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They’ve been calling Kristoffer Borgli this year’s enfant terrible, and I can’t be bothered to figure out why. I’ve been avoiding all The Drama drama. I’ve fully opted out. Deep within my brittle bones I’ve grown more than fatigued by the cinematic discourse du jour. I’ve started to feel its weight, like a particularly evil germ, haunting my digestive tract. I think if I ever see another critic, instead of reviewing the actual film itself, opine about why some plot point or character or conception is problematic, about why a film should take risks but not those risks, and why a film should disturb the comfortable but not us and our comfort, or a thousand other rhetorical cul-de-sacs I can only ever read in the tone of a person (you know the type) who claps for emphasis with each patronizing word . . . I think if I ever have to see anything like this again, I’ll spontaneously combust.

But now that I’ve seen The Drama — having successfully avoided all discourse about the film or its director beforehand — I find there’s nothing particularly controversial or shocking about it at all. It’s hard to imagine anybody really having a problem with the film; in fact it seems like most of the negative attention it’s received has been solely in the form of online think pieces with titles like “The Backlash to The Drama Has Begun” or “Why The Drama Is Dividing Audiences,” whose real substance appears to be only reporting that a few people on Twitter criticized the film for being tasteless. So low are the stakes in film these days, the idea that a movie could truly shock its audience, could cause a legitimately passionate reaction beyond a bit of griping online — this idea seems like a dream of an older time.

Though surely there’s been enough of that discourse, too. We who carry on stupidly loving cinema spend our days drowning in eulogies over the demise of movies. Yet it’s nearly impossible to avoid adding your own voice to the funeral dirge, when the subtextual undercurrent of film in the past 15 years has been just that — the loss of an older cinematic culture. Like every other art form, our movies feel untethered from actual life, lost in their little discursive bubbles. Television, too (at least the version of television which has fragmented into streaming media), is so overwhelmingly prim and gray and risk-free. There’s nothing at all of the Dionysian: no real risk or sublimity or sex. No bodily abandon. Yet it’s not like we get anything really Apollonian in its place — never anything sheer, elegant, or exquisitely composed. Mostly we get the same overly-refined, liminal, obvious product. There are of course exceptions, because there are singular, visionary artists in any era. But the exception doesn’t disprove the rule.

Even a perfectly entertaining, good-looking, occasionally funny satire like The Drama (which is actually set in something like our present) is curiously muted — it doesn’t have the true texture of our world, nor even of a heightened movie-world, but a kind of inbetweenness, a too-clean mirror of our own. It lacks a sincere belief in its own unreality, or else fails to make us believe. That it sometimes delivers an accurate picture of the ridiculousness of contemporary neuroticism, and of the darker, more disturbing complexities of personality we first-worlders simply can’t bear to acknowledge — for this we can partially forgive it, and enjoy what it has to offer, as a brief commentary. But it’s still only half an experience. It promises a certain weirdness, a depth of black comedy, and perhaps even some good honest perversion, which it never fully delivers.

Something funny happens when a foreigner tries to make a movie about Americans. Sometimes you get an alienist masterpiece like Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. Other times an exoticist fantasy like the films of Chloé Zhao. Kristoffer Borgli at least feels a bit less out of place. After all, he’s heir to a Scandinavian film world that includes Ingmar Bergman (note the Passion of Anna poster on Robert Pattinson’s apartment wall) and the Dogme filmmakers Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, and Borgli most resembles these last two. Or rather: his work in The Drama most resembles Succession, one of the few truly great TV dramas of our time, which was itself influenced by Vinterberg’s darting camera and chaotic scenarios. Succession is also practically the only piece of media to capture the real texture of the last decade. Now Borgli brings this chain of influences more or less full circle, handily combining something of Succession’s glassy, droll anxiousness with the numb, low-lit A24 house style. Watching The Drama, I felt haunted by the growing awareness of just how much contemporary film and television could reasonably be termed the aftermath of Scandinavian Modern.

The soft, warmly-lit look of the film slots easily alongside Celine Song’s Past Lives and Materialists, as well as Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, The Worst Person in the World, and Oslo, August 31st. But Borgli’s film wants to provoke in ways those kinder films never could. What Borgli really wants to get at is the narcissism and neuroticism of upper-middle-class Americans — he wants to play the trollish Scandinavian, breaking out of his pristine Norwegian bubble to worm his way into the taboos and unspoken worries of America’s most enlightened, liberal striving class. Hence the way he throws us immediately into the awkward meet-cute of Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya), a disaster that has no reason to work, followed by a date so painful it has no reason to progress, followed by a series of intercut conversations with friends Rachel (Alan Haim) and Mike (the great Mamoudou Athie). From the start, we understand that these two beautiful people are not normal characters — in fact they’re barely characters at all, but ciphers who know next to nothing about each other, and who seem to possess few actual qualities beyond stammering, wincing, or laughing awkwardly.

Pattinson and Zendaya play their characters as doggedly and plausibly as possible, yet that’s exactly what interferes with the film. You get the sense watching it that there’s a strange, funny script running along on one level, trying to develop its central conceit into an exploration of empty, anxious modern people; while on another level, the actors have committed themselves to really selling the psychology and fragility of the characters — but all they can do is contort inwards, looking exasperated, or catatonically depressed. The film is missing that hyperbolic, even cartoonish, comical dimension, which a few more heightened performances could have brought to it. It tosses back and forth between brief moments of realist panic, followed by droll comedy, which works about half the time. There’s none of the swagger or charm Zendaya has shown before: she’s forced to play the bewilderingly naive gamine with supposed dark depths, while Pattinson plays a basic, exasperated neurotic as if begging to be unleashed into the weirdo he really is. Only Alana Haim gets to play her role as if she’s really in her own skin — mostly in the same bitchy register as her role in Licorice Pizza, which was such a great performance you can hardly mind the partial reprise.

The conceit is deadly simple and profoundly Millennial — the same sort of brief, nightmarish moment of oversharing that something like Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave is built on. As they approve the catering and wine for their wedding ceremony, Charlie and Emma sit at night with Mike and Rachel, and their tipsy conversation leads each of them to reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done. The mistake is Emma’s: she confesses that, at the age of 15, she nearly carried out a school shooting, something she’d actively planned and only abandoned at the last minute. The rest of the film spools out in a panic over this revelation, which Charlie and Mike treat as simply unbelievable — and to which Rachel, whose cousin was paralyzed in a shooting, reacts with disgust and horror. From the moment this happens, the rest of the film is simultaneously decided (because its satire wouldn’t exist without it) and cursed by it (because no person in the film, above all Charlie, seems capable of reacting to it like a normal human being).

To a degree this is Borgli’s doing. He wants us to see the jerky, terrified motions of these fragile people as a pathetic, neurotic response to something that should really be entirely understandable. He wants Emma’s revelation to be a kind of challenge to that neuroticism — the terror, the essentially elitist fear of being contaminated by another person’s filth and darkness. The worry that anyone you know might at any time be harboring fantasies of violence (or any other taboo, or criminal vision). The finest part of the film is the long, chopped-up conversation the morning after, in which Emma tells Charlie the full story of her violent adolescent fantasy. Briefly, the film takes real flight, as Charlie imagines the young Emma, moving to Louisiana with her military father, being teased, developing her fascination with guns, and, as she says it, with the whole “aesthetic” of shootings themselves.

The sequence is funny, frank, illuminated with genuine pathos. Everything about Emma’s situation is in fact quite normal. She wasn’t some warped psychopath — only a sad, isolated kid, at an age when every kid feels sad and isolated. She developed a fascination with revenge, and the cult of shootings, because (as Charlie halfheartedly tries to say to his friends later) that’s exactly what American kids do. Teenagers have always been doomy and fatalistic, have always felt like the central victims of the world. In America they are simply provided with a morbid way out, and this particular way is sensational, cultic, and the subject of a secret, shameful fascination to all Americans. This sequence of the film has nothing but sympathy for the trite, pathetic normality of the young Emma, and for the older Emma, now facing the possible dissolution of her marriage only because her fragile fiancé, so disturbed by the possible latent violence in his future wife, can barely stop for a moment and consider how completely basic the girl’s anger and dissociation were.

The real masterstroke of the film — a high point it never quite recovers from — is the further revelation of how Emma’s plan was interrupted. Before she could carry it out, another shooting happened nearby, claiming the life of a kid from her school. Soon she was swept up in a student crusade and in fact became a strident activist against gun violence. All it took was that one sudden shift, and a newfound sense of belonging, and young Emma was freed from her ideas of violence, “like waking up from a dream.” Charlie mordantly compares this to Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien, about a French boy who is rejected from the resistance and joins the Nazis instead, “Only in reverse.” He’s nearly right, though he cannot finally intellectualize it. Of course, Emma’s story reveals how life actually works, which is what’s apparently intolerable about it. We’re not all running on simple, reducible scripts of violence or non-violence; sometimes completely normal people get into very dark, violent obsessions without being total psychopaths; then, just as quickly, they snap out of it.

What really haunts Charlie (and Mike, and Rachel) is the boring universal contingency of all human life, the capacity of every person for committing terrible acts. In this, Borgli gets the mundane absurdity of 21^st-century American professional class morality dead right — since their world is more or less predicated on denying that they could ever be capable of doing or thinking the wrong thing. Had Emma gone through with her plan, she would have been irrevocably marked as evil, and remembered as a tragic psychopath. But she didn’t. So is the person standing in front of Charlie, about to marry him, really a normal, trustworthy person? When Charlie asks his coworker what she would do if she found out something similar about her partner, she blithely responds, “I don’t know, call the police?” It’s a good line. It hammers home just how hopeless we are before the unknown dimensions of those we claim to know. At some point in the past, someone thought about doing something horrible — but what authority now could punish them for that? Do people deserve punishment for things they’ve only thought about? Well, somebody deserves punishment. Otherwise, how do we know it was wrong?

We can see where Borgli is going with this: look at these yuppies, look at this tortured, crumpling man, unable to recognize the abject humanity of his lover. Borgli certainly gleans the hypocrisy of a certain class of young-ish Americans: stridently moralist in temper, while aspiring towards complete inoffensiveness; but secretly very afraid of being associated with the wrong people, deeply concerned with making sure those people get punished. The trouble with all of this is that it feels secondary to the general unbearable, personal anxiousness that grips Charlie, which also renders Emma an equally confused, stammering mess. By the time we get to the finale, and the wedding, the film has long since passed the point at which a normal person would have either abandoned the ceremony, or accepted the tormented past of their partner. It has spun its wheels furiously to get where it was going, while generally losing the threads of deeper questions set off by those early revelations. The ending, after the disaster of the wedding, feels perfunctory and unearned, as if beamed in from a simpler movie. Perhaps this is the point, given the abortive rom-com we were presented with at the film’s start.

With more viewings, it’s possible The Drama will stand up a little better. At first sight, it’s a film that wants to provoke far more than it actually does. On the other hand, anyone troubled by its attempt to make satire out of school shootings should keep far away from movies for a while. One thing the film certainly gets right is that narcissism and moral hypocrisy, though universal and perennial, have a specific flavor in the 21^st century. So many people are so neurotic about art, sex, and emotion, they can barely enjoy them. They wish to be libertines, but worry whether the people around them are secretly thinking bad thoughts, or harboring the wrong desires. This is especially true in literature and film: all many people seem to see in a work of art is their own convictions (which are never as deeply held as they’d like to think), reflected or rebuked in it. Because of this, cinematic discourse these days rarely gets past a childish kind of pseudo-morality. Art is never given any real freedom — never allowed to risk being wrong.

The Drama at least gestures towards the kind of challenging and even offensive work we so desperately need. If I got anything from the film, it’s this: the urgency, the necessity for someone to come along and make a film that actively shocks, angers, and disturbs our miserable moral complacency. We’re starving for it. After the disappointment of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, I felt especially despondent. What’s missing in Fennell’s movies is missing everywhere else. There’s no true vulgarity or excess. There’s no abandon. She wants everything prim and controlled, glossy, wrapped in lurid colors; a candy-colored confectionary feast on a too-green lawn. She apparently believes that kink, vomit, blood, and eggy fluids all add up to some sort of feverish sexual transgression, when in truth it’s as dull and frigid as a dollhouse. After Wuthering Heights, I found myself returning almost reflexively to my beloved Ken Russell, that great maverick of British cinema — particularly The Devils, a masterpiece of true Dionysian excess, so orgiastic and blasphemous it was banned and redacted in countless places. It’s a beautiful, absurd film, filled with medieval violence and pagan riot, genuinely dangerous, genuinely erotic, and cruel. But totally free to offend anyone, throwing itself without reserve at every historical hypocrisy it can sink its teeth into. Russell paid the cost for it. Yet the result makes whatever passes for transgression in art today seem so tame it hurts. How long do we have to wait before cinema gets that brave again?

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

I. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Christmastime in Las Vegas: tinsel on the slot machines, Santa hats on the pit bosses, short days, vivid winter sunsets, balmy nights. Tourist shortages have recently put the city in a nervous mood, as Americans increasingly choose to gamble from the safety of their couches, but you wouldn’t know that making your way through the crowds that fill the plush lobbies and malls and casino floors of the Wynn and the Venetian and the Flamingo, crowds of staggering variety: couples and families from Tel Aviv, from Dubai, from Shenzhen, all there to experience the most American of cities, that strange neon bloom in the desert built on mob money and defense money and the fantasy of hitting it big. That’s where I was, in town to meet up with my girlfriend and her family for the holidays, and consumed with thoughts of The Wizard of Oz.

Consumed because we had tickets to The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, a “4-D experience” at the gigantic domed arena which “harnesses the power of AI, alongside traditional VFX, to bring The Wizard of Oz — a film made in 1939 — to life in an unparalleled way,” or so the promotional copy says. And consumed because, ever since I first saw it as a small child, I have considered The Wizard of Oz, if not my favorite movie, at least the Ultimate Movie, the American Midsummer Night’s Dream or Alice in Wonderland, art and entertainment and joy and tragedy all working as one. It means something that Sphere Entertainment has, at a cost of over $100 million, chosen The Wizard of Oz for its inaugural venture into film (not counting a U2 concert film or Darren Aronofsky’s glorified planetarium show Postcard From Earth) and not Star Wars or Marvel or any other more recent cultural phenomenon. Their bet on this nearly 90-year-old film has been rewarded; as of this writing The Wizard of Oz at Sphere has sold 2.2 million tickets, made nearly $300 million, and been extended at least until December, and possibly indefinitely. This 1939 adaptation of an odd children’s story has turned out to be unfathomably deep and resonant. Though suffused with the spirit of the age, with the old spirit of vaudeville and the sadness and hope of the Great Depression, The Wizard of Oz nevertheless has a strong claim to being the most timeless and endlessly renewable piece of American art.

As you file into the auditorium, the Sphere’s 106,000-square-foot wraparound screen is done up to look like an old Hollywood movie palace, with velvet curtains and an ornate ceiling. The lights dim, the MGM lion roars, the fanfare plays, and suddenly the theater disappears and the sepia Kansas sky over which the opening credits roll is in front of you, above you, behind you, filling your field of vision, bigger than any other screen in the world, bigger than life. The music, newly re-recorded and blended with the original vocals at great expense, fills the hall via thousands of speakers, gorgeously clear. For a few minutes, it is enchanting.

But something’s not quite right. Something is, in fact, very, very wrong. These aren’t the characters you’re used to; they’re jerky and unnatural. Dorothy’s face is TikTok-smooth, her freckles disappear and reappear from shot to shot. Cuts have been made — a line here, a transition there — to bring the movie from 100 minutes down to 80, and the film feels sped-up, with no time to luxuriate in the small moments. In the showstopping tornado sequence, the audience is blasted with powerful wind machines, paper leaves scatter, and seats rumble and vibrate until the house lands with a thump, Dorothy opens her front door and steps into the Technicolor land of Oz. But this isn’t the Oz we know, the psychedelically unreal painted soundstage backdrops of the original. It’s a semi-realistic landscape that resembles a PlayStation 3 game. Look up! There’s a bird going into a CGI flower. Look to the left! There’s an AI-generated munchkin just standing around and waving on a loop. Dive into the behind-the-scenes promotional content for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere and you’ll find that the Google Cloud engineers interviewed sound uncannily like proponents of the roundly derided early AI trend of extending the backgrounds of paintings, so we could see what the rest of the Mona Lisa’s body was doing. Don’t you want to know what the Scarecrow was up to in all those close-ups of Dorothy? Don’t you ever wish, while watching The Wizard of Oz in a theater or on television, you had a bigger frame, so you could see residents of the Emerald City milling about in the background?

If you answered yes, you likely perceive The Wizard of Oz as a piece of endlessly remixable IP, a glimpse into a dynamic world which can always be modified and expanded upon. If you answered no, you perceive the film as a discrete cultural artifact and product of a specific place and time, and the frame as a composed space and a productive limitation rather than a constraint. It is the battle between those two incompatible worldviews that has come to define the modern entertainment industry, and as The Wizard of Oz at Sphere demonstrates, the former is currently winning. Yet the most exciting and delightful special effects in The Wizard of Oz at Sphere are all showman’s tricks as old as theater itself: the magnificent tornado sequence, the fake snow that fills the auditorium during the poppy field scene, the drone-powered flying monkeys that swoop overhead. The overwhelming size and clarity of the Sphere screen is impressive, to be sure. But it’s disquieting to watch these real people made into jerky AI marionettes, put into a new CGI landscape that has little of the beauty or artistry of the original, and much is lost when you take away the guiding hand of the filmmaker, who consciously guides the viewer’s emotions through each frame. At the end of the day, I would have had just as much if not more fun in a packed theater, watching the unimprovable 1939 version.

II. The Genius of the System

I had reached no greater understanding of the film’s unique magic, so I set out to look for answers in the accounts of its creation. To my surprise, the narrative of the immortal human artistic impulse vs. the crude and inelegant hand of the machine falls apart when you begin to study the making of The Wizard of Oz. In the late 1930s, when studio logos meant something, MGM stood for glossy prestige pictures, all swirling strings and luscious Technicolor: musicals, sophisticated comedies, highbrow literary adaptations. Under the leadership of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg (the model for the powerful Hollywood producer in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon), they were a factory, an assembly line that turned these films out by the dozen. The Wizard of Oz is the ultimate example of the studio system at full power, of film-by-committee, and its author is best described as MGM itself, embodied in the Technicolor unit, the costume department, the songwriters Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, and everyone else who worked on the film. Victor Fleming is the credited director, but he was one of four (alongside Richard Thorpe, George Cukor, who worked closely with Judy Garland to develop the Dorothy character, and King Vidor, who shot the Kansas scenes). There were 10 writers, some of whom drafted large parts of the story and some of whom merely punched up dialogue and pace. Auteurism simply doesn’t apply here.

Not to say, of course, that human artistic decisions didn’t play a vital role, as they did when Harburg, Arlen, and producer Arthur Freed intervened to stop Mayer, in the role of know-nothing suit, from cutting “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” But perhaps the alien perfection of The Wizard of Oz comes from the fact that while one can see the evidence of great effort in every frame, from the painted backdrops to the lovingly stitched costumes, the whole thing appears to have been assembled by some overmind, some higher intelligence. It runs counter to the romantic ideal of the individual craftsman, the ideal by which we are taught to understand most kinds of art. And yet, like a medieval cathedral built over hundreds of years by thousands of hands, the film is no less human for it.

When it came out, it was considered neither a masterpiece nor a blockbuster. “As for the light touch of fantasy, it weighs like a pound of fruitcake soaking wet,” pronounced the New Republic’s Otis Ferguson, who also called Garland’s singing and dancing “thumping, overgrown gambols” (somebody kill this guy!). “A stinkeroo,” was the verdict of Russell Maloney of the New Yorker. There were many positive reviews as well, but the film was only a modest success at the box office, and only broke even on its lavish production and marketing budget upon its 1949 re-release. It was television that made The Wizard of Oz a phenomenon; the film was thrown in as part of a package deal for the rights to show Gone With the Wind, and became a yearly event on CBS beginning in the late 1950s, just as color television was beginning to spread.

These facts lend themselves easily to a materialist explanation for the popularity and resonance of the film: a generation of baby boomer critics and filmmakers watched it when they were young (such as David Lynch, whose love for Oz is explored in the documentary Lynch/Oz), showed it to their children, put it in their own films, and it became an enduring classic essentially by accident and circumstance. Yet, watching it, do you really feel that way? Vulgar materialism melts away when faced with its mystical, mythical power. The Wizard of Oz “somehow seems real and important in a way most movies don’t,” wrote Roger Ebert, because “its underlying story penetrates straight to the deepest insecurities of childhood, stirs them, and then reassures them.” Sooner than you think, it says to the child, you’ll be thrust into the adult world, where you’ll find color, opportunity, and friendship, but also difficulty and terror. Authority figures will turn out to be fraudulent or bumbling. You’ll have to rely on your brains, heart, and courage. As adults, we know this to be true.

It is well documented (particularly in Aljean Harmetz’s essential study The Making of the Wizard of Oz) that no one had any fun making the most delightful film of all time. Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr (the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, respectively) arrived at the studio at 6:30 a.m. every day for their two-hour makeup sessions, and would suffocate for hours under the brutally hot arc lights needed for the Technicolor cameras. Haley couldn’t sit down in his Tin Man costume; he would lean against a board between takes. Lahr ate his lunch through a straw. Buddy Ebson, originally cast as the Tin Man, was hospitalized and put on oxygen for two weeks after inhaling too much of the aluminum powder in his makeup and finding himself unable to breathe (when they recast Haley, they changed the formula). Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch, was badly burned during a stunt. Hollywood lore has it that the 124 actors playing the Munchkins terrorized the set with drinking, practical jokes, and hotel orgies; though this appears to be greatly embellished, it is undoubtedly true that they were financially exploited, their salaries ending up in the hands of unscrupulous men like Leo Singer, who leased them out like trained animals as “Singer’s Midgets.” Even Toto (played by a female Cairn Terrier named Terry) had to take two weeks off after a crew member stepped on her paw.

All this toil, strife, and exploitation must have had some subliminal effect on the final product, because part of what keeps The Wizard of Oz from being an entirely saccharine fantasy is the darkness, sadness, and pain around the edges. There are moments of cruel sarcasm and sadism, such as in the “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead” sequence, in which the Munchkins gleefully describe the witch’s death (the falling house was “not a healthy situation for the Wicked Witch / who began to twitch, and was reduced to just a stitch”) and hand Dorothy a bouquet for having “killed her so completely.” There’s the moment no child ever forgets, in which Dorothy, trapped in the witch’s castle, sees the face of Auntie Em in the crystal ball on the table suddenly turn into the face of the witch, mocking her cries for help, or the moment when the flying monkeys tear apart the Scarecrow. And if you know anything about the American entertainment tradition, there’s something melancholy about seeing Bolger, Haley, and Lahr, all of whom came up in vaudeville, playing the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, these creatures searching for a purpose, something to make them whole. The great indigenous art form these men trained in had vanished, utterly destroyed by the very movies they were helping to make, and even in their wonderfully comedic performances, something of this sense of loss comes through.

III. The Brains, the Heart, the Nerve

There’s one major thing about The Wizard of Oz I’ve mostly avoided mentioning until now: Judy, the girl with heartbreak in her voice. Without Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz would be a great film, but only with her does it become the apogee of all cinematic entertainment. As the film critic Brendan Boyle has pointed out, “Of all the special effects the movie employs, there is nothing more immediately upsetting than the image of Judy Garland crying.” By now it’s well known what MGM did to Garland: fed her speed to keep her going and downers to put her to sleep, constantly criticized her for her weight and called her unattractive, employed members of the studio to spy on her, encouraged her to abort her first child, claiming it would ruin her girlish image, and eventually blamed her for becoming a flighty, unreliable addict and cut her loose. When she died of an accidental overdose at 47, many blamed MGM for what they saw as a slow-motion murder. But you don’t have to know any of this tragic background to see the real pain and fear and sorrow in Garland’s performance, her outrage when she first meets the Wicked Witch and when her alter ego Miss Gulch tries to take Toto away, and her essential kindness towards the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Wizard. There is something in Garland’s combination of pain and goodness that immediately draws us to her, that makes us long to see her happy, safe, and comfortable again. No other movie star, Golden Age or otherwise, brings out this response.

Then there’s the voice, that inexplicable object. If Garland’s tearful face is the most upsetting thing in The Wizard of Oz, her voice somehow draws those tears out of us, cuts through everything in the world to hit us straight in the heart, as it does in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” (If you want to really turn on the waterworks, listen to her quavering, world-weary, gorgeously-arranged performance of “Over the Rainbow” at her 1961 Carnegie Hall concert; the entire audience pin-drop silent. Don’t listen to it in the office or on public transit, though, if you want to avoid concerned glances.) Tears are a constant with Garland. “I asked some professional musicians to explain what made her voice so great but even they were mostly reduced to mute gestures of love,” writes Bee Wilson in a recent London Review of Books essay on Garland. “No one at MGM could have taught her to sing the way she did.” Halfway through the companion podcast (and LRB podcasts are generally quite reserved affairs), discussing the resonance of “Over the Rainbow,” Wilson, too, starts crying.

But even a talent like Garland can’t carry the film on her own, as anyone who has watched her more obscure films is aware. I began this essay intending to find out exactly what makes The Wizard of Oz so perfect, so heartbreakingly gorgeous, so engineered in every frame to surprise, delight, terrify, and enchant. I have to admit, after rewatching it twice (once at the Sphere and once at home) and reading hundreds of pages on its creation and its impact, I still don’t feel as if I’ve grasped it. Perhaps there is no better explanation than to say that it bloomed up out of the collective unconsciousness, whatever subliminal story it tells us was brought into being because it had to exist, and everyone who helped usher it into the world, from the directors and screenwriters to the costume and set designers to Garland to the Munchkins, were midwives in a process they did not fully understand. You can easily detect the authorial hand or the set of social circumstances that produced other great popular art of the period: Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Citizen Kane. They are wonderful, but ultimately explainable. The Wizard of Oz stands apart — we are still trying to decipher where it came from and what it is trying to tell us. Beautiful, funny, sad, thrilling, electrically alive in every frame, it does for us what we want to do for Garland: it is like a comet, a wondrous, shimmering orb descending upon our bewildered, frightened, tornado-tossed selves to comfort and encourage us. Sometimes one must lay down one’s sword in the war against cliché and reach for a phrase battered and beaten to death by Hollywood’s perennial celebrations of itself, by a thousand Oscar clip shows and smarmy executives and vapid paeans to the power of the silver screen. Sometimes one has to shrug and call it what it is: movie magic.

What are Hollywood movies for, anyway? Are they mere escapism, insidious distractions, showing us beautiful people and places for a while so we don’t have to think about our own circumstances? Are they a cruel dream factory, luring in the young and talented only to destroy them and later strip them for parts to be used in an AI-generated thrill-ride, meant to separate Vegas tourists from their money at the rate of three shows a day, seats starting at $110 with optional VIP Bad Witch Luxury Experience? Or are they that, but also something more? Are they expressions of our will to imagine, to create, to visualize, as the song goes, what lies beyond the rainbow, and then, through months of labor and thousands of people, bring it into being, at least for an hour and 40 minutes at a time? The current moneymen and moguls in Hollywood and the tech industry (but I repeat myself, the two are at this point one and the same) talk of eliminating the human element from filmed entertainment, of a future in which we can all spend our time in a numbed-out haze watching the voices, bodies, and personas of the honored dead ghoulishly reanimated — Mickey Mouse fighting Darth Vader, or whatever. It’s a bleak vision, a kind of cosmic cynicism that makes the likes of Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer look like pure art-for-arts-sake aesthetes, and I shudder to think of it.

Yet watching The Wizard of Oz tells us that the artistic spirit prevails at unexpected times and in unexpected places, and that at a previous moment when studio power was at its most formulaic and tyrannical, when individual expression was crushed and labor was exploited and abused, some combination of forces nevertheless came together to produce this film: a miraculous achievement, a film that, through all its silly costumes and fantastical songs and knockabout vaudeville routines, manages to speak directly to the indescribable mix of joy and melancholy that arises in each of us when we think of the perils of childhood, of the thrills and disappointments of adulthood, and of the perennial longing for home.

Henry Begler, a contributing writer to The Metropolitan Review, writes the Substack newsletter A Good Hard Stare. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Oscars Season is upon us, and consistent readers can probably guess which films I favor for the biggest awards. One Battle After Another certainly seems like a lock for Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay — and as our greatest working director, Paul Thomas Anderson deserves to finally be recognized by the Academy. So you’ll get no complaints about that from me. But were I to do any kind of “If I Picked the Winners” piece, it would be Sentimental Value all down the line: Director for Joachim Trier, Original Screenplay for Trier and Eskil Vogt, Lead Actress for Renate Reinsve, Supporting Actress for Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Supporting Actor for Stellan Skarsgård (who may very well win on Sunday night).

What do the Best Picture nominees have to say about our moment? There’s been a lot of talk about how 2025 was a turning point for Hollywood, the kind of year which people might study someday for the topicality of its “serious” films, or for the fact that some of those films managed to reach bigger audiences than usual. I do think some of this rings true, though it’s difficult to tell what will last. Only half of the films nominated for Best Picture this year are any good. Bugonia and One Battle After Another certainly feel like truthful responses to a particular zeitgeist. Sentimental Value and Marty Supreme would be great films any year. Their resonance is deeper: more universal and more personal at once. F1 has nothing to do with anything besides Brad Pitt’s star power, while Hamnet is a punishing sentimental weeper that misunderstands Shakespeare and has a pretty dim view of human emotion. In previous essays, I’ve written about Frankenstein being just another misfire of a Del Toro film, Sinners being a mediocre movie in prestige dress, and Train Dreams being a snooze — so I won’t belabor those.

This leaves The Secret Agent — another film I really could see being considered a classic someday. Though it sometimes lapses into feeling like something of a cultural dissertation, satisfied with its own themes and engrossed in nostalgia for a time when people had to deal with actual fascism (you know, the “real, heavy stuff” we today couldn’t possibly understand). But as it picks up its pace, ginning up the soundtrack, getting better and fleeter as it goes along, it carries the viewer effortlessly to that sudden sharp-drop bathos of an ending, revealing itself, retroactively, as a rather great film. And regarding Wagner Moura’s performance, only superlatives will do. I still hold that Ben Whishaw’s work in the overlooked Peter Hujar’s Day is the great performance of 2025. But of the lead actors who are actually nominated Sunday night, it should really be Moura going home with the trophy. Hawke, DiCaprio, and Chalamet are all fantastic — I think any one of them could feasibly win. But Moura’s performance is especially astonishing: whether warm, guarded, haunted, silent, or monologuing, he’s transfixing. And the fact that the Academy keeps nominating more films and more actors from non-American films is a happy trend — one I hope only grows more common each year.

