Phil discusses some big plot points for Avengers: Infinity War below the break.  If you are metaphorically Captain America pushing back against the Thanos fist of spoilers, stay away.

​The Revenant made Alejandro Gonzalex Innaritu into a dominant Oscar force.  It gave him his second consecutive directing award after the previous year’s Birdman, putting him on a pedestal with other back-to-back winners John Ford and Joseph Mankiewicz.  Who knows how cinematic history will remember any individual working today, but where Innaritu lands in comparison to those two is an interesting thought experiment.  Ford is someone who mastered the Western and added immeasurable scope to his films while also communicating intimacy in his most famous shots, particularly his iconic end to The Searchers.  Mankiewicz had some successes, particularly in All About Eve, but he’s also got his name on some huge blunders like Cleopatra and isn’t a guy that people think of first when rattling off the great directors of the era.  Based on the thinness of the films that brought Innaritu his wins, it seems somewhat obvious that Innaritu will end up more like Mankiewicz.  An exemplar of the maxim that Oscar wins aren’t given to the Best of something, but the Most, Innaritu’s The Revenant is a series of dares and tricks that becomes punishing and ostentatious and unnecessary long before its overlong runtime expires.  

Greta Gerwig, queen of indie cinema, has been in a dozen films about tentative young women trying to figure out the next steps of their lives.  The best of these, like Frances Ha and 20th Century Women, balance a light tone with serious introspection, while the worst, like Greenberg and Lola Versus, devalue Gerwig’s character as either a prop or a caricature.  Having taken part in so many versions of that particular archetype, Gerwig is uniquely suited to turn back the clock to 2003 and make her own film about the kind of person some of her characters might’ve been in their teenage years.  By also turning the protagonist into a rough approximation of herself, Gerwig can also construct a deeply specific coming-of-age story with an anti-indie sensibility.  For all the focus on the titular Lady Bird in Gerwig’s immaculate directorial debut, she’s only one grounded and affecting character in a film packed with them.  No props or caricatures here, just love for everyone that graces the screen and a film that is impossible to not fall for.

​Brett Morgen splices together dozens of hours of previously-unseen footage of Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees in 2017’s best documentary.  Jane is devoted to ten years of Goodall’s early career, through her recruitment by famed paleontologist Louis Leakey and the successes and failures of her personal and professional life.  Intercut with present-day Goodall putting wry cappers on events, the doc works as nature footage and excels as a first-hand account of misogyny within a family unit and in the whole of a society.  

​The stereotype of the emotionally cold Scandinavian gets officially buried in Lukas Moodysson’s Together.  The big-hearted Norwegian film Elling should’ve dispelled the assumption that these descendants of Vikings are stiff and monotone and depressed, but I still held onto it in spite of mounting evidence.  Even Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, otherwise a Job-like film about a teacher falsely accused of sexual abuse, contains back-slapping scenes of old friends jovially spending time together.  Moodysson puts any bedrock expectations about Scandinavian cinema to rest with his joyous celebration of connection and growth.