Early in Uncut Gems, writer-directors Josh and Benny Safdie (they co-wrote with Ronald Bronstein) gift us, and themselves, a visual metaphor that is simply too irresistible to pass up. After a prologue set in the blood-diamond mines of Ethiopia, a telephoto lens zooms deep into the crevices of an iridescent gem, as though excavating the soul of the diamond. The image becomes an increasingly amorphous, abstract canvas of raw colors and even rawer conundrums, an obliquely sublime carnival of sheer sensory overload. Before, that is, it finally mutates into the innards of a scan of protagonist Harold Ratner’s colon. A wonderfully grotesque metaphor for the film’s ability to find beauty in the detestable and atrociousness in the beautiful, it’s also a recognition of the ease with which the audience might overlook the violence that undergirds the artifacts of late capitalism. The cloacal excursion is a surprisingly pure encapsulation of the film itself, a sojourn into this man’s psychological innards that expose the webs of social entanglement that both construct him as himself and that invite him to believe that he can actually mobilize them for his gain before finally setting him adrift in a void of delusional egotism.

The film? It works pretty well. It’s a bit of a pity that it never develops beyond this initial, beautifully lurid metaphor, or finding variations on it. I can’t help but feel that something got lost, an intangible something missing somewhere between the anus and the mine, betwixt the film’s play of the absurd, the wonderful, and the violent. The Safdie Brothers’ Good Time was nearly my favorite film of 2017, a scintillating acid-bath of 21^st century brutality and a frayed raw-nerve of psychological and architectural disarray. Uncut Gems is bigger, has more polish, and is at times more intoxicating, but it essentially repeats and in some ways reduces the formula, and like the gem at the center of the tale, it sometimes feels a bit more like the crystalline craftsmanship hides a black hole. It plays at larger thematic and geopolitical concerns, but these were already present in the earlier film, lodged between a dye pack and a hard place, and making the gestures explicit doesn’t necessarily make the film itself smarter. While it hits the ground running, it also has only, essentially, one tonal note to play from beginning to end. Despite the opening metaphor, Uncut Gems sometimes seems to work like its protagonist, so blinded by the rush of its own momentum and the thrill of its own formal beauty that it cannot quite see the full picture, let alone recognize how trapped in holding pattern it may be.

The rush is a rush, admittedly, and the thrill is, for the most part, honestly earned. This is a film that does everything in its power to evoke the choking atmosphere of sheer possibility, the way that the belief that we have an open field of play actually compresses us and squeezes the life out of us. It has a forbidding forcefield of a sonic palate that somehow manages to constrict us in the act of opening itself up, like a carnivorous plant releasing spores of sparkling metallic dust drawing any intrepid wanderer into its vise. Daniel Lopatin’s exquisite synthesizer score often seems like a demonic emanation from the gem itself, an alien artifact that is seldom seen but which organizes lines of human physical and mental energy in its name. The gem, like the score, weighs on us even when it remains invisible. When Howard cuts through the New York City streets at a pace between a strut and a shuffle, unable to stop or even look in another direction, the metallic glisten of the score takes on a gravitational quality, ever pulling him toward a forward that is actually just a spiral.

 Add to that a sound mix that summons a swarm of voices and competing dialogues always threatening Howard’s supremacy in the frame, and the film starts to seem like an anti-Altman film that utilizes a dense, heterogeneous soundscape not to spread out and wander (as Altman does) but to narrow in on us and imply tightening forces that are only semi-visible but that sculpt and shrink its protagonists’ field of possibility nonetheless. The Darius Khondji cinematography is also pretty thorny, a harsh melding of vicious realism and garish ethereality, New York City greasiness and gossamer glow. For a film that traces unexpected lines of connection between all forms of matter and the entrails of one man’s belief that he can transcend them by riding the chaos of the international market to his betterment, this is stellar, pointed filmmaking. Each of these tools evokes the sense of raw potential in the air, some dormant energy all around us that invites us to search for it and weaponize it even as it is secretly using us, like a strange shimmer beckoning you that is secretly a shiv at your throat.

