I spoke of poets and journeymen in my review for 2022’s third best documentary, the visually stunning All That Breathes; about documentarians who structure their films to inform cleanly and those ones who delve into the essence of their subject matter to make documentaries that transcend the merely educational and become cinematically arresting. Though I very much like Laura Poitras’ bombshell Edward Snowden documentary from 2014, Citizenfour (it ages well even if one of its key players, Green Greenwald, very much doesn’t), I probably had her figured more for a thoughtful assembler of non-fiction essays than a dazzling poet of the genre. That film was as smoothly competent as you would want a film about the Snowden NSA leak to be. It didn’t call for a lot of stylistic brio. And yet, here Poitras is edging out the year’s most cinematically sumptuous documentary (and movie, period) and placing in one of my top twenties for the second time in less than a decade. And, while Citizenfour was visually unadorned, Poitras’ partnering with photographer subject Nan Golden has unlocked a host of untapped visual verve I never knew she had. I never thought Poitras was a mere journeyman, but her dizzyingly artful, peerlessly edited All the Beauty and the Bloodshed lays waste to the idea that there is anything the least bit pedestrian or perfunctory about her. When you hold All the Beauty (dense, visually observant, luminously hard-scrabble) up next to Citizenfour (subtle, journalistic, lucid), as different as they may seem, I think what you find is that Poitras is an agile, intuitive documentary chameleon. She knows how to empathize and identify with her subject closely enough that she figures out hos their story should be presented. Poitras is out to do much more than just inform her audience, but her ace in the hole is an understated versatility. The ability to tailor the style to the substance. Figuring out how to visualize the story means understanding, on a deep level, what the story essentially is, and Poitras walks so closely with her subject that you almost forget she’s there. Contact‘s Dr. Ellie Arroway may have said they should have sent a poet. B ut if you want a documentary that is smart, and unobtrusively cinematic, you could do a whole lot worse than sending a Poitras.

I place a premium on things like cohesion and thematic tightness, but let’s have a heart cheer for messy cinema. That is not to say that All the Beauty and the Bloodshed doesn’t say lot of intelligent things very lucidly. But it is, in so many ways, the movie its title promises, one bursting at the seams with life in all its overflowing agonies and joys. In telling the story of the queer counter-cultural visual artist and photographer  Nan Goldin, whose career has now spanned six decades from the post-Stonewall LGBT scene of 1970s and early 1980s New York through the AIDS epidemic to the present day, where Goldin (who nearly died from a prescription overdose) has become the leading general fighting the opioid crisis, Poitras tells a story with enough narrative detail to wash away clean themes and story beats. Her film is a torrent of emotions and grace notes, an entire life lived in the course of a couple hours. In her later years, Goldin has fought tirelessly to reduce the harm of opioids and hold the epidemics’ cruel billionaire architects, the Sackler family, accountable. The Sacklers have long put their considerable riches into prestigious museums (including The Louvre and New York City’s Guggenheim), which has allowed them to publicly cleanse their toxic reputation and become celebrated patrons of the high art world. Goldin’s recent triumphs have seen her withhold her prized artwork from any gallery, museum or institution that places the Sackler surname on their buildings and wings. As part of the artistic community that gave a voice to countless AIDS victims, Goldin helped to popularize the phrase “silence kills”, and as a photographer who made queer and trans people the subjects of her work, she well understands the anguish of being nameless, anonymous. The genius of her late career mission (marshaled by her opioid non-profit PAIN) has been to weaponize that anonymity and turn it back on the most loathsome abusers ever seen. She knows that, like most humans, what the Sacklers crave is to be respected and thought of. Just having obscene amounts of capital is not enough for them. She knows this because, as a friend of some of the first queer people to battle their way out of America’s closets, she experienced what it feels like to be denied that same visibility. Poitras once again has an immensely compelling protagonist on her hands and she knows a pinch of salt is all that’s needed to get their full flavor. In this case, she has the two things she needs to make her movie dynamic: Goldin’s treasure trove of stunning photography and her humane, confident, piercingly urbane voice. The right person to tell the Nan Goldin story is so obviously Nan Goldin, and Laura Poitras gives her all she needs and not one one thing more; not one extraneous filmmaking flourish. This messy sprawl of a life story is paradoxically sharp and tight.

Bob Dylan once sang (in a rare moment of being completely complimentary to a woman), “She’s got everything she needs. She’s an artist.” I’ve always like that idea of the artist, not just as a talented explorer of some specific medium but as a person with the empathy and intelligence to find value wherever they go in the world. For Nan Goldin, art is not merely her photography but everything she’s ever done to make her life and the lives of good people around her better. It’s her way of beautifying her surroundings and it’s also been her means of survival in a society that bullies and devalues the non-heteronormative. and the neuro-atypical. The first sad chapter in Nan’s origin story is about how she lost her beloved older sister to suicide, all because her repressive suburban family couldn’t overcome its own ignorance and mental illness. Nan found a camera just as she was shipped away to foster care and it saved both her life and her considerable wits. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is about making art with every fiber of your being, which is why Goldin’s opioid activism is just as much a work of artistic genius as her powerful collections of photography. They are both ways of recognizing the victimized and censuring the oppressive. All the Beauty presents Goldin’s entire fraught life (social ward, queer and impoverished outsider, abuse survivor and opioid victim) as a gorgeous, artful testament to surviving. This is why Poitras’ film has to be so sprawling and discursive. It sees no clear lines of division between what the artist creates and how the artist lives. An artist like Goldin lives out their art as surely as they make art in order to live. Seeing the jaw-dropping gamut of life experiences Goldin has lived through (and how many culture-shifting American epochs she helped influence) is impossibly moving. In telling the story of a stigmatized subversive, Poitras captures Nan’s gritty irrepressible spirit while slyly making a film to get our spirits soaring Goldin is too sardonically punk to be in some standard-issue feel-good documentary and Poitras marries the form of her film to that tattered, hard-scrabble aesthetic. But, please do not tell Nan Goldin I used such a schmaltzy word, her story and the film around it is absolutely the best kind of inspiring. Under the bruises and grime, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed has maybe the most enormous heart of 2023 film.

Like Nan’s sexually frank feminist photography books, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is moved by a transcendentally lusty spirit. It is a profane work of genius. Nan’s art is not only inspired by survival but by a spirit of raucous tenacity that comes from finding life outside of a mainstream society that threw you away. Goldin laughs at how she used to relish being shunned from the group homes her parents exiled her to. “I made an art of it,” she observes with characteristic dryness. Her art captured people like her who had been scuffed up and devalued and rejected, and it found a soaring, defiant grace and beauty in their determination to exist and persevere. The bloodshed of the film’s title is the trauma, psychological abuse and premature death that wracked Goldin’s various communities and came close to destroying Nan herself. Having watched her own gracious, intelligent sister and so many others suffer and succumb to societal ignorance gave her a gift of vision and awareness. From the straitjacket of 1950’s suburbia to the rampant homophobia of the 1970s and 1980s (which has only gotten marginally better at concealing itself in the ensuing years) to the more than 500,000 victims of the Sacklers’ misinformation campaigns, Golden sees the truest artistic value in calling bullshit on anyone who tries to suppress truth and the voices of others. The spirit of punk rock sprouted like clover from the muck and garbage of 70’s and 80’s New York City (and other places too) and, whether one wants to call Goldin strictly punk or any other name that fits the eclectic range of artistic scenes she frequented, her boisterously defiant ethos conveys all that punk stands for. The furious belly laugh of people who have truth and love and art on their sides and are ready to scream it at the top of their lungs. Nan Godin’s art is a full-throated rebel yell and Laura Poitras’ film backs her like a quiet supportive friend with a subversive gleam in her eye. Poitras may seem like a humble, rigorous student next to the anything goes attitude of Goldin, but, by the end, she feels as ready to hurl a brick as anybody.

Of course, the punk trappings of Nan Goldin and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed have little to do with the Sex Pistols or the Ramones or anything literally punk. If anything, the sensibilities of Goldin and her queer artistic community feel more in line with the enigmatic dankness of the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol. What the punk aesthetic at its best represents is the struggle of those on the margins; trans people, queer people, women and non-whites. Goldin’s story is that of a suburban Jewish misfit who narrowly escaped a death of the soul and crawled through social welfare hell until she found her true community. Nan says of her first New York friends and roommates, “They were running away from America and they found each other.” The same is true of Nan herself. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is about art not just as a protective cloak that outsiders can wear but also a kind of homing beacon; a means of identifying good, kindred souls. People who want to love you, not belittle and chip away at you.  Back when she was still a teenager in group homes, almost too traumatized to speak out loud, Nan made friends with a closeted gay youth named David. She helped him make his way out of the closet and, in return, he gave her her name: Nan. In the world All the Beauty, art is a means of travel to the places where we truly belong. It helps keep the monsters at bay and draws our true families toward us. Poitras has put together a painful but staggeringly life-affirming journey out of the wasteland of Space Age nuclear family America, to its vibrant, subversive center. To the places that would nurture and inspire some of the greatest photographs, paintings, music and cinema of all time. To the heart of America’s cultural awakening. And, when you look at the full tapestry of it, you see so much of Nag Goldin’s experience writ repeatedly. Persecuted, queer and unorthodox kids flee their private hells, author new stories for themselves and liv long enough to see their art reshape the face of American culture. The rumble they create is even felt, to some extent, back in the very mainstream enclaves they once fled. But who really cares what makes an impact in those mean, forsaken deserts anyway. The time to seek validation and acceptance there passed long ago.

