Amerikatsi.

Michael Goorjian’s Amerikatsi is a dramatic farce that explores two dark periods in Armenia’s history through the eyes of one man who manages to maintain a sense of hope even when his fellow man is cruel to him and fate is crueler. It’s a testament to our humanity and our ability to survive even in awful conditions, and an indictment of the systems and the people that make these conditions possible. It’s a beautiful, funny, heartfelt movie that deserves a much wider audience. (You can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Charlie (played by Goorjian, who also wrote and directed the film) escapes the Armenian genocide of 1918 when his grandmother hides him in a cart, allowing him to escape execution at the hands of the Turks. Then just four years old, he ends up in the United States, but after World War II, when Josef Stalin called for Armenian expatriates to return home to held rebuild the country, Charlie does so, only to end up wrongly accused of being either an American spy or a capitalist pig or both, after which he’s sentenced to hard labor. From his cold prison cell, he can see into a nearby apartment, and he watches their lives as if it’s his daily soap opera, becoming invested in their relationship and in the man’s secret passion for art, leading Charlie to reach out and try to make a connection across an impossible boundary.

Much of what happens around Charlie is absurdist comedy, part Kafka, part Iannucci, and you have to just accept that he’s going to end up in prison despite the ridiculous circumstances that land him there. He barely speaks Armenian when he returns to the Caucasus and speaks no Russian, so any attempts to save himself after he’s arrested go nowhere, and he’s the butt of many jokes among the guards and even fellow prisoners, at least at first. He’s even thrown in the “icebox,” a storage room that’s especially cold in winter, yet over time he makes it his own space, at least, and jury-rigs contraptions like a clothesline or a way to sit at the high window and eat his meals while watching his neighbors, even writing down some of their customs like the order of the toasts after a big dinner. (Apparently, one of them is to Mount Ararat, a volcano in easternmost Turkey that is a symbol of Armenian culture and heritage.)

Charlie is an optimist, but not a fool, which is key to making this character work. He has hope, and it appears that nothing can truly extinguish it, but he isn’t blind to his situation; he hopes that there’s something better to come, not that someone will come save him from his current state. Goorjian plays him with such an earnestness that it’s easy to believe in the character, that Charlie could still find joy in small things, and that he’d take the risks he does take to get a message to his neighbor – who turns out to be a more important person than Charlie realizes – just to help another human. The guards call him “Charlie Chaplin,” an overt nod to the tramp-like qualities of the character, with Goorjian occasionally mimicking Chaplin’s walk in the film. The Tramp can be childlike and credulous, but his heart and his ingenuity win the day, which is a good summary of how this Charlie wins out in the end as well.

The score for Amerikatsi, by Armenian composer Andranik Berberyan,is exceptional, with folk music mixed with ambient music to provide some depth and color to what could otherwise have been very bland and grey scenes of Charlie in his prison. There’s also a familiar name in the credits, as the movie was executive produced by Serj Tankian of System of a Down, who also is listed under “additional music.”

Amerikatsi was Armenia’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and became the first Armenian film to make the shortlist, although it didn’t make the final cut of five nominees. I can’t say it deserved a nod, as I haven’t seen any of the five yet, but if they’re all better than this one, then 2023 might have been the best year in film history. Amerikatsi tells a simple if ridiculous story, and in so doing it gives us glimpses into Armenian history and epitomizes the strength of a people who’ve been victims of their neighboring aggressors for over a hundred years.

Stay True.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critic Circle award for memoir or autobiography, Hua Hsu’s Stay True begins as a coming-of-age story about growing up as a first-generation American, trying to fit in with other kids through culture and counter-culture. Hsu eventually found a strong friend group at UC Berkeley, doing normal college kid things and seeing the world as full of endless possibilities, until one of his closest friends is murdered in a random carjacking, a senseless crime that destroys so many lives and leaves Hsu in an uncertain world of grief. It’s brief yet Hsu writes so clearly and specifically that each scene feels real – and so do the emotions that come from it.

Hsu was born to Taiwanese parents who emigrated to the United States to flee the repressive government in Taipei in the 1960s and 1970s, then grew up in California as an outsider to multiple groups – he wasn’t white, yet he wasn’t a high achiever like many of the other Asian-American students he saw. He eventually gravitates to music as a way to be cool, particularly towards indie music, even starting his own zine in high school to try to get free CDs from record labels, adopting a cooler-than-thou attitude to people who listened to mainstream artists like Pearl Jam or the Dave Matthews Band, or even latecomers to Nirvana. When he graduates from high school and attends Berkeley, he meets Ken Ishida, who in many ways is all the things Hsu wants to be – effortless, charismatic, handsome, just naturally cool without trying. The two don’t exactly become fast friends; their friendship grows over time, and evolves around and through their differences rather than in spite of them. Theirs was, in Hsu’s telling, the sort of friendship that you are lucky to find a few times in your life, one that lasts for decades even as others drift apart or become nothing more than Facebook friendships.

