Contains spoilers and plot points for the following films: The Farewell and Midsommar

There's a brief point early in Lulu Wang's The Farewell where it's easy to imagine an alternate universe mash-up of this movie and Ocean's 8.  When Awkwafina, the dutiful granddaughter, assures her grandmother on the phone that she's wearing a hat to keep warm (she's not), she could easily be on the way to a park in Queens to work her next hustle.  The illusion is dispelled early on though, and it's Awkwafina's posture that does it.  In The Farewell, she moseys around with rounded shoulders and a permanent slump; this is not the swagger of a fingersmith who has the gall to lift Cate Blanchett's watch.  Billi (Awkwafina) is always dressed in a sort of inchoate sweatshirt fabric ensemble.  It immediately gives off the whiff of someone who both strives for comfort and who couldn't care less what impression she's giving because she has bigger worries on her mind.

And this is true -- Billi's grandmother, or Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao), has just been diagnosed with cancer and she doesn't have long to live.  What seems the wildest to Billi, however, is that Nai Nai is the only one who doesn't know.  Her extended family gathers in China to say goodbye under the guise of a family wedding, all the while keeping the secret under wraps.  In fact, they don't even want Billi to come, fearing that her lack of a poker face will give it all away.  It's not an unreasonable worry:  Billi's eyes brim over with mournfulness every time she looks at Nai Nai, as likely will the eyes of every audience member watching the movie.

It may sound like a crazy tradition to anyone unfamiliar with it, but it's apparently commonplace.  Doctors speak to relatives about diagnoses and keep the secret safe from the one with the disease.  The family comes from all over China, Japan, and the US to gather for the wedding/farewell, but Billi herself seems to have the most difficulty with the cover-up.  She urges her family members to reveal the truth, until she's set straight.  This is simply what is expected and it's not cruel or absurd:  Nai Nai herself hid the fact that her husband had cancer from him until near the end.  Chinese people have a saying: "it's not the cancer that kills them -- it's the fear."  The family takes on the burden of grief to protect the afflicted person.  In this, the group shares the pain of the knowledge for the individual.

The clash of cultural ideals is at the forefront of The Farewell, not just in its culture of grief but the overarching idea of the individual and its obligation to the group, or the reverse.  Billi's family is proud to have moved to America, but Billi herself is at sea.  Her wardrobe reflects her amorphous state -- she's too Chinese in America and not Chinese enough in China.  She mourns being uprooted at such a young age from China, unable to understand or recognize her homeland anymore.  Wang's handling of these emotional moments is patient and honest.  Her camera prefers unbroken takes of Billi's emotional monologues, while maintaining a safe physical distance.  The space in the frame allows us to constantly contextualize Billi, while emphasizing the actual distance she feels.

The Farewell careens between drama and the comedy of the lengths that the family goes to to keep the truth from Nai Nai, but Wang keeps it warm and genuine.  It's an ambitious feature:  the majority of the dialogue is in Mandarin, its hues are often pellucid blues, and most of it was shot in Wang's hometown.  Wang's concern is with authenticity, not what's marketable.  But even when the film reminds us that it is a film, like in a slo-mo scene near the end, it's more to signal the coming together, the sharing, of the family in that moment of what they have to do.

At one point in The Farewell, Billi remarks in disbelief that what they're doing is surely considered illegal in America.  This statement could probably be repeated a few times over in Ari Aster's Midsommar, another summer flick this year that dealt with culture clash and grief.

Reeling from a recent tragedy, Dani (Florence Pugh) ends up tagging along on her boyfriend Christian's (Jack Reynor) Swedish bro-trip.  The group visits and takes part in a famous mid-summer festival in a secluded, rural village that only happens every ninety years, which quickly takes horrific and bizarre turns.

Aster himself said that his follow-up to Hereditary was meant to be a break-up film, but it fails at making a compelling case as either that or a horror film.  Dani and Christian's relationship is pretty flimsy and mostly broken up to begin with.  Christian is an asshole from the start, and we're never certain what Dani's attraction to him is or was.  There's a bare expository phone call to a friend sketching it out (apparently involving a friend of Dani's that we never see or hear from again.  Does Dani even have any other friends?  It's unclear), but that's the extent of it.  Christian's behavior throughout borders on laughable, but the action that proves to be the final straw isn't completely in his hands.  He ends up so drugged up, we're not even sure how much agency he ultimately has.  It's clear that he wouldn't have needed much of a push, which makes this plot decision even more curious.  And there are those who might feel that what he did deserves the outcome: being paralyzed, stuffed into an actual bear suit, and burned alive...but that seems a bit harsh to me.

Midsommar​ makes a far more fascinating watch as a study on grief and ritual.  Almost all of the beats of the film are shown to us beforehand, either in mural or verbally.  Even the horrific opening scene is precluded by a picture of what is about to happen.  One member of Dani and Christian's group, Josh (William Jackson Harper), is actually studying the mid-summer festival as part of his thesis, and so remains the most unfazed at the first ritual that the group experiences.  The reactions to this ceremony, involving the two eldest members of the village, are fairly indicative.  Two British tourists are screaming at the sight, Josh's only admission the night before is something akin to "wait till you see it -- it'll ruin the experience if I tell you about it" as if he's talking about the ending of The Sixth Sense rather than a cult ceremony, Dani is shell-shocked, and Christian is doltishly aloof, assuring her later that he's certain that other cultures would consider American traditions with the elderly equally barbaric.  His response isn't really inclusive as much as it is dismissive of Dani's own feelings and trauma.