While they are very different films, Poitras’ documentary could have also been titled Everything Everywhere All At Once. It is a film about connections and interconnectedness; between artistic scenes and eras, between art and life, and between the past and the present. Life experiences of years gone by echo in the present. Old friends return when we need them most, and our relationships see their meanings change and deepen as the story goes on. Life gives us material to make art and people learn that, through making art, they have been giving themselves valuable strategies for surviving. My favorite single scene in the film comes when Goldin and her PAIN colleagues organize a publicity event at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. The jaw-dropping visual conceit is to have people in the upper decks of the gallery drop down pamphlets full of chilling opioid statistics onto the museum floor, all done up to look like prescription slips. The moving image Goldin creates of hundreds of pamphlets falling down like snow from fifty feet above us is as dynamic and cinematically overwhelming as just about any sequence in 2022 cinema. Nan Goldin’s technical talent (for photographic image-making) is beyond doubt, but what strikes you is her conceptual brilliance. The ability to think of the world in pictures, movement and ideas is what true artists have. For all the Sacklers’ pretentions as art patrons, Nan Goldin lays waste to the lie that they have any actual art in their souls. Their crimes against thousands are despicable enough but Goldin is repulsed at the perversion of art the Sackler name represents. Art is an illuminating fire of righteous truth. Nan weaponizes real art to turn it back on these frauds with all  the furious indignation of a person who’s spent years staring down abusers and hypocrites. Six decades into a brilliant career, we have the joy of watching Nan Goldin fully metamorphize into an avenging super hero. Watching that blizzard of damning leaflets flutter down on a crowd of art lovers, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Goldin would probably make a hell of a filmmaker if she ever tired her hand at it. Like I say, she’s got everything she needs.

If I could designate each film year its own piece of internet speak then 2022’s would absolutely be “get you someone who can do both.” It was a year where a vast majority of the cinema’s heights came from films with a varied skillset. A ticklish Waking Ned Devine-style Irish tourism comedy keened with despair. A Jaws-esque survival thriller was packed with ideas about exploitation and racism in the entertainment industry. A zany multiverse action film had audiences sobbing buckets and calling their mothers. The year’s box office success story was how a sequel to a ridiculous 80s action movie best known for being a homoerotic military recruitment tool managed to be a sumptuously entertaining and well-acted drama (and maybe also a homoerotic military recruitment tool). The films of 2022 contained multitudes that would have made Walt Whitman blush. TO wit, I had one of my heartiest laughs of the past film year while watching a scene suffused with loss and unspeakable longing. In a late scene from Panah Panahi’s astonishingly confident debut Hit the Road, a father lays by a campfire close to the border of Iran and Turkey. His 7-year old son lies on top of his chest and his wife sits of a ways by herself staring off in tearful silence. The family has just had to pay a wrenching farewell to someone close to them and they do not know when they will see their loved one again. The weary father lists, eyes half closed, as his motormouthed child goes on about Batman and his famous Batmobile. He asks his child how much he figures the extravagant vehicle costs and the child has an answer at the ready: six-hundred million dollars. This leads the father to propose a hypothetical anecdote about “the poor orphan Batman” and his precious car that had me literally crying with laughter. And laid over this funny exchange is also one of the most heartrending, emotionally observant scenes of 2022 with all the sensitive direction and softly twinkling music one would expect from a tragedy. Because Panahi’s masterful scene really is a slice of tragedy. It’s a tragedy and it happens to be one of the most ticklish scenes of the year. And if that sounds like a perplexing balance, the most puzzling thing of all is how perfectly harmonious the poignance and daffy humor are in the moment. It surprised me on a first viewing. On a second viewing, I realized with astonishment that this first-time Persian director had actually been holding that delicate balance between the gently gutting and the sublimely funny for the entire film. Hit the Road spends 93 perfect minutes on standing on a pinhead between a bell laugh and a choked sob. Iran’s already-vibrant cinema scene just got itself someone who can do both.

Hit the Road opens to the sounds of plaintive piano keys and the white noise whoosh of speeding cares. A car sits parked on the shoulder of an Iranian highway and its passengers, an older man and woman, their two sons (one in his twenties and one seven) are all lying still inside with eyes closed. After what feels like a minute, the small Batmobile-admiring child stirs and the other occupants all rouse from their slumber. But the hyperactively eccentric child (is there any other kind?) asks a question that might have occurred to the audience already: “Are we dead?” They are not in fact dead, but something does feel instantly woozy and off about Panah Panahi’s superb road trip dramedy. A sense of ennui and tension hangs in the air, made all the more noticeable by the fact that Hit the Road retains the breathlessly antic humor that is the road trip comedy’s stock in trade. The comedy (sometimes high energy and sometimes drolly understated) throws the spectre of unspoken sorrow into sharp relief. We gradually come to learn that, unlike most films about family car trips, this one will not feature a journey home. It will not feature one because there is no home to return to. The family has pooled all their money, sold their house and car (their soft-spoken, visibly devastated eldest child drives them in a rental) all to get their grown son to the Turkish border and to book the services of someone who can help him safely cross over. There is no talk of return and they will not be going with him. There is no talk about what comes next. The eldest is driving toward a new life and will not see his loved one again for a very long time, if ever. And the rest of his family are, as the Talking Heads say, on a road to nowhere. This looming sadness does not negate the fact that Hit the Road still has many of the warm signifiers of its genre. The family bickers comically, have some spirited hijinks, meet colorful strangers and generally bond. The tropes of the road trip comedy are all present and accounted for, but they coexist in uneasy harmony with the mournful realities and anxious uncertainties of this family’s unfortunate situation. Panahi patiently and empathetically lets rich humor and tearful pathos commingle until you no longer know if your eyes are moist from laughter or heartbreak (this was a major contender for Carnivorous Studios’ fifth annual Damp Face Award). Hit the Road takes the expression “permanent vacation” and mines it for its most unexpectedly bleak implications.

Hit the Road is an achingly lovely, humane film. Like Life and Nothing More, the late Iranian maestro’s Abbas Kiarostami’s masterpiece about a town recovering from a deadly earthquake, this film loves people and it believes in the average person’s desire to be good and helpful to their fellow man. Its sense of sweet humanity is so winning that it may take you some minutes to register that it is a deeply pissed off piece of work. Hit the Road is a furiously critical and deeply political work of art. It’s angry in a way that compassionate people pushed too far by abuse are angry, which sums up my experience with Persian art very succinctly. A great many Persians wish simply to dance sing and love on their own terms, but they have had to contend for decades with dogmatic rulers who demonize sexuality, oppress women and silence their greatest philosophers and artists (we’ll talk about Panah’s long-persecuted filmmaker father in a short while). Hit the Road is one of the most righteously enraged kiss-offs to a country that you will ever see, made all the more rich by how conflicted it feels about the idea of severing ties with home. It rages quietly and with the patient wisdom of a martyr. It holds onto its humanity because that is what any virtuous, unjustly trampled upon person does, but it is not satisfied with moral victories. At the end of the day, however true and rights its position is, righteousness and decency and moral virtue isn’t going to do one solitary thing to keep this poor family together or give them a future. Goodness is an intrinsically valuable thing but it does not give this family what it truly needs: answers. What comes next? Where do the people of Iran go from here? If great art raises questions rather than giving easy, pat solutions, Hit the Road is an unqualified triumph. Panah Panahi’s soulfully wronged meditation on the idea of home is one of the greatest films of the nascent 2020s and one of the most subtle and powerfully realized directorial debuts in cinema history.

While it regards its characters with an unflaggingly sympathetic grace, Hit the Road is gently but firmly critical about denial. In a smart bit of metaphor, the parents are hiding two important truths from their youngest child. They do not let on that he will be losing his brother, possibly for good. They also do not tell him that the family dog, along for the open-ended ride, is dying. The essence of Hit the Road is pure punk rock in the way it damns the hypocrisy and cruelty of Iran’s policies, particularly those armed at gays and women. The parents’ struggle to tell their child the hard truths is like a projection of their nation’s abuse and what Papnahi is asking of his fellow Iranians is a shattering of that perverted, dysfunctional cycle of lies. It is an angry punk song set to a sweetly meandering melody. It recalls the special blend of love, bruised hope and anguish that made Spike Lee’s ending to The 25th Hour so powerful. As the film stares down the road at painful change and separation, the feeling of impending loss also speaks to the beauty of connection and family. In overwhelming grief, it finds occasion to think about love and community; to offer up a smile of gratitude for the very thing that is being taken away. It presents those things with overflowing heart and humor and it saves all its bitter anger for the powerful unseen targets who deserve it. The genius of letting Hit the Road function as a funny, vibrant, emptionally satisfying road trip movie is how that calls attention back to the sorrow at the films heart. In other words, this should be an uproarious story of love and familial bonding on the road and nothing else. That’s why that simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking Batmobile monologue the father gives isn’t merely impressively multi-dimensional but essential to the film. It is Panahi’s entire thesis in miniature because this family should be able to have that laughter and joy without the heartache and loss. And they can not. They feel so close to being on the kind of vivacious, fun and life-affirming vacation that make up most road trip films, but that is a trick of the light. In reality, they might as well be light years away: from normalcy, from stability, from an empathetic government, and, before long, from their beloved child. They have miles and miles and miles to go before they can even imagine anything feeling right again. If that happy ending exists somewhere down this family’s long, bumpy road, it is not to be found in this film.

