I was roused from my hiatus while driving to work this week and listening to the New York Times podcast The Daily. I felt compelled to listen to this particular episode as it’s a retrospective on the work of Rob Reiner, who left us too soon this past weekend. The episode is a pretty standard review of Reiner’s body of work, but towards the end, guest Wesley Morris reads a passage from David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film:

“As a director, Rob Reiner seemed more struck or poleaxed by the notion that niceness could save the world. It is a petty thought, but one that stifles so many human and social realities. And so his work turns to pie in the sky, with good and bad, all too clearly labeled. He’s carried along by a fundamental decency and a sense of scenes that play, but his films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we’re good to our kids, everything will be OK. This is not true. Life is more interesting.”

Sick prescience aside, this is a horrible take. It being quoted by the Times as Morris gushes about Thomson’s bona fides as a critic is disgusting. The idea that Reiner’s art is in any way “less-than” because a film like When Harry Met Sally (1989) doesn’t feel real enough is anathema to what cinema is about, and what film criticism should seek to do. Bambi (1942) might follow a “dumb orthodoxy” established by the five Disney animated films that preceded it. It’s still Bambi.

And Stand by Me (1986), a film based on a Stephen King novella, contains the unfiltered darkness you would expect from King. Adults can be cruel, kids can be evil, and things don’t always work out. The movie opens with an adult Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss), now a writer, sitting alone in his car after reading a newspaper headline about the death of one of his childhood friends. From there, the film drifts backward to that summer in 1959, when four boys: Gordie (Wil Wheaton), Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman), and Vern (Jerry O’Connell) set out on a two-day quest to find a missing boy’s body. In the days before cheap and ever-present entertainment, you had to work for it.

For all its talk of death, Stand by Me is really about life and how we cope with one of life’s greatest constants: pain. It’s the rare coming-of-age story that feels both universal and specific. The kids strike genuine chords of laughter, machismo, quiet introspection: the film argues that friendship is what keeps us sane in a painful world. You don’t realize the film is making this argument while watching it: each scene feels authentic, so you start watching and, before you know it, the movie’s over.

Reiner directs the film with an honesty that’s disarming. There’s no gloss, no sentimental softening of the edges. The boys talk the way kids talk. Crudely, curiously, endlessly, and Reiner never interrupts their rhythm. Stephen King’s original novella The Body gives the story its emotional backbone, but Reiner finds the warmth in it. He doesn’t flinch at the darkness, yet he never lets it overpower the small joys: singing “Lollipop” on the tracks, arguing about Goofy’s species, roasting marshmallows, daring each other to be brave. What makes Stand by Me linger isn’t its nostalgia but its truth. The film understands that friendship at that age is its own kind of love story, as fragile and fierce as any romance. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.”

I find myself thinking about the distance between who we were and who we become. Maybe that’s the real reason Stand by Me endures. It’s not just a story about kids on a journey: it’s a mirror for every adult who once was one. When Gordie looks back on that summer, he’s not just remembering his friends or the adventure. He’s remembering the moment he realized he’d never be the same again.

Reiner’s films may be idealistic, romantic, and heartfelt, but this is what makes them great. And for any critics who would say “This is not true” to stories where things turn out ok, or that “life is more interesting,” I would ask: how is life ever supposed to imitate art if art has to be life?

Stand by Me
Written by Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans; Based on the novella The Body by Stephen King; Directed by Rob Reiner
1986
89 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Netflix
You’ll like this if you like: The Outsiders (1983), Now and Then (1995), My Girl (1991)

In Happening (L’Événement, 2021), a young literature student named Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) in 1960s France discovers she’s pregnant. The seriousness of this revelation cuts short any expectation that this film is a typical French coming-of-age film featuring a young woman. Her reaction is not the joy or panic of most cinematic pregnancies but something quieter and more terrifying: the realization that her life, as she knows it, is over. In a society where abortion is both illegal and unspeakable, Anne’s choices collapse into a single, dangerous path.

Director Audrey Diwan films this story with a moral clarity that feels closer to a documentary than a period drama. The camera stays uncomfortably close to Anne, trapping us in her point of view. There are no musical cues to soften her fear or to instruct us how to feel. Every frame is built to emphasize the suffocating lack of control women had over their own bodies, and how that control, or the loss of it, defines one’s future.

What makes Happening so effective is its refusal to dramatize the obvious. Diwan doesn’t sensationalize Anne’s ordeal; she simply shows what happens when society denies bodily autonomy. The film’s restraint is what makes it so devastating. When Anne seeks help, every encounter feels like a negotiation with shame: the doctor who refuses her, the friends who distance themselves, the man who disappears into comfort. Each scene becomes a study in isolation.

Vartolomei’s performance is outstanding. She plays Anne not as a symbol but as a person fighting through humiliation and exhaustion, her face caught between defiance and despair. By the film’s midpoint, her body itself becomes the narrative. It’s a site of revolt, of betrayal, of endurance. It’s no wonder that she’s found some success internationally, most recently in Mickey 17 (2025) as Kai Katz and in The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) as Haydée.

There’s nothing romantic about Happening. It’s a movie that makes you wonder who we are as a species. It doesn’t offer catharsis, only truth. Painful, painful truth. The film’s final moments are quiet, almost numb, and that’s the point: freedom, when earned through this much pain, doesn’t feel triumphant. It feels like survival.

Happening (L’Événement)
Written by Audrey Diwan and Marcia Romano; Directed by Audrey Diwan
2021
100 minutes
French
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Kanoopy
You’ll like this if you like: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)

Quick note: You may have noticed that, for the first time since we started three years ago, Movie Night missed a week! That’s because my wife and I recently welcomed our first child! Yay for being tired! Movie Night recommendations will continue, but the pace may vary a bit going forward as we navigate this exciting new chapter of our lives. Thank you for taking a few minutes every week to read some thoughts on movies: it’s a joy to think through what makes a movie work (or not) and share with you. Cheers to you and to hopeful future film revelations!

When is a thriller not about who committed the crime but about who’s being watched as a result? Klute (1971) opens not with violence but with absence: a man gone missing, a phone call cut short, and a young woman’s name, Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda), scribbled in a notebook. What follows is a slow descent into the murky space between performance and paranoia, a film that’s as much about being looked at as it is about looking back. It’s a movie that feels shockingly obscure, given the pedigree of the director and the stars involved.

Alan J. Pakula, who would go on to direct The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976), lays out a sketch of an obsession he would later perfect: the feeling that someone (someone powerful?) is always watching and that the truth, however close, will stay hidden in the shadows. His camera lingers in the dark, behind glass or through wire mesh, until you feel complicit in the surveillance. You can feel the paranoia tightening, not like the sudden fear of a modern thriller, but as a constant hum, a quiet dread that permeates each well-defined room within the film.

Jane Fonda is what gives Klute its pulse. Her Bree is both an object of desire and a subject of her own becoming, a woman whose livelihood depends on performance but whose interior life is what the movie truly wants us to see. Fonda won an Oscar for this role, and rightly so: she plays Bree with a rare mixture of confidence and exposure, a woman who is honest with her psychiatrist and dishonest with the men who pay her. It’s surprising in its portrayal of psychiatry working exactly as it should; 70s films, for good reason, are rife with anti-heroes and societal mistrust: an institution like psychiatry depicted in such a straightforward manner feels subversive. Bree’s voice trembles when she’s with men, but her eyes never stop calculating. Watching Bree means watching someone watch themselves.

Donald Sutherland’s John Klute is almost a negative space in the film, a quiet, stoic investigator whose presence seems to amplify Bree’s contradictions. He is the one searching for the missing man, but it is Bree who is missing from herself. The title may bear his name, but the movie belongs to her: a film about a woman performing under constant observation, both by men and by the camera that refuses to let her hide.

