A confession: When I first saw Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” in 2011, I didn’t really get it. I liked it — was wowed by the imagery, moved by the music, and appreciative of the film’s long-range lens on human existence. I got into a squabble outside the movie theater with a quartet of retirees who thought “Tree” was the dumbest thing they’d ever seen — and certainly not the escapist Brad Pitt movie they’d paid their money for — because I felt they didn’t respect the art and enormity of what Malick was attempting. But I guess on some level the movie still seemed an attempt, rather than an achievement.

I don’t think so now. Great works meet you where you live and only when you’re ready. I was in a different place in 2011 than I am twelve years later, both emotionally and along the long string of a life. My kids were teenagers back then, were in peak rebellion, and maybe I came down on the crabbed Pitt/Nature side of the film’s equation, as opposed to the forgiving Chastain/Grace side. Or maybe my spiritual self was simply undernourished at the time; faithful readers know (and perhaps share) the exhalation and exploration that can happen once children are out of the house and there’s time to remember who you once were.

Or maybe it’s even simpler than that: That global and national events of the past decade have all of us thinking in more epic and/or apocalyptic terms than we’re used to. In any event, “The Tree of Life” now seems to me one of a handful of movies that could be called holy in the largest and most non-denominational sense, in that it forcefully, artfully, gracefully reminds us of the big picture and our essential/infinitesimal place in it; of the value of mercy (in dinosaurs as well as humans) and of the radical nature of love. And to those who have said, then and now, that the movie is “pretentious” — well, that word means either that an artist is trying too hard or that you’re just not looking hard enough.

My guest for this episode is Alex Winter, an actor and filmmaker who is best known in the popular culture as Bill of the “Bill and Ted” movies but who also has an acclaimed resume as a documentary filmmaker, with his well-received and -awarded Frank Zappa bio-doc “Zappa” (2020) and a series of docs on the perils of Internet technology, of which “The YouTube Effect” (available for streaming) is the latest. Alex is a NYU film school grad who can drop a Mizoguchi reference with the best of them; he brings a cineaste’s appreciation and a director’s insights to the discussion of this uniquely transcendent movie. “The Tree of Life” can be rented on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube and elsewhere — do yourself a favor and watch it on the biggest, most hi-def screen you can manage. This podcast is also streaming on YouTube with additional film clips.

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This was a delight: A deep-dish discussion of one of my favorite films of all time with one of my favorite young critics. Hunter Harris has written for GQ, New York magazine’s Vulture, and the New York Times, but it’s her pop culture newsletter “Hung Up” and its associated social media tendrils that had Forbes recently name Harris to its “30 Under 30” list of media up-and-comers. “Hung Up” has the energy and smarts of heyday-era Entertainment Weekly, a laugh-out-loud wit, and one of the best b******t meters in the business, and for a sixty-something critic who fell off the back of the zeitgeist truck ages ago, it’s a bulletin from the front lines of entertainment culture that doubles as a cheat sheet for alter kockers.

Up to now, Hunter and I have mostly waved at each other in passing from across the Internet, but it turns out we both stan for the same Paul Thomas Anderson movie, the elegantly subversive, almost unbearably beautiful “Phantom Thread.” Because the film was billed as Daniel Day-Lewis’s final screen performance — as Reynolds Woodcock, a couturier in 1950s London who has a power-play love affair with his muse and model Alma, played by Vicky Krieps — it attracted a larger and perhaps more mainstream audience than is usual for PTA. That audience seemed baffled by a romantic melodrama that’s actually a dark comedy in disguise — a love story about two people who seemingly want to kill each other. That “Phantom Thread” plays these games under a veneer of the most luxuriant cinematic craft imaginable (the dresses! the camerawork! that score!) is part of its pleasure and definitely part of the joke.

As I wrote in my 2017 Boston Globe review, “At the heart of ‘Phantom Thread’ is a dance between two difficult people, embodied by a pair of actors at the absolute top of their game. Day-Lewis is an acknowledged alchemist, and Reynolds — foppish, temperamental, gifted, insecure — is a dazzlingly complete creation. That said, the generosity with which he allows Krieps to serve as the film’s center is remarkable and rewarded. The Luxembourg-born actress, a 10-year veteran of European film and TV, charts every subtle step of Alma’s transformation, from meekness to a godlike serenity that’s only a little terrifying.”