Of course, Ken is the murder victim here, which I don’t think is spoiling anything if you’ve read any reviews or anything else about the book. It was as pointless as stupid as it gets; his killers bought a bunch of stuff with his credit cards and went to their house, with his car still on their lawn. They were caught almost immediately, and the guy who actually shot him is still in prison in California; his girlfriend, an accomplice in the crime, was just released last year. His murder was enough to shock Hsu and their whole friend group, but Hua takes it even harder because of how their last interaction went, and his guilt that perhaps Ken would still be alive if he’d said or done something different in that situation.

Hsu’s writing is delicate and evocative all at once; he eschews the big twist or shocking moment, and lets the characters – of which he is one – tell the story, with his wry observations often providing humor or some needed context. So much of Stay True asks how to measure a life, to borrow a phrase; when someone close to us dies, how do we remember them, truly remember them as they were, rather than the version we hold in our memories, which may be colored by our emotions or wishes. It becomes tangible to Hsu when he has to deliver the eulogy at Ken’s funeral, where he speaks more honestly than you might expect for the ceremony, while much of what comes afterwards, in the final third of the book, is Hsu trying to make sense less of what happened and more of how to go on. He writes letters to his late friend, sees his figurative ghost when a certain song plays or when it’s time for a cigarette. His relationship with his girlfriend stalls. He reacts as many people would in the face of such a tragedy; few could describe it in such lucid, honest terms.

I did read a review of Stay True that referred to the book as “unsentimental,” which I think depends on how you define the term. Sentimental literature and art is maudlin, weepy, turgid; Stay True is none of those. It is, however, a sad story, told plainly but with tenderness at its core. Hua Hsu lost his best friend, without warning, and without the emotional tools to cope. He’s written a beautiful tribute that speaks to the grief we all must face in some way, while also delving into the details of his life and Ken’s that made both of their stories unique.

Next up: Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage, by Nathalia Holt.

Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is an achievement. It’s a biopic, a deep character study, a thriller, a heist movie, and a Shakespearean tragedy (well, except the title character doesn’t die at the end), wrapped up into a three-hour movie that never lets up its pace. It’s incredible that a major studio bankrolled this and gave it such a long theatrical release, given its subject and its three-hour run time, but I hope its runaway success encourages studios to take more risks on prestige films like it. (It’s streaming now on Peacock, or rentable on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Based on the biography American Prometheus (which I have not read), Oppenheimer tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the physicist who led the United States’s effort to develop a nuclear weapon, known as the Manhattan Project. It’s framed by the events that came after the war, when Oppenheimer became an advocate for international control of the very weapons he helped to develop, leading to a sham hearing that led to the revocation of his security clearance and a subsequent public hearing that led to the downfall of his chief antagonist, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.). The movie itself runs from the 1920s, when Oppenheimer was still a student, meeting Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and studying under Max Born (mentioned but not depicted), through his time as a professor at Berkeley, his tenure in Los Alamos leading the Manhattan Project, and the post-war attacks on his reputation. The movie focuses on his professional efforts, but his personal life, including his marriage to the biologist Katherine (Emily Blunt) and his affair with the psychologist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), although the movie drags when the focus shifts away from the thriller at the heart of the film.

Writer and director Christopher Nolan packed Oppenheimer with dialogue, so there are very few moments of silence in the film, and any time the movie is focused on the professional arc, it flies. (If I were a more pandering sort, I might say it moves at the speed of light, but I’ll leave those jokes to the least common depunimator.) The script underscores just how massive the undertaking and how unlikely the assembled team of physicists and other scientists was. It’s easy to let hindsight make the development of the first atomic bomb seem like an inevitability, but it was a gigantic effort that required the participation of scientists from across the west, including some refugees from the Nazi regime, and coordination across multiple agencies and university laboratories. The physics behind nuclear fission was only discovered in 1938, and the plants refining the plutonium needed for the bombs didn’t even come online until 1943 and 1944. We know how the story ends, but the movie puts you into the action enough that you can feel the tension and the uncertainty among the scientists – who knew what was at stake, but had no idea if they’d succeed or when.

Oppenheimer’s marriage and infidelity make up the film’s secondary plot, and while it’s an important part of his story and is intertwined enough with his professional life – including his pre-war flirtation with the Communist Party – that it has to be in the film, but there’s so little development of Katherine’s or Jane’s characters that neither role amounts to much beyond one good scene apiece. There’s not enough screen time for either of them, since neither was involved in Los Alamos, and the result is that two Academy Award-nominated actresses are little more than props – which makes Blunt’s nomination for Best Supporting Actress more than a little surprising.

