Join us as we discuss the horrors of late capitalism and how this acquisition might hasten the slow decline of the theatrical experience.

Thankfully, we’ve got more than a decade worth of experience doing this and we basked in a bunch of great movies all the live long year.

Find out which topped our list and along the way enjoy a deep, serpentine discussion about the cinema that stood out and left an impression.

Timeline

00:00 Introduction and New Year Greetings
01:23 Reflecting on the Year in Movies
09:54 Favorite Beverages and Listener Shoutouts
13:39 Diving into the Best Movies of the Year
14:01 Unexpected Movie Highlights
28:24 Breaking Down Cynicism in French New Wave Cinema
29:32 Exploring Unconventional Films and Performances
30:10 Debating the Merits of After the Hunt and Bugonia
37:45 The Polarizing Life of Chuck and Its Unique Appeal
40:49 Celebrating Genuine and Earnest Storytelling
42:29 Top Four Films of the Year: An Overview
59:42 Leo’s Versatility and Performance in One Battle After Another
01:01:59 The Propulsive Nature of One Battle After Another
01:03:50 Sean Penn’s Unbelievable Performance
01:05:17 Benicio Del Toro vs. Sean Penn: Best Supporting Actor Debate
01:10:34 Ryan Coogler’s Sinners: A Box Office Hit
01:18:12 Michael B. Jordan’s Dual Role and Performance
01:27:55 The Joy of Cinema and Final Thoughts

New domain, who dis?

Yes, if you clicked through the email, you have probably noticed that In Reel Deep has a new resting place. Steve and I got tired of paying for two domains, but we haven’t lost our zeal for cinema or listmaking.

So, here we are, with another top 10 list—our 12th together if we’ve got the count right. It was a pretty amazing year for the watchers, even if the bean-counters tell us things are increasingly bleak for the industry as a whole. Here are 16 films we loved from the year that was.

The Top Four

Black Bag

Andrew Johnson: One thing that happens a few times a year right now if you’re a middle-aged cinephile, is that you watch a movie and are reminded they barely make anything explicitly and exclusively for adults anymore. Black Bag was one of those reminders. It might even be the rarest variety, for surely we get 10 or 20 adult comedies for every erotic thriller. Fewer still are the erotic thrillers that are actually good, as Black Bag is. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are the biggest reasons for this, but it’s not just the sexual tension between them that accounts for it all. It’s the perfectly manicured and tight-fitting suits and cocktail dresses, the hot and cold tones of their home and the office, respectively, and terseness with which they are able to express fierceness without a voice ever being raised. The sexy vibe is the thing—one that leaves you thinking of a lot of other similar movies with a spy veneer that forgot those vibes and, in so doing, suffered.

Steve Cimino: Andrew mentioned Fassbender and Blanchett, and it’s delightful watching Fassy be a devoted Wife Guy. But Black Bag is really a six-hander; you’ve got Tom Burke, who is quietly having quite a moment with this and Furiosa. You’ve got Marisa Abela, who is fantastic on HBO’s Industry and a huge amount of fun here as well. And you’ve got the always reliable Naomie Harris and the unhealthily handsome Regé-Jean Page. When Pierce Brosnan is the weak link, you’re doing something right. Thank god Steven Soderbergh un-retired and—as Andrew said—continues to make high-end movies for grownups.

Marty Supreme

AJ: Timothee Chalamet’s Marty Mauser is a manic inversion of the Walter White types that have dominated television and movies for two decades. His deep flaws are immediately apparent. He happily admits that he is out for himself, and will cut just about any corner or screw over just about anyone to make his name. But by the end of Marty Supreme he is overcome by the wreckage left in his wake. In other words, director Josh Safdie made one that celebrates the try-hards. Marty Mauser is an asshole, but he isn’t cynical or ironically detached, or working through some private shame about who he is. He is, to put it another way, genuine even as he lies and fucks his way around Manhattan, London, and, finally, Japan. To put it another way still, he is a breath of fresh air. It’s quite something to make a statement about authenticity through a character that is defined as much by his dishonesty as by the way he plays ping pong.

SC: I think Uncut Gems is a masterpiece, and Marty Supreme is not quite Uncut Gems. It’s Josh Safdie grafting his anxiety-inducing, shithead-centric style onto a sports film, albeit with a scene where concentration camp occupants lick honey off of one of their own. Chalamet throws himself into the titular role with his usual vigor and doesn’t shy away from the annoying side of being a self-centered force of nature. It’s also clear that Josh got custody of the Safdie weirdos in the divorce; you can have The Rock and Emily Blunt, Benny, we’ll take George “The Iceman” Gervin and (sigh) Kevin O’Leary. Shave 20 minutes and this rises to the five-star level.

One Battle After Another

AJ: I’m going to sidestep the roiling debate about where this film might fit in the 21st-century canon—overhyped, underhyped, masterpiece, whatever—and instead focus on what I think will always land about this film even when this particular political moment passes. For me, that is the paranoia and exhaustion of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson—a guy who has walked away from his notions of changing the world to instead devote himself to raising a decent human. In most ways, I am nothing like Bob Ferguson, but I do understand how precious a child you have raised in to a semi-competent human is—how much you want for them and what you’d be willing to do to secure and protect their chance at a chance. We’ve all been through a lot, us parents, but we all have a lot more get through, and director Paul Thomas Anderson gets that perfectly here.

SC: And I will not sidestep anything; this is a modern classic, a truly propulsive motion picture that speaks to the moment and entertains at the same time. The way Jonny Greenwood’s score undercuts the intensity just enough, the incredible performances by almost everyone but especially James Raterman as Greg Bovino Jr., and of course the grand finale drive through the mountains that made everyone realize there were new ways to shoot a car chase. Paul Thomas Anderson has long been a director for film boys (and girls!) whose movies often broke into the zeitgeist long after their release (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, even Phantom Thread). But now is his time and place, and he’ll deserve all the little gold men he racks up on March 15.

Sinners

AJ: At this point, we have to show up whenever Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan are together again. Sinners gives us twice the Jordan in that sense, with him cast as twin brothers, and perhaps that multiplying effect is the best way to interpret and absorb this film, which is at once about vampires and the blues and the long legacy of race relations in the Jim Crow South that extend to the here and now. Sinners is well in keeping with Coogler’s quite accessible sensibilities. It is, after all, another genre flick, following on from Creed and Black Panther. At the same time, this is the most ambitious of the bunch. It swings bigger thematically than anything he has done since Fruitvale Station, while managing to be just as fun as his more mainstream fare.

SC: Just an incredible theater watch. All the music, the extended history-spanning dance sequence, Jack O’Connell and his vampire friends doing an Irish jig in between hunting their victims. Andrew and I love Creed and think Michael B. should’ve been nominated years ago, but it’s fitting that he and Coogler break through in the same year. And let’s hear it for Delroy Lindo, another actor we love who deserved a nomination (if not a win) for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. Now he finally has one, in somewhat of a surprise, for a true phenomenon that is unapologetically Black but truly spoke to everyone. Nobody does that quite like Coogler, capturing his own experience and his research into Black history and translating it into scintillating moviemaking. He won’t win Best Director, but he’s undoubtedly one of our best.

The Best of the Rest

28 Years Later

AJ: In 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle terrified us well before a speedy zombie flashed on screen by presenting a plausible vision of what complete societal collapse might look like, and how quickly it could come about. There is Cillian Murphy caught on the surveillance cameras still in central London, the wide shots displaying both the deafening silence of a suddenly empty city and the pace at which it happened, what with the crashed cars and the piles of barely rotting trash that remain. Civilization always hangs by a thread. 28 Years Later arrives as a sort-of mirror image of this. It switches a grainy, dawn-of-digital feel for something more pastoral, idyllic, natural, and creepily tradwife. This vibe is undercut by the story that unfolds, and the plot is a key juxtaposition because as safe as things might look, reality inevitably overwhelms. Lindisfarne—connected to the mainland of the United Kingdom only by a footbridge that can be crossed only at low tide—looks like the ideal place to shut out the world and ride out a long storm. But this delusion is a grave error. There is nowhere that is safe forever from an existential threat. Avoiding it is ultimately impossible and makes you more vulnerable in the process. Yet again, this is a frightening vision of the future—one that tells us that our problems don’t end with a Black Swan event. They are just beginning. Sounds familiar.

After the Hunt

AJ: For most of its runtime, After the Hunt is carried, clumsily, by its sterling cast—Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ayo Edebiri, and an elderly stateswoman-like Julia Roberts. It is a melodrama, but a high-gloss one set against the backdrop of the racial and gender politics of the late 2010s, which is all to say it holds your attention. Its final scene takes it to another level. Roberts and Edibiri are five years’ removed from the melodrama that turned them in to adversaries at Yale. They meet up for a drink, and it quickly becomes clear that both have benefitted materially from what seemed at the time to be certain personal and professional ruin. They exchange genuine pleasantries—a jarring development given what has occurred between them—and in so doing reveal a deep, dark, disturbing cynicism. Clumsy as it all is, Luca Guadagnino is making a statement here about the (ongoing) damage done by elites. Really, it is an indictment, and a damning one at that.

Blue Moon

SC: This felt like “the little movie that could” when I saw it and now it has two Oscar nominations, for screenplay and Ethan Hawke’s incredible performance. I have never seen Oklahoma! and have very little knowledge of musical theater, but I love Hawke and I like Richard Linklater and—even though I’ve seen very few actual plays—I love movies that are framed like them. Hawke’s Lorenz Hart is one of the most endearing sad sacks you’ve ever met; you can feel the desperation in all his witty rejoinders, in the way he hopelessly stares at Margaret Qualley’s Elizabeth as she’s going on about her love life, which he claims to want to be a part of despite clearly being a semi-closeted gay man. All this, plus Bobby Cannvale hangin’ behind the bar serving drinks and bantering with Hart in between soul-crushing conversations; cue the Al Pacino “what a picture” meme.

Bugonia

AJ: One way to explain why so many of the worst of the worst people in this country—and by that I mean tech CEOs—are so obsessed with jumping in rockets and leaving the planet is that they might be literal aliens. They certainly lack humanity. Anyway, director Yorgos Lanthimos makes that notion quite literal in Bugonia, although he doesn’t really reveal it until the very end. I found that revelation to be a bit of a pulled punch, but in the end it didn’t really take away from the sociopathic desperation of Emma Stone or the pathetic, galaxy-brain rantings of a grief-stricken Jesse Plemons. The performances of these two make this one the year’s best, no matter what you think of that ending.

Highest 2 Lowest

AJ: No need to overcomplicate the analysis here: Spike Lee collaborating with Denzel Washington is still must-see viewing. This time around, Spike and Denzel offer us a meditation on the complications that come with success in a creative field—the ever-present temptation to compromise what brought you to this point, to trade what made you for security and comfort. There are times in Highest 2 Lowest when this is made a bit too explicit by the mechanics of the story and the way the characters talk about the predicament in which they find themselves. Ride it out. Enjoy the opportunity to see Denzel carry another quintessentially New York Spike Lee vehicle. Who knows how many times we’ll get this opportunity again.

