Year in Review: The Most Memorable Theater Experiences of 2023

This won’t mean anything to you unless you’re on a certain part of the film-specific social media world but: The movies are back, baby! Less abstractly, the domestic box office rebounded to more than $9 billion in 2023. In 2022, the number was $7.4 billion. We have not returned to the pre-pandemic days ($11.4 billion in 2019), but Americans have shown a willingness to go back to the theater. And, though sequels and franchises continued to run rampant at the box office, smart, original adult fare snuck in there, too.

This was, of course, the year of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie led the U.S. box office with $636 million in receipts, becoming the first non-sequel (or franchise continuation) to top the charts since Finding Nemo in 2003. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer, a three-hour historical drama about the man who created the atomic bomb, finished fifth at the box office with $326 million. That film was likely aided by the memification of the Barbie double bill and the Christopher Nolan imprimatur, but these kinds of things don’t happen much anymore, so wind-assisted or not, it’s worth celebrating.

Generally, I don’t spend a lot of time talking about the box office on this site because I really don’t care about how much money lines the pockets of the wealthy (mostly) men who seemed determined to destroy the industry they lead. See the introduction to this series for my thoughts on that topic. But, if we accept the cinema as a communal experience, then the larger the community, the grander the experience. The world is better when more people go to the movies together.

In that spirit, I wanted to share some of my favorite theater-going experiences of 2023. Last year in this space, I lamented the closure of The Landmark and the Laemmle Playhouse. This year, I celebrate the reopening of the Eagle Theater and Vista Theatre and the conversion of the AMC Sunset into the Landmark Sunset, all of which factor into the great cinema experiences discussed below. We still don’t have the ArcLight, and if it ever comes back, it seems like it won’t be until 2025, but at least we can say that the bleeding stopped, or at least slowed, in 2023.

We’ll start in my neighborhood, a scant 10-minute walk from my front door, at the Highland Park Theater, itself the subject of closure rumors. As of now, it survives. In early March, I attended a late-night showing of Scream VI. Ever since a bootleg VHS copy of the director’s cut of the original fell into my too-young hands (a story I recounted here), this has been my favorite film franchise. Over 25 odd years, I have seen each new film in theaters. I have aged with these films and these characters.

So, you can imagine my joy at my 10:35 p.m. screening when a young couple walked in, sat a row in front of me on the other side of the aisle, and set their infant child, in its carrier, on the ground. I mean joy sincerely. The couple was respectful of the theater, the child was well behaved, and a good time was had by all. I could not help but notice that the father had set the child down facing away from the film, then went to the snack bar. Moments later, the mother looked down and adjusted the carrier to face the screen.

Don’t worry. The child was surely too young to comprehend the violence on screen and more than likely slept through the whole thing. My joy comes in knowing that the next generation is out there. Scream 2 came out in 1997. I was 9 years old. My dad took me on opening night – my first opening-night screening. This child won’t remember being at Scream VI with its parents, but they were there.

As of this writing, the Scream franchise is in shambles. The producers undervalued their star, Neve Campbell, and she sat out the sixth installment. They thought they had the next generation in line and were ready to leave the past in the past. But, life comes at you pretty fast. With preparations for part VII underway, they lost one star to a successful Netflix series and the other to hysteria over political comments she made (let the record show, she did nothing wrong). Then, the director left. It’s hard to make a movie without stars or a director. Maybe, they will. Maybe, it will be good. But, maybe the luster is gone.

In May, I made my first visit to the Academy Museum theater. Why it took me so long, I don’t know. The film I chose, though, could not have been a better introduction, and the Museum could not have been a better showcase for the high camp of Prince’s Purple Rain. The Academy theater has the best sound system I have ever heard, and if you are in the Los Angeles area, you owe it to yourself to make the pilgrimage. A proud member of the museum, I know I’ll be going back for years to come.

Come July, the world was ready for Barbenheimer. It hit with a force not even the most optimistic projections could have imagined. Then, it didn’t stop hitting. Barbie became one of three movies to top the box office for at least four straight weeks in 2023, joining Avatar: The Way of Water and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It stayed in the top 5 for 10 straight weeks before having its theater count sliced to make way for the openings of the new Paw Patrol movie, Saw X, and The Creator.