The two best performances are, unsurprisingly, the two that earned Oscar nods – Murphy for Best Actor and Downey Jr. for Best Supporting Actor. Murphy has worked with Nolan before in Inception and Dunkirk, and he gives a superb performance here as the title character, depicting the scientist as a sort of aloof genius whose determination and focus allowed him to lead the project to completion, while also showing his confusion at how his actions affect people around him, including his wife and his mistress. Downey’s career resurgence has been fun to watch, although if you’re old enough to remember his earliest work as part of the so-called “Brat Pack,” you probably saw how talented he was; I remember his supporting performance in the 1995 adaptation of Richard III, which was the first serious role I’d seen of his, and how compelling he was in every scene, often overshadowing other more accomplished actors. Downey isn’t known for dialing it down, but that’s what he does here, to great effect, so that Strauss comes across as an intense, ruthless, yet very professional politician, someone who often acts in his own self-interest but never out of emotion. As much as the movie puts Oppenheimer at its center, Strauss has his own story arc within the movie where Oppenheimer is often just a bit player, giving Downey the chance to be the lead actor in this film-within-a-film. Two outstanding performances in a gripping, wide-reaching story would put just about any film near the top of my annual rankings.

Oppenheimer was nominated for 13 Oscars this year, and I’d guess it’s going to win a slew of them, including Best Picture, Best Actor (for Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (for Downey, Jr.), and Best Director, although I haven’t finished all of the nominees in any of those categories yet and can’t offer an opinion on whether it’s deserving. Of the films I’ve seen from 2023 so far, though, it is the best, just ahead of Past Lives, which is a tighter and far more affecting film, but without as much ambition or as wide a scope. It did not receive a nomination for Best Visual Effects, however, despite the stunning scene where the first atomic test takes place in Los Alamos; perhaps that’s not enough compared to the other nominees, none of which I’ve seen.

Sail.

Sail was one of the most unusual new games I played in 2023: a cooperative trick-taking game where you’re trying to jointly steer a ship around obstacles and sea monsters to reach the end of the path before you run out of turns or your ship takes too much damage. It’s a retheme of a Japanese game called Hameln Cave, published in a tiny box by the folks at Allplay, who specialize in publishing ‘big’ games in small boxes, including Pollen (a retheme of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai: the Card Game) and the underrated little dice-rolling game Sequioa.

Sail has a deck of cards in three suits where each number has a specific symbol on it, and the combination of symbols on the two cards played in each trick determines what happens on the map. You and your partner will each get a hand of cards, exchanging some before the first turn, and then you’ll play a series of tricks – without communicating with your partner – where you must follow suit if possible, which of course means trying to get rid of a suit and/or find a way to indicate what you have to your partner.

The map varies by game, and you can pick a scenario to suit your desired difficulty level, play through them in sequence as a campaign, or even design your own. Every map has obstacles in rocks and Kraken monsters, plus lines you must cross by the end of the Nth turn to stay in the game. You have a set number of turns to reach the finish line, the distance to which also varies by scenario. One major catch is that the spaces on the map are diamonds, so moving to an adjacent space isn’t the same as moving in a straight line, and you’ll have to try to tack back and forth to keep moving while also trying to avoid the islands and monsters. One great card combination lets you move straight to the diamond that only touches your current space at one point, but as you might imagine it’s hard to pull that off. If moving the ship would put the ship on an island or off the map, it doesn’t move at all, which results in a wasted turn.

The remaining combinations can run from the ‘not too bad’ to the ‘very bad,’ with many of them dealing damage to your ship. Cards numbered 1-3 have a Kraken symbol and when played with other cards numbered 1-3 or cards that just move your ship to an adjacent space, they damage your ship. The game begins with all cards numbered 1 or 2 in a separate Kraken deck, but those will enter the player deck any time you take damage from the Kraken. You might even take two damage if you both play a card numbered 1-3 in the same trick. You can deal damage to the Kraken, which allows you to take the lower card in the trick and discard it to the Kraken deck, improving your deck for the next round and also giving you more time, as you can lose the game when the Kraken deck is exhausted. If you both play cards with cannon symbols, you flip the next card in the deck and get something positive – moving the ship either to an adjacent space or forward, or discarding a low-numbered card to the Kraken deck.

Each round ends when one player wins their fourth trick, so you can extend rounds by trying to balance the number of tricks each player wins. When a round ends, you take damage based on where the Kraken meeple is on its board; this meeple moves up any time you take damage but the top card in the Kraken deck isn’t a numbered card but the Kraken card itself, after which you move that to the bottom of its deck and bump up the Kraken meeple so you take more damage after each round. If you ever take damage from the Kraken but there’s nothing else in its deck, you lose.

If you steer the ship on to the End Token on the map, you win immediately. As in most coop games, there are more ways to lose than to win: If you haven’t reached the End Token after 5 rounds, haven’t passed the checkpoints after rounds 2/4, exhaust the Kraken deck, or move the Kraken meeple to the final space, kindly labeled as “Dead.”

What really, really works about Sail is that it’s extremely tight – I don’t think this is a game you can ever win easily. I played this with my father, an experienced bridge player, and once we got the rhythm going, we did quite well … yet whenever we won a scenario, it was by the skin of our teeth. It made for an intense but fun gaming experience: there’s such satisfaction in pulling off the series of moves you need to win without being able to communicate. After a few rounds, we started to ‘read’ each other a bit more as well, so we could strategize without communicating, which I think is also key to this sort of game (The Mind would be the best-known example, I think).

