As many literal-minded people pointed out, 2019 was not in fact the last year of movies. Many good films have been made since then. Last year great films from all over the world were released in the US. A random list of disparate and original films seen on American screens in 2024 includes La Chimera, About Dry Grasses, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, The Settlers, A Different Man, Universal Language, and, yes, Megalopolis. One of the best movies of the year summed it all up, not just in its title but in subject matter and style—in its whole approach to what a movie is and can be in the mid-2020s: Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. It’s a film about a certain kind of filmmaking being done under certain conditions that seem, in their way, more perilous than the ones under which Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was made.

I think 2019 will come to be seen in film history as a golden year and an inflection point, the same the way 1939 and its movies exist in the popular imagination as a series of classics constantly open to new investigation and debate—not just The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but also The Rules of the Game (of course), Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, Love Affair, Stagecoach and Young Mr. Lincoln, and at least a couple dozen others. The 2019 version of this inventory includes Parasite, The Irishman, Uncut Gems, Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Souvenir, Ash Is Purest White, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and as in 1939, a number of other films whose reputations will grow and wane and grow again—Peterloo, Atlantics, La Flor, Midsommar. The films of 1939 arrived at a time of burgeoning right-wing authoritarianism, and 2019 was similarly set on a precipice.

The difference between 2019 and now is that films from six years ago already seem the product of a different world. As it says onscreen in a film made at another turning point in history, “That era has passed. Nothing that belongs to it exists anymore.”

In Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” which is about an automated torture device, Kafka writes that “we used to have to adjust a few things by hand, but from now on the machine will work all by itself.” I think this is exactly what people dread about AI and why they recoil from it, and also why large corporations are so excited about it. It is an aspect of the kind of fascism Kafka predicted. It removes the human element from the cinema just as the tech industry in general is removing showbiz from entertainment.

Here the news, entertainment, and the government all merge into a pool of toxic sludge. Because of AI, we could already picture a future in which another pandemic happens while we, as a species on lockdown, pass the hours in isolation viewing subpar art made by hallucination-prone nonentities. Today, videos of ICE raids scored to AI-generated nü-metal songs follow AI-generated jpegs of Donald Trump as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, calling to mind “Ride of the Valkyries” from that film’s score, solidifying the connection to the Wagner-loving Third Reich. We live under a mode of dehumanized production where the most human element is the images of dead Palestinians that show up in our feeds between the latest iterations of the official slop.

The confluence of digital projection, streaming channels, AI, and the alleged death of criticism often makes it seem like we are dealing with the destruction of a worldview. I believe that this is indeed the goal of the corporations that control the studios and publishers. I don’t think it means that people don’t want to read criticism. What they don’t want to read are writers who are afraid of their editors, who curry favor with Hollywood, and who want to be influencers. Critics like that don’t consider one of the most important and necessary things about criticism today, that “struggle,” as Noam Chomsky put it, is always a matter of fighting “the business world.”

That should be foundational. The novelist Don DeLillo said the same thing in 2005, in an interview with a French horror-film magazine:

Writers must oppose systems. It’s important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments…. I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.

Crazy Rich Asians

If you go to a bachelorette party on an island and the other guests put a huge bloody fish head on your pillow, you are in a horror movie, not a rom-com. Maybe at this point in the history of capitalism there’s not much difference. Crazy Rich Asians looks more like a glossy tourist magazine produced for an international economics summit than a movie.

While Henry Golding just misses the mark at being an actual Anglo-Asian Cary Grant (maybe next time), Constance Wu, playing an Asian American everywoman, comes off generic, a paper doll dressed first as a professor, then as a Disney princess. Among the too numerous cast, Ronny Chieng and Victoria Loke stand out as a sarcastic, mean-spirited young husband and wife who despise each other, unlike the unmemorable Gemma Chan and Pierre Png, who play a more prominent, unfunny version of the same thing. I would gladly watch an entire movie about Chieng and Loke’s shallow, disrespectful, well-dressed irritants wasting their fortune while struggling to maintain their status.

