If you saw my Top 10 list for 2023, you’d notice it was published in July – a full 6 months after the calendar year ended. Here, I’m sliding in a week past that previous record. The reasons remain the same: work, family, and the simple fact there is so much to see and so much of it not quite feasible to see until well into the next year. So here we are.

Many films I’m sure are great but I never got around to: Anora, The Brutalist, Challengers, All We Imagine As Light, The Substance, Nickel Boys, etc. There are many. Hopefully one day I will see them.

But the beauty of writing this nearly 6 months into 2025 is that I know what really stuck with me. First, a some acknowledgment of films that didn’t quite make the cut but still had much to offer.

A FITTING FINISH: Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl

This film holds my favorite sight gag of the entire year: an alliterative sentence of a penguin doing prison pipe pull-ups. And then it follows my second favorite sight gag: that same effortlessly cool penguin, Feathers McGraw himself, sweating literal beads of sweat. There’s definitely a nostalgia button being hit here, bringing back a villain from the Wrong Trousers film I first saw over 20 years ago, a short housing one of the greatest chases in animation history. But no corners are cut. The puns are as plentiful as ever. Gromit’s face remains relentlessly elastic. And it all builds to a clever, rousing finale. My four-year-old found the gnomes utterly terrifying once they went evil (“Dada I don’t like this movie“), only to continue watching from the kitchen, inching further and further back to her sleeping bag before asking to watch it all over again.

ANXIOUSLY ANIMATED: Inside Out 2

Last June, at the tail-end of an incredible trip to Costa Rica, I convinced my wife that we should see a movie in San Jose in the Cine Magaly. Of all the (not very accessible) options, I figured we would see Inside Out 2, or, as the marquee called it, Intensa Mente 2. The dialogue would be in English and the subtitles in Spanish. Surely I could use my two years of high school Spanish from 20 years ago and match it with a little bit of understandable dialogue – what could possibly go wrong?

Needless to say, I deeply overestimated my Spanish. But even as I pieced the story together visually, it was hard not to feel the sequelitis running through the film’s veins, like it was working overtime to assure me that yes, there is enough story worth telling and no, this is not some kind of studio cash grab. It’s a simliar structure to the first film. It adds several more characters. There’s also two memorable voices missing (Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling) because Disney didn’t want to pay up. So it all feels like it’s tumbling towards something new while being strangely handcuffed by the Mouse Powers That Be. I definitely enjoyed some of the weirder bits (the 8-bit character in Deep Memory) and the impressive puns (The Sarchasm). Anxiety (Maya Hawke) and Envy (Ayo Edebiri) add perfectly-cast voices to the mess the characters create.

But by far the best part of this film – and the thing that transcended whatever language barriers or lack of access I was dealing with throughout – is the very real way it shows a manifestation of an anxiety attack. You can feel Riley working through it, trying desperately to keep it all together. And you can see how all the emotions are furiously trying to keep her from spinning out of control. It’s the high point of the film and worth revisiting.

A WEIRDER DRONE: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

A tweet that has stuck with me over the past year is Drew McWeeny’s observation that every drone shot is like the cinematic version of a throat clearing. Whenever I see it in films or TV these days, that’s all I can think about. A story going “uh, um…” as it leads to its next thought. So for a film that’s been in Development Hell for literal decades, with screenplay after screenplay being considered and scrapped, it’s no surprise the opening minutes of this film are littered with drone shots. It’s as if Burton himself isn’t sure how he wants to get into the story after being away from the Beetlejuice universe for so long.

But for a movie with such a long development line, this could have been so much safer. There are tantalizing story lines set up that go absolutely nowhere – you can’t just bring Monica Bellucci in and discard her like that! – and not all the jokes hit. The Jeffrey Jones running gag definitely went meaner and longer than necessary.

But the best part is undoubtedly the really weird shit like Willem DaFoe’s undead cop, a true example of an actor Understanding The Assignment and having an absolute blast doing it. The legacy sequel has really held no juice for me. I have to be convinced to care somehow. And if it can’t tell a story that makes sense – the less we say about the ending, the better – it can at least give us a few more shades of bizarre humor.

STING OPERATION: Hit Man – written and directed by Richard Linklater

A darling of the 2023 Venice Film Festival, many of my favorite film critics bemoaned a true crowd pleaser being gobbled up by Netflix’s cash and deprived of a proper theatrical release. When it finally arrived to the streamer, premiering in June of 2024, I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. The reality of this film is that, like many Richard Linklater films I’ve seen over the years, it can fall into an intellectual rut. What looked from the trailers like a blast of pop ended up being more of a singer-songwriter’s attempt at hitting it a little bigger, a little broader. Glen Powell continued his hot streak with this year, trying on some pretty playful personalities as the role-shifting Gary Johnson. And the chemistry between Powell and Adria Arjona could probably power at least a few small towns.

If you’ve heard about the iconic Notes scene in the final act, I can assure you it’s as clever and delightful and sexy as you’ve heard. It’s so sparkling that a) I couldn’t believe it had been done onscreen before and b) I forgot all the minor nitpicks that could possibly have come up (could he really type that quickly beforehand?). In the end, the tone takes another shift and truly commits to the bit, offering a real sting of commentary on how we’re all playing roles until we find just the right partner in crime.

BARK AND BITE ALIKE: Nightbitch

I’ve been a huge fan of Marielle Heller’s last two films, and the minute I heard about the synopsis, it felt like a perfect marriage of director and material. And, in many ways, it is. But it’s also a case where the material got warped to the interests of the director, and yielded a fascinating document.

This New Yorker article should be a companion piece alongside the film. You can definitely feel, with it’s intricate shifts and specific POV, like this is something deeply personal to Heller. Amy Adams gives a performance full of empathy and anger, the perfect actress to lead this story through. This could have just been a film about a woman reclaiming her life and her story. What elevates it even further is the way it allows the husband to come around and realize what he’s missed. Kids complicate everything, and they especially complicate a protagonist’s journey, when the two adults need to figure out what the new normal looks like. This progression away from the premise and towards some greater understanding makes the film shaggier, but it also makes it that much more meaningful. It’s a brave film. A brave actress helping a brave director tell a rather brave story. It’s not for everyone. It may never get its due. But I’m glad Heller got this out of her system in the way only she could.

SLIGHTLY SHORT-CIRCUITED: A Wild Robot 

There is much to admire about this film. The voice cast, led by Lupita Nyong’o’s powerfully gentle work. The animation style in the way it feels messy in a very controlled manner, art bustling with chemical reactions. That it’s being directed by one of my favorite animation directors in Chris Sanders. So much to like! Even the trailer, with it’s remix of “What A Wonderful World” felt like it was designed in a secret lab to make me, and specifically me, cry all the tears. 

But there’s a funky shape to this film that I suspect short-circuited the waterworks. The film makes you think that Brightbill’s moment of flying is the emotional climax. But there’s still an entire second half of a film to go. Which leads to an ending that feels a few scenes too long, blunting the emotional impact. This is the kind of film that makes you feel through 60% of it like it’s going to make you cry, living in your chest and threatening to break everything loose. But that ending, as it becomes increasingly protracted – the key deviation from the excellent Peter Brown book it’s based on – lets out so much of the steam it has built. Perhaps it’s trying to set up a sequel that may or may not be made. But it might also just not be able to fully trust its own story and splits the difference. 

Movies are hard to make. Animation even harder and longer. There is still so much to celebrate about this fine film. I just wish it had a smoother landing in the home stretch.

A SLICE OF THE PIOUS: Conclave

Every Easter, I think about a tweet from a film critic who once said, “If church was like The Last Temptation of Christ, I would have gone a lot more.” So much of what held people back from seeing Scorsese’s classic back in the 80’s still holds true now: the assumption of depiction versus a more human, more relatable reality. I found Willem Dafoe’s Jesus so engrossing not because he was tip-toeing some kind of make-believe line of decency; instead, he had fears, doubts, and desires just like you’d expect from every 30-something male. It made him more relatable and thus all the more powerful a story. 

Unless you’re fortunate enough to visit the Vatican, you don’t really see any of it up close. The only sense of movement the rest of the world sees – beyond the papal visit or speech – is white smoke from a chimney. Only then do we know change is on its way. What Conclave does so artfully and entertainingly is expose just how normal these gossiping gentlemen are. Deciding on the new pope is an enormously stressful experience for a man already doubting his own place in things, and few can communicate so much with their face alone quite like Ralph Fiennes. He is the moral center of the film just as much as he’s the canvas for which we can paint our own projections upon. Any film that has Stanley Tucci, Jon Lithgow, and an assortment of other perfectly-cast actors is going to keep me glued to the screen. The cinematography and production design work in concert to make the most intimate of conversations feel epic, like little verbal dances across a sprawling, immaculately-framed chessboard. All of it leads to a conclusion I found unexpected and moving in equal measure. Perhaps it’s fantasy to hope for a fairer world where the right pope for the moment is chosen. But Conclave reminds us that real change comes from all the things we cannot see.

A HUGH LEAP FOR HEROKIND: Deadpool + Wolverine

I didn’t have high hopes for this one. Six years is a long wait from the last sequel, even if a studio merger, COVID, and strikes complicated the timeline. I was not crazy about some of the people involved this time around. And my Marvel fatigue is an old t-shirt I retired to my closet years ago. It would take a lot to pull me back in, and the early trailers showing a greyish CGI hellscape didn’t do the trick.

There is still so much about this movie that doesn’t do it for me. Many of the jokes fall flat, especially in the juvenile attempts oriented around Deadpool’s nebulous sexuality. The mask allows Reynolds and the crew to ad-lib to their heart’s content, and that level of contentment is a whole layer of atmosphere above where I stand. And that’s okay! It doesn’t have to be for everyone. But, despite all these gimmicky warts, what brought me back in were two things: the connection to the early 2000’s Marvel and the indomitable, indefatigible acting energy of one Hugh Jackman.