There is a voyeuristic rhythm to Klute that makes it feel both deeply 1970s and startlingly modern. The city hums with loneliness: an unlit apartment, a reel-to-reel tape turning slowly, the sound of a voice played back too loud. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis, nicknamed the “Prince of Darkness,” built a world of muffled menace where each shadow feels like a secret. You can see the DNA of later films such as Taxi Driver (1976), Blue Velvet (1986), and Zodiac (2007) in the way Klute uses urban isolation as both mood and metaphor.

At its heart, Klute is a film about control: who has it, who pretends to, and what it costs to keep performing under someone else’s gaze. Bree wants to be free: to quit sex work, to become an actress, to choose her own roles. But she is caught in a loop where desire and danger blur. Pakula’s camera captures that tension perfectly, turning even the simplest apartment scene into a battle between exposure and retreat.

What makes the film so enduring is not just its mystery but the way it stages a conversation between intimacy and fear. The surveillance is not just technological: it is emotional. Everyone in Klute is recording, replaying, interpreting. Everyone wants proof of something that can’t be captured.

When Bree tells her therapist, “I wish I could be anonymous,” you feel the entire decade collapsing into that single line. It is a wish that no one, especially in the age of microphones and memory, ever really gets. The paranoia of its time reverberates today.

Klute
Written by Andy Lewis and Dave Lewis; Directed by Alan J. Pakula
1971
114 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Criterion Channel.
You’ll like this if you like: The Parallax View (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Zodiac (2007)

If Demi Moore used The Substance, it’s not Margaret Qualley, a creature equal parts perky and vacuous, who would emerge from her body. If, as advertised, The Substance created the perfect version of a person, Moore would be reborn as Molly Jensen, her character from Ghost.

In Molly Jensen, we get a 26-year-old Demi Moore near the peak of her physical beauty (a plateau she has spent most of her life on), yet she eschews her physical gifts instead of incorporating them into the character. She has a Dumb and Dumber pageboy haircut that looks ridiculous on anyone else and hides her slender form behind chunky sweaters and overalls. She wears only touches of makeup, leaving even her slightest imperfections exposed (e.g.,—no, i.e., the small pockmark on her left cheekbone).

The movie tries valiantly to minimize Moore’s body, only failing at times, like when we catch brief glimpses of her thighs as she’s working the pottery wheel or her bare back, bisected by the strap of a white, lacy bra that seems harsh and abrasive when juxtaposed against her creamy skin. She’s not hiding her body out of shame and modesty like a young Amish woman returning from Rumspringa and attempting to put the genie of her sexuality back into the bottle. But rather, refreshingly, her body is an afterthought. It doesn’t represent who she is. It’s merely an imperfect vehicle for her soul.

Ghost begins as if it were intended to be a horror movie, but the producers abruptly changed their minds as filming began. There’s a loud, otherworldly tone that catches you unaware as the title flashes on the screen before quickly fading. Sinister music plays while the camera pans across a dusty attic filled with foreboding shapes of objects long abandoned by previous owners, covered in shrouds and rags. Then, we see Molly, Sam (Patrick Swayze), and Carl (Tony Goldwyn) punch through the ceiling of the apartment they are renovating as Molly and Sam’s future home, and the creepiness is suddenly abandoned, replaced by a hopeful, home-improvement show vibe.

Ghost mostly takes place in Tribeca (Triangle Below Canal Street, kind of like how incel comes from involuntary celibate) in NYC, which also hilariously houses the Ghostbusters’ headquarters. NYC was dirty and dangerous at the time. The movie was released in 1990, the year NYC homicides peaked.

Swayze plays a banker and Moore an artist, but again, this is a different time, and there’s less separation between the two jobs. Before the housing and mortgage crises, being a banker did not necessarily make you an immoral asshole, cokehead, destroyer of worlds.

The movie has two halves — not before and after Swayze’s character, Sam Wheat, gets murdered (threshed?) and becomes a ghost, but rather before and after Whoopi Goldberg makes her entrance. Those who know Whoopi primarily through The View might not realize what a comedic force she was in the ‘80s and ‘90s. She used to headline Comic Relief with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal to raise money for the homeless. Whoopi plays Oda Mae Brown, a flamboyant con-artist spiritualist, and provides the humor needed to balance Moore’s emotional performance. She is the other side of the coin for Molly, the ballast that keeps the movie from tipping into dreariness.

Ghost is about pining for someone you love, encapsulated by “Unchained Melodies,” the song that plays during the famous pottery wheel scene (which, to this day, is the most erotic and sexually confusing scene I’ve seen in a movie). Moore’s performance is crucial to the movie. She’s the conductor of our emotions, guiding us by example through the movie’s emotional beats. Like the chart of smiling and frowning faces sociopaths use to learn empathy, she helps us identify and experience grief, yearning, disbelief, hope, and love. Deemphasizing Moore’s physique frees up bandwidth, allowing us to focus on the emotions revealed on her face and the way her spirit shines through her flesh, if that is how we can understand emotion.

This was the first movie to make me cry.

Ghost
Written by Bruce Joel Rubin; Directed by Jerry Zucker
1990
126 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Kanopy (It’s free if you have a library card!)
You’ll like this if you like: The Bodyguard (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993)

Ahh, the buddy cop movie. It seems like we get one or two every year now, but 48 Hrs. (1982) is the one that really set the tone for the genre. (While up for debate, many consider it to be the first true buddy cop flick.) Directed by Walter Hill, the film pairs a gruff San Francisco cop, Jack Cates (Nick Nolte), with a fast and smooth-talking convict on temporary release, Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy). The setup is simple: Cates needs Hammond’s help to track down a pair of violent fugitives, and Hammond wants a taste of freedom while he can get it. The two men are constantly at odds, and out of those odds, the buddy cop template was born.

What makes 48 Hrs. sing isn’t just the action or the plot. If you hadn’t assumed already: it’s Eddie Murphy. This was Murphy’s film debut, and within his first five minutes of screen time it’s clear that he’s a star. His energy, rhythm, and comic timing bounce off Nolte’s world-weary performance. There’s a“redneck bar” scene, where Hammond takes charge in a way that’s both funny and charged with racial tension. Murphy transforms what could’ve been a flat supporting role into the center of gravity for the whole movie. As Ebert once pointed out, it’s the inverse of Gene Hackman’s The French Connection (1971) bar scene where his character Popeye Doyle intimidates patrons in a bar in Harlem.

Hill doesn’t dress the film up much. His camera work is lean and functional, with early ’80s grit that feels closer to a crime thriller than a comedy. At times, it feels like a comedy that Michael Mann would’ve made. And while there are plenty of laughs, there’s also an undercurrent of menace. The criminals they’re chasing, particularly Albert Ganz (James Remar), aren’t played for laughs. The seriousness keeps the stakes high, which makes the banter between Cates and Hammond feel sharper and more dangerous. Higher highs and lower lows, as it were.

Watching it now, the film is fascinating both for its influence, an influence that feels little discussed, and for the way it captures its era. An era in which writers believed harmony could be achieved between two very different people if they were only working towards the same goal. This is the core of the buddy cop film: a type of movie that idealistically believes we have more in common than we have different. Time will tell if the trope is to be believed, but in the meantime, it paved the way for Lethal Weapon, Bad Boys, and dozens of imitators. It cemented Eddie Murphy as a star. Hammond’s role as both comic relief and truth-teller cuts through the film’s macho swagger, but it also lays bare how much Hollywood leaned on caricature to sell its stories. Idealism doesn’t conquer all.

Still, if you want to understand why buddy cop films work the way they do, 48 Hrs. is essential viewing. It’s messy, loud, and a little mean, but it has the electricity of something that feels new: working with good people you don’t understand to solve problems.

