The Films the Oscars Forgot, Part 2

My top five films overlooked by the Oscars have some commonalities. Four are by women. Four are by directors who wrote or co-wrote the screenplay. Four are international productions. Four squarely have feminist themes running through them, though not in the ways we’d expect. All five deal with trauma survivors in remarkably different ways – a war orphan and found family, migrants confronting domestic abuse, a woman being stalked as her support system evaporates, the survivor of a school shooting, a musician rejected by her own family for being a daughter instead of a son.

Once again, this features only films that received no Oscar nomination whatsoever. Each of these films is remarkable and will stay with me. Each is one I’ll revisit again:

The Girl from the Other Side: Siuil, a Run

directed by Kubo Yutaro
written by Maiya Satomi, Nagabe

A perfect fairy tale, dark and caring with no easy answers. A little girl named Shiva is alone in the forest, orphaned by war. Creatures that can curse you with a touch lurk here. One such beast discovers Shiva, but being kinder than the others he decides to care for her.

He can’t remember his life, his name, his family, or anything but the loneliness of his curse. Scared she will fall to the same fate, he is determined to return Shiva to humans. Neither his own kind nor the humans make this easy.

The film is short at an hour and 10 minutes, and you can tell it’s on a budget. That hardly matters when the shot choice is this good, the visuals this unique, and its use of light and shadow can make a single moment blossom with emotional implication.

“The Girl from the Other Side” is gorgeous in aesthetic and spellbinding in its storytelling. Watching it reminds me of the feeling I got when I watched “The Last Unicorn” for the first time as a kid. I felt a genuine threat of not knowing what was going to happen, and a sense of things I couldn’t put words to back then, but I might now: Some stories can make you feel as if you absorb fragments of the stillness and grace its characters possess in the midst of chaos. I can only describe that feeling as a fusion of heartbreak and reassurance. A good fairy tale can balance us on the precipice between the two, and “The Girl from the Other Side” is a perfect balance.

You can watch it on Crunchyroll. It came out as a film, but in the U.S., it’s divided into three episodes – probably because our viewers are more likely to watch when it’s presented that way.

Nudo Mixteco

written/directed by Angeles Cruz

Sometimes late at night, after watching a good movie, I come across a still moment and I just feel kindness. As in: the storyteller understood these people that the whole world passes by. She was kind to them when you or I might not even notice the opportunity to be kind. She saw them and said, “You exist, I see you,” and Angeles Cruz is a strong enough artist to help the rest of us notice.

“Nudo Mixteco” is composed of three loosely connected vignettes. Each centers on a migrant worker coming home to their town in Oaxaca. The events in one story don’t trigger those in another, as we often see in American ensemble stories. Instead, their connection as parts of the story develop our better understanding of a community and its generational history. This is common in Latin American literature. The stories are related not because they shape each other, but because they shape and reshape how we perceive each.

Much of what’s tackled in the film are realizations of women’s sexuality and their agency within a Mixtec town. The implications of so many small moments in the film don’t dawn on us until later – not because of a plot development, but because we understand a character and what they’ve been through better. As we understand the lives they left and have returned to, our ability to infer what those moments mean grows: what a man glancing at a woman tells us about his fidelity away, what a woman’s nausea tells us about her own history.

“Nudo Mixteco” sees real people more clearly than perhaps any other film this year, but they don’t give awards for that.

Watcher

directed by Chloe Okuno
written by Zack Ford, Chloe Okuno

“Watcher” got lost in the shuffle because it came out within weeks of Netflix’s aggressively mediocre “The Watcher”. The film “Watcher” is a masterpiece of slow burn horror. It builds around how women’s real concerns for their safety are brushed under the rug and dismissed as hysteria.

Julia moves with her husband to Bucharest, Romania. Alone in their new apartment, she spies a man watching out his window. Is he watching her? The city? Is he the same as the one she thinks is following her? Is she building paranoia from feeling stressed and alienated, or is her husband alienating her as a response to her legitimate fear?

Maika Monroe stars, meaning the “It Follows” actress has now led two of the most important horror films of her generation. She is superb and adds real heft to a role that’s historically been played far more breathy and helpless.

The premise may reflect “Rear Window”, but the film itself mirrors some of the best giallo horror of the 70s, such as “Deep Red” and “Don’t Look Now”. For all its style, “Watcher” feels grounded and consequential. The horror isn’t unstoppable, but neither is Julia skilled or brave. They’re both limited like most of us are, so much of the horror is played out in who believes Julia. The more she reaches out for her support system and authorities that are supposed to help, the more they shirk responsibility. The foundation upon which “Watcher” is built is a very real world horror that women have to survive.

This makes “Watcher” feel much more terrifying as it edges closer and closer to bursting into the type of horror movie we recognize. Aiding this is one of the most effective soundscapes of the year, a use of subtle white noise and room tone that finds its way under your skin and becomes deeply unsettling. “Watcher” is the tensest film of the year. It inverts much of what we expect horror to be in a way that makes a hell of a point and escalates what we’re familiar with to a level of sheer terror. And it has the best closing shot of the year.

The Fallout

written/directed by Megan Park

I want to call “The Fallout” timely, but since the cycle of school shootings at its heart is endless in the U.S., I’m not sure there’s a moment when it wouldn’t be. I’ve rarely seen a film tackle a traumatic topic better. It does so from the eyes of Vada, who doesn’t have it in her to turn her experience of survival into a fight for justice or change. It’s all she can do to get back to any kind of normal. She processes her experiences through the filter of teenage hormones and a mix of building and burning bridges.

At its heart is Jenna Ortega’s performance as Vada. Ortega’s getting recognition for “Wednesday” and “Scream”, as she should. With five films and a series, playing wildly different roles in each, she was the performer of the year in a way no one’s been in ages. Her role in “The Fallout” is one of the best and most realistic performances of coping with trauma that’s ever been put to screen, down to the way post-traumatic tremors just become a chronic norm of her existence.

There’s a scene where she lies to her therapist in order to convince herself she’s fine, and it’s revealingly desperate yet guarded. She embodies both reaching out for help and slapping away any hand that’s offered because she needs to regain control of her surroundings, and you can’t regain control when the person helping you is driving. She needs the help, but she also needs to recapture expressing her agency strongly enough to reject it. Ortega’s is such a psychologically complex realization of someone stuck in the push-and-pull between these contrary needs, and she acts them as if clinging on to survival. Her not being nominated is the most glaring oversight of the Oscars, but “The Fallout” is in the class of film that the Oscars routinely ignore.

Maddie Ziegler, who you may know from her youth as a dancer on TV and in Sia music videos, also surprises with what should’ve been recognized as a superb supporting performance.

The filmmaking retains an indie ethos that feels rarer in recent years, one that’s been supplanted by a “studio indie” vibe over the last decade-plus. Writer-director Megan Park’s intact sense of experimentation and confrontation is key to telling stories about young adults because it goes outside a formula to portray contentious and lost characters. So much of YA work has figured out how to convey themes from the inside of the system out, and that’s important, but we still need movies like “The Fallout” that tackle their stories and perspectives from the outside-in.

“The Fallout” brilliantly portrays the often incomplete stages of coping with trauma, while reflecting a broader trauma our children endure today in the name of money the gun lobby dumps into politics.

Qala

directed by Anvita Dutt
written by Muhammad Asif Ali, Anvita Dutt

Gothic horror doesn’t hide its monsters from you, it tells you how they came to be. There’s no twist that you can’t already identify yourself. Instead, gothic horror tells us how its monsters costume themselves in human forms, a humanity they only recognize as those who named them monsters in the first place. Musicals don’t allow characters to hide from each other long. They betray their characters’ forms and bring to the fore their hidden agendas.

This is the unexpected axis upon which Anvita Dutt’s gothic horror musical “Qala” turns. Qala is the inheritor to her late father’s musical legacy, but much to her mother’s humiliation, she’s not a boy. One form of abuse turns into another when her mother discovers a musically talented orphan boy she can adopt and use to replace Qala. Suddenly Qala is disposable, to be married off and forgotten. How does she get from there to become a celebrated film singer?

Even if the music is compartmentalized within performances, those performances always betray what’s really going on. Why do that when its gothic horror explicitly tells us? Because its monster isn’t hiding from us, it’s hiding from herself.

With “Bulbbul” and now “Qala”, Dutt and lead actress Triptii Dimri have created two very different feminist gothic horrors, each asking us to understand the necessity and tragedy of its “monsters”. Dimri’s monster in “Bulbbul” was righteous and right. Her monster in “Qala” is much more complicated. She reflects and repeats abuses because this is how she’s been taught the world works. Her actions are the result of learning at her mother’s feet how disposable she is. Her survival is a mix of emulating her mother’s actions, even when a pale imitation of her mother’s cruelty meets with her mother’s rejection and disapproval.

The monster here is less Qala and more the cycle in which she’s trapped. “Qala” isn’t about a big realization you couldn’t have guessed much earlier. Gothic horror doesn’t hide its monsters from you. Musicals don’t allow their characters to hide. They tell you how a monster comes to be. In illustrating the cycle of abusing and rejecting daughters, it reflects a horrific monster that much of the world maintains and practices. This is how Dutt makes gothic horror that’s both classic and evolved. The monster in “Qala” is only hiding in the forms we taught her, costumed in the humanity that surrounds her. What’s horrific and monstrous about her is a reflection of what surrounds her.

“Qala” is a technical marvel, with astounding cinematography, set design, and costuming. Dutt has arguably become our most important horror director working today. I’ve compared Dimri to Anthony Hopkins before, in her ability to glance across the camera and let you know, “Watch this, watch what I can do” before a character bites. That ability to loose sheer will onto the screen lets her turn a film on a dime, from one where everyone’s acting for the audience into one where everyone’s acting for her character, where we as audience turn from viewer to enabler. It is awesome and frightening, and Dutt and Dimri might be the best director-actor pairing going today.

Honorable Mentions/Films I Missed

There are so many honorable mentions. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s “Do Revenge” is a remarkable teen comedy and satire about performative allyship that boasts a sharp screenplay reminiscent of “Clueless” if it were out for blood.

Ti West’s duology of horror movies “X” and “Pearl” both star Mia Goth and take us through unexpected relationships between different eras of cinema and the adult film industry.

Jordan Peele is ever-reliable and “Nope” continues his string of exceptional horror movies. It says something when someone’s worst reviews are for a film still considered borderline-great.

There are still other films I haven’t seen yet: journalism drama “She Said”, the Lithuanian sci-fi “Vesper”, Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future”.

No list like this is ever going to be complete, and that goes to my point in what the Oscars miss. They dismiss many films, particularly indie and international films that don’t fit their eligibility requirements and especially films made by women because they don’t match the mentality of nominating the same, old perspectives over and over again.

The Oscars got their top choice right this year, but that’s not a reliable habit on their part, and they’re not getting the nominations as a whole right when just four of the last 65 Best Director nominees are woman, when just one of 10 Best Picture nominees was directed by a woman, when just two of 18 people nominated in the Best Screenplay categories were women, when only three women have ever been nominated for Best Cinematography, when only 20% of Best Editing nominees are women.

If you think Hollywood lacks originality, the answer is there: seek out the perspectives that are original because they’ve rarely been featured before, because they bring new perspectives than the ones that we’ve platformed and awarded. Those films are being made and ultimately, what the Oscars missed is a framework to highlight this other work that is out there, that is creative, that is original, that gives you access to 100% of the talent making films instead of just 50%. Why would any of us trap ourselves into having so little, enjoying so little, when there’s so much more filmmaking and filmmaking that’s so much more expansive. What the Oscars miss is just a useful lens for what we miss. There is so much more out there to see.

Read Part 1, which features five more films the Oscars forgot.

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The Films the Oscars Forgot, Part 1

You’re going to have years when someone isn’t represented in the Oscar nominees. All five Best Directors being men? Nine out of 10 Best Picture nominees being directed by men? You’re going to have years like that, just like you’re going to have years when all five Best Director nominees are women and nine out of 10 Best Picture nominees are directed by women. That’s just the way variance works and – wait, what?!? There’s never been a year like that for women? Only four out of 65 Best Director nominees since 2010 have been women, and that’s such a statistical uptick we’ve celebrated it?

