No, Time to Die: The Biden Years On-Screen, Part Two

In the second installment of a quarterly series, Brendan Boyle and Adam Nayman consider the cinema of the Biden years.

By Brendan Boyle, Adam NaymanJuly 26, 2025

• Film

• History

This essay is the second entry in Brendan Boyle and Adam Nayman’s ongoing series, The Biden Years On-Screen. The first essay was published in February.

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DURING THE 2020 CAMPAIGN, either through deceptive editing or in-camera glitching, a video of Joe Biden surfaced that appeared to show the candidate moving in short, jerky bursts as if buffering in real life. In an edit first circulated on Twitter, user @GarlicCorgi added a dialogue cue and the musical score from the video game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, creating yet more surrealist iconography for a presidency that seemed to accumulate it like a Katamari ball. Unlike film critic J. Hoberman’s “Secret Agent of History,” locked and loaded with the international consensus in his sights, or the cinematic commanders in chief before him, Biden shimmered through our hyperreality as a figure of ghostly asynchronicity, creating the impression of decisive action while lurching to catch up with his own projection of forward movement: perpetually out of step, even with himself.

Hoberman’s thesis in the Found Illusions trilogy—that popular movies transmit socially significant ideological content for the critic to excavate—relied on a significant overlap in the pre-streaming era between the moviegoing public and the American people, with box office receipts as empirical links (or smoking guns with which to take aim at Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and other perceived industry power brokers). The new normal, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the temporary elimination of theatrical windowing, represented a decisive rupture of this correlation, with added analytical obstacles in the opaque new metrics of success imposed by streamers. Not burdened by the obligation to report their audience totals and heavily incentivized to skew them upward, industry leader Netflix began issuing weekly top 10 rankings straight to the platform’s home feed in February 2020. Starting in November 2021, with the release of their $200 million caper clunker Red Notice directly to the service, these rankings were based on “total hours viewed”—with no way to account for repeat viewings, autoplays, or whether or not anyone was in the room to watch it. (“It doesn’t matter what you do, only matters what they think you’ve done,” explains Ryan Reynolds’s art thief Nolan Booth). Still, the figures sent a powerful message about the company’s global reach: that a distracted, inattentive subscriber base, wandering from room to room to tote laundry or clear dishes while glancing at a screen in the background, suited them better than butts in seats. To paraphrase Brecht: Having played their part to dissolve the moviegoing audience, the streamers began to construct another—in other words, to build back “better.”

Beginning his presidency with 57 percent approval, Biden centered his legislative agenda on his campaign’s Build Back Better platform, which became an omnibus bill of the same name after some stimulus planks were passed under the initial 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The more ambitious BBB, funded partly with taxes on corporate profits and increased IRS enforcement, stalled in the Senate, failing to win the critical 50th vote from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Despite Biden’s self-professed image as a proficient backslapper, the legislative balance of power in an agonizingly gridlocked Senate proved intractable, even for his particular set of skills. By September, the honeymoon was decidedly over: the images of chaos that erupted from Afghanistan as the US Armed Forces withdrew their troops, resulting in the swift return of the Taliban and the widely televised fall of Kabul, drove Biden’s approval into the low 40s, a doldrums from which he would not recover (save for a telling window in the fall of 2024). While some progressives and anti-imperialists commended Biden for making the hard choice, it came at the seemingly permanent cost of his mandate, in the process breaking with the sacred, if fallacious, self-image of the United States as a global peacekeeper.

Elsewhere, the film industry struggled to recapture the consensus cinema of the prepandemic years. In 2019, Hollywood’s decade-long love affair with IP-based filmmaking reached an inflection point with the May release of Avengers: Endgame, the climax and apparent finale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe phenomenon, which had begun with 2008’s Iron Man. What could replace it? Producer wunderkind and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige would need time to generate the same interest in a new superhero team, with the release of so many Avengers from their contracts and their places in the story. (The final scene of Endgame, with an artificially geriatric Chris Evans passing Steve Rogers’s adamantium Captain America shield on to Anthony Mackie’s Falcon, duly evoked Saving Private Ryan’s greatest-generational challenge—“Earn this”—while also turning Cap, however inadvertently, into a wizened Biden effigy.) It would be a few years before enough of the warning signs mounted—Eternals (2021), Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), The Marvels (2023)—and the industry belatedly realized that something essential, whether the untimely loss of Black Panther (2018) star Chadwick Boseman or the blockbuster era itself, was not coming back.