And yet, in spite of its unwavering honesty, Hit the Road does find a way to hold on to some open-ended note of hope for the future. I’ll be damned if I can describe what that hope specifically is or what it even might look like. It feels more like the kind of hope that the faithful hold for the afterlife; a vague and stubborn resolve that one day in the future will be the day that things start looking a little better. Partly, that’s a product of the film’s warmth and infectious good humor. It may partly be there to throw the sadness into sharper relief, but it also makes it hard for me to not see Panahi’s film as a work of optimism on some level. It gets back to that punk rebel sensibility that is so impervious to defeatism. The hope isn’t that this mortifying state of affairs is going to turn around, but hope for its own sake. It’s not a hope for Iran’s callous government or really a hope for anything. It’s hope because what else are you going to do? Hope, unrealistic or not, is its own intrinsic good and you hold to it because not holding onto it means losing everything. Hit the Road may carry a lot of pain and disappointment, but it carries it with a resolute heart. Its pain is also its unbowed strength; its will to persevere even when the situation seems so desire that it’s nigh impossible to determine what perseverance is even for. There is also just the matter of Panahi’s elegant, eloquent and unpretentiously literate script, so full of wry comedy and honest wisdom. It’s the kind of perfectly poetic screenplay that manages to feel both grounded and transcendent. At one moment, a farmer sees the father’s arm in a cast and asks how it happened. “I fell” the uber-dad deadpans. The farmer asks where he fell. “From grace,” the father sardonically adds. The film is full of sharp, potent lines like that. It is utterly profound and transporting in its writerly flourishes. And yet, at no point does the heady rhetoric threaten the realness of these characters. They are compelling flesh and blood people and the understated confidence of their dialogue works to increase our love for them and draw us further into their lives. The dialogue, like the humor and the gorgeous scenery, is all there to help them and help us find some small bit of peace and relief. It’s not just false hope to help bitter medicine go down, but a reminder of what makes life beautiful and worth living. Laughing and loving in the face of systemic barbarism and apathy is the most rebellious thing we can do. And, after just one feature, Panah Panahi already has enough rebel clout to make him a luminary on the subject.

Panah has stouthearted defiance in his blood. His father is the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who spent the last two decades being harassed, threatend, jailed and censored by his own government. In 2010, he was arrested for trying to make art that criticized the legitimacy of the Ahmdinejad regime and was sentenced to six years under house arrest and, most cruelly, a 20-year ban on making his art. Only a year later, Jafar let Iran know what he thought of their policies by making the brilliant documentary This Is Not A Film, which not only documented his house arrest but insightfully tackled the question of how one makes art under censorship. The full answer to that question can be best understood by  watching the film, but the short answer is you do it by any means necessary and without fear or reprisal. This Is Not A Film was smuggled out of Iran inside of a birthday cake and took the film world by storm. Since then, Panahi the elder has made five more acclaimed films that he was technically forbidden from making at all, including the thoughtful 2022 gem No Bears. Like Hit the Road, all of Jafar Panahi’s recent films thumb their noses at Iran’s tyranny. Panahi plays a gleefully defiant Robin Hood to his government’s craven Prince John, stealing despotic undies and running them up the flag pole. But sobering news came in mid-2022 when Jafar Panahi was thrown into a notorious prison for the crime of coming to the defense of another persecuted Persian director. There were accounts of physical abuse and with them a sinking feeling that Jafar had pushed these cruel authoritarians as far as he could. He had been living out something like his own personal Cool Hand Luke for many years now and that story, as thrillingly subversive and rebellious as it is, ends in tragedy. Maybe this time, the Iranian government would shut Jafar away for good or do something worse. After almost seven months of imprisonment, Jafar Panahi gave his government an ultimatum. He started a hunger strike and gave Iran two options: his own death or his absolute liberation from the prison. Film fans braced for a noble but gutting conclusion to this rebel story. Hit the Road takes up Jafar Panahi’s torch. It poses the question of how you create hope out of nothing at all, out of hope’s very absence. The son in the film has a late moment of peace and love in a road side chat with his mother. He talks of his admiration for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the third act of that film, an astronaut journeys into a terrifying void, but that is not the end of the story. Its enigmatic final shot suggests the possibility of, well, possibilities; of new life and something hopeful beyond the abyss. Even if he does not know what it will be, Panah Panahi stalwartly believes in love, solidarity and hope beyond Iran’s political abyss. On February 3rd of 2023, two days after beginning his hunger strike, Panah’s father was released from prison and went home to his family.

Like a great many documentary-loving cinema buffs, I’m frequently critical of the “talking head” format. That would be your standard news interview format of sitting some people down in chairs and filming their informative faces as they go on at length and impart facts to the audience. I don’t mean to lay into the entire idea of filming an interviewee talking. For one  thing, there’s always the case of an astonishing film like Errol Morris’ “The Fog of War”, where just watching a human being react, emote, think out loud and speak is the whole appeal. And even a more boundary-breaking documentary like John Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing” makes brilliant use of talking heads elements to supplement its more formally dynamic parts. I come not to bury talking heads but maybe to continue my push for limiting them. For making them more spice than steak. Some of the most astonishing documentaries from the last decade have been purely experiential (“Leviathan”, “Manakamana”), eschewing interviews and explanations entirely. “Now, now,” the talking head devil’s advocate on my left shoulder cautions. “Those films were designed to be immediate and sensory. A documentary aiming to shed light on a little-known subject in an
educational way is naturally going to need more learned, professorial figures explaining things to you. The little imp has a point. And yet, the question should always be how we can make films better. And on that note, I am proud to introduce Shaunek Sen’s “All That Breathes”, a film chock full experts with factoids to unload about nature and pollution and modern-day India that nonetheless manages to inform while always feeling like a cinematic experience. It takes the building blocks of a talking head documentary and alchemizes them into visual poetry. Here is a film that absolutely could have consisted largely of its main subjects (three altruistic brothers in Delhi who run a makeshift hospital for injured birds of prey) sitting in front of a camera and telling us their story. And the miraculous thing is that they do tell us their story and they do sometimes directly address the audience. And yet, the film nevewr breaks its enchanting, wondrously visual spell. Here is the surest proof yet that, while the talking head format may always have some role to play, we’re never had less need of its conventions. The documentary is officially free to spread its wings and fly.

“All That Breathes” cues us in early that it will be as much a film about reflecting on the wonder of nature as it will be an essay on present-day threats to the natural world. Whole minutes before we first hear the voices of our lovable bird saviors, we hear the sounds of a field somewhere amid the filthy streets of the Indian city of Delhi. There is the thick rustle of scavenging rodents, the drone of hovering insects and the barking of stray dogs. Cats mewl from the alleys. Sen’s brilliant cinematographers Ben Bernhard, Ritu Das and Saumyanada narrow in on a gathering of rats in a grassy lot. The ever-present Delhi traffic is out of focus, an afterthought. We will soon meet the brothers Mohmmad Saud and Nadeem Shenzad, and their soft-spoken friend Salik Rehman. We will see the inner workings of their makeshift miracle, a soap dispenser manufactury whose true purpose is the rescue, treatment and release of black kites, gorgeous, falcon-like birds of prey that are a beloved fixture
of Delhi’s skies. High pollution levels and other environmental challenges mean that more and more of these beautiful birds are plummeting from the sky and ending up in cardboard boxes in these men’s warehouse-cum-hospital. Like Oskar Schindler with his factory, the men use their soap dispenser business only for the unrelated good it can help them afford to do. The work is painstaking and sometimes heartbreaking but their renown in the community and the room full of rehabilitated birds waiting to soar again testifies to the noble value of their Sisyphean battle against climate change. At one point, as many as 28 injured black kites await medical treatment, and if that didn’t sound insurmountable enough, one brother explains, “The baby season hasn’t even started yet.” Sometimes this little family even puts itself at peril for their good work, as when two of the brothers ford a chilly river at dusk to bring a kite back from the precipice of death. In return, the kites not only spiritually enrich Delhi’s soul (caring for one is said to earn you goodwill from the gods) but serve a vital ecolofical function for the city. As Reza tells us, a single black kite can devour and erase an astounding five to six tons of waste in the span of ten months. The story of the rescuers’ evolution from aspiring bodybuilders (their interest in musculature aided their education as veterinarians) is moving and compelling enough on its own, but Sen and his team’s sense of keen observation and poetic tone makes “All That Breathes” nothing short of spell-binding. It feels like a stunning illuminated ode to making the world better. It’s by no means a tearjerker, but a fine, life-affirming mistiness hangs over the whole thing. This informational documentary about environmental healers has its own powerful, palpably therapeutic air.

