So. Where were we?

In the Before Times, pre-COVID, pre-lockdown, one of my last trips to a movie theater was for a series of Frank Capra/John Ford double bills hosted by the American Cinematheque. Their weekend’s programming included two classics from the tail end of the Depression: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on Friday, and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath on Sunday.

There can be serendipity in moviegoing, particularly if it’s the kind where a crowd can turn a film from 80 years ago into a live event. And as fate would have it, the screening of Mr. Smith happened on the day that the Senate voted 51-49 to not hear witnesses in the (first) impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Those headlines were not lost on the theater’s MC, who took to the stage before the show to acknowledge the news and assure us that a little Capra would help. Far be it from me to deny that Mr. Smith is a cathartic experience for anyone who’s frustrated and righteous, which I guess is most of us nowadays. The irony is that, to the extent that Mr. Smith has a firm set of real-world politics at all, it’s a very conservative film: anti-New Deal, skeptical of city values and Big Government compromises, and convinced that only the wicked might disagree with its homilies. (The LA crowd did seem appreciative, but I imagine Trumpists would love the sequence of Jimmy Stewart furiously punching random people on the streets of DC after he gets slandered by the Fake News press).

This makes double-billing it with The Grapes of Wrath another kind of serendipity, because the dueling populism of the two films is like a tug-of-war between conjoined twins. Ford’s film supports the New Deal as much as Capra’s film is wary of it, and while it may not be the most outright socialist movie to ever take the Oscar stage, it’s definitely in the running.

I had seen both of these movies years ago, as a student. But that weekend, they no longer seemed so academic. The present-tense urgency of their making—the kind that powers and lacerates both films, threatening to tip their most subtle strengths into hysteria—had grown in resonance.

All of which is to say that how and if “the movies” address the outside world was forcing itself to the top of mind in the Trump era, even in a moment as comparatively innocent as February, 2020.

And then, of course, everything went to hell.

2020 may well go down as one of the most significant years in movie history, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the content of the films themselves. The upheaval of the pandemic effectively pushed film distribution ten years into the future, further from theaters and onto streaming services. But if—as was the case for much of the year—conversations about the return of theaters revolved around Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, and hopes for serious American cinema from a streaming service settled on David Fincher’s Mank, you can’t avoid that both directors delivered some of their weakest work.

I don’t wish to give too much credence to any hand-wringing about the insignificance of movies in times of crisis. In fact, during the pandemic, the protests, the lockdowns, and the election chaos, movies were a source of solace. And as for the longterm cultural cachet of a dying medium, I’d be a lot more concerned if movies hadn’t been “dying” for the entire time I’ve been alive.

But one running theme did emerge in new releases: the way that so many movies made with an eye on 2020 felt, well…not bad, necessarily. But wildly inadequate for what they were up against.

The Trial of the Chicago 7? I appreciate Aaron Sorkin imposing his own hyper-talky brand of order on the chaos of the 60s, doubling for the divided Left of today. But it’s far too clean, too stagy, and too cutesy for 1968. Or for the last election cycle.

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm? It’s not just that Cohen’s jokes are lazier this time around, but that the landscape has soured them. There was a thrill in the Bush era in catching people say the quiet part out loud. Today, Cohen can go to a MAGA rally, and there’s nothing that anyone will say to him mid-prank that they wouldn’t happily tell CNN.

David Byrne’s American Utopia? I had fun—Byrne knows how to bring music to the stage, and Spike Lee knows how to bring the stage to the screen. But be careful giving it political import as an essential State of the Union instead of a pleasant get-out-the-vote oldies revue.

In that sense, the DOA Oscar campaign for Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy may make it the most significantly insignificant movie of the year: the union of a conservative commentator and a “liberal Hollywood” crowdpleaser that averaged out to nothing.

So where does that leave Nomadland, the Oscar favorite and an eager contender for a definitive movie about America in the 2010s?

