Wherever you land on Tarantino’s latest, I think you’ll agree that it’s best to go in blind. So I’ll be short and sweet. On the surface, Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood is his most mature film, and probably ties with Jackie Brown as his most restrained (read: fewest violent outbursts). It’s his Hail Caesar!; his self-aware love letter to Hollywood. But beneath the supposedly wistful gloss is an overwhelming sense of dread: about a loss of innocence, the death of the old guard, and the feeling that everything is about to change.

In other words, it’s meta as hell; a fantasy about the queasy darkness that lurks beneath our cultural icons, made by a Weinstein-adjacent, former-Polanski-defending provocateur with no shortage of baggage in the public square. And in typical Tarantino fashion, there’s a mad tension at work between my brain and my heart. Which has always been his MO: “This is wrong, you know it’s wrong, now watch me make you root for it.” But this time, for the real-life characters involved and the director at the helm, it’s absolutely personal.

I had a lot of fun with this one at Cannes, and can’t wait to catch it in a less zombified state — even if subsequent rewatches give my brain more to criticize. For better or worse, there’s a lot to chew on here. Chris and I do spoiler-free** and spoilery talks in Episode 567. 

** Note: A summary of the historical record (RE Tate, Polanski, the Manson family) is discussed in the spoiler-free section. In this sense, I’d recommend not going in /totally/ blind. The more familiar you are with the sandbox he’s playing in, the more (positive and negative) you’ll probably get out of this one.

There’s something powerful about inaccessible places, where physical closeness magnifies an emotional remove. If I’m being honest, the travel memories I most romanticize are rarely anchored in connection. They’re buffered by language, by impermanence, by literal rain-smudged glass. Waiting dumbly at an outdoor restaurant in Istanbul for an unknown meal (büryan kebabı) at an unknown cadence (on the hour, every hour) for a price I’d learn by trial and error. “Far off the beaten path” in my memory, which is like a Turk calling Central Park “far off the beaten path” from Times Square. That jet-lagged sunset trudge through Shibuya, enshrined by a generation of Lost In Translation viewers, which remains totally impervious to irony: when I’m lost in a sea of scuttling strangers, all my learned self-awareness adds up to zilch. A church trip to San Francisco at 15 years old, overwhelmed by the sheer density of the Mission: Mariachi bands next to megaphoned preachers; pupusarias and dive bars and Chinese donut shops, all cut by alleys hiding murals more vibrant than anything I’d seen in art class. It was like high and low, metropolis and back-yard-BBQ had all slammed together. “If I ever get the chance,” I thought, “I’m going to move to this city.”

I did move to that city, along with many thousands like me. Bored of suburbs that had been tailored specifically to us, we were drawn to the different, the vital, the “real.” To anything, in short, that wasn’t already ours. You know the rest of the story. We entered in droves, causing prices to skyrocket, and displaced the very people who had made the city unique. So the irony of me, a white techie transplant, watching a film called “The Last Black Man In San Francisco” in a hundred-year-old cinema that’s been retrofit to serve $12 milkshakes and truffle fries…it’s palpable. Gentrification is a painful, complex subject, and I have no moral high ground to claim. I can’t watch this through the eyes of the displaced, and it’d be cheap and co-opting to try.¹ But film, when it’s good—and this one is really, really good—can serve as a bridge between otherwise inaccessible worlds. And while director Joe Talbot and star/co-creator Jimmie Fails have some brutal truths to speak about gentrification, what strikes me most is the beauty they exude in the telling. I opened this review with the nostalgia of travel, because I can’t help but see a damning contrast between the feelings they’re wrestling with and the ones I’ve put on a pedestal: not my surface-level high of seeing the unfamiliar at a pleasant remove, but the bone-deep ache of seeing something familiar, something really truly yours, fade out of reach. And finding a melancholy respite in the sorrow.

“You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.” With those words, uttered to a whining commuter on the SFMTA, Jimmie voices the closest thing The Last Black Man In San Francisco has to a thesis. It’s not that he doesn’t feel anger, of course. There are plenty of things that demand it: his childhood eviction from the neighborhood of his youth (Fillmore), the criminal neglect of the neighborhood of his present (a radioactive Hunters Point), acts of arson fueled by predatory landlords, acts of murder fueled by antagonistic police. And if you only read the synopsis and the “Sundance hit” byline, you’d probably expect the film to mostly live in those spaces. I know I did. I was prepared for a courtroom drama about squatters’ rights; a man torn from his birthright who insists on taking it back, on righting society’s inexcusable wrongs. Righteous outrage at infuriating concepts. But it’s hard to hate an abstract concept; almost as hard as it is to love it. The intensity of feeling that this film operates in can only be specific. It’s the specificity of Jimmie’s love that gives weight to his loss.

Perhaps most striking is the film’s precise sense of place. It’s become cliché to call a work of art “a love letter to” its setting, but Adam Newport-Berra’s cinematography makes that phrase virtually unavoidable. This is one of the most lush, meticulously composed depictions of anything that I’ve seen in recent memory.² Love infuses every frame. Much like Paterson, it’s a surreal depiction of a very real city that manages to be both heightened and intimate, meditative and grand. We’re encouraged to take our time, to soak up every idiosyncratic detail. It’s about the tenderness with which you turn a city into a home, painting over its blemishes and burrowing into its minutia: not blue but periwinkle, not The City (certainly not “San Fran”) but Golden Gate Ave just before Steiner where the main thoroughfare gives way to a row of tree-lined Victorians. So many settings are burned in my brain. The cliffs south of Potrero that shear off from blinding green to greyish brown, sunlight strobing through telephone poles as the bus snakes around the bend. A particular building just above a Tenderloin parking lot with a wide facade containing just a single column of windows. An overcast late afternoon on California street, as the fog rolls in and the headlights start to flicker and Jimmie’s tiny, distant skateboard emerges from the peak and zig-zags cautiously down.

A city is more than the sum of its postcards. It’s the people who make up its essence. Take Jimmie’s bestfriend Montgomery Allen. Tweed blazer, blue slacks, sandals with socks: a playwrite of eternal curiosity, always in on some cosmic joke, who seems to be floating a few feet above the rest. Or Kofi, the inscrutable neighbor and childhood friend. Talking shit in the company of his Greek Chorus posse; warmhearted and proud of you when caught one-on-one. Grandpa Allen, nestled in his tiny couch in his tiny living room watching televised movies from the 40’s. It doesn’t matter that he’s functionally blind: Mont will whisper-narrate the important bits (“Is she pretty?” “I would say so”), and he’ll beam like he’s seeing it for the very first time. The suit-and-tie street preacher, perched on literal soapbox, pouring his soul out to an audience of none. The busker on Mason singing “San Francisco (Flowers In Your Hair),” his euphonious voice negating a lifetime of halfassed pity. Absorbing it all is Jimmie himself. A mostly silent, unfazed observer, he glides through the city with such frictionless ease you’d think he were a part of the scenery. Whether rolling listlessly down a city slope or screaming in a vacant house just because he can, he’s blessed with an almost childlike contentment. Always wearing the same uniform of beanie and red flannel; all he really wants is for things to stay the same.

Still, despite our hero’s best intentions, the world is changing. And the film makes no bones about where its sympathies lie. In one painfully relatable scene, Jimmie is sitting at a bus stop somewhere near Union Square when a nudist walks by. Slowly, as if it were the most casual thing in the world, he unveils a courtesy cloth, sets it on the neighboring seat with a maître d’ flick, and plops down. In a hackier satire, that would be the whole of it: Jimmie the audience and nudist the foil, setup and waaacky punchline. But here, they’re both part of the setup. The bitter punchline comes in the form of a decked out cable car filled with partying techies (fresh from Moscone if the lanyards are any clue), hooting and hollering at the hilarity of a naked man. And not just laughing, but shouting the exact “Silicon Valley” reference that cohort would use, trying to be in-crowd when actually being obtuse. This is the “other” that is isolating our hero: not the quirky characters who lend the city its color, but the posturing invaders who consume it whole-cloth. Having driven him out of his own home, they don’t even have the decency to understand it. At least not beyond a few cheap signifiers. Here the specificity is pointed, and personally indicting. I’ve been that tourist giggling at the naked man; I’ve unironically used that very quote. When Jimmie and Mont meet a skeevy real-estate broker, the alma mater he name-drops is no accident. Neither is the neon sign shining through his office window: the entrance to the same pricey theatre I was presently seated in, a 30 second walk from my apartment.

Which isn’t to imply that this is a meanspirited caricature, either. What it is, is an honest and precise expression of grief. While the film is more than happy to highlight societal evils, I don’t think it’s primarily about the things that it hates: not the yuppie couple who bought Jimmie’s home as a status symbol, or the polite-but-suspect neighbor who comes to his play, or even Thora Birch’s punked out hacker giving her privileged rant on the bus. They are called out, to be sure, but they aren’t the addressees of this lovehate letter. Like Blindspotting and its conflicting feelings about Oakland, The Last Black Man In San Francisco is less concerned with fixing society’s failures than it is with analyzing Jimmie and his chosen response: his quiet acceptance of a collective sin he can’t control. His wistful blend of love and hate and even a tinge of bemusement, as he realizes that the home he’s fighting for might no longer exist. Might never have existed, at least not in the pure sense he’d hoped; that this cycle might repeat itself like the slow-rolling fog.

“Do you love it?” It’s easy to be nostalgic for far-flung places, but whatever that feeling is, I don’t think it’s love. At best it’s a fleeting infatuation. Genuine love doesn’t require motion blur, or jet-lag, or incomprehension: it doesn’t depend on a lack of familiarity. It luxuriates in familiarity, in the everyday routine. It’s patient, intentional, with nowhere in the world it’d rather be. Jimmie loves his city, even as it betrays him. Joe loves his city, even when it disgusts him. And here I am, a direct beneficiary of all that betrayal. I’d be lying if I said I’ve fully unpacked what that means, let alone how to conscientiously move forward.³ Have I recognized the beauty around me with an ounce of the passion I give some half-shrouded skyline on the other side of the world? Or am I forever the consumer, gawking at the “novel” and “real”—of the city I live in, of art that condemns me—from my garish party bus? The Last Black Man In San Francisco accomplishes what the best art can: it holds a mirror to society, and gnaws at something true.

This letter may not be addressed to me. But with its careful eye and soulful construction, it demands an emotional response. Chris and I discuss it on Episode 560 of The Spoiler Warning podcast.

Rambling Preamble

“Cannes is a festival of contradictions.”

I’ve tried to start this post a handful of times throughout the festival, and it’s always been with some variant of that sentence. Sometimes it was written from a place of bemused detachment, marveling at the juxtaposition of high and low, glitz and grime: the shimmering starlet and monkey-suited undergrad strutting side-by-side up the same red carpet for Malick and Mektoub, Rambo and Rocketman. If there’s any difference at all between the 4-hour arthouse and the 90-minute popcorn flick, neither the swarming paparazzi nor the slinky DJ set (a mashup of French baby-making ballads and Entourage-douchebag chic a la Hit The Road Jack) are tipping their hand.

Sometimes it was written from an uglier vantage point: the sleep-deprived 6:30am line for a film I barely wanted to see; the cramp-footed death march home after hours of begging, armed with a sign and a sunburn and the sweatiest Men’s Wearhouse tux this side of prom. There, the contradictions took on a more bitter hue. Cannes as the ultimate empty facade; a monument to nothing but its status as monument; a Mediterranean grove of Instagram fig leafs obscuring 2am Big Macs and 5am alarms, restless hours wasted in a sun-stewed daze, and a level of bureaucratic confusion that makes the DMV look like a concierge at the Ritz. How many nights of sleep had I lost due to some ambiguous disclaimer or seemingly-vindictive constraint? How much money, in opportunity cost and airfare and exorbitant AirBnB fees, was I throwing down the drain to watch movies in a setting infinitely less comfortable than the theatre 20 steps from my apartment? Here we are, the quote real cinephiles endquote, literally begging for scraps (and frequently failing) while a horde of zombified financiers twirl and giggle up the iconic stairs for a film they’ll never know the name of which they’ll leave halfway through — after a hearty conversation, a snap of the screen with the flash fucking on, and a round of leisurely e-mails on a phone whose brightness is somehow higher than max. Look at them all, dead-eyed and hollow, parading their excess for nothing and no one. Does that Czech supermodel with the $10,000 bag really harbor a passion for British socioeconomic drama? That rat-pack crew of bachelor party wannabes, they’re all big Jessica Hausner fans now?

And sometimes, of course, a wonderful thing would happen, leaving all that cynicism in the rearview mirror. In those moments, the contradiction was actually the festival’s secret source of joy; the velocity of a low becoming a high, the dark that makes sudden light all the more blinding. At 7:25 you’re empty-handed, begging on the corner; 7:26 you’re merci beaucoup-ing some generous stranger; 7:27 you’re sprinting up the red carpet, side-stepping Iñárritu on your way through security; 7:29 you’re standing in the packed Corbeille to cheer on Almodóvar, Banderas, and Penelope Cruz; 7:30 the lights dim and something calm, and assured, and beautiful begins. It doesn’t matter where you were, what you had to do to get there, how you felt like giving up 5 minutes prior. You’ve experienced what cinema does at its best: it fills you, transports you, creates emotion from scratch. And at Cannes, even on the most meager of badges, that emotional high is never far from reach. It’s a helluva drug, and it’s worth all the anguish…er, arguably.

So here I am, on my flight out of Nice, wondering how I can possibly summarize these two frantic weeks in a legible form factor. I guess I can start with stats. Over the course of 12 (or 10, depending on how you count) days, I saw 27 things this year. That included all 21 films In Competition within 24 hours of their debut, 20 of which were at the Lumière, 14 of which were black tie premieres (“galas”). It also included 2 Out Of Competition premieres at the Lumière, 2 Un Certain Regard premieres at Debussy, 1 ACID premiere at Studio 13, 1 director rendezvous at Buñuel, and unfortunately 0 Lighthouses. 15 of these came from begging, 8 from last minute lines, 3 from the cinephile office and 1 from the town hall.¹ On my “worst” three days I only saw a single film: once due to failed or poorly-communicated lines, twice due to Tarantino-mania. On my “best” day I caught 5 things: Mickey and the Bear (ACID) in the morning, a Nicolas Winding Refn talk in the afternoon, then back-to-back galas of Claude Lelouch’s The Best Years Of A Life (Out Of Competition), Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers (In Competition), and Gaspar Noe’s Lux Æterna (Out Of Competition, and batshit great.) At 55 minutes, Gaspar’s midnight screening was by far the shortest. At 3 and a half hours which felt like 8, Kechiche’s Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo was by far the longest and, also, the worst. On one night I managed to sleep 8 full hours. For two days I managed to eat all 3 meals. Zero caffeine was ingested on this trip, which is a challenge I’m still not sure I needed to take.

Okay, now on to the good stuff: how should I talk about the films themselves? I’ve toyed with a few options. I could list everything I saw and rank them in some way. Or I could cherry-pick individual films which moved me and do long-form writeups. Or I could follow the precedent I set last year, and do day-by-day recaps which in turn break out into longer reviews. With time, I’m sure I’ll get a little bit of everything. But for now, I’ll settle on this: a chronological list of everything I attended, paired with extremely brief thoughts, and ending with a stack rank of all 21 In Competition films. All of this is off the cuff and likely to change; stay tuned for meatier reviews later.

