popsublime: favorite films

None of the five films that I’m including here as favorites from 2025 were movies that I ever thought that I’d be writing about for my year-end post, not even remotely, and three of them are contenders only because 2025 was the weakest year for cinema thus far in my 52-year lifetime. A couple of them I’ll be writing about only in part, one for its central performance, and another for its final twenty minutes or so. This was a year in which I saw Wicked: For Good twenty (yes, twenty) times in cinemas, a personal record that I doubt I’d ever have broken were 2025 not such an underwhelming year for cinema as art (vs. mere commerce). I’m championing these five films because in most cases they were ignored, not taken seriously, or even outright ridiculed. Audiences in general can’t be relied upon as any kind of critical barometer anymore at all, neither mainstream audiences nor critical audiences. Do the majority of people these days know cinema history and critical history well enough to do the actual work? No, they do not, which only makes me even more proud of how bizarre, eclectic, disparate, and surprising this list of my five favorite films of 2025 truly is.

Tonatiuh, who stunningly portrays Molina (and Molina’s imaginary, fictionalized counterpart) in Bill Condon’s spectacular musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman, should rightly become a massive star, and I predict that he/they will. Tonatiuh acts, dances, emotes, and sings the hell out of this role, and the fact that this movie has been so unjustly overlooked is pure downright homophobia, y’all. Produced by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Diego Luna, this so-called remake is miles and miles ahead of its 1985 predecessor. (I mean, William Hurt got an Oscar for Best Actor for playing Molina? Get real, Academy! Give Tonatiuh EVERY DAMN THING, or I will simply lose my mind.) I’m totally convinced that the reason this movie has been cruelly and almost entirely ignored is because it’s a tender, moving, and somewhat unprecedented gay/trans love story. Watch it, and you’ll know exactly that I mean. This world has a lot of catching up to do.

Diego Luna’s performance as the Argentinian political prisoner Valentin is equally multifaceted and exact. He inhabits his role in a manner that’s both full of heart and replete with talent, in that he sings & dances expertly (while making it come across intentionally as semi-amateurish), menaces, becomes a heartthrob after first being a stubborn fool who cannot be loved but then finally is loved because he opens himself up to it. What a joy to watch the kind of character transformation that we so rarely see in cinema these days. Through to the film’s final image, Luna ably and fully carries the torch of understanding for both his own character AND Tonatiuh’s, to the extent that their relationship in the film bears the burden of real historical meaning, especially with regard to trans-identified individuals, their romantic and sexual desires, and their intimate relationships. It’s revealing that during their audition conversation via Zoom, Diego Luna told Tonatiuh (who’d prepared multiple elaborate scenarios for the occasion) simply to relax and have a conversation with him. That sort of humanity and mutual respect shines through both of their performances, ultimately, and buoys the movie in ways that very few films are successfully borne by their actors anymore. (And yes, Jennifer Lopez is excellent as the Spider Woman. Mindless detractors, please go away.)

Black Phone 2 is the film that I’m most perplexed ended up in this post. While I thought the first Black Phone installment (adapted from Stephen King’s son Joe Hill’s suspenseful yet sparkless story) was tolerable, it was kind of just an archetypal (yet intelligent enough) retread of the whole “abducted boy trapped in a disgusting basement dungeon who fights his way out and kills the killer” horror movie staple. Black Phone 2 is on another level entirely, and that’s largely due to its distinctive setting: a wintertime Christian camp on a frozen alpine lake in the depths of blizzard season. It’s an origin story on several levels (ho-hum), but no matter since the actors all get it and firmly lock in the narrative, especially the brilliant Mexican actor Demián Bichir as the longtime overseer of the camp’s employees and counselors.

Mason Thames reprises his role as Finney Blake a few years later, and it’s really his performance (played against the relentless menace of Ethan Hawke as the Grabber) that distinguishes Black Phone 2 from standard horror movies. (Horror was the ONLY film genre that actually grew in 2025 by the number of films released.) Whether Mason Thames was directed as such or made his own choice as an actor, it’s clear that there’s an atypical commentary on pedophilia threaded throughout Black Phone 2, from as early as a scene where Finney is smoking out on his front porch at night and imagines the masked Grabber, whom he murdered by strangulation at the climax of the first film’s finale, beckoning to him from beside some breeze-filled trees. Finney has a simultaneous flashback to an image of the Grabber gently stroking his fallen bangs from across his forehead, remembers what he said to defend himself, and quietly stares ahead into the distance as he takes a drag from his joint.

