I'm also having a lot of anxiety about what this incoming administration means for my wife and her metastatic breast cancer treatment and any future treatments (see previous posts beginning in 2020 for my perspective on our cancer story in end-of-year movie post form), considering Republican plans to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and end the Affordable Care Act (which is far from great but does protect people with preexisting conditions) and RFK Jr's threats to pause some federal cancer research (and lots of other medical research) for eight years if we're unfortunate enough to live through this man "go[ing] wild on health." I'm hoping there's enough blowback to prevent these things from happening. (The eight-year research pause seems especially unlikely but is nevertheless extremely upsetting. If you care about us at all and voted for this, you threw us under the bus, and your groceries ain't getting any cheaper anyway.)
We're almost five years into this horrible cancer burden we don't deserve, and we still have a great time together, but the day-to-day experience of dealing with it on our own without much support (though there's not much anyone can do) is more difficult than people realize even when things are going well on paper. Her treatments have mostly been successful (other than some determined armpit lymph nodes that required a surgery and are probably causing more trouble again, which will probably require a change in treatment), but the side effects with the current line of treatment are difficult to manage and the possible next treatment she may have to switch to could be even more disruptive. (Also, my work schedule for the next five months is about to be an enormous burden at the worst possible time, and I have a few minor health issues of my own to take seriously.) A good day for us is pretty similar to a good day pre-cancer and pre-COVID, but a good week means something different now. It's incredibly isolating and lonely. I feel closer than ever to my wife, but I feel an enormous distance between myself and everyone else. (I switched to a hybrid work schedule this year after years of work-from-home isolation, and the initial psychological benefits have begun to dissipate after the last few months of faking normalcy and trying to make some lifestyle changes that are at odds with office culture.) It's sometimes hard to reconcile the supportive, exclamation mark-filled comments on her social media and CaringBridge page with the reality of our lived experience. Yes, good scans are worth celebrating, but the narrowing of possibilities the treatments and attendant side effects cause and the parts of our previous life that are mostly gone forever and the agonizing slow march toward the day when the scans aren't going to be so good anymore are also part of the story. When the same treatment keeping the tumors from spreading also makes it painful to put on shoes and go places and walk around, sometimes the supportive comments unwittingly carry arsenic inside the candy. People love an inspirational tale of overcoming obstacles (cancer happens to other people and even if it happens to me or my partner, we can beat this thing with can-do gumption and spirit, right?), and they also love a person on a deathbed (we're all misery vampires to various extents), but the everyday of chronic illness is an inconvenient buzzkill best avoided and ignored in a narrative of uplift. People like to tell her she's brave, but brave's got nothing to do with it when you don't have a choice. I'm bitter and angry and exhausted and stressed. (I emphasize that I'm speaking for myself here, not my wife.)
What does all this have to do with movies? Buddy, everything is connected to everything else, even though the people in charge don't want you to believe that. My year-end movie posts have transformed over the years from recommendations (check out my cool/uncool taste and worship it) to autobiography (here's who I am and where my experiences and idiosyncrasies and personal aesthetic have led me), and going to movies in the theater is a big part of my life that informs the other parts of my life. Movies (and music and the other arts) aren't an escape. They're a lifeline back to humanity for a guy like me who has trouble mingling with and relating to my fellow humans and slanging the chit-chat. They plug me back in to the lifeforce the dehumanizing dominant culture smothers. I try to reject as much of that as I can in favor of art made by people, which is sometimes difficult because the big shots have made it difficult by somehow destroying both shared-community and solitary get-to-know-thyself experiences. We're all interacting with infinite variations of the same shit in the same way, but separately. I'm not a nostalgic person, but I miss the days before social media and AI and crypto and the Internet and 24-hour news and influencers, when the only people who used the words "content" and "brands" were business jerks and the little piggies who worked in advertising. I miss the days when the Internet was just AOL and degrees of distance from Kevin Bacon and slowly loading scans of Madonna's Sex book. I miss the Internet when people wrote blogs and read them. My soul is a dinosaur in an abandoned mall next to a Wal-Mart that just closed. This is going to weird places, so here are the movies seen on the big screen (made by people!) that I cared about the most this year (alphabetical by title because I don't do the ranked thing).
