First Reformed and The Good Lord Bird can best be linked by a common, disheartening truth: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I so badly want what Ursula Le Guin once called for—stories that allow for the discernment of other ways of being, and which imagine grounds for hope.
Much of what I saw in 2018 reflected a related range of anxieties—about difference, catastrophe, isolation, belonging. Maybe that’s every year. Likely it’s too soon to tell. But among the things I saw, in a year of personal and political upheaval and ambivalence, these are the moments that solicited my attention most memorably.
On the one hand, everything we do may be meaningless. Oblivion may be the only truth. But on the other, maybe it’s exactly this ultimate despair that makes our all our everyday actions essential.