If I say “pagan horror cinema” to you, dear film viewer, and it doesn’t automatically raise the specter of The Wicker Man, I am not sure that you are operating on writer-director Ari Aster’s wavelength, nor, I think, within his intended audience. That cinematic relationship is both the film’s personal test and its cruel inheritance, a horror lineage that bestows a queasy moral vista that the film very evidently wishes to surpass. The schematic reading of any pagan horror film (which is to say, films hardly trying to hide their indebtedness to The Wicker Man) is that they allegorize the dormant aftershocks of Paganism on modern Christianity, typically coding the latter as individualistic and civilization and the former as communal and essentially transgressive in its refusal of modern liberal norms. And, inevitably, they tend to find the latter mortally terrifying, especially when the pagan religion is, gasp, lead by women rather than men.

Films in this mode partially relieve the moral dubiousness of meditating on the supremacy of the modern West by only explicitly comparing it to essentially European pasts (otherwise, Midsommar bears an unmistakable ideological kinship with Eli Roth’s ludicrously racist Green Inferno, even if they are aesthetic and affective polarities). But while this blunts Midsommar’s immediate sense of ethical indiscretion, the film’s vestiges of more overtly Eurocentric visions are still readily apparent. Midsommar tests itself against The Wicker Man by upending and disfiguring the original film’s obviously dubious gender politics and skepticism about communal life, but, as I wrote above, it also inherits a debt that it can’t fully break from. Midsommar would dearly like us to know that it is skeptical of modern Western social forms, more overtly so than The Wicker Man or most pagan horror films, but that doesn’t overtake the slow-creeping terror with which it treats the non-individualistic Western past.

Joker is a portrait of a lost soul waywardly wandering his way through a meat thresher called 1980s Gotham City. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a clown who dreams of being a stand-up comedian, who cares for and lives with his physically and perhaps mentally ill mother Penny (Frances Conroy), and who suffers from a rare and unnamed neurological disease that makes him laugh when he gets nervous. When he is fired from his job for (unthinkingly, which is telling of his personality) bringing a gun to a gig at a children’s hospital, he kills three drunk Wayne Enterprises stockbrokers on the subway, nominally to stop them from assaulting a woman and, more immediately, from attacking him, but ultimately to let out his slowly encroaching agitation at the world. While Fleck starts a relationship with Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz) and worships aged television talk-show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), Joker strangles Arthur in a swampy miasma of social disarray and simmering economic and cultural tensions that look suspiciously like those effecting the United States circa 2019, and which have done nothing to abate in the ensuing years.

First things first: It’s not actually original, except within the heavily circumscribed container of the comic book film, either in its loose meditations on mental illness, or what Fleck, like Travis Bickle before him, would probably call “urban rot,” or its very Scorsese-esque depiction of a facsimile of post-‘70s New York, or in its rehashing of Batman’s most famous, and most negative-mirror-image-of-himself, antagonist. Joker really, and unapologetically, is just an inferior rehash of Taxi Driver meets The King of Comedy, and its strengths are inseparable from the viscous brutality and nervous energy of those two classics of frayed New York discombobulation and neoliberal deregulation.

The thing is: Joker is a pretty pungent pistol-whip of a film. While copping from Taxi Driver is old hat in the world of “serious” and “not-so-serious” (and “why-so-serious?”) cinema, King of Comedy remains mostly uncharted territory, even all these years later. Like that acid-bath parody of domesticated masculinity, Joker is a shiv of a character study, from Joaquin Phoenix’s toxically limber evocation of self-destructive animosity to De Niro’s own exploration of his own cinematic history in his appearance as Franklin, the embodiment of Rupert Pupkin’s wildest milquetoast desires. I didn’t think writer-director Todd Phillips (cowriting with Scott Silver), he of The Hangover fame, had it in him.

With its spectral mood and sinister diagnosis of 21^st century social restlessness, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows was one of the early success stories of the A24 horror boon. Its atmospheric texture, evoking an oneiric gloss on reality, made it one of the patron saints of the so-called “elevated horror” explosion, which rode a crest of stylistic experimentalism to examine undercurrents of human trauma and dejection. A mere half-decade later, by 2019, elevated horror already felt bloated, no longer an exploratory rebellion against the corporate debasement of ‘00s horror but a codified set of rules and regulations, an examinable, even scientifically replicable, formula and a self-immolating object. Like much of late ‘10s culture, it increasingly felt like an attempt to solidify the status quo in the guise of intervening in it.

