It seems a little funny that the 2022 Academy Awards went in so rapturously for King Richard, a modern sports film with a title that makes it sound like it could be about a medieval sovereign, yet turned a blind eye to the numerous stories of Old World regal gallantry that 2021 had to offer. It was something of a small boom year for stories from the pre-Middle Ages, between Joel Coen’s stunning and singular expressionist take on Macbeth to Ridley Scott’s trenchant and triumphant late career peak, The Last Duel. Scott’s film felt bracingly modern, while Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth felt brackishly ancient, like a primeval curse dredged out of the depths of a steaming swamp. David Lowery’s The Green Knight, 2021’s high watermark for cinema that could have been adapted from an illuminated manuscript, falls into that ancient, yellowed Macbeth camp. Its greatest aesthetic virtues (it is the kaleidoscopic counterpoint to Tragedy of Macbeth‘s chilly blacks and whites) make us feel a million miles removed from the present day and maybe from any day that ever existed. We feel the chill of the truly strange and inscrutably archaic, the sense that ghosts and lost spirits are lurking not far from us. As with Macbeth, a high and reaspy voice ushers us into the story. It speaks softly at first of King Arthur and we gaze upon a floating crown descending onto the head of some shadowy robed figure in a dimly lit throne room. Then it intones, “But this is not that King,” and the anonymous monarch bursts into a roaring crackle of flames. The voice rises to a Gollum-like bellow as it promises a rousing tale. There is a kind of dissonance at work. The words themselves are not sinister; the speaker is simply promising a rousing story to come. But her voice is beyond disquieting. DIrector David Lowery wants us to feel off balance and just the right amount of menaced. Adventures and wonders lie ahead, but he is also letting us know that his The Green Knight will be tinted with an air of the ominous and unknowable. If we are expecting a swashbuckler, he is preparing us for something with a lot more dread, mystery and danger than we are used to from the average knight’s tale. It’s not uncharacteristic of this relatively young auteur. The man who made A Ghost Story can’t resist imbuing his latest and best film with a touch of the spectral.

While past Lowery films like A Ghost Story and the elegiac Robert Redford bank robber tone poem The Old Man and the Gun had some bravura setpieces to recommend them, their aesthetic was also decidedly lo-fi at the same time. To use a music metaphor, The Green Knight is Lowery’s chance to leave the bedroom studio and make what feels like a glam record by comparison. From its atmospheric, dizzyingly edited Christmas Day opening to its giddy, head-dropper of an ending, The Green Knight is Lowery’s first complete showstopper. It’s a gorgeously tactile, bewitching, and frequently disquieting bit of old legend come to life. In telling the tale of Gawain (not yet Sir Gawain of Arthurian fame when we meet him) and the Green Knight, it feels like Lowery himself is entering the royal banquet hall of King Arthur and answering the ruler’s call for an outrageous and stupefying story of bravery and peril; of men not only leaving home but leaving the comfort zone of a physical realm they thought they knew. The Green Knight‘s story begins on a Christmas morning when heedless, cocksure Gawain (a striking and terrifically dialed-in Dev Patel) leaves his mother and lover to go dine in the castle of his uncle, King Arthur. The kindly, aging King graciously offers Gawain an empty chair next to him and his Queen. Then the good King rises from his seat and asks for one among his dear guests to bewitch him with a great story of derring-do. Before any man can step up to answer the call, however, the titular Green Knight himself (or itself) strides into the hall to kick David Lowery’s movie into action. He is plainly something other than a mere man. He has a face like a tree trunk and a beard of mossy green bark. With each step he emits low creaks like a swaying ship’s mast. This unsettling being removes a large axe from its sheath and proposes a yuletide game to all present. He will offer any man the chance to strike him in whatever place he chooses and as hard as he likes. In turn, that man must journey far away to the Green Chapel exactly one year from this day, seek out the Knight and let him return that same blow. Ambitious, invincible Gawain steps up and borrows a sword. The King emphatically reminds Gawain that this is only meant to be a game. Gawain barely registers his wise uncle’s warning. He surges angrily forward as if into battle and cleaves off his arboreal challenger’s head. But the Green Knight does not die. He merely picks up his own detached head, mounts his steed and rides from the castle leaving two chilling words ringing in the impetuous youth’s ears: one year. What follows is Gawain’s quest to seek out his destiny and to reckon with the reality of his own likely beheading.

What Lowery, adapting a classic, albeit lesser-known, piece of Arthurian legend, is doing is to challenge Gawain in much the same way as the Green Knight does in that early showdown. The idea is to test the hotheaded, action-oriented notion of what an adventure story must be. Gawain fails to recognize the Knight’s challenge as friendly gamesmanship and his empty, short-sighted braggadocio sets him on an entirely different kind of hero’s journey. One that he may very well never return from. Lowery’s tale is full of gob-smacking wonder, ingenious effects and eye-popping cinematography, but it is unlike a great many tales of brave knights.  For all his posturing, Gawain is not a knight and he rarely, if ever, acts bravely. Lowery has no intention of making Gawain look like a swashbuckling badass because he is nothing of the sort. If Gawain is to maybe one day become the figure of Arthurian legend that he is meant to be, he must slay the dragon of his own blustery youth first. From encounters with bandits to doing a favor for a martyred girl’s ghost, the chapters of Gawain’s story consistently undercut and deflate him. If nothing else, The Green Knight is a great tale of what it means to be young, dumb and full of one’s self. By contrast, Sean Harris keenly and movingly plays the great King Arthur, that most celebrated of legendary kings, not as a chest-thumping showboat but as a man whose encroaching years have blessed him with kindness and soft-spoken humility. It is for the young to see heroism as a thing of braying outward confidence. But what Gawain’s regal uncle values most is his nephew’s integrity; that he learns from his macho mistake and somehow finds the good fortune to return to him alive. He knows that if Gawain can somehow survive the cost of his own juvenile egotism, he might get far enough away from these youthful delusions of invincibility and one day become a person worthy of a real hero’s tale. But he must account for his actions alone. He must be willing to die if he’s to have any chance of becoming a great man; the great man he foolishly thought he could become with one rash swing of a borrowed sword.

What makes The Green Knight radical and refreshing isn’t just how vibrantly it distills the pure psychedelic essence of Arthurian lore. It’s in how Lowery investigates and tweaks the notion of what a hero’s tale can (and maybe more often should) be. The most uninvolving hero’s journeys concern protagonists who are already set in stone; perfect and competent with no need of improvement or growth. The folly of too many such stories is conceiving of the journey as a mere traversal across terrestrial distance when it is much more important to map the aspiring hero’s journey across the landscape of their heart and conscience. We should track them as they trek across the undiscovered lands of their own integrity and will. It is the a thread common to heroic narratives as varied as Die Hard’s John McClane in Nakatomi Tower and Frodo Baggins on the road to Mordor that a hero should undergo a trek across their inner selves to mirror and refract their physical journey. Gawain’s mission is fascinating not only because it is rich in incident and otherworldly sights, but because of how much it challenges his emotional maturity at every step. Which is to say what little emotional maturity he has has at this early and impulsive stage of his life. And the real test is not surviving the volley of bandits, ghosts and giants he encounters, but the impossible passive gauntlet that waits in the Green Chapel. All the strange new dangers rattle him far less than the certain test at the end of the road. In Lowery’s tale, all the unknown in the world is a cakewalk when compared to the thing Gawain knows he must do. For all its rousing setpieces, the journey of The Green Knight and Gawain steadily wends away from macho antics and feats of physical prowess. Temper and rash action have caused all of Gawain’s woes and now the real test of manhood is whether he has the integrity to honorably, humbly submit to his challenger and give up what he owes. Some thrilling spectacle occurs along the way, but the real voyage of the film is Gawain’s quest to find true valor and honor. An honor that is meek and humble and entirely in opposition to ostentatious, stereotypically manly chest-thumping.

The Green Knight is a story of human frailty and pride. Gawain starts the film arrogant and blind. He is a callow Prince Hal laboring under the delusion that he is already Henry V. He has done precious little in his life but drink and fuck at the time that he steps up to what he mistakes as a basic feat of masculine might. David Lowery’s target is the kind of ego and insecure bluster that masquerades as strength. To quote the animated series Steven Universe (another great hero story that is more interested in its hero’s inner journey toward emotional maturity than in the battles he fights), Gawain must learn to be strong in the real way. And the very real possibility that he may not live to apply the genuine strength he acquires just makes his challenge all the more poignant. While they may not appear to have a lot of superficial similarities (apart from the fact that both contain a ghost), what connects The Green Knight to Lowery’s masterful A Ghost Story are characters stubbornly clinging to old notions of reality and the need for them to complete painful metamorphoses, even if it radically alters or ends life (or death) as they know it. What fate awaits Gawain past his daunting challenge remains unclear to us and to him right up to the film’s final frame. But that is very much the idea. The true valor he has been unwittingly marching toward is the courage to move toward what he does not know; to accept what lies beyond the veil between a world he vainly thought he and whatever comes next. The fact that the next chapter for Gawain could be either adulthood of his bloody demise just means that true maturity entails coming to terms with our own endings. Whether it is the end of youth, of ego, or of our very lives is irrelevant. Whatever it is that lies at the conclusion of our journeys, we must reckon with it if we are to ever see ourselves as people worth looking up to. And after all the bravado and action, it is the quiet acceptance of things we can neither control nor change that truly tests our mettle.

The Green Knight is also a Christmas movie (that is, one set during the yuletide season) that actually feels possessed by a kind of Christmas spirit. Like A Christmas Carol, it is a bracing, wintry parable about a human being who must learn a lesson and change for the better. There is some mystery as to whether it is too late for him, but there is a hope that it might not be. The tale is filled with an atmosphere of December. A brisk chill in the air, the smell of food wafting through hallways and alleys, and an ineffable feeling of mystery and magic hanging over everything. And kicking it all off is a group of merry revelers huddled together, drinks in hand, ready to be transported by a story. But instead of these knights hearing an old tale of courage and peril, it is we the audience that are brought in through the screen and given the chance to see an old legend play out in a new and exciting way. A chance to delight in things ethereal and supernatural, ephemeral and inexplicable. An occasion for wide-eyed wonder. But also, like any good Christmas tale, it is an occasion for inward reflection and the fortifying of conscience; to find ourselves in the story. In presenting the tale of a thoughtless mistake, it is implicitly also a story of wanting to do better even if we do not yet understand how. It is a reminder of the goodness and the weakness inside of us and the hope of a fresh chance to commit to the path that is virtuous and true and more often than not arduous. The Green Knight sparks the imagination and warms the belly like a pewter mug full of mulled wine. It is a film I look forward to adding to my own list of Christmas cinema classics. A beautiful and sparkling bauble and a bewitching morality play. A festive thing of beauty to be unpacked and treasured at the end of each too short year.

In 2017, Sean Baker made The Florida Project, my favorite film of that year. It would have been my favorite film of a great many years that it might have come out. In it, he directed genius screen actor Willem Dafoe to the best work of his career, gave us one of the best child performances of all time from Brooklynn Prince, and also got stellar work out of a young woman most famous for being an Instagram influencer. And, following up on the talent he showed with his iPhone-shot 2015 gem Tangerine, he created a luscious hardscrabble world populated with non-professional actors and got them all to give lovely, lived-in performances too. So when I saw that Baker’s next film, Red Rocket, would star former MTV VJ-turned-Scary-Movie-franchise player as a shifty porn star, I chuckled and shrugged my shoulders. Nothing about that premise sounded like the stuff masterpieces are made of and I have never once been impressed by Simon Rex. Nonetheless, I smiled to myself and said, “I guess I’ll be raving about Oscar-worthy Simon Rex a year from now.” It has now been more than a year since I made that half-joking prediction, and I am here to say that it has absolutely come true. Simon Baker has directed a retired C-list actor whose most recent brush with fame was as a comedy rapper named Dirt Nasty to what is arguably the best male performance of 2021. Because fucking of course he has. Because, just as a small part of myself made that prediction in jest, a much larger part of myself knows better than to bet against Sean Baker. But the wondrous thing about a Baker film is the potential it makes you see in everyone he works with too, whether it’s Willem Dafoe or someone with no acting on their resume. And here let me stop making this all about Sean Baker, because I am fully done disrespecting Simon Rex in this review or anywhere else in life. Baker may make miracles possible, but the work Simon Rex has pulled off here is a mighty dramatic and comedic accomplishment that should utterly recontextualize how people see him. It was unsurprisingly too much to hope for that the year’s best leading male performance sneak into an Actor lineup that had room for Javier Bardem in Being the Ricardos. But I can only hope that this does mean the start of new things for Simon Rex. If nothing else, watching him go for broke (even broker than the character he plays) in Baker’s gonzo neorealist satire of hustlers and hucksterism should show all of Hollywood that he has a potential that very few of us had been able to see.

