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Charlotte Wells, 2022 · 101 minutes · MUBI, Max

Charlotte Wells made Aftersun as her debut feature and made one of the most quietly devastating films in recent cinema. The premise is modest: a young woman looks back on a holiday she took with her father when she was eleven, trying to understand what she was too young to see at the time. The film exists in the gap between what the child perceived and what the adult now suspects, and it lives there with extraordinary restraint.

Paul Mescal plays the father, Calum, with the particular quality of someone performing ease — making things fun for his daughter while something underneath is not fine. This is difficult acting because it requires him to show two states simultaneously without tipping into either one. He does it. Frankie Corio, playing Sophie at eleven, is extraordinary — not in the way child actors are usually praised, meaning she seems natural and unaffected, but in the deeper way: she is present in every scene in a way that makes you feel the weight of what she does not understand.

Wells constructs the film from fragments — home video footage, memories, impressions — and gives you the pieces without telling you how to assemble them. The horror of the film, if horror is the right word, arrives slowly, and it arrives because you have been paying attention. Nothing is spelled out. Everything is there.

Watch it once and it will stay with you. Think about it afterward — the dancing scene at the end, in particular — and you will understand something about grief and memory and the limits of what we can know about the people we love.

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VERDICT — A debut of exceptional assurance. One of the best films of recent years, full stop.

POUR — Something from wherever you are. A local wine, something you have been meaning to open. This film deserves your good bottle.

MOOD — Attentive. Patient. Ready to feel something without knowing quite what.

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Plan this morning with a Date Night guide: The Sunday Late Breakfast.

Some films belong on the shelf. Find it on Blu-ray.

Joachim Trier, 2021 · 128 minutes · MUBI, Prime Video

The title is a provocation and the film earns it. Julie, the protagonist of Joachim Trier’s Oslo trilogy closer, is not actually the worst person in the world — she is something more uncomfortable: a recognizable person, mid-twenties, trying to figure out what she wants and finding that what she wants keeps changing. Renate Reinsve plays her with the specific quality of someone who is fully present and constantly elsewhere at the same time, and she won at Cannes for it, deservingly.

The film is structured in chapters, titled and distinct, which gives it the quality of a novel — or of a life examined in discrete moments rather than continuous narrative. We follow Julie across relationships, careers she picks up and puts down, and the ordinary accumulation of choices that eventually constitute a person. Trier does not judge any of it. Neither should you.

What the film captures, with unusual precision, is the particular ache of being uncertain about your own desires — of wanting something until you have it, and then wanting something else. This is treated not as a character flaw but as a condition, common and largely unexamined in cinema. Trier examines it carefully and without sentimentality.

The supporting performance by Anders Danielsen Lie, as Julie’s older partner Aksel, is some of the best work in the film. The scene in which they have the kind of conversation couples rarely manage in real life — honest and devastating and strangely kind — is worth the whole runtime.

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VERDICT — One of the most honest films about being young and uncertain in the last decade. It will find you wherever you are and say something true.

POUR — Something clean and slightly bitter. A Negroni, a dry vermouth on ice, or whatever feels right for the version of yourself you’re in tonight.

MOOD — Reflective. Generous toward yourself. Ready to be a little uncomfortable.

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Plan this evening with a Date Night guide: The Bookstore Date.

The kind of film that rewards a second viewing. Find it on Blu-ray.

Spike Jonze, 2013 · 126 minutes · Available on Max, Prime Video

The premise of Her — a lonely man falls in love with his operating system — sounds like satire, and the film earns the right not to be one. Spike Jonze is not interested in cautionary tale; he is interested in what love actually is, what it requires, what it does to the people inside it. The fact that one of the people is an AI named Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson with extraordinary warmth and precision, turns out to matter less than you expect.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore with a particular kind of careful interiority — a man who writes other people’s intimate letters for a living and cannot manage his own. He lives alone in a version of Los Angeles that is warm and slightly diffuse, all earth tones and soft edges, a city that has been designed to feel just comfortable enough. The production design is doing real emotional work: this future is not dystopian. It is merely lonely in a way that is already recognizable.

The relationship between Theodore and Samantha develops with genuine tenderness. Jonze does not wink at it. The film asks — seriously, without hedge — whether the origin of a feeling changes its validity, and it does not answer cleanly. The ending arrives as a kind of reckoning that the film has been building toward without you noticing.

Arcade Fire’s score and the original songs by Karen O are exactly right. The whole thing is exactly right. It is a film that will leave you thinking about what you need from the people you are close to, which is always worth the time.

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VERDICT — A film about loneliness that is genuinely warm. One of the best of its decade, and one of the few films about technology that is really about something else entirely.

POUR — Something light and slightly sweet. A mezcal with honey, or a glass of something sparkling.

MOOD — Tender. Reflective. Newly attentive to the people in the room.

Some films belong on the shelf. Find it on Blu-ray.

Luca Guadagnino, 2017 · 132 minutes · Available on Netflix, Prime Video

Luca Guadagnino’s film is a study in heat — literal and otherwise. It is set in a villa in northern Italy in the summer of 1983, and the summer is not incidental. Everything in the film — the light, the slowness, the way time stretches and then suddenly collapses — is an argument that desire is inseparable from its conditions. Remove the peach orchard, the afternoon swims, the long lunches that drift into dusk, and the film does not exist. This is a film about a specific summer, which is the only kind of summer that matters.