MY TOP SHELF
The English title of this Turkish movie doesn't exactly scream "party on" unless you're a dry grass enthusiast, but I admire its old-fashioned arthouse pleasures and novelistic sweep, and I was engrossed for the entirety of its three hours and ten minutes. This story of a middle school art teacher with an enormous chip on his shoulder running down the clock on his mandatory service in a small village in hopes of being transferred to Istanbul moves through days and seasons and intense life changes and events (and one unexpected formal and stylistic rupture that jerks you out of the narrative and then back into it) with care and sensitivity. Ceylan has an unflinching empathy for every person his camera stares at, including his often unsympathetic and sometimes despicable main character, and he knows how to drill into the layers of experience that make up a human being. I also love the visual uses he makes of the interior living and working spaces of his characters and what those spaces reveal about them.
I know I'm hitting you back-to-back with these near-parody of arthouse cinema titles, but you'd be a fool to skip this one (shot on 35mm!). (Look at me, badmouthing exclamation marks while also using them.) This is an incredible visual representation of memory and tactile sensation and how one winds around the other. Jackson says she was influenced by Terrence Malick's recent work, but I think she goes deeper. It's no surprise she was a poet and a photographer (and still is) before she made films. Every frame here is alive. Flames from a house fire piercing through a roof, fat drops of rain smacking the water in a river, a child sitting on the floor watching the adults drink and play records while running her finger over the chipped nail polish of her mother's toe. More people need to see this.
A crazily ambitious semi-adaptation of an old favorite of mine, the 1903 Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle, Bonello's Beast moves between 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles, and 2044 AI-controlled no-place and between romantic costume drama, disaster film, horror, and science fiction. It taps into the existential panic and dread of the James novella as well as the technology-enabled anxieties, fragmentations, and existential panics and dreads of the 21st century, with room for Blade Runner, the Lost Highway through Twin Peaks: The Return period of David Lynch (only the scenes inside the Los Angeles house, don't yell at me), Trash Humpers, and green screen commercial filmmaking. It's at once exquisitely composed and messy as hell, tightly controlled and wild. I'm undecided about George MacKay's performance(s), but Lea Seydoux is incredible, as always. She's like Isabelle Huppert. You know you're in the hands of someone who knows how to be in a movie more than almost anyone alive. I'm not just talking about acting. I'm talking about belonging on a screen no matter a movie's subject, tone, time period, setting, director, physical space, costume design, or hairstyles.
A movie in the pre-21st century sense of the word full of old-fashioned pre-digital pleasures and analog textures (this was also shot on 35mm film), Nichols' portrait of a Chicago biker gang in the mid-'60s to early '70s, based on the great photography book of the same name by Danny Lyon, hits a lot of familiar rise and fall story beats but approaches them from quieter and more unusual angles, particularly in his choice to filter almost everything through the point of view of Jodie Comer's character Kathy, the girlfriend and then wife of one of the bikers. Her character type in these movies usually gets saddled with the "you're spending too much time with (insert gang/career/obsession here) instead of me" four-scene role (the meet-cute, the good times, the start of the bad times, the big fight), and versions of those scenes do play a role here, but they mean so much more and have more shade, depth, and punch when you're getting them from her unique insider/outsider perspective after getting to live with her character for an hour. This is also a great character actor ensemble piece with some wild '60s Chicago accents that sound exaggerated but mostly aren't. (Kathy really talked like Jodie Comer does if you've heard any recordings of her.)
Mati Diop's work resists neat categorization, and her second feature (she's also directed several amazing short films) continues that trajectory by blending documentary, narrative storytelling, and experimental film methods. Her subject here is 26 royal artifacts (of thousands) stolen from the kingdom of Dahomey by French colonists in the 1890s and returned to Benin (formerly Dahomey) by France in 2021. Diop lets her striking images do the talking, with two notable exceptions: an intermittent scripted narration made up of multiple layered voices speaking the same text and representing the voice of the art objects and footage of a debate/discussion by Beninese college students thoughtfully dissecting the moral, political, and cultural complexities of the artifacts' return. Diop has created a sharply original piece of anti-colonialist art with a beautiful closing moment.
