The New YorkerModify

It’s a credit to Louise Bourgeois that her art can still surprise. For much of her career, the French-born, New York-based artist showed only sporadically—until the Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective, in 1982, when she was seventy. After that, and especially since her death, in 2010, Bourgeois has become a household name, and her art a familiar presence. Yet even acolytes of her psychologically freighted sculptures, drawings, and prints may find new revelation in “Gathering Wool,” an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth (through April 18) focussed on her late abstractions.

Installation view of “Gathering Wool,” from 1990.

Art work by Louise Bourgeois / © the Easton Foundation / VAGA / ARS / Courtesy Hauser & Wirth; Photograph by Thomas Barratt

The first room provides the show’s aesthetic apex. It’s dominated by the huge installation “Twosome” (1991), in which a black tank hums while slowly moving in and out of a larger one, with a flashing red light inside. A nearby screen plays a clip, from a 1978 performance, of Suzan Cooper strutting among Bourgeois’s sculptures and gutturally singing a song about being abandoned. The themes here are classically Bourgeoisian—human interdependence and the difficulty of uncoupling—but the contrast of austere kineticism with raw emotion is unusual and enthralling.

The exhibition proceeds more typically from there, with a series of evocative pieces on the darkened ground floor, including the titular installation, from 1990: seven oversized wooden balls that seem to be gathered in conversation before a metal screen. Upstairs, in a limited exhibit (closing Jan. 24), the tone changes again, as more modest sculptures and works on paper are scattered across the light-filled fifth floor. The display, although understated, highlights the rhythms of Bourgeois’s obsessive repetitions, and pleasure comes in the form of details, such as in an untitled piece in which a pair of marble eggs hides in a stack of weathered crates.

Since the implosion of his wry alt-rap group Das Racist, which stood as a testament to the blog-era internet’s megaphonic power, the Queens rapper Himanshu Suri, or Heems, has carved out a more serious career offline. In addition to Swet Shop Boys, his project with the actor Riz Ahmed and the English producer Redinho, and a gig at N.Y.U. Tisch’s Clive Davis Institute, Heems’s music as a soloist has unpacked intersectional identity, probing the Indo-Gothamite experience with clear eyes, a biting disposition, and an easygoing wit. He still knows his way around a joke, but on such albums as “Lafandar” and “Veena” he expands the scope of the hip-hop ego.—Sheldon Pearce (Baby’s All Right; Jan. 31.)

For her feature-film directorial début, “The Chronology of Water,” Kristen Stewart adapts Lidia Yuknavitch’s eponymous 2011 memoir and renders the author’s intense subjectivity with a rare creative fury. The drama carries Lidia through a traumatic childhood and sexual abuse by her father (Michael Epp), her departure for college, a marriage, a stillbirth, a time of erotic hedonism, and the awakening of her literary vocation by the writer and teacher Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi). Stewart conjures Lidia’s complex inner life with agitated images and a bold editing scheme that flashes back and ahead. The adolescent and adult Lidia is played, by Imogen Poots, with passionate commitment; her desperate quest for a place in the world—and the liberating, redemptive power of writing—comes through ferociously.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

Sudan Archives.

Photograph by Aaron Parsons

Initially, Brittany Parks was defined primarily by her violin. The singer-songwriter, who goes by the name Sudan Archives, treated the instrument through which she studied ethnomusicology as a kind of aesthetic signifier, even when she became a mainstay in L.A.’s beat-music community in the mid-twenty-tens. In recent years, that signifier has transformed into a talisman, the engine powering a wide-ranging multidisciplinary songcraft that encompasses R. & B. and soul, hip-hop and electro, house and techno. Her 2025 album, “The BPM,” is her most liberated and ambitious LP in a career characterized by radical moves; the artist uses her alter ego to turn her multi-instrumentalism into a personality diagnostic.—S.P. (Webster Hall; Jan. 29.)

Have you ever sat through the movie “Whiplash” and somehow thought, What if this had more jazz? Look no further, for the Town Hall has just the thing to satisfy. An eighteen-piece jazz band will play the soundtrack live, while Damien Chazelle’s masterpiece of stress screens onstage. You’ve seen sweat detonate off Miles Teller as he rumbles out “Caravan,” and now you might be able to feel it, too—courtesy of the drummer Greyson Nekrutman, a member of the Brazilian heavy-metal band Sepultura. The film’s composer, Justin Hurwitz, conducts, hopefully with less verve for torture than J. K. Simmons had. Jury’s still out on how far the band will take it—it might be helpful to have a medic, or a therapist, on site.—Jane Bua (Town Hall; Jan. 31.)

Noche Flamenca.

Photograph by Steven Pisano

In recent years, Noche Flamenca, New York’s finest flamenco troupe, has been taking inspiration from the art of Francisco Goya. The company’s aesthetic of bare-bones authenticity and banked-fire passion matches the painter’s dark candor. Situations and moods from Goya prompt and color the troupe’s usual loose collections of ensemble numbers and solos for its excellent dancers (among them Jesús Helmo and Paula Bolaños) and its transcendent star, Soledad Barrio. The troupe’s latest program, “Irrationalities,” joins Goya with a touch of Fellini and Sophocles’ “Women of Trachis.” The ancient Greek playwright is another kindred spirit for Noche Flamenca, which presented a revelatory version of “Antigone” a decade ago.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; Jan. 27-Feb. 8.)

In his later years, in the nineteen-fifties, the director Max Ophüls, who fled his native Germany when Hitler took power, developed one of the most instantly recognizable—and one of the most sophisticated—cinematic styles, based on elaborate tracking shots jointly choreographed for camera and actors. Metrograph’s twelve-film retrospective of his work includes these mature masterworks (a highlight is the Maupassant adaptation “Le Plaisir”) and his Hollywood films of the forties (such as “Letter from an Unknown Woman”). The selections range back to the start of his career, in the nineteen-thirties, with such films as “The Company’s in Love”—a bittersweet inside-the-movie-business comedy (screening in a new remastering) that he made in Germany, in 1932—and the dazzlingly inventive French romantic comedy “The Tender Enemy,” which is also a ghost story.—R.B. (Jan. 24-March 1.)

Illustration by Doug Salati

1. Last year, I finally got a car—after living in New York City for twenty years without one—and one of the marvellous benefits is being able to spend more time exploring strange and mystical areas upstate. It is no surprise to me that the region, with its misty, mountainous terrain, has given rise to many oddball communities, both utopian and nefarious. I recently binged the new podcast “Allison After NXIVM,” a CBC show that features in-depth interviews with the actress Allison Mack, who did jail time for her involvement with the abusive upstate cult run by the con man Keith Raniere. The podcast is a fascinating artifact, the tale of a woman still untangling her role as both victim and victimizer.

