The 50 Best Films of 2021

A staggering number of visceral, ambitious, and glorious movies were released in 2021, covering a vast spectrum of tones, sizes, and intentions. And yet one always encounters people who continue to say that “cinema is dead.” Ask for elaboration and they often say that there’s nothing to see in the theaters, which isn’t, paradoxically, the same as saying that movies are well beyond their expiration date.

Instead, movies that people tend to remember and take seriously have mostly scurried to streaming outlets, where they’ve proliferated and mutated in the abundance of choice. For one, the thing we used to call a “documentary” has taken on particularly radical contours, and films like Robert Greene’s Procession, a formally and socially audacious documentary-slash-personal confessional, have come as close as modern cinema has to evoking a stream of consciousness. It’s also playing on Netflix, available to every subscriber, and could easily be mistaken by the uninitiated for the kind of routine true-crime shows in which the outlet specializes.

Such realizations lead us back to a familiar refrain: that there are lots of great movies without the theater experience to lend them a patina of exceptionalism. And this complication has been intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic and the panic that it’s understandably inspired in Hollywood, which is more determined than ever to rely on spectacle for the global bucks. The easiest short-term solution is to accept that this theatrical patina—save for the arthouses in the larger cities and the few formally adventurous filmmakers, such as Wes Anderson, who can get his work booked in big theaters—is an outdated notion and reacclimate to reality.

For people who aren’t fortunate enough to live near a venue playing, say, Janicza Bravo’s Zola or Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Drive My Car, theaters are bloated stadiums playing mega-act dinosaurs, and should be accorded appropriate respect or lack thereof, while the best films are usually hidden somewhere on a streamer’s menu between Hallmark Christmas movies and various seasons of Everyone Loves Raymond.

In other words, good movies require the effort of personal vigilance, and the films below merit the expansion of purview. In troubled times, these daring, highly disparate productions show that a cherished medium isn’t only not dying but may, in fact, just be beginning to get its sea legs. Cinema could be evolving into a form that’s more personal and eccentric than ever, in accordance with the newfound intimacy that arrives from learning that theaters can be lovely but are also essentially beside the point. Chuck Bowen

Click here for our contributors’ individual ballots.

Editor’s Note: Hong Sang-soo’s In Front of Your Face, which isn’t scheduled for release until 2022, has been removed from our list due to eligibility criteria. See you next year, Hong.

50. Come True (Anthony Scott Burns)

Cinemagoers have remarked on the dreamlike quality of film since the medium’s inception, yet commercial films about dreams that manage to capture something of their ambience remain few and far between. Dreams, after all, tend to repulse the coherence that’s the default mode of narrative cinema. Come True is among those few, but in contrast to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, which revels in the anarchic freedom of lucid dreaming, Anthony Scott Burns’s film specializes in the sense of powerlessness that makes nightmares so terrifying, stressing the horror side of horror sci-fi. Burns trades jump scares for slow POV tracking shots, their inexorable drifting movement plunging us into shadows where Jungian archetypes hang upside down and the silhouette awaits with glowing eyes. This device reproduces the feebleness experienced by the angst-ridden Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) during sleep paralysis, that state in which dreamers are, say, confronted by an incubus, and attempt to scream or jerk awake but find their muscles unresponsive. Rather than subjecting dreams to the logic of narrative cinema, which would neutralize their potential to both fascinate and terrorize, Burns allows his subject matter to suggest all manner of formal deviations from genre expectations. William Repass

49. Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Lili Horvát)

Throughout Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, writer-director Lili Horvát makes room for the slow temporalities of subjective experience writ large, and feminine subjective experience in particular. This is a film that’s less about what a character wants and more about how she feels—one shaped and re-shaped by Márta’s (Natasa Stork) psychic particularities. It delights in wallowing in ambiguity, contradiction, and doubt, even when our protagonist is in therapy giving voice to her uncertainties. Horvát’s most unequivocal commitment to the cinematic contributions that a feminine gaze may yield lies in the way the madness inherent to remembering and loving from a feminine position don’t amount to a pathologizable character state. As a neurosurgeon, it’s Márta who gets to decide what counts as pathological. Even when she’s in the position of patient during her therapy sessions, she feels compelled to be the author of her diagnosis. Unrequited love occupies Márta, even consumes her, but it never disables her at any point. Diego Semerene

48. Pig (Michael Sarnoski)

Michael Sarnoski’s Pig is about a nearly homeless man traveling to Portland from the woods of Washington state to find his stolen truffle pig, a setup that’s practically an invitation for Nicolas Cage to indulge in his signature brand of gonzo theatrics. But this is a revenge film that’s ultimately about the futility of vengeance to ease the baggage of the soul. The ostensible villain here is Darius (Adam Arkin), who picked a fight with Cage’s Rob out of heartache and bitterness. Rob and Darius are understood to be reflections of one another—people who, gripped by loss, can no longer seem to fully function. Rob has his forest, while Darius has his chic estate, with the Darius’s son, Amir (Alex Wolff), looking for a place to fit in. Pig’s devotion to its alienated protagonist is cumulatively moving, and the film almost functions as a metaphor for Cage’s own career: He was once the toast of Hollywood, with an Oscar and several Jerry Bruckheimer blockbusters under his belt, who left for the wilderness of eccentric low-budget cinema. This wilderness has allowed Cage to purify his art, honoring his own instincts, as the woods have presumably simplified and enriched Rob’s cooking. Bowen

47. Limbo (Ben Sharrock)

Ben Sharrock’s deadpan, life-affirming Limbo follows four asylum seekers who are staying on a fictional Scottish island, where they’re taking cultural awareness classes that teach them how to adjust to English-speaking Western culture. At the center of the film is Omar (Amir El-Masry), a Syrian refugee whose struggle to reconcile his past with his future, as well as his survivor’s guilt, is detailed in alternately wry and haunting bits of narrative business. There’s a thoughtfulness to Sharrock’s framing, from the pans to the frames within frames, that sets the film apart from so many others obviously indebted to the work of Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson. You never quite shake off the artificiality of the presentation, but that encumbrance feels attuned to the characters’ sense of displacement. There’s nothing much to the story, a simple tale of reckoning and atonement in a strange land, but it’s elevated by the intimacy of Sharrock’s blocking, the room he makes for kindness, and humor that feels like sweet dollops of relief from so much melancholy. Ed Gonzalez

