This year’s release calendar has been so loaded with feature-length wonders, many of which push the boundaries of art form, that even as we head straight into the belly of the “awards season” beast, our usual edict remains intact: Anyone who thinks this has been a bad year for movies simply hasn’t seen enough of them. And there are only more goodies to come. Our list of the best movies of the year so far follows the same basic rules: In order to qualify, a film must have been released in North American theaters for at least a week or on a VOD platform in the same territory. That means we’ve got the usual festival leftovers from last year that finally made their way to audiences, new titles from earlier festivals that have already been released, all alongside a handful of titles that materialized in recent months. It also means that we can’t include movies we’ve already seen and adored that have yet to be released, even if they’re right around the corner, including a number of our favorites from Cannes, Telluride, Venice, TIFF, and NYFF.
Now is the time to catch up, enjoy!
“About Endlessness”
There’s something amusingly dry about the idea of a 76-minute film called “About Endlessness,” but Roy Andersson isn’t joking. Well, he isn’t only joking. A Swedish renegade whose pointillistic dioramas of the human condition are pieced together with drollness in much the same way as George Seurat’s landscapes were painted with dots, Andersson has always been amused by the sheer absurdity of life on Earth. But if even the title of Andersson’s latest feature sounds like a wry gag, it’s also meant to be taken at face value. The least funny and most tender movie that the “Songs from the Second Floor” filmmaker has made since building his own studio with the profits he’d saved from decades of enormously successful commercial work, “About Endlessness” adopts the same qualities of life itself: it’s both short and infinite. It’s over in a heartbeat, and yet it feels like it could go on forever. There are scenes of absurdity, and scenes of loss. There are scenes of pain, and — in a far more pronounced way than in any of Andersson’s previous films — scenes of joy. On a long enough timeline, these various episodes will all be flattened out into the same minuscule size. And yet, even in the moment, Andersson has already rendered them with almost equal importance. Like a stone-faced Scheherazade, Andersson stops as soon as it’s clear that he can outlast us. —DE
“Anne at 13,000 ft.”
The film’s ambiguity is carefully crafted, the result of a collaboration between its director and star. Deragh Campbell, who improvised much of the dialogue over its two-year workshopping and production period, receives a writing credit alongside Kazik Radwanski, who created the role specifically for her. Together, the two generate a highly kinetic character study that refuses to settle on a certain mood or emotional atmosphere. Like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence,” the duo manage to effortlessly sprinkle bizarre moments of humor into the most disturbing emotional conflicts, showing how it’s possible to experience two opposing emotions at once. It’s no small feat to channel the same energy as someone like Rowlands, but the similarities between the great actor and this up-and-comer are astonishing. —Susannah Gruder
“Annette”
Before “Annette” dives into 140-odd minutes of moody songs and swooning tragicomic twists, director Leos Carax takes charge. In a grumbling voiceover, he advises his viewers to “hold your breath until the very end of the show.” It’s exactly the sort of impossible request that makes sense for this mind-blowing musical fantasia: “Annette” doesn’t just take your breath away; it keeps your breath hostage until the credits roll. Combining the energizing compositions of Sparks with Carax’s ever-enigmatic creativity, “Annette” powers through its expressive rock opera conceit with a propulsive Adam Driver at its center. He sings through virtually every scene as if the world depended on it. And for the purposes of this movie, it does: Carax’s first directorial effort that he didn’t write, “Annette” turns on the peculiar balance of the Sparks’ compositions, Carax’s operatic style, and Driver’s deranged performance as a comedian doomed to fail. Sure, there’s also a wooden baby that sings and the occasional cutaway to a melancholic gorilla, but they all exist to support the larger cause.
