Last year I joked that the best film of 2017 was the trailer for Black Panther. And while “best film” might be a stretch, I’d argue that it /did/ speak best to the year’s frustrations. Electric, stylized, and first-pumpingly fresh, it felt less like a Marvel movie than a defiant call to arms. Lay down your tired origin stories, your comfortable fictions of wealthy, chisel-chinned white men incrementally learning selflessness. A new order is coming, and it won’t quote feature a vibrant, model, ethnically diverse cast endquote. It will be black: a film by black people, starring black characters, telling a story wholly unique to the black experience. It will not be whitewashed or timid or remotely apologetic, and it certainly will not be televised.

Black Panther (4/5) delivers on that promise—or, at least, on the aspects that matter. Ryan Coogler’s film is bold, assured, and wholly unfamiliar to the broader MCU. His Wakanda looks nothing like Tony Stark’s industrial Midtown or Doctor Strange’s mystical Village, thank God: a marvel of afrofuturistic production design, it presents a vision of technology which might amplify culture rather than sanitize it, and a new sort of magic you can actually touch. Spears destroy bullet-proof windshields. Metal beads heal fatal wounds. Tribes are still separate, traditions are still sacred, Africa is still African, and a king is still, undeniably, a king. He just happens to be wearing a vibranium suit.

Better still, Coogler finally gives us characters with authentic, traceable motives. Boseman’s T’Challa is much closer to Wonder Woman than any quipping Avenger: he wants to protect his people while also being open to the world, and he struggles to balance those impulses. Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger is, arguably, the most interesting Marvel “villain” to date: part Hamlet and part Malcolm X, he’s propelled by forces so noble you might (if not for their ruthless application) mistake him for a hero. These are heavy themes they’re wrestling with, and the film never hides that: Wakanda may be fictional, but the society they’re fighting over couldn’t be more real.

In substance and subtext, it’s a total home run. Tonally, though, I couldn’t help but feel mildly disappointed. Not that it was remotely boring—Black Panther is easily among the most entertaining MCU entries to date. But in light of all the bombast promised by the trailer, the resulting film strikes me as somewhat…restrained? Intense but never quite insisting, angry but refusing to outright antagonize. As Creed-like hand-to-hand combat gives way to plastic, CGI wars, it’s hard not to feel the weight of the Marvel machine slowing it down, dragging what should be “incredible” into only “very good.”

Still, very good superhero movies are very, very rare, and ones telling original stories are even more so. This one deserves all the love it will get this weekend. Chris and I review it in this week’s late night, post-screening episode.

This week, Chris and I watched all five Oscar-nominated live action shorts, as well as two powerful Oscar-nominated foreign films: The Insult (Lebanon) and A Fantastic Woman (Chile). We also watched an animated film starring James Corden as a jacket-wearing bunny who wants to steal vegetables.

This post is about Peter Rabbit.

We tried to record a serious review of this movie. We really, really did. And after dozens of slip-ups, extended periods of awkward silence, and at least five minutes of uncontrollable laughter, we abandoned that recording and tried again. The truth is, you didn’t want a serious review of Peter Rabbit. What you wanted was to imagine two grown men leaving an afternoon showing of a tense Lebanese courtroom drama, stepping into a bar for multiple drinks, then joining a packed crowd of mostly children to watch a movie which features Domhnall Gleeson drinking from a toilet with a plastic straw.

Peter Rabbit is what I imagine happens when a writers’ room packed with edgy comedians and a mid-tier late night host decide to pad a 15 minute premise into a 100 minute runtime. It’s Looney Tunes violent. It’s very, very silly. Virtually every sequence is choreographed to a Now That’s What I Call Indie Pop track. It’s got the see-what-sticks kitchen-sink style of humor common to most childrens’ movies, with half the jokes working (see: everything about the rooster) and half dripping harmlessly to the floor like a blackberry you squeezed to honor a fallen comrade. (It’ll make sense, I swear.) The good news, though? The human actors absolutely sell each bit, strong or weak. Rose Byrne oozes with impossible charm and cartoon credulity, a perfect foil to the zany mayhem that surrounds her. Gleeson goes for broke in his physical comedy; lobbing sticks of dynamite, tripping over roughly 100 rakes, and being jolted across the room by an ongoing bit eerily similar to the Neighbors 2 airbags. Watching the two perform all that B-level material with A-level gusto isn’t only fun, it’s surprisingly endearing. Like getting to play pretend with a younger relative, or like being young yourself.

Kids will laugh their heads off, adults won’t mind, and a drink or two won’t hurt. You can catch our short, spoiler-free, only-mildly-chaotic second review:

It’s tough to review a documentary. Like any genre, there’s no clear metric to judge it by because there’s no single goal they share. Some aim to provoke, others to inspire; some are didactic deep-dives, others meditative character portraits. Some, as we find this year, are desperate cries for help. The difference with the documentary format, is that some things are out of the filmmaker’s control. Can the director be blamed for a “weak” character arc? “Obvious” melodrama? Likewise, can they honestly be praised for a compelling twist they’ve seemingly stumbled into? Is it happenstance or found art? Does the distinction even matter?

I don’t have the tools to properly critique the five Oscar-nominated documentaries. All I can do is tell you how — given my own limited, flawed, subjective point of view — they impacted me. Some made me smile. Others nearly brought me to tears, and provoked sharp, political anger. Others frustrated me via some disconnect between content and form. All of them are available on major streaming platforms, and deserve to be wrestled with on your own terms. Brief reviews, in order of episode discussion:

• Icarus set out to be the Super Size Me of bicyclist doping, but ends like the Tickled or Citizenfour of Russian Olympic fraud. Like the latter Snowden doc, it is only valuable for its (fabulously lucky) access: filmmaker Bryan Fogel’s ability to weave a coherent narrative is virtually nonexistent, and much of the buildup to the Russian scandal is frustratingly opaque — even when the story virtually writes itself. It’s worthwhile as a time capsule, but largely artless as a doc. Your mileage may vary.
• Strong Island might be the most difficult of the bunch to discuss, because I feel it veers into the other extreme: artful at the expense of relatable authenticity. Yance Ford’s exploration of their brother’s absurdly unjustified murder, and the egregious failure of the justice system to bring it to trial, is heartfelt, personal, and deeply relevant today. In an attempt to channel that loss, though, Ford often turns the camera inward — and that tug-of-war, between the attempted naturalism of a grief observed and the inherent self-consciousness of grief directed and edited and re-shot, was a bitter pill for me to swallow. Every possible angle (a bias-damning procedural, an exploration of familial grief, a personal tribute to how loss impacts the filmmaker’s identity) is valid and powerful in its own way, but it felt like they never quite committed to which she wanted to tell. This is one instance where I think the whole is somehow less than its parts.
• Last Men In Aleppo is somehow both the most difficult to watch and the one I most full-throatedly endorse. A Syrian-directed film following the lives of a volunteer rescue group in Aleppo, it’s an absolutely gut-wrenching experience: in the first ten minutes we watch cluster bombs level residential buildings, men pull children (some living, some lost) from the rubble, and familial survivors howl with grief…all with a relentless intensity which Kathryn Bigelow would struggle to imitate. We see heroism, depression, relief, numbness, and — against all odds — tiny glimmers of joy, as families strain to carve normalcy out of a chaotic world. Like the best films, its slice-of-life humanism serves as a shortcut to empathy, shining a spotlight on lived-in experiences which we might otherwise ignore. As the credits rolled, I couldn’t help but feel all that sadness transmuting into anger: how dare we sit in ugly abundance while so many struggle to survive? How dare we give pursed lip-service to “feeling their pain” while refusing them shelter due to some incremental 0.000001% risk to our unearned well-being? When cities are being leveled and innocent children are hurting, what right do we have to expect normalcy, to demand it for our own quarantined spaces? “America first” can rot and burn. People first, always.
• Abacus: Small Enough To Jail is a provocative, topical drama which skirts a perfect line between lightness and outrage. It follows the Sung family, owners of a small bank servicing immigrants in NYC’s Chinatown, who were the first — and only — institution to be indicted following the 2008 housing crash. The case against them is almost laughably flimsy, and the defendants (a patriarch who likens himself to Jimmy Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life, a mother who just wants out of the spotlight, and their go-get-em nose-to-the-grindstone daughters) are just about the nicest people a government could choose to humiliate and crush. In addition to being a gripping courtroom drama and a charming portrait of a tight Chinese family, it raises several issues relevant today: the distinction between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, the need for prosecutorial discretion in choosing which “crimes” to punish, and the scapegoating of others’ specks while our own planks grow daily. A lovely little film, with substance to boot.
• Faces Places is also a lovely little film, but I can’t quite make the case for it being a /substantial/ one. Effectively an French sequel to the Steve Coogan “Trip” movies, the film follows legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda and young artist/muralist JR as they drive through the countryside making art. Specifically, they photograph strangers (an elderly woman living in a deserted block, a farmer, a young mother, a goat, the wives of three stevedores) and paste their blown-up portraits on the side of existing structures. It’s a whimsical examination of art — both the joy of creating it, and the empowering thrill of seeing oneself reflected in it. I’m sure French New Wave fans will glean much deeper layers of meaning; mine was as a breezy, pleasant escape.

