gentry (Byrne looks like a rose fresh from her parents’ estate) who knows as much about the working-class north as she does about life on Mars.18

But something in her does seem to know about loving death, or wanting the vertigo of loving in death’s shadow. Enter Anthony (Tom Burke), a slightly older, brutishly handsome denizen of art galleries, opera houses, and the sort of London restaurant that might be emptied later in the evening to accommodate a duchess’s grand ball. He has a languid, disdainfully playful Oxbridge manner, a chalk-stripe suit, and a purported job in the Foreign Office. As Julie will eventually learn, he also has a recurring need for infusions of her cash, no doubt explained by the heroin habit she is too unworldly to detect. But that part is almost secondary. What matters is that he assures her at the outset that she’s fragile and lost and always will be lost. Sold.19

Hitchcock, the film professor says, used to suggest as much as tell, elide as much as show. (Not once in the Psycho shower scene do you see the knife penetrate flesh.) While Julie contemplates this artistic method, Hogg practices it and then some, narrating The Souvenir in fragments and ellipses, confounding the chronology, implying as much as she says about how and why Julie is sucked into an infinitely hurtful love, and then, just for a moment, giving you a flash of the knife’s tip drawing blood. If The Souvenir were not so cerebral, I suppose its pain would be too much to bear. As it is, you assemble the pieces mentally as you’re watching and then grieve over them later, in your memory.20

And that odd, repeated landscape shot? Hogg waits until the very end to reveal its place in the puzzle. It has to do with Julie’s education in filmmaking. It has nothing to do with filmmaking and everything to do with her loss. Like The Souvenir, it turns out to be a thing of beauty and a sadness forever.21

he frame-up, prosecution, and years-long imprisonment of the young men from Harlem—boys, really—who became known as the Central Park Five might be described as a miscarriage of justice, in the sense that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a nuclear mishap. In a 2012 book on the subject, Sarah Burns peels back layer after layer of misconduct, negligence, and willful blindness by the New York City police and Manhattan district attorney’s office—layer after layer of lynch-mob excitement among much of the white press and public—until the underlying rawness bleeds into the semblance of an officially conducted hate crime. For those who want to look at the facts coldly, a PBS documentary film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, also released in 2012, is available for streaming.

Circumstances have changed in some ways, but the story is as appallingly timely as ever. In a 1989 New York City electric with fear and racial animosity—the fear sparked by high levels of street violence, the racial animosity stoked by reckless politicians, journalists, and loudmouths—the rape and near-fatal bludgeoning in Central Park of a young, white, affluent jogger mandated immediate government retribution. And the government had candidates ready-made for punishment: a large, loose gaggle of dark-skinned kids, many of them raucous, some violent, who had been roaming the park that night.

To convert five of those kids into felons required only brutal police interrogations, pursued without respect for either truth or rules of conduct, combined with the hell-bent agenda of the head of the Manhattan DA’s sex crimes unit, Linda Fairstein, who seemed to regard material evidence as a mere encumbrance. To win convictions required only the bumbling of multiple disorganized defense attorneys, combined with a public atmosphere poisoned by tabloids and your Eyewitness News team. The man who raped and almost killed the jogger was left free to roam while five boys, ages 14 to 16, went to prison for years for a crime they did not commit, then struggled painfully after release to resume their lives. In 2002, after new evidence emerged and the district attorney’s office reexamined the case, New York State Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada vacated the convictions.

That’s what you can learn—and seethe over—by watching the documentary, reading the book, or sitting down in a library to study other available sources. What can you get by turning on Netflix and watching When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s four-part dramatization of the story?

sense of duration, for one thing. Everything about the case was bound up with the passage of time—the contested number of minutes when the jogger and the five could have been in proximity, the unconscionable number of hours endured by unaccompanied minors under police browbeating, the anxiety-ridden weeks of preparing for trial, the years that the accused ground out in prison and their families in devastated homes. Pass from the what of the subject to the how of its representation and you see that a consciousness of duration also dominates the movie. (Let’s call the production by its rightful name, not the Netflix category “limited series.”) Everything in the film’s working-out is conditioned by DuVernay’s having about three times the length of a normal feature in which to tell her story.

The luxury has been good for her. A filmmaker of laudable ambitions but occasionally tendentious means, which can leave her straddling the line between solid and stodgy, DuVernay has used her extra time with a flair she has too seldom exercised before, sprawling when she wants to draw out suspense or deepen emotion, telescoping when she wants to cut short your breath.

It’s crucial, for example, that you experience the excruciating length of the police interrogations. DuVernay dwells on them for much of Part 1, cross-cutting freely to show you the differences among the boys and their families and the near sameness of the sense of futility that closed in. In some ways, it’s her tendentious side that moves her to prolong these descents into despairing false confessions. By getting you to feel how resistance cracks into acquiescence, she rebuts the government’s case even before her on-screen prosecutors present it. But perhaps more important, the lengthily elaborated interrogations enable her to bring off a quiet coup at the end of Part 1: the scene where the accused boys are at last put together in a glaringly lit holding cell—for some, it’s the first time they meet—and apologize for having implicated one another.

Even more affecting are the fluid, time-collapsing transitions in Part 3, in which she pans across scenes in prison and transforms the youths, one by one, into bulked-up men. The device in itself is not novel. But the way it makes the pit of your stomach drop away is expertly judged, with DuVernay allowing enough of a pause after each shock so you can almost recover before she hits you with the next. Here she has no message to deliver, no argument to advance. Her main purpose is emotional: to make incalculable sorrow real, again and again.

With two of her characters, though—Raymond Santana Jr. and Korey Wise—DuVernay expands time for yet another purpose: narrative complication. Wise was the only one who had reached the age of 16 at the time of the rape and so was tried as an adult and sentenced to the full hell of a penitentiary. Santana was the only one who broke the law after his release on probation—broke it for real this time—and was thrown back into prison. These distinctions give DuVernay good reason to focus on Wise and Santana and an opportunity to make the grand structure she’s designing a little more eclectic and asymmetrical through the addition of two stylistically distinct spaces.

In the narrative room reserved for Santana (played as an adult by the long-faced, tensely coiled Freddy Miyares), DuVernay tells a tale about the victory of frustration over prudence. Taken in upon parole by his endlessly loving, hopelessly ineffectual father (a touching John Leguizamo), Santana has to endure the insults of a furious stepmother, the indignities of quarters suitable only for a child, and the almost laughable system of barriers erected between felons and the jobs they need. When Santana eventually chooses to push back, he does so in a high-risk form of resistance that DuVernay presents as less than admirable and almost heroic.

Santana gets extra attention, but DuVernay nevertheless intercuts his extended story with those of three of the other judicial victims. But for the fifth, Wise, she holds back, teasing the viewer for a long time with his absence and then devoting the majority of Part 4 to a sustained narrative of his suffering. I might summarize this tale as the temptation of a saint in the wilderness. Of the five, Wise was the least prepared mentally and emotionally to endure even a juvenile prison, let alone Riker’s Island and Attica. DuVernay makes his experiences into a story of bafflement, fear, deliberate self-isolation (Wise prefers solitary confinement to the dangers of the general population), and retreat into fantasy. It’s also a story of grace, as manifested through the unexpected kindness of a white guard, and of the persistence of a heartbreakingly fragile hope.

arratives about holy fools are notoriously difficult to pull off. I attribute the profound success of this one to DuVernay’s faith in a remarkable actor, Jharrel Jerome. (You might remember him as the teenage best friend in Moonlight.) He is the only member of the cast who plays his character as both a child and a man. If that sounds difficult, imagine doing it without betraying for even a moment that you’re giving a performance.

To return to my original question: What you get from DuVernay’s film is an almost physical sense of presence from Jerome. Beyond that, you get sharp, indelible characterizations across the board (especially Niecy Nash as Wise’s mother, Delores; Aunjanue Ellis as Yusef Salaam’s mother, Sharon; and Michael Kenneth Williams as Antron McCray’s tortured father, Bobby). You get an account of the Central Park Five case told as if from within the families—which means told not just with unshakable knowledge that this miscarriage is no aberration but also with a crushing grief among the adults and a sense of guilt about their inability to shield their children. When They See Us delivers all this with a new level of directorial expressiveness from DuVernay, enriched by the moodily nuanced cinematography of Bradford Young.

And then, of course, there’s the tendentiousness. DuVernay’s screenplay (assisted by Robin Swicord and Attica Locke) does not entirely resist the impulse to score points. Many of them are scored against Fairstein, played by Felicity Huffman in a late-’80s version of western villain wardrobe (her raincoat might as well be a gunslinger’s duster) and a scowl that could raise bloody welts. In case you don’t understand why five dark-skinned kids are about to be immolated on a prosecutorial altar, the dialogue written for Fairstein will tell you. The word “animals” comes up. The remark “We are not in control” leaves the definition of “we” unspecified and screamingly obvious.

I don’t want to make excuses for Fairstein. I just want to point out that a filmmaker more certain of her audience and her own powers might have modulated the late scene in which a new prosecutor, charged with re-examining the case, sits down with Fairstein just long enough to excoriate her, speaking ostensibly for herself but really on behalf of the filmmakers, the audience, and all right-thinking people. And it’s not enough for the character to mouth accusations of malicious, deliberate incompetence. DuVernay makes her open a bag and pull out some of the best-selling thrillers that Fairstein wrote in a second career.

It’s too much. Whatever wrongs Fairstein committed, she had a right to try her luck at being an author. And you can say this much for her novels, as distinct from her case against the Central Park Five: They were labeled as fiction.

t once artfully coy and unabashedly confessional, Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir is a memory film about all-consuming, disastrous first love, set in the England of the early 1980s. It’s exceptionally fine and as paradoxical as any movie I’ve seen in a while—wholly submerged in the skin of its young protagonist, an apprentice filmmaker named Julie (Honor Swinton Rose), and yet as coolly distanced as the Hitchcock movies Julie hears about when she shows up for film school. The clash of perspectives would be enough to make you cross-eyed if Hogg didn’t resolve them so exquisitely in a strange and strangely calming view of a landscape that repeats throughout the film—hardly even a landscape, you might say, but a picture of the sky with a few treetops poking up at the bottom of the frame. I should point out that this view, too, is designed as something of a puzzle, but I’ll get to that later.

For the moment, let’s consider a different kind of clash. The Souvenir begins with a succession of black-and-white still photographs of the decayed shipbuilding town of Sunderland, overlaid with the sounds of a radio interview with a young woman—Hogg back in the day?—describing a film she’d like to make there. She has in mind the story of a poor young boy and his obsessive, fearful love for his mother, who he knows must die someday. As The Souvenir jumps into its narrative, you quickly learn that this is Julie’s film-school project and that nobody believes she can make it work. Julie is a daughter of the landed gentry (Byrne looks like a rose fresh from her parents’ estate) who knows as much about the working-class north as she does about life on Mars.

But something in her does seem to know about loving death, or wanting the vertigo of loving in death’s shadow. Enter Anthony (Tom Burke), a slightly older, brutishly handsome denizen of art galleries, opera houses, and the sort of London restaurant that might be emptied later in the evening to accommodate a duchess’s grand ball. He has a languid, disdainfully playful Oxbridge manner, a chalk-stripe suit, and a purported job in the Foreign Office. As Julie will eventually learn, he also has a recurring need for infusions of her cash, no doubt explained by the heroin habit she is too unworldly to detect. But that part is almost secondary. What matters is that he assures her at the outset that she’s fragile and lost and always will be lost. Sold.

Hitchcock, the film professor says, used to suggest as much as tell, elide as much as show. (Not once in the Psycho shower scene do you see the knife penetrate flesh.) While Julie contemplates this artistic method, Hogg practices it and then some, narrating The Souvenir in fragments and ellipses, confounding the chronology, implying as much as she says about how and why Julie is sucked into an infinitely hurtful love, and then, just for a moment, giving you a flash of the knife’s tip drawing blood. If The Souvenir were not so cerebral, I suppose its pain would be too much to bear. As it is, you assemble the pieces mentally as you’re watching and then grieve over them later, in your memory.

And that odd, repeated landscape shot? Hogg waits until the very end to reveal its place in the puzzle. It has to do with Julie’s education in filmmaking. It has nothing to do with filmmaking and everything to do with her loss. Like The Souvenir, it turns out to be a thing of beauty and a sadness forever.

ecades after a team of filmmakers captured the sounds and sights of two evenings of worship at a Baptist church in Los Angeles—decades after those services yielded a double album that became the best-selling record of Aretha Franklin’s career—the documentary Amazing Grace has been completed and released into theaters. Surely the first and most overwhelming emotion that ought to be felt by anyone with ears in working order—ears, and a heart—is gratitude.

Franklin, the voice of the century, was 29 years old on those January evenings in 1972 and was returning to the roots of her music, not alone but in the midst of fellowship. With her were her lifelong friend the Reverend James Cleveland, the Southern California Community Choir, a handful of her regular studio musicians, and an invited congregation. Despite the commercial trappings of the event—and it must be said, at once, that commerce is no stranger to the church—the film delivers Franklin at the height of her powers, as the leading celebrant of a communal outpouring. Which is to say, Amazing Grace is Franklin and a living tradition united, Franklin borne aloft on the wings of saints, exponential Franklin.

Here’s some of what was inaccessible on the record album, and which you can now see:

Members of the choir rising here and there at the sound of her voice, like scattered, irrepressible shoots in early spring.

The pummeling legs of congregants who have released themselves from the pews and dance out their exultation.

James Cleveland handing off the piano midway through “Amazing Grace” so he can sit to the side, bury his face in his hands, and sob.

The shimmer on Franklin’s face, which glistens with light reflected off of her sequined gown and the sweat of inspiration.

Add the experience of awe to that first, natural response of gratitude. The people who gathered at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in January 1972—some of them, anyway—were united in the belief that God works wondrously among us. They had this music as evidence. You, moviegoer, have Amazing Grace; impart the credit however you will.

Then, having felt gratitude and awe, you can proceed to the more troubling emotions.

itting in a front pew on the second night, in all his manicured, pomaded, electric-blue-suited glory, was Franklin’s father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin, accompanied by his longtime lover, the renowned gospel singer Clara Ward. Let me not hesitate to give C.L. Franklin his due: He was a favorite preacher of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and one of his close associates. He was also the man who made his daughter a soloist in his church when she had just turned 10, took her on the road starting when she was 11, and produced her first recording, “Never Grow Old,” when she was 14, a year after she gave birth to her first child. Now, under her father’s eyes, Aretha Franklin leaves the pulpit (where she has performed for most of the two evenings), sits at the piano, and returns to that first number of her recording career, giving it perhaps the deepest and most stirring performance of the entire event. You needn’t have read anything about her life to see that she’s singing “Never Grow Old” for her father, that she’s taken on the demeanor of an obedient and perhaps frightened child, that she’s weeping.

How to go on? I can tell you, again, why it’s a mistake to watch Amazing Grace without regard to its communal religious meaning, as if it were essentially the document of an aesthetic coup—like the video of Renée Fleming’s Covent Garden La Traviata, let’s say. I am not qualified, though, to discuss the implications of Franklin’s relationship with her father and her church. Fortunately, I know of someone who had the credentials.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time:

Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked…. I knew how to work on a congregation until the last dime was surrendered—it was not very hard to do—and I knew where the money for ‘the Lord’s work’ went…. I don’t refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair…. the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves.

It is possible to be profoundly moved by Franklin’s performance of “Never Grow Old” while recognizing that it’s both an expression of religious devotion and a show-business star turn. It is possible to respect the Rev. C.L. Franklin for his very real attainments and yet notice that when he’s invited into the pulpit in Amazing Grace, he does not praise God but only his daughter’s success (which is to say, his own). It is necessary to note that she scarcely says a word on either evening. The thought that rises inescapably is that you are watching a kind of cover-up: that Aretha Franklin, rather than Jesus, must be lauded again and again during these evenings because the triumphant, commanding woman before you remains, in some way, an abused young girl.

“There was no love in the church.” For the most part, the reviews and articles I’ve read about Amazing Grace have preferred to dwell on gratitude and awe and avoid this devastating thought. Perhaps that’s because most of the people who write about movies are not committed Christians and can content themselves with the outward musical experience. Perhaps it’s because so few people of any description, even today, are willing to look for more than a moment at the realities that Baldwin confronted so steadily.

He confronted them; but in his complexity and honesty, he did not dismiss them, or what he’d received from the church. “In spite of everything,” he wrote, “there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare.” And though he told everyone he’d fled the church, he also insisted on showing that it hadn’t left him. He posted the evidence at the beginning and end of The Fire Next Time, in words he chose from the old gospel songs.

I wonder what he would have made of Amazing Grace if he’d lived to see it brought into the light, so many years after the event. The zest, joy, and capacity for facing and surviving disaster are certainly there, in abundance. So, too, is the bad faith. But for those who care to nurture hope, the film also suggests that perhaps Baldwin’s harshest judgment on the church need not be final. Nine years after The Fire Next Time, a community came together around Franklin not in self-hatred and self-avoidance but with manifest pride. You can see it in the way the congregants claim their right to be seen by the cameras. (This is show business in which everybody’s on show.) You can hear it in the open boasts of having won both God’s prize of salvation and America’s prize of money. As another crossover gospel artist, Sam Cooke, had sung, “A change is gonna come.” Look back at Amazing Grace, and you perceive that it already had.

have so often questioned the notion that films can improve the world—all right, I’ve so often made fun of the idea—that I have a duty to mention The Silence of Others. Produced and directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar and released under the auspices of Pedro Almodóvar, it’s a legal thriller of sorts, and all true.

The Silence of Others follows the efforts of a group of activists—a small nucleus at first, then hundreds—as they struggle to work around, and then overturn, Spain’s 1977 amnesty law, known as the Pact of Forgetting, which has made it impossible to prosecute former members of the Franco regime for their crimes. Because of the law, there has been no truth and reconciliation process in Spain, as in other countries that emerged from fascism. This film is the years-long story of people who are resolved to bring torturers to justice, exhume parents from unmarked mass graves, find the records of infants who were stolen from them.

The Silence of Others is clear-eyed, clear-headed, and artful without advertising its own skill. It has made a difference in the world. It was named Best Documentary at the 2019 Goya Awards and to date has been seen in Spain by more than a million people. It is now being seen in the US, too, starting with a theatrical run at Film Forum in New York.

They had Bayreuth. We have the Marvel Universe.

Or so I’ve thought, as we pass the weeks between the release of Captain Marvel, which introduces Brie Larson as the Universe’s latest superhero, and the opening of Avengers: Endgame, which, as all sentient beings know, will require Larson to swoop in and undo the galactic holocaust wreaked last year in Avengers: Infinity War. Notice the urge in the Marvel Universe to unite all things in heaven and on earth into a single grand scheme. Notice the intuition that this immense structure is teetering, with the one-eyed father of plots (not Wotan, but Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury) perhaps unable to hold out against Marveldämmerung. Except, of course, he will. All sentient beings already know that, too, much as they believe (though now I’m just guessing) that Larson, as the Brünnhilde of today’s all-encompassing artwork, very likely has flown in not to perish in the flames but to blow them out.

 I say all this not to mock the Marvel Universe but to praise it.

Think of what Bayreuth meant to the bourgeoisie of 19th-century Europe. After their struggle against hereditary power left them victorious, but also vaguely ashamed, as they compared the coarse, money-driven world they were building to the glories and charms they saw in the past; after they watched an oceanic mob rise to engulf them in 1848, then subside again, temporarily, behind a seawall they knew was leaky; after their homes had been crammed with a miscellany of riches grabbed from the world beyond Europe, and their churches emptied of certainty, these new lords of the planet went on pilgrimage to Bayreuth, where their triumphalism, avidity, guilt, and self-loathing were resolved into the transcendence of a new art. They took their seats in a cavernous theater that seemed like the interior of the skull of Richard Wagner, the genius who, by himself, had transformed the chaos outside into an art of the future within. The sounds and visions of a single great mind surrounded them: unitary, complete, immense, and wholly unsullied by contemporary affairs. At Bayreuth, you thrilled to the ultimate reality of Northern myth and medieval Christendom.

The Marvel Universe, too, is a world unto itself, as you’ll know if you’ve ever been talked at by a true fan. But no pilgrimage is required. If you want to experience it within a group enclosure, the map is conveniently dotted with them, many providing frequent, overlapping start times for the sounds and visions. If you don’t want a group enclosure, the latest fractal of the ensemble will soon come to you, to be enjoyed on your home TV or that little computer you carry in your pocket. There are multiple, perhaps infinite points of entry, as the purveyors of this cosmos recently explained in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

nd who are the purveyors? Not a lone genius (however jocularly that idea was suggested, and simultaneously mocked, by the many cameo appearances of Stan Lee, may his memory be a blessing). The Marvel Universe is created and operated by a global corporation. This is art for an era in which not only God, but also the individual, is dead. Old-fashioned filmoids like me may cling to the personalism of the politique des auteurs, but even we understand that’s become a reactionary cause. Witness how easily the Marvel Universe absorbs indie authors, such as Ryan Coogler (two blinks after Fruitvale Station), or the directors of Captain Marvel, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who only a few years ago were making the social-realist Half Nelson on the cheap in Brooklyn. The truly progressive art of our time—progressive in the Wagnerian sense of anticipating where our culture may go—issues from a business organization and is marketed to everyone: not the self-appointed enlighteners of bourgeois imperial Europe, but all of us droplets sploshing about in the sea that had the Bayreuthers so worried.

What totalizing experience do we droplets purchase with our tickets? What anxieties and contradictions does the Universe scheme resolve and transcend in 120-minute increments? Surveying the content of these movies and the point in comic-book history from which they spring, I note that they have a moment of crisis at their origin, as the Ring cycle had in 1848. In the background of them all is the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Vietnam War. (The movements for black and female liberation, not so much—although of late the enterprise has caught up retroactively with Black Panther and Captain Marvel.) These movies tell us over and over about covert government operations gone wrong, technological advances and medical experiments turned monstrous, fantastically wealthy heads of corporations arrogating to themselves the rights of sovereign powers. And that’s the hopeful stuff. Far from sheltering the audience from contemporary affairs, the Marvel films obsessively remind us of the actually existing systems that swirl above our heads, beyond the control not only of a democratic populace but often of the elites who purport to direct these powers.

To take the present example, Captain Marvel is the dual origin story of an extraterrestrial warrior come to Earth and of Nick Fury, the former soldier turned high-level spymaster of the Avengers series, who receives quite an education by tagging along behind the eponymous superhero. The year is 1995; the place at first is Los Angeles, where Vers (pronounced “veers,” as in changing her direction or mind at high speed) has crash-landed on a mission and drawn the baffled attention of Fury. In addition to discovering that advanced civilizations flourish beyond the solar system and occasionally treat Earth as a pit stop (emphasis on “pit”), Fury eventually learns that the difference between a ruthless terrorist and a desperate freedom-fighter is sometimes one of perspective. Given his years in the CIA, he might have known that already—but he receives fresh instruction from Vers, who grows considerably in strength and self-knowledge through her adventure on a backward planet. Among her biggest lessons: humans are resilient, sisterhood is powerful, and new technologies may be used for peaceful purposes but often aren’t. She also learns that authorities are sometimes less than honest, soldiers may be sent to die in ignorance, and her true purpose is to end war, which she can best do by kicking ass on an interstellar scale. As I said, contradictions.

enjoyed all this thoroughly and didn’t mind that the main contradiction was heightened, not transcended, by Vers’s coming into the full awesomeness of her abilities. Larson makes something more than formulaic out of Vers’s grit and impetuousness, Jackson takes the trouble this time to play the nuances of his character (since the filmmakers, for a change, have given him some), and Boden and Fleck do an admirable job of touching on humble details and common interactions amid the CGI fight-or-flight extravaganza. (This is a superhero movie in which somebody has to wash the dishes after dinner, and somebody has to dry them.) I look forward to Brünnhilde II.

That said, I can’t pretend that my era’s total work of art is everything I want. Wagner, the rotten asshole, wrote staggeringly novel scores that opened a century’s worth of possibilities for musical composition. The Marvel Universe movies are for the most part amusing, well-made, not without their thoughtful side, and have contributed nothing new to cinematic art.

And yet the field is not moribund. Look at Roma. Look at Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which is now flooding a few scattered US theaters with its daredevil spirit (after provoking near-riots in China among audiences who thought they were going to see a normal movie). Wonders are still being performed, but these are the one-offs of stubborn auteurs. The Marvel Universe series, though worthy of being called the defining artwork of our epoch, nevertheless shrinks from innovation, and so reveals something disheartening about the limits within which we live.

Why we accept them, I don’t really know. But I can tell you that when Wagner’s audiences showed up at Bayreuth, they got a breakthrough artistic experience of historic proportions, despite all the bad faith involved. We get a Gesamtkunstwerk that always stops short—and it’s not as if our own faith is all that good.

atteo Garrone may never again make a film as strong as Gomorrah—he may never again grab subject matter as wide-ranging in its implications and idiosyncratic in its details as he did with Roberto Saviano’s exposé of organized crime in Naples—but having now chosen a more modest, anecdotal topic, almost an Aesop’s fable, he has turned it into the dark, absorbing, beautifully acted Dogman.

It’s the tale of a small, weak, accommodating man and his alliance—whether imposed, resented, or desired—with another man who is large, strong, and heedlessly violent. As the title implies, it’s about being treated like a dog. But it’s also about the capacity to impose the human will on dangerous beasts, and about the conditions that sometimes make the trick morally suspect.

A beast is the first thing you see: a pit bull snarling into the camera in close-up, eager to maul the lens and anyone behind it, prevented from doing so only by the chain that binds it by the throat to a grimy tiled wall. When Garrone cuts to a wide establishing shot, showing the raw-surfaced, murky room where the action is set, you see that the dog has a more immediate target of attack in a fellow determined to give him a shampoo. This is the proprietor of the dog-grooming salon, Marcello (Marcello Fonte), a slim, long-faced, slightly stooped man in early middle age, who has a pleasantly gummy smile and a habit of addressing even enraged pit bulls as “amore.” Within a few more cuts of the initial edit, Marcello has won the beast over with his interspecies love. He’s drying the pit bull with a hot-air hose, and the dog is calmly turning its head to catch the stream.

The thoroughly inoffensive Marcello enjoys both his dogs and the easy companionship of the other shopkeepers along his stretch of a weedy, crumbling, concrete-block housing development somewhere on the outskirts of Naples, just off the water. (It’s the kind of picturesquely grim location that furnished Garrone with so many memorable panoramic shots in Gomorrah.) Marcello also loves getting visits from his red-haired young daughter (Alida Baldari Calabria), who evidently lives with her mother but likes to help with the dogs. The only hints that Marcello is less than pure are his small side business dealing cocaine and his friendship with Simone (Edoardo Pesce), a motorcycle-riding skinhead, whose leather jacket says “Uncle Sam” on the back. Simone has the self-discipline of a 2-year-old, the physique of a professional wrestler, and the manners of a pre-shampoo pit bull. The other shopkeepers seriously entertain the possibility of hiring some guys from out of town to take care of him. The gentle Marcello somehow remains under his sway, with worse and worse consequences.

If Garrone didn’t have two such compelling actors as his leads, Dogman might have collapsed under the prodding of its own metaphor. But Pesce is genuinely frightening as Simone, and Fonte, who won the award for best actor at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, makes up for everything overblown in the premise through his consistently moving, understated performance. He’s capable of big gestures when they’re called for, but twice, at crucial points in Dogman, Garrone has Fonte just sit before you in silence—and while scarcely budging, Fonte shows you every moment of turmoil in Marcello’s thoughts. It’s up to you to imagine why Marcello makes his decisions—Garrone fortunately doesn’t push any interpretations—but when he does, you feel you’re watching a real catastrophe, in a real man, in real time.

In The Brink, a documentary that follows Steve Bannon from autumn 2017 through the 2018 midterm elections, you often hear him say he’ll “convert” 20 percent of a given audience. That’s all he’ll need, according to his calculations, to effect permanent change, and it seems to be why he permitted Alison Klayman such close, ongoing access as a one-woman film crew. In his view, all media exposure is good—Bannon says he learned that from Trump—and so he doesn’t care what the other 80 percent of us might think of the material Klayman has scooped up. Here are scenes of Bannon tapping billionaire donors (the better to rail against elites), spreading his shambling warmth to the Republican base (while his assistant Sean says he wouldn’t live in their tasteless homes for a million dollars), and coordinating strategy with Europe’s leading racist politicians (then insisting straight-faced to Guardian writer Paul Lewis that any appeals to anti-Semitism are entirely in the reporter’s mind). Here, too, is a close-up view of Bannon’s electoral strategy of 2017–18 as it crashes and burns—after which he moves on, with fresh and ample funding. Errol Morris previously fixed Bannon in place for a full-frontal interview in American Dharma. In The Brink, Klayman gives us something even more disturbing: copious on-the-fly glimpses of the man in action.

Of all the genres into which I could dump Benedikt Erlingsson’s Woman at War—action thriller, political satire, green polemic, star vehicle—the most encompassing, on-key choice might be wide-screen color musical. Granted, the singing is all choral, the dancing (if you want to call it that) comprises a little tai chi practice and a lot of running around, and the numbers are principally scored for wheezy keyboards (harmonium or accordion), Sousaphone, and a trap set augmented by a circus drum. Considering that the film’s odd instrumentalists keep showing up on camera, I’d even go so far as to call Woman at War a backstage musical, with the proviso that the wings might be in the heroine’s mind. Nobody (except for the movie audience) actually sees the trio of musicians solemnly performing on the mountain tundra, or wherever the heroic Halla happens to be. She alone hears the cockamamie suspense-theme rat-a-tat as she ventures out alone to halt an aluminum-smelting operation, and its contribution to global warming, by disabling Iceland’s electrical grid.

If this description makes Woman at War sound unbearably quirky, consider that the lightest-hearted musicals can answer a hunger for physical grace, while the most daring, even before the Sondheim era, have spoken to situations far beyond boy-meets-girl. Erlingsson strikes the balance between humor and urgency right from the start, thanks in large part to having cast Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir as his Artemis with a backpack and cozy sweater.

Rangy, redheaded, and just about 50, Geirharðsdóttir dashes across the terrain with fluid strides in her establishing scenes (a police helicopter is pursuing her, only minutes after her attack on the power-transmission lines) and, when able to pause for a moment, expertly disassembles her weapon of choice, a takedown bow, as if by second nature, keeping her eyes on the horizon rather than watching her hands work. Since seeing Woman at War, I have learned that Geirharðsdóttir is a star in Iceland, where audiences presumably add layers of associations to her performance as Halla. All I know is that she’s utterly convincing in the wild as a fierce eco-warrior and equally persuasive when Halla returns to Reykjavik, where people know her as the lively, peaceable, bright-faced director of an amateur choir.

ormal life: the ground to which people are supposed to be morally committed, though as the planet warms, it does have a way of flooding. The conflict in Woman at War doesn’t concern whether Halla might be justified in committing sabotage—the framed photographs of Gandhi and Mandela in her home answer that one—but whether she’s making tactical and emotional mistakes by turning her back on common, daily ties and going it alone. Although she has accomplices, both cultivated and ad hoc, Halla strives to keep them at a safe distance from her actions—which is admirable, except that when she gets around to issuing her manifesto (in a daredevil stunt straight out of Les Vampires), no one has helped her by vetting the text. The few ill-considered phrases she’s sprinkled into her flyer are all the government needs to discredit the self-styled “Mountain Woman” through an all-channels media campaign. There it is, to her dismay, playing on every TV screen and echoing in every passing street-corner conversation: the propaganda of do-nothing centrism. Erlingsson mimics the language so well that you might find it chucklesome, if it didn’t ring so dreadfully true.

But the trashing of Halla’s pseudonymous reputation is only half of her dilemma. The other half is that her activism might force her to abandon the cherished hope of adopting a child: a 4-year-old Ukrainian war orphan who unquestionably needs Halla, but who might have to wait for her forever. With the possibility of a warm domestic relationship floating into view and, at the same time, threatening to vanish, new musical performers appear out of nowhere—a trio of wailing Ukrainian folk singers in traditional costume—leading you to wonder if Halla’s self-dramatizing internal soundtrack might be evidence that this heroine, although valiant, is also a little cracked.

Well, who isn’t? Although Halla is sometimes magnificent in her defiance, the drollery deflates her just enough to let you feel close to the character. In that sense, the most whimsical element of Woman at War—the music—is the one that brings you closest to ordinary life. The resolution of Halla’s dilemma, by contrast, is effected through a narrative sleight-of-hand that is well prepared but wildly artificial. Although satisfying in a movie-ish way, it leaves you with a package that’s tied up so neatly, you might suspect that it’s empty.

But then, in his cleverness, Erlingsson deliberately roughs up the story again, inserting a running gag about a South American wanderer in Iceland (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada), who in his hapless innocence is always in the wrong place when the cops come by. This is the most high-handedly satirical part of Woman at War, and in its way the one that keeps the movie honest. In the end, Europe is flooding, its fate mourned at full vibrato by the Ukrainian folksingers, and yet Halla the demigoddess has come out all right. But the young guy in the Che T-shirt? He’s screwed.

lthough it’s common in the theater to transpose historic plays into modern dress, filmmakers seldom make the prince of Denmark prowl a Manhattan office building, as Michael Almereyda did in his Hamlet, or have Beatrice and Benedick go at each other in a suburban California house, as they did in Joss Wheedon’s Much Ado. The usual practice in movies is to adapt freely, like Cocteau in Orphée or Alfonso Cuarón in Great Expectations, or update facetiously in the Coen brothers’ manner. Only rarely does a filmmaker attempt a true double vision, calling up the original period in its integrity and at the same time showing us our present condition.

This is the brilliant, unsettling feat that Christian Petzold pulls off in Transit. He takes the characters and events of the 1944 novel of the same name by Anna Seghers and sets them without comment or explanation in present-day Paris and Marseille. A young German man, Georg (Franz Rogowski), is on the run in occupied France. He slips in among the desperate people crowding the US and Mexican consulates, where they wait day after day for exit visas. Policemen—exactly like those you’d see now—prowl the streets, demanding papers and throwing people into vans. In the bistros—exactly like those you’d sit in today—rumors circulate that the “cleansing” has reached Lyon and will soon get to Marseille. Nobody goes into detail about the forces that have occupied France (though it’s clear they’re German) or what the cleansing might be. Although the people in the consulates talk obsessively about the documents they need, they don’t say too much about why they must be on the ship that sails tomorrow—the one that, for all they know, might be the last. And so, as the movie opens up in your mind, the Nazi occupation stops being a relic of history and starts happening in the here and now, where today’s multitudes of stateless people hold on in the shadows against their own imminent cleansing.

To be in focus, a dual vision requires an immaculate style. Petzold weighs the effect of each image in Transit, never faltering in his camera placement, never cluttering the action with an unnecessary shot. The edits are crisp, the soundtrack precise with its jabs of ambient noise, the lighting clear and pitiless in the play of shafts and gloom, and the compositions as full to the edge as Edward Hopper’s with physical detail and loneliness. Action scenes unfold with unforced drama—this is, of course, a film about people on the move—but as the protagonist settles more deeply into Marseille, extended moments of interpersonal negotiation come to predominate, each as complex as a bomb needing to be defused.

Giving life to all this, Rogowski brings a combination of athleticism, shrewdness, and brooding vulnerability to Georg. A wiry, dark, sharp-featured man who sometimes resembles the young Joaquin Phoenix, Rogowski is a dancer and choreographer as well as an actor, who moves with a self-confidence that you imagine might enable him to evade the police, or hold his own in a fight. When he speaks, though, it’s in a light, slightly choked tenor that betrays Georg’s exhaustion and disillusionment. A communist of working-class rather than intellectual formation, Georg has made it out of two prison camps and evidently would no longer care to follow his principles into a third. Circumstances have given him a chance at escape through a false identity, but also have presented him with emotional complications he doesn’t want. Instead of slipping invisibly through Marseille, he becomes involved first with a young Arab boy (Lilien Batman) and then with Marie (Paula Beer), a beautiful, enigmatic woman who likes Georg but turns out, ironically, to be faithful to his phantom double.

Living phantoms are everywhere in Transit. They present dubious papers, occupy cheap hotel rooms off the books, and tell stories about themselves that probably aren’t true (and wouldn’t matter if they were). Many people are also phantoms in potential, since nobody knows who might disappear next, and some are already dead, though nobody knows that either. Everything is at once pressing and insubstantial; there’s no time to waste, and nothing to do but wait. Add to this ghostliness the vision of a time past that’s also present, a time present that’s out of place. There you have the sorrow and fascination of Transit, an imaginary trip through the anteroom of two genuine hells.

n my way home from watching Gaspar Noé’s latest film, Climax, I did a little reality-testing as self-defense. I had just seen Noé snatch away the ground from two dozen characters, and I wanted to know if he’d done it to me as well.

Jolting along with me in the subway were people of every faith and none, every gender and none, from many ethnic backgrounds and almost all ages and economic levels. During rush hour, as many as 258 of us will be packed into a car, united in discomfort, strain, and fatigue but otherwise not merely diverse but deeply divided. Multiply by 10 and you get the number of riders jammed onto the train, who by any reasonable expectation should be ready to lash out—and yet, over the course of 40 years of daily commuting, I can recall fewer than half a dozen fights or even shouting matches. Some theorists of animal behavior say we’re hard-wired for aggression; some theorists of society think the corruptions of New York encourage every kind of selfishness and anger. Your own nerves, too, may tell you at times that conditions in the car favor a riot. Yet we ride on in the millions, getting along with one another so well that we hardly even notice we’re doing it.

