At the midway point of the year, the film critic discusses his top three films.
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00:00I'm Richard Brody, I'm a film critic at The New Yorker,
00:02and these are the best films of the first half of 2024.
00:09Jane Schoenbrun's second dramatic feature,
00:11I Saw the TV Glow, is two kinds of experience at once.
00:14Schoenbrun, who is a trans filmmaker,
00:17films the experience of dysphoria
00:19as a kind of general dysphoria,
00:21not specifically gender-oriented,
00:23but a discomfort in existing in the world.
00:26What if I really was someone else?
00:29Very far away on the other side of a television screen.
00:34It's set in an unnamed suburb.
00:36Starts out in 1996 when Owen, who's in seventh grade,
00:39is obsessed with a TV show called The Pink Opaque,
00:42something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
00:44about two teenage girls with superpowers who fight evil.
00:47He shares that obsession
00:48with a slightly older girl named Maddie.
00:51But there's an underlying question
00:52at the center of the film.
00:53Why this fandom for a TV show
00:56that's ultimately revealed to be fairly trivial?
00:58And that, too, is one of Schoenbrun's big ideas.
01:02The reason that these two gender-conflicted teens
01:04fixate on this TV show is that, in mass media,
01:07at the time, there was nothing else for them,
01:09and so they pick up on whatever they can get hold of.
01:12In a way, I Saw the TV Glow
01:14makes its very existence its subject.
01:19It's a hard title to remember,
01:20but an impossible movie to forget.
01:22The feeling that the time for doing something has passed.
01:25It's the first fiction feature
01:26by the Brooklyn-based filmmaker Joanna Arnau,
01:29who wrote it, directed it, and also stars in it.
01:32She plays Anne, a 30-something Brooklynite
01:35who desires a relationship based on BDSM.
01:40But she also wants a romantic relationship,
01:42and those two desires come into conflict.
01:44The movie is simultaneously very earnest
01:47about emotional and sexual matters,
01:49and yet wryly, delicately comedic.
01:52I like when you tell me what to do.
01:55I know that.
01:56What else?
01:59I don't know.
02:00Can you just tell me what you want me to do?
02:02I'm telling you what to do right now,
02:04and you're not doing it.
02:06What she wants from BDSM isn't so much pain as humiliation,
02:09which is to say a controlled version
02:11of what she's getting in an uncontrolled way
02:13in the rest of her life.
02:15At her office job, which is both numbing and oppressive,
02:18and even in her family life,
02:19where her parents, though loving,
02:21are also harshly and obliviously judgmental.
02:24Love, when Anne finds it, turns out to be humiliating, too.
02:28I worry about being alone.
02:34Oh.
02:38Sorry.
02:39Her writing is epigrammatically exquisite.
02:43Her performance is bold and uninhibited,
02:46yet choreographically precise.
02:48And as a director, she frames herself and the action
02:52at just the right distance and just the right angle
02:55to lend it an air of ambiguity, complexity,
02:58and almost kaleidoscopic emotionality.
03:01The Japanese director, Ryosuke Hamaguchi,
03:04is one of the living masters of the art of dialogue,
03:06as seen in his most famous film, Drive My Car,
03:09which won an Oscar two years ago.
03:11But in his new film, evil does not exist.
03:13Though the dialogue is terrific,
03:14he does something entirely new.
03:17The movie is set in a rural mountain village
03:19not far from Tokyo,
03:21where a man named Takumi lives with his young daughter.
03:24He works as a sort of factotum,
03:26sort of handyman who helps out
03:28the proprietors of a local restaurant.
03:30But there's trouble in paradise.
03:32An entertainment company from Tokyo
03:34wants to build a glamping lodge in the vicinity,
03:37which runs the risk of despoiling the environment
03:39and in particular, ruining the water supply for the town.
03:50But in this film,
03:51Hamaguchi does something that in his urban dramas,
03:54he hasn't done.
03:55He simply watches.
03:58He looks with fascination and admiration
04:02at the physical work that goes into making life
04:05in a village, not just possible, but beautiful.
04:08Though the movie takes a tense view
04:09of personal relationships
04:11and even has a dark side to it,
04:13Hamaguchi is still fascinated by the beauty of nature.
04:16Though the movie takes a tense view
04:17of personal relationships
04:19and even has a tragic dimension,
04:21it's nonetheless an exultant movie.
04:23Hamaguchi's contemplative ardor is in no way passive.
04:26On the contrary, there's something exemplary
04:28about the art of cinema in Evil Does Not Exist.
04:30It proves that the essence of the cinema
04:33isn't just to observe beauty, but to preserve it.