As a pure experimental ride expressed entirely through song, “Annette” works in fits and starts with the same surreal blend of haunting beauty and dry, absurdist humor that Carax brought to “Holy Motors.” At times, it trades that movie’s cosmic mystery for a blunter narrative arc. Sparks has apparently been trying to apply their winsome songwriting talent to film for decades, at one point even plotting with the late Jacques Tati, but their musical bonafides don’t equate to a cogent script. Still, marvel at these flaws and the appeal of “Annette” comes to life: With a story less enthralling than the spectacular way it unfolds, the movie often exists in conflict with itself, and the messiness is its greatest asset as Carax and his musical companions map out the trajectory of a man marred by the exact same condition. —EK
“Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar”
It seems odd to deem any film an instant cult classic, but “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” is such a giddy outlier, a dense, flawed assemblage of zany humor that people will happily tear into for years to come. Bumps and all, “Barb and Star” is a wholly unexpected combination of “MacGruber,” “Pop Star,” and “Despicable Me” (yes, really) that operates entirely on its own wavelength. Fortunately, most of that wavelength has hysterical results, resulting in an eager-to-please package that tosses off lines designed to inflict maximum comic damage (a gag about “fried bald eagle babies” is impossible to contextualize, but it’s the sort of thing that left this critic gasping for air) before zipping right along to another wacky new set piece. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who both wrote the film and star in it as the eponymous Barb and Star, seem understandably thrilled to bring this nuttiness to life. The pair reportedly cooked up what would become Barb and Star — good-natured BFFs from “Soft Rock, Nebraska” who have never left their small town — while making “Bridesmaids,” first imagining the inseparable duo as a single character (allegedly Maya Rudolph’s character’s mom) who delighted in her seemingly common life. But while that sounds like the sort of thing ripe for cheap jokes and mean jabs, Wiig and Mumolo have an obvious affection for their BFF avatars, and Barb and Star’s fidelity to their bond is the film’s one immutable element. Both a loving ode to friendship, an excuse to learn all about Jamie Dornan’s truly excellent singing ability, and the rare comedy that seems destined to have the same staying power as the otherwise peerless “Bridesmaids.” —KE
“Bo Burnham: Inside”
We know what you’re thinking: a comedy special on a list of the best movies of the year? But look, if you’ve seen “Bo Burnham: Inside,” you know that “comedy special” doesn’t exactly cut it. With its 90-minute running time and freewheeling experimental arc, Burnham has essentially crafted a microbudget movie about the last man on Earth coming to terms with a reality that has already slipped beyond his grasp. Quarantined and disheveled from the first scene, he careens through oddball melodies and monologues about modern times, resulting in a hilarious crisis of consciousness gone wild. How do you craft escapism when escape is no longer an option? Burnham turned the camera on himself. The lanky comedian-turned-filmmaker has been delivering wry musical standup work since his teen years, but the pandemic forced him to reconsider his approach. While “Bo Burnham: Inside” has been billed as a surprise Netflix comedy special from a guy who has made a few them, it’s actually a far stranger and profound feature-length immersion into the anxieties of a year when the very idea of a “comedy special” sounded like a lost cause. The result is more Charlie than Andy Kaufman, as “Inside” becomes less about messing with the audience than plunging them into the contours of Burnham’s conflicted mind, mining brilliant and scathing observations in the process. Burnham wrote, directed, edited, and starred in this minimalist musical fantasia, shot exclusively in his home in Los Angeles over the past year, and the result is an impressive one-man technical feat loaded with surreal twists and dense commentary under the veneer of sophomoric gags. Just above his charming grin lurks an eerie stare, and the ensuing ride lingers between those two extremes, as Burnham comes mighty close to amusing himself to death. He may be conflicted about the world these days, but there’s much to glean from watching him make sense of it. —EK
“Can You Bring It”
If he hadn’t become one of the great modern dance choreographers of the last fifty years, Bill T. Jones could have been a poet. As his often transcendent work makes abundantly clear, the best dance is poetry in motion, its highest aspiration as an art form to use the body to express what language cannot. Still, as evidenced by a rather remarkable speech used to open “Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters,” a moving new documentary about one of his most enduring works, Jones could dance with his words, too. “We are as good as our last performance,” he says in an acceptance speech at the 1989 Bessie Awards, less than a year after his partner Arnie Zane had surrendered to complications from AIDS. “We are all going to die. I am a Black man. I obsess. My mother lives alone. Arnie is dead. The company is with me. I am scared.” Someone in the crowd shouts something incoherent, words of support no doubt, and the arresting tension is pierced with applause. It’s a strong opening that sets a high bar for what’s to follow, and though the film itself can’t fully live up to the frisson of that moment, it captures the emotionality of dance as well as any film could, even finding a few electric moments that reach out and grab the heart. —Jude Dry
“The Card Counter”
What’s riveting about “The Card Counter” — what makes it a fresh riff on Paul Schrader’s usual formula, and broadly absolves it from lacking the transcendent power of a “First Reformed” — is that William Tell (Oscar Isaac) is actually trying to work out a clean answer. He’s trying to take expiation into his own hands and live to enjoy it. The math is more absolute with blackjack than hold ‘em, but a good poker player can look right through the cards, and William is nothing if not a good poker player.
If he can see into someone else’s soul, maybe he can see into his own. And if he can see into his own soul, odds are that he might even be able to fix it from within the purgatory of his own existence before heaven and hell have to get involved. The difference between “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter” is the difference between asking “Will God forgive us?” and “can we forgive ourselves?” It’s not a matter of potentiality, but rather a question of possibility. Schrader’s latest is still baptized in the same religious asceticism that runs through so many of his films, but its lonely man is only focused on the things he can control. —DE
“CODA”
Sundance There’s little surprising about the shape of director Sian Heder’s smash Sundance hit feature: It’s a family drama and a coming-of-age tale that combines familiar beats about finding yourself, breaking free of your family, and making plenty of mistakes along the way into one tear-jerking package. Yet what “CODA” lacks in storytelling originality, it more than makes up for with other touches of ingenuity. Chief among them is that it’s a film that focuses on a deaf family and treats their woes as being just as worthy — and relatable — as innumerable other stories that, at least, initially feel just like it.
