Moonlight

Directed by Barry Jenkins, United States, 2016

Moonlight opens with a long shot following Juan in a regular day as a drug dealer in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood. The camera tracks behind him as he crosses the street, scoping out his surroundings. As he catches up with a younger dealer, the camera circles round and round the two of them, also taking in a strung-out addict begging for a free fix and a young man sprinting down the street while sirens blare in the distance. The roving, 360 degree camera movements reflect Juan's paranoid, cautious awareness of his surroundings. He can never let his guard down, not knowing what direction a threat might come from. He has a silent, stoic tough guy poise that we later realize is more of a defensive mask than his natural personality.

Moonlight has several such scenes, where the expressionistic camerawork reflects the emotions or mindset of its characters. We see a gentler side to Juan when he forms an unexpected friendship with Chiron, a young boy he finds alone in an empty drug den. Juan and his kind-hearted girlfriend Teresa become like surrogate parents to the quiet, sensitive but intense Chiron. In one gorgeous scene, Juan takes Chiron to the beach and teaches him how to swim. The camera mimics Chiron's perspective, bobbing in and out of the waves as Juan holds him in the water, then releases him to swim on his own. We feel, as Chiron does, the safety of Juan's arms, and the scary but exciting thrill of struggling independently through the choppy surf. Another shot from Chiron's point of view shows his mother, Paula, staring at him with hostility - and at us, directly into the camera. She's backlit by an ominous pink glow that heightens the intensity of her expression, which looks to Chiron like hatred. We see only brief moments between Chiron and Paula, who is addicted to drugs, but the glimpses of their relationship make it clear why he avoids home to seek shelter elsewhere.

Moonlight unfolds in three chapters, each covering several days at different points in Chiron's life. The first chapter, "Little", is about Chiron as a boy, "Chiron" as a teenager, and "Black" as a young man. The screenplay is an adaptation of the unpublished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, which was based on his own life. McCraney grew up in Liberty City. His single mother was addicted to drugs, and passed away fairly young from HIV-related complications. Juan is based on a real man, Blue, a drug dealer who became like a father figure to young McCraney but died when he was only 7. Chiron's experiences with bullying and discomfort with himself as a gay kid and man are rooted in McCraney's own life. Moonlight's director, Barry Jenkins, also grew up in this neighborhood with a drug-addicted mother, though he and McCraney had never met until they collaborated on the project. Jenkins and McCraney know these streets and these people; Moonlight thrums with authenticity.

On paper, Moonlight might seem thin. The characters rarely explain their motivations or past histories, let alone speak their minds. We must fill in the gaps of their silences, and the missing time between the three chapters. Barry Jenkins's camera expresses what the characters cannot, making vivid their inner emotional lives that they prefer to keep hidden. An excellent ensemble cast also communicate so much, moreso through their body language than their dialogue. Mahershala Ali has limited screentime as Juan but makes a quietly powerful impression as a man living out a dangerous, toxic path. His relationship with Chiron is an expression of regret and a yearning for redemption and connection beyond his own dog-eat-dog world. Naomie Harris is frightening and heartbreaking as Paula, a woman who does have love for her son but has been overtaken by addiction and despair. She's the only actor to appear in all three chapters, transforming from a wrathful, larger-than-life figure in the eyes of young Chiron to a regretful, diminutive phantom of a person in the adult Chiron's perspective. Three actors play Kevin, a friend of Chiron and the man he falls for. Kevin is more comfortable in his own skin than Chiron, a friendly extrovert who more freely accepts his romantic desires in private though is just as unwilling to express them publicly. Jharrel Jerome and Andre Holland capture Kevin's confidence and charm, but also his underlying fear and insecurity.

Chiron is also played by three actors of different ages - Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes, respectively. As a boy, he's all wide-eyed shyness and caution. As a teen, his coiled body language and clipped speech reveal his pent-up fury. The transformation between chapters two and three is the most shocking, as Chiron grows from a skinny boy to a hulking, muscular man. He speaks and moves more assertively, with a presentation that says, loud and clear, don't fuck with me. One of the dangers facing films where multiple actors play the same character is audience disbelief that they are actually watching the same person, but Moonlight draws a simple, persuasive character arc between the three iterations of Chiron. His peers and mother perceive his gentleness as weakness, and torment him for it, calling him "not a real man" or a faggot. As a teen Chiron is clearly overwhelmed with anger, and after a brutal incident he snaps, tired of being a victim. Chiron decides on a course of violent action, seeing it as the only way to protect himself. Barry Jenkins shows us Chiron's new decisiveness through his cinematography and Ashton Sanders's body language. He surveys his bloodied face in the mirror, an unfamiliar hardness in his eyes - one of many shots in Moonlight where a character directly, confrontationally stares into the camera. He then charges through the hallways of his school, intent on getting revenge on a bully. His movements are now laser-focused and aggressive, such a change from his previous timid and uncertain physicality. Even the colors in this scene reflect his newfound purpose, the bright blue of his shirt syncing with the blues of his school's hallways - he's becoming like his environment. Though his violent outburst is hardly unjustified it directly leads to the adult Chiron we later see - a drug dealer, unrecognizable beneath his muscles and impenetrable tough attitude.

