In late 2022, Sight and Sound released its once-a-decade list of the greatest films of all time. The list is voted on by slightly under 2,000 film critics, making it a somewhat more rigorous survey than most, and this decade's was a doozy: thanks, in part, to the inclusion of significantly more women and non-white critics, rankings were shaken up more than they've been in the last eighty years of the list's existence, including the controversial toppling of both Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as Top Movie Ever by Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-and-a-half-hour-long film about three days in the life of a widowed housewife.

The Philadelphia Film Society made the bold, somewhat-nuts choice to screen the entire 100-film series this year; upon learning this, I made the bold, somewhat-nuts choice to try and watch the entire series in theaters. SPOILER ALERT: this did not happen!! But the dozens I did see were frequently, relentlessly, staggering experiences. I've lost track of how many times I left a theater with my mind absolutely reeling; my entire conception of cinema as a medium has been torn apart, stitched back together, and torn apart again, more times than I can count.

I've long been a fan of certain directors, and have studied film enough to call myself a movie enthusiast, but I wouldn't say I've ever loved film itself. This year has changed that for me. I've never been as awestruck by the potential of cinema as a medium, or as deeply aware of cinema as a specifically twentieth-century invention, as I've become over this year. The history of film is inextricably entwined with the history of the 1900s: it marked the birth of mass media and pop culture, grappled with the horrors of both World Wars and the Holocaust, and played an integral part in the evolution of international capitalism as we know it today. The world which now feels inevitable to us had barely been born at the start of cinema; over the century, film commented on it, wondered about it, and reacted with hope and dread as a new kind of human existence took shape. It reflects upon what was and what is; at its best, it suggests possibilities for what might still become.

You can view the full list here. I'm offering it because I don't have the discipline to include write-ups of what each film is, when it was made, and where it was made. A hundred movies is a lot, even if I did miss half of them. And I'm not offering my takes on them as definitive, or even as the final say on what I think about each movie. My impression of each one was informed by the happenings of my year; I was more prepared for some than I was for others. These are meditations more than reviews: I hope that, in the writing of these, I wind up expressing something more than I consciously know how to. Much like the act of filmmaking itself jfc ok lets get started shall we

DNW, though I've seen it half a dozen times already. This one's inclusion on the list feels more like recency bias than anything: I deeply enjoy it, but I'd be surprised if it was still on the list a decade from now. I wouldn't mind if I was wrong, though!

DNW, because I didn't learn about the PFS series until after it had screened. I was very sad about this, because Buster Keaton is brilliant, The General is a goddamned delight, and I would have loved to see this with an audience. I'm sad that this ranked as low as it did.

DNW (see above)

I rushed to theaters to catch this one about two hours after I discovered what PFS was doing. I knew absolutely nothing about it going in; I left convinced that I needed to see as many of these films as I humanly could, that to miss a single one might be to miss an opportunity, and an experience, that I couldn't possibly fathom going in. I preferred the alternate title of this movie, Strange Beast, because it is a literal chimera: half an almost ambient exploration of the tender, budding relationship between two shy, quiet men, and half a far more savage and magical story of the wilderness in which they get lost. The moments I remember most vividly are the kinds of tiny moments that movies rarely capture, yet which immediately felt almost like memories: the slow way that one person finds his head in another's lap; a singer performing against a cheap, garish backdrop. For the first time out of many, I found myself in what now feels like the most crucial state of mind for any kind of moviegoing: a sheer wonder at what could possibly come next.

DNW. I think I missed every last Western this year, completely by accident.

DNW

A recurring theme this year, for me, was being taken aback by just how goddamn delightful black-and-white movies could be—and by how unexpectedly poignant their emotional depths often were. What starts out feeling almost like a magic trick—a pair of earrings bounces from owner to owner, slowly drawing them all together in almost clockwork ways—slowly turns into a tragedy, one that's somehow equally tragic for every participant involved. I was struck by the madame's husband, an aristocratic military general who is possessive and controlling of her almost by default, but who is shockingly self-aware and gracious—at times, taking a joke played at his expense and extending it without anyone else realizing, and at other times, plaintive as he tries to point out how trapped by circumstance everybody seems to be, unable to control his own destiny, and trying to get everyone else to recognize how inescapable their fates will be, one way or the other.

The extended party sequence at the end of this historical drama later inspired the opening of The Godfather, among other films. I knew of the sequence going in, but was still caught off-guard by how my heart stopped almost the moment the party began. A movie about the end of aristocracy and the beginning of democracy as seen from an aging duke's point of view, the film takes pains to show the duke's graciousness, his awareness that his era is over, that a new world is taking place. He is determined to make the transition from old world to new as painless as he knows how. Yet he is unprepared for the moment when, all at once, the world leaves him behind; the present belongs to the youth, as foolish and cruel as they can be, and what he thought was a noble mission—to record the wisdom of a now-gone era, to help his descendants learn from his mistakes—is abruptly revealed as horrible folly. The new generation will leave the old to rot, an act which would be vicious if it wasn't so absentminded. The duke recognizes this, too, and with his final moments of relevance, acts not to forgive but to at least endure his own suffering, to make his pain his own rather than bequeath it on those yet to come.

DNW. I think it was on the same day as The Leopard, and The Leopard was very long.

This three-hour slice of life left me almost entirely unmoved, but I felt bad about it. I wasn't sure whether I just wasn't in the mood to appreciate it on its own terms, or whether the things it was doing were things I'd seen done better in books or even in television. I still don't know. I attempted to rewatch it the next day, and enjoyed the first hour of it quite a bit; then life called, and I put it down, and I never picked it back up.

I watched this at home with my girlfriend, snuggled up on the couch, a couple of weeks before its official screening; the PFS showed it in black-and-white, and I'd have loved to catch it there. An absolute delight of a movie, even on third-or-fourth watch. Its messages about class warfare and capitalism are there, but first and foremost it's simply a deeply enjoyable movie, equal parts heist and satire, family drama and thriller. It's genius that its ending only works if you take the deeper messages into account—a message about the state of the world becomes, instead, a story about how ostensibly well-meaning people can nonetheless inflict horrible suffering upon their "lessers" out of sheer obliviousness, and about how a horrible crime can, through a certain lens, be seen instead as an inevitable act of almost-justice.

I don't think I understood how much sheer fun Wong Kar-wai is, but he seems determined to make every shot and every cut as dynamic and playful and surprising as it possibly can be. I'd compare him to Edgar Wright, which would be high praise in and of itself, but Kar-wai's work is more transcendent, less focused on mere entertainment than on sensation. The moral of this movie, as far as I can tell, is that if you love somebody, it is indelibly your right to sneak into their home and to blast "California Dreamin'" as loudly and as many times as you can get away with; and if somebody blasts this song at you, you had better take the fucking hint.

DNW, though I've seen it enough times before to last a lifetime. I just do not enjoy Stanley Kubrick, with maybe one exception (and it isn't this). Later in the year, I watched my first Andrei Tarkovsky film, knowing that Tarkovsky was both frequently compared to Kubrick as a filmmaker and that Tarkovsky hated Kubrick's guts, and... Tarkovsky had a point imo, sorry Stanley

Jean-Luc Godard was the biggest revelation for me all year long, which is funny, because his first movie on the list was this: a 4.5-hour long documentary series that is almost a self-parody of avant-garde French pretension. Yet I was blown away. Godard's narrative is at once oblique and simple: it feels like he's talking circles 'round what he really wants to say, but partly that's because he seems to want to state certain straightforward theses, not out loud, but by demonstrating their truth. Even at his most antagonistic, he understands how to be fun on levels that even the fun Great Directors barely seem to touch; his message weaves through the futility of cinema wanting to stand against the horrors of the Holocaust, through declarations that Alfred Hitchcock may have been a more powerful man than Adolf Hitler, and ends on such a shockingly tender and personal note that I found myself in tears, and deeply confused as to why. I'm going to tell myself I intend to rewatch this again right away, and I'll forget to do so for another 4 or 5 years, and then I'll finally rewatch it and beat myself up for not immediately returning to it the day after. It feels like a part of myself changed that day, and like I've spent the rest of the year rediscovering who and what I am.