As Heder’s film evolves and leans further into the patterns of the genre, that seeming familiarity becomes one of its greatest assets. You may think you know this story, and you probably do. But you’ve never quite seen it like this, with these characters, and with this care paid to an underrepresented portion of the population. In fitting so neatly inside expectations, Heder makes a sterling argument for more films like it — which is to say, movies that focus on under-served characters and performers (all of Heder’s deaf characters are played by deaf actors, the film is subtitled) that still contain massive appeal for everyone. It’s a crowd-pleaser that works its formula well, even as it breaks new ground. Anchored by star-making turn from Emilia Jones as teenage malcontent Ruby Rossi, “CODA” takes its title from Ruby’s lot in life: as the child of deaf adults, her vibrant parents Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur). In fact, Ruby is the only hearing person in her household — her older brother Leo (Daniel Durant) is also deaf — and she’s long served as the Rossis’ hearing proxy to the world. And while the Rossis have mostly avoided being a part of the wider world, their fortunes remain entirely tied up in it and, by extension, in Ruby. —KE
“Days”
Sometimes (explicitly) queer, often (undeniably) male, and always tinged with a post-apocalyptic charge that carries through their happiest moments, Tsai Ming-liang’s films are so drawn to the dark recesses between us that even their titles sound like pleas for connection or laments over what’s been lost. “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone.” “What Time Is It There?” “The Wayward Cloud.” The likes of “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” might linger in the mind for its ASMR design and time-in-a-bottle wistfulness, but such a bittersweet aftertaste follows an experience that’s bound together by a furious tension between the intimate demands of our bodies and the impenetrable distances that isolate us inside of them. The despair percolating beneath “Vive L’Amour” and “Rebels of the Neon God” eventually gave way to the abyssal howl of “Stray Dogs,” which — similar to Béla Tarr’s “The Turin Horse” from two years earlier — was such a voice-killing scream into the void that people naturally assumed its author had nothing else to say. In Tsai’s case, that turned out not to be true; he’s been steadily working in the museum world for the last eight years. Nevertheless, the news that he and Lee had collaborated on another feature — one that would revisit the mysterious neck ailment his now-52-year-old leading man began to suffer on-screen and off during 1997’s “The River” — couldn’t help but seem a bit ominous. How much bleaker would this new project be? What would the specter of death add to a body of work that has always bent over itself as it shambled towards the end? If Béla Tarr announced he’d made another movie at this point, I’d probably assume it was a snuff film. Expectations for Tsai’s latest may not have been quite so grim, but I certainly wasn’t bracing myself for one of the most touching dramas of the year. —DE
“The Disciple”
Northern Indian classical music sounds like nothing other than itself: The jangling of the sitar and the meditational warbling of the improvised vocals known as raga have a profound ancient quality that taps into the mystery of human existence. Ravi Shankar may be the name most closely associated with popularizing such melodies in the West, but the art form (known as Hindustani music) extends well beyond the accomplishments of one man. That’s the hard truth faced by Sharad (real-life musician and acting newcomer Aditya Modak) in Chaitanya Tamhane’s brilliant sophomore drama “The Disciple,” the story of an idealistic young performer who dreams of capturing the magic of a musical traditional that he may lack the talent to achieve himself. In Tamhane’s dreamy, transcendent character study, the undulating raga melodies serve as a transformative portal to self-discovery that places the audiences in the confines of its entrancing power. “The Disciple” follows Tamhane’s stellar first feature, “Court,” which also looked at the complex role of music in Indian society, in that case through the lens of a corrupt judicial system. Here, the music that Sharad adores take on a more personal connotation, as the man contends with the provincial nature of his vocation in a world that waits for no one. Taking cues from his wizened mentor (veteran singer Arun Dravid), Sharad dreams of obtaining high marks as a classical music vocalist, absorbing enthusiasm for the process from his late father. But there’s a reason only an elite few manage to excel at the rhythmic, transcendental wailings of the raga, and it doesn’t take long to see that Sharad might not have the right stuff. “The Disciple” unfolds in slow, melancholic rhythms on par with the music at its center. Set against Mumbai’s bustling cityscape, a backdrop at violent odds with Sharad’s contemplative vocation, the movie follows the character through three distinct eras as he grows older and continues to internalize his frustration. The movie is more about the journey than the destination, with a conclusion that suggests the student never really becomes the teacher when the subject is his own life. Cinema is rarely this relaxing and revelatory all at once. After it was denied the slot of its country’s Oscar submission, “The Disciple” landed quietly on Netflix earlier this year, and the small screen can’t fully encapsulate the sonic wonders it offers up. But it’s a start, and well worth a look. —EK
“El Planeta”
“El Planeta” builds its conflict around a single problem, but holds off on revealing it until the very end. In artist Amalia Ulman’s charming first feature, the writer-director stars as a young creative who returns from London to post-crisis Spain, helping her broke mother contend with destitution after her husband’s death. Mostly, they hang around the seaside city of Gijón throughout an ambling black-and-white mother-daughter comedy steeped in the small details from their grifter lifestyle, shrugging off the looming threat of eviction and maybe something worse.
