Jake Gyllenhaal and Tatiana Maslany in Stronger.

Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions

Jake Gyllenhaal is the star of Stronger, David Gordon Green's film about Boston Marathon bombing survivor Jeff Bauman. He portrays the trauma of losing both lower legs in the blast with startling frankness — the post-traumatic stress, the wait to heal, the slow and difficult process of rehabilitation, and what it's like to contend with both depression and being made into an unwilling national symbol. Gyllenhaal may get an Oscar nomination for his work in the film, and that wouldn't be a bad thing. But Tatiana Maslany is the reason the movie works as well as it does — as more than a chronicle of suffering and recovery in the wake of an act of terrorism.

It's not just Maslany's performance that's remarkable, though she's genuinely great as a woman trying to figure out if she can make a life with someone who seems, at times, unwilling to make a life for himself. The prominence given to her character, Erin Hurley, Bauman's then on-and-off girlfriend, eventual spouse, and now ex-wife (a part of their relationship that doesn't make it onscreen), is noteworthy in itself. Stronger, adapted from Bauman's memoir and written by John Pollono, is as much Erin's story as it is Jeff's, and is a far better movie for it. More than anything, it's a love story, and a difficult, intense one that's not just about two people contending with catastrophe, but about how catastrophe doesn't erase relationship problems that were already there.

Scott Garfield / Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions

What it's not is an attempt to capitalize on still fresh distress, in that strange Hollywood tendency to put rough recent history onscreen as if reenactments of tragedies justify themselves, nothing more needing to be said. Stronger is the second Boston Marathon bombing movie to come out in the less than five years since the incident happened — not a giant span of time in which to accommodate two major movies featuring two big stars. It arrives less than a year after Mark Wahlberg's Patriots Day, one of two ripped-from-the-headlines features Wahlberg and director Peter Berg released in 2016, and the kind of film that did solemnly serve up the attack and its aftermath as if it were a kind of public service.

To its credit, Patriots Day was a relatively restrained affair that resisted the urge to sensationalize. But it really didn't need to, given how it jabbed at healing wounds in the name of prestige cinema, casting Wahlberg as a fictional police sergeant who ended up conveniently central to the all major events surrounding the bombing, its aftermath, and the subsequent manhunt. It was a movie about an act of violence, while Stronger is a movie about people whose lives were spun out by that act of violence, and who struggle to move forward in its wake. Stronger is, in some ways, the opposite of Patriots Day in its deep sense of humanity, its focus on recovery rather than revenge, and its interest in contending with the public's habit of neatening complicated narratives into inspirational fables.

Scott Garfield / Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions

And Jeff and Erin's story is complicated. They are, at the start of the film, a month into their latest breakup. A chance run-in at a bar makes how much they still like each other clear, as well as Erin's reasons for pulling away. While Jeff is sweet and smitten, he's also flaky, immature, tending to let his protective, raucous family dictate the terms of his life, including the place his outsider sometimes-girlfriend has in it. He's a little too comfortable where he is, and, as Erin puts it, he doesn't show up, and it's to prove that he's changed that he turns up as promised on the day she's running in the marathon, staking out a spot by the finish line to cheer her on. When the bombing occurs, their nebulous relationship is made even more so by the guilt Erin knows she shouldn't feel but can't entirely shake off.

Jeff endures something terrible, and Gyllenhaal, looking especially boyish, transmits his shock and anguish so believably it's sometimes hard to watch. But Stronger also stays alongside Erin as she sits in the hospital next to his family, distraught and uncertain, quiet in the corner while they grieve out loud. In those early sequences, Stronger sometimes unexpectedly recalls another, very different film from this year, The Big Sick. It, too, captures how it feels to be unsure of where you belong in someone else's calamity, especially when romantic ties can be defined along so much more of a spectrum than familial ones. Erin lingers there by Jeff's side, visiting and accompanying him through harrowing medical procedures. She's there right up until he's brought home to the apartment he shares with his mother (Miranda Richardson), to prepare for rehabilitation and a readjustment to an altered life that he dismisses her from. And she, having no excuse to stay, leaves.

Scott Garfield / Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions

The movie suffers whenever Erin's not onscreen, not just because of how painstakingly present Maslany is in the role, but because as a solo show, Stronger can't help but drift into the territory of so many past depictions of disability, in treating it as a kind of acting challenge, a technical feat. The film is careful and empathetic about Jeff's experiences — how he contends with living in a space where the stairs, the hallways, and even the placement of a toilet paper roll in the bathroom no longer accommodate his body and mobility. There are rare moments when you’re reminded that you're watching an able-bodied actor play a person with a disability, but they exist and are always uncomfortable. And all of them arise from scenes built around the idea of Jeff learning to overcome his disability, rather than exist with it.

Stronger is at its best when it's a movie about allowing Jeff to live rather than needing him to triumph. Which means, at times, that he's a jerk and a lousy partner, wallowing in self-pity and inertia, getting trashed with his hard-drinking mom or his friends from the neighborhood. The boldest thing Stronger does is trust enough in Maslany's performance and in the writing of her character to allow Erin to do something that a lesser movie would never even attempt — to walk away, and not just once, when Jeff is ready to let himself go. When Stronger does find its way to a happy ending, it's hard fought and hard won.

Gyllenhaal's may be the showy part in Stronger, but Maslany's is, in many ways, the more difficult one, and the one that affirms the movie's subdued but undeniable worth as a relationship drama. When everyone is choosing to see Jeff as a heroic figurehead, an emblem of "Boston strong," Erin looks as him as the flawed guy he's always been. And Maslany exudes a heartbroken but confident certainty as her character calls him on his own shit, and grapples with whether they have a future together. It's unbearably sad, and unbearably real.

Tom Cruise in American Made.

David James / Universal Pictures

In his new movie, Tom Cruise plays a hotshot pilot with a need for speed, a megawatt smile, and penchant for breaking the rules. Yup, just like he did in Top Gun, only this time around, he's not an all-American hero: He's an all-American fool. He's Barry Seal, a fictionalized riff on the real man of the same name who ran drugs for Pablo Escobar, served as a DEA informant, and — at least in the film — did it all under the questionable protection of the CIA, who recruited him to run surveillance missions and, later, guns to the Contras.

Three decades after Maverick in Top Gun smirkingly fought baddies from an enemy nation the movie never bothered to name, Barry in American Made carelessly smuggles coke and weapons, and gets so rich off the venture that he runs out of space in his house to store all the dough he's yet to launder. "If this ain't the greatest country in the world..." he muses, never giving more thought to the massive Cold War schemes he's become a part of, or the consequences of what he's doing.

American Made, which was directed by Doug Liman and written by Gary Spinelli, isn't the greatest of Tom Cruise roles, but it is the most resoundingly self-referential. What's otherwise a diverting but dismissible romp through some of the darker elements of the '80s (including Iran-Contra, which Reagan nostalgists prefer to gloss over, revise, or flat-out ignore) becomes sometimes more with Cruise at the center, letting out familiar whoops of glee as his plane just barely clears a short Columbian runway. It becomes a referendum on the type of character that made him a movie star in the first place, in the Risky Business/Top Gun/Cocktail/Days of Thunder era — the underdog whose let's-just-do-it-and-be-legends cocksureness is synonymous with his appeal.

Cruise and Domhnall Gleeson.

David James / Universal Pictures

Like a lot of the protagonists Cruise spent the better part of the '80s playing, Barry is an American dreamer, a guy with a particular talent and an easy certainty that he deserves the good things that come his way. But these qualities are more amusing than charming on Barry, who takes up the CIA's dangerous proposition like it's the opportunity he's been waiting for all his life. Barry isn't portrayed as morally compromised so much as morally oblivious, treating every offer that comes his way as a new adventure, accepting the description of "crazy" as a compliment. He's a man who thinks he's the hero of the story, when in fact he's the punchline.

It's unclear how aware Cruise is of the way American Made plays off his own onscreen image, because the role depends on the actor playing it straight, with not a wink of self-awareness even when Barry crash-lands a plane in a suburban street, emerges covered in cocaine, and makes his escape by pedaling away frantically on a child's bike. Barry's lack of self-awareness is his foremost quality, really. At the start of the film, he's a commercial pilot stultified by his TWA gig, to the point where we see him creating "turbulence" on a flight just for kicks.

When a CIA agent named Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson, playing his character as a frustrated cubicle drone just trying to get ahead) approaches Barry at a hotel bar one day, talking about "building nations down there," it doesn't take much to get him on board. A fast plane, a shell company, and a mission to take photos of rebel groups in Central America is enough to lure the pilot into dumping his stifling but stable job. He has no problem keeping this secret from his wife, Lucy (Sarah Wright), until bad timing sends them scurrying from their home in the middle of the night and off to a CIA-provided stretch of land in Arkansas that becomes the base of a larger off-the-books operation.

Tom Cruise and Sarah Wright in American Made.

David James / Universal Pictures

"I do have a tendency to leap before I look," Barry confesses to a camcorder in one of the self-made videos the movie is punctuated with, a stylistic choice that's more irritating than illuminating. Barry does a whole lot of impulsive leaping, from surveillance to drug smuggling to gun running to flying Contras back to the US for training, at which point most of them run away. He's a fitting point person for an operation that no one on the government side seems ready to admit is a disaster — someone for whom self-interest and serving his country are one and the same. American Made doesn't surprise with its arc of rise and fall, the apex being the glorious scene in which Barry and Lucy have temporarily weightless sex while flying a plane full of goods back from Columbia, giddy with illicit success. The inevitable comedown is hard, of course, but not that hard, because you're never really invested in Barry, with his piles of cash overflowing from every cabinet and his blithe, unthinking participation in large-scale trafficking.

It's Cruise who sticks in your mind, especially in scenes like the ones in which Barry shows off in the air, dodging rebel army fire or taunting the DEA agents trying to track him down. There's one sequence in which he wakes up a fellow pilot who's fallen asleep at the wheel by jostling the wings of their planes together, and it really is like a dirtbag version of the opening sequence of Top Gun. It's as if Maverick grew up, settled down, got bored, and then went back to chasing the same hotdogging highs he used to in a queasier setting, his avowed patriotism exposed as an empty excuse. When Cruise, as Barry, laughs as he and his boys evade capture on the way back into the US with cargo holds full of coke, it's with the same confident sparkle he's always projected. But there's no blockbuster cool to it — what you end up thinking is, God, what a dick.

1. Brad's Status

Ben Stiller and Austin Abrams in Brad's Status.

Seacia Pavao / Annapurna Pictures

Brad's Status is a portrait of white middle-class male anxiety that's so dead-on, it's actually excruciating to watch. That might sound like a strange sort of recommendation, but the film is the work of writer-director Mike White, creator of Enlightened and scripter of Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl — a man for whom discomfort is an art form. In lead actor Ben Stiller, doing a more serious turn, White's found an excellent collaborator with whom to create some truly exquisite cringy-ness. Stiller, with a trying, restless dissatisfaction, plays the Brad of the title — a Sacramento man who runs a small nonprofit and shares a nice suburban house with his wife (Jenna Fischer) and their teenage son, Troy (Austin Abrams). Troy's a sweet, smart kid, but his likely acceptance into Harvard comes as a surprise and then seismic shock to his father, who hadn't expected it, and who's been busy grappling with fading idealism and a general sense of having already peaked.

By any rational measure, Brad's life is a comfortable and happy one. But he can't help seeing himself as a failure compared to his undergrad pals (played by Jemaine Clement, Michael Sheen, Luke Wilson, and White himself), who've gone on to wealth and fame. Plunged into turmoil in the midst of taking his kid on a college tour, Brad vacillates between elated hope for Troy's future and a desperate desire for him to avoid what Brad perceives as his own lack of success, feelings that are expounded upon in claustrophobic voiceover. Until White softens up right at the end, Brad's Status is a quiet but hilariously biting portrayal of earnest liberalism running up against lingering white entitlement.

How to see it: Brad's Status is now in theaters in limited release.

2. Clínica de Migrantes: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Clínica de Migrantes: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

HBO

Mainstream attention tends to turn to short documentaries only once a year, when their category presents a mystifying challenge of five unfamiliar titles to choose from when filling out Oscar pool ballots. But Clínica de Migrantes deserves to be seen and to be talked about beyond its awards potential. Director Maxim Pozdorovkin (Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer) has made a 40-minute movie that isn't just emotionally wrenching, but remarkably timely, occupying territory at the intersection of our current, urgent conversations about health care and immigration. The film profiles Puentes de Salud, a nonprofit, volunteer-run clinic in south Philadelphia that offers free medical treatment to undocumented, uninsured, and financially insecure immigrants who otherwise don't have access to it.

Clínica de Migrantes observes patients who come in, some in desperate need after having been denied health care elsewhere, or having gone without it as long as possible out of fear of deportation. In simply depicting the day-to-day operation of the clinic, it's a powerful record of some of the difficult realities and vulnerabilities that come with being undocumented. But it's also a resonant film about health care, about doctors who actually strive to understand their patients' working and domestic realities, who try to earn their trust and to help them navigate bills from other hospitals. It presents, simply and movingly, a case for caring for those who need it as a moral mandate.

How to see it: Clínica de Migrantes: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is now streaming on HBO.

3. First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

Sareum Srey Moch in First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers.

Netflix

Angelina Jolie's career as a director has taken a wildly unpredictable path. First she took on a fraught romance straddling different sides of the Bosnian War in In the Land of Blood and Honey, then made a staid bid for Oscar glory with the World War II movie Unbroken, and more recently offered up the 2015 lush, indulgent melodrama By the Sea, in which she and soon-to-be-ex-husband Brad Pitt played troubled (and childless) marrieds and also played peek-a-boo with promises of insight into their real-life relationship. And now, it's back to war with a film based on Loung Ung's memoir about what happened to her during the reign of the Khmer Rouge — a child's-eye view on a devastating period in Cambodian history.

But despite Jolie's seeming intentions here to use cinema as an extension of her humanitarian work, she's too interesting a filmmaker to turn out the movie equivalent of vegetables, something to be consumed dutifully under the recommendation that it's good for you. First They Killed My Father has worth as a work of art beyond its devastating subject matter, in particular in the way it approaches the atrocities it depicts through the perspective of someone whose understanding of what's happening is limited. Young Loung (first-time actor Sareum Srey Moch) and her family have their world upended with dizzying speed, going from a middle-class existence in Phnom Penh to being scattered among work camps, where people starve and are executed. Aside from the jarring montage at the start, the film is freed from having to explain the whys of what's happening, allowing it to be an act of sensory overload, a rush of unsettling images. It's all the more powerful for being so experiential, a national apocalypse as seen by someone who's only just grasped what death is.

How to see it: First They Killed My Father is now streaming on Netflix.

4. Lucky

David Lynch and Harry Dean Stanton in Lucky.

Magnolia Pictures

Screen legend Harry Dean Stanton, who died in September, couldn't have picked a more fitting swan song for himself than Lucky, the directorial debut of fellow character actor John Carroll Lynch. Stanton plays the title character, a ninetysomething man whose comfortable routine gets a jolt when he collapses one morning and is forced to confront his own (and everyone else's) mortality. But Lucky is joyful, not mournful, a rambling opportunity to while away an hour and a half in the company of an actor who rarely got a leading role, but who delightfully fills out this one.

Lucky isn't cantankerous so much as he is incapable of altering his behavior to accommodate anyone at this point in his life. He's been pared down to his essential self, looping from the diner of his small desert town to the store to buy cigarettes (his doctor, baffled by his health, suggests he'd best never quit smoking), back home to watch game shows, and then off to have a drink. Different characters drift through to shoot the shit, including David Lynch as a bar regular whose tortoise has gone missing, Tom Skerritt as a fellow former WWII vet, and Ron Livingston as a lawyer urging Lucky to look into estate planning. It's the kind of loose-limbed movie that you visit more than you watch, and it's an awfully pleasurable stay.

How to see it: Lucky is now in theaters in limited release — here's a list of locations.

5. Rat Film

Rat Film.

The Cinema Guild

Theo Anthony's Rat Film is an essay in the form of a convention-busting documentary that starts by recounting a creation myth (in which a rodent nibbles the world into existence) and then works its way up to another story of conception. It's about rats — including the one shown trying to leap out of a trash can in one of the first shots — and the neighborhoods in which infestations have been the worst. But it's also about the formation of an American city, and specifically about the forces of redlining that shaped Baltimore, where Anthony is from. His film flips from computer-generated images of streets as a video game landscape to historical maps, from a pest control specialist at work to an examination of how the area was split up into risk zones for homeowner loans that were, functionally, a form of segregation.

While the score, by fellow Baltimore native Dan Deacon, offers an enveloping whirl of electronic sounds, Rat Film adds layers upon layers to its dense argument about how acts of urban planning and engineering can conceal acts of racism and classism, and about how their legacy can be felt today. It's a brilliantly ambitious and unapologetically odd movie that might be best summed up by philosophical exterminator Harold Edmond, one of the interviewees, when he says: "It ain't never been a rat problem in Baltimore. Always been a people problem."

How to see it: Rat Film is now in theaters in limited release — here's a list of locations.

6. Strong Island

Strong Island.

Netflix

In 1992, filmmaker Yance Ford's brother William was killed during an altercation with a local mechanic on Long Island, where the family lived. William was unarmed, but he was black, and the man who shot him was white, and an all-white grand jury decided not to indict the latter, to the shock and distress of the Fords, declaring the act one of self-defense. As an instance of racialized injustice, it's a story that feels sickeningly familiar, but for Ford, it's obviously also intensely and agonizingly personal. Strong Island, Ford's directorial debut, is about William's death, but it's also about how his family contended with both grief and feeling so devastatingly wronged — how it fell apart in the wake of this brutal reminder of who was really welcome on the path of upward mobility their suburban town seemed to offer.

Ford's film presents a heartbreakingly detailed portrait of his brother as an outraged counterpoint to the demonization done in court to present him as so dangerous he deserved to be murdered, sometimes punctuated by confrontational if formally distancing sequences in which Ford talks directly to the camera. But it's Ford's mother who provides the film's most devastating moment when she reminisces about how she feels she failed her son: "I did William a great disservice in raising him the way we did. We’ve always tried to teach you guys that you see character, and not color. And many, many times I wonder, how I could be so wrong?"

How to see it: Strong Island is now streaming on Netflix.

Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner 2049.

Alcon Entertainment / Warner Bros.

Blade Runner 2049’s melancholy hero K, played by Ryan Gosling, has some things in common with his predecessor Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), protagonist of the original Blade Runner. Like Deckard, K is a loner who likes a long coat, and whose job is to kill — though no one in this dystopian universe calls it that, preferring the euphemism "retire." K, like Deckard, is a blade runner, a professional hunter of replicants. Unlike Deckard, whose origins were famously left ambiguous in Ridley Scott's 1982 film, K knows his nature exactly: He's a replicant himself, and the targets he retires are his own kind — though older, wayward models who've attempted to escape the subservient existences for which they were created.

K is part of a new, more obedient line of replicants, synthetic beings primarily invented to bear the brunt of the dangerous labor of space colonization, the fruits of which are then enjoyed by humans who get to start anew in nicer off-world climes. The prime mindfuck of the Blade Runner universe is that replicants are so close in every way to humans that — superhuman strength aside — there's no way to immediately tell them apart. In the first Blade Runner, a haunting test has been formulated in order to suss out who's human and who's not by highlighting the uncanny valley of a replicant's not-quite-right emotional responses (they are, to quote their corporate manufacturers, "more human than human").

By the year 2049, in the sequel, all K needs to do is check for a serial number embedded in the sclera of every replicant's left eyeball. The opening sequence, in which he travels to a protein farm to retire Sapper (played by Dave Bautista), who's been passing as human, makes it clear that this is easier said than done.

Harrison Ford

Stephen Vaughan, Alcon Entertainment / Warner Bros.

Replicants, as K puts it, don't have a soul — though as his flinty boss Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) snaps when he uses the word: "You've been getting along fine without one." So it's maybe appropriate, if disappointing, that Blade Runner 2049 doesn't have a soul either. Like its main character, the film (very loosely adapted from Philip K. Dick and directed by Denis Villeneuve from a script by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green) coasts along perfectly well without one, until its cavernous hollowness becomes unignorable. The new Blade Runner is a gorgeous simulacrum of a meaningful movie, one that's even more beautiful, if so much less resonant, than the classic in whose footsteps it follows. The best thing about it is the return to one of cinema's most memorable and influential landscapes: a near-future Los Angeles on a dying Earth from which everyone fortunate enough has already left.

That LA, vast and dense, is the most compelling character Blade Runner 2049 has to offer, more interesting and more engaging than any of the people, familiar or new, replicant or human, who make their way onto the screen. The film, shot by Roger Deakins, is strenuously dazzling to look at, presenting detailed panoramas of an urban setting made up of dark, jam-packed blocks studded with the occasional pyramid-like mega-skyscraper. The visuals of the sequel are sharper and more self-consciously designed than the original, but the conceptualizing of that forward-tiling LA remains fascinating, the urban equivalent of a garden that's been allowed to grow wild and untended for years.

It's a city as a globalized, hypercapitalist hallucination, loomed over by buildings emblazoned with glowing brand names, signage more often in Cyrillic or katakana than English. Ads project holograms towering 40 stories high over packed streets teeming with vendors offering everything from black-market object analysis to automat food to sex. The expanded view presented in Villeneuve's film includes San Diego as a garbage dump so substantial that it's home to its own community of trash pirates, and also a giant wall that has been built to keep out an encroaching ocean boosted by rising sea levels. It's too lived-in a future to feel alarmist — it's our world, but worse, but also so alluringly cinematic.

Robin Wright and Sylvia Hoeks.

Stephen Vaughan, Alcon Entertainment / Warner Bros.

The existence K has carved out for himself in this urban sprawl beset by endless precipitation is a lonesome one. The presence of new-model replicants like him are apparently tolerated but disliked by the Earth’s remaining humans — he's sneered at by his neighbors, and his non-replicant coworkers within the worn confines of the LAPD headquarters have a tendency to use the slur "skin-job" in his presence (then remember and apologize).

The only company K keeps is an AI companion named Joi (Ana de Armas), a biddable holographic fantasy who adores him with a unquestioning wholeheartedness that's clearly her big selling point but, to us, is still disturbing. She sometimes disturbs K, too: "I'm so happy when I'm with you," she croons to him; “You don’t have to say that,” he tells her, aware that she, in her computer-mandated ardor, is as compliant with his desires as he is with the humans'.

The uneasy scenes with Joi — this computerized receptacle for longing in the form of a beautiful, incorporeal woman — are K's most intriguing. His character otherwise comes across as just a still point in an intensely art-directed world. Gosling plays K like a wan variation on the type of roles directors like Nicolas Winding Refn (in Drive and Only God Forgives) and Derek Cianfrance (in Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines) like to give him — emblematic of a certain kind of romanticized masculinity, stylish and self-sacrificing and sad-eyed, hardboiled exterior with a gooey sentimental core.

