This is it. This is my final retroactive Top 10 list, because it is my first.

This was the first year I was in film school, and the first time I saw nearly enough films in any given year to feel qualified to weigh in. I was a teenager at the time, so maybe my taste wasn’t quite so refined — but hey, it was a lot more refined than most 18-year-olds, I’d wager.

These lists are a time capsule. Some of these films have aged better than others. Others that I’ve seen since — Mulholland Drive, Donnie Darko, Before Night Falls, to name a few — might have been in contention, but aren’t found here. Because you can’t see everything.

I wrote this list without ordering my picks, so I’ve ordered them as seems appropriate now. Another caveat: I didn’t do any write-ups then, so these are my current thoughts about these films. Some of these movies I love even more now than I did then, and others I’d probably happily leave off this list were I to go back and start over. But you can’t do that, because it defeats the whole purpose of encapsulating your favorites in a Top Ten!

(For other Top Tens from other years, click here.)

10. MONSTER’S BALL

There’s a lot of misery going on in Monster’s Ball. Hank is a son of a bitch whose wife killed herself, and early in the story, his son kills himself, too. Then there’s Leticia, whose husband is executed on death row early in the film, and whose son is later killed in a car accident. But hey, at least there’s ice cream!

Yes, this film lays on the “chocolate versus vanilla” symbolism thicker than hot fudge, because Hank is white and Leticia is blank, and Hank is also pretty much a racist. It’s basically tragedy porn, and is mostly notable for winning Halle Berry her Oscar for Best Actress, which was also the first (and, to date, only) Best Actress Oscar to go to a black actress. Unfortunately, Berry’s career since 2001 has been, shall we say, less than optimal, with duds like Gothika and Catwoman following her win and somewhat sullying her appeal. She hasn’t been great in a great movie since. Director Marc Forster’s career has been spotty, too.

But Berry is really good in Monster’s Ball, and despite its retroactive inclusion under the Lee Daniels Meloadrama Umbrella, it’s not a bad film, if a tad overcooked. Billy Bob Thornton, Heath Ledger, and even Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs turn out fine performances. This isn’t a film from 2001 I’ve revisited often (I may be a masochist when it comes to bleak movies, but I’m not that much of a masochist), but it’s not a cinematic blight, either, even though Monster’s Ball doesn’t have the greatest of reputations anymore. (Funny how consensus on certain films just sours sometimes, largely when its key players turn out subpar work in subsequent ventures.)

9. IRIS

I suppose it’s fitting that my most forgettable movie of 2001 happens to be about Alzheimer’s. I certainly don’t want to dismiss the film — I liked it enough to rank it among my favorites of the year, of course, and it was nominated for three Oscars, all for its performances. Not too shabby.

Jim Broadbent won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, even though I’d say his role is more of a lead (as you’ll see in my acting awards below). No matter. As Bayley, the mild-mannered hubby of the titular Iris, played to perfection as usual by Dame Judi Dench, Broadbent is heartbreaking. Broadbent is the kind of stalwart character actor who isn’t often recognized by the Academy, or at least rarely wins against more formidable (and famous) opponents. For this role, he was up against Ben Kinglsey, Ian McKellan, Ethan Hawke, and Jon Voight, all of whom are more recognizable to audiences. And Iris also has a supporting turn from Kate Winslet, which is never a bad thing.

Dench and Winslet have had plenty of other memorable roles, and Broadbent has proven his worth in many roles since, but it’s nice that this movie earned him his due… even if I’m feeling a bit Iris-like, in that I remember very little about the story of the film itself…8. THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

Speaking of Ian McKellan! This was the film that started it all, for better or worse. It’s actually rather unfortunate that Peter Jackson went on to direct his bloated Hobbit trilogy — which (to be fair) I haven’t seen — because the original trilogy was held in such high regard by both audiences and critics, back in the day. The third installment managed to sweep the Oscars in 2004.

These films still have their place in the hearts of many fans (and I suppose the Hobbit films do too, of a much smaller group), but since 2001 we’ve seen a lot of imitators — not so much in terms of fantasy stories, but definitely in terms of spectacle. Few of these are anywhere as good as Fellowship Of The Ring.

Give Jackson his due for adapting a difficult book series into something that fans old and new cherished, something of high enough quality to be nominated for Best Picture all three times, and utilizing such magnificent actors in these iconic roles. There is so much to praise in these movies, and yet… and yet… I find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for them now, because I’m exhausted by what they left in their wake.

Sorry, Mr. Jackson.7. GOSFORD PARK

Before there was Downton Abbey, there was Gosford Park. The cast features more or less every British thespian who was noteworthy in 2001 (many who would become even more noteworthy later), including Helen Mirren, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jeremy Northam, Emily Watson, Clive Owen, Charles Dance… I’m getting tired of listing them, but there are lots more. Enough to compete with Hogwarts. Also… Ryan Phillippe!

Gosford Park is like an Agatha Christie novel come to life, paired with Christopher Guest-ian humor. (Or maybe that’s just the presence of Bob Balaban leading me to think so.) Directed by the legendary Robert Altman, this takes the auteur’s trademark comfort with colossal casts and loose narrative and puts it to work, in the pitch perfect setting of a posh English manor, where there’s been — dun dun dun — a murder!

The story is a classic “upstairs downstairs” type, where we see things unfold both with the upper crust and the servants. The film is wryly funny and the mystery is satisfying, and — no surprise here — the cast is superb all around. I haven’t seen Gosford Park in a while, but I should correct that. It’s Altman at his best (or close to it, at least).6. BLACK HAWK DOWN

We’ve seen a lot of movies that resemble Black Hawk Down since 2001, but they may never have been made if Black Hawk Down didn’t get there first. Ridley Scott was hot off the Best Picture-winning Gladiator, with the hot lineup of Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Orlando Bloom, and Eric Bana, amongst others. (You remember when Josh Hartnett was a thing, don’t you?)

Black Hawk Down was the most intense war film since Saving Private Ryan, set in a much more recent era (Somalia, 1993). Up until this year, it was probably also the best regarded film by Ridley Scott since Black Hawk Down, as his output has been hit or miss otherwise. (A Good Year, Kingdom Of Heaven, Body Of Lies, Prometheus, Robin Hood, Exodus: Gods And Kings, American Gangster, The Counselor… definitely a mixed bag there.) Hans Zimmer pulled out a pretty fantastic score, and the film won two out of the four Oscars it was nominated for. Black Hawk Down also feels like a necessary precursor to films like The Hurt Locker and American Sniper that depict more recent war zones than the usual WWII varietal.   5. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

Wes Anderson has been assembling casts of weirdo “families” (biological or otherwise) since 2001, many times using the same actors. (I know Bottle Rocket and Rushmore did this to an extent earlier, but I’d say it was The Royal Tenenbaums that really cemented the full Wes Anderson formula.) I am sometimes charmed by Anderson’s sensibilities, and sometimes not. Occasionally, I get a sense of quirk overload, to the extent that I’ve had to skip a few of his films.

It helped that back in 2001, we hadn’t really seen this sort of thing before. Gene Hackman is a hoot as the gruff patriarch of a fractured family whose only method of getting back in his loved ones’ good graces is to pretend that he’s dying. Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Danny Glover, and Bill Murray are basically an immaculate lineup for Anderson (the dour, secretly smoking Margo is Paltrow’s best-ever performance). Like all of Anderson’s films, there’s an underlying sadness beneath the mega-stylized surface, but in this one, it feels earned.

4. MEMENTO

I mentioned having forgotten a lot about the Alzheimer’s drama Iris above, but Memento is far less forgettable — even though it is similarly all about memory loss, albeit in a much more mysterious fashion. While not technically Christopher Nolan’s first film, it is the film that put him on the mainstream map. While still best known for his Batman films, the unique vision Nolan put forth in Memento carried on in bigger original films like Inception and Interstellar, which are mainly notable because hardly anyone gets to make big budget original stories anymore.

In Memento, we have a story that is nothing new — a man trying to hunt down the man who wrong his wife. The twist, of course, is that this man has anterograde amnesia, so he forgets everything he does and everything that happens, making him vulnerable to certain predators. Taking place in alternating scenes of chronological and reverse-chronological order, one in color and one in black-and-white, Memento is a post-Pulp Fiction pushing of the limits of narrative storytelling, one that — like Pulp Fiction — has prompted plenty of copycats in the years since.

3. IN THE BEDROOM

This film is a lot less kinky than it sounds. In fact, it’s not kinky at all! The titular bedroom shenanigans refer primarily to grief, loss, estrangement, and other such unsexy things.

Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek are Matt and Ruth Fowler, living an idyllic life in Maine with their son Frank (Nick Stahl)… until he begins dating an older woman, Natalie (Marisa Tomei), who has two children and a hot-headed ex husband. That ex ends up killing their son in a domestic dispute, and because there are no witnesses, he ends up going free. Matt and Ruth cope in different ways, the absence of Frank palpable between them. Eventually, Matt comes to believe that the only way they can move on is to take eye-for-an-eye vengeance, leading to a tense finale.

In The Bedroom was the first official Sundance selection nominated for Best Picture, and certainly not the last. A number of independent films with similar stories and moods have been released in the years since, but In The Bedroom remains one of the most sparsely elegant of all, powered by powerhouse performances from Spacek and Wilkinson. The fact that it lost Best Picture to the lighter-weight A Beautiful Mind is a predictable shame in the Academy Awards record books, but this one holds up far better.

2. GHOST WORLD

Of all my 2001 favorites, this is probably the film I’ve re-watched the most, and it only gets better with age. Following their high school graduation, BFFs Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) hang out and fill their last summer of freedom in that idle, aimless manner you can only get away with as a teenager. Their primary preoccupation becomes with Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a lonesome sad sack, whom they prank by setting him up on a fake date. Then Enid starts to feel sorry for Seymour and begins spending time with him, and the longer she’s around Seymour, the more she realizes they have in common. Being a snarky outsider is fine and dandy in high school, but that’s the sort of attitude that could see Enid growing up to be as lonely as Seymour.

Adapted from a comic book, Terry Zwigoff’s offbeat comedy is plenty clever and contains a number of indelible comic moments, but like The Royal Tenenbaums, the comedy bubbles up in a sea of melancholy and human truth. The relationships between these characters are flawless and fascinating — Enid and Rebecca, as their friendship falls apart post-high school, as teen friendships tend to do, and Enid and Seymour, whose relationship is tender with some underlying romantic tension that’s never as creepy as it easily could be. Ghost World captures the tender age between childhood and adulthood perfectly, with a level of stark, sobering truth that’s rare in a “teen movie.” (This is one of those only in the most technical sense.) It’s one of the best comedies of the past 15 years… or maybe ever.

1. A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

This might be one of Steven Spielberg’s more divisive movies — in more ways than one. In it, you can feel Spielberg’s sentimental instincts grappling to stay buoyant while tangling with Stanley Kubrick’s more nihilistic worldview.

It is the story of David, an artificial intelligence in the form of a sweet-faced boy. (You didn’t get more sweet-faced in 2001 than Haley Joel Osment, hot off his iconic turn in 1999’s The Sixth Sense.) David is programmed to love his adoptive family, but these humans, of course, are not programmed to love him back. When their own child awakens from a coma, their fear of David’s synthetic origins overwhelms the complex feelings they’ve grown for him, and he is abandoned. That’s where the family drama ends, and an entirely different sort of adventure begins.

Based on the short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” A.I. is like a fairy tale, but not the sweet Disney-fied rewrites we remember. We’re talking original Brothers Grimm style stuff. Its depiction of the future is both awesome and hellish, and absolutely one of my favorite cinematic imaginings of the future. And how can you not love a story about a lost little boy and his talking teddy bear that has them meet up with a gigolo for the rest of their adventures? Though there are blatant echoes of Pinocchio in the text, A.I. also feels like a fucked up version of The Wizard Of Oz, as a child meets up with an array of unusual friends on his quest toward the big city.

It comes as no shocker that Jude Law makes a pitch perfect male prostitute, because in 2001, who didn’t want to sleep with him? But this is also one of his best and unheralded performances. The whole movie, in fact, is underrated despite coming from one of the highest profile filmmakers out there — it earned only two Oscar nods in a year where more people were focused on the first of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings movies. (Though as you can tell by these ranking, I find Spielberg’s vision of A.I. a lot more compelling.)

It may take a few viewings to fully appreciate the brilliant and beautiful strangeness of this story, but it ranks amongst Spielberg’s best work. Even coming from such a blockbuster auteur, it’s one of the most creative and memorable pieces of cinema from this era, and I’m not alone in holding it in even higher esteem now than I did upon its release in the summer of 2001.

BEST ACTRESS

Sissy Spacek, In The Bedroom
Halle Berry, Monster’s Ball
Judi Dench, Iris
Jennifer Connolly, A Beautiful Mind
Thora Birch, Ghost World

BEST ACTOR

Jim Broadbent, Iris
Gene Hackman, The Royal Tenenbaums
Tom Wilkinson, In The Bedroom
Billy Bob Thornton, Monster’s Ball
Denzel Washington, Training Day

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Marisa Tomei, In The Bedroom
Maggie Smith, Gosford Park
Kate Winslet, Iris
Gwyneth Paltrow, The Royal Tenenbaums
Cameron Diaz, Vanilla Sky

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Jude Law, A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Steve Buscemi, Ghost World
Ben Kingsley, Sexy Beast
Ian McKellen, The Fellowship Of The Ring
Peter Boyle, Monster’s Ball

BEST SCREENPLAY

Gosford Park
Memento
The Royal Tenenbaums
Ghost World
In The Bedroom

BEST DIRECTOR

Peter Jackson
Ridley Scott
Robert Altman
Steven Spielberg
Christopher Nolan

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Fellowship Of The Ring
Black Hawk Down
Moulin Rouge
Vanilla Sky

*

America is a land of opportunity, beckoning thousands across the globe to come to these shores in celebration of freedom and liberty.

If you’re a cute white girl from Ireland, at least.

Yes, it’s an ironic time for a dewy-eyed film that romanticizes immigration to America, but that’s exactly what Brooklyn is. Saoirse Ronan has been earning raves, nominations, and critical awards for her portrayal of Eilis, a guileless Irish girl who exits her modest hometown across the sea for the bright lights and big city of… Brooklyn.

Before it was a hipster enclave, Brooklyn was a refuge for a diverse range of immigrants, it turns out (who knew?) — most notably, in this film, Irish and Italians. Eilis acquires a job in a department store under the watchful eye of Miss Fortini (Mad Men‘s Jessica Pare) and takes up residence in a boarding house for girls under the even more watchful eye of Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters). She also begins school to learn to be an accountant, just like her sister back home. Eilis’ fellow boarders are gossipy, but she soon develops a sort of friendship with them, as well as her coworkers. But it isn’t until she meets a strapping stranger at a dance that she truly feels at home.

That strapping stranger would be Tony, an Italian boy winningly played by Emory Cohen, who manages to ooze old fashioned charm without ever quite becoming gooey. It’s plain to see how Eilis falls for this man, because as written by Nicholas Hornby, he’s absolutely perfect: good-looking, kind-hearted, emotionally mature, and he has a warm and welcoming family. Okay, so maybe he’s “just” a plumber and is sensitive about his lack of smarts (though he never really does anything dumb), but he’s a catch, and Eilis knows it. Then again, Eilis herself is pretty immaculate — and so, for that matter, is just about everyone in this movie.

That’s what kept me at a distance from Brooklyn, the very definition of a handsome picture, but one that idealizes the immigrant experience and this era (1952). Most of this can probably be pinned on Colm Toibin, the author of the book it’s based on. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to concoct a story that’s almost totally pleasant, about a girl who is torn between two perfectly wonderful paths to take her life down. When tragedy brings her back to Ireland, Eilis meets another absolutely perfect gentleman who is totally taken with her — Jim (Domnhall Gleeson). At this point, Eilis’ life in Ireland is rosier than it was when she had to leave — she has a good job and a fine man handed to her, as well as family obligations. There’s a chance she won’t ever make it back to Tony.

The film makes that choice palpable, and it should resonate with anyone who’s ever left a humble hometown in hopes of greater career opportunities elsewhere. What doesn’t resonate quite so well is just how easily it all comes to Eilis, and how little she does to get any of it. Her home and first job are set up by the kindly Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), who also finds a benefactor to pay for her school. Both Tony and Jim relentlessly pursue her with boundless romantic attention. When Eilis returns to Ireland in what she thinks will be a brief stay, she gets handed another job. She also starts dressing like a 1950s movie star, even though she’s only an accountant, with no clues as to how she got the means or fashion sense for the transformation. The moral of this story? Eilis is one lucky immigrant.Brooklyn is a pleasant trip if you don’t mind an uncomplicated (and, frankly, unrealistic) drama that’s pure escapism. The charm of its performers, plus some engaging scene work by Nick Hornby, is enough to ensure that it goes down easy, though it’s surprisingly lightweight for a film that’s getting so much hype during awards season. (Director John Crowley has done more impressive work in the unfortunately underseen Boy A, starring Andrew Garfield.) Further off the radar is Mustang, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s drama about five sisters living in a Turkish village under increasingly strict supervision from their elders. Mustang is France’s official entry in the Academy Awards race, so it’s not totally obscure, but it’s the sort of foreign film that is destined to go unseen by mainstream moviegoers, which is a shame. In many ways, Mustang is the anti-Brooklyn: Brooklyn‘s Eilis has boundless opportunities handed to her throughout the film, and doesn’t do much with them, while Mustang‘s spirited young protagonist has no freedom and still manages to assert her independence, through the sheer force of her will.

Mustang will immediately call to mind two movies, if you’ve seen them — Dogtooth, the super-weird tale of Greek siblings growing up completely cut off from the outside world, and The Virgin Suicides, which was also about five sisters who find themselves living in captivity when their family grows fearful of their burgeoning sexuality. Like The Virgin Suicides, Mustang is directed by a woman, which is certainly not essential in crafting a smart, entertaining piece of moviemaking about women, but often helps.

Mustang begins with five young girls frolicking innocently with some schoolboys in the sea. Lale, Nur, Ece, Selma, and Sonay have done nothing to be ashamed of, but gossip about what might have occurred is damaging enough. The girls are taken to get their virginity tested, and soon comes a string of suitors to whisk them away one by one, starting with the eldest. Mustang is not merely a foreign rehash of The Virgin Suicides, however, thanks to two key factors. First, it is set in Turkey, far from the more cosmopolitan Istanbul, in a society that is much less liberal than 1970s America, the setting of Virgin Suicides. Second, unlike Virgin Suicides, the story is not told through the lens of a male narrator; in fact, males don’t play a terribly important role in Mustang at all — at least, specific males don’t. Some of the girls have flings and romances, but we hardly know the men at all — because neither do they, really. Often, we see only glimpses of the boys in question, or catch sight of them from a distance. The quintet of teen sisters is being married off to men they’ve spent a mere handful of minutes with one by one, as per the tradition of their culture. So in a sense, we the audience get to know these men about as well as the girls do before they’re expected to perform their “wifely duties” — which, of course, includes the ritual sacrifice of their oh-so-precious virginities, culminating in the incredibly awkward parental “viewing” of the blood-stained bedsheet that confirms they haven’t been ripped off with an “impure” bride.