Look, this is one of the few years where I feel the Oscars got the Best Picture right. Normally if they remember to nominate a movie like “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, it’s astounding they recognized it – let alone seeing it win. But the full scope of the nominees remains staggeringly narrow.

This is not an article about films by women. I’ve got some in here written and directed by men that were overlooked, too. I just took my list of best films and looked at the ones that saw no Oscar nominations whatsoever. My guideline for this isn’t: select films by women. But there’s zero way of looking at the Oscars and understanding their guideline as anything but: overlook films by women. Just four out of 65 nominees. When I do an article about the best films the Oscars overlook, what do you think’s going to come up?

We constantly complain about a lack of originality in Hollywood, while overwhelmingly watching films from the same narrow band of perspectives that have been platformed for a century in filmmaking. What do you think’s going to happen?

The Oscars are recognizing more than they did before, and that means being more inclusive than before. But getting one step of the work done doesn’t mean all the work’s done. It can be true that the winner this year was the right choice, and that the nominations as a whole still have a mountain of work to do.

These are the best films that didn’t get a single Oscar nomination, and many of them deserved nominations in any fair fight. You’ve also got a film or two that didn’t meet eligibility requirements, which are a mish-mash that already disqualify an enormous number of independent, streaming, and international titles.

Mad God

written & directed by Phil Tippett

We’ll start off with my most controversial pick, and I mean just among myself. My own internal monologue is asking me, “Are you sure?” and it’s responding, “Damn straight”. That’s because “Mad God” is a test of patience and fortitude, an unimaginably painstaking stop motion film from Phil Tippett.

The man is a legend in visual effects, having done the stop motion and miniatures for the original Star Wars trilogy, “Dragonslayer”, and “RoboCop”, and the visual effects for “Willow”, “Jurassic Park”, and “Starship Troopers”. He evolved from an animation director of stop motion and optical effects to one overseeing CGI. 30 years in the making, “Mad God” mixes these with puppetry and live action.

What’s “Mad God” about? A courier descends from the heavens to journey through layered histories of worlds that have each destroyed themselves. If you’ve ever seen a contemporary art installation that one of you’s going to love and be moved by and the other is going to be repulsed by and immediately leave, this is that. If you don’t have the stomach for gross and gore, don’t touch the film. One of its medical scenes is as close as I’ve come to feeling like a night terror’s been realized on screen.

I’m not usually one for that kind of thing, so why do I still like this? Its episodic journey through dense environments of violence and brutality doesn’t feel egotistical or fetishized; it feels reflective of the horrors we read about every day. It feels understanding of our smallness in the face of genocides, systemic abuses, and disasters.

My greatest fear is that this is all humanity is, that anything good or kind I do, or that anything anyone’s done to dodge or minimize harm doesn’t matter. My fear is that in numbers we constantly regress into destroying ourselves, that not enough rise against this cruelty for long enough to make a difference. Part of me knows that each kindness, protest, and the work of activism adds up to a mountain of effort that avalanches into momentum. Part of me knows that each cruelty, abuse, and con does the same. “Mad God” envisions that fear in all its horror. It even asks, “What if that’s all there is?” It doesn’t feel good, but it gives me a space to confront and process it.

That’s what the best contemporary art accomplishes. It creates a hall of mirrors to start reflecting pieces of ourselves inside. Where “Mad God” pushes even beyond this is in considering our creations of divinity. Regardless of whether a particular divinity is real, we certainly do a job of projecting ourselves onto it. “Mad God” works as both a cocktail of human horrors and a creation myth of universes each doomed to self-destruction. To beget something as violent as humanity’s been, how grotesque must divinity be if we’re made in its image? To beget a divinity that licenses and allows our cruelty, how much cruelty must we project onto it in order to justify permitting our own? If divinity is that hall of mirrors, what the hell are we reflecting?

Many of the films we celebrate each year are versions of stories we’ve seen before. I’ve seen no version of “Mad God” before. It is, perhaps, deeply flawed. It is certainly repulsive. While there are influences or fitting stop motion companion pieces to it, such as Mark Osborne’s short “More”, Fred Stuhr’s music video for Tool’s “Sober”, or Jan Svankmajer’s surreal “Alice”, “Mad God” is something for which there is no other version. That makes it the best and worst example of what it is, and what it amounts to is a truth about humanity at large that I sometimes fear overbears the other truths we carry.

Petite Maman

written & directed by Celine Sciamma

Nelly is 8. Her grandmother has died. Her parents clean out her grandmother’s home, filled with memories of her mother’s youth. Nelly has little to do, so plays in the woods. She meets another little girl, Marion. Somehow, Nelly has met her own mother, when she was Nelly’s age.

The concept is explored slowly and simply. The two girls aren’t there to ask sci-fi questions about time travel or come up with a solution to their mystery. There’s no ticking clock or magical quandary. They build a hut from tree branches, play board games, and put on a play for no one else but themselves. In these simple activities rests a profound and needed connection, one that speaks to Nelly’s fracturing family and Marion’s own well-being.

Celine Sciamma is the writer and director of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Girlhood”. I’d argue she’s our best director working today, but that’s for another article. Suffice to say “Petite Maman” is her lightest touch yet. Sciamma can sit you in moments that are passing and forgettable in ways that make you realize how human and deeply caring they are. An observation from a child can describe the situation of an adult more succinctly than our greatest writers. The smallest and most ordinary act can be a towering expression of love.

Sciamma explores a child’s fear and confidence as the shape of her world changes. She explores how generations can care for each other, yet be incapable of communicating the impact of loss between them. She explores how a child sees a parent’s chronic illness, and comes to understand it with maturity. “Petite Maman” feels like every moment of it really happens, that this tale is as natural as a windy day.

The film presents what happens as real, confirmed by other characters in different ways. Yet even if it is metaphor or imaginary friend, that demarcation becomes unimportant because it represents something real to a child. It represents what they are going through. That internal reality has to be the film’s and thus ours as well. Anything else wouldn’t be a true window into Nelly’s experience.

Sciamma doesn’t overwhelm you; she gives you the space to overwhelm yourself. These acts and expressions of care often go unrecognized in our lives. She simply recognizes them with us. She opens a window onto other people’s lives so that we might understand our own better. I leave all her films feeling gentler and, I truly think, understanding kindness better.

The Woman King

directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood
written by Dana Stevens, Maria Bello

“The Woman King” easily stands beside other historical epics in terms of visuals, design, acting, story – everything you want out of the genre. The African Kingdom of Dahomey is at a crossroads, on the precipice of war with its neighbors and debating its participation in the slave trade even as European nations encroach. Viola Davis plays Nanisca, the general of the nation’s all-women fighting corps.

Thuso Mbedu’s Nawi is given up by her father to the army and undergoes grueling training to become a soldier as war breaks out. Under the tutelage of Lashana Lynch’s veteran Izogie, she learns to manage her training in conjunction with her independent streak. There are battle scenes, political intrigue, even a forbidden love story. It’s all well done, and none of it pretends that the era can only be presented in muddled gray-blues the way our historical epics about Europe are.

Why didn’t “The Woman King” get more recognition? It suffered a concerted effort from right-wing social media to de-legitimize its launch. Click on any video or article about it and you can see a deluge of comments criticizing the film for pretending Dahomey didn’t have slaves of its own. Except this is wrong. Not only is Dahomey depicted having slaves of its own, whether it should continue participating in the slave trade is the entire plot of the movie. Yet the controversy allowed conservative media to make the argument that if Black filmmakers were erasing an African country’s history of slavery (they didn’t), why shouldn’t white people be allowed to do the same? This is an argument easily disproved by watching the actual movie, or even just the opening text crawl of the movie, but the average Fox News viewer or Kiwi Farms poster isn’t going to do that when they could just spend that time getting angry about something they made up.

The astroturfing didn’t stop there – conservatives went on about how the women army unit of Dahomey lost in both battles it fought, in 1890 and 1892, as if the two-and-a-half years Europeans had bothered to record was somehow a representative history of a unit that was in service for more than 200 years. If I looked at two later years of Vietnam and extrapolated that it meant the United States’ military was a joke that had never won any battle or war, I’d be laughed out of any room where someone hadn’t already punched me in the face. So why would we do the same to someone else’s history (hint: cause racism!)

Yet this concerted effort across conservative media and mainstream social media hamstrung the film, discouraged audiences, and blunted enough support to turn American awards bodies away (“The Woman King” did fine overseas at the BAFTAs with two nominations, for instance). We accept deeply inaccurate historical films all the time. There’s virtually no scene in “Braveheart” that isn’t rife with inaccuracies (Robert the Bruce, who betrays William Wallace in the film, never betrayed him and was the actual figure celebrated in Scottish history as Braveheart; none of its battles happen the way they’re presented; the princess Wallace gets pregnant was three years old at the time; there’s a whole list of this). In fact, “The Woman King” is probably on the more accurate side of historical epics – not that this is saying all that much given the genre. So why do we suddenly care if a historical epic has inaccuracies? (hint: cause racism!)

Choose to watch the film, however, and you get a lively, engaging, visually exciting, and terrifically acted drama.

Prey

directed by Dan Trachtenberg
written by Patrick Aison, Dan Trachtenberg, Jim Thomas

With apologies to whichever guns you think are top or most mavericky, “Prey” is the best Western action movie since “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”. This is due to the film’s focus on character development and plot. What’s all that nonsense doing in a modern action movie? Hearkening back to an age when action-adventure movies didn’t leave off the ‘adventure’ side of things. I like my action-action movies and my action-romances and my join the Navy-join the Navy movies, but action-adventure still has a very compelling place.

The fifth main entry in the “Predator” series is the best by far, and a remarkably technically accomplished one. If you’re not familiar with the franchise, it tells the story of an alien race that treats the Earth as a hunting ground, complete with the kind of trophy killing our hunters take part in. Humans inevitably prove one of the most sought after prey. Landing in the Great Plains of 1719, the Predator quickly starts hunting people, Comanche and colonizer alike.

“Prey” features a mostly indigenous cast. Amber Midthunder plays Naru, a Comanche woman who bucks gender roles by wanting to hunt. She’s a good tracker, but also doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. “Prey” is intriguing because it doesn’t pose an Arnold Schwarzenegger commando, Danny Glover cop, or squad of elite military getting overwhelmed by Predators. It poses a talented but still inexperienced hunter against something unfathomable. She’s prone to make costly mistakes, but she’s also quick to observe and learn. This ratchets up the tension, and “Prey” does the best job in the series of having us notice things the hero can use right as she does.

There’s also a lesson taken from “Alien” here – the inherent tension of a woman making the right decision and men assuming she knows so little they should immediately do the opposite regardless of whether it’s smart. That speaks to something real. No matter how much you’re trained as a soldier or hunter, the one thing men are trained in even earlier is to automatically dismiss what women tell us. “Prey” portrays the cost of this bluntly.

It still may seem ridiculous to suggest a “Predator” movie is one of the best films of the year, but it really is that good. No nomination for its cinematography, which relies almost entirely on natural light, is one of the biggest oversights of the Oscars. The pacing is extraordinary and genuinely communicates the threat of a Predator as something unknowable and difficult to quantify, maddening in its otherworldly incomprehensibility. It makes the creature more than an action movie villain, it makes the Predator a horror movie stalker.

This is all paired with a surprisingly complex and moving metaphor for the horrors of colonization and genocide. It manages to take how we feel in opposition to an inhuman hunter of people and reflect it onto how we should feel for an inhumane one. There’s a scene of slaughtered buffalo as far as the eye can see, killed to starve out Native American tribes and skinned to deny them a resource and trade good – something that is real and did happen far beyond the already unfathomable extent shown in the movie. A Predator suddenly seems far less otherworldly and cruel by comparison. It’s one of the best scenes in a film this year, and it’s hardly the only pointed moment “Prey” brings to bear.

It’s a complex and thoughtful movie that delivers on action, adventure, pace, atmosphere, character, and goes above and beyond when it comes to theme and implication. You can watch it in English or a Comanche dub.

Don’t Worry Darling

directed by Olivia Wilde
written by Katie Silberman, Carey Van Dyke, Shane Van Dyke

“Don’t Worry Darling” is the tale of gossip websites pitting two women against each other despite evidence to the contrary. It’s the story of yet another conservative astroturfing campaign being way more successful in de-legitimizing a woman than you’d like to believe they’re capable of. It obsesses over what day several years ago Olivia Wilde might have started dating her actor Harry Styles because we care when women do this, but shrug our shoulders when a significant portion of male directors do.