Though before I go on to talk about what’s currently worth seeing, I think it’s worth mentioning the exception to that trend: the absence of any nominations for Park Chan-Wook’s brilliant No Other Choice. Here’s one of those films people are truly going to study for years to come, for its contemporary resonance and its pure formal invention. Park is simply one of the greatest, most creative filmmakers of the century, and No Other Choice is a riot of stylistic innovations — of transitions, shots, and ideas for mise-en-scène which no other director would ever dream up. In some of his larger-scale compositions, Park’s use of separate figures and planes for dramatic irony rivals Hitchcock. In smaller scenes — like a comically botched hit job soundtracked by music so loud the murderer can’t hear the murderee — his sensibility is inimitable: every next step is a surprise. No Other Choice deserves comparison with his Vengeance Trilogy as an ultimate example of Park’s high stature in the contemporary canon of great cinema.

But that glaring snub aside, let me turn now to the first two films of 2026 that are actually worth seeing, if you can.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

As a sequel, The Bone Temple has a strange heft. It picks up immediately after the final whirligig moments of last year’s 28 Years Later — a savage, punky, surprisingly cathartic work which might just be Danny Boyle’s most creative outing as a director — where the hero, Spike (Alfie Williams), suddenly ran afoul of “Sir Lord” Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his loony, Satanic tribe of Jimmys. At first, The Bone Temple leads us to think we might be in for a tale of the horrifying and continuing adventures of Spike. But screenwriter Alex Garland has other things on his mind. Rather than return us to Spike’s island home, or give us a simple picaresque of post-apocalyptic violence (though there’s a bit of that in the gang’s grueling torture of an innocent farmstead family), we’re consistently brought back to the titular temple, the metaphysical heart of the film, where the slightly mad and absurdly orange Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) is beginning to uncover a possible cure for the rage virus.

How the movie gets back there is more than a bit contrived. But despite the bloodcurdling, unpredictable voyage of the Jimmys (with Jack O’Connell clearly having the time of his life in another deliciously outsized villain role), I was glad and surprised when it did. The sequences with Kelson and the hulking, naked “Alpha” zombie he’s named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) are strange and truly beautiful. Nia DaCosta proves herself a very good director here, her style balanced perfectly between echoing Boyle’s kinetic frenzy and keeping the rest of the film’s zaniness within the frame. And she does excellent things with that frame, always keeping each scene’s sense of space intact, even as she sometimes still chops it, Boyle-style, into so many constitutive parts — a harder thing to do than some people might think (see: Christopher Nolan). It’s an excellent piece of work.

Kelson’s “ossuary” itself is a great, immediately iconic piece of design, a perfect anchor for the surprisingly mythical aspirations of the film, which by the end grows literal, as Jimmy tasks Kelson to perform the role of “Old Nick” for his ingenuous cult. Kelson’s fire dance is just the kind of sublimely weird cinematic moment that will surely earn The Bone Temple its future status as a cult classic. But it’s in the quieter moments of the film that Fiennes’ performance shines, elevating the film nearer to the nervy brilliance of its predecessor. Simply put, Fiennes is one of the finest movie actors in history, with a seemingly infinite range. The character of Ian Kelson requires him to be genuinely dangerous, scary, funny, obsessive, graceful, weird, and somehow also kind — all at once. It is, without irony, one of the best performances of the man’s extraordinary career.

Alex Garland should keep giving his scripts to other directors. What Boyle, and now DaCosta, have given him, in their respective adaptations, is the mediation necessary to make his compelling sci-fi scenarios work as films. Directing his own scripts, Garland always ends up turning out liminal, ungraspably vague allegories. I’ve not seen the much-loathed Men, or the impossibly gray Warfare, but this was true of Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Civil War especially. The first two films are truly vicious and frequently profound — really peculiar films, which would be classics if they weren’t also so uncanny, glossy, and bloodless. But at times, Civil War almost feels like it was rendered by an LLM: everything is such a blur of digital blandness; the edges of its allegory are so sanded down and dulled, it seems like an accidental fantasy. There’s nothing resonant, or even really American, about it in the slightest. But as a screenwriter, the man is — truly — a fitful visionary. Because Boyle and DaCosta understood how to make clearer images out of his ideas, the 28 Years Later trilogy is shaping up to be his best work. Which makes it (happily) one of the more surprising developments in recent film.

The Moment

It’s easy to forget how groundbreaking Richard Lester’s 1964 masterpiece A Hard Day’s Night was. For the Beatles — just one year into their newfound global fame — to appear in the first British equivalent of a Pop-Art Nouvelle Vague film was a watershed moment. But the real genius of A Hard Day’s Night lay in the way it built its humor and sense of playfulness outwards, from the personae of the Fab Four themselves. The movie’s Marx Brothers-by-way-of-the-Goon-Squad style of subversive anarchy was a logical result of the group’s well-established cheekiness, and parries with the international press. Contrasted with their professionalism as touring workhorses, the tension in the film was set: yes, they loved their screaming fans but, crucially, the boys spent most of the film trying to escape their responsibilities, bursting out of the studio, dancing around the grounds, loitering where they shouldn’t, wandering into other offices, getting into chases with the police like in a Buster Keaton short. Like Athena bursting from the skull of the old televisual Zeus, the new youth culture of the 1960s was born with the film, from that need to escape — the joy of the music itself suggested that the spirit of that culture was ultimately uncontainable, even by the suits who descended to profit off of it.

In The Moment, Charli XCX also longs to escape. But in the prison of contemporary pop stardom, there’s just no anarchy available, no break-out possible for a hip young woman of the 21st century. A whole litany of tragic female celebrities lies behind her; the empty morass of trendy internet micro-celebrity threatens to drown her everywhere she goes. Her only escape is a spa in Ibiza, which looks more than a little like a location out of an A24 horror flick. Her team is full of noncommittal yes-men, muttering and side-eying each other like secondary characters in an episode of Succession; the magazine people and label reps and businessmen are obvious, bland parasites and vultures. Yet her chauffeur has never heard of her, and wonders if she makes music “like Leona Lewis.” She’s on the cutting edge — but there is a very long way to fall, if she teeters.

With The Moment, Charli joins a long lineage of films concerned with the vague mockumentary skewering of popular music fame, from that original Beatles breakthrough to This Is Spinal Tap to the Lonely Island boys’ Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping — yet the film never really finds a through-line for itself. It has no real shape; it never really gathers an argument for its own existence, outside of some clearly necessary personal catharsis for Charli herself. It’s stuck somewhere between searing pop exorcism (the most interesting parts of the film) and toothless backstage parody, which doesn’t go anywhere new. The strobe-lit opening and subsequent first-act club trip suggest a kind of pummeling, gonzo contemporary document that never really materializes. Instead, we get a turgid middle act of haphazard riffs on ridiculous arena concerts, battles between leeching creative teams, and Charli’s own spiraling out from the pressure to keep up with the phenomenon that was brat. Unfortunately — like a thousand other contemporary directors — the only way Aidan Zamiri can think to suggest this pressure is to work mostly in unremitting claustrophobic close-ups. The result is, well, claustrophobic.

All of this is sometimes compelling, and the film is fitfully entertaining when Charli herself is on the screen. She has some great moments that show real promise as an actor; other times, she’s ill-served by both the script and Zamiri’s fragmented coverage. A surprisingly unnerving and excellent scene with an eerie Kylie Jenner is particularly good, suggesting further levels of meta-awareness and weirdness that might have made the film great. But anytime the movie leaves her behind for more meetings and squabbling between groups of managers and anxious businesspeople, the film slows down and the sheer dead air becomes exhausting. The final act, where Charli burns out and disappears, feels predictable and perfunctory.

Yet I’ll give it this: the final three or four minutes of the film are the kind of excoriating satire I wish the rest of the film had landed. After Alexander Skarsgård’s Euro-fop director has convinced Charli to craft a glitzier, stagier “story” for the proposed concert film-within-the-film, Charli finally comes back and agrees to go along with the show, stupid as it is. Though this is too short (I almost wish the back third of the film could have been the whole fake performance itself), it’s still a sublime rebuke to every sentimental, puffed-up, twerking, or just plain cringey tour spectacle today — from Taylor Swift to Dua Lipa to Beyoncé and beyond. As the words “an Amazon Studios film” appear on the screen, along with quotes by hopelessly outdated websites and magazines tripping over themselves to praise her “new direction,” the final moments of Charli’s ridiculous cinematic sell-out performance nearly redeem the whole movie — brilliantly, savagely, reading the entire contemporary music industry and journo-sphere for filth.

So, for at least one sequence, The Moment proves what brat itself proved: that Charli is still savvier than the world expects from its popstars — and that a real artist (even a clever artist of the Spectacle like Charli) will always hold out for their right to individual expression over the demands of the moneyholders. I only wish the rest of The Moment had embraced the bitchy satire of those last minutes. Yet this is the trap: Charli understands celebrity, but even she isn’t powerful enough to go beyond the constant demands of contemporary fandom. She just manages to exorcize herself of her brat-era demons. But every pop star’s need for their audience will inevitably become a conflict, when the simultaneous need for unmediated artistic expression is on the table. What comes next for Charli after The Moment depends entirely on her ability to square that circle, with her integrity intact.

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

I want to take advantage of the ramp-up to Oscar season — a wonderful time, during which my inner child will always be excited, no matter how pessimistic I’ve become over the years. I believe in being candid, so I’ll admit this serves a dual purpose: (1) allowing me to get to a few films from 2025 which I still have yet to review, and (2) allowing for time, since movies are usually released much later here in London than in the States, and several enticing films (Sirât, Resurrection, Sound of Falling, The Moment, The Secret Agent) haven’t even hit theaters. I still haven’t seen either the new Avatar or the perfectly meme-worthy 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — it may surprise some readers to learn I want to see both films, and frankly expect to enjoy them. But I have just managed to catch, whether in theaters or available to stream, a few films from last year that I think deserve mentioning. And since I believe in being so candid, I’ll also admit I couldn’t find much of a method for weaving these reviews together. One is a great film, one is a very good one. One is quite bad, though it at least has the virtue of being a fascinating failure.

I rankle at the description of any artist as an “acquired taste.” All taste is acquired. Possessing “good taste” just means you’ve encountered enough examples of a medium to understand some of its contingencies — to understand how a thing might’ve been different than it is, but also why it’s not; to pry into whether that was by design, or because of some failure in the execution. Of course there’s no avoiding subjectivity. But in the end, “good taste” simply means being able to explain why you liked or disliked something, instead of vaguely gesturing to the way it made you feel.

So anytime I notice people talking about how hard it is to get on a film’s wavelength, about how it “just didn’t work for them,” or how they’re worried a director is beginning to repeat themselves — my ears perk up, for these are tell-tale signs that what might be happening is interesting enough to have activated philistine self-defense maneuvers. I’ll never understand the point of being frustrated by artists who cultivate confrontational or overly quirky personal styles and signatures: if they fail, they fail, and there’s a nobility in it. If they succeed, then they succeed, and art wins out. I’m not always sold on the idea of the cinematic auteurist — except for the occasional experiment, film is a collaborative medium, as the cliche says rightly. But I do think we live in a time where the necessities of the industry render the old studio model almost incapable of producing good entertainment, let alone some kind of true movie art.

So if we want exciting cinema, we’re nearly always bound these days to look for evidence of an actual, idiosyncratic personal vision. And yet this has become difficult to do, when the new language of the studio model has done over even the most market-tested blockbusters using the same pop-therapeutic ideals as the rest of contemporary media, which abounds in functionally empty terms of an extremely denuded, limited kind of personal filmmaking. Not understanding the difference between this sort of marketing and the actual thought of a great filmmaker is how you get legions of people thinking Sinners is a great film because of the reasons Ryan Coogler made it. For far too many people, the film’s greatness seems legible precisely because the film has been constructed out of so many political and sociological allegories, which the audience can parse out like a high school poetry class. Coogler’s work on Sinners is a great example of a perfectly good writer whose real savvy lies in constructing the kind of text people want to pick apart, rather than in its actual depth at the visual and formal levels. His film drowns in subtext, yet his direction is visually confused and incoherent (especially in that beloved oner, a show-off piece that’s not nearly as good as it pretends to be). There’s a reason his biggest influence and mentor is Christopher Nolan.

Well, that was a long preamble to a simple statement, which is: I stand by the films Yorgos Lanthimos, one of the few popularly-recognized “acquired tastes,” a man who clearly delights in disturbing audiences that have never seen a film by Pasolini or Haneke. People who love Lanthimos celebrate a filmmaker who revels in the (now quite literally) alien, the chemical, the stark mutilating of normal human action in pursuit of a rigorous surrealism. He’s as easily caricatured as Wes Anderson — except that he isn’t, really, since like Anderson’s ostensibly affectless anomie, the obvious “quirks” of Lanthimos’ ultra-calculated, deadpan, nearly-infantile actors are deeper than they first appear. Because they barely contain that subcurrent of enormous, undifferentiated, inexpressible human pain beneath. Wes is a literate humanist and nostalgic portraitist: Yorgos is an absurdist with a mean streak, who pursues his zealous ambiguities at the cost of everything else (including, sometimes, quality). Like filmmakers as varied as Robert Bresson and Stanley Kubrick, Lanthimos is a Kabuki director — not conventionally realist in the slightest, his method is hyperbole undercut by banality.

Because of this, some people respond to his films with revulsion, while others sigh and feel fairly put-upon, after leaving yet another film whose main goal seems to have been unsettling its audience and making them feel a bit nuts. Other people just think he’s never really topped Dogtooth. I think he works best when his droll signatures are mixed in with other things: as The Favourite mixed in history and period drama, and Poor Things mixed in fantasy and Victorian anachronism (it certainly helped that both films were oriented around truly brave performances by extraordinary women actors). In movies like The Lobster, Kinds of Kindness, or The Killing of a Sacred Deer, his calculations appeared more characteristically, yet each felt like a smaller-stakes experiment in the Lanthimite register. Now, with Bugonia, he’s adapted one highly self-conscious discourse-laden script by Will Tracy (who also wrote last year’s inferior discourse-athon Eddington) into what might just be the most accessible Lanthimos film of all.

Yet the trouble many people seem to have with Bugonia is that, while it takes the sad paranoia of its conspiracy-theorizing kidnapper Teddy (Jesse Plemons) seriously, and takes his exploitation of his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) seriously, it is not quite as interested in exploring the experience of its one female character, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the pharmaceutical CEO they’ve captured and tortured, believing to be an alien. Part of the reason is that Michelle is, indeed, an alien — a possibility the film toys with until its final sequence (here I should say the film is a remake of a 2002 Korean movie Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan, who was himself set to direct the English-language version before stepping down, at which point Lanthimos was asked to fill in). But what I’ve seen in some reactions is clear discomfort with the unadulterated rage the film taps into.

Teddy may be crazy, may be like every frothing, disenfranchised prole gone down one internet rabbit-hole too many — his conspiracies may have him chemically castrating himself and his poor cousin, hooking a woman up to an improvised electric chair, and fantasizing about starships and aliens killing bees. But he is, on the film’s own terms, correct. Worse: he’s correct in the wrong way, a paranoid, exploited, traumatized loser, who suspects the elites of the world have programmatically poisoned the earth. He’s completely right, only the things which his basic insight leads him to do, in the search for retribution, destroy himself and the one person he actually loves. His desperate, pathetic violence is what ends up dooming the entire human race: there’s no reward for being the only one wearing a tinfoil hat to a nuclear explosion.

Yet this is all only the level of rough allegorical analysis I just disavowed myself, above. If we want to read Teddy as a metaphor for MAGA America, we can. If we’re good liberals, we’ll find ourselves disturbed that the film seems to suggest the reactionary paranoia of MAGA-world is well-founded — then we start sympathizing with the female CEO whom Teddy has chosen for his revenge, who lives in a glass mansion and ruthlessly extracts money from sick people under a veneer of girlboss feminism. Keeping to that level, we discover that the film has basically played us — we’re forced by our sense of politesse into endorsing a monster. But of course this is part of Bugonia’s brilliance; why, even if it isn’t a truly great film, it’s a searing, wounding one. If an alien decides the human race must end because we’re all just dumb apes cooking the only earth we’ve got, then we’ll all end together, good and bad alike, the torturers and the tortured. Our political commitments are no good to us if they spin us around in pointless circles, further and further away from our most intimate, moral ones. Our frequently adolescent analysis of art according to those vague principles of political and sociological allegory — searching through entertainment to discover evidence of its “standpoint,” of what its says or doesn’t say about our societal preoccupations (as though a work of art can somehow be whittled down to its content) — will always be a dead end.

Bugonia passes through the whole contour of contemporary discourse this way, collecting more and more pathos as it goes along. And despite the literal nightmares it caused me, it has grown in my thoughts since I saw it. It goes without saying that Plemons and Stone are stunning: though they’re both only 37, they seem like two of the most established veteran virtuoso actors alive. Aiden Delbis is wonderful, too: what could have been just “a character with autism” becomes so much better than that, because his performance (and the written role itself) side-step both high and low expectations to deliver only a character — someone whose autism is not just a help or a hindrance, but another part of his own individuality. Yet what lingers most in the end is the film’s acute sadness and serious anger, its sense of the tragedy and hopelessness of the world in the third decade of the 21st century. If we make it through to the next century, I suspect Bugonia will be one of the films people still watch — like Taxi Driver in the seventies, or Easy Rider in the sixties — to figure out what it felt like to be alive in 2025.

A James L. Brooks movie attempts to happen in the present day — this couldn’t work, so instead it ends up being set in 2008. Why? I’m really not sure. Perhaps because that was the last time in history before everyone had a smartphone, when people still sometimes left messages on answering machines and had to print directions off the internet (both of which happen in Ella McCay). Ella McCay is played by Emma Mackey, and somewhere in that statement is a metaphor for the entire film. In one scene, our plucky wonk do-gooder heroine gets accidentally stoned, and pours forth earnestly about her favorite public healthcare proposals, and how, dadgummit, she really thinks she could change things around here, as the strings on the soundtrack tinkle sweetly in a parody of a James L. Brooks movie. All of which surely, cosmically, could not have happened after 2016, now that the Heartwarming Hollywood Comedy™ has become as rare in America as a shark attack. In all ways (and there are many baffling ways at work here), Ella McCay is a movie beamed in from a different latitude, a different timeline completely — yet though it’s a flat, confounding mess, there’s a kind of numbed-out charm to it, a lulling mild fascination, in just how alien every line delivery, plot point, and individual scene of the film ends up being.

Ella McCay is also a species of personal filmmaking: clearly a passion project, from a once-successful director who hasn’t made anything in 15 years. Perhaps Brooks simply wanted to see if he could still make one of his characteristic dramedies in 2025. Personally, I’ll forgive a man just about anything if he made Broadcast News and helped create The Simpsons — so I’ll forgive him Ella McCay. But I cannot bring myself to understand what motivated anyone else to make this bizarre film. I’ll save you too many plot points: suffice to say, Ella McCay is supposed to be the kind of thing Frank Capra once made, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington meets Ruth Bader Ginsburg: the heartwarming tale of heroic woman vs. machine (also her neglectful adulterer father, and her neglectful restaurant-owning husband, and the media, and the entire state legislature). Ella ends the film as the youngest and shortest-termed governor of the state she was born in (a fact the film repeats constantly) — whose capital appears to be in some nondescript New England town small enough that her aunt’s bar sits next to the family’s old house, and the media can find out about the apartment she uses for trysts with her own husband. Which is what gets her in trouble . . . because her husband was the one who told the press . . . whom he then tried to pay off . . . because . . . frankly, I can’t remember. Ella McCay is mystifying.

In one scene, Ella sits in the back of a security detail SUV, conversing with the cop who drives her around town (played by Kumail Nanjiani). The cop consoles her about her family troubles by telling a silly story about his own mother. Ella collects herself after an agitated phone call, sits forward, and says she can’t hear him, at which point he begins to yell his story back to her. It’s awkward. She nods, says “uh-huh,” a few times, and yet the way the film is edited, she goes straight from appearing to fake as if she cares about his story, in the first reaction shots, to suddenly laughing uncontrollably — as though either the script or the editing itself had elided the parts where Mackey was supposed to transfer between real human emotions. The audience is left puzzled: is Ella McCay simply a chronic carer, gritting her teeth and listening to another silly story, or is she genuinely invested and delighted by this man? The film is simply never sure which sort of lovely, kind person it wants her to be. Throughout the movie, you get the same sense, that Mackey (an excellent actor) was handed an impossible part (woman whose only real flaw is caring too much and not believing in herself enough), and constantly forced to flip from one level of emotion to a different key in an instant. And the rest of this daffy film lurches in its orbit around her in exactly the same way.

Take a passage in which Ella’s agoraphobic brother Casey (Spike Fearn) — whom we were formerly introduced to as one of many supporting characters in Ella’s story (yet another person she cannot help but help) — suddenly becomes the film’s main character. We follow him off in a long sequence, as he finally confronts the girl who left him (Ayo Edebiri, playing an Ayo Edebiri-type role), stumbling into his own bad romantic comedy. Prior to which we had exactly one insert of him, and one scene with Ella, to establish a situation we are now expected to care about as a new main focus of the film. Ella McCay does this throughout its long running-time, playing like a half-remembered dream of older Hollywood plots and types and scenarios. It has no real contour: much of the film is just Ella being elliptically driven around from bar to court to home to her brother’s and back — a frugal use of sets, sure, but also a metaphor, in some deep way, for the film’s struggle to be about anything at all. Besides, that is, James L. Brooks’ obvious love for this impossible figment of a woman he’s conjured into being (in his head, not on film).

Yet that’s what gives this truly lousy film its fascination, and why I almost liked it by the end. A film like this — which believes, as James L. Brooks does, that sentiment and purity of character can be sneakily feasible elements, in a realist picture of the world — seems to our cynical age like a dream so unreal it could only be silly. It’s a bald attempt to resurrect a dead style and genre, only in a flat digital garb akin to a Netflix Original movie. So of course the attempt to make this kind of film could only short-circuit: Ella McCay stumbles around, constantly trying to form and re-form itself, as the sheer anachronicity of its old Hollywood mechanisms wear down, and the gears rust, and what once seemed like a lovely fantasy worth projecting on the silver screen now plays as a series of bungled mistakes. It’s one of the most remarkable, memorable failures of a film I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Premiered at Sundance a year ago, and only just released here in England, Ira Sach’s little masterpiece Peter Hujar’s Day may just be the best film of 2025 — or at least the best among equals. It’s a film that takes place entirely in one apartment, in the course of a single conversation, which is mostly a monologue, anyway. There are two characters: Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) and the great New York photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), though Hujar’s vivid words make many other famous figures, from Allen Ginsberg to Susan Sontag to William S. Burroughs, all but physically present as characters themselves. The script is an abridgement of an actual conversation that took place 52 years ago, over an evening, for a project Rosenkrantz had envisioned, in which she’d record people she knew describing an entire day from memory, in exact detail. Hujar’s was the only interview she ever did, and though the tapes were lost, a transcript was discovered several years ago in an archive. Sachs adapted the film from Rosenkrantz’s book.

Yet it’s hard to explain exactly why this description conveys nothing of the film’s magic. Part of it is the film’s almost mystical evocation of that bygone era — seedier, somehow more innocent and more bitter; simpler, but starker. Part of it is the awareness, which ebbs and grows as the film flattens or draws attention to its fiction, that while we’re listening to the actual words an actual man once said, what we’re really watching is a British thespian calling them back to life at 24 frames per second. Part of it’s just the fascination of Hujar’s simple tale: tromping to the Lower East Side, buying cigarettes, photographing writers, working in his darkroom, sleeping in late — as Rosenkrantz points out in the film, though they’ve only covered 24 hours in a life, in the course of its telling the tale has begun to take on all the qualities of an epic, or a novel.

There’s the way the two figures shift around the room, pouring drinks, lighting candles, at one point dancing to music — later moving to the bed to rest their heads on each other; then out to the balcony; then back into the living room, where Peter confesses the havoc his cigarette smoking is wreaking on his body, and Linda confesses that she worries about him, and a mournful gap opens up between them, a recognition of the darker side of life, built up around the edges of the narrative. In a film which slows down so completely, and so totally abandons itself up to this spoken narrative, the subtlest change becomes moving and meaningful. Sachs’ direction is perfect, and his timing is sublime: he knows exactly when to move, and when to linger, when to punctuate the monologue with music or simple shots of the characters in light, or in or out of focus.

And then there’s Whishaw’s performance, which is one of the best in recent movies. Rebecca Hall is perfect as well, her constant radiant attention an immensely graceful, surely difficult thing to pull off. But Whishaw is the star, by design, and rarely has a movie been this possessed by a single actor’s performance. Technically, his recitation alone is a tour-de-force; but it goes beyond that, and possession really is the only word for it. Though Whishaw’s Hujar is aloof, sardonic, a bit arrogant, a bit confused by himself, Whishaw makes a brilliant decision in showing that the artist is every bit the performer. Even relaxing with a good friend — or perhaps because of the sudden prompting of the tape and microphone — Hujar’s monologue becomes a ballet around his own authenticity. The question of his lying comes up several times, as he fudges certain inconsequential details of his day. Whishaw’s performance suggests this is simply the way it is for the man. Not out of any malevolence: he simply seems to say things without thinking through whether they’re precisely true or not. Hujar appears chronically detached from his own life, as if regarding it from above, or beyond. At times he seems almost already dead, and more than a bit amused and aroused by it.

Still, the dance is a genuine dance, and so every little gesture, every lisp or characteristic bit of accent, in Whishaw’s hands becomes a truth — a Hujar truth, and a performed one, but only because the man is clearly such a born performer, and it’s only natural. Whishaw’s complete resurrection of the man on celluloid becomes a microcosm of the film itself, since where does the hunt for historical reconstruction and artistic authenticity end? It ends the same way a day ends: it goes around and around, and starts over just the same, until one day it doesn’t anymore. Whishaw’s Hujar is a beautiful tired artist, a man exhausted by the start-and-stop of that everyday, but still propelled forward by a quest for something — a new photograph, a new meeting, a new gig, a new hit — that might really redeem the cycle, make it worthwhile. His evocation captures a very deep truth about the nature of artists, and of a certain kind of gay artist especially. One whose constant sprezzatura always betrays a clownlike sadness, how his queerness had given him the exact expertise in outsiderdom he needed to be a great artist, and how both would always keep him there.

There’s little else to say about Peter Hujar’s Day, except that it’s one of the first American movies I’ve seen in years that felt as rich and metatextual as a great European art film — taking as its subject both real life and the cinematic representation of it, without devolving into cliches about movies being nothing but sophisticated lies. What the film stages is a knowing fabrication, true: yet what’s evoked in that brief 1 hr 16 minutes — the distance from that time to ours, the universality of it, and the particularly of it, the sadness of losing a vital species of artist, and the pain of remembering him — transcends its fabrication so fully, it becomes a primal commentary on the ultimate point of cinema. That the performance of an exquisite fiction is often the truest thing anyone can do. When the Oscars ceremony finally comes around in March, my inner child will be very excited. But my grown good taste will find me exasperated and saddened that the Academy simply passed right over the most important performance of 2025.

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

Much of contemporary discourse about China remains trapped in what might be called an all-consuming Trump vortex, where nearly everything is refracted through the prism of the 45th and 47^th president.

Two new works on China manage to escape that pull for a wider lens look at a country that has undergone a rapid shift over the course of the past several decades.

Jia Zhangke, perhaps China’s most internationally celebrated filmmaker, and deservedly so, returns with Caught by the Tides, an elliptical tone poem and time-lapse romance that doubles as an anthropological portrait of modern China, revisiting central characters of his past films and following their lives across decades as the country transforms around them. Meanwhile, Dan Wang’s new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, offers an assured and lively technocratic account of the political and economic machinery behind that transformation.

In an early scene in Caught by the Tides, which stitches together new and archival fragments, and features actors from Jia’s prior films, including his longtime artistic collaborator and wife, Zhao Tao, a group of Chinese youth dance ecstatically to the Swedish pop song “Butterfly” by Smile.dk. The kinetic dancing scenes bleed into street celebrations of Beijing’s successful bid to host the 2008 Olympics. The evocative montage feels like a fever dream of a country in motion, being thrust into modernity.

Wang’s book traces the very same rise more soberly, explaining how the Soviet Union’s love of heavy industry shaped Beijing’s Politburo, for whom “production was a noble deed to advance communism, while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism.” Wang’s story, and Jia’s more lyrical companion, is one of a relentless focus on the “real” economy: modernizing poor regions of the country, glorifying production, and disdaining consumption. In the U.S., where a financialized economy long ago eclipsed a manufacturing one, Americans are almost resigned to a kind of material decay, if not a spiritual one.

Yet Wang also details the cracks in the China Hype Machine. One fissure in the growth narrative is the fallout from China’s imploded real estate bubble, including the corner-cutting that the breakneck growth encouraged. Long before the bubble burst, parents were already referring to collapsed schools in Sichuan as “tofu houses” due to their fragility, a shorthand for the costs of corruption and speed.

Tofu houses aside, Wang’s central thesis is that China has nevertheless become an able “engineering state,” focused on building, as opposed to America’s “lawyerly society,” which is overly focused on procedure and blocking everything. Like most grand dichotomies, it explains much and collapses perhaps too much, but it is a useful frame. The sense of possibility in American public life, especially among liberals and the left, has narrowed dramatically. It’s now difficult to imagine the U.S. undertaking projects involving statecraft or public investment of the scale or ambition of FDR’s New Deal. Gripes with the lawyerly society have given rise to the Abundance movement, which Wang himself supports, advocating for more building to alleviate scarcity in housing, energy, and infrastructure. Slow progress is now being made to make America more conducive to building again. Even before the Abundance movement gained steam, the Biden administration fell in love with industrial policy again, and prior to that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed for a Green New Deal, which laid conceptual ground for an industrial policy revival, envisioning a massive investment in infrastructure. But Wang’s book captures a sense that the U.S. has already fallen too far behind, in spite of recent piecemeal efforts.

