Spider-Man: No Way Home

It’s way deep down, I think. The one, irreducible reason why we watch movies. We want to feel again how we felt that very first time, when something on a screen had us thinking, just, WOW.

Sometimes I think chasing that sensation is useless. And then a movie like Spider-Man: No Way Home comes along and I have hope again. Just, WOW.

I’ll get to the story in ten seconds, but at the risk of overstating things, it’s hard to understate how well written, produced, and acted this movie was. The action/adventure/thrills are entertaining, yes; but more importantly, they are held together by the strands of a believable coming-of-age story. In this one, empathy and love don’t always make things easier. Characters—both good and bad—have nuanced internal struggles. This is a superhero movie, matured.

Peter Parker therefore struggles for much of it. This good-natured, rather jacked teen is trying to figure out how to best live in a world that villainizes his superhero alter ego, Spider-Man. His loved ones (Aunt May, girlfriend MJ, friend Ned) usually keep him grounded, but he’s tired of the dramas of his life hurting theirs. So he asks an older, wiser fellow superhero, Dr. Strange, for help. Oh child, how the problems do follow.

If you ever have the chance, I would recommend not pulling on a loose string in the fabric of space and time. To share any other plot points with you would be to spoil (several, wonderful) WOW moments, but it’s sufficient to say that this movie is as fun and funny as it is surprising and deep. Truly a blockbuster.

Sure, you’ll enjoy the story far more if you’re a fan of comic books, previous Marvel or Spider-Man movies. But I wouldn’t consider myself much of either, and boy—no, man—have I been trapped in this web. I am so happy about it.

After Antarctica

How stupid are we?

Destroying the planet that sustains us? Trekking solo in the Arctic at 75 years old?

Indeed, After Antarctica touches on some interesting human behavior. But it’s not here to shock or guilt or convince us of anything. Rather, it’s about one man’s connection with the last wildernesses our planet has to offer. And it is as beautiful and mature as movies come.

We begin it with Will, just choppin’ some wood. He needs fuel to heat his cabin off-grid in Minnesota. But he’s thinkin’, too, about his life. As one does when they’re about to do something that might kill them.

You see, after decades of exploring our planet, Will, at 75, still feels the need to walk in the wild. When he explains why, the camera zooms out from his red, crusted face and smacks us with reality. He is in the Arctic now, sitting alone, tiny, in a vast sea of freeze. A white so big it feels like it’ll implode under its own weight.

Smart edits and zooms like these add punch to Will’s already terribly interesting life story. He has adventured, seen death, gotten hitched. But this movie really knocks you out when Antarctica joins the ring.

In 1989, Will captained a small group of international explorers to study, walk, and sled across the entirety of Antarctica. From end to end, without motors or machines. It took seven months.

A talented film crew witnessed portions of that journey, and our current moviemakers unleash never-before-seen footage of such raw power and emotion that I began to feel the stupid one. Thinking humanity is stupid is stupid. We are capable of vastness, good and bad. Harming the planet, yes, but saving it, too. Assuming things about movies, then changing our minds.

With crevasses as big as your nightmares and mere rags separating skin from death, this movie is true thriller. True adventure and true superhero. But by zooming in to Will’s psyche and out to the Poles of past and present, this movie defies genre. It is a humbling, uplifting, and terrifying experience.

So am I sad? Miles of what Will has explored have melted away forever because of climate change. Will shows us so, understanding that he was the first and the last to see such places. But he doesn’t mope. After each adventure he returns to his cabin and the nearby wilderness center he founded. He educates his community about the planet so that they too can explore without destroying, should they choose to do so.

Movie Man

Old man sits alone. Looks out window. Plays movie.

This is Movie Man—and it’s far more entertaining than it sounds. Jam-packed with movie magic, actually.

There are a few reasons for that. Stig Björkman is the first. This octogenarian director, writer, interviewer, and film critic has steeped himself in the movie scene for years. His Stockholm apartment is filled with mementos to show for it, and that helps now that he must quarantine alone. If not for the coronavirus, he’d be jet setting around the world attending film festivals.

So, he throws on a movie. And then another. And another. Looks out the window; tap dances a bit. Oh! A video call, with friends! There’s always the video call with friends, too.