Chris and I discuss all five films, and a good bit of politics, in our bonus omnibus review:

Nothing of interest was coming out this week, so Chris and I concocted an elaborate plan: watch and review all of the 2017 Oscar-nominated documentaries. Five features in a single weekend; that’s a lot of streaming. Arguably too much.

Then Cloverfield happened.

I’ll be honest, it is hard to write a meaningful review of The Cloverfield Paradox (2.5/5) — a fluffy, inoffensive B-movie that somehow mashes up Alien, Armageddon, Godzilla, Gravity, Back To The Future 2, and every terrible conversation between stoners who read a wikipedia article about quantum mechanics and think it relates to philosophy. Is it dumb? Absolutely. Is it interesting sci fi with well-defined rules? Hell. No. Does it have kinda fun horror tropes and jump scares to move it along? Sure. Is it packed with a fantastic cast who do their darndest to elevate the material? Wall to wall. Does Daniel Brühl punch a Russian in the face? Does Gugu Mbatha-Raw cry on command like nobody’s business? Does Chris O’Dowd utter the line “I’d like to take a bath with identical twins and a tub of Rocky Road” while the fabric of spacetime is literally ripping apart? Check, check, check. Does any of this relate to the Clover-verse? Not in the slightest. Would it have survived a standard theatrical release under a title that didn’t staple it to the back of better movies? Highly doubtful. But in this context, after all that documentary heaviness, The Cloverfield Paradox was a mostly fun escape.

Chris and I talk about Netflix’s business model, what quantum entanglement isn’t, Hollywood’s bizarre insistence on making characters use silly text lingo in serious situations, and the dubious pun “in-Dan-Tractable” in this week’s (lighter) episode. Stay tuned for documentaries.

Things I wanted to see but hadn’t yet: Okja, BPM, Your Name, Faces Places, Loving Vincent, Foxtrot, Wonderstruck

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

Podcast: you can listen to a similar (but not identical) list I gave with my friends over at The Spoiler Warning.

Introduction

Every year, when it comes time to make one of these Top 10 lists, I’m reminded of how arbitrary the ranking process is. After all, if a stranger asked you to recommend an album, you’d never just rattle off your five personal favorites and call it a day. You’d first try to hone in on a more tractable question: “well, what kind of music do you like?” Because music, like all art — like all things — can’t be judged by some objective metric. It’s only good insofar as it made you feel something; and whether that thing you felt is the particular sort you came in looking for.

And yet, maybe because film is a smaller medium (i.e. critics really can see everything), I always forget that impossibility come January. I find myself agonizing over orderings, or the relative merits of various performances — comparing comedy to biopic to coming-of-age to romance as if any could be meaningfully “less” than the other. The truth is that, despite critical consensus, Lady Bird is not the best film of the year. Neither is Dunkirk, or Get Out, or Call Me By Your Name, or The Post. (Especially not The Post…) There is no Best Film, because there’s no Best Statement; no end goal or message which every filmmaker aspires to. It’d be a terribly boring world if there were.

So, while I always violate the terms of a Top 10 to some degree, this year I’m really opening the floodgates. To answer what, I hope, is a more meaningful question: what were the various statements of 2017, and how did they move me? To assist that (and to squeeze in double what the limit allows), I’m counting down pairs of films which orbit similar themes or pose similar questions. There’s a rough ordering here somewhere (the films in my #1 spot are probably more dear to me than those in my #10 spot), but it’s intentionally muddied by the grouping. In general, my favorite member of the pair determined its location on the list — so while flattening this into a Top 20 would be wrong, it’d be no more than 50% wrong (and quite a bit less, as luck would have it!) Feel free to check the podcast for a more cutthroat ranking. Or, better, ignore ranking entirely and just enjoy the good stuff.

10. Coming Of Age In Uncertainty: Lady Bird and Landline

Coming-of-age flicks are particularly revealing, because they act as a sort of barometer for the culture at large. What do we wish we could impart to our younger selves? What is the essential truth we’d distill? Maybe it’s a reaction to the politics of 2016, but this year the answer seems to be a nonanswer: no one has a goddamn clue.

Greta Gerwig has always been the best part of whatever she’s in, to the point where she arguably transforms the filmmakers who work with her. You can draw a straight line from the frank sex of Nights and Weekends to Swanberg’s love-in-the-technology-era Easy; can feel her practically dragging Noah Baumbach up from the subdued charms of Greenberg to the rapture of Frances Ha to the unrestrained slapstick of Mistress America (full review). She’s a light in bitter places, an advocate for full-throated pathos in all things, and she leaves people better than she found them. I love her artistic voice. And yet, I never predicted the impact Lady Bird would have.

My gut response to the overwhelming acclaim of Lady Bird was skepticism — navigating-senior-year-of-highschool indie flicks are a dime a dozen, so why did this one hit critics so hard? And, honestly, I still don’t have a satisfying answer. But I think the secret lies in her use of lightness to disarm us. Saoirse Ronan’s titular protagonist checks off plenty of boxes (first heartbreak, first sexual encounter, first major act of rebellion), and they’re sketched with all the specificity of lived-in experience. But there’s never a tidy lesson to learn from them: no one to blame, no one to hate, no third act redemptive do-over. Her parents (Laurie Metcalf and Tracey Letts, both wonderful) are flawed and conflicted in their attempts to control and befriend her, but those conflicts never even hint at a resolution. The film, instead, functions as a bright, vulnerable shrug emoji: when we leave we have no idea what the “right” path is, or how any of this will work out. The only certainty, is that none of this gets easier.

***

Gillian Robespierre is no stranger to gray areas herself: her 2014 comedy Obvious Child may have drawn headlines for its subject matter (abortion), but what made it truly bold was its refusal to moralize on the subject. It certainly wasn’t a tacitly pro-life statement (as Juno or Knocked Up might be misconstrued); but neither was it a pointedly pro-choice rallying cry. It was a human film, concerned solely with the woman at the center: Jenny Slate’s Donna, for whom the same act could be a source of pain, relief, and a very funny standup routine to boot.

Landline continues Robespierre’s humanistic streak, this time tackling infidelity. Edie Falco and John Turturro are parents struggling to keep a stagnant marriage alive. Their oldest daughter Dana (Slate) may have changed a vowel since her previous film, but her station in life is otherwise unmoved: standing at the threshold of a new phase of adulthood (marriage), and terrified. So terrified, she blows it up. Watching both relationships strain is Ali, the youngest of the family, a high school senior who can’t seem to muster up the energy to care about the future. After all, why care when this is how it ends up? When your dad is a scumbag and your mother is trapped and your sister’s visibly self-imploding; when everything is as black-and-white and personal as it seems to a teenager, who wants to write an essay about Michigan State? Like Lady Bird, there are no tidy resolutions here; but unlike Lady Bird, the audience has seen enough “wrongs” to truly feel owed a few. Ali doesn’t exact some cosmic justice on behalf of her mother; Dana doesn’t trace any grand prodigal arc. People will fail. People are complicated. You will fail. Keep trying.

9. Entertainment As Escape: Brigsby Bear and Baby Driver

So what solace do we take in a world that lacks easy answers? Two films this year reminded me that, for all the quote grand messages endquote of cinema, sometimes it functions best as a grand distraction: a relief from, rather than reminder of, the complicated world around us.

Brigsby Bear is nearly impossible to explain without giving away its central premise, and that premise may be its most delightful aspect. Part Room and part The Disaster Artist, it’s the story of a man (Kyle Mooney) who has only seen a single television show: a cheesy, dated, Barney-esque educational series named “Brigsby Bear.” Stranger still, he’s the only one who’s seen it. So when circumstances arise which permanently take the show off the air, he feels an odd sort of weight — this thing was his, and now it’s gone, and no else is even aware of its absence. He copes with this loss the only way he knows how: by making more episodes. Donning an enormous bear mask and a Public Access-worthy collection of props, James and his friends recreate the bewildering universe of Brigsby. It’s a movie about how entertainment gives color and texture to our world; how consuming it lets us escape from life’s difficulties, and how creating it lets us transform them into joy. The cast is uniformly great, but the true standout is Mark Hamill, giving his best turn as a knowledge-bestowing hermit this year — The Last what, now? One the pleasant surprises of 2017.