Seeing Channing Tatum as a ridiculous version (that accent!) of Remy aka Gambit – an X-Men hero rumored for decades before finally getting a shot onscreen – instantly got me on the rooting side of the film. And having Elektra and Blade, the real OG’s in this Marvel universe that keeps getting rebooted, made it even sweeter. I don’t have any real connection to these characters. But it is fun to see Jennifer Garner and Wesley Snipes have their own kind of fun with revisiting the past. Everyone seems to be getting a kick out of this big-budget cosplay, and I’m not beyond enjoying it.

But Jackman commits so hard to his role, to so convincingly showing you the deep anguish Wolverine lives every second of every day with, that it warps the entire film to its own gravity. Anytime Deadpool’s side of things gets too far out into the quick quip realm, Jackman wrangles it with his voluminous forearms and twists it into something far more tolerable. The van fight is a clever use of tight space and powerful abilities, but it’s the monologue that precedes it, when Wolverine tears Deadpool an asshole and a half, that really pulled me in. Jackman believes this universe, this script, this character more than anyone possibly could. He doesn’t just sell it. He collects royalties by the second, with each micro shift of his brow, each mutton chop sweat drop.

The ending still makes absolutely no sense to me. It seems to undercut the entire emotional journey of the characters, regardless of how they both nearly died to save the world – or universe or branched timeline or whatever it is these days. But I don’t care: it’s just great to see people care about the things we once thought silly, and to be reminded of just how powerful they can be. Humor is a significant force. But commitment to the bit – that’s a superpower.

WHEN MISERY NEEDS COMPANY: Hard Truths

It took a Delta flight a couple months ago to finally catch up with this film, and I’m still digesting it. So much has been made about Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s stunning (and criminally overlooked) performance as Pansy, the most entertainingly miserable person you’ve seen onscreen in a while. Every little thing sets her off. The lines that are too long, the people wanting her parking spot, the strangers who dare look at her the wrong way. Pansy could probably find a way to complain about her own shadow. And Jean-Baptiste so artfully allows you to see how much energy this woman expends on all this discontent just as the cracks show you how much she exhausts her own spirit.

What I love – and what sticks with me, still – is how writer/director Mike Leigh doesn’t judge. There is every reason to give Pansy a moment of comeuppance, where someone finally lights into her and snaps her out of it. Instead, Leigh gives us contrast. There is a bit of whiplash that occurs when you see Pansy practically foaming at the mouth about some nonsense, only to shift to a hair salon where her sister, Chantelle (a luminous Michelle Austin), is the center of a free-flowing, open environment full of laughter and warmth. There is no way these two could be sisters. But as you see everyone around Pansy slowly moving away, Chantelle stays close. Midway through the film, the two sisters visit their mother’s grave. And while cinematic history may have conditioned us to believe a major breakthrough will occur here, Leigh doesn’t let anyone off the hook. “I don’t understand you, but I love you,” says Chantelle.

In the final scenes of the film, Pansy has driven everyone away with her outbursts and her unwillingness to accept the help and light of others. She lays in bed, hoping she can sleep away whatever is rotting within her. Meanwhile, downstairs, her husband, with a badly twisted back, calls for her. Neither one is able to move – one physically and the other emotionally. Even then, Leigh refuses to judge or give us answers. A film of remarkable performance and restraint that will make you rethink how your own energy affects those around you.

I WILL FOLLOW YOU INTO THE DARK: Rebel Ridge

Every year, there’s a highly regarded film that I finally get around to and then, as I’m watching, I inexplicably – and during a key sequence! – fade in and out of Napland. One year, it was Arrival. Another year it was Pig. Both great films that absolutely did not bore me; just had the misfortune of being seen on a Friday night when my body needed a reboot before my brain accepted the terms. A similar situation happened with Rebel Ridge in the (literal) darkest scene of the movie. I have an inkling of what happened. I looked at Wikipedia after to confirm the suspicions. But somehow that body reboot of a nap blunted my emotional engagement.

But by the time Aaron Pierce is rightfully praised for what will surely be an outstanding turn in next year’s Lanterns HBO series, many of us will point to Rebel Ridge as the proof of concept for Pierce’s superstardom. Yes, he is 6’3″. Yes, his piercing eyes make you feel like you’re hiding a secret you’re not even aware you have. And yes, he’s classically trained from England like so many male action film stars these days. But not every actor can put all these things together into something intriguing. Pierre does it with ease.

Despite my brief nap, I have no problem recalling that Rebel Ridge is an exceptionally clever film about how you can defeat a rather overwhelming enemy through nonlethal means. It’s truly masterful the way writer/director Jeremy Saulnier is able to ratchet up the tension as the minutes go by and Pierre’s predicament grows increasingly desperate.

Come for Pierre’s rise, so you can say you saw him back when he was in a film only released to Netflix (even better, watch him in Barry Jenkin’s Underground Railroad on Amazon Prime). Stay for Saulnier’s muscular direction and carefully laid out story of a man trying to fight back against severe injustice the only way he knows how.

And now, the stickiest of 2024:

10. A Real Pain

You could make the argument that this is a film about two great character actors playing something eerily familiar. Eisenberg’s Richie comes across like a lot of neurotic, stressed-out Eisenberg characters. And Culkin’s David isn’t too far from Roman Roy, with his unpredictable cadence and propensity for saying wild things at perhaps a tick or two past the right moment. But, to me, this is all deceptive. It’s going to relax you. You’re going to think you know what you’re seeing. Two very odd ducks coming together to go on a Holocaust tour. They’ll probably bond. Share some big tears together. Find some greater truth in life to unite behind. You’ve seen this kind of movie before. You can practically feel it.

But that’s not what this is. And what really sticks with me in the months since I’ve seen it is how artfully Eisenberg (who wrote and directed) lays out these two men who are so desperate to be more like the other, and yet will never get there. Richie is the responsible one. He plans everything. He reaches out. He is The Good Guy who does the Right Thing. But this also, in many ways, makes him invisible. And Richie knows it. He knows how painfully square he is, but he can’t quite break out of it. And as much as David pains him with his unpredictable behavior, he can’t help but look on in envy when his cousin effortlessly connects with these people he’s never met before. The way he can get them to all drop everything and do silly poses in front of very real, very solemn historical statues.

It reminds me of an essay I read nearly twenty years ago and which has haunted me in the many hundreds of weeks since. Charles Baxter compares the fiction writer and the poet, and while the strokes my feel broad, the characterization rings true. Fiction writers are often deep in their heads. They’re piecing together the story, the dialogue, the little bits of their own life they can lift and put into fictional place, like a puzzle with just the right kind of felt on the bottom. The poet, on the other hand, lives in the moment. They don’t hold onto things. They seek out experiences and connections. They lead with curiosity and introspection, keeping them in The Moment far more than the fiction writer can ever seem to manage. But the poet is jealous of the fiction writer’s ability to rewrite anything, to bend the narrative towards something that feels better, perhaps even truer. The fiction writer wants to be less absorbed in thought, less up their own narrative ass. They want to be each other. At least a little more of each other. A perpetual battle that will never be won or lost.

9. Lisa Frankenstein

I will watch anything Diablo Cody writes. Beneath the playful dialogue and offbeat characters is deep empathy. She loves her little weirdos and she understands that we are all little weirdos in our own way. Zelda Williams brings a lot of flair to her directorial debut, and what I will remember more than anything is how much this film commits to an ending I did not see coming. Sure, the 80’s fashion and music is a lot of fun. Cole Sprouse and Kathryn Newton really sell their bizarre little relationship.

It starts really cute and playful and then accelerates in a way that if I became a Human Wikipedia and read you the plot, sentence by sentence, you would short-circuit. It’s insane. It sounds like a bunch of questionable ideas somehow strung along into a feature. But it’s the audacity of it all – and Cody’s delightful, yet human touch – that gives it all the electricity it needs to bring it to life. I still smile thinking about how everything went from the expected Frankenstein’s monster film into something only Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could dream to be. We need more genre fare with a flair for fun, and highest of kudos to Williams and Cody and their team for making this low-budget delight.

8. The Fall Guy

Two years ago, David Leitch came out with Bullet Train, in which a pretty great concept (a man fighting his way through a train full of escalating challengers) is led by a massive movie star (Brad Pitt) and injected with offbeat humor that doesn’t always stay on track. This past summer, Leitch has The Fall Guy, another film sporting a great concept (a stunt man goes undercover to win back the love of his director), a massive movie star (Ryan Gosling) and injected with offbeat humor that doesn’t always land. All of this to say: Leitch continues to make films that are shaggy as hell. Not all of it works. At times you can feel the bumps of a production with perhaps more money than it needs. But what elevates this year’s Leitch production is Drew Pearce’s smart script and the bubbling chemistry provided by Gosling’s co-star in Emily Blunt. I never quite fully believed in the movie Blunt’s character is supposed to be making – which she herself isn’t a believer of either – but I bought, 150%, the dynamic between Gosling and Blunt. And there are few funnier shots to me this year than Gosling, in a big truck he mistakenly believes to be a closet, quietly crying to Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well”.

What Leitch’s last two films do especially well at this big-budget action hybrid stage is allow character actors to let their quirk flag fly a little freer. Hannah Waddingham gets to play someone several shades darker than Rebecca Walton. Aaron Taylor Johnson gets to flaunt just how little brains can exist behind an 8-pack. Winston Duke gets to ham it up as a stuntman bestie.