2. On a less sinister note, I loved Mona Fastvold’s new film, “The Testament of Ann Lee,” so much that I saw it three times in a week. It tells the story of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), an illiterate Englishwoman who founded the American Shaker movement, from a commune called Niskayuna, on the Hudson River. It’s a gorgeous achievement—full of music, ecstatic dance, and true believers hollering in the woods.

3. I have continued down the Shaker rabbit hole since seeing the film, reading every book about the group that I can find. So far, my favorite is Chris Jennings’s “Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism,” from 2016, which charts the paths of five kooky dreamers who founded (often ill-fated) experimental communities in the American wilderness.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• The phantom of the wedding reception
• The so-called “Australia effect”
• What it’s like to be a parent of a baby actor

Dear Secretary Pete Hegseth,

I realize that this is a big ask, but would you please invade and take possession of my son and daughter-in-law’s apartment? Or maybe you’d like to make them an offer first? Either way, as a concerned mother and patriot who believes that national security begins at home, I feel it’s my duty to let you know that Otis and Luna, the co-dictators of Unit 4-C, at 439 Bergen Street, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, must be overthrown. When you commandeer the home, take a look behind the toaster. Have you ever seen such an alarming amount of dust? And that rogue Cheerio! This is a couple unfit to govern a two-bedroom. One more piece of intel: The refrigerator light has a checkered history of flickering, suggesting impending danger. The refrigerator was manufactured in China.

But this is not just about making 4-C great again. America needs 4-C! The territory in question is rich in valuable resources. After you breach and clear the kitchen, check the cabinet to the left of the oven. See the never-opened truffle-infused oil on the top shelf? It was very expensive and Luna never sent me a thank-you note. Extract it.

Pete, what size shoe do you wear? Otis has stockpiles of investment sneakers under the bed. Please plunder! (Talk about boots on the ground—slippers, too.) Now make your way to the podcast studio-slash-coat closet. Wouldn’t it make a great command center? And the living room could be converted into a pied-à-terre ballroom for functions with visiting dignitaries. Which reminds me: If the Navy needs to dock any of their vessels, such as a kayak or canoe, the Gowanus Canal is nearby. The occupation of 4-C is essential. If 4-C goes, there goes 4-D and 4-B, and possibly the rest of Park Slope. I’m not saying that the apartment’s a hotbed of narcotic activity, but does anybody need that many plastic baggies for sandwiches?

Did I mention that there is a minor involved? Her name is Daphne and she is my twenty-seven-week-old granddaughter. Her parents have limited my access to her, citing “nap schedules,” “cluster feeding,” and something else. I missed First Bath, First Tummy Time, and First Projectile Peeing. Mr. Secretary, is this not a free country? It is nonnegotiable, therefore, that the Department of War intervene. Said asset must be secured immediately. (Don’t forget the baby seat—still in the box!)

But be forewarned: My son and my daughter-in-law are armed with, among other weapons, a stapler, a very sharp vegetable peeler, and an unregistered SodaStream carbonating device. A good time to invade would be Thursdays from 4:15-5 P.M. That’s when they have their dumbbell-strength-training class on Zoom. Also, on Thursdays, you can park on their side of the street. I’m pretty sure that you have the right to enter because of eminent domain—or Manifest Destiny? Neither Otis nor Luna (or the baby) are in NATO, so the alliance should present no problem. I don’t think that Latvia likes Luna, but I’d rather not get into that here.

I won’t tell Congress if you don’t!

Patriotically yours. ♦

There’s history wherever you look, but it takes a filmmaker’s eye and ear to extract its substance from beneath its surface, which is what Suzannah Herbert does in “Natchez,” her new documentary. Natchez, a Mississippi River town of about fourteen thousand residents, is popular with tourists, who come to see its meticulously restored antebellum houses, especially during a pair of annual “pilgrimages” featuring guided tours that are long on nostalgia and short on history. From 2022 to 2024, Herbert filmed several such tours, often led by the homeowners themselves, most of whom are white, including some who can trace their family’s occupancy to before the Civil War. She also filmed Natchez tours led by Black residents of the area, who tell stories very different from those of their white counterparts, offering correctives to the town’s sanitized mythology of itself. By way of these divergent perspectives, Herbert’s film not only identifies local social fractures but also reflects a national moment when white rage is ascendant and the President has issued an executive order (with the Orwellian title “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”) that has led to the bowdlerization of National Park Service exhibits and websites involving slavery.

“Natchez,” a wide-ranging mosaic of cinematic portraiture, bears out a strange truth about nonfiction filmmaking: it’s as much a matter of casting as fiction is. The documentary puts personalities to ideas; it teems with notable characters, spanning a range from righteous to indifferent to ignoble, who excel at speaking their minds and expressing their emotions when a camera is pointed at them. The events that Herbert films are undated; the movie only hints at chronology, and its dramatic arc is a surprising one, revealing a change of consciousness by way of changes of circumstance. From the start, the filmmaker, working with the editor Pablo Proenza, establishes two main characters, both born in 1964: Tracy McCartney, a white woman who volunteers at a lavishly restored house called Choctaw Hall, greeting people while wearing a nineteenth-century-style hoop skirt, and Tracy Collins, a Black man who is the pastor of a Baptist church and also gives tours of the town, driving visitors around in his passenger van.

At Choctaw Hall, McCartney tells guests how the tradition she’s a part of got started: the town, made wealthy by cotton, suffered a boll-weevil infestation in the early nineteen-hundreds and gradually fell on hard times. Seeing venerable houses in disrepair, a pair of women’s volunteer groups founded in the late twenties—the Natchez Garden Club and the Pilgrimage Garden Club—launched the preservation mission and inaugurated the tours. Collins, who goes by the nickname of Rev, expressly states that his program is to “violate some Southern-pride narratives with truths and facts.” On his tours, he says, “You can’t talk about cotton without talking about slaves.” At one point in the film, McCartney, who has just got divorced and can no longer afford to volunteer as a guide, joins one of Rev’s tours and hears him talk about Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and ongoing forms of white supremacy. “He said some things that made me think about it a little bit differently,” she says.