That’s reality. To Noé, though, this sociability is a mediocrity and a sham, beneath which lurks the brutal, authentic truth. He means to plunge your face right into the guts of that terrible, beautiful Absolute. Never mind that it’s more like the bowl of cold spaghetti proffered to blindfolded middle-school kids in a Halloween house of horrors. You’ll plunge! And so will his characters—in this case, a recently assembled troupe of dancers, all young and fit but otherwise as disparate as subway riders, who are sequestered in an isolated building after a rehearsal and driven nuts by the LSD-laced sangria they unknowingly drink while partying.

It’s possible, barely, that Noé had an idea when conceiving Climax. At the conclusion of the prologue—a series of video interviews with the members of the fictitious troupe—the company’s manager babbles about how she’s proud to take the group on a tour of America, where people don’t see anything like the excellence of French dance. Cut to a dress rehearsal, conducted in front of a glittering tricolor backdrop, onto which Noé superimposes the title: “A French film and proud of it.” Now you see, at considerable length, what the manager calls French artistry: a been-there-done-that mishmash of voguing, hand jive, street-dance contortionism, promenades on the diagonal, and writhing on the floor with a crotch-is-burning sneer. Pure mediocrity, endlessly repeated. Does Noé realize it stinks, and is he poking fun at French cultural pretensions? Is he also sticking a thumb in the eye of his French producers, including government funders? Maybe, briefly. But then it’s time for the acid to kick in, and the characters to start reeling through some ultraviolence and the old in-out, in-out.

I admit there is virtuosity in Climax. It’s extremely difficult to film long, hand-held takes in which the camera follows or encounters actors engaged in whatever the hell they’ve been told to do. It’s even trickier if you meanwhile tilt the camera woozily, or turn it upside down, in sympathy with your tripped-out characters. But this is virtuosity without thought or purpose, other than to show that everyone’s beastly. And though I can’t say that any character in Climax is admirable, I note with added queasiness that Noé has chosen to make the ones with the darkest skin tones the most brutal and obscene.

There’s a climax here, all right—the climax of a certain strain of European bad-boy cinema (it’s always boys), in which fantastic visual skill is devoted solely to the lifting of a middle finger. Well, the same to you, Gaspar Noé. The New York rush hour is all the extremity I need—and it comes with a comity you evidently wouldn’t believe.

The posture of serene indifference with which The Nation’s film column historically faced the Oscars has shifted during my tenure into more of a defensive crouch. I suppose that’s only to be expected, now that a single night of industrial self-promotion has expanded into an awards season that tramples one-third of each movie-going year. Out stomp the prize seekers during November and December in a parade of white elephants, followed in January and February by the time-killing, leftover releases that look more like sick mongrels fleeing an unscrupulous pound.

To be fair, the movies coming out now are not all misshapen rejects. In fact, I have something to say about two of them. But before I do, I ought to rise from the duck-and-cover position long enough to acknowledge that the most mainstream of the 2019 Best Picture nominees, A Star Is Born, doesn’t deserve the neglect to which I’ve so far consigned it.

Not that I want to give it too much credit. Considering that this latest Star Is Born is the fourth version of the show-biz yarn—or the fifth, if you count 1932’s What Price Hollywood? as the original—you might say its makers owned up to the obvious when they gave the story’s cowboy rocker, played by Bradley Cooper, a theme song that posits that “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.” I should point out, though, that Cooper is not merely the hirsute baritone lead of this production but also its co-screenwriter, co-songwriter, and Oscar-snubbed director, who put that self-critical musical proposition into his own mouth. His decision to do so is neither out of step with his acting career nor out of tune with the movie.

Except for occasional star turns in movies like American Sniper, Cooper has made his way in the business by playing deftly against his he-man type. He’s been the preening butt of the Hangover series, the half-cracked ne’er-do-well of Silver Linings Playbook, the comically horny and inept FBI agent of American Hustle, and—in perhaps his most resonant performance—the conscience-stricken false hero of The Place Beyond the Pines. In A Star Is Born, Cooper continues the trend by casting himself as Jackson Maine, a man who seems at first glance like a throwback to the tough, old-school westerner—he treats whiskey as a major food group, avoids shampoo as if it’s an STD, and has Sam Elliott for his older brother—but on closer inspection proves to be so much of a wayward aesthete that he might have haunted Downtown Manhattan in the 1970s, hurting for his next art fix. He meets Ally (Lady Gaga), his future love interest and protégée, when he wanders into a drag bar, where he settles in as comfortably as if he’d choose Paris Is Burning as his desert-island movie. And what is Gaga doing that he finds so attractive, other than belting out a cover of “La Vie en Rose”? By performing in diva get-up as the one physiological female in the drag show, she is (I might imagine) acting as a woman imitating a man imitating a woman.

This is something new in the tradition of A Star Is Born. Many gay men have identified with the fabulous, suffering, enduring images of Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand—but with Gaga, everyone who feels the call of the polymorphous can see themselves in the endlessly malleable contours of her face and hear their emotions throb in her omni-generic singing. And if Cooper in his role has stayed closer to the original—the man who has driven himself to succeed but now prefers to wallow masochistically in failure—he has nevertheless added an extra kink to the character. This embodiment of the old ways allows himself to die so that Gaga may preserve the authenticity—the realness—of her play of appearances.

Do I think A Star Is Born deserves an Oscar as the best film of 2018? The question doesn’t interest me. But if it should happen to win, at least the prize will have gone to a picture that thinks some of the old ways have outlived their usefulness, and has done its bit to escort them to the grave. I’ll also feel the winner was directed with skill and self-effacing integrity. It turns out Cooper can do that, too.

mong the other awards that will be settled on February 24 is the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film, which might or might not go to the recently released Never Look Away. Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who already owns an Oscar for his 2006 feel-good Stasi melodrama The Lives of Others, Never Look Away faces extremely stiff competition in its category (from the incomparable Roma and the shamelessly swoony Cold War, among others) but benefits from the air of prestige that Academy members like. It’s about art, which the voters think is good. It’s also about something else they value highly: making money.

The money-making part is something of a secret, though, reserved for those in the know. Never Look Away unfolds at a leisurely pace as the tale of a German boy named Kurt, born in the 1930s in Dresden, who has a precocious talent for drawing and a cool, keen eye for his family’s troubles. Before the war, they suffer because of an insufficient enthusiasm for Nazism. After the war, they struggle in a city that has been reduced to rubble and converted to communism overnight. As he comes of age, Kurt takes a job in a sign-making shop, then gains admission to the city’s art academy, where he receives the traditional academic training required for the production of socialist realism. He wins prestigious mural commissions but hates their dishonesty and makes up his mind to defect, crossing into West Berlin only weeks before the wall goes up. Now he can make any kind of art he likes; he just doesn’t know what that would be. So he goes to Dusseldorf and enrolls in another academy, this one run by a gnomic fellow who never removes his fedora. After much trial and error, Kurt finally discovers a way of his own to create art—he makes slightly blurry grisaille paintings based on snapshots—and launches his career with a lavishly praised show at a gallery in Wuppertal. As the movie ends, everyone in the audience understands that Kurt stands on the threshold of a great career, while some know more: In broad outline, his story matches the biography of Gerhard Richter.

Now, Richter is no Bradley Cooper, but he’s famous enough and very rich, which means that anyone who ventures even occasionally into an art museum will recognize Never Look Away as the story of a winner. Satisfaction and self-satisfaction are built into the viewer’s experience: the pleasure of watching the hero invent a style that will carry him to glory; the pride of picking up on von Donnersmarck’s knowing winks and nudges (for example, by recognizing the man beneath the fedora as a pseudonymous Joseph Beuys). As if to improve the glow of flattery with the tingle of expectation, von Donnersmarck makes you wait three hours to see Kurt lift himself at last to a status matching Richter’s.

But by drawing out the film, von Donnersmarck does more than defer a foreordained triumph. He also gives himself time to stuff the biographical frame full of fictitious crimes, cover-ups, doppelgängers, sexual shenanigans, and abrupt unmaskings. In this way, the director moves Never Look Away out of the category of fancy biopic and into the realm of languorous, art-house suspense movies—like Blow-Up, you might say, if Antonioni had been a German postmodernist eager to offer reassurance.

The trick is to arouse anxieties about the nightmare of history and then gently wake the audience from them. For this, von Donnersmarck needs a villain—someone who can concentrate all the evils of 20th-century Germany into a despicable and ultimately disposable body—and so he invents one in the person of Professor Carl Seeband, an SS medical officer tied to Kurt by the mysterious bands of fate. When Kurt is a small boy, infatuated with his beautiful, artistic, sometimes delusional aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), Seeband is the dark figure in the background who separates the two. (It takes him almost the whole first act to do it.) When Kurt grows into a young man (the lithe and brooding Tom Schilling, his ice-blue eyes glowing beneath a floppy widow’s peak), he falls in love with another student at the Dresden academy, Ellie (Paula Beer), and Seeband emerges from the shadows as her father. A strange coincidence: Ellie looks almost exactly like the aunt, and is as old as Elisabeth was when Kurt saw her for the last time.

With the incomprehensible powers of a great artist, Kurt intuits the tragic connection, casting his eyes about Seeband’s medical office as if spotting a ghost’s aura. And with all the brutal, arrogant rectitude of a former SS man—albeit one who now proclaims his allegiance to communist ideals—Seeband moves against Kurt. (As played by the square-jawed and beefy Sebastian Koch, there’s a lot of Seeband to move.) Von Donnersmarck tries fitfully to draw comparisons between the two antagonists—both say, when challenged, that they use their skills “because I can,” and both are driven (in Seeband’s words) to be recognized as the best at what they do—but these are no more than formulas inserted into the dialogue, as magical in their way as the spiritual affinities that bring Elisabeth back as Ellie: Von Donnersmarck pretends to dialectics and delivers Theosophy. And when he makes a show of sounding the depths of modern Germany’s great political divide, he surfaces with a shrug. All you really need to know is that both sides were terrible; the proof is that Seeband was on both.

Kurt stumbles onto this great truth (or cliché) in the course of discovering his artistic method, and in the culminating Blow-Up sequence exposes his father-in-law’s depravity without quite knowing that he’s done it. When Seeband sees what Kurt has been painting and escapes to the wings, like Snidely Whiplash making his exit in Act III of Little Nell on the Tracks, Kurt just gives a puzzled look and returns to the easel. It’s as if the great irony of Never Look Away lay in the artist’s inability to understand the meaning of his own work.

That too, of course, is a cliché. If there’s any real irony at the end of Never Look Away, it’s that von Donnersmarck has spent three hours laboring to overturn conventional critical opinion by infusing Richter’s art with autobiographical sentiment and world-historic angst—yet all he’s done is stuff it with kitsch.

or better and worse, artists are rarely seers like Kurt, or grandly self-immolating lovers like Gaga and Bradley. When young, they’re more often like Sinan (Doğu Demirkol), the recent college graduate and would-be writer stuck in the Turkish provinces in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree: prickly, sarcastic, self-involved, a little physically awkward, and for all that somehow endearing—when you don’t want to punch him in the face.

Sinan pulls the right corner of his mouth upward when he talks, giving him that sincere wise-guy look, and tends to roll side to side while walking stiff-legged through his hometown’s hilly streets. Like so many of Ceylan’s characters, Sinan is a tireless walker—both in Çan and in the nearby farming village where his father goes to work the land (or hide)—providing many opportunities for the camera to follow him and unfold panoramic landscapes. And like the other hapless Chekhovian types with whom he shares the movie, Sinan talks endlessly.

There’s the high-school sweetheart who gave up on education, put on a headscarf, and is bitterly resigned to being married off, and the fellow graduate who can’t get a teaching job but is cheerful about joining the riot police. There’s the mayor, who isn’t too busy to receive Sinan and express warm support for his manuscript, so long as it will encourage tourism, and the prominent regional author encountered in a book shop, who finally puts a stop to Sinan’s provocations by shouting that he’s going home to soak his feet. There are the two young imams who have been helping themselves to apples from somebody’s tree, and who disagree about whether it’s best for people not to think too much; as well as Sinan’s mother, who shakes him to the core by saying that if she had it to do all over again, she’d still marry his father.

For the most part, The Wild Pear Tree comprises a series of these rambling dialogues, the most tense of which are with Sinan’s father (Murat Cemcir), a silver-tongued grammar-school teacher whose gambling habit has left him cadging loose change from his son. He’s maddening, broken, and the only person in the movie who has any idea of what Sinan’s doing with his impossible-to-describe “meta-novel” of “personal observations of the local culture.”

No star will be born in The Wild Pear Tree—or die, either. There are no winners to be found, not even that regional author whose feet hurt from listening to Sinan. There is still something to be won, though: if not forgiveness, then the capacity to forgive. To Ceylan, that would be the most difficult art of all—and if you look around with him and see how beautiful everything is, it just might seem possible.

dam McKay plays for laughs in Vice like Scheherazade playing for time. Lives are at stake—the lives of people everywhere subject to American power—and McKay figures that if he can just keep the jokes coming, and so coax us into watching the exposé he’s built around the lumbering, grunting, tooth-sucking figure of Dick Cheney, we might yet rise up from the multiplexes and save ourselves.1

He has followed this narrative strategy before, in The Big Short (2015), where he achieved great advances in the art and science of the celebrity footnote. (Example: Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, explaining how subprime mortgages can be packaged as bonds.) But the gallows humor in The Big Short concerned only the deliberate engineering of a financial collapse that ruined millions. In Vice, McKay’s theme is nothing less than an oligarchic coup, to which he believes Cheney quietly devoted himself throughout his career as White House chief of staff, congressman, and finally vice president—a coup that announced its success with shock and awe in the skies above Baghdad, and a rattling of hollowed-out democratic institutions at home. A subject so large and terrible demands that McKay take in earnest the title that he and Will Ferrell gave their comedy website, Funny or Die, and deliver that proposition’s all-in cinematic expression: a long, loose, raunchy variety show in which actors play dress-up and put on silly voices in pursuit of a desperate purpose.2

The sense of desperation actually comes first in the movie, established in two contrasting images of situations careening out of control. Vice begins on a dark Wyoming road in 1963, where a car driven by a blind-drunk young Cheney is veering toward probable disaster. Then, without transition, the camera is suddenly pushing along behind Cheney on the morning of September 11, 2001, as a Secret Service agent hurries him into a command room. Just like that, shakiness and speed plant their flags in the film’s visual style, calamity lays claim to the atmosphere, and McKay’s Cheney impersonator, Christian Bale, goes from being a lean-jawed young tough to a bald, portly usurper of presidential power, no longer taking foolish risks after a bar fight but now gambling on the fallout from mass murder.3

The voice-over narrator—an informative mystery character—sums up this introduction by asking how Cheney became who he was: a man who could give the Pentagon shoot-to-kill orders on his own authority. Vice sets out faithfully to answer that question about an individual’s moral formation; but since this film is as much agitprop as biopic, as much political history as comedy, it further complicates the opening by adding what you might call McKay’s Law: a theory of the electorate’s Cheney-enabling obliviousness.4

You see the evidence flash before you in found images: self-involved men playing golf while a forest fire rages in the background, slack-jawed women dancing spasmodically in the throes of pop-music possession. The mystery narrator argues that a population overburdened by work and overwhelmed by the world’s complexity can’t be expected to behave otherwise, but the grotesqueness of the pictures McKay has chosen suggests he might harbor a less sympathetic attitude. You catch a whiff of resentment from the professional funnyman who has to jolly the audience into paying attention—a hint about why McKay bypassed the Cheney-specific title Vice President and went for the culture-wide allegation of Vice.5

I usually dislike such finger-wagging, and I regret its recurrence later in the film, but McKay’s gags hit their mark so often, and his case against Cheney is so detailed and compelling, that I’m willing to say, provisionally: Fair enough. Besides, when McKay finally moves into the main body of the film, it becomes clear that he’s put more into it than laughs and scandalmongering. Vice has enough depth that it also can excite pity, fear, and a creepy, corporeal dread.6

cKay interprets Cheney as a terse and fundamentally mediocre yes-man driven onward in life by his wife’s ambition, and so you might describe Vice as a satirical variation on Macbeth. Amy Adams burns coldly in the role of Lynne, Lady Cheney; a roster of right-wing moneymen, making cameo appearances at think tanks and on Fox News, helps put the time out of joint for the rising killer. And yet this tale has no witches to draw the king of shadows toward his end—none except the flaws and excesses of Cheney’s body.7

By the time you reach the climax, McKay is literally staging the action above a hole where Cheney’s heart ought to be. Having suffered multiple coronary incidents over the years, Cheney received an organ transplant at age 71. But in McKay’s boldest passage of moviemaking, he elides the date of the surgery, 2012, and recapitulates several years of Cheney’s accomplishments as a grand montage sequence, centered on the bloody cavity on the operating table. Civilians and soldiers burst apart in Iraq, detainees writhe under torture, schoolchildren flee from rampaging gunmen, liars multiply unchecked on the airwaves, migrants huddle in detention, a fossil-fueled planet combusts—and those are only the public events that circle the gaping void. Also passing by in the montage are people who (in McKay’s view) were used up by the man who corroded his own heart: Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, and (most grievous of all) Cheney’s daughter Mary, who found that his quiet defense of gay marriages such as hers became expendable to her sister’s political ambitions.8

But let’s back up. As I reread this climactic summary, I realize that McKay is right to want to lighten the mood now and then. Before I inadvertently talk you out of watching Vice, let’s change the topic to Christian Bale.9

Gossip sites have been avid to report how the sometimes recklessly self-transforming actor put on weight to play Cheney, but these news items do nothing to prepare you for the sight of a great-bellied Bale swathed in pajamas at a bathroom sink. This vision appears at a critical moment—Cheney must decide whether to accept the offer to be Bush’s running mate—and in one of the film’s subtler jokes, McKay and Bale convey his habit of deliberation by making you watch Cheney brush his teeth. He gives them a thorough scrubbing. He lowers his heavy head and spits, copiously. Then, as if you hadn’t already seen enough, he knocks back a cupful of mouthwash and gargles. McKay confines this action to a single long shot, but by the time it’s over you feel as if you’ve been close enough to the Bale-Cheney corpus to have caught the spray.10

At other moments, Bale performs veritable ballets of discomfort: leaning back in satisfaction in the desk chair of a minuscule White House office and almost bumping the wall, or sinking lower stride by stride while entering Congress, as if walking into quicksand, because he’s having yet another heart attack. The best of Bale’s physicality, though, comes out in smaller gestures, which don’t so much imitate Cheney’s mannerisms as bring the character’s thoughts to the surface. The fits and starts of Cheney’s speech, the lateral sneers that bare one set of incisors, the pauses for breath that are also half-swallowed growls: These are Bale’s manifestations of a mind at once patient and brutal, wary of exposure but entirely sure of itself.11

It’s the mind of a man who has no talent for flippancy—unlike his mentor Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), who dazzles the young Cheney by getting away with talking dirty in public—and who expects the average person to dislike him. In another of McKay’s subtler gags, he has Cheney mumble his way through a stump speech during his first run for Congress, as if hoping that once he’s permitted his words to project a few inches into the air, he might do the safe thing and suck them back in. Lynne gets along much better with the crowd when she takes over for him, though her notion of oratorical inspiration is scarcely less ridiculous. Crying out with all the verve and conviction that Amy Adams can give her, Lynne boasts that Wyoming women aren’t unnatural, like those East Coast feminists: “We don’t burn our bras. We wear them!”12

Cheney’s ultimate foil, though, as Vice has it, is George W. Bush: a man who, in Sam Rockwell’s gleeful, runaway performance, is every bit as warm, candid, garrulous, and naive as Cheney is cold, devious, taciturn, and cynical. Moviegoers who continue to bear a grudge against W. may need to work up a little compassion once they’ve seen Bale, under hooded eyes, study an eager, loose-limbed Rockwell the way a trout angler appraises his expected dinner.13

And yet McKay has enough compassion of his own that he doesn’t portray Cheney as having always been so horrid. There’s a distinct moment in Vice when you see Cheney stop being a servile, quasi-buffoonish aide to Rumsfeld and turn into a hard, dangerous man. It happens at a funeral back in Wyoming, where Cheney warns his despicable father-in-law never to come near his family again. At that brief instant, you get to feel you’re on Cheney’s side, as you witness for the first time his peculiar imperviousness: a preference for operating behind a protective barrier while lobbing credible threats of massive retaliation. He seems not merely justified but admirable—after which McKay begins the long tale of how Cheney applied those same faculties to the consolidation of absolute executive power.14

Vice crams so much detail about this subject into its 132 minutes, and is so determined to keep up the necessary pace for japing characterizations and comic digressions, that cracks eventually open in the surface. Topics are broached and then abandoned (remind me: What exactly happened with Valerie Plame?); new scenes start out of nowhere. McKay has the energy to carry you past these rough spots, though on a second viewing you might wonder about the material he must have cut, and wish he’d done a better job of smoothing the edits. And while McKay makes no such flubs when he integrates social-psychology research and propaganda methods into his story—here are the public-relations focus groups that helped sell the Iraq War, and the pristine blonde flamethrowers of Fox News who kept America heated up—the lessons have a village-explainer tone. Despite Naomi Watts’s uncredited turn as a Fox News talking head, these passages diverge from the celebrity footnotes of The Big Short. For one thing, they’re not funny; and if we, the movie-going public, are indeed as abased, as vitiated, as McKay’s Law implies, then it’s presumably too late for us to learn from them, anyhow.15

That said, these are small complaints about a daringly large movie. Vice succeeds both as a brash, try-anything entertainment, full of outrage, sorrow, and a sense of absurdity, and as a guide to how we fell into our current predicament. A career politician, addicted to secrecy, pushed America toward autocracy when he was vice president. Now our president is a career scam artist, addicted to publicity, and the power he craves is at hand.16

oland, 1949: Two musicologists and their Communist Party–appointed minder travel the frozen countryside—villages of crumbling wooden shacks where the chickens underfoot outnumber the humans; expanses of snow void of anything except a single tree to piss against—to record people’s wailing love songs and take note of the singers’ names. The minder isn’t impressed; where he comes from, he grumbles, every drunk sings like that. But soon two truckloads of rural folk are rolling into the muddy yard of a repurposed country estate, there to try out for a new troupe that will honor the true culture of Poland’s masses and bring it to city audiences, albeit cleaned up a little.17

This is how Wiktor (Tomasz Kot),  the arranger and conductor of the musicological team, locks eyes for the first time with Zula (Joanna Kulig) in a drafty audition room. He’s dark, lanky, iron-jawed, and brooding, with a lock of hair that droops over his vast forehead. She’s blonde, full-lipped, fiery-eyed, and carries herself with a swagger. Wiktor knows Zula isn’t really from a village and has done time in jail—and if people don’t want to hear a Polish folk song, he quickly learns, she’s just as happy to give them a number picked up from a Russian movie. No matter. Wiktor has to have Zula for the troupe. Zula has to have Wiktor. Fifteen years of mad love and misery ensue, on both sides of a divided Europe.18

Cold War,  it’s called: the new foray into black-and-white historicist romance by Pawel Pawlikowski, writer-director of Ida (2013). With its sexy lead actors and nostalgia for the old bohemian Paris—France is where the lovers settle for a while, and 1950s French film is where Pawlikowski finds much of his style—Cold War gives audiences a lot to swoon over. It even makes a fetish out of communist Poland—tacitly, of course, but with guarded affection. A rotten, terrifying society, you’d think; but its suffering was so noble, and its kitsch was such fun.19

But to give Pawlikowski his due, he’s clever. Cold War is about people who can’t feel authentic no matter where they are, East or West; and at the same time, it’s about its own inevitable rootlessness, as symbolized by a song in Zula’s repertoire. The tune originates as a village lament, cried out by a half-starved young girl in pigtails and a ragged sweater. It turns into a lush chorale for the prancing Polish folklore troupe, then a number to be crooned in a Parisian jazz club, and finally a breathy pop song with fancy French lyrics. By that point, Zula and Wiktor know they have a home, a doomed one, only in one another; and Cold War has owned up to being an old-fashioned melodrama—a good one at that.20

The farming town of Monrovia sits a bit southwest of center in the state of Indiana. The population, which numbers slightly more than 1,000, was reported in the most recent Census as 97 percent white. Median household income hovers around $64,000 a year; about 15 percent of residents live below the poverty line. Four houses of worship, all Protestant, dot the map. In 2016, 77 percent of the vote in Monrovia’s county went to Donald Trump.

You can learn none of this from Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary, Monrovia, Indiana, which played at the recent New York Film Festival and began its US theatrical rollout at New York City’s Film Forum. As in his previous 41 nonfiction films, Wiseman forbids himself the use of voice-overs, interviews, archival images, printed texts, soundtrack music, or any other means of imposing external information or an explicit argument on his subject matter. His job, as he sees it, is to give you something more enduring than data or opinions, and yet also more fragile and elusive: an idea, constructed of normally occurring sights and sounds, that you intuit as the whole of Monrovia.

Consider the carefully crafted illusion that the town’s main drag is compact enough to fit into a few establishing shots, and that Wiseman’s camera, sooner or later, pokes into its full array of storefronts. A little reflection will tell you that these forays aren’t truly exhaustive, but they feel close enough after you’ve passed some time with the people in Hot Rod’s Barber Shop, Café on the Corner, Dawg House Pizza, Slingers Tattoo, Red Barrel Liquors, Class Act Hair Studio, and even a place you’re not supposed to be able to penetrate, the Masonic Lodge, visited on a day when aproned officials honored a fellow adept for his 50 years of service. By the time Wiseman has added to this ensemble two or three meetings of the local planning commission, a baby shower at the Monrovia Festival Community Building, and a kitchen shift at the Main Street Bar and Grill, you have the feeling that you could get around the town center on your own, and would find most of the faces familiar.

As usual, though, Wiseman is less interested in faces than in the work that people do. He devotes whole sequences to processes like spraying a broad expanse of crops, encouraging a writhing crowd of pigs onto a transport, dumping truckloads of rattling kernels into an elevator, grinding and packaging meat at the supermarket, and cropping the tail of an anesthetized dog. I could go on—but then, I’d risk making it sound as though Wiseman flips through Monrovia as if he were thumbing through a catalog. Yes, he likes those successions of wordless, fixed-camera images, neatly arranged one after the other in discrete pops. But as scenes recur and a rhythm gets going, certain types of labor gain force as organizing principles in the film.

’ve already suggested one such theme: the cycle of feeding people, from the fields and pens to the deep fryer and pizza box. A second theme is education. Among the earliest scenes are two that characterize the instruction in Monrovia’s high school: a classroom lecture about the town’s history of success in men’s basketball going back to the 1920s, delivered to students who seem to expect this material to be on a test, followed immediately by a rehearsal for a school performance, in which a beaming girls’ ensemble chirps “Ja-Da” while executing choreography suitable for Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe.

The school teaches praiseworthy uses of the flesh, while the churches (in Wiseman’s third principal theme) preach the eternal superiority of the spirit. He begins the film (after an introductory montage of agricultural views) in a Bible-study class, where the pastor speaks of Jesus’s promise to comfort the faithful throughout lives that will unavoidably be filled with tribulation. This scene eventually proves to be one-half of a frame, the remainder of which comes at the end of the film, with a lengthy funeral sermon delivered by a different minister. This man urges the mourners to rejoice that a 74-year-old wife and mother has gone home to Jesus—after which Wiseman proceeds to the cemetery for the singing of “Amazing Grace” and the backhoeing of some of Monrovia’s rich soil into the grave.

Some viewers might draw their sharpest conclusions about Monrovia’s mind-set not from these preachers but from the members of the planning commission, who worry that a housing development on the outskirts of town might “change the demographic.” Others will read much into an episode set in a shop bluntly named Guns & Ordnance, where the salesmen and browsers bypass the more utilitarian firearms to admire assault rifles and a handgun that dwarfs Dirty Harry’s. But as much as any other figures, the two pastors complete the physical, social, and political idea that Wiseman so immaculately builds up in Monrovia, Indiana. Here is a place literally rooted in natural processes yet imagining itself beyond the reach of nature, filmed at a moment when people linger over their nostalgia (for the likes of “Ja-Da” or hoops glory) while being steeped in anxiety about encroachments of the new.

That’s my impression, anyway, based on what Wiseman makes of the town. How Monrovia would represent itself, I can’t say. A local newspaper or radio station might give the beginning of an answer, as well as an opening for a dialogue with the world beyond the cornfields; but despite his impulse to be complete, Wiseman doesn’t turn up any such thing on Main Street.

t would be unfair to Ruth Beckermann to praise her new film, The Waldheim Waltz, primarily for what it tells us about the Trump era. And yet, while addressing a subject distant in time and place from Monrovia, Indiana, she speaks even more directly to our current situation than Wiseman does, while taking a diametrically opposite approach to documentary.

Her theme is the care and management of historical amnesia, and the rage that can erupt when its comforts are disturbed. The year of the presidential election in Austria, Beckermann was among those who stirred up an inconvenient past. Acting as both observer and participant—roles that, to Wiseman, would be incompatible—she began bringing her clunky new video camera to demonstrations against the Christian democratic candidate, former UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim, after the magazine Profil and the World Jewish Congress produced solid evidence of his Nazi past, which he, in common with many other Austrians, had long pretended did not exist. At first, using a tactic favored by our own administration, Waldheim and his supporters dismissed the revelations as a mere rehash of old, long-disproved rumors. But as more and more documents emerged and election day approached, the tone changed, both in the candidate’s public statements and on the streets. Waldheim, the veteran diplomat and smiling front-runner, recast himself as the victim of a partisan smear campaign, or worse—a vengeful conspiracy against blameless Austria itself, conducted by certain well-funded alien forces who are known to control the media.

Somehow, Beckermann keeps her blood from boiling as she revisits these shameless lies. Perhaps she manages to stay cool because she’s so fascinated by her own recorded images from 1986—which are brusque, immediate, and rapid—and takes such lingering, morbid pleasure in the period news footage she’s amassed. There’s something almost droll about her voice-over narration and her choice of straight-ahead jazz to underscore it. As she explains toward the end of the film, she was proud that an early handful of anti-fascist activists grew into a large movement, and she gives a keenly intelligent account of how they almost won. But she also looks closely at the victorious Waldheim and his supporters, who seem a little too familiar for comfort. Behold the fury of good, Christian people upon being told that no, they weren’t innocent victims.

In its happiest and saddest event, this year’s New York Film Festival brought to the screen something like Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind. This was the film that Welles photographed almost in entirety, working on and off from 1970 into 1976, and edited in a partial, preliminary way, only to lose the footage to his financial backers. Recently, a group led by Frank Marshall, Filip Jan Rymsza, and Peter Bogdanovich rescued the material and assembled it into their best approximation of what Welles would have made of these hundreds of reels, and this was what the festival offered: the recovered Holy Grail of cinema.

The assembled faithful could have been forgiven for expecting the rains to fall and the Fisher King to be healed. Hooray! Alas. The Other Side of the Wind turned out to be not the Grail, but a self-portrait that the Fisher King might have made in his pain and infirmity. It’s about a grand old movie director played by John Huston—out of money, out of fashion, surrounded by aging cronies and harassed by young mimics, flatterers, and carpers—who is struggling to complete a film. You see long, discouraging excerpts of his work-in-progress: an imitation of Antonioni in his mode of wordless sex, radical politics, and youth culture anomie, presumably undertaken by the Huston character in a vain attempt to keep up with the times. Around this joyless parody is a framing narrative that I take to be Welles’s own vain attempt to keep up: an account of the great man’s last birthday party, supposedly shot vérité style by multiple observers and edited into an early-’70s mishmash.

For people with an infinite interest in Welles—like me—The Other Side of the Wind will provide inexhaustible material for study. But artworks don’t exist primarily for study purposes. They’re meant to live, as Welles’s work did from the 1930s into the ’60s, when he was among the people who created world culture. The Other Side of the Wind reveals a Welles who had retreated into a defensive position, reacting to a culture that had got ahead of him.

Which is to say: Thank you, New York Film Festival, for showing this picture. Now let’s talk about some of the movies on the slate that are alive, and likely to remain so.

Of those I managed to see, none could match the clarity of vision and intensity of feeling, expansiveness and intimacy, breadth and breath of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Set in Mexico City in 1970-71 and based on events in Cuarón’s childhood, the story in simple terms is about two women and the complementary troubles that bind them: the pregnancy of the unwed Cleo, a domestic servant of Mixtec background (Yalitza Aparicio), and the abandonment of Cleo’s high-bourgeois employer Sofía (Marina de Tavira), whose husband has walked off. But, of course, nothing is simple here: not the love between Sofía’s children and Cleo, the ignorance of the children about the events over their heads, the desperate anger that Sofía sometimes lets splash onto Cleo, or the current of violence that runs between poor and rich, country and city. Roma is a film about private life, and a private home, that keeps moving into the public realm, with Cuarón’s wide-screen, black-and-white camera continually traveling, tracking, exploring, revealing. It’s not just ostentation. Cuarón makes good on the old notion that the moral purpose of camera movement is to show that the world is whole; that there is always something beyond the edge of the frame, and then something beyond that. And because Cuarón is faithful to the continuity of the world, he also has a way of letting the world pour into his shots, adding more and more action to the image whenever the camera does happen to pause. Without even stirring, he can unite a puddle on the floor with the blue sky above, and allow you to feel what both mean to the maid who does the scrubbing.

Not as good as Roma (because, my God) but worthy of being discussed in the next breath is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s deeply moving Shoplifters, which won the top prize at Cannes this past May. Dramatizing the warm, loving exploitation of abandoned children for criminal purposes, it follows about half a dozen of Tokyo’s marginal people who have formed a makeshift family, living in a squat and stealing to supplement their meager wages and pension. Shot close to the pleasantly raffish actors (including two who are remarkably young) and imbued with the beautiful light that makes Kore-eda’s scenes feel like moments of eternity, Shoplifters implicitly adopts its characters’ worldview, so it never plays as a protest or exposé. As far as these people are concerned (with one key exception), this way of life is normal, though necessarily risky and clandestine. The plot revelations, which Kore-eda cunningly piles up at the end, are heartbreaking when they hit.

Alice Rohrwacher, whose film The Wonders was a highlight of the 2014 festival, returned this year with a delightful fable, Happy as Lazzaro, about a young man who’s the holy innocent of a poor, isolated settlement of tobacco farmers. Would you believe it, these people live in circumstances so primitive that they have just one light bulb, which they take from room to room as needed. That’s the premise, anyway, with Rohrwacher starting the film as if it’s going to be a throwback to 1940s Neo-Realism. Then Lazzaro (the sweet, open-faced Adriano Tardiolo) literally walks into a completely different kind of film full of chucklesome improbabilities, and squatters not unlike Kore-eda’s shoplifters. I wish Rohrwacher had thought of a better way to end the picture than to resort to a weak religiosity; but I’d gladly watch everything up to the last five minutes again and again.

The great Jia Zhangke returned to the festival with Ash Is Purest White, a welcome return to form after his previous, tedious puzzle-box movie, 2015’s Mountains May Depart. Once again starring Jia’s signature actress, the formidable Zhao Tao, Ash begins in 2001 in the criminal underworld of Datong City, where Zhao reigns as the moll of the hulking crook Liao Fan; then the film expands into a 17-year-long picaresque adventure across large swaths of China. Melodrama merges with documentary observation, documentary with landscape film, in the course of which Liao turns out to be a disappointment. Zhao is not. Witty, gritty, resourceful, and burning with the “righteousness” of which other criminals only boast, she endures.

Like Jia in Ash Is Purest White, Bi Gan uses an illegal handgun to move along the plot of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Unlike Jia, he’s a genre-mad experimentalist, whose fascination with cinema as a machine of dreams and memories makes him something like a Chinese David Lynch, only much more daring. For its first half, Long Day’s Journey plays like a scrambled film noir, in which a sorrowful casino manager (Huang Jue) returns to his home in the crumbling industrial city of Kaili to act like an amateur detective and mope about women, who in his experience are either physically departed or emotionally distant. Nothing makes much sense, but everything is gorgeous. Then, to start the second half, the detective goes into a theater to kill time, at which point you begin to watch the movie he’s seeing, and from which he will never emerge: a 3-D picture titled Long Day’s Journey Into Night, of which he’s the star. It’s an hour-long fantasia based on all the themes and motifs you’ve already seen, only now stretched into a single endless camera excursion through an irrational, nocturnal urban maze.

To Bi, camera movement is not moral revelation. It’s the royal road to our collective unconscious. I prefer Cuarón’s worldly approach (trust the author of Gravity to be well grounded); but the festival this year gave audiences a chance to see his work in close proximity to Bi’s thrilling oneirism and showed that both can be fully alive.

Church services are always humming along in RaMell Ross’s meditative documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening. The thump of basketballs against hardwood is perpetual, the stars wheel continually overhead, and distant lightning flashes eternally behind dark, rolling clouds as kids set off bottle rockets. The supplies of fireworks and young people seem endless, but that’s an illusion. Some kids get older in the course of the film. Others do not.

