Movies
Image Credit: Warner Bros.
THE BEST
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson): Yes, my movie of the year was One Battle After Another. I saw it a first time projected in 70mm, and again in VistaVision, both gorgeous but the Vista presentation was lusher with the soft lingering California light of the day’s quieter hours and retained the vividness of some of the subtle tones in the stark, parched desert-road landscapes. It’s streaming now, and I’m very curious how it looks on a TV. One day I’ll get to the IMAX version.
OBAA is a funny, terrifying dialectical window into opposing militia-style groups and the ways they’re both performative and dead serious — neither reality negates the other. And the quasi-rural settings, while more in the background of the story than its source material Vineland, lay the tone nicely for an extended meditation on the forest v the trees.
Thomas Pynchon’s novel was a loose conceptual scaffold for OBAA, although it seems wrong to talk about the book in those terms when it’s less a straightforward narrative than it is a heavy cloud of cultural memory. OBAA acknowledges the memory for sure (from 1990, looking back at 1984 and then-recent countercultural history) and yet Paul Thomas Anderson makes it super clear that framing the fight as “the past” can make you blind to all the shit going down constantly in the present.
One of the key differences between the two works is in the motives for being a stool pigeon or deciding to work for the man. The most controversial aspect of OBAA is the character Perfidia (Teyana Taylor, playing her as a voltaic, slippery electric eel). Some Black critics of the film have flagged this bit of the script as misogynoir, calling out her hypersexualization and general wildness as a tired trope for women of color. I can’t speak about misogynoir with any authority so I’ll defer to those critics, but while I agree that Anderson could have handled Perfidia more artfully I do sense he had a coherent thought process. Both the movie and book are cynical, but the book is more critical of the people who turn rat fink, while the movie is fairly sympathetic and blames the systems that turn them. People turn because of coercion, threats, bullying, abuses of power, absence of agency. It’s rumored that Pynchon script-doctored PTA’s drafts and anyway I’m sure he and PTA had many deep conversations while “adapting” the book, so perhaps this points to Pynchon’s own views evolving with time.
Which is to say, Perfidia has some stuff to work out in therapy but is absolutely a sympathetic character. She gets a kick out of humiliating Lockjaw at the detention center because she’s young dumb and full of cum, as many twentysomethings are — and once he comes calling again, in that bathroom stall, and again yet when he forces her into naming names and going into hiding, she realizes she’s made a grave mistake. Her dom kink is not the story; his is. The dom kink of white power and law enforcement and the military is. (Another instance where I wonder if Pynchon himself is evolving. Frenesi Gates, who is not Black, enjoys her relationship with Brock Vond a whollle lot more than Perfidia does with Lockjaw. Does Perfidia ever look happy in her scenes with him after their first encounter? I say no.)
A friend noticed something, and it’s subtle, but OBAA sets up a few instances of two contrasting archetypes who perform the same behavior or say the same slur and then the movie waits to find out which character Gets In Trouble with the audience for it. I mentioned the shared humiliation kink but there’s the R-word too, which Bob uses on the phone and then is quietly paralleled in a later use by the guy guarding the 1776 ranch. I don’t think it’s PTA decrying wokeness, either — the movie is urging us to stay woke. It’s just that the battles, one after another, go on despite the messy people who fight them.
The two codas contrast nicely as well. There’s the digital-looking, almost Netflixy one with zombie Lockjaw, which I interpret it as coming from his mind at the moment he’s dying in the burning car: his fantasia of ultimate triumph and validation and the few seconds of barely perceptible paranoia and aloneness that creep in just before the life flickers out of him. The way that the office building feels like death and feels like a corporate new-construction mausoleum and feels like a chilly hell-realm bardo and feels like the emptiness and atemporality of white aspirationalism. It is a very basic looking office, like it’s at a hotel near an airport. That’s the prize, eh? It’s the final location of the Xmas Adventurers, and it’s illustrative that PTA chose a variety of settings to represent the WASPish militia: an anonymous office space, a sprawling and secretive old-money mansion, a tony wedding hotel that Lockjaw had to use a back entrance to get into because he’s failed these guys’ test before they’ve even run it and that’s a metaphor for SO MUCH. (And then he runs his own test on Willa. You gotta punish and humiliate everyone downstream of you, right?)
And there’s the gauzy, lovely coda of Bob and Willa’s full psychic integration with being present in the present day, Willa getting to become a person who experiences running to rather than just spending her youth running from, Bob being out of his fog and excited for Willa to go off and do the meaningful movement work that he understands is needed right fucking now, even if he’s gonna hand that work over to her while he stays on the couch.
Everyone’s good in it. Leo can be an actual actor when he wants to. Sean Penn can detach himself enough from being a grotesque person to play a grotesque character with all the shadings of rot and failure. Regina Hall is astonishing in her supporting role: pissed-off, haunted, disappointed. If Chase Infiniti is the movie’s heart, Hall is the cranky old soul.
The Pynchon is present in how networked every group in the film is and the deep and far-reaching tentacles of those networks — whether it’s protective community care or nihilist yokel white supremacy. It’s about the work, and who’s out there in the muck doing it every day, and the actual human beings the results of the work matter to. It’s about “attraction to power,” as a trope, as a kink, as a trap.
