The Bests of 2024 (So Far)

I always put together some kind of half-year reflection. I thought I might cover a larger breadth this year than last and include more categories. These are my choices for the Best Songs, Album, Credit Sequence, Performance, New Series, and Movie this year (so far). I’m not trying to come up with any pretend objective nonsense. These are my choices, based on what most wowed me, what feels most needed in the world to me.

Best Song #1
“Meet the Grahams” by Kendrick Lamar

The defining musical moment of the year has arguably been Kendrick Lamar’s very one-sided rap feud against Drake, where calling out Drake’s grooming of girls finally seems to have stuck in the public consciousness.

Lamar’s “Not Like Us” is the most playable song that came out of it, and gave us the lasting description of Drake, “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-minorrrrr”.

I slightly prefer “Meet the Grahams”. There are problematic elements in it, obviously. I get tired of derogatory language toward women, but thankfully that’s limited to one line. Even if I’d want one or two changes, I have to admit how surgical the song is as a whole.

It’s one of the most lyrical eviscerations of a human being imaginable, a piece of musical horror that sees Lamar reciting letters to Drake and his family members (including an alleged hidden daughter). It’s all placed over a driving minor chord that repeats to the point of hellishness. The result is relentlessly dark, and if not for Lamar’s unique delivery and the subtly jazzy production, it’s tonally something I’d much sooner expect from a group like clipping.

In other words, it’s not the kind of entry you’d ever expect from Kendrick Lamar, but it still demonstrates the precision of his lyrics, and it employs several meta-layers: the repeated minor chord, literalizing the epistolary nature of a modern rap feud, making the conversation larger by addressing the enablers of Drake, and having it prepared to drop a mere 20 minutes after Drake’s “Family Matters” – suggesting without the aid of any lyric that Drake’s own claims are simply projection.

Best Song #2
“Rouge” by YU-KA

And now for something lighter. I’m a huge fan of new jack, which is an R&B-swing-pop hybrid that loves walking bass lines and synth hits. It saw its heyday in the 80s and 90s with performers like Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul, whose “Straight Up” remains one of the clearest examples.

New jack has hung around without really having a ton of evolution. I’m not sure it needs it – its complex approach to syncopation keeps it sounding fresh and has a habit of fusing its disparate elements together in the same way vaporwave art does. It’s clearly of-a-time, but feels separated from the norms of that time. It sounds like 90s music imagining 2020s music for a future that never happened.

“Rouge” by YU-KA is ridiculously listenable – I’ve easily played it 20+ times. It’s classical new jack because of the push-and-pull between the vocalist, that anchor of a bass line, and the aggressively grouped synth hits. They strain to go in different directions during the chorus before slamming back together again when we get to the verse. Yet it also feels like a modernized take because of a driving rhythm, a more intense delivery, some video game-esque riffs, and the unexpected background vocals.

There’s probably a more accurate term for when it’s done on a bass, but one of the little details I love most is that early glissando the bassist does at the end of the first bridge – it sounds like a record scratching, and serves as a re-introduction of the walking bass line. It’s later echoed at half-speed by the backing vocal around 1:13 when the verse shifts away from the bass line and momentarily toward those backing vocals – that now grow in number for the next bridge.

It’s an incredibly clever way to signal backing changes that get a little introduction of their own before adding in with everything else again, and it makes the song feel like it’s escalating toward something as it goes. I love how this is written. It’s a fun bop, but it really demonstrates the nuance and complexity that makes new jack feel like future music from an alternate reality.

Best Album
Prelude to Ecstacy by The Last Dinner Party

This hooked me with “Burn Alive”, which starts out as this emotive, gothic, Marissa Nadler-esque dream pop but increasingly shifts into lead singer Abigail Morris absolutely belting out notes.

The comparisons are numerous – Florence + the Machine, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Kate Bush are popular ones, but I’d throw Queen and Anna Calvi in there, too. And it’s wacky that they’re all accurate, depending on whether a song is in a raw emotive phase, going dark and hedonistic art pop, hitting the brakes with sharp staccato choruses, or showing off Morris’ overpowering vocals.

Every song has these shifts. It’s not that this changes song to song, it’s that it changes as quickly as verse to verse in a way that still works. It treats chamber pop as if it were anthem rock designed to be played in a stadium, which: huh?