A running theme in Moonlight is the impact certain expectations of masculinity have on men, gay or straight. In the world of Chiron, Kevin and Juan, to be a man is to be "hard". Vulnerability is punished, while violence is upheld as a man's way. Both Kevin and Chiron resort to violence as a tactic of survival and self-protection, though it's not behavior that comes naturally to either man. Juan is a small-time kingpin in his neighborhood, but in his interactions with Chiron we see a completely different man - one that is silently calling out for freedom from the cruel, false world he has mired himself in.

Moonlight illustrates a depressing cycle of violence and falsehood. As an adult, Chiron models himself after Juan - he becomes a drug dealer, drives a similar car with the same crown on the dash, owns a similar kind of pistol. We see him on the job and are reminded of Juan - the same paranoid awareness, the same shallow toughness, the same kind of half-threatening, half-businesslike interactions with a young underling. The world violently denied Chiron as himself, and he's responded by giving it what it expects from a man like him - poor, black, from a community overrun with drugs. For him, it's not only learned behavior but a way to survive. Moonlight makes clear that for all these characters, their actions are a form of survival. Paula uses drugs to escape her crushing loneliness. Kevin betrays Chiron to save himself. Juan deals drugs to blend in to his Darwinian society. Chiron resorts to drastic self-transformation to stay safe. The terrible irony is that they all end up contributing to the very systems and ideologies that have made their own lives hell, and by seeking survival have put themselves in terribly dangerous positions. We never learn exactly what happens to Juan, but it's not hard to guess, nor to see the same future for Chiron if he does not change.

In the final chapter of Moonlight, Chiron reconnects with two people from his past who have done him harm - his mother and Kevin. Kevin calls up Chiron and apologizes for his act of betrayal - Trevante Rhodes's performance is beautifully subtle in this moment, as Chiron's tough exterior falls away and we see the vulnerable little kid again. He drives to meet Kevin, recently released from prison and working in a diner. Though the first two acts of Moonlight are very moving, and punctuated with moments of brilliance, for me it's in the third act that Moonlight becomes truly great and powerful. As Chiron and Kevin reconnect in the diner, we are witness to an acting masterclass between Rhodes and Andre Holland. Every glance, gesture, and indirect statement is loaded with more meaning and emotion than is apparent on the surface. I found myself hanging on to every little nuance of their interaction, a sign of subtly brilliant acting, writing, and directing.

Moonlight's last act is astonishing for its quiet catharsis. Chiron begins to honestly reckon with himself, and to forgive. His story ends with luminous hope, a hope that Moonlight genuinely earns. It ends with redemption too - even for Juan, long gone from the story. Chiron breaks from the same path that took Juan, and instead heeds the better advice Juan shared with him as a kid - that he needed to decide for himself what kind of man he was going to be, not to let anybody else make that decision for him. Chiron finally speaks his heart, and as we've seen so much of his silence, his hurt, and his anger, his vulnerably honest words land with stunning power. We're not only seeing an individual man finally speak truthfully for himself, we're seeing the cyclical despair of his world finally broken.

Love & Friendship

Directed by Whit Stillman, United Kingdom, 2016

Love & Friendship is a confusing title for this Jane Austen adaptation. There is a Jane Austen short story titled Love and Freindship (yes, with 'e' before 'i') written when she was only 15, but Love & Friendship is actually based on her unfinished novella Lady Susan, written when she was 19 and unpublished during her lifetime. Lady Susan tells, in epistolary format, of a middle-aged widower and social climber with a genius for manipulation. Considering it was written in 1790s England - and by a teenager, no less - Lady Susan is pretty risque. Its main character is an unrepentant schemer, sexually and financially ambitious, who is neither redeemed or overtly punished for her behavior. A tacked-on epilogue resolves the story and spells out Lady Susan's villainy, but up until its final pages Lady Susan is all scandalous wit. Jane Austen mines humor out of the drastic differences between Lady Susan's letters - depending on who she is writing to, her language is all sugary sweetness or politely phrased savagery. That Jane Austen could conceive of this character at such a young age is early proof of her cleverness and insight.

For superficial reasons it might be surprising that Whit Stillman, the oddball director behind Love & Friendship, would adapt Jane Austen. He's an American indie filmmaker, and none of his previous works were period pieces. But he's been making Austen-inspired movies all along. His 90s cult classics Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco are comedies of manners whose privileged characters are intelligent and erudite, but not as wise as they believe themselves, Emma Woodhouses stranded in the late 20th century. Stillman does justice to Austen with his first official adaptation of her work. Their sensibilities work perfectly together - many of the funniest, sharpest lines come straight from the book, but Stillman fleshes out and deepens the story, adding welcome touches of absurdist humor and a much more satisfying ending.