46. Lost Course (Jill Li)

Jill Li’s Lost Course documents a wave of protests in the Chinese fishing village of Wukan in Guangdong Province that resulted in a failed democratic experiment. In the film’s first part, “Protests,” the camera plunges into the thick of the action as Wukan’s villagers, reacting to the sale of communal land by corrupt government officials, engage in mass demonstrations and petitioning, backed by a general strike. Eventually, the protests force the government to grant the villagers’ demands for a free election, and the movement’s leaders are swept into positions of modest power on the village committee. Part two, “After Protests,” opens one year after the election. Bogged down in bureaucratic rigmarole, the new village committee has succeeded in restoring none of Wukan’s land. The film takes its time, not only to explore Wukan’s struggle as a process, in microcosm, of Chinese politics, but to develop a character study of those involved. Even as their passion and naïveté sour, and even as they abandon the fight, denounce one another, or cling blindly to past successes as their political movement stagnates, Li’s camera remains steadfastly sympathetic. Repass

45. Ema (Pablo Larraín)

Ema marks a fascinating inversion of Pablo Larraín’s prior Jackie, which concerned the pressures of having to filter one’s all-too-real grief through performative displays of propriety. Natalie Portman’s Jackie Kennedy, shell-shocked after being robbed of her husband, lets the demands of office, even one as ceremonial and condescending as that of the first lady, dictate her behavior even in private. But Ema’s focus is on how mourning is expunged through chaos of words and flailing limbs, a movement that embodies a boundless sense of sexual wanderlust. As much as Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo) and Gastón (Gael García Bernal) bicker, one is left to wonder just how much worse things would be for them if they didn’t act out against each other. Perhaps their guilt would fester and their mutual recrimination would boil over and erupt like a grease fire. It would be all too easy for Ema to pass judgment on them, whether over their reflexive rejection of parenthood in the face of its hardships, their combative relationship, or their sexual promiscuity, but Larraín is too interested in the ambiguity of the characters’ physical expressions of their inner selves to condemn anyone. Jake Cole

44. A Shape of Things to Come (Lisa Malloy and J.P. Sniadecki)

Much of A Shape of Things to Come is an engaging immersion into the day-to-day life of a man, Sundog, who lives alongside various animals in a makeshift ranch-slash-ecosystem in the Sonoran Desert near the Mexican border. The film offers a reminder of how fascinating various processes—in this case ranging from Sundog’s hunting and butchering of animals to his harvesting of toad venom in the middle of the night—can be when artists have the confidence to observe their subjects without having them fit a prescribed narrative. And this willingness to put aside traditional narrative parallels Sundog’s shunning of conventional society. Lisa Malloy and J.P. Sniadecki invite us to read all kinds of meanings into their film’s title. It could allude to Sundog’s blossoming madness, or to the madness of a metal and plastic world we’ve constructed almost out of spite to the natural one we inherited, or both. In this rather disturbing light, you may feel as if Sundog will succumb to the machine of corporate modernity, as his understandable rage may destroy his ability to enjoy the remarkable little sanctuary that he’s managed to carve out in the middle of an unforgiving patch of earth. Bowen

43. Dune (Denis Villeneuve)

Denis Villeneuve’s languorous method of blockbuster filmmaking matches unexpectedly well with Frank Herbert’s famously plotty 1965 science-fiction epic. Villeneuve is an undeniably portentous filmmaker, and his deftly managed adaptation is, like no space opera since Star Wars: The Last Jedi, gratifyingly preoccupied with conveying pivotal plot details through action, color, and scale. Despite Hans Zimmer’s awesomely ominous score and the actors’ broadly stoic performances, Dune giddily tackles the daunting challenge of building out Herbert’s strange and intricate worlds. Complicated gadgets and weaponry are introduced and demonstrated with minimal exposition, while the cerebral powers of the matriarchal Bene Gesserit are illuminated mostly through convulsions of sound. Villeneuve demonstrates a nearly fascistic sense of control throughout, and for once his itch for spectacle matches the scope of the material, which carries willful echoes of America’s doomed, prolonged incursions in the Middle East. It will take another film to determine whether or not Villeneuve can capture the fraught political and emotional breadth of Paul Atreides’s possibly cursed hero’s journey, but few blockbusters of recent vintage have set as grand a stage as this marvel of Dune. Christopher Gray

42. Azor (Andreas Fontana)

Andreas Fontana’s Azor is set in the rarified world of early-1980s Argentina’s elite, among whom certain family names carry a weight equivalent to titles like president or general. Into this world steps a Swiss financier (Fabrizio Rongione) whose status-denoting patronymic, Yvan De Wiel, is representative of a venerable private bank that bears his family’s name. Yvan has been dispatched to Argentina to check in on the firm’s rich and powerful clients after Keys, the company’s previous man in Buenos Aires, has mysteriously disappeared. Throughout the film, we come to understand that Yvan and, by extension, his clients’ well-cultivated air of refinement masks a savage indifference to the brutality being waged against the people of Argentina, and Fontana brilliantly mirrors this “banality of evil” theme in the film’s very form. Set almost exclusively in comfortably furnished hotels, fancy country estates, and well-lacquered private clubs, the film takes place in a world far removed from the sociopolitical tension gripping the country. And yet, while there’s never a moment of overt violence in Azor, a river of blood courses beneath every impeccably composed frame. Keith Watson

41. Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen)

In 2020, David France camouflaged the human subjects of his documentary Welcome to Chechnya by applying an uncanny digital mask over their faces. The effect allowed for the saga of homophobic persecution to be told without making the lives depicted even more susceptible to lethal reprisal. In Flee, Jonas Poher Rasmussen taps into the impressionistic powers of animation for similar reasons as his friend, a gay Afghan refugee, recounts the long series of horrors that he endured in getting from Kabul to Copenhagen. The aesthetics add an oneiric tinge to a form of passing, or crossing, that could only be described as nightmarish. But it also challenges the possibilities of so-called nonfiction filmmaking in fundamental ways. The myth of documentaries as an unvarnished chronicling of a world haunts the genre. Flee exposes documentaries, and stories we tell others and ourselves more generally, as having always already been works of fiction—at least since the days of Robert J. Flaherty. Timely and innovative, Flee humanizes the dehumanized strangers whose knocking we ignore through its elegant style, and a disarming sensibility toward the humorous in the tragic. Semerene

40. Labyrinth of Cinema (Ôbayashi Nobuhiko)

The ambitious and exhausting Labyrinth of Cinema is a three-hour rumination on war and cinema by Ôbayashi Nobuhiko, who’s most famous for the 1977 cult classic House. Imagine an even more maximalist variation of that film’s gonzo aesthetic and you’ve got an idea of Labyrinth of Cinema, in which several teenagers are whisked into a cinema screen and teleported into sequences that represent the Boshin War, the second Sino-Japanese Conflict, and, most agonizingly, the bombing of Hiroshima. Ôbayashi isn’t much interested in literal coherence, especially in the dizzying 90 minutes that open the film. Instead, he fashions a slipstream of formal devices and flourishes—feverish Technicolor hues, cheekily obvious uses of blue screen, kinetic samurai battles—that suggests how war is mythologized and in the process sanitized by cinema. Ôbayashi complicates this mythology by emphasizing for prolonged stretches of time the dread of impending death and repeated loss, particularly as embodied by an innocent young girl who dies again and again throughout the ages. Bowen