And mostly functional, in this case — K questions his own existence, and his search for a purpose coincides with his execution of an assignment which eventually leads to him meeting up with Deckard. But not until after a long, long stretch that's not meditative: It's patience-testing. By that time, K's gone from being the apparent key to the movie to its biggest piece of narrative baggage, a figure who looks great in that shearling duster but is an exasperatingly colorless presence.

Barkhad Abdi and Ana de Armas.

Stephen Vaughan, Alcon Entertainment / Warner Bros.

And the rest of the film looks so vivid, from the golden lighting that pools around K and sinister fellow replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) as they walk the Wallace Corporation halls to the glowering loiterers K must stride past in the cluttered halls of his own apartment building. The imagery of Blade Runner 2049 has a resonant grandeur the rest of the film can't come close to matching. It tries, primarily with Jared Leto, whose appearances as blind industrialist Niander Wallace are mercifully brief. Wallace's theatrical speeches about space expansion and how civilizations move forward are the movie's equivalent of Rutger Hauer's "tears in the rain" monologue from the original, and while they include verbiage that plays into the film's religious parallels, they come nowhere near that splendid conviction, that pulpy power. They're just Leto muttering about angels on his Zen island of a conference room, all surface and nothing there.

Which is the case for all of the film. It's exquisite-looking and distant, inviting you into a painstakingly crafted world but no further — certainly not into any particular investment in K, or Joi, or Joshi, or even its older and embittered Deckard, whose presence is still easily the warmest to the touch of anyone onscreen. Ford’s character wasn't necessarily sympathetic in the first Blade Runner, but he was one whose fate felt important, an individual trying to survive in a system run by giant, indifferent institutions, unwilling to consider the question of whether he himself was just a tool created by one of them. He was someone whose limited point of view was forcefully cracked open. Blade Runner 2049, on the other hand, manages to be prettier but far more prosaic. It might put on a convincing face, but you couldn't ask it to pass a Voight-Kampff test.

Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in The Florida Project.

A24

The Florida Project takes place a few miles and a whole universe away from Disney World, in a lavender-painted motel called The Magic Castle. Like the other businesses along its commercial strip in Kissimmee, Florida, it's a clear attempt to catch tourist runoff from the nearby theme park. And travelers, like the dismayed honeymooners who arrive to see the lodgings they booked online aren't remotely what they expected, do occasionally wash up in its lobby.

But most of the guests of The Magic Castle aren't visitors, they're residents, crowding into rooms they rent by the week because getting together the chunk of change needed to even begin thinking about an apartment isn't tenable. The inhabitants of the motel are one wobbly rung above homelessness, many of them families whose children hang out together, a transient playgroup made up of members that come and go with little warning.

It's a precarious situation that, you'd think, would make a name like "The Magic Castle" read as bitter irony. And that's certainly a part of The Florida Project, which juxtaposes the rough realities of its characters with an awareness of the massive monument to corporate cheer and consumption lurking just down the road — the Happiest Place on Earth, ready and waiting, providing you can afford to get in.

But what's so great about the film, so astonishing and so devastating, is that there's some sincerity to that name as well, at least in the case of the day-to-day adventures of 6-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), its kid protagonist. The motel and the line of buildings around it are the beautiful-seedy dominion she reigns over with a combination of impish curiosity and slowly fading innocence. Childhood can be its own kind of magic kingdom, though the instability of the life she and her young ex-con mom Halley (Bria Vinaite) share keeps threatening to burst that bright, unconcerned bubble.

Christopher Rivera, Prince, and Valeria Cotto.

A24

The Florida Project is written and directed by Sean Baker, who's made an increasingly prominent career out of chronicling existences eked out in economic gray zones, first in New York, then in Los Angeles, and now the Sunshine State. His 2004 movie Take Out centers on an undocumented Chinese immigrant scraping by as a deliveryman, while 2008's Prince of Broadway goes further uptown to track an African man whose counterfeit bag hustle gets complicated when he has to care for a toddler. Starlet (2012) focuses on the friendship between an adult film actor and her elderly neighbor in the San Fernando Valley, and 2015's Tangerine, Baker's biggest breakout so far, follows two trans sex workers through a long day of dealing with johns and personal dramas on a block of Santa Monica Boulevard.

These are stories about marginalized lives that don't get put on screen very often, but Baker's greatest worth as a filmmaker comes not just from his interest in representation, but also from his understanding that he's making movies about people, not poverty. That's certainly the case with The Florida Project, which doesn't pretty up its characters' frequently miserable straits in any way, but is never miserablist, either. Moonee and Halley have good days and bad ones — mostly good for Moonee (it's summer vacation) and starting to tend toward the bad for Halley, who's come off a recent stint in prison, lost her job at a strip club for refusing to do extras in the back room, and is struggling to find another gig.

Since she's not working, Halley watches over both Moonee and Scooty (Christopher Rivera), another Magic Castle kid whose mom Ashley (Mela Murder) is, for a while, a friend who works in a nearby diner and sneaks out food for free. But Halley generally opts to lounge, unconcerned, in front of the TV while the kids roam free. Baker cast Vinaite off of Instagram, and in her first role, with her tats and her brightly dyed hair, she's as magnetic a figure as she is an alarming one, her character as prone to acts of reckless destruction and wild outrage as she is to ones of boisterous joy.

Vinaite

A24

The film is startlingly good at showing echoes of Halley's impulsive behavior in Moonee — or maybe it's vice versa. While Halley has to reckon with some depressingly grown-up developments, she's still half a kid herself, screaming "You're not my father" like a rebellious teen when warned about her behavior.

When The Florida Project follows Halley, it shows her attempts to get by, hawking knock-off perfume or purloined MagicBands to tourists, and making a consequence-heavy, desperation-driven decision that's hinted at long before it's actually revealed. But when the film follows Moonee, it revels in play as she wanders, at first in the company of Scooty and then, when Ashley and Halley have a falling-out, with a nearby motel girl named Jancey (Valeria Cotto). Jancey's a sweet sidekick who befriends Moonee after an initial confrontation involving shrieking and spitting, a development that speaks as much to their quickly shifting community as it does the unique capacity kids have to exist in the present.

The children beg for change for soft serve (Scooty's pitch is that "the doctor said we have asthma and we gotta eat ice cream right away"), explore abandoned homes in a pastel-colored development, and pay visits to the motel's long-suffering staff. Baker clearly turns extended sequences over to his child actors, ones that don't appear to be scripted at all — letting them just be mischievous kids and occasional little shits who make their way through worlds of their own creation, closed worlds that are much more inviting than the one the adults in their lives have to deal with.

Vinaite, Prince, and Cotto.

Marc Schmidt / A24

Prince is, like Vinaite, a newcomer to acting, and her performance in the movie is enough to convince you that she has to be one of the planet's most charismatic children. But some more seasoned faces make their way into The Florida Project as well, chief among them Willem Dafoe as The Magic Castle's manager Bobby, a man who's been around the block but remains invested in the well-being of the residents, despite it being a source of constant heartbreak.

Bobby starts out as a straight-man foil for Moonee and her gang, but becomes a grander, sadder figure as the film goes along, engaged in the impossible task of trying to ward off harm from people too vulnerable to be able to do much to evade it themselves. Dafoe is worry embodied, constantly harried, and a shorter appearance from (a surprisingly normal) Caleb Landry Jones hints that the motel is something that's consumed whatever life Bobby once had.

But it's Moonee and Halley to whom The Florida Project belongs, two troublemakers trying to keep all consequences at bay by denying they exist, stocking a shopping cart full of throwaway treats in a dollar store, laughing and whirling around like it's a mystical playland. Which, in that moment, you can believe that it is. But while the power of imagination may be a savior in a Disney movie, it isn't in the sun-washed reality of The Florida Project, which concludes with a touch of poetry that might break you in two. It's not a happy ending, but it is, like the rest of the film, pretty much perfect.

Quentin Tarantino and Harvey Weinstein at the premiere of Inglourious Basterds in 2009.

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

Harvey Weinstein built his career on art made outside the system. He got his start putting out films like Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, which got a wrongly convicted man freed from prison; and Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh's edgy lower-budget landmark; and Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston's invaluable exploration of New York City drag balls — and many, many more. He made his name and his fortune releasing work the mainstream wouldn't support, ones from first-time filmmakers, queer filmmakers, and foreign filmmakers. It's a fact that tends to be forgotten or brushed aside when taking in what started as a trickle of infuriating and sickening stories about his sexual misconduct, and has now grown into a flood of harassment and rape allegations. Weinstein represents something more complicated to grapple with than the industry insider toxicity he's now becoming an emblem of.

Weinstein, with his alleged robe-clad massage requests, does come across as a classic Hollywood horror in these accounts, reportedly chasing women around a room like some executive producer–as-nightmare satyr. The stories of his casting couch nastiness are so outrageously regular in their patterns, practically a company-enabled routine, that it might be tempting to think of his ouster as a much-needed exorcism of a lingering boogeyman from the bad old days. It makes sense to draw a line from Weinstein back to someone like MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who was as adroit at building up his studio in the ’30s and ’40s as he was at terrorizing women who came through it. But in some ways, it simplifies what Weinstein has always represented to place him in the context of that vile but established pattern, which may be why his former adviser Lisa Bloom called him "an old dinosaur" as a strange defense — before she quit, and before he was fired on Sunday from the company that (for now) still bears his name.

Andie MacDowell in Sex, Lies, and Videotape, originally released by Miramax Films in 1989.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

But Weinstein is far from the last abuser in the industry, even if his behavior was an especially infamous open secret. And his is far from just a Hollywood story, given how much of his success came from finding and leveraging voices from outside Hollywood. It's also a story about independent film, this alternative world that started apart from but has become increasingly entwined with the establishment. Indie film is where Harvey Weinstein and his brother, Bob, got their start back in 1979, with their first company, Miramax, the one they named for their parents and shored up by releasing Pedro Almodóvar titles and movies directed by women like Jane Campion and Leslie Harris. It's through the monetizing of works made outside the American studio system that Weinstein was able to start accruing the clout he liked to throw around so much.

You can look at Weinstein's comeuppance through the lens of fellow accused showbiz serial predator Bill Cosby. He certainly did — former Weinstein Company employee Emily Nestor told the The New Yorker he was "very weirdly proud" about how "he’d never had to do anything like Bill Cosby." You can look at it through Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, and Donald Trump, as a depressing example of how the sexual misconduct of powerful men is the rare bipartisan quality in divided times. But Weinstein's is also the highest profile and most infuriating of what's been a string of revelations of abuse and harassment within indie film institutions over the past few months. 2017 has been a wretched year for many reasons, and one of them has been the reminder than cinephilia is no safe space for women.

In August, Cinefamily collapsed.

Cinefamily is a nonprofit that took over the old Silent Movie Theatre in West Hollywood 10 years ago, transforming it into a place where you could watch screenings from couches and then drink wine and talk about what you just saw in the patio out back. Cinefamily's programming, which is currently suspended pending an investigation, ran the gamut from Nickelodeon reunions to Andrzej Zulawski retrospectives, the high and the low and the outlandish and the classic, all mixed together. It was the kind of space for repertory and indie fare that LA, despite being a movie and TV industry town, seems forever short on — an improbable movie lover's dream, a place that was sustained with the help of some hip friends and many volunteers.

Cinefamily

Alison Buck / Getty Images

Cinefamily is the kind of local phenomenon with a reputation so singular that it could lure someone like former assistant programmer William Morris from across the country in hopes of working there. But, as Morris himself put it, it was a workplace marked by "an active rape culture" in which female staffers and volunteers were reportedly treated, to intense discomfort, as a dating pool for now-former executive creative director Hadrian Belove and board member Shadie Elnashai. Reading the accounts here at BuzzFeed News, at LA Weekly, and at Jezebel of disillusioned former Cinefamily employees and volunteers what emerges is an organization that sold itself as a community for all film lovers, but that operated as a place in which the men in charge threw around their cultural cachet.

Belove, one of Cinefamily's cofounders, its guiding force, and the reported center of its misogynistic environment, said to LA Weekly back in 2010 that the place's programming process was akin to "making a mixtape for a girl you're trying to impress, in that you want to demonstrate all the possible points of connection, and all the things you thought were awesome in the world." It probably should have been an early red flag that Cinefamily's key personality talked about his work by way of the metaphor of a guy flaunting his pop culture authority in hopes of being rewarded with sex. It's not even the idea of using borrowed cool to get laid — something people have attempted to do for time eternal — that's so irksome. It's how gendered the dynamic he describes is, one of women passively receiving and being dazzled by male authority.

There are no reported claims of sexual assault against either Belove or Elnashai. There was, however, a 2014 sexual harassment lawsuit that was filed against Belove by former director of development Tina Poppy and settled out of court, screenshots of which were included in an anonymous email that set off the events that would lead to Belove's resignation. The lawsuit alleged that "Cinefamily knew that Belove was unfit to be put in a position of authority over women." It also featured details like Belove, in this saga's smaller-scale equivalent of hotel bait and switch, booking a room with only one bed for him and Poppy to share at the Sundance Film Festival. When she objected, Poppy said she was told the organization wasn't going to pay for another one.

Brie Larson attends the Women of Cinefamily Weekend screening of The Hunting Ground in 2016.

Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

The reality of the indie film realm is that it is by nature less formal, everything done on the cheap and for passion rather than money, fast and loose and supposedly more limber and free than big, stodgy corporations. But it is exactly that aura of here-for-the-love-of-it casual chaos cultivated at a place like Cinefamily that makes abuse so much easier to hide, because it can be brushed away under the guise of someone being uptight, or difficult, of not being a team player and not fitting in. When something like that housing situation is presented as a resource issue for your scrappy arts nonprofit, you're put in a position of having to accept an affront or cede the opportunity to someone else. Working at a place that once touted its female-aimed pajama party screenings has to lose its sheen when you yourself have to share a bed with your creepy boss. It's no wonder so many of these accounts end with women choosing (or being made) to leave.

In September, the Alamo Drafthouse and the annual genre film festival the company helps organize, Fantastic Fest, erupted with an escalating string of controversies.

First came news that the Drafthouse had rehired Devin Faraci (someone who, full disclosure, I know and have hung out with at film festivals), the former editor-in-chief of its Birth.Movies.Death site, after he'd stepped down last year following sexual assault allegations. The revelation that Faraci was once again writing for Drafthouse came by way of surprise bylines on Fantastic Fest programming blurbs. Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest cofounder Tim League (who is also someone I'm friendly with, and whose house I once stayed at during the festival) released a statement in defense of his decision to secretly rehire Faraci. League acknowledged that a "culture of sexual harassment and gender inequality persists in our society and specifically within the film industry," but also said that he felt that Faraci's attempts at rehab and self-examination were sincere and earned him a second chance at employment.

The lack of transparency behind League's call caused a public and internal outcry, and led to the resignation of Fantastic Fest programmer and film producer Todd Brown, who in a pained statement of his own wrote about the history of sexual abuse in his family and about whose right it is to forgive those responsible for assault. "Anyone who has ever suggested that Fantastic Fest and the Drafthouse is just the geek friendly equivalent of the classic Old Boys Club, you have just been proven correct. We have just seen that Club in action. There it is, the Club utterly ignoring the victim while it creates a protective ring around the perpetrator," he stated.

Suki-Rose Simakis at the 2017 Fantastic Debates.

Fantastic Fest

Brown’s words would continue to resonate in the days that followed, after Faraci resigned again, for good this time, and multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault were made against one of Fantastic Fest's other cofounders, Harry Knowles. Drafthouse and the festival severed all ties with Knowles, who ended up stepping down from the website he founded, Ain't It Cool News, but the damage had been done — the company and the event have had to reckon with regaining the trust of customers, employees, and attendees.

Both the Drafthouse as a chain and Fantastic Fest as an event are branded as havens of unapologetic film geekiness, as spaces where older titles played alongside blockbusters and where movie fandom reigned supreme. The Drafthouse has turned its don't-talk-don't-text videos into viral, celebrity-studded phenoms. Fantastic Fest is as famous for its live events as its horror, thriller, and grindhouse programming, for unique happenings like the Fantastic Debates, in which various industry folks come up in front of the crowd to argue over something film-related and then move their (real or staged) fights into a boxing ring.

But in the wake of so many unaddressed, ignored, or covered-up claims of sexual misconduct, and of someone like Knowles using their power as a culture gatekeeper to get away with allegedly groping, propositioning, and generally discomfiting women, the question of who, exactly, these places are a sanctuary for has become pressing. If, as with Cinefamily, the Fantastic Fest community is supposed to be like a family, it's turned out to be the kind of family in which a handsy uncle keeps getting invited over to dinner, and the women around the table are left to do their best to steer clear of his orbit, or to stop showing up themselves.

Last week, Harvey Weinstein — "the media's white whale," as The Hollywood Reporter's Janice Min put it — was finally brought down by testimonials of at first a few, and then many, brave women.

John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, released by Miramax in 1994.

Lions Gate Films Home Entertainment

Weinstein's downfall was enabled by a cultural shift in which these women feel more likely to be heard and believed and in which men are more likely to be held accountable — no question. But it's also been helped along by the fact that Weinstein's once-formidable power has faded. We're long past the Miramax heyday of the ’90s, in which Harvey and Bob seemed nigh-invincible. Back then, in the Wild West of indie film, they were able to snap up edgy, influential titles like Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Clerks at festivals and introduce them to suburban cineplexes, and put their own money into financing fare like Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love, films they saw potential in when the big studios didn't.

It's one of the ironies of Weinstein's career that, while he and his company played a huge role in helping establish the careers of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, he wasn't considered a great friend to filmmakers. He was known for shelving films and for trimming or mangling them, depending on who you talked to, his habit of demanding significant edits earning him the nickname "Harvey Scissorhands." He was famously hard to work with, but people would complain and then go back to him anyway — Miramax and then The Weinstein Company weren't the only game in town, but for years, no one else was as good at taking advantage of awards and news cycles to secure box office returns.

Weinstein's skill with the former sometimes gets him credited with the dubious honor of inventing the modern Oscar campaign. But it's his overlapping talent for PR stunts that could be more queasily impressive. He hired Alan Dershowitz to successfully appeal Clerks' initial NC-17 rating, a publicized battle of bold cinema versus the prudish MPAA that he'd go on to repeat. He screened My Left Foot for Congress and had its star, Daniel Day-Lewis, speak out in support of the not-yet-passed Americans with Disabilities Act. He understood that presenting a movie as politically important could be just as effective a means of marketing as underscoring its importance as a work of art with awards. Of course Weinstein walked in the Women's March at Sundance last year. He knew better than anyone that causes could be good branding. But cultivating a corporate image of progressivism doesn't mean living by those ideals.

Harvey Weinstein, Bryan Cranston, and Neil Burger at a party for The Upside at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.

Emma Mcintyre / Getty Images

That cynicism could be seen in the mind-boggling public statement Weinstein gave to the New York Times, in which he pivoted from a garbled apology right into a claim that he was going to turn his energies to taking down the NRA, the calculation clumsily apparent. The allegations against Weinstein are a different magnitude than what happened at Cinefamily and at Fantastic Fest, but there are ways in which these incidents fall into a dispiriting line. In particular, there are commonalities in how the value of the films these companies and organizations are dedicated to presenting get used to justify covering up misconduct. A shared love of movies doesn't make misogyny go away, and a sense of community doesn't mean that power won't get abused.

One thing that can be said on behalf of giant corporations? No one would mistake them for friends or for family. The same can't be said for Cinefamily (right there in the name!), or for Fantastic Fest, or, most glaringly, for Weinstein. Gwyneth Paltrow told the New York Times that "I thought you were my Uncle Harvey" was running through her head after he'd made a pass at her, as he has so many women, years ago in a hotel room. "Don't ruin your friendship with me for five minutes," Weinstein warned model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez in audio captured by the NYPD in 2015, as if being coerced into someone's room to watch them shower were an everyday interaction between pals. The indie realm thrives on not having to follow the strictures of the big studio, but there's a huge price that can come with those blurrier boundaries — and in these incidents, it seems like it's always women who are paying it.

And — in these stories, at least — it's the men who manage to show a capacity for denial that approaches cognitive dissonance. Cinefamily's Belove, faced with a multitude of testimonials about his behavior, dismissed them as a conspiracy of "bitter ex-employees and their friends" who "have banded together and sought to destroy Cinefamily through a campaign of false accusations to the media." Knowles kept tweeting about movies while old AICN staffers quit and the Drafthouse cut ties, as if it were all just business as usual, right until he stepped down to let his sister take over the site. And Weinstein is still giving interviews to Page Six, which he told on Wednesday, "I will definitely be back making movies, perhaps in a year, with a new company, once I've been through treatment, taken a long hard look at myself and who I am, and got better." The fact that he thinks that's even possible is a problem.

Jessica Rothe as Tree Gelbman in Happy Death Day.

Universal Pictures

Tree Gelbman is not your typical final girl.

Final girls, those young female characters who have so often been the sole survivors of slasher movies, are usually also nice girls — in the sense that they're both sweet and well-behaved. They're resourceful and quite possibly plucky, and they don't drink and they don't have sex, and their reward for their unfussy wholesomeness is that they're allowed to survive the story and the climactic showdown with the big baddie.

Tree, the time-looping heroine of Happy Death Day played by Jessica Rothe, is none of these things. She is (as she'd probably cop to herself) a bit of a bitch — a flaky, catty, blonde sorority girl who helps enforce a harsh social hierarchy in which she occupies a prime perch. In a scene the film repeatedly returns to like a save point in a video game, she wakes up in a stranger's dorm room bed, irritatedly warns the guy (Israel Broussard) "not a word of this to anyone," and hoofs it, in last night's outfit, back to her sorority house, where she's grilled by frenemy Danielle (Rachel Matthews), not about whether she's okay, but about whether the guy she was with was of appropriate status.

Universal Pictures

Tree parties, she fucks, she's mean, and she has a habit of wandering into amusingly sinister locations by her vulnerable lonesome, often in a primed-to-get-gore-stained white dress. She's chosen an unforgivably annoying "it's your birthday" ringtone for her phone. She is — at least by the rules of the genre so memorably made explicit in Scream and deconstructed in The Cabin in the Woods — doomed. And indeed, she’s murdered by a masked killer in a pedestrian underpass in Happy Death Day's first act, the kind of bloody end you might expect for a cheerleader type in this sort of horror film. Only she gets to come back, and to try to find a way to live on for another day.

Happy Death Day, which was directed by Christopher B. Landon and written by Scott Lobdell, is a welcome sign that the teen slasher might be returning to life (sorry) after getting pinned under the weight of the self-awareness that, on the plus side, did give us the meta humor of things like Scream and Cabin in the Woods. It’s a product of Blumhouse Productions, which leveled up this year with Get Out and Split, two legit cultural breakthroughs as well as box office hits; the company also deserves some attention for what it's done to help resurrect (sorry) this shrieky, silly, and curiously satisfying subgenre for the smartphone generation. Blumhouse is behind, among other titles, 2014's improbably good desktop found footage feature Unfriended and 2015's improbably bad (but successful) theater found footage feature The Gallows. Happy Death Day falls somewhere between them quality-wise, eschewing the found footage concept for an equally high Groundhog Day–meets–House on Sorority Row one.