I also love that this entire first album has centered on celebratory queerness. That’s not exactly new in British music, but Prelude to Ecstacy combines that notion with the COVID experience of being conscious of mortality and finality. The unique result in tone seems not to just celebrate queerness, but to envision a Golden Age, an if-not-now-when, and that is a combination of themes that does feel very unique to the last few years.

CW: next entry contains imagery of genocide

Best Credit Sequence
Gyeongseong Creature

From the very opening, you can tell “Gyeongseong Creature” is something haunting and unique. It’s been a controversial show, setting realistic depictions of the Japanese genocide of Koreans in the 30s and 40s next to a pulpy supernatural mystery, beautiful fight scenes, and a schmaltzy love story. I understand the pushback on it, but I’ve also seen so many projects process and reflect on the Holocaust in part by folding it into other genres. It’s not always ideal, but many indigenous Central and South American experiences of colonialism are turned over through fantasy and horror. I’m not in a place to say whether that’s right or wrong for Korean work, but because those are the frameworks I have, I do have a hard time criticizing “Gyeongseong Creature” for this when it’s clearly still viewing inhumane actions as inhumane – much like Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” or “The Devil’s Backbone”.

This attempt at fusing the real to the genre is done exceptionally well in the unsettling opening credits. They veer from the supernatural to the historical and back in a way that reflects the show at its best. Part of what haunts in the show itself is the supernatural becoming easier to grasp than the real and inhumane. What really happened feels like the cosmic horror that the mind can’t fully comprehend, the part that doesn’t belong in this world. As horrifying as the supernatural images in the credits are, the one that hits hardest is the soldiers dragging the dead child – because that’s a horror we know exists, yet is the one we spend decades still trying to process.

Best Series Performance
Maya Erskine, Donald Glover, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

There’s no separating these two for me. There’s no saying one’s better than the other because they both do so much work to let the other shine. The complete rethink of the “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” premise gives us two of the rawest, most realistic performances of a troubled relationship. It just also happens to be taking place during clandestine missions for an agency neither one can trust.

There’s a scene where Erskine is opposite Parker Posey, and it feels like a genuine handing of the baton from one legendary indie comedy actress to another. It occurs as tension mounts, but toward what we haven’t learned yet. It’s emblematic of the show’s ability to layer dry humor over increasing tension to realize the unsettling unspoken as it careens toward disaster. We cringe away at the social awkwardness, and keep looking because we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Glover offers an incredibly realized character who’s exceptionally skilled in this trade, but probably doesn’t have the caution and self-preservation to survive long in it. He trusts too much, he’s honest too often, and he improvises too guiltily. It’s a complex portrayal that’s rare in the genre.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” explores the morality of spies who aren’t always fully up to the task, especially when the tasks they carry out are so inexplicable. There’s no tracing their actions to an outcome, there are just actions and events detached from impact. Are they doing right for the world? Are they doing wrong for it? Who knows?

But it’s also exploring a relationship between a disaffected, emotionally numb woman who can’t connect and who compartmentalizes her morals away, and a deeply feeling man who knows exactly who he is but can’t compartmentalize anything enough to endure.

The combination of these two ideas shouldn’t work, but what comes out of it is something exceptionally human and utterly unique. That’s precisely because these are two actors whose versatility easily embraces such rangy concepts.

Best New Series
Fallout

Simply put, “Fallout” is an exceptional modern satire. Its use of Americana and kitsch in an apocalypse that’s largely business as usual lampoons corporate exploitation and the exceptionalist narratives we cling to just to get through the day. People and cockroaches and whatnot might survive the apocalypse, but what survives most intact is conflict and the exploitation that drives it.

It perfectly embodies the video game series on which it’s based, not only by capturing that dark and witty sense of satire and poking fun at moral ambiguity, but by centering itself on concepts of its characters’ agency. This is what the best video game adaptations – such as “The Last of Us” and “Arcane” – have grasped as they shift from movies to series formats.

Video games as a medium give players the ability to explore concepts of agency. Every play-through by every player is slightly different, even for a very linear game. That theme of choice, agency, the relationship between action and hesitation, being frozen by choice or making the wrong one but committing to it and making it work, these are the experiences that video game-to-screen adaptations completely dismissed for so long. They adapted stories alone and thought them thin, barely coming up with enough for 90-minute movies, instead of also adapting the act of exploring a world and the motivation for the choices you make inside of it. That’s what video game adaptation has finally gotten right in the last few years and why these 10-hour series adaptations are filled to bursting.