It doesn’t take many moments of Stig sitting in silence for us to empathize with his plight. Quarantine has affected us all. The camera sometimes continues filming for a few seconds past those moments, but no matter. There is plenty of movie magic left in this documentary to make up for that.

Which brings us to reason two. Because Stig has been around the block, his chats with friends—ahem, big names and luminaries—are documentary gold. We see how these people react when the world pauses. When they’re off of the red carpet, sitting shoeless on their own.

How gratifying it is. John Sayles’s Spanish totally needs work. Burhan Qurbani (like me) wants people to stop being so creative already! Isabella Rossellini casually drops a bombshell idea of returning to moviemaking. And then there's that scene where Stig is watching special features for a movie that he loves, and in those special features, the director praises some of Stig’s work. Film reels all the way down.

The best and most evocative part of Movie Man, though—the reason why I think it will be viewed and discussed for years to come—is its extraordinary compilation of movie scenes and music, weaved seamlessly into the context of our corona film club. The movie is truly a treat; a nonstop barrage of pleasurable, memorable moments from movie history. A reminder of the wonder and magic that cinema can bring to our (sometimes bleak) lives. You don’t need to have seen all (or really any) of these to feel the power they carry.

Stig, of course, didn’t need such a reminder. But I bet you all my popcorn that, nestled in his chair, surrounded by all those DVDs and books, candy bowl at the ready and TV playing this movie, he’d be tickled to see how he plays a part in such a grand story. And that tickles me, too.

Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind

I remember most her eyes. Those big, almost perfect circles vacuuming it all in like her life depended on it. Sometimes they’d widen and it felt like she was pleading with me. But that one time, when they closed and she giggled . . . I felt, I saw pure joy.

This is no infant I speak of. This is one of the United States’ most celebrated and prolific writers, decades into life. This is Joyce Carol Oates.

Simply mesmerizing she is. How she talks, what she has to say. The moviemakers know it and so feature Joyce and just Joyce. We sit with her in her sanctuary, the writing room. The place where she spends ten hours a day.

Then the comfortable, soft silence is broken by a question. How did a household without books or high school diplomas produce you? Joyce answers, words flow and eyes dart. I swear you can hear her mind whirring.

Though she has written millions of words over the years, none of her story is stale. Each question for her becomes a terribly interesting response for us. Riots in Detroit. Beatings and murder at home. Misery, mystery, yearning.

The voice-over language captures it all so beautifully. Of course it does. These are the words of Joyce by way of one of her characters, from one of her novels. Whatever we just learned about her life, one of her creations has experienced something similar. This blending of history, fiction, and memory is as much a respectful homage as it is a powerful moviemaking technique. Thank goodness director Stig Björkman persisted for years asking to document his friend.

And so, watching Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind feels like getting away with something. Humble genius has sat down with us, so that we may know it. But such genius can only carry its shield of articulation for so long; at a certain point it melts under the weight of deepest emotion. And it is in these precious few moments of complete vulnerability that the true treasure of this movie is revealed.

Objects

Have you ever taken a shell from the beach?

Vincent wants to know. As writer, producer, cinematographer, and director of Objects, he’s trying to understand why some people cherish things and others don’t.

Like that famous journalist who fills his books with hunks of dead grass. Or that writer whose desk might as well be an archeological site. He finds keepers like these and asks them why they do what they do.

Their answers are vivid and touching, recounted with such conviction that it’s hard not to smile. By explaining to us—heck, just by their laying eyes on that ancient party favor or faucet handle—our subjects (re)live deep emotions of a lifetime.

Is this unhealthy attachment, or are the non-keepers out there the broken ones? The movie explores these ideas, too. Clips from popular downsizers and minimalists confront our keepers. But they don’t blink. Over time, their stories seem to present to us a picture of deep feelers—not hoarders or materialists.

It’s sweet stuff. And smart moviemaking maintains a nostalgic, whimsical vibe throughout. Flashbacks blend focus and dimensions because sharp here, fuzzy there is much like memory.

Objects will assuredly fade into nothingness someday, as all things do. How lucky I am for experiencing it first.

Boycott

Let’s pretend for a minute that Boycott isn’t for you. You’ve seen the trailer, read the reviews, and prefer not to watch.

It happens. And it’s usually not a problem. But now, let’s pretend that your decision to skip watching is against the law.