It looks likely to have a big night, so it’s worth a moment to acknowledge the dissent. It leans hard on photography over drama or inquiry. Its view of poverty can lapse into tourism. And you could argue that it fits the Academy’s ideal politics: a vital document of our time, done in a way that never really runs the risk of pissing anybody off. But in its best moments, the collation of American landscapes, themes, and narratives beautifully stirs the pot. And at the very least, the late arrival of Oscar frontrunner with enough acclaim to warrant backlash was one of the few aspects of 2020 moviegoing that felt like a return to normalcy.

Indeed, trying to place any movie near the cultural center of 2020—as opposed to TV binges, social media channels, late night pundits, etc.—feels a little futile, though that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. Best-of-2020 lists have tended to feel like odds and ends, and that includes the Academy’s itself, due to economics as much as taste. With a lot of big or big-ish studio films delayed, this is a rare Oscar year without a crowd-pleasing blockbuster or large-scale Hollywood spectacle. The Best Picture lineup has no Ford v. Ferrari or Dunkirk or 1917 or Bohemian Rhapsody to flaunt, and the live-action films in that category that went to streaming—Mulan, Wonder Woman 1984—didn’t build anything close to a critical mass of popular support.

Yet none of that quite explains my own personal hodgepodge, which runs out of Academy contenders by the halfway point and unintentionally gravitates towards a certain miniaturism. This could be chalked up to the structural shifts of 2020—a year without a popular sensation, with distribution upended and without the social component of moviegoing. (Absolutely none of the films listed below were watched with an audience).

But it could also be something else: that the only type of big statement worth trusting right now is the kind rooted in smallness. And that’s the closest I can come to unity in the top of the top of a bottomed-out year: the recurring image of a figure at a crossroads, looking in each direction.

My 10 favorites of 2020:

10. Kajillionaire (Miranda July, US)

Miranda July’s best movie is a bit like the performance at the center of it: pickled in affectations, but those affectations cover something resonant, even raw. So while a lot of its “quirky” Sundance-isms would have felt played out even ten years ago, this comedy has an eerie metaphor on its side: a social ecosystem (call it America?) in which payment is treated as a substitute for warmth. And what’s more, the film follows that idea to a place that’s both uplifting and uncompromised. It makes an emotional high amidst fluorescent retail signify as worldly wisdom. A payoff, in every sense of the word.

9. The Father (Florian Zeller, UK/France)

For the third wave of quarantine, a movie that can make a meal out of an apartment. This is Alzheimer’s as a puzzle film, with a touch of the recursion and geometry of Marienbad. So what sounds like an Oscar duty—one of Britain’s finest actors tearing into an incurable disease—turns out to be more cinematic than you might expect. Its biggest visual games are so clearly received that its subtler ones creep up on you. And by the end, it’s done a fine job of deepening from tap-dancing cleverness into tragic soul. Key line, saved for the finale: “We have to go while it’s sunny…It never lasts long.”

8. Soul (Pete Docter & Kemp Powers, US)

Pete Docter (Up, Inside Out) is the most interesting voice to come out of Pixar’s collective identity since Brad Bird, and for tantalizingly opposite reasons. Whereas Bird is interested in the exceptional “incredibles” among us, Docter has stayed steadfastly interested in what one character in Soul summarizes as “regular old living.” In short, his lesson for the tots is that a rich emotional rollercoaster awaits every human being simply by their virtue of being alive. It’s clearer than ever that he has his own formula to stick to, and that it has concessions: talking animal slapstick, somewhat belabored metaphors, and a few fantasyland rules that play fast and loose. But more than most “children’s films”, his are designed to be a wildly different experience when the young-uns revisit them fifteen years down the road. The insight that no, you probably won’t end up being what you want to be when you grow up, but yes, you can be happy anyway, is a heady message to drop on them. Lively animation helps.

7. Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, US)

After forking over $20 to A24 for an advanced virtual screening, I feared that the loveliness of Minari was by nature far too modest to withstand the two-ton slab of awards hype that was about to be dropped on it. But how should one hype such unassuming delicacy, particularly when so much of what makes it special is not its “big moments” (a literal barnburner, say) but the observations that fill in the cracks? Minari doesn’t reinvent the wheel of autobiographical childhood cinema, and it doesn’t need to. Its characters feel real and complete, and it neither lacks dramatic incidents nor unduly forces them. It recalls the narrative flow and it-takes-all-kinds spirit of Renoir in his River/Southerner mode. And god knows that’s welcome now more than ever.

6. Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, US)

The rare movie whose second half is more interesting and complex than its first, and fulfills its themes too. Reportedly, the director was influenced by the lost-in-America classics of the 1970s like Five Easy Pieces. It shows, and the jittery drive that Riz Ahmed conjures up feels instantly recognizable but beyond any stereotype that could pigeonhole his character. A film about being forced to find a new direction, made with the wisdom not to forsake your past or expect anyone to have easy answers for the second act. Especially not yourself.

5. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, UK)

As movies and TV get more difficult to tell apart, no piece of 2020 “content” was more valuable in that debate than Amazon’s/Steve McQueen’s Small Axe. The creator himself calls it a TV series, though its parts are discrete, and they diverge in cast, plot, runtime, aspect ratio, and setting (all in London in the same era, but jumping between years). But the idea of separate films viewed as one is essential; it’s necessary to Lovers Rock that it both feels like such a small snapshot and that it has the context of far more fraught scenarios. Because if, from Hunger to 12 Years a Slave, McQueen tends to succeed and provoke more as a director of experiences than plots, here his primary experiential mode isn’t suffering but a shot at jubilance. And he proves that, with the right lens, affirming life can be just as political as studying its struggle.

4. City Hall (Frederick Wiseman, US)

For a country that too often hates the idea of government, documentarian Frederick Wiseman heads back to Boston and delivers a gargantuan tribute to local civil service. It sounds like propaganda, and in a sense it is—or it would be, if it showed any interest at all in accommodating an audience. Instead, it observes its subjects on their most titanically quotidian terms, and its placid brand of Direct Cinema—which insists that we spot the significance of its filmed moments ourselves, or else shut them out entirely—matters as much as what’s on camera. Which, if you can handle the runtime and see the unity of its individual pieces, is about how, whether you value the Right’s ideas of tradition or the Left’s ideas of change, society is a complex work in progress. And not to be taken for granted.

3. The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

Possibly one of Hong Sang-soo’s best films, although in a body of work so hand-crafted and so prolific, such distinctions may be meaningless. Each film from South Korea’s beguiling puzzlemaster feels like a status update, or a different house on the same street. His style can be mysterious or elusive, teasing you with where he might be heading. But his sense of mathematical structure—of scenes that rhyme, of sudden camera movements that push the everyday into the uncanny—goes well with what is at heart a simple story. In fact, one of the most thoughtful stories about the life of a married woman to come along in some time. Other point of inspiration: showing just how basic the ingredients of a rich film are. There seems to be no reason that people anywhere and everywhere at any time couldn’t make it themselves.

2. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, Portugal)

The cinema of Pedro Costa can be as frustrating as it is invigorating, and over the years, his most widely acclaimed films—docu-fictions about the slums of Lisbon—have left me feeling less enlightened about poverty, addiction, and diaspora than what a clever director can do with digital video. So I didn’t exactly run-don’t-walk to his latest when it dropped, but in the end I left feeling that its quiet arrival on streaming services (where I still hope that niche movies like this can find their audience) was one of the cinephile events of the year. Either his particular mastery is reaching new levels of emotional directness and narrative clarity, or I’m finally getting used to him. Either way, this is a prime example of movies as their own art form, as images whose astonishment can carry an emotional weight beyond just gobsmacking you. The dialogue roots you, but then use your eyes: a dirge through the darkness towards daylight.

1. The Assistant (Kitty Green, US)

Some may say that this is a movie where not much happens, especially compared to Never Rarely Sometimes Always (another extended ordeal for a heroine) or Promising Young Woman (a high-concept machine built to provide catharsis, generally at the expense of sensible storytelling or coherent messaging). The difference with the former is that The Assistant is not about the hardest day of one’s life, but a day like any other. And its difference with the latter is that providing catharsis is the last thing on the film’s mind. It’s the best movie yet about the MeToo era, a withering gaze at life as a film-worker, and a potent look at arriving in an environment where everyone chillingly refuses to name the obvious. I suspect future films will tackle the subject with a grander, more robust style—The Assistant‘s approach is as pared down as can be. But the film’s sheer lack of sensationalism qualifies as a real triumph. The sober, determined control proves you don’t need it.