***

Is there a more consistent filmmaker in Hollywood than Edgar Wright? Love him or leave him, his movies always deliver on precisely what their trailers promise. Hell, they’re effectively feature-length trailers: razor-sharp edits, rip-roaring soundtracks, and quotable quips delivered by genre-fied characters who (impossibly) earn them. If Scott Pilgrim proved the formula, Baby Driver might prove its hypothetical limit: it’s a deliriously fun joyride through style over substance, with style approaching infinity and substance zero. Ansel Elgort’s Baby acts as an audience surrogate, driving his getaway car to the rhythm of a non-stop classic rock playlist. Inseparable from his headphones, Baby is most at peace when he’s drowning in stimulation. Cars skid, cameras veer, and a star-studded cast chews diesel-drenched set dressing while Queen and Blur blare triumphant. If Brigsby Bear was the best film about escape, Baby Driver might be the best example of it: pure, cinematic joy.

8. Love As Agent Of Change: The Big Sick and Phantom Thread

Oscar Wilde said that “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex,” and there might be a similar rule for love stories. Everything is obliquely a romance, but those films which tackle love head-on are rarely about the feeling itself. Instead, they’re about what love does; what it signifies to one or both characters, and what it changes or demands.

On its surface, The Big Sick is just about about as heartfelt a love story as you can get. And as a lover of standup, and a particular fan of Kumail and Emily’s, I fully expected it to move me. I just hadn’t anticipated why it’d move me. In heavier hands, the story might have written itself: love beset by tragedy, humor as a bulwark against hopelessness, light at the end of the blah blah blah credits. It would have tugged heartstrings, and it would have been earned. But The Big Sick foregoes tugging for a more precise operation, revealing tiny layers of truth behind the bleeding-heart drama. Truths about growing up and finding your voice; about the burden of family and religion and culture, and the delicate maneuver of “breaking free” without severing or diminishing their weight. It’s about the changes Emily demands of Kumail by virtue of her existence: her refusal to be sidelined, to be swept under the rug of “private life” to an overbearing family; the way she forces him to reckon with his own identity and worth. It’s about how guarded passivity strains our relationships, and uncompromising honesty becomes its own higher brand of love — messy, hurtful, and wholly undivided. Avoid spoilers if you want; this isn’t, ultimately, about a meet-cute or coma. Those are handled beautifully, but there’s a deeper healing (and awakening) at play.

***

You’d be hard-pressed to find a less traditional love story than Phantom Thread. And yet, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s delightfully twisted way, love is exactly what it deconstructs. A worthy companion piece to Aronofsky’s (insufferable) mother!, Phantom Thread is interested in the egomania that drives creative expression, and the near-impossibility of finding love within that framework. Daniel Day Lewis’ Woodcock, like Bardem’s nameless Artist, stalks his household with a cruel singularity of focus. He shouts at everyone who tries to help him. He torments the one woman, Alma (a wonderful Vicky Krieps), who truly loves him. His withering silence is more abusive than any torrent of expletives, and he wields it like a dagger. Set in the high fashion culture of 1950’s London, the film is brimming with visual charm even as its lead grows monstrous and terrifying. But what truly sets it a part, and earns it a place on this list, is its third act coup — a twist which casts Woodcock and Alma’s relationship in a light I still haven’t really unpacked. It suggests a violent sort of love which is, like Wilde’s sex, indeed about power — but less about asserting it than properly regulating it. Love might be at its most powerful when it brings us to our lowest, dampening selfish instinct before it tips from “agent of creativity” to “agent of chaos.” This chilly, check-and-balance, mutually-assured-destruction view of love may not be the most heartwarming of the year. But I’m finding it hard to shake.

7. Pain As Catalyst For Growth: Stronger and The Work

Sometimes growth is forced upon us by others, but sometimes it comes from within; from the deliberate, painful, day-in-day-out grind of self betterment. Two films, one biopic and one documentary, highlight the human struggle at the heart of change.

Stronger tells the true life story of Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal), a 27-year-old Boston native who lost both his legs in the Marathon bombings. I’ll be honest: I didn’t have high hopes for this one. With an incident so fresh, and so overtly heartbreaking, the risk of deification (see: 21st century Clint Eastwood) or twisting suffering into a cheap sort of martyrdom, is high. So I was floored to see how David Gordon Green tackled this material. The inciting events, and the subsequent heroism, take up maybe the first 20 minutes of the film. The rest is devoted not to enshrining our protagonist, but to dismantling the cost of hero worship: the toll of presenting as “strong” to the outside world, while struggling with feelings of worthlessness inside. Gyllenhaal is an absolute revelation here, revealing the wounded, guarded impotence behind Bauman’s easy exterior. Never wholly good nor wholly bad, he wants to do the right thing — mostly. But he also wants the love of his on-again-off-again girlfriend Erin, and he isn’t above woe-is-me manipulation to get it. This is a film that lets no one off the hook. It says that intentions are only the first step; that true growth is a constant struggle, and some days we fail it. On the best days, though, our successes might be magnified by the humanity of past failure. Jeff Bauman is a flawed man striving to fill out the image of a hero. And that might be more inspirational than the real, impossible thing.

***

The Work may be the most appropriately titled film of the year. Set over a four-day intensive therapy session between inmates and visitors at Folsom Prison, it’s a documentary about the hard, hard work of emotional growth. Picture this: ten to twelve people, primarily convicts serving near-life sentences for violent crimes, stand in a circle. The instructor asks one member to share his story. Staring firmly at the floor, he opens up about the events that led to Folsom — a gang-related murder — and the years he’s spent in wait. He misses his family, but he can’t properly mourn them, because to properly feel anything would be to feel the horror of the prison system and the enormity of his loss. One by one, peers tease out details, urging him to confront things head-on, until suddenly, tears. Release. He’s on the ground, and he’s screaming in a way you’ve never heard a grown man scream. Five dogpile to restrain him while he pushes, fights, vents every ounce of aggression into this thing he’s fortified against for years. Eventually his energy runs out, and we rejoin the circle.

I’m not positive how I feel about the methods used in The Work. Like AA or a bestselling self help book, there’s a certain sheen to their dialogue — an overemphasis on mysticism, on spiritual affirmations and the value of the experience — that feels performative. The camera is always felt, an intrusive observer which modifies the result. But that’s precisely what makes this documentary so fascinating. We sense that these people truly want to bare something, be it for personal satisfaction or documentary fame or a positive mark in an upcoming parole hearing. And we watch how they grapple with that desire, how they verbalize or perform it. To a man who has known only aggression, it might be physical; wrestling with pain, shouting at it, beating it to a pulp. To a father fearing for his own child, quiet words of paternal support (“you are enough, son, you are loved”) ring truer than any profound psychic revelation: projecting on himself the love he wishes he could give his son. Maybe the things that I receive as hokey and over-sentimental — platitudes about masculinity, intrinsic worth — are overused precisely because they’re needed. Because they’re what we crave when we’ve lost everything else. Regardless of truth, watching these men at the end of their rope, grasping for any available tool to express themselves…it’s a profound, spiritual experience.

6. Grappling With History: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and I Tonya

Regret was a major theme of 2017, and it doesn’t take much digging to guess as to why. From Brad’s Status to Star Wars (full review), many begged the question: where did it all go wrong? Two films in particular highlighted the subjective nature of past experience. Using competing narratives and a Rashomon-like recasting of events, they’re about the way we struggle to make sense of the present in light of the past — our past, that is. The story that we, and only we, get to tell.

It might seem presumptuous to use such lofty terms for The Meyerowitz Stories, Noah Baumbach’s direct-to-Netflix comedy about three adults coping with an obnoxious father. On paper it reads like Baumbach’s take on The Royal Tenenbaums — or a spiritual sequel to The Squid And The Whale — and there are similarities to be sure: like many films this year, there’s a relentlessly self-obsessed artist (Dustin Hoffman) at its center. But I’d argue this film is less about classic familial dysfunction, and more about the way bitterness and self-questioning get passed down like family heirlooms. Hoffman’s patriarch is mired in history, constantly comparing himself to his more successful peers. Ben Stiller’s Matthew struggles to fill the role of “favorite son”, never quite able to earn or outrun it. Adam Sandler’s Danny never had any delusions of being the “favorite”; a talented childhood having given way to a less-than-dazzling adulthood, he has little but a limp, a divorce, and a college-bound daughter to his name. He loves being the sort of father his own wasn’t, but now that his daughter no longer needs him, who exactly is left in that identity? Elizabeth Marvel’s Jean is the only one who seems to have made peace with her past, despite hints of darkness beyond any Matthew and Danny experienced. There’s a real sadness at the core of this comedy, particularly in Stiller and Sandler’s world-weary portrayals of middle age. These are adults with grown children of their own, but deep down they’re still relitigating what they lost in their youth. A song at the piano early in this film, between Danny and his college-bound daughter, made me tear up despite having barely known these characters. And that pathos continues through the bitterest of scenes. It’s a lovely, wistful little flick.

