AwardsWatch

The most remarkable thing about The Invite is not the films it is like, but in the way we are invited to be part of something special, thoughtful, and refreshingly hopeful.

Visiting these characters from decades ago feels like opening a time capsule, playing on the same kind of twinge-in-your-heart nostalgia and sentimentality found in the best Pixar films.

Robin Hood, at times, speaks about his popular persona and seems to be in direct conversation with the generations of stories that would surround his name hundreds of years into the future. It’s an interesting wrinkle, but one stamped out by the film’s more predictable dynamics: the world-weary savage, his unexpected young companion, and the path to breaking cycles of violence. These are foundational ideas that help make up the bedrock of similar mature fables. The Death of Robin Hood grounds them into dust with a brooding glare.

Such is the ultimate effect of Disclosure Day, a great film from our greatest director that feels guaranteed to only get better the more people discuss it and mull over its intentions.

The result is a film that contains nearly everything adolescence can hold: desire, embarrassment, friendship, cruelty, harassment, loneliness, tenderness, and fleeting moments of connection. Yet what lingers is neither nostalgia nor melancholy. It is the feeling of having spent time with people rather than characters. By the end of La Gradiva, Atlan has achieved something deceptively difficult. She has made observation feel like drama.

It’s an ancient tale told within a chilling, new context that poses an inevitable question. What kind of man is able to make it out of the minotaur’s elaborate maze alive? In the legend, that was impossible, but in a modern context, the answer is even more disturbing.

The film is undeniably demanding: slow, resistant, and often withholding. It rarely offers explanation or narrative relief, leaving connections implied but never stated. But this difficulty is structural. It is built around dynamics rather than events, around how people adjust to one another in real time and negotiate power through proximity alone.

While not his finest film of his career (or even this year, that would be Chime), Kurosawa continues to prove himself as a vital contemporary master of the craft that explores the essential fabric of his past and present in order to understand the future that is coming.

Through Esteban and Emilia’s troubled shoot, we get a glimpse of what must be sacrificed – ego, pride, creative control – to achieve reconciliation. Given what we’re talking about, it’s a wonder that films manage to get made at all. In that vein, perhaps The Beloved, like its fictional and real-life forebears, confirms that moviemaking truly is a miracle.

A Man of His Time is a pretty standard bio-pic that is elevated by Arlaud’s excellent, subtle performance as the director’s past relative.