My favorite movie of the year. This is maybe the best and definitely the funniest piece of art about the consolidated and hollowed-out era we're presently enduring. Jude's film presents a long day in the working life of a production assistant for a Bucharest-based production company churning out the 21st century slop (social media influencer content, commercials, corporate training and PR films, cheap movies going straight to streaming services) as she spends all day and most of the night driving from place to place in horrible traffic, filming auditions of injured employees hoping to appear in a corporate ass-covering safety awareness video for a payoff, and trying to squeeze her life and errands around her work (she also mentions driving for a ride share company during her days off). She blows off steam by making hilariously profane parody videos as Bobita, a wealthy Andrew Tate-esque misogynistic hustle and grind influencer, and posting them on TikTok in spare moments throughout the day. Jude shows us these TikToks and also includes scenes from Lucian Bratu's 1981 film Angela Moves On, about a day in the life of a woman driving a cab through the same Bucharest streets, which Jude sometimes manipulates through the use of slow motion, the pausing of frames, or zooming in on extras. Jude with this movie and with 2021's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn has really developed a film language that meets the current century where it lives. A lot of reviewers have harped on about the running time (two hours and 44 minutes), but it breezed by for me except for the final (still-hilarious) scene where feeling the seconds pass is part of the point.
This got dumped in the February release-date graveyard, most people didn't see it, the people who did see it didn't seem to like it as much as I did, and professional reviews were either mildly negative or mildly positive without being particularly enthusiastic, but I'm hoping it earns an eventual cult following. I was right in predicting The Big Lebowski's belated success when my friends, classmates, professors, and coworkers were less than enthused (wild to live through the "why don't people love this like I do?" initial muted response, the vindication of its growing fandom, and the "alright, everybody, settle the fuck down already, it's just a movie" phases of Lebowski), but I was wrong about the future rise and rise of Burn After Reading mania. (Too many of you are still sleeping on that one, which, despite having the ugliest opening credit fonts the otherwise font-savvy brothers ever used, is otherwise one of their funniest movies.) This Ethan minus Joel solo Coen brother outing (a collaboration with his wife Tricia Cooke, who, but for the same strict Directors' Guild rules that kept Ethan's name off Coen brothers' directing credits for years, would be credited as co-director) is silly, silly stuff in the Raising Arizona tradition (though far less family-friendly), a 1999-set live-action cartoon road movie from Philly to Florida that is equal parts sweetness and filth. It has some awkward moments, but I found most of it ridiculously appealing and big-hearted in a way that (intentional or not) acted as a temporary antidote to the mean-spirited sourness and disconnection of the present cultural moment, and Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan have great chemistry. Bill Camp as Curlie delivers my favorite line (and line read) of the year. Qualley's deliberately cartoony Southern accent is a polarizing choice, but I was fine with it. This isn't Wild River, it's a screwball sex comedy involving a briefcase full of dildos.
I don't know how to write about this movie. I feel so connected to it emotionally and aesthetically, but it resists description and analysis. There's something unsettlingly but comfortingly nonhuman about the camera's viewpoint here, like the natural world or some ancient spirit is controlling its movements and gaze. I think the film is ultimately optimistic, but it's an optimism that doesn't include us, an optimism about the time before we were here and the time after we'll be gone. I think about the ending at least twice a week.
Weird, messy, personal Ozploitation madness on a grand Hollywood scale. I'm happy it exists and happy I saw it on a big screen, but I'm unhappy its qualities were overshadowed by a stupid media overemphasis on its disappointing box office. It was number one the week it was released, but it was a week when overall attendance was down, so it wasn't number one hard enough for the shareholders. Since mainstream media give the impression that profits and awards are proof of a film's artistic worth, the news about the financially disappointing first week became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Miller remains one of the great directors of kinetic action, and this eccentric and exciting movie deserved better.
I got to see this on the big screen due to something in Austin called the ATX TV Festival (it's also where I believe I picked up my second bout of COVID, another sign that movies are superior to TV), but it's the first installment of a three-episode HBO miniseries called God Save Texas, in which three Texas-based filmmakers create political documentary/personal essay film hybrids about the Lone Star State. Linklater's doc makes a striking companion piece to his feelgood semi-autobiographical animated film Apollo 10 1/2, about his childhood in Houston. After Linklater's parents divorced, his mother got a job teaching speech pathology and audiology at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, and the city became Linklater's hometown from fifth grade through his college years. Huntsville is also home to the state prison and carries out the substantial number of executions this legislatively barbaric state churns through. The prison and the university are the two major economic and social hubs of the city, employing the majority of the population and regularly bringing new people to town. Linklater reminisces about his formative years with high school friends and old neighbors and talks to a new generation of people living there now (including members of the community of Nigerian immigrants who moved to the city to work in the prison and their Huntsville-born children), making excellent use of his laidback persona, his ability to hang comfortably with the artists and the jocks, and his gently folksy back-to-my-roots narrative structure to ease the audience into one of the strongest anti-death penalty polemics of recent years. It's a complex look at a town and a state that are too often painted in simplistic terms by outsiders and a recognition of the humanity our systems can't recognize even though we created them.