***

I, Tonya has a similar blend of acridity and wit, but the tone it strikes is less wistful than defiant. In one of the year’s absolute best performances, Margot Robbie imbues Tonya Harding with all the love-me-or-leave-me stubbornness of a punk icon. She has the unique capacity to hurt that can only come from having been hurt herself. She sees the world as deeply unfair, and, honestly, I’m inclined to agree. We don’t just watch her story; we watch every possible interpretation of her story. Like last year’s experimental documentary Tower, the script features fictionalized reenactments of real-world interviews: Tonya, her alcoholic mother (a scenery-chewing Allison Janney), her abusive ex-husband, her “bodyguard”, and the paparazzi all weigh in, interject. While that leaves room for plenty of fourth-wall-breaking playfulness, it also lends I, Tonya a bold subjectivity. Unlike most biopics, Gillespie’s explicitly acknowledges its biases and leverages them as strengths. Where other films might restrain scenes of domestic abuse in an effort to be even-handed, Gillespie frees them to be both monstrously evil and cartoonishly good, to be exactly as Tonya perceived them and as they aspirationally perceive themselves. There’s something electric, anarchic, about all that mayhem, like watching someone take a wrecking ball to their own family tree. Maybe Tonya was a tragic victim of circumstance. Maybe she was a self-serving, opportunistic brat. Maybe she knew nothing about the Kerrigan affair, maybe she orchestrated the whole thing, or maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. Only one thing stays consistent amid the heightened counter-narratives: on or off the rink, the girl was a force to be reckoned with. Now sit back and reckon with her.

5. Forging An Identity: Mudbound and Blade Runner 2049

Another source of uncertainty is personal identity: are we the product of our parentage, or the label that society bestows on us? Or is it possible to forge our own path? Many films touched on this, some mentioned (Meyerowitz, The Big Sick) and some not. Two in particular exemplified not only the question, but the loneliness inherent in not knowing.

I’ll admit, I wasn’t eager to watch Mudbound. Its setting and subject matter made me think I had it pegged. 1940’s, Deep South, generational struggle. I expected a harrowing portrait of Jim Crow-era racism — powerful, to be sure, but not particularly enjoyable. What I got instead of was a precise, plodding rumination on American identity, and the way World War II disrupted soldiers’ conception of self. Two men, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) and Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), return from the war to a small Mississippi farm. Slavery is decades gone, but socioeconomic roles remain largely the same: Jamie’s brother owns the farm, Ronsel’s family works the land. As resentment grows between the families, neither man can shake the feeling that he is being misused; that the world he has observed to be so big, so multifaceted, strips this tiny one of its power. Jamie drinks away his dormant potential; Ronsel lashes out against social mores he sees as dated and dying. Like the best Jeff Nichols drama, Dee Rees’ lets us simmer in that discomfort; there’s a rhythm to the film’s dread, a warning in its Gothic grays and browns. It’s clear the center cannot hold, but all the telegraphing in the world can’t dampen the impact when it all goes to hell. Mudbound is a near-perfect drama, potent and unnervingly specific.

***

Most years, I give one film the Stephen Isn’t As Snobby As People Think, Sometimes He Likes Things That People Actually Saw Award — aptly (and concisely!) titled to remind myself that great cinema isn’t limited to small-budget indies; that a behemoth franchise can be just as artful as a delicate awards-baity biopic. It’s hard to think of a more appropriate recipient than the bold, criminally-underseen Blade Runner 2049. Despite my negative introduction with Sicario (full review), Denis Villeneuve has gone on to become one of my favorite modern auteurs: be it the brash outrage of Incendes, the cool crypticism of Enemy, the riveting melodrama of Prisoners, or the dreamy impressionism of Arrival (full review), Villeneuve is a master of tonal control. He knows exactly what feeling he wants to instill in the viewer, and he instills it ruthlessly. And what is the legacy of Blade Runner if not a distillation of some gnawing feeling; an elevation of ambient texture as art form? Despite decades of fan arguments, the plot of Blade Runner is its least fascinating part. Far more interesting are the questions posed by its tone: what is life, what is humanity, what am I? In the face of all this spectacular, neon nothingness, what right does man have to be anything? If the original prods at the existential, Villeneuve’s sequel absolutely roars it. Zimmer and Wallfisch’s score shouts it; Deakins’ gorgeous cinematography overwhelms with it. It’s a difficult, strange reflection on personhood and the quest for meaning; one that never provides easy answers or tidy conclusions. Like the original, it’s a daring — and, from a studio perspective, laudably risky — cocktail of blockbuster grandeur and arthouse ambiguity. It’s also easily the best science fiction film of the year. An absolute stunner.

4. Crafting A Legacy: Only The Brave and Darkest Hour

If Danny Meyerowitz and Tonya Harding looked back this year, other protagonists were more inclined to look forward with an almost pre-emptive regret, feeling the weight of future hindsight. Two films, about as different in tone as can be, examine the legacy we leave in our response to hardship.

There are a few unpopular choices on this list. But if there’s one I’m most eager to go to bat for, it’s Only The Brave; the most heartrending — and woefully overlooked — biopic of the year. Following the rise and fall of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the film does for wildfire fighting what Nightcrawler (full review) did for crime-scene photography or The Hurt Locker did for bomb disposal: it presents the stressors, and emotional contradictions, of a world I’d never really known existed. Unlike a Bigelow flick, though, what I loved about Only The Brave was how uncomplicated my sympathies were allowed to be. Firefighting may well be the purest symbol of human endurance: flawed men confronting an ever-present danger, with no agenda or motive in sight. The stakes are high, the enemy quite literally unforgiving, and the battle lines drawn vividly clear. While the film is framed around its tragic finale, it shines most brightly in its quiet aftermath — a meditation on grief, and the weight of survival, which communicates more emotional truth in five minutes than most war films do in their entire runtime. Impeccably brought to life by an all-star cast (Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jeff Bridges), it’s the most communal, cathartic movie-going experience I had in 2017. I cried. You’ll cry. In a year where nothing seems pure — no victory untainted by an ugly shift in power to exploit it, no hero without the spectre of some politicized enemy — when everything has a secondary and tertiary agenda, dear God, doesn’t it feel good to cry at simple, human bravery?

***

Darkest Hour is also framed around tragedy, but the two couldn’t be more different. Joe Wright’s portrait of Churchill-at-the-crossroads is a glorious, fist-pumping crescendo of a film; and the best treatment of Dunkirk to boot. Much has rightly been made of Gary Oldman’s transformative performance — he doesn’t just play Churchill, he becomes possessed by Churchill, with all the magnetism and arrogance and impulsivity that come with it. From beginning to end, this is his story to carry; his dark night of the soul and its roaring denoument. But it’d be a shame to forget how well everything works in concert to prop up Oldman’s portrayal. Skirting between the claustrophobic palace intrigue within ministry walls and the total, apolitical devastation without, the film lets us feel the weight of Dunkirk more than any Zimmer ticking clock: not just the incomparable cost of human life in the present, but the unforgiving gaze of a future that will remember and judge. It implicates us in Churchill’s struggle, in his terrible need to balance cold political calculus against hot-blooded passion. It reminds us that no decision of value is simple. That history may have smiled on Churchill’s bold stand, but with an alternate roll of the dice it could just as easily have damned him; that the line between courage and recklessness, between grand oration and warmongering hucksterdom, is often in the eye of the beholder. In a year brimming with populist bombast and rage-trumping-rationale, it might seem odd that Churchill’s rallying cry moved me like it did. I certainly don’t think the film idolizes him — nor do I think his take-no-prisoners style is best emulated today. Maybe it’s that in the face of overwhelming adversity, what he presented as the courage of his convictions was, in fact, the product of relentless self-reflection. That final speech on the Parliament floor isn’t powerful because Churchill stands alone, but because his verve — his passion — persuades the entire room to join him. Like the River City townspeople marching with Harold Hill, I don’t believe, in that moment, Winston’s flowery language has stripped them of their reservations. They’ve simply realized that it’s better to gamble on a shared answer than be divided on the question, if answer they must; better to suffer as one voice, to opt-in to a confidence they may never earn, than to quietly erode apart. That community, that bringing together of people, is — I believe — the true legacy Wright is grappling with. And it’s one that seems hopelessly out of reach today.