Factor in Lesley Manville’s Oscar-nominated performance as Reynolds’ officious sister Cyril — gatekeeper of both the House of Woodcock and her brother’s island of breakfast calm — and the echoes of such classics as Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” and “Phantom Thread” is an experience so lush that it teeters on the edge of the absurd. It’s rare and great fun when you get to talk about something you love with someone who knows and loves it as much as you do, and this week’s “Classics of the New Millennium” episode finds my guest and me wandering all over the force field of this remarkable piece of cinema. Is Barbara Rose (Harriet Sansom Harris), the drunken heiress deemed unworthy of a Woodcock gown, a figure of mockery or the film’s most tragic character? Are the (Oscar-winning) dresses high art or the high bourgeoisie’s idea of same? Is Alma a strong-minded heroine or a delusional psychotic? Do she and Reynolds deserve each other? Would anyone else have them? Come listen in as Harris and I untangle the warp and weft of “Phantom Thread.”

N.B. The movie is currently streaming on Netflix and for VOD rental on all the usual platforms. This podcast is also available on video on YouTube, with film clips. Audio-only listeners won’t be able to see the well-known photo of author Vladimir Nabokov with his wife Vera that I compare in the podcast to a shot in “Phantom Thread,” so I offer it to you here as a hint to the movie’s possible antecedents and gamesmanship.

Enjoy.

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If you have never seen Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film “Paterson” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), now would be a very good time to watch it, with the world falling to pieces on a daily basis and your frazzled soul in need of a balm. If you’ve already seen “Paterson,” now would be a good time to watch it again. In fact, it would be entirely within the philosophy of this movie to watch it every day, as part of the cycle of quotidian events that turns like a bus driver’s steering wheel from morning to night. When I reviewed “Paterson” for the Boston Globe in January 2017 — two days before the Presidential inauguration of a certain orange-hued megalomaniac — I wrote:

“Paterson” is set in Paterson, N.J., and concerns a bus driver, played by Adam Driver, who is also named Paterson. Already you may be getting a sense of the resonant circular prayer wheel that is Jim Jarmusch’s new film.

Paterson the man is a poet — although most people don’t know it — and he takes his inspiration from the late, great William Carlos Williams, who did not live in Paterson the city (rather in nearby Rutherford) but who dedicated 12 years and five volumes to an epic poem called “Paterson.” If you pick up a copy of “Paterson” the poem, you may come across the repeated line: “Say it! No ideas but in things,” and that may be the best guide to what Jarmusch has achieved here. “Paterson” the movie is about the ordinary slipstream of our days — about all the stuff we touch but never notice — and also about life’s piercing, inexhaustible beauty when we do notice. Coming out at a time when the world seems both upside down and backward, watching this film feels like drinking from a cool, clear lake.

So maybe there’s never a time when the movie is not necessary. To talk about “Paterson,” I enlisted my old friend Glenn Kenny, who currently reviews films for the New York Times and RogerEbert.com, was one of the tent-poles of the sorely missed movie magazine “Premiere,” has written an excellent book on “Goodfellas,” and pens one of the more erudite movie blogs out there, “Some Came Running.” Glenn brings a wealth of knowledge about Paterson the city — he went to college there — and I bring an obsessive interest in Jarmusch the semi-intentional Zen filmmaker, which this particular movie (and “Broken Flowers”) (and “Dead Man”) (and “Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai”) go a long way to making a case for.

You can stream “Paterson” on Amazon Prime or, with ads, on Amazon’s Freevee service. This podcast is also available in video form, with film clips, at the Watch List YouTube channel. I do hope you enjoy the discussion.