We live in a world on the brink of some potentially disastrous changes, both on a natural and a societal scale, and “All That Breathes” never sells that fact short. It would have been easy for it to become a harrowing bearing of witness to environmental disaster, occassionally leavened by sweetness and human decency. The film also never ignores the futile frustration and fatigue that besets our heroes on a daily basis. But, with all that emotional exhaustion being something of the critical point of the film, “All That Breathes” still may be on of the least jaded or defeated movies I have ever seen. Much like its fellow 2022 documentary masterpiece
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, “All That Breathes” is a tough, clear-eyed film buoyed by the contagious satisfaction of doing small acts of good in a weary world. With all of the year’s great writerly bits of dialogue, one of the most poignant and prescient moments consists of two simple words one man repeatedly says to another in that bird hospital. “Next bird.” As we stare down wrongdoing and loss, those two words better capture the joyous tenacity of carrying on than any I can think of. Good is done one step, one person, one bird at a time, and whether your last attempt to make life nicer on this planet succeeded or failed, your next move always boils down to just keeping the good work up. “All That Breathes” doesn’t pretend that we will just fix the environmental mess in front of us. It just sees
damage has been done and knows that the only wrong course is outright inaction and despondency. That won’t help. Like the kites chipping away at Delhi’s ne er-ending mountains of garbage. It’s there in the film’s care for the little representatives of nature. The way young Reza cares for a tiny squirrel he keeps in his shirt pocket. The way the film patiently watches a family of small monkeys cross a scaffolding on its way home. The documentary finds an endlessly soothing spring of calm because it reminds us how important and virtuous love and attention to the little things can be. Call it idealistic if you will, but the film’s belief that we will only win this survival game one selfless act and one individual at a time touched me greatly. If that tack feels simplistic in the face of rampant pollution, massive greed and unchecked selfishness, I cannot be too hard on this film for that. The value of small, simple goodness is the very lifeblood of “All That Breathes”.

Sen has made a great film about the impact of climate change because it is as informative on the subject as it needs to be and the rest is pure, voluptuous visual poetry. The shots of animals trying to habitate in one of Earth’s dirtiest, most populated cities speak volumes even devoid of the beautiful, thoughtful narration that accompanies them. There is something so stirring about how this isn’t just a tale of human expansion versus wild nature, but of human nature and wild nature juxtaposed. It is the story of nature adapting to a manmade world it never could have anticipated. As presented here, there is something simultaneously awe-inspiring and profoundly disquieting in its shots of graceful kites perched atop literal skyscrapers of human rubbish, or long-legged herons wading through streets flooded with soapy run-off. The situation that the natural world must negotiate because of human action and inaction is deeply unfortunate, but seeing how nature prevails in that struggle is stirring and visually breathtaking. Climate change is the most important and impactful issue of our day, and we need more films unpacking what it all means and how we can check its effects. But I will remember “All That Breathes” when a hundred climate change documentaries have come and gone because, in addition to being rigorous and eye-opening, it is just a transcendent, beautiful piece of cinematic art. It radiates poetry and takes inspiration from its protagonists’ contagious love of their work. It succeeds through jaw-dropping shots of man’s pollution and sprawl, and it also thrills with shots that luxuriate in the beauty and endless resilience of nature. It deserves to stand as a blueprint for how you tell stories about the climate crisis in fundamentally cinematic ways. “All That Breathes” is deeply rooted in the same Earth that it is advocating for. If the message of your movie is love of nature and stewardship of our planet, the first and best idea for making sure that message resonates is showing us a new view of that planet. If your film and its subjects are driven by love for the Earth, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that your camera must make us fall in love with the Earth. This wondrous documentary also has a beautiful, detailed specificity to it. The climate crisis is vast and far from monolithic. It is happening in a hundred small, seismic ways, and these birds are just one of myriad portholes into this pressing issue. They are, in effect, the kite in the coal mine.

Visual imagination really makes all the difference in “All That Breathes”. I’ve well noted that. The overriding thesis of this whole review might as well be how the great documentaries do more than just function as information delivery systems. People need to do more than just learn and know. They need to remember, and they will remember if they are moved. I think we need to keep talking about the visual art of this film. Let me drive it home and say that “All That Breathes” has the best cinematography of 2022. In a year where Cinema went big and bold, where we plunged into sapphire fantasy oceans and leviathan jellyfish prowled the wide open skies; in a year where Steven Spielberg and Park-chan Wook made great new films; in such a year, this humane, whispered prayer of a documentary managed to give us more profoundly moving and lusciously composed shots than any other. Like another cinematography all-timer from 2022, Jerzy Skolimowski’s “EO” (which narrowly missed our top 20), Sen is subtly capturing animals in a strange way that feels utterly new to me. These shots of fauna feel intimate, confessional, almost invasive if it weren’t being done with such overflowing reverence. It somehow just sees animals in their singular, very immediate way. They are all completely themselves, which is to say, after centuries of anthropomorphism (can we admit that “March of the Penguins” is bad yet?), that animals are not us. We are us and the animals are what the animals are, and there is something poignant and environmentally wise in that truth and in that divide. The ravishing visual poetry of “All That Breathes” seems built around one humbling, powerful thesis: we have become distinct and different from the natural world and yet, we have never been above it or truly apart from it. At most, we forget that world, always at our own peril. In one ravishing shot, a group of activists protesting for Muslim tolerance gradually blurs into the background as we focus on a snail crawling along a twig in the foreground. “All That Breathes” sees a host of global struggles and it sees the space that separates them and the spiritual threads that invisibly bind them. As we fight vital battles for dignity and personhood, the natural struggle pushes forward as it has for millennia. “One shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes,” one brother says in the line that gives this film its title. Sen’s masterful filmmaking team not only lucidly paints the world of this kite rescue operation, but vividly puts it into a language of magnetic images that take in all of nature. All struggles come down to the protection of lives. And “All That Breathes” renders each life onscreen with equal, even handed empathy.

Let me try briefly to come at the film from a very self-interested angle. All That Breathes is about finding the work that really defines you. These men may operate a soap dispensary business to fund their avian hospital, but what they’re really doing is earning for themselves the right to be thought of, first and foremost, as kite veterinarians. To see themselves and to be seen by their community as the thing they love doing. It’s a notion that speaks to this avocational, if not yet vocational, critic very deeply. When the eldest brother finds the financial freedom to receive a university education in the States, he does not go to learn better manufacturing practices nor to improve his business acumen. He goes to further his art, the thing he does that actually puts a piece of himself into the world.  I am not being so bold as to suggest that me writing this glowing review of this wonderful movie is remotely as noble as what the kite rescuers are doing. But I like All That Breathes’ recognition, as the Mountain Goats’ great John Darnielle once sang, that “some things you do for money, and some you do for love, love, love.” It’s just another example of All That Breathes’ argument that the greater good is best served by what we do out of love and conviction. Maybe that’s naive but Sen is making a spiritual argument and the idea of belief in small, selfless changes feels spiritually true to his film. I’ve seen documentaries about conservation in exotic locales that mostly feel like excuses to satisfy the viewer with a nice human interest story (there was at least one such film in at least one of this Oscar’s documentary categories). But All That Breathes never feels like pat, self-satisfied progressive tourism. To me, it really does feel holy, which is just how these men see their work. It is an earnest call to conservation and a soaringly poetic ode to people doing good in the world and a most bewitchingly composed snapshot of the climate crisis. In a great film year full of rather unusual riches, just look at this empathetic little wonder. Behold: a documentary with the craft and passion to talk with more than just its head.

I’m a little leery about calling certain films minor to a director’s filmography. For one thing, it tends to feel too relative. A minor film from Kubrick, Coen, Altman, Rohmer, the Andersons (P.T. or Wes) and others dwarfs the best films of your average director. A so-called minor Scorsese film (let’s say Hugo) still tops almost the best films Robert Redford, Stephen Daldty or Tom Hooper have ever made and nobody goes around calling Quiz Show (an extremely fine film) minor. So I don’t want to start my review calling Richard Linklater’s wonderful, effervescent Apollo 10 1/2: A Childhood Odyssey minor just because it happens to only be the eighth or ninth best film of the laconic dreamer’s sterling career. It is far too strong and personal a work to be slighted like that. But I do find it interesting, with directors who have a substantial body of freat work, to look at the films that fall somewhere below their masterpiece colleciton. I find that the films just outside of that realm often have a way of enriching the films just above them and sometimes give us a lot of fascinating insights into the directors themselves. Think of the 2022 films from James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, which may fall just outside of their most perfect opuses but also act like beautiful prisms playfully reflecting some of the ideas and themes those auteurs have spent their careers exploring. The ways films like these, and like Apollo 10 1/2, play within their directors’ filmographies is fun, rewarding and infinitely more interesting than the question of whether those films will be admitted to the elite canon of their very best work. Besides, while he has made no less than five perfect films by my count (the Before trilogy, Dazed and Confused and Boyhood, with Waking Life not far behind), I can’t imagine Richard Linklater, the good-natured stoner bro of filmdom, loses a lot of sleep over words like “perfection”. His ace in the hole has always been his meandering, ramshackle nature; the way he arrives at beautiful and deep revelations with all the unhurried nonchalance of a day drinker finding a cool tidepool at a beach party. He is a practiced expert at a very rich and warm sort of aimlessness and he has found perfect material in the halcyon glow of his own childhood in 1960’s Houston. Not unlike fellow longhorn Terrence Malick, he finds deceptively heady ideas about life in the humidly carefree atmosphere of a Space Age Texas suburb. I see Apollo 10 1/2 as The Tree of Life‘s charmingly low stakes little brother, albeit set in a place where trees of any kind are scarce to be found.