3. Love Is Dangerous: The Shape of Water and Call Me By Your Name

Be it hyper-stylized or subtly understated, cinema has a lot to say about romance. But in 2017, the nature of it feels…different. Gone are the soft-focus euphemisms, the delicate pans to a fogged up window. This year, love feels like a political act — a dangerous, mystifying thing. Brightly lit, tangible, defiant. Two films this year, each with similarly decadent color palettes but very different aims, sharpened love to a knife.

Whatever the word is for what Guillermo del Toro does with fables, The Shape Of Water (full review) might be the clearest argument for it. An early-60’s love story between a nonverbal cleaning woman and a monstrous fish creature, the film lends itself to plenty of dissonant comparisons (tons of Edward Scissorhands-era Burton, some Beauty and the Beast, a whole lot of Amélie, a dash of Hugo or Hail Cesar or even La La Land). In his hands, though, it’s a perfect mix of wild romanticism, gore, shock, sadness. The filmmaking is visually gorgeous: lush blues and greens, tactile, glistening, a camera that swoops and pirouettes between scenes like a synchronized swimmer. It’s brimming with character actors doing unabashedly over-the-top work, be it Sally Hawkins’ wonderful brightness as the wordlessly emotive Elisa, or Michael Shannon’s terrifying, nihilistic Strickland. After all, joy and terror are two sides of the same coin in del Toro’s universe. Sex and violence are treated with the same fairytale frankness as raindrops on the window or jiggling jello pies: shimmeringly physical, dense, technicolored, wet. That same childlike wonder which renders monsters as beautiful, renders hatred as bottomless, unmotivated, raw. A gay man’s advances are cruelly rebuked; a black couple is refused service at a counter; Strickland wields his power like a cattle prod, over any one or thing “God” saw to put beneath him. None of this is remotely subtle. But there’s something powerful about that simplicity, about casual miracles and cruelties existing in the same, unblinking frame. How do we respond to new, uncomfortable textures? Blackened fingers, slimy flippers, a bubbling bathtub, an outstretched palm. Do we close our eyes, shoo them; ban them from the light of our civilized romances? Or do we reach out, unfurling, and plunge?

***

It might seem odd — maybe even offensive — to compare Call Me By Your Name (full review), a heartbreaking queer romance set in 1980’s Italy, to a fable about falling in love with a fish creature. But in an odd way, they complement each other extremely well. Both are lovingly-constructed, atmospheric period pieces. Both center around a forbidden, near-Platonic brand of love; one which frees its protagonist from repetitive cycles and offers a means of escape. Elisa and Elio both glide through the world to their own rhythm, filled with a passion so self-evident that their scenes of silent longing rank among the most powerful moments of the year. And the specific objects of their love (both mysterious, fantastical, and hopelessly out of reach) are only relevant to the degree that they teach them to move. Guadagnino, like del Toro, uses his lens to highlight the world’s irresistible physicality — the crisp relief of a dip in the lake, the warmth of a Mediterranean summer evening, the juiciness of a freshly-picked peach, the way skin seems to glimmer in the sunlight. The way things, plainly seen, can feel almost hedonistic; can compel in you an unshakable want. It’s a film about learning who you are and the things you choose to want, less coming-of-age than coming-of-body. About presence, persistence, and a life fully felt — be it the joy of love or the pain of its absence. Michael Stuhlbarg (a voice of quiet compassion in both films) gives a monologue that would melt the hardest of hearts, and Sufjan Stevens (reprising the sparsely plucked folk of Carrie and Lowell) contributes the best original songs of the year. But Timothée Chalamet, showing stunning emotional range in the third act, is the film’s true revelation. In a single, extended take, he embodies that same contradiction Stevens is wrestling with: “Oh, to see without my eyes the first time that you kissed me…How much sorrow can I take?…Blessed be the mystery of love.”

2. Haunted By Absence: A Ghost Story and Personal Shopper

The flipside of love is loss — or, more specifically, the vacuum left by love’s absence. Two films this year explored that particular ache: both sparse, impressionistic pieces which take that metaphorical haunting to unsettling extremes.

A Ghost Story is a difficult film to write about, because describing it in words seems antithetical to the point: a nameless couple, played by Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, live together in a tiny plot in Texas until…well, until they don’t. Less feature film than elaborate art installation, David Lowery’s piece is a visual representation of grief turned inside-out. It’s a story not primarily of losing something but of becoming the thing that was lost, an object of orphaned love, unneeded and stuck. It’s about the way we bind ourselves to certain places and memories, dislodge ourselves within their walls; about that intangible substance whose presence turns a house into a home, and whose absence turns a home into a memorial. Or ruin. Or shrine. That little bit of ourselves — our love, or sorrow, or resentment — which seems to hang in the air a moment too long, to be soaked up by someone else or linger like a ghost. None of this is particularly easy to watch. It’s an extremely slow, virtually wordless, claustrophobic mood piece, whose meandering tone lulls you into a trance while lobbing just enough sparse jolts to keep you on your toes. But if it clicks into you, like it clicked into me, it becomes something more than mood; something jarring and recognizable, which I’ve never seen on film before. A Ghost Story is an emotional haunting; a distant sort of intimacy, so chilly it eventually feels like warmth.

***

Scrawled notes left on a counter. Unkept promises. Routes you might have taken had you been anyone but yourself; others attempted, blocked by barriers you didn’t even know were there. That thought which felt so sturdy inside, only to evaporate in the space between utterance and impact. Bouncing dots on an iPhone screen, spooky action at a distance signifying real thumbs on real glass, abruptly vanishing and reappearing like a pulse till suddenly: words. Gray, motionless, cold. Information. All of the “meaning” with none of the dance.

We’re all haunted by something. In Clouds of Sils Maria, Olivier Assayas’ lead is haunted by her own past — by a beauty and liveliness that can’t last forever, can’t simply be conjured back into existence by virtue of acting it out. In Personal Shopper, she’s haunted by everyone else; by a failure to connect, or a desire to become, or both. Sometimes that takes the form of a letter, a text message, a whisper of grief or rote transaction in a posh fashion boutique. Sometimes it’s a literal ghost materializing in frame. This film is best entered blind, so — like A Ghost Story — I don’t want to ruin much by way of exposition. All I’ll say is it’s an enigmatic ride in the best possible way: there are crescendos of magical realism which absolutely floored me, and questions brought up which I’m not sure I’ll ever resolve. Assayas’ direction is excellent, his mood-building is confident and on-point, and Kristen Stewart gives the second best performance of a Twilight star this year.

1. Signifying Nothing: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Good Time

Love, loss, striving, regret…2017 was a year of complicated emotions. But if there was one universal mood which overwhelmed all others, it was this: a feeling of outrage — a desire to do something — with nowhere of value to funnel it. That impotent shout of “something is wrong, and I don’t know how to change it”, which belied countless headlines and jokes and exasperated Twitter rants. So it’s fitting that my two favorite films of the year chronicle the actions of deeply flawed people, as they try to redirect their fire and fury into something approaching good.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (full review) may be the most mature film of Martin McDonagh’s career. It has all the cleverness, and gleeful blasphemy, of his earlier work — unquotable monologues, manic fits of disproportional violence. But it also has something serious to say, and is willing to take its brooding time saying it. In that sense, it’s hard not to compare it to his brother’s Calvary (full review). If Calvary asked the question “What use is faith in a world whose institutions fail to earn it?”, Three Billboards asks “What good is anger when there’s no one to absorb the blame?” It’s a story of characters filled with righteous indignation and no proper place to funnel it. Mildred Hayes can’t believe her daughter’s murder hasn’t been solved. Sgt Dixon can’t believe his boss’s “good” name is being dragged through the mud. In typical playwright fashion, improbably heightened events are used to tease out real emotions from real people: the point isn’t what happens, it’s how these characters would respond if it had. Perfectly scripted and wonderfully realized (Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Woody Harrelson all shine), those responses are a joy to witness. If you go in expecting an A-to-B storyline with lovable heroes, you’ll be sorely disappointed: this is a film where no one is righteous, no one is correct, and (contrary to popular controversy, I’d argue) no one comes within spitting distance of redemption. But they want to be redeemed, and that want — through the muck and darkness — is palpable. If you’re ready to soak in a few hours of gray, you’d be hard pressed to do better than this.