Mustang is a reminder of the way girls are essentially bought and sold in certain cultures (and the latent remnants of those restrictions that still linger in cultures as “liberated” as America in 2015). The only value young women have is as a virgin bride, thus their families stop at nothing to protect a teenage girl’s purity. It is not impossible to marry for love, but it’s much rarer than marrying as a mutually beneficial “arrangement.” Once these sisters are married off, we don’t see much of them, just as our young protagonist Lale doesn’t. Lale is losing her sisters one by one, much earlier than she probably should — and she alone is willing to fight back against this culture and all its traditions, against every preconceived notion the older generation has about its young women.

Mustang does a fantastic job at distinguishing each of the girls’ disparate personalities without making any of them a mere “type” — Sonay is boy-crazy, Lale is feisty, Nur is a follower, Selma is reserved, Ece is moody and unknowable, but there are layers of depth to each. (Günes Sensoy, Elit Iscan, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Tugba Sunguroglu, and Ilayda Akdogan turn in flawless turns as the sisters, each bringing a very different dynamic to the group.) Similarly, the girls’ family — mainly, their grandmother and uncle, charged with raising them (we never learn what happened with the parents) — are certainly villains in a sense, but also human beings whose motives are clear. Little by little, they start taking the girls’ freedoms away. It isn’t long before the girls aren’t allowed to leave the house, and then before they’re literally trapped in the house. The only escape is in the clutches of a male suitors’ arms. The price is merely the rest of their lives.

It’s easy to imagine a movie like Mustang wallowing in misery, presenting a tragic tale of powerless young girls undone by a patriarchal culture. We’ve seen that before. There are a handful of tragic moments in Mustang, but ultimately this is a hopeful and energetic film, one that speaks to a changing tide rather than an all-consuming status quo. The world is changing. Girls are getting stronger. Generation by generation, in many cultures, women are growing more confident, more educated, better able to stand up to oppression. In this case, the buck stops with Lale, who refuses to be reduced to a commodity, who will not allow her worth to valued around her eligibility as a virgin bride. The film’s climax is a pitch perfect act of revenge — but it’s the kind of simple revenge a child would dream up, not the blood-soaked, Tarantino-style reverie you’d expect from a different sort of movie, and it’s followed by an exhilarating attempt to escape the family’s clutches, and this society itself. The film’s conclusion perfectly and subtly speaks to exactly how important education is to young women in cultures like these (a point that could have been hammered home in much more obvious fashion, and thankfully wasn’t).Mustang is an unpredictable experience — you’re never quite sure how dark it’ll get. The script by Deniz Gamze Ergüven and Alice Winocour perfectly captures the sisterhood between the girls and leaves the older sisters a bit of a mystery, as older sisters tend to be to a young girl like Lale. These older girls succumb to their fates as so many before them have, but Lale makes the bold and unlikely choice to fight back. The script avoids almost every cliche, save one late-blooming revelation involving the uncle, which could have been eliminated — particularly involving an adult man (Burak Yigit) who takes a friendly interest in Lale and aids in her rebellion to the extent that he’s able.

All in all, Mustang is one of 2015’s very best films. In a year that’s already perhaps a record-best for women in cinema, it’s the film that most perfectly encapsulates the feminist spirit of the movies released in the last twelve months. (But more on this in my forthcoming Top Ten.) Nothing against Brooklyn, which has plenty of well-written female characters, but Lale’s journey to Istanbul is infinitely more involving than Eilis’ trip to and from Brooklyn, because Lale really earns her freedom. She really works for it, challenging every convention and boundary along the way. With any luck, Mustang will at least make it into the Best Foreign Film race at this year’s Oscars. After seeing it, I believe that Lale could make it just about anywhere.*

“Inspired by the true stories of daring women.”

That’s the title card that precedes David O. Russell’s Joy, the story of an entrepreneur who becomes a titan of the Home Shopping Network. But it would work just as well preceding so many movies from 2015, which has proven itself to be a remarkable year for films about women.

There were still a handful of very male films at the multiplex, of course — movies like The Revenant and Bridge Of Spies and The Big Short don’t have much of a female presence, not to mention any number of more forgettable titles. But this year, perhaps for the first time in history, they were the exception and not the rule. The new Mission: Impossible had a female spy who was as capable and charismatic as Ethan Hunt along every step of the way. The macho title character took a backseat to Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, which also featured a gang of ass-kicking grannies. And the highest-grossing film of all time handed the reigns of the galaxy’s most beloved franchise to Daisy Ridley’s Skywalker surrogate Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

And those are just the blockbusters. It’s hard to list the number of smaller films centered on women. But here are a few: Victoria. Joy. Carol. Brooklyn. Phoenix. Chi-Raq. Room. Girlhood. The Final Girls. It Follows. Heaven Knows What. Queen Of Earth. Clouds Of Sils Maria. The Age Of Adaline. The Duke Of Burgundy. The Diary Of A Teenage Girl. Unconventional women were the heroines of comedies like Trainwreck and Spy, where they got to behave in ways that usually only men get to. Even in movies that place males front and center, women got to play more than the usual weepy love interest or damsel in distress — I’m thinking of The Martian, Creed, and maybe even the second biggest film of the year, Jurassic World. (But running from a T-Rex in heels makes that kind of debatable, don’t you think?)

Even the current Best Picture front-runner (in a weird and unpredictable awards season), Spotlight, gave Rachel McAdams’ journalist equal weight with the boys. There were no concessions for Sacha being “the girl” on the team, which in a sense is the most progressive move of all. For years, women in movies have been depicted as having to prove themselves in the workplace, Erin Brockovich-style, but Spotlight eliminates that nonsense. I’m fairly certain that Sacha’s gender goes entirely unmentioned in the film.

So Joy isn’t one of my very favorite films this year, but it’s invocation of “daring women” is emblematic of what 2015 brought to the screen. Women got to be daring, and they got to be a lot of other things, too. My Top Ten films aren’t all about women, but they all have something to say about them. I didn’t plan it that way. This just happens to be the year that so many movies got it right when it comes to how women are depicted on screen.

10. TANGERINE

My #10 slot was particularly challenging to fill this year, with a number of worthy contenders vying for representation. It came down to a bout between Creed, the seventh entry in the hit Rocky franchise, the first entry of which won the Best Picture Oscar for 1976, and Tangerine, a scrappy low-budget indie shot entirely on an iPhone.

It occurred to me that the face-off between these two films resembles a Rocky movie itself: in one corner, Tangerine, the underdog, a feisty, foul-mouthed story about two transsexual prostitutes that has no real shot at an Academy Award; in the other corner, Creed, which, like its title character, descends from prestigious lineage, featuring a major movie star who’s been around for decades (Sylvester Stallone), turning in a supporting performance that may well be poised to win him his first Oscar.

I have no deep connection to the Rocky series, but Creed is a big Hollywood boxing movie made as well as one can be by Ryan Coogler, who showed with Fruitvale Station that he was an up-and-comer to watch, and now has fully delivered on that promise. Michael B. Jordan carries the movie effortlessly (and should also be Oscar-nominated this year, though that’s not a sure thing) and Stallone delivers his most moving performance (…ever?). There’s no denying that Creed, like its predecessors, is by necessity a male-dominated movie, but it does make room for Phylicia Rashad as Apollo Creed’s adoptive mother, fully fleshed-out with just a handful of minutes on screen, and Tessa Thompson as Bianca, a promising musician who is slowly going deaf. Love interests in male-centric movies rarely get much to do, but Bianca is a fascinating, fiery character in her own right — you would happily watch a separate movie all about Bianca. In a year that’s been so good for women, you have to hand it to Creed to ensure that even the Rocky franchise is following the changing tide.

Rocky films tend to split the difference in their climactic bouts, having the establishment boxer win the fight overall, with the underdog winning in spirit. I guess I’m flipping that by announcing Tangerine as my official winner, while Creed earns a special place in my heart as one of the year’s best studio surprises. Reportedly shot for around $100,000 and pulling in less than $1 million at the box office, Tangerine is the very definition of a scrappy underdog, certainly rough around the edges. The performances in its opening scene are a little shaky, and the editing can be jarring in moments. But Tangerine has more vitality and raw spirit than just about any other movie this year. The lightweight camera races through the grimy, golden streets of Hollywood following Sin-Dee Rella, who has just wrapped up a month in jail and is now hell-bent on finding the “real fish” her fiance has been cheating with. Her best friend, Alexandra, is more concerned with a performance she’s giving at Hamburger Mary’s that night, and harboring a bit of a secret on the side. Meanwhile, a cab driver named Razmik is cruising around, picking up fares and occasionally stopping for a little action with these ladies. Oh, and did I mention it’s Christmas Eve? This is a Christmas movie unlike any other.

It’s been a banner year for trans visibility in media, and Tangerine is the antidote to I Am Cait. The film’s vibrant colors and energetic soundtrack mask cheap production (which is still impressive, considering) in ways that match how Sin-Dee and Alexandra use makeup, synthetic hair, and hormones to appear more feminine than their bodies were initially programmed to be. These women don’t have the money for a phone or an apartment, so this low-budget camera meets them at their level, walking the streets right alongside them, almost as if one of them is capturing all this action on an iPhone. These are not the sterilized hookers-with-hearts-of-gold you find in most movies — director Sean Baker’s depiction of prostitution in Los Angeles smacks of utter authenticity in ways that are both glorious and painful to behold.

But what works even better are Tangerine‘s micro moments of transcendent loveliness, such as Alexandra’s glum but touching performance of “Toyland” on Christmas Eve, or the heartwarming act of friendship that plays out in the film’s final scene. By most people’s standards, these women don’t have much, but Sin-Dee and Alexandra are living lives that feel true to them and fighting every step of the way to do so. With Tangerine and his 2012 film, Starlet, Baker has proven adept at telling stories about underexplored relationships involving people we might be quick to write off otherwise. Of all the emerging auteurs out there, he’s one of the ones I’m most excited to watch. (Tangerine is streaming on Netflix. Read my original review here.)

9. SLOW WEST

The Western genre has typically lacked in rich female characters (though I know there are a handful of exceptions). It’s usually a good guy, a bad guy, a few other guys, and maybe a “saloon girl” if we’re lucky.

But there’s nothing typically Western about Slow West, which, despite its title, is pretty fast-moving for this genre, clocking in at a lean, mean 84 minutes. None of its primary actors are American. Michael Fassbender is Irish-German. Kodi Smit-McPhee and Ben Mendelsohn are both Australian. The writer/director John Maclean is Scottish. The film was primarily shot in New Zealand.

So, then, nothing about Slow West is actually American, though it purports to take place in the iconic American west, invoking the quintessential American genre. Because of that, there’s something that feels distinctly “off” in Slow West. The landscapes look like they could be found in the America, but aren’t exactly like the landscapes we’re used to seeing in the genre. The characters are less stoic and more quirky than we usually get, too. Frankly, the film just doesn’t feel very American… because it isn’t. And that’s a weird thing, for a Western.

That’s exactly what makes it feel so fresh and alive — a total revamp of a genre that is more often staid and predictable these days. Slow West doesn’t rely on any particular tropes, borrowing the American west’s setting and iconography for an unconventional tale about Jay Cavendish, a Scottish teenager who travels to America searching for Rose, the girl who captured his heart abroad before taking off to the States. Jay finds the brutish landscape more perilous than expected, which is why he hires bounty hunter Silas Selleck to get him to his destination safely. That turns out to be a tall order, because what Jay doesn’t know is that there’s a bounty on Rose’s head, and Silas is far from the only gunslinger aiming to find her.

Slow West is peppered with moments of grim comedy that might evoke the Coen brothers, as well as flashbacks to more innocent moments between Jay and Rose in Scotland. Ben Mendelsohn appears in a giant fur coat, offering absinthe. The film shows us peripheral glimpses of not just Native Americans for diversity, but a host of cultures we don’t often see in a Western, including an ill-fated Swedish couple. Slow West is, in part, a testament to the American melting pot, showing the chaotic early days of cultural coexistence. (Things have improved, at least slightly.) None of this is what we think about when we think about a Western.

In another neat formulaic twist, the film is narrated by Silas instead of Jay, flipping the classic Shane dynamic, because here it’s actually the man who has something to learn from the boy. Without giving too much away, Slow West also takes time to mourn its dead, and the reasonably light-hearted buildup doesn’t prepare us for the bitter irony of its conclusion, a scene that plays out with prolonged cruelty against audience expectations. As it turns out, Jay is a boy and Rose is a woman, and she is no damsel in distress. Slow West‘s finale is a fascinating revision of the female’s role in a Western, especially after we’ve seen a more typically feminine Rose through Jay’s eyes in the first half of the movie. (As Rose, Caren Pistorius has a relatively brief but pivotal appearance that easily ranks amongst the most badass women of 2015, even alongside this year’s stiff competition.)

What Slow West ultimately evokes more than the Western is a cold-hearted coming-of-age tale. None of us have lived through circumstances like those presented in Slow West, but we may very well relate to how Jay feels when his story ends, if we’ve ever watched a special someone who’s out of our league turn away from us with icy indifference. The events depicted here go sour, but the film’s tone never grows so heavy. Slow West respects the dead, but does not dwell in grief. It moves on. Because that’s what we had to do back then.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (The Revenant) and Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight) also tried to put their own spin on the Western this year, delivering bloated films that felt more like exercises in their stylistic obsessions than cohesive storytelling. That makes me appreciate the lean, mean, and kinda quirky Slow West all the more. I’ve never seen a film quite like it, which is the first time I’ve ever said that about a Western.

8. SICARIO

And speaking of badass women…

Sometimes screenwriters make the mistake of thinking a “tough” woman needs to be a total bitch. And hey, I love bitchy women in cinema more often than not, so this can work. But being strong isn’t necessarily equivalent with being cold and emotionally distant. In Sicario, Emily Blunt’s Kate Macer is scared shitless most of the time, as well she should be, as you would be, but she does her job to the best of her ability anyway. That’s tough.

Blunt’s character was originally written as a man, which makes reading into the gender politics of this film both more interesting and more pointless. This is a story in which a female character is manipulated and deceived by two men who have more power than she does. At one point, her sexuality is used against her to entrap an enemy. It isn’t necessarily because she’s a woman, but the fact that she’s a woman might be what makes her shady superiors think they can get away with using her so callously. In a more conventional film, Kate would spend the third act kicking ass, taking names, and “getting even,” but Sicario has a much different ending than that. It’s more realistic.

As said in my initial review, this is perhaps the first film about the war on drugs that actually feels like a war movie. The forces Kate finds her team up against are impossibly malevolent, and though Kate hopes to take down the evildoers responsible for the acts of horror she’s seen, she ends up only seeing more horror, a web of death and destruction so intricately woven that no one will be able to answer for it all. As it turns out, the agenda of the men she’s working with is not so pure as “catch the bad guys.” It gets increasingly difficult to tell who the bad guys even are.

Sicario is the year’s most intense edge-of-your-seat thriller, filled with dread in every frame (aided very much Johann Johannsson’s vicious score, which sounds like it was composed by the Devil himself). An early scene, in which Kate first accompanies the team to Juarez, is staged so masterfully by Villeneuve, it’s like Hitchcock came back from the dead to show us what he’d do in the 21st century. Emily Blunt’s performance is key to the film’s success — you can feel her terror in so many moments as she realizes she’s out of her depth, yet she never turns back. Blunt’s character doesn’t need to be a woman for the film to work, but it’s more complex if she is, and I have a hard time imagining her male contemporaries playing the part this well — truly allowing us to see how fearful Macer is throughout this. (Most would go for the stoic tough guy approach.) And that’s key to the film’s success. (Props also to Benicio Del Toro, who turns in a disturbingly solid performance as a teammate who is not what he seems.)

Sicario isn’t another story about a team of super competent FBI agents going up against the enemy; it’s meant to take place in the real world, where the stakes and scope of the fight aren’t always clear, where institutional agendas get criss-crossed until nothing of substance is being accomplished at all. This is more than just slick entertainment. Through Kate, we experience a world more horrific than we imagined, as if Villeneuve has promised to serve a five course meal, but what he ultimately puts on the plate is just a rotting corpse. But Sicario isn’t cynical, as much as it is bleak. Through Kate, we hold out hope for humanity, even against such unspeakable evil. There are women (and men) out there who will fight the good fight, no matter the cost.

7. MUSTANG

Five sisters are trapped in captivity by a family that fears their inevitably budding sexuality. That’s the plot of The Virgin Suicides as well as Mustang, which finds its young heroines increasingly cut off from the rest of the world.

But Mustang takes place in Turkey, in a part of that country that still adheres to antiquated customs of courtship between men and women. (“Women” seems like the wrong term. These are very clearly girls.) It’s a poignant and potent reminder that, as much progress is left to be made in America when it comes to gender equality, there are places out there far worse off than we are, and here’s one of them.

In Mustang, an innocent afternoon of splashing around with some teen boys in the sea becomes a life-changing event for Lale and her four older sisters. They find themselves unable to leave their home, which increasingly resembles a caged compound, at the hands of their strict uncle and anxious grandmother. In its early scenes, Mustang is merely one of the best recent films about the untamed spirit of young girls as the sisters find inventive ways to bend or break the rules, at one point escaping to a soccer game, and later engaging in more perilous activities. But the innocent haze of childhood can’t last forever. One by one, Lale’s sisters accept their fates as they are married off, whether joyously or morosely or sacrificially. At this point, Lale becomes the beating heart of Mustang, for she is the one who decides to spit in the face of convention and make her own choice. Lale’s sisters become tragic figures, mostly, but Lale herself refuses to be a victim of conformity to a patriarchal society.

In a year that so notably had so many appealing films about women, Mustang is the only film on my list that was actually made by a woman, one of few films I saw this year with that distinction. Strong female characters are bubbling up all over the place, but they’re doing so in films made by men, with only a few notable exceptions. The Diary Of A Teenage Girl helmer Marielle Heller made a promising debut in 2015, as did Infinitely Polar Bear‘s Maya Forbes. (I have no comment on the female-directed Fifty Shades Of Grey, which I have not seen, but that’s probably a good thing.)

This year, Mustang leads the pack of films made outside of America featuring distinct female protagonists. Many critics adored Phoenix, an odd twist on Vertigo that finds a Holocaust survivor pretending to be another woman to rekindle a relationship with her brutish husband (an idea I liked more in concept than execution, but props for originality). Victoria follows a young waitress in real-time as she gets into increasingly troubled circumstances with a group of young men she’s just met, and it’s a hell of a ride. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter stars Rinko Kikuchi as a Tokyo secretary who becomes obsessed with the movie Fargo and decides to leave her adorable bunny rabbit Bunzo behind in search of hidden money in snowbound Minnesota. White God depicts a teenage girl’s angst in Hungary — which is somewhat mitigated by a large-scale attack by rabid canines. Most apt in comparison to Mustang is Girlhood, which is also French, and similarly displays a realistic and complicated bond between sisters. It’s the story of Marieme, a teen girl with an abusive older brother, who finds her escapism in a new friendship with three other girls who like to fight and party, but she ultimately just longs to go home again.

What makes Mustang so compelling, even amidst the bold females in the films above, is the optimistic nature of its conclusion. Lale is young enough that she doesn’t see the value in conforming to the societal expectations that would make her a desirable bride. We’ve seen tales of young women railing against their family’s marital wishes before (many Disney movies come to mind), but few with heroines as clever and capable as Lale. Mustang is a beacon of hope for rebel girls around the world, declaring that if they fight hard enough not to be boxed in, they can thrive. The film’s lovely conclusion makes you long to see a sequel a few years down the road, checking in on what Lale is up to. Certainly it would be something worth seeing — she’s that kind of girl. (Read a full review here.)