39. About Endlessness (Roy Andersson)

About Endlessness bears writer-director Roy Andersson’s unmistakable aesthetic markings, but the setup-punchline formula that the Swedish auteur mastered in his commercials and regularly employed in his features is downplayed here, complicated or bypassed altogether. Many of the discontinuous vignettes that comprise this concise feature—most of which occur in an unnamed Swedish city without clear temporal markers, Andersson’s version of Jacques Tati’s Tativille—have no overriding comic conception to speak of, or the joke is so understated that it elicits little more than a faint chuckle. A young man passes a florist on the street and turns back as she walks into her store. A woman stands in an empty meeting room admiring the cityscape outside the window. A man checks the money stash in his mattress before retiring for the evening. Calling these prosaic moments of life “scenes” feels imprecise, as Andersson is simply staging mundane situations that float free of the need for punctuation marks. In About Endlessness, rather than eliciting surprise and wonder, Andersson is channeling his full stylistic arsenal in search of something far more delicate: a recognition of the sublime, and of a kind of holy present tense, in the prosaic. Carson Lund

38. Passing (Rebecca Hall)

Coursing through every meticulously arranged frame of Rebecca Hall’s feature-length directorial debut, Passing, is a kind of sickened rage and psychological nuance that sets it apart from your average high-minded period film about race. In adapting Nella Larsen’s 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel of the same name, Hall follows the author’s lead by depicting not so much the blatant prejudices of the time’s stifling racial barriers but the punishing wounds often self-inflicted by those who tried to cross those barriers. While hitting a couple moments somewhat on the nose—such as the scene in which Irene says, “We’re all passing for something or other”—Hall’s screenplay mostly avoids over-simplifying the conundrums that its characters find themselves in. Even when Passing takes an inevitably tragic turn, rather than indulging in old clichés about what happened when characters crossed what was then called “the race line,” it leaves room for ambiguity and humanity, precisely the things that the racist rules of 1920s America attempted to eradicate. Chris Barsanti

37. The Two Sights (Joshua Bonnetta)

With The Two Sights, Joshua Bonnetta again contemplates death and the traces it leaves behind, this time in the remote climes of Scotland’s northern archipelago. A waterlogged expanse of misty steppes and vertiginous drops into crystal-blue waters, the Outer Hebrides islands on which the film is set total a population of just over 20,000 people, and Bonnetta keeps them largely out of frame, preferring instead to ruminate on grandiose bisections of land and sky. On its surface, the film presents a smattering of voiceover testimonials from unseen Hebrides residents, who relate stories of strange happenings on the islands, most involving deaths or hauntings. The stories of these lost souls are never visualized, though Bonnetta pairs them with footage that feels roughly analogous, if not like an outright projection of a mental image. As Bonnetta offers these fill-in-the-blank visual inducements, his soundtrack blends field sounds recorded by the director himself with archival audio sourced from the region. With the exceptions of folk-music clippings that are most obviously archived, the distinctions between past and present material become nearly impossible to discern and indeed negligible, as Bonnetta’s subject is, after all, the layering of history atop the current moment. Lund

36. I’m Your Man (Maria Schrader)

Set in a near-future Germany where technology has just realized the dubious dream of romantic relationships between people and robots, Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man puts the Turing test into cine-practice. Maren Eggert stars as the skeptical Alma, an expert in cuneiform who agrees to test out one of these “humanoid robots,” Tom (Dan Stevens), for three weeks in order to secure funding for her passion project, aiming to prove that ancient Sumerian texts, previously thought to be purely administrative, contain the rudiments of poetry. If Alma’s study of cuneiform seems like a throwaway subplot, it ends up having a great deal of thematic implication. Alma may be reading poetry into a text, or humanity into Tom’s algorithmic processes, but if poetry and humanity are not in the eye of the beholder, where else do we look to find them, what other measure do we have? Through Schrader’s camera, our humanity comes into focus as a compromise, shaky at best, between the mathematics of instinct and the absurdities of consciousness, a tragicomic state of unhappiness in perpetual pursuit of a happiness that it can never fully realize. Repass

35. Undine (Christian Petzold)

Though at once lighter and stranger than any of Christian Petzold’s films to date, Undine takes the melodramatic trappings of those films as its explicit subject, questioning the fixed nature of human behavior in a world whose borders are constantly shifting. It’s ironic and puzzling, then, that Undine (Paula Beer) is both human and a water sprite. As this typically compact but deceptively rich film moves along, flashes of dislocation proliferate, undermining its seemingly contemporary setting and leaving us to wonder whether love and logic are compatible. As Petzold ushers his lovers toward doom, the film almost seems to rewind, revisiting most of its settings and turning sites of passion into mausoleums of aching and regret. “Form follows function,” Undine says at one point, and with minor alterations in framing and presentation Petzold fundamentally shifts our sense of these locations. Apparently the first in a trilogy of modern stories based on fables, Undine is a striking change of pace that sacrifices none of the director’s intellect or ambition. Gray

34. Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir)

As it traces the harvesting, sale, and use of khat, a flowering plant with stimulant properties, Jessica Beshir’s Faya Dayi takes us on a journey through the walled city of Harar in eastern Ethiopian and around its outskirts. Khat is primarily used by Sufi Muslims for religious purposes, but its side effects, such as euphoria, have broadened its appeal beyond traditional rites, turning the plant into Ethiopia’s cash crop. Throughout, Beshir’s aesthetics channel the euphoric feelings induced by khat: The high-contrast black-and-white cinematography oscillates between soft and hyper-sharp focus, while her use of slow motion and the film’s languid editing pace turn even the most mundane action into an ethereal, stretched-out moment in time. Beshir’s use of slow motion is especially pronounced in Faya Dayi’s second half as other, non-narcotic forms of escapism are explored, such the local swimming hole that people dive into on scorching days. No less a tradition than the use of khat, these actions deepen the film’s portrait of the things that bind people to their homeland. Cole