***

We’ve arrived at my favorite film of the year, and I’m largely at a loss for words — after all, what can constructively be said about alchemy? Good Time simply has no right to be as marvelous as it is. Following a young man (an electric, virtually unrecognizable Robert Pattinson) over a single evening in Queens as he attempts to make bail for his incarcerated brother, Good Time is pure, visceral cinema; putting you in the headspace of the unlikeliest protagonist. Pattinson’s Connie is about as far from a role model as any in Three Billboards. A high-octane control freak, the film opens with him removing his developmentally disabled brother from therapy — to rob a bank in broad daylight. When the job goes south and Nick winds up in Rikers, Connie uses every tool in his arsenal to free him. He breaks into the prison wing of a hospital. He tries to flip a Sprite bottle filled with LSD. He sweet talks his girlfriend for cash, a kindly older woman for her home, and her sixteen-year-old granddaughter for a midnight ride that will end in the backseat of a cop car. He pummels a security guard to within an inch of his life, and from all outward appearances he feels vindicated in doing so — sees casualties left in his wake as justified, uncomplicated. Why? Because Nick is family. He loves, and feels a holy responsibility towards, his brother, and all that fear and guilt and frustration combine into a righteous propulsion to act. Whether that action is helpful or harmful is almost irrelevant. The central image of the film is also its thesis: Connie, breathless, running for everything he’s worth, while the redblack night bends around him. Part Taxi Driver, part Linklater, and part Harmony Korine, Good Time is a breathless, neon-infused fever dream of a film. It’s mesmerizing, cathartic, daring, provocative. And it features, by far, the most powerful closing shot of the year: a quiet, gentle exhale after all the tension we’d endured. Leaving the theatre, I wasn’t sure how to characterize my feelings. I was wrestling with too many conflicted emotions. I still am.

Outro…

I think I’ve written enough for one year. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge how many excellent movies I still couldn’t cover. Of all the films I enjoyed this year (Dunkirk, Let It Fall, Logan, Columbus, Coco, Wonder Woman…) the one that really stands out, that I can’t believe still didn’t make this list, is Get Out. Honestly, has anything else left a comparable cultural footprint? If anything, I think that dent just makes some films too daunting to write about — it’s tough to find something new to say about a film that’s already permeated the Zeitgeist. And it felt reductive, somehow, to try and pair it with anything else on the list — as if I could lump the black experience with my own cheesy sentiments about 2017 by way of analogy. (The best I could come up with was Personal Shopper, and I’ll leave the hamfisted thematic parallels as an exercise to the reader…)

So, I’ll leave it at that: vague honorable mentions and as many disclaimers as I can muster. Jordan Peele is the man. Chris Nolan is a maniac. Patty Jenkins pulled off a miracle. Why can’t HBO shows count as movies? Wouldn’t The Deuce make a great companion piece to Good Time? Am I a monster for not adding The Florida Project (full review) to this list? Do you remember that year I didn’t add Mad Max (full review)? I’m wrong! I know I’m wrong! Why are you still reading this? Movies.

A better-late-than-never December Fiction Roundup! Thanks to travel and holidays, last month gave me time for 7 novels, pretty much evenly spit between been-meaning-to-read-that-one-forever classics and recent discoveries. 2017 was an eye-opening year for me, and this collection encapsulates its contradictions better than any stretch since I started writing these reviews. Remember: the ratings are arbitrary; they’re wholly dependent on time and place, expectation and emotional release. These authors don’t need me to rate them. Read all of these. Read everything.

Of the 40 or so books I read in 2017, Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Sonora (4.5/5) was the single least popular according to Goodreads — a whopping 357 readers by my last count. That is an honest-to-God tragedy.

This is a gorgeous, lyrical debut. I’m stunned it’s a debut, because it packed an emotional wallop like little else this year. It’s a mesmerizing coming of age story, following two girls’ journey from the Sonoran desert of Arizona to the drug-addled blur of New York City. Assadi is an extremely self-assured writer, with a heart wide enough to encompass the tiny details of adolescent loneliness, and a knack for brilliant turns of phrase. Sonora functions less as a novel than a hypnotic, dreamy poem; some cross between an Aronofsky flick and a Mountain Goats album. In fact, while reading I couldn’t shake the comparisons to John Darnielle’s Wolf In White Van and Universal Harvester. Assadi’s desert functions much like Wolf’s Trace Italian or Harvester’s empty planes: an endless source of possibility and dread. Read this book. It’s lovely.

“Like faces, the smell of a person cannot be replicated. The smell of a fire in my hair from a particular party, the smell of a friend’s perfume rubbed into my shirt. The smell of lipstick and chalk soaking the dressing rooms at dance rehearsals. The smell of a lover in your fingernails the morning after. The smell of my mother: orange peel, suntan lotion, faint vanilla. The smell of Laura: lavender laundry detergent, danger, linger of red wine, sweat, cigarette. The smell of Eli: the smell of seventeen, of the beach at night, coconut, white blossom, salt, stars. The smell of Dylan: vodka, fire, dirt in autumn, February in the desert.”

“The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the few blue-shifted galaxies in the universe. Instead of being torn away from us by a force far greater than gravity, the fate that commands the red-shifted galaxies, the force that will cause all the lights to one day go out, Andromeda is coming for us at eighty-five miles per second. In four billion years, far after the sun has grown too hot for us to live, it will crash into us, into the Milky Way. My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.”

Little Fires Everywhere (4/5) was my first introduction to Celeste Ng and, I’ll be honest, I didn’t quite understand the hype at first. This is a book that sneaks up on you; that has no overt desire to impress you. A modestly-scaled drama about an upper-class suburban family and their lower-class tenanst, it skirts some line between Stepford Wives-ian satire and empathetic, teenaged sincerity…and it never really leaves that territory. But, thanks largely to Ng’s phenomenal character work (her distinct narrative voices for each character, and the way their POVs transition to one another mid-scene, is a highlight — the likes of which I haven’t seen since Imagine Me Gone), we shift as the story continues. Somewhere around the halfway point, I found myself totally invested in the story, both in relation to the particular citizens of Shaker Heights, and in the socioeconomic tensions their journeys represent. It’s a neat little morality tale, which raises questions about gentrification, parenthood, and aw-shucks white liberalism that I’m still wrestling with today. A calming, thoughtful read.

“Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare—a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug—and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”

Jesmyn Ward is a marvelous wordsmith; the rare sort of writer whose work only improves when spoken aloud. I primarily listened to Sing, Unburied, Sing (4/5), and I’d suggest you do the same: it’s a chilling, provocative experience, occupying a space somewhere between novella and spoken-word poem. Like Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, Ward’s is a puzzle that I A) have no desire to explain in plot terms, and B) can’t wait to reread and unpack. In fact, without giving away too many plot points, the two go hand-in-hand for a number of reasons. Following a mother and son’s drive through the Gulf Coast of Mississippi to pick up a father from prison, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a gorgeous open wound; a rumination on racism and hopelessness as unflinching as it is specific. I’m not sure I fully understood it, but I was haunted by it. An outstanding choice for the National Book Award.

“Given slumps and runs his hands up and down the doorsill; he did this when he was alive, wore the wood of the sills in the house smooth with his rubbing. He freezes and looks at me, and I wish he was alive, was flesh, because I’d kick him. Kick him for not being able to speak. Kick him for seeing whatever it is he sees or hears out in the yard and not sharing that with me. Kick him for being here, now, for taking up space in the waking, sober world, right before me. For knocking the world sideways—birds flying into glass windows, dogs barking until they piss themselves in fear, cows collapsing to their rumps in fields and never rising—still winking and smiling, every dimple and tooth declaring the joke. For dying. Always for that.”

The Power (3/5) was a frustrating book for me. Frustrating because it presents one of the most compelling ideas I’ve read all year, and it does substantially less with it than I’d wanted. Here’s the premise: imagine if women were more powerful than men. More specifically, imagine a world where women are capable of shooting electricity from their fingertips. What would change? Fear of walking the streets at night? Power structures in the workplace? In government? The dynamics of sex? Centuries ago, physical power differentials crystallized for us a society of male control and female submission. If the scales tipped today, could the same structure hold?

It’s a premise I’ve found myself thinking about for weeks since finishing the book. Here’s the problem, though: I’m not convinced Naomi Alderman shares my enthusiasm for the questions the premise begs. Rather than drill down into the human element, The Power seems more interested in going bigger and broader; constructing a world where every terrible male behavior is slowly substituted for an equal and opposite female behavior, with little by way of motive or sober reflection. Religions shift from patriarchal to matriarchal. Men are treated as subservient eye-candy. And in a passage which, to me, read as a bit shallow and unearned, sexual assault swaps pronouns while remaining semantically identical; complete with justifications of “__ was asking for it”, “__ could have stopped us,” etc. Time and time again, events seem to happen not because women would do them, but because men currently do; highlighting the absurdity of our behavior and its terrible justifications. In that sense, it reads less like an exploration of gender and sexuality, and more like a pitch-black satire or revenge fantasy — a satisfying one to many female readers, I’m sure, just not the journey I was hoping to take.

