The Message is the Medium: Favorites of 2024

It was announced in February of last year that at 78, writer/director John Waters would return to filmmaking with his first feature since 2004’s A Dirty Shame. He adapted his own novel, Liarmouth, reportedly writing a strong script with lots of great John Waters-y flavor and tapped Aubrey Plaza to star in the project. But in November it was announced that the production was no-go due to a lack of funding. I regard Waters as a national treasure and a true auteur. I also respect him as an author, a queer icon a cultural historian, and for never compromising. I’m not sure he gets talked about enough as a filmmaker who struggles to only make the kind of film he wants to make; fighting for his vision and sticking by his regular players. For my money, he’s also the most purely American filmmaker I can think of, and while I’m sure budgeting is always an issue in producing his subversive confections, the thought that funding channels won’t give this iconic filmmaker money to make a film is more than a little despairing. How much can a Waters film cost to make?

Meanwhile, it seems as if half the movies playing in a theater at a given time are A24 productions – many of them navel-gazing delivery systems for relatively nonthreatening political messages, purposely oblique and unreal so as to telegraph the notion of “ART!” to mass audiences. American art tends to be marked by a vulgarity and obviousness, which never offends ambiguity-adverse ticket buyers. Can A24 not cough up some budget money to get into the John Waters business? Or do they think audiences may struggle with the charm and sweetness, the personal brand of perversity found in genuine Camp, as opposed to the film-school Camp trimmings of an overwrought pile-driver like The Substance? Are audiences really no better than studios at recognizing and appreciating actual cinematic transgressions within a market saturated with the kind of phony, cooked-up transgressions the studios manufacture?

I generally don’t mess with the Franchise Industrial Complex when I go to the movies because the product bores me. But I’m also more than a little annoyed with supposedly original material that doesn’t even try for basic plausibility, which I’m supposed to excuse because There’s An Important Point To Be Made. I tend to respond most enthusiastically to film experiences that make me look at the world I live in or myself in a new way. But when so many releases see every calculated moment endowed with “MEANING!” or “SOCIAL SIGIFIGANCE!”, the results can be every bit as crushingly boring. What the audience is supposed to accept or overlook simply because of the primacy of the message makes for the dullest kind of experience. It tells us that we go to “serious” films to be messaged at and that this is all Serious Art is for: saying something, as opposed to doing or being or standing for something.

Worse yet, the messages are too copiously buried under abstraction to motivate people to do anything about them. What is the effect of all this heightened awareness - these abstractions without nuance? What good are pleas for humanism, rationality, tolerance and understanding if they don’t lead to the better world their makers supposedly want? A film that calls people to take direct action, or steers people towards agency, would be steering them away from the frivolous things in life like fashionable consumption, which would be a Capitalism No-No. So the key is to place just enough political messaging inside a project to make people take it seriously and think that seeing it constitutes doing something about the problem but not so directly or consequentially that it affects profit margins. Talking about or thinking about the problem as a substitute for doing something about it. Essentially, the audience must be stroked.

More people might know when they’re being stroked than studio executives realize. More people might be put off by it than Hollywood wants to admit. Maybe this is why a nasty picture about a clown cutting women up did good business at the box office this Halloween. There’s a hack honesty to its contempt for humanity. Everything that happens in it is unprovoked and free of context – a geek show for incels (I saw the first Terrifier, decided I didn’t need to bother with any of the others). Its appeal comes from the fact that it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is. It’s refreshingly meaningless.

This is why Capital is always uneasy with the idea of “Art.” Art is a risky way of making money, requiring a lot of dressing up to not threaten the bottom line. The appearance of relevance or profundity must be formulated and standardized. This way, people think they’ve addressed the despair characterizing 21st century life just by watching something. Considering the way arts are taught in America, it’s no surprise that fear and mistrust of Art are part of our national character. So Art must be obvious and vulgar enough, with each element calculated and under control. And it must announce itself loudly as an Art Film, so a badly educated public won’t feel threatened by it OR motivated to change its consumption habits. Artistic flourishes, those moments in the movie where something is intriguingly unreal and open-ended, must come in at designated points in the film, be easily decodable enough, and they must not last too long. Studios like A24 trade entirely in this over-calculated, self-serious, Art-By-Numbers output, and now others are following their lead.