33. State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa)

In State Funeral, Sergei Loznitsa cobbles together archival footage from the various grandiose celebrations that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in order to paint a portrait not of the Soviet politician himself, but of the theatrics that prop up totalitarianism. Crowds gather in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Azerbaijan, East Germany, and beyond, all the various places collapsing into a single mourning square. Statesmen disembark from their planes. Uncountable wreaths are laid. Everyday folk carry larger-than-life photographs of their leader. Some stand still in front of shops, as if unmoored by the news, waiting for guidance on how to go on without “the greatest genius in the history of mankind.” There’s enough certainty in this communal trance to transcend physical distance and the finality of matter itself. Even if, or precisely because, it’s that irreversibility that Stalin’s unresponsive body announces. The images that Loznitsa deftly assembles feature astonishingly consistent angles, mise-en-scène, and gestures, and these shots have been restored to such uncanny crispness that it seems impossible to believe them to have been “found” as fragments devoid of an original vision captured by the same light, with the same film stock, and signed by the same cameraperson. Semerene

32. The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane)

For Sharad (Aditya Modak), singing is a heightened state of being. And even as we see him become weathered and pudgy as time, along with a lack of success and, naturally, money, wears him down, he remains determined to teach raag at a local school, while still performing and trying to sell CDs of rare raag musicians on the side. Given the philosophical nature of the guru Maai’s interview snippets and the remarkably beautiful musical performances of Sharad and his guru, Sindhubai (Dr. Arun Dravid), writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane appears, for much of The Disciple’s running time, to be fully celebrating the asceticism and endless struggle that Sharad has committed himself to. But as time goes on, we not only see the costs of pursuing perfection, but also the isolation that results from his strict and limiting adherence to practicing and teaching only raag. It’s a single-minded focus that is, in large part, passed down from his own gurus, though when he berates one of his students for wanting to sing raag in a fusion band, it reveals not a love for the artform to which he’s devoted his life, but a domineering spirit that arises from his musical monomania. Derek Smith

31. In the Same Breath (Wang Nanfu)

Wang Nanfu’s In the Same Breath makes an elemental point with furious lucidity: that Covid-19 ravaged China and the United States due to their respectively self-interested governments, who acted in bad faith in a bid to maintain power. Wang utilizes a simple, devastating device, fashioning montages that fuse Chinese propaganda with footage of what’s actually happening. Certain images here are unforgettable, from a dying woman gasping for air like a stranded fish to medical workers wandering streets that are riven with road blocks, trying to find patients who are almost certainly to be deposited at an overcrowded hospital that will reject them. Wang reveals the Covid-19 pandemic to be an inevitable, catastrophic comeuppance for both China and the U.S.’s respective policy failures, and, in a final, heartbreaking flourish, the filmmaker imagines what a sensible, well-communicated response to Covid-19 might’ve looked like, which suggests nothing more or less than poignantly naïve fantasy. Which is to say that, in Wang’s extraordinary documentary, contemporary political structures are as much of a disease as Covid-19, and, in the long run, the deadlier foes. Bowen

30. Shiva Baby (Emma Seligman)

Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby is a refreshingly contemporary twist on the coming-of-age story. The fulcrum of the film is Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a liberal arts major who’s dabbling in both babysitting and sex work to support herself through her studies. Attending a shiva for a distant relative, her efforts to balance the professional and the personal are excruciatingly put to the test when she sees that her married sugar daddy, Max (Danny Deferrari), is also a guest at the event. The film’s action unfolds almost entirely within the confines of a few adjoining rooms, and the sense of overwhelming claustrophobia is enhanced by uncomfortably tight framing, along with a sparse sound design punctuated by minimal, ominous strings. But even as the tension ratchets up, the film mostly unfolds in a naturalistic manner. Its impressive tonal balance is also evident in the frequently hilarious dialogue, which is in the same uneasy register as some of the best cringe comedy of the past couple of decades, without ever feeling too self-conscious to be believable. David Robb

29. Two Lottery Tickets (Paul Negoescu)

In a key scene from Paul Negoescu’s Two Lottery Tickets, Sile (Alexandru Papadopol) dismisses Romania’s big-screen output as “doom and gloom,” citing as evidence a touted recent production whose title he can’t recall (he’s referring to Stuff and Dough). If this overt intertext weren’t enough, the next layer of structural in-joke in the film is that it’s blatantly composed of the formal DNA of the Romanian New Wave. Two Lottery Tickets’s mission is to find new possibilities in these (in)expressive tools—or rather, in its mining of the time-tested fundamentals of screen comedy, to restore old possibilities not yet fully exploited by this critically lauded movement. The story concerns three friends who take to the road after misplacing a winning lottery ticket. The uncertainty around the exact circumstances of the ticket’s disappearance is the fuel for hilarious set pieces. Jokes often emerge from the background, as in the best and last punchline in a string of yuks triggered by a dispute with a policeman about a car’s paint job. And in the most striking detour from Romanian New Wave habits, Negoescu eschews determinism and a fixation of logic problems to surrender instead to the forces of chance, saving his funniest expression of this theme for the film’s throwaway postscript. Lund

28. El Planeta (Amalia Ulman)

Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta is a deeply felt dramedy whose droll humor and placidly beautiful black-and-white surfaces mask a searing socioeconomic desperation. Ulman, who also stars in the film as the quirkily stylish Leonor (or Leo, as she prefers to be called), explores the impoverished reality lurking behind her main characters’ aristocratic façades. And she does so with a breezy melancholy that’s attuned to the blithe spirit of Leo and her mother, Maria (Ale Ulman, the filmmaker’s real-life mom), who treat their hand-to-mouth lifestyle as a kind of game. Or, at least, they try to—grifting, shoplifting, and bluffing their way from one day to the next while acknowledging the true direness of their situation only in jokey asides. Ulman nods toward Spain’s recent financial crisis, contrasting the crushing weight of poverty with a lavish upcoming gala at which Leo and Maria plan to rub elbows with luminaries like Martin Scorsese. Wealth and contentment, the film suggests, are an illusion that can be maintained by wearing fancy clothes, carefully curating your Instagram content, and never letting anyone see you sweat—even when you’re about to be evicted from your home. Watson

27. Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven)

The intrigue created by Paul Verhoeven’s love of tonal clash and generalized profligacy doesn’t quite save Benedetta from feeling like it’s revealed its entire hand well before the credits roll, but while it’s hot, it’s hot. Verhoeven certainly builds up a heady, campy mix of religious imagery, corporeal abjectness, and masochism, emphasizing the centrality of the body, and particularly the female body, in the configuration of power. And by the time that Benedetta (Virginie Efira) has ascended the ranks of Pescia’s nunnery, a certain long-delayed sex scene is every bit as gleefully gratuitous and flagrantly blasphemous as everything else up to that point. A searingly caustic take on the sublimation of sexuality into the practices and imagery of Catholicism and the fundamental role of the body in grounding Church doctrine, Benedetta challenges its audience on a number of fronts—not the least of which our utter lack of interest in the conventional morals aligned with either sex or God, in either this century or the 17th. Not unlike a Renaissance dildo made of whittled-down wood, Verhoeven’s film is ultimately uneven and dangerously provocative, but it’s also a lot of fun. Brown