“Where does time reside?” Ross asks in one of his occasional on-screen texts, well after he’s drawn you into the film’s disjunctive, single-take views of today’s rural Alabama. Maybe the answer is that time resides in three places at once: the shifting, teasing, broken cinematic pattern that he constructs out of captured moments; the unfolding circumstances in which his subjects pass their lives, which feel precious and unrepeatable, yet as static as the barometric pressure; and history, which hovers both inside and outside the movie’s frame.

The external part of that history has to do with Hale County’s exalted place in the development of American photojournalism. This was Walker Evans’s destination in 1936, when he took the pictures of white sharecroppers that went into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Although James Agee’s text for that book questioned whether he and Evans had been intruders more than helpers, and spoke eloquently of how the reality of Hale County escaped their best efforts at description, the photographs immediately became a moral and aesthetic touchstone thanks to the way they engaged head-on with their subjects, who posed with simple dignity while frankly returning the viewer’s gaze.

Ross knows all this but mentions none of it, leaving Evans’s achievement as the unacknowledged, contrasting background to his own work. He came to Hale County in 2009 to take a teaching position, made the acquaintance of local families, and after a while began to shoot the five years of ordinary, daily experience that he later condensed into 76 minutes for Hale County This Morning, This Evening. His choice of visual approach is virtually the opposite of Evans’s. Ross’s images are intimate and emotive; the camera often follows people closely or shows details as if through his subjects’ eyes, and a heightened color intensifies the mood. A point in Evans’s favor: He often stood back when taking the picture, and so made his distance from his subjects—physical, social, cultural—integral to the composition. A possible objection to Ross’s approach: By so often effacing distance, he seems to assume that his subjects’ stories are his own.

But then, he has a different relationship than Evans did with his cast of characters. Ross, an African American from the North, went south to live and work among semi-rural black people whose history is linked with, if distinct from, his own. A sense of this history is always lurking in Hale County, even though it, too, goes unmentioned, with one notable exception. One of the film’s principal subjects, Daniel Collins, who attended Selma University in nearby Dallas County throughout most of the filming, speaks at one point of having thought about attending a commemoration of the historic civil-rights march to Montgomery in 1965, but explains that basketball practice took precedence. It’s not that Daniel is unaware of the march and its importance. He just doesn’t see how marking the anniversary would advance his hoop dreams.

As Ross asks in another text, making a legal/photographic pun, “How do we not frame someone?” How do we, as observers, keep from boxing in a life that’s constrained enough as it is; or, to put it less delicately, how do we refrain from railroading yet another young black man? Ross’s answer with Daniel—and with the film’s other principal subject, the similarly young but far more family-oriented Quincy Bryant—is to get breathtakingly close and then back away; peer at their faces and then watch the landscape roll past a car’s window; compress five years of their lives into about a week of screen time (judging by the number of sunrises and sunsets), but concentrate so intently on the texture of their world that they seem to exist in an eternal present.

Some people might call Ross’s method immersive, but he’s as likely to pop you out of a situation as to invite you to soak in it. His narrative effects can be ironic, or heartbreaking. Of Quincy’s first son, a text says, “So soon, Kyrie is tall enough to reach the basket,” after which you get an overhead shot of a toy basketball hoop, with the little boy’s head brushing the net as he runs back and forth. Of Quincy’s second son, an infant, a text drily announces, without prelude, “Korbyn was buried in the early afternoon.” You abruptly look down into a red-clay grave.

Like most of the film’s images, that burial pit is richly memorable in itself and made disorienting by the adjacent shots. Ross edits to create atmosphere more than story, as when he cuts from a view of sweat plopping at Daniel’s feet to a picture of drops of rain on a pavement. Very often, as the image changes, so does the emotional tone. First a young man goofily proposes that he might safely view a solar eclipse through a Chick-fil-A waffle fry, and then the white curve of the sun pops onto a black screen, looking like a disembodied grin. But the emotion can change within a shot, too, as when a woman with a powerful voice begins to belt a hymn in the midst of a church service and then chokes up, managing to breathe only the odd line of music while the cries and shouts continue around her. Or beauty and sadness can combine in a single shot—for example, Ross’s picture of sunlight slanting like the fingers of God through a stand of trees, while also filtering through the smoke from a trash fire.

This is clearly not the magical realism that sold so many people, so unnecessarily, on Benh Zeitlin’s 2012 Beasts of the Southern Wild (to mention a notable recent foray into African-American life in today’s rural South). If anything, Ross is anti-magical, and certainly unsentimental; and yet, for all the critical acumen he shows in his probing, skeptical on-screen texts about the use of documentary images, he’s also big on epiphanies. The light that shines throughout Hale County This Morning, This Evening comes from more than all those sunrises and moonrises. It seems to illuminate Daniel, Quincy, their families, and their world from within.

“Time to go now,” an usher called into the theater as the credits ended and half a dozen of us remained in our seats. “Back to New York. It’s the same as when you left.” True enough; but we weren’t.

A light-fingered, warmhearted comedy about coping with the intolerable, Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls takes place in and around a brews-and-boobs restaurant—I mean, a family-friendly entertainment business—called Double Whammies, located on a frontage road of Interstate 10 in south-central Texas. You’ve probably traveled along similar stretches of highway, though directors rarely bother to capture them as intensively as Bujalski does, filling the opening of the movie with views of looping ramps and overpasses, sunless arcades of sooty concrete, sextuple straightaways vibrating with a perpetual whoosh and rumble. You’ll probably recognize the strip-mall architecture, too, even if you’ve never turned into a one-story, faux-ranch establishment such as Double Whammies for a signature Big-Ass Beer and a precisely clocked three minutes of flirtation. Bujalski’s setting is the American ubiquitous; and his central character, bar manager Lisa (Regina Hall), might be termed the American overlooked, as one of countless working women who keep themselves and everyone around them going, and do so with a smile.1

The only thing uncommon here is the plot—not in its incidents (which are as ordinary as a PBR) but its structure. Support the Girls is a rare house-of-cards movie. Watch the first inadvertent nudge. See the whole thing tumble.2

ints of instability begin with the film’s first human sound, which is Lisa’s sniffling as she sits in the Double Whammies parking lot, crying behind the wheel. Only after starting at a sudden rap on the car window—it’s a good-morning from Maci (Haley Lu Richardson), the waitress who will later be described as an angel sent to teach everyone about good attitude—does Lisa put on her professional grin and hop out, ready to march into a day’s work.3

She has a platoon of new job applicants to stuff into pink T-shirts and try out (Double Whammies evidently being a business with a high turnover); the young son of an employee to shelter until a waitress from another shift can be recruited for child care; and a kitchen to inspect (discreetly, glancingly) for evidence of rats. There’s also an impromptu, not to say surreptitious, car wash to organize to raise funds for a waitress who was jailed the previous night, having decided to deal with an abusive boyfriend by aiming her car’s front fender at him. And then there’s that strange noise in the restaurant’s ceiling.4

Upon investigation, the banging overhead turns out to be a would-be burglar trapped in an HVAC duct. He’s handled easily enough, the local cops being Double Whammies regulars. But the man’s extraction proves to be the push that destabilizes everything for Lisa, until she eventually breaks down in the women’s room in front of her closest workmate, Danyelle (Shayna McHayle)—breaks down laughing, that is. The alternative of screaming is still premature.5

ujalski, a stealthy filmmaker, develops these incidents in a style that’s easygoing on the surface, as suits his mundane though odd choice of milieu. (In previous films, he’s passed time in motel- and mall-based subcultures like computer-chess tournaments and fitness clubs.) Bujalski saves his punchiest image-making for the end—and even then, his strongest effects are not just understated but silent. Right before the climax, a series of wordless shots from Danyelle’s point of view tells you everything she won’t even bother to say about the men in Double Whammies and their notion of what’s not just permitted, but cool. At the stunning finale, you know instinctively that Lisa, Maci, and Danyelle are sensing their mortality, and their freedom, simply from the way they look up to the sky. Until reaching those high points, though, Bujalski tips you off to his art only when he cuts to the next shot a little before you anticipated it, or unexpectedly spikes a scene’s emotional pressure. He keeps knocking you off balance, gently, seemingly with no dire threat; but in the cumulative effect, you feel what it’s like to be a card slipping down in Lisa’s painstakingly constructed life.6

Bujalski can make that collapse matter to you because Hall, as Lisa, is so solid. She’s used to being the anchor of ensemble casts—in Girls Trip, for example—and here again she plays straight woman to bouncy Richardson, fierce and forthright McHayle, and others like Lea DeLaria as the bar’s loyal, proudly butch customer, Bobo. All Hall has to do among these flightier characters is remain grounded (she’s dug into the Texas soil so well that when she requests something of a friend, she asks for a “fiver”); broadcast decency with the strength of a clear-channel station; and show, from the gut, how Lisa pulls herself back together after each new catastrophe. Which is to say, Hall does everything.7

Have I mentioned, by the way, that I smiled almost nonstop through Support the Girls? I did that not because Bujalski was trying to be funny, or because it’s amusing to see homely, boozy, out-of-shape men judge the looks and character of young women, but out of pleasure at the warmth and mutual responsibility that Lisa shares with her workmates. Maybe some of them are no better than they ought to be—and yet together, in an unacknowledged combat zone off the roar of I-10, they have some real laughs behind those professional smiles. They make a life.8

his column has put me in a retrospective mood, since it marks my 30th anniversary writing about films for The Nation. So it’s fortunate that I have a 40th anniversary to write about, and a series to peg it to. For the second half of September, the Metrograph theater in Manhattan is offering a birthday salute to the distributor Icarus Films, screening 56 titles that demonstrate a principle dear to both that company and me: the conviction that a movie can have strong social or political content and still do something interesting as film.9

I had the good luck to write on just that theme for one of the first pictures I reviewed here, Marcel Ophüls’s Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, and dozens of other films in the series implicitly make the same point. The Metrograph is showing, among others, Chris Marker’s epic (or perhaps encyclopedic, or maybe satiric) recent history of the global left, A Grin Without a Cat; Patricio Guzmán’s gorgeous meditation on astronomy and the collection of human remains, Nostalgia for the Light; Chantal Akerman’s magnificent, wordless journey into the regions of her unlived past, D’Est; Lynne Sachs’s almost tactile resurrection of the resistance to the Vietnam War, Investigation of a Flame; and, for those in a truly retrospective mood, Heddy Honigmann’s Forever, an infinitely touching documentary about the Père Lachaise cemetery and its visitors. If the Metrograph is far from you, please be aware that almost all of the films in the Icarus series are available on streaming services, making it possible for you, too, to look back, and look around.10

Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman is more than just interested in the problems of “passing”: It’s obsessed by them, as you see in its improbable but true story of a black police detective, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), who successfully takes on the persona of a recruit for a Colorado chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Anticipating Sorry to Bother You by a few decades, the real Stallworth accomplished this feat in 1979 by using his white voice over the phone.

Some filmmakers would be content to turn this episode into a bizarre police procedural. Lee prefers to expand on it, using the story to explore the black American “twoness” of identity that one of his characters cites, name-checking W.E.B. Du Bois—a double consciousness that has sometimes tried to resolve itself in a single outward falsehood. In BlacKkKlansman, these dynamics of imposture go far deeper than the uneasy situation at the plot’s core. They complicate all of Stallworth’s relationships: with his incipient lover, Patrice (Laura Harrier), a pigs-hating college radical to whom he can’t own up to being a cop; with his partner in the investigation (Adam Driver), a thoroughly acculturated Jew whom Stallworth accuses of passing as gentile; and, of course, with himself.

The very first time that Stallworth goes on assignment as a detective, he’s required to melt into the young audience at a speech given by Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins), where the topic is the need for black people to purge the ideas about themselves that they’ve swallowed at the insistence of whites. A shift in self-alignment plays visibly across Stallworth’s face, as he progresses from awkwardly mouthing “Right on!” responses (a beat too late) to taking Ture in with wide, moist eyes.

So many instances of passing run through the film, at levels from the common daily acts of self-betrayal to a historic coup of Klan-busting, that I’m left wondering: What kind of movie is BlacKkKlansman passing for? The answer, when it comes, is unmistakable. Having spent more than two hours pretending to abide in the commercially imposed mode of narrative fiction, in which BlacKkKlansman has struck poses, lurched from scene to scene, and only intermittently generated moments of suspense or sharp laughter, the film in its last minutes breaks into the realm of documentary, freeing itself and walloping the audience.

Lee devotes the finale to a montage of horrifying archival footage of the August 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and of the majestic equanimity in the response of Donald J. Trump, who felt that a violent mob of neo-Nazis must surely include “very fine people.” In retrospect, you feel that everything Lee has contrived with the fictionalized characters and action of BlacKkKlansman leads to these moments of current reality. Nothing else he does in the film lives up to their impact.

Not that he lacks for ideas. He even seems to enjoy some of them and wants to share the fun with the audience, as when Stallworth and his partner Zimmerman rehearse in the locker room of police headquarters before the latter’s first meeting with the Klan. It’s two acting workshops in one: Stallworth coaches Zimmerman to match his vocal intonations, which the Klan leader has heard over the phone, while Washington and Driver demonstrate how to play bounce-and-catch with the rhythm of a comic scene.

Other pleasures include a burlesque prologue set in the 1950s or early ’60s featuring Alec Baldwin as the fictitious, ripely Confederate-named Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard, who repeatedly botches the filming of a rant against black Americans and the communist Jews who control them. The movie also sparks to life in a couple of extended telephone conversations between Stallworth and the Grand Wizard, David Duke (Topher Grace), which have the sass of prank calls with some infuriation thrown in; and during Stallworth’s first date, when amid an ample helping of music and dance he takes to the floor with Patrice and flirtatiously mouths the refrain of “Too Late to Turn Back Now”: “I believe, I believe / I believe I’m falling in love.” As for the movie’s period clothes, and the luxuriant naturals that balloon in perfection from the heads of Stallworth and Patrice, it would be fair to think they exist for the sake of dress-up as much as authenticity.

This is to say that the liveliest, most confident stretches of narrative fiction in BlacKkKlansman are the ones that involve games and playacting. And that’s curious—because Lee, betraying a little twoness of his own, does not fully trust the entertainment values on which he instinctively relies. References to other movies accumulate in heaps—not mere allusions or glancing parodies, but titles, posters, and excerpts with commentary—until you might feel you’re watching an illustrated lecture, in which each slide serves as the next one’s caption.

Lee has always aspired to be a warrior artist, believing that African Americans can either let themselves be mentally enslaved by the images foisted upon them or fight back through images of their own. Think of the young Malcolm being waylaid into crime by gangster movies in Malcolm X, or the TV writer in Bamboozled trying to strike a blow for himself by creating an old-time minstrel show. That said, the pileup in BlacKkKlansman is exceptional, with Gone With the Wind collapsing into The Birth of a Nation, Tarzan, Shaft, Superfly, Coffy, and The Birth of a Nation yet again. Lee does not want to pass as a mainstream filmmaker (which is to say, in general terms, a filmmaker with a white consciousness), and so he waves the dubious materials of movie history in front of you as evidence of his critical distance from them. The result, though, is that he clots his film’s narrative texture. More than that: Because of his frequent preference for making statements over realizing scenes, he too often makes you sit through sequences of stiff, clunky filmmaking, as when he crosscuts between a Klan initiation and a lecture about lynching, in an exercise so protracted that it’s still going on long after the Grand Wizard himself would have gotten the point.

None of this matters, of course, when Lee makes his ultimate rejection of false consciousness, jumping from the time frame of the fictionalized story into the present. Radical black consciousness fuses at last with factual exposé, as the burning cross witnessed by Stallworth in 1979 is suddenly replaced by the flames of the tiki torches in Charlottesville in 2017, and the character played by Topher Grace gives way to the real David Duke, speaking in praise of the enabler now installed in the White House.

I felt that despite the patches of wobbliness and pomposity in BlacKkKlansman, the film was well worth my time for the sake of that shocking leap into a reality so rotten that spoiler alerts are neither necessary nor possible. And yet this finale, which is the movie’s greatest strength, is also in a way its greatest weakness, since it takes everything lively in Stallworth’s exploits, with their impetuousness, daring, and inspiriting impudence, and collapses them into heart-sinking images of a Klan apparently more triumphant than ever. Outrage turns into its opposite, despair, in a final twist of double consciousness: The footage from Charlottesville rebukes the happy-ending conventions of pop cinema, which Lee despises, but at the same time seems to deny that his 32 years of activist filmmaking have changed anything.

And the movie character of Ron Stallworth? You learn what he stands for; you see how he triumphs by his bold passing and then is tripped up. But Lee rarely gets you under the skin of his twoness. It’s something that’s talked about but not explored, in a movie that might have put a little more faith in Lee’s own implicit faith in progress—not to mention his dramatic powers.

f BlacKkKlansman falls short by positing double consciousness as a theme but then standing apart from its protagonist, so you don’t get much consciousness at all, then a thorough corrective is available in Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, a movie that plunges so deeply into its main character’s mind that there really is no outside.

She, too, is double, as the title suggests; and at some point in the proceedings, as you learn, she’s off her meds. That’s what you hear her mother say, anyhow, insisting into the phone that yes, it’s an emergency, she’s a teenager, I don’t know for how long, she didn’t tell me she’d stopped taking them. The call sounds frantic, but it does offer comfort of a sort: It enables you to construct a story about all the strange goings-on you’ve been witnessing in Madeline’s Madeline.

Now you can reassure yourself that you’ve been seeing everything through the eyes of a disturbed girl. Her emotions splash everywhere, her imagination sloshes woozily, and the theater workshop in which you’ve seen her rehearse must be making her worse. But then, which would you rather do: sit back and reduce everything to a banal explanation like this, or dive with Madeline into the experience of hearing a voice start up on its own, out of sync with the face that’s supposed to localize it, while in the hazy light of a small apartment’s kitchen—a danger zone ever since the movie began—a faint glow seems to spread beyond the contour of her mother?

Madeline’s Madeline is the third narrative feature by Decker after her well-received Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (both 2014) and is a major step forward from them. Beginning in the mind of its title character—which is to say, in mid-delirium or dream—it goes on to live firmly in the body of its young lead actress, Helena Howard. I might even say the film is about Howard’s body, or rather what she can do with it as a performer, which is just about anything. She has a lanky build, with limbs that can splay wildly, mince in delicate imitation of a cat, promenade with defiant sexuality, or lash out in sudden violence. Atop this whirring contraption of arms and legs is a head that might be oval, if you could ever see it whole. All you get, though, are partial views, mostly of two searing eyes and pouting lips, glimpsed through a voluminous cloud of copper hair.

Who, if anyone, controls this body? Madeline’s weary, fretting mother, Regina (Miranda July), wants to secure it, keeping this nubile teenager safe from a world that wants to invade from all sides (and into which Madeline seems all too willing to leak). Madeline’s new surrogate mother, her swaggering theater director Evangeline (Molly Parker), wants to deploy it: An improv-and-dance-based avant-gardist who seems to have been searching unsuccessfully for the outline of a new production, she perceives in Madeline a source of furious energy and surreal ideas and is eager to use the girl for all she’s worth—with complete love and support, of course.

Caught between these conflicting wills—sometimes raging at the first, sometimes letting herself be seduced (so to speak) by the second, often playing them off against each other with instinctive cunning—Madeline runs through a series of possible selves. At Evangeline’s suggestion, she can be a cat or a sea turtle. (Decker’s cinematographer, the brilliant Ashley Connor, obliges by producing cat-cam and sea-turtle-cam.) During a moment of truce with her mother, Madeline can be a pleasant companion, lying on a park lawn and chatting. (But the image is tilted 90 degrees, so Madeline reclines at attention, bolt upright.) When she spots a man ranting on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk, Madeline decides that she too ought to wander through the passersby and rant, and the film breaks into jumbled nocturnal jump cuts. When she’s at a house party and feels neglected, Madeline sidles into a too-bright kitchen, where Evangeline’s husband is alone, and tries telling him in a temptress’s husky voice that she’s decided to lose her virginity. And then, in the most stunning transformation of all, Madeline turns into her mother for the amusement of the theater workshop, performing a monologue that is so observant, precise, and pitiless that Regina flees in horror.

But I see I’ve again strayed mistakenly into inventing narrative, or constructing a scheme, for a movie that respects the fluidity of a 16-year-old’s sense of self by demanding to be a “what the hell?” experience. There are people with pigs’ heads in this picture—I’m talking about random pig people—and wheeling skies that could make you dizzy, and a theatrically booby-trapped town house that looks persuasive but can’t possibly be real. The one certainty about Madeline’s Madeline is that it’s about Helena Howard as a performer: a young woman who seems to have effortless, immediate access to every emotion and no need to stoop to mere mimicry in her characterizations. She simply becomes different people.

But then, even that element isn’t so certain—because Madeline’s Madeline is also about the question of why we care so much about performers, and how we might tote up the moral and emotional costs of acting. “It’s just a metaphor,” you hear reassuringly at the start of the movie, as an actress playing an actress playing a nurse leans toward the camera lens. “Are we using this as a metaphor?” asks another actress playing an actress later on, as Evangeline’s troupe mills around in confusion. Yes. No. I don’t know. All I can tell you is that something is at stake in Helena Howard’s Madeline—or many somethings—and that you’ve got to see this whatever-it-is.

No sooner had the Greatest of All Time firmly established his reign as champion than he abandoned the name Cassius, as the world’s most glorious butterfly might have shucked its cocoon. But in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (which is, in part, a tale of metamorphosis), the scuffling and frequently scuffed protagonist clings to his given name of Cassius, often shortening it to Cash, which goes well with the surname Green. Amiable, imaginative, and at first seemingly none too energetic, Cash is all about getting that green, as he has to be, living in a garage in Oakland on which he owes four months’ rent. To make money, he will sell whatever he needs to, including himself. For a considerable stretch, he does well at it, too, though with shameful consequences for his soul—which is the only part of this movie I could have predicted.

How many parts are there? It’s hard to say. Sorry to Bother You bears some resemblance to the car that Cash, in his original state, impels through Oakland on pocket change and willpower: a vehicle banged together from so many spare panels that it’s a five-tone. Working with much the same ingenuity and disdain for elegance that would have ruled in that auto-body shop, Riley has made a fable about union organizing and worker solidarity—astonishing to see such a thing nowadays—and then welded it onto a satire about the ways in which people perform race, a diatribe about contemporary media as a culture of humiliation, a critique of art-world critiques of global capitalism, and a horror movie. How all this fits together, I’m not sure; but I’m content to have muttered “Now what?” during the screening far more often than “That again!,” and I’m delighted to have staggered a little on the way out, having had all that subject matter dumped on me in a little under two hours.

To the extent that Sorry to Bother You holds together, the person doing the binding is Riley’s lead actor, Lakeith Stanfield. Best known for playing the kind, hapless, and obliquely brilliant stoner Darius on Atlanta—and for having shouted the title in Get Out—Stanfield begins the film holding his body like a question mark. The shoulders are hunched within an unfortunate sweater vest (just the thing, Cash apparently thinks, to impress the white people doing the hiring at the RegalView Telemarketing boiler room). The head is thrust forward, with eyes sometimes vaguely downcast, and it’s topped by a possibly inadvertent hairstyle, whose protrusions echo the old ornamental fringe that dangles from the ceiling of his car. Everything about Cash at first seems puzzled, tentative, and dubious; everything overwhelms him. When he takes up the telemarketer’s craft, he feels as if each call brings him crashing down from his workstation to a site he can picture on the other end of the phone, where people are going about their lives with no need of him. Each time, as you laugh, you see the mute apology that Stanfield puts into Cash’s eyes.

Then the old hand at the next workstation (Danny Glover) lets Cash in on the secret of successful telemarketing: Use a white voice. No, not merely nasal, but also unconcerned, unpressured, unrushed—the voice of someone who has never been fired but only laid off. It’s not the way white people actually talk, the mentor explains, but the way they think they ought to sound. Cash tries it (the abruptly high-pitched, singsong tones that emerge from Stanfield’s mouth are voiced by David Cross), and it works too well. It’s not just that Cash begins to rack up sales. It’s that you see him straighten up and start to smile, with pride and pleasure brightening his face for the first time. And worse: Now that he’s using his white voice, Cash no longer feels the slightest empathy for the people he’s got on the line.

A man who has freed himself from empathy might be all set to make money, but he will no longer be a reliable help to the friends and fellow workers (Steven Yeun and Jermaine Fowler) who are struggling to unionize RegalView Telemarketing. Nor will he have an easy time holding on to his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), given her anticolonialist, anticapitalist, Africanist ideals. Detroit earns her living on the streets as a kind of human billboard, holding aloft the products of a sign-making company, and at night creates performance art—which is another way to turn her own body into a sign. In one of the movie’s more disturbing twists, she uses the performance not to recuperate from the day’s indignities but to intensify them by calling abuse onto herself—whether in masochistic identification with Cash or to repudiate him violently, it’s impossible to say.

We come to the theme of injury. For reasons that are too thickly determined to explain here, Cash spends the movie’s second half with a length of white gauze wrapped around his head, its surface perpetually oozing a blot of red. You might interpret this bandage as an outward sign of the wound he has inflicted on himself within, especially as the plot gets weirder and a Bay Area gazillionaire white-bro disrupter (Armie Hammer) persuades him—in the film’s most scabrously funny scene—to proceed from marketing artificial whiteness to acting out a confected blackness. But then, Cash isn’t alone in yielding to self-humiliation while telling himself that money cures all. In the world of Sorry to Bother You, TV’s most popular game show has people compete by taking a massive beating, which also seems to be the prize.

Is that supposed to be amusing? The people in Sorry to Bother You generally think so. Having grown accustomed to taking blows, they positively bubble over at the sight of somebody else getting it for a change. I might complain that this analysis of our callousness is a little too pat and familiar, except that it isn’t an analysis at all but one more dented panel on this jolting, fuming, ridiculously transporting jalopy of a movie.

“Stick to the script,” the bosses at the telemarketing firm keep telling their workers. Cassius, who is no champion, does just that for the longest time; but in his first feature film, Boots Riley pretty much shreds the script, or several of them. Nothing in this movie happens the way it’s supposed to, from the non-hero’s discovery of his special gift (which turns out to be the opposite of empowering) to the valiant exposure, on live TV, of Armie Hammer’s nefarious plans (which only helps move them along). The one unifying statement you could make about this burlesque is that it’s a lesson in the virtue of disobedience—which, by the end, Cassius has learned. Unwillingly.

Bees creep peaceably over the hands of Thomasin McKenzie, the teenage actress cast as the protagonist of Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace. It’s not an editing trick; you see McKenzie’s calm, heart-shaped face and unprotected fingers within a single shot, as the bees settle onto her palms and explore. Those same hands also spend a few minutes of screen time cradling a plump bunny and stroking its ears. Rabbits can be nervous creatures, apt to deliver efficient kicks, but this one relaxes into warm lumpishness with McKenzie, despite having Chainsaw as its name.

Set in the verdant world of the American Northwest, Leave No Trace begins with close-up views of fecund branches, glistening spiderwebs, and hollows of knee-high ferns, and ends with a panorama, seen from above, of a man disappearing into a mountain thicket. This rustling landscape might not quite pass for a new Eden—one of America’s long-favored sites of imagination—but it’s nevertheless suffused with a vibrant yet soothing light (thanks to Michael McDonough’s cinematography) and seems ready to absorb and shelter, rather than threaten. This is where McKenzie’s character, Tom, and her father, Will (Ben Foster), are first seen making their home, without running water, electricity, or fixed walls, in a nature that knows no violence.

A Christmas-tree farm, on the other hand, turns out to be a roaring nightmare of mutilated spruces, crashing loads, and helicopters buzzing down as if for an assault. That’s how it seems to Will, anyway, when the State of Oregon decides to civilize him, like some late-30s Huck Finn with PTSD. Having captured him and his daughter in Portland’s vast Forest Park, where the two have been living off the land (or is it hiding out?) for an unspecified period of time, the authorities decree that if this family is to remain together, the child must go to school, the parent must earn wages, and both must live in the house that Human Services assigns them, on the farm that jangles Will’s nerves and makes him clutch his head. The confinement, the noise, the officiousness masquerading as kindness: They’re all intolerable to him, with the helicopters as a special torment, uncannily echoing the choppers that shake him out of sleep at night. What’s worst, though, are the hints—given with the tenderness and respect that are the norm between this father and his rapidly maturing daughter—that Tom might like it here.

o-written with Anne Rosellini, and based on a novel by Peter Rock, Leave No Trace is the third film that Granik has made about a woman in extremity—though not the mortal peril that hovered over Vera Farmiga as a recovering addict in Down to the Bone (2004), or Jennifer Lawrence as an unwilling intruder into criminal secrets in Winter’s Bone (2010). In keeping with its vision of an idyllic almost-Eden, Leave No Trace generates suspense about Tom’s fortunes and signals her moments of defiance almost imperceptibly, with a few words left unspoken or a muttered rejoinder phrased so that her father can take it as acquiescence if he chooses to. Leave No Trace is a quiet movie—or, rather, a muffled one. Tom’s restiveness is always just below the surface, even when she’s offering her habitual “Thank you” to her father (which happens suspiciously often, with perhaps too much meekness) or cheerily complaining that she’s hungry (and so reminding him of her growth). In response, her loving father never raises his voice and never lifts a hand in anger, no matter the terrors that he’s tamping down.

Foster plays Will with a combination of weariness and patience that is striking for this usually explosive actor. With a bushy beard and close-cropped skull, he keeps his powerful torso a little hunched; his close-set, dangerous eyes are often downcast. The man is so contained within himself that you understand why he can’t stand being shut inside a building; and yet he’s also given to issuing peremptory commands to Tom, for reasons that seem more tenuous the deeper you get into the movie. As for McKenzie, her piping voice and slim frame don’t suggest anything like the inner violence that Will fears and fights against. Instead, matching Foster in subtlety, she embodies an innate steadiness (useful for calming bees and rabbits) that underpins Tom’s mounting desire to live outside the forest.

She doesn’t want anything as flimsy as romance (a pursuit unknown in any of Granik’s movies) or as basic as sex, despite the story’s planting of a nice farm boy in her path. If the danger perpetually looming over Tom is the law, the temptation is community. She wants to be free to think her own thoughts (as Will has taught her to say); like other American characters before her, she has approached independence in the green world, and she’s known with her father a love that’s as pure as it gets—and as isolating. Now, though, the road has taken her among people who are willing to extend their hands and ask nothing in return; and, unlike Will, she feels whole enough to accept and reciprocate. That’s the dilemma: to open up a new life for herself in society, or to blow up her father’s old one in the wild.

The choice seems palpable because the characters are, too. You might say that Granik prepared for Leave No Trace by making her remarkable documentary Stray Dog (2014), a portrait of the Vietnam War veteran, trailer-park manager, makeshift paterfamilias, and recreational motorcyclist Ronnie Hall. With Hall, Granik witnessed the gentleness and commitment to mutual support that can be found in the heartland among no-budget people who have learned to distrust authority. She saw how emotional wounds can persist in combat veterans and learned how these men (they were all men) manage to go on even so, through the understanding they receive and the help they give. When Tom enters a community comparable to Hall’s in Leave No Trace, she encounters moments of sweetness and generosity that might have seemed sentimental in the hands of another filmmaker. With Granik, they ring true. She knows practical things, such as the character of the faces to put on the screen and how long she can linger on them, and she’s also learned a few more important matters, such as the firm allegiance that people can bear to their sense of right and wrong.

Leave No Trace lacks the ferocity that drove Granik’s earlier features, as well as a ready hook for audiences; but it offers deeper sorrow and greater hope, as well as a direct line to a substratum of the American imagination. I can think of nothing wrong with it, except for its being Granik’s fourth film in 14 years. By contrast, in the time since her breakthrough in Winter’s Bone, Jennifer Lawrence has found work in 18 pictures, a few of which (when written by David O. Russell) even gave her characters to play. I don’t know exactly what Granik might need by way of financing and support so that she, too, can continue to write characters and elevate her actors (as she’s done again with McKenzie)—but I wish somebody would give it to her, so she can catch up.