Sound ridiculous? You might be interested in Boycott after all. It’s about how anti-boycotting mechanisms are being written into law all across the United States.

And so this is the one where a Texan Muslim speech pathologist, a Scotch-Irish Arkansan redneck, and a Californian public servant walk into a courtroom. Though they seem to have little in common, they each value the freedom of speech. Rather than sign anything that included anti-Israeli-boycott language, they sued.

Hearing about these prohibitive laws is quite frankly shocking enough to keep our attention, but the moral rectitude of our three subjects is even more riveting. These are ordinary folk putting their livelihoods on the line.

We listen to their stories from the source while lawyers, think tank and advocacy group interviewees pepper in context. Apparently, boycotting has been around since the beginning of the country. So too religion and politics. And this is where the doc gets bogged down in bias.

Moviemaking techniques like fast editing and montages with ominous music set the tone that rights are being attacked. Hurting people (and thinkers who agree with them) are given the sole spotlight. Opponents receive minor screen time, and are either unprepared or not as thoughtful as the other interviewees. Even the pro-boycott experts—whose job it is to rely on reason rather than emotion to convince people—are exasperated when they try to summarize their opponents’ positions. The moviemakers of course made sure to justify this one-sidedness in the credits (by explaining that several people it had requested to interview declined to do so). None of these things alone is fatal, but put together in the manner that they were, they’re suspect.

An uneven hand does its cause no favors—even if that cause is just. By already having its mind made up on the issue, Boycott doesn’t allow its viewers to make up their own. It’s a head-scratchingly disappointing technique for a movie which otherwise heroizes people who think for themselves.

And yet all that said, Boycott is worth your watch. At worst the issues presented are real and compelling. And at best, these ideas (and lawsuits) might better the lives of people living all across the globe.

Dune

Tell me—what did you dream of last night?

For Paul, the answer never changes: a face bathed in warm light and swimming sands, whispering. Of what, we don’t know. But the dreams seem meaningful all the same.

Perhaps they’re just the byproduct of a little excitement; the Emperor has chosen Paul’s family to take over the desert planet called Arrakis, after all.

You’ll find out soon enough. And long before that, you’ll realize that this movie is magnificent. The worldbuilding is heart-stoppingly beautiful; the story, spicy. Polticial, religious, and romantic intrigue swirl around everything from persons to planets.

But brining things back down to Arrakis for a second, it’s quite popular. Scorching sun and monstrous sandworms won’t stop an endless caravan of colonizers; the sand here has spice, and spice fuels interstellar travel. Arrakis’s natives, the Fremen, are therefore forever subject to the whims of power-hungry outsiders looking to profit.

Paul’s Atreides family (from their own lush and oceanic planet) might be different. They sympathize with the plight of the Fremen and value their ways. But even so, when the Emperor asks you to do something, you do it.

So we follow the family’s journey in governing a new world—and we do so from Paul’s perspective. The smart young man with the dreams has a special aura about him. Likely inherited and cultivated by his mother, Jessica, who is as quiet as she is cunning. When the two spend time together speaking in all sorts of languages, it’s clear that in this universe of different things, they are yet still different . . .

The introduction to Paul’s life and home—like the introduction to Arrakis, the other power players and their home planets—is a feast for the eyes. The moviemakers give us breathtakingly realistic and impressive vistas. Everything from the haze over an alien city down to the woodworking detail in a living room adds to the gravity of what we’re witnessing. This feels real. Real culture; real history; real lives at stake.

When the Atreides meet the Fremen, things do not go as smoothly as anyone would like. And complicating this is the Harkonnen, who the Emperor has chosen the Atreides to replace—and who are desperate to have their position back.

Dune is not action-packed, but boy is it an adventure. Rather like a dream that moves you, it is so real, so filled with things you recognize, and yet so very different from what you’ve experienced before.

Lapsis

D’you ever think about what the world was like before you were born? How people accomplished things without computers, or telephones? Lapsis puts us in this thoughtful mindset—while maintaining a compelling story. It blends old-school thriller with new-school looks, and the result is a slow-burn, down-to-earth sci-fi that you don’t want to miss.