48 Hrs.
Written by Roger Spottiswoode, Larry Gross, Steven E. de Souza, and Walter Hill; Directed by Walter Hill
1982
96 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Kanopy (Free with a library card.)
You’ll like this if you like: Lethal Weapon (1987), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), The French Connection (1971)

What if your perfect marriage wasn’t so perfect? I know what you’re thinking: insane premise in the 40s! Insane as it may be, that’s the starting point for Impact (1949), a brisk little noir that begins with the kind of betrayal the genre was made for: a wealthy businessman blindsided by a scheming wife. Walter Williams (Brian Donlevy) thinks he has it all: money, a successful career, and Irene (Helen Walker), a glamorous wife who always seems a little cool to the touch. Turns out that instinct is correct. She’s plotting with her lover to bump him off and live happily ever after with the insurance money.

But noir is nothing if not about things not going according to plan. The murder attempt fails, someone dies, and Walter is left wandering; injured, presumed dead, and stripped of everything he thought anchored his life. Instead of crawling back to his old identity, he winds up in rural Idaho, where Marsha Peters (Ella Raines) offers him a job at her garage. What follows is part noir, part pastoral redemption story: Walter finds solace in honest labor, the warmth of community, and a new kind of love.

That mix is what makes Impact so interesting. Its San Francisco scenes are straight out of the noir playbook: sleek houses, shadows across the walls, double-crosses in hushed tones. But once Walter stumbles into the small-town garage, the film feels closer to Frank Capra than Billy Wilder. Noir usually suffocates its characters in despair, but Impact lets in some fresh air, suggesting that you can escape betrayal and start over; if you’re willing to turn a wrench and let go of the city.

The performances help bridge the tonal shift. Donlevy, typically cast as heavies or cynical types, softens as Walter learns to live without wealth or status. Raines, who had already built her noir credentials in Phantom Lady (1944), grounds the film with warmth and resolve. And Walker is terrific as Irene, cool and venomous enough to remind you why noir loved dangerous women.

Impact isn’t canon noir on the level of Double Indemnity (1944) or Out of the Past (1947), but it’s an enjoyable entry in the second tier of the genre. It reflects postwar anxieties about the fragility of domestic life, the temptations of greed, and the American dream of starting over in small-town decency. It may begin in the shadows, but it ends in daylight: the rare noir with a redemption arc.

Impact
Written by Arthur T. Horman, Jay Dratler, and Dorothy Davenport; Directed by Arthur Lubin
1949
111 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Kanopy (Free with a public library card)
You’ll like this if you like: Phantom Lady (1944), A Perfect Murder (1998), Double Indemnity (1944)

Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996) might be his most watchable film, which is akin to saying a restaurant is the cleanest in the food court. Still, Bay’s tendency toward overblown set pieces and hyper-masculine melodrama works here because the whole thing is already ridiculous. The movie doesn’t need subtlety; it needs Nicolas Cage running around with a baby’s diaper bag full of green chemical balls that could kill the entire city of San Francisco.

The setup is straightforward: General Hummel (Ed Harris) seizes Alcatraz with a band of rogue Marines, holding tourists hostage while threatening to launch chemical weapons at San Francisco unless the government pays reparations to families of fallen soldiers. He’s a sympathetic villain, maybe even more so today than when the film came out. The government responds by sending in a team that includes Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), an FBI chemical weapons specialist, and John Mason (Sean Connery), a former British spy who’s the only person to have ever escaped Alcatraz. Ah, British spies! The plan: sneak in, stop the missiles, and save the city.

What makes the movie work is the casting. Cage leans into his signature mix of awkward humor and lunatic outbursts, while Connery seems to be playing a “what if James Bond had been locked up for thirty years” riff. Their buddy-cop dynamic carries the film through Bay’s action sequences, which would eventually become indulgent, but at the time of the film’s release felt fresh and innovative. Don’t take my word for it! Watch it! Connery’s smooth disdain cuts through Cage’s manic energy, and vice versa. An interesting companion film would be The Untouchables (1987), which has Connery providing supporting contrast as well. Meanwhile in The Rock, Ed Harris’s Hummel is a man who genuinely believes in his cause, and gives the film an unusual moral center for a Bay picture.

Of course, the movie is also peak 90s blockbuster: quick cuts, swelling Hans Zimmer score, Bay’s golden-hour explosions, and a San Francisco that looks like it was built to be driven through at 90 miles an hour. The car chase down Lombard Street alone is both insane and deeply satisfying, a Looney Tunes set piece disguised as military thriller.

In hindsight, The Rock feels like the last breath before Bay’s excesses became exhausting. It has the scale of a true summer movie, but also self-awareness and charisma from its leads. Maybe the best way to put it is this: The Rock is Michael Bay with training wheels. They’ll fall off soon enough.

The Rock
Written by David Weisberg, Douglas S. Cook, and Mark Rosner; Directed by Michael Bay
1996
136 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Available to rent on all major services.
You’ll like this if you like: Con Air (1997), Die Hard (1988), Face/Off (1997)

There’s a universe, pretty close to this one, where The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) never existed. Disney had originally planned a serious animated epic, a Prince of Egypt-style project called Kingdom of the Sun with Sting writing the music. The final film, of course, is not that. It couldn’t be further from that. Somewhere in the chaos of creative implosion, executive panic, and dumb luck, the movie mutated into the strangest Disney feature of its era: a buddy comedy about a spoiled emperor turned llama, a kindhearted peasant, and a villainess (voiced magnificently by Eartha Kitt) who is basically a Looney Tune. It’s less “Disney Renaissance” and more Saturday morning cartoon, but like a plot in a Saturday morning cartoon it inexplicably comes together.

Kuzco (David Spade), a narcissistic young emperor, opens the movie by breaking the fourth wall to introduce himself as both narrator and subject. This alone sets the tone: self-aware, petty, unwilling to follow the typical fairytale blueprint. His foil is Pacha (John Goodman), a humble villager whose hilltop home becomes the unintended target of Kuzco’s plan to build his birthday palace. The plot only kicks in after Yzma (Eartha Kitt), the film’s true MVP, accidentally transforms Kuzco into a llama with the help of her lovable idiot sidekick (sidepiece?) Kronk (Patrick Warburton). What follows is a road trip movie in which llama-Kuzco must learn a little humility, Pacha proves decency is not weakness, and Kronk steals every scene with his culinary prowess.

Visually, it’s a departure. Gone is the grandeur of The Lion King or the painterly beauty of Pocahontas. Instead, the animators lean into rubbery expressions, slapstick timing, and irreverence. Characters don’t just acknowledge the audience: they argue with the narrator, redraw the map they’re traveling on, and bend the “rules” of the film’s own reality. It feels anarchic in a way Disney almost never does.

What makes The Emperor’s New Groove endure is how it never pretends to be more than a comedy. There’s no real love story, no sweeping ballads (sorry Sting), no grandiose moral; just a lean 78 minutes of gags and unlikely friendship. And yet, tucked into the laughter is a genuine warmth. Kuzco changes not because the story demands it, but because Pacha’s kindness is relentless enough to cut through his llama-sized ego. This may be David Spade’s finest performance.

Despite not pretending at more than a comedy, one could zoom out enough to see the morality play at work here: someone with money and power, taking from someone without it. That person with the power is so ignorant of their responsibility that they become a target. While there is no direct acknowledgement or resolution of these dynamics, having them subtly drive the plot and inform the reality of the characters is refreshing. In the back of some viewers’ minds, power dynamics are being considered, and principles or beliefs are forming.

Twenty-five years later, the film has outlived its chaotic production history. It’s a cult favorite, beloved by kids who grew up quoting Kronk’s shoulder angel or Yzma’s “WRONG LEVER!” scream. It’s a rare example of a studio film that stumbles into something timeless.

We’ve been writing about animated films all month, with the exception of Dae’s great post. To be fair, I forgot to tell Dae I had a theme in mind for the month. Whoops. We’ve all got a lot going on, but now August ‘25 will be the funniest month, likely only to me, because it has four ‘cartoons’ and The English Patient (1996). Which of these five films deserves the highest praise? We’ll let you be the judge. But the reason I mention animated films is that they’re becoming more of a lost art in American film. The Emperor’s New Groove is proof that a movie doesn’t have to be the next Princess Mononoke (1997) to warrant the greenlight. It’s a medium that allows for creative storytelling of the highest caliber: engaging for all ages, inspiring for the young, subversive for the old. This movie is a summer delight; an example of animation not at its finest, but at its best.