It Was Just An Accident

SC: It’s a shame that this didn’t sneak into the Best Picture top 10; when it comes to filmmaking the word “brave” gets thrown around too often, but It Was Just An Accident is the genuine article. Writer-director Jafar Pahani has previously been imprisoned for speaking out against the Iranian government, and this is a searing statement about a cowardly, torture-happy regime and the cost of standing up to tyranny. That said, it’s neither hopeless nor overly grim; it’s got team-up energy, as a group of survivors with differing personalities discuss what to do after capturing what seems to be their former oppressor. Panahi has plenty to say but he’s telling a story, not preaching, and his work is all the better for it.

The Life of Chuck

SC: According to Letterboxd, this is one of the year’s most polarizing movies, which is another way to say that my brother and I liked it and everyone else hated it. I see their point; after the bravura opening act, which I would argue is near-perfect in creating both anticipation and dread, the rest is inevitably a letdown. It doesn’t help that Tom Hiddleston, the titular Chuck and front-facing in all the marketing, is around for only 15 minutes (but what a 15!) and the rest hinges on how much you like hearing Mark Hamill say “Chucko.” But I still love it; from Chiwetel Ejiofor and Matthew Lillard to Mia Sara and Karen Gillan, everyone maximizes their limited screen time and brings an admittedly shaky overarching idea to life. Mike Flanagan’s films are much less beloved than his Netflix miniserieses, possibly because he wears his heart on his sleeve, but I think we could use a little more of that these days.

Nouvelle Vague

AJ: Much like Marty Supreme, Nouvelle Vague centers itself on a protagonist from several decades ago who is unconventional and driven and fucking real—oozing modernity and, in the process, crying out to us here in our post-modern world. The similarities kind of end there. The great film critic and Breathless director Jean-Luc Godard is not presented as a rapscallion, like Marty Mauser. Instead he has unconventional—almost unbelievable—methods that manage to work. Director Richard Linklater constructs a vision and version of Godard that seems designed to build up your cynicism initially, what with the sunglasses that never come off and the hyperbolic protestations about the meaning of art and cinema, and then chips away at it through the shoot of Breathless. You end up disarmed by the apparent pretension of French New Wave—unable to discount its authenticity, even if it’s not your particular bag.

The Secret Agent

SC: The movie most worthy of this classic Simpsons meme. I went into Secret Agent not knowing much beyond “Wagner Moura is very handsome with a beard” and “I loved Kleber Mendonça Filho’s last film, Bacarau.” I also enjoyed his in-between documentary, Pictures of Ghosts, which Secret Agent is fully in conversation with. It’s about political unrest in 1970s Brazil, with Moura as a professor who unwittingly becomes associated with the resistance and marked for death. If that sounds straightforward, I promise you the movie is not; at one point, a severed leg (found in a shark’s mouth) starts attacking gay men out cruising at night, which is then covered prominently in the local papers. Is it a metaphor for all the puffed-up stories planted to cover up deeper corruption? Probably, but we certainly see a first-person leg attack. Filho loves being strange and messy, weaving a complicated web and understanding that his films don’t have to make perfect sense to mean something.

Train Dreams

SC: Train Dreams has a lot of mumbling in the woods. Joel Edgerton is murmuring, William H. Macy (now with brand-new beard!) is murmuring, the trees are swaying in the wind. It’s a dreamy, Malick-ian journey through the life of Edgerton’s Robert Grainier as he loves and loses and tries to find purpose in the forests of Idaho. And it’s one of the rare examples of a Netflix acquisition that I think helped the movie; I saw it in theaters and I wish others could’ve done the same, but I think it got eyeballs and recognition via the streaming service that it wouldn’t have found as yet another high-quality indie dropped quietly into 800 theaters. So hooray, Netflix; you have a use beyond letting me catch up on Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.

Warfare

AJ: For most of its runtime, Warfare is a cinema verite-style snapshot of one of America’s many foreign misadventures. Told essentially in real time as a stranded platoon awaits backup in insurgent-ridden territory in Iraq, it is largely swimming in the familiar waters tread by everything from Black Hawk Down to Lone Survivor to the likes of The Hurt Locker and American Sniper. It is a harrowing and tension-filled experience, although not exactly a new one, at least until the haunting final shot. The dust has quite literally settled. It is quiet—more noticeably so after the preceding 90ish minutes of anguish and blood and rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. Things seem almost improbably normal. But the power lines are askew. There are still streaks of blood in the sand. Everyone seems to be trying to move along despite the fact that everything is just a bit off.

Weapons

SC: It’s odd, it’s clunky, it bounces between being on-the-nose and esoteric. But it also has some of the most off-putting moments I’ve ever seen, including Benedict Wong’s Marcus headbutting his lover to death. I had a deep, disgusted reaction to that scene that wouldn’t go away, which I imagine is what writer-director Zach Cregger was looking for. He wants the audience to know in a few short moments that Amy Madigan’s Gladys is unstoppable once her unexplained magic has you in its grasp. You’ll hurt yourself, you’ll hurt the people you love; there’s no coming back. A lot of the “answers” in Weapons don’t really make sense, at least once you remove them from the context of the movie, but Cregger keeps it moving at such a brisk, entertaining pace that it didn’t bother me in the least. I laughed, I cringed, I had a wild, unpredictable time at the movies.

Like a groundhog in Punxsutawney, it’s time for Steve and Andrew to poke their heads out and dish on the best movies of the year. We’ve got 18 films from 2024 to celebrate. If you’ve got some time, take a look back at our films of the year stretching back more than 10 years. Our picks hold up wonderfully.

On to the list!

The Top Two

Challengers

Andrew Johnson: Most of our favorite sports movies aren’t really about sports. They are romantic comedies or tragedies or whatever with a bunch of uniforms and a built in win-lose climax. Because Luca Guadagnino is who he is, and because Challengers leans hard in to its love triangle, it’s tempting to see this film as in league with, say, Bull Durham. It’s easy to say it’s a film about something else with tennis as a backdrop. Don’t get suckered into this line of thinking. Challengers encapsulates what it is to play and then fall in love with tennis - its allure, the maddening drive for perfection that can never be realized, the truly bizarre relationship you have with your opponent on the other side of the net. A few years ago, I picked up a racquet and became obsessed, and Challengers explains it all.

As Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan says early on in the film: “For about fifteen seconds there, we were actually playing tennis. And we understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It’s like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.” This is tennis: transcendent and fleeting. And this is a film that encapsulates the essence of something.

Steve Cimino: I don’t love tennis as much as Andrew, but I do love pulsating dance scores like this one from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I love weird love triangles where arguments are like tennis matches and the music hits accordingly. I love Mike Faist confirming he’s the real deal post-West Side Story. And I love Josh O’Connor getting the juiciest material and running with it; he’s America’s crumbum sweetheart. One thing I did hate: people monitoring Challengers’ box office like it was Elon’s jet and yelling about how Zendaya can’t open a movie. It’s a tennis sex drama that made $96 million worldwide! She’s the leadingest lady of her generation and you better get used to it.

Dune: Part Two

AJ: Denis Villeneuve’s pair of films are a crowning achievement, not just on the basis of their quality, but also on the basis of the degree of difficulty. Frank Herbert’s book has a psychedelic quality. Villeneuve’s adaptation maintains these elements, but balances it with palace and political intrigue and exhilarating action. You won’t have more fun than Paul Atreides riding a worm, for example. Entertaining and awe-inducing as the spectacle is, Dune: Part Two also manages to impart the more quiet tragedy of this story - that of Paul’s helpless descent into radicalism. It’s great stuff, and proof that the major studios can still make epic, original, thrilling popcorn tales.

SC: Greig Fraser won a cinematography Oscar for Dune, and the sequel might look even better. It’s amazing that Denis stuck the landing this hard, that Chalamet brought Paul Atreides to life so well, that Austin Butler is still doing crazy accents. Javier Bardem deserves not only an Oscar nom but a win! The worst part is probably the tacked-on Brolin/Batista “showdown,” which takes about 45 seconds and doesn’t really disrupt anything. The whole thing is such an accomplishment, a textbook example of “first movie does well-ish in theaters, builds steam on streaming, second one blows the door down” and hopefully Denis’ blank check for years to come.

The Best of the Rest

Anora

AJ: The visceral experience of Sean Baker’s Anora is much like one of the nights depicted therein. It is wild and energetic in one moment, lost and meandering and long in the next. It’s possible this means the film could have been edited a little tighter, but it’s also possible that it fits its subject material perfectly. Either way, this sits nicely alongside Baker’s other works exploring the dark, seedy underbelly of American society. It gives its titular character hope - the kind glamorized in Pretty Woman, the kind that pervades our society, where we’re all on the cusp of being rich - and smashes it with a hammer in about 10 minutes. There is no fairy tale. There is only an ever-expanding chasm between the hyper-wealthy and the rest of us. It’s a lot wider than we think - its distance so great that it is hard to peer across from one side to the other and make out human forms.

The Brutalist

SC: What a Brodyquest! The journey from 2002’s The Pianist to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist was a wild one for Adrien: From The Village and King Kong to Predators and a whole lot of Wes Anderson, there’s something for … someone? No one? It’s mostly a pile of wasted potential, but he’s back with a vengeance here. So are the deservedly-Oscar-nominated Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones and the unheralded Alessandro Nivola, who really makes the first half sparkle (with sadness). More than anything, let’s hear it for the intermission; my neighbor and I took the 15 minutes to pee, discuss what we’d just seen, and lock in for the bleak-but-riveting second half. Every movie longer than 180 minutes should be required to have one (except for The Irishman, which flies by and should be twice as long).

Civil War

AJ: Alex Garland’s latest film paints a chilling and foreboding picture of a modern-day America torn apart by, well, civil war. Its texture and features hit close to home - whether that’s the would-be despot and king holed up in the White House or the small town passed through trying its level best to pretend like none of this awfulness is happening. At its core, though, it takes aim at the notion of “the story” as conceived by the present-day media, particularly and specifically its fixation on capturing dramatic moments at the expense of, simply put, the real story. The abdication of journalistic responsibility isn’t the cause of our current predicament, but it is part of the rot.

A Complete Unknown

SC: I did not expect to include the James Mangold-directed Bob Dylan movie on my top 10 list, that’s for sure. Especially now that Walk the Line is 20 years old and has been thoroughly dismantled by Walk Hard. But apparently you can teach old dogs new tricks, and the director of Cop Land has pulled off biopic magic: elevate and deflate your subject at the same time. Dylan (Timothée Chalamet, duh) was a genius and a chameleon; he had something that the Llewyn Davises of the world did not, but he was also an asshole in a business full of assholes. The key to unlocking ACU is when Dylan asks Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook, not Joaquin) for advice; Cash tells him to go crazy and burn the place down, while being a piss-drunk mess who attempts and fails to drive away in his car. These people were brilliant disasters. We’ve had enough repetitive fawning for a lifetime; kudos to Mangold and Timothée (and Ed Norton, and Monica Barbaro, and everyone involved) for taking the path less traveled.

The Dead Don’t Hurt

AJ: The subdued but fully realized connection and intimacy between Viggo Mortensen and Vicky Krieps is what makes this little-seen Western so fantastic. Mortensen and Krieps have a charged chemistry - the kind that works with a simple glance of admiration or wince of pain and fear - and it makes the rest of the thing go. Mortensen’s character doesn’t say enough and so he ends up chasing revenge. Krieps’ character says too much, at least for this time and place, and so she ends up being the reason her husband seeks vengeance. This is a quiet, sad, affecting film that more people should see.