Its world is very much like ours. Tech companies monopolize profits while traffic cops sneak tickets onto your car. New Yorkers speak with unmistakably New York-accents. The only difference is, the computers are quantum.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to know what that means. Ray, our lead, certainly doesn’t. He won’t risk bringing untested tech home while his grown but sickly step-brother still struggles to get through each day. What the family needs is a cure, not faster internet.

It’s a fair point. But for Ray, it’s a losing one. This charmingly polite, rough around the edges everyman—played wonderfully by Dean Imperial—can’t pay the bills with his odd jobs anymore. The quantum bandwagon is beginning to look golden.

And so, picture Tony Soprano with a rucksack, dragging a lawnmower behind, and you’ll have a good idea of Ray at his next gig. As a cabler, he’ll hike through the wilderness and lay down cable for the quantum computer overlords. The job pays well. Really well, actually . . .

How? And why does Ray’s trail name make his fellow cablers shudder? Why does his employer hire humans to do work that its robots can do better?

With each footstep, Ray creates more money, more enemies, and more questions. The tone is uneasy from beginning to end, really; unfolding, refolding mysteries spook and entice us at the same time. It is a treat to watch.

And top notch moviemaking makes it so. Lapsis appears to be the baby of Noah Hutton: He wrote, directed, edited, and composed its music. This is an impressive workload, but especially so given how subtle and powerful each of those aspects is. Erica A. Hart has picked a wonderfully realistic and talented cast (with Madeline Wise standing out as the reserved but piercingly intelligent foil to Ray). And Mike Gomes’s cinematography gives us grains and hues and symmetry that make us see the cables in trees and the vines in computers.

This is a movie to watch, and these are moviemakers to follow.

Promising Young Woman

That girl is absolutely GONE right now. And look at that outfit, I mean . . . she’s BEGGING for it, isn’t she?

We’ve all heard this kind of talk before. We may even have debated its merits. But in real life, at night at the bar, things happen faster than philosophers can discuss them. And this is why Cassie’s plan is so intriguing.

She’s that girl, head rolling around, eye shadow running. She doesn’t say much when a man (inevitably) swoops in. And she continues not to say much when they’re at his place and he’s even more brazen about taking advantage of her. Then, when things are about to get very, very bad, Cassie sobers up instantly. What do you think you’re doing?

Their stunned, contorted faces—what a pleasure to witness. Yassss Cass, let the predator squirm under the weight of his own inadequacy; longer, longer!

And yet, stop Cass, please stop. Your behavior isn’t changing any minds in a meaningful way. You’re still depressed; still not over what happened to your friend back in med school. Why do you still do this?

And why would we watch something so uncomfortable?

Because we remember our mothers. Because we recognize those lines up top. And because this movie is catharsis itself. A treasure.

After seeing Cassie malaise through days at the coffee shop and nights at the bar, we get the picture. Then a real man enters it and gives us all some hope. He’s socially awkward still, but in an endearing way. Not out to take advantage, but around because he cares about that girl from his med school class who was so smart, so wonderful. The plot thickens.

I certainly had my guesses about where it would go. And they were all wrong. The movie takes everyday interactions and lays them out before us in an original, devastatingly illuminating way. Fairy tale blends with horror, mystery with thriller. The end product is a nauseating, tear-jerking, and triumphant work of art.

Special recognition must go to writer and director Emerald Fennell. Though the story speaks for itself, so many moviemaking techniques amplify it. Take the camerawork for example. It’s almost brazenly different than the usual. In many of the early scenes, the bottom of the picture falls just above foot-height. It’s not noticeable at first, but it’s a brilliant technique to freak out our subconscious: we’re on edge partly because we can’t get grounded, and we can’t get grounded partly because we can’t see the ground. With techniques like this or an asymmetrical or wide-angle shot, it can feel like we’re floating with the characters through a bad dream.

But dream it is not. Promising Young Woman confronts us with reality.

Ema

Ema adopted Polo. And when she didn’t like the fit, she gave him right back.

So begins one of the stranger stories I’ve encountered in some time.

Gastón fights with Ema about it. Though hubby directs her dance troupe, he takes no responsibility for what just happened. The snipes are as weak as they are disingenuous—hinting at what sorts of people would abandon a young soul, and why.