Think “Tiny Furniture” by way of “Paper Moon”: In a tender and playful riff on the art-imitating-life conceit, Ulman acts opposite her real-life mother, Ale Ulman, an acting novice who nevertheless gives a fun and zany performance as a diva in denial. The pair apparently did endure a bout of homelessness in their time together, and Ulman truly went to London for school. No matter how much the movie departs from the specifics of their experiences — and the way things work out, it’s pretty clear that it does — the real-life bond between the women helps cement the movie in genuine chemistry even as it zigs and zags through a leisurely plot. —EK
“Ema”
An anarchic, liberated, and contagiously alive character study that feels like it was born out of a three-way between “Amélie,” “Oldboy,” and Gaspar Noé before maturing into a force of nature all its own, Pablo Larraín’s “Ema” doesn’t always dance to a clear or recognizable beat, but anybody willing to get on its wavelength will be rewarded with one of the year’s most dynamic and electrifying films. Which isn’t to suggest the movie — Larraín’s first since the one-two punch of “Neruda” and “Jackie” in 2016 — doesn’t grab you from the moment it starts, only that it keeps you on your toes for a little while before you can figure out the steps, and it never lets you take the lead. Or maybe the film’s initial veil of impenetrability would be more accurately likened to the billowing smoke that obfuscates a burning car wreck. At least the identity of the firestarter is never in doubt. Her name is Ema, she’s a Reggaeton dancer in her late twenties, and she’s first introduced walking through the pre-dawn streets of Valparaiso with a flamethrower strapped to her back. You’re drawn to her right away, and not just because gasoline is leaking down her back. It’s the inverted tidal wave of bleached-blonde hair; the leopard-print belly shirt; the hawk-like hunger (for we-don’t-know-what) that makes everyone she looks at seem like prey. It’s like every other person on Earth is sleeping, and she’s out there blazing her own trail. —DE
“The French Dispatch”
This charming sketchbook of stories about American expatriates in France delivers a welcome salute to storytelling as a way to make sense of the world. A freewheeling three-part salute to old-school journalism in general and The New Yorker in particular, the movie works in fits and starts, swapping narrative cohesion for charming small doses of wit and wonder about odd people and places worth your time.
The result is an endearing and liberated explosion of Andersonian aesthetics that doesn’t always cohere into a satisfying package, but never slows down long enough to lose its engrossing appeal, and always retains its purpose. Closer to a French New Wave experiment than the more controlled ensemble stories in his repertoire, “The French Dispatch” is akin to Wes Anderson inviting audiences into his laboratory as he mines for gold from real material, and fuses it with his homegrown artistry. —EK
“The Green Knight”
Courtesy of A24 A mystical and enthralling medieval coming-of-age story in which King Arthur’s overeager adult nephew learns that the world is weirder and more complicated than he ever thought possible, “The Green Knight” is an intimate epic told with the self-conviction that its hero struggles to find at every turn. Stoned out of its mind and shot with a genre-tweaking mastery that should make John Boorman proud, it’s also the rare movie that knows exactly what it is, which is an even rarer movie that’s perfectly comfortable not knowing exactly what it is. The surreal genius of David Lowery’s “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance by anonymous” (to quote the on-screen text) is that it fully embraces the unresolved nature of its 14th century source material, contradictory interpretations of which have coexisted in relative harmony for more than half a millennium. Is it a paganistic tale about the fall of man, or is it a Christ-like quest about the hope for salvation? Does it bow to chivalry as a noble bulwark against man’s true nature, or does it laugh at the idea that a knight’s code would ever be a sound defense against his deeper urges? Is it a misogynistic poem about manipulative witches, or a proto-feminist ode to women’s power over men?
To all these questions and more, Lowery rousingly answers “yes!” And yet what makes “The Green Knight” grow in your mind (like moss; like rot) for days after watching it is that Lowery never equivocates at any point along Sir Gawain’s journey from the Round Table to the forest citadel where his fate awaits. Instead, he pulls tight on the tangled knots that have bound this saga to our collective imagination for so many centuries, and braids them all into a timeless fantasy about the struggle to make sense of an irreconcilable world. Hypnotic from its fiery start to its gut-punch of a finale and polished with a hint of heavy metal that makes the whole thing shimmer in the darkness like a black light poster in the basement of your friend’s parents’ house. —DE
“In the Heights”
So exuberant and full of life that it would probably convince you the movies were back even if they hadn’t gone anywhere, “In the Heights” is the kind of electrifying theatrical experience that people have been waxing nostalgic about ever since the pandemic began — the kind that it almost seemed like we might never get to enjoy again. Seeing this massive, guileless, heartfelt piece of Hollywood entertainment on the big screen is like coming home after a long year in exile only to find that it’s still there, and maybe even better than you remembered. In that sense, Jon M. Chu’s super-glossy adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s other Broadway smash lands with equal parts rapture and relief. If only anyone had gone to see it. Despite the Pro Bowl team of Monday morning quarterbacks who were eager to explain what happened, the box office failure of “In the Heights” remains the year’s biggest head-scratcher. But some movies are simply too full of life to fade away after a few bleak weekends, and Chu’s full-throated (if controversially incomplete) celebration of Washington Heights’ Latinx community is such a propulsive ode to “a people on the move” that it makes you feel like its characters are dreaming with their eyes open. It’s also the rare bomb that deserves to produce at least three genuine movie stars, as Anthony Ramos, Melissa Barrera, and Corey Hawkins are so damn radiant that you’d swear Cassiopeia shines over Washington Heights after all. —DE