Politically charged social commentaries are typically housed inside toothless abstractions (like revolutions against fascism relegated to the stuff of fantasy like Star Wars, Hunger Games, Harry Potter and other cash cow teen fictions). We don’t see a movie about black self-actualization or a black uprising unless it’s in Black Panther. A movie dealing with cultural and institutional forms of racism had better be a genre piece made by Jordan Peele, in which the demands of horror movies and thrillers deaden and water down the filmmaker’s urgent and worthy concerns (“fun” wins out over the invention of something like Nickel Boys, which finds an original and enticing way to powerfully relate a hellish black experience while intentionally avoiding slave plantation imagery). We don’t see in movies how we can prevent social breakdown, only what happens after it starts in Civil War, a film with almost no interest in how the world got that way. We don’t get an examination of religion unless it’s in a cynical piece of non-art like Heretic - this year’s Barbarian. It’s never real for a second but rather a wind-up toy cooked up by clever screenwriters and there’s no potential for story or commentary unless everything happens in the exact contrived way that it happens. We don’t get any kind of information on how to actually disempower the ultra-rich - we only watch their unprovoked suffering in Saltburn, or root against them as every inhuman movie villain. In short, we don’t get a way out. We get stroked. Nothing that would directly lead to us alleviate the despair characterizing this era outside of a movie theater seems allowable for mass consumption inside a movie theater - another form of American denial with its own disastrous consequences.

Despite being an established filmmaker with name recognition among moviegoers, the major producers and financiers (who know next to nothing nothing about movies) have no idea what John Waters is going to do or what kind of film he might make. His ideas come from fertile collaborations with his cast, and his imaginative, cheerful mixture of vaudeville and exploitation. He can’t be paved over by calculation, or have any message in his work juiced up, simplified or mainstreamed for easier consumption because any metaphors he employs are too free and idiosyncratic for that treatment and because studios are still convinced at this point that Americans just don’t get Camp. To those parties clutching the purse strings, he’s seen as nothing more than a risk. So this artist, who I would argue is in a way, an actual artistic militant, who can lift us up by showing us how therapeutic it can be to crystalize our revenge fantasies creatively, who with his band of high-school outcasts can genuinely delight us with “the filthiest people alive,” gets no money to make a film because it’s too risky. I would welcome the guerilla filmmaking revolutionaries in his Cecil B. Demented if they were ever to surface.

Waters isn’t the only one without an assured place in showbusiness heaven. Francis Ford Coppola had to put up entirely his own money to make Megalopolis. Only a great and confident filmmaker could make something so gauchely bombastic – it’s not successful but I was too dazzled by its grandeur to really hate it. The horrendous treatment of Clint Eastwood and his Juror #2 at the hands of Warner Brothers with its new CEO - following a merger with Discovery Inc - is still more evidence of the lack of respect for established filmmakers. A studio can lose hundreds of millions on another Marvel turd, but if Eastwood’s Cry Macho makes 16.5 million back on a 33-million-dollar budget, he’s lucky to get week-long theatrical release for his new movie at all? Clint Eastwood? It was far too hard to see the new Mike Leigh film, Hard Truths, which is on my Best List for this year, because distributors and festivals refused to deal with it. Do they think a movie about an insufferable person automatically means the movie must be insufferable? And on and on: I have to hunt for David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, travel to the suburbs for Spanish master Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, be at one theater when the sun hits it at the just the right time of day for Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada all for the crime these old masters committed of forgoing peonage to selfhood in favor of ambiguity and the freedom to make up my own mind about the material.

Maybe Waters will get to make his film one day. I don’t know. But I can’t help but think that the ever-tightening stranglehold that the people holding the purse strings have on commercial filmmaking and releasing at the moment mirrors the stranglehold that ultra-wealthy oligarchs have on our laws and governments, and by extension our lives and destinies. Either way, denial is what makes the whole thing perpetuate, with “it’s business” as the perpetual justification. Hollywood entertainment has historically been either behind or ahead of the times and at this moment it’s woefully behind. There is so much that needs to be not just said but done. Oligarchs have seized control of the United States and Hollywood ‘s messaging still amounts to: “Have the courage to be who you are!”