It's difficult to say if any of these is the correct response to a culture or tradition we're unfamiliar with.  Christian and Josh, after all, are only accepting as far as it benefits their own ends.  Dani is easily, by the film's last smile, the one who most assimilates into the pagan cult.  Appropriate because of the amount of grief she has already suffered by the time they arrive in the village.

But what does Midsommar say about grief or the tradition of the individual for the whole?  Certainly the individual is subservient to the community, as shown in their sacrificial and mating rituals.  And yet, the individual is not set apart from the community in their acts.  What is the most appealing to Dani is the sharing of their grief and action.  When Dani witnesses the betrayal of Christian, she breaks down and weeps, only to be joined by a group of women who weep and wail with her, sharing every bellow and sob.  When Pelle (Villhelm Blomgren), tells Dani that he knows how she feels, it is to make her feel less alone, and to assure her that he has also witnessed the death of his family in a horrific fire (which begs the question, of course, on exactly how many once-every-ninety-years rituals they participate in).  Not only that, he emphasizes how the community supported him and kept him from feeling lost.  The only way this makes sense is to realize that the village completely assumes responsibility for the pain they caused by sharing in it.  When the sacrifices burn at the end and cry out their pain, the whole village cries out in tandem with them, in a recognition and sharing of that grief.

Dani understands this.  Already she has taken part in a dancing ceremony, where she became one with the dance, causing her to completely understand the Swedish words thrown her way.  In her delirium, she finally understands what is being communicated because she becomes one with the people around her:  a part of the group.  It's not certain exactly how much her final decision is influenced by her feelings for Christian.  But as she weeps and wails along with everyone else, she is taking part in their culture of grief.  Her beatific smile at the end is the cherry on top.  She is no longer a part of a toxic relationship where she has to feel shame in sharing her pain; she is now a part of a community that wants to feel what she does.

I inevitably go through a film review and watching slump around the springtime.  It happens almost every year -- a combination of film fatigue and an excess of mediocre fare.  This year, the nail in the coffin may have been the latest Avengers movie (or maybe another superhero movie?  Or was it another Disney live action movie?)  So the next few reviews will be uncharacteristically late.  My apologies.

There's no better way to say it:  Olivia Wilde's directorial debut, Booksmart, is entirely winning and winsome, proving there's still some new luster to be had from an old graduation buddy comedy film.  Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) have been friends forever and are about to graduate from high school.  They've buckled down and checked all the boxes to get into the best schools.  But on the eve of graduation, Molly finds that maybe they didn't actually check all the right boxes.  Their classmates are headed to the same prestigious futures, proving that they worked hard just as much as they played hard.  In a last-ditch effort to have it all, the two embark on an all-night quest to participate in the greatest party of all time.

Dever and Feldstein are gems, never flagging in their portrayal as supportive friends.  Nothing would make me happier than to see the two of them collaborate again in other roles like another Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly pair or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  Booksmart deftly navigates the usual "search of an epic party" trope, turning it instead into a friendship odyssey, complete with a mysterious oracle-like figure (a hilarious Billie Lourd) that keeps popping up to guide their journey, a lotus-eating drug scene, and scenes of such surpassing strangeness they only make sense in the context of a teen film. 

Yet despite these exotic scenes, the story and emotions are familiar.  It's a tumultuous time of our lives where we keenly feel emotions even when we rollercoaster from our highs to our lows in minutes.  It's also all-consuming, disorienting, and egocentric.  Wilde captures all of this perfectly, from the slo-mo scenes of Molly's disbelief in the school hallways, to the poignant beauty of the light-filled pool scenes that catches those effervescent moments we'll never capture again if we're not there to seize them, to the steadicam daze that follows when Amy leaves that pool.  It's a confident handling of material that belies the fact that this is Wilde's debut and the uncertainty of the subject matter.

Amy and Molly are each other's "person".  They are that person in your youth who knows you better than your parents do, maybe better than you yourself do.  But through the course of their night, they find out more about each other and their classmates: always proving that there is more to a person than meets the eye.  One person doesn't have to belong to simply one Hogwarts House; teenagers are more complex than that, despite what your average highschool flick will tell you.  Appropriately, Booksmart proves that the average highschool flick doesn't have to be average at all.  I'm thankful that smart, relevant movies are being made that belie mediocrity or the idea that we have to settle for anything less.  Booksmart is funny, affirming, and a delight on all fronts -- Wilde has knocked it out of the park and inaugurated a promising directing career.

With writer-director Christian Petzold, much of what he gives you is right up front, as in his sometimes too on-the-nose (albeit beautiful) film titled ​Phoenix.  That much remains the same in his latest film Transit, which is the third of his loosely related trilogy "Love in the Time of Oppressive Systems".  As its title suggests, it not only deals with the characters who are searching for literal transits out of their situation, but also the limbo they find themselves in.

Georg (Franz Rogowski) is one such character who is trying to escape the encroaching fascist regime.  What year it is is also a surprisingly opaque detail.  It feels like 1940s Germany, but there are no swastikas, and the dress and transportation seem fairly modern.  Although based on a 1944 book by Anna Seghers, Petzold strips the movie of any period clues, leaving us in another sort of purgatory that brings the narrative closer to us.  One woman points after a fleeing Georg at one point, for all the world sounding like an informant yelling after a Jew.  And yet at another, Georg connects with a North African immigrant and her son.

Georg impersonates a dead man in order to obtain a visa and papers to flee Europe, but with that come all sorts of entanglements with other refugees, including Marie (Paula Beers), who is that dead man's wife and searches for him, ignorant that he has passed away.

Transit has a framing device of a narrative within a narrative that is jarring at times, but then only adds to the surrealism of the story.  What we're narrated verbally isn't always met with what actually happens before our eyes.  It also immediately enforces a distance from the characters that is echoed by the distance from the action which induces shame in the bystanders of the story.  There's a skewed logic at times in the ways characters act, as if they are party to the whims of a writer.  But again, this only underscores the tragedy of the skewed logic of oppression that is all too real.