The Emperor’s New Groove
Written by David Reynolds; Directed by Mark Dindal
2000
78 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Disney+
You’ll like this if you like: Shrek (2001), Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), Road to El Dorado (2000)

The Triplets of Belleville (2003) defies description. It’s an animated French film that barely uses dialogue but speaks volumes through its surreal, exaggerated visuals. Directed by Sylvain Chomet, it tells the story of Madame Souza, a determined grandmother who embarks on a rescue mission after her cyclist grandson Champion is kidnapped during the Tour de France. Along the way, she enlists the help of three aging vaudeville singers, the eponymous Triplets of Belleville, who may be past their prime but still have plenty of pep in their step.

This is not the kind of animated film where everything is rounded and cute. The characters are drawn with strange proportions, noses too large, legs stretched out like rubber, and jaws that seem to go on forever. There is nudity. (Gasp.) The city of Belleville itself looks like Paris through a semi-grotesque funhouse mirror, and the villains, mobsters who are real squares, are as absurd as they are threatening. Chomet’s style is grotesque, yes, but it’s also affectionate, as though he’s celebrating the quirks of human bodies and urban life rather than hiding them.

The lack of dialogue makes the film universal. A bark from the dog Bruno (whose dreams are entirely about trains) or the wheeze of the Triplets’ kitchen-band instruments conveys more than any speech could. Sound is everything here: the rhythmic tapping of shoes, the percussive clatter of junkyard instruments, the wheezy, jazzy soundtrack. It’s a reminder that music and movement can carry a story just as powerfully as words, and as crazy as it is that this movie is now over 20 years old, folks who enjoyed the recent film Flow (2024) will find a lot to like here.

Thematically, the film has a lot to say about obsession and resilience. Champion pedals until his body looks like a machine; Madame Souza trains him with a whistle, a metronome, and eventually a vacuum cleaner strapped to his bike. The Triplets survive their twilight years by banging on whatever they can find to keep their music alive. Everyone is bent, stretched, or worn down by their pursuits, yet there’s an obvious dignity in the way they keep going, and a clear affection for life despite the toll it takes on us; despite how ugly it can seem at times.

In the early 2000s, when animation was dominated by CGI gloss, The Triplets of Belleville felt like a throwback to a stranger, more handmade world. It’s weird, tender, funny, and deeply original. Chomet reminds us that animation isn’t just for children or even just for stories of fantasy. It can be grotesque and melancholy, filled with characters who look broken but are stubbornly alive. It’s a movie that makes you ask, in the best way, What did I just watch?

The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville)
Written and directed by Sylvain Chomet
2003
80 minutes
French
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Max
You’ll like this if you like: City of Lost Children (1995), Persepolis (2007), Fantastic Planet (1973), Flow (2024)

It’s hard to believe Movie Night’s gone this long without me writing about a Wes Anderson film. For you see, I am in that infamous group of filmgoers that can’t get enough Wes Anderson. We are the Society of Crossed Keys, and we’ll find something to like about a Wes Anderson movie, even if we didn’t totally understand what we just watched. (The second, third, or fourth viewings usually clear things up.) Yes, we can come off as insufferable: you don’t want to be around me when someone mentions they didn’t like Asteroid City (2023). But for my part at least, my love for Anderson’s films stems from the appreciation that they exist at all. That in an age of maximally corporatized art production, there’s a rare bird out there who figures out repeatedly how to get his evolving visions brought to life. I wonder if this is what watching Kubrick in real-time was like? Who was the somewhat polarizing, generally accepted oddball director before Anderson?

One film of Wes Anderson that everyone agrees is great: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). There’s a charm in Anderson’s vision here that feels like a family heirloom handmade quilt: meticulously crafted, warm, fraying at the edges. It’s his first foray into stop-motion animation. Despite this, Anderson's DNA is unmistakable: symmetrical framing, autumnal color palette, wry humor, and characters who deliver their lines in a straight and direct fashion; something often called out as stiff in his movies, despite this being the most realistic thing about his movies. (Listen to conversations in your life, people!)

The film, adapted from Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s book, centers on Mr. Fox (George Clooney), a reformed chicken thief turned newspaper columnist, who can’t quite shake the itch for one last big heist. He lives a seemingly contented life with his wife, Felicity (Meryl Streep), and their son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), in a cozy underground home. He’s getting old. He knows he should be content, but just can’t shake… what is it he can’t shake? His nature? His plan to raid the farms of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean of their goods sets off a chain reaction of human-animal conflict, forcing the entire woodland community to adapt or perish.

Anderson’s stop-motion world is tactile in a way that modern CG doesn’t match. The fur on the characters ripples from the animators’ fingerprints; sets look like they were built from a mix of dollhouse furniture, vintage miniatures, and a craft store’s finest finds. It’s whimsical, but there’s grit here too. Mr. Fox’s battles with the farmers aren’t just comedic capers; they’re existential skirmishes about identity, community, and the cost of self-indulgence.

The voice cast is a cocktail of Anderson regulars and perfectly cast newcomers: Clooney’s suave confidence is balanced by streaks of insecurity, while Streep’s Felicity has a quiet steeliness, that at times melts into an matrimonial sympathy that will break your heart. Willem Dafoe turns in a sleazy, scene-stealing performance as a rat with a Southern drawl. Jason Schwartzman’s diminutive Ash has one of the greatest arcs of any character in an Anderson film, short of Schwartman’s Max Fischer in Rushmore (1998) Alexandre Desplat, working with Anderson for the first time, turns in a banjo-laced score that weaves between Burl Ives–esque whimsy and something sharper, adding to the film’s bittersweet tone.

Like much of Anderson’s work, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a story about control and chaos. It’s about parents realizing their kids might be weirder than they are, about holding on to your essential wildness without letting it consume you. It’s a family film in the sense that kids can enjoy the talking animals and chase sequences, but adults might be watching, maybe sitting beside their children, quietly reflecting on age, and remembering a type of melancholy that is always trying to get in.

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Written by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach; Directed by Wes Anderson
2009
87 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu
You’ll like this if you like: Isle of Dogs (2018), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Chicken Run (2000)

This is my favorite movie, and it changed the course of my life.

I was 17 years old in 1996 when I first saw The English Patient in a theater with a date and a friend she brought. I didn’t understand a lot of it (much like how I didn’t get why my date had brought a chaperone). But what struck me and stayed with me was the movie’s wondrous mixture of adventure and romance that seemed deceptively achievable.

At the time, I favored movies loosely in the adventure genre, and they were all exciting but completely implausible (Indiana Jones movies, The Goonies, Seven, Forest Gump, Jurassic Park, etc…). The English Patient, which features explorers and cartographers traversing the deserts of North Africa in bi-planes and utility vehicles, was the first movie of this genre where I could see myself realistically engaged in similar adventures. There are no holy grails or pirate treasure to find. The explorers in The English Patient do the gritty work of drawing maps and driving through endless deserts.

The movie also depicts love as an adventure, as equally dangerous as desert exploration. The main lovers are Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine, a well-read, elegant, British woman, a product of generational wealth and privilege, and Ralph Fiennes as a Hungarian count named László Almásy. Yes, I’m aware this is the setup for a bullshit romance novel with Fabio on the cover. But KST and Fiennes play their roles with subtlety and earn our sympathies and admiration, even though they are despicable characters engaged in an illicit affair (Katharine is newly married). Lesser actors would have created obnoxious, flimsy, unlovable, unbelievable, and unwatchable characters. And again, part of the magic of this movie is that these characters love each other in such a realistic and human way that it makes you believe you could be in love with someone the way Almásy was in love with Katharine.