If the suavest con men act like magicians whose hands you never see move, we see every frantic gesture Mikey Sabre makes to advance his various seedy agendas. We see his ploys coming seemingly before he does. For as shifty as he certainly is, his cards are also kind of on the table if only because they keep falling out of his sleeves. If many a great huckster never lets you see them sweat, sweat is really the main and only export Mikey Sabre has to offer. He is a poorer, sadder, meaner con man for poorer, sadder meaner times and there is much more venomous critique in his story than in breezy concoctions like The Sting and the Oceans films. And yet, as pathetic as Mikey is, Baker and Simon Rex just make him an awful lot of fun to watch. What he finally has in common with cinema’s other great, and infinitely more talented con men is that he cannot help but put on a show. Less a suave light show of a man than an erratic bottle rocket that will inevitably set some poor sucker’s lawn on fire (if not multiple suckers), he nonetheless makes for fiendishly captivating viewing. And without wanting to reduce Baker’s lively American satire to pat lessons, one takeaway from Mikey may be that our country has become too undiscerning about the kinds of flim flam men we let bewilder us. Once the hangover of Mikey Sabre wears off, the moral may be that America deserves to go back to a better class of ripoff artist.

Still, Baker does not judge his characters for sometimes letting a two-bit hustler like Mikey walk over them. He understands too well how so many people like them are looking for something nice to hold onto and believe in even if that something rolls into town with nothing but bruises, a ribbed tank top and a suitcase full of red flags. Even in this decidedly acidic skewering of the American Dream (or its porn-based equivalent), Baker finds beauty in blight and commercial sprawl and industrial drabness. He finds something bold and stirring in what people do to give themselves a little bit of hope each day, whether it’s a trip down to the megamall or an afternoon watching court TV shows. He finds love and humor in the people who inhabit these spaces and he loves to pick out splashes of luminous color, wherever he can find it. He loves gaudy hues, but he sees nothing tacky in them. They are, if anything, a shout of defiance in the face of real soul-killing ugliness. It’s this approach that made The Florida Project‘s fleabag motel into its own violet-hued Magic Kingdom, and it makes Red Rocket‘s tale of small town claustrophobia and stalled dreams feel strangely transcendent. It is a film grounded in the real and with an eye toward escape. You can feel how the yellow glow of a donut shop and its frosted wares might feel like a rare and welcome sprinkle of joy ane release for someone like Mikey’s unemployed wife or the numerous refinery workers who start their mornings there. As the stars in Mikey’s eyes become ever larger with the wild prospect that Strawberry will help him make his Hollywood (read: San Fernando Valley) comeback, Baker adds more bright hues via a visit to an amusement park and the loud Madonna Inn pink paint job of Strawberry’s house. Pink. “It’s supposed to make you happy or something,” Strawberry wryly muses. I believe Baker is giving us the first overt thesis statement of his filmography, a purpose behind all the delicate pastels and thrift store Technicolor that make his films so deliciously saturated. Though I don’t think that the nature of all that bright color is as obvious as instant happiness. I don’t think Baker’s sunny color schemes are a clean antidote to the hard living inside his worlds. I don’t think Strawberry or any of the other denizens of this Texas bardo believe that either. At the same time, I also don’t think the lovely hues are meant to be dismissed as superficial or cynical in some Tim Burton kind of way, as if they were only masking hopelessness under a thin sheen. Like art, like any pleasing thing, I think the color in Baker’s universes does what it can for his characters. I think they all take the little snippets of beauty and fun in their sometimes dispiriting lives for every bit of solace it is worth. Which is to say, both a great deal and not nearly enough. The color is supposed to make you happy, which  means you try to seek happiness in whatever patch of cracked pavement it lives in. And that attitude towards life is all the more important when so much around you is gloomy and broken down.

And when you allow hard-hit characters like these to have a little hope and humor and defiance, to laugh and fight on through their troubles, you stave off rote miserablism. You can sidestep the kind of voyeuristic piteousness and punishing bleakness that is the natural hazard of the neorealist genre. It does not mean that sorrow is not sometimes a part of Sean Baker’s films, because they can absolutely knock the wind out of you when they have a mind to. But it feels humane to be with the characters, by their sides instead of watching them with concern from a clinical distance. What allows Red Rocket to work is that the people, mostly women, that Mikey Sabre tries to manipulate or placate or exploit are largely on to him. Sean Baker has created some wild and puzzling characters in his young career, but he really doesn’t do rubes. The women Mikey tries to steer toward his seedy ends do allow him to sakte by with a great deal of sexism and chicanery, but Baker’s characters are always real people with complex inner lives. It is Mikey’s failing not to recognize that. To only hear his own conceited, cocksure, motor-mouthed voice as it drowns out everything else. To pay mind to nobody but himself, narrating his great story in a never-ending stream. To never once consider that he might not be the smartest man in the room or in this small town or in the state of Texas. So the women let this delusional charlatan boast and carry on. Maybe it’s because they are good-hearted enough that they are trying to figure out, just as we are, if Mikey is deserving of love or sympathy or an honest break. Beyond better angels, maybe they also have their own uses for Mikey. Strawberry flabbergasts him when she reveals (in a brilliantly staged scene at the top of a rollercoaster) that she knows all about the porn star past that he was so craftily concealing. The cagey daughter and second-in-command to the matronly pot dealer who begrudgingly employs Mikey sees right through his cheesy patter and Eddie Haskell bullshit from the moment they meet. She lets him make money for her family, but she is also sizing this Svengali up, deciding when it will be time to cut him off at the knees. And MIkey may worm his way back into Lexi’s bed, but he gives her too little credit too. Mikey’s parallels with Donald Trump eventually mean that Baker is willing to give him a little nuance but is unwilling to let him off the hook or let his callous narcissism go unexamined. Yes, Red Rocket tells us, we Americans can be too quick to let a certain kind of self-serving parasite use and demean us. But the cinema of Sean Baker is always full of empathy and love and faith in the essential goodness of people, even if those people can sometimes make disastrously bad decisions. The residents of Sean Baker’s films are strong and fiercely intelligent and determined to survive. The effervescently generous director reminds us that the megalomania of greedy and ethicless men must surely fall in time to the patience, solidarity, and resilience of smart, resourceful women.

Romania, we should hang out more often! I mean that personally, as in I should let more of the darkly puckish Eastern European nation’s beautifully bleak and defiantly subversive cinema into my life. And I mean that societally, as in all of the world’s nations, and maybe Americans in particular, would do well to learn from Romania’s struggles for civil rights over the past century and more. To dive deeply into its fight against oppression ranging from press censorship to anti-intellectualism to a woman’s right to freedom over he own body (unforgettably examined in 2007’s masterfully unnerving black market abortion drama 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days). And I don’t just mean that in the dry academic sense of comparing our own recent authoritarian woes with the unthinkable ones they have endured. I mean we owe it to ourselves to draw something emotionally and spiritually from Romania’s experiences. There is something raucously inspiring about the art they make in response to hypocrisy and oppression. There is nothing treacly or even all that optimistic about it, except that it reveals the heart of a population determined to survive. Films like Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and Radu Jude’s timely cherry bomb Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn aren’t really in the business of looking for silver linings to governmental apathy and national trauma, but they do carry a proud sense of resilience to them. Their power comes from their willingness to pay unvarnished witness to corruption and cruelty and their unwillingness to try to make the best of it. These are things that have happened and, in many cases, are still happening and the only best that can be made of it is to simply tell the truth about it. In a society that has, at various times, tried to silence the artist, imprison its thinkers, and bend reason and science to the whims of the powerful, the Romanians have made cinema that moans as ominously as a death metal song but also holds up a punk rocker’s middle finger to decades and decades of state repression, indifference to poverty, and deeply ingrained misogyny. And I’m not saying that Romania’s history is literally a one-to-one with America (the particularly vicious Ceausescu regime that lasted from 1965 to 1989 started nominally as a socialist state before quickly turning craven, greedy, and despotic) or that our own law enforcement problems are at the same degree as those of the Ceausescu Securitate disappearing and brutalizing dissenters. I’m just saying, when a country has lived through wave after wave of authoritarianism and managed to distill that horrific experience into volumes of aspirationally rebellious, vivaciously angry art, we should consider knocking at their bedroom door (don’t let the Black Flag stickers and the blood red “Go Away” stickers scare you away) and picking their brains. For anyone dealing with their own petty, bullshit demagogues, Romania is plainly a nation worth listening to. They know a thing or two sticking it to cheap, mean-spirited tyrants and they happen to do it in a way that is acidically funny and cool as Hell!

My favorite poet is Edward Arlington Robinson. Most of his works, such as “Eros Turranos” and the very famous, Paul Simon-inspiring “Richard Corey” seem to take place in turn-of-the-century (19th that is) smalltown New England, but he has a great one that takes place in actual England. In this poem, “Ben Jonson Entertains A Man From Stratford”, Robinson imagines the titular 16th century playwright and Shakespeare contemporary meeting one of Shakespeare’s hometown friends in a pub and regaling him with musings about the Bard. One line I’ve always loved is when Jonson speaks of Shakespeare’s testy literary relationship with time and its mysterious, nebulous, inexorable passing. He refers to it as “his monster Time” It’s an observation that has always resonated with me. I also have a kind of rambunctious frenemy relationship with the copet. The very idea of Time feels both fascinating and disquieting, inspiring and harrowing. Time is a thing to be wrestled with and reckoned with and many of my favorite artists have been those who have their own Time monsters to spar with. Linklater stretching time out in Boyhood and the Before trilogy while also weighing the idea that everything might be just one simultaneous instant. Brilliant documentaries like Manakamana and Time (go figure) grappling with how Time moves and is experienced. Tarantino chopping up the temporal order of events in Pulp Fiction for maximum emotional and thematic oomph. Some artists regard it with awe and mystery and some just send Marty McFly whizzing back to the 1950s, turn time into a child’s playtoy and leave the metaphysical debates for the philosophers to figure out. After all, nobody ever said you had to take Time seriously. Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (he prefers the name Joe) is one of those deeply philosophical types, a man who beholds the mysteries of Time with a respectful humbled hush. His films, like his great Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives often exist in a magical realist realm where all things, from ghosts to royal animal spirits to a man who dies every time he goes sleep, feel possible. The nature of existence suddenly unfurls to reveal a world unbeholden to the restraints of our rational senses. His explorations of Time take place in the present moment, from which we observe Time passing, but also hum with the energy of all the Time that passed through this space before we ever got here. In Memoria, we briefly hear a university professor talk about how wood absorbs everything that touches it, and Weerasethakul seems to be positing that maybe all present existence retains the energy of the histories that came before. His latest opus is another bewitching, at times deliberately inexplicable tone poem of history, life, death, sleep and magic.’

Memoria is a film about being unsettled and in that respect it’s the best such film I can name since Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper. What scant conventional narrative there is pales in comparison to the visual and sonic world that Weerasethakul conjures around us. It is a film deeply in tune with sonic texture. The bustle of pedestrian traffic or the low din of a restaurant crowd or the trickle of a Colombian mountain creek may seem banal, but Weerasethakul lets us spend enough time with them that they become entrancing. The film has explicit ideas and themes, but its focus is really about the enormity and bewilderment of existing in this big, mysterious world of ours. The way we do the best we can to process it with the starter pack of senses we are born with and how outmatched those faculties are in the face of everything. I think the times when our senses can barely make sense of things is where the magic lives for Weerasethakul. He means to very gently and lovingly short-circuit our brains. There’s a lovely and unnerving scene early on that focuses on nothing more than a parking lot full of cars at dawn. Then one of their alarms goes off and then other cars join in until they are all crowing their different sirens together. Then, one by one, they stop. Until there is finally silence again. No living thing is there in that parking lot and we do not hear anything before they go off, but something must have caused this chain reaction. Is it Jessica’s phantom noise that we can no longer hear when we aren’t sharing her point of view? Or is it some other force vibrating on some undetectable level? Our senses can’t process it in any direct way, yet the chorus of alarms testifies that something must be there, just beneath the feeble radars of our perceptions. And if our five main senses can be given the slip in this way, are things like reason and understanding not similarly susceptible? A Weerasethakul film aims to shake up our rigid notions of certainty about this world that holds us. He wants us to make room in our rational, scientific brains for the eerie, unexplainable and confounding. And while the result is meant to be disorienting and haunting, I think there is also a touch of something wonderful and sweet in the way he disorients us. His films feel as if they are possessed by friendly ghosts.

