Oakland plays itself in Sorry to Bother You, unlike in Black Panther, but its message extends to the whole country. A damning portrait of things as they are in the US, this movie’s accurate and wild version of the present moment is Brechtian — alienated, sardonic, and disreputable. Boots Riley’s vision, which combines Repo Man and Idiocracy yet remains wholly his own, encompasses shit jobs, union organizing, and horrible tech billionaires who turn people into lifelong slaves and captive half humans desperate for rebellion.

To that end, First Reformed is daring and unrelenting — it searches for and pinpoints real harm. Ten people walked out of the theater where I saw it, most of them Schrader’s age. I think they left because the film’s intensity was too much in a world where they had the option of seeing Book Club at a theater down the street.

There is a slight upward trajectory in Let the Sunshine In, from the obnoxious banker (Xavier Beauvois) Binoche is dating at the beginning to a manic drunken actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle) to the quieter men at the end, including Depardieu and Alex Descas as a gallery owner. The film imperceptibly slides toward maturity and becomes more profound but less eventful, as Binoche settles into calmness without giving up her quest for love. In the early scenes of the film, Denis seemed to parody the work of macho French directors or French cinema in general, with the rude banker demanding “gluten-free olives” at a bar and giving the bartender and Binoche detailed instructions about everything else. The banker also mentions “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and alienation, a parody of French socialists who sold out to finance and got so rich they had time to worry about the invisible enemy, gluten, in foodstuffs that are free of it.

“Cinema is an event seen through a keyhole,” wrote Jean Cocteau, which André Bazin points out in an essay from 1951 called “Theater and Cinema.” The Hotel Artemis Quad lobby situation was an event that gave my friend and me a keyhole view into the world of Hollywood film publicity in New York, but that was not what Cocteau had in mind. Les parents terribles was an important film to Bazin because for him it proved that filming a play did not have to be uncinematic. This was a theoretical argument in postwar France, where directors like Bresson asserted that the theater and the cinema were distinct media that should have nothing to do with each other. By directing his own play for the screen just as he had staged it, and with the same actors, Cocteau, Bazin claimed, had shown that filmed drama did not have to be stagey, even if the action was restricted to a couple of sets.

The action, however, was not memorable to me. It was too seamless. I lost interest in the perfection of the film’s technical achievement, which I never doubted for a minute would be anything but complete and astonishing. I longed for just one moment where something wasn’t perfect, to remind me that humans had made this study of improvised naval success. Mostly I remember the image of Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy’s face in a CPAP mask left over from whichever of Nolan’s Batman movies he was in. When soldier Harry Styles survived it all, it was as though “the enemy” had been vanquished so that the real Styles could leave the set, fly to Los Angeles, hop in a car, and drive between palm trees singing the song from Titanic on “Carpool Karaoke.”

She and the film are nice to the nuns and priests who are her teachers but who are people too, with real lives and problems of their own. One of them (Lois Smith) sees right through Lady Bird. “You clearly love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah Joan tells her, in a line I had trouble imagining a real person saying. [...]

A little girl (Dafne Keen) shoplifts Pringles and what looks like a can of Four Loko Frost from a gas-station convenience store in Logan, which takes place in the year 2029. Movies have told us our future was dystopian, but it never occurred to me that things would get so bad that Four Loko would still be around a decade from now. Wolverine, by 2029, has deteriorated, too. His claws don’t retract as quickly. Working as a limo driver in a black suit and tie, he’s slower to recover from his wounds. Hugh Jackman, who also has to play a younger re-cloned Wolverine double, plays the original Logan as a Humphrey Bogart character, world-weary and disinclined to get involved.

I’m not interested in animated feature films even though I fully understand that Miyazaki is a great artist and I have been told more than once that it is in things like WALL-E and Toy Story 3 that we will locate the zeitgeist. As a child of the terrifying Watership Down era, I am surprised anew each time a Lego Batman Movie or a Coco captures the imagination of anyone I know over 12. Once, a while ago, I was walking to a two-screen movie theater down the street from me to see a French movie called Strayed. As I got closer I noticed an unexpectedly long line of adult couples waiting to buy tickets. Wow, I thought to myself, there sure are a lot of André Téchiné fans in this neighborhood. When I got to the theater I saw that Finding Nemo was playing on the other screen.

Lately the acting in TV commercials has gotten really good. The other night I saw an ad for some company that helps people get rid of timeshares they don’t want anymore and I thought, Man, that was great, really affecting. That could have been an episode of Togetherness on HBO, if that was still on. Car commercials are particularly satisfying these days. Thirty-second-long one-acts with movie-level production design and cinematography, each one is a humanist masterpiece featuring quality acting that fits right in with streaming drama. In one, a wedding party gets caught in the rain and they can’t walk to the outdoor altar so they have to jump in their mini-SUV to get there. You really get a feel for the relationships between these four people in that thirty seconds. Car manufacturers know our little victories are hard-won. Automakers just get us. In other ads, the family drama of auto insurance plays out just as insightfully.

Coppola’s restraint, her lack of concern for character development or backstory or psychology — her good qualities as a film director — frustrate critics. Winning Best Director at Cannes for The Beguiled somehow only added to her image as a dilettante. As something of a Hollywood deserter, with each new film she makes Coppola finds out that there really isn’t any refuge from the things she has left behind. The rich will always be with her, only slightly less of a problem for her than they are for everybody else. It is to her credit that she understands them, even as her elegance restrains her. If she elides the harsh truths that underpin the fading lives of her glamorous characters, her oblique approach does not save them from moral rot. Their eventual destruction is off-screen, indicated by shots of the ransacked interiors where they once celebrated their privilege.