As a boy growing up in Fenyang before China’s building-led transformation, Jia longed to escape his provincial hometown, like many others looking to “escape constricting expectations” and “rural drudgery.” In a 2009 New Yorker profile, he said that he “cycled ten miles just to catch a glimpse of a passing train, which looked to him like a symbol of ‘the faraway world, the future, hope.’” His works, Caught by the Tides included, often follow characters making similar journeys and not always finding the future they sought. Watching his films, one imagines what we might have seen amidst the steel and tenements if a filmmaker with his keen, naturalistic eye had captured America during its frenzied industrial transformation.

In China, that sense of new energy still persists, although it has taken many different forms. In August 2025, NBA star Steph Curry arrived for a promotional tour, as the American basketball world league has made up with China after a rocky few years and seeks to again expand its brand in Asia, particularly in basketball-obsessed China. Curry was welcomed by a light show which included a reported 5,000 drones mimicking his three-point shot falling through a basketball hoop, a spectacle which went viral on social media. The videos joined a growing genre of Chinese infrastructure porn, including breathless content about new bridges and trains, artifacts of a tech boom that some have deemed Sinofuturism.

And it’s not just an obsession with bridges and trains, apparently “[t]he most fashionable thing you can do in downtown New York these days is drink a beer on Canal street, crouched on a low plastic stool…” in a nod to “the habits of old Chinese men,” part of a phenomenon known as Chinesemaxxing.

All of this content feels like dispatches from a future America that hadn’t been strangled and sclerotized by all sorts of political dysfunction.

In Breakneck, Wang observes that “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese,” arguing that “both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth.” It’s somewhat ironic that the current occupant of the White House, a onetime developer who was a gaudy, gold-plated symbol of the 1980s shortcut to wealth mentality, now presides over a country that is nostalgic for its capacity to build.

In 1999, when China’s own building spree was beginning to take hold, Jia was blacklisted by government censors. He had just made his debut feature, Xiao Wu (Pickpocket), without official state approval. The film, a reinterpretation of Robert Bresson’s 1959 classic, starkly portrays the decaying, stagnant life of Jia’s hometown and the young people struggling to get by. Its unflattering portrait of Chinese youth ran against prevailing state sensibilities. China would later grant Jia official state approval for his films, perhaps recognizing, for practical reasons, that his international success could be an asset and by the state’s own desire to encourage its homegrown film industry. Wang notes this same ideological flexibility at the core of Chinese governance, observing that “the greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist.”

In 2015, Jia commented on the restrictions on his filmmaking, remarking that “how we see or understand freedom differs from person to person,” before bluntly adding that “as a filmmaker, the clearest issues have to do with censors in China, and how I can maintain a certain level of freedom within the limitations and restrictions imposed upon me.” Like the pragmatism of the Chinese state itself, even its truest artists are compelled to color within the lines.

When Jia was growing up, life in the town of Fenyang was confined and offered few opportunities for young people, especially those seeking creative freedom. In Breakneck, Wang describes how today’s free spirits can travel to places like Thailand’s Chiang Mai, where psychedelics like mushrooms and ayahuasca are accessible, or China’s Yunnan province, where officials are more relaxed, “looking the other way while…youths immersed themselves in cryptocurrency projects by day and relaxed at speakeasies at night.” A growing number of Chinese elite are also moving to Tokyo, where there’s “much more space to discuss anything freely.”

While the U.S. builds far less physical infrastructure, it has begun to resemble China in less expected ways. As Xi has tightened controls over free speech in China, now punishing not just political speech, but “excessively pessimistic sentiment” about life in general, the U.S. is cracking down on pro-Palestinian activists, critics of the administration, university administrators, and the media, and deploying state power in ways that make earlier cancel culture war battles seem quaint.

As a rebuke to critics who claim that China can’t innovate because it doesn’t have free speech, Wang explains that he believes China, like other autocratic regimes, has gotten far in the realm of scientific advancement, in areas like solar power, electric vehicles, and robotic arms, “in an atmosphere of worsening political repression.”

That worsening political repression sometimes takes the form of social engineering, which Wang describes as China’s embrace of engineering in all its forms, not just civil or electrical. He explains that the Soviet Union once inspired Chinese technocrats to become “engineers of the soul,” a Stalinist phrase which Xi has repeated. Wang chronicles the harrowing systems of social control behind forced sterilizations and abortions under the One Child Policy, including instances where bulldozers were sent to tear the roofs off the homes of noncompliant families, as well as the excesses of China’s zero-COVID policy.

The pandemic-era sequences in Caught by the Tides, with images of mandatory COVID-19 testing lines, hazmat suits, and a more disquieted people, capture the mundane efficiency of the Chinese state, as well as the isolation of the population. Jia noted that this period “created a sharp contrast with the kind of energy and momentum that [he] witnessed in 2001.” Breakneck, meanwhile, conveys even darker sides of social engineering and China’s rigid lockdowns, recounting the story of a pregnant woman who was denied access to a hospital because she hadn’t yet verified a negative PCR test. She would go on to miscarry outside of the hospital. Wang notes that “the story went viral until censors deleted it.”

Like other deeply humanist filmmakers, including the Dardenne brothers and Ken Loach, Jia gives voice to those dislocated by 21^st century capitalism. His work is less overtly political, yet contemporary China’s state-led interventions serve as both a backdrop and character in all his films, raising questions that are inherently political, if not explicitly stated. That interplay may owe to the influence of Italian neorealism, which Jia has said shaped his work’s “fusion of documentary and fiction.”

Caught by the Tides doesn’t reach the visceral heights of Jia’s 2013 masterpiece, A Touch of Sin, a more urgent and confrontational film. But his latest work is doing something altogether different, a contemplative chronicle of people swept up in China’s radical transformations, presented almost as a historical artifact.

By the end of Caught by the Tides, the film’s protagonists, having traversed decades of upheaval, from urbanization to the displacements caused by the Three Gorges Dam and the rise of the digital age, are older, wandering through the streets of a gleaming hypermodern China. Yet we sense that their dislocation remains unchanged. In Breakneck, Wang reflects on the dislocation of his own parents, who emigrated from China to Canada and then to Philadelphia. He wonders whether they might have lived a more pleasant life in China, or at least one with more community than the atomized life offered by American suburbia.

Both Caught by the Tides and Breakneck ultimately converge on a similar truth, if unarticulated, which is that amid the machinations of engineers or lawyers, and despite all of China’s enviable material progress, ultimately, human connection is the only force that still confers meaning.

Kiren Gopal is a consumer protection lawyer and policy strategist who writes about film, politics, and culture. Follow him at x.com/kirenitynow.

In my brief tenure as critic here, I’ve been pretty clearly pessimistic about the current state of the cinema. Discerning readers will note that the only film I’ve reviewed positively so far was released 50 years ago. They’ll note, too, that I’ve been entirely ambivalent about the overall quality of this past year’s cinematic output. I took the chance in my Superman review to air my exhaustion with the whole superhero genre (a sentiment that at least seems somewhat shared by the general moviegoing public — for now). On the back of Seth Rogen’s The Studio, I waved away any talk about 2025 being a banner year for the return of good cinema, opining that most of the highest-grossing movies every year continue to be films aimed at children. Then I wrote about finding Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein only fitfully interesting; I wrote about Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, and why what passes for adult cinema in the world of small-sized and “independent” films — though far better than the average blockbuster — is still, on the whole, much duller than it ought be.

On the one hand, I think it’s appropriate to opine like so when given the right stage. Ours is an elegiac century, down to its bones. The subject of “serious” arts these days is most often a barely-suppressed, ongoing reckoning with the anxiety unleashed by the last century, and with the weight of all our self-conscious failures to live up to its most sterling achievements in popular culture. To add to this general, mournful air is, to some readers, understandably, the veritable flogging of the dead historical horse—one we’re all quite aware has long since passed away beneath us. Still, on the other hand, to do otherwise would mean telling a lie. And that is the work of artists, not critics.

So as we head into 2026, I owe it to my readers to finally bestow some genuine praise on the best films of 2025. And there were plenty of good movies, though in general I found myself most excited by the ones everybody else seemed ambivalent about. I loved Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt; found Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon charming and admired Eva Victor’s debut Sorry, Baby. I was surprised by the punk rock digital garishness of Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, which I found thrilling. To the likely dismay of many, I also held fast to my adoration for Wes Anderson — the most unfairly vilified director of this century. The Phoenician Scheme was one of the loveliest and funniest films of his career. I find his films, all of them, to be emotionally overwhelming experiences, and remain perplexed by people who don’t.

I’ve also been confounded by many people’s reactions to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Those who praised it as a perfect film seemed way too carried away by the hype, while those who think it wasn’t revolutionary enough should get their heads checked — not because of any actual politics in the film (which are hazy because life itself is hazy), but because the idea that a film’s quality has anything to do with revolutionary politics is an insult to the creative freedom of artists everywhere. But this is an old problem, hardly unique to our day and age: people have always distrusted art they suspect of being insufficiently aligned with their own moral programs. After watching the film a second time, I do think it’s extraordinary on its own terms, even if in the long run it’s one of the least-great films from the greatest working American filmmaker. If it wins a dozen Oscars it will be the rare movie that deserves to do so.

But all those titles aside, I suppose I ought to stop putting off my denouement here, and get to the reason I’m writing this: to praise the very best of the year. And I did not see any films in 2025 better than Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme — two films I feel confident calling future classics. If I’ve delayed getting to them until now, it’s only because I find it difficult to say much about such great cinema, except to repeat that it’s plainly and obviously that: great cinema. The two films could not be more different — one lurid, frenetic, exhausting, and linear; the other still, quiet, melancholic, and filled with light. One set in a past that occurs in a furious present-tense; the other in a present oppressed by the thrum of the past. And yet each is such a stunning work of resolutely contemporary cinema: not just film — not just movies — Cinema. Genuine, grand works of popular entertainment that escaped the Arthouse with all their ideas and techniques intact, sacrificing none of their artistic bona fides as they reach outward to meet their (hopefully sizable) audiences. Both films even work brilliantly as metaphors for the current plight of cinematic artists themselves (though, let’s be real, a large portion of the greatest films have always been about this, directly or indirectly). But I won’t belabor that point too much. I’ll only try to explain what I think makes these films worth seeing on the big screen.

In Sentimental Value, it all starts with a house. Joachim Trier and his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt begin by introducing us to the old Borg family home. Our two lead characters, sisters Nora and Agnes (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), grew up there, as did their father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a Bergman-esque film director who left them behind after divorcing their mother. As the plot begins, the mother has just died. Nora has become an acclaimed stage actor suffering from opening-night panic attacks, depressed and haunted by a former suicide attempt; while the younger Agnes, who once acted in one of Gustav’s movies as a child, has settled into presumably happy domestic life as a historian with a loving husband and son. Gustav approaches Nora with a film script, insisting she play a character clearly based on Gustav’s own mother, Karin, who was tortured by the Nazis and later killed herself. Nora gives him an outright no. By chance, Gustav then meets a famous Hollywood actress (Elle Fanning, in a brilliant bit of meta-casting) who is keen to shed her starlet image and prove herself as a serious actor being directed by a serious Scandinavian auteur. She takes the part instead.

All revelations of the Borg’s familial history and difficulties are treated by Vogt and Trier with a characteristically light touch — no sudden discoveries, no pointless suspense for the audience. Their intergenerational tragedies are like the old house itself: lived-in, somewhere they keep returning to despite themselves, because it’s the place that made them who they are. The house is the metaphorical and literal center of the film, and in a dazzling prologue, Vogt and Trier imagine the entire history of the place through the eras. Here, as in their last film, The Worst Person in the World, they turn to the voice of an older, female narrator to speak objectively, literarily, of the thoughts of the characters, and of the history itself.

Throughout the film, this narration comes and goes, and we are treated to more and more images from the past — we see how the rooms of the home were occupied by different generations, we see images from the very different childhoods of Gustav and his daughters. In some sense these moments are the natural evolution of the digressions Vogt and Trier have increasingly employed in their last few films — as when the young Anders in Oslo August 31st imagines following people from a cafe all the way home to observe their lonely lives; or in The Worst Person in the World’s dizzying montages on climate change and the deaths of Julie’s female ancestors. It’s a wonderful way of using film language to accomplish something novelistic, yet in Sentimental Value it feels even more assured, even more important for our grasping the underlying structure of the film, as it spirals out and away from that center into more and more conflict among its characters, and in their ideas of themselves, before returning for an ending that feels somehow both surprising and conclusive.

Besides the extraordinary performances — Skarsgård, Reinsve, and Lilleaas one-up each other continually, and Fanning is stunning in sequences requiring her to perform as a mediocre actor slowly becoming a good one — what I will remember most from the film, for a long time, is its tone and its sense of light. So many of the most beautiful images in the film are soft and warm, as close to natural light as Trier and his cinematographer, Kasper Tuxen, can get. And given the apparently singular spectral of an Oslo summer, this is particularly beautiful. By now Trier is an expert in balancing his use of handheld with more stable shots, unburdened by the need to show off, able to pursue pictorial beauty for its own sake, but always with a true eye to what the point is. He is, in other words, a great director, not just a writer. His visual style is a flawless marriage of arthouse observation, brief flashes of punk immediacy, and occasionally thrilling push-ins and montages that come from a more obviously American pop film tradition — just as the subject and tone of the film runs the gamut from Ibsen to Hollywood to documentary, from high to low. It’s an exquisite creation, one of the few great films in recent years that could only have been made right now, by an artist of this particular temperament, even as it feels simultaneously timeless. It’s a reminder that the newest things often feel the most peculiarly familiar.

Josh Safdie achieves a similar coup in Marty Supreme, only one that points in an obviously opposite direction. Just as with Uncut Gems and Good Times — the last two films he made with Benny (which now feel a bit like single-drill exercises in preparation for the all-out court press of Marty) — the film is a one-way slalom, a relentless scene-to-scene-to-scene development of the same insane and exhausting logic that drives its never-not-hustling lead character. Only a single digression — a brief unforgettable excursus to an overheard tale from Auschwitz — occurs in the course of the film, which is otherwise preoccupied by the nearly picaresque blunders of the indefatigable Marty Mauser, whose big talk and endless hustles are pitched at allegorical proportions. Marty is not only a single, striving, 1950s Jewish boy, with a globe-spanning American dream. Marty is every hustler, every American man, every American Jew, every single hopeful winner of every sports game ever, every midcentury American guy with a business, every entrepreneur who ever sold himself, every artist — and therefore also Timothée Chalamet himself, and Josh Safdie himself, and probably all of us, insofar as the unquenchable fire and thirst of a Marty Mauser still activates the undying itch of the dream America continually inflicts on itself and the world.

That is to say: Marty Supreme, as its swaggering lead actor and its director have frequently told us, is a film of immense ambition, itself about the burdens and follies of ambition. It is Raging Bull and The Hustler and Boogie Nights and any other cocky/tragic American epic of the low road, of the burnt-out hope and faith in the self. Safdie and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, film all kinds of manic activity from far away with long, crashing telephoto lenses — the way Robert Altman used to do. And yet with supervision from the legendary production designer Jack Fisk (the actual genius behind There Will Be Blood and many of Terrence Malick’s greatest films) the film feels so grounded in an actual felt past, no amount of anachronisms can interfere with it. Marty’s tenement building; the seedy hotel featuring Abel Ferrara and his dog; the London Ritz; a Brooklyn shoe store; finally a tennis exhibition in Tokyo — every one of these feels seared into my memory as a real place, a place I’ve been, that is how detailed and true it seemed, on the big screen. It’s a reminder of where big Hollywood budgets actually used to go: to those departments and craftspeople and studio necessities that could render the exact kind of detailed, illusory cinematic world an audience could really lose itself in.

Still, what I remember best of Marty Supreme is its insistent, bleary-eyed, midnight darkness, laced with neon; supercharged montages of con jobs and tournaments; its carousel of a soundtrack that whirls from Daniel Lopatin’s synthesizer landscapes to mid-fifties jukebox numbers to all those anachronistic pumping eighties songs, drawing the film forward into a future of coked-up and sweaty sports films, as if to say, in a different world, the world of the future, Marty would have finally been a champion. Part of Safdie’s brilliance lies in his ability to combine so many disparate elements together — ping-pong, Chalamet’s ego, sports movies, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the Holocaust — in a way that doesn’t feel incongruous, only grandly life-sized. Same with all the brilliant performances that basically turn stunt casting into an art form itself: Tyler, the Creator as a fellow strutting artist (that is: table tennis hustler); Gwenyth Paltrow as a has-been Hollywood actress; actual capitalist Kevin O’Leary as a vampiric businessman; Son of Saul star (and soon-to-be Malickian Jesus) Géza Röhrig as a concentration camp survivor. Special mention should also be made for the wonderful Odessa A’zion, as the woman doomed to love Marty and nearly die for it.

But of course the center of the film — the reason for the film — what so much of the film is actively meditating on — is Chalamet, an actor who has by now become synonymous not just with preternatural talent as an actor, but with an obsessive actorly will. Chalamet’s story of himself, what he sells us as an actor, is the idea of abolishing all doubt and all cringe in the reaching for unironic greatness, doing so with the total faith that willpower and discipline alone are enough to accomplish it. Of course, the catch — as with many an American story — is that this fucking works. The Sell is too zealous to be denied. He is what he says he is, just as Marty Mauser is what he says he is: a phenom, a new era, an unstoppable dreamer and king of himself.

Chalamet as cultural figure (and as great actor) is a gift to a writer-director like Safdie, whose career thus far has been one long obsession with abolishing the difference between “realism” and “real life,” from having Arielle Holmes reenact her own drug memoirs in Heaven Knows What, to structuring Uncut Gems around an actual Celtics game and casting Kevin Garnett as himself. As Safdie prepared to blow his intimately-detailed street-level “reality” up to classic Hollywood levels of historical sweep and symbol, he surely looked around and realized there’s no better moment, no better young actor, and no better climate for this narrative than right now, with Chalamet. And just as with his inverse performance as Dylan in A Complete Unknown, part of the role is a commentary by Chalamet on Chalamet, on the impossibly high status of American movie acting post-Brando, on the ambitious icon he’s embodying, and on American iconicity itself.

However, the final and most important power of the film comes from its acknowledgment of a world itself far stranger, and more tragic, than we (or Marty) can imagine. Marty is not a dreamer because he succeeds, and he doesn’t succeed because he dreams. He survives because he has the will to do so, and in America the individual dream is synonymous with survival. As another fusion of pop cinema with the conceptual tools of the arthouse, only working it out the other way around, Marty Supreme takes an opposite tack to Sentimental Value, ending not with wandering individuals returned to a warm family center, but to the curse of familial normalcy in the wake of a failed individualism. Its sense of lingering tragedy is no less profound — though it does at least hold out some slight hope for redemption, somewhere, in the acceptance of the impossibility of achieving certain of our dreams. Like all great art, it refuses to say anything more definitive beyond that. But it gives us one hell of a great entertainment to get us there.

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is an Associate Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

A long lineage of Jesus films depicts Christ as almost otherworldly, serene, and calmly removed from the people around him. Movies like Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) depict Jesus as bathed in a soft glow of light, and as he moves through Jerusalem he seems to barely touch the ground. While Christian doctrine professes that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, depictions of him in film almost always place a heavy thumb on the scale of divinity. There have been a few notable exceptions — and it’s within this counter-stream of Jesus films that Lotfy Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son fits most squarely. It depicts a world filtered through horror and a deeply human Christ, both of which are uncommon but not unique within the canon of Jesus films. Despite its connection to this interesting lineage, The Carpenter’s Son remains a rather surface-level exploration, shying away from some of the more disturbing issues it hints at.

The film narrates the lost years of Jesus’ childhood, telling the story of a 15-year-old boy (Noah Jupe) who knows he’s not like the other children but isn’t quite sure what he is. He’s called the Boy in the credits, and not referred to as Jesus until the film’s climax. His father, the Carpenter (Nicolas Cage), is in equally turmoil, unsure whether his child is “of the angels” or a spawn of the devil. Regardless, the Carpenter recognizes the power and danger of the Boy, and does everything he can to protect the world until his son gains enough maturity to understand his powers. The Boy finds himself drawn to a peer (The Stranger, Isla Johnston) who refuses to go to school and entices him to commit violations of ritual law, such as touching a sleeping leper. While the identity of this Stranger is treated as a major reveal, it’s pretty obvious from the beginning who the Boy is palling around with. This becomes the overriding question of the story: Will the Boy follow his father’s advice and grow into a pious believer, or follow the Stranger down a different path?

At the start of the film, a Blair Witch-style title card informs us that a number of other Gospels filled in the narrative gaps that the four canonical Gospels left behind. We then learn that what we are about to witness is based on a text (most often dated to the second century C.E.) called The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. This tells us a great deal about how Nathan has conceived the film along with its relation to the canonical Gospels.

The canonical Gospels certainly reveal gaps in Jesus’ biography. Matthew and Luke offer birth narratives, though they differ wildly — our traditional Christmas pageants are usually a blend of the two. John begins with a poetic description — Jesus as the Word of God that has existed since the beginning of time — while Mark simply dives into Jesus’ adult ministry. Only Luke includes details of Christ’s childhood, and it’s just a single story about a 12-year-old Jesus lost in Jerusalem: his parents find him in the temple, teaching the Rabbis from the book of Isaiah. This leaves us with years unaccounted for, and many questions.

Though intriguing, the title card of The Carpenter’s Son presents two challenges. First, it seems to imply that the Gospels, Infancy included, form a single story that can be collated together. In reality, the Gospels offer differing takes on the story of Jesus rather than existing as parts of a narrative whole. Secondly, referring to the film as “based on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas” is a bit of a stretch as a comparison. Both the Gospel book and the film center Jesus’ adolescence and Joseph’s deep concern with his son’s growing powers — the Infancy Gospel even refers to Joseph grabbing Jesus by the ear to admonish him — and both contain a number of scenes in which members of the community complain to Joseph about trouble the boy is causing. But the Infancy Gospel depicts Jesus as more of a bad seed who runs around cursing people who upset him — sort of a first-century Palestinian Anthony sending his enemies into the cornfield — until he decides to stop cursing and heal instead. There’s little of that in The Carpenter’s Son.

The most striking departure from the Infancy Gospel is the absence of Satan, the primary antagonist in The Carpenter’s Son. In the Gospel, there’s no evil force tempting the young Jesus onto the wrong path, no explanation for why the adolescent goes on a cursing spree. The Infancy Gospel leaves us with the unsettling idea that Jesus might have been a divine being whose wrath could outweigh his benevolence — or, at the very least, that he had to learn how to temper it. Midway through the Infancy Gospel, Jesus decides to stop cursing people, “and immediately all they were made whole who had come under his curse.” The young Jesus then spends the rest of the text healing and resurrecting people, often after being mistakenly blamed for causing the harm in the first place.

The Carpenter’s Son doesn’t depict Jesus doing much cursing, and even his miracles are muted. His resurrections are limited to the grasshopper he absentmindedly crushes while listening to his parents argue about the best way to raise him, and his deviant behavior is just the hijinks of any high schoolboy, like when he takes the opportunity to watch through a window while his neighbor showers outside. Indeed, his mother (played by pop star FKA Twigs) argues that he’s just a boy, leading the Carpenter to fire back, “He’s unclean and always covered in filth.” Most parents of teenage boys can probably relate to this feeling. But it’s these very human qualities that put the Boy at risk of being led astray by the devil.

The narrative in which Satan tempts Jesus has a strong cinematic antecedent in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation depicts a deeply human Christ (played by Willem Dafoe) conflicted over whether to accept his divinity. The “temptation” referred to in the film’s title is Satan’s offer for Jesus to step down from the cross and live his life as a human, rather than accepting his identity as Son of God. The film was met with a number of protests and boycotts from Christian groups, most of whom objected to the film’s nudity and portrayal of Jesus as a sexual being. (Granted, the scenes of Mary Magdalene in the brothel are fairly gratuitous.) This controversy seems an oversimplification — it’s possible that underneath the outrage at sexual themes lies a more difficult discomfort: a Messiah struggling with responsibility, human enough that he considers throwing off the weight of his divinity.

While The Last Temptation of Christ doesn’t dive as fully into the horror genre as The Carpenter’s Son, there are clear elements of horror in Scorsese’s film. The resurrection of Lazarus is a terrifying scene complete with a slow zoom into the depths of the tomb, followed by a jump scare. Stylistically, The Carpenter’s Son lies closest to another Gospel horror movie: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

Much of the lighting and camerawork in The Carpenter’s Son, particularly the nighttime scenes, recalls Mel Gibson’s depiction of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before the torture that will occupy most of the film. Gibson shot this scene in a strong dark blue hue, with darkness seeming to creep in from the edges of the frame. Even Lorenz Dangel’s score for The Carpenter’s Son feels reminiscent of Gibson’s film: eerie, minor chords creating an atmosphere of menace. In The Passion of the Christ, Gethsemane is where Satan tempts Jesus most directly, offering him an escape from the torment he is about to undergo. But Gibson’s Christ is too superhuman for this to be a legitimate possibility. It seems like more conservative audiences are willing to consider that Satan might have tempted Jesus, but not that Jesus would ever have thought of relenting.

Another stark difference between The Carpenter’s Son and the Infancy Gospel is the speculated theological function behind the utilization of horror. There’s no scholarly consensus on the purpose of the Infancy Gospel; Oscar Cullman has argued that the author was just a poor writer, such that it didn’t occur to him that depicting a child Jesus as killing other children would be a bad look for the Messiah. Kristi Upson-Saia suggests that it’s actually an anti-Christian document that’s intended to slander Jesus and his followers — which doesn’t explain why the Infancy Gospel would also depict Jesus as the powerful Son of God.

But there’s another possible way to read the Infancy Gospel, a potential meaning that falls by the wayside when we assume the primary characteristic of God is benevolence. Maybe we’re supposed to be afraid of Jesus — and maybe the unknown author of the Infancy Gospel was simply tugging on some loose threads already present in the Gospel accounts. There are clear places where Jesus inspires fear, such as when his disciples wake from a nap on a ship’s deck to find him walking across the water toward them, mistaking him for a ghost (Matthew 14:25-27; Mark 6:47-50). When the disciples see the risen Christ in the Book of Luke, they also mistake him for a ghost (Luke 24:36-40), and the original ending of the Gospel of Mark (before a later scribe added a happy addendum) has the women finding the tomb empty and running away in terror (Mark 16:1-8). Through centuries of softening the edges of these stories, we’ve domesticated Jesus to the point where it’s impossible for us to imagine him as frightening. The Gospel accounts suggest otherwise.

The Carpenter’s Son, by contrast, actually presents a fairly tame view of Christ. The horror emanates from Satan, not from the Boy himself. Unlike the Infancy Gospel, which seems to ask whether Jesus might be a figure to be feared, The Carpenter’s Son suggests that it is only Satan we need to fear. And since the Boy resists the temptations of Satan by film’s end, he’s ready to enter the Gospel accounts that we all know — making this film the kind of gap-filling exercise that its title card proclaims it to be. It’s easy to wonder if there’s a deeper theological horror in this story, waiting to be uncovered.

There are certainly other flaws in the film. The audience’s tolerance for Cage’s histrionics will be tested, and Twigs’ portrayal of the Mother ultimately fades into the background, since her character offers little beyond a pious counterweight to the Carpenter’s melodramatic doubt. As a late-night, unsettling mood piece, it succeeds admirably. There’s plenty of style, plenty of atmosphere, and a good degree of menace and dread. But it doesn’t have the gravity it aspires to, or that its devout detractors are afraid it might have.

Brandon R. Grafius is professor of biblical studies and academic dean at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit. He has written for publications such as Salon.com, The Christian Century, Sojourners, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

It gives me little pleasure to report that Train Dreams is an unfortunately empty film. A pretty film, in some ways. But an empty one. And as a moviegoer who believes that today’s critics are, on the whole, far too easy on this contemporary strain of middlebrow cinema, I must confess: I’m tired of films that look and feel like Train Dreams. I know nothing about the original Denis Johnson novel, which some people I know have called a great one — I only have the film. And in the film of Train Dreams, everything which could possibly be said about it is already so present at the surface, already so obvious and literal and exhaustively clear, it’s transparent. The movie is a long, muted, gentle lament on the old themes of American industrialism and on the fading of nature at the hands of those American industries. It’s about the loss and the hard work and the loneliness of a single stoic man, quietly watching history pass him by.

But even more than any of these, what Train Dreams is really “about” is its constant telegraphing to the audience that these are the themes which make up the movie Train Dreams. It is understood that the audience will be dutifully contemplating these themes, as the Max Richter-y strings of Bryce Dessner’s score thrum ponderously beneath big American images of trees and train tracks and the furrowed brows of the sawyers and Arcadian cabins by lovely low marsh ponds. They’re the great, meaty, existential American themes, after all — here rendered competently in a familiar digital over-crispness, better-looking than your average Netflix Original but still perched somewhere between a more artful episode of Planet Earth and Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Throughout my viewing of the film, I felt more and more that I would very much like to escape its overtight, picturesque vision (literally: the film is set at a 3:2 ratio, standard for 35mm still photography) into the far freer, far deeper worlds of its most obvious mediating influence: Terrence Malick.

What is left to positively report? Not much. The story centers around a logger named Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), working in Idaho and Washington in the early years of the 20th century. He goes off on long expeditions before coming home to his wife (Felicity Jones) and infant daughter, until one day he comes back to find that a wildfire has destroyed the cabin and consumed his family with it. He wanders the wilderness like a ghost, until deciding to rebuild the place as a hermitage, and then one day in the 1960s someone gives him a cheap ride in a biplane. We’re told by the narrator (Will Patton) that this was the moment he finally understood his life. And it’s as literal as that.

From the start we understand that Grainier is your classic puzzled everyman: a vaguely spiritual proletarian cipher, ideally “natural” and soft, always yearning to get back to domestic bliss, regarding the world mostly as a peculiar blur of ideals, people, and actions he’ll never understand. Early on, he watches a group of angry white men grab a Chinese railworker and throw him off a bridge to his death: the face of the unnamed dead man appears to him again throughout the film, and never speaks — a cringeworthy, impassive Oriental ghost, symbolizing Grainier’s essential acquiescence to the world. Plenty of other (essentially anonymous) figures come and go, as Grainier slowly plods his way through wet forests, mourns the loss of his wife, and stumbles unknowingly into the middle of the 20th century. And throughout all of it, that all-knowing narrator describes what Grainier feels and thinks with all the perfunctory folksiness of a Ken Burns documentary. I assume the narration has either been lifted from the novel or shaped to invoke it. Either way, it’s a complete miscalculation.

Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones are good actors with nice faces. But neither of them register much as characters. Even as the center of the film, Edgerton is so interiorized and withdrawn that almost nothing comes across in the way of personality. The same is true for most of the undifferentiated faces scattered through the film’s vignettes. It’s perplexing. Are we supposed to take these vague people as essentially allegorical — standing in for humanity itself? Or are we meant to take them as individuals being anonymized by the flatness and confusion of their small place in history? It’s not that a film like this has any obligation to say either of these things. But as it is, the movie seemingly gestures towards each, without much thought as to what it would actually entail to suggest either idea more definitely — or any ideas at all, really. The big exceptions here are William H. Macy, who gives a wonderful, brief performance as an eccentric old dynamite man; and the great Irish actor Kerry Condon, who has perhaps two scenes as a National Park worker, the only person to whom Grainier ever confesses his grief. Both of these people have so much personality behind their eyes — are such clear characters — they throw the emotional drabness of the rest of the film into stark relief.

Clint Bentley, in his first time behind the camera, proves an unimaginative director—though he’s perfectly adept at locating and arranging some very pretty vistas, and occasionally manages to frame a memorable shot. Late in the film, when Grainier has gone back to logging, Bentley just about pulls off one genuinely motivated tracking shot of workers in a clearing. For a moment we get a glimpse of that fuller sense of space, which would have been necessary to make the rest of the film feel less plainly claustrophobic. As it is, that 3:2 ratio, which Bentley apparently selected for its verticality (to capture the height of the trees) and its consistency with old photographs, while not as squarish as the old 4:3 of silent film, is still tall and quite constrictive — especially since so much of the film consists of tight medium shots and close-ups of people, most of which are shaky and loose, often with a shallow focus. The film can’t help but descend constantly to these dull shorthands for suggesting “realism” and “poetry” in contemporary cinema. If Bentley does rest his camera long enough to get more than one figure in the frame, then he generally leans too heavily on that analogy with old pictures, arranging and posing the actors too neatly (the overly pristine period production design of the interiors doesn’t help this). Then what might have been arresting images of bodies in a landscape, usually become only more idols of static photographic “history.” Though it insists on trite poetic realism, the film’s “poetry” mostly consists of on-the-nose dream montages, while its idea of “realism” ends up more like a frontier postcard — think less Ansel Adams, more basic American nature-kitsch.

Besides giving further proof to my suspicions that Terence Malick may indeed be the single most influential American filmmaker of the century so far, Train Dreams at least provides an opportunity to reflect on what passes for arthouse these days, and an opportunity for me to take the state of “independent” cinema to task. The problem — generally — is that it’s too frequently middlebrow. The filmmakers have simply gotten better at hiding it. Train Dreams shares a lot with contemporary films that flaunt their groundedness and ground-level poetizing. It isn’t far off from films like Ramell Ross’ Nickel Boys, or even certain films by David Lowery and Chloé Zhao (though Lowery has made a few excellent movies, and Zhao has her moments) — it’s even somewhat adjacent to Sean Baker’s films; in a different way, it borders on the mode of Barry Jenkins (a very good filmmaker) or Trey Edward Shults. I’m reminded, too, of Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder, and films by Jeff Nichols.

True, that’s a wide spread of films and filmmakers. But what they share, in my mind, is a kind of basic sense of time and montage, of tones and techniques that almost never stray from the same subdued strain of plaintive poetry; images that can be either airless, or lost in bleariness, or even just chasing a sentimental striation of light. It’s a sensibility I don’t yet have a name for, though it’s much closer to middlebrow than many would like to admit. The same is true for so many “elevated” horror films, and the lesser products of boutique studios like A24 or Neon. They get by on good scripts and great actors and the fact that it’s quite easy to make a perfectly nice image with an expensive film camera and an attractive interior, or a landscape. But even in the best of these small-to-mid-sized “indie” films (often “indie” in affect alone), things are often too contained; they’re too legible. These films are often “about” very important contemporary issues and feelings, except that their way of going about this never extends to formal considerations. They may ultimately work because they sustain a mood (and this is maybe even more important than form, in the end, for cinema) — but there’s a sameness which afflicts so many of them, little different from the sameness across our Blockbusters, or across our streaming shows.

I’m not hardly suggesting something like Anora is actually comparable to Marvel films or Stranger Things. But films like Anora are still only impressive to audiences because they’ve become so unused to seeing basic competency (and universal human concerns like death and sex) on the cinema screen. But put Baker’s Oscar-winning sex worker thriller next to something like Alan Pakula’s 1971 masterpiece Klute — you’ll see just how sexless contemporary “sexiness” is; how tepid its sense of real risk and social commentary. Ambiguity, empathy, arousal, danger, drugs, cities — any of the “serious contemporary things” that Baker is going on about in his film seem to me more than a bit adolescent, when placed against something like Klute’s street-level dive into 1970s New York, its tender love story, or Jane Fonda’s still-extraordinary performance. But go even further, and put it next to something like Andy Warhol’s party films, or Ken Russell’s ragged, psychedelic operas — the sheer tameness and prudery of the entire current cinema will be glaringly apparent. A lot of what gets deemed “mature” or “challenging” filmmaking these days is, unfortunately, only a kind of leeching off of the saddest, emptiest leftovers of a movie culture that seems close to being forgotten.

After The Brutalist, which I saw at the beginning of this year, I began to wonder if this is turning into one of the more crippling diseases of whatever passes for the arthouse in American cinema today: the clear sense that what drives these films is an obvious desire to be instantly read in the category of “classic,” by creating far less formally interesting and much more literal versions of older ones. The Brutalist succeeded despite its ambitions. But its reach and its pretension were clear from the start. It wanted to be “the kind of film they don’t make anymore” and if it ended up being better than this, that was only to the degree that Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold created something idiosyncratic and genuinely gorgeous — this despite the film’s overt concerns with its own grandeur and place in the long history of epochal cinema.

Indeed, this is how “indie” movies (or more accurately, small-to-mid-sized cinema) can still sometimes rank among the better contemporary American films. The Safdie Brothers reach for this same “classic” strata, and do so nakedly. But they’ve succeeded because their own personal obsessions are peculiar and illuminating enough to carry them through the force of their own pretensions. They’ve also devised a frenetic style that feels both totally modern and formally appropriate to the characters and tones that interest them. Similarly, Ari Aster can be an exhaustingly virtuosic director: somehow overly-controlled in his set-ups yet completely self-indulgent in his scripts. Yet at least once — in Midsommar — he achieved something brilliant and original, where the formal constrictions worked with the “content,” not against it. And of course, of all contemporary filmmakers, Robert Eggers remains the purest exception to the era’s overweening sensibility: in The Lighthouse, in the best sequences of The Northman, and above all in his Nosferatu, none of the aforementioned contemporary fixations apply in the least. On close examination he is in fact the most genuinely “classical” young filmmaker we have. All these filmmakers (but not just them; there are others) share one thing: they are too singular and weird to be middlebrow. They’re far from avant-garde, far from experimental. But they’re still the work of resolute artists with a bit of freakishness and compulsion to them — things the middlebrow tends to sand away when it can.

Of course, by now I’ve veered far away from Train Dreams — mostly because there’s just not much else to say about it, other than its being yet another example of rather empty prestige filmmaking in 2025. Of course I would like to see younger filmmakers making more interesting movies, rather than falling for the easier cliches of contemporary cinematic storytelling. Of course I want a renaissance of inventive and experimental independent cinema — same as anyone else who cares. But I still don’t see this happening if critics can’t start being a little tougher, even on smaller adult dramas that win Oscars. As far as I can tell from the number of critics who have simply swallowed Wicked: For Good without complaining — treating it as if it were anything other than a disturbing sign of the immense hollowness of the age — we’ve lost nearly all our central, trustworthy critical voices. Meanwhile, the industry culture of interviewers, content-makers, and fandoms have gone off the deep end of complete commercial fealty, totally abandoning the idea of addressing movie art whatsoever. From now on, as far as I’m concerned, anyone who reviews a film like Wicked without calling it exactly what it is (a cultural nadir and an embarrassment to cinema) no longer deserves to call themselves a critic. But just because popular cinema has grown this desiccated doesn’t mean we should heap empty praise elsewhere — as the general, consistent plaudits for Train Dreams have demonstrated, plenty of critics are still too easily wowed by films that make them feel very sentimental and profound. When it comes to the middlebrow, even the critics themselves need rescuing. Who is going to do it?

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a knife. Things look dicey for a moment — until Cruise gains some distance and kicks him repeatedly in the head. While doing so, he imparts a few words of wisdom: “You spend too much time on the internet.”

What divides the heroes and villains in Final Reckoning is simple: the villains have to Google things, and the heroes do not. There are three bad guys, more or less. First, the Entity, a rogue AI halfway through its plan for global domination. Second, Gabriel, the Entity’s meat puppet. Third, a gang of surprisingly likable Russians who take Cruise’s team hostage in a house in Alaska. What unites the villains isn’t malice so much as it is uselessness. I mean that precisely. They are often effective, even successful. But never useful.

The Entity is a strikingly lazy AI. Instead of designing and synthesizing a new biological agent able to wipe out all humans or speedrunning a century of robotics development and building its own army of Terminators, it confines itself to a few embarrassingly plausible tricks. It seeds the internet with convincing fake images and videos, converts a set of mindless followers to do its bidding, and commandeers the world’s atomic arsenal — technologies from the 1950s that I imagine are indeed protected by complex security arrangements, but hardly require a new computing paradigm to defeat.

Gabriel and the Russians are no better. Gabriel has only one move: stealing something that’s not his, and then using it to blackmail Tom Cruise into doing all the work, like the ultimate free-rider on a classroom group project. As for the Russians, despite needing to hack a secure DoD server, not one of them can operate a computer. Just point a gun, give the clever people a deadline, and tell them to get to work.

Cruise and his team, by contrast, are profound in their usefulness, built for a world where accessing the internet means certain death. They use old radios to contact submarines. They hand solder intricate electronics on the fly. They navigate their museum-piece plane to an unspecified location on the East Coast of South Africa with nothing but a paper chart and a set of coordinates. Nuclear bombs are defused and even thoracic surgery is improvised without any sense checks from Google, Perplexity, or GPT-5.

In the world of Final Reckoning, where the Entity is all-seeing, things unsearchable and uncheckable like secret clues and symbols become vital. The president convinces an admiral to help her by writing down a date whose significance only the two of them understand. That admiral earns the trust of the USS Ohio’s commander by giving Cruise a medal whose meaning is private between them. To fool the Russians, who they know are listening in, Cruise’s team sends coordinates that direct him to the opposite side of the world from where he needs to be: a feint they know only he could decode.

What Cruise and his team carry in their heads and bodies not only saves them but the world. Donloe, the CIA chief exiled to Alaska, knows the submarine’s coordinates because he memorized them a decade ago. Tapeesa, his wife, can deliver the lifesaving decompression tent because she still knows how to navigate by compass and sextant. Grace, Hayley Atwell’s pickpocket-turned-teammate, saves the world through a skill so subtle it can barely be named: the thing that separates a ‘good pickpocket’ from a ‘great one’ — timing.

This division between characters with embodied knowledge and those without runs through all of Cruise’s recent work. His own impossible mission is to teach the value of physical competence: not just knowing things, but knowing how to do them. In Final Reckoning, this idea finds its clearest form.

A few days before Final Reckoning came out, HBO aired another feat of ludicrously embodied competence: the season two finale of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal. In the show, Fielder — a comedian — sets out to answer whether ingrained pilot behaviors are making air travel less safe, and if so, how to fix them. Quickly, he realizes the only way to truly understand this is to become a pilot himself. So he does, spending two and a half years secretly training to fly a commercial airliner. In the finale, not only does he reveal this to the audience, but he also flies a 737 with 150 actors aboard, over the Mojave Desert.

As anyone who’s ever watched someone who is good at their job knows, embodied skill is satisfying to witness. Just before the release of Sinners this year, director Ryan Coogler appeared in a video filmed in partnership with Kodak. In the video, Coogler, armed with a whiteboard and props, talks to camera for ten minutes about the technical nuances of shooting on 65mm film: the properties of analog stock, the spacing of perforations, and the subsequent implications for aspect ratios in projection. The resulting demand for IMAX showings of Sinners crashed AMC’s website.

One can’t help but imagine the 20th-century philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty watching on proudly as a new generation takes up the work of undoing Cartesian dualism, the separation of mind and body they both saw as the original sin of analytic philosophy.

It was Ryle who, in 1945, formulated the distinction that runs through Cruise’s films: that between knowledge of and knowledge how. The former was propositional, the sort you can articulate in neat, explicit statements. The latter was practical aptitude, the kind only revealed by competent action. Crucially, you can possess the latter without the former; knowing how does not entail being able to explain it. Donloe, crouched over a live nuclear bomb in Final Reckoning, gives the idea its best cinematic gloss. “Where’d you learn to do this?” asks his colleague, watching nervously. “Never said I did,” he replies.

In 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty also published The Phenomenology of Perception, in which he put forward an even simpler argument: to draw any distinction between consciousness and body is nonsensical. For Merleau-Ponty, the body was not a mere vessel for the mind but a repertoire of skills built and refined through contact with the world, an inescapable part of all human thought. His thinking directly shaped the “Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition,” a five-stage framework for how adults progress from novice to expert, still taught everywhere from NHS wards to U.S. Air Force flight schools. I do, therefore I am. No wonder Cruise is addressed, jarringly, as “mister” six times in the film.

Embodiment in a machine age has haunted novelists ever since Mary Shelley went on her 1816 holiday from hell and came back with Frankenstein. Perhaps the most prophetic of all is E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story The Machine Stops, in which humanity finds itself benevolently trapped in a network of individual hexagonal cells buried deep beneath the earth, with every need tended to by a system known simply as the “Machine.”

Forster’s humans are the original Google-dependents: reliant on screens and buttons for communication, revolted by physical contact, and terrified of living on the surface. When the Machine finally fails, so does their civilization. Only then, in a moment of true grace, do they realize what they’ve lost:

Man, the flower of all flesh . . . was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body — it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves.

Like Forster, Cruise and his long-time collaborator Christopher McQuarrie invent machines to dramatize the age they live in. Forster gave us the Machine; McQuarrie, the Entity. But unlike Forster, their imagination of technology is not apocalyptic but diagnostic — they aren’t warning us of the machine age so much as asking what it demands of us, and what it reveals.

This brings us to what looks, at first glance, like a paradox: How does a franchise so lovingly built on disguises, gadgets, and inventions of all kinds — from the eye-tracking projector that gets Cruise into the Kremlin to the single suction glove that lets him cling to the Burj Khalifa — end with a villain made of pure technology?

If you asked Cruise, his answer would be simple: technology is good when it roots you in your body and bad when it lets you forget you have one. That’s why Final Reckoning, for all its AI villainy and suspicion of the terminally-online, still treats technology with a near-Romantic sensibility. Hand-soldered pen drives, aging aircraft carriers, and vintage biplanes carry Cruise and his team on their mission to save the world. At times subtlety disappears altogether; the film’s most inviting location is a candle-lit Arctic hideout filled with analogue comforts: old books and gramophones, telescopes and soldering tools.

A significant portion of the film’s middle third is devoted to a diving sequence, in which Cruise must descend to the ocean floor to reach a wrecked submarine. For the human body, this is an impossible feat. Fortunately, on the USS Ohio there’s an experimental diving suit that will keep him alive for a limited time. Once he resurfaces, his team will revive him with a defibrillator and place him in a portable decompression tent before the gases in his blood can kill him.

There’s no jawing (as Daniel Craig’s Bond might have done) about the suit’s weight, its complexity, or the fact that using it requires hours on a treadmill to flood the body with oxygen. No grumbling either about how untested it is or the real possibility it might fail. When Cruise is about to dive, the final words he hears aren’t “good luck” or “godspeed,” but “take care of my suit.”

It’s no coincidence the sequence borrows heavily from Aliens: another film about humans surviving an inhuman enemy with just embodied competence and fallible machinery. The Navy SEALs’ uniforms, gym, and vibe echo that of the Colonial Marines, Cruise’s boxy dive mask recalls the angularity of Ripley’s power loader, and the submarine’s collapsing interior evokes the battered starships with names from Conrad novels that litter the franchise.

The same ideas return — turned up to eleven — in Cruise and McQuarrie’s two other collaborations this decade outside the Mission: Impossible franchise. The first, Edge of Tomorrow, in which Cruise relives the same day on repeat until he generates enough embodied knowledge to defeat an autonomous alien race, is, even for the purposes of this essay, too on the nose, so I’ll focus instead on Top Gun: Maverick.

The film opens with Cruise test-piloting an experimental stealth aircraft in a last-ditch attempt to save the program from cancellation by the “drone ranger,” an admiral who wants the budget for his autonomous fleet. For the program to survive, Cruise needs to hit Mach 10: a speed no vehicle has ever reached. As the team watches on, he delivers the impossible. Gauzy wisps of supersonic air stream across the cockpit windows as Maverick stares out into the black of space. He whispers softly to his dead best friend, “Talk to me, Goose.”

Soon afterwards, Maverick is sent back to Top Gun to train a new generation of pilots. He begins his first lesson holding up the flight manual for the F-18, which makes the Riverside Chaucer look like a novella, before throwing it in the bin. “I assume you know this book inside and out. So does your enemy.” What matters instead is the knowledge that can’t be written down: the things his students already know by instinct, but cannot yet express. “Today we’ll start with only what you think you know.”

The quest to ‘“know more than we can tell,”’ as Michael Polanyi put it, drives the rest of the film. The pilots even have their own version of the phrase, a near-religious catechism recited at almost every decisive moment: “Don’t think. Just do.”

Beyond the screen, the same principle applies. In the Mission: Impossible franchise, filming begins with no plot or script, only a commitment to figuring it out in the process. It’s most evident in each film’s tentpole action sequences, where the line between Cruise the actor and Cruise the stuntman blurs beyond recognition.

The art critic Robert Hughes once wrote of his love for “the spectacle of skill” — the thrill of watching an expert at work, whatever the discipline. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cruise’s increasingly daring plane sequences. In Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Cruise clings to a real Airbus A400M as it lifts off from an airfield in Lincolnshire. He sprints across the field, in that inimitable Tom Cruise style, mounts the wing with practiced ease, and seats himself by the cargo door. The plane taxis. So far, so cool. Then it lifts off. The perfect hair vanishes, blown back and forwards, alternating second by second between old skeleton and boy with bowl cut. His clothes are shapeless and billowing, pulled off him by the force of the air.

This is no country for sprezzatura, nor the embodiment preached by the wellness industry with its vocabulary of “balance” and “equilibrium.” Here, we are meant to feel the effort. To know yourself is to know your limits, and so push your body to the edge of failure. When they are about to perform stunts, Cruise often briefs his team with an unusual mantra: ‘Don’t be safe, be competent.”

At the end of Final Reckoning, Cruise plummets through the sky as his parachute burns to cinders above him. To film it, the stunt team soaked a parachute in flammable liquid, flew him to altitude in a helicopter, and pushed him out as it ignited. He did this 19 times. When he asked to go again, the stunt coordinator told him there were no parachutes left. This was a lie. McQuarrie was more direct: “You’re done. Do not anger the gods.”

It’s interesting to see this return to embodiment and strange to find myself drawn to it. Like many default clever people, I’d long paid lip service to Merleau-Ponty and his ilk while living as a dualist; my brain was the moneymaker, my body just along for the ride. It was only after having children that I began to understand what it meant to inhabit a body rather than simply use one.

In an essay for Granta earlier this year, the writer Saba Sams contrasted her son’s love of leaping from benches and walls with her own unease: “For them, the body is not a constraint, is not a ticking clock, is not something to be moulded or hidden. The body is the window to movement, and movement is a window to joy.”

Sams captures something larger. This renewed fascination with embodiment isn’t spontaneous, it’s a reaction to technologies so powerful and frictionless they’re impossible to ignore. Even the most grounded among us now move through the world not through our bodies but through screens, which is why so many make the negative case for technology, urging us, thankfully without a Cruise-style kick to the head, to spend less time on the internet.

What Cruise gives us is the positive case: not just resistance to disembodiment but a reminder of what is beautiful about being physical in the first place. The skilled things bodies can do are inherently satisfying. They can be thrilling, reassuring, even a little terrifying. But, as David Foster Wallace put it in his essay on Roger Federer:

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

That’s the mission, if we choose to accept it. The target is not the recent bugbear of AI, but instead the more gentle conditions of modernity. When we use Google Maps instead of a printed atlas, or when CGI is used to sell a stunt instead of the performers doing it themselves, something is lost. It’s why the focus on AI can sometimes be misguided. It’s not so much a revolution, it’s simply the next step on the ladder of disembodiment: another in a long line of technologies to make humans a little less self-reliant. Why learn, if you can ask?

In the final biplane sequence, we watch Cruise commandeer a plane, fly it to another, board that plane midair, and take control of it — a feat so exhausting it beggars belief. Gabriel, the villain, in order to survive his defeat, needs only do something a hundredth as difficult: jump from the plane and deploy a parachute. He laughs. This is easy. But he doesn’t know the complexities of leaving a biplane with a parachute — the correct moment to release, the parts to steer clear from. He’s never bothered to learn. He frees himself, clips the rudder, cracks his skull open, and dies.

Here we see the real villain: not intelligence, but convenience. The mission so often feels impossible because we keep trying to do things without effort. Cruise’s answer is simple: Stop. Remember your body. Sometimes, it’s better to take the hard way.

Final Reckoning’s closing scene presents us with two intelligences and two bodies. One is Cruise, a 62-year-old body who we’ve seen, for the last two hours, run fast, dive deep, and hang from planes. The other is the Entity, trapped in a glorified USB stick: a golden nugget incapable of anything other than being flushed down a toilet.

One still moves. The other never could.

Aled Maclean-Jones is a writer and critic based in London. He writes on culture, books, and technology, and publishes on Substack at Rake’s Digress.

Someday someone will actually adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a film. Until then, we will have to make do with filmmakers using Shelley’s ever-resilient scaffolding as a playground for their own obsessions. Del Toro’s newest treatment of the story has been marketed and blurbed by many critics as “the movie he was born to make.” More than anything, though, the film serves to prove how far we still are from realizing the depths of Shelley’s original vision. Del Toro’s achingly sincere and fitfully compelling version of the book has maintained only that — the mere scaffolding of the story. It has next to nothing in common with the spirit of Shelley’s High-Romantic nightmare, and far more to do with del Toro’s own interests, especially his perennially unilluminating and often ponderous dedication to the tone of fable and fairy tale.

It’s no accident that the only great Frankenstein films — James Whale’s two immortal Universal classics, Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) — didn’t even worry about the scaffolding. They are of course the bases for the Frankenstein of modern popular culture, films which jettisoned all but a few garbled scenarios from the book and erected the rest from a pure Hollywood riff on a century of other vague Gothic imagery and literature. Two of the funniest movies ever made — Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) — are themselves riffs on the Universal films, and only those films. And while there have been a few attempts to stage the proper Shelley version, nearly all of them, such as Kenneth Branagh’s awful and characteristically self-important 1994 film, have seen fit to mangle whole sections of Shelley’s work, and invent others from whole cloth.

So now we get the long-awaited version from the man who would seem the most obvious choice to make it — and yet, once again, here is a Frankenstein that finds nothing worth saving from the original besides that basic scenario. In the first, authoritative 1818 version of the text, Victor Frankenstein was a man from a happy family, betrothed to his cousin Elizabeth, who finds himself reading the works of alchemists like Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus while getting caught up in the fervor of late 18th-century Enlightenment science. This precise setting and period are key to the original story’s brilliance: Shelley evokes an almost beatific time in her own recent history where faith in medical, technological, and social progress was just beginning to achieve its modern velocity — a time in which the center of scientific study was shifting from physics to chemistry and biology.

English Romanticism was the great inheritor of this new concern for biological science, and thrived on metaphors of botany and organicism, just as it fed itself on the new psychology of the German philosophers. Frankenstein gets its power from this — and from its mordant, haunting sense of the old fairy tales furiously spinning into new, wretched life at the birth of the industrial world. In a way, to read Frankenstein is to read what the Romantics thought of the Enlightenment — and their thought was, in brief, that the new scientists had better read Paradise Lost. In fact, one could sum up the ambiguity of the original Shelley novel simply by saying that, in her Frankenstein, it is the Monster himself who reads and understands Milton, not his creator.

Del Toro, as expected, avoids almost all of Shelley’s original material. His primal obsession has always been the feeling of fairy tale itself, united with the trappings and settings of old Hollywood horror films. Even the subtler, Promethean horrors of the original are absent. Instead, he grafts all the whizbang technologic set-dressing of the old Universal films onto an even more overtly-Romantic, maximalist vision of the Shelley story; updating its setting to the mid-19th century — presumably to get in a few dull stereotypes of Victorian squalor and a tinge of punk Darwinism in the reanimation presentation to the Edinburgh Dons, who revoke Frankenstein’s qualifications in horror.

Victor Frankenstein himself (Oscar Isaac, in an uncharacteristically hammy and misjudged performance) becomes, to all effects, like a grown-up Lord Bullingdon from Barry Lyndon: he’s a sour brooder with a tyrannical father (Charles Dance, in a Charles-Dance-type role) and a doomed pregnant mother (Mia Goth, who also pulls Oedipal double-duty as Elizabeth). The nature of Frankenstein’s work is changed from accidental discovery to lifelong attempt at making up for the loss of his dead mother. Cousin Elizabeth is no longer the saintly pen pal and future wife, but a foil and an object of envy destined to marry Frankenstein’s brother (and, in a peculiar turn, a sort of angel for the Monster). She’s also the niece of the man who wants to bankroll Frankenstein’s experiment (Christoph Waltz). The private, tortured space of Frankenstein’s chambers in the book is transplanted to a huge, vertiginous castle on the edge of a sea — if we had any doubts before about just what height of Gothicism del Toro is going for.

The point of all this, of course, is not only to amp up the opera, but to give del Toro a chance to dream up a thousand gnarly details for the making of the Monster. Shelley herself barely spared a moment to describe the actual process of making the creature. But for del Toro, that’s the whole point. He delights in playing yet another turgid, whimsical Alexandre Desplat waltz while he lingers over Frankenstein’s vivisections, and makes sure to show us all the minute aspects of the building of the electrical apparatus, as well as the construction of the attic and underbelly of the tower. This sequence of the film is entertaining, even if his incessantly roaming, unfixed camera quickly grows exhausting. When it comes to the camera, del Toro is no great director: his Frankenstein has moments of beauty, but even the most arresting images are frequently undercut by the film’s waxy, shadowless look and by awkward framing that makes every other shot feel as if it’s coming from the corner of a too-wide room.

Del Toro obviously has a wonderful imagination (it’s his brand, after all) and a real gift for supervising art departments. Production design, costuming, visual effects — all that goes into curating and assembling the milieu of a film — is del Toro’s real brilliance. Though, at his best, he also has a good nose for the well-worn cliche worn well. His whole cinema is a cinema of cliche in the most literal, least pejorative, sense of the word. And sometimes — as in Crimson Peak, or the faerie parts of Pan’s Labyrinth, or the middle section of this film — he really can animate and reinhabit some old type well enough that it sings and feels alive again. But because the man is a desperately earnest, yet finally mediocre writer, he only ever achieves it in pieces. He’s never been a consistently good director of actors: Christoph Waltz and Oscar Isaac have never been so limp on film before, and Mia Goth — who among contemporary actors has just about the rarest rogue-genius sensibility for the theatrical — is asked, for whatever reason, to be muted, haughty, and melancholic throughout the film (though as a pure subject for costume and headdress, she’s never less than fascinating on camera).

In the end, there’s one main reason to see Del Toro’s Frankenstein and that is Jacob Elordi, who here proves himself to be what was mostly hidden underneath the pure exploitation schlock of Saltburn or Euphoria, and could be briefly glimpsed in his Elvis from Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla: that is, a great physical actor trapped in the body of a beautiful man. Has any contemporary heartthrob so totally embraced such a complete privation of his trademark physique? There’s no room for vanity within the Monster. Elordi surely saw his chance to free himself of the burden of his looks — and yet what he chooses to do is pretty magnificent. His elegantly awkward, Butoh-inspired performance is the real glory of a film that would be a rather hollow experience otherwise. After its overheated Freudian first half, the film finally comes alive when it leaves behind Frankenstein the man and follows the Monster — a section which comes closest to following the finest section of Shelley’s story. The middle of the film, wherein the Monster leaves to hide and watch the family of an old blind man, is also the finest part of the film. And, thank god, this time the movie Monster actually does read Paradise Lost.

As the film goes on, and the Monster returns to wreak havoc, del Toro’s Frankenstein almost comes close to the heights of a tragic fairy tale. Though the contrivances del Toro takes to get himself there are ridiculous, the pietà of Elizabeth’s death in the Monster’s arms is lovely (so sincere that there were snickers in my theater when I saw it), as is the Monster’s return to the ruins of the tower to discover the site of his creation. Even at the ending, when the Monster and Frankenstein have met out on the ice and come together in the cabins of the Scandinavian ship — the resolution of this particular father-son/God-Adam story is moving. Still, del Toro doesn’t quite earn the weight of the climax he worked so ponderously toward. It rests entirely on Jacob Elordi’s broad shoulders, and he does his best. Yet where Shelley’s Monster chooses to burn his creator and end his own life — del Toro, big earnest softy that he is, can’t help but let his Monster stare off into the sunset, ponder his apparent immortality, and conquer his desire to die.

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

Seth Rogen is dreaming of New Hollywood. Just a few weeks ago, Apple’s The Studio won 13 Emmys — setting the record for most wins for a comedy series. The cynical read on this would be that there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than another backstage satire about itself; such an avalanche of golden trophies is as much a marker of the movie business’ self-love as it is for any qualities of the show, which are plenty. Certainly, The Studio is no Sunset Boulevard — no pitch-black excoriation of the underbelly of the world’s glitziest exploitation land, nor some more highly wrought tragic riff on a dying medium. Still, Rogen’s show has the distinction of being the first contemporary piece of media to depict the process behind the movie industry as it is right now — and to actually say something about it.