Universal Pictures

The result is something that's just the right amount of ridiculous, flipping between legit scares and horror comedy. Happy Death Day's highlight isn't a scene of dread, but a demented montage of Tree spying on suspects in order to solve her own murder like some inept, respawning Nancy Drew — only to get hunted down, again and again, by her dogged, baby-faced executioner. But the film doesn't just find a clever way to refresh a maybe-calcified genre. It also overturns some of the genre's more puritanical tendencies by focusing on the sort of character whose death would traditionally be presented as an extreme but deserved kind of comeuppance, because surviving these sorts of stories is a reward reserved for the nice, the pure, and — occasionally — the comic relief.

In that way, Happy Death Day represents a kind of reparation on behalf of conventional slasher fodder. Instead of moving on from Tree after she's snuffed out, the film stays with her as she runs through her fateful birthday again and again, looking for a way out. She isn't discardable: Her character gets filled out more and more as the day repeats, into a person with tragedy in her family life and a great deal of denial. She's someone who sought solace in becoming a particular form of campus socialite, remaking herself in the image of the pretty, shallow, demanding sorority queen. In moments of self-reflection, she admits to having become someone she doesn't think her mother would be proud of.

Rothe and Ruby Modine.

Universal Pictures

Tree isn't just a type. And neither is the roommate, Lori (Ruby Modine), who's placed in her immediate proximity for seemingly easy comparison. Lori works at a hospital, doesn't wear makeup, and kindly gifts Tree with a homemade cupcake that the birthday girl promptly discards (too carb-heavy). Lori, in fact, is the kind of character who, from the outside, has the markers of a standard final girl (she’s even a brunette, in contrast to Tree), and the way that the film frees both her and Tree up from their expected destinies is witty and pointed. Because, really, why keep holding fast to the conservatism of those unspoken requirements for survival in these films, anyway?

Happy Death Day trades the moralism for a more palatable arc of self-improvement, with Tree peeling off the brittle veneer she's acquired as the movie rolls on, shedding the phony friends and the casual cruelty and reexamining the life she's made for herself. And though her self-examination — like the movie itself — is highly imperfect (in particular, in how it resolves the affair she's having with a married professor), her sense of liberation isn't. Tree doesn't make it to the end of Happy Death Day because she's somehow unspoiled or because she learns to clean up her act, but because she frees herself from the highly regimented persona she was using as armor. She's not good, but maybe she's better — and that's the kind of final girl revamp worth rooting for.

Michael Fassbender in The Snowman.

Universal Pictures

The Snowman is made up of all the right parts. The cast, which includes Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and J.K. Simmons, is first-rate. The source material is an acclaimed best-selling Norwegian mystery novel. The story is the kind of brainy serial killer tale that's oh so hot right now. The filmmaker, Tomas Alfredson, is the guy responsible for the stunning vampire coming-of-age saga Let the Right One In and the moody espionage drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. But, somehow, the movie itself is an inept misfire — the kind of entrancing train wreck that makes you long for a behind-the-scene tell-all to explain what, exactly, went so wrong. The selections below are just a sampling of what transpires in the most incoherent yet accidentally adorable serial-killer mystery ever.

1. Michael Fassbender plays a detective named Harry Hole. To be fair, it's not nearly as hilarious a name in Norwegian — here is the author of the acclaimed Harry Hole books, Jo Nesbo, pronouncing it as intended, with two syllables. But for reasons unknown and unfathomable, in making a movie that's in English but retains the Oslo setting, the team behind The Snowman decided to have everyone onscreen pronounce it to rhyme with "soul," making "Harry Hole" sound like the pseudonym of an adult film star who has a unique sense of humor and an anti-waxing preference. All sorts of should-be innocuous moments, like the one in which a character thunders about "the great Harry Hole," get transformed into punchlines.

2. Someone talks about a visit to "a pregnancy doctor." It's just one example of the kind of elegant, naturalistic phrasing that makes the film occasionally sound like its script was run through an outdated version of Google Translate.

Universal Pictures

3. The snowmen are just too adorable to be scary. Those "Mister Police" ads went viral for a reason, and it wasn't because the childlike writing and the doodle at the bottom were so inherently chilling. What is remarkable about the baddie's motif of choice is how cute the snowy figures remain despite all the movie's strenuous attempts to portray them as sinister. Ominous music swells as a victim sees, out her window, that a snowman's been built facing her house — and it looks absolutely delightful. The camera cuts forbiddingly to the grimacing snowman positioned near a gruesome discovery — and it feels like a wacky reaction shot.

4. People get their skulls shattered with a shotgun — twice. You've got to balance out all that winsome snowman imagery, after all. Much of the film's violence involves the mechanized garrote the killer uses to lop off body parts, but The Snowman is also so fond of the image of someone's head being blown to bits by a shotgun blast (something the Netflix series Mindhunter also recently featured) that it depicts the results twice. It's disturbingly gross, even in duplicate, but also notable for feeling like the setup to a shot that's featured prominently in the trailer (see below) but never in the final film. That would be the shot of a body with a snowman head, which, honestly, for reasons of aforementioned unintentional adorability, was probably better left on the cutting room floor.

Universal Pictures / Via youtube.com

5. Chloë Sevigny is in the movie for like five minutes. But what minutes! She slaughters chickens in a shed, delivers a few lines with an accent no one else is attempting, gets brutally beheaded, and then reappears because, it turns out, she's playing twins.

6. Harry proves himself to be Scandinavia's worst legendary detective. The Snowman is based on the seventh novel in Nesbo's series, after Harry's had time to establish his bona fides. Everyone onscreen affirms the main character's record, but all we get to see is a guy who doesn't even notice when the killer turns up in his apartment in disguise, playing the same music that was on at the last crime scene. Director Tomas Alfredson has freely admitted that he didn't have enough time to film the entire script and that "when we started cutting we discovered that a lot was missing" — which explains why an already convoluted story ends up nigh impossible to follow onscreen, Harry's motivations from scene to scene as opaque as the mystery.

7. Harry also proves himself to be Scandinavia's worst paternal substitute. Like many a brilliant fictional detective, Harry's personal life is a garbage fire — he's an alcoholic, and he has a complicated relationship with the ex, Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who cares about him but has moved on to someone more reliable. But it's her teenage son, Oleg (Michael Yates), who becomes an accidentally funny symbol for Harry's disastrousness. Harry tries to maintain a stepfatherly relationship with Oleg, but keeps forgetting or flaking on their plans. And because we know nothing else about Oleg except that he's continually getting bailed on, the kid becomes a kind of slump-shouldered Charlie Brown caricature constantly trudging away, dejected, after being abandoned once again.

Fassbender and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Universal Pictures

8. Rebecca Ferguson attempts to sneakily film someone with the world's most obvious camera. Early in the movie, we learn that the Oslo police are employing a new video system that syncs up every 12 hours with a central database. The cameras they're supposed to use are, inexplicably, the size of small briefcases, making the scene in which Ferguson's junior officer tries to surreptitiously plant hers in a bookshelf the stuff of comedy.

9. Val Kilmer appears in the movie, but his voice maybe...does not? Kilmer confirmed, in a Reddit AMA five months ago, that following "a healing of cancer," his tongue has been swollen and he didn't yet sound like himself. Perhaps due to that illness, in The Snowman it sure sounds like he's been fully dubbed over. But that's when he gets to talk at all — it's handled so clumsily, with the film attempting to cut around and disguise the moments when he speaks, that his appearances in a few flashbacks acquire a Twin Peaks–like strangeness. It's most marked during a sequence that contorts itself in order to have him arrive at a crime scene, acknowledge a colleague, and discover a body without saying a word.

Val Kilmer

Universal Pictures

10. Fassbender runs right out into the open during the big showdown, bellows "Come on, I'm ready," and promptly gets shot. By that point, it makes as much sense as anything else that's happened.

11. The credits roll and reveal all the incredibly gifted people who worked on this mess. The Snowman is executive-produced by no less than Martin Scorsese, who was, for a while, attached to direct. Three-time Academy Award winner Thelma Schoonmaker was one of the editors. The sometimes striking cinematography comes from Dion Beebe, who's an Oscar winner himself, having shot Chicago and Edge of Tomorrow and Memoirs of a Geisha. In some alternate universe, there's a good version of The Snowman garnering awards talk — but not this one.

Clockwise from bottom left: A24 (3), Focus Features, Neon, Sony Pictures Classics, STX Entertainment, Fox Searchlight (2), Netflix, Lionsgate, Universal Pictures, Roadside Attractions

By this point last year, everyone pretty much agreed that La La Land, a delightful, Hollywood-flattering musical, was the frontrunner to win Best Picture — whereas the passionately beloved Moonlight was too artsy, too gay, and too black to actually win. We all know how that turned out. This year, either out of penance, kismet, or some combination of the two, no single film — nor even a tight triad — has emerged as the Oscar favorite or favorites. The field is blissfully wide open.

Which is fine! Wildly speculative odds-making is part of the great fun of the Academy Awards. But if a movie's awards chances become the only conversation about it, then its genuine, ineffable pleasures risk transforming into the film geek equivalent of sports stats, dryly predicting that movie’s chances of winning the race to an Oscar. We stop talking about why the movie is good, and instead only obsess over why it could win.

So bear that all in mind when regarding this year's crop of movies at the center and periphery of the "awards conversation." These films have either won over audiences and critics in theaters, earned praise at the Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Telluride, Venice, Toronto, and New York film festivals, generated genuine buzz in advance press screenings, or garnered awards-y attention based purely on the prestige of the people making them without having screened for anyone else. Some of these movies may go on to win all kinds of awards, while others may be ignored entirely only to emerge years later as 2017's Groundhog Day or Harold and Maude. And they are all for your consideration as feature films unto themselves. —Adam B. Vary

Movies that have opened:

1. Get Out

Universal Pictures

Feature films generally have a hard time being responsive to current events, given the years-long process from inception to release. For whatever reason, that does not seem to be the case this year! The first of many examples is Get Out. Since it premiered in February, writer-director Jordan Peele's galvanizing social thriller has only grown more trenchant in the wake of the white supremacist marches at Charlottesville, and President Trump's criticism of NFL players protesting police shooting unarmed black men. (Not to mention a cheerless handful of other events, too.) It is rare for a film steeped in the tropes of horror movies to earn awards attention, let alone one that debuted at the start of the year, but Get Out's blistering timeliness — not to mention its superlative box office — should drive more examination its way. Consider that the last horror movie to win Best Picture, 1991's The Silence of the Lambs, also opened in February. —A.B.V.

Release date: Feb. 24

2. Wonder Woman

Clay Enos / Warner Bros. Pictures

There was a time when blockbuster movies that earned their massive popularity by capturing the country's imagination — movies like The Exorcist, Star Wars, Ghost, The Fugitive, and The Sixth Sense — also became major Oscar contenders. None of them, however, were superhero movies, one of the last genres to have never earned a Best Picture nomination. Which makes Warner Bros.' reported commitment to doing a full awards campaign for Wonder Woman even more unusual. But if there's anything the last few years have taught us, it's that past performance has less and less bearing on future outcomes at the Oscars. Wonder Woman also tapped into a powerful cultural need, not only breaking box office records but speaking directly to audiences hungry for a female hero driven by goodness and love. And as the industry works through an unprecedented conversation about sexual violence and harassment, Wonder Woman’s message could resonate even more. —A.B.V.

Release date: June 2

3. Beatriz at Dinner

Lacey Terrell / Roadside Attractions

In another movie that benefits enormously from the fraught times we live in, Salma Hayek plays the titular Beatriz, a masseuse and healer who ends up at a high-class, high-stakes dinner party celebrating a Trump-like real estate mogul played by John Lithgow. Because writer Mike White (School of Rock) and director Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl) keep the inevitable collision between these two characters grounded in realism (for most of the film, anyway), the movie ends up feeling like a chamber piece — you could easily see White adapting this for the stage. What lingers long after the film’s rather controversial ending are two of the most memorable performances of the year from Hayek and Lithgow, who deliver deft and nuanced work as two radically different souls forced to comprehend each other. —A.B.V.

Release date: June 9

4. The Big Sick

Nicole Rivelli / Amazon Studios and Lionsgate

The Big Sick was a word-of-mouth sensation over the summer. The romantic comedy is based on the real medical calamity that brought now-married screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani (who stars as a version of himself) and Emily V. Gordon (played by Zoe Kazan) together. With strong supporting performances from Holly Hunter and Ray Romano as Emily's parents, it provided the kind of "I laughed, I cried" gratification that studio films have largely abdicated in pursuit of franchise bombast. A smart awards campaign by Lionsgate — which had three Best Picture nominees last year in La La Land, Hacksaw Ridge, and Hell or High Water — could easily make this film a major nominee. —A.B.V.

Release date: June 23

5. Dunkirk

Warner Bros. Pictures

The British army's miraculous escape from the Nazi forces surrounding them at the small French seaside town of Dunkirk was one of the most critical moments of World War II. It's tailor-made to be retold straightforwardly as a classic Hollywood motion picture. Instead, writer-director Christopher Nolan marshaled just about every filmmaking technique in his arsenal to make, essentially, an art film about the event, using a time-fractured triptych of stories that studiously avoids traditional movie tropes like, you know, a central main character. The result is as stirring and astonishing as anything Nolan has made, and it has every chance of finally earning the god of movie geeks his first Oscar nomination for Best Director. —A.B.V.

Release date: July 21

6. Detroit

Francois Duhamel / Annapurna Pictures

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal both won Oscars and wide acclaim for their gritty, gripping journalistic approach to the Iraq War in 2009's The Hurt Locker. But when they used those same techniques to depict the Detroit riots of 1967 — specifically how three black teenagers were killed by white police officers in the Algiers Motel — Bigelow and Boal were criticized for treating brutal, racialized violence as an opportunity for virtuosic filmmaking. Producer Megan Ellison used Detroit to launch her company Annapurna Pictures as a bona fide indie studio, and there are few people with better Oscar track records this decade than she has. Still, while Detroit is an expertly made and well-acted film about a terribly important subject, it is also a grueling experience to sit through, and Academy voters may simply choose not to. —A.B.V.

Release date: July 28

7. First They Killed My Father

Netflix

Here's another high-profile film about a real event that was slammed for its seemingly tone-deaf approach. In this case, a profile of Angelina Jolie in Vanity Fair suggested that the production for her fourth film as a director tricked young Cambodian children into taking money they thought was real, which Jolie said later was a "false and upsetting" mischaracterization of the audition process.

That controversy nearly overshadowed the film, which has earned Jolie by far the best reviews of her directorial career. BuzzFeed News' Alison Willmore praised her "experiential" approach to telling the story of the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from the perspective of a child (Sareum Srey Moch). "The film is freed from having to explain the whys of what's happening," she wrote, "allowing it to be an act of sensory overload, a rush of unsettling images." First They Killed My Father even qualified as Cambodia's entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Ironically, the biggest hurdle for this film's awards prospects may not end up being the casting controversy or its challenging subject matter, but the fact that it was released by Netflix, a disruptive force in the movie industry that the Academy has been reluctant to honor. (More on this later.) —A.B.V.

Release date: Sept. 15

8. Stronger

Roadside Attractions

For four consecutive years now, Jake Gyllenhaal has delivered go-for-broke performances — in 2013's Prisoners, 2014's Nightcrawler, 2015's Southpaw, and 2016's Nocturnal Animals — that impress and surprise, and ultimately get overlooked by the Academy. In his latest film, Stronger, Gyllenhaal plays Jeff Bauman, who lost his legs in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and he commits to depicting the waves of anguish and self-pity that buffeted Bauman as he struggled to recover. Whether the Academy will overlook Gyllenhaal once again remains to be seen, but voters (and audiences) should at least also take a long look at Tatiana Maslany's equally striking performance as Bauman's on-again, off-again girlfriend, Erin Hurley. —A.B.V.

Release date: Sept. 22

9. Battle of the Sexes

Melinda Sue Gordon / Fox Searchlight Pictures

Yet another weirdly relevant movie! This one is about the media circus around the exhibition tennis match between feminist pioneer Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and self-styled male chauvinist Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell). Directed by Little Miss Sunshine's Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, Battle of the Sexes is also a personal examination of King's sexual awakening with her hairdresser (Andrea Riseborough), as well as a portrait of how Riggs' gambling obsession and stiflingly wealthy wife (Elisabeth Shue) drove him to reclaim the spotlight by any means necessary. It's about a lot of things, this movie, which may be one of the reasons why its box office has been so tepid. But Stone and Carell's strong performances, and the film's impressive attention to detail, may win over Academy voters in not-so-straight sets. (I’m sorry.) —A.B.V.

Release date: Sept. 22

10. The Florida Project

Marc Schmidt / A24

Director Sean Baker's last film Tangerine was one of the genuine delights of 2015, bringing an eye-popping beauty to the often disregarded world of trans sex workers in Los Angeles. His follow-up, The Florida Project, also cowritten with Tangerine's Chris Bergoch, focuses a similarly stunning gaze on the down-and-out lives of Halley (Bria Vinaite), a young ex-con, and her 6-year-old daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince). They live week-to-week in a motel just miles from Disney World that's become the last rung before homelessness for many of its tenants. The motel’s manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) becomes a kind of surrogate father figure for both Halley and Moonee, but the film’s lasting power comes from its clear-eyed understanding of how the wonder and recklessness of childhood can cut both ways. —A.B.V.

Release date: Oct. 6

11. Blade Runner 2049

Warner Bros. Pictures

For the second year in a row, director Denis Villeneuve has delivered a prestige sci-fi movie suffused with astonishing visuals and a hypnotic examination of the very nature of existence. Unlike Arrival, however, Blade Runner 2049 divided critics, some reveling in its outrageously stunning cinematography (courtesy of perpetual Oscar also-ran Roger Deakins), some frustrated by its glacial pace and skin-deep characters. All it takes to do well at the Oscars, however, is a core group of passionate voters — and given the film’s vast technical achievements, it is certainly likely to earn more than the two nominations the 1982 original did (Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects). —A.B.V.

Release date: Oct. 6

12. Marshall

Barry Wetcher / Open Road Films

Steve (Joe Keery) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) go demo-dog hunting in Stranger Things 2.

Netflix

Stranger Things made Eggos into a meme and the most essential Halloween accessory of the past two years. It reintroduced the world to the wonders of the defunct Farrah Fawcett Fabergé Organics hair-care line, an array of products it could now probably resurrect as merch. It offered up the case for Dungeons & Dragons as not just a role-playing game, but a useful analogy for decoding the impending apocalypse. Yet the biggest brand refresh the Duffer brothers' Netflix series has attempted isn’t on behalf of a product, but rather a group of people. For two seasons now, Stranger Things has been an ongoing venture to rehabilitate the nerd.

Bringing our culture back to an understanding of nerds as underdogs that everyone can root for is no small achievement in 2017, when the concept of the nerd has become so ascendant as to barely be a meaningful identity anymore, and simultaneously so toxic that the resentful gatekeepers of nerdom who remain are more likely to be associated with doxxing and death threats than with, say, the superhero movies that everyone watches. Between GamerGate, the annual onslaught of angry “Puppies” determined to hijack the Hugo Awards, the James Damore memo, and the endless plethora of online rants about SJWs ruining the world, the connotations of modern-day nerdiness have more to do with persecution complexes and bullying than being socially rejected or bullied.

In returning us to a simpler time, when an all-encompassing obsession with sci-fi and fantasy was still something that could get you thrown into a locker, Stranger Things provides a form of escapism that has nothing to do with alternate dimensions. It invites viewers to indulge in the sweet self-righteousness that can come with getting excluded for being uncool. That's a delicate, dicey feat that the series mostly managed to pull off in its first season. But in its second, there’s significantly more present-day baggage weighing it down.

Dustin, Mike, Lucas, and Will go trick-or-treating.

Jackson Lee Davis / Netflix

Jocks rule and nerds drool in the fictional '80s of Hawkins, Indiana. Stranger Things is awash with longing for the way a shared love of unhip things (like Tolkien and dressing up as Ghostbusters) can be a badge of honor and a secret language among its main characters, but also — in a way that feels a little perverse — nostalgic for the straightforward injustice of being derided because of that love. This worked best when it focused on the intense bond between Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and the missing Will (Noah Schnapp), depicting them as friends so close that they lived in their own slightly tweaked reality. It wasn't just the closed world of relatively unsupervised kids, but one that primed them to believe in, and gave them vocabulary to understand, the monster other characters take longer to come around on.

And it was a world that was, at least in its first season, aimed to feel intimate while also being earnestly welcoming. The strangest thing about Stranger Things is that it's a mainstream show that looks back fondly to a time when something like it would be hopelessly niche. In 2017, most of the series’ unapologetic throwback movie references aren't obscure at all — from Jurassic Park to E.T. to Gremlins to Firestarter to It, the show’s bar for entry in spotting homages is set intentionally, invitingly low. It's able to generate an atmosphere that's as cozy as it is creepy because it's bent on welcoming everyone into its band of outsiders.

At least, that's the idea. But it’s telling that the Duffers underestimated the degree to which viewers would latch on to Barb (Shannon Purser), who became a runaway internet favorite based on very little screentime. Poor, doomed Barb — sitting by herself on that diving board in her mom fashions while the popular kids canoodled inside — emerged as a poignant, acutely relatable figure for anyone who's ever been left behind by a friend's changing social status. The short shrift given to her death, especially when compared to the seemingly communitywide search for Will, was evidence that while she, like the main kids, was an outcast, she was not the right kind of outcast — or at least not the kind of outcast the series' creators thought anyone would be invested in. The second season worked hard to enact justice for Barb, delving into Nancy's (Natalia Dyer) guilt over her best friend's death and introducing Barb's parents and their grief-stricken search for closure. But there are other new, even bigger fractures in the bubble of inclusive outsiderness the show has struggled to maintain.

Max, Lucas, Mike, Will, and Dustin at the Snow Ball.

Netflix

Puberty turned out to be an even more trying antagonist than the evil entity looming large on the horizon of the Upside Down. The monster merely wanted to take over and destroy the world as the characters knew it. Puberty, far more pernicious, sent the show drifting back toward retrograde gender norms and character patterns it had previously managed to avoid, ones in which the (male) nerd always gets rewarded with romance. It's a stereotype the series initially subverted in its sweet central relationship of Mike and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), because Eleven wasn't just the girl, she was also the creature — a dynamic that was genuinely unpredictable, and sometimes (like when she broke the arm of that bully in Season 1) unsettling, as if the kid in The Iron Giant somehow ended up dating the robot.

But the second season ended with a series of pairings off at the Snow Ball that felt a lot more traditional — a blithely heteronormative happy ending that also came depressingly close to presenting romance as recompense for its characters’ heroism. Mike and Eleven were dramatically reunited, and Lucas got a slow dance and a kiss of his own with new arrival Max (Sadie Sink). Sink, who is 15, said she felt uncomfortable about shooting the kiss, which wasn’t originally in the script — a fact that apparently only made the Duffers more eager to include it. Dustin, left on the wrong end of that love triangle, instead scored a dance with Nancy, who assured him that eventually he'd be a ladykiller. "Girls this age are...dumb," she advised. "But give them a few years and they'll wise up. You're going to drive them nuts." Even Will — bowl cut, recently possessed pallor and all — ended up sharing an at-arm's-length shuffle with some unnamed partner.

