I noticed the tiniest, most joyful little detail in my second viewing of Faces Places (or its lovelier French title, Visages Villages), Agnes Varda and JR’s humane, sweetly digressive documentary about meeting and photographing working class folk in France’s small towns. JR, a young visual artist whose calling card is pasting large photographic prints across the fronts of trains, tankers, and large buildings, has set up a scaffold to put up his latest piece of work. A friendly police officer has crossed the street to inform him politely but matter-of-factly that he will need a permit to erect any future scaffolding in this town. JR smiles and shows he understands and then starts joking and conversing with this civil servant. A moment later, Agnes Varda (legendary French director and the thoughtful nonagenarian co-director of this effervescently poetic film) arrives to suggest JR head to a nearby café to meet a beautiful barista who they may want to photograph. In the next beat, JR is in the café meeting the barista. And the officer is there with him! This stranger, who basically just came to check his paper work, is now there right beside JR just merrily tagging along on the errand. This most minute of moments is Faces Places’ soul in miniature, and I also think it points to perhaps the most vital skill a nonfiction filmmaker can possess. One of the most invaluable and often invisible talents that the greatest documentarians have is the ability to draw people into their orbit. You must make people want to be around you and talk to you. A great documentary filmmaker knows how to engage, even with the most shy and taciturn of subjects, to make them feel comfortable and open and ready to bear themselves. Expressing oneself for a camera can be an awkward, uncomfortably intimate thing even for a seasoned actor, and the magic trick of the most brilliant documentaries is to guide a person through that difficult process when they, in all likelihood, are not professional performers. Faces Places finds Agnes Varda and JR to be masters of connecting with the people they interview and you leave each exchange feeling that they have coaxed something deep and true out of their subjects. What makes this one of the most superlative documentaries ever made is how even the most humbly withdrawn subjects they find end their encounter smiling, engaged, and eager to reveal more of themselves. Faces Places is quite possibly the most unabashedly humanistic documentary I have ever seen, and it attains that power because its creators seem to genuinely love people. At the end of a long year, where it felt like a whole lot of human beings distrusted one another as a rule, Faces Places is a reminder that it is in our nature to reach out to one another and need one another. It is a love letter to human beings, working class ones in particular, that positively glows with empathy, curiosity, and affection for humankind.

The first thing to know about Faces Places is that it is an Agnes Varda film. If you are not aware of the 90-year old filmmaker’s past work, take comfort in the fact that this would-be cinephile has not caught up to a single film in her large, influential body of work until now. It is an omission I mean to remedy as soon as I can. For now, it is just important to know that the prolific Varda was a pioneer of the French New Wave, the stylish, energetic, and frequently anarchic film movement led by directors like Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, which tore down many of the boundaries of classical filmmaking and had a massive impact on a generation of modern filmmakers (Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese among them), who would take inspiration from its innovative, brazen example. Agnes Varda comes from this French pack of rebels, though her rebellious streak is more subtle and contemplative. She is a petite woman with hair that is half-auburn and half white, and she carries herself with a gracious, unfussy candor. At ninety years of age, where many a director might lose their cinematic appetite, Varda is motioning for a dessert menu. In Faces Places, she strikes up an artistic partnership with a 33-year old, sunglass-clad French photographer named JR. The two of them take a fast liking to one another and decide to head out on a loosely structured road trip through the many bucolic villages of rural France. They know each others’ talents (she a filmmaker and he a visual artist) and admire each others’ work. They have an idea that they will go out with a film camera, meet people, shoot their pictures, and the rest, in that oh so nebulous French way, will reveal itself to them along the way. The two new friends set out on their odyssey in JR’s mobile photography studio, a modest vehicle with a camera printed on the side and a small lab in the back. The idea is to head away from Paris and into the villages of the French countryside, where the two mutually admiring artists will mingle with the local populace and practice their respective arts. This involves introducing themselves to people, learning their stories, and using JR’s gift for grand-scale photography to pay tribute to them. In their first encounter, JR blows up photographs of villagers with a baguette between their teeth and stitches them together across a town fence to create what looks like an entire village feasting together on the same long loaf of bread. They travel to a salt processing factory and plaster images of every worker reaching out to one another across a spillway. And, in a tremendously moving scene, they meet a miner’s widow who is the last resident left on a block of abandoned, dilapidated houses, and emblazon her image twenty feet high across the façade of her home. Faces Places is a beautiful, lyrical travelogue of France, surely the finest documentary ever made about photography, and also a sweet, heartfelt ode to modest, hardworking people. It is also about Agnes Varda and JR and their relationship as partners, as cinema-lovers and as friends. It is the story of an older artist who is drawing closer to the end of her life and her meditations on death, art, and legacy. And it is very much about how her dear friendship with this kindly, hip young man colors those ruminations and reflections.

If one line evokes the soul of Faces Places, as well as that of the curious, poetic Varda herself, it is one that comes early in Varda and JR’s discussions about what the film will be. Varda is not concerned about setting out on the road with only the most tenuous of premises. “Chance has always been my best assistant,” she tells JR. Varda began her career as a photographer, and this notion, of never knowing what one will find but being ready for whatever it is, is a vital part of photography. You cannot always control what images will enter the frame, but you know they will come and you wait for them in anticipation. Faces Places is a masterpiece made on the fly. It attains much of its beauty via its invigoratingly flighty spirit, flitting from subject to subject and spinning merrily into sublime digressions. At one point, the film wanders off into a meadow for ten minutes to muse about two opposing schools of thought on goat farming. The genius of the film is that it leads with a spirit of blithely restless wanderlust, yet the end result feels soulfully cohesive. Varda is a brilliant editor and arranger of her own work, and having perfected that skill over decades and decades liberates her and JR to follow a rambling path, knowing that, whatever they find along the way, there will be a story in it. This is not just an approach to documentary filmmaking that Faces Places pulls off with breathless aplomb. It is also of a thematic piece with the film’s journey. Faces Places is very much about opening yourself up to new and unexpected experiences at any age. One of the joys of the film is seeing the vibrant, curious spirits of the subjects they meet. One factory worker stares quizzically at JR’s latest massive photograph. Then he beams and says, “Art is supposed to surprise us, right?” In another small town, they befriend a local farmer who has been in charge of doing his village’s harvesting for many years. Recently, the tractors he uses have had advanced computer technology installed in them. He admits that this makes him something like a passenger in his own job. He reflects that all this technology may be making use more antisocial, less engaged, But still, his overall attitude is one of wonder at progress; at life’s relentless forward motion. He is fascinated by the foreign and new. “I get a kick out of it,” he says with a smile.

Faces Places has a hunger for new sights, new places, and new experiences, but it is even more vitally about opening your mind and soul to other human beings. The film hums with a spirit of adventure and with a yearning to meet, know and love the countless faces that make up our world. It is about the small joys of reaching out and connecting with people and that love for engaging with new people extends to its very creation. Faces Places is simply one of the most lovely odes I have seen to the virtues of collaborating. Varda confesses at the start that this will be her first time really working with a collaborator in over sixty years as a filmmaker. She smiles and enthusiastically notes that this will be a giant leap forward for her. Faces Places gracefully unfolds as not only a film about its humble, hardworking subjects, but also a film about the wonderfully sweet, supportive partnership and friendship that develops between the sage, droll Varda and her spry, affably energetic traveling companion. Varda and JR are kindred spirits and also fascinatingly subtle contrasts to one another. In one scene, the two artists admit that each of them may be performing the roles their different ages have assigned to them: JR, in his sharp fedora and Roy Orbison shades, playing the spirited young man, while the diminutive, elderly Varda adopts the persona of the wise grandmother. JR’s playful presence provides a lovely complement to Varda’s more subdued brand of vivacity, though both brim with a glee for their art; for the process of finding and uncovering human beings. Faces Places is a celebration of collaboration as a process that both synthesizes the visions of multiple creators and also throws their unique differences into relief. It is endlessly joyful watching Varda and JR laugh, bounce ideas, and good-naturedly spar with each other, partly because the film has keen insights about the creative process. But what really makes their collaboration so engaging to watch comes down to the fact that Agnes Varda and JR are simply two of the warmest, most endearing figures to ever stroll across a film screen. They are generous, intelligent, spontaneous, and fun to be around, and they add immeasurably to this teeming, open-hearted tapestry of the very best in humankind.

At its core, Faces Places is about wanting to know people and see them with as much kindness, clarity, and insight as we can. This is the reason the two collaborators head out into the villages of France with little plan in place outside of simply finding people and photographing them. They trust that the desire to just look at humanity will be enough to see the project through, and their faith is more than rewarded. I adore every, warm, kind interaction in this film. However, what transforms Faces Places into a masterpiece of boundless compassion and curiosity is how it slowly evolves into the story of Varda and JR wanting to better know each other. The film’s spirit of vibrant empathy is so contagious that the creators cannot help but turn their cameras upon one another. They join the arc of this ever-developing story, or rather were always a part of it. And I will now need to tread lightly, as I do not want to give away the most poignant, soul-sating, and all around best ending in any 2017 film. One of the documentary’s recurring storylines involves Agnes Varda’s longtime relationship to French New Wave master, firebrand, and petulant genius Jean Luc Godard, a now-distant friend who Agnes has not seen in over five years. With his sophisticated air of cool and the sunglasses he keeps perpetually over his eyes, Agnes sees something of Godard’s enigmatic, confident flair in JR, for better and maybe also for worse. Varda reveres her estranged friend’s talent, but also knows that Godard had a knack for being cutting, aloof, and cruel. In trying to figure out who JR is as a young man just beginning to make his artistic mark on the world, Agnes Varda is also trying to parse what kind of people a new generation of artists will be. They have the shoulders of giants to stand upon, but I believe Varda also hopes for something a bit kinder than certain geniuses of her generation. I think she hopes that that a man like JR will aspire to Godard’s greatness as an artist, but also aspire to be a better all-around human being. In its final moments, Faces Places reveals itself as an effortlessly wise look at aging and legacy and an almost impossibly profound letter of hope passed down from one generation to the next one in line. In a year that seem pockmarked with generational infighting, watching the friendship and artistic kinship that flowers between Agnes Varda and JR over this brief, magical 94 minutes felt absolutely restorative. 2017 had its share of powerful endings, but the closing minute of Faces Places is the one I want to keep with me; the one I want to intermittently steal away to and dwell in. It is a warm embrace between the young and the old, a tender paying of respect to experience, and a sweet expression of confidence and hope for those who will decide what humanity becomes next. Faces Places is a movie about trying to see and understand people and it ends with an exchange of mutual understanding that is too wise and beautiful for words. At the end of 2017’s storm, that final shot is an oasis of selfless calm and fellowship that I could have sat in contentedly for hours.