Barbie’s opening weekend accounts for the highest-grossing single weekend of a comedy in history. Its second weekend is second place on that list. As of the end of 2023, it stands as the 11th biggest movie in the history of the U.S. and the 14th biggest movie ever worldwide. It is, of course, the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a woman. Gerwig’s accomplishment truly boggles the mind. This is all made sweeter, of course, by the brilliance of the film itself, a whip-smart, uproariously funny, subversive parable that deserves every penny of its success.

Right there alongside it the whole way was Oppenheimer, a grand cinematic achievement of a different sort. Boxed out of the top spot by Barbie, Nolan’s film set the record for the highest-grossing film never to hit No. 1, breaking a mark previously held by such cultural phenomena as Beauty and the Beast and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The film also had its own 10-week run inside the top 10. Whatever air Barbie had not sucked out of the room, Oppenheimer breathed for its own. There was nothing else this summer.

I caught a morning screening of Oppenheimer the Saturday it opened. The theater was mostly full, and the lobby was as pink as you might imagine. I held off until the Monday after opening weekend to see Barbie on the AMC Burbank’s magnificent Dolby screen. It felt like being part of a cultural movement, similar to when I attended the opening night midnight screenings of The Dark Knight and the original Avatar. Except, this was a Monday evening, yet the crowd was just as lively and invested. When I talk about shared experiences, this is what I mean.

The second time I saw Oppenheimer was about a month into its run, feeling the need to see it in Nolan’s beloved IMAX format. I attended the TCL Chinese IMAX in the heart of Hollywood, never an easy place to get to but all the more rewarding for it. I have my problems with the execution of the storytelling and characterizations in that film, but on that giant screen, it is an undeniable accomplishment. So big and bold and beguiling.

Two months later, I was back at the Chinese for AFI Fest, which I attended for the first time last year. Gerwig, the woman of the hour for her massive artistic and financial success, had been named the guest artistic director of the festival, offering her the opportunity to program a series of films she would introduce. I knew I must go to at least one of these screenings, and I chose the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death.

The film remains gorgeous, and Gerwig’s intelligent, impassioned introduction shone new light on an old classic. I won’t lie. She brought me to tears. Something about hearing a brilliant artist talk about something she cares about, it just gets me. Just like it got me the last time I saw this film, when Martin Scorsese screened it at the Lincoln Center in New York. It was impossible not to think of Scorsese discussing the film that night as I watched Gerwig deliver her own thoughts. Both are special artists, possessed of uniquely artistic souls. On this night of celebrating a classic, I knew the future, too, would be bright.

June 2023 brought the reopening of Vidiots, a long-beloved video rental store that had closed down a few years before. Lucky me, it reopened in my neighborhood. Of course, I have been a frequent customer. Ask me to see my membership card sometime. The new Vidiots space is attached to the old Eagle Theater, which had long fallen into disuse. 

The team at Vidiots did a beautiful job renovating the theater and the programming has been second to none. I finally had a chance to go in December for a screening of American Fiction, followed by a Q&A with writer-director Cord Jefferson and composer Laura Karpman. It was a full house, as most Vidiots screenings have been. I look forward to attending more. And, failing that, you can probably find me among the racks of DVDs most weekends.

Speaking of the return of classic LA theaters, the Vista Theatre, now owned by Quentin Tarantino, reopened its doors in November. One of the last films I saw at the cinema prior to the pandemic was a screening of Titanic at the Vista. All theaters closed shortly thereafter, and it took the Vista a little longer to return. But, it has, in all its glory, returned, as beautiful as ever. I saw Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest there, a fittingly haunting film for that grand old place.

Finally, I will close out with a film I saw at the above-mentioned Landmark Sunset, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. I will not dive too deeply on the film now since you will read more about it in future installments of this series. Andrew Scott, Claire Foy, and Jamie Bell, three of the film’s four stars, were in attendance for one of the most insightful, delicate, and wonderful Q&As I have ever been privileged to witness. 

Whether it was Scott talking about the emotional resonance of the story or Bell reflecting on his journey with his own family, the discussion was heartfelt and probing. It shared this in common with the film that preceded it, a screening I would wager drew more audience tears than any I have ever seen. I would never use tears to measure the quality of a film, but as a measure of the quality of the shared experience, they are perhaps second only to laughter.