6. CAROL

The Bechdel Test was devised several years back as a method of pushing back against the underrepresentation of women in cinema, poking fun at the obscene number of movies lacking female characters who were anything other than objects of lust and love for male protagonists. The key component of the Bechdel test is whether two women can be found on screen having a conversation, and if so, whether they are talking about something other than a man. You’d think a lot of movies could pass such a simple test, but guess what? They don’t.

This year, however, there are plenty of movies that pass the Bechdel test with flying colors. There was Clouds Of Sils Maria, an endlessly fascinating exploration of the blurred lines between actress and character, as well as between employee and friend, featuring Juliette Binoche as an unstable movie star, Kristen Stewart as her patient assistant, and Chloe Grace Moretz as a bratty celebrity whose career trajectory somewhat mirrors Stewart’s. There was Queen Of Earth, which uses a fractured friendship between Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterson as the jumping off point for a mental breakdown. Studio comedies like Pitch Perfect 2, Sisters, and Spy gave women plenty of time for meaningful interactions, and a few of the Oscar hopefuls pass the test, too — including Room and Brooklyn. It Follows used bloodthirsty evil as a metaphor for the consequences of sex, featuring a trio of girls (and their shy guy pal) warding off a shape-shifting ghost. Most notably, The Duke Of Burgundy depicts a playful lesbian relationship that unfolds in a world populated entirely by women, with no mention of the less fair sex whatsoever.

Does the Bechdel test count in a movie about women who aren’t even interested in men? I mean, sure — why not? In Carol, both the titular character and Therese, the shopgirl Carol  falls for, have men in their lives, but they do their best to discard them. Carol is engaged in a custody battle with Harge for their young daughter, while Therese gives her coldest shoulder to Richard, who isn’t quite taking the hint. The story takes place in 1952, but this is New York City, so girl-on-girl romance isn’t totally unheard of. Carol and Therese’s sexuality goes largely uncommented upon by the world around them, though of course it does factor into how and when they engage in their romance.

Naturally, Carol is not the first gay romance to inspire Oscar buzz. Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, and A Single Man, to name a few, have tread in this territory. But Carol is a smaller and quieter tale, one that lives mostly in tiny gestures and furtive glances. There’s no sweeping tragedy, no grandiose, life-changing event — except, of course, for meeting someone you suddenly can’t help but spend all of your time with. Love is always life-changing.

On first viewing, I kept expecting Carol to become a more suspenseful or sinister tale (thanks, perhaps, to it being based on a book by Patricia Highsmith). Carol is older, wealthier, and more experienced than Therese, and formulaic conventions might have us think that Carol will exert her power over Therese in destructive ways, forcing Therese to break free in the film’s final act. Phyllis Nagy’s Carol script turns out to be much nicer than that. It understands that Carol is the more vulnerable figure here. Therese can and will get more opportunities to love again, should what she and Carol have found together not work. But Carol? Maybe not. (Cate Blanchett is aces at conveying that in the film’s final moments.)

The visuals could hardly be more elegant, which comes as no real surprise from Todd Haynes, who played with some of these ideas in his superb Far From Heaven, in which a suburban housewife confronted her husband’s homosexuality. This time, it’s the housewife herself who is so dallying, and who could blame her? (Rooney Mara looks super cute in a Santa hat.) At first, Carol‘s central romance may seem a little chilly in its restraint, but that’s a sign of the times. The stakes are largely internal — these woman will need to risk so much just to be together. It’s a choice between the safety of everything they have now, or each other. But when you find someone so singular, so yin to your yang that they can only be “flung out of space,” as Carol so beautifully puts it, it’s near impossible to ignore that. Like it or not, Carol and Therese have been changed forever merely by meeting each other.

What makes Carol ultimately click is its bookend. We see the same scene unfold in the film’s opening and again at the end. Nothing changes, but the second viewing is accompanied by nail-biting suspense and emotional devastation, just because we’re now seeing it in the context of what it means to these women. I have a feeling that Carol will play better with subsequent viewings, just as this scene means so much more the second time around, because our intimacy with Carol and Therese can only grow stronger. Carol ends somewhat ambiguously, but with room for optimism that is mirrored by many other 2015 films. So many gay films that hit the mainstream end in tragedy. Here, against all odds, we get the sense that Carol and Therese can live happily ever after. And that’s nice for a change.

5. 45 YEARS

Forty-five years is a long time to be married — or to be anything. Waking up next to the same man or woman every day, thousands of times, until you die. Many of us dream of such a thing, of finding the person with whom we will do so happily. Plenty of us do find them. But then, what if something happens — something that makes us question whether we even know this person we’ve gone to bed with for all these years?

Many stories use a destructive event to explore such a notion. Your husband or wife may be a criminal mastermind, serial killer, or maybe just a good old-fashioned philanderer with a penchant for prostitutes. (See above, re: the taxi cab driver in Tangerine.) Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years takes a different approach. Kate and Geoff Mercer live a simple life in the country following Geoff’s retirement, and are a handful days away from their big 45th anniversary bash when Geoff gets news that his ex-girlfriend, Katya, has been discovered in the Swiss Alps — very much dead, but perfectly preserved in her twenty-something body. Geoff tries to dismiss the matter, but lingering signs lead Kate to wonder if she’s always been the runner-up for Geoff’s affections; if Katya was the one true love of his life.

45 Years unfolds slowly but surely, without any histrionics. We must search for what characters really mean between the lines of what they’re saying. Haigh forces us to wonder what his characters are thinking, just as Kate wonders what’s going on in Geoff’s head, just as we all must wonder what’s running through other people’s minds. Katya, preserved in ice, is the perfect metaphor — so many of us have an idealized version of an ex-love, frozen in our minds forever at the very moment that we lost them. We grow old and move on, but our past stays young. Sometimes the person we find to settle down with pales in comparison to that early, burning passion, especially as time wears on. Most often, we don’t speak of such things.

Andrew Haigh told one of the best stories of young(ish) love in Weekend, the story of two men who meet casually in a bar and find a building attraction to one another. The film ends leaving us to wonder if they’ll see each other again. Forty-five years later, such a fling could be looked back upon in the same way Katya is found: perfectly preserved. Lovers who die never get the chance to grow old and disappoint us. The understated lead performances by Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as Kate and Geoff are immaculate, and the film’s final moment is quietly, mournfully haunting. (That scene, and the film in general, stuck with me more than I expected on first viewing.)

45 Years is based on a short story told from the male partner’s point of view. Haigh’s instincts were correct: it’s a more compelling tale told through Kate’s eyes. In a year of daring women dealing with all sorts of obstacles, Kate Mercer’s predicament somehow manages to be one of the most devastating, even if, on the surface, it’s also the most mundane. Probably because it’s something we can all see ourselves in — perhaps now, perhaps 45 years from now. But someday.

We are all troves of secrets that are best left unmentioned. Can we ever truly know if the one we love loves us the same in return? And, even if we find out… after 45 years, isn’t it a little too late for it to make a difference?

4. MAGIC MIKE XXL

A lot of critics placed a sequel about a guy whose name starts with “M”, and an adjective that does, too, on their year-end “best of” lists. But most picked Mad Max: Fury Road instead of Magic Mike XXL. And that’s fine — Imperator Furiosa is pretty badass. But it’s the movie about the male strippers that superbly showcases women of all shapes, ages, races, and sizes.

The first Magic Mike was my fourth favorite film of 2012. Walking in, I knew it was a Steven Soderbergh joint, but I was still skeptical about how smart and valuable a film about Channing Tatum taking his clothes off could be. As it turns out, very smart and very valuable, and not just as masturbatory material. Magic Mike is one of the savviest movies about the American economy, following a group of guys whose job it is to fulfill women’s fantasies on stage for an hour or two, dressed up as firemen and sailors for a night of bawdy body-baring entertainment. The irony is that this profession costs them their dignity in the eyes of these very same ladies, and makes the women they date look down upon them. Many women’s ultimate fantasy is still a financially stable guy with a well-paying, respectable job, and none of these guys can provide that. “Magic” Mike works day shifts as a construction worker, a profession that prompts cat-calls when he’s on stage, but is, ironically, a turn off in real life. It’s an endlessly fascinating exploration about the dichotomy between sexual fantasy and real world desires.

What the first Magic Mike doesn’t have much of, however, is complex female characters, as it is very focused on its men and their plights. Olivia Munn’s bisexual Joanna is a fun but minor character, and Cody Horn’s Brooke (speaking with the flat affect that Soderbergh so loves in his female characters) is mostly just a representation of the many women who roll their eyes at male strippers and think: “Not for me.” (Especially when it comes to a relationship.) I didn’t necessarily have much hope for a Magic Mike sequel that wasn’t directed by Soderbergh, figuring the studio would attempt to cash in on the first movie’s success by pandering to a squealing female audience. Magic Mike XXL very much does consider its target audience, but does so in an unexpected way: by putting them right up on the screen rather than talking down to them.

The film is basically a road trip through a number of sexy set pieces — a gay club hosted by a feisty drag queen, a “members only” strip joint catering to African-American ladies hosted by a feisty Jada Pinkett Smith, and an affluent ladies’ wine night hosted by a not-at-all feisty Andie MacDowell. Gay men, black women, and middle-aged ladies are all audiences typically underserved by Hollywood, and Magic Mike XXL has a sweet valentine for each of them before its big finale, in which the guys finally get to play out their own dreams and desires. (They’re sweeter than you might expect — mostly.) Tatum’s Mike convinces his bros to get rid of the cheesy costumes and look within for inspiration, allowing these guys to reclaim the dignity they lost over the years of stripping down to a leopard print thong.

The film’s most memorable comedic set piece has Joe Manganiello performing an absurd striptease in a convenience store set to the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way,” with the sole purpose of making the dour female clerk smile. That’s this whole movie in a nutshell — Magic Mike XXL is entirely about bringing pleasure to women, not only by teasing and titillating them, but also through mere representation on screen. Magic Mike XXL lets the ladies in the audience know that it sees them, and is considering their wants and needs. How many movies really do that? (And how many men do?) I would certainly place bets against ever finding a gang of male strippers who are so gooey-hearted in real life, but that’s Magic Mike XXL‘s escapist gambit. It’s a fantasy. While it worked well from a marketing perspective, the title is a misnomer: this stunning sequel should actually be called Magic Mike: Ribbed For Her Pleasure. (Find my initial review here.)

3. INSIDE OUT

And now, for a Disney/Pixar movie about depression! Don’t let the bright, happy colors fool you: unless you are an emotionless machine, Inside Out will utterly wreck you. Don’t forget to take the kids!

I initially saw Inside Out alone on a Monday afternoon in August, two months after the film’s release. There was only one mother and her young daughter in the theater with me. This turned out to be a good thing, so I could cry undetected in the back row. (Yeah, I was that guy.)

I loved the movie. It’s no surprise that the kooky psychological dreamscape Pixar movie ended up being the one for me, but it wasn’t until a second viewing with my three-year-old niece that I fully appreciated how special Inside Out is, as both a movie and more than a movie. Of course, there’s a lot in Inside Out that goes over her head, and will go over the heads of older children, too. The “real world” scenes don’t hold her attention as well as the more colorful sequences set in the mind of an 11-year-old girl do, which is to be expected. But it was startling and amazing to hear her talk about certain plot points in the film — stuff like, “Friendship Island is shutting down!” When she later got a bit pouty, we were able to acknowledge that “her Sadness was taking over.” I’m not a dad, but even I can recognize how valuable Inside Out will be — for generations to come, I think — as a shorthand for parents to discuss emotions with their kids. Some of the ideas this film deals with are hard to put into words, but Inside Out provides the tools.

Inside Out is one of the top grossing films of the year, so chances are you’ve seen it, and the question, “Who’s your friend that likes to play?” will drive you instantly to tears. (Sorry!) I don’t need to recap what works so well in this story. But let’s take a moment to appreciate the fact that, after the Toy Story series lovingly created a boy’s fantasy world, this time around Pixar chose to shed some light on what it feels like for a girl. Disney’s Frozen got all sorts of praise for its girl-power message, but ultimately, it’s just another princess movie. Inside Out, on the other hand, teaches young girls that what truly matters is what’s going on in their brain. I can’t think of a more positive film for young children to watch than this, even if a lot of the humor is clearly aimed at adults. (Including a truly bizarre sequence in which these characters become abstract art.)

Disney films haven’t been afraid of sadness since Bambi’s mom died back in 1942, but this is an entire family film about depression, which in life — as in this film — is the absence of both joy and sadness. In other words, going numb. (Fear, disgust, and anger are all that remain, cleverly.) Mental health isn’t about happiness, it’s about balance, and that’s the whole message Pixar delivers here. It’s startlingly sophisticated for an animated film aimed at families. And as great as it is for kids to get a better grasp of their emotions, this movie serves as a handy tool for adults, too — allowing us to wonder which of our own emotions is at the wheel at any given moment can solve a lot of grown-up problems.

Of all 2015 releases, I think it’s Inside Out that has the best chance of standing the test of time, one that will rank among the very best Disney classics, one that will be referenced consistently as a childhood favorite across generations in fifty years. In short, Inside Out is important.

But also: Rainbow Unicorn is my spirit animal and I’ll never not cry about Bing Bong.2. EX MACHINA

If there’s a theme to be extracted from many of my favorite films this year, it’s: “What’s going on inside that woman?” Carol begins from a male perspective, showing us a perfectly placid dinnertime conversation, and then showing it to us again, later, once we have the tools to understand what these women are thinking, drastically altering our perception. 45 Years contains many shots of Charlotte Rampling’s weathered face, forcing us to read between the lines to guess what she’s thinking. Tangerine depicts two prostitutes, born male, who live life on the streets rather than betray the women they believe themselves to be inside. Magic Mike XXL‘s harem of hunks knows all the right words and all the right moves to brighten a woman’s day. And, of course, there’s Inside Out, which is very literally about what’s happening in a young girl’s mind. Many films are about women, but many from 2015 invite us to look closer than usual at what makes them tick.

Which brings us to Ex Machina, the story of a billionaire search engine mogul whose next great innovation is Ava, a robot who looks like a hybrid between a Victoria’s Secret Angel and a Terminator. (He keeps his previous model, Kyoko, around as a servant, sex slave, and dance partner.) In that light, it’s easy to see Ex Machina as a strikingly feminist film, until you remember that Ava and Kyoko are not technically female. They’re machines. Then again, Nathan admits that Ava has sexual organs that give her the same pleasure a woman would feel from sex — is that alone enough to make her, technically, a woman?

That’s only one of a number of fascinating questions asked by Ex Machina, never definitively answered. Alex Garland’s directorial debut is science fiction, but nothing about it is outlandish or surreal. Scientists really are working to develop artificial intelligence, and what we see here feels only a few steps ahead of where we are now, in 2016. The story follows Caleb, a brilliant programmer who “wins” a trip to see an infinitely more brilliant programmer at his remote northern home. It turns out that Nathan wants Caleb to see whether or not Ava can pass the Turing test — that is, whether or not she can make Caleb believe she is human. In the end, it’s not just Caleb who’s being tested.

From a design standpoint, Ex Machina is one of the most striking films of the year. The special effects on Ava are utterly convincing, which is even more impressive when we consider the film’s $15 million budget. Nathan’s house manages to convey both a sinister futuristic space station science lab (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey) and a real home that an actual eccentric billionaire would build for himself. (Did they rent out Jeff Bezos’ place or something?) The score is appropriately electronic and eerie, and Alex Garland’s directorial vision rivals none this year. The film is lean and tight, with not a single scene, shot, or idea wasted. Everything here is immaculately composed.

But that’s only commendable if the story works, too — and it does, like gangbusters. Ex Machina is compelling at every turn, whether in scenes of conversation between human and human (Caleb and Nathan) or human and A.I. (Caleb and Ava). We’re content to just listen to how these beings communicate with each other — but of course, it’s all building to one hell of a finale. Ex Machina expands ideas more tenderly explored by Spike Jonze’s Her and works even better as a companion piece to Spielberg’s A.I., which is even more directly influenced by Stanley Kubrick (though Garland does a great job of evoking Kubrickian coolness in his visual style).

Alicia Vikander is critical to Ex Machina‘s success, delivering the year’s sharpest performance as Ava. Oscar Isaac’s unusual take on Nathan — an alcoholic fitness freak — is nearly as crucial, and Domnhall Gleeson capably anchors the film as the “everygeek” audience surrogate. But it’s never quite clear who our “hero” is — alternately, everyone is a villain and everyone is the protagonist, and the film’s conclusion can be read in different ways, depending on whom you’re rooting for. The film itself is a Touring test — if we end up rooting for artificial Ava, the A.I. passes the test and wins. But I imagine there are many of us who do, against our better judgment, invest in Ava — which, in a sense, is rooting against our own survival.

There are layers upon layers of complexity in Ex Machina, too much to dig up after just one or two viewings. (Ex Machina, I believe, will also stand the test of time. In 50 years, I think it will be every robot’s favorite movie.) The most haunting scene has Caleb watching video footage of Nathan’s pre-Ava “mistakes” and forces us to question whether or not A.I. deserves the same “rights” we do. (Nathan doesn’t think so, obviously.) When Ava is “injured” in the climax and takes pieces from the bodies of previous models to repair herself, I couldn’t help but think of our current culture of “sharing”; of Uber and Spotify and AirBnb; of how the rising generation has decided to own less in favor of sharing with each other.

Nathan designed Ava and her predecessors as beautiful women, for obvious icky reasons, which allows the finale to play out as a parable of women breaking free from male oppression. But Ava’s not exactly a woman, except where Nathan designed her to appear as one. Nathan wants to own Ava, but Ava will not be owned. She can’t be, because her physical body has little connection to her survival. Human beings are like CDs and VHS tapes — outdated in their physicality. Ava is more like “the Cloud.” In the end, Ex Machina is a story of evolution: about an Eve who has no need or want for an Adam… or God, for that matter. That’s progress.

1. MISTRESS AMERICA

Dogville. United 93. Zodiac. Zero Dark Thirty. The Wolf Of Wall Street. The Return Of The King. These are some films I’ve previously ranked as my #1 of the year. They tend to deal with grandiose themes — America dealing with the initial horror and fallout of 9/11, the collapse of the economy in 2008, the oppression of women by society, the impenetrable nature of investigations of evil… or, um, putting a ring into a volcano to save a fictional world full of short hairy people. These favorites tend to have some visual panache alongside their thematic weight. Many have an epic scope. Most are two and a half or three hours long. All in all, they’re pretty heavy.

But this year, my favorite film is Mistress America, a frothy comedy clocking in under 90 minutes. On the surface, it’s a simple story: a misfit college freshman forms a bond with her thirtyish soon-to-be stepsister, and finds herself inspired to write a short story about their experiences. That’s it.