The Films (and events) of Cannes

In total, there are 12 days of the festival. The first features only a single Opening Film; the middle 10 are standard festival fare (multiple premieres and rescreenings of the day prior); the last is devoted entirely to reprises and one out-of-competition Closing Film. To denote the track, I’ll use [CO] for Official Competition, [UCR] for Un Certain Regard, [OOC] for Out Of Competition, [ACID], and [MISC]. I’ll also use [P] and [R] to denote Premieres and Reprises respectively. Every CO and OOC film was seen at the Grand Lumière, except for Sibyl which was reprised in the Buñuel theatre. UCR was always Debussy, ACID was Studio 13, MISC was Buñuel.

DAY 1

• Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die [CO][R] was a bit of a deflated opening for the festival: while having plenty of his signature elements (wry sense of humor, detached characters, methodical pace, one earworm of a song), it never really picked up steam. At its best, it was very absurd and very silly; at its meta-narrative worst, it was a total dud. Still, I picked up my first red carpet of the festival!

DAY 2

• Annie Silverstein’s Bull [UCR][P] is right up my alley: a tender, understated coming of age story about a young Southern girl (Amber Havard, who reminds me of a younger Brie Larsen in the best way possible) learning to control both her own anger and the rage that surrounds her. It didn’t exactly pack a wallop, but it landed exactly where it needed to in my heart. Also, it started what would begin one of the trends of the festival: films dealing, either explicitly or implicitly, with opioid addiction.

• Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables [CO][P] packed precisely the wallop Bull lacked. It’s a riveting thriller about police brutality, systems of power, and a society on the brink of uprising. Comparisons with Do The Right Thing abound, in theme if not in style (for better or worse, Ly opts for a much more traditional narrative approach). It may have benefited a bit from its placement in the festival (Jarmusch happened to be an easy act to follow), but it remains an extremely impressive debut. I would not be at all surprised to see this in the Foreign Language Oscar race.

• Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau [CO][P] is a movie I respected much more than I loved. It’s a parable about imperialism in the key of Jodorowsky; a slow-burn psychedelic Western that improbably pairs B-movie thrills with a resonant social message. Unfortunately, my tolerance for “weird” was a bit too low following my post-Miserables high, and while certain images will stay with me (particularly a scene involving a naked couple and shotguns), I never quite clicked with the tone.

DAY 3

• Mati Diop’s Atlantics [CO][P] may just be the sleeper hit of the festival: a hypnotic fable about loss and grief set in Dakar, Senegal. Diop is the first black woman to have a film premiere In Competition—let alone to receive an award!—and her aesthetic sensibilities are everything here: gorgeous lights and shadows, the deep blues of a lapping ocean tide, the slow hint of smoke in the night. This is a quiet, lovely, meditative debut, and it’s one of those films that only gets better with time.

• From here on out my day was defined by mistakes. While begging for a ticket to the new Ken Loach film, I received an invitation to the bizarrely-sought-after Rocketman [OOC][P] by mistake…and promptly gave it away. Why? So I could be 3 hours early to the Loach line, of course! That line was never let in, and I walked home dismayed and Elton-free.

DAY 4

• Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You [CO][R] was well worth the wait and early wake-up call. An intimate drama about a delivery van driver and his caretaker wife, the film picks up right where I, Daniel Blake left off. Yes, unemployment is a vicious cycle, but sometimes employment can be no less cruel. Both films feature a near-identical conversation, a protagonist bemoaning “I’m trying my best” only to be told that it “isn’t enough.” On paper, the sentiment would feel about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Under Loach’s careful, empathetic gaze, it’s a potent call to action: We are owed life and dignity at a bar that “best” can easily clear. In the wake of Uber and Lyft’s recent IPOs, that call is more urgent than ever.

• Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe [CO][P] is an odd little film which hovers somewhere between the lush romanticism of Amelie and the glossy remove of Killing of a Sacred Deer. A Sci-Fi drama about mind-controlling flowers (and, by inference, antidepressants), it’s conceptually interesting — and, at times, visually inventive. But after exhausting all its stylistic and substantive ideas within its first 15 minutes, it just sort of coasts…and coasts…and coasts…Some loved it; I found it one of the weakest of the fest.

• Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory [CO][P], by contrast, knows exactly what to do with a lush color palette. That should surprise no one familiar with his work. What might be a surprise, though, is just how autobiographical the film is. It’s hard not to read it as the culmination of an entire career, a hindsight-soaked ode to success and hardship, loneliness, yearning, creativity and its many sources. Above all it’s about the sacrifices made on the journey of life; both the people we sacrifice (friends, lovers) en route to our dreams, and the people whose sacrifices we indebt ourselves to (a knowing schoolteacher, a longsuffering partner, a mother’s indefatigable spirit). Come for Antonio Banderas’ career-best performance as a thinly-veiled Almodóvar; stay for the soul that infuses every frame. What a satisfying work of art.

• After such a high, I’m mildly embarrassed to report that I gave away my late-night invitation to see two episodes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old To Die Young [OOC][P]. Sleep comes for us all.

DAY 5

• Annabelle Attanasio’s Mickey and the Bear [ACID][P] is another charming, if not particularly novel, entry into the coming-of-age genre. The film, which first premiered at SXSW, follows a few weeks in the life of Mickey Peck, an 18-year-old on the cusp of graduation who spends her days caring for her hard-drinking, veteran father. It’s hard not to see parallels between this one and Leave No Trace; but where Granik’s vision of father-daughter strife is defined by empathy, Attanasio’s gets at something decidedly more prickly. Its familiar subject matter is elevated by two excellent leads — Camila Morrone as Mickey, and James Badge Dale as her father Hank.

• I then ditched the Wild Goose Lake premiere to catch Nicholas Winding Refn’s Director Rendezvous. He didn’t disappoint. Refn is an engaging conversationalist who is exactly as pretentious as I’d expected, but quite a bit more self-aware about it than I’d given him credit.

• Claude Lelouch’s The Best Years of a Life [OOC][P] was largely just a way to pass the time between screenings, and I admit that I am not its target demographic. A sort of octogenarian Before Midnight, it revisits the cast of Lelouch’s acclaimed A Man and a Woman (1966) to add a final coda to their love story: what it was, what it might have been, I think you get the picture. Wistful, saccharine, and gooey to the core, it was all pleasant enough, I suppose—but interspersing archival shots from the ’66 classic with this one felt like sprinkling caviar on a Krispy Kreme.

• Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers [CO][P] has all the right ingredients: a bold stylistic vision, a dynamite quadruple-crossing plot, and a lovely setting (Tenerife, where I’m presently headed). Unfortunately, in his nonlinear slicing and dicing for the sake of “cool”, Porumboiu severs anything resembling an emotional core. That may well be the point, of course — some subversive message about the Romanian surveillance state and its ability to hollow you out in the name of predictability — but the heart didn’t feel what the brain observed. I needed more to sink my teeth into if I wanted to stay awake.

• Gaspar Noe’s Lux Æterna [OOC][P] was exactly the wake-up call I needed. A sort of epileptic, acid-laced Birdman, his midnight mockumentary about a film shoot gone wrong (starring Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg as themselves) starts uncharacteristically slow and builds to a glorious, screeching crescendo. On the one hand, it’s a silly, self-referential exercise. On the other? I completely adored it.

DAY 6

• Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake [CO][R] premiered on the same day as Porumboiu’s film, and the comparison somehow detracts from both. Here is another aesthetically gorgeous thriller which piles its twists on so thick, it’s hard to feel anything for anyone. At a certain point, the two plots even started to bleed together in my mind (my own fault, of course, but it is what it is). I dug the action choreography, and the night shots of a noir-y, rain-soaked China were really something. But if there was a beating heart to any character, it was sadly lost on me.

• Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire [CO][P], by contrast, might have more of a beating heart than the other 20 films put together. It’s a period piece about two women in very different life situations — one an unwilling bride-to-be, the other a portrait artist hired to paint her in secret. I won’t reveal much about where it goes (like all films at Cannes that weren’t made by Tarantino, I went in knowing nothing but the title and director). Instead, I’ll just say that it floored me, combining the passion of Call Me By Your Name or Carol with the social malcontent of a vintage bodice ripper. A gorgeous film that doesn’t waste a second. Easily one of the festival’s best.

• Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life [CO][P] has been heralded as a return to form. Some will say Malick is back, others will say he never left. Having skipped everything of his since The Tree Of Life, I’m not fit to weigh in either way. What I can say is that it feels like a combination of old and new Malick, and for the most part that’s a good thing. A 3-hour historical drama set in WWII Austria, it mashes up all of his modern fixations (spinning camerawork, whispered narration) with his classic aesthetic (Tarkovskian landscapes, hyper-religious sentiment, the essence of what makes us good) — a Big Film about Big Themes, it makes all of his maximalist impulses feel earned. And being present at its premiere, just a few rows from the director, was an honor I won’t soon forget. So why did I only like, never love, this one? Maybe it’s the subject matter. I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything had been done before, and done better — either by others (compare the claustrophobic prison scenes to Son of Saul) or by Malick himself (the intimate family moments of The Tree Of Life, the soul-searching desperation of The Thin Red Line). All of its beauty felt slightly misplaced, somehow. Still, I can’t wait to see what he’ll set his sights on next.

DAY 7

• Maryam Touzani’s Adam [UCR][P] is, thematically, exactly the sort of thing I tend to adore. It’s a delicate portrait of pregnancy, motherhood, and female bonding set in a Casablancan bakery. And it occasionally lived up to that premise. There are moments of wordless, naturalistic beauty here unlike any other film I caught at the fest. Those are exactly the reason I go to UCR screenings. But the connective tissue between those moments felt too thin, somehow, less interested in telling a story than simply moving us from one perfunctory beat to another. In the end, as much as I loved the performances, I felt the film itself was only half baked.

• Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne’s Young Ahmed [CO][P] did much more for me on the “naturalistic drama” front. If you’re familiar with the Dardenne catalogue, you probably know the basics: a pressure-cooker character piece which takes an extremely simple premise and milks it for every ounce of pathos it can muster. What sets this one apart, though, is the social element. Centered around a Belgian teenager on the cusp of religious radicalization, there are about a thousand ways the story could have fallen apart: too extreme and it’d veer into propaganda, too gentle and it’d be toothless and trite. Thankfully, they thread the needle beautifully, granting Ahmed terrifying flaws without ever losing sight of his empathetic core. I laughed; I cried; I stayed on the edge of my seat. I fell in love with this quiet little film.

• Ira Sachs’ Frankie [CO][P] is also quiet and appropriately small, but I can’t say I felt the same enthusiasm for it. Maybe it’s a problem of location. In Love Is Strange and Little Men, Sachs’ characters are imbued with a lifetime of familiarity: we know exactly which streets they’d walk, which apartment they’d nest in. This time they’ve relocated from New York to Portugal, and something seems to have shifted in transit — the nuance is still there, as is the pitch-perfect dialogue that defines all of his work. But absent is the feeling that I truly know them as people, rather than a collection of clever signifiers. I enjoyed this one enough for what it is, but I can’t say it left much of a mental footprint.

DAY 8

• The majority of this day was eaten by Tarantino mania: 5 hours of begging on the same street corner, no luck. Do I wish I’d done something else with my afternoon? Do I resent the woman who showed up 30 minutes before the screening and snagged a ticket right next to me? Sure, sure. But you live and you learn.

• Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite [CO][P] took whatever lingering frustration I might have had and squashed it like a…well, you get the idea. How can I describe this genre-defying masterpiece? It takes everything in the director’s ouvre — action, horror, the darkest of comedy — and blends them together into something both profoundly moving and relentlessly entertaining. I loved everything about this movie: its brilliant construction, pitch-perfect characterizations, meticulous framing, uncompromising message about economic strife. In a way, Bong Joon Ho out-Loaches Loach: If you’re looking for a parable about the cyclic nature of lower-class living, this is it. Standing in applause as the credits rolled, I was certain this would be my favorite of the festival. I was right.

DAY 9

• Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood [CO][R] was, of course, the biggest draw of the festival. 25 years after the Palme-winning Pulp Fiction, the director was back with a kickass cast and the sort of premise festivals swoon over: movies about moviemaking, about the glamor and insanity of Hollywoods gone by. And, in classic Cannes fashion, all my effort meant zilch. After a full day of begging and a groggy morning spent waiting in a meaningless line, I finally scored my ticket by accident: a stranger calling to me from the red carpet and handing me a spare ticket moments before the film began. So, was it worth all the hype? I’m giving it a firm “yes”. In some respects, Tarantino’s latest marks a huge departure, trading giddy violence and exploitation for a glossy trip down memory lane that wouldn’t feel out of place next to Hail, Caesar!. In other respects, it is very much a Tarantino film, for some reasons I can mention (its sense of humor, signature panache) and others I won’t. This is the movie DiCaprio should have won his first Oscar for, and Pitt is better than he’s been in years. It may not be the consensus pick Cannes was expecting, but I loved it all the same. And I think I mostly agree with that contentious letter. More than anything else in the festival, this one really benefits from going in blind.

• And, having successfully caught the most sought-after film of the festival, I took the night off with my girlfriend to have a bite and a drink, watch Jackie Brown on an iPad, and promptly fall asleep.

DAY 10

• Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime [CO][R] was the perfect fit for an early-morning screening: an unassuming talky flick with layers of emotion hiding up its sleeve. I was surprisingly moved by this film, and by Dolan’s performance in particular, which perfectly captures the way trauma can cause love and aggression to intermingle. His directorial vision was no less assured: a few touches (certain music cues, one beautiful scene shot through frosted glass) got me real good. As with many of the festival, I think the less you know about this one the better it will land, so I’ll leave it at that!

• Arnaud Desplechin’s Oh Mercy! [CO][R] also had a unique directorial vision, but I can’t say it moved me in the same way. A lugubrious procedural about the elusive nature of truth, it’s well crafted on paper — and acted the hell out of by Léa Seydoux and Sara Forestier — but fundamentally lacking, to me. Maybe this is yet another example of my own language barrier bringing a film down, rendering dialogue that ought to pop into inert Philosophy 101 text. Either way, for all its style, this was my least favorite film of the festival…for a few hours, that is.

• Abdellatif Kechiche’s Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo [CO][P] would handily take the throne just a few hours later. I can’t decide which is more sad: that I stayed up until 2am to watch this 212-minute dry-hump of a film premiere, or that some thousand poor souls woke up at 7am to do the same thing sober. Articles have emphasized the film’s contemptible male gaze, and in particular the 20-minute cunnilingus scene (which somehow manages to be both unsimulated and the least realistic sex I’ve ever seen on screen). Hell, I’ve even been quoted in some. But the truth is, the walk-outs started long before the B-grade pornography began. Some left after about an hour, during the nightclub scene that felt like it would never end. Others left an hour and a half later, when the nightclub scene had still failed to end, despite having added virtually zero dialogue or character growth of any kind (unless twerking and downing enough shots to take down an elephant counts as “growth”). At a certain point in the evening, when at least half the audience had already left and we were sure the credits were about to roll, my friend checked his watch. It was only midnight. There were at least 100 minutes left to go. The laughter that followed, and continued throughout the rest of this trollish endeavor, was the evening’s only redeeming quality. People trying to compare it to The Brown Bunny or Southland Tales are seriously missing the mark. Those were contentious films which took it too far; this one is barely a film. Sit through this entire thing in a dark theatre, phone out of sight, and find one thing to praise about it. I dare you.