A Different Man

SC: Hey look, the Golden Globes did something right! Sebastian Stan gives the performance of his career (sorry, Trump movie) and wears the hell out of some heavy prosthetics. This has a lot of the dry, dark humor of Beau Is Afraid, where one put-upon man is unwittingly the subject of so many strange conversations and wild circumstances. But at its core, it’s about how we see people with disabilities and how they see themselves. Is Adam Pearson’s Oswald actually a wildly charismatic man with extreme deformities, or is he something Stan’s Edward conjured up to haunt and taunt him, a living, breathing telltale heart? We aren’t left with any real answers, just lingering uncertainties and the sense that the world Edward longed to be a part of isn’t that special after all.

Evil Does Not Exist

AJ: What happens when righteous anger has nowhere to go? We’re living in an elongated moment where, unfortunately, we’re all about to keep findingg out. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Evil Does Not Exist is a warning about where this is all going. And, in a perfect encapsulation of this moment, it all starts with a seemingly banal town meeting where two middle managers sell some rich guy’s lousy idea to a bunch of people who can see right through their shoddy pitch. The social contract is being broken, and the thinnest veneer of civilization lies atop it.

I Saw the TV Glow

SC: Jane Schoenbrun loves Twin Peaks: The Return, and it shows. Their second feature produced one of my wilder in-theater experiences of the year; it’s mysterious and strange and largely unexplained. I’ve heard several people describe the story in totally different ways; beyond the clear allusions to being trans and finding your true self, I think Schoenbrun doesn’t mind audiences being confused and a little bit paralyzed. That’s how Owen (Justice Smith) carries himself the entire time, until he has a screaming fit and then quickly apologizes to everyone around him for the inconvenience. Accepting who you are requires a lot of courage, which maybe Owen isn’t ready to deploy. In that sense, TV Glow is a cautionary tale; for all the bullshit transphobia being spewed these days, the real monsters are the people who prevent others from finding their place and their happiness in the world.

Look Back

SC: A 58-minute anime on my top 10 list? If it’s good enough for Lights Camera Jackson, it’s good enough for me! This beautiful story tracks the relationship between Fujino (Yuumi Kawai) and Kyomoto (Mizuki Yoshida) over many years; the former popular and clever, the latter a talented shut-in. They aren’t equals and never pretend to be; they’re a duo that fill each other’s gaps. As they embark on a series of manga projects, both amateur and professional, they’re pulled apart and brought back together in unpredictable ways. It’s heartfelt and genuine, a true testament to the power of art and friendship. That it packs so much into such a short running time is a blessing, not a detriment.

Love Lies Bleeding

AJ: You won’t get a better Hulk movie than this, no matter how many shades of color Marvel tries. This is a mood film, and it works because it commits so wholeheartedly to creating a certain vibe. Love Lies Bleeding is sweaty, grimy and dark. Was the sun ever out in this film? It has maybe the finest collection of bad haircuts ever put on celluloid, and it is filled with moments of dread and danger. It’s a remarkable story with top-notch performances from Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, and, especially, Ed Harris and Dave Franco.

My Old Ass

AJ: My Old Ass is a film about middle age masquerading as one about coming of age. Maisy Stella’s Elliott’s drug-induced conjuring of an older version of herself (played by Aubrey Plaza) ends up playing opposite to expectation. It’s a silly-seeming, powerful, affecting lesson about regret and grief, and what’s most striking of all is that it is the younger Elliott who ends up having something to teach her older self, and not the other way around. We aren’t who we are without all the good and bad we’ve gone through. Regret is a part of being human, but, as the younger Elliott says to the older, we should think of it more comprehensively. It’s not about single moments, but instead about the sum total of our relationships with those with whom we are close.

Nickel Boys

SC: It takes a few minutes to warm up to Nickel Boys’ style; RaMell Ross’ decision to shoot everything from the first-person perspective seems like a gimmick that might not hold up for two hours. But soon it becomes thrilling, and sometimes chilling, to see everything from someone else’s eyes. And when we suddenly switch perspectives, or when the point-of-view character looks in a mirror, you almost want to pump your fist with delight at what Ross is pulling off. Of course, the tale of two black teenagers at reform school in Florida is probably not going to end in joy. That’s why Nickel Boys matters; it’s a reminder that—despite love, and often because of it—some wounds never heal. We are still paying for the sins of the past.

Nosferatu

AJ: Robert Eggers is an absolute master, at this point, of putting you in a time and a place and taking that time and place quite literally. He did this in The VVitch to thrilling effect, and here he does it again, just as effectively. Despite most recent depictions, there’s nothing actually sexy about vampires, if you think about it. But there is plenty that is horny, and that is what Nosferatu seems to grasp, where so many other vampire films do not.

Rebel Ridge

AJ: Director Jeremy Saulnier is like the Wes Anderson of action thrillers where everything always gets screwed up, which ends up putting his protagonists into progressively worse situations. It might be all he does, but who cares when this is the kind of thing he produces? I’m not sure any of his subjects has had it worse than Aaron Pierre’s Terry Richmond, or that I’ve rooted harder for someone to succeed and to deliver comeuppance to the arrogant baddies, led by the corrupt police chief played by Don Johnson. It’s a nice bonus that anyone who sees this movie will get an education in the outrageous practice of civil forfeiture. It’s entertaining, and you’ll learn something.

Red Rooms

SC: The internet is bad. I make my living on websites and you’re reading this on a website—and hopefully listening to our latest podcast—and I would blow it all up in a second if that was possible. If you’ve been living under a rock and still think “but gee whiz, the web is harmless,” enjoy Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms. It’s about a young woman (Juliette Gariépy) who is very online and becomes obsessed with an accused serial killer on trial for the murder of three girls. She’s not alone in that obsession, and her ability to access everything—information, money, depraved shit—at the click of a button sends her deeper down a rabbit hole of self-destruction. It’s a very real-feeling horror story about what can happen when you give lost souls the key to their own corruption.

The Substance

SC: This was 10th on my list, and I’ve been wondering for months if it should make the cut; the unexpected praise it’s received from the unimpeachable Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has raised even more red flags. But at the end of the day, I had a blast with The Substance, and the Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley/(sigh) Dennis Quaid trio is probably the best threesome of the year, non-Challengers edition. Qualley in particular has been underpraised; the Moore ‘comeback’ narrative is fun but Qualley does so much of the heavy lifting. She’s clearly a star waiting for the right solo vehicle. Yes, it’s unsubtle as heck, long as hell, and stars the motherfucker from Reagan, but sometimes it’s refreshing to be bashed over the head with how fucking awful Hollywood, society, and culture really are.

In Reel Deep is pretty much an annual thing at this point, so here we are again with our Best of the Year list for 2023. We’re in to our second decade of doing this. And eclectic as we remain, we’re in an almost unprecedented amount of agreement about what we loved this year, sharing four in our respective top 10s.

So, here we go. We’ve got 16 of the year’s best for you, waiting just below.

The Top Four

Anatomy of a Fall

Andrew Johnson: You’ll never hear the song “P.I.M.P.” the same way again, for starters. Pay a little bit closer attention, though, and Justine Trier’s film will have you thinking of how it fits in with the rich cinematic tradition of courtroom-style dramas that prompt deep thought on the nature of truth and what we can ever really know. Yes, Anatomy of a Fall merits mention in the same breath as Rashomon and Anatomy of a Murder among others.

Steve Cimino: The French courts look wild, man. And I no longer have to wonder what a certain hit 50 Cent song sounds like on a steel drum. But beyond that, this is a remarkable drama about the tangled messiness of truth, death, perception, and memory, and a reminder of how well movies can depict all of the above. It’s a whodunit but also a whydunit, with wonderful performances from Sandra Hüller, Milo Machado-Graner, and a dog named Snoop. It’s trite to say, but at a time when what’s real and factual is up for debate, Trier has produced a neatly layered look at how muddy objective reality can be.

The Holdovers

AJ: There you are Alexander Payne. You too, Paul Giamatti. There have been countless movies in the same vein as this one - coming-of-age stories where a ragtag group of misfits find connection and purpose in each other - but few made this well. That’s down to Payne and, especially, Giamatti and the far less known Dominic Sessa and Da’vine Joy Randolph. The Holdovers is the kind of movie that leaves you wondering what the characters in it are up to - how their lives turned out - long, long after it is over.

SC: Just an absolute delight. By far the 2023 movie I’d most recommend to someone’s parents, no matter who they are, but also a super-fun romp for all ages. In case you’ve forgotten about Giamatti, he’s as back as can be and he’s also got a weird eye. Randolph deserves every award she’s racking up, and Sessa deserves a few too. Payne’s return to form is a little pretentious but always pauses at the right moment to let the air out of Giamatti’s Paul Hunham, an overbearing windbag academic with a heart of gold. And again, there’s the eye; seeing it bulging on the big screen was one of the thrills of my cinematic year.

Oppenheimer

AJ: Perhaps the finest tribute to this film I can offer is that I am as haunted by the exploits and subsequent downfall of J. Robert Oppenheimer as the title character is. Christopher Nolan delivered an indictment of the Nuclear Age and a workplace drama all in one. Beware your own idealistic ambitions when they are joined up with those of cynical political climbers.

SC: Finally, the unmistakable Christopher Nolan masterwork. Interstellar is more of an acquired taste; The Dark Knight is fun until you realize it’s a pretty-looking but dumb Batman movie where Batman is the worst character. But Oppy has it all, including every white character actor on the planet, especially Josh Hartnett, Benny Safdie, and (swoon) David Krumholtz. It’s the Robert Downey Jr “bounceback” we never really needed. It has maybe the most emotional and captivating scene I’ve seen in years, when the remarkable Cillian Murphy is faux-celebrating the bomb’s detonation in front of screaming ‘fans’ and slowly losing his mind. It’s a propulsive masterpiece in which Albert Einstein is a literal character and leaps out from behind a cab at a pivotal moment. It’s a wild, 180-minute, pulse-pounding epic about a scientist who makes a bomb in which nearly every second is gripping. It’s high-brow blockbuster filmmaking at its best.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

AJ: This will live longest in my memory because it introduced my 8-year-old daughter to the concept of a cliffhanger. What happens next to Miles Morales might be my least favorite part of the film, to be honest, but there’s a metric ton to love here, from the romance between Miles and Gwen Stacey, to the unbearable burden of secrets between parents and children to the distinct animation style and ambitious cinematography. Yet again, the Verse version of Spidey is more daring and inspiring than pretty much anything the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ever conjured. What a treat.

SC: Gwen Stacey in Across the Spider-Verse—her arc, her dialogue, and the performance by Hailee Steinfeld—is the greatest female character in comic book movie history and it’s not even close. It’s lovely to see Miles Morales again, of course, and I’ll never begrudge Jake Johnson for taking a nice paycheck for a few hours of “remember me, I’m back” work, but pivoting to revolve this sequel around Gwen is a brilliant touch. It’s touching, it’s heartfelt, and it adds depth to an already-thoughtful series of children’s animated films. Shameik Moore’s Miles still drives the story, and he’ll probably wrap it up nicely in the third entry, but my lasting memories of Spider-Verse are gonna be Gwen-y in the best way.

