Black Bag even begins with the dinner party from hell where the divinely played George and Kathryn invite all their coworkers in espionage, including a showy ensemble with Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke, and Marisa Abela, to dine. Unbeknownst to the guests is that George slipped some truth serum into the roast. It certainly makes for lively table conversation. It also acts as an opening salvo for a story about the risks that come with trust, loyalty, and knowing your partner in a setting where the stakes are no less high than treason and summary execution.
Writer-director Zach Cregger is adamant that his latest melding of horror and humor is not about anything specific. Or rather, it’s not about anything we can easily infer, as he so claimed in multiple interviews that acknowledged the personal tragedy which inspired the story but always included statements to the effect of “I have nothing to say with this movie.” That might be his public stance, but any piece of art that pertains the ghostly projection of an AR-17 floating above a classroom is screaming a whole hell of a lot in modern day America, whether the author cops to it or otherwise.
A return to high-concept mysteries that would sprinkle a dusting of the supernatural on top, Weapons takes fiendish pleasure in its centerpiece puzzle: Why would nearly an entire classroom of elementary schoolers rise from their childhood bedrooms and run into the dark at 2:17 a.m.? The answers discovered by their teacher (Julia Garner) and a grieving father (Josh Brolin) who would blame her for his son’s disappearance, are as satisfying as they are unexpectedly primal. This is achieved by casting an overwhelming pallor of ambiguity over the proceedings before a final, triumphant puncturing of that dark cloud. Still, the reason the film gnaws at the imagination is that like all catastrophes which invade our schools and communities, the consequences linger long after the danger’s abided. We suppose, apparently coincidentally, like the specter of an assault rifle over a once innocent but now desecrated school.
Over the last decade, Korean cinema has done a better job at pinpointing the rot of 21st century capitalism than almost all celluloid and digital Western fiction. So it tracks that when it came time to adapt Donald Westlake’s scathing satire of a deadly job market in The Ax (1997), the task would fall to Oldboy and Decision to Leave master Park Chan-wook. Relocating the tale to Seoul and in an even more ruthless era of automation and encroaching AI, No Other Choice offers a pitch black study of an upper-middle class maestro in paper production (Lee Byung-hun) who finds himself without a job and unable to claim the single musical chair left in his industry when three other out-of-work paper executives are all up for the same job. If only there was some way to… eliminate the competition?
Despite being an obvious student and product of Eastern cinema, Park has always had more than a touch of Hitchcock in his vision board, and he brings that out with a film that takes perverse pleasure in the haphazard homicidal daydreams that become action here. He outright makes a hero of a would-be killer that might seem nefarious if he wasn’t so endearingly clumsy in his desperation to keep the family home, pay for his daughter’s cello lessons, and buy back the family dogs that were given away. There is a wry physicality to Lee’s performance which never quite crosses over into comedy, but it tempers the darkness of the material nicely, especially when paired with Son Ye-jin as Lee’s devoted and inquisitive wife. Together they anchor an indictment of a system that pits the lower classes in a literal death struggle to be the lucky one who gets to keep their head above water. Then again, the movie is delightfully cynical about what happens to anyone who exposes their neck for the American suits on top.
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a far quieter film than the rest of the top five in this list, but it is no less a masterful achievement. An artful portrait of a family who can only communicate through art — and even then dysfunctionally — Sentimental Value draws with human lines when it introduces us to renowned Norwegian filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) and his adult daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). By virtue of the haunted family home they have kept in the family for nearly a century, one comes to intuit their malfunction goes back generations, as evidenced by the over-the-hill Gustav wanting to make a final film that is about his suicidal mother… but as played by his estranged daughter. It’s a role Nora also promptly declines, leading to the intrusion of a well-meaning Hollywood starlet (Elle Fanning) who speaks neither Norwegian or Swedish but will attempt all the same to inhabit the mother and child both for an old man.
A film keenly concerned with characters and acting choices, even more so than Trier and Reinsve’s essay about arrested Millennial development, The Worst Person in the World, Sentimental Value lives and dies by what is never said by Gustav and his daughters, lest one of them is behind a camera or the other in front of it. Lilleaas therefore has the most challenging role since she is the only one of the three who grew up not to be an artist. Instead Agnes is a historian, which gives her a sense of perspective on her family’s ennui that the others lack.