Our lead herself may have been adopted, maintaining to this day a disturbingly intimate relationship with her family. She considers freedom to be life’s ideal; dance and sex, interchangeable expressions of it. Gastón is also out-there, but interested in countering what he perceives to be pop culture’s dumbing down of society. The average person in Valparaíso, Chile—let alone Polo’s social worker—has trouble dealing with such idealists. She is dismissed as seedy and naive; he, spacey and gay.

So what’s this couple, a veritable middle finger to their community, to do next? Sleep around; create, for sure. But the crux of this movie is Ema’s devious, intricate plan to get Polo back. The story, if nothing else, is original.

It’s also worth a watch if you care about thoughtful and beautiful construction of movie scenes. As Ema ensnares more and more people in her plan, the screen pulsates with life. Every image (like a golden sunset, or a pupil shining bright against the grey odds of big city life) is vivid and meaningful. And then there’s the music. Strings discover an unexplainable emotion just before sliding into another one; reggaetón bass thumps our already overbeating hearts.

But pretty in pieces is not enough. The dialogue is too often unnaturally expository, taking us right out of the story. A strange choice for a movie that otherwise moves at a snail’s pace, introducing heavy ideas slowly and deliberately. And though having us think through things like sex, alienation, dependency, and incest is laudable, the story leaves so much open to interpretation that I fail to find a moral in it.

Perhaps that was intentional. Ema is undoubtedly a movie to confuse over and marvel at. But enjoy it or learn from it, I did not.

Users

I was at a loss even as the credits ended. Users was a movie so beautiful and sad; its parts so basic but its whole so unique. Only some time later did I realize: This movie made me grateful that movies exist. It was a learning experience unlike any I have had.

Looking at the story one way, it’s nothing special. Not a story at all, in fact. Just a narrator thinking out loud about the world technology is creating for her child. Thoughts we’ve all had before.

But Momma’s musings—her questions and concerns—are not about what the next generation of cell phone might look like. She is thinking about the very core of human interaction with this container we call Earth. And she is speaking to us.

See these cold, uninviting spaces? This is life now. These iced shoeboxes are the new womb. In this factory we grow plants without soil or sunlight. All our memories and communications? Instantly accessible, everywhere, but kept on quarter-inch-thick cable surrounded by millions of gallons of murky green water at the bottom of the ocean. Good luck restarting.

In pondering what life might look like, our narrator (the director) takes the time to show us what life does look like. And in doing so she spotlights how technology has already changed the course of humanity. For example, thinking about a baby being raised by a computer without its mother’s touch is scary, but so too is a scene where hundreds of TV screens glow in the faces of airline passengers. The perspective out the window—the perspective from the miracle of flight—has become so commonplace that we ignore it. Comparisons like these are powerful and plenty.

The scenes are simple, usually static, rarely showing more than one thing to focus on at a time, and yet the movie is an overwhelming sensory experience. A masterclass in direction, editing, camera- and sound-work, music.

Sure, a minutes-long rainstorm of recycled motherboard chips will have you feeling bad about the excess of our world. But the moviemakers pass no judgement here; rather than illustrating our “forgotten” connection with nature, they remind us that it is multi-faceted and ever-changing. We pass from the warm electricity of a baby at its mother’s teat to a computer assuring its child at play in the forest that it is safe. (Computers do not forget.) Each scene is beautiful; each ultimately reminding us that we are just animals trying our best in the universe.

From beginning to end, the imagery is crisp, incisive, and breathtakingly gorgeous. Tides of life and breath, water and memory, geometry and physics take turns washing over us.

I won’t tell you to watch this before you die. If there’s anything to take away from it, it’s that watching the world around you is what’s important. But if you’d like to do that from a new perspective—or if you need a reminder of how to do so, or whether it’s even worth it—then you’ll want to add this experience to your bucket list.

Paper & Glue

Art is a racket. Unnecessary and ostentatious. When’s the last time it fed the hungry, housed the unhoused—heck, even changed a mind?

It’s easy to think this way with the world burning. Maybe even intuitive. But Paper & Glue will make you think twice about that.

A young JR sure wouldn’t have guessed it, though. Growing up in a French ghetto, he found that art did nothing for anyone. Even after taking things into his own hands—tagging his name around Paris to tell the world that yes, he had a place in it—nothing.

And yet years later, we meet JR as a world-famous artist—one who has directed a movie that spotlights the practical, positive impact which art can have. And the story is simply incredible.