It doesn’t hurt that KST is profoundly beautiful. She’s young but not youthful. I will not compare her to a fine wine like a MILF-smitten perv, but her beauty has substance and complexity. (Fuck, those are wine descriptors.)

I can’t think of a movie that captures so many beautiful people at the peak of their beauty. I’ve already mentioned Ralph Fiennes, who was a sex symbol a long time ago, before appearing as a doughy cardinal in Conclave. The movie also stars Colin Firth as Katharine’s cuckolded husband, just a year after the release of the version of Pride and Prejudice featuring his one-man wet t-shirt contest; Juliet Binoche as a combat nurse from whom wounded soldiers understandably beg kisses; Naveen Andrews as a dashing Sikh sapper (bomb disposal specialist) before he was an Iraqi torturer on Lost; and Willem Defoe as a spy, but I’m not including him in this list of beautiful people. He just doesn’t make the cut. (That’s an awful pun, if you know the movie. And no, the pun is unrelated to his…)

I know beauty alone is insufficient for a compelling love story, but when you combine five (or six, if you count Willem Defoe, which I don’t) stunning actors in the golden hour of their beauty, it’s like having an accelerant just sitting around. Perhaps it’s this beauty that allows us to hold Katharine and Almásy blameless for their cruel and destructive affair, making it feel more like a chemical reaction that was teleologically inevitable.

The movie alternates between two chunks of time. The “present” takes place in Italy, during the waning days of World War II. Hana, the combat nurse played by Binoche, is taking care of the English patient, a horribly burned man who claims not to remember his name. He’s known as the English patient due to his accent, and like a fucking badass, his only belonging is a leather-bound copy of Herodotus’s Histories, with photos, notes, and drawings tucked inside.

The other time period is the years shortly before the war, where we see Katharine and Almásy pulled into a love affair despite taking reasonable precautions. As Hana tends to his burned body in the present, relying heavily on morphine, the English patient tells her about his time in the desert with Katharine, taking us into his past and the mystery of his identity. Or as Roger Ebert put it in his beautiful review:

Backward into memory, forward into loss and desire, “The English Patient” searches for answers that will answer nothing. This poetic, evocative film version of the famous novel by Michael Ondaatje circles down through layers of mystery until all of the puzzles in the story have been solved, and only the great wound of a doomed love remains. It is the kind of movie you can see twice–first for the questions, the second time for the answers.

Jesus, Ebert, you were the fucking poet laureate of movies.

When I rewatched the movie last week, I was reminded of the reasons behind several past and ongoing decisions. Why I wanted to join the Peace Corps. Why I had initially requested an Arabic-speaking country, preferably in North Africa. Why, as a volunteer, I valiantly attempted to carry a leather-bound diary that remained embarrassingly empty. Why I’ve grown my hair, and even why I have an appreciation for older, elegant women.

The English Patient
Written by Michael Ondaatje and Anthony Minghella; Directed by Anthony Minghella
1996
162 minutes
English, German, Italian, Arabic
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Hoopla! It’s free if you have a library card, and everyone should have one.
You’ll like this if you like: Parts of Legends of the Fall and The Mummy.

Messy. Loud. Weird. That’s how Turning Red (2022) describes its heroine, and also how I’d describe being thirteen. One of Pixar’s most chaotic and confident movies, which was done no favors by the pandemic, Turning Red follows Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang), a Toronto middle-schooler who wakes up one day to discover she’s turned into a giant red panda. Unlike the title of the film, which does triple or quadruple duty, this is not a metaphor. Or, it is: but it’s also a literal, poofy, whiskered, tail-thwapping problem that knocks over desks and causes mayhem in Chinatown. Her parents are freaked. Her friends are obsessed. Meilin is... confused.

The panda, it turns out, is a generational gift-slash-curse passed down from her Chinese ancestors: a blessing turned burden that now arrives right on time with her period. Director Domee Shi doesn’t dance around the metaphor. She leans into it with full pads-and-cramps candor. What makes Turning Red special isn’t just the obvious allegory about puberty, but how accurately messy it depicts growing up. She crushes hard on guys, draws embarrassing fan art, lies to her parents, and throws herself into a homemade pop concert scheme with the energy of a caffeinated theater kid. She’s not a precocious adult in a kid’s body: she’s just a kid, navigating hormones, heritage, and a mother who watches her like a hawk.

That mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), is a perfectionist with a pager and a glare sharp enough to slice bao. She’s also painfully familiar. Not in a villainous way, but in a “yeah, I’ve been there” sort of way: hovering, worrying, trying to protect Meilin from the very world she needs to explore. Turning Red doesn’t condemn Ming; it lets us feel her fear. This is the rare film without a true villain. Life doesn’t need villains to be hard.

The visual style is a sugar rush of Y2K tweenhood: chunky flip phones, Tamagotchi, boy bands with frosted tips. There are big Studio Ghibli influences too, especially in the way food is animated and emotions bubble to the surface. And like Ghibli, it refuses to flatten or moralize its protagonist. Meilin is allowed to be selfish, wild, emotional, and brave, all at once. The comedic beats and the timing of the editing stand out among Pixar’s oeuvre. Despite the character design, which is starting to feel bland (look up “beanmouth”), Turning Red subverts expectations, for the first time in years, of what a Pixar movie “is.”

When Turning Red was released, it sparked a backlash from “adults” who seemed to think the movie was “too specific,” as if specificity weren’t the entire point of storytelling. There’s a scene where Meilin doodles sexy fan art of a local convenience store clerk and hides it under her bed. There was much online pearl-clutching. But isn’t that childhood? Or at least it’s a childhood that Disney’s usual moral polish hasn’t sanded down. Domee Shi, who won an Oscar for her short film Bao, brings a wonderfully personal voice to the chaos. You feel like you're watching memories rather than blueprints.

More importantly, Turning Red is part of a welcome turn in Pixar’s lineup toward letting non-white, non-male, non-sanitized characters take the wheel. Like Soul, Coco, or Luca, this one is culturally specific but emotionally wide open. What makes Meilin’s journey resonant isn’t just the metaphor of transformation: it’s the specificity of who she’s transforming into. Not a hero. Not a rebel. Just a weird kid figuring it out.

By the time we get to the final showdown, where mother and daughter clash, you’re not just watching a battle of wills. You’re watching the collision of generations, fears, dreams, and expectations. It’s gloriously ridiculous, deeply sincere, and refreshingly honest. The best part? Meilin doesn’t “fix” herself by the end. She embraces the panda. The mess. The weirdness. The loudness. Which is good advice for the rest of us. Unless your “panda” is illegal in some way. In your case, resist the panda.

Turning Red
Written by Domee Shi and Julia Cho; Directed by Domee Shi
2022
100 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Disney+
You’ll like this if you like: Inside Out (2015), Bao (2018), My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

There are lots of reasons Point Break (1991) shouldn’t work. Keanu Reeves plays an FBI agent named Johnny Utah. Patrick Swayze plays Bodhi, the surfer-guru-bank-robber he’s tracking down. There’s a prolonged skydiving sequence, a Reagan mask crime spree, and a whole lot of extremely sincere talk about “finding the edge.” But in Kathryn Bigelow’s hands, it all holds together. You ride the wave out not because it makes sense, but because it feels like it does, and because of the elder statesman of American cinema: Keanu.

The film opens with a kind of parallel baptism: Utah doing FBI drills in the rain, Bodhi surfing waves at golden hour. Cuts between the two seem to suggest that this isn't really a story about law enforcement or crime, but about identity. Who you are when the gun goes off, who you are when the wave lifts you up. Bigelow frames the story as both a thriller and a spiritual quest, and she shoots the action with a visceral clarity that makes the air feel thinner and the water heavier. Everything moves. Everything matters.