Petzold has always given the impression of a Hitchcockian noir filmed in the present, with crisp colors as well as shadows.  It's a style that's evocative of the old suspense master while being completely now.  Marie flits like a ghost through each scene, haloed with importance even before she's introduced into the story like a soft surround of Kim Novak.  And yet, the range of colors achieved by cinematographer Hans Fromm is thoroughly modern, from the blues of the night train travel, to the hues of late French cafes, and the baking sun of Marseille.

Transit perfectly evokes the purgatoric in-betweenness of its characters and their situations, unable to shed their past to embrace their future.  Georg is time and time again driven by his guilt, trying to assuage it, even as he becomes more than a simple bystander who only wants to survive.  However, Petzold reminds us that the only way to change our narrative is to remember our past and learn from it.  The future determines as much of the past as the reverse, or as one character puts it:  "Who forgets first?  The abandoned one or the one who left him?"  Perhaps it is whoever moves on first.

Ash is the Purest White, the latest from Jia Zhangke (Mountains May Depart, Touch of Sin), could stand as a bravura showcase of Zhao Tao who plays the protagonist Qiao throughout the years, immutable as China radically changes all around her in this epic that spans 17 years.

The film starts with Guo Bin (Liao Fan), a local crime boss, and his girlfriend Qiao who epitomize the kind of gangster cool a la John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat.  And although Qiao starts the story firmly claiming to be outside of the criminal underworld her partner overlooks, she finds herself holding on to its tenets after everything else has moved on.  Qiao aloofly expresses disinterest in ballroom dancing, claiming that she's not into Western culture even though she's just come off of the floor joyfully dancing to "YMCA".  But during that joyful romp with her boyfriend, he drops his gun onto the floor and they both stare at it dumbfoundedly for a beat before she gets back into dancing with him again, adjusting to the shock.

The skill to adjust comes to the fore when years later, Qiao leaves prison to find China almost unrecognizable and her relationship with Bin equally so.

In one pivotal scene, Qiao and Bin discuss a dormant volcano and ask how they can know its potency if it hasn't stirred in years.  Qiao is that volcano of the film, purified by trial, and evincing a strength that never has to erupt to make itself known.  Her facial expressions and feelings are masterfully revealed (or held in check), and Jia keeps the camera lens often at a distance.  Her anguish, frustrations, and sadness simmer at that space.  They're often ripples in a calm facade that are easily missed if you're not paying attention.  Bin is certainly unable to perceive her, to adapt, or to conquer his pride...something that gets in the way of understanding the significance when they both return to the spot that overlooks the same volcano years later.

Qiao holds herself to a moral code, the code of the underworld, long after it's been disavowed and forgotten by the surrounding country.  Ash is the Purest White is as much about Qiao's endurance through the radical transformation of China as it is about her changing relationship with Bin.  Ash takes place over three progressive time chunks, with cinematographer Eric Gautier using different media for each period to highlight the passing of time.  The first goes from DV to 4K, emphasizing the pop of colors, which comes to the fore at the climax of that period during an almost sublime fight scene.  The second is shot on 35 mm, with a sort of grain and grace that mirrors Qiao's journey and maturity.  Even the sickly neon green in a motel scene is muted, lacking the same vitality of color as before.  And the final is shot in digital 5-6K, almost washed out of color, even as it's framed by a reminder of the present and future with its high-speed trains and security cameras.

Jia's film is one of both a grand and intimate scale.  He's always reminding us of China's wanton path of progress that pushes people from their homes because of a mine being overtaken or a new dam being built, but he frames it in Qiao's devastating journey as she tries to find herself after something much more personal displaces her.  It takes a phenomenal actress to direct attention in that way even in such a demanding setting, and Zhao does it all without gaudy theatrics.  Instead, her performance makes us feel keenly for her even if she only gives a scoff to the side or a slight twitch of the eyes.  Like Zhao, Jia's performance is neither heavyhanded nor aphoristic.  Instead, it gently reminds us of what we lose in changing times and of the impossibility of going back to our homes.

Jordan Peele's Us is either a cinematic achievement or a sophomoric slump, depending on who you talk to.  Unfortunately, his film's intent also seems to vary depending on whoever you happen to discuss it with.  I've heard all sorts of convoluted theories, and although a close watching (and rewatching) may reveal the actual answer, Us is not as tight as his debut Get Out.

Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o) plays the matriarch of the Wilson family.  They're fairly well-off and fairly average.  The father (Winston Duke) went to Howard, they have one son (Evan Alex) and one daughter (Shahadi Wright Joseph) who bicker reassuringly, and they're currently vacationing in their family cabin in Santa Cruz.  However, after a frightening encounter at the beach, Adelaide is beset by all sorts of forebodings which come to fruition that night when they are visited by another family of four who have their faces.

Us is rife with allusions, from the opening scene that zooms in on a smattering of VHS tapes framing a television set that plays a Reagan Era commercial.  And it's that language, as well as the carefully selected music pieces, that inform the film.  In many ways, it relies on our knowledge of tropes to build its unease.  The Jaws t-shirt that the son Jason wears is there to build our wariness of danger at beaches and the Thriller shirt that the girl wears in the opening scenes reminds us of horrific transformation and things that go bump in the night.  The C.H.U.D. VHS tape is a reference to both the plight of the homeless and subterranean terrors.  There's a white rabbit that leads the way to a topsy-turvy world and there are even a set of twins, which are both a reference to The Shining and to the duality that is a theme throughout Us.  But while all of these are carefully chosen and alluded to, if a viewer goes in blind, there is a lack of other scares, tensions, or frights cinematically.  A horror film needs more than a few scrapes of violin strings.  Furthermore, a working knowledge of horror films also should mean that its characters are more aware rather than succumbing to the usual ceaseless stupidity that accompanies such fare.  At this point, it's a disservice to Peele as a director and writer and to the audience that any of these should be used as a crutch.