*****

The Honor Roll: 15 more films that made movie-going worthwhile this year:

Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark)

David Byrne’s American Utopia (Spike Lee, US)

Dick Johnson is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, US)

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, US)

The King of Staten Island (Judd Apatow, US)

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe, US)

Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, Romania)

The Nest (Sean Durkin, Canada/UK)

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman, US)

Nomadland (Chloe Zhao, US)

Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi, Italy/France)

Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, US)

Time (Garrett Bradley, US)

Undine (Christian Petzold, Germany)

The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan, China)

You can’t fault film history for lacking irony or showmanship. The year and the decade ended exactly as they should have: in an exasperating public debate about the definition of cinema, kicked off by one of Hollywood’s finest living cineastes by accident, spinning in circles for months, and not ending because anyone was satisfied, only because they got tired. I don’t mean to be too flippant. After Martin Scorsese said Marvel movies were “theme parks” instead of cinema, the ensuing clickbait shitstorm did produce some very thoughtful pieces about the state of Hollywood product. But if you have a Twitter account (and I can’t say I recommend it), you could see the way this back-and-forth lacked even a shared frame of reference, even while the question was a valid one.

Ironically, any cinephile of the old school has ample reasons to be happy with the present. Indeed, you could argue that more of film history is more widely available, and in better quality, than at any other point in time.

It just so happens to coincide with a moment when fewer people than ever seem to care.

But tonight is Oscar night, and “caring about movies” is the reason for the party. The idea that the movie business really matters, and that the statues just make it official, is a large part of the Academy’s goal, or its act, or its calculus. The day after the nominations were announced, Variety ran the headline “Oscars Nominate Films Audiences Have Actually Seen”—a somewhat sardonic reprieve from the recent concerns that Academy voters and “the public” don’t understand each other anymore. I’m not sure that the Academy or the public did anything differently in 2019, but they did overlap on some of the liveliest parts of a lively year. Most of the Best Picture nominees were hits, and most of those hits deserve to be talked about. To the extent that everyone can ever agree on anything, I saw nothing more unanimous in the 2010s than praise for Parasite. (Its popularity has put me in heaven, but a hit-tip to the brave dissent, particularly this great piece on the MUBI Notebook that gets into the political weeds). Angst about Netflix seems to be a thing of the past, and while multiplexes can feel sclerotic—or like theme parks—the role of streaming services in film distribution is the place where a still-open chapter of cinema history has some vitality to it.

But Oscar season increasingly inspires another tradition, one that’s an upscale spiritual kin to Scorsese’s comment: the debate of craft versus meaning. And on that count, 2019 was a doozy.

So for starters, a word about my Joker paradox: the film is on my list of honorable mentions even though I wrote 1,000 words of ambivalence about it. It’s a divisive film, and a rare division that puts Lucrecia Martel and vocal IMDb fan culture in the same corner. Purely as a comic book origin story, it may well be the decade’s most engaging piece of tentpole revisionism. But if you want to see it as a film with something real to say about mental illness and inequality in America, or a film that elevates the material to the subversive sophistication of Taxi Driver—well, then there’s plenty to call bullshit on. So for all its antisocial gestures and anarchist overtones, the praise it deserves is this: good clean fun. But it’s divided me against myself. Disagreeing about Joker was more enjoyable, and probably more productive, than all the 2019 films I’ve forgotten.