“She is in a high and lofty realm, a place where the lungs fill with ice crystals and everything is very clear and clean. It scarcely matters what is actually happening. She could kill them. That is the profound truth of it. She lets the power tickle at her fingers, scorching the varnish on the underside of the table. She can smell its sweet chemical aroma. Nothing that either of these men says is really of any great significance, because she could kill them in three moves before they stirred in their comfortably padded chairs. It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.”

There is no way to talk about Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (4.5/5) without sounding like an insufferably pretentious lit major. Believe me, I’ve tried. A poet’s exploration of how truth is transmuted to story, it’s about as self-consciously meta as they come — a bit of Adaptation, a bit of if on a winter’s night a traveller, and a whole lot of white male neuroses. And, for added snobby measure, it’s set in New York City!

I know, I know. On paper, we don’t need another story like this. And yet, for reasons I can’t explain, I absolutely loved it. I love Lerner’s incisive diction; love the way he pulls meaning out of his day-to-day life while also satirizing the search for meaning. I love its tenuous relationship with truth, its blending of fact (a New Yorker piece Lerner wrote appears here as a New Yorker piece his narrator wrote; his narrator gives a lecture on language and the Challenger explosion which he, also, gave) and dreamlike fiction. It’s a wonderfully lyrical work, with an ending that floored me — I sprinted through the last half of this book in a single sitting. So, maybe I won’t try to explain. This book was written for me. Maybe it was written for you too.

“Would you know what he meant if the author said he never really saw her face, that faces were fictions he increasingly could not read, a reductive way of bundling features in the memory, even if that memory was then projected into the present, onto the area between the forehead and chin? He could, of course, enumerate features: gray-blue eyes, what they call a full mouth, thick eyebrows that she was probably careful to have threaded, a small scar high on the left cheek, and so on. And sometimes these features did briefly integrate into a higher-order unity, as letters integrate into words, words into a sentence. But like words dissolving into sentences, sentences into paragraphs and plots, combining these elements into a face required forgetting them, letting them dematerialize into an effect, and that somehow never happened for long with Hannah, whom he was now beside.”

“When we were over the water, under the cables, we stopped and looked back. Uptown the city was brighter than ever, although as you looked north you saw the darkened projects against the light. They looked two-dimensional, like cardboard cutouts in a stagecraft foreground. Lower Manhattan was black behind us, its densities intuitive. The fireworks celebrating the completion of the bridge exploded above us in 1883, spidering out across the page. The moon is high in the sky and you can see its light on the water. I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America:”

If 2017 represented an intentional shift away from my niche authorial voice (white, neurotic, male), let American Pastoral (5/5) stand as my grand, year-ending bender of a relapse.

This book is incredible, and the plot is irrelevant — it’s no wonder the Ewan McGregor film adaptation was panned. On the page, it is the story of a Newark glove manufacturer (Seymour “Swede” Levov) grappling with the 60’s alongside his politically…let’s say troubled daughter. A heightened look at two different versions of American idealism in the nearly-Watergate era, and an ode to the aspirational power of sports on the side. Yawn. Big deal.

Here’s the thing, though: American Pastoral isn’t about what it’s “about”. It’s about Nathan Zucker (i.e. Roth)’s attempts to piece together a narrative about his old highschool idol the Swede; about the myriad ways we project, and misunderstand, and dramatize in our goal to know each other. It’s about the Rashomon-like way three different people (an author, a bitter brother, and the man himself) will perceive identical events in irreconcilable ways. In that sense, it’s impossible to mentally untangle this book from one of my favorite David Foster Wallace stories, Good Old Neon. Volumes could be written about the comparison. Zucker, like David, is seeking to understand the why of an icon from the distance of hindsight. Why did everything go wrong in Swede’s life, with his cheery, all American, ball-playing exterior? What could it have been like inside his skull-shaped kingdom; what if, just for a moment, we could peer through the keyhole of his personality and inner monologue? Was he happy? Was he naive? Was he tormented by the burden of his success, or “wholly unhaunted by voices telling him that there was something deeply wrong with him that wasn’t wrong with anybody else”?

I found this dissection of the craft of writing to be absolutely brilliant, due in large part to its nonlinear structure. Roth begins with Birds’ Eye summary, then delves into memoir, then revises into omniscient narrator; digging deeper and deeper into one man’s psyche til, by the end we’re so lost in the torrent of inner-monologue we can barely move at all.

Perhaps, in bits and pieces, that structure would feel redundant. I recommend doing what I did: devour it whole.

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again.”

“Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn’t surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try turning yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even than your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness—not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can’t touch it.”

The Road (4.5/5) is, against all odds, my first introduction to Cormac McCarthy; and may have been the perfect way to close my year in literature.

So much has been written about McCarthy’s powers, and The Road in particular, that it feels redundant to explain. He is, quite frankly, the antithesis of my literary icons: where many are dense, he is sparse; where many are overwhelmingly emotional, he is cryptic; where many would weave a tapestry of language and syntax, he is concise, unshowy, and seems to know no punctuation mark but the comma. Even apostrophes are iffy. He’s the perfect digestif after a hearty meal, a bracing shot of something that cleanses the palate and clears out the sinuses for good measure.

If you’re one of the few people who doesn’t know the premise of The Road, I won’t spoil it. I’ll only say this: no one, absolutely no one else, could have told this story the way he told it. The unwaivering vision, the confidence of tone, the steady authorial hand that says “show, don’t tell, and show as little as you need.” To be this much of something, you need to risk being nothing. McCarthy knows exactly what he’s doing.

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

If 2017 and Trump have taught us anything, it’s that good journalism—free from censorship and cronyism—is essential. But 2018 and Michael Wolff necessitate a few more modifiers. Good journalism is also patient. It’s sturdy. It’s unshowy, to the ire of shareholders everywhere. It doesn’t rely on knee-jerk reactions, doesn’t throw red meat to a hungry public without thoughtful preparation. It wields its power responsibly. It edifies. It delves into the nitty gritty semantics behind the obvious spectacle. It would rather say nothing than say something untrue. It’s the opposite of our president. It’s thoughtfully, wonderfully, anachronistically boring.

In the best films on the subject (All The President’s Men, Spotlight (full review) ), there’s a tonal symmetry at play: they extol the virtues of deliberation, craftsmanship, and humility by being themselves deliberate, intricate, and unshowy. They build suspense in the way Woodward and Bernstein might build a story: a two-steps-forward-one-step-back, nose-to-the-grindstone plodding which refuses to overstate its case. They understand that truth speaks louder than melodrama; that Marty Baron calmly urging “don’t publish, wait” instills more urgency than any sprint to the printers.

So while The Post may be 2017’s love letter to good journalism, I’m not entirely sure it knows what it means. With Bridge of Spies (full review) I criticized Spielberg for effectively missing the point; for trying to squeeze a thought-provoking mood piece into a sweeping, moralistic hero’s journey. Substituting only a handful of words, the exact same review could have been written about The Post—and, much like the above films’ virtues, there’s a certain tonal symmetry to its flaws. In the telling, Spielberg continues to spell subtle in all caps: enormous Oscar-y performances, John Williams’ grand orchestral swell, Meryl Streep gliding down the steps of the Supreme Court while a wall of admiring women beam. Characters shout “THIS IS RELEVANT TO 2017” to no one in particular, holding our hands through even the tiniest of inferences (see: the Watergate epilogue.) And while the story he tells has plenty to recommend it (the importance of taking risks, the boldness of Katharine Graham in the face of patriarchal condescension, the last death rattle of smoke-filled, boys’ club journalism), it’s hardly a model of journalistic restraint. Slow, responsible sourcing is traded for a frantic ticking clock; Shreiber’s “don’t publish, wait” replaced with Hanks’ “the American People lose unless you publish tonight”; the vast majority of messy implications simply swept under the rug. Didn’t this ticking clock have at least as much to do with scooping the competition as it did with Saving America? Doesn’t the leaker also have his own analogs in 2018, ones society didn’t unanimously support? It’s a story worthy of nuance; of an actual, challenging point of view.

Despite its lack of nuance, I liked The Post just fine. Spielberg, for all his flaws, knows how to craft dazzling dramatic arcs and characters an audience wants to cheer for. He knows how to make a movie feel like an actual movie, like an event worth showing up for. But beyond the dazzle and the talented cast, it’s the scenes of people just doing their jobs—combing through a floor full of scattered pages, putting thoughts to words to metal to ink to paper to hands to trucks to readers across the country—where the film really shines. I wish there had been more of those moments, and less of a moralistic point loudly (but unconvincingly) made. Chris, Carson and I review it in this week’s episode.