It’s an expensive soundtrack packed with 80’s anthems and power ballads. It just feels and sounds like guys having the time of their lives, living it up in Australia through stunt after stunt after stunt. You can feel the fun of it all. And I especially delighted in the way Pearce injects the metanarrative of our two lovers at the heart of the sci-fi film, like an almond-centered chocolate candy. Pure fun that should have made many more millions at the box office.

7. I Saw the TV Glow

For the longest time, I yearned for a mass cultural event. It’s why I watch the Super Bowl alongside social media – it’s one of the few things we have left that so many people partake in at once. But sports, for all its narrative flourishes, can’t always compete with the cultural depths of art. Art has been defragmented in a thousand streams (pun fully intended). We don’t have albums to obsess over. Movies aren’t in theaters like they used to be. Books lack a communal space for discussion that isn’t haunted by Nazis and Reply Guys. And there is just too much goddamn good TV out there. Nostaglia is a dangerous drug, but I think it’s easy to misunderstand what we truly long for. For me, it isn’t so much a time or place; it’s a common shared experience to obsess over. I still remember the Wednesday nights from college friends and I would gather for the latest LOST episode, and the way our minds were collectively blown with the first flash forward. And how, just a few blocks down the next night, there’d be a watch party for The Office. Or how, as a Resident Assistant, I marched 45 freshmen through Riverfront Park on our way to see The Dark Knight in IMAX, freaking out every passerby with my gnarly, melting Joker makeup.

As much as I love writing these little Best Of lists, the desire to do so has sometimes felt more like inventory – etchings into wood to be revisited later – than something to be shared. The chances of readers having watched all these same movies? Basically nil. The chances they will seek any of these out and find a way to fit it amidst their already expansive, ever-expanding media diet? Only slightly higher. What Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow gets is just how important those shared experiences are and just how much we die a little inside when we have no one to share it with. And especially when no one else gets it quite like you do. Owen (an incredible Justice Smith) is in denial of just how much The Pink Opaque has impacted him, even as a childhood friend comes back trying to draw him back into that communal safe space. We are all dying to share the things we’ve seen because we’re all dying to be seen a little bit better. And to feel like that thing that so profoundly affected us was real. That it happened. And that it cannot, regardless of administration or climate, be erased.

6. Love Lies Bleeding

Any movie that can convince Ed Harris to have that awful of a mullet wig is going to be worth it. Kristin Stewart brings a sweaty loner desperation to Lou that’s instantly captivating, and the chemistry between her and the wayward Jackie (an outstanding Katy O’Brian) is heartbreaking and real. Dave Franco has never been sleazier until his JJ meets a mindblowing (maybe kinda pun intended) end. Every actor really makes you believe in the reality of this.

The ending is what still sticks with me, many months later. Our gals have seemingly fought their way – both physically and metaphorically – through the last remaining ties to their difficult past. The desert surrounding them and the miles of highway before them suggest a life they can happily rewrite. It almost feels too good to be true. And then there’s a stirring in the back of the truck. A body once believed dead has sprung to life. Next: we see Lou digging the body she just had to re-kill while Jackie awakes. It’s that kind of nap where you wake up and realize things are much harder than you dreamed of. That the truth will catch up to you, eventually. And that the fantasy you’ve been living just might be more real than you can handle. It’s a deceptively simple ending.

What I still think about, months after first seeing this, is how writer/director Rose Glass (alongside co-writer Weronika Tofilska) shows her characters under smaller lights, surrounded by growing shadows. The frame is expansive, bathed in darkness. And there’s our characters, only visible from the small range of light they’re standing in. It’s an artful metaphor in so many ways. The way we have to make our own little happiness, and the way we can be fooled into thinking we’re safe when we are surrounded by what will devour us.

You can tell Glass just wanted to tell this weird, little crime story in her own way and, when given the opportunity, passionately makes the most of it. She’s absolutely someone who is now on my radar and I cannot wait to see what she comes up with next.

5. His Three Daughters

There are few genres of film I enjoy more than “let’s get some of our best actors together in a small intimate space and let the fireworks fly“. And when you combine some of my actual favorite actresses in Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen? I’m there. I’m so there.

There are many movies about siblings coming together as a parent is dying. But I’ve never seen one quite like this. I love the way the writer/director Azazel Jacobs initially films each of these three very different sisters, all alone in their own frame, even as they’re sitting at the same table together. That separation by frame continues through most of the movie, subtly breaking apart. And then, by the end, we rarely ever see them alone.

In many ways, Coon has the hardest role. She’s bitter. She’s angry. She doesn’t understand why her pothead sister just couldn’t get a simple form signed. She is a heavy presence everywhere she goes, even as though she wants to believe herself to be a feather floating amongst the wind, confused as to why people are not more appreciative of her. Coon finds all the edges in the silhouette and all the light that can squeak within. It’s astonishing work.

We know by Lyonne’s limited response that she’s a dam waiting to burst. And yet Jacobs and Lyonne keep you waiting, letting other people – including her boyfriend (Jovan Adepo) – speak and fight for her. And when she finally breaches the wall? It’s your tears, not the metaphorical water. It hits you in the softest spot. The narrative and audience patience is rewarded.

But Olsen nearly runs away with the whole thing. The way she so carefully lets us see a woman cracking from within, someone who thought they had it all figured out and isn’t sure how to let the world see she most definitely hasn’t. She’s never comfortable, even when she’s doing her yoga breathing exercises in the living room. It’s the kind of work that often goes unnoticed at awards season but that when you stumble upon it later, you’ll look around the room for a witness, any witness, and wonder aloud, “How did she not win all the awards for this?”

I still think about a moment late in the movie when the father (Jay O. Sanders) of the three daughters – who’s presence has only so far been heavy breathing heard down the hall – is brought out into the living room. He suddenly stands up, pulling off all the tubes and tape he’s been entombed in, and delivers one lucid, haunting thought after another. He’s full of love and regret and a desperate need to get out any important thought he has, like a door is about to be closed on him. It’s so jarring and yet so fitting. And Sanders is the perfect vessel of an actor for it. The masterful thing about this sequence is that you know it has to be some kind of dream sequence. There is just no way otherwise. But it’s a catharsis that’s only possible because of the patient story steps taken beforehand, as beautiful a dramatization as I’ve seen of what can happen when three people at odds with each other finally see the light. Sisters who were once shot in isolation are now always within the frame, together, forever.

4. Mad Max: Furiosa

I still think about the opening scenes of this astonishing film, the way the low, distinct rumble of the motorcycles sneaks up and lives within the theater walls as we watch characters chase each other over long, blue sand dunes at night. The way that George Miller lets this prequel reference Fury Road in ways that only deepen it. The way that Chris Hemsworth, Thor himself, absolutely disappears into a role as this muscular yet desperate villain, Dementus.

And Praetorian Jack. What a name. What an actor in Tom Burke. What an impression.

There are so many ways this film could have gone wrong. It could have repeated the structure and all the things we loved about Fury Road. Hell, it could have just been 150 minutes of the Doof Warrior rocking out, a rock opera for the apocalyptic ages, and I would have been satisfied. But where Fury Road is almost entirely a chase film, from opening frame to last, Furiosa builds instead like a biblical epic broken into parts. This isn’t just the story of Furiosa (Anna Tayler-Joy). This is the story of the Land of Women fighting back. Of protecting what’s theirs. Of trying to find a glimmer of hope in a sea of darkness.

I confess I did not see the point of this film until I read Kyle Buchanan’s excellent Blood and Chrome, which revealed how, in the long gestation of Fury Road, Miller and his team had written an entire prequel that is very much the film we came to get this year. Miller and his team have lived this tale, day after day, year after year, and the obsession pays off in astonishing ways. I still get tickled thinking about the various set pieces and how they play out differently in shape and rhythm. The long shot of Dementus’ monster truck chasing Furiosa along the ridges of large, cracked land. The first time we see death by motorcycle. The final confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus, when she realizes that revenge will be something she has to define and live with, because death is not enough.

I don’t know what kind of tax credit wizardry had to be agreed to with Australia to make something this big and weird and beautiful happen, but I’m so glad it exists. It’s a complete vision. The thing that still sticks with me a year after seeing it is the closing moments when we see how Furiosa has decided Dementus’ fate. It’s the cleverest kind of “revenge” I’ve seen onscreen in a long time, a kind of mythically-tinged moment that may or may not be true and yet could make a believer of anyone.

3. Sing Sing 

There is a moment late in this extraordinary film when Divine G (Colman Domingo, deserving of all the awards) is at his parole hearing. The film has carefully laid out for us all the reasons to be hopeful. Divine G is clearly a positive presence in the community at Sing Sing Correctional Facility: setting aside his pride and taking another troubled prisoner under his wing in Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin), talking to the prisoners when play director Brent’s (Paul Raci) words aren’t quite hitting the right way, and offering inmates ideas and ways to do better at their next parole hearing. We want Divine G to win because we see how deserving he is. We know there’s some kind of tape that’s supposed to exonerate him. Everything will, for once, work out. Justice, as we see it, will finally be served.

But then Domingo offers some of the best acting I’ve seen all year when you can see it slowly dawn on Divine G, mid-interview, that he’s not going to get the news he’s worked so hard for. Worse, he’s interviewed in such a callous manner, leading up to when he’s asked, point-blank and soaked in disrespect, if he’s been acting in front of the panel. There are about 5 different layers of things going on in Divine G’s head at this point, and Domingo plays them all like a heartbreaking symphony. From there, the film only gets more artful, laying down each devastating card it had carefully hinted at before. When Divine G finally breaks, it’s just as bruising to see how beautifully the men around him absorb it. They don’t overreact. They don’t fight. They just stand and listen. Because they know that anger and they know how badly they wanted someone just to listen to them once. So they do it all together, as a community, a safety net being offered for a man ready to jump. 