Marshall McLuhan’s now universally known passage from his 1964 text Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, presented the idea that The Medium is the Message – emphasizing that the communication medium itself is the most psychologically influential element of media and the most worthy of study, not the messages it carries. In the 21st century, I would argue we’re seeing a reversal of that notion within artistic mediums. Renegade journalist Chris Hedges wrote an article observing that corporate news organizations now essentially work backwards. They ask themselves how their readers want to feel about a certain subject, and then they produce something to that effect. In other words, they’re stroking their audience. I feel as if major studios work the same way – a screenwriter is hired to convey certain non-threatening, quasi-liberal messages and then a story or a fantasy or a biography is cooked up for that message before a director is brought on board. Essentially, The Message is the Medium. Cinema as a polemic extension of a logline.

The films I’ve placed on my best list for 2024 felt free of that thinking, and I’m noting common themes of striving upwards (both for filmmakers and their subjects), questioning and even rewriting the official history, treating pleasure and custom with suspicion, challenging the order of things, confronting who we are at this moment, finding ways to live in this scary world. This time, I’ve not numbered them. There are ten, but I’ve given them no rank. I’m presenting them in the order in which I’ve written them.

You can be taken to deep places in cinema without being stroked or pandered to. Below are ten great examples:

Universal Language – Dir: Matthew Rankin

Matthew Rankin belongs to the sparse collection of filmmakers who can create a whole cinematic world out of the existing materials of the one we currently occupy. Everything in his depiction of Tehran-by-way-of-Winnipeg (or is it the other way around?) is familiar but strikingly just a bit off. The sophistication of his visual language - bodies vivisected or hemmed in by brutalist architecture - recalls Jacques Tati at his most ambitious. But where a film like Playtime offered suggestions on how to liberate city dwellers or least help them cope with the absurd spatial constrictions in modern urban life, Rankin is interested in something less tangible. This Rosetta Stone of misdirection and situation substitution makes his loosely-connected, randomly-shuffled human gallery of stymied Middle Eastern Canadian urbanites into a canvas for exploring the arbitrary nature and purpose of perhaps literally everything: nationality, religion, community, money, language, ritual, morality, social cues, architecture, customs, civics, economy and identity.

It's mounted with such confidence - some ingenious set design (familiar yet unfamiliar), a dry sense of humor befitting of a Roy Anderson or Aki Kaurismäki, and beautifully framed exterior spaces and structures so blasé, it’s hard to believe they weren’t designed by the filmmakers. You feel as if anything can happen, because there's no prior film you can use as a reference point, and there’s enough of the right kind of ambiguity which makes for the most exciting moviegoing experience there is. Universal Language may be seeking to unravel our deepest-set ideas about what constitutes society and consciousness, or it may be a film doing nothing more than asking “Why is it all like this? Why isn't everything different?” Either way, it's consistently fascinating and beautiful. And it contains the best use of The Guess Who's “These Eyes” you're likely to ever see in a movie.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat – Dir: Johan Grimonprez

A stunning fusion of jazz and revolutionary politics, brilliantly articulated from multiple angles, makes this the most sobering and compulsively watchable documentary I've seen this year. We follow the struggle for independence in the newly formed Democratic Republic of Congo. The nation's first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, is undermined at every turn by a corrupted UN, and the imperialist hegemony of its former colonizer, Belgium, along with Britain and the US. The process of the Congo’s independence and by extension, African decolonization, is cutting into the bottom line of western superpower nations who want to plunder Congo’s uranium mines for the nuclear weapons necessary for the looming Cold War arms race.

At the same time, American jazz artists are touring abroad, playing some of the first jazz concerts in African nations as well as behind the Iron Curtain. Artists like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie are then seen as de facto ambassadors and expounders of the American way. The innovations and liberation from structures in jazz ties in with the political struggle for freedom. Jazz itself is seen as both a lament for a history of oppression and subjugation and an expression of collective strength and pride in Black America that extends to the African Diaspora.

