Narges Rashidi and Bobby Naderi in Under the Shadow.

Vertical Entertainment

Horror has never been short on the formidable mother figures. Consider Diane Freeling venturing into another dimension to yank her daughter Carol Anne back into the world of the living in Poltergeist, Ripley heading back into Xenomorph Queen hell to retrieve Newt in Aliens, Rachel frantically searching for solutions to save her son Aidan from a VHS-enabled curse in The Ring, and, hell, Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th — all women willing to go to extreme lengths on behalf of children.

On the flip side, there are the tyrants and termagants, the moms-as-villains keeping one sensible heel on their kids' throats — Psycho’s Norma Bates, eating her son up from the inside; Carrie’s Margaret White, with her warped ideas about sin; Dead Alive’s Vera Cosgrove, literally pulling Lionel back into her womb; and Black Swan’s Erica Sayers, pouring all her thwarted dancer’s dreams into her daughter.

And then there’s Amelia (Essie Davis) in The Babadook and her sister in shared delusions and spectral intruders, Shideh (Narges Rashidi), in the excellent new film Under the Shadow, heroes in mom-centric horror who manage to be a bit of both of these archetypes. They're protectors as well as demons — loving their kids but also feeling so worn out and smothered by their needs that they’re poised to snap. They are, in other words, human, which is the stuff of horror only when measured against ingrained, hard-to-shake ideas about motherhood as a state that should be effortless and instinctive. Women should want to spend all of their time with their children; it should be enough for them, even when it’s not.

The Babadook.

IFC Films

Under the Shadow, which is written and directed by Babak Anvari, has recently arrived in theaters, two years after Jennifer Kent’s 2014 breakout The Babadook; they're a pair of claustrophobic stories about a woman and her child, and the dark thing that may or may not be haunting them.

Under the Shadow takes place a few decades and a few thousand miles away from the present-day Australia in which Amelia and Sam (Noah Wiseman) live in The Babadook. But the two movies fit together like a minor key chord, resonating off each other in their themes of love and loneliness and the flutters of rancor that can lurk in the most devoted of motherly hearts. They could inaugurate their own compelling mini-genre devoted to a particularly pointed sort of maternal anxiety, one in which the protagonists are caught between a drive to shelter their children and a sense that their own identities are getting eroded by motherhood.

It’s not that Under the Shadow's Shideh is a reluctant wife and mother. She’s married to Iraj (Bobby Naderi), who she fights with but clearly loves. And she adores their child, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), a saucer-eyed little girl fond of staging tea parties with her doll, Kimia. They’re a family of three who’ve carved out an urbane middle-class life in a Tehran apartment decorated in nostalgically hideous, period-appropriate earth tones.

But Shideh had dreams of also becoming a doctor, ones she was on the way to fulfilling when the 1979 Iranian Revolution put everything on hold. She got married, had Dorsa, and when the movie begins, some years later, she’s told that she can’t resume her studies, because she’s been blackballed under the new Islamic regime due to her political record. "I suggest you find a new goal in life,” a university official coolly tells her.

Under the Shadow.

Vertical Entertainment

It’s the ’80s in Iran, and you can feel Shideh’s horizons narrowing in ways that go beyond how she’s been consigned to being a housewife — in how impatiently she puts on a headscarf before allowing a repairman inside, or how she draws the curtains before slipping a Jane Fonda aerobics tape into the family’s forbidden VCR for her home workout. Whatever idealism she harbored about the future of the country has been replaced by a reality of religious conservatism that obviously doesn’t reflect her hopes.

Meanwhile, bombs are falling over the city, an unexploded missile even lodging itself in the roof of the family’s apartment building, the country in the midst of a war with Iraq that consumes most of the decade and that leads to Iraj being drafted away. When Shideh is left alone with their daughter, her restless personal dissatisfaction and the national anxiety converge with Dorsa's conviction that she’s being haunted by a djinn, a creature out of Islamic mythology, who means the family ill. It’s the djinn, Dorsa’s certain, who’s making her sick and who’s stolen Kimia, and as tensions grow in the house, Shideh is torn between frustration with her child and the suspicion that she may be onto something.

It’s no coincidence that in both Under the Shadow and The Babadook, horror comes creeping in by way of children’s tales that seep into adult awareness rather than the other way around. All of the terrors plaguing Amelia’s troubled son Sam at the start of The Babadook seem to congeal into a ghoulish pop-up book that just appears one day, giving his fears a focus while seemingly being created by them. In Under the Shadow, a boy who’s new to the building tells Dorsa about the djinn after being sent to live with relatives when his own parents are killed in an air raid; the connection between an attack from above and malevolent mystical beings lodges itself in Dorsa’s head until she’s sure djinn have spirited Kimia away upstairs in the bombed-out apartment.

For Amelia and Shideh, no scary story itself will ever be as alarming as the practical possibility of something keeping their kids up at night. These films are odes to the giddy vulnerability of exhaustion as much as they are about the supernatural, how these already worn-down parents trudge onward with less and less sleep, opening them up to ideas they know are irrational in the light of day.

Amelia stares, terrified, at the dark corners of her shadowy room at night, and Shideh envisions the cracks in the living room ceiling opening up under pressure from something meaning ill, as if they’re succumbing to their children’s nightmares, sanity slowly slipping away. Isolation only escalates the hauntings, or the shared psychosis. Amelia is a widow whose connection to her remaining family splinters thanks to Sam’s acting out, leaving the pair to spiral down into reclusive instability. Shideh is separated from her husband by national service — when he calls, the lines are so bad he’s barely audible — and she and Dorsa find their building rapidly emptying out due to the attacks, as their neighbors head for safer climes.

And yet, time to themselves is a denied luxury. The Babadook makes a dark joke out of how Amelia’s attempt to take advantage of a rare moment alone to eke out a solo orgasm gets interrupted by a scared Sam jumping into her bed. In Under the Shadow, Shideh demands that before Iraj leaves, he tell her if he believes her desire to go back to school makes her a bad mother. The dread these movies summon and simmer isn’t just about harm coming to children, but about not being good at motherhood, about missing something fundamental, about, in their darkest moments, the potential to be the thing that harms.

The Babadook.

IFC Films

Both Under the Shadow's and The Babadook's characters are also terrorized by pieces of clothing, which sounds funny but in practice is thoroughly eerie, especially given the connection the items have to the dead. Amelia’s late husband’s empty suits give form to the Babadook, and the patterned curtain in a photo of Shideh’s recently passed mother makes an appearance as a phantasmal chador.

The familiar, shabbily domestic turns ominous — scaring the women in the comfort of their own homes, with the comforts of their own homes, maybe, but also highlighting how personal these breakdowns are, colored by loss. Amelia has her grief as well as a sense of abandonment due to the death of her spouse. Shideh grapples with feelings of having failed to live up to her mother’s expectations, ones she’ll now never be able to fulfill. The stuff of their bereavement becomes the stuff of their fear.

And also, the stuff of their resentment. The Babadook may be an entity representing Amelia’s depression and mourning, but one of the movie’s most provocative suggestions is that, whether she remembers or not, she may actually be the one who created the book that so frightens Sam — she, who used to write, who “did some kids' stuff.” And, while Shideh tears the apartment apart trying to find Kimia, who Dorsa insists they can’t leave the city without, Under the Shadow hints that perhaps Shideh is the one who took the doll in the first place, in some unconscious act of spite against the daughter with whom she’s been left, when she once entertained more expansive plans for herself.

Under the Shadow.

Vertical Entertainment

Like The Babadook, Under the Shadow is scary, the cultural specificity of its spookiness making it no less effective when its creepy figures start lurking in doorways and rattling at windows. But these movies also make use of a panic that has nothing to do with the supernatural. They’re intimate horror movies about the dark things lurking in a family home, and, more interestingly, in the minds of women, in how unmoored they start to feel in identities defined by the children they’ve had, in their self-doubt, and their own shunted-aside longings. It’s what makes both films reverberate long after the standard haunted house movie has faded from memory. What's a monster lurking under the bed compared to the nagging suspicion that maybe there’s something monstrous within?

Moana and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Warner Bros.

When Moana was being developed a few years ago, Disney was probably thinking about bringing more welcome diversity into its signature Walt Disney Animation Studios line and the possible introduction of a new Disney Princess. What the company couldn’t have expected was that its newest animated musical would arrive in theaters directly in the wake of a traumatic presidential election that has left huge swaths of the country frightened about their futures. Same goes for Warner Bros., which announced Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them back in less tumultuous 2013. It was supposed to be the start of a planned five-film return to J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world and not a cinematic security blanket under which people would want to huddle.

But here we are, crouched in the shadow of President-elect Donald Trump, and this is how the latest efforts from two of the largest purveyors of pop-cultural comfort fare against the oppressive weight of so much real-world distress.

Moana

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Moana is 2016's second Disney animated feature, and it’s considerably more traditional in comparison to Zootopia, the talking-animal-buddy-cop-racial-allegory it follows. Its title character is a South Pacific Islander chieftain’s daughter, voiced by 15-year-old Native Hawaiian newcomer Auli'i Cravalho. She has an animal sidekick (an idiotic rooster named Heihei), a parent who doesn’t understand (her father, Chief Tui, voiced by Temuera Morrison), and a longing to go beyond her prescribed role in the community in which she was born. Her story is inspired by folklore — Polynesian myths, including that of the demi-god Maui (Dwayne Johnson), a trickster Moana is tasked with recruiting on a quest to return a mystical stone and restore balance to the area.

In other words, Moana represents an easeful return to a particular formula central to Disney’s brand, and the familiarity of the rhythms of her story might prove a solace. But it’s disappointing that the things that are most compelling about her are the selective ways in which she diverges from type. She doesn’t, for instance, have a love interest — the movie instead opts for a bickering, reluctant mentor–mentee relationship between her and Maui, who teaches her how to sail and navigate by the stars. She isn’t white, and neither are the other characters or the majority of the voice cast, which is heavy on actors of Pacific Islander descent like Nicole Scherzinger, Rachel House, and Jemaine Clement. And the proportions of her body aren’t as impossible as Aladdin’s Jasmine, or The Little Mermaid’s Ariel, or Frozen’s Elsa — girl’s got some solid, strong-looking legs. She looks like she could learn to travel the ocean, solo. Which she does.

Walt Disney Motion Studios

She also learns to believe in herself and her own specialness in a way that might have more impact and feel less rote if she weren’t already being trusted to lead as the future chief and if the anthropomorphised ocean hadn’t designated her as its chosen one when she was a toddler — a scene that is, to be clear, enchanting as all hell. As is, you start to wonder how much additional assurance one magically blessed royal needs. Moana is so carefully nice that it creates the feeling of being swaddled in bubble wrap, its writers (who at one point included New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi, though it’s Jared Bush who has the listed credit) so careful with regard to Doing Things Right that they don’t do a lot to actually develop their main character or give her difficult choices. The finale even conveniently allows her to pursue her dreams of exploring the ocean without stepping away from her duties to her people.

Maybe a little bubble wrap sounds good right about now — or maybe it sounds smothering. But Moana’s indisputable saving grace is how good it looks — really, better than any other Disney movie to date, overflowing with lush, brazen beauty, from the verdant island on which Moana grows up to the vision she has of her voyaging ancestors gliding by on spectral canoes across a nighttime ocean. It’s through its visuals that Moana achieves moments of the sublime, though the Lin-Manuel Miranda songs aren’t bad either. The big ballad, “How Far I’ll Go,” may not be a carpool circuit banger on the level of “Let It Go,” but it’s a mighty earworm nonetheless, one that seems ready for at least a few months of omnipresence, an “I Want” song turned radio-ready empowerment anthem. Moana may be so calculated in terms of Doing Things Right that it only occasionally sparks to life as art, but there’s something admirable in how hard it tries — in terms of representation, in terms of not defining its lead by the men in her life, and in terms of incorporating Pacific Islander talent. It’s an effort toward inclusion that isn’t perfect, but as a gesture, it still means a lot. Comfort level: Middling

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Jaap Buitendijk / Warner Bros.

Familiarity may be a mixed blessing in Moana, but it’s the main draw of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a film promising a new story in an old universe, taking place across the Atlantic decades before the Harry Potter series. America in the 1920s has its own flavor — nonmagical types are called “No-Majs” instead of Muggles, mingling with them or letting them in on the fact that magic exists is forbidden, and everything is overseen by the Magical Congress of the United States of America, or MACUSA. But there are still wands and wizards and wonders, among them a suitcase containing a menagerie of magical creatures smuggled into the country from England by Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne).

Newt isn’t Harry Potter. He’s not terribly comfortable with people — he’s shy and not into eye contact — but he’s knowledgable, caring, and great with animals. Or at least, he’s great in the way of a devoted pet owner who fondly watches someone getting chased by their growling dog while shouting about how “Fido is really friendly, promise.” Neither he, nor the other characters — among them former Auror Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and hapless No-Maj Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) — are as easily endearing as the boy wizard, but then they’ve already done their growing up. Their concerns, too, are all grown-up, involving illegal trafficking, or finding a way back to work after being disgraced, or getting a bank loan to start a business after spending years abroad during the First World War.

Jaap Buitendijk / Warner Bros.

Then there’s the crusading anti-wizard extremist group going around called the Second-Salemers, headed up Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton) and her adopted son Credence (Ezra Miller). There’s concern among the maybe-too-set-in-their-ways MACUSA, led by President Seraphina Picquery (Carmen Ejogo), about keeping wizarding a secret. There’s a notorious Dark wizard, Gellert Grindelwald, who’s escaped from Europe and whose whereabouts are unknown. There is, frankly, way too much stuff going on for one movie, and much of it is grim or at least filled with foreboding. Like a lot of recent franchise installments, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them feels like it’s more concerned with setting up future business than it is with developing its own plot, doing a lot of setup that doesn’t yet pay off but that crowds into plot threads that do. Its final act includes some flubbed reveals and a set piece that should feel emotionally wrenching but that instead comes across as just hurried.

And yet…it feels great to revisit Rowling’s creation, even in spin-off form, and even when we’re reintroduced to it in an era that’s a lot less cozy than a magical British wizarding school. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a story about the retrieval of escaped magical creatures in New York that grows to include fears of discovery and persecution by the No-Majs, worry about wizardly retaliation and war, and the damage caused by repression of identity. These themes have pings of present-day resonance — in terms of extremism, of expressing sexuality, and of prejudice — without pushing too hard at the parallels, and they end up making the film more of a consolation rather than less. Which is something that Moana, in all of its sometimes numbing pleasantness, misses out on — it’s not a lack of pain that allows escapist entertainment to take you away from harsher realities for a second, it’s how that pain is handled. Comfort level: Surprisingly High

Jessica Chastain in Miss Sloane.

Kerry Hayes / EuropaCorp USA

In movies, the careerist ice queen usually lives alone. You know the type. After a long day at the office, she goes home to an empty house: That’s the price she pays for caring so much about work, too much, leaving her staring down the barrel of spinsterhood or contending with a shattered marriage or two. Maybe she keeps a cat for company; maybe she owns an exercise bike as a symbol of her steely discipline. Her singleness is not always a permanent condition, for sometimes she’s rescued from it by love, like Sandra Bullock in The Proposal or Renée Zellweger in New in Town or Katherine Heigl in everything — all the uptight, type A rom-com sisters ensconced in sleek apartments they never seem to have time to enjoy until a strapping suitor comes along to thaw them out.

Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada.

Twentieth Century Fox

Other times she’s an antagonist, and aloneness is comeuppance for her ruthless ambition — like Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, finally showing her underbelly sitting miserably in that beautiful Upper East Side townhouse, speculating what the headlines will be when the news of her latest divorce goes public (“Snow Queen Drives Away Another Mr. Priestly,” she hazards bitterly). Or Sigourney Weaver’s magnificent executive empress Katharine Parker in Working Girl, whose lover (played by Harrison Ford) flees her luxe Manhattan digs when she proposes marriage as if he were an adventurer escaping a Gorgon’s lair, off in search of less demanding romantic prospects. It’s never a choice in these films, solitude — it’s a sign of failure being flown over an otherwise successful life. No matter how high these women climb, the fact that they don’t have a partner is evidence that something is wrong with them, that they’re incomplete.

It’s Working Girl, Mike Nichols' pleasant, lightly poisoned fable of white feminism in a white-collar workplace, that suggested there were two types of female empowerment. There was the “bad” kind, in which women become calculating and emasculating and too much like men; and the “good,” in which they remain soft and straightforward and mostly take aim at each other. It’s a movie that, in the 28 years since its release, has managed to age poorly while at the same time remaining regrettably relevant, given how much this artificial dichotomy cropped up in the narrative of and commentary during the recent presidential election.

Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl.

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

These ideas of “good” and “bad” female empowerment were the undercurrents of discussions of Hillary Clinton’s likability or lack thereof, her preference for pantsuits, the blame placed on her for her husband’s infidelity, her perceived arrogance and coldness, and that ineffable quality about her that just “bugs” people. They were just as present in the contrasting alt-feminism offered by Ivanka Trump, one that bolstered the Trump family brand while never threatening anything so uncouth as to infringe on patriarchal structures or appear indifferent to the male gaze.

But they’re also challenged and undermined in a crop of elbow-throwing fall movies that tackle the dilemma of being powerful and female in a world in which forcefulness and femininity are still treated as incompatible. Films like Elle, Miss Sloane, and Toni Erdmann not only provide some much-needed rethinking of the careerist ice queen, but they suggest she was never in need of being solved or vilified in the first place. The main characters in these movies are much more than a type or a foil — they’re carving out tricky and not always happy paths for themselves in cutthroat industries, upending expectations of how women are supposed to behave, and bearing scars from the battles they’ve fought. And what do you know: They all live alone.

Isabelle Huppert in Elle.

Sony Pictures Classics

There is a downside of living alone that has nothing to do with romantic inadequacy. It’s the sense of physical insecurity that can come when nobody is around to call on for help. It’s a feeling that haunts Michèle LeBlanc (Isabelle Huppert) after a man in a ski mask forces his way into her tasteful Parisian house on a quiet afternoon and sexually assaults her. That’s the scene with which Elle starts, a brutal opening gambit that will leave some audience members unwilling to stick around for everything to follow...though that would be a shame. Elle isn’t really — as some have described it — a rape revenge tale, because Michèle doesn’t set out to destroy her rapist. It’s instead a broader portrait of a woman so familiar with and well-versed in misogyny that she’s come to treat it as a reliably exploitable male weakness — it’s even made her rich. Michèle and her best friend Anna (Anne Consigny) run a successful video game company that earns its profits from titles featuring extreme, occasionally sexualized violence.

Michèle understands all too well the tangled impulses of resentment and humiliation men can feel about a woman being in control — she rules over an office full of young guys who mostly loathe her. When one questions her credentials during a meeting (the “fake gamer girl” meme is just as irritating when flung around in French), she smacks him down, totally unruffled, replying, “Maybe we’re just two bitches who got lucky, but the fact is the boss here is me.” Then another employee composites an image of her face over that of a game character in the process of being violated by a monster's tentacle and sends the video around the company, an unintended animated echo of the physical assault she recently endured.

Anne Consigny and Huppert in Elle.

Sony Pictures Classics

They’re not alone in their simmering acrimony. There are flickers of rage against women lurking within even the most seemingly innocuous of male characters in Elle, including the ex-husband with whom Michèle is still friendly but divorced after he hit her; the doofus of an underemployed son she sometimes feels is a stranger to her; even the mild-mannered, married neighbor (Laurent Lafitte) who stops by to help the single lady with things around the house. The latter becomes a source of fantasy and a target of flirtation for Michèle in the wake of her attack, this bluff, capable, safe-seeming fellow who works as a banker and then comes home to help his wife set up a nativity scene for Christmas — but, in a grim undermining of the idea of the gallant protector, he turns out to have one hell of a dark streak.

What makes Elle so reverberant (especially on second viewing, when its shock tactics have less effect) isn’t just the world it presents, which places the ingrained misogyny of the day-to-day on a spectrum with the viciousness of masked rapists. It’s the arid equanimity with which Michèle treats the resentment and mistreatment lobbed at her — she is inured to but intolerant of it, and has similarly grown indifferent to the behavior that is expected of her because of her gender. That extends to the attack, and the extraordinary expression on her face as she looks down on the bloom of blood over her torn crotch, coloring the bubbles of her subsequent bath. It’s the countenance of someone confronting evidence of the latest in a lifetime of affronts that started in childhood with her father, who committed an infamous series of murders in which she was unfairly implicated. It’s the look of a woman who will, when she discovers her rapist is someone close to her, decides to initiate sexual contact with him — not as some kind of warped continuation but as an exorcism of what he did to her, a complicated way of diminishing him.

Nothing surprises Michèle. Rather than make her bitter, low expectations have left her bitterly funny, as if they (and the occasional fantasy about beating her attacker to death) have provided her with an infinite well of strength. Elle comes from Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, the former Hollywood blockbusterer behind RoboCop, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers who’s returned to working in Europe, to whom the movie likely owes its lurid streak and desire to provoke. But it’s the terrific Huppert who holds the whole chancy enterprise together, finding for Michèle more completeness than is there on the page, a combination of world-weariness and the unbowed weightlessness of not giving a damn, creating in the process one of the year’s most intriguing roles.

Chastain and Mark Strong in Miss Sloane.

EuropaCorp USA

The title character in director John Madden’s Miss Sloane is, like Michèle, a redhead and, like Michèle, would probably be described as a stone-cold bitch by anyone who’s had the misfortune of tangling with her. She’s a DC lobbyist played by Jessica Chastain, one who — thanks to the efforts of Jonathan Perera’s labored script — is defined by a collection of enthusiastically signposted habits. Elizabeth Sloane takes pills so she can get by on almost no sleep, a physical stand-in for her addiction to the job. She eats at the same crummy Chinese takeout place around the corner every night because food is just fuel, caring as little about her meals as she does with most other sensory pleasures in her life. She does occasionally book time with a sex worker (Jake Lacy) so she can enjoy orgasms and human contact without all the accompanying baggage, though she affirms she has zero regrets about her decision not to have a relationship. Elizabeth is a self-conscious and performatively chilly protagonist, prone to saying things like “I understand you have feelings and a life, but I have no duty to them.”

Despite the heavy hand in how she’s characterized, Elizabeth’s a pleasure to spend time with, because Chastain plays her like she’s Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, an unstoppable villain newly weaponized by the side of the angels. Or, at least, for the forces of gun control. Rodolfo Schmidt (Mark Strong) recruits her away from her moneyed firm with the promise that she’ll lead a smaller, scrappier team in the battle for better gun regulation, a fight that even he seems to think is unwinnable. With her trim bob and her matte red lipstick and her array of tailored, monochromatic outfits, Elizabeth projects an aura of such bloodless severity that no one in the film — or in the audience — buys the reason for why she signs on: that she believes it is the right thing to do. She’s asked, more than once, if someone close to her died in an incident of gun violence, a personal connection being easier to reconcile than ideological commitment.

But ideology, for Elizabeth, is enough. Miss Sloane is a political fantasy of someone willing to fight dirty for a good cause, Washington lobbying as a heist to be pulled off. It’s also, maybe more poignantly in the wake of the election, a fantasy about the ice queen triumphant, the person you really want to have on your side, using all her sway and intense focus to plant a designer heel on the neck of her former employers and on the gun lobby who hired them. Her brusqueness, obsession, and willingness to use others and to turn her entire existence over to getting the job done are all positioned as assets (rather than tendencies she needs to abandon), even as Miss Sloane acknowledges they’re unsustainable and include lots of collateral damage. Long after the movie’s made its last, not terribly satisfying twist, the character lingers, more powerful in concept than the sum of her parts.

Sandra Hüller in Toni Erdmann.

Sony Pictures Classics

Unlike Michèle LeBlanc and Elizabeth Sloane, Toni Erdmann’s star, Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller), isn’t at the top of her field. She’s right in the middle, employed by a German consultant group contracted with an oil company in Romania to execute layoffs, trying to climb her way up in a job in which she’s often the only woman in the room who isn’t an executive’s wife or assistant. But like the other two protagonists, she’s got her own slick, impersonal apartment she uses for (too little) sleep, work, and hosting what turns out to be an unforgettable department party. She’s got a lover in the office, though she keeps him at arm’s length, their relationship a secret and unlikely to lead to more. Her life is careful, controlled, and entirely dominated by her job until her father, Winfried (Peter Simonischek) — a shaggy-haired music teacher from whom she’s grown distant — turns up without warning at her doorstep. Then he refuses to leave, upsetting the ecosystem of her existence, inserting himself into her life by pretending to be a stranger (the “Toni Erdmann” of the title) after she refuses to acknowledge him as her father.

It’s the framework of an Adam Sandler movie — the tightly wound businesswoman reconnects with her goofball dad, lets her hair down, and learns she doesn’t need her lousy corporate gig to get by. Except that’s not how Toni Erdmann goes at all — it refuses to pathologize Ines’s desire for professional success, or to conclude that contentment for her is a simple as quitting her crummy job. Who’s to say another one would be better? It’s not like anyone around Ines is malicious. Instead, writer-director Maren Ade captures with unbearable accuracy how workplace sexism can be a death by a thousands cuts, and how hardening yourself to it or adjusting to fit in can make you read as brittle. When Ines tries to talk to a client, she’s passed off to take his wife out shopping instead. When men she works with go off to explore the “famous Bucharest nightlife,” she’s left behind because they have no interest in a woman witnessing their potentially extramarital adventures.

And when she has to bend her life to accommodate something work-related, her father calls her out on it, his joking-but-not-joking comment “Are you really a human?” having enough sting to it that he apologizes afterward. But the gap between them at that moment is yawning. It’s a difference of experience not just between their industries and generations, but between their genders, the double standards of what’s expected of her and how much more she has to give of herself as a woman just to keep up. Winfried doesn’t solve Ines’s dissatisfactions with practical jokes, because for the character, nothing about her situation is funny to her. Ines has her own sense of absurd, and it’s a testament to how good Toni Erdmann is that it emerges stealthily, amusingly, and heartbreakingly over the course of her father’s chaotic stay, a sign of what the two have in common, in the face of everything keeping them apart.

Peter Simonischek and Hüller in Toni Erdmann.

Sony Pictures Classics

The secret of the career ice queen is that, despite the label, she’s always been passionate — just passionate about things that women haven’t traditionally been expected to prioritize. She’s often used as a case study in the dusty but never discardable discussion of whether women can, in fact, have it all, or whether getting ahead at work means letting another part of your life languish.

More unfairly, she’s been leveraged to imply that ambition itself can make a woman undesirable — unfeminine, off-putting, bitchy. In Working Girl, Harrison Ford ends up with Melanie Griffith’s plucky character Tess, drawn to her because she’s not the caricature of the ball-breaking female execs who surround him in their sexless boxy suits, going on about cutting the opposition “off at the knees.” “You're the first woman I've seen at one of these damn things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman,” he says of her cocktail garb, and as a reward he buys her shots while refusing to talk business or even tell her his name.

It’s always had the thwack of an arrow to the chest, that line from the “nice guy” love interest, that casual dismissal of all the women trying hard to fit into office culture by being one of the guys, to not present themselves as sexual objects first and foremost. Even a movie about and for women can’t stop itself from approaching them from a decidedly empathy-free male point of view, which is why the arrival of Elle, Miss Sloane, and Toni Erdmann now feels so long in coming. They’re the proof that “careerist ice queen” is an epithet, not a type of person, because within their confines, she’s just a woman with grand plans for herself. Turns out the transformation was as easy as putting her at the center of her own story — and that shouldn’t be hard: She likes to be in charge.

Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), and Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen) in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Jonathan Olley & Leah Evans / Lucasfilm Ltd.

A few days after the election, Rogue One screenwriter Chris Weitz and Gary Whitta, another writer who worked on the film, kicked a reactionary hornet’s nest on social media. In the wake of Donald Trump’s win, Weitz tweeted, “Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist (human) organization,” to which Whitta chimed in, “Opposed by a multi-cultural group led by brave women.” (Both tweets have since been deleted.)

As takes go, these aren’t particularly chancy ones — Nazi Germany has provided inspiration for the Empire from the start of the Star Wars franchise, and Whitta was pointing out an unmissable fact of casting. But because we’re now, astonishingly, living in a moment in which equating white supremacy with evil can be considered a bridge too far, the portion of Twitter that’d describe itself as alt-right exploded with rage. They were also spurred on by falsified claims that a version of the film had called Donald Trump — not a known part of the Star Wars universe — a racist, and by their insistence that studio entertainment and politics shouldn’t mix.

The hashtag, #DumpStarWars, was spawned.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Lucasfilm Ltd.

An attempted Star Wars boycott sounded just as likely to damage the giant franchise as the proposed Hamilton one, but Weitz ended up apologizing (while leaving a safety-pinned emblem with “Star Wars against hate” up). This week, Disney CEO Bob Iger assured angry internet denizens that their popcorn was safe from any seasoning of unwanted relevance. “I think the whole story has been overblown and, quite frankly, it’s silly,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “This is a film that the world should enjoy. It is not a film that is, in any way, a political film. There are no political statements in it, at all.”

The calculating corporate authority folded, and the ragtag army of keyboard rebels sorta won. If you squint — and have a particularly grim sense of humor — it’s a little like the arc of a Star Wars movie.

It’s always been both a feature and a bug of the beloved franchise that it’s so uncomplicated for anyone to project themselves on the side of the scrappy Rebel Alliance. But no matter how appealing the mythology, the world is not made only out of righteous underdogs — there's also the oppressive Galactic Empire.

Iger is wrong, of course. Rogue One is not a scathing anti-Trump allegory. It is, it turns out, a fairly minor addition to the Star Wars ’verse, but it is political. All movies, no matter how silly, serious, or space operatic, are political in terms of how they represent their universes and their expected audiences, and in terms of what they reinforce as normalcy.

Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Lucasfilm Ltd.

Rogue One was directed by Godzilla’s Gareth Edwards, and chronologically, it occupies the sliver of time right before the start of Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. It lays out largely unnecessary groundwork for the original trilogy, but it also provides a minor-key prelude to a set of films all about swashbuckling adventure. Its characters aren’t predestined heroes or powerful Jedi; they’re soldiers and spies, the sort that fight and fuel and sometimes die during skirmishes. Rogue One doesn’t just make you feel its battles, it meddles with Star Wars’ fundamental moral divide, blurring the lines between the sides, and giving its main character, the steely Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), plenty of reason to need to be won over.

Spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), for instance, is a loyal agent of the Alliance, but he’s shown blasting a few non-Empire folks for pragmatic reasons, and he has been known to act as an assassin. Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) is a former Empire pilot who takes huge risks in order to swap sides, only to be tortured by the very parties he’s trying to help. The Alliance is divided, distrustful, and prone to disagreements, having splintered and birthed some extremist groups. The Empire — well, the Empire’s still chilly, cutthroat, powerful, and embodied by a sinister white man (Ben Mendelsohn as Orson Krennic) because there’s only so far these characterizations can be reworked. But now we see figures who doubt it and come to defect, among them Jyn’s father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), a reluctant architect of the Death Star trying to pass along information about a weakness in the planet-sized weapon.

K-2SO (Alan Tudyk) and Jyn in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Lucasfilm Ltd.

Rogue One is at its best when it’s at war — it has some bruisingly good action sequences, many centered on Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen as the staff-wielding blind warrior Chirrut Îmwe. He’s got a carbine-carrying pal, Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), and they join up with Jyn and Cassian. There’s a former Imperial enforcer droid named K-2SO (Alan Tudyk) whose lack of filter and any elegance makes for the bulk of the film’s scattered humor. These characters scramble from planet to moon to planet on a mission that ultimately has them retrieving plans for the Death Star. But their development is considerably less of a priority than the fighting they do (though the capable Jones, at least, manages to sells Jyn’s quiet transformation from indifferent outsider to true believer in every determined clench of her jaw).

Rogue One collects characters with a casualness that makes them all feel like they could be potential cannon fodder, or at least disposable, especially as the film readies to join up with A New Hope in its final act. When a few familiar faces, ship designs, and fabulously old-timey futuristic bits of technology make an appearance, they’re fan service, but they’re also a reminder that we already know what happens next — and it doesn't feature any of the characters we’ve more recently been introduced to.

Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones) in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Lucasfilm Ltd.

Even when they’re getting inadvertently diminished by their own franchise, though, there’s a deliberateness to Jyn and her comrades that feels like it could make a lasting mark on the Star Wars brand. They’re a band of women and people of color, a choice that’s echoed, to a lesser extent, in the array of characters we see at the Alliance base, with droids and non-humans scattered in. The Rebellion, in Rogue One, is dominated by the marginalized in a way that’s specific, and that provides a particular foundation in its fight for freedom — broad and generic no longer. It’s a quiet touch, but it’s unmissable — you might even call it political.

1. Daredevil

Patrick Harbron / Netflix

For months, all I looked forward to was Daredevil Season 2 dropping on Netflix; the first season had been so good. But when that day finally arrived, I was disappointed, spending most of the time texting friends, "So...Daredevil. It's been pretty boring so far, right?"

I wanted to like Season 2. Really, I did. It had Elodie Yung as Elektra, and you know I'm always here for more Asians onscreen. And Jon Bernthal looked great as the Punisher, but he wasn't nearly as interesting as the terrifying but at times completely vulnerable Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio). Apparently, Fisk returns in the latter half of Season 2, but I wouldn't know because I didn't make it that far. From the looks of my Netflix account, I got to the beginning of Episode 4 before I quit and put on Jessica Jones instead.

I'm a sucker for good triumphing over evil. So when our hero Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), an altruistic lawyer-turned-well-meaning vigilante, began sabotaging his life — ruining his friendship with Foggy (Elden Henson) and any chance of a relationship with Karen (Deborah Ann Woll) — I lost interest. If I wanted to watch someone make bad decisions, I'd just look at my own life. Also, fuck Karen. —Susan Cheng

2. Empire

Chuck Hodes / Fox

Sometime last fall, when Lucious (Terrence Howard) was in prison for the first few episodes, I began to tire of Empire. But I felt I should stick with it. More episodes in, as the story continuously revolved around who was in charge of Empire the company, I realized there are few things I care less about than the music industry. I still watched for a bit, enjoying Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) like I do, but then a few episodes piled up on my DVR, and I thought, Why should I watch them when there's so much TV out there? That was the end of that. I hear that Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday) died, and Mariah Carey was a guest star, but I am at peace with this decision. —Kate Aurthur

3. The Flash

The CW

I very deliberately quit Empire; I did not mean to quit The Flash. I fell victim to the too-much-TV thing with this show, and because of its link to Arrow and Supergirl (and the godforsaken DC's Legends of Tomorrow), I basically panicked and slacked on all of them. I'm slowly catching up (though not with Legends of Tomorrow), starting with Supergirl. I will eventually get to The Flash, but for now, I cannot say in good conscience that I watched this show that I once loved! —K.A.

4. How to Get Away With Murder

Mitch Haaseth / ABC

I never missed an episode of How to Get Away With Murder in its first season. It was one of the only shows I sat down to watch religiously on the same night, at the same time, every single week without fail. Annalise Keating (Viola Davis) was a complete badass, her students were all interesting characters with their own backstories, and I constantly found myself wanting to find out what happened next. Plus, who can resist watching a classic Viola Davis crying scene?

And then, after two seasons, I became exhausted by all of the drama. I grew emotionally attached to characters who were dying left and right, the twists and turns at the end of every episode made me weary, and it all just became too much. When Season 3 premiered, I didn't tune in. That's not to say I couldn't be convinced into bingeing a bunch of HTGAWM episodes I've missed, but for now, I'm not sitting on my couch to watch Annalise Keating and her law students on Thursday nights. —Krystie Lee Yandoli

5. Modern Family

Peter "Hopper" Stone / ABC

Modern Family has always been my “popcorn” show — a lighthearted alternative to the cerebral series in my DVR queue, guaranteeing a few laughs and a heartwarming ending. But this year I stopped laughing.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but suddenly I realized the characters had become spiteful instead of quirkily thoughtless. My joy over LGBT characters being major players on a network sitcom dissolved as Mitch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cam (Eric Stonestreet) became screeching caricatures of a gay couple. I wondered why black people seem to only appear on standalone episodes — and wished Kevin Hart had stuck around as Phil’s (Ty Burrell) neighbor. And good god, how many more times could Gloria’s (Sofía Vergara) ethnicity be the butt of a joke? Modern Family definitely is not “modern” in the way its ABC siblings Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat are — and you know what? They make me laugh. —Drusilla Moorhouse

6. Pretty Little Liars

Eric McCandless / ABC Family

There was a time when I felt like I needed to watch every TV show featuring a queer female character, and there was a time when that felt manageable, considering how few there were. That was the world in which Pretty Little Liars first premiered in 2010. I watched Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell) come out to her military father, I watched her first girlfriend die because bury your gays, and I watched a lot of really fucking ridiculous shit: Texts cannot be sent anonymously, one cannot evade murder just because there's a commercial break, and I cannot with the hashtags in support of a presumed statutory-rape-filled relationship between a student and teacher. But I stuck around for a while — five very long seasons, to be exact — for a queer young woman of color on television. Now, however, there are queer women all over my television screen, and the absolutely absurd and often inappropriate drama of Pretty Little Liars doesn't feel like it's worth my DVR space or time. (Especially not with another trans character with murderous intentions.) I may have bowed out with only two seasons to go, but I know whatever resolution this show tries to offer will be unsatisfying at best and offensive at worst. So...see ya later, bitches. —Jaimie Etkin

7. Outlander

Neil Davidson / Sony Pictures Television

I love time travel, historical dramas, period costumes, and men in kilts, especially when one of those men is Sam Heughan. And in the beginning, I found Outlander enchanting. Claire Randall (the luminous Caitriona Balfe), a smart, independent former World War II combat nurse, was as empowering as a female character could be in that era. She didn’t lose her inherent strength when she was transported back to the 18th century, but I was much less interested in seeing my protagonist as a saucy lass in a bodice-ripper romance. And then things got really rapey.

Still, I stuck with Outlander. A woman on her own must have been especially vulnerable to sexual predators, right? But the sadistic, unrelenting torture and rape of her husband was one of the most upsetting episodes of television I’ve ever seen. I was steadfast until the end of the first season when Claire and Jamie set sail for France in the finale. I fully expected that after a break, I'd be able to tune in for the premiere of the sophomore season.

But when Outlander did return for Season 2, I couldn’t bring myself to watch Claire continue to play the damsel in distress — and even more rape scenes. That ship had sailed for me, literally. —D.M.

8. Quantico

ABC

For a while, Quantico was the perfect silly show — the kind that always seems to have a lot going on and yet never seems to demand your full attention, and which also stars television’s No. 1 provider of hair inspo of all time, Priyanka Chopra. But Quantico’s convoluted structure of present-day disaster investigation and flashbacks to training started to wear on me, especially when the show doubled back multiple times on various romantic entanglements and personal betrayals. I couldn’t, for the life of me, keep track of who was on the outs with whom at various moments in time; 22 episodes is just too long a stretch to sustain something so strenuously twisty. I surrendered before the end of Season 1, and when I checked back in at the start of Season 2 and saw that it was repeating the same template, this time with the CIA, I said goodbye to Quantico for good. —Alison Willmore

9. Saturday Night Live

NBC

I’m a completist, so I can never really commit to quitting a show — it’s been two years and I still promise I’ll catch up on you, Suits, Pretty Little Liars, and Teen Wolf. I swear! There's a lot on my DVR, and my Netflix queue, and my Hulu watchlist, and my Amazon watchlist, but Saturday Night Live is the one program that I am least prone to hit play on.

I watched this season up until Dave Chappelle hosted, skipping maybe one or two episodes prior to that. In fact, I have been watching almost every episode of Saturday Night Live since the existence of Hulu. I think there are a lot of amazing cast members, like Vanessa Bayer, Aidy Bryant, Kate McKinnon, and Kenan Thompson, and I am really rooting for new head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider after successes like “Wishin’ Boot” and Kelly’s film Other People.

But my grievances start with how the show handled the election. It seemed unethical to have Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, host in the heat of his campaign (even though many have done it before). And it seemed unnecessary to let Jay Pharoah go, as if Barack Obama is not still relevant enough to be a part of sketches. The show bet too big on Hillary Clinton, and now it's been over a month since she lost the election, and they are still trying to drag her into sketches just because Kate McKinnon call sell an impression. Can you imagine how annoying it would be if we still had to see full Mitt Romney sketches over a month after the 2012 election?

Somehow, “Weekend Update” hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che continue to be the only cast members doing press, and they continue to make ignorant comments. Also, if SNL is going to have white host after white host after white host, can they at least include people who are interesting and charismatic, and not an alleged sexual harasser?

At this point, the only thing I feel like I'm missing out on are the musical performances, because the show's choices of innovative artists like Solange, Chance the Rapper, and Maren Morris have been the only impressive thing about this season. —Marcus Jones

10. Unreal

Lifetime

Unreal, you broke my heart this year. In Season 1, you were television’s most wonderful surprise, a blisteringly smart, bleak AF drama with the seemingly lighthearted setting of a reality dating show, tucked away on, of all places, Lifetime. I loved Shiri Appleby’s Rachel, adored and winced at the way she always rationalized away her ideals because she was addicted to her terrible job. I liked her relationship with her boss, Quinn (Constance Zimmer), a toxic funhouse mirror of supportive sisterhood. But in Season 2, Unreal quickly went off the rails, shifting focus away from the dysfunctional work relationships that made the first season so good, amping up the twists, and seriously mishandling the casting of the first black suitor on Everlasting, which seemed like a development with great promise when it was announced. I bailed before the end of the season in favor of a mourning period for what was, last year, one of my favorite shows. —A.W.

11. The Walking Dead

Gene Page / AMC

To be honest, I tried to quit this show for years — basically every time yet another group of inexplicably evil survivors arrived to ruin everything. The annoying "Glenn's dead" fakeout last fall took away my last shred of interest in the show, but it's easy to get sucked back in when your roommate puts it on every week. So I continued idly hate-watching right up until the Season 6 finale, when Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) appeared and I walked out because I would rather clean the kitchen for an hour than watch another glorified villain terrorize the characters I'd grown to love.

The characters are what kept me watching all this time, through all the surprise cannibals and random progress-destroying sadists. I rooted for Daryl (Norman Reedus) as he went from volatile misfit to devoted protector of the group. I loved seeing Carol (Melissa McBride) transform into the show's most badass hero, especially when she feigned defenselessness to deceive outsiders. And I teared up when good-hearted Glenn (Steven Yeun) did the right thing every damn time.

So ultimately, I stopped watching for them. Since I won't have to see my favorite characters die, they still live on in my imagination, and I wouldn't have it any other way. —Sarah Willson

For more Best of 2016 content, click here!

Yes, there’s a lot of work to be done, but this past year wasn’t all bad.

ABC; Getty; Marvel; Disney; Netflix; Paramount; Lilly Wachowski; The CW

When Marvel Studios hired Ryan Coogler to direct Black Panther.

The 2018 movie is Marvel Studios’ first feature to star a black character, and Coogler is the first black director to helm a Marvel Studios feature. (Reporting by Adam B. Vary)

Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images; Marvel Studios

When Black-ish was open and honest about police brutality in America.

During an early 2016 episode, called "Hope," Dre (Anthony Anderson) and his wife Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross) get into a discussion about police brutality as the family waits to see if a police officer will be indicted for killing a black man who was unarmed. (By Michael Blackmon)

ABC

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From the man behind one of the biggest earworms of the year, to the woman we all wanted justice for in 2016, to, of course, Chris Pratt.

Kylie Bunbury

Late into the audition process for the lead of Pitch, 27-year-old Kylie Bunbury walked into co-creator Dan Fogelman’s office. “Sometimes you just know. Sometimes you see somebody and think, That’s what I had in my brain and I didn’t even know it. That’s how it was with Kylie,” he told BuzzFeed News. “When she walked in the door, that was it. I saw the television show.” (By Jarett Wieselman)

Fox

Jon M. Chu

“A hero that doesn’t look like you makes you want to be something else,” Chu told BuzzFeed News. The upcoming director of Crazy Rich Asians, who helmed the Now You See Me sequel in 2016, said, “These are characters who have never been seen on the big screen before: Some are totally immoral. Some are completely materialistic. Some are total assholes. Others are super kind. It just runs the gamut and shows there’s not one Asian.” (By Susan Cheng)

Bryan Dale for BuzzFeed News

Desus Nice and The Kid Mero

Desus Nice and The Kid Mero, two Twitter personalities, quietly broke ground on a staid platform — and they did it during the most insane few months in American political history. On other networks, “it’d usually be like get a white guy, give him a suit, get an auditorium, get a band, get three guests, boom. Monologue, interviews, we out,” Desus told BuzzFeed News. At Viceland, Mero added, it all starts with them asking, “What do you want to do?” (By Marcus Jones)

Viceland

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From Disney princesses to the end of Idol and the fandoms of Harry Potter and Star Trek, BuzzFeed Entertainment reported on what goes on in the worlds of your faves this past year.