It’s as though the filmmakers are suggesting that teenage Finney is somehow, on some level, slightly now more at peace in himself with what transpired through the mundane abduction plot of the first film, or at least he now has a grasp of the Grabber’s carefully planned motives that younger boyhood Finney did not. The subdued tension brought about by that smoking-at-night-on-the-porch scene in particular feels uniquely innovative to me in the horror genre, and for me it tilted forward the entire balance of the movie in ways that I hadn’t anticipated whatsoever. Re-emphasizing that aspect of the film is the central plot device of three young boys whose ghosts are trapped under the thick sheet of ice atop the frozen alpine lake, who were killed by the younger version of the Grabber long ago (hence the ho-hum origin story), and whose unburied spirits are restlessly urging Finney and his sister to save them.

Ryan White’s profoundly moving documentary Come See Me in the Good Light should win this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary, full-stop. The film focuses on the final years in the life of the celebrated non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who died of complications from ovarian cancer in July of this year at age 49, just one month prior to what would have been their fiftieth birthday. Gibson’s brave partner Megan Falley is equally a part of the film, both as the foundational heart that keeps their relationship together through the very hardest of times, and often as an initiator of some much-needed humor to buoy them through things that young couples should never have to endure, though I’m sure that plenty of people do every day. I just want everybody to stream this film on Apple TV, so I won’t say much else except that 1) I cried about seven times while watching this film at the IFC Center in New York City, from like three minutes into the film until all the way through the heart-stopping closing credits song “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” by Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile (which should also receive an Oscar for Best Original Song, to be honest), and 2) I downloaded every single one of Andrea Gibson’s e-books the very moment I walked out of the cinema. Like their inspiration Mary Oliver, Gibson aimed to make their poetry a mission of redemption and a gift to other human beings, a way to try to help them through their lives and survive.

Jacob Elordi’s indelible physical and vocal performance as the Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein will stay with me probably for the rest of my life. By the end of the movie, I wanted to walk around every day in his character’s awesomely ragged, burnt-out, “I’ve survived every kind of catastrophe” shredded black ribbons streaming backwards in the arctic winds costume like some kind of gangly Gothic matinee idol. Jacob Elordi should be, will be, and is one exactly: a matinee idol for the ages, and this performance absolutely cements it. As much as I appreciate online commentaries by those in-the-know about the deep significance of the physically masterful elements that Elordi brings to his role (since the Creature begins as an infantile semi-being and advances through the gauntlet of every tragedy that the world can possibly throw at him in a nonstop onslaught of violently desperate bombardment), I was even more taken in by Elordi’s voice, a voice that learns as it goes, that philosophizes and grapples and soothes and eventually understands, or attempts to. Whoever marries this man someday will be a very, very lucky person. He’s the real deal: a reader, a scholar, a tall kind heart, and one hell of a phenomenal actor.

Finally, I loved the final twenty minutes or so of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, and I could probably watch Noah Jupe’s face as Hamlet in that scene at the Globe Theatre for most of 2026, to be honest. What makes the scene work is how it captures Shakespeare’s genius (in part via Paul Mescal’s performance as the Ghost and as Will himself). Rather than having the ghost of his dead son Hamnet appear in the play, which would have been the logical choice for any other playwright, of course William Shakespeare would write Hamlet’s father as the ghost, since grief in the wake of Hamnet’s death has made a ghost of Will as Hamnet’s own father (and obviously of Jessie Buckley’s often too over-performed character as Hamnet’s mother). Art abstracts the truth, a lesson that even Zhao’s film doesn’t quite learn, unfortunately, for the vast majority of it leading up to its final scene. And just as sadly, the vast majority of films released throughout 2025 didn’t learn that vital lesson either, and so on we go to 2026.

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Wicked and Wicked: For Good (dir. Jon M. Chu, 2024 and 2025)

Wicked and Wicked: For Good are a once-in-a-generation cinematic experience. Moreover, these two films will have a dedicated global audience for at least two generations, probably for fifty years or more, not dissimilar to the long-range success of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. These two new movies amply honor that movie’s glorious (and serious) legacy, while also very generously augmenting and expanding it. If Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande don’t both receive Oscars for their indelible performances, I will be rioting. And why is the director, Jon M. Chu, receiving so little attention overall in the wake of these films? Perhaps he doesn’t need any. He made two perfect movies that are both consummate entertainment and deep, meaningful explorations of a wide variety of themes and dialectics: female friendships and rivalries, outsiderdom and insider-ism, secrecy and honesty, old and new orders, dreams and nightmares, humanity and animalism, and I’ll stop there since this list could clearly go on for quite a while.

