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Manohla Dargis
Dazzling in Plain SightEvery year, as I start the herculean (and absurd!) task of winnowing a year’s worth of movies into a top 10, I also sift through a lot of grim media coverage about the terrible, horrible, possibly salvageable state of the entertainment industry. In the movie world, things are always looking up (maybe) unless they’re catastrophically down, a cycle of boom and bust that has gripped the industry for much of its history and always convinces someone, somewhere, that the movies are dead. It’s a familiar charge with a changing cast of murder suspects: synchronized sound, television, cable, streaming and, of course, corporate idiocy.
Despite their continued decline, the big American-based studios still dominate the mainstream media coverage and what little attention an increasingly fragmented, distracted audience has remaining. To that end, nearly every week another megadollar production comes hurtling toward us, gobbles up all the media interest, rakes in fortunes or becomes just another tax write-down or write-off. Some of these movies are OK, others are bilge; a scant few are memorable. Yet as my hardworking colleagues and I eagerly share in our reviews for The New York Times, the movie world is much vaster than what these companies offer, and good, great and miraculous work often flies under the radar. Here’s a sampling of the bounty.
1. ‘All We Imagine as Light’ (Payal Kapadia)ImageKani Kusruti, left, and Divya Prabha, in “All We Imagine As Light.” Credit...Janus and Sideshow Films, via Associated PressThis delicate, achingly wistful story about empathy is an example of the same, and centers on two female nurses and a cook, friends who work at the same hospital in Mumbai. Over the course of the movie, Kapadia shifts between these caregivers who together and separately experience ordinary pleasures, face painful difficulties and find comfort, support and companionship in one another. Every so often, Kapadia, who has also made documentaries, incorporates images of everyday people milling through the city, images that connect her characters to a sea of humanity and, by extension, to those of us watching. (In theaters)
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