On its surface, the film is about Johnny Utah going undercover to infiltrate a group of surfers who may also be the notorious “Ex-Presidents,” a gang of bank robbers who wear masks of Nixon, LBJ, Carter, and Reagan. (Adept social commentary given the year this came out.) But the deeper tension isn’t between Johnny and Bodhi; it’s within Johnny himself, a by-the-book jock who finds himself drawn to the counterculture he's meant to dismantle. This is a cop movie that doesn’t glorify the badge; It’s about seduction: of freedom, of adrenaline, of belonging. And it’s about how easy it is to lose yourself when someone offers you a life more vivid than the one you feel like you have or the one you had planned.

Reeves plays Johnny with his trademark brooding naiveté; he’s not dumb, just out of his element. And the late great Patrick Swayze is magnetic. Bodhi should be ridiculous. He quotes the Bhagavad Gita, calls surfing “a source,” believes in a kind of wave-based enlightenment, and it works. Swayze plays him with total conviction. He truly believes that the human spirit is meant to soar. And you kind of want him to be right.

Point Break came out at a time when action films were largely meathead affairs, all explosions and wisecracks. Bigelow brought something else: physicality, yes, but also lyricism. She’s interested in bodies in motion, and in the line between control and surrender. You see it in the surfing, in the skydiving, in the chases, the moments that feel less like spectacle and more like ritual. It’s easy to forget, amid all the adrenaline, how good this film looks.

Also great: It helped lay the groundwork for a whole subgenre of thrillers with homoerotic undertones. (You could argue it was carrying forward the legacy of Top Gun (1986)) The bond between Johnny and Bodhi is physical, intimate, and steeped in unspoken longing. They chase each other across landscapes and ideologies. They jump out of planes together. They fall in a way that feels mutual. It's not subtle. But it's also not a joke. The emotional core of the film is real: these are two men who see in each other the path not taken.

There’s a reason Point Break keeps coming back: quoted, parodied, remade (poorly) in 2015. Like The Fast and the Furious (which owes it a massive debt), it's a film about loyalty and speed and the thrill of going too far. But unlike many of its imitators, it never feels cynical. It believes in the myth it's selling. Watching it now, you can see the outlines of Bigelow’s later films: the tension, the choreography, the focus on people pushed to their limits. But here, it’s all still coated in salt spray and California sun, soaked in testosterone and transcendence. At one point, Bodhi says, “If you want the ultimate, you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.” The film believes that. The final scene of the film is a rare one: it will stay with you. Everything you think you knew about the film changes in an instant.

Point Break
Written by W. Peter Iliff; Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
1991
122 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Max
You’ll like this if you like: The Fast and the Furious (2001), Top Gun (1986), The Hurt Locker (2008)

A near-future Japan. The economy has collapsed and the youth are in rebellion. the The government responds by passing the BR Act: a law that forces one randomly selected class of students each year to fight to the death on a remote island. The kids are provided maps, rations, and a random weapon. The rules are simple: the last kid standing wins. Some kids in a bus on their way to school fall asleep. When they wake up, they’re not at school; they’re on the island. They never saw it coming. In Battle Royale, the violence is not simple, and the emotional toll is staggering. It’s Lord of the Flies by way of Takashi Miike, with a dash of The Running Man and a tidal wave of teenage panic, not entirely unlike the also infamous House (1977).

There are movies that celebrate the passage of time and the comity of one generation passing the torch to the next. Maybe both generations can, gee I don’t know, learn something from one another. There are also movies in which one generation fucks another generation over. Battle Royale (2000) is the latter: a dystopian satire, a splatterpunk opera, and a scathing indictment of generational betrayal. Watching it nearly 25 years after its release is like finding an old scar that never quite healed. It’s how I imagine watching The Big Short (2015) might feel in twenty more years. It’s also a reminder of how outsized its influence has been on Western culture, from Shaun of the Dead (2004) to The Hunger Games books to Kill Bill (2003); its influence bouncing off of different artists like a pinball bouncing off walls.

When the film premiered in Japan, Battle Royale was radioactive. Politicians denounced it, critics didn’t know what to do with it, and some countries banned it outright. As always, controversy has a way of selling tickets. The film became a box office sensation where it was allowed to be scene, and a cultural flashpoint, grossing over $30 million globally on a modest budget. (The movie didn’t make any kind of premiere in the US until 2011.) Kinji Fukasaku, then 70, directed it with the fury of someone half his age and twice as angry. It was his last complete film before his death in 2003, and it's arguably his most explosive work.

The style is pure chaos. Fukasaku’s handheld camera work lurches through the underbrush, jolting from moments of eerie calm to sudden, balletic carnage. The editing is jagged, the pacing relentless, and the soundtrack (especially Masamichi Amano’s use of classical pieces) adds a haunting formality to the carnage. Underneath the frenzy is something more: a quiet, persistent heartbreak. This isn’t just a film about teenagers killing each other. It’s about what happens when adults stop protecting children and start weaponizing them instead.

Fukasaku knew the terrain well. As a teenager, he was conscripted into a weapons factory during World War II. He later recalled hiding under desks during bombings, surrounded by death. Battle Royale feels like the culmination of that trauma, refracted through pop cinema. It’s a movie about kids, made by someone who never forgot his childhood. A childhood of living in a world that had given up on him.

In the context of Japanese cinema, Battle Royale stands at a turning point: the tail end of the '90s J-horror boom, the rise of hyper-violent manga adaptations, and the continued growing globalization of Japanese pop culture. (Think: Nintendo and Playstation.) Interestingly, Fukasaku came from the old school: yakuza dramas, postwar thrillers. He died right as he was creating a new school.

What stands out most is how prophetic it feels, despite the premise. In 2000, the idea of a government turning kids into live-streamed killers was pure dystopia. Now it’s dystopia lite. Between Twitch, Fortnite, TikTok callouts, and social media pile-ons, we’ve built our own high-stakes youth arenas: no island required. We watch teenagers climb, fall, go viral, get doxxed, and repeat. We’ve normalized spectacle, and the easiest people to draft into the arena are our young. They never see it coming. .

Battle Royale
Written by Kenta Fukasaku; Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
2000
113 minutes
Japanese
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Kanopy and Hoopla (Both free services with a public library card.)
You’ll like this if you like: Kill Bill (2003), The Hunger Games (2012), Lord of the Flies (1963), Snowpiercer (2013)

Watching Days of Heaven (1978) is the closest you will ever come to experiencing a memory that isn’t your own. (At least until neural interfaces become more advanced.) Not the characters’ memory, but something older: like a memory of America’s promise before it industrialized its soul. Telling any story about America that doesn’t include the foundational oppression of its founding can feel incomplete, but the evils of opportunism on display here resonate beyond the frame. Terrence Malick’s second feature plays like a whisper carried on the wind through wheat fields: a story about lovers, laborers, and landowners that lets silence and sunlight do most of the talking.

The plot, spare and biblical, follows Bill (Richard Gere), a steelworker in early 20th-century Chicago, who accidentally kills his boss (whoops) and flees the city with his girlfriend, Abby (Brooke Adams), and his kid sister, Linda (Linda Manz), to the Texas Panhandle. There, they join a roving mass of seasonal workers harvesting wheat for a wealthy, unnamed farmer (Sam Shepard), who notices Abby and eventually falls for her. Bill, pretending to be Abby’s brother, sees an opportunity for a better life and encourages the relationship. The genius across all Malick films is the way he doesn’t waste time on dialogue trying to justify characters’ actions. We see Bill chart a course, and we may question his actions and feel disgust, but we accept the fidelity of the situation to life because, well, life is weird. And silent.

It’s a film full of contradictions: vast, open skies paired with tiny, boxed-in lives; an Edenic landscape cut down by machines. A love triangle where no one really wins, but everyone is too quiet or too proud to say what they want. The silence is key. Malick doesn’t bother with the usual scaffolding of character backstory or dialogue-driven scenes. Instead, he lets us drift through the story the way Linda does: half-knowing, half-guessing, observing from the margins. Her voiceover is erratic and plainspoken like a child trying to make sense of adult disasters. It’s one of the great cinematic narrations precisely because it doesn’t explain: it observes. “Sometimes I’d feel very old like my whole life’s over,” she says at one point, though she’s maybe twelve. In Malick’s world, time doesn’t unfold in order; it swells and contracts, depending on where your heart is.