The fright in Peele's film comes from the unknown within the known.  When the father, Gabe, asks the doppleganger family "Who are you people?", the answer in a dry, rasping voice is "We're Americans."  The line is there for laughs, but for Peele it is very literal.  Americans are afraid of the "other", but they're also afraid of themselves.  Not necessarily for individual sins, but for a collective consciousness and guilt that they're not taking responsibility for.  In Us, the characters are directly responsible for the lives of their others, whether they realize it or not, and then their worst fear is manifested when those shadow selves rise up.  Whatever that means for the average viewer (or the average American) -- poverty, homelessness, the current political climate, global warming-- perhaps Peele is getting more at our lack of public and social responsibility for the monsters we create rather than a specific issue.  The Reagan "Hands Across America Initiative" ad is an example of a sort of action that didn't end up meaning very much at all other than imbuing a sense of patriotism and what an American is--the sort of action where taking part was more of a show than an actual effort.

It's admittedly a broad (possible) explanation, but that is emblematic of the rather broad problems of the film.  It overexplains at some points, but the overexplanation only leads to more plotholes.  Us would have done better by scaling back on the reveal and allowing more strangeness, or for going all in for the social commentary.  The commentary as it is can only be theoretical, since there isn't a ton to back up any theory that anyone comes up with.  The obvious answer, given the Reagan ad in the beginning, would be that Peele is talking about the plight of the homeless and the have-nots, who are trapped and without opportunity to better themselves.  But it doesn't necessarily deliver.  Because Us​ wavers in a weird in-between where the style of the film has more sheen than the underlying story, it ultimately fails.

The style is admittedly gorgeous.  It Follows cinematographer Mike Gioulakis creates some gorgeous carnival scenes, bringing to mind the lights and pop of the vintagey decade of the other horror movie.  The colors are especially vibrant throughout, able to slice through the literal and figurative darkness of the film.  Lupita Nyong'o is even more so, able to completely convince us that her character and her doppleganger are completely different people.  She makes the movie frightening, with her vocal lisps and balletic movements.  Her character is the most fleshed out, with emotion and a closeness that comes from a well-rounded writing of her, so we end up caring far more about her than any other character in the story.  The other members of the family are more of a brief outline of the familial roles.  Furthermore, the editing of their lines and their rapport is strangely stilted at times, ruining the timing that's so important to both comedic and horror films.

Us has some good ideas and even better directing, but in the end it doesn't come together.  It doesn't work as either a fable or a scary movie, mainly because of that lack of cohesion.  It often confuses and it doesn't succeed in making us ask the right questions.  However, there are many good reasons to see it, and it has the unfortunate denigration of seeming poorer only because it comes after Peele's standout Get Out, which had a tighter vision.  Nevertheless, I'm excited to see what he comes up with next; there are nuggets of greatness in the film, and not only because he alludes to previous classics.

Say what you will about Wonder Woman, but it at least proved that a "woman superhero" had enough draw to pull in winning box office numbers.  So this begs the question as to why the Marvel Universe decided that its first film with a female protagonist had to serve as a filler between the two Avengers movies.  Not only does this do a disservice to the film, but it's also mildly insulting, as if it needed to tantalize moviegoers with a "see this prequel to the actual movie you do want to see -- Avengers Endgame" gimme.

Captain Marvel is a fair enough movie on its own, but it's not necessarily a superhero tale we deserve or need right now.  Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) starts the movie as Vers (pronounced "Veers"), on the planet Hala.  She lost her memory six years ago, the same time she was imbued with a special power that allows her to shoot beams out of her fist.  When she crash lands on Earth (now in the 90s), it's to keep Skrull aliens from infesting the planet but it also comes with a burgeoning awareness of her past.  If you're not entirely connecting the narrative dots at this point, you're not the only one.  Captain Marvel, strangely enough, bears the most resemblance with a DC Universe movie - Man of Steel, for more reasons than one.  They both start on an alien planet, with somewhat confusing exposition and a setting that distances us rather than brings us closer to the character.  And ultimately, they focus on characters that seem to have no flaws.

Veers is told consistently that her problem is that she is too emotional.  But what is the emotion that she's supposed to hold at bay?  Anger, confusion, impotence?  The problem is that there is a lack of range in emotion that Larson is given to convey.  We know she's a fantastic actress.  We've seen her pathos and her comedic range in everything from Short Term 12 to Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World and 21 Jump Street.  And yet it mostly falls flat in a film.  Her humor is relegated to a quirk of the lips and a raise of eyebrows.  Her best moments are the odd couple camaraderie she shares with a de-aged Samuel L. Jackson, as the fresh as a dewdrop agent Nick Fury.

In an early scene, she wakes up her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) to spar because she's just woken up from a nightmare.  He tells her that there are sleeping pills for that and she replies with a wry twist of her mouth, "Yeah, but then I'd have to sleep."  Is that supposed to mean that she'd rather tussle because she's a tough girl, or that her nightmares are so bad that she'd rather avoid them?  It's not certain, and there are too many missed opportunities throughout the story because of similarly shapeless lines.  Captain Marvel lacks snap and sparkle, which is another way it kind of resembles Man of Steel which felt like a nostalgic filtered blue jeans commercial at times.  It's hard to say what makes her unique, other than the type of perseverance that we've seen in all superheroes.  Her backstory is told in flashbacks, which robs us of perhaps yet another origin story, but also what makes her her.  The only snippets we see of her are the few where she's told she's not good enough, but we don't know anything else about her really.  We don't have a roundness of her character, and the emotion she's said to show too much of is mostly her grit.  She doesn't really have any demons or flaws to speak of.  Her big character/memory reveal isn't that momentous at all...in fact, I'm sure it's revealed in any number of trailers.