Kwadar and his team clearly did their research, and by using former prisoners (and members of the Rehabilitation for the Arts program depicted in the film), there is an almost effortless economy to the storytelling. When Sean Johnson, on the verge of seas of tears, pleads to Divine Eye to let go of the anger consuming him, you believe it. When Divine G tells his fellow thespians that anger is the easiest emotion and Raci, with the perfect disposition, exasperates, “too easy,” you believe it. The camera understands the most valuable part of the film is their collective stories which, in the limited time of a movie, means we see through their faces. The 16mm film makes all the contours, wrinkles, and bumps of each of these characters pop. We know these are men who have lived and are striving, every day, to get a little more color back into their lives. 

But I keep coming back to the vulnerability. The acting exercises they willingly perform together. The endearingly goofy props they put together with cardboard and dreams, all in service of a truly out-there time travel story involving gladiators, Egyptians, and Hamlet. The way they share their dream places, each of them as varied as their personalities. They are creating space for each other to feel a little more human each day. And within that space, they can allow the art to heal them. Healing doesn’t happen on its own; it must be done within community. And what a community this is to briefly be a part of.

2. A Different Man

Categorization, by definition, dehumanizes. Studios hope to fit their films within neat genres to make them more marketable. But many of the most unforgettable movies are the ones that defy this neatness. They yank at genre boundaries like yarn, running and weaving into its own final form. Aaron Schimberg’s exemplary, deeply reflective A Different Man is such a film. It lurks with Lynchian and Cronenbergian horror, harkening back to old-school, tactile sci-fi, before shifting into a psychological dramedy and settling into a daring satire that wraps it all together. I wouldn’t even know how to truly define it except as a true vision of what it means to push beyond the constraints of the stories we’ve been told to believe.

Sebastian Stan deserves all his flowers for the way he shows Edward’s transformation throughout. His posture can only be described as “haunted” early in the movie. And when the extra skin (quite literally) peels away and he looks like Stan himself? Edward doesn’t quite know what to do with this strange new power. He walks downtown, stunned at how people simply pass him by without comment. He goes into a bar he attended the previous day – in which he, in the throes of transformation, puked his entire guts out in the bathroom toilet – and has a new, ill-fitting swagger to him. He feels stiff. Like an action figure trying to figure out how many points of articulation it has. And then when unruly Mets fans come bumbling in, Edward is suddenly one of them. The way Stan screams within all the excitement says so much about the character; he is a man desperate to fit in but with nothing to build upon. He is an empty vessel in search of direction.

There is so much more to say about this film. Renate Reinsve is incredible as Ingrid, a one-time neighbor of Edward who later writes the play of the story she imagines his life to be. The way she pokes and prods at his life early on, trying to embellish it into something more interesting, only to later twist everything into an overwrought, misguided attempt at onstage empathy? I know that person all too well and yet Reinsive manages to keep Ingrid from being a completely repulsive character, finding new layers to bring to the surface. And when Adam Pearson shows up as Oswald? Everything kicks up to a whole new level of playfulness and meaning. Oswald has the same genetic condition of neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) Edward has, but he’s just about everything Edward is not and wishes to be. And Stan plays that desperate jealousy and resentment beautifully. He is a man being shown the distance between where he is and where he yearns to be and is deeply unsure if he can bridge the gap.

Often when there’s a work of art related to disability released into the public, it takes me a while to get to it. There’s a fear that your experience will be portrayed somehow, and badly. And if it’s somehow well-done, then you feel your chances of expressing your own have deflated. A box has been checked; the Hollywood bus will not come back around anytime soon. What I found so comforting about A Different Man is how I felt like it was made by someone who understood. Schimberg has been very transparent about how having a Cleft Palate affected him, over a lifetime of 60 surgeries. And his collaboration with Adam Pearson has clearly helped him find a delightful conduit through which his complex ideas can course through. Nearly every line in this film is tinged with a double-meaning. Philosophical and cultural conversations are dramatized. Schimberg has heard and grappled with them all. And he’s eager to push forward. 

I am probably going to spend the rest of my life thinking about this film, turning it over like a Rubik’s cube, feeling my way through every crease and shift. I am just in complete awe of what Aaron Schimberg and his team of Stan, Pearson, and Reinsve have accomplished. There are more layers than a forever-spinning onion. It’s incredible. The understated nature of it all makes it easy to overlook at first. And then, like me, you’ll never get it out of your head.

1. My Old Ass

It took me until my second daughter started walking to realize how much I had been a parent asleep at the wheel. At times, I felt we had moved through our firstborn daughter’s stages with efficiency because we knew we could probably savor the second one a little bit more. We didn’t entirely know what we were doing the first time around. And then we really didn’t remember what we learned the second time around. And then, by that time, we realized it was too late. She had already started walking. Our days of holding her were now numbered.

The reality with children is that everything is numbered and you are not privy to that data. You don’t know the last time you’ll pick them up. Or that they’ll let you pick them up. Or the last time they will tell you they love you and mean it. Or the last time they will actually want to sit and eat with you, rather than scurry off with their friends. My first daughter used to say, in the cutest way, “Dada, hold you” instead of “Dada, hold me.” The day she finally said it the more grammatically correct way, a small petal inside of me dropped from the rose, much like in 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. So when my second daughter started saying “Dada hold you“, something woke in me like a cold sweat. I had to document better. I had to savor it more. It would all be gone too soon.

The premise of My Old Ass – a high school senior meeting her 39-year-old self on a drug-induced trip – suggests some humor and wisdom. But I did not expect to get so emotionally walloped. Cracks formed in the dam when Madison talked with her mother about the first night she could put herself to sleep. I felt that so hard. I could picture it so well I could almost remember the smells, the soft sound machine lights, and the slight breeze from the nursery’s ceiling fan. It was so long ago and yet just like yesterday. Time isn’t a flat circle; memory makes it feel so.

It’s easy for films with time travel concepts to suffer cognitive entrenchment with their own ideas, to go so deep in the weeds they lose the audience. Writer/director Megan Park understands none of this matters. We just need to know they’re connected and that she trusts her own metaphor. When Younger Elliot (an electric Maisy Stella) and Older Elliot (a heartbreaking Aubrey Plaza) are lying in bed next to each other, it’s one of the tightest time loops ever constructed. “You are so lucky,” Older Elliot stresses. “Life will never be the same as it is now.” She describes getting lost in the excitement of the city, of the regret of missing out on her first Thanksgiving away from home. “The only thing you can’t get back is time. When you get older, it goes by so fast, dude. So fast. It sucks.” And as she’s saying this, we can see in Plaza’s face the way Older Elliot’s done the math many, many times, and still, no matter how hard she tries, cannot find a way to find a more satisfying answer. Time is undefeated. Then she looks over to see Younger Elliot falling asleep. The message might well have been a ghost, a whisper. But that’s how it is. That’s how it often has to be. The brain has to lose the plot so the heart can even get into the conversation.

There’s especially inspired song selection in this film, even if it makes me uncomfortably feel my age. Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right” while Elliot and her girlfriends slide across water towards their hallucinogenic hubris. Justin Berber’s “One Less Lonely Girl” on a second mushroom trip as Elliot wrestles with why her girl-hunting self suddenly is in love with a guy. Even the French song “Comme Des Enfants”. But my favorite, and the one that hits hardest, is when Chad and Elliot start getting intimate with each other beneath an isolated boathouse in a rainstorm and Feist’s “Let It Die” begins, the sound of ache and longing entwined. What we don’t know is how the lyrics will hurt more later. And that’s precisely the point. If we knew the pain coming, would we still make the effort?

I went in expecting this film to be about a younger self being schooled by a more cynical older self. What I didn’t anticipate, and what sits with me all this time later, is how it works in reverse. Younger Elliott reminds Older Elliott of how to let go of the past, of how to find a way forward as they both walk into their own path of uncertainty. In the final shots, the golden hour light shines around Young Elliott’s head. Her hands reach out and knifes through the water she once haphazardly motored through. She’s going to savor this lake that gave her so many memories. She knows she’s fortunate to be aware it’s the last time, and she’s not going to let herself take it for granted.

I don’t usually publish my Top 10 lists until a month (or two, or three) into the new year. A lot of this is just logistics. It’s hard to catch all these great movies that come out in the last quarter of the year. It has to be spread out. Something has to give. And while I often find my favorites earlier in the year (this list will prove just that!) I can’t help but exercise patience in giving some late-year award contenders a chance.

When you combine that with the time-bending nature of being a full-time teacher and parent of two young children, you get a situation like this: a 2023 list over six months into 2024. But in many ways, this is how I like it. I love writing about movies that stick with me. My first attempt at a movie blog was called The Gumball Factory because that’s what the best art did for me: gave me something to chew over, on my own and with others. And if you really want to overextend the metaphor: something that I’d often catch my sole on whenever I thought my brain had discarded it.

So here it is: the stickiest films of 2023. 

A FOND FAREWELL: Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3

Maybe it’s by accident. Maybe it’s just following a roster of GOTG comic book villains and this is the biggest remaining one. But I think it’s fitting for James Gunn to use the High Evolutionary, a villain so committed to his society-developing goals that he’ll wipe out entire, well-functioning towns just for another chance at something a smidge more successful. Is that not what reboot-laden Hollywood is today? Every good, popular thing must be remade. Not to add meaning or to explore new colors in the narrative – that’s bonus frosting for cinematic foodies. No, everything must be remade to squeeze a little more juice out of the aging lemon. 

Gunn knows this as well as anyone. He’s now leading the DC film and television division at Warner Brothers, which currently has a prospective schedule full of rebooting characters. He’s currently making a rebooted Superman movie with the (and this could change!) title of…Superman. Hollywood is the High Evolutionary and it will always be. So what’s James Gunn gonna do with his final film with his beloved Guardians of the Galaxy, the franchise that helped boost Marvel’s financial and creative floor? He’s going to rage against the machine with all his unique touches.