Playing Lady Susan would be an exhilarating challenge for any actress, and Kate Beckinsale absolutely owns the part. Most well-known in America for her role as leather-clad heroine in the action-horror series Underworld, Love & Friendship is a very different kind of project for Beckinsale and she clearly enjoyed the change of pace. It's her best performance since The Last Days of Disco nearly 20 years ago - which is, not incidentally, also a Stillman movie where she gets to show off her sharp comic timing. Lady Susan, described as a "genius of a diabolical sort" and "the serpent in Eden's garden", manages to manipulate every single character at some point in the movie. She knows exactly how to use deliberate language to twist the moral standards of the time and make herself appear appealing or innocent. Beckinsale plays Lady Susan with a quick tongue and a mischievous gleam in her eyes, self-delighted for pulling off her schemes.

Love & Friendship might surprise audiences with how directly comic it is. Previous cinematic Austen adaptations, though not entirely without humor, have mostly been romantic dramas (Clueless excepted). And though her novels are romantic, that side of her work has been overemphasized. Jane Austen is as practical as romantic in her view of couplings - she is always aware of the economic and social necessities men and women had to negotiate, and casts a gently satirical eye on the hypocrisies of upper class English society. Lady Susan in particular is all satire and no sweetness. Love & Friendship captures her cutting wit. For these characters, Lady Susan especially, language is a weapon and armor. Every polite, verbose conversation is a covert power struggle and battle of wills, characters using convoluted rhetoric and slyly (mis)applied moral principles to prove their rightness - or, at least, maintain the appearance of rightness.

Actually, the "appearance of rightness" is what's most important in this society. Even in how it tells its story, Love & Friendship makes clear that reputation is more important than truth to its characters. The most dramatic moments of the story are elided - two marriage proposals involving major characters happen off-screen. We learn about them by characters' discussions after the fact. This might frustrate some viewers hoping for a more dramatically conventional approach, but it's not accidental. What happens in this story is less important than what characters say about it, how they manipulate gossip surrounding events to further their own agenda.

Love & Friendship also makes clear that, for a woman in Lady Susan's place and time, manipulation was sometimes necessary. She's in a dreadful position - a middle-aged widow who, just by how her society is structured, must be entirely reliant on the hospitality of others for her livelihood. She's a proto-feminist in a way, relentless in the pursuit of independence and unabashed about her romantic and sexual ambitions. Her determination is impressive and a direct rebuke to the ingrained sexism of her times, a point underlined by Sir James's speech about the essential differences between men and women (deeply ironic in context). But Love & Friendship does not turn Lady Susan into a hero either - her schemes are clearly not just a necessary evil, but something she enjoys for the sake of it. And through her carefully-worded witticisms Lady Susan often unintentionally reveals her own faults. "Only by one's friends can one truly be known," she remarks sagely. If true, her one real friend, equally unscrupulous American expat Mrs. Johnson, exposes plenty about Lady Susan - as their entire friendship is founded on a shared disdain for everyone else.

Sir James Martin is one of the movie's most inspired embellishments from the book. He's described by Austen as "a bit of a rattle", a vague but apt description that Stillman and actor Tom Bennett take to absurd extremes. Sir James behaves like an alien attempting to communicate with the proper Georgian manners and failing disastrously. Tom Bennett's performance is over-the-top in the best way - the rambling scene where he cluelessly introduces himself is comedy gold. Both Sir James and Lady Susan are indelible comic creations, and both also, though in different ways, expose the hypocrisy of their society. Everyone around Sir James is clearly mortified by his lack of social graces. They only tolerate him because he's wealthy - making clear the values of their world. "He brings a lively new angle to things," they say euphemistically. Many of the foolish things Sir James says are uncomfortably revealing, not least of all his bizarre homily on "the Twelve Commandments". When cautiously corrected by another character that there are, in fact, only Ten, Sir James is delighted. Missing the point entirely, he now wonders which two commandments he can ignore. "Perhaps the one about the Sabbath. I prefer to hunt."

One of the running jokes in Love & Friendship is the ornamental nature of religion among its Anglican characters and their constant botching of the Ten Commandments. Lady Susan shames her daughter with the fourth (or is it fifth?) commandment, "honor thy father and mother". "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is addressed in a brief but telling moment - one these characters break gleefully and often. Sir James's foolishness is just a ridiculous reflection of the more sophisticated, refined foolishness of his society, and his Twelve Commandments gaffe is not just a gag. Religion is just another accessory to this world, which for all its moral posturing is motivated by wealth and status more than anything else.

But Love & Friendship is not all cynicism - in fact, some of Stillman's additions make it gentler than the book. Supporting characters like Lady Susan's guileless daughter, Frederica, offer a counterpoint to the more manipulative and cluelessly privileged characters. Frederica is the only character who seeks out the truth with humility. She visits the local curate looking for answers about how to really honor her mother. The curate's academic, over-zealous demeanor is amusing, but his words offer an alternative worldview to the scheming and complacency surrounding Frederica. He rhapsodizes about "the superb Baumgarten" and his "aesthetic trinity" - "Truth is the perfect perceived by reason, Beauty by the senses, and Good by moral will". I know nothing about Baumgarten or his theory of an aesthetic trinity, but can sense these principles at work in Love & Friendship, particularly the final scene. Lady Susan's schemes have been rewarded with triumph for her - she's now involved in a secret menage-a-trois, one man her desired conquest and the other providing income and blithely unaware of his position. But in spite of all her plots, the other characters have emerged largely unscathed and happy. Frederica and Reginald DeCourcy, both former victims of Lady Susan, are wed and seem blissful. Reginald reads a poem praising his wife's greatest beauty as "virtue", and Frederica (alternatively known as a "Kentish nightingale" or "Surrey songbird") sings "Love Will Find Out the Way", no matter what manipulations try to squash it.