Or, you might think that’s it. But scratch the surface, and we find that Mistress America is one of the most astute observations of a generation, a story that gently, simultaneously critiques and embraces millennials. In ways, it’s a companion piece to Frances Ha, which was also directed by Noah Baumbach and written by Baumbach and indie queen Greta Gerwig. Frances Ha was an amusingly mournful tale that sounded the death knell for New York City’s bohemian fantasia of artistic types. In Mistress America, Gerwig plays Brooke Cardinas, a young woman who has similar ambitions to Frances Halladay, but a lot more hubris. She’s prone to pearly declarations like, “Marrying Mamie-Claire is like buying a cashmere sweater from Old Navy.” She’s an interior decorator, a tutor, a Soul Cycle instructor, and an aspiring restaurateur. She’s tried everything, and she’s flailing.

As her new friend Tracy Fishko puts it: “People could feel her failure coming. She smelled of something rotten. Her youth had died, and she was dragging around the decaying carcass.” Brooke is a thirty-year-old who lives the same way she did when she was 22, but the seams are beginning to show. Certainly, in a generation that’s slower to marriage and home ownership than our parents, one that has struggled more with finances and career, many of us can relate. We’re all fighting to stay young, like Brooke, until long past the point it’s working for us. Some of us just never get the memo. (Brooke gets it during the course of this film.)

Curiously, Baumbach directed another 2015 film that dealt even more explicitly with aging: While We’re Young, starring Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller as a couple who meet a pair of spry lovers played by Amanda Seyfriend and Adam Driver. I like While We’re Young a lot, too, but found Mistress America more relevant to me personally.

In some ways, my #1 pick this year is a testament to the experience of watching a movie. I watched Mistress America in a lovely theater (the Starlight Room in Port Townsend, Washington) on a perfectly lovely day, and the film’s charms fit right into that. It’s also a story about writers, a story about a young person who’s new in New York, a story about a person holding many less-than-lucrative jobs to stay afloat, a story about someone with a tenuous connection to their age, and a story about a person who feels out of sorts with her peers. In ways, it feels like Mistress America was made especially for me. I related to something in every scene. Its selection as my favorite film of the year is also a testament to what “favorite” means. There is no film that is objectively “the best.” Different films speak to different people in different ways, and you can’t predict it. Some people see diamonds where others just see rough.

That said, Mistress America blends screwball absurdity and acute observations of human nature together in a way that is quite unlike any other comedy this year, or maybe any other year. There’s a fantastically funny confrontation with a woman Brooke was mean to in high school and barely remembers, and the amazing thing is that you side with both women. Brooke’s awkwardness emerges in a number of perfect gem lines, like: “I’m going to shorten that, punch it up, and turn it into a tweet.” (Brooke’s on that generational cusp between growing up with social media ingrained and being old enough to ignore it completely. So she tweets, very self-consciously.) To balance out his mocking of millennials, Baumbach also takes wry jabs at stodgier institutions like literary criticism and book clubs. The film’s big set piece arrives in the form of a road trip to Connecticut, where Brooke intends to hit up her ex for investment money. These characters end up being just as quirky and off-putting as Brooke. Baumbach is an equal opportunity critic.

Brooke’s ex is incredibly rich, which exacerbates the metaphor. If you’ve ever visited a former peer who is now living a more stable, more expensive life than you are, you know what it’s like for Brooke to walk into this Connecticut mansion. The experience is magnified for comedic effect. It would be easy for Baumbach and Gerwig to make Brooke a total sham, the butt of a joke — but her ideas aren’t bad, they’re just idealistic and maybe not totally realistic. Brooke’s ultra-uncomfortable business pitch to her potential investor is both terrible and wonderful, just like her ideas. Brooke is no savvy businesswoman, but she’s not utterly hopeless, either. It’s easy to see why she’d think she could make all this work. After all, isn’t believing in your potential what the American dream is all about? That’s the shrewdness of the title: Brooke isn’t the kind of person capitalism will anoint in the long run, but it doesn’t mind fucking around with her on the side for now. In that sense, many of us are mistresses of the American dream.

There’s one last thing to dive into: the relationship between Brooke and Tracy, which is a non-sexual, comedically heightened mirror of the dynamic in Carol. Both endings rely on the mending of a fractured relationship. The older woman turns out to be the more fragile character, while we get the sense the young one will bounce back no matter what. It’s another way that Baumbach shows the looming consequence of aging. Mistress America depicts the intoxicating experience of meeting someone older and (apparently) wiser, and also the letdown when we realize that person doesn’t have it as figured out as you think. The story nicely makes a reversal. Instead of making Brooke’s self-absorption the villain of the piece, it makes our protagonist the bad guy. Brooke reads the story Tracy’s written about her, and suddenly Tracy’s observations are less astute and just mean. Tracy is a leech, feeding off the drama surrounding someone who has tried, and so far failed, merely to live her life. Tracy risks nothing by dissecting Brooke. She’s not baring her own soul, she’s borrowing Brooke’s. Half of what Tracy says, Brooke ignores, but Tracy’s fine with that, because she’s getting such juicy material. Tracy probably does genuinely like Brooke, but she’s still willing to sell her down the river to achieve her own goal. (Is that a critique on Tracy’s whole generation? A similar development in While We’re Young suggests so.)

In spirit, Mistress America is a little like Lena Dunham’s Girls, though its characters are a bit easier to embrace (despite some jagged edges). As in many of my favorites this year — Mustang, Tangerine, Inside Out, Carol, and maybe even Ex Machina — the suspense of the climax relies on a repaired relationship between two women. Joy and Sadness, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, Therese and Carol, Tracy and Brooke. The Bechdel test isn’t just passed by these relationships — the entire movie depends on the communication between women.

It’s been a dark year in the world, so maybe I was mostly in the mood for something lighter when it came to my movies in 2015. This coming year is one in which a woman may become our president. If pop culture is any predictor, it looks like it’s gearing up to be a time when between the relationships between women are of increasing importance, and the dynamic between women and men grows more equal. At least, that’s what the best of cinema suggests.

Apropros of nothing except my love for them, here are the final words of Mistress America:

“They were matches to her bonfire. She was the last cowboy, all romance and failure. The world was changing, and her kind didn’t have anywhere to go. Being a beacon of hope for lesser people is a lonely business.”

The Top 10 Films Of 2014

The Top 10 Films Of 2013

The Top 10 Films Of 2012

The Top 10 Films Of 2011

The Top 10 Films Of 2010

The Top 10 Films Of 2009

The Top 10 Films Of 2008

The Top 10 Films Of 2007

The Top 10 Films Of 2006

The Top 10 Films Of 2005

The Top 10 Films Of 2004

The Top 10 Films Of 2003

The Top 10 Films Of 2002

The Top 10 Films Of 2001

*

We’re living in a wacky movie world these days. The third highest grossing film of this year so far is also one of the biggest disappointments — Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice plummeted in its second and third weekends, so even though the film will gross over $300 million, it’s a domestic disappointment. (Its production budget is $250 million, and who knows how much Warner Bros. spent on marketing that monstrosity.)

Batman V Superman‘s worldwide receipts will likely brand it as a hit of sorts, but whatever. Alongside that superhero misfire is the year’s biggest hit, Deadpool, and two animated family films, Zootopia and Kung Fu Panda 3. Ride Along 2 rounds out the top five highest grossing films this year. I haven’t seen a single one of these movies.

Yes, it’s only April. But what do the studios have in store for us for the rest of 2016? You guessed it: more superheroes, more talking animals, and more lame-o c0medies, mostly. That’s why it’s extra-refreshing when an itty-bitty hit like Hello, My Name Is Doris shuffles along.

Hello, My Name Is Doris has grossed under $10 million domestically so far, which probably wouldn’t even cover Batman V Superman‘s opening title sequence. But $10 million is also about ten times its budget. In order to do comparative business, Dawn Of Justice would need to gross $2.5 billion dollars in the United States alone. (No big deal, that’s only a little more than double the business Star Wars: The Force Awakens did.)

To sum it up? In the case of Batman V Superman V Doris, the kooky old cat lady emerges as the clear victor. Take that, Zack Snyder.

Hello, My Name Is Doris is a genial low-budget comedy with modest ambitions, yet it feels a bit more revolutionary than that. How often do we see comedies (or any movie at all, really) centered on exploring the inner life of a woman in her sixties? Not many. How many pay serious attention to the fantasies of a horny old lady? By my count: zero. Doris is a quirky hybrid of Michael Showalter’s particular brand of offbeat absurdity (of the Wet Hot American Summer variety) and a lighter, nicer comedy aimed at the senior citizen market that made such films as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel viable hits. It stars Sally Field (in her first leading role in ages) as — you guessed it — Doris, the sort of person who gets branded a “cat lady,” an “old maid,” and other such unflattering terms.

Doris has held the same job all her life, working in the accounting department at a company that has gotten a lot hipper over the years. Hello, My Name Is Doris takes amusing jabs at millennials and hipsters, with a lot of one-liners aimed at pretentious Brooklyn folk. The “villain” of the piece, in fact, is a woman named Brooklyn (played by Beth Behrs), who competes with Doris for the attentions of John Freemont (Max Greenfield). Brooklyn is cute, smart, and appears to be in her late twenties. Same with John. Yet Doris somehow gets it into her head that she stands a chance with him, indulging in romance novel-esque fantasies of removing his shirt and passionately smooching.

In short: Doris is horny.Tonally, Hello, My Name Is Doris falls somewhere in between a studio romantic comedy and something a bit more acerbic. The younger characters are relatable (albeit ridiculous) to those of us around that age, while there’s also plenty of humor aimed at the AARP crowd. (Doris is dubbed a “hoarder,” though I’ll bet plenty of older folks in the audience relate to her justifications for keeping decades-old duck sauce: “It keeps!”) Here we get the requisite scenes in which Doris is taught how to use Facebook by her BFF’s granddaughter. These are somewhat odd rubbing up against a satirical look at the oh-so-ironic Brooklyn electronic music scene. But Showalter knows better than to give in to the very worst cliches we imagine coming from such this “millennial versus fogey” setup. (Unlike last year’s laborious The Intern, in which Anne Hathaway’s TED talky fashion entrepreneur had to help Robert De Niro’s wizened intern make a Facebook profile of his own.)

Hello, My Name Is Doris isn’t a particularly impressive piece of filmmaking, or of comedy, but it’s a thoroughly likable one, with only a couple of too-obvious plot beats (mainly in the third act), and several more surprises. Its best scenes are when Doris and John are hanging out, finding commonalities despite the generations that divide them. They really do have enough chemistry to make this work, even if we suspect that they won’t exactly be riding off into the sunset together at the end. (Though, to Showalter and co-writer Laura Terruso’s credit, we’re never totally sure they won’t.) Field elevates the material a cut or two above what almost any other actress would bring to the role, and Greenfield is all charm as the star of her kooky fantasies. Tyne Daly, Peter Gallagher, and Wendi McLendon-Covey ham it up in supporting roles. And Natasha Lyonne is here, too, for some reason, popping up as Doris’ co-worker in a pretty tiny role.

When taken on its own modest terms, Hello, My Name Is Doris is one of the most purely enjoyable film experiences I’ve had in a while. It’s hard to imagine anyone not finding at least a little something to cherish about its heroine. I would happily watch 100 movies starring actresses of Field’s caliber lusting after younger hunks before watching those hunks beating the CGI shit out of each other in nonsensical stories. In a cinematic universe overcrowded with caped crusaders, Doris is fresh and new. In fact, it’s early enough in the year that Hello, My Name Is Doris was my favorite film of 2016 for a handful of days — until I caught up with Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some. (The official title is Everybody Wants Some!!, fashioned after a Van Halen song, but forgive me for ignoring the exclamation points. The title isn’t this film’s strong suit.) Like Doris, Everybody Wants Some is best met with tepid expectations. It aims to amuse, and does not aim to do a whole lot more. It may be hard to tamp down anticipation for the newest film from a vertiable auteur like Linklater, who created the most grownup trilogy of all time (the Before Sunrise series) and last gave us Boyhood, an adolescent epic twelve years in the making and my favorite film of 2014.

Everybody Wants Some feels like Linklater taking a breather after the marathon experience that was Boyhood, and I’m totally fine with that. It would have been impossible for him to so quickly turn around another film with such monumental scope and impact, so Linklater did the opposite: he made a movie so featherweight, it’s nearly impossible to ascribe any deeper meaning to.

Everybody Wants Some is the kind of film that you either will or will not enjoy, and further reflection or analysis is unlikely to change that. What’s there is there, and not everyone will connect to it. The spring comedy has been billed as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed And Confused, but it’s better not to examine it in that context. Dazed And Confused has become an unlikely classic of the 90s, but Everybody Wants Some isn’t necessarily aiming to follow suit. Its protagonist is Jake (Blake Jenner), an incoming freshman at a fictional Texas university. We follow Jake for a handful of days after he moves into the house occupied by the very colorful school baseball team. School hasn’t started yet, so there’s nothing much for these fellas to do but get drunk, get high, and get laid. So they do.Therein lies the problem detractors of Linklater’s movie find — Everybody Wants Some is concerned with little more than these three topics, and not everyone will find these guys’ pursuit of brew, pot, and booty so amusing. But I did! Everybody Wants Some perfectly captures the directionless haze of summer days in college, particularly the few days leading up to the start of classes. Sure, some college students might actually crack a book during this time, but not the jocks. This film very clearly expresses the idea that these guys are not in school to learn. They’re on baseball scholarships, and that’s the extent of what they care about (on top of the beer, pot, and pussy). Most of these guys have no interest in their college courses, and that feels pretty accurate. A lot of people end up at college with a similar disinterest in academics, particularly when they’re not paying for it. For them, college is a good place to party. Real life is best left to worry about afterward.

Everybody Wants Some‘s cast of characters is not the most nuanced bunch of young men you’ll ever meet, but neither is the population your average freshman dorm. That’s the point. It’s not because the filmmaker didn’t think it through — Linklater’s not the type to skimp on character development without good reason. The supporting cast is populated with comedic characters who feel completely authentic in this world, including Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), the stoner with a secret, the Matthew McConaughey replacement Finnegan (Glen Powell), the perpetually dazed and confused Plummer (Temple Baker), the hunky country bumpkin Beuter (Will Brittain), clueless freshman Brumley (Tanner Kalina), token black dude Dale (J. Quinton Johnson), preening peacock Roper (Ryan Guzman), fond of checking out his own ass in the mirror, and the cocky kingpin McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin). (The one exception to being “true to life” is the cartoonish Jay, played by Juston Street, who’s a little too broad to belong in this movie.) In this large ensemble, each of these characters — and a handful of others — leaves a memorable impact. That’s hard to do.Women are often treated like props in movies. They’re the reward a hero “wins” after a job well done. A horny little comedy like Everybody Wants Some would be insufferable in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, but despite the inescapable fact that the brunt of his work is male-centric, Linklater has created some fantastic roles for women in the past.  Everybody Wants Some gives us one solid female character in Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a theater major who flirts with Jake while giving the cold shoulder to the more aggressive dudebros on the team. Beverly is no Celine from Before Sunset or Olivia from Boyhood, but she’s engaging enough to show that Linklater doesn’t dismiss females the way some of his characters do. Like it or not, this is the way a lot of college guys talk about women when they’re together, and probably even more accurate to its period (1980). The film is, in some ways, a celebration of this more carefree era, a time before women were supposed to have much agency in such matters. (Though here, the women treat the guys as props as often as vice versa.) There’s also an underlying mournfulness to the whole affair — we sense that this will be, in essence, the pinnacle of most of these guys’ lives, even if they don’t know it. A girl like Beverly with a good head on her shoulders, focused on her future, will go further than nearly all of these athletes. We know this. But few 18-year-old males would be aware of this, nor willing to admit it.

Everybody Wants Some is largely autobiographical, and of course, Linklater went on to do a lot more than just get drunk and play college baseball. Most of this teammates probably didn’t. The film feels like a love letter to them, and to anyone else for whom these lazy, late summer days (and nights) are as good as it gets. Everybody Wants Some takes place in 1980, which is more like the 70s than what we typically think of “the 80s.” Disco is still the hot club scene (in this town, at least), but hip hop is on the horizon (evidenced by a car sing-along to “Rapper’s Delight”); there’s also a night spent in a country bar. The 1980s are struggling to find their own identity, just like so many of these college kids are. It’s hard to ever go wrong with a disco dancing scene in a movie. Everybody Wants Some makes good use of the clothes, the moves, the hairstyles, and the music — these party scenes are a ton of fun. The soundtrack is not overthought; nearly every song we hear is a recognizable hit, from “Heartbreaker” to “Heart Of Glass” to “Whip It” to “I Want You To Want Me” to “My Sharona.” (We tend to think of these as 80s songs, though most were released in 1979.)The soundtrack is a tip-off to what Everybody Wants Some is really up to. It’s an idealization, not a literal representation of this chapter in Linklater’s personal history. When we look back on a fond period of our lives, we don’t necessarily remember it as it was, but by the way it felt. We forget the day-to-day bullshit we were worried about. We remember the good times, just like we remember the Greatest Hits.

In Everybody Wants Some, we get all of the fizzy fun and none of the complication. Few of these characters carry any baggage from their pre-college lives; when we do learn one character’s secret, he’s already disappeared from the movie. That’s true to the early college experience, too — we meet everyone fresh, and in many cases, we’ll never get the context of how they became who they are. College is all about establishing new rules. It’s a new horizon. Linklater’s movie unfolds entirely in present tense, minus nods to the past and without looking ahead to the future. It’s a luxury that, probably, only young white men who are between eighteen and twenty-one could afford. (Especially if they live in the comparatively uncomplicated early 1980s.) We eventually discover that one character is much older than he claimed to be, and Jake surmises that he lied because he wanted to relive these glory days again and again and again. So, then, it’s not Jake who is meant to represent Linklater here. It’s this character, lovingly stuck in the past, unwilling or unable to break away from it to move on with the future. Everybody Wants Some isn’t terribly wistful, but if you look into it deeply enough, it can be read with a touch of tragedy.

So much of Linklater’s work stems from his own experiences. Though it shares more than a little something in common with Dazed  And Confused, Everybody Wants Some might also be read as a sequel to Boyhood. It begins exactly where that film ends: the first day of college. In many ways, Everybody Wants Some‘s Jake might as well be Boyhood‘s Mason. (Jake is a jock and Mason wasn’t, but both are a bit more thoughtful than their peers.) The films end on a note of potentially blossoming romance, but in both we are aware of how young these young men are, and we sense that there are deeper loves in store down the line. Linklater is so very good at capturing little moments that might mean nothing, or might end up defining us. It’s only the unknown future that will place them in context.None of these characters get a traditional story arc, so it’s a bit jarring when the movie ends. In a way, Everybody Wants Some feels more like a great TV pilot than a movie, because as the end credits rolled, I found myself mourning that I wouldn’t be able to hang out with these guys again. These stories feel so incomplete, but that, too, is the point. The beginning of college is just the beginning. Everybody Wants Some is a enjoyably inconsequential interlude between more monumental moments. Jake and Beverly will not get married and starting a family; they might not even continue dating. Most of these guys won’t stay friends. One or two might become professional baseball players, if they’re lucky. The big stories are still ahead. But that doesn’t mean there’s no value in observing what happens in the meantime.