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One of the great pleasures of putting together the “Classics of the New Millennium” podcast series — I suspect it may have been the impetus all along — is that it gives me an excuse to revisit movies I may have liked or loved well enough when they came out but am now curious as to whether they’ll last. Many do, some don’t, and some deepen their grip with each passing year. Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) felt like a film out of time in 2007 — hewing to no known cliches of Hollywood screenwriting or story structure, it seemed to have dropped in from a century earlier in look and feel and sound. Sixteen years on, it plays more than ever like a foundational American masterpiece, a movie that gets into the guts of what makes this country so terrible and great. It is about our twin engines of capital and religion — personified, respectively and unforgettably, by Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano — and about the families we idealize while leaving them behind in the dust of our ambitions. It’s a work of magisterial craft, from Robert Elswit’s uncannily period-appropriate cinematography to Johnny Greenwood’s yawing, vertiginous score — music from the bowels of the earth. And it’s proof, if you’re still looking for it, that Paul Thomas Anderson is one of our true originals — a storyteller whose vision and rhythms are daringly his own. In a cowardly film industry addicted to imitating the last big thing, whatever that may be, this marks him as a radical, a revolutionary, a bomb-thrower, except that the bombs he throws are tales of empathetic monsters who bear more than a slight resemblance, if we’re honest enough to admit it, to the faces we see when we look in the mirror. Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” is my personal favorite of his works, and a movie I hope to get to in this series, but “There Will Be Blood” remains the one that convinced me and a lot of other people that here was a filmmaker to stand with the greatest narrators of the American drama and the human comedy.

The film is based, very loosely, on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” and can be easily found online: It’s streaming on Paramount+ and Hoopla and a $4 rental on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere. My guest for discussing the film is the estimable New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, one of the smartest and most trenchant reviewing voices out there, and a friend and film festival colleague of many years standing. I hope you enjoy the conversation — we certainly had fun talking about the film. And thanks, Manohla, for prompting me to revisit a work that only improves with age.

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So, first off, I have to apologize: It’s Friday and I don’t have the usual What to Watch line-up telling subscribers about good movies in theaters or on VOD. What can I say? I had a busy week in dinosaur media: An appearance on NPR’s “Here and Now” to talk with host Robin Young about gifted child actors who grow up into good, not-insane adult actors, and two pieces for the Washington Post: An appreciation of the late, great Robbie Robertson that runs today (free link is here) and a 45th-anniversary celebration (sort of) of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” that will go up next week.

Anyway, it’s August and new-release pickings are traditionally slim during the dog days. Of movies opening in theaters and on demand today, I look forward to catching up with “Jules,” featuring Ben Kingsley and an alien, the cheeky British hair-salon horror movie “Medusa Deluxe” (in theaters and streaming), and “Red, White, and Royal Blue,” an Amazon Prime rom-com about a feud-turned-love affair between the President’s son and Britain’s (fictional) Prince Henry that sounds and apparently is so ridiculous as to be reasonably good fun.

If you’re still thinking deep thoughts about “Oppenheimer,” allow me to recommend Justin Chang’s excellent think-piece in the L.A. Times peeling apart the movie’s moral layers of representation and non-representation (free link is here).

Until next week, though, you’ll just have to make do with the latest podcast in the Watch List’s Classics of the New Millennium series, this one reuniting me with my good friend and Boston Globe work-BFF from 2002 to 2013, New York Times critic-at-large (and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner) Wesley Morris. When asked which movie he’d like to discuss, Wesley went straight to Spike Lee’s 2006 heist movie “Inside Man,” which stars Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, and Willem Dafoe, among others, and which prompted a lively discussion on genre, casting, and all things Spike. Have a listen up top or watch the video version below; the movie itself can be had as a cheap rental on all the usual streaming suspects should you want to watch or re-watch it ahead of time, which I recommend you do, because there are spoilers galore when Wesley and I get going. Man, I miss this guy.

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When was the last time you watched “No Country for Old Men” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐)? I saw it twice in 2007, the year it came out, and then two weeks ago while preparing for this podcast, and the intervening 15 years had cast a pall of dust on the experience of the movie that a revisit dispelled in a blast of bleak Texas wind. Is this the Coen brothers’ greatest two hours of film? I might argue that “A Serious Man” (2009 and a future candidate for this series) beats it by a nose, but we’re edging into personal preference here — both films show the merrie pranksters of indie film (or, as I like to think of them, the Sundance equivalent of Steely Dan’s Becker and Fagen) acquiring a cruel majesty and seriousness of purpose that had heretofore only been hinted at in “Fargo.” The Coens were known and beloved for their ironic, deadpan comedies, but the jokes in “A Serious Man” ascend to the level of Kafka, and “No Country” is as steady and unyielding as a myth. The movie’s basically three men in a desert landscape — three and a half if you count Woody Harrelson’s relatively brief appearance — but it plays like an epic on the death of the American soul, with a final cut to black that’s the equivalent of a coffin lid slamming shut.