I’m going to dispense with most of the typical movie review trappings for what I’ll write here, including plot, delving into the original source materials, and the (kind of obvious) political subtext. Instead, I’ll just call attention to what I saw and explore a bit why those details resonate with me, and also perhaps situate them into some sort of cultural and historical lineage. Have you ever heard the phrase “friends of Dorothy” in reference to gay men? There’s a reason why that phrase exists, which extends far beyond the stereotypical reverence gay men were known to have for Judy Garland (whose death jump-started Stonewall). In an era not so long ago, gay life was a life lived underground, both socially and in terms of individual gay men’s psyches. Our lives, historically, had to be sublimated due to entrenched social shame, which still persists today in most places around the world, even if it’s slightly less overt these days. In many cases, gay men’s real lives were secondary to their fantasy lives. The lives that they imagined for themselves as escapes from prejudice and persecution are the reasons why films like The Wizard of Oz, as well as Wicked and Wicked: For Good, 1) came into being in the first place, and 2) became reliably long-lasting cultural outlets and touchstones for gay men to enjoy their own collective mental space and claim a corner of existence for themselves. (Whew.)

Some of these things are so obvious that they’re barely worth saying, but alas. The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion were all clearly coded as gay. Not even “coded.” Just GAY, full-stop. And not shy about it either. Back in 1939, that was a novelty, and a necessary one. Since you couldn’t live your life openly out in the wider world itself, you could do that up on the screen, while Dorothy and Toto led the way, because you couldn’t trust anybody else, but you could trust a wide-eyed Kansas farmgirl and her cute little dog, so you just follow them to get to where you need to go: over the rainbow, through a tornado, across sprawling fields of opium high-inducing poppies. (In Wicked and Wicked: For Good, those fields of poppies are broad stripes of rainbow colors. I mean, just go ahead and overdo it. We won’t mind at all.)

And the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion all re-appear here, though briefly, and in each case they’re the product of a type of twisted nightmare. And that’s where Wicked: For Good in particular gets really interesting. The Wizard of Oz is, in its entirety, both intra- and extradiagetically, a fever dream. So when Wicked: For Good tilts into the nightmare realm, which it does often and deliciously well for anybody who’s got even a slight goth sensibility, the effect is nearly overwhelming in the best possible way (especially with a pair of Real D glasses on, trust me…the two fangirls seated next to me were pretty much totally losing their minds during all of those scenes, as was I). Just like the characters in these films themselves, you are forcefully shoved right out of the theater and into an alternate virtual reality, perhaps the land of the Shifting Sands, as L. Frank Baum coined it, an endless pastel dunescape that surrounds the Land of Oz and protects it from outside intrusion (as well as keeping its citizens from ever leaving, or at least not without the penalty of death in the vast majority of cases).

As much as we love Elphaba and Glinda, who will now remain iconic in perpetuity as Wicked: For Good rolls out across the world, Fiyero for me is the most important figure in the second film, and his significance is tied to one brief scene, specifically, when the guards of Oz bind him to wooden poles out on the edge of the vast fields, to try to get him to reveal Elphaba’s whereabouts. I knew from the initial shouts of the men who surround him, even before we see the actual flash of the image of him bound to the fenceposts, that it was a direct reference to the death of Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was bound to a roadside wooden fence and left there to die by two homophobic young men in Laramie, Wyoming, back in 1998. Time has now washed over that deeply tragic murder, and the film captures in this scene that sense of cultural forgetting, too. But more importantly, the film revives Matthew Shepard and lets him live again in the form of Fiyero’s Scarecrow. I have almost no doubt that this was intentional, particularly in the spirit of a revisionist text like the book by Gregory Maguire from which these films (and the musical before them) were adapted. I recalled some lines about Matthew Shepard’s death from Eileen Myles’ poem “Taxicabs”: “little scarecrow / with his / scarecrow / desire.” This vitally important connection to Fiyero’s redemptive character arc in Wicked: For Good is one that I feel certain most critics and audiences will otherwise miss, unfortunately. I was (and remain) really moved by it. It’s my very favorite aspect of the film, and if any of its creators happen to read this: I’m grateful.