26. The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo)

Hong Sang-soo’s The Woman Who Ran is defined by absences: by who isn’t in the frame and by what isn’t said throughout conversations that appear to be determinedly trivial. Returning to Seoul after years away, Gam-hee (Kim Min-hee) reconnects with a trio of female friends, and they talk of the food they eat and indulge in local gossip, repeating observations with a fervor that feels obsessive and mindless, as if these women have gotten too calcified in their own lives to utter anything but mantras. Yet Hong and his actors communicate the disappointment and sadness that’s being suppressed by well-practiced politeness, offering anecdotes that abound in pointed loose ends. Throughout, you may recall that audacious sequence in Grass in which a woman repeatedly went up and down a flight of stairs, as Hong fashions a similar yet subtler portrait of stasis with his latest. Many Hong films examine romantic pressures from the POV of a surrogate for the director himself, while The Woman Who Ran suggests Hong’s fantasy of how women discuss him when he’s not around. Bowen

25. Titane (Julia Ducournau)

Julia Ducournau’s Titane expands on the filmmaker’s interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration. It also ratchets up Raw’s combination of body-horror explicitness and art-film abstraction, making for a wild ride through a female serial killer’s techno-sexuality that would make J.G. Ballard blush. At question early on in the film is the way bodies become seen as machines, instrumental objects with components and fluids onto which we project our desires. Alexia’s (Agathe Rousselle) role as a dancer who gyrates on top of expensive vehicles makes her into a sexual object for the men who flock to watch her, but for Alexia it’s clearly always been about a fusion with the metal. The pure audiovisual trippiness of Titane’s final two thirds is welcome—in particular an excursus into the bodily dangers of fire zones and an enigmatic, homoerotic sequence featuring Vincent’s firefighters dancing in slow motion to a Future Islands song. And the film’s exploration of corporeal transformations both willed and unwelcome makes for some imagery that taps into deep anxieties about the uncanniness of inhabiting the fluid-filled sack that we call a body. Pat Brown

24. This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese)

Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection explores the impossibility of mourning. Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo), an 80-year-old widow living in a rural village in Lesotho, learns that her last surviving son, a migrant worker laboring in a coal mine in neighboring South Africa, has just died. She has thus lost all of her loved ones and decides to plan her own funeral. She wants a simple coffin. No golden angels or other gaudy nonsense. Mosese’s mise-en-scène and camerawork are breathtaking. This is a story told through the gracefulness of the camerawork, the stunningly lit tableaux, and, most remarkably of all, through fabric. Not many films, especially ones with a documentary sensibility, use texture—wool, mud, cement, ashes, and cloth specifically—as a storytelling device the way that This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection does. In one of the film’s many unforgettable scenes, Mantoa gets up from the chair where she usually sits to listen to the radio and dances with her dead husband, raising her arm as if holding an actual body that isn’t there, a voice in the background telling her to take off her “cloak of mourning.” And she certainly takes it all off in a bewildering final sequence when Mantoa simultaneously surrenders to loss and spurns it. Semerene

23. There Is No Evil (Mohammad Rasoulof)

The four shorts that comprise writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Golden Bear-winning There Is No Evil complicate the declarative nature of the film’s title in fascinating ways. There is evil in the world, of course. More specifically, there’s evil in a nation that forces its young men to enlist in military service that may require them to execute their fellow citizens. There’s evil in choosing between killing just one person or many, and in killing some so that one can love others. There’s evil in bureaucracy, in family secrets, in selective rectitude. And there’s evil in selfish refusals masquerading as ethical stances. In fact, for Rasoulof, evil seems to be the most significant organizing force of daily life—the evil of past actions, present decisions, and atemporal structures—in a culture such as Iran’s that accepts murder as a legitimate form of punishment. There Is No Evil, then, doesn’t try to facetiously dispel the statement that its title makes by asking whether or not evil exists. It ponders, instead, how citizens position themselves in relation to the inevitable evil that runs through their country’s core, architecting its every corner and generations of people. Semerene

22. Zola (Janicza Bravo)

Every moment in Zola pulsates with life, as director Janicza Bravo fuses seemingly incompatible tones and styles to capture the wild mood swings of her protagonists in states of emotional and physical extremis, in turn freeing her actors to boldly plumb their characters’ hidden and idiosyncratic depths. Bravo and Slave Play author Jeremy O. Harris’s screenplay teems with musically obscene dialogue, boldly unhampered by politically correct skittishness and embodying another performative aspect of the film’s characters. Though the film is profoundly empathetic to the plight of women like Zola (Taylour Paige) and Stefani (Riley Keough), it’s often staged as a go-for-broke comedy. Bravo doesn’t condescendingly position Zola and Stefani as martyrs in service of a feminist sermon, but rather sees them as upstart capitalists looking to take control of their “product,” in this case their bodies. The matter-of-fact, satirical acceptance of this cynical point of view is poignant, and in a resonant and uncomfortable twist, Zola turns out to be a better pimp than X, commandeering Stefani’s marketing online to sell her friend for higher rates while avoiding the bedroom gymnastics herself. Bowen

21. The Card Counter (Paul Schrader)

Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter sounds like a run-of-the-mill genre outing on paper. At Leavenworth, William Tell (Oscar Isaac) learns how to count cards, which he translates into a lucrative profession on the outside, hustling casinos for amounts of money that are too small to be worth the effort to flag. William is also haunted by a mysterious past that will gradually come to the foreground of the film’s narrative, and like many grifters in need of redemption, he enters the orbit of a family that serves as a symbolic surrogate for another: a troubled younger man (Tye Sheridan) and a woman (Tiffany Haddish) who stakes gamblers. With his austere aesthetics, Schrader captures the barbarism bubbling underneath civilized society, suggesting that William’s rules, not to mention the filmmaker’s, are pretenses for keeping evil rationalized away from the forefront of the mind. Everyone, blissful in their routines, is complicit. Given his knowledge of how close barbarism actually is to the surface of ordinary life, it’s little wonder that William finds life in prison to be a soothing cocoon, with particularly oppressive rules to keep his roiling mind preoccupied. Prison also offers William the comfort of knowing that he’s being punished, allowing him to offer a conceivable sacrament. Bowen