Richard Linklater rarely misses a chance to wax poetic on the nature of time, memory and consciousness. In his rotoscoped philosophy gem Waking Life, he appears as himself to muse about the nebulous border between dreams and death, the present moment and all the moments that have passed. A few years later, he had Ethan Hawkes’ character in Before Sunset put it succinctly: time is a lie. Maybe every moment is a dream of past, present and future all laid like transparencies on top of one another. Apollo 10 1/2 has that dreamlike quality that makes time feel slippery and illusory. Specifically, it feels like a youthful daydream. It presents itself initially as a bit of historical fantasy in which a young Linklater is asked (for the most adorably cockamamie of reasons) to secretly pilot the Apollo 11 module to the moon weeks before the real mission will be televised. But that imaginative boys adventure merely ends up being the film’s bookends. The meat of Linklater’s animated slice of autobiographical life is about the present adult Richard Linklater (given voice by three-time Linklater muse Jack Black) reminiscing about his carefree days in 1960’s Houston at the dawn of the Space Age. We learn of his father’s work for NASA (purely administrative to his children’s eternal disappointment) and what it felt like to live on the periphery of humanity’s most daring technological achievement. But what we really get the most of aren’t observations about space travel but seemingly trivial details of that time and place.  The music and movies and campy classic television shows (Dark Shadows is just as gripping to the Linklater children as updates from NASA and both jockey for screen time on the old TV set) of the day. The neighborhood faces and the rambunctious, occasionally hazardous ways adolescent Houstonians passed the time. Shot through with Linklater’s inimitable sense of childlike enthusiasm, Apollo 10 1/2 might be cinema’s greatest feature-length tangent. The transcendent art of the decade and the sprawling banality of the expanding Houston suburbs all swirl together into a bewitching, winningly observant act of remembering, which (in true Linklater fashion) becomes a meditation on what defines the times and what we choose to recall. The Linklater patriarch may grumble when his four children flip over from discussion of the Moon landing to a cheesy science fiction program, but both pieces of media were formative for the director telling this story. In the end, we reconstruct a story of the past with all the details we have and it’s no great matter if one memory is a watershed event and another one is just Herman Munster’s face. There are no minor works in the category of one’s memories. Reminiscing is not only a personal act, but a creative one as well. Memory is not bound by strict parameters of social importance. As Apollo 10 1/2‘s fictitious bookends demonstrate, it is not really even bound by strict parameters of fact and fiction.

Apollo 10 1/2: A Childhood Odyssey is doing a lot of heady philosophizing in that sweetly shambling Linklater way, but those shy about intimidatingly cerebral films will find as much to love here as those hoping to get a heady intellectual contact high. With this director, an amiable, buzzed vibe is just as important to his sensibilities as literary references and tingly thought experiments. The head and the heart are always in touch with each other in a Linklater film. He makes movies for art-loving romantics everywhere. It has also long been my feeling that he is maybe just a bit underappreciated as a visual and tonal stylist. Like his French New Wave influence Eric Rohmer, Linklater is drawn to the pleasure in words and talk, which sometimes gets him labeled as talky and downplays what a distinct and flavorful cinematic language he has honed. Long before he made Waking Life (one of his three singular animated marvels alongside Apollo and A Scanner Darkly), he hit big with the one-two punch of Slacker and Dazed and Confused, films that seemed to have one foot in bucolic Texas and one foot in some dream realm. In Apollo 10 1/2, he captures the languid sprawl of an endless Houston summer partly because he is trying to evoke the reality of his suburban origins. But the aimless, humid rhythms and heat waves of Texas also feel a lot like the haze of memory itself and the way that aesthetic fits both the terrestrial and the subconscious is about as purely Linklater as it gets. The underrated quality of Richard Linklater the visual storyteller is how he subtly captures something that feels like nostalgia’s essence; a sweet, smoky buzz like the first beer with friends on a porch as the heat starts to dissipate. What makes Apollo 10 1/2 feel so substantial, in spite of its breezy tone, is that it is positively pickled in that woozy sensibility. it has the kind of scruffy warmth that is not only characteristic of 1960’s home videos but also somehow seems to bottle up every other adorably shambolic thing Linklater ever experienced, from the soft scratch of Herb Alpert LPs to those cartoon shorts MTV aired between commercial breaks. The primordial stew that birthed his gentle but endearingly rambunctious aesthetic smells like cheap weed, french fries and gasoline. Linklater announces this is to be a film about the Moon landing and then lets every other pop culture touchstone wash over the lens. As the semicolon in the title implies, it’s as much about childhood’s inner space as it is about things floating outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

With Linklater, small details are given equal and sometimes greater importance than the weightier matters. His beautiful, impossibly romantic Before Sunrise (and its arguably even richer sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight) depict an organically unfolding conversation between two people who are falling in love with each other. The film finds room for philosophical musings on love, faith and death, but also plenty of time for art, beer, food and pinball. In Linklater’s oeuvre, the small grace notes of what we enjoy and do for fun are essential parts of what makes life rich and interesting. They are not less important than the big cosmic questions, nor are they more so. In Linklater’s gorgeous and goofy imagination, the cosmos and your favorite movie are all connected in one life-affirming link. This idea was given its most cohesively powerful expression in Boyhood, where major life events like graduations and birthdays were deliberately left out to make room for baseball games and digressive conversations; things that a lesser filmmaker might have left off for being inessential. The Linklater school of thought tells us that the mundane and the trivial and the purely fun experiences we have are actually the most essential in defining our lives. Most people go to school or get a first job or have major rites of passage, but those smaller specificities are what help make our lives singular. They are what make our lives our own. Apollo 10 1/2 is, above all, a superb little coda to Boyhood; a winsome exploration of how the little things stick with us and shape our stories. Linklater teasingly starts Apollo 10 1/2 with his surrogate self asked to embark on a nationally vital space mission, a Marvel-level astronaut adventure. And then he tables all of that before it can even get started so that a charmingly enthusiastic Jack Black can gush about all the cool games, music, shows and places that made up life down on 1960’s Earth. Linklater will send us off to the stars in good time (but not a long time, as one Linklater character once said) but only after he tells us about how much he loved The Twilight Zone and his favorite jazz record and the treasured Texas tradition of pouring a ladle full of hot chili into a fun-sized bag of Frito Lays. This is why Apollo 10 1/2 couldn’t possibly be minor Linklater. Minor films don’t typically have the DNA of a director’s entire personality inside them. Richard Linklater knows about films what great travel writers know about cities. You’re never going to experience as much joyous, spontaneous life if you only stick to the gift shop maps and the big tourist sites. He lovingly takes the audience around his Houston just as Slacker took us around his Austin. And that means he’d much rather take us to Houston’s adorably scruffy Disneyland simulacrum, Astro World than to the major museums and historical sites. The most enchanting sights to see are little oddities and they can only be found off the main drag and down the back alleys of Richard Linklater’s memory.

Anyone who knows me well knows that Richard Linklater is one of my favorite living filmmakers. More than a favorite, he happens to be a director who taps into some essential part of my core. I think he is objectively a genius in terms of how he writes and how he crafts his scenes but he’s also my ur-example of a director who is just completely for me. I’m an empathy-loving, pop culture-fixated intellectual humanist romantic through and through. I love a whole host of directors with a diverse array of perspectives (I think Michael Haneke’s great and am also proud to say that I don’t think like him) but if I’m being honest, I probably am Richard Linklater. He stands with the great empathetic directors like Ang Lee, the late Jonathan Demme, Greta Gerwig and, most notable, the visionary Eric Rohmer. Whatever subject he lights on, he renders it with a palpable love for people. I leave each of his films with my intellectual curiosity recharged and my appreciation of humanity restored. He’s a surprisingly ideal fit to tell the story of one of Earth’s most purely optimistic moments. He comes at it from his own charmingly low key angle. His focus on tiny details of 1960s life cohesively ties into the idea that the Moon landing itself was the result of thousands of lesser known people. Apollo 10 1/2 is Linklater’s invitation to see the Apollo 11 mission just a little differently; to zoom in and take in the little granules of cultural context surrounding it. Just as he shows us his personal experience of the culture through all the pop culture ephemera he absorbed as a kid, he makes one of the most public, well-documented moments in human civilization feel intimate. He asks us to consider people like his father, working with spreadsheets and purchase orders far from the launch pad and the flash bulbs. In a moving moment following the landing, Linklater’s father marvels that the astronauts and flight control pulled it off. His wife tenderly reminds him to include himself in the victory, saying, “We all did.” In a film whose default tone is sweetly breezy, Richard Linklater remembers to show us how moving the Apollo 11 mission was for all the many souls who contributed to it. And he follows it up with another moment that touched me to no end. When the night’s groundbreaking broadcast is done and the stations sign off (as they did back in the early days of television), the Linklaters end their unforgettable night in the same way they end every night. They turn off the set, exchange “good nights” and “I love yous” and slip of to bed. Historical milestones are a great change of pace, but there’s just something about the reliable rituals that are waiting for us each and every day.