Compare this to the number of other characters in the Avengers that we'll see in the Endgame, many of which have had numerous movies already.  At this point, the Marvel Universe has afforded to go darker and more complicated with its villains, heroes, and morals.  We've seen these heroes be defined by their weaknesses and grow from their mistakes.  Furthermore, they're each imbued with certain characteristics that allow them to both be individual and contribute something when they come together as a team.  It's great that they've decided that Captain Marvel is the strongest Avenger, but that doesn't necessarily make her the best.  In fact, like Superman, it almost makes her...boring.  The final scenes of Captain Marvel hold zero tension, because none of it is a challenge to her.

Yet despite that, it has many merits.  The strongest relationship in ​Captain Marvel is the one between Carol and her longtime friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch).  It's the linchpin to the film and really the emotional core that convinces Carol to go forward.  Carol achieves her goals without relying on a man, or even having a romantic subplot shoehorned in.  Her tenacity is also exhilarating compared to the spate of other feminine characters in sci-fi movies that feel the need to emphasize both the toughness and the naivete of its heroines which forces them to rely on others -- exemplified in everything from The Fifth Element to Wonder Woman.

Am I being too tough on Captain Marvel for being thus far the only female-led Marvel movie?  Objectively, Captain Marvel is a weak movie.  It suffers from loose pacing and weak character development.  It plays more like an earlier Marvel movie, rather than the 21st one -- it somehow takes a step backwards in its ability to juggle humor and pathos.  We know so little about Captain Marvel (a name which is also never actually said in the movie, just one we're supposed to surmise came to being) even though she is certainly likable and we'd like to know her better.  And it commits a superhero cardinal sin in being more dazzled by her powers than her actual humanity.  The danger, I feel, is more that are we allowing it too much slack for being a female-led Marvel movie and why we should.  There's good material here and it's far more disappointing how much potential is in this film.  It's not a bad outing, but it's certainly not memorable.  If you're faced with exposition in a story or a movie that you only want to experience once, then you know it's poorly written.

However, Brie Larson is always winningly winsome and it's not the worst Marvel movie by any means.  She has at least set the stage as someone we'd like to see more of and on top of that, I'm looking forward to seeing her camaraderie with the other members of the Avengers team.

Every film in the top five this year were movies that moved me, made me think about the world differently, made me want to be a better person in some form.  Art imitates life, which has lead to some fraught cinema in the past couple years but hopefully life can also imitate art in its beauty, its kindness, or in the ways that it opens our eyes to experiences alien to our own.​

5. Won't You Be My Neighbor

​Not so much an objective lens at Fred Rogers, but a reminder of what a gift this amalgamation of goodness this man was.  In a time of segregated swimming pools and when people were throwing bleach into the water where African Americans were swimming, Mr. Rogers invited the neighborhood policeman, who happened to be African American, to dip his feet into a wading pool with him on television.  When television was starting its era of bringing terror into living rooms across the nation, Mr. Rogers created a safe place that encouraged kindness and gently challenged firmly held preconceptions.  The documentary features an early segment of the show where the puppet King Friday, the (benevolent) dictator, is erecting a wall to keep "undesirables" out of his kingdom.  Obviously some things haven't changed, but again neither has the importance of Mr. Rogers' message of kindness and worth.  Mr. Rogers' love for humanity instills a value in not only a person's self, but in their neighbor as well.  Perhaps more than any other movie this past year, Won't You Be My Neighbor made me want to be a better person.

4. Blindspotting

Blindspotting is a buddy movie that doesn't pull the punches when it comes to police violence, gentrification, and how we must both recognize and work to overcome the automatic prejudices we're unfortunately blind to.  Its premise and propulsion has you cringing from the get-go, knowing that it can't end well, and yet the surprise comes in the humor and the humanity that is laid bare by the final frame.  Miles (Rafael Casal) is a white man in a gentrifying Oakland who holds the swag of the lingo by its ruff, but still feels he has something to prove...something that at one point unfortunately results in a brawl where he attempts to prove his street cred by unleashing his fury onto someone who calls him a poser.  However, in that moment, he becomes yet another white man that imposes violence on a black man without having to worry about the consequence.  He could be seen as someone who's blind to race in that it wouldn't have mattered to him who he was beating up, except in the next scene his impotence instead reveals him as someone blind to his own privilege.  Collin (Daveed Diggs) is a sort of Superman, keeping his rage in check throughout the whole film until his pain and anger at the injustice of his life comes to a heady head in a climax that flashes red in more ways than one.

3.  Prospect

I love this movie.  This indie flick shot in the Hoh Rain Forest with costumes, set, and props handcrafted by the directors and yet completely evincing the feel of a space western set on a toxic, alien moon.  Each character comes to us fully formed, opaque as they are authentic.  Cee (Sophie Thatcher) has gotten as far as she has in life by being tough, but it's the glimpses we see of her vulnerable youth and the gradual growth of her character, somehow felt in our hearts more than our heads, that build to a surprisingly moving ending.  It's a testament to the writing that you never know what is going to come next, and yet after it happens you realize it couldn't have happened any other way.  Pedro Pascal as Ezra gristles through his lines with a delight as if he's a voiceover for a cowboy (or the narrator in Supergiant's Bastion), and really I couldn't give him a bigger compliment than that.  You're awash with Prospect's colors, or you can physically feel the drag of each labored breath that the characters make.  And you're inevitably bereft to come to the end of a story you have to let go of when emerging from the theater, surprised that you were able to exist elsewhere.