20. The Souvenir Part II (Joanna Hogg)

Joanna Hogg always planned for The Souvenir to have a sequel, and for it to concern the mending of a heart rent by pain. But while The Souvenir Part II is as delicately observed and thoroughly enrapturing as its predecessor, it’s also about how people come to understand themselves through the things they make. Much of the film follows Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne) as she goes about realizing her thesis project, which is being produced in parallel to the garishly pretentious musical being made by her classmate, Patrick (Richard Ayoade). Venturing so close to open parody is a risky move on Hogg’s part, but the heightened comic quality of her supporting characters suits the complex self-reflexivity of the film, with its constant invitations to its audience to view and think about it as a means by which the author is reconciling herself with her past. In the end, Julie’s film, assembled from her memories of the tragic relationship depicted in The Souvenir, hardly seems more fully formed than Patrick’s scattershot musical, but its roots in her experiences give it an undeniable life that his project lacks. A film of understated warmth, profound emotional complexity, and eminently British dry humor, The Souvenir Part II is a vital tribute to art as a necessary component of life. Brown

19. Procession (Robert Greene)

Robert Greene’s Procession hinges on an audacious concept: Middle-aged men were asked by the filmmaker to write, direct, and act in recreations of their sexual abuse by priests. No film that this critic has seen has wrested this pain onto the screen as forcefully as Greene has here, and his relentlessness steadfastly opposes the pat way that media fixates on “healing” as a box to be checked. The six men who participated in Procession—Mike Foreman, Joe Eldred, Ed Gavagan, Dan Laurine, Michael Sandridge, and Tom Viviano—are seen hurtling from catharsis to despair and back again sometimes in a matter of seconds. One step forward, another backward, over and over again in a perpetual and agonizing tailspin. Unlike Spotlight, Procession isn’t especially interested in the particulars of attempting to bring the Church to justice. The detective work that we see in the film, which unfolds in three primary threads, is of the psychological and emotional variety. Greene homes in on the men’s recollections to one another and to the camera of what happened to them; their search for the places where the abuses occurred, in an attempt to lance the pain of their childhood memories; and the short films that they make in an effort to bridge the first two threads, revisiting their trauma and lending it a sense of containable place, which in one case is a set that can be symbolically destroyed when the shoot is over. Bowen

18. Identifying Features (Fernanda Valadez)

Fernanda Valadez’s feature-length directorial debut, Identifying Features, captures the mundane horror of a faceless bureaucracy going about the grim and clinical business of cataloguing the devastation wreaked upon people by gangs and institutional failure. Throughout, the characters look for signs of the people they knew among lifeless things, the expressionless faces of the dead and belongings left unclaimed. The film, then, is as much about the act of seeing and observing as it is about struggling to recognize that which might not clarify much at all. At one point, Olivia (Ana Laura Rodríguez) either cannot or refuses to identify a body presented to her as that of her son. Chuya’s (Laura Elena Ibarra) son is identified by his birthmark, but Magdalena’s (Mercedes Hernández) son may well have been burned beyond any possible identification. When she spots what appears to be his bag among some discarded items, its presence reveals nothing about where he might be. And so she continues to search for him, trapped in a holding pattern of uncertainty, her individual pleas for help and understanding drowned out among so many others. Steven Scaife

17. The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)

The French Dispatch takes Wes Anderson’s signature play with nested narrations and his love of midcentury culture to new heights. This painstakingly detailed film embeds stories within newspaper articles, lectures, and television interviews, and incorporates animation and text, in an ode to a mode of authorship that’s mostly disappeared with the decline of print media. Weaving several vignettes that illustrate stories from the titular newspaper based in the fictional and cheekily named French burgh of Ennui-sur-Blasé, the film does much to exhibit what may have been special about a borderline fantastical culture. Its relatively self-contained shorts each pay tribute to the casually serious midcentury intellectual, with their comfortable clothes, dangling cigarettes, and deceptively rigorous approach to the life of the mind. And their intense attention to language is, of course, reflected in Anderson’s own cinematic language. The French Dispatch is a tizzy, but a tightly controlled one, each frame so drolly composed that its meticulousness itself becomes a joke. On occasion, the action even grinds to a halt to serve Anderson’s need to see everything as a pictogram, as a riot in a prison-turned-art-gallery stops in place, improvised weapons looking ludicrous when frozen mid-swing. Brown

16. The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes)

Todd Haynes’s documentary The Velvet Underground begins with an epigraph: “Music fathoms the sky.” While Charles Baudelaire is mentioned early on as an influence on Lou Reed’s songwriting, there’s no explicit working out of what this citation of a 19th-century French poet has to do with a band of American avant-garde ’60s rockers. Haynes simply trusts us to trace a line between those four words and the Velvet Underground’s narcotic, poetic sound. This masterful collage of a film overwhelms with its aesthetic possibilities. Haynes splits the screen into multiple panels, incorporates clips from the burgeoning avant-garde cinema of the ’60s, and overloads the soundtrack with the Velvet Underground’s often cacophonous rock experiments. Haynes’s circulating aesthetic currents work in confluence to emphasize how the music of the Velvet Underground summed up, and in a way that no one else could, the totality of the times in the artistic capital of the United States. It fathomed the unfathomable depths of a roiling culture in a process of rapid transformation. Brown

15. Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma)

Petite Maman departs from Céline Sciamma’s last two feature-length directorial efforts in its comparative modesty. With none of the overt social messaging of Girlhood or the grand romance of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma’s precisely composed images and muted dialogue serve a more intimate story about the longing to connect with one’s mother outside the bounds of the parent-offspring relationship. Petite Maman indulges the same kind of fantasy as Back to the Future, answering the question of what it would be like to meet our parents at our own age—though it’s not overly concerned with temporal paradoxes or a high-stakes race to ensure one’s genesis. Rather, contemplative and cool almost to a fault, the film emphasizes the simple acts of connecting with and parting from people, and the rueful inevitability of time’s passing. Petite Maman’s look at an impossible connection between a young girl, her mother, and her grandmother captures with wistful clarity the asynchrony that keeps us from getting to fully know our parents as people—fantasizing a scenario in which its main character can achieve an understanding that for many of us comes too late. Brown

