Tag: father-daughter relationship

Favorite Films of 2024, Part 2

Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Read part 1 here.

Favorite Films of 2024 (Part 2)

11. Dancing Queen, dir. Aurora Gossé. This coming-of-age dramedy from Norway was not promoted at all in the US but quietly arrived on Google Play early this year—thanks to my YouTube algorithm for suggesting it! Seventh-grade Mina (Liv Elvira Kippersund Larsson) has a crush on Edwin (Vilijar Knutsen Bjaadal), aka E.D. Win, a hip-hop dancer with a large social media following who has just transferred to her school. Despite having no dance experience, Mina decides to audition for his crew ahead of a local competition, and she enlists her grandma (Anne Marit Jacobsen) to train her, and her best friend Markus (Sturla Harbitz) to help her practice the partner work. The film is so endearing, even if a bit predictable in its beats. 

12. Ghostlight, dir. Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan. Dan (Keith Kupferer) is a construction worker who’s grieving a grave loss and is unwilling to open up about it with his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) and daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer). (The three actors are father-mother-daughter in real life.) One day he inadvertently stumbles into a rehearsal of a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet. The head of the troupe, Rita (Dolly De Leon), invites him to stay, which he reluctantly does. He’s never acted before, but he finds himself taking on a role in the play, which helps him connect with his emotions and with other people and begin his healing journey.

Streaming on AMC+.

13. Janet Planet, dir. Annie Baker. The free-spirited but weary Janet (Julianne Nicholson) lives with her eleven-year-old daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), in western Massachusetts, running an acupuncture practice out of their home. Lacy is lonely and quirky and craves her mom’s affection; Janet gives it but is usually also absorbed in some kind of interpersonal entanglement. Over the summer of 1991, during which the film is set, a succession of three visitors come in and out of Janet’s life: a live-in boyfriend, a woman trying to escape a cult, and said cult leader. Lacy tolerates these ephemeral presences but wishes her mom were more exclusively available to her. The film is about Lacy learning to share her mom with others and coming to grips with the fact that she is not the only person her mom needs. The last scene, where Lacy comes to this realization while watching her mom contradancing, gutted me!

Streaming on Max.

14. Green Border, dir. Agnieszka Holland. This film is a difficult watch. It dramatizes the humanitarian crisis precipitated in fall 2021 when Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, lured several thousand asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa to his country with the promise of free transit to the European Union, then dumped them on the borders of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia as payback for EU sanctions against his country. Green Border focuses on a Syrian refugee family of six (Jalal Altawil plays the father) and an Afghan woman (Behi Djanati Atai) they befriend on the plane ride over—their being tossed (like a football, as one character laments) back and forth across the militarized Polish-Belarussian border, cold and hungry, with neither country willing to receive them.

The film also follows two Poles: border guard Jan (Tomasz Wlosok), who contracts PTSD, and budding activist Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), who joins a group providing water, food, clothing, first aid, power banks, and legal counsel to those crossing the forested swampland into Poland. We see one aid worker cradling the head of a hypothermic refugee as she spoon-feeds him hot soup, and another tenderly rubbing ointment onto the swollen, blistered feet of a weary woman traveler. Sadly, government policy has made these tangible acts of loving care acts of political resistance and grounds for arrest. But there’s a double standard at play, as we see in the epilogue.

Streaming on Kanopy.

15. Juror #2, dir. Clint Eastwood. A taut legal thriller, Juror #2 is all about conscience. Family man Justin (Nicholas Hoult) finds himself on the jury of a murder trial, and when the details of the alleged crime are revealed, he realizes he may have been the unwitting perpetrator. He is torn between his integrity and his self-preservation instincts, between his loyalty to the law and his loyalty to his wife and soon-to-be-born child. What I like about the film is how it prompts you to consider what you would do in the same situation—let someone with less to lose and with lower morals take the fall (the defendant, a single man with gang involvement, is a known abuser of women, and the prosecution has a strong case against him), or own up to what you know and have your and your family’s lives upended.

