Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)

Cast: Mikey Madison, Mark Eydelshteyn, Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Aleksei Serebryakov, Darya Ekamasova, Luna Sofia Miranda, Lindsey Normington. Screenplay: Sean Baker. Cinematography: Drew Daniels. Production design: Stephen Phelps. Film editing: Sean Baker. Music: Joseph Capalbo. 

Of the record-setting four Oscars producer-director-writer-editor Sean Baker won for Anora, the one for editing may be the most significant. Though they get little notice from moviegoers, film editors are the ones who shape a movie's pace and mood and tone, and often the ones who accomplish the director's vision, which is why so many great directors choose to work with the same editor on every film, as Steven Spielberg does with Michael Kahn or Martin Scorsese with Thelma Schoonmaker. If they can, directors often edit themselves, as Joel and Ethan Coen do under the nom de moviola Roderick Jaynes. Anora is the kind of movie that needs the right editor. It's a comedy with elements of slapstick and screwball and a soupçon of rom-com thrown in, but it has dark edges. Too much violence or wackiness or mush or realism and it could go sour. It's also a movie with the right texture, achieved by elements that don't need to be there, like the Coney Island candy shop that plays only a passing role in the plot but adds a sweet little offbeat flavor to the film. To appreciate the way Baker plays with tone in both directing and editing, watch the character of Igor (Yura Borisov), who seems at first to be just another thug, hired muscle to bring Mikey Madison's Anora into line. But Baker manages to insert Igor into the frame just often enough and subtly enough to build him into a character with an essential role at the film's end. If Anora isn't a great movie -- there's nothing of moral or intellectual importance about it -- it does the right thing often enough to qualify it as an exemplary one.

Nobody's Hero (Alain Guiraudie, 2022)

Jean-Charles Clichet in Nobody's Hero

Cast: Jean-Charles Clichet, Noémie Lvovsky, Ilies Kadri, Michel Masiero, Doria Tillier, Renaud Rutten, Philippe Fretun, Farida Rahouadj, Miveck Packa, Yves-Robert Viala, Patrick Ligardes. Screenplay: Alain Guiraudie, Laurent Lunetta. Cinematography: Hélène Louvart. 

Nobody's Hero has no credited production designer or film editor, which suggests that it all somehow came together on the streets of the French city of Clermont-Ferrand and in the head of writer-director Alain Guiraudie. And considering the almost random and accidental events and eccentric, impulsive characters that make up its narrative, that could be true. It's one of those movies in which no one does or is precisely what you expect. Suffice it to say that it's a slightly darkish comedy about a  middle-aged man who picks up a prostitute, takes her to a seedy hotel run by an elderly man and a teenage girl, discovers that she's married to a jealous man, and somehow gets himself and the others, as well as the tenants of the apartment house where he lives, involved in an international terrorist incident that may not be international or terrorist after all. All the actors in this head-spinning but amusing movie play it as if it makes sense, which is the only way to do this sort of thing. Whether you think this sort of thing is worth doing is another matter entirely.

Wicked (Jon M. Chu, 2024)

Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Peter Dinklage (voice), Andy Nyman, Courtney Mae-Briggs, Bowen Yang. Screenplay: Winnie Holman, Dana Fox, based on the musical play by Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz and the novel by Gregory Maguire. Cinematography: Alice Brooks. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Myron Kerstein. Music: John Powell, Stephen Schwartz. 

I admit that I didn't much care for Wicked. The few things I did like about it, such as Jonathan Bailey's impish Fiyero, were overwhelmed by frantic choreography, ugly (and naturally Oscar-winning) sets, and noisy special effects. It's a movie for children of all ages, but especially hyperactive ones. 

Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, 1999)

Sul Kyung-gu in Peppermint Candy

Cast: Sul Kyung-gu, Moon So-ri, Kim Yeo-jin, Park Soo-young, Park Sung-yeon. Screenplay: Lee Chang-dong. Cinematography: Hyung Koo Kim. Art direction: Park Il-hyun. Film editing: Hyun Kim. Music: Jaejin Lee. 