The first movie this year that made me wonder whether I'd just discovered my new all-time favorite film. I'll be abusing the word "delightful" in this write-up, no doubt, but seriously: this film was more inventive and fun than I knew it was possible to be outside of cartoons. It's a perfect coincidence that the film Godard wrote and shot during his divorce to its lead actress ranked just above his documentary series, made decades later, about his belief that art's most fundamental purpose was to convert deep feeling into sheer style: this is as sexy and classy and 60s and French as sexy, classy 60s French cinema can be, yet all that feels like a counterpoint to the underlying sorrow of its story, which is told in as amusing a fashion as a sad story can be told. Absurdity will be our downfall; sincerity will be our downfall too. It's hard to decide whether this film is chauvinist or is about a chauvinist, because it's both—it's a movie about Godard getting his heart broken, and it's a movie acknowledging that he probably deserved it, and in between he tosses out gags so inspired that a single scene alone seems to have been the inspiration for Mel Brooks' entire career.

It goes without saying that the Sight and Sound 100 contains an awful lot of gorgeous cinematography, yet this might have been the single most beautiful film of the year: everything about it is stunningly eerie, as if an oil painting had come to life and drawn you into its strange, unsettling depths. It's a war story told from the fringes of the war, where two children are young enough to confuse genuine bloodshed with Frankenstein. Either way, the world seems wondrous to them; either way, they aren't grown up enough to understand the way the world "does" work, which means that they find themselves believing in fiction on the one hand, and are all-too-ready to accept disturbing non-fictions on the other. Truth be told, I don't remember its exact plot: I mostly remember the way its oils seeped into my skin, staining me in ways that can't be washed away.

I talk about David Lynch being my favorite director more than anybody should ever talk about anything, but at the same time, I have a curious tendency to remember his movies as being cheaper and worse than they are until I rewatch them. No amount of viewings helps me remember just how profound of a filmmaker he is, in part because he has an unparalleled genius in capturing the intricate, minute shifts in people's faces; his scripts can seem broad and hokey on their surface, but he can pack an essay's worth of variation into the way somebody says a single line, capturing a person's deepest, strangest feelings even if they'll never quite know what they meant to say out loud. He's the only director whose depiction of eros I have ever found interesting, but the real fun of watching a Lynch film in theaters is seeing how randomly any given audience seems to laugh at certain moments and not others. In this showing of Blue Velvet, a scene that I've always found excruciatingly upsetting got maybe the biggest laugh of the movie... and the horrifying thing is, as disturbing as that scene still was, I also knew exactly why everybody seemed to find it so damn funny. (Yet another facet of Lynch's virtuosity is: he understands exactly why such horrifying things could make a person want to laugh.)

There's a whole subcategory of films in this series that might just be described as: Witchy Shit™. This movie is a great depiction of young women being friends, and it's a just-as-great depiction of never-quite-consummated desire and love between said women, but beyond that, it is simply occult as hell, and I was fucking here for it. Even before the real Witchy Shit started to happen, every aspect of how Julie and Céline communicate feels like they're performing a ritual neither of them fully understand; later, they find themselves seemingly transported into the plot of another movie, which they alternate between laughing at, trying to decipher, and trying to alter altogether. If I watch this movie enough times, it too might become my favorite film ever—and I somewhat regret that I've only seen it sober.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger—better known as The Archers—feel like the kind of lost-gem filmmakers that I wish I'd discovered as a young kid. Their movies are simultaneously campy, silly, serious, and stirring: everything about them is batshit, in a way that makes them feel weirdly modern. This movie opens with a downed fighter pilot contacting a woman via radio and seemingly falling in love with her mid-crash; that the movie then shifts to one of the silliest, fruitiest depictions of an afterlife I've ever seen feels almost like a bonus. I feel like Douglas Adams knew this movie very well: it feels like his exact kind of heartfelt nonsense. The world needs more of this joy in it, idk.

DNW. Somehow, I missed every single Chaplin movie this year, which leaves me in a funny place: I know I've seen at least three Charlie Chaplin movies in my lifetime, but I can't remember which they were. Nonetheless, my real takeaway remains this: Buster Keaton was robbed.

Much to my shame, I had to walk out of this, the second movie on the list by Edward Yang (after Yi Yi, above). I simply could not stay awake, for reasons that was not entirely this film's fault. Yang is, weirdly, the director whose films I least responded to this year, yet feel most convinced that I ought to give more of a try. True greatness is defined, in part, by ineffability, and the fact that Yang feels so compelling to me despite my literal inability to be compelled seems of a piece with the rest of my year: whether I liked it doesn't affect whether it stuck with me, and the film-and-a-half I saw by Yang most certainly stuck.

One of the most infamous films of the year, due to its seven-and-a-half-hour(!) runtime—eight-and-a-half, once you factor in intermissions and a much-needed dinner break. I trained for this goddamn movie, the way that some people train for a marathon. Turns out I didn't need to: this was one of the most surprisingly watchable, enjoyable movies that I saw all year, even though it contains multiple real-time sequences of people walking slowly, silently down rainy, muddy streets. Its story feels like it should be simple, yet somehow it isn't: a village of impoverished people is robbed even blinder, somehow, and then its residents are betrayed worse than that. And the movie's length is used, not to embellish this story, but to ground it: these people aren't exactly fools, but the small world they know is the only thing they know, which makes the larger-scale atrocities of their place in time almost impossible to comprehend. The moment they leave their village behind, they are entirely at the mercies of those who better understand what's happening. And the triumph of the movie is that it manages to make those long, dreary walks in the rain feel like hope, because that road presents the possibility of a better world; you feel it, even when you know all-too-well that no hope lies at the end of it, even when you knew going in that this was a story about inevitable despair.

The greatest classics have a deep weirdness to them—see what I said about ineffability, in #80 above—that keeps them from ever feeling like the tropes they've long since become. And Sunset Boulevard is genuinely great. I regret that I was on the verge of passing out when I saw this one: while the first half struck me as extraordinary, my tiredness meant that the second half flew by me as disappointingly inevitable. That's my fault, not this movie's. Luckily, better Billy Wilder movies were yet to come.

DNW. I think I was traveling.

DNW, and I'm still beating myself up over it.

DNW, for the simple reason that I've seen it a dozen times. There's a reason why Hiyao Miyazaki is the only(?) animated director on this list, and why he's on it twice.

Somehow I'd never seen this movie until this year. It was a privilege and a joy to see it on the big screen. While the other movies I've seen of Miyazaki have at least the trappings of plot—conflict, antagonists, motive—My Neighbor Totoro has next to none, and its genius is that it doesn't need any. Its world is so wondrous, every moment spent within it such a marvel, that it earns your attention without seemingly asking for it: a triumph of sheer generosity. And in a world that often makes it feel as if you can only be worth others' attention by manipulating it out of them, that's a powerful message in and of itself. So is seeing a film that's primarily about children who freely give their attention to the world around them, because the world is inherently worth their minding.