Faces Places is a film with a vibe both heady and free-wheeling. In many ways it seems like a niche film on paper, being both a subtitled documentary and a reflective essay on variousvcerebral subjects, ranging from cinema to the nature of memory to the psychic weight of place. I suppose it qualifies as an art film, but the pretentious connotations that sometimes go with that label could not be further from this film’s crystal clear aims. I would recommend Agnes Varda and JR’s miraculous documentary to absolutely anyone because it is so thoroughly vivacious, loving, and open. It is filled with beautiful imagery, lovely art, gracious people, and only the purest of emotions. It is funny and friendly and comforting and wistful. And, for all its philosophical musings, it finally just amounts to an open-hearted salute to the very best in people. Because its creators embark upon their journey with such earnest curiosity, playfulness, and kindness toward those around them, they find a country full of people with good hearts and stories just waiting to be unearthed. Faces Places has a lot to say, but one lesson might be that if you go out in search of the good in human beings, you are certain to find it. In one scene, Varda and JR are looking for a parasol to use for their latest photograph. One man they question seems uncertain and a bit hassled by the request, but he obligingly runs off to his parents’ home to see what he can find. He comes back moments later beaming from ear to ear and holding his mother’s old bridal parasol. He proclaims with a proud smile, “You may use it for the photo.” A couple scenes later, he is excitedly pulling JR up to the top of the town’s tower to show off his skills as the village bell-ringer, gushing about how each bell has its own name. My mother always told me that, deep down, people want to be of help to one another and that they want to have their stories heard. You have only to extend a warm hand to them. Faces Places is 2017’s great reminder of this beautiful truth. It is as true in documentary filmmaking as it is in life: kindness and a spirit of gentle curiosity can open worlds before your very eyes.

Popularity is not a huge concern for me where film is concerned. I try not to get overly invested in how widely seen or heard the art I like gets. A great many of the albums I cherish most will probably never go platinum and many of the films I count among the best are lucky to get anywhere near $50 million at the box office. One of my favorite recent Best Picture winners is The Hurt Locker, which, even after everyone knew it was going to win the Oscar, managed to scratch out just over $17 million in the United States. Popularity and approval are fickle mistresses and it’s best for your sanity not to let them get in your head too much. That is not to say I am a contrarian about popular art. I like, value, and adore plenty of widely successful works of film and music, but I also have long divorced myself of the need to have my tastes validated through massive mainstream acceptance. Still, I have to say the occasional chance to love something in tandem with a huge group of people is really, really nice. There’s an indescribably giddy thrill when you watch a brilliant piece of art skyrocket into the zeitgeist. When you hear a great film’s name floating through the air at coffee shops and house parties. I imagine it’s how it must have felt to be a Beatles fan in the 60s or a Michael Jackson fan in the 80s. Or to be alive in 1972 and watch The Godfather become the year’s box office juggernaut. It’s a special feeling when a bold, beautiful piece of art not only hauls in a boatload of money, but also just gets a wide swath of the culture talking about it. And again, one never knows when that will happen with the things they love and you can drive yourself crazy if you wait for it too expectantly. It’s probably best to love whatever moves you and not put too much stock in popularity. I only mention it for two reasons. One, because it’s been incredibly gratifying and great to watch a new horror masterwork like Get Out deservedly capture America’s hearts, minds, and fear sensors. And, secondly, because every viewing I have of it ends with me gushing that of course this became a popular phenomenon and bloody well deserves to be! Get Out is brilliant for a whole host of reasons, but I have to marvel first and foremost at what a furiously engaging, viciously clever piece of pure pop entertainment it is. Its exquisitely canny sense of cinematic popcraft is key to why it has only improved after this third viewing, just as it was crucial to coaxing $175 million worth of American eyeballs into theaters to applaud for the year’s most explosively insightful, rousingly incendiary examination of racism in modern America. It is the reason that millions not only came to see the movie and take in its scintillatingly caustic wisdom, but gushed elatedly about the experience afterwards. Get Out is the year’s, maybe even the decade’s, great reminder of the power of brilliant popular art to get a grand conversation going; to stoke the flames of discourse on a national scale.

Jordan Peele’s marvelously witty horror satire begins on the dark streets of an anonymous, affluent American suburb. A young black man walks and talks on a cellphone. He speaks to the person on the other line with trepidation about his surroundings. In what may be my single favorite line of comedic dialogue in a film filled with lacerating humor, he wonders aloud what kind of demented psyche would conceive of placing a street called Edgewood Way a half a mile away from a street called Edgewood Lane. It is an early look at the film’s hybridization of horror and white bourgeois critique. It is the tried and true horror standby of suddenly not recognizing your surroundings or realizing with dread that you just passed that same creepy tree for the third time. But this time the gnarled forest has been replaced by a quiet, wealthy, predominantly white upperclass neighborhood. As an aside, having grown up in a suburb myself, I can attest that having streets with nearly identical names pop up in different random locations is a real phenomenon, and if you were to theorize that they were so arranged to confuse the daylights out of anyone foreign to the area, I would grant that is about as sound a theory as any. This young African-American man is on his way to some dinner at one of these grand, palatial houses. He never makes it there. A white muscle car blasting old-timey 1930s music (a sly elbow to the ribs of any privileged person who has ever felt nervous hearing hip hop coming from a car on some city sidewalk) pulls up and a hulking figure in a metal mask subdues this poor, lost traveler. The masked attacker throws his unfortunate conquest into the trunk and the car drives away into the eerie, lamplit suburban darkness. There is something nefarious going on in safe suburbia and Peele, an observant horror aficionado, gives us a glimpse of it through the time-tested horror trope of meeting an early a victim before we meet our main characters. To put it another way, this young African American man (the terrific and ascendant Lakeith Stanfield) is Drew  Barrymore in Scream. The film’s protagonist, and the next person to walk into this perilous patch of privilege, is Chris Washington (rising British actor Daniel Kaluuya, whose subtle, brilliant facial expressions are the movie’s secret weapon), a young black photographer living in New York City. He is four months into a romance with Rose Armitage (Girls’ Allison Williams, very good), and they are about to take a very serious step forward in their relationship. They are driving down somewhere south to a nice suburb (we understand instinctively that it is the same ominous suburb from the opening) so Chris can spend a weekend getting to know Rose’s parents for the first time. The Armitages are very well played by Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) and national treasure Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich, Capote, Into the Wild). As Rose drives, Chris talks on the phone to his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery, giving occasional, utterly welcome bursts of broad comedy to an unsettling film), an animated, slightly paranoid TSA agent who warns him that the white suburbs can be a strange and scary place. A moment later, a terrified deer hurtles across the road and leaps through the window of the moving car. It’s a tense moment made even more tense by the arrival of a pushy police officer, who prods Chris for his identification even though he had not been driving. The two lovers eventually make it to the Armitage homestead, a large, gorgeous mansion with a gazebo, a lake, and a sprawling backyard fit for strolling and lawn sports. The Armitage parents seem to be nice enough people with an awkwardly liberal sensibility. Mr. Armitage gushes to Chris that he would have voted Obama for a third term and he blushes when Chris sees that the family keeps two black servants on the property. They are soon joined by Rose’s cocky smart-aleck brother, Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones in a polarizing performance that I actually find perfectly tuned to the arrogant, entitled archetype it is going for). Jeremy is home on a holiday from medical school. The film is about Chris entering into a white suburban setting as essentially the only black person and it keenly shows what a stressful process that is for him to navigate. We feel a subtle sense of unease for Chris even before Mrs. Armitage is cajoling him into an already iconic midnight hypnotism session to cure him of his smoking, before Chris starts noticing that the black housekeeper and groundskeeper have an air of polite, lobotomized menace about them, and before a throng of wealthy Caucasian partygoers descend upon the house to attend the Armitages’ annual garden soiree and to pepper Chris with wrongheaded displays of racial sensitivity and questions about the advantages of blackness. Get Out is a horror film at its core, in ways that I prefer not to spoil, but it is also a brilliantly pitched satire of the general anxiety of being black in America and in largely white spaces, to whatever extent the two are even different. Before we come to understand the sinister mysteries lurking beneath this civil, liberal façade, Get Out is an outstanding deconstruction of the façade itself. It is amazingly perceptive about the quieter, less overt kinds of racism and fear that Chris has to deal with as a matter of daily black life. If Get Out had never transitioned into a literal horror film, it would still probably stand as one of the most insightful and stinging examinations ever made about the intersection between racism and well-meaning white progressivism. Get Out is great as both a perfectly paced horror film and as a shrewd, biting comedy of manners, but it is most ingenious of all in how it blends the two approaches to create something new, lively, and startling.

Jordan Peele has famously bristled at the suggestion that his film could ever be classified as a comedy. Peele may have risen to prominence as one half of the acclaimed Key and Peele comedy duo, but he has been unequivocal about having only the most sober motives for making Get Out. “Get Out is a documentary,” he announced on Twitter. I may disagree with Jordan Peele’s argument that Get Out is not a comedy, but his point is very well taken and I am in total agreement with the spirit of what he is saying. Get Out is smart and very funny, but it does not exist to be anyone’s source of levity. It is a film that speaks its truths with clear wisdom and authority and Peele’s nimble comedic timing, which is present even in some of the film’s most terrifying moments, should not undercut the fact that the film is speaking honestly about a very real state of injustice in modern America. But Get Out is a fantastic reminder that comedy can be used to enhance serious themes rather than detract from them. What makes Get Out such a blisteringly great piece of work is that it reminds us of comedy’s power to speak with fury and unflinching candor. Not every work of comedy exists simply to produce laughter. Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) is one of the most perfect comedies ever created and it is not the least bit frivolous. It has arsenic in its veins and its purpose is to bluntly tell us that we will one day annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons. But the bigger issue here seems to be Peele’s fear that comedy gets unfairly dismissed in today’s culture, and that suspicion could scarcely be more well-founded . Get Out’s script contains some of the sharpest comedic insights to be written in years, but it is a work of genius because it has more on its mind that any single genre can encompass. Peele has created an impeccably paced hybrid of horror, thriller, satire, social critique, and comedy because he needed all those colors to evoke the full picture of what racism looks like in the 21^st century. And what is most gob-smacking is not only that this hybrid of styles hits its targets with pinpoint precision, but that the finished result is so completely captivating and compulsively watchable. For a film taking on at least three different genres at once, Get Out simply moves like a dream. Jordan Peele has made a blazingly original, energetic blockbuster entertainment for America to laugh at, scream through, and excitedly talk about. And I stand in defense of his freedom to question how that work is processed and classified. He has made a film that captures American race relations in a way few ever have, and he has earned the right to call all of us out for finding any of it simply funny or entertaining.