You’d have to go back to Bloomsbury to find another set as insular, self-promoting, self-destructive, imitated, parodied, publicized, and at last mythologized as the crowd that hung around New York’s East Village in the late 1970s. All things in proportion, of course. Compared with their English counterparts, the Alphabet City group scored far lower in investment income, Cambridge certification, and connections to the gentry, and far higher in ethnic diversity, assertive queerness, and heroin use. There were also a lot more of them—if not swarms, then a shifting mass who earned their credentials by being young and showing up, and who believed that the right to be called an artist (or at least artistic) was best enjoyed without prior mastery of a skill. That said, democratic upstarts, too, can be snobs. Speaking some 40 years later, one of the memorialists in Sara Driver’s documentary Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat can still praise the scene’s favorite dance hangout, the Mudd Club, with blinkered sincerity: “Everybody who was anybody was there.”1

As one of those long-ago anybodies, and a respected film-world somebody today, Driver brings to Boom for Real a quality that’s both unexpected for this topic and invaluable: balance. On one side, she’s visceral and immediate, without falling into the trap of autobiography. She knows people who can describe for her the smells and sounds of the Lower East Side in its 1970s dereliction (rank, skunky, eerily quiet) and recall the details of what they ate, where they found their clothes, and how the pace of life changed throughout the days and nights, from idling to making up projects to partying. She also knows how to get her hands on amazing archival images of her title character, from around 1978 (when the 17-year-old Basquiat was going around with Al Diaz, spraying “SAMO”-tagged messages on buildings and infrastructure), to 1980–81, when Basquiat first made paintings that were meant to hang on a wall rather than cover it. Slender, beautiful, and apparently all business, the artist-in-development is more than the subject of Boom for Real; he’s the film’s chief presence.2

And yet he’s the chief absence as well, since the footage of him is silent and ghostly. That’s a clue to the other side of Driver’s balance. She loves Basquiat and his milieu in themselves, but she also sees them as the product of outside forces: from the white flight and economic dislocation that had ripped through broad swaths of New York (as mentioned in President Ford’s so-called “drop dead” speech in 1975, excerpted on the soundtrack) to the graffiti art, rap music, and break dancing that flourished in the Bronx and were imported to Lower Manhattan by Fred Brathwaite, the Sol Hurok of hip-hop culture. Brathwaite was instructive even for Basquiat, whom he tutored in bebop history. (At the time, Basquiat was devoting himself to playing clarinet in a noise band, when not slathering paint over any object within reach.) But, more generally, Brathwaite helped diversify a downtown scene that had intuited that, as curator Diego Cortez tells Driver, “the Age of the White Male was already over.”3

Enter the master graffiti artist Lee Quiñones. Interviewed by Driver in his present-day studio and seen in footage from Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 feature Wild Style, Quiñones functions in Boom for Real as a kind of alternate-universe figure: the man Basquiat might have become if he hadn’t made it big in the high-end galleries and museums but survived into a productive middle age. Quiñones comes before the camera with a calm and thoughtful demeanor: by any reasonable standard a successful painter of historic significance, confident of his merit, proudly Nuyorican, and above all alive. But that wasn’t what Basquiat wanted, any more than he wanted to make a name by painting subway cars. (He learned from the graffiti artists, but despite his “SAMO” period he never really was one himself.) As one after another of Driver’s subjects testify, Basquiat was determined to achieve greatness, with all its benefits.4

Boom for Real ends at the moment when the 20-year-old Basquiat got his wish, taking off in his career with such speed and power that Driver illustrates the effect with a rocket launch. She is not concerned with what came afterward: the escalating prices, critical disputes, and untimely death. What matters to her is that Basquiat lifted off, and in so doing raised to glory the whole amorphous clique in which he’d lived. Many commentators speak of his art as an assertion of blackness in a white-dominated art world. To Driver, though, his paintings are important because they condense everything that she and her friends were watching, listening to, and doing. Think what you will of the insularity and snobbism of the downtown crowd. Basquiat, more than anyone, made good on its boast of having become a culture.5

That’s all over, of course. The streets where Basquiat scuffled are now lined with pricey restaurants and boutique hotels. The paintings belong to those who can pay $110 million at auction (hammer price plus buyer’s premium). When you watch Boom for Real, though, all that disappears for a few moments, and the lost downtown Bloomsbury swims into view. No, not everybody was there, or wanted to be—but how marvelous it is, to be able still to visit.6

eanwhile, elsewhere in New York: The immigrant Mexican laborers in Jim McKay’s En el Séptimo Día pedal around Brooklyn delivering food, clean vegetables in corner delis, mop the floors of porn-video stalls, or hawk cotton candy in Times Square. Those are their days. At night, they cook for each other and then sleep jammed into an apartment that six or seven of them share. Or maybe eight; the guy who finds them jobs and collects the rent is liable at any moment to show up with somebody who just came off the bus from El Paso and will now occupy his own slice of the floor. It’s summer 2016, according to a title at the start of the movie—not a good time for immigrants whose papers aren’t in order, though not as bad as it was going to get. But the characters in McKay’s sparkling fable have things to worry about beyond Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These roommates have formed their own soccer team (the jerseys say “Puebla” but might as well read “Apartment 3B”), and with just one week to go before the league final, they’re short a man.7

Part De Sica, part Loach, and all Brooklyn, En el Séptimo Día is principally the story of José (Fernando Cardona), the apartment’s leading scorer and mainstay of the bicycle delivery team at a Sunset Park restaurant that aspires to white tablecloths. Trim, slope-shouldered, and oval-faced, he’s everybody’s low-key Mr. Reliable: the guy who is last to leave for practice (because he’s been in church, praying for the team) and the first to step forward to ease problems with the boss. On Monday, though, José runs into a labor issue he can’t negotiate. The restaurant’s slick young Anglophone owner (Christopher Gabriel Núñez) tells him with the blandness of unchallengeable authority that he’s needed on the coming Sunday, the day of the league final. No substitute or excuse will be accepted—it’s show up or lose his job.8

Now the team’s at risk of being short by two—and Mr. Reliable, who wants to please everyone, doesn’t know what to do or how to tell his buddies.9

Premised on a single though multilayered workaday problem, filmed on location, and cast almost entirely with nonprofessional performers recruited in Sunset Park, En el Séptimo Día plays out day-by-day with the unfussy integrity you’d expect of neorealism. Every detail seems as solid and dependable as José himself, and the actors (an array of vivid, unforced personalities) look and feel at home in whatever they do. But as McKay understands, there’s more to neorealism than negativity: the rejection of artifice, the outcry against injustice. The tradition can also affirm the resilience, humor, and even charm of its characters—which En el Séptimo Día does so generously that it gave me more pleasure than any film I’ve seen in a while.10

Much of that pleasure comes from sheer visual satisfaction, prompted by the joy that cinematographer Charles Libin finds in every street corner, walk-up apartment, and stretch of public park. When José interrupts his deliveries to phone his lover back in Puebla—his pregnant lover, whom he needs to bring to New York without delay—he tells her something you’ve been thinking yourself, that it’s a beautiful day in the city. José may have paused for this call under a lane of trees near an industrial waterway, but it’s the freshest, calmest, most glistening industrial waterway you’ve ever seen.11

To get this kind of cinematography, which releases the inner light of things rather than imposing a vision on them, it helps to have a director with McKay’s crisp, self-effacing style. To cite just one of the thousands of decisions he’s made: Look at the scene where the members of the soccer team first appear, loaded with gear as they clatter one by one down a staircase in their apartment building. McKay has positioned the camera on the staircase itself, on a low step, to emphasize a sense of narrowness, crowding, and high spirits, as a seemingly endless stream of players pours down from the landing.12

The deepest satisfaction of En el Séptimo Día comes from these characters, these comrades, as they improvise a piecemeal scheme to rescue their championship hopes and José’s self-respect. He has struggled quietly with himself throughout the movie; he has listened to reasonable people advise him that no soccer match is worth his future in the United States with his lover and their child. On the other hand, the people he plays with are more than just teammates; they’re his sustainers, his community—and he’s really good at this game. When the tension is released at last and the dilemma’s put to rest (you can’t really call it resolved), McKay does not cheat on the darker implications of the story. But like the rest of the film, the culminating image is radiant: a close-up of José smiling in the soft, late-afternoon light.13

En el Séptimo Día has been knocking around the festival circuit for about a year, having started its tour, appropriately enough, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It goes into general release in early June, which means you can now watch it without having to search for a special screening. All you’ll get is a special experience.14

he Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón has been on the festival circuit, too, with her autobiographical Summer 1993, winner of the award for Best First Feature at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival. Don’t let the prize put you off: “Autobiography,” combined with “first feature,” can spell trouble for juries, which are too often tempted to reward the emotionally overwrought and stylistically flashy. Simón, though, has made a blessedly subtle film, which despite a core of terrible loss unfolds with the gentle patience of someone unwrapping a gauze bandage.15

“Why aren’t you crying?” are almost the first words spoken to the point-of-view character, tousle-haired 6-year-old Frida (Laia Artigas), as she plays in the nighttime city streets. A fireworks celebration is in progress, while upstairs, in a small apartment, Frida’s relatives are packing boxes for an imminent departure. Straight-faced, dry-eyed, Frida lets herself be put into a van, clutching a doll as well as the half-remembered words of a prayer that she’s been told will keep her close to her mother.16

When she wakes up the next morning, she’s at her new home: a farmhouse in the hilly, forested countryside. Though no one spells out the situation, it’s soon enough clear that Frida is now in the care of her uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer) and his wife Marga (Bruna Cusí), a handsome young couple whose informal but polished manners and artistic tendencies suggest they’re back-to-the-land types. From the first, they’re warm, generous, and accommodating toward Frida, but she’s having none of them, or of their little daughter Anna (Paula Robles), for whose benefit Frida explains the name and origin of each of her dolls while insisting they must never be touched.17

There’s something unburdening about spending time with a cold, angry, watchful little girl. She’s not asking for your sympathy, and when it comes to trying to amuse her, as you would with an easier kid, the pressure’s off. Summer 1993 gives you the imaginative distance to sit back in freedom and observe, as you do in the film’s many shots that trail along behind Frida. That said, Marga isn’t privileged to sit in the audience. She has volunteered to make an effort and has been deputed to do it as well, and you feel for her, as her frustration gradually comes into the open. Frida is trouble herself and makes trouble with Anna, while Esteve, who’d rather play his guitar than take a stand, is worse than useless. You sense Marga needs a breakthrough; but you also understand you’re in the hands of a filmmaker who does not traffic in cheap catharsis.18

And yet this modest, quiet, deeply felt movie comes through in the end. Frida lets herself smile. Marga gets her crucial—if unacknowledged—moment of acceptance. And Esteve, with his usual good-hearted inadvertence, sets off the tears. Just enough of them; just in time.19

I’d be tempted to call them numberless, all the cameo appearances that Stan Lee has made in movies based on his Marvel comics, except that IMDb has counted 32, the most recent being his turn as a school-bus driver in Avengers: Infinity War. My favorite of the Marvelmeister’s walk-ons, though, is not in any film but in Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, where Lee kibitzes over breakfast with other historical funny-book men in the Excelsior Cafeteria on Second Avenue.

The year is 1954 (God alone knows the year of Avengers: Infinity War), and Lee is as worried as any of his compatriots about an impending congressional investigation into their corrupting influence on America’s youth. Here as elsewhere in the novel, Chabon reminds you that people thought of comic books as the disreputable trade of men with arrested talents and crude taste, who profited off childish minds at a dime a throw. To the MBA mentality that nowadays passes as mature, Lee’s genius appears in hindsight as the entrepreneurial feat of having converted such dross into an empire worth billions. To Chabon, though, it was precisely the cheapness of comic books that made them glorious and even magical, with their muck capable of soaking up blatant wish fulfillments, unembarrassed desires, visions that were literally fugitive.

Which is to say, I don’t care whether Avengers: Infinity War disappoints or surpasses the forecasts of industry analysts. Nor am I going to write off the movie solely because it’s the latest in a series of products financed, shaped, and marketed by a powerful corporation. (It’s a little late in the day—almost 100 years late—to doubt whether works born of a big company can really be art.) My only question is whether enough old-fashioned, unadulterated crap survives in this picture to make it worth a few hours of your time.

vengers: Infinity War certainly can’t compare with other recent fantasies like Mad Max: Fury Road and The Shape of Water. It lacks the directorial flair of those pictures, their committed performances (nobody here plays for her life like Charlize Theron and Sally Hawkins), their full-throated themes. (All that Avengers: Infinity War has to say about the world is that Malthusian genocide would be wrong. Noted.) The film’s one true distinction is that it cannot stand on its own. Not only is it incomplete despite a running time of 149 minutes (there will be a second part), but its action would be meaningless to anyone who hasn’t seen a good many previous Marvel pictures. This isn’t a question of a plot’s being spun out over three, four, or five films, as is now common. It’s the exceptional matter of disparate plots being sucked together, for the purpose of giving fans more than 20 popular characters at one sitting.

By “characters,” of course, I mean the fusions of actor and role that audiences greet with cheers when Chris Evans shows up as Captain America, or Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther. Despite the film’s near-perpetual flow of mayhem, from New York City streets to spaceship interiors to the blasted surfaces of derelict planets, much of Avengers: Infinity War plays like late Howard Hawks, in that there’s little more to contemplate than characters teasing each other. Audiences know the quirks of these screen personalities so well, and have grown so fond of them, that the directors of Avengers: Infinity War, Anthony and Joe Russo, can get their biggest laugh just by having the usually flippant Robert Downey Jr./Iron Man stand still for five seconds in speechless exasperation.

That said, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have supplied a story, which appropriately (given the goal of bringing together as many characters as possible) is a tale about achieving a prophesied outcome by collecting things. This organizational pattern runs so deep in our imaginations that you’d have to call it preliterary. It’s the basis of every scavenger hunt, and of fictions that include Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; Steven Spielberg’s recent, not uninteresting Ready Player One; and even Macbeth (a play about a man who step-by-step amasses promised titles and ordained catastrophes). In Avengers: Infinity War, the objects that must be sought are magical gemstones. Their pursuer, zooming through the galaxy in a giant spokeless Ferris wheel, is Josh Brolin, who has been animated to look very large and purple, with a chin like a locomotive’s cowcatcher, as the idealistic mass murderer Thanos.

Thanos has his moments of pain and dread—but none, needless to say, as deep as those of his fellow serial killer Macbeth, or as rich as the thematic ambiguities and poetic extravagances that enmesh the Scottish tyrant. The Russo brothers are working for the simpler satisfaction of sheer agglomeration, and they go about their task without a trace of the cinematic sensibility that would be a rough equivalent to Shakespeare’s poetry. You needn’t think The Shape of Water is a masterpiece to understand what Guillermo del Toro meant when he spoke of wanting to create a monster movie in the style of Douglas Sirk. It was the idea of a born filmmaker, someone who feels how an effect of light, an angle of view, and a camera movement can combine to make meaning. Whether the Russo brothers can do that sort of thing, I don’t know, but it’s apparent they didn’t even think to try. Having risen in the business by working on quirky television sitcoms, they’re all about pace: Just keep the dialogue bouncing and the actors in frame.

And there you have the redeeming unadulterated crap. Though the Russos’ expensively produced “film” is currently playing in theaters, where exhibitors score extra cash by providing 3-D, Avengers: Infinity War already looks like it belongs on handheld screens, computer monitors, and household panels. For all its commercial mass, it floats along without the gravity of self-importance, as if it were any other item that might be called up or dismissed from the day’s menu of diversions. It’s not, of course. The so-called Marvel Universe is so large that Avengers: Infinity War can be almost entirely self-referential, holding itself aloof from the rest of pop culture. At one point, in fact, Iron Man in effect orders Tom Holland/Spider-Man to stop mentioning movies from outside the Marvel bubble—but that only adds to the sense of weightlessness.

Having grown up in movie culture, I feel a pang at this sign of its demise. But I also honor the humble wish that this new product fulfills. It offers audiences more than thrills, fantasies of power, or visions of riches. It gives them a temporary community; it stages a reunion. Hail, Avengers: Infinity War! The gang’s all here.

Beautiful, brooding, and astonishingly two-faced, Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City is a quasi-documentary fiction with both multiple precedents and none at all. You could locate it within world cinema’s heritage of city symphonies (the place, in this instance, being Cairo); the line of intensely imagistic, narratively unsettled Arab-language pictures best represented by the Syrian avant-garde (whose filmmakers, I fear, might now be worse than embattled); or the Western European tradition, perfected by Michelangelo Antonioni, of movies about sad, lonely people walking around and staring at things. All these triangulating references are apt—and yet they don’t give you a fix on Said’s picture, because it simply won’t sit still.

Said shot In the Last Days of the City from 2008 through at least the early part of 2010 (or so I’m estimating, based on the scenes of street celebrations after an Egyptian victory in the Africa Cup of Nations), working from a script he wrote with Rasha Salti. He then assembled the film from the footage he’d amassed—about 250 hours’ worth, according to one account—continuing the editing into 2016. Hence the Janus faces: The film looks forward through the eyes of Khalid (Khalid Abdalla), who is too preoccupied to realize he’s witnessing the beginnings of the 2011 Tahrir Square uprising; it also looks backward through the eyes of Said, who knows that the stirrings of democratic rebellion he captured back then have culminated (for now) in authoritarian stasis. These two gazes coexist within one set of images.

If that makes In the Last Days of the City sound challenging to watch, you should know that it is above all a richly sensuous film, which strives to accommodate the thick, shifting layers of sight and sound that overwhelm verbal descriptions of Cairo. But, yes, magical achievements such as the Janus vision are difficult not only to create but also to receive. Do not expect the conventional comforts of heart-pounding suspense.

f time is like a river—not a bad image for a movie that has the Nile flowing through it—then most filmmakers struggle against the current. They devote themselves to the art of getting people to care about what might come next, whereas Said knows that film, by the laws of physics, can only record images of what the river has just borne away. If you care about the subject before the camera as Said cares about Cairo—very deeply—then narrative drive counts for very little next to the fact that you’re experiencing love and loss 24 times a second.

That’s what seems to matter most to Khalid as he wanders through downtown with his camera. A slim, quiet, thirtyish man born into an artistic family, Khalid has the inclination and the resources to spend his time working on a documentary about… what? The project, which seems as interminable as psychoanalysis, mostly involves collecting and editing interviews with women who are on their way out of his life—his mother (Zeinab Mostafa), who is dying; his former lover (Laila Samy), who is about to leave the country—or who say they have nothing to tell him, like the theater director (Hanan Youssef) who is fed up with his asking about the old days in Alexandria. “No more nostalgia!” she shouts at him, adding that when he gets back to his stuffy apartment, he ought to open the windows for a change.

But Khalid, in the tradition of Chekhovian characters at a triple impasse—personal, artistic, world-historical—has no problem with his apartment, other than needing to leave it. Buildings are being demolished all around, and it seems that he too will have to move within a couple of months, though his real-estate agent can’t seem to find him a place without chickens roosting in it.

So Khalid drifts with the current: not exactly in the moment (because he’s always mulling over the past, and shooting scenes that vanish before his eyes), but swimming in the perceptual flood. The irony, of course, is that he doesn’t see what time is carrying him toward, even when he inadvertently catches it on film.

Sometimes, he passes a little crowd chanting that the Quran must rule. At other times, he walks by a few rows of demonstrators calling for the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Always there are soldiers and plainclothes cops—the former staring ahead blank-faced, the latter looking around with vulpine appetite. As a title card announces, these images begin in December 2009. At that point, two years before the uprising, they’re just threads in the fabric of the city to Khalid—neither more nor less important than a stooped beggar woman, a bright little girl selling cigarettes in the midst of traffic, a veteran of the 1967 war retelling his stories for the thousandth time in a cafe, or the views through taxicab windows that turn Cairo into an unfolding shallow-focus band of shimmering light and color.

Khalid can try to grasp these elusive sights and sounds, but he has no one to share them with—no one to think with him about what the effort of filming means—except for three friends his own age who are also about to slip away. All three are visiting filmmakers who have come to Cairo for a panel discussion; one resides in Beirut, another in Baghdad, and the third—having fled Iraq’s bloodshed—in Berlin. (They are played, respectively, by Bassem Fayad, Hayder Helo, and Basim Hajar.) In the Last Days of the City is at its most energetic and convivial, and also its most argumentative, when the four buddies are together, talking through the night and then driving through the streets at dawn with video cameras in their hands. Each visitor faces his own artistic and political dilemma; each promises to send Khalid some images so he can finally finish his damned movie. Then the friends scatter, to become hovering absences like all the others.

Now that In the Last Days of the City has reached the United States, beginning with limited runs in New York and Los Angeles, it is irresistible, if facile, to compare it with the Brad Anderson–Tony Gilroy thriller Beirut (which is, by the way, not a terrible movie). The obvious difference is viewpoint: One is internal to the place and culture, the other external. But the more important distinction is open versus closed form. Said is willing to give you something that is all the more affecting for being discontinuous and inconclusive—a deliberately paced leap toward the impossible. No film about incipient failure could be more brilliant about looking back while falling short.

If you can speak of Armando Iannucci’s HBO series Veep and his 2009 movie In the Loop as following a formula in the midst of their flirtations with anarchy—their situations engineered to spin out of control, taking the improvisational performances with them—then you might say that he practices the old knaves-and-fools dialectic: portraying political animals as either skilled, self-involved brutes or bumbling, self-involved imbeciles, but mutually dependent and, in both cases, terrifyingly foul-mouthed. To provide enabling space for this bad behavior, Iannucci also interposes a smattering of middle terms: characters who are reasonably competent and responsible (like you, in other words) but fallible enough to compromise themselves or be fouled up by idiots—and also terrifyingly foul-mouthed.1

Having put this formula to work with present-day situations and fictitious characters in his earlier dark comedies, Iannucci now applies it for the first time to a historical incident, involving much higher stakes and a roster of more or less real figures from 1953, including Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), and Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin). These are the knaves and fools who party like frat boys, play practical jokes with their food, and tell raucous, blood-drenched stories over dinner to amuse the title monster (Adrian McLoughlin) in The Death of Stalin.2

Shot—I mean, photographed—in a steadier and more deep-hued style than In the Loop, with scenes recorded amid significantly more elaborate settings, The Death of Stalin takes a stab—I mean, makes an effort—at conveying the gravity of its subject through an early montage of MVD arrests, interrogations, and murders. To an agitation of Tchaikovsky on the soundtrack, bulbous sedans roar through the dead of night, sick-faced sons point to the rooms where their fathers are hiding, and, in the background, bodies thud and tumble down staircases. Multiply by a thousand, the montage suggests—by a million. I have seen more dreadful dramatizations of Stalin and Beria’s reign of terror, but I credit Iannucci with presenting this version straight. The trick, though, in keeping with the formula, is to veer back and forth without transition between different types of brutality: on one side tortures and killings, and on the other blatant slapstick.3

Iannucci sets the tone by opening in an ornate concert hall, where the musicians onstage are performing an achingly beautiful piano concerto by Mozart, while in the Radio Moscow broadcast booth the engineers are falling over themselves in panic and casting aspersions like mud pies, because Stalin himself has phoned and they don’t know what he wants. You detect a whiff of proud, strained, despairingly useless artistic culture, expelled like stale air from the Soviet balloon that Iannucci has just popped. Before long, the conductor will knock himself cold with a pratfall—that’s how scared he is of Stalin—while the chief radio engineer, forced by a whim of the General Secretary’s to repeat the performance, informs the audience that they are not going home. They will stay, listen again, and applaud. At which instruction, before so much as another note has been played, the music lovers dutifully begin clapping—and, just to make sure, rise to their feet.4

So we see the complicity between knaves and fools, the bond between victimizers and victims, which also plays out among the film’s principal characters: the members of the Central Committee. The purest knave among them (apart from the title corpse) is Beria, portrayed by Beale with the rotund, pince-nezed suavity of a man who can be utterly reassuring, even genial, in the breath before he orders a woman to be shot in front of her husband. Except for suffering a grisly demise (spoiler alert!), Beria is too vicious to be subjected to slapstick—unlike the Central Committee’s purest fool, Malenkov, whose characterization by Tambor is one long comic indignity of owlish blinks, jowl-shaking stammers, whinnies of inappropriate laughter, and vain adjustments to his dubious hair. Not surprisingly, Malenkov is among the first to make the error, when kneeling beside Stalin’s unconscious form, of dipping his trouser legs into a puddle of urine.5

f course, Iannucci also provides a few middle-term characters—notably the sweetheart of the movie, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough), whose sincerity and intelligence somehow have not been poisoned by the general indecency, and the movie’s hero, Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who is ahistorically trim and chisel-featured as embodied by Jason Isaacs, an actor who always seems to have one lock of hair dangling dashingly over an eyebrow, and so provides just the wish fulfillment the audience needs.6

But the crucial middle term is Khrushchev, who gradually does something previously unknown for an Iannucci character: change from being a semi-fool into not quite a knave. You will search in vain for anyone adaptable in Veep or In the Loop, anyone with a hint of an inner life that might overflow his or her function in the plot. You might not expect such a character in this movie, either, when you first see Buscemi braying like a buffoon as Khrushchev, with his signature baggy suit and hockey oval of a bald spot. He, too, manages to soak his knees in piss, and (worse than Malenkov) does it while still dressed in his pajamas. But then, as the jockeying for power begins, something takes hold in the man.7

Partly it’s Khrushchev’s realization that he’s out of options: He can either act boldly now or wait a few days for Beria to kill him. Partly it’s that Khrushchev is in love with Svetlana. Not that he says so, or that she understands he’s fumbling for some equivalent of “I love you.” But you sense what’s going on in him when he babbles that he’ll never let any harm come to her, that he’d personally stand in the way of any harm—professions that do nothing, as they drag on, except provoke Svetlana into shouting that he’s the only one around here talking about harm, and some help he’d be anyway. Riseborough fully lives up to her flaming hair, as she shows an initial bafflement igniting into alarm and then outrage; but Buscemi is the actor who goes through the bigger transformation in this scene, as Khrushchev nerves himself up to overstep a limit with Svetlana. Even though his daring in this scene yields him nothing except rejection, the momentum will carry him toward a second, far more dangerous threshold.8

If this sounds like a romantic process more than a historical one, bear in mind that Iannucci claims to be nothing more than an entertainer, whose source for The Death of Stalin is a graphic novel of the same name by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin. The authors researched their subject both deeply and a little indiscriminately. That pianist performing Mozart, for example, is based on the real-life Maria Yudina, but she is shown in the context of a questionable episode from Solomon Volkov’s much-disputed Testimony. As you might expect, then, Nury and Robin’s treatment of the material, and Iannucci’s, relies on broad contour lines and heavy contrasts. Their Yudina not only expresses her contempt for Stalin, as the historical figure did, but becomes the precipitating cause of his death when she manages to slip him a defiant note, whose message spurs the dictator’s collapse. History advances by sympathetic magic, as well as by slapstick and unrequited love—which is fine in a movie so long as it’s a good one, like The Death of Stalin.9

Honesty compels me, though, to mention that the great film about the death of Stalin is the 1998 Khrustalyov, My Car! With its multitude of characters ironically sideswiped by the cruelties of history and crazily shuffled by the raging, satirical writer-director Aleksey German, it’s a movie so exhaustingly dense and outlandish in every scene—so disconcerting, disorienting, eyeball-blasting, and heart-confounding—that my colleague John Powers once suggested that the New York Film Festival ought to sell tickets for 10-minute excerpts, since that was enough to give you the idea, and more than most people could absorb.10

Needless to say, you can’t watch Khrustalyov, My Car! on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, or whatever pirate site your 14-year-old nephew has been using to download porn—though a few DVDs are still knocking around—so by dangling this unobtainable experience before you, I’m really just playing a nasty, teasing power game. Which seems appropriate, since it’s what so many of the characters in The Death of Stalin are accustomed to do. Maybe the movie doesn’t live up to the most lavish praise that’s been heaped on it, but there’s a certain grim pleasure to be had from seeing its knaves and fools stripped down to their essential, vulgar meanness—especially now, as we watch our mean, vulgar fool in the White House dancing with the Kremlin’s knave. If you want a couple hours’ relief from that spectacle, you might try The Death of Stalin. The laughter won’t stick in your throat—much.11

o return, though, to where this story began: “Yes, that’s it!” Karl cries to Friedrich as they reel, very drunkenly, through an alley in Paris on the first night of their bromance. “Until now, philosophers interpreted the world. But it must be transformed!” At this stage of intoxication, guys like Seth Rogen and James Franco might have had the sudden, giggling inspiration, if transported back to the 19th century, to borrow that sweet phaeton they’d spotted in an archduke’s driveway and take it for a trot through the Bois de Boulogne. Not Karl and Friedrich: They come up with the Theses on Feuerbach.12

So it goes in The Young Karl Marx, an improbably lush and deadpan-funny epic about a pair of two-fisted materialists and the bodacious babes who loved them, as they brawled and rollicked their way toward writing The Communist Manifesto. (“We must deliver it by February first! Only five weeks!”) Directed by Raoul Peck on the heels of his triumphant I Am Not Your Negro, and co-written by him with the perpetually waggish Pascal Bonitzer (who has helped the likes of Raul Ruiz and Jacques Rivette invent unexpected gifts), The Young Karl Marx is to the best of my knowledge something new, both in buddy comedies and romantic costume adventures: the story of a scheme to shoulder aside the leaders of the League of the Just and rededicate the organization to a bold new movement, marrying descriptive sociology to post-Hegelian theory!13

Lantern-jawed August Diehl plays Marx, with a scraggly beard on his face and indignation forever burning in his deep-set eyes. Stefan Konarske, last seen as a space officer in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, brings a touch of sulky, pretty-boy glamour to the role of Engels. (Always chafing under the burden of his father’s money; always flinching at the expectation that Marx will bring it up again.) As Jenny von Westphalen, Vicky Krieps is as assertive as she was in Phantom Thread (the old order, she declares, will crumble!), though not to the point of serving her husband Karl an untrustworthy mushroom omelet. She just gives him a forgiving kiss and the reassurance that he must leave her behind in chilly Brussels with a newborn child, if the revolution needs him in London. (To be fair, this happens long before Engels would write The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.) As for Engels’s soul mate Mary Burns, Hannah Steele gives her the full Maureen O’Hara firebrand performance. John Ford would be smiling somewhere, if he were a communist and knew how to smile.14

You get all this, plus horses, candles, drawing rooms, cobblestone streets, dark Satanic mills, and multiple debates with the ever-forgiving anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Olivier Gourmet), photographed in approximately the same palette that cinematographer Kolja Brandt previously used for Young Goethe in Love (aka Goethe!).15

Believing as I do that the best of all social programs, gendered pronouns aside, is “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” I am delighted to receive the improbable gift of The Young Karl Marx. That said, I’m a little worried that Peck might take this movie more seriously than I do. Although he clearly wants to entertain, he does not signal a desire like Iannucci’s to make you laugh—that’s your choice—and at the end presents a heroic montage of communism’s march through the decades. Faced with that finale, I have to say that one of my abilities is a capacity to make distinctions, and one of my needs is for a fair historical accounting. So, while I insist that communism get credit for its role in the international labor movement and the struggle against colonialism, I also think that Peck’s montage ought to have included a few less celebratory images: Soviet tanks on the streets of Budapest and Prague, let’s say, or starving Chinese peasants slaving over backyard steel foundries, or the rogues’ gallery from The Death of Stalin. Despite that lapse, Peck has, as with Lumumba, proved that he has a skill for historical epics. Now that it’s streaming, will you enjoy watching it? Very possibly, if you’ve got enough nerdiness to thrill at seeing Marx and Engels respond to Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty with The Poverty of Philosophy. Is the whole thing kind of silly? Yes, but maybe not quite enough. Will it inspire the masses to take up the Manifesto anew? Now, that’s funny.16

akanda! Land of pastoral futurism, where herdsmen wave cheerfully at spaceships zooming above the umbrella-thorn acacias, and earth-toned skyscrapers rise from the savanna like David Adjaye versions of the Watts Towers. Wakanda! Rich and peaceful land of unbroken spiritual traditions and ancient African high tech, kept secure by its invisible force-field border and the self-satisfied ignorance of white colonialists.

Here, cleverly concealed across the ocean, is the dream of so many African Americans: a beautiful homeland of wise kings, strong women warriors, and market streets that are at once charmingly old-fashioned and bustlingly hypermodern—much like the ones in Blade Runner, you’d think, except for being sunny, well-kept, and frequented exclusively by black people.

Several generations of Marvel comic books featuring Wakanda and its superhero king T’Challa have now given rise to the Disney release Black Panther, the most recent pop movie that is said to have Changed Everything. To the studio marketers, op-ed writers, and puff-piece journalists who have been making this claim, it’s all a matter of positive images and relatable characters. Except for Will Smith in Hancock, and Samuel L. Jackson as Frozone in The Incredibles, and of course Halle Berry and Anthony Mackie in other Marvel Universe pictures, plus Wesley Snipes in Blade (if you want to press the point) and Robert Townsend in The Meteor Man (which should not be forgotten), there simply have been no black superheroes in the movies. Not enough, anyway, even if you count Muhammad Ali starring as himself in The Greatest and When We Were Kings. Now black audiences have a special-effects blockbuster all their own, set mostly in Africa, which, I admit, is newsworthy—although it’s not the most interesting aspect of Black Panther.

What’s really intriguing is the way that an Africanist myth invented in 1966 by two Jewish guys in New York, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and later elaborated upon by the likes of Reginald Hudlin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, has now been taken over by Ryan Coogler, the writer-director who previously made the very good social-realist drama Fruitvale Station and the first-rate genre-revisionist Creed. With the help of his co-writer, Joe Robert Cole, Coogler has thought to delve into the deep sorrow implicit in this fantasy: the nagging idea that the Wakandans, those happy people across the ocean, could have rescued America’s Africans but instead abandoned them, leaving them poor, traditionless, and playing basketball on concrete lots.

The feelings of loss and envy running through the film—feelings of anger and betrayal as well, which a representative of black America directs squarely at the inhabitants of this imagined homeland—add a level of emotional complexity to Black Panther beyond anything you might reasonably have expected. Certainly you couldn’t have predicted this trait as easily as the standard-issue plot (the usual stuff about smugglers, superspies, and madmen bent on revenge), let alone the checklist of fistfights, spear fights, gunfights, chase scenes, and scenery-wrecking battles. Coogler has met these requirements in full and then some; but also, astonishingly, he has brought an identifiable personal touch to the film, despite its zillion-dollar budget and obligatory cameo appearance by Lee.

he signs of Coogler’s authorship are his true homeland, Oakland (the setting of several key scenes), and his signature actor, Michael B. Jordan, cast as a mysterious but unmistakably dangerous adventurer who gradually snakes his way toward Wakanda, bringing a headful of finger dreads and a “Wussup?” vocabulary into the African Eden. Functionally, Jordan’s character is a very bad guy, posited as the opposite of Chadwick Boseman’s very good T’Challa/Black Panther. One swaggers, schemes, rages, and drawls with the voice of urban America; the other strides, pursues wisdom, practices benevolence, and (like the other Wakandans) speaks in the kind of lilting, accented English you might call soundstage Swahili. Boseman is a wonderful actor who brings an innate grace and sympathy to T’Challa, even when rolling around in his superhero outfit. But his extraordinary range, which has enabled him to play Jackie Robinson in one movie and James Brown in the next, has been put to little use in Black Panther, where he runs the gamut from dignified to resolute. Jordan, as Erik Killmonger, is the one who gets to show off how much he can do—and despite being cast as a villain, he’s the one who, in his pain and isolation, owns Coogler’s heart.

Coogler is clever in playing out the reasons behind that sense of abandonment. At first, while T’Challa ascends the throne of Wakanda and resolves some clannish restiveness, Killmonger proceeds on a parallel track in movie-criminal mode. He seems like your usual trader in expensive and dangerous goods, except for combining a ready store of information about colonialism with a willingness to work with a white South African. It’s only after T’Challa and his team undertake a mission against the monstrous Boer that Killmonger and the Black Panther begin to converge—and, still later, when the two men come face to face in open conflict, that Coogler reveals secrets, laying bare the violence in one and the need for moral reassessment in the other.

If Black Panther were to seek therapy to resolve this inner conflict, the presenting symptom might be a repetition compulsion: The movie keeps looping back on itself, showing multiple versions of an initiation scene, a ritual combat, and (most telling of all) scenes of the deaths of fathers. These feel like more than mere folds in the narrative, put there to explain or deepen what you’ve already seen. It’s more as if Black Panther can’t work through the problems it’s posed and so has to keep revisiting them.

These repetitions slow the movie and weigh it down—though not as much as the big shoot-’em-up in a casino (yes, another of those) and the episodes of hand-to-hand combat, dimly lit and jerkily edited to disguise the absence of anyone remotely like Jackie Chan. Fortunately, there’s so much to dazzle the eye—from towering waterfalls and mammoth CGI rhinoceroses to glowing underground industrial installations and neo-Constructivist furnishings—that Coogler bears you along. (The production design is by Hannah Beachler, the cinematography by Rachel Morrison.) A little more humor would also have helped, but the job of supplying it has fallen almost exclusively to the delightful Letitia Wright as Wakanda’s Princess Shuri, a cross between a cheeky little sister and James Bond’s armorer, Q. She lightens the proceedings whenever she’s on camera. When she’s not, the best you get is some mild amusement at the way T’Challa makes goo-goo eyes at Nakia, the undercover agent and love interest played by Lupita Nyong’o.

Outwardly, Black Panther matches Nyong’o for beauty, and also for her slightly too solemn determination as an actress to play and win by the rules. (The Africanist superhero blockbuster has to be twice as good to earn half the money.) Inwardly, Black Panther surprises with themes and emotions that might escape the attention of action fans but are present all the same. It’s fun, in that heavy blockbuster way. But it’s also notable as the first Disney release to come out explicitly against a program for global race war—or to admit that a character could argue for that program seriously.

ace war—the actually existing version of it still practiced in the United States—is the subject of Travis Wilkerson’s experimental, investigative documentary Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?

A proudly oppositional no-budget veteran, Wilkerson is so determined in this new movie to intervene against white-on-black violence that he’s tried to punch through the screen. For the initial presentations of Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (including its 2017 premiere at the Sundance festival), he went back to one of the oldest practices in cinema and delivered a live narration. You won’t have him in the room during the theatrical release, which is beginning its rollout at Film Forum in New York. The print now features a standard voice-over, spoken in Wilkerson’s deep, solemn tones. But the movie’s “I” emphatically remains the filmmaker himself; the “you” being addressed is still you, the viewer; and the materials that are shuffled and scrambled and questioned throughout the proceedings—from home movies and a worn newspaper clipping to interviews, snatches of songs, and fragments of To Kill a Mockingbird—set loose a personal, familial, national murder story that Wilkerson hasn’t the slightest desire to contain within a frame.

Told briefly, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? is an account of a white man getting away with murdering a black one. On that fatal day in October 1946, in the town of Dothan, Alabama, 46-year-old Bill Spann walked into Branch’s Grocery and somehow had words with the proprietor, Samuel Edwin Branch, Wilkerson’s great-grandfather. Great-Grandpa ended the discussion by shooting Spann dead with a .32 pistol. When Wilkerson finally resolved to investigate this dreadful piece of family history—it was after the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case—his mother supplied him with a contemporaneous newspaper article confirming that Branch had been charged with first-degree murder.

But even though Wilkerson succeeded in retrieving Spann’s death certificate—which he reads aloud, in painful detail, over excerpts from his family’s home movies—his search through the courthouse archives turned up no record of an indictment. The case simply vanished—like Spann’s corpse, which was taken to Louisville, about 45 miles from Dothan, and buried in an unmarked grave. S.E. Branch, however, is memorialized in his hometown: The cemetery is no more than an unsheltered triangle within spitting distance of the main road, but Branch lies under the family headstone. He lived until 1970—long enough that Wilkerson can show you a photo of himself as a baby cheek by jowl with his killer great-grandfather.

hat baby picture is about all you see of Wilkerson, who prefers not to show himself while conducting interviews and pursuing truth. To present such images would be to give himself an aura of heroism, and so to deny the terror that was a predominant note of his expedition back home. The record of his visit to the nearby Klan stronghold of Cottonwood, for instance, consists mostly of brooding shots of trees—their past use was much on his mind, and he didn’t expect the people would want to be filmed—followed by a view of the two-lane blacktop along which he fled after two boys approached him, called him by name, and instructed him to wait because some people were coming to see him.

The image of the valiant documentarian would also have been at odds with the multiple failures Wilkerson acknowledges in his voice-over. His inquiries consistently hit a dead end whenever he approached white people, none of whom seemed to have any idea what he was talking about. Black people were more forthcoming, but they often preferred to speak with him anonymously and could shed no light on the last moments of Bill Spann’s life. The exception was Ed Vaughn, a retired public servant and activist, whose home museum of African-American history is the subject of an extended visit by Wilkerson. Vaughn, too, had no information about Spann’s death, but he testified that two other people were murdered in Branch’s Grocery.

Knowing this much, a different filmmaker might have set about structuring his story as a personal journey into his family’s history. Wilkerson resists the impulse. In the first place, as he’s at pains to note, two families were involved here, one of which he’s unable to record because the other wiped it from the world. In the second place, if Wilkerson were to concentrate on his family’s history, he’d narrow the focus of the film, when what he wants is to stretch it to the horizon.

Which he does, without having to go to unusual efforts. A request to speak with his aunt Jean—the sort of inquiry any filmmaker would routinely log—leads directly to rifle salutes and battle games, since this aunt is a member of the forthrightly racist and proudly secessionist League of the South. A visit to a League ceremony in Verbena provides Wilkerson with another creepy scene that makes him want to run, and confirms that his family’s images are mere shards in the pointillist explosion of American life. And despite having an eye like Walker Evans’s—witness the somber, still images of dilapidated houses, churches, food shacks, and deserted Main Streets that multiply throughout the film—Wilkerson isn’t interested in capturing a stable picture of this life. He wants to latch on to the blast itself, and ride along with the forces in it that he would call justice. That’s why he begins and ends with the shouts of “Hell You Talmbout,” Janelle Monáe’s roll call of murdered African Americans, to which he adds the name of Bill Spann.