I look forward to making 2024 another glorious year at the cinema and can only hope that the experiences I have over the next 12 months can live up to those of the past 12. As the world largely continues apace on its path of destruction and doom, within the four walls of the cinema, at least, I remain ever the optimist.

Check back next time for Part III of Last Cinema Standing’s Year in Review series as we take a look back at some of the best performances of the year.

Last Cinema Standing’s 2023 Year in Review

There is no way to write about the year in film that was 2023 without writing about the strikes that shut down Hollywood for months. For the entertainment industry, there was no bigger story over the past year. The Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild took to the picket lines to insist the future of the industry look better than the present and recent past. They made great gains, but only time will tell if the film world can avoid the fate of so many other industries corrupted by the promises of big tech and bigger profits.

The unions sought important concessions in specific areas such as the regulation of artificial intelligence and the establishment of a fairer and more equitable streaming model. These were absolute must-haves if the film industry is to be sustainable moving deeper into the 21st century. However, the labor strife – the blame for which lies entirely at the doorstep of the studios – is emblematic of a larger rot at the core of Hollywood, itself a bellwether for the crumbling infrastructure of any number of industries.

That rot cannot be easily summarized, but if asked to pinpoint an origin, in a word, I would say “consolidation.” Too much power, influence, and money rests in the hands of too few. It has always been this way, but it feels as though we are at a tipping point, after which we will tumble inexorably into the gaping maw of a beast we have fought but could not slay.

Just last week, the terrible news came that the heads of Max and Paramount+ met to discuss a potential merger. Much will have to happen for that to take place, but let there be no mistake: This is a disaster in the making, and it is happening faster than we can possibly comprehend. To wit, if I had written that same sentence a mere five years ago, it would have been meaningless. The Max brand did not exist. Paramount+ was but a faint glimmer on the horizon. Yet here we are, in a world where each controls its own vast piece of the very history of film.

Add in Disney, which controls the other biggest portion of our shared cultural heritage, and you have the three companies that could destroy the past, present, and future of the movie industry while writing it off as little more than a tax deduction. If this sounds hyperbolic, ask any of the hundreds of people who worked on the Batgirl movie what they think. If a high-profile comic book movie can be the victim of a tax scam – seriously, it’s straight out of The Producers – then it can happen to anyone at any time.

Coyote vs. Acme, another completed film nearly killed for the writedown, was saved only by the fury and anger of a populace sick of seeing its culture devalued by the cultureless heads of state at these companies. But, fury and anger can only burn so bright for so long. If the price of preserving the future of the artform is eternal vigilance, I am not certain our collective vigilance can last an eternity.

Still, that is what we do here at Last Cinema Standing. We are devoted to the art, to the artists, and to all who stand with them. At the end of the day, all we have is each other. In the dark of the theater, after the curtain has gone up but before the screen has begun to flicker, we sit together in silence, sharing one hope, one mission, one love: the cinema.

It was not my intent to begin the Year in Review – ostensibly, a celebration of a year in a cinema – on such a down note, but it would be a dereliction of duty not to reckon with an industry on the brink, staring down an uncertain future. Beyond that, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the film industry and its problems are but one small piece of a world beset by war, genocide, inequality, and instability. 

It was a devastating year for the world and its peoples. Things are tough out there, and they are not getting better, though plenty are working toward that goal. I have faced a number of personal challenges that pale in comparison to the true problems we all face but which have made life that much more difficult for me anyway. So, what do I do? I do what I have always done and what I will continue to do as long as the space exists. I go to the movies. I celebrate the art I love. And, I share it with the people who care, like you. Let’s try to find some joy together as we look back at the year in cinema that was 2023.

Check back next time for Part II of Last Cinema Standing’s Year in Review series as we take a look back at some of the most memorable movie-going experiences of the year.

New movie review: The Killer

Michael Fassbender, in The Killer

It would be a lot easier to be a big fan of the collected works of David Fincher. There is nothing controversial in proclaiming The Social Network one of the best films of the 2010s. No one bats an eye if you observe that Zodiac is a top-shelf crime procedural. There is, of course, the cult of Fight Club. The director is famed for his numerous takes, and over the years, his dedication to his process has become its own sort of mythology. I’m very happy for everyone, but it’s also okay to want more.