What's jarring here isn’t so much the sudden onset of puppy love between characters who were strongly coded as children last year (that’s middle school for you) but rather the one-sided neatness of it. It feels like the narrative’s concern is distributing kisses and reassurances of desirability to its young men — the romantic affirmation they apparently “deserve” after their trials and tribulations — rather than dealing with all of its characters evenhandedly.

To watch Season 2 of Stranger Things through its end is to watch signs of present-day cultural toxicity approach like shark fins poking out of the water. Eleven and Max get left with the tension between them unresolved, as if there's only room for one token female in the party and they'll have to vie for the spot. Mike fake-geek-girls Max when she suggests her role in the group can be that of the non-D&D-approved "zoomer." And Dustin walks away with the message that eventually women will wise up and throw themselves at his more deserving feet, a pernicious assurance that can blossom into ugly, unfounded entitlement.

Nancy and Jonathan visit with Murray.

Netflix

And why wouldn't he take it to heart, when it's an expectation the series also underscores in the relationships of its older characters? Before Bob (Sean Astin) meets his gruesome end, his romance with Joyce (Winona Ryder) serves as a middle-aged fulfillment of Nancy’s prophecy, proving that the onetime founder of the Hawkins AV Club can eventually attain the girl he crushed on from afar as a teen. Nancy herself drifts into the arms of the dreary Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), not out of any evident attraction but because she seems to eventually surrender to the idea that it's her narrative destiny, as someone caught between the prom king and the moody loner.

When investigator–conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman) rather creepily engineers the inevitable Jonathan-Nancy hookup midway through the season, it feels like these problems with the season are getting conveniently restaged in miniature, storylines driven by the creators' sense of obligation rather than the characters themselves. Nancy turns to Jonathan just when it makes the least sense, just as her soon-to-be-former boyfriend Steve (Joe Keery) is completing his unexpected transformation from luxuriant-maned jerk to stealth hero of the second season, becoming a chaperone, protector, and source of advice to some of the younger characters. It's not just that we don't see why Nancy is drawn to Jonathan; it's that Steve has become so much more interesting.

The fact that Keery was promoted to series regular in the second season after winning over fans in the first would seem to suggest that the Duffers have a better grasp on Steve's appeal than they ever did on Barb’s. Steve atones for his past misdeeds, changes his priorities, and, when the time comes, allows Nancy to break his heart without putting up a fight. And it’s noticeable that he shifts in more significant ways than any of the other characters, most of whom don't feel like they've been maturing so much as coming around to the spots already marked out for them.

That Steve is the only figure who defies his preordained type speaks to how central types are to Stranger Things — and in this season, to an extent that feels constrictive. The trouble with insisting that it’s the nice guy who ultimately gets the girl is that it relieves the nice guy of any need to change; he can just wait for the world, and the girl, to catch up with him. Stranger Things may have set out to rehab the nerd, but it's losing sight of the fact that we're all nerds now, and no one gets excused from having to grow up. ●

Rose Byrne and Louis C.K. in I Love You, Daddy.

The Orchard

Louis C.K.'s I Love You, Daddy was already the world's most terribly timed movie. It's a would-be provocative comedy about how a man's Woody Allen–esque hero starts pursuing his 17-year-old daughter — and was, at the time of writing, still scheduled to open right in the middle of our current maelstrom of stories about decades of Hollywood predation. In the wake of Thursday's New York Times report on C.K.'s own long-rumored sexual misconduct, in which multiple women accuse the comedian of forcing them to watch or listen to him masturbate without their consent, The Orchard announced that it was canceling the release. It's a film, however, that should never have come out at all, unless it was going to be used as a primer for how conversations about power and consent get mishandled, muddied, and ultimately used to excuse or obscure abusive behavior.

In the movie, C.K. plays a successful but no-longer-on-his-game television producer named Glen Topher. John Malkovich is Leslie Goodwin, a revered 68-year-old director, unapologetic luster after teenage girls, and rumored child molester. If that doesn't make clear that he's intended to be a Woody Allen stand-in, then the reverence with which C.K.'s character treats him should. "He's a great artist! Probably the best writer-filmmaker of the last 30 years or more," he yelps when his daughter, China (Chloë Grace Moretz), brings up Goodwin's reputed pedophilia and known track record with much younger lovers.

Then he scolds her for judging someone on the basis of what she's heard rather than what she can know for sure. "His private life, that's not anybody's business," Glen says, in a variation on a familiar, nauseating rationale that people have used to defend their problematic (right up through potentially criminal) faves for time eternal. It's a rationale C.K. has employed on his own behalf, dismissing talk of his own then-only-rumored misconduct in the New York Times in September by saying, "If you actually participate in a rumor, you make it bigger and you make it real." He went on to say, "The uncomfortable truth is, you never really know. ... To me, if there was one thing this movie is about, it’s that you don’t know anybody."

John Malkovich and Chloë Grace Moretz.

The Orchard

Given those "rumors" about C.K. — and the "rumors" that also swirled around Weinstein and Brett Ratner and Kevin Spacey and others before victims recently came forward to confirm allegations to the press — the astonishing convenience of this stance is galling. (As is the way the film coyly winks at the stories about C.K. by having a character mime jerking off in a room with his coworkers.) You "never really know" only if you're willing to consign accusations of sexual misconduct to the realm of gossip and hearsay, to pretend these stories get whispered about only because no one's sure if they're true, rather than because the consequences of speaking up can be so punitive.

As the post-Weinstein fallout consumes Hollywood, spreads through other industries, and provides hope that we may be headed toward actual (maybe) systemic (maybe) change, I Love You, Daddy isn't just tone-deaf. It's stunningly hubristic, pushing an argument that's been used to silence people for decades. And it unfolds entirely within what now feels like a very telling blind spot for its writer, director, and star, in which the answer to questions about consent is inevitably an alarming "it's complicated.”

I Love You, Daddy is the first movie C.K. has directed since Pootie Tang in 2001. In the years since, he's built up a career as one of the most respected stand-ups in the business; created Louie, an acclaimed, uneven FX show that helped spark a slew of other raw, form-pushing dramedies like Atlanta and Master of None; and self-funded Horace and Pete, an impossible to describe play-as-TV-drama-as-web-series that featured some genuinely great writing and acting. C.K. casts himself in the role of an industry hack in I Love You, Daddy, but as a real-life creator, he's been self-funding his projects in order to make them without outside interference. All of which makes the film more enraging and disappointing, coming after so much work that's grappled with other risky subject matter with empathy and humanity.

I Love You, Daddy is basically "As the Father of a Daughter": The Movie.

But he's been dicey on the topics of sexual violence and coercion before. In Season 4 of Louie, his character pushes himself on a resistant Pamela, played by longtime collaborator Pamela Adlon (who also appears in the new movie). During the ensuing struggle she snaps, "This would be rape if you weren’t so stupid!" And C.K. has talked about male violence against women in his stand-up, but when he's intentionally portrayed sexual coercion onscreen in the show, he's tended to role-reverse, allowing himself to get forced into oral sex by Melissa Leo or dressed in makeup and penetrated by Adlon. Given that he comes out of these encounters asking to see these women again, these scenes seem more intent on his character's humiliation than on showing any degree of understanding regarding consent.

I Love You, Daddy doesn't just continue to muddy the waters around those issues. It is in itself an example of a powerful comedian proving himself incapable of confronting the transgressions of another man in the industry he admires. Which isn't remotely surprising — in the Times article about C.K., estranged collaborator Tig Notaro goes on the record, but none of C.K.'s male colleagues do. Allen's a formative influence for many comedians, and he's clearly one for C.K., who's acted in one of Allen's movies and who includes multiple homages to Allen's Manhattan in I Love You, Daddy. But after raising the possibility of the sexual assault of a child, the film swerves to focus instead on the gray areas surrounding older men who try to sleep with teenage girls. It's a deflection that's crushing, not just because C.K. chooses not to confront the possible misdeeds of another powerful male comedian, but because he opts instead to pick and choose from the rumors, then argue that maybe some of these troubling choices aren't all that bad.

To describe this as an unasked-for argument would be putting it lightly. Yet the film makes it nonetheless, by sidelining the rumors of Goodwin’s pedophilia (something that even the noncommittal Glen can't rationalize away) as a “really personal story” Goodwin promises to explain over drinks. As Goodwin is shown grooming China, accompanying her as she tries on bikinis at a department store and taking her to Paris, Glen hovers indecisively, wanting to put a stop to what's happening but unwilling to put his foot down and confront either his doted-on child or the artist he so admires.

C.K. as Glen Topher

The Orchard

It's "As the Father of a Daughter": The Movie, but C.K. isn't interested in exploring and critiquing the mindset of men whose empathy for women seems entirely dependent on being a parent to one. In lieu of that, he makes a woman, his love interest Grace (Rose Byrne), present talking points about sexual maturity and why what he suspects is happening between Goodwin and his daughter might not be so bad. These are words C.K. clearly feels too uncomfortable having Glen speak; Grace shoulders the unmanageable burden of defending why teenagers should be able to have sex with adults while Glen halfheartedly recites reasons why it's wrong. She's positioned as the sophisticated third-wave feminist actor to his agency-denying rube, whom she scolds for describing the relationship she had as a teenager with a fiftysomething as rape. "So when a girl does feel lust and desire, then she's got to be with a fucking boy?" she snaps.

It's a conversation the movie presents as reasonable, when it's actually queasy and dangerous. C.K. wants to present sex and attraction as things that are too messy for broad rules or generalizations. But it's impossible to do that if you're also going to willfully ignore or remain oblivious to the central issue — how the massive power imbalance innate to this kind of relationship makes it ripe for abuse, the way power imbalances enabled and protected abuse in all of the stories currently spilling out of Hollywood at the moment. It's Adlon — tasked as she so often is in C.K’s work with being the voice of reason and sanity — who comes in as Glen's salty ex-girlfriend, socks him in the arm, and tells him he has to take action, even if it makes China hate him. In doing so, she provides C.K. with an escape hatch. He's able to turn the movie into one about his character's personal failings, rather than follow through on the incredibly troubling arguments he raises and then runs away from.

C.K. and Moretz.

The Orchard

Woody Allen, like the character Leslie Goodwin, was accused but not charged of sexually abusing a child. His alleged victim was his then 7-year-old adopted daughter by then-partner Mia Farrow. Dylan Farrow reiterated the allegations in 2014, mincing no words in calling out those who continue to work with and support Allen, writing that "Woody Allen is a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse."

Allen has, of course, continued to work anyway, becoming an enduring symbol of Hollywood’s ability — up to this point — to treat sexual misconduct allegations as a mere inconvenience. He continued to work after marrying another of Mia Farrow's adopted children, a woman who is 35 years his junior, whom he met when he was dating Farrow (a relationship that caused a scandal, but wasn't illegal). The same can be said for the relationship between Allen’s 42-year-old character Isaac Davis and the 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) in Manhattan, traces of which — from the New York City setting to the black-and-white cinematography down to the fact that China is the same age as Tracy — are all over I Love You, Daddy. (Times have changed, but Allen's attempts to normalize these relationships continue with the film he just finished shooting, A Rainy Day in New York, which reportedly features a sexual relationship between characters played by Jude Law, 44, and 19-year-old Elle Fanning.)

Kristen Stewart and Woody Allen at Cannes in 2016.

Anne-christine Poujoulat / AFP / Getty Images

Hemingway herself was 18 when Allen tried to whisk her off to Paris the way Goodwin (Malkovich) does with China (Moretz) in I Love You, Daddy. Unlike China, Hemingway chose not to go — in her 2015 memoir, Hemingway described turning him down over uncertainty about the sleeping arrangement, saying, "I'm not going to get my own room, am I? I can’t go to Paris with you." Who knows if C.K. was aware of this anecdote when writing I Love You, Daddy (he declined to comment for this piece; C.K. responded to the allegations in the Times story with a written statement in which he says "These stories are true.") — but it feels like something that could have informed his film, especially in the way Hemingway describes her parents reacting to Allen's offer. "I wanted them to put their foot down. They didn’t. They kept lightly encouraging me," she wrote.

C.K.'s insistence, in his own movie, on keeping the focus on parental permissiveness rather than the predatory nature of a decades-older celebrity trying to erode a teenager's boundaries enough to fuck her, serves as its own kind of normalization. And so I Love You, Daddy ends up being a tribute to Allen in ways C.K. probably never intended. "We’re at the bleeding edge of 'That’s not OK to do now,' but those people are still around," he told the Hollywood Reporter. "That’s a very interesting line to be on." He doesn't just let Allen off the hook — he lets himself off as well.

Pamela Adlon and C.K.

The Orchard

C.K. has described I Love You, Daddy, which he shot on the sly this summer, as a film he expected would piss some people off. But in light of C.K.'s alleged past behavior, and the fumbled apologies he reportedly made to some of his victims in the years since, the movie plays more like a stroke of self-immolation. It’s the work of a man who's been expecting consequences to come calling, and who decided to lean into the coming anger with a have-to-hear-all-sides affront that inadvertently echoes so many of the excuses and denials that men adjacent to or accused of misconduct have offered up in the past few weeks.

I Love You, Daddy is the work of a man who's been expecting consequences to come calling.

When Glen claims Goodwin's sex life is "not anybody's business," it mirrors what Matt Damon recently said about the allegations surrounding Harvey Weinstein to ABC News, painting him as a “womanizer” rather than an abuser. "I wouldn’t want to be married to the guy," Damon said. "But that’s none of my business, really." And when the movie skirts over the possible assault of a child in favor of steering the conversation toward the morality of May-December relationships, it brings to mind Kevin Spacey's attempt to pivot away from Anthony Rapp's allegations of being assaulted while underage by coming out.

And when Glen, at a dark moment, offers a broad repentance to all the ladies in his life, it lines up eerily with the way the tech industry's Robert Scoble denied sexual misconduct allegations made against him in October while writing, "I apologize to women in general that I could have been a better man and husband." C.K’s Glen blurts out a more impulsive "I'm sorry! I'm sorry, women. Please, on behalf of all women, please let you all know that I am very fucking sorry." It's meant to be a joke, the low point for a man who feels like he's been unable to live up to anyone's personal or professional expectations. But it ends up turning an unwillingness to take a stand on sexual misconduct as just another one of Glen's foibles.

You know, no big deal, just another flaw on par with how he's no longer a good writer, or how he dumps all his work onto his long-suffering producing partner. It's narcissism in the guise of self-criticism, his character talking around these huge issues of consent and maturity and in the end only delivering a song of himself. C.K., for all his other insight, proves himself incapable of wrapping his head around the sexual and professional power dynamics that he thinks he's exploring, but that doesn't stop him from feeling comfortable commenting on them. Or from suggesting that the what-the-hell moral of the film, delivered (of course) by another teenage girl, is that "Everybody's a pervert. I'm a pervert, we're all perverts, who cares." Turns out, people are starting to care a lot. ●

Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox

There are better movies in 2017 than Martin McDonagh's dark comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but no performance this year has felt more rawly resonant than Frances McDormand's turn as its caustic heroine, Mildred Hayes. You could put Mildred on a T-shirt, layering her scowling face over selected quotes from the ever-growing mountain of inadequate apologies from disgraced men. You could make her into a meme: Here’s Mildred in the pair of no-fucks-to-give coveralls she wears everywhere, except to bed, as she firebombs government buildings, kicks sniggering high schoolers in the crotch, and takes out a series of unignorable ads about how the rape and murder of her teenage daughter remains unsolved.

Mildred, whom McDormand plays with a resplendent wrath and heartsick grief, is perfectly positioned to be the fictional patron saint of our current cultural moment. She is a woman who refuses to let the act of brutal sexual violence that tore her family apart be forgotten, to let it slide into the realm of regrettable but normalized tragedy. She insists on writing what happened in 20-foot-high type: "RAPED WHILE DYING. STILL NO ARRESTS. HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY?" Her singularly feminine rage glows so brightly that you could hold your hands up to the screen and warm yourself by its furious glow. Anger is destroying her life, but it's also liberated her in a way that — on the heels of the first year of the Trump presidency and the continuing, Weinstein-fueled revelations of harassment and assault — is incredibly cathartic.

McDonagh, who wrote the part of Mildred eight years ago with McDormand in mind, has stumbled into something that reverberates deeply with 2017’s discourse about sexism — a tale of a small-town crime and cops that gets at what happens when a society runs out of patience for female pain. But while Three Billboards gets at something bitterly real in showing the turn that takes place when a woman's outrage becomes genuinely inconvenient for the powers that be, there's a less laudable way in which it also feels timely. The film tells the story of a woman pushing back against the ingrained misogyny of her town, and props it up with a remarkably lukewarm treatment of anti-black police brutality. Three Billboards is so sharp when it comes to depicting Mildred’s pain, and yet so clumsy when it comes to depicting the habitual racism of the place in which she lives, that it feels indicative of the terrible fallacy that we can only focus on one type of oppression at once.

Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) meets with Mildred (McDormand)

Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox

If an inadvertent side effect of "the reckoning" over sexual harassment and assault has, in fact, been that a conversation about gender has in some ways subsumed that of race (or, as Jay-Z put it while addressing a young fan who's surely going to have to deal with both, "at this very moment America is way more sexist than they are racist"), then Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is the film of a moment in more ways than one. It forces you, as a viewer, to decide whether its desultory treatment of the black characters on the movie’s sidelines is worth tolerating in exchange for the satisfaction of its protagonist's burn-it-all-to-the-ground fury.

What the film gets right on all fronts is how power protects itself, via active threats but also through the unspoken push to maintain the status quo, to yield to the welfare of "good men." That's a very loaded term in the movie. Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), the head of the Ebbing police department and the person named on Mildred's billboards, is a "good man," as Mildred is reminded by her priest, and by the dentist who then tries to remove one of her teeth without anesthetic, and by Willoughby's threatening cop colleagues.

Based on what we see of the sheriff, the beloved boss and married father of two girls has a sardonic sense of humor and is likable enough, even if he’s not a candidate for sainthood. Willoughby also has terminal cancer, which gives him a grim emotional advantage over Mildred in the war she instigates. Her daughter is dead and gone, whereas Willoughby is actively dying. The film portrays, with painful precision, how little Mildred needs to do to lose the town's support, even as the mother of a murdered child. Their sympathies instinctively turn toward the prominent family man, the cop whose job it is to keep the peace (while turning a blind eye toward the occasional act of brutality committed by his employees).

The pressure to keep quiet about sexual misconduct and violence isn't just about protecting perpetrators; it's about not rocking the boat, not disrupting the structures that "good" folks benefit from the most, regardless of whether they're abusers themselves or blithely oblivious. It's not like the Ebbing community doesn't know exactly what happened to Mildred's daughter or considers it anything other than monstrous. But they're also writing off the crime as a deplorable but occasional consequence of living in the world — women get raped and murdered, especially when they go out alone. What can you do?

The only move Mildred feels she has, as time passes and attention fades, is to place a series of giant ads on a local road that offer a reminder in stark, clear terms. It's a revelation that comes with a price — not just because she can’t really afford the signs, but because she’s also reopening old wounds. She has to look at the billboards every day on her ride home; she can see them from her house. They are, in bright red with black text against the big blue sky, the movie's second most eloquent image, after McDormand's clenched jaw. They're how her high school–aged son Robbie (Lucas Hedges) learns the details of his sister's death, which he'd been trying to avoid.

Willoughby (Harrelson) and Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell) by one of the billboards

Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox

When Mildred takes out those ads, she also breaks an unspoken rule regarding who gets to speak out and who should be held accountable. Willoughby isn't the man who assaulted and murdered Mildred's daughter. But, as Mildred rightfully points out, the buck stops with him, as he’s the guy in charge. Yet this inconvenient truth causes everyone in town to recoil, her tragedy apparently only worthy of compassion until it threatens a prominent man. The ways in which the people of Ebbing form a protective layer around Willoughby provides an all-too-familiar demonstration of who instinctively gets public sympathy and how sexual violence gets smoothed over.

Mildred’s choices are not those of a "good woman," who'd presumably retreat from view, accepting the fate of her daughter as just a sad but unavoidable casualty. But being "good," in the film's parlance, doesn't seem to be available to Mildred in the same way it is to some of Ebbing's men. It seems to have nothing to do with kindness or moral forthrightness and everything to do with who deserves to be given second and third and fourth chances, and who gets shielded from consequences.

Mildred's ex-husband, Charlie (John Hawkes), was presumably also "good." He's a cop, and he used to abuse her, and in the one flashback in which we see Mildred's dead daughter Angela (Kathryn Newton) alive, the girl spits at her mother in the midst of an argument that "we've only got your word" on whether the beatings really happened. So Mildred has intimate experience with a "good” man and how his word gets taken over yours — even by your own kid — because his reality is more convenient. It makes the incensed act that kicks off the film all the more powerful because it's clearly a kamikaze move: the act of someone who knows that what she's doing will likely cost her her place in the community, and doesn't care.

The fictional Ebbing, Missouri, is a setting that's far afield for Martin McDonagh, who was born in London to Irish parents, and who was a four-time Tony-nominated playwright before he ventured into film (you can hear that in his dialogue, which is dense and determined to dazzle, sometimes at the expense of the characters tasked with delivering it). His 2008 directorial debut In Bruges was about Irish hitmen (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) trading profanely philosophical barbs while hiding out in a historical Belgian town. His self-referential 2012 follow-up Seven Psychopaths was set in the US, but had Farrell back as another Irishman, this time struggling to write a screenplay in Hollywood.

Dixon (Rockwell) confronts Mildred (McDormand)

Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox

But the characters in Three Billboards aren't visitors or transplants. They're spending their whole lives in Ebbing, and while the town may not be real, that area of the US certainly is. And Ebbing happens to be located in the same state where, three years ago, protests against police violence fueled an ongoing social movement after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

In striving to make Ebbing feel like a lived-in place, rather than just an idea of one, Three Billboards treats racism like it's just another quaint regional detail — part of the local decor. Here's the gift shop, here's the bar, and here's Officer Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), a violent, openly intolerant alcoholic who's rumored to have tortured a black man in his custody. That’s a claim the other characters don't deny so much as they defend on the basis of a lack of evidence. Dixon also gets declared a "good man," if there's any question of how little the term has to do with moral quality and how much it has to do with how many chances someone is given. Even Mildred herself is let off the hook for an assault she’s definitely committed. Dixon instead arrests Mildred's black friend and coworker Denise (Amanda Warren) for possession, to use her as leverage (seemingly her only function in the movie). His colleague congratulates him for coming up with the idea.

