This was a phenomenal year for movies, but, if I may repeat myself, you needed to know where to look. Do not bother to sift through the sequels and retreads that dominated the box office, and, yes, I’m counting that incoherent eyesore “Wicked.” Look to the movies with the unusual premises and adventurous actors that maybe you haven’t heard of yet. You have no excuses. Movieland on Arthur Ashe Blvd., for instance, played almost every movie on this list for at least a week. And good for Movieland, which provides an invaluable service to the Richmond area. We shouldn’t take that theater for granted [Editor’s note: It was recently reported by TV Jerry’s Jerry Williams that Movieland Bowtie would be undergoing a major renovation over the next six months including two large auditoriums with 50-foot wide screens, luxury recliners, arcade and duckpin bowling.]
Looking for a movie is no different than scouring about for a restaurant: if you want the special experience, you’re going to have to poke around a bit, and sometimes your risks will not pay off. That’s life, and sometimes even when a meal or movie sucks it gets your sensors firing anyway for the high-wire that it’s asking you to walk with it. All mass media wants to do is sell you numbing McBurgers and fries, which, hey, sometimes that’s what you want. Sometimes, that’s what I want. But is that all you want? If so, that is your right. Just don’t come up to me at a party this holiday season and tell me there are no good movies being made anymore.
This year, I gravitated towards two types of movies: traditional cinema, with classically shaped stories made by masters of the field (see #2 and #5, for instance), and volcanic and experimental and inspiring cinema that suggests how this art form will live and adapt to wild and proliferating new forms of media (#1 and #11). And, without any further throat clearing, since I know you’re skipping this part anyway …
25. “Terrestrial Verses” (Ali Asgari, Alireza Khatami)
A 77-minute series of conversations between Iranian citizens and representatives of various bureaucratic institutions is shaped by the filmmakers into a terrifying examination of the minute ways an authoritarian regime invades the lives of its citizens.
24. “His Three Daughters” (Azazel Jacobs)
Three daughters and three superb performances by Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon, and Elisabeth Olsen are the centerpiece of this robust character study. Azazel Jacobs fashions a theatrical one-set chamber piece into a moving memory play.
23. “Challengers” (Luca Guadagnino)
At some point it became uncool to like “Challengers,” but this is still a sharp and timely romantic dramedy about how our modern cultural obsession with branding can bleed into everything, from the tennis courts to the boardroom to the bedroom. Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor are sensational.
22. “The Bikeriders” (Jeff Nichols)
Gifted American director Jeff Nichols returns from a long hiatus with this story of broken men who play at being in a biker gang until it grows into a real organization that swallows them alive. Nichols indulges in some distracting “Goodfellas” cosplay, but his period atmosphere shames that of more hyped movies, and Tom Hardy and Austin Butler give two of their best performances yet.
21. “Didi” (Sean Wang)
This very pleasant surprise, about a Taiwanese American boy’s experiences during the summer before he enters high school in 2008, is the nerviest and most moving teenager movie that I’ve seen in years. Sean Wang is one to watch, and, yes, we’re now old enough for period movies set in 2008.
20. “Red Rooms” (Pascal Plante)
A fashion model is also an accomplished hacker and a groupie for a man who’s accused of torturing and murdering children. That’s quite a sentence to digest, isn’t it? Pascal Plante’s scalding moral thriller dramatizes a woman’s battle for her own soul, springing the most hypnotically icy tracking shots in this year’s cinema.
19. “Oh, Canada” (Paul Schrader)
Reuniting with “American Gigolo” star Richard Gere for an adaptation of deceased friend Russell Banks’ novel “Foregone,” Paul Schrader fashions his most vulnerable movie since his last Banks adaptation, “Affliction.” As a filmmaker dying of cancer, Richard Gere gives one of the sharpest, leanest, and most poignant performances of his career. This one isn’t quite out yet, it expands in theaters throughout December.
18. “A Different Man” (Aaron Schimberg)
This meta-farce about identity politics, self-loathing, and body image suggests a Charlie Kaufman movie that’s been pruned of its author’s narcissism. Just when you think you’ve got this movie figured out, Aaron Schimberg twists it into new and unmooring directions. Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson are a lacerating buddy duo.
17. “Hit Man” (Richard Linklater)
Glen Powell and Adria Arjona’s sexy star power and Richard Linklater’s discursive comedy are the candy shells of “Hit Man,” which dissolve to reveal a story of fluid personalities and moral borders that are easily broached. “Hit Man” is a cold-blooded thriller in a lark’s clothing, and for that it was misunderstood.
16. “The Devil’s Bath” (Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz)
In a forest village in 18th century Austria, a recently married woman succumbs to depression, which her community is woefully unequipped to handle. Researched from true-life events, “The Devil’s Bath” is a bitter brew that earns its nastiness, as the shock tactics are part of a nuanced concern with how social norms can fail individuals.
15. “Pictures of Ghosts” (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s reminiscences about growing up in Recife among its classic and now vanishing movie palaces doubles as a vaster exploration of childhood and cultural and political change, including the insidious effect of corporate gentrification. Cinephiles may come to feel as if Filho is telling their story as well.
