The Secret Agent
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s fourth feature is, at least to me, his most perfect yet, in that it spins so many stories under the guise of telling just one. Like Walter Salles’ 2024 barnstormer I’m Still Here, it’s about being in the thick of Brazil’s military dictatorship, but it’s just as much about the movie landscape of 1977, when a young cineaste, presumably of Filho’s age or under, could sneak into the likes of Jaws, The Omen or local hit Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. The filmmaking, likewise, draws on so many influences, including the heat-stroke aesthetic of exploitation cinema (a dead man’s leg even goes on the rampage), but Filho weaves everything together in a surprising and very sophisticated way that serves to platform Wagner Moura’s soulful performance as a college teacher forced underground and pursued by the sleaziest of hitmen.
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Sound of Falling
This is the only film on the list (so far) that I’ve seen more than once. Making her Cannes Competition debut with only her second film, Germany’s Mascha Schilinski has made a film to revisit and revisit, an immersive rush that operates largely on an instinctual level. Time goes out of the window in this film’s company, as the lives of four (or is it five?) young girls overlap and intertwine over the course of a century. David Lynch is an easy comparison as far as creating such abstract moods go, but Sound of Falling is the visual equivalent of listening to a cool Brian Eno album: You’re in the know and in the dark.
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Sentimental Value
It’s beginning to seem as if Joachim Trier couldn’t make a bad movie if he tried, and this year he made a great one. Ditching the austere chapter-to-chapter format — an affectation that has infected independent cinema worldwide since his namesake (and distant relative) Lars von Trier’s heyday — this Trier’s film is a way more approachable father-daughter story, in which a faded European auteur tries to make amends for being a deadbeat, arty dad. The magnetic yet combustible combo of Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve is one for the ages. Ingmar Bergman will be turning in his grave.
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson landed with such a bang, it’s hard to remember a world before Boogie Nights (yes, I know the first one was Hard Eight, and, yes, I refuse to call it anything but Sydney). Even though I’ve liked everything of his since, with the exception of There Will Be Blood, One Battle After Another is the first to recapture that lightning, notably (for me) by using Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” in a way that recalls Magnolia’s use of Supertramp. Like a lot of my favorite films this year, it evokes the ’70s, in that it’s about where your beliefs take you and where they leave you — sometimes high and dry.
Eddington
Ari Aster’s film is about everything, and that’s what did it. It premiered in Cannes, a festival where — almost — every reviewer is expected to deliver IMMEDIATE JUDGMENT! But Eddington is too much for that, a salty satire that’s so far ahead of its time that its reckoning will come many, many years in the future. For most people, the Covid lockdown was an aberration, a blip now in the past, but under Aster’s scrutiny it becomes a kind of malevolent big bang but in reverse, unraveling decades of progress and setting up a dystopic future filled with fake news, AI slop and data mining.
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Train Dreams
The omega to Eddington’s alpha, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is a wistful reverie about the past, in which Joel Edgerton’s stoic rural logger watches the 20th century unfold from the outside as he struggles to come to terms with the loss of his wife and child. Terrence Malick inevitably comes to mind, but Slovakian director Dušan Hanák’s 1972 documentary Pictures of the Old World is a better comparison, a study of loneliness, life in the margins and people he describes as not having been “deformed by civilization.”
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Sinners
It’s funny to see Ryan Coogler’s film described as unique when it borrows so much from Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn. But Coogler borrows that premise — more of a glorified B-movie mash-up — and takes it in a way more interesting direction, drawing on the layered histories of blues and folk to the extent that it might even be the best use of music in a horror since The Wicker Man, notably Jack O’Connell’s rendition of “Rocky Road to Dublin.” It wouldn’t work, however, without Coogler’s flawless Depression-era world building and two indelible performances by Michael B. Jordan as twins.
The Mastermind
Josh O’Connor gave one of the year’s best performances in the Knives Out threequel Wake Up Dead Man, but Kelly Reichardt’s superb Bressonian drama is a more subtle display of his less-is-more style of acting. Set in the beige, modernist world of small-town Massachusetts circa 1970, The Mastermind doesn’t so much tell a story as simply unravel, much like O’Connor’s character, struggling architect James Mooney, when his plan to pull off the most bourgeois of crimes — art theft — goes spectacularly awry. With echoes of Reichardt’s Night Moves, it’s both distinctively and indirectly political, perhaps even a dry comment on the complacency of middle-class draft dodgers.
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Sirāt
East meets West at 120 bpm in Sirāt, Oliver Laxe’s apocalyptic road movie, which begins with the mother of all raves in the vast expanse of the Moroccan desert. Dealing with the bigger questions in life — about who we are and where we’re going — Laxe puts reality on the back burner so that we can only wonder what’s going on in the outside world. Instead, like the techno-infatuated road warriors helping Sergi Lopez’s Luis find his missing daughter, we succumb to the portentous beat-beat-beat of hell’s own sound system and a driving, heart-racing score meticulously sculpted by Kangding Ray.
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If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
The title alone of Mary Bronstein’s movie is a bold and very apt statement of intent, since mood takes precedence over meaning in this surreal and often very spiky character piece. Like a great lost ’70s movie in the vein of Diary of a Mad Housewife, it’s hard to summarize, since everything and nothing happens, most of it revolving round a mysterious hole in the ceiling. But the special effect is Rose Byrne’s dazzling work as a mother at her wits’ end, dealing with a sick daughter in the absence of her military husband Charles — a part played, in a sublime coup de casting, by Christian Slater.
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