What could have been a gimmick in the hands of a lesser writer-director than Lee Chang-dong becomes  revelatory in Peppermint Candy: Life can only be understood through hindsight. The film begins with the moments leading up to the suicide of Yongho (Sul Kyung-gu) after he shows up at the reunion picnic of a group of factory workers. Behaving erratically, he first disturbs the group and then climbs to a railway trestle where he stands in front of an oncoming train. The film then flashes back to scenes from Yongho's life, each one earlier than the one that has gone before: first three days earlier, then in succession, five years before, 12 years before, 15 years before, 19 years before, and finally 20 years before -- the only sequence that takes place at the site of his suicide. The accumulation of details, laced through with various leitmotifs such as the candy that gives the film its title, presents a portrait of a man brutalized by experience, and in particular by the experience of living through two decades of South Korea's troubled history. It's a study in remorse and guilt and compulsive misbehavior that succeeds because of Lee's storytelling skill and Sul's lacerating performance.  

Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024)

Cast: Josh Harnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Alison Pill, Hayley Mills, Jonathan Langdon, Mark Bacolcol, Marnie McPhail, Kid Cudi, Russ, Marcia Bennett, Vanessa Smythe. Screenplay: M. Night Shyamalan. Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Production design: Debbie DeVilla. Film editing: Noemi Katharina Preiswerk. Music: Herdis Stefánsdóttir. 

Viewing the manhunt for a killer from the killer's point of view is a good premise for a thriller, one that was done classically by Fritz Lang in M (1931). And M. Night Shyamalan gets off on the right foot by casting the attractive, underrated, and underused actor Josh Hartnett in the lead. He plays Cooper, the psychopath next door, a capable and loving family man whom no one would suspect of being a serial killer called The Butcher. He is just being a good dad when he takes his 12-year-old daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a concert by her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), only to find out that the arena is under tight surveillance by the police and the FBI under the supervision of a profiler (Hayley Mills, in the most improbable bit of casting in this or any other year). Will he be able to outwit his pursuers? Do we really want him to? Unfortunately, Shyamalan botches things in working out the plot, in large part by making the concert, of which we see much more than necessary, a crashing bore. The writer-director's daughter, Saleka, wrote and performed her own rather lackluster songs, one of the instances that justify the phrase "nepo baby." She's also not up to the acting demands of the role when she's off-stage. Worst of all, the film ends with a scene that leaves room for a sequel. I'm surely not the first one to suggest that it be called Claptrap?   

Le Jour Se Lève (Marcel Carné, 1939)

Cast: Jean Gabin, Jules Berry, Arletty, Jacqueline Laurent, Mady Berry, René Génin, Arthur Devère, René Bergeron, Bernard Blier, Marcel Pérès, Germaine Lix, Gabrielle Fontan, Jacques Baumer. Screenplay: Jacques Viot, Jacques Prévert. Cinematography: Philippe Agostini, André Bac, Albert Viguier, Curt Courant. Production design: Alexandre Trauner. Film editing: René Le Hénauff. Music: Maurice Jaubert. 

Daybreak, the Anglicized title of Marcel Carné's Le Jour Se Lève, recalls another great attempt at poetic cinema, F.W. Murnau's late silent Sunrise (1927). But where Murnau strove for a kind of allegorical poetry, to the extent of labeling his characters The Man, The Wife, and The Woman From the City, Carné's poetry is rooted in actuality. Jean Gabin plays François, a factory worker who falls in love with Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent), who works in a flower shop. He follows her one night to a music hall, where she watches an act by the animal trainer Valentin (Jules Berry). At the bar, he strikes up a conversation with Clara (Arletty), who was Valentin's stage assistant but has just broken up with him. When he discovers that Françoise is infatuated with Valentin, François lets himself be drawn into a relationship with Clara. Eventually this quartet of relationships will turn fatal. But Carné and his screenwriters Jacques Viot and Jacques Prévert choose to tell the story in flashbacks: The film begins with François shooting Valentin and then holing up in his apartment as the police lay siege to it, trying to arrest him. The film superbly mixes suspense, as we wait for the outcome of François's standoff with the police, with romance, as we learn of the affairs with Françoise and Clara that brought him to this point. It's often cited as a precursor of film noir for its mixture of passion and violence. Gabin is the quintessential world weary protagonist, Berry the embodiment of corruption, and Arletty the woman who's seen it all too often.  