DAY 11

• Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor [CO][R] came as a welcome change of pace after the inane evening that preceded it. A sprawling procedural about the trial of ex-mafioso Tommaso Buscetta, the film rises or falls on its lead’s performance. Thankfully, Pierfrancesco Favino delivers the goods: alternatingly thunderous and timid, blustering and heartfelt as the situation demands. The film around him is slowgoing, methodic, and not quite as gripping as it ought to be — when it veers into Season 6 Sopranos territory it feels oddly inert. But those inert moments are few and far between; for the most part, this riveting courtroom drama is well worth a watch.

• Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven [CO][P] is a small wonder of a film, managing to be both wistful and hilarious while barely saying a word. Armed with the most meticulous mise-en-scène of the festival, Suleiman highlights the minute absurdities of daily life, both in his hometown of Nazareth and in the places he visits (Paris, New York City). He isn’t the first to tap into this well, of course; comparisons to silent film, or the work of Jacques Tati, are plentiful and deserved. But I’m struck less by his knack for comedy than by his knack for composition; or, rather, by how he makes composition into its own sort of comedy. Too humble to be my favorite but too well-crafted to be much less, I have a feeling this one will only grow with time.

DAY 12

• Justine Triet’s Sibyl [CO][R] was my last film of the festival, and the only one I didn’t manage to catch at the Lumière proper. To be honest, after 11 days of begging, I’d been too burnt out to try. But packed into the Buñuel after a relaxing day of wandering the town, I was probably in the best possible mood to enjoy this. A tragi-comedy about a therapist who uses her patient’s lives as fodder for her novel, it’s precisely the sort of meta-meta fare the festival eats up. And you know what? I ate it up too! Funny, thought-provoking, and anchored by an excellent performance from Virginie Efira, it was the perfect snack to wrap up the trip; not too heavy, not too light.

In Competition, ranked

Phew! So there you have it. Everything I saw at Cannes. Now, as promised, I’ll give a quick ranking of the Competition films, which will almost certainly change by the time I wake up tomorrow:

1: Parasite

2: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

3: Pain and glory

4: Les Miserables

5: Sorry We Missed You

6: Young Ahmed

7: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

8: It Must Be Heaven

9: Matthias & Maxime

10: Atlantics

11: A Hidden Life

12: Sibyl

13: Frankie

14: The Traitor

15: Bacurau

16: The Whistlers

17: The Wild Goose Lake

18: Little Joe

19: The Dead Don’t Die

20: Oh Mercy

21: Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo

Outro

Cannes is a festival of contradictions, and I am no exception. Sitting here in my hotel in Tenerife (where I landed some 2/3rds of the way through this post), I’m unable to sift out the good from the bad. Stacking up moments of deep frustration against rapturous delights, the stressors of an opaque bureaucracy (I still recite names and showtimes when I try to fall asleep at night, like some obsessive-compulsive human Moviefone) against the delicate, the subtle, the empathetic, the profound. Maybe there’s no point in untangling it; maybe the 8am Ken Loach needed that 3am Big Mac just as surely as Malick needed my sweat-chilled suit. Mucinex and masterpieces, dolor y gloria. There’s something to be said for fighting for the things that you love, for love being wrapped up in the fight itself. I’m empty, and exhausted, and energized, and full. I never want to go to Cannes again. I’ll see you there next year.

Avoiding spoilers in an Avengers: Endgame review is about as daunting as avoiding a ham-fisted metaphor for Thanos—they’re inevitable, if only in negative space. How can I preserve the delight of an unexpected ending, while describing a film that’s one 3 hour climax? It’s a bad idea, and it probably won’t work. But if Endgame has a message for all of us, it’s that dogged conviction can redeem even the unlikeliest of plans. So let’s tighten those shield straps and get down to work.

As an individual film, Endgame is surprisingly solid. As the end of a series, it’s downright great. But I’m far more interested in the loopy interplay between those two things. The duality of being both final chapter and fresh start; the uncanny way past films weigh on the present even as new moments reinforce, or sanctify, the past; the rush of electricity when a mangy tangle of narrative threads (3 hour film, 6 hour saga, ~50 hour MCU, 11 year culture) converging at a solitary focal point—sending shockwaves that ripple back, tip to root, tidying and braiding past chaos like Chris Hemsworth’s beard. It’s a feat of tapestry that lets Infinity War inform Ant Man 2 to tee up Paul Rudd’s tears to cut Ant Man 1’s zaniness to foreground Scott Lang’s humanity to impart Ant Man the Hero an unlikely seriousness to be undercut by a taco some 12 minutes later—what might have been a throwaway gag, in short, becomes a nostalgic release of something you didn’t know you felt. That’s not a spoiler in any conventional sense; it’s just one of a thousand Goldbergian contraptions that hum whenever a character’s on screen. A single character, that is. When four or five intersect and those gears start turning, it’s a wonder we’re able to feel anything but tired. Yet I wasn’t tired, even at 2 am. on a Thursday. I felt light, giddy, strangely proud. Steering all that heavy machinery into lightness is, I think, the film’s real superpower.

We’ve experienced aspects of this before, of course—even with other 50 hour sagas, even this very weekend. But I’d argue no show, not even That One, could pull off Marvel’s trick. It’s partly a question of breadth: no single series, however expansive, has room for humorless demigods, bald-capped wizards, beige UN councilmen, and talking raccoons; to say nothing of hoo-rah period pieces, retro space operas, fiery political allegories, heist comedies, coming-of-age dramadies, and whatever lifeless genre Bucky calls home. There’s a lot of tone to wrangle, here, which means one massive emotional arsenal. But it’s also about the unique shape films take: the clean start, middle, and end that must be internally satisfying while fitting snugly in a nesting doll of starts, middles, ends. That kaleidoscope of tones housing fractals of micro-arcs—it’s dazzling to see, and I doubt we’ll ever see it again.

So how can I praise a movie that’s all structure, if I’m not allowed to talk about it directly? I guess by saying that Markus, McFeely, and the Russos have pulled off the stunt, and that pulling it off is no small miracle. They do right by a surprising number of characters, including—especially—those I was barely inclined to care about (Captain America, Doctor Strange). They render each Avenger necessary for the end result (count ‘em), and retroactively justify even the silliest of franchises, with Guardians, Ant Man, and even Thor given vital roles to play in the final showdown. They also make room for some improbable solitude, and the cast is more than game to make it count—I can call out specific highlights (Robert Downey Jr., aforementioned Paul Rudd) but just about everyone is on top of their game here for at least a stretch. There’s even some nice symmetry to be had in comparing the film’s arc to the series it resided in: unwinding the clock from heart-wrenching politics to escapist fantasy to spectacle-heavy CG-fest to naive idealism, only to mash it all together in one epic clash. While it’s far from a perfect outing (tune in for plenty of nitpicks, as well as broader complaints about diversity and comic tone) I’d be hard pressed to come up with a tidier way to close something this massive.

It’s admirably clever storytelling, is what I’m saying. And you don’t need to /notice/ that cleverness to enjoy it: if you’ve toiled through this 22-part journey you’re bound to be its benefactor. I am by no means a Marvel fanboy; if anything, I’ve gotten fatigued by it. I’m far more excited about where the franchise is headed, than by whatever it’s left behind. But Avengers: Endgame makes even the most lackluster entries feel meaningful, somehow; it justifies the whole, silly ride. It’s the only film in the MCU I’ve gladly watched twice, and if I had a lick of free time I’d go for round 3. Choose to be a part of this insane cultural moment, conveniently forget that the moment happens to fund one of the biggest corporations on the planet, catch it in theatres on the biggest screen you can, and then listen to our 2 hour deep-dive in this week’s episode of The Spoiler Warning Podcast.

Death is real
Someone’s there and then they’re not
And it’s not for singing about
It’s not for making into art

If you’ve read anything of mine recently, you probably know that Phil Elverum has been a prism through which I’ve seen a lot of art refracted. The above words in particular were rattling around my head as I watched Paddleton. How do we tackle something as insurmountable as death? It’s not an abstraction, not a theme or metaphor, not a catalyst for pie-in-the-sky poetry or heart-wrenching melodrama. It simply is, for better or worse; this dumb inevitability that’s at once ubiquitous and unspeakable, stale and profound. There’s nothing more insufferable in the world than to write about dying: entire wardrobes have been erected around phrases like “dumb inevitability.” But there’s also nothing more human in the world than to fear it, to witness it, to eventually live it. It’s the hack Lifetime Original premise that unites us all, a territory more well-trod than any three-chord breakup song: someone’s there and, then, they’re not.

When it comes to art that wrestles with the subject, there’s a razor-thin edge between “exploitative” and “profound.” And like romantic vs pornographic or darkly comedic vs offensive, it can only really be defined in subjective terms. Some films tackle mortality head-on, full of sentiment and transparent motive, and I fall in love at first sight. Others, no less earnest, leave me feeling angry and manipulated. Some opt for a subtler approach, and I roll my eyes at the faux pretension. With others, that same subtlety hits me like a tidal wave.

What I love about Paddleton is that it carves out a new path, one that’s both achingly direct and allergic to drama. In keeping with the Duplass Brothers’ aesthetic, the film—starring Mark Duplass and Ray Romano, directed by Alex Lehmann—has that lax, bullet-points-and-improv vibe that will either delight or infuriate depending on your tolerance for the genre. When Michael (Duplass) learns he has terminal cancer, he resolves to end his life on his own terms. Soon after, he and his best/only friend Andy (Romano) take a road trip to the nearest pharmacy that’s willing to provide physician-assisted suicide medication, a little drug store in Solvang. But don’t let the destination fool you: there are no Sideways hijinks to be had here, no off-the-rails moments or third act twist. There isn’t even much of a road trip, really, at least not in the cinematic sense. The friends simply drive to get his medication, have a few drinks, sleep, drive back, and…well, I won’t officially spoil it, but you can fill in the blanks.

It’s tempting to say that Paddleton is carried entirely by its final 20 minutes—like the similarly-paced Jeff Who Lives At Home or Safety Not Guaranteed, it swings for the emotional fences and knocks it out of the park. These are some of the most gorgeous, humanistic moments I’ve seen on screen in a long time, and both leads act the hell out of it. But the truth is that the trick only works—only avoids crossing that line—because of the nuanced character-building that precedes it. Whether huddled around a Kung Fu video, squabbling over the bill, or ruminating on “how bees see” and “sand-off” in the car, Romano and Duplass bring years of lived-in authenticity to their onscreen friendship. For my money, it’s the best either has ever been (and I’ve seen The Big Sick). We believe both their deep, platonic love and its clumsy expression: we’ve seen them before; we’ve maybe even been them. And that space for self-identification is precisely where the Duplass’s freewheeling style shines, giving us a window into the mundane, everyday-ness of its leads. As we see ourselves reflected in their banal eccentricities, the elephant in the room grows more tangible, somehow. Michael is a real person, and he is really going to die. So is Andy. So am I. So are you.

We know all of this, of course. We’ve seen it on screen, too, in countless iterations. But Paddleton resides in the space between soundtrack cues, in a way that few others manage. It argues that buried between shots of a foreboding test result, tearful embrace, EKG flatlining, and shovel in the dirt, there are months (often years) of boring, joyous, ridiculous, silly life left to live. Movies still help pass the time; home-made pizza still tastes good; the so-unfunny-they’re-funny jokes still…well, are. The world spins madly on, tinted by that “dumb inevitability” but only just a notch. When the tears finally do come—and, oh, did they for me—they feel different against that backdrop. Like mourning, celebration, and pride rolled into one.

For communicating all this with humor and grace, Paddleton is getting nothing but my love. And it’s on Netflix right this second. Get a good pair of headphones, steel yourself for a cry, and thank me later. Or hear Chris and me discuss it in Episode 547 of The Spoiler Warning.

Here’s a scenario that’s oddly common. A filmmaker is tasked with bringing a popular property to screen, and given a budget roughly equivalent to the GDP of a small nation state to make it happen. They hire an A-list cast, labor over meticulously detailed production design, and employ a team of visionary VFX leads who, despite sky-high expectations and insane production schedules, somehow manage to elevate the state of the art with each passing year. Having assembled a Who’s Who of creative talent, they march lock-step in service of one goal: bringing to life the most corny, mediocre script money can buy.

Why is this? Why do we expect world-class results from every technical contributor, only to settle for writing that wouldn’t make the shelf of an airport convenience store? Is it a case of decision-by-committee—of a responsibility so heavy that the only way to bear it is to spread it translucent? Of too many hypothetical audiences to satisfy, their market quadrants iteratively rounding the corner of every bold decision? And even if we can explain away the risk aversion, why the other flaws? What quadrant is made larger, or executive producer happier, by half-assed dialogue and a nonsensical plot?

I may never solve this mystery, but Alita: Battle Angel stands as its latest casualty. Its source is an internationally beloved manga; its producers and director are genuinely great; it features multiple Oscar-winning performers in its cast; it is, according to virtually all sources, a labor of love. And that love is palpably visible on screen. The film’s visual style is wonderful, a Sci Fi cyberpunk skate park with welcome shades of Mad Max and Neill Blomkamp. Its action scenes, too, are a joy to behold: swiftly paced, graphic-novel stylized, and worthy of the biggest screen you can find. Alita is the sort of character who could only be brought to life in 2019, with eyes that defy the uncanny valley and moves that defy Newtonian mechanics.

Also defied, unfortunately, are basic plot mechanics. “You are the most human person I have ever met,” Hugo insists to Alita, and while it’s not inaccurate it’s a very low bar: when not being literal mouthpieces for an inevitable endgame, the people in this world make emotional 180s like it’s worth 3 points in Motorball. Hugo is by far the worst offender, existing only to: spout cringey platitudes, make implausibly poor decisions (comprising the only real “conflict” in the film), be vaguely fallen in love with, brush hair out of his eyes. He finally answers that eternal dystopian question: “What if half a girl fell in love with one tenth of a Jonas Brother?” But if Hugo’s arc is aggravating, he’s at least given time to trace it. Christoph Waltz’s Ido defines himself solely by a small set of principles, all of which he’ll abandon for reasons left entirely offscreen. Jennifer Connelly’s Chiren yearns for nothing but a Zalem we’ve never been taught to care about, until the precise moment the plot demands she stop. Mahershala Ali’s Vector is a slick villain who’s so good you almost forget he’s been given nothing villainous to do. Even Alita, the most human of them all, is granted at most a mumbled hero’s journey—the tone is familiar, but the words don’t make sense. She’s a “hero” without a single heroic motive, capable of shifting from “Be true to my heart” to “Rip it from my chest” to “Kill for sport” to “Send boyfriend on vacation” as the script demands. As I watched her tearfully learn her origin story for the third time in an hour, I couldn’t help but wonder if there had once been a “very human brain” at the core of this film—chopped and screwed in the editing room like so many macheted limbs.

Alita: Battle Angel is a legitimately dazzling achievement; and I’m rarely one to nit-pick over plot. But I thought this one really strained credulity. Chris and I talk Equilibrium, Elysian, and what’s under the under-city in Episode 543 of The Spoiler Warning.

[Post-Cannes note: I went to Cannes on a Cinephile badge, and managed to catch all 21 films in Official Competition! You can read about my experience here.]

[04/08/19 note: As of today, some Young Cinephiles have started to receive their 3 Days In Cannes accreditations. Congratulations! Scroll down to the second section to learn more about what to expect.]

Hey I know that guy!