DNW, and feel bad about it, because Godard made such a big fuss about what an atypical and important director Roberto Rossellini is in Histoire(s) du cinéma. When I said that every missed movie this year felt like a serious loss, I meant it; I look forward to spending 2024 catching up.

When I was in film school, I watched Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, and got next to nothing out of it. Now that I've seen L'avventura, I feel like there's maybe a bit of a trend. While this movie had some striking cinematography, and while it had a few moments that I think will really stay with me—nothing like realizing your friend is missing and hunting for them on the jagged cliffs overlooking a sea so turbulent that its roar never dies down—this was one of the only movies this year that really left me wanting to look at my watch, wondering when I'd earned the right to go home. (As a general rule, it feels like a lot of stuffy films by self-important men lost a lot of purchase on the S&S list this year; in 1962, it made it as high as #2, and now here it is, fighting for its life, after placing 21st in 2012. From the contemporary reviews I read of it, it seems a lot of critics were struck by its depiction of alienation in the early 60s; maybe now its message feels less original, or maybe it feels flat-out less good.)

DNW, sadly, but isn't this movie's story such a miracle? When I first watched it, it was assumed that vast swathes of the movie were lost forever; nowadays, you can see it almost entirely as it was first composed. And it's still stylish as all hell.

DNW. How did I miss this one? Why am I such a disgrace?

The Archers strike again! The ballet at the center of this movie is such a goddamn marvel that I completely forgot I knew the fairy tale this film's story comes from, and was somehow totally surprised at how it ended. Again, these are directors who I wish we focused on more nowadays: it feels delightful that this movie is such a masterwork in crowd-pleasing and also finds time to stage an absolutely breathtaking and surreal blend of virtuosic choreography and film-editing magic. (The real joy, I think, lies in how the genuinely-compelling dance means the movie trickery catches you off guard, and then the brilliant movie magic means you're ready to be ensnared by the stunning dance all over again. The theme of this list might as well have been "chimeras.")

DNW; was shown as a double feature with #70.

I've been meaning to watch this film for over a decade, and was still shocked at how good it was. Tarkovsky is similar to Kubrick in how willing he is to let the camera act as a detached observer of human behavior; he is different from Kubrick in how much he enjoys writing genuinely compelling drama, and how often he makes reality seem almost like a fairy tale. Yet, like Kubrick, he shies away from letting his drama congeal into full-blown narrative: his striking dramatic tension has a way of ebbing and flowing, sometimes leaving an impression without a conclusion, and other times working as an almost moralist fable. I wasn't in the right state of mind to properly take this movie in, but even so left feeling delighted and awestruck—and that was before its final passages pulled some unexpected trickery that made me want to cackle and clap my hands like a tiny, overjoyed baby. Film critics talk about how meditative and thoughtful his movies are, but they should honestly talk more about what fantastic showmanship Tarkovsky's got, and also about how sexy his shit is. (I love that we never see Andrei do the painting that he's literally remembered for, but that Tarkovsky did focus on what really matters, i.e. making sure Andrei's got insanely fuckable cheekbones. What a historical babe.)

The further down we go on this list, the more upset I get at the movies I missed. DNW :(

The funniest thing about this movie to me is how the opening crawl makes it seem like it's going to be the kind of film you need to know history and geography for, the kind of thing where complex geopolitical tensions shape the entire narrative of the film. Then literally anything else happens, and you realize that the crawl was there to get all the fiber out of the way so we could focus on the things that really matter: namely, sharp quips, hating Nazis, and pretty people with sad eyes. Umberto Eco was probably correct about all of the reasons why, on some levels, Casablanca is not exactly a profound or politically astute film; at the same time, this was a movie made in the literal middle of World War II, written and directed by people who had a lot of reasons to hate and fear Nazis, and that defiant sense of weary people coming together to do the right thing for goddamn once is still a heck of a drug. (One of the many takeaways from this year, for me, is that greatness is inherently contradictory: a lot of these movies were made by people who wrote manifestos arguing that the other people on this movie were dreadful and banal and probably kicked puppies, yet here all those people are, together despite their best efforts.)

HOW DID I MISS THIS ONE
I mean, I've seen this movie before, but man I would have liked to see it in the context of, say, everything that I just wrote about Casablanca.

DNW. Somehow, I managed not to see Goodfellas until I was, like, 29, and I'm probably a healthier man for missing out on it till then. I missed every last Scorsese movie on this list, and that makes me pretty sad. But Goodfellas was not at all the film of his I most regret not catching.

DNW. Idk, I think I just had a lot going on that month.

DNW. True story: when I was still in high school, my drama teacher took our class on a field trip to see Tarell Alvin McCraney's early play The Brothers Size, where it left an indelible impression; teenagers, as a general rule, are not supposed to see theatre that good. So the fact that one of McCraney's play got adapted into a movie, and that that movie became one of the most popular and beloved movies of the decade, and that it also won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and that I nonetheless somehow haven't seen it yet... folks, it baffles me too. "I'm going to rectify that this year, at long last," I said to myself every week for the first half of this year, and then I didn't.

Fellini, along with Antonioni, is one of the self-important fellas whose movies slid precipitously down the Sight and Sound 100 this year; unlike Antonioni, I could at least see why Fellini had made it on the list in the first place. The movie's message certainly resonated; certain of its passages moved me. Anita Ekberg portrays maybe the sexiest woman-as-object-of-desire to ever grace a film, and my take on her was that her simple inability to care about the men trying to drip off her from all angles suggested that she was aware of the banal inadequacy of the celebrity-and-sex culture that surrounded her, and refused to take part. Later, I read other critics' take on her, and was surprised at how many of them seemed to think that she, not her paparazzi, was the banal one; still later, I saw Fellini's 8½, and found myself wondering whether Fellini sided more with me than the critics. I'd have much rather seen a movie that followed her than Marcello; if it's not already self-evident how vacuous everything about his lifestyle is, I'm not sure that a 3-hour movie about his vacuity is going to help any.

DNW. Seems like I'd have really liked it. Instead, I chose to watch Fellini. Blech.

DNW. Here I am, loudly advocating for Buster Keaton, and I didn't even catch this one in theaters. Actually, I think I was in Maine while this one was playing. Don't @ me.

DNW in theaters, but I rented it to watch on my own. Of all the Billy Wilder films this year, this one was by far my favorite: like Madame de..., it was such an inventive contraption that I was caught off-guard by the depths of its depression and melancholy, which felt altogether more contemporary than I was expecting. It's a movie about several kinds of alienation, all of which still feel relevant today. And its ending, in which all that is banished and love seems to take root, feels like a kind of hopefulness I'd love to see more of nowadays—in part because the way it depicts that love feels a lot more fun, a lot more like two people fondly and rightly giving each other shit, than the mawkish kind that endlessly persists.

DNW; was still in Maine

DNW; I could say that I was recovering from my Maine trip, but the more-honest story is that (a) I have never once enjoyed a Ridley Scott movie, and (b) I saw this movie in high school and was so offended by how much worse it was than the original Philip K. Dick novel, how devoid it was of Dick's hall-of-mirrors ingenuity, that I went home trying to start a fight with my father, whose favorite movie is Blade Runner, only to be foiled by my father's endless love and generous compassion. 

You know how I went on and on about Godard earlier? Well, this movie was screened by the PFS for four times longer than every other film on this list. And somehow, I still fucking missed it. I reminded myself multiple times during its theater run that it was currently in theaters, that I had to go see it, that I would beat myself up for ages if I missed it, and then... I dunno, my late summer and early-to-mid fall was just a lot.