Rev displays the rhetorical power, leavened with humor and warmth, of a skilled public speaker, but many others are charismatic, too. There’s Deborah Cosey, the first Black member of the Pilgrimage Garden Club—who says that the garden clubs had long been “slaps in the face to the African American community”—and the owner of an antebellum house known as the Concord Quarters. An unadorned brick building, it housed enslaved people and has a kitchen where many of them once worked. Cosey was formerly a guide at a historic inn in the town and was ordered to “stick to the script” when she insisted on mentioning the inn’s slave quarters; today, as she says, “I wrote my own script.” There’s David Garner, an elderly white homeowner and guide who is also a brazen and unabashed racist, using the N-word on tours, even after being “reprimanded” for “inappropriate words” and forced to censor himself by the “hoop-skirt mafia.” Garner is gay and claims that “half” of the historic-home owners are gay men, the only people, he says, with “the money and the taste” to maintain the properties. Rev, who’s been on Garner’s tours, wonders whether Garner is merely “trying to portray a Southern aristocratic gentleman, how they would talk.” He adds, “Maybe you can see if there’s a real him or is that the real him?”

White tourists describe visiting these sumptuous, old-fashioned properties as a way to “get away from current events,” and the film’s poised cinematography, by Noah Collier, captures the enveloping allure of these pristinely preserved grand dwellings. But current events are inextricable from the subject of “Natchez,” perhaps all the more so in the months since the movie premièred, at the Tribeca Film Festival. The federal government is a conspicuous presence in the film, because the National Park Service owns an antebellum house, and a ranger who works there, Barney Schoby, goes into great detail regarding the daily lives of people who were enslaved, including how knowledge that some surreptitiously gleaned during their labors helped them prosper under Reconstruction. The N.P.S. also owns another Natchez site, called Forks of the Road, which, for a time, was the second-largest American slave market. The N.P.S. is attempting to purchase all the former land of the market in order to turn it into one of the country’s principal slave-market museums—but the owners of some sites don’t want to sell, and one, a white man named Gene Williams, is derisive about the project.

The person mainly responsible for the Forks of the Road preservation and historical research, according to Schoby, is an elderly Black man named Ser Boxley. Boxley, seen all too briefly onscreen, is one of the most extraordinary presences in the recent cinema. He describes his activism in mystical terms: “The enslaved ancestors here asked the question, Who is going to tell their story? And I said I would.” An unnamed white ranger who openly seeks to end the whitewashing of history says, “I see him as a Biblical prophet,” someone who is “pointing out to the status quo that they were not fulfilling their mission of justice.” The grandeur of Boxley’s influence is conveyed by his terse, oracular speech. When Cosey first met him, in a store, he mentioned her purchase of the Concord Quarters and said, simply, “These buildings are worthy of preservation.” To watch Herbert’s film is like watching a report on a place that has subsequently been besieged. It’s hard to imagine the N.P.S., under the Trump Administration, advancing the educational program that’s on heroic view in “Natchez.” Herbert may have preserved more history than she ever expected.

The power of governments to replace education with indoctrination is the subject of another remarkable new documentary, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which likewise features characters who, at the end of filming, are at risk. It’s a first-person narrative relating the experiences and observations of Pavel (Pasha) Talankin, who, as a videographer at a school in the Russian town of Karabash, about a thousand miles east of Moscow, was directly affected by his country’s invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022. Quickly, the school received directives “from above” requiring teachers to install a new “patriotic” curriculum and students to perform nationalistic songs and speeches—all of which Talankin had to record on video, as proof that the school was following orders. Talankin, an independent-minded opponent of the war, who had turned his office into a “pillar of democracy” where students could gather and speak freely, submitted a letter of resignation.

Soon after, however, he made online contact with David Borenstein, an American filmmaker based in Denmark, who wanted to document the war’s impact on daily life in Russia. Talankin, realizing that history was unfolding before his eyes, promptly withdrew his resignation. Now he could fulfill his official duties—recording marches, flag-waving parades, grenade-throwing competitions, and educational visits from Wagner Group mercenaries—while also amassing footage for Borenstein. In the film, he reflects wryly that he is no longer just a videographer but also a film director.

Talankin bears witness to the conscription of young men and mourns the combat deaths of some of them, and he ruefully recognizes the effectiveness of propaganda. With dogma filling school days, students aren’t being educated and are left intellectually unprepared for much but obedience. He hears President Vladimir Putin declaring, on TV, “Teachers win wars,” and redefining opposition as treason. When Talankin notices a police car parked at his apartment building, he decides to leave Russia. Pretending merely to go on vacation, he takes with him much more footage for Borenstein to assemble. The result, featuring a copious voice-over by Talankin, is an exemplary work of cinematic modernism, a reflexive film that turns its genesis into its subject and its moral essence. “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” relentlessly dramatizes its most exceptional aspect—the very fact that it was made. ♦

I’m a rational person. I grew up in a family of scientists. My dad, who studied the brain, told me when I was a kid that Santa and God didn’t exist. (Don’t say anything at school, he suggested.) My uncle, a molecular biologist, delivered impromptu poolside lectures on the recombinatory power of DNA. But my mother, who’d been an English major, was superstitious. She was alert to the sinister possibilities of weird coincidences—two tails-up pennies found on the same day, three flat tires in a row on the left side of the car. One summer, a cardinal took to flying at the glass of our living-room window; she interpreted this as an omen. She was drawn to people with a similar orientation. Once, one of her boyfriends claimed that he was seeing the Devil. He’s right there, the boyfriend said, in the far corner of the room. Look—you can see his eyes.

Maybe it’s not surprising that, in middle and high school, my favorite writer was Stephen King. Later, I fell into the vortex of “Twin Peaks,” and of David Lynch more generally. The world is full of bad actors—cheats, liars, tyrants, sickos—who are, ultimately, mere human beings; at least, this was how rationality would have it. But King and Lynch were interested in evil, an abstract force. An outmoded concept, evil was baggage from a pre-modern age, the least useful way to interpret bad behavior. And yet it still exerted a pull, I thought, because every so often people do things so terrible that our rational, psychological vocabulary feels impoverished. Did I believe in evil? No. But I believed that people believed in it. And sometimes I could think of no other word for the insensible malevolence that seemed to steer people and events toward awful ends.

And yet my mom’s boyfriend didn’t say that he saw evil in the corner. He said that he saw the Devil. To matter to us, abstract forces have to become concrete. At that point, they risk becoming hackneyed, unimpressive, absurd, even silly. “What was hidden in the depths would often appear so flat when brought to the surface,” an artist named Tove thinks in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel “The Third Realm.” “The meaning would be squashed if the symbols were too familiar.” Tove wants to depict the intensity of having a body—a violent, irresistible reality that breaks down the boundaries between living things. But she can’t do it—in fact, she laments that her drawings look like New Yorker cartoons. This doesn’t mean that the intensity she recognizes doesn’t exist, only that she’s failing to properly understand or represent it. It could be that some of the forces that shape our lives will always resist being represented. They may be too big or strange to fit into our heads.