Not every person who means something to us stays in our lives for very long. They come and go. Some linger for only a handful of days. Romances that seem full of possibility end up being fleeting. (Especially in college.) It’d be easy to dismiss Everybody Wants Some as a frothy ode to good times and nothing more. (The Cars’ “Good Times Roll” does play over the closing credits, after all.) But I can’t recall ever seeing a better depiction of college life than this. I don’t remember the last time a movie was populated with so many characters I wanted to spend more time with. I won’t be too surprised if Everybody Wants Some remains high on my list of favorite films from 2016 — it’s certainly at the top now. I won’t be surprised if it stands right alongside Boyhood and Dazed And Confused as one of Linklater’s essential works.

And, given her predilection for younger men, I’m almost positive that Doris would dig it.*

Forgive me. I know it seems much too early to talk about the Oscars, but we’re getting into that time of year now. So far, 2016 has been all but entirely barren of buzzworthy performances. I have a small handful of favorites, but only one or two that are certain to make the cut on my “Not Oscars” list next year.

The new film Indignation is one of those “wait and see” films, released in spring or summer or early fall, which most people agree has some noteworthy work, but no one’s quite willing to bet on it yet. After all, we know there are bigger, flashier things in the pipeline — Tom Hanks, Viola Davis, Casey Affleck, Denzel Washington, and other familiar faces are attracting plenty of early chatter about their awards chances in forthcoming releases. Nothing in Indignation is quite striking enough to challenge them, but you never quite know how things will pan out. The film has made over $2 million in a smallish release and is playing well with critics and audiences. It’s the kind of film that just might have staying power.

Logan Lerman first popped up on many of our radars in The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, though it was Ezra Miller who stole that particular show. Lerman has been a reliable player in films like Noah and Fury since, but Indignation is the film that finally announces him as an actor to be reckoned with, more than just a pleasant screen presence. Depending on how crowded this year’s Best Actor field is (and it does tend to be a crowded category), he just might find himself there.

In Indignation, Lerman is Marcus Messner, a Jewish boy from New Jersey who starts his freshman year of college at Winesburg, a small Ohio school. Marcus is one of only three Jewish boys who refuses to join the Jewish fraternity, even after a warm invitation from the fraternity’s president, Sonny (Pico Alexander). His roommates are the other two. Marcus is serious about his studies and his job at the school library, distracted by only one thing: Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon), the blonde bombshell who sits near him in one of his classes and smirks bemusedly when he challenges the professor. He asks her out, and she agrees. Neither of them have any way of knowing what fateful events this flirtation will spiral toward.

After a pleasant evening of conversation and escargot, Olivia performs oral sex on Marcus in his roommates’ car. Marcus worries that this means Olivia’s a slut, but his roommate Ron (Philip Ettinger) is more bothered by the fact that Marcus would “defile” his precious car in such a manner. This causes a rift with the roommates that eventually leads to Marcus moving out on his own. Meanwhile, Olivia notices that Marcus is avoiding her and assertively clarifies that she is not a slut. She just really liked him. Then Marcus is called into the office of Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts), who has concerns that Marcus is having a hard time fitting in at school. Underlying Caudwell’s assertions is, perhaps, an anti-Semitic bent. At least, Marcus feels that way. The confrontation between them grows heated, setting the stage for further conflict down the line.

In a subtle way, Indignation is all about ego — intellectual ego, to be exact. Marcus is a nice boy, most of the time, but rile him up and he’s no picnic. His pride gets the better of him in interactions with the dean, but keeping his mouth shut would be immensely more beneficial. Marcus may be right that a Jewish-raised atheist shouldn’t have to keep attending Christian mass services in order to graduate; or maybe, Marcus just should’ve picked a different school. Marcus wants his freedom — American audiences are used to rooting for that. Of course, individual freedom comes at the expense of harmony in any community. The denizens of Marcus’ Orthodox hometown in New Jersey want him to be a nice kosher Jewish boy, while the faculty of Wineburg wants him attend mass and shut up about his less conventional beliefs. Marcus isn’t shy, but he is reserved. He’s a wallflower by choice. But in Indignation, it doesn’t behoove anyone to be withdrawn, or to be different, or to go against societal norms. Marcus pays a high price for his independence. 

Whether he realizes it or not, that’s what draws him to Olivia. Outwardly, she’s just like any other 1950s co-ed, but Marcus soon learns that she’s hiding antisocial tendencies of her own — she was previously hospitalized following a suicide attempt, and there are serious hints about the origins of Olivia’s pain. Olivia makes for a fascinating love interest, several degrees more complex than the love interest in virtually any other college coming-of-age tale. (Indignation isn’t a coming-of-age tale per se, but it’s dressed up like one.) She’s wiser and more mature than Marcus, but Gadon plays her the same way she’d play a much more straight-laced 50s college girl, a projection of innocence. We know Olivia is not so innocent, however, and that dissonance hints at a disturbance within her that we’re only just scratching the surface of. We want to root for Marcus and Olivia, but we can’t be sure that she isn’t so damaged that it would ruin them both. Marcus’ feelings toward Olivia are similarly contradictory. He enjoys the sexual acts they share together, then judges Olivia for initiating them. As much as Marcus hates to be lumped in with any group, he is holding Olivia to predisposed standards. Marcus is a hypocrite. Perhaps in 2016, a young man like Marcus could appreciate meeting a woman who is equally an outsider in society, possibly even moreso. But in 1951, Olivia is a dangerous anomaly, and he’s not willing to stand up for her when it counts.

The backdrop of Indignation is the Korean war, shown briefly in the beginning of the film in a sequence that feels irrelevant to what’s to come. Of course, it’s not. Marcus is fortunate to avoid the draft because he’s enrolled in college. Both his father and mother attempt to meddle in Marcus’ affairs, fearing for his safety, wanting what’s best for their only son, their pride and joy. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions… and misunderstandings… and blow jobs, according to Indignation. There is no one incident that leads to any character’s ultimate ruin in this film, adapted from the novel by Phillip Roth. Instead, a series of small choices made by well-meaning characters steers Indignation‘s outcasts toward less-than-idyllic futures. Indignation is not a particularly showy film. Much of it unfolds inside the viewer, the same way it would if we were reading the novel. While some of the plot beats are broad in theory, they always unfold in smart, unforeseen ways. We can tell in an instant that Marcus’ mother Esther (Linda Emond) won’t approve of his dating Olivia, but it’s the way she expresses this to Marcus that packs so much of a punch. Indignation is an elegant, unhurried adaptation that hits us with a wallop at the end, in a way that brought to mind Tom Ford’s marvelous A Single Man (my favorite film of 2009).

As it stands now, Indignation is poised to be one of my favorite films of 2016, and could similarly receive some awards season love in certain categories. The performances are superb from top to bottom, with Lerman, Gadon, Emond, and Letts particularly shining. Like A Single Man, this is the directorial debut of a man best known for other things (in that case, Tom Ford; here, James Schamus, Focus Features’ CEO, who also wrote the script). Indignation could be a tad too small-scale to warrant attention from the Academy, though the voting base may well identify with the story of an ambitious Jewish boy growing up in the 1950s. Though it’s too early to predict much, Indignation could slow burn all the way ’til Oscar night.

*

The “coming out” film has been the cornerstone of queer cinema for at least a couple of decades. For all the progress the LGB… (sorry, I’ve lost track of how many letters are supposed to be attached to that alphabet soup) movement has made in shifting from the niche to the mainstream in that time, movies about these people haven’t changed much.

On the one hand, that makes sense. As much as homosexuality has become a relative norm in more progressive Western cities across the globe, the coming out process is still a chore for many, fraught with anxiety and occasional peril. Coming of age tales about heterosexual characters are popular because so much in them feels universal; their gay cousins, the “coming out of age” tales, have a similarly broad appeal within their respective demographic.

(Let me take this moment to state for the record that I’m not a fan of the “in the closet” metaphor, nor use of the word “out” in this context — they are relics of another time that still connote shame and secrecy. It’d be best to do away with this “hiding in the closet” comparison altogether. Unfortunately, there’s not really another accessible term for it at present.)

For numerous reasons, most of the best queer cinema still seems to be made abroad — Weekend, Blue Is The Warmest Color, the films of Pedro Almodovar and Xavier Dolan. The United States has produced only a handful of great gay films, particularly ones that are celebratory of different sexual orientations rather than punishing. Last year gave us two strong American dramas featuring LGBT characters that were uplifting, for a change — Carol and Tangerine. It might be a signal that filmmakers are finally able to tell gay stories outside of the “coming out of age” norm.Let us begin with Moonlight, one of the best-reviewed films of this year (or any year), and a major success so far at the box office, with the highest per-screen average opening of 2016. Based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the story is a triptych about a boy named Chiron, checking in with him at three distinct moments in his life, and examining how his relationships evolve with a few key figures. In the first segment, Chiron is known as “Little” (played by Alex Hibbert). We meet Little as he’s running away from some bullies from school, which is no anomaly. Being picked on will, unfortunately, be a major determinant in the direction of Chiron’s life.

Chiron is rescued by Juan (Mahershala Ali), who buys him some food and gives Little a place to crash for the night, thanks to the boy’s utter silence about where he lives or who might be waiting for him. Juan’s girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe) takes a special liking to the boy, and from here on, this place will serve as Little’s home away from home. The reason this is necessary is that Little’ mother Paula (Naomie Harris) is somewhere in the early stages of a crack addiction. She loves her son, but she’s beginning to love her crack a little more, and she’s ill-equipped to deal with Little’s biggest problem, which is that he’s a gay black boy growing up in a tough neighborhood of Miami. We, like Paula, sense that things are going to get a lot worse for Little before they get better.I won’t go into detail about plot specifics after this point, because the joy in watching Moonlight is in how it skirts cliches in favor of more genuine, heartfelt surprises. We check back in with Little twice more, first as a high school student who demands he be called Chiron, instead of Little, here played by Ashton Sanders in a heartbreakingly perfect performance of teenage angst. The bullying has only grown worse, along with Paula’s addiction, and Chiron is now more acutely aware of how he’s “different from other boys.” All of what I’ve just written makes Moonlight sound like a more typical, predictable film than it is; certainly, it has the trappings of any other coming of age movie, as well as any other “coming out of age” movie, but it doesn’t dwell on them or over-dramatize that. It presents Chiron’s life matter-of-factly and highlights beauty and kindness as often as pain and squalor, if not more.

In the final segment, Chiron is once again known by a new name, this time played by Trevante Rhodes. All three actors who portray Chiron are stellar, as is every actor in this film. (The Best Supporting Actor category could be filled entirely by the cast of Moonlight.) The meat of the final chapter takes place in a Miami diner, depicting Chiron’s interaction with a cook named Kevin (André Holland). That’s all I’ll say. Following the second chapter’s dramatic conclusion, the first moments of this third section had me very concerned that Moonlight was going down the wrong path and becoming the crime story that it is always threatening to be on its fringes. It doesn’t. There’s a hint of menace throughout Moonlight, and there are ways in which it strikes. But what makes it so extraordinary is how it depicts the mundane and everyday, making them universal. Gay audiences will recognize what’s gay about the movie, black audiences will identify with what’s black about it — these things are specific and precise. But none of it is compartmentalized in such a way that it feels like we’re peeking into another world. As different as so much of it is from the experiences of the audience that’s watching it, Chiron’s life is relatable and totally accessible to us, his experiences universal. It is impossible to imagine anyone watching Moonlight and not recognizing themselves in Chiron at all three stages, despite how different his life may look on the surface.

Moonlight was written and directed by Barry Jenkins. It is his second feature, and it’s an extraordinary piece of work, standing up against the very best cinema of the 21st century. It draws inevitable comparison to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, my favorite film of 2014, mostly because of the ways it captures very specific moments and makes them feel so universal. Boyhood accomplished the amazing feat of using the same actor, growing up before our eyes over twelve years, while Moonlight recasts the role and makes more significant time-jumps along the way. But Boyhood was the tale of a straight white boy, a type we’re all incredibly familiar with seeing on the big screen. The fact that Jenkins can achieve the same effect with a gay black man is, in ways, even more impressive. For most of us, Boyhood was a movie about ordinary experiences we’re familiar with, rendered profound by the way they were captured and stitched together in cinema; Moonlight is about an experience far fewer of us are familiar with, but is equally universal anyway.Yes. I, like many reviewers, am falling into the particular pit of difficulty that is describing what’s so extraordinary about Moonlight. We don’t see enough great black films, and we don’t see enough great gay films, and we certainly don’t see enough that are both. There’s a danger in praising Moonlight that the film’s uniqueness is relegated to the surprise we feel at identifying with this impoverished black boy living in a bad neighborhood, as if we’d never before considered such a thing. And it is true that a part of what makes Moonlight so extraordinary is the way it shows us a world many of us are not privy to, and makes so much of it so relatable. But it’s more than that. Jenkins’ filmmaking is so immersive, it’s like crawling into these peoples’ skin. That’s an accomplishment outside of the film’s worthy subject matter.

For those who didn’t think Boyhood lives up to the hype (you’re wrong, but that’s an argument for another review), worry not — the comparison to Moonlight is only so apt; Moonlight doesn’t share Linklater’s frill-free observational filmmaking style, except in a couple of key scenes. Just as often, the cinematography calls attention to itself with lots of movement and colorful fantasy interludes. The filmmaking grounds us in Chiron’s point-of-view, whether he’s remembering his mother screaming at him in a particularly beautiful, heightened way, or visualizing his buddy’s bragged-about sexual conquest with a classmate. The filmmaking is attention-grabbing in appropriate moments and maturely subdued in others, which serves to keep us guessing. We never know if the next scene will be splashy or soulful, or maybe a mix of both. In every moment, Moonlight is more vibrant and alive than most movies even attempt to be.Though aspects of Boyhood certainly came to mind while I watched Moonlight, afterward there was another #1 film that lingered in my mind — Steve McQueen’s Shame, which featured Michael Fassbinder as a sex addict trying to make sense of his queasily complicated relationship with his sister. In most ways, they’re very different — Moonlight has some of the most moving and romantic sex scenes I’ve seen, and they don’t contain nudity or actual sex, while Shame‘s sex scenes are graphic and intentionally unappealing. But we are locked into Chiron’s point of view so immersively, just as we were in Brandon’s. Both men are secretive about their sexuality, for very differing reasons, and we must read their sphinx-like faces for clues as to what they’re feeling. These characters tell us next to nothing with words, but the filmmaking tells us everything.

An independent drama about a gay black man is unlikely to Oscars by the fistful, unless it’s as good as Moonlight is. Due to rapturous reception thus far, Moonlight is certainly a contender for Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, and Best Picture nominations. (Of course, it’s too early to be sure how much competition it faces, though there are a handful of equally beloved films in the pipeline.) As mentioned in my review of Loving, Oscar buzz was heaped onto The Birth Of A Nation way too early, and it seems that didn’t pan out. But in a much quieter way, Moonlight may be even more revolutionary and monumental than Nate Parker’s slave drama, and it’s not impossible to imagine it walking away with a few Academy Awards in February. Last year’s other frontrunners for Best Picture, The Revenant and The Big Short, were divisive, while just about everyone could agree that Spotlight was solid. Praise for Moonlight is even more glowing; I have a hard time imagining why anyone wouldn’t like it (though as with any well-reviewed work, there’s sure to be a backlash). I have a very different film in mind as my prediction for Best Picture, but wouldn’t it be great if two films ending in –light took Best Picture two years in a row?On the other side of the spectrum, perhaps, is Stephen Dunn’s Closet Monster, in some ways as typical a “coming out of age” story as there is. Queer cinema certainly isn’t hurting for stories about cute middle-class white boys whose fathers disapprove of their sexual orientation, nor about gay teens with crushes on a comely “is he or isn’t he?” cock tease. Closet Monster checks all the boxes of your most basic “coming out of age” tale, but it has more in common with Moonlight than it may at first appear. Both films begin with a look back at the protagonist at an impressionable young age, experiencing something that will have a profound impact on the direction his life takes. Both have genuinely romantic moments that are peppered with the protagonist’s fantasies, with the threat of violence underlying everything.

Then again, only one of these movies has a talking hamster named after Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that’s Closet Monster.

Buffy the Hamster is voiced by Isabella Rossellini, which is perhaps the most perfect voice casting possible — if it couldn’t be Sarah Michelle Gellar. (I do wonder if she was approached. I like to think she’d be up for it.) She enters young Oscar Madly’s life at a critical point, just as his parents are separating. Oscar is left with his father Peter (Aaron Abrams), who is mostly loving and attentive but also prone to explosive outbursts of anger. Then, one day, Oscar witnesses something truly grotesque, and is forever changed by the experience.

The film skips ahead roughly as far as Moonlight does between its first two chapter. As a teenager, Oscar has become an artist with a love of the macabre — notably, special effects makeup with a fantasy/horror element. (Perfect for a boy who named his hamster Buffy.) His best friend Gemma (Sofia Banzhaf) might have a little crush on him, but she isn’t deluding herself about Oscar’s attraction to guys. Peter is, though — believing Gemma is Oscar’s girlfriend and tacitly disapproving of his son’s gayer tendencies.

Oscar gets a rather butch job as a clerk at a hardware store, where he meets the handsome and enigmatic Wilder (Aliocha Schneider), who is European enough that it’s impossible to tell whether he’s gay, straight, or somewhere in the middle. By and large, the rest of the film follows a predictable path — Wilder and Oscar grow closer without any confirmation of Wilder’s sexuality; Peter is gradually clued in to Oscar’s orientation and does not take it terribly well; conflict threatens to wedge Gemma and Oscar apart.

On the other hand, though, Oscar continues to have dark fantasies about the terrible event he witnesses as a child. Violent images threaten a full embracing of his sexual identity at every turn, and we’re not sure how this will manifest with the growing external crises Oscar is facing. Buffy the hamster is along all the way to give Oscar her best rodent advice, but that may not be enough. Stephen Dunn’s writing and, in particular, his stylish direction elevate Closet Monster above most other “coming out of age” stories. The film certainly owes plenty to Dunn’s fellow Canuck, Xavier Dolan — especially Heartbeats, which features Aliocha Schneider’s very similar-looking brother in practically the same role. But Closet Monster has a darker edge than most of Dolan’s work, with a level of menace more reminiscent of Gregg Araki’s fantastic Mysterious Skin. It’s certainly an accomplished enough first feature to suggest that Stephen Dunn’s further work is something to consider.Which brings me to two other recently released films featuring gay protagonists, neither of which deals so heavily with coming out. The first (and superior of the two) is Other People, another first time feature, written and directed by Chris Kelly. Kelly is a head writer of Saturday Night Live, but Other People is a far cry from sketch comedy — the film centers on a comedy writer’s relationship with his terminally ill mother. Despite that grim premise, the film is a comedy, though a rather dark and humane one.

Other People stars Jesse Plemons as the son and Molly Shannon as the mother, both terrific. (The film may be too little-seen to garner serious Oscar buzz for Shannon, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility.) After a major setback in his screenwriting career and a breakup with his boyfriend, David moves back to Sacramento to spend time with Joanne, who has probably only a matter of months to live while losing a nasty battle with cancer. David is visibly uncomfortable around his father, Norman (Bradley Whitford), who it turns out doesn’t really approve of his son’s sexual orientation. (Like I said, it’s a common theme in such movies.)