Smile (Parker Finn, 2022)

Cast: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert, Kal Penn, Rob Morgan, Gillian Zinser, Judy Reyes, Jack Sochet, Nick Arapoglu, Perry Strong, Matthew Lamb, Dora Kiss. Screenplay: Parker Finn. Cinematography: Charlie Saroff. Production design: Lester Cohen. Film editing: Elliot Greenberg. Music: Cristobal Tapia de Veer. 

The rictus that spreads across the faces of those who are about to kill or be killed is probably the scariest thing about Smile, a routine horror movie that has not much going for it other than some committed performances, particularly by Sosie Bacon as the psychiatrist being driven mad by a supernatural being. Horror movie fans accepted it despite a phony premise and some deep inconsistencies in the plotting, so it spawned the inevitable Smile 2, from the same writer-director, Parker Finn, in 2024. You know who you are and whether you want to watch it. 

All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)

Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in All We Imagine as Light

Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad, Anand Sami. Screenplay: Payal Kapadia, Himanshu Prajapati, Robin Joy, Naseem Azad. Cinematography: Ranabir Das. Production design: Piyusha Chalke, Shamim Khan, Yashasvi Sabharwal. Film editing: Clément Pinteaux. Music: Topshe. 

In a film at once delicate and gritty, Payal Kapadia paints a picture of urban loneliness in the lives of three women. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse in a Mumbai hospital, hasn't seen or heard from her husband for a year since he left to work in Germany. Anu (Divya Prabha), her younger roommate and fellow nurse, is under pressure from her family to accept an arranged marriage like Prabha's, but she's in love with a young Muslim, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Their friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital, is being evicted from the apartment she shared with her late husband by the construction company that wants to tear it down. When they leave the teeming city to help Parvaty move to the village where she once lived, each of them begins to confront their emotional isolation. Kapaia's film deservedly won the Grand Prix at Cannes, but it failed to attract Oscar nominations, in part because it was produced by an international consortium of companies and the Indian film industry failed to submit it for the awards. 

Big Eden (Thomas Bezucha, 2000)

Cast: Arye Gross, Eric Schweig, Tim DeKay, Louise Fletcher, George Coe, Nan Martin, O'Neal Compton, Corinne Bohrer. Screenplay: Thomas Bezuch. Cinematography: Rob Sweeney. Production design: Stephanie Carroll. Film editing: Andrew London. Music: Joseph Conlan.

Big Eden is a queer romantic fantasy, or maybe daydream. You make it big in the city and return to the small town where you grew up in the closet, and you discover that everyone not only tolerates your queerness but is happy to facilitate it. And you find that your handsome best friend, on whom you had a crush, has returned too, and is now willing to make a go of it with you. But you turn him down because you realize that he's still straight. (Yeah, right.) And then, when you're about to return to the big city, you discover that an even better-looking man has been carrying the torch for you all these years but was too shy to make a move. Happy ending. This utter nonsense might have worked as a movie if writer-director Thomas Bezucha had found the right tone for it, but he meanders between moodiness and quirkiness, and is unable to come up with dialogue that strikes the right note and even sometimes to make sense. Moreover, he has miscast the central role with the otherwise capable character actor Arye Gross, who has none of the charisma that would make us believe that either the old friend (Tim DeKay) or the secret admirer (Eric Schweig) are pining for his affections. And what's a romance without sex and passion, which never show up on screen except in a couple of tepid kisses? The only thing Big Eden succeeds at is demonstrating that queer people can make romantic movies that are as improbable as the ones straight people make. 

Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun, 2023)

Zhu Yilong in Only the River Flows

Cast: Zhu Yilong, Chloe Maayan, Hou Tianlai, Tong Linkai, Kang Chunlei, Wang Jianyu, Zishi Moxi, Liu Baisha, Yang Cao, Zhou Qingyung. Screenplay: Kang Chunlei, Wei Shujun, based on a novel by Yu Hua. Cinematography: Zhiyuan Chengma. Art direction: Zhang Menglun. Film editing: Matthieu Laclau. 

Moody, absorbing, and sometimes enigmatic film about a detective (Zhu Yilong) haunted by a series of murders in a town in rural China. Wei Shujun's direction and Zhiyuan Chengma's cinematography make the most of the gloomy, oppressive setting.