The Best of the Rest

Asteroid City

AJ: Wes Anderson has spent much of his career pondering how people adapt to the gaping void of grief, and Asteroid City is yet another extension of that theme. It’s not an easily answerable question, but what I appreciated about this entry in his filmography, relative to the others, was that he hazarded an answer. Put one foot in front of the other. Carry on. The holes can’t be filled, and if you seek to fill them, you’ll miss out on possibilities. This one is as dry as the desert setting, but it packs a remarkable wallop at the end.

Beau Is Afraid

SC: One of the few 2023 releases that I saw twice in theaters, I spent almost the entire year thinking about Beau. Ironically, I didn’t love Hereditary or Midsommar; I could tell Ari Aster was a genius, but his first two releases felt more impressive than enjoyable to watch. Yet as I watched Joaquin Phoenix wander around as the titular Beau, terrified of his surroundings, seeing everything as a series of death traps that may or may not be real, I was either laughing hysterically or overwhelmed by the complexity of it all. Beau is weird as hell and understandably polarizing, and I actually started to like it a little less once I saw some “fan theories” on Reddit that tried too hard to dissect its plot. It’s best to sit back, relax, and let Aster’s suffocating pool of anxiety wash over you.

BlackBerry

AJ: Yes, Dennis the CEO is worth the price of admission alone, but Glenn Howerton isn’t the only one driving the fun here. BlackBerry had plenty of company last year - AIR and Tetris also gave us crash-course business histories of beloved consumer products. Part of the reason this was the class of the bunch was because failure after unbridled and unrivaled success is vastly more interesting than the more familiar pattern of struggles on the brink followed by triumph. It’s the performances from Howerton and Jay Baruchel that make this such fun. Hubris: it works where product-market fit is concerned, too.

El Conde

AJ: How many directors were filled with envy after taking in the latest from Pablo Larrain? It’s a brilliant, obvious stroke of genius to turn a bloodthirsty dictator like Augusto Pinochet in to a real, actual vampire, but it takes a good dose of craft to take that conceit and make it a visual delight that also plays well as an extended riff on Succession.

Fallen Leaves

SC: Sad to say that Fallen Leaves was my first Aki Kaurismäki film, but it won’t be my last. Along with the overwhelmingly dry dialogue and the sparse-but-deliberate set design that made me think of Wes Anderson with notably more restraint, I was immediately in love with the romance between Alma Pöysti’s Ansa and Jussi Vatanen’s Holappa, to the point that I was yelping in anger when circumstances intervened to keep them apart. Also, Janne Hyytiäinen deserved an Oscar nomination for his work as Holappa’s even-dryer pal Huotari; never have lines been delivered so monotone yet popped so hard.

Killers of the Flower Moon

AJ: Martin Scorsese’s latest remains surprisingly divisive, and I suspect that’s because of how grueling and punishing an experience it is. Given the runtime and the subject matter it chronicles, you might expect that punishment to come in the form of brutal, stylized violence. Instead, it comes from Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Ernest Burkhardt, and the slow-motion, tragic contradictions he embodies. I’m not sure this is a great film - it’s certainly not up with Marty’s best - but it is a visceral and important one.

Maestro

SC: Everyone taking potshots at Maestro seems to have fully missed the point. “But I didn’t learn anything about Leonard Bernstein and his music!” I didn’t realize that a movie about a person needs to explain all the nuts and bolts of their being in order to be successful. In a manner similar to Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Bradley Cooper has no interest in going paint-by-numbers with his Bernstein ‘biopic.’ He’s trying to capture the essence of the man, what made him tremendously complex and hurtful to those he loved, and how his gifts won over people who otherwise might’ve kicked him to the curb long ago. And if you really need some music in your movie, the Ely Cathedral performance is maybe the best scene of the year.

Napoleon

AJ: You’re forgiven if you were expecting a straightforward, sweeping historical epic and instead got a comedy with a side dish of big-guns-go-boom-boom. But you’re not forgiven if that subversion of expectations leads you to misunderstand this film. Napoleon the Toddler was one of the boldest cinematic choices of the year, and it worked to great effect, showing off and deriding the staggering damage that can be wrought by the wrong infantile man operating at the wrong moment, when he possesses a non-insignificant amount of street smarts.

Past Lives

SC: The most rise-and-fall movie of 2023; every year, there’s a picture that captivates audiences—usually a sweet drama—but then a few weeks go by and “but was it really that good” starts up. And then there’s pushback, and pushback to the pushback, and we go on like this forever. Past Lives really is that good; for starters, Celine Song finds a way to shoot New York that somehow looks new and exciting. And the brilliant performances of Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro all emphasize the distinctness of this trio brought together by love and circumstance. The three-way dinner scene will make you cringe and cry at nearly the same time; you’ve never seen hearts alternatingly swell and break quite like this.

Perfect Days

SC: Another admission: I’ve never seen a Wim Wenders movie until now. But I’ll have to go back and revisit his work as well, because Perfect Days couldn’t be more up my alley. I could watch Kōji Yakusho’s Hirayama live his quaint Tokyo life for another 2 hours. Your initial read might be that this is a laid-back, chill story about a guy who finds joy in cleaning public toilets for a living. And while that is some of the appeal and a chunk of the run-time, it’s also about what he left behind, and the value (and sometimes detriment) of routine. We should all find happiness in the little things, otherwise what’s the point of being alive, but it’s also foolish to think you can wall yourself off from the rest of humanity. I think that’s what Wim’s getting at here, and I’m all for it.

Poor Things

AJ: I don’t know what I was expecting going in to this film. Truth be told, given Yorgos Lanthimos’ esoteric filmography, I’m not sure you should ever go in expecting anything from the man. What surprised me wasn’t so much the sheer oddity of this Frankenstein’s monster tale as it was the sweetness at its center. This is, yes, a coming-of-age tale, and it’s one with an immense amount of soul to go along with its wit. Bella Baxter’s sense of her own agency, something partially instilled in her by God (aka Willem Dafoe), is as empowering as it is raunchy and ridiculous.

The Taste of Things

SC: Knowing very little going in, I started to suspect that this was a “woman behind the scenes” story: a famous chef can’t function without his female partner, the unseen heart and soul of the operation, and falls apart without her. But nope; this is about a partnership, albeit an uneven one given its 1885 setting, and how food binds them together professionally and romantically. Scene after scene ends up being nothing but Juliette Binoche or Benoît Magimel cooking, and I loved every minute of it, especially when they cook for each other. Trần Anh Hùng imbues his film with a deep, unspoken sense of longing, one that lingers—like the smell of a meal—long after you leave the theater.

Honorable Mention

AJ: Knock at the Cabin continued M. Night Shyamalan’s sorta-resurgence. John Wick 4 further cemented that franchise’s place among the best in action movie history, and certainly the best going right now. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was a lot of fun. Meanwhile, No Hard Feelings and Bottoms reminded me that it is still possible to make a great comedy, and I’d happily go to the theater to see this kind of film in the future.

SC: The Boy and the Heron is, much like The Wind Rises, a beautiful potential coda for the great Hayao Miyazaki. BlackBerry does the device-o-pic (is that a new word) right by reinforcing how the world of tech is just another cravenly greedy and ultimately doomed dump birthed by modern capitalism. And The Iron Claw is a flawed but emotional retelling of pro wrestling’s infamously ‘cursed’ Von Erich family. I talked all about it on my other podcast, Awesome Truth; give it a listen!

In Reel Deep may lie mostly dormant, but our annual Best of the Year list is very much alive. This marks a whole decade of the two of us doing this. It feels fitting that we’ve made it to 10 years of list-making in a year where, well, things kind of went back to normal.

Perhaps that sense of normalcy - of big-budget blockbusters raking in nine figures over months-long runs at the box office - is why we don’t have too much in common this year. We’ve got 18 of the year’s best for you, only two of which overlap.

On to the list, and here’s to the next 10 years.

The Top Two

Decision to Leave

Andrew Johnson: The legacy of Hitchcock is alive and well in Korea, and Park Chan-wook is a big reason why. It was hard not to think of, at once, Vertigo and In the Mood for Love as this story unfolded. What kind of story are we willing to tell ourselves in the name of love? Quite a yarn, as it turns out.

Steve Cimino: Park Chan-wook is mostly known as the provocative filmmaker behind the wild Oldboy and the erotic The Handmaiden, so it may be shocking to watch Decision to Leave and find out that it’s a relatively standard cop thriller. There are no hallway fight scenes nor any explicit lesbian sex. What makes it so exciting is the feeling that Park is, to a certain extent, censoring himself, or at least holding back his deeper impulses.

So when Park Hae-il’s detective character is quietly obsessing over Tang Wei’s femme fatale, it’s not a stretch to imagine the writer-director doing the same. What we end up with is a South Korean noir with notable, tangible restraint, one almost bursting at the seams with unrequited passion and desperation. Tang Wei, in particular, brings real depth to the type of character that is usually by-the-book and thankless; when a movie cop loves a woman he can’t or shouldn’t have, that’s usually a sign that she’ll look sultry and seductive and probably commit a crime or two along the way. But director Park subverts expectations just enough so that, even if you’re not left guessing at the end, you’ll be thrilled at the route you took to get there.

Tár

AJ: Cate Blanchett delivered one of the best individual performances I have seen in a very, very, very long time. As with anything that edges out of the film discourse and in to the more general discourse, this film has been mischaracterized and oversimplified. It’s not about cancel culture at all. It’s about ego and delusion. Does Lydia Tár need to be the way she is to rise to her station? This is the question Blanchett and director Todd Field leave you with, and like any great film it doesn’t posit a true answer.

SC: It’s quite reductive to label this “the cancel culture movie.” For starters, it’s incredibly funny; I had trouble getting on its wavelength during my first viewing, because writer-director Todd Field doesn’t slow down or help you out. He weaves a narrative around Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár and her choices big and small; her indiscretions are sometimes so blatant that you have to laugh. Somehow, possibly because she’s the most brilliant actress alive, Blanchett gives Tár a tone and an aura where she’s clearly the most confident and brilliant person in the room, even as she’s shoveling bullshit or pushing boundaries that we know will doom her.

It’s an incredible depiction of the trappings of hype, of what it must feel like to have the world in the palm of your hand and yet be unable and unwilling to stop pushing the envelope. It’s most striking when Lydia starts spiraling, of course, but Blanchett gives us glimpses of the unraveling well in advance. And Field—who acted in Eyes Wide Shut and is a noted Kubrick devotee—maintains the mystery by locking us to Lydia’s perspective. We see what she sees, so we don’t know how bad it’s gotten until it’s staring us in the face. It makes the meltdown that much more unexpected and enjoyable.

The Best of the Rest

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

SC: The best documentary of 2022 and one of the year’s darker films, though not without its own unique strength and optimism. Directed by Laura Poitras, the filmmaker behind Citizenfour, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed takes us through the life and times of Nan Goldin, an acclaimed artist who has led a very public campaign against the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma to highlight their role in kick-starting and perpetuating the opioid epidemic. Goldin was an addict herself, with a tumultuous upbringing, and her relentless quest to remove the Sackler name from various museum wings and disrupt their rampant reputation-washing is an exercise in courage.