I can't get enough of Hong Sang-soo's movies, and I also can't really explain how or why they affect me so much, so I'll just follow Gi Ju-bong's poet character in this film as my guide and agree with him that searching for meaning is the coward's way. Recommended if you're feeling ambivalent about your own creativity, a fan of cats, and/or someone who's having trouble relinquishing pleasurable but unhealthy drinking, smoking, and eating habits.
I'm not sure everything here completely works, but, man, is it visceral, sweaty, sexy, and mean. I thought I was probably going to enjoy a horny, violent lesbian crime thriller with a bodybuilding angle, a sprinkling of arty pretension, and Ed Harris sporting weird hair, and you know what? I did. Excellent use of Throbbing Gristle's "Hamburger Lady."
Like I said about Radu Jude's recent work, Vera Drew's semi-autobiographical The People's Joker finds a film language that meets the current century where it lives. It's both an accessible crowd-pleaser with a traditional narrative structure and a crazy experiment in film form made out of a disparate grab-bag of pop culture sources (Hollywood comedies, the coming-of-age film, superhero movies and comic books, Joaquin's Joker, SNL, UCB, sitcoms, reality TV, Saturday morning cartoons, cable news, dystopic sci-fi, YouTube, cop shows, standup comedy, family melodrama, the "very special episode"). It's funny and inventive (I especially enjoyed the jokes at Lorne Michaels' expense) and just a little exhausting. It also knows how to work its tiny budget to its artistic advantage. I don't put movies on my favorites list for having the "correct" politics, and this one is here for the reasons I've already mentioned, but it's nice to see such a buoyantly optimistic (but non-pie in the sky) movie by a trans woman at a time when the right wing is relentlessly bullying and harassing (and the centrist liberal wing is throwing under the bus) a tiny demographic with no real power made up of people just trying to be themselves and live their lives.
The second Hong Sang-soo movie on my list, and he has two others from this year that haven't even made it to Austin yet. The guy's insanely prolific. Hong's recent works are variations on his usual themes but also experiments in what a movie can be in a post-celluloid world, and his current uses of lower quality resolution and the occasional slightly out-of-focus image (I haven't even seen In Water yet, which is out of focus for the entire running time) counterintuitively have a visual excitement missing from the bland crispness of the high-def digital image. I'll get into it more in Part 2, but Hong's movies are primarily concerned with the absurdism of the mundane everyday, but they have subtle supernatural undercurrents involving parallel lives and alternate realities/dimensions that viewers are free to ignore or chew on at their leisure. In that spirit, I think A Traveler's Needs is his witch movie, and it's my favorite of Hong's collaborations with Isabelle Huppert.
Though I'm a fan of his previous work, I had mixed feelings about Jonathan Glazer's stylistic approach to the subject of complicity in genocide while I was watching this movie and long after I finished it. I couldn't decide whether I felt closer to Richard Brody's shredding of the film as a conceptually audacious art kitsch trivialization of the Holocaust's horrors or J. Hoberman's praise of those same conceptual decisions as a surface reflecting ourselves back to us. After nearly a year of the movie's images persistently remaining in my thoughts, and images of Gazan death and displacement persistently appearing in my social media feeds, I think I'm with Hoberman, and I think it belongs here.
NO SHELF WILL HOLD THESE OBJECTS
Most of my friends hate Harmony Korine's movies, but I love the little freak. He fills me with glee. I'm not even sure this movie is a movie, and the AI aspects of it don't exactly thrill me, but I love the way it looks, even if it's the least compelling narrative he's ever dreamed up (and I'm a guy who could watch the Trash Humpers hump trash all the livelong day). It's kinda-sorta like Stan Brakhage, recent Terrence Malick, the Grand Theft Auto games, AI art, CSI: Miami played at half-speed, a community theater production of Scarface, and late-'90s/early 2000s hip hop videos ground into a semi-movie-ish paste. At its worst, it's like watching someone play a video game. At its best, it's like tripping balls inside a giant piece of soft, fruit-flavored candy.