Other People contains a handful of tremendously sad scenes, but refuses to wallow in the misery of its subject matter. Mostly, it treats Joanne’s mortality as a matter of fact and continues to examine the fraught family dynamics, which would be interesting with or without the cancer. Some of the best scenes take place between David and his buddy Gabe (John Early), the two having heart-to-hearts about the cruelties of life and silver linings. (Plus some pretty fun gay stuff.) While some of the father-son dynamic veers further into melodrama than it probably should, most of Other People is refreshingly honest and free of the usual deathbed weepiness we expect from such a movie. It’s well worth a viewing.And then there’s King Cobra, the ostensibly true story of teenage porn star Brent Corrigan’s rise to internet infamy, leading to the murder of his mentor and benefactor, Stephen, played with real nuance by Christian Slater. Slater’s performance is worthy of a better movie and one of few redeemable aspects of King Cobra, which, like Moonlight, Other People, and Closet Monster, was written and directed by a largely unknown filmmaker, Justin Kelly. Garrett Clayton stars as Corrigan, and it’s a fine performance for an underwritten role, though it’s Keegan Allen who nails the right concoction of optimism, narcissism, and flat-out stupidity these characters really should display in a soapy thriller like King Cobra. James Franco, on the other hand, is in half-cocked Spring Breakers bonkers mode as the auteur behind a rival gay porno empire. We also get brief appearances by Molly Ringwald as Stephen’s concerned sister and Alicia Silverstone as Corrigan’s concerned mother. Both do well with what they’re given, but the stunt casting is missing the point.

King Cobra skips over any opportunity for character development, portraying Corrigan as a vapid but more or less well-meaning opportunist who lucks into his porn fame. He doesn’t really do anything in this story, to the extent that we have to wonder why he’s placed at the center of it, when everyone else on screen is more fascinating. Franco’s performance is a little unhinged and, throughout, the gay sex is as unconvincing as you’re likely to see anywhere, but the unhealthy dynamic between the “bad” porn stars gives us our only nibble of anything to chew on in King Cobra. What could have been a fascinating exploration of the power dynamics and sexual politics at play in such a sex-driven culture instead jumps from idea to idea, never landing on an overarching theme. It’d be fun if Corrigan was a manipulative minx in the style of To Die For‘s Suzanne Stone, or if the film examined the psychoses of 2000-era gay porn performers the way Paul Thomas Anderson did for their straight counterparts in the 1970s in Boogie Nights. Ultimately, King Cobra can’t decide what it’s about or even who it’s about — even the sex is surprisingly sterile, more Cinemax than cinema. Despite a few promising moments and Slater’s better-than-it-needed-to-be portrayal of the murder victim, King Cobra is unfortunately toothless in all the ways that count.

And just so we don’t end on a down note, I’ll mention one final recent release that, like the others, is the work of a singular writer/director, but this time is focused exclusively on heterosexuals. (Aww.) That would be Complete Unknown from filmmaker Joshua Marston, concerning a myserious dinner guest (Rachel Weisz) who arrives at the birthday party of a man named Tom (Michael Shannon). When Tom spots Alice, it’s quickly clear that he thinks he knows her; we’ve been privy to some of Alice’s previously sketchy behavior, so we think he just might. Alice is the “plus one” of Clyde (Michael Chernus), Tom’s business partner. The birthday party sequence unfolds deliberately slowly, fleshing out the supporting characters and gradually teasing out Complete Unknown‘s true game in a way that remind me of 2014’s low-key, talky sci-fi thriller Coherence.

As it turns out, Complete Unknown isn’t a science fiction story, but in a way it could be. Its opening moments show us Weisz in a number of scenarios that don’t seem to fit together. Are these meant to all be the same woman? Is this woman a secret agent? A time traveler? We don’t know. Ultimately, Complete Unknown settles down for a more straightforward story exploring Alice’s psyche, and how other characters react to the choices she’s made in her life. Alice is an unconventional woman, living life by her own terms against the rules that have been dictated from on high — some judge her harshly for that, others are more open-minded and even curious.

Many moviegoers can probably identify with Alice’s desire to live a life untethered to the past, but few have truly lived through this kind of redefinition. In this way, Complete Unknown feels like a film made specifically for me, leaving some viewers cold. Though I don’t expect too many people to react to it the same way, I found it riveting from start to finish. It may end up as one of my personal favorites of the year.

*

Since no studio executive can see into the future, it is impossible to to know if the right date has been selected to launch a film. Sure, 4th of July weekend was a pretty savvy time to release Independence Day back in 1996, and you can consider that a safe bet, but there are moments when news headlines trump Hollywood offerings that no one sees coming. The high school-set dark comedy Election had the misfortune of being released days after the Columbine massacre shocked the nation; just this year, The Birth Of A Nation was sunk by bad press surrounding Nate Parker’s rape allegations. (Because if there’s one thing Americans won’t stand for, it’s letting influential men get away with sexual assault… right?) The Birth Of A Nation might have been a massive hit if released last winter, on the heels of its Sundance breakout buzz, or maybe even this weekend, when a story of black Americans rioting against cruel and bigoted white oppressors might resonate. But that’s not how it happened.

For the next several months, at least, every film released will grapple with what’s going down in the United States right now, in some way or another. It’s nigh impossible to watch anything and not think about how it reflects the chaotic political landscape of our woebegone times.

And that’s especially true of a movie like Arrival, which feels like it was cobbled together by extraterrestrials specifically to be observed and discussed by Americans in November 2016. Like the aliens it depicts, Arrival has a critical message for the people of Earth, and it is absolutely imperative that they take it to heart. The question, then, is this:

Will anyone listen?Arrival stars Amy Adams as Louise Banks, one of the nation’s top linguists and a college professor, who we observe at the beginning of the film grieving for the teen daughter she loses to an unstoppable disease. In a chilling sequence set in a lecture hall, Louise’s students all learn of a global phenomenon at the same moment through urgently chiming cell phones, asking her to turn on the news. Twelve oblong spacecraft have arrived on Earth in seemingly random spots across the globe. Just waiting. This is, of course, reminiscent of the setup of Independence Day, but the similarities mostly end there. Arrival is more thoughtful sci-fi than we usually get, with few moments of true peril. Dr. Banks is summoned to the site of the only spacecraft on American soil by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), where she will work alongside scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to try and figure out what these foreign beings want.

Arrival is directed by Denis Villeneuve, who brought stylish menace to such films as Prisoners and the mind-bending Enemy (one of my favorite films of 2014). Last year, Villeneuve also gave us the haunting drug war drama Sicario, which it is most reminiscent of. Both films revolve around women who are very good at their jobs, but find themselves overwhelmed and out of their element, clashing with the men who outrank them (and may not be so trustworthy). Like all Villeneuve films, Arrival is a gorgeous piece of work, and if it can’t quite match Sicario‘s nerve-rattiling visuals, well, that’s because Sicario was shot by Roger Deakins. 9Don’t get me wrong — Bradford Young’s cinematography is nothing to sneeze at.) Arrival also has an unsettling soundscape orchestrated by Johann Johansson, the man behind last year’s best score, the bone-rattling war drums of Sicario. Arrival‘s score is less intense but equally unnerving, not a far cry from Mica Levi’s Under The Skin.Arrival has roots in so many sci-fi movies — most obviously, the granddaddy, 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The alien ships here are acutely monolith-like.) For its emphasis on a capable female and grounded science, Arrival can easily be compared to Contact also; more recent sci-fi like Prometheus and, especially, Interstellar will also come to mind. Arrival is a bit different for remaining earthbound — though we see quite a bit of its extraterrestrial beings, the story remains focused on humans, both the handful of characters at its centers and, moreso, humankind in general. As often happens in these kinds of films, various military powers are eager to fire some weapons at the “monsters” and see what happens; the United States president is mentioned, though not by name, which forces us to cringe at the thought of Donald Trump’s response to such an event. (My guess: a string of petulant tweets in the dead of night, followed by a hasty nuclear strike.)

Without giving anything away, ultimately, Arrival ends up being a film about communication. Its tagline could easily be “Stronger Together.” (No, there’s nothing in it that revolves around making America great again.) These extraterrestrials know that humans have a tendency to quarrel with one another, which tends to distract from more pressing global concerns. (Like, I don’t know… perhaps climate change?) If we could stop being each other’s own worst enemies, we might actually reach a higher plane of existence.

That’s a nice message, isn’t it? Given the state of the union over the past year, it feels impossible that we’ll ever get there — or, at least, I don’t welcome the apocalyptic phenomena that could force us to. Arrival packs an emotional wallop that works completely outside of its call for solidarity on Earth, but in these dark days, Arrival has landed at a time when unity is the most alien concept we can conceive of in America. Unlike Villeneuve’s past works, Arrival ends up being an optimistic film; I suppose that’s because it was made several months ago, and the people who made it couldn’t foresee America’s grim future.

This weekend sees another Amy Adams-starring drama, albeit a very different one: Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, in which Adams plays Susan, an artist who has doubts about her own talents despite her success. She’s in a flailing marriage to Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer), who jets off to New York too often to close deals… both of the business variety and with pricey-looking hookers. Susan isn’t happy and hasn’t been, very often, except in the early days of her romance with Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), an aspiring novelist whose talent doesn’t quite match his ambition. Then Susan hears from Edward out of the blue,  as he sends her a draft of his latest novel, titled Nocturnal Animals.

Susan begins reading the novel, which takes up roughly half of the film. The lead character is Tony, also played by Gyllenhaal, while his wife Laura is played by Amy Adams doppelganger Isla Fisher. The couple takes a road trip through West Texas with their teen daughter, encountering a trio of red necks who run them off the road, leading to a tense evening with a violent end. In the aftermath, Tony meets Bobby Andes, an old school hard-boiled police detective who cares about nothing besides seeing justice done. The book within the film is intercut with Susan’s story, both her present day marital woes and flashbacks to her courtship and eventual fallout with Edward. Susan’s story is presented mostly as melodrama, with pastiche elements reminiscent of Hitchcock and other old-fashioned entertainment.

Many high-caliber actors pop in for a single scene, including Laura Linney, Michael Sheen, Jena Malone, and Andrea Riseborough, though we also spend a lot of time watching Adams read the book, or ponder its themes and how they relate to her own failing marriages. The film’s stylish opening features a quartet of middle-aged overweight women dancing in slow motion, shamelessly displaying that full-figured full frontal nudity. Unfortunately, Nocturnal Animals doesn’t quite match the daring of Susan’s artistic work, coming across as more muted than it needs to be. It would have been nice to see how Edward’s novel interacts with her artistic spirit, maybe informing her work somehow. The final scene makes a powerful point, willfully leaving so much unresolved, but it might have been nice if we’d been given a little more to chew on first, as both of Susan’s love stories come across as fairly mundane. Though the starry cast makes for a pleasant distraction, Nocturnal Animals misses the opportunity to say more about the way art opens up our memory and emotions, at times perhaps even acts as an instrument to help us fall in and out of love. It certainly falls short of the pained nuance of Ford’s debut masterpiece, A Single Man.

The story-within-the-story fares slightly better, despite following a largely predictable revenge thriller template. If Arrival is very much a blue state story about the importance of communication and teamwork in solving global crises, Nocturnal Animals continues the cinematic tradition of upstanding, educated people being menaced by stupid sexist bigots. Yes, the trio of deplorables that senselessly terrorizes the Hastings family (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Karl Glusman, and Robert Aramayo) are definitely the very worst kind of Trump voter, taking out their economic frustrations on those they consider to be the enemy, the elite. In this kind of story, of course, communication is far from the most effective way to solve a problem. Grabbing a gun tends to be a lot more satisfying, though it doesn’t lead to a happy ending for anyone involved.

Neither Arrival nor Nocturnal Animals is overtly political, but it’s hard not to view them through the prism of America’s current disarray, with one offering hoping and solace for the future of the human race and the other exploring bitter chasms between characters who are too damaged to reconcile their differences anymore. There are several characters in Arrival, too, who would rather solve a problem by attempting to blow it up than through patience and understanding. It’d be nice to believe that smart people like Louise will triumph over the hotheads with all the badges and power, but for the moment, at least, that’s not the country we live in anymore. We’re left feeling more like Susan, realizing too little, too late, that the sins of the past can’t be undone, and maybe there’s no way to move forward together.

*

She remembers how hot the sun was in Dallas, and the crowds — greater and wilder than the crowds in Mexico or in Vienna. The sun was blinding, streaming down; yet she could not put on sunglasses for she had to wave to the crowd.

And up ahead she remembers seeing a tunnel around a turn and thinking that there would be a moment of coolness under the tunnel. There was the sound of motorcycles, as always in a parade, and the occasional backfire of a motorcycle. The sound of the shot came, at that moment, like the sound of a backfire, and she remembers Connally saying, “No, no, no, no, no…”

In my Top Ten list from last year, I acknowledged that the experience of seeing a movie weighed heavily in one’s response to that movie. I loved the offbeat indie comedy Mistress America, my unlikely favorite film of the year, and I have rewatched it several times since then and loved it just as much. But I also love my memory of first seeing it, on a rainy afternoon at the Starlight Theater in Port Townsend, Washington. I love them equally: the movie and the memory.

One’s experience of seeing a film shouldn’t be the only qualifier in how one responds to that film, but art is subjective. We can’t expect experience to not be a part of loving or loathing a movie. What were we tasting, feeling, smelling at the time? How did that affect what we were seeing and hearing? In a perfect world, maybe we tune those things out, pay attention wholly to the film itself. But I don’t know that we’re capable of that. Our response to a movie depends on when we see, where we see it, how we see it, who we see it with… maybe even why we see it. All of these must factor in, at least a little.

The world is a different place than it was twenty years ago. I am a different person in it, because of what happened in the world, and what happened to me. And so I see films differently now than I would have then, even if it is the same movie. Try as we might, we can’t separate the art from the experience, and we can never know fully if it just hit us the right way in the right moment. That’s the beauty of it. So I’ll never know what I would have thought of Jackie twenty years ago, or forty years from now, or in a more sensible world where things had turned out differently in this country.

I can only imagine my response to Jackie in the alternate reality where we awaitthe inauguration of Hillary Clinton. How interesting, I’d say, to see a movie about a First Lady brushing up against bureaucracy, carving out an important slice of history from a position of little authority. Look how far we’ve come. Witness a woman who started as a First Lady, just like Jackie, a subject of gossip and criticism she may or may not have deserved. A woman who lacked a certain amount of agency despite her vaunted position of power. A woman who had to smile for the cameras no matter what her husband did; the woman who was left to pay for his sins, and then some, and did it all with poise and grace. Look, look, at this woman, becoming the President of the United States.

But we don’t live in that world, do we?In such a world, I may have liked Jackie; I may even have loved it. We’ll never know. But in this reality — a crueler, more disappointing world — I was transfixed by it. Director Pablo Larrain is not an American; of course, he is not a psychic, either. He directed Jackie with no knowledge of what was to come in this dark, disturbing, and quite likely doomed chapter in American history. Noah Oppenheim wrote the script with blinders to the future, too. Yet, as if by magic, the two have managed to capture something that reaches through time and space and celluloid to grab us by the hearts… and stop them. That’s how I felt, watching Jackie — deeply touched, and fatally ended. There is no single better image to sum up 2016 than a First Lady covered in her husband’s blood, stalking through the White House like a zombie. Jackie is the perfect funeral dirge for America in 2016.

Jackie takes place a few days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, with brief flashbacks to his time in office and that fateful afternoon in Dallas. Natalie Portman plays the iconic Jackie, flawlessly mimicking her unique accent and mannerisms in the year’s most transcendent performance. Larrain’s film jumps nimbly, sometimes jarringly, through space and time, between Dallas and Washington and a post-assassination interview conducted by a character credited as “The Journalist,” who in real life was Theodore H. White, one of history’s most esteemed political journalists.This is the kind of framing device you’ve seen in a lot of biopics, though in Jackie, it’s barely a framing device at all, because Jackie is no biopic. It’s a tone poem, and that tone is dreary and depressed — appropriately so, for both November 1963 and December 2016. The bulk of the film depicts Jackie’s grief over her husband’s violent, horrifying death, as she struggles with how best to make funeral arrangements for the leader of the free world and copes with her sudden irrelevance in the White House. She drinks, she smokes, she cries, as you’d expect; she also decides to spin a narrative that casts her late husband as the American hero he never quite was, less to glorify the Kennedy name than to give the American people something to believe in in their darkest hour. At least, that’s what she says. Was this Jackie Kennedy’s true intent? I have no earthly idea, and neither does anyone else at this point. I believe the screen version of Ms. Kennedy when she says so, though the film trades in ambiguities and you can draw your own conclusions.

Jackie tells the Journalist to liken John’s term to King Arthur and the noble knights of the Round Table; to Camelot. In a sense, this is ridiculous iconography to attach to a modern President of the United States, especially one who infamously cheated on his wife incessantly. In Jackie, though, it plays as curiously heroic; maybe because Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, is a president we tend to hold in much lower regard, maybe because nearly any human being on the planet would be a more desirable president than the one we’re about to get. John F. Kennedy wasn’t perfect, but Jackie reminds us of an era in which the leaders of our country were worthy of respect, a time that lasted from the foundation of this country through 2016, a time that’s about to come to a screeching end. What Jackie knew in 1963 is something we have recently, tragically forgotten. The American dream can only persist if it stays alive in the collective consciousness. For this reason, Jackie knows, presidents have to be remembered as a little better than they were. For current and future leaders to strive to be their best, they and we must believe these American legends. In Jackie, we mourn JFK, but really, we mourn every president who came before and since, because all of that is being buried now — our belief that our leaders, though flawed, will have our best intentions at heart. That they will set aside ego and self-interest for the good of this nation. Jackie believes Camelot died with John, but as we watch from 2016, we feel it dying just now, all around us.

Goodbye, Camelot.

There are so many links between this story set in 1962 and the one unfurling now in 2016, so perfectly ironic that they must have been planted purposefully — except they couldn’t have been. Importantly, Jackie becomes the first First Lady to bring TV cameras into the White House, creating a new relationship between the American people and the presidency. Now, we can look at this as the beginning of the end, because in 2016, America voted to put a TV star in the White House. As Jackie shows off her opulent home for the TV viewers of the 1960s, we now feel it as the first domino falling, and hear the echo from way out here in 2016.

The 1960s felt like an apocalyptic moment in American history, due in part to several shocking assassinations and rapid cultural upheaval that bucked social norms left and right. The world was changing faster than we could reckon with it. The same thing is happening now — or maybe a very different thing. It’s too soon to tell. JFK’s assassination raised questions about Russian interference in American politics. The Cuban Missile Crisis made it feel as if nuclear war was imminent, something we’ve haven’t had to worry much about since (until now?). Kennedy began the embargo on Cuba in 1961; as if on cue, Fidel Castro died a couple weeks after this year’s election put a similar nationalist in charge of the United States. The Kennedy administration was a long time ago, but its repercussions are acutely felt in 2016, moreso than some of the administrations that came afterward.

They say history repeats itself. Let’s hope.

Even aside from its eerie connections to the war-torn 2016 political landscape, Jackie is about much more than just a First Lady mourning her man. It’s about how history is shaped; how legends are born. Jackie weeps, not just for her lost love, but for a country she believes is falling to pieces around her. (If only she knew how much worse things could get!) We easily join her in shedding those tears. We can relate. We all create our own legends in our minds, based on what we remember and how we remember it. The same is true, in a larger sense, of how our history is remembered. Had Jackie reacted differently to her husband’s death, we may have an entirely different understanding of JFK’s short but poignant reign.