But there’s a film, too! One of the best of the year even! Did you know that? “Don’t Worry Darling” isn’t just another opportunity to de-legitimize and trap a woman in a make-believe world where men dictate reality, it’s also a complex cyberpunk tale about…well, crap…de-legitimizing and trapping a woman in a make-believe world where men dictate reality.

None of that’s a spoiler. Unlike apples-to-oranges “The Matrix” comparisons, “Don’t Worry Darling” is a cyberpunk movie that acknowledges the last 20+ years of cyberpunk filmmaking and assumes you already know how all that works. Instead, it becomes a Hitchcockian take on the genre that studies how Florence Pugh’s Alice can recognize and escape a false world. The film picks apart male supremacy movements with expert precision and doesn’t forget to highlight the extent to which complicity enables oppression.

Read any of the news about this film, and you’d think it’s more important who director Olivia Wilde is dating, or – despite a complete lack of evidence – whether that dating means she cheated on her husband (like we know for certain Steven Spielberg and James Cameron did to their wives with their actresses to our utter lack of giving a shit, as well as continuing to nominate them regularly including both their films this year. But a woman might have possibly done it maybe but also maybe not, so get the klaxons klaxoning).

Wilde leveled one of the most important films aimed at dismantling male supremacist bullshit in years, and the MRA and far right convinced people left, right, and center that her relationship history meant her film was unimportant and unworthy. How far we’ve come. We like to imagine we’re immune to the next Trump when we conform to the groundwork of it every day. Luckily, artists like Wilde are making films meant to shine a spotlight on this treatment – if only we’d watch them, and by ‘we’ I mean men as well.

Read Part 2, featuring another five films the Oscars forgot.

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The Most Joyous Series of the Year — “Spy x Family”

“Spy x Family” is one of the reasons I’m looking back at 2022 this way instead of just pushing a top 10 list. I’m not sure that I’d put the hit anime on a top 10 list. For all its unbridled enthusiasm and sense of joy, it has some pacing and focus issues and one or two subplots fall flat for me. Yet I’m going to remember it way better than anything I’d stick at #6 or #7 for the year. It’s going to mean more to me going forward than most things on a top 10 list would. So what’s the point of that list? We don’t watch series so we can organize lists. We watch series for how they bring out the human parts of ourselves that we don’t always get to feel in other moments of our days.

“Spy x Family” appears to land as the most popular anime of 2022 by far, and for good reason. In a land that’s based on the Cold War between West and East Germany, the spy Twilight is assigned to befriend a high-ranking government official who plans to restart an active war. The best way to do this is through the official’s son, who attends a prestigious private academy. Under the cover of Loid Forger, Twilight will have to adopt a child, find a fake wife, get his new child enrolled at the academy, and ensure that she performs well enough to join the social club of upper echelon students.

Things go off the rails pretty quickly. The child he adopts is Anya, who hides that she’s a telepath discarded from a state experiment. She’s not the age Loid needs to enroll her, and she’s not the academic standout that would get her in, but she can read his mind and fake exactly what he’s looking for.

Anya tells no one she’s a telepath – she’s scared she’ll be hunted and rejected. She does use her powers to help connect Loid with a potential new mom – a woman named Yor who’s an elite assassin. Yor’s fearful she’ll be investigated for the unofficial crime of not being married. Loid needs someone to play a wife. Yor needs someone to play a boyfriend. Anya takes care of the rest.

The pair agree to play out a fake marriage. Loid is unaware that Yor is an assassin, Yor is unaware that Loid is a spy, they’re both unaware that Anya is a telepath, and Anya knows everything about them to the detriment of anything academic. And that’s all way before they get the dog who can see the future.

What follows would usually be a comedy of strangeness, of hiding truths and miscommunicating with each other. Instead, it’s something rarer – a comedy of normality. Yor’s strength and martial prowess come off as normal to Loid because those are the kind of people he’s always been surrounded by. When they put on a massive role-playing game for Anya and a drunk Yor plays a witch who fights Loid, he doesn’t wonder why she’s a better fighter than the most legendary spy in the world. He wonders about the role-playing, “Why is she using physical attacks when she’s a witch?”

Raising her younger brother without parents, Yor imagines she has no clue how to parent despite being immensely caring, attentive, and fiercely protective. She’s never had anyone to affirm that she’s doing things right, and even if he can be slow on the uptake, this is what Loid can ultimately give her.

Anya has meant nothing to anyone, and has never had the opportunity to make anyone proud, but here has a chance to participate in an operation that can save the world – even if she misinterprets what’s going on half the time. What’s strange to the world around them is the greatest amount of normal and comfort any of the three has ever experienced.

We get to see spy missions, some with Anya and some without. These are routinely good and often ridiculous – finding microfilm swallowed by a penguin, winning a brutal underground tennis tournament. One of my favorite moments in the series is a brief vignette, only minutes long, where Loid meets with his handler, petals falling from a nearby flower. Loid quietly recognizes that his handler has overlooked a fine detail in her disguise, and when she asks him about the mission, he brags about Anya like any parent would – a gorgeous moment of two spies losing their edge for different reasons.

Anya is the series’ motivator, though. She’s a below-average student, but when her parents try to help her, she can only read their thoughts about spying and assassination. She’s not a savant or phenom, but a kid who knows she’s saddled with the fate of the world, something she understands by reading Loid’s mind, but can’t share with anyone lest she reveal her secret.

What connects about her is that her parents do everything they can to shield her from their burdens, but because of who Anya is they never have any chance of doing so. All they can do is support her through them. In between dodgeball tournaments, craft fairs, and dog adoptions, there’s something about this that speaks to our modern moment. Anya’s played as the cutest thing on television, as a character who exudes ‘must be protected at all costs’, but her attempts to befriend a politician’s son and help Loid succeed in his mission are nearly all remarkable misfires because kids aren’t tactical. They’re unpredictable, pushing boundaries, fearing the lack of them, and just getting a sense of how the world works. In its own way, amid dozens of unrealistic events and satires, “Spy x Family” gives us one of the most accurate depictions of how a kid acts.

Anya stands up for others and what she witnesses as the truth, but she’s also a huge troll who’s naturally curious and likes seeing what she can get away with. She tests out empathy and ego, lying and self-sacrifice. She’s a kid who barely knows anything, except the reality that the future of the world hinges on her accomplishing a mission way beyond her capabilities. Even if it’s desperate, doing something is better than not taking any action.

That’s why “Spy x Family” is a joy. It has a couple subplots that I’m not big on, such as Yor’s brother who works for the secret police and harbors an obsession for his sister, or Loid’s protege who wants to take Yor’s place. The series is a remarkable, quick-witted comedy, sure, but it’s also one where Loid repeats his mantra of creating “a world where children won’t have to cry anymore”, something Anya believes in and takes to heart because she’s never known a world like that before.

We root for Anya partly because she’s an innocent kid with a streak of gremlin, but mainly because this is her chance to live a life where she has hope and is protected. The fate of the world is abstract and hard to grapple with. The fate of one kid is something we can feel in our bones and fight for. We need to see this family work, and as it messily comes closer together, it’s a joy to have it reaffirmed for us that yes, this is a family that cares for each other more and more by the day.

“Spy x Family” is a cleverly over-the-top spy anime, a savvy comedy, a solid actioner, a beautiful story about adoptive family, but what works best about it is that it’s a story of a child finally having the opportunity to be happy and loved.

And its theme songs are absolute bops.

You can watch “Spy x Family” on Hulu or Crunchyroll.

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The Most Stunning Series of the Year — “The English” & “First Love”

“The English”

There was no shortage of beautifully filmed and designed series this year, but one stood out as striking enough to surpass everything else I saw. “The English” demonstrated a staggering visual sense of endless wilderness, an infinite natural backdrop both gorgeous and intimidating. It contrasts this with pernicious and ironic iconography that represents the destruction wrought by colonization and Westward expansion. The show’s use of natural light shows that few lighting and color-grading effects can match the simplicity of filming at certain times of day – even if that restricts the time you have to capture a scene.

The Western stars Emily Blunt as Lady Cornelia Locke, who’s come to the American West to kill the man who killed her son. Chaske Spencer plays Eli Whipp, a Pawnee scout for the U.S. Army who seeks to live the rest of his life in quiet despite a world that’s determined to kill his people. Naturally, they link up, discover a shared past, and guns blaze.

“The English” doesn’t shy away from commenting on the unbridled savagery of European colonizers, assessing the genocidal history of “Manifest Destiny”, and linking Christian expansionism as directly responsible. Its main story may be equal parts romance, actioner, and tragic backstory, but “The English” picks apart imperialism and methods of forced assimilation thread by brutal thread on its way.

I do have a few issues with “The English”. It’s so eager to demonstrate its clear mastery over every era of Western that the pacing has a few hard shifts. A separate B-plot that eventually ties in hides its secrets and never gives its characters enough time to burn into memory, meaning every time we switch to it, it’s overly confusing. I normally love overly confusing, but I just had to shrug my shoulders and go with it. A few supporting performances here and there try way too hard and cross over into sketch territory. These are infrequent, but enough to notice.

As briefly as it can frustrate or confuse, these elements are ultimately pretty easy to set aside. What really lingers is the unparalleled cinematography, seeing for miles at times, the haunting use of light and shadow in others, and never letting go of a special kind of magic that feels truly cinematic and larger than life. I remember my breath being sucked away at one point as a horse and rider are silhouetted by the sunset in the dust they kick up, a shot that requires complex choreography yet was only possible to capture for a few minutes in a day before the sun changed angle.

If you appreciate the patiently developed tableau of classic cinema and can accept a great series that makes occasional storytelling mistakes, “The English” is a visual feast with superb leading performances and a driving sense of purpose. (Read the review.)

A close runner-up:
“First Love”

I could say many similar things for “First Love”, a Japanese romance series that tells the story of lovers in the 90s who reconnect today. Yae wanted to become a flight attendant and travel the world, but an accident prevented this. Now, she’s content working as a taxi driver, but struggles bridging the gap to her son Tsuzuru, who lives with his father. Her former lover Harumichi works as a security guard after serving as a pilot, but when they meet, she doesn’t remember him.

“First Love” is remarkable for director Kanchiku Yuri’s choice to film in the style of each narrative’s time frame. She echoes the dramatic approach of each era’s storytelling, the parallel stories told during the 90s and today changing down to shot choice, coloration, and even hints of picture clarity. As the flashback begins to catch up, these choices also change according to those times. It’s not the kind of thing that jumps out and hits you over the head; it’s used subtly and in service of the story.

The match of directing, cinematography, costuming, set design, and even dance choreography comes together to highlight the strange mix of quietly trying to find satisfaction in life against a backdrop of loneliness and disappointment. It serves as a phenomenal metaphor for Japan’s Lost Generation, which includes Gen X and Millennials who saw a stiff economic downturn as they entered the job market. Yae’s and Harumichi’s own stories and careers reflect this as well.

The wintry setting of Sapporo, Japan is used exquisitely, sometimes just in the daily routes Yae takes around the city, and sometimes more dramatically – as in a youthful confession of love in a blinding snowstorm. Kanchiku Yuri accomplishes one of the best directing jobs of the year, and I’m eagerly looking forward to whatever she does next. On top of this, Mitsushima Hikari gives one of the best performances of the year as the adult Yae.

Like “The English”, “First Love” has long streaks where it feels like it’s the best show of the year, but it’s similarly undermined by some of its writing. It relies on a key plot device that’s cliché (at least among Western viewers) and large portions of its romances hinge on forms of stalking. It’s certainly not the first drama to treat stalking as romantic, but it feels like a giant rift to justify crossing, even if the other parts of the series are superb.

I’d still recommend it with this caveat. It’s OK to watch problematic things as long as we don’t cover over the problem or lie to ourselves about its presence. It is a remarkably filmed and acted series, but one that includes a necessary “Yes, but…”

Like I said, there was no shortage of beautifully filmed and designed series this year. The others at the top include:

“Pachinko” tells an elegant epic of Korean diaspora that survives genocide and war. (Read the review.)