That’s also why he talks early on about the falseness of Atticus Finch’s heroism in To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee’s Monroeville is about 100 miles from Dothan) and finishes by speaking about the exposure of Finch’s racism in Lee’s long-unpublished Go Set a Watchman. Wilkerson sees his film, no less than his family, as caught up with these cultural artifacts in the continuing movement of history—a history in which you might decide to be a liberal (if you’re content to congratulate yourself) or, as a better choice, a radical.

For what it’s worth, I note that Wilkerson, too, indulges in a touch of self-congratulation. His ideas and methods really are radical; he didn’t need to say so in his voice-over. He also had no need to express self-disgust for using expensive equipment and getting paid to make the film. (He’s referring, I assume, to the foundation grants for which he and other artists bow and scrape.) I want to say to him: Yes, it’s hard to avoid complicity, but please let up on yourself. “One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse.”

That said, the country road that Wilkerson drives in Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? keeps winding on. You see it early in the film, and you see it late. Despite changes for the better, we’re all still on it—and the way Wilkerson colorizes the image, we might as well be traveling through Mars on a bad day.

Quiet, non-narrative films like Abbas Kiarostami’s posthumous 24 Frames are often tagged as “poetic,” the default term for anything that has neglected to squeeze itself into a commercially viable genre. Good enough. Let’s start with a few lines from a poem, Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man”:1

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice…

…and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind….2

And here is the first of the 24 framed images that compose Kiarostami’s film: a full-screen reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Hunters in the Snow. Three men returning from their labors, their backs turned to you, trudge toward a vast, frigid valley, dogs following their sunken tracks, ravens perched in the bare branches above, the peaked, snow-thatched roofs of little houses dropping away below. You contemplate the utter stillness. You feel time has stopped.3

Then a plume of smoke begins to rise from a chimney in the painting. A fresh flurry of snow drifts down, accompanied by the whistle of wind. Crackling and cawing break onto the soundtrack—from the fire being tended near the inn at the picture’s left, from a bird swooping across the center of a mottled, overcast sky—and a real dog (I mean, the filmed image of one) wanders in, just to nose around. Then the dog trots out of the painting, the snow lets up, the wind dies down. Having given you a few moments of “life,” Kiarostami returns you to the painting and to silence—to a time that’s frozen. Like the “listener” in “The Snow Man,” who has learned to become “nothing himself,” you now behold “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Fade to black.4

It’s not hard to imagine Kiarostami himself fading to black, very slowly, during his time making 24 Frames. He puttered over the film in his basement in Tehran for three years, assisted by the digital animator Ali Kamali, who used a video program to layer movement and sound onto The Hunters in the Snow and dozens of scans of Kiarostami’s nature photographs. It must have been an absorbing process, which continued even after Kiarostami was hospitalized with cancer. By the time of his death, he had created more than enough computer-animated photographs to make up the 24 he wanted for a film—24 being the number of frames that ordinarily translate into one second of movie time. Each of his “frames,” though, lasts four and a half minutes. Kiarostami had figured out a new way to stretch time, but he couldn’t defeat it. After he died in July 2016, his son Ahmad completed the work.5

Given this history, skeptics might wonder if 24 Frames conforms to Kiarostami’s final intentions, or if he’d even had time to formulate them. Some naysayers might also think the primary materials for 24 Frames—Kiarostami’s still photographs—are too slight to support 114 minutes of cinematic meditation. For the moment, let’s just say there’s an overwhelming consistency of imagery, process, and mood in 24 Frames, which makes the film feel very much like the considered work of a single artist—and not just any work, but the last testament.6

Bruegel’s painting makes all the difference, establishing motifs that run through the next 23 animations of Kiarostami’s photographs. It’s winter in these images more often than not, with snow deep on the ground and trees shaking under gray skies. Dogs and birds show up frequently. (Crows might be the stars of the movie, given how often they hop and croak through the scenes.) Hunters make themselves felt in Kiarostami’s frames, too, though only off-screen, through the sound of their guns. The difference from Bruegel’s painting is that, with a few notable exceptions, a human presence is implied but unseen. Fences run across the unpopulated landscapes in some of the frames; in others, the landscape is glimpsed, or obscured, through the windows of uninhabited rooms.7

There’s also transient, invisible evidence of humanity in the music that’s matched to some of the frames: an old tango by Francisco Canaro, Maria Callas performing “Un Bel di Vedremo,” Janet Baker singing the Schubert “Ave Maria,” or an instrumental number by the Naqsh Duo, two young Iranian women whose compositions sound like traditional Persian music crossed with Quartet for the End of Time.8

Do these occasional patches of music violate the principle of Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” introducing the something of human desire into the fundamental nothing of the natural world? I’d rather say they set up a push-and-pull. Sometimes you feel dissolved into the scenes that Kiarostami has created, as if snow and wind were one with the birds and animals—as much inside them as outside—and one with you, too. (The land, Stevens writes, is full of the “same wind” that blows “in the same bare place / For the listener.”) At other times, you sit back and wonder at how much emotion you’re pouring into a scene with which you have only the most tenuous connection. This generally happens in the episodes in which you’re separated from the landscape, seeing it from inside a house (or, in one case, a car) while hearing the recorded music that someone has chosen to play. But who? Nobody’s in the room. The listener, too, has dissolved.9

Whether the episodes are underscored by music or only by “natural” sound effects, they can be pitiless in their simplicity, as when two horses spar in a blizzard, or a prowling cat snatches a bird out of a burrow in the snow, which is immediately filled by another bird. The frames can be quizzical as well, or droll. A herd of cattle strolls in threes and fours across a deserted beach, with the cows looking for all the world as if they belong there. (Later, the same computer-animated herd walks through a clearing in a forest, just as improbably, and just as convincingly.) Or: A puppy on the beach runs up yapping to a seagull and scares it away. A moment later, the puppy re-enters to yap at the empty space where the seagull used to stand.10

Whether you chuckle or brood, you think all the while of how the apparent motion in these photographs is an illusion—like the fictitious evidence that Kiarostami invented of an ongoing world outside the frame; like the impression of time unspooling naturally in scenes whose duration was arbitrarily decided and artificially fixed. In other words, you keep thinking about the essence of filmmaking. In his great fictions—and, even more, in the quasi-documentary fictions—Kiarostami pulled off the magical trick of keeping you aware of the movieness of the movie without ever distancing you from his characters. He was, in that sense, an anti-Brecht, who refused to alienate anybody. 24 Frames, though, has almost no characters except for the birds and animals—and they don’t do the two things that most interested Kiarostami about human beings, which are that we care for one another and we lie. So I wouldn’t argue with a moviegoer who finds 24 Frames too contemplative an experience. And yet there’s the departure of the final frame, inhabited by Kiarostami himself—or rather, this being a grand lie, by someone who implicitly represents him.11

The setting is a room at night. A figure, seen from behind, lies face-down on a desk, dozing. Next to the figure, a computer monitor displays a freeze-frame of an old English-language movie. Maybe we’re looking at the film this person had been watching before falling asleep. Or maybe we’re seeing the person’s dream, projected onto the little screen nearby. Either way, the picture gradually jerks into motion. The movie’s scene continues; the actress and actor slowly kiss.12

As a filmmaker subject to the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Kiarostami was never permitted to show people kissing. But at the close of his life, using 24 Frames, he finally got to do just that. The music he chose to accompany this great moment is lushly sentimental. The image on the monitor is grainy and pixelated, and the person who would presumably be most interested in watching it is left fast asleep. No matter. As a warm filmmaker with a mind of winter, Kiarostami had learned that absurdities and impediments are as much a part of the world, and himself, as snow and wind. Everything was frozen, and the body was dying of cancer—and yet the kiss could happen.13

The figure sleeps. The screen on the desk says: “The End.”14

hrough a strange trick of perspective, images of Palestinians and Israelis are coming closer to us in the movies just as the vision of a modus vivendi between the two peoples fades into the distance. We’ve recently seen the US debut of a documentary by Amos Gitai, West of the Jordan River, which in some ways continues his invaluable 1982 Field Diary, and the festival premiere of Julia Bacha’s documentary Naila and the Uprising, produced by the nonprofit Just Vision. (Disclosure: I have a personal connection to that organization.) Witness also two films longlisted for this year’s foreign-language Oscar: Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot and Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult. Of the four, only Doueiri’s film holds out anything I could describe as hope, and it’s a strangely confected one at that.15

To date, Doueiri is best known for the excellent debut feature West Beirut (1998), about teenagers in the midst of civil war, and the psychological thriller The Attack (2012), which was subject to a ban because its scenes of Tel Aviv were actually filmed there. (Lebanese citizens are proscribed from visiting Israel.) The Insult is a fable about an angry exchange of words in present-day Beirut. On one side is a Christian garage owner (Adel Karam) who is mostly concerned with his business and his pregnant wife, but who also happens to be a Phalangist nursing old grievances. On the other side is a Palestinian construction foreman (Kamel El Basha) who is mostly concerned with doing his job and supporting his family, but who also happens to be a former militant who fled Jordan after Black September. All it takes between these two is the wrong tone of voice: Words eventually escalate into clumsy physical violence, and then into a widely publicized lawsuit that threatens to set off a new civil war.16

The dialogue in The Insult is punchy, the editing brisk, and the performances kept just a notch below swaggering exaggeration, as you might expect from a writer-director who has worked with Tarantino. But the real question isn’t whether the movie pops (which it does); it’s whether Doueiri achieves any justice by turning The Insult into a courtroom drama. What does he ultimately put on trial? Nothing less than the status of Palestinians as a particularly victimized people deserving of particular consideration.17

In raising this issue for cinematic litigation, Doueiri shows himself to be an exemplary moderate, trying to have things both ways. He uses the courtroom setting to document the PLO’s massacre of Christian civilians in the village of Damour in 1976, weighting the film’s visual evidence and its screen time toward the position that Palestinians, too, have the blood of innocents on their hands. But the Phalangist lawyer who makes this case is played by Camille Salameh (think of Ian Holm as old Bilbo Baggins), while the pro-Palestinian attorney is Diamand Bou Abboud (think Jennifer Lawrence). That’s Doueiri’s formula for “turning the page,” as his characters say: Acknowledge the wrongs suffered by one side, but maintain the perceived glamour of the other.18

Move south with the documentaries by Bacha and Gitai, though, and the facts on the ground don’t look very glamorous. In the somewhat slapdash West of the Jordan River, Gitai grabs on-the-scene interviews with Palestinians in Gaza and Hebron and learns that the only thing they want the Israelis to do is disappear. Meanwhile, in the studio-shot interviews with Israeli political leaders and journalists—who mostly run the gamut from Haaretz to Haaretz—he learns that Israel’s remaining leftists believe that the only thing likely to disappear is the last tatter of their democracy.19

Bacha seems to come to a similarly bleak assessment in Naila and the Uprising. An admiring portrait of Naila Ayesh, a longtime activist in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the 75-minute film is also an act of historical recovery, bringing to light the leadership of women in the first intifada, as well as the argument that the PLO undercut the best hopes of a grassroots movement by signing the Oslo Accords. Uprising is a vigorous film, but it sees hopes for change only when it looks back to when they were foreclosed.20

It’s left to Samuel Maoz to put this sense of dreadful stasis into strong dramatic form in Foxtrot. A film about the terrible cost of the occupation for both peoples, and about the corrosive, self-defeating norms of Israeli manhood, Foxtrot is as impressive a movie as I’ve seen in months. Before it enters general release in March, I must inform the cultural boycotters that if they pass it up, they’ll miss an ingeniously structured, impeccably directed film that knows how to toy with you—and even raise a bitter smile—while it goes about breaking your heart.21

Booze, women, and movies: These are the wastes of substance that Senator Charles E. Grassley specified, in early December, as weaknesses of the financially and morally impoverished. Guilty as charged. I like all three, and I don’t have a penny.

So welcome, fellow culpable spendthrifts, to the end-of-year movie column, where I suggest new ways to diminish America’s greatness! By the time this is over, I will have encouraged you to throw your money away on the silly spectacle of Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, the anti-Trump propaganda of Steven Spielberg’s The Post, and an inexplicable period melodrama (with plenty of couture and cocktail music) by Paul Thomas Anderson, titled Phantom Thread, that’s sure to leave you shrugging.

Payne’s Downsizing (written with the help of his long-standing collaborator Jim Taylor) is a cheerful fantasy on the subjects of ecological doom, intractable class and race divisions, and the supremacy of marketing over human affairs. Bright with the blue of billboard skies and the gold of sales brochures, it also shines with the blinding fluorescence of a private medical center, where Matt Damon, in his American Everyman mode, gets himself reduced to a perfectly proportioned five inches tall. The miniaturization is another reason why this deeply pessimistic story bounces along so genially. You can’t feel too bad when a thousand visual tricks, executed so they’re charmingly obvious, turn the movie into a toymaker’s wonderland.

A director who thrives on the visual and emotional power of real American locations, sometimes beautiful (Sideways, The Descendants) but more often workaday and down-at-the-heels (About Schmidt, Nebraska), Payne has never before practiced the Santa’s-workshop method of filmmaking. He’s done it now so he can match his style to the ingenuity of the premise. Say that a marvelous invention can lessen humanity’s toll on the environment by making people tiny—on a voluntary basis, of course. Say that this Earth-saving technology migrates from research institutes and NGOs into the hands of American corporations, which convert it into a scheme for selling lifetime memberships in communities that are not just gated but bell-jarred. In subdivisions with names like The Summit at Navajo Orchards, miniature people can now enjoy the McMansions of their dreams while feeling they’ve done something for the planet. Will Matt Damon and his wife, Kristen Wiig, go on fretting over their bills in Omaha, in the cramped and dowdy house that’s all they can afford? Or will they do the right thing by retiring to the Southwest in early middle age, to the minuscule but ultra-high-bourgeois comfort of Leisureland?

They retire, of course—at which point Downsizing begins to play out, with jovial amusement, all the nastiness and woe that the wee people have brought with them into their scale-model development. Southwestern mini-paradise comes complete with compact slums, extremely short menial laborers (most of them Spanish-speaking), and a market in thimble-size counterfeit luxury goods, the latter of which are supplied by Christoph Waltz with his best grinning, cynical, Eurotrash flair. As a challenge to the conscience, Leisureland also offers a peg-legged Vietnamese refugee—played by Hong Chau, in a flamethrower of a performance—who seizes on Damon to boss around. She has the crazy notion that she needs to do good in her world, no matter how shrunken, and he needs to help.

“When once you have thought of big men and little men,” Dr. Johnson claimed, to dismiss Gulliver’s Travels, “it is very easy to do all the rest.” I bet he’d think Downsizing looks easy, too. Clever surprises flow without strain into goofy jokes, parodic riffs into sad absurdities, and all seem light enough to blow away, never to be missed—as if they were the dandelion heads that tower over Matt Damon like the crests of palm trees. How simple of Alexander Payne.

How mind-breakingly difficult, in fact, to show our desperation to us like a bauble.

s a rule, it takes two years to make a big-studio movie, from the day the producer commits to the project to opening night. The production of The Post, undertaken on a 10-month schedule almost unknown since the demise of the studio system, tells you something about how good it is to be Steven Spielberg, and how urgently he wanted this story told.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, it was late February 2017 when Spielberg read the script for The Post, forwarded to him on behalf of first-time feature writer Liz Hannah. Evidently, he liked what he saw: a tribute to the crusading investigative journalists who brought the Pentagon Papers to the public, despite threats of jail time and worse from the Nixon White House, and a sympathetic portrait of a woman, The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham, who in the course of this episode assumed the full authority that men had thought she couldn’t wield.

Because Spielberg rarely confides in me, I can’t say for sure why he was so taken by these subjects at just this moment. All I know is that a few weeks into the catastrophe of the Trump administration, he decided to make this film, signed Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks the same day (when you’re Spielberg, you can do that sort of thing), called in Josh Singer to polish the script with Hannah, and by the end of May was shooting the movie. He was determined to have The Post in theaters by the end of 2017. I doubt he’d explain the rush as I’ve done, by citing a need for anti-Trump propaganda. More likely, he’d say he wanted to give the public an exciting and entertaining story of timely interest—and so he has. Split the difference.

Now that The Post is on-screen—it opens on Friday—you can see how the speed of production has seeped into the movie’s texture. It’s not just that the story rips along, breathlessly generating suspense. (This, despite your knowing how things will turn out, as you did in Lincoln.) The main characters are all racing against various deadlines, so of course they bustle in and out of scenes, snapping out lines left and right and making messes in their nervous excitement. But, beyond that, there’s a brisk air of getting on with the job, in both the performances and the direction, that moves The Post away from Spielberg’s usual manner of grand moments, giving it something of the efficiency of a good Clint Eastwood picture.

That helps, since an outward-looking story about Ben Bradlee’s pursuit of a big scoop needs to mesh with an inward-looking story about Kay Graham’s self-doubt and growing self-assertion. The movie hits all its marks in the latter plotline and goes on without lingering, in a process greatly assisted by Streep. It’s fun to watch America’s highest-powered, most honored actress pretending to vacillate and falter, until Graham chooses (with a mere tilt of Streep’s head and a lift of an eyebrow) to become what she’s meant to be.

Just as important, congenital speed enables The Post to be something more than rousing. It will make you cheer all right, provided you believe what the Trumpists do not: that newspapers have the duty to hold governments accountable, and women have the right to make decisions at every level of society. But even as it revs you up, The Post also reminds you that both public faith in the mission of the press and the rights of women were won not so long ago, and their permanence can’t be assumed.

That’s a somber realization, as Trump Year One blunders toward its close. All the more reason for The Post to have its dark thoughts but not dwell on them. Spielberg gives you a touch of complexity and then breezes past it, toward the feel-good climax he bets you need. It’s not among his great movies—but it’s one to be grateful for.

t’s right that fortune should favor Paul Thomas Anderson, who once resolved a plot by means of a citywide rain of frogs. Weird, unforeseeable circumstances have worked for him by greeting his new film, Phantom Thread, with a downpour of Harvey Weinsteins.

Not that there’s anything unpleasantly frog-like about the film’s chronic abuser of women: a 1950s London dressmaker to the wealthy and titled who has the good luck to be portrayed by a sleek, trim, murmuring, and impeccably groomed Daniel Day-Lewis. Nevertheless, the coincidence of the film’s release with the current outpouring of women’s righteous anger makes the contemporary parallel leap to mind. Phantom Thread is the story of an infinitely self-involved artist-entrepreneur who regularly supplies his atelier with women and then coldly disposes of them, as if they were the rags with which he wipes his shoes. More to the point: It’s the story of the ritzy dressmaker’s contest with the latest in his series, Alma (Vicky Krieps), who refuses to be tossed away.

If not for the Weinstein effect, audiences might currently be scratching their heads, trying to figure out why this period, this milieu, and these characters should be of pressing concern. Granted, the costumes are extravagant, the settings alternately lush and scenic, the music (by Jonny Greenwood) an often dazzling reinvention of the respectable pop of the 1950s (somewhere between cocktail lounge and light classics), and the performances as finely finished as the couture. That said, watching Phantom Thread is like being presented with a cream-colored, engraved invitation, with heraldic crest, to a party that was held 60 years ago. What the hell does Anderson expect you to do with it?

After scanning the early reviews, I’m convinced nobody has a clue—and maybe Anderson likes it that way. He’s hinted at a touch of the esoteric in Phantom Thread by having the dressmaker sew small, personal mementos and messages into the linings of his garments. Perhaps the filmmaker, too, has hidden a private meaning somewhere in the picture. As to the meaning the public can take away, the best guess I’ve seen, by the veteran critic Todd McCarthy, is that we should enjoy Phantom Thread as an homage to Hitchcock’s melodramas (notably Rebecca) and a reflection on the perfectionism and misogyny of Hitchcock himself. That’s a smart, perfectly reasonable interpretation; but I think it stops short of suggesting why anyone other than an obsessive cinephile should care about this movie.

That’s where Weinstein and his like might lend a hand. Not that Day-Lewis’s character has any of that gang’s oafish lewdness. Just the opposite: He’s aloof, meticulous, and seems almost indifferent to sex. But he does share their conviction that women are mere instruments of his will. Anderson makes the point early on, after Day-Lewis has plucked Alma out of a restaurant where she works as a waitress and has begun to measure her for modeling. She seems abashed to be told that she has no breasts but is at once corrected. “It’s my job to give you some,” he explains calmly. “If I choose to.” By this point, you’ve already learned that this man recognizes only two women as existing in their own right: the sister who runs the dressmaking house for him (Lesley Manville) and his long-dead mother. All others are like Alma: semi-inert stuff, to be fashioned as he likes for as long as he likes.

At first she seems willing enough to be his disposable Galatea: a fresh-faced but no longer girlish immigrant who speaks with a vaguely continental accent and trips over her own feet when she first waits on Day-Lewis in the restaurant. But like the women who are done with being silent about the Weinsteins, Alma proves to have the capacity to answer back. First she dares to make noise buttering her toast at the breakfast table, disturbing the great man’s peace, and persists when she’s told to stop. Then, when casually informed that she has no taste, she suggests she might have tastes of her own. Ultimately, she goes so far in her self-assertion as to turn the plot of Phantom Thread into something Hitchcock might have imagined.

The difference between this film and a Hitchcock melodrama is that Alma goes to her outrageous extremes lovingly—and perhaps the dressmaker knows it. The deepest mystery of Phantom Thread, and the strongest source of its suspense, is the question of what these two people might understand about each other, and what emotional bargain they might strike.

The potential for a powerful man and a vulnerable woman to come to terms is of course not a part of the present struggle over sexual abuse—especially not if the terms negotiated are as twisted as those in Phantom Thread. But to be compelling, a film doesn’t have to speak out on an issue. So long as it sounds some ground note of reality—even a random, extraneous ground note, like that of the Weinstein scandal—it can build up a ringing tower of sympathetic vibrations that you’d swear were symphonic, if they didn’t hang in the air like ghosts. What’s going on in Phantom Thread? Damned if I know—but I’m sure I feel it.

inally, rather than write about the latest Star Wars (which hardly needs promotion), I’d rather say a few words about another of the outstanding cash-burners of 2017, which is now winning awards: Jordan Peele’s indelible horror movie, Get Out.

Given that the film has been out for a while, you probably know that Get Out is the story of a young African-American man who ventures into the wealthy suburbs for a weekend with his white girlfriend’s family. There, he begins to feel even more assailed by creepiness than he’d expected—teeth-grindingly overwhelmed, as if every time these people try not to make him uncomfortable they sprinkle sour, powdery candy on his molars.

White liberal journalists, knowing that Peele got his start in comedy, have tagged Get Out as a satire on the racism that persists among their own groups. Permit me to say, no. In the first place, although Peele calculates just the right titration of comic relief for the film, he allows not one drop more. Satire implies the provocation of laughter, even if it’s harsh or mocking. The truly disturbing Get Out seldom raises so much as a smile.

In the second and more important place, the subject of Get Out is not white liberals. The subject is the emotional world of the film’s protagonist, Chris (the unfailingly sympathetic and convincing Daniel Kaluuya); and the primary intended witnesses to that world, sitting in the movie house or on their couches at home, are other African Americans. How else should I interpret the film’s mode of address? At a critical moment in the plot, another black character furiously shouts the title’s imperative at Chris. Peele, by extension, might be said to yell the same directive to every black person in the audience: Get out!

Get out of what? Let’s say the illusion that you can trust white people; the delusion that you can risk loving one of them.

Being the pale type myself, I don’t for a moment accept as literally true the premise of permanent, endemic white treacherousness. But Peele doesn’t ask that belief of me, or anyone. What he does is scream in terror that this premise might be true; he howls at the nightmare vision of white people exerting their dominance not just around him but inside his body.

I see very few movies that express an emotion with such intensity, or set their uncanny images like barbs in your brain. Black people who are curious about the awards hoopla may find that Get Out speaks to them. Those who are not black are free to eavesdrop. That’s the great advantage Peele gives himself by choosing this genre as his vehicle. Everybody knows how to watch a horror movie.

alendar dates aren’t crucial in fairy tales—but, all the same, you will guess The Shape of Water takes place in the early 1960s by the news images of civil-rights activism that flicker momentarily across a black-and-white console TV tucked into an attic apartment. It’s good to know approximately where the ground’s located, even when a setting, like this garret, is up in the air—even when the mood flows between elegy and romance, the music coils and pivots in a chromatic waltz, and the deeply colored gloom is shot through with the glistening of a magical creature from the wild. Let the film’s lonely top-floor neighbors change the channel at the sight of police dogs ripping into the dispossessed. Elisa, the heroine of The Shape of Water, and Giles, who narrates her story in voice-over, might try to exclude this struggle from their fairy tale, but brutal reality will seep in anyway.

Part Cinderella and part Beauty and the Beast, with a large admixture of Creature From the Black Lagoon and Dr. Strangelove, The Shape of Water might be summarized as the story of the love between a cleaning woman and a science experiment. She, Elisa, leaves the garret each evening to work the midnight shift at a military-research facility somewhere outside Baltimore: not a gleaming laboratory but a subterranean industrial site where curving, fluorescent-lit concrete tunnels are inset with clanking metal doors. He, nameless and inhuman, resides behind the heaviest of those barriers, chained in a saltwater tank so investigators can study his intricate dual system of gills and lungs. His captors—principal among them a government agent who enjoys torturing the scaly creature with a cattle prod, which he calls (in an echo of the Birmingham police attacks) an “Alabama howdy-do”—fear and despise this “asset” but believe he might yield a technological advantage against the lurking Soviets. Elisa, whose interest in the Cold War is limited to the piss she mops up in the men’s room, thinks the creature is fascinating and beautiful and keeps sneaking into the cavernous cell to communicate with him. He has a wordless repertoire of moans, roars, and burbles. She is mute but teaches him sign language, and soon discovers that the creature likes hard-boiled eggs and Benny Goodman.

It’s no mystery where this relationship is going, given that you’ve already seen Elisa masturbating in her grimy bathtub on a routine schedule, while a timer keeps her alert to the progress of her daily hard-boiled egg. Clock time, uncooked sex, semi-nostalgic dilapidation in grandiose spaces, and uncanny beings: These are long-standing preoccupations of writer-director Guillermo del Toro, and will lead in this film toward predictable consequences. The real question is whether, on the way toward the climax of The Shape of Water, the Birmingham police dogs will retain their integrity as solid horrors within a fluid fairy tale, or whether they’ll dissolve into an excuse for mere whimsy, plus some knockout production design. I had my doubts.

The Shape of Water is neither one of del Toro’s more darkly compelling fantasies, such as The Devil’s Backbone or Pan’s Labyrinth, nor a gleeful comic-book adventure like Hellboy. It operates in the slippery middle realm where filmmakers too often pretend to plumb the depths of myth, when all they’ve really done is toss off a miscellany of pop-culture references. You will understand my misgivings when I tell you that Elisa and Giles live above an old movie palace—hooray for Hollywood—and share a love for watching outdated soundstage musicals on TV. In this enthusiasm, they behave just as stereotypical outcasts are expected to do in films (especially Giles, a gay man in middle age), signaling the audience to extend an easy if condescending sympathy while enabling The Shape of Water to express approval of itself. Why, Elisa and Giles would just adore their own movie.

I won’t argue with viewers who think del Toro has made it too easy to unite a whole roster of the abused and marginalized (including, in Elisa’s case, someone who is literally silenced) by bringing them together around a captive freak of nature. Voiceless single women, gay men, African Americans, low-wage workers, liberal scientists in thrall to the national-security state, sequestered suburban housewives, and fans of obsolete forms of magazine illustration: The Shape of Water leaps to the defense of them all, like an issue of The Nation on acid. And yet it touches ground. Of all the big year-end releases, The Shape of Water is the one that most deeply moved me.

ts emotional power begins with Sally Hawkins’s performance as Elisa and always returns to Hawkins, but every actor has at least one indelible moment that rings true, often with genuine pain. The prolific character actor Richard Jenkins has never been better than as Giles, daring to touch a young man with whom he’s become infatuated and quietly suffering the smackdown. Octavia Spencer, playing Elisa’s best friend at work, is supplied for the umpteenth time in her career with coveralls, a mop, and a white man who assumes he can belittle her—the difference here being the nakedness of his insult, and her palpable struggle to hold in the shock. In the role of a scientist called Bob—not to reveal anything more about this character, or the plot—Michael Stuhlbarg imbues seemingly limitless detail into every morally clear self-assertion and exasperated tactical retreat of a man who is being undercut on all sides. As for Michael Shannon as the story’s rigid, strutting villain, he has been asked before to use his hooded eyes, Caligari frame, and Frankenstein jaw to alarm audiences. Here, bringing the character’s pride, ambition, and sanctimony to the surface, he gives the movie its true monster—in contrast to the creature, who is mimed by the indispensable Doug Jones under maybe 20 pounds of makeup and prostheses that he wears as easily as his own flesh.

But, Sally Hawkins. From the moment she blithely does a little tap dance to express Elisa’s pleasure at an old movie she’s watching, Hawkins’s lightness draws you in. Her feelings, instantly legible, play through every loose joint and each homey, sympathetic crinkle of her face with a charmed vivacity that makes you want to know more. Waiflike without seeming simple or easily victimized, her Elisa has the grit of a woman who works a hard shift and is often tired, but also the reserves of spirit of someone whom life has not entirely tamed—which is why you might be delighted, but not surprised, at the way Hawkins approaches the glowing vertical cylinder that’s part of the creature’s prison tank. She steps toward it like a ballerina: her right hand lifted to shoulder height, her left foot extended and trailing, her body cheated toward the camera so you can share in Elisa’s rapt expression.

All this is marvelous, but not as thrilling as the intensity Hawkins brings to the turning point of the movie, when Elisa insists to an unwilling Giles that they help the creature. Del Toro and his co-writer, Vanessa Taylor, have given Elisa a multipart tirade to fling at Giles, which Hawkins must deliver in subtitled sign language. And so, with fury added to her quickness, she more or less dances the speech. Her arms pound and slash; her chin drops like a gavel. Breathtakingly eloquent without speaking a syllable, she carries The Shape of Water back past the ’30s and ’40s musicals that Elisa loves, all the way to the silent era.

Whatever brutal realities may gather in the shadows, Hawkins earns them for the film, and does so in the best fairy-tale fashion: with playfulness and fervor. As for del Toro, he may have worked in his lighter mode this time but is still guilty of ravishment, and on an absurd scale. Why would he call this film The Shape of Water? Maybe because desire is life-sustaining, all-encompassing, buoyant, potentially suffocating (unless you learn to swim with it), and infinitely mutable. Others may think of desire in terms of flame, but del Toro has his own view of the subject—and the least you can say is it’s gorgeous.

y chance, the season brings us two more movies about intensely driven women, both as compulsively talkative as del Toro’s Elisa is silent, and both played by actresses who (unlike Hawkins) perform star turns designed to serve their own reputations as much as the story. Lesser pictures—but, in their own ways, I, Tonya and Molly’s Game reward your attention.

Written by Steven Rogers, directed by Craig Gillespie, and starring a very convincingly athletic Margot Robbie, I, Tonya is the biopic you didn’t know you wanted about figure skater and alleged goon Tonya Harding. It’s a deeply ambivalent movie—or maybe a dishonest one—which makes fun of the provincial, barely-working-class America in which Harding grew up—and then condemns you, the viewer, for having laughed.

An example of the basic joke: At the first interrogation over the notorious kneecapping attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan, Harding and her sometime husband, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), lie to the FBI, saying, “Well, we don’t know anything.” An FBI agent replies dryly, “That must make life difficult.”

An example of the punch line: Robbie, as today’s Harding, speaks directly to the movie audience about her plea bargain and banishment from competitive skating. “It was like being abused again—except by you. All of you.” It’s an effect, I suppose. A cheap one. Nevertheless, there’s something in Harding’s story to bring shame upon almost everyone, from the skating officials who shunned her for her poverty and rough manners to the journalists who used her as a meal ticket to the public who complacently treated her as a laughingstock. I, Tonya gives a breezy tour of the life, troubles, and social implications of Harding, both before and after “the incident,” often zooming and circling along the ice with her and cutting among competing, incompatible first-person narratives. Robbie is impressive, but Allison Janney steals the movie as Harding’s endlessly bitter and bullying mother.

Molly’s Game, another almost-true story, is the tale of a former competitive skier, Molly Bloom, who ran into a little trouble of her own with the law in 2014 for having run high-stakes, celebrity-heavy poker games in Los Angeles and New York. The first film to be directed as well as written by Aaron Sorkin, it has the advantage of his renowned geysers of dialogue (wonders of nature, you’d think, which miraculously spritz both hot and cold) and the disadvantage of his two-speed directorial gearbox. The characters and chatter either race headlong or else idle in neutral to give everyone a minute to breathe. You could set your watch by the alteration.

I don’t know who’s meant to be the star: Jessica Chastain, or Jessica Chastain’s cleavage. I understand the real Molly Bloom played up her looks, as well as her shrewdness with spreadsheets, odds, and client psychology, but maybe Sorkin shouldn’t have gone overboard treating his audience as she did her customers. Fortunately, Chastain above the neck performs marvels of elocution with Sorkin’s dialogue (while moderating the impression made below), and the mere mechanics of the poker trade are enough to keep you fascinated. A rock-solid Idris Elba plays Bloom’s initially reluctant lawyer.

ack to the subject of women who are not heard: One night in 1944, a group of young white men in rural Alabama grabbed Recy Taylor on her way home from church, raped her, and insouciantly let her walk back to her father, husband, and young daughter. Centuries of experience told the abductors that they’d merely exercised their prerogative, and that Taylor would remain silent. Instead, she went to the sheriff. He briefly pretended to take an interest. The chief rape investigator sent by the NAACP, Rosa Parks, did more.

In The Rape of Recy Taylor, documentarian Nancy Buirski assembles a collage of interviews, texts, music, and archival images (including excerpts of race movies) to tell the story of Taylor and Parks in the immediate wake of the crime and during its very long aftermath. The result is a striking hybrid: at once impressionistic and argumentative, focused on individuals but also alert to the role, frequently unheralded, that women played in the civil-rights movement. Not to be missed.

Also not to be missed: Daniela Vega, as the title character in Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman. Playing Marina, a waitress, nightclub singer, and strongly self-possessed trans woman in Santiago, Chile, Vega is on-screen for all but the first few minutes, carrying the film almost single-handedly through its shifts between melodrama, social-problem picture, and delirium. Vega’s feat is all the more remarkable given the trajectory of Marina’s story: apparently straight down, after her deeply loved partner (Francisco Reyes) dies suddenly and his family sets out to strip her of everything, from her keepsakes to her dignity to perhaps her liberty. If not for Vega’s vitality, and Lelio’s unerring pace, the story might be unbearable. Instead, despite all the heartache, it plays as a study in the resilience that flows from a woman’s fundamental decency. A Fantastic Woman was released only briefly in the United States to qualify for awards but should be back in theaters in the new year. Please look for it.

got everything I wanted from the 55th New York Film Festival on the night I watched Félicité by Alain Gomis, a writer-director who knows how to make a movie percolate.

First he gets a simmer going in his title character (Véro Tshanda Beya) as she sits, lost in thought, in a bar one night in Kinshasa. Her face in close-up is as silent and magnificent as the sculpted head of a god, but not nearly so impassive. Every time Gomis cuts back to her from the bursts of gossip, boasting, and argument that flicker around the room, you see sparks in her eyes—from sorrow, maybe, or anger. Then the bar’s owner turns up the heat, demanding to know why there’s no music. Félicité stays put, but a half-dozen men seated around her respond to the complaint by grumbling their way into the cul-de-sac that serves as a bandstand, where they wake up their instruments and start fomenting a groove. Patrons nod and shimmy in their chairs; the temperature rises. Then Félicité promenades to the microphone, throws back that monumental head, and sings. Sweating and shouting break out; people are on their feet. One of them struts forward to plaster banknotes on Félicité’s forehead.

At that, she finally smiles. The movie’s popping at full boil, and you’re caffeinated, ready for whatever may come.

Like a good many of the selections in each year’s NYFF, Félicité tells the story of a working person struggling against adversity and injustice in a locale far from the polite bustle of the festival’s Lincoln Center home. In this case, you’re projected into the jammed and ramshackle streets where Félicité—a single woman, no longer in her first youth—must chase after cash for surgery for her injured son. (The health-care system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo apparently practices the same pay-as-you-go method to which many Republicans want the United States to revert: Until Félicité comes up with the money, her son can just lie in the hospital, bleeding from a compound fracture.) But unlike the average social-problem picture, Félicité isn’t about exemplary figures making their way through representative incidents. It’s about an irreducible individual—two of them, actually: the stubborn, often standoffish Félicité and Tabu (Papi Mpaka), the large, hard-drinking, but thoroughly kind rogue who loves her.

That makes Félicité one of the experiences I craved most from this edition of the NYFF: something like a Dardenne brothers movie, but with a driving beat, a goofy love story, and the interpolation of some mysterious, blue-tinted images of orchestral performances and forest settings to remind me that Félicité’s mental world isn’t all slums and soggy francs. 

Put differently, Félicité is an outgoing, exploratory movie, brimming with curiosity and feeling—qualities you might expect from an international festival that promises revelations. I can’t say that all the selections in this year’s main slate met that description. But plenty did, whether their primary impulse was to document, satirize, spin out baroque narrative conundrums, or tell a plain story straight from the heart.