Get Out announces itself as a horror thriller in its opening minute, when a young man is put in a violent chokehold and thrown unconscious into the back of a strange car. It is a dread-soaked, pulse-pounding, menacing piece of work right until it plays its heart-stoppingly suspenseful final card. For all its genre-bending, it is indisputably a work of horror cinema, yet I have heard the odd viewer express disappointment about where the film ends up in its most explicitly horror-bound third act. I personally think that the film’s journey from subtle social satire through nervy, unsettling comedy of manners and into the realm of the nightmarish is a big part of the film’s brilliance. But the very fact of that complaint points to just how cannily Get Out works as an incisive dissection of white gentility. Get Out is a brilliant whole composed of individually brilliant parts. The early scenes introducing the Armitages have a strong grasp of the banal niceties of a privileged Caucasian family that dearly wishes to be seen as racially enlightened. The little touches of affluent suburbia are trenchant and funny and just right, from the early false start menace of a runaway deer (the scourge of many a suburban street where I come from) to the awkward mandatory tour of the Armitage house, to Mr. Armitage’s desperate attempt to endear himself to his daughter’s new beau by shoehorning urban vernacular into his conversation. The Armitage cocktail party, like the Armitages themselves, is a cavalcade of cringeworthy rich progressive tics, from the retired golfer who won’t stop gushing about Tiger Woods to the man who tells Chris without blinking how very fashionable black culture has become. These scenes are not horrifying in the conventional sense, but Daniel Kaluuya’s precise, beautifully reactive performance captures the agonizing discomfort of having to be the one black person in this situation. The scenes of Chris simply trying to survive an awkward weekend with a self-consciously liberal white family, their aggravatingly oblivious friends, and their unnervingly sedated African-American servants add up some of the most splendidly written, well-acted, and insightful satire I have seen in a long time. This is a world of gazeboes and bingo, of hired help and carrot cakes. Of badminton and leisurely days spent drinking pitchers of lemonade on the back patio. It is unsurprising that bocce balls, fine china teacups, and mounted hunting trophies are fixtures of this place. The twist is to present this mannered, civil milieu as something foreboding and unhinged and to have those symbols of luxury become props in a frantic struggle for survival. Peele paints his vision of upper class suburban life in such a sublimely acerbic way that I do not blame anyone for wanting a whole film of it. But having that space, which feels so benign to those who dwell in it, morph into a hellscape is the point. To Chris and other black men like him, a rich, predominantly white space like this always has the potential to become dangerous. For black Americans, the suburbs have always vibrated with the barely hidden threat of violence and suppression.

Get Out cannot simply be a satire or a social critique of liberal privilege for the same reason it cannot simply be a comedy. It was never meant to be about that. Horror was always deep within its DNA. The film draws us in to laughing and nodding in knowing agreement at its witty social points, but the film is really about coming to understand Chris. In fact, it is not even to correct to say it is about understanding him. Peele’s faultless writing and Kaluuya’s rich, focused performance make Chris Washington an understandable, relatable, and endlessly sympathetic character from the very outset. There is never a question that we will understand and like this man. The reason Get Out must descend into full-scale horror, into the inky suffocation of the Sunken Place, is that we must learn to feel Chris’ alert state of terror. We must be with him through this ordeal so that his horror, from the smaller social anxieties to the larger fear of death, becomes our own in some way. Jordan Peele is saying in no uncertain terms that this is what the black experience in America has felt like, feels like, and will likely continue to feel like for the foreseeable future. It is the simmering tension of feeling at best out of place, and forever looking over your shoulder for an even less innocuous source of dread. It is why it is not only really nice, but also just plain important that Get Out has become the year’s most perfectly engrossing piece of popular entertainment. Its pop bonafides ensure that its massive audience is hooked in and along for the ride, and from that point all Peele has to do is train his camera on Chris for the duration. Get Out torpedoes the typical big shows of racial tolerance. Peele throws these ineffectual gestures back at his country and instead asks that we just think more about what it is like to be in Chris’ shoes. It is a call for less impotent guilt, less useless self-pity, and more empathy. To the white crowds that saw and cheered for it, Get Out was an invitation to empathize in a truly clear-eyed way. And to the millions of black Americans who watched it, it was a gratifying opportunity to have a grand mainstream phenomenon capture bits of their experiences and project them onto the screens of a nation that rarely hears them. It was a chance to go into a horror film, a genre that historically chews up black characters, and see something different. Without saying if Chris survives his journey through the seven circles of suburbia, one thing is beyond doubt: Chris is a vibrant, nuanced, unforgettable character, and Get Out is fully his story. This horror film may put him through some mortifying paces, but it also respects him and is entirely about him. It belongs to him.

There are any number of great films to come out each year, and only a fraction of them get the wide attention they deserve. That is just a fact of life in our current cinema culture, which offers a staggering array of potential titles to watch each and every week of the year. Popularity does not give a work of art its greatness, but certain works of art demand to be seen by as many people as possible. If any film this year were to pull in a massive audience, I am glad that Get Out is that film. That is not simply because it is witty and cutting and wonderful. It is not even because of how valuable and poignant its message is. More than anything it is because Get Out says more to me about the American experience than any other film this year did. It deserves to be a national box office hit because it is a film about our nation. It deserves to be popular because it is about our population. It is about how it feels to be a black person in the current national climate. It is about the current black struggle and about how the privileged Americans on the sidelines of that struggle attempt to understand it, lend support to it, misguidedly define it, and exploit it. It is about the varying ways that white Americans try, and often fail, to help; to reduce some of the dread that comes with being black in this country. It is about the teeming, conflicting mass of racism, compassion, apathy, idealism, and ignorance that is America. It is a critique of the failings of those of who meekly claim to want to do some good; of those who insist that they stand for tolerance and personhood but can offer little outside of empty assurances. It satirizes our varying, feeble responses to this ongoing saga of dread. It pokes fun at the many layers of our rhetoric and our guilt. It allows us to laugh at the absurdity of our manners and mores. But it eventually stands back aghast. Because for as many of us decry bigotry, America continues to be a pretty frightening place to not be white. Even with all our niceties and best intentions accounted for, the end result still looks an awful lot like horror.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is the latest film in a grand tradition of cinema that blurs the line between being an artist and being a romantic partner. It examines the elements of passion, control, dedication, and commitment that are common to both love and the creative process, and in so doing it joins a fine list of films ranging from the charming likes of Shakespeare In Love, to the visionary romantic dysfunction of 8 ½, to the heart-palpitating phantasmagoria of this year’s mother!. Also like mother!, Phantom Thread is a film about an artist weighing the all-consuming needs of his artistry against the needs of another human being, and if I say that Daniel Day Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock is at least a marginally less selfish partner than Javier Bardem’s messianic poet in mother!, then that may be the year’s most damning faint praise. The key difference I find between those two films is that I do not believe mother! Is really about love in any substantial way. It is in the nature of that film for the artist’s ego and obsession with creating to utterly drown out the slightest hint of romance. By contrast, I think that Phantom Thread is absolutely about love, even more than it is about the struggles of an artist. Phantom Thread is a keen look at the rhythms and pitfalls of a new romance and, at the risk of overselling this too much, it is also subtly very funny. In telling the love story between a celebrated dressmaker and the gently headstrong waitress who comes waltzing in to his neatly arranged life, Paul Thomas Anderson finds a rich, crackling energy beneath a pristine world of elegant decorum and self-serious craft. Love is an effervescent, discombobulating whirlwind in Phantom Thread and, while it does have a lot of insight into the rigors and superstitions of an artist’s work, the artistic process is also largely here to be the apple cart that romance jostles. Phantom Thread is a deliriously lavish, meticulously composed, sumptuously costumed British period piece and it uses its gorgeously ornate surfaces as a kind of contrast to the brash, unpretentious, blithely unfussy blush of swooning romance. It is a film whose lovely, old-fashioned sheen exists both to be admired for its surface beauty and to be ever so sweetly punctured.

The period of Phantom Thread is 1950s London, where a world-renowned dressmaker named Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis, giving a dependably tremendous dramatic performance punctuated with sly comedic notes) is the toast of womens fashion. He is a man of soft-spoken haughtiness; intense, unflaggingly confident in his skills as an artist, yet also given to temperamental fits of frustration and doubt. He is a rich portrait of the most exacting kind of artist, while also feeling ever so slightly like a keen satire of a certain breed of talent. Reynolds is a believable, multi-faceted depiction of the genius diva archetype, with just a sprinkle of self-aware skewering. The House of Woodcock, the multi-story London studio where he lives and works, is a pristine sanctum to his rigid, well-honed routine. The guardian of that sacred routine is his sister Cyril (the great Lesley Manville, softly terse, quietly acerbic, and very funny), a no-nonsense woman who oversees the traffic of deadlines, appointments, and people that streams in and out of Reynolds’ busy, posh life.  Part of that job involves ushering out Reynold’s latest brief romantic fling whenever he inevitably tires of her. Cyril’s job is to indulge her brother through his wild swings between inspiration, melancholy, and petty outrage. On the evening after a successful fashion show, Reynolds sits with Cyril in their favorite restaurant, cautiously pleased with the show, wistfully longing for his dear, late mother, and unhappily at a loss for what to do with the latest paramour to wear out her welcome. With the nonchalant professionalism of a woman who has dealt with this a hundred times before, Cyril tells Reynolds she will show the unfortunate lady the door and sends him off for a brief holiday in the English countryside to recharge his mental, emotional, and artistic faculties. Reynolds speeds his sleek, gleaming Bristol 405 down Britain’s narrow country lanes and through the night, and ends up on an idyllic village on the Yorkshire seaside by morning. He stops at a hotel restaurant for an impressively large breakfast, which he orders from a shy, soft-spoken waitress with rosy cheeks, a slender physique and a Belgian accent. She blushes as he speaks to her. Before the check has been paid, the intensely self-possessed Reynolds has convinced her to have dinner with him at his country house. Her name is Alma (Vicky Krieps, a relatively unknown Belgian actress who does brilliant work and, by the film’s very design, steals scenes from Daniel Day Lewis in what is allegedly the swansong performance of his career). They have a fine meal of fish and wine. He tells her about his mother,  his career, and his penchant for sewing secret messages and small totems into the linings of his work. He has a blunt, domineeringly forward way with her from the start. He has her remove her lipstick so he can better see her true face.  After supper, he brings her downstairs to his workshop where he takes her measurements. Entering into a relationship with him will mean entering into a relationship with his work as well. Cyril arrives halfway through with her usual knowing half-smile, and the two siblings methodically size up the young woman who will soon become the latest in House Woodcock’s ever rotating queue of romantic partners. “You have no breasts,” he tells her with clinical detachment, before helpfully reassuring her, “You’re perfect. My job is to give you some.” We see Reynolds Woodcock is a talented, fascinating, and all but impossible man. His attention is always tuned first to his own voice, then to Cyril’s. And of course the majority of his energies go to the clients and to the dresses. His romantic partners get whatever little bit is left over. What is curious to see is that Alma notices his maddening drive and his brusque manner almost immediately. She chooses to fall for him in spite of it and because of it, but she also maintains a quiet resilience in the face of it. She weathers his commands and insults, but she will not allow herself to be made a silent partner in the relationship. “Stand normally,” he curtly says. She calmly says she is. With annoyance, he explains he meant to stand up straight. “Yes, well, you didn’t say that,” she shoots back with a soft frustration to match his own. Phantom Thread is a wondrous, clever melodrama and the joy comes from watching this relationship unfold, but there is a simplicity to this film once you have seen where it goes. It is really just the story of an artist walled in to a life of routine and how the woman he falls in love with enters into that sterile, meticulous space. It is about Alma entering into this prestigious, pristine house of rules and manners and walking through it with her own stubborn, clumsy grace. It goes to some dramatically unhinged places before all is said and done, but it is a love story through and through. All the gripping intrigue, intense conflict, and testy power upheavals are there to act as both an operatically pitched commentary on the challenges of any relationship and a blackly comic satire about what love does to the human ego. Phantom Thread is both the lush, emotionally fraught, old-fashioned melodrama it appears to be and a slyly winking send-up of the same. It sets up its fancy pretensions to luxuriate in them and to irreverently topple them. Like love itself, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is swooning, intense, and just a little bit absurd.