1917, I’m less sure about. The Best Picture race was intriguingly open until Sam Mendes’s long-take extravaganza arrived, and it’s now a frontrunner over four or five far more interesting and substantive films. The timing helped. If 1917 had been released a few months earlier, the spell of its technical virtuosity may have worn off, revealing a rather ordinary and safe war movie underneath. The word “immersive” comes up a lot, but if the film does indeed “make you feel that you are there”, it’s worth asking where “there” is. Is it the trenches of 1917, or the middle of a precisely orchestrated series of action setpieces? And if the film is so relentlessly, insistently spectacular, does that help immerse you, or just make you aware of all the strings? Its one-take continuity has neither the in-the-shit verisimilitude of Saving Private Ryan‘s opening act nor the baroque allegorical tension of Apocalypse Now. Instead, Olympian technocracy takes precedence, without even enough self-reflection to recognize how that could be the theme of the era. At least half of it might as well be “World War I Mountain” at Universal Studios, and that’s the crowing irony of 2019: after all that public frenzy, the Academy might land on a movie that’s essentially a theme park ride. Sometimes, even prestige should be understood accordingly.

Without further ado, my top 10 of 2019.

10. Transit (Christian Petzold, Germany)

Transit is conceptually risky, daft, and irresistible: the script for a World War II thriller inexplicably pasted on top of our own not-too-distant present. The result is a strange tension, allowing old-fashioned narrative tropes, contemporary politics, incipient fascism, and pure incongruity to nag away at you. When two people walk through the background of a shot in sunny Marseille, you have to wonder: are they paid extras in a movie about the coming terror? Or just passing by?

9. High Life (Claire Denis, France/Germany)

Claire Denis’s psychodramatic space odyssey came out early as one of the most provocative movies of the year. Disturbing and emphatically not for everyone, its convergence of beauty and repulsion is some kind of dark ecstasy, and a return of sci-fi to true trippiness.

8. Atlantics (Mati Diop, Senegal/France)

To Western eyes, the genre elements of Mati Diop’s beautiful Cannes hit seem to belong to the 19th century: forced marriages, a true love lost at sea, and ghosts that return for closure. Cinematically, the film belongs to the 21st, coming across like supernatural neorealism and claiming all these traditions in the name of something distinctly imaginative and politically savvy.

7. Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar, Spain)

Pedro’s second old-soul movie in a row is a winding tale of art and life getting so tangled together that you can’t tell which is imitating which. You’ll be enchanted if you try. A film director, the real people who inspired him, the actors who reinterpret—these are familiar Almodovar ingredients. But time has been getting heavier in his films, and here it gives resonance to the realization that, for any artist who pulls from their life, the final creation still can’t belong to you alone. Which is why it’s Antonio’s movie as much as his.

6. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, US)

Tarantino has said that this is his Roma. He meant Cuaron, but he might as well have meant Fellini, because Tarantino is one of the few director in Hollywood today with enough free-rein celebrity that an undisciplined string of ideas can be greeted as an event. Tarantino is a born crowd-pleaser, but the question has come up before and likely will again: does he know when his crowd-pleasing instincts have unsettling undercurrents, or does he do it all in his sleep? Either way, his latest opus has multitudes. It’s keenly attuned of what the movie business offers its fans, asks in return, and requires to stay running. As much as this is about the End of an Era, it’s about something constant. So this sprawling, funny, wild cartoon fresco is like Fellini’s Rome in another way, too: it’s an Eternal City. The mode may mutate and fashions may change. But Hollywood will always be here, beautiful and ugly.

5. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma, France) & 4. Little Women (Greta Gerwig, US)

Portrait begins with a fiercely self-possessed woman instructing students on how to draw her, and Little Women begins with a publisher insisting that any young heroine needs to be married or dead by the end of the story. In other words, we have two costume dramas that, while drawing what they like from older visual and narrative traditions, tackle a still-valid subtext: how do you do justice to women’s experiences in fiction, art, and by extension the movie business itself? Portrait is a heady film of tremendous painterly control, and a lesbian love story in which erotic contact arises from kinship and inquiry. In Little Women, Gerwig’s deceptively rigorous skill with anecdotal detail expands the loveliness of Lady Bird to a wider scope. It never stops flowing, and the decision to rope in the spirit of the author for a meta-bookend both fulfills and plays a merry goof on the formula. Individually, either film would be a treasure. Together, they’re the double bill of the year.