14. Days (Tsai Ming-liang)

Centered on the quotidian lives of two unnamed men (played by Lee Kang-sheng and Anong Houngheuangsy), Days finds Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang reflecting once again on people’s unspeakable loneliness and alienation in a world lacking in reciprocity. In a series of tableaux vivants, where the camera remains mostly still and sound is entirely diegetic, the uneventful days of the two men unfold, or, considering the film’s meticulous attention to such elements as water and fire, you could say that they burn slowly. Indeed, the younger man (Houngheuangsy) stokes the embers of a fire so he can methodically make his lunch, washing vegetables and fish in buckets inside his bathroom and concocting a makeshift stove by placing a pot on top of the other one containing the embers. The older man (Lee), in turn, is seen taking a bath, stretching his sore body in the woods, and staring out a window for what feels like an entire afternoon, as he listens to the sound of water. Were Lee facing the lens, the sequence would belong to the same documentary universe of Wang Xiaoshuai or Sergei Loznitsa—of evidence through dogged visual persistence. Semerene

13. Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve)

There are no apparitions in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, but it isn’t too far off base to describe this story about a filmmaking couple, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), who make a pilgrimage to the island where Ingmar Bergman lived for many years as a ghost story. Bergman came to fervently believe in ghosts toward the end of his life, and it’s clear that his spirit still haunts Fårö, as well as the lives of Hansen-Løve’s characters. Given how directly Chris refracts her experiences on Färo into the fiction that she’s constructing, the film’s middle stretch can feel a little redundant as it progresses. But Hansen-Løve is merely setting up a finale that brings the various threads about ghosts, relationships, art, and gender to a head, and without sacrificing all the alluring ambiguities she’s built up to this point. Ultimately, Bergman Island suggests that there’s a way to reconcile oneself with the ghosts of cinema past. Brown

12. The Works and Days (Anders Edström and C.W. Winter)

Anders Edström and C.W. Winter clearly couldn’t be bothered by the insidious notion in contemporary discourse that films must “earn” their runtime by some arbitrary commercial rubric, as their eight-hour The Works and Days (Of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is an obstinate rebuttal to the idea that a hierarchy of representational importance even exists in cinema. Running alongside its leisurely evocation of 14 months in the life of its eponymous farmer, who’s caring for her progressively ill husband, is a comprehensive visual and sonic itinerary of the Kyoto Prefecture region in which she resides. The implication is that this rich and rhythmic study of a setting in all its seasonal permutations is as critical to understanding its central subject—her toils, her joys, and her grief—as any more traditionally dramaturgical situation, and in witnessing this strategy unfold, we come to realize how stingy most narrative films are in inhabiting the experiential qualities of a place, and how much stands to be gained from doing so. For those open to recalibrating their relationship to attention—as its myriad longueurs of cicada-backed contemplation encourage—The Works and Days is a generous gift, and one to which surrender eventually yields astonishing emotional rewards. Lund

11. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze)

A discursive fairy tale of sorts, Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is just as interested in the mundanities of city life as it is in the cursed romance at its heart. Filmed in effulgent 16mm in the Georgian city of Kutaisi, the film combines scripted scenarios, lyrical documentary observation, and melodious yet self-questioning narration into a work that’s at once quietly meditative and thrillingly alive. If one can detect notes of Abbas Kiarostami’s serene docu-fiction hybrids or Otar Iosselani’s rhythmical urban romances in Koberidze’s style, these reference points can’t capture the sheer organic invention on display in each off-kilter camera placement and narrative digression. Throughout, Koberidze opens himself up to the possibilities, visual and otherwise, that are immanent in Kutaisi’s winding alleys and sun-dappled cafes, casting a set of scraggly street dogs into a drama about friendship, and transforming a kids’ soccer match into an epic highlight-reel montage. In one moving sequence set to images of the coursing flow of the Rioni River, Koberidze’s narrator laments the strife and calamity of the contemporary world, but with What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, the filmmaker responds not with despair but rather with one of the most expansive, singular, and ultimately hopeful works of cinema in recent memory. Watson

10. Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar)

Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers is haunted by absences, by how a country informs its citizens’ psyches on a granular level. Its central mystery involves the connection between a woman’s quest to recover the bones of ancestors who were murdered and mass-buried during the Spanish Civil War, and two new mothers’ attempts to make peace with their families. The cross-associations that Almodóvar weaves between these threads are startling, suggesting the ripple effects that are inherent in even casual interactions. The filmmaker creates a slipstream of history, art, architecture, and lineage, folding every element of his society effortlessly into one of his most robust and moving melodramas. Almodóvar deftly establishes a potentially convoluted setup with Parallel Mothers. In the tradition of Sirk and Hitchcock, he’s become a master of crafting scenes that casually reverberate with endless levels of subtext. Quite a bit happens in this film, and much of it doesn’t need to be revealed, except to say that Almodóvar continues to toy with notions of heritage and erasure. The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Almodóvar understands to be one in the same. Bowen

9. Red Rocket (Sean Baker)

Sean Baker’s Red Rocket is set in late summer 2016, and throughout, we hear snippets of news reports about the presidential election, though no characters seem to pay them much notice. But the sounds and images whose significance escapes Mikey (Simon Rex) is hard not to notice from our vantage point for how they speak to his utter self-absorption. He’s the rugged individualist, oblivious to any part of the world that he can’t personally instrumentalize. But the sound of Donald Trump lying his way toward the Oval Office and the constant sight of the oil refinery looming behind Mikey as he rides a kids bike on dilapidated streets subtly emphasize that he doesn’t exist apart from the society he chooses not to acknowledge, but within it and as a product of it. As he bulldozes a fragile and imperfect small-town community, his American-hustler charm increasingly grates on the people he won’t acknowledge that he relies on. If what seems to be the comic irreverence of Red Rocket, from its title to its use of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” as a recurring motif, actually constitutes a kind of despair about American society, in the end it’s accompanied by the hope that people might be able to band together and kick the Mikeys of the world the hell out. Brown

8. Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (Frank Beauvais)

Elegiacally recapping a four-month period of self-exile in 2016 during which Frank Beauvais coped with personal and global horrors via a steady home-viewing diet of four to five films a day, this intimate found-footage memoir is driven by a frantic internal monologue, narrated by the director himself. The film’s most immediate appeal is the simple scavenger’s thrill of encountering so many tantalizing images in different formats from across film history in swift succession, a thrill that places the viewer in much the same consumptive role that Beauvais bemoans in a passage discussing the merits of communist films over Western ones. Of the heroes represented in these respective cinematic legacies, the director posits, with provocative broadness, that “one creates and produces, the other consumes.” At one point, Beauvais offers a fleeting glimpse of a rock thrown through a television set, which bluntly expresses the same revulsion to the idea of falling captive to the screen, of sacrificing a dynamic and reciprocal relationship with the outside world and becoming an “impotent spectator” to violence and unrest. That Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream both condemns and inhabits this spectator position is what gives it its piercing honesty and haunting relevance. Lund