Phantom Thread is a decadent, luminous, crystalline ode to the many facets of love. One way it is wise is in presenting love as a disruption to the status quo of a person’s life. Paul Thomas Anderson is smart enough to let us become swept up in all that tradition and routine just as Alma is. He lets us be bewildered and enchanted by the dazzling sheen of it all. This is a painstakingly groomed world of delicate fabrics and brittle decorum. And beyond what all this says about how new love can upend the structures we spend years carefully erecting around ourselves, Reynolds Woodcock’s precise little Faberge egg of a world is just a beautiful little object to behold and marvel over. Anderson weaves this tasteful, dapper fashion world with glee, relishing the chance to make the most formally old fashioned film of his career, but in a way that feels as boldly intoxicating as one would expect from the director of There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights. Instead of showy cinematic pyrotechnics, Anderson instead focuses on images so rich with color and texture that you feel full just from looking at them. This rich soufflé of a film does not rewrite any of the recipes. Instead, it just replaces the onions with the most expensive shallots money can buy and uses three times more butter than the cookbook calls for. Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood (a frequent collaborate with Anderson) ties this glowing, perfumed package together with a swelling score of piano and strings that is both sophisticated and sometimes perversely grandiose. It is a world of linens and silks, shiny sports cars, gleaming white penthouses, diamond tiaras, and delicious cuisine. It is important we see the minutest detail of this fussed over universe. It is a world designed by a man with great wealth, impeccable taste, and an unyielding sense for how and where everything should be if he is to continue operating at the peak of his powers. He loves big breakfasts eaten quietly, dislikes meals cooked in too much butter, and detests the word “chic”. Everything about this world, including Reynolds himself, is carefully put together with not a thread out of place. And it is not to say Alma’s arrival changes Reynolds’ ability to eat a scone with raspberry jam and Lapsang tea every morning, or throws the glitz of his lifestyle into any knde of jeopardy at all. But the very presence of a newcomer who doesn’t intuitively grasp the finest detail of his strictly programmed schedule is enough to throw Reynolds Woodcock into a tizzy. It is the very notion of having to change anything for another person that vexes him. Phantom Thread is about a self-labeled bachelor who has seemingly never kept a romance for more than a few months suddenly finding a person he may really want to keep. And it is about him frantically looking for any justification to be done with it. “He’s like a spoiled, little baby,” Alma confides with bemusement to a friend. Love means allowing some small change into our lives. Somewhere deep in his soul, Reynolds must know it is not any one shakeup to his process that is bothering him. It is a thin-skinned irritation at the idea of having to make any change, any compromise whatsoever.

To be clear though, while the opulent, manicured world of House of Woodcock may at first seem like a cold, domineering fortress, the film’s true immovable object, and I would also say its primary protagonist, turns out to be Alma. What makes Phantom Thread such an invigorating and darkly sweet film is that it is about the act of being bold and defiant with your love. Reynolds has spent decades with no change and no real dissenting voice outside of Cyril’s, who has learned to only press him cautiously in ways that will not disturb his fragile, artistic temperament. Alma is not explicitly out to upset her new love but she has the courage to be utterly herself in love. When she tells Reynolds she does not care for a fabric he is using, he and Cyril both balk. He spits that she has no taste, but she fearlessly replies that she likes her own taste. “Maybe some day you’ll change,” Reynolds mutters wearily. “Maybe not,” Alma replies with serenely unflappable confidence. After Reynolds throws a fit over Alma taking her breakfast too noisily, Cyril offers that she should probably just acquiesce to his preferences. Alma shakes her head, “I think he’s too fussy.” Cyril stares back with a look that conveys both amused surprise and a bewilderment at such a novel idea. To live in Reynolds’ world is ostensibly to tread lightly and to conform to his whims, because he is the great, put upon artist; because it is England circa 1950 and he is a powerful, respected man. Alma loves him steadfastly, but she will not become a tongue-tied mannequin in Reynolds Woodcock’s shop window. “I respect your advice, Cyril,” she later tells her future in-law, “but I have to know him in my own way.” Phantom Thread is a complex, nuanced picture of the joys, trials, and indignities of bonding yourself to another person, but I think it is also of Alma’s refreshingly straightforward state of mind. Loving someone is a choice you make. And no one, even and especially the subject of your affections, can dictate how you do it.

That is not to say that Phantom Thread thinks that one should refuse to ever budge in romance. The important distinction between Alma and the Reynolds Woodcock we first meet is that Reynolds recoils at the idea of having to do any bowing or bending. Alma is fiercely true to her self and to her need to love in a way that is free and open, but she is not unwilling to let love alter who she is. I have never believed in the axiom that you should never change for another person. Any life experience is an occasion to grow and change, and a deep love is one of the most soul-shaking life experiences one can ever have. Alma is not resistant to all of Reynolds’ rules and customs. She simply refuses to be a passive spectator in her own love story. She wants to change for Reynolds, insofar as that metamorphosis does not diminish her integrity. She dearly wants to become joined to this man, but the notion that this should mean completely submerging her sense of self into his strikes her as ridiculous and also rather counter-intuitive. What real good are we to the ones we love if we do not bring our own personhood to the table? Alma is active and engaged in a way that frequently perturbs Reynolds, but she is not simply trying to rattle his windows. She may chafe at the House of Woodcock’s occasionally stifling protocol, but she also very much loves the House, just as she loves the man. She speaks with joy about helping Reynolds with his work, blushes with earnest pride when she gets to help model his dresses, and reacts in protective rage when a boorish heiress makes a drunken spectacle while wearing one of his fashions. “It’s your work,” she seethes tearfully. I think Phantom Thread is about holding on to a sense of yourself fin love, while also eagerly picking up the burden of another person’s dreams and fears. When a Belgian princess comes to the House of Woodcock to be fitted for her royal wedding dress, Alma walks politely but nonchalantly up to her and introduces herself. “I live here,” she says proudly. Phantom Thread is fundamentally a film about being unafraid in love; about making your love a space that you own are proud to spend your days in. As long as you are with a person, you have the right to make your home in their heart and to assert your place there. For all its heightened melodrama, Paul Thomas Anderson’s grand, woozy, decadent film is really a sweet, simple, and sharp ode to the strange dance of courtship; to the art of changing for another person in the right ways.

Phantom Thread comes at love from a lot of angles, but its stance is largely curious and empathetically quizzical. It is a film whose tones are often cerebral, arch, and pitch-black, but it nevertheless is never less than wholly compassionate. It sees romance as a fascinating, powerful, fickle, and mysterious force. Beneath its billowing score and almost dauntingly elegant compositions is a real, beating heart. With deference to Anderson’s terrific Punch Drunk Love, I believe this is the most unabashedly romantic film of his career. It is a stately, impeccably sculpted film about finding real, squishy emotion somewhere deep inside a stately, impeccably sculpted world. In its deliriously wicked conclusion, it manages to get to true love in a thoroughly demented way. In that moment, it proclaims that there are few wrong ways to find love with another person. Love is strange, enigmatic, and nebulous, and as long as you and your partner understand each other, nothing is really off limits. The rules of love are an ever evolving contract between the parties. Romance is a delightful, frustrating, frightening, revelatory conversation between souls for as long as they want to go on having that dialogue. This is Paul Thomas Anderson skewering the follies of artistic and relational pride, and honoring the value of working with a partner. Giving part of yourself to someone can be a scary and occasionally uncomfortable process, especially when you have become very accustomed to creating alone. But there is value in finding someone who challenges our spirits and bucks the wisdom that we have spent years following. What good are life and art if we are never pushed to change? Where would humankind be without collaboration?

I still write film reviews the way I used to write term papers as a pimply thirteen year-old.  I put a line paper notepad on my desk or my table or Taco Bell’s table and I hang my head over it. I lean over it and scribble and furrow my brow, and I try to come up with the film’s main subjects. I outline like my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Marocchi, first taught me to do. These outlines can actually be a very handy barometer for how I feel about a film’s quality. With a poor or mediocre film, the outline topics tend to be pretty superficial, less subjects than general elements one expects to find within a film. Acting. Writing. In a pinch, I might do a paragraph on how bored or entertained I was. With great films though, I can find themes or motifs or ideas. I can delve into the various ways the work made me feel and find a paragraph for each emotion. I would never want to reduce Film to a point system, as if a film’s quality hung on how many bullet points I could come up with for it. Movies are not wrestlers or Lincoln-Douglas debaters. Still, it is a good sign when a film gives me too much rich substance, too many paragraphs, to fit into a single review. For example, it’s a very good thing that, instead of using my opening paragraph to come up with some relevant anecdote or thesis to tie the whole film together (this brief explanation notwithstanding), I am going to use my introduction to state that James Gray’s The Lost City of Z (pronounced “Zed” in the film) is some of the most luscious, grand, classically sumptuous adventure film-making I have seen in some time. The level of sheer craft on display in James Gray’s soulful and stirring biography of 1900s Amazonian explorer Percy Fawcett is so beautiful, painterly and rousing in the best old-fashioned way that it could be the focus of discussion in a review of some other very good film. Alas, there are just so many rich ideas and themes in The Lost City of Z that I have no choice but to squeeze in its lovely lensing, hypnotically lavish tone, subtly mesmerizing score, and the breathtaking immediacy with which it captures its moment in history right here at the start. The film’s surface pleasures alone could take up an entire review if this were a more modest piece of work. But The Lost City of Z is one of the year’s great works of art, and so I have to place them here like little footnotes. James Gray’s film is so sharp, thoughtful, and magnificently poignant that its status as the year’s most perfectly composed period piece is really just the beautiful, gold-trimmed leather binding on a great, thick work of literature. The Lost City of Z is a true story with the sweep and emotional scope of an old classic novel; the kind of classic that, when you are finished, you may just pick back up to flip through the pages, smelling the yellowing paper and running your fingers over the odd illustration inside.