What would the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum (who named Elphaba from the sounds of his three first initials), think of his own legacy? Would these films inspire him, move him, overwhelm him? I think he would probably be extremely pleased, and also quite surprised. His books about the Wizard of Oz were popular enough in his lifetime that his publisher wouldn’t let him abandon writing them, even when he wanted to move on. He was married to a woman in his own era, but who knows how else he might have identified more inwardly. He had a clear interest in outsiders, and social justice, and (way ahead of his own time) transgender-identified characters as well. I could say a lot more right here, some of which might border on mere conjecture or speculation or suspicion, so I won’t. All I will say is (and the finale of Wicked: For Good also makes this abundantly, gorgeously clear): the human heart is the desert dunescape of the Shifting Sands, whether we tread that beautifully treacherous terrain alone, or in the fortunate company of others.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (dir. Aitch Alberto, 2023)

Over the past couple of weeks, I watched Aitch Alberto’s film Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe a total of six times in cinemas, and I cried my eyes out three of those times. Between viewings when I wasn’t watching the movie, I was thinking about the movie. The movie never left my mind, and my heart remained right in the zone of the movie, too. The movie showed at only one cinema here in Boston, at AMC Boston Common, so that’s where I saw all of my screenings except for one last Sunday, which I watched from way at the top of the balcony of the gorgeous Art Deco cinema up in Brattleboro, Vermont called the Latchis Theatre, where I thanked the manager through my tears after the movie for showing it on the big beautiful screen in the historic main moviehouse. And now, before I say what I have to say about the film (which is quite a lot), I’ll make one really big statement: for me this movie is even better than Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, which is a movie that I still adore today, and as much as I totally and unendingly love Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in that film, the two young actors in this new movie, Max Pelayo (as Aristotle Mendoza) and Reese Gonzales (as Dante Quintana), give performances that are even deeper and more significant than those in Brokeback Mountain.

The film is adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s popular and groundbreaking 2012 young adult novel of the same title, which I read several years ago at the online suggestion of the gay novelist Garth Greenwell, who really championed its importance. The movie’s screenwriter and director Aitch Alberto, a Latina transwoman, has perfectly distilled what’s necessary to retain from the novel on every single level and translated it to film exactly in all of the right ways, stylistically and otherwise, and I honestly don’t think that the book could have been adapted any better than it is in this film. Apparently, there’s a much longer director’s cut, and although I could feel a few of the missing parts that trimmed the movie down from nearly three hours to about 90 minutes, I still felt that it all fit together admirably despite the standard commercial compromises that producers and studios often force upon directors. Aitch Alberto’s director’s cut will make its way to us someday, I’m fairly certain of that. What’s clear is that this director poured her entire heart and soul into making this movie, and into walking the slim tightrope to craft it in ways that will not only move a wide array of audiences internationally for decades to come, but will also actually help to save and reconfigure the lives of young LGBTQ+ viewers. Yes, this movie is that important.

At the film’s delicate center is Max Pelayo’s Ari Mendoza, a conflicted yet still hopeful young Mexican-American guy in high school in El Paso, Texas in 1987. He meets Reese Gonzales’ more outwardly cheerful and (semi) well-adjusted Dante Quintana that summer at a local swimming pool, where Dante teaches Ari how to swim since he’d never learned. The tenderness of those opening scenes, leading up to and including the film’s opening title card, could not be more flawlessly balanced and conceived. The year 1987 happens to be my favorite year in pop culture, and I was whisked right back to my own youth as a struggling soon-to-be-gay kid in Cincinnati, Ohio by the film’s details and specificities. All of this is done in a very gentle way, so that we’re immediately invested in the complicated interplay between these two characters. Pelayo and Gonzales expertly (especially as younger actors) set up their dichotomy, and what’s fascinating is how the relationship of the two boys in the film develops gradually and intimately but not necessarily along the definitive lines of sexuality itself, though that does eventually arise as the two boys come of age via a series of letters that they write back and forth to one another when Dante’s English professor father Sam (Kevin Alejandro, an adorable dad if ever there was one) takes his family away from El Paso to Chicago due to a university teaching gig for a year.