I think it’s great he’s centered the entire movie’s narrative around Rocket Raccoon, a character that literally has a CGI mouth modeled after one of Gunn’s dogs, Von Spears. And that he begins the film with Raccoon half-singing to an acoustic version of Radiohead’s “Creep”, a reminder that this is a franchise of misfits. And that the ending involves not only saving a bunch of human orphans, but a whole Space Noah’s Ark of badly mistreated animals. I love that Gunn goes just as hard with the soundtrack, moving us into the 90’s with some unexpected choices. The fact that the action finale is scored to Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” is oddly perfect. This rag-tag team has embodied a bit of that snotty, yet earnest Beastie Boys attitude. 

There are so many ways that Gunn could have sleepwalked his way through his last Marvel movie before jumping over to his extra-full-time gig at DC. But you can see him making the most of it. The giant physical set of Knowhere. The extra gross texture to the Orgoscope or the impressive gore when High Evolutionary’s face is removed. The way he takes Gamora’s death in the Avengers films – something that probably knee-capped the trilogy story he likely wanted to tell – and makes it a message of how people may not be who we want them to be, but they’re good enough as they are. Gunn has clearly hit upon a formula that works just as well for him as it does for audiences. The Suicide Squad could be considered the R-Rated DC version of Guardians of the Galaxy. And his next movie will be about one of the biggest, yet most well-meaning misfits in all of culture: Superman.

I will remember how deeply Gunn cares about all the trilogy actors he’s worked with. You can see it in the way he sends every character off on missions that fit not just who they are but who they can be. He wants these people to do well – fictional or not. Volume 3 is a big film that doesn’t quite fire on all cyclinders – the Marvel machine grinds the gears a little too often – but the goofball and heartfelt streaks Gunn and his team paint it with make it a worthwhile ride. Gunn will continue to make big blockbuster films with lovable actors, great music, and an earnest yet offbeat approach. In many ways, he’s just like the characters at the end of Volume 3 – pushing ahead out of his comfort zone and seeing what magic he can find in the process.

A KNOCKOUT JOKE: The Killer

The funniest thing about this movie is also the realest: it’s a feature-length setup for a zeitgeist punchline. Director David Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker are in total lockstep with this, an adaptation of the French graphic novel series by Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon. It starts off funny enough, with Michael Fassbender’s narration almost comically meticulous, as if he’ll fall asleep while wanking off to the sound of his own carefully-calibrated voice. But when a mission goes awry, he must fix it. And anyone who’s ever had to be on the phone for hours – days, even – to dispute a bill will understand Fassbender’s pain as it plays out within the contract killer genre. He goes from one place to another, each finish line revealed to be the beginning of another race against time, money, and his own life. When it all ends high up in the Brooklyn apartment of a wealthy man, a big smile crept over my face. “What I’m trying to say here, and I can’t express this strongly enough,” the panicked billionaire says, “I have no issue with you. Zero. As far as I’m concerned, we’re good.” There are a comical amount of layers between him and the problem Fassbender was supposed to take care of so that the pain does not disturb the rich guy’s takeout meals. He is a man insulated from pain. And the insulation is the world the rest of us live in, the one where our bill disputes suck hours of our lives and when a mistake on the job can mean the difference between life and a callous death.

COME FOR THE LAUGHS, STAY FOR THE HEART: No Hard Feelings

If you’ve seen any interview Jennifer Lawrence has done over the years, you know she’s got a sense of humor rarely showcased on the big screen. Anytime someone wins an Oscar – as Lawrence did in 2013 – it’s hard to get off the Oscar-baiting Prestige Film Train. The trailer showed some good gags – the throat punch, the pickup line about weiners – but they successfully obscured a rather touching story about an adrift woman desperate to call something her own.

I still think about a scene midway through, when Maddie (Lawrence) and Percy (an incredible find in Andrew Barth Feldman) go to a fancy dinner at a fancy resturaunt to make up for the prom night neither of them went to. When a nearby upright piano opens up, Maddie dares Percy to show off the playing ability he previously disclosed. It all feels light and fun – an odd couple making the most of an unexpected summer connection – until Percy goes up to the piano and, to Maddie’s complete surprise, plays Hall And Oates’ “Maneater”. As he glides into the intro and the opening verses, the camera slowly eases towards Maddie, who is frozen by the fact the song applies to her way more than Percy even realizes. I still get goosebumps by the acting Lawrence does in this scene. The way she shows so many conflicting ideas and emotions on the verge of completely overwhelming her, all without moving. It’s an incredible scene to anchor the movie with, one that elevates it to something deeper than I ever expected.

THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD: A Thousand and One

I first checked this movie out after Film Crit Hulk’s effusive praise, and I’m so glad I did. Writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s thoroughly impressive debut avoids so many cliches by immersing itself in the specifics and grooving alongside Teyana Taylor’s incredible performance as Inez. But it’s in the film’s final third in which the story elevates. It takes all the cards it has carefully laid down and begins to reveal them, one by heartbreaking one. It’s here we meet the oldest version of Inez’s son, Terry (Josiah Cross). What makes Cross’s performance so unforgettable is the way he communicates so much with a character we know uses few words. Terry is often withdrawn. He needs more time to process things. But when the film’s twist kicks in, when the truth that’s been hid both from Terry and from us, the audience, is revealed, Cross devastates. Most onscreen teens we see are hyperverbal, sharing their many thoughts and conflicted feelings. Perhaps it’s because some writers don’t spend enough time around teenagers. But it also may be because teenagers can be notoriously frustrating people to converse with. They hold so much in – sometimes unconsciously, their brains still making sense of the world – and what they do share can sound completely unaware of the ecosystem around them. But Cross does it all with his eyes, with his body language, with his movement. It’s a masterful performance seeped in a honesty and vulnerability we don’t often get to see. Cross, like Rockwell’s film, avoids cliche with every choice. He meets Taylor inch for inch, giving their final scenes its bittersweet, yet hopeful sting.

A LAYER CAKE TO SAVOR: May December

What’s stuck with me most about May December is how much we gain from the layering of its narrative. We think we know this story because it closely remembers the true story of the teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and the 12-year-old male student she initiated a deeply inappropriate relationship with. But director Todd Haynes makes great use of the angles the script by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik offer. By having a try-hard actress in Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) come into the town where Gracie (Julianne Moore) and Joe (Charles Melton) reside, intending to shadow Gracie for a role in an upcoming biopic, we see the mythmaking that takes place. Elizabeth’s desperation to tell their story feels just as predatory as the media must have been when Gracie and Joe were first reported on. It’s rekindling a cycle of trauma and shame that begs us to ask: who does this story benefit and why are we so desperate to tell it again? And when will we value the cost of these stories more than eyeballs they bring?

At one point in the film, Haynes uses a gorgeous shot of Moore and Portman sitting before a multi-sided mirror, their reflections physically showing us just how many sides to the story there really can be. The additional mirrors added to the scene (per a suggestion from the cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt) makes it hard for us to figure out at first which angle is real and where characters in the scene are actually positioned. We never quite know which one is the truest angle. And it doesn’t matter. We will believe what we choose to believe. And we will find ways to distort the story over and over again. 

What also sticks with me, all these months later, is Melton’s slow burn of a performance, and the way we realize he’s missed an entire childhood. He’s there for his first child’s high school graduation and it feels much like graduating college when you realize the goal you all shared no longer exists. Suddenly they – and you – are free, and what comes after is a terrifying unknown. He melts in silent tears. There is no going back. No parent to lean on and guide him through the next phases. The only way forward is stepping into deep uncertainty. 

THE ASHES OF GUILT: Oppenheimer

This cast is stacked like a Russian Doll’s cupboard. Great actor upon great actor upon great actor, all neatly placed within roles that stretch down hallways and across boardrooms. It’s so great to see so many favorites – Josh Hartnett! David Krumholtz! David Dastmalchian! Florence Pugh! But having so many welcome sights doesn’t just put a face to a name – it makes the film skate by just fast enough to make you almost forget how harrowing it will all soon be.

The opening minutes of Nolan’s Oppenheimer show a level of editing the rest of the film doesn’t try to match. Full of suggestion and color, of visions and terrors, it’s as close to a big-budget art film as Nolan may ever attempt. And then it settles into rhythm. And, to be fair, there is a particular delight in that rhythm of watching great actor after great actor step up to the plate and knock their line or two clear out of the park. Everyone wants to work with Nolan. It feels as if the entire film is imbued with goodwill, even as it shows the outline of some of the darkest horrors of history. The scenes flow by and you can’t help but be swept up in it. 

What sticks with me the most is the way Nolan ends his film, bringing Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy, deserving of all the awards and a sandwich or five) back to the pond with Einstein (an excellent Tom Conti) as he delivers this final line: “When they’ve punished you enough, they’ll serve you salmon and potato salad,” he says, as Nolan shows us flashes of the awards banquets soon to come, “give you a medal, and pat you on the back, telling you all is forgiven.” Then the look on Einstein’s face hardens. “Just remember, it won’t be for you…it will be for them.” 

In just one line, beside a pond, we see how an everlasting history of complicity is built. People support the worst of urges in their own self-interest. They find someone else to blame. And then they circle back around, as their nightmares become too much, and try to reward their way out the guilt tunnel. They don’t want the burden. They don’t want to have to explain themselves to Saint Peter or whichever gatekeeper they believe in. They want to burnish regret and shame into a forged medal to be passed on to someone else. Let the demons find those ashes, they think. Let me admit my wrongs while maintaining my status above it all. 

I think about the line everywhere I go. The many random, all-too-late recognitions for things that were once swept under the rug and out of sight. If you look hard enough, you can see the white-hot light at the center of it all, the passion hidden or stolen. It’s almost enough, just like the bombs borne from Oppenheimer’s work, to take your breath away. 