Memoria is fascinated by the nexus between the corporeal world and dreaming and it fittingly resembles nothing so much as the act of trying to describe a dream upon waking. There is that wonderful, patient scene where Jessica goes to the sound recording booth and she and Hernan try, step by step, to pinpoint the sound she keeps hearing. It’s a mesmerizing dance between our fantasies and all the tools of science, as Jessica and Hernan take the stuff of feverish imagination and run it through the sorting machine of logic and technology. The beautifully futile attempt to give language to the ineffable majesty of existing. In a Weerasethakul film, unlike most actual dreams, there isn’t really a moment where the strange power of the dreaming dissipates or loses its grip to the real and the rational. If anything, the film has us wake from what felt like real life into a dream. Dreams are real here. Memoria starts with what could be just a hallucination, watches Jessica hold it up to the light of day, and then slowly metamorphosizes into a rumination on how much wonder and bizarre phenomena are right there in front of us. It is a blurring of the lines between life and death, sleeping and waking, until they are one and the same. While waiting in a hospital hallway, a scientist opens up a doorway in front of Jessica. She informs her it is essentially a morgue, a place where bones and remains are being kept and puzzled over. A space for death. “Want to come have a look,” she asks with cheery politeness. Jessica does want to have a look and follows her in. And Joe Weerasethakul is similarly beckoning us in and inviting us to meditate, without any sense of fear or negativity, on life’s natural endpoint. Or maybe endpoints, for some. When the older Hernan awakes from his very long death siesta and looks up at Jessica, she inquires very matter-of-factly what temporarily dying is like. “Not bad,” he casually replies. “I just stopped.” Again, as much as Memoria is the story of Jessica being unsettled by a sensation she cannot explain, its attitude toward the unknown is one of peaceful curiosity and even hushed excitement. What a wonder to be in this beautiful place and to still have so very much to know about it. With as much death as I have felt surrounded by in the last few years, watching Weerasethakul muse on it with such wisdom, calm and childlike wonder felt like a thing I needed. It made for one of 2021’s most soothing cinematic odysseys.

Memoria is a notable example of a film that teaches you to watch it (and using that buzzy film phrase allows me to mark another square on my Cinema Bingo card). You might find parallels to it in the hushed meditations on nature in Terrence Malick’s films of in the long static shots of Malaysian filmmaker Tsai Ming Liang. But Joe Weerasethakul has long developed a rhythm all his own. As he does in that car alarm scene, his hypnotic patient takes suggest a world just under the surface of what we can see and feel. We all (sigh, most of us) believe in things like microscopic bacteria, sound waves that only certain creatures can pick up on, and even a part of our own brains that is virtually inaccessible to our conscious minds most of the time. Weeraethakul’s films whisper tome that if I can believe in those wondrous, hidden phenomena, who knows what else could be happening just beyond the fumbling grasp of my human senses. His films are an invitation to be quite and still but also alert, anticipating what might happen next. It feels like stretching a muscle one rarely uses, and it feels downright subversive in a cultural landscape with no shortage of frenetic entertainments. There is, to use an old cliche, nothing quite like it. If you have the urge to expand your definition of what an adventure film can be, Memoria is a transcendental trek into the wildernesses of Time, life, death, and the human self. And of course, if you ever feel confused or dumbfounded by what this unique cinematic object is up to, you can just look into the paradoxically open and inscrutable face of the incomparable Tilda Swinton. Behold the mixture of awe and disorientation that dances across her eyes. Her expression will tell you that you are entirely right in being puzzled and lost here in Weerasethakul’s haunting Colombian trance state. It will also tell you that it can be bracing fun to not always know where you are going.

Memoria has a lot to say about letting fo and allowing one’s self to be taken on a journey into someone else’s world. It is partly, I think, about the value of opening up to others’ stories. Weerasethakul has certainly done that by crossing the Pacific Ocean to Colombia and making his first film outside of the Asian continent. Tilda Swinton has left the Scottish Quarter of the Milky Way and acted in a film where at least half of the dialogue is in Spanish. And Swinton’s character within the film undertakes a trip outside of her own comfort zone through Bogota, out into the Colombian mountains and beyond in order to catch some part of a story that is much larger than her and older than her and also crucially not really about her. It’s a beautiful and necessary thing to let yourself be touched by stories that are not really about you. It’s as good for warding off narcissism and myopia as oranges are for scurvy. I cannot overstate how vital and soul-expanding it is to fill your life with stories that are not your own. Memoria also quietly and implicitly critiques the way white people, well meaning or not, can plunder non-white experiences for their own benefit in an exploitive way. Jessica’s sister speaks of a tribe her anthropology crew is researching that does not wish to open themselves up, mentally and culturally, for the world to probe. We are blessed to have the chance to take in a multitude of stories and perspectives, but we are also not entitled to every last one of them. Some of the world’s mysteries should be allowed to stay mysteries. It is just one more way that Joe Weerasethakul is teaching his audience to be still, curious, and respectfully receptive to the overlapping buzz of narratives all around us. That is the nature of cinema’s empathy-invoking power. You walk into a dark space and an artist introduces you to some people you’ve never met. Some are real and some are fictions conjured by actors. Either way, you sit quietly and you learn about them, while maybe learning a bit more about yourself too. Sometimes the intent of the story is to inform you and educate you. To shed light on some important subject or to illuminate an idea, so you can walk into the theater lobby with a firmer grasp on existence. Films to bolster our understanding and give us newfound clarity. I appreciate films like that. Still I’m very thankful they are not all like that.

I’ll stand on my soapbox for a minute and say that, as an uncle many times over, I feel that uncles still feel underrepresented in cinema.  It feels particularly tough to find good films about uncles. My people cry out for more stories. I say this as someone who never cared for John Hughes’ comedy Uncle Buck growing up and who had the pleasure of agreeing with his childhood self wholeheartedly after a recent rewatch. And, as I’m one of those snobs who can’t stand Napoleon Dynamite, I have little use for that desperate goofus Uncle Rico as well. I’m very much behind Mary Poppins‘ Uncle Albert and his laughing-on-the-ceiling shenanigans, but that’s a bit role and it’s unclear whose uncle he’s even supposed to be. It’s possible he might just have been bestowed with an honorary Uncle title, which obviously doesn’t really count. We have some very compelling uncles in The Lion King‘s Uncle Scar and Hamlet‘s Uncle Claudius (Scar’s non-lion equivalent), but those are some real unsavory uncles. Certainly not the kind of uncles anyone lucky enough to assume the title of uncle should aspire to become. The same goes for Harry Potter’s miserable Uncle Dursley. And of course, no matter how often he is reincarnated and reimagined, things don’t go ever all that well for Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben. That poor man has died a lot. So where does that leave you ifyou’re looking for an uncle in a major role, who isn’t palpably evil, whose film doesn’t suck, and who isn’t frequently dying on a sidewalk in the name of increased pathos? I feel like I’m currently looking at Uncle Fester (who, to be clear, is not dead even if he would love it if you thought of him that way) standing in a room all by himself. And we love Fester, but that is just not a satisfactory state of avuncular affairs for more than a century of cinema. That’s why Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon hit me on such a personal level and filled me with teary joy for all the uncles out there like me. We’ve waited for this, gentlemen! Behold, a great film that not only has a really good, fully realized uncle as a leading character, but is also very much about the joys of having a nephew or niece. An arty, sweet little dedication to the bond between children and their parents’ brothers. It may seem a small thing for a film to be about, but there’s not such thing as a small thing when a filmmaker approaches it with this much clear-eyed thoughtfulness.

I try my best to be a purist when it comes to reviewing films and when it comes to choosing the worthy group to make my annual top twenty list. By that I mean, I tend to avoid choosing a film just to be novel or omitting a film just because it’s already been listed by a plethora of other critics. My list is meant to commemorate (for my own forgetful future self as much as anyone) what most impacted me that year and I like it to stand as a reliable barometer of that first and foremost. To be frank, I don’t go out of my way looking for controversy in my choices. I often find myself in line with much of the critical consensus and I’m perfectly okay being in that line as long as it reflects my honest impressions about the film year. That said, left field picks and passion picks do end up on my lists semi-occasionally and I won’t deny that I feel a little swell of pride when they do. It’s nice to stand up for films that deserve more love. Critic or not, having personal choices you can fight for is one of the great joys of being a movie lover. In the case of Pablo Larrain’s Princess Diana film Spencer, I may need to walk the word “personal pick” back a bit, for it’s not as if I’m by myself in adoring it. There is a nice, reasonably sized group of us up here on this weird little Kubrickian hilltop. Spencer was by and large a well-reviewed film, even taking home the lion’s share of Best Actress critics prizes for Kristen Stewart. But, despite some good ink, Spencer has still felt like the most unfairly picked on great movie of 2021. General audiences seemed to absolutely loathe it (the same ones that presumably cheered on a dysfunctional carbon copy biopic like Bohemian Rhapsody to earth-shattering box office) and, even among the critical community, it felt just a wee bit polarizing. I am incensed on Spencer‘s behalf that it is not unanimously beloved, but this does give me the thrilling opportunity to defend its honor; to leap onto my white steed and mount a spirited defense on behalf of Pablo Larrain’s inventive, cerebral, and emotional fable (as an opening title informs us) about the late Princess of Wales’ uncomfortable tour of duty as an in-law of England’s Royal Family. It’s a joy to be able to champion its many virtues because a second viewing of Spencer only made it more clear what a special, singular and even playful ode it is to Diana Spencer and what her trials as both a Royal and as arguable the world’s most public figure have to say about modern celebrity worship and how a media-infused society treats the women it purports to idolize.

Being a Pablo Larrain film, Spencer is a vivid rumination on the full gamut of what it means to be a politician, celebrity, or often both. It is what it means to be someone with a place reserved in our history books. The one thing the film is not, to the dismay of many a viewer, is a straightforward, completely factual biopic. While it takes inspiration from a specific Christmas holiday Diana and her sons (William and Harry, who you may have also heard of) spent with the Royal Family, the word “fable” clues us in from the start that Larrain has something more surreal in store. It is what I would call an impressionistic rendering of its subject. Cinematographer Claire Mahon shoots Sandringham House and the surrounding verdant countryside like it’s all trapped inside a haunted Faberge egg. And the sense of regal pomp and circumstance inside these airy spaces add a sense of something eerie and spectral to this winter palace. We start the film with not a soul in sight. Then a cavalcade of armored trucks roll past a dead pheasant on a lonely private road. Nameless soldiers exit the lorries and march into the palatial estate with wooden crates that look like they might contain rifles. But, instead of containing weaponry, we see that they are filled with meats, produce and cheeses for the three days of terribly tasteful Christmas festivities. Then a large company of chefs march in to the darkened kitchens, entering the palace as the soldiers retreat from it. And only after all that ceremony do we finally glimpse our titular princess, driving in her convertible and seen from behind. Her festive plaid sweater feels like the first genuinely warm splash of color after those bracingly chilly opening moments. She has gotten herself lost, almost certainly on purpose, on the way to her antiseptically majestic lodgings. The first time we see the face of Diana Spencer (a spellbinding Kristen Stewart, using all her talents as both an A-list and an endlessly undersung character actor) is in a rural roadside cafe asking directions from a gaggle of working class folk who are all stunned speechless to see her. Once all the royals have arrived at the palatial grounds, we learn why Diana was keen to take her time getting there. She is scrutinized for having the gall to be the subject of tabloid fixation. A taciturn lurker of an ex-soldier (Timothy Spall, terrific as a man so quiet and intensely off-putting that he almost comes off as comical) has been retained by the Queen to both keep an eye on Diana and watch out for anyone who might want to spy on her. A centuries-old tradition calls for guests to weigh themselves on arrival and departure, nominally in the name of fun. And, while she knows her distant husband Prince Charles is having an affair (he presents her with the same pearl necklace he gave to his mistress and Diana is expected to wear them to the Christmas Eve supper), all the gossip about attention-seeking behavior and impropriety swirls about her. Even sequestered away with the people who despise her for attracting flash bulbs, she is still the one who is gawked at. The atmosphere is claustrophobic and disorienting, though her beloved sons are there to lighten the mood and provide her with listening ears and real love. But, sadly for Diana, most of the ears at Sandringham are the ones she feels leaning in to catch the next unorthodox thing she says. And, if it were all not enough to make Christmas tense, she starts imagining that the ghost of Anne Boleyn (another disrespected and martyred British royal) is walking the grounds and speaking to her.