You can buy it directly from Allplay for $1 cheaper than you’d pay on Amazon, including shipping, and you could check out Sequoia as well. I also just learned that they’re reprinting the Reiner Knizia classic Through the Desert, a top 100 game for me since I started making those lists, but which has gone out of print twice in the last decade or so. I own a copy of a prior printing but I’m excited that folks will be able to buy it later this year.

North Woods.

Daniel Mason’s North Woods is the story of a house. I mean, it’s the story of the people who live in it, and some who just pass through, but the only constant in this peculiar but beguiling book is the house, located on what becomes an apple orchard in western Massachusetts. The house becomes the site of a number of tragedies – there’s a lot of death in the book, some comic but others just sad – and some truly eccentric characters who remind us of the transience of life and the things we leave behind.

The house, described as lemon-yellow and assembled piecemeal over many years, first goes up in the 1760s and sees everyone from young lovers to Revolutionary soldiers to a woman kidnapped by Native Americans to an escaped slave and the slave-hunter trying to abduct her and more, although none leaves more of a mark than the Osgood family. Their patriarch discovers an apple there he calls the Wonder, becoming an evangelist of the strain and developing the giant orchard that envelops the property and that his spinster daughters will eventually make their livelihood – at least, until one of them finds a beau. Much of the action in the book is botanical, as apple seeds, acorns, beetles, and fungal spores also leave their mark on the house, its environs, and thus the people who inhabit it. Eventually, we enter the 20th century, with a woman whose son believes he can hear the voices of the dead people who previously lived in the house – which leads to his diagnosis with schizophrenia – and the house’s decline into ruin.

Mason challenges the reader twice over, once with the unusual structure and once with his use of the supernatural in a subtle but central way. The book’s many sections vary in length and style, with interstitials that come in the form of letters, pamphlets, a real estate listing, poems, and more digressions from the prose format. Some work – the real estate listing is one of the funnier bits, and it’s just a single page – but there’s a sense of Mason trying harder than he needs to in a book that is in and of itself a creative marvel. The poems especially do not work, not because they’re bad poems – I am not in a position to judge their merits – but because they add nothing to the novel as a whole. They take up space without advancing story or character, and unless I’m missing some great Parnassian achievement here, I’d have preferred he omit them entirely.

The supernatural elements are harder to understand, but also more essential to the novel. Without spoiling what those elements are, they appear slowly, without much in the way of warning or foreshadowing, building as the novel progresses until they are woven thoroughly into the fabric of each story. By the time we reach the final character to visit the house, it’s easy to see where that chapter will end, because each successive tale has leaned a little more on the supernatural elements to complete its narrative. North Woods could exist, and excel, without the interstitial bits and style variations, but it could not exist without the spirits. (As an aside, I did not catch that the twelve chapters were supposed to represent the twelve months of the year, later reading that in the NPR review of the book. It’s another clever trick that, in hindsight, was also quite effective because of its subtlety.)

That last character refers to the world as either “a tale of loss” or “a tale of change,” and North Woods does not seem to take sides in this debate. The characters themselves experience loss, sometimes plural, often unexpected and unfathomable. The house and the land persist, but their denizens change, as do the ways in which the humans use the building and the trees. And all of the death begets new life, even, in its way, the eventual death of the house by fire, which we know can regenerate the land (e.g., certain morel mushrooms fruit well after forest fires). Death is not final in Mason’s novel, which is obviously a spiritual view that readers may or may not endorse, but he uses this as a device to connect the dozen stories and characters, as one death often sparks the series of events that lead to the next character or chapter in the house itself. It’s an unusual novel, and a slow one to start, but Mason’s lithe prose and gift for characterization ultimately wins out, even with some distractions in his literary flourishes.

Next up: Bryan Stephenson’s Just Mercy, which my daughter had to read for school last year. (He’s a Delaware native.)

Babel.

R.F. Kuang won the most recent Nebula Award for Best Novel with her first novel for adults, Babel, a long and intense fantasy story that upends many of the conventions of the ‘youth goes to magic school’ subgenre while also attacking serious questions of colonialism and privilege. It’s dark and riveting, and perhaps its best feature is how unsentimental it is about its subject and characters.

The book’s full title is the unwieldy Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, which I think makes the book sound boring when it’s actually a thriller for the majority of its 500-odd pages. Set in the 1830s, it follows a Chinese orphan who is adopted by a strange English academic and brought to Oxford to study at its translation school, which is the most powerful institution in the country and perhaps the world. In this alternate history, translators can create powerful objects from silver by taking advantage of the meaning gaps between words in different languages that might have the same denotations but that have cultural or other contextual differences not captured by a word-four-word translation. These silver bars power much of the world at the time, but Oxford is their only producer, making England the world’s most powerful nation and allowing them to dictate the terms of trade with their partners … and to leave much of the non-European world in a state of underdevelopment because they refuse to share the technology. The orphan, who takes the English name Robin Swift, finds himself torn between the comfortable world of his academic setting and his own values, including his ties to China, which drive him to fight the ivory tower and try to bring silver-making to the broader world.