The film contains no interviews and no narration. Director Johan Grimonprez and his team build the story they want to tell out of archival footage from musical performances, UN sessions, press conferences and newsreels and lace it with annotated quotations from artists, colonizers and revolutionaries alike (flashed less briefly than those in Ken Jacobs' Star Spangled To Death, but no less effectively), presenting the movie as a piece of thoroughly researched journalism. A line of logic also begins to present itself in the way sequences are edited - a cut from Nikita Khrushchev famously banging on a UN podium in protest of western Imperialism cuts to Louis Armstrong shuffling his feet in front of an audience. Rhyming images make similar declarations of freedom. Revolutionaries and jazz artists both must pull ideas and inspiration out of the ether, receptive to who they’re serving and the relationship they have with them. The associations come fast and dense in a film that seems to be thinking on its own, entirely within a musical structure. As a historical indictment, it’s incendiary. As an essay on the power of music, it’s an eye opener. As a piece of film assembly, it's extraordinary.

His Three Daughters – Dir: Azazel Jacobs

The feeling for complex family relationships that Azazel Jacobs - one of the best American filmmakers working today - brings to his stories has a theatrical flavor in His Three Daughters that I found rich and invigorating. It's a film that will make you want to see a play: the staging, the dialogue, the use of the apartment space where three sisters of different ages and personalities spend time caring for their ailing father in his final days. There are unresolved issues they must work out between them before they can really grieve. We try to mourn our elders while they're alive, if only to soften the coming blow, but it's easier said than done. The sisters with very different temperaments are played by Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen, who are all perfectly attuned to the material (to say nothing to the excellent work of the rest of the small cast). One senses a lot of exploration in rehearsal for the shoot; games played as a lead into story, in which the actors bring their ideas and experiences in to create these rich characters (like an unrushed stage production). It might be why the characters in a Jacobs film are always people I know.

It's because time was allotted for adding personal touches to these characters and a love for theatrical reflexes in general - like the moments when the sisters’ conversations lapse in and out of gibberish - a theatre exercise I remember from my own training to teach us how little the actual words matter in our overall expression. There is so much insight here into the behavioral modes people go into when faced with the terminal illness of a loved one. The things we do when we mourn or are preparing to mourn: aggrandizing small, inconsequential details, shit-talking, nitpicking, micromanaging others, numbing ourselves or just tuning out. And all the while the dead and the dying are agents of change in our lives, completely ignorant of their profound effects on our inner selves and, in a sequence that made my hair stand on end, might even want to have their own say in our process. I wanted to hug this movie – it’s the kind of film I feel comfortable recommending to strangers on the street.

Perfect Days – Dir: Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders and his star Kōji Yakusho filmed personal introductions for each repertory cinema playing Perfect Days and that personal touch underlines the care that went into this film about finding beauty in everyday things, which gradually enters sublime territory. Like the films of Yasujiro Ozu, one of Wenders’ heroes, it's deceptively simple - spare and natural but made with a great deal of contemplation and style. The world depicted in the Japanese setting feels both fanciful and cinematic (right down to the public toilets serviced by Yakusho’s municipal custodian, unstained by any human expulsions) and life size at the same time. Realistically unreal. Yakusho’s toilet cleaner Hirayama listens to music on cassettes he buys from the same store, takes photographs, reads books in the park, patronizes the same soda machine and noodle stand each day. Routine and repetition don’t feel like tedium or oppression in this light (as I used to think they are) but more like paths to inner peace and surprisingly, freedom.

Hirayama lives humbly and simply - placing his phone on a ledge by his downstairs front door hints at the place modern tech occupies in his life. A younger co-worker teases Hirayama’s antiquated tastes. The young woman tagging along with the co-worker prefers Hirayama’s company, finds his taste in music interesting. There are chance encounters, episodes, vignettes, a suggestion of an earlier life that went badly. The depiction of dreams – evocatively rendered in fuzzy black and white – as our brain’s confusing way of processing our days and our existence are beautifully done. The rest of the film is so gorgeously shot and lit by Franz Lustig in every vibrant shade of blue imaginable. At its core, this what movies do best; find beauty in the everyday, use what is familiar to give shape to what lies beyond our existence. The finite occupying the negative space of the infinite, joy and pain occupying a coterminous presence in every moment of precious life (in an unforgettable final facial tableaux). It’s pure cinema, made with immense humanity and empathy.