Poitras does an exquisite job of bouncing between Goldin’s past and her present-day activism, highlighting why she feels this deep commitment to forcing the Sacklers to pay for their crimes, or at the very least own up to them. Most impressively, there’s a sense of “why don’t we all feel this way” that pervades the entire movie; maybe we don’t all have the stature, the background, or the fortitude of Goldin, but we should still be just as furious.

Avatar: Way of Water

SC: It’s been said a million times since December 2022, but you don’t count out Big Jim Cameron. I’ve been a moderate Avatar defender for a while now: Probably the best 3D movie ever, a spectacle worthy of the hype, perhaps a little light on substance. And I won’t pretend like The Way of Water figures the last part out; there are still plenty of undeveloped characters, not to mention valid questions about representation. But this film is such a powerhouse on the big screen; the world that Cameron builds remains large, lush, and inescapably interesting. Curiously enough, it’s not the Na’vi that most audiences are remembering but the tulkun, the big telepathic whales who befriend members of the new water tribe.

That’s typically how it goes in a Cameron, with the T-800 and Jack and Rose from Titanic as exceptions. More often than not, it’s about the environment, the look and feel, the exquisite setpieces, not the well-drawn characters. As discussed with other movies in this year’s top 10, maybe that’s why his films are insanely popular but somewhat forgettable; we love the big moments in theaters but they don’t seem to stick when we leave. Regardless, even though the haters will forever yell things like “Oh, you like Avatar?! What’s the main character’s name?”, this is a film and a series worthy of the enthusiasm and the massive box office.

The Banshees of Inisherin

AJ: It’s still just my second favorite collaboration between Martin McDonagh, Brendon Gleeson, and Colin Farrell, but what a collaboration it is. The bleak, wicked humor at the core of the setup feels like a homecoming of sorts when you put it on early 20th century Irish shores and pair Gleeson and Farrell together. The fun of the film - yes, I found it fun - is spending most of the film trying to figure out who the asshole is, when the correct answer all along was everyone except Kerry Condon.

Crimes of the Future

AJ: For perhaps obvious reasons, this was the most visceral moviegoing experience of the year for me. There is, for sure, a parable about policing bodies just under the surface here, but, honestly, I was too absorbed by David Cronenberg’s superficial premise to bear it much mind initially. Crimes of the Future advances the bold claim that, in the near future, surgery will be the new sex, and damn if I didn’t find myself almost believing it by the end.

Elvis

SC: I can barely put into words how much I love Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. I’m not even a huge Baz fan; Moulin Rouge is good, Romeo + Juliet is fine. But something about Elvis fully won me over from second one. It’s kinetic; it’s wild; it plays fast and loose with Presley’s life, turning ‘important’ situations into absurd melodramas that are entertaining and well-intentioned enough to work. Austin Butler’s performance as The King deserves all the praise it’s received; Tom Hanks playing Col. Parker as a combination of Fat Bastard and Goldmember is a blast, though I can see how some people can’t see past the voice and makeup.

In fact, I can see how some people can’t see past the shiny, somewhat silly veneer of the entire movie. If that’s your hangup, I beg you to give it one more try, hopefully with a nonjudgmental eye. Go on this ride with Baz and embrace Elvis’s legend; he’s not trying to capture the man, only the spirit and the energy that surrounded him, and I think he succeeded with loud, vibrant panache.

Kimi

AJ: Steven Soderbergh feels impossible to appreciate because he is so prolific. He’s already on to the latest chapter in the Magic Mike saga (speaking of things that feel impossible to properly appreciate!), and so you might have missed this one from early 2022. Go back and find it. Enjoy Zoe Kravitz and the obvious Rear Window undertones, but also think of how it ties together that influence with the paranoia vibe of Alan J. Pakula’s thrillers from the early 1970s.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes on

AJ: Sure, this quiet, unassuming picture is about grief and community, and you can show it to anyone, even young kids like mine. But what I most loved about it was its sense of perspective in a world filled with distraction. There’s a telling moment where Dean shows Marcel that he’s going “viral” and he remains fixated on finding his family. Marcel is cute as all get-out, but that little guy is determined as hell when it comes to the things that are most important. What a lesson that is.

Nope

AJ: Jordan Peele has a real track record at this point, and, as a viewer, it’s one I have come to love. If you can go in to one of his films spoiler-free, the experience you’ll enjoy is one of controlled bewilderment - things seem normal just all a bit off - and then you’ll get a methodical, well-foreshadowed set of reveals that make the whole ride a lot of fun. Nope fits perfectly in that pattern.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio

SC: Film buffs who are also masochists will recall that there were two Pinocchio movies released in 2022; this mini-masterpiece from the Oscar-winning GDT, as well as a Robert Zemeckis-helmed “live-action” Disney remake that should burn in a fire. If anything, GDT’s adaptation reinforces what an absolute mess the Disney one turned out to be; this particular brand of quirky stop-motion animated film may not be for everyone, but it takes a few delightful chances and feels far more honest to the odder elements of the Pinocchio story.

Disney has a way of sanding down the edges, if only because its versions of these stories have been around for so long. But “old man builds wooden boy who comes to life” is an objectively insane concept, and so including immortality and Mussolini and boot camp feels organic and refreshing, especially when paired with the jerky unpredictability of stop-motion. All the voice actors are more than game; Ewan McGregor is really fun as the weary Sebastian J. Cricket, and Gregory Mann is exuberantly unhinged as Pinocchio. Not every stop-motion movie has to be weird and dark, of course, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

RRR

SC: What else can be said about RRR? In a year where the Marvel machine finally stumbled, S. S. Rajamouli (and Big Jim, and Tom Cruise + Joseph Kosinksi) reminded us what blockbusters can be. I was lucky enough to see RRR in theaters after my brother raved about it; it was me and maybe one other guy, and I’d snuck in two backpack beers to make it through the 187-minute running time. To be honest, I can’t even remember drinking them; I could barely handle Ram (Ram Charan) leaping into a rioting crowd to retrieve a rock-throwing suspect, and then Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) outdueling a CGI tiger, and then the two joining forces to save a young boy with only a horse, a motorcycle, and a flag between them. And then the “Dosti” montage! And then the “Naatu Naatu” dance! And we’re still only about 90 minutes in.

I’ve watched this a half-dozen times since on Netflix, and there’s always something new to enjoy. It’s an epic that sings as a whole but can be easily enjoyed by those who’d prefer to go scene by scene and rewatch their favorite parts. Rajamouli and his cast understand that all the effects and setpieces in the world don’t work without characters and emotions and fun; more than anything, RRR is fun. Please, Hollywood, take copious notes.

This Much I know to Be True

SC: You probably haven’t seen this Nick Cave concert film, currently streaming on Mubi. But I found it to be perhaps the most poignant and emotional of the “COVID movies,” shorthand for anything filmed during or largely affected by the pandemic. Director Andrew Dominik (who you may know from the brilliant The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, or for getting raked over the coals for Netflix’s Blonde) swirls his cameras around a compact performing space to shoot intimate footage of Cave, frequent collaborator Warren Ellis, and a handful of musicians as they perform some of Cave’s new material. It’s intercut with Cave’s musings about the world around us, made even more powerful due to the recent deaths of his sons. He’s not always talking about COVID isolation specifically, or even depression and loss as recognizable feelings, but he is trying to illuminate how art and creation have helped him through some truly dark periods. Whether you love Cave’s work or are just looking for an introspective concert film, this is well worth your time.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

AJ: I know this is based off a short story, but for people my age it’s more like a grown-up version of the dilemma first introduced to me by Aladdin. What should you do with that third wish? How do you balance your own desire with what is just and right. It’s a silly idea, I guess, but it’s very much in the right hands with George Miller directing and Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba giving it an exquisite vibe. It’s about storytelling and the real peril of absolute power, and it’s just a wonderful picture.

Top Gun: Maverick

SC: Tom Cruise is a fascinating Hollywood creature, for his choices as much as his performances. There’s his surprisingly unpredictable early period (Top Gun 1, The Color of Money, Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July). There’s the “giving himself over to auteurs” period (Jerry Maguire, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia). There’s the misguided, stinky period (Knight and Day, The Mummy, American Made). And there’s now, where he keeps risking his life for our love.

He seems to be committed to Mission: Impossible and Top Gun only, which is alright by me; we want quality, not variety. And Maverick is a film of the highest quality; it’s the rare legacy sequel that deserves to be made, a movie that marinated until it was really and truly needed. Cruise finally has an age-appropriate love interest, and Jennifer Connelly shines in the role; he somehow chilled Miles Teller out for a few months (watch The Offer if you want to see unbridled Teller, presumably his preferred state). The stunts are incredible; as with RRR, they’re earned because we care about the characters involved. Tom Cruise did his part to help save the movies, and we thank him for his service.

Triangle of Sadness

AJ: OK, so Ruben Ostlund isn’t subtle. He does have a gift for the wonderfully uncomfortable premise and a penchant for perhaps belaboring his point. Triangle of Sadness fits in perfectly with Force Majeure and The Square. But, you know, for me, if you do all that stuff with enough glee, the belabored message can not be much of a bother at all. So it is here. I won’t soon forget a Russian oligarch and a Marxist luxury yacht captain debating the relative merits of styles of governance while a bunch of rich people vomit and shit all over each other. In fact, I can’t think of a better metaphor for what passes as serious intellectual debate these days.

Women Talking

SC: I’m a sucker for filmed stage productions, an ironic interest given that I’ve been to the actual theatre only 6 or 7 times in my life. And though Women Talking is not a play, it easily could be; writer-director Sarah Polley places her titular women in an old barn for most of the running time to discuss their fates and futures.

This was one of the more disorienting filmgoing experiences I had in 2022, in the best way; Polley drops you in the middle of what seems to be a religious colony, with no idea what year it is and a vague (but growing) sense of the horrors being inflicted upon these women. As Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, and the others assess their options—as women, humans, children of God—I was captivated by not only their performances but the timelessness of their conversations. For too long, women sharing thoughts like these has been a subversive act. Polley capturing it on film, and with such a stellar cast, further solidifies it as a reality and a necessity.

The Woman King

AJ: Remember when they made blockbuster action films for adults? Here’s a terrific reminder of what that was like to make you pine for the days when there were 10 or 20 films like this every year. Here also is proof that we can add bona fide action star to the list of Viola Davis’ many considerable talents. She is absolutely wonderful here. The secondary love story is a bit of a miss, but Davis’ performance and the action sequences that are actually possible to follow, devoid of CGI, and chock full of very human stakes, make this one to treasure.

What have we been doing for the last year or so? Well, mostly and thankfully, we’ve been at the movies. If 2021 was miles away from being a year of “recovery” generally, it was at least a vastly better one at the cinema.

Assuming we make it that far, next year will be the 10th edition of these lists Steve and I have pulled together at the end of every year. In the world of unprofitable film websites, we’re limping along, but we’re still here, and that’s no small feat. Here are our 17 best …

The Top Three

The Last Duel

Andrew Johnson: For all the costumes and blindingly distracting star power, this is a deceptively simple story - it’s tri-partite format allowing you to dig deep on class and gender dynamics that, though certainly more brutal and rigid than today, echo to the present. I’m here for examinations of truth that are methodical, as if turning a kaleidoscope around and around. And I’m especially here for it when Jodie Comer, who outshines Driver, Damon, Affleck, and the rest, is involved.

