This has been a difficult year. You may have been buffeted by anger you didn’t want to feel, and didn’t know how to productively process. Breeding grounds for misinformation—and its even more treacherous sibling, disinformation—have proliferated. AI is coming, supposedly to make our lives easier, but in reality it may just be taking our jobs. Sometimes it has seemed that soullessness has become the order of the day—as if having a soul were simply too much bother.But as of right now, at least, most movies are made by human beings, and they are still one of the most extraordinary ways for humans to talk to one another. The conversation may seem one-sided. After all, a filmmaker makes the movie, and then you buy the ticket or pay to stream it. But if you care about movies at all, then surely there have been times you’ve gone so deep into a film that you’ve almost taken up residence within it—or, rather, it has taken up residence within you. This is why filmmakers do what they do. Some are...