YORGOS GOES YOLO: Poor Things

Very few filmmakers seem to be having as much fun as Yorgos Lanthimos while he chases dark ideas and quirky dreams. Not all of Poor Things quite comes together – but that’s only because it’s bursting at the seams with fantastical ideas and risks. Lanthimos allows his film to explode with color and contrastive visuals just as the loud, clashing world is being absorbed by a deeply confused yet ferociously curious Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). You can see every actor having the time of their life participating in this phantasmagoric fantasy, this technicolor acid trip of a film.

I do wish Lanthimos and his team gave us more of what they suggest in the final shots: an imagination from Bella Baxter that doesn’t seem so deeply drenched in the male gaze. But the surrounding film, and Stone’s performance at the center of it, shows just how cruel and colorful a world we bring our children into and how, at some point, we all have to let go.

A SHELL WORTHY OF HOME: TMNT: Mutant Mayhem

It does not take much to sell me on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. Even after the Platinum Dunes produced versions that came out in 2014 and 2016 with their nightmare fuel CGI designs. Even after all the cartoons made and all the toys botched (they’ll never make them as good as they used to, I keep telling myself). But a script from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg? With Jeff Rowe (Mitchells vs the Machines) co-writing and co-directing? With a new, invigorating art style? With a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score? What more could a Turtlehead even ask for? 

It says a lot about this film that the hype never felt overblown. From the very get-go, when we’re in the middle of a mission and the Reznor + Ross score rocks out, you know you’re in good hands. The good vibes are sustained throughout. 

What stuck the most with me is how easy it is to forget all these years later that these are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. For whatever reason – perhaps the suits they wore in their original live-action films or the fact they just seemed so kick-ass – I always read them as aimless twenty-somethings. Here, they embody their names in many ways. They talk over each other. They joke. They seek ill-advised thrills. And, more than anything, they just want to fit in. 

I found it an inspired choice this time around that for as gorgeous as the animation choices can be, the humans are by far the ugliest thing in the entire film. They look often look grotesque and judgmental. They look more alien than even a ninja turtle. You spend the whole film with this hilarious group of turtle teens, understanding their desire to fit in but also wanting to remind them that humans are absolutely no cooler. Perhaps that’s where the wisdom kicks in. We always think the older ones are wiser until we are them, and realize we’re still teenagers in our own hardened, shelled bodies, still desperate to fit in somewhere. 

All this and it must be said how fun this movie is. When I strived to find a movie for my 4th graders to watch before a Break, the vast majority feverishly voted for this one. It makes them feel a little cooler. A little bit on the edge. A little more like the teenager they may one day dream themselves to be. 

THE SOUND OF COMPLICITY: The Zone of Interest

It’s not often you see a movie scored with the sounds of human suffering, but Jonathan Glazer has always been one to set audiences off-balance. The genius of this film lies in how it plays like a rather standard family story. They’re all living their lives in a beautiful home, a happy life only temporarily upset by the father’s job transfer. They swim. They try on clothes. They argue about how they should not have to move. It’s all fairly standard familial stuff except for that part about the whole thing being scored to the sounds of humans being deprived of dignity and, eventually, their lives.

There’s a baby that cries almost all the way through the movie. You could think the baby is colic. But you will also be unable to ignore the gunshots, the screams, the many, many audible and visual reminders that next door to this family is a Holocaust crematorium. You’ll be unable to ignore the fancy coat the wife tries on, knowing it belongs to someone else. Or that the human remains that interrupt a family swim are not some unnatural phenomenon, but rather an everyday circumstance they’ve stumbled upon. Entire lives and family trees are being removed, one immoral decision at a time, and all you’re seeing in the foreground is a family who’s so used to it that they’ve tuned it out. It’s white noise. It’s everyday life.

Glazer and his team have created a masterful exploration of what it means to be complicit, to allow great suffering to slip into the casual noise of our lives. I still think about the final scenes when the father stumbles down the stairs, as if he’s going to vomit, to finally purge some awful thing that he’s been holding deep within him. Maybe he’s finally grown a moral center after seeing the plans other crematorium managers have. His whole body is keeled over. It’s a position we’ve never seen him in. And yet: nothing comes out. His body is used to it by now. The question becomes: is ours? 

A PLAYFUL PLAYTHING: Barbie

There was no reason to believe that a film adaptation of one of the most popular toys of all time would be good. But I trusted in Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbauch, even if I had no idea the tone they’d aim for. But the first trailer showed just how delightful it could be. And so the excitement built and built and built and it finally came out last summer in a cultural explosion worth being a part of. You can practically hear Gerwig giggling behind the screen in every scene, so thoroughly entertained by all her wonderfully-game actors, delivering lines from a script full of ideas and heart. After the more subtle, intimate delights of her first two movies in Lady Bird and Little Women, it’s so exciting to see Gerwig play in such a massive pink sandbox and for so much of  her voice and energy to carry over through the studio system.

Ryan Gosling’s Ken may have been the performance (rightfully) nominated for an Oscar, but it’s Margot Robbie’s Barbie that holds it all together at the center. She masterfully plays all the shades of Barbie’s feelings – her confidence, her self-doubt, her heartbreak when things fall apart – and gives the film the expansive emotional palate to play with. There are entire unforgettable sequences and lines I’ll always be excited to return to. Let Barbie be a reminder that you can be earnest in your pursuits (just look at how many classic film inspirations Gerwig name-drops in this video) while still embracing the absolute fun of it all. 

A LIZARD KING WORTH FEARING: Godzilla Minus One

Hollywood has really tried their damndest to make Godzilla a thing. They rebranded him in 2014 with Gareth Edwards’ earnest take and its Michael Dougherty-led 2019 follow up, King of the Monsters. Then they tried again teaming him with King Kong – himself rebranded only 15 years after Peter Jackson’s remake – in 2021’s Godzilla vs Kong and 2024’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. At this point, it feels like a classic Hollywood misunderstanding: mistaking iconography for character. Just because something looks cool doesn’t mean it will be. Don’t get me wrong: the current American Godzilla is pretty cool in its own way, especially when he blows an atomic breath blast to the middle of the Earth because he doesn’t want Kong talking shit about him. But what Japan understands is that Godzilla works best as a metaphor. He does not have the most mobile face. You can only work the eyes so much before they look goofy. You can make him too lean and look like a knockoff Jurassic Park T-Rex. He exists best as scaly, giant canvas to work upon.

What this Godzilla Minus One does so beautifully is show the percussive, crescendoing impact of trauma. Our lead character is already dealing with survivors’ guilt after the film’s incendiary opening scene. Then he feels another layer of guilt as he returns to a devastated hometown. And then – and only then – does Godzilla resurface. Instead of pumping your fists like we do in America, you’re thinking “Oh, fuck that guy.” You know these people don’t deserve any more pain. But a bill must be paid, and the chances of Godzilla paying are about as realistic as him having an online savings account.  By the end, when the line, “Is your war now over?” is uttered, I got goosebumps and tears. It reminded me of the end of the original Jurassic Park, when the final moments aren’t about the badass dinosaurs but rather the end of a terrifying journey where these people feel fortunate to survive. There is no telling what will come next. Surely, chaos will reign. But somewhere in that moment, the formed bond becomes unmistakable and worth protecting. The war may be over, but worthy battles will soon begin.

10. You Hurt My Feelings

Nicole Holofcener is one of our greatest screenwriters alive. Few are so deft at observing and depicting the emotional microtranscations we make in our everyday lives. How we’re all tightly-wound, high-functioning people until someone unlocks us with the right key and we explode out into the wide, unpredictable open. Here, an entire movie centers around Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhearing some rather honest writing feedback from her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies). The person she believes no secrets are held between. The person who’s supposed to be her person. And once she hears the true opinion he’s been withholding, it feels like all bets are off. All truths are now some from of well-dressed lies. The center, for now, cannot hold. 

Holofcener builds out her intimate thematic framework with characters who are all avoiding conversations they need to have. It’s the kind of thing that builds over years of routine, when we know the rhythms of our partners and children so well that we can sleepwalk through every hiccup. But it all adds up and, at some point, the bill must be paid.

I love the way Holofcener shows Don half-assing his way through his job as a therapist. After all, if all your conversations are happening behind closed doors, who’s there to really debate how good you are? He’s protected in a way that his wife, a writer, is not. Even when a disappointed couple threatens to sue him for therapy they claim doesn’t work, he’s unbothered. But after he lays out everything in the open with Beth, after they finally talk about the little white lies they’ve told each other, the little things they do to avoid the harder conversations they should probably consider having, he feels a shift. He comes back to the office a new person. He connects with his patients better. Holofcener walks us through the pain of truth, the ways we lie even as we’re hurt by being lied to, and how scrubbing off that scar tissue allows us to move a little better.

9. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

There’s a scene where our rag-tag group of heroes, desperate for answers, stumble upon a graveyard. There, they can ask each awoken deadman up to 5 questions before they return to their eternal slumber. They blunder it initially, asking questions to each other, only for it to be overhead by a deadman and counted against them. But then they start to figure it out, and with each given answer, we see glimpses of a battle that could easily have been slid within the high-budget fantasies of the past. That is, until they meet their on-field demise and their story reaches a literal dead end. If I were to sum up this film, this unexpected wonder of a $150 million dollar adaptation to a well-known fantasy board game, I’d point to this scene. The characters and actors play it straight, which only makes it funnier. And it ends on a perfect button of a deadman still awake, waiting for someone to ask a 5th and final question so he can finally get back underground. It’s ridiculous and hilarious a terrific use of Dungeons & Dragons lore that can delight fans and newbies alike.