The film is absurdly beautiful. Perhaps the second-best example of the phrase “every frame a painting” being true. (Barry Lyndon (1975) being the standard-bearer). Cinematographers Néstor Almendros and, later, Haskell Wexler, shot most of it during the “golden hour,” that narrow slice of day where the light is soft and vibrant. People look like silhouettes; animals move like ghosts. Fire spreads across fields like a biblical judgment. You could pause Days of Heaven at any moment and hang the image in a gallery, and yet none of it feels staged. Malick’s obsession with nature isn’t decorative: it’s existential. Nature doesn’t care about your plans, your lies, your clever manipulations. It just continues, eventually, without you.

Romantic fatalism is everywhere in Days of Heaven, but it doesn’t arrive with operatic intensity. There’s no breakdown, no screaming, no catharsis. Just wind and consequence. Abby, Bill, and the farmer each try to secure happiness: through love, labor, or land. But the land has its own logic. The harvest ends. The weather turns. Someone gets hurt. The tragedy feels inevitable, not because the characters are doomed from the start, but because they live in a world that punishes yearning. The moment they reach for more, the sky gets darker.

By the time the final train pulls out, Malick leaves us with a lone character, walking along the tracks with someone they’ve just met. “I’ve got to go now,” they say. “But I might come back.” Maybe they will. Maybe they never will. But the beauty of Days of Heaven is that it leaves them, and us, suspended in that possibility: a breath held between seasons.

Days of Heaven
Written and Directed by Terrence Malick
1978
94 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Criterion Channel
You’ll like this if you like: Badlands (1973), The New World (2005), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) If you’ve ever wanted to get into Malick but have balked at the runtimes of his films, this is your best bet: 94 minute-Malick!

When Sicario (2015) begins, we think it’s a movie about Emily Blunt’s character, badass FBI agent Kate Macer. In the opening minutes, she breeches a room, dodging a shotgun blast that would have taken off most of her head, and returns fire, cutting down her would-be killer. She’s the lead agent on a team specializing in kidnapping victims, but they don’t find any survivors in the cartel safehouse they just raided--only the putrid bodies of people who died horrible deaths and were interred standing up between the studs of the walls where you would normally find pink insulation. The movie doesn’t indicate if they were alive as the drywall went up.

After the bodies are found, Kate is recruited by a flip-flop-wearing CIA operative played by Josh Brolin. He needs an agent with tactical experience to take down the cartel leaders responsible for the murder house.

We’ve seen movies and TV shows like this, where an exceptional person or team is recruited for a mission. Like Spy Game (2001), where Robert Redford recruits Brad Pitt; Andor (2022), where Stellan Skarsgård recruits Diego Luna; The Color of Money (1986), where Paul Newman recruits Tom Cruise; Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), where Indy recruits his hard-drinking ex-girlfriend, Marion; Ocean’s 11 (2001), where George Clooney recruits more people than I care to name; and on and on. This is an eternal movie set-up.

We assume this movie will be no different from the other recruitment movies we’ve seen, that challenges exist only to make it more satisfying when the protagonist eventually leads the team to victory. We assume this because of our familiarity with recruitment movies and because, by the time Sicario came out, we already saw Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow (2014) as Rita Vratski, the Angel of Verdun, who wields a fucking helicopter rotor blade as a sword. After seeing her action-hero bona fides in that and the opening minutes of Sicario, it's unfathomable to us that her character is not the hero of this movie.

Maybe another reason we’re so certain Emily Blunt will be the hero is because we’re a little bit racist. Although Blunt is famously British (she was Mary Poppins, a character that rivals 007 for Britishness), she plays an American character. Alejandro, a Colombian character played by Benicio del Toro, sidelines Kate Macer at the moment we think she’s finally ready to take over the helm of the movie. Alejandro is the titular sicario, which the movie's prologue explains is the term for a hitman in Mexico. Yet, we cannot comprehend what is happening. It’s as shocking as if the Chinese acrobat from Ocean’s 11 took over Clooney’s heist gang or the fez-wearing Arab guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark beat the Nazis and then made an honest woman out of Marion.

Kate Macer’s role in the movie is to sign a form and shut up. When future generations of what is left of America watch Sicario, this might not seem so odd to them. Perhaps they will immediately grasp the movie. Happy Fourth of July.

Sicario
Written by Taylor Sheridan; Directed by Denis Villeneuve
2015
121 minutes
English, Spanish, Ukrainian (I didn’t catch it, but this is what IMDb says)
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Netflix
You’ll like this if you like: Traffic (2000)

Sometimes the scariest thing isn't the virus: it's what survives it. I think that might have been a slugline for 28 Days Later (2002) when it came out; it hasn’t aged well, but like all trend-setters, the follow-ons tend to erode the original value. Before The Last of Us, before the idea of a “rage virus” wormed its way into pop culture, there was 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s lean, grimy, and unexpectedly poetic zombie thriller. It’s a film that doesn’t just imagine the end of civilization: it sits in the eerie silence after the crash, then imagines the chaos that follows.

The more interesting contributor to the project, in retrospect, is Alex Garland. Over time, a clear thesis emerges in his work (men), and his commitment to this thesis is evident in everything he’s written or directed since. Each subsequent work offering a different angle on how men could be rightly interpreted as original sinners in a new world.

We open with Jim (Cillian Murphy), a bicycle courier who wakes up from a coma to discover that London is barren and empty. This isn’t a dreamy Bergman apocalypse. This is “bloody handprints on the hospital wall; a Coke can rolling down an empty street” kind of apocalypse. The opening scenes, shot on digital (hard to watch still!), give London an uncanny quality: like CCTV footage from the end of the world. It's beautiful, it’s terrifying, and it’s not remotely concerned with traditional horror aesthetics. The sound design, zombies approaching swiftly and quietly and without warning, rather than slowly and moaning, is one of the film’s most effective choices.

Boyle, working from Garland’s script, fuses horror with something more unsettling: a morality play about survival, humanity, and control. Jim eventually joins up with Selena (Naomie Harris), who’s the atypical apocalypse survivor with a strict no-nonsense approach: if you're infected, you get a machete to the face. Quickly. Their bond isn’t romantic: it’s strategic, tense, and always a little uncertain. And yet, like everything in this movie, it morphs.

The film’s real terror blooms in the third act, once our group stumbles upon a military outpost promising safety. Enter Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston), who delivers what might be the most unsettling line of the film, not with teeth bared but with calm finality: “I promised them women.” 28 Days Later is a story about how society breaks down, but also about how society is built, and who does the building. Garland fears that the world’s oldest prejudice will survive even the apocalypse, because it’s continually at the root of how we build society.

The acting in the film is understated and effective. Murphy, long before his Oscar win, is wiry, hollow-eyed, and surprisingly tender as Jim. He goes from confused victim to something closer to predator, a transformation the film doesn’t celebrate so much as quietly grieve. Naomie Harris, meanwhile, is competent, commanding, and completely uninterested in the male savior narrative. Their final moments in the film together are both strange and hopeful.

28 Days Later reinvigorated a genre. It’s now being followed by 28 Years Later (2025), a planned first part of a trilogy, which is currently in theaters. I’m excited to see Boyle and Garland team up again, as their early work together was some of the most interesting of the aughts. Garland is a writer with a passing interest in genre and an intense interest in gender politics. Boyle is our foremost narrative anthropologist.

28 Days Later
Written by Alex Garland; Directed by Danny Boyle
2002
113 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Available to rent on all major services.
You’ll like this if you like: Children of Men (2006), The Road (2009), The Last of Us (2023)

School’s out. The day is long. The freezer is full of popsicles. Today marks the official start of summer. When it comes to summer on the silver screen, no one captured summer’s strange and wonderful blend of idleness and excess quite like Agnès Varda.

