False eyelashes, champagne, a parade of pastel dresses; Priscilla is a movie of metonyms, of commodities standing in for a woman whose identity has been effectively usurped by celebrity lifestyle. As visually and sonically precise as ever, Coppola fashions an immaculately cloistered world that plays host to the pleasures and traps of materialism, fame, and femininity.
9.
All of Us Strangers, dir. Andrew Haigh
All of Us Strangers is surely Andrew Haigh's first legitimate tearjerker, and it's a doozy. But the film balances its more lachrymose tendencies with the cerebral ambiguity of its ghost-story concept, offering an exceptionally perceptive, LGBT-specific portrait of loss, trauma, and middle-age malaise. The four-person cast is as intimate as Haigh's darkly dreamy images.
8.
Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig
It seemed a tall order to turn a doll brand into a smart, impeccably crafted film, but who was anyone to doubt the results considering the talent behind and in front of the camera? Gerwig, with Noah Baumbach, created a film that can sit comfortably beside her Lady Bird and Little Women as a warm, witty, idiosyncratic female coming-of-age story that also has a pointed word or two for the patriarchy. Plus: The colors! The dancing! The professional beaching!
7.
Showing Up, dir. Kelly Reichardt
I can't think of another film about an artist quite like Showing Up, which has no time for hoary clichés about tortured creative genius and plenty of time for simply wallowing in the quotidian realities of living and laboring as an average workaday creator who's trying to get her hot water turned back on. Reichardt's tone is at once genial and tart, attuned to the mundane, soothing rhythms of process as well as the vexing contingencies that intrude upon it.
6.
Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros, dir. Frederick Wiseman
Like Showing Up, Frederick Wiseman's latest documentary - as in most of his prolific body of work - is concerned with process and the institutions around it. Across four luxuriant hours, Menus-Plaisirs observes the operations of the Michelin three-starred Troisgros restaurant in Ouches, France; the legacy of the family that runs it; and the larger agricultural and social ecosystems in which it exists. It's utterly absorbing in that special Wiseman way.
5.
The Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer
How do you represent historical atrocities in fiction film without trivializing or sensationalizing them? Jonathan Glazer ingeniously addresses this problematic in The Zone of Interest, which conveys the unconscionably horrific magnitude of the Holocaust without showing a single image of ghettos or camps. In Glazer's rigorously circumscribed images of idyllic domesticity literally walled off from its genocidal crimes, evil has rarely felt so chillingly banal, and present.
4.
The Killer, dir. David Fincher
In The Killer, Michael Fassbender's titular character is your typical overextended 21st-century gig worker; his job just so happens to be assassinating people. Fincher's jet-black, razor-sharp film is a caustically funny satire of global capitalism, digital-era alienation, and the kind of deranged male ego that has become unnervingly familiar in this moment of "fuck your feelings" rightwing rhetoric. Oh, and it looks and sounds incredible.
3.
May December, dir. Todd Haynes
Taking the concept of a would-be lurid tabloid drama and turning it inside out, May December offers tantalizing interrogations of identity, gender, power, and exploitation, in which the psychologies and positions of its triangulated central characters remain fascinatingly nebulous. Something akin to the child of Bergman's Persona and Haynes's own Safe, it's a richly thought-provoking shapeshifter with two of the year's finest lead female performances.
2.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, dir. Radu Jude
Two years after his incendiary Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Radu Jude has made another mordant, formally inventive, superbly-titled Marxist jeremiad for the Information Age. Vitally angry and confrontational - but always highly playful - the film weaves together fiction, documentary, a whole other preexisting film (!), and parable in a biting indictment of a dehumanizing techno-capitalist present that could hardly seem to get any more dystopian.
1.
Past Lives, dir. Celine Song
There have been plenty of films concerned with the "what if?"'s of brief encounters, missed chances, and unfollowed roads, but few can match the soul-stirring melancholy and capacious sensitivity of Past Lives. Anchored by extraordinarily fine-grained performances from Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro, Celine Song's debut feature film deftly explores cultural displacement, transnational identity, and a myriad shades of longing and existential uncertainty. What could have been told as a tragedy is instead a remarkably wise, generous vision of life's possibilities.
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