It’s a perfect time to see “Fallout” adapted because its themes are based on how individuals and entire communities can be manipulated, re-written, capitalized, and set against each other through both mythology and media narrative. The apocalypse as a setting means that our modern manipulations become their mythologized ones, ways of thinking that are then built upon with new manipulations. It’s an exploration of how norms are shifted, not just in the moment through shock doctrine, but how those big, immediate movements justify themselves through centuries of constantly re-written cultural mythology and the endless wars they birth. That might sound a little silly, but how’s Ukraine looking? How’s Sudan looking? How’s Gaza looking? The youngest of those conflicts traces back at least 100 years in cycles of eruption and preparation, the oldest at least 1,500 years.

“Fallout” as a franchise has always explored how these cycles endure, and satirizes our enabling of them. Yeah, there’s lots of action and the equivalent of a cool zombie cowboy – the show’s hilarious, but it manages through laughter to make us look at some of the most disturbing human mistakes we keep repeating. Its unique way of disarming you to make you look at that abyss can feel like being in a delirium, rapturous and disoriented.

Best Film
Love Lies Bleeding

“Monkey Man”. “Furiosa”. “Dune: Part 2”. It’s been a stellar year for vengeance. But the film that wowed me most was a dark, $10 million 80s noir starring Kristen Stewart. She plays Lou, a gym manager who falls for Jackie, a bodybuilder passing through town. They start a romance, complicated by steroids, an FBI investigation into Lou’s estranged father (Ed Harris), and the domestic violence her sister (Jena Malone) is suffering.

This is some of the best work those three have done, so it’s even more impressive that the standout is Katy O’Brian’s Jackie. We don’t get her backstory in any detail, but the writing and performance give us everything that’s resulted from it. It creates a kind of negative space, a silhouette of backstory that we can tell the shape of. She is anger in search of a target, desperate for agency in her own story, and the targets she chooses to topple are cathartic. I’d write a separate heading for best film performance, but I’d only write what I just did.

Director and co-writer Rose Glass is a name to watch. Her previous film was another A24 production, “Saint Maud”, which earned two BAFTA nominations. The setting, color, and tone of her first two films are wildly different, but she’s given us two visually audacious, confrontational pieces that are sometimes darkly funny and sometimes border nightmare. She’s written and directed riveting performances out of her ensembles in both, exploring mania, obsession, and self-destruction as metaphorical responses to generational systemic violence.

The wildest thing about “Love Lies Bleeding” is that I can write all that and then tell you it’s one of the sweetest movies I’ve ever seen about two people seeing each other for who they are, in large part because they’re able to do so unfettered by the harm the world wants for them. Its most violent moments are sometimes its most tender, because when the systems that hold them in place respond violently, they finally have in each other the strength to respond in kind. “Love Lies Bleeding” is an incredible film.

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New Shows + Movies by Women — The Year So Far

The ebb and flow of titles is always unpredictable, so I thought I’d do something a little different this week. Last week saw 13 new shows and movies by women. This week sees just one, “Past Lies” from Spain. It’s frustrating when that happens, but rather than just pitch a single title up here, I’ll take the opportunity to share some standout shows by women I’ve seen so far from this year. First, let’s tell you about “Past Lies”:

NEW SERIES

Past Lies (Hulu)
directed by Julia de Paz, Clara Roquet

A group of successful women are shaken when the 25-year-old remains of a missing high school classmate are found in Mallorca, where they shared their senior trip. Star Elena Anaya may be familiar to American audiences from her lead role in “The Skin I Live In”.

Director Clara Roquet won Best New Director and was nominated for Original Screenplay at the 2022 Goya Awards, Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars. Director and co-writer Julia de Paz was nominated for Adapted Screenplay the same year.

“Past Lies” premieres on Hulu tomorrow, Friday May 10.