14. “Ghostlight” (Kelly O’Sullivan, Alex Thompson)
This rough-and-ready study of a man who is led back to his family through theater is one of the rare honest movies about grief. Real-life father and daughter Keith Kupferer and Katherine Mallen Kupferer are poignant and raw, and a final magical-realist flourish is truly transcendent.
13. “Gasoline Rainbow” (Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross)
The Ross brothers are mastering a blend of documentary and fictional film that offers the best of both worlds: the realism of nonfiction and the poetry and catharsis of good fiction. Here, the Rosses apply their magic to the teenage road trip, and come up with one of the most convincing and moving youth films since “Dazed and Confused.”
12. “The Beast” (Bertrand Bonello)
This adaptation of a Henry James story is also an L.A. thriller in the key of David Lynch as well as a future shock parable of artificial intelligence inheriting society. The commonalities linking the stories is the theme of the human death drive and the longing left in its wake, as well as a series of astonishing nesting performances by Léa Seydoux.
11. “I Saw the TV Glow” (Jane Shoenbrun)
Jane Shoenbrun macabre coming-of-age tone piece is a searing reinterpretation of the teenage horror movie. It’s less a work of genre than a full-blooded bloom of surrealism, touching on the trans experience as well as the alienation that grips many of us who feel that we are squandering our lives, hiding from our dreams.
10. “Smile 2” (Parker Finn)
With muscular set pieces, a wonderful lead performance by Naomi Scott, and a ferocious atmosphere, “Smile 2” represents an enormous leap forward from its predecessor. It’s a potent showbiz melodrama in the vein of “Black Swan” or “Neon Demon,” with a finale for the ages. Parker Finn is another one to watch.
9. “In Our Day” (Hong Sang-soo)
Another list, which is to say another Hong Sang-soo movie about artists and their acolytes drinking and eating their way towards a quiet reckoning. Wry, funny, and well-acted, with a casual, hard-earned humanity that is among Hong’s hallmarks.
8. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” (Tyler Taormina)
Tyler Taormina’s film suggests “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” as set inside of a snow globe and directed by the French master of temporal experiments, Alain Resnais. Don’t worry, it is fun, a new Christmas classic with memorable characters that is also a beautiful and nostalgic expression of time bending, folding, and eluding us.
7. “Evil Does Not Exist” (Hamaguchi Ryûsuke)
Hamaguchi communicates the ecological violation of a village by carving his narrative into hard and beautifully bleak shards, thusly violating conventional expectations of resolution. “Evil Does Not Exist” is a trance, a requiem, and maybe a sign of a shift in Hamaguchi’s typically more expansive aesthetic. This film has stayed in my system for over a year. I’ve seen it three times and am eager to return again.
6. “Chime” (Kurosawa Kiyoshi)
This 45-minute narrative about a sound that drives folks to murder is the horror film of the year, a return to form for Kurosawa that is so quiet and tactile that it’s irrational. It feels like the visualization of a social anxiety that we didn’t even know we had, concerning a contagious disassociation that evokes the supernatural element of Kurosawa’s “Pulse” and the mass media of real life.
5. “Juror # 2” (Clint Eastwood)
Come for a classically sculpted Clint Eastwood procedural, stay for a disturbing and morally thorny examination of the balance between personal and social responsibility. The result is a suspense film that is, among other things, actually suspenseful. And don’t take the performances of Toni Collette and Nicholas Hoult, together again 20 years after playing mother and son in “About a Boy,” for granted. [Coming to HBO Max on Dec. 20]
4. “Between the Temples” (Nathan Silver)
This shaggy comedy of longing and grief and manners, following the May-December quasi-romance that results from a woman looking to a former student for counsel on her long-delayed bat mitzvah, is among the most exuberant and purely enjoyable movies of the year. Jason Schwartzman is wonderful, but God bless Nathan Silver for giving Carol Kane the role of her unique career.
3. “Last Summer” (Catherine Breillat)
This film that invites you to empathize with a woman who uses her legal resources to evade the consequences of her affair with her teenage stepson is authentically daring. It’s daring because the French master Catherine Breillat doesn’t bat an eye, doesn’t feign outrage. She looks human nature head on and doesn’t flinch. The upcoming Nicole Kidman erotic thriller “Babygirl” is juvenilia next to “Last Summer,” and Léa Drucker’s performance as the protagonist is among the greatest of the year.
2. “Hard Truths” (Mike Leigh)
Mike Leigh returns to form with another story of working-class Brits in crisis, with “Secrets & Lies” alum Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a woman whose bitterness is eating her alive. All she can see is disappointment and misery, and Leigh looks into this woman’s hell without wavering. The film is revelatory and deeply, shockingly funny. There will be more on this one in January when everyone can see it.
1. “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (Radu Jude)
Overworked and turned on by her frenetic purgatory, Angelica (Ilinca Manolache) hops around Bucharest in and out of the realms of corporate sharks and the working-class people they exploit. Jude stages this adventure as a mutating fantasia of film references, archive footage, online videos, and global atrocities. This hilarious, scalding, truly anti-corporate movie suggests how cinema can adapt to contemporary life. Cut this film up into bits and pieces on TikTok or YouTube and perhaps viewers will be able to discern the anger and poetry beneath the meme.