Streaming on Max.

16. Kneecap, dir. Rich Peppiatt. UNESCO classifies the Irish language as “endangered,” as the number of native speakers has continued to decline ever since English became the national language during British rule. However, more recently there’s been an urban revival, owing in part to the proliferation of Irish-language immersion schools—and to the popularity of Kneecap, a hip-hop trio from West Belfast who rap mostly in Irish, for them a sign of national identity and pride. Formed in 2017, they’re a controversial group whose lyrics often contain Irish republican themes along with profanity and references to drugs and sex. Many young Irish people have embraced them and been inspired by their music to learn Irish.

Band members Liam Ó Hannaidh (stage name Mo Chara), Naoise Ó Caireallain (Móglaí Bap), and JJ Ó Dochartaigh (DJ Próvai) play versions of themselves in this riotous, fictionalized origin story that compelled me mostly because of its fresh take on the musical biopic genre and in how it addresses the politicization of language. Also, it’s funny. But expect irreverence.

Streaming on Netflix.

17. The Outrun, dir. Nora Fingscheidt. Based on the best-selling memoir by Amy Liptrot, The Outrun follows Rona (Saoirse Ronan), an alcoholic in her late twenties who drops out of her PhD program in biology and returns to the remote Orkney Islands of Scotland, where she grew up, to pursue recovery. Rona is closely attuned to the natural forces around her, which gives the film an elemental quality, and Ronan attacks the role with an admirable ferocity. It’s a vital portrait of addiction and the journey to and through sobriety. Unlike some other films that tackle the subject, it doesn’t revel in the character’s misery; it shows the destructiveness of addiction, for sure, but it also shows Rona finding happiness along the way in things other than drink, like dancing with neighbors, barking at seals, baking bread, collecting and drawing seaweed, or pretending she’s a sailor at sea.

18. We Live in Time, dir. John Crowley. In nonlinear fashion, this affecting rom dram traces the relationship of Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut (Florence Pugh), from their initial meeting in a hospital hallway, to the birth of their daughter, to Almut’s death from cancer, and a hundred little moments in between. It’s a beautiful picture of committed romantic love and how it negotiates change, crisis, and conflicting aspirations, but also the many joys it holds.

19. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, dir. Benjamin Ree. The subject of this Norwegian documentary is Mats Steen (1989–2014), a video gamer who was born with Duchenne disease, a rare form of muscular dystrophy. When he died at age twenty-five, his parents had thought he lived an isolated life. But then they started receiving emails from strangers, numbering in the hundreds, who knew Mats through the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, where Mats interacted with friends daily as the character Ibelin Redmoore.

To bring Mats’s story to life, the film starts out conventionally, with home video footage from and interviews with the family. But then it transitions into animated segments that re-create some of Mats’s personal experiences within the world of the game. An actor voices Mats using Mats’s own words, taken from gaming transcripts and blog posts. These segments are interspersed with in-person interviews with some of Ibelin’s fellow Starlight guild members. I appreciate how the film challenges the stereotype of video games as shallow, time-wasting, and solitary, showing how for Mats, who had limited mobility, they were a means of exercising agency and cultivating meaningful connections with people all over the world.

Streaming on Netflix.

20. A Different Man, dir. Aaron Schimberg. Part dark comedy, part psychological thriller, this film stars Sebastian Stan as Edward, a man living with neurofibromatosis, which causes noncancerous tumors to grow on nerve tissue. He undergoes an experimental procedure that undoes his facial disfigurement and thrusts him into an identity crisis, even more so when he meets a man named Oswald (Adam Pearson) who looks a lot like his presurgery self. He envies Oswald’s confidence and charisma and feels increasingly threatened by him when Oswald is cast to play a version of him in a stage play written by his former next-door neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve). We’re made to wonder whether there’s something insidious about Oswald, or Edward’s insecurities are just acting up.