Fantasy has rarely ever felt this fun. The creatures are inspired. The scenery gorgeous. And the film truly follows the spirit of a Dungeons and Dragons game in which every bit of problem-solving feels like an inspired bit of improv, of stumbling upon answers you didn’t realize existed. There are so many little nice touches set up that definitely pay off later, including a final choice at the end that – no joke – had me all emotional! You know that writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldenstein are probably a bit shocked they got people to put so much money into this. But you also know it’s gotta be a great script to get so many game, fun actors involved. Hugh Grant, especially, seems to delight in his villainous turn. Chris Pine deftly handles the silly and the serious while being a generous scene partner to actors who totally understand what movie they’re in. I could go on. In a fairer world, this would have been a massive box-office hit and a sequel would be currently filming.

8. American Fiction

The most persistent thing about this movie – the part I can’t shake, over 6 months later – is the way it shows the point it’s trying to make. It feels like we’re softly pinballing between two parallel lives, the story Monk (a pitch-perfect Jeffrey Wright) believes the world wants of him and the true life he’s not yet ready to write about. And he can’t seem to win in either one. He’s always playing catch-up while being reminded he’s not quite in control. In the literary and film world, he’s at the mercy of an algorithm developed within a system that constantly undermines him. In his own life, he’s stumbling his way through one family decision after another.

I still get goosebumps when I think about a small scene when Monk is driving back from the hospital and his family’s longtime nanny, Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), asks him a simple question: will he walk her down the aisle? It’s a marriage you’re already rooting for because it’s two people late in life, grabbing on to whatever joy they can tie around their fingers. But it also reminds you how much of the family is missing and how, despite it all, Monk has made enough of an impression that he’s the one she chooses. You can see how much it touches Monk, how much he needs it. In a world desperate to place marginalized people on pedestals that only isolate, it hits especially hard when someone unexpectedly draws us in closer. 

Jefferson has built quite the eclectic, impressive writing career over the years with his work on The Good Place and Watchmen. He always felt, to me, like the chameleon who could do it all. Here, he gets to show a little bite while showing just how much further he could push, if given the opportunity. I hope he gets it. I hope this is the beginning of a burgeoning new career direction and he goes all the way.

7. Past Lives

Too often these days I find myself failing to respond to people in a timely manner because I want to make space for them. A Marco Polo here, a text there. I leave them unanswered, waiting for the right moment that never quite comes. They are like books I’m holding, stacked high and just over my head, that I just need a place to set them down upon. 

The real beauty of Past Lives, to me, is the way it makes space. It is an interrogation of the self disguised as a movie. You know these people. You may have been then at some point in your life. You’ve used the same technology – the laggy jitters of Skype, the Facebook messages sent leaping into the unknown. The story is simple in its structure to make way for a stunning amount of emotional complexity. And that complexity comes not just from the film itself, but from you, the viewer. 

No film made me think about my own past quite like this one. It made me think long and hard about the parts of my life – both across time and space – that are inaccessible to others. How those from my childhood would not able to fully access my life here in Austin and vice versa. How there’s entire stories that I need to translate for others, over and over and over again, until I understand for myself why they matter so much to me. 

6. Killers of the Flower Moon

The last time Martin Scorsese made a 3.5-hour movie (2019’s The Irishman), I found a morning when all would be quiet and marveled at how quickly the time passed. Years of story flowed before me, all culminating in a gut punch of an ending. Just recently, I found another quiet morning to watch a 3.5-hour Scorsese movie – this one only three minutes shorter – and marveled at the how quickly the time passed, again culminating with a gut punch of an ending. This is the power of being in the hands of a true master of cinema. It’s what happens when you have an editor like Thelma Schoonmaker. When you have a writer like Steve Zaillian or Eric Roth. When you have talented actors like Robert DeNiro and Leo DiCaprio. When you have a devastating, centering performance from Lily Gladstone as Molly Burkhart. There are few people doing it like Scorsese and you can feel the man working with utmost focus to ensure he tells this story with equal parts respect and verve.

Not once did I wonder if we needed to see the whole story as presented. Everything has its purpose. The deliberate pace setting the Osage Nation chessboard up, punctuated by the sparks of quick, wrongful violence. The many characters established as dominos leading toward a death spiral they can’t escape. You won’t truly appreciate how devastatingly the entire thing falls apart if you don’t see how formidably it was built, how painstakingly everyone was put into place, and how quickly everyone became a body to be pulled in front of another body, scrambling to keep ahead of the trail of guilt.

I still think about two paired shots that take place just before everything truly descends into tragedy. Scorsese, along with his masterful cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, sends the camera through a house full of Molly’s relatives and their partners. It’s a wide swoop of a shot. We see how it’s a little too many people – too many competing interests, both present and hidden – and how it does not nor cannot truly feel like home. The air has been poisoned with greed. You can feel it as much as you can see it. But as that camera slows, we see Molly’s grandmother, clearly at the end of her mortal coil, as the shot shifts to a house empty of everything but a single, solitary owl. It looks to Molly’s grandmother and nothing more needs to be said. Death is near. We are shown just how lonely it feels. To at once be surrounded by a true community and then to have it taken away within the next few breaths. The owl will return later on as more Osage die.

The surrealism of the owl, a powerful Osage symbol, shows just how genuine Scorsese and his collaborators are. In just two vibrant shots – one of worrisome plenty and one of terrifying scarcity – we see respect paid to a rich Osage culture and the way white man’s arrival and the destruction of their community has isolated them.

I still think about the final words delivered in the film, at the end of a dramatization of a radio show meant to market the FBI’s work in investigating the Osage crimes. For all we’ve seen – the tragedies, the blood shed, the history erased – we are reminded that those who did the most wrong were eventually released, and that the original owners of the land, the Osage, would be reduced to the sound of a mocking voice actor. And so Scorsese, playing a producer within the radio show, steps up to deliver a piece previously omitted: Mollie’s obituary. As he describes her life and family, the last line is the one that hits the hardest: “There was no mention of the murders.” If you can see how devastating the decimation of the Osage wealth and community in 1920s Oklahoma was, then you can only imagine how many other histories have been wiped out and swept under the rug. This is a film that will haunt you long after its final shot. As it should.

5. Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse

There are few films I’ve sung the gospel of more than 2017’s Into the Spiderverse. Every line hits. Every character lingers. Every action scene is full of emotion and confidence. And to top it all off, it assured many risk-averse studio heads that yes, you can invest in animation that looks a little different and it can be very, very successful. So how do you possibly follow up a film so many people consider a downright modern classic? It certainly helps to have producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller – a team that’s somehow made just about every bad-sounding idea into cinematic gold – back on scriptwriting duties. It also becomes apparent that so many of the people working on this astonishing film were inspired by the original before it. And that they all have the same collective goal: to take it one step further. 

What makes this film so memorable is how it takes it further. There is certainly a god-level amount of technical work at play here, with the way so many characters are crammed into scenes and yet remain distinct. The artistry alone truly feels like a supergroup gone supernova. But what I keep coming back to is the way it pushes our characters. One of the opening scenes alone, in which Gwen must confront her father about her identity, is one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen or experienced in a movie theater. And to go there following a showstopper of an action scene with a DaVinci-drawing inspired Vulture time-tripping into a Guggenheim Museum with a pregnant and motorcycling Spider-Woman and for it all to feel as if it’s one piece? It’s incredible. How lucky are we such a thing exists? 

But I keep coming back to the way the film does a very Lord and Miller thing of using the meta idea of a canon – one that, as our cultural superhero infatuation has shown, is predominately white and straight – and how it affects the way we live our lives. Miles can see the way things should go. The person he maybe should be. But when the math doesn’t seem to math, he takes matters in his own hands, in another mindblower of an action scene where just about every Spiderman ever created is chasing him up a sky-ascending train, culminating in the line that sets everything into place just as it all is blown up: “Nah, I’mma do me.” 

I can’t wait to see what this means for Miles, Gwen, and the many Spiderfriends (especially Hobie aka Spider-Punk, one of the coolest characters ever committed to film) all wrapped up in this ever-expanding tale. I hope they take their time. The way the groundbreaking animation works with Daniel Pemberton’s invigorating score is just such a mood to bathe in. This is a series so committed to making something memorable that I know there’s nothing to worry about. They will do right by the characters and the audience. And we will be all the richer for it. 

4. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

As someone completely mesmerized by writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s debut film The Edge of Seventeen in 2016, her follow-up sat high atop my must-see list since the first trailer. You can tell James L. Brooks (Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment) is her mentor, the way she shares his warmth and empathy for characters while punching out one great line after another. But adaptations can be tricky, even when they’re esteemed sources like Judy Blume’s 1970 classic. Needless to say: Craig and her team pull it off wonderfully.

I saw this movie 9 months ago and still cannot shake Rachel McAdam’s performance as Margaret’s mother, Barbara. At the start, we learn the family is going to move to New Jersey for Margaret’s father’s new job, and that Barbara will take a break from her busy career hours to stay at home. McAdam’s eyes are lit with tickled possibility as she informs Margaret that now she will be able to spend all the time together they didn’t have before. Every parent knows this fantasy. That opportunity to trade in years of guilt for the levity of sharing something special. But then the real kicker comes in: time frees up just as Margaret becomes as independent and social as ever. She needs her girlfriends to talk about all the Big Girl things coming her way, and with a candor she can’t quite imagine having with her own mother. Barbara does her best to swallow the disappointment, and McAdams presents it in beautiful, heartbreaking fashion, a mother doing her best to find some light in a situation full of shade and isolation. It’s a valiant effort, one so consuming that she keeps forgetting to order the new couch they need. Barbara just missed the window. And now she’s a child, without friends, relearning how to deal with the world again. That’s the tough thing about parenthood – you are reminded of all the time of what you’re missing with your kids and then when you finally get it, it’s too late. 