THIS YEAR’S SHOWS SO FAR

Links go to my reviews, let’s get in:

“Fallout” (Amazon) is one of the best shows of the year. It’s an incredibly biting and visually beautiful post-apocalyptic dark comedy co-showrun by Geneva Robertson-Dworet. It works as an adventure, as action, as science-fiction, as character drama, and especially as a dark comedy. Watching it kind of broke me because as fun as it is, its retrofuturist satire bites deeply into modern anxieties.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” (Amazon) is a spy comedy showrun by Francesca Sloane. Dry humor in an unsettling atmosphere makes for an incredibly unique feeling – the whole show is quirky but tense. There are multiple memorable guest stars, which is usually a feature I don’t care much about, but here it’s used very well and in ways that sometimes undermine the concept. Maya Erskine and Donald Glover star, and the pair act the hell out of it.

Those two are pretty intense. If you need something lighter but still very worthwhile, “Renegade Nell” (Disney+) is a really fun historical adventure/comedy about a woman forced to become a thief. It’s showrun by Sally Wainwright. I’d compare it to a period “Buffy” with much higher production values, or a series-level “Pirates of the Caribbean” without the baggage. If the first episode doesn’t hook you, you are unhookable.

“Death and Other Details” (Hulu) is fun if you can get along with its period-mystery-in-modern-times vibe. Mandy Patinkin plays the wacky detective. It’s co-showrun by Heidi Cole McAdams. Its quirk might come off as overly precious to some, but I ended up liking its diorama-esque stylization. It acts like a stage comedy, which is something I look for, but you’ll be able to tell pretty quickly if it’s your thing or not.

And of course, “Abbott Elementary” (Hulu) is still a great comedy co-showrun by Quinta Brunson. The writing has an incredibly good feel for its ensemble and where their strengths lie. Usually a sitcom gets its good writing in early seasons and the ensemble develop their timing in later ones, but “Abbott Elementary” has enjoyed both right off the bat.

I’m working on “Unnatural” (Netflix) right now. I loved Nogi Akiko’s police series “MIU404” because it presented a way that police can help people from a non-antagonistic perspective, and it focused on both large and small cases. Not everything was high drama, life-or-death stakes. Its sensibilities were completely different from an American cop show. “MIU404” is still on Netflix. I highly recommend it, and I’m thrilled Nogi’s prior series “Unnatural” – about a woman leading a forensics team investigating odd deaths – is now there, too.

On my watchlist are the second season of Tima Shomali’s Jordanian drama “AlRawabi School for Girls” (Netflix). The first season was incredibly salient, punctuating an intriguing interpersonal drama about bullying with some rattling scenes.

I also need to watch Korean vigilante mystery “A Killer Paradox” (Netflix) written by Kim Da Min, and I keep hearing really good things about Vivienne Medrano’s animated musical-in-hell series “Hazbin Hotel” (Amazon) so I’ll be checking that out.

In this feature, I limit the weekly coverage to series showrun or directed by women (or else I couldn’t do the amount of research I have to do weekly). But I do want to highlight how good of a year it’s been for anime written (or based on work written) by women:

“The Apothecary Diaries” (Crunchyroll) is the best mystery going for a second year in a row. It follows Maomao, the daughter of an apothecary in Imperial China. She wants to remain anonymous and live a quiet life of testing poisons on herself, but her knowledge of chemistry and medicine means she can make connections between clues others can’t. The mysteries are balanced between small and large, between incidental and intentional, and its protagonist is a unique blend of tenacious and lazy that you usually don’t see – especially for women characters. “The Apothecary Diaries” is based on a light novel series by Hyuuga Natsu.

“Delicious in Dungeon” (Netflix) is a rangy fantasy series that tells its story through cooking (of fantasy creatures), written by Ueno Kimiko and based on a manga series by Kui Ryouko. Its talented but sometimes bumbling adventuring party is a familiar anchor of fantasy, but done very well here. As they set out to resurrect one of the party’s sisters before a dragon fully digests her, what makes the show unique is how it world-builds. They’re broke, so they cook monsters along the way. Hunting and cooking requires knowledge of the dungeon’s ecology and environmental impacts, which in turn reveal complex relationships between the world and its magic. It’s deeply thought out and surprisingly engrossing. And while it’s not primarily an action series, its action scenes are phenomenal.

“7th Time Loop” (Crunchyroll) is one of the best uses of time loop fiction I’ve seen, about a woman who repeats five years, each time taking a different career. Every time, a war that envelops the world causes her death, and she restarts that five year chunk. She keeps the skills and knowledge she accumulates each go-round, and makes it her mission to use these to stop the war. It’s written by Machida Touko and based on a light novel series by Amekawa Touko. I would’ve preferred it got an extra episode to give the ending some more room to breathe, but it has such incredible character writing along the way that it’s a minor flaw. There are scenes here that are so literary and layered they should be studied if you’re even remotely interested in storytelling.

