​For obvious reasons, I’ve always confused The Big Chill with The Ice Storm, and the latter was the one I happened to watch first.  Despite their titles and the shared presence of Kevin Kline, these films aren’t exactly similar, but Ang Lee’s acid-tipped recreation of the late 70’s was exactly what I wanted out of Lawrence Kasdan’s star-studded tale of 60’s hippies turned into 80’s yuppies.  It turns out the Big Chill has little to say about the withering of youthful idealism or getting stuck in historical patterns, and it has even less to say about the Reagan-era time period it takes place in.  That doesn’t make it dull, which it isn’t, but it does make it slight and something of a waste of all the considerable talent on the screen.

​My Dinner With Andre, Louis Malle’s meal in real-time between an eccentric playwright and a workaday actor, has the feel of a homework movie.  A play adaptation that’s also a two-hander about insular theater types seems like exactly the kind of navel-gazing paean to the difficult life of actors that would keep anyone who’s not an actor at arm’s length.  I should’ve trusted Malle and actors/writers Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory more than that.  My Dinner With Andre knows when its characters are being pretentious and it knows how to break down their pretensions until they’re just humans grappling with the same things that any aging human thinks about.  This is the thoughtful conversation a person dreams about having with their friends, and the film itself realizes how rare and meaningful such an interaction can be.  Before the 80’s gave itself over to biceps and blockbusters, Malle made one of the best of the decade with two nebbishy men, just talking to each other.

​Sean Durkin’s long hiatus from film directing finally comes to an end with The Nest.  After breaking out with intense cult psychodrama Martha Marcy May Marlene, a film that also marked Elizabeth Olsen as a major talent, audiences have had to wait nine years for a follow-up and Durkin delivers with a marital drama that retains the level of unbearable intensity that his debut also demonstrated.  A film that feels like it could’ve been made at any time during the last seventy-five years, The Nest has a timeless quality that evokes the great actors of Hollywood past and puts it out of step with the grand spectacle that so much of modern filmmaking is increasingly consumed with.  Though it’s easily imaginable as a film that Elizabeth Taylor or Paul Newman could have acted in, The Nest also reaches back into recent history and presents a version of the kind of greed that will reshape the world for the worse, all while presenting a picture of a marriage with a rotted foundation.  Durkin’s multi-faceted film represents a major leap for him as a filmmaker, or it would if The Nest received any of the widespread recognition that it deserves.

​Gavin O’Connor’s three sports movies have moved from the straightforward Miracle to sports-as-therapy male weepie Warrior.  O’Connor’s newest film, The Way Back, follows a similar track as Warrior wherein some kind of medical extremity forces a character with father issues through a physical transformation, only to find some kind of clarity through sports.  It’s a more interesting tack than the head-down, work-hard, believe-in-yourself messaging so many lesser sports movies engage in.  In fact, endless wind sprints won’t cure one’s alcohol problems and profane anger directed towards referees isn’t an appropriate way of releasing stress and pressure.  Featuring a career-best performance from Ben Affleck in a period of his life that mirrors his character, The Way Back is less triumphant buzzer-beater and more incremental improvement over the course of a season.  The former leaves the viewer in a cheerier place, but the latter contains far more truth.

Victor Hugo’s classic Les Miserables has retained all of the raw power of its depictions of the French underclass some 160 years after its publishing, and in Ladj Ly’s fiery film of the same name, circumstances haven’t improved all that much.  The gamins of the present-day Montfermil banlieue still grow up in an environment where state authority is abusive and local authority is corrupt.  To paraphrase Hugo, both forces contribute to the clouds that will inevitably produce a thunderbolt, and Ly’s film does indeed strike lightning.  A film that has only become more relevant throughout 2020, as France has its own version of Black Lives Matter protests in response to police brutality and stop-and-frisk tactics, Les Miserables is a work that places a lot of pressure on itself with its iconic name and meets those expectations by embracing an angry humanist streak that Hugo would recognize.

Of all the Catholic hymns I had to sit through as a child, one that still sticks out is the one with its refrain of ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’  A Catholic audience was surely supposed to take that as a ban on complaining about any matter large or small, but a better understanding of its accusatory nature would point its finger at god.  Even Jesus on the cross wondered why he had been forsaken.  Terence Malick opens his greatest film, The Tree of Life, with a similar question towards Job, except it’s god taunting Job’s misfortune and his daring to question god’s purpose.  Where were you, Job, when I shaped all things?  Malick proceeds to interrogate the god-to-subject and subject-to-god relationship in a film whose timeline spans billions of years.  The Tree of Life is the ultimate in the universal drilling down into the specific, a scope that few filmmakers would be able to get their arms around.  Malick, a director who has always found time for digressions on natural beauty, gloriously makes it work.

​Between the HBO series Euphoria and Trey Edward Shults’ Waves, 2019 provided audiences plenty of ways to worry about teenagers.  Sharing a freewheeling, sensuous style and a menacing tone, both works communicate the extreme levels of feeling and emotion that teenagers are capable of and the dramatic consequences that can arise when those extremes aren’t held in check.  With Waves, Shults’ third film after Krisha and It Comes at Night, the young director maintains a simmering tension that boils over into operatic breakdowns as teens who were holding everything inside can only do so for so long.  Featuring two distinct and complementary lead performances by Kelvin Harrison Jr and Taylor Russell, Waves suggests that, while the average US teenager lives in a safer and more comfortable world than any teenager before, they are still plagued by dilemmas beyond their emotional maturity.

Noah Baumbach bridges the gap between his former and future surrogates with While We’re Young.  Starring, among others, Ben Stiller and Adam Driver as intergenerational opposites, Baumbach again does the frequently exceptional work of making compelling characters out of difficult people.  This funnier-than-average-Baumbach film provides lots of opportunities for comeuppance for the male leads and solid exasperation for their respective partners, played by Naomi Watts and Amanda Seyfried.  While We’re Young comes at a crossroads in the life of Stiller’s character, and the movie resonates with anyone contemplating or approaching one of their own.

​Eliza Hittman continues her realist deep-dive into the subverbal misery of the American teen with Never Rarely Sometimes Always.  More procedural than earlier films It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats, both of which lived entirely in the psyches of their protagonists as they acted out sexually, Hittman’s latest follows a young woman as she takes steps to quietly terminate a pregnancy.  The film focuses on protagonist Autumn’s attempts to solve a problem, where Hittman previously made her bones on the leadup to riskier and riskier behavior.  Never Rarely Sometimes Always loses some emotional and character beats in its step-by-step recreation of something that’s made more difficult than it should be,  but it’s another strong outing from a director who has yet to make anything less than a compelling and piercing portrait of American adolescence.

The façade of stoic men being cracked open by a horse taps into a primal corner of the mind, planted by some ancient instinct to get closer to nature or bond with another species or who knows what.  What better place for this story to get retold than in a prison?  Perfectly cast with man-mountain Matthias Schoenaerts as a simmering inmate desperate to get away from people, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s soulful debut The Mustang hits all the right beats in a film that simply works.  Everyone involved surely knows that audiences have been in cinematic places like this before, and Clermont-Tonnerre takes the audience down an exceptional version of this comfortable road.