The first of these things that The Studio says, it says quite literally — buried in an exchange between soon-to-be-head of the fictional Continental Studios, Matt Remick (Rogen), and his assistant Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders, one of the first great actresses in years who could genuinely play a ’30s screwball comedienne). In the first minutes of the first episode, Remick reveals he has to take meetings with representatives from both Rubik’s Cube and Jenga. One of the funnier through lines in the show is Continental’s desperate attempt to find IP comparable to Barbie, though Remick would rather be making something truly prestigious:

Quinn: Oh my god, this is so depressing. I’m like, 30 years too late to this fucking industry.

Matt: I know, trust me, if it was up to me, we’d be focusing on making the next Rosemary’s Baby or Annie Hall or, you know, some great film that wasn’t directed by a fuckin’ pervert.

Quinn: Turns out perverts make great movies.

Matt: They really do.

It’s chuckle-worthy, and those two titles are really picked more for their famously loathsome directors than as proper stand-ins for their period. Yet, it’s still clear that what’s on Remick’s mind is the same thing that seems to be on many minds these days: that grand romantic lost world of New Hollywood, the final glory days stretching across the late 1960s and ’70s, when every year Hollywood seemed to mint future classics pitched to actual adult audiences — days when a film like The Godfather might be considered serious movie art, top the box office, and still win a bevy of Oscars on top of it all.

In the episode, Remick soon gets his promotion, yet when he walks into a meeting with his new boss, intent on selling his idea that prestige and box office results ought to be reconciled, he walks out instead with a single bottom line: making a tent-pole film out of Kool-Aid. And so, many antics throughout later episodes will center around Remick’s attempts to be taken seriously as a “filmmaker” while having to hawk superhero movies, cast IP cash-ins, and avoid being bought by Amazon, fucking over real filmmakers like Martin Scorsese along the way. Dozens of celebrities come and go, playing themselves, and the show does a fine job of skewering awards shows and Comic Con reveals, along with the general, ambient sense that movie studios these days seem to investors like outdated appendages of tech companies.

In what’s probably the show’s best episode, “The War,” Quinn and her co-executive Sal Saperstein (Ike Barinholtz) sabotage each other’s projects in increasingly spiteful ways. Sal wants to hire the actual director of Smile to make a clear rip-off, called Wink. Quinn wants to bring in Owen Kline — a young director with a single small A24 film that went to Cannes, which she pitches to Remick as being “executive produced by the Safdie brothers.” Of course, the prestige-coveting Remick loves the twinkling sound of the Safdies, A24, and Cannes — but slick old Hollywood Sal declares Wink is for normal people, not “pansexual mixologists living in Bed-Stuy.” When Sal accidentally destroys a movie set with a poorly lobbed burrito, Quinn openly celebrates how easy it would be to get him fired: “I’m technically a bit of a minority. A bit of a woman of color. So you’re double fucked. I’m gonna be a hero! There’s gonna be marches in my name!” It’s a good, healthy sign that a TV show can finally make light of these kinds of things.

The Studio gets all its details right, gives us what I imagine is a painfully accurate image of the contemporary foibles and essential vapidity of Hollywood — it’s perfectly funny, very well made, sweetly nostalgic, and dead on with its skewering. It’s the kind of thing 10,000 critics have surely declared, “A HILARIOUS HEARTFELT LOVE LETTER TO THE MOVIES.” And it was surely some murky combo of this sentiment and its genuinely pointed satire that managed to bag it so many Emmys. But in the end, the thing that the show cannot quite escape is just what haunted it from that first exchange: the glory days of the medium are gone, never to return. Studios are locked in a battle against their own capitalistic decay; it’s never been harder to get masses of people to sit down for a film; and the stuff we do make on any big scale has never been stupider, or more infantile. O New New Hollywood, where art thou?

But let’s rewind briefly to those films mentioned in Quinn and Matt’s exchange. Are these pervert-made classics really the exemplary films of their period? In subtle ways, yes. In 1968, Rosemary’s Baby was a landmark horror film that did spectacularly well at the box office and made Roman Polanski’s American career. Our memories of the ’60s are peculiar and selective: this was a major studio movie based on a popular book. In fact, it would probably shock modern audiences to realize just how many stories now remembered as classic Hollywood films were adaptations of novels nobody knows anymore. But it was resolutely a mainstream effort. The studios were not gone in the late ’60s, replaced by fervent young filmmakers or swamped by the counterculture. No, the studios were made of old heads, old movie people, attempting to respond to rapid changes in temperament, and the freedom offered by the termination of the Hays Code.

So consider Annie Hall, from 1977 — a pop classic if there ever was one. It may take another generation before we remember what a genuinely great filmmaker and comedian Allen actually was, but even today Annie Hall is the one film even Allen haters can’t really deny. It’s the film that beat Star Wars at the Oscars, after all — and probably deserved to. But more than anything, Annie Hall has next to nothing to do with the spirit of the New Hollywood of popular imagination: what it shares is the abstract ethos of a time in which artists were supposedly given money and freedom to do as they wished; while, somehow, many of these films ended up becoming popular, lasting, memorable hits. So though it’s haunting our memories and minds these days, New Hollywood was much more vague than we sometimes realize. It certainly wasn’t some radical vanguard of outsiders — it happened firmly under the green lights of the old guard. And besides, there was virtually nothing to been seen in Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, The French Connection, The Godfather, Cabaret, Chinatown, or Taxi Driver (to name the most-named) that can’t be pretty handily traced back to their influences in the French New Wave, alongside postwar Italian, Swedish, Polish, Czech, and Japanese cinema. What it was, was a vibe. “We can do this kind of thing now,” said the studios and filmmakers of the time, and audiences believed them.

More than one commentarian has suggested that our time resembles the rise of that moment. Our streaming TV wasteland is comparable to the first popularization of television in the ’50s, while the tremor that sent through Hollywood — leading to the revamping of the star system, huge roadshow musicals, sword-and-sandal epics, and Oscar-winning spectacles like Around the World in 80 Days — can surely be likened to our contemporary studios’ reliance on sequels, reboots, comic book characters, and other recognizable IP. If there’s one reliably successful thing we make cheaply and en masse these days, it’s surely horror films — and these might find their analogue in the old ubiquitous, cheap westerns. If we insist on any kind of rigid 1:1 ratio, historically, then we should be in for a similar revitalization of the cinema coming, well, just about anytime now. Maybe next year, or maybe the next. So some have been saying, for a while. So some keep trying to say . . .

With the remarkable success of Warner Brothers this year, prophecies of the coming New New Hollywood have grown only more frequent. To be fair, the success is pretty dramatic: seven films in a row opening at over $40 million — A Minecraft Movie, Sinners, Final Destination Bloodlines, F1 the Movie, Superman, Weapons, and The Conjuring: Last Rites — a streak only broken by everybody’s beloved One Battle After Another. (There are limits, and apparently a film by the greatest working American director is one of them.) Warner Brothers crossed $4 billion worldwide with just 11 films, and the last time they did that, in 2019, it took 20. Considering the other big films of the year, there’s the supreme zombie indices of Jurassic World Rebirth, and Disney’s biggest hits, which were both live-action retreads, How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch, while Marvel flunked with Thunderbolts* and just barely made up for it with The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The final Mission: Impossible did well enough to crack the top 10 of the year so far, but the gold medal goes to Ne Zha, the Chinese juggernaut, distributed by A24 in the States. With Zootopia 2, Avatar: Fire and Ash, and Wicked: For Good still to come, forecasters predict this might be the best overall box office year since before the pandemic. I can only nod and agree that this is a generally good thing, and I hope that it’s as promising as many are saying it is.

And yet look at those films. I love a good popcorn movie as much as the next person, but I’m going to stake my flag on Snob Island here — since I think we’re certainly not going to get closer to any kind of cinematic renaissance by cowering from charges of elitism — and say that almost none of these are films for intelligent adults. Most are for children, or adults who need to feel like children.

Now, for a slight comparison, consider the ten highest-grossing films of 1968:

1. Funny Girl

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey

3. The Odd Couple

4. Bullitt

5. Oliver!

6. Planet of the Apes

7. Rosemary’s Baby

8. Romeo and Juliet

9. Yours, Mine and Ours

10. The Lion in Winter

This is, frankly, so embarrassing we should be crawling under our beds and crying ourselves to sleep. By my count, that’s one classic musical (1) and one decent one (5), a classic comedy (3), a classic action film (4), a classic sci-fi (6), a classic horror (7), one of the great Shakespearean adaptations (8), and two of the best films ever made (2, 10). Only one of these films has been mostly forgotten by time, while the others still make the rounds on YouTube reaction channels as “essential classics” for even the most internet-brained content creators. And crucially, none of these are really your stereotypical “New Hollywood” films (even 2001 was a colossal MGM spectacle on paper). Funny Girl is so old-school it was directed by William Wyler. Bullitt and Rosemary’s Baby do have that “New” flavor — both in camera technique and subject matter, but they exist far, far away from the counterculture. Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet made waves for marketing Shakespeare as a “youth movement” picture, but it’s really an Italian film made with American dollars. The Lion in Winter is a dense historical drama with one of the most literate and sophisticated scripts ever adapted from a middling stage play. I repeat: put up this year’s big films — are any of them anywhere near this level of essential artistry?

I admit I depart from nearly everyone on Sinners — it’s a fun ’90s romp disguised as a post-2010s social issue picture. It’s also not very good; it only has the trappings of a style. Weapons at least is well made, and its creepy allegory is potent — it especially seems to signal the ways in which “elevated horror” is tapped out, and Cregger’s half-comedic dream-space approach feels like a relief after a decade of exhaustive, obvious ideological critique. Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps are most notable for being deliberate throwbacks, attempting to remind their audiences of the days when superhero films felt just a bit less impersonal and gray, and it didn’t require too much familiarity with the universe or its tie-ins to be legible. As I’ve written before, this also signals at least a slight shift. But I’m unconvinced of any larger movement. The two ostensibly “adult-friendly” films I’ve seen talked about most — Materialists and Eddington — were not successes. And though both have interesting, conflicting things to say about what our society is actually like these days, both are finally undermined by the fact that “saying something about what our society is actually like these days” is their governing principle as films. Both struggle to just be works of art, and lose themselves in textual commentary on themselves and their positions in contemporary discourse.

No, I’m sorry to say, I see no reason to hope that an uptick in box-office success will equate to an uptick in cinematic art. There are, of course, brilliant films being made all the time (consider how both our great American Andersons turned out all-time great Benicio Del Toro vehicles this year). But like Matt Remick walking out of that first episode’s meeting, the triumphant hope that box office and prestige might once again meet in the minds of the masses is still being beaten over the head by the brute fact that what most people seem to want is the same: slop, slop with stars, slop with capes, slop with the Disney logo on it, slop you can share with the whole family.

New Hollywood emerged for two big reasons: (1) There was something to draw on — namely the fervor induced by beautiful European women walking across the modernist compositions of European geniuses, and (2) a true movie-going culture. In the years when the ’60s cultural shift hit cinemas, movies were already the central cultural pastime. Tickets were cheap. People came in and out of the theater as they wanted. Sometimes people watched two films in a row, or stayed in their seats to watch the same film again. Sometimes they caught the second half and stayed around after to catch the first. People might stumble into a film they’d never heard of because the title sounded interesting or because they were bored. Plus, there was air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter. If we can’t ever recapture that world, even in miniature, what good is there of dreaming of another New Hollywood?

This sounds like pessimism. But it’s not — it’s reality. There are steps that have to be taken if movie culture is to become dynamic again. This is arguably possible; it’s just not going to look like a revival of the last time popular movies suddenly grew important and exciting. Audiences have to be prepared to think, to want to think, about the things they are seeing. Executives have to be willing to take risks. And this is going to sound rather harsh, but independent filmmakers are going to have to get better. (And I don’t mean A24 or Neon, which are more brands than studios by now, and increasingly dull ones at that). I mean actual independents. Local communities and artists alike should be religiously, zealously aspiring to make great art on their own, even within their limited means. And people need to be brutally honest when even the most sympathetic young artist makes something that isn’t very good. Inflated praise is a disease of our time, and there’s no crying in baseball.

But of course, more than anything, critics have to start acting like critics — no longer lobbing soft two-star reviews at the latest Minecraft movie or condescending to review the dregs of streaming offerings. They have to champion the films that really are that great. In the last five or six years, I’ve seen numerous films that deserve to be called future classics: the Safdie’s Uncut Gems, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and The Lighthouse, Joanna Hogg’s Souvenir films, great middle-period films from P.T.A. and Wes Anderson, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, and Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. Not one of these films is too obscure or dense or too demanding for most audiences. Each one is entertaining, beautifully made, and — crucially — intelligent. These are the kinds of films that ought to be reaching huge numbers of people, winning awards, and dominating the box office. Part of what has made One Battle After Another so interesting is that it seems to be the rare moment in which something like that is very nearly happening.

And yet one film does not a zeitgeist make. The worst of cinema’s nadirs may be behind us, but that does not mean the road ahead will operate in ways predictable by any study of historical change. If anything, we ought to be going back to the films that inspired that original New Hollywood movement: the French New Wave, the great postwar world cinema masters of the ’50s and ’60s — films that are, if anything, incredibly undervalued these days. But like all incredibly fertile periods in art, their fertility is fairly endless. One more viewing of Jules and Jim, or Cleo from 5 to 7 — a trawl back through The Leopard, or L’Avventura, or Ivan’s Childhood, or the films of Bergman, Ozu, Kurosawa, the best of the Czech New Wave — could mean all the difference. Anything to keep from dreaming the same Matt Remick dreams, the same suckling sadness of the loss of a faded Hollywood, fantasizing about the next Godfather that could achieve that holy triumvirate of cinematic blessings: money, praise, and statues. Instead looking — peering back — for something, anything, to remind us again of what really makes things new: real experiment, real urgency, real flash, or ingenuity. For the sake of the art, and barely tolerating commerce, not a dream of a lost novelty, but a proper understanding of the source from which the new once came. That alone will do.

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

There is a buzz in the air. Electricity skitters across telephone wires, rubber sheaths stretched from pole to pole, drooping above rooftops. Signals ping between satellites and television antennas. Microwaves zap frozen dinners. Static has become the incessant white noise in the nation’s collective head. Later that autumn, “Miami Vice” will premiere on NBC, broadcasting a world of pastels, cops, cocaine, and excess onto the Tubes in every household. Brewing over that sweet Northern California summer — like the bulbous belly of a helicopter skimming the crests of evergreens, its blades whirring and shearing the air — is the presidential election. Everything is shifting. The world is unrecognizable.

It is under these circumstances, in the year 1984, that Thomas Pynchon’s fourth novel, Vineland, begins.

The basic facts of the story are as follows: In the 1960s, Frenesi Gates was part of a revolutionary group called 24fps who captured instances of injustice and abuse of power by the government (“A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed”). She falls in love with FBI agent Brock Vond, who convinces her to be his informant. Following a collapse of a college-turned-seceded republic, an organized hit, and a stint in a re-education center, Frenesi escapes Vond’s snare. After this, she marries Zoyd Wheeler, a hippie and keyboardist for The Corvairs. They have a child together, Prairie, but Frenesi sees her as a parasite, “robbing her of milk and sleep, acknowledging [Frenesi] only as a host.” While Prairie is still an infant, they divorce and she returns to Vond. She ends up in witness protection, married to another man with another child, but escapes, and at the start of the novel, Zoyd learns that the 24fps, Hector Zuñiga, and Brock Vond are all looking for her. Then, for two-thirds of the novel, Zoyd is dropped, and we focus on Prairie and DL’s (a 24fps member) search for Frenesi, navigating a disassembled nesting doll of classic Pynchonian narrative that includes characters like Karmic Adjuster Takeshi Fumimota, Weed Atman, the quasi-cult leader of a seceded Californian state calling itself “The People’s Republic of Rock and Roll,” Blood and Vato, two chthonic towers who prowl the interstates in search of the biggest bang for their towage buck, the Thanatoids (“like death, only different”), and a slew of other misadventures that defy brief explanation.

More or less (mostly less), this is the basic plot that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another sticks to: Ghetto Pat and Perfidia Beverly Hills are lovers and revolutionaries, part of a collective who call themselves the French 75. They have a child, a girl named Charlene, but Perfidia resents her, especially because she is an obstacle to her revolutionary commitment. A bank heist goes wrong; Perfidia is arrested. Lt. Steven J. Lockjaw offers her immunity if she provides him with the names of the rest of the French 75. She enters witness protection, joins “Mainstream America,” and resides in the prototypical, cookie-cutter suburban house. It doesn’t take long for her to escape. As she slips out and across the Mexican border (breaking Lockjaw’s heart), Pat and Charlene are forced into hiding, into an asylum-like society called Baktan Cross where they assume the identities of Bob and Willa Ferguson. Sixteen years later, Lockjaw emerges from the shadows to raise hell and capture Willa, who may or may not be his biological daughter. Before he can get his hands on her, she flees with the help of Deandre, a member of the French 75, and Lockjaw’s indefatigable pursuit sparks a chase that asks Bob to rekindle his former spirit if he wishes to find his daughter.

We’ll get to One Battle After Another in a moment. First, let’s rewind the clock four decades.

When I started reading Vineland1 (partly because of the imminent release of One Battle After Another — referred to as OBAA from here on out — and partly because I’m evolving into a bit of a Pynchonhead), I thought, oh, how pedestrian. In the 17-year span between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland, perhaps Pynchon decided to opt for convention. Sure, the whole transfenestration concept2 — for Zoyd to continue receiving his disability checks, he must perform an annual public act of craziness — isn’t exactly Jamesian realism, but in the wake of Gravity’s Rainbow, I found it tame. Not surprisingly, the straightforwardness lasted all of 30 pages before things canted towards typical Pynchonian zaniness.

Transfenestration completed, Zoyd catches up with his old federale pal Hector Zuñiga, who’s been trying since the 1960s to turn him into a fink. Hector tells him that his estranged wife had been in the witness protection program, but due to Reaganomics-induced budget cuts, is no longer in the program. Their conversation grows heated (ideological differences), but before it can boil over, a SWAT team with the word “NEVER” stenciled on their helmets raids the place and Hector flees. The pursuing party in question is Dr. Dennis Deeply, head of the National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation (NEVER). This is the world Pynchon portrays, where people are sent away to Tubaldetox for humming the “The Flintstones” theme or reciting the names of “The Brady Bunch,” where television has permeated the American mind to such an extent that the passage of time is tracked by “daytime” and “primetime,” where people act as if they’re “characters in a television sitcom,” where the television is sentient and announces “From now on, I’m watching you.”

Back in the day, Vineland did not receive stellar reviews. In the long wait after Gravity’s Rainbow, perhaps readers were expecting something more prophetic, more akin to the grandeur of its predecessor. Expectations are often the bane of pleasure. Yet, from the moment I picked up Vineland, I couldn’t put it down. My literary affair with Pynchon is in its nascency, which means my critical capacities are blunted by the giddiness of the honeymoon phase. That’s not to say I don’t recognize the novel’s flaws, but I am more than willing to ignore them, to give myself over to Pynchon’s nimble hands. Perhaps in 1990, Pynchon’s depiction of television’s enormous influence seemed less salient. In 2025, however, I’m amazed at how precisely he predicted the 24-hour news cycle, the TikTok-induced wilting of our attention spans (“They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it’s what the Tube is for . . . ”), and the pervasion of pop culture.

What struck me most about Vineland is its heart and its optimism. Yes, I was lured and mesmerized by the antics, the narrative twists, the band of eccentric characters, but I found myself deeply moved by the broken family at the center of the story. In particular, the penultimate chapter when Zoyd is acclimating to domestic life without Frenesi, with a young daughter in tow, pushed me to the brink of tears. It describes Zoyd’s move to Vineland, depicted as a “Harbor of Refuge,” a green, arboreal Eden. There’s a moment when he’s looking at a 3-year-old Prairie and realizing the duties of fatherhood, the love he has for this innocent child, and if you read one passage from Vineland, there’s a strong case to be made that it be this one:

After a while Zoyd was allowed into the Traverse-Becker annual reunions, as long as he brought Prairie, who at about the age of three or four got sick one Vineland winter, and looked up at him with dull hot eyes, snot crusted on her face, hair in a snarl, and croaked, “Dad? Am I ever gonna get bett-or?” pronouncing it like Mr. Spock, and he had his belated moment of welcome to the planet Earth, in which he knew, dismayingly, that he would, would have to, do anything to keep this dear small life from harm, up to and including Brock Vond, a possibility he wasn’t too happy with. But as he watched her then, year by year, among these reunion faces her own was growing more and more to look like, continuing to feel no least premonitory sign of governmental interest from over the horizon beyond the mental-disability checks that arrived faithfully as the moon, he at last began, even out scuffling every day, to relax some, to understand that this had been the place to bring her and himself after all, that for the few years anyway, he must have chosen right for a change, that time they’d come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.

Before I went into OBAA, I urged myself to consider not how closely Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA from here on out) would adapt Pynchon’s work (for one thing, it’s clearly “inspired by” rather than “adapted from”; and second, it is impossible to depict the wild diversions, the neologisms, the Brobdingnagian cast of characters that inject Pynchon’s writing with that unflinching energy), but why PTA is the director best suited to capturing and inhabiting Pynchon’s spirit.

Both men are quintessential Californian artists. PTA is the poster child for the San Fernando Valley; Boogie Nights is an ode not just to the later-abandoned artistic integrity of the 1970s porn industry, but also to the suburban sprawl of the Valley. Although Pynchon was born and grew up in New York, he lived in California throughout the 1960s and ’70s. In his Manhattan Beach apartment, listening to the lapping waves of the Pacific Ocean, he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow. Three of his novels — The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice — comprise the so-called California trilogy. His prose embodies a spirit that I find hard to associate with a New York writer. When I think of New York, I think of the New Yorker, the literati, the patina-coated Statue of Liberty, the history of immigration and the history of the country itself. California, conversely, is full of contradiction. The redwood forests in the north, the surf communities and the South American-influenced culture in the south. The Hollywood sign, erected on the side of the Santa Monica mountains, looms over Los Angeles. The state is also home to that small-in-geography but monumental-in-reach canton: Silicon Valley. This contrast, and irony, between the moneyed world of tech and the free-wheelin’ attitude of the coast serves as a major ideological conflict in Vineland.

Then, there’s the sheer scope of their creations: big ensemble casts comprised of big, bombastic characters. These characters are often thrown into a snarl of circumstances. In that occasionally disorienting entanglement, both Pynchon and PTA seek to uncover some truth about the nature of human existence, or at least to gain a foothold of clarity.

Perhaps the most contentious aspect of their oeuvres is that their work is largely retrospective. Though I have not heard of any polemics aimed at Pynchon for his history-oriented tendencies, PTA has been maligned for his reluctance to interrogate the present (his last film set in modern day was 2002’s Punch Drunk Love). As someone whose reading, listening, and viewing habits exist primarily half a century in the past, I’d like to defend PTA and Pynchon, and anyone who chooses to probe history. Certainly, artists ought to try and make sense of the present — doing so can help to predict the future — but by delving into the past, rooting around for clues, those particularly astute artists are able to stumble upon patterns, to discover the buds that flower into the future. PTA and Pynchon are two such artists.

Woolgathering aside, let’s turn to OBAA.

Lest any accusations of bias should emerge, I will admit that I consider Paul Thomas Anderson a genius. He is one of my favorite living filmmakers — and probably my favorite contemporary filmmaker. Whatever bone or neural arrangement is responsible for bestowing the talent of filmmaking to such figures as Scorsese and Fellini, PTA has it. Many months ago, when grainy photos of DiCaprio hunched by a phone booth first surfaced on the web, I was prepared to shell out any amount of money to witness it on the silver screen ($55.36 for two adult IMAX tickets).

With PTA at the helm, it’s no wonder that OBAA is elevated by its both lovable and love-to-hate-them characters.

It’s hardly stating the obvious to point out that Leonardo DiCaprio steals every film that he’s in, but perhaps the most compelling, complex performance in OBAA is that of Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills. While Lockjaw represents the objective evil that has pervaded our society and Bob is a paranoid dad trying to raise a daughter in an upside-down world, Perfidia’s character is morally ambiguous — and PTA, rightly so, does not label her as good or bad. Although her greater aims are good (freeing hundreds of migrants, fighting for truth and freedom, for the “little man” of society), she also commits several wrongs (killing a man, rejecting her daughter). This ambiguity reaches its apex in her relationship with Lockjaw. Sexually, hers is the dominant role, and it appears that by virtue of her eroticism, she overpowers Lockjaw. Yet, her freedom remains in his hands — were it not for him offering her a deal, she would have been imprisoned. Though she flees to Mexico, does she really escape? Because of Lockjaw, she cannot return to the country, to her home, to her revolutionary métier, to Bob and Willa. Such uncertainty regarding the distribution of power makes their relationship, and Perfidia’s character, unquestionably riveting.

DiCaprio is at his best when he plays lethargic losers, bumbling bums, and down-and-outers. Crawling and drooling in a Quaalude-induced paralysis, melting down in a trailer after flubbing his lines (“eight goddamn fucking whiskey sours”), or donning a plaid bathrobe and post-cataract-surgery sunglasses, stumbling after a squad of ninja-esque skaters across rooftops, jogging with the athleticism of a pinochle player. This is primo, electrifying DiCaprio, and it is this version of him — much more than the cherubic blond of Titanic or the straight man of Revolutionary Road — that makes it impossible to look away from the screen. His performance as Bob Ferguson embraces the slapstick. Jumping from building to building, he falls through the gap, is tased upon standing, and topples to the ground in a manner that would make Chevy Chase proud. Seething, spitting, sobbing, he tries in vain to negotiate with the revolutionary hotline, whose operator refuses to give him the rendezvous points unless he supplies the answer to “What time is it?” (“You should have studied the revolutionary text more carefully,” the snarky operator tells him). His character’s entanglement is filled with such Kafkian maladies. In these moments, DiCaprio’s portrayal of Bob epitomizes the Kafkian3 protagonist: a man trying his best to do good but stumped at every point by bureaucracy and the absurdity of his circumstances.

Alongside Bob there is Benicio Del Toro’s Zen sensei Sergio St. Carlos and Bob’s daughter, played wonderfully by Chase Infiniti. The latter’s chemistry with DiCaprio is undeniable; their father-daughter bond is palpable, tender, and without it, the film would be a shell of artifice. Most of the narrative sees Willa thrust into a foreign, dangerous environment; except for initial help from Deandre and the Sisters of the Brave Beaver, she is forced to navigate it alone. In the end, she survives not because of her father or members of the French 75, but because she acts as agent of her own fate. Living in a world struck by paranoia and violence, largely inherited from her parents and their generation, Willa is asked to untangle herself from an imbroglio she doesn’t deserve to be in. Through Infiniti’s blend of humor, pathos, and fear, the audience is plunged into this eerily familiar world alongside her. Del Toro’s cool, calm, and collected performance is a necessary balance to DiCaprio’s manic, discombobulated energy. While Bob is running around and ducking on the dojo’s mat, Sensei is talking placidly on the phone, putting on one cowboy boot, then the other, as though the streets beyond his window are not burning, not the site of a citizen-militia stand-off, not illuminated by and vibrating with the blares of police sirens.

Undoubtedly, the character that burns himself into your mind is Lt. Steven J. Lockjaw, portrayed astonishingly by Sean Penn. We’re introduced to Lockjaw’s character via his cock. During the opening sequence, in which the French 75 raid and free an immigration detention center, Perfidia breaks into Lockjaw’s office. She wills his penis to stand erect and leads him outside, his cock directing him forward. Though she enchants him, she also, by virtue of that spell, ties herself to him forever — “his erect penis had become the joystick with which, hurtling into the future, she would keep trying to steer among the hazards and obstacles, the swooping monsters and alien projectiles of each game she would come, year by year, to stand before . . . .” In some demented way, Lockjaw and Perfidia are like Shakespeare’s doomed lovers.

Lockjaw is the most cartoonish character of all, and Penn commits, admirably, to the bit. He struts as though his pistol is still lodged up his ass; his lips (the smacking, the licking, the labial dexterity) constitute their own character; his veins pulsate and protrude from his boulder-like physique. He is an anthropomorphic G.I. Joe, a caricature of masculinity and the military. Part of his character’s arc is the desire to join a secret society, The Christmas Adventurers Club — a clear parody of the Elks, the Moose, the Lions, and their members’ khakis, navy blazers, and red-striped ties. White supremacy is never mentioned by name, but membership in the club entails that you are inherently a superior human, even if you’re not more intelligent, more talented, or more successful.

In his satire of the military, PTA makes use of irreverent monikers (second only, perhaps, to the Strangelovian sobriquets of General Buck Turgidson and President Merkin Muffley). “Lockjaw” is self-evident, but “Throckmorton,” of Virgil Throckmorton, the head of the Saint Nick acolytes, requires a brief surf of the web. The Throckmorton sign is a radiological slang term that “refers to the position of a penis as it relates to pathology on an X-ray of a pelvis.”4 They’re everlastingly amusing, and in classic PTA phallic-and-genitalia-gag manner, they augment an already scathing depiction of the military-industrial complex.

The only thing about Penn’s performance and Lockjaw’s role in the film that gave me pause was how out of place it often felt. Don’t get me wrong, OBAA is certainly satirical, but either that satire is underplayed in the Bob / Willa parts or overplayed in the Lockjaw / military parts. Sitting down in the cinema, having avoided 90% of the discourse already preempting the film, my only two reference points were Vineland and Dr. Strangelove (Spielberg’s comparison). Dr. Strangelove plays in a consistent satirical tone; every line of dialogue, every scene and scenario is a farce. That’s not the case with OBAA. Naturally, the film takes a more earnest approach to the depiction of the detention centers, the blazing battle-in-the-streets between the citizens and the militia. Because Vineland was on my mind, I yearned for more of the bizarre, more of the Lockjaw-ian sensibility that couldn’t be translated to the screen: Zoyd’s annual act of transfenestration, the Kahuna Airlines debacle, Takeshi and DL’s mishaps, romance, and the Vibrating Palm technique, the Puncutron machine for reversing said technique, Prairie’s stint in the Sisterhood of Kanoichi Attentives, and the Tubaldetox.

Were it not for its pace and PTA’s deft directorial hand, the film could have been derailed by the shifts in tone. Because of these two qualities, though, we’re able to glide over such oscillations and revel in the pure entertainment value. To be fair, Pynchon often jumps from tone to tone, sometimes illogically, and had I gone into OBAA sans-Vineland, perhaps I would not have noticed these oscillations at all.