Writer-director Aaron Schimberg, who has a cleft palate, said this film arose in part from his own contradictory feelings about his disfigurement, and the odd experience of looking in a mirror after having had multiple surgeries and wondering if the face he sees is his own or one that was only created by doctors. He also said he wanted to write a role for Pearson, whom he had worked with before, that defies the two roles he is typically offered—either a sympathetic victim who’s deemed heroic simply for existing, or a horror villain—and that makes use of his naturally gregarious, extroverted personality.

Streaming on Max.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Inside Out 2 (Disney+), Thelma (Hulu), Spermworld (Hulu), Civil War (Max), Problemista (Max), The Promised Land (Hulu)

Favorite Films of 2024, Part 1

Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Of the 102 films I’ve seen that were released in the United States in 2024, these are my top ten. I’ll reveal my top eleven through twenty in a “part 2” post in the next few days.

Although I typically draw spiritual, theological, or liturgical connections with the art I feature on this website, here I do not do that. I’ve chosen these films not based on any kind of Christian messaging or interpretive possibilities but because they are beautifully made films that resonated with me. They address themes such as family, friendship, simplicity and awe, repressive governments, growing up, grief, mortality, addiction, trauma, joy, disability, identity.

One thing I love about cinema, as holds true with all the arts, is how it can connect us more fully to God, others, the world, and our own selves. So while I don’t think you need to watch movies with a purpose in mind, if you find yourself hesitant to invest the time, perhaps you might consider that connective capacity.

If the film is currently streaming for free with a subscription service, I’ve noted that at the bottom of the entry. Otherwise, check your local theaters or online rental platforms.

[Top 20 from 2023] [Top 20 from 2022] [Top 20 from 2021] [Top 20 from 2020]

Cautionary note: Different viewers have different sensitivities. If there’s a particular type of content you want to avoid, I’d advise you to check out the “Parents’ Guide” section of the film’s IMDb webpage, to which I’ve linked each film title.

Favorite Films of 2024

1. How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, dir. Pat Boonnitipat: From Thailand comes this tender story of a late teenage boy, M (Putthipong “Billkin” Assaratanakul), who quits his job as a video game streamer to become the live-in caretaker of his ailing amah (maternal grandmother) (Usha Seamkhum) in the hopes of inheriting her house when she dies. While initially motivated by self-interest, M develops genuine affection and gratitude for his grandma the more time he spends with her—getting up early with her each morning to make and sell congee at the street market, bringing her to the temple to pray, sitting with her during chemotherapy sessions (one of the most moving scenes is when he picks off the loose hairs she’s been shedding, one by one, from her sweater while she rests in her chemo chair). The balance of humor—conveyed especially through Amah’s feistiness—and sadness—loneliness, familial hurt and estrangement, terminal illness—is deftly handled and the emotional climax well earned.

2. Daughters, dir. Angela Patton and Natalie Rae. Pursuing the initiative of a group of young Black girls at Camp Diva Leadership Academy (now merged with Girls For A Change), Virginia-based community activist Angela Patton has helped organize a series of daddy-daughter dances in US prisons, a chance for K–12 girls to connect in person and make memories with their incarcerated fathers. This documentary captures one of those dances from 2019, following Aubrey, Santana, Raziah, and Ja’Ana over the course of eight years—before, during, and after the event. These girls and their fathers speak their sorrows, fears, insights, disappointments, and hopes, shedding light on the impact of parental incarceration and especially the rise, since 2014, of no-touch and even screen-only prison visits.

I appreciate that the film shows the complexity of the father-daughter bond, avoiding a simplistic portrait of that bond as either wholly resilient or frankly unmendable. The dance is not a triumph for all participants. While all at least have a desire to show up for each other, forgiveness and trust don’t always come easily. Nor does conversation, when you’ve been separated from someone for so long and barely know them.

Surely a contender for scene of the year is when the girls come down the hallway in their dresses, hand in hand and proud but nervous, to greet their fathers, who sit in a row of folding chairs in borrowed suits and ties. The men’s reactions are precious.

Streaming on Netflix.

3. Dìdi, dir. Sean Wang. Dìdi means “little brother” in Mandarin, and Chinese parents also use the term as an endearment for their younger sons. In this semiautobiographical dramedy from writer-director Sean Wang, it references the lead character Chris (Izaac Wang), a thirteen-year-old Taiwanese American boy growing up in Fremont, California. It’s 2008, the summer before high school, and all the awkwardness and anxieties of adolescent boyhood are upon him. He’s trying to fit in with a skater crowd and to figure out how to flirt with girls, and he’s navigating turbulent relationships with his mom (Joan Chen), who he feels is ashamed of him, and his sister (Shirley Chen), his only sibling, who’s getting ready to leave for college. Also living in the house is his nai nai (paternal grandmother) (Zhang Li Hua), played by Sean Wang’s actual grandma. The film is cringey in all the right ways, capturing that pubescent period we’ve all gone through of insecurity, immaturity, pressure, and desperation. Izaac Wang’s is one of my favorite performances of the year, especially for the vulnerability he lets us see in his character.

Streaming on Peacock.

4. Perfect Days, dir. Wim Wenders. This serene drama contains little plot, dialogue, or conflict and yet is absorbing to watch. It’s built around the daily routine of Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), a custodial worker in Tokyo whose job is to clean public toilets. We watch him wake up, fold his bedding, water his plants, brush his teeth, put on his royal blue jumpsuit, and walk outside to greet a new day. He sanitizes toilet bowls, sweeps floors, and wipes mirrors, taking great pride and care in his work. He occasionally pauses to appreciate moments of beauty: children playing in the park, leaves glimmering in sunlight. He eats dinner at a restaurant where he’s friends with the proprietor. Then he reads at home by lamplight before falling asleep. His is a quiet life and a full one. His attentiveness and gratitude call us to the same.

Streaming on Hulu.

5. Sing Sing, dir. Greg Kwedar. Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) is a program at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility in which professional teaching artists lead year-round workshops inside the prison in theater, dance, music, creative writing, and visual arts. The drama Sing Sing spotlights the acting troupe as they put on a production of Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, a time-traveling epic they helped come up with that involves an Egyptian prince, gladiators, pirates, cowboys, Robin Hood, and Hamlet. Starring Colman Domingo as the real-life John “Divine G” Whitfield (who was a founding member of RTA and who makes a cameo appearance), Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin as himself, and an ensemble cast of other formerly incarcerated RTA participants, the film celebrates the transformative, therapeutic power of the arts, as the men find vulnerability, agency, creativity, confidence, connection, and release. It’s a real heart-warmer!

6. Nickel Boys, dir. RaMell Ross. Based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Colson Whitehead, this lyrical film is set in the Jim Crow era primarily at Nickel Academy, a state-run juvenile “reform school” (essentially a prison farm) in Florida, inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys that operated from 1900 to 2011, where hundreds of students were subjected to forced labor and physical and/or sexual abuse. The remains of several dozen boys have recently been unearthed from unmarked graves on the school grounds, many presumed to be victims of excessive punishment.

Nickel Boys centers on Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a high-achieving high schooler who gets sent to Nickel after hitching a ride in, unbeknown to him, a stolen car. There he becomes friends with Turner (Brandon Wilson). Despite the harrowing backdrop of their relationship, the boys share moments of leisure and joy, and for any violence that occurs, the director made the deliberate choice to portray it offscreen.

The film is shot almost entirely in double first-person POV, switching between the perspectives of Elwood and Turner. I had heard this beforehand and was skeptical that it would work for an entire movie, worried that it might come across as gimmicky, but on the contrary, it worked beautifully. I was mesmerized by the compositional poetics from the very beginning, by how the use of what the director calls “sentient perspective” allows us to get inside moments in a new way. (Shout-out to cinematographer Jomo Fray for, alongside director RaMell Ross, developing and executing such an evocative visual language; for an enthusiastic, in-depth conversation Fray has on his process, approach, and choices for the film, see here.) Before we meet Turner, a decade-plus earlier in the timeline, we see young Elwood’s face only in reflections—in the chrome plating of his grandma’s iron as he watches her do house chores, or through a window display of televisions that are broadcasting King’s “Our God Is Marching On” speech, before which Elwood stands transfixed. Then later we get to see him through Turner’s eyes. That characters look straight into the camera when they address the two mains creates an atypical intimacy and directness.

7. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, dir. Mohammad Rasoulof: Shot in secret and smuggled out of Iran, this thriller is about a family of four in Tehran who become increasingly divided as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement takes hold in 2022, demanding the end of compulsory hijab laws and other forms of oppression against women. Because the protest and crackdown scenes could not be re-created without attracting scrutiny, the director spliced in documentary footage that had been captured on various anonymous cellphones, some of which, I’ll warn, graphicly depicts police brutality and its aftermath.

In the film, the head of household, Iman (Missagh Zareh), works as an investigator in the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Court, signing death warrants against those who have violated sharia law, much to the chagrin of his daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), who sympathize with the antigovernment protestors. Their mom, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), tries to run interference between them and Iman and maintain normalcy, tradition, and respect in the home. But when Iman’s gun goes missing, chaos ensues; he becomes increasingly paranoid and unhinged.

Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof has served jailtime before for his criticism of the Iranian government, and to avoid his latest eight-year prison sentence, he escaped the country illegally in 2024 and currently resides in self-exile in Berlin.

8. A Real Pain, dir. Jesse Eisenberg. After the recent death of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, two Jewish American cousins embark on a tour of Poland to visit her childhood home and connect with their heritage. David (Jesse Eisenberg) is straitlaced, shy, and anxious, whereas Benji (Kieran Culkin) is loud, uninhibited, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants, devil-may-care. This clash of personalities makes for a funny film, but we also come to see that behind Benji’s bluster there is, as the title gestures toward, “a real pain.” (The more frivolous meaning, of course, is that Benji is exasperating!) Both comedic and serious, the film succeeds in pulling off its dual tone while exploring relational dynamics and different ways of dealing with pain and trauma.

Streaming on Hulu.

9. All We Imagine as Light, dir. Payal Kapadia. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) live together as apartment mates in multicultural Mumbai and work as hospital nurses. Prabha’s husband lives in Germany and rarely communicates with her, and Anu is dating a young Muslim man, against her Hindu parents’ wishes. When their friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) becomes widowed, she is evicted from her shantytown, and they help her move back to her home village by the sea. The film is about sisterhood and longing—about these three women of different ages each pursuing a light-filled future in their own way.

10. Nowhere Special, dir. Uberto Pasolini. This warm, affectionate, tragic film set in Belfast was inspired by a newspaper headline: “Father dying of cancer spent his final months finding family for son.” When John (James Norton), a single dad who’s thirty-three, is diagnosed with brain cancer, he starts looking for a home for his four-year-old boy, Michael (Daniel Lamont). He partners with social workers to interview potential parents and tries to prepare Michael for what’s coming. A dead beetle in the park becomes an opportunity to teach him about death.

A premise like this could easily become over-the-top sentimental, but much to the film’s credit, and owing in part to the contained performances of the two leads, it does not. There’s both a sweetness and a sadness to it, as we watch father and son build ordinary memories before their imminent separation: they take naps together, wash their respective vehicles, enjoy ice cream cones in the park, watch dump trucks in action. As John becomes progressively weaker, Michael notices: he observes how his dad now needs to use two hands to pour a cup of OJ; he sees him wincing in pain when he thinks he’s not looking. Despite the heartbreaking scenario, the film is ultimately hopeful.

Streaming on Kanopy.

Favorite Films of 2022, Part 1

Victoria Emily Jones4 Comments

Since 2020, I have been publishing an annual list of my top twenty films of the year, with trailers and microreviews. (See my lists for 2020 and 2021.) I love the collaborative nature of filmmaking, the coming together of so many talents—writing, acting, directing, shooting, editing, set design, costume design, etc.—to tell a story through moving images. Movies are actually my favorite mode of storytelling. It’s a shame that in some circles they’re denigrated as inferior to novels, less worthy of our time. That’s absolutely not true!

Moviegoing can be transformative. Like other art forms, movies reflect back to us the many aspects of the human (and in the case of my #5, animal!) experience, and can demand something of us.

Here are the first ten of my twenty recommendations for films to see that were released in the United States (though several were made internationally) in 2022, ranked in order of preference. Please be aware that many of these have R ratings and that you can consult content advisories if that concerns you.

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, dir. Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Bighearted and bizarre, this comedy sci-fi action adventure is about a first-generation Chinese American woman, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who’s trying to hold it all together as her laundromat business is failing and her relationships are fraying, especially with her twenty-something daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), whom she just doesn’t “get.” Then one day, out of nowhere, Evelyn is enlisted by a version of her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), to stop the evil Jobu Tupaki, a version of Joy, from destroying the multiverse. As Evelyn travels to alternate universes, she’s able to access skills and emotions her alt-selves possess and bring them back with her to help her fight.

Absurdity ensues. In one universe, Evelyn has hotdogs for fingers, and so becomes adept at using her feet; in one she’s a rock overlooking a canyon; in another, a teppanyaki chef whose colleague is controlled by a raccoon under his hat; in yet another, she’s a martial arts–trained movie star who never left China. She “verse jumps” from one to the other seeking to save her daughter from the vortex of despair into which she’s trying to suck everyone and everything, and all the while Joy is trying to find a version of her mother whom she can connect with, who can understand the emptiness in her.

The directors said the film is about a family trying to find each other through the chaos. At its core, it’s a family drama—one that explodes across the multiverse. It’s also about choosing kindness and joy (symbolized by a googly eye) and moving toward one another in empathy. It’s much louder and more outrageous than all my other picks, and I could have done without the scatological humor, but I found myself enthralled by the wild, disorienting ride that lands at a really tender place. Michelle Yeoh proves her versatility as an actor, and Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra, is hilarious.

Streaming on Showtime.

2. The Banshees of Inisherin, dir. Martin McDonagh. Set in 1923 during the Irish Civil War on a fictional island off Ireland’s west coast, this dark comedy begins when Colm (Brendan Gleeson) tells his lifelong bestie, Pádraic (Colin Farrell), that he no longer wants to be friends. Colm is a fiddler and composer who wants to establish a legacy, a musical output that will live on—a goal that Pádraic is impeding by distracting him with daily hours of dull conversation, he says—whereas Pádraic says he merely wants to be known for “being nice.” Baffled by his friend’s abrupt severing of their relationship, Pádraic repeatedly pursues understanding and restoration, escalating the tension toward acts of violence. Male friendship and loneliness, melancholy, and mortality are key themes in this artful buddy-breakup movie that had me laughing out loud as well as tearing up.

Streaming on HBO Max.

3. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, dir. Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson. Light overcomes the darkness in this stop-motion animated musical adaptation of the classic Italian children’s novel from 1883. It was written and codirected by Guillermo del Toro, a master of magical realism, and has been in development since 2008. When his young son dies, the carpenter Geppetto (David Bradley) carves a boy puppet, Pinocchio (Gregory Mann), to fill the hole left by this profound loss. In an act of compassion, the Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) brings Pinocchio to life and commissions Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan MacGregor), an itinerant writer, to look out for him. Curious and unruly, Pinocchio ends up trapped in a circus by an abusive showman. He and his father spend much of the film trying to reunite, to be family to each other.  

These story points will sound familiar to most, but del Toro cleverly adapts them and adds new ones, setting the story in a Tuscan village during the rise of Mussolini in the 1930s, with one of the main villains being a Fascist podestà who’s trying to recruit Pinocchio into the army. It turns out it is the villagers who blindly subscribe to Il Duce’s propaganda who are the puppets, whereas Pinocchio, with his irrepressibility, is decidedly unpuppetlike. Thus the film explores contexts in which disobedience can be a virtue. Del Toro also places more emphasis on Geppetto’s growth than Pinocchio’s, making the story about Geppetto becoming a real father—learning to accept Pinocchio with all his quirks and difference, not making his love contingent on Pinocchio fulfilling his image of the perfect son—rather than Pinocchio becoming a real boy.

The artistry of this film is dazzling! I was blown away by the production design by Guy Davis and Curt Enderle (they designed the locations and characters and established the whole visual style), especially the evocation of interwar Italian life and culture, with the centrality of the church. I’m also dazzled by the puppets—shout-out to Georgina Haynes, the director of character fabrication—because remember, with stop-motion animation, all the characters are handmade, physical creations existing in three-dimensional space, not computer-made or drawn on a page; all but the “wooden” Pinocchio (made from 3D-printed hard plastic) consist of a manipulable silicone skin sitting over a mechanized system.

Streaming on Netflix.

4. Aftersun, dir. Charlotte Wells. Eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) is on vacation with her single dad, Calum (Paul Mescal), in Turkey. He doesn’t have a lot of money, but he’s trying to create a memorable holiday for her. And despite its mundanity, it is memorable—the frame story is adult Sophie replaying its moments on tape and in her mind. Aftersun is a very personal project for first-time writer-director Charlotte Wells, who draws on her own history and relationship with her father; she says she wants people to be able to feel the warmth of these memories, even though they’re tinged with sadness. Though it’s never spelled out, it appears that Calum suffers from depression, and we gradually see more and more of his pain. The lack of exposition enables us to make our own inferences about it and about the ending. The “Under Pressure” dance sequence, which intercuts a frantic, stroboscopic nightclub scene where adult Sophie searches the floor for Calum with one of young Sophie and Calum dancing lovingly outside the hotel, safe in each other’s arms, is a contender for scene of the year—a metaphoric conveyance of mental health decline, of holding on and letting go.

5. EO, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski. Who would have thought a donkey’s inner life could be so captivating to watch onscreen? His memories, his imagination, his hopes, his fears, the affection he feels and longs for, his joys and sorrows. EO follows the life journey of the titular donkey as he passes from owner to owner, some of them kind, others cruel. He starts out at a circus in Poland, where he’s tenderly cared for by the young performer Magda (Sandra Drzymalska). But he’s seized by animal rights activists and ends up at a horse sanctuary, and from there he moves to a petting farm for children with disabilities. He escapes, looking for Magda, and spends a harrowing night alone in the forest. Chancing upon a soccer game the next day, he becomes a mascot for a time, a figure of great adulation but also vitriol by the opposing team. His next job is as a beast of burden at a fur farm, where he’s made to carry fox pelts, and then he’s acquired by an Italian priest.

There’s very little dialogue in the film, and there are no voiceovers to convey EO’s thoughts or emotions, which we infer by context. The cinematography, from close-up shots of EO’s dark, expressive eyes to wide shots of varied landscapes, is gorgeous—visual poetry. EO is an indictment of human violence and a call to empathy for animals. Dare I say I liked it better than the Bresson classic (Au hasard Balthazar) that inspired it? Unlike its predecessor, it stays entirely focused on the donkey’s perspective, with humans relegated to the periphery.

6. Hit the Road, dir. Panah Panahi. A road-trip dramedy from Iran, this debut feature by Panah Panahi follows a family of four as they drive across the Iranian countryside under the pretext of a wedding. Dad (Mohammad Hassan Madjooni), who wears a leg cast, sits in the back with the young, ball-of-fire son (Rayan Sarlak) and sick dog, while Mom (Pantea Panahiha) and the quiet older son (Amin Simiar) take turns at the wheel, sometimes evincing their worry. There’s something clandestine about this journey, and over the course of the film we learn more but not much. But even with the imminent separation hanging like a cloud, there’s a lightness and a sweetness that’s so endearing as we watch the characters bicker and goof around and connect with one another. Films that can hold together the weighty and the comical, like this one, tend to be the ones I enjoy most.