Speaking of wanting more, enter: The Killer. Fincher’s latest is a sleek little thriller that sure seems to be a lot of fun. After all, who doesn’t want to watch a globetrotting assassin story with Michael Fassbender at the center? Insert your Assassin’s Creed jokes here. The performance is great. The pictures are pretty. There is, however, an emptiness at the film’s core different from that intended by Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker.

The film is nihilistic to a fault, which in and of itself feels a tad “been there, done that” from the guys who made Se7en. But, at the end, this was not the emptiness I felt. Rather, I sensed a thematic void. The movie spends a lot of words – a lot of words; truly, Fassbender’s Killer is almost shockingly loquacious – saying virtually nothing at all. Its defenders would have you believe this is a feature, not a bug, but I’m not buying it.

I have heard the lead character is intentionally dull, that the point is the dullness. This would hold water if not for the fact that when push comes to shove, the unnamed killer pulls out enough Jason Bourne- and John Wick-style tricks to seem sufficiently badass for a college dorm room poster. Indeed, the image of Fassbender pointing his gun directly at you will make a nice companion piece to that Tyler Durden poster your freshman year roommate definitely had.

There is no point in penalizing a filmmaker for an audience misunderstanding his work. It is not Fincher’s fault that Project Mayhem now carries a lot of Proud Boy baggage for those who lack a sense of irony or self-awareness. Still, the director seems to have ascended in the culture to that rarified air where his weak spots are declared intentional satire, and detractors are accused of not getting the joke. Make no mistake, there are jokes, and I get them. It’s just that no amount of humor can cover for what’s lacking underneath.

For instance, it’s very funny that we hear the Killer repeatedly recite a set of rules for pulling off an assassination, then proceed to break every one of these rules and never pull off a successful assassination. But, that’s it. That’s the joke. It doesn’t mean anything that he tells us, in that incessant voiceover, he is one of the best assassins in the world, then proceeds to fail at the one thing at which he’s supposed to be an expert. At best, it’s a weak joke, and at worst, it’s a story flaw.

It gets worse the deeper you dig – and from here on out, spoilers if you intend to watch The Killer – so let’s dig. After the Killer botches the opening assassination, he is targeted for elimination by some other hired guns. Those hired guns show up at his house in the Dominican Republic and badly injure – but don’t kill; I guess they’re not very good either, despite us being told they are – the Killer’s girlfriend. 

We will never learn much about this girlfriend. Her name is Magdala, and she is played by Sophie Charlotte, who is given nothing to do. She’s just a function of the plot, a reason for Fassbender’s assassin to go on, what Tarantino might call, a “roaring rampage of revenge.” Ah, but therein lies the rub. See, one of those rules he lives by is to “fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.” He will spend the rest of the film working pro bono. Again, funny, but empty.

Finally, there is the movie’s most curious choice, one I have not been able to stop thinking about and pondering, ‘Why?’ The Killer does, in fact, kill a lot of people, and every single one of them is a woman or person of color. He is hired by a white, male billionaire to kill another white, male presumably billionaire, neither of whom ends up dead. So, where does that leave us? I see two options.

One, it’s a mistake of casting. The Lawyer (Charles Parnell) doesn’t have to be black. The Expert (Tilda Swinton; we’ll come back to her) doesn’t have to be a woman. The Brute (played by Sala Baker, who is Kiwi) does not have to be ambiguously non-white. Maybe it just happened to work out that way. But, I don’t think so. The famously meticulous Fincher doesn’t leave anything to chance.

This leaves option 2: It’s intentional and meant as commentary. I’ll take a stab at it: When the elite clash, marginalized people suffer. Fine. It is perhaps marginally subtler than Fight Club in its messaging, but there is no more meat on the bone. The Killer represents whatever function of capitalism you wish to rage against, but he’s still fun. He’s still the POV character, and Fincher and Walker position him as the person we’re meant to root for, without reservation.

It is the Tyler Durden problem once more. Fincher, a consummate stylist, simply can’t make the character anything less than cool. With his keto diet, Smiths playlist, and eighth-grade nihilism, he certainly seems like someone who would listen to Joe Rogan. This is a person I know for a fact Fincher hates, but the script and filmmaking lack the restraint of style to make the critique stick.