What it harks back to, I suppose, is expectation as the bane of pleasure. Part of my fondness for Pynchon’s writing stems from his appetite for confusion. He does not shy away from throwing the reader into a morass, leaving them to fend for themselves. I relish this feeling. This feeling happens to be one of many reasons why I rank PTA a genius, why I salivate at the news of another of his films hitting the theaters. Despite the obvious ambition of the subject, of capturing what it’s like to live in the tatters of a world and what to do about a shrinking future, and the expansive vistas, OBAA seemed a little too neat. It may be counterintuitive to fault someone for their faultless creation, but PTA’s films ascend into the spiritual when they welcome messiness, when they toe the line between reality and absurdity. Take, for instance, Punch-Drunk Love. On the surface, it’s a simple romantic comedy. Until the harmonium is introduced, on which Sandler’s character plays the same sequence of three descending notes amidst chaos. Until we hear the stunted nature of the dialogue. Until we learn of the seven sisters, the “fungers” (a portmanteau of “fun” and “plungers”), the airline miles / Healthy Choice hack. The film occupies that delicious uncanny valley, where we know what we are watching is real, yet we sense that every element is slightly askew, as though we’ve entered a sliver of reality formerly forbidden. Perhaps because it is PTA’s most commercial film, his most straightforward in plot, and thus, most likely to appeal to a wider audience, OBAA, even when the bizarre and the satirical reach their apotheosis, remains grounded. Again, for what it aims to achieve and for the mirror it puts up to the last decade, grounding is the intended effect. And yet, I cannot help but yearn that the scales were tipped in favor of the enigmatic.

What OBAA deserves praise for is its ability to lean into big-budget commerciality without slipping into the moral turpitude oft-associated with commerciality. Clocking in at 170 minutes, the film plays more like a taut 90-minute thriller. The percussive, staccato score — composed by frequent PTA collaborator Jonny Greenwood — heightens the tension and stakes of every scene. The set pieces are awesome. Complex, kinetic, and sensorially panoramic, they evince the importance of watching a film in the theater instead of on a TV (or, god forbid, an iPhone).

The camerawork, particularly in the sweeping wide shots of the desert, is wondrous, amplified by the filming in VistaVision. Fact is, film is better than digital. Digital presents a barrier to immersion, whereas film — with its graininess and tactile surface — invites the viewer into the scene. The handheld shots of Bob scrambling through the hallways and up to the roof of Sensei’s apartment are frenetic and exhilarating. There’s a sequence towards the conclusion of the film that tracks a car chase with the Christmas Adventurers’ assassin, Prairie, and Bob. Keeping the camera glued to the ground, along the undulating desert roads, PTA creates a literal sense of momentum, putting us in the passenger seat as we rock and sway across the billowing tarmac. Surely, this will cement itself in PTA’s already expansive compendium of hypnotizing shots.

I won’t be surprised if OBAA becomes PTA’s most successful film at the box office. As someone who loves meandering, plotless, arthouse films, I also understand that they are not for everyone. If OBAA draws people to the theaters, if it exposes non-cinephiles to the rare mastery of Paul Thomas Anderson, if it invites its audience into dialogue and discourse, if it inspires us to seek out anarchist literature and to question unearned, unjust authority, if it asks us to look inward and reckon with the qualities of ourselves, of our society we dislike, then there will be no denying its triumph.

There’s one last matter to discuss: revolution.

Revolution is about sacrificing your now for someone else’s future. It seems facile in theory, especially because most of us would like to believe that we are not slaves to our ego, that we are able to survive under dire circumstances, that the luxuries we take for granted are not necessary to our comfort. Being a revolutionary, though, is much harder than we make it out to be. It is easy to be whipped up in the rousing frenzy of manifestos and pieces of art. How many of us, though, when there’s fecoventilatory collision,5 will return to swiping on our phones and watching mind-numbing reality television? Perhaps we will gather with our similarly world-weary friends and complain, over a few beers, about the government, the capitalist machine, the injustice, roused momentarily by the buzz of a couple burbling pints, only to sway home and stumble into the supple comfort of our beds, then wake in the morning, go to jobs where we schlep after cruel and crude bosses in hopes of earning an end-of-year bonus, slide back into the grooves of the system, those cries of rebellion now no more than hollow words fading into the void of memory.

There’s no question that my attitudes tend toward the nihilistic and the cynical. In many ways, my cynicism, the dwindling belief of the Baby Boomers as they confronted the reality of Reagan’s ’80s, and the similar Generation X malaise that is the focus of OBAA, is exemplified by Weed Atman’s evolution from mathematics professor to quasi-cult leader:

Once he would have proclaimed, “Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. This forces us to be humane — to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.” But these days he was saying, “It’s wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?” Between these two replies, something had happened to him. He was still preaching humane revolution, but seemed darkly exhausted, unhopeful, snapping at everybody, then apologizing. If anybody caught this change, it was much too late to make a difference.

As I write this piece, though, I am beginning to find that elusive, hope-inspiring “but.” Like the film’s title suggests, change is about one battle after another, putting one foot in front of the other. We cannot expect change to happen in an instant. Change is accrued. Whether it reaches that critical mass in ten years or one hundred, in my lifetime or my grandchildren’s lifetime, it will happen. Yet, there is no ultimate end to change. There will always be battles, fights between good and evil (if it can be reduced so simply), and what OBAA tells us is that we should not give up but adapt. In that I believe. Perhaps that’s what I didn’t formerly understand, or didn’t allow myself to understand for fear of being disappointed by reality: the idea that resistance is not a zero-sum game, that we can take small steps in the positive direction. Evolution in species occurs over thousands and millions of years, comprised of infinitesimal shifts; so too does revolution.

Were OBAA a truly revolutionary film like Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers,6 however, it would be centered on the politics of its revolution. Yet, we only catch glimpses of their anti-fascist message: “Free from the eyes, the ears, the weapons of the Imperialist State.” Instead, and I consider this a boon rather than a detriment, OBAA is more interested in the relationship between father and daughter, and more broadly, the way our dreams and unfettered aspirations are trampled upon in middle age, when kids, marriage, and life ask for the bulk of our attention and there is not much left to do but settle into the mainstream. In fact, it should not be judged as a revolutionary film, nor do I think it was PTA’s intention to espouse a concrete ideology for how to combat our country’s increasingly authoritarian arrangements. If you consider all of PTA’s films, they are concerned with fraught relationships: a cocksman and his estranged father, a British dressmaker and his headstrong muse, two youths discovering the labyrinth of love. Like Vineland, OBAA is propelled by PTA’s exploration of an imperfect family in the midst of a crumbling and impossible-to-explain world. This purported decision on PTA’s part allows the film to achieve universality. Every revolution is different. The rebellion in Algiers against the French government is different from the civil rights protests and counterculture movement of the 1960s, which is different to the aggressive, dynamite-fueled methods favored by the French 75. What will our next revolution look like? To be determined, but it is heartening to know that a one-size-fits-all policy does not apply.

Granted, when I walked out of the cinema, and in the days following, I did not experience that transcendent, spiritual lift that accompanied, say, my first viewing of Magnolia7 or The Master. And perhaps Vineland was partially to blame for this, as I continued to sift through the similarities and deviations, where the film embraced its source material and where it fell short. Yes, in spite of my best intentions not to evaluate one in terms of the other, I could not help myself. To this day, Vineland exists in my consciousness as though it were a chip implanted into my brain. So, if this review seems a little equivocal regarding OBAA, it’s because I feel equivocal. Perhaps in another month, or upon rewatch, I will feel differently. I wrote most of this piece on September 27 — the day after I saw OBAA — using a Bic pen, on 15 pages of a legal pad, the pages rife with arrows, notes in the margins, tangential spirals and parenthetical remarks (“How do I capture the Pynchonian ethos?” “Where am I going with this?” “Vineland — boomers, OBAA — Gen X”) — very much like a conspiracy theorist stretching red string across a board of clues and facts, seeking one clean, cohesive answer — and after three straight hours, I had to pause, relieve my bladder, allow the potassium levels to recover in my right hand, for my customarily neat handwriting had begun to devolve into a doctor’s scrawl, the letters seeping into one another in a lazy cursive, until my mind moved too fast, and my cramping hand too slow, so that the end of each word wilted into illegibility, reduced to a hieroglyph whose language I no longer knew.

This compulsion to write, I think, is a testament to not just the ambition and drive of OBAA, but also to the greater power of PTA as a filmmaker. When the credits roll, you feel as though you’ve been embossed with something. Sensations and sentiments have been stamped onto your brain. He and his characters take root — they intertwine with your quotidian concerns, the grocery lists, the bill payments, whether you’ve left the stove on.

Despite my equivocations, OBAA remains the work of one of our finest, most daring filmmakers vivifying the ideas and the prescience of one of our most idiosyncratic, inimitable novelists. During a decade when both cinema and literature have been languishing, when fewer people are going to the theater to watch non-MCU movies and reading literary fiction, and on a grander scale, when both of our democracy’s political parties are foundering and no one listens to one another and we seem to be spiraling towards a chasm in our nation’s history, the achievement of OBAA is not to be undermined, but to be applauded.

In the last chapter of Vineland, Isaiah Two Four,8 Prairie’s drummer boyfriend, provides us with one of the novel’s most cutting passages:

“Whole problem ‘th you folks’s generation,” Isaiah opined, “nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it — but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars — it was way too cheap . . . .”

I’m fortunate enough to be part of a book club that culls its members largely from a first-year seminar that reads the entirety of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Every month, we gather on the Upper East Side to discuss Cousin Bette, Moby Dick, or the stories of John Cheever, and lament the tragic downfall of the humanities, as well as express megrims about the state of the world, cultural and otherwise. Most recently, we bemoaned the lack of a bohemia and a counterculture. Selling out is hip. Music is sold not on the basis of the lyrics or the uniqueness of the sound, but on the glossy appearance of the artist. Streaming has reduced film and television into the offal of its once-meaty substance. Literature has abandoned formal experimentation. Underground movements never totally disappear, yes, but their presence seems to be at an all-time low. This explains why I rhapsodize about the days of the Village Voice and Bob Dylan’s plangent, political ballads and the peak of American cinema. It’s much more than romantic nostalgia — it’s a yearning for something meaningful and nuanced.

In Vineland, Pynchon’s thesis is that the Reagan era, the cultural turn towards materialism and profit, the rise of television et al., squashed the counterculture ideals cultivated in the 1960s, and pivoted those young radicals and optimists into cynical, resigned suburbanites. In OBAA, PTA does not explicitly tie the death of revolutionary ardor to a specific root — though with the benefit of hindsight, we can trace the events of the last decade that led to disillusionment. The question stands: What culture will we return to? The 1980s? Not a chance. Reviving the 1960s seems impossible unless a mass virus wipes out all smartphones, their associated apps, and screens smaller than a 24-inch Panasonic television. Do we return to the 1990s? The 2000s, pre-financial crisis?

One Battle After Another, on its own, will not provide an answer. It will not even flip the switch that urges us into revolution, cultural or political. On both fronts, however, it is a step in the right direction. Let’s not stop there, though. Let’s take heed of Isaiah Two Four’s warning and ask ourselves this: What is our Tube, and what can we do to understand it so that we avoid the pitfalls of our progenitors? How can we escape intellectual death and forge a culture that preserves our humanity?

Daniella Nichinson is a fiction writer from Philadelphia, where she is an avid tennis player and an old soul. You can find more of her work here.

While my peers listened to the Beatles, and Richard Nixon was on the verge of being impeached, and the war raged on in Vietnam, my mother and I watched black-and-white films together in our one-bedroom apartment in Yorkville.

She would see, in the New York Times TV section, that a classic such as His Girl Friday was on Million Dollar Movie, and the evening would be arranged in order to watch it. It was my first study in contrasts, as life looked so different in the 1940s compared with my gritty New York 1970s childhood.

In the ’40s there was glamor (think Bogie and Bacall). In the ’70s? Polyester (think The Brady Bunch). In the ’40s fabrics flowed. In the ’70s everything was stiff, including the hair (see the Dry Look). And the colors . . . somehow, I could never get excited about avocado green or harvest gold. Better to simply get rid of them and go back to elegant black and white. No one looked better in it than Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, with Rosalind Russell, whose wisecracking, caustic Hildy Johnson churns out top-notch newspaper features for ex-husband Walter Burns while dressed in stunning suits made up of diagonals and stripes. Other well-dressed notables of the era include Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire, Lucille Ball in The Dark Corner, and the stunning Gene Tierney in Laura.

If I go back to my favorite Hollywood era, that of the 1930s, it is hard for me to maintain any sense of critical judgment. Most of it was simply delightful. Take Swing Time for example, where Fred Astaire plays a gambler and Ginger Rogers his dance teacher. The plot is classic boy-meets-girl, with the ensuing business of twists, snappy repartee, and costuming perfection. I would give anything to own Ginger’s black day dress, in which she gives Fred his first lesson and lands on her bottom. Or take The Gay Divorcee, when Fred sings “Night and Day” to Ginger, set against a shimmering oceanic and Art Deco background as her white dress floats behind her like a cloud in the silvery gray sky. And what of the exquisite song “The Continental”? This 14-minute dance extravaganza, as only Depression-era Hollywood could do it — it even has the chorus girls dressed in gowns that are half black, half white — won the first Oscar for Best Original Song.

In the ’30s there were no jeans or T-shirts. Men wore suits; women wore dresses. Their hair was done and they wore lipstick. And there were always cigarettes and hats. If I get started on the exquisite coupling of William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man, or any of the inky film noirs I love, we will be here for a long time. Suffice to say, the glorious Carole Lombard of My Man Godfrey never ran around the corner to get milk in sweats and flip-flops.

There is one color film of the 1950s that possessed me: North by Northwest. Alfred Hitchcock’s stunning take on identity theft, in which Cary Grant is chased by a crop duster through the cornfields of Indiana, starts out in Midtown Manhattan. Grant plays Roger Thornhill, a Madison Avenue adman who makes the mistake of having drinks with colleagues at the Plaza and ends up captive in a car that whisks him to the leafy Long Island estate of the sinister Phillip Vandamm, played with suave perfection by James Mason. I think my mother felt a strange kinship with this Cold War story, as one scene takes place at the United Nations, where she worked for many years as a typist, and another is set in Glen Cove, one town away from where her parents settled after the war and which was home to many Eastern European immigrants at the time.

As an adult, I see how I was taken by the look and feel of classic films as a child. It was, however, more than simply the visuals. In time, I came to realize that there were two important characteristics of these films. First, they lured me out of my confusing world with my mother into an alter-cinematic universe where we didn’t have to talk to each other. Second, classic films helped me understand the Depression- and World War II-era existence that my parents grew up in. Not that my world was bad; it wasn’t. There was a lot, though, that made no sense. I didn’t understand my mother and I certainly don’t think she understood me. How could she? Her childhood and adolescence were spent fleeing Stalin and Hitler. My childhood was charmed compared with hers. We certainly didn’t have the same relationship my friends had with their mothers.

My mother went back to work when I was 4, and as I got older I became the classic latchkey kid, coming home to an empty apartment after school. After grabbing a snack from the kitchen, I would settle down with The 4:30 Movie (it should be noted that in my world classic films came before homework). When my friends and I were able to go out on our own, one of our favorite activities was to go see black-and-white films at revival houses in the city. There was the Thalia on 95^th Street, the Bleecker Street Cinema, the Theatre 80 St. Mark’s, and the Regency. We would go see Bogie and Bacall double features such as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep or Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn in masterpieces like Pat and Mike or Desk Set. One great memory I have is of looking over and seeing my best friend, Andrea, wearing her glasses as we watched Dial M for Murder in 3D at the 8th Street Playhouse (also the site of many a Rocky Horror screening).

If you met someone at the time who understood the black-and-white film, you immediately entered into a subterranean culture; you spoke the same language. I remember meeting my friend Stephanie in college, and her admission that she loved Astaire and Rogers films; we’ve been friends ever since. Our bond was simply cemented when I spied the Top Hat LP by her stereo the first time I went to her house in Greenwich Village. We even dressed the parts, shopping at one of the many vintage stores that were all over Manhattan at the time, such as Unique Clothing on lower Broadway and Church Street Surplus off the corner of Canal. Andrea’s father ran a prominent theatre, and for one opening that I was invited to, I wore a rich blue evening dress covered with almost invisible rhinestones and wine-colored pumps. I must have mistaken myself for a young Joan Crawford. Or was it my mother? I have a black-and-white picture of her sitting in a small boat on a lake; she must be in her mid-20s. It is most likely taken at Ammersee or Starnberg, near Munich, where she lived with her first husband, Noel. I looked at this picture recently and realized I had inadvertently bought the same sunglasses she is wearing.

My mother rarely talked about her experiences in World War II, and when she did, the stories came out of nowhere and were disjointed. I’d be making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and suddenly I would hear her talking about a distant cousin who died in the war. I wanted her to sit down and tell me these stories. When I was in my 20s, I vowed I would get her to do so. One day I announced that I was coming over, pen and notebook in hand, and that we would start writing them down. When I got there, though, she reneged. “I’ll tell them when I am ready.” That day never came.

There is one film that I have seen multiple times in my life that truly captures the feeling that must result from being trapped in an occupied country: Casablanca. As a child, I only saw the glamor and romance of the Bogart-Bergman-Henreid triangle; when I saw it recently, all I could see was the desperation of the refugee plight and Ingrid Bergman not knowing where to turn next. She didn’t need to utter a word of dialogue; her face said it all.

Perhaps the act of watching black-and-white films has been more than just a cinematic obsession; it is my way of understanding a distant mother I barely knew, one who tried to do her best, but whose toolkit had been all but depleted by Stalin and Hitler. All children want their parents to be happy; maybe my escape into these films is my attempt at giving my mother a second chance. I didn’t want to see her aging in gritty, graffiti-covered 1970s New York but rather as a glamorous young woman boating on a lake in the late 1940s.

I suppose I have also completely demented my own children with my black-and-white obsession. My younger child called from college recently, saying she really wanted to watch a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film again. She missed them. And a viewing of Desk Set with my older child requires a certain level of intestinal fortitude, as they have memorized every scene between Katherine Hepburn and Joan Blondell, conjuring the experience of a 1950s Rocky Horror Picture Show. Among my many regrets is that I once offended my older child’s high school friend because she hadn’t seen a black-and-white gem, The Philadelphia Story. It took some time for her to confront me on the matter, but when she finally did, she was blunt: “You sucked in your breath and gasped. I felt so badly. It wasn’t my fault.” I felt badly, too, because I realized then that I had turned into my mother, who would suck in her breath when some poor soul made the colossal mistake of revealing that they had not seen a certain film. Ever since, my children have put me on watch: “Mom, you have to control yourself; don’t suck in your breath if someone hasn’t seen North by Northwest! You can do it.”

These days I practice as much self-discipline as I can muster when confronted with anyone who does not speak the language of the black-and-white film; after all, I have to remind myself, it’s not their fault. They weren’t indoctrinated into this cult as young children.

I simply take a deep breath, hand them my carefully culled list of 50 must-see classic films, and tell them I’m available for viewing anytime they’d like.

Anita Bushell is the author of One Way to Whitefish (2024) and Object Essays: A Collection (2022). Her work appears in multiple publications online. Find her at anitabushell.com.

It’s a gift for the young cineaste to be introduced to certain filmmakers at certain stages of life. The films of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, for instance, are a perfect education for the very young. They teach a fundamental fact. Movies are composed of conventions — frames, movements, transitions, plots, character types, stock situations — and it’s the responsibility of a great filmmaker to idiosyncratically adapt, or else explode, those conventions whenever possible. Chaplin does so with an eye for the gag and a sense for exquisite sentimentality. The Marx Brothers achieve it by battling against every convention, wielding comedy as a weapon against all human propriety, hubris, civility, and taste, and their best films unravel in brilliantly stupid ways that greater filmmakers and comedians will never be able to match.

So then perhaps this cinema of exuberance gives way to the great Hollywood epics, the grand studio musicals, and the more elegant comedies of Hollywood’s golden decades. Perhaps it also gives way to those great “classical” directors — Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Stanley Donen — whom the adolescent may not yet know by name but whose best works establish a more subtle and controlled style. Like the French auteurists of the early Cahiers du Cinéma, our little cineaste will have to grow to a more rebellious age before he can really look back and see that there was something like a serious, thinking artist behind all that composition and collaboration.

Then comes Alfred Hitchcock. Perhaps a bit of Orson Welles too — but the central fact will always be Hitchcock. To confront the master at the right stage in one’s film education is to confront a kind of ultimate filmmaking. He remains the purest of all film directors because no other is better at teaching us how to watch a film. Hitchcock is indeed our director, always impressing on us the importance of our watching. “Look here, now here, now here,” he says, before he pulls back and shows us that the people we were watching are also watchers, and that these watchers are generally in danger of being discovered. Hence the stock Hitchcock scenario: a person accused of a crime they did not commit, or else aware of a crime that no one else believes — itself a dramatization (often a very funny one) of the same tensions the early screen comedians understood, only choreographed tautly over an abyss of human sex, murder, and perversion. Hitchcock is an exploder of convention too, equipped with an art of extreme, pointillist control. He knows precisely what he wants us to see and delights in playing on our need to know what’s going to happen. Hitchcock as a pure figure (just imagine that famous silhouette) is a byword for film directing itself. No film artist ever made it clearer to a popular audience just what a film director actually does.

Which leads me to Stanley Kubrick, who stands in peculiar relation to all these American forebears. The legend kept a deliberate distance from communion with other artists and shunned most influence from the greater world of cinema, preferring to construct his own sterile, private alternative. Yet he still stands, somehow, as an inheritor to those Hollywood traditions of intensely staged and choreographed cinema, whether that of the screen comedians, classical directors, or Hitchcock. In a sense, Kubrick’s style is to Hitchcock’s what a command is to a coax. The mythos that built up around Kubrick in his lifetime — his misanthropic coldness, reclusiveness, exhaustive need for control — is not wrong. It’s clearly there in the films, beginning with Dr. Strangelove in 1964 and running all the way to Eyes Wide Shut in 1999. Kubrick’s films are a stern, declarative exhortation to look. And though they can be quite funny, they’re almost certainly never warm, charming, or humane. They are nearly always about human society as essentially dehumanizing. Civilization and its discontents: the vicissitudes of the human animal.

Yet even if these films spend their time mocking our human foibles, just as Hitchcock’s do, there’s nothing in Kubrick’s filmography with the genuine eros of Notorious or the desperately tragic romanticism of Vertigo. Hitchcock the thinker, the elaborate constructor, is always working in service of a mood, a tension, a feeling. And he will use the entire apparatus of moviemaking to ensure that he can get the audience to where that feeling lies. (Consider how the union of such a wheelhouse of technique, married with the sentiment of a Chaplin, might produce that later modern emblem of the American moviemaker, Steven Spielberg.) Not so for Kubrick. That total control, that command to look, needing us to squirm in the face of the naked humanity he places under his exhaustive microscope, often means that to watch a Kubrick film is to watch an artist who has subordinated film to his own thinking. We see what Kubrick thinks, and he does not appear to be impressed.

Of course, this is a little reductive. Even these disquieting tendencies don’t derail his best films. The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut turn that dehumanization into deliriously cynical romps through the ridiculousness of male egos (the former a satire on the puerile fantasies of the writer in isolation; the latter a meditation on the abstract emptiness and sexlessness of Tom Cruise). In contrast, A Clockwork Orange and especially Full Metal Jacket, in pointing their barbs at a more general cultural mindlessness, end up becoming powerful but exhausting, violent, nearly empty products themselves. Perhaps this is the point. One can never quite know with Kubrick exactly who the joke is on, though it’s at least guaranteed that it’s partially on those rulers of society who insist they control the narratives of our world. If this sounds like a somewhat bargain-bin Marxism, well, there’s something a bit impish and shallow about Kubrick, all the more pronounced for being diverted into such weighty, self-important cinematic monoliths.

Of course, in his finest moments, none of this matters. Should our young cineaste be lucky enough to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on the cusp of adolescence (as this one was, at the age of 11 or 12), there can be no better introduction to the seemingly infinite possibilities of cinema. Even the heaviest facets of Kubrick’s style tend to disappear in the course of 2001 — space, time, and cosmology turn out to be too big a canvas for even the most controlling of cinematic thinkers. The film gets away from him, in the best possible way, and goes galloping off into the largest of cosmic questions, which no one could possibly answer. Sure, there’s plenty of satire on humankind’s scientific hubris: HAL 9000 remains the ultimate AI nightmare, and the famous match cut from bone to spaceship is, after all, a metaphor which works both ways. But it’s the pageantry that really does it: Kubrick wants to dazzle us with things we’ve never seen, at a level of detail, eeriness, and beauty that no science fiction film has ever surpassed. And dazzle us he does, giving a greater elegance to the questions posed by the film — an elegance only the other of Kubrick’s true masterpieces achieves.

If 2001 dignifies Kubrick’s chilly project with a genuine sense of wonder at the universe (and humankind’s existence in it), Barry Lyndon achieves something perhaps more difficult: a sense of the human being in history. This is what occurred to me as I sat down last week to watch the extraordinary new 4K restoration of the film at the Prince Charles Cinema. Though of course it’s still icy, aloof, and unsparing, Barry Lyndon manages to be Kubrick’s most human film. Certainly, in its commitment to total detail and its evident pictorial beauty, it argues for itself as an aesthetic experience even before it hits you with the sheer distancing effects of its tableaux vivants or its refusal to indulge in anything like psychological portraiture. At the time it was released in 1975 — right in the middle of the angst and energy of 1970s New Hollywood — these qualities struck many people as purposelessly alienating. In her review of the film, Pauline Kael essentially chalked it all up to a composed but ultimately airless expression of the same old Kubrick fetishes, a procession of gorgeous images with nothing much else to recommend them.

The fetishes are certainly still there. But watching it again on the big screen with a very interested, responsive audience, I found that only the most pronounced moments in the Kubrickian mode (a too-wide-angle shot here, a clunky handheld there) have dated. The rest has remained as completely singular and out of time as 2001. The sheer gorgeousness of every moment is argument enough. (Seriously, if the new restoration is coming to a big screen near you, do not skip out on the experience.) It’s Kubrick on the heights.

Redmond Barry’s story begins with a fateful duel that sets him on his path and ends with another that causes his disgrace. In between, he bounces from one European army to another, becomes a double agent and a professional gambler, and finally marries his way into the nobility, only to ruin the entire aristocratic family financially. Naturally, Kubrick’s take on the story is uninterested in Redmond Barry as a person, and Ryan O’Neal plays him as a pouting sentimental cipher, a charlatan and a survivor buffeted by history, incapable of change. All the while, Michael Hordern’s exquisite narration is always a step ahead of the character, armed with prose right out of William Makepeace Thackeray’s original picaresque novel.

The real subject of the film is something like the sweep of time — yet also the wars and debaucheries and absolute ossification of the European aristocracy, so many infantilized mummies in powdered faces, always disdainful and bored. Barry’s world is one of ritualized violence at the mass civilizational level, and we’re with him as he schemes his way into the class that benefits most from it. But in the end he’s as pathetic as anyone, cruel to his wife and abusive of his stepson, redeemed only by his total love for his little boy, Bryan. When the child dies, we finally see Barry the human being, for a moment, crying over the boy’s bed. It’s an anachronistic Victorian commonplace on Thackeray’s part — the sentimental death of the sickly child. Yet Kubrick leans so far into the maudlin scene that it revolves right past the film’s general irony until it comes back around to sentiment again. The death scene is fascinating, a real test case for the film as a whole: somehow the Kubrickian distance becomes the perfect medium for a 19th-century author’s vision of an 18th-century rogue.

It’s all there in the grandeur of the great “Sarabande” from Handel’s 11th Harpsichord Suite, which provides the film’s weightiest moments — the opening, the first duel, the funeral of Barry’s son, et al. But also in the “Andante” from Schubert’s Second Piano Trio, which forms the stately, ironic underpinning of the second half of the film. It’s as unclassifiable as Barry Lyndon itself: moody, minor key yet gliding and grand in a palatial way. Pure Schubert. Stirring and romantic, though very much couched in the Mozartian classical perfection that came before it, just like the world of the ancien régime in which Barry Lyndon is actually set. It’s refined, thinking music for the Age of Sensibility and Enlightenment, while Handel’s “Sarabande” gives the film another pole and necessary anchor in its mournful Baroque threnody. Then there’s The Chieftains’ absurdly lush Irish “Love Theme,” which feels as though it should be complementing something far more wistful and earnest than what we actually find on screen. All of this combines with Kubrick’s taste for repeated shots slowly zooming out to reveal their figures against impossibly detailed landscapes and architecture. The film presents life as a historical frieze, as deliberate literary artifice. Perfectly Kubrickian.

The stories of the film’s obsessive production are well known: special lenses from NASA, the painstaking reproduction of natural light, intimate period details of costume and decoration, the influence of Hogarth and Watteau. And yet what it all adds up to in the end feels as slight and shadowy as Redmond Barry himself. History, Kubrick seems to suggest, is grand and deadly; then it’s over. “They are all equal now,” says the epilogue. Whole civilizations rise and fall, poor people are ground to bits, the rich eat well, and a few schemers manage to make their mark for a while, though all fall eventually. It’s the film’s rich, haunted emptiness which lingers — all the gilt palaces and enormous gardens, occupied by trapped figures who never seem to feel any joy, who never transcend their surroundings. The lives of the rest are, of course, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So Kubrick seems to say. Yet if that’s true, and his vision of the sad mirage of humanity’s hubris is the ultimate point, there remains a single unanswered question, like what one might finally ask of God (surely amusing Kubrick himself to no end): Why make it all so beautiful?

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

Superhero films are strange things. For all that we’ve been inundated with in that bloating genre ever since Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie kicked off the contemporary rush, it’s easy to forget just how unlike everything else these kinds of films are. They’re sort of like other blockbusters, sure — only of course we all know they’re not. Each new superhero flick, in these days of superhero exhaustion, serves as an opportunity to step back, and consider just how strange it is that the last 25 years of American culture have seen us drowning in fantasies of wearing tights, capes, and technosuits while beating the ever-living hell out of each other. It’s not merely that superhero films have helped generate our queasy “end of cinema” climate — in which risk-averse studios continuously spit out new sequels and reboots of the same characters and stock situations — but that they are really the perfect medium for this state of affairs. New universes, alternate castings, a reenvisioning here, a retconning there: just as comic books constitute the apotheosis of the never-ending serial, the movies based on them have a similar infinite-endedness, the same sense that all a director or writer need do is return to one character, reach back into a particular world, shake it up like an Etch A Sketch, and start all over again.