2. Burning

What can I say about this elusive movie that can properly convey how it affected me?  It's based on a Murakami short story, so there's jazz, al dente pasta, and an alienated asian man.  But Burning is so much more than that, existing primarily in the hazy blur between definite objects -- most of the key scenes are shot at beautiful dusk, Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) lives close enough to the demilitarized zone to hear the blares of North Korean propaganda, and answers are very rarely given straight, often only through elided metaphor.  Burning has hands down my favorite scene of the year, one that involves a dance at dusk that starts as a beautiful desire for more and then disintegrates into an utter lack of meaning.  For those few minutes, nothing else in the world exists.  I think it's criminal that Burning hasn't gotten more recognition this year, with its stunning cast, sophisticated script, and a story that clings like the smell of smoke settling into the fibers of your soul.  I don't know how Chang-dong Lee did it, making a movie that is even more Murakami-esque than the original source material, and yet something that's fiercely its own.  It's very much a tale of South Korea: its disparate wealth, its disaffected youth, and its simmering uncertainties and unfulfillments
​
1. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

This is the first year that an animated movie has made it to my top ten (and also the first time Damien Chazelle has released a film that has not topped it -- sorry First Man​, although you had the best soundtrack by far).  It's surprising because I generally do love animations, and there's something both aesthetically and technically pleasing about a medium where you have to be aware of every single thing in each frame.  But it's been a while since an animation has made me feel as much as this one, and longer since one has made me want to see the world differently.  Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a joyful feat, one that thrives on its originality and also in its familiarity.  Without hitting you over the head or trying to ram a message down your throat, it both expounds how important it is to find what makes you you while also opening our eyes to how meaningful it is to be able to look at someone else and say "I see you" and "I understand you".  It is a brilliant juggernaut of animation styles, of origin stories, and of sheer wonder.  And it's funny.  I don't know how it accomplishes all that.  There are moments you're overcome with the impossibility of what's before your eyes, and yet it's not as a spectator but as someone that is part of the experience.  It somehow makes a case for animations, for superhero movies, and for a Spider-Man movie in an overcluttered era of all three.  Go see it.  Move to the beat in your seat.  And leave the theater changed for the better.

10-6 here.

Cheers all.

Someone once told me that a reviewer's job, be it for food or film or anything else, is to have moments where we can shed light on something that deserves to be experienced, something that should be rewarded and might go criminally unseen.  The best example of such a review, of course, is Anton Ego's critique in one of my personal favorites, Ratatouille.  I really only write about film because I love it so much, and the top ten list at the end/beginning of each year is one I enjoy quite a bit since it's one of the only times I feel free to voice a subjective opinion.  I had a difficult time honing the top ten list for 2018, but what I ended up with was a list that had mostly movies that were seen widely, but also mostly had one moment or one scene that really captured my heart. 

I don't expect everyone to feel the same as I do (god knows I've gnashed my teeth about Ladybird enough with people), but I'm thankful for the richness in film that allows us to feel differently.  Every single year, I hear people bemoaning the dearth of good film, but every year there is something to appreciate -- some old director coming into his own, or some new director innovating, or my eyes being opened to a completely unfamiliar life, or Tom Cruise learning a new death-defying stunt...and every year, I think:  What a year to be alive.


10. Shoplifters

There's a scene in Hirokazu Koreeda's latest film where we watch the family watching fireworks go off.  It's one of the most beautiful scenes in a film of wrenching and gorgeous scenes, and it's reminiscent of Florida Project's similar scene of the small ragtag family traveling to watch Disney World's fireworks from afar.  In Shoplifters, we don't see the fireworks at all, but Koreeda reminds us what is important is not the spectacle itself but how it makes us feel, and how that spectacle can transform us.  The wonder, love, and hope are reflected on all of the family members' faces.  Shoplifters is a lot about what we see but don't hear, what we feel but aren't able to express verbally, the things we want to say but aren't able to convey.  Koreeda has always been good at the driving/crippling force of loneliness, as well as the ties that bind and sever us.  Are the families we choose stronger than the ones we're born into?  How much do we owe to those we're tied to?  There are never any easy answers, and Koreeda masterfully builds the story from these moments, uncertainties, and what we believe of what we see before stripping it away from us.  It's a film that gives as many truths as fabrications.

9. Cold War

"It's a metaphor," a French artist tells Joanna Kulig's character, Zula.  "Time doesn't matter when you're in love."  But Zula has little use for the wishy-washy breathy aspirations of French music or its metaphors.  For her and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), time is very much against them, and they are very much in love in this smoldering, devastating piece by Pawel Pawlikowski.  Like his Ida, Cold War is shot in a close 1.37:1, but while most films use that aspect ratio to evince an intimacy and claustrophobia (Andrea Arnold's American Honey is close shot after close shot of Sasha Lane's numinous face), Pawlikowski finds so much breadth in each frame it's incredible.  There's space in the noise of each shot, and every single second could be frozen as a piece of art.  His framing is a gift, given freely without begging for attention, and yet catching the breath every time - when Zula floats down the river singing, when the wheat rustles as a farewell in the background, and in the tremulous to searing truth of their music and their love.  Zula and Wiktor cannot exist apart, but they can't be together.  Emotionally and politically fraught, they are only able to save each other by hurting each other and time is not a luxury they can spend -- whether it's the span of fifteen years or the agony of a one-sided rendez-vous ended with a surprised "oh".  Cold War spans years, miles, and borders, and like each frame, the silences are as full as the movements.