A24; FX; Suzanne Tenner; The CW; Sony; Matthew Murphy; Amazon; STX

60 Days In

Seven law-abiding citizens volunteered to spend two months behind bars to help a frustrated sheriff fix his problematic prison, and every second was filmed for A&E’s hit docuseries. This is how they pulled it off. (By Jarett Wieselman)

A&E

American Crime

Creator John Ridley and stars Felicity Huffman, Connor Jessup, and Joey Pollari told BuzzFeed News how socially responsible storytelling turned the ABC drama into the most daring TV show in years. (By Jarett Wieselman)

Ryan Green / ABC

American Idol

Since 2002, American Idol has discovered unknown talented singers and offered them the chance to achieve superstar status. While not everyone has reached the heights of Kelly Clarkson or Jennifer Hudson, many have left indelible marks on the hearts and ears of the viewers who did “Dial Idol” for them. Before the series finale, BuzzFeed News asked past contestants to reflect upon how the show changed their lives. Within are their slightly edited responses. (By Jarett Wieselman)

Fox

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Jason Mitchell and Garrett Hedlund in Mudbound

Steve Dietl

Of the handful of breakout movies from 2017 Sundance Film Festival, none looks more destined to be an Oscar nominee next year than Mudbound.

Mudbound (remember that title!) is a handsomely made, urgently relevant drama about the intertwined lives of the black Jackson and white McAllan families on a farm in 1940s Mississippi, unfolding with both a Faulkner-like lyricism and a cutting contemporary resonance. It comes from filmmaker Dee Rees, who made her debut with the acclaimed 2011 lesbian coming-of-age film Pariah and went on to direct Queen Latifah in HBO’s Emmy-winning Bessie. Mudbound's impressive ensemble cast includes Jonathan Banks, Mary J. Blige, Jason Clarke, Carey Mulligan, Rob Morgan, Straight Outta Compton breakout Jason Mitchell, and a more-interesting-than-usual Garrett Hedlund.

It's one of the best films at the festival. But somehow it has yet to finalize a deal for a distributor, while lighter or more personal fare like those about an aspiring rapper (Patti Cake$), overcoming an eating disorder (To the Bone), and real-life romance (The Big Sick) were quickly snapped up from the fest for $10.5, $8, and $12 million, respectively.

Mudbound has nothing in common with Nate Parker’s 2016 The Birth of a Nation, aside from also being the awards-y work of a black director and dealing with racism through the lens of history. But it’s hard not to feel that the latter film has managed to cast a shadow over the former anyway. Parker’s Braveheart-style biopic of Nat Turner famously premiered to multiple standing ovations at Sundance last year, kicking off a giddy bidding war that ended in its sale to Fox Searchlight for a record-setting $17.5 million. The resurfacing of ugly details from Parker’s past and a subsequent PR flameout turned that release into a much-discussed disaster.

Carey Mulligan in Mudbound

Steve Dietl

It seems extremely unlikely that Rees's past is going to yield any Parker-style revelations, but the contrast between the scramble following the premiere of The Birth of a Nation and the slower bidding pace for Mudbound is pronounced. The exercise in caution has arrived, in part, from the increased scrutiny of all potential Oscar contenders (though Casey Affleck, whose Manchester by the Sea also played at Sundance last year, seems to be bouncing toward an Academy Award win with no trouble), as well as from the producers' desire for a campaign that could aide Rees in making Oscars history.

And, in part, all this just seems like an unfortunate syndrome of Sundance, a festival that — despite its increasing attention to diversity — still features few larger black-centric films: Two in a row can't help but get grouped together in people's minds.

Which, frankly, blows. Mudbound is a different and better movie than The Birth of a Nation. It's one that’s nuanced and challenging where Parker’s (personal history aside) was bluntly effective. Rees, working from a screenplay she and Virgil Williams adapted from Hillary Jordan's novel of the same name, doesn’t root her story in any one character. Instead, she lets the point of view slip from one person to another, and with it the narration, creating a chorus of voices sharing their particular experiences.

The result is a film that portrays different sorts of systemic oppression in which its characters survive with a lived-in weariness. We're made to understand, for instance, the combination of gratefulness and growing resentfulness that Laura McAllan (Mulligan) feels toward her husband, Henry (Clarke), who spared her from a life of spinsterdom but feels no obligation to consult her or even ask her in advance about the huge decisions he makes for their family — like moving them to the Mississippi countryside.

Mudbound

Steve Dietl

We feel for Laura’s frustration and her sense of impotence, which she describes via her own voiceover. But she, in turn, is oblivious to the ways in which she wields her privilege as a white woman, as when she offers Florence Jackson (Blige) a job that Florence could use, but also isn't sure she has the option of refusing. Laura seems unaware of the difficult position she's putting Florence in, but the film makes it clear: The camera tracks Florence’s gaze as it slips from Laura’s smiling face (“Good news!” Laura chirps) to that of Henry's bitterly racist father (Banks), who also lives in the house and who’s poised to make Florence’s life hell, whatever her answer.

Henry has a habit of assuming that his sharecroppers' time and labors are his for the taking, and Florence’s husband Hap (Morgan) quietly rages against being treated as property rather than as a tenant. Hap dreams of owning the land taken from his family during Reconstruction, and can’t understand the restlessness of his son Ronsel (Mitchell), who returns from World War II to a country that treats him as less than human after he was lauded as a hero abroad.

It’s suave Jamie (Hedlund) who sets Mudbound’s main plot in motion by returning from the war traumatized and tired, intent on defying the white supremacist legacy of his Southern town and befriending Ronsel, the one local who understands what he’s been through. Jamie, like his friend, was there when the world broke, and he has no interest in returning to any pretense of racial hierarchy enforced by sneering men who need their place in society to be propped up. In depicting that relationship, too, Mudbound is clear-eyed, revealing sincerity but also the innate power imbalance in terms of which of the two men risks more by disobeying old rules.

By the time it approaches the end point suggested in its opening scene, Mudbound has a half-dozen plates spinning, having set them in motion so deftly that it’s easy not to have noticed. That’s how rich Rees’s film is, extending empathy to all of its characters while providing excuses for none of them, especially not the ones benefiting most from systemic oppression. It’s a film about the past, but it’s also one about intersectionality, about the strengths and the limits of the connections that can form between people based on shared experiences of gender, of race, of war. It's a story that may look old-fashioned, but sure doesn't feel that way.

These actors and filmmakers blow our hair back.

The 2017 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, has drawn to a close, but these actors and filmmakers may have much bigger things ahead of them.

Nnamdi Asomugha, actor and producer, Crown Heights

Lakeith Stanfield, Natalie Paul, and Nnamdi Asomugha are all excellent in the film Crown Heights, which is based on the This American Life segment about the real-life wrongful imprisonment of Colin Warner. Much like Making a Murderer or The Night Of, Crown Heights depicts how grueling and unfair the criminal justice system in America can be. While Stanfield embodies the overwhelming dread that comes with trying to prove one’s innocence from a prison cell, Asomugha (Carl King) both as actor and producer makes sure to explain the great lengths Carl went in order to help free Colin. At times he’s a lawyer, a detective, a complicated father; but overall Asomugha’s portrayal reveals what it is to have unconditional love for a friend in a story that proves ordinary people can still beat a system meant to break them. —Marcus Jones

Ryan Kobane / 2017 Sundance Institute

Abby Quinn, actor, Landline

Landline — the follow-up to Jenny Slate, Gillian Robespierre, and Elisabeth Holm’s collaboration on Obvious Child — has ‘90s charm and a winsome cast including Edie Falco, Jay Duplass, and John Turturro. But it's 20-year-old newcomer Abby Quinn's Ali who steals the show.

The movie follows two sisters (Quinn and Slate) in 1995 Manhattan, trying to figure out whether or not their father is having an affair. Quinn navigates her onscreen persona's selfish, annoying adolescent behaviors with ease — saying "fuck" just to piss off the adults, slamming doors, calling her sister the human equivalent of constipation. However, she also grounds her with a unique old-soul quality. One minute she's strumming a guitar, improvising a dirty song with her very real musical talent, and the next she smokes a cigarette while cradling her mom on the bathroom floor.

Quinn captures what it's like to be a teen going through a family breakup; sure, you want to escape and go clubbing and shove dangerous powders up your nose to forget, but at the end of the day, you still have to go home and deal. —Keely Flaherty

Jojo Whilden / Courtesy of 2017 Sundance Institute

Adam Long, actor, When the Street Lights Go On

In the pilot for Brett Morgen’s debut narrative TV show, Adam Long (Happy Valley) plays bad boy Casper, who may or may not be connected to the murder of two people in a small Illinois town. He scares the shit out of me. —Katie Hasty

Anonymous Content

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Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 2.

Summit Entertainment

John Wick lives in New Jersey.

So do a lot of other people, but for most of them, it’s not the same statement that it is for John. John lives in New Jersey because New Jersey is not New York, and cities like New York and (as we see in John Wick: Chapter 2) Rome are home to a byzantine economy of assassins and kingpins. John is done with all that: He got out, got married (Bridget Moynahan plays the late Helen, who only appears in photos, videos, and flashbacks), bought an airy modernist house, started wearing jeans, and acquired a series of adorable dogs, the second of which (spoiler?) does not share the grisly fate of the dog from the first John Wick. John didn’t just leave his old life behind, he plunged himself into suburbia as if he could ward off the past with the inconvenience of having to take the PATH train. Like many a former urbanite, his was a quality-of-life move, but an especially complicated one.

There have been approximately one billion movies made about characters who try to leave their extralegal lives behind and run into the old “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” But none have used the concept of getting out of the game as a basis for world-building the way John Wick and its blissfully bruising, only-slightly-less-novel sequel have. In stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski’s films, the line between “working” and “retired” is a firm one, defined by regulations that are even more elaborate and explicated in Chapter 2. There is no dabbling in the John Wick series — it’s either kill-or-be-killed or go completely normcore. When John goes back to work in the first film, and does so again at the start of the second, he puts on a suit like he's going into the office. He's the action hero as workaholic, never able to really pull himself away.

It was John's appearance, in retirement, as what Goodfellas' Henry Hill would call a "schnook" that made him seem like easy pickings in the first John Wick, a revenge-mourning drama. But it's the rules that get John killing again in Chapter 2, when a Camorra higher-up named Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) comes to collect on a marker owed him by John from back in the day — one that, having unretired, John isn’t in a place to turn down. The result is another brutal but unexpectedly elegant action movie that takes as much pleasure in the beauty of how wet pavement reflects light as it does in the splatter of blood across a wall.

Riccardo Scamarcio in John Wick: Chapter 2.

Niko Tavernise / Summit

Credit Stahelski's ability to shoot fight scenes and gun battles with a cleanness that makes you realize how chopped up they are in most other movies — using longer takes and full-body shots, all the better to appreciate the lyrical prowess with which John slams some henchman’s head on a counter and inserts a pencil into his brain. But it’s the details of screenwriter Derek Kolstad’s universe that allow Chapter 2 to be more than just a beautifully made shoot-’em-up. The new film is even more explicit about and entertaining in how it treats John’s old life as akin to a murderous but tradition- and perk-heavy social club.

He meets, for instance, with a sommelier (Peter Serafinowicz) who walks John through weapons like they were wines. We get a glimpse into the room full of secretarial staff housed in the underworld hub that is Winston's (Ian McShane) Continental hotel, where membership files are maintained and bounty notices are delivered by pneumatic tube and punched into ancient computers. There’s a scene in which a battered John sits in the neutral territory of the hotel’s bar alongside fellow hitpeople Cassian (Common) and Ares (Ruby Rose), both of whom had, minutes before, been doing their best to kill him. The shadow society they're all a part of may be brutally violent, but it's also absurdly civilized.

John Wick laid out the basics of its codified criminal community, but Chapter 2 builds from them an intricate world that has the claustrophobic quality of any professional industry. It’s gossipy, backbiting, and cutthroat (lol); its high-end trappings — the plushly clubby lounges, the duck fat potatoes savored by a baddie, the tailor who sews bulletproof armor into John’s custom suit, the museum in which Santino takes meetings — only enhance the sensation that being a top-ranked killer is akin to being an investment banker, a high-flying master of the universe living only for the rush of taking out competitors and raking in cash.

John Wick: Chapter 2.

Niko Tavernise / Summit

John may have an incredible gift for violence (a character asks if he’s addicted to revenge), but Chapter 2 makes him appear, in the end, less like a figure out of nightmares and more like someone who's a slave to the terrible job he’s so unfortunately great at. It makes John Wick a poetically unhappy sort of badass, the role an ideal fit for Reeves’ slightly faded beauty and aura of melancholy. Swagger is even less of an interest to him in the second film than in the first. He's a character with nothing to prove except how tired of everything he is, the assassin as heartbroken executive, stripped of the trappings of the domestic life he tried to make an escape into. New Jersey, it turns out, wasn’t far enough.

Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight.

David Bornfriend/A24

It's difficult to say what exactly makes a movie a Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards. There's the artistic production and experience, commercialization and accessibility of the story, and, of course, its so-called “universal appeal.” But there's also revolutionary storytelling, groundbreaking cinematography, and a film’s (potential) cultural impact and longevity, which cement its place in history, if not Oscars history.

Citizen Kane and Do the Right Thing, for example, did not win Best Picture (the latter wasn't even nominated), but they've certainly had more impact in the decades that followed than How Green Was My Valley and arguably, even Driving Miss Daisy, the films that won in the years in which they were eligible. On Sunday, there are nine movies vying for the biggest prize in Hollywood: Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion, Manchester by the Sea, and Moonlight.

Barry Jenkins' Moonlight tells the captivating story of Chiron, a young, poor, gay black man, from childhood to adulthood. It manages to be both heartbreaking and heartwarming as it navigates Chiron's difficult narrative while exploring and building on discussions about blackness, masculinity, sexuality, poverty, and the often painful experiences that accompany self-acceptance.

But the favorite for Best Picture is La La Land, although one would be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the swaths of criticism that have recently been launched at Damien Chazelle's musical. David Cox at The Guardian called La La Land’s inevitable win “a disaster for Hollywood and for us”; April Wolfe at LA Weekly referred to it as a propaganda film; but perhaps the most scathing review came from two-time Grammy nominee Elon Rutberg, who famously collaborated with Kanye West, who referred to the film as “fascist” in a series of since-deleted tweets.

The conversation around this year's Oscars has largely centered on comparing Moonlight to La La Land. The former introduces three unknown black actors sharing the lead role, while the latter stars two of the most famous white actors in Hollywood, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, engaging in a romance. The former is an independent film with a reported $5 million budget that pales in comparison to the reported $30 million budget of La La Land, released by Lionsgate. The latter was a box office hit pulling in almost $340 million, while the former only made $22.4 million.

There's also a temptation to compare La La Land’s likely victory and Moonlight’s likely loss to Grammys night just two weeks ago when Adele won Album of the Year for 25 over Beyoncé's Lemonade. But that oversimplifies both situations. The success of an album versus a film is an inherently flawed comparison that discounts the different art forms. Moreover, there are different institutions that govern the reward systems for these different art forms. Still, there is something to be said about whether a project that is black and centers blackness can ultimately win against what New York Times contributor Myles E. Johnson calls “safer, whiter, more apolitical choices.”

There will be, as there ought to be, conversations about the multilayered role race plays in choosing the Best Picture winner. But Moonlight’s probable loss is a result of a larger system that always made the film an underdog, and not just because of its social location as a “black film.” We can't talk about Moonlight’s successes and shortcomings without talking about the larger conversation of the Academy, the arts, and the culture in which it lives.