For all its snarkiness and self-effacing humor, Love & Friendship is ultimately gracious and generous. This graciousness is the secret ingredient that makes Stillman's movies - deadpan and wryly postmodern on their surface - not only witty, but unassumingly wise. I always get the sense that he likes his characters, even as he pokes fun of their self-absorption, cluelessness and dishonesty. In the fashion of all the best comedies, Love & Friendship exposes and mocks the nonsense that people are capable of, but by the end all is well (or mostly all - Sir James would disagree if he had any awareness).

10th Anniversary: There Will Be Blood

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, United States, 2007

*Plot spoilers ahead 

"So - ladies and gentlemen - if I say I'm an oil man you will agree."

Those are among the first words we hear in There Will Be Blood, spoken in an intimidating baritone by self-made oil baron Daniel Plainview. He's selling himself to a town that has struck oil, promising to share any wealth he makes from drilling. "I'm a family man," he says, somewhat unconvincingly, pointing to the frozen-looking boy at his side. He knows what the townspeople want to hear, but there's a stiffness in his manner and a hostility in his eyes that betrays his distaste for everyone in the room.

This monologue - the first dialogue in the film - doesn't arrive until nearly twenty minutes have elapsed. The opening scenes of There Will Be Blood silently observe the risky nature of Plainview's work and his incredible endurance. We first see Plainview as a younger man, alone in a mine pickaxing for gold. Climbing down the mineshaft, he falls and shatters a leg. Not forgetting his gold, he climbs out the mine and crawls all the way back to civilization - a horrific shot shows Plainview dragging himself through the dirt, miles of desert mountains stretched in front of him. He survives and earns his reward. Several years later, we return to Plainview - now drilling for oil, the new fastest path to wealth. We are shown how dangerous drilling for oil is when a co-worker is instantly killed in a brutal accident. The dead man had an infant boy, H.W., now orphaned. Plainview adopts him. 

This prologue is masterful filmmaking. Director Paul Thomas Anderson focuses on the process of drilling for oil - not something I'm particularly interested in, but by careful observance of the grueling work involved, Anderson makes it gripping and suspenseful. Anderson's direction was clearly inspired by Stanley Kubrick, the patient slow pacing, detached beauty of the cinematography and shrieking strings score are reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining. The elemental imagery - of oil-blackened hands raised in celebration, of harsh desert plains that yield riches for those brave enough to hunt for it - promises an epic American myth, with Daniel Plainview at its center. These opening scenes show a man at his most comfortable - isolated and working for profit, no matter how nasty the work. His adoption of H.W., though, is puzzling. Was it out of compassion, or something more strategic? He clearly has tender feelings towards H.W., even if he expresses them awkwardly. In one sweet moment, H.W. reaches curiously for his new father's bushy mustache, and Plainview lets him.

The majority of the film is set in the southern California town of Little Boston, where Plainview finds success and wealth after striking oil. There Will Be Blood has often been compared to Citizen Kane, another mythic story of an American tycoon whose greed isolates him from those he loves. It's an obvious and not entirely inaccurate comparison to make, but the tragedy of Daniel Plainview is distinctly different from that of Charles Foster Kane. Kane is an essentially good man who, through his selfish ambitions, drives away everyone who loves him, realizing at the end of his life that all his wealth brings him no happiness without anyone to share it with. Plainview is a lonely-by-choice misanthrope from the beginning who is tempted to connect with others, to care about something other than getting money, and ultimately turns them away. By the end, he doesn't seem to have enough humanity left for regret.

Daniel Plainview's character is illuminated by his relationships to three important people in his life - H.W., a stranger claiming to be his long-lost half-brother, and Little Boston's minister, Eli Sunday. Plainview clearly loves H.W., but just as clearly loves the pursuit of profit more. When a man arrives on his doorstep claiming to be his "brother from another mother", bringing persuasive evidence that he's telling the truth, Plainview cautiously accepts him. He slowly opens up to this man as with nobody else, treating him like a business partner and brother. It becomes clear that for Daniel Plainview, blood bonds are the most important connection. He distances himself from H.W. when it becomes clear that the boy has a very different personality, kind-hearted and only moderately ambitious. Once H.W. goes deaf in an accident at the oil derrick, he becomes too troublesome and Plainview sends him off to boarding school. His ultimate dismissal of H.W.: "there's none of me in you". Similarly, once Daniel realizes that his long-lost brother may actually be an impostor, he is devastated, and not only because of the betrayal. "I'm your friend," the impostor protests in the face of Plainview's fury, but Daniel does not have or want friends. His ego could not handle such a relationship. He only wants to be surrounded by mini-Daniel Plainviews.