Dixon's behavior, and the way it's tolerated by others, is depicted with a matter-of-factness that's striking — but not nearly as striking as the disinterest the film has in actually engaging with that racism. It's a disinterest that becomes clearer as Dixon becomes increasingly central to the last act of the movie, eventually starting to reckon with his anger and his brutality, but never with his bigotry. He doesn't exactly end up redeemed, but while his character gets deepened and complicated and made miserable, there's no further discussion of his horrifying past.

Rockwell, who leans mesmerizingly into the character's sloppy self-loathing, has been getting Oscar talk since Three Billboards premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September. But as the movie has started to play to national audiences, the glowing critical acclaim it's racked up has been countered by other writers wondering why its flippancy — not just about racism, but about racist police brutality — hasn't gotten the same attention as its acting has. In letting Dixon's attitude skate by unchallenged, the film doesn't just turn a vague Darren Wilson figure into this sad clown. Instead, like the New York Times' much-criticized Nazi-next-door piece, it humanizes a hate-filled man without offering anything close to the same empathy to the people on the receiving end of that hate.

Mildred (McDormand) and James (Peter Dinklage)

Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox

McDonagh certainly finds proximity to prejudice useful, at least in his Tarantino-esque tendency to pepper his dialogue with slurs in order to take advantage of their transgressive heft. When Mildred taunts Dixon, she drops the n-word in her description of his history of violence, and it feels like it's there more so that McDonagh can try the term out than to give Dixon a chance to retort that "It's 'persons of color'-torturing business, these days, if you want to know."

"Retard," "faggot," "midget" (aimed at a long-suffering local played by Peter Dinklage, who infuses the part with a poignant dignity) — Three Billboards is peopled with characters who'd use these words without thinking twice. But McDonagh doesn't seem to have more than an abstract understanding of the impact this speech or the contemptuousness that spawned it can have. The word "cunt," on the other hand, becomes the spine of an intensely bittersweet set of scenes involving Mildred's relationship with her murdered daughter and living son. McDonagh seems to have no trouble comprehending that insult and the residual sting it carries, but he doesn't get why putting an air-quotes n-word in his heroine's mouth evokes the wrong kind of flinch. He has a solid grasp of how a woman can be dismissed as crazy, as a bitch. But when it comes to American racism, he's playing tourist.

Three Billboards' failures of intersectionality do as much to make it a fitting capper for this year as its incendiary female ire. It's a year that started with a presidential inauguration that was, to many, an admission of misogyny writ on a scale larger than any billboard. The election that led to that was (and still is being) messily relitigated by different factions of the left, each intent on deciding which demographic failed to show up, or showed up in the wrong way. The marches that followed were energizing — women united in a show of force and solidarity! Except for the participants of color who struggled to feel welcome. This year’s highest profile feminist fare in pop culture has been rolled out with much fanfare but little diversity, from the action-heavy but comfortably fantastical Wonder Woman to the dystopia of The Handmaid's Tale, whose scariness was matched only by how unconvincing its blithe post-racialism felt.

And then there was Harvey Weinstein, who didn't exclusively prey on white women, but whose downfall, it's hard not to feel, came about because of just how many famous white women had the courage to speak out against him. Sexual harassment and assault aren't experiences unique to white women in any sense, but it is apparently white women against whom it counts the most, and who have become the face of those fighting back against it. They've embraced public displays of anger in thrilling ways — like Uma Thurman, whose measured seething in an October Access Hollywood video went viral. At that moment, she could have been a sister in formalwear to Mildred, both of them ready to burn everything down. But while that is a rage that's exhilarating to witness, it's a rage that's not available to everyone. Just as not everyone in Ebbing can claim the protection of being considering "good," we still don’t live in a world where everyone gets to be angry. ●

Merrick Morton / Twentieth Century Fox

Clockwise from right: A Fantastic Woman, Get Out, Dunkirk, Your Name

Sony Classics/Universal/Warner Bros/Funimation

Why wouldn't a year that has had no use for subtlety end with the Los Angeles area literally going up in flames? After all, Hollywood has been on fire, figuratively, since the Harvey Weinstein story broke in early October, and since long-tolerated toxicity in the industry has suddenly, shockingly, and gratifyingly become something that comes with consequences.

This is a strange time to be a culture writer, for reasons that go beyond the sexual misconduct reckoning that has demanded everyone reconsider the relationship between artist and art. On one hand, the jittery, neverending rush of urgent political news means there are times at which writing about film and television can feel hopelessly frivolous, like fiddling while Ventura County burns. On the other, having a president who's a former reality TV star and who continues to take cues from the format can sometimes make pop culture seem like the only lens through which it makes sense to see current events.

Either way, when it comes to the movies, I haven't been in the mood for comfort. What's lingered with me have been the titles that are big and bold, either in theme or aesthetics or tone. There's a time for subtlety, and it isn't now.

11. The Post

Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep

20th Century Fox

Steven Spielberg's The Post is about the publishing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and the accompanying battles over freedom of the press, which means that it is both timely as fuck and very aware of that fact (it came together, was shot, and was completed within this year). But it doesn't start with the obvious outlet (the New York Times, which got the material first) or the obvious subjects (the reporters who broke the story). Instead, it focuses on Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), who never expected to find herself in control of her family's paper, and whose uncertainty about how to take a leadership role is exacerbated by how often she's the only woman in a room full of men (played by Tom Hanks, Bradley Whitford, Tracy Letts, and others) who have no hesitations about telling her what she should do.

She's not a radical or anachronistic heroine, but a product of her time, and she's someone whose job it is to care about the unsexy realities of the paper as a business, not a public good. It makes her eventual decision, which she stammers out during an impromptu conference call, inexpressibly rewarding, because it doesn't come easily. The risks she's taking have been made so clear. The sheer grown-upness with which Spielberg tells the story makes its occasional sentimentality endearing — including a shot of Graham outside a courthouse that should be intolerably cornball, but instead is irresistibly tear jerking.

10. A Fantastic Woman

Daniela Vega

Sony Pictures Classics

When Marina, a waitress and nightclub singer living in Santiago, learns of the unexpected death of her lover, a doting older man named Orlando (Francisco Reyes), any attempts to mourn him are cut short by the suspicion and hostility she immediately finds herself facing. The police quiz her about whether she's a sex worker and maybe a murderer. Orlando's son tries to take back the dog his father gifted to her. Orlando's ex-wife forbids her from attending the funeral, not wanting anyone to know that Orlando was in love with a trans woman.

It's a sustained blast of virulence that's grueling to sit through, but Sebastián Lelio's film isn't about intolerance — it is about Marina, played by first-timer Daniela Vega with the presence and infinite watchability of a classical Hollywood star. Marina is neither reduced to a victim nor simplified into a symbol over the course of the movie, and the hatred she contends with becomes another way for her to examine her own identity as others try to dismantle her sense of self. How she emerges, stronger and more certain, is a startlingly lyrical journey, an exploration of grief and introspection peppered with scenes of richly depicted magical realism.

9. Get Out

Lakeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya

Universal Pictures

It feels like a decade has passed since February, when Jordan Peele's directorial debut opened in theaters and went on to become one of the year's biggest cultural breakthroughs. Looking back on Get Out from the vantage point of December, what's striking about it is how funny it is (sorry, Golden Globes truthers) as well as how eerie. Peele's is a sharp, incisive film about liberal racism and supposed allies who are actually engaged in a very literal and gruesome appropriation of blackness. But it's also a deft, meticulously made horror comedy that doesn't waste a beat or a bit of imagery.

Even the throwaway anecdote Dean (Bradley Whitford) tells about how his father lost an Olympic slot to Jesse Owens lines up with that deeply unsettling late-night encounter Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) has with the house's caretaker, Walter (Marcus Henderson), though we don’t know it at first. The scene in which Rose (Allison Williams) challenges the cop who’s asking for her boyfriend's ID takes on a very different meaning by the end of the film. And that last glimpse of Rose provides a bleak but resonant parallel with the story Chris tells about his mother. The whole film comes together likes a power chord.

8. Raw

Garance Marillier

Focus World

The strangest truth about writer-director Julia Ducournau's virtuosic first film is that even though its scenes of flesh-eating had audience members fleeing theaters and fainting, it's much more a story about freshman year of college than it is about cannibalism. The urge to eat other humans is really just another complication that former vegetarian Justine (Garance Marillier) has to contend with when she starts veterinary school in Belgium. Other challenges include a brutal hazing process, a frenemy of an older sister (Ella Rumpf), unimpressed professors, and a roommate (Rabah Naït Oufella) on whom she's developed a confusing crush.

This has been a great year for coming-of-age films, like Lady Bird and Call Me by Your Name, both of which barely missed spots on this list. But nothing can touch the woozy, hallucinatory rush of Raw, in which the main character’s journey of self-discovery turns out to be viscerally (lol) fraught. College might be a place to experiment and find yourself, but there are no promises you'll like all the things you turn up. Female desire has rarely been portrayed in such a provocatively dark way.

7. Okja

Ahn Seo-hyun

Netflix

How to describe Bong Joon-ho's fabulously indescribable movie? It's a slapstick comedy about a bunch of corporate and anti-corporate goofballs that also manages to be a razor-edged satire about globalism. It's a dark story about meat as a mass commodity, in addition to being a bright kiddie-led action adventure. It's Korean in sensibility and in its main character, but features Tilda Swinton (pulling double duty as twins), Paul Dano, and Jake Gyllenhaal in major roles. It is a saga of how businesses are getting bigger and the world is getting smaller and how these developments are inexorably and irreversibly making everyone's lives worse — plus, it has an adorbs CGI animal.

And, in maybe the greatest contradiction of all, it's a film about a giant company feeding everyone in the world the same products, produced by Netflix, which essentially does just that with streaming content. It's hard to imagine any other studio shelling out the reported $50 million budget on something so chancey. The future may be an uncertain thing unfolding in the shadow of mega-conglomerates, but at least the movie business is staying interesting.

6. Dunkirk

Warner Bros.

Maybe the reason that there were three (three!) different movies about the Dunkirk evacuation this year is that there's a grim longing for the solidarity that comes with being desperate and under attack. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is the best of the trio, maybe because it demonstrates a way to make an epic World War II movie without focusing on the usual feats of attack — a great story about a squeaker of an escape, not a guns-blazing triumph. The movie is a fascinating meditation on nationalism, and something even more abstract than that. It's about what it means for a group of people to turn themselves into an army, a teeming temporary organism of war made up of people who have accepted they might die for the greater good, or who are trying their best not to.

Dunkirk proceeds with a mathematical complexity — Nolan is totally to filmmaking as Rush is to music — and without anything that could be traditionally labeled as characters. Fionn Whitehead on the beach, Mark Rylance on the water, and Tom Hardy in the air are all ways of looking at the evacuation, as well as ways of looking at warfare — through a scrabbling attempt at survival, or willing volunteering, or self-sacrifice. Formwise, it’s nothing like the usual war movie — instead, it’s a sweepingly cinematic work on a larger, but not dehumanizing, scale.

5. Your Name

Funimation

Makoto Shinkai's body-swap romance is the highest grossing anime film of all time, and the fact that it made such a relatively small mark in the US is a reminder, if you needed one, that as a country we're still mostly bewildered by animated fare that isn't primarily aimed at kids. Your Name is for the teens and the teens-at-heart, a tearstained, feels-laden magical romance that's as ecstatic as a Carly Rae Jepsen chorus. Taki is a Tokyo boy and Mitsuha is a country girl. When they start inexplicably waking up in one another’s bodies, it's first the stuff of awkward comedy, then emotional connection, and then something grander. The two main characters spend most of the movie apart, with hundreds of miles between them, which only makes the beautiful scene in which they finally meet all the more deliciously swoon-worthy.

4. Faces Places

Cohen Media Group

When 89-year-old Agnès Varda first embarks on this road trip of a documentary with a thirtysomething street artist who goes only by JR, it's just on the right side of cute. They're like a quirky, Gallic-inflected buddy comedy, tootling around the countryside in a van that JR has customized to print large-format versions of the pictures he takes of people, portraits he pastes on the sides of buildings. But Faces Places turns out to have a steely spine. The codirectors seek out subjects in former mining towns, farms, and docks, speaking with ordinary workers in unseen or fading industries, and then splashing their larger-than-life photos on walls for everyone to see. There isn't an explicitly political message to their collaboration, but it is as undeniably political as it is lovely, an elegy for aspects of the country that are vanishing with time.

Varda, who contemplates her own mortality over the course of Faces Places, is in many ways herself a figure from an older France. But it's when she goes to visit to an old filmmaking friend, with unexpected results, that the film clicks together devastatingly. Time may move on, but that doesn't mean you have to turn away from the world — so much better to be like Varda, still hungry for new experiences and new people.

3. The Villainess

Kim Ok-bin

Well Go USA Entertainment

No single movie scene this year brought me as much satisfaction as the climactic action sequence in The Villainess, in which anti-heroine Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin) runs down a speeding bus, leaps onto the back of it and hacks her way inside with a hatchet. Director Jung Byung-gil was a stuntman before he stepped behind the camera, and there are action sequences in The Villainess, like the one on the bus, or the one that takes place on motorcycles, that feel like he's reinventing how fights can be shot, moving the camera in fluid ways that seem almost impossible.

It's all extraordinarily violent and cinematically inventive, but the surprise is that these sequences get paired with a story that's part La Femme Nikita, a little Kill Bill, and all blissful melodrama. It's a heady pairing of macho action and unapologetic soapiness that intersect in sequences like the one in which Sook-hee hefts a sniper rifle in her wedding dress. Sook-hee is a resonant, formidable avatar of wounded female rage — both terrifying killer and a woman who's been terribly wronged. The anguish she feels is as memorable as her talent for brutality.

2. Phantom Thread

Vicky Krieps and Daniel Day-Lewis

Focus Features / Laurie Sparham

Paul Thomas Anderson's film is a love story, though it doesn't look it at first. It looks like it's about a naive young woman, Alma (Vicky Krieps), who's destined to get swept up, used, and eventually discarded by a prominent man — the both stuffily and phallically named Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis, in his last role before retiring), a celebrated dressmaker in 1950s London. Reynolds' creative process cannot be extricated from his regimented personal life, and both are guarded ferociously by his sister and business partner Cyril (Lesley Manville). If this sounds, in 2017, uncomfortably close to the stories of abuse of power that have come flooding out of various industries in the past few months, what happens is instead a sly subversion of that dynamic.

Anderson portrays Reynolds' airy atelier and home as a kingdom of rustling gowns, respectfully flirtatious client interactions, and silent breakfasts, all of it more sensual than the relationship Alma shares with a man who is so accustomed to being accommodated in all things that any change to his routine baffles and angers him. He wants Alma as a muse, but she refuses to accept the distance he so desires to keep. Their relationship is an enigmatic, totally engaging duel that I could watch forever.

1. The Florida Project

Bria Vinaite, Brooklynn Prince, and Valeria Cotto

Marc Schmidt / A24

We did a lot of crying this year, and sometimes it had nothing to do with the news. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

Elio’s father’s monologue in Call Me by Your Name

Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) have already parted ways by the time Elio’s father, Mr. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), sits his son down for a talk, and I was pretty sure I was all cried out. What follows is a monologue that cut me to my core, an unbearably honest reflection on the importance of feeling everything — the highs and the lows — that is both profoundly beautiful and gutting. “We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new,” Elio’s father tells him. “But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything, what a waste.” By the end of the speech, Elio is crying again, and I found myself sobbing harder than I had at anything that came before. “Right now there’s sorrow, pain,” Mr. Perlman says. “Don’t kill it — and with it, the joy you’ve felt.” Noted, I thought, gasping for air. —Louis Peitzman

Sony Pictures Classics

When Issa and Lawrence finally get closure after their breakup in Insecure

Part of what makes HBO’s Insecure so special is its hella accurate portrayal of the trials and tribulations of dating while black in the year of our Lord 2017. In Season 2 we watched Issa and Lawrence, the couple we spent much of Season 1 rooting for, try to unravel from each other after a bad breakup. They tried to drink it away, dance it away, work it away, sext it away — the whole thing was like a Solange song and/or SZA album. When none of the distractions worked, and they found themselves face-to-face, it led to the showdown from hell that had group chats and Twitter timelines lit across the country. But none of the over-the-top theatrics or under-the-belt shade from that moment compared to the bittersweet final scene between them in the season finale perfectly titled “Hella Perspective.”

In the scene, the two sit in the kitchen of the empty apartment they once shared, for the very last time before handing in their keys, to have “the closure talk” that every breakup deserves but doesn’t always get. Lawrence apologizes for shutting down when his professional plans didn’t shape up and he couldn’t provide for them the way he wanted to. Issa apologizes for not knowing how to be there for him during his depression. And then she addresses the elephant in the room, the ultimate cause of their demise — her cheating on him with her ex-boyfriend. In was in that moment that she says the words that broke me, Lawrence, and probably anyone who has ever betrayed or been betrayed by someone they loved: “I wish I could somehow convince you that it wasn’t about you. You’ve only ever loved me and expected me to want the best for you and I promise I did.”

WHEW. And then, as if emotions weren’t already high, they exchange one of the purest, most tragic kinds of "I love you" — the one that comes at the end of a relationship where you know the love is real, but you also know it’s not enough. The entire scene was so authentic, it was almost cathartic. Whether you were sobbing because you could recall a similar breakup conversation or because those were words you never got but always needed to hear, the tears were inescapable. —Sylvia Obell

HBO

The ending in Coco

When I was on vacation in Florida in 2006, I saw the Adam Sandler “comedy,” Click, sitting next to my father, probably the most important person in my life at that moment. I left the theater hysterically crying after being subjected to a scene where Sandler is rewinding his father’s last words over and over again because he had skipped too far past his life to have a chance to save him. I was so thankful I was in Florida, away from the kids from school who would’ve relentlessly teased me for shedding a tear. I thought that would be a singular experience, and for the rest of my life, if a movie made me cry it would be only one respectable, masculine tear.

Of course that ended this year when the conclusion of Coco fucking shattered me into a million little pieces. I sat next to my grandmother, who is going through some health issues, as I watched the protagonist Miguel sing the lullaby “Remember Me” to his bisabuela Coco, so — SPOILER ALERT — her father would survive in the spirit world through her memory long enough for them to be reunited when she passes the next year. I thought about how precious the moment was, getting to experience this with my grandmother, and finally feeling represented by Disney as Latinx Americans. I also thought about all the family in my life who were so vital to my parents’ adolescence whom I never got to meet, but stay alive through the memories my family shares with me.

The ending of Coco reminded me of my abuelo, who died in the '80s from medical malpractice, but lives on every time one of his sisters sees him in my face, or my own great-grandmother, who passed away just a few months short of the wedding she always promised my dad she would dance at — a promise my dad now makes to me. I was bursting with emotions again, this time at my hometown theater where those same kids from school (now young adults) still might be able to run into me crying, but now I felt good about having a relationship with my family strong enough to relate to the central themes of the film. Still, though, I sprinted to my car after leaving the theater to sob in hiding. —Marcus Jones

Disney/Pixar

When Midge settles on her stage name in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Throughout the terrific first season of Amy Sherman-Palladino's Amazon series, Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) toys with various professional names in the same way that she toys with the idea of committing herself wholeheartedly to comedy and leaving behind for good the dream of the Upper West Side married life she once had her heart set on. Hiding behind terrible noms de plume ("Fanny... Brice?" she suggests once, only to be reminded "that's taken") is a way of keeping one foot uptown in the familiar confines of her parents' classic six, and one in the smoky downtown club in which she's started to find her voice as a stand-up. Midge doesn't want to have to choose. She still loves Joel (Michael Zegen), total vintage fuckboy that he is, even if she's also falling in love with what it's like to be in the spotlight instead of just playing the supportive spouse.

The big question of the first season is whether Midge will be able to kick off a career in comedy, but coming a close second is the question of whether Midge will take Joel back, and whether he'll be able to handle the fact that Midge is no longer the perfect housewife she was when they were together — that, as she puts it, "he might not like the new me." The way these two dramas come together in the season's final sequence is perfect enough to bring a tear to the eye in itself. But then there's that moment when, after blowing the roof off the Gaslight Café, she thanks the crowd and introduces herself as "Mrs. Maisel" — her married name, the real life role of the wife and the comic persona clicking together just as Joel stumbles off into the night feeling stunned by both her secret and his own feelings of betrayed inadequacy. Midge's triumph is so intensely bittersweet, marked by the realization that she wants it all just as it seems that she won't actually be able to have it. —Alison Wilmore

Amazon Video

The ending in The Handmaid's Tale

The Season 1 finale of The Handmaid's Tale had a number of emotional moments, including the ending, when June (Elisabeth Moss) is taken out of the Waterfords' home (to go who knows where). And several of those moments certainly caused to me well up. But I cried like hell in one scene in particular: The Handmaids are summoned to a Particicution and are told by Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) that they must stone their fellow Handmaid Janine (Madeline Brewer) to death for the sin of endangering her baby. (In the previous episode, she had threatened to jump from a bridge with the baby, but June talked her down.) It wasn't great what Janine did! And there were sure to be consequences. But to be executed by her own? Even Aunt Lydia has qualms about it.

The scene is a mirror image of the Particicution we saw in the pilot, in which June gets way too into kicking a man to death for a crime he may or may not have committed. So when June is the first to drop her rock that's meant to stone Janine — and the rest of the Handmaids follow suit — it reflects how much she's changed. (And lo, the tears did flow.) But this group of Handmaids has changed too. As June points out in voiceover, when they first met each other, they were terrified — but, she says, "we don't look at each other that way anymore." The whole scene offers hope that they can come together, which surely will happen in the future. Rise up, ladies! —Kate Aurthur

Hulu

The Ravager funeral in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

I've felt a lot of things watching Marvel Studios movies over the past nine years, but I never expected to openly weep the way I did at the end of Guardians Vol. 2. First, we watch Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) witness the only father figure he's ever known, the irascible and disgraced space pirate Yondu (Michael Rooker), die to save his life. Then, back safely on his ship, Peter flicks on "Father and Son" by Cat Stevens, as Yondu's fellow Ravagers congregate to pay their respects with a shockingly brilliant display of fireworks. And then Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) — an antisocial, anthropomorphized raccoon — stares up at the brilliant display, moved beyond his ability to reckon that Yondu's friends would honor him even though he had been such an asshole. Oh, and throughout, Baby Groot hops from the shoulder of each of the Guardians, doing adorable baby things like hug and yawn and fall asleep. I know the scene is engineered to provoke my tears, but I've grown so fond of these space-faring ne'er-do-wells that each tear feels totally earned. In fact, I just watched it again, and wept anew. —Adam B. Vary

Marvel

When Marion refuses to say goodbye to Lady Bird in Lady Bird

Much of the way Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird presents the fights between mother (Laurie Metcalf) and daughter (Saoirse Ronan) is gutting. They jab at each about how they perceive the other’s faults, and they do it with such incisive intimacy that you walk away feeling like you’ve just had a fight with your mom. So by the time we get to the end of the film, when (spoiler alert) Lady Bird’s parents are dropping her off at the airport for her first year at NYU, I’d been rubbed raw. And when Marion finds herself stubbornly unable to get out of the car to say goodbye to her daughter, my heart caved in a little.