“Judas and the Black Messiah”
Warner Bros/Everett Collection
Fred Hampton is looking for revolutionaries. William O’Neal is trying to stay out of prison. In Shaka King’s vivid “Judas and the Black Messiah, these seemingly very different men will be set on a terrible collision course for each other. One part Hampton biopic, one part unnerving portion of American (and all-too-recent) history, King’s drama is a nuanced portrait of a people, a place, and a betrayal that has never before received such a full telling. Bolstered by major performances by eventual Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya (as Hampton, the visionary chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late ’60s) and Oscar nominee Lakeith Stanfield (as O’Neal, an FBI informant who infiltrated the BPP and Hampton’s inner circle), “Judas and the Black Messiah” makes the Hampton saga feel as urgent — and tragic — as ever. King, directing only his second feature film, deftly handles the complex script he co-wrote with Will Berson from a story by the Lucas brothers, Keith and Kenneth, one that layers time, place, perspective, and mood. At every turn, “Judas and the Black Messiah” doesn’t just allow the space to consider the motivations of both its primary characters, but actively seeks out those shades of gray. Fred is a blazing visionary who routinely calls for nothing less than a total overthrow of American politics, but he’s also a tender soul who gets skittish around the girl he likes and is the first person to show up to comfort a grieving mother. William is a rat and a snitch, the kind of guy who revels in the spoils his ill deeds earn him, but also demands justice for a fallen brother. There are no easy answers here, but that only makes it feel all the more real. —KE
“The Killing of Two Lovers”
With a movie called “The Killing of Two Lovers,” one might know what to expect from the start, but Robert Machoian’s gripping thriller plays off the prediction of its title at every riveting moment. David (a disheveled Clayne Crawford) is already at wit’s end as the movie begins, hovering over his estranged wife (Spideh Moafi) and her new boyfriend as they sleep in their small-town Utah home. A gun sits in his sweaty hand, but he has yet to pull the trigger. From that unnerving start, the movie drifts through David’s fragile existence, as he makes repeated attempts to reconnect with the love of his life and their four children, juggling his simmering rage with the semblance of sanity still percolating in his head. This material could turn melodramatic at any moment, but Crawford’s jittery performance and Machoian’s naturalistic style joins forces with an ominous sound design that brings the fragility of its protagonist’s mindset to life. The result is a fresh and bracing new look at the dissolution of the American family that redefines edge-of-your-seat filmmaking through the sheer talent on display at every moment. —EK
“Moffie”
There is no more delicious agony than the one felt when you’re sitting millimeters from your crush, wondering who’s going to make the first move, or if someone will at all. That unbearable, painful erotic tension is more or less the sustained mood of Oliver Hermanus’ shimmering and sensual military drama “Moffie,” which is easily the best movie about gay male repression since “God’s Own Country.” Set in 1981 South Africa at the apex of the South African Border War, the film’s story of gay unrequited desire turns out to be a casing for something far more lethal in its marrow.
“Moffie” is Afrikaans slang for “faggot,” and the film, which is based on André Carl van der Merwe’s autobiographical novel of the same name, attempts a bold gesture in reclaiming epithet as an emblem of power. It’s 1981, South Africa, which means it’s not okay to be a “moffie”; effeminacy is a sign of weakness, and being gay is also illegal. It’s also a moment of compulsory military conscription that all (white) boys over the age of 16 must endure, and so that means, as the film begins, Nicholas Van de Swart (Kai Luke Brummer) is readying to ship off to defend colonized land. On its face, the war is between the white minority government and Angola, whose Communism the South African Defense Force wants to stop from spreading; but really, the atrocities as seen inflicted in this movie are governed by the power-seeking regime of Apartheid, and not any real threat. —Ryan Lattanzio
“Mogul Mowgli”
Film Forum Riz Ahmed has his musical career derailed by the sudden onset of a degenerative disease. The basic premise sounds familiar — the actor plays a similar role in the Oscar-nominated “Sound of Metal” — but “Mogul Mowgli” is a wildly different beast, thanks to both its raw aesthetic approach, and its surreal, occasionally hilarious magnification of diaspora anxieties. Ahmed, who co-wrote the film with director Bassam Tariq, plays a late-blooming, London-born Pakistani rapper with a focus on identity. Once his career takes off in New York, an autoimmune disease leaves him unable to walk, let alone attend his breakout European tour, and before long, it sends him tumbling down a rabbit-hole of delirium. Zed’s physical battle coincides with his first trip home in years, and the gap in generational POV is readily apparent. On its surface, it reads like a paint-by-numbers immigrant/first gen culture clash, but the film gets to the root of this familial disconnect in a unique way, revealing a phantasmagorical journey into Zed’s fractured psyche, as a man caught in a simmering culture war with himself. —Siddhant Adlakha
“Passing”
In the mid-1920s, budding writer Nella Larsen set her eyes on joining the ranks of the rising “New Negro” writers spilling out of the Harlem Renaissance like Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and their leader and mentor Alain Locke. The Chicago native even relocated from New Jersey to Harlem to better place herself — and her husband, trailblazing physicist Elmer Imes— in the heart of the cultural action. While Larsen has not yet enjoyed the full recognition of her contemporaries, she produced two remarkable novels that continue to enthrall readers. The best known of the pair is “Passing,” a complex examination of race and sexuality set against the backdrop of the same ’20s-era Harlem that Larsen was so keen to be part of.