Knausgaard, a Norwegian novelist, rose to global prominence in the twenty-tens, with “My Struggle,” a six-volume autobiographical cycle. The books were all about his personal life—they included painful details about his childhood, adolescence, parents, spouse, children, and so on—and yet they also reached for more abstract themes, having to do with death, nothingness, transcendence, and freedom. Navigating through their leisurely, hypnotic pages, one might read about the preparation of a boring dinner (fish, carrots, potatoes), or the particulars of a vacation with small children (strollers, crackers, sunscreen). Then, unexpectedly, a “vague feeling” would arise—something hidden “in the mist, in the darkness of the forest, in the dew drops on the spruce needles,” and connected to larger understandings of the world and our place in it. This wasn’t the reassuring notion that transcendence hides within the everyday. Instead, “My Struggle” captured the wavelike rhythm with which the luminous extraordinary disrupts the resolutely physical ordinary. “I think one of the reasons I love the Bible is that it’s very physical there,” Knausgaard told me recently. “There’s no abstract thought in the Bible, in the Old Testament. It’s a physical world. And it’s that world I’m longing for, somehow. I want it back.” Across this stony landscape, light sometimes falls.

“My Struggle” followed a writer in search of inspiration, and so its abstractions had a certain flavor: they tended to be artistic, aesthetic, elevating. But in Knausgaard’s latest series of novels—the fourth, “The School of Night,” arrived in English earlier this month—the ineffable is stranger. The books are entirely fictional, and so Knausgaard, freed from the strictures of his biography, has turned toward less domesticated unknowns. Broadly, the cycle tells a supernatural story set in an absolutely realistic world. In the first book, “The Morning Star,” published in English in 2021, a new star appears in the night sky. Its light is bright enough to cast shadows. What is it? “You only had to look at it,” one character says. “Something silent and intense streamed from it. It was almost as if it possessed a will, something indomitable that the soul could contain, but not change or influence.” The star, he goes on, communicated a “feeling that someone was looking at us.” But who? And what sort of meaning did it contain? No one can say.

After the star emerges, everything becomes uncertain. One character, an undertaker, notices that death seems to have been suspended. People see ghosts, have visions, and suffer prophetic dreams. Atheists experience faith and priests become atheists. Marriages fracture, or almost do: instead of settling into new equilibriums, relationships grow harder to define. Fringe philosophies and scientific theories seem suddenly apt. There are sounds and shadows in the forest; the Devil, or devils, may be walking the earth. (Jesus called himself the Morning Star, a character recalls—but also, “in Isaiah the Morning Star was the devil.”) The uncertainties introduced by the star make undeniable the uncertainty of human life in general. We already live on islands of rationality surrounded by seas of mystery. We build dikes to hold back death, time, and meaninglessness, but still remain essentially unsure about the fundamental conditions of our existence.

The novels rifle through the history of thought and culture, tracing the paths existential unknowns have carved. The second book in the series, “The Wolves of Eternity,” is concerned partly with techno-futurists who seek to defeat death through science; “The Third Realm,” from 2024, follows Norwegian black-metal bands who begin summoning the Devil for theatrical effect but end up believing in, and channelling, dark forces. There are countless ways to domesticate the unknown by cozying up to it, and many of them are found in the novels: addicts embrace self-destruction, romantics read the Romantics, and so on. Still, the advent of the star unsettles these familiar pathways. The unknown actually appears, as in an allegory, and it doesn’t explain itself.

Knausgaard started the first book during the pandemic, he told me. “And I wrote into the pandemic. And that book is about a danger from outside, threatening.” He recalled sitting with his family in London, hearing the sirens, understanding that a large, unknown, and overwhelming force had arrived in the world. The new books take this feeling and generalize it. We’re all going to die; we all get older, our lives and the world flowing away from us, and so we try to habituate ourselves to time and to death. Still, these forces rise up, as alien as ever, reminding us that it’s not they who live in our world, but we who live in theirs.

Knausgaard slips easily into this way of looking at life. In London, he haunted Deptford, the part of the city where the playwright Christopher Marlowe is buried; “The School of Night” is concerned partly with Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus.” “I knew I wanted to set a novel there,” Knausgaard told me. “Because I’m incredibly fascinated with the fact that what separates us is time, and I don’t know what time is.” The novel’s protagonist, Kristian, thinks that the essence of death is “absence”: absence is “the shadow of death.” When we feel the absence of the dead, that’s because we no longer coincide with them in time—and yet time, though clearly real, is also profoundly mysterious. Are the dead absent, or is time somehow an illusion? For those who grieve, like Kristian, no question could be more important. What does it mean to live without an answer?

It took me a while to adjust to the world of “The Morning Star” and its sequels. I have two small children at home, and so my life is all about life—I’m surrounded at all times by growth and learning, accomplishment and development, vitality and joy. And I’m also, professionally and personally, committed to the value of rational explanation. “The boundary between the rational and the irrational is almost as absolute as that between life and death,” one character in the series reflects. “A rational perspective can entertain nothing else.” The irrational, he continues, including belief in God, has therefore “been allocated its own designated sphere, a bit like a children’s table at a family celebration, where belief rather than knowledge dictates the truth. . . . It is where the children sit, with their children’s food, indulging in their children’s matters, while the grown-ups run the world.”

This view of things was like a barrier between me and the books. Two experiences broke it down. First, I attended a conference on artificial intelligence, where I moderated a couple of panels; I had conversations with scientists about what consciousness is, and whether machines could have it, and I was struck by how even people at the forefront of our technological civilization embrace quasi-mystical speculations about souls and minds that might have made sense hundreds of years ago. They thought of themselves as hyperrational, but lived with mystery, too.

And then I had a series of conversations with my son, who is seven, about death. Over a period of months, he asked me, “Will I die?” and “Will you die?” He had more questions: Why do living things age? Is Heaven real? Will we ever know what happens after death for sure? On his own, he arrived at the ancient philosophical idea with which Knausgaard begins “The School of Night”: “There is no reason to be afraid of death,” Kristian writes, since “when we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.” This, he notes, is more or less “how Epicurus put it a long time ago.” Seven, it turns out, is the age at which philosophy begins.

I have my own views, which I believe are reasonable and rational, about consciousness, aging, death, and Heaven. Moreover, as a parent, I like to have answers, and to suggest that there’s a sensible way to look at life and the world. I did my best to answer my son’s questions authentically and appropriately, in ways that respected his intelligence and autonomy. But the effort left me feeling almost ashamed. I present myself to him as someone who knows a lot about many things. But, on the most fundamental questions, I was evasive. The truth was that I had helped usher him into a world we don’t understand. Just putting my thoughts into words seemed to turn them into lies. “If I could articulate what I’m feeling . . . you would understand,” Kristian goes on. “But I can’t, for in language there is hope, in language there is light. The night is without language.”

