“Carol,” directed by Todd Haynes, Brooklyn Academy of Music, through December 31I have a conflicted relationship with “Carol,” the latest film from Todd Haynes. Or at least a more conflicted relationship than I typically have with a film. I’ve seen the film twice, and loved it both times, but I’m not sure I love it as much as so many others. (Every time the film lands atop a “best films of the year” list, I start to question it more.) I love it in the moment, and in the immediate aftermath, but it’s not a film that sticks with me for very long, and there is an odd emotional distance, maybe even coldness, that I feel hurts the film. This might seem like an odd way to introduce a film that sits on top of a column suggesting films you should see this week, but, despite my ambiguous response, or maybe even hopefully because of it, “Carol” is still worth watching. There are moments of unmitigated beauty, and Haynes remains, no matter his subject or cast or distribution model, one of the smartest American filmmakers working today. What are you going to go see, the new Tarantino movie? Don’t insult yourself.“Spirited Away” (2002), directed by Hayao Miyazaki, IFC Center, December 24-31This is still, for me, Hayao Miyazaki’s best film. A richly dense and sprawling work of imaginative wonder and genuine weirdness, the Japanese animator’s work is showing all week at the IFC Center as part of a series dedicated to the work of Studio Ghibli, the production house that Miyazaki calls home. All screenings before 6pm are dubbed in English, if that is your thing, but I would suggest going to see the film, or any of the films in the series, in the original language with subtitles, as the English dubbing tends to over-explain and soften the expressiveness of the dialogue.“45 Years,” directed by Andrew Haigh, IFC Center, opens December 23In a recent interview I did with director Andrew Haigh for Modern Painters, he calls himself a “pessimistic optimist,” which is good way to describe the tone of “45 Years,” easily one of the best narrative films of the year. A work of visual and performative restraint, it’s a film that bottles up its emotions, like people in relationships often do. There is tension in silences, and things that should be spoken are stashed away, left unsaid. But Haigh handles the material with such efficiency, anchored by two of the strongest performances in a film this year — Tom Courtenay and, especially, Charlotte Rampling — that when the emotions finally rise to the surface, the release is almost too much to handle.“Ball of Fire (1941), directed by Howard Hawkes, Film Forum, December 25-31Maybe not the best film Howard Hawkes ever made, but still a very enjoyable comedy featuring an energized performance from Barbara Stanwyck as Sugarpuss O’Shea (one of the best character names of all time) and a script from Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder that shows signs of what they would do very successfully over the next two decades. “Ball of Fire,” maybe most interestingly, was recycled seven years later as “A Song is Born,” once again directed by Hawkes and with Wilder receiving a writing credit. “Ball of Fire” is screening here on an archival 35mm print — it’s a real treat, and unfortunately not something that happens very often anymore. This might be your last opportunity to see it in this format.“Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One,” directed by Miguel Gomes, Film Society of Lincoln Center, through December 31The final part of the bombastic trilogy from Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes is something that shouldn’t be missed, even if you skipped the first two parts. They work well together, all in a row, but watching them in that order is not necessarily required. In an interview with Gomes from the December issue of Modern Painters, he told me, regarding his interest in the original “Arabian Nights,” that he “was fascinated by the vertigo it gives, the multiplicity of the stories to a point where you almost go insane.” Gomes uses this as a loose frame to tell stories, real and imagined, of his home country, and works toward crating a similar effect. There are things in “Arabian Nights” I’m still working out my head around, things that I feel as if I understand within the structure of the film but find hard to explain out of context. For that alone, the film is more interesting than most anything else out there.
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