The two most daring and accomplished American movies of the year are also, at first glance, the most dissimilar. RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” stunningly drawn from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, sustains a rigorous first-person perspective—toggling between two principal characters, both Black teen-agers incarcerated at a juvenile-reformatory facility in Jim Crow-era Florida—to achieve the most lyrical feat of literary adaptation in many a moon. Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man” is a darkly deranged comic fantasia, assembled from a grab bag of mad-scientist horrors, Woody Allen meta-conceits, Roman Polanski paranoiacs, and various barbed, discourse-baiting ideas about authenticity, privilege, and artistic integrity. It’s a patchwork, but one that keeps accumulating ever more brilliant and elaborate patterns of meaning. No spoilers here, but each movie builds to a high-wire moment of physical and psychological transference, while expanding the conceptual possibilities of audience identification—both inside and outside the frame.
In which myth becomes breathtakingly modern—and utterly sui generis. The Italian director Alice Rohrwacher rediscovers Orpheus and Eurydice under the Tuscan sun in “La Chimera,” a romantic adventure in which a present-day tomb raider (Josh O’Connor, never better) digs deep for his lost love. Far more explicitly, the German filmmaker Angela Schanelec revisits Oedipus Rex in “Music,” a meticulously plotted riddle about a man who is swept up, with astonishing swiftness and zero exposition, in an ordeal he can scarcely comprehend. The gods prove cruel but not omnipotent, and the modern settings exert their own redemptive pull; the final effect is that of a magic trick, in which the characters manage, in each film’s miraculous closing moments, to slip the bonds of tragedy.
8. “No Other Land”
Two galvanic portraits of mass displacement and dehumanization that generated passionate acclaim and furious blowback. In the harrowing, multi-threaded drama “Green Border,” the veteran filmmaker Agnieszka Holland reveals the Polish-Belarusian boundary to be its own circle of geopolitical Hell, where refugees are abused, politically weaponized, and subject to never-ending horrors; the result is a drama of extraordinary tension and lucid anger, but also of clear-eyed pragmatism, particularly when the focus shifts toward the work of Polish activists, who help whomever they can in impossible circumstances. Activism is also central to the bracing, infuriating documentary “No Other Land,” which details a moving friendship between two men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, as they turn cameras on the Israeli government’s demolition of homes in the occupied southern West Bank. The four filmmakers—a Palestinian-Israeli collective, consisting of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor—were brave enough to keep filming; with any luck, a U.S. distributor will muster even an ounce of their courage.
11. “Hard Truths”
The Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia, in her emotionally overflowing narrative début, “All We Imagine as Light,” inflects fine-grained storytelling with a documentarian’s resourcefulness and insight. In “Hard Truths,” his latest film of many, the English director Mike Leigh hones and intensifies a signature workshop process that empowers his actors to plumb rare depths of emotional truth. What emerged from these realist exercises were two of the year’s most trenchant dramas about women, marked by harmoniously balanced acting—from Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in “All We Imagine as Light,” and from Marianne Jean-Baptiste (in the performance of the year) and Michele Austin in “Hard Truths.” Their work affirms the rewards of female solidarity without pretending that the road to happiness is ever anything, in the end, but a personal journey.
And to make an even twenty, here are nine honorable mentions, in alphabetical order:
Sean Baker’s virtuoso farce rivals Radu Jude’s as a portrait of a working girl driven to gig-economy extremes; in Mikey Madison, a star is born.
Steve McQueen’s beautifully composed drama shows us war through a Black child’s eyes, and it’s a revelation.
“The Brutalist”
Brady Corbet built it, and you should come—for its classical sweep, its visual majesty, but, most of all, for Guy Pearce.
“Dahomey”
Mati Diop’s brilliantly conceived documentary, about a historic act of postcolonial repatriation, gives everyone (and I do mean everyone) a voice.
“Here”
The Belgian director Bas Devos renews your appetite—for soup, for companionship, and for cinema that treads lightly yet lingers deep in the memory.
“Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell”
Watching this staggering début feature, from the Vietnamese filmmaker Phạm Thiên Ân, is like riding a motorcycle through a ghostly landscape between town and country, reality and dream, the living and the dead.
In Annie Baker’s pitch-perfect first film, a mother and a daughter drift beautifully out of alignment.
For Francis Ford Coppola to realize this gloriously bonkers fever-dream project required decades of patience and, in the end, a good share of his own Northern California vineyards. Fittingly, its most art-averse detractors responded with an awful lot of whine.
“A Real Pain”
Jesse Eisenberg’s wonderful tourist-de-force comedy, in which he and Kieran Culkin play cousins on a trip through Poland, lightly ponders the weight of individual suffering, historical trauma, and the vast chasm that swallows and unites them. ♦