“Cracow Monsters” is a sumptuously dark and dreary Polish modern fantasy with a silky sense of color and shadow. (Read the review.)

“Andor” is a moving embrace of 70s social sci-fi that may be the height of Star Wars storytelling. (Read the review.)

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The Scariest Series of the Year — “Evil”

Horror on TV doesn’t have a great history of success. Most of it is watered down for general audiences, and the demand of so many episodes a year can leave many series with uneven plots and unfocused characterization. “Evil” struggled with this in its first season on CBS. It was good, but clearly strained against the format. Then it switched to Paramount+ last year, and it started knocking its plots out of the park.

“Evil” follows an assessment team sent by the Catholic Church to decide whether exorcisms, miracles, sainthoods, and other mysteries are real. It’s run by a priest named David, played by “Luke Cage” himself, Mike Colter. He favors having skeptics on board, so he’s recruited Kristen, a lapsed Catholic psychologist played by Katja Herbers, and an atheist debunker who was raised Muslim, played by Aasif Mandvi.

Each episode’s plot focuses on different aspects and subgenres of horror, getting as nitty gritty as road trip and meme horror. Outside of the episodic plots, the running subplots center on demons ruining the world with clickbait and cryptocurrency, or a priest wondering why his visions of a protective saint switch race as he learns she was really Black. There’s an edge of irony and satire that might be more recognizable in something like “Good Omens”, but as funny as “Evil” can be, it uses its ridiculous moments to hone the horrific.

The comparisons to “The X-Files” it’s gotten aren’t that far off. Some of it’s the mystery of the week and how character development feeds into the big, longer-term arcs. Some is the balance between the scientifically trained Kristen and true believer David, though “Evil” couldn’t be called a lift – much of Kristen’s story deals with her four daughters, and David is a former journalist with a reporter’s mind for research. On top of this, Mandvi’s extremely skeptical Ben often shifts Kristen less into the skeptic position and more into the swing voter role on how to go forward. In a way, this provides her agency within the plot that was denied “The X-Files” Scully when Mulder steamrolled a decision.

I think the comparison is most apt when it comes to the balance of dark humor and true horror. There’s a strange way they can be twinned and start to become the same thing. It’s a very fine line to walk, and I would say this is what makes “Evil” both similar to and different from “The X-Files”.

Michael Emerson’s performance as the villain Leland, possibly a demon, basks in that intersection between the ridiculous and the awful. My favorite moment in the show still comes from the second season, when we pick up the premiere with a breathtaking vision David has of Kristen being threatened. We wait to see the outcome from the prior year’s finale, only for Leland to pop up in the middle of the vision doing a meme dance. Leland and the show often veer so close to nonsense it’s laughable, but the show always pulls it sideways into something threatening. “Evil” isn’t just frightening, it also expertly disarms us of our defenses so that we’re accepting of that fright. That’s the core approach to “X-Files” through and through, but “Evil” then builds on that foundation by taking it steps further.

Often, Leland uses social tools in a common but nonsensical way, allowing the show to point out areas of privilege and systemic abuse that operate the same way: nonsense that we justify as everyday reason. “Evil” doesn’t just disarm us so that we’re willing to experience fear, it then uses that fear to ask why we’re willing to be afraid of these things in a TV show, but act like they’re normal in the real world. Much of the show’s sharpest critical elements center on the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church itself.

The other biggest difference is Kristen. Sure, she’s a scientific skeptic who starts out with a healthy work-life balance. What makes her so different from the Scully archetype is that she can readily exist in the same space as Leland. Whereas David is doing his best to fulfill an idealized role of a priest, and Ben is an ethical skeptic who’s haunted by misuse of his past work, Kristen is fully capable of stepping into the ridiculous and the dark with a smile, of existing in it and speaking its language, of using it, fighting it on its own terms. She’ll look at someone cutting corners and cut the very same ones if it holds them accountable. Out of her team, which includes a gigantic, muscled dude and a hard-line skeptic with no fucks to give, it’s the tiny mom of four who will step in, get the dirty work done, give demons anxiety, and somehow go home with enough energy left to ably (and often single-handedly) take care of her family. It’s one of the most dynamic roles going right now.

This isn’t to say she doesn’t struggle with some of her decisions – this is most of what season 2 was about, after all. But in season 3 we see a Kristen who’s come out the other side and has learned better what is necessary, how to forgive herself for it, and how to trust herself in impossible circumstances. In fact, after early days of Leland going directly after Kristen, it’s clear he’s understood he needs to chip away at her support structure to have any chance of shaking her – and he’s regularly hampered by his own misunderstanding of Kristen as overly emotional and David as overly logical, the complete reverse of who they actually are.

There are so many other wonderful things that have developed on this series: Christine Lahti’s descent into corporate evil, Andrea Martin’s fantastic no-B.S. nun Sister Andrea, and how great it’s been to witness Mandvi seriously grow as an actor from the first season to this one.

Freed from the constraints of network TV, “Evil” has become the scariest series going, and it uses both its humor and fear to highlight the hypocrisies we willingly live with every day.

You can watch “Evil” on Paramount+.

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The Saddest Series of the Year — “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners”

Studio Trigger’s anime is based on the video game “Cyberpunk 2077”, which was adapted from Mike Pondsmith’s genre-defining tabletop role-playing game. With that many layers of adaptation, it’s a deep surprise how resonant the show is. The cybernetic dystopia of Night City is overrun with both corporate and street-level crime. After disaffected student David tries to do things the right way and loses the few anchors he has in life, he turns to the mercenary life known as edgerunning.

Despite his youth, can David fit in with an experienced, successful crew? In a world where replacing pieces of yourself with hardware blurs the lines of reality, and David wants to run away from his reality, can he keep his sanity? Can he achieve any of the dreams others have for him? Can he protect the people around him?

That’s all pretty familiar territory, but “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” is one of the most damning visions of terminal capitalism I’ve seen. The natural comparison might be the classic “Ghost in the Shell” and its series continuation “Stand Alone Complex”, but “Edgerunners” lands much more closely to a different classic. In 1988, “Akira” warned us of and argued for the rejection of what’s come to be known as disaster capitalist futurism.

Like “Akira”, “Edgerunners” captures traumatic repetition on both the personal and cultural scale. As Thomas Lamarre once wrote of “Akira”, it houses two types of mimetic repetition of trauma. In its constitutive mode, “Akira” translates the future of a Japan still coping with nuclear destruction. How does it develop economically and industrially? How does it change national identity? In its generative mode, how is this taken advantage of in an information society where populist political power is built on disaster capital?

Lamarre argued that “Akira” sees how the constitutive passes into the generative, or how repeating of a trauma during the development to cope with it creates the circumstances for that trauma to be taken advantage of, and creates a situation where the traumatized seeks to enact that trauma on others. In other words, if you live in a mentality of that trauma’s repetition, then survival is to be on the other side of it when it happens again.

“Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” poses a world shattered by the poisoning of the well, by a collapse of the world’s previous mode of information sharing – our modern internet. It envisions that poisoning as a condition that prompted mass violence, civil war, world war, and cultural immolation. Corporation-states survive because their territory is notional, intangible, a maintenance of perceived value. Territory can’t be bombed when it’s a data set, and you can’t run out of people in a world where people are the most fungible asset that exists.

David’s tale is that of a boy chasing trauma and repeating it ad nauseam because he thinks that’s the way through it. This reflects the story of its world – that of a society chasing trauma and repeating it ad nauseam because it thinks that’s the way through it. When shock doctrine is the rule of the world, survival is to be on the other side of it when it happens again.

Needless to say, the results aren’t happy. That’s not a spoiler. Whatever the saddest things you can think about this story are, you probably aren’t prepared. Neither are the story evolutions in “Edgerunners” cheap – they’re sudden, unsentimental, harsh, and they go unmourned. They are heavy in their lack of meaning, in their lack of consequence, in how the world travels on because you can’t run out of people in a world where people are the most fungible asset.

Genre and fan social media was overrun with viewers asking for help from each other in coping with how depressed the series made them, so when I say “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” is sad, I mean it spills over with grief. The show is a beautiful, repulsive howl, the voice of a world in disintegration envisioning a futurism of living in shock doctrine, to the point where everyone’s gaze has been turned to normalize that shock. We’re even introduced to David as he experiences a braindance – the sensory recordings of someone who dies violently – a snuff film that might seem like a sci-fi creation if there weren’t also image boards in our world dedicated to gore and people dying.

“Edgerunners” balances the 80s futurism of macro cybernetics – an aesthetic that feels less realistic in today’s digital world – as a metaphor for transforming our humanity into notional currency so we can trade it away for the newest, most powerful and influential technological elements to get ahead. Take Rebecca, who’s had her body replaced piece by piece to look like a child again – a clear advantage in drawing out and distracting men in a corporate world.

Like, I said, it’s repulsive. That doesn’t mean what it depicts isn’t true. “Edgerunners” can often feel like the nausea that comes on after getting punched in the gut. There’s devastation here, and a sense of profound desperation and loss I’ve rarely seen a show capture. It belongs among the best sci-fi series made, animation or otherwise.

“Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” may not be what our future ends up looking like, but it captures a horror of roads the world may travel down, of the populism, fascism, disaster futurism, and terminal capitalism that have already taken shape. It’s a masterful metaphor for how much of ourselves we trade to survive, that where once we sacrificed for the next generation’s dreams, now we sacrifice for the next generation’s sacrifice.

You can watch “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners” on Netflix.

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My Favorite Performances of the Year (So Far)

The more content we have, the more our “to watch” lists rack up shows that we may never get to touch. That’s not a bad thing. It’s better to have more than we can find time to watch than too little, but it’s important to share those series and performances that move us. Sometimes we find these where we don’t expect.

I’m not a big TV comedy watcher, in part because I prefer shows that are willing to tread into the absurd. That hasn’t been the style the last decade. When we’ve standardized even the mockumentary format, we need to find new approaches before it’s tired out. Yet this year has shown a tendency to do just that, not just navigating into far more absurd and satirical waters, but also changing formats and genres on the fly without worrying about whether each half hour forms a complete thematic arc.

There are so many other performances this year that don’t make a list like this. When you highlight the individual, you can overlook the ensemble, and “Abbott Elementary” boasts one of the best ensembles of the year, led by Quinta Brunson and Tyler James Williams. (I know I just complained about standardized mockumentaries, but this one shines through the format.)

Similarly, “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” has no weak spot in the cast. Anson Mount may be trying to make himself my new favorite captain in the franchise, but as “Star Trek” often is, the show is a resounding group effort.

I didn’t really dive deep into voice acting, but I do have to highlight Rie Murakawa’s work as the gender-expansive Osana Najimi on “Komi Can’t Communicate”. Few convey the balance of care for others with the pure, willful chaos that she does.

There are also those performances that might not ask their actors to stretch too far because that’s not what the show needs from them in that moment. They’re examples of perfect casting nonetheless. I think of Hazal Kaya’s charismatic light mystery turn as Esra in the Turkish “Midnight at the Pera Palace”, Cassandra Freeman’s Vivian and Jordan L. Jones’s Jazz on “Bel-Air”, and Alan Ritchson’s Jack Reacher on “Reacher”.

There are several performances I want to highlight even more than these:

Emmy Rossum, “Angelyne“

You could dismiss Emmy Rossum’s performance in “Angelyne” as that of playing a ditz, but this would overlook an incredibly complex role. The story of an 80s celebrity famous for being famous is described through various conflicting recollections. These different perceptions, including Angelyne’s own, each change who she is and her path to celebrity.

There’s a scene where Angelyne sits down with Playboy owner Hugh Hefner. He’s surrounded by an entourage of women, and Angelyne counters with her own entourage of men – both retinues are only there for show. He wants her to pose nude, but it quickly becomes clear he’s outclassed. He’s part of an old-fashioned misogyny that trades fame for ownership and exploitation. She’s pioneered the trade of exploiting celebrity itself, without the need to answer to someone like him. It’s here that her ability for negotiation, cutthroat attitude, and business acumen all bite, where her airhead presentation gives way to a keen understanding of Hollywood and how to beat men at their own game.