However, Plainview loathes the only character he's actually similar to - Eli Sunday, the charlatan minister of Little Boston. Eli leads a cult-like, heretical church called The Third Revelation. He screeches madly in front of an awestruck congregation, claiming to cast demons out of arthritis-stricken old ladies. Eli is the only person in Little Boston who immediately distrusts Daniel Plainview, and Plainview seems to be the only person who sees through Eli's holy facade. They're mirror images of each other - in different professions, but both are selfish conmen. "It takes one to know one" and both men hate what they see.

At the time of its release, many critics took the symbiotic rivalry between Eli and Daniel to symbolize the dual forces of capitalism and Christianity in America. If that was Paul Thomas Anderson's intention, There Will Be Blood does not develop those themes towards any overarching statement as far as I can tell. Anderson's next two films, The Master and Inherent Vice, show his gift for astute commentary on American history and culture, but There Will Be Blood, for me, has more value as an eccentric character study. 

Any good character study needs a good performance at its center - and as Daniel Plainview, Daniel Day-Lewis is beyond good. It's one of the all-time great movie performances. Day-Lewis builds to moments as bombastic and theatrical as Jack Nicholson at his craziest, but can also communicate much when his character is doing nothing. His proud but uncomfortable body language, the barely concealed hostile tenor of his voice, and especially his slyly hateful gaze make as indelible an impression as his psychotic outbursts.

Of course, There Will Be Blood is not just the Daniel Day-Lewis show. Paul Thomas Anderson's direction is incredibly confident. Anderson has made a film as alternately subtle and over-the-top as Day-Lewis, where patient build-ups lead to shocking eruptions of madness. There Will Be Blood has several astonishing set-pieces that show off Anderson's genius. In one sequence, Plainview's derrick strikes oil which bursts from the earth in a giant black geyser before catching fire, becoming a column of flame. Daniel looks on from a safe distance, his face ominously lit with red and dollar signs on his mind. Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead fame, composed the unconventional soundtrack, which in this scene sounds like the rhythmic clanking of bones. There Will Be Blood, in moments like this, captures something frightening and primal - the terrifying power of the geyser, forced from the earth through tremendous pressure, and the equally volcanic power of Plainview's greed and hatred. There Will Be Blood is fashioned from the elemental stuff of myth.

Tragic and scary as it is, There Will Be Blood is also surprisingly funny, more so than I remembered. This morbid streak of humor is also reminiscent of Kubrick, who played the dehumanization of his characters for laughs as much as pathos. Daniel Plainview's antisocial behavior becomes aggressive to the point of absurdity. "One night, I'm gonna come to you, inside of your house, wherever you're sleeping, and I'm gonna cut your throat," Daniel says, in response to a mildly condescending comment from a friendly rival businessman. The threat is so extreme and unwarranted that I couldn't help but laugh at the insanity. His petty power plays with Eli Sunday are played as farce that escalates into slapstick violence.

The dual strands of tragedy and black comedy reach their inevitable end points in an epilogue that takes place in 1927, over a decade after the main bulk of the film. Plainview is now hugely wealthy and alone, an alcoholic ensconced in a lavish, Xanadu-like mansion. H.W., now an adult and happily married, visits his father - we understand they have been out of touch for years. H.W. forgives his father and asks for reconciliation, but Plainview disowns him with cruel mockery, claiming he only adopted the boy to have a sweet face around as a business strategy. A flashback of a tender father-son moment when H.W. was younger disproves Plainview's point - he did love H.W., but his selfishness destroyed their relationship.

Now officially divorced from any vestiges of humanity, Daniel Plainview has another visitor from his past - Eli Sunday, in desperate times and asking for money. What begins as a mildly hostile conversation escalates into a drunken, abusive tirade from Daniel. Their selfish impulses have brought these men to a point where they are more caricatures than humans - Eli is nothing but sniveling, cowardly hypocrisy and Daniel is nothing but malevolent, paranoid destruction. I've already praised Paul Thomas Anderson's direction, but his writing deserves as much attention. The dialogue in this epilogue is brilliant and bizarre - Anderson must be a bit of a madman himself to have thought up Daniel's colorful insults and that infamous milkshake metaphor. Their confrontation finally turns to ludicrous violence that would not be out of place in a Tom & Jerry cartoon, surreal and funny but ultimately disturbing. Ironically triumphant classical music meets the cryptic, sick punchline - "I'm finished!"

My Favorite Films of 2016

Ranking favorite movies, especially after only one viewing, is kind of useless. Boiling down complex storytelling and artistic experiences to "I liked X better than Y" is pretty silly and misleading, especially as my opinion on all these movies might revise over the next few years. Some I might grow to love even more, some I might realize are not as great as I initially thought. Also, I still haven't seen several potentially awesome 2016 movies (Toni Erdmann, Elle, Cameraperson, Things to Come, Loving, etc).

But I like making these goofy lists anyways - because I'm a nerd and they're fun. Don't take it as a list of "the objectively best movies of 2016" or "most highly recommended movies of 2016", as your mileage may vary. They're just the ones that moved, excited and fascinated me most.