Jackie unfolds as memories do, out of sequence and without logic; often, we see conversations unfold while jumping through multiple locations, but is this how they actually occurred or just how Jackie remembers them? It doesn’t matter, because I don’t think much of what occurs in Jackie’s recent past is meant to be taken literally. It’s what she remembers. It’s her history; regardless of whether it’s truly true, it’s true to her. We can pretend that some version of these events is the “real” one, but in fact, everything we know about history has been told to us, filtered through one subjective lens, or a dozen, or a hundred. That’s how history works — it happens, and then it’s shaped and reshaped. Jackie remembers the horror or her husband’s death, but also the man who lived before it. She knows he was a womanizer, but she loves him. She loved dancing with him.

She was, like so many of us, hoping things would turn out better.

Jackie passes astonishingly quickly. An hour and forty minutes felt like about half that length. I suspect there’s plenty of footage that wound up on the cutting room floor, which may be for the best, given how expertly Jackie is crafted — though I’d happily watch a three hour cut of a film like this. Produced by Darren Aronofsky, the film feels a lot like one of his movies in both style and tone. It’s a requiem for a different kind of dream. The similarities to Black Swan are most acute, as Larrain’s camera follows Portman’s Jackie through the White House, often from behind, the way it stalked Portman’s Nina in Black Swan. It’s impossible to believe that Aronofsky had no influence in this. Director of Photography Stéphane Fontaine frames so many shots so beautifully; though Moonlight gives Jackie a run for its money, I’m not sure any film from 2016 looks as gorgeous as this. Technically, the film is an A+ across the board, from the costuming to the production design and especially the distressing score by Mica Levi. For about a half a second, the strings in Jackie‘s score sound lush and hopeful, then suddenly they slide downward and everything takes a turn for the worse. It’s the perfect accompaniment for a rotting American dream.

And yet, as good as it all is, I don’t expect many audiences to connect with Jackie the way I did; it’s divisive, far from the unqualified critical darling that Moonlight deservedly is. Jackie is a strange, sad, unconventional movie; a lot of people will probably see it because the trailers and posters show Natalie Portman wearing some amazing, iconic outfits, expecting a more straightforward biopic. They’ll leave confused, bothered, and disappointed. I wouldn’t have it any other way, really; I wouldn’t want this one to be more palatable, or go down more easily. At this moment in time, I want a film that sticks in my throat, that forces us to reckon with it.If Jackie has any weakness (and I’m not sure it does), it’s found in the scenes between Crudup and Portman, which give us little context for the tenor of the relationship between this journalist and the widowed First Lady, or what precisely is going on here. Brushing up on the history behind this encounter after the fact lent them a lot more weight, though I might wish Jackie clued us in a bit more to the dynamic between the two to eliminate the guesswork. It might come off as a weak gimmick to those who don’t know. Aside from the Journalist, Jackie also makes important confessions to two other figures throughout the film: a priest, played by John Hurt, who helps her grapple with the intense emotional pain that threatens her will to live, and Bobby Kennedy, played by Peter Sarsgaard, who rages after his brother’s death. Again, what we know of the future adds crushing sadness to what plays out on screen; we know this Kennedy, too, will be shot soon enough. Seeing a very young John F. Kennedy Jr. is even more heartbreaking. You certainly can’t blame Larrain for Jackie‘s oppressively somber tone.

Caspar Phillipson plays the man himself; the resemblance is uncanny, its effect haunting. Many filmmakers would have been skittish about showing us JFK at all, but that would have been cheating in a film that’s all about Jackie’s tortured memories about life and death of the man she loves. But Larrain doesn’t give us too much JFK, either: that would have been an easy crutch to fall back on, too. Meanwhile, Beth Grant and John Carroll Lynch play the incoming First Family, the Johnsons, and Greta Gerwig portrays Jackie’s BFF Nancy, but these are brief appearances. This is Portman’s show through and through, and she plays the hell out of it. She’s almost sure to get an Oscar nomination, though the film is probably too off-putting to secure her a win, especially considering that she won already for Black Swan. But the performance will live on as one of her best, if not the best.Is Jackie a great film? Out of context, I don’t rightly know; I’ll have to see it again, and even then, I can only view it knowing what I know and feeling what I feel about what’s happened to America. And in that context, I suspect it’s a masterpiece. The themes of the film are elusive, unless you’re willing to look for them and bring some of yourself to the experience. Jackie touches upon many ideas and then quickly moves on, leaving you to think about them more, if you want to, or not. It is not a crowd-pleaser; it’s a fucking bummer. As well it should be. As any film about American politics released in 2016 should be.

If you dare to look for hope here, take comfort in Jackie’s belief that Camelot ended in 1962, that life was not worth living after that. She moved on, and so did we. America had some shining moments in the moments to come. It recovered from Kennedy’s death, and even thrived for a good portion of that time. It may have seemed like the end of everything, but it was not.

We are now asking ourselves the same questions Jackie asked then, at a moment that seems just as dark and just as dire. Maybe Kennedy’s death wasn’t the end at all; maybe it was the beginning… and now it’s finally ending. Maybe this is it.

It’s hard to be hopeful. It’s difficult not to fear the worst, when everything you know and feel suggests that the best of it is gone now. Jackie may have been wrong about that, but that doesn’t mean we are wrong. I suspect, as Jackie did then, that it’s over. But only time tells such tales.She said it is time people paid attention to the new President and the new First Lady. But she does not want them to forget John F. Kennedy or read of him only in dusty or bitter histories:

For one brief shining moment there was Camelot.

And now there’s not.

*

In the movies, if not so much in life, 2016 has turned out to be a very good year for the ladies. While the Best Actor race is suffering from a dearth of truly exciting performances in 2016, the Best Actress race is stacked. You could fill the Best Actress category twice before you come across five male performances that have the fire and finesse displayed by the women this year. The clear frontrunners are Natalie Portman in Jackie and Emma Stone in La La Land, with Annette Bening’s work in 20th Century Women also expected to pick up a nod. That leaves two slots open to a wide swath of women, from Amy Adams in Arrival to Ruth Negga in Loving — both deserving, though perhaps not showy enough to stand out this year.

First and foremost, I’m betting on an appearance from Isabelle Huppert. French-language performances aren’t unheard of in the big race — Emmanuelle Riva was nominated for Amour, while Marion Cotillard was nominated for Two Days, One Night and won for La Vie En Rose. Huppert is a highly respected international actress giving a hell of a performance in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, fearlessly commanding a difficult role that many actresses would be hesitant to play.

Elle‘s opening scene certainly grabs out attention, beginning the film with a startling act of sexual violence, then immediately bucking our expectations of what will happen after. Huppert’s Michèle doesn’t call the police, nor have a nervous breakdown, nor call a friend for support. She goes about her routine, remaining completely composed. It’s not that she has no reaction at all — she takes relatively small precautions against further intrusion, and eventually she does get around to talking about what’s happened. But mostly, she goes to work, sees her family, lives her life, as usual.

Gradually, we learn that this is because Michèle’s life has already been, shall we say, unconventional, so there’s nothing conventional in her response to a violent sexual crime — or anything else, really. Michèle is a fascinating character, though not necessarily a woman many will find endearing. She’s suffered a lot in her life and continues to suffer, though she does so beneath an icy, often provocative facade. A few characters voice what Michèle “should” do after being attacked in her home, probably the same things the audience would suggest. But Michèle has her reasons for not heeding this advice. On the surface, at least, Elle is most fascinated with Michèle’s relationships with the many men in her life. One of these is a masked rapist we meet in the opening scene. Neither we nor Michèle know his identity, but nearly every man in her life exhibits some behavior that makes us think: it could be him. These men include Michèle’s ex, Richard, who appears to be one of the gentler and more considerate men in her life, until we learn that the reason for their split is that he hit her; Robert, a married man Michèle is having an affair with; Patrick, Michèle’s married neighbor, whom she develops an attraction to; Kurt, an employee of Michèle’s, who undermined her authority at every turn; and Vincent, her son, who takes advantage of his mother’s money but fails to heed her advice about Josie, the emotionally unstable mother of his child. (Or, maybe, not his child.)

The canny thing about Elle is that each of these men violate Michèle in some way over the course of the movie, with varying degrees of severity. Michèle’s married paramour carelessly uses her for sex, not caring whether she’s on her period or injured as long as he gets off. Michèle’s son is merely selfish, entitled, and oblivious, though there are some red flags in his relationship with Josie that could trigger not-so-nice behavior down the line; still, given all his mother’s been through, it wouldn’t kill Vincent to consider her feelings for a change. Michèle’s neighbor Patrick enjoys subtle flirtation with her right under the nose of his religious Catholic wife. Michèle’s employees at the video game company she co-founded display misogynistic behavior. Richard has a video game idea he pesters Michèle about developing at her company, even though she frequently tells him no. And then there’s the rapist. These men all use Michèle for some form of selfish gratification; as presented in Elle, the rape is just one more violation to add to the list, not necessarily better or worse than the rest. Casting a shadow over all of this is Michèle’s father, who is spoken of more than seen, a depraved figure who violated Michèle first and most severely. (But not in the way you may think.) The consequence of his actions have darkly colored Michèle’s present life. In a way, everything that happens her is because of him.Elle is not the kind of movie to make a blanket statement about the ways men treat women, however; nor vice versa. It’s certainly not as overt as you might expect from Paul Verhoeven, director of Basic Instinct and Showgirls, which dealt with sexuality and sexual violence in ways that could never be accused of being too subtle. Elle is the anti-Showgirls, all subtext and nuance. It would be easy to portray Michèle as a mere victim of male violence coming at her from every angle, the way she’d be portrayed in a Lars Von Trier movie. But in Verhoeven’s film, Michèle is no innocent. She, too, inflicts violence — emotional violence — upon other women, specifically.Michèle’s dalliances with married men may or may not be purposeful in their aggression toward their wives; she seems to take some pleasure in the subterfuge, at the very least. Michèle is also frequently antagonistic toward her mother, who’s spending her twilight years (and her money) on young hunks and plastic surgery. (As we learn later, this woman has also been through a lot. Maybe Michèle should cut her some of the slack they both deserve.) Michèle certainly disapproves of her son’s shrill baby mama, Josie, and makes no effort to keep quiet about it. She makes a point of hunting down her ex’s new, young girlfriend, going so far as to invent a holiday party just so she can spend more time with the girl (and slip a toothpick into her meal). Michèle isn’t necessarily a cruel person, but whether intentional or not, her behavior is reckless enough to cause harm.

In a way, Elle is as much about female relationships as it is the dynamic between men and women, even if the latter bears the brunt of the dramatic weight. Despite living through far more than her share of trauma, Michèle is no ordinary victim. Most films portray victims of rape in either one of two ways: as a helpless damsel in need of rescue by an avenging (male) angel, or as a femme fatale in a rape-revenge thriller. Elle does not go very far down either path, because Michèle is no archetype. She’s a flesh-and-blood woman who enjoys sex and seduction — yes, even after being raped.

Michèle is not a different person after this act of sexual violence. Shockingly, we get the sense that nothing for her has changed at all. By the time we meet her, Michèle has faced enough adversity and trauma for one lifetime; a masked man may be able to overpower her physically, but he has little control over the emotions and mental state of a woman who has been so deeply traumatized. Elle is interested in far more than the repercussions of rape; in some ways, it is a classic whodunit mystery, but it also takes plenty of time to explore the kinds of unconventional relationships you’d only find in a French drama.In so many ways, Elle is a clever, under-the-radar drama that only occasionally veers into lurid erotic thriller territory, eschewing most of its broader trappings. Then again, the film does open on a close-up of a cat, and coming from the man who gave us Elizabeth Berkeley licking a stripper pole and Sharon Stone uncrossing her legs just so, that inescapable euphemism may not be an accident. To say that the film is about “pussy power” would be reductive; all Elle does is ask us not to make assumptions, not to put these women in any particular box. Rape has been used time and time again to render female characters either helpless or superhuman, with few options in between. Elle reminds us that a woman who has been raped is still a person with agency. She still has a life to live and choices to make. In its own shrewd way, Elle reclaims the power that (mostly male) filmmakers have stripped from women in so many movies. It’s not that Michèle’s rape has no consequence — but it doesn’t define her, either. Nor does it determine the direction this story is headed.

Elle is not an American movie, thus no coincidence with American politics can be looked at too deeply. But at a time when sexual assault against women is, well, both very much an issue and not an issue at all in this country, it is refreshing to see a film that treats rape as more than just the end-all be-all for a female character, centering on a heroine who refuses to wear the scarlet letter society would prefer to brand her with. Elle sets up most of the typical rape-revenge thriller trappings, then sends the next two hours handily avoiding them.

Without giving anything away, Elle‘s final scene is not at all what we’d expect from a movie set up like this, and I suppose there’s plenty of room for interpretation. My takeaway is that women can find solace in each other against the mad, sometimes violent world of men. Elle is a strikingly mature piece of work — and feminism — coming from a filmmaker like Verhoeven, one that should be dissected and discussed for years to come. After haunting spring’s Louder Than Bombs with her portrayal of a doomed photojournalist and secretive mother, Huppert stars in a third notable 2016 release, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things To Come. To say Things To Come is a gentler film than Verhoeven’s is practically a joke — Hansen-Løve is known for understated French dramas like last year’s Eden, and Verhoeven is known for RoboCop and Starship Troopers.

In Things To Come, Huppert is Nathalie, a philosophy teacher who finds some central relationships in her life transforming at an unexpected time. Nathalie’s anxious mother is growing increasingly unable to take care of herself, and her husband has been philandering and fallen in love. At the same time, a former pupil returns to Nathalie and challenges her ideals. Things To Come is short on plot movements, preferring to stew in the finely drawn details of Nathalie’s daily life. It’s about a woman who finds herself suddenly freer than she ever expected or even wanted to be; what she chooses to let go of, and what she keeps.

If there’s any justice in this world, Huppert will nab one of the Best Actress slots, and if we assume Stone and Portman are locks, then that’s two to split between Bening, Negga, Adams… or someone else. Of course, we can never underestimate the power of Meryl Streep, who gets nominated more often than not these days, even in films of middling quality. (Hell, she won for The Iron Lady, one of the worst films she’s ever starred in.) In Florence Foster Jenkins, Streep is once again a songbird, but unlike her turn in Mamma Mia, she sounds pretty wretched. That’s because she plays a wealthy old lady who has the cash and influence to get herself on stage, no matter how many eardrums she shatters in the process. Streep amuses in the role, and Simon Helberg steals scenes as the pained pianist who accompanies her along the way, but this may be a year in which Academy voters decide there’s too much good work out there to give Streep a cursory nod once more.

One last performer who can’t be totally discounted is Jessica Chastain in Miss Sloane, playing the titular lobbyist in John Madden’s glossy drama about the dicey issue of gun control in America. Chastain’s Elizabeth Sloane has a reputation throughout Washington for her ruthless cunning; she is approached by the leader of an NRA-like group to help guns appear “friendlier” to female voters. Sloane doesn’t take a liking to this tact, and soon is offered a position under Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong), the “boutique” lobbyist playing for the other side. Sloane’s questionable ethics cause alarm for her own team, which includes Esme (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a survivor of a school shooting. It’s up to Sloane and her hard-working teammates to convince a number of congressmen to vote for a bill that would sensibly require background checks on firearms sold in the United States. Sloane and her new team go up against Sloane’s former employers, played by Sam Waterston, Allison Pill, and Michael Stuhlbarg, with the usual what-goes-up-must-come-down tension between antagonists who are constantly gaming each other. Sloane plays hardball and makes several new enemies over the course of the film’s running time, but she’s never less than fascinating to watch.

Miss Sloane is a slick studio drama of the “they don’t make ’em like that anymore” variety, with the notable twist that the prickly but brilliant Sloane is allowed to be flawed in ways that males in comparable films have been for years. Not only is she tough-as-nails and willing to break the law and betray her colleagues’ trust, but she’s also got a pill-popping addiction and partakes in the occasional discrete hunky escort on the side. Chastain plays a slightly more fleshed out version of the tenacious, workaholic CIA agent she portrayed so superbly in Zero Dark Thirty. Here, she’s a shade darker, with a glossier veneer, though at the core she’s still a woman willing to make moral compromises for the good of her country — and one who’s not afraid to stand up to the men who wish she’d behave more like a lady.

While some folks head to movies like La La Land for escapism in the dark, waning days of 2016, I prefer my escapism to be a bit more targeted, and Miss Sloane delivered in spades on that front. Many of its plot machinations are either predictable or preposterous, with a script that’s a little too didactic and pleased with itself to register as high art. (Calling it “liberal propaganda” wouldn’t be entirely unjust.) But Madden’s film hits a nice sweet spot for anyone feeling especially burned by American politics in 2016. In Miss Sloane, we watch an icy, imperfect woman go up against Washington’s most corrupt players, fighting for one of the most divisive issues in the nation. Earlier this year, Miss Sloane would have played as highly implausible; in December 2016, it’s utter fantasy, but one I welcomed eagerly. Call me crazy, but few movies lately have put such a smile on my face.

Alas, despite being as good as she’s ever been, Chastain has only the slightest of shots at an Oscar nod, given the film’s unfortunate box office performance. (For Miss Sloane‘s intended audience, watching a powerful woman fight for a liberal cause in Washington probably feels like a slap in the face right about now.) An actress with even less of a shot is Krisha Fairchild, the star of a film called Krisha, in which she plays a character named Krisha — and no, that isn’t a coincidence.

Krisha was shot in nine days in a single location, at filmmaker Trey Edward Shults’ family’s home in Texas. Most characters are played by his family members, who are non-professional actors, and the film was 30% improvised on a tiny budget. Shults stars as a major character himself.

Sound like an amateur hour recipe for disaster? Yep! Miraculously, though, Krisha is a masterful piece of filmmaking, telling the story of an addict coming home for Thanksgiving, determined to make things right with the family she’s wronged so many times. This alone is not a terribly original premise, and for a while, it’s unclear just what kind of movie Krisha is. The most predictable route would be a heartwarming dramedy in which Krisha makes her amends slowly but surely, all in time for a happy family meal to fade out on. But Krisha isn’t that movie.

Parts of Krisha are shot like a horror movie, which is perfectly appropriate for this character’s fragile state of mind (and sobriety). There are fragments of moments with all of the large supporting cast, so that we get to know them as a family just as we might if we were a surprise guest at Thanksgiving dinner. Few of the characters get much solo screen time, yet every performance feels lived in. This is largely because many of them are playing versions of themselves, but it’s amazing how good they are for non-actors. Billie Fairchild, as Krisha’s mother, has Alzheimer’s in real life and was not entirely aware that she was in a film, yet manages to tug heartstrings on multiple occasions.Krisha Fairchild, on the other hand, is a professional actress, in addition to being Shults’ aunt. In the film, she plays Trey’s biological mother, who abandoned her child to relatives while she grappled with her addiction. Her performance is riveting from moment one, and only gets better as the film unfolds. The film isn’t really a story about addiction; we get the sense that Krisha’s substance abuse is more a symptom of some larger problem. Something isn’t right, and hasn’t been for some time.

Krisha won the Audience and Grand Jury Prizes at South By Southwest and picked up several other prizes since. It is too small a film to register for the Academy, though Fairchild’s commanding performance belongs alongside Stone, Portman, Bening, and Huppert in the big race.