The book, like its predecessor “Quicksand,” is run through with details culled from Larsen’s own life, including her experiences as a mixed-race woman in a time of heightened racial division. It’s a calling-card work, and in first-time director Rebecca Hall’s capable hands, “Passing” becomes a similarly seminal feature film, as beautiful and bruising and knotty as the novel that inspired it. Like Larsen, Hall hails from a mixed background, and her own experiences with racial presentation and expectation help root a complicated story that resists any and all hammy or heavy-handed twists. —KE
“The Rescue”
“The Rescue” is first and foremost a riveting, immersive, stomach-in-your-throat documentary about the youth soccer team who were trapped deep within a flooded cave in Northern Thailand during the summer of 2018. “Free Solo” filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin — further cementing their reputation as rock stars of the extreme non-fiction cinema scene with their most absorbing and ingeniously crafted stress-fest to date — so intimately embed us with the ragtag team of cave divers who attempted the impossible that we feel worthy of a medal just for watching them do it. And yet, the documentary’s ample suspense is never so overwhelming that it obscures this story’s poignant sentiment, nor is the selfless heroism on display so overwrought that it washes away the bittersweet aftertaste “The Rescue” leaves behind. Yes, Vasarhelyi and Chin have cobbled together a true life men-on-a-mission movie intense enough that even Michael Bay and Peter Berg should be able to recognize that no mega-budget dramatization could match up to it. But “The Rescue” ultimately isn’t as fraught a story of people coming together to save 13 strangers from certain death as it is one about why people can’t be moved to save 130 million strangers from a similar fate. It’s a portrait of incredible generosity that leaves behind a visceral understanding of where that generosity ends. —DE
“Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain”
Focus Features From the early days of his breakthrough exposé “Kitchen Confidential” through the TV adventures of “No Reservations” that ended with his suicide, Anthony Bourdain lived hard and fast to explore the world without an iota of bullshit. On camera, his punk rock attitude complemented his baritone declarations at every turn, and fueled globe-trotting journeys that wrestled unfamiliar cultures into intimate experiences. His abrupt suicide in 2018, in the midst of filming a new episode in northeastern France, had a terrible kind of logic to it because Bourdain’s uncompromising spirit meant that he would always have the last word.
All of which creates intimidating expectations for “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” documentarian Morgan Neville’s enthralling deep-dive into the mystique of a man so keen on exploring and explaining the world around him that he barely had time to explore himself. With its dense assemblage of archival materials and candid talking heads, “Roadrunner” gets the job done, yielding a tough, infuriating tribute to Bourdain’s ineffable genius and the tragic inclinations that came out of it. “Roadrunner” doesn’t match the brilliance of watching Bourdain do his work, though Neville has assembled an emotional investigation into the toll of his career. If you felt like you knew Bourdain from his TV presence, “Roadrunner” confirms it: He put everything he had onscreen to the detriment of everything — and everyone — else in his life. And yet no camera could capture the turmoil he suffered through it all, as he put himself on display while endangering his own sustainability. —EK
“Saint Maud”
An unholy cross between “First Reformed” and “The Exorcist,” Rose Glass’ taut and trembling “Saint Maud” transmutes a young woman’s spiritual crisis into such a refined story of body horror that watching it almost feels like a religious experience. A palliative care nurse in a dreary town somewhere along the British coast, the intensely devout Maud (a divine Morfydd Clark) is doing her best to seal the area around her soul. That seems to be one hell of a struggle. Soft-spoken but vibrating with serial killer intensity, Maud seldom opens her mouth when she’s not talking to God inside her acetic little apartment, and reminding her lord and savior that she was meant for something greater. Maud’s bitter new patient (Jennifer Ehle) doesn’t, uh, share quite the same faith. Like most secular films about the fervor of devout religious faith, Glass’ severe and wickedly crafted debut feature is wary of its protagonist’s conviction; “Saint Maud” isn’t in a hurry to define its terms, but there’s no mistaking that Maud is a horror movie unto herself. She’s like if the alien from “Under the Skin” disguised herself as a nun. Is it really possible that one of those voices belongs to God? Will Maud be granted a ticket to heaven if she can save her patient’s soul? Glass refuses to hedge her bets. In her own way, the filmmaker is as much of a hardliner as her heroine, and “Saint Maud” is all the more terrifying for how it refuses to back down from its truth. —DE
“The Souvenir Part II”
A24
An extraordinary work of meta-fiction which continues where the previous film left off, and subverts the fastidiousness of its construction to illuminate why Hogg felt the need to make it in the first place. As vulnerable as its predecessor and textured with the same velvet sense of becoming, “Part II” adds new layers of depth and distance to the looking glass of Hogg’s self-reflection, as it follows Julie through the fraught process of making her graduation film… a short which just so happens to be the tragic story of a 25-year-old London girl’s relationship with an older heroic addict. Not only is the set in Julie’s film virtually identical to the apartment from “The Souvenir,” it is the apartment from “The Souvenir,” only this time the camera pulls back to reveal the airplane hanger that surrounds it. In essence, Hogg is making a movie about her younger self making a movie about her younger self’s worst heartbreak, which is effectively a remake of the previous movie that Hogg made (the press notes adroitly refer to “Part II” as “a deconstruction of a reconstruction”). And while the view through that infinity mirror of romantic dramas isn’t nearly as confusing as it might sound on paper, or at all, it also further complicates itself in dazzling fashion by the end, as slavish re-creation gives way to a richer synthesis of memory and imagination. —DE