1. Silence (my review)

2. Love & Friendship (my brief review / UPDATE: wrote a full review)

3. Knight of Cups (my review)

 4. The Witch - possibly my favorite American horror film since The Shining. As thoughtful and artful as scary.

 5. Tale of Tales (my review)

 6. Cemetery of Splendor - another humbly mind-bending vision from Apichatpong Weerasethakul (aka 'Joe'). Casually blurs lines between past and present, mundane and magical, politics and folklore.

 7. Hail, Caesar! - a classic Hollywood tribute and critique, a Passion Play that is half-ironic and half-sincere, another lighthearted but deceptively thoughtful movie from the Coen brothers.

 8. Arrival - a parable on the value of patient communication, a drama about one mother's incredible love and sacrifice, a heady exploration of fate vs. free will and how language shapes perception, and a sci-fi spectacle starring majestic tentacle monsters!

 9. Moonlight - a coming-of-age story of unusual gentleness and dignity, about a young man who is given very little of either. Moments of grace surrounded by predictably constant heartbreak. The ending is luminous with hope. (UPDATE: wrote a full review. Also, after a second viewing, I would've rated this even higher on my list.)

 10. Paterson - another remarkably kind film, a look at the quiet life of a bus driver, poet, and husband. Its quirkier elements felt distracting on first look, but I suspect my appreciation might deepen on a second viewing. Sweet and meaningful either way.

Honorable Mentions:

• The BFG
• Certain Women
• Everybody Wants Some!!
• The Fits
• Hell or High Water
• La La Land
• The Lobster
• Our Little Sister
• Right Now, Wrong Then
• Rogue One
• Sunset Song
• Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience

10 Great Performances (not ranked, and with the caveat that there are many acclaimed 2016 performances I haven't seen yet)

• Amy Adams in Arrival
• Mahershala Ali in Moonlight
• Kate Beckinsale in Love & Friendship
• Bebe Cave in Tale of Tales
• Andrew Garfield in Silence
• Alden Ehrenreich in Hail, Caesar!
• Lily Gladstone in Certain Women
• Jung Jae-Young in Right Now, Wrong Then
• Trevante Rhodes in Moonlight
• Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch

Knight of Cups

Directed by Terrence Malick, United States, 2016

For the first four decades of his career, Terrence Malick completed only five films. From 2013 through 2018, he will have released five more. This newfound productivity is totally unexpected from Malick, now 73 years old. His latest films, To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, feel slightly different from earlier works like The Thin Red Line or Days of Heaven. Those were rare events, from a perfectionist and visionary who took years between masterpieces. In comparison, Malick's recent work, though no less visionary, is sketchier and slighter, more autobiographical and idiosyncratic. With Knight of Cups, Malick has moved further than he ever has from traditional narrative - there is a story here, but told as a stream of recollected memories, a cinematic collage driven by music, narration and nonlinear editing.

Knight of Cups follows Rick (Christian Bale), an L.A. screenwriter in an existential funk. Rick is hardly even a character - we never learn what he writes about, his hobbies or opinions, and Christian Bale barely speaks in the role. He is an autobiographical stand-in for Malick and a placeholder for an emotional state - he is searching, restless and dissatisfied, which is all we really need to know.

The poster tagline for Knight of Cups is simply "A Quest". The film opens with narration from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the story of Christian who must travel through the City of Destruction and Vanity Fair before arriving at his desired destination, the Celestial City. It is, of course, an allegory for the spiritual journey of a Christian, who must navigate dangerous temptations through the course of their worldly life before reaching heaven. As the words of Bunyan fade, another allegory is narrated to us - the tale of a prince who is sent West from the East to find a pearl by his father the King. But once in the West, the prince drinks from a cup and falls into a deep sleep - he forgets the pearl, and forgets who he is. But the King does not forget his son, and sends messengers to remind the prince of his quest. It's a hybrid of two ancient spiritual texts - "The Hymn of the Pearl" from the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, and A Tale of the Western Exile by medieval Persian mystic Suhrawardi.

Seemingly disassociated imagery plays underneath the narration of these allegorical quests. We see Rick wandering an empty desert landscape, and shots of Earth from orbit. Then we see VHS-quality images of children at play, maybe distant memories from Rick's childhood. And as we hear of the prince forgetting his mission, we see the adult Rick, stumbling through a lavish L.A. party in a drunken stupor. There is a brief stop-motion animation scene - an art installation playing at the party - of a topless model covered in black paint, taking on and off an unnerving mask, seeming to lull Rick to sleep and a visual representation of an unfixed, mutable postmodern identity. This prologue tells us to view Rick's journey as an allegory - he is our Christian and Prince, the Celestial City and Pearl his destination, and the Angelenos he meets are tempters and guides in his quest. Knight of Cups belongs to an ancient, archetypal storytelling mode - the moralistic and religious allegory - but tells it through a radically modern style, as influenced by avant-garde art as traditional cinematic grammar.

The title, Knight of Cups, is also the name of a tarot card that sums up Rick's personality. The Knight of Cups, when upright, represents a romantic adventurer, a seeker with high principles. When reversed, it represents a person who is easily distracted and cannot discern the truth from lies. Knight of Cups is split into chapters named after tarot cards, each centered around Rick's relationship with a different character. They all have a unique philosophy or lesson to share with him that aligns with the meaning of their chapter's card.