Chantal Akerman blew everyone's minds by showing up at #1 with Jeanne Dielman. Ever since watching Pierrot le fou, I'd been anticipating Akerman, since the first thing I discovered after I walked out of the theaters gleeful over it was an interview where Akerman said that Pierrot was what made her realize she wanted to make film; "Aha," I thought, "a fellow pilgrim." Akerman's only other film on the list was this documentary, an almost somber film featuring shots of New York City that never really focus on individuals, mixed with voiceover letters from her mother, and it shook me to my core. One shot in it had my jaw slowly falling open, involuntarily, because I simply could not imagine how Akerman had caught it. I don't know how she caught any of it. And at the same time, I don't know how I'm so surprised, because none of the shots seem like they're trying to do anything remotely fancy; they are simply positioned in such intelligent, thoughtful ways that they capture exactly as much as they could possibly capture, in ways that make the entire movie feel... not spiritual, exactly, but abundant in spirit. You could watch this movie every week instead of attending religious services, and it wouldn't feel like blasphemy. 

DNW, and I regret it. This isn't performative regret, FYI: I'm just over here feeling gently bad about myself.

DNW. How is Under the Lake the only Campion I've ever seen? The composer of this film even collaborated with my favorite musician at some point. I should have seen this—like, not just this year, but in general. What the hell.

I deeply loved virtually every French New Wave film that I saw this year, almost as much as I came away from virtually every 60s Italian film unmoved. The 400 Blows felt intimate and personal in a way that Godard's movies don't; it's quieter in the way it rejects and invents film techniques, but nonetheless watching it felt like seeing the birth of a new kind of filmmaking, one that was more intimate and heartfelt than cinema before it ever seems. It's also a stunning instance of a bunch of child actors absolutely knocking it out of the park. I wanted to give Truffaut a hug; I was delighted to learn, reading up about this movie, that he seemed as generous and lovely a person as he was a filmmaker. Also, the opening sequence of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was totally just the filmmakers doing a pastiche of this movie, right? It's gotta be.

DNW, and I'm pissed off about it. It seems fun as hell.

DNW. I have no opinions on having not seen this movie.

One of the best times you can possibly have in a movie theater. One of the most thrilling sequences you can ever watch in a movie theater (the cornfield bit—if you know, you know). One of the most fun Bond villains ever written in a non-James Bond movie. Arguably the single funniest ending shot in film history.

DNW. I remember loving it in film school, but time has eroded all memory of it. Letterboxd suggests it would have been a blast, though.

The frustrating thing about not being a Kubrick fan is that, on every conceivable level, his films are immaculate. I'd been meaning to see Barry Lyndon for a good decade before I finally caught it, and so many things about it stand out to me: the incredible way in which he gets tricked into fleeing his home, and the way that he gets robbed immediately after; the deadpan war scene, in which soldiers numbly march their way into bullets (after which Barry quietly decides he'd rather be a deserter, then gets caught by enemies and realizes that actually being a flat-out traitor is where it's at). It's visually tremendous; its character arcs are highly original; its social commentary is killer; it is very, very funny, in its straight-faced way. But none of it gets under my skin. I appreciate it on every technical and conceptual level, and I understand that I should be laughing, I should be moved. But I don't. And his movies are too long for me to sit still and politely appreciate; for that kind of investment, I want to feel more than I do. Maybe this one will grow on me, and I was tempted to see it a second time when it screened as part of a different series, but my experience with Kubrick is that I almost never know how to look past the trees to see the forest, and it's a real shame.

The one film that PFS didn't manage to screen this year. For once, I am blameless.

Why didn't this movie feel more pretentious? It's so goddamn abstract, and so much of it consists of people roaming through forests yelling about mystic elements that might exist, without the film's ever backing those elements up. Yet I really goddamn liked it. The opening bits set in a militarized zone were almost ballet-like in their portrayal of military movements set in opposition to the trespassers; the ending sequences were as close as I've ever seen in-color cinema get to German Expressionism. And the vagueness always felt meticulous, as if Tarkovsky knew exactly which ambiguities he meant to preserve at all times. Of the three films of his I saw this year, this was probably the one that stirred me the least, but the bar is so high that I still walked out of this movie and bought the book he wrote on filmmaking. I couldn't not. That man works on a higher plane than almost everybody, and on a different plane than literally everybody. It's a miracle that his movies are so fun despite being so weird.

From one perspective, DNW. From another perspective, I watched this years and years ago, in a way that still means DNW. From a third perspective, I briefly found myself wondering whether I'd watched this this year, before recalling that I had not. There is no perspective from which I did in fact, see this movie this year, yet somehow the accounts all vary nonetheless.

DNW. I remember liking this one in film school too. I'm also only just remembering that I got COVID in July, which is probably why I missed so many things.

Funnily enough, I'd never found this movie compelling before! This time around, something about it finally landed: it's such a meticulously-constructed entertainment, and each of its pieces operates on a different register. What I'd never noticed before was how gradually the central mystery swims into view, because all of this movie's pieces are given an equal weight to that primary story; that, to me, feels like Rear Window's masterstroke. (I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I was struck, this time, about the two-dimensionality of each window, belying depths deeper within: it's like a series of silent films in color, knitted together to reflect a story about their onlooker's life. And if that's not a fantastic metaphor for how our lives are entertained by the flotsam and jetsam of art and media and entertainment that we take in, partly intentionally and partly unwittingly, I don't know what is.)

I got to see this movie as a birthday present to myself. This time, I was caught up in how terrific all the early sequences are, before the central premise really takes off; when this movie still feels more-or-less like a very funny crime thriller, it holds up marvelously. Then men disguise themselves as women, the movie gets campy and gay, and Marilyn Monroe shows up in such a staggeringly funny performance that it reminds us how wasted she was as a sex icon. (This time, as always, I find myself less interested in her sexy song number than I am in literally everything else she does.) And one of Wilder's masterstrokes is that, once all that picks up, the crime bits are all but forgotten: the movie always feels like it ends half an hour earlier than I'm expecting, because it takes all the "obligatory" shit that modern movies would feel compelled to include, chortles, and throws it all out. If this is Wilder's highest-rated movie on this list, maybe that's why: not just the boldness of its inclusions, but the boldness of what it realizes it can omit.

To be honest, I wish this wasn't Godard's most famous film. It was his first feature film, and it's by far his most primitive, and its fame doesn't do him justice. At the same time, it's impossible for it not to be his most famous film, because it singlehandedly invented the language and tone of modern cinema. Simply put, this is the first movie that really feels like the kind of movie that still gets made today. And that's layered on top of what Pauline Kael identifies as the first film about people who... well... grew up watching film. Its main character isn't a cool, hardened criminal: he's a young man who's seen movies about cool, hardened criminals and wants nothing more in life than to emulate one. Well, he wants one thing more, and it's to be loved by the woman he loves—but he doesn't know how to find that, in part because his love for her is the same "love" he'd feel for a romantic lead in a movie he was watching, and in part because he doesn't really know how to drop the act. She, in turn, is the very image of sophistication—but is she sophisticated because she wants nothing and is amused by everything? Or is she sophisticated because she realizes how illusory, how make-believe, the world around her is? She betrays him because she wants to see whether it helps her feel for him, and she claims that the experiment is a success... but as she watches him die, she doesn't seem to feel a thing. Just desserts? Perhaps. In any event, it feels like a movie about realizing that movies birth culture, that they're too seductive not to birth it, and that film is precariously at risk of creating a generation of people who cannibalize themselves. (The surreal part about watching it now, of course, is realizing that there was a time before it when this wasn't the case. We're well through the looking glass now.)

DNW; saw a decade ago, and don't remember it

DNW; either saw a decade ago, and don't remember it, or saw a different Chaplin film and don't remember that

DNW, I think because I was in North Carolina.