In total, Knausgaard told me, he thinks his new series will comprise seven books. He’s writing them intuitively, without knowing how everything will end up; as each novel unfolds, he said, “I just hope for a kind of a miracle.” It would be wrong to expect the novels to explain themselves—in a series about life’s inexplicability, that would be false. But through a kind of asymptotic, negative process, they seem to be closing in on a vision of life in which it’s defined by what we will never know. ♦

Donald Trump is an editor’s nightmare and a psychiatrist’s dream. Amid all the coverage marking the first anniversary of his return to the White House, one story—which did not get the attention it deserved—stood out for me: a Times analysis of how much more the President has been talking and talking and talking. The findings? One million, nine hundred and seventy-seven thousand, six hundred and nine words in the Presidential appearances, as of January 20th—an increase of two hundred and forty-five per cent compared with the first year of Trump’s first term in office, back in 2017.

There are many conclusions to be drawn from this astonishing statistic, including the obvious one, that our leader loves the sound of his own voice, and the slightly less obvious corollary that he has no one around him willing or able to tell him to shut up. It’s also true that, in rambling on so much, Trump reveals just about everything one could ever want to know about him—his lack of discipline, his ignorance, his vanity, insecurity, and crudeness, and a mean streak that knows no limits. “It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely,” Thomas Mann wrote a century ago in his novel “The Magic Mountain,” set in a sanitarium perched above the Swiss mountain town of Davos, where Trump spent the better part of this week proving to the stunned attendees of the annual World Economic Forum the continuing relevance of Mann’s observation.

“Sometimes, you need a dictator,” Trump soliloquized on Wednesday, during a reception for business leaders. A few hours earlier, in an address that lasted a full hour and a half, the President had announced that he would not invade Greenland, despite his recent threats; explained that “stupid people” buy windmills; and admitted that he had decided to raise tariffs on Switzerland, because its Prime Minister, “a woman,” had “rubbed me the wrong way.” The speech, during which Trump four times referred to Iceland when he meant Greenland, was more than twice the combined length of the addresses of the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. On Tuesday, speaking to the White House press corps to mark the actual anniversary of his return to office, Trump had discoursed on everything from his mother telling him he could have been a Major League baseball player and explaining to him what a mental asylum was to his hatred for Somalia and its “very low-I.Q. people.” That one lasted a hundred and four minutes.

Trump, of course, was rude, untruthful, and excessively, if not quite so egregiously, long-winded in his first term, too. The difference today, as he presides over a cowed American government, whose checks and balances no longer function as they used to, is that his Administration is far more willing and able to turn his fantastical words into tangible realities. The President, it now seems clear, has the world’s most consequential case of untreated logorrhea. (Dictionary definition of this condition: “Excessive and often incoherent talkativeness.”)

And I’m not just referring to the week’s crisis over Greenland and the future of the NATO alliance, a crisis which began and (sort of) ended with many words being uttered by Trump about his “psychological” need to own the vast and strategically located Danish territory. Consider, for example, Trump’s “Board of Peace,” which he débuted before leaving Davos on Thursday morning. In Trump 1.0, perhaps this would have been no more than one of his Twitter controversies, in which he posted some crazy graphic of himself leading a rump group of world powers to overthrow the United Nations as the new permanent chairman of the global board of directors. In Trump 2.0, his alternate reality is not just a social-media post or the subject of an over-my-dead-body fight with his latest panicked national security adviser but an in-person photo op featuring the President, a real-life logo copied from the U.N.’s, and a random assortment of world leaders who were willing to buy a seat on Trump’s committee for a cool billion dollars. (Belarus and Qatar, yes; Britain, France, Germany, and every other major U.S. ally in Europe, no.) I highly recommend watching the fully live-streamed event, a show one might caption “Donald Trump and his pretend League of (Lesser) Superheroes, with himself as a bizarro Superman in charge of the world.”

My favorite moment was when—after bragging about how “everybody wants to be a part of” the board that every other major world leader, with the possible exception of the war-mongering pariah Vladimir Putin, refused to join—he claimed that the group he himself had dreamed up was some distinguished independent organization that had solicited his chairmanship. “I was very honored when they asked me to do it,” he said. For all I know, he believed it.

Perhaps just as revealing, when Trump reached the fulsome self-praise section of his speech, he explained that he was such an incredible peacemaker that he had even managed to end wars in places where he had not known they were happening. Imagine admitting this about yourself. Another quote from “The Magic Mountain” sprang to mind: “I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on. . . .”

A decade into the Trump era, Americans are more or less used to this manic political performance art, proof, if we still needed it, that millions of our fellow-citizens are all right with having a clearly disturbed leader who cannot control what he says. (Although, to be fair, even some partisan Republicans are starting to worry that they could pay a serious price this fall for what the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, no fan of Trump’s, called Trump’s unnerving“rambling appearances” and “downward spiral” in his latest Wall Street Journal column, headlined “Is Trump Trying to Lose the Midterms?”)

But the stunned reaction of so many Europeans to a week living in the full-on Trump talk cycle ought to remind us that there’s something to be said for the plainer interpretation of Trump’s out-of-control behavior, even if years of intensive exposure in the U.S. have inured us to it.

“This is a wake-up call, a bigger one than we’ve ever had,” Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, said.

“The time has come to stand up against Trump,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark and secretary-general of NATO, said.

It was only a few days before his speech in Davos, on the eve of his visit to Switzerland, that Trump was revealed to have sent a text to the Prime Minister of Norway, complaining that, because Norway had denied him the Nobel Peace Prize, he was under no obligation to proceed peacefully in his desire to take over Greenland. The message, surely a first in diplomatic annals, began: “Dear Jonas, Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Lars-Christian Brask, a deputy speaker of the Danish parliament, no doubt spoke for many in Europe when he responded to this evidence of Trump’s “mad and erratic behavior” by asking on television whether the President was still capable of running the United States.

What struck me was how calm, reasonable, and puzzled Brask’s tone was as he said it. But it’s going to be a long three more years; there’s almost certainly going to be a lot of shouting before this is all over. How many polite ways, after all, are there to ask whether the President of the United States has lost his mind? ♦

The glass in this year’s Oscar nominations is more than half full. There’s always much to complain about (just wait), but the Academy did itself proud by recognizing the year’s best film, “Sinners,” in a record sixteen categories and giving multiple nominations to several other superb films, including “Marty Supreme” and “One Battle After Another.” Hollywood did unusually well this year with these big-budget, large-scale movies of unusually forthright and complex substance, and it’s a pleasant surprise to see the Academy respond enthusiastically to them. Or, to put it differently, they’re spectacular films, which helped to get their unusual elements through the gates. The same holds for the Brazilian film “The Secret Agent,” which takes daring dramatic leaps through time and plays subtly intricate yet deadly earnest games with its protagonist’s identity; it’s also a teeming, large-scale thriller, and the Academy paid attention to its multidimensional inventiveness.

