10. Transit
How does one even begin to talk about Transit? Christian Petzold’s latest is a confounding and contradictory meditation on loss and grief. It puts the personal in conversation with the political as German refugee Georg (Franz Rogowski) ventures to Marseille to avoid the advancing occupying forces. Once there, the apathy we see from him early on dissipates as he grows closer with fellow refugees who are all trying to procure the visas needed to flee the continent. The story is based on Anna Seghers’s WWII novel, but Petzold ingeniously removes his adaptation from any one time period. Transit is a film unstuck in time. It takes historical elements and interweaves them with images of modern technology. This makes the story all the more timely, asking us to consider historical understandings of fascism and what this looks like in our modern world.
More than just inviting a political reading of the film, Transit’s unspecified time period gives the entire story an indefinable quality. The film always feels just barely out of reach; it is an uncanny valley where we identify parts of the history we know but recognize that it’s clearly not entirely our own past. We think we know this story but we don’t. This extends to the film’s positioning of interpersonal relationships as if they were part of a ghost story. Characters, alive but not really living, haunt the streets of the French port city searching for what will never come: the ability to leave this place and this history, the people they’ve lost but wish would appear again, the sense of personal identity that comes from stability. Transit’s narrative conceit of an intangible timeline could have been a gimmick, but in Petzold’s hands, it becomes a breathtaking and heartbreaking study of loss, both collective and individual. To say that no other film accomplishes what this masterpiece does, while true, is also underselling it — no other film is even trying. (Anna Swanson)
9. Avengers: Endgame
Whether or not Endgame ends up as the highest grossing movie of all time (it probably will), the 22nd installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is still an unprecedented cinematic event. Emerging as the culmination of 10 years’ worth of world-building, The Russo Brothers manage to deliver satisfying character beats amid the scores of heroes bobbing, weaving, and hot-potato-ing to defeat Thanos once and for all.
There are so many moments throughout Endgame that make it a Movie with a capital M – Cap catching Mjolnir is still such a rush, even after a couple of viewings – but there’s also a lot to be said of the film’s quieter, more human moments. In its first hour or so, the filmmakers linger on these characters as they grapple with the biggest loss they’ve ever faced, chronicling the state of the world five years post-snap. That’s a feat in and of itself, offering the audience a meditation on the ways that people cope with failing the ones they love before jumping further into the action. And out of all of the film’s send-offs, it’s Robert Downey Jr.’s that’s the anchor; the MCU isn’t short on punchy lines of dialogue, but “I love you 3000” just has a way of sticking long after the credits roll. It’s all proof that this honking blockbuster does, indeed, have a heart. (Christina Smith)
8. Fast Color
The superhero “sub-genre” is all the rage thanks to Marvel and DC, but some of the best come from outside of the big two titans and capture the heroics on a far smaller scale. Unbreakable (2000) and Chronicle (2012) are two of the better known, but Julia Hart’s affecting and powerful tale of generational women is equally deserving of love.
The film introduces viewers to a young woman named Ruth (the always fantastic Gugu Mbatha-Raw) as she struggles to control a power that causes by seizures in herself and earthquakes around her. With authorities on her tail, Ruth heads home to her mother and her daughter who she left behind years ago — both have powers of their own, and when the men who want her arrive they’re forced to contend with three generations of powerful women. Director/co-writer Julia Hart crafts a tale about women finding strength and purpose in both themselves and each other, and rather than send them into battle to destroy the film instead sees them find power in creation. It’s a beautiful little film. (Rob Hunter)
7. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Starring Jimmie Fails and based on his actual experience losing his family home in a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco, this collaboration between Fails and lifelong friend Joe Talbot is deeply personal filmmaking at its finest. Watching The Last Black Man in San Francisco feels like being handed a piece of someone’s soul. It’s not just the passive experience of being told a deeply personal story, but getting thrown into the deep of it. It’s the sort of film you feel in your heart and your stomach and your bones, not because the reverb is shaking your seat but because you’re watching something made with that singular combination of love and skill that grabs you by the throat from the first frame to the last. With echoes of The Odyssey, it’s a cinematic voyage that’s at once epic and intimate, tapping into universal emotional truths through the highly specific and personal.
While not a popcorn flick it’s the sort of film you want to catch on the big screen for its visual artistry, which is practically hypnotizing. A beautiful film about some pretty ugly stuff, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is the most poignant kind of tragedy — a journey that leaves you feeling full instead of empty, and the sort of viewing experience that sticks with you long after you leave the theaters. (Ciara Wardlow)
6. Under the Silver Lake
The cultural narrative of Under the Silver Lake is less about the film itself, and more about its year-long fall from grace in the eyes of its maker, A24. And as if that hasn’t hurt it enough, the scant conversations about it in the pop cultural ether aren’t helping its case. The film was pegged as a deeply misogynistic and self-obsessed effort from It Follows writer/director David Robert Mitchell. And while that’s certainly a valid way to read it, there’s a tangential wave of thought that acknowledges many of Mitchell’s more overt controversial moves as critiques of the poisonous concepts he’s being charged with promoting.
UTSL is a technically and stylistically impressive stoner neo-noir epic with radiant performances from its stars Andrew Garfield and Riley Keough. It’s marvelous and dazzling in its attempt to entangle you in its mystery, and it’s absolutely hilarious for how truly bizarre it is. It will undoubtedly make you think, even if those thoughts are embittered. And regardless of how its socio-politically understood, it shows that Mitchell is ambitious as hell. If he can bounce back from the major popular and critical flop, we’re bound to see something mesmerizing in round four. (Luke Hicks)