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho): Brazil’s The Secret Agent is a great companion piece to One Battle After Another: like Anderson’s film, it’s a vivacious, music-rich shaggy-dog polemic about entrenched institutional corruption and the lengths some regular people go to try to survive it and elude it. In this case, the corruption is the government, law enforcement, and industrial leadership under the country’s military dictatorship as the exiled and marginalized experienced it in 1977. And Also like OBAA, it’s a tonal whirlwind, with Friedkin/Pakula action-paranoia pastiche, absurdism that zigzags between Commedia dell’arte masque horror and funny tabloid-cryptid hysteria, and a joyful old commie looking out for everyone. Udo Kier has a brief appearance, in what I believe was his final role. The Secret Agent is a beautiful watch too, with Evgenia Alexandrova providing the most consistently vibrant, colorful cinematography I’ve taken in all year (GDT’s Frankenstein looks sickly grey in every instance where the color grader doesn’t selectively and gratuitously saturate a scarf or something). The narrative threads that don’t resolve remind us that in life under political upheaval in a pre-internet age, many lingering questions necessarily remained mysteries.
Os Afro-sambas: O Brasil de Baden e Vinícius (Emilio Domingos): Another compelling 2025 chronicle of midcentury Brazil: a documentary about Os Afro-sambas, the landmark 1966 collaborative album between Baden Powell and Vinícius de Moraes. The LP was a sort of cultural ambassadorship project that connected the cosmopolitan chic of a celebrated poet-diplomat with a modern jazz guitarist turned keen student of the rhythmic sound world of Afro-Bahians on the northeast coast. Director Domingos spends time with members of the Salvador community that guitarist Powell immersed himself in, and interviews various personnel (amateur and professional musicians alike) that contributed to the record. He provides valuable context too. In 1966, Brazil was only two years into the hostile regime change, so disruptions in music were extremely palpable; the bossa nova mania just starting to sweep the US and UK was well out of fashion, with tastes turning to psychedelic rock and the harder percussion of samba. The album Os Afro-sambas is a firm handshake between the genteel middlebrow relinquishing control and the restless youth charging into the decade’s back half.
Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs): If The Secret Agent had the most vibrant, colorful cinematography, Peter Hujar’s Day was evocative in quieter ways, its homey 1974 tones suggesting themselves into space like a Japanese watercolor or the steady but terminal flicker of a still-active candle collapsed inward. Its ultimate tribute to New York arts photographer Peter Hujar is in how Sachs foregrounds the ever-changing qualities of available light, and perhaps the light’s slow movement against the static apartment backdrop is a hat-tip to another crucial image maker we’ve lost, filmmaker Michael Snow and his durational epic Wavelength (1967). Hujar’s focus was portraiture, so with that in mind we never lose track of the two characters at center stage; the close, loving friendship between Hujar and his interviewer for the day, Linda Rosenkrantz, is what really gives the movie its élan vital and generosity of spirit.
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt): So good, so smart. Uncanny similarities to parts of Leos Carax’s Pola X, including the closing shot.
Sinners (Ryan Coogler): Also very good and smart, although the last act needed tightening. Both this and The Mastermind address the destructive capacities of white privilege and the sense of entitlement that goads even the loser white people into believing all property is fundamentally ours to enter, to take.
Universal Language (Matthew Rankin): The first movie I saw in 2025 was a Canadian magical realist comedy inspired equally by Guy Maddin and the Iranian New Wave, an exurban city symphony about nothing and also about distance and communication and human needs. The setting is both Winnipeg and Tehran and somehow neither. I can’t remember a lot about it and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee): Unrepentantly melodramatic, very silly as a plot, and fully awesome as a later-career auteurist flex, Spike Lee’s Kurosawa adaptation makes a 10-course meal homaging the granddaddy of all cinematic pivot points, including a lengthy Bronx chase sequence that among other things functions as an excuse for the great Eddie Palmieri (RIP) and his band to show up and wail over the top. And a movie as ambitious as this requires a heavy-hitter marquee star, which it has and then some: a social media poster and theater employee wrote that Denzel Washington is such an icon his fans don’t even approach the ticket counter with the name of his newest release, they just say “Two for Denzel.” Which is, I assume, another aspect of the flex for Spike.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie)
Duse (Pietro Marcello)
Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)
Pin de Fartie (Alejo Moguillansky)
COOL RESTORATIONS, REPERTORY, PROGRAMS, ETC
Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars (Howard Brookner, 1985, at NYFF)
Television Event (Jeff Daniels, 2020, at IFC)
Highfalutin (Hans Broich, 2021, at Anthology Film Archives)
Pgm 4: Poetic Documentaries (Jacob Burkhardt, various 1975–2022, at Anthology Film Archives)
Jazz Is Our Religion / Blues Like Showers of Rain (John Jeremy, 1972 / 1970, at Maysles Documentary Center)
No More Sweets for You (curated program by Elisabeth Subrin, short films from 1995, at Light Industry)
Queer and Uncensored: Bottom and Top (various, 1967 / 1986 / 1973, at MoMA)
We Are Fugazi from Washington, D.C. (Joe Gross / Joseph Pattisall / Jeff Krulik, 2023, at Big Ears Festival)
MIXED FEELINGS
It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley (Amy J. Berg): Incredible archival footage that I wish could have spoken for itself, because aside from the interviews about the creation and performance of his music, this documentary was not it. Perhaps telling for who was the most involved with it and which key figures of his life were so not involved that they weren’t even mentioned.
WALKED OUT OF
Björk: Cornucopia (Ísold Uggadóttir): I respect Björk, truly. She’s a force for good. And the production design and costuming here are splendid, so kudos to her team. But she’s so far up her own ass these days that me walking out 15 minutes in was a mercy killing. Let me remember her as a Sugarcube, not whatever this is.