By that point in the narrative, Ari and Dante have already cemented their intense friendship. Dante shares with Ari some poetry and art to try to open him up. Ari’s heart has mostly clamped shut because his parents’ hearts have also closed somewhat, for tragic reasons that are revealed to us later in the film regarding Ari’s older brother Bernardo, who’s in prison. I wish that the amazing Latinx cast of older actors who portray the parents and guardians of Ari and Dante, actors who are all so excellent in finely calibrated roles — from the wonderful Eva Longoria as Dante’s caring mom, to the remarkable Eugenio Derbez as Ari’s distant yet loving father, to the touching Valerie Falcón as Ari’s deeply supportive mother, to the luminous Marlene Forte as Ari’s doting lesbian aunt, Tia Ophelia — would receive the kind of attention they so fully deserve for their performances (such as a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Ensemble, to be honest).

What’s subtle and tucked away in the corners of the film is equally as powerful as those actors who are front and center; for instance, the smartly timed reappearances of a pair of birds high above in flight that Dante remarks look “so free” when he first sees them overhead during a scene with Ari early in the movie. Several other intelligent stylistic details it took me all six viewings to finally notice, such as the subtlety with which some Christmastime scenes are framed. Unlike most mainstream movies that make a big to-do about Christmas scenes, mainly for releases later in the year, here we get only a brief “Merry Christmas” in a letter from Dante to Ari, along with a magical faint blue glow at the very edge of the screen during a scene inside Ari’s home, which I finally realized were Christmas tree lights around a silver (and intentionally slightly out-of-focus) ornament nestled in its branches. Some of the El Paso landscapes and multicolor sunsets were clearly influenced by Robby Müller’s seminal cinematography in Wim Wenders’ now-legendary 1984 film Paris, Texas, a great visual touchstone for Aitch Alberto and the talented cinematographer Akis Konstantakopoulos to refer back to.

There’s also a short but pivotal scene in which Ari, who’s sixteen, finds a way to get himself a six-pack of beer by having an older guy buy it for him at a local convenience store. The older guy (precisely portrayed by Marcelo Olivas), who’s clearly gay and playfully says that he’s 45 when Ari asks, has a few moments of interaction with the teenager that reveal more about the deep complexities of intergenerational issues in the gay male community than just about any other scene that I’ve ever seen on screen. The important aspect is that this is accomplished in part through great acting and minimal dialogue, but it’s conveyed even more through mood, as well as through some small yet knowing glances and tiny gestures, something that felt vividly real to me (while bordering on a kind of magical realism) each time I watched that scene again. The subtle intensity of that brief exchange between the two characters captures something that many, many other films have tried to achieve before and never quite accomplished. This scene, in its backlit sense of mystery, as seen from Ari’s younger point-of-view, totally does.

Of course, since Ari and Dante are high schoolers, we get a good serving of nostalgic details that align with mid-’80s John Hughes classics: upturned shirt collars, constant teasing about who fits in and who doesn’t, neon-toned clothing and bangles, plus a beautiful Latina leather-clad goth girl temptress (Luna Blaise’s sweetly realized Elena Tellez) to lure Ari just a bit while Dante is away with his family in Chicago. I will mention only vaguely two more abrupt and violent scenes later in the film, on which the entire narrative depends, and on which its grounding in harsher realities and truths about our world firmly rests. We would not be able to arrive at the film’s cathartic conclusion in a desert landscape outside of Ari’s old 1957 pick-up truck without those more difficult scenes, so it’s important that audiences of all ages endure those two scenes, in order to understand their key purpose in the film.

I haven’t seen a more gorgeous or moving ending to any film in several years now. Though it’s culturally complex in a number of ways, I’ll try to explain why. After Ari kisses and briefly rejects Dante until a tragic turn sends him back into Dante’s hands, the two young men are then forced to confront what their relationship to one another actually is, and with the loving support of both of their families, what it might mean to their futures. Ari Mendoza is the film’s protagonist, tortured and shifting from his closeted adolescence into his more liberated adulthood. To hear him finally express, in so many words, that he was afraid of being gay himself (and therefore also afraid of Dante), and that he won’t be afraid to love Dante Quintana, is a transcendent moment that also cuts two ways, not because it isn’t earnest since it clearly is, but because I think, in the real world outside of transformational fiction, it’s probably incredibly rare, especially between two young men. I’d like to see a mainstream film in which the protagonist is the more openly gay and more outwardly effeminate Dante. Where is his story? And why is this essentially Ari’s story instead? I think it’s because the people who really need to see this film and benefit from watching it are the young guys like Ari all over in the greater world, though of course, they’ll be the ones least likely to watch it in a cinema. Every audience of the six I viewed the film with were nearly all teenage girls, or young women who’d recently been teenage girls when they’d read the book that the film was based on. The guys like Ari out there in the world may be more likely to find and watch the movie a bit more privately when it's streaming online, or at least that's my hope. Our world will change if they see this film and its core message reaches them.

