The year’s top 10 movies
with its arms flung wide open.” Reinsve plays a woman in Oslo who is bouncing between potential career paths and potential romantic partners as she nears her 30th birthday. This Cannes Film Festival hit, which won’t get a wide U.S. release until February, simply watches her decide, meaning it’s “about no less than a 21st-century quest to lead a meaningful life.”
Licorice Pizza
“Paul Thomas Anderson’s paean to life in the 1970s San Fernando Valley is a shaggy comic wonder,” said David Sims in TheAtlantic.com. Newcomers Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim co-star as a charming teenage hustler and the aimless 20-something who’s drawn into his orbit. The film is instantly delightful, yet it also rewards repeated viewings because of the precision with which it captures “the blurry period between teenagehood and adulthood, where true independence is out of reach and you’re still invincible to the mundanity of being a grown-up.”
The Souvenir Part II
For the follow-up to her acclaimed 2019 semi-autobiographical drama, Joanna Hogg has made “a benevolent movie about the self-absorption of the young,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Honor Swinton Byrne again stars, now as a 1980s London film student whose boyfriend has died from an overdose. To recover, the character decides to make a film about their relationship, and “with that seemingly simple story, Hogg captures a thousand facets of what it’s like to be a young person eager to make a mark on the world—while also needing desperately to make sense of it all.”
The Lost Daughter
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut is “the kind of film that will bury itself in your subconscious,” said Lindsey Bahr in the Associated Press. Olivia Colman stars as a vacationing middle-aged academic who is reminded of her struggles with parenting by a younger mother who seems a kindred spirit. Despite the idyllic Greek seaside setting, a sense of danger permeates every moment of the film, and Colman’s inscrutable Leda is “one of the richest characters that has ever graced our screens.”
The Green Knight
“Bewitchingly gorgeous and utterly itself,” David Lowery’s adaptation of a 14th-century Middle English poem speaks directly to modern viewers while fully honoring its source, said Dana Stevens in Slate .com. Dev Patel stars as Gawain, a brash aspiring knight who, after gaining brief renown, sets out on a quest that’s almost certain to end with his death. The “trippy” metaphysical journey that follows “collapses the distance between life and death, heroism and cowardice, love and betrayal.”
Passing
Though Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut is set in the 1920s, “nothing in it feels all that distant,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. Co-stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga deliver “a master class in incremental revelations” while playing two friends who both are Black but live in jazzage New York City on different sides of the color line. It’s “a dangerous friendship, based on deception,” and the slow-simmering black-and-white drama that Hall has built around it is “anything but conventional.”
C’mon C’mon
We’ve come to expect virtuosic performances from Joaquin Phoenix, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. But in this “turbulent, tender” drama, the revelation is 12-year-old Woody Norman, who gives “one of the greatest of recent performances by a child actor.” With freewheeling improvisational ease, he and Phoenix develop a captivating bond while playing a nephew and uncle thrown together by a crisis in the boy’s household. The film they inhabit proves both “intensively intimate” and “expansively world-embracing.”
The 27 sources used to establish our rankings include the sources above plus Entertainment Weekly, Hyperallergic.com, The New York Times, TheRinger.com, Vanity Fair, Variety, Vox.com, and The Washington Post.