[...] he once walked from Munich to Paris because he thought doing so would save the life of Lotte Eisner, the German film historian and critic, who was ill at the time. Herzog completed that journey, Eisner lived another nine years, and Herzog published a diary of his cross-continent trek, called Of Walking in Ice. When he’d passed through the town of Sontheim, Germany, Herzog wrote, “Spending the night is going to be difficult, the area is bad. Industry, smells of sewage, silo fodder, and cow dung.” A German Romantic but also a realist to the core, Herzog knows that epic journeys stink. He makes them because, as he told Les Blank in Burden of Dreams, “We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.” The sentiment calls to mind the sights and smells of his earlier trip more than what he found in the Amazon. In his films, as in his life, Herzog has crisscrossed vast distances to avoid bovine complacency and its associated stench.

Before and during the festival, about fifty films are screened during the day for the press. I saw forty of them. I missed one because of a therapy appointment. (Even though I am a film critic, I hope to be able to have normal relationships someday.) I missed another because I had a hangover and couldn’t face the hour-long trip to Lincoln Center from my apartment in Brooklyn. Two I paid to see, and went on Sunday afternoons after buying tickets using the festival’s complicated and anxiety-inducing website, with its countdown clock.

Here are some facts about my mother, which also describe Dorothea in this film. My mother was an ex–graphic designer who divorced my father when I was very young. She owned a Volkswagen Beetle. She smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and they killed her in her sixties. She would listen to my records when I wasn’t around, trying to figure out what I liked about them. She preferred Talking Heads to Black Flag. She was lonely, never meeting any interesting men in our small town, and she was always reading a book from the library. Interested in progress and concerned about the future, she tried to teach me to be decent and kind while the Dead Kennedys and Joy Division were teaching me to be insolent and moody. I, in turn, spent time at a nearby university meeting hip older girls, like Gerwig’s Abbie, who worshipped David Bowie, and sneaking out to music shows in bars where they’d let in teenagers with IDs so fake they wouldn’t have fooled a blind man.

All of a sudden I became aware, or I remembered, that there is a better world somewhere else, that being in this one, where we were waiting for The Purge: Election Year to shock us, was a waste of the time allotted to me in this life and that, if I were going to see a movie, what time I have would be better spent with a form of cinema that acknowledges something other than the bloodshed and mayhem into which the world has fallen. The image of Homayoun Ershadi as the suicidal man in Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry came to me. It shook me awake. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I wanted out. I wanted to live.

The lights went down and trailers unspooled for a bunch of other movies, each one as dumb as the next, and then The Purge: Election Year began, and we sat there and watched it. Part of the time, at least, I saw it through the lens of Kiarostami, as if I were wearing glasses that made the film uglier. The rest of the time I just gave myself over to the movie’s sardonic portrayal of an out-of-control America led by murderous right-wing kooks, where foreign tourists put on Abraham Lincoln masks and kill the poor for fun.

Staying in Iran after the revolution and making films nowhere else for over two decades, however, meant Kiarostami was able to continue the work he had started in the 1970s, which concentrated on children, classroom life, families, domestic spaces, and the aftermath of natural disasters, all the things Iranian cinema was allowed to show. Kiarostami forged a unique style of contemporary neorealism and wed it to a new kind of consciousness of the cinema as medium. Thinking about his films while watching an American film leads to a sobering realization: all the things that Kiarostami could not show in his films became the only things Hollywood filmmakers chose to show in theirs. What he showed in his films were the things abandoned by Hollywood: conversation, friendship, understanding, compassion, and empathy.

When watching Kiarostami films, one also has a great sense of another kind of freedom not found in Hollywood movies, nor in most European art films: freedom from the creeping realization that a film we are watching was made by a cynical shit or a self-deluded megalomaniac. Kiarostami’s films were not responding to the formulaic considerations Hollywood labors under in pursuit of big opening weekends, and their maker was not seeking fame or awards by making them. His loose stories, contemplative style, and the absence of certain plot points and backstory free us from this sense of manipulation even as we are patiently led to endings that are quite often emotionally shattering.

Watching a movie in a movie theater is an act of collective loneliness. Shirin makes that loneliness cathartic, but by not showing the film within the film, Kiarostami avoids transforming it into entertainment. The power of our individual response to entertainment is itself the film’s subject. The film is unfinished and in a sense does not really exist without people to experience it. The audience makes the film with the filmmaker, a central tenet of Kiarostami’s filmmaking, which he often alluded to in interviews.

A children’s movie about how great science is, The Martian has a pragmatic message for budding astronauts: you solve one problem, then another, and see if you survive. The film’s obsession with years-long plans imparts a Soviet feel to the space program depicted, but its sunny optimism keeps the movie all-American. Not once do we believe The Martian will end with a shot of Matt Damon’s skeleton half-buried in sand. Maybe the film is so bright because the days are thirty-nine minutes longer on Mars than on Earth, the same thirty-nine minutes that should have been cut from this Friday-less Robinson Crusoe. Kristen Wiig, however, is on hand to show that girls aren’t into The Lord of the Rings.

A fairy tale of lean-in capitalism about a Cinderella without a prince, David O. Russell’s Joy recasts the crazy family of a Capra comedy with stellar toxicity. Joy’s (Jennifer Lawrence’s) undermining relatives are the selfish American clan par excellence, claiming to know everything about Joy’s business while sabotaging her future. Robert De Niro and Isabella Rossellini, playing evil-universe versions of themselves as Joy’s father and stepmother, delight in their performances as fickle scoffers.

Joy is a natural inventor prone to epiphanies about household products — the film could be called A Beautiful Mop. Her ingenuity and tenacity save her from a life of drudgery, though by the end her victory seems hollow. The film, busy with fake TV soap operas and flashbacks, doesn’t imagine another life for her, except maybe settling down with a cable-TV executive (Bradley Cooper) who lectures her and is wrong half the time. The mitigating factors in her struggle are that she can turn a profit, employ her friends, and help younger women manufacture improved lint brushes. Set in the early 1990s, Joy suggests these were the consolations working-class Gen Xers could hope for.

[...] In film and television, his distinctive oeuvre has obsessed cinephiles, fans of the outré, and film academics, giving rise to the adjective Lynchian, a word, as Lim points out, that many have tried to define but that the culture at large has decided means “weird.” Lim boils the Lynchian down to “abysmal terror, piercing beauty, convulsive sorrow.” Lynch’s movies, he writes, “give form to the submerged traumas and desires of our age.”

Romero cast an African American in the lead, and he shifted the horror genre’s dynamic, aligning it with black-and-white anti-war documentaries like Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig, also released in 1968, and distinguishing it from the lurid color horror movies Roger Corman and Hammer Films had been turning out up till then. Those films made certain concessions to the film industry; Night of the Living Dead did not. This was an American horror movie, so it needed no English accents or familiar character actors. It was grim and unflinching, showing average citizens, played by average people, eating the arms and intestines of their fellow townspeople. Romero drove home this central point — that a zombie-infested America differed from the status quo only in degree, not in kind — by ending his film with realistic-looking fake news photos depicting his characters’ banal atrocities.