A quick word on the performances: I will highlight two in particular, though everyone else does lovely work. Fassbender is in nearly every frame of this thing, and he is magnificent, reminding us why we loved him in the first place. Coming off a rough stretch (including The Snowman, X-Men: Apocalypse, Assassin’s Creed, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix, all reviled) and time away from acting to raise a family and race cars, this will be seen as a huge win for the actor. Warmly received and popular on streaming, if not at the box office, we can say that Fassbender is back, and hopefully, he gets more chances to do his thing.

Swinton, meanwhile, anchors the film’s finest stretch. As one of the assassins hired to kill the Killer, she is sitting down to a quiet meal alone in a fine-dining establishment when the Killer takes a seat across from her (along came a spider who sat down beside her). The dialogue is no great shakes, but Swinton and Fassbender sell the hell out of it. And for once, Fincher lets the actors lead, setting his camera down and just watching these two great performers work together. I could have watched 90 minutes of just this scene, but alas, there was more to be done, none of it equalling these heights.

Ultimately, maybe I’m not criticizing the movie Fincher made so much as the movie people will see. But, you would think the guy who made Fight Club would have learned to be a little more careful with his aim. As the Killer would know, the ricochet can be brutal.

New movie review: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

Albert Brooks (left) and Rob Reiner, in Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

“You think I see two roads.” – Albert Brooks, in Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

Albert Brooks has been with me my whole life. I can’t say what the first thing I saw him in would have been, but I know it was early. It could have been The Simpsons, where he made his first guest appearance in 1990. Maybe it was The Scout, a 1994 baseball movie that would have been on the shelf at the video rental store at the exact moment in my life that I was watching every baseball movie in existence. The true beginning doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s been there.

Rob Reiner’s new film, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, is a documentary about Brooks, yes, but it’s also a chronicle of all the ways he’s been there and all the people he inspired along the way. Reiner, who has been best friends with Brooks since they were in high school together, takes us through every stage of Brooks’ amazing career.

We see the early variety and talk show appearances, which presage what we would now call the alt-comedy movement. We see the early short films he made for Saturday Night Live, a tradition that continues on the show to this day. There is a brief standup career, which serves as proof that a mind like Brooks’ cannot be confined to the stage. No, this act must be presented before the largest audience possible, which means TV and, of course, the movies.

The movies. The first Brooks-directed film I saw was Defending Your Life, a staple of TBS in the late ‘90s. About a man who arrives in Judgment City, the way station between life and the afterlife, the premise held much appeal for a kid who was scared of dying. We don’t know where those trams are going at the end of the movie, but they must be headed somewhere, and anywhere would be better than the void. It’s a wonderful fantasy.

Brooks tells Reiner that Meryl Streep approached him at a party and (maybe) jokingly asked if there was a role in the movie for her. He demurred, then realized, ‘Well, yeah, of course there’s a part for Meryl Streep.’ She is, naturally, excellent in the film.

Reiner’s documentary is full of these kinds of Hollywood stories and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Much of the film is told by Brooks to Reiner as they sit at a restaurant booth together, á la My Dinner with Andre. There are clips from just about everything Brooks has been a major part of, and there are interviews with everyone from David Letterman to Neil DeGrasse Tyson to Steven Spielberg. It’s a tremendous boon to the film that Reiner can call upon his famous friends, but the stories make it clear that for most of the interviewees, the privilege is theirs to be able to honor Brooks in this way.

Along with Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, Albert Brooks absolutely deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best comedic filmmakers of the 1970s and ‘80s. Allen had the accolades and the prodigious work ethic, while Mel Brooks had the bigger-than-life spoofs and outrageous gags. Albert Brooks instead flew under the radar, working rarely and often with little help from the studios. A number of the doc’s best stories involve Brooks getting studio notes, then ignoring them to his films’ great benefit.

So, Brooks has never won an Academy Award nor had a particularly big box office hit. He is what we would refer to as a “filmmaker’s filmmaker.” Other artists love him because they get it. Brooks is simply always ahead of the curve. With hindsight, though, it seems apparent that Brooks’ first three films – Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), and Lost in America (1985) – serve as the sharpest critique of yuppie culture that we have. Each remains relevant today, and in many ways, they grow more relevant every day.