The story begins in Ireland in 1905, where a British corporal in his mid-30s named Percy Fawcett (Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam, one of several 2017 heartthrobs giving performances that fervently demand we reconsider their potential) is stationed at the English barracks there. The soldiers are all preparing to take part in a British military tradition: a stag hunt. We see Percy’s vigor and ambition almost immediately, as he captures the day’s prize. With the stag comes a chance to meet higher ranking officers at that evening’s banquet. The chance, however, never materializes for Percy. In whispers, one man of high rank explains to another man of higher rank that Percy Fawcett comes from a disgraced family, and both take their leave before the enterprising man can approach them. We come to see much of what drives Percy Fawcett is a desperation to establish a legacy and to restore some luster to a family name that his late father tarnished through drunkenness and gambling. Percy Fawcett is not the only character important to this story. We also meet his wife, Nina (Sienna Miller in a splendid, subtly observant performance), a vivacious, confidently enlightened, and resolute woman, who does not hesitate to call out the sexist hypocrisies and injustices that are a regular part of life in Edwardian England. Percy and Nina, who Percy lovingly calls Cheeky, have a young son and they seem to hold a wistful affection for their modest, happy life, while also knowing that it is beneath someone of Percy’s military experience and accomplishment. Percy’s fate seems to be to forever labor under his father’s long, tarnished shadow. Then one day he receives the fateful order to report to London. He learns the Royal Geographical Society needs someone to mediate (and also help exploit) the border tensions in the rubber-rich tropical forests between Bolivia and Brazil, by helping to map the heretofore uncharted region. The Brazilians and Bolivians will have an allegedly neutral party to draw their border lines, Britain will be able to look into some lucrative resources, and humble Percy Fawcett will have an opportunity to lead a mission whose success could restore some piece of his family’s reputation. He will also have to leave behind his wife and young son, and will miss the birth of his second child.  In the name of improving his family’s life, Percy will spend more than two years in the dense, perilous Amazon undergrowth. Along the way, Percy procures the services of Henry Costin (Robert Pattinson, as fantastically subtle and understated here as he was fantastically livewire and unhinged in this year’s Good Time), a dryly soft-spoken ex-corporal who Percy first encounters drunk a full week into their Atlantic steamship voyage, but who quickly proves himself to be a level-headed and immensely resourceful companion. They travel to Fazenda Jacobina, a rubber outpost that represents the last and furthest reaches of Western civilization into the Amazon, including an outdoor opera house all but engulfed by tropical flora. There they pick up a small crew of British men and one indigenous guide who is brought to them in chains. Percy’s first journey to map parts of the Amazon is an expectedly harrowing, grueling ordeal, complete with spear attacks, piranhas, a mutiny attempt, panthers, heatstroke, and maddening deprivation. What is less expected is that Percy comes to find ancient pottery in the jungle, possible evidence of an advanced civilization, which makes him a sudden exploratory pioneer and the talk of London when he returns. What is also unexpected, at least to anyone who has never seen a Werner Herzog film, is that this punishing land of intense heat constant danger exacts a powerful pull on Percy. He comes to fall in love with it and dreams of immediately returning in the hopes of discovering an entire lost city in the Amazon. In no time at all, having scarcely met his infant son, he is rushing back to Bolivia with Costin and another trusted crew member. He also brings along a rich donor (Braveheart’s Angus McFadyen, in a brief, brilliant portrait of pompous incompetence), who aids the mission with his social clout and woefully jeopardizes it by being weak-willed and ill-equipped for jungle hardships. Percy finds even more evidence to support his theory of advanced Amazon cultures, though the lost city remains tantalizingly out of his grasp. He returns to England to rejoin his family and then goes off to fight in World War I, but Percy Fawcett’s thoughts never stray far from the jungle, a place where he has found his life’s work and where the pretentious mutterings of British society are lost under the babble of river water and the buzz of insects. Like Timothy Treadwell, famously captured in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Percy Fawcett is a man who both finds and loses himself in a wild, dangerous place. And The Lost City of Z is a film that empathizes with his need to escape while remaining clear-eyed about the toll that obsession took on a family he left behind for so many years. James Gray’s film is by turns an impeccable turn of the century period piece, a rousing adventure story, and a gently hypnotic hymn to the siren song of the unexplored and unknown. It sees the call of discovery as something softly beautiful in its lure; less a fever dream than a hazy, warmly soothing trance.

I have already mentioned how gorgeous The Lost City of Z’s images of jungle exploration are, but there is something deeper than beautiful surfaces here. In a very classical, sweeping way, James Gray captures the rhythms of insatiable wanderlust. The editing choice that best demonstrates this is my favorite single shot in the film and leads to what is quite possibly my favorite cut in all of 2017 cinema. Percy Fawcett has just met Costin and is firmly chiding him for being intoxicated. Costin dutifully and apologetically hands over his flask of whiskey and Percy pours its last remnants into the sink. In a very tight closeup, we see a long stream of brown fluid running toward the drain. Then we cut from that stream inching forward to a steam train pushing its way into the Bolivian jungle. It’s a relatively simple, two-shot edit and I’d have to say it’s about as formally tricky as The Lost City of Z gets. But there is a tremendous power in that moment. We feel the thrill of venturing into new, uncharted places, perhaps even before Percy himself has fully felt it. The Lost City of Z is more than just a simple adventure film, and James Gray finds space to question the harms of Percy’s obsession and the wider Western world’s fixation on interloping into places it finds exotic. But Gray knows it is important that we feel the giddy intoxication of pure, uninhibited travel. He wants us to see the dazzling mirage of exploration that Percy sees and feel the breathless rush in his heart. I cannot remember when I last read one of the classic adventure books, but from the moment this film opened, with the enigmatic image of bowls full of fire flickering in the dark night above the Amazon, I recalled what it felt like to read Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island. The implications and consequences of Percy’s Amazon adventures are complex, but it is crucial to Gray that we feel the enthusiastic, almost boyish spirit of discovery that Percy feels in his soul, even in moments where his life is in great danger. The Lost City of Z is an utterly empathetic film. It does not doubt that we may judge Percy Fawcett for his single-minded obsession with finding Z, but it does ask that we let ourselves get swept up in his daydream first. More than asking us, the film positively whisks us away to that place until we cannot help but share his awe-struck curiosity.

And if falling under the enchantment of an adventurer’s life is the key to understanding and feel for Percy Fawcett, even in his most pig-headedly trying moments, it is equally important that we get a sense of the itchy straitjacket of 1900s British society that he is wriggling out of. Part of what makes Charlie Hunnam such a wonder in this role is that he uses his volatile, rough-hewn charm to suggest a man chafing at a society that routinely dismisses him. I imagine Hunnam, a heretofore mostly unsung actor, can relate to having more potential than most people can immediately see. I confess to having been one of those people. Percy Fawcett is a man of tremendous drive and keen intelligence, but the harsh social pecking order of this time tells him that his fate was sealed decades ago when his father chose to lose the Fawcett name at the bottom of a bottle. Even the Royal Geographical Society’s decision to give Fawcett the Bolivia mission feels like an attempt to foist a dangerous, thankless job on a man the British military sees as a bit of an embarrassing afterthought. At best, Fawcett may come back with some small handful of clout. At best, he may one day die with the black mark finally scrubbed clean. He may dare to dream of breaking even. Both Percy and Cheeky immediately pop against the drab, restrictive landscape of Edwardian values. They are nuanced, sensitively played characters and we quickly grasp that both are blessed and cursed with an awareness of the ridiculous unfairness of the hierarchical system they are sentenced to spend their days in. “I know the medals are ridiculous, Cheeky,” Percy says about his hunger to finally have some brooch pinned on him after years of service. Then he adds, “But they may be our only chance.” Understanding and seeing the unjust whims of one’s society does not mean that one can alter them or be entirely untouched by them. Percy and Cheeky have intelligence, integrity, and a spark of good-natured humor about their circumstances; about this arbitrary thicket of social climbers and family legacies. But all the grace and wisdom in the world really only enables them to sing in their chains. These are multi-faceted, vibrant human beings who pop against the drab backdrop of their rigid society, and I cannot decide whether that makes their plight more or less tragic. The Fawcetts would write an extraordinary story together. Percy’s discoveries in the Amazon would upend the West’s condescending notions about tribal cultures. He would achieve more real acclaim and historical importance than someone in his social position could have dreamt possible. But for all he achieved, Percy could never entirely escape the desire to gain the approval of men who had long ago declared themselves above him. For all that he knew better, their patronizing stares followed him. And for all the boundless freedom he pursued and found in the South American wilds, there was always a sad undercurrent of desperation and inferiority pushing him along. He found as much liberty and joyful escape as any British man living in his day ever could. But, much as Lawrence of Arabia’s T.E. Lawrence learned, there is no such thing as infinite liberty and escape only lasts if we never have to go back where we came from. Like many a great Werner Herzog film, The Lost City of Z finds a potent mixture of elation and melancholy in one man’s attempt to define and find himself outside of society’s strict codes.

For as much pathos as James Gray finds in Percy Fawcett’s bittersweet odyssey to discover some great truth beyond the petty materialism and social strata of Edwardian England, the most sorrowful fact may be that Percy himself is still very much a product of his time and place. It is not just that Percy cannot entirely escape England’s classist mores, but that he cannot fully free his own mind from the ignorance around him. Percy is a thoughtful, rigorous, good-hearted man in ways that many of his snobbier peers are not, yet he reacts in apopleptic disbelief when Cheeky suggests that she might come along with him on his travels. He is a man able to advance theories that enlighten minds about indigenous cultures. He even has the humility to concede to his own arrogance when he learns that some tribes have advanced farming systems. But the hypocrisy of refusing to fully see that a woman could be an explorer escapes him. Even as Cheeky raises their family alone for years at a time and teaches herself celestial navigation and even unearths the key piece of research in Percy’s great anthropological theory, he cannot come to see the full strength of this brilliant, stalwart woman. In some sense, even when we are with Percy in the Amazon, The Lost City of Z is Cheeky’s story. If Percy Fawcett had to voyage a continent away into the perilous jungle to find dignity and some relief from the stifling class realities of 1900s England, he at least had that jungle. But the greatest marvel of fortitude and grace in the film is Cheeky, who had to spend years away from her husband and had to bear that separation while also toiling under the daily humiliation of being a woman in a time when women were thought capable of so very little. This vibrant, observant, dynamic woman surely knew that a more just society was on the way. Perhaps she could sense suffrage and employment and feminism just over the next crest in the hill, but she had to stay where she was. She had to see it in her imagination. In the film’s heart-stoppingly beautiful final shot, we are left to contemplate a woman who hoped to find her own adventures, her own space, but instead had to settle for exploring the uncharted depths of her own unappreciated mind.