3. Uncut Gems (Ben & Joshua Safdie, US)

Neon New York noir from the Safdie brothers—a thematic successor to The Maltese Falcon with the aftertaste of something closer to the gutter, like Night and the City or Force of Evil. So there’s a rich, cynical history to compare it to, but the triumph is that it doesn’t exactly move like you’ve seen and heard it all before. The Safdies’ view of NYC as one giant multi-ethnic hustle has its own pungency, and they improve on Good Time by allowing comedy and feeling a chance to breathe. I don’t know if Adam Sandler was robbed, but if his job was to hide insecurity behind a smirk, hang on for dear life, and collapse under the weight of delusions, his particular star presence somehow perfectly fits the noir archetype of a cocky sap who thinks he can beat the house.

2. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, US)

Dig your own grave and lie in it, morally if not literally. You can call it now: Martin Scorsese has made at least one truly great film in every decade since the 1970s.

1. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)

If Bong Joon-ho movies seem to exist between genres, it’s because he pairs the absurdity of comedy with action where laughter is an unlikely fit. Like the Coens, he tells stories that could go in any direction—and more importantly, creates worlds where those directions feel plausible. So the first time I saw Parasite, I felt the spasmodic sense of unpredictability; the second time, the clockmaker’s precision. He’s too much of a showman to look down on any genre he’s mixing in the lab, and if you’re new to his Korean films, you have Mother, The Host, and Memories of Murder awaiting you. As for Parasite, everything you’ve heard about not reading plot summaries is true. To end the year and the decade, its soulful mixture of empathy and dismay, of fiendishness and sorrow, is haunting.

*****

The Honor Roll: 15 more films that made movie-going worthwhile this year:

Ad Astra (James Gray, US)

American Factory (Steven Bognar & Julia Reichert, US)

Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller, US)

Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, China)

Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles, Brazil)

Birds of Passage (Ciro Guerra & Cristina Gallego, Colombia)

High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, US)

Honeyland (Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov, Macedonia)

Joker (Todd Philips, US)

The Kingmaker (Lauren Greenfield, US/Denmark)

Knives Out (Rian Johnson, US)

Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, US)

The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, UK)

Synonyms (Nadav Lapid, Israel/France)

Us (Jordan Peele, US)

The Round-Up is a collection of capsule reviews for new releases that filled up my notebook but never got a full dive. This one goes out to the off-the-beaten path titles that I liked but that’ll miss my best-of-the-year list. No Oscar nominees allowed.

Little Joe (Jessica Hausner, UK/Austria/Germany)

Jessica Hausner’s chilly, cheeky slice of futuristic paranoia won a top prize at Cannes before getting released into the day-and-date morass, and I hope it finds its audience where the Venn diagram of geekery and perversity overlaps. It could use a rewrite to beef up the plot and make the metaphor subtler, but it’s conceptually and aesthetically solid bizarro sci-fi—a spin on Invasion of the Body Snatchers that makes you wonder if getting body-snatched might actually be preferable. A friend of mine said it looked like “nature run amok.” It’s really “motherhood when your kid goes through puberty.” Same same.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Asako I & II (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Japan)

Sucker that I am for doppelgängers, and happy out of principle to see the fundamental dynamic of Vertigo get gender-flipped, I’d recommend this to anyone similarly inclined. As a mystery-laced melodrama, it resonates aesthetically and metaphorically: it unfolds as a play on youthful and mature ideas of love, and what happens when it comes time to cross that threshold. Dramatically, it goes out with a whimper, during which insane romantic obsession is really just ordinary confusion with an ordinary solution. But maybe, as they say, that’s life.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry, US)

A movie about characters who have a front-row seat to a rock star’s self-destruction. But why would anyone want to be around for it? You could apply that question to the audience, not just the characters, and the answer is Elisabeth Moss. She’s frighteningly effective at seeming like a genuine waste case, not just an actress playing one. Alex Ross Perry doesn’t have Cassavettes’ skill at mining insight into people—his film never opens the context like Faces or A Women Under the Influence. But the formal arc is strong. For a director so in love with words, “talk” in Her Smell is just another part of the soundscape. When the grunge trainwreck reaches a passage of quiet, the adjustment is so jarring it makes you dizzy. Then it lifts you up.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Dark Waters (Todd Haynes, US)