Now, while the average viewer just eager to watch a little bit of down–the-middle lifestyle porn was probably already feeling uncomfortable with the constrictive, frigid Kubrickian atmosphere of Spencer, I have to believe the moment Larrain turned it into an actual ghost story is the moment that basic audience mentally (and in some cases physically) hurried for the exits. In losing a certain kind of general audience, Spencer freed itself up (just as Princess Diana eventually broke free from stifling royal customs) to be a much more rewarding film. For my part, I love how Pablo Larrain makes history feel a little haunted. Films like Spencer and his superb Jackie burrow deep into the recesses of their heroines’ psyches and delve into the subjective experience of being a public figure. And, far from being some arbitrary flourish, what the Anne Boleyn ghost connection drives home is that, for a certain kind of famous woman, being placed in a high position can actually be a terrifying and powerless thing. Even the Queen herself breaks her stony composure for a few almost gentle moments to remind Diana that they all exist as fodder for the public’s consumption. each of them typecast into whatever civic image can best serve the people’s expectations of them. “The only picture that really matters is the one of you they put on the ten-pound note,” Her Royal Majesty confides to her estranged, press-hounded daughter-in-law. “When they take that one you understand that all you are, my dear, is currency.” Poor, doomed women like Anne Boleyn were used and abused by their powerful husbands, disposed of and mistreated, and then fed the popular imagination for centuries afterwards. But what of their inner lives, and what of the stories they would have wanted told? Diana spent her adult years trapped in royal finery and boxed in by photographers, but the one happy thing we know of her story is that, before her death, she was able to free herself from her handlers. Before her road ended in that Paris tunnel, she was able to experience real love and a life of her choosing for a short while. And so, criticizing Spencer for not being a standard issue prestige film about the finer points of life as a Royal feels cruelly ironic to me. The film seems to argue that Diana Spencer fought to leave that lonely place. She took great, courageous pains to thwart convention and escape that repressive and sterile way of life, and in doing so she authored her own story as something more than just popular currency. She earned the right to have her story be more than just some coffee table book of behind-the-scenes palace intrigue. However one may feel about Spencer‘s wildest liberties and flights of fancy, from ghost Queens to pearl-eating to Polanski-evoking fever dream outbursts, this subjective, impressionistic take sure feels more like the story Diana deserves.

This also is a major reason that Kristen Stewart is such a perfect choice for the role, before we even touch the perfect blend of enigmatic exteriority and outspoken grace she brings to the banquet table. Stewart comes to this role with a metatextual understanding about what it means to be an object for the popular culture; a precious stone to be handled, praised, ogled, valued and devalued. She has all those years of being under her own kind of microscope, from child star to rising indie actor to disrespected Twilight ingenue to vilified other woman to brilliant character actor finally penning her own cinematic legacy. Stewart became the first American to win the Cesar (France’s answer to the Oscar) some years back for her revelatory work in Olivier Assayas’ The Clouds of Sils Maria. The big American awards body shunned her from even getting a nomination, as they did for her similarly great Assayas follow-up Personal Shopper. American audiences have placed Kristen Stewart on some of the highest pedestals and just as often pelted her with rotten fruit while she was up there. She surely knows something of not just the trappings of fame, but the powerlessness and disrespect that can come with it. She secured her first-ever Academy Awards nomination not two months ago for Spencer, and it certainly seemed like she had to fight tooth and nail to even have the Oscars notice that. None of Spencer‘s other great performers (Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins’ lovely work as her dresser and childhood friend), its splendid crafts (Claire Mahon’s icy kaleidoscope camerawork; Jonny Greenwood’s majestically ghostly score; Jacqueline Durran’s elegantly arresting costumes), or Pablo Larrain’s beautifully controlled direction were considered worthy. Stewart is perfect for the part because Spencer is a film all about what it feels like to be somehow both idolized and demeaned at the same time. To have the eyes of the masses utterly consume you for pleasure and then insult you afterwards. And she brings to the role both psychological realism and a haute couture model’s sense of the persona Diana projected. She has a dancer’s knack for rendering grand, glossy emotions in subtle, physical ways. I think of how difficult it must have been to completely let us into the headspace of this person while also nailing all the iconic exterior pop of the most photographed individual in the world. It demanded an actor with a character actor’s emotional complexity and an Angelina Jolie-level sense of how to captivate the camera one still image at a time. Off the top of my head, I can name maybe three current actors capable of doing both those jobs at the very highest levels. They are Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron, and the great Kristen Stewart.

Like those performers, Spencer‘s perfection lies in being beautiful and iconic and also upsetting the expectations that come with wearing that heavy icon’s crown. It’s a pet theme for Pablo Larrain too, investigating the double-edged word of image and of historical scrutiny; how the broader society looks at its idols and how those idols respond to the knowledge that society is trying to make sense of them and define them. Jackie argues that Jacqueline Kennedy very shrewdly used the public fascination with her and with the assassination of her husband and spun it to the nation’s advantage by giving them a moving moment of historical pageantry. Spencer‘s Diana is different. She does not want to dance with history, but to dance with herself. She knows she will forever be under the microscope of the popular eye, but she refuses to accept it quietly, much to the ongoing consternation and embarrassment of her controlling, stiff upper lip in-laws. She is thwarted at every turn by the ever-seeing gaze of her new family and the Paparazzi (the former stitch up Diana’s bedroom curtains for fear of the latter) and she is corralled in by the nagging feeling that anything she says or does will be framed as either an acquiescence to the Royals’ arbitrary customs or as further proof that she really is an attention-seeking exhibitionist. And what Diana wanted, the film poses, was to feel something like freedom. I’m not trying to argue that one cannot take Spencer to task for being indulgent, wildly fictionalized, and sometimes even campy (to its great benefit in my opinion). But all of that is what makes Spencer feel like such a liberating, melancholically heartfelt dedication to Diana and to her her legacy as a person who chafed at the societal corsets that tried to hem her in. Larrain’s “fable of a true tragedy” is an ode to Diana as the wild English colt that no paddock could contain. There’s a montage of wordless moments in the last third of Spencer that consist of Diana dancing. Posing. Prancing, Pirouetting and twirling through finely furnished sitting rooms and marbled halls. Puckishly swatting at lacey curtains and merrily thumbing her nose at stately decorum. It is the most indulgent and purely interpretive scene in the film and it is also quite easily one of my favorite cinematic moments of 2021. In all its bratty, fed- up glory, it is the perfect affront to the Royal Family and mainstream audiences alike. Don’t let the ornate vases and velvet cushions fool you. Spencer is a silly, raucous punk song ringing through the prim halls of power and rattling all the tea trays. And it’s okay if it is not entirely to your personal taste. With all due respect, sir or madam, this one is not, strictly speaking, for you. It’s for Diana.

Of course, who really knows what the Princess of Wales would have made of Pablo Larrain’s beautiful, befuddling paradox of a film? I think he’d be the first to admit that it’s not so much an attempt to photorealistically render Diana Spencer. Photographs and tell-all exposes were probably the things she was most sick of, outside of her coldly philandering husband. If anything, the film is a rebuke to the idea that anyone could knows Diana better than Diana herself. For all the voyeurism she endured, her thoughts were her own, and yet history still needs to have its say on the matter. It always does. And so, in addition to being a raucous salute to Diana’s flight from rigid customs and a loveless family situation, Pablo Larrain is also using Spencer to punk history itself. He is critiquing the idea that we can cleanly tell anyone’s story no matter how much time they might spend in the public eye. In a late scene, Diana muses on how many British rulers are memorialized with a single word (William the Conqueror and such) to try to succinctly convey a sense of them. All of a person’s traits and faults and contradictions and personality boiled down into one last pudding for the easy consumption of future generations. The past melted down into one currency. And, as silly as condensing a living human being into a single adjective obviously is, I’ll play along for a moment. If Diana is to be commemorated with a word, what is it? Based on Larrain’s fault, I propose Diana the Defiant. Diana who would not be hemmed in by a pearl necklace or by a miserable marriage. Diana who, when the time came for them to compose her portrait, would not sit still. In her honor, Pablo Larrain has created one characteristically uninhibited work of art to hang in History’s stuffy sitting room. A spirited feminist whoop, from its ghostly freakouts to its flippantly discordant pop song ending. In a hall of solemn biopic busts, it’s a treat to have one with color in its cheeks and a self-winking sneer in its lip.

Everyone take a bite of your nearest mutton leg (or vegetarian alternative), hoist a pewter mug full of mead, and roar out a mighty toast to the Year of Our Lord 2021, one of the greatest on record for Medieval Cinema! I’ve never been automatically in the tankard for tales of ye olden days, heavy with sword fights and knights and kings. If I’m being honest with myself, most of the Robin Hoods not featuring photogenic foxes or Mel Brooks songs have been non-starters for me and, like many, I had consumed my fill of Game of Thrones years before it ended. But when a good Middle Ages-adjacent tale works it works, and 2021 gave us a few special films to stir up the raucous warrior blood in the Medieval film genre. Ridley Scott gave us a wickedly modern skewering of fragile masculinity in The Last Duel and David Lowery may have made the best Arthurian movie of all time with The Green Knight. And, surprising nobody who has seen the delicious texture and tone he has brought to period pieces like True Grit, Inside Llewyn Davis, Barton Fink, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Miller’s Crossing, Joel Coen gave us another grippingly nuanced and inventive look into bygone times with The Tragedy of Macbeth. He has given us a reading of Shakespeare’s violently engaging masterwork that howls and moans with all the maniacally ominous glee of a crackling ghost story. A bloody and foreboding yarn so cynical and bleak that you almost feel elated by its sinister, primeval majesty. Both The Green Knight and Coen’s Macbeth aim to make us feel unsettled from the first seconds and in similar ways; a raspy feminine voice croaks archaic poetry at us from offscreen in a way that both repels us and invites us to lean forward to enjoy the old school pleasure of a dark, dangerous story. Both got right under my skin and made me light up like a little kid huddling by a campfire. Apparently Old World sagas recounted with heaping helpings of uncanny dread is a pleasure center I had forgotten I had, and one I hope to have engaged more in the near future. As I have noted before, 2021 gave a renewed good name to the period piece by taking journeys into history that were both aesthetically engaging and also worked with feverish imagination to connect those stories, costumed in period garb, to the present day. And very few films did a better job tying a centuries-old tale to the here and now than Joe Coen’s masterful voyage into Shakespearean calamity.

With some minor abridgements, The Tragedy of Macbeth is largely the same deliciously fatalistic “Scottish play” many of us probably first came across in high school. MacBeth (a terrific Denzel Washington, as weary and as ill-tempered as an old grizzly bear) is a great warrior and loyal subject of King Duncan. At the story’s beginning, he is fighting off the last of his leader’s enemies in a great war. For his valor, he is to be named the Thane (a land-holding nobleman) of Cawdor. On his way to receive his promotion, however, he and his war buddy Banquo come across three old “weird sisters (Coen’s rendition proposes the could also just be 3 parts of one troubled old woman’s Gollum-like personality). The witchy trio present Macbeth with the first of several prophecies: he shall hereafter become King of Scotland. This oracle gets into Macbeth’s head so thoroughly that the wine of his new title later that evening (King Duncan proclaims that his son Malcolm will be Scotland’s next ruler) turns to vinegar in his mouth. Instead of serving as the nice gold watch for decades of loyal service to the Crown, Macbeth now regards it as a crushing rejection.. Macbeth treks home to Castle Dunsinane and Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand, having a lot of fun with her characteristically brusque take on the role) with blood-thirsty and bitter thoughts already stewing in his mind. King Duncan will soon be visiting them in their castle and their disappointment and desperation plants a vicious seed in their minds: kill King Duncan and claim the throne for themselves. And once that treacherous deed is done, the remaining bulk of the story is all the stuff of legendary falling action. Blood stains that won’t wash out. Frame jobs and feuding. A cauldron bubbling with more noxious prophecy to poison our protagonists last vestiges of reason. A forest marching to in unison against a fortress. It’s a bitter and senseless tale that, unlike Macbeth’s late assessment of his own sorry plight, signifies quite a lot. Few stories written have such a distressingly resigned stance on man’s cannibalistic urges toward his own species and the ways that power leads human beings to drunkenly lurch in the direction of their own undoing. Macbeth was not the first bloody game of thrones written, but it has a claim to being among the finest to ever muse on man’s cruel efforts to climb to the top of the heap, even when that heap turns out to be a pile of corpses.