It’s Cannes season again, and things have changed quite a bit since my Three Days In Cannes post from last year. So I thought it’d be useful to give a little update. There are two major points I’ll touch on:

1. As the title suggests, I’m going back to Cannes! Having aged out of contention for their Young Cinephile pass, this time I’ll be putting on my adult pants¹ and attending as a Cinephile proper. Since my accreditation has already been approved, I’ll talk a bit about that process below. ↯

2. Also, as last year’s title suggested, I have indeed gone to Cannes. And since 2018 was the very first year they tried their Three Days In Cannes experiment, I get the sense that some of you might be curious how the process works. (The spike in traffic and “How do I become a Young Cinephile” e-mails helped, too.) So I’ll do my best to give some helpful hints about last year’s process as well. ↯

But first, let’s get the basics out of the way. The Cannes application process is notoriously opaque: there are different forms of accreditation, each of which puts you in a different bucket and gives you access to different theatres you can barely pronounce (let alone productively Google).

If you are in the film industry, you’re a first class citizen and eligible for a proper Festival pass. If you’re a journalist (as the vast majority of people who write online about the festival are, for obvious reasons), you’re eligible for a Press pass. I’ll assume you are neither of those things, as you probably have better resources than some off-brand blog by a guy who shares a name with the worst person in America.

If you’re a philistine like me, you’re probably eligible for a more limited Cinephile pass. If you’re a philistine like me but a little younger, you’re definitely eligible for the Young Cinephile pass, which offers less time than its “adult” counterpart, but substantially more access. I’ll repeat that: Young Cinephile > Cinephile, at least for their duration of overlap. For the last 3 days of the festival this year, I will be actively jealous of every Young Cinephile. They’ll be seeing 3+ films a day while I’ll be begging on the street for one.

2019: Cinephile Accreditation

At the end of last year’s Cannes, I was—understandably—exhausted. But I was also feeling some pre-emptive nostalgia. I’d had my moment, and the moment passed. In a few days I’d turn 29, and short of becoming a member of the press (which is not impossible but, you know, we’d need roughly 100x more listeners), I might never be able to attend the festival again.

Why? Because I wasn’t a member of the industry, I wasn’t a member of the press. And when I’d skimmed the Cinephile requirements, I internalized that it was exclusively meant for active film students, or the organizers of entire film-going groups. Looking back now, it makes sense why. The first sections are “School Groups”, “Film Students”, and “Cultural or Film Club Associations”—all of which require proof. What I somehow hadn’t noticed was this final section: “Member of a Cinema Club”. Translation: “just a regular guy who joined a thing.” But I’m a regular guy! I can join a thing!

Like all forms of Cinephile accreditation, “Member of a Cinema Club” requires some ID card as proof. Luckily, it turns out that becoming a card-carrying cinema club member is not as hard as it sounds. In fact, I’d already inadvertently become one in 2018, by registering as a Star-level patron of SFFILM. At the time, I’d seen the annual membership as a tiny way of giving back to the local community (while getting access to some sweet early screenings in the process). I had no idea it was also my golden ticket to Cannes. And while I don’t recall receiving a physical ID card, it had been sitting in my Constanza-sized wallet this whole time.

You may not live in the Bay Area. But if you’re near any major city, there’s a strong chance you have a rhyming organization available to join. Hunt for all the film festivals in your Metro region, scroll down till you find the name of the group that puts it on. Go to their website, hunt for a “Membership” or “Donate” or “Give Back” link, and see if they give a physical ID in return.²

OK, so turns out I’m a member of a cinema club with physical proof! From there the application was a breeze. I just had to scan my passport and SFFILM card, fill in the requisite info, and write a cover letter. Now, I will never know to what extent that letter truly matters, but I do know that in both years I’ve applied, I heard back extremely quickly (at least relative to anyone else I’ve met.) So based on that thin evidence, and my own sense of pride, I’m choosing to assume the letter is important. Here’s the one I wrote this year, for reference:

And…that’s it! Turned in my application around midnight on the 1st, frantically refreshed my inbox for 5 days, and eventually got the e-mail:

Book an AirBnB five minutes from the Palais, throw it on my calendar, and we’re off to the races! But that’s all for future me to sort out; let’s talk about the past.

2018: Three Days In Cannes Accreditation

Last year, I wrote a similar post about the application process. tl;dr: Three Days In Cannes is a great opportunity, you should apply, here’s the PDF of my 2018 cover letter for reference:

I also wrote a few detailed recaps at the Festival proper. If you’re curious, you can read them below:

• Day 0: Burning
• Day 1: In My Room, Dogman, Sorry Angel
• Day 2: BlacKkKlansman, Knife + Heart, The Wild Pear Tree
• Day 3: Shoplifters, Yommedine, Under The Silver Lake

I’ll assume, instead, that you got to this post because you were googling “Three Days In Cannes”, and were hoping to get some info about how the process works. So I’ve compiled a few common questions and answers.

OBVIOUS DISCLAIMER: I can only infer based on past experience, and in the case of the Young Cinephile accreditation, that sample size is as small as humanly possible. For all I know, this year’s badge will be entirely different. Still, given how many hoops the organizers had to jump through last year, I find it unlikely they’ll add yet another drastic change.

A note on terminology

As mentioned above, Cannes can sometimes seem impenetrable. Here are a few phrases you might want to be familiar with:

• The In Competition films are the “main” track of the festival. These have two premieres a day, every day. Over 10 days, that means 20 films are in this class (~21, give or take an Opening and Closing film).
• The Un Certain Regard films are a secondary, but still very prestigious, track of the festival. They also have two premieres a day, totalling 20.
• There are a wide array of other films screening around the festival, including the Director’s Fortnite, Out of Competition, International Critics’ Week, Cinéfondation shorts, and so on. I am sure there is immense value in visiting these tracks, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll assume you are less interested in them. You only have three days; you probably want In Competition and Un Certain Regard.
• The Palme d’Or is the most prestigious prize of the festival, given to the top-voted In Competition film. The Grand Prix is essentially a second place prize, and the Jury Prize is (maybe controversial to say) a third. Un Certain Regard has its own separate track of awards.
• A gala screening is an evening premiere, for which you are required to dress in black tie.
• An invitation is a printed ticket for a particular screening, almost exactly the size and shape of a boarding pass. You’ll see industry suits carrying stacks of these; you’ll probably be lucky to officially receive two. Unofficially, it’s open season.
• A Last Minute Line is exactly what it sounds like: a place you’ll stand in the hopes of getting in to an otherwise impenetrable screening. This is not hopeless by any means.

What can I do with my Three Days In Cannes pass?

I mentioned before that the Young Cinephile pass is substantially better than the Cinephile one. Here’s why: it lets you go anywhere in the Palais at any time. There are five theatres that are a part of the Palais de Festivales—i.e., the official theatres of Cannes. There’s…

• Grand Auditorium Louis Lumière. This is the big, famous one; the one with the red carpet packed with celebrities, where all In Competition films are shown for the first time. No matter who you are, this will always be invitation only. Lucky for you, you can request invitations in the Palais proper, and are prioritized quite a bit higher than a standard Cinephile who requests offsite. Like a Cinephile, you also can either crash the Last Minute Line or beg for invitations on the street—I know, it sounds weird, but it works and just about everybody does it.
• Théâtre Claude Debussy. This is where all Un Certain Regard screenings premiere. It’s also where journalists go to watch In Competition premieres while the industry goers (and those of us who crash) are simultaneously in the Lumière. Like Lumière, some of these will be invitation only. For others, you’ll have access to the badge holders line. At least for the Un Certain Regard screenings, you have a damn good shot.
• Salle du Soixantième. This one is far more important than I’d realized going in. Lumière and Debussy are notoriously packed, and there’s a good chance you won’t catch every premiere. But the Soixantième is devoted to showing rescreenings of whatever premiered at the festival the night before. And unlike regular Cinephiles, you have unlimited access to this.
• Salle Buñuel and Salle Bazin. For most of the festival, these are either showing non-competition films or are hosting director Q&A’s. But when the last day of the festival rolls around and the Palais becomes fully devoted to reprises, these will also be your ticket into whatever you missed previously in the festival. You will have access to this.

Additionally, there are a number of theatres throughout the city which any badge holder can use. This one in particular was devoted solely to Young Cinephiles in the three days I was there last year: the Cinema Les Arcades. Much like the Soixantième, Buñuel, and Bazin, this was showing Selection and Regard screenings that had premiered earlier at the fest. And it has three screens, so your odds of catching something are substantially better here than anywhere else.

There is one downside to Les Arcades, however. This being in France, the French language will always get priority when it comes to subtitles, followed by English. A Korean film, e.g., will only have French subtitles baked into the video. For all theatres in the Palais, they have installed a second subtitle bar specifically for English, below the actual video frame (see the photo I snapped from a Lumière premiere above). This separate bar and projector does not exist at the Arcades, and likely will not exist at most non-Palais theatres.

What does that mean for you? If you don’t speak French, you can only use Les Arcades for screenings of A) French films (which get English subtitles), B) English films (for which you won’t need subtitles), or C) whatever other language you happen to comprehend with realtime fluency.³

I’m only there for three days; what if the film I want to see premiered earlier in the festival?

As mentioned above, Saturday is your friend. You will not see a schedule for this beforehand in your official brochure, and if your experience is like mine, the organizers will be woefully vague about it. But don’t fret: on Saturday, all theatres you have access to will be screening Official Selection and Un Certain Regard films around the clock. It’s a mad dash, but you’ll get your shot to cross a ton of gems off the list. See last year’s schedule:

And, of course, Les Arcades will continue to have your back.

How should I factor in lines?

Lucky for you, you’re coming to Cannes at the tail-end of the festival. This is typically around the time that journalists and industry folk start to wrap things up. News orgs start leaving behind skeleton crews for the last couple of flicks; random dipshit producers⁴ duck out to get a head start on their Monaco vacations. This means the lines are not so bad. Er…relatively speaking.

Me, personally? For all films I cared about at Debussy, Soixantième, Buñuel, Bazin, and Arcades, I showed up about 90 minutes early and could always get a seat. I suspect even 50 minutes would be possible, though cutting it close. Bring a book and relax.⁵ For the Lumière, I was able to get in at the Last Minute Line if I showed up 2.5 hours before the premiere. If you’re willing to try your luck standing around waiting for an Invitation, that number can go down to 30 friggin seconds.

How does security work / what should I know?

Security in the Palais can be a bit rough. There’s a bag check at every entrance, and an ostensible limit on food and drink.⁶ Since you will likely be in a hurry to get where you’re going before the line vanishes, this means you want to pack as light as possible. It also means, depending on which theatre you’re visiting, you want to plan accordingly.

I mentioned above that there are five theatres in the Palais. Three of these theatres are only accessible from within the Palais: the Soixantième, Buñuel, and Bazin. The Debussy, meanwhile, is accessible from the outside: you can eat and drink until the second you are admitted in. The Lumière Last Minute Line is a mixed bag: half of it is outside of security, but when they open the gates, you’ll have another 45 minutes or so of a line that is inside security. This means you can scarf down food, and that extra diet Coke, as long as you’re willing to toss it the moment they open the doors.

Some lines are indoors: the Buñuel and Bazin. Others are outdoors: Lumière, Debussy, Soixantième. Pack sunscreen and sunglasses for those, as it is liable to get hot. Dehydration is also a legitimate concern, so I’d recommend packing two reusable bottles. One big one, which can be filled and used while in an outdoor line, and emptied as needed once you hit security. Another 50cl one, which can be brought inside.

When does my “badge” officially start working?

You are officially able to pick up your badge the night before your 3 days begin. And if you notice, my travelogue included a “Day 0”. This is because, even though hypothetically your badge doesn’t work before the first day starts…it actually sorta does? Or at least it did for me? By whatever glitch in operations, I was able to beg for an Invitation and make it to a Lumière premiere, my badge scanned at the entrance with no sign of trouble. Your mileage may vary, but I say go for it.

Where should I stay?

I get that money may be a serious issue, especially if you’re on the younger side. So I don’t mean to be calloused when I suggest blowing more. But look, you’ve only got three days at this thing you booked an international flight to attend. Compared to the plane ticket, is the relative price difference between a hostel an hour-long bus ride away, and an AirBnB that’s a 15 minute walk, really worth the trouble? Remember, you have a tactical advantage over the other festival-goers. You’re multiplying by 3 or 4; most of your competition has to multiply by 11.

In my experience, Cannes involved a lot of racing around. And thanks to the heat and competing matinee/gala schedule, some of those races included costume changes. In one instance, I literally ran in a tuxedo to arrive moments before the film began—if I had needed to hail a taxi or wait for the bus, I doubt I could have made it.

So I’ll put my bias on the table: I think it is within your best interests to be as close to the Palais as humanly possible. Try to be a comfortable walk away, so you have the flexibility to relax and change (and shower!) as needed. 15 minutes is fine; I don’t think 30 would be. And bear in mind which neighborhoods are hilly, and which are flat.

It’s only three days, is it really worth it?

Absolutely. It’s only three days, but you can pack a lot of viewing into those if you try. My total film count was 10, including many of the most well-regarded of the festival—if I hadn’t planned a 6am flight on Sunday, I could have easily stretched that to 11 or 12.

More importantly, though: you get to go to Cannes! And all these logistics, which seem so impenetrably opaque from a distance, will become quite easy once you go through the ringer for the first time. Three days gives you enough exposure to get a real feel for Cannes—with all its amazing and infuriating aspects—so you’re no longer in the dark when it comes to attending to full festival later. That experience will make it easier to slum it with us regular Cinephiles once you finally age out. And, if nothing else, it makes for a helluva profile picture.

[1/31/22 Update]: Looking for something a little more recent? Check out my 2021 edition of this list

More ramblings: if one novel isn’t enough for you, you can also find my 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014 lists.

Podcast: you can listen to my flat Top 10 list on The Spoiler Warning.

[Cross-posted to Medium]

Introduction

The enterprise of list-making is a doomed one from the start. Art doesn’t adhere to an objective value metric—or even a stable subjective metric—and even if it did it wouldn’t be transitive (A > B and B > C != A > C), and even if it were it would profoundly miss the point. It’s why it’s valid to critique awards shows on the basis of inclusion; why rebuttals about “meritocracies” feel childish to anyone with a passion for the craft. What are the four best ingredients in food? Your top two family members? The nations of the world ranked 195 to 1? You might notice the most avid fans of a thing are often the least likely to give blanket recommendations—not because they’ve forgotten how to love, but because they’ve learned to savor the million forms love takes. They know there’s space on the shelf for both triple and session; that it’s valid to wax poetic about a bretty saison before cheerfully ordering a pilsner. Great is all around us; the only question is you. What are you in the mood for? What are you looking to fill?

You’ve heard it a thousand times, but that doesn’t make it less true: art isn’t a monologue, it’s an active conversation. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the universe of film. The time and place in which I enter a movie informs it almost as much as the content itself: what’s corny in my living room becomes heartbreaking on a red-eye; what’s obvious one year becomes vital in the next. For those fleeting aspects (mood, location, the insufferable teenagers next to me) I do my best to compensate, but for the long-lived ones it’d be hollow to try—you can’t sift out context. Cinema is a response to the world as is, and a breathless provocation for us to respond in kind. Sorry To Bother You is undoubtedly political, but so are Aquaman, Blockers, and Paddington 2. If not in the editing room, certainly in the multiplex: the moment they opened the doors and let us in, all of our baggage became a part of the narrative.