Masculinity and its inherent social expectations entrap both Ari and Dante, along with entrapping the other young men in the film. The movie’s open-hearted, climactic finale (as well as its cosmically beautiful denouement) gives a solid and loving push towards toppling those unfair, damaging, and compulsory gendered expectations. While I have no doubt that there are young gay male romantic couples out there like Ari and Dante, some of whom actually do commit to one another and make it happen together, I’m not convinced that it’s at all widespread amongst the gay male population, though I’d also like to believe that it’s more than just a mere fantasy. Those young men out there who do find any kind of love like Ari and Dante should count themselves very lucky.

Sunday, September 3, 2023

The Unknown Country (dir. Morrisa Maltz, 2023)

This past week, I drove north to Rockland, Maine, and then also took the ferry out to Provincetown on Cape Cod to watch Morrisa Maltz’s film The Unknown Country on the only two screens on which it was showing in all of New England. The film stars Lily Gladstone as Tana, a young Native American woman who, in the wake of her grandmother’s death, takes a long road trip to return to the reservation on which she grew up, from Minnesota to South Dakota, reconnecting with people and places from her past along the way. After finding a photo album of her late grandmother’s own road trip off the reservation when she was a young woman herself, Tana decides to trace her grandmother’s footsteps and visits the places in her photographs, extending her travels south to Dallas, Texas, and the desert wilderness in the surrounding landscape there. Not only is The Unknown Country my favorite film this year, but I think it’s also, after my two close viewings of the film, one of the most important movies to be released in the past decade.

Most of the figures whom Tana encounters on her picaresque journey aren’t actors but real people portraying themselves in the film, so it’s a smart fusion of fictional framework with a documentary heart. Tana attends the wedding of her cousin Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux to her husband Devin in a moving scene during which the couple exchange their heartfelt personal vows because of how their family had tried to keep the two of them apart when they were younger. Their solution was to “get pregnant” in order to have even more of a reason to stay together. Tana also crosses paths with a man who runs a motel, a woman who owns a local dancehall, and a group of like-minded young adults during a freewheeling night of fun out in the city. These side stories throughout the narrative become the film’s focus in the same way that Alma Har’el’s film Bombay Beach did with the longtime denizens who live around the Salton Sea in California. Through hearing about the lives of these diverse individuals, we’re given an authentic collective snapshot of America, our sprawling country that’s otherwise nearly impossible to succinctly summarize or explain to those from outside of our culture.

That The Unknown Country is a Native American woman’s story goes a long way towards redeeming a particular strand of American life that often gets completely ignored. Lily Gladstone’s performance in the film is for me among the finest in cinematic history, to be honest. Her consummately expressive face gives her an ideal opportunity to show her complete emotional range throughout the movie’s 86 minutes. The power of her performance is the exact opposite of most powerhouse performances in that there’s no trumpeting of any kind, just pure raw honesty. Yet the film’s tactics and parameters are also poetic and elliptical. We’re not given details about Tana’s journey and her past in any outright ways, but rather through subtle implications and shadings of emotion. In two separate scenes, we can sense that something violent may have happened to Tana in her relationships with men, given her look of fear and potential panic when a few men linger near her in menacing ways during those two scenes. The film doesn’t rest on those moments, however, but rather incorporates them into the flow of the rest of the movie.

Accompanying Tana’s journey on the film’s soundtrack are stunning songs by Neil Halstead of the shoegaze band Slowdive, as well as intermittent radio broadcasts with carefully selected and edited commentaries from across the American divide on various talk shows. Through our hearing and being reminded of those divisions, the film builds deeper connections to the history of genocide of indigenous people in this country, the still-open wound that we should all be more aware of living with on a daily basis in our capitalist country that’s built entirely on stolen land. An older woman from Tana’s tribe tells her how the land itself will heal her, advice that echoes vastly across the film’s mesmerizing and engrossing landscapes, thanks to Andrew Hajek’s brilliant cinematography. We as a culture will never be able to move beyond that wound of our ignored, shared history unless we can fully acknowledge the effects of that violent past on our present and future lives. The current trend of making “land acknowledgments” is only the very tip of the iceberg in that regard.