Traditional movie-making has always operated uncomfortably in this paradigm. In their contemporary phases, Marvel and DC movies have largely split the difference between young directors with new, quasi-authorial visions, and a very old-fashioned, old-Hollywood kind of intensive producer oversight. It’s a state of affairs which probably dates back to Tim Burton’s first two Batman films in 1989 and 1992 — which, along with Richard Donner’s original Superman and Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films, seem to me to be the only superhero films that truly deserve to be called classic pop cinema — the tension inherent in superhero films is always one between corporate management of IP and the desperate hope that some fresh filmic artist with a good idea can jumpstart, restart, or continue the franchise in question. Just look at Marvel’s recent trend of hiring young “indie” directors such as Chloé Zhao to helm their films — only to micromanage many of them into oblivion — to see how impossible that juggling act often is.

James Gunn may be the first person in the history of the genre to straddle this distinction. The man occupies an unprecedented position in this kind of cinema: Steven Spielberg’s co-founding of DreamWorks may be the only comparable situation as far as producer-directors go. As co-CEO of DC Studios, Gunn now has total oversight of the “DCU,” focused on recouping DC’s prestige after more than a decade of losing out to Marvel. As a director, he’ll have a level of control over his sets and stories which no director of superhero movies has ever had.

Now, whether or not this produces good films — let alone the DC renaissance many are hoping for, now that Marvel appears to be floundering as it makes its way to Doomsday — remains to be seen. And whether that even matters remains to be seen by people other than me. Call me fatigued. Call me a glutton for punishment, too: I keep turning up to the next one, hoping it’ll somehow provide the kind of popcorn thrills I always hope for from any good blockbuster. Yet the track record of the super-studios, as producers of interesting films, has never been a good one. Every MCU movie has dated terribly, and only Gunn’s own Guardians of the Galaxy movies (the first two, anyways) and Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok are any fun, because they frequently escape the superhero nonsense and settle for being old-school buddy comedies in science-fiction dress. Most superhero films since the first Iron Man have been dour, gray, CGI-slop behemoths, buttressed by constant exposition and laced with enough quippage to distract the viewer from the fact that they’re watching yet another film that pretended to be “about” something — only to climax in more scenes of sardonic demigods slamming into one another, or yet another sci-fi sky-beam threatening to destroy the innocent population of another colorless city.

Of course, on average, DC has been much worse. The Snyder era was exactly as grim and pretentious as we all remember it being. Even Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies seem weaker to me these days, though they are moving, well-written, well-acted, and obviously better than the dozens of gritty reboots which followed in their wake. My personal heresy here is that I genuinely found Matt Reeves’ recent The Batman the most compelling superhero film since Raimi’s Spider-Man 2. It’s overlong and silly, but it has a look, an ambience, and a sense of basic mise-en-scène that even Nolan’s frenetic films are missing. (Nolan never met a scene he couldn’t cut up until all sense of space and continuity grew as jumbled and unsure as a Michael Bay movie.) Like Spider-Man 2 — which remains the high point of the genre — Reeves’ film had a sense of exactly what kind of spectacle superhero movies alone are capable of putting in front of an audience. It understood how to show the audience the exact kind of fantasy that was being handled on screen, and showed few signs of having to pander to any rabid, unhappy fandoms.

Though it’s far from a great film, Gunn’s Superman understands this, too. At its best, it’s zippy and uncomplicated. A little goofy. A little earnest. These are good qualities in a film about a god-man. Audiences and fans seem to be enjoying the film immensely; even my own boomer parents thought it was pretty “fresh.” When it works, it’s largely because David Corenswet seems like a born movie-star. When the film isn’t dealing with him, or Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor (also great), it begins to drift slowly into CGI dullness. Though it at least boasts a few colors besides tan and gray, and remains easygoing throughout, it still ends up in a long, exhausting CGI-addled climax which is depressingly similar to every other long, exhausting CGI-addled superhero movie climax.

Yet Gunn’s tonal approach is incredibly savvy — and a bit brilliant. He’s clearly aware of the general fatigue with the form, aware that his old employers at Marvel have over-extended themselves betting on their multiverse-and-streaming-TV racket, and attuned to a general sense that gritty “realism” is both exhausted and exhausting. The entire sentimental, embrace-the-cringe, kindness-is-the-real-punk reframe is clearly meant to be a breath of fresh air in a stale world of predictable and depressed comic book characters. And the general public’s sense that Superman remains the proto-superhero — or at least the most representative of the genre as an historical phenomenon — gives Gunn a shot at some good old-fashioned slate-clearing.

As a director, Gunn is still largely incapable of staging a particularly interesting shot. He’s one of many, many contemporary directors who seem to actively chafe at the existence of the camera’s pictorial frame. He gets so obsessed with smashing between individual focal points in a scene that he abandons any sense of a legible frame in between these moments. He’s simultaneously addicted to his steadicam and reliant on haphazard, unmotivated cuts within certain scenes. And, like many contemporary films, these are clearly culled from coverage, rather than thought through from the start. He also favors wide-angle lenses on large format digital cameras like the ARRI Alexa LF and RED V-RAPTOR — two of Netflix’s “officially approved” digital cameras, which is why the un-lit daylight scenes in the film only barely escape the same poorly-colorated dullness that plagues so much contemporary cinema and so many streaming TV shows. The effect is often that the audience is viewing the action through a kind of manic, roving fishbowl.

Both Luthor and Mr. Terrific have their little fleets of portable drone-cameras: given Gunn’s style in the film, this strikes me as a clue to his own fantasies as a filmmaker. He loves trying to follow Superman in flight with an ostensibly “unmoored” camera, using CGI to transition a bit too smoothly through fight sequences in careening long-takes, where the camera apparently banishes gravity and slaloms at will. If anything, his Superman is a fantasy about camera technology — a dream of a kind of frictionless fluidity of movement through space — the fantasy of an infinite tracking shot and the abolishment of the need for a cut — something plenty of directors have fantasized about, from F. W. Murnau to the Watchowski sisters. This puts sequences of the film more in line with video games like God of War or The Last of Us Part II, where the “camera” avoids cutting by smoothly snaking through the computer-rendered environment, over and through obstacles, always locked intimately with the movements of the playable character. At times this yields interesting experiments, though it still has a half-baked quality. Gunn doesn’t seem to have really thought through the point of moving towards such a style, only to have vaguely recognized that it might be an interesting way of portraying a Superman uniquely unbound by normal human movement. And of course, when he does get back to the “real world,” his filmmaking becomes so blandly conventional it does nothing to illuminate the scenes in question.

Still, Gunn’s Superman doesn’t really have to be a technical achievement to accomplish what it’s set out to accomplish: the tricky feat of steering comic book movies back into confidently sincere territory, unafraid of corn and sentiment — though perhaps not yet comfortable again with camp, something these films haven’t done well since Burton. In this way, I suspect it’s going to be successful. The film is a perfectly decent example of a medium that has grown wearisome; yet there’s a genuine, felt difference, and it’s almost entirely to do with Gunn’s tonal calculations. What audiences seem to be responding to is a film which doesn’t want to elicit anything from them other than to entertain them, making Superman the smartest and most genuinely enjoyable pivot we’ve seen so far in the era of superhero fatigue. And yet this situation demonstrates the greater meta-issue at stake in these superhero films — one of the things I find makes it harder and harder to encounter them as films whatsoever. That is, in a climate of cultural strip mining, where box office earnings feel increasingly harder to squeeze out of people, and getting bodies into theaters remains an unpredictable business, each superhero film increasingly takes on the burden of representing superhero films as a genre — making an argument to audiences that the genre is still worthwhile and important.

Unlike films whose primary concerns lie more along the axis of artistic expression — or even just awards and prestige for writers or actors — all blockbusters, by their nature, have to solve a problem: generating audience interest, and figuring out how to sustain it. With comic book movie fandoms, this is a bit more easily done through tie-ins (though even that gets exhausting, as Marvel has demonstrated) and staging important events in whatever canon those audiences care most about. For the rest of us, it has to fulfill the traditional blockbuster need, which is to give us a fantasy we might want to go along with for a few hours. So what’s ultimately most interesting about Gunn’s Superman is how it reveals these fantasies have changed.

A great majority of superhero films have been discreetly — though usually not so discreetly — “about” American foreign policy. Yet Superman marks a decisive move away from the themes of the War on Terror, to those of far-off wars and a general American helplessness. It plays the hits as far as interventionist debates go: Like The Avengers and the Nolan Batman films, Superman’s plot points serve as something of a proxy for debates about American foreign entanglement and domestic spying, and whether an empire wielding the most powerful military technology ever set loose on the world can ever be truly good or benevolent (the fantasy being that it can). Of course, none of these superhero films ever manage to say anything very provocative about said issues — given the sheer amount of money the American military often puts into them, how could they? Still, they generally manage to say something about how Americans currently see themselves (and the things Americans want to be saved from).

In Superman’s case, the fears seem pretty legible, beginning with worries about an American government that is entirely cynical and self-interested — happy to abstain, literally, from the destruction and military intervention it once engaged in directly, instead delegating it to private corporations with their own shadowy plans and loyal armies of young fans and cultists. In the case of Luthor, think Thiel, Palantir, Raytheon, and Musk. One of the truest strains in Superman is just how young and nerdy Luthor’s minions are: the young, angry, and tech-obsessed are the new cult members of tomorrow. In a plot point involving the release of damning footage from Superman’s Kryptonian parents, the film even satirizes the easy pendulum swings of performative 24-hour news media. (In the film’s hierarchy of public institutions, only print journalism gets a naive pass as essentially trustworthy.) Then there’s Luthor’s “pocket universe,” which resembles an interdimensional Guantanamo, where he can imprison nearly anyone he wants under an approved government contract. The parallels with the Trump administration’s new concentration camps are obvious.

And then there’s the film’s staging of an invasion of the fictional state of Jarhanpur by the also fictional state of Boravia. Many people have pointed to certain images in the film as clearly reminiscent of the destruction of Gaza — though given that the film’s archetypally war-torn country of righteous, impoverished brown people is being invaded by a vaguely-Slavic post-Soviet country (run by a cartoonish Putin stand-in), it’s really a convenient fusion of the two great ongoing horrors of our moment: the eradication of Gaza and the outright military invasion of Ukraine. Collapsing the two into the same category of violence certainly seems instrumental and naive. Still, it’s interesting: it suggests that what’s causing many Americans the most pain right now is no longer our involvement in unnecessary foreign conflicts but that we’re fundamentally helpless to stop the murder of innocents overseas, while remaining very aware that this murder directly benefits many of the most powerful people in the world. The fantasy has shifted: Gunn’s Superman delivers its audience the catharsis of seeing superpowered beings step into our current moral vacuum, saving the kind of innocent, beleaguered people we’re all watching die on screens in real life, every day, while our own government sits around and allows it. Does this make the film left-wing? Not particularly. But it does signal a change in our collective anxieties, one which no amount of online right-wing anger will be able to deflect.

Superman signals a shift towards a different register in the superhero movie — perhaps in blockbusters on the whole. One that includes a central, potentially destabilizing, naiveté — which is why it likely won’t be embraced by left-wingers, either. Yet I suspect general audiences will embrace it; in fact they already seem to be. People long for a time in the past — an unspecified time, which may never have existed — in which Hollywood films spoke directly to the masses, and unified them in a sense of shared humanity. Superman aims its own slightly awkward, subtly calculating, and somehow ultimately believable naiveté in this precise direction. And in the true tradition of American cinema, whether this works or not isn’t ultimately up to the people who make movies. It’s up to the people who go to see them.

Sam Jennings is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he also runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.

A peculiar development is on hand. The people in power, the people who make the news and shape history, no longer want to wait for someone to play them, years later, in a movie; they want to play themselves, now, live on TV, with dramatic flair. They imagine how they should be perceived by the audience and they deliver to us that perceived character. Our Defense Secretary imagines what a Defense Secretary should be like and plays that version on TV. Our Attorney General plays her version of Attorney General. Trump, of course, plays Trump. They all decided to cut out the middleman — the historian, the biographer, the screenwriter, the actor — and deliver their own unfiltered biopics straight to the consumer. This M.O. doesn’t require much effort to conceive and execute, it’s a good tool to build your personal brand, and, as a fortuitous side effect, it has defanged the whole satire genre. How do you mock power when it acts like a bad-dream Monty Python skit?

On top of that, things are moving fast. Jesse Armstrong, the writer and director of HBO’s Mountainhead — a satire about four tech oligarchs whose whims and products make the world burn — must’ve watched with dismay at how the timeline made his artistic efforts obsolete before he even wrote down “EXT. SNOWY MOUNTAINSIDE.” Armstrong wrote the screenplay for an almost two-hour movie in January, started shooting in March, made edits in April, and released it in May. During that time, just to take a cursory look at world events: the US President threatened Canada and Greenland with invasion; a US ally was mocked and humiliated by the President and the Vice President on live TV; markets plunged, then recovered based on a presidential tweet; a rogue billionaire and his team of twenty-year-olds wrecked crucial government agencies; and the US credit rating got downgraded. The day before the movie was released, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and an inspiration behind some of the characters, stopped by the Oval Office high on ketamine, with a shiner on his right eye, apparently given to him by our Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (a southpaw!), in an altercation over DOGE failings. And less than a week later, Musk had an acrimonious, shit-hurling falling-out with the man he spent a quarter of a billion dollars on making President just months earlier. I mean, what can a fiction writer even do here?

In Mountainhead, four tech bros arrive at a sprawling modernist chalet in snow-covered Utah mountains for some R&R: a poker game, an “intellectual salon” with “no deals, no meals, no high heels” (that is no shop talk, no household help, no women) as distractions.

There’s Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the owner of a social media platform and the richest man in the world. The platform, called Traam, has just released a new feature that allows users to create high-quality deepfakes. Within hours of its release, it is unleashing planetary-wide chaos. Venis’ general attitude to seeing the world burn on his phone screen is a shrug and a cackle. “Nothing is fucking serious, and everything is funny and cool.” He wishes, however, that he could “get off this rock” someday.

Jeff, played by Ramy Youssef, owns an AI company. Its main technology has the capacity to fact-check the news and thus curb spreading political and economic turmoil. Venis is interested in buying Jeff’s AI company so that he could mitigate the deadly consequences of his recent innovation without admitting error and taking responsibility. Jeff’s AI has another potential: Venis and Randall (Steve Carell) believe that it can usher, within five to ten years, a transhumanist future.

Randall is the graybeard of the group. We’re never quite told what he does, but it is clear that he’s some kind of a hedge fund/VC guy, a “dark-money Gandalf.” He knows everything about credit ratings and bond markets and strategic reserves, he throws around words like de minimis (finance guys do that), and his worldview, unlike that of the other three, has solid philosophical underpinnings. It is Hegelian dialectic that, in his interpretation, is transformed into the triad “Fuck! What? Cool!” “Fuck!” — that’s people’s initial reaction to an innovation; “What?” — a subsequent reevaluation; and “Cool!” — an eventual acceptance. Randall also has an incurable cancer, and is particularly interested in continuing his existence in digital form.

The poorest of them all is Soups (Jason Schwartzman), the owner of a meditation app. His net worth is a mere five hundred million, a soup-kitchen-level poverty in the realm of billionaires (thus the nickname, Soups). Jesse Armstrong has a talent for exploring the pecking order of the rich, and I was reminded of a Succession episode where a character described an income of five million dollars as a nightmare: “Can’t retire, not worth it to work.” Here Armstrong turbocharges the same sensibility applied to a different fractal space. The numbers are different, but the dynamic is the same. Soups can’t crack the b-nut — that is, raise a billion dollars for his app — and it gnaws him.

The oligarchs arrive at the compound, owned by Soups, with their full entourage: assistants, lawyers, doctors, nannies. The help is sent away, and one expects the men to welcome their brief liberation from the constraints of wealth, and switch into a relaxed, jovial mode. When they’re all finally in the same room together, however, we don’t observe old friends genuinely happy to see each other. What we see instead is pantomimed brohood. The yells of delight are contrived, the hugs awkward. They all seem to act out the kind of a bro connection they think they should have, the kind they imagine regular people have, or they themselves might have had in their younger, poorer days — the chummy pranks, the boozy, laid back poker game with takeout Chinese food, the pool-shooting and chilling in a man cave. But by this point in their structured, overmanaged lives, they’ve lost that instinctual capacity for simple fun, while the imperative to appear to have fun has twisted them into ridiculous contortions.

The actors’ comedic chops come in handy here. Their task is to portray characters who are acting like they’re normal, but at the same time let the underlying fakery work its way through several emotional layers — a layer of bravado over a layer of insecurity over a layer of existential despair — and the result is almost Chekhovian. Jesse Armstrong must’ve met some billionaires in his life, and I have no reason to doubt his depiction of the type. Are they really so wooden and so excruciatingly boring? If so, I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for us, rubes, too — we’re all NPCs in their worldwide video game. But, hey, unlike the tech bros, who plan to live forever, at least we get to exit this game eventually.

Jeff, the guy with AI, is the only one who is still mostly grounded in and has emotional connection to the physical realm. His main concern is not world domination, but his girlfriend, who went to some kind of sex party, or, as she describes it, “a party where people have sex,” in Mexico. He’s worried about her, and he puts some of his security detail on her itinerary to make sure she is okay, and obsessively checks his phone for her texts. Poor guy.

The rest of the group’s relationship with objective reality is patchy. These men are in all seriousness preparing themselves for a digital transcendence. They appear to be done with the tangible world, with fleshy, earthly, carbon-based entities and activities. On a walk through the woods, Venis and Randall wonder if the other eight billion people actually exist out there, and conclude that they don’t. Back at the compound, food is abundant, there are lavish spreads of catered snacks in every room, but the characters never touch them. Venis has a baby son, whom the nanny procures on schedule for some father-son time. It’s a sad scene. Venis awkwardly holds the baby in outstretched arms, then puts him down to crawl on a frozen concrete driveway. You can almost tell what goes on in his mind at this moment: he is torn between two conflicting sentiments. On one hand, this is his son and he knows that he’s supposed to care for him; on the other hand he can’t display too much affection because that perfectly natural human impulse would violate his “nothing is serious and everything is funny and cool” ethos.

Soups, the owner of the wellness app, laments, on the verge of tears, that no matter how much he meditates, no matter how many self-help books and podcasts he reads and listens to, he can’t hit the billion-dollar mark. Lol! Before the movie is over, Soups will have gotten some education about what one must really do to raise a billion dollars.

At times this disconnect reaches a surreal form: when Randall tries to boil an egg, he doesn’t put water in the pot. Jeff points it out, and then they discover that there’s no water in the faucet. The problem is not resolved in any way, and we move on. I thought Armstrong might’ve considered venturing out more in the direction of the surreal, of madness. The setting, an isolated snowy mountain lodge, the people who have lost all bearings with the world outside, all beg for claustrophobia-induced cinematic psychosis. A little bit of Buñuel, a little bit of The Shining. But then the script would have to be an hour longer, and it would’ve taken the story away from Armstrong’s focus on unlimited power in the hands of the few, and he ultimately decided against it.

Still, a madness is there. It is not a madness induced by isolation; it is a madness brought about by intellectual and epistemic decay. The tech bros are, of course, not stupid, but they’re captured by unfalsifiable concepts. They must know that Mars is uninhabitable no matter how strongly and sincerely they wish to occupy it. They must know that AI consciousness can never be attained because consciousness is a non-computable state. And yet they’re in thrall of their own TED-talky “you can do it if you wish it badly enough” bullshit. Do they think that their sheer will and loads of money will overcome those non-trivial constraints?

They never get to play poker. There’s gossip and scheming, and the movie culminates in a haphazard attempted-murder scene. (Spoilers ahead.)

Randall, Venis, and Soups conspire to kill Jeff, because Jeff refuses to sell his AI company to Venis. Each of the conspirators has his own motivation: Venis needs Jeff’s AI to help manage the deepfake chaos; Randall needs AI in the hands of Venis, because Venis thinks it can go transhuman (and thus facilitate Randall’s future non-carbon existence); Soups counts on finally raising his first billion out of the deal.

At first, they contemplate dispatching one of their security guys to do the job. They decide against it, in part, because doing it themselves is “the Nietzschean thing to do,” and then go about killing Jeff with the nonchalance and hijinks of five-year-olds playing hide-and-seek.

And here’s what happens when extremely online people try to do a manual task: Newtonian physics gets in the way. The Übermenschen reign over the realm of zeros and ones, but they struggle in the world of space, time, and causality. They get too entangled in logistics, they run through multiple scenarios, but can’t execute. Their unfamiliarity with anything tangible, anything analog, is what prevents them from realizing their devious plans. Their minds are sharp, but their hand-eye coordination is poor and their mastery of kinetics is abysmal. The three of them fail to overpower Jeff on multiple attempts. Finally, they manage to corner Jeff in a sauna, where, under the threat of burning him alive, they wrestle a capitulation. Jeff signs NDAs and a letter of intent, selling his company to Venis and Randall. As part of the deal, Soups gets two billion dollars for his meditation app.

I think that Armstrong meant for the scene to be somewhat comical. I didn’t find it funny at all. Their flippant, Joker-like glee, their chants of “Khashoggi! Khashoggi!” with which they chase their friend around the house point at the existence of some previously unseen levels of psychosis. It was quite chilling.

The morning-after scene was also bizarre. After the previous night’s near-death ordeal, Jeff casually walks into the kitchen, where his would-be killers are having breakfast, and engages in small talk. Sure, he has plans to sue them and get his company back, but wouldn’t he want to first GTFO? This doesn’t seem like normal behavior. Maybe it was an attempt by Armstrong to hammer home his Succession-era main takeaway one more time: These are not serious people. The country is run by men with a maladjusted perception of reality who either plan on living forever in cyberspace or are currently living in a movie. They’re acting out a public persona, but there’s no substance underneath the mask. And perhaps, this is an out for us. With their epistemic closure, with their alienation from the empirical world, with their reliance on mere appearances, the players’ cache of references is limited and quickly depleted. They all risk being stuck in a self-referential loop where they will imitate an imitation. Their act will soon become a derivative of a derivative, like an AI model trained on its own slop before it collapses on itself.

We, the NPCs, just have to wait it all out in the analog world.

Katya Grishakova is the author of The Hermit (Heresy/Skyhorse 2025), a novel about a Manhattan bond trader who goes through existential crisis. She writes at her Substack The Center Holds.

“I have been on the road for the last five months . . . really thinking the worst of people.”

This is how comedian Bill Burr opens his 2010 stand-up special Let It Go, right before he launches into a tirade detailing his disgust for the human biomass he regularly encounters at the airport. It’s a sentiment you’d expect from a comedian who is known first and foremost for his anger. But contrast that with how he opens his most recent stand-up special, 2025’s Drop Dead Years:

“It’s kind of a weird thing to be over fifty, really starting to realize how fucked up you are. I thought I did stand-up because I loved comedy. I did stand-up because that was the easiest way to walk into a room full of a bunch of people that I didn’t know and make everybody like me.”

Not only is the message different, with Burr focused on his own faults rather than the faults of others, but so is the setting it’s delivered in. He’s not on stage when he says this. Instead, he’s leaning up against a wall outside the venue, speaking straight into the camera. The framing resembles a reality TV confessional. It’s only once he gets this insight off his chest that he’s able to go out and start telling jokes.

What happened in the intervening fifteen years that brought Burr to this conclusion? What made him turn inward and realize that he, not other people, was the main source of his problems? The answer lies in the long arc of his stand-up material. On the surface, his jokes may seem to be nothing more than a litany of complaints. But dig a little deeper and you’ll see one man’s ongoing attempt to confront, control and reckon with his anger.

Burr has been one of the preeminent comedians of what’s been called “The Second Comedy Boom,” typically marked as beginning around 2009 and lasting far longer than its predecessor in the 80s. He’s delivered eight one-hour comedy specials across multiple platforms, hosts an incredibly popular podcast, has acted in premier TV shows such as Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian, and was the first comedian to ever perform in Boston’s hallowed Fenway Park. All the while, he’s been known for his propulsive, vitriolic stage presence, dropping nonstop expletives while ranting about the problems he encounters in everyday life and society at large.

His first two stand-up specials, 2008’s Why Do I Do This? and the aforementioned Let It Go, certainly fit this bill. He goes on profane diatribes against Oprah, self-serve checkout lines, corporate greed, and weekend trips to the farmers market. They’re laugh-out-loud funny the entire way through, but Burr’s finger is always pointed away from himself during these specials. The problems are out there, the fault of some nebulous other, never the guy yelling while holding a microphone. He acknowledges his anger on occasion, but he mostly seems resigned to it, believing it to be an unchangeable part of his personality.

Burr’s perspective starts to shift in his 2012 special You People Are All the Same. For the first time, he realizes his anger has a direct impact on the people around him. Or, more accurately, it has a direct impact on his dog. He sees that the violent outbursts of his pit bull are the result of her emulating his intense and fiery energy. Because he moves through the world a certain way, the dog follows suit, and Burr has to deal with the consequences. No real solution is offered at the end of this bit, but the acknowledgment is a significant first step.

His next few specials follow a similar pattern. Burr is aware of his anger, he sees its negative consequences, he tries to work on it, but no meaningful progress is ever made. He’s like Sisyphus, pushing the boulder with all of his might, only for it to wind up back at the bottom of the hill. In 2014’s I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, he’s worried about having children because of how his temper might impact them. Flash forward to 2019’s Paper Tiger, he’s a first-time father trying (and failing) to control his temper around his young daughter. The theoretical has become the real, but no major changes have occurred. In fact, he closes that special by detailing how he refused to cry when he and his wife had to give their dog away. Instead, he bottled up his feelings and “added it to the shelf of anger that sits in every man’s chest.” Afterwards, he couldn’t help but wonder, “Who that I love in my life is going to pay for that in the future?”

I remember watching Paper Tiger and thinking, “Man, when is this guy going to get it together?” I had been following him for years, and aside from being a fan of his comedy, I was rooting for him. While he was as funny as ever, he seemed to be spinning his wheels emotionally, unable to access a deeper truth that was dying to get out. Luckily, the catharsis he was seeking was not far off, and it would change everything for him.

The true turning point occurs in 2022’s Live at Red Rocks. Burr details a psychedelic experience he had while on mushrooms and how it helped him come to terms with his inner demons. He didn’t feel a sense of bliss or peace while on drugs though. In fact, quite the opposite. It was a bad trip, but it had positive consequences.

As the mushrooms started to take effect, Burr was overcome by, “This profound sense of loneliness and not feeling loved.” He laid in bed, freaking out, trying to figure out what this feeling was, until it finally dawned on him.

“Oh, I know what this is . . . . This is how I felt growing up!!”

He then dives into his emotionally turbulent childhood, a subject he’s discussed on stage before. Only now he looks at it in a new light. For the first time, he acknowledges how damaging it actually was, both in the short- and long-term. There’s a clear and obvious connection between what he experienced in his early years and the way he acts now. He sees his frightened childhood self in his daughter’s tears after he yells about an unexpected Zoom call, not realizing she was in the room. It’s then and there that he vows to not make the same mistakes his father made with him when he was growing up. He doesn’t want his kids to end up like him.

Which finally brings us to Drop Dead Years, named after the time in a man’s life where he might just drop dead out of nowhere, presumably from decades of suppressing his emotions. How do we find Burr after his grand realization just a few years prior? The answer is similar in tone, but very, very different in subject.

The same comedian we know and love is still there. He curses, he yells, he gets riled up. But he’s now quicker to acknowledge his own shortcomings. He opens the special with an extended bit about being more agreeable with his wife, and identifies himself as a significant source of their marital discord. “She agreed to spend her life with me and I’m being this curmudgeonly asshole. And I’m kind of ruining the one life she has.”

More importantly, we hear a word from Burr that hasn’t come up once in his seven previous specials: sadness. After claiming that men are only allowed to feel two emotions (“mad” or “fine”), he describes in vivid detail his own sadness and how he copes with it: by ignoring it or burying himself in useless hobbies.

This, to me, is the most revealing part of the special. Obviously, his sadness didn’t pop up out of nowhere. It’s been with him the entire time. His habitual anger is just how he covered it up, because anger is a preferable alternative. It makes me think of a line from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye:

“Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

It’s easier, and more fun, to be angry than it is to be sad. And Morrison is right about anger: it does involve an awareness of worth. When you’re angry, you’re saying, “I deserve better than this.” You validate yourself. Burr has gotten a lot of laughs out of his anger, but it’s not the primary emotion that underlies his explosive reactions. Once you get to that primary emotion, to the sadness that sits at the core, anger stops being so fun. You see it for what it really is — a defense mechanism.

Think about the growth, the years of serious introspection, it took for Burr to evolve from the comic of his early specials to the one we see today. That he came to this realization in his fifties makes it even more impressive. The older we get, the more entrenched our patterns become, and the harder it is to change. Making such a drastic pivot on the back nine of his life required Burr to admit he’d been living and thinking the wrong way for decades. That takes a level of bravery and courage most people do not have in them. He might not have found it at all if not for stand-up, if he hadn’t been confronting these issues night after night, year after year.

As a fan, and as someone who performed stand-up comedy for fifteen years, Burr’s trajectory captures what I love most about the art form. His specials contain a clear through line, a cohesive narrative arc. We’re introduced to the core issue in his early work, watch him struggle to resolve it over the next several specials, and witness the emotional climax during his mushroom trip in Live at Red Rocks. It all culminates with the denouement of Drop Dead Years. Both Burr and the audience finally see it all so clearly: his anger and comedic proficiency, the two things he’s made his name off of, are masking the sadness that lies at the heart of the man onstage.

I can’t think of a modern comedian who has presented an entire 360-degree view of themselves in their specials the way that Burr has. On top of that, he never stops being funny. Never once does he veer into preachy territory, or make his set feel like a monologue. Not many comedians can pull off the rare combination of being both funny and genuinely revealing. For most, it’s a trade off. I love Dave Chapelle, but I’ve just about had enough of his persecution complex over his last few specials. Why does he feel the need to keep poking the bear when he’s already so beloved and most people are on his side? Louis C.K. remains one of my favorite comedians of all time, but I really wanted to hear why he felt compelled to masturbate in front of those women. If anyone could dissect that situation with humor and grace, it’s Louis. Sure, every performer is entitled to draw boundaries at what they want to share, but as a fan you always feel a sense of disappointment when something’s been left on the table.

I wish more comedians took Burr’s route. Comedians in general have a weird relationship with what they call “honesty.” It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in comedy, but it’s not always authentically practiced. Comics will talk about their sexual exploits, drunken misadventures, mental health issues, etc., and claim that they’re being honest. But genuine honesty requires genuine risk. An audience expects comics to talk about those topics. Comedians are supposed to be the sad clowns whose lives are falling apart. When a comic delivers what the audience expects, there’s no real risk of rejection. Contrast that with John Mulaney, in his latest special Baby J, telling the audience how disappointed he was that nobody in his rehab center recognized him. The main point isn’t his drug use, it’s the personal defects that led to him using drugs in the first place. That is a level of honesty that doesn’t make a comedian seem cool or exciting or fun to hang out with. It’s just disgusting vanity, laid bare for all to see.

I also wish audiences demanded more from their performers. Comedy fans can be annoying in the way they revel in the inadequacies of their heroes. They cheer on the personal failings of their favorites to make themselves feel better about their own shortcomings. In turn, the comedians become victims of an odd sort of audience capture where they don’t want to mess with what brought them to the dance. If Bert Kreischer ever puts a shirt on again, it’ll be a miracle. It’s stagnant performer and audience dynamics like this that lead to comedians winding up dead in some random hotel room in New Jersey. The myth of the tortured artist is a hard one for comics to break out of once they’re fully caught up in it.

Burr goes the opposite route. He makes fun of fans who don’t want him to change. During Red Rocks, when Burr mentions that he’s a changed man, an audience member cries out “Bullshit!” To which Burr quickly replies, “Are you saying ‘bullshit’ because you don’t believe me, or because you don’t want me to leave?” He doesn’t want to be someone’s excuse for why they didn’t better themselves and grow up.

This is what makes Burr a truly transcendent comedian. He’s willing to confront things other comedians refuse to confront. He wants growth. He wants change. He wants to become a better person, for both himself and for his family. And he trusts that by becoming a better person, he will ultimately become a better comic. We need more artists like him to light a path for the rest of us to follow.

Peter James is a former stand-up comic living in New York City. He currently writes the Substack Diary of a Failed Comedian.

Prophesying cultural doom has become a popular pastime online, to the point of being hackneyed. I have been guilty of it myself. My most popular post on my Substack, Cross Current, titled “There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness for Most of the 21st Century So Far,” has the subhead “Human Mediocrity Will Pave the Way for AI Supremacy.” Dramatic, I know.

When I say I see a speck of light in my crystal ball, this is not some manifesting hocus-pocus. I hurt my own brand by saying this, potentially losing scrollers fiending for their next fire and brimstone doom sermon. Sorry, no stone tablets here.

For the past month, from April to May, a string of releases has reinvigorated my faith in the power of theatrical cinema. If there are even three more films as good as the three I am reviewing here, this will be the greatest year in cinematic history since 1999, meaning of course this will be the greatest year for film this century.

What makes this month so different from all the others? Blockbusters may have been all Marvel or Fast and Furious, but have we forgotten all those great indies? Even Netflix was releasing great films like Roma. I guess I would point to the evolution of what Stephanie Zacharek in Time calls a “real movie” or a “movie movie.” What she means is a movie that is worth leaving the house and watching in the theater. While she does not limit the criteria to include only big, bold projects, that is what unites all three of these phenomenal “movie movies”: ambition. Yes, they are intelligent, moving and have an artistic sensibility. Still, Alex Garland, Ryan Coogler and Andrew DeYoung know all too well that, in our era of “Voice” audition pop, pretty West Village influencers who perform their privileged consumer choices and creepy AI videos of bread rolls morphing into puppies, you either go big or go home. Mousiness and restraint are a luxury that we cannot afford in our current moment.

Why is the cultural sea change happening in film before music? In the sixties, it happened the other way around. Being able to release a song as soon as possible was an asset then. Nowadays, as anyone who has been on the Substack feed for only a week has read by now, all this fast media everywhere is leading to fragmentation, weakening any unified, significant cultural direction. Only movies, with their limited number of theatrical releases, have the magnitude to influence the zeitgeist now. It is not only happening in movies. Literature has also returned to its perch for arguably the first time since the sixties. Substack’s network is the right size for a cultural scene to be nurtured. Music, forever a slave to TikTok, is at the mercy of the most inscrutable algorithm in history. If sixties music was sent out like baby Moses in a basket on the Nile River, today’s music is that same baby going down the whitewater rapids without a helmet. In the 2000s, music had a more Substack-size network of blogs and websites (Pitchfork the biggest of course) to help the signal to noise ratio at that time.

But now the movie theater is where the revolution is happening. For most of our young century, TV was the center of widely-recognized prestige. Even now, streaming is having its own moment, but the sheer volume of available shows dilutes the impact. A string of incredible shows (Severance, Adolescence, The Rehearsal) gets drowned out by the cacophony of reality shows and low-engagement, casual viewing potboilers. I don’t know what’s crazier: how dizzying this past month has been for film or how bleak much of twenty-first century cinema was preceding our current moment.

Let’s not get confused: I am not saying theatrical cinema is saved from its financial doldrums (although all three of these films have been box office successes). What I am saying is the movie industry seems to be in such a rut right now, it looks like the suits are going down gambling. If a blonde in yoga pants can make more money showing her morning routine than your average film can, is it surprising that aging, Ativan-chomping studio execs are saying, “Folk singing Irish vampires in the 1930s Mississippi Delta? Fuck it!”?

The first shot in the revolution was fired on April 11, when Warfare was released. Based on writer/director Ray Mendoza’s experience (co-director and writer Alex Garland helped translate this experience to film) as a Navy Seal in the Iraq War during the Battle of Ramadi, the film plunges the audience on a military overwatch where the Alpha One Platoon monitors and protects a U.S. Marines mission. Moments after air support has been pulled from their theater of operations, an enemy grenade is lobbed in the platoon’s makeshift sniper’s nest, leaving sniper Elliot Miller (Cosmo Jarvis) injured. As Elliot is led into an Abrams tank for evacuation, an IED is detonated, killing their translator Farid (Nathan Altai) and wounding Elliot and Sam (Joseph Quinn). The team retreats asking for air support and another evacuation plan.

As you might have guessed, critics are expected by staff and readers to give plot summaries, but the focus of Warfare is not on story or even character, but atmosphere and tension. Film schools in the future (if there are any) will use this as a prime example of how to keep an audience on the edge. The opening scene, where the team watches the music video for the Eric Prydz song “Call on Me,” with sexy women doing aerobics, foreshadows the dynamic of the film subtly. The song begins with a muffled sample of the Steve Winwood ‘80s corpo-pop hit “Valerie,” with no drums, before coming in clear with a beat on the hook. After the IED explosion later in the film, the audio is also muffled for minutes, with the hypnotically tranquil smoke lingering in the air. Cut to the injured parties inside screaming in shrill agony for help at full volume. The quiet/loud dynamic returns throughout the film at unpredictable times, leading to an uneasiness throughout and after. When I left the theater (Nitehawk at Prospect Park), I remember being suspicious of any quiet moments on the M train, hoping another bomb wouldn’t go off. Sam Fuller said the only way you could make an anti-war film was to fire a gun at the audience. This is the next best thing — and a far better anti-war message than whatever preachy message or commentary the film’s detractors wanted spoonfed.

Unlike Warfare, the follow-up to Alex Garland’s Civil War (my favorite film last year), I did not eagerly anticipate Sinners, which was getting touted by critics for its message. Three reasons I decided to walk into Williamsburg Cinemas and see it with an open mind: it is a hit film that is not a reboot or a sequel; it apparently has quite a few steamy sex scenes (I support the return of sexuality in movies like Challengers and Babygirl); the folk and blues soundtrack has created online buzz. Needless to say, my expectations were exceeded.

Smoke and Stack Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan) are twins from Chicago who head to Mississippi in 1932 with money they stole to buy a saw mill from a white racist and turn it into a juke joint. They hire their cousin, Preacher Boy (Miles Caton), to play the guitar at their new venue, against his preacher father’s (Saul Williams) wishes. His music is too good: it attracts a gang of Irish folk-singing vampires, led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell), that bite Stack’s white-passing ex Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, never more glamorous). Shit turns left real fast.

Even for a mainstream major studio film like this (Warner Brothers, as opposed to A24, the indie powerhouse that released Warfare and Friendship), the strength is less in the story (which comedian Shane Gillis hilariously, if callously, compared to From Dusk Till Dawn). What makes it stand out from all the other formulaic hits (as of this writing, the live-action Lilo and Stitch reboot is poised to win Memorial Day weekend) is the music. On the one hand, Sinners is a glorious last entry in the fading folk horror genre, bringing the typically Eurocentric genre to the Black South with blues and actual Irish folk music (weaving in African folklore, of course). If director Ryan Coogler will be remembered for anything, it will be for creating places you want to visit, possibly live in. In 2018’s Black Panther, it was the fictional African nation Wakanda. Here, it is the Delta in the 1930s.

Sinners could also be the beginning of another era, or another revival anyway. I imagine the elevator pitch for this film: “O Brother, Where Art Thou? with vampires.” The bucolic music lulls you into a trance, vulnerable for the next fright. Do not be surprised to hear more Delta blues at the multiplex in the future. One minor gripe I had: there is a scene where Preacher Boy’s playing is so good, a portal in time opens and musicians from the past and present enter, including Black rock guitarists and turntablists. It felt like Coogler lost confidence in Preacher Boy’s performance standing alone. These performances should not be interrupted by anything except shrieking vampires.

All three of these films finally bringing this moribund decade to life are horror films in a sense. Warfare is a war movie, but it gave me the most jump scares I’ve had since The Shining, which I saw as a child. Sinners fits snugly in the genre. The dark comedy Friendship has its own nightmarish visions to share. Perhaps it's a sign of the times (or living in New York City) that the two theaters I saw it in (AMC Empire and Williamsburg Cinemas)1 had the most laughs I have heard in a movie theater since Step Brothers back in 2008. Like Step Brothers, Friendship might prove a bigger success as a home release, but for now it is outperforming expectations.

Suburban dad and corporate drone Craig Waterman (the fearless Tim Robinson) and his wife, Tammy (Kate Mara), who recently beat cancer, put their house in Clovis, Colorado up for sale. One day they receive a package meant for their new neighbor, local weatherman Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd, who only gets more charming with age). After he drops off the package to Austin (and Tammy suggests that Craig make friends with him) they hit it off. Then Austin introduces Craig to his friend group and, during a round of play-fighting, Craig sucker punches Austin. As a sign of contrition and bizarre self-chastisement, Craig eats a whole bar of soap from the garage sink.

Like Warfare, the monstrously bizarre gags (sight gags as well as verbal, refreshingly) are spaced apart with moments of quiet, simmering tension, patiently letting the pressure build. For this reason, and many others, some which I will touch on later, Friendship is and will be my favorite film of the year. To be skeptical of a comedy being so high on a critic’s list is to forget the anarchic force that Mad Magazine possessed, along with Dr. Strangelove (no problem comparing this movie to that one, especially since they are both successful dark comedies and Tim Robinson looks like George C. Scott), The Firesign Theatre, The Committee and M*A*S*H. Unlike even the other two films, Friendship is a film that truly seems to have moved past the culture wars.

This is not to say that it has no social commentary, or that it is for everybody. The broadly funny scenes, like Craig smashing through a glass door, should play to the cheap seats, sure. But those demented flourishes, like when party crasher Patton (played by potential scene stealer Conner O’Malley) ends a speech by saying “I’ll leave you with this — we absolutely should still be in Afghanistan,” carry a wattage that will only resonate with younger (and young-at-heart) misfits. Whether this movie will be a blockbuster remains to be seen, but it already has a rabid cult following that mocks those on social media who didn’t get it, calling them normies who should go back to watching their Marvels (there’s a running gag in Friendship of calling a Marvel superhero film “a Marvel”).

If it surprises you how popular this film is with the youth, you are forgetting that comedy is the lingua franca of Gen Z. It is also mind-boggling that most studios had cold feet about Tim Robinson as a movie star, when most youths are laughing at his “I Think You Should Leave” sketches on TikTok and Reels while avoiding going to the multiplex to watch any of the “more bankable” stars. Friendship might just become this generation’s secret handshake, like Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited was for a different one. The roaring laughter of the theater audience (which hasn’t been heard after years of Hollywood avoiding comedies to better appeal to global markets and indie studios steering clear so as not to disturb their stuffy liberal patrons) is like the signal of a new age, like the opening arpeggio of The Byrd’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” that announced the arrival of the Sixties.

Again, this is not a film without commentary. This is a film about the (male) loneliness crisis. Like Warfare, it doesn’t call attention to its message. It shows us instead of telling us. Though Craig’s psychedelic trip in the back of a smartphone retailer is, on the surface, a gag that plays against the stereotypical colorful, surreal drug sequence by having Craig order a sandwich at Subway — wouldn’t you know it, Austin takes his order in this sequence — it ends up being the most revealing scene. In his real life, Austin is a celebrity while Craig is an office schlub whose wife (she separates from him shortly before his trip) hangs out with her ex-boyfriend and whose son barely respects him. He craves approval, especially for his high-paying job. In the Subway sandwich shop trip, we see Craig at his core. Understandably, he imagines Austin at a lower tier than him, remembering his order and everything. But Craig is incapable of imagining himself as anyone greater. He clearly can’t imagine Austin respecting a cubicle jockey like him, nor can he envision himself as a CEO or even a punk rock star (yes, Craig has a terrible grasp of what punk rock is). In short, he doesn’t want to imagine better for himself, he wants to imagine worse for his frenemy.

Sure, I am overhyping a Tim Robinson comedy, go ahead, say it. Ignore the masterful writing and direction of Andrew DeYoung, who has primarily worked with comedian Kate Berlant, writing a comedy special (Would it Kill You to Laugh?) with her and fellow comedian John Early that also explored the hostility beneath friendship. Blow past Tim Robinson, just like I did when he was on Saturday Night Live, just like many others did when he was on Detroiters and when he had his half-hour showcase on the Netflix limited series The Characters. Reminds me of when 12 Years a Slave won against Her for Best Picture at the Oscars. But tell me which film are we still discussing twelve years after its release?

Does this mean we are about to have a New Hollywood renaissance? What do I know? From all my predictions about 2025 that I posted back in December, the only one that has proven true so far is we are about to have some great films this year. If it’s not enough to save Hollywood, then may it all burn out in a blaze of glory. Now that’s punk rock.

Mo Diggs writes about tech, culture and legacy media. His Substack, Cross Current, looks at the intersection between the new media trends of today and the legacy media trends of yesterday. It has been mentioned in the New York Times and The Guardian.

A century ago, all Hollywood knew was silent films. People flocked to the cinemas. Dressed in gowns and tuxes, they treated a night at the movies like a night at the opera. Of course, they had nothing to which to compare it. Perhaps to our bleary, overstimulated eyes, the silent film is as much a quaint relic as the rotary phone or a children’s toy fashioned out of sticks. To the moviegoer of 1925, though, going to the theater to see static photographs transformed into moving images must have seemed as mystical as the thought of flying to the moon.

Recently, I experienced a form of this magic for myself with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I wanted to watch it out of obligation. Could I call myself a cinephile if I skipped over this colossus of cinema history? But I was not expecting much. How could a film without words sustain my attention or stimulate my curiosity? Well, it did. Swells and silences in the score, monumental production design, the expressive faces of talented thespians — all of it coalesced into a stirring depiction of greed, industrialization, and class.

However, Metropolis left me nonplussed. My profession — the medium of this very review — is erected on words. Without language, literature topples. I should not have been so riveted by a film that rendered my area of expertise superfluous. This quasi-crisis was further stoked by my ongoing reading of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, in which he seems to liken Western language to a convenient but oppressive tool, one that strips us of our empathy and deprives us of reaching the depths of emotion. Were those silent films onto something? Did we lose out on something profound when we introduced dialogue to the screen? Don’t get me wrong: words matter. Words breathe life into a blank page. Words are the easiest form of communication. Words are mellifluous. So, why couldn’t I peel my eyes from the screen for the 85 minutes of Flow’s duration? A film not just without words, but also without humans. What could an animated film with a cast of growling, mewling, cawing animals possibly illuminate about the live-action, literate world of Homo sapiens?

When I queued up Flow, I was not expecting to like it. Rather, I was expecting to experience nothing more profound than simple entertainment. Full disclosure: I bear an unwarranted aversion to animated films. My narrow-mindedness has deemed them fodder for children or the parents of young children. (A penchant for animation, however, is not as unsettling as those Disney-obsessed adults, especially those who choose to get married in the company of underpaid workers sweltering under Goofy costumes or chafing in the synthetic frills of princess dresses.) But I was intrigued by Flow for two reasons: its Latvian origins and its lack of dialogue. The idea that this film emerged from a Baltic country the size of West Virginia and is competing with its swollen, big-budget American counterparts is fascinating. A classic underdog tale. What piqued my interest the most, for the reasons recounted above, was the lack of words. Metropolis, at least, had intertitles spliced in with dialogue and narration. How would Flow tell a feature-length story without such ostensibly necessary crutches?

The premise of Flow is straightforward: a flood destroys the home and surrounding forest of a cowardly cat. Displaced and alone, it must seek out the help of other animals to survive in an uncertain world. The cat, true to its nature, is terrified of the water, but also unwilling to collaborate. Here is where the conflict unfolds. Can an individual escape death? Can one person, or creature, recover after being deprived of their home? Can dire situations lead us to unite and to laugh at the pettiness of our differences?

As the water level rises and the cat meows at the desolate horizon, a sailboat manned by a capybara comes to the rescue. The cat jumps aboard. It is far from happy, though, about having to share the vessel with an oversized rodent. What begins as a two-animal crew slowly, and unwittingly, collects new members. The cast of characters is unexpected — who could have thought of putting a capybara and a lemur together? But more importantly, the animals represent distinctive and often opposed archetypes. A languorous, unflappable capybara. A materialistic lemur. An affable dog — breed: golden retriever. (What other breed could be so doltish and good-natured?) An honorable secretary bird. And the skittish, independent cat. We see ourselves in each of these characters. We see the good and the bad of human nature. And perhaps that is the most impressive quality of Flow: these animals are flawed. Like humans, they err and regret, but they also understand their mistakes and grow because of them.

For half of the film, the cat sulks in the shadows. When it toes into the light and stalks the length of the boat, it is not for the purpose of camaraderie. It gazes at the novel surroundings or tracks the fish swimming in the water. Everything else irritates it: the capybara’s incessant napping, the lemur’s bucket of rattling trinkets, the dog’s clumsiness and unshakeable joy, the secretary bird’s authoritarianism. The cat believes that the rest of the animals are weighing it down. It believes that it can fend for itself, even in an environment where it has no bearings.

Over and over again, the cat and its shipmates are helped by the actions of others. The secretary bird sacrifices a wing and is ostracized from its flock to protect the cat. An enormous, prehistoric whale saves the cat from drowning; later, it helps to free the crew’s crashed boat. When the lemur loses its prized glass sphere, the capybara swims to retrieve it. The dog always tries to do right, even if it sometimes results in broken mirrors and unwarranted excitement. We come to realize that this disparate band of animals is linked by the foreignness of their circumstances, drifting along in a world without answers or guidance — not so far off from the inner crises we confront day-to-day. Eventually, the cat realizes it, too. In a scene that elicits a huzzah from the viewer, the cat finally dives into the water to catch fish. A pile accrues on the deck. Dozens of multi-colored, multi-patterned fish. Ready to gorge on the fruits of its labor, the cat stops. It glances around at the rest of its mates: quiet, hungry. And instead of eating, the cat totes a fish to each of its companions.

Besides the endearing characters and the universality of its story, Flow is a visual feast. The animation lacks the hyper-realistic gloss found among its contemporaries. For that, I am grateful. In some ways, it is reminiscent of rotoscope animation. Patches of color shade fur and feathers like dollops of paint on a palette. The forest and the ruins of an ancient city are depicted with transportive attention to detail. Water — the antagonist and a notoriously difficult substance to animate — mesmerizes. Ripples across the surface, reflections of trees and snouts, refractions of sun. Still water and frothy water and torrential water. It bursts through the screen and sweeps you along on its current.

The authenticity is bolstered by the soundscape. Rather than using AI-generated animal noises, the film crew recorded woofs and hisses and pattering paws from real creatures. Even if you can’t tell the difference, aren’t you filled with a sense of wonder knowing that the noises you hear come from living, breathing beings? Films are magic. At their best, they reflect the ingenuity of the creative mind, the ability to replicate on the screen the complexities of life. The spontaneity of human touch imbues cinema with that magic. CGI and the calculations of machines strip it of that sublime quality. Most animation is computer-based — there is no way around it — but Flow surpasses the confines of circuitry and flows into the realm of the tangible, the real, the human.

There is a timelessness to Flow that contributes to the shared experience between its characters and its audience. We are thrust into a world that may or may not be our own, into a time that may or may not be our own. No landmarks or metrics of progress indicate if it’s the distant past or a post-apocalyptic future. As such, our disorientation is akin to the cat’s. Side by side, we’re charting these foreign passages and learning to exist in a strange environment.

After watching the film, I decided to read more about its creator, Gints Zilbalodis. Flow is Zilbalodis’ second feature. His first, Away, is an awe-inspiring feat. In the span of four years — between the ages of 20 and 24 — he wrote, directed, edited, and composed the music for Away (he knew nothing about animating or making music). The best film school? Diving into a project and doing it yourself. Learning on the fly. Comparisons to John Cassavetes and Richard Linklater and Sean Baker — all of whom made or make compelling, insightful films that transcend their limited resources — are natural. They are stories told with unflinching honesty. Stories that recognize the exceptional in the unexceptional. Past art should not inform one’s evaluation of an artist’s current work (but I am not a professional critic, so I suppose that affords me a little leniency). Yet, I found myself even more enamored of Flow after learning about Zilbalodis’ guerrilla-style spirit. More importantly, knowledge of Zilbalodis’ artistic journey tells me that greatness is not manufactured in prestigious schools or through access to high-tech gadgetry. Greatness comes from practice, from devoting oneself wholly to one’s craft. Even better, if you have something worthwhile to say, that triumphs over any amount of money and elaborate technology. Millions of dollars thrown at a superficial story will not result in emotional depth. Perhaps it will look pretty, but that is nothing more than the gloss of the unreal. As a fledgling writer, this provides me great comfort: pursue art for art’s sake, pursue it because you cannot do anything else, and you will create something sincere.

Perhaps I am overlooking flaws because it’s an animated film, because I went in with tempered expectations. Perhaps that was wrong of me — to preemptively dismiss a film as incapable of introspection due to its medium or the simplicity of its story. Often, however, the breadth and intensity of emotion lies in the smallest of details. In the quotidian and the banal.

Words are important. But words are not our sole means of expression. Were that the case, we would not be moved by the sonorous notes of a Mozart sonata or the vivacious colors of a Matisse. In the end, words are one of many tools we possess to delineate meaning. Flow decides to use the language of the body and the language of music. Though we witness emotions portrayed on the snouts and beaks of animated animals, we appreciate the universality of such feelings: fear, greed, anger, grief, remorse, elation.

We may not see human faces or hear human language in Flow, but we encounter the challenges and celebrations of humanity.

Daniella Nichinson is a fiction writer from Philadelphia, where she is an avid tennis player and an old soul. You can find more of her work here.

Search the internet far and wide, and you’ll find that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fan-edited videos of Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho; Bateman is portrayed by Christian Bale in the film adaptation directed by Mary Harron. Beneath these videos is an interpretation of Bateman as an Übermensch figure with the ideal body. This powerful investment banker lives in luxury, carved from nowhere like a porcelain statue, with a devil-may-care attitude.

Many of the movie’s scenes have been parodied numerous times. A scene where Bateman walks into the office while listening to Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” shows him in his glory through bright and distorted filters. His morning routine — an obsessive attempt to have the perfect skin texture through conditioners, as well as an intense exercise regimen — is also highlighted in these edits. Other popular scenes include all the men comparing their business cards and Bateman becoming very envious when one’s more textured; the infamous sequence of Bateman’s execution of Paul Allen, after he monologues about Huey Lewis and the News, is recreated with Huey Lewis. There’s also no shortage of memorable quotes like “cool it with the antisemitic remarks” or “I’m going out to return some videotapes.”

It is unclear whether they are in on the joke or unironically endorse the viewpoint. One can argue that the people making these edits do not understand the movie, nor are they supposed to sympathize with a megalomaniac. Others say that American Psycho is necessary and a warning about the plight of men. But 25 years on, the film is a memetic reflection on not just Reagan-era materialism and machismo, but the viewer’s own vices. And it has determined how one should interpret the villain’s neuroses.

Bret Easton Ellis’ novels have been notoriously difficult to translate into film, and American Psycho was no exception. According to the New York Times review, Patrick Bateman was like a sophomore who turned Dorian Gray into a bore. But he’s a template that’s akin to Alex DeLarge and the narrator from Notes from Underground. When the novel was published in 1991, the graphic violence inspired widespread outrage. Gloria Steinem notably condemned the novel for its alleged misogyny. (Ironically, Steinem happened to be Bale’s stepmother, which Ellis notes in his mock memoir Lunar Park). News outlets often singled out the novel for the inspiration of real-life massacres and murders. (In Australia, where I’m writing this essay, it was shrink-wrapped and restricted to adult readers). Harron achieved what seemed to be impossible: staying properly faithful to the novel and retaining much of Ellis’ substance.

The film adaptation received better mainstream reviews than the novel, but it still inspired a great deal of outrage due to its violent nature. For his part, Ellis has gone on the record about his mixed feelings on Harron’s adaptation. He felt that the book is Bateman’s stream of consciousness, but that the medium “demands answers,” meaning that the ambiguity will be completely lost. Spoken in first person, the novel lays bare Patrick’s propensities for violence and treating women, whether it’d be his fiancée or various mistresses, as individuals to be conquered. But for all of its subversions, it was difficult to make his downward spiral an endpoint of Bateman seeing everything as a commodity, perhaps the core of Ellis’ critique of an era where wealth seemed easier to accumulate.

There are certain elements that Harron didn’t translate from the novel to the screen. Rather than highlighting Bateman’s ambiguity, she focused mostly on the pomposity of the yuppies. This choice was ripe for social satire, but it also meant that American Psycho’s gory violence is minimized while the viewer laughs at the character’s vapidities. Huey Lewis and the News and Genesis are signifiers of middlebrow taste, and Bateman’s intense monologues about the bands before he turns lustful or murderous are the biggest punchlines. Harron also turned Donald Kimball, a private detective played by Willem Dafoe, into the film’s moral conscience, in contrast to Bateman’s amorality. All of this to balance the film’s darker tones with a playful bounciness that results in the film’s high rewatchability.

Harron and Ellis both have the same aim to see Bateman as ultimately inhuman, but understand that he’s supposed to have a conception of being one. He is a product of high-end consumerism. It seems easier to embrace the film rather than the novel because of the perception of the author and filmmaker. Ellis is far more sympathetic to Bateman’s plight and has embraced the role of the artist provocateur. In the novel, it’s never entirely clear whether Bateman is killing or hallucinating. Harron, meanwhile, ultimately views Bateman with disdain, and she doesn’t miss the opportunity to make fun of his vanity. One has to admit this decision has served American Psycho, the film, well.

The film proved to be bleak and hilarious, largely thanks to Christian Bale’s magnetic performance as Bateman. He delivers his lines with such a sarcastic punch and revels in the film’s self-awareness that this character is ultimately childish and privileged. The violence is still shocking, with one scene involving him wielding a chainsaw naked while chasing a prostitute who has already witnessed his body count. Harron directs it from the victim’s point of view as if it’s a typical slasher movie. The never-ending hallways she tries to run away from are delirious and stressful. Simultaneously, there’s a hilarious bit where Bateman takes a break from his carnage to taste her feet.

Bateman’s inner remorse can be a bit of a charm, in contrast to his friends and fiancée, who are about as self-satisfied as he is. He briefly becomes vulnerable when he’s around his secretary Jean (played by Chloe Sevigny) and struggles to execute her. Only when she finds out about sketches of his murders does she react with emotional distress.

So what do netizens see in Patrick Bateman? There’s an internet phenomenon called Literally Me that refers to the ability of the viewer to relate to certain characters. It’s an umbrella that consists of disaffected young men, including Tyler Durden, Alex DeLarge and Patrick Bateman. All of whom are largely flawed, unreliable narrators who rebel against polite society. The empathy towards Bateman, as a sigma male — seen as self-reliant, independent and a lone wolf, who has no affection for any other human being — from young men almost matches with Ellis’. After all, he told UnHerd: “It was the end of the Reagan era: yuppies, Manhattan, Wall Street. What it meant to be a man, how masculinity was defined, was very different from what I aspired to be. And yet . . . I wanted to fit in.”

Some are confused as to why fans won’t understand that Bateman is ultimately a punchline on privilege. I feel that they speak more or less with their social anxieties without having the capacity to commit heinous acts; these characters are shaped against what society demands of them.

Through memes and a perpetual search for meaning, millennial and zoomer humor has become more surreal than it is up-to-date with the film’s absurdity. As Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, “Rather than trying to restore meaning and sense where they’ve gone missing, the style aims to play with the moods and emotions of an illegible world.”

Fans of American Psycho view Bateman as someone who fulfills himself with deluxe experiences, filling in whatever blank slate he has. That fantasy is reflected not just in fan edits of the character, but is extended through the macho posturing of influencers and content creators that would algorithmically shape the minds of young scrollers.

But by the end of the movie, Bateman wants to be recognized for his killing. Following his execution of Paul Allen, he uses his apartment to hide all of his bodies. Eventually, the place became clean, and no proof of his crimes can be traced. His confession does not alarm any of his colleagues, and so when he tries to be plain about it, they become offended. He did not achieve closure, so he is stuck in the cage built around him.

American Psycho was released with a wave of movies about being detached from society — Fight Club, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich and American Beauty — near the end of the 20th century. The trope of young men’s struggles for recognition has only become more prevalent, particularly in entertainment. As digital natives, young men have never been more lonely and directionless. And with Luca Guadagnino directing another adaptation featuring Austin Butler in the lead, there’s a possibility that it may follow the discourse it has already inspired, or produce one that could be even more absurd than Harron’s. But the discourse has already ensured that Ellis’ vision of Patrick Bateman is intact, as long as many people are interested in seeing him as someone other than a serial killer.

Adrian Nguyen is a freelance writer and essayist. He currently writes the Substack newsletter . He lives in Sydney, Australia.