The Lost City of Z is a film with a genuine affection for human curiosity and a frank, generous, and clear-eyed understanding of the constraints that compel us to wander and explore. It is a film about both the freedom of open spaces and the harsh authority of borders. Physical borders, societal borders, and mental borders. It is a film about questing for some sense of wondrous freedom within the cages of our realities, and the fact that it is about questing for liberty within our limitations makes it feel fitting that it finds such vivacity, beauty, and real emotion within something as well-worn as the adventure film or the British period piece. Like this year’s Mudbound, The Lost City of Z is a film less interested in reinventing the wheel of old-fashioned epic cinema than embracing its classic design features and smoothing them out to perfection. It is a dramatically enthralling tale of exploration and a sumptuously mounted, splendidly acted look at turn-of-the-century England, and what is most vital is that it shakes every last bit of wax from those old, reliable genres. It finds rich, psychologically complex people under the costumes and poignant, nuanced motivations beneath the derring-do. What James Gray has crafted here is masterful. A film about trying to buck the system that restores the lustrous good name of traditional cinema.

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk received instantaneous, almost unanimous raves from the moment it screened in early July of 2017. It went on to earn eight Academy Award nominations, eight BAFTA nominations, and an endless list of wins and nominations from both critics and industry guilds. It comes from the creator of critical and popular hits like Memento, The Dark Knight, and Inception, yet it had a host of critics lining up to anoint it as the new apex of his filmography. It vaulted to an astronomically high score of 94 on Metacritic and made more than $500 million in worldwide box office. If you judge a film’s success as being some combination of reviews and the number of sheer eyeballs that watch the thing, then Dunkirk is your unimpeachable 2017 champion. And for all that, I have to posit that it may be the most underrated film of the year. Somehow, most of the conversations I have had about it have carried a sense of being underwhelmed, which is an odd reaction to have to a dynamically directed, feverishly intense, critically adored Oscar player that half of the world paid IMAX money to see. The thing I have found about Dunkirk is that it is so very much its own beast that it vexes a wide spectrum of viewer expectations. The film provokes strong opinions about what it actually is, what it should be, and what it needs more of, and the strangest thing of all is that there is no decisive consensus as to what the film needs more or less of. My family was impressed by the spectacle of it but found it to be a chilly, clinical experience without a lot of human interest. They echoed the feelings that a number of friends have had regarding a paucity of memorable, distinct people to take us through the story. I understand this criticism, yet I find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum. I could have done with even less characters; even less of a conventional human angle. I am a lover of great characters and writing. My top ten of 2017 is overwhelmingly populated by character studies. But in this one case, I wanted even less of it. I found myself wishing Nolan had given me an even drier martini (and that will be the last time the word “dry” comes up when discussing this sopping wet movie), with even less of the olive juice of human interest. There is a moment early in the film when a weary, tense line of British soldiers stands on a dock waiting to board a boat. The rough surf roars up at them. As the waves crash at them, they all duck in unison and just as soon stand back up as a unit. This line of men looks like some kind of human wave, like an extension of the ocean itself. This was my moment of nirvana with Dunkirk and it was the special quality I wanted more of in the film. It was a moment of dynamic, wordless, utterly shot-based cinema, like I might get from a Kubrick or Tarkovsky film. And while I understand wanting more human voices in what is largely a tale of noble human fortitude, I was nonetheless brought back down to earth a bit whenever the film paused to let a character give some speech. And I am not saying that my take is the definitively correct one. What I am saying is that Christopher Nolan has made a film that seems to confound expectations about what makes a great war film. And in a year that was relatively short on the ground for boldly uncompromising works, Dunkirk’s ability to both conquer the box office and still be kind of polarizing is its own intrinsic medal of honor.

What is really exceptional about all this is that Dunkirk never really had to be this idiosyncratic. To be frank, when I heard that Christopher Nolan was making a film about the famous Dunkirk rescue in World War II, I did not anticipate any idiosyncrasy whatsoever. I have loved a number of Nolan’s films in the past and I anticipated a well-made war picture, but I was also sure that this would be his attempt to make something broadly appealing and inspiring. And the thing is Dunkirk is something of an inspiring movie. It just also happens to the year’s most brutally visceral cinema experience. Dunkirk is a terse, relentlessly intense telling of Operation Dynamo, the British mission to rescue over 330,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk, France where they faced almost certain capture by the Nazi armies. In history books, Dunkirk often comes up under the heading, “The Miracle at Dunkirk”, emphasizing heroism in the face of adversity and long odds. The Miracle of Dunkirk would see Britain rally to save hundreds of thousands of soldiers, with many British civilians coming to assist with the rescue in private boats. Operation Dynamo unexpectedly thwarted a crushing Nazi victory and very likely saved Great Britain from being coerced into a conditional surrender with Germany. As some Dunkirk detractors have pointed out, there was a lot of nuanced historical context to this situation, including the involvement of non-British forces in the conflict and the complex strategic considerations that led Germany to spend three days pummeling the surrounded troops but not making a decisive strike to defeat them. And of course there was the matter of Winston Churchill, only some 220 miles away in London, advocating for Parliament to send relief to those beaches, which was the substance of 2017’s Darkest Hour and is nowhere to be found in this film. To sum it up, Dunkirk features none of the following: major strategic discussions, speeches to any government body, visible Nazi soldiers, Winston Churchill, and, for the vast majority of its runtime, any place on God’s green earth outside of the shell-pocked beaches and choppy waters of Dunkirk. What Dunkirk does feature is terrified men, a positively demonic symphony of bullet whizzes and engine whines, endless alternating torrents of water and fire, relentless action, and a hypnotically teeth-gritting Hans Zimmer score that would be well over the top in any film where vicarious shellshock was not the raison d’etre. Dunkirk gets one of its few moments of relative calm out of the way in its first minute and it spends that minute acquainting us with our harrowing situation and letting us know that there will be precious little peace in the 100 minutes to come. A small group of soldiers walk through the deserted streets of Dunkirk as a deceptively gentle rain of white leaflets falls down upon their heads. The leaflets show a map of Dunkirk and stark block letters read, “YOU ARE SURROUNDED”. One soldier (Fionn Whitehead, very good as the closest thing the film has to a main protagonist) grabs a handful to use later as toilet paper. No sooner have the men stopped to check their surroundings then an ear-splitting hail of machine gun fire pierces the eerie stillness. The men, who we have not known for much more than thirty seconds, are all gunned down as they flee, with the exception of Whitehead’s character. The lone soldier makes it behind the tentative safety of a cluster of sandbags guarded by French soldiers. Even that safety feels unbearably shaky, however, as the monstrous din of the gunfire seems to follow him even as he runs further behind the French line. The cacophony chases him and us until we reach the dismal dead-end of that beach full of soldiers. The plot of Dunkirk focuses on the desperate struggle to escape from this place while under the constant, faceless threat of German bombs, bullets, and torpedoes. Dunkirk is a historical war piece that exists almost entirely as an enervating action survival film. What makes it unique, apart from Nolan’s decision to strip most of the prestige away in favor of unflagging terror, is its time structure. Nolan and his editor Lee Smith (unquestionably and almost necessarily the most valuable contributor to the film’s success) cut with brisk, hurtling energy between three places and time periods. The first is a week before the evacuation, as Whitehead’s character and a multitude of other soldiers (including British singer and heartthrob Harry Styles) wait at the docks, trying to put men on boats and vainly struggling to dodge the strafing of German planes. The second time period takes place at sea a day before the evacuation, as a British private craft manned by a kindly civilian (reliably well-played by British national treasure Mark Rylance), his son and his young employee sails to Dunkirk. The last period takes place in the air one hour before the evacuation as British pilots (one played by Tom Hardy) fly to provide the evacuation with air cover. Dunkirk is the story of three different groups of men constrained to a limited view of war and all the more terrified for not knowing the bigger picture. Dunkirk is not the first war film about just trying not to die and it is not the first to argue that war is a hard thing to fathom when you’re in the middle of it. But it may be the only film I can name to make the claustrophobic scramble of surviving war feel this chaotic, merciless, and physically draining. Dunkirk is Christopher Nolan’s most purely sensory work. It is a wildly successful attempt to capture how time must feel within the metallic maelstrom of battle.

An easy way to illustrate the overall effect of Dunkirk would be to say that it extends the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan across an entire film. That’s frankly a little reductive and it ignores the fact that Dunkirk communicates some pretty rich ideas, but one cannot fully compliment the multi-faceted achievement of this film without pointing out that it is some of the most perfect action cinema ever captured. It is an absolutely beautiful, majestically assaultive action film. If Dunkirk were nothing but the most propulsive, maniacally tense, ingeniously crafted action film of the year, I would still feel a strong obligation to write about it and recommend it. One cannot take pure, visceral, heart-pounding cinema like this for granted. As an act of sheer, harrowing spectacle alone, it is one of the year’s most beautiful and intelligent works of art. And I say intelligent because it is not just that Dunkirk looks impressive or that it moves with astonishing power or that the sheer scope of the thing is jaw-dropping. There is also a keen sense of how great action cinema does more than pry open your eyes and assault your ears. Nolan has always had a shrewd understanding of how our fear sensors operate. He relishes not just the explosive moments, but the foreboding lulls right before something catastrophic happens. Before he sinks a carrier ship and sends it to the bottom of the sea, he watches two soldiers push nervously through the crowd to be closer to the door and holds on them anxiously looking at it. We shiver at the possibility that this ship could flood with water long before we see it happen. Before a vast swath of oily ocean goes up in flames, we have a moment to process that a group of shipwrecked soldiers are floating in it. Then a faraway voice screams, “Oil! You’re in oil!” This is action cinema so brutal and unrelenting that it becomes poetic in its fury . Dunkirk values an almost musical sense of pacing. To use an old cliché, this is the quintessential case of a director holding his audience in the palm of his hand. We tremble at coming down from the latest dreadful adrenaline rush because we know the film is only easing our anxiety so we will be vulnerable for the next moment of panic. Putting an experience like Dunkirk into words is futile, but the fact is that no movie made me feel a more elated sense of terror. And that elation does not mean that you don’t feel genuine empathy and compassion for the men going through this ordeal. But Dunkirk is so skillful at hooking an IV drip of adrenaline to your veins that it is impossible not to feel perversely enlivened in a mortified way. Nolan understands that the great heart-pounders need to do more than just throw sound and fury at the audience. You must also be continually setting up new payoffs. You must not neglect the fine art of making your audience wait. In Dunkirk, Nolan demonstrates an impeccable knack for laying down timebombs in one scene that will go off two scenes later.