Kuang begins her novel with a familiar trope – the orphan is plucked from poverty by a mysterious (white) person who brings them to a school that reveals hitherto unknown talents and opens up a world of power and possibility to them. Robin is fluent in Mandarin and becomes so in English, while his professor-benefactor, who takes him in as a ward until he’s old enough for Oxford’s Linguistics Department, drills him in other languages to better prepare him for academe. Once there, Robin becomes fast friends with a few classmates and acclimates quickly to a life of privilege and sudden respect, as the linguistics tower is the jewel in the Oxonian crown, and those ticketed for its top floors – where the silver-making is done – are the Big Linguists On Campus. (I’m not making that other joke, sorry.) The plot begins to diverge from the archetype shortly after Robin matriculates, as an outsider attempts to recruit him to a shadowy, decentralized activist group that wants to pilfer silver bars from Oxford to share them with the developing world. Robin doesn’t choose his fate immediately, although he ultimately chooses – or is forced to – side with the rebels, opening up the second portion of the book, where Kuang continues to explore the same themes of exploitation and social justice, but shifts the style from Magic School Wunderkind to a spy thriller with tons of action and many, many surprising twists.

As a straight read, Babel is a smart and clever thrill ride up to the very last page. The gimmick around languages, using what gets lost in translation as the proxy for magic, is incredibly clever and a credit to Kuang’s intellect and her own linguistic prowess; it feels like the sort of idea you’d have if you’re fluent in several languages without much or any relationship and have tried to translate something but found the words lacking. That alone won’t power a book, but Robin is a superb protagonist, principled but cautious, anxious yet willing to make bold decisions, flawed but ultimately heroic in his own way. His friends are fun side characters, perhaps not as fleshed out as they could be other than the Indian-born Ramy, but this book is already long and giving any of them more time would probably just pad the length.  

This particular subgenre has many smart and entertaining books in it, but I can’t think of an other example that is this serious at its core. At heart, Babel is an angry book, based loosely on the leadup to the Opium Wars and the English crown’s exploitation of both its colonial empire and of China after it subjugated the latter by use of superior weaponry. It’s also a metaphor for the two centuries since then, where the West has seen enormous economic advancement, leading to longer life expectancies and better health outcomes, that it has not shared with the developing world. Some Asian countries – the so-called “Tigers” – have caught up, but did so by selling to the west and undercutting labor costs, while a few western financiers played God with their currencies and nearly killed their economies in the process. The same imperialist-capitalist philosophy that leads fictional England to keep silver-making to itself drives nations and drug manufacturers to charge market rents for treatments or cures for diseases that are devastating sub-Saharan Africa. Over 90% of the children with HIV and over 90% of the pregnant women with HIV in the world live in that region. People with HIV make up over 2% of the population of Africa as a whole. The virus is driving a co-epidemic with tuberculosis. The developed world has not stepped up with sufficient funds to stem the spread of the virus and reduce the death rate through antiretroviral drugs. Even ignoring the potential economic benefits of helping a continent with over a billion people fight an epidemic, isn’t there a moral imperative to help people not die of a disease that is 1) mostly preventable and 2) mostly treatable, just because they don’t have the money or even a way to get it?

Robin’s answer, ultimately, is yes. How he gets there, and what he and his friends end up doing to try to topple the tower, literally and figuratively, makes Babel one of the smartest and most thought-provoking page-turners I’ve read in years. I can even see why readers who’d read this first might have been disappointed by her next novel, Yellowface, which feels insubstantial by comparison. Its ideas are also important, but Babel creates a universe to call out universal ills, and forces you to reckon with its themes by plunging you into a story you won’t want to put down.

Next up: Currently reading Daniel Mason’s North Woods.

The Boy and the Heron.

I’m an avowed Hayao Miyazaki fan, having seen every film he’s directed or written other than his first, 1978’s The Castle of Cagliostro, some of them multiple times. My Neighbor Totoro is a favorite of all of my kids, and my daughter has a modest collection of Totoro-themed trinkets, while I’d rank Spirited Away among the best animated films I’ve ever seen for the complexity of its story and the way it blends fantasy and a very specific form of psychological horror. After 2013’s The Wind Rises, Miyazaki announced his retirement (not for the first time), and it seemed right as that was one of his weaker films. Maybe he’d just lost his fastball in his 70s.

He unretired at some point in the interim, spending seven years making his latest and likely final film, The Boy and the Heron. It certainly feels like a swan song, with a story that’s inspired by his own childhood and is told through his typical lens of fantasy, nature, and food, and ending on a beautiful note that seems to say goodbye to all that. It’s very Miyazaki, enough to satisfy his longtime fans, but takes a darker tone for much of the story than anything else he’s done in the last twenty years.