Watching these early films makes you feel like you are in on a secret, and no matter when you discover them, you feel that Brooks is speaking directly to you about the world you occupy. Twenty-one years before Survivor landed and changed the television landscape, there was Real Life, a perfect distillation of what reality TV would become. Give the two leads in Modern Romance a couple iPhones and it becomes virtually indistinguishable from dating in the 2020s.

Lost in America was explicitly about the post-Vietnam generation of yuppies who were too busy consuming to concern themselves with the bigger questions. But, release it today and see what millennial doesn’t identify with the desire to chuck it all and start over, while feeling trapped by the relentless grind of life. There is no generational divide when it comes to middle-class, middle-aged ennui.

Ahead of his time at every turn, Brooks is very obviously a genius, but he is also a comedic genius, and one thing I am underselling is just how damn funny this movie is. Whether it’s your first time seeing the ventriloquist act or the 50th, it remains riotously funny. Even today, the 76-year-old Brooks, né Albert Einstein, is as quick-witted as ever, cracking up Reiner at every opportunity.

There are brief sections, as well, on an acting career that features pitch-perfect supporting turns in everything from Taxi Driver to Drive to his Oscar-nominated performance in Broadcast News. Obviously, he is a top-tier guest star on The Simpsons, serving as the best part of one of the single greatest episodes of perhaps the greatest television show ever made (Hank Scorpio, “You Only Move Twice”; enjoy).

For me, though, it all comes back to the movies and wishing we got more than just the seven features written and directed by Brooks, including just one this century. That would be 2005’s Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, another biting satire about looking for connection in an increasingly disconnected world. Of course that film would face difficulties, coming as it did in the midst of the “War on Terror,” and Brooks found himself at odds with the studio again.

In the closing moments of the documentary, Brooks says to Reiner:

“I had a very famous agent, and he said to me, ‘I don’t know why you always take the hard road.’ And, my answer was, ‘You think I see two roads, and I don’t. If there was an easy road, I’d have a house there.’ I said, ‘What do you think? I get up. I can’t wait for the goddamn trouble I’m gonna get into.’ I said, ‘... I see one road.’”

This hit me hard. I’m no longer a kid, afraid of death. I can accept the void. At 35, if I’m very lucky, maybe I have a little more life in front of me than behind me, but there’s only one road, and it only goes one direction. That’s true for all of us, and all we can do is the best we can. And, hopefully, if there is a Judgment City out there, our best is enough.

New movie review: Anatomy of a Fall

The first thing we see is a tennis ball haphazardly tumbling down the stairs. We never see what caused it to tumble, who might have thrown it, dropped it, or perhaps accidentally knocked it. We accept the mystery because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter. Anatomy of a Fall will ask us to accept the mystery many more times over the course of its story, and we will learn bitterly that some mysteries are easier to accept than others.

Director Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning drama forces us to confront the way our culture has turned murder into a spectator sport by way of true crime podcasts, sensationalized media, and our own need for tidy endings and easy answers. It is a brilliant piece of work that instantly joins the pantheon of that ever-vaunted genre: the legal thriller.

And yet, it stands above such genre trappings. Triet employs a sense of style rare among courtroom dramas, and even the best American legal thrillers can tend toward formula. Anatomy of a Fall is anything but formulaic. Yes, it helps that to outsiders, such as myself, the French trial process will seem downright bizarre, but the film’s specialness goes beyond any cultural oddities. Its genius lies in the multitude of small, human interactions it gets right, in its deft handling of the subjective and objective points of view, and in the wonderful performances Triet gets from her actors.

Chief among these, of course, is German star Sandra Hüller, whom you may recognize from the international breakout hit Toni Erdmann or 2021’s lovely I’m Your Man. Here, Hüller is given the unenviable task of playing a woman so convinced of her own righteousness that she can seem aloof or unfeeling. In her most private moments, however, we can see that she is anything but. Rather, she simply seems tired of participating in the games so many others are committed to playing. Her Sandra wants what she wants, and right or not, she is willing to take it.

In a subtle bit of foreshadowing, we hear Sandra before we see her. Over images of that falling tennis ball we mentioned, we hear Sandra talking to a student who hopes to base her thesis at least in part on Sandra’s work. Sandra is an author who has based much of her fiction on circumstances from her own life, as many authors do, but she comes off as strangely unaware of the many parallels that exist. 

