It’s tough to want to give an honest recounting of where I found excitement at the theater this year. I feel like this year more than in most years past I’ve slipped into a sort of contrarian opinion. I’m not going to claim a film that is universally derided is good, but I’m definitely going to get side-eye about a few of my choices. Yet, these are my choices.
Out of the dozens of films I saw this year, these ten are most representative of where I found deep comfort, elegant sadness, and unbridled joy with strangers in the dark. They reflect some personal and professional upheavals as well as a reminder to keep working on myself and the things I want to change.
A single film isn’t supposed to be everything for everyone no matter what the Hollywood money managers and marketing teams want you to believe. A single film will always sing differently from one heart to another. What affects me deeply is personal to me. I can understand logically the arguments one may make against a film’s merit, but you can’t argue with how it made me feel. These ten films made me feel, want, yearn, and crave the most.
10. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
I don’t know much about Bruce Springsteen’s life. I don’t know much of his music more than the hits I’ve heard in passing. What I do know about is feeling that creative drive to try and understand why you act and hurt the way you do. The scene that left me in tatters, wasn’t the truly beautiful scene between Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) and Jon (Jeremy Strong), but it was the scene where Bruce was unable to tell Faye (Odessa Young) what he was feeling. He speeds off in his car and screams into the void. I saw a lot of who I was and a lot of who I still am in this film and it made me feel like I could bring myself out of the dark some day. Maybe I won’t always walk the streets alone.
9. Superman
I love comic books. I love the color, the dynamism, and the storytelling. I’ve never been a Superman reader or that much enamored with the DC pantheon, but what this film did for me was to create a superhero film that wasn’t embarrassed to be a superhero film. It’s vibrant, hilarious, hopeful, joyous, and emotional in ways I would never have suspected. This film isn’t just a superhero film that will connect with other superhero films, but a film that embraces the audacious, complicated, and complex storytelling of the decades of comics that came before it.
8. It Was Just an Accident
From its first frame to its last, this film gripped me. I love a story that grapples with complex topics and the ethical questions raised within this film are some of the most complex any human could face. The way the story is structured leaves us guessing with every step the characters take. Not only that, but in spite of its serious subject, the film is often outright funny. It’s an incredible journey and one that demands to be seen and thought about.
7. Splitsville
Relationships are complicated. This film shows how ridiculously complicated they can get when the idea of an open marriage is broached, but not fully understood by both parties. It’s hilarious in so many of the relationship foibles and it takes us on a journey that doesn’t come out the way you expect. It has two superlatives that I dare you to top with any other movie this year. It has the most outrageously funny scene as Carey (Kyle Marvin) attempts to hold onto the half dozen plastic baggies of goldfish won at the carnival while riding a twisting and turning roller coaster and it has the best fight sequence with Carey and Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) going at it. The curveballs thrown during the fight are as glorious as the fight itself.
6. The Mastermind
This film is a gorgeous slow burn. It’s perfectly cast with actors that never outshine each other, but enhance each other’s performances. The strangeness and beauty of it is in the chaos that the heist causes. In any other film these setbacks would have been the whole of the plot, but here they’re another roadblock to the success J.B. (Josh O’Connor) has always envisioned for himself. It’s not typical or expected. This is Kelly Reichardt at her most meticulous. The details of the opening scene are nearly perfect and the ending is the punchline on a joke you didn’t expect in the telling of the story.
5. Familiar Touch
You don’t think about how much a sense of touch can affect a person until you see it like this. This film is not like other films where the protagonist is struggling with memory loss. It isn’t designed to give you tears because the circumstances are tragic. It’s designed to show you how one sense informs the others and that memory isn’t linear. It shows that a simple gesture is a tremendous gift. The cast is impeccable and I will never get that scene of Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) in the pool out of my mind. The peace and the calm of that scene are beautiful.
4. Boys Go to Jupiter
It often takes a bizarre, whimsical film to reflect a deeper truth about yourself and your place in the capitalistic pecking order of the world. This is a film full of dreamers, most of whom are dreaming about a future that is never going to happen, but some of whom dream that impossible dream where contentment and real happiness are well within reach. The songs seep into my soul and the animation beautifully fills the screen with the odd shapes and movements only animation can create.
3. Materialists
Celine Song has a way of making films that change shape and evolve into a perfect alchemy of the things left unsaid and the things that need to be said. She understands the modern practicalities of life in your thirties better than many other filmmakers have. The scene between Lucy (Dakota Johnson) and John (Chris Evans) where they dance at the wedding destroys me. There’s a heft to their silence, to the strained nature of their past and the odd circumstances of their present that will affect their future. Much of this film is steeped in these very heavy moments that are terrifically played and shown.
2. Black Bag
A spy thriller is only as good as its cast and this is one of the most capable and complementary casts ever assembled. The film is the most high stakes game of Clue that’s ever been played. The way that Steven Soderbergh shoots it is like a kitchen sink drama of the black ops world. The editing is so good that a beat is never missed even as your heart beats out of your chest. The scenes with each suspect attached to the lie detector test are alternately funny, thrilling, and very steamy with the intimacies it uncovers. I could watch a whole movie of Clarissa (Marisa Abela) trying and failing to seduce George (Michael Fassbender), who then goes home and works out his sexual frustrations with his wife, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett).
1. Sentimental Value
This is a film of subtlety, of listening to everything in between the words the characters say. It’s a film about two people, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), who don’t fully understand themselves and can’t communicate with each other, but somehow see each other better than anyone else. There are so many funny and beautiful moments amid the clashing of personalities. Each actor gets their showcase and each actor compliments the other three in the main ensemble. A line that will forever stick with me from this film is, “Praying isn’t really talking to God, it’s acknowledging the despair.” This film isn’t about despair, but acknowledging that we can’t ever get through it alone.