A premature realization of this epochal change premiered in the United States on October 8, 2021, a year and a half delayed and not a moment too soon: No Time to Die, the final outing of Daniel Craig’s James Bond, which took the unusual step of seemingly killing off its iteration of the character. This Bond had been conceived as a grounded, back-to-basics reboot in 2006’s Casino Royale, climaxing with the death of his traitorous lover Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), a foundational trauma that provided emotional ballast for multiple sequels, including the direct continuation in 2008’s Quantum of Solace. As directed by action journeyman and franchise veteran Martin Campbell (who previously oversaw the 1995 Pierce Brosnan 007 vehicle GoldenEye, as well as sci-fi action movies such as 1994’s No Escape), Casino Royale assimilated the aesthetic preoccupations of signature post-9/11 thriller The Bourne Identity (2002) and, even more so, the handheld shooting and fast cutting of its Paul Greengrass–helmed sequel The Bourne Supremacy (2004), which film scholar David Bordwell termed “intensified continuity.”

Picking up new tricks as it went along, Eon Productions—the family firm of IP caretakers co-captained by heirs Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson—similarly borrowed the narrative midsection and political messaging of 2008’s The Dark Knight in Skyfall (2012), a referendum of sorts on Bond’s 21st-century relevance. As with Christopher Nolan’s zeitgeist-defining War on Terror allegory, Skyfall wore its conservative politics proudly, with MI6 head M (Judi Dench) reciting the final lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” in a tribute to the superspy as nationalist icon, resolving in an epilogue that returns Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) from the field to M’s office—now manned by Ralph Fiennes, inverting the Craig era’s gender balance and putting everything in its right place.

If these adjustments were regressive, the retcons of 2015’s Spectre qualified as outright misjudgments, revising the villains of the previous three films into pawns of the title organization and of puppet master Ernst Stavro Blofeld, now played by Christoph Waltz in a spectacularly unimaginative casting: Colonel Hans Landa as dark-money Thanos, the shadowy architect of a Bond Cinematic Universe. The quippy dialogue and potboiler plotting suggested a smirking, cartoonish tone reminiscent of the Roger Moore era, a choice—let’s do a silly one—that sat uncomfortably alongside the serialized stitching, let alone the deep shadows and gilded lighting of Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography. In catering both to the Eon tradition of quality and to fan-flattering marketplace trends, the extravagantly freighted Spectre (budget estimates soared to $300 million) went over like a lead balloon.

One of the first films to move its release date from spring 2020 due to the worsening pandemic, No Time to Die suffered from an almost unprecedented level of prerelease hype, which eventually came to echo the sentiment of its leading man’s dual promotional runs: let’s get this over with already. Smarting from multiple on-set injuries and as many instances of continuity whiplash, Craig’s actorly ego merged with Eon’s prestige pretensions by securing an irrevocable finale for the character; the delayed return of the blockbuster turned out to be a long goodbye. With its opportunistic pilfering of various IP-driven trends, the Craig run concluded as the axiomatic film series of its era: expensive, derivative, increasingly sentimental, and unsustainably concerned with its own importance. By setting him up to make the ultimate sacrifice—in an uncanny twist, saving humanity from a planned viral plague—No Time to Die insisted not only that we view its weathered, exhausted Bond as the irreplaceable man we’d be sorry to lose, but that we feel sorry for him as well. The nostalgic closing image of his true love (Léa Seydoux) and their child driving off into a tunnel resembling the films’ iconic gun-barrel opening suggested a franchise model approaching its creative vanishing point.