The main slate’s only pure documentary, an audience favorite, was the lovely and loving Faces Places (Visages Villages), a collaboration between Agnès Varda, 88 years old at the time of production, and the 33-year-old photographer and installation artist JR. Shot in a spirit of spontaneity on a series of road trips, then playfully assembled by association of ideas, the picture delivers just what its title implies: images of the faces of laboring people, collected in towns and rural areas throughout France. These come with stories about the subjects as well as teasing portraits of the filmmakers, whose art-world Mutt-and-Jeff act (tall and skinny male hipster, short and round old lioness) would come off as cute if it weren’t for the intimations of mortality hovering around Varda. You encounter isolation and loss in the film, as well as pleasure and workplace solidarity. But the overriding impression—perfect in a film dedicated to photography—is of the potential for the human personality to abide. Look at JR’s photomural of an elderly woman living in a semi-derelict coal-mining town, after he’s pasted her image onto the row house she refuses to abandon. You see the face of someone strong enough to have been made from bricks.

s often happens, documentary tendencies ran through some of the festival’s best fictions, notably The Florida Project by Sean Baker (whose previous film was the astonishing Tangerine) and The Rider by Chloé Zhao: the first an excursion into the candy-colored stucco dilapidation of the residence motels and junk shops clustered a few streets away from Disney World, the second a trip into the ranches and rodeo arenas of South Dakota’s High Plains. 

The mood of The Florida Project varies from wide-eyed delight to jittery shrewdness to weary responsibility, depending on which character we’re following. The principals are an untamed 6-year-old motel inmate (the superb Brooklynn Prince), who is always up for mischief and adventure; the girl’s scuffling single mother (Bria Vinaite), whose elaborate tattoos and hair of a color not seen in nature advertise the fun-loving, dirty-minded defiance of one of the undeserving poor; and the motel’s put-upon manager (Willem Dafoe, living his role without a moment’s self-regard), whose kindness somehow keeps overcoming his disgust. I wish Baker had thought of an ending for The Florida Project; having brought his characters to the point where they have no solutions, he finds none of his own, other than to force the naturally occurring ironies of his setting into a final grand statement. But that’s a two-minute lapse, after nearly two hours of grit, outrage, and beauty.

As for The Rider, its naturally occurring mood is one of elegiac grandeur. Brady Jandreau leads the nonprofessional cast as a young rodeo cowboy who can no longer compete because of the crack he’s put in his skull. Taking himself down a painful notch, he patches together a still-dangerous living by training other men’s horses. The film’s pace is measured; the dialogue, terse; the story, minimal. But everything Zhao puts on the screen feels alive and true, especially the scenes of Jandreau handling horses. Impossible to script or fully plan, these long moments are like gusts of South Dakota weather made as permanent as sculpture.

I suppose there’s also a documentary element, or at least an autobiographical one, in Lady Bird, the second feature written and directed by Greta Gerwig, and the first she’s done solo. The central character (played by the unfailingly persuasive Saoirse Ronan) mirrors Gerwig’s past by attending a Catholic high school in Sacramento, coming of age around the time of the second Iraq War, and having a theatrical streak, which in her case is rarely channeled into formal performance. The creative energy goes more often into fighting with her sternly sympathetic mother (Laurie Metcalf), agitating to go east for college, and getting into unfortunate misunderstandings with boys. These are normal incidents for a standard coming-of-age picture, but Gerwig and Ronan redeem them by making their heroine as finely tuned as an antenna, always quivering with signals about the new selves she might momentarily try on.

A similar depth of personal feeling, though perhaps less self-amused, runs through The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), by one of Gerwig’s frequent collaborators, Noah Baumbach. The movie crackles with an emotional energy, and cackles with a rueful laughter, that have been missing from his recent films, but which return in full force now that Baumbach has again taken up his theme of children being twisted into odd shapes by a parent’s monstrous self-regard. Dustin Hoffman holds forth as the bumbling, embittered old sculptor who has done the twisting; Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Elizabeth Marvel are the grown children, still seething and suffocating hilariously. Under Baumbach’s direction, their comic timing is faultless—though none can beat Emma Thompson in the role of the sculptor’s current wife, who seems to have kept herself preserved in alcohol since 1974.

nd now, let’s get to the festival’s big-ticket items.

“Filmmaking magic” would be weak praise for the art that Todd Haynes brings to Wonderstruck, his adaptation of the illustrated novel by Brian Selznick. So why, at the end, did I feel the enchantment had melted into air, leaving nothing behind? I wanted to love this movie about young people lost and found in Manhattan in two different eras; I wanted to explore it, just like the more modern of its children pores over a mysterious book he’s found. But, it turns out, there’s nothing to discover: The film’s system of motifs and correspondences is so airtight—as sometimes happens with Haynes—that, despite the best efforts of Julianne Moore (a wonder in herself), I ultimately felt all the satisfaction of having watched somebody else solve a crossword puzzle.

Now, with Arnaud Desplechin, it’s more like having a feverishly brilliant desperado (usually played by Mathieu Amalric) thrust a half-finished crossword into your hands while raving that you must complete it for him, immediately, while he cooks you a wine-soaked dinner, mutters something about James Joyce, and sings the theme from Marnie, which he hopes won’t distract you. Ismael’s Ghosts, shown in New York in a cut that was 20 minutes longer than at the Cannes premiere, casts Amalric as an unhinged writer-director trying to make a film, or get out of making one, about a brother who died or vanished (or did he?), while at the same time struggling with the memory of a wife who died or vanished (also doubtful). Everything in the movie (Desplechin’s, I mean, not Amalric’s) springs at you with the force of discovery. There isn’t a predictable turn of events, a dull choice of image, or a settled opinion anywhere in the film, which needs the extra 20 minutes to make room for whatever is currently on Desplechin’s mind: astrophysics, Lacanian psychology, Renaissance perspective, the diplomatic corps. With Charlotte Gainsbourg and Marion Cotillard as Amalric’s Vertigo twins.

In Zama, Lucrecia Martel creates a mood that is equally feverish—as is only natural, since the setting is cholera-infested 18th-century South America—but also more stately, given that the title character (Daniel Giménez Cacho) serves as a magistrate in a godforsaken colonial outpost where the proud Spaniards insist on wearing wigs in the 100-degree heat. Based on a novel by Antonio di Benedetto, Zama becomes increasingly elliptical and fantastic as the magistrate maneuvers to be posted to Spain, only to slip further and further away from his goal: out of the governor’s office and away from the flirtations and bribes of polite society, into a native village, and then out to the jungle on a futile expedition. I might call the film a delirium, but Martel is too precise for that, and too harshly satirical. You might rather think of this work as a landscape film, whose softly colored, picturesque surface is disturbed here and there by grubby fools.

The satire in Ruben Östlund’s Cannes winner, The Square, is more up-to-the-minute and maybe also more discomfiting, since it takes aim at well-meaning people of good conscience and a little money, like the NYFF audience. Claes Bang stars as the chief curator at a contemporary-art museum in Stockholm, where he starts out sleek and smooth but becomes progressively ruffled due to the bungled marketing of a social-sculpture installation, his own ill-advised venture into street philanthropy, and the provocations of an American journalist (Elisabeth Moss) who seems gosh-darn innocent at first, but might be an imp dispatched by the forces of chaos. Östlund’s craft is immaculate, his range ambitious, his shifts of tone breathtaking. It’s also clear that he knows museums from the inside and can be killingly funny about them. My only reservation is that The Square is a pre-Trump project released in the midst of the Trump era, when it’s become convenient for establishment conservatives (and justifiably inflamed leftists) to blame our situation on the bad faith of fancy-pants liberals. Sure, there’s bad faith, but whatever the curator’s faults, I can think of worse sinners.

or that reason, perhaps, I felt that the NYFF films that best captured my mood were neither the scathing satires nor this year’s social-problem epics, Mudbound and BPM. (Both were rapturously received, by the way—but talk about exemplary characters living through representative incidents…) Maybe our present crisis doesn’t always demand the most radical or outspoken artistic response; maybe a more relenting cinema can provide room to think, and imagine. The pictures that have especially stayed with me (though I don’t claim they were the festival’s best) are Hong Sang-soo’s On the Beach at Night Alone and The Day After, and Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope.

As sly and quizzical as ever, Hong has made a pair of films starring Kim Min-hee as a sharp-witted young woman embroiled with a more powerful, married older man. In On the Beach, the affair is in the past and the man is a filmmaker (echoing Kim’s actual relationship with Hong, which became tabloid fodder in Korea); in The Day After, the man is a book publisher and the affair will perhaps happen in the future, if the bum gets his way. Both films honor a woman’s wrath, exasperation, incredulity, and contempt at male entitlement, while acknowledging that men are sometimes fueled in their misbehavior by a stupid wistfulness (and, of course, strong drink). Screening at the festival in the midst of l’affaire Weinstein, these humane, clear-eyed, heartbroken comedies seemed more than a delight: They came as a relief, and a welcome act of conscience.

But they offered no solution. That remained for Kaurismäki to do in The Other Side of Hope, his fable of a war refugee from Syria finding help and comfort among people in Helsinki who don’t much care what the authorities think. With a generosity worth emulating, Kaurismäki gives his refugee (Sherwan Haji) key lighting worthy of a 1940s movie star, live performances of the best Finnish rockabilly (played by musicians who look like Frank Zappa forgot them in a parking lot sometime in the ’80s), and a conspiracy of newfound friends who are unfailingly loyal, despite running the city’s worst harborside restaurant.

It’s all very silly, in the face of the Syrian horrors and European brutalities that Kaurismäki takes pains to acknowledge. To these, he can counterpose only kindness, community, humor, and art. These forces are hardly enough to end an international crisis. But I believe they can save a life, sometimes—and when found on the screen, they make a film festival count for more than a tally of masterpieces.

he New York Film Festival began this year on a note of muted jubilation, like a fanfare of sighs. Such was the response to the world premiere of Last Flag Flying by Richard Linklater, a favorite of the festival’s organizers and audiences for many years, who stood for the first time in the coveted but perilous spot reserved for the director of the opening feature. Coveted, because the selection of Last Flag Flying elevated the once-raffish author of Slacker to the company of Buñuel, Varda, Fassbinder, and Kurosawa. Perilous, because the first night—which must serve both artistic and fundraising agendas—has also sometimes gone to the likes of Woody Allen’s Celebrity, the picture that proved that no movie is too bad to open the New York Film Festival.

No one I spoke with thought Last Flag Flying fell to anything like the wretchedness of Celebrity, or even the cheesy respectability of other first-night classics like Chariots of Fire and The Queen. But although people went away with their love for Linklater undiminished, they hadn’t cheered for him as they’d wanted: as the vindicated practitioner of an independent American cinema that can be at once experimental, humanistic, and accessible. The word “disappointment” never came up, at least within my earshot, but I heard many instances of an extended, open-ended “Well…”

Some of those drawling shrugs came from me. But after a little reflection, I’ve begun to think that Linklater has his core audience right where he wants us: more discomfited than joyful, more thoughtful than triumphant. He has risked taking on subjects that are new for him: the aftermath of war and the fortunes of American men a crucial half-generation older than his usual characters. The conventional narrative approach he’s applied to this material poses no difficulties for an audience. And yet, because of his subtlety and ambivalence, Linklater gives no comfort to the viewers of Last Flag Flying, no possibility of understanding the story in terms of political points scored. The only agenda—should you accept it—is to mourn.

A road movie of the lurching variety, which chugs fitfully through military towns from Norfolk, Virginia, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Last Flag Flying plays out in places built to cramped and thrifty specifications—gloomy bars and flimsy motel rooms, storefronts banged together with particle board, Amtrak cars that have smelled dusty since their first run—with the cement-floored cavern of an Air Force hangar as the sole, chilling instance of any ambition toward grandeur. Ubiquitous Christmas trees neither cheer these spaces nor persuade you to ignore the bad weather, which is predominantly a drenching downpour. The time is December 2003, when, as the characters’ journey begins, American troops are about to capture Saddam Hussein. For some young soldiers in Iraq, though, the present-day war is already over; while for the middle-aged veterans who are the focus of Last Flag Flying, their war of more than 30 years ago seems never to have ended.

Doc is the one who sets off the plot and provides its disconcertingly vague center. Played by Steve Carell, who has been outfitted with a droopy mustache, health-plan eyeglasses, and a manila envelope loosely filled with cash, this meek, nondescript fellow shows up one wet night at a tavern located unpromisingly beneath a highway in Norfolk, where, despite being one of only two customers, he has to prompt the bartender to look at him. Recognition dawns at last on the saloon keeper, Sal, a bearded, booming Marine Corps veteran played by Bryan Cranston with the kind of wild-man, insult-comic energy that attracts adolescents and makes mature people head for the door. He sees that Doc is a buddy from Vietnam, a Navy man who, despite his evident mildness, ended his tour with two years in the brig.

Sal may have forgotten Doc’s face, but Doc remembers Sal’s recklessness and counts on it the next day, persuading him to drive to an undisclosed location where he’ll find a treat. The destination, to Sal’s initial dismay, is a Baptist church. The surprise, to his delight, is the man in the pulpit, Richard Mueller, a third buddy from Vietnam. Once known as the furiously uncontainable Mauler, Mueller (in the form of a portly, white-goateed Laurence Fishburne) has become a gravely decorous minister of the Gospel.

Doc is counting on him, too. As he explains over dinner at Mueller’s house—meekly, haltingly, as if he needed to apologize for his entire life, not just his mysterious two years in the brig—Doc lost his wife to cancer earlier in the year and now has learned that he’s lost his only child as well, who was barely into his 20s and serving with the Marines in Iraq. Doc has no one else. He wants Sal and Mueller to help him bury his son.

wo wars; two generations; one overwhelming sense of futility and guilt. As the buddies set out for a funeral that will take them much farther than expected, the news from Baghdad gives them ample opportunity to complain about how young men are repeatedly sent far away to fight people who pose no threat to the United States, and how the military and the government (to these men, it’s the same thing) repeatedly lie about the conduct of these wars. This sort of speechifying isn’t Linklater at his best; but he’s used argumentative political dialogue before (in Fast Food Nation and even A Scanner Darkly), and with the help of screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan, he’s put the lines credibly enough into his characters’ mouths. I’ve heard such disillusioned pronouncements from Vietnam veterans, and I can believe that Sal and Mueller would make them like this, letting their reawakened memories spur them on but at the same time trying to pull back a little, since Doc shouldn’t be told too often that his son died in vain.

What I don’t believe is the canned white-versus-black needling between Sal and Mueller (it just doesn’t go down like that) or, even worse, the two men’s almost diagrammatic struggle for Doc’s soul. Mueller, holding fast to his redeemed life by trying to impart a little faith to Doc, keeps urging him to take comfort in prayer and the expectation of heaven. Sal, who is proudly unredeemed, mocks every such appeal with obscene humor, on the principle that only the most base reality is true, and that truth must be faced.

For a while, the sheer size of the performances masks the shabbiness of the conceit. It’s hard to resist the gale force of Cranston’s shucking, blustering, joking, and railing, or the combination of deep calm and explosive potential in Fishburne (who demonstrates, when pushed, that this wayside pastor might be a dozen times more dangerous than Sal); and even Carell, quietly resourceful as ever, somehow manages to go big with Doc’s smallness. It doesn’t take long, though, for the performances themselves to expose the phoniness of the conflict that’s been imposed. The audience knows that Sal has the worse argument, because his version of truth-telling is hurtful; but he’s got the funnier dialogue and the more consistently energetic role, and so he keeps winning an unequal contest.

Until he doesn’t—at which point, Last Flag Flying seems to take back everything it’s said about warfare across the generations.

he people I spoke with on opening night seem to have missed Linklater’s usual fluidity in Last Flag Flying—that feeling of traveling through the unfolding moment, which is such a deep pleasure in the Before trilogy and such a miracle in Boyhood—and they regretted that Sal and Mueller were simplified almost to the point of caricature. (You can find characters with more specificity and depth in Everybody Wants Some!!) But what really drained people’s enthusiasm was the impression of a thematic reversal toward the end of the film: the sense that, after the talk about warfare as lies and futility, after the dramatization of how the emotional wounds fester for decades, Linklater at the last moment had rescued military virtue, even affirmed it.

This was the issue I had to rethink, starting with a recognition of the terrible poverty of the characters. By that, I don’t mean they’re impecunious, though I doubt that the wealthiest of them earns more than $35,000 a year. The problem is that—with the exception of Mueller, who has his wife, church community, and Jesus—these people have been stripped of emotional ties. Doc has lost everyone. Sal never had anybody. (He prefers to pass out in his bar rather than sleep at home, and spends his nights haranguing a sole booze-addled customer.) The young lance corporal who’s been detailed to accompany them (J. Quinton Johnson) admits upon questioning that he was an orphan of the Oakland streets who enlisted in the Marines for lack of anywhere else to turn. (Doc’s son was his best friend—and now he’s gone.) Most heartbreaking of all is a poor, elderly widow (Cicely Tyson), whom the buddies visit in her tiny house in Boston. She pretends to be cheerful, living with nothing but the occasional phone call from her grandchildren and memories of the son who was killed in Vietnam. Under Sal’s influence, the buddies intend to tell her a harsh truth about that death—but then, at a turning point signaled by a close-up of Sal, they choose to protect this defenseless woman by lying instead.

While I was watching Last Flag Flying, I didn’t appreciate how thoroughly the lies filter into the final scenes; nor did I notice that this very talkative movie had suddenly gone mum at the end, as the characters tacitly conspire to establish and maintain an illusion. I just knew the effect was heartbreaking. But having recognized the void that opens in the film as the only alternative to the lie, I don’t think that Linklater has come anywhere close to going soft on militarism and its myths. If anything, he’s been hard: on right-thinking people like me, who know exactly what we believe about the Vietnam and Iraq wars and their apologists, and on himself, a man who was 8 years old at the time of the Tet Offensive and, to date, hasn’t made a film about anyone—military or civilian, American or Vietnamese—who was at mortal risk then. Linklater apparently hasn’t wanted to think about those people. In my determination to stay clear about the issues, I hadn’t thought about them, either—not enough, anyway.

But here they are, lingering on, sustained by one another and a lie that’s necessary to them, not official. This is, in literal terms, a film about the impossibility of staring truth in the face when the face has been blown off. There’s no reason to cheer about such bitterness—but a fanfare of sighs seems appropriate.

If you think of great libraries as archives of the human condition, maintained to preserve everything we’ve thought and done, then you’d figure Frederick Wiseman would eventually make a film about the New York Public Library. He, too, carries the totalizing virus.

Over the course of a 50-year career, Wiseman has sought to capture the living essence of an entire world’s worth of institutions—from madhouses and wards for the terminally ill to great theater companies, universities, and ballet schools; from welfare offices, zoos, and meatpacking plants to nuclear-weapons training facilities, art museums, state legislatures, and Central Park. At his most optimistic, he turns his attention to towns or neighborhoods where he sees multiple forces interacting for the common good: in Belfast, Maine, or the Jackson Heights section of Queens, New York. At his most scathing—in Public Housing, for example—the institutions he studies seem almost deliberately constructed to make people fall apart.

Look at libraries differently, though—as providers of services to the urban masses—and it will seem just as inevitable that Wiseman would get around to them. He, too, is an agent of social change. The title of “muckraker” is, of course, too simple for him, despite the scandal of his first films: Titicut Follies (1967), which the State of Massachusetts tried to ban from public view, and High School (1968), which, in the words of one reviewer, showed the systematic conversion of “warm, breathing teenagers” into “forty-year-old mental eunuchs.”

Still, just as an activist streak runs through the branches of the New York Public Library, so too does it animate all but Wiseman’s most contemplative works. He is, famously, an observational filmmaker, who refuses to conduct interviews, add explanatory texts or voice-overs to the image, layer extraneous music onto his scenes, or even provide a caption to tell you who’s talking. You get nothing except what you would have seen and heard if you’d been present with him when the action was happening. And yet, through his choice of what material to show and how to sequence it, he often constructs implicit arguments that address not so much the arrogance of power as its mindless, grinding indifference. These implied polemics are all the more persuasive for seeming to emerge from the evidence before you.

In his 42nd film, Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, which receives its theatrical premiere in September at Film Forum in New York, Wiseman looks at his subject from both his Olympian and activist perspectives, and with attention to both major aspects of the NYPL’s mission: a center for scholarship and a resource for the city’s poor, ill-schooled, and homeless. Following an organizing scheme he’s used before, Wiseman bounces back and forth in his scenes between the marble palace on Fifth Avenue and a scattering of humble branch libraries in the Bronx and Harlem; public events and back-of-the-house labor; executives planning the system’s future and ordinary people using what the NYPL offers.

Pay attention to context and do a little Internet research, and you can find out that the uncaptioned decision makers overheard in their deliberations are NYPL president Tony Marx, chief library officer Mary Lee Kennedy (who has moved on since the film was shot), chief operating officer Iris Weinshall, and vice president for government and community affairs George Mihaltses. I identify them here to make the point that Wiseman had access to serious people talking about critical issues. He also had access to many anonymous members of the rank and file to whom these leaders are responsible, including toddlers singing “Old MacDonald” at story time, kids doing homework and building robots after school, a researcher combing through Timothy Leary’s correspondence in the manuscript room, career-seekers at a jobs fair, and an elderly woman in Chinatown learning to use a computer.

Negotiating between these two groups, and sparking the movie to emotional life, are the heroes of Ex Libris: librarians. Some of them come before you as marvels of patience and dry humor. A reference librarian on the phone desk calmly informs a caller that unicorns are actually imaginary; an after-school-program librarian in the Bronx advises a kid, “If you’re holding onto the robot to make it stop moving, then that means you need to change something on the computer.” Others are bearers of infectious enthusiasm. They boast to visiting students that in the picture collection, you can look up subjects such as “dogs in action”; they proudly show off an Albrecht Dürer print of a rhinoceros, while explaining that in the early 16th century, this treasured item was a kind of newspaper. Most crucially for the tone of Ex Libris, the librarians offer care and warmth, whether they’re doling out picture books to the schoolkids who squirm around them or distributing Wi-Fi boxes, with a sincere “Congratulations,” to a line of West Harlem residents who have qualified for the free rental.

I pause to note that Wiseman could have put other librarians on the screen had he wanted to—the ones, for example, who have kept me waiting 40 minutes for a book that turned out to have gone missing, and then tossed back the call slip as if they were flipping the bird. But they wouldn’t have suited the theme he has in mind for Ex Libris.

ore a collage artist than an investigative reporter, more a phenomenologist than a historian, Wiseman has given a much different treatment of the NYPL than you would find, say, in Scott Sherman’s book Patience and Fortitude (written in part for The Nation, and published in 2015 just before Ex Libris went into production). Wiseman is interested in librarians as wonderful people—as comfortable making an impromptu translation from Middle English (while denying that they’re good at it) as they are teaching a blind person to read Braille, or directing a woman to copies of steamship manifests so she can trace her family’s arrival in America. He has edited Ex Libris to suggest two broad questions about these multitalented public servants: How does the NYPL keep the librarians working? And what is the broader meaning of what they do?

The answer to the first question comes in the scenes of library president Marx and his executive crew and can be summed up in one word: money. Ex Libris is in some ways an essay on fund-raising, or (to be more precise) the interplay between public allocations and private philanthropy. The first time you see Marx, he’s giving a talk on this subject to library supporters, using the example of the NYPL’s digital-access initiative to illustrate how donations pouring in from one source can uncork funds from the other. The last time you see him—some three hours later in the film’s running time—he’s in his conference room, planning how to keep the money flowing toward the NYPL in the city government’s next budget. The challenge, he says, is to match the language of solicitations to the NYPL’s goals. The big, simple message for donors must somehow reflect the priorities the library has set for meeting the public’s needs.

You hear a lot in the conference room about those needs in their immediate and practical form. The agenda includes providing a reasonable degree of daytime shelter for people who live on the streets (“The library is a place where we don’t keep our distance from the homeless,” Marx tells his colleagues), making up for deferred maintenance in the branches, and balancing the money spent on books that the general public wants today with the cost of books that will be useful in the future. But the larger meaning of the institution’s role emerges elsewhere: in scenes of the library’s public programs of interviews, lectures, and discussions. Here again Wiseman had a wide choice of moments to include. He selected those that suggest the most radical agenda.

Ex Libris begins with a long excerpt from a book talk with the scientist and secularist Richard Dawkins. (All excerpts from the public programs are long. Wiseman, as usual, is in no hurry in this film; he believes ideas need time to develop.) Calling for nonreligious people to make themselves heard, Dawkins insists that some ideas are simply not true—the theories of young-earth believers, for example—and must be labeled as such. As for the supposed absence of awe and wonder from atheists’ lives, he says that nothing could be more moving than to contemplate the reality of a living cell, in all its stupefying complexity.

And so, by borrowing Dawkins’s words, Wiseman suggests the terms that will describe the NYPL through the rest of the movie. The institution is thrilling in its complexity and resolute in its service to the truth. The complexity of the library’s operations is, of course, seen everywhere in Ex Libris. But when it comes to the issue of propagating the truth, Wiseman has decided to focus on one fact among all the others that the library addresses: the continuing legacy of slavery.

By the time Ex Libris is over, you’ve heard about opposition to the slave trade by 17th-century Muslim clerics in Africa and the defense of slavery by writers in the antebellum South. You’ve listened to Ta-Nehisi Coates talk about his family’s reverence for Malcolm X, and have sat in on a discussion held in a tiny branch library between Khalil Gibran Muhammad (at the time director of the NYPL’s Schomburg Center, and a current member of The Nation’s editorial board) and people outraged over McGraw-Hill’s whitewashing of slavery in recent textbooks. When you see a performing-arts workshop on sign-language interpretation for the deaf, the text being used for illustration is the Declaration of Independence. When you peek into a meeting of the board of trustees, Kwame Anthony Appiah is giving a presentation about the works of Phillis Wheatley.

For Wiseman, this is where the scholarly and social missions of the library intersect: in speaking the truth about slavery and its aftermath, while providing services in many neighborhoods where people still bear the marks of slavery’s more obvious burdens. He gives a very fine-grained picture of the library in this dual role, neither ignoring the day-to-day operations of the NYPL system nor neglecting the beauty and delight of its collections and magnificent main building. There is so much beauty and delight in Ex Libris, in fact, and so much vivid personality in all the people, that a lackadaisical viewer could be excused for summing up the film as a loving tribute. So it is, I suppose. But even at age 87, there is nothing lackadaisical about Wiseman. The sly old wizard constructs a top hat right before your eyes—and then, while you’re admiring its sheen, pulls out a 500-year-old rabbit.

heo Anthony was born in 1989, about 60 years after Frederick Wiseman came into the world, and until recently had made only a few short documentaries. You wouldn’t want to curse him with high expectations for his first feature-length documentary, especially when he’s given it the sure-to-please title Rat Film. But the deliberately strange essay he’s composed—on what you might call the natural history of racism—is so inventive and, appropriately, so biting that he’ll have to get used to being praised.

Unlike Wiseman, Anthony revels in voice-overs, soundtrack music, informative text overlays, and on-camera interviews, especially when they come at you from unexpected angles. Before you can get your bearings in Rat Film, a voice has recited a series of mock-academic titles (“Presentation of a Video Game,” “Explanation of an Experiment”); the exhaust-pipe flames of a drag racer have erupted in slow motion; a string quartet has played something inappropriately meditative; and the head of a snake has briefly ventured across a corner of the screen. Meanwhile, the ostensible subject of this documentary—rats in Baltimore—has not yet come into focus. Fuzzy video, shot in an alley at night, looks down at a rat trapped in a garbage can. The average Norway rat, the mock-academic voice informs you, can jump 32 inches, whereas the regulation height of a Baltimore garbage can is 34. (Is this true? I don’t know.) At last the picture sharpens, and you see the rat clearly, its eyes shining furiously in the dark.

Having unbalanced you, Anthony proceeds to go backward in time and simultaneously outward into Baltimore’s neighborhoods. Backward: to a history of city ordinances, housing covenants, and bank-loan policies that confined African Americans to wretched slums; to the declaration, during World War II, of a war on rats, conducted with poison in these same slums; and to the writings of a prominent Johns Hopkins scientist who didn’t draw much of a distinction between the rats and the slum dwellers. Outward: to the backyards and alleyways today where some Baltimore residents hunt rats for sport (with tools including blowguns and a rod-and-reel), and where a chatty, philosophical pest-control officer makes his rounds. Baltimore has never had a rat problem, he declares; it has always been a people problem. He likes rats—they put food on his table.

Rat Film is a movie for people who feel that the world we’ve made is so unbelievably outrageous that it can best be conveyed in a scramble. Viewers who demand a point-by-point exposition will not be happy. The rest of us can hang on for the ride.

o much has been written by now about Dunkirk that I hesitate to add my own bit. Better to jump to a film that’s more of the moment, such as Good Time, by Benny and Josh Safdie. But in case my ideas about the one should somehow apply to the other, I’ll pause to think about Dunkirk’s Christopher Nolan, the Dr. Feelbad of blockbuster directors.

“Doctor,” because he’s forever displaying a quasi-scientific expertise in warping cinematic space-time. “Feelbad,” because he never lets a hero sail into the higher dimensions without carrying a ballast of guilt. Four interlocking levels of dreamland in Inception weren’t enough to keep Leonardo DiCaprio from being pulled down toward the memory of his dead wife. The vortex of a black hole in Interstellar didn’t tug at Matthew McConaughey as strongly as his grief at having abandoned his daughter. As for poor Christian Bale, we’ve all seen how Nolan made him batty.

Dunkirk is Nolan’s first movie based on real events, but the emotional ground he gives his characters hasn’t changed. His British soldiers are surrounded by Nazi forces on the beach while engulfed within by their sense of failure. Maybe they’ll be rescued from the first trap, if they’re lucky enough to dodge the Luftwaffe dive-bombers, but they can’t escape the second. Survival will mean living in the humiliation of defeat; and so they’re no better than they should be, behaving as if shame is already lost.

Anglo-American World War II movies don’t always portray the Allied combat troops as brave and morally clean (have you watched The Big Red One recently?), but Dunkirk is extraordinary for depicting its soldiers, almost without exception, as scheming, cowardly, and mutually vicious. The best of them, plucked out of a wreck in the middle of the Channel, turns out to be madly violent; the worst is ready to murder one of his fellows to buy another five minutes of oxygen for himself. I’m speaking only of the enlisted men. The officers, when on shore, remain as stoic as Kenneth Branagh, who mostly stares into the distance chewing the inside of his lips, and in the air are as gallant as Tom Hardy, who may run out of fuel but not the resolve to shoot down one more Jerry. I suppose superior breeding has freed the officers from the conviction of worthlessness that afflicts common soldiers and even the civilians who set out to the rescue in their little boats. The teenager who insists on sailing with Mark Rylance (the very picture of English middle-class decency, going to war in his tie and sweater vest) wants to help evacuate the troops because he feels he’s never done well at anything. Scarcely into puberty, he’s already haunted by failure.

In making this observation about Nolan’s liking for ostentatious gloom, I don’t pretend to dismiss the undeniable grandeur of Dunkirk, or to diminish the cheers that the movie elicits when its soundtrack at last cues up the Elgar. I’m curious, though, how this very astute filmmaker guessed that his audience would want Dunkirk’s happy ending to have the character of a redemption, almost of grace, freely given to sinful characters.

You might say that Nolan is just doing what’s worked for him before, and has made him Steven Spielberg’s successor as a director of blockbusters perceived to be serious. With Dunkirk, he’s also followed Spielberg’s example by giving world-historical authority to his characteristic manner. But clearly more is at play here than one man’s sensibility and wiles. Although the moviegoing public, which used to be almost universal, now amounts to a large niche market, even for the likes of the Dark Knight series, Nolan evidently has tapped into a general yearning in the culture, which finds satisfaction in elaborately crafted pictures full of guilty brooding.

What might a Venn diagram show about the intersection of Nolan’s fans with another significant niche audience—the most commonly encountered followers of Donald J. Trump (torch-carrying neo-Nazis excepted for the moment)? So far as I can tell, they feel sinned against rather than sinful and are searching not for grace but victory, so you might imagine their mathematical set would scarcely overlap with Nolan’s. And yet, with Dunkirk playing on more than 4,000 screens in the United States and taking in more than $154 million so far, there must be a few Trump voters in the audience. When I ask myself what they receive for their money, I think of them going to Dunkirk for a dose of the martial valor they crave (in this case, a pure white valor) and getting, as a bonus, a release from their widely reported resentment.

They, too, claim to feel isolated and abandoned, and, also like the soldiers at Dunkirk, they have an enemy to hate: the cheating, oppressive liberal elite. But maybe, in the dead of night, when the sleepless mind tallies bills past due and opportunities unseized, the Trumpists’ self-righteousness falters—at which point failure might settle on them, as on the trapped soldiers, with the weight of guilt. If so, I can imagine how the conclusion of Dunkirk would do something much less abstract for these viewers than provide, say, an interesting redefinition of heroism. It would give them a vicarious solace they can scarcely admit they need.

As for the service that Dunkirk might perform for non-Trumpists, multiple articles in The New York Times tell me everything I need to know. The theme of self-blame never enters the discussion. The pieces focus instead on technique (how the plan of the film was devised, the scenes directed, the music composed), commerce (how the film has triumphed at the box office), and morality (how the good guys hold on and prevail, in an abiding contest with evil). These emphases suggest to me that the authors identify with Nolan—the fortune-making, craft-mastering winner—far more than with his suffering characters. The admiration expressed for the darkness of his vision comes off in this context as mostly a sign of approval for his having a conscience—as do all Times readers, of course.

No wonder, then, that Dunkirk has been a hit, if Nolan has figured out how to appeal in such different ways to different groups of people. The praise I’ve read from the Times writers and other mainstream cinephiles makes good sense to me; but I think I prefer the response I’ve intuited among Trump’s followers. If I’ve read them correctly, it goes deeper; it sweats out the underlying motivations in the film with more earnestness than Nolan himself may have brought to them.

Don’t get me wrong—I despise Trump, and I’m none too happy with the voters who put him in office. But sometimes wrongheaded people discover more worth in a picture than the right-thinkers do.

hat said, nobody of any political persuasion will find a whiff of redemption in Benny and Josh Safdie’s acidly titled Good Time.

The sole available point-of-view character is reprehensible beyond even the lowest schemer in Dunkirk. The stakes are lower, too—ultimately life-or-death, but needlessly, inexcusably so, and on a level that’s anecdotal rather than world-historical. Abandon the comparison with Nolan and look instead to the far more appropriate example of Martin Scorsese, and Good Time will still seem brutish to the point of futility. Like Mean Streets, it’s a tale of petty crime and bleak family relations in the least picturesque neighborhoods of contemporary New York—but with neither the portrayal of a deeply lived subculture nor the invitation to empathize with a conflicted, striving character. It’s mean, all right—also myopic, pitiless, and deliberately ugly, and it leaves you with no moral. I like it a lot.

Set for the most part in Queens—an obstacle course of pizza parlors, bail bondsmen’s offices, dingy hospitals, and dingier side streets crowded with suffocating houses—Good Time unfolds mostly over a single evening and night, in the aftermath of a bungled bank robbery. Connie (Robert Pattinson) has half-flattered, half-bullied his adoring, mentally challenged brother Nick (Benny Safdie) into joining him in the stickup, which fairly crackles with tension, and also with the sound of your hair turning white at Connie’s incompetence. This mastermind apparently hasn’t watched any bank-heist movies and so doesn’t know it’s a mistake to let the teller fill your sack with unexamined objects from a back room. Also, don’t call an Uber for your getaway car. You’ll just be exasperated when the driver circles the block and shows up late.

The result: Most of the cash is lost, Nick is captured (after being injured), and Connie finds himself scuffling for bail money for his brother, rather than running out of state with a nest egg. The rest amounts to the story of a long improvisation, in which the sly and sometimes violent Connie lies, wheedles, scams, and bludgeons his way from very bad to much worse. Though heartless, he tries to extract money from a girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) by pretending to be hurt by her lack of sympathy for his brother. Though utterly self-centered, he gets his hands on a car by faking a warm interest (including sexual) in a bored teenage girl (Taliah Webster). The closest Connie comes to being forthright is when he hectors a hapless small-time criminal encountered along the way (Buddy Duress), in a nasty echo of the way he dominates Nick. At least with his brother, there’s a hint of caring and responsibility. With the schnook, Connie is nothing but vehement in asserting the superiority of his brains and entrepreneurial spirit, which have served him so well during the long night.

The Safdies are smart filmmakers—so much so that they and co-screenwriter Ronald Bronstein have twisted the plot to make synopsis unthinkable—but, for the most part, they hide their art. They make no bravura gestures, and, except for one or two panoramic establishing shots, they also reject the picturesque, keeping cinematographer Sean Price Williams’s camera on top of the characters and tied to the action. The Safdies want gut-deep immediacy from the actors and complete absorption from the audience. The only time they remind you that you’re watching a movie is when they wash a monochromatic light across the shot; and even then the color (usually acrid or bilious) registers more as an emotion than a design choice. Their method, in short, suits their purpose. The better to expose Connie’s cleverness as self-defeating vanity, they avoid doing anything merely clever of their own.