So what baggage were we bringing to the theatres last year? Plenty, to be sure: anger in droves, hope a bit less than usual, cynicism, desperation, exasperation and then some. But if I could find a catch-all description of the prevailing sensation, it would be trauma: individuals exposing it, society wrestling with it. If 2017 was foggy from a whiplash-induced daze, 2018 was a conscious attempt towards action and response. Social movements like Times Up forced us to reckon with past injustices; others like Black Lives Matter continued to shine a spotlight on the present. Parkland students used their trauma as a catalyst for change, while abuse victims relived theirs to bring powerful men to account. Sometimes this yielded legal results (Weinstein, Cosby, and Spacey each in various stages of prosecution), but more often it provoked some national reckoning: what will we permit, what will we believe, what right do we have to intentionally forget? We listened to their stories and tried to internalize their pain; we grappled with supposed redemption arcs, re-examined past figures we’d let too easily off the hook. Both the most discussed comedy special and the Grammy winning song were explicitly about deconstructing trauma and society’s response. A far cry from strawberry champagne on ice.

I won’t speak for anyone else, but I felt drained by 2018. I’d wanted to be the sort of person who could absorb all that suffering: to mourn every tragedy from Pittsburgh to Puerto Rico, disown every abuser, voice outrage at every national sin. But as the headlines kept coming, my anger felt impotent; my sadness turned hoarse and performative. What was I supposed to do with all that heaviness? Should I hide behind layers of protective abstraction: ignore it, rationalize it, quarantine it from the heart? Should I shout back in defiance, or use it as fuel: take some step to redeem it, or turn it into art? Or should I let the sadness be the thing in itself: seek to understand it, internalize it, commune and move on?

When coming up with a theme for this Best Of list, I wanted let that question guide me: “what do we do with past and present trauma?” And so, in a classic case of biting off more than I can chew, I’ve compiled a dozen answers to that question—and with each a pair of excellent films that explore it from a different angle.

While I’m happy to stand by this as a Top 24, the pairing constraint involves a handful of sacrifices¹—some films fell lower on the list than I’d have placed them alone, others made absent entirely. With that said, the order is still important to me, reflecting both my love for each individual title and the weight their combined message carries. The lower the number the higher my “score”, with the second in the pair typically rating higher than the first. But, again, there’s no use in stack-ranking art.²

P.S. The standard convention is to hold off on festival screenings till their official release, such that certain Cannes or Tribeca films should technically fall under 2019. I mostly held to that…except, of course, when I didn’t, for reasons that are boring and arbitrary.

P.P.S. In 2018 I saw about 120 movies, but there are still bound to be blind spots. Offhand, I know I missed: At Eternity’s Gate, Zama, Happy As Lazaro, Hale County This Morning This Evening, Border, Hereditary, The Old Man And The Gun, The Mule. There are also a few I’d hoped to revisit before making this list, given how beloved they seem to be relative to my (mostly positive!) response: Burning, The Favourite, Cold War, First Reformed.

Enough prologue. How ought we respond to the trauma of this world? We can…

1. Quarantine it: Isle of Dogs & Leave No Trace ↯
2. Redeem it: Bad Times at the El Royale & The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ↯
3. Gild it: Madeline’s Madeline & The Wild Pear Tree ↯
4. Rationalize it: American Animals & Thoroughbreds ↯
5. Thaw it: Thunder Road & State Like Sleep ↯
6. Outrun it: First Man & The Rider ↯
7. Defy it: Support the Girls & Widows ↯
8. Expose it: The Tale & BlacKkKlansman ↯
9. Reconcile it: Wildlife & Roma ↯
10. Share it: Shoplifters & Private Life ↯
11. Ameliorate it: Won’t You Be My Neighbor & Eighth Grade ↯
12. Unravel it: Blindspotting & Minding the Gap ↯

• Plus some honorable mentions ↯

12. Quarantine it: Isle of Dogs & Leave No Trace

You know the feeling: you open your news feed after a hellish week, see something terrible, and feel the sudden desire to retreat. You know it matters, know you have some civic duty to confront it head-on. But you know other things, too: that you’re goddamn tired; that it’s always something, isn’t it; that nothing anybody does seems to make a dent anyway so why expend the energy. Wouldn’t it be easier to tamp the bad feelings down? To give yourself permission to look away?

Isle of Dogs is a parable about multiple levels of retreat, beginning with the collective one of the city of Megasaki. When rapid industrial growth causes an influx in environmental waste, they opt for an S.E.P. solution. Solving it may be hard, but shoving the problem somewhere else? That one’s easy. And when the city’s dogs are stricken with disease, they repeat in kind: don’t cure them, don’t empathize them, simply move their pain out of sight. Better yet, kill two birds with one stone; and so, dogs roam freely on the ruins of Trash Island. Political analogs, of course, abound (refugee crises, climate change, our present rhetoric around immigration). But what truly resonates with me is its sense of personal retreat, in the behavior of dogs who were abandoned. Chief (Bryan Cranston) has experienced too much heartlessness to hope for anything better. Rather than fight it, he responds in kind. He cuts off all feelings for Dog’s Best Friend, opting instead to be an island unto himself. “I bite,” he says bluntly, and it isn’t a warning. It’s an act of resignation. But through Anderson & Co’s magnificent visual design, we see in his eyes that hope isn’t lost. Can he get off this literal and figurative wasteland? Can the people of Megasaki swim to meet him halfway?

Sometimes emotional retreat doesn’t call for hardening; sometimes it simply calls for solitude. In Leave No Trace, Debra Granik delicately prods at the cons and pros of this choice: the pain of isolation vs the relief of no longer being seen. Will (Ben Foster) is a widower and a veteran, borne witness to trauma we’re only obliquely privy to. He has concluded this world is simply too much to bear, opting instead for a makeshift life in the woods. He and his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) fashion their own universe: an ad hoc curriculum of library books and survival guides, a language of signals only they can understand. For Will, this setup is perfect—provided they don’t get caught. For Tom it’s more complicated: without the catalyst of trauma, she also lacks his will to isolate. She has physical needs to be “of this world”, but she has other, deeper, emotional needs. She can’t live life solely as an observer. As they fumble to find balance between those two poles, we see glimmers of human connection: one scene in particular, involving an animal training class, is among the warmest and most emotionally gratifying of the year. But warmth and numbness can’t easily coexist, and Granik resists the urge to put a finger on the scales. She suggests vulnerability isn’t a path we can all take, or at least not one we have a right to force. Maybe true openness means respecting others’ need to close: giving what we can, withholding what we must, and trusting the love we scatter along the trail will be found in due time.

11. Redeem it: Bad Times at the El Royale & The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Closing may work when the problem is external, but what if the trauma comes from within? Your own past sins, your present demons? There’s no running from the wrong we inflict on ourselves. We either dig in our feet and declare it a right, or we orient it toward some arc of redemption. Two films this year, both antihero-brimming period pieces, highlight the allure of that arc—and the difficulty of tracing it.

In Drew Goddard’s Bad Times At The El Royale, our leads find themselves in the same run-down motel on the same stormy night, at the border between California and Nevada. There’s Jeff Bridges’ heavy-drinking priest, whose kind eyes and courteous demeanor only betray the regret they were cultivated to hide. There’s Dakota Johnson’s Emily, the brash enigma whose poker face is only slightly more convincing. She’s seeking redemption as well; not only for the things she’s done that need salvation, but the things she’s prepared to do to save someone else. Cynthia Erivo’s Darlene is haunted, but not by regret; she’s living to redeem a past she couldn’t control. Others too, who won’t be named—each tenant trying to rectify the person they’ve become with the person they’d hoped to be. To cross some spiritual line, where the light is more flattering or the provisions more substantial, where the rooms aren’t so achingly sparse. Everyone, that is, but Chris Hemsworth’s Billy, a Manson-esque figure whose chilly certainty offers a different sort of comfort: a sturdy logical formula that rounds “regret” down to “none”. He does his damndest to wreak havoc on the Royale. But neither logic nor plan nor performative confession, can drown out that voice inside. Her song echoes through darkness in defiance of easy answers. “Love don’t come easy, it’s a game of give and take.”

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is singing different variations on that tune. Every piece of the Coen’s six-part anthology involves someone trying to turn the wagon around: searching for some action that can enshrine their misdeeds in glory, recast their brutal existance as part of a meaningful whole. And in typical Coen spirit, it definitely don’t come easy—in those rare cases where it comes at all. It’s a film about characters who hope to become more than characters, who ask for more than the cards they’ve been dealt. Can Tim Blake Nelson’s Buster be immortalized in death? Can James Franco’s outlaw find beauty in his fate? Can Harry Melling’s Artist evangelize softness to a hardened world? Can Liam Neeson’s Impresario use his calloused hands in service thereof? Can Tom Waits’ Prospector find the one thing that will justify his endless digging? Can Zoe Kazan’s Alice conjure unlikely love amid cruelty and death? Can our stage coach passengers, by some trick of the light, spin their selfish narratives into something fundamentally good? And is there any use in trying if the outcome stays the same?

10. Gild it: Madeline’s Madeline & The Wild Pear Tree

Let’s consider the Artist from above. Unlike other members of the Coen-verse, he offers a different sort of redemption: no behavior changed, no triumph sought. He promises instead to render an ugly world beautiful. And isn’t that the allure of art? The chance to alchemize suffering, to put it in service to something greater than itself? At its best, art becomes a balm for our pain. But, like all numbing agents, it can also be addictive. Two dreamlike films explore that pull: the beauty it promises and the obsession it demands.

In Josephine Decker’s feverish Madeline’s Madeline, the causal relationship between art and suffering is blurry from the start. Evangeline (Molly Parker) is an experimental playwright dedicated to finding honesty in art. And she sees in Madeline (Helena Howard) her ultimate muse: someone who can not only mine her own pain for beauty, but mine it to seemingly inexhaustible extremes. She doesn’t just emote, she inhabits her art. She becomes whatever she is asked to reflect: a cat, a monster, a disapproving mother, a dazzling prodigy or a hopeless problem child. And her powers are as mesmerizing as they are terrifying. Games become nightmares; warm-up exercises topple into fiery exorcisms. Madeline’s mother (Miranda July) had hoped the theatre would act as therapy, as a way of releasing Madeline’s anger. But supply-side economics suggests a dual force: the more her anger’s release is praised, the more she must produce to maintain it. With its towering performances and dizzying visual language, the film thrusts us into a similarly dissonant headspace. What is the line between supporter and vouyer? Is Madeline’s suffering building to catharsis or doubling down on itself, a fractal that emboldens the very pain it reflects? Can the labyrinth of the heart never be fully exhumed? Or by burrowing into her darkness, might we eventually hit sky?

In The Wild Pear Tree (full review), art is less an exorcism of pain than it is a way of giving meaning to numb routine. Sinan (Dogu Demirkol) is a young novelist looking to carve out a life for himself. Fresh out of college but not yet employed, he’s in that transitory phase where everything is amplified to its most romantic extreme. He doesn’t know what exactly he’s writing, but he knows it needs to bleed; to inhabit all genres, to be about nothing and everything. Thus he frames integrity as an impossible virtue, a standard failed by quite literally everyone: his mother whose love feels too obvious, uncritical; his father whose curiosity is neutered by a failure of perseverance; the imams whose faiths seem either hand-wavey or stubborn; the novelist whose fame was borne of pragmatic compromise. Sinan wants to live on as something pure and revered, but in his draconian search for purity he’s ruled out the living part. Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan knows this is untenable, of course. But like Chekhov to his Konstantin or Linklater to his Jesse, there’s a tenderness in this portrait of brash, young idealism. Sinan may never create a work that perfectly encapsulates both the blandness and beauty of the artistic struggle. But over three meditative hours of fluid conversation, Ceylan gets extraordinarily close.

9. Rationalize it: American Animals & Thoroughbreds

When confronted with the messy realities of our world, it’s tempting to try to reign things in to some manageable shape. To find a framework (logical or narrative) that somehow excuses it, explains it. To recast its hypocrisies as helpless or inevitable, and reduce our complicity to a rounding error in kind. Life isn’t fair. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. You can’t save everyone. They’ll spend it on drugs anyway. The poor will always be with us. Survival of the fittest. It’ll only breed dependence. More forward or die. We wield absurdity as a hall pass for apathy, faux-certainty a shield against more complicated truths. And in limited doses, a bit of anaesthesia is fine: we can’t save everyone, life isn’t always fair. But logical desensitization is a dangerous game. In what follows, we see what happens when it’s taken to an extreme.

In the corner of Kentucky where our American Animals leads reside, they see neither wrong nor overt injustice. Just a vague sense of futility and a dictum to move. You might be surprised to learn that this alone—not poverty, not pain, just run-of-the-mill boredom—was enough to convince a group of 20somethings to commit a heist. Yet that’s exactly what our fictional protagonists (and their documentary counterparts) resolve to do. They’re going to steal a priceless work of art from the university library, and do so in broad daylight. Spencer and crew are not naive. They know that theft is wrong even in a vacuum, and that their escalating stakes could get someone hurt. Know that even if it worked they wouldn’t be any less alone. But rather than grapple with that reality, they distract themselves with peripheral narrative—how exhilarating such a stunt would feel, how cinematic it would look. Excuses come easy when mythology has a foothold: no one will get hurt, no one will miss it, if you really think about it it’s a victimless crime. Eventually they cease to be agents making a choice; they become actors performing to an audience of none. As their plan takes form, and that narrative accumulates mass, we start to feel the same blinding pull.

That’s the thing about hypothetical arguments: they have a way of bypassing our built-in quality control. Like the adage about boiling a frog, they begin as rationale too harmless to refute, but slowly—through a chain of mental escalations, each too subtle to trigger a red flag on its own—they gain substance. In Thoroughbreds (full review), Lily (Anya Taylor Joy) doesn’t begin as a murderer. She begins as we all do: young, malcontent, tragically bored. She feels in her bones that life isn’t as it ought to be, and she sees in her stepfather the apotheosis of that lack. She wishes he weren’t there, would just disappear. She maybe even wishes she could be the one to do it. But her desires are purely hypothetical—until she tells Amanda. Amanda (Olivia Cooke) is all heart and no head; she is “technically right” incarnate. I see in her the reductio ad absurdum of countless half-compelling ideologies (you choose the ism: nihil-, determin-, libertarian-, New Athe-). She speaks with the certainty of someone who has no skin in the game, and her impeccable logic becomes an impenetrable shield. She doesn’t cause Lily’s anger, of course. She only permits it. “The only thing worse than being incompetent or being unkind or being evil is being indecisive.” It’s the sort of oversimplified mantra too reductive to be true, but too catchy to shake. It lodges somewhere inside, gestates. It’s powerful precisely because it’s simple: you can hold it, recite it, surrender yourself to it. With pitch-black screenplay and two outstanding lead performances, Cory Finley makes that surrender a thrill.

8. Thaw it: Thunder Road & State Like Sleep

If we sometimes use logic to cauterize suffering, more often than not we settle for numbing it—changing the subject, clinging to some new distraction. But despite all good intentions, nothing can stay frozen forever. All pent-up grief must eventually thaw. These films express the way time-delayed sorrow has a way of catching up with us, and the pain inherent in meeting it head-on.