DNW; might have still been in North Carolina

DNW; still have never seen this; the only Hitchcock I somehow missed

I'll admit that, upon leaving the movie theater, I looked this one up and realized that I'd completely missed that actors were playing multiple roles within the same family, splayed across time. On some level, though, I'm glad that I didn't realize that: it bled into the movie's deeply surreal-yet-moving atmosphere. For its sheer spectacle alone, Mirror puts other films to shame: shot after shot feel like magic tricks, or like glimpses into a world more fantastic than our own. Yet it all revolves around a story of extraordinary intimacy: of the love between family who are too fragmented to fully connect to one another, let alone themselves. Husbands and wives, parents and sons, find themselves divided, time and again, by the pain they've had inflicted upon them and by the pain they inflict upon others. Everything reflects; everything echoes; the fantastic infinities of these broken worlds only serve to underscore an emptiness that seems so obvious, so simple, you think it would be mendable. Yet like ghosts in the mirror, or ghosts in our past, we reach out only to find ourselves alone. In the plainest and most commonspoken ways, Tarkovsky is profound.  

It was Scorsese's stunning essay on Fellini that made me determined to catch every Fellini film this year; I also remember when 8½ was frequently cited as a contender for Best Film Ever Made, next to Citizen Kane and Vertigo, before "ponderous men" took such a hit in the Sight and Sound rankings. Scorsese's feelings on 8½ are so wondrous that I regret not being able to see or feel any of what he did, on first pass; the fact that it felt so obvious, so blatant, might mean that I missed everything that I should have been catching, or it might mean that this is one of those less-than-timeless classics that'll keep slipping lower on this list. Maybe I'll come back to it one day, but—Scorsese's passions aside—I struggle to bring myself to care.

One of the best films ever made about: (1) portraits, (2) ladies, and (3) fire. I was really unsure of how I'd feel about this movie, since I'm wary of hype (and this movie was hyped-to-death on release) and tend not to love erotic cinema (and this movie is very definitely that). What I found was a stark and bizarre period piece, so stripped-down that it could have been a play save for how vitally important its environments are to establishing its lush, bleak mood. It captures love with a stiff, buttoned-up warmth that's appropriate for its era, and then in a ferocious, messy frenzy that's appropriate for passion itself, landing in something so intimate and familiar and natural that you feel shocked that this is what so many people work so hard fear and repress. And then it captures something more, because this is a period piece, after all. 

DNW; still mad about it. Easily my favorite Scorsese film and one of my favorite movies of all time. It captures the terrors of being a lonely man in a way that's painful in one way for lonely men, and painful in a very different way for everybody else.

DNW, and I regret it.

DNW, and... as a Jewish man who grew up going to Holocaust museums and listening to survivors speak, I can't bring myself to regret missing this one. 

DNW; looks fun as hell

DNW; I told myself I'd watch at least one Bresson movie this year, and then I proved myself a liar

What stunned me most about this, as someone who'd never seen it before, is that it's a movie about local community: about the different social pockets that, from afar, seem to constitute a single group of people, but up-close turns out to be deliriously colorful and entirely at odds with itself. Yet at the end of the day, it's a community; you understand their scorn towards the white couple that's moving in, not because that couple doesn't fit in but because they're oblivious to the idea that there's anything to "fit into." Tensions bubble over in three successive ways: first, as a conflict between community members; then as an intrusion by outsiders to that community; and finally as the community tearing itself open. The shock and tragedy of its final minutes only works, though, because of what a sheer joy the movie is—it's easily one of the most engaging and fun times I've ever had in a theater, up until it wasn't. I'd seen a handful of Spike Lee films before this one, but none of them could have prepared me for how good this one was.

As with Pierrot le fou, I could call this my favorite movie of all time and not feel a tinge of dishonesty about it. It felt like a new flavor of physical comedy: slapstick handled in a more mature, sophisticated way than I've ever seen it handled before. Its set compositions are absolutely stunning, an alien near-future that's equal parts modern living, science fiction, and Doctor Seuss. But what it does with its sets—creating elaborate gags on every inch of the screen all at once, with almost no cues telling you where to look at when—is what truly sets it apart. I feel like I could watch this movie ten different times, look in ten different places, and see ten different things. And its last major scene, an endless sequence set in a newly-opened restaurant, is so dense with rhythm and motion that I think I'd have to watch it half a dozen times before piecing together the full incident. In some ways, it made me think of games like The Incredible Machine, though I've never played a game whose interlocking pieces were as intricate as Playtime. In other ways, it made me imagine a different future of entertainment, one in which films like this are put on at parties and by families, slowly drawing us in rather than leaping out to grab us by the throats, meditative and contemplative the ways that novels are but in a medium that lets them be properly social experiences. A man can dream of better worlds.

DNW, though thankfully I caught another Ozu later on

DNW, though I did watch this one 15 years ago. To be honest, I just wasn't in the mood for a bummer.

I didn't realize this movie was three-and-a-half hours long until I sat down in the theater. But it flew by. Has any movie ever been this entertaining and this socially and emotionally intricate? I can see how it spawned about a dozen different genres of movie, and three hundred different tropes; the difference between it and its imitators, and the reason that a single movie inspired so many different flavors of imitation, is that other films play these kinds of scenes as single notes, while Seven Samurai plays them as complex chords. Lowbrow entertainment, intricate character arcs, stunning and haunting visuals, and careful portraiture of a historic era all take place in lockstep—it's effortlessly engaging, its humor is broad and simple and delightful, its characters are memorable and compelling, and the depths of its story sneak up on you so quietly that, by the end, it's almost shocking that this film feels like the epic it is.

First things first, I'm not sure that any movie has ever taken advantage of the sheer bombast of cinema the way that Apocalypse Now does; I can't think of a movie that needs to be seen in theaters like this one. Second things second, this is still one of the greatest depictions of the evils of war, and of the American military-industrial complex, ever made—regardless of how many jackasses watch it and completely miss the point. Third: the Final Cut is deeply frustrating, in that it adds extra length to Marlon Brando's scenes at the end that his character honestly needed to be done justice, but it also adds the French plantation sequence, which not only interrupts the otherwise-perfect flow of the movie but is so cheaply and tackily done that you instantly see how Coppola, who spent a decade directing some of the greatest movies ever made back-to-back, eventually wound up as a disappointing and depressing punchline of an artist. That there's no singularly perfect cut of Apocalypse Now could serve as a metaphor for Coppola himself, but really it just means that one of us is gonna have to put that cut together ourselves. (The man has done most of the work for us already.)

I feel a little blasphemous for saying this, but I think that Persona suffered for my having the rest of the movies on this list to compare it to. Next to Ingmar Bergman's other films, it's a daring avant-garde deep dive into a woman's psyche, in ways that ask disturbing existential questions about how we work as people—but that's, like, half the films on this list, and Persona felt a lot shallower than most of those. It's stunningly beautiful, in that artful Swedish magazine-ready kind of way, but I'm not sure its beauty particularly holds up to the rest of the films in this list either. Ironically, I think that more-or-less any other Bergman would have been a more enjoyable watch in this context. (And Persona probably holds up much better if you watch it in any other context than the one I saw it in, to be fair.)