“Stop and Go”
The only surprising thing about Mallory Everton and Stephen Meek’s “Stop and Go,” a breathless road trip comedy that’s silly in the face of death and upends expectations at such a fast and furious rate that you eventually learn to stop having any. Co-written by Everton and her longtime best friend Whitney Call (two BYU grads who honed their craft on the Mormon college’s sketch comedy show, “Studio C”), “Stop and Go” doesn’t start on an especially promising note, as its blitz of an opening scene — set at a crowded pre-COVID party where people are talking in each other’s faces and sticking their grubby hands into shared bowls of popcorn — suggests that we’re in for an unusually manic riff on the kind of “take it or leave it” indie fare that’s come out of the pandemic so far. Pink-haired elementary school teacher Jamie Jerikovic (Call) sits across from her blonde sister Blake (Everton) as they rattle off their high-flying plans for the next year, the dialogue ping-ponging between the two girls like they just snorted Preston Sturges’ ashes, if nothing else. We’re going to Rome. And Coachella. And Disneyland with Nana.” Life is great. The world is their oyster. “Tom Hanks is happy.” Freeze-frame. Record scratch. Cut to: March 30, when 50,000 cases have already been diagnosed in America and the country’s biggest TV star is a 79-year-old doctor from Brooklyn. —DE
“The Summer of Soul (Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)”
A pulsating panorama of “Black, beautiful, proud” people, “Summer of Soul (Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” is a joyous and welcome addition to the documentary subgenre of rock festivals. But this one, which marks the directorial debut of The Roots drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, comes with a most unfortunate history: Its film reels were buried in a basement for 50 years, largely unseen, until now. Seething through the entire documentary, against the backdrop of a racially turbulent 1960s, is an insistence on a new kind of racial pride and unity across the diaspora, which infuses “Summer” with an honesty and realism. It’s explained that attendees distrusted the NYPD to the point of hiring the Black Panthers to safeguard the festival, anticipating Black Lives Matter events decades down the line. Questlove and editor Joshua L. Pearson lace together footage of stage performances with history lessons (Motown, gospel music, the evolution of Black style, the concept of a common struggle among Black people worldwide), tying it all together with endearing recollections of the single day in 1969 by those who were there. The result fans the flames of Black consciousness. It’s a demonstrated feeling of pride that represents Black salvation, most movingly evident when Nina Simone, the “High Priestess of Soul,” takes the stage and performs “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” — a love letter to the next generation and a kind of how-to manual. —Tambay Obenson
“Sweat”
There are some movie characters who take their time to cement themselves onscreen, but Sylwia Zajac (Magdalena Kolesnik), the celebrity workout instructor and social media fiend at the heart of “Sweat,” establishes herself in a matter of seconds. Speeding through a rapid-fire workout routine in the zippy opening sequence of director Magnus von Horn’s taut and emotional character study, Sylwia wears a frozen grin as she moves through an energetic physical routine for a boisterous crowd as the camera swoops around her. There’s an inherent sensuality to Sylwia’s breathless assemblage of planks and pushups, but the balletic display buries the essence of the person beneath the surface. Her face tells a different story, with wide eyes hinting at the anxious, fragile human she’s struggling to contain for the cameras. “Sweat” evaluates that struggle as it pushes Sylwia to a breaking point. The most intense look at a social media-obsessed loner since “Eighth Grade,” Swedish director Von Horn’s Polish-language feature finds its character wrestling with the nature of her popularity, until she’s forced to confront the disconnect between her public and personal existence in vivid detail. A dazzling figure who thrives on sharing her beauty with the world, Sylwia has boxed herself into a superficial universe of her own design. —EK
“Test Pattern”
Kino Lorber First-time feature filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford squeezes a lot out of 82 minutes. In “Test Pattern,” a perceptive and often quite painful examination of sexual assault, relationship dynamics, racial divides, and the corrosive power of violence, the writer and director mines a dizzying amount of topical issues, tying them all up as a compelling two-hander to boot. Despite the density of their subject, Ford avoids heavy-handed platitudes and dramatic tropes, instead relying on a strong script and a pair of sneakily powerful performances from stars Brittany S. Hall and Will Brill. Weaving back and forth in time, “Test Pattern” opens on the incident that will drive the bulk of the drama’s action: a woozy Renesha (Hall), still somehow managing to sit upright on a bed, a glass of water threatening to tip out of her hand. She’s not alone, and when Mike (Drew Fuller) comes into frame, Renesha’s dulled senses might not instantly realize the threat, but Ford’s invasive lensing of the interaction