Taste of Cherry uses the cinema to figure out if life is worth living, a hard question that seems superficial because so many films so easily reach the conclusion that it is. They show us a wedding, a happy family, a good job, a lottery winner. They indulge our desire to see things work out for the best. Kiarostami does none of that. Taste of Cherry excludes, cutting away plot and backstory, two things that can bog down a film. It goes in circles and meanders, the concision of its ninety-nine minutes becoming clear only in retrospect. It is meant to conceal, even to frustrate. Instead of tying the story up neatly, its ending does something else.

After Kiarostami's death, Mohsen Makhmalbaf—his fellow member of what is sometimes called the Iranian New Wave, who in Close-up plays himself, the filmmaker whom Sabzian was arrested for impersonating—summed up his colleague’s life and career for the BBC: “He could show you how friendship could take you out of loneliness.” The title of the 1987 film that begins the director’s Koker Trilogy asks the main Kiarostamian question: Where Is the Friend’s House? The following two films in the trilogy, And Life Goes On (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), take place in the aftermath of the devastating 1990 Manjil-Rudbar earthquake. Those films put Kiarostami on the road to Taste of Cherry, in which he examines the precariousness of life without the backdrop of natural disaster. In Taste of Cherry, the calamity is private and subjective. We are never told what it is. Perhaps it is life itself.

Asia Kate Dillon, a nonbinary actor with a neatly shorn head, would have made a better foe for Wick, but Dillon is instead constricted to Helmut Newton–esque slinking and posing in tight black pencil skirts. Ian McShane’s Winston, a traitorous hotelier, sleepwalks through his role like he’s playing the Most Interesting Man in the World in the Dos Equis beer ads. As incessant gunfire in the lobby and corridors destroys his hotel, McShane responds with ever faker nonchalant bullshit acting, mirroring the overelaboration of everything else in the film. The John Wick franchise has an official weapons supplier, but the film’s target audience isn’t gun nuts. This is a movie for corporate travel agents upset that it costs so much to stay in hotels.

Here, the film’s 180 really kicks in. We are supposed to feel pity for Cao, a man who is getting millions in tax subsidies from the state of Ohio. Then American Factory wrenches us again, like in Modern Times, with a supertitle at the end that informs us that by 2030, 375 million people around the world will have lost their jobs to automation, unions or not. Why this ideological muddle? Because this is cinema verité in the service of power, not people, made to win awards. A success story in the film, about an unemployed forklift operator named Jill who has to live in her sister’s basement until she gets a job at Fuyao and moves into a tiny apartment by herself, turns sour when she’s fired for bringing up safety violations. As for the Chinese workers in Dayton, they only look happy when their new American friends are teaching them to shoot pistols and shotguns in their backyards, where they can pose for photos holding firearms and wearing cool suits.

In Milton of Vivos, a fairly young man who’d led a life of hardship and abuse detailed his upbringing on the streets with a single mother. His bunker was one of a series of many others in South Dakota that look like mini-airplane hangars in a field. Milton’s belongings were scattered about in big piles, giving the windowless undivided space the feel of a hoarder house yet to be filled, as if Milton had moved from his car into a warehouse and now had plenty of room for storage. A bed was in there, somewhere. Milton had decided to get away from everyone else. Now he lived like a homeless person, but in a military shelter where he’d scraped up enough money for a 99-year sublease. Offering subleases does not speak of a firm belief in the apocalypse on the part of his landlord, the Vivos Group. Milton’s bunker could house two dozen other people. He did not seem like a prepper so much as a lost soul.

The Platform is a dystopic horror film from Spain that I watched dubbed but also with the English subtitles on because of the sirens outside. It is a disgusting, cruel film that seems written by a smart eighth-grader. A pallet of Michelin-star restaurant food descends through hundreds of floors of a prison, one floor at a time, in this reactionary microcosm of class relations. Prisoners fight over scraps with no concern for those below them. Director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia is so nihilistic he will undoubtedly make the leap to Hollywood, especially since his cynical banquet leaves room for religiosity as the last course. Spoiler alert: the dog dies.