Hundreds of Beavers – Dir: Mike Cheslik

Can I call a film a masterpiece if a good portion of its effect can be attributed to its presentation rather than the actual film? Director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews went ride or die with their roadshow presentation, driving around to independent theaters around the country (AND Canada). They would build their audience city by city, closing the show with Q&A sessions interrupted by star’s wrestling with people costumed as the beavers and rabbits from the movie, who could be seen strutting around the lobby high-fiving patrons before the show. Those same costumed animals are sought after in the film by Cole Tews’ brewer-turned-DIY-fur-trapper in this smorgasbord of zany slapstick. It’s a stew pot with Looney Tunes (specifically Bob McKimson and Tex Avery) for a stock base, and liberal doses of Monty Python, Benny Hill, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and surprisingly, the logic of video games (leveling up, equipment upgrades). It’s almost like an introduction to comedic roots of cinema for a generation that grew up playing video games.

The audience I saw it with went wild: cheering, participating, howling with laughter, seemingly in unison. The ability of Cheslik and his touring troupe to get their audience working with them is highly laudable, even noble in this detached media landscape. In their fear of losing overseas dollars, big studios don't make comedies anymore - a shameful trend when you see what a movie like this accomplishes in black & white and virtually without spoken dialogue. Beavers’ onslaught of gags involving tracks in the snow, pinecones, icicles, spittoons, homemade traps, Rube Goldberg-style injuries, chases by sled or log rolling (to name a few of many) are entirely visual, making them potentially approachable to audiences worldwide. Gags repeated throughout the film seem to happen in sequence, each time with variations and different outcomes, suggesting a machine learning process or different instruments improvising with the same chord progressions, making Hundreds of Beavers hilarious, yes, but also fascinating to watch as it tries to keep topping itself.

And yet, not viewing the film in a theater doesn't seem to have the same effect. Responses from friends and peers who streamed it at home have been mixed. If anything, it makes the case for seeing films in a theater with an audience as the optimum experience. There were moments when my laughter ceased to be simply responsive and became reflexive and reflective - something coming from the sheer delight of the experience as a whole. How many times has that happened to you at a movie in 2024?

All We Imagine As Light – Dir: Payal Kapadia

The sophomore effort of director Payal Kapadia finds her continued exploration of and identification with Mumbai working women. Her documentary, A Night of Knowing Nothing, saw her fully attuned to the sense of isolation and disaffection in 21st century India – remarkable for a debut feature. The first Indian film in the main competition at Cannes in 30 years, All We Imagine as Light feels even more passionate and confident. Kapadia is interested in female lives lived in longing, worn down by tedious work, chiseled by private pain, with the repressive nature of life in a nation currently gripped by authoritarian nationalism as the backdrop. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are roommates working different jobs at the same hospital. Prabha’s husband, working abroad in Germany, patronizingly sends her a rice cooker despite not trying to contact her in months. Anu’s excitement about her new relationship with Shiaz (Hridu Haroon) is limited and perpetually precarious as his being a Muslim and she Hindu in a racist society means they can’t hook up or be together in the open.

We see how life in this society is stifled by its false promises of success and happiness. We feel the constriction, both physical and emotional, of Indian patriarchy and theocracy, and the sense of passivity people have to foster in order to cope. It would be bleak were Kapadia not to suggest with genuine hope the possibility of autonomy and opportunity offered by distance from the deceptive allure of Mumbai. We must find ways of bursting our own bubbles, best done together with those we love. The catharsis Kapadia and her wonderful cast demonstrate is possible is rendered with simple and understated poetics, while never betraying a deeply held political conviction. Exploring how people endure in the face of hardship is a noble thing that movies do. This Mumbai could stand for any 21st century city, and these characters could be any of us blinkered urbanites trying to survive the escalating entropy that’s constantly threatening to render us obsolete. This is profound work, deserving of your full attention.

Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell – Dir: Phạm Thiên Ân

The debut feature for director Phạm Thiên Ân has a style reminiscent of Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (I find the term “slow cinema” somewhat pejorative). Long takes, a contemplative tone, evocative imagery on the process of change and metamorphosis, in both nature and the man-made world. The attentive, imaginative sound design even recalls Weerasethakul. Winning the Camera D’Or at Cannes in 2023, as those filmmakers did in previous years, one gets the sense that southeast Asian filmmakers have a view of the world and of filmmaking that captures the hearts of festival audiences and judges. An open viewer will respond to the quasi-documentary style with its discursive exploration into the abyss of the human soul, nature, the afterlife, and the wisdom of rural people with a spiritual connection to the land they live on. Ghosts and living people have an uneasy relationship on the same plane.

Thiên (Lê Phong Vũ) travels from Saigon to the rural village where he grew up for a funeral for his sister-in-law, who was killed in an auto accident, accompanied by Dao (Nguyễn Thịnh), her five-year-old son. The physical journey and the spiritual journey inherent in his immersion in the countryside and interactions with locals – including, in a key scene, an old woman who relates the experience of her soul when she was briefly dead – deepens as an inquisition into the disappearance of Thiên’s long-missing brother comes to the emotional foreground. There are images of extreme beauty, in a story whose unabashed religious and ecological significance fits the humbling or flattening of the ego of its main character. Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell is not a perfect film. It’s not always a streamlined or graceful effort, and in some spots less mysterious and intriguing than it should be. But this is such an exciting first feature for a filmmaker, clearly announcing an intent to deepen the exploration of themes in the work of his regional contemporaries, leaving an indelible impression on all those ready to tune in to his wavelength.

Dahomey – Dir: Mati Diop

Touching on the alarming themes present in many of the most striking features from 2024 (history is fraught with theft and exploitation, the world of appearances is deceptive and fraudulent, violence and division frame much of 21st century human experience, crucial information is always tainted or omitted), Mati Diop takes a daring and experimental approach to political issues and the conversations we’re having at the moment with Dahomey. No good news is without complication in this cinematic era, and the history we’re taught and the art that arrives for our consideration is fraught with ethical questions. Like Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, the looting of historical artifacts is viewed with equal parts speculation and condemnation.

But this film goes further, I think, in asking not simply whether restitution to the wronged parties can be made and by and to whom, but what restitution actually is. Diop has absorbed deeply the various questions of how the process of historical restitution can be carried though outside of notions of oblivion and denial that frame post-colonial debates. The answer, judging by this stunning film, which seeks to reappropriate and rewrite history as a means of dismantling the legacy of colonialism, is multi-faceted. Her examination of restitution efforts is physical, intellectual and spiritual in nature, its process narrated in the film by one of the recovered statues in one of many powerful small touches.

We’re informed that objects belonging to the West African kingdom of Dahomey are being returned from a museum in Paris to one in Benin, part of a larger global movement surrounding museums returning loot and the cultural ancestry it represents back to the nations from which they were looted. We see a university discussion about the meaning and efficacy of returning the objects leading to a larger discussion about how to honor the native tribes. The legacy of colonialization and slavery and plundering of the natural resources of their homeland is still a deep wound, a source of shame and anger. In 2024, Diop told Sight & Sound that she was “haunted by all the energy it took me to emancipate myself from a certain hegemonic culture.” The restitution is important (the audience shares the experience of being wrapped and packaged in the same crates with the objects), but so is the discussion held by Benin students, as debate and free speech are being threatened with censorship by the government. That these discussions exist on film at all feels like a militant act on the part of Diop, nobly transmitting a vital historical and cultural interrogation, whose battles are still being fought and whose reverberations are still being felt today.