The mix of Christianity and tarot is intentionally baffling. Knight of Cups is about the search for meaning in a postmodern, pluralistic society. In 21st century Los Angeles, radically different forms of belief rub shoulders. Looking for answers, Rick visits a Catholic priest, a tarot card reader, and a friend who eloquently speaks of Buddhist monastic life. He witnesses the prayers of his Christian father and a Buddhist girlfriend. He is surrounded by religiously devoted hedonism - fashion shoots worshipping beauty, lavish parties sanctifying pleasure, billboards evangelizing consumerism.

If this all sounds very esoteric and obscure, that's because it kind of is. From its opening minutes, Knight of Cups is a take-it-or-leave-it enterprise, whose unabashedly grandiose themes and approach will variably leave viewers intrigued, puzzled, or rolling their eyes. But Terrence Malick, particularly when collaborating with genius cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, has a visually distinct, sensual style that grounds his lofty ideas. His films capture a vivid sense of place, whether 1950s Texas suburbs, 17th century London, or the jungles of Guadalcanal. Malick's eye, when turned to present-day Los Angeles, yields fascinating results. The rich lounge in decadence in Hollywood Hills mansions and unnaturally clean, towering skyscrapers. The street level is a different, much less glamorous world, strewn with trash and poverty, seedy strip clubs and curiosity shops.

Modern urban life looks alien through Malick's camera. Everything is transitory, impermanent, on the move. Knight of Cups often returns to bird's eye views of buzzing traffic, and ground-level shots of crisscrossing overpasses. Nearly every shot of the sky shows airplanes and helicopters in the distance, always on the move - but to where? There's no still center to this world. In one scene, Rick wakes to an earthquake shaking his apartment. He stumbles outside with his equally unsettled neighbors, aftershocks still rumbling - an alarming reminder of what an unsteady edifice the city is. A brief detour to Las Vegas is surreal - it's a ludicrous monument to artifice, an enormous desert mirage that somehow hasn't disappeared yet.

The temporary nature of modern civilization is contrasted to the stillness and permanence of the natural world. The towering desert mountains outside L.A., which were there long before the city at its foothills and will outlast it. After the hectic Vegas sequence, Malick's camera lingers on one of the mysterious sailing rocks of Death Valley, a path cut behind it from its patient, slow journey forward. In particular, Knight of Cups always returns to the ocean. Every chapter of Knight of Cups has its characters return to the beach, to play in the waves and look in awe at the waters' expanses. Going to the beach is a regular part of L.A. life, sure, but in Knight of Cups it has symbolic meaning as well - an attempt to commune with something eternal and unchanging.

But Knight of Cups ultimately resists total dichotomies between the natural world and human civilization. His camera is too curious to be very condemning. We see the hollowness and instability of modern cities, but they are also places abuzz with life, creativity and playfulness. Malick doesn't seem to nod in stern disapproval at all the Hollywood bacchanals (which are ultimately not very extreme) so much as find them amusing and misguided - an absurd expression of adults' desire to return to a state of childish play.

Knight of Cups finds small signs of the eternal within the temporal. Angels appear in unlikely places - a statue hovering over Vegas, a hungover partygoer wearing wings, a model's back with a chintzy wings tattoo framing the word "Faith". Commonplace L.A. swimming pools are filmed like holy places, backyard baptismal waters. Knight of Cups is much less black-and-white in its allegorical meaning than Bunyan. Does the City of Destruction really need to be escaped, or can the Celestial City be found within it? The transcendent and mundane, holy and sinful, worldly and spiritual might not be so easily extricated from each other.

Many of Malick's previous films build to a moment of cathartic revelation, like the heavenly reunion in The Tree of Life or the priest's monologue in To the Wonder, but Knight of Cups does not provide any answers or point towards one way of truth. However, the last chapter, "Freedom" (the only chapter not named after a tarot card), is distinctly different from the rest of the film, more serene. It's not because of a change of settings, which remain the same, but how they are filmed. The camera is no longer whirling and lunging, but staying still. The shots last longer. The soundtrack, filled with repetitive classical music, is replaced by sounds of the city and nature. The L.A. streets and skyline look suddenly peaceful. Rick has somehow found inner calm, and the film reflects it.

Flowers of Shanghai

Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan, 1998

A brief opening title sets the scene: late 19th century Shanghai's opulent Flower Houses, brothels attended by the wealthy. The film fades in on a group of men gossiping and playing rowdy drinking games. Silent, serene women stand around them, occasionally whispering among themselves or strategically contributing to the men's conversation. The camera drifts around the outskirts of the group, capturing the conversation's flow without emphasizing one particular person. It's a naturalistic scene that feels unscripted and unrehearsed - like the camera is a portal into an everyday moment in the past. The shot lasts nearly ten minutes uninterrupted.