Here’s a paradox for you: critics often shout most effusively about films which are tonally incompatible with shouting. The sturdy biopic anchored by a key, nuanced performance; the unassuming indie which plucks heartstrings but refuses to tug. They resonate because they’re appropriately small, showing quiet restraint on the whole so their subtle excesses feel, by comparison, enormous. In a cinematic landscape filled with over-the-top everything, it’s refreshing to stumble into something so assuredly gentle; it makes you want to shout “LOOK AT THIS RARE GEM” from the rooftops. But what about the people who heed your advice? Relocated to the landscape of Things Shouted From Rooftops, subtlety suddenly feels a bit anticlimactic. “Pretty great” gets demoted to “no big deal” gets demoted to “overrated” gets demoted to Shakespeare In Love. It’s hard to write about smallness in all caps.

I deliberately drowned out the awards buzz for Call Me By Your Name, and I hope you do the same. Because this is precisely the sort of movie—slow, personal, insistently specific—that would be crushed under all that hype, and things this delicate are worth protecting. Go in fresh and you’ll discover a lovely little coming of age flick: tenderly acted, gorgeously shot, passionate, and flawed. It’s 1983 and Elio is a precocious seventeen-year-old who lives in Italy with his hyper-literate parents. He’s exactly the sort of person the well-traveled, adolescent son of an archaeology professor would be, a contradictory jumble of know-it-all cool and eye-averting timidity. He moves through the world as if dancing to a New Wave Baby Driver soundtrack, “gliding” with all the clunkiness of someone who desperately wants to look weightless. He’s well read, visibly. He’s bored, loudly. He somehow manages to make playing piano ironic. He knows just about everything—except, of course, for the things that matter. What matters in this case is Oliver, a graduate student staying in his family’s house. Oliver isn’t self-consciously anything, is cool as stone. In fact, he’s effectively a living, breathing statue: a silent symbol of Platonic personhood, studied more intently by Elio than any sculpture his dad might unearth. He looks at Oliver and it’s not quite clear whether he wants to be rescued by him or to touch him or to become him. Maybe his particular brand of wanting is intransitive, a state of being like “seventeen” or “aching” or “unanchored”. Seeing Oliver makes him want.

“Coming of age” might be a misleading label for this: Elio doesn’t learn about personal responsibility, or coping with an overprotective mother, or carving out his future independence a la Lady Bird. What he comes into is more specific than age. It’s presence, physicality, touch. Like 2015’s Carol, Call Me By Your Name is less concerned with romance than with the way romance shapes a young person’s sense of self. What it catalyzes in their relationship to the world, to the body and its wants. So it’s appropriate that everything in this film screams “touch me”: the lush greenblueyellows of Northern Italy, the haunting Sufjan Stevens score, the countless scenes of swimming and eating shot on grainy 35mm. Texture is everything here, and for the first half Luca Guadagnino is mostly content to let us soak in it (often with aimless indulgence, which is sure to aggravate some viewers.) But eventually all that wanting reaches a tipping point, climbing to a third act that’s just about as powerful as anything I’ve seen all year. Michael Stuhlbarg will rightly make you cry, but Timothée Chalamet’s performance (showing some truly incredible emotional range) did much more than that for me. It lodged inside, somewhere, and it’s still doing its work.

I don’t think this is the best film of the year. I also don’t think it ever set out to be anything so lofty; it knows exactly what story it wants to tell, and it narrows in on that to the exclusion of all else. So much so, that even my gnawing reservations (particularly the one about age gaps) felt weirdly irrelevant while I watched. I can’t promise you’ll feel the same, and would fault no one for having a negative reaction to this. But for me, for this particular story, everything meshed beautifully. You can listen to Chris and my loud, windy, 75-mile-per-hour 2am review in a bonus episode of The Spoiler Warning.

Trying to critique a massive movie franchise is a bit like trying to write a Yelp review for a skyscraper, or a 747 flight. I might nitpick the shape of the windows on the top dozen floors, or the treble squeal of the pilot’s intercom; but at the end of the day, the hell do I know? The sheer magnitude of the endeavor — the rippling impact of every minor decision, the endless bureaucratic constraints, not to mention the absurd price of failure — is beyond me. Maybe half the plane can’t hear unless the intercom is deafening; maybe impassioned pilot-wannabes would riot in the streets without the exposition on wind speeds. Maybe if the panes were cut two inches wider, or the Finn subplot 10 minutes short, an entire floor would go bankrupt from crumbling action figure sales. I should be glad it bore that weight without creaking. I should be grateful when nothing crashes and burns.

So how should I talk about Star Wars: The Last Jedi; i.e. the massivest, franchise-est thing someone could make? Well, for starters, it doesn’t come close to crashing or burning. In fact, to Rian Johnson’s endless credit, it makes all that load-bearing look mostly easy! Juggling fan-servicing shoutouts, evolving mythologies, multiple spectacular set pieces, and way too many “leading-ish” roles for a 2.5 hour movie, he does the series justice without doing harm to any of its (many) constituents. There are aspects of this film which easily best any entry in the Star Wars saga — the tactile visuals of salt and snow, the samurai slickness of the imperial throne room, the emotional heft of the primary (Rey) subplot. Johnson took on a near-impossible task, and he did right by it. As a big fan of Brick and Looper, I can’t help but feel proud.

But there’s a reason I’m tiring of Enormous Franchise Flicks in general: you can always see the committee peering through the screen. Overstuffed B-plots that exist solely to prop up future films and sell plush toys. Contractually-obligated icons who Ham[ill] it up for nostalgia but would never survive a blind audition. And, maybe most frustratingly in the case of The Last Jedi, a script that just feels overwritten — themes which echo a bit too self-consciously, protagonists with dramatic arcs so tidy you could trace them with a Joseph-Campbell-stamped compass. None of this is bad, or distracting, or even particularly disappointing, of course. It comes with the risk-averse territory: if you wanted nosedives and backflips, you shouldn’t have flown commercial. I just wish, somehow, we could find a way to have both. I wish someone could keep this thing sturdy without it feeling so safe.

Chris, Carson, and I discuss this at length in a half-spoiler-free, half-spoilery episode of the podcast:

They might need to invent a new word for what Guillermo del Toro does. His films are dark, provocative fables; mature themes coated in a childlike sheen. All the starry-eyed unsubtlety of a saccharine Disney flick cut with something which isn’t bitter so much as menacing and strange. Black roses blooming in a graveyard; a drop of blood in a sugarcube.

Whatever the word is, The Shape Of Water might be the clearest argument for it. An early-60’s love story between a nonverbal cleaning woman and a monstrous fish creature, del Toro’s latest lends itself to plenty of dissonant comparisons (tons of Edward Scissorhands-era Burton, some Beauty and the Beast, a whole lot of Amélie, a dash of Hugo or Hail Cesar or even La La Land). In his hands, though, it’s a perfect mix of wild romanticism, gore, shock, sadness. The filmmaking is visually gorgeous: lush blues and greens, tactile, glistening, a camera that swoops and pirouettes between scenes like a synchronized swimmer. It’s brimming with character actors doing unabashedly over-the-top work. Sally Hawkins’ emotive Elisa is the clear standout, but so is Richard Jenkins’ lonely artist Giles, Michael Stuhlbarg’s conflicted scientist Hoffstetler, Octavia Spencer’s no-nonsense Zelda. Michael Shannon is…well, I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, exactly, but I know that it’s terrifying. After all, romance and terror are two sides of the same coin in del Toro’s universe. Sex and violence are treated with the same fairytale frankness as raindrops on the window or jiggling jello pies: shimmeringly physical, dense, technicolored, wet. That same childlike wonder which renders monsters as beautiful, renders hatred as bottomless, unmotivated, raw. A gay man’s advances are cruelly rebuked; a black couple are refused service at a counter; Shannon’s Strickland wields his power like a cattle prod, over any one or thing “God” saw to put beneath him. None of this is remotely subtle. But there’s something powerful about that simplicity, about casual miracles and cruelties existing in the same, unblinking frame. How do we respond to new, uncomfortable textures? Blackened fingers, slimy flippers, a bubbling bathtub, an outstretched palm. Do we close our eyes, shoo them; ban them from the light of our soundstages, fables, and civilized dining establishments? Or do we reach out, unfurling, and plunge?

Chris, the ghost of Carson future, and I review it on this week’s episode: