There are many films that were impressive to me this year, like The Zone of Interest, Poor Things, American Fiction, All of Us Strangers, Maestro — but these five and their directors, I believe, are a cut above the rest.
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer isn’t so much a mind-bender, though it does pick up in one place and deposit you in another without explanation. Even with three hours, Nolan with breakneck speed charges through how we get to the story of what the government eventually did to J. Robert Oppenheimer. There’s much to get through of a life that expansive. Nolan fell in love with Oppie while reading American Prometheus — I dare anyone to read that book and not fall in love as well. But as much detail as Nolan lovingly renders from American Prometheus in the film, there is so much that had to be left out.
If you know history, you’ll know that Oppie’s life crested the arc between the 1930s bohemian chaos through to World War II, and then into the Cold War. As an American Jew, Oppenheimer felt the sting of antisemitism throughout his life, from his college days onward. History has once again begun another cycle as we head into something similar to what was happening back then. It isn’t just chaos in our country: there are tensions building up around the world that feel like the era Oppie lived through.
That we’re now once again dealing with rising antisemitism should surprise no one. As Max Von Sydow says in Hannah and Her Sisters, “the question isn’t how could [the Holocaust] have happened but why doesn’t it happen more often?” It’s never really gone away. It’s just that a whole generation has now been indoctrinated in our universities and online to see humanity as a ranking system not by class or wealth but by skin color, gender, and apparently, religion.
Nolan could not have known any of this when he began making Oppenheimer. He came at it like so many of the best directors do. They’re like the daring climbers who look at Mount Everest and say “because it’s there.” It isn’t a question of why do it — it’s why not? When Oppenheimer first came out, the way into the movie was about the fear of nuclear war, which suddenly felt closer than ever. But the way in now is, without a doubt, the oppressive forces of antisemitism that led our government to hotly pursue him.
Oppenheimer is a movie that squares off two Jewish men: Oppie and Lewis Strauss. Strauss is an “establishment Jew,” played by Robert Downey Jr. in one of the best performances of the year. Humiliation and shame seep through his veneer in every one of his expressions. He breaks your heart just by saying nothing. Strauss wants to be what Oppenheimer became. He can’t ever be. All he can do is destroy Oppenheimer. But the irony here, and the beauty of this story ultimately, is that Oppenheimer is a “destroyer of worlds.” So in the end, they both must hold onto this curse.
It fills me with hope for cinema, and humanity, that Oppenheimer is as popular and as profitable as it became. A movie that is this cerebral, this opaque, this intellectual should not have been one of the year’s highest grossing films. Yet somehow, it is. Why? Because of Christopher Nolan, who has built up a reputation for giving the audience something they’ve never seen before. Just take the Trinity test sequence. The entire movie is the set-up for what will be the explosion of the first nuclear bomb.
Did anyone expect the explosion to be seen first, then heard later? It’s so quiet, it takes your breath away. This moment was what Oppenheimer was aiming for by building this thing. BECAUSE IT’S THERE. That is what we do as humans. We strike forth, we conquer, we build, we invent. Nolan is the kind of filmmaker who does all of these things in one movie.
Most of Nolan’s films, other than the Batman movies, require that you submit to them, not wrestle with them to make sense. They feel like a dream, most of them do — and if you’re looking for a narrative line that makes sense you’re not going to get it.
People turned out to see Oppenheimer on the Nolan name alone. Sure, some were interested because of the story of Oppenheimer himself, but Nolan brings it, in every cinematic sense. That he hasn’t yet won an Oscar is embarrassing to the entire industry of Hollywood and the Oscars. We know the best never win anyway. Hitchcock, Kubrick, you name it. Of course, the Oscar game is really a silly thing that has never and will never determine greatness. It’s a consensus vote that can only reflect the moment of time in which it was formed. But still.
Does voting for Christopher Nolan make them feel good about themselves? Is it a virtue signal? Does it make history or move the needle? No — but it would make them honest in what they were invented to do: award the highest achievements in film.
David Fincher, The Killer
There’s a certain kind of David Fincher fan that drives me to drink. They are like the Scorsese fans that demand he make Goodfellas every time. Fincher, it seems, can’t ever move out of the box he’s been placed in with hyper-violent films like Zodiac, Fight Club, and Se7en (which isn’t really violent because it’s all suggested, not seen). They were expecting The Killer to be a bloodbath. That it is an existential rumination on human existence has clearly confused some people, leading to a much lower audience score on Rotten Tomatoes than the movie deserves. No other director is as misunderstood in his time as David Fincher.
But that’s usually because people like me have also tried too hard to fit him into the Oscar box, a confinement that doesn’t suit Fincher’s style. It should never be his or anyone else’s job to make a movie to cross off winning an Oscar off the bucket list. That cheats audiences of being taken to places they’re not expecting to go.
Over time, Fincher’s films do seep into the public’s collective unconscious and find a place in cinematic history. Netflix has a full slate of Oscar movies and The Killer exists as a work of pure art — not for profit, not for statues, but BECAUSE IT’S THERE. I’ve seen The Killer probably ten times and every time I watch it I discover something new.
What bookends The Killer is the struggle of the protagonist, or more accurately antihero, to become one of the “few” not one of the “many.” Who are “The Many”? They’re the people who get killed. Who are the “few”? The people who don’t, which is why the top guy survives. He’s too rich to kill. People would notice.
The Killer, for most people, is a hard movie to love. There’s nothing touchy feely about it. It’s unapologetic for what it is. If you think about the Zodiac killer in Zodiac, you see the same kind of emotionless bloodshed. Here, our killer isn’t doing it because he likes it or is enacting revenge, but because he’s getting paid and it makes him feel in control of his own destiny.
Here, editor Kirk Baxter talks about the opening scene where we see The Killer preparing for his shot, the one where he misses that kick-starts the whole movie.
Every shot in The Killer is a painting. The editing is the best of the year, clean and precise. The score is sublime. The team behind Fincher’s films are at the top of their game, all of them are. And it is the best film Netflix has on its slate, even if it ends up being the least awarded.
The Killer is a companion piece to the last time Andrew Kevin Walker and David Fincher collaborated with Se7en. That film matched an idealist like Brad Pitt with a fatalist, Morgan Freeman. By the end of the film, the idealist would learn the way of the world when his pregnant wife’s head is delivered in a box. We never actually see the head — the imagination does it all, and everyone remembers that scene. They also knew then what they should know now: Fincher is not afraid to go there, no matter how dark.
But in that daring is also a necessary disconnect from humanity. Thus, Fincher himself becomes The Killer, able to put the worst atrocities mankind can commit on screen for audiences to consume, to applaud, to thirst for. Sometimes filmmakers who make films that reach into our darkest corners eventually make a film that asks the audience to respond to their participation in this game.
The Killer asks us what more do you want to see? Do you want to see the woman shot up close and personal? Do you want more of the fight? Do you want to see Tilda Swinton suffer when it’s her turn? In the mundane scenes of washing out storage boxes and dumping body parts in the river, we see the downtime. Most of it is downtime.
Some have said The Killer is Fincher’s most personal film. I would say it’s his most personal confession. He’s a kind man with a big heart who is married to a woman who puts food out in the parking lot for a family of stray cats, yet he’s known by his fans (and they demand this of him) to be a brutal, uncaring assassin in his movies over and over and over again.
This film shows what kind of a toll that can take on a person. We are only human, after all. And to have it all crushed into an art compactor like the Oscar race is probably the punchline none of us wanted. The Killer is easily one of the best films of the year. A crowdpleaser? Hardly. More like a crowd punisher. But it’s nothing we don’t deserve.
Greta Gerwig, Barbie
Gerwig deserves all of the praise she’s getting. Yes, for once a female director made a movie where you don’t have to adjust your thinking on a curve to satisfy activists. You can just say: yeah, man, look at THAT. For me, Barbie has become a great movie, though it took me several viewings to fully appreciate it. What hooked me was the “Just Ken” dance number, which I’m still shocked appeared in a blockbuster movie about Barbie. Yet, there it is.
This just pure genius up one side and down the other. It’s everything that’s great about both Greta Gerwig’s and her partner Noah Baumbauch’s unique sense of humor. When you revisit Frances Ha, you see the beginnings of what would become Barbie. I love everything about it. It celebrates Ken. It makes up a whole new word, “Kenergy.” It breaks the rules of grammar, “My name’s Ken” “And so am I.” It’s alive and inventive and pure brilliance. If that’s all Barbie was, just that scene alone would make it one of the best films of the year. But ultimately, where Barbie soars is with Gerwig’s voice. It’s that last scene where Barbie decides she wants out of the manufactured reality, the forced happiness of Barbie World to become human, with all of its downsides.
And so we see this moment in a series of shots that, to me, elevates Gerwig from perfectly fine as a director to one of the all-time greats.
She’s not afraid to take the movie to a sentimental, sincerely emotional place. The story comes full circle. If it begins with Barbie’s unwanted thoughts of death, it ends there too with the resolution that yes, we die; yes, life is fucked up; yes, we get depressed. But look at what we can also do. We can laugh. We can love. We can have babies. And in a way, this is also both Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig escaping the trope of the pretty blonde to become creative people too. That monologue seems to be about both of them.
As good as Barbie is, the focus is mostly on Gerwig because that is how we see movies and movie makers now. It has to be because of the unilateral insistence upon change.
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon
I’ve heard people describe Martin Scorsese as two people. One is the sinner and one is seeking absolution for those sins. His films can be divided along those lines. When he dares to indulge in funny, sick people, he then must also find ways to atone. Killers of the Flower Moon is the latter of the two. But what makes this movie really soar is Scorsese’s wealth of knowledge of history and film history, specifically documentary filmmaking. Killers is a hybrid of the kinds of documentaries Scorsese has made (from The Last Waltz on through No Direction Home) and his feature films.
What I find most thrilling about watching Killers of the Flower Moon is, like Fincher’s The Killer, the collaborators that work with Scorsese. In this case, it’s his longtime friend, the late Robbie Robertson, and of course, the master: editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Watching these three collaborate on this film is an exceptional pleasure. This is particularly true of Robertson’s score from minute one.
We first see the Osage burying a child. Then, we see oil bubbling up from the surface of the earth, which Scorsese uses as a metaphor for blood spilled. He will repeat this imagery throughout, but I can’t imagine how the opening scene would play without Robertson’s drumbeat. The music is everything here, just as it always is with every Scorsese movie.
Killers of the Flower Moon was a story that needed to be told. It can almost be seen as documentary until those scenes that remind us we really are watching a Scorsese movie, and yes, that’s Robert De Niro.
Alexander Payne, The Holdovers
I feel like I live inside an Alexander Payne movie at all times. His vantage point of humanity matches mine. I find the same things funny about humanity that he does. Sideways and About Schmidt are my two favorites, but now I can add The Holdovers to that list. There is still a place for films that can be for everyone. The Oscar race is shrinking and becoming more isolated from not just the general public, but the struggle of daily life. The most interesting stories, though, are the mundane — what Woody Allen called “the horrible and the miserable.” The Holdovers is a movie about ordinary life, and it’s glorious.
If you want to be a good writer, study this screenplay. It wasn’t adapted from any source material but it plays like it has been — that is how strong of a piece of writing it is. And though David Hemingson is listed as the sole writer, there’s no doubt that Payne’s influence can be felt throughout.
Because the needle has moved so far in the weirdest direction of late, it’s easy to write off The Holdovers as nothing special, but it is the foundation of storytelling itself: catharsis. That is a sensation not on offer by many films this year. Catharsis here means every character in the film has an arc. Whatever it is they’re meant to work through is resolved. What better way to spend a couple of hours than investing in a payoff like that.
Paul Giamatti has given the performance of his career as a professor no one likes (and no one has ever liked) who has spent his life quietly enacting revenge on college students he resents. Somewhere in there is the great man he never was. We find out about his past bit by bit, and when his story is finally told we can understand why he has built for himself a cage.
The message of the movie is clear. Even if we’re dealt a bad hand in life — our beloved son dies in a terrible war, we’re cursed with failure, we’re raised by people who don’t really care whether we live or die — there are still ways to carve out a path to find life worth living. It might sound cliche and maybe it doesn’t excite Film Twitter much, but it’s what we need from movies. Not all movies. But some movies.
Payne is such an assured storyteller now he doesn’t have to prove anything. How you know it’s one of the best directed films of the year is that every character in that movie comes to life in the mind’s eye weeks, and even months, after seeing it.
The Holdovers isn’t a movie of great shots. It’s a movie of great characters who invade your heart and move you beyond words. I can’t think of a better movie to watch over the holidays than this one.