Its focal points are two families, one white and the other black, the McAllans arriving through hard luck and bad faith on the dismal land that the Jacksons had to struggle to earn. Like Hillary Jordan’s source novel, Dee Rees’s Mudbound feels like a summoning of William Faulkner, given how intensely focused it is on the generational legacy of hate. Unfortunately, I’m still fucked up.” As in The Meyerowitz Stories, Baumbach’s work is most insightful when characters perform an ugly tightrope walk between fashioning themselves as triumphant rebels and having to confront their own abject state of being. Despite their satisfaction, Jean tells them: “I’m glad you guys feel better.
The film’s defining sequence involves Jean’s (Elizabeth Marvel) late revelation that she was sexually harassed by one of her father’s friends as a child, which prompts brothers Danny (Adam Sandler) and Matthew (Ben Stiller) to retaliate by vandalizing the now senile perpetrator’s car. Caught amid his stifling tyranny as an artist and father are his three grown children, whose festering resentments, which stem from a history of complex interpersonal relationships, rise to the surface with each new confrontation in the wake of their old man’s hospitalization. Think of the filmmaker’s latest as a spiritual sequel to 2005’s The Squid and the Whale if the principal characters of that film were 30 years older, with the grumbling patriarch (played here by Dustin Hoffman) still unsatisfied and unsuccessful in his artistic ambitions. Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories is a rich conglomeration of autobiography, screwball comedy, and existentialist ennui. Chuck BowenĮditor’s Note: Click here for individual contributor ballots and a list of the films that ranked 26–50.
With cinema, we can be alone together, but fulfillment is tethered to risk, which is reliant on submission to the chaos of unmediated life and the evolving curiosity, empathy, and courtesy that it requires. Emphasizing images of people’s faces, they turned their art into a rallying cry for unity between the self and the best and worst of society. With this context in mind, French filmmaking legend Agnès Varda and street artist JR offered one of the most resonant metaphors in this year’s cinema. Many of these films dramatize a struggle to connect while elaborating on the realms existing within one’s mind, riffing on the at once freeing and imprisoning temptation to write off the outside world. Three of the year’s greatest films are neurotically charged chamber dramas in which artists struggle with their self-absorption and self-loathing to salve their fear and loneliness-a salve which is more readily available to them via their art.
An indie sensation shows the impoverished hell-overseen by a man of astonishing kindness-that neighbors a global fantasy land right across the road, while a Portuguese mind-bender utilizes religious iconography to tell the story of a man who’s essentially alone, requiring direct authorial intervention to achieve transcendence. The break-out horror film of the year suggests that outwardly tolerant sections of white America are driven by a hideous hypocrisy, confirming the worst nightmares that many African-Americans have about venturing outside their designated “places.” These nightmares are also elucidated by one of the year’s best documentaries, which merges personal poetry with a brief history of social atrocity. Both coincidentally and by pop-cultural osmosis, many of the year’s best films ask how deeply we may be permitted to check out and how far we should risk and extend ourselves for the prospect of personal and social rehabilitation. We live in an age in which articles are written daily on the need for “checking out” of online culture, so that we may disconnect from the bombardment of grotesqueries that keep us in an emotional tailspin. Cinema is an art of collaborative effort that speaks implicitly and often explicitly of the values of community, which often seemed in short supply this year.