“A Sign of Affection” (Crunchyroll) is a superb and tranquil romance between a deaf woman and a man who learns sign language. What I like about it is that things don’t come easy – and I don’t mean the usual trope of dragging the will they-won’t they out. What I mean is that both characters question if they truly like each other or simply see in each other an idea they want to embody in themselves. Yuki’s been sheltered and likes that Itsuomi travels the world. Does she like him, or just that he represents a wider world out there? Itsuomi travels because he seeks out new experiences. Does he like her, or is she simply a new experience that will fade once familiar? The great gentleness and care for the other with which they figure this out already provides the answer, but even if the anime itself is pretty sentimental, it’s refreshing to see this realistic complexity and sense of responsibility be the core of the story. It’s also a really good view on a man doing the work to unlearn assumptions and understand someone else’s perspective. Itsuomi doesn’t automatically know how to understand and relate to someone who’s deaf, and he makes clear mistakes, but he does the work to unlearn bad habits and replace them with recognition and communication.

This last one is current season, so only halfway in, but “Train to the End of the World” (Crunchyroll) is a very hidden gem. It fuses wholesome with disturbing as four girls drive a train through an incredibly artistic and metaphorical post-apocalypse to find their lost friend. It’s cosmic horror if the power of very stubborn friendship was enough to fight your way through it, and holding onto that in the face of unprecedented weirdness has its own way of speaking to our times. It’s written by Yokote Michiko.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

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New Shows + Movies by Women — Dark Comedies and Star-Crossed Romances

It’s an extremely good week for comedies, and there are a number of retro throwbacks to the 80s and 90s. There are also a lot of romances but, you know, with fun complications.

I’d highly recommend “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, the late-season Oscar nominees are starting to hit streaming, and there’s a feature directorial debut I’m especially excited to see. That’d be by Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin Williams. The Diablo Cody-written “Lisa Frankenstein” looks like a throwback comedy to the wave of 80s goth such as “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands”.

I highlight films here both when they premiere in theaters, and on streaming. That’s why you’ll see “The Marvels” and “Cat Person” included below, months after their theatrical runs. It’s something I started doing during the pandemic and I continue it for two reasons.

The first is that the pandemic is still going regardless of how much we’ve normalized it in our heads. A lot of people are very justified in staying home, and certain places that have handled the pandemic more responsibly offer a safer opportunity to do something like sit in a crowded theater than other places that didn’t.

In addition, a lot of people with chronic illness and disability still have to make tough decisions about physical distancing and self-quarantine. The social distancing many of us endured in the interest of public health still hasn’t ended for some people, because enough other people didn’t bother. What a shitty thing to do to others. So even if something is featured when it hits theaters, I’m still going to include it when it hits streaming, because not everybody in every area has the option to safely go.

The second reason is that the whole point of this weekly feature is to platform films by women because they don’t typically get the same marketing as films by men.

Part of that is that they also tend to get more biased reception. That means films by women are at a disadvantage in terms of advertising exposure, and at a disadvantage because of the normalization of misogyny as a response to women’s cinematic perspectives. Now, you might say “The Marvels” had a large platform, but if I feature theatrical movies when they hit streaming, I’m not going to start applying that rule piecemeal.

Moreover, “The Marvels” was severely hurt by a marketing campaign that apologized for its existence. When I wrote about this, I highlighted the word count in its final trailer, where Nick Fury got 32 words – more than the film’s three women protagonists combined. In fact, Thanos, a male villain not even in the film, got more words than two of the protagonists, and Iron Man and Captain America (male heroes who aren’t in the film) each got more words than one protagonist. After ramming Iron Man, Captain America, and even underperforming box office draws like Thor and Ant-Man into our heads over and over through their marketing, Disney wasn’t willing to do the same with Captain Marvel – a hero whose standalone film made more domestically than any of those four did in their dozen-plus runs at it.

So while “The Marvels” certainly had a higher marketing profile than the vast majority of films out there, even that large of an event film couldn’t escape a misogynistic bungling of its advertising.