A feature-length addition to his eponymous short, Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road is a tiny miracle: an empathetic character study that is exactly as tone-clashing as grief itself. Effusive tears as prelude to unexpected laughter, a tinge of self-awareness hiding deeper denial. Officer Jim wants to seem like he has it all together: like the death of his mother didn’t completely unmoor him, like the custody battle for his daughter isn’t always top-of-mind. But with a knack for saying aloud precisely what he meant hidden, and a camera that rarely leaves the writer-director’s face, Jim’s vault is about as flimsy as they come. He cracks, and cracks often, with each outburst slightly more heightened than the last. A humanistic drama anchored around four or five searing long-take monologues, Cummings’ film is extremely endearing—even as his lead grows increasingly less relatable. Thunder Road is interested in the peaks of grief and catharsis; in what breaks a man, and what happens next. He can hide beneath his covers and study his pain, sure, but what happens when there’s nothing left to study? When the funeral was three weeks back, the world has moved on, and you’ve alienated everyone you’d meant for support? Eventually it becomes a choice: to roll down the windows if only a crack. To let something in so the stale bits can go. A game of patty-cake with your smirking daughter. A buddy with a twelve pack and not much to say. You coast in that gear between collapse and delusion, and hope the shit in your rearview isn’t as forever as it appears. Accumulate distance, feel the wind in your hair, and you’ll know you’ve finally reached the song’s crescendo. Sit tight, take hold.

Katherine (Waterston) has accumulated physical distance from trauma, but she’s no closer to that highway than Jim at the start. It’s been a year since the unexplained death of her husband, and she’s done all she could to drown out the noise: packed up and moved across the Pacific, thrown every ounce of willpower at her career. But eventually, as always, her old life calls her home. A neon noir through rainy-night Brussels, Meredith Danluck’s State Like Sleep (full review) sets off on a search for answers. What led him to die like this? Who’s left to blame? Underground nightclubs and all manner of seedy character await, cast in a shimmering, sludgy haze. The heart of the film, though, has nothing to do with answers. It’s about what the search catalyzes inside of Katherine; the feelings she’s exposed to, the shame brought bubbling up. The way words of comfort from a loved one can serve to amplify that pain; the way the ear of a stranger (Michael Shannon) can prove a safer release. Anchored by a wonderful lead performance, hypnotic cinematography, and four of the most expressive eyes in Hollywood, State Like Sleep moved me in a way few did this year. Call it the festival high or nostalgia for a particular time and place: this is one underseen gem I can’t wait to revisit.

7. Outrun it: First Man & The Rider

Numbing mechanisms can take many forms. I find, in my own life, that the most potent distraction can be personal ambition: letting myself burrow fully into some project or goal, installing blinders against the big picture. And while I’m sure it’s universal, I feel something distinctly male in the shape my blinders take: the way The Goal becomes desperate, self-propagating, a bet staked by no one. Two films’ protagonists face a similar condition; men in the heartland who have become addicted to a dangerous ambition, using it as means to outrun trauma. Or if nothing else, to move so fast its details blur.

Damien Chazelle is fascinated by ambition and the immolation that comes with it—the drummer tapping till his hands go bloody, the young lovers who forsake all for their art. Typically that ambition is fueled by a high, some palpable thrill. In First Man the ambition couldn’t be loftier, or its promise of adoration more pronounced. But if Gosling’s Neil Armstrong is enjoying his race to the moon, he does little to let us know. There are no Right Stuff glimmers of fraternity, here, no Apollo 13 break for national applause. If there’s even a smile, it’s fleeting and thin. Rather than fixate on the glamour of The Ultimate Goal, Chazelle trains his gaze on the sadness it conceals—the tragic loss of Armstrong’s daughter, whose tiny absence informs every gesture he makes. Rather than face that grief, he turns inward, a stone; unable to relate to his wife (Claire Foy) in her mourning, unable to find joy in the children he’s expected to raise. Confronted with human loss, he resolves instead to look upward. And while he might be that impulse’s clearest manifestation, we see in society the same upwards tilt. Faced with incomprehensible, tangible losses—nuclear annihilation, societal upheaval, civil rights violations, abject poverty—they distract with the promise of a Sisyphean task. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart!” But perched atop that chilly rock, from the most jaw-dropping heights IMAX can render, should we really imagine Armstrong happy?

Neil may be trying to outrun his sorrow, but he masks it well—behind glory, national unity, inspiration. In Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, challenge is the sole motivating factor: not because it is easy, not to stick it to the Soviets, but solely because it is hard. And dangerous. And a hell of a rush. Brady (Jandreau) has one calling in life: to tame and ride bucking broncos. So when a brain injury threatens the viability of that calling, he only doubles down. Like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, he knows the path he’s chosen is destructive, perhaps even deadly. But absent that risk, what alternative could he choose? Days stocking shelves in a sterile grocery aisle, nights shooting shit about “old days” long gone? No, better to die in motion than live standing still. In the face of First Man, it might seem strange to wax poetic about the glory of a Midwestern rodeo. But if you’ve seen Zhao’s footage, you’ll know: the moment the gate opens, those broncos snap loose with a force that rivals any spaceship. She lets us feel, viscerally, just how liberating his escape could be. The Rider is a soulful parable about restlessness: about the things you would do to drown out the lonely, and what happens when those same things threaten to destroy you. Would you choose to go gently into life’s simple pleasures? Or would you strain against the rock till it wins?

Or maybe there’s a third route for both of our heroes; a different sort of irrational joy, no less absurd but a bit less destructive. A different philosopher put it best:

only one thing
made him happy
and now that
it was gone
everything
made him happy
– Leonard Cohen

6. Defy it: Support the Girls & Widows

Sometimes trauma is too big to outrun; sometimes it’d be short-sighted to try. From #AbolishICE to #MeToo, we’ve seen there can be immense value in rising up, in challenging a painful status quo. In setting the cards we’ve been dealt ablaze. Two films, starring women of color, capture the pressure that leads one to finally fight back—and the visceral howl it releases.

In Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls, the system might strike you as fairly mundane. And Lisa (Regina Hall) doesn’t initially seem like a woman on the brink. Working a thankless management gig for a local Breastaurant, she’s accepted that the world won’t change around her. Like so many unsung heroes of middle-management, she’s resolved instead to act as a buffer: to do whatever she can within her shitty situation to better the lives of those in her orbit. Like raising legal fees for her embattled employee Shaina (Jana Kramer), or helping Danyelle (Shanya McHale) recognize the potential within, or solving one of a thousand little problems through some unseen act of bureaucratic ingenuity. Over the course of her day, though, a realization dawns on her. This thing she’s so good at, expending so much energy to hold together…it doesn’t deserve to be held. Her job with the creepy clientele and stapled-on smile, her coddled boss who wouldn’t recognize competent leadership if it grabbed him by the mullet: it all needs to go. Like Thunder Road, this is another low-budget gem of a character study, showcasing an individual in a state of emotional flux. But unlike Officer Jim, Lisa is fueled by nothing if not clarity: she demands more out of life than what she’s been given. As keenly observed as anything in Bujalski’s mumblecore wheelhouse, but with far more cultural fluency and bite, Support the Girls is a joyous celebration of those who look a broken system in the eye and say “Not another word.”

If Support the Girls was all about magnifying tiny injustices, Widows thrives in reining massive ones in. On the surface, Steve McQueen’s genre flick is a sort of hybrid revenge / heist story: Veronica (Viola Davis) responding to the death of her husband by taking matters into her own hands. That narrative is present, of course, and it’s as deliriously fun as you’d expect—not since The Departed have I seen a crime drama so utterly self-assured, so masterful in its twisty, bloody brooding. But what truly elevates it is the score of issues it manages to wrestle with on the side; touching on politics and poverty, the racial dynamics of crime, the way institutions become self-propagating machines with their own language of loopy self-justification. Like a David Simon show without the didacticism, or Scorcese with added sociopolitical heft, this is a film that dissects more in the periphery than do most “serious” films up front. In McQueen’s universe, every individual is lashing out against something: Viola a loss that runs multiple layers deep, the Manning Brothers (Brian Tyree Henry and Daniel Kaluuya) a Chicago that walls off legitimate paths to power, Belle (Cynthia Erivo) a class structure that refuses her a foothold, Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) a world that views her in transactional terms. Visceral and chilly, a popcorn flick with menace, Widows might not be the root-for-the-winning-team spectacle its premise implied. It’s something at once more difficult and satisfying: a story of anger seeking an outlet; of flawed responses to a rot that won’t clear itself out. And it’s absolutely riveting.

5. Expose it: The Tale & BlacKkKlansman

Sometimes we’re too close to a rotten situation to recognize it for what it is; sometimes the present doesn’t give us the firepower to fight. Instead we wrap it in protective mythology, using whatever tools we can to survive. As a frozen grief will eventually thaw, though, so will the stories we build to protect ourselves eventually crumble. These genre-bending films blur the line between truth and fiction—wielding story as a sledgehammer. They tear down rosy narratives of the past, and hold the resulting ugliness up the light.

In Jennifer Fox’s autobiographical The Tale, she grapples with the horrors of her own childhood abuse. Her mother has found an old 8th grade essay, which features a number of troubling references—an “older boyfriend”, a perfect romance. If she is understandably upset, Jennifer (Laura Dern) is initially dismissive: the past is the past, what’s the use in digging it up? But dig she does, first out of curiosity, then necessity. As Fox (the character) attempts to reconcile the world she saw at 13 with reality she knows at 40, Fox (the director) explores the many contradictions of assault survival: the flimsy rationalizations, the undeserved shame, the desire to find a framework that renders life “normal”. She doesn’t just pay lip-service to them; she shows them, using experimental narrative to render inconsistencies on screen. Her depiction of the past is glossy, but off-putting; part the Virgin Suicides and part The Stories We Tell, its past-tense actors (a chilling Jason Ritter and an almost otherworldly Elizabeth Debicki) strike me more as symbols than flesh-and-blood people. Which is fitting, given Fox’s aims: despite its immensely personal aspect, the film is less interested in the details of her specific trauma than in the overall shape trauma can take; the way it mutates in the mind, preserves itself behind bulletproof glass. In her attempt to shatter it, her film gets at horrors too galling to be depicted in any other medium: too ugly and exploitable to depict in fiction, too devastating to make plain in documentary. It’s a singular—and fearless—exhumation of trauma.

BlacKkKlansman (full review) also uses fiction as stepping-stone to real world trauma. But if The Tale uses the present to shine a haunting light on the past, Spike Lee’s latest uses past to shine a light on the present. On the surface, the film is a 70’s-style buddy cop flick about past-tense racism: a joint infiltration of the KKK led by a black officer, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) and his white partner, Flip (Adam Driver). But like Fox, Lee’s vision of the past strikes me as too glossy to be literal: a squad neatly separated into Crooked Cop and Hero, villains so bumbling they border on comedic. But as his fable grows ever more implausible, hints of the real world continue to peek through. A speech by Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) resounds with modern-day fire; a viewing of Birth Of A Nation feels palpably Now. While Stallworth debates whether it’s even possible to change a crooked system from within, for most of the runtime he seems to be doing just that—and doing it effortlessly. You can almost feel Lee struggling to untangle his dual inspirations, the rose-tinted past Hollywood sold us and the present-day racism that proves it a lie. When he finally pulls the rug out from under us, it comes with a jolt I hadn’t experienced since Do The Right Thing—a searing indictment of our own damning past, and the technicolored fables we use as a figleaf.

4. Reconcile it: Wildlife & Roma

Sometimes history yields a clear hero or villain, but more often than not it’s a vague, messy thing. In these instances, we look back not so much to challenge our past, as to accept its maddening intractabilities. Two films this year concern themselves with that clarification process. Both are period pieces which try to reconcile social asymmetries, relational strife, and the demands of parenthood—as filtered through the eyes of a child.

In Wildlife, we witness the dissolution of Joe’s (Ed Oxenbould’s) family as he might have seen it: through a camera dimly, vague and inexplicable. It’s 1960’s Montana, and Jerry Brinston (Jake Gyllenhaal) is yet again down on his luck. Like so many men this year (First Man, American Animals, The Rider, Free Solo), he’s compelled by a gnawing sort of ambition. He’s restless. He needs to do something. To be of some hard, simple, undeniable use. And so he sets off to fight a wildfire, leaving his wife and son behind. Said wife, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), is struggling with her own brand of restlessness. But the flames she’s drawn to are of a less literal sort. If affair with an older man (Bill Camp) begins as discreet, it quickly veers towards the performative: unmuffled giggle-fits in the adjacent bedroom, drunken dinner parties under barely-there pretenses. It’s a strange situation, and neither we nor Joe ever quite have a grip on it. She hasn’t snapped a la American Beauty, but she’s not quite calm and collected either. It’s as if she wants her son to see what’s driving her, to peer through her cracks, bear witness to her pain. Like she’s sending a telegraph to Future Joe that Present Joe can’t read. While we’re never told this is a retrospective, Paul Dano’s direction lends it the unmistakable cadence of memory. I can almost feel Joe sitting in his study a few decades (and divorces) later, drinking a glass of wine, staring at old photographs, and wondering “Where the hell did it all go wrong?”

Whether Joe is looking back is subject to interpretation. With Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, that backward gaze is its evident beating heart. Set in the early 1970’s in his hometown of Mexico City, the film follows stand-ins for the two most important women in his young life, each of whom are struggling within their own social caste. There’s the mother, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), who appears at first blush to be the film’s protagonist. Much like Jeanette, her husband’s abandonment sends her down a path of liberation—swerving, perhaps, reckless if need be. But her emotional journey fades to the background as the true lead emerges: Cleo (Yaliza Aparicio), the family’s longsuffering, loving, endlessly generous housekeeper of indigeneous descent. For every indignity Sofia suffers, Cleo suffers a thousand in kind. And yet she never responds with Sofia’s defiance, opting instead for a humble, quiet, nearly angelic perseverance. We can almost feel Cuarón’s conflict of feeling on screen, as he considers his own mother and his housekeeper Libo. Is it right to cast Libo in this saintly glow, to treat long-sufferance as a virtue rather than implicate that suffering’s source? Was her unwavering love for him a thing to be praised, or a societal symptom to be mourned? Was his mother the hero in one story, the villain in another, or some combination? As we glimpse moments of calm and calamity, tenderness and hardness, symmetric intimacies and asymmetric transactions, we get no closer to an answer. And maybe there is no answer. Maybe we each contain multitudes, and our best hope is to render them as faithfully as we can. Painting in gorgeous, panoramic black and white, Cuarón at least makes the mystery shine.

3. Share it: Shoplifters & Private Life

If a broken home can be a prism through which we refract the world’s trauma, a loving one can often act as a bulwark. Two films look at the ephemeral nature of family, and the strength that can come from even its unconventional variants.

When Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (full review) premiered at Cannes, I was expecting more of his typical fare: searing family drama with a quiet undercurrent of grief. What I hadn’t expected was how sharply it would probe at the idea of family itself. For the Shibatas, the familial bond is closer to marriage: a conscious choice to co-identify, co-exist. To share in sickness and in health, in plenty and especially in want. In stealing fresh fruit from the neighborhood market, and in warmth underneath a tin-pattering roof. But who, exactly, gets to make that choice? Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) can choose to be the designated provider; Osamu (Lily Franky) and Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) co-conspirators in romance. But for Shota (Jyo Kairi), the young boy turned apprentice in theft, is it fair to say that this life was a choice? What about five-year-old Yuri (Miyu Sasaki), inducted to the Shibata clan at the start of the film to escape an abusive family of her own? She knows that they love her, and—in the year’s most heartbreaking scene—she learns precisely how that love is intended to feel. But is she capable of participating in that choice? Is she even aware she’s making one? Sweet but not saccharine, and human to the core, Shoplifters gives breathing room to all these questions without tipping the scales. In its delicate stroll between the moral alleyways of life, though, it just might fill your heart.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis separates romantic love (Eros) from that of friendship (Philia) in spatial terms: “lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.” Yet as romance progresses, the former nearly always tilts toward the latter. Having found the peaks to be elusive and fleeting, couples build a foundation on sturdier material: shared interests, shared goals, a consciously shared life. They move, together, in some forward direction. Sometimes, though, that momentum can blind them to the initial romance; the goal ceases to be for Us and becomes for itself. That’s how Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti) strike me when we enter their Private Life, solemnly injecting and masturbating (respectively) in a fertility clinic. After umpteenth fruitless pregnancy attempts, they’ve finally resolved to give IVF a shot—every possible shot, to be more specific. They ask favors of family; they prowl diners for eggs; they spend countless hours in pursuit of one glorious hypothetical future. Parenthood. Family. Us. So fervently do they push for their two to be three, they’ve rendered the former almost invisible. But I never believe that it’s absent. I think it’s petrified, crystalized; a lattice of mutual frustration, of rueful laughter, communal fatigue. They share some ineffable bond. It makes even the most wrenching shouting match play with a hint of a smirk; they might look on the outside like they’re falling apart, but they’re both in on the same bad cosmic joke. Maybe, one day, they’ll find that family they’ve been looking for. Or maybe their search only highlights the one they’ve already got.

2. Ameliorate it: Won’t You Be My Neighbor & Eighth Grade

When confronted with the iciness of the world around us, it’s tempting to respond in kind: to feel guarded, cynical, above all this shit. And sometimes it’s right to fight back; sometimes it’s necessary to close. But for many of us, that anger becomes a vicious cycle, a joyless arms race toward mutually assured division. What if we break the cycle? What if we could combat the world’s darkness with unlikely light? Two films this year remind us that it’s possible to stare into the abyss and find childlike joy. To find empathy in the tiniest struggle, and hope in the middle of a yawning ravine.

Fred Rogers has always been a beacon of light; if anything, that lightness was his signature brand. But in the political moment Won’t You Be My Neighbor finds itself in, his joy represents something more, something borderline radical. His delicate affect against Trump’s heavy bluster; his unwavering gaze against our dunks and our smirks. The way his voice cracks when learning of the death of a pet; the way he addresses the camera like it’s the most interesting person in the world. The way he patiently nods at our fears and our grief. He challenges us to take this world seriously, to not only acknowledge its pain in the abstract but to process it, feel it. To see political strife and say “let me try to understand this.” To feel the weight of our sadness and ask “how can I be a balm?” With a documentary as direct and unshowy as Rogers himself, Morgan Neville argues that kindness was neither tactic nor facade. It was a higher calling, a ministry. And in years like this one, where the mad that we feel feels stark and overwhelming, his call is irresistible. It’s a simple lesson, so obvious it becomes invisible: hear each other, love each other, meet the world with a smile. Writing it feels hokey and evangelical. Witnessing it brought me to tears.

Nothing, though, got the tears flowing quite as much as Eighth Grade (full review). In concept, Bo Burnham’s debut sounded like precisely the wrong approach to 2018: an older male director co-opting the experience of a 13-year-old girl. In practice, it’s a modern day answer to Rogers’ challenge—and a bit of a miracle at that. It’s an exercise in looking Growing Up levelly in the eye and saying “I hear you, I care about you, I take you seriously. Your problems are real, and they are precisely as heavy as you tell me they are.” Kayla (Elsie Fisher) is a bighearted girl on the cusp of adolescence, straining the align the her she knows herself to be with the her that keeps breaking out. She’s endlessly empathetic but with nowhere to put it, her brilliant inner-monologue turned clumsy when spoken aloud. She has that good-humored personality that desperately nods along before it even gets the joke—a brand of infectious okay-ness made no less endearing by the anxiety that fuels it. She wants what we all wanted before learning it was impossible: to “be normal”, to “fit in”, to keep girl in the mirror from falling hopelessly short. She hasn’t yet learned that we all feel that, always, or that falling short can be the most beautiful thing. But as slowly and surely as we did, she will. And when Kayla finally reaches that self-acceptance, that hope, we’re all a bit stronger for the trek. Like Ladybird without the audibly-penned cleverness, or Edge of Seventeen without a hint of an edge, or Boyhood without Linklater’s (charming) indulgence. Eighth Grade is so achingly earnest, so effortlessly observed, so heartfelt and vulnerable and perfectly concise, I almost want to downplay how much I love it. How dare I put a film about a preteen girl above Accepted High Art™? But if Kayla can alchemize her awkwardness into “Gucci”, and Burnham can mine the most overdone genre for something poignant and new, I think we all can leave room for a little of magic. 2018 gave us enough to feel dour about. For all the joy Kayla brought me, I’m rounding her story up to perfect.

1. Unravel it: Blindspotting & Minding the Gap

I can’t tell you how tempting it was to end on that note: to bask in the upswing and let joy have the final word. And in other years, I might have—there’s immense value in optimism, in digging for goodness and light. But if the year has taught me anything, it’s that optimism is a gift not all of us are afforded. Too often, our desire for tidy resolution becomes an excuse to paper over others’ concern.

The truth is that none of these responses do the year justice: not joy, not anger, not redemption or clarity. No, if anything defined 2018, it was in its utter refusal to resolve. These films boldly follow suit. They acknowledge our contradictions—our joys and sorrows—with an honesty that defies all conclusion. They resist all attempts self-definition; they refuse to be merely one thing.

If I could name one movie that perfectly captures the spirit of the year, it would be Carlos López Estrada’s Blindspotting. Following a few days in the life of Collin (Daveed Diggs) as he struggles to make sense trauma while surviving his parole, it’s a film that thrives on contradictory perspective. When we meet Collin he seems hopeful and upbeat, till a witnessed act of police brutality sends his worldview spinning. For the rest of the film he’s haunted by dual interpretations, by an uneasy alliance of darkness and light. We feel both the relief of his freedom and the tightness of its bounds; see the beauty of his Oakland home and the threat that looms over it. Every siren becomes an omen, every moment something borrowed at risk of being withdrawn. Even the comic beats—of which there are surprisingly many—feel tenuous, foreboding; as if the whole of Collin’s existence is one plot point away from collapse. That mish-mash of moods permeates the city as a whole: bubbly conveniences which mask the pain of gentrification, a sense of identity that’s constantly in flux. Collin feels them both changing, and not only for the worse—maybe he was holding on to too much anger, maybe the green juice really is better for his health. But the means of that change—the system that forced it, the motive that belies it—it’s toxic, unwelcome, unjust. So who should he be, and who should he be it for? Blindspotting is an urgent examination of race in America, both universal and specific, a public airing of grievances and a personal reckoning. It’s jarring and insistent; a film whose spoken word pieces shook me with more ferocity than any thriller this year. And its message is less a resolution than a desperate call to arms: “I am both pictures! See both pictures!”

Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap (full review) is an attempt to do just that: to bear witness to multiple perspectives at once. Shot over years in the life of three skateboarding friends as they navigate the contours of young-adulthood, Liu’s is a soulful documentary about identity and choice. It’s about how our own family narratives become self-fulfilling prophecies, and how, through the process of untangling them, we might clarify ourselves. Each friend, on some level, is struggling with the same root trauma, and each uses a different mechanism to cope. Many are ones we’ve discussed in depth. Bing seeks to expose past trauma, to interrogate and understand it. Keire wants to clarify his trauma, to give it perspective and, so doing, some semblance of peace. And Zack…well, he never quite settles on which direction he’s headed. Is he running from it, rationalizing it, fumbling to redeem it? Can he ultimately break free from the story he’s preordained? Like a time-lapsed Up series with the intimacy of a therapist, Minding the Gap is about as close to flawless as a doc can get. It’s an indelible time capsule of an era in flux, but it’s also a timeless look at the challenge of self-definition: the things we throw away, idolize, or carve out in its pursuit. And it’s profoundly honest in its attempt. It insists on highlighting the good and the ugly, celebrating the thrill of motion while recognizing the damage it leaves in its wake. It doesn’t justify or condemn; it refuses to oversimplify. It simply holds both pictures up to the light.

I can’t think of a better response to this overwhelming, electrifying, messy goddamn year.

Honorable Mentions

Trying to rank art is always a futile attempt. Trying to rank it under heavy constraints—they must be pairs, they cannot overlap, they must have a tie-in to traumatic response—is damn near impossible. And like any list, it’s bound to leave casualties in its wake. I won’t even try to make a ranked honorable mentions list, but I will show you a few options that I toyed with. For a variety of reasons that have virtually nothing to do with quality (my mood at midnight on a Saturday, the vaguest sense of what’s easy and what’s difficult to write) these didn’t make the cut.

Let’s start with a few alternate pairs that I couldn’t spin into being about trauma:

• Finding your tribe: Skate Kitchen & Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse
• Uneasy parenthood: The Elephant and the Butterfly & Tully
• Struggling to find individuality in a fated world: Annihilation & If Beale Street Could Talk

And other excellent films, which would have neatly converted certain pairs into triplets had I only mustered the strength:

• Mission Impossible: Fallout for #7: Outrun it
• Dogman for #6: Defy it
• Paddington 2 for #2: Ameliorate it

Finally, some re-shuffles I’d considered of all of the above, which I still quite like

• Break free of it: Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse & Minding the Gap
• Mythologize it: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs & American Animals
• Find shelter from it: Leave No Trace & Shoplifters
• Conjure unlikely love despite it: Roma & Eighth Grade
• Deconstruct it: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs & BlacKkKlansman
• Solve it: The Tale & State Like Sleep

It’s enough to make you wonder if the world isn’t actually separable into neat thematic pairs! But that would mean this whole exercise is…no, best not to think about it.

Closing Bits, Shameless Plugs

In addition to written reviews, which I’ve tried to link inline, you can find untold hours of me discussing these films in front of a microphone, courtesy of The Spoiler Warning! Among the dozen pairs and honorable mentions, we have podcast episodes for:

• Minding the Gap
• Blindspotting
• Eighth Grade
• Won’t You Be My Neighbor
• Shoplifters
• Wildlife
• BlacKkKlansman
• Widows
• First Man
• Thunder Road
• State Like Sleep
• Thoroughbreds
• Madeline’s Madeline
• The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
• Bad Times At The El Royale
• Leave No Trace
• Isle Of Dogs
• Tully
• If Beale Street Could Talk
• The Elephant and the Butterfly
• Annihilation
• Mission Impossible: Fallout

If you’re interested in reading more about grief and its relation to film, you can check out this essay I wrote a few months ago. Or follow me on Twitter @sdavidmiller, where I sometimes post thoughts…and more often, retweet political articles with a sense of impotent rage. Hey, we do what we can to get by.

“Stations” is a semi-biographical short story I conceived of in a hotel in Tokyo (room 617 to be precise…) in early 2017 and wrote almost immediately after. The piece (particularly the ending) was heavily inspired by Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, a wonderfully cryptic ode to memory and loss. Here’s the final scene:

Okay, no more elaboration, enjoy! (Plain text below, PDF at the bottom)

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Stations

Six floors down the mirrored elevator, beyond the marble-slick lobby where they always know your name, through the garish luxury mall hawking overpriced luggage, around a Starbucks filled with travelers each on their very last cheat day, one long escalator ride under a skyscraper cineplex, enormous spider statue, comically upscale McCafe and endless flow of pedestrians, sits Roppongi Station. All in all a five-minute walk on a good day, seven or eight if you take it slow. The metro map is a tangle of criss-crossing arteries, bright colored and swerving, dotted with stations whose bolded names obscure every inch of city block. Ueno. Marunouchi. Hongo-sanchome, Korakuen, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Shinbashi. They weave into a dense knot hugging city center and unravel only as they near the map’s edges: up Nikko, down Yokohama, left Osaka and Kyoto, all fraught with possibility. Five minutes, eight max, and even the most chronically zombified guest could find him or herself alive within the system, pulsing through its atrium or hurtling toward some mysterious limb. An open door, press of a button, 200 steps and the tap of a metro card, and life could just happen to you, just like that. You pick the line. You choose the speed.

Hungry? Take the silver one to Ginza, veer a block or two off the main street, and watch as neon lights give way to something magical. Restaurants on every corner, dim-lit and nameless, the sort that don’t offer English menus and you won’t even care because there are pictures and, well, let’s face it, you wouldn’t know the names anyway. Narrow stairwells lit by those same red lanterns you’ve seen in the movies, terminating in a curtain you aren’t entirely sure you’re allowed to open. Feign enough confidence to swing it wide and you’ll probably find us, eating at the Thai joint two blocks from our apartment, squeezed into a makeshift overflow table because the recent influx of Yelp reviews has rendered legitimate walk-ins impossible. I don’t know which dish I’ll be trying, but I guarantee you she’ll be grinning over a bowl of Tom Yum. (She’s normally one to champion variety, but if she had to eat one meal only for the rest of her life, she always said, that soup would be it.) We’ll be discussing our respective days at work, or squabbling about some slight she’s certain I implied or I’m certain she shouted, or—depending on the time you visit—fumbling through clumsy small talk about the President-elect and endless greed of Bay Area landlords, all self-conscious laughs and minimal glances, unsure who we are to each other now. If they don’t have a picture menu just sit at the bar. The chef usually speaks a bit of English, and even if he doesn’t you can always point and smile.

Not like the smile you’re wearing now. That nervous, toothy variety, the kind that means you’re uncomfortable but are too polite to say so. Don’t worry, I get it. Not every meal has to be an adventure. There are still a few Snickers left in the mini bar; feel free to help yourself. There’s no shame in just being a tourist once in a while, in clinging to the comfort of the herd. No shame in the Starbucks and McDonalds—pardon, McCafes—either, and don’t let any nagging impulse to quote truly immerse yourself say otherwise. The only people who give a flying fuck about “immersion” are the tourists, which is the great irony of it all. Any local, anywhere, will say do whatever you want. Sometimes searching for The Right Thing is exhausting. Sometimes The Right Thing is to cave and enjoy whatever piece of home you can, whatever you’ve simmered in for years. So grab a guilty Big Mac and chuckle at tiny, cute cups, then ease outward cautiously, going your own pace. This is your vacation, after all, I assume. Why exactly did you say you were here?

In fact, your first stop should probably be Shibuya. Rise from the station and it all tumbles into you: blinking billboards, gravity-defying skyscrapers, its famous crosswalk constantly emptied and refilled. It’s kitschy but it really is something, rolling through waves of faces like that: silent businessmen, stumbling drunks, tourists of all stripes nearly trampled trying to snap the million-and-one-th selfie from the center. It doesn’t even matter if it’s real or cultivated—the motion blur doesn’t care about context, doesn’t lie. That existential thrill, the feeling of “lost,” it pierces all manner of meta. Just on the other side of the crosswalk is a dog statue, which you’ll probably want to claw through the crowd to snap your own photo with, and around the corner you might bump into her sister, dad, his wife, and us, forming a tenuous chain where hands never quite meet, wading through the intoxicating, glitzy stupidity of Times Square. Gold-painted dancers standing eerily still; spandexed Spiderman and inhumanly large Shrek, his felt ogre mask barreling through years of irrelevance. All of us will say the whole scene is gauche, but inwardly we’re pulled by the same riptide as everyone else: that kitsch-defying thrill of almost drowning but not. We’ll be snapping ironic selfies and plotting our escape, and you should keep an eye out for her expression when I’m not looking, because this is one of the last times I’ll see her before she tells me it’s over. I’m curious what you find.