And if the marvelous craft and precise timing of Dunkirk were not impressive enough, let me also join the chorus praising Nolan for making fruitful new use out of some of his oldest tricks. Dunkirk is not the first Nolan film to play with the concept of time as a kind of prison (Memento) or to place a story within a multi-tiered temporal structure (Inception). But I do not know that he has ever used the tricky, prismatic nature of time to more rigorously suspenseful effect. It is the reason that even those scenes where the gunfire dies down have an unbearable, suffocating dread to them. On a purely surface level, this device imbues the film with an urgency that is immediate and unbelievably bracing. From the moment Hans Zimmer’s timebomb of a score started its first metronomic ticks and two of our soldiers went racing down the beach with a stretcher, a knot formed in my stomach and a strange, nervous half-grin spread across my face. It was terrifying and unbearable and also undeniably exciting. I don’t know that I felt a more primal rush all year than when the gears of Nolan’s unforgiving doomsday clock started to turn and the film made its first rotation through the three tiers of time. Even as a purely superficial thrill ride, Dunkirk has a grimly entertaining sense of purpose. Fortunately, Dunkirk is not simply a dazzling piece of narrative machinery. What Nolan set out to do, by his own admission, is to use the cruel, rigid bars of these time structures to tap into the idea of war as a fickle, arbitrary, and incomprehensible game of survival. The soldiers on that beach do not know that civilian boats are days away from rescuing them or that some small amount of air support will rally to their aid in the nick of time or that a strategic gambit by Hitler and his generals will keep the Nazis from massacring them right where they stand. They only know this terrible moment and this wretched, doomed expanse of sand. Dunkirk takes the World War II story with one of the most famous happy endings and spends most of the film showing how, until that happy deliverance arrived, this place was a violent, forsaken hellscape. Dunkirk shows how time and our limited perspectives play potently off one another and how especially excruciating that must be in the context of war. It is a straightforward but powerful idea, and the devastating marvel of it all is how Nolan uses skillful physical acting, astonishing practical effects, and a tremendously effective plot structure to make you feel a trapped soldier’s dilemma in your bones. It is a simple enough thing to say that one intends to use temporal cross-cutting to convey the heightened fear and uncertainty of battle and quite another thing to pull it off with this level of precision, immersion, and even sneaky emotion. Any number of directors could have conceived of the kind of roaring engine needed to power a movie like this, but only someone with an exceptional grasp of pure, muscular filmmaking could have built it. Only a director with both an impeccable grasp of whiz-bang storytelling and an auteur’s sense of why that story needed to be told in that way could have built something this visually and sonically mesmerizing and quietly rich in ideas. Just as he did with The Dark Knight, Nolan has created a rousing, indecently thrilling popular entertainment that is also brutal, bruising, and exhausting.

And this astonishing onslaught almost never lets up for the entire 100 minutes. We are placed among a mass of men running around the trap of this surrounded beach with no inkling that help is coming and little time to do anything but run, hide, and pray that their next frantic stab at survival doesn’t lead them to a watery grave. And every now and then we return to Mark Rylance on his boat or Tom Hardy in his cockpit, mostly to remember that help is actually coming for these poor souls, and also to remember that those coming to the rescue are in no small amount of danger themselves. For all its relentless menace, Dunkirk does care about these people and about the unlikely triumph of this moment in history, and so we get some small ration of character and dialogue to keep us sated and sane. But, while I cannot begrudge anyone for wanting more humanity in this flurry of death, who these people are is so completely not the point of this film. To hear where the soldiers come from or which of them wants to go to university or to learn that Whitehead’s character wants to open a fish-and-chips shop in Brighton when he gets home would be utterly immaterial. It would be downright counter-intuitive to the film’s desperate, headlong momentum and to the greater points Nolan is making about war and survival. Dunkirk is an elemental film. It is rushing water and blazing fire and air whipping around the wings of fighter planes. It is tons of blackened earth flying high into the sky and crashing down around us. And it is human beings who have no choice but to become elements themselves. There is no choice but to hug the earth and plunge into the cold waters and become one with whatever part of this landscape isn’t exploding. And when our characters are not silently running, crouching and swimming from death, they are quietly moving toward other men in the hopes of finding some safety in small clusters. The men in Dunkirk behave like molecules. We do not find out if any of them have best girls at home because it does not matter, least of all to them in this moment. Nolan’s vision of war is beyond humanity, which maybe makes it sound like there is some truth to the critique that Dunkirk is too cerebral and efficiently  cold for its own good. But I would maintain that the sheer intensity of the thing is actually what makes it more human. It is a vision of how much war strips away from people. Nolan is a good enough director of actors that I never once thought of these men as bland cogs. One can read the bleak dehumanization of this ordeal on their grubby, blanched faces. The fear when the water rushes over their heads. In one of my favorite shots, a soldier narrowly avoids drowning and pops above the water just in time to hear an explosion go off above his head. He plunges immediately back under and throws his hands above his head with the teary frustration of a child. Where does one have to go to not die in war? What does one have to become? Can I just be a fish? Do men have to become waves? I look at this man’s frail, flailing terror and I find the humanity that some say the film lacks. But, if any viewer looks at these quiet, huddled men and cannot entirely make out a fully fleshed human being, that may say a lot on its own.

What makes Dunkirk the year’s most underrated film may be how it seems to exist in between so many polarities. I have heard some wave it away as being too traditional, just one more World War II drama in a cinema landscape full of them. I have heard others complain that this nerve-rattling action extravaganza was too atypical of what they seek in movies about this time and conflict. It did not give them enough of the heart-tugging prestige they expected from what is arguably the Great War’s most touching moment of human fortitude. Dunkirk is the year’s most idiosyncratic traditional film, and the year’s most inspirational art film. For much of the film men become part of an almost faceless tapestry, yet we also find time for weighty speeches about country, duty, and sacrifice. Zimmer’s score screeches and sneers and then gives way to lovely, swelling strings. Dunkirk is a phenomenally exciting blockbuster smash and also might be the most cerebral, austere war film since The Hurt Locker. It is a luscious, grand entertainment full of derring-do and it also watches in frozen horror as a ships full of screaming men sink to the ocean floor like metal tombs. It is pathos and blood-curdling terror, together and in proportions that we do not often see. There are few things more safely respectable than a World War II picture, yet somehow the one thing Dunkirk never becomes is safe. Even its final reading of Churchill’s famous speech feels like something strange and a little unhinged. It feels like both a sincere appreciation of valor and bravery and a haunted, knowing acknowledgment that all this rhetoric is probably stuff and nonsense. Dunkirk is a miraculous hybrid of lofty war drama, peerless action spectacle, and harrowing thriller. It oscillates between the three, perhaps because a tale like Dunkirk is just too messy to told in a single way. The lesson may be that seemingly straightforward stories like this are never as tidy as they are made out to be. Nolan is clearly proud to honor the people who were part of this rescue mission. He knows the value this miracle story holds for Great Britain and for people around the world. But he also knows that narratives come after the fact. It is natural for the living to tell stories of survival, but survival itself has little need of words.

Sixteen years ago, I was sitting in an Ethics and Religion class. I had enrolled to complete a few of the theology credits that were mandatory at my Jesuit undergraduate university, even for hopelessly damned Communications majors. I remember spending an afternoon discussing an idea that my professor termed, “The Gleam of Sin”. It could have also been “The Glow of Sin” or “The Allure of Sin”. What I remember is delving into the notion that there is a kind of radiant, sinister beauty in sinning itself that goes past just doing wrong to get something you want. If you were, say, a jewel thief engaged in a heist, the gleam or glow wouldn’t come from the rare diamond in the glass case, but from the stealing. There is an extra, intangible lure in the heist itself. The very act of doing the wrong thing can have its own kind of intoxicating sheen. And if you asked me to render this abstract ethical concept into visual terms, I honestly do not know that I could come up with a better evocation of shiny, eye-catching vice than just about every frame of Good Time. Josh and Benny Safdie’s (known to film enthusiasts as the Safdie Brothers) gritty, neon fever dream about one night in the life of an unrepentant, lowlife bank robber, as he tries to break his brother out of a prison hospital, places us in the front car on a pulse-quickening, nauseating rollercoaster of terrible decision-making. Along the way, it snaps a souvenir photograph of the viewer covering their face in disgusted shock and maybe also to hide the fact that all this ugly, flashy sin is perversely just a little invigorating. That is not to say that Good Time is a remotely pleasant experience in any conventional sense of that word. But, like riding the most horrifyingly rickety ride at a two-bit carnival or popping a ball of wasabi into your mouth on a dare, the film has a canny sense of the sickly thrill of dangerous choices, and it makes us voyeurs to that dark fixation in the human soul. What is most remarkable is that the film achieves this as both a tautly visceral piece of cinema and as a terrific, magnetically queasy character study. Good Time is a litany of self-destructive, wantonly sinful behavior, so it stands to reason that it needs a sinner.