James Bond will return, of course, by the good graces of Jeff Bezos (recently seen blasting off into space, Hugo Drax–style) and Amazon. When it was officially announced early in 2025 that Barbara Broccoli—by some measure the longest-serving Bond Girl—had divested herself of the family business along with Wilson, the reaction online and even in legacy media was as if 007 was now taking orders from Spectre. While not technically a hostile takeover, Amazon’s enfolding of all things Bond—not just as an extant and sprawling intellectual property but also including any number of potential new subdivisions—under the proverbial big tent exemplified their ongoing role as pop-cultural slumlords. Of course, movies (or $500 million streaming series like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) don’t really pay the rent for Amazon, whose filmmaking division is largely untethered from old and dusty notions of profit or return on investment. Hence the eccentricity of their in-house feature-filmmaking catalog, which kicked off in 2015 with Spike Lee’s gangbanger Lysistrata riff Chi-Raq and constitutes perhaps the deepest and most eclectic grab bag of any 21st-century production house—a testament less to a genuinely artist-friendly ideology than to a money spigot located on prime real estate in Silicon Beach.

In August 2021, two months before No Time to Die bowed on more than 4,000 American screens—enervating a respectable if unspectacular $70 million opening weekend—the strangest-ever Amazon Studios production snuck in through the stage doors of the nation’s art houses, bearing laurels (though no awards) from the Cannes Film Festival and a couple of genuine movie stars. Written and directed by the congenitally eccentric French filmmaker Leos Carax, and top-lining Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as tempestuously temperamental artist types who become parents to a sentient, anthropomorphic marionette, Annette was a sung-through, fairy-tale rock musical/parental cautionary tale that wore its myriad weirdness on its sleeves, proudly, as a badge of honor. The film reportedly cost $15 million dollars, chump change for Amazon but by far the biggest budget of Carax’s career. “When you make an expensive film you sell your soul,” the director told IndieWire, as if anticipating accusations of a deal with the Devil.

The Faust legend hangs over Annette, which is about a wildly successful stand-up comedian who learns, too late, to be more careful about what he wishes for. The same need to be amplified that turns Driver’s Henry McHenry into a motor-mouthpiece for vile, MRA-style rhetoric catalyzes a dangerous bout of jealousy when his eponymous daughter—remanded to his custody after her mother dies tragically—becomes an even bigger star than him, appearing in the “Hyperbowl” halftime show by virtue of what seems to be divine intervention. (“We love Annette,” coo the hoi polloi, to the staccato arias of the British avant-rock duo Sparks.) The absurdity of the film’s storyline is total, but also deceptive, with significant beyond-the-frame connections to Carax’s personal life (his wife, Yekaterina Golubeva, died several years earlier under mysterious circumstances); more generally—and a bit pretentiously—Annette is styled as an excoriation of toxic masculinity, laced with a potent drip of self-pity. Beyond his status as an auteurist surrogate–cum–dead ringer—growing increasingly Caraxian in manner and bearing as the film goes on—Henry suggested a kind of showbiz Mephisto, a Weinstein manqué variably denying, dissembling, and manipulating the people around him, including and especially Annette, who, in, a neo-Pinocchio twist, is humanized just in time to shrug off her father’s apologies. “Can’t I love you?” moans the incarcerated mogul, imploring a bit of sympathy for the Devil. “No, not really, Daddy,” trills his offspring. “It’s sad but it’s true. Now you have nothing to love.”

A case can be made that Driver’s skill at inhabiting charismatic creeps—and also creep-adjacent, mostly good guys, like the hulking, hooded-romantic Adam Sackler on Girls—is what’s made him such an in-demand millennial leading man, a pent-up antihero for compromised times. His movie star career began in hyperdrive, with his inclusion in the ensemble cast of Disney’s relaunched Star Wars trilogy as its villain Kylo Ren—a discount Darth Vader down to his own snouted helmet. Petulant and prodigious, sulking and smoldering, Driver surpassed expectations for Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), “bring[ing] his A-game to a dress-up pageant,” as critic Eric Hynes wrote. As the Force-touched heir of legacy heroes Han Solo and Princess (now General) Leia, Ren’s rejection of his birthright in favor of genocide and patricide spoke to cresting concerns about alienated young American men armed with AR-15s—a moment of corporatized brand rejuvenation intersecting with a zeitgeist that was also hostile to the idea of Daisy Ridley’s heroine Rey as an intergalactic Mary Sue.