The film excavates this most effectively through its main thematic focus on individual and communal grief, past and present. As Tana carries her grandmother’s memory across the countryside, we witness her grief up close, sometimes in quick downward glances, and at other times in fully exposed ways when she breaks down in tears in bed late one night. I think the film asks some important questions. What exactly is grief? How do we navigate it, both by ourselves and as a culture? What effect does grief have on us over time? Does it permanently change us? Many widescreen shots in the film show Tana threading her way through snow-covered fields and roadways in an older car that kind of resembles a white hearse, so in that sense, I felt like Lily Gladstone’s character is carrying the collective grief for all of us.

When Tana visits her grandmother’s brother, Grandpa August (beautifully portrayed by Richard Ray Whitman), he gives her a small blue suitcase packed with some of her grandmother’s belongings, including a vintage white cotton dress with a simple print. At the film’s quietly climactic finale, Tana ascends to a windy mountaintop vista wearing that dress, recreating a photograph of her grandmother’s as she stood in the exact same place. That moment and image flawlessly open up the floodgates of the past, connecting Tana not only to her grandmother, but also to the deep well of time itself. She’s now the fountain through which that healing and empowering tributary can flow. The Unknown Country is that rarest of things: a perfect and seamless film.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Three Favorite Films of 2022

As the first year when movies and moviegoers truly returned to cinemas in full force in the three years since the global pandemic began, 2022 made for an interesting and unusual year in film. Some releases had been delayed and pushed back for nearly that long, like Tom Cruise’s long-awaited Top Gun: Maverick, a decades-later sequel that’s mostly impressive as action movies go (or on the flipside, Michael Bay’s Ambulance, an almost comically breakneck action flick that fewer people saw but that I still enjoyed as an offbeat summer movie). And that seemed to be the trend this year from a business or industry perspective since 2022 felt slightly imbalanced in terms of what was on offer at the box office. The studios behind a hefty backlog of mainstream movies that waited out the lengthy period when seats at venues had remained emptier could finally capitalize on their products, alongside some smaller movies that were made during the pandemic and often had to leap over sizeable hurdles to accomplish the task. The mainstream offerings are rarely the movies that interest me most, however, and for the most part, my three favorite films of 2022 were no exception. I did watch each of them at least twice at the cinema, and in one case even multiple times, and I felt equally involved during every repeated viewing.

Max Walker-Silverman’s sublime lyric poem of a movie, A Love Song, was the film that moved me the most in 2022, so much that I watched it at three different cinemas three nights in a row. The film’s pitch-perfect lead actress, Dale Dickey, had received the Excellence in Acting award at the Provincetown International Film Festival back in June, and I attended her conversation on stage about her career while I was at the festival, though I hadn’t watched A Love Song there. I liked how relaxed and offhand she was with her answers, as someone who’s been a successful character actress in well-known films for many years now. Her leading role as modern-day nomad Faye is long overdue then, but what an ideal role it is, fully inhabited and imbued with the spirit of someone who’s experienced enough of the world to be slightly weary of it, yet who’s also managed to retain her sense of wonder in the face of loss.

We’re never quite sure about why Faye ended up living in her camping trailer out in the desert wilds of Colorado at a peaceful lakeside location dotted with wildflowers (which often get their standalone still-shots at key points in the film). We simply see Faye flip open a calendar to a month and date sometime after March of 2020 and watch her write “TODAY,” resetting the present moment for herself in the wake of something that pushed her previous life off course, which happened to so many people throughout the pandemic. She has a tiny perch of a bookshelf with only two books on it: John James Audubon’s Birds of America for birdwatching and learning to identify birds by their calls, and a book on astronomy for stargazing and identifying the constellations. On my second viewing of the film, I noticed that the movie actually begins while the screen is still dark, when we hear the sound of a mourning dove cooing. That bird and its sound will play a pivotal role during the film’s quietly powerful climax with Faye alone on a windswept mountaintop at night later in the film, my favorite moment from any movie this year.