In many delightful, all-too-human ways, Margaret spends the rest of the film trying just as much to figure out her beliefs on religion as her complex thoughts about these new phases of puberty. She sees the way religion tears her family apart – a thorny estrangement McAdam’s plays powerfully – and the way competing biological timelines threaten to spread giant cracks through every friendship she forms.

In the final scene, Margaret’s period finally arrives. She yells for her mother, who feels emboldened by the fact her daughter – so independent for so much of this wild New Jersey school year – finally needs her. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” Barbara says as they embrace. But we know. It’s so many emotions as a parent coursing through your veins, threatening to burst out at any moment. By this time, my tears are threatening to burst out, too. Barbara runs to get some pads she’s set aside for Margaret – because preparing for the possible future is definitely a parent coping strategy – only for Margaret to say she knows how to use them because she’s been practicing in her room for two months. You can see in McAdams performance – again, this should have won all the awards – how Barbara is doing the math, how she’s trying to sit her hurt at not being involved in this process along with her pride in her daughter’s growing persondom. “Well, then,” she says, pushing a smile as kindly as you she can, “You don’t need me.” She leaves the bathroom and shuts the door and that’s when my heart and chest caved in alongside Barbara’s. It reminds me of a tweet I read long ago where the difference between having kids and not having kids is not that you feel more emotions, but that you feel all of them deeper. McAdams as she shuts that bathroom door and takes it in all is Exhibit A.

Craig knows how to end this movie, this journey of a girl who’s spent so much time trying to figure out who she is alongside so many competing ideas, interests, and values. She’s had to wrestle with the opposing faiths of her grandparents and the competing interests of her fast-growing friends. She’s a duck calm above the pond but furiously pedaling beneath. And yet, here she is at the end, looking to the camera, a year older but untold years wiser, ready for the great unknown.

3. All Of Us Strangers

Family can make it feel like your past life is frozen in amber. There are comments you never escape. Ill-fitting jokes that are always repeated. A constant feeling like you can’t escape the person you were back then long enough for them to truly see who you are now. An example: my siblings insist I am terrible with directions. Just the worst. Not a person to ever count on. But every time they say it, it baffles me into a quiet submission. We haven’t lived close enough the last decade for me to give them many directions. But then I remember the trips we took together – the Canadian adventure without a working GPS, the hunting for an apartment around the wonky, turn-heavy South Hill of Spokane. Their memory of my ability to give directions is strongest in places where of course I would be bad at giving directions. I had no idea where we were going, where north, south, east, or west resided. It seems silly, but when it’s brought up – still to this day – it feels like I’m being yanked 15 years back. There’s no escaping it. 

When Adam (Andrew Scott should have got all the awards for this) struggles to write a script about his one childhood, he finds himself mysteriously returning to his childhood home. And even though Adam’s parents died in a car accident when he was 12, they’re there to greet him. They were frozen in amber at the time of their death, and now they’ve been released. Their clothes or hairstyles haven’t changed. They are clearly stuck in the 80s. What at first seems like a great opportunity to make up for lost time is quickly undercut by the tension of Adam realizing he still hasn’t come out to his parents. He’s lived a whole life – full of loneliness, of success and failure – and they have no idea. They are now just as much strangers to him as he felt with them. 

The way that Andrew Haigh frames this story (based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada) so elegantly shows how much we are constantly rewriting our lives. We’re looking back, imagining conversations we always meant to have and never did, wondering what choices could have changed our lives had they been different. While Adam’s reconnecting with his parents, he’s also starting a genuine, careful relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal). To say any more would be to give too much away. But I still think about the shock I felt at the ending, and the way Haigh suggests that maybe we’re just as much strangers to ourselves as we are to others. Maybe we’ll be spending the rest of our lives rewriting our way to a better ending, to who we want to be seen as.

2. Perfect Days

So much of technology these days flattens the joy. Cinematography looks duller and less-inspired than ever in the streaming era. Music is torn from albums and mixed in ever-expanding playlists that encourage us, whether we realize it or not, to stay in sonorous silos. Kindles, as much as I love the convenience of them, rob of us of that feeling of speeding through a book and realizing you’re about to run out of the minor miracle we’re now absorbing.

Hirayama (a luminous Koji Yakusho) drives to work each day doing a simple job he takes great pride in. He has all his tools. He does his job with the kind of precision you can find great satisfaction in. On his drives, he makes great use of his work van’s tape deck, listening to only cassettes. What feels rather fitting is that Apple – and likely any service streaming this film – does not include the name of the song or who the artist is. The lyrics are not even subtitled. It makes our main character more inaccessible to me. I can appreciate the visual beauty he finds, but I’m missing a key part of what connects with his soul. Finally, I use Shazam, an app Apple bought and embedded, to identify the song for me. But it won’t even try to sell me on the album it comes from. Only the single. It wants the thing to be broken into sellable parts. It wants to dangle a carrot forever. That’s the society Hirayama finds himself trapped in.

What I find so gorgeous about this film is the subtle ways it tells us in its second half that this man, who seems to have it all figured out, is using his routine to find the meaning he’s long been searching for. He didn’t get it at the previous career he escaped from. He didn’t find it in family. And he certainly didn’ find it when his coworker quits one day, sending him spiraling into an unexpected fit over the phone, demanding for a replacement as soon as possible. 

We spend so much time thinking about what the perfect days would be – the resort we’d be drinking a margarita from, the family we’d be talking with, the delicious food we’d be ingesting – without considering how to make our everyday something we find great, accumulative meaning in. Perfect Days made me long for the analog, for the feel of bass and the warmth of tape, for the mistakes and questions, the mysteries and the wanderings. The way our routine can help us build these blocks of time in which we can, if we’re open to it, find a little bit of magic. 

1. Asteroid City

I don’t even know where to start with this miracle of a movie. Pick one strand and out comes more colorful string from another side of it. You can turn this film over like a Rubik’s Cube, shuffling and turning and gazing at every side and you’d find something new. Ask 5 fans what they think this movie is really about and you’ll get 5 really unique answers (and more than likely at least 2 that will describe it as a baffling bore). No 2023 movie has stuck in my mind for so many different reasons quite like this one.

I think about the boy who’s constantly doing stupid shit, jumping off of buildings and daring others to do wild things. We, the audience, are just as sick of his antics as the characters around him. Finally, someone asks what his deal is. His response will stop you mid-breath: “I don’t know,” he says, “maybe it’s because I’m afraid no one else will notice my existence in the universe.” Behavior is communication. And Asteroid City is full of people expressing shades of grief, confusion, and longing.

People make fun of Anderson for his layers of artifice. But it’s not artificial; it’s the realest part of his films. We are always making meaning. We are constantly reframing our lives. We try on different voices – our therapists, our parents, our stronger selves – like narrative devices, shaking the stakes around to see if any truth we may have missed drops out like a cosmic 8 ball.

When a wide-eyed alien interrupts a star-gazing ceremony in the middle of the movie, coming down to take the asteroid rock it spots, it sends the entire group into an existential tailspin. What is this alien and what could it want from us? But the answer is far more sobering when it later returns to drop off it off and leave. It’s turned over to reveal some kind of number. They’re simply doing inventory. It’s so deflating to everyone that one small town’s phenomenon is another alien’s documentation on a spreadsheet.

Similar to May December, Asteroid City gains great power from its narrative layers. It takes a couple viewings to fully understand when an actor is playing a character – but it’s all intentional. Towards the end of the film, Augie Steenbeck (a fantastic Jason Schwartzman) exits the play to go behind the scenes and find the director. Augie expresses he still doesn’t understand the character and wants to know if he’s doing him right. “I still don’t understand the play,” he says. “Doesn’t matter,” the director (Adrian Brody) reminds, while assuring him he’s doing great. “Just keep telling the story.” We’re all Augie in our lives. We’re all finding ourself in moments where we aren’t sure if we’re playing the role right. And we just need to be reminded that we’re doing great, that it all doesn’t really matter in the end, and that we just keep telling the story we’re in. Augie is a photographer and there’s a line he repeats often throughout: “My pictures always come out.” It sounds like he’s bragging at first. Like he’s a man incapable of mistakes. But the repetition reveals something deeper: that every effort we make at understanding life matters. A picture may be a thousand of the most truthful words you can manage in that moment.

Later on, the actors are working with Saltzburg Kietel (Willem DaFoe), an acting teacher very much based on Lee Strasburg, and he leads them in an exercise all based on a simple mantra: you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. It’s a line that you unconsciously, intuitively understand before you truly get. You can apply it to the grieving process. You can apply it to just trying to figure out what you want out of this life. But the idea that you must be lulled into something, that you must sleepwalk, that you must wander and allow yourself to be lost before you can truly understand where to go? What a beautiful reminder. I haven’t shaken it since.

There is so much delight to find in this film. Scarlett Johansson’s incredible, heartbreaking work as a big-time actress all too aware the world doesn’t really understand her. The way Tom Hanks’ grandfather keeps pushing Augie to have the conversations even he’s not ready to have with his granddaughters. Jeffrey Wright’s rapid-fire ceremony monologue that somehow encapsulates the country’s anxious wartime history, culminating with the sticker of an all-too-relevant line (“If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life, you picked the wrong time to get born”). The young class that breaks into song with “Dear Alien (Who Art In Heaven)”. The consistently gorgeous pastel-pasted shots throughout. There will always be people who don’t like or don’t get Anderson’s films. But he’s always able to corral a beyond impressive group of actors and he always finds a way to comment on the deepest and hardest of human emotions in such a colorful, almost child-like form. We’re all children trying to figure things out. And it’s not that Anderson hasn’t grown up; it’s that he understands us better than we’ll ever give him credit for.