instantly puts the audience on alert. The discomfort of that scene will stay with both Renesha and the audience, as “Test Pattern” takes us through the events that led to the encounter, and everything that came after. The next morning, Renesha and her boyfriend Evan (Brill) motor around Austin in search of a rape kit (like “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “Test Pattern” is a sterling reminder that many female-centric health care is often impossible to obtain), the film makes a sly transition into a drama less about Renesha’s personal trauma, than a wider-ranging look at the absolute dehumanization that seems to accompany bureaucratic matters. There are many moments in “Test Pattern” that might inspire rage in its audience, but none so affecting as the repeated lack of concern that follows a request for a rape kit. The person in need of it, who requires the minimum of care and compassion, rarely gets that. —KE
“Titane”
Following the cannibalistic “Raw” with another ravenous film that pushes her fascination with the hunger and malleability of human flesh to even further extremes, Julia Ducournau has made good on the promise of her debut and then some. Whatever you’re willing to take from it, there’s no denying that “Titane” is the work of a demented visionary in full command of her wild mind; a shimmering aria of fire and metal that introduces itself as the psychopathic lovechild of David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” before shapeshifting into a modern fable about how badly people just need someone to take care of them and vice-versa. During the first half of the film, it’s hard to tell if you’re watching the most fucked up movie ever made about the idea of found family, or the sweetest movie ever made about a serial killer who has sex with a car, poses as the adult version of a local boy who went missing a decade earlier, and then promptly moves in with the kid’s still-grieving father. During the second half, it becomes obvious that it’s both — that somehow it couldn’t be one without the other. —DE
“There Is No Evil”
“There Is No Evil” spends 30 minutes establishing its premise, and another two hours taking it in surprising new directions. Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s brilliant anthology feature, which won the Golden Bear at the 2020 Berlinale before finally opening in North American this year, moves in so many unexpected directions that it remains impossible to pin down until the credits roll. The movie unfolds across four stories about military men tasked with executions as they grapple with their options, contend with the fallout, and witness the impact it has on the people closest to them. Rasoulof, who has been barred from leaving his country since 2017, has made an absorbing ride defined by the paradoxes of its people. Nobody in “There Is No Evil” has it easy: There’s no simple moral code when every possible option leads to a point of no return. —EK
“The World to Come”
Bleecker Street As coldly drawn as an atlas yet no less capable of enflaming the imagination, Mona Fastvold’s “The World to Come” is a hard and brittle period love story that thaws into something much warmer — what its hyper-literate heroine would call “astonishment and joy” — as a merciless 19th-century winter blushes into a most unexpected spring. The story is set in upstate New York circa 1856, where Abigail (Katherine Waterston) mourns the daughter who was taken by diphtheria a few months prior, and journals about a world that feels barren in the young girl’s absence. “With little pride and less hope,” she writes, “we begin the new year.” And what a new year it turns out to be. It starts with new neighbors, including the comely Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) and her sulking husband (Christopher Abbott). It blooms with new memories. And it shudders with the tectonic aftershocks of a woman who — with no means of escaping her nook-like place in the world — dares to remap herself. Fastvold’s knockout may be so withholding that other “restrained” lesbian romances seem as if they’re sky-writing their emotions by comparison, but “The World to Come” so masterfully entwines the furtive eroticism of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” with the kerosene ache of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” that it finds its own way to convey the sweet vertigo of falling in love. —DE
“Zola”
If the evolution of creativity in the 21st century means that Twitter feeds can fuel feature-length adaptations, “Zola” is a terrific place to start. Director Janicza Bravo’s zany road trip comedy about a pair of strippers on a rambunctious 48-hour Florida adventure embodies its ludicrous source while jazzing it up with relentless cinematic beats. Bravo, who co-wrote the movie with “Slave Play” breakout Jeremy O. Harris, applies the surreal and edgy sensibilities of her unsettling dark comic short “Gregory Go Boom” and the similarly outré “Lemon” to another jittery look at anxious people driven to self-destructive extremes. This time, their antics result in a rambunctious crowdpleaser made all the more compelling because it’s true. Well, maybe. In October 2015, Detroit-based stripper A’ziah “Zola” King unleashed 144 tweets chronicling her madcap journey with new pal Jessica, who invited her on a quick jaunt down south to hit the clubs. In King’s account, the impulsive odyssey took an oddball turn when Jessica picked her up with her boyfriend and pimp in tow, as the ensuing trip eventually involved prostitution, gunfights, and even a ridiculous suicide attempt. Though aspects of that drama were embellished, “Zola” embraces the opportunity to exist within their confines, beginning with its title character (a terrific Taylour Paige) gazing at a mirror as she recites the immortal tweet that kicked things off: “You wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” —EK Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