Driver’s star persona was further refined in writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2017 continuation Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, which fleshed out—and, in short order, bumped off—Ren’s overlord Snoke, a motion-capture creation inhabited by Andy Serkis as a Svengali with a seductive purr. Swaddled in a bedazzled golden robe, Snoke cut a Hugh Hefneresque figure, further casting Ren (and Driver) as a different generation of masculine menace: soft, sensitive, yet dangerously misguided. Johnson, whose sloganeering tendencies let fly in his up-to-the minute detective features Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022), smartly positioned Driver as a pop-cultural icon for a historical hinge point, a figure of raw potential who, counterposed with a generational peer in Rey, would have the opportunity in the trilogy’s final installment to reject the sins of his elders—to “let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”

The retconning of Rey’s own bloodline to connect her to franchise final boss Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) in Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) spoke to Disney/Lucasfilm’s critical failure of nerve; after suffering the fan backlash to Johnson’s contributions, the powers that be literally silenced Driver for the trilogy’s final showdown. In the process, the film indicated that Kylo Ren himself was an unworthy figure to bear the gravitas of a billion-dollar enterprise’s endgame antagonist, and that a specter from beyond the veil had to return—somehow—to retake the role. Driver, for his part, had long since moved on. Moving quickly to capitalize on his fame, he had lined up an impressive run of collaborations with critically adored filmmakers—among them Steven Soderbergh (Logan Lucky, 2017), Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories, 2017; Marriage Story, 2019), Jim Jarmusch (Paterson, 2016), Martin Scorsese (Silence, 2016), and Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman, 2018). By the time of Annette’s release, Driver had already garnered a reputation as an auteur’s actor: a versatile leading man with an active fanbase who could help secure financing for dream projects, commercial prospects somewhat aside—of which Carax’s sui generis streaming whatsit served as exhibit A.

Exhibit B: his bristling, unsentimental parody of medieval noblesse oblige in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021). As Jacques le Gris, a squire elevated well above his station—and his former fellow Caroline War veterans—by a powerful royal patron, Driver draws a bead on entitlement and how it metastasizes into sexual aggression. From his point of view, Jacques’s status gives him every right to seduce—and overpower—Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer), the wife of his cash-strapped frenemy Sir Jean (Matt Damon). Point of view is everything in The Last Duel, which tells its story of rape and revenge from three different perspectives: his and his and then hers, melodrama under the sign of Rashomon. Given the project’s development as an original screenplay by Damon and Ben Affleck, it was a fait accompli to read the film as a not-so-veiled allegory taking aim at Damon and Affleck’s former employer Harvey Weinstein. Without protesting too much—more like just enough—the boys and their co-writer Nicole Holofcener insisted that their aim was simply to “create three dimensional people and tell [a] specific story.”

Mission accomplished: By the standards of Late Ridley Scott, who likes to shoot first and ask questions later (if ever), The Last Duel is unusually measured and compelling, and, yes, three-dimensional in its juxtaposition of masculine power fantasies and stymied female agency. The rhetoric around its commercial underperformance, meanwhile, suggested that the public appetite for grim, heavy-spirited Me Too fables was limited. Driver had a second Scott collaboration in the bag: House of Gucci, released in November just weeks after The Last Duel’s quick September entrance-and-exit from the box office charts. Its pop music soundtrack and camp qualities—also featuring performances by an accented Lady Gaga alongside Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino—only highlighted Scott’s slovenly mise-en-scène, with Driver once again on hand to provide credibility through his capable performance. The presence of alleged Hollywood creep Jared Leto, mugging beneath layers of prosthetics as the balding, middle-aged Paolo Gucci, further solidified the impression that after the suggestion of bold steps forward in The Last Duel and Annette, both Scott and Driver had taken the proverbial step back: a pitfall and a by-product of Driver’s idealistic, increasingly questionable loyalty to an earlier era of film titans.