We also learn that Faye is awaiting the arrival of Lito (beautifully portrayed by Native American actor Wes Studi), a long-ago friend of Faye’s from high school days, with whom she shares an unresolved attraction. A young girl and her band of brothers who live nearby stop by to ask if Faye can move her trailer so that they can unearth the body of their long-buried father from under the site, to which she kindly replies, “Someone’s expecting to find me at this one.” The gentle dance between Lito and Faye plays out in semi-silence and through songs, both songs that they perform and songs that they spin the radio dial to see what fate will play for them. To see how that relationship unfolds, you’ll just have to watch the movie to appreciate how delicately it’s handled. Some might compare A Love Song to recent Oscar-winner Nomadland, which shares a few elements of its storyline and a similar locale, but whereas Nomadland is drawn on a wide canvas, A Love Song draws its energy from intimacy and quietude, paying homage to the tiny yet universal details that rescue us from heartbreak and urge us to keep going.

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a film that I was surprised to enjoy as much as I did. While I’m fine with all of Luhrmann’s previous movies, the flashiness of his style never quite drew me in entirely. Elvis, while also obviously flashy at times, operates on a different scale and in a different register, perhaps because it’s ultimately attuned just as much to its subject’s quietly tragic fall and early death, not simply to his turbulent but meteoric rise to pop stardom and worldwide fame. Austin Butler’s nuanced and tireless powerhouse performance remains my favorite performance of the year, and even if he doesn’t win an Oscar for it, I can’t imagine that the award should go to anybody else. His performance feels deep and transformational in a way that the central role in a biopic rarely ever can (notably, in a year that also saw the release of a worthwhile biopic of Whitney Houston, another top-selling popstar whose life ended tragically early).

Perhaps because Austin Butler’s face and voice were up until now less familiar to audiences overall, he was able to slip into Elvis Presley’s skin and persona more subtly. When we watch him perform the songs and recreate pivotal moments from Elvis’ career, he’s believable in ways that span generations. One friend of mine who saw the movie at the cinema said that everyone from her kids to her father enjoyed it, and she mentioned how rare it is to find a movie like that these days. Coincidentally, I watched the movie at one cinema with an older audience and at another cinema with a younger audience of mostly high school students, and both were equally and clearly under the considerable spell that the movie casts over its viewers, certainly in scenes where Elvis’ own audiences breached the standards of propriety in that era as the United States careened towards the civil rights movement.

Although the movie explores the biographical details of Elvis’ life, from his family’s conflicted ambitions for his career to his problematic business partnership with the shifty, self-christened “Colonel” Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks with relish in a performance that I admired more than other moviegoers in the United States did), the film’s real focus is on Elvis’ music and its popular appeal to the American public, over whom it washed like a tidal wave for two decades, winding through genres from rock & roll to blues to pop to country to gospel to film soundtracks. That broad cross-section of musical styles seemed intentional, and it’s one reason why Elvis became the template for later popular artists like Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson, each of whom refused to be tied down to any single genre of music, bending the rules to defy those conventions. Several scenes depict how Elvis sparred with his handlers and often improvised on the spot to avoid being ensnared by giving his listenership exactly what Tom Parker thought they might want at every particular moment. The standout montage scene is the recreation of a major televised production that was supposed to be an innocuous Christmas special that found Elvis instead swerving to elevate it to an upper echelon that matched his talent.

Of course, the movie does eventually descend into Elvis’ struggles to hold onto his relationships with his wife Priscilla and his young daughter Lisa Marie, whom it became harder for Elvis to keep as the focus of his life when his worldwide fame (alongside various dangerous addictions) began to overwhelm his attentions, not to mention his mental and physical health. But by the time the forces around him try to help him rally to keep things together, it’s already too late and slipping out of his control. At those moments especially, Austin Butler’s performance seems to access a higher level of authenticity and veracity. Some have argued that at 30 he might have been too young an actor to play the role at Elvis’ later stage, but since Elvis’ career started in his teens and he died at 42, the casting feels smart and well-timed to me. As things stand, Butler totally owns the performance, and by the time we arrive at a clever diptych that segues from Butler’s recreation of a late televised performance of Elvis singing “Amazing Grace” back to Elvis’ original performance, the film’s magic has been fully consummated and the deal is sealed.

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Thursday, January 1, 2026

Five Favorite Films of 2025