Don’t get me wrong – Angelyne comes off in many other situations as a narcissist and manipulator, but not because she’s a sociopath. She ditches who she once was and embraces a celebrity persona as an escape from abuse, itself a re-enactment of generational trauma. Her performance serves as both a critique of New Age commercialism and the influencer culture that evolved from it, and an understanding of the desperation that drives people to chase it as a survival mechanism. That Rossum’s performance utilizes camp as well as drama lends a stunning flexibility to the series. Rather than portraying someone who’s conflicted, she portrays someone who conflicts us: she’s deserving of our horror and judgment as well as our empathy and admiration.

Jabari Banks, “Bel-Air”

The dramatic remake of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” is good, and it does the difficult, thought-out work of adaptation well. Do we need a second take on “Fresh Prince”? How could it not ruin what came before? Won’t it complicate my nostalgic understanding of the character to have a completely different actor play him? I lament this difficult question so much I can barely pay attention to movies containing anywhere between three and seven Spider-folk.

“Bel-Air” updates many things that wouldn’t be said on TV in the early 90s, advancing conversations about racism into today’s media and political climate. At the show’s heart is Jabari Banks’s performance of a young man who’s torn between versions of who he wants to be, who both admires and resents the wealth that suddenly surrounds him and is wary of the self-hate that social acceptance in white circles demands of him.

Banks captures so many of the tics and nuances in the actor Will Smith’s original performance, while still giving his interpretation of the character Will Smith. You can emulate someone else’s performance with nods to their movement, but Banks encodes it into his performance in a way that feels much more natural and internal than an acting nod. The characters don’t just act similarly, they think similarly. “Bel-Air” leans on a strong cast with a number of good performances, but Banks’s is a captivating interpretation that drives the show.

Barbara Liberek, “Cracow Monsters“

“Cracow Monsters” is a Polish horror series that’s more fantastique than fantasy. Based on Polish folklore, the series hearkens back to the moodiest and most atmospheric habits of 90s horror with quick and harrowing bursts of action. Barbara Liberek plays Alex, a medical student who fears the onset of schizophrenia and self-medicates with drugs and alcohol. She’s revealed to have a power that can help hunt otherworldly creatures, and grudgingly works with a group of similar students.

Alex’s curiosity, earnestness, and frustration are balanced against a tendency for self-destruction and isolation. She wants to survive, but is so afraid that she’s on the cusp of repeating her mother’s mental illness and suicide that she also wants to destroy herself in what time is left to still control her own fate.

Liberek realizes a character who’s dreaming yet terrified her dream is doomed, rushing against the clock to become a doctor before the onset of schizophrenia. She takes care of others, yet aggressively rejects anyone attempting to aid her, lest they get invested. She couldn’t care less about helping anyone hunt demons until her curiosity drives her enough to tolerate having to work with other people. Alex is the kind of standoffish, matter-of-fact, justifiably resentful noir character that women rarely get to play, but Liberek realizes her in both humanizing and iconic ways.

Claudia O’Doherty, “Killing It”

Claudia O’Doherty possesses that rare Madeline Kahn ability to exist in the show’s story so completely that she’s naive to it, while at the same time sitting outside of it and pointedly commenting on it. It’s one of the toughest demands in comedy because it asks the actor to simultaneously portray two extremes that each comment on the middle ground where all the other characters live.

O’Doherty achieves both the character and the meta extremes, whether it’s fulfilling a dead man’s last wish by eating his identifying information, or dragging a bag full of dead snakes through a convention hall where the wealthy con their worshippers. She delivers an outsized portion of the absurdism in “Killing It”, while existing inside of it as someone who’s completely normalized to it.

One of the midseason episodes, “The Task Rabbit” involves O’Doherty’s Jillian housesitting in a mansion, and coached by Zoom call to pretend she’s rich and cutthroat for a wealthy date. It’s an acidic take on “Cyrano de Bergerac” that becomes a half-hour of modern science-fiction as pointed as anything I’ve seen this year. It entirely relies on O’Doherty’s ability to comment on the story even as she suffers it.

You may also recognize O’Doherty as Stede Bonnett’s wife Mary in “Our Flag Means Death”.

Kheng Hua Tan, “Kung Fu”

“Kung Fu” is an important show, but not necessarily a great one. It’s the kind of CW fare where you can drop in on an episode and know everything that’s going on in the first three minutes, chiefly because all the characters repeat it over and over again. Nonetheless, I love it, in large part because its cast is so incredibly charming.

As their kids run around having adventures, it’s the parents played by veteran actors Kheng Hua Tan and Tzi Ma who anchor often-poignant B-plots. The main plot about artifact trails, all-too-convenient clues, and insta-hacking can get very silly, but they often serve as an opportunity to open up points about Chinese history in the U.S., racism, and fighting gentrification.

Preserving one’s culture in a society determined to assimilate and re-purpose it hides traumas both historical and personal. Where Tzi Ma’s emotionally open Jin abides and understands, Kheng Hua Tan’s Mei-Li is more intense and guarded. Those scenes when she opens up enough to speak about her own history provide some of the clearest and most resonant moments happening on TV.

Taika Waititi, “Our Flag Means Death“

“Our Flag Means Death” lets director and Oscar-winning writer Taika Waititi stretch his legs as an actor. His improv and comic timing are impeccable. On the surface, his character of Blackbeard is a man for whom nothing is a challenge anymore. He’s grown numb to life, and wants to retire and enjoy his wealth. Yet this numbness hides something else – a growing attraction to the incompetent gentleman-pirate Stede Bonnett.

Paired with Rhys Darby’s Bonnet, Waititi’s Blackbeard offers a lens on two ways that men are taught to deny their homosexuality. In Stede’s case, it’s trying to fit into a suffocating heterosexual lifestyle – acting the part in regards to wife, children, place in society.

In Blackbeard’s case, the metaphor is that of suppressing who he is through a psychological self-mutilation, an inwardly turned hate and cruelty that bubbles to the surface and has to find other targets beyond himself – thus reinforcing the expectations of who he should be and how he should act.

Stede is an escape from that, but both struggle to escape the cages of expectation they’ve lived in most of their lives. They’re each expected to act a certain way, and do massive harm to themselves and those around them just to keep up the facade. To find each other and accept who they are is a kindness for both of them and their communities. That this is presented so well in the storytelling of a satirical sitcom is remarkable. Waititi is surrounded by an excellent cast, but it’s his performance that gives the series its pace and rhythm.

Minha Kim & Youn Yuh-jung, “Pachinko“

Minha Kim and Youn Yuh-jung play young and elderly versions of Sunja, in a story that follows her family across half a century. “Pachinko” uses this family as an opportunity to look at the Korean diaspora, some of which fled Korea during a brutal occupation only to suffer more hate and racism in Japan and the U.S.

Kim and Youn (along with child actor Yuna) realize the same woman across half a century, keeping and evolving mannerisms, showing how physicality changes without losing what makes that physicality unique. The way each glances, considers a silence or speaks before thinking, the way each enters a space, looks out for someone else or forgets to…it’s all the same person. It’s all the same character in a way that goes beyond two actors finding something shared. There’s an essence on-screen, something that we talk about when we think of movie magic, that these two actresses evoke.

There’s no suspension of disbelief needed. They’re the same person. In the emotional, gut reaction we have as viewers, there’s an instinct in me that would sooner believe they’re the same person across decades than that this could possibly be a character played by different actresses. I don’t think I can say I’ve ever felt that before.

Alan Tudyk, “Resident Alien“

“Resident Alien” might be the best thing SyFy’s managed in years and years. The comedy about an alien who’s crash-landed and has to live among the humans he was sent to destroy had a strong first season last year. This year’s been a little more up and down, but Tudyk’s performance continues to be a comedic goldmine.

The evolved-octopus-out-of-water story asks Tudyk to be doing outlandish physical comedy constantly, and the man hasn’t hit a wrong note. The series is edited for a sense of irony, and this only helps. It’s the kind of show where it would be very easy to chase a joke that doesn’t work. Very occasionally, it will do that for some of the other characters. The series centers on Tudyk’s Harry first and foremost, though, and a live-action series anchoring itself to this much physical comedy is nearly unheard of today. That’s because it needs someone with Tudyk’s skill to pull it off.

Bridget Everett & Jeff Hiller, “Somebody Somewhere“

The way these two characters appreciate and speak to each others’ unique way of looking at the world – and their anxiety at not finding a place in it – helps them find a joy that’s otherwise blocked.

Stuck in small town Kansas, and struggling with a rural environment that often feels claustrophobic, Jeff Hiller’s Joel is the only person around who treats Bridget Everett’s Sam as if she’s somebody admirable and worthy of notice. It’s not a romance. Joel is gay and he has a boyfriend, though the rest of the town is so willfully blind to this fact that they all just assume it’s a “corrective” romance for both.

Their friendship opens up a level of acceptance and self-acceptance that both have trouble finding elsewhere. It enables them both to not just help each other up, but to foster the beginnings of community within a community where they’ve rarely fit.

Andrew Garfield, “Under the Banner of Heaven“

I opened my “Under the Banner of Heaven” review by calling Andrew Garfield a beautiful performer. The crime scene that opens the show is horrific – you just don’t ever see much of it. We see its corners and edges, but we never leave Garfield’s Detective Pyre. It’s his reaction, the plaintive eyes that he can’t disguise, the bodily shudder, the beginning of erosion in someone’s beliefs played out in his carriage…it tells me so much more about the effect of that crime scene than the goriest image ever could.

It shook me from the beginning. Pyre’s caring but insistent manner is ideal in a detective, and arises from his faith even as it readies to be ripped to shreds by the realizations he’ll make about the brutal, misogynist Mormon fundamentalism he investigates. Pyre’s a walking emotional and spiritual sacrifice, and there are points where even he knows this. Yet he’s played with a care and gentleness that’s more admirable and capable than the blunt, desensitized cops that are worshiped on so many other shows. (The only flaw I find in his performance is how much he looks like Jimmy Carr in this hairstyle.)

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What the Oscar Nominations Missed

The Oscars tend to latch on to specific films and focus all attention on them. There are 17 categories a feature film can be nominated in (since it can’t be nominated for both adapted and original screenplay). Of course, certain categories can see two nominations, such as two supporting actors for the same film. There are 18 possible if you’re an animated film, but at that point several of the other categories are realistically shut off to you.

This year, “The Power of the Dog” has 12 nominations, “Dune” has 10. They’re both extremely good films, but I’m not so sure that both excel past so many other films this year in the vast majority of categories. The record for nominations is held in a tie by “All About Eve”, “Titanic”, and “La La Land”. “All About Eve” saw nominations in 14 of the 16 categories for which it qualified. “Titanic and “La La Land” saw nominations in 14 of 17 categories. That tendency to boil the industry down to only a few films is counterproductive – not because of the quality of the films, which are very good, but because it necessarily overlooks technical, writing, and acting achievements in smaller films, genre films, and sometimes otherwise average films.

A movie that’s good-but-not-great might have superb editing that deserves a nomination. An intentionally cheesy horror film could deserve a nod for its jaw-dropping production design. A black-and-white film might deserve a costume nom, and there might be a whole host of brilliant smaller films that simply got overlooked (this entire paragraph is foreshadowing).

More than any other awards show, the Oscars are built as an advertisement. The Academy harnesses the preferences of its membership to create zeitgeist around a limited number of films. If dozens of films each have a few nominations apiece, the ad doesn’t work because audiences aren’t really pushed in a specific direction. There’s too much choice for the advertisement to direct you. If a very few films have a mountain of nominations, then those movies become must-see.

I’d argue that this is counter-productive because it sells to a limited section of your audience. Horror and science-fiction films that break new technological ground get ignored; independent films and non-English language movies compete for a limited range of nominations; and many of the bravest directors taking the most chances are overlooked. While the recognition for Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” this year, Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland” last year, and the films of Asian and Hispanic directors the last several years is long overdue, this limited focus in nominations is a big part of the narrowing that barred entry for including these perspectives in the first place.

There are ways to celebrate the entire industry without losing focus – especially when you’ve got three hours to do it – but hammering a few films into mind over and over again is a more risk-averse strategy. Again, these films deserve it; they’re just not the only ones that do. I’d suggest the repetition and lack of focus on the accomplishments of the industry at large is a big part of the reason the Oscars keep losing viewers. Audiences have the entire world of filmmaking at their fingertips now; their nominations still don’t consistently reflect that.