If all that sounds exhausting, you’re ready for a drink. Swim the veins two more stops to Shinjuku and follow the herd to Piss Alley or Golden Gai for a nightcap. Tiny corridors, capillaries, packed with intimate bar and yakitori whose hunched patrons barely fit at the counter, arched backs grazing foot traffic like your bruised suitcase corners graze the ground as it rolls. It’s still touristy, of course, but in Japan even the touristy places can leave you feeling alone. It’s why Lost In Translation still resonates so deeply, even after you realize that everything our American heroes experienced was cultivated specifically for them, that they were actually anything but lost. Even in the cultivated spaces you’re outnumbered ten to one. “Touristy” means at any given counter you’ll find one or two travelers rather than none: tatted army bro silently gulping, bespectacled hipster penning biopic by the sip, mutton-chopped 30something with an interest in Japanese culture (particularly women) that strikes you as creepy and downright predatory (though you’d never say it to his chops) or, of course, us. Always us. Sipping Napa reds at the booth in the corner, sampling scotch collection from the overhead shelf, experimenting with Hot Toddy or Glühwein in the kitchen, cracking bottles of fancy beer on the couch—her stubborn European hatred of all things hoppy winding through switchbacks of begrudging truce, mild appreciation, and full-fledged enjoyment, till by the third year we’re polishing off 750ml of some double-digit ABV abomination while the sappy iTunes rental blares. You’ll see us unthawing Tivoli with paper cups of glögg; ringing in Chisinau Christmas with a bourbon her dad nearly downs all at once; sharing sours in Portland; hop monsters in Tahoe; unpronounceable stouts in Brooklyn; tasteless lagers on a fishing trip in Moldova; overpriced Corona in the Malibu sand; no-name local crafts in Boise on my birthday as a Hawaiian-shirted booze bus pedals “Highway To Hell” and the overhead canopy sags under sudden, hot rain. Other things, too. Things behind closed doors, things I wouldn’t let you see. Tiny treasures witnessed by a glass of Syrah. Endless fights where the bottle stares back, me seething with silence, knowing my quiet is the thing that keeps the argument going but fearing any word will cave in on itself, will be crushed under her response. Her final, tearful exit paired with whatever shit was in the fridge. Try soju, skip hot sake, and run like hell from any all-you-can-drink izakaya. Only blackout of my life was in one of those places. If you’re anything like me you’ll regret it by morning.

Run-ons? Slurring? I prefer the term impressionistic, oh opinionated, pixelated stranger. Speaking of impressions, I don’t mean to cultivate some grandiose image of Tortured Alcoholic. The empty Sapporo cans on the bedside table carry a certain poetic significance, I’ll grant you that, but there’s a lot more to me you don’t know. On the top of the ring is Kasuga station, my stop, dotting the neighborhood I called home for a few months forever years ago. This was before she and I had even met, save perfunctory banter at a party or two. Nearly killed myself on that first extended stay, typing out 20-hour days and 7-day weeks in a tiny, fluorescent office where we all wore slippers and nobody said a word. My hard work paid off, though, and that success is what kicked the whole thing off: starting the company, leaving the program, falling into an apartment only four blocks from hers, commiserating in late nights then laughing in late nights till eventually the relationship jump-started one—you guessed it—late night three years back. She tempered my self-destructive habits a bit, but I never did lose that drive. Neither of us did. I still work myself to death with frightening frequency, and where I come from that’s meant to impress you. Around the corner from the office sits a massive industrial complex, 30+ rows of windows exposing bleary-eyed salary men, foreheads stationed on desks in a war of attrition with the overbearing boss. (Armistice will be signaled when he finally rises, marches troops out the door, and all mutually disarm by getting too drunk to speak.) The stress really gets to you, especially here, and numbness is often less symptom than cure. She knew those pressures all too well. Up one row you’ll see her, T minus forty-eight hours till yet another deadline, making her eighth americano while the terminal spits out numbers that just don’t seem right. Me sitting exasperated beside her, insisting that a few hours of sleep will do her a world of good, that we’ll both solve it together first thing in the morning. She’ll do what I’d do, of course: shrug off sound logic and get back to work. A few windows left and it’ll be me this time, finally crawling into bed just as her alarm readies itself. Stealing a pathetic 90 minutes till yet another call from Unnamed Chinese Customer invariably tears me back to the screen. That project shaved years off my life, I’m sure of it, and it certainly didn’t do any favors for us: three months completely evaporated, evenings spent drifting through each other like ghosts. (And that’s not even mentioning last March in Beijing, when I was so burnt-out and sleep-deprived that I probably called her like, two times, tops, which of course seems absurd from where I’m sitting now.) Though I’m certain she’s awake I won’t say a word as I slide beside her that morning, if you can believe it given my present inability to shut up or even pause for punctuation. At most I’ll eek out a halfassed side-hug and lifeless cheek peck, like one of those cheery technicolored sitcoms where the wife’s always nagging and the husband’s an oaf and the queen bed is actually two twins, their edges tastefully touching to show a flaccid, FCC-approved hint of fire. Now, of course, I want to say everything and do everything there on that bed, FCC be damned, but in the window I’ll silently roll to the side to avoid that look she’s got queued up for me.

There are always more stations. Some I’ve already been, others I’d planned to visit eventually. The neighborhood below us is known for its vast sprawl of nightclubs, throbbing meccas where local and expat alike fork out obscene cover charges for the faint hope of contact and a deafening roar. We’re gyrating in there, somewhere, the me inside having become the sort of person she probably wanted all along: the salsa dancer, the great romantic, the shot of life who whisks her back to a youthfulness she once knew. Out by Hongo-sanchome are a few married friends, generals from the fluorescent days still marching strong. One just had his first son; another has two he reportedly never sees. I’m sure I’m in a tiny apartment there, too, address presently unknown. Coasting through a blissful newlywed high, her finally out of school and making a decent paycheck, our combined income and lack of responsibility able to support every romantic whim as signified by the filmic Manhattan skyline lighting the scene. Or slouched at the dining room table, cautiously planning the holiday where our parents will finally meet (a nonreligious one, we both agree, to dampen the culture clash.) Or arguing about aforementioned holiday on the couch, me with the same silence that threatens to rip the room in two, wondering how it never changed after all these years. Or raising him, or her, or them, our modest suburban home close enough to commute but far enough for the husky to run himself tired on a reasonably-priced lawn with actual grass and no hypodermic needles and a love still inside there. Or resentment, maybe, too. Or that 60’s sitcom bed. The love hotels in Ikebukuro—here I’ll tread lightly. Rooms there we’ve rented, some thrilling some bland; other rooms, unopened, rooms I truly hoped to ignite with an electric vulnerability before suddenly losing my chance. It’s…it’s complicated. Way out at the map’s periphery, out to snowy Nikko where our dogsled soars under polar night and pulsed magnetic green: something we both treasured, something I was able to give her. Him there, also, dumbly peeking through the trees and waiting for his chance at the reins. Let’s not wade into the jealousy shit. The fish market in Tsukiji, where I’d someday show her how the tuna here blows any Pacific Northwest salmon out of the water, pun absolutely intended. Hand clutching hand in a real chain this time, tightening grip against the friction of crowd, me steering through the manic marketplace and thrilled at finally playing world traveler in the relationship. To our left an enormous pile of shrimp—“shrimps” as she’ll call it. It’s a quirk of language but it always struck me as sweet; individual tributes, beings with names, owed the barest identity before being skewered and torched in that beachside Brazilian joint she still dreams about opening. Just a few weeks ago, actually. Christmas. That’s when I’d planned to bring her here for the first time.

No, no, no, I don’t feel up to it tonight. You go on ahead, maybe I’ll catch up later. Me? Stuck in the past? And you honestly think you’re fit to make that call? You who would waltz into a stranger’s hotel room armed with a suitcase, insistent look legible beneath featureless blur, and zero plan of how to get where you’re going? I know your type. You’re hardly the first and you’ve all been the same. Always black dress and heels, acute angles sharpened like something out of a repressed teenage fantasy, with a face that’s gorgeous but literally impossible to see. Always showing up here asking to dance, to explore, to see something new or cast light on old places. Well go on! No one’s stopping you. Hell, there are a thousand bone-headed club dwellers lining up for their shot. Five minutes, eight max. Just cut it with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl schtick, with the snap-out-of-it savior complex. Has it occurred to you that I don’t want to be saved tonight? I’ve been here before. I’ve already danced. I’ve seen everything I want to see, and the stations en route are jam-packed with people I can never become, people I’d rather not brush up against thank you very much. But that shouldn’t hold you back. Dance your fucking heart out. Dance like she is, like she begs me to do.

Please. You don’t need to rush out all melodramatic like that. It’s just…look, I really do hear you, and you have every right to be upset. I know exactly what I sound like, spouting tear-jerking fugues and overwrought details like something out of a masturbatory GQ travelogue. As if I knew anything about Tokyo, or love for that matter! But tonight I really am busy. Let’s meet up tomorrow. I’ll bring you to the same spot a friend once brought me, way back on that first visit, on my lone weekend off. We’ll wake up at dawn and catch the JR to Kamakura. It’s nothing like this city, none of that digital buzzing. It’s alive with something ancient, sacred, slow. Dusty streets bookended by quaint little shops, selling rice crackers and trinkets from far flung places. We can follow the dirt road all the way out till we hit this little shrine—a lovely, tranquil sanctuary dug in a hill, which if you climb on top of you can even make out the sea on the horizon. It’s touristy but not at all garish, and on a Sunday it shouldn’t be too crowded either. There are candles you can buy for a handful of change, wax prayers wrapped in specifics neither of us can read. You’ll light one in remembrance of someone long gone and then just leave it there, in the rack by the entrance, your tiny tribute glowing next to a hundred others like it; and there’s something moving, even profound, about the way they’ll all blend into one. Just because we can’t access it doesn’t make it performative or appropriative or cheap. There’s a reason we do these things, a force stronger than irony. We’ll cleanse our hands in the trickling pebbled fountain, bowed by the weight of unpronounceable gods, voices hushed to a whisper if they even sound at all. Throw a few coins, give a lone staccato clap, and peer into room 617 where I’m sitting in bed on a Saturday night in the vibrantest block of the sprawlingest city watching an old Russian flick over minibar Sapporo because she’d always asked me to and I’d always declined, all while you go insistently on about stations—Nostalghia is the name, if you want to look it up—and on the screen the lead actor cups my fifty yen flame, tremblingly wading through knee-high bath stretched all the way from sun-yellow Malibu to the sepia shores of that lake where we fished, shielding the wick of its memory so the wind and steam can’t flicker it out, and when after a few false starts he reaches the finish he sets it down between our poles, hers and mine, and the camera lingers on three solitary sticks till a subtle zoom-out reveals our absence, then the lake and the entire subway station and the knotted thousand veins I was never able to reach, junctions I unknowingly crossed in the haze, alternate lines where I’m someone I yearn for or someone she needed, old stations with grayscale feeds endlessly splicing, new stations tiled with you, me, and static—routes that I’m simply not ready to consider, terminals that I know I’ll get to someday—I’m romantic, not naïve—but I don’t want to get to them, not quite yet, because the view is still widening and now everything is shadowed (even the limbs out past the map’s periphery) all dwarfed by a giant altar of crumbling stone, a blown up miniature ruin in arthouse green-gray surrounding candle and poles and lake and Corona and Times Square and Tom Yum and love hotel and shrimps, and myriad glasses with unison clinks and those bright conversations where the heat pulsed electric and the dim where we looked through each other like ghosts, and the kid(s) and the husky and the house with the lawn and every single goddamn argument she started that I’ll never get to win, or lose, never even get to escape from as long as I’m stuck in room 617 rejecting yet another advance from yet another faceless future to sit. And watch. And redeem or, at least, remember. Give me one last cheat day; one more night. Let me hold it for the instant there’s an “it” to be held. Before the loudspeaker chimes and the tracks start to rumble and it comes tumbling in with a flame-quenching gust—

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Stations (PDF 80K)

Travel has kept me from posting about movies for a while, but there are two Christmas Day releases which I happened to catch screenings of last month: On The Basis Of Sex and Vice.

There’s a concept I heard recently which stuck with me. It’s the idea of “liberal Doritos” ¹, denoting media which exists to reiterate progressive concepts (or express outrage at their conservative counterparts) without expounding in any meaningful way. Pod Save America, viral John Oliver rants, whatever fraction of Twitter follows Robert Reich. There’s nothing wrong with Doritos, per se, but they aren’t particularly nourishing either — that hunger which drove you to crack open a bag isn’t one a twelve pack can satisfy. It’s an empty calorie addiction: the more you eat, the more you crave, and the more vaguely uncomfortable you feel. A moderate amount might be good for your mental health, but keep an eye on that systolic.

If certain podcasts are liberal Doritos, On The Basis Of Sex (3/5) is an IV filled with liberal hot fudge: a treacly indulgence that delivers on its promise and asks for nothing in return. A hagiographic take on the early life and career of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, it’s exactly what its trailers (and final release date) implied: well-acted, well-intentioned, and, well, obvious. Felicity Jones gives a perfectly charismatic performance as RBG, Armie Hammer her improbably wonderful husband, Sam Waterston and Stephen Root her bah-humbug-a-woman’s-place-is-in-the-kitchen antagonists, and so on: the battle lines are drawn in crayon, along with helpful “Stand here to be on the right side of history” labels lest any of us get confused about the hot button issue of Are Wealthy White Women People Also. Applause lines outnumber moral dilemmas about 8000 to 0: save Justin Theroux’s ACLU head, there isn’t a whiff of uncertainty to be found here — let alone a discernible flaw under Ruth’s halo. While none of that is surprising, or a genuine threat to its feel-good aims, it certainly makes for a toothless final product. But hey, who needs teeth when you’ve got that sweet, sweet drip.

Vice (3.5/5) similarly features an all star cast standing on telegraphed sides of history, but there’s nothing sweet about it. Adam McKay’s directorial follow up to The Big Short is what happens when you crush liberal Doritos into a cool ranch powder, chop it fine with the edge of a Michael Moore DVD, and start sniffing. It’s a wild, abrasive ride, is what I’m saying; and while it’s not holding any of its punches, it also isn’t out to remotely challenge you. Christian Bale’s portrayal of Dick Cheney is absolutely incredible, and Amy Adams more than holds her own as Lynne. I’m sure somewhere on McKay’s editing machine lives a deliciously bleak, complex biopic starring the two of them. This one, though, tips its hand faster than you can slur “Halliburton” at a neighboring barstool, complete with maniacal laughter, cutaways to nature documentaries, and the least necessary narrator this side of Casino. I believe almost every word of what it’s saying, but did it have to stand so close to my face? Vice is a movie which somehow italicizes its own underlines; a giddy takedown of the Cheney dynasty which basks in its biases, which has zero desire to appear balanced or impartial. And hey, maybe balance is overrated in 2018; maybe it’s right to let loose and just feel angry for a night. God knows it’s an entertaining way to pass the time. But if you expected something cogent or educational like The Big Short, you’ve come to the wrong place. This particular upper wasn’t prescribed to help you study. Chris and I chatted about On The Basis Of Sex a few weeks back.