JR walks up to dangerous, forgotten areas (a favela in Rio or a maximum-security prison in the United States, for example), asks the social outcasts who live there if he can photograph them, and then pastes giant posters of their black-and-white photos all over the area. These are massive exhibitions, using whole or even multiple buildings. And seeing their effect can bring you to tears.

When a widow sings; when a Swastika-faced inmate reaches across racial gang lines; when a child who walks through machine gun violence every day says that a picture makes him happy, it’s hard to deny that art changes lives. And because JR documents his projects along the way, we watch realtime photo and video reactions to it all. Normal people who usually deal with more pressing concerns now look at their lives in a different way. They are changed profoundly by these experiences.

This, together with smart storytelling and JR’s charmingly unassuming demeanor, make for an entertaining and reassuring watch. Before you say art can do no good, come take a look at this. It just might be art in its highest form.

Fear Street: Part Two - 1978

Do you study the roller coaster first, or just go for it? Isn’t the fun part getting thrown around in unexpected ways?

I think the same is true for movies. The less you know, the better. But Fear Street: Part Two - 1978 breaks that maxim; you’ll get a whole lot more out of this movie if you watch its prequel (Fear Street: Part One - 1999) first.

Duh, you’re thinking. And duh, I thought, while watching. How could I have expected more from this?

The story begins where the last one ended: Deena and her friends are plagued by an evil that they’re unsure how to defeat. So they go in search of their only hope, a woman who had encountered that same evil years ago and who seems to have survived unscathed. A good sign, right?

Not so fast, says the survivor. In a movie-long flashback, she recounts what happened to her sister and friends back at summer camp in 1978. Everything was normal until someone started acting funny. And then someone else . . .

What this movie series does right is to swell with angsty, frivolous teens. This gets us on edge—and distances us from the gravity of the situation when one of them is inevitably chopped to pieces. The story unfolds slowly but surely, and the production is of professional quality. But it’s all been done before.

The movie lives off of stale approaches: the summer camp horror, the catchy music played as ugly violence unfolds, the caricatures of people.

You’ll enjoy Fear Street: Part Two - 1978 if you’re looking for a movie solidly in your comfort zone. It has mystery, gore, and good versus evil. But because it offers nothing new, the ride has no thrills.

Fear Street: Part One - 1994

Shadyville offers no prospects . . . unless you count murder.

Deena—heck, everybody—knows this. Her small town has become a hopeless, confusing place where high schoolers make light of killers; notoriety is the closest thing to accomplishment that they can imagine. It’s almost like everyone knows, deep down, that this place has nothing for them but pain.

As Deena and her friends will soon find out, there’s a reason for that. And it’s more sinister than they ever could’ve imagined.

You’ll learn too . . . eventually. The first half of Fear Street: Part One - 1994 feels just as long as its title. While petty, unsympathetic teens vie for the most-unlikeable-human award, little else happens. That makes it hard to care about what’s going on.

But if you can sit through the nonsense, the second half will reward you with classically-inspired, professionally-produced slasher horror. Indeed, the story’s structure gets better with compounding interest: Each plot point ratchets up the entertainment value by several multiples—and as time passes, with increasing frequency.

It all begins with, well, I’ll let you take a guess. And this affects Deena especially hard now that her boo and confidant has moved to the idyllic, rival town of Sunnyvale. When teen angst puts Deena and her crew in a spooky situation, more than just human emotions are rattled. A mystery dating back years and fears is uncovered once again.

The movie is no masterpiece, but its blend of light and dark makes for a fun date night. Especially if you’re in the mood for a scare, you could do worse than to watch this flick.

Squid Game (오징어 게임)

How did you fare on the playground? Be honest with yourself.

OK, good. Now that you have an answer, it doesn’t matter. Squid Game will chew you up and spit you out regardless.

It’s a jarring, violent story—but one so inventive and compelling that you’ll see yourself in the characters even as you’re repulsed by them.

Gi-hun introduces us to it all ever so innocently. He appears to be a degenerate gambler like any other, stealing from his elderly mother here, letting down his daughter there. But then a strange thing happens.

The man is given an offer: play on a grand scale. Play a game that, with debts like yours, it would be foolish to turn down . . .

To those of us with impulse control, this would appear too good to be true. And it is.