In other words, it’s a year in which, unexpectedly, what’s great is also popular, and that’s a combination that Oscar-land finds hard to resist. Most of the year’s best films confront power in its many forms, especially political power, and the nominations reflect the Academy’s acknowledgment that this is the topic of the moment. This acknowledgment, however, is as much a matter of aesthetics as of politics: messaging alone counts for little, because method, form, and style are inextricable from ideas and ideologies, from the way in which principles are realized.

It’s particularly heartening to see the New York independent filmmaker Josh Safdie enter the club, with “Marty Supreme”—and all the more so to hear his name called alongside that of his co-writer and co-editor Ronald Bronstein. (The film got nine nominations.) Actually, this year’s Oscars is, among other things, a part of the Bronstein Industrial Complex: Rose Byrne is also nominated, for Best Actress, for her performance in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” directed by Mary Bronstein, who is married to Ronald. For the record, Ronald’s one feature to date as a director, “Frownland,” is the most important independent film of the century so far, not least, for its casting of nonprofessional actors in major roles and its development of their artistry in dramatic scenes of emotional extremes.

The nominees for this year’s new award, for casting, feature three films—“Marty Supreme,” “One Battle After Another,” and “The Secret Agent”—which similarly include nonprofessionals in prominent roles. (Ronald himself, a nonprofessional actor, starred in Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2009 feature “Daddy Longlegs.”) In “Marty Supreme,” Safdie and Bronstein sustain, sharpen, and intensify the same tone of New York tension and aggression, struggle and desperation that marks their previous work. The same goes for Mary, whose one previous feature, “Yeast,” from 2008—in which she starred alongside Greta Gerwig—is a big New York showcase for acting with a frenetic, explosive edge.

On the other hand, if the year’s best nominees are brash and sharp-edged, the Academy also coated the year’s list with sentimental goo, starting with “Sentimental Value,” “Hamnet,” and “Train Dreams.” It’s unpleasant to note that wonderful actors have been ill-served in these films. Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” about the fate of a family house amid the conflicts between a film-director patriarch and his two daughters (one an actress), is a middlebrow, middle-class, midrange view of the artistic world that its characters implausibly inhabit. The blandness starts with its images and affects its performances, too. Similarly, in “Hamnet,” subjectivity is downplayed into plot points, the story’s mystical ferocity is underplayed, the domestic melodrama is by the numbers, and the climactic tear-jerking is just mugging for the camera. As for “Train Dreams,” it dilutes barely enough information and ideas for a short film over a lugubrious and portentous hundred minutes of ostensibly pretty but textureless images. If people in the old days really talked so slowly and dully, more would have died of boredom than of disease.

There’s also a kind of garish showiness that the Academy isn’t immune to. I wasn’t much more enamored of “Sirāt,” a notable disappointment given the greatness of its director’s first feature, “You All Are Captains.” The new film puts empty characters (their tattoos are more expressive than the dialogue they’re given) into dangerous situations and dispatches them with all the empty pleasure of video-game kills. (The electro score, by Kangding Ray, however, is impressive: immersive and pummelling. Unfortunately, it wasn’t nominated.) Emma Stone is among my favorite current actors, yet she has hitched her wagon to a tendentious, numbingly cartoonish set of films by Yorgos Lanthimos, including “Bugonia,” which elicit flamboyant performances that win acclaim and awards but aren’t deepening her art. His films offer his actors no mirror effect, no room or need for introspection.

I’m shocked, if not surprised, that there was no recognition for “Hedda,” with its performances by Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss (or for its screenplay, an ingenious revision of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”), or for “Highest 2 Lowest” and its lead actor, Denzel Washington. And it’s a shame that Josh O’Connor went unacknowledged for “The Mastermind.” Nonetheless, in a year in which the studios came through to a remarkable extent and produced some movies of extraordinary artistry on a spectacular scale, the intersection of the art and the business of cinema is uncommonly strong. Despite the many problems that the film business is facing—declining attendance for realistic dramas, competition from streaming, the menace of A.I., and merger fever—the hunger for the art of movies, from inside the business itself, offers a welcome glimmer of that most old-timey of Hollywood sentiments: hope.

The winners I’d pick are below in bold, followed by the rest of my preferred nominees in alphabetical order.

Best Picture

Properly understood, the very notion of bestness reflects a view of much more than the year’s movies. What makes a movie the best isn’t just an act of judgment but also of imagination: how it will look in the rearview mirror of cinema history, how it will shape the future of the art. Among the many virtues of “Sinners”—alongside its fusion of genres and tones, of intimate moments and grand design, of big ideas and big emotions—is the way its spectacular action maps onto myth and history. “Marty Supreme,” by contrast, points to myth and history but, because of its exhilaratingly hectic pace, has to leave them merely signified rather than explored. Still, if “Sinners” doesn’t win, I’d be delighted if “Marty Supreme” did. Its speed marks a fruitful crisis in Josh Safdie’s style (it plays more like an endgame than a new start) but its crowded constellation of idiosyncrasies makes it an emblem of advanced aestheticism—a rare quality in cinema.

Except, of course, in the world of Wes Anderson, who goes from strength to strength so consistently that his uniquely cultivated symbolic power and sensuous audacity is often taken for granted. “The Phoenician Scheme” brilliantly pairs its foreground and its background but keeps a little air between the characters and the ideas (maybe because the story has a connection to Anderson’s actual family history). “The Mastermind,” the year’s most exquisite film, is profoundly alert to its protagonist’s existential disaffection, but leaves the specifics of his milieu untouched, whereas, in “Highest 2 Lowest,” milieu is everything; Spike Lee, remaking Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” manages to improve on the original by fully realizing the protagonist’s world (here, the music business) and taking its aesthetic and cultural politics seriously. “Misericordia” is an inside-out mystery, a local thriller of crime and punishment that exists in an ideas-world of its own, springing from its director Alain Guiraudie’s decades-long imagining of the chthonic pansexuality of rural life. “One Battle After Another” creates a revolutionary mythology only to ruefully debunk it, but its occasional slide into satire has the odd effect of subordinating its big ideas to an action film, however thrillingly accomplished. “The Secret Agent” offers a sense of history unfolding that’s unmatched in this year’s movies, and “Hedda,” in updating and revising Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” offers a critical sense of literary history the likes of which I’ve rarely seen in any film. But “Sinners” is the year’s most comprehensive movie, the one that offers the best argument against artificial boundaries and for putting everything in.