The film is shot in black and white but, Bruno Delbonnel’s gob-smackingly godly, German Expressionism-evoking cinematography makes it all looks like pure gold. To watch The Tragedy of Macbeth is to see Joel Coen plugging his own distinct sensibilities and thematic obsessions into this classic story. I found myself delighted and only a little bit surprised to discover that the Coen touch is an absolutely perfect fit for Shakespeare’s cynical saga of power. In the Coen Brothers’ first film and masterpiece, Blood Simple, one character warns another that it is no simple thing to kill a person. He is speaking in that instance of making sure the job is done, lest your poor victim survive to turn the crosshairs back onto you. But the thorniness of causing another’s death only begins there. A Host of stories from Macbeth to Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart to myriad other Coen films remind and caution us (we vicarious armchair murderers) that sometimes, even when the job is done, it’s not really done. Our trail of guilt and incrimination does not go cold just because the body does. What is Lady Macbeth’s eternal “out, damned spot!” soliloquy if not the most famous example of a character learning too late the pesky complications of taking a human life. For most, the cost of killing is so psychically consuming that self-justification becomes a Sisyphean task; one that takes up the rest of our pitiful hours.. Lady Macbeth is understandably remembered as a coldly calculating schemer, but Coen’s direction and Frances McDormand able performance help us to remember the even more tragic shred of a person she becomes in the wake of her vile act. She has thrown herself, a frail and shivering child, into a violent brawl with her own hulking conscience and it only takes a matter of hours for the beast to leave her broken and lifeless inside the fortified walls of her own castle. And, while his wife is rapidly losing a duel with her own sense of self, King Macbeth is locked in an outward battle to protect himself from the immediate consequences of murder. What that means is he must commit even more murder, in a futile race to justify himself and insulate himself from the bloody evidence pointing toward his cursed house. By the time the Weird Sisters reenter the scene to fill his head with more suffocating swamp gas, it is already far too late for his attempt at self-cleasning to succeed. The seeds of his vice are already blowing out across the fields of Scotland. Even the bloody trees know what he’s done. And they’re coming to see him about it.

The hardest thing about a good Macbeth to my mind is that both Macbeths are, on their face, despicable. The first time I witnessed Shakespeare’s Scottish play read out loud by my Junior year Honors English class, I felt something was missing. No offense to us. I remember enjoying the morbid spectacle of it all, the twisty and sinister journey of mayhem and bloodshed. But it was also a nasty piece of work and it felt pretty easy to keep a distance from the sorrow of the play because the Macbeths were such plainly greedy, unredeemable sociopaths. One can picture a particularly basic 1500s attendee of the Globe Theater walking out and saying, “Gee, I thought the writing was good but Macbeth is such an unlikable person. Why should I care what happens to him?” Well, Joel Coen is an awe-inspiring wizard at getting us to care about some of the most distasteful, unpleasant characters in all of fiction. Fargo‘s Jerry Lundegaard is an absolute monster by the end, but it feels cruel to call him unlikable per se. He is broken, sad, impotent, and dumb. But our hearts also ache for him. What makes a plan-gone-wrong story so compelling in Joel Coen’s hands is how he manages to bring us into the stunted hearts and minds of some very amoral and short-sighted people; at regarding them with a critically honest kind of compassion. On that note, I will never have much patience for the school of thought that the Coens cruelly torture their characters. On the contrary, I think they torture them with the utmost empathy and insight. We are always given the chance to relate to these people up to a point. I will here echo the critics applauding Coen’s shrewd decision to make the Macbeths an older childless couple. We would never condone what the Macbeths do. Macbeth murders a dear, old friend for the sake of a title. But we are meant to feel their sense of panic and to see their jagged little wheels spinning. We see they, like a Jerry Lundegaard or a Llewyn Davis are nearing the back half of their lives with little to show for it. Like Llewyn Davis’s box of unsold records that he must now carry with him, whatever grand dreams the Macbeths have harbored for the future have turned to burdens over the dissatisfied years. I may not know much about what an aging Scottish general feels when he is passed over for the promotion that was supposed to give his life meaning, but I can see Macabeth’s face fall when Duncan passes the monarchy instead to his son. And I can see the pain in Lady Macbeths drawn face; maybe even the painful memory of a failed attempt at bearing children. And these people are monsters, make no mistake about it. But a Coen monster is a very human monster. To put a finer point on it, it often seems to be an overabundance of the human that brings the monster out in them. And in letting the Macbeths’ low-rent disappointment sink in before the dagger plungers into Duncan’s chest, Coen ears the right to truly call his Macbeth a tragedy.

Of course, some time between the murder of King Duncan’s bodyguards and the moment one of Macbeth’s own soldiers is throwing a rival’s child from the second story of a burning house, we stop feeling pity for the Macbeths. Dismay and revulsion take over, for King Macbeth is a revolting human being. By the time he reaches the end of his bloody, savage road and the oak leaves of Birnham Wood are blowing through Dunsinane’s cavernous halls, he has gone from a pathetic, manipulated monster to a vain and entitled one. Emboldened in the belief that he cannot be taken down, he has galloped well past the likes of a haphazard bringer of death and sadness like Jerry Lundegaard and is now discussing murder tactics with the likes of an Anton Chirgurh. And when I made note of that gruesome metamorphosis on my first viewing, that was the moment I concluded that Joel Coen had made another work of genius. (Just as an aside, if The Tragedy of Macbeth is to be labeled a minor Coen film, then the time is past due to find newer and more descriptive ways of discussing those films that happen to only rank in the back half of a near-perfect ouevre.) Coen had picked up a centuries-old play and seen two separate Coen archetypes in one man: the sad sack schemer down on his luck and the hellbent avatar of carnage. Jerry and Anton, there in the heart of one classic villain. He had found in Shakespeare’s blood-soaked saga a very Coenesque story of how men are emasculated by a desire for money and respect, how they cry out to be heard and recognized as serious men, how they overestimate their faculties and conspire to rise above their stations, and how all that impotent upward striving can so often turn us into bad men. Into doomed, damned and dead men.

And being damned and forsaken by God (or the howling void that marks the absence of God, whatever the case may be) might just be the most Coenesque element that Shakespeare’s play has to offer. I thought back on the Coens’ A Serious Man protagonist and Gob stand-in, Larry Gopnik, trying mightily and sincerely to find God’s presence out in the world, fearing that there may not be a Creator to witness his ordeals or hear his pleas, and eventually learning there could be worse things out there than an indifferent and godless Universe. By the time poor, put-upon Larry is staring down a cancer diagnosis and his only son is staring up into the funnel of a tornado, Coen has posed the hypothesis that we should maybe treat the search for God with the same guarded caution as the search for extraterrestrial life. That is to say, if we assume a higher power exists, can humans actually assume that said power cares about human life or even feels positively predisposed to humankind? Must God necessarily be like the cute, grey, almond eyed aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or could he not just as easily be like the xenomorphs of Aliens? In Macbeth, the would-be King starts the play thinking he’s found a miracle; that the spiritual world has pierced the veil between Heaven and Earth to bestow a glorious, regal destiny upon him. He believes he is hearing a voice, though Shakespeare, ever ambiguous and open to interpretation, never settles whether that voice comes from God, a senile or malevolent old woman, the Devil, or the demons in Macbeth’s fragile head. The only thing of certainty is what happens to the Macbeths, whether you believe the cosmos leads them astray or, like so many greedy and frail dream-chasers before them, they just doom themselves. In a Joel Coen drama, the quest for gold and power tends to end poorly no matter what logic is guiding or justifying the quest. And both Divine Arithmetic and human calculation have an uncanny way of adding up to similarly dismaying sums.

The ascendance of Persian writer-director Asghar Farhadi over the last ten years, from hot upstart to reliable Oscar contender (he has two gold men for Foreign Language Film already) has been so steady that it almost feels like we cinephiles may already take him for granted. By the time he was accepting his second Academy Award for The Salesman in 2016, you could detect a whiff of the inevitable and the unhip to it; the sense that the Oscars were now just fully in the tank for Farhadi. As if he were Ron Howard, as opposed to one of cinema’s most exciting and consistently thoughtful chroniclers of human nature. We have the luxury of living in a world where an Asghar Farhadi film is a presumable Oscar heatseeker and, predictability aside, we’re all much the better for it. And, if there is a reason why a director with the prickly, nuanced humanism of a Persian Kenneth Lonergan has been so readily embraced even by the rarely prickly Oscars, it’s that there is something kind of undeniable about his films. You can feel it when you watch one. There is just something intuitively powerful and right about how candidly and potently he captures living, breathing human beings. Anecdotally, I remember speaking to a handful of friends in 2011, not long after A Separation had come out, and being quietly floored to find that they had sought out the film. None of them were what I’d call ravenous arthouse fans and I was rather surprised that an intricately plotted, densely verbal Iranian divorce drama had found its way to them. Not only had they seen it, they were ecstatic and effusive about it. And when I went to rewatch it, it made sense why they would be. Yes, the film was difficult in its subject matter and the simmering intensity of the characters’ plights, but the stuff of classic, old-school drama was right there on the screen. When you watch an Asghar Farhadi film unfold (and few directors working today are better at painstakingly unfolding a story), you get that know-it-when-you-see-it tingle. They required a modicum of patience, but they reward that patience with stories of human miscommunication and striving and faltering and trying to do better that just connect. They tap into something universal and relatable. I think what is spell-binding is how Asghar Farhadi can take stories happening in the very specific cultural and political environment of modern Iran, posit very pointed insights about Persian society, and also transcend that cultural setting to find themes that are powerful and timeless.

Before A Hero‘s poignant and eloquent themes have been unpacked, however, Asghar Farhadi is already doing what he may do better than anyone working: building himself a beautiful plot. The triumph of the film is in how it weaves together an intricate pattern of human actions and consequences that organically feed off one another in ways that feel honest and believable. This plot concerns Rahim (phenomenally played by Amir Jadidi), a recently divorced single father in the city of Shiraz. Rahim has just been released from debtor’s prison for a weekend furlough. While out, he has grand plans to make good with the man who had him jailed, a creditor who he owes 75,000 rial. His idea is to sell some gold coins that his girlfriend discovered at a bus stop to pay off all of his debt. However, a calculation issue at the local pawn shop leads Rahim to realize that he will not be able to pay his bitter debtholder back entirely. Instead, he decides to take the road of piety and leaves the coins with the police in hopes that they can be returned to the person who misplaced them. Instead of leaving his cell phone as a contact number, he leaves the number of his prison. As a result, when the coins are recovered (by a grateful woman who had hoped to use them to gain some financial independence from her domineering husband), news of Rahim’s good deed ends up reaching the prison. The warden and staff are all quite inspired by Rahim’s virtuous act, particularly because Rahim could have used the coins to help repay part of his debt. The prison, which has its own public relations reasons for wanting to publicize Rahim’s kindness, calls a news affiliate to report on the story and Rahim suddenly finds himself out of jail and embraced as a national celebrity. A charity is collecting to help pay the rest of his debt, a cushy government job offer is in the works, his concerned sister and brother-in-law have regained respect for him, and he seems to be in the good graces of just about every man, woman and child in Iran. One notable exception is Bahram (an excellent Mohsen Tanabandeh), the man he owes the money to and also brother to Rahim’s ex-wife. This stern man is openly suspicious that Rahim is not acting openly. It’s partly the byproduct of their soured business relationship (the opportunity went under, though Rahim insists he was not at fault) and Bahram’s feelings of vicarious resentment on behalf of his sister. But we sense that, his temper and bias against Rahim aside, Bahram is not entirely wrong in his skepticism. Farhadi films are patient and unfailingly observant; they do not tune any information out, regardless of which character is presenting  it. A formulaically plotted version of this story might posit Bahram as nothing more than an antagonistic obstacle to Rahim’s freedom, but A Hero chafes against the unfairness of that notion.  After all, Bahram may look like the ill-tempered creditor, but wasn’t he originally just a generous man who took on debt to help his former brother-in-law and then suffered for it when everything fell apart? Farhadi films remind us that the dramatic notion of a single protagonist is something of a deception because everyone is the protagonist of their own story. If you’ve seen one of Farhadi’s marvelous films, you know that any clear-cut idea of heroes and villains has no place in them. Any bold lines between characters we are meant to sympathize with and ones we are meant to resent are bound to get blurred in short order.