Within that context, let no one accuse Mitchell of resting on his laurels with Under the Silver Lake. Rather than extending the genre trappings of It Follows, Mitchell emphasizes its mood of extraordinary ennui and cyclical, ever-gestating confusion, figuring the modern world as a quiet, drawn-out apocalypse, a walking corpse. It recognizes the earlier film’s poetic evocation of suburban detritus set against a backdrop of industrial aimlessness as the real heart beneath the (too obvious) metaphors for sexual transmission. Like its predecessor, Under the Silver Lake is a deeply woozy film, a story about lives running in circles that can only lead to a puzzle never to be solved, and like its predecessor, it positively vibrates with both internal instability and the emptiness of that very energy.

The Irishman is both a stern rebuke and a sober reckoning. After the breathtaking but ultimately tiring The Wolf of Wall Street, with its grotesquely flippant energy (grotesque in good ways as well), and the sublimely adventurous but sometimes hermetic Silence, The Irishman is a self-conscious homecoming. It announces itself as a return to the primordial breeding ground from which Scorsese’s career came. On one hand, it is a return to form promising a severe sense of finality. It tethers its director’s fifty years of cinematic releases together and ravages them, burning the director’s less critical supporters with righteous indignation. On the other hand, The Irishman is also one foggy four-hour anti-climax, a swamp of characters who seem unable to think or act creatively at all. It is a portrait of the mob as an American bureaucracy, not an American battleground. It is a homecoming as an act of slow, painful penance, a return to the most fertile ground of Scorsese’s career in order to scorch the earth.

Scorsese’s films often chase and desire dizzying heights of cinematic bliss, from the apocalyptic panic of Bringing Out the Dead to the slippery, Warner Bros. zeal of After Hours, a trend that reaches its apotheosis in the impossibly manic “Sunday, May 11, 1980” scene in Goodfellas. While these heaving highs of pure cinematic muscle are inevitably chased by brutal come-downs, the man’s films often court the very vitality and vivacity they ostensibly want to redress. Whatever comeuppance they insist on, you leave feeling satiated, even torqued. The Irishman, conversely, is pure holding pattern. There’s no up or down, no growth and decay, no cinematic evolution and destruction, just a tired old man who seems to have been out of sorts in his very body decades before his nominal decrepitude. In Steven Zaillian’s screenplay (adapting Charles Brandt’s nonfiction work I Heard You Paint Houses), Robert De Niro’s Frank Sheeran is not so much a broken man as a stillborn one, a guy whose slowly crumbling self belies the hollow husk he always was.

Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film about the melancholy of desolate spaces and the overpowering intimacy that can take up residence in them. A sensory romance to rival Wong Kar-wai’s aching, radiant exploration of unstated affection In the Mood for Love, or Alain Resnais’ oneiric portrait of fractured connection Hiroshima mon Amour, Portrait is the rare romance that explores the very nature of its genre. Portrait is really a meditation on the form of connection and love itself, on the way it breaks the self into many dispersed parts, the means by which it creeps up on you, how it takes over the soul and consumes the mind. Fundamentally, the film asks what it means to relate to another person. It is certainly, in this case, a “queer” film, but the relevant sense of that term is less that the two lovers are women than that the film troubles any stable or foundational understanding of what desire itself ought to look like. And I do mean look like. In addition to bewildering any conventional desire to label the film a specifically “lesbian film,” Portrait offers romance in a simultaneously expansive and fragile sense, as something that occurs in the gap between the mind and the eye. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an uncommonly perceptive exploration of perception itself.

Nominally, the “looker” is Marianne (Noémie Merlant), commissioned by a Countess (Valeria Golino) to paint a portrait of her daughter Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), which we intuit is de rigeur  prior to an aristocrat’s impending marriage, in this case to a nobleman of Milan, who Héloïse has never met. Héloïse cannot know that she is being painted, which would indicate her agreement to the marriage, which she steadfastly refuses. She is only home from her chosen life in a convent because her older sister has recently committed suicide. Under the pretense of being a companion, which becomes the actuality of being a friend and lover, Marianne accompanies Héloïse on daily cliffside walks while she discreetly memorizes the contours of her face for a portrait she completes behind closed doors. However, when Marianne completes her portrait, she refuses to maintain the façade and tells Héloïse, who rejects the painting not, as we expect, out of a refusal of her impending husband’s desire but out of a desire to court and cultivate the beauty located in the artist’s desiring eye. The painting, Héloïse finds, doesn’t capture her fire, so to speak, nor the fire of Marianne’s attraction to her. Knowing that the painting reflects a desire of Marianne’s that remains untapped, both for observing Héloïse and for the possibility of creating with her, Héloïse decides, willfully and for the first time, to pose for Marianne.