Directing

First, the legally required boilerplate: by definition, the best movie of the year is the one that’s directed the best. Last year, I made the case for separating the two honors for the pleasure of spreading the love and the prizes between two different films, two different filmmakers. This heretical policy gets some support from yet another rigid convention, that of credits, which separates directors from screenwriters. Still, this year, most of my favorite films are the works of hyphenates—directors who also wrote, or co-wrote, the scripts—and so it takes some analytical work and poetic appreciation to isolate the art of directing in the year’s best films.

Ryan Coogler, as the creator of “Sinners,” is, in an overarching way, the year’s best director. On the other hand, “The Mastermind” is a different kind of movie, intimately scaled even in its action scenes, low on digital effects, and high on long takes in close settings. Throughout, its director, Kelly Reichardt, transforms scenes of the sort that are so often filmed in a neutral style, yielding a mere record of the scripted action, into finely calibrated and mercurially complex interactions—even for a single character alone on a ladder or handling a box filled with paintings. In so doing, she embodies the idea of direction as immediate on-set creation achieved through the basic tools of cinema, an idea that is here exalted and revitalized.

Acting: Performance by an actor in a leading role.

The acting categories are, in a way, painful to write about, on the premise that there are basically no bad actors, only bad directors. The question is often asked: But don’t actors have agency? Avoiding the temptation to answer, “No, usually just an agent,” I’d say that, if a given performance seriously elicits that question, then the serious answer must be “Either too much or too little.” That usually happens when an actor appears overly controlled or insufficiently guided—either sealed tight or unhinged. With great performances, the results prove the merits of the film’s making—and the balance of the director-actor relationship.

Just different enough and just enough alike: such are Michael B. Jordan’s two performances as the twins in “Sinners,” which show a delicate calibration of the physical and mental force in each character. He’s responsive to far more than the events at hand, always attuned to the characters’ pasts, to the dangerously pressurized world around them, and to their visions of the future. It’s an extraordinary demonstration of thought in action—and it’s this expressive factor that puts it a cut above that of Josh O’Connor in “The Mastermind.” There the physical finesse and the slow burns of comedy and tragedy are built into Kelly Reichardt’s discerning direction, but the character’s wider spectrum of experience is filtered out of the script (the price of refinement), which keeps O’Connor’s performance within narrower confines than Jordan’s in “Sinners.”

Denzel Washington is, in real life, at the top of the movie industry exactly as his character in “Highest 2 Lowest” is at the summit of the music business, and he infuses the role with an imaginative sense of swagger and command, which makes the tottering of the character’s empire all the more poignant. (It also adds an element of ambiguity, even ambivalence, to the movie’s fresh-start ending.) Yet, strangely, the starriest performance this year is also, by definition, a more elusive one—that of Wagner Moura, in “The Secret Agent,” playing a man on the run who is forced to change his identity in order to keep a step ahead of the dictatorial Brazilian authorities. In effect, the role is that of an actor, and Moura’s charisma and that of his character converge. This creates both enormous empathy and (because, wherever he is, he stands out) enormous danger. The spotlight that comes from within is too strong to be dimmed. Moura fills the frame and bursts from it just as his character bursts out of his immediate milieu into history.

It pains me not to have a sixth slot for Ethan Hawke, for his self-transformative and self-effacing incarnation of the lyricist Lorenz Hart, in “Blue Moon.” He seems not to play the role but to channel Hart. On the other hand, despite the resistance I’ve felt to the prodigious Timothée Chalamet’s gee-whiz performances to date, his turn in “Marty Supreme” is astonishing and inspired, because it sublimates the habitual overeagerness of his style into substance. Chalamet has been aptly ambitious beneath his theatre-kid charm, and this is the first movie where he conveys the hunger of adult concerns, however callow and reckless the character he plays may be. Still, the action never slows down enough to allow the protagonist—or the actor—a moment for reflection.

Acting: Performance by an actress in a leading role

This is the easiest category to choose, for one happy reason and one unhappy one. The happy one: Thompson’s acerbic and assertive Hedda, firmly in synch with the director Nia DaCosta’s bold approach to Ibsen’s play, stands high above the competition for its combination of rhetorical flair, heated passion, and melodramatic command. And I had little hesitation about Thompson’s co-nominees. Rose Byrne’s high-pressure frenzy in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” comes closest in its own sharp-angled, cubistic variety. Susan Chardy, in “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” calmly conjures the agonized force of long-suppressed trauma and the effort to concentrate that force into principled action. (She would have got this recognition a year earlier had the movie been released in 2024, as originally planned.) Callie Hernandez, who co-wrote “Invention” and based its story on her late father (complete with copious archival documentation of his unusual life), plays a character close to herself yet fictionalized enough to lend the drama significant symbolic weight, turning a local manipulator into an avatar of historical transformation. As for Dakota Johnson, the widespread repudiation of “Materialists” has been one of my movie-year peeves; “Past Lives,” the previous feature by its writer and director, Celine Song, was widely acclaimed even though (or, I suspect, because) it effaces the practical and, um, material basis for its romantic drama. In “Materialists,” Song doesn’t stint on sentiment, but she also digs deep into the money matters and other worldly considerations that color it. Johnson, whose impulsively thoughtful way with dialogue is one of the delights of recent cinema, invigorates the movie with her mercurial energy.

Now the unhappy reason—indeed, two. First, one of the best performances of 2025 was by Agnès Jaoui, who was involutedly neurotic, whimsically effervescent, painfully afflicted, and daringly free, in Sophie Fillières’s “This Life of Mine,” but the film is still unreleased here. (I caught it at one of a handful of special screenings.) Second, the competition hasn’t been as plentiful as it should have been. Not enough movies offered women leading roles as substantial as what men got. The same was true last year; at the time, I suspected it was a mere happenstance of production schedules, but now, I think it’s a trend, and I believe that there’s a wider reason for it: the resurgence of unchallenged misogyny. The marketing and positioning of actresses in their roles is tougher than it’s been in recent years because of the insult machinery of man-boy social media and its echoes across society more widely. I think this causes some filmmakers to inhibit their actresses, or to turn substantial actresses blatantly showy. The resulting movies, tailored to appeal rather than to challenge, stick their exceptionally talented actors into well-established grooves (sentiment, neatness, flamboyance). They can still feature performances that win acclaim but they don’t advance the art of acting or that of individual actors. (Reminder: the problem is not at all to do with the actresses’ artistry but with how movies are directed.)