When I heard Richard Linklater was going to make his first new animated film since the 2000s, I said to myself, “It’s about time!” It was both an exclamation of excitement and a safe prediction about the contents of the film itself. It’s almost always about time with this filmmaker. How it passes, how it lingers, how we mark it. How maybe it’s a lie but also how very real the waking dream of time feels. Apollo 10 1/2 is also a sly film about nostalgia. a word that I don’t always associate with positive connotations. A long soak in a bath of nostalgia can be bewitching and intoxicating, but it also has a pesky way of making our brains waterlogged. It can cloud the senses and distort our memory of the times we are nostalgic for. It can cause people to get too bogged down in the moments of their own coming of age to the point they become oblivious to the beauty of the present moment. I have rolled my eyes repeatedly at members of older generations who claim that they just don’t make art and pop culture the way they used to. I assure them that, if they paid more attention, they would see that they very much do. More recently, I’ve grown to watch members of my own 90s-kid generation fall prey to the same habit. And I have to remind them that the present has art to rival the time of their childhoods. As has every year between their childhoods and now. Apollo 10 1/2 quietly critiques nostalgia by noting how little the Moon landing did to alleviate the many systemic evils of that time. But at the same time, it pulls us into an irresistible nostalgic reverie so powerful that we spend a hundred minutes helplessly pulled along in its current. Linklater isn’t really a lecturer. He’s not actually out to give us a polemic on the scary grip of looking backwards. His way is just to show us the hypnotic eddy of nostalgia and to ask with his characteristic stoner bemusement, “Ain’t that something else?” It’s for us to decide how much the nostalgic free associations of Apollo 10 1/2 are fun and sugar rush pleasurable and how much this exact kind of breathless idealizing of the past presents uneasy implications about memory’s power to gloss over harder truths. Linklater? He’s just out looking for pockets of wonder and weirdness and beauty in the most unassuming places. He’s just wandering the beach at dusk in search of tidepools. And this latest little pool looks like it has a whole universe inside of it.

Unlike my review last year for Peter Jackson’s Get Back, it  would not be quite right to say that lovable Mexican cinema demigod Guillermo del Toto (the same man Peter Jackson replaced on those unfortunate Hobbit films) “came back” in 2022. For one thing, the man is only five years removed from his Best Picture and Director Oscars for Shape of Water, an admirably spirited and well-made film. Some of his other work over the last fifteen years may have fallen short of unqualified home run status and into the realm of beautifully crafted curios (Nightmare Alley, Crimson Peak), but let’s just be clear that those funky little baubles still display a sense of love and imagination that put ninety-nine percent of cinema’s visual stylists to shame. So no, Guillermo del Toro hasn’t been lost in the woods the way Peter Jackson had been until recently. At worst, he’s just been over there in the next room, always following his muse and pouring his jolly film nerd soul into whatever struck his fancy (when he’s not generously and vociferously shouting out his fellow filmmakers). Let’s be frank. If I’ve had slight hesitations about del Toro’s 2010’s and early 2020’s output, it’s only been because I’ve seen him strike genius before. In 2006, I went to a theater in Los Angeles with my law school roommates to watch Pan’s Labyrinth, his ravishing Spanish fairytale about fascism, rebellion and imagination. My first viewing was a top twenty theatrical experience, a crowd oscillating in unison between tearful hush, enchanted delight and audible tension. I’ve been to a lot of down-the-middle crowdpleasers, but I may never hear a crowd erupt more cathartically than the moment Maribel Verdu’s courageous housekeeper narrowly escapes torture at the hands of Sergi Lopez’s vile Captain Vidal, using her switchblade to carve a permanent sneer into his hateful face. And one should not not hold a director’s masterpiece against their other very good works. But, in truth, I have waited for Guillermo del Toro to make something like that again; that soulfully coherent and powerful. My wait came to an end in 2022 in the unlikely form of the man’s first animated film (along with his animator co-director Mark Gustafson), Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. His now-Oscar-winning stop motion marvel finds the humble, spirited creative clearing his throat and drawing in his breath to bellow out another classic. With his sweet bookworm demeanor and giddy enthusiasm for movie-watching, del Toro is always a delight to hear from and read about. But this latest gem feels fiery and personal in a way that even Shape of Water‘s most impassioned harangues against conformist bigotry didn’t for me. The gothic maestro is at the height of his powers again and ready to hold us rapt with attention once more.

The original seed for Pinocchio is not an old fairytale but an 1880s Italian novel by Italian author Carlo Collodi. Its most famous (and still best by my estimation) screen treatment is Walt Disney’s surprisingly unnerving and painterly animated masterpiece from 1940. In spite of its bracing darkness, the Disney version does not match the sheer Grimms Brothers-evoking macabreness of the novel, if only because Disney’s Pinocchio never bites a cartoon cat’s paw off nor later has that same cat try to hang him to death. It’s a high, fucked-up bar. Guillermo del Toro’s superb new spin on the tale as seen through the lens of 1930s fascist Italy is also a little less grisly than Collodi’s text though arguably no less morbid. The man who made fairy tale magic so spooky and tragic in Pan’s Labyrinth has made another tale suffused with death and tormented by human cruelty. Death strikes no more than fifteen minutes in when kindly village woodcarver Geppetto (a truly special voice performance by British national treasure David Bradley) loses his beloved 8-year old son Carlo (I choose to see this as Del Toro literally killing the story’s author) to an accidentally-dropped bomb. The devastated old man spends years in a spiral of grief. The crucifix he was carving in the local church hangs unfinished, a reminder to the whole village of his absence. The village buzzes with judgmental gossip. Geppetto falls into a drunken haze. One night, in the throes of a debilitating bender, he chops down a pine tree (one that Carlo had planted prior to his death) and crudely carves the titular puppet out of it. This display of anguish earns the attention of a cricket named Sebastian, who has just moved into  a hole in the tree’s trunk when it is suddenly, rudely chopped down. Geppetto’s loud sobs also earn the sympathy of some forest spirits, who take a peculiar kind of pity on the bereaved father by bringing his alarmingly rough, alcohol-inspired artwork to life. Unlike Disney’s Geppetto, this version doesn’t wake up grateful and moved to find a son he never had. This one awakens mortified to find a piney abomination clumsily breaking objects, singing loudly and calling him Papa. “I’m not your Papa!,” the old man yells with revulsion. The villagers are even more up in arms when the unruly, possessed plaything claiming to be a young boy storms into the church, causes a supernatural commotion and tries to pose like the wooden colleague on the cross above him. 2022 was a great year for wild plot twists and Geppetto’s initial gobsmacked reluctance to having a relationship with his ersatz son is only the beginning of the twists del Toro applies to this oft-told tale. The local fascists, notably the village priest and the leader of the local fascist party (voiced by del Toro regular Ron Perlman) quickly abandon the idea of drumming Pinocchio out of town and instead try to rein him into conformity with their own norms and plans. Pinocchio is ordered to attend school and become an upstanding citizen. And when, as in the Disney version, he is lured into a seedy life of show business by a traveling puppeteer (an effective Christoph Waltz, though I think Paul Giamatti  would have eaten this role alive), the next course proposed is that he join Mussolini’s youth army (certainly not in the Disney version or in Colucci’s novel). This idea becomes especially intriguing to the local fascist hood when Pinocchio is run over by a truck and comes back to life no more than an hour later. If there’s one thing a Nazi loves more than a naive young mind, it’s a naive young mind that is impervious to death. It’s so nice to have Guillermo del Toro back in anti-fascist fairy tale mode. It’s a micro-genre that has sorely missed him while he was away.

On the strength of Pinocchio and Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s understanding of fascism could not be more sharp and multi-hued. It is not merely the violence and debasement at its core that he grasps. He is not simply out to snipe at its oppressive vileness. As brilliant an avatar of spiteful evil as Captain Vidal was in Pan’s Labyrinth, he was only authoritarianism’s most dominant face. One of the ingenious twists of that film was how its heroine had to do more than thwart this obviously fascistic villain. When the seemingly benevolent Faun whose instructions she has been dutifully obeying (in the name of disobeying an evil man of course) asks for a drop of her infant brother’s blood as the final step in her quest, she realizes she cannot heed this demand, even if it is nominally in pursuit of a virtuous goal. She must see at last that fascism wears many masks, with the Captain being just one among them Fascism is not simply a barking demon. It can also take the form of arrogant buffoons, ineffectual stooges and even a friend who pressures us to turn a deaf ear to our own consciences. It can even take the form of a family member. The fascism of Pinocchio’s village is only partially a militaristic kind. It is just as much comprised of fearful citizens, dogmatic priests, judgmental bureaucrats and even disappointed fathers. There are systems of control that have no need for barbed wire and boots. In Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, the lovable auteur wrestles with the burden of both being a father and having a father, with the voice in our heads that whispers there are some people we should obey reflexively. Maybe that voice comes from a good place and maybe we’re right to listen to it, but what about when the voice is wrong? Del Toro leaves the issue of how much obedience a child owes their parent bracingly unresolved. He simply observes that there is something very scoldingly parental in the nature of fascism. Fascist governments are like toxically stern parents who reduce their subjects to the status of perpetually grounded children. A fascist nation abuses its people and then metes out guilt-ridden punishment if they dare to question that abuse. Mussolini and Hitler did not refer to their kingdoms as Fatherlands for nothing.