This means that the movie lives or dies with Robert Pattinson’s performance as Connie, the con man who fools no one for very long, except his brother. A former tween-and-teen heartthrob who in recent years has fled as far from conventional romantic leads as has his Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart, Pattinson moves through Good Time in a kind of slip-swagger, teetering in perfect balance on the edge of menace and buffoonery. His Connie would be beautiful if he weren’t so revolting, frightening if he weren’t so manifestly feeble. I believed every second of Pattinson’s performance as much as I believed in the bathroom-sink bleach job that Connie gives himself as a disguise. His head glares with a falseness that can’t be faked.

And that, more than any disparity of scale and budget, is what separates the Safdies from Christopher Nolan. They don’t use characters to trouble your conscience and then relieve it, or to bind you to some awful difficulty and then let you loose. The Safdies leave you free from the start—to judge Connie or thrill to him, recoil or be allured, hate or mock.

The one thing you can’t do is look away.

s a child in India’s Gujarat state, Rahul Jain played in a textile mill that his family had the good fortune to own. As a young man studying at the California Institute of the Arts, he returned to India to explore another of these throbbing, fuming, cavernous factories and shoot a documentary perhaps only he could have made: Machines.

An exceptional first feature, combining impeccably assured image-making, deep empathy, and a muckraking spirit, Machines takes you on an extended tour through the fluorescent-and-concrete maze of the factory and introduces you to the routine of the workers who were willing to speak candidly with Jain. Many are migrants, who traveled hundreds of miles from other states, after borrowing money from local lenders, to work 12-hour shifts, sometimes back-to-back. The average daily pay—the equivalent of perhaps $3—is just enough for cheap food and chewing tobacco to keep the boys and men working around the clock, often without even a pittance left over to send to their families. Union organizers step forward from time to time but then have a tendency to die.

Talk about being trapped with no expectation of rescue. Do these workers feel exploited? One of the older men, sitting on the floor, denies it. No one made him come to the factory, he tells Jain, perhaps a little sharply; he’s done this to himself. But later in the film, workers crowded into a courtyard confront Jain with more heat, predicting that he’ll feel bad for them, take their pictures, and then go away. What, they’d like to know, will he actually do for them?

Having watched Machines, I’m sure he’ll think of something. Jain has already opened the lives of these workers to untold audiences, in a work of formal integrity and sometimes surprising beauty. I want to see what other future these proud, strong, wretched people might have, and I want to see whatever film Jain makes next.

Can someone who is not African-American—a so-called white woman, for instance—legitimately create artwork about the 1967 Detroit riot? My answer is an emphatic yes; my evidence, the last 30 pages or so of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel them. Of course, them isn’t really “about” the days of upheaval, except in the sense that a salmon’s life is ultimately about swimming upstream to the spawning ground. The only way you could have kept that book from going for the guns and flames was by clubbing it on the head; and even then it would have struggled on, snuffling for its sweet spot.

So my main question about Detroit—directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by Mark Boal—isn’t whether it commits the purported crime of cultural appropriation. The very first thing the filmmakers do, in fact, is ward off that charge by nodding toward a prominent African-American source. Detroit begins with a brief history of black life in the North, illustrated with animated versions of images from Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. The incorporation of internal movement to Lawrence’s paintings seems a little tasteless to me, on the level of Liberace’s addition of soaring violins to the Moonlight Sonata. Still, the pictures represent the authority the filmmakers want, backing up their forthrightly worded texts about multiple “rebellions” (not “riots”) in northern cities, and lending credibility to their assertion that an eruption in Detroit was inevitable.

After that introduction, most cultural warriors would probably let the movie proceed. But here’s what I want to know: Once Detroit gets going, to what sweet spot does it head?

I can think of three, the first of which is the place where it started.

After a riveting, extended dramatization of the episode that sparked the 12th Street riot—a police raid on an unlicensed bar—followed by rapid vignettes of the next two days of chaos, Detroit settles into its main business: placing you in the midst of the horrific events of July 25–26 at the Algiers Motel, blocks away from the epicenter. The facts of that night remain murky, but this much is clear: On the assumption that a sniper had fired from the motel, a contingent of white Detroit policemen, National Guard soldiers, and state troopers took over a portion of the complex, held everyone under arrest, and conducted a protracted interrogation that included beatings and death threats at gunpoint. By morning, three black teenagers were dead of gunshot wounds, seven black men were seriously bloodied, and the two young white women found on the scene had been stripped naked. In the ensuing series of trials, none of the officers were found guilty of wrongdoing.

What happened, exactly? Detroit gives you a highly credible reconstruction—not that the filmmakers will stop at mere plausibility. They’re content with nothing less than full immersion, playing out the incident at such length that the movie might more accurately have been titled Algiers. By means of excruciating exhaustiveness, they hit the first of their sweet spots: proving to their own satisfaction, and presumably yours, that their opening statement was correct. The white cops in the Algiers were unrelentingly racist and violent, and the black Detroiters devoid of options other than enduring their victimhood, collaborating with the cops, or rebelling.

Bigelow and Boal envision the purity of victimhood in the figures of Larry Reed (Algee Smith) and Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore), members of an aspiring vocal group who are holed up at the Algiers. They’re portrayed as achingly dewy and innocent—especially Larry, who might play at being a ladies’ man but mostly wants to lift his sweet tenor toward heaven. The self-torture of collaboration is represented by Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a security guard who believes the best way to help his people is to align himself with the inescapable white authorities and demonstrate his rectitude to them at all times. Bigelow and Boal make him out to be the type of guy who would iron his boxer shorts. You know from the start that he’ll end up betrayed and disillusioned, just as any experienced moviegoer will understand that Larry and Fred will never get back to the stage of the Fox Theatre.

Standing as representatives of rebellion: nobody. Not one of the black characters at the Algiers Motel appears to have been out on the streets.

Evil is embodied principally in the form of Krauss (an invented name), a self-righteously bloodthirsty white cop portrayed by Will Poulter, whose apple-cheeked face puts you in mind of a demonic Howdy Doody. Cast in part for the arching swoop of his eyebrows, with their hint of devious cruelty, Poulter has been directed to play Krauss with the subtlety of Simon Legree in a road show Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

I’ll have something to say about the problems the movie poses for itself by making Krauss’s viciousness so manifest that other white cops, at all levels, recognize it and are appalled. For the moment, it’s enough to say that the boldfaced and italicized characterizations in Detroit enable the movie to find its sweet spot of political righteousness.

ut do we need a broadly drawn cinematic demonstration of white police villainy and black suffering, in an era when (if you’ve got the stomach for it) you can watch a video of Chicago cops summarily executing Laquan McDonald? Does this proof add anything, intellectually or politically, to the assertions in the movie’s introduction? The answer, clearly, is no—but then, the movie has other sweet spots to reach.

Despite her recent forays with Boal into ostensible realism, in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow is at heart a genre filmmaker, who revels in bigger-than-life situations and the opportunities they present for building suspense and orchestrating violent action. Her talent in this mode is formidable—which is why, I suppose, she has conceived Detroit as a drama of hostage-taking, in which malevolent forces toy with the helpless prey they’ve captured. In effect, she’s returned to the scene that established her career—the roadhouse episode in the 1987 horror movie Near Dark—with Officer Krauss substituted for the leader of the vampire gang.

I don’t object to Bigelow’s use of a real event as the occasion for seeking cinematic thrills and offering them to the audience. It’s what she does; and you can’t reasonably ask her to stop, when she’s able to make you sweat out the night in the claustrophobia of the Algiers Motel without your thinking for a moment that you, at least, could get up and leave. But her instinct for the visceral overflows her chosen subject, making a mess of the themes of Detroit.

For example, is Bigelow against police brutality, or for it? Key scenes of the film are set in an interrogation room in police headquarters, where a red stain on the wall, at about the level of a suspect’s head, leaves no doubt about the routine. When Melvin Dismukes sits in the suspect’s chair, Bigelow has you squirming in fear for him. But when it’s Krauss’s turn, she revs you up to see him get what he’s got coming.

Considering that his fellow officers share your disgust, is it possible that not all white Detroit cops are racists? And even if they are racists, might you be willing in this particular circumstance to say that they shouldn’t be too nice to Krauss? Bigelow continues to raise these questions, or rather obscure them, when she goes on to show the results of the interrogation. Krauss smirks his way out of the room behind a lawyer, before he’s uttered a meaningful word or had his hair mussed; his partners walk free as well, after a judge rules their confessions inadmissible in court on grounds of coercion; and you seethe, on the director’s cue. You’re back, in other words, to Zero Dark Thirty, with its emotional appeal to a belief in the efficacy—no, necessity—of torture. At least in that movie, people could argue (although I did not) that Bigelow dramatized the toll of torture on the practitioner. In Detroit, though, she makes you want to see the truth beaten out of these bums, and to see justice done through a legal process.

If Bigelow had chosen to explore this contradiction, rather than just elicit it, I might have said that she sheds a glancing light on a bigger issue, more proper to a story about 1967 Detroit: the emotions of the people who rioted. But Bigelow doesn’t sort through the feelings she dredges up in you; nor (despite the film’s introductory statement) does she show any real interest in a whole population’s transition from chronic resentment to conflagration.

Events happen almost by magic during the night of the police raid on the unlicensed bar. The camera quickly pans left, and an angry crowd materializes out of nowhere. The cops drive away, and a quick cut shows a rock conveniently at hand, ready to be applied to a storefront’s accordion gate. On one level, this narrative efficiency is a testimony to Bigelow’s skill. On another, it’s further evidence that her mind, despite protestations to the contrary, is not really concentrated on the active thoughts of most black Detroiters.

I think it’s on her third sweet spot: show business. If Detroit is consistent about anything, it’s playacting; everybody in the film does it. A temporary resident of the Algiers Motel (Jason Mitchell) amuses himself by performing an impromptu sketch about police oppression. The cops put on a gruesome show for their captives, and try to sound convincing when telling superiors their improvised stories. Larry, who turns out to be the tragic hero of this tale, suffers a terrible fall after he ventures overconfidently into the Algiers, when all he wants to do is sing.

That’s how Bigelow and Boal shape the narrative of Detroit: as a story of the loss of a promising music-industry career. Maybe, in the minds of people who have won show-business success, that sums up the devastation well enough. But when I look over the toll of July 23 through 27, 1967—43 dead, 1,189 injured, 2,500 stores looted or burned, and a major American city put under military occupation, never yet to recover—I suspect there’s more to this than Motown.

You might call it a gimmick, if you go into the theater in an unforgiving mood. Or you might call it a stroke of inspiration.1

David Lowery, the writer-director of A Ghost Story, has chosen to represent his title character by a guy covered in a white sheet, Halloween style. Two elliptical holes, with nothing but emptiness behind them, occupy the place where the eyes should be. Sometimes the sheet slips a little, so the dark holes look like they’re drooping, and sometimes the guy beneath the drapery slowly turns his head to stare at something, which makes the fabric gather prettily in helical folds. That’s about all the expression you get from this movie’s central presence, who mostly stands around in silence.2

Lowery inserts this masquerade, as bland as it is childish, into the most mundane of settings—a one-story house, designed with no social ambitions and plopped down in the grass and weeds of a present-day Texas city—so the effect never comes close to spookiness. Nor is it meant to: Lowery prefers for A Ghost Story to be wry, wistful, affecting, and odd with the kind of strangeness that doesn’t wear off. He succeeds so well that the wonder he elicits—about love, grief, memory, and time—eventually needs to make room for the mystery of how he’s pulled off the trick.3

What makes you empathize with a ridiculous point-of-view character who does very little and can’t show emotion? Granted, the ghost becomes demonstrative on one occasion, when he smashes crockery, and you can guess something about his inner life when the electric lamps near him suddenly flicker and buzz. But even at these moments, you remain at a considerable remove from the character, compared with the immediacy you’d get if you saw an actor’s face and body and heard his voice. Besides, the anger that you intuit in these scattered episodes is exceptional. The emotions that usually seem to emanate from this watchful soul—longing, curiosity, a melancholy stubbornness—are in a much subtler range, and yet you read them from a near blank.4

suppose you feel so much for him because you’re a ghost, too. Sitting passively before the screen in the theater’s darkness, you watch the comings and goings of people who can’t see you, can’t be touched by you, can’t hear your voice. You’re as good as dead to them, and so you witness A Ghost Story as if through the sheet-man’s empty holes.5

What you see is a constrained, fragmentary world, one in which you’re continually reminded that much is hidden in the margins or has gone missing entirely. Lowery and his cinematographer, Andrew Droz Palermo, present everything within an old-fashioned squarish frame, which sits in the middle of a larger, more conventionally horizontal field of black. I sometimes became so absorbed that I forgot I was looking at only a fraction of the screen; but with the next cut, I would always pop out again and notice the void hovering around the characters.6

Quite a few of them show up over time, but the main ones, present at the beginning, are a nameless young woman and man (Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck), very much in love, who are preparing to move to a new house. That’s what you piece together, anyway, from your disjointed glimpses of their lives. Within a few quick scenes, you learn that she never stayed in one place for very long as a child, and suffered from this rootlessness; that he’s a composer of pop songs of the droning-synth variety, which he sings in a high, keening voice; and that both are disturbed by unexplained bangs in the middle of the night. There’s more to discover, of course, though nothing of the plot-driving variety. But before you learn any of it, the man suddenly dies of an unspecified misadventure, only to return from the morgue draped in his sheet.7

So the vestigial story ends, and the movie begins. One after another, the scenes in their little frames fill up with time, as observed in long, steady takes by a character who is no longer in any hurry. As is appropriate for a movie experienced by a dead musician, the scenes also fill with sound—principally the Wagnerian electronica composed by Daniel Hart, who likes to write repetitive, drawn-out, ascending scales that never quite reach their promised high point, given the shifting of the harmony beneath each note. Above all, the scenes fill to bursting with emotion—as tenuous and uncertain as the soundtrack music, as indefinable and unchallengeably present as the prismatic light that sometimes plays around the edges of the frame.8

So long as Rooney Mara remains in the house, she’s the object of the ghost’s unwavering attention and the film’s primary source of legible feelings. At once birdlike and fierce, she gives a locus to the movie’s free-floating grief, most memorably when she sits on the floor and methodically forks an entire pie down her throat. (In doing so, she also reveals one of Lowery’s unusual influences: The pie-eating is a near copy of a scene in Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle.) Then, because nothing in A Ghost Story is permanent, except perhaps for time and love, she moves out. The ghost stays—according to Lowery, that’s what spirits do—while strangers start to pass through the house, trailing their momentary preoccupations and desires across these few thousand square feet of eternity.9

My own preoccupations almost kept me from seeing A Ghost Story. I wasn’t a fan of Lowery’s breakout feature, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), which also starred Mara and Affleck and seemed to me to waste them both in the service of a fussy genre revisionism. When I saw the teaser art for A Ghost Story, with its Halloween figure pictured in mimicry of 19th-century spirit photographs, I thought I’d be in for more of the same. Then too, I didn’t expect that Lowery—or anyone—would come close to the touching inventiveness of my favorite film from the beyond, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life.10

As far as I’m concerned, Kore-eda remains the champ, with his modest community of supernatural bureaucrats, by turns social workers and low-budget filmmakers, helping each of the dead to find just one abiding moment of meaning in the life they’ve left. Lowery, being an American, imagines something much lonelier: He consigns his ghost to an alienated individualism on the Texas plain, and to a self-imposed task—a search—that might yield meaning eventually but has the look, for God knows how long, of mindless scratching.11

Like the movie itself, this scratching is obsessive and materialistic, and the characters who pass through while it’s in progress suggest that it’s futile as well. (In case you miss the point, Lowery supplies a party scene where a beery windbag, played by Will Oldham, talks the life out of everything from here to the heat death of the universe.) And yet there’s a wonderful amplitude of humor and melancholy in A Ghost Story, of faithfulness and determination, which Lowery achieves through the most traditional methods of filmmaking, coupled with a sensitivity to the basic conditions of watching.12

I note that Lowery could have gotten away with casting an extra as the ghost, but Casey Affleck took the part himself, spending perhaps three-quarters of his screen time as an incognito mime. The movie hides a lot more actor than was needed under that sheet—and, just so, a lot more thought and feeling than you could ever have hoped to encounter are working away under the surface of this film.13

t the opposite end of the scale from A Ghost Story in technical sophistication is every other special effect in this summer’s movies.14

Sometimes these fabrications are gorgeous to behold, even if the story they’re employed in doesn’t amount to much. I’m thinking of Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, no doubt the classiest comic-book adaptation we’ll see for a while, in which a 3-D stream of bright-colored sci-fi fantasies splashes from the screen for more than two hours. Unfortunately, this CGI extravaganza is far more memorable than the film’s semi-juvenile stars, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, who deliver their dialogue with a careless impatience that makes you think they’d rather text.15

In another case, as the film settles into cliché, even the blockbuster’s marvels fade to lackluster. Twenty minutes into War for the Planet of the Apes, you realize that director Matt Reeves and his team of writers haven’t thought of any reason for the movie to exist. They’re just patching together whatever’s at hand—a theme or two from old Stanley Kramer message pictures, a recollection of Apocalypse Now—on the principle of “Well, because.” By the time the picture they’re stitching together emerges in its full senselessness, you’ve long since lost your surprise and delight in Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his fellow motion-capture apes. Two movies past the wit and virtuosity of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the formerly amazing creatures have become no more involving than any other characters who slog toward a trilogy’s last paycheck.16

ut I’m happy to say that one of the summer’s CGI inventions remains astonishing, and lovable, from first to last: the giant pet pig that is the title character of Bong Joon-ho’s Okja.17

Midway in size between a hippopotamus and an elephant, with a wide, flat tail, a single udder, and a distinctly humanoid iris around the pupils of her intelligent eyes, Okja is first seen in a pastoral idyll in the mountains of South Korea, living with her 14-year-old best friend Mija (An Seo Hyun). The cinematography is by Darius Khondji, which means the forest is lush green, the streams and waterfalls are crystalline, and the fruits that Okja craves—which she gathers by rolling her bulk downhill into a tree—almost glow with a not-quite-ripe red. Bong and his colleagues have integrated the animation into this setting with a seamlessness to match Okja’s relationship with Mija. The two even nap together, with Mija lying on Okja’s broad back; and when Okja turns over, Mija rolls in unison, leaving the actress miraculously settled on the belly of the CGI pig.18

This harmony, of course, is too good to last. We know, because Bong has preceded these leisurely scenes of nature with a prologue set in New York, where a prowling, preening, shouting, arm-waving Tilda Swinton, in full-bonkers exuberance as the CEO of the Mirando Corporation, has strutted through a press conference announcing the birth of miracle pigs that will feed the entire world. Video images flash on all sides, so fast that none of the assembled reporters can wonder what they’re really about. A corporate executive (Giancarlo Esposito) watches from a catwalk, silently mouthing with Swinton the script of her ostensibly candid remarks about these super-pigs—entirely non-GMO!—and the plan to raise the first of them on an ethnically diverse set of traditional family farms around the world.19

No wonder the mountains of Korea seem so peaceful after all that. No wonder that Mija is going to be heartbroken—and rebellious—when she realizes that everything she’s been told is a lie. The Mirando Corporation owns her beloved companion Okja and has come to take her back to the United States: first for another publicity stunt presided over by Swinton, and then for the fate of all pigs.20

As even this brief summary should make plain, the director and his co-writer, Jon Ronson, have a lot on their minds, including the satirical themes that Bong played with previously in The Host and Snowpiercer. He’s fascinated by the chaos that corporations and governments set loose, even while seeking to keep order through money, mendacity, and ecological mayhem. As a Korean, Bong also thinks it’s particularly funny—and awful—that so much of this trouble lands on people from his part of the world, when the Euro-Americans profess to generate it out of pure benevolence; and as someone born into the post-1968 world, he looks on activists (such as the hilarious Animal Liberation Front cadre in Okja) with sympathy, nostalgia, and very little confidence.21

That’s Bong as a social thinker. As a filmmaker, he’s also got a lot of ideas, many of which have to do with setting loose chaos of his own. He’s better at eruptions of wild action than almost anyone today; the only complaint you can make against these set pieces (such as the rampage in Okja through an underground shopping mall) is that when they’re over, it takes a while for the movie to get back into gear. I’m not sure, though, that Bong cares. His chronic preoccupation with matters irrelevant to plot development and narrative rhythm—for example, Swinton’s teeth, in which he takes an interest more proper to an oral surgeon—betrays the mind-set of an artist who doesn’t let commercial imperatives get too much in the way of his compulsions.22

Here’s another of Bong’s enduring preoccupations: the courage of young women, whether they struggle to survive abduction by a hungry mutant (The Host) or set off valiantly to bring a giant pig back to the mountains. Okja is a very busy film, full of chases, intrigues, performances pitched at the level of hysteria, and televisual hubbub. At the center of it, though, stands Mija. While everyone around her seems completely crazy, she remains not calm, exactly, but unafraid, not still but unswerving in purpose—which makes her even more astonishing than her CGI friend.23

Thirty-two centuries ago, when Ramses II wanted to project an image of himself, he assigned swarms of artisans to carve his likeness out of the rock at Abu Simbel, not once but four times, decreeing that his quadruple gaze should scan the desert from a height of 66 feet or more while mere humans milled below the level of his soles.

Today, to make us look on his works and despair, our pharaoh simply types 140 characters.

It’s a familiar story, this evolution of the tools of persuasion. Lincoln grasped the new opportunities presented by photography; FDR, radio; Kennedy, television. And when you consider that the means of communication have changed far more in the blip between Lincoln and Trump than they did in all the time from the New Kingdom to the American Civil War, it’s understandable that we often speak as if what’s novel in our situation is the technology, rather than how we use it.

Pancho Velez and Sierra Pettengill don’t make that mistake in their documentary The Reagan Show. Using only archival materials—principally news broadcasts from the years of the Reagan presidency, and selections from the miles and miles of videotape that the administration recorded and distributed through its White House Television Office—The Reagan Show pieces together a narrative about a historic shift that happened some 30 years ago, when images devised for mass distribution became more than instruments for winning political power and enacting policy. For the first time, it seemed as if manufactured images were the policy.

That, at least, was what many people thought, to their dismay. In The Reagan Show, you can see Chris Wallace grouse to the audience of NBC News about Reagan’s spending two-thirds of his time on ceremonial occasions and PR opportunities. In Wallace’s account, this disproportion made Washington question whether Reagan was in charge of his own administration. But in other contemporaneous clips, White House insiders argue that Reagan’s continual selling of himself was an act of governance. Michael K. Deaver, the deputy chief of staff, told Barbara Walters that policy-making is all a matter of “how you stage the message.” David Gergen, Reagan’s director of communications, claimed that the White House has always been a stage. The only question is whether you allow the TV networks to manage that stage or step up and do it yourself.

Perhaps most telling of all is a comment that Reagan himself made in a 1988 farewell interview with David Brinkley. When asked whether his career as an actor had taught him anything that had been useful in the presidency, Reagan chuckled and hesitated, then said, “There have been times in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”

I suppose Ike managed. So did LBJ. But it doesn’t matter that other presidents found it possible just to do the job. For Reagan, it was possible to do the job just by seeming to be president. He took that for granted; and today, Trump takes it for granted, too.

ow did we get to this point? Velez and Pettengill aren’t big on explanations—they scarcely even allow themselves title cards—but in one of their rare excursions outside the televisual world of the 1980s, they hint at an answer by showing clips from some of the movies in which the future president established his image: Storm Warning, Desperate Journey, This Is the Army, Cattle Queen of Montana. As J. Hoberman wrote in a 2016 essay, summing up both the persona that Hollywood gave Reagan and his wholehearted internalization of everything it entailed, “He was the embodiment of happy endings and uncomplicated emotions, amusing anecdotes and conspicuous consumption, cornball patriotism and paranoid anti-Communism, cheerful bromides and a built-in production code designed to suppress any uncomfortable truth. He was a true believer in the magic of the movies.”

In some of their film’s most entertaining moments, Velez and Pettengill puncture that magic by exposing the behind-the-scenes work that went into it. When Reagan, as president, filmed a commercial for John Sununu’s campaign for governor of New Hampshire, he earnestly told the camera that he was making the endorsement on the basis of personal knowledge, then botched take after take because he couldn’t pronounce “Sununu.” Nancy, too, got caught in the outtakes when playing her role as the delighted and ever-devoted wife. At the Reagans’ ranch in California, Ron climbed onto a horse before the cameras of the White House Television Office and cheerfully rode off on cue, while his co-star perched in brittle misery on her saddle.

Pettengill, an expert on researching and using archival material, has masterfully plucked such scenes out of the 66-foot colossus of videotape that Reagan’s staff piled up. (In one of its rare title cards, The Reagan Show asserts that his White House recorded as much footage as the previous five administrations combined.) Velez, meanwhile, brings to The Reagan Show the combination of curiosity and formal rigor that he exercised in his previous documentary feature, the 2013 Manakamana: a travelogue, thrill ride, human-interest story, and structuralist experiment all in one, made with Stephanie Spray through Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. The Reagan Show is neither as multifarious as Manakamana nor as strict in construction, but it does involve a similar project of working within limits—in this case, the visual evidence left behind from Reagan’s terms in office.

You may have seen some version of this method before—in Kevin Rafferty and James Ridgeway’s Feed, for example, which uses raw footage from the 1992 presidential primaries to show candidates in their unguarded moments. Or you might know Andrei Ujica’s 2010 The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, an astonishing history of the Romanian dictator assembled entirely from his propaganda films. But if The Reagan Show is not unprecedented in its approach, it has the distinction of revealing a turning point in American democracy from a dual perspective: the inside point-of-view of the jocular, self-confident Reagan and his clique, and the viewpoint of the increasingly bitter journalists complaining about having been shut out.

But what about today’s audience? Does The Reagan Show shut us out, too?

nyone who lived as an adult through the 1980s will recognize at once that The Reagan Show makes no attempt to provide a comprehensive history, or even a coherent one, despite its roughly chronological scheme. The film begins, for all purposes, in 1983, after much of Reagan’s agenda was in place: the tax cuts for the rich, the union busting, the race-baiting assault on social welfare programs. (Also unmentioned: the assassination attempt that made Reagan, in the public eye, both a near-martyr and an even tougher guy than before.) Reagan’s one military adventure, the 1983 invasion of Grenada, leaves no trace in The Reagan Show. The Iran/Contra scandal does take place; but it happens without meaning—no proxy war in Central America, no criminal flouting of the law, no widely televised congressional investigation—and then blows over quickly, as soon as Reagan crinkles his eyes in the Oval Office and says, Gosh, I guess I must have done something wrong.

If you know what the Reagan administration was actually about—its substance, that is, rather than its sales methods—then you wind up supplying these facts and others as you watch The Reagan Show, breaking into its airtight structure from the outside. So much for the phenomenology of the media. Just as you could not have understood the goals of Reagan’s administration if you had read only its publicity handouts, The Reagan Show demonstrates (perhaps despite itself) that you can’t grasp the function of his televisual apparatus if you confine yourself to looking at it from within.

But then, studying it from outside is hardly any better. As Velez and Pettengill show, Reagan and his people succeeded in getting the news media to report on White House publicity as a story in itself and then to comment on their own commentary, in a round of distraction and self-distraction that was new at the time and has since become standard practice. It hardly matters whether the principal medium is videotape or Twitter, or whether the distractor in chief developed his persona in Hollywood or (as Hoberman says of Trump) “in a far shoddier information eco-system that was already polluted with lies and where his roustabout antics were taken for truth.” The few and powerful pursue their own interests, while the rest of are encouraged to pursue clickbait.

The Reagan Show seems, to me, to be both a valiant exposé of this situation and one of its victims. That’s because Velez and Pettengill, in their fascination with image-making, have chosen to follow only one substantive issue through the Reagan years: the proposal for a space-based missile shield (his Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars) and the subsequent summit negotiations on nuclear-weapons reductions, conducted between Reagan and the Soviet Union’s new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. Observers at the time reported on the meetings between the two officials as an international duel of publicity campaigns (“the ultimate PR opportunity,” as you see George F. Will explain on ABC News); and Velez and Pettengill follow their lead, creating a narrative that goes from widespread dread of imminent nuclear war in 1983 to the signing of an image-driven but immensely consequential treaty in 1988. The Reagan Show ends happily—as its star would have wanted it to.

I’m not sure why Gal Gadot, star of Wonder Woman, reminds me of an asparagus spear. Maybe it’s because she’s such a strikingly vertical figure. Maybe it’s the sleek braid that often tops her stalk, or the air of healthful vigor she exudes, heavily redolent of thiamine and riboflavin. Or maybe I’m associating her too closely with the vegetative state of the movie in which she’s been planted.

Yes, the “summer’s most anticipated release” is a slog, a schlep, a bore, a brainless and unstoppable encroachment of kudzu across the world’s screens. Anticipated by whom, by the way? By the people who chose to respond to a Fandango survey, the results of which have been cited by The New York Times with a bland credulity last accorded to polls favoring Hillary Clinton. Is there a connection? Not really—except for a misplaced faith in feminist exceptionalism. Many people, myself included, have deplored the American film industry’s indifference toward stories about female characters of any description, its blindness toward actresses who have passed the age of 40, its malign neglect of women who stand ready to produce or direct films. That said, there is no reason to think that the world, or even the subset of it known as cinema, will improve solely because a comic-book-franchise blockbuster has a woman as its lead and another woman in the director’s chair.

You can ask my teenage daughter. (She’s better than any Fandango survey.) Did she benefit from the magical cliché of “empowerment” by watching Wonder Woman? “I can feel empowered,” she told me, “without staring for two hours at Gal Gadot’s butt.” Nevertheless: Had this spectacle given my daughter no thrill at all? “Ohmigod,” she said, forgoing the “I am Diana, daughter of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, by Zeus” argle-bargle. “You walk out feeling stupider than when you went in.”

Which, I think, is the point. The screenplay for Wonder Woman, written by Allan Heinberg from a yarn he concocted with Zack Snyder and Jason Fuchs, is an origin story about another, even dumber origin story, with a third origin story popped in toward the end. Flashback lurches into tedious flashback, while in the interim, blurs of jerky, chopped-up action and CGI explosions fill the spaces where you might have hoped for credibly choreographed battles. Left unemployed, your mind wanders after this or that odd detail: noting which historically oppressed groups the filmmakers have ticked off their diversity list (hey, a North African and a Native American!), or puzzling over the film’s curious version of narrative economy, which enables characters to surmount Olympian barriers and span thousands of miles merely by saying they’ve done it.

Mostly, though, you watch the protracted, single-entendre flirtation between Diana, daughter of Hippolyta, and a World War I–era Yankee soldier who has somehow barged into her island paradise. Because the soldier is played by Chris Pine, he not only looks great but is also nimble with banter, self-mocking humor, and the flummoxed reaction shot. Perhaps the best that can be said for Wonder Woman is that someone had the wit to cast Pine in the boyfriend role, and that the director, Patty Jenkins, knew how to use him as a foil for Gadot, improving the effect of the dumb-but-smart deadpan she’s learned to perform. I admit she’s a clever enough asparagus to get by with the act. Just don’t expect her to threaten the memory of Carole Lombard.

What else has Patty Jenkins brought to the project? A filmmaker who made an impression in 2003 with her very good first feature, Monster, starring an uglied-up Charlize Theron as the accused serial killer Aileen Wuornos, Jenkins certainly knows how to take command of a vehicle. But in the case of Wonder Woman, she seems rather to have been along for the ride. She was plugged in as the second-choice director for a property that was cast before she was hired, written by others to conform to the Warner Bros. franchise scheme, and bossed by a team of 13 producers (11 of whom are men).

In that light, it might be more appropriate to say that Wonder Woman teaches disempowerment—the lesson that special-effects blockbusters are now the driverless Ubers of cinema. The algorithm decides all, and the only destination it recognizes is a bank where you don’t have an account. Once upon a time (goes the origin story), when the studio system was not yet defunct, a band of heroes called Auteurists championed those filmmakers who were capable of imposing their personalities on genre stories, affirming the individual in a society of mass production. In 2017, though, trying to detect a personal vision in Wonder Woman is as futile as searching for financial security by jumping into the gig economy, or resisting conformity by rushing to be the next to post on a social-media thread. I’m glad for Jenkins that she got the job. But has this crummy movie struck a blow for women? Tell it to the algorithm.

f you’re looking for a heroine with whom you’ll want to spend some time in the movies, let me recommend Shynika Jakes, one of the three principal figures in Andrew Cohn’s documentary Night School. When Cohn began filming in 2014, Jakes was a 26-year-old high-school dropout living in one of Indianapolis’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods—living in her car, since the money she made at Arby’s didn’t stretch far enough to cover a luxury such as rent. Determined to make a better life for herself, maybe as a nurse, Jakes decided she had to get a high-school diploma—not a GED certificate, a diploma—no matter what it took. That’s how Cohn met her. Wanting to show audiences how tough it is for people to climb out of poverty, he embedded himself at a high school in the neighborhood—one that had been established exclusively for adult dropouts—­and met Jakes, who agreed to let him follow her around.

Another student who agreed was Melissa Lewis, 53 years old at the time and living in morose solitude. When she came to the school, her goal was to earn something that had slipped away decades before—to prove to herself that her life was not over. “I was an adult very young,” she explained to Cohn. “I had that first [child] when I was 14 years old.”

A third subject to sign on was Greg Henson, a former drug dealer in his early 30s with a criminal record and a 4-year-old daughter he was raising on his own. A man who seems almost obsessed with having his regrets and good intentions understood—his constant refrain is “You feel me?”—he has no trouble explaining why he is forcing himself to spend his time scratching out algebra problems. “Lookin’ at her,” he says of his daughter, “lookin’ at her, lookin’ at her.”

If Frederick Wiseman had been the one to go to Indianapolis, he would have used the title Night School literally, planning and editing his production to construct a picture of an institution. Cohn, who adheres more to the character-driven approach that Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert took in Hoop Dreams, scarcely even identifies the school his subjects attend. (It’s the Excel Center, a charter school started by the Goodwill organization.) Instead, he keeps his focus on three perpetually weary, vulnerable, hard-pressed, and endlessly brave individuals, bringing you close to them through a mutual trust that can’t be faked.

You see Henson coping when his brother is shot, when his daughter has to be rushed to the hospital with a seizure, when his bid to have his criminal record expunged leads to his having to report to the county jail—one damned thing after another, and somehow the man keeps showing up in class to solve equations. For her part, Jakes takes the risk of not showing up: Having been drawn into the Fight for $15 organizing campaign­—­tentatively at first, and then more intensively—she eventually takes to the street as a striker, jeopardizing her diploma and her meager wages at Arby’s, but finding a public voice for the first time. Lewis, who might be the most fragile of the three, overcomes her solitude during the film—Cohn’s camera is there when she meets the new love of her life, on the bus—but despite all her hard work, she just can’t do the algebra. When, in her dejection, she comes close to dropping out for the second time, Cohn is there as well; and he’s with her in church when she finds the strength to keep going.

It might seem apt to say that the subjects of Night School are indomitable, if you knew only the outcome of their struggles. But if you accept Cohn’s invitation to watch their herculean labors, you understand that Lewis, Henson, Jakes, and millions of others live full-time on the cliff’s edge of defeat, with the circumstances into which they were born conspiring to push them over. Night School is a happy-ending documentary, one that cheers on three people who triumph through individual grit, as Americans are supposed to do—but the film makes it clear that each diploma awarded at their high school ought to come with a medal for exceptional valor.

he feature-length documentaries selected for this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival, presented June 9–18 in New York by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and IFC Center, pay special attention to three broad topics: the world’s refugee crises, the abuses built into America’s criminal-justice system, and threats to a free press. The opening-night presentation, Zaradasht Ahmed’s Nowhere to Hide, chronicles the effects of endless war on Iraq and a family’s deliberation about whether to flee the country. The closing-night film, Brian Knappenberger’s Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, documents the power of billionaires like Peter Thiel and Sheldon Adelson to control, or simply shut down, publications that displease them. In between, festival audiences can catch selections like Peter Nicks’s The Force, which takes a close-up look at corruption and incompetence in the Oakland Police Department, and Erik Ljung’s The Blood Is at the Doorstep, about the aftermath of the fatal police shooting of Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee.

With so much to feel bad about, maybe you’ll forgive me if I pluck Cristina Herrera Bórquez’s No Dress Code Required from the schedule, since it’s another happy-ending documentary about self-made heroes. Its stars, Fernando and Victor, operate a beauty parlor in Mexicali, where over the years they have glamorized countless brides. In 2013, inspired by the marriage in Mexico City of TV star Felipe Nájera, they decide it’s their turn. Unfortunately, though, the government of the Free and Sovereign State of Baja California proves to be less accommodating than that of the Federal District, as it was then known. No Dress Code Required is the story of Fernando and Victor’s 18-month battle, from June 2013 through January 2015, to get the municipal authorities to perform a function unambiguously mandated by law—a right they claim not so much for themselves (since they can be married in Mexico City at any time) as for everyone in their state.

As the loving couple explains to the camera, the government’s callous opposition reawakens in them all their long-buried feelings about being demeaned, bullied, and pushed to the side. But these supposedly negligible hairdressers have resources the government doesn’t anticipate: nerve, flair, friends, excellent lawyers and wardrobe, and a calm eloquence, no doubt previously untapped, that perhaps surprises even them. Unless you’re a religious scold, Fernando and Victor should be irresistible; and so is No Dress Code Required, a film that comes out totally gay in both senses of the term.