Here's why Moonlight’s chances for Best Picture were never high. —Kovie Biakolo

Moonlight is not a traditional "Oscars movie."

Jharrel Jerome and Ashton Sanders in Moonlight.

David Bornfriend/A24

In January 2016, a week and a half into intense criticism of a slate of all-white Oscar acting nominees, Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was received like a feature-length answer to #OscarsSoWhite. After a first screening famously bookended by standing ovations, the film was quickly snapped up for $17.5 million, the biggest deal in the festival’s history. Parker, who starred in, wrote, and directed the film, was being positioned as king of awards season until details about a rape accusation from his past resurfaced. He presented himself in interviews as an aggrieved, unrepentant party annoyed at having to address the incident, and then, news emerged that the alleged victim had killed herself in 2012, and the Oscars talk ended.

The Birth of a Nation scored such a huge deal out of Sundance because studios saw it as a way to coast into a collection of categories at the Academy Awards. While it was expected to get a boost from the urgent conversation over nominee diversity, it was also Oscar-y in some very traditional ways: Not only was it a sweeping historical drama based on a true story, but also Parker’s tale of fighting to get the project made for a decade was such a press-ready one, the actor turned director chasing a passion project Hollywood didn’t want to make but sure was eager to buy. The Birth of a Nation was the kind of movie that’s calculated to win Academy Awards — Parker described it himself in terms of a past Best Picture winner: “black Braveheart.”

In contrast, there’s not a whiff of Oscar bait to Moonlight. It’s an art film, an exquisitely tender, anguished coming-of-age story told through lyrical sequences from three stages in Chiron's life. Its structure isn’t standard, and neither is its sense of rise and fall, as it goes from the vivid bursts of experience in Chiron’s childhood and teenage years to a measured look at his life as a man who’s shielded himself against vulnerability, but is trying to find it in himself to open up. There’s no lead performance — Chiron is played instead by a trio of relative unknowns (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes) who were able to achieve a near-miraculous continuity in their shared depiction of a single person. Moonlight isn’t the kind of movie that the Academy Awards have tended to go for at all — it’s so much better than that.

It’s ridiculous to compare Jenkins’ film with Parker’s just because the directors are both black, which is why it seems like plausible Academy thinking. It’s not that Moonlight was simply swapped in like some kind of substitute, but without a title as blatantly Oscar-courting as The Birth of a Nation, Academy voters had to be more open to work from a black filmmaker they might have, in another year, shrugged off as too challenging. —Alison Willmore

And La La Land is the quintessential "Oscars movie."

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land.

Dale Robinette/Lionsgate

La La Land is, at the very least, a good film. It is also desperately ordinary in its storytelling, but that's not a count against it. The film is the kind of project whose parts are set up to be recognized by the Academy: It fosters nostalgia (for Hollywood in particular), attempts to combine beauty and sadness, demonstrates struggle, the ending isn’t terribly predictable, and it has two safe, likeable, and extremely popular actors as its stars (actors who've romanced each other onscreen before no less).

It also features a problematic depiction of American jazz that erases black experiences — a throwback to an era many people of color have no desire to return to — and Ryan Gosling’s character, Sebastian, is presented as white savior of “real” black American jazz.

But that's not surprising. The arts are rewarded within problematic institutions in (sometimes openly, and sometimes insidiously) a deeply imperfect culture. What makes a movie Oscarworthy cannot be separated from those imperfections and problems. —K.B.

Most of the country hasn't even seen Moonlight.

Naomie Harris in Moonlight.

David Bornfriend/A24

Of the nine Best Picture nominees, Moonlight has pulled in the smallest haul at the box office. In its entire four-month platform run, it’s made just shy of $21.5 million, as of Feb. 22, which, for context, is less than what the widely unenjoyed Matt Damon movie The Great Wall made in the US in its first weekend. At its widest release across the country, Moonlight played in just over 1,100 theaters, whereas a typical blockbuster would open in 3,000 to 4,000 of them. Hell or High Water, Lion, and Manchester by the Sea have all made under $50 million, while Fences and Hacksaw Ridge made a bit more. Arrival, La La Land, and Hidden Figures have all broken $100 million, with Hidden Figures at the top with $146 million.

A low gross doesn’t mean a film won’t be bestowed with the big prize — The Hurt Locker made even less than Moonlight (around $17 million), and still snagged Best Picture in 2010. The Academy Awards aren’t supposed to be measured by way of financial success — if that were the case, Rogue One would be sweeping all categories, and math would decide all winners. Also, art, etc.

That said, as movies become increasingly divided between low budget indies and $150-plus million franchise features, there’s been a sense of anxiety surrounding the Oscars ceremony about what it means for the future of the industry when the most coveted prize of the year goes to a movie only a tiny fraction of the country has actually seen. —A.W.

And the Academy needs to draw an audience.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land.

Dale Robinette/Lionsgate

Forget the industry — what does giving the biggest cinematic honor to a film hardly any of America saw mean to the Oscars broadcast, which (at least in theory) relies on giant audiences tuning in because they care about who wins what?

For decades, the Academy Awards have been preceded by the Independent Spirit Awards the Saturday afternoon before. They were founded in 1984 as a more casual, smaller film-focused counter to the mainstream taste the Oscars have traditionally represented. But as has often been the case in recent years, the titles nominated for Spirits and those nominated for Oscars have quite a bit of overlap. Moonlight just swept this year's Spirits, which, perversely, speaks to why it might be less likely to make headway the following evening.

Because if there’s no difference between the main event and its scrappy indie alternative, then everyone has to confront how great the gap has gotten between the movies the public actually goes to see and the ones Hollywood holds up as exemplary. —A.W.

Awards campaigns can be as responsible for winning Oscars as the movies themselves.

Emma Stone in La La Land.

Dale Robinette/Lionsgate

Just as one does not simply walk into Mordor, one does not simply get nominated for and then win an Oscar. One campaigns for an Oscar, at great length and financial expense, over festivals and parties, through lunches and post-screening Q&As, and in interviews and photo ops. It’s the side of the Academy Awards the public doesn’t get to see, the ramp-up that’s like a political run, except instead of glad-handing with members of the community, it’s Academy voters who get schmoozed.

And while schmoozing isn’t an exact science, it definitely appears to have helped tipped the balance from one movie to another in the past, regardless of quality. Harvey Weinstein’s legendary skills were credited with helping Shakespeare in Love pull off an upset against Saving Private Ryan in 1999 — no matter that it’s the latter film that’s better remembered. The most brilliant awards campaign in the history of humanity can’t give a movie more cultural heft, but it might be able to help on the trophy front.

Moonlight was out on the awards trail like all other prospects — you can track the growing exhaustion in Mahershala Ali, who’s primed to win Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film, from his interview quotes about the lack of sleep and the wife he'd rather be home with (not to mention their just-born child). Awards pushes aren’t measurable in a way that allows comparison, but it’s worth noting that Moonlight’s distributor is A24, a nimble, hip distribution company with great taste that was founded in 2013, and that hasn’t had a chance to carry out many campaigns yet. La La Land, in contrast, comes from the larger, more established Lionsgate: 2005's Best Picture winner Crash was its release.

Also, at their most cynical, awards campaigns are about allowing voters access to famous names, and feeding them simplified narratives about what makes films deserving. And for all the talent of Moonlight’s cast, its celeb wattage is comparatively low, putting it at a disadvantage when it comes to luring in voters who wouldn’t turn up for a mere screening but who’d do it to lay eyes on, say, Emma Stone. —A.W.

The Academy has a long history of not recognizing stories about people of color.

Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind, Octavia Spencer in The Help, Lupita Nyong'o in 12 Years a Slave.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Dale Robinette/Walt Disney Studios, Fox Searchlight

Moonlight director Barry Jenkins at the 89th Annual Academy Awards.

Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

The wildest thing that has ever happened at the Oscars — yup, even wilder than that time in 1974 when a guy streaked naked across the stage — took place Sunday night at the end of what had, up until that point, felt like an Oscars ceremony short on shocks: While presenting Best Picture, Warren Beatty opened the envelope and then, for reasons unclear at the time, hesitated, leaving his fellow presenter, Bonnie and Clyde co-star Faye Dunaway, to announce the predicted La La Land as the winner. Cue the applause and acceptance speeches unfolding in front of increased turmoil as the ceremony's producers ran on stage. Soon, La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz made his way to the mic and revealed , astonishingly, that a mistake had been made.

For a second, it looked like Horowitz was pulling an Adele at the Grammys, another white person sheepishly using their winner’s platform to acknowledge the more deserving, yet passed-over, piece of black art. But Horowitz wasn’t making a gesture, he was literally trying to correct a huge error. “This is not a joke — Moonlight has won Best Picture,” he said. For maximum drama, he grabbed the correct card out of Beatty’s hands and held it up for the camera to zoom in and confirm his words, a moment that Twitter would meme the hell out of minutes later. It was a twist ending M. Night Shyamalan (who played along on Twitter) couldn't even dream up, an immense fuckup destined to be parsed and studied like the Zapruder film. And, for many of us, it was the first time since Nov. 8 in which the world made any goddamn sense.

Twitter

Ever since the presidential election, the temptation to, jokingly or otherwise, cast other collective cultural events as a re-staging of that fateful evening has been irresistible. It’s also been like the revisiting of trauma, since each one until now has played out the same way. After La La Land swept the Golden Globes, there was the Super Bowl, in which the Atlanta Falcons consistently throttled the New England Patriots — led by Trump pal Tom Brady — only for the crown to slip from their hands in a way that felt uncomfortably familiar. Then there was the Grammys, during which the aforementioned Adele incident took place. The British singer won Album, Record, and Song of the Year over Beyoncé's Lemonade, despite even Adele herself admitting Lemonade was 2016’s defining work.

It’s not like any of these were exact Trump parallels (Adele seems very nice!), but they all felt like nationally broadcast instances of whiteness reasserting its grip on a country that has been fighting its way, ever so slowly, toward a future in which whiteness does not mean a guaranteed win. And by that measure, the nail-biting last-minute Best Picture reversal wasn’t just a case of the finest film winning — it was a gratifyingly redemptive triumph.

Barry Jenkins’ compassionate, gorgeously wrought story about how a black, queer, and poor boy comes of age in Miami beat out the heavily favored La La Land, a movie whose blithe racial assumptions and fetishism for nostalgia have unfortunate connotations in the wake of an election campaign in which each had been explicitly and effectively weaponized. Moonlight, a testament to cinema’s ability to create empathy and understanding for marginalized lives, bested La La Land, a testament to its ability to serve as an escape from reality. It didn’t just feel justified — it felt necessary.

But no matter how satisfying Moonlight’s success was — and no matter how many fiery late-breaking takes on the alleged destructive force La La Land there were — Moonlight’s mangled victory isn’t actually a triumph of good over evil. Or even of the left’s triumph over the right, because let’s be real: The true conservative candidate among the Best Picture contenders would be Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge (and wouldn’t that have been an upset, in every sense of the word).

Barry Jenkins accepts Best Picture for Moonlight.

Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Images

The way that Moonlight and La La Land were placed in grand opposition over the course of awards season created a compelling narrative that burdened both movies with roles that were, in different ways, unfair to them. Being presented as the important, political urgent one has meant that Moonlight’s incredible aesthetics have frequently been overlooked or treated as secondary in the conversation. And La La Land — which out of awards context plays like a slight, winsome ode to a semiretired genre — got crushed under the burdens of being the overpraised representative of white supremacy.

La La Land was not the active villain of the Oscars, but it sure seemed poised, until that incredible final inning defeat, to benefit from an unjust and racist status quo. And while art doesn’t have an obligation to put real-world relevance front and center, that doesn’t mean that the melancholy dreaminess of Damien Chazelle’s musical is neutral. It felt like a “no comment” in a year that has really, really demanded a comment. Whereas Moonlight’s every choice is a statement — not just in the story it tells, but in the ways in which it envelops you in its experiences, the pain and the firework-bright moments of joy felt by its young protagonist. Its success is a milestone for representation at the Oscars, but it’s also a commemoration of remarkable artistry and depth. It’s a development destined to give a boost to a movie that could use it, that’s still only been seen by a small fraction of the country when it should be enjoyed by the widest possible audience.

What Moonlight isn’t is a sure sign of greater shifts in the industry or at awards shows: The Oscars have made steps forward in terms of diversity and recognizing artistic daring before, and followed them with steps back. The Academy Awards remain a window into how Hollywood sees itself and how it’d like to be seen, two things that are sometimes directly at odds. Because, no matter how many easy digs Jimmy Kimmel managed to slip in (or tweet) at the current administration last night, the self-assured progressivism that so much of the film industry takes for granted has been very slow to manifest in the choices that industry has made about whose stories get told and who gets to tell them. Studies from University of Southern California, Annenberg’s Media, Diversity & Social Change Initiative have not only laid bare damning statistics about who’s directing and appearing on screen in the biggest movies; they’ve also showcased how little those stats have been improving.

Mahershala Ali accepts the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Moonlight.

Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Images

The trouble with attaching meaning to the Oscars is that they are, in the end, only a highly selective, imperfect, subjective reflection of what’s actually happened in a cinematic year. Moonlight was always going to be one of 2016’s most significant films — getting the big award doesn’t change that, but just confirms what everyone already knew.

What will actually be significant is what comes next, for the cast and crew of Moonlight and for so many other actors and filmmakers, in terms of what’s funded and who’s put on screen. The Academy Awards aren’t a re-legislation of the larger battle for America’s soul — they’re another temperature check, an evening in which Mahershala Ali could have a historic moment as the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar, give a beautiful, heartfelt speech, and still have to smile through Kimmel making multiple dumb cracks about his name. No matter how good the movies may be, it’s still Trump’s America we’re living in.

1. Creepy ruins vacuum packing forever.

Kimstim Films

Some people use giant vacuum bags to store sweaters when they're out of season. Those are what the killer in Creepy uses to store dead bodies. The first time we see evidence of this gruesome tactic, a cop stumbles onto one of these shrink-wrapped corpses tucked away in a closet, the shriveled remains sealed up in plastic like a cutlet. The second time, we see the murderer in action, and the body is a lot fresher. The combination of the mundane and the nightmarish is what Creepy thrives on; it's a film that's not quite mystery and not quite horror, but something unsettling in its own right.

Creepy is one of two films director Kiyoshi Kurosawa released last year (it's set in suburban Japan while the other, Daguerrotype, takes place in France). He's best known as part of the wave of J-horror directors whose work was imported and remade in the late '90s and early '00s. There's nothing overtly supernatural about Creepy's narrative: a retired detective (Hidetoshi Nishijima) moves with his wife (Yuko Takeuchi) to the suburbs, only to get caught up in a cold case and trying to figure out the deal with a strange neighbor. But the dread that builds up, effectively and terribly, over its runtime certainly owes something to the aura of casual evil surrounding its antagonist. Something's obviously off about him from the start, and what's just as scary as his gruesome crimes is how easily he's able to pull others into his dark world — the characters so disaffected that they're vulnerable to his warped energy. His is a grotesque parody of domesticity that people surrender themselves to, out of their own unhappiness and isolation.

How to see it: Creepy is now out on DVD and is available for digital purchase and rental.