The Boy is Mahito Maki, a young child in Japan in World War II whose mother dies when the Tokyo hospital where she works burns down. Soon after, Mahito’s father marries his late wife’s sister, Notsuko, and they move to her estate in the countryside to escape the bombing. While there, Mahito encounters a talking, taunting heron, and wanders into an abandoned tower on the property with a haunted history. You can probably guess that we’re going in that tower, with the heron, and very strange things are going to happen there, which would be correct, as Notsuko – by then very pregnant – wanders into the forest as if in a trance, and Mahito goes on a quest to find her that takes him into another world, one populated by angry parakeets, starving pelicans, little white sprites called wara-wara, and the solution to more than just the mystery of Notsuko’s disappearance.

The Boy and the Heron is chock full of Miyazaki staples, starting with the unbelievable landscapes, lush with greens and vibrant floral tones – a reminder that hand-drawn animation is still capable of blowing us away by evoking the same sort of sensations we get from the ultra-realism of modern CGI. There are adorable tiny creatures made for merchandising in the adorable wara-wara, just like the soot sprites of Totoro. There’s food, a lot of it, which somehow looks delicious even when it doesn’t look very real. And there’s magic of the Miyazaki variety, like fire witches and talking herons (well, just one) and a hallway of doors that lead to different worlds. It’s not fan service, but it’s comfort food for fans all the same.

Where The Boy and the Heron succeeds is the way it layers a metaphorical version of Miyazaki’s life and career on top of the actual story of Mahito. Mothers in hospitals and cities under attack are common motifs in his films, both drawn from his own childhood, as is the distant relationship Mahito has with his own father – a pattern Miyazaki has said he’s repeated with his older son Goro, who has directed several Studio Ghibli films himself. A large portion of the plot concerns the ideas of world-building and the responsibilities of a creator (or, by extension, an artist), and when the movie ends by closing a literal door on one of those worlds, it feels like Miyazaki himself saying he’s done as a filmmaker. Mahito’s entire story arc from the moment he meets the heron – voiced in the English dub by an unrecognizable Robert Pattinson – seems to serve as a loosely figurative interpretation of Miyazaki’s career in animation, from his first encounters with the form through the fifteen years he worked before writing and directing his first feature to his reluctant decision(s) to walk away.

There’s a long period where Mahito is in the other world where the story loses some momentum, between his encounter with the wara-wara and his entry into the tower, and the film probably could have benefited from some editing here – not that anyone was likely to tell Miyazaki what to do with his own film. Some of this comes together in the ending, including the meaning of the tower, although Miyazaki also leaves some things unexplained, as is his wont; the conclusion turns out to be incredibly moving, especially through that lens of him using the hall of doors and Mahito’s choice to pass through one as his own way of saying to audiences that he’s done. It’s in the upper half of his films, and if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke or the sheer joy of Totoro or Kiki’s Delivery Service, it’s a wonderful and moving way to end a Hall of Fame career.

The Boy and the Heron just won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature, which has gone to the eventual winner of the Oscar in that category in 75% of the years since the Globes introduced their category, including the last three winners. The Oscar race feels like it’s coming down to this film, a hand-drawn marvel that’s the Academy’s final chance to honor a legend in the field, against Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, one of the most innovative animated films ever and the sequel to a past winner. I think the Spider-Verse movie is the more worthy winner, but The Boy and the Heron is more likely to win, and my sentimental side hopes it does. Miyazaki has only won this honor once, for Spirited Away, and only been nominated two other times, as the Academy passed over Ponyo and two films he wrote but didn’t direct, Arrietty and From Up on Poppy Hill. Giving The Boy and the Heron this award would be the sort of lifetime achievement honor the Academy seems to love, and the film itself would be the easy choice in most years anyway.

Rye Lane.

Most meet-cute films are little more than cute, and often they’re just cutesy to the point of being saccharine. They’re date movies, or “date movies,” assuming you care more about the mood you’re setting than the caliber of the movie itself. It’s just not a genre associated with quality, which is why Rye Lane, streaming now on Hulu, was such an incredible surprise: It’s a genuinely great movie on its own merits, even though you know from the start that the protagonists are going to get together, in part because they’re both so realistically drawn and well acted. (Thanks to Chris Crawford, who ranked this among his top 5 films of 2023, for telling me about it.)

As the film opens, we see Dom (David Jonsson) crying in a stall in the all-genders bathroom at an art exhibition, when Yas (Vivian Oparah) comes in to use the neighboring stall, leading to an awkward conversation where Dom reveals that his long-term girlfriend left him for his best mate. The two reconnect outside of the loo and end up walking through Rye Lane Market for a few hours, bonding over their recent breakups, eating at a taco stand for the film’s best cameo, encountering both of their exes, and engaging in more hijinks. The love connection hits a few snags, eventually breaking when it becomes clear that one of them lied to the other about something significant, setting up the finish where, of course, they get together for real.