 

The third of my "possibly instant all-time favorite" movies this year, and easily one of the strangest movies all year. An Iranian man pretends, on a whim, to be a film director that he isn't; the family that he lies to eventually takes him to court over it. A different filmmaker hears about this, and persuades the court to let him sit in on the proceedings, and to ask this man deeply personal questions about why he chose to do what he did. He also films reenactments of the incident in question, starring this man and this family and set in the family's actual home. As the man is given a chance to explain not only what he did but who he is, likely for the first time in his life, you see the subtle depths of his strange decision play out in his performance, as he's given a chance to play the role of a lifetime—which is to say, himself. And the miracle of the film is that he reveals himself to be an extraordinary actor, as his new director—half documentarian, half narrative filmmaker—gives him an opportunity to be seen by precisely the family he'd hoped would see him as anybody but himself. Without this movie, I'm not sure you get Charlie Kaufman or Nathan Fielder, but I'm not sure that Kaufman or Fielder have ever created anything quite this dazzling or this heartfelt (and that's a high fucking bar).

It felt like an artsy student film. I'm informed that it's the origin of artsy student films, which explains a lot. I'm further informed that it was a huge influence on David Lynch, which makes sense, because I've seen Lynch's artsy student films too. As a former art-school student, I may have been prejudiced against this one. Or maybe I've just seen all of its images (which are terrific) appropriated by so many art students and music videos and aspirationally pretentious film directors that I couldn't appreciate them in their original context. It felt like the sort of thing I'd show a class after they'd read Freud's essay about the uncanny, if I was the kind of college professor who made my class read Freud's essay about the uncanny, but I fell asleep in that class multiple times, so I'd probably show 'em something like Close-Up instead.

DNW (along with every other Western this year, completely by accident)

The French New Wave films this year were among the most consistently delightful of the series, and I walked away with a massive new art-crush on Jean-Luc Godard, but I'm glad that Agnès Varda outranked every other New Wave director on this list. This is such a dazzlingly multilayered take on a young woman, portraying her first at her silliest and brattiest and most glamorous and then, with increasing deftness, unpacking the person who she is underneath, while slowly calling attention to the fact that her silliest, brattiest self is a byproduct of the casual disregard that nearly everyone in her life seems to show her. Every attempt she makes to be human gets batted down, fondly but definitely, with the exception of one close friend and one total stranger. And for all that I was prepared for this to be a merciless, satirical take on the ludicrous and unfeeling nature of modern society—French New Wave, y'all!—I was delighted that, in the end, it turned into one of the most touching and heartfelt romantic films I've ever seen, in less time than I'd ever have thought it would take. But its depiction of young romance is so plausible for the simple reason that, after a film's worth of people dismissively thinking they already know her, Cléo meets one man whose attraction to her is less that he knows who she is and more that he'd sure like to learn.

It's preposterous that Jean Renoir was this good at making movies in 1939. I found it almost hard to believe that this movie was that old. At the same time, it's hard to believe that it could have been made any time later, not because it feels pre-modern but because it's so efficient at constructing an elaborate tale between a ridiculous number of characters that it seems like the kind of thing you only could have made before other movies gave you the impression that that kind of storytelling simply isn't possible with films. The film moves at an insane clip, establishing so many storylines so charmingly that you barely notice how much you're asked to keep track of. When all its characters converge in a single mansion, the movie begins to shuffle rapidly between combinations of characters, almost like a card trick, unfurling just the right details in just the right order, until you almost take it for granted that there'll be a major social or emotional shift every fifteen seconds or so. Yet it never feels exhausting, in part because of the movie's sheer charisma—again, think the showmanship of a magician—and in part because its cinematography is so inventive, so multilayered, so fun, that at times narrative beats are revealed as literal sight gags. The only director I know who tries to tell stories this rich is Robert Altman, but even Altman at his peak would sweat trying to match this movie's tempo (let alone its sheer panache). That it's also a masterful tale of wealth, corruption, and the kind of decadence that preceded the rise of fascism makes it feel disturbingly modern in 2023, and makes it beyond frustrating that it was more-or-less blacklisted for not being the kind of mindless propaganda that France thought its population needed.

It's a cliché to call this movie monumental, but watching this series this year drove home just how monumental an achievement this movie is. You can see Coppola drawing on the virtuosic techniques of the directors who preceded him—taking The Leopard as inspiration for The Godfather's opening wedding, most obviously—and using them to elevate what could have been a potboiler thriller into something vastly more. Every line, every shot, is iconic; every actor is legendary. Like Apocalypse Now, this movie feels like cinema fully realized, magical in the way that only film can be, at once extraordinarily deep and instantly unforgettable. It presents a lurid, seedy world, a club whose secrets are too tantalizing not to want in on, even as it simultaneously shows us why we're better off staying far, far away. Criticize it all you want for being too seductive to serve as a proper cautionary tale: in a sense, it's a movie about that seductiveness, and maybe about the fact that seductiveness is the heart of cinema itself. After all, it's a tale about a man who knows all-too-well not to step into his family's business, and who never forgets it, even as he takes step after step deeper into that world, even as his aging father greets him with sorrow in his eyes. Yes, it's almost exclusively about men, and ends on a shot of Michael literally closing the door on his own wife; that, too, is a part of the movie's message. And if a lot of men watch this and take exactly the wrong message away—or if they watch it, take the right message, and move in the wrong direction regardless... well, this might be a film about why. You can call evil by its name, you can avert your eyes, but neither avoiding it nor naming it will protect you from its nature.

DNW, but can happily say that this is the last movie on this list that I've never once managed to see.

A pop-culture tribute to pop-culture; a film tribute to film; a musical tribute to musicals. Every last person in this movie has been trained to express nothing but sheer delight on their faces and through their bodies; every last person, likewise, is very clearly having an absolute blast (occasional IRL sicknesses be damned). Donald O'Connor's performance in "Make 'Em Laugh" is a marvel—such a virtuosic fusion of physical comedy and dance that it all-but-proves there's no distinction, past a point, between music and comedy; the two are born of the same thing. And poetry must come from the same place as comedy and music, and all three must come from the same place that love does, or else Gene Kelly could never move that way in the rain; his face could never light up that way as he sings; the song, and the dance, and the words, and the smile, could never mean all the things that they clearly do. The history of cinema is as much about this—about music, about dance, about the poppiest possible expressions of love—as it is about anything else. Isn't it extraordinary, after all, that love like that not only exists, but can be sung about, so simply and so catchily that 75 years later, the whole audience still knew exactly how to sing along? 

Michael Nyman's score to this film is so extraordinary that I can't tell which of my feelings were about the film, and which were about the score. It really is a marvel that a single filmmaker devised so many different cinematographic and editing techniques as early as 1929; it's just as much a marvel that he captured so much of the world as it stood back then. My interest as I watched this wavered, fading in and out like a bad radio station—I blame that on the fact that the movie's narrative, as it is, is loosely formed at best. But when I tuned in, I was not only delighted but awed; I felt a sense of history, not only by my glimpses of the world as it stood a century ago, but by my realization that I was watching a man for whom everything I take for granted about the modern world was still fresh and new, a man who saw unbelievable potential and could do little more than express—in delirious, excitable, and incoherent ways—all the possibilities he himself barely understood. I watched him, and I realized how much the world has changed since then, and how little time has truly passed between his era and ours. All of a sudden, reality seemed mutable; the uncertain future seemed exciting and hopeful rather than simply ominous; I realized that, only a few generations from now, the world we mistakenly think of as granite and eternal will be absolutely foreign to us, forgotten even by those who lived it. I left the theater feeling keenly aware of my own heartbeat, as if it was one motor among many, as if the engine of the city I lived in and the country I was born in was still under construction, as if human nature itself had yet to be written. Again, though, I'm not sure how much of this was just the score.