The best performance in The Last Duel came courtesy of Affleck as Count Pierre d’Alençon—a righteously goateed party monster who implores visitors at his invitation-only castle orgies to “take [their] fucking pants off.” If Scott’s vision of France’s sybaritic, satyriastic elite meeting behind closed doors to get their freak on fell short of, say, Eyes Wide Shut, it nevertheless slotted the film alongside a vast cycle of millennial movies that, to varying degrees of intentionality and artistic achievement, channeled anxieties around the activities of one Jeffrey Epstein, the New York financier (as per his good friend Jim Downey) whose predations made him into something like the public face of clandestine one-percenter depravity—even more so than Harvey Weinstein, with whom he had many friends in common. No man is an island, but Epstein’s 71-acre property served as a metonym for both its owner and his celebrity clientele—a remote stretch of beach beyond prying eyes or impunity, the site for a perfect getaway.

It has been said—in a book of bawdy letters—that enigmas never age, but one reason that Epstein has endured beyond the grave is his status as a bipartisan bogeyman: both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are easily glimpsed in photos with Epstein and his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell. In 2023, an Instagram video surfaced that bore an ominous bit of text: “When you find out who owns the island next to Epsteins,” it read. The video then cut to a man saying, “Spoiler alert: It’s Joe Biden.” There was no basis to the story, Biden having chosen to vacation pretty much everywhere else except Little Saint James, but in a moment when guilt by association was becoming an increasingly powerful rhetorical tool for pundits, shitposters, and professional conspiracy-slingers alike, Epstein’s flight logs held real potential for political weaponization. Trump’s vow in fall 2024 to unredact their contents—a campaign-season promise that has since boomeranged back on his administration and MAGA as whole—energized the Pizzagate brigade even as it called to mind the I Think You Should Leave sketch in which Tim Robinson, clad in a hot dog suit, starts ranting to perpetual onlookers about the need to find the guy who just crashed a hot dog–shaped truck through a department store window. “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” he insists, staggering out of the vehicle, eyes darting nervously, a lucid—and hugely memeable—distillation of projection, evasion, and transparent bad faith.

Speaking of bad faith: The most self-consciously provocative American horror movie of 2021—and also the most willful entry into the dubious but sociologically potent subgenre characterized by film critic Nick Newman as “Epsteincore”—was surely Red Scare co-host Dasha Nekrasova’s The Scary of Sixty-First, which wrought its own perverse variation on Me Too themes. Here, the heroines—played by the director as well as Betsey Brown and Madeline Quinn—come to seek out, and get off on, full-body demonic possession by the spirits of Epstein’s victims; they’re pick-me girls in thrall to pinup photos of Prince Andrew. Set in a contemporary New York where the vibes are clearly off—and shot to look an awful lot like the swinging Manhattan of Rosemary’s Baby (1968)—the film’s sleaze-coated textures suited the ideological slipperiness associated with its director. An authentically striking camera subject with a knack for throwing poses (in all senses of the word), Nekrasova was enough of a cinephile (and a wit) to cite the noted “female edgelord filmmaker” Claire Denis as an influence on Scary, diversifying her artistic allegiances beyond the bad-boys club of Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, and Polish Svengali Andrzej Żuławski while holding her own work to the highest possible standard.