After Gi-hun accepts, a complex mystery is presented. This game has severe rules, in a severe setting. And Gi-hun is not alone. Not at all alone.

Each episode illustrates a bit more about the game’s players and creators, but devilishly leaves us wanting more. And the game itself? Disturbingly compelling. Our playground pastimes, adultified. Nine episodes of binge-worthy, nail-biting entertainment await you.

The winner will take home a prize that does something to our animal brains. All of them. Even us viewers safely watching outside the screen know this is crazy; we know this is unfair and violent and impractical, and yet we ponder it anyway. Watch it anyway.

It’s the kind of show you desperately want to talk about with someone else. Not necessarily because it’s good, but because it taps into something universal, illustrating and examining our human strategies to this game of life.

I watched every episode of Squid Game like an addict: always high, never satisfied. Am I happy about it?

The Card Counter

That thing you don’t talk about. That thing that eats at you all the same; the one you won’t remember—but can’t forget. The worst thing that has ever happened to you.

Can you sit with it? Will you forgive?

The Card Counter recalls these painful themes. It’s a super-antihero movie that takes guts to watch. And it’s a masterpiece, one that you should watch as soon as you can.

But let’s keep it simple, silly. Like Bill. Even though he’s exceptionally good at cards, he makes sure not to win too much. The object of his game is maintaining a routine; traveling from city to city and casino to casino, counting cards each hand, each hour, each day, to pass the time. It keeps his mind off that thing . . .

As they say, though, game recognizes game. Bill is just too special to fly under the radar. When two very different people approach him for very different reasons, lives are changed forevermore.

That’s it. That’s all we need for a work that’ll go down in movie history as both brutally visceral and deeply tender.

As Bill’s routine continues with new shape, we learn more about his backstory: why he’s willing to spend his life as a gambling algorithm. The emotional masterpiece is revealed as the new acquaintances connect.

The care that was taken to create this movie is moving. Both the whole and its parts are exceptional, such that if I called any of them out, my list would probably just look like the movie’s end credits.

I am no expert. But I implore you: Please, go sit with The Card Counter, and learn.

The Father Who Moves Mountains (Tata mută munții)

What is it about those movies which we know are good—but that we still don’t like?

Take The Father Who Moves Mountains. It’s a stirring character study with an inescapable draw: Once his son goes missing on a mountain, Mircea does all he can to find him. We can’t help but root for a win here, and the suggestive title keeps our interest piqued.

This setup, though disconcerting, moves us. Mircea’s ex-wife; his current, pregnant wife; his son’s (also missing) girlfriend and her family; the rescue team—every one of these characters is in a limbo, and we feel for them.

Indeed, smart writing has given us a metaphor of what we all know and fear: parents can’t protect their children forever; people cannot protect themselves foralways; humans are smart and resourceful, but even their most capable cannot defeat nature’s long arc.

It sounds a downer, but our natural optimism keeps the story compelling. What might the latest search uncover? What sorts of tricks does Mircea have up his sleeve this time? And about that, who the heck is this guy anyway? What does he do when he’s not on a manhunt . . . or cheating on his wives?

This one-two punch of mortality and unsavory protagonist is actually refreshing. This is thoughtful construction which makes you think, and it’s what makes the movie good.

But it does not save the day. The movie remains a downer, and some of its other aspects frustrate in a far less constructive way. If you’re a woman in this story, you are mentioned only in relation to motherly duties; rarely discussed, rarely viewed, you’re just a pawn in a man’s storyline. Mircea’s power to move mountains (so to speak) is not explained or justified. And the ending, though successful in proving a point, feels more like a nail in a coffin than a satisfying resolution.

Vivo

Has your life gone the way you thought it would?

Or does it sometimes feel like you’re just a monkey, flailing around in a complicated world? Well, Vivo can relate with the latter.

OK, he’s a kinkajou, not a monkey. Irrelevant! What matters is that he can sing and dance! Along with friend Andres, he busks at the local plaza. Connection and fulfillment in sunny Havana, Cuba; what’s not to love?!

A letter. A letter written by someone from Andres’s past, asking him to travel all the way to the United States. The old man is ready for this, probably his last big adventure. But Vivo is not. His world was once big and scary, before he found meaning in Andres and his music, and he’s not ready to lose either.