I don’t mean to treat this in a cynical way. You can still like watching an ad. Hell, I’m writing this whole article about one. I’ve enjoyed the Oscars a number of times, though I think it took a wrong turn when it shifted away from Hugh Jackman, Neil Patrick Harris, and song-and-dance numbers and instead pursued James Franco and – at least an improvement from him – no host at all.

And while I’m excited for Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes hosting, I’m also wary of host Amy Schumer given her history of racist jokes. That includes some that are basically Trump lines about Latines. Yes, she apologized in 2016. It must’ve been difficult to write that single Tweet before she went straight back to making even more racist jokes, including the racist cluster of clusterfucks that is “Snatched”. And…actually, you know what, I just wrote nearly the same intro about Ellen Rapoport last week. Maybe let’s find comedians who don’t build their careers off of posing Latines as inhuman, untrustworthy animals. You have no idea how tiring it is and, if you do, wouldn’t it be nice to write and talk about what we love without having to feel that hatred sucking away our soul when we come to these parts of it?

Let’s circle back. The Oscars offer a well-recognized lens through which to look at which nominations struck and what movies and accomplishments were overlooked in the past year:

Best Costume Design

Nominated: Cruella, Cyrano, Dune, Nightmare Alley, West Side Story

Forgotten: Marci Rodgers, Passing

A black-and-white film can have trouble standing out in this category, but the costume design in “Passing” is astounding. What’s most remarkable are the places where it isn’t flashy, where we see the clothes people dressed in on a daily basis. Our central characters are socialites to a degree, but they’re not ridiculously wealthy. What they wear is nice, but unlike so many period films, it looks like the clothing that characters from that period would actually wear more than one time.

There was a focus on avoiding flapper fashion tropes, which didn’t define that era yet is routinely recognized for doing so on film. As Costume Designer Marci Rodgers says, the film’s characters were “more likely to adhere to respectability politics than to flout sartorial strictures of that era”. After all, part of passing as white is fitting in without calling too much attention to yourself.

In other words, the costume choices make the period film feel lived-in instead of simply giving us idealized examples that look nicest being worn once for the camera. That alone should put Marci Rodgers’s work in “Passing” ahead of certain other films that prioritize cinematic showiness over period accuracy and practicality. You may’ve seen Rodgers’s work before in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and Steven Soderbergh’s “High Flying Bird”.

Best Make-up and Hairstyling

Nominated: Coming 2 America, Cruella, Dune, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, House of Gucci

Forgotten: Eldo Ray Estes (makeup head), Cliona Furey (hair designer), Mike Hill (special makeup effects designer), Nightmare Alley

The exclusion of “Nightmare Alley” from this category is astounding, especially when you consider that the film tracks across several years and shifts characters through different social classes and styles. To my mind, only two of the nominations approach the sheer amount of work that “Nightmare Alley” accomplishes, representing a carnival in the 30s, high society in the 40s, shifting characters in and out of hairstyling, wigs, wigs on top of wigs. I’d even say the hallmark accomplishment of the film – making Bradley Cooper unrecognizable in two wildly opposite directions – stands alongside the best individual make-up jobs of the year.

Best Production Design

Nominated: Dune, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, The Tragedy of Macbeth, West Side Story

Forgotten: Desma Murphy, Malignant

The Academy has a habit of overlooking stellar technical achievements in films that aren’t otherwise great. “Malignant” is more complex because it’s actively created to be ambitiously, consciously…I don’t want to use the word “bad”, but it has a serious investment in schlock horror and why we connect to it. “Malignant” succeeds so wildly at evoking shocking slasher films because it’s so knowledgeable and precise about their history. I didn’t imagine “Malignant” had a chance to be nominated for anything, but it does some remarkable things with its production design, and how that design is purpose-built for so many other elements of the film – such as its cinematography, special effects, and choreography.

For its production design, “Malignant” draws from 60s/70s giallo and pop art, the wide gamut of 80s horror, more specific sci-fi like “Blade Runner”, and especially 90s gothic action movies like “The Crow”. It also pulls from much more recent horror films, although this is harder to separate from director James Wan’s own style considering he’s created so much of this newer aesthetic himself.

“Malignant” introduces a surprising amount that’s fresh in horror filmmaking from a technical standpoint. The production design is outstanding, even if the rest of the film’s ambitions lie in giving us a grisly creature feature that doesn’t really care how good or bad it is, so long as it keeps your attention.

Best Visual Effects

Nominated: Dune, Free Guy, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, No Time to Die, Spider-Man: No Way Home

Forgotten: The Suicide Squad
(clip contains major spoilers)

I’ve long hated this category because it prizes the greatest amount and fidelity of visual effects. It tends to lean away from how those effects are actually used in an artistic sense. I’m not sure we’ve seen an action movie that so effectively translates comic book sensibilities through visual effects, and that’s saying something considering how competitive and well-funded the genre is right now.

It’s tough to see “The Suicide Squad” snubbed here when it introduced a more playful and character-focused use of visual effects than superhero movies think we deserve. If I name my 10 favorite moments of visual effects this year, at least four come from “The Suicide Squad”. From Harley Quinn’s Disneyfied vision of violence and Polka-Dot Man’s lo-fi powers and high-strung anxieties, to King Shark’s entire existence and the cartoonish horror and beauty of the film’s dementedly heartfelt climax, no other movie’s visual effects this year actually served the characters inside of the film better than in “The Suicide Squad”.

Best Sound

Nominated: Belfast, Dune, No Time to Die, The Power of the Dog, West Side Story

Forgotten: Jill Purdy, Nathan Robitaille, Nightmare Alley

The ticking of a watch as it passes by the camera. The strike of high heeled shoes on marble. The lively bustle of a carnival. The empty white noise of a city. The strange sound absorption of snow, a sensation rarely captured so well in a film. I loved the sound design of “Nightmare Alley”. It has a number of nominations, so it’s not exactly lacking, but I would have loved a nomination here.

Best Original Score

Nominated: Don’t Look Up, Dune, Encanto, Parallel Mothers, The Power of the Dog

Forgotten: Natalie Holt, Fever Dream

Natalie Holt garnered a lot of attention this past year for composing the music for “Loki” (and years before that for hurling eggs at Simon Cowell). Her work in Claudia Llosa’s “Fever Dream” is a pulsing thing centered on breathing strings and a sense of profound isolation. Magical realism on film is extremely reliant on its music because it’s the element that can most immediately mirror a character’s emotional state. The score connects the inner experience of being in that moment to a form that’s defined by a far more abstract and disordered sense of time and place.

Holt’s score is yearning and lonely. It reflects the finality and fatalism of this particular kind of magical realist storytelling. It’s consequential and dramatic without ever feeling overbearing. It’s quiet and lurking, but sympathetic at the same time, just like the threat of tragedy that’s understood too late even though it begins and concludes “Fever Dream”.

Best Cinematography

Nominated: Dune, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, The Tragedy of Macbeth, West Side Story

Forgotten: Oscar Faura, Fever Dream

As a piece of magical realism, “Fever Dream” needs to blend the suggestive and abstract to the everyday. Landscapes themselves become animist, and homes that interrupt the farmland create a progressive layering of what’s perceived as safe giving way to field and copse and finally wood.

There’s a consistent use of backlighting, natural evening light, and shallow focus that is generally avoided in film but here highlights the woman at the center of its story as unable to see the full picture even as the audience recognizes it. That’s a central tenet of magical realism: that the audience already knows the what, but we need to learn the why and how. To find ways that evoke this through cinematography is remarkable, and this is all before taking into account the film’s shades of horror and beautifully filmed hallucinatory elements.

I’d also strongly push “Titane” and “Passing” here because I can do so and quickly move on to the next category without explaining how I’d still get it down to five nominations:

Best Film Editing

Nominated: Don’t Look Up, Dune, King Richard, The Power of the Dog, tick, tick…BOOM!

Forgotten: Fred Raskin, Christian Wagner, The Suicide Squad

This shouldn’t come out of left field if you’ve seen the film. Every bit of personality, comedy, and emotional resonance in “The Suicide Squad” is underlined by its extraordinary editing. What’s most impressive is the sheer range on display here: action movie, comedy montage, noir, drama. There’s a full rotation of different editing rhythms that James Gunn’s film cycles through for its various characters and their different emotional states.

It fuses title screens into the environment, flashbacks within literal windows, and a host of stunning tricks that you’d expect to see in something far more experimental than this genre usually gives us. I’d place this as one of the most difficult jobs for an editor out of all the superhero movies we’ve seen, but it doesn’t just hit that mark – it excels beyond it on every front.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Nominated: Coda, Drive My Car, Dune, The Lost Daughter, The Power of the Dog

Forgotten: Rebecca Hall, Passing

Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novel brilliantly discusses the co-optation of culture and identity. I’ve seen a lot of reads on the film that talk about how it rejects a Black woman who’s long passed as white and is trying to return to being Black, but I think this risks overlooking a central conversation in the film.

Clare isn’t someone returning to being Black, she’s someone who’s still passing as white, returning to a Black community as a white tourist in the fashion protagonist Irene and novelist Hugh discuss mid-film. This redefines “Passing” into a far more complex consideration of privilege, co-optation, and whether someone can embrace who they are while still hating it. It’s one of the most wrenching discussions of race I’ve seen in narrative filmmaking.

Best Original Screenplay

Nominated: Belfast, Don’t Look Up, Licorice Pizza, King Richard, The Worst Person in the World

Forgotten: Emma Seligman, Shiva Baby

Emma Seligman’s debut film lands an audacious number of risks. It tells the story of Danielle, a college student who bumps into her sugar daddy at a Jewish funeral service. She navigates her parents’ expectations, a passive-aggressive ex, and a number of realizations about the lies her sugar daddy’s told her. As it touches on feminism, sexual empowerment, Millennial and Gen Z angst, and generational lies, “Shiva Baby” becomes an unflinchingly tense navigation of both personal and cultural truths that still aren’t wholly deciphered.

The screenplay is equal parts funny and horrifying, and manages to make us laugh even as things grow more uncomfortable. At times, I even found myself comparing the quickfire theatrical pacing and claustrophobic use of a single location in “Shiva Baby” to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Best Supporting Actress

Nominated: Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter), Ariana Debose (West Side Story), Judi Dench (Belfast), Kirsten Dunst (The Power of the Dog), Aunjanue Ellis (King Richard)

Forgotten: Ruth Negga, Passing
(CW: clip contains racism, use of the N-word)

This is one of the biggest oversights of the year. One of the most complex roles in recent years asks Negga to portray a Black woman passing for white. Through a friend, she returns to the Black community – but not as someone re-embracing or relearning who she is or the violence she’s done to her identity.

Instead, she returns as white, entering this sphere as a tourist, assuming centrality in a community she still rejects from her own identity. She does this in a way that’s outwardly kind, soft-spoken, and often plaintive, but also reads as manipulative, in full use of the white privilege she’s learned. Rarely has someone portrayed the insidiousness of cultural co-optation so completely.

Best Supporting Actor

Nominated: Ciaran Hinds (Belfast), Troy Kotsur (Coda), Jesse Plemons (The Power of the Dog), JK Simmons (Being the Ricardos), Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog)

Forgotten: Willem Dafoe, Nightmare Alley

The Oscars have a way of overlooking some of the best genre performances. Unless someone’s playing the Joker, the most precise and chilling performances in genre work go without a nomination. Dafoe’s carnival boss Clem Hoatley sticks in your brain as a hideously abusive, yet nonetheless chummy man. He’d love talking to you and showing you the ropes, but he’d just as soon stab you in the back if it served his purposes. What communicates for all his toothy, slithering presentation is just how banal and workaday he makes abuse, how he can discuss it like any other work procedure over drinks and a meal. As housed within horror fantasy as Clem Hoatley is, we’ve all met many managers and supervisors who are just like him.

Best Actor

Nominated: Javier Bardem (Being the Ricardos), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Power of the Dog), Andrew Garfield (tick, tick…BOOM!), Will Smith (King Richard), Denzel Washington (The Tragedy of Macbeth)

Forgotten: Nicolas Cage, Pig

Nicolas Cage movies are often B-grade flights of nonsense, but you can’t dismiss all of them. That risks overlooking some of the most interesting independent work of the last several years. None stand out as strongly as “Pig”, a quiet and understated testament to gentleness housed within the framework of what would be a revenge film with any other script.