2. Elijah Wood agrees to be backup, no questions asked, in I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore.

As Tony, Elijah Wood sports a rattail. He also blasts metal, lifts weights in his backyard, and is unexpectedly active in his Christian faith. But none of these details is as telling as the moment that his neighbor Ruth (Melanie Lynskey), who's spoken to him twice in her life, shows up as his door and tells him she needs backup. "Okay," he says, no questions asked, like he's been waiting his entire life for a near-stranger to come by and request his help. Which...he probably has. Tony is a loner who keeps throwing nunchaku and stars around the house, and who has an earnest but unearned confidence is his own physical formidability.

Tony is just longing for a chance to right a wrong in a world that feels filled with them, which makes him the perfect sidekick for Ruth, a lonesome woman who reaches her breaking point when her house is broken into and robbed. Part Napoleon Dynamite, part Blue Ruin (which starred writer/director Macon Blair), I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore is a funny, violent, amateur revenge thriller that deploys Lynskey as an unlikely but totally wonderful action hero, and that won a Grand Jury prize at Sundance earlier this year with its brutal charms.

How to see it: I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore is streaming on Netflix.

3. A cat gathers food for her kittens in Kedi.

Oscilloscope Films

There's an early scene in Ceyda Torun's documentary Kedi in which an orange tabby struts along the sidewalks of Istanbul like they belong to her, and all the people around are just convenient dispensers of food. The camera nimbly tracks the cat on her routine of scrounging food, begging at the feet of indulgent patrons of an outdoor café and checking out the contents of a discarded bag before walking, easy as you please, into a store to take an offering from the cashier. The elegance of the way she trots through the streets to take the cake she's been given to her bundle of waiting kittens is a total delight.

Kedi documents some of Istanbul's thousands of strays, as well as the people who feed, care, and watch out for them. For centuries, cats have been a part of Istanbul's cityscape, belonging to no one but cared for by everyone who puts out water or spares a nibble. Throughout Kedi, a film as soothing as a warm bath, different interviewees talk about their histories with different cats, about cats healing them or saving them, about cats as feminine figures or embodiments of freedom. It's a life with more dangers, being out on the streets, but sunny as it may be, the portrait Kedi offers is mesmerizing — that of a city that belongs to its animal inhabitants as much as it does its human ones.

How to see it: Kedi is now playing in limited release.

4. A woman revisits her goth roots for the sake of family in Little Sister.

Forager Films

When Little Sister's protagonist Colleen (Addison Timlin) dyes her hair pink, slaps on some black lipstick, and performs a jello-as-baby-gore lip sync to Gwar, it has to be the most poignant return to goth-dom ever committed to screen. Colleen, who moved away from her childhood home of Asheville, North Carolina, years ago, is now far from the pale foundation–loving teen she was. She's become a nun in training, preparing to take her vows and ministering to the poor in Brooklyn. But for her brother, Jacob (Keith Poulson), a recently returned war vet dealing with a facial disfigurement from an encounter with a land mine, she's willing to revisit the past. Maybe even a bit eager to — once a goth girl, forever a goth girl, at least at heart.

Zach Clark's movie follows a standard indie template — a character heads home and has to reckon with estranged family or a repressive area. But in a twist to the usual formula, Colleen's parents' (Peter Hedges and, in a nice bit of meta-casting, Ally Sheedy) failure to understand their daughter comes not from the fact that they're conservative. Instead, the parents are pot-smoking progressives glued to coverage of the 2008 election unfolding in the background. When Colleen's mother jokes she expected her daughter would grow up to be a "lesbian satanist," Colleen miserably replies, "Sometimes I think you're sad I'm not." The way her parents stare when she prays before a meal is a reminder that being truly accepting means coming to terms with things you're not comfortable with — be that a heavily eyelinered goth phase, or the choice to devote one's life to God.

How to see it: Little Sister is available on Blu-ray/DVD and for digital purchase and rental. It's also streaming on Netflix.

5. Everyone bags on Life Is Beautiful in The Last Laugh.

Ferne Pearlstein / The Film Collaborative

The one thing almost everyone in The Last Laugh can agree on is that Roberto Benigni's sickly sweet Life Is Beautiful bites. "The worst movie ever made!" yells the god Mel Brooks. "To make a comedy about a concentration camp and avoid what really went on there, it's a great trick, but it's absolutely meaningless." "Seriously, the blurb should be, 'He puts the 'hah' in 'Holocaust'!" adds Gilbert Gottfried. The interviewee who does go to the mat for the movie, Abraham Foxman, isn't from the world of comedy but from the Anti-Defamation League — which speaks to how little consensus Ferne Pearlstein's documentary features in tackling the topic of taboo laughs, specifically about the Holocaust.

During what's become a huge moment for hate speech getting passed off as humor, The Last Laugh is a straightforward talking-heads-and-archival-footage doc that's acquired a depressing timeliness in tackling who gets to make jokes about what and the concept of "punching up." But it's also refreshingly nuanced in dealing with how little control people have over what others are laughing at, particularly in a bit as boundary-pushing as, say, the "In My Country There Is Problem" singalong in Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat. Sarah Silverman, another of the interviewed comedians, cites a friend who used to call these "mouthful-of-blood laughs," a bitter reminder that the more cutting the joke, the more it is at the mercy of its audience to understand the target.

How to see it: The Last Laugh is now playing in limited release.

6. My Life as a Zucchini acknowledges the weirdness of its own name.

Gkids

Foreign animated movies aren't famous for their post-credits scenes, so it's worth pointing out that there is one at the end of My Life as a Zucchini, and that it offers another level of commentary to the main story. It's presented as an audition tape, as if the stop-motion puppet serving as the main character were actually a child actor who goes on to discuss the relatability of the story and then ask if he could change the protagonist's name, should he be chosen for the film.

The answer must be no, since "Zucchini" retains his oddball nickname throughout the film, a French/Swiss stop-motion affair that was up for the Best Animated Feature at the Oscars this year. (It lost to Zootopia.) But that post-credits sequence provides a touch of softness and distance to a film that deftly uses bright colors and character designs to tell a story that goes to some dark places. Directed by Claude Barras and adapted from a novel by Gilles Paris, My Life as a Zucchini follows the title character, a 9-year-old boy, after an accident leads to the death of his alcoholic mother and lands him in a group home. The kids he ultimately befriends there have been neglected, abused, or separated from their parents by deportation. It's sad material that the movie doesn't soft-pedal, but rather, treats from a child's-eye view that makes the whole affair both more bearable and more tragic.

How to see it: My Life as a Zucchini is now playing in limited release.

Garance Marillier as Justine in Raw, Drew Barrymore as Sheila in Santa Clarita Diet, Sennia Nanua as Melanie in The Girl With All the Gifts.

Focus World, Erica Parise/Netflix, Saban Films

When Julia Ducournau’s twitchily terrific horror movie Raw rolled into the Toronto International Film Festival last September, it made headlines for causing people to pass out during screenings. It was enough to cement its already blossoming fame as a future gorehound fave, which began a few months earlier at the Cannes Film Festival, where people up and left during the scene in which Justine (Garance Marillier), the veterinary school freshman at its heart, has her first brush with cannibalism by way of a severed finger she finds irresistible.

But the rough reputation Raw’s been saddled with isn’t really earned, which is clear on rewatching. Ducournau’s feral spin on a college coming-of-age story isn’t nearly as eye-proddingly hardcore as 2008's Martyrs or 2001's Trouble Every Day or some of the other more notorious entries in the whole New French Extremity tradition Raw owes a debt to. It’s got nothing, gross-out-wise, on the Stateside torture porn trend that encompasses the Hostels and the Saws either.

Raw’s bursts of intensity are memorable not because of the level of carnage they feature, but courtesy of the concepts they showcase. It’s repulsive not just because it depicts something that people instinctively recoil from, but because the movie demands that you experience it alongside its doe-eyed heroine as she reluctantly finds herself shifting toward being a predator.

Raw

Focus World

The standard sloppiness of a first year away at college gets punctuated by increasingly explicit arts of consumption — Justine gets a truly unfortunate bikini wax, crushes confusingly on her gay roommate Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella), and starts down a path of eating people. There’s a liberating grotesquerie to Raw’s scenes of its female lead sinking her teeth into someone else’s flesh — monster, not victim — like a horror movie answer to the boundary-pushing body comedy of Comedy Central's Broad City.

Cannibalism is fundamentally resistant to being sexed up. Vampires can be sultry and alluring right through their slurping of someone’s blood, lending themselves to metaphors for addiction or parasitism — the idea of draining someone’s essence while leaving them relatively whole in other ways. Cannibalism is so inherently repellent that it can, as Ducournau discovered, make viewers faint. It’s taking the basic human experience of hunger and twisting it into something that’s so wrong, the using of others as food, as meat, with the most primal (and most hilariously unladylike) of me-before-you motives.

Flesh-eating also gets splashily (ew) icky in Victor Fresco’s Santa Clarita Diet, Netflix’s otherwise mixed bag of a comedy in which Drew Barrymore plays Sheila Hammond, a wife, mother, and realtor turned member of the undead. The same goes for Colm McCarthy’s smart rethinking of the zombie apocalypse genre, The Girl With All the Gifts, with Sennia Nanua as its title character, Melanie, an adorable kid who also has a vicious hankering for live things.

Cannibalistic female leads are having a miniature moment on screen (following in the footsteps of their returning predecessor iZombie), and there’s a giddiness to how unapologetically off-putting their appetites are — they are fundamentally destructive, unable to conform to normalcy, their cravings uncontainable.

Raw

Focus World

We've seen the ravenous revenant masses on AMC's The Walking Dead and its spinoff, and there are the human-consuming underclasses in the upcoming movies Slack Bay and The Bad Batch. But there’s something distinctive about the way Raw and Santa Clarita Diet and The Girl With All the Gifts couch their cannibalism in a female perspective.

Traditional perceptions of femininity, after all, have always been linked to a denial of desire — to physical urges being unseemly, whether for sex or food. Scarlett O'Hara is made to down a meal before going out to a barbecue because real ladies are supposed to maintain the illusion that they don’t need to do anything as unseemly as eating a full meal. Delicacy means pretending you don’t fart or shit or require sustenance, that you are complete as is, able to exist forever on a few spritzes of refreshment, like an air plant.

But Justine, Sheila, and Melanie don’t just have appetites, they have appetites of the most transgressive and confrontational kind. In the scene in Raw that sent so many festivalgoers running for cover, the aforementioned finger belongs to Justine’s unpredictable older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf). She loses the appendage in a home grooming accident that’s better left to unfold on screen than described. While calling for an ambulance, Justine retrieves the stray digit from the floor, then gives in to an impulse to suck the blood off the thing herself. She nibbles at the ragged edges a bit, before finally giving in and devouring it entirely, all while Alexia is passed out nearby.

It’s revoltingly intimate, the way the sequence tries to make you think about the feeling of still-warm skin and splintered bone against the tongue. But it’s also a joyously fucked-up twist on the familiar scenario of a woman giving in to the compulsion to binge on something she shouldn’t, like Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) eating that chocolate cake out of the garbage on Sex and the City — only this time, it's human flesh.

Santa Clarita Diet

Saeed Adyani / Netflix

Raw is all about unruly feminine appetites, cannibalism being the foremost but far from the only one Justine experiences as she test-drives semi-independent life. Her transformation from virginal vegetarian is set off by a hazing ritual in which she’s made to swallow an uncooked rabbit kidney, but it’s enabled by the freedom of freshman year away from home, an unmoored state that's depicted with alternately surreal and grounded detail.

It’s not for nothing that Justine’s urges to eat and to fuck develop in parallel. The scene in which she pops her cherry is a passionate but wincingly wolfish encounter; in an effort to channel her instinct to bite, Justine ends up sinking her teeth into her own arm. Her expression of self-discovery is presented as something alarming, old fears of unchecked female desire made literal — freed from repression, Justine finds herself with society-rupturing hungers.

Which is the case for Santa Clarita Diet’s Sheila as well — despite the show's uneven tone, the key joke comes from juxtaposing abstentious Californian clean living against bodies gone thoroughly and messily out of control, from the explosive vomiting that comes with Sheila's transformation to the pile of entrails she crouches over at the end of the first episode, entreating her loving husband Joel (Timothy Olyphant), "I really want to make this work.”

The Girl With All the Gifts

Aimee Spinks/Saban Films

Being undead turns Sheila into a creature of id, and, loose toes and drooping eyeballs aside, she prefers it. She has more happiness, energy, and desire for sex post-transformation, merrily pursuing her own pleasure by pushing Joel's head below her beltline when she wants an orgasm. When a dickish coworker tries to pressure Sheila into an affair, she doesn’t opt for avoidance or try to finesse the situation with flattery or file a complaint with higher-ups, all the non-ideal choices countless women have had to decide between in similar situations — she just eats him.

Santa Clarita Diet is a “how Sheila got her gruesome groove back” saga, made richer by Joel’s more complicated emotional arc as he accompanies his wife on her adventure. He struggles, befuddled and increasingly distressed, to accommodate not just Sheila’s new sense of emancipation, but that it comes with a significant price, and that she doesn’t care.

Which is central to this cannibal lady subgenre — stories of liberation that comes at no cost go down easy because they trouble no one. But Justine and Sheila's self-exploration is dangerous, threatening to the existing order, something made even more explicit in The Girl With All the Gifts, in which the fate of humanity rests in Melanie’s hands. Or, really, her body.

In a world overtaken by brain-dead, fungus-infected “hungries,” Melanie is one of a group of hybrid children being studied by the remaining humans in hopes of a cure. She’s a sweet, smart little girl, the favorite student of her kind teacher (Gemma Arterton), but she, like the other children, is kept restrained by soldiers who refer to her as “it,” because the scent of unprotected human flesh can turn her into a rapacious force. She docilely submits to her imprisonment under a scientist (Glenn Close) who periodically dissects members of her class, because it’s what she knows.

The Girl With All the Gifts

Aimee Spinks/Saban Films

It takes a fence breach for that to change forever, and for Melanie to be turned loose with a few of the survivors in the decimated outside landscape, where she comes into her own. The Girl With All the Gifts, which zipped through theaters but is very worth catching up with on demand, shows how Melanie’s mostly terrified fellow travelers come to trust her to control her cravings. But that’s not the point — the point is the way she begins to rethink how much she trusts them, and a set of relationships dependent on her making sacrifices in order to maintain the status quo.

She’s a striking figure, this cute kid capable of tearing out someone’s throat. If cannibalism is, in these stories, a grisly symbol for putting oneself first — to the point of being willing to nosh on other people to survive — then Melanie’s journey could be described as one of learning to embrace the nightmarish thing within.

Melanie’s a kind of extreme end-of-the-world sister to Raw’s Justine. Both are clever schoolgirls with extremely wayward hungers that can’t ever entirely be tamped down. But where Justine grapples with the horrific idea that her fulfillment can only ever come at the expense (and spare limbs) of others, Melanie gives it more meditative and unsettling consideration.

Then again, she, Justine, and Sheila are all different degrees of disturbing, these bloody-mouthed broads with their disruptive appetites — figures of female desire at its most gleefully threatening, demanding a big bite of the world and unconcerned with accommodating either the safety of others or the settled stomachs of anyone watching. They provide a visceral challenge to what it means for women on screen to be likable. They’re gruesome, but they’re a little glorious as well. Because hey, everybody’s got to eat.