Steve Cimino: One of the year’s more perplexing flops. I can see why audiences might’ve come in expecting a Gladiator-style epic and been surprised by the contemplative drama they got instead, but it seems like everyone rejected it outright. It’s their loss; I did not expect 84-year-old Ridley Scott to direct such a sharp repudiation of masculinity, but he’s crafted a historical masterwork from the brilliant script by Nicole Holofcener, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck. If you were let down by the lack of swords and armor but made it to the end anyway, the titular duel itself should be plenty of a reward. And let’s not forget Jodie Comer, who literally ties the movie together. Her Oscar snub is reason No. 2,461 to ignore the Academy Awards.

The Power of the Dog

AJ: There’s plenty about which to be rapturous here, but I think what surprised and delighted me most about this film is how off-balance I felt the entire time. The revelation that Kodi Smit-McPhee’s character is as cold and calculating as anyone on the open range is a huge part of that, of course. But so is what the wreckage wrought implies about every step leading up to it. Who is the real monster here? There is no simple answer, though there is an obvious one, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Phil. Is he really any worse than his brother, George? Jane Campion’s sweeping epic invites examination of this question, which is why, more than the stunning landscape, it lingers.

SC: One of the most wonderful surprises of 2021 is everyone watching The Power of the Dog. Somehow, Jane Campion’s Western became a crossover smash on Netflix, inspiring many a Bronco Henry meme and earning the most Oscar noms of the year (OK, they do get it right sometimes). Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Kirsten Dunst, and Kodi Smit-McPhee are all fully deserving of the heaps of praise sent their way. Jonny Greenwood busts out a truly disarming, ominous score that fits like a glove, and Ari Wegner’s cinematography is masterful. This is the rare work that is properly regarded by all; it’s beloved and awards-heavy, as it should be. Eat shit, Sam Elliott. (I loved you in A Star is Born.)

West Side Story

AJ: Steven Spielberg is a master in part because of how easily he manipulates our emotions. From the now Internet-famous school dance scene to Tony and Maria’s fire escape romance, he puts a smile on our face, only to wipe it off as West Side Story hurtles toward its tragic conclusion. Obviously, this is a story that has been told many, many times. The ease and skill with which Spielberg tells it only further entrenches his greatness.

SC: It’s beyond boring to say a Steven Spielberg film is well directed, but my god this is well directed. It’s beautiful to look at; the dance sequences are brilliant; the story stands the test of time. So why isn’t it the best of the year? Two words: Ansel Elgort. If you can put the sexual assault allegations against him aside (and I totally understand if you can not), he’s still not good here. I don’t know which 20-something actor plays the role instead, but Elgort looks even more limited when up against folks like Oscar nominee Ariana DeBose and should-be nominees Rachel Zegler and Mike Faist. It’s a shame, because literally everything else Spiely has whipped up works like a charm.

The Best of the Rest

The Card Counter

AJ: Oscar Isaac, Paul Schrader, and a tale about America’s total failure in Iraq? Yeah, this was going to have to try hard to not make my list. What a combination Isaac’s barely bridled, simmering rage is for a story about the utter depravity of Abu Ghraib prison and how that is reflected, like a mirror image, by moral bankruptcy at home. As with First Reformed, Schrader doesn’t sugarcoat things, suggesting there is no way back from this, given the denialism baked in to our culture.

CODA

AJ: Film Twitter hates this film for things that have absolutely nothing to do with it - because of how it might be regarded by the deeply flawed Academy. Ignore that body for a second (or maybe more), and what you have is a small, mostly familiar tale that is spun with heart and an abiding respect for its characters. Sure, it might be trite, but it is filled with the tonally appropriate pathos for one of the best coming-of-age films in recent memory.

Drive My Car

SC: The opening credits roll 45 minutes into Drive My Car, which made me squeal like a little kid. You mean all this setup was a PROLOGUE?! Thus begins Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s lengthy character study about theater, culture, loss, and the power of redemptive art. In particular, a scene where two characters discuss a cheating spouse has stuck with me; one person’s heartbreak at being betrayed is another person’s lament that he could never have this woman for more than one night. Life is all about perspective, and Drive My Car strives to depict other people’s experiences in glorious, painstaking detail.

Dune

AJ: Apologies in advance for this, but Dune was like water in the desert if you, like me, crave blockbuster fare that isn’t emotionally and developmentally arrested (read: almost all of Marvel Studios’ output). It’s quite a thing to make the scope and scale of interplanetary, politically driven fantasy feel new, and non-derivative, but Denis Villeneuve did it. Pass the spice. I’m ready for the sequel.

The French Dispatch

AJ: In my book, this is Wes Anderson’s best film in a good long time - certainly since Moonrise Kingdom, but maybe even going back further. What works? Well, if I may be so bold, the vignette style keeps the film feeling vibrant and keeps Wes out of the ruts that, for me, have made his more recent fare second tier. Bill Murray’s line that “however you go about it, try to make it sound like you wrote it on purpose” is quite a statement about this entry in Anderson’s filmography.

The Green Knight

SC: This feels a little like 2021’s forgotten film; it came out in July, when COVID-19 had subsided but many people remained wary about going to theaters. It still made $19 million, not bad for a fantastical drama during a pandemic but not enough to stick as a cultural conversation piece. Which is a shame, because it’s a remarkable movie. David Lowery is a visual master, from the design of the titular knight to the pure hunkyness he coaxed out of star Dev Patel. And let’s not forget about Sean Harris rocking the house as an elderly King Arthur with a raspy whisper, a far cry from the other Arthurs we’ve seen but a perfect fit for Lowery’s vision.

A Hero

AJ: Absolutist conceptions of honor that stretch back centuries and a modern world where, thanks to social media, everyone has a “brand” to maintain are an absolutely terrible mix. Asghar Farhadi leaves you deliriously confused by the morals and morality of the characters in his film, which is pretty great because, y’know, humanity. The texture of human beings - the flaws and failings and possibilities - don’t fit neatly in to structures and systems that are reductive. A Hero explains why.

Judas and the Black Messiah

SC: Yes, this was nominated for several Academy Awards last year. It was also released on HBO Max in February 2021, and we’ve made it very clear on this site that we don’t care for the Oscars and their “rules.” Logistics aside, it would be a crime not to include it; Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield give two of the year’s best performances, and the finale -- despite it being a true story with a very telegraphed endgame -- is a genuine gut punch. Writer-director Shaka King has put together an amazing first feature, nailing all the little things that make city-based crime dramas great and letting Kaluuya and the subject matter do the more subversive work for him. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

The Lost Daughter

AJ: No film, including Titane, made me feel more uncomfortable than Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, which gives us Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley striking right at the heart of the myths of parenthood, and, more specifically, motherhood. It meanders and it may introduce a few too many unneeded plot threads, but at its heart is a mirror, held up to us parents, and especially us husbands, about just how unglamorous, unsatisfying, and unsettling being a mother can be. It, uh, makes you think. The thoughts aren’t happy ones, but they are important.

Mass

SC: Surely the least-seen movie on this list, which is a shame. I only sat down to watch it after absorbing months of light chatter about “that filmed play about a school shooting.” It is indeed that; it’s also an actor’s delight and the best four-hander in recent memory, with Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, Ann Dowd, and Reid Birney all getting their moment in the sun. I had tears streaming down my face for nearly all of Mass’s final hour, fully sucked in by the emotion resonating from every actor and the intensity of their many layered conversations. If you’re the kind of film fan who gets giddy when an actor visually gears up for their next monologue, this one’s for you.

The Matrix Resurrections

SC: Yep, the fourth Matrix movie is the best blockbuster of 2021. Sorry, Dune, F9, Shang-Chi and the rest; you’re all fun, but I was fully won over by this incredibly introspective sequel and its attempts to reckon with its own existence. I understand why some moviegoers moaned when a character references Warner Bros. I know the action is a far cry from Reloaded and even Revolutions. But I saw this in theaters and the excitement was palpable; you could tell who was disappointed and who was enthralled, and I was obviously among the latter. I think Keanu Reeves does exquisite work; I think Jessica Henwick deserves trophies. I mostly think Lana Wachowski found a unique way to go back to The Matrix without embarrassing herself or tainting its legacy. That is worth celebrating.

Pig

AJ: A John Wick-Phantom Thread fusion starring the underappreciated Nicolas Cage as the broken, truffle-hunting gourmand is, well, catnip for me. I’d dig around in the dirt for this sort of film. Cage and camp might have an unbreakable bond, but he’s still a very capable leading man, the kind that can convince you a hunt for a pig is a very serious thing.

Titane

SC: By far my most striking theater experience of 2021 was seeing Titane. There’s car fucking. There are firefighter dance parties. There’s Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon giving two of the best performances of the year. Writer-director Julia Ducournau is an absolute force to be reckoned with; her debut Raw was provocative and wild, and Titane takes those adjectives to a whole new level. But it’s not shocking just to shock; somehow these wild scenarios and desperate characters are built upon real, understandable emotions. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re into something twisted yet profound, there’s so much to love.

The Worst Person in the World

SC: Obviously the best rom-com-dram of the year comes from Norway. It’s the kind of mid-tier movie that the U.S. has largely left behind: an intimate, dark, funny look at relationships that feels both universal and tied to right now. Renate Reinsve does incredible work as the on-again, off-again titular worst person, her status largely depending on the person she’s dating and the situation she’s in. It captures sensations we’ve all felt before: feeling stuck, longing for freedom, being selfish, losing yourself in a romantic moment. And unlike many other films, it gives us both those moments and their slow aftermath. Relationships are full of peaks and valleys, many of which are self-inflicted, and writer-director Joachim Trier lets his characters’ impulsive choices and laments play out for us all to absorb and dissect as we will.

One of the things you learn living through a (hopefully) once-in-a-generation global pandemic is that there is no real escape, save via herd immunity.

COVID-19 has been with us for more than a year now and it feels a part of quite literally everything. It has filled up our hospitals and dominated our news. It has kept us from friends and family members and interfered with our livelihoods. It is the primary organizing function in our lives. It dictates who we see, how and where we see them, and what we wear when we do. It even dictates how I buy my groceries. Last spring, when I worried about COVID-19 being everywhere, I mostly was concerned with what might be traveling in to the house on the shopping bags that held those groceries. Now, I know the pathogen itself is airborne. It’s everything else about it that makes it feel like it’s absolutely everywhere.

Obviously, this hits our health care and essential workers most tangibly and acutely. The fatigue they must feel at this point is incomprehensible to an insulated desk jockey like myself. But even for someone as fortunate as me - someone who has the means to keep his risk to a bare minimum - the wear and tear of this pandemic is unfathomable. And it may remain so for as long as I live.

As we announced on our podcast this week, Steve and I are taking a hiatus. It was Steve’s idea, but one I embraced almost immediately after he called me to discuss it - in a conversation that, quite humorously, had all the beats of an amicable breakup.

If it isn’t already obvious, we don’t make any money from this endeavor. We’ve been doing it together for seven-plus years. I’ve been writing about film in this space - not always under the banner of In Reel Deep - for almost a decade. We write and we talk about the movies here because we love to do it. The minute that isn’t the case - the moment it feels like more of an obligation or a chore - is the exact time for us to stop.