Cage plays Rob, a man whose truffle pig is stolen. Truffles go for thousands apiece, and he seeks the pig out amid Portland’s cutthroat restaurant scene. Cage delivers the performance of his career. Rob is an aggressively guarded misanthrope, shut off because he remembers every bit of empathy throughout his life. A towering, bearded, bloodied hermit, he navigates confrontation through a gentle understanding of others. Rarely have characters so overwhelmed by their empathy and desperate to shut it off been portrayed with such human nuance.

Best Actress

Nominated: Jessica Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter), Penelope Cruz (Parallel Mothers), Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos), Kristen Stewart (Spencer)

Forgotten: Agathe Rousselle, Titane
(CW: clip contains violence, blood)

Agathe Rousselle in “Titane” stands out as one of the most chilling and soul-emptying performances of a psychopath in cinema. As Alexia, she goes through every emotion there is as if performing a shell of expectations for others. She spends most of the film hiding in a guise that begins to accept elements of her psychopathy – under that of a man among other men. The male privilege that accepts and prizes aggression is one she can find a comfort in, and the ability to create such a cold character who still evokes our empathy – not because she’s changed but because her environment has – is a performance that challenges our understanding of the norms we use to demarcate gender and its privileges.

Many times, the best performance in a year is something you’ve seen done before in an exceptional, unparalleled way. This year, it’s something exceptional and unparalleled that I’ve just never seen done before.

(I want to be specific – hers is not a performance of a trans character. She is hiding out, disguising herself as a young man because it prevents police from finding her. She remains a woman throughout, even if she hides this from others. This allows writer-director Julia Ducournau to investigate the masculine tendencies that are discouraged among women, and the feminine aspects in men that we’re trained to psychologically self-mutilate out of ourselves).

Best Directing

Nominated: Paul Thomas Anderson (Licorice Pizza), Kenneth Branagh (Belfast), Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), Steven Spielberg (West Side Story)

Forgotten: Julia Ducournau, Titane and Rebecca Hall, Passing

Rebecca Hall’s “Passing” and Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” both leap toward the front of my list of the best films of the past decade. “Passing” requires a precise realization of its smallest moments and gestures, whereas “Titane” is a visually evocative tour-de-force. Both feature an exquisite pairing of actors directed with purpose: Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga in “Passing” and Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon in “Titane”.

Both directors fit stories into worlds both recognizable and related to our own, yet at the same time stylistically removed so that story can bite deep when the time comes. Both films had me thinking for days, falling asleep in a fog of their implications and waking up with a deep desire to tackle them anew. Both offer questions and challenges to my perceptions that I’m not sure I have the answers to, and that’s exciting art that I know I’ll return to again and again.

Ask me whether Hall or Ducournau did a better job and the answer will change day by day, depending on which one I’m thinking about. They’re my 1-2 for best film of the year, and neither saw a single Oscar nomination.

Best Picture

Nominated: Belfast, Coda, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, West Side Story

Forgotten: Passing

So why choose “Passing” over “Titane”? There’s a precise answer, and it’s that the screenplay for “Passing” elevates it above “Titane” in how it speaks to me. Even if both are precise creations, “Passing” cuts into me where “Titane” extrudes something from me. Nine times out of 10, I’d choose what’s more evocative, but I’m not sure I’ve met a film that cuts so deep as “Passing”.

The Black and Hispanic experiences for those who aren’t both can be very different, but both face some similarities in the systemic constructs that ask us to internalize racism against ourselves. That separates us from our communities, and even makes us reject them or repeat to them the very same racism practiced on us. I spent much of my childhood learning from my environment to hate the Hispanic half of who I am, and much of my adulthood learning to accept it. That requires coping with the trauma that was inflicted on me and that I was taught to inflict on myself.

At the same time, as Rebecca Hall says in the clip above, I have to reckon with the aspects of privilege I have embodied or used. What benefits have I enjoyed that others who can’t pass haven’t? What aspects of that system have I propagated?

Oh, but that’s all subjective? How else would we watch film? Saying the best film of the year is any film says that it speaks to us in some subjective way. Few films have bothered with concepts of passing and internalized racism, despite racism against oneself being one of the most widely repeated messages in the history of American media. There needs to be more that speaks to this section of the audience, and frankly, there needs to be more that speaks like “Titane” as well. The reason it’s right next to “Passing” is because it speaks to vicious and hateful reinforcements of binary gender constructs. I think we all could’ve used a bit less of that growing up, too.

Frankly, the difference between what I’d call the best and second-best film of the year, or even fifth-best film of the year isn’t really that much. They’re all worth seeing. The nominated films are all worth seeing. I just don’t want to let the moment pass without highlighting so much else of what made last year special in film.

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What Were the Best Music Videos of the 2010s?

The 2010s were an odd decade for music videos. The medium seems to have both a record audience and a diminishing importance. Music videos at the beginning of the decade measured the celebrity of an artist. The best were (for some reason) often considered those with the most cameos of other celebrities.

Now, viewership is overwhelming, there’s more access to music videos than ever before, and that interest is much more fragmented. Websites dedicated to covering music videos have gone under. A star can no longer maintain their celebrity solely on opulently produced music videos.

Are these good things or bad? It’s genuinely hard to say. It’s an evolution. I certainly don’t mind that stars themselves have become less central to music videos. When they do feature, it’s less about anchoring the video to a musical performance and more about how the star features, highlights, or contrasts to a story taking place. It leaves more room for narrative, setting, a director’s touch, dance, choreography, performance.

These are the 10 music videos of the last decade that stick with me the most:

10. “Land of the Free” – The Killers

directed by Spike Lee

Hope can’t function without the work to realize it. Change doesn’t happen unless people enact it. Spike Lee’s video for The Killers’ “Land of the Free” speaks to the sad, backwards phase the United States has found itself embracing. We’re running concentration camps for Latinx immigrants, tearing children from their parents and keeping them locked away for no reason. Incarceration has been transformed into a modern version of slave labor for the prison industry. Children are shot in our schools with no real effort made to decrease the risk they face.

“Land of the Free” is a Rorschach test for how you’re feeling that day: hopeful, angry, motivated, hopeless, desperate. All of those feelings are part of a whole. All of them are legitimate and natural. Just keep taking the next step to changing something. Keep taking the next step of the work that feeds that hope and one day realizes it.

9. “Happy” – Mitski

Content Warning: Gore

directed by Maegan Houang
produced by Ben Kuller

Mitski’s likely had the strongest music video output in the last half of the 2010s. There are a number of her MVs that could make a list like this: “Washing Machine Heart”, “Nobody”, “A Pearl”, “Your Best American Girl”.

Many of Mitski’s videos center on the dissonance of being biracial. Director Maegan Houang’s “Happy” might investigate this best in terms of the white beauty standards held against women of color. What the video reveals is how racism is used to undermine feminism that isn’t intersectional. While it supposedly prizes white women over women of color, it’s ultimately used to suppress both. White patriarchy doesn’t enable or reward women held as successful in it, it just points them at another marginalized community while both are victimized.

8. “Genghis Khan” – Miike Snow

directed by Ninian Dorff
produced Sarah Boardman, Rik Green
choreography by Supple Nam

And now for something happy. A surprise hit that came out of nowhere, “Genghis Khan” is a terrific love story that exemplifies the strengths of music videos as a medium. It communicates its ideas quickly and upends your expectations through song, dance, and just a few cutaway shots.

We’re familiar enough with the tropes it plays with that it doesn’t need any more than this. It’s successful because it can tell a story in under four minutes with very broad strokes and a bare handful of specifics that establish and then invert cliches we love. It’s expertly directed because it knows where to pull back and trust the audience.

7. “Elastic Heart” – Sia

directed by Sia, Daniel Askill
choreographed by Ryan Heffington

Dance can communicate a great deal, including the inability to escape certain struggles and bring the people we love with us. Sia has discussed the video in terms of being two sides of her personality, and it also works as demonstration of family members struggling and fighting – sometimes with each other. A daughter learns to cope with mental illness and trauma and a father can’t escape its impact – whether because it’s too late or too progressed, he simply didn’t have the tools and help in time.

The responses to this video were understandable. Many worried about connotations of pedophilia at the idea of Shia LaBeouf dancing opposite Maddie Ziegler in a cage. Impact outweighs intent, so it’s appropriate that Sia herself quickly clarified the aim of the video and didn’t seek to blame or attack those who were concerned about it.

As a metaphor for mental illness and trauma recovery, it can be powerful. The video itself is the sum of a number of smart decisions. Ryan Heffington’s choreography is off-kilter and imbalanced, playing with the power dynamic and difference in size between his two dancers. The camera remains still at various points only to explode into motion. The editing is energetic and chooses its patient moments. There’s sometimes a slight fish-eye effect used in shots taken from inside the cage that creates a slightly distorted perspective. And of course, the two dancers are phenomenal, both in their choreography and in their performances as actors.

6. “What Kind of Man” – Florence + The Machine

directed by Vincent Haycock
produced by Jackie Bisbee, Mary Ann Marino, Alex Fisch
choreographed by Ryan Heffington

Florence Welch has a catalog of fearless performances in music videos. Perhaps none of them match “What Kind of Man” for their range and the flexibility of their interpretation. Welch and Director Vincent Haycock put together a 48-minute film called The Odyssey, composed of nine original Florence + The Machine music videos. “What Kind of Man” serves as the opener to it.

I’d describe it as a burgeoning storm of a music video if it wasn’t expressly making that comparison within the video itself. The range of scenes swings wildly across intimate experiences, framing an entire rocky history of trust, anger, desire, shame. We come away with the shape of what someone’s love life has felt like – whether across multiple romances or just one is hard to say. We understand the gender inequality that played into it, the feelings of disaster and healing that accompanied it.

If we were asked to build a chronology of events out of the video, we couldn’t possibly. Yet if we were asked to describe the feelings surrounding those events, we could describe what the video shows us for far longer than it runs. “What Kind of Man” is like an impressionist painting – we may not be able to identify individual objects in it, but we can describe exactly what it feels like.

(I had this list sorted out before I looked at the production and choreography credits. Lo and behold, choreographer Ryan Heffington again. I supposed I should be looking for more of his work.)

5. “The Body Electric” – Hurray for the Riff Raff

directed by Joshua Shoemaker
produced by Dan and Cathleen Murphy

Hurray for the Riff Raff’s protest anthem “Pa’lante” could just as easily have made the list, but “The Body Electric” is the music video I go to when I feel most helpless in changing things. It’s not because the video makes me feel hopeful. It’s because it makes me see how much more hopelessness out there is felt by others, how many marginalized communities are struggling and seeking for their voice to be legitimized, to be seen as human. The sheer volume of that struggle isn’t reassuring, but I know we’re none of us alone in that struggle. The hopelessness I’m feeling isn’t unique, or unprecedented, or insurmountable. It’s a desired effect of the racism I fear and fight against, of the misogyny and transphobia addressed in the video.

“The Body Electric” reminds me I’m not alone. There are more of us who want to change things than those who want them to remain this way. That pain is heard. It’s felt. It has platforms. People are fighting every day. I don’t fail if I’ve fought until exhaustion. We all have at some point. I fail if I don’t recognize that in others, if I don’t see the communities who are all in this. Art like this can be poignant in driving a point home, and it can also serve as a bridge to the lonely and exhausted that reminds them it’s OK, that exhaustion is shared, just as overcoming it is shared.

4. “Quarrel” – Moses Sumney

directed by Allie Avital, Moses Sumney
produced by Meghan Doherty

Moses Sumney’s song speaks of the power imbalance in a relationship between people of different privileges. The music video deals with the desire to transform into something he cannot, the fairy tale that people of color can be seen as the same when the difference that’s applied to them is itself illusory. We turn the hate of that inward in an impossible effort to become the things that hate us.

Or, the music video deals with the desire to oppress and cause violence to those we care about who don’t have the same privileges, and it’s not until Sumney puts himself into the shoes of those he oppresses that he can understand how his actions cause harm.

“Quarrel” is difficult to parse. Like many great fairy tales, it can say multiple things depending on your point of view.