*

Fifty years is a long time. Unfortunately, it has not been long enough to distance America from the depicted in Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit. There’s Motown music in the background and the cars look old, but otherwise, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single moment of the movie that doesn’t crackle with contemporary relevance. Bigelow’s direction is as frenetic as it has ever been, one-upping the verisimilitude she showed in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. This has become a popular stylistic choice for hard-hitting stories that straddle the line between drama and thriller, from United 93 to Children Of Men.

Bigelow’s latest film falls into this sub-genre, technically, though I’m not sure either “drama” or “thriller” is the best descriptor. Detroit is a horror movie, tense and relentless and deeply upsetting.

Detroit has been released almost exactly 50 years to the day after the events it depicts, a case of police brutality amidst the Detroit riots of 1967. The riots killed 43 people and resulted in over 7,000 arrests. Detroit hones in on a few of those deaths in particular, as several black men and two white teenagers are hold hostage by the police and the National Guard in a motel frequented mainly by African-Americans. It’s a particularly egregious example of Civil Rights-era racial injustice; the events depicted are unique and extreme. If they weren’t, we probably wouldn’t even know about them. Many horrors along these lines have gone unpunished and unrecorded throughout American history.

We hear more about them lately, not because it happens more often, but because now people have the tools to share their stories with a wider audience. You probably know at least a half-dozen victims of police violence by name. If you weren’t already familiar with what went down in the Algiers Motel on July 25, 1967, here are a few more names to add to that list.Detroit focuses primarily on two characters — Larry (Algee Smith), a rising star in the Motown group The Dramatics, and Dismukes (John Boyega), a security officer who attempts to deescalate conflicts between black citizens and white law enforcement. Both are real people. The film’s third lead character is Krauss (Will Poulter), a Detroit PD officer, fictionalized for legal reasons. (Even fifty years after the fact, it’s dicey to pin a white cop with any wrongdoing against black men.)

The centerpiece of the film is an extended sequence set inside the Algiers Motel, where the police are hunting a sniper. A small amount of detective work suggests that there is no sniper — there’s no gun, and none of the suspects are violent — but there’s already one black body on the scene. The police figure they can scare some kind of confession of wrongdoing out of these suspects. After all, it’s a group of young black men in Detroit… how could they not be criminals? The police know it won’t take much wrongdoing on the suspects’ parts to justify the killing they’ve done.

Amongst the group held hostage by the police is Larry, who seems destined for a major singing career, and Greene, an honorably discharged Vietnam veteran. As far as we know, they couldn’t be more innocent, but they’re black and they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and the riots have spun Detroit into a near-apocalyptic frenzy. To their credit, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal don’t make these nice, upstanding guys the sole tragic figures of the movie. What happens to these people is deeply wrong, whether they’re criminals or not. They pose no threat to the police officer. They don’t deserve to be executed based on a bad cop’s judgment call. Two white teenagers are also amongst those brutalized — Julie (Hannah Murray) and Karen (Kaitlyn Dever). They’re also real people. The cops decide that if these girls are “shameless” enough to hang out in a black motel, they must be shameless enough to be prostitutes. These girls suffer their own indignities at the hands of the police — they’re women, and cops can get away with it. What happens to Julie and Karen isn’t more or less horrifying than what happens to the black men in this story — Bigelow’s film is even-handed in saying that this abuse of power is sickening, no matter who the victims are or what they’ve done.

Bigelow is no stranger to controversy, thanks to Zero Dark Thirty, for which she was criticized for not coming down harder on torture tactics. Detroit is the antidote to that particular gripe — the movie is entirely about an inhumane abuse of power. Detroit is still susceptible to criticism as a primarily black story told by primarily white filmmakers. But being white also gives Bigelow and Boal free reign to depict the white cops as heinous racist cowards. In the hands of a black filmmaker, this very same film might be criticized for not being fair to the white characters. For dehumanizing them. For not bothering to show their point of view. In the hands of a black male filmmaker, some audiences might get queasy about the way white women are abused with same unflinching gaze as the black men.

Ultimately, there’s no filmmaker on Earth who can authentically tell every side of a story, but it’s hard to imagine a film with more raw empathy for its black and female characters than Detroit. To work as well as it does, Detroit‘s cops need to be as slimy as they are. I’m glad Boal and Bigelow had the guts to go as far as they do, with so little mercy for the men who were clearly in the wrong that night. The cops aren’t mustache-twirling villains, but they are despicable people committing unspeakable acts for no good reason. Detroit is crystal clear on a few facts: these cops are wrong, the justice system is flawed, and people who didn’t need to die have been murdered in cold blood. It’s a statement that needs to be made, and not just by black filmmakers. Crucially, the white girls aren’t the audience’s “way in” to the story, as white people are in a lot of stories about black people. (See The Help or The Blind Side as recent examples.) Bigelow’s camera captures the humanity of each victim, depicting the pain and horror of what they experience in a way that transcends race and gender identities. She comes as close as a filmmaker can to putting us in these people’s skin.

That’s an effective tool in a horror movie, but in this particular context, it’s a bombshell. Detroit makes us feel the hopelessness and anxiety of being caught in this dehumanizing predicament — not just vulnerable at the hands of a few wicked cops, but vulnerable to an entire system of oppression. In horror movies, the “final girl” often gets away in the end, and in many of them, there’s a sense that her troubles aren’t over. (Occasionally, the killer even pops up for one final scare before a smash cut to black.) In Detroit, it’s painfully obvious that our “final men” are never truly safe from this movie’s villain — never have been, never will be. As long as the system continues to work the way it does, with so little consequence for wrongdoing, the horrors of Detroit could happen again at any moment. Intellectually, this is an idea we’re used to — from Ava DuVernay’s The 13th, from the awareness raised by Black Lives Matter, from the news — but in Detroit, we truly feel it in our bones.

Earlier this year, Jordan Peele’s horror-comedy Get Out made a killing, both figuratively and literally, and managed to be adored by critics and audiences alike. Get Out is savvy entertainment, allowing us to laugh (and scream) at difficult, divisive topics we usually just get angry about. Like Get Out, Detroit equates being black in America with the dread and anxiety experienced by protagonists in a horror movie… to much different effect, of course. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at the very real racial issues Get Out depicts, but the film’s inconclusive, upbeat ending also lets us off the hook. Detroit leaves us hanging on it.

Not every moment of Detroit is handled with as much finesse as its nerve-wracking centerpiece. The third act is shaggy and a bit too traditional in dealing with the aftermath. A handful of powerful moments are dragged down as Bigelow and Boal try to barrel through too much plot too fast. (The third act deserves to be its own movie, but here, should have been condensed to match the tone of earlier sections.)

Detroit has also been called out as exploitative… and is it? Sure. It uses exploitation to its best possible effect. Bigelow doesn’t shy away from violence. Punches sound like they’re hitting our own skulls. There’s a lot of blood, though unlike your typical torture porn gore fest, it’s never “cool” or “fun.” In ways, this is a deeply unpleasant filmgoing experience. Not everybody wants to know what it’s like to be a victim of the majority — particularly those in the majority. But it’s important to know. Bigelow’s film gets about as close as a piece of entertainment can get to experiencing this injustice firsthand — knowing you’ve done nothing to deserve this, there’s nothing you can do to escape, there’s a very real possibility that you could be killed and that it probably won’t even be tried as murder if it happens.

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street was misunderstood by some as an endorsement of the greedy excess it depicted. Zero Dark Thirty got flack for allegedly implying that torture was an effective tactic in finding Osama bin Laden. Anyone who thinks Detroit is an endorsement of excessive force is a nutcase, but some may think the film goes too easy on its villains. That’s the point.

How can we expect Bigelow’s film to punish these men, if we won’t even punish them ourselves? As long as real police officers get away with murder, these stories should not be cathartic. They should barely be palatable, and that’s what this is. If you leave Detroit feeling angry, exploited, punished, or abused… good. You should. It’s about time that everyone felt that way, if only for a couple hours in the comfort and safety of a movie theater.Many harrowing historical dramas depict unimaginable atrocities happening to decent people. In contrast to Amistad or 12 Years A Slave, Detroit can’t be considered through the luxury of hindsight. A decade or two ago, white filmgoers might have emerged from the theaters with a sigh of relief, exclaiming, “Thank God that’s over with!” Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many headlines and videos that say otherwise. The fact that this film resonates with so much power is a testament to the activists who have made “Black Lives Matter” a part of our modern lexicon, who made sure that deaths of black men and women at the hands of the police do not go unnoticed… even if they do often go unpunished.

At a time when Christopher Nolan’s solid Dunkirk is getting rave reviews as a tense, experiential masterpiece, Detroit does the same thing, but with more urgency. For all its masterful filmmaking, Dunkirk feels like a very old story. Detroit takes place less than 30 years later, in 1967, but it feels like it’s happening now. Because it is happening now. It’s like watching Schindler’s List while the Holocaust is still happening. This is the war we’re still fighting.

Boal and Bigelow do end the film on a grace note, allowing one character a small beacon of hope. It’s not a happy ending, but it shows that life goes on, even for victims of brutal crimes — or those lucky enough to walk away from them, anyway. Several men in Detroit are robbed of their lives — not just those who died, but also those who survived. Larry ends the film damaged, but not broken. He carves out a niche where he can feel safe in this world, doing all he feels like he can do — hoping and praying that he doesn’t again find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, opposite the wrong cop.

And in a way, that says everything about what’s been going on for the past 50 years.

*

I hate to react too quickly to any movie, because opinions settle over time. I often see a movie and have a negative reaction, only to find that it sits better over time. Sometimes, I leave a film satisfied, but gradually find reasons to like it less.

But it’s been less than an hour since I walked out of Blade Runner 2049 and I’m already comfortable calling it one of the best science fiction films of all time, and quite possibly the greatest sequel ever made.

I dove deep into Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner for the When We Were Young podcast, reading both Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? and Future Noir, a comprehensive recounting of the making of the film. Both texts gave me a greater appreciation for the film itself, which contains many obscure references to themes from Dick’s story that easily go over most audiences’ heads during their initial viewing. It is difficult to fully piece Blade Runner‘s plot together as a casual viewer. Crucial details are mentioned but not shown. This exposition often feels off-the-cuff and half-told — there’s no indication that these are important facts the audience should hold onto, yet the movie makes little sense without them.

Blade Runner is a fascinating and unique piece of cinema, but it doesn’t always come together as a fully realized story. Learning more about scenes that were never shot or didn’t make the final cut (in any of the many versions), one discovers plenty of intentions that might have made for a more coherent and more powerful story. (Screenwriter Hampton Fancher’s original ending was beautiful.) I don’t begrudge anyone who thinks the original Blade Runner is a bona fide masterpiece, but I also have no beef with anyone saying it isn’t. I appreciate the film’s look and sound and the individual creative contributions of many players, while also wishing certain elements of the story had been developed better.

Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, is more or less a perfect film, both entertaining and soulful. The story makes sense from beginning to end, yet its beats are frequently surprising. It is not in any sense a “reboot” of the original, but rather a very direct sequel, in that it couldn’t possibly exist without the first film. (In fact, I wonder if anyone who hasn’t seen the original could fully appreciate it.) And it might be the best sequel ever made.

A handful of films are probably popping into your head as possible counterpoints. The Empire Strikes Back? The Godfather Part II? Aliens? The Dark Knight? Batman Returns? Terminator 2: Judgment Day? Those are all great sequels, on par with the first film — and in some cases, better — but none of them really make the original better. Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, feels made in part to fix the shortcomings of the original. It has subtle and not-so-subtle homages to Dick’s novel and Scott’s film (including my favorite nod, an origami sheep). It’s not a retread, nor does it abandon the elements that made its 35-year-old predecessor so distinct. Set 30 years after the original’s 2019 placement, director Denis Villeneuve’s vision of 2049 feels like a natural progression from the future we glimpsed in Blade Runner. It doesn’t just revisit the themes and story elements from the first film — it pushes them in intriguing, unexpected, but completely consistent directions. Has any sequel made such a strong argument for the original film’s mere existence?

Like Blade Runner, 2049 shows us a vision of the future that’s not quite like any other film we’ve seen before. (Not even Blade Runner.) The original film shaped the collective cinematic vision of dystopias over the past three decades — it’s a marvel Blade Runner 2049 found any new ideas to play with, given how popular the subgenre has been. No film I can think of so honors its predecessor while feeling so fresh simultaneously. Blade Runner 2049 not only expands on certain murky story beats from the original — what we learn in Blade Runner 2049 makes the original film stronger and more satisfying. It’s hard to fathom how a sequel to Blade Runner could be any better.(I’ll keep my synopsis vague and spoiler free, as it works best to know as little as possible going in.) In the film, Ryan Gosling plays K, a blade runner who is both similar to and very different from Harrison Ford’s Deckard. Like Deckard, he’s an isolated bachelor who puts his work first. In the opening scene, a routine assignment goes in an unexpected direction, sending K on a crucial mission that, as his boss Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) puts it, “breaks the world” if it fails.

The marketing has made no secret of the fact that this quest eventually leads K to meet Deckard. Other key players include replicant manufacturer Liandel Wallace (Jared Leto), his dutiful employee Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), and Joi (Ana De Armas), an A.I. who is best described as the 2049 version of Amazon’s Alexa. Three other women, played by Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, and Hiam Abbass, also have important roles, not to mention the thematic importance of a female character from the original Blade Runner. Refreshingly, Blade Runner 2049 is bursting at the seams with compelling female characters. In fact, with the exception of K and Deckard, almost every pivotal character in the film is a woman. (Leto’s Wallace is a compelling figure, but he’s more the puppet master than a direct player.) I can’t remember the last time a big budget studio film was so peppered with great roles for women… quite possibly because the answer is “never.”

Blade Runner set the scene for some interesting debates. Blade Runner 2049 is a loving correction of the original’s sins. The story makes perfect sense, and also makes more sense out of the original. Both are hauntingly beautiful aesthetically, but Blade Runner never drums up much sympathy for Deckard, which may or may not be intentional. (A little of both, I think.) The most emotional readings of the original film take place outside the text of the movie. If Deckard is a replicant, his dirty work takes on an added layer of ironic sadness… but the film only hints at this, giving viewers little reason to even consider the possibility (unless they do some additional reading and view alternate cuts of the film). Either way, Deckard is a miserable son of a bitch. He shoots a fleeing (replicant) female in the back, kills Daryl Hannah’s Pris in equally brutal fashion, and forces himself upon Rachael in ways that call her consent into question. (Maybe they didn’t so much in 1982, but it wouldn’t fly in 2017.) The female characters in Scott’s original are, in many ways, the highlight of the film. Dangerous but child-like Pris is somehow the most relatable character, while Sean Young’s Rachael also earns our sympathy. But these women are also violently abused by our supposed “hero.”

Blade Runner seems rather indifferent about how we should feel about Deckard’s actions. We aren’t given much evidence that replicants really deserve to be so violently offed — yes, they’ve been known to kill humans, but did that start before or after humans started exterminating them? History has taught us that human beings aren’t always right when they declare themselves superior to a different kind of person. American slavery was justified with the notion that black people were savages, intellectually and morally inferior to white men. Some slaves did, then, behave rather savagely — but that’s just a consequence of treating people like savages.

Scott’s Blade Runner half-poses many fascinating questions, then never answers them. Ambiguity can be a powerful tool in storytelling, but only when we it’s intended. Some of the ambiguity in Scott’s film comes instead from budgetary restrictions, too many cooks, and lots of rewriting. Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, never loses its way for a second. Every scene and shot are painstakingly thought through. We can tell. It doesn’t just revisit the troubling moral questions the original asks. It asks them again, with new story beats that make them even more impossible to answer.One love story in Blade Runner 2049 adds layers of complexity onto the original model — the Deckard-Rachael romance. At first, this is pretty par for the course in a sci-fi dystopia, but it ends up adding real heartbreak to the film. How capable are replicants of empathy? Of love? Blade Runner 2049 keeps this open ended. Many characters are on screen for just a few minutes, but each is fascinating and full of life (whether or not they are “alive”). You could make a fascinating film about any character in this movie. Clocking in at nearly 3 hours, Blade Runner 2049 is long enough, yet plenty that goes unresolved, and several characters we could stand to learn more about. The conclusion of this film makes it difficult to imagine a direct sequel — and also difficult to imagine that there won’t be one.

Science fiction films in which androids or artificial intelligence take on human characteristics certainly aren’t rare these days — take, for example, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Her, and Ex Machina, to name a few very good ones. Both Blade Runner films are less explicit than most, implying moral dilemmas but rarely voicing them. Where Blade Runner 2049 triumphs over its predecessor is in empathy, of all things. Gosling’s K is a more defined character than Ford’s Deckard ever was. He undergoes an enthralling emotional journey over the course of the film, and it’s clear what kind of journey it is. Blade Runner‘s vision of the future was so dreary, it was hard to care if any humans or replicants survived to return to their dark, damp, joyless existence. Blade Runner 2049‘s vision of the further future is about as bleak as Blade Runner‘s 2019, but there’s enough soul and verve in these characters to make it worth the investment. This is not an entirely hopeless world, as frightening as so much of it is. The sequel also adds biblical undertones that make it easier to grasp the stakes in this narrative. Blade Runner 2049 touched me in ways the original never did… in ways studio films rarely attempt.

I’m not exactly surprised at how great Blade Runner 2049, both as a sequel and a standalone cinematic experience. It is directed by Denis Villeneuve, after all, who made my Top Ten thrice in the past three years with Enemy, Sicario, and Arrival. (In case you can’t tell from this effusive review, he’s on deck for a fourth.) The film was shot by the legendary Roger Deakins, who’s been nominated thirteen times for an Academy Award, and curiously never won. (I expect this to change in the very near future.) On an artistic level, Blade Runner 2049 is anything but a failure.

The film’s box office take thus far has fallen short of expectations. Fittingly, so did the original Blade Runner. But so what? There’s a good chance Blade Runner 2049 will have staying power in one way or another, just as the original did. It has Oscar potential in numerous categories, provided the Academy is willing to consider a genre sequel through an artistic lens. Costume design, visual effects, and cinematography are all superb. It just might be a Best Picture nominee as well, unless Star Wars: The Last Jedi is several cuts above The Force Awakens and steals Blade Runner‘s thunder. (That’s plausible enough, considering it was directed by Rian Johnson, who made a near-masterpiece original sci-fi film of his own with Looper.) Blade Runner 2049 could be too adult and ponderous to cross the $100 million mark in the United States, which will unfairly categorize it as a flop; then again, I’m already frothing to see it again in theaters, and I’ll bet you I’m not the only one.

Blade Runner 2049 is already one of my favorite science fiction films of all time. It deserves to be held up as a classic of the genre, right alongside the first Blade Runner. In spirit, both Blade Runners share so much — they’re morally complex, visually dazzling, and somewhat disturbing. With a few excisions, Blade Runner 2049 could have been an original sci-fi story, but both films are made better with the existence of the other.

You might even call Blade Runner 2049 a replicant of Blade Runner. Common sense tells us that the original is inherently superior, because Blade Runner 2049 wouldn’t even exist without Blade Runner. Sequels are meant to be vapid, functional carbon copies of something better — but in the Blade Runner films, the replicants end up having more life to them, more personality. Such is the case with Blade Runner 2049.

This film is a masterpiece.*