The character arguably most important to Good Time spends the majority of the film offscreen. Nonetheless, his is the first face we see and his fate sets the major arc of the story into motion. He is Nikolas Nikas, a developmentally disabled man who looks to be in his early 30s (and very well played by co-director Benny Safdie, who, it should probably be said, has no mental disabilities in real life). He is sitting in the office of a psychologist who is asking him questions to test his understanding of complex ideas: metaphors, similes, word associations. The psychologist, a kind, somewhat frazzled older gentleman named Peter, asks Nik to explain the axiom, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” Nik does not understand the proverb. He stares for a beat and then mumbles that it just means you shouldn’t count your chickens. We learn that Nik may have had domestic trouble with his grandmother, who appears to be his caretaker. He seems to be a kind-hearted but emotionally turbulent young man. Nik is suspicious of this allegedly helpful man’s intentions and is bashful about his ability to provide sensible answers to the questions he is being asked. In short, he is the kind of person who needs a nurturing environment and it appears his home life has not entirely provided that for him. A patient, trained professional who understands his condition is probably what Nik needs. Unfortunately, this therapy session does not get to proceed very far. Only a few minutes in, the session is interrupted by Nik’s brother, Connie, a fast-talking, belligerent young man with wild eyes, greasy hairy, and an immediately apparent air of feral intensity. Connie scolds his brother for considering therapy, verbally accosts the psychologist for trying to take advantage of his vulnerable brother, and practically drags Nik out of the building. The therapist points to Connie and says, “Shame on you, sir. You are not helping.” As they leave, Connie points to another patient leaning semi-consciously against the wall and asks Nik indignantly if that is how Nik sees himself. Connie tells Nik he loves him and that the only help he really needs is his devoted brother by his side. And then the film immediately jumps to the two siblings clad in latex masks walking into a bank. Connie robs the bank for a small amount of money using only a notepad and the silent threat of Nik’s hulking presence. They make it out of the bank, into an alley to get rid of their disguises, and into the back of a getaway car. All the while, Connie is reassuring his brother, hugging him and praising him for being such a good, helpful accomplice. They sit in the car and then a fateful click sounds from the duffel bag full of money and the entire vehicle fills with a mist of fluorescent pink dye. The car crashes with rosy plumes billowing out of it and Connie and Nik flee on foot, stopping to wash off their faces in the restroom of a very ticked off Pizza Hut manager. They emerge back on to the street and into view of a police officer. Connie tries to play it cool, but Nik does not have his brother’s poise or the street smarts needed to override the alarm bells in his head. He tears off in a sprint with Connie running close behind him. Connie escapes, but Nik crashes through a sliding door and is arrested. He is taken to Rikers Island prison and then unconscious to Elmhurst Hospital when his temper leads him to get into a lopsided prison fight. And all of this comes in the opening 15 minutes of a very fleet-footed, adrenaline-charged 100-minute film. The rest of Good Time is about getting to know our main protagonist and sinner, Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson, in a performance so brilliantly intense and charismatically nasty that it instantly erased whatever reservations I once had about his talents), as he tries to free his brother, first by trying to raise bail and then by breaking him right out of a police-guarded hospital room. Without giving too much away, Good Time is a classic “one dark night of the soul” film, and while the film’s plot is driven by the quest to ostensibly rescue poor, battered, incarcerated Nik Nikas, the tar-black soul we spend this ghoulishly stressful night peering into belongs to Connie. The film is about watching one of the most wily, reckless, foolish, infuriating ne’er-do-wells to ever appear on screen as he attempts to do his version of a good deed. Over the course of one tense, hellacious night, that good deed will involve deception, jailbreak, mistaken identities, battery, impersonation, drug-dealing, breaking and entering and an endless stream of slick double-talk. Good Time moves quickly and in sporadic jerks, which has the virtue of not only making it a masterclass in energetic anxiety, but also an exact reflection of Connie himself. Good Time is about following a character who has an uncanny knack for survival and improvisation and precious few other decent human qualities, apart from a deep love for his brother and an oily charisma that he seems pathologically incapable of using responsibly. At one point, he puts the moves on an underaged girl just so she won’t notice his face on the nightly news. Connie Nikas is quite simply a phenomenal screen creation. He is a shrewd urban coyote of a man. He gives off a bouquet that is equal parts cheap cologne and flop sweat. He is a man forever see-sawing between his impeccable capacity for escaping disaster and the bottomless depths of his selfishness and deplorable decision-making. I am fascinated by this man, but I did not for a second like him. A word like “anti-hero” would probably be a bit too complimentary for Connie. He is not to be liked and he really doesn’t need to be. All that matters is that the fate of Nik Nikas, a wholly sympathetic character, rests entirely on the success of Connie’s galling, destructive, unnervingly shaky song and dance.

And I will reiterate that the thing Good Time does to absolute perfection is to become an unflaggingly propulsive character study. “Propulsive” and “character study” are words not often seen together, but Good Time lives in a beautifully disorienting realm between the two. It is filled with both jagged intensity and a feeling of intimacy for the people on screen. In its headlong rush of stomach-knotting momentum, its nearest 2017 rival is Dunkirk, which is decidedly not a character study. To watch Good Time is to understand what it must feel like to be Connie Nikas, a man perpetually in the midst of a steadily worsening crisis. He is too wily to completely fall down and is always in too deep to ever fully catch himself, and so he exists in a frantic limbo of plotting his next skin-saving tactic while looking over his shoulder to see if the consequences of his last impulsive ploy are catching up to him. Like the character, the film lives on a razor’s edge of disaster delayed and never entirely averted. It is antsy and raw and always stumbling frantically toward its next plot turn, like a doomed con man with no choice but to keep hustling on toward some unforeseeable deliverance. The editing feels breathless and kinetic, even in moments where we are simply watching two characters talk. The brilliant score by electronic artist Oneohtrix Point Never is a thing of angular, pulsating beauty. The clashing of shadows and bright colors on screen mixes desperation and a fool’s kind of hope. The neon lights that shine down on Connie and his sinful, violent journey provide some illumination in the darkness, but they are scarcely a relief. The images in Good Time have a wild, insomniac quality to them. The colors are pretty in a harsh way. The lights that flare and flicker through the dank New York City alleys are not the light at the end of any tunnel. They only exist to keep Connie awake, moving, and mindful that he has miles to go before he sleeps. Good Time is, if nothing else, the year’s most abrasive film, from the demonic quality of its nightscapes to the shattering mirror ball of its synth score to its world of worn out people living along the gloomy periphery of a foreboding city. Connie is a relentlessly vulgar man and he is soon joined by a drugdealer (energetically played by Safdie Brothers collaborator Buddy Duress) who matches Connie’s seediness and far surpasses him in raucous bluster. And those characters not howling out loud in strife have a weathered, quietly defeated quality to them. I don’t honestly think the Safdies see the entire world as being this ugly and fatigued, but I think this is what it’s like to live in Connie’s world. It is a world of jaded bail bondsmen, angry mothers, and girlfriends clinging tightly to frail, forsaken dreams. This place is filled with pushers and impoverished tenants and sunken faces halfway through their third consecutive graveyard shift at the hospital. This is a blazingly dynamic, indecently suspenseful, ominously colorful carnival ride along the bleakest track that wee hours New York City can provide

And as thrilling as all that is in a kinetic human trainwreck sort of a way, I would probably hesitate to recommend Good Time so enthusiastically if it was only offering hypnotic despair for its own sake. What gives the film a much needed soulful kick are its fleeting glimpses of humanity’s better angels. I think of a moment early in the film when Connie tries to scrounge some bail money from his girlfriend (played potently in a sharp, two-scene performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh). When her mother’s credit card is declined, she calls up her mother and wails, “I just wanted to do a good thing for someone!”. In that moment, I could see the full human capacity for sin and redemption that runs like a seam through the movie. The pathetic folly of trying to use this parent’s card to bail her shifty boyfriend out of a jam. The fallible sadness of that failed gesture and also the noble desire to do good in this world, butting up against each other in that single moment. Good Time is a great look into the soul of a very lost, sinful man, but it is simultaneously more hopeful and more emotionally bruising because it does not take place in a world devoid of human decency. The New York City of this film is not simply a den of wicked vipers, but a world of frail, painfully recognizable human beings; of people struggling, striving, falling down and every so often helping each other back up. We see a number of people offer small acts of kindness to Connie, even as we suspect some of them may be barely holding themselves together. As this dark, hallucinatory roller coaster careens through the inky night toward its final destination, it does periodically zip past traces of real light. Not the unending neon kind that buzzes artificially in the grimy darkness of Connie’s nocturnal odyssey, but the light of basic humanity. And if there is grace to be found in this frenetic panic attack of a film, it is in the notion of providing some small bit of help to another person, even if that person is a reckless scoundrel.

Of course, the funny thing is that Connie sees himself as one of those helpful people. At the film’s opening, he sabotages a therapy session because he sees his mentally impaired brother as being above that kind of help. “You,” says the mortified therapist, “are not helping.” Instead, Connie takes his brother to rob a bank. And I do believe that Connie truly believes himself when he says that what his brother needs is just him. They may be engaged in a serious crime, but Connie sees that crime as a necessity and at least they’re doing it together as brothers. Being with his doting, wiser brother who loves him whole-heartedly: that is helping. Until it lands Nik in prison and Connie decides to break him out because that is now helping. And if I’ve so far painted Connie as the immovable object of amorality in this story, I will now say that Good Time’s frail, flickering candle of hope for the good in people does extend even to this aggravating, prideful, floundering cur of a man. But I think the key to Connie’s fragile, tentative redemption rests on him becoming honestly aware of the kind of man he is. In a ragged but hopeful ballad over the closing credits, Iggy Pop sings, half in a croon and half in an exhausted croak, “The pure always act from love. The damned always act from love.” The point is that love alone is not necessarily enough to justify our actions. For as rotten and uncouth as he is, Connie’s scenes with Nik leave no doubt that he has a bottomless love for his brother. But if you are an irresponsible, selfish person, the love you give will be in some way a product of those baser traits. Love is not entirely immune from the less savory emotions roiling inside of us, and it is dangerous to pretend that our genuine care for a person will prevent us from ever doing harm to them. Part of Connie’s arc is about trying to figure out how to not only act from love, but to do so in a way that actually produces a loving outcome. And learning to do that can be a complex process, even for those of us who do not knock over banks for a living.

Good Time is a film of inexhaustible, frenzied momentum, but we reach a moment at the film’s end where that falls away. The white hot glare of Connie’s viewpoint finally relents for a moment and the film takes on a quality that is less showy and kinetic. This film that has spent most of its runtime with battery acid coursing through its veins finally feels still. I imagine someone like Connie would find this stillness suffocatingly drab. But after ninety minutes handcuffed to Connie, this sudden lull also feels like a relief. It is like a cool glass of ice water running down our throats after a night of consuming nothing but cigarette smoke and everclear. And I believe it is meant to feel peaceful and maybe just a little bit uncomfortable as well. For someone used to the furious pitch of a fast-paced criminal lifestyle, this must be what that arduous process of going straight feels like. The tedium of beginning to build a healthy life and seek real help with our demons must feel both comforting and frighteningly alien when you have spent years living in the caustic strobelight of a person like Connie Nikas. There is no scintillating sheen to making better daily decisions for ourselves or talking about our issues. “The Allure of Stability” is not a term of art, as far as I know. There are no vibrant neon lights along this path; only crisp, clear daylight, which can seem blinding when you have been ducking through dark alleys for so long. Good Time is a film that runs through a gritty, fetid gauntlet of chaos and vice, and then it emerges out of the night into a sunny dawn that feels disorienting in its own way. Our protagonist stands frozen, timid as a deer and uncertain of where this new road will lead him. And then, finally, he takes a few blessed steps forward and walks warily but hopefully toward a human kind of salvation.