The actual plot of Rye Lane follows the typical story arc of the meet-cute or any rom-com, naturally limiting its upside. For a formula movie to avoid being just formulaic, the characters have to be credible and the actors in the two lead roles have to excel. Jonsson and Oparah are both superb and have clear chemistry, with Oparah especially strong playing the harder-edged and slightly more complex character, as Yas has the longer back story and her character starts with the blank canvas. The script, by first-time film writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, keeps the two characters believable mostly by avoiding unnecessary details – they’re not idealized, they’re not living high on the hog, they don’t have ridiculous lives or impossibly perfect traits. If anything, they’re both appropriately screwed up given what’s come before.

And on top of that, Rye Lane is very, very funny. It’s a screwball comedy wrapped up in a date movie, calling back to classic comedies of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, throwing its two protagonists into a series of misadventures, some of which push the edges of credibility but all of which lead to hilarious results. The visit to Yas’s ex’s mums’ house, where the two women are having a cookout, is especially ridiculous and had me cringing in a good way from start to finish. The connecting thread is that one of them has a bad idea, and the other goes along with it (or is roped into it unwittingly), and then hijinks ensue. It’s hard to pull this off without turning the movie into a joke or just ending up with a bunch of unfunny situations. The script pushes the envelope without breaking it, and the two actors are so credible in their characters that the film never once goes off the rails.

A superb feature debut by director Raine Allen-Miller, Rye Lane really does the meet-cute as well as any recent movie I can remember. It’s a wonderful ride, even though you know the shape of the story arc, and where it ends is exactly right for its story and its characters. And in a year where best-of lists are dominated by some heavy dramas, Rye Lane is the perfect palate cleanser before your next three-hour watch.

The Holdovers.

Alexander Payne’s films often depict deeply flawed people in an empathetic way, almost challenging the viewer to root for them in spite of their awfulness – Miles Raymond in Sideways and Jim McAllister in Election come to mind. The Holdovers, Payne’s latest film and a return to form after Downsizing flopped, has a pair of these awful characters at the heart of its story, giving the viewer a window into each of them as they learn to develop empathy for the other – and for other people in general – that they’d previously lacked. (It’s streaming free on Peacock, or you can buy it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a brusque, old-school instructor of Ancient Civilizations at the Barton School, a tony boarding school in Massachusetts, loathed by students for his ungenerous grading and general classroom manner. The headmaster, angry with Paul over another matter, assigns him to be the one teacher who stays over the Christmas break with the “holdovers,” five students who can’t go home for the holidays for varying reasons. One of them, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), was supposed to join his mother and stepfather in St. Kitts, but gets a last-minute call that she’s going to St. Kitts alone with her husband on a delayed honeymoon, so Angus must stay on campus, and he’s not happy about it. It gets worse, as the other four boys get to head off on a ski trip, but Angus’s parents are unreachable (or just ignore the calls), so he can’t get permission to leave, stranding him with Paul, the head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and the janitor Danny (Naheem Garcia). Mary recently lost her son, a Barton alumnus, in Vietnam, as he couldn’t get a student deferment, with a stark contrast between his fate as a rare Black student at Barton and his many white classmates.

Paul and Mary don’t know each other very well despite both working at the school for what appears to have been about twenty years, and neither knows Angus at all beyond his time in Paul’s class. Once he’s the only student left, Angus starts to act up, with comical and serious consequences, which helps the two get to know each other beyond the classroom. There’s a holiday party thrown by another Barton staffer, a Christmas dinner with just the three of them, an unplanned field trip, a definitely unplanned trip to the hospital, and more seemingly minor events that allow David Hemingson’s script to reveal more layers to each of the characters.

The film takes place over the winter break of 1970-71, a time when men were men, by which I mean they weren’t supposed to talk about or acknowledge feelings. Paul and Angus are cut from that cloth, and just getting to the points where they do reveal an emotion or two, such as Angus’s comments at the Christmas dinner, is a huge challenge for both men; for Angus, as a teenager, it could be seen as a sign of weakness by his peers, while for Paul, the gruff exterior hides some inner disappointment that the film only hints at later on. Mary is more open with her feelings, although they come out a lot more at the holiday party when she’s had a few, and early in the film it’s clear that neither Angus nor Paul is comfortable with even her modest degree of openness. The parting shot of the two men is brilliantly awkward, and dead on for their two characters, especially in that time period.

Randolph seems to be the favorite right now for Best Supporting Actress, and while I’ve only seen one other potential nominee (America Ferrera, for Barbie), it is a tremendous performance in a somewhat limited role. Giamatti was somewhat infamously snubbed for Sideways, earning his one Oscar nomination a year later for Cinderella Man, and while I could see him landing another nod this year, I’m also a little curious if he can play a character who isn’t fundamentally an asshole. I could see The Holdovers getting both of those nominations as well as Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay (GoldDerby shows it as the favorite for the latter), but I’m not sure how much credit here should go to Payne as the director versus the other contributors. The script itself is smart and witty and a great example of showing people developing empathy in a way that also gets the audience to empathize with them. All three lead actors are excellent. I wouldn’t take anything away from Payne here, but it felt to me like the best thing he could do was stay out of the way.