I can’t quite believe, now that I write this, that we’ve been doing it for this long without taking a real break. I can’t believe I had the incredible good fortune to sit a cubicle over from someone who cares as much about films and writing about them as I do, and who has good taste and real talent to go with it. It’s enough to make me pause and consider my position on fatalism.

The truth is, we don’t know if this is a hiatus or just … the end. We know it’s a stopping point, though it could wind up being the stopping point. We’re full-fledged adults now in ways we weren’t when we first met, with all the responsibilities and encumbrances that come with that fact. We might have come to this stopping point even without a global pandemic.

But it seems hard to argue with the notion that COVID-19 brought this specific hiatus about, even if it was an eventuality. COVID-19 has worked its way deep into every facet of film, just like everything else. I don’t need to catalogue the ways it has impacted the business, accelerating disruptive trends likely to alter the landscape of moviemaking forevermore.

But I do feel the need to talk about the more individual loss here. It is, of course, a trivial one in contrast to the mass death experienced every day in this country. I hope it goes without saying that I am not comparing what’s happening in our hospitals every day to what isn’t happening in our movie theaters. All I do hope to express is that something significant is being lost there too.

A year of a seemingly unending supply of streamable films at my fingertips has been more than enough to convince me that experiencing movies exclusively without the theaters they should be shown in is a dystopian future of which I want no part. The very environment of a movie theater is designed to offer you escape. You sit down next to strangers in the dark and you go somewhere else for a few hours. If you are a decent person, you don’t look at your phone. You certainly don’t pause the movie every 10 minutes to grab something from the fridge or respond to a text message or feed your cat.

There is just no escape right now. There are no movie theaters to safely attend. In the streaming-only world, there is no moviegoing experience. There is just content shoved down your throat at a mind-numbing pace. Consume it how you want. Spread it over three days. Brush your teeth while it plays. Don’t think too much about it when it’s over. Don’t even linger too long on how weird it is to see people in crowds without a mask on. Just move on to the next thing you’re watching while you do something else, while you’re biding your time for this all to be over.

Movies still do offer us some sort of respite. Our best of 2020 list is chock full of films you should make time to see. But writing and talking about them? Nope. Not right now. Not with the creeping, all-encompassing despair of COVID-19 spilling over on to celluloid, just like everywhere else. We have to dig too deep at this moment, and if we’re not going to be paid for our efforts, then it better feel like a labor of love.

My guess is we’ll be back in some fashion, sometime relatively soon. But one of this pandemic’s other lessons is that you aren’t as in control as you think - not even close. In the meantime, you can follow us on Letterboxd (ajohnsonterp and mino65434, respectively) or, for you imaginative types, try to conjure up what we’re texting each other about Nomadland or Dune or whatever else is coming soon to a reliable internet connection near you.

We’ll be right here.

As with everything else, 2020 at the movies — or, to be more accurate, at home watching the movies — was a year unlike any other, and almost exclusively in the worst way imaginable. Still, for cinephiles, there was plenty of quality to pass the time, even accounting for just how much time needed to be passed. It’s time to deliver our favorite piece of the year: In Reel Deep’s Best of 2020.

This time around, we have 16 movies that were not to be missed, including four that neither of us could resist. Here they are: the finest films 2020 had to offer.

The Top Four

Bacurau

Andrew Johnson: The only thing I don’t love about Bacurau is anticipatory: it’s hard not to imagine this film being remade by a big American studio and wrecking a masterpiece in the process. The good stuff? Everything else. Bacurau has a strong, specific sense of place - it transports you to a part of Brazil you’ve probably never considered once in your life, immerses you in a particular kind of shamanism - and then plays in a surreal manner with all the circumstances surrounding this little village. There are UFOs and machetes and a bit of a Hunger Games feel. This film knows exactly where it takes place, but leaves it up to you to figure out when and sort out why it all matters. It doesn’t hold your hand, and it takes you on one of the wildest, best rides of the year.

Steve Cimino: A lot of what makes Bacurau great has been covered by Fran Hoepfner on Defector. Which is impressive, because it’s a hard movie to describe. “There’s this little town in Brazil where the matriarch dies, and then Udo Kier and some UFO-shaped drones invade, and there are a lot of Star Wars-ian wipes and dissolves and it just rules.” It really does.

It’s slow and methodical, in a good way. It’s about colonialism but also moviemaking. There are very calculated misdirections, including how it subversively flips our expectations regarding “village teams up to fight bad guys” stories. It builds to what seems like an inevitable explosion only to end with a satisfying but comparative whimper. At points, Kier seems to be doing something of a Tommy Wiseau impression.

As Hoepfner notes, it’s the 2020 movie I most wish I could’ve seen in theaters, but I’d say it’s pretty perfect no matter how you consume it.

DA 5 Bloods

AJ: If BlacKkKlansman was an exploration of the dangerous banality of white nationalist movements, then Spike Lee’s follow-up to that film, Da 5 Bloods, feels like the beginning of response on what we might do about it all. The short answer is that it is complicated. The sins of America go far beyond our borders, and they carried by all of its people - yes, even black GIs who went to Vietnam. There are a slew of great performances to enjoy - most notably Delroy Lindo’s and a truly haunting ghostly one from Chadwick Boseman - and there is a firm reminder at the end: true justice is incompatible with the kind of individualism that drowns out everything but greed and self-interest.

SC: One of two Spike movies on my top 10! And much more of what we’d normally consider a “Spike Lee movie” than the David Byrne concert film below. Da 5 Bloods features what I think is the performance of the year from Delroy Lindo — though I expect Chadwick Boseman, also excellent here in a supporting role, to snag the Oscar for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — as a MAGA-loving vet who rounds up his buddies for a trip back to Vietnam. Spike, the king of boastful bravado, lets Lindo rant and rave like a wild man while providing grounding glimpses of the calm, reasonable man he could’ve been, before the war and the world started squeezing and wouldn’t let go.

It gets a little absurd at moments; I did not expect the ending to be a gunfight between Clark Peters and Jean Reno. But kudos to Spike for ignoring the Irishman technology at his fingertips and resisting the urge to de-age his stars. It works thematically and it’s also less distracting than seeing Isiah Whitlock’s smoothed-out face for half the movie. Like many Lee films, this isn’t the smoothest or tidiest ride, but the bumps along the way are part of the charm.

First Cow

AJ: It’s odd, though perhaps unsurprising, that two of the best Westerns of the last few years (the other here being The Revenant) have reached well beyond the American southwest and to well before the post-Civil War era. Both films put the bleakness of survival on the frontier at their center. Sheer will matters, but, as First Cow takes pains to point out, it doesn’t really amount to much if you can’t break through the isolation at some point. The beginning and end of this film are hauntingly beautiful.

SC: Another quiet gem from writer-director Kelly Reichardt, a story about the titular cow and also about friendship. Not much happens in terms of plot; new pals Cookie (John Magaro) and Lu (Orion Lee) meet in the 1820s wilderness, neither fitting in with the world around them. Stealing milk from the aforementioned cow allows them to make biscuits and sell them in the local market, which of course draws too many eyeballs and leads to serious trouble.

But it’s the sweet moments between the friends that really resonate; they’re two beyond-bit players in pioneering America who don’t get up to what we typically associate with that era: battles or adventure. Instead, we get people trying to survive in a world where nothing was easy and life comes and goes with surprising swiftness. The things we take for granted now — easy-to-access dairy products, the (relative) freedom to pursue your dreams — were not an option then, and I love Reichart for focusing on those serious challenges without being grandiose. Some would call it boring; I’d call it brilliant.

Mank

AJ: I’m not sure I know what David Fincher was playing at here exactly. He was playing at a number of different things. I’m also not sure this film is for anyone who isn’t already in (reel) deep on classic cinema and the business of moviemaking. I am 100 percent certain I don’t care. Mank feels like it was made for people like me - people who could marinate in Charles Dance and Amanda Seyfried and Gary Oldman bringing mid-century San Simeon to life. I didn’t want it to end even if what Fincher was trying to say was muddled as one of Mank’s many, many cocktails.

SC: As my colleague Andrew Johnson noted on Letterboxd, Mank may be too “inside baseball” for many people. It certainly covers the genesis of Citizen Kane in great detail, something that may not appeal to the masses.

But as I noted on this very website, I think Mank is about more than that. I couldn’t help thinking about Herman Mankiewicz’s attempts to integrate into and then push back against William Randolph Hearst’s empire as indicative of today’s corporation-fueled media landscape and those of us who tweet, post, and rail against enabling coverage of despots like Donald Trump. It’s good to speak your truth; it also doesn’t usually mean a thing. Words are just that; they aren’t action.

Gary Oldman’s Mank is happy to back Upton Sinclair for governor and couch his beliefs in witty rejoinders, but most of it goes nowhere. Until, of course, he writes Citizen Kane, a masterpiece that skewers Hearst and holds up today as a testament against power-hungry titans. He had his shot, and he took it. We should all be so lucky.

The Best of the Rest

American Utopia

SC: Stop Making Sense is still the greatest concert film of all time, but it finally has some non-Last Waltz competition. I saw David Byrne perform this show in Los Angeles in Aug. 2018 — remember live music? — and it was a masterpiece. Spike Lee’s filmed version is just as brilliant. Byrne’s energy and the smooth, seamless choreography will make you smile for two-plus hours, as will the beloved Talking Heads songs interwoven with some solid choices from the frontman’s latest solo album.

Lee primarily makes his presence felt during the performance of Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a song that lists the many names — and photos — of Black people who were killed by the police. But Byrne has assembled a multicultural band that feels right at home in a Lee joint, and Spike keeps the camera moving enough to remind you that this is mostly an exuberant affair. Watching this film isn’t as remarkable as seeing the show live, but given the current state of the world and the need for a little happiness, it’s more than good enough.

Another Round

SC: Upon first glance, this feels like a light watch: four friends decide to stay slightly drunk at all times, to “maximize their potential.” Or, to cope with crippling midlife crises. What happens is exactly what you’d expect, moments of glory interspersed with the crushing results of becoming eager alcoholics. Underneath it all, writer-director Thomas Vinterberg and star Mads Mikkelsen tap into an age-old story of losing appreciation for what you have, with a fitting (and earned) redemptive climax.

There’s a sweetness in the forgiveness ladled out throughout this movie; nobody’s perfect, and nobody expects them to be. The best part about Mikkelsen’s Martin is that we know Mads is a big, handsome, charismatic man; we want him to feel happiness, but he broods so seriously and deeply that his malaise becomes inescapable. Then, when Vinterberg finally lets that malaise dissipate, it’s as joyous as you’d imagine. This isn’t a sprawling epic, but it’s as good a character study as you’ll find this year.

The Assistant

SC: It’s easy — and accurate enough — to label this “the Harvey Weinstein movie.” That’s to your benefit as a viewer, as there’s value in watching it not knowing what to expect. The perspective crafted by writer-director Kitty Green grants us access not to the ghastly assaults themselves but to the ease with which they’re enabled. Some people cower in fear; others quietly cover things up to help their careers. Still others know exactly what’s going on and do not care. Through the eyes of titular assistant Jane (Julia Garner), we see all of the above in intimate detail.