7. The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier)

Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is a charismatic negotiator arrived to make a deal with our rom-com-unfriendly times and dismantle our time-honed defenses against sentiment. In what could be called a bait and switch if it didn’t seem so fluid and effortless, the film’s levity of spirit at first belies, then ends up accentuating, deeper themes about navigating a world in flux and a life you only get to live once. The film strikes many familiar chords about life, love, and loss, but proves that much insight and pleasure can still be gained by simply rearranging them a bit. Certainly there’s an honesty in its exploration of a woman who deeply loves two men, and a dedication in its identification with Julie’s (Renate Reinsve) complex position as a 21st-century woman, that are relatively unique. But if some films look to revivify a formula rather than reinvent the wheel, The Worst Person in the World may be the prime example of how to restore fun, significance, and even a little bit of sex to the well-worn terrain of the romantic comedy. Brown

6. Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Following on the heels of a handful of films orchestrated in stately legato, Paul Thomas Anderson’s eighth feature is a rollicking picaresque that chugs along in hurtling tracking shots and montages scored to contemporaneous radio hits. But the air of carefree playfulness doesn’t fully amount to rose-colored nostalgia, as Anderson sprinkles enough hints of danger, inequity, and societal breakdown throughout to lend his autobiographical jam session a sneaky depth of feeling. On the surface, Licorice Pizza may be Anderson’s most uncomplicatedly romantic film, as it presents a pair of searching souls who seem made for each other and proceeds to tear away the perceived barriers between them over the course of two spectacularly entertaining hours. But its subtle recognition of a thornier reality on the margins of Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana’s (Alana Haim) charmed path spikes the crowd-pleasing payoff with a dash of arsenic. As in Phantom Thread, love is shown to be an escape from reality, a regression to a youthful state of innocence that temporarily conceals the more challenging parts of ourselves—and in this film, of society itself. Lund

5. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Hamaguchi Ryûsuke)

Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a collection of three shorts, all concerning the unmooring after-lives of faded relationships. In its very title, the first episode, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” conjures the thin line between rapture and melancholia that governs the film as a whole. The seeds of romantic exploitation that exist in the episode reach full bloom in the second and most daring one, “Door Wide Open,” which concerns two, maybe three overlapping stories of intimate gamesmanship. The third, “Once Again,” doesn’t have the intricacy of the first two, but it gains in power upon reflection, enriching the rest of the film. If past relationships are such easily alterable realities in retrospect, homes to which we can never return, perhaps they can also be altered in the mind to the benefit of all involved. At its heart, Hamaguchi’s film is an alternately scathing, erotic, terrifying, and affirming fable of the primordial power of storytelling. Bowen

4. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Researchers have speculated that cultures without analog technologies recorded themselves by happenstance, embedding conversations into the lines of pottery, like the grooves of a record. If sound is a physical phenomenon then all that the voices of the past require to be heard is a receiver of sorts with storage capacity to bring them into the present. This is the philosophical terrain that Thai master of slow cinema Apichatpong Weerasethakul navigates with his first (kind-of) English-language feature, Memoria. A Scottish orchid farmer traveling in Colombia, Jessica gets caught up in an unraveling mystery that centers the eruption of the arcane and spiritual into the modern world—recalling Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, only with a bit of a sci-fi, media-centric twist. In the film, Colombia and the Amazon jungle become akin to waking dreams, the characters moving though spaces as if in a kind of slumber and those spaces coming to seem disconnected from human activity. Again in a Weerasethakul film, we find spirits lurking behind the everyday world, but in Memoria, they might just be repressed memories emanating from a world that never actually forgets. Brown

3. All Light, Everywhere (Theo Anthony)

Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere follows several strands that are united by two themes: the encroachment of surveillance hardware and software into everyday life, and the fact that such developments are as riven with racist, classist biases as any other element of society. Two of the strands tackle the rise of body cameras in law enforcement from complementing angles, from the point of view of the Arizona-based company Axon Enterprise, which manufactures the Taser and has a near monopoly on body camera technology, and from that of Baltimore police officers taking a training seminar on how to use the cameras in the field. The film captures many paradoxes and biases of sight and photography, from the hellish to the transcendent, even deconstructing itself along the way to reveal its own omissions and selective emphases. Besides Anthony’s consistent presence in the film, in which he’s shown manipulating performances, shots, and editing rhythms, subtitled information and a ruminative, resonantly robotic narration by Keaver Brenai suggest alternate, haunting, almost ephemeral points of view, as if the film is at war with itself as an embodiment of all its critiques. All Light, Everywhere is head-spinning, serving as proof, in the tradition of Frederick Wiseman and Robert Greene’s cinema, that political works can also be beautiful. Bowen

2. The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)

Nobody is where they should be in The Power of the Dog, and everybody seems to be searching for something, somebody, or somewhere else. Set in 1925 Montana, Jane Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 book tracks the obsessions, miseries, and passions of a group of people who inhabit a cavernous house in the middle of a vast ranchland and make each other miserable until blood is finally shed. The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility. Ari Wegner’s richly high-gloss cinematography and Jonny Greenwood’s unusually conventional score contribute to what can feel like an overly staid package. But the rattling interpersonal tensions and lack of simple emotional payoffs point to something more complicated. Campion is concerned more with the pensive give and take between restless characters than story here. Still, she pulls the tragic conclusion together with a sharp dramatic reveal that builds on clues she carefully seeded earlier with all the elan of an ace Agatha Christie acolyte. Chris Barsanti

1. Drive My Car (Hamaguchi Ryûsuke)

Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Drive My Car, a free-form and intuitive adaptation of the Murakami Haruki short story of the same name, concerns the intersection between private and public spheres, particularly how artists attempt to gain greater accesses to personal realms for their art. The protagonist is Kafuku (Nishijima Hidetoshi), a theater actor and director mourning the death of his screenwriter wife (Kirishima Reika), whose method of creation involved sexual deceptions that he refused to acknowledge. Two years later, Kafuku is mounting a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima, going over the text each morning and night while a young driver, Misaki (Miura Tôko), ferries him in his assuring cocoon of a Saab. Every person that Kafuku encounters in Hiroshima reflects his past back to him, yet they’re also each thrummingly present in their own right, as Hamaguchi stages rapt and exhilaratingly prolonged scenes that suggest the entire arcs of lifetimes within minutes. Like Murakami before him, Hamaguchi is intensely in tune with the notion of a life as constituting worlds within worlds, offering an abundance of riches that includes portions of an uncannily moving Uncle Vanya that serves as a commentary on Kafuku’s need to confront and even savor the ruins of his existence. Diving deep into the recesses of memory and imagination, Hamaguchi mounts a classic—one of the greatest of all movies concerned with the creation and delectation of the lifeblood of art. Bowen