The brilliance in Lady Bird lies in its depictions of the very real emotional limitations that populate so many relationships — especially those tied to your own identity. Sometimes, in life, someone very important to you won’t be able to open themselves up to give you what you need from them. Sometimes, you might be that person who is limited. I don’t know if I’d ever seen that feeling expressed so eloquently in a film before Lady Bird. Marion can never take back not saying goodbye to her daughter on her way to college. She can never take back the hurt it caused her daughter, or herself. But in that moment, the film demonstrates such a deep empathy for both of those characters that I’m tearing up even writing about it now. —Alanna Bennett

A24

The “White Rock” episode of Better Things

One of the strengths of Pamela Adlon’s critically adored but somehow still underrated series is the way it consistently catches you off guard. Despite being a comedy, the show has never shied away from a vast emotional spectrum, delivering on the very real pathos of Sam’s (Adlon) life as a single mom, working actor, and struggling dater. But the episode “White Rock,” in which Sam and her daughters visit her relatives in Canada, surprised me with a gut punch I didn’t see coming. After Sam learns that she has a long-lost great-aunt who was locked away in an institution long before Sam was born, she becomes determined to discover what happened to her. The answer feels like a foregone conclusion, but Sam’s near-obsessive search is moving because of how futile it is. And then, of course, there’s the heartbreaking inevitability of learning that her Aunt Marion has been dead for decades. Adlon deliberately eschews writing anything emotionally manipulative; the tears that come when Sam asks, “So then, everyone forgot her?” are earned. —L.P.

FX

When Randall and Beth have to say goodbye to their foster child Deja in This Is Us

It’s hard to pick just one scene from This Is Us that made me cry this year because Lord knows every time Randall gets emotional on television, so do I. But watching Randall and Beth decide to become foster parents this season, after getting to know Randall’s birth father William last season and grieving his death, has caused me to tear up on more than one occasion.

Their first journey led Deja into their home, a teenage black girl from the hood who ended up in foster care after her mother was arrested for a crime a lover got her involved in. It took the family months of love and patience to get Deja to open up and work through the trauma she’d experienced in past homes. So when Deja’s mother shows up on their doorstep during the winter finale, demanding her daughter back after her release from jail, my heart dropped for my favorite couple. Even though it becomes clear that Deja returning home to her mother is probably for the best — which is why Randall and Beth ultimately decide not to fight it — having to say goodbye is hard for all parties involved, including myself.

The farewell starts off lighthearted, with Beth telling Deja to take care of her big beautiful heart and Randall asking Deja what he’s going to do without her there to call him out for being corny. But then Deja opens up to Randall to let him know that her desire to go back home doesn't mean she didn't like living with them — something they definitely needed to hear but assured her they knew, as parents are wont to do. And just when you think the moment can’t get any more bittersweet, Deja shocks everyone and allows Randall to hug her goodbye — showing she’d finally grown to trust him despite her past abusive experiences with men. Randall is shook. Beth cries. Deja’s mother watches, shocked as well. Sigh, that damn show really knows how to make you feel all the things. —S.O.

NBC

The opening sequences on Themyscira in Wonder Woman

This is technically a sequence, not a scene. Or maybe just a...section of a movie. Regardless, I teared up approximately three minutes into Wonder Woman, when I realized that this movie was going to live up to some of my dreams for it. As little Diana watches the adult Amazons fight and starts to mimic them, my heart swelled and I started to lose my shit a little bit. This little girl, I knew, was the reflection of so many little girls around the world who would see this movie. It had taken literal generations to get there, and there is still a lot of progress left to be made, but in that moment, I was full of nothing but celebration. There is so much power in Themyscira, from its very concept as a women-only island to...well, the physical and mental power of the women who live there. Seeing the way they live and the way they fight lit something up inside me. And when Robin Wright's Antiope jumps off of a shield during battle? That’s a moment that is now permanently stained on my brain. And it welled me up good. —A.B.

Warner Bros.

The tragic end in Only the Brave

Barely anyone saw this film when it opened in October, perhaps because its subject — the true, tragic story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, an elite firefighting crew based in Prescott, Arizona — felt far too real amid the stories of wildfires decimating Northern California. It's a real shame; there is scarcely a better time for this story given the wildfires still raging throughout California and elsewhere in the country.

After a particularly pernicious, fast-moving inferno kills 19 of the 20 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, director Joseph Kosinski (Tron Legacy) unflinchingly captures the aftermath, as the news begins to spread throughout the men's hometown. The families of the crew eventually congregate in a local school's gymnasium; all they know is that one of the crew has survived, and they have to endure an agonizing wait for news as to who it is. So when that firefighter — an ex-junkie so touchingly played by Miles Teller — steps into the gym, Kosinski cuts between the terrible realization on everyone else's face that their loved one didn't make it, and Teller's face suddenly awash with (even more) grief and guilt. It's almost overwhelmingly sad, and a powerful reminder of the sacrifices faced by firefighters, and the loved ones they leave daily, hoping they will make it back home. —A.B.V.

Courtesy Of Sony Pictures

Nora’s story in The Leftovers

The Leftovers began with a mystery: Why did 140 million people, 2% of the world’s population, suddenly disappear? And where did they go? In the stunning series finale, we got what may be an answer to the latter, as an older Nora (Carrie Coon) tells Kevin (Justin Theroux) about her trip to the other side, where the departed have lived out their lives without the ones they left behind. Nora’s story, performed with impeccable restraint and emotional honesty by Coon, may be true — or it may just be a story. What matters more is the feeling behind it: The answer to the mystery ultimately comes down to faith. The final exchange between Nora and Kevin, both in tears, is overwhelmingly moving for the way it underscores that theme. “I believe you,” he tells her. “You do?” she asks, visibly touched. “Why wouldn’t I believe you?” he answers. “You’re here.” And the last line of the series: Nora’s quiet, poignant “I’m here.” Not since the Six Feet Under finale has an HBO series closer made me cry like that. —L.P.

HBO

The final scene by the fireplace in Call Me by Your Name

By the time we reached the last scene of Call Me by Your Name, my heart had already been fortified and ripped to shreds by this movie multiple times. By then, we are soaking in the aftermath of the fleeting, affecting relationship the film is centered on. Oliver (Armie Hammer) and Elio’s (Timothée Chalamet) summer together is over, and all that’s left is that supremely bittersweet feeling of being both heartbroken over the end of something and grateful that it happened at all. Enter Elio, fresh off a very painful phone call, staring into the fireplace. There’s no dialogue — only a wistful Sufjan Stevens song — and the scene rests entirely on Chalamet’s command of emotion. All you need is his face. It’s the whole thesis statement of the movie, wordless and in micro. It also lasts throughout the end credits, and it will make you want to stay in your seat and weep with it every time, just to spend a few more moments in that world. —A.B.

Sony Pictures Classics

Edwards' departure in Grey's Anatomy

After a hundred years of watching Grey's, I will confess that the intern characters do sometimes turn into a blur. But Stephanie Edwards (Jerrika Hinton), who joined the show in fall 2012, was always a standout to me. There was her relationship with Jackson (he did her wrong!), and her excellence as a surgeon (she got both Meredith's and Amelia's stamps of approval). And that she had sickle-cell anemia as a child, a story Jo didn't believe at first, seemed to be right for the character. So when I learned Hinton was leaving the show, I became afraid Shonda Rhimes would kill Edwards in some sad way I wouldn't be able to bear — because she's done it before, and she'll do it again.

In the second-to-last episode of last season, Edwards basically blows up a rapist (long story) in order to save a little girl named Erin. During the whole finale, Edwards and Erin are in constant jeopardy as a fire (that Edwards caused by blowing up the rapist) spreads throughout the hospital. I was holding my breath in fear! But then they are finally found, and Edwards — true to form — is still performing CPR on the kid as they are being rescued, despite her own severe burns. She will not leave Erin's side.

Edwards is alive, though, so how is Hinton going to leave the show? Why, with a moving speech, of course! When Webber (whom I still call the Chief, and I'm not sorry about it) comes to visit her in the burn unit, she tells him she's quitting. She tells him she's spent her whole life in hospitals, and that having faced death, she wants to live her own life — "away from the monitors, and the blood, and the sterile gowns, away from saving other people's lives," she says. "I want my own. It's time I live my own." (This is when I went from merely crying to some sobs.) "You changed my life, Dr. Webber. You taught me how to take my past and find my path. Thank you." Goodbye, Edwards! —K.A.

ABC

Madison Ferguson, Lauren Lee Smith, Jayden Greig, and Michael Shannon in The Shape of Water.

Kerry Hayes / Twentieth Century Fox

The Baltimore we see in The Shape of Water is on the cusp of a decline. It's the early 1960s, in "the last days of a fair prince's reign" (as a voiceover fancifully describes the JFK presidency), and it's also early in what would become more than a half-century of white flight, deindustrialization, and crime eroding the city's population. This being a Guillermo del Toro movie, the hints of the eventual hollowing out of neighborhoods are depicted with the same sense of grandeur as the unlikely love story that follows, done up in deep, rich colors and moody lighting. Main character Elisa (Sally Hawkins), for instance, inhabits an enchantingly ragtag apartment perched above a fading movie palace, with bits of dialogue drifting through the floorboards from the mostly empty theater below.

Elisa, like most of The Shape of Water's characters, lives in the city. But the film's villain, a malevolent government suit named Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), does not. When he heads home, he swings his chrome-detailed car away from downtown and toward a breezy street lined with trees and mid-century houses that feels like it might as well be another universe, one in which the sun somehow shines brighter and milkmen scurry by in crisp white shirts. In a way, it is another universe — the America that Strickland, a monster born of his era's darkest paranoid patriotism, is striving for. He works for a God he imagines looks a lot like him, and for a country of Cadillacs and jetpacks and chipper nuclear families and racial uniformity. "The future is bright. You gotta trust in that. This is America," he tells his son, the affirmation of a new manifest destiny in which those vintage, sitcom-worthy 'burbs would stretch from coast to coast. He makes that optimism sound like a threat — and it is, to anyone who’s not included in its vision of progress.

The myth of the suburbs as a wholesome, throwback refuge has taken a pummeling at the movies this year, from the sinister opening scene of Get Out to three fall prestige releases — The Shape of Water, Suburbicon, and Downsizing — that all take their own stylized runs at a similar idea. That sense of suburban sprawl as a repository for an outdated American dream haunts del Toro’s winsome creature feature very effectively; it also compelled and confounded directors George Clooney and Alexander Payne, both of whom made suburb-centric, award-season hopefuls starring Matt Damon. Whether it’s of the past or future, these movies all conjure an idealized suburban vision that lingers like a mirage in some part of our national consciousness. But they also demonstrate that it's not easy to go to battle with a concept.

Clooney's Suburbicon fizzled out soon after it hit theaters. Payne’s Downsizing seems poised to do the same when it opens this Friday. These are, not coincidentally, films that lob awkward critiques from inside the fantasy they're trying to dispel — from the point of view of characters who still enjoy a place in the planned community, even if their lives are not what they'd expected. The Shape of Water, on the other hand, is slipping toward the Oscars, maybe because it cleverly takes the tone of a myth itself, and maybe because it approaches the fantasia of the spacious house, the picket fence, the good schools, the good living — and everything else left unsaid — from the perspective of those who aren't included in it.

Matt Damon and Jason Sudeikis in Downsizing.

George Kraychyk / Paramount

In March of this year, Business Insider ran a series on the death of the suburb, laying out an argument for how the demise of malls and McMansions, and the slump of casual dining restaurants and big-box stores, were indicators of a larger lifestyle shift. It wasn't that the suburbs were going away, the articles suggested (though the young and affluent keep clustering in cities where there are more jobs), it was that suburbs themselves were also shifting — toward walkability and denser, multifamily housing near public transit — becoming more citylike.

The promise of the traditional suburbs that Strickland heads home to in The Shape of Water, that Gardner Lodge (Damon) dreams of escaping from in Suburbicon, and which Paul Safranek (also Damon) goes to incredible lengths to afford in Downsizing, isn't a very 2017 sort of promise — even if Downsizing is set somewhere near the present day. What's driving this trend isn't an IRL push toward these communities, but a figurative one. The suburbs, especially the idealized, impossible communities of the late '50s in Suburbicon and early '60s in The Shape of Water, are what's meant to come to mind when someone talks about wanting to Make America Great Again.

Or, as the sign Tennessee congressional candidate Rick Tyler posted last year more starkly put it, "Make America White Again." Tyler defended himself by saying he wanted to return the country to the "1960s, Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver time when there were no break-ins; no violent crime; no mass immigration." It's a fantasy of an era that people have sought everywhere, from the "whiteopia" of North Idaho ("it just felt like America in the 1950s") to the promises of Donald Trump, who pointed to "the late '40s and '50s" as the time when "we were pretty much doing what we had to do" as a country. Clearly, Tyler missed some lessons in the subtle art of dog-whistle politics, or felt that the need to disguise bigotry had passed, but either way, the direct connection he made between this particular breed of nostalgia and whiteness was almost a relief to finally hear spoken out loud. What was always there was finally brought to the surface.

Matt Damon and Noah Jupe in Suburbicon.

Hilary Bronwyn Gay / Paramount

In fact, the idea of something warped lurking beneath the surface-perfect sheen of retro Americana is a juxtaposition that's now practically retro itself. That might be why Suburbicon, which attempts to illuminate the connection between “great” and white as if this reveal were a surprise, comes across as so toothless. The movie weds an old Coen brothers script about the dark side of an allegedly idyllic bedroom community (in which a boy, Nicky [Noah Jupe], slowly realizes there's nothing Father Knows Best about his seemingly upright dad) with a far more grounded story about a black family getting harassed after moving into the all-white neighborhood — and ends up doing justice to neither.

Even though, according to Clooney, Suburbicon began as a film about housing discrimination, and the Coen elements were added to provide "some form of entertainment," the end result is a movie in which the storyline about race feels like an afterthought. The black family that causes such an uproar in the neighborhood barely gets to speak; the escalating violence and hostility they face is a horrifying, but largely symbolic, development that’s eclipsed by the more madcap (and movie star–heavy) murder plot unfolding in parallel.

Clooney may have set out to criticize sentimentality toward the film's era and setting, but he turns out to be as susceptible to the aesthetic allure of the suburbs as anyone else. We can see that in the choice to have Julianne Moore reprise her brittle '50s housewife routine, to put Damon back in shirtsleeves and browline glasses, and to open the film with a chirpy slideshow advertising the amusingly narrow charms of the community for which it's named. Suburbicon is akin to watching someone do a standup set in front of a building that's on fire, trying to keep the viewer's attention with easy punchlines while a genuine menace blurs into the background.

Damon’s suburban dreams in Downsizing are more contemporary; it's upward mobility, or a lack thereof, that's on his mind. His character, Paul, is a kind and incurious occupational therapist who lives with his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) in his Omaha, Nebraska, childhood home. She has her heart set on a newer, bigger place in a nicer area they can't afford, and he struggles to make the finances work. While not unhappy himself, he's plagued by a nagging sense that he should be doing better than he is — keeping up with successful high school classmates, climbing the ladder. In other words, his economic anxiety is getting him down.

So, instead of scaling back their dreams, the couple decides to scale down their bodies with a new, irreversible scientific process in which people are shrunk to a few inches tall. This allows them to consume fewer environmental resources and, more importantly, live luxe miniature lifestyles on their regular-size bank accounts. It's a sci-fi variation on Americans going abroad to stretch their US dollars in developing economies, only instead of heading abroad, it involves heading to a Lilliputian-planned community in New Mexico called Leisureland. In Leisureland, everyone can afford a pool and jewelry and to while away their days like rich retirees.

Neil Patrick Harris makes the pitch on behalf of Leisureland in Downsizing.

Paramount Pictures

It's a different kind of suburban fantasy, but once you get past the droll, Charlie Kaufman-esque imagined technology, it's not too far removed from those gleaming visions from the '50s and '60s. Leisureland offers those same, outdated expectations of effortless prosperity and an unquestioned white majority, preserved the only way they can be — by way of extreme contortions and self-rationalizations. The characters in Downsizing risk a possibly lethal procedure in order to to afford a five-bedroom house and then pat themselves on the back and say they did it to save the planet from overpopulation.

It's a visually delightful metaphor, but it gets messier and less meaningful as soon as Paul makes his way to Leisureland's far reaches. There, downsized immigrants live in a miniscule tenement without the benefits and protections enjoyed by the main community, commuting in to clean and build and do all the other labor that people like Paul are trying to opt out of. As Downsizing sets out to teach the well-meaning, oblivious Paul some tough lessons about the world and his place in it (with assists from Christoph Waltz as an amoral, hard-partying European exporter and Hong Chau as a selfless Vietnamese refugee and all-around magical Asian), it begins to demonstrate the same myopic limitations of Suburbicon.

Karimah Westbrook in Suburbicon.

Hilary Bronwyn Gay / Paramount

Both films center on figures whose assumptions about family and the future fall apart (Nicky in Suburbicon, Paul in Downsizing), and whose personal misfortunes are set up as small-scale equivalents of the systemic tragedies that afflict characters on the movies' outskirts. Nicky ends up genuinely, rather than begrudgingly, befriending Andy (Tony Espinosa), the black kid next door, after his home life implodes so spectacularly. Paul discovers economic and global realities he never gave much thought to — but only after the perfect, pocket-sized lifestyle he'd come to Leisureland for got derailed.

These choices feel like mediation, as if the experience of being marginalized — whether you’re targeted by hostile neighbors or used as dehumanized labor for a community you're not allowed to be a part of — needs to be filtered through Nicky and Paul in order to be relatable or accessible. Suburbicon and Downsizing are both driven by the desire to create some common ground with the audience through these characters who haven't been seeing the whole picture — to find a way into broader cultural questions of exclusion by way of these white protagonists and their more intimate dramas. They end up being dutiful meditations on guilt rather than stories about the people whose mistreatment and oppression they purport to be so interested in. The increasingly disastrous press tour their shared star Damon is currently in the midst of for Downsizing turns out to be, ironically, appropriate. Like these movies, Damon has been unable to stop himself from turning a conversation about something systemic into one about himself.

The Shape of Water, in contrast, roots itself from the start in the perspectives of characters whose identities render them invisible, interchangeable, or vulnerable to those in power. Its heroine, Elisa, who is disabled, and the allies she acquires (a gay man, a black woman, a foreigner) are people who already know very well, or are forced to accept, that they're on the wrong side of the picket fence. If it sounds schematic on the page, like a supergroup of the disenfranchised, it plays sweetly and straightforwardly onscreen. Just as the city they share isn't idealized — it's just where they live — the way these characters are drawn together isn't idealized, either. It's not the commonalities in how they've been demeaned or dismissed that ultimately unify them. It's that they are, both literally and figuratively, in a place to see each other more clearly than people like Strickland, with his gaze fixed on his imagined future and his home life cozily secured, miles away.

Sally Hawkins and Richard Jenkins in The Shape of Water.

Twentieth Century Fox Film

And they're not all immune to the warm lure of Americana either, as evidenced by Giles' (Richard Jenkins) doomed crush on the counterboy at a chain restaurant. He’s a strapping, dimpled young man who speaks with a twang and offers up easy chatter — a performance of down-home charm that's entirely synthetic, an act put on to sell pie that Giles can barely choke down. The arc of their two-scene relationship neatly encapsulates the ideas The Shape of Water expands on over the rest of its runtime (with much more resonance than Suburbicon or Downsizing): Everyone's free to fall in love with the idea of the idyllic American suburb — but it's not going to love everyone back the same way.

And maybe that idea won't appeal to everyone in the first place. The alienation The Shape of Water so efficiently lays out in two scenes, Get Out sums up in just one — its opening sequence: Andre (Lakeith Stanfield) strolls along a leafy suburban street with obvious and, it turns out, extremely warranted unease as a lone black man walking through a white neighborhood. It's a setting out of a Halloween movie, except instead of a masked slasher, Andre’s afraid of getting shot by the cops because a panicked local assumed he was a threat. When he’s snatched off the sidewalk, it's a double reversal — something scary was lurking out there in the dark — but it's also a reminder that for some, the idea of the suburbs has never been a sanctuary at all. ●

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Lucasfilm

The best and worst idea the new Star Wars trilogy has had is to make Kylo Ren a school shooter.

This isn't a take, something Rian Johnson's unexpectedly divisive The Last Jedi has spawned a seemingly inexhaustible supply of — enough to fuel online skirmishes right through whatever that new spinoff trilogy turns out to be. This is right there in the text, a truth that was revealed in The Force Awakens and then shown, in the new installment, in two converging accounts of a massacre that differ only on one central (but in the end inconsequential) point. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), born Ben Solo, the moody, powerful son of Han and Leia, attacked his teacher and left him for dead. Then he slaughtered most of his classmates before setting fire to the Jedi Temple where they'd been studying. He's a galaxy-far-far-away riff on an uncomfortably familiar figure out of the last few decades of news.

In the annals of Star Wars, Kylo's heel turn is nothing compared to that of his grandfather Darth Vader, who spent a whole trilogy getting seduced by the dark side before succumbing to evil, choking out his pregnant wife, killing a roomful of children, and turning against his longtime master. Vader's transformation was grand and tragic in its arc — the predetermined stuff of a space opera in which there is good, and there is evil, and the two forces continue to vie for supremacy in a galactic civilization spanning many species and star systems.

Kylo's break with his old life and old identity, on the other hand, is portrayed as a half-regretted act of resentful rebellion, an abbreviated self-immolation he still sometimes seems befuddled to have survived. Vader was an epic villain. Kylo was a kid who started idolizing his infamous grandfather because his parents were too busy to pay him enough attention, and even as a man he holds on to Vader's burnt-out helmet like a teenage outcast hoarding Axis memorabilia left behind by the generation no one talks about at family reunions. He wears his black robes like a high schooler in a trench coat — like he's playing dress-up in a uniform he's not yet big enough to wear.

Despite his aspirations toward it, there is no grandeur in Kylo Ren. But as a character, he verges on being too big and too complicated for the movies he's been a part of, especially as Adam Driver plays him, with a mixture of pain and hurt so raw it threatens to rend the fabric of the series every time he's on screen. Driver is terrific as Kylo Ren, so good that his wounded smoldering sometimes puts the character at odds with castwide acting that's otherwise calibrated to the straightforward pitch of an interstellar adventure. It feels as if Driver's working in 24-bit when everyone else has committed to 8.

Kylo Ren examines his helmet (before punching a wall with it) in The Last Jedi.

Lucasfilm

That's never more clear than in Kylo's climactic showdown on the mining planet Crait with his own former mentor Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) in The Last Jedi, in which a serviceable Hamill offers up a satisfying, cartoony shoulder brush — an unapologetic applause beat, the crusty older fighter shrugging off a blaster barrage like it's nothing. Meanwhile, opposite him, Driver roils like someone dredging up a lifetime's worth of bad memories for the sake of the scene; his face is blotchy with complex emotion, his shoulders rounded like someone who long ago accepted that grace was not for him, but that brute strength could be. He's mesmerizing in his method-heavy, contemporary-feeling angst — more than it feels like he should be, given that he's not the one we're supposed to be invested in at that moment.