3. “This is America” – Childish Gambino

directed by Hiro Murai
produced by Danielle Hinde, Jason Cole, Fam Rothstein, Ibra Ake
choreographed by Sherrie Silver

Obviously, “This is America” belongs high on any list like this one. Why does it work so well for so many people? It speaks to a country (and cultural movement across many countries) that increasingly uses fear to dominate and radicalize its people against each other. It builds layers of violent imagery immediately ignored with smiles and dancing. The smiles and dancing immediately enable the next eruption of violence.

Nothing is healed in that cycle. All of us quietly fear it while simultaneously feeding it, participating in it, enabling it. It fuses together the acts of violence and illusions that erase them to evoke a lurking fear that we use those illusions to suppress and deny.

2. “RAPIN*” – Jenny Wilson

Content Warning: sexual assault

animated & directed by Gustaf Holtenas

Jenny Wilson’s 2018 album EXORCISM is an unraveling of after-effects from a sexual assault. The entire album serves as a maelstrom, an extensive fallout of damages and dealing with them. Its uncomfortable discussion of recovery as a process that often repeats the trauma is stark and realistic. There’s no before-and-after picture to it.

“RAPIN*” is the first song on the album, a fever dream that serves as a terrifying monument in life that can never be erased. Gustaf Holtenas’s animated music video reflects that terror in a way that’s both surreal and sickeningly physical.

It’s not a representation that can be easily digested. It’s confrontational, visceral, revolting, haunting. It conveys how trauma changes the way someone sees the world from that point forward, how the event itself replays in their mind. It’s a direct and painful music video that places the viewer into the shoes of the victim, if only to describe in some slight way something that can’t be described.

1. “Afterlife” – Arcade Fire

directed by Emily Kai Bock
produced by Anne Johnson

The best we can do for the people we’ve lost is remember them. Sometimes we can only do so in impressions. Perhaps its a TV show you grew up watching with them. Perhaps its a place where you danced. Perhaps its a shoulder you rested upon. We don’t always have access to these things anymore. We reach out to them in our imaginations, in our dreams, we try to resurrect them in the art we create.

We try to touch them just one more time, to evoke something lost – their image, their voice, their presence. Sometimes a death can feel like nothing will ever be the same. Sometimes it can feel like they just stepped out for a minute, and they’ll be right back.

“Afterlife” deals in the impressions we might remember in our dreams, the memories of work and leisure a father might have, a teenager’s memory that’s precise but lacks context, the brief feeling of reassurance after a child’s nightmare.

“Afterlife” is sad and longing, but it’s also immensely reassuring. It shares one glimpse of something we all feel in our lives, at a way our hearts all break and mend until we can test their breaking once again because we so dearly want to remember those we’ve lost.

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What Were the Best Films of the 2010s?

The best films of the decade will be wildly different for everyone. Naming them is a way of highlighting what you value and anchor to. It might call attention to a movie someone else hasn’t seen, or that they don’t see the same way as you. The films on lists like these show us something about ourselves.

Sometimes the films named anticipate a movement that follows, or interpret one already happening. Other films are simply unique, and unlike anything else. Is the perfect war film superior to a challenging and flawed film that’s utterly unique and does what no other film you’ve ever seen before has? The answer to that is going to vary by critic, by viewer. The reasons for that answer are more important than the answer itself.

These are the films that stay with me, that I think about on random days because they’re close to me. There are elements in some of them I haven’t fully figured out. The viewing experience may have been going on for years because I still haven’t stepped out of that beautiful moment after the credits are over and I consider the way each sits like a presence beside me.

10. “Selma”

written by Paul Webb
directed by Ava DuVernay

“Selma” isn’t a biographical or historical film. It’s a war film. It communicates the process and procedure of meaningful protest. It follows the strategies the groups involved created and reacted to. It engages the architecture of successful protest and the work that goes into it at the ground level. It’s not a film about individual icons, though it features them. It’s a film about real, flawed people who fostered and empowered community to make change.

“Selma” measures its sacrifices as both countless and deeply personal. Each is unknowable as even more mount, and each is world shattering for the people left in its wake. It’s an exercise in perfect direction and tight character acting. It doesn’t stylize its era and it spends time with smaller roles to show you the impacts and emotion of that moment in time.

(Read my original review.)

9. “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem”

written and directed by Ronit Elkabetz & Shlomi Elkabetz

The third film chronicling a troubled and unsatisfactory marriage, “Gett” is a movie that erodes you just as it does its main character. Struggling against her country’s religious laws, Viviane Amsalem (co-writer/director Ronit Elkabetz) spends years in court trying to obtain a divorce from her husband.

He refuses to grant her one, and even when he does the conditions are his alone and subject to change. The film is simply presented, relying on its very real performances. Among many other things, “Gett” is an incredible examination of communicating desperation through restrained and even dulled emotions. It’s a film that, inside one courtroom, portrays a consistent resistance to the normalization of being treated as sub-human and without rights.

8. “The Secret of Kells”

written by Tomm Moore & Fabrice Ziolkowski
directed by Tomm Moore & Nora Twomey
(released in 2009, U.S. in 2010)

“The Secret of Kells” designed its animation to look like the illuminated manuscripts that monks would spend years designing. The story it told concerned some of those monks attempting to finish the Book of Kells and then save the manuscript before invading vikings pillage their abbey. It doesn’t help that a god of death is lurking in the woods, but a helpful faerie does her best to help.

It all sounds a bit ridiculous, but it works as a beautiful fable and the Celtic-styled animation is often overwhelming, stunning, and evocative. The film achieves an experience of calm and wholeness that matches the best of Hayao Miyazaki.

7. “Interstellar”

written by Jonathan Nolan & Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

This is one of the two big event films on the list, and I genuinely think it deserves to be here. As a high-concept science-fiction film, it sits comfortably alongside predecessors like “2001”. What’s unique about writer-director Christopher Nolan is that in his best moments, he melds high-concept to event filmmaking. That “Interstellar” also succeeds as an adventure film is incredible.

It’s also a movie that finds hope buried under layers of hopelessness. It presents a world that’s given up, that lies to itself to maintain the illusion that it’s not clearly dying – a world that becomes more and more familiar with each passing day – and it shows us an optimistic story of finding a way through. That way through is demanding, it takes generations, and it asks for work and sacrifice.

(Read my original review.)

6. “Under the Skin”

written by Walter Campbell & Jonathan Glazer
directed by Jonathan Glazer

“Under the Skin” is an art film that nearly all my friends hate. I love it. It’s a chaotic and lurking work that follows an alien (Scarlett Johansson) as she picks up lonely men and consumes them. You try to understand her and her burgeoning interest in becoming human – or at least experiencing human things.

The specifics of the Michel Faber novel on which it’s based are thrown to the side in favor of a multitude of potential readings. In fact, director Jonathan Glazer allowed his crew to design and score the film according to their own individual interpretations. A movie can so easily go careening off into disaster with that approach – and some would say this one did.

For me, however, it’s a disturbing work of inverting horror. It asks you to identify with a predator, making it inaccessible as it should be but coaxing you into the work of attempting to do it anyway. Then it confronts you with the idea that this is the work you’ve been doing. That might seem like a betrayal or trick on the movie’s part, but so much of our society has been built on normalizing and shielding predators that we’ve now elected one. Maybe we could have used a few more movies like this one.

(Read my original review.)
(Read my interview with author Michel Faber.)

5. “Life of Pi”

written by David Magee
directed by Ang Lee

Few films try to tackle the meaning of faith. Far fewer actually engage it without focusing on proselytizing or idolatry. “Life of Pi” tells the story of a young survivor stuck on a life raft with a tiger. The second of the two event films on this list, it’s patient, heartbreaking, and utterly human.

I hate frame stories – they’re a terribly used concept across movies. Yet the idea of a journalist going to interview the survivor as an adult allows Irrfan Khan to recall his story in ways that build both emotional and logical anchors (Khan has a solid and overlooked argument for greatest actor of his generation). Doing so creates a remarkable moment of self-questioning in the audience that makes the frame story a valuable way of describing and explaining hope and faith.

4. “Sicario”

written by Taylor Sheridan
directed by Denis Villeneuve

“Sicario” is a stalking thing. It’s a movie that’s a nightmare, a film about FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt). She’s tasked to an ill-defined covert operations team in order to legitimize its actions across the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s all standard spy fare so far, right? The film itself begins like a mystery and descends into a murk of threat and erasure.

It’s controversial in some circles of critics of color because of the way it poses Mexico as a war zone for the drug trade. The presentation in the film is definitely somewhat overblown. I find value in how the film illustrates the way the United States feeds the drug trade and installs leaders who are no less violent – but whose violence simply aligns with and feeds the financing of our own.

The villain in the film isn’t ultimately Mexico in any way. The villain is U.S. imperialism. What’s powerful in the film to me is one woman simply trying to do her job, and how the overwhelming nature of that imperialism increasingly dissolves the values that she imagines she’s risking her life to uphold. As I put it in my review, “It’s not the threat to Kate’s life that is most compelling. It’s the threat to the idea that Kate’s life matters”. For my money, it’s Blunt’s best performance.

(Read my original review.)
(Read my Best Film of 2015 piece.)

3. “Girlhood”

written and directed by Celine Sciamma

I once called “Sicario” the best film of 2015. I don’t know that I was wrong – it’s very close by in this list. The movie that’s stuck with me ever so slightly more, however, is my runner up that year – Celine Sciamma’s “Girlhood”. I’ve found that many “bests” in years past have shifted slightly – this list itself might look entirely different in a decade’s time.

“Girlhood” itself is a coming-of-age movie that doesn’t deal in the usual trials and tribulations of maturing. It follows a group of high-school girls in France. Most of them are Black or of Middle Eastern descent. The film deals with trans identity. It covers the silence of women before groups of men. It shows the path of maturing in a far different light than in the safe, stereotypical, low-risk, middle class ways that most coming-of-age tales cover.

It’s a film that shows growing up as a constant struggle to find or create safe harbor in a world that doesn’t provide it for everyone. It is inspiring, emotional, evolving, it feels all the more real when very light touches of magical realism are used, and there is a full scope of emotion to it – from the joy of community to the isolation of survival.

(Read my Runner-Up of 2015 piece.)

2. “Stories We Tell”

written by Sarah Polley & Michael Polley
directed by Sarah Polley

“Stories We Tell” is a complex family documentary that covers extensive meta territory. Filmmaker Sarah Polley was curious about stories that she might not be her father’s daughter. She delved into her own family’s history to profile her late mother, interview her mother’s lovers, her own family, and to research who exactly she was, what stories shaped her, and which were truthful.

One of the most interesting aspects of the documentary is that Michael Polley – her mother’s husband and the father who raised her, serves as narrator for it. He’s also interviewed, and his calm and acceptance of the entire endeavor is another layer to be…not examined, but simply sat with and understood.

The film reveals piece by piece, but it’s never a mystery so much as it’s a contemplation of lives lived, of what a person understands about someone they love and might also fail to understand about them. It’s unlike anything else I’ve seen, and stands out as something truly and quietly unique in all of film.

1. “The Milk of Sorrow”

written and directed by Claudia Llosa
(released in 2009, U.S. in 2010)

“The Milk of Sorrow” is a Peruvian film that traces how trauma shapes future generations. It follows Fausta (Magaly Solier), a young woman whose mother passes away in a remarkable first scene. Fausta’s mother was raped in a civil war, and her stories and experiences of this have shaped Fausta’s view of the world. She passes through it quietly, timidly, shying from a hundred normal things that she reads as potential dangers.

Fausta’s also made shocking decisions for her own health that make no sense, but that are framed by paranoia, superstition, fear, and how trauma has infused itself into folklore. The film is a reserved piece of magical realism that traces in one character how trauma echoes in a society – especially among its indigenous communities.

The cinematography is stark and beautiful one minute, rich and full of motion the next, yet another argument that Natasha Braier is without a doubt the cinematographer most overlooked by the Oscars this last decade. Writer-director Claudia Llosa’s film operates on two levels: a quiet, obvious, and patient one on the surface, and one that exists below that in the muted suppression of panic that deals with anxiety, shame, and betrayal.

If you enjoy what you read on this site, consider subscribing to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to continue writing articles like this one.