It’s that empathy bit that makes The Holdovers a superlative film rather than just a great one. Getting viewers to side with characters who are unlikeable in tangible ways is a real challenge for writer and actor – not just rooting for them like some anti-hero, but to embrace them as three-dimensional characters who have serious flaws and may not even like themselves. All three actors meet this challenge, and the script puts them in the right situations for them to show the audience who and what they are. Trying to do more would have ruined the magic.

Past Lives.

Past Lives is the first feature from writer-director Celine Song, and became a surprise hit at the U.S. box office, taking in just over $10 million even though it has no stars in the cast and much of the film is in Korean. It’s small and intimate, with only three real characters, yet manages to explore the nature of love and identity as we follow two of those people from their childhood in South Korea to a meeting in New York 24 years later. It’s a wonderful film that barely strikes a single wrong note even as it moves through territory that naturally lends itself to sentiment and cliché. (You can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Na Young (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) are 12-year-old classmates and academic rivals when we first meet them, but just as they seem to be falling for each other, Nora’s family moves to Toronto, after which she takes on the name Nora Moon. Twelve years later, Hae Sung finds her via a page for her playwright/director father’s latest movie, and the two strike up a very intense relationship over Skype and messaging, one that seems to be headed for something more serious until one of them calls it off due to their careers and the physical distance between them. A dozen years after that, the two connect in person, but the window for them to have an actual romance has closed, and they both have to deal with the weight of their memories and the lost connection to each other.

The title of the film refers to a Korean concept, inyeon, where people are connected over their lives or even multiple lifetimes, to the point that fate or providence is pushing them together. Nora and Hae Sung spend significant time in the film debating whether they have inyeon and are actually meant to be together, although in the end it appears that they don’t, as one of them falls in love with someone else. It would be romantic if it were true, but even Past Lives doesn’t take it as fact and in many ways subverts the concept with what it does to its two protagonists.

Beyond the love story, however, there’s a powerful meditation here on national/ethnic identity and the difficulty of assimilation. Nora left Korea at 12, learning English shortly before their trip, and then emigrated a second time from Canada to the United States. She works diligently to fit into western culture, including taking on a “western” name that non-Koreans could more easily pronounce or remember, in a familiar look at the immigrant story where the younger generation becomes American or Canadian or European and loses some or all connection to their country of birth or their parents’. When Hae Sung appears the second time, by which point they’re 36, she’s moved on with her life enough that his visit throws off her equilibrium, and over several days she becomes more uncomfortable with her feelings and with this intrusion of her past life into her current one. At first, Nora’s the cool one of the two, as she’s married and looks at Hae Sung with some pity because he’s not and it’s clear that he hasn’t entirely moved on. The more they talk, and Hae Sung becomes more open about his feelings, the more it rattles her, dredging up something she’s tried to forget or bury, whether it’s him specifically or something broader about her past.

Lee is a revelation in Past Lives, carrying large portions of the film herself because her character is the conflicted one and we see more of her without Hae Sung than the reverse. I’d only seen her previously in some guest spots on the new Electric Company, but I can’t say I remember her appearances. So much of the communication between Nora and Hae Sung is nonverbal, and both Lee and Teo Yoo are superb at expressing their feelings through gesture or facial expression – the ambivalence Nora feels when Hae Sung visits, her anxiety when he and her husband Arthur (John Magaro) meet, the feeling of being stuck between two people who can’t communicate directly so she’s the translator despite her feelings for and about both men.

The script takes Nora’s perspective more than Hae Sung’s, giving her character more depth while leaving him a little harder to grasp, which would mirror the way she’d view him given the huge chunks of time between their real and virtual meetings. We see more of her life outside of their interactions with each other than we do of his, with Hae Sung’s scenes without Nora mostly times he’s out drinking with his buddies. The Best Actress field is incredibly crowded this year, so Lee may not end up in the final five, but it’s an outstanding performance without which the film wouldn’t be as effective or as affecting.

I’ve seen references to Past Lives as romantic, but I don’t think that’s the apposite word here – it’s about romance, but it’s far more realistic than romantic. A romance might have forced the two together in some unbelievable plot twist or sop to the audience. Such a conclusion would have done a real injustice to the characters and the story here of the sacrifices we make in life and the difficulties many people face when leaving one family, culture, or country for another. Instead, Song weaves a delicate tapestry around her two main characters, maintaining the credibility with the viewer so that we can spend time pondering the what-ifs of this pair, and the what-ifs in our own lives – the relationships, romantic or platonic, that never came to pass because life got in the way. It’s a simple, quiet marvel, and beautiful right through the characters’ anguish when they meet for the last time.