Their conversation, which is being recorded for the student’s notes, can be read two ways, and Hüller plays that space between perfectly. On the one hand, Sandra is a German woman who has moved to her French husband’s small hometown, and with few, if any, friends, she could be seeking comfort in a genuine human connection. On the other hand, as she drinks what is not her first glass of wine this afternoon, the bi-sexual Sandra may be trying to seduce the student, literally right under the nose of her husband, who is working upstairs.

Friendship or seduction? It could be either, and this is the first time but not the last that we are asked to live in the mystery. This same tension underlies everything that follows, emphasizing just how ephemeral the idea of objective truth really is.

Triet drives this point home in the film’s standout scene, one of the best scenes in any movie this year. Sandra is on trial, accused of murdering her husband, Samuel (a superb Samuel Theis), and the prosecution reveals it has a secret recording of a fight between the couple that occurred the day before Samuel’s death. The fight takes place in English, so the members of the court are provided a French transcript so that they may follow along with the recording.

For the first time in the film, we get a true flashback. We finally get to meet Samuel, who has been a ghost haunting the film up until this point. We see the husband and wife argue. It starts off small, turns petty, then explodes, as arguments between long-term couples with simmering resentments are wont to do. 

From a filmmaking standpoint, it is a bravura sequence, with Hüller and Theis delivering wonderfully lived-in performances, convincing as two exhausted people who have been through this before, too many times. The writing is a masterstroke of observation, exemplifying the ways small grievances fester and turn toxic, poisoning a relationship. In this one scene, we learn everything we could ever need to know about who these people were, who they are, and how they got this way.

It is absolutely devastating to witness these two people verbally tear each other to shreds. Then, at the peak of the emotional tension, just as it is about to boil over into physical violence, Triet cuts back to the courtroom. On the recording playing for the jury, we hear glass break, a slap, more breaking glass and possibly dishes, and more physical violence.

The director does not cut away here to shield us from the brutality that is evident. The film is unsparing in what it chooses to show us. Rather, once the confrontation turns physical, it exits the world of objective truth and becomes something subjective. The transcript, the recorded words, this is all that can be known for sure, so we are allowed to see it. What happens outside of that must be interpreted, guessed at. Sandra provides an explanation, but it is only her side. We are not allowed to see it because that would be the film showing us something that cannot be known.

The argument sequence is one of those rare, magical moments in cinema when everything – the writing, the themes, the performances, the filmmaking – comes together at once to crystallize whatever the filmmaker is trying to say. Every single person I have spoken to about the film has mentioned this scene. It has a way of sticking with you long after you leave the theater. You feel compelled to play it back in your mind, thinking through the twists and turns, looking for some clue that explains it all. I’ll save you the time: No such clue exists.

This is Triet’s and co-writer Arthur Harari’s final trick. The media are filled with lurid true-crime tales and murder-of-the-week stories that teach us to look for the signs, to be junior detectives, parsing every detail for information. Generally, at the end of these stories, the clues add up, the murderer is caught, and we are satisfied that wrongs have been righted and justice prevails. Anatomy of a Fall exposes these stories for what they are: wish fulfillment. Life is so often messier, and Triet and Harari understand this.

Sandra’s attorney has argued that Samuel killed himself, though Sandra herself doubts this theory. At one point, a TV commentator says plainly that a famous writer murdering her husband is a lot more interesting than a sad teacher killing himself. During the trial sequences, Triet often cuts to the gallery, filled with spectators who have no skin in the game but their own fascination with a dead man and an accused woman. They are invested in a story of a murder, not a story of facts and truth.

Among these spectators sits Daniel, Sandra and Samuel’s preteen son. Played by Milo Machado-Graner, in one of the greatest child actor performances you will ever see, Daniel is the collateral damage of a marriage turned sour, a culture turned cold. The final half-hour turns on what Daniel may or may not remember and what he chooses to do with that memory. His process is gut wrenching to witness, and we know that no matter what choice he makes, he will never be the same.

At the end of the day, when we cannot know the truth, all we are left with is a choice about what to think and whom to believe. In general, movies are a safe space because filmmakers are omnipotent. Even the best, most subtle films offer us objective stories wherein we can feel secure because we will be told what is real and what to feel. Anatomy of a Fall is anything but a safe movie, and therein lies its power.