Hard Truths – Dir. Mike Leigh

I think Mike Leigh’s depictions of the messiness of human behavior - of the people in our lives who frustrate us so much that we sometimes have to laugh - was so corrosive and unsettling this time around, it affected his ability to get adequate releasing for this film. His pretty and well-researched historical epics about the Peterloo Massacre or painter J.M.W. Turner go down much easier with audiences, whereas distributors in the business of packaging movies for mass consumption don’t know what to do with this kind of Leigh project. It was turned down by the festivals in Cannes, Venice, and even the normally welcoming Telluride. That it opened in one theater here in Chicago is shameful, especially for what I feel is the worthiest kind of art – the proverbial Rock In One’s Shoe. The British writer/director of 27 films and numerous stage plays must have thought at first that he’d made a real clunker. But trusting in his no-frills approach to observing and attempting to understand complicated and seemingly hopeless human subjects, he turns in something so painful and awkward that can also be so downright hilarious and real. Picture a movie steeped in the feeling behind every inappropriate laugh you’ve ever had at a funeral. There’s no flashy technique to speak of, but Leigh goes emotionally where most directors don’t even dare. I haven’t squirmed so much at a film this year, never had to reevaluate my assumptions so often and so fully while I watched something. It’s a film you come out of shaken and incredulous, and then one week later you’re astonished by it.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste (of Leigh’s Secrets & Lies), in a performance that is some kind of tour-de-force, plays one of the most unpleasant, exhausting characters I have ever seen in a movie. She berates her family, strangers, patient salespeople and everything in sight in every scene. She is constantly dialed up to 11, finding fault in everything and everyone, completely unaware of the emotional damage she inflicts. We wonder how her defeated husband (David Webber) and home body son (Tuwaine Barrett) can still stand to be in the house with her. She seems to hate people not despite their cheeriness but because of it. She’s relentless and almost seems too belligerent to be real, until Leigh illustrates how this kind of person, who can make day-to-day life so depressing and stressful for the rest of us, is always the most unhappy, the most anguished, the most let down by life. How draining it is to be angry all the time. The lengths some people will go protect themselves. The last scene is perfect. Does it look to you like this woman will finally capitulate? You tell me.

Leigh plays no tricks. There’s no sleight of hand. The film is so totally of the moment, yet the same arrangement of shots and scenes could have been assembled 20 years ago. Everything is just truthful and organic and motivated by an emotional feeling about what’s going on and what the options and possibilities are. Leigh gives people the freedom to be people. He only works with character actors, and it’s easy to see why. That so many people in film distribution who may or may not be aware that their decisions control our culture chose not to deal with a film like this might be its biggest artistic strength. The movies that make the biggest impression on us are the ones that complicate anything simplistic we want to say about them.

Pictures of Ghosts – Dir: Kleber Mendonça Filho

Watching Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film again, I think it explores the role that structuring absences play in our lives. Cinema can be like memories of people we never knew, where ghosts live again on screen for a brief period, their figures lit by the light of a 35mm projector. “The bizarre thing about 35mm is that it’s almost ageless,” says the Brazilian director of Bacarau and Aquarius. There’s a bit of sentimentality on his part in this fascinating essay which draws connections between civic and personal history, between multiple forms of “ghosts”. When the places that show movies disappear, it’s hard to say what they accomplished. They were buildings, once teeming with energy, where people gathered and were transfixed on other worlds for a while; delighted, scared, aroused, captivated. They have their life cycle, just like the people attending. How do those memories inform or shape the lives of the people who saw the movies all those years ago? Where now can we look for evidence of their effect? Do people remember what the theaters were like?

Filho’s mediates on multiple spectral presences in his hometown of Recife, not the sprawling travel destination of a Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, but a substantial enough city to have a vibrant culture in which properties and structures vanish all the time (a process excused as “progress” with its own kind of violence to it). It’s as if they never existed. We see the evolution of the apartment where Filho grew up. He speaks of the influence of his left-wing activist mother, seen in TV interviews and home video footage. A neighborhood dog that barked incessantly was heard barking years after it had died, thanks to a neighbor’s TV station playing one of Filho’s early films shot at the house in which the dog was heard barking – cinema as and exorcist. Governments change, but the act of going to the movies stays the same. The film speculates on the guiding belief that the local cinema builds a community’s character. The spaces that house movies have a residual power.

I have a particular affinity for this essayistic kind of feature, perhaps because of the insights proffered by blurring the lines between documentary nonfiction and scripted fiction – the latter evidenced in the film’s poetic Night-on-Earth-esque coda with Filho and his Uber driver, still another kind of ghost. Filho’s narration is lucid and his assemblage of home video footage, and newsreel and archival footage with evocative uses of sound make Pictures of Ghosts compulsively watchable. A film about a cinematic subject at a time when the closing of local movie houses threatens to turn moviegoing into a niche activity that is itself, totally cinematic and dreamy. I can’t think of a more effective tribute.

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