Kylo's brooding, his temper tantrums, his petulant desire to carve out his own path, and his overall air of fetching, long-locked gothiness made him into a instant meme when The Force Awakens came out in 2015. He spawned the infinitely enjoyable Emo Kylo Ren Twitter account (whose two follows are Hot Topic and Darth Vader), Tumblrs devoted to his imagined awkward adolescence at home, and an army of shippers rooting for an alluringly dysfunctional endgame in which the character would end up with pure-of-heart hero Rey (Daisy Ridley). The Last Jedi, with its shirtless scene and its earnest, Force-enabled interplanetary conversations between Kylo and Rey (akin to late-night DMs), gives shippers plenty of fuel to recontextualize the relationship between the characters as a tortured, war-torn romance.

Kylo Ren is too appealing for straightforward villainy. But the cute-ification he's constantly subjected to speaks to how audiences are struggling to contend with a character who wasn't turned to the dark, but instead chose it. He is relatable in spite of his acts of monstrosity, not because he's misunderstood. Kylo trembles right on the verge of being too real a creation for Star Wars' good-versus-evil dichotomy, even in The Last Jedi, which has blurrier borders between the two.

He is laughable at some moments, and relatable at others. He's frightening without being a straightforward, power-hungry antagonist like his boss, Supreme Leader Snoke, or a slimy pantomime villain like his rival General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson), who might fit in better in Spaceballs. Kylo Ren doesn't seem to want anything at all, except to shed the past and the person he was, and to maybe have some company while doing it. He has gone to huge lengths to prove how little he cares about anything, when, obviously, he cares a lot about everything.

Kylo Ren with his lightsaber in The Last Jedi.

Lucasfilm

The apparently overwhelming desire in fans to soften Kylo’s edges and brush over his wrongs — he murdered his father, one of the franchise's most beloved characters, in the previous film — is a testament to just how compelling Driver and his commitment to the character are. But it's also the darkest trick that these new films — for all that criticism The Last Jedi is getting about its humor — have pulled off. In making Kylo so magnetic, the filmmakers have managed to turn us all into apologists, doing the fictional equivalent of online fans cooing over serial killers, or the neighbors who give quotes to the media about how the shooter seemed like such a nice guy.

Kylo Ren is such an intriguing villain that, despite everything he shows us about who he is, we — like the characters in the film — keep trying to turn him into something else: an anti-hero, a romantic lead, someone due for a happy ending instead of just possible redemption. Star Wars continues to struggle to introduce moral complexity into its fictional universe. But in Kylo Ren, the franchise has certainly introduced some complexity to its fandom, by reminding us how susceptible we are to giving unlimited chances to sad, angry young men. ●

Jade Schulz for BuzzFeed News

A movie is not a sandwich, and neither is a TV series, no matter how often we describe bingeing one as if it were a private encounter with a party hoagie. But we've developed a tendency to use the language of purchase power and nutrition — what's healthy, what's not — and to talk about the things we watch the same way that we talk about the things we shop for and eat. This was particularly on my mind when poking around Rotten Apples, a website that declares its aim to "make ethical media consumption easier," as if it were the Hollywood abuse equivalent of one of those sustainable seafood shopping guides.

Rotten Apples launched in December and attracted a burst of attention for presenting itself as the Rotten Tomatoes of the post-Weinstein era. It’s a searchable site that lets you input the title of a movie or TV show and see if anyone connected to it — cast member, writer, director, or producer — has had sexual misconduct allegations reported against them by a major news outlet. The results are either "fresh" or "rotten," and simply list the names of any alleged perpetrators, with the uglier details tucked away behind hyperlinks to relevant articles.

Rotten Apples’ impossible promise of simplicity seems emblematic of how much people want to be told there's an easy response to a vast and increasingly complicated conversation. Audiences have been demanding more, politically and morally, from their art and entertainment in general, a reality that goes beyond #MeToo, but to which #MeToo has given an incendiary urgency. We demand better representation and sharper cultural relevance in our entertainment, in addition to wanting the industry that produces it to stop being a hotbed of sexual assault, harassment, and misogyny. But all the thumbs up/down binary of Rotten Apples is actually good for is illuminating how much there is to wrestle with behind the jargony slogan of "ethical media consumption."

Type in "The Birth of a Nation" and you get the fascinating juxtaposition of a rotten result for the disgraced 2016 Sundance favorite directed by Nate Parker, but a clean bill of health for the KKK-glorifying 1915 D.W. Griffith film after which it's named. The Pirates of the Caribbean series gets a "fresh," as the domestic violence accusations against star Johnny Depp apparently fall outside the site's purview. Milestone Asian-American weepie The Joy Luck Club, on the other hand, is a no-go, courtesy of having been executive produced by alleged harasser Oliver Stone. The site’s internal logic gets even shakier once you go back more than a few decades. Per its own mission and given the long, terrible realities of show business, just about every pre-'80s title should probably come up as tainted.

People want to be told there's an easy response to a vast and increasingly complicated conversation.

"By no means is this site meant to serve as a condemnation of an entire project," the creators, who come from the advertising world, insist in the blurb describing their noncommercial project. But everything about the site suggests it's a resource for helping you sort through what to watch — and I understand how that pitch might be seductive. All the horrifying stories of the last few months have given people the urge to do their part in reacting to the news, whatever that might mean; in addition to delivering yes/no decrees, Rotten Apples provides a way to navigate labyrinthine showbiz structures that can make it tough to figure out who was involved with what. But being an ethical consumer of media, if that's what you want and how you want to put it — organic! free range! — was never going to mean just dumping any title that's been touched by one of the industry's seemingly boundless supply of bad men.

This isn't a "separating the art from the artist" argument — god, am I tired of "art from artist" arguments, when the reality of engaging with art has always been so much more complex than that. The inadequacy of that old mantra, which has been held up in some quarters as a purist approach to criticism, as if critics approached all art in white coveralls while in a clean room, has been especially evident of late. Being able to effortlessly separate work from its creator is most often the privilege of those who relate to the artist more than to anyone that artist might have wronged. It's easier to discount those details (and this goes beyond misconduct) when they don't apply to you, when they're abstract or distant.

Which is to say, it is a process that is entirely and uncomfortably personal, deciding how much what you know eclipses what you watch. While Hollywood pushes toward industry reform for the work that's made going forward, how we contend with the work that's already around remains an individual journey you're already on, and have been on all your life. And that, no matter how slick the branding, will never be easily outsourced to a website.

Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby

Paramount Pictures

Before she is raped and impregnated by the devil, the eponymous character in the 1968 horror classic Rosemary's Baby, a guileless, young housewife played by Mia Farrow, eats a drugged dessert. Well, part of it — she knows something's wrong with it and doesn't want it, but pretends to finish it anyway, because her husband tells her to and she'd prefer not to upset him. Rosemary is lied to, coerced, terrorized, and made to doubt her own mind and body in countless escalating ways throughout the film, but it's the mundane menace of that early scene, before everything starts really going off the rails, that has always lingered with me — the candlelit dinner with the chalky chocolate mousse. How smoothly John Cassavetes' character, who's made a deal with satanists in exchange for a career boost, shifts between tactics as he attempts to coerce his wife into choking down the substance he knows is going to knock her out. How easily he makes her into the unreasonable one.

First she's imagining things ("That's silly, there is no undertaste," says Cassavetes), then she's being ungrateful toward the neighbor who made it ("Come on, the old bat slaved all day"). And when that doesn't take, he implies not just that she's being difficult ("There's always something wrong"), but that she makes a habit of it. There's no overt threat, just deftly scripted manipulation in which a woman's sense of obligation to keep the peace is used to leverage her into doing something she doesn't want to. Rosemary's Baby is a landmark of paranoid horror and a breathtaking pregnancy nightmare, but it's also a hell of a study in gaslighting. It’s a movie that reflects a keen understanding of gender dynamics and how regularly women are undermined, disbelieved, and made to question their own realities — by their spouses and their doctors as well as the occasional evil coven.

And it was written by Roman Polanski, who, in 1977, was convicted of the statutory rape of 13-year-old Samantha Gailey, then fled the United States, never to return, when he was told the judge had decided not to honor his plea bargain. In the last six months, he's been accused of assaulting multiple other women in that same time period. Polanski's track record of rape predates the Weinstein era by decades, which is why, maybe, his moment of reckoning has yet to come around. Not only has he managed to keep making lauded movies in the years since, but he also got the public support of over 100 prominent directors, actors, producers, writers, programmers, and executives who signed a letter demanding his release when he was arrested in Switzerland in 2009. To take a gander through all those names, in the light of 2018, might feel astonishing, though it shouldn't. The #MeToo moment has been one of seismic, desperately needed change, but it shouldn't blot out the memory of what business as usual was like right up until the past few months.

For so many of the people I've talked to, friends over beers and colleagues after screenings, the #MeToo movement has been a period of heady, long-simmering anger and righteous frustration — and underneath, a thrum of shamefaced dread that someone whose work is really important to them will be next. But my heart was broken long before by Polanski, whose work is part of how I learned to love movies, and whose work taught me the early lesson that someone can sympathize with and show a deep understanding of women on screen while abusing them in real life. The latter has counted for a lot less in the eyes of the industry than the former — until now. After decades of toxicity, so central to the business that the casting couch is as much a part of showbiz iconography as the fresh-faced dreamer getting off a bus in Hollywood, the fact that consequences have finally been attached to misconduct is an idea I'm still getting used to.

There is something startlingly satisfying in the way famous figures have recently been bumped from schedules or swapped out of work — Kevin Spacey from All the Money in the World and House of Cards, Bryan Singer from Bohemian Rhapsody, Ed Westwick from Ordeal by Innocence — because for so long, people have been protected and enabled by the myth that they are just too essential to be replaced. Their transgressions disappeared, while they remained. But the last few months have emphasized that the world keeps revolving without them, that no one is genuinely irreplaceable or so good that they have some kind of right to commit misconduct. One of the many side effects of #MeToo has been to provide a reminder that Hollywood has never been a meritocracy, that it operates on favors and favoritism, lust and spite, just as much as it does ability and bankability. If, despite her talent, a woman can have her career put on hold or cut short just because she turned down the unwelcome attentions of a powerful man, well, that capriciousness cuts both ways — any vacuum left by that powerful man would quickly be filled in by any of the people already around and jostling for a chance.

The vanishing, for yet-undetermined amounts of time, of predatory men isn't going to hurt film or television.

It might hurt you a little, or me, to have to accept that someone who made something personally meaningful to us has abused power and other people, but no one's art (or box-office draw) is so astonishing as to merit some kind of consequences-free pass on predatory behavior. And no one's art is so astonishing that it's proof they're incapable of wrongdoing, despite the way Dustin Hoffman brandished his role in Tootsie like a Get Out of Jail Free card when being questioned by John Oliver on stage at a Wag the Dog event in December. Hoffman, who's been the focus of multiple harassment accusations, insisted that "I would not have made that movie if I didn’t have an incredible respect for women," as if the very act of making the film, in which he played an actor whose ideas about women change after disguising himself as one to land a role on a soap, were indisputable evidence on his behalf.

Liking Tootsie doesn't make you rotten any more than making it proves Hoffman fresh.

I still love Tootsie, though. And Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion, Knife in the Water, and Chinatown, and the Casey Affleck–starring A Ghost Story, and Louis C.K.'s weird and wonderful Horace and Pete, in which at one point Laurie Metcalf delivers a 20-minute monologue so riveting and human and funny-dirty-agonizing that I went back and restarted the episode as soon as it was over just to see the whole thing again.

I would happily never hear about Woody Allen and most of his output ever again, because I've never been able to see what his fans see, and because so much of who he seems to be as a person seeps onto the screen, and I don't like who he seems to be as a person at all. But I've tried (I have tried so hard!) to stop fighting about him, both because it's ruined some friendships and because, in the eyes of people who defend him as fiercely as they would a beloved family member, I see the impulses I've tried my best to let go of myself: the rush to defend something that has spoken to you so deeply that criticisms of its creator feel like personal attacks. Liking Tootsie doesn't make you rotten any more than making it proves Hoffman fresh.

At the Golden Globes the other week, the red carpet was flooded with celebrities dressed in black, the color of mourning or of businesslike seriousness. Some celebrities had brought activists with them to try to broaden the conversation about sexism and harassment beyond Hollywood, and all listened to Oprah declare "that a new day is on the horizon" and heard Laura Dern "urge all of us to not only support survivors and bystanders who are brave enough to tell their truth, but to promote restorative justice." Not everyone agreed on how meaningful these demonstrations and statements were, but what seemed clear is that they speak to an underlying culture in need of change. They point to skewed stats that could be shifted, from who's in front of the camera to who's behind it to who's greenlighting these projects to begin with. And those stats aren't just about balancing the two sides of the gender binary, though the “50/50 by 2020” push that is one of Time's Up goals is a place to start.

These are all initiatives that outsiders can support as consumers, with the tickets they buy and the subscriptions they sign up for. There are actionable ways in which the film and TV industry can be pressured into change by its audience, in terms of supporting more diverse voices and work produced by companies that are conscious of both preventing misconduct and protecting those who report it. There are things you can do looking forward that can affect change. When it comes to looking back, though — that's still really up to you alone, and no one's going to be forced to stream the complete Cosby Show any more than angry mobs are going to go door to door tearing Hannah and Her Sisters posters from walls and tossing them on a public bonfire.

The #MeToo moment might well come around for Roman Polanski, though then again, who knows, given that he's not dependent on Hollywood money to make his films. It seems to, finally, be arriving for Woody Allen, whose days as a working filmmaker may be coming to an end as actors have been distancing themselves and expressing regret for appearing in his movies. Both men are in their 80s, so if funding or distribution dried up for either, it would be more of an ignominious push toward retirement than a more decisive gesture. But it would still be a sign of an industry actually attempting to change direction, slowly, like an ocean liner charting a new course.

Either way, the history they're part of and the work they've made will remain, leaving audiences to choose to contend with it or not, and to figure out how to feel about it. That sequence from Rosemary's Baby isn't going anywhere, and it'll keep reverberating in my head whenever I see it. I'd love to see something even better, though, from someone new. ●

It was a quieter year at the annual film festival in Park City, Utah, but there were still plenty of powerful, moving, and surprising films worth talking about.

The Tale

The most talked about film at the 2018 festival, hands down, was Jennifer Fox's autobiographical drama about a woman reexamining her recollections of what she convinced herself was a consensual sexual relationship when she was just 13 years old. She gradually comes to realize that it was actually abuse. The Tale, which stars Laura Dern as a version of the director, is so relevant to the #MeToo moment that it's startling to learn that Fox, a documentarian making her scripted debut, had been considering this project for years. Dern is as good as she's ever been in the lead role, venturing into some dark emotional territory, but it's the film's flashbacks, in which 13-year-old Jenny is played by the painfully young Isabelle Nélisse (with an adult body double filling in during sex scenes), that will really test and devastate audiences. Fox fearlessly explores not just predatory behavior and the malleability of memory, but how these experiences can shape the rest of our lives, no matter what we openly acknowledge — defining what we think is normal, and influencing the people we become. —Alison Willmore

Distribution: The Tale has been purchased by HBO Films, and will premiere on the network sometime this year.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Eighth Grade

As a teenager, Bo Burnham built his comedy career by posting linguistically dexterous, vigorously brazen rap videos to his YouTube channel from his bedroom. So there was reason to expect Burnham’s feature film debut as a writer-director — about Kayla (Elsie Fisher), an eighth-grade girl who also posts videos to her YouTube channel from her bedroom — would take on a similarly skewed, voluble comic worldview. Instead, and much to the surprise and delight of Sundance audiences, Burnham reveals a deeply felt empathy for what it’s like to be a sweet, painfully quiet girl just trying to get through her last week of middle school. The film features some bursts of startling cringe comedy, like when Kayla suddenly blurts out to her crush that she has dirty pictures of herself on her phone. But Fisher (who voiced Agnes in the first two Despicable Me movies) always keeps us hooked into Kayla’s inner life without ever slipping into a kind of precocious maturity of polished child actors. And while Burnham roots her story in the signifiers of our current moment (late night Instagram k-holes, school shooting drills), mostly Eighth Grade captures the universally relatable small-yet-potent dramas of simply being 13, like showing up at a birthday pool party when you’re friends with no one, and learning to navigate attention — wanted and alarmingly not — from older teenagers. —Adam B. Vary

Distribution: A24 will release Eighth Grade at some point this year.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Sorry to Bother You

A Rainbow Brite whirlwind from the brain of hip-hop artist Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You is a movie that will stay with you. That might be because of its stellar cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Armie Hammer, Steven Yeun, Terry Crews, Kate Berlant — the list goes on. It might be because the film is positively dripping in the kind of style that can really energize a person. Or it might be that this is a movie built on a foundation of fantasy devices and surrealism that keeps the floor constantly moving underneath you the whole time you’re watching it. Or perhaps it'll be the striking social commentary that'll get you. But most likely, it’ll be all of the above. Never has a story about a group of telemarketers been so dynamic, and rarely have I been so excited to see how the rest of the world will react to a film. If this movie doesn’t develop a strong and devoted fanbase, I’ll eat my hat. — Alanna Bennett

Distribution: Annapurna Pictures bought Sorry to Bother You’s worldwide rights and will distribute it.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

The Kindergarten Teacher

Writer-director Sara Colangelo's remake of a 2014 Israeli drama of the same name is not, in any conventional sense, a horror film. But sometimes it sure feels that way, as you observe with dread the way the character of the title, the restless Lisa Spinelli (played by producer Maggie Gyllenhaal), channels her dissatisfaction with the conventionality of her Staten Island life into an obsession with a student she believes is a poetry prodigy. Jimmy (Parker Sevak) is sweet and not quite 6 years old, and he occasionally lets loose with some very advanced-sounding vocabulary, but The Kindergarten Teacher keeps us wondering whether he's a child genius or a canvas onto which adults project greater meaning. Similarly, the film keeps us on a knife's edge regarding Lisa's motivations, and what combination of sincere and selfish is driving her to act out. Gyllenhaal keeps the character human while refusing to soften her increasingly outlandish behavior in a career-great performance. —A.W.

Distribution: The Kindergarten Teacher does not yet have theatrical distribution, though it really, really should.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Hereditary

It's tough to give an overview of the midnight movie that scared the collective pants off the festival this year. Director Ari Aster's feature debut sidles so slyly up to its nightmarish premise that for long stretches all you know is that something is going slowly and terribly wrong for the family at its center — a family grieving for, or at least making gestures toward grieving for, its difficult, late matriarch. Annie Graham (Toni Collette), an artist, tries to hide herself in her work, while husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) attempts to be supportive, son Peter (Alex Wolff) just wants to be a normal teenager, and dreamy daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) seems stuck between worlds. Before it all goes to hell, Hereditary works just as well as a drama about people trying to pretend the growing fractures between them aren't there, and trying to will their dark history into the past. Every year, if we're lucky, some title comes along that spans both the horror and arthouse genres, and Hereditary is set to be 2018's answer to The Babadook, It Follows, and The Witch, combining awesomely disturbing imagery with unsettlingly thoughtful filmmaking. —A.W.

Distribution: Hereditary will open in theaters in wide release on June 8, from A24.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Won't You Be My Neighbor

The late Fred Rogers was a miracle of a human being, an ordained minister and television evangelist for decency, kindness, and the power of imagination through his peerless PBS children’s series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which aired from 1968 to 2001. In Won’t You Be My Neighbor, taken from the indelible song that Rogers sang at the start of every episode, director Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) chronicles the lifespan of the show and the man who made it possible, interviewing everyone from Rogers’ family to the crew members who worked on it for decades in its modest Pittsburgh studio. The result is as humane and profound as Rogers himself, a man who believed to his marrow in human goodness and the sanctity of childhood. But it’s no hagiography. What made Rogers so special also left him isolated in our increasingly crass world, and understanding better as an adult what drove him to become such a gentle giant for tens of millions of children is a soothing, if bittersweet, balm for the soul. —A.B.V.

Distribution: Won’t You Be My Neighbor will open in theaters on June 8, from Focus Features.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Adapted from the beloved YA novel of the same name, The Miseducation of Cameron Post aims to be what would happen if John Hughes met Todd Haynes and they focused their energies on a group of queer teens. And it mostly hits that mark, settling into a thoughtful rhythm in a challenging setting: a ’90s boarding school devoted to trying to turn queer kids straight. Miseducation is as interested in the stealth ways people find joy and intimacy in an oppressive world as they are in the oppression itself. There’s also a solid cast holding that down — Chloë Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck, John Gallagher Jr. are only a few of the names that make the movie sing. And with director-cowriter Desiree Akhavan steering the ship, the film finds moments of exuberance and humor that elevate it above after-school special and closer to a modern take on Hughes. — A.B.

Distribution: None yet.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Skate Kitchen

Two decades and change after Kids, Larry Clark and Harmony Korine's button-pushing, cautionary tale about youngsters behaving very badly in New York City, filmmaker Crystal Moselle reclaims some of that unsupervised teen hangout territory on behalf of joyful liberation with this immensely pleasurable skateboarder drama. Moselle, whose first feature was the uneasy but unforgettable Lower East Side shut-ins doc The Wolfpack, returns to the same neighborhood for a film that's scripted, but that, in terms of culture and cast, draws heavily from the real girl skater community of its title. Newcomer Rachelle Vinberg stars as Camille, a Long Island 18-year-old who makes her way from Instagram fan to gradual member of a gang of badass girls (played by fellow skaters Dede Lovelace, Nina Moran, Ajani Russell, and others) who carve out space for themselves in the city's male-dominated parks and spots. Jaden Smith is the famous face who's tucked in there as an elusive object of desire, but Skate Kitchen is really and unapologetically a film about girls — about identity, belonging, and the complicated rules of friendship. —A.W.

Distribution: None yet.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Private Life

There are literally hundreds — thousands! — of movies about becoming a parent, but precious few focus on anything other than spontaneous pregnancy. So thank goodness for Private Life, which features Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), a New York couple in their forties who are grinding through the modern ways of starting a family that rarely if ever appear in a movie. They weather the expensive medical indignities of IVF and the emotional minefields of private adoption, and then, out of desperation, turn to their charmingly aimless twentysomething step-niece Sadie (Godless’ Kayli Carter) to be an egg donor. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins — whose last feature The Savages charmed Sundance 11 years ago — brings an unsparing eye to how infertility can run a marriage ragged, and how women of all ages endure the unyielding expectations placed on their bodies. (In the post-premiere Q&A, Jenkins joked that the Birdman-style pretentious title of her film would have been Private Life: The Biological Tyranny of the Female Condition.) But if Private Life sounds like a drag, it is anything but, for one big reason: Kathryn Hahn! I mean, Kathryn Hahn! KATHRYN HAHN! —A.B.V.