This has been my favorite film since I was 18; I fell in love with so many new movies this year, and some of that love was deeper than I've felt for a new movie in ages, but Lynch is still my wellspring in so, so many ways. I return to him, after every new artistic encounter, and find all of my new discoveries lying in his same old films. This was my second time seeing this one in a packed movie theater, and—as always with Lynch—I'm more grateful than anything just to see which lines got which reactions, as the audience burst out laughing at moments with such emotional ambiguity that they'd have been equally right to sit there frozen in terror. And for all that Mulholland Dr. is almost infamously pegged as a hard-to-understand artsy-fart movie, one of the biggest rediscoveries for me is always that Lynch is so fucking funny—and not just funny, but funny in such a broad, easy way that he puts broad, diverse audiences in stitches. This movie has several of the funniest scenes in movie history (the botched hit, the marital affair), several of the scariest (the alley behind Winkie's, Club Silencio), one of the sexiest (you know the one), and one of the greatest musical performances ever captured on film. And even after a year of watching peerless cinema, I can't think of a single other director who could have done all of this—all of this at once—and threaded it together to make a movie that, seen one way, is a fathomless enigma, and seen another way is as straightforward a narrative as can be. After all, its first scene sets up a mystery, and its last scene solves it. How much broader can a movie get?

I walked out of this movie literally speechless. I tried leaving a friend a message about it, only to helplessly open and close my mouth for minutes on end. Beau Travail is such visceral filmmaking, every scene bombarding the senses, every performance a dance. It's a movie about bodies, about the miracle of movement, about the physicality of existing in space, navigating that space, sharing that space, shaping that space with others. It's a movie about the tensions that exist between people forced into the same space; about the ways in which our joys are conditioned and restrained and transformed in the name of ideals which break and twist and destroy us. And I'd been told that "the dance scene at the end" might be the greatest ending in movie history—which I'd now argue that it is—but I wasn't prepared for what that scene was exactly, or for how abruptly and quickly it struck, or for the way that it resolved a film's worth of personal and sexual and societal and political tensions, not through storytelling or didacticism, but by cutting a Gordian knot and letting a man's body be... well... everything. I wish that watching this film was mandatory.

DNW. I... really meant to see this one. I planned to watch it once sober and once stoned off my gourd, to give it the proper treatment. But at the end of the day, I needed some kind of break at the end, and Kubrick and I are just... well, we've decided to go our separate ways. Andrei and I just need more time alone.
   T

After catching Chungking Express at the start of the year, I was beyond ready to see another Kar-Wai movie—especially this one, which I've heard talk of for literally decades. The first half of the film was absolutely dazzling: it danced, packing an insane amount of substance, mood, and flourish into every frame. And then... I dozed off. We'd tried to make a date night of it; there'd been tacos and tequila. It was late. I have no discipline. I do not appreciate beauty.

Thirty minutes into this, I was strongly considering walking out. It didn't grab me; nothing about it had particularly stood out. But I stayed. And slowly, bit by bit, this movie stole me away, without seemingly trying. Everything about it is plainspoken, unpretentious, simple. With only one major exception, it felt like I could predict each scene before it happened. Yet towards the end, I was moved and devastated. Yasujirō Ozu is famous for pretty much exactly this, and I can see why so many artists find him so profoundly fascinating. It's all so basic, so obvious, that it's hard to tell exactly how it worked its magic. And perhaps "magic" is the wrong word for it: instead, it captures something like inevitability, showing the obvious facts of (semi-)modern life and the obvious facts of all life, full stop, letting the two snarl together with predictable, heartbreaking results. It's not trying to do anything: everything simply happens. Twenty years from now, I will either have never seen another Ozu film or I will only be watching Ozu films. Mark my words.

There's something about seeing this film at the end of my year of film, after watching 20-30 years of the masterpieces that inspired it and 80 years of masterpieces that have followed in its wake. There are countless ways to make a movie, countless ways in which different countries and cultures have devised their own approaches to filmmaking, countless ways to define what makes a film a masterpiece. And through all that, Citizen Kane blazes through. Every aspect of it is cutting-edge, borderline-avant garde, moody, evocative, and absolutely lurid crowd-pleasing bombast. The sets are a virtuosic display of all the ways that space can shape the bodies in it. The camerawork pulls off magic trick after magic trick. The manner of acting, the manner of scriptwriting, feels breathtaking in its theatricality: it feels intimate as a small stage, its performers constantly speaking over each other and interrupting one another, chaotically and with perfect choreography. And at the center of it all is Welles, the larger-than-life man who seemed brilliant at everything, playing a man almost as brilliant as he is, documenting the ways in which that man's determination to master everything leaves him with nothing. In a decade where Great Male Artist films dropped in so many critics' esteem, Citizen Kane stands strong—partly because it's a film about the follies of male ego, and partly because Welles is having too much fucking fun.

Above everything, it's wild how weird this movie is—Hitchcock, who often loves to play with tropes and classic archetypes, loads this one up with supernatural possession, doppelgangers, transmutations, and a film whose central focus shifts more times than feels plausible. Perhaps there's an element of vertigo there: the bottom drops out of the movie, the plot falls away, and suddenly all that's left is the woman at the center of it, a device used by men to manipulate other men who abruptly becomes more human than all that—and then, tragically, becomes a device once more. I was struck by how similar some of this film's plot beats are to E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story "The Sandman," which inspired Freud to write his original essay about the uncanny; I was also struck by how much Lynch's Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive (really, his whole oeuvre) each feel like a direct response to Vertigo, on two completely different levels. The real possession, I think, is of Scottie Ferguson, who's paid to track a woman's steps, then finds he can't stop following her. Why? He's uncertain, even as he follows her through her death and beyond it. Why turn a woman into a perfect replica of one who he thinks is dead? Is it really just to bring her back to life, to make her stand in as his ideal? I'm not so sure—because even alive, she was nothing but mystery. The moment of their passionate embrace feels more ghostly than any other scene, and not just because he's holding someone who knows that she's a ghost. What lies beyond this moment, for the two of them? Where can he possibly go with her but down?

Of course. Of course this movie took the top slot. Of course this is perched right at the top of the list. Having seen it, nothing else feels remotely fitting. This is the future of cinema, as surely as Citizen Kane once was; the fact that it's 50 years old doesn't change that in the slightest.

After pondering Akerman's connection to Godard all year—wondering at how his whimsy and mania birthed her steadfast deliberation—I was struck by how much her calm, muted, static approach to filmmaking required the staggering confidence to know what she could do away with. The more she removes, the more she calls attention to what remains: the seconds slowly ticking by, the endless complications and permutations of a daily routine. Jeanne Dielman's son doesn't notice the passing of time any more than he notices his own mother: he distracts himself with anything and everything but what's right in front of him. Jeanne, though, is stuck in a purgatory wherein everything she does must go perfectly, from the ways she prepares food to the sex work she does to make money, because it's the only kind of work she can do without interrupting her chores. It takes an hour to observe what a day of her life looks like, another hour to watch what a single ruined potato does to the rest of her day, and a final hour to watch her struggle to make coffee, wholly convinced that she might murder the infant she's babysitting if the coffee comes out wrong. (Without any shift in cinematography, without any change in sound, without much visible change to Jeanne herself, a whole stretch of this film plays like a horror movie; one of its masterstrokes is how many different kinds of film it becomes without seemingly changing anything at all.)

I can't help but think of the temple of Moloch in Metropolis, all of those factory workers simultaneously transforming into a ravenous demon and feeding themselves to him. Jeanne is trapped in the clockwork of her own life: everything is obligatory, and nothing can be ignored. One of the many things that becomes obvious across the run of the film is just how little of her housework involves simple routine, just how little can be done without careful planning, just how much Jeanne must commit herself to every little thing she does. She turns it into a kind of dance, and one that's shockingly gripping—but it's clear that she can't stop, that she can never stop, that her world will completely shatter if she stops feeding herself to it at every moment of every day. The mounting tension of the film is that looming question: what if she does?