The middle sections of this Pinocchio are about the young puppet learning the right kind of loyalty, the right kind of selflessness. Not the sort rigidly demanded of us by some authority figure but the kind our consciences (which are sometimes harried, aspiring novelist crickets) compel us towards. The beginning and conclusion of del Toro’s film are lovely, wise bookends about grief and mortality. The prologue that leads up to Pinocchio’s grief-addled creation was not part of Collodi’s novel. Geppetto’ s tragic loss is a conceit added whole cloth by Guillermo del Toro and it considerably deepens this story of a being that can only dream of being a flesh and blood human being. This version of the story posits dying (read: staying dead) as the most human thing of all. Before he becomes an anti-fascist icon, we first meet Pinocchio as a hysterically unholy torment to his creator. A motormouthed mockery of an old man’s grief and a cutting reminder of the folly of trying to outmaneuver death. In that sense, this Pinocchio’s off-putting roughness is both wryly funny and poignant. As if to remind Geppetto how very much this is not his dead son, Pinocchio looks less like a wooden little boy and more like something you would see in a child-friendly version of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Pinocchio’s entrance and early scenes are so sharply discomfiting that I momentarily questioned if this version of the character would even have any kind of redemptive or life-affirming arc.  For a matter of minutes, Guillermo del Toro feints toward this being a story about how alcohol and the spirit world conspire to rub the inevitability and permanence of loss in a kindly woodcarver’s face. Those early scenes of Pinocchio as an uncomprehending little terror are also hands down the funniest that del Toro has ever written. And while this epilogue and coda may seem mostly separate from the film’s ruminations on fascism, I think all of these themes speak to our messy humanity. How our fear and our ignorance and our sadness and our powerlessness over death are all primal forces that we are swept along by. They are the things that lead us by the nose more often than not and that is a very relatably human thing. I don’t think Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio offers a bright line moral here, so much as it offers a prayer for our emotional endurance. A hope that, while we cannot be free of that complicated, vulnerable swirl inside of us, we can find a way to be more than the unthinking product of it. From time to time at least. Finding your courage and yourself in the maelstrom is what makes you a real boy or girl.

With all there is to love about del Toro’s remarkable first foray into animation (from the stunning detail of its stop motion work to its potent voice performances), I’m maybe most impressed by what a singular and personal work of adaptation it is. If the directors of 2022 were contestants on an old season of American Idol, Guillermo del Toro would be the director most likely to have Paula Abdul gushing, “You made it your own!” There’s nothing wrong with adapting a source material faithfully and subtly, but del Toro’s dramatic deviations are almost all perfectly judged (I don’t know that this absolutely needed to be a musical but I think most of its songs are perfectly good). The airlift form the 1880’s to 1930’s Italy sets up its fascist themes and gives the animators a wealth of beautiful period detail to play with. The addition of Carlo and his tragic death gives a broad children’s fable character dpeth and specificity in a way that never interferes with the story’s fairy tale tone. And the details involving Pinocchio’s multiple not-quite-deaths and his repeated journeys through a hilariously bureaucratic underworld (del Toro bemusedly suggests that maybe humans don’t have a copyright on tedious protocol) are delightfully sardonic. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is what happens when a creator is inspired by a work of art but not bound to it. It’s a testament to the value of not simply memorizing your source but really understanding it. Guillermo del Toro sees what has made Pinocchio endure and then, like any great artist taking a crack at a frequently covered chestnut, he offers some insights of his own that you might not have considered before. Sometimes he plays along with Collodi’s already-eccentric story and sometimes he runs away from it and around it in circles like a giggly schoolboy. IN a film about defiance as the very best human trait, del Toro leads by example. He clearly has the greatest of respect and affection for the old tale he is adapting. But he loves it because of what it makes him think of, and he’s too vivacious and uninhibited a filmmaker to stay in its shadow. To truly honor someone you respect, be it a father or a fellow artist, you need to have the courage to be yourself.

Is Guillermo del Toro funny? I said it before but it bears repeating that his Pinocchio is genuinely a very funny film. I was surprised by its humor, though maybe it was unfair of me to assume that it wouldn’t have that. Guillermo del Toro does have the two Hellboy films, which rely a lot on jokes. Then again, I found Shape of Water‘s attempts at being funny to be somewhat off. Not in an entirely ineffectualy way, but clumsy enough to make me wonder why this movie was trying to make me laugh. Whimsy fit Shape of Water very well, as it fits del Toro himself, but the jokes (about weird repressed 1950’s sex and Chiclets and generals yelling “unfuck this mess”) felt more shoehorned in. But I laughed heartily at Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, enough so that I feel I owe the ticklishly sweet man more credit as a humorist. Jokes may not be what I come to his films for, but what I do come for is to bear witness to his exuberant id. and if Guillermo del Toro needs some jokes to really put the finishing touches on his latest Chex mix of eeriness, sentiment, rebel attitude and note-perfect effects, then that’s what he needs. Artists as wildly imaginative as him are always going to be given to wild indulgences and it’s a given that not all of them will connect with me. But Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a blessed reminder of why the man is such an undeniable force for good in filmdom. Because, when all of his flourishes and flights of fancy lock into place, there’s just nobody on the planet (don’t you even think about saying Tim Burton to me) like him. And when not everything is gelling seamlessly, there’s still nobody on the planet like him (not even Tim Burton). He’s a man so endearingly, irrepressibly himself that his film about fish sex and red scare politics cruised to Oscar glory and just about everyone was tickled to watch it happen. So not, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Guillermo del Toro came back in 2022. If anything, I came back to him. Like a prodigal son coming home to cinema’s most gregarious, free-wheeling and generous father.

James Gray is a director of eclectic sensibilities. So even though his latest gem is set in the 1980s and mostly makes use of golden age hip hop and Clash-style punk for its soundtrack, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me busting out a little 90’s skate punk as a jumping off point for digging into his film. I enjoy the band NOFX quite a bit, in all their goofy, major chord glory. I am particularly fond of their 23-minute opus “The Decline”, a fiery, tonally diverse suite song that calls out the evils of everything from gun violence to anti-intellectualism to draconian marijuana laws. But its central thesis critiques a certain kind of myopic selfishness that feeds on fear. It’s the kind of frightened covetousness that turns garden variety self-interest into an all-consuming blaze of egomaniacal survivalism. One which transforms “my family comes first” into “my family comes only”. The idea that we only have the resources to care for our own, regardless of the consequences of that mindset. In the song’s rousingly cynical closing act, the learned emeritus Fat Mike roars out, “Fellow members, Club We’ve Got Ours. I’d like to introduce you to our host. He’s got his. And I’ve got mine. Meet the Decline.” This sprawling punk anthem came back to me as I watched James Gray’s autobiographical account of liberal New York Jewish family negotiating and painfully compromising their principles at the dawn of Ronald Reagan’s first term. Gray’s story is one of 2022’s most intellectually rigorous and deeply disquieting films because the people it most strongly takes to task are basically decent. The powerful advocates of classism and racism are mostly tucked away in the shadows and unseen. Gray alludes to the unscrupulous and the powerful intermittently (particularly by using the 1980 Presidential election as a loose framing device), but Armageddon Time is really the story of people who want to do the right thing. It is about people who want to be seen as compassionate but find themselves tripped up by the hurdles of prejudice, opportunism, generational trauma and moral cowardice. It is a potent and dismaying look at how American society prioritizes some people while stigmatizing others, and how even the well-meaning can be separated from their morals by the strong paternal hand of that society.

It’s the autumn of 1980 in New York City and a good-hearted but headstrong young Jewish boy named Paul Graff has just begun the sixth grade. Paul dreams of being an artist but his talent gets him sent to the blackboard on the first day when he draws a (quite good) rendering of his balding teacher. He doesn’t have to suffer his punishment alone for long, however, because another student all but volunteers to be punished with him. The teacher calls out the name of a young black boy, Johnny Davis. “The name’s Bond. James Bond”, the charismatic youngster suavely replies. They win their classmates’ laughter together and lose the right to participate in gym exercises for the day. Paul walks Johnny to his bus (Johnny lives in a poor neighborhood with only his grandmother) and they chat. They talk about Johnny’s dream of being an astronaut and the upcoming class trip to the Guggenheim Museum. Paul promises to pinch a 20-dollar bill from his mother’s purse so Johnny can afford to go on the outing. Paul lives a comfortable life, though his father (Jeremy Strong, strong) labors as a working class repairman. His maternal grandparents are wealthy enough to help the family. His older brother attends a rich private school downtown. His mother (Anne Hathaway, as great as I’ve seen her in quite some time) is a driven woman with plans to run for head of the District School Board. They live in a well-kept townhouse. Paul is especially close with his British-Ukrainian grandfather on his mother’s side, Aaron (an endearing and superb Anthony Hopkins giving one of the year’s truly great supporting performances). Aaron is a noble and doting man, always giving the Graff sons gifts and encouragement. He represents the very best angels of the Graff family, but even he has a somewhat stifling sense of familial tightness. He has known scarcity and hardship and a certain greedy fearfulness vibrates just below his genteel surface. His own Ukrainian mother saw her parents murdered by anti-Semitic hooligans. That was when she moved the family away from the Ukraine to Liverpool and from there across the ocean to New York City. The Graffs have had to fight prejudice and hate to become the modestly successful American family they are and they live with the uneasy feeling that it all could be taken away from them in an instant. That is why, when Paul’s blossoming friendship with Johnny lands him a suspension (they are both caught smoking pot in the stalls), even kindly Aaron supports the decision to pull him out of public school and send him to the lofty, elite school his older brother attends. Paul is being pulled in two directions by his close bond with a nice, misunderstood black boy and by the many forces that want to groom him into the thing that Johnny will never be allowed to be: a powerful, accepted cog in society’s upper echelons. The private school does not settle the war for Paul’s soul, it only starts it. It does not conclude the matter of Paul’s affluent future as his family hopes. Instead, the whole ordeal and especially his painful separation form Johnny opens Paul’s eyes to ugly and systemically violent truths about the American Dream and which people are handpicked to take part in it. Moreover, it sets in motion a tragedy that irrevocably changes these characters and alters the destiny of the man directing this film.