Of course, in a year when countless $200 million-plus films tanked, “The Marvels” was also singled out as a flop. You had “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Napoleon” on either side of it also financially flop, but these were treated with narratives of financial success. These were offered excuses of one day supporting Apple’s streaming service as if the MCU isn’t the tentpole that supports Disney’s much larger streaming service.

Furthermore, an argument that audiences are interested in those two films while being uninterested in “The Marvels” can only be measured by, you know, audience. The number of audience that is interested enough in going to see something is measured by the number who go to see it. That’s it. That’s the metric. Expectations have nothing to do with a resultant number, yet the argument persists that people were more interested in seeing these similarly performing films than “The Marvels”, despite the same number of people going to see “The Marvels”.

The expectations argument, I just…man, it’s a head trip. You’ve gotta love an argument about comparing expectations: you start from a standpoint of “fewer people are interested in this” so when the same number of people are measured as being interested in this, it magically translates into “more people are interested in this”. That’s it, that’s the argument for similarly budgeted films by men being financial successes by getting the same or worse performance as films by women. If it’s a film by a man, more people being interested of course means more people are interested. But also if fewer people are interested, that also means that more people are interested. What an age of cybernetically enhanced, meta-reality constructed, speak-nonsense-into-reality double standards we get to enjoy. I’m usually more disciplined in these intros, but honestly – fuck that. Fuck my entire gender for this stupid-ass fucking bullshit we could close down tomorrow if a quarter of us were even interested in doing that work, and sorry that you’ve got to go through this dipshit nonsense as a result. I have no segue; there is no segue. There’s a reason I write the intro last.

New series by women this week come from Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S. New films by women come from Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S.

NEW SERIES

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Amazon)
showrunner Francesca Sloane
half-directed by women

Donald Glover and Maya Erskine star as spies who maintain a cover as a married couple. Unlike the 2005 film, the pair work together for the same agency. I reviewed this and it’s an incredibly weird, funny, and profound experience that I highly recommend. The supporting cast includes Paul Dano, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman, Jon Turturro, Wagner Moura, Alexander Skarsgard, and Eiza Gonzalez.

Showrunner Francesca Sloane has written and produced on “Fargo” and “Atlanta”. Four of the eight episodes are directed by women – 2 by Karena Evans (“Snowfall”) and 2 by Amy Seimetz (“The Girlfriend Experience”).

All 8 episodes of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” are out on Amazon Prime.

Let’s Talk About Chu (Netflix)
showrunner Remii Huang

This Taiwanese series follows Chu, a wax technician who makes a sex education vlog as a side job. Her view on relationships is colored by her parents’ unhappy marriage and siblings’ struggles in long-term relationships. Some of her family build toward longer relationships, some away, as Chu develops an understanding toward what she wants for herself.

Remii Huang directs. All 8 episodes of “Let’s Talk About Chu” are out on Netflix.

One Day (Netflix)
showrunner Nicole Taylor
half-directed by women

In 1988, Emma and Dexter meet the day before their college graduation. Their lives take them in separate directions, but they’re unable to fully let go of the connection they made. The series visits their lives on one day out of every year. The show is based on the 2009 novel “One Day” by David Nicholls.

Nicole Taylor showruns. She won a BAFTA for “Three Girls” and was nominated for another for “The C Word”. She also wrote the film “Wild Rose”, which earned several nominations at the British Independent Film Awards.

Molly Manners (“In My Skin”) and Kate Hewitt (“Life”) direct 7 of the 14 episodes between them.

All 14 episodes of “One Day” are out on Netflix.

NEW MOVIES

Past Lives (Showtime)
directed by Celine Song

Two childhood friends are torn apart when Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. They reunite for a week 20 years later, sparking complications in and reflections on their lives. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo star.

“Past Lives” is nominated for two Oscars, including Best Film and Best Original Screenplay. It’s the first feature film for writer-director Celine Song.

“Past Lives” is on Showtime. A reminder: some Paramount+ subscribers may have had Showtime added in the past year as part of their subscription.

Lisa Frankenstein (in theaters)
directed by Zelda Williams

This retrowave comedy sees a teenager and her crush struggle to maintain appearances when his corpse is resurrected. Diablo Cody writes.

Director Zelda Williams is perhaps best known for being the daughter of the late Robin Williams, but you’ve likely heard her work as a voice actor on series like “The Legend of Korra”. Writer Diablo Cody is, of course, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who wrote “Juno” and “Jennifer’s Body”, as well as creating the “United States of Tara”.