It's impossible, by design, to separate the style of the film from its subject. This is a movie about a single mother doing housework; it focuses, painstakingly, on every last detail of every little chore, because there is no other way to make a movie about this woman. On some level, Akerman knew that she was making a movie, more-or-less, out of the scenes that get cut out of every other movie; there's a playfulness to just how aggressively she pushes that, removing every hint of what any other movie would call action or drama. There's a pointedness to that fact; there's also something radical about how beautiful she makes housework look, not by fantasizing it but by devoting herself to its rhythms. This movie is avant-garde because it is about a woman; it is experimental because it is about something that got cut from the language of cinema; it is formally radical because the entire artform of cinema was designed to tell stories about men, so to speak.

But it's also, demonstrably, a movie that changed cinema, and that will continue to change it. Portrait of a Lady on Fire owes its entire existence to this movie. The Slow Cinema movement that Sátántangó comes from would not be the same without this film. I was struck, as I watched, by how similar its rhythms and repetitions seemed to Animal Crossing and to similarly meditative games; whether Jeanne Dielman directly inspired those matters less than that it anticipated them. (And I'm sure that something somewhere in the causal chain of inspirations that led to Animal Crossing owed a debt to Akerman and Jeanne Dielman.)

In some ways, Jeanne Dielman also feels like a response to earlier generations of films depicting women: to the quietly suffering mother of Tokyo Story, to the sorrows of Madame de... The history of film seemed so much shorter to me this year, like a conversation still barely begun; just as Godard and his peers in the French New Wave simultaneously rejected Hollywood for its industrialized entertainment while admiring it for its energy and artistry, Akerman seems to reject conventional ideas about what makes a movie "interesting" or "entertaining" or "compelling" while simultaneously understanding that it's her duty to be all these things. It's easy to understand the idea of Jeanne Dielman as a film, I think, because the idea of it consists more of the rejection than the embrace. The experience of watching it is one of feeling, acutely, the ingenuity that went into every long second, the energy that keeps its central performance from ever seeming monotonous or excessive. When I watched News From Home, I had the sense that I'd never seen a film that felt more like sculpture; Jeanne Dielman is a similarly sculpted work, and like great sculpture it is defined by how it removed what it removed, and by how what remains is perfectly static yet never once feels it.

The less expression Jeanne shows on her face, the more that you see her routine as her expression; the more this movie dwells on her life's "mundanities," the clearer it becomes that these mundanities house her soul. She is her duty, she is her house, she is this fixed and unmoving camera, this peculiar shade of green, this door closing silently until the day grows dark. How does this movie feel like so many different kinds of film, when on the surface nothing seems to happen? Simply by giving you the time you need to realize what you're looking at, what this routine expresses, what this woman's soul is made of. Once that sets in, every slight interruption feels like violence. You see a woman sitting at Jeanne's usual seat at the local cafe, and you don't just wonder whether Jeanne's about to claw this stranger's eyes out, you feel like it would be totally acceptable of her to do so. This doesn't show on Jeanne's face, exactly, because it doesn't have to. The calculus of her everyday life is her face, her feeling, her very existence. A change in routine is an emotional blow, an outright existential panic, because this is her only existence. 

And when Jeanne's son comes home, on that second night, and off-handedly mentions that her hair is a bit messy... when you've seen what it takes for her to get her hair right, and when you've seen what kept her from doing all of that today... well, it doesn't matter that he probably meant it to be helpful, or that he's just casually observing something that doesn't matter much to him. Jeanne's face doesn't need to betray a thing for you to know the complex pain she feels, towards this boy who's too young to understand her grief and too old to be forgiven for not understanding. Not that the movie makes a big deal out of this moment, or out of any other moment. It doesn't have to. But it does ask that you look closely enough to notice.

It's ironic that you couldn't even try and make a version of this movie yourself, even if you wanted to. You can remake Citizen Kane, hypothetically. You can make another adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. How could you possibly remake a three-and-a-half-hour-long movie in which the most compelling sequence involves twelve-ish minutes of someone failing to make coffee? If Jeanne Dielman didn't exist, it feels like you could perfectly recreate the whole movie from the idea of it alone, provided you were as willing to commit to its demands and needs as Akerman must have been. Now that it does exist, nobody else could possibly remake it. Hell, the sheer existence of smartphones means that it would be impossible to recreate this movie today. The world of Jeanne Dielman is almost as alien to the twenty-first century as the experience of watching it—quietly and in the dark and without a single sound from the audience or a single blinding phone screen—proved to be. 

But you don't need to remake it. It exists, and it is perfect: a movie that could not have been made any other way, because its story could not be told by any other means. A movie whose existence is simultaneously deeply political—because how could it not be?—and completely detached from any politics but the depiction of a life. A film that is paradoxically boring and dazzling, audacious and plain. A film that, in so many ways, feels like a continuation of the story told and retold by Godard, by Welles, by Ozu, by countless others, each working with technology that's equal parts magical and frustrating, trying to find a way either to weave enchanting fantasy out of everyday life, or to capture something meaningful about everyday life by means of enchanting fantasy. It's the challenge that every artist faces: to find a way of looking at the same thing everybody sees, and to somehow express what it is, not despite but because of the fact that we're all so convinced we already know that we don't realize how long it's been since we actually looked, since the endless routine of life felt ominous and alien and strange.

Of course this movie topped the list. Of course it was a film from about that era, written and directed by a woman, starring a woman, made with an all-female crew. (Another quietly radical act, in that it's easy to dismiss until you think of how much outrage would ensue if any major modern director attempted the same thing.) Many people saw this year's Sight and Sound rankings as a referendum on gender, an attempt to "inject feminism" into the discourse, a byproduct of some kind of agenda. I don't think it was, though, is the thing. Jeanne Dielman came into being because of radical gender disparity, not just because Akerman wanted to comment on that disparity, but because that very disparity is why stories like Jeanne Dielman's were overlooked, why film hadn't invented the language to tell a story like Jeanne Dielman's, why Jeanne Dielman went overlooked by critics up until it was brought to their attention. (At which point, thankfully, many of them immediately grasped how extraordinary it was.)

Jeanne Dielman is positioned where it is because it's as mammoth an evolution of cinema as an art form as Citizen Kane was before it. Because it inspired its generation in the same way that Godard's movies inspired their generation—and not despite the differences between Godard's and Akerman's styles, but because of them. If the history of art is a story of countless frustrated people attempting to express the inexpressible, and if the triumphs of art are those moment when, all at once, someone discovers a new language for speaking things previously unspeakable, then Jeanne Dielman is art at its very pinnacle. It's a vision of cinema, and it's a vision of a woman, and the two are inextricable, because its vision is of a cinema that knows how to look at women. It's a vision of cinema inverted, cinema that points in rather than bursts out, cinema whose mood is found, not in Orson Welles' dazzling hall of mirrors, but in the gradual familiarity of coming to know a person and a place across a span of time, rather than with a singular establishing quip. How did something so muted bring so many wide, delighted, astonished smiles to my face? How did I watch so much of this for so long and walk out feeling electricity fizzing in my veins?

On the flip side, a man in the theater I watched this in walked out loudly yelling, for everyone to hear, about what a waste this movie was, about how angry that he was that critics liked it. It was important to him that everybody know. I looked over my shoulder at him as I walked by; Jeanne Dielman's son would never have mentioned that his hair seemed out of place. I could still hear him yelling to his friends from two blocks away. Of course.

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