How do you write about a movie when it's actually 52 quintillion movies? Using generative technology in one of the only ways I'm not alarmed by, Hustwit's documentary(ies) about Brian Eno assemble(s) and reassemble(s) thousands of hours of material (both archival footage and footage shot specifically for this film) into a roughly 80- to 100-minute form that is different every time it's shown. The version you see won't be the version I see unless I'm with you when you see it. (They're still trying to figure out how to make this happen for home viewing after its theatrical run ends.) The results, at least in the model generated for us Austin people on that August night, are a more than appropriate Eno blend of humanity and machine-driven technology, distance and warmth, decision and chance. I jokingly told the friend I attended the screening with that we'd probably get an all-Bono and Coldplay version with my luck, but, fortunately, we got Bowie, Roxy Music, John Cale, Devo, and lots of Eno in his studio and in nature, watching Fela Kuti performances on YouTube and swearing at the ad breaks just like I do (love that he doesn't pay for the premium ad-free version) while explaining how the interplay between the lead and background vocals on Remain in Light was influenced by Kuti's horn parts, talking about why he turned down producing a Joni Mitchell album and his subsequent regrets, and organizing a group singing project with the neighborhood locals. His guarded optimism about humanity's future and how we'll have a better society if we find solutions to the climate crisis (that "if" is bold, all-caps, and 50 feet tall) made me feel a glimmer of hope. Even if it's false hope, I'll take it, though our possible impending extinction also gives me peace of mind in ways it never did pre-2020.
This is the kind of big, stupid gesture only a real artist could make, and I'm fortunate this gesture was presented to me in fucking IMAX!! What a time to be alive. Coppola is hopped up on big, earnest goofballs here, delivering a ridiculous, contradictory, playful, sometimes visually stunning (the rainy night drive!!!), very funny (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), kind of stupid (but I said that already), very earnest (I said that already, too) invitation to "plow through the riches of [his] Emersonian mind." This is a forward-thinking yet reactionary old man nearing the end of his life and career (though still full of the beans) and letting his imagination and personal savings run wild. Ideologically, it's a bit of a mess (the acting is all over the place, too, with some people getting it and some people looking lost), but it's a much more straightforward and controlled narrative than the social media meme-ification and mainstream media spin would have you believe. The reactions to this thing are almost as entertaining as the thing itself. Film-loving people whose taste I generally trust have called this the best movie of the century, a piece of shit, a fascinating trainwreck, not that bad, and misogynistic trash that reveals its admirers' hatred of women. Are all these things true? Are none of them? Yes. Masterpieces, great movies, and neglected gems are neat, but I also have a bottomless appetite for the ambitious chaos object, the folly, the flop turned cult, the crazed passion/vanity project, and what the French call the film maudit (the "cursed film" defended by a passionate minority).
I know this is the third time I've said this, but I don't how to write about this one. As someone says in the mostly too conventional Godard Cinema documentary, talking about a Godard movie and watching a Godard movie are two completely different experiences. Presented at film festivals in 2023 as Godard's final work (though two more short films subsequently followed, the last completed the day before his assisted suicide in 2022 at the age of 91), TOAFTWNE:PW carries traces of Histoire(s) du Cinema (like nearly everything he made that followed that major achievement), but it also points toward a new way of working, which is such a Godardian thing to do near the end. Has there ever been a more foolish exercise than the listicles ranking Godard films from best to worst that popped up after his death? I can't think of a director less suited for that treatment. It's like ranking the letters in a word.
HONORABLE MENTIONS (I'M DROPPING THE SHELF THING NOW)
Hit Man (Richard Linklater)
This sharp, funny romantic comedy/action-thriller crowd-pleaser with attractive leads would have been either a big hit or a home video cult success if it came out in the '90s. Instead, it gets buried in arthouse theaters for a week and then dumped in the Netflix content pile. What are we doing here?
Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (Ethan Coen)
The other solo Coen brother project of the year. A planned Jerry Lee Lewis documentary fell apart after Lewis died and the director abandoned ship, so T-Bone Burnett sent the collected archival footage to a mid-pandemic stir-crazy Ethan Coen and asked him to do something with it. Coen created an achronological impressionistic mixtape of a movie that got some flak for being a glorified YouTube compilation video, but I think it reveals more about Lewis and is wilder and a hell of a lot weirder than any conventional documentary, the cherry on top being footage of Lewis wearing the craziest damn vest I've ever seen.
Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill (Brian Lindstrom & Andy Brown)
Though taking a conventional talking head/archival footage/animation/celebrity fan testimonial approach (Big Thief have the hardest working publicists in indie showbiz) and opening with Fleet Foxes instead of the genuine article, I still found much to admire here. Hardcore Sill fans are not going to learn too much they haven't read already, but her wild and tragic life story is insanely compelling, most of the talking heads actually knew her, and the filmmakers have incorporated a surprising amount of audio interview recordings and performance footage from one of the most under-documented musicians of the '70s. She was one of a kind, and I hope this movie introduces more people to her work. She absolutely smokes her more financially successful celebrity Southern California singer/songwriter peers, but the marketplace doesn't like to reward the real ones.
Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)
Wenders' strongest fiction film since the mid-'90s dials down the more annoying aspects and false notes of his uneven post-Lisbon Story narrative features and sustains more of what he's good at while also heading in some promising new directions. It occasionally teeters into sentimentality or false uplift, but it's mostly a return to form (to use a phrase I mostly hate). It disarmed my cynicism. I'm sympathetic to some of its detractors' criticisms in theory but not in practice. Sure, it may be a slight failure of artistic nerve on Wenders' part to avoid showing any of his public toilet cleaner main character's nightmarish bathroom cleanups, but shots of a diarrhea-splattered toilet or a puddle of vomit would have completely knocked this film out of its rhythm. (I'm picturing a guy with professorial specs and a Van Dyke beard telling a Cavett-esque PBS talk show host, "The diarrhea is implied.")
Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson)
Guy Maddin's first feature-length film since 2015's The Forbidden Room (there have been several short films in between, most notably The Green Fog, an abstract remake of Vertigo using only clips from other San Francisco-filmed movies, TV shows, and music videos), co-directed by brothers Evan and Galen Johnson (his frequent collaborators for the last decade), is a major stylistic departure from his usual repurposing of silent and early sound film techniques in favor of a crisp, digital, contemporary sheen. It's still very much a Maddin film in sensibility, though a considerably calmer and quieter one, which may sound like ridiculous adjectives to apply to a movie about G7 summit world leaders (who bear little resemblance to their real-world counterparts) getting lost in the woods and encountering masturbating bog people, a giant brain, and a possible apocalypse, but that's Maddin and the Johnsons for you. I found it oddly soothing and anxiety-relieving, though it does seem to be missing that indefinable quality that separates great Maddin from good Maddin. Oddly, this was the only movie I watched in an enormous corporate multiplex this year, and the only other people at my screening were three elderly women and a fourth woman of my middle-aged vintage.
Separated (Errol Morris)
Made for MSNBC but given a tiny theatrical release the weekend before the election, Separated documents the moral and ethical black hole of the Trump administration's family separation policy (and the government employees trying to stop it) in bureaucratic detail. (The chickenshits at MSNBC didn't air it until after the election, but would it have mattered? Both major parties talked about undocumented immigrants like they were vermin.) It was a depressing watch before the election (I can't imagine watching it now), but I'm glad it exists. It's not without Morris's sense of humor and eye for eccentricity and absurdity, and the way he lays out the information is compelling (though I haven't entirely made up my mind about the effectiveness of the scripted reenactment scenes of an undocumented mother and son entering the country and getting separated), but it's one of his sadder and angrier documentaries. Trump's immigration officials are either ghouls getting off on their power or weak-willed yes-men and women, but Morris also pointedly and justifiably criticizes the immigration policies of the string of presidents from Reagan to Biden.
Theater of Thought (Werner Herzog)
Herzog's documentary about the brain, advancements in neural technology, and the possibilities of and ethical questions raised by those advancements is a satisfying and very funny example of the modern Herzog formula, where he approaches the material as both himself and the "Werner Herzog" persona. It doesn't go into too much depth with any of its subjects, but as a general overview of the terrain, it's lively and eccentric.
ALMOST, BUT NOT QUITE
Godard Cinema (Cyril Leuthy)
This might be for you if you like biographies of artists more than you like art.
MaXXXine (Ti West)
The weakest of the three Maxine/Pearl movies, but I liked the look of the candy-sleaze '80s Los Angeles setting and Kevin Bacon's Foghorn Leghorn accent.
She Is Conann (Bertrand Mandico)
There's great stuff here, but, damn, it's a mess.
WOULD HAVE MADE THE TOP SHELF LIST IF I HADN'T MISSED IT IN THEATERS
Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice)
