Other Loves

“Aquarius” (from Kleber Mendonça Filho); “Autumn” and “The Dreamer” (Nathaniel Dorsky); “Bagatelle II” (Jerome Hiler); “Certain Women,” especially Kristen Stewart (Kelly Reichardt); “Creepy” (Kiyoshi Kurosawa); “The Fits” (Anna Rose Holmer); “The Illinois Parables” (Deborah Stratman); “Into the Inferno” (Werner Herzog); “Jackie” and “Neruda” (Pablo Larraín); “Krisha” (Trey Edward Shults); “La La Land,” if mostly its finale (Damien Chazelle); “Loving” (Jeff Nichols); “Mountains May Depart” (Jia Zhangke); “Paterson” (Jim Jarmusch); “Sunset Song” (Terence Davies); “20th Century Women” (Mike Mills).

A. O. Scott

Last spring, with #OscarsSoWhite in the rearview mirror and Donald J. Trump’s victory on the as-yet-unglimpsed horizon, I reviewed Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room.” It struck me at the time as a smart, brutal, slightly contrived thriller about members of a rock band battling a gang of white-supremacist punks in the Northwest. In retrospect, though, it seems possible that this scrappy little indie (which just missed making the list below) was something more than a bit of nasty fun. Maybe it was a harbinger, an unheeded political signal amid the pop-cultural noise, a pre-emptive allegory of battles to come.

Am I reading too much into it now, or was I not paying close enough attention then? If so, I’m hardly the only one. Relevance is one of the great shibboleths of criticism, and after a real-life event as dramatic and complex as this year’s election, the temptation to seek clues and answers in works of popular art is almost overwhelming. Think pieces promising to tell us “How [insert title here] Explains Trump” popped up after Nov. 8 like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and entertainment has been mined for signs and symptoms of working-class disaffection, coastal-elitist bubble-think, fake-news gullibility and every other real and imaginary affliction of the American body politic. But cinema is better at exploring than explaining, and the screen is more like a prism or a kaleidoscope than a mirror or a window. We seldom get the news from movies.

Which is not to deny that they are useful tools for reckoning with reality. In a time of confusion, the best films can offer clarity, comfort and a salutary reminder of complexities that lie beyond the bluster and expedience of political discourse and conventional journalism. We go to the movies — and we still go quite a lot, by the way, in spite of the seductions of the couch and the streaming queue — in search of escape from reality. We’re also looking for alternative routes to the truth, for sparks of imagination that can ignite or illuminate our own thinking when it gets muddled or stale.

The 11 releases listed below were not only my most memorable movie-watching experiences of the year; they were also, in ways I can’t always specify, helpful. They stirred my curiosity, troubled my sleep and increased the range of my understanding. Sometimes they just made me feel better.