Andy Daly as Forrest MacNeil in Review.

Danny Feld / Comedy Central

If criticism had a patron saint, it would be Forrest MacNeil, the host-as-tragic-hero of Comedy Central's Review, which came to a close on Thursday on precisely the kind of despairingly chipper note the series has refined over 22 brilliantly excruciating episodes.

Review, which was co-created by its wonderful star Andy Daly, was a scripted series in the form of a reality show. Every episode, Forrest reviewed various life experiences based on requests submitted by a fictional audience. The assignments ranged from the seemingly benign (“having a best friend”) to the exceedingly dangerous (“being buried alive”), though even the most harmless of ideas tended to go horrendously wrong.

In an early episode that’s a series high-water mark, Forrest reviews the act of eating 15 pancakes (half a star) and eating 30 pancakes (five stars), the bouts of binge-eating and vomiting bookending a brutal sequence in which — in the name of his show — he ends his marriage to his adored wife Suzanne (Jessica St. Clair) in order to assess getting a divorce.

Forrest’s work cost him a lot, including his spouse, his child, his home, and his father. He himself endured getting shot, stabbed, hit by lightning, and lost at sea. Over Review’s two and a half seasons, Forrest started to feel like a human Wile E. Coyote in a tan blazer, enduring endless, over-the-top punishment in a pursuit he couldn’t seem to quit. Or maybe he was in hell, with his producer Grant (James Urbaniak, throwing sly looks to the camera) the demon prodding him into acts of self-torture for the sake of the show.

Kaden Gibson as Eric, Jessica St. Clair as Suzanne, and Andy Daly as Forrest MacNeil.

Michael Yarish / Comedy Central

Critics have, unsurprisingly, always taken it on the chin when they’re put onscreen, portrayed as ethically compromised opportunists, joyless snobs, and/or self-important guardians of art in works like Ratatouille, The Critic, All About Eve, and Birdman. They are generally shown to be unloved and unlovable — but who could help but adore Forrest? Pompous, clueless, hopelessly square, he was convinced he was doing a public service when everyone actually seemed to see him as some dancing puppet. Forrest was an epic fool, but he was a noble one, pledged to the ethics and self-determined regulations of his craft even as the world burned down around him.

Forrest’s problem was a grandiose, hilariously dark version of the one all critics face: To review something is to operate under the pretense that your particular experience is universal, that it can stand in for everyone’s, and that the personal and the professional can be separated out. He was particularly deluded about everybody else’s willingness to accept the cleanness of that divide, vandalizing his relationships again and again, then reacting with bewilderment when, say, the woman he was dating became angry that he was blackmailing her for the show (blackmail: one and a half stars).

Forrest was attached to the idea that he could review something objectively even as Review revealed the relentless subjectivity of his every ordeal. He approached reviews out of spite (sleeping with a celebrity) or loneliness (marrying a stranger); he was oblivious to context (glory holes) and self-delusional (having the perfect body). He attempted to intellectualize rather than emotionalize whole swaths of his existence. He suffered for our sins — for, more than anything, that strange and terribly specific sin every critic commits in consuming something they would’ve never bothered with were it not for work. For work, we watch or read or eat or try things we never would otherwise — as a service to others, an attitude it’s squirmingly uncomfortable to see represented and skewered so smartly onscreen.

Comedy Central

You can’t just separate out an experience from everything that defines you and consider it dispassionately. But Forrest, bless him, tried, as declared in his perfectly overstated tagline: “Life — it’s literally all we have. But is it any good?” We may never know, but at least we can be assured that Forrest lives on, waiting for a next assignment that will never come, long after his show has gone away.

Warning: LOTS OF SPOILERS!

How it challenged our instincts about women on TV.

I've never seen anything like Big Little Lies on TV before. But prior to its premiere, I had at least three conversations with TV journalists who were dismissive of it because it was about a group of rich women. I was shocked — are the tribulations of women's lives and motherhood fodder for a trove of TV shows hidden away from me somewhere? Because personally, I'm more tired by crime and conmen.

Prestige television as it currently exists has largely skipped over stories about communities of women — Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City addressed women's problems and friendships early on in the new Golden Age of TV, and Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin are still doing it. (Gilmore Girls, which was never considered Golden Age, is another exception.) But think of how rare it is to see a group of women in a scene talking about their lives. The stakes are so high on TV these days, almost no one talks about their lives! (The doctors on Grey's Anatomy do sometimes, but then they're inevitably interrupted by a surgical emergency.) Big Little Lies offered something different, as the final scene of the miniseries showed in almost comic relief. While the road to that frolicking-on-the-beach ending wasn't a feminist utopia — there was sniping and competitiveness and jealousy along the way — it is possible for women to come together to try for something better. Or not, actually — I would also gladly watch shows about women coming together to try for something worse! —Kate Aurthur

HBO

Its acting.

One of my favorite parts of Big Little Lies is watching the characters listen while someone else is talking. It's the kind of acting that's usually thankless — all we tend to get is a quick shot of someone generically nodding their head.

On Big Little Lies, however, listening is such an integral part of the story. It matters how Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) absorbs Jane's (Shailene Woodley) matter-of-fact explication of her rape; how Celeste (Nicole Kidman) takes in Perry's (Alexander Skarsgård) careful elisions regarding his abuse in their first therapy session; and how Jane receives the child psychologist's positive assessment of Ziggy (Iain Armitage). And in each of these scenes, Witherspoon, Kidman, and Woodley do some of the best work of their careers.

As does just about everyone else on this show! Adam Scott allows Madeline's husband, Ed, to be wounded and prickly and kind of dull in the same moment, so you can understand why she would be drawn to him but not all that thrilled by him. Skarsgård somehow manages to keep Perry from becoming a two-dimensional villain without ever shying away from the monstrousness of his behavior. Even Zoë Kravitz is able to give shape to Bonnie, the character given the shortest shrift on the show, especially considering her all-too-relevant backstory in Liane Moriarty's novel. (Spoiler alert for the book of the show you've already watched: Bonnie was abused by her father.)

And then there are the kids. All of them so kidlike in the most real way — I believe that Madeline's daughter Chloe would be so self-possessed and musically astute because Darby Camp totally convinces me of these traits.

It will be fun, if a little reductive, to watch the Television Academy scramble to sort out how to nominate all of Big Little Lies' superlative performances — the Leading Actress in a Limited Series category alone will be insane. For now, though, we can just revel in a show that allowed so many talented people so much room to breathe so much life into all of these messy, compelling, deeply human characters. —Adam B. Vary

HBO

How it nailed the insidious threat of men.

There’s something haunting about Big Little Lies, and it’s not just the fact that death hangs over the entire series. Its creeping feeling is palpable — and it hinges, at least in part, on the role of men in this series about women.

Though Big Little Lies is not about misogyny per se, there is an underlying sense of male threat embedded into its narrative — most dramatically in every scene between Celeste and Perry. But it’s also there when Ed’s eyes linger on his teenage stepdaughter Abigail (Kathryn Newton) — an action never spoken of or confronted — and when he watches Bonnie exercise, then comments that he “just love[s] sweat on women.” It’s there in the tenor of how Renata's (Laura Dern) husband Gordon (Jeffrey Nordling) threatens Jane, and in the feeling of foreboding when Madeline’s ex-lover Joseph (Santiago Cabrera) screams at her, moving toward her in anger while they’re alone. It’s there when Madeline is alone in her car, breaking down in tears after hearing about Jane’s rape. It’s even there in the children: the way Renata and Gordon's daughter Amabella (Ivy George) comes home with bite marks, but is too afraid to tell her parents who hurt her.

In big and little ways, Big Little Lies shows what so many women learn through experience. It’s not a problem that can really be solved in seven hourlong episodes of an HBO series, but the finale of Big Little Lies brings one of its driving themes together in a genuinely moving way: Throughout the episode, we see both the subtle and momentous moves women make for each other when they sense that something is, indeed, off. It’s in the way Madeline jumps in to defend Jane when Gordon confronts her, and in the body language between Renata and Celeste after the former witnesses the latter run from Perry. It’s in the way Bonnie follows Celeste with her eyes when she senses Perry is a threat. And it is, of course, in the literal manifestation of all of this tension, when Perry attacks his wife and all of the women come to her defense. Because while the show has fun with its wealthy helicopter moms, it comes alive through the shared language — and in this case, the eventual shared bond — that accompanies surviving the nagging threat of men. When we think about Big Little Lies years from now, we'll see all of those women united on the beach — at least, I know I will. —Alanna Bennett

HBO

Its therapist.

My parents, now retired, spent much of their adult lives as mental health professionals (my mother was a clinical social worker; my father, a psychiatrist). Some of their patients were grappling with issues similar to what Celeste has to confront in Big Little Lies. But until "Once Bitten," the episode in which Celeste's therapist, Dr. Reisman (Robin Weigert), carefully guides her patient to face the truth of the abuse her husband Perry inflicts on her, I had never seen any TV show or movie so thoughtfully capture what my parents did every day in their offices.

Far too often, therapists are used as convenient tools for conflict, breaking ethical boundaries without a second thought and behaving wildly outside of the interests of their patients. I get it — that kind of depiction can make for easy drama. But like every other facet of Big Little Lies, in Celeste's sessions with Dr. Reisman, this show chose instead to pursue the great drama of real human behavior. Even more than HBO's late 2000s series In Treatment, this show nailed the empathic precision therapists employ to help their patients slowly, sometimes arduously, disentangle themselves from the thorny traumas weighing down their lives. I've never seen anything quite like it, and after that scene in "Once Bitten" was over, I was so overcome with emotion, I had to pause the show for a second to recover. —ABV

HBO

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1. After the Storm

Hiroshi Abe as Ryota Shinoda.

Film Movement

Ryota Shinoda, the hangdog type played by Hiroshi Abe in After the Storm, wrote a novel that won an award 15 years ago, and has been coasting off that almost entirely faded glory ever since. These days, he's a compulsive gambler who's forever broke and behind on child support for his son Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa), and he's still pretending his part-time job working for a seedy detective agency is research for the follow-up book he hasn't been writing. The ex-wife, Kyoko (Yoko Make), he's still in love with is about to marry someone else, and he's in denial about it. But so is his elderly widowed mother Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki), who hadn't expected her son to come drifting back her way in middle age, scouring her apartment for things to pawn.

While this all sounds very "lovable loser makes good," filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda is too exacting and too unsentimental to ever let Ryota off the hook as he lies to himself and to his loved ones. And Kiki — who, like Abe, is a regular actor in the director's movies — is an Olympic-level heartbreaker, capable of enveloping warmth one moment and of delivering a deft twist of the knife the next. She and Abe played mother and son in Koreeda's phenomenal 2008 Still Walking, and while After the Storm isn't on par with that work, it does feel like a sequel of sorts, a beautifully careworn family drama about another sort of mourning and letting go.

How to see it: After the Storm is now playing in select theaters around the country — browse a list of locations here.

2. All This Panic

Dusty Rose Ryan and Delia Cunningham.

Factory 25

"I'm petrified of getting old," Ginger, the most mercurial of the Brooklyn teens in All This Panic says at the beginning of Jenny Gage's directorial debut. "I can't stand the idea that one day someone will tell me, 'You look a bit old for that outfit.' I don't want to age — I think that's the scariest thing in the entire world." It's an unbearable thing to hear from someone who's not even old enough to legally drink yet, but the sentiment is also achingly real in its sincerity. Gage's light-streaked documentary about a group of ultra-hip girls approaching semi-adulthood appreciates that the only thing more alarming than youth, in all its uncertainty, is the idea of getting too old to be given the benefit of it.

All This Panic tries to capture and bottle that dizzying, liminal feeling of hovering between childhood and adulthood, all of these firsts lined up in front of you like a test — first kiss, first love, first time away from home, first time having sex. The details of its subjects' generally privileged if not necessarily well-off lives are not always relatable — so many cool parents providing their kids with booze! — but the rawness of their experiences certainly is. Its young women navigate crushes, friendships, relationships, sexuality, fashion, race, and financial instability with a frankness that's rare and not always endearing.

And while the film is lovely to look at, it's the bursts of ugliness that are often its most recognizable parts. To watch Ginger lash out at her family over her not wanting to go to college but having no idea what to do next is to feel dropped right back into a very turbulent time of life. It's a portrait of youth so real that it can leave you, unlike Ginger, appreciating what it means to get older.

How to see it: All This Panic is now playing in theaters in New York and will be making its way around the country — check out a list of locations here.

3. The Blackcoat's Daughter

Emma Roberts as Joan.

A24

At a secluded Catholic boarding school on break, Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton) are the two stragglers who've been left behind in the care of a pair of nuns when their parents are late to pick them up. Elsewhere, a troubled-looking young woman named Joan (Emma Roberts) hitches a ride with an older husband and wife who turn out to have some tragedy in their pasts. These two storylines unfold in parallel in the dead of winter, eventually converging with the syrupy-slow sensation of a nightmare you can't rouse yourself from over the course of this enigmatic, unsettling horror movie.

The Blackcoat's Daughter is the debut film from Oz Perkins (son of Anthony), though thanks to distributor problems it's come out after his equally atmospheric second feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, started streaming as a Netflix original. The two are enough, together, to make Perkins everyone's favorite new art-horror director — he has a way not only with simmering dread but with making everyday spaces frightening just by the way he moves his camera, always hinting at something monstrous lurking just outside the frame.

If you haven't seen either film, The Blackcoat's Daughter is the place to start — it's a dark fable in which forces of evil and fears of abandonment prove themselves to be equally formidable.

How to see it: The Blackcoat's Daughter is playing in theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and a few other markets. It's also available on demand and for digital rental or purchase.

4. Five Came Back

John Ford shooting WWII propaganda.

Netflix

Five Came Back provides the perfect response to lob at anyone who's ever offered up the argument that movies are just movies and shouldn't be politicized. This three-part Netflix documentary, directed by Laurent Bouzereau and based on Mark Harris's book of the same name, lays out just how massively powerful a political tool that film has always been, both as a vehicle for a director's point of view and, more directly, as propaganda. Five Came Back examines the experiences of five famous filmmakers — John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens — before, during, and after volunteering their services in the United States' fight during World War II.

Five Came Back would be interesting if slightly staid historical fare at any time, blending archival footage (some of it from the docs the five produced) with fresh talking-head interviews from fellow directors Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greengrass, and Lawrence Kasdan (narrator Meryl Streep save it from being a total sausagefest). But at a moment when people are more visibly politically polarized and drifting toward increasingly partisan sources of news, Five Came Back's discussions of propaganda, the calculations behind it, and the impact of representation feel pressingly timely and important.

How to see it: Five Came Back is streaming on Netflix.

5. I Called Him Morgan

Lee and Helen Morgan in 1970.

Kasper Collin Produktion AB / Courtesy of the Afro-American Newspaper Archives and Research Center

Lee Morgan was a wunderkind, a talented trumpeter who was playing with Dizzy Gillespie when he was still a teenager, but who developed a drug habit that would lay him awfully low until he met the right, and wrong, woman. Helen Morgan was the older woman who enjoyed having musicians over, liked to cook for them, possessed as she was of a quick wit, a tart tongue, and a love of jazz. Theirs wasn't the usual relationship; as one of the interviewees who knew them in I Called Him Morgan puts it, Lee's needs made it seem "almost like adopting a child." But they were good for each other, until they weren't, until Helen shot Lee in Slug's Saloon in the East Village in 1972, and he bled out in the time it took for an ambulance to reach him through heavy snowfall.