It takes an unusually gifted director and cast to make a lengthy, un-showy sequence like that engaging, but Flowers of Shanghai immediately immersed me into its world. Each scene plays out in a similar way - the film fades out of one shot and into another, each a tableaux of life in Shanghai's flower houses that never feel enacted for the sake of an audience, but like discreet glimpses into past lives. This approach to historical recreation is not dramatically satisfying in the conventional sense. Flowers of Shanghai loosely follows several major characters, but they come and go, and major events often occur off-screen. Melodrama of any kind is elided, and despite taking place in a brothel no sex is shown. Like in real life, conversations are rambling and unrushed, and people often do not say what they really mean.

Flowers of Shanghai is more anthropological than dramatic. Through observation we slowly learn how this cloistered world operates. Each flower house is run by a madame who buys girls as young as 7 or 8. She trains them to become specialized courtesans called flower girls once they are teenagers. Flower girls are visited by wealthy patrons, who form relationships (or contracts) that are often semi-monogamous. The patrons support the girls, buying them clothes and jewelry, and the girls provide companionship, a sentimental education, and sex. The luckiest (and smartest) flower girls are bought, at an exorbitant price, out of the houses and into marriage - usually as a second or third wife, as no upper-class gentleman would take a courtesan as his first.

As in all his films, director Hou Hsiao-Hsien studies how individuals are shaped by, and survive within, their environments. We observe that the women who flourish as flower girls are practical businessmen, who know when to be charming and when to be cruel. The women who are incapable of adapting are beaten down ruthlessly. The men are careless and harsh, often without intending to be. Their hierarchal power is so ingrained and unquestioned that they aren't even aware of their cruelty. In this environment, falling in love is dangerous and short-lived, though it still happens. The glimpses of unselfconscious emotion in Flowers of Shanghai - whether tenderness or anger - are startling for their precious authenticity in a society ruled by money, status, and inequality.

Flowers of Shanghai is beautiful and suffocating. Every scene takes place indoors, with cinematography lit only by the light of oil lamps. Everything is lushly beautiful, from the flower girls' dresses to the ornate decor and lavish meals; but it's also overwhelming, a world smothered in things. The slow drift of the camera, droning strings score, and slow fades between scenes gives Flowers of Shanghai a soothing, hypnotic quality, like being lulled into an opium dream (that could just be a secondhand high from all the opium smoked in the movie).

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is unique in his vision as an artist. His films are both practical and poetic, as they rarely escape mundane realities but nevertheless become dreamy, mysterious experiences. Flowers of Shanghai is among his finest films - not as endearing as Cafe Lumiere or as awe-inspiring as The Assassin, but a powerful, vivid recreation of a long-gone world.

Viewing Journal - January 2017

Two 2016 releases I've caught up with this week...

The BFG (Steven Spielberg, United States) - Like a stowaway from a more innocent era of children's films. Spielberg's latest has none of the frantic pacing, anachronistic brattiness or vulgar humor of your average kid-pic drivel. OK, there are a surprising number of fart jokes, but even those are painless; they're not a desperate grab for cheap laughs but actual jokes, with patient set-ups and silly punchlines. That patience is key to The BFG's charm. It doesn't rush through the spectacle, but soaks in the wonder of its young heroine catching dreams like multi-colored fireflies, or the absurdity of the titular gentle giant visiting Buckingham Palace and making its human-sized grandeur look like a dollhouse. The main attraction is the Big Friendly Giant himself. All-CGI characters usually leave me cold but he's an engaging exception, since very little of Mark Rylance's winsome charm has been lost in translation. The BFG may not be distinctive enough to become a new kids' movie classic, nor is it among Steven Spielberg's finest. But it is modest, lovely, and child-like, virtues that shouldn't be underestimated. Had it come out in the 90s, little-kid me would've loved it.

American Honey (Andrea Arnold, United States) - Not only is American Honey a road trip movie, watching it was like experiencing a road trip. Moments of spontaneous beauty flit by, but it's dreadfully long and I was relieved when it ended. No doubt, American Honey's lengthy aimlessness is intentional, as it reflects these kids' lives - they're going nowhere. Star, a bright teen with a wild streak, escapes her miserable home life to join a hard-partying crew of vagabonds, traveling across America in a van and selling magazine subscriptions. They're America's abandoned kids, the so-called "white trash" from neighborhoods devastated by meth and poverty, banding together and looking for freedom on the road. Director Andrea Arnold captures natural moments of camaraderie among the crew, from sing-alongs to drunken fights, and coaxes believable performances from a cast of nonprofessional actors. Even Shia LaBeouf, the only established Hollywood actor in the crew, blends in. Arnold has a good eye for the gorgeous expanses and grim detritus of middle America, and a good ear for music. The rap / country soundtrack fits the milieu and works in unison with the visuals. American Honey has the stuff to make a great movie but, frustratingly, it isn't one. Despite being 160 minutes long, it does not expand in meaning as it goes along. The characters remain half-sketched. The social commentary - the teens a microcosm of capitalism at its starkest, their American Dream not stretching beyond "make money, get turnt" - offers little insight. As an experiential, sensual immersion into a certain lifestyle, American Honey is occasionally exhilarating, but too monotonous to maintain interest over nearly three hours.