And, while Farhadi is gradually allowing flecks of mud to spatter onto Rahim’s saintly Samaritan story, he is also adding nuanced plot complications. While Rahim has most of the money he needs to settle his debt, he will still need the job the charity is setting him up with to make the last of the payments. But when the hiring manager asks to cross-check Rahim’s story with the woman he allegedly returned the gold to, the narrative starts to fray. Because Rahim wasn’t the one to meet the woman (his sister met her along with Rahim’s developmentally disabled son), and the woman left no telephone number, which of course could look suspicious. Maybe she did that for her own secrecy (we know that she feared her husband finding out about the coins) or maybe Rahim put together an act of kindness to repair his own sullied reputation. And now maybe Rahim’s decision to have the woman call the prison looks a little more like a calculated act of grandstanding for his own gain. And while this detailed array of moving parts is coming together, at first to our protagonist’s benefit and then just as quickly against him, Farhadi’s characters are making mistakes. As people do. Mistrusting each other and accusing each other and getting in their own way. The wonder of an elaborate Farhadi plot is that there is never a feeling of contrivance. It’s all the seemingly natural result of fallible human behavior; sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes borne of petty emotions, but always recognizably human. It is a talent I stand utterly in awe of. The ability to turn the wheel of plot effortlessly so that one decision seamlessly brings us to the next, and yet to be in control of that seemingly invisible process. To make it seem like your film is off-roading away from any kind of pre-scripted path and then to arrive somewhere so powerful and revealing that you can’t help wondering if the writer really did end up right where they intended to go after all.

It’s not just A Hero‘s eventual resolution, both sweetly tender and heartbreakingly tough, that resonates. As the sleek engine of its script design purrs along through each bracing twist and turn, Farhadi finds windows into humanity and psychology and morality the whole way. Among other things, A Hero is one of the greatest films I’ve seen about overnight celebrity and the social media age. Think of how leadenly and obviously a great many films have tried to shoehorn Facebook and Twitter into their plots over the years (look at Don’t Look Up‘s inscrutable, cursed boomer mishmash of Internet montages for the latest example) and then marvel not only at how organically the phenomena of tweets and viral videos shape A Hero‘s plot, but also how much of the viral age is at the core of what Farhadi’s film is grasping toward. Namely, Farhadi wants to examine the way we rush to adjust our perceptions of a person’s character in response to a constant, often contradictory torrent of information. Even the film’s simple title, A Hero, feels like a sardonic smirk at the fallacy of trying to categorize things too neatly. It’s a dunk on the fallacy that complex human beings can be cleanly grouped under simple archetypes. As uncharitable as he seems, Bahran is right about one thing: Rahim’s overnight development into a national good guy inevitably paints Bahran as the miserly asshole. And neither label comes close to telling the real story of who they are. The film sees in social media not just new ways of processing facts and stories but the prevalence of some ancient human habits, like vanity and the need to sculpt a public-facing image for ourselves. To design a version of ourselves that others can accept and that we can life with. Rahim, the prison, and even the charity are all forced to grapple with the omnipresence of social media and all of their decisions and conundrums are the product of living in an age where our decisions reverberate far beyond their immediate effects. Every self-benefiting choice that a character wants to present as completely noble has its layers of self-interest stripped bare and revealed. And even those choices that may have been done without selfish reasoning have their purity called into question. It is the inherent result of living in a world so public that scrutiny is widespread and so interconnected that our actions cannot help but collide and commingle with the actions of others. And the collision of human behavior may be the most Farhadian theme there is.

That sense of the epic tangle of humanity is what allows Asghar Farhadi to sculpt this explicitly 21st century parable into something that could also feel at home in the plays of Chekov or on some ancient Greek stage. There is a curious scene in the opening minutes of A Hero, just after Rahim has been temporarily released. He goes to visit his brother-in-law at work to propose the idea of paying off his debt. His brother-in-law happens to do archaeological preservation at an ancient tomb, the massive and awe-inspiring Naqsh-e Rostam. His current place of work happens to be some hundred feet above the ground and Rahim must makes his way up a wooden scaffold erected against the wall of this lofty historical wonder. This ancient site doesn’t affect the rest of the film in any way. Rahim’s brother-in-law could just as easily have worked in an office park or a laboratory or a school. But Asghar Farhadi chooses to set this scene here, to include this ancient glimpse of a civilization long past. This has the effect of making us think of all the people who were here before. People who occupied this same city, same ground and same space for centuries and centuries before the characters of A Hero were even born. And it made me reflect on how some of those ancient humans might well have had stories fundamentally similar to Rahim’s. People in jail. Someone who can’t catch up with her debts. A man trying to patch together his broken reputation. A Samaritan. A saint. A con man. Walking the streets of Shiraz separate from each other or all inside the heart of a single citizen. That briefly glimpsed, seemingly extraneous tomb may be Asghar Farhadi calling his shot. He’s telling us that he is striving to make something that is timeless, its deep themes so rooted in the human condition as to be transplantable to any age in human history. Maybe I’m being hyperbolic by saying you could reimagine a Farhadi drama at any point in human history, the same way people do with Shakespearean plays. But also, maybe the comparison is not an undeserving one. Both can be simultaneously true. Asghar Farhadi would certainly approve of that notion.

After all its moral complexities have been meditated on and chewed over, what lies at the heart of A Hero is a story about the difficulty of trying to do the right thing. One of the oldest metaphors for a life lived virtuously is the straight and narrow path, but Farhadi’s films critique that image. In Farhadi’s rich, multi-faceted moral universes, the right thing seems much less straightforward.  In A Hero‘s first act, Rahim thinks he has found an easy way to free himself from jail; a way to start a new life with his loving girlfriend and to reunited with his son. What his ordeal teaches him, in ways both harsh and true, is that the truly virtuous path takes a lot of discipline and self-sacrifice. It will likely mean that Rahim cannot have the freedom he thought he was so close to gaining just yet. To many eyes, the ending of A Hero might feel merciless, but I also found a small sliver of hope to it. Rahim does end the film in a better place, even if it is not as ideal a position as the one he thought he could maneuver his way into. But he does have people who love him and he finds a new sense of ownership over his own past mistakes and the ways that he can do better in the future. And there is a kind of freedom in that realization that we can only hope will sustain him until he finds the more overt, physical freedom that he wants. The pathway to redemption he thought he had found may have been a mirage. But that does not mean that the real pathway to a better life does not exist.

It’s almost hard to believe that we’re still just a humble seven years into the ascendance of Tessa Thompson. I remember going out on a date with my now-wife in 2014. The screening was at Oakland’s New Parkway Theater, and the film was director Justin Simien’s incisively funny debut satire Dear White People. I thought it was very good and my wife just about loved it. The Sundance splash was maybe too shaggy and small-scale to make a dent with many awards bodies, outside of some scattered and deserving Breakthrough and First Feature wins. But, even knowing that it would not come near Oscar, we felt buzzy about it walking out onto the street. What lingered with me was the sheer promise I had seen on screen that night. Justin Simien’s potential as a writer and director, for one. But even more instantly, lightning-in-a-bottle undeniable was the performance by Tessa Thompson. Beyond the dynamite performance, I felt like I had just come face to face with a real presence; a charismatic force. Thompson had been around for five years prior, unbeknownst to me, appearing in some well-regarded indie films and a Tyler Perry movie. But Dear White People was the moment her star arrived fully formed, and the seven-and-change years since then have been all about Tessa Thompson repeating her name ever louder for those in the back. Her impressive body of work already includes a role in acclaimed MLK drama Selma, HBO’s Westworld, and Alex Garland’s excellent science fiction horror tone poem Annihilation. She is subtle and spirited in all of those. Her early splashes with auteurs like Ava DuVernay and Ryan Coogler earned her a high placement within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (as Valkyrie), now a calling card for a great many respected screen actors. Above all that are three soulful, electrifyingly intelligent pieces of Oscar-caliber acting (never mind that the Academy tripped over its pigeon-toed clown feet to not honor any of them), the crown jewels in her tiara. The first two were tremendous supporting turns in Coogler’s Creed and in Boots Riley’s hilariously incendiary capitalism takedown Sorry To Bother You. Thompson is a great supporting player, but her magnificently complex lead work this year in Rebecca Hall’s debut film Passing should be a reminder that she is absolutely made to carry films, and great ones at that. The more succinct way to put it is that Tessa Thompson is a damned star. It takes a special kind of talent to give a performance this full of quiet grace notes while also giving it the potent, Hollywood-ready charge of a true A-lister to be.

But Passing is not all about Tessa Thompson. Let’s salute another of its brilliant female talents for a minute. Among its numerous qualities, 2021 will be remembered for some special debuts by actors turned directors. Joss Whedon’s career is effectively dead now, but one of his talented regular actors, Fran Kranz, stepped behind the camera to direct some terrific performances in the slightly heavy-handed Mass. And two extremely talented female actors, Maggie Gyllenhall and Rebecca Hall, surpassed all expectations with The Lost Daughter and Passing, respectively. Passing, based on Nella Larsen’s novel of the same name is the story of Irene Redfield, a comfortably affluent black woman living in New York City in the 1920s. On a sweltering day in the city, Irene walks into a fancy tearoom to escape the heat. The relatively light-skinned Irene hides most of her head beneath a lacey white hat. We can sense that she is moving furtively, discreetly through these spaces full of wealthy whites, not with any kind of shame but with full consciousness of the early 20th America she occupies. She does not draw attention to herself. Suddenly, she is not the only person of color sharing this tearoom. Another pale-skinned black woman, this one with blonde hair, is looking at her from the next table. She asks if they know each other. When Irene stammers and balks at the question, the woman laughs heartily and says, “Of course I know you, Reeny.” She reveals that she is Clare Gardner, a friend from childhood. They begin to catch up about life;  about their marriages. Irene is married to a black doctor in Harlem (very well-played by Moonlight‘s Andre Holland) and Clare is married to a white Chicago banker (Alexander Skarsgard, oily and ever so slightly menacing in just his handful of moments onscreen). Then Irene asks a very pointed question: “Does he know?” Clare shakes her head almost apologetically. Her life of relative privilege and happiness has meant hiding her existence as a black woman from her openly racist husband and passing as white. This makes Irene visibly uncomfortable, but she endures a much ruder shock when Clare’s husband walks into the room. He reveals that his pet name for Clare is Nig. Then he informs Irene, who he does not recognize as black, that Clare shares his uninformed hatred for black people. Irene returns shaken to her comfortable Harlem life, raising children and coordinating glitzy galas and charity events for the New York City Negro League. She tries to ignore the impassioned apology letters that arrive from Clare over the following weeks (though she snaps to Clare’s defense when her husband refers to Clare as crazy). But one day, Clare shows up in the flesh in Irene’s doorway. Little by little, they become part of each other’s lives again, though the uncomfortable nature of how Clare is living her life never really goes away for Irene. Irene is proudly and openly black and yet she has her own  ways of hiding her blackness or at least limiting it to certain forums. She is hesitant to discuss the more openly disgusting realities of American racism in front of her children, which rankles her husband. Passing is a gorgeous character study of two black women with very different approaches to moving through the insidious spaces of 1920s America, and how they both embrace one another and come into conflict. And it is a glimpse of an often idealized time in the nation’s history, seen through a lens of blackness that is all too rarely applied to it in popular American fiction.

One of the most refreshing qualities Passing has is that, in marrying pristine period trappings with a rich and nuanced story, it gives me the very happy opportunity to really wrap my arms around a period piece. It’s a chance that doesn’t come around as often as I’d like. Sometimes I’ll hear the more basic, prestige bait-taking movie-goer in my head (he had his heyday in the early 2000s and boy did he ever go in for Finding Neverland) accuse me of hateful bias toward all things period-based. Of looking at any lushly recreated period drama that comes along and dismissing it out of hand on the basis of historical handsomeness alone. Films like Inside Llewyn Davis, Terrence Davies’ Sunset Song, The Favourite, and If Beale Street Could Talk (among many others) give me the chance to set the record straight on my alleged period piece aversion. They give me proof that I am not automatically bound to be unmoved by historical recreations; to treat every period piece with the same indifference I feel for middlebrow prestige entries like The King’s Speech and The Reader. Passing was one of the year’s most bracing reminders that being transported to another time and place can be a transcendent experience if the director has a reason to take us there beyond temporal tourism. While Passing‘s subject matter is sober to its core, Rebecca Hall finds a jolt of energy in delving into this 1920s New York setting. This was the time and the place of the great Harlem Renaissance, a black artistic and cultural movement of more than a decade, which gave birth to brilliant works of literature (from such legends as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston), intellectual dialogues that would shape the coming Civil Rights Movement, and revolutions in music that still reverberate in just about every modern genre you can name. Rebecca Hall is a fine enough director to be able to distill something of the Harlem Renaissance’s passion, creative buzz, and intelligence into the filmmaking. Some of that comes through her crisp and thoughtful black-and-white cinematography (which puts that of a certain period Oscar contender to shame). Some of it comes through the strains of the great Devonte Hynes’ (known in modern musical circles as the R&B visionary, Blood Orange) wistfully breezy score. And a great deal of it comes from how she confidently fills these meticulously curated spaces with Nella Larsen’s sharp, poignant dialogue. The care put into the period detail shines because urgent, impassioned life is radiating through those spaces. The period aesthetic is important to the story, but never more important than the story itself.