Fittingly, my friend and critical colleague Isaac Feldberg and I talked about “No Country for Old Men” in the aftermath of Cormac McCarthy’s death on June 13. Of the author’s novels adapted to the screen, it’s hard to argue that this one isn’t the best, so true is it to the pared-down detail of the writing, its empathy and its juddering violence. The Coens are on record as saying they were drawn to the project because they felt McCarthy was a genre subversive like them — “No Country” is a western that short-circuits every cliche of the form — but the novel also served the brothers as a template for filmmaking techniques that by 2007 had been honed to a level of unparalleled invention and efficiency. You can watch this movie with the sound off and still be held in a fugue state of awe. But don’t do that: You’d miss the sociopathic purr of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, the hiss of his bolt pistol, and the mournful monologues of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who knows that the classic shootouts on Main Street have given way to random death out on the Miracle Mile.

“No Country for Old Men” is streaming on Amazon Prime and Paramount+, and it’s available for VOD rental in all the usual places — give it a watch if it’s been too long and then listen to Isaac and me go down a rabbit hole of appreciation and analysis. (Or watch us on YouTube, if you’d prefer.) It’s a movie whose pitiless message of chance and fate in modern America whispers louder than ever.

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I’m so glad my friend and critical colleague Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times and NPR’s “Fresh Air” chose South Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” as his pick for a great film of the 21st century. Justin brings to the discussion a deep knowledge of Lee’s filmography — I regret to say I’ve only seen 2010’s “Poetry,” which is remarkable — and a festival interview with the filmmaker under his belt. More to the point, he’s able to get under the skin of a movie that resists easy synopsis and interpretation.

Five years after its release in 2018, “Burning” is already edging toward the timeless: A powerfully ambiguous tale of love, eros, innocence, and simmering violence that has the bones of a thriller but the air of a cautionary existential fable. Based on a Haruki Murakami short story called “Barn Burning,” the movie departs from its source in critical ways, notably in more clearly hinting at what one of its three main characters — the sophisticated and possibly psychopathic Ben, as played (brilliantly) by Steven Yuen (“Minari,” “Nope”) — is actually up to. (Whatever it is, it ain’t burning greenhouses.)

In my 2018 Boston Globe review of the film, I wrote “‘Burning’ … is a beautifully cryptic slow burner that lingers long in the senses. It plays like one of Patricia Highsmith’s unsettling power-play suspense tales, but with the talented Mr. Ripley off to one side while his victim (or one of them) assumes center stage. … There are moments that defy categorization but that land with a mysterious, expanding hush. They can be as small as the smile and barely perceptible wink Ben gives Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) in a party scene, inviting him in on a joke the younger man doesn’t quite get. They can be as luxuriant and lengthy as a sequence at sunset at Jong-su’s farm, Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo) impulsively singing and dancing in the nude and then Ben confessing to awful doings as the light almost unnoticably fades away. The awful doings may in fact be a metaphor for something even more unspeakable. … “Burning” could be about metaphor, actually — about the way people make things stand in for other things, ideas for ideas, emotions for emotions, until the only way to cut through the abstraction is with obsession, or violence.

The film, if you haven’t seen it or would like to revisit it before or after listening to the podcast, is streaming on the Peacock Network and Kanopy and available for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere. Justin’s and my conversation is also available to watch on YouTube, with a few “Burning” scene clips added. I hope you enjoy the discussion.

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It’s strange to realize that David Fincher’s “The Social Network” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) came out in 2010 — it seems like it was just yesterday and it also seems like two centuries ago. Thirteen years on, and after a decade-plus of social and political upheavals that can in part be traced directly to Facebook, this first warning about where our social media was taking us and the nature of the people at the helm looks more depressingly on the money than ever. And yet it remains a crackling piece of entertainment — a movie that’s all talk yet never stops moving (not unlike social media) and a film about computer geeks that spends most of its time in the real world. Above all, it’s an early look at the toxic bro-men who have become our captains of industry while leading us by the nose into the dark. (Hello, Elon.)