Timothée Chalamet plays Elio, seventeen, the precocious son of an academic, with the kind of performance that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable about how good it is. He is all nerve endings — reading, playing piano, writing in his journal, orbiting the older American graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) who arrives to assist his father. The film traces what develops between them over six weeks with a patience that is itself erotic: nothing is rushed, and every delay accumulates.

The film’s final scene — Chalamet alone by a fireplace as the credits roll, his face cycling through something like every emotion in sequence — is among the best pieces of acting in recent cinema. It asks nothing of the viewer except attention, and attention is exactly what it deserves.

Michael Stuhlbarg’s speech near the end, as Elio’s father, is the kind of scene that reveals itself differently every time you watch it. See the film once for the summer. See it again for that scene.

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VERDICT — A film about first love made with the generosity and clarity that the subject demands. Essential.

POUR — A cold glass of something Italian. A Pinot Grigio, a Soave, something that tastes like somewhere warm.

MOOD — Open. A little nostalgic. Ready to remember what it felt like before everything became complicated.

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Plan this evening with a Date Night guide: The Slow Dinner at Home.

The kind of film that rewards a second viewing. Find it on Blu-ray.

Wong Kar-wai, 2000 · 98 minutes · Available on Criterion Channel, Max

Wong Kar-wai made In the Mood for Love as a film about what does not happen. Two neighbors — a man and a woman, both with absent spouses who are having an affair with each other — discover the betrayal and spend the rest of the film in each other’s company, carefully, without crossing the line their spouses have already crossed. The film is about that restraint: what it costs, what it means, what it leaves behind.

Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung play the two leads with a quality that can only be described as exquisite withholding. Every scene between them is charged because the charge is never released. They share stairwells and noodle shops and borrowed time in rented rooms, and the camera — Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing shooting on lush, saturated film — circles them slowly, as if afraid to look directly. The cinematography is the film’s argument: some things can only be glimpsed sideways.

The score, built around Shigeru Umebayashi’s recurring waltz and Nat King Cole songs performed in Spanish, does something unusual: it makes you feel the passage of time as a kind of grief. You understand, watching this film, that the moment passing is also the moment being lost, and that the characters know this too, and that knowing it does not help.

Watch it in a room with good light and no distractions. It requires your full attention and rewards it completely. Afterward you will want to sit with it for a while before talking about anything at all.

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VERDICT — One of the most beautiful films ever made. A masterwork of mood, restraint, and longing that has no equal.

POUR — A glass of something red and slightly smoky. Something that asks to be held.

MOOD — Still. Attentive. Willing to feel something without needing it resolved.

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Plan this evening with a Date Night guide: The Wine Bar at Six.

Some films belong on the shelf. Find it on Blu-ray.

Jacques Demy, 1964 · 91 minutes · Available on Criterion Channel

Every line of dialogue in this film is sung. This is the premise, and it sounds like a conceit — the kind of thing that wears out its welcome in thirty minutes. It does not. By the time you reach the end of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, you will have entirely forgotten that speaking this way is unusual, and the final scene will arrive and take something from you.

Catherine Deneuve plays Geneviève, seventeen years old, working in her mother’s umbrella shop in a provincial French city, in love with a mechanic named Guy who is about to be conscripted. The story that follows is not what you expect from a film this beautiful. Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand, who wrote the score, understood that the most devastating thing you can do with music is use it to carry ordinary sadness — grocery lists and practicalities and the small negotiations of life — and let the beauty of the form do the emotional work that the characters cannot.

The film is shot in supersaturated color — aquamarine, coral, lemon yellow — in a way that reads as both dreamlike and intensely real. The color is not ironic. It is genuinely lovely. And that loveliness makes what happens to the people inside it hurt more.

Watch it in French with subtitles. The English dub robs it of everything. Have a second drink ready for the last ten minutes.

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VERDICT — The most beautiful film about loss you will see this season. The final scene is as good as cinema gets.

POUR — Champagne, obviously. Or sparkling water if you want to feel the full weight of it.

MOOD — Tender. Aching. Grateful to have watched it.

Worth owning, not just streaming. Find it on Blu-ray.

Céline Sciamma, 2019 · 121 minutes · Available on Criterion Channel, Mubi

Céline Sciamma’s film is built around a problem of looking. A painter is commissioned to produce a portrait of a young woman who refuses to sit — she will not be painted. So the painter must look without being seen looking, carry the image in her memory, and render it alone. This is, it turns out, an incredibly effective way to fall in love with someone, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire understands that completely.

Set in 18th-century Brittany, the film is rigorous in its period detail and radical in its emotional intelligence. Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel give performances of extraordinary precision — there is an entire relationship conducted in glances, in the way someone hands you a candle, in the decision to look back when you knew you should not. Sciamma directs as if she has been conserving this film her whole career.

The color palette is worth pausing on: grays and blues and the orange of firelight. The film takes place mostly indoors, in rooms that feel like held breath. When the fire scene comes, it arrives with the force of everything that has been restrained until that moment.

There is a late sequence involving Vivaldi that I am not going to describe. You will know it when it comes. Clear the next fifteen minutes after the film ends before you have to speak to anyone.

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VERDICT — A film about desire rendered entirely through restraint. One of the best of the decade, and it earns that without trying.

POUR — A Burgundy with some depth. Something that rewards patience.

MOOD — Precise. Quiet. Burning.

The kind of film that rewards a second viewing. Find it on Blu-ray.