But life happens, doesn’t it? Vivo finds himself journeying alone to Miami, and in doing so, re-learning what it means to engage with his surroundings.

It’s a sweet story, and very often funny. This world is colorful; its animation, in that sweet spot between campy and hyperrealistic. And though a cute, singing animal can do no wrong, Vivo’s friend-along-the-way Gabi, played by Ynairaly Simo, steals the show. Not only is her character (arc) adorable and instructive, Ynairaly’s performance hits high notes across the emotional spectrum.

Music, of course, rounds out the movie. The songwriting is recognizably modern (and recognizably Lin-Manuel Miranda), though rooted firmly in its Afro-Cuban inspiration.

Vivo’s earliest scenes may be on the nose, but that doesn’t bog it down. It’s an energetic, fun family movie—and one whose best parts, funnily enough, are its heavier scenes. When the music stops and the hard work of feeling begins, characters and audience alike have a chance to reflect.

So what if life doesn’t always go the way you thought it would? If it did, how could it ever be better than you had imagined?

Max Richter's Sleep

Please take a moment. Try and remember how it was to be rocked to sleep. How it felt when your parent sang you a lullaby, or read you a story as you dozed off.

Did you feel safe? Comfortable? Or were you not really there, moving between worlds? Max Richter’s Sleep explores all of this and more.

And that’s impressive considering Sleep is just a song. Well, a song eight hours long, whose overnight performances transform event spaces into giant public bedrooms . . . But perhaps even more affecting is that the thinkers behind this experience—and the many attendees—were willing to do this kind of thing. A stubbornly long lullaby shared with strangers while you are at your most vulnerable? It flies in the face of an always-on, self-protective culture.

And yet it’s not a new idea, Max explains. Long songs and performances have been found throughout cultures and history. The difference here, though, is the focus: This meticulously planned event means to speak to your mind precisely as it moves in and out of consciousness. It sounds trippy, but it’s a largely comforting experience, and one that calls back to the simple (and powerful) act of letting go which humankind seems to forget as it ages.

Watching the performance and hearing the music is therefore refreshingly calming. So too is its origin story beautiful.

Interviews tell us that Max and his wife Yulia often went to bed with empty stomachs; the starving artists always fed their children first. But their desire to create and connect with a broad audience kept them firmly at the low-paying fringes of society. Even if Max performed somewhere afar, Yulia would tune in at the end of a long day—and inevitably fall asleep. A thoughtful and perceptive person herself, she found that listening while dozing was an experience unlike any other. And when Max responded to this observation with a secret composition years in the making, their lightbulbs burned in unison. We need to do something with this.

The two make an adorable couple, and their dedication and creativity are on full display in this movie. So, too, are the stories of certain spectators and performance planners. We learn a bit about what drew people to this unintuitive experience. It all makes for an interesting watch, and thanks to remarkably consistent camerawork and lighting, an experience you can safely doze off to.

This is typically not the highest praise for a movie. But here, it is. It’s a testament to the respect and understanding the moviemakers have for these creators, their hard work and goals.

So take a moment. Get comfy, turn those lights down and that volume up. You’ll be glad you did.

The Orange Years: The Nickelodeon Story

The thrill of this movie may be lost on Generation Z; its members can access endless, personalized entertainment at any time. But Millennial viewers who had even sporadic access to the Nickelodeon channel growing up will know: It is special to experience something just-for-kids in an overwhelmingly adult world.

This nostalgia is made for the in-crowd, but even so, The Orange Years: The Nickelodeon Story is an uplifting watch.

One reason is its people. So many of them, it seems, were genuinely passionate about creating entertainment that nodded to the inherent unfairness, loneliness, and helplessness of being a kid. Executives, creators, and performers alike sit down with us to describe just how moving that was—and still is—to them. Nobody around was doing what they tried to do.

And not only does it uplift, it excites. We hear tales of underdogs from different fields banding together to fight for yet other underdogs—and in short order, hear snippets of success.

The movie unleashes all this goodness in order. First comes the small-time, Ohio public access inspiration. Then, the slow, deliberate focus on figuring out what it really means to be a kid. Then, the journey; its twists, turns, and hit shows.

Even if you don’t care how Nickelodeon got its name, or why it picked an orange logo, or why so many of its early shows were successful, you’ll likely enjoy the positivity and resilience on display in this documentary.