Dark Waters seemed instantly like a strange choice of material for Todd Haynes, which is to say, the material is normal. But this legal thriller feels immediately like his, and it benefits from a Haynesian gaze: a wary fascination with “normal” Americana, because it could so easily be hiding a perversion of nature or a suppression of the body. The corporate lawyers at their cocktail parties seem as plasticine as the dolls from Superstar and as absurd as Douglas Sirk’s suburbanites, with a similar sense of alienation and sneaky humor. This (undeniably Queer) perspective papers over the cracks of what could otherwise be a routine agitprop procedural. At least until the routine agitprop procedural wins out in the end. See it nonetheless.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

For all the ways Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit looked immediately wrongheaded—exactly what some critics found kitschy and treacly about Life is Beautiful, multiplied by Wes Anderson—there was one moment in the ubiquitous internet ads that kind of tickled me. Rebel Wilson, as a Nazi schoolmarm, shouts “Kids, it’s time to burn some books!”, and a group of fresh-faced ten-year-old students jump up and cheer. Easy irreverence? Perhaps. But what underlies that laugh is a genuine observation: that the horrifying appeal of fascism is rooted in an urge that any red-blooded American boy might understand. And that needn’t be empty. It could be, you know…satire.

An “anti-hate satire” is how the promotions for Jojo Rabbit having been billing it—somewhat defensively, in fact, as if they’re afraid that a candy-colored comedy about a conflicted Nazi child and his imaginary-friend version of Hitler might otherwise scare families away. In truth, Jojo Rabbit isn’t really satire. Not many of its jokes are heady, dangerous, provocative, or incisive, or even try to be. It has very little to say about anti-Semitism (it’s bad) or World War II (it was rough), and honestly, the most startling thing about it is its political irrelevance. In a post-Charlottesville era, where a messy American brand of Naziism has felt emboldened to go public, poking fun at old school “Jews have horns” anti-Semitism and the military pomp of Hitler’s goons feels terrifyingly, cartoonishly obsolete. Waititi reportedly wrote the script in the early 2010s, and as Jojo Rabbit becomes an Oscar contender, I can’t tell if it’s to the film’s advantage or its detriment that the finished product came along now.

But it is very much worth noting what Jojo Rabbit does well, because its flaws gets to its virtues and vice-versa. Waititi has a valuable skill with kid’s-eye-view tenderness. He knows his way around the anxious, even morbid traditions of children’s literature, and the way children relate to parents, to each other, and to the idea of having to be a grown-up someday. When it operates in this vein, Jojo Rabbit so earnest, warm, and cuddlesome that cynicism would be unseemly. But whenever it asks its historical setting for something more grounded—that is, whenever its jokes or gut-punches require the stakes and complexities of WWII—it’s as much a dramatic mishmash and tonal mess as the cynics suspected. So in the end, all that its “just keep going” message really signifies is that history offers no trauma so traumatizing that you can’t eventually make a Jojo Rabbit about it: simplistic, goofy, whimsically aestheticized, a lot safer than it pretends to be, and unable or unwilling to touch past-tense history or present-tense politics. This is a movie that will process the Holocaust by throwing a David Bowie dance party, and if that sounds like toothless hipster myopia, you’re not far off.

But the result is not cynical itself; ironically, something like The Reader, which plays the material straight, feels much more calculated. Jojo Rabbit is more like a movie that a kid would dream up and then somehow get to make, and it may be that Waititi flourishes best in purely fantastical settings that adult scrutiny can’t touch. That impression is aided by the onscreen presence of the director himself, who plays the role of the buffoonish Hitler with total commitment, even when the wit and slapstick are spotty at best. You can call it a “saving grace” if you like. Either way, it’s the reason Jojo Rabbit deserves neither Oscars nor hate: for better or worse, Waititi does seem to be as innocent as his characters.

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Jojo Rabbit is in theaters and up for Best Picture at the Golden Globes. For the Oscars, who knows what.