In Along the Coast (1958), a 24-minute kaleidoscope of seaside life on the French Riviera, Varda turns her lens to beach towns caught between leisure and spectacle. An early Varda, initially made for French television at the behest of French tourist agencies, the film glides from one brightly saturated scene to the next: red parasols and crowded beaches, opulent villas and salt-of-the-earth locals, sunburnt tourists and the ghosts of tradition. Varda’s narration floats above it all: dry, lyrical, occasionally bemused, as if she’s flipping through a vacation slideshow while whispering poetry over your shoulder.

There’s no plot to follow. For me, that’s the point. Like the best summer days, Along the Coast unfolds without urgency. It’s interested in textures, contradictions, and the strange rituals we invent when we try to relax. Varda takes her assignment further than a simple show of beauty. She sees the coast not just as a playground but as a mirror: for colonial fantasies, for the construction of leisure, and the performance of wealth. But she’s not here to scold. She’s here to notice. And what she notices is often beautiful, often ridiculous, sometimes both at once.

Made a few years before Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Along the Coast offers a glimpse of Varda in an in-between phase: part photographer, part sociologist, part poet. You can see her style sharpening as she studies faces, gestures, movement, and color. Even in this early short, her empathy and curiosity feel endless. Agnès Varda follows her assignment and makes a tourist film that shows the weird beauty of humans. Subverting the assignment, she goes on to show us the unadulterated beauty of untouched nature. Changing the assignment, she imagines and shows us a fantastical combination of the two, before bringing us back to earth, where humans dominate.

If you’d like a jolt of Mediterranean color to kick your summer off, Along the Coast is like a postcard from a friend who sees things for what they are, for better or worse, ugly and/or beautiful, and opens your eyes to seeing it too.

Along the Coast (Du côté de la côte)
Written and Directed by Agnès Varda
1958
26 minutes
French
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on YouTube and the Criterion Channel
You’ll like this if you like: La Pointe Courte (1955), vacation slideshows, 1960s postcards, parasols, early Godard without the cigarette smoke

The Lives of Others (2006) opens with a man listening. Not speaking. Not acting. Just listening: ears trained to pick up the conversation. The pauses, the breaths, the subtext of love or betrayal. It’s 1984 in East Berlin, and Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is a true believer in the GDR, a loyal soldier of the Stasi, and an expert in eavesdropping. He’s a man who knows how long it takes a prisoner to break. Who believes, with chilling conviction, that guilt can be measured in silence. The film is about a man, but it’s also about a country on the brink. It’s not about loyalty. Or betrayal. It’s about what happens when someone begins to feel. When the mechanics of duty give way to the murmur of doubt, and a man who’s spent his whole life observing from a distance finally allows himself to see.

The Lives of Others is the debut feature by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (great name), and it’s a rare first films that feels like it was shot by someone who had been waiting their whole life to say a specific thing: and finally had a chance to say it perfectly. It’s haunted by quiet details: the soft click of a tape recorder, a red typewriter ribbon smuggled in from the West, a musical phrase that gets stuck in your head.

At first, Wiesler is sent to spy on Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright beloved by the state, and his partner Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck), a famous actress. The surveillance is political theater: punishment arranged by a jealous Minister. Wiesler doesn’t know that yet. Or maybe he does, and refuses to see it. What matters is the slow shift that follows: as he listens to their lives, something in him softens. He starts to protect them. Quietly. Secretly. And for the first time, he acts not for the state, but for what he believes is right. It’s a testament to the arts, but more-so to our shared humanity that art can aim for.

There are so many ways that this movie could have felt maudlin or self-congratulatory, but it deftly avoids the shtick of so many historical dramas with an axe to grind. That’s partly thanks to Mühe’s performance: so still it’s almost spectral. But also because von Donnersmarck trusts silence. He trusts restraint. He trusts that you, the viewer, will lean in and listen. In an era obsessed with spectacle, The Lives of Others is quiet.

Some have compared The Lives of Others to 1984 (1984), but that’s only half right. Orwell imagined a world so saturated with fear and control that no private interior could survive. This film, in contrast, insists that even under total surveillance, some kernel of truth and beauty might remain. That people change. That resistance can be quiet, even invisible.

Wiesler never gives a speech. He never has a big moment. But that’s what makes his transformation feel true. Redemption here isn’t cinematic. It’s mundane: a changed report, a brief hesitation, a mailbox, a book inscription. And when the denouement arrives in the film, after everyone has moved on and forgotten, we know exactly what kind of man Wiesler was and is. What kind of story this was all along: One that isn’t about the lives of others. It’s about the lives we could have had if we had made better choices as individuals and as a society.

The Lives of Others
Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
2006
137 minutes
German
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Available to rent on all major services.
You’ll like this if you like: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), The Conversation (1974), Cold War (2018)

The American dream looks different for everyone, and for some it’s a myth. In a budding capitalist society, a unique and desirable talent is the skeleton key to success. Baking, for example. But games can be rigged before they’re played, and like any true capitalist venture, the one at the center of First Cow (2019) won’t succeed without what is technically referred to as “crime.”

There’s more to First Cow (2019) than pure social commentary, Kelly Reichardt’s tender frontier story about friendship in a verdant but somehow desolate place. On it’s face the film is about a loner named Cookie (John Magaro) and a Chinese immigrant named King-Lu (Orion Lee) who go into business together in the Oregon Territory. Their frontier startup idea: fried biscuits with a drizzle of honey. Their supply chain: a stolen pail of milk from the only cow in the region, owned by a wealthy English landowner (the unmatched Toby Jones). Their strategy: don’t get caught.

Like many Reichardt films, First Cow is deceptively simple. It moves slowly, listens carefully, and pays close attention to human hands and shared glances. The stakes are low, and when you’ve settled into the lovely pace of the film, you realize the stakes are suddenly high. There are no shootouts, no gold rushes, no heroic arcs. Just two men trying to get by, hoping that a little ingenuity and a touch of larceny might be enough to carve out a life in a place that seems to be buzzing with promise.

Reichardt’s work is often defined by what it refuses: sensationalism, sentimentality, and spectacle. Her films—Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Certain Women (2016) are built out of quiet observation, often focused on people living on the margins of American life. She favors natural light, long takes, and non-movie stars, grounding her stories in a realism that feels lived-in rather than performed. If the western genre is usually about taming the frontier, Reichardt's version is about being weathered by it.

But this is still America, and the dream of upward mobility rests on someone else’s property. Literally: the cow is not theirs. They milk her in secret, under the cover of night, whispering soft apologies as they steal the goods. There is a universe out there where Magaro, maybe most known for his role as the chill white guy in Past Lives (2023), wins the Oscar for his performance here. It’s sensitive, sincere, and sweet. You’re rooting for him the whole way. The milk Cookie and King-Liu symbolizes a quiet act of rebellion, both gentle and transgressive, against a system that hoards resources and guards opportunity.

There’s a melancholy baked into the film’s crust, even as its central friendship warms the heart. Cookie and King-Lu don’t just want to survive, they want to build something. A bakery, a home, a future. But their environment, a muddy, testosterone-fueld dominated trading post full of drunk trappers, hungry capitalists, and brittle egos, offers little in the way of protection. One misstep and the whole enterprise falls apart.

The film opens in the present day, with a woman discovering two skeletons buried side by side in the forest. You can guess who they are, but the mystery isn’t the point. Reichardt’s real concern is the life these two men made together before the world caught up with them. In a country obsessed with progress and profit, she offers a different kind of origin story: one that values friendship, collaboration, and the small, sustaining joys of a warm, oily cake, or the perfect clafoutis.

The West has rarely felt so quiet, or so intimate. There’s no need for a grand mythos here. Just a cow, a griddle, and a chance at a dream.

First Cow
Written by Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt; Directed by Kelly Reichardt
2019
122 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Available to rent on all major services.
You’ll like this if you like: Old Joy (2006), Dead Man (1995), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)