“Lisa Frankenstein” sees a wide release tomorrow, Friday Feb. 9.

Cat Person (Hulu)
directed by Susanna Fogel

Margot is a college student who starts dating a man who’s very different in real life from the man he portrays over texts. She misreads red flags and justifies them as quirk before it all starts going off the rails.

Susanna Fogel co-wrote “Booksmart” and “The Spy Who Dumped Me”, and directed the latter. She’s also directed on “The Flight Attendant”.

The streaming premiere of “Cat Person” is tomorrow, Friday Feb. 9.

The Marvels (Disney+)
directed by Nia DaCosta

The film was a lightning rod in theaters for a bunch of silly reasons, but was actually a pretty fun, uncomplicated romp that reminds me of superhero movies before they became homework. It combines three heroes, two of them new to film – Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, and Monica Rambeau. Brie Larsen, Iman Vellani, and Teyonah Parris star with Samuel L. Jackson and Zawe Ashton.

Director and co-writer Nia DaCosta also wrote and directed the 2021 “Candyman”.

“The Marvels” is out in its streaming premiere on Disney+.

Upgraded (Amazon)
directed by Carlson Young

Ana is upgraded on a work trip, which makes a handsome stranger mistake her for her boss. This sparks a romance, which is complicated when her lie starts to surface. The cast is quietly loaded: Camila Mendes, Archie Renaux, Marisa Tomei, Lena Olin, Anthony Head, and Thomas Kretschmann star.

Director Carlson Young previously helmed the experimental “The Blazing World”.

“Upgraded” premieres on Amazon Prime tomorrow, Friday Feb. 9.

Suncoast (Hulu)
directed by Laura Chinn

A teenager who’s caring for her brother must take him to a specialized care facility. There, she develops a friendship with an activist who’s protesting a landmark medical case. Nico Parker, Laura Linney, and Woody Harrelson star.

The film is based on writer-director Laura Chinn’s experience from the 2000s. It’s her feature debut, but she previously wrote and produced on series “The Mick” and “Florida Girls”.

“Suncoast” premieres on Hulu tomorrow, Friday Feb. 9.

Popular Theory (in theaters)
directed by Ali Scher

Disclosure: I’m friends with a family member of the director.

A genius girl named Erwin is the youngest student at her high school. A fellow science enthusiast helps her develop a chemical that shifts the social hierarchy there.

Ali Scher directs and co-writes.

“Popular Theory” is out in wide release tomorrow, Friday Feb. 9.

CW: transphobia

Lola (in theaters)
directed by Nicola Peltz Beckham

Lola works with one goal in mind: to get her younger sibling Arlo out of their toxic home. An unexpected crisis turns her plans on their head.

Nicola Peltz Beckham writes, directs, and stars in her feature debut.

“Lola” sees a limited release in theaters tomorrow, Friday Feb. 9.

Lost in Perfection (Netflix)
directed by Hsin Yin Sung

In this Taiwanese film, May starts investigating her father’s new fiancee Lan. Lan has had rich husbands die before, but it may or may not be her fault. Through her investigation of Lan, May confronts the other’s views on money and sex.

“Lost in Perfection” is out on Netflix.

Float (in theaters)
directed by Sherren Lee

After a woman nearly drowns in a small town, she falls for the lifeguard who rescued her. At the end of the summer, her feelings for him conflict with an opportunity to further her career. “Float” is based on the novel by Kate Marchant.

Director Sherren Lee also helmed episodes of “Kim’s Convenience” and “Murdoch Mysteries”.

“Float” is out in wide release tomorrow, Friday Feb. 9.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

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Quirky, Disturbing, and Unexpected — “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Two hopeful spies who are rejected by other agencies find one last opportunity. With whom? Someone who pays well enough for the details not to matter. The pair meet on their first day of marriage, posing as a couple in order to better work together under cover. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine star as John and Jane Smith.

Don’t confuse this for the 2005 movie starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. It’s “inspired by” that film, but the two barely have anything in common. And that’s fine. They’re both good, but in very different ways. Where that film followed two married spies who hid their jobs from each other, this one sees the pair of spies knowingly enter the marriage as a cover.

