Rachel Kushner

The greatest of the “kitchen sink dramas” and my favorite film of the British New Wave, even if it was made by a Canadian. Really, The Leather Boys is a perfect movie, a profound and moving (and very funny) drama about working-class life in England in the early 1960s, and about motorcycles and “rocker” subculture at the infamous Ace Cafe, and finally, about men and illicit love.

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In this 1964 wonder, jazz great Abbey Lincoln plays Josie, a preacher’s daughter, lonely and single, a schoolteacher already of marrying age when she meets Duff Anderson, who lays railroad tracks outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Josie’s father looks down on Duff, who is neither religious nor educated nor willing to accept the terms of Black obeisance in white society, as the preacher himself has done. This film is tenderly and magnificently of its time, as it delves into questions that are still unanswered, unsolved, about race, autonomy, dignity and how to be free.

This trenchant and satiric masterpiece, about the death of a model worker in post-revolutionary Cuba, dead reckons with the deepest absurdities of the socialist bureaucracy. If you’ve ever been to Cuba, you might understand. If you’ve never been to Cuba, this film will make clear the principal lesson, that a corpse is nothing compared to having all of your correct documentation in place.

Wake in Fright, first released in 1971, is a bizarre and hair-raising and totally absorbing movie about dereliction and spectacular ruin in a mining town in the Australian outback. It does not merely shock, however, but rather stains whoever sees it: Its residue of “wrong turns” clings to the viewer, too.

The original title of this Lattuada romp was I’ll Take Her Like a Father, and what ensues is even more illicit than you’re picturing. A real-estate speculator makes a deal to marry a landowner’s daughter, sight unseen, who turns out to be an aphasic woman-child, probably suffering from autism. She’s also smoldering hot, in a baby-doll nightie, and famished for sex. In Poor Things this setup leads to self-discovery and independence as the character Bella Baxter grows up. In Bambina the character stays in her pre-language state, horny and grunting, and the real-estate speculator leaves language behind to join her there. Bliss!

Anna, about a pregnant teenage girl living on the streets of Rome, is the mother of all films about Italy in the 1970s. Everything is shown, including Anna in the shower with lice shampoo, and yet the film is full of mystery, as if its scenes contain invisible secrets that bear intense scrutiny and never entirely divulge themselves. Every time I watch it, I’m transfixed anew.

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I’ll never forget the first time I saw this film, on television as a child, and how it made me feel. The film is a world inhabited by children, and there is high comedy and delight there. And then, late in the film, we come to understand that one of the children is being beaten. The reality is as harsh as the moment when the tough boys smash the red balloon in The Red Balloon, which is small-time training for Small Change. In the end, when the teacher shares his thoughts on children and cruelty, it’s magnificent and unforgettable.

Should Nelly, played by Isabelle Huppert, stay with her educated, bourgeois, uptight and angry husband, or should she go off with leather-clad lowlife Gérard Depardieu, who is good in bed but not for much else? If it’s no surprise to guess which she chooses—as Loulou’s mother says, “If she’s so nice, why is she with you?”—this film is still full of unexpected delights.

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Pialat’s “Bresson film,” in the sense that it is an adaptation of Bresson’s great novelistic muse, complicated right-wing Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, who also wrote Mouchette and Diary of a Country Priest. I like to think of this film within the tradition of Hot Priest Projects, on the heels of Léon Morin, Priest by Jean-Pierre Melville, which placed Jean-Paul Belmondo on the clergy side of the confessional. In this case, we have Depardieu as Donissan, a priest in doubt and despair, sensing evil in every corner. Depardieu’s beauty and strength, the bodily vitality of a man in spiritual crisis, gives us a whole new view into his talents. We are a long way from the beer-swilling Loulou.

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Gus Van Sant told me about this film. It wasn’t available to stream, so I programmed a screening of it at Metrograph just to be able to see it. It’s the saddest movie ever made, and everyone in the theater was crying (you’d have to be a serial killer not to). The sadness is worth it. Crissy Rock, a comedian from Liverpool who plays the main character and could not herself read until she was in her late twenties, is searing and unforgettable as the mother who loses all her children to social services. But it’s not a dreary film. The opening scene, of a karaoke bar, is ground zero for karaoke scenes in movies. Ken Loach is ground zero for rendering, with great sensitivity and dignity, the tragic lives of people in tough circumstances.

The novel on which Ramsay’s gritty and sublime mood portrait is based happens to be one of my all-time favorite works of literature (the novel of the same name by Alan Warner), but what makes it so great as literature is its unfilmable interiority, Morvern’s incantatory thoughts. And yet Lynne Ramsay, who must love this book as much as I do, understood how to build something—a world that is equal to, if necessarily different from, the effect of the book.

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A Christmas Tale is sophisticated and slippery and exquisite. Catherine Deneuve is always great, but here her performance is a kind of apotheosis, her wisdom and experience and artistic instincts gathering around her like an elemental density. The ensemble cast and meandering but precise plotline are so much like life itself, in all its gallows humor, partly provided by Mathieu Amalric’s hilarious antics. I love this film. It’s home cooking for me. But I also love Christmas.

“Today’s world in a nutshell: No one asks us, then it’s too late,” says one of Non-Fiction’s characters, a book publisher (Guillaume Canet) forced by the market to contemplate a bleakly digital future. It’s one of the film’s many long ensemble conversations about a changing world. You might think such a film would be too marked by its moment and the year, 2018, in which it was made, but no: Non-Fiction was ahead of its time and feels prophetic still today, in 2024, in terms of people and their self-deceptions and the smoothly convenient technological hell we’ve made for ourselves. Inside of which, everyone still thinks they’re the one genuine true real thing, and they are right, if only from a certain angle. Today I feel like it’s my favorite of his films, and even possibly his most affirming and joyful.