James Gray is much too eclectic of an auteur to be hemmed in by the kinds of stories he tells. He’s one of the last directors you could ever pigeonhole. He has been back to the turn of the century (The Immigrant and his masterpiece The Lost City of Z), into the future (Ad Astra) and occasionally to the present (Little Odessa and Two Lovers). His films have gone to Edwardian England, the remote Amazon, the far reaches of outer space and frequently returned home to his native New York City. If there’s a germ of a consistent theme to be found in his work, I think it’s the heavy yoke of family and expectations. In Ad Astra, Brad Pitt’s astronaut sets out to find a father whose approval he has always craved, while that same father has suddenly cast off a lifetime of societal expectations by going rogue. The Lost City of Z‘s Percy Fawcett starts as a social striver trying to clear his tainted family name before a chance to make good by mapping the Amazon points him down a path that is his alone. But while he loses himself in his beloved rainforest, the question that looms is whether he is doing right by his family back in England. Family and society are primal forces to either surrender to or rebel against but, no matter what, you can never entirely get away from them. Not even light years away from Earth. They are fundamental fields of gravity that govern life as James Gray sees it and all of us define ourselves, rebel and conformist alike, by how we respond to them. In Armageddon Time, Gray renders the vision of his own family with fairness and empathy but also with merciless honesty. Family can be an unflattering thing; poison and antidote in one bottle. He shows the Graffs’ fearful selfishness, their blind entitlement, their internalized racism, their years of suffering anti-Jewish bigotry now unthinkingly projected out at the next marginalized group. He captures a brutal beating at the hands of his stern, emotionally repressed father. If Avatar: The Way of Water posits that family is a fortress, Armageddon Time adds that it can be a fortress under siege with us trapped inside of it. Family can protect us but it also has the power to suffocate and drive us mad. The entire institution of family carries with it the uncomfortable notion that our empathy is already partly spoken for, that we reserve a larger portion of our kindness and care for this one group of people that shares our genes. Armageddon Time is James Gray’s gently harrowing account of learning that opportunity and dignity are not apportioned equally in America. The brilliance of Gray’s film is in how he sees family as a snapshot of that harsh societal truth in miniature.

Armageddon Time is about as insightful a film about white privilege as I have ever laid eyes on. What makes it so biting is how it sees racism and privilege as the result of both deliberate cruelty and unconscious self-obsession. I was reminded of something Brad Dourif’s doctor from Deadwood says: “I see as much misery out of them moving to justify their selves as them that set out to do harm.” A society of racial injustice and unequal opportunity is built a brick at a time by the justifications of individuals afraid for their own position; by those who fear that they only have enough capacity (of money, of time, of emotional energy) to see to themselves and their own circle. The gravitational pull of self-interest is hard to resist. Fat Mike has it right. He’s got his and I’ve got mine. The Graffs are basically well-meaning people. They do not espouse hateful rhetoric, even if they do fall right into prejudiced line the second one black boy’s existence poses some vague threat to their child’s future. There is an unspoken theme in Armageddon Time about how people act out their own past oppression against other exploited groups, passing their victimization along like a hot potato. The Graff family is vocally against Ronald Reagan but they are blithe participants in the society that is about to welcome Reaganism’s self-serving myopia with open arms. They may be registered as Democrats but they eagerly push Paul into a school and career track populated by the sons of the greedy, powerful and unprincipled. Many, this critic included, are perfectly willing to attack a system solely interested in securing prosperity and safety for a privileged handful of whites, but it takes a different sort of courage to disavow the benefits we receive from that system. To refuse what you are given and let your advantage go unused. Armageddon Time understands how hard it is for ostensibly progressive white people to refuse the money, so to speak, even when we know it has been stolen from the disadvantaged. We can critique the unjust enrichment of white over black all day long, but there is a tendency to do so in a very generalized way; a way that leaves our own selves out of the problem. The Graffs know things shouldn’t be the way they are, but they also feel they could really use any leg up that America is offering them. Even the noble and tolerant grandfather Aaron won’t say no to this arbitrary fortune. He accepts special treatment and remembers how recently the shoe was on the other foot. How not very long ago it would have been a Cossack’s boot breaking down their door. “The system is rigged and unfair,” we cry out and then discreetly drop the tainted coins into our pockets.

Armageddon Time is an intimately observed coming of age story for James Gray but it also has the foreboding of a slowly unfurling horror movie. The slasher waiting in the bushes is nothing less than the American 80s, and nobody’s ideals or best liberal intentions are safe. Gray’s wise, sober little tale has the clammy panic of a waking nightmare. The more Paul watches all of society degrade and devalue Johnny (from uncaring teachers who write him off to the police to even other black adolescents), the more incensed Paul becomes. That’s when the world starts to take on truly chilling undertones. Because he learns that all his righteous indignation, disgust and sorrow can’t give him the courage to really do anything about this injustice. The Armageddon in question is the total paralysis of human empathy and social action; the failure of our own convictions when we have to make a choice that might threaten our own interests. Meanwhile, Johnny Davis knows where his story is headed from the beginning. His resigned, worn out face tells us everything we need to know. He is heartbreakingly aware that no future has been set aside for him. When Paul worries about his teacher punishing them for ditching a field trip, Johnny chuckles knowingly and says, “Nothing’s gonna happen to you, man.” Johnny has Paul’s back with a tender ferocity. He doesn’t have a chance against this depraved system, but it hurts him to see it grind down his friend. Paul sadly finds himself tongue-tied when two rich classmates at his new school ask him if he ever went to school with blacks (but of course they don’t use the word “blacks”). The Graffs watch a Reagan interview where the incoming President warns that this generation might be the one to usher in Armageddon. His Armageddon is a rhetorical weapon, a fear cudgel that he will soon use to help herd America into a notoriously conformist chapter of its history. The true Armageddon isn’t what Reagan says it is but, in getting the American populace to buy into the idea, it does become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The real cataclysm is the wilting of the American soul in the face of manufactured fear. The compromising of Americans’ principles as more of them prioritize their financial security and make peace with the limits of their power to help the stigmatized, brutalized and neglected.  Sometimes that racist abuse takes the form of plain old neglect. When Paul is sent to the principal’s office, the principal doesn’t know what to do with him and sends him right back to class. The message is actually crueler than mere punishment. Society has repeatedly let Paul know that it doesn’t much care where he goes or what happens to him, just that there’s no real place for him. He simply doesn’t matter. I have heard and digested the criticisms of Armageddon Time as being just another exercise in white guilt. But I find James Gray’s self-immolating autobiography so clear-eyed and scorching that it avoids navel-gazing. It never feels like an act of indulgent self-flagellation or pat forgiveness. Certainly not forgiveness of any kind. It sees the human beings at the center of this story in all their dimensions, but it never lets a one of them off the hook. Under its muted, autumnal visual palette, Armageddon Time breathes a rebuking fire that consumes Gray’s loved ones and himself.

The problem Armageddon Time sees is how the future is forever being held back by the past. The way that, even if you were to assemble enough people who genuinely want to create a more equal and equitable world, they would need to sacrifice personally.  They would need to agree to break with traditions that have protected and enriched them. Real justice would require drastic change, and whoever created the system as it currently stands was cunning enough to entangle a lot of white Americans in it; to make sure that each of them has enough of a piddling token stake in the status quo that they feel they would suffer some detriment from altering it. In the way it sees the morass of self-interest and complacency as the enemy of progress, Armageddon Time reminded me of The Wire, David Simon’s revelatory show about law, crime and city politics in Baltimore. Various characters in that show envision and try to implement better, fairer ways of governing and policing. Better ways of being as a society. And the stark brick wall reality that they always butt up against is that it’s very difficult to get people to change an unjust system that they own shares in. If only half the people in that system didn’t want to be judges and higher-ups, The Wire‘s unorthodox Detective McNulty laments. “But no, everybody stays friends. Everybody gets paid. And everybody has a fucking future.” It’s just what Paul Graff’s family is doing when they place him in that private academy full of future judges, politicians and CEOs. They are buying him into that safe future that is so very beholden to the craven past. In what could have been too on the nose, the first person Paul runs into on his first day at rich school is Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. He is there with his daughter Maryanne Trump Barry, an Assistant United States Attorney. She has come to the school’s assembly to tell this auditorium full of privileged white boys the unvarnished truth. The future has been prepared specially in advance for them. It has been paid for and gift wrapped to be given to them on a day not so far from today, in a year not so distant from 1980. It is of course expected that they will one day reciprocate for their own kind, ensuring that the right to peace and prosperity is handed down to the chosen people who will gather in this same stately hall decades from now. Armageddon Time does not actually get its title from that Reagan interview. It’s instead a reference to “Armagideon Time”, a 1970s reggae song by a black Jamaican named Willie Williams. It was later covered by a white British band  called The Clash. The song is about poverty and inequality and fighting back against systemic evils. There is not much hope in Armageddon Time outside of a small moment of symbolic victory for Paul. But there may be a nugget of hope in the lyrics of “Armagideon Time”, a reminder of what needs to be done. “A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight,” Williams sings. “Remember to kick it over.”