8. If Beale Street Could Talk

Is there a bigger fanboy of Wong Kar-Wai than Barry Jenkins?  Thank god for it though, because If Beale Street Could Talk is a masterclass in color and impressions, washing us in warmth, longing gazes, and the most attractive smoke swaths since In the Mood for Love.  And as tragic as its story is, it's as unrelenting in its harsh reality as it is in its hopeful optimism, a balance we could all benefit to learn from.  Beale Street characters bare their souls to us, looking full on into the camera lens.  It's vulnerable and personal -- what we feel from that moment is very much our own experience meeting the gaze of Tish (KiKi Layne), of Fonny (Stephan James), and of Officer Bell (Ed Skrein).  Whatever our past, there is something in us that meets the tactile revulsion of Tish when her hand is brought to the noses of proprietary white men at the perfume counter.  And yet for me this movie works because of what it keeps to itself as much as what it gives us in those honest moments.  Fonny circling a sculpture that he shapes as much as he shapes the swirls of smoke around him is wrapped in a reverie that both he and Jenkins decide not to explain because that moment is his.  It doesn't belong to us as viewers, just like that last whisper in Lost in Translation isn't meant for us.  Perhaps more than any other movie, Beale Street is a bathing of color, music, and lush warmth.

​7. Roma

Formally and technically a flawless film, Alfonso Cuarón's deeply personal story is made all the more compelling because it's told from a viewpoint other than his own.  I overheard someone say of it, "It was everything that I wanted it to be", which pretty much sums it up.  A mastery of mise-en-scene and the kind of deep depth of field activity hitherto seen in the opening of The Revenant.  There's so much going on in each scene that shows both how small we are in the context of the surrounding world, and yet emphasizes how little essentially separates us from each other.  In one moment, we see a child in a full spacesuit playing at astronaut, and then in a different place in a far different circumstance, we see a child at the same play, costumed only with a bucket on his head.  Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is mostly a passive player in this story as she struggles against the both metaphorical and  actual waves that try to pummel her into submission.  But there's a deep strength and undercurrent of love she holds and that Cuarón feels for her.  And those small moments that we are drawn close to her, like the full look of love she gives to her lover in a hotel room is all the more worshipful because of its rarity.  The opening itself is a killer, and although Roma seems like mere beautiful shot after beautiful shot at first, Cuarón allows the emotion and pathos to blossom into its powerful climax.

​6. Annihilation

Annihilation was one of the first films I saw of 2018, and I knew right away it would be somewhere in my top ten.  Unsettling and not one for easy answers, it reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey (and similarly, I could almost hear the audible disengagement of some audience members in its last act).  An extremely loose adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's book, Annihilation is a fever dream, a slow descent into hallucinatory madness, and an ascent into the destruction that is entwined with survival.  It's not a perfect movie by any means, one of its flaws being the jarring mundanity of its narrative framing, but it should be celebrated because of how unrelentingly strange it allows itself to become.  The different types of facades the four women hold before entering the Shimmer slowly disintegrate, but is it for a wondrous transfiguration or is it for the surrender to the terrifying unknown at the cost of self-annihilation?  Annihilation ​asks us: can it be both?

​Top five to follow next week.

Spider-Man has always been a favorite of mine.  Peter Parker was a normal kid bitten by an extraordinary spider, and still dealing with all the travails as a kid from Queens, struggling with a bad internship, college classes, an ornery boss, and paying the rent.  There was something way more approachable about him, in a way that aliens with God-like powers, millionaires with butlers and secret batcaves, and playboy philanthropists with high-gadget suits never were.  His adjustment to his powers were more akin to a boy adjusting to puberty than a Captain American emerging out of a machine with bulging muscles.  But Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had a tall barrier to crash, with its deluge of live action Peter Parkers in the last decade and even more saturated superhero market.  It's hard to make a case for wanting or needing more of either.

But Spider-Verse has created something both completely classic and completely new, blasting aside conventions and all our dread at "just another superhero" movie.

Is it the story?  Yes and no.  The titular Spider-Man this time is Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), half black and half Puerto-Rican.  This time he's not a boy from Queens, but a boy from Brooklyn.  He's won the lottery in getting selected for an uppercrust magnet school in the city and also in getting bitten by a radioactive spider.  Not long after the latter, evil-doers have disrupted the space-time continuum, which results in, wait for it, having to save the world, but also other Spider-Man versions from parallel dimensions who get sucked from their universes and into Miles'.

It's all a little heady, and it sounds like it could be as messy as an Avengers movie, but directors Bob Persichetti, Rodney Rothman, and Peter Ramsay are helped rambunctiously by writer Phil Lord (The Lego Movie) and the result is a totally off-kilter, incredibly complicated film that has an amazingly singular vision and direction, achieving clarity with each mindboggling push of the visual envelope.

Each Spider-Man counterpart is chosen for their individuality, highlighting a difference in animation, in gender, in style, and ethnicity.  Miles himself has his own rhythm, his own swagger, even as he's struggling to come into his own.  Spider-Man: Homecoming chose to eschew the origin story completely in order to deliver its fresh take on the worn tale.  Spider-Verse does the opposite and doubles down, but that's the beauty of it.  The movie, and Miles himself, is a thrillingly original, alive being.  You've never seen a Spider-Man like this.  But while the movie is about finding its uniqueness, it is concurrently about identifying with others.  At each point, Spider-Man is finally able to look at someone else and say "I know you.  You are me."  It is precisely that duality that Spider-Verse balances and thrives on.