“The Social Network” made major stars of Jesse Eisenberg (above right) and Andrew Garfield, and it provided career breakthroughs for Rooney Mara (above left) and, as the Winklevi, Armie Hammer. It’s most critically a story of how America’s traditional ruling class is helpless in the face of the new robber barons of Silicon Valley, and it’s probably the best, least annoying match-up of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and subject matter. (The characters are, for once, as smart and as glib as he is.) I’m delighted to discuss the movie with Odie Henderson, a longtime movie reviewer for rogerebert.com and, as of last October, my replacement as film critic at The Boston Globe. Odie is known for shooting from the hip, to say the least, but in addition to his wit and forthrightness, he also brings to this discussion decades of day-job work as a computer programmer and a working knowledge of the tech world depicted in the movie. In Odie’s words, “This is exactly what IT people are like. Except I think it made the Jesse Eisenberg character too nice.”

It’s one of the most illuminating and provocative Watchcasts yet, and I hope you give it a listen. If you’ve never seen “The Social Network” or want to revisit the movie before or after the talk, it’s streaming on Paramount+ and available for a $4 rental fee at Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere.

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It’s interesting when movies try to predict the near future, especially when you come back ten years later to see what they got right and what they got wrong. Spike Jonze’s “Her” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) came out in 2013 and painted a picture of a spooky brave new world right around the corner, where pant waists were higher, people dated their operating systems, and we all were lonelier than ever. The film was eerily prescient in some ways — it predicted Siri and our current debate over AI — and now seems dated in others. The hero’s job at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com? In 2023, that would be outsourced to ChatGPT. Still, there’s a lot to talk about with the movie I put atop my Ten Best list in 2013 — like, a lot — so I was glad my friend and critical colleague Amy Nicholson picked “Her” as her choice for a 21st century film classic. Amy’s good smart fun, and the conversation went in all sorts of directions: How to production-design a believable day after tomorrow, why “Her” is a great L.A. movie (and an even better future-L.A. movie), the diplomatic art of interviewing Joaquin Phoenix, “Garfield Minus Garfield,” and the near-perfect 1968 Kinks single, “Days.”

If you’d like to watch (or re-watch) “Her” before or after listening to the podcast, the movie’s a three-dollar rental at Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube, and elsewhere. If you’d like to watch Amy’s and my conversation as well as listen to it, the YouTube version is below. I hope you enjoy.

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Armando Iannucci’s 2017 political comedy “The Death of Stalin” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, streaming and for VOD rental on various platforms) is not only a bona fide 21st century masterpiece but one of the few genuine satires to be put on film — satire in the Swiftian sense; satire that leaves a viewer as bloodied as the characters. Iannucci, best known in the US as the creator of “Veep” but beloved in his native UK for the government sitcom “The Thick Of It” and for the 2009 film “In The Loop,” has said he wanted to make himself and audiences extremely uncomfortable when he was turning the 1953 post-Stalin battle for succession into a farce, not so much of the slamming-door variety but the blithering-idiot kind. So we have gifted soft-shoe practitioners like Steve Buscemi as Nikita Krushchev, Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov, and Michael Palin as Vyacheslav Molotov, but we also get Simon Russell Beale as Lavrenti Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police and a corpulent black hole of evil so unrepentant he can take your breath away. And while the wordplay and bustling character comedy may be worthy of Palin’s Pythons or a Preston Sturges classic, we are never allowed to forget the real deaths and depredations, the Kafkaesque perversion of language, and the paranoia and sycophancy that are daily life in an authoritarian state. Watching “Death of Stalin,” we laugh uproariously at the manipulations of these homicidal little bureaucrats, and then we choke on our laughter, in part because they’re closer than we’d like to think.

Needless to say, it’s not much of a date movie, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when my original Boston Globe review occasioned a handful of huffy letters from readers who went to see “The Death of Stalin” and did not find it funny At All. And, in a very real sense, they’re correct. But, as my colleague and friend the film critic Sam Adams points out in this week’s WatchCast, the success of a true satire may actually be gauged by the number of people who don’t get the joke.

Have a look at the movie if you haven’t seen it already, and then listen to our discussion (or watch it on YouTube with extra visual aids!), in which we try to define the line between comedy and horror and marvel at how easily, how pitilessly Armando Iannucci is able to set up camp there. I wish he’d come back to America and make a satire about our current political state, but we may be well past satire by now. (And if you think I’m exaggerating, allow me to share this brief and relevant sound clip, shared with me by my podcast editor, of a recent comment from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in conversation with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie.)

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