Streaming on Showtime.

7. TÁR, dir. Todd Field. Set in the classical music world, this drama explores the corrupting nature of power through the (fictional) character of Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), an award-winning conductor, composer, educator, and author. It’s an intense and brilliant performance of a complex character who is amazing at her craft but who also uses her status to manipulate others, including the young female cellist who has just joined her orchestra, the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic. The tension rachets up as they prepare to perform Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and rumors about Lydia’s connection to the death of one of her former protégés threaten to undo her.

8. Broker, dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu. Found families is a key theme in the oeuvre of the Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu, whose Shoplifters (2019) is one of my all-time favorite films. His latest, Broker, is set in South Korea. Seeking to place her newborn son, Woo-sung, in the care of a family better equipped to raise him, the young single mom So-young (Ji-eun Lee) leaves him outside a church, where he is intercepted by Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho) and Dong-soo (Dong-won Gang), who attempt to sell him on the adoption black market. The next day she returns with doubts and demands to be included in the process of finding a home for Woo-sung. So she follows the two brokers in responding to the calls of prospective buyers, and along the way they pick up a stowaway from an orphanage, the ebullient Hae-jin (Seung-soo Im), the character that really brought it all together for me.

As they drive from city to city, the five travelers bond with one another, each of them carrying their own forms of rejection trauma and seeking love and belonging. The last night they spend together . . . wow! Kore-eda is a deft handler of sentiment, never maudlin but rather inserting understated emotional moments in all the right places (another example: the flower on the wet car window scene). He tackles heavy subject matter and complex social issues with heart, always keeping his characters at the center and allowing for reprieves of warmth and brightness. He avoids simplistic endings but also unnecessarily bleak ones, taking a vantage point of hope.

9. The Fabelmans, dir. Steven Spielberg. This coming-of-age drama is a fictionalized telling of Steven Spielberg’s upbringing in a midcentury Jewish American household and, since seeing his first movie in a theater at age six, his developing passion for cinema. Spielberg’s stand-in is Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). In many ways The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s love letter to his artistic and free-spirited mother, named Mitzi in the movie and played by Michelle Williams, who from the get-go fully supports Sammy’s dream to become a filmmaker, unlike his much more practical father, Burt (Paul Dano), a computer engineer, who doesn’t initially see filmmaking as a worthy pursuit.

I wondered if The Fabelmans was going to be a self-indulgent homage to Spielberg’s successful career, full of Easter eggs to his other films, but it wasn’t that at all. The story stands on its own apart from its basis in the particularities of Spielberg’s life. It’s about vocation and family and the power of films to help us see the truth. That it’s also a semiautobiographical portrait of a director whose films I grew up on (E.T., Jaws, Jurassic Park) and continue to admire is an added bonus!

10. Nanny, dir. Nikyatu Jusu. Marked by menace and mystery, this psychological horror-drama centers on Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant to New York City hired by an affluent couple to care for their daughter. Aisha is haunted by the absence of her six-year-old son, whom she left under the care of a cousin in Senegal so that she could earn money to bring him to the US. But that goal becomes difficult when her employers start withholding her wages. As she navigates the oppressive situation she finds herself in, she is visited by figures from West African folklore: Mami Wata (a mermaid-like water spirit) and Anansi (a trickster spider). They seem like malevolent forces, but her boyfriend’s grandmother encourages her to reframe her thinking and to ask what the spirits want not from her but for her. Could they be haunting her to help guide her toward a new and better life?

The film deals with class, race, exploitation, resistance, survival, motherhood, and guilt—all parts of Aisha’s immigrant experience. Despite the too-quick resolution that follows, the scene at the end of Aisha being reborn out of chaos is visually and emotionally compelling. I appreciate how writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, born in the US to Sierra Leonean parents, uses supernatural horror tropes in unique and subversive ways.

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

Read part 2.