As we celebrate the holiday season and the conclusion of another year, the films this month revolve around the end of things: the end of the world, the end of youth (at times, what’s the difference?). In Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” we see a collage of loneliness in people at the end of their rope; in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory,” a filmmaker, in the twilight days of his career, drifts off into dreams of his childhood.
If that is all too heavy for the season, chase things down with a shot of holiday magic via an underrated gem from the late Japanese auteur Satoshi Kon.
‘First Reformed’ (2018)
This year, as if they could not not do it, multiple films (“Eddington,” “One Battle After Another,” “Bugonia”) wrestled with the existential chaos, psychosis and anxiety of being alive today. Paul Schrader did it in 2017.
His haunted film profiles a minister (Ethan Hawke) at a small church who begins to spiral after counseling an environmental activist (Philip Ettinger) overwhelmed by climate collapse. As doom and fury loom ever-larger — the film captures our peculiar age of conspiracy-brain violence — the reverend finds solace in a budding connection with the activist’s wife (Amanda Seyfried).
It is a manifesto of contemporary dread wrapped in barbed wire (IYKYK). Yet strange and sobering as it is, the film tries to square the impossible equation of our times: how to hold both hope and despair in one’s hands.
‘Certain Women’ (2016)
As with so many of the films of Kelly Reichardt, one of our great living filmmakers, this sort-of anthology film requires adjusting to her slower tempo; when you do, one is rewarded with the richness of patiently observed lives that are often as soulful as they are plaintive.
Broken into three vignettes, the film tracks four women living across Montana: a lawyer (Laura Dern) dealing with an erratic client (Jared Harris); a woman (Michelle Williams) wrestling with a dismissive family; a rancher (Lily Gladstone) who begins an almost wordlessly longing relationship with a night school teacher (Kristen Stewart), whose class she wanders into from the bitter cold.
Together they form a mosaic of quiet desperation spread across achingly lonely plains. The quartet barely cross one another’s paths, but are all women slowly suffocating in a world that is equal parts indifferent and demanding. As is Reichardt’s signature, these are small stories where little happens; yet days later, all that humanity and history are still rattling around in your heart.
‘Tokyo Godfathers’ (2004)
Boil it down to the elements, and Christmastime is really two things: the presence of family or the absence of it. This film is about both.
In Satoshi Kon’s holiday classic, a homeless trio find an abandoned infant in a garbage dump on Christmas night. The group — a gruff alcoholic (Toru Emori), a transgender woman (Yoshiaki Umegaki) and a teenage runaway (Aya Okamoto) — are an unlikely family that is truer to the name than you’d think: They’re insulting and inconsiderate toward one another, but also there for one another when no one else is.
Moved by the symbolism of it all (lost baby, lonely Christmas, snowy night), they go looking for the baby’s parents, determined to bring her home. So begins a funny, heartwarming and madcap adventure through Tokyo, and also, even in a drably snowcapped cityscape, one of the most visually splendid Christmas films you’ll come across.
‘Pain and Glory’ (2019)
Only Pedro Almodóvar could make a late-life heroin habit appear so tender, so rich, in emotion and color, that you almost want to sink into the drug’s dreamy haze yourself. Once a prolific filmmaker, Salvador (Antonio Banderas) now spends his days dejected as he battles various physical ailments. He can’t work anymore and, casually coming to heroin as a pain reliever, begins to have vivid dreams about his childhood.
Those memories and the figures from his past that he comes to reconnect with — old lovers, collaborators and a mother (Penélope Cruz) who’s the gravitational force of his life — are characterized by playful charm, but most of all with a palpable lovingness.
It’s sensitive and elegiac in a way that makes it hard not to see Salvador (also with distinctly shocked-out hair) as a proxy for Almodóvar. This is certainly not a film he could have made as a young director, and it reads at times like a final letter on a full life that was processed through filmmaking. But thankfully, as with Salvador himself, there are still more films to be made.
‘Girlhood’ (2015)
Confronted by the cruelties of adolescence, the face of young Marieme (Karidja Touré) often appears to shrink inward, as if fleeing from everything she sees and hears. You can’t blame her. Her single working mother is largely absent, her older brother is a violent bully, and life in her African enclave on the outskirts of Paris brings disorienting vagaries and little promise. But when she falls in with a crew of girlfriends, she opens up to a newfound sense of brash self-possession, if also increasingly dangerous behavior.
Where that leads can sometimes feel like a meandering downward spiral. That is, until one sees that the director, Céline Sciamma, is ultimately interested in a study of gender politics, a kind of dance between carefree sisterhood and, when a teenage girl is stripped of agency, the learned performance of masculinity. The latter is all Marieme can rely on to assert control on a future that’s slipping from her fingers.
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