One more hero, while I’m at it: the grieving, vengeful mother played by Emmanuelle Devos in Frédéric Mermoud’s Moka. Movies about female vigilantes are rare outside the realm of martial-arts epics and the deliriums of Abel Ferrara, which makes this cool, precise psychological thriller all the more notable. Based on a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, Mermoud’s film follows a woman whose only way to bring herself back to life is to find and confront the hit-and-run driver who killed her teenage son. What will she do when she finally arranges the confrontation? She doesn’t seem to know, which is fitting for a film about crossing borders, whether geographic (between Switzerland and France), sexual (between more than a few of the characters), or legal. The tension builds slowly as Devos identifies her target: a beauty-shop owner in Évian (Nathalie Baye) who seems certain to have been the driver and yet is too brittle under her strained, professional smile for Devos to hate.

Moka is a neat package, pleasingly spare in its dialogue, that might have seemed like a minor Hitchcockian exercise if not for Devos. She remains the most dangerous woman in French cinema: someone who projects a sensuousness that is still startling in middle age, with her wide, downturned mouth and insolent eyes, combined with a visible intelligence so smoldering that it could get her charged with arson. I probably don’t need to say it, but American pictures have no equivalent.

Like millions of other people, I ran to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 at the earliest opportunity. The first installment of James Gunn’s Marvel Universe series won my heart in 2014, principally for the moment when its ragtag band of misfits, at last outfitted as a team, strode toward the camera in heroic wedge formation, with Zoe Saldana as the warrior Gamora puncturing the visual cliché by letting out a slow-motion yawn. I’d hoped for further acts of insolence in the sequel, and I was not disappointed. But then again, I was.

In explaining why, I can fortunately dispense with both a synopsis and a spoiler alert, given that Gunn has rummaged through Gene Roddenberry’s beloved Star Trek plot catalog and dug out Story No. 3(b): A being with strange powers, encountered on a pseudo-paradisiacal planet, makes his bid for universal domination. That this dusty trunk item did not originate with Gunn, or even with Marvel Comics (despite the film’s obligatory cameo by Stan Lee), isn’t a fault in the Guardians aesthetic, but rather the main point.

Outdated pop culture gives Guardians its master joke, as well as its carefully judged position among other special-effects blockbusters. The ostensible central character, Peter Quill, was kidnapped as a child by bandits from outer space and so has no earthly references beyond those he learned in 1980s Missouri. Mentally frozen in time though grown into the strapping form of Chris Pratt, he continually cites the songs and TV shows of his childhood. To his fellow characters in the wildly high-tech settings he now inhabits, this stock of information is utterly meaningless. To us, it’s a storehouse of nostalgia, if not downright embarrassment.

We settle in happily between fantasies of future worlds (rendered with the shiniest new digital imaging available) and memories of the clunky, mass-marketed analog products of our past. The joke’s on us, of course, because the movie we’re now enjoying is stamped with its own sell-by date. In 2047 (should humanity make it that far), the latest movie about an earthling kidnapped from 2017 Beijing will have her talking excitedly about Guardians to her bored, uncomprehending ET abductors. But who wants to think ahead? It seems we’re all comfortable knowing that today’s prized entertainment is tomorrow’s junk-shop item. Meanwhile, Gunn and his accomplices have made themselves considerably more than comfortable, thanks to their strategy of both fulfilling and mocking the conventions of the superhero extravaganza.

It’s tempting at this point to dismiss Gunn’s project as just another instance of Hollywood’s making money by having things both ways. Plenty of other blockbusters practice self-referential humor, sometimes with an ingrained defensiveness so habitual that their winks at the audience turn into a facial tic. But in its frank, playful acknowledgment that pop culture’s products—including itself—are both flimsy and nonbiodegradable, Guardians touches on something essential about these movies. Yes, they’re formulaic in concept and repetitive in execution, frequently thoughtless about anything except their own marketing and production schemes, and far too often heartlessly bloody. They’re also amazing—if you’d never seen one before, you would walk out of the movie house agog at the wonder and majesty you had just witnessed, to declare (with Preston Sturges’s convertible-sofa salesman) “There is no limit to man’s ingenuity.”

So how much real ingenuity—the potentially lasting kind—is on display in the new Guardians?

I would put into the “wonders” column the white plastic egg that the strange being uses as his spaceship. I also like the way he repurposes the egg’s form as a display case for mannequins that illustrate his life story (this is an alien intelligence with a consistent design sensibility); and I like Kurt Russell’s commitment to the role of this swaggering interplanetary stud, who sometimes cozies up seductively to Earth females and sometimes beams with a great-bearded patriarchal sincerity that you shouldn’t trust more than you would a beer commercial. He’s exactly the father figure that Peter doesn’t need, and (of course) the one Peter wants.

But then, there are multiple family romances in this Guardians; almost everyone gets to have his, her, or its own emotional catharsis. On the one hand, this is appropriate for a series that has moved away from being the story of the straight white guy and is now realizing its destiny as a platoon movie on LSD. On the other hand, I’m disappointed: Guardians has become earnest in preaching forgiveness, reconciliation, comradeship, and half a dozen other virtues that are ill-suited to a movie that pretends to razz the whole superhero business. Leave it to Spider-Man to tell us that with great power comes great responsibility. In Guardians, an ill-tempered bionic raccoon is supposed to pull down responsibility’s pants. But Rocket, voiced by Bradley Cooper, now has the duty to live up to his own cinematic reputation—such are the snares of success—and his buddy Groot the talking tree has gone cutesy on us.

I had a fine time, all the same. And considering that one of the movie’s best jokes is about a desperate, extended search for Scotch tape—once again, the analog takes its vengeance on a digital world—it’s to the credit of Guardians that I didn’t even mind paying extra for 3-D. But the lesson here is that the sell-by date for the cleverest pop-culture insolence comes more quickly than you might think. Watch out for Vol. 3—by the time it arrives, we might have to ask which Guardians will mock the Guardians for us.

ndrzej Wajda, age 90 and full of honors, died on October 9, 2016, about a month after critics at the Toronto International Film Festival watched the premiere of his final contribution to world cinema, Afterimage, and decided that it wasn’t what they wanted to see. La La Land was evidently more to the reviewers’ taste, with its pep and bright-colored mediocrity. The story of characters who have some talent but not too much, as portrayed by stars who kind of sing and dance, La La Land purports to be about following your dreams but secretly dedicates itself to settling; whereas the uncompromising central character of Afterimage is an artist of historic stature—the modernist painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski (1893–1952)—whose drawn-out suffering and death at the hands of Poland’s communist regime is the sole action of the film. Critics complained of claustrophobia and a surfeit of gloom.

It didn’t seem to occur to the film’s detractors that Wajda, at the end of his career, no longer felt the need to impress people but instead wanted viewers to mold themselves to him. Such an attitude sometimes seeps into artists as they reach old age, with results that are well documented. “In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes,” Adorno wrote; and with rare artists like Wajda, who know they have made their mark on the histories of both their art form and their disastrous political era, this summing-up can be as brutally compressed and yet loosely strewn, as physically blunt and yet heartbreakingly fragile, as a wrecked car on the roadside.

This particular wreck clearly held deep personal meaning for its author; but not, as some might suppose, because he identified with Strzeminski. To understand why Afterimage propels itself forward, like its hero, in a kind of targeted flailing, you might first ask whether Wajda felt closer to the protagonist or, instead, to the gaggle of subsidiary characters around him.

A biographical note: Wajda entered the Lodz Film School in 1950, just when the Polish authorities forced Strzeminski out of the Lodz State Art School (which he’d co-founded) and made sure that he was unemployable. A young artist was on the rise; an older artist in the same city, who in different circumstances might have been Wajda’s teacher, was being lowered into poverty and the grave. Perhaps the two never met; but you can see Wajda working himself imaginatively into Strzeminski’s circle, decades after the fact, in the many scenes of Afterimage in which the old painter is surrounded by his pupils, all roughly the same age as Wajda was in those years.

If Strzeminski decides to roll down a hill, these disciples will giddily tumble after him. That’s what happens in the prologue, the only part of Afterimage filled with laughter and rural sunshine, when Strzeminski (Boguslaw Linda) takes his students to the countryside to paint in the open air. The real fall, the fatal one, hasn’t happened yet. But when the persecution begins, the young people continue to cling to Strzeminski, huddling around him in the lecture hall—he prefers to sit in their midst, rather than talk from a podium—or crowding into his tiny apartment to show their latest work. As the film turns dark and relentlessly interior, these garlands of open-faced, hopeful, deeply worried young artists still drape themselves over their master, warming him and the scenes they decorate.

But warming is about all they can do. They provide a little material aid and comfort; and then, as the claustrophobia worsens (the Toronto press corps was not wrong to observe the effect of suffocation), all but one or two fade away, leaving their teacher both trapped and helplessly exposed.

Will the audience going into Afterimage know about Wajda’s unstated backstory in Lodz and guess that, when he reflected on the past, he might have thought of himself as one of these young people? Probably not, and Wajda evidently didn’t care. Too preoccupied with his theme to bother with the niceties of addressing an audience, he seems to have figured that we’d catch up, if we wanted to.

Nor did Wajda indulge himself, or his viewers, in pretty fantasies of being the young person who rescued Strzeminski and changed history. His thoughts instead turned to guilt—and not just the regime’s. Beyond constructing a dramatic account of how the authorities crushed Strzeminski rather than allow him to profess a form of art independent of state control, Wajda made up a story of how the artist reluctantly and bitterly pushed away the young people (mainly women) who were most devoted to him, so they might perhaps escape with their lives.

One of these is Hania (Zofia Wichlacz), a full-lipped, dark-browed beauty who has come to the art school from Warsaw (Poles in the audience will automatically supply their own “war-devastated”) and fallen in love with Strzeminski. Never mind that he’s balding, jowly, nicotine-stained, stubble-chinned, and swings through Lodz on crutches, having lost his right leg and left arm in World War I. His eloquence about intentional vision and personal choice inspires Hania to stay with him after almost all of the others have dropped away; and like any other needy man, Strzeminski prefers not to acknowledge what’s going on with her but just keeps benefiting from the attachment, until she leaves him no choice except to practice the awareness he’s always talking about.

The other principal attendant is Nika (Bronislawa Zamachowska), Strzeminski’s middle-school-age daughter, a pigtailed, spookily deadpan kid with eyes so widely spaced they seem to sit over her ears. A child of divorce, Nika is suspended in the film between two deaths, her mother’s and Strzeminski’s, and while waiting for the latter to occur spends her time fending for herself at too young an age and trying to care for her father, who mostly pretends she’s not there. When Nika moves out of his apartment, packing up as abruptly as she’d moved in, Strzeminski goes on painting and lets her leave without a word. Even so, it seems he’s paid attention. “She’s going to have a hard life,” he mutters after the door has slammed, in the same tone of voice you’d use to remark on the weather.

Like Nika, characters in Afterimage are always walking into scenes and then walking out again. There are so many doors in the dramaturgy that you’d think Wajda had recycled a set of stage directions from a Feydeau farce. These comings and goings aren’t funny, of course; they mostly remind you that threats lurk everywhere waiting to make their entrance, and any hope of escape is futile. That said, it would be a mistake to neglect the ironies in Afterimage that verge on grotesque, despairing comedy. These begin with the appearance at Strzeminski’s apartment window of a gigantic poster of Stalin, which the artist matter-of-factly slashes with a crutch so that it won’t cast a red shadow on his painting. (Cut to two distressed cops on the street below, who comment, more or less, “Jesus Christ!”) Wajda picks up the joke later, when Strzeminski gets a job churning out more such pictures of the great leaders (he’s the best painter in the workshop, of course). And when little Nika is excited to carry a banner in the May Day parade, Strzeminski watches from the window; it’s the only time in the film you see his daughter smile.

Like other historical dramas by Wajda—Katyn and Korczak, for example—Afterimage memorializes the victim of a state-sponsored crime. But if we take the title seriously—the physiological phenomenon of a retinal afterimage was crucial to Strzeminski’s theory of art—then we should turn away mentally from the central figure in his moment of time and look instead at the lingering shadow that the regime’s actions imposed on those who followed. Afterimage is ultimately about what would ensue for Nika, and Hania, and Andrzej Wajda. The film, in its catastrophe, doesn’t show you any of that; but if you pay attention, you can glimpse the ghostly aura.

During the spare hours when he wasn’t writing and producing Guerrilla and American Crime for television, working on a yet-to-be-titled Marvel superheroes project, or crafting the screenplay for 12 Years a Slave, the furiously industrious John Ridley somehow made time to direct Let It Fall, a lengthy documentary about 10 years of mounting African-American outrage in Los Angeles, 1982 to 1992, and its culmination in the Rodney King riots.1

Despite Ridley’s ambition, he is not the first to have worked this territory. Ezra Edelman expanded O.J.: Made in America to epic proportions, and won an Oscar, by situating the trials of O.J. Simpson within an ample narrative about the ingrained white supremacy of the Los Angeles Police Department in that same period and everything that flowed from it, from smashed houses to broken families to trails of corpses on the streets. If you saw O.J.: Made in America last year, some of the dreadful events it revisited will still be fresh in your mind, so that you recognize even the archival footage when you re-encounter it in Ridley’s film.2

But for all the sociological sweep that Edelman brought to the subject, he was essentially making a true-crime picture, with one person in the foreground and a murder trial at its climax. Ridley’s game is different. He wants to understand this decade through the experiences of more than a dozen people who were intimately caught up in these events, and (just as important) to understand the people themselves. He pieces his narrative together from the accounts of retired police officers of varying rank, African-American residents of the South Central neighborhood, a family of shopkeepers from Koreatown, a Japanese-American family from suburban Alhambra. In drawing these people out, he has fully respected Jean Renoir’s insight in Rules of the Game: “What’s terrible is that everyone has his reasons.” As for the climax of his story, it isn’t anything so ritualized and contained as a jury verdict. It’s a fire, which rages across Los Angeles for days.3

You know, from the start, that the fire is coming, and you may even recall some of the fatalities that led to it. First a 20-year-old black man, James Mincey Jr., died at the hands of white cops, who applied a chokehold to him after a routine traffic stop. (The woman who was his girlfriend at the time tells the story.) Then a young suburban woman, Karen Toshima, was caught in the crossfire of gangs that had spilled out of South Central and into Westwood (her brother Kevin tells the story): a death that alarmed LA’s more privileged citizens and brought the full paramilitary force of the LAPD to bear on black neighborhoods in Operation Hammer. A 15-year-old African-American girl, Latasha Harlins, died when a Korean-American shopkeeper, Soon Ja Du, abruptly decided to shoot her in the head, a crime that was clearly recorded by a surveillance camera, and for which Du received a sentence of five years’ probation without jail time. (The story is told by a woman who was in the shop, waiting while her little brother played Pac-Man.) Then came the verdict in the case of Rodney King, an unarmed man bludgeoned into a pulp by police officers wielding metal batons (because, to their disgust, they were no longer allowed to use chokeholds). Although this incident, too, was recorded on videotape, the trial ended with no punishment whatsoever being meted out to the perpetrators. (The accused cops declined to be interviewed for the film, but Ridley gets the story from another policeman who was present, and who testifies, without shame or irony, that “What I witnessed at the scene was 100 percent LAPD policy.”) After that, Los Angeles exploded, and still another victim became famous: Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who was dragged from his vehicle by black rioters and stomped nearly to death.4

As the movie unfolds, you know very well that the looting and burning are on the way, and also the stomping; and yet Ridley manages to build suspense by introducing his witnesses gradually, without always tipping you off about who they are and what part of the history they saw. You often have to guess at why you’re listening to someone, and what might lie behind his or her words. In one key instance, you don’t even get to see the speaker, though his testimony frames the narrative from the beginning. Only at the conclusion of Let It Fall do you understand the roles of half a dozen of the people on-screen or see their emotions at full force, as teased out by Ridley during the interviews. It turns out that some attacked Reginald Denny, one videotaped the beating, and one left the safety of his home to try to bring Denny to a hospital, guided (as he tells it) by the voice of God.5

The name of that rescuer is Bobby Green. There are other surprising heroes in Let It Fall, as well as characters who confess with pain to their failings, and people who suffered devastating loss and yet speak with forgiveness and understanding. There are also villains—but not many of them. The truly awful, such as former police chief Daryl Gates, appear only in smirking, self-justifying archival footage. The interview subjects who come close to being villains—people who to this day are bitter and enraged, and have blood on their hands—turn out to have their reasons, just like everyone. Gary Williams, who was charged with beating and robbing Denny, assures Ridley that he can have compassion for anybody. But on April 29, 1992, he says firmly, “The compassion line was closed.”6

Let It Fall is a single comprehensive history of how Los Angeles tore itself apart from 1982 to 1992, and also of a dozen or more personal tragedies. It’s like looking into the heart of all those single flames that made the conflagration.7

The blessings of peace rain down in Joseph Cedar’s Norman, seeded from low clouds of bribery, cronyism, and résumé inflation. The bribe amounts to no more than a pair of men’s shoes (though, to give the corruptor his due, they’re Lanvin); the cronyism, to wishful claims of friendship with the rich and powerful. As for the résumé inflation, it’s a sin the title character can scarcely avoid, surviving as he does on a business card and a cell-phone number.

You’ve met this exhausting type before: the wheedler, the cajoler, the unrelenting hanger-on, overjoyed to have run into you because he swore to your cousin in Baltimore that he would double your money, as soon as you give it to him. The tartness of Norman—subtitled The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer—comes from situating this figure within the segment of American Jewry that would do anything (please, just ask me!) for the State of Israel. The film’s sweetness, and its innovation, comes from perceiving the sincerity of this particular schnorrer, whose desperation to advance himself is inextricably bound up with his desire to serve others. How is the world maintained? Through the good works of scheming nobodies like Norman Oppenheimer.

You hear Norman on the soundtrack before you see him, which seems appropriate for this man of tumbling and unreliable words. His light baritone is pitched for ingratiation but breathlessly insistent; his enunciation rapid but braying, as if mashed potatoes caught beneath his upper lip were keeping him from closing his vowels. You listen to the spiel he’s rehearsing, about a billion-dollar deal, and realize that he wants to arrange it between parties he doesn’t actually know.

Then he pops into view: a bookishly bespectacled Richard Gere bundled up in a cloth cap, camel-hair coat, and muffler, his unbarbered white hair flopping over his right eye, a leather satchel slung awkwardly over his left shoulder. Hope, need, and loneliness are written on his every feature, from the lips that hang open with baffled longing to the little eyes that squint upward in anxious appeal. He is the very image of a “warm Jew” (as someone will soon call him), stuck in the cold place of the movie’s perpetually snowbound Manhattan. When Norman meets with his real contacts, they generally agree to see him on the plazas outside their midtown towers, not inside, and then forget their overcoats, which tends to shorten the conversation. When he accosts prospective contacts during their morning runs in Central Park, they scowl in contempt and flee down the icy paths.

Norman is the story of this merchant of unsought, dubious favors and the one prospect who does not freeze him out: Micha (Lior Ashkenazi), a sleek Israeli official with a sweet tooth and a streak of melancholic self-doubt. Targeted by Norman at a business conference and then pursued through the New York of glass-curtain-wall offices and shop windows—a city ready-made for snooping and stalking—Micha allows the voluble stranger to approach, talk, sidle in, touch his forearm, and finally clutch his shoulder. (Cedar cleverly shoots this action in dumb show, from behind the window at Lanvin, so you needn’t think about Norman’s chances of fooling anyone with his patter; you just see Micha acquiesce.) It’s the most superficial of encounters, after which the two men go back to being isolated in New York: Micha dining at taxpayer expense at a table for one, while Norman appropriates some herring and Ritz crackers from the stock in a synagogue kitchen. But by the evening’s uneventful Chekhovian end, they’re bound by a cell-phone connection and the sound of their tired voices. Micha has recognized that Norman is clingy but well-intentioned—at heart, just a warm Jew. And both men have understood that they’re mirror images: one fretting that he’ll never rise, the other worried that he’s already on his way down.

Yet Micha does not descend. Three years later, at the start of the film’s next chapter, he has become the new prime minister of Israel, rapturously applauded at an AIPAC-like convention attended by every American power Jew that Norman has ever wanted to meet. Norman is there, too, wearing a lanyard badge that was presumably begged, stolen, or acquired at a steep discount. And Micha remembers him. Being the warm type himself, he embraces Norman in full view of the delegates and calls him “my friend.” The action stops momentarily; Cedar literally arrests it so that Norman can wander in a happy daze among the people who now ring him like motionless horses on his own private carousel. When the action grinds back to life, it suddenly accelerates far beyond the earlier pace. For the rest of the movie, Norman will busily improvise intrigue upon teetering intrigue by virtue of his ostensible proximity to Micha, while Micha will effect a similarly jury-rigged and very Norman-like plan for peace in the Middle East.

More satire than comedy, more fable than satire, Norman may remind Cedar’s fans of the continually shifting tone of Footnote, his variously funny, acerbic, and moving film about academic and familial rivalry. That film, too, featured a large-scale performance by Ashkenazi, who is good at both expansive gestures and seething introspection. As Micha, he shows you a greedy, preening gourmand who loves fine chocolate and the chance to chat up the woman who sells it; a dedicated but nervous public servant, who can be tempted by a designer suit but leaps straight out of its trousers when he sees the price; an ambitious politician who sometimes gets tired of himself after a long day and just wants to talk with a harmless Norman; a worldly philosopher who, in his hammiest moments as a political leader (and Ashkenazi’s as an actor), bellows his principle of duplicity, triplicity, quadruplicity in state affairs. He’s going to compromise with everybody, Micha shouts at his inner circle, because the opposite of compromise isn’t integrity—it’s death.

All of these different aspects of Micha are of course one, and they’re also one with Norman’s drive to achieve happiness for himself by first making everyone around him happy, no matter how many lies it takes. He’s the marginally shabby American doppelgänger of Micha, chasing the respect that his counterpart also craves (but has won), offering promises and telling tales just as freely (though Micha has far more ability to make his words stick). It makes all the difference that Cedar and his producer, Oren Moverman, cast Richard Gere as Norman, a role that converts the remaining residue of this actor’s vanity into pathos and forgivable folly. No matter how Gere hunches and cranes his neck, no matter how he holds himself stiff against the assaults on Norman’s dignity, you see beneath the surface someone who knows he won the lottery for good looks. Gere lets just enough memory of that physical grace shine through to make you wonder how Norman has entered late middle age with no assets other than his wits, plus the unshakable conviction that his absence from higher circles must be a mistake.

It’s a pity that he has to be disillusioned on that account. What’s even more painful is that his expansive fantasies are stripped from him in the windowless confines of a bureaucrat’s office—or is it an interrogation room?—where his glowing visions of both himself and the State of Israel are revealed to be no more substantial than the tourism posters tacked mockingly high on the walls. Neon-colored fish dart in the clear water above Norman; an implacable force reaches across the desk. Realpolitik is cold, and so are the mechanics of Cedar’s plot.

But in its spirit, the film is wonderfully, improbably generous—just like its none-too-honest hero. Norman is the fable of a man who desperately wants to be recognized but abandons this modest, wistful goal so that others may thrive. At a time when big names are spelled everywhere on the walls of buildings, Norman is a movie lovingly dedicated to the virtues (sometimes very well hidden) of the small, the compromised, and the anonymous.

ome people—not everyone, of course, but a large enough group, with members around the world—believe that the ultimate form of recognition is an obituary in The New York Times, incontrovertible proof that a life has mattered. If the stiff is famous, the Times obit will be instructive and pleasingly nostalgic, filling in details that you didn’t know and calling up reminiscences from your own life. If the subject is someone previously unknown, the obituary will bring the excitement of discovery. Obits edify, astonish, refresh, console (after all, you’re not the one who’s gone), and reaffirm day by day that individuals still count for something, though some more than others. I know quite a few people—my wife, for example, a lively and sociable person with nothing morbid about her—who cheerfully start each day with the Times obituary page.

Vanessa Gould’s documentary Obit shares some of the virtues of this minor literary form and of the writers who practice it at the Times. Her film believes in curiosity, anecdote, and concision, the detail that encapsulates and the window that opens onto history. Borrowing from accounts published in the Times as well as archival images, Gould entertainingly sums up the achievements of more than a dozen of the departed, while also bringing to life the personalities, opinions, and work habits of another half-dozen people who are with us still: the staff of the Times’s obituary department.

It is one of the few such departments that survive in today’s newspapers—which is odd, in its way, since the genre is arguably more vital than ever. Margalit Fox, who comes across in her interviews as the most willing theorist on the staff and perhaps its most inventive stylist, proposes that obituaries are now free to be “just as swaggering and rollicking as their subjects.” And why not? After the writer has satisfied the minimum requirements—supplying a name, age, and confirmation of the person’s passing—the article should have “next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with the life.”

A similar idea, though given different emphasis, comes from the calm and measured Bruce Weber, who is shown working throughout a single day on the obituary of William P. Wilson, John F. Kennedy’s television consultant for his presidential debate with Richard Nixon. To tell an engaging story, Weber explains, the article will have to teach a little history to Times readers, so he’s taking the risk of writing two paragraphs of narrative about the debate before even mentioning Wilson. The headline, Weber says, will take care of the fact that somebody’s dead, so he needn’t worry about that. All he’s got to do after sitting down at his desk in the morning is to interview the widow and gather sources; make himself an instant expert on a topic he’s never written about before; give his editor, William McDonald, enough detail to present at the Page 1 meeting at 4 pm; and deliver a first-rate finished article by six. Weber goes to the coffee machine a lot.

Insights like these make Obit a remarkably good film about the craft of writing. You learn about news judgment (which is to say, why former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the guy who invented the Slinky both deserved Times obituaries), problems of length (“I don’t have time to write it short”), and the challenge of matching style to substance (Paul Vitello, assigned to memorialize the 1960s advertising executive Dick Rich, mulls over verbal equivalents for the images in his subject’s best-known TV commercials). Problems specific to the genre also figure into the story. On a good day, Weber says, you come to the office and ask, “Who died?” On a bad day, someone as famous as Robin Williams or Prince dies an hour or two before the print edition closes, and because the death is unexpected, the Times has nothing prepared on which to base your article.

Those advance obituaries, more than a thousand of them, are kept with millions of other items in the morgue, which is stored off-site because the sheer weight would “pancake the floors” of the Times Company’s skyscraper. So says Jeff Roth, the sole remaining employee at the morgue and one of the film’s most demonstrative talkers. A slim, 40-ish fellow who puts on a white shirt and tie to work alone among the file cabinets, Roth may say the most of anyone about institutional change at the Times, as the guardian of its yellowing and labyrinthine history. Writers and editors deal with the evolving problems of a digital, 24-hour newsroom; Roth deals with materials that are obsolete but still indispensable, filed in overlapping generations of systems that no one living understands. He sounds perpetually amazed.

I was amazed, too, and often delighted by Obit. Now that I’ve made that recommendation, professional ethics compel me to state that my boss, Katrina vanden Heuvel, is co–executive producer of the film. But I didn’t find that out until the closing credits, so you might say it’s a dead issue.

You might describe it as a counter-séance. A Quiet Passion, the eighth feature-length film by Terence Davies, doesn’t pretend to recall the skeptical spirit of Emily Dickinson to the land of the living but rather projects you into her departed world, which folds itself almost tangibly around this poet of worldly departures. Everything is odd here: the geometric decorum of family gatherings in the parlor, the formal mode of address mixed with epigrammatic banter, the blanketing hush at evening, the endless play of candlelight and shadow, and most of all the behavior of Dickinson herself. She may put you in mind of a wraith, with her elongated frame and painful trembling, but there’s nothing delicate about her: not her refusal to sit in church or kneel in prayer at home, not her crockery-breaking fits of temper, and certainly not her way of thanking the editor of the Springfield Republican for having published her work. When he presents himself at her home, she insists on remaining at the top of the stairs, so she can berate him from on high for having altered her punctuation.1

You cringe at the affront to a man who seems well-meaning enough, if dim; you ache for the fresh wound that Dickinson has now inflicted on her already enfeebled hopes for literary recognition; but you also understand that this bitter complaint over a few dashes and commas is one more instance of the “rigor” that her devoted sister Vinnie admires in her. Dickinson rejected convention in a spirit not of rampaging freedom but of exactness, the better to leave the reader a trail of meticulously selected pebbles and bleached bones that would lead, by a short but deliberately irregular sequence, to revelation. Davies, too, has been exacting throughout his career, refusing himself the easy norms of exposition and transition; but in his best films (such as Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes), he’s practiced a paradoxically liquid rigor in which each epiphany flows lusciously into the next. In his deep love of Dickinson, Davies has now adapted his smooth and coloristic style into something closer to her jagged tactility, so he can touch on the truth of what he calls A Quiet Passion—a title that at first sounds like it belongs on the cover of a less-than-marketable paperback bodice-ripper, but that actually makes a Christ out of Dickinson, who by her suffering and death redeemed all who read.2

Of course, there is no plot here. People who let themselves lapse into cliché may speak of an individual’s life as a story (or, even worse, a journey), but as Psalm 90 reminds us, there’s no more narrative to it than you’d find in a blade of grass. Allow me to recommend, just in passing, the setting of Psalm 90 by Charles Ives, another uncompromising New England artist, whose music Davies has chosen for the end of A Quiet Passion. At the movie’s climax, Dickinson is lowered into the grave, having been accompanied to it by a geometric cortege, Ives’s chilliest orchestral strains, and a soundtrack recitation: “Because I could not stop for Death….” Throughout the rest of the film, while you await this foregone conclusion, you get to see the deaths or distancings of the people Dickinson loves. There’s your “story.” Nothing else happens of any consequence, except for a few brief shots of the poet scratching at papers in the dead of night and stitching the sheets into tiny booklets by day—but that’s everything.3

Part of the mystery behind this everything is how a young woman born into the culture of 1830s Amherst could have made herself into the poet Emily Dickinson. The biographies document an education and social circle that were considerably more ample than Davies allows; but he knows these factors cannot explain the transformation (since others drew on the same resources without becoming geniuses), and so he slashes them away. With the concentration on religious bullying that has characterized his films, he begins with the very young Dickinson at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where in the face of her evangelizing headmistress’s wrath she stands steadfastly alone as the sole self-proclaimed “no-hoper” in her class, confessing neither to an immediate conviction of her sinfulness nor to an aspiration to be saved. Davies does not pretend to show how Dickinson mustered the courage to refuse, in public, demands in which she did not believe. He merely assumes, from the start of the picture, her capacity to say no, then moves on quickly to other moments.4

Played in this early part of the film by Emma Bell, Dickinson seems to differ from her sister Vinnie only in the degree of her candor, her more vivid sensitivity, and her desire to be allowed to write poetry in the wee hours, when she won’t disturb the household and it won’t disturb her. To the question of how this young Emily matures—which is to say, how the lively, clever, and conventionally pretty Emma Bell turns into the intellectually piercing and severe-faced Cynthia Nixon—Davies in effect gives the one-word answer that is faithful to his materialist work: photography.5

Davies re-creates a family portrait-sitting session (and in so doing provides one of the film’s few moments of levity, when the famously overbearing paterfamilias Edward, played by Keith Carradine, barks at the photographer, “I am smiling!”), then dollies in on each image, morphing the subjects one by one into their older selves. As the cliché has it, this is the magic of the movies—but the whole point is that no magic is used. You see only a physical process, which is nevertheless impressive to watch, and which prompts questions—about matters such as the motions of the soul—that are not going to be answered.6

Even Dickinson, whose powers of imagination and insight far surpass those of anyone around her, cannot understand how she becomes the person you see in the later part of the film: someone bitter and reclusive, and so judgmental that she’s apt to provoke quarrels even with her beloved Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle). Part of the reason for the change, surely, is the long-term effect of the constraints imposed on women, which she feels keenly and does not shy from denouncing. Another reason: Her physical maladies wrack her more and more terribly.7

Dickinson’s debilitating fits, filmed and acted with impeccable precision, arouse a natural pity and terror in you; meanwhile, her eloquent attacks on male privilege and female submission elicit an almost automatic assent from a 2017 audience. Emotional money in the bank, you might say, well-earned but not mysterious. And yet, despite whatever skepticism you might share with Dickinson and Davies, there is a residual hint of magic in A Quiet Passion. You find it in the inexplicable circumstance that Davies’s artifice, though blatant, comes to seem less obtrusive as the film goes on, while your engagement with Dickinson’s character grows deeper even as she becomes more off-putting.8

I’d say your acceptance of the artifice is less a matter of habituation—I never did get used to the arch dialogue—than of your coming to feel how thoroughly the film is steeped in Dickinson’s poetry. Early on, for example, when a pious aunt advises Emily not to be afraid of death, you very distinctly hear a fly buzz. Or to take another example: When Emily first holds her newborn nephew (played by the dullest, lumpiest baby the waggish Davies could find), she looks him in the face and coos, “I’m Nobody. Who are you?” As with the passing incidents, so too with the compositions: Davies repeatedly arranges his figures the way Dickinson carves out her stanzas, sculpting the actors into solid, steadily observed groups of two and three.9

As for the way Dickinson becomes increasingly compelling, some credit must go to Davies, who has proved himself over the years to be one of the great directors of actresses, but most is emphatically due to the extraordinary Cynthia Nixon. Like any good performer, Nixon knows how to play a subtext. Unlike all but the very best, she can show you layer upon translucent layer, until her character’s states of mind take on the clarity and complexity of a polyphonic texture.10

When she shouts at the servants, you feel Dickinson’s impatience at their clumsiness, recognize her terror at her own sudden infirmity, and see how she blames herself for being physically weak, all at once. When she dares to put one of her little sewn books into the hands of the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, you sense her deep need for intellectual companionship and respect, mingled with fear of being dismissed, reserves of anger (held ready in case of dismissal), and semi-suppressed sexual longing. Nixon gives as detailed, and yet as unaffected, a performance as you could hope to see, even when the words drop away and her acting is entirely physical. During Dickinson’s final illness, when she’s shaking uncontrollably in bed, it’s undecidable whether Nixon is wearing the expression of someone staring in horror or caught up in ecstasy.11

This is how materialism and doubt may triumph in poetry, and do triumph in A Quiet Passion. You see Nixon’s face framed in the crack of a shadowed door—Dickinson is listening with misgivings to a soiree in the parlor below—and the word “stricken” comes to mind, as if to sum up what you’re seeing and so allow you to move on. But as Davies holds the shot, and Nixon holds the pose, it becomes obvious that those two explanatory syllables fail the facts that are before you: the skin’s pallor, the neck’s cords, the grooves running down either side of the nose, the unblinking eyes that stare into nothing. “Stricken” cannot cover all that. You realize, as you do again and again in A Quiet Passion, that only the particulars matter—the pebbles and bleached bones, laid out (as they are here) in an order that’s made just for them and is just right for this moment.12

So teach us to number our days.13

mong the remarkable people I learned about through Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s documentary Karl Marx City is Dr. Udo Grashoff, a lecturer in modern German history at University College London who has developed a specialty in suicide notes. Early in the film, Epperlein consults this gently understanding man to help interpret the letter, at once casual and strangely formal, that her father sent her in 1999 from his home in Chemnitz (or Karl-Marx-Stadt, as this now-crumbling industrial center of East Germany was known from 1953 through 1990), just before he hanged himself.14

There were other letters too, anonymous ones, which made their way to Epperlein’s mother not long after the suicide, accusing her husband of having been an informer for the Stasi. Karl Marx City documents Epperlein’s return to her birthplace 15 years later, camera crew in tow, to investigate whether this damning allegation was true, and whether it might have had something to do with her father’s death.15

There are many questions to confront, not least of which is whether Epperlein really needed the crew. The Stasi recorded everybody, all the time, so she is able to piece together a disconcertingly complete picture of her childhood using spoiled, overripe color footage dug out of the vast Stasi archive. For explanatory purposes, she also pastes in materials like excerpts from Stasi training films, which illustrate methods for surreptitious shooting in the streets and parks, and surveillance video from an interrogation room. As if to underscore the omnipresence of the Stasi and its informers—and the omnipresent anxiety that everything might be known and no one trusted—Epperlein sometimes shows herself retracing the steps the agents would have taken through the city. You hear sounds recorded covertly in decades past, as Epperlein, wearing professional headphones and a leather coat, openly carries her microphone and recorder through the same snowy, now-deserted plazas and streets.16

You might already know Epperlein’s work from the excellent 2004 Iraq War documentary Gunner Palace that she also made with Michael Tucker. It was, so to speak, a hot documentary, filmed in the midst of combat, but it offered the nuances of wartime surrealism (having been shot, in large measure, in the ruins of a Hussein family mansion) and the unfiltered voices of US soldiers. Karl Marx City is a cool documentary, reflective and self-distanced, despite the urgency of Epperlein’s questions about her father. It begins by asking what she reliably knew about him, then goes on to ask what she knows about herself, what the citizens of the former German Democratic Republic choose to acknowledge or forget, and what people in the rest of the world care to understand or ignore about the GDR, if they ever think of it at all. Ghosts hover in Chemnitz: memories of the dead, like Epperlein’s father, and audiovisual shades of Karl-Marx-Stadt that history has otherwise wiped away. You might say that Epperlein picks up their signals as she trudges about with her microphone. She reminds us that they don’t come from the world beyond, but from ours.17