Acting: Performance by an actress in a supporting role

The year’s hardest category: I wish there were eight statuettes to give out. Here, too, DaCosta’s reconfiguration of Ibsen, by making Hedda Gabler’s former lover (and her husband’s main professional rival) a woman, and by greatly expanding that role, offers Nina Hoss a showcase for intellectual passion and romantic frenzy. The performance, like the role itself, would be disastrous were it not simultaneously supremely commanding yet grievously defenseless. Hoss inhabits the part completely, and in so doing she transforms the history of the play and clinches DaCosta’s improvement on Ibsen. Meanwhile, if the prize were awarded for power per second of screentime, Gaby Hoffmann, playing a nineteen-sixties dropout in survival mode, would win; her furious silence is as eloquent as her terse determination, and her voice, quietly oracular, is one of the most memorable things in the movie.

Tânia Maria, in “The Secret Agent,” delivers a performance that’s in an altogether separate category. A rug-maker by profession, she met the director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, in 2019, when he was looking for extras in rural Brazil for his film “Bacurau.” In his new film, she plays a far more extensive role, as an elderly leftist sympathizer who runs a safe house for the politically persecuted—a den mother of resistance whose words, wry and wise and salty, spring from a deep well of horrific experience. Mendonça initially chose Maria for her voice, and her voice, in a few dozen lines, dominates the film. Finally, tough to choose between Gwyneth Paltrow and Odessa A’zion in “Marty Supreme”; they’re both screen-filling, in different ways. Paltrow, in her first major non-Marvel role in a decade, plays a former star coming out of early retirement with exultant grandeur and aching vulnerability. A’zion, as the protagonist’s married lover, who can match his manipulative wiles beat for beat, conveys an exciting, bittersweet sense of the wheels turning beneath deceptive surfaces.

Acting: Performance by an actor in a supporting role

One of Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterstrokes in “One Battle After Another” was to cast Benicio del Toro as the character of Sensei Sergio St. Carlos—and to be so sure of del Toro’s centrality to the film that the shoot was stopped for two and a half months while the actor was busy starring in “The Phoenician Scheme.” Much of the role was conceived by del Toro, who also shaped the crucial concluding segment in which his character appears. Anderson, in other words, brought in an actor as a main collaborator, which is why this supporting role is nearly a lead. Even without knowing about this element of the film’s production (and I didn’t when I saw the film), it is impossible to miss del Toro’s inventive power.

John Magaro’s voice in “The Mastermind” is still echoing through my mind, not only because it’s a distinctive voice but also because it conveys an enormous burden of mixed emotions—friendship, responsibility, love, and desperate fear of an unnamed past catching up with him. In “Sinners,” Delroy Lindo brings passion and wit to the role of an elder bluesman, and delivers the movie’s central monologue with tragic Shakespearean majesty. In “Blue Moon,” Andrew Scott, as the composer Richard Rodgers—whose success with the première of “Oklahoma!” is shadowed by a painful encounter with his troubled former collaborator, the Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke)—renders a simple role poignantly complex, capturing the composer’s practical solidity, compassionate tact, and fierce pride. As for Kevin O’Leary, if he weren’t already well known as a reality-TV panelist, he’d be recognized more plainly for the etched-in-stone authority of his performance in “Marty Supreme,” as a raging tycoon who’s both benefactor and nemesis.

Casting

This is the first year that the Academy is giving an award for casting, and the timing is perfect, because it’s a branch of filmmaking which has been exceptionally distinguished this year. One of the most cheering movie phenomena of 2025 is the prevalence of nonprofessional actors mingling freely with stars, as in “Marty Supreme,” “One Battle After Another,” and “The Secret Agent.” As for “Eephus,” there are no stars at all; instead there are pros and amateurs on and around the baseball field where the movie takes place, including the independent-film luminaries Keith Poulson and Theodore Bouloukos, the “Uncut Gems” alumni Keith William Richards and Wayne Diamond, the longtime baseball announcer Joe Castiglione, and the retired baseball player Bill (Spaceman) Lee. “Peter Hujar’s Day,” meanwhile, is not only one of the year’s best adapted screenplays, it also has a cast—of just two, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, as the titular photographer and the writer who asks him about his day—who inhabit their characters—and the 1974 setting—with fierce attention and mischievous freedom.

International Feature Film

The Academy’s system in this category is misguided, and not only because its nominees come not from the Academy itself but from official boards from individual countries, but also because nominees in the category can include films that haven’t yet been released here. (The documentary category has the same problem.) That said, international filmmaking is in feeble shape, partly because of the jambalaya of international co-productions, partly because of the inroads of television aesthetics, and partly because of the cloistered aestheticism of self-conscious art-house cinema. The greatness of “The Secret Agent” is in its self-transcending realism—an aesthetic that’s as daring in its details as it is inconspicuous in its compositional refinement. This is an art not of depiction but of revelation. “Misericordia” is similarly a seismic art, of a world of apparent order trembling eruptively with the force of desire. Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” set in Lusaka, Zambia, is a work of fervently critical realism that subtly but decisively shifts its tone, at crucial moments, to the symbolic realm. “The Empire” is one of the year’s most outlandishly imaginative films. Bruno Dumont pursues a harshly realistic exploration of small-town politics, romance, and family life on the northern coast of France by the most unexpected means possible—of a “Star Wars” parody featuring the war between good and evil, involving a pair of massive vessels, one below the sea, the other in the sky.

I grudgingly include “Nouvelle Vague,” Richard Linklater’s superb off-Hollywood film, which—and I say this with affection—could as easily have been made on a studio backlot as on the computer-doctored streets of Paris. Yet the upside is the inclusion, with an easy conscience, of the American director Rob Tregenza’s Norwegian film “The Fishing Place,” which is mainly in Norwegian and German and which is among the most aesthetically accomplished and psychologically intricate Second World War films of recent years, a worthy companion to Lou Ye’s woefully underrated “Saturday Fiction.” And, again, worth noting that Sophie Fillières’s “This Life of Mine,” had it been released here last year, would have been on this list.

Documentary Feature Film

The system is screwed up: the Academy grants eligibility to documentaries yet unreleased here if they’ve won a festival prize or have been nominated by their country for Best International Feature. “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” opened yesterday, and “Natchez” opens January 30th; if neither is nominated this year, will they be eligible next year, on the basis of their 2026 release dates? Both “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” and “Suburban Fury” are one-on-one interview films, drastically different in subject and in method, but similar in their directors’ bold, necessity-driven originality in their approach to the format. “Afternoons of Solitude,” in which the director Albert Serra followed the torero Andrés Roca Rey through three years of bullfights, is an observational film that, by means of precise and probing camerawork and a deftly handled relationship between the filmmaker and the bullfighter, redefines the very nature of cinematic observation while also providing a view of the sport that, horrific as it may be, also exalts its mortal glories. ♦