“Art today is Jean-Luc Godard,” the French poet Louis Aragon wrote in 1965. “Godard is not satisfied with the world as it is, he remakes it in his own manner . . . in Pierrot le fou red sings like an obsession.” It would again, decades later, in The Image Book. Godard has long been one of the few who believe that color is not a given, that it is a craft like any other. If his movies—the ones with Belmondo, with Gorin, with Miéville—have staying power, it is because he never completed his own search, for color or anything else. It is customary for any legendary artist to lapse into an academicism of the self. They have figured out how to do what they do and do so indefinitely. Godard wasn’t like that.

My favorite genre is the movie musical; my least favorite, the musical-theater-kid movie. Both Spielberg’s Story and last year’s other corny pretender, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, have arrived as quaint, todos-juntos representatives of the latter brand. Bright, high-pitched, and would-be weird, they come from a time when we weren’t shaken by a global pandemic that wiped out millions of the bottom and made billions for the top. Miranda had the audacity to state in a promotional podcast for In the Heights that he wanted to “transcend” (“progress beyond”) West Side Story by not making “yet another gangster movie.” Good for him.

Gravity is at the center of Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, an apocalyptic comedy in which Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio play twin Chicken Littles gesturing broadly toward a falling sky. But more than anything it’s gravitas that McKay seems to be after. Don’t Look Up was recently voted the winner of this year’s Writers Guild Award for Original Screenplay, and, this Sunday, it may win a few Oscars as well. The film, which was subsidized by Netflix, is a messy and inane statement of purpose by a director who is drowning in purpose—and statements. At this point, another statuette could serve as a life preserver.

Within the first two minutes of Benedetta’s prologue—in which its namesake’s younger incarnation compels a bird to shit in the eye of a potential assailant—it’s clear that Verhoeven is in his comfort zone; if the movie doesn’t necessarily push beyond those confines, it confirms them as a uniquely spacious and fertile patch of cinematic terrain, where provocation and pleasure get intertwined on a molecular level and nearly every line cuts two ways, as a statement of principles and a sick joke.

A man flips a baby through the air while standing on the edge of a high roof, a cityscape surrounding him. A car runs into a brick wall on a race course. Over the archival footage, Bordowitz tells of his father’s death: he went to see Evel Knievel jump across the Grand Canyon, then was fatally struck by a bus as he left the event. Bordowitz lays in his bed and describes getting fucked in the ass for the first time, his gaze trained daringly on the camera. When he speaks of the man coming inside him, no condom, the image jumps: a stuntman shoots out of a canon. Unlike the moralizing narratives of the era, Bordowitz equates contagion to chance.