Green leads us down this path of both passive and active disinterest, letting the revulsion build as we see ignorance continuing to be bliss. There’s barely an ending, let alone a happy one, unless you count the real-life arrests of several Hollywood monsters. But even that took decades and left countless victims in its wake. We’re left unsatisfied and even depressed, very much on purpose; it’s how a story like this one must be told.

Boys State

AJ: Given what we’ve all witnessed over the last four years, Boys State feels urgent. How did we get to this point and how can we ever break free of the acute, specific political misery that plagues us here in the United States? This documentary - about a five-day mock representative government put together by teenage boys in Texas - offers some clear, but speculative answers, at least to the first question. At best, there is guarded optimism on the second. All that said, to focus on the events captured on film over five days here and relate them only to the last four years is to miss a more searing and timeless message: politics, put in the wrong hands, debases us all, and it’s especially bad when the representative government doesn’t represent the body politic. This didn’t make me feel optimistic, but it does offer flashes of hope to which you can cling. This in turn does make it a perfect film for the moment, even if it has something to say well beyond it.

Hamilton

AJ: Maybe this shouldn’t be eligible for the list. Maybe I’m “Helpless” to resist. Maybe this was one of the most thrilling film experiences I had all year. Disney+ put this on their service the week of July 4th, and in so doing delivered a little bit of optimism - the smallest bit of hope in the bleakest year of my life. Don’t give up on America just yet - not if people of color can tell the story of the Founding Fathers to a string of addictive, innovative tunes on Broadway.

Lovers Rock / Mangrove

SC: First off, Steve McQueen’s Small Axe is a series of feature films. I will not bring that to the floor for debate.

The best two are Lovers Rock and Mangrove. They’re extremely different; Lovers Rock is 68 minutes long and essentially depicts a London house party. It’s about little joys, the freeing power of music, toxic masculinity, and the opportunity to shake off oppression for a few short hours. Mangrove is a courtroom drama that puts The Trial of the Chicago 7 to shame, striving for a feeling of accuracy while deeply tapping into the drama of being Black and on trial for your life against an unwavering system.

They’re both part of McQueen’s attempt to document the lives of West Indian immigrants in London over several decades, and they’re imbued with the patience and simmering emotion that we’ve come to expect from the Academy Award-winning director. Shaun Parkes, in particular, is an absolute force as Mangrove protagonist Frank Crichlow. He understands the abusive forces that reign over him and tries to stay out of their way, but the desire to resist becomes a necessity when his restaurant becomes ground zero for their oppression.

The rest of the film is Crichlow and his neighbors rallying against their tormentors, surviving through sheer guile, legal prowess, and the unbending knowledge that they are in the right. They were, and they are, and McQueen’s intimate depiction of their struggle to prove it is a fitting tribute.

Oh, and the “Silly Games” scene in Lovers Rock is 2020’s best.

My Octopus Teacher

AJ: Moments of true peace have been hard to come by over the past year. Here is one that marinates in them - one that shows the way back to them. Find your kelp forest. Find your octopus. Smile with a bit of melancholy and bask in the knowledge that true, unlikely connections are what get us all through.

Palm Springs

AJ: Groundhog Day is a perfect film, but Palm Springs, which sounds at first like a wholesale ripoff of a classic, also, has something to say about love and companionship and what really matters in the world. This film is funniest in the first 30 minutes as you loop with Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti. It finds a more poignant gear, though, as the bond between the pair grows and they wrestle with how to break free from their existential predicament. It is sweet and wistful - perhaps never more so than when Samberg and J.K. Simmons (the only other person caught in the loop) sit in Simmons’ backyard and have a man-to-man about what they have lost and gained in their time loop. That this all comes after Simmons bow hunts Samberg in the film’s opening sequences makes it all the more poignant. I am here for all the Simmons’ bow hunting I can get, but Palm Springs offers so, so much more.

Soul

AJ: With the possible exception of Coco, this is the best Pixar film of the past decade or so. It uses the boundlessness of animation as a medium - traditionally something oriented toward children - to explore big adult questions about existentialism and purpose. Soul is a visual stunner that lives up to the very best of Walt Disney, who famously bristled at the idea that the way he made his films meant they were just for people below a certain age.

Sound of Metal

SC: I started this movie about a heavy metal drummer who goes deaf assuming it would feature excellent sound design. I didn’t realize how much work writer-director Darius Marder and sound designer Nicolas Becker would put into building to that silence. As Ruben (Riz Ahmed) clings to hope and the bits of hearing he has left, the audience becomes isolated along with him, losing our link to the most underrated sense in the movie-watching experience. You don’t realize how important sound is until it’s taken away.

You know the implants Ruben wants won’t really work. You know his hearing will never come back, yet you want to believe because he does. And when he finally embraces the silence, the logical end moment that we all knew was coming feels truly earned. More than anything, and better than maybe any other movie I’ve ever seen, Sound of Metal captures the frustration of not being able to will your life in the direction you’re certain it should go.

Also, Paul Raci for Best Supporting Actor.

The Way Back

AJ: Put this story in the wrong hands and you get a disastrous film - one that is filled with tropes and moralizing and, likely, the wrong ending. Here, then, is a tribute to a formulaic story in the right hands, those of director Gavin O’Connor and a mid-career Ben Affleck who has something quite different to offer than a decade or two ago. There’s grief and optimism and a one-step-forward-two-steps-back thing going on that makes The Way Back a rewarding experience, well beyond a broken person neatly putting his life back together thanks to a plucky high school basketball team.

Walt Disney famously bristled at the notion that he made movies for kids.

“I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or 60,” he said. “I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should.”

Just a few minutes in to Pixar’s Soul, it was hard not to think of this sentiment. One of the reasons so many of us use Disney’s films to introduce our young children to the very concept of film itself is because they don’t “[play] down” to the grown-ups dutifully watching along. They have several levels. Still, Pixar’s films of late generally seem to be pushing this notion to the limit. If the Disney classics are, broadly speaking, about growing up, then Pixar’s - again, especially of late - are more deeply existential.

WALL-E, Up, Inside Out, and Coco traffic in nothing less than life and death and the search for meaning and identity. And now there is Soul to add to the list. It both continues this trend and is also the most direct and explicit on these themes. After all, its main character Joe Gardner, a music teacher who dreams of being a professional jazz musician, finds himself in an existential pickle before the title of the film is introduced.

I love all of those spiritual predecessors. And I loved Soul. But, you know, what about the 5-year-old on the couch next to me? I’m not speaking hypothetically or whimsically here. She is a big part of the reason those other Pixar films hold such a special place. They aren’t as much fun if they become late-night viewing. Isn’t it a bit of a Pyrrhic victory if a film both high-minded and literal enough to have a Great Before and a Great Beyond is lost on the young ones - or, worse, bores them? I turned to my left as Joe’s green, glowy, blobby soul began pinballing around the Great Before, and, well, it turns out Walt Disney is a much smarter man than me. My kiddo was rapt and smiling. There is much here to appreciate, whether you be five or six or 37 or 60.

Soul is co-directed by Pete Docter, who also brought us Inside Out. Together, the two films feel like a sort of micro- and macro-economics on the subject of existence itself. Inside Out is about the emotions held delicately in balance inside all of us. Soul is, to a degree, about the things in life we miss when we become too inwardly focused. It, too, is about balance, but instead about the balance between personal satisfaction and professional ambition.

As someone who basically had their dream job in their early 20s and then decided to find a different career after realizing it brought me little in the way of happiness, Soul spoke to me on a deeply personal level. As someone who loves animation, it nourished something even more basic.

Soul bounces between the streets and jazz clubs and shops of present-day New York City and the existential planes of the Great Before and the Great Beyond. It’s a stunning contrast because New York is unbelievably realistic. Were it not for Jamie Foxx’s Joe or Phylicia Rashad’s Libba or Donnell Rawlings’ Dez in the middle of the scenery, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between a real barber shop or tailor shop or jazz club and what Pixar’s animators have brought to life. The slice of pizza that 22, Joe Gardner’s sparring partner voiced by Tina Fey, evokes smells and sensations of being in Manhattan so strong, you’ll want to sop the grease off the top with a napkin.

The existential planes, meanwhile, glow with otherworldly colors. There are none of the hard edges of New York. Everything is soft and round and neon pink or green or blue. There are really no rules here other than Disney’s 12 basic principles of animation. That’s usually a scenario where the limitless possibilities of animation are allowed to flourish, and this is no exception. Imagination seems boundless. And so Picasso’s cubist paintings are brought to life alongside a rainbow-hued Spanish galleon.

To be in New York City with Joe Gardner is to think of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald records and of wolfing down greasy pizza at 3 am. To be in the Great Before is to think of Fantasia and the pink elephants scene in Dumbo. It is to reach worlds only possible in this medium.

Docter, along with co-director and co-writer Kemp Powers and composers Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Jon Batiste have done nothing less than to bring our world and a vibrant, impossible fantasy world together, and they have done it with a story that speaks to everyone, no matter their age.

The question of whether Pixar even makes kids movies anymore - the one I was pondering just a few minutes in to Soul with some concern - is rendered irrelevant, silly even, by the time the credits roll. Spend some time with this one. It will hit you deep.

Comic books are inherently goofy. A bunch of people dress up in costumes and fight bad guys; sometimes aliens and robots are involved.

Based on the initial response to Wonder Woman 1984, there’s a vocal subset of fans who want more of this. They desire zaniness. They want more rocks that grant wishes; they want more former SNL cast members to turn into human-animal hybrids.

At the same time, an equally loud bunch have been hastily disparaging this pivot to the peculiar. “More of the same!” they yell, ignoring that sameness in DC Films often means Zack Snyder-influenced, reheated garbage that — once upon a time — we all disliked for different reasons.

Where WW84 goes wrong is trying to saddle that line while also following the typically bloated sequel blueprint. Dead characters return; our protagonist makes big choices with power-sapping consequences; the dreaded two-villain setup weighs everything down, as it does in nearly every other second or third franchise entry that employs it.

What makes this movie different also makes it interesting. Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince resolves disputes with words as often as with her lasso. The central conflict has global consequences but isn't a big machine or monster that will obliterate us all. The MacGuffin is ridiculous in a simple way, one that somehow defies more logic than a whim-catering power glove. And Pedro Pascal is chewing a forest’s worth of scenery as a megalomaniacal faux business tycoon who doesn’t even pretend to be capable of a physical altercation.

Its problems, however, stem from a half-baked script that was probably rushed into readiness after the smash success of the 2017 original; it’s needlessly complex for what should be a straightforward story with literally four characters. And Diana Prince has yet to be defined; she seems to be a hero for the downtrodden, a hesitant savior, a god, and a fairly functional regular human being, all at the same time. After two feature films that bear her name, I couldn’t tell you exactly what she wants.

WW84 is best when Gadot takes on the bad guys in clear-cut action sequences; it’s also kinda good when our romantic leads are one on one, letting their surprising chemistry shine. But you can’t buck trends and be a unique comic book movie while also being a sprawling, poorly paced mess.

I don’t think writer/director Patty Jenkins has suddenly lost her fastball, and most of us will never know how WW84 would’ve looked on a big screen in front of a packed crowd. But in 2020, we all have to play the cards we’re dealt, and I suspect this departure from expectations will ironically end up spawning a lot more sameness under the already-meh DC banner.