The story itself is an unfortunately timely rumination on American attitudes toward race and success. It speaks to us from the 1920s about themes of racism and classism that are probably as old as American itself. It is of course a stinging indictment of our nation’s inherent racism, probably first and foremost, though a phrase like “first and foremost” feels cut and dried for a film as jazzily alive as Passing. Its greatness lies in how animated it is by literate discourse and sublime characterization. It is a considerably more conflicted story than what I was expecting. In a way that was not clear to me when I first read its raves out of Sundance, Passing takes what seems like a straight-forwardly bad decision (Clare’s choice to pass herself off as white) and complicates it. It is not that the film lets Clare off the hook for her decision per se. Nor would it be entirely accurate to say that no judgment is passed on Clare, for Irene is very openly judgmental and critical of her friend’s actions from the film’s earliest minutes. I guess it just has the kind of empathetic patience to only judge up to a point. And it never vilifies Clare, even as she increasingly becomes a source of frustration and mental turmoil for Irene. It is a credit to Nella Larsen’s lovely and subtly ornate dialogue (Clare sometimes has the saucy and playful pithiness of some classic Southern Belle character). And it is thanks, in no small part, to Ruth Negga giving what may be the performance of the year. It is not just that she imbues the character with a dynamic mixture of affection, brazenness, uncertainty, coquettish sass, intelligence, melancholy, and a host of other emotional nuances. It is also the paradoxical way she plays Clare as both an open book and as a secret that can never be fully uncovered. In the end, I think that is how Passing can take an action that understandably makes the bile rise in Irene’s throat, never entirely forgive its problematic nature, and yet allow Clare to remain understandable and heartbreakingly sympathetic. She is allowed to retain an air of mystery and we come to know and love her enough to feel that she should not be punished for what she is doing. That whatever Clare Gardner is going through, and has gone through up to this point, has given her enough pain and fear to deal with as to render easy proclamations of wrongness a little useless. For pity’s sake, with all that Clare manages to keep hidden about herself, there is never any question that she is torn up by what she must do to survive.

It’s also clear that no person would ever do what Clare is doing unless they absolutely felt they had to. It should be obvious before one even starts Passing that the antagonist of the film is not Clare Gardner, but her entire unthinkable set of circumstances. It becomes clear in the moments where Clare can let her disguise slip that she wishes she had Reeny’s confidence to be openly black. That she wishes her life’s path had been something closer to that of her friend and she could live fully as herself. When Clare first invites Reeny up to her hotel suite, she orders drinks from room service and you can hear some of the affected genteelness of her put-on white voice drop away bit by bit. She becomes louder, more playfully assertive, until the white mask seems to disappear completely for a moment. It is a moment of liberation and also of quiet sadness for Clare. But we felt a similar kind of sadness for Reeny too, during those opening moments of the film when she was floating quietly through predominantly white New York City with not another black face in sight, her head buried in that white hat like a deepsea diver’s helmet. What stands out in Passing is how lonely it is for both these women to live in this chapter of American history, and what a blessed relief it is for them to find each other in that vast white ocean. It is why, even though Reeny’s anger at Clare feels justified, you still want them to rekindle their friendship and hold onto each other. Passing is suffused with a feeling of frail human connection that does not erase the critical questions of whitewashing at its heart. What it does is free those questions from icy abstraction. the film’s images of black women navigating a hostile world recall the bruised humanity of Todd Hayne’s lesbian period masterpiece Carol. The society these women occupy is one where they must, on some level, exist undercover. Part of what complicates Reeny’s reckoning with her friend’s decision to pass is that she has also engaged in a form of passing. She has also had to find ways to mollify the racism and white prejudice around her. By aspiring to a more moneyed lifestyle. By courting white luminaries to her cause. And by shying away from frank discussions of racial barbarism, even in her own home. Passing is about the very different sorts of compromise two marginalized women choose to make in order to feel some version of whole.

Passing is finally a gorgeous film but a tough-minded one, in a way that respects the fine line between heartbreak and cruelty. I do not believe it ever tips crassly into the latter. Rebecca Hall’s stunning debut film loves its characters and wants the world for them. But it also knows that America has never been a place were things tend to work out ideally for people like Reeny and Clare. Just like a number of great American novels, it is a story about where people come from and about upward striving. It is about those small, mean things that try to fix some of us in place. It is about a country that has never stopped being stratified in almost every way that a country can think to slice itself up and cut itself off. By race, by class, by gender, and by sexual orientation. And it is a film about running from our pasts and ourselves. It is a beautiful story about trying to break free of trauma and toxicity to find one another. And it is sadly also about how those toxic things reform and reassert themselves to split us apart once more. It is a film with much of the sweet, soothing character of Americana but none of the facile, surface gloss that word connotes. It is honest to its core. It lives in the space between mournful and hopeful, between tenaciously vibrant and ominous. It lives in the 1920s and in a perpetual present that has yet to relinquish its tidal hold on us. It lives in the ceaseless past. It lives in the United States.

Some time after November 2020 and after the uneasy haze of paranoia and exhausted hope that was December, someone with a Twitter handle felt confident enough to say a few optimistic, forward-looking words. What they said was that, whatever the Biden Administration had in store over the next few years, they were tentatively eager to return to some semblance of competence. That matters would once more be conducted, however soullessly, greedily or bureaucratically, by people who believed in a rule of law and a certain time-tested way of doing things. It might end up being as enjoyable and inspiring as a visit to the DMV, but there was an immediate feeling of relief in even returning to that grinding, hidebound state of affairs. DMV’s may be soul-crushingly clinical, unsympathetic and slow, but they are at least rarely chaotic. One year and change later, there are arguments to be made about how functional and competent the new regime has been and also how much blame is to be apportioned between the slow bureaucrats and the remaining agents of craven chaos that still gleefully tie the bureaucracy’s shoelaces together. But I bring this all up because there is something resonant in the desire to be surrounded by people who are at least trying to get a job done. Who want to be functional at their roles, even if that function can seem limited and indifferent to the bigger picture. It struck me while watching The Rescue, 2021’s best documentary, what a comfort there is to be had in watching smart, capable people come together to do something helpful for the greater good. Chalk it up to four years of obstructionism and sabotage by our own leadership, but I felt a serenity in The Rescue, at the same time that my heart was palpitating with it. The year’s most claustrophobically tense cinematic offering took on the peaceful vibes of a YouTube ASMR video at certain points. What times we live in when a white knuckle disaster film can take on the warm glow of comfort food!

As they demonstrated with their Academy Award-winning masterpiece Free Solo, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have a knack for balancing unbearable tension and laidback empathy. Free Solo had me grinning and gripping my seat rest in roughly equal measure. The Rescue achieves a similar feat and throws in a heaping handful of tearful catharsis too. It’s a promising development in their relatively young careers (the husband and wife team had made one previous climbing documentary together, 2011’s Meru, before really breaking out with Free Solo a few years ago), showing a hunger not just for documenting great feats of adventuring but for infusing those tales of derring-do with humanity and swelling emotion. Many of you probably still recall the global news event that sets The Rescue into motion. In 2018, twelve adolescent boys from a Thai soccer team, as well as their assistant coach, went spelunking into one of the many gorgeously labyrinthine caves that snake under the limestone Doi Nang Non Mountains of Northern Thailand. The plan was simply to explore and throw a birthday picnic for one of the players while they were down there. However, a sudden outbreak of heavy rainfall flooded the caves and left the team trapped some two-and-a-half miles inside the snaking system of tunnels. A myriad of concerned citizens of the world, from the Thai Navy to a mass of international volunteers to religious leaders, all flocked to the caves to lend their efforts, but the barrage of rain from the beginning monsoon season and the beyond-challenging conditions inside the cave (One subject says just swimming beyond the entrance felt like navigating whitewater) meant that the prospects for the boys’ survival were grim. As fortune had it, one local was an older British man with a peculiar hobby: cave diving. His niche interest had put him in contact with Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, two of the biggest fish in this exceedingly small and dangerous pond. The story of how two British men ended up unofficially spearheading a miraculous rescue effort in the Thai Highlands and the cavalcade of obstacles they faced is a thing I dare not ruin with over-explanation. Suffice to say that The Rescue can stand alongside Apollo 13 in the annals of great and rousingly meticulous problem-solver cinema. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s tremendously detailed true yarn has so many thrilling and fascinating twists, it makes a rescue film like The Martian seem sedate by comparison. I had truly forgotten the simple, weepy joys of watching intelligent people out-maneuver certain doom and, for reasons as topical as COVID and as universal as the joy of seeing human tenacity in action, it felt positively rejuvenating to watch it happen.

Of course, the “watch it happen” of it all is itself a minor miracle of filmmaking. For, as you may well have put together by now, Vasarhelyi and Chin did not just happen to be in northern Thailand when this thrilling saga went down. Nor would they have been inside the caves filming the rescue if they had been. The challenge of being in these caves at the time was so perilous that only a small handful of experts in an extremely niche subculture could even think to attempt it, and even they knew they were taking their lives into their hands. What we have then is a work of non-fiction built substantially out of dramatization, in order to recreate the astounding experience of bodies moving through those narrow spaces and brackish, unforgiving waters. If Free Solo felt at times cinematically modest outside of its thrilling El Capitan climax, The Rescue announces that Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin can move a few mountains of their own when they need to. It is incredible to see the scope of what they’ve recreated here, but even more jaw-dropping is that I rarely snapped out of my reverie (or back from the edge of my seat) long enough to even register that what I was seeing was being dramatized at all. That is partly an accomplishment of bravura technical filmmaking, but it is even more a credit to the fact that The Rescue’s spectacle and scope are secondary tools on its utility belt. Because what really makes this film soar is the richness of its Swiss timepiece plot and the empathetic way it gives its subjects character beats within that plot. The way it creates a delicious party mix of narrative surprise, humor, and human reflection is a reminder that, while Vasarhelyi and Chin may seem to be operating within their own niche area of thrill-seeking outdoorsmanship, it is folly to pigeon-hole them; to see the National Geographic production title at the beginning of the film and think we already have them pegged. Their work feels too emotionally transcendent to be filed under either sports or nature. They have my blessing to never make a single film without a harness or crampon, so long as they are all rendered with this much heart and vibrant empathy.

That ineffably soulful and positive seam that runs through The Rescue and Free Solo is important in the same way feeling the safety mechanism snug against your chest at the start of a rollercoaster ride is important. When you find yourself about to zoom away on a journey with this much breath-catching storytelling velocity and with stakes this high, it’s important to feel a little security. To know that you are in safe, responsible hands. Because our adventurous directing duo have clearly absorbed enough of the world’s thrills themselves (Jimmy Chin’s feats include scaling Mount Everest) to know how to transmit that adrenalized feeling to their audience. In the back of our minds, we know that The Rescue will end happily, just as surely as we know that Free Solo is not the sad tale of Alex Honnold falling to his death from El Capitan, but Vasarhelyi and Chin tighten a screw with such diabolical glee that it is easy to forget about happy outcomes for a couple unbearably fraught hours. They are deft at keeping us locked in the moment and they build this story with the patience of Lego enthusiasts. As hesitant as I am to spoil a single beat of this plot, perhaps we can open just one Christmas present early, in the name of showing just what a fantastically constructed adrenaline machine The Rescue is. The first time our two hellbent hobbyists enter the cave (I could write an entire essay on how Vasarhelyi and Chin stand in awe of death-courting obsessive while never entirely letting their psyches off the hook), they find people there in one of the first chambers. These are not the trapped boys, but four grown men; utility workers who were unable to escape when the flooding began. The men are thankfully alive, but the British divers have to extract them by carrying them underwater to the safety of the entrance. It’s a relatively short distance away, but the process is nearly disastrous. The men thrash against their saviors and reflexively bang their heads against the cave ceiling in a claustrophobic panic. One diver describes the process as akin to an underwater wrestling match. A detail like this adds so much to an already gripping and full-to-bursting story. For one thing, it adds a marvelously scary dash of color to a narrative that was never not tense to begin with. Beyond that, it organically complicates the already sticky matter of the rescue, for the divers now realize that any kind of simple extraction effort is doomed to fail. What barely worked with a few grown men for a few minutes can hardly be expected to work with a dozen scared boys over the course of some four hours. And then, beyond mere story mechanics, the anecdote with the utility workers invites our imaginations to recoil at the agonizing detail of it all. The distance, the darkness, the terrible animalistic fear that anyone would feel in that situation. Which is why only this small group of awkward Britons with strange, specifically wired brains can even conceive of going on this excruciating odyssey. Which then makes it feel all the more fiendishly inconceivable that Vasrhelyi and Chin are sending us with our squishy, non-thrill-seeker brains down there with them. Before we can arrive back in the sweet safety of The Rescue’s joyfully tearjerking finale, we must first endure one heart attack of a dark story ride. The only way back to Gepetto’s Workshop is through the belly of the whale.