Distribution: Netflix will stream Private Life in 2018.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

What They Had

Family dramas about upwardly mobile white people brought together by a personal crisis has practically been a genre unto itself at Sundance for decades. But first-time writer-director Elizabeth Chomko imbues this one — about a family brought together after matriarch Ruth (Blythe Danner), with midstage Alzheimer’s, wanders away in her nightgown in a wintry Chicago night — with a charming lived-in specificity that feels immediately real. Michael Shannon gives great Michael Shannon as the son exasperated from trying to convince his irascible father, Burt (Robert Forster), to move Ruth into a full-time memory-care facility. And as Bridget, the sister stifled by her dull marriage, Hilary Swank makes clear she should be working a whole lot more than she does. Danner, meanwhile, has two moments when Ruth suddenly snaps into lucidity that walloped me flat. If Sundance is going to keep showcasing white-families-in-crisis movies, I hope they’re all as trenchantly funny and movingly well-observed as this one. —A.B.V.

Distribution: What They Had will open in theaters on March 16, from Bleecker Street.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Madeline's Madeline

Madeline (Helena Howard) is a teenage girl with an incredible talent for theater and a mental illness for which she was recently hospitalized, and which she sometimes opts not to treat with the meds prescribed to her. The inside of her head is a dizzying, vivid place, and Madeline's Madeline takes place almost entirely inside it, leaving the audience to parse out the slippery nature of reality as its main character perceives it. Josephine Decker's film is a bold, brilliantly visualized portrait of a young woman caught between an overly protective mother (Miranda July) and a parasitic director (Molly Parker) whose attempts to work with her read more like attempts to appropriate portions of her life for the sake of art. But Madeline's more than either woman can handle, maybe more than the world can, this force of nature whom Howard plays with such incandescence that it's hard to believe she's never acted onscreen before. —A.W.

Distribution: None yet.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Blindspotting

Blindspotting is the debut screenplay of Hamilton star Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, a complicated buddy film grounded in a gentrifying Oakland. It’s also the feature directing debut of Carlos López Estrada, and Casal’s first major film role. Given this many debuts — and that the film crackles with vitality from start to finish and experiments with verse in genuinely interesting ways — Blindspotting feels like the start of something very special. The film is centered on Diggs’ Collin, who works with Casal’s Miles as a mover and who’s adjusting to life after a stint in prison. Through deft uses of setting and character, the movie addresses race in a way that doesn’t just fall back on the same tropes we’ve become used to as moviegoers. Instead, it hashes out whiteness in a layered way. Blindspotting swings for the fences, a truly ambitious film and a showcase for a whole lot of talent. I’ll be interested to hear what conversations bubble up around it once the public gets ahold of it. And I’ll be interested to see what everyone involved goes on to do next. — A.B.

Distribution: Lionsgate will release Blindspotting later this year.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Monsters and Men

Like Blindspotting, the story of Monsters and Men springs from the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer, and, oddly, they both feature Jasmine Cephas Jones (Peggy in the original Broadway cast of Hamilton) as the long-suffering mother of a main character’s child. But unlike the brashly overstuffed Blindspotting, writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Jones takes a studiously restrained, human-scaled approach to Monsters and Men’s three lightly intertwined stories, capturing how the shooting reverberates well beyond the initial, all-too-familiar headlines. We start with the decision of a young father (Anthony Ramos, another Hamilton alum!) to post his cell phone video of the shooting to the internet, before shifting to how that decision affects a black NYPD officer (Ballers’ John David Washington) and a high school baseball star (Mudbound’s Kelvin Harrison Jr.). The film is so tastefully indie that it’s hard to know how, or if, it will break through beyond the festival, but its understated approach is all the more absorbing for how much it requires you to lean in. —A.B.V.

Distribution: Neon picked up domestic distribution rights to Monsters and Men during the festival, but no release date has been announced.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Hearts Beat Loud

For those who got to know Nick Offerman’s work through Parks and Recreation, you might be accustomed to seeing him as the stoic, stern, woodworking Ron Swanson — a man who makes fun of salads, hippies, and too much enthusiasm. In Hearts Beat Loud, Offerman plays a Brooklyn-dwelling musician and the most earnest, effervescent role I’ve ever seen him in. He’s the kind of man who squeals with joy in artisan coffee shops. And it’s wonderful.

Hearts Beats Loud follows a father (Offerman) and his daughter (Kiersey Clemons) as he tries to pressure her into starting a band with him the summer before she leaves for college across the country. It’s heartrendingly sweet, with several original songs I’m genuinely distressed I can’t own and play on repeat already. I need them right now. It also features something still relatively rare onscreen: a love story between two women of color (Clemons and Sasha Lane). It’s a movie that doesn’t explicitly plug into any massive political conversations right now, but that’s part of the joy of it: It gets all its juice from just telling a human story with a big ol’ heart. Speaking to others who caught the film at Sundance, I got the impression that it clung to their hearts just as it did to mine. — A.B.

Distribution: Gunpowder & Sky will distribute Hearts Beat Loud in North America, while Sony Pictures Worldwide will distribute internationally. No word on dates yet.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

From eighth-grade girls to skateboarding showboats to struggling gay teenagers, these actors and their roles wowed audiences at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival — and promise to keep audiences buzzing all year.

Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade)

In Eighth Grade — Bo Burnham’s empathetic look at a shy girl during her last week in middle school — Elsie Fisher has the tricky task of becoming more than just an avatar for our collective adolescence. Fisher plays 13-year-old Kayla with such bare vulnerability that she imbues the whole film with a gripping emotional suspense. Kayla spends large stretches of the movie completely trapped in herself. It can be so easy when playing quiet, observant characters to make them feel like blank slates who lack personalities. Kayla, however, feels like a fully realized person — the audience gets a full sense of who she is, even when Kayla herself is having a hard time actually showing that to the rest of the world. The credit largely rests with the way Fisher navigates this film: Her face and body language are tools she wields for an arresting experience. —Alanna Bennett

Taylor Jewell / AP

Forrest Goodluck (The Miseducation of Cameron Post)

Given that it's set in a school attempting to emotionally browbeat the queerness out of a bunch of queer teens, you’d think The Miseducation of Cameron Post — which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year — wouldn’t manage to be as funny or as warm as it is. That it pulls off its tricky tonal position is in part because of deft steering by director Desiree Akhavan — but it also hinges on the charisma of the three teenage friends at the story’s center. The least well-known actor in that trio is Forrest Goodluck, whose previous work includes The Revenant. He plays Adam Red Eagle, and he brings to the role a humor, warmth, and incisiveness that make you want to see him in about a thousand more things right this second. His work in this role transports you back to the best parts of high school, even as Miseducation’s plot centers on such dark oppression. That’s a feat — and one Goodluck excels at. —A.B.

Tommaso Boddi / Getty Images

Isabelle Nélisse (The Tale)

It’s pretty impossible to talk about what Isabelle Nélisse does in The Tale without causing great alarm, but here we go: She plays the 13-year-old version of the film’s writer-director, Jennifer Fox, who as an adult (and played by Laura Dern) begins to reconcile her memories of the relationship — first emotional, then sexual — she had when she was 13, with her 40-year-old coach Bill (Jason Ritter). Fox went to enormous lengths to insure Nélisse’s physical and psychological safety during filming, including an adult body double for any scenes of physical contact. But Nélisse’s ability to capture the complicated emotions stirring inside Fox means that even her character’s dialogue scenes with Bill are harrowing to watch. The fact that she filmed those scenes when she was just 11 — to drive home just how young Fox looked at the time — makes her accomplishment that much more astonishing. —Adam B. Vary

Taylor Jewell / AP

Helena Howard (Madeline's Madeline)

Some people just look lit up from within on screen. That's the case for newcomer Helena Howard in her debut in Josephine Decker's Madeline's Madeline, playing a teenager whose mental illness and ability to commit herself entirely to acting roles seem, in complicated ways, to be related. As Madeline, Howard is as magnetic as she is menacing — sometimes she comes across as a girl who seems like she should be sheltered, and sometimes she's an erratic presence testing out her sexuality or lashing out in violence. The triumphant film doesn't just rest entirely on Howard's masterful performance, it's built on her improvisations with the rest of the cast, making her not just the star but a creative force to be reckoned with. —Alison Willmore

Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images

Rafael Casal (Blindspotting)

The biggest standout scene in Blindspotting — the one that everyone argued about after its Sundance premiere — comes when Collin (Daveed Diggs) breaks into a passionate, stream-of-consciousness rap about the bone-deep fears he has to harbor every time he encounters a cop. It’s one of those you-either-go-with-this-or-you-don’t movie moments, and I totally went with it for one big reason: Rafael Casal’s performance in the scene as Collin’s lifelong best buddy, Miles. Casal cowrote Blindspotting with Diggs, and he’s well known in the world of performance poetry. But he really announces himself in this film as a talented and soulful actor, playing Miles with the kind of galvanizing charisma you’d expect from the lovable fuckup BFF. In that climactic rap scene with Diggs, however, Casal says nothing, drawing instead from a well of deep feeling to convey Miles’ fear and awe at watching his friend race at the edge of his own sanity. The film simply would not work without him. —A.B.V.

Taylor Jewell / AP

Kayli Carter (Private Life)

On paper, Kayli Carter’s role in Private Life risks becoming an irritating manic pixie dream millennial stereotype: As Sadie, she’s a rudderless twentysomething college dropout who’s always talking about not being taken seriously as an artist and decides almost on a whim to donate her eggs to her desperate-to-start-a-family step-aunt and uncle (Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti). But Carter (Netflix’s Godless) is so darn winning that we can’t help but fall for Sadie’s moony earnestness, especially as Carter lets us understand the character’s quiet, desperate need for purpose. It’s such a tightrope walk for an actor, getting us to see a person who still doesn’t know who she is herself as a fully realized character, but Carter pulls it off wonderfully. —A.B.V.

Taylor Jewell / AP

Nina Moran (Skate Kitchen)

Skate Kitchen takes its title from a real community of female skaters in New York City, and although it tracks the coming of age of a Long Island girl (Rachelle Vinberg) who joins them, director Crystal Moselle (The Wolfpack) treats her cast of almost entirely first-time actors as an ensemble. So it feels just a little wrong to single anyone out from the delightful group of young women. But, oh well: Nina Moran, as the ball-capped lesbian Kurt, immediately stands out, both as a character as unabashed about her sexuality as her abilities on a skateboard, and as an actor capable of revealing the currents of rage that bubble underneath Kurt’s happy-go-lucky temperament. —A.B.V.

Sonia Recchia / Getty Images

Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie (Leave No Trace)

Filmmaker Debra Granik has an eye for actors. Her 2004 debut, Down to the Bone, served as a breakthrough for lead Vera Farmiga, who'd acted in film and TV before but had never gotten a chance to show her talents like she did as a mother of two trying to hide a drug addiction. Her 2010 Winter's Bone showed the world what Jennifer Lawrence, as a tough Ozark teen, could do, and was an essential step to Lawrence's current stardom. So it really needn't be said that the young lead of her new film, father-daughter drama Leave No Trace, is one to watch. But let's go ahead and say it: New Zealander teenager Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie doesn't just hold her own against Ben Foster in this film about a family of two who've been living in the Oregon wilderness. She quietly becomes the heart of the film, a wise-beyond-her-years young woman who comes to understand the difficulty her PTSD-stricken father has with living in society, but also begins to wonder if she's willing to continue accompanying him in his off-the-grid existence. —A.W.

Taylor Jewell / AP

Laura Dern and Isabelle Nélisse in The Tale, which was acquired by HBO.

HBO

Harvey Weinstein attended last year’s Women’s March at the Sundance Film Festival. Weinstein walked on behalf of women's rights among the Utah locals and festival attendees that turned Park City's Main Street into a sea of pussyhats and pointedly worded signs — the same man whose decades of alleged sexual assault, harassment, coercion, and silencing of women would shake Hollywood to its core and kickstart the #MeToo movement just nine months later.

I heard repeated references to this incident at Sundance 2018, which was notably the most female-driven iteration of the festival I've ever attended, with 37% of the features directed by women — from Desiree Akhavan's young adult adaptation, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, to Alexandria Bombach's documentary portrait of a Yazidi activist, On Her Shoulders — all four directing prizes going to women, and countless panels about sexism and unconscious bias and pay parity. Weinstein's march worked both as a grim punchline about what a difference a year makes and a cautionary reminder of how little public gestures of allyship have to do with how someone really behaves.

While people once again gathered for a rally in the Park City snow, where the likes of Lena Waithe and Jane Fonda delivered rousing speeches about unity and the need to organize, there was a decidedly skeptical undercurrent throughout the festival toward performances of allyship. The tradition of saying one thing while doing another isn't new or unique to Hollywood, but it does come across as more galling in the light of #MeToo — all that talk, and the pins and T-shirts and marching, looking especially cheap without accompanying action.

Tessa Thompson, wearing a sweater tribute to some women directors, at the Women at Sundance Brunch.

Phillip Faraone / Getty Images for Refinery29

Sexual misconduct was certainly discussed during the last week and a half (the festival even launched a hotline to which it could be reported), but the more urgent questions on everyone's minds had to do with money, and the power it has to reshape workplace culture. At the packed Women at Sundance brunch, in an eyebrow-raising reworking of Naomi Klein's concept of disaster capitalism, panelists talked about how they hoped to be able to enact "disaster feminism," using the moment as an opportunity to make inroads into systemic imbalances in the industry.

But money, until the festival approached its end, wasn't doing much flowing toward films helmed by women directors. Films were being snapped up, but it was only in the second weekend that major deals were done for women-helmed scripted fare like Leave No Trace and The Tale. This may have been a female-driven Sundance, but the narrative that started a few days in and built to an apparently firm verdict by the end was that this year’s festival was a disappointment, a down cycle, devoid of any obvious breakouts. It's hard not to see these two things as related, especially with unnamed but apparently powerful distributors tellingly grumbling to Variety, "Who are these movies for?"

Women are making movies, and some of this year's were genuinely great — but in order to get those movies seen, they have to contend with a gauntlet of distributors who make the calls on what's relatable and viable, and who, in doing so, dictate the kinds of stories that end up in theaters, and who gets to tell them. Everyone is eager to say that they support women, that they're listening to women, that it's more urgent than ever to give work and equal pay to women in addition to assuring their safety. But when it comes to taking chances on women-directed work and seeing it as commercially viable, Sundance 2018 mostly felt like a long lesson in just how far we still have to go.

If you've never been to Sundance, you may have developed a rough idea of it as a snowy wonderland of celebs, tucked into $1500 puffy coats and cashmere beanies, wandering around a small ski resort town collecting freebies from gifting suites. And this is all true in ways that are incredible to witness, but it's only part of the picture. Sundance is Hollywood's dream of its best self, a showcase for work that is, at least theoretically, made outside the system, the product of bold sensibilities and diverse voices and artistic integrity.

Every year, whole swaths of the industry gather to watch films that are meant to be the kind they'd love to make if only they weren't subjected to market pressure. And then those films are immediately subjected to market pressure, as distribution companies battle to purchase the most promising titles for theaters, for video on demand, or for streaming. Incredibly ill-advised deals have been made in the giddy high altitudes of the festival, but then influential discoveries have been made there, too — and these deals, whether they turn out to be lucrative for the company or not, are showy gestures of companies throwing their weight behind a work of art. It's why Sundance remains, even in a "quiet" year, important. It’s an event that promises to kickstart careers and allow people in from outside the industry, even if the reality turns out to be more complicated than that.

The most talked-about movies at Sundance last year — The Big Sick, Call Me by Your Name, and Mudbound — were all picked up by theatrical distributors and are all currently Oscar contenders in various categories. The most talked-about movie at Sundance this year, The Tale, will bypass theaters to premiere on HBO.

The Tale director Jennifer Fox with cast members Common, Jason Ritter, Isabelle Nélisse, and Ellen Burstyn.

Tommaso Boddi / Getty Images for IMDb

Whatever combination of bidding and filmmaker negotiations went on behind the scenes, the result was that the company that stepped up with the best deal for the film wasn't a theatrical distributor but a cable network. There's no need to relitigate pointless movies-vs.-television debates. But it does feel like a startling whiff on the part of the film studios to pass on such an ambitious prestige title, letting it go to the small screen, which has been notably much friendlier to female-driven stories and creators in recent years.

The Tale is an autobiographical drama of sexual abuse from Jennifer Fox, a documentarian making her scripted debut. Laura Dern plays an on-screen incarnation of the director, a woman who starts to question whether what she'd insisted to herself at the time was a consensual relationship was actually abuse — she was 13, and he was her 40-year-old running coach (played by Jason Ritter). The Tale slips between the past and present, depicting the unreliable nature of memory and how we use it to shield and harm ourselves by reworking history into something easier to deal with. It is #MeToo the movie, complete with power imbalances that protect and enable a predator long after his first victim has left him behind.

Perhaps The Tale is timely in the wrong way, enough to scare off buyers with its unflinching sequences of the adolescent Jennifer (played by the painfully young Isabelle Nélisse, just now 14) being groomed and eventually coerced into sex. Those scenes are no less agonizing when watched with the knowledge that they were shot using an adult body double. The movie is insistently frank about what statutory rape looks like, in direct contrast to the glossed-over version of events that older Jennifer convinced herself of. It refuses to look away from difficult scenes, and its gaze is steady and distinctively female.

Indie film is often about hawking the idea of "importance," so what film executives (and critics) relate to impacts what gets bought.

I don't want to imply that The Tale got a rough shake in being picked up by HBO, which is a huge platform that will probably put the film in front of more eyeballs than a theatrical release would, and the reported 7 million dollars paid for it makes it the second biggest deal of the festival. But it seems worth mentioning that the biggest deal, for a reported 10 million dollars, was for Sam Levinson's Assassination Nation. It's a film I didn't see and can't speak to the quality of, but it's described as a violent satire about a town that goes off the rails when a hacker starts posting its secrets online, including ones about the four teenage main characters who become targets of hate. In other words, it takes on misogyny and female revenge on a much broader, less serious scale. That there was a rush to secure the rights to Assassination Nation indicates it's not necessarily proximity to the #MeToo movement that's a red flag for buyers — "This is a film that everyone needs to see and discuss," the Russo brothers, who were part of the deal, declared in the acquisition announcement.

Rather, the problem seems to be one of perspective and approach, where the raw realness of Fox's film about her own experiences is judged as less significant than a flashy, button-pushing romp. Variety's Owen Gleiberman even went so far as to refer to The Tale as a "sketchy postmodern Lifetime movie." That's language that recalls the chick lit-ification of books by women in the publishing world; their femininity is treated as a sign that they're lightweight, disposable, and lacking in artistic substance. Indie film is often about hawking the idea of “importance,” so what film executives (and critics) relate to impacts what gets bought. And executives and critics are still not a demographically diverse group.

I have no idea who will buy my favorite film at the festival, an impressionist portrait called Madeline's Madeline, directed by Josephine Decker. Decker’s earlier output veered into the experimental, and her new movie isn't that — it has a clear story to tell — but it's not conventional, either. The story drops you into the chaotic interior life of a ferocious teenage girl with a never-specified mental illness and makes you navigate an often slippery sense of reality alongside her. The viewing experience hits you like a fist, thanks in part to the awesome intensity of its lead actor, Helena Howard, in her heavily improvised first on-screen role. As Madeline, she burns so brightly that you can see how the character compels and alarms so many people in her orbit, including her smothering mom (Miranda July) who Madeline sometimes thinks about harming, and the theater director (Molly Parker) whose rehearsals are a sanctuary until their "collaborations" start to feel vampiric.

Helena Howard in Madeline's Madeline.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

But Madeline's Madeline doesn't have an easy marketing hook. It bristles with ideas about race and class and inspiration and mental health while refusing to be a treatise on any one of those in particular, to the benefit of viewers and detriment of anyone trying to pitch it for sale. The movie is neither overtly woke enough to be presented as a movie that will teach people something, nor the product of one of the established (and near-universally male) auteurs from whom some playfulness with form is tolerated — your Paul Thomas Andersons, your Coen brothers. As a result, Madeline's Madeline might be doomed to festival purgatory. Even fans of the film at the festival seemed to talk about it as if it were already consigned to the past, a footnote in the bright career Howard seems destined to go on to have. Though even as I say this, I wonder if I haven't simply internalized the industry's cynicism about how a ticket-buying audience (or their narrow idea of one) will behave.

There are more women behind the camera, but they're still predominately white, even as casts become more diverse.

Just as mesmerizingly uncomfortable, but more straightforward, The Kindergarten Teacher at least stands a better chance of landing a bigger distributor. That’s thanks to the star at its center, Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also produced the film. The Kindergarten Teacher is a remake of an Israeli film, reworked with a Staten Island setting by writer-director Sara Colangelo. Like Madeline's Madeline, it plays around with an attentive-bordering-on-predatory relationship between an ominously well-meaning white lady (who Gyllenhaal doesn't soften one bit) and the young person of color whose bones she seems to want to suck the talent out of — in this case, a kid in her class (Parker Sevak) who she becomes convinced is a poetry prodigy. Seen in the context of the festival, that recurring motif is like a dark on-screen acknowledgement of another Sundance reality: There are more women behind the camera, but they're still — like filmmakers in the festival in general — predominantly white, even as casts become more diverse.

But while The Kindergarten Teacher leans into that anxiety, there's none of the same tension on screen at all in Skate Kitchen, another personal favorite and another film that's still waiting on distribution. Ironic, given that director Crystal Moselle's first feature, The Wolfpack, a doc about siblings who'd spent their lives locked away in an apartment, teetered right on the edge of art and exploitation. In Skate Kitchen, Moselle stumbled upon another group of highly cinematic New York City kids (a cluster of extremely hip skateboarding girls) and built a scripted movie around them, but the results feel collaborative. You forget they're mostly first-time actors because this fearless, racially diverse, sexually fluid crew of trash-talking young women feels like a convoy from a cooler future — until Jaden Smith, perfect as a stealth fuckboy, stirs up drama regarding rules about dating your friends' exes that go way, way back.

Rachelle Vinberg, Ajani Russell, Nina Moran, and Dede Lovelace in Skate Kitchen.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Skate Kitchen feels gratifyingly fresh, but it also could be in conversation with Larry Clark and Harmony Korine's 1995 landmark film Kids, as it revisits and reclaims some of its teens-roaming-the-city-unsupervised territory. Whereas Kids played like a button-pushing cautionary tale of very bad behavior, this new film finds a sun-streaked but unromanticized hope in its skater collective — like maybe all we ever needed was to put the girls in charge.

It's been almost a quarter century since Kids, which, of course, had its premiere at Sundance, and which, of course, was released in theaters by Harvey Weinstein to all sorts of uproar over its content. The idea of “indie” film — as a market, as the way certain films get financed, and as a sensibility — has changed a lot since then, and it's illuminating to contrast the prurient outrage that boosted the profile and box office draw of Kids with the debate over the abuse scenes in The Tale. And it seems that it's still a bigger risk to bet on a woman's film about her own sexual initiation at the hands of a predatory man than on one about a predatory teenager who gets his kicks deflowering barely pubescent girls.