I Called Him Morgan is a flat-out sublime doc directed by Kasper Collin, with Arrival's Bradford Young contributing some of the cinematography, and it provides an entrancing window into the '60s New York jazz scene that zooms in on photos from years-ago parties and gigs and jam sessions, the people in them sometimes turning up to provide commentary. But it's the tragic romance between Lee and Morgan that's the film's spine, with Helen holding up her own end of the story via an audio interview, never completed, that someone did with her years later. Lee Morgan may have been the famous musician, but Helen glows bright in her own right. "I will not sit here and tell you that I was nice, because I was not," she says, her voice lingering on after she died. "I was sharp. I looked out for me."

How to see it: I Called Him Morgan is playing in select theaters — here's a list of locations.

6. Prevenge

Alice Lowe as Ruth.

Shudder

Alice Lowe, the writer, director, and star of Prevenge, was seven and a half months pregnant when she shot her directorial debut — a fact that's almost as impressive as how outrageously, amusingly dark its portrayal of impending motherhood is. The actor, maybe best known for her turn in Ben Wheatley's vacation-turned-killing-spree horror comedy Sightseers, plays Ruth, a woman convinced that her unborn child is speaking to her and commanding her to commit murders.

And oh, does she. Ruth steadfastly trudges along, swollen ankles and all, obeying the bloodthirsty commands of her fetus. The audience comes to understand that trauma over the loss of her partner is one of the guiding factors on this gory rampage. But it's more than just a journey of vengeance the (likely unwell) Ruth and her (probably totally normal and non-talking) baby are on. Ruth's one extreme ball of maternal anxiety, channeling her fears and stress about having a child, about going through birth and parenting alone, into something very ill-advised. Prevenge is a small movie, but it's impossible to forget.

How to see it: Prevenge is streaming on Shudder.

Cuidadín: ¡HAY MONTONES DE SPOILERS!

La serie ha supuesto un reto a la forma en que vemos a las mujeres en televisión.

Nunca antes había visto nada como Big Little Lies en televisión. Pero, antes de su estreno, tuve por lo menos tres conversaciones con periodistas televisivos que mostraban cierto rechazo porque trataba sobre un grupo de mujeres ricas. Me quedé un tanto impactada: ¿las tribulaciones de las vidas de las mujeres y la maternidad alimentan todo un tesoro de programas de televisión que de alguna manera estaban escondidas para mí? Porque, personalmente, a mí me cansan más el crimen y los estafadores.

La televisión de prestigio, tal como existe hoy en día, se ha saltado en muchas ocasiones las historias sobre las comunidades de mujeres. Mujeres desesperadas y Sexo en Nueva York abordaron los problemas de las mujeres y la amistad entre ellas a principios de la nueva Época Dorada de la televisión. Orange is the New Black y Jane the Virgin lo siguen haciendo. Las chicas Gilmore, serie que nunca se consideró de la Época Dorada, es otra excepción. Pero piensa en lo raro que es ver un grupo de mujeres en una escena hablando de sus vidas. Hoy en día, en las series de televisión hay tantas cosas en juego que nadie habla de sus vidas (los doctores de Anatomía de Grey a veces lo hacen, pero inevitablemente son interrumpidos por una emergencia quirúrgica).

Big Little Lies ofrecía algo diferente, tal como se mostraba en la escena final de esta miniserie. Aunque el camino a aquel final de diversión en la playa no era una utopía feminista (fue un camino plagado de ataques personales, competitividad y envidia), demuestra que es posible para las mujeres aliarse para intentar conseguir algo mejor. O no... en realidad, también me encantaría ver series donde las mujeres se unen para conseguir algo peor.

HBO

Sus interpretaciones.

Una de mis cosas favoritas de Big Little Lies es ver cómo los personajes escuchan mientras otra persona habla. Es el tipo de interpretación que normalmente resulta muy desagradecida. Todo lo que solemos ver es una imagen rápida de alguien asintiendo con la cabeza.

No obstante, en Big Little Lies escuchar forma parte fundamental de la historia. Importa cómo Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) absorbe la explicación directa y natural de Jane (Shailene Woodley) acerca de cómo la violaron; cómo Celeste (Nicole Kidman) reacciona a las sutiles omisiones del maltrato que hace Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) durante su primera sesión de terapia; y cómo recibe Jane la evaluación positiva de Ziggy (Iain Armitage) por parte de la psicóloga infantil. Y, en cada una de estas escenas, Witherspoon, Kidman y Woodley realizan algunas de las mejores interpretaciones de sus carreras.

Al igual que hace prácticamente todo el reparto de la serie: Adam Scott permite que Ed, el marido de Madeline, se muestre a la vez herido, quisquilloso y un poco aburrido, para que puedas comprender que ella se sienta atraída por él pero tampoco esté totalmente entusiasmada con él. De alguna manera, Skarsgård consigue evitar que Perry se convierta en un villano bidimensional, sin alejarse en ningún momento de lo monstruoso de su comportamiento. Incluso Zoë Kravitz es capaz de darle forma a Bonnie, el personaje al que menos atención se presta en la serie, especialmente teniendo en cuenta su muy relevante historia de fondo tal como se narra en la novela de Liane Moriarty. Alerta de spoiler sobre el libro en el que se basa la serie que ya has visto: el padre de Bonnie abusaba de ella.

Y luego están los niños. Todos actúan como niños, de una manera muy realista. Me creo lo de que que la hija de Madeline, Chloe, sea tan dueña de sí misma y tan musicalmente astuta porque la actriz Darby Camp me resulta totalmente convincente a la hora de aportarle esas cualidades.

Será divertido, aunque un poco mundano, ver cómo se las arregla la Academia de la Televisión para nominar todas las actuaciones tan excepcionales de Big Little Lies. La categoría de Actriz Principal de Serie Limitada será una locura. Pero por ahora podemos disfrutar de una serie que dio a tantas personas talentosas mucho espacio para dar tanta vida a estos personajes tan desastrosos, tan convincentes y tan profundamente humanos.

—Adam B. Vary.

HBO

Cómo clavó la insidiosa amenaza de los hombres.

Hay un algo persistente e inquietante en Big Little Lies, y no es solo el hecho de que la muerte esté presente en toda la serie. Es una sensación palpable y creciente que, al menos en parte, depende del rol de los hombres en esta serie sobre mujeres.

Aunque Big Little Lies no trata sobre el machismo propiamente dicho, existe una sensación subyacente de amenaza masculina que va unida a la narrativa, y cuando más dramática se vuelve es en cada escena entre Celeste y Perry. Pero también está ahí cuando los ojos de Ed se posan sobre su hijastra adolescente, Abigail (una acción de la que nunca se habla ni a la que nunca se hace frente) y cuando Ed mira a Bonnie haciendo ejercicio para luego comentar que "le encanta ver el sudor en las mujeres". Está en el tono con el que Gordon (Jeffrey Nordling), marido de Renata (Laura Dern), amenaza a Jane y en el sentimiento de aprensión cuando Joseph (Santiago Cabrera), el ex amante de Madeline, le grita y se acerca a ella enfurecido mientras están solos. Está ahí cuando Madeline está sola en el coche, sumida en un mar de lágrimas tras haber escuchado la historia de la violación de Jane. Incluso está ahí con los niños: la manera en que la hija de Renata y Gordon, Amabella (Ivy George) llega a casa con marcas de mordiscos pero tiene demasiado miedo para contarle a sus padres quién le ha hecho daño.

Big Little Lies muestra, con detalles grandes y pequeños, lo que tantas mujeres aprenden con la experiencia. No es un problema que se pueda resolver en siete episodios de una hora en una serie de HBO, pero la final de Big Little Lies muestra uno de sus temas conductores de una manera realmente conmovedora: a lo largo del episodio, observamos tanto los gestos sutiles como los más transcendentales que las mujeres tienen entre ellas cuando sienten que algo de verdad va mal. Está en la manera en que Madeline salta a la defensa de Jane cuando Gordon le planta cara, y en el lenguaje corporal entre Renata y Celeste cuando la primera ve a la segunda escapar de Perry. Está en la manera en que Bonnie sigue a Celeste con los ojos cuando siente que Perry es una amenaza. Y, por supuesto, está en la manifestación literal de toda esta tensión, cuando Perry ataca a su esposa y todas las mujeres acuden a defenderla. Porque, aunque la serie se divierte con las "mamás" ricas, cuando realmente cobra vida es a través del lenguaje compartido (y en este caso a través del vínculo que acabarán compartiendo) que acompaña al acto de sobrevivir a la persistente amenaza de los hombres. Cuando, dentro de unos años, pensemos en Big Little Lies, veremos a todas esas mujeres unidas en la playa. Al menos, así será para mí.

—Alanna Bennett.

HBO

Su terapeuta.

Mis padres, ya jubilados, pasaron gran parte de su vida ejerciendo como profesionales de la salud mental (mi madre era trabajadora social clínica y mi padre era psiquiatra). Algunos de sus pacientes lidiaban con problemas similares a los que tiene que enfrentarse Celeste en Big Little Lies. Pero hasta el episodio "Once Bitten", donde la terapeuta de Celeste, la doctora Reisman (Robin Weigert) guía cuidadosamente a su paciente para que esta se enfrente a la verdad de los abusos que sufre por parte de su marido, nunca había visto ninguna serie ni película de televisión plasmar con tanta consideración lo que hacían mis padres cada día en sus oficinas.

Demasiado a menudo, los terapeutas se utilizan en la pantalla como herramientas prácticas para el conflicto, rompiendo las barreras éticas sin pensárselo dos veces y mostrando un comportamiento que en gran manera sobrepasa los intereses de sus pacientes. Lo entiendo: representarlo de esa manera es una buena forma de conseguir un drama fácil. Pero, como pasa con todas las otras facetas de Big Little Lies, en las sesiones de Celeste con la doctora Reisman la serie optó por explorar el gran drama del comportamiento humano real. Incluso más que la ya difunta serie de HBO, En terapia, esta serie clavó la precisión empática que aplican los terapeutas para ayudar a sus pacientes a deshacer el nudo y liberarse de los espinosos traumas que pesan sobre sus vidas. Nunca he visto nada parecido y cuando terminó aquella escena de "Once Bitten" me sentí tan abrumado por la emoción que tuve que hacer pausa durante un momento para recuperarme.

—ABV.

HBO

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Your Name

Funimation

The blissful supernatural romance Your Name is already the biggest anime hit of all time. It’s made more money abroad than previous record holder Spirited Away did worldwide in 2001 — and that film was from god of the medium, Hayao Miyazaki. Your Name finally arrives in the US this week, opening in 286 theaters — not bad for an animated feature that isn’t intended for young kids, though a fraction of the 3,440 theaters in which live-action anime remake Ghost in the Shell played when it flopped over the past weekend.

Anime is currently at the center of a blistering ongoing conversation about erasure and appropriation in Hollywood adaptations. Like most imported fare, Japanese animation itself occupies a passionate but niche market in the US. Aside from sporadic children’s breakthroughs like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Studio Ghibli, big-screen anime releases have barely registered at the box office here. The US exports franchise films like they’re going out of style (which, you could argue, they are, given how much TV has muscled its way to the front of the cultural conversation). Hollywood produces tentpole movies so expensive that turning a profit is wholly dependent on performance overseas.

Funimation

But when international blockbusters make their way here, we’re confounded. Foreign films get treated like arthouse films, even when they’re not. We don’t really have a model for something as expansively mainstream as Your Name, which will be playing in both subtitled and dubbed versions around the country. And that’s maddening, because Your Name is the kind of wonderful that should be seen by the widest possible audiences.

It's a teen romance with a huge, tearful heart and a touch of magic. Two high school students — small-town girl Mitsuha, who lives with her sister and grandmother in rural Itomori, and Tokyo-bred Taki, who shares an apartment in the city with his father — are strangers living hours apart who start randomly waking up in each other’s bodies, as much an embarrassing annoyance as it is a mystery. They fumble through unfamiliar daily routines, then wake up back in their own beds having to figure out what havoc the other person may have wreaked on their lives in a day.

While their shifts in behavior bewilder and sometimes sexually fluster their classmates (“Why is a girl in love with me?!” Mitsuha asks Taki in one of the messages the two start leaving for each other on their smartphones), they soon settle into a teasing rhythm that exemplifies how skillfully Your Name combines the uncanny with the down-to-earth details of teenage life.

Funimation

The why of the scenario is not nearly as interesting to them as the how: how it’s going, and how it ups the stakes of their existing day-to-day dramas. Taki grumbles about Mitsuha, who's delighted by the access to new culinary treats, spending all his money on cafés, while Mitsuha scolds Taki about not knowing how to sit in a skirt. Mitsuha, in Taki’s body, has more success with Taki’s crush than he ever did.

Each finds that their body-swapping experiences have the tendency to fade like dreams when they return to their normal existences. When the phenomenon suddenly stops, Your Name shifts into something grander about the nature of the pair’s connection, which involves a comet that makes a once-every-1,200-years flyby of the Earth and a braided cord that represents both a tradition and the red string of fate.

Taki and Mitsuha's worlds are filled in so vividly by the movie that we fall in love with and right alongside them. Their social spheres have an in medias res messiness — especially in the case of Mitsuha, caught between obligations to family traditions and her desire for a more cosmopolitan life, with the added scrutiny that comes with being the estranged daughter of a local politician. “Please make me a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life!” she yells in frustration early on, not having cottoned onto the fact yet that she’s already been afforded the opportunity.

Funimation

Your Name is written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, who’s been heralded as the next Miyazaki (to his discomfort), though it doesn’t feel like a Miyazaki movie at all — its sensibility is more pop and more abundantly romantic, filled with yearning that seems to inform the radiant beauty onscreen. Its Tokyo is a bustling but overwhelming cityscape; its Itomori a scenic if stifling backwater winding up a mountainside; and its central celestial event, the comet, is rendered from multiple points of view in breathtaking fashion, streaking across the sky with a prismatic loveliness that underscores the incident’s importance before we ever understand it. It’s a teen movie not just in terms of its characters, but in the way it summons the feeling of every emotion brimming over.

It’s also, being a Japanese movie, often very Japanese. Elements like a shrine and its guardian god; the kuchikamizake Mitsuha and her sister make as part of a ceremony; the obvious influence of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami; and the joke involving the misuse of a gendered word for “I.” That doesn’t make the movie less easily understood or its ending less tear-drenchingly effective. But these details do emphasize how tricky converting a movie like Your Name into a Hollywood production would be, now that American studios have become a black hole of content, pulling in intellectual property from all over the place to be reworked into hoped-for hits.

Funimation

There’s so much cultural specificity here to be contended with, either somehow carried over or translated, and those are responsibilities US companies have proven depressingly indifferent toward — making off with the bones of a property while leaving behind its soul. Maybe Your Name will meet that same destiny, or maybe it’ll be treated better. Maybe it won’t be remade at all. Whatever happens, it’s here now, and you should take the chance to see it in all of its animated, swoony majesty on the big screen.