But what a delight it is to arrive at the other end of it, born anew and baptized in some combination of cold sweat and salty tears. It’s a lovely feeling to have experienced all the slow-building tension and terror and to feel the release and to laugh at the harrowing ordeal we have allowed ourselves to experience vicariously. The Rescue takes a near disaster and makes it so entertaining that it almost feels indecent. But once you’ve see it, one cannot imagine trading it for something more staid, studied, and conventionally inspirational. And I would not trade Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin as filmmakers for anyone less given to heightened sensations. In a world full of talking head documentaries (and The Rescue has its own fair share of talking heads), I don’t know that I will ever begrudge a documentarian for seeking something more ecstatic than just bare facts. As I begin to salute the great artists of 2021, I am so pleased to count two journalists who can tell a story in strokes of passion, spectacle and emotion. As I noted with 2020’s masterful documentary, Honeyland, you know you have a brilliant documentary on your hands when you can picture it being every bit as rich and interesting if the story were pure fiction. Every documentary filmmaker has an obligation to present the facts honestly, but the truth need not be an obstacle to dynamic storytelling. The great ones take the facts and paint with them.

To put it another way, any story probably has more possible details and nuances – more truth inside of it -than a single film can encompass. The art of telling a great non-fiction story lies in carefully curating the facts and deciding which ones to give emphasis. The Rescue even acknowledges that, outside of its central story of these UK divers, there were many thousands of people who were no less vital to the survival of those boys. Before the divers could even begin their rescue, armies of volunteers had to methodically take strips of tarp and plug up cracks in the hillside to keep more water from falling into the caves. A mass of people came together to literally seal a mountain and it is but a single detail in The Rescue’ s intricate plot. Think what a story that would make! Then a wise religious elder came when all hope seemed lost and he led everyone in days of prayer to calm the monsoons and, would you believe it, it worked! What a gorgeous look at the age-old dialect between faith, reason, spiritualism, and science that would make! The Rescue honors a multitude of selfless human beings even as it sticks primarily to the action-packed business of an adventurous few. It recalls a film like Clint Eastwood’s underrated Sully in how it finds heroism not only in the death-defying but in simple acts of discipline and professionalism. Beyond mere competence, the film seems possessed of a more noble spirit. Call it generosity. Call it community. Call it anything but indifference. The film sees more love, compassion and ingenuity in this tale than it can possibly unpack in two hours. It leaves those other wonderful wrinkles for the next storyteller to more fully unfold. Just add water.

I’m leery about using a term like “Asian cinema”, as if the film movements of countries as distinct as China, Japan, and the recently Best Picture-winning South Korea were all part of the same cultural mass; as if they weren’t as unique to one another as they are to the cinema of any European country. Still, because awards bodies still have a lot of work to do in recognizing the contributions of Asian actors and creators (I will never forgive the Academy for snubbing Steven Yeun’s titanic work in Burning) and because I want to encourage anyone reading to look beyond the Western world for great art, I’ll fudge it and say that Asian cinema has had a great decade and an absolutely scorching last few years. South Korea has given us the best film of the year two years in a row. Japan recently gave us Shoplifters, a towering masterpiece about economic stratification to stand alongside the one that just won Best Picture You could fill multiple acting categories entirely with performances from the last two years of Asian cinema. This is the second year in a row where three Asian filmmakers have gone deep into my personal top ten. Bong Joon Ho just spent the past decade making vital, delirious gems culminating in history’s first foreign language Best Picture winner for Parasite. Last year saw a young woman from Singapore and a Chinese-American skater kid from America’s decaying Rust Belt make two of the decade’s finest documentaries. And here in America, two of our most promising directing talents are a  pair of observant, endlessly empathetic Chinese-American women. One is Chloe Zhao, whose masterpiece The Rider soulfully cracked our 2018 top ten list, and who will soon make her Marvel debut directing the likes of Angelina Jolie and Kumail Nanjiani. The other is Lulu Wang, a New Yorker who has turned her own experience with a terminally ill loved one (the tale was originally featured as an episode of the superb, long-running human interest broadcast, This American Life) into one of 2019’s wisest, funniest, and most gently sublime pieces of art. In a year that gave us no shortage of richly emotional work, few films held me in rapt, misty-eyed awe like The Farewell.

Our true story begins with an old Chinese woman in the northeastern city of Changchun, seated in a doctor’s waiting room. She has just gone in to have x-rays taken and her sister is in another room receiving some very sad news from the physician. The woman, whose family calls her Nai Nai (a splendidly lovable and heart-rending Zhao Shuzhen) has Stage 4 lung cancer and only a handful of months to live. The sister walks out with a placid smile and tells her sibling everything is fine. She has a clean bill of health and the spots on her x-rays turned out to be nothing but “benign shadows”. While Nai Nai waits, she makes one of her regular calls to her 20-something granddaughter, Billi (rapper turned actor Awkwafina, graduating from her scintillating comedic work in 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians into a full-stop great dramatic player), an aspiring artist who immigrated to New York with her parents decades ago. A couple days after speaking to Nai Nai, Billi learns the hard truth from her parents. The conceit of The Farewell is that everyone in Nai Nai’s family knows she is dying save for Nai Nai herself. Billi’s parents (wonderfully played by Diana Lin and Tzi Ma) break the news to her. Everyone will be traveling to China under the false pretense of Billi’s younger cousin’s wedding, where they will have the chance to pay their last goodbyes to Nai Nai without Nai Nai herself knowing that’s what they are doing. The one person not meant to be there is Billi herself, for fear that her fraught emotions and her closeness with her grandmother will give the whole ruse away. Billi shows up anyway, unannounced, and the whole film becomes an emotionally charged reunion, not only with the ailing woman, but with a whole clan of siblings and cousins who had gone off on their own separate journeys years ago. Everyone is solidly committed to this well-intentioned lie except for Billi, essentially the most Westernized member of her clan, who has conflicted feelings about the ethics of hiding her own grandmother’s imminent mortality from her. What forms is a complex human eddy of people processing their preemptive grief and finding the courage they need to pull off this grand deception. In its strange and modest way, The Farewell becomes the most intimate, cathartic version of Ocean’s 11 you could ever imagine.

The Farewell is one of the most touching and insightful immigration narratives I have ever had the pleasure of viewing. It’s a tale of our globalized world, with characters reckoning with the value of home versus the opportunity that comes from leaving our birthplaces behind. It’s a sweet little paradox of a film, where the big communal lie at the center draws everyone back to their place of origin and forces them to confront deeper truths about what was lost and gained when they made their individual decisions to either stay in China or venture out to see what the rest of the sprawling world had to offer. In one of the film’s most visually arresting sequences (The Farewell is the kind of film you think of as predominantly writerly until you go back and count its cavalcade of lovely, inventive shots), the larger family discusses the opportunities and bitter trade-offs of sending your children abroad or encouraging them to revere their homeland. As they sit around a restaurant table and debate, a cornucopia of different foods cycles along the very bottom of the frame on a large, mechanized lazy susan. The Farewell doesn’t pick sides, but observes, with sweetness and clarity, the nature of life in our big interconnected world and what that does to our collective sense of place, family and identity. As much as Nai Nai’s fate is the emotional engine of the film, what devastates Billi in a more unexpected way is being back in her birthplace all these decades later, sifting through old memories of neighborhoods long bull-dozed, and realizing how much she has missed all these people, her people. At the risk of dating this review, realizing the value of our relationships is, in this time of self-quarantine, extremely relatable.

The Farewell is one of the most soulful and endearingly character-centric films to weigh in on the age-old dialectic between Eastern collectivism and Western individualism; the rights of the one and the larger obligations we owe to the social groups we belong to: a family, a country, a world. To quote the decade’s most transcendent sitcom, The Good Place, who are we and what do we owe each other? To Billi’s more Westernized eyes, what Nai Nai is owed is honesty and the chance to not only face her own death with clear eyes, but to say her goodbyes to people. She is owed a degree of respect for her personal autonomy, her right to handle her morality on her own terms. In a gorgeous scene, set in a darkened bar room bathed in the orange glow of neon streetlights (again, what a lovely and thoughtfully framed film!), Billi’s uncle posits the matter differently. The imminence of one’s own death is a terrible burden and, rather than forcing Nai Nai to endure that fearful prospect that she can do nothing to change, they can take up that load for her. “It’s our duty to carry this emotional burden for her”, he insists. What plays out is not some abstract examination of the individual’s rights versus our responsibilities to those around us, but a blissfully cathartic outpouring of human connection carried along by what might be 2019’s deepest bench of terrific actors. The fact that you’ve likely never heard of any of them outside of maybe Awkwafina (I certainly had not) is just one more reminder how much unrecognized artistic talent Asian cinema has had all this time, just waiting to be discovered by the larger world. When you get to The Farewell’s perfect and sly hero shot late in the film, you may feel like crying or cheering for this whole magnificent ensemble. For a group of people you’d never even known about just seventy minutes prior.

I could write until I’m blue in the wrist about mise-en-scene and editing and cinematography and the ocean of ideas that this blessed art form has still barely scratched the surface of. But I really love that, beyond all its rigor and insight, The Farewell is firmly a film for your heart, your soul, your funny bone and your tear ducts. It’s ideas about people as lone units and as parts of larger collectives are all undergirded by a profound love for human beings. Nai Nai and Billi are two of the most endearing, nuanced characters of recent years, and the caliber off screen acting that brings them to life is of the most rarified kind (surprise, surprise, both were ignored by the Academy). Beyond those two, the characterization of Billi’s parents, played with such pathos and rich humor, helps to form a vivid tapestry of what it means to be Chinese and to also search for an identity beyond China. Add an unfailingly dimensional cast of aunts and cousins, and you get a film that invests in effortless, empathetic humanism on the widest scale. I must once again stand up for the quietly breathtaking imagery of The Farewell, It’s easy to let its warmth, wit, and perfect acting distract you from how much thought has gone into its compositions. But, oh my, what sublime acting this film has! Lulu Wang works absolute marvels with her sharp, luminous and utterly dialed-in cast. When Billi’s uncle breaks down giving a toast to his unwitting mother, the camera pulls back to make him a tiny griefstricken figure alone on the stage, and it’s brought me to sniffly tears every single time. It’s hard to put it all into words without giving away the delicious human spontaneity of it all, but I’ll just say that you owe yourself the gift of The Farewell‘s generous, messy humanity. Billi realizes how much she’s missed all of her people and Lulu Wang goes full tilt to show shy it was so hard for her to leave all of this behind all those years ago.

And to bring it back to this belated celebration of brilliant Asian filmmakers (one that the mainstream is having full decades too late), what better way to tap into a heart-filling sprawl of Asian characters than with a magnificent ensemble. I love The Farewell because the depth of the ensemble really becomes a distillation of the film’s major themes. There’s the resolution to your collectivism versus individualism dialectic right there! Every one of these perfect characters (no less than ten of them just in the immediate family) is trying, with varying levels of difficulty, to commit to this problematicallly noble team effort. The tension of the film is about if they’ll be able to pull of this scheme together, and what the nuance of the cast shows us is that being part of a collective is not such a homogenous thing. As they each resolve to be part of this group scheme, so much lovely specificity comes shining through in each one of them. I think the ideas is that there are shades of grey in cultures we think of as strictly one way: individualist or collectivist, Eastern or Western. We see this idea rendered visually in one of my favorite scenes in the film, involving a visit to Billi’s grandfather’s graves. As Nai Nai delivers a prayer to her late husband’s headstone, she stops after each sentence to bow, and the other nine family members bow along with her. But each of them are just a little out of rhythm with each other, so it looks like some erratic wave of heads bowing out of and into the frame. It’s a funny and rather lovely sequence, tying into The Farewell‘s view of people banding together while also being fundamentally, fallibly themselves. Each one of us is our own fumbling person, but it’s nice to know that, if only in our shared fallibility, none of us are alone.