​Without taking a poll, I suspect that I’m in the minority of preferring Wes Anderson’s last decade of work to his previous one-and-a-half.  Moonrise Kingdom proved a much better fit for Anderson’s children who act like adults, as opposed to his adults who act like children.  The Grand Budapest Hotel became my favorite of Anderson’s films after a second viewing, a perfect blend of eccentricity and melancholy that also happened to be more thoughtful and meaningful than anything he'd done previously.  His latest, The French Dispatch, follows in Grand Budapest’s footsteps, an anthology where all the ingredients are perfectly calibrated to amuse and affect in a film that’s unmistakably Anderson’s but is completely lacking in the things that used to annoy me.  In telling the story of a magazine editor who wanted everything just so, Anderson writes another autobiographical character whose control and vision leads to something wonderful.

​In The Card Counter, Paul Schrader’s lonely men get another workout.  The film functions as a loose continuation from First Reformed, such that the cause of the self-imposed loneliness is located in the War on Terror.  Where Ethan Hawke’s Father Toller encouraged his son to enlist and die in a pointless conflict, Oscar Isaac’s William Tell took a more direct approach.  Isaac, long overdue for a return to prestige filmmaking after several lucrative but creatively bankrupt years in the superhero/Disney Star Wars wilderness, couldn’t have found a better vehicle than a Schrader starring role to catapult back into critical good graces.  However, where Schrader’s grasp of Big Christianity and black-pilled environmentalism was ironclad in First Reformed, the world of The Card Counter is loose and undefined, while Isaac’s costars aren’t given the material necessary to keep up with him.  The director-lead actor combination here is brilliant, but the film that contains it is not.

Nicolas Cage, patron saint of ham, has a low hit rate.  Whether for financial distress or a love of being on a set, the man doesn’t say no to much, regularly appearing in half-a-dozen or more films every year.  Most of those go straight to video, never to be seen by anyone but bad-movie podcasters and insomniacs who’ve already watched every other movie in existence.  However, Cage’s considerable talent sometimes runs into the right project and the viewing public remembers that under the accents and the random voice modulation and the bulging eyes is a man who can readily access depth and sincerity when he wants to.  It’s only been three years since Cage’s last reminder, with Mandy and Into the Spider-Verse, but he’s amassed another 11 movies in that space.  With Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s stunning debut, Cage puts away his high-volume theatricality for a quiet performance that, while lacking in volume, is missing none of the actor’s unforgettable presence.  An untouchable lead performance paired with Sarnoski’s precise direction and a lacerating script makes Pig into one of the best films in recent memory, thus lending Cage the credibility to go make another ten straight-to-video money laundering schemes.

Lee Isaac Chung goes back to his childhood in the pastoral Minari, an autobiographical breakout from a promising filmmaker.  A Korean American whose father moved the family to an Arkansas farm when he was a boy, Chung dramatizes exactly that as his characters navigate various divides and ambitions.  An immigrant story of the kind that American filmmakers keep returning to, for good reason, Minari’s down-to-earth roots and naturalistic style make for an affecting film.

A school is a difficult place to imagine Danny Ocean setting up shop for his latest heist, but where there are piles of cash and minimal oversight, anything can be turned into a big payday for the unscrupulous.  Cory Finley’s Bad Education tracks the perpetrators behind the largest theft involving a school in US history, turning a dry case of embezzlement into a plot with verve and momentum and insight into the thieves and the community they were supposed to be serving.  A major leap forward for Finley after his impressive debut in Thoroughbreds, Bad Education provides mid-budget excellence that is an anti-hero character study, a coming of age tale, and a piercing satire all at once. 

Jonathan Glaser’s Under the Skin put Scarlett Johannson in the role of a predatory alien who entices men to come back to her home, which doubles as an inky-black slaughterhouse.  Her prey willingly strutted to their deaths even when confronted with the otherworldly appearance of her ‘bedroom.’  Candy-colored companion piece Promising Young Woman entices its male targets with a moral morass instead of a deadly one, and per Casey Mulligan’s Cassie, they never make the right decision when presented with the opportunity to make the wrong one.  Emerald Fennel’s caustic debut Promising Young Woman puts a contemporary spin on the revenge drama, adhering to the expected themes of those kinds of stories in unexpected ways.

​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.