So much of literature, cinema, and religion contemplate the afterlife. What happens to us when we die, where do we go, how are our lives judged? Less spiritual attention — at least in the west — is paid to how and why we get to be alive on this planet in the first place. Something must be in the air: just as Pixar’s holiday release Soul introduced The Great Before as the first episode in a trilogy ending with the Great Beyond, Edson Oda’s festival favorite Nine Days contemplates a process by which souls come to inhabit a life on Earth.

Arriving in theaters this weekend more than a year’s pandemic delay, The Green Knight might be the closest thing to “pure cinema” that I’ve seen in a very long time. David Lowery’s lyrical adaptation of the fourteenth century anonymously-written epic poem sprawls across the screen using all the tools at its disposal, making it it easy to see why A24 held out to assure that audience first experienced it as a theatrical experience. It was worth the wait. 

Although director Tom McCarthy borrows heavily from the Amanda Knox story, Stillwater is hardly a ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama. Instead, he wisely takes inspiration from the situation of a daughter whose study abroad ends with imprisonment for a gruesome murder she claims not to have committed as the jumping-off point for a different kind of tragedy in three acts.

With his feature film debut about one man’s love for his prized pig, writer-director Michael Sarnoski has harnessed Nicolas Cage’s latent intensity and made what might be my favorite film I’ve seen so far this year.

With Roadrunner, kind-hearted documentarian Morgan Neville virtually reunites many of Bourdain’s dearest friends and collaborators to contemplate his life and legacy while working through their still-raw grief on film. Whether the documentary’s subject would have approved of the project (probably not) is perhaps beside the point.