Breathtakingly beautiful in animation, in music, in the undeniable pleasure and beat of the movie's rhythm.  Spider-Verse finally takes us back to the keen joy of superhero movies.  It flushes us in CMYK colors, squiggles come out of characters to indicate sensory emotions, and at some points the film dips into paneling and thought bubbles as it dips into the format that got us all into comic book heroes in the first place.  The whole voice acting team is again a joy to behold, and all the lines have the familiarity of an extremely well-thought out rhythm, like banter put to music.  It's the best animation of the year in every way possible -- visuals, acting, story, and animating innovations.

Moore's voice is the emotional core of the movie, one where the peril and sentiment aren't contrived.  Its message resonates with the viewers, not just because of how potent it is or how imperative it is to revel in both our individuality and being able to recognize ourselves in others.  There's a moral imperative Miles shares with us without having to hit us over the head with it.  Miles is able to overcome and to grow not only because his great power gave him great responsibility, but through his acknowledgement of his power, which is inherent in any one of us.  Spider-Verse's themes of identity are essential, but its most thrilling aspect might be that any one in the audience can, in some way, point at the screen and say "I know you.  You are me."

Film auteur Lee Chang Dong has taken Haruki Murakami's sparse 10-pager Barn Burning and turned it into a 2.5 hour elegy of fierce loneliness and simmering rage in the film Burning -- a story that both expands its Murakminess while becoming something completely individual.  Never has Murakami been adapted so well, or subverted so significantly.

The film opens on Jongsu (Ah-in Yoo) making a delivery to a shop where he clearly catches the eye of one of the girls working at the front, scantily clad and dancing to promote the store's sales.  Her name is Haemi (newcomer Jong-seo Jun), and it turns out that she's an old neighbor, whom he ends up not recognizing.  It might be because of the plastic surgery she had, she offers blithely, or it might be because his memory of his childhood waxes insubstantial most of the time.  He clearly doesn't remember the time that he crossed the street to tell her she was ugly when they were kids, but that also doesn't stop him from being completely taken by her now.  She becomes the object of his desire, partially because of her attraction to him, and partially because of his...well, objectification.

Murakami is known for writing accomplished, lonely men who exist vaguely alienated.  Jongsu is certainly lonely, but in him simmers an anger as well as an existential ennui.  He's an aspiring writer who can't write because he doesn't understand the world around him; he's a college graduate who can't hold down a job, a former creative writing major who cleans cow droppings.  Surprisingly, Murakami's cypher makes a sort of appearance in the form of Ben (Steven Yeun), the man who arrives to become the point of the love triangle involving Jongsu and Haemi.  Mysterious and cosmopolitan, not quite belonging, and yet affecting an easy privilege as he cooks pasta while listening to jazz.  His laconic posture and obvious wealth stun a round-shouldered Jongsu, who is only a few years younger and can't fathom this kind of achievement.  At first, he can only sit idly by while Ben sweeps Haemi off her feet.

While Murakami's writing tends to leave loose threads at the end, Lee has created a story that permeates the ambiguity throughout.  It's carefully orchestrated to heighten its nebulous qualities and it does so masterfully.  Several of the key scenes are shot at dusk (including one incredible dance to jazz music which searches for greater meaning only to disintegrate into its lack -- it's quite possibly one of my favorite scenes of the year), that time where night is as strong as day.  Lee explores those imprecise boundaries constantly:  Jongsu's old farmhouse is an area of land that is slowly becoming encroached upon by the city and he lives close enough to the DMZ that he can hear North Korean propaganda being blasted from across the border.  Ben is a character that doesn't entirely belong in South Korea, and even his highly sophisticated language is peppered with oft-Anglicized words and the accent is just off enough to make you feel its foreignness even if it's impeccable otherwise.  But more than that are the borders between morality, which are played with constantly here.  Even a brief side view of a newscast of Trump reminds us that not everyone operates on the same rules of truth.

Burning is stunning in every facet.  The actors live their parts rather than act them out;  there is a deep understanding that they have achieved of their characters that we as an audience will never fully know.  Yeun is a revelation, making a new turn as a sinister, indeterminate figure.  The story hinges on both the familiarity and stark unknowableness of his character, and Ben is at turns terrifying and suave.  There's so much he claims to not feel and so much he gives the affectation of knowing, but neither stops him from thoroughly enjoying the spectacle before him.  Yoo is a powerhouse of constrained emotion -- it's fitting that we never see the release of his masturbation and that one of his wrought confessions of love midway through the movie is just laughed away.  Even as his helplessness and confusion mount however, the distortions are often only shown on his face in the aftermath of waking up from troubled dreams.  Jun is also sensational here, literally fresh-faced, disarming in her childlike but not childish behavior.  But it's the writing, the direction, and the colors that bring everything together.  Burning is paced meticulously and it shouldn't surprise anyone that cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong's last film was The Wailing, which also has gorgeous fog-rimmed mountainous backdrops.  Lee's beauteous long-shot takes subside into darkness, pushing the limits of what our eyes can make of expressions and feelings in the gloaming of its characters.  His writing is clever and sophisticated, giving each character a different flavor, always revealing just enough to make us ask more.

I won't go into the details of the story, but it's clear that aspiring writer Jongsu isn't the only character who struggles to create a narrative, even going so far as to fabricate one when writing a petition partway through the film.  Haemi is searching for what she calls "Great Hunger" and there's an effacement not only physically by changing what she looked like, but in the stories she weaves.  There's a warring desire to be found, but also to disappear.  Burning is about class disparity, an anger that has no outlet, and the destruction that comes from creating.  Throughout the film, Lee gives us mysteries that will linger and mysterious characters.  Who is Haemi?  Who is Ben?  The genius is that by the end, it burns out to ask us the actual question:  Who is Jongsu?