That’s not an enormous difference, but what makes the series truly unique is how dark the humor and drama delve. There are strokes of loneliness and desperation that feed into its quietly building tension, that make Jane and John feel strangely alone in this New York City. It captures both the aggressive sense of privacy needed to maintain your personal space in New York, and the resulting sense of isolation that can become inescapable when you’re surrounded by everyone, but no one in particular.

Episodes contain missions, ranging from a simple theft to arms running…but each turns into something different. A mission to a ski resort to observe a couple, bug their phones, and intercept a call is also a contemplation on the stages of relationships, a consideration of reality TV addiction, and a jarringly sudden touch on fear of loss – itself disarmed with a wildly inappropriate joke.

The action is built on a familiarization of suspense, how normal moments can grow tense in ways that we’ve all experienced, but gateway into violence that we haven’t. It creates a dissonant experience of realism and surrealism. The situation is familiar. The result isn’t. It’s all anchored by the humanism of showrunner Francesca Sloane’s writers room, but with the hinges oiled and loosened by directors like Hiro Murai (“Atlanta”) and Amy Seimetz (“The Girlfriend Experience”).

It can feel like looking at an Andrew Wyeth or Edward Hopper. The reality is recognizable, we could step into that moment and feel all the emotions of it, but that underlying tension, the escalation of the unknown, that’s existential, the kind of thing that – whether real or not – we’re built not to look at long, for our own good.

At its core are these two isolated people, whose job is to keep looking, to keep existing on that line, who find in each other some sort of refuge and safe space. The stranger things become, the more they rely upon each other. How much of their isolation is anxiety, and how much is sociopathy? If it’s the former, where’s the difference when their job entails murder? If it’s the latter, then why do they need each other?

The world outside them is so strange, so heartless, so threatening, and they are tasked to go into it for their own talents in being strange and heartless and threatening. We lose our window back to whatever’s normal. We just know they find solace in each other, and in that kind of world that makes us find solace in them.

Both Erskine and Glover are phenomenal in this. It’s a dialogue-driven show, but there isn’t much that’s strictly meant to be funny. As it gets toward the middle episodes, there are some breakaway comedic scenes, but they’re more punctuation than feature. They can feel a little forced sometimes, but the pair of them are too talented to let anything slide away from good. The bulk of the humor comes from situations that would normally be directed toward comedy but are instead shifted toward the unsettling. We laugh because these actors are extraordinarily funny, but also because the show generates nervousness to spare. It’s these moments where the dialogue feels most natural and unforced. It’s left to Erskine and Glover to make these scenes human enough that we find them funny, their foibles comforting and their inside jokes endearing even as they wade through horror.

The supporting cast is perfect for a series that slips between as many cracks as this one does: Paul Dano, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman, Sarah Paulson, Wagner Moura, John Turturro, Alexander Skarsgard, Eiza Gonzalez. Every one of them can play comedy and drama, find where the two meet and dissolve into each other, can turn small talk into comfort or discomfort, and comfort into love, discomfort into threat.

Few shows achieve this sense of us against the universe, because it poses the world itself as difficult to know. Stories tend to want you to know their world and feel comfortable navigating your way through that world. The world of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is hostile, too recognizable, too close. Not horrible, just…strange and overwhelming and buzzing, with occasional horrible things in it. A reflection isn’t an escape. There’s a sense of dissociation, of the spareness of the world outside, of entering into a place that’s more hostile than agreed, of a broken promise of norms that were only stories anyway.

There’s a reverberating echo to “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” that feels like what the world can feel like. It’s alarming in a way that expects us not to raise alarm. It’s not what we agree to. It separates us from ourselves. What was real flecks away like paint that hasn’t been maintained. That raw nerve faintly pressed, that way of harnessing our anxiety and turning it away from kindness, of whispering it toward that dissonance, toward that dissociation, and finally toward harm – that is the modern feeling of the world “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” captures, perhaps better than any show I’ve seen. The romance works because it’s the only place that kindness can still thrive, and it works for us because we desperately need to know that kindness can still thrive.

Not every piece of the show works, but what does is brilliant, unsettling, engrossing art. Yet for how disquieting it is, there is a strange comfort in it, a way it recognizes the world at its worst and agrees that we’re not mistaken for wanting something different from it, that we’re not alone when we start to lose sight of what that was.

“Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is on Amazon Prime.

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