Cinematically speaking, The Scary of Sixty-First is not at the level of Trouble Every Day (2001), or Bastards, Denis’s scabrous 2013 thriller, whose pale, incestuous patriarch (Michel Subor) is a Gallic monster under the sign of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It’s more like an unofficial adaptation of sad-girl poet laureate Ottessa Moshfegh’s buzzy, BookTok-ratified 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, whose self-anesthetizing protagonist sleeps through 9/11. With its paranoid tone and sexualized violence, the book is Epsteincore without an Epstein. In interviews, Nekrasova talked about “the hauntology of contemporary life” and a desire to “help people make sense of an emotional truth of the world”—one an entreaty to the academic set, the other a dog whistle to conspiracy theorists (and a public hug-it-out photo op with Alex Jones was on the horizon). But despite its trollish tone, including a fleeting cameo by Red Scare co-host Anna Khachiyan as a “Ghislaine Maxwell doppelgänger” (or is she supposed to be Anna Wintour?), Scary’s ketamine-fueled, all-of-them-witches shtick penetrated the progressive wing of film-festival culture, bowing at Berlin alongside the likes of Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Hong Sang-soo, and Céline Sciamma, who had famously stormed out of a French awards ceremony to protest a citation for Polanski. As genre filmmaking, Scary may not have been, well, scary, but it was suggestive, consolidating the seductive, compulsory solipsism of the small, weirdly influential (and easily influenced) New York media cohort that, depending on who you asked, positioned itself—or was inserted by an unlikely coalition of cautionary, pearl-clutching bloggers and deep-pocketed tech bros—as a viable site of subcultural resistance to the reigning neoliberal establishment. (The question of the filmmaker’s conviction remains open; in a recent post on X, Nekrasova said that, in retrospect, her Epstein fixation was “fruitless” and had caused her “a lot of anguish.”)

Much film discourse that autumn took a back seat to a favorite spectacle of the bourgeois critic class: the third season of Succession, which premiered on HBO (and Warner’s then-new HBO Max service) in October as a post-Trump narrative with deep ambivalence about the potential for disruption. Plucking Nekrasova out of the zeitgeist for inclusion in the show’s rapidly expanding ensemble as a PR lackey, creator Jesse Armstrong and his writers examined the feud between failson Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) and his media mogul dad (Brian Cox) as a nexus of multiple avenues for resistance to the gathering consolidation of all media, put in stark, apocalyptic terms by Kendall as a “323 BC” opportunity for cultural reset. Tasked mainly with reading tweets out loud, Nekrasova’s derisively named Comfrey Pellits was on hand not only to underline Kendall’s addled Christ complex but also to subtextually suggest his dubious moral righteousness. This personal thread climaxed with a gaudy, ghastly birthday celebration at Hudson Yards—America’s own glass-and-steel Suicide Forest—where Kendall’s breakdown and public spat with his siblings marked another of Armstrong & Co.’s spiraling plots, in which each movement toward a possible reunion and alliance against their father pushed the siblings further down toward oblivion. If, as in Armstrong’s favored Emerson quotation, every institution is the shadow of a single man, the Roy family comprised yet one more system unable to reform itself.

On the big screen, the season’s prestige offerings showed further warning signs of a movie culture withdrawing into niches. After notching his first (but not last) Academy nomination for Willem Dafoe’s performance in The Florida Project (2017), indie tyro Sean Baker returned with Red Rocket, the blackhearted tale of a grifter (Simon Rex) retreating to his Texas hometown and finding no shortage of new marks for the taking. Recalling the Satanic antiheroes of pulp novelist Charles Willeford, Rex’s Mikey “Saber” Davies was a deliciously contemptible protagonist for an indie cinema less preoccupied with the current administration’s new normal than with the specter of an exiled con artist in chief. Baker, whose deceptively youthful looks and rangy Twitter “likes” tab belied his age, was a seasoned yet still lesser-known filmmaker growing into his place among the upper tier of American auteurs. The holidays also saw the return of Steven Spielberg—a certified Genius of the System many times over—with a remake of West Side Story (1961), his first foray into the musical genre. The set-bound production, filmed between New Jersey exteriors and New York’s Steiner Studios, paid dutiful homage to the Robert Wise–Jerome Robbins original even as Tony Kushner’s screenplay—revising the book by Arthur Laurents—carefully excavated the historical subtext beneath the original musical. Placing this Romeo and Juliet fable in the shadow of the Lincoln Center development may have pleased devotees of Robert Caro, but it tended to dull the musical’s chromatic heights. As Richard Brody wrote, the pathologizing quality of Spielberg’s adaptation “Krupkifies the film. […] He leaves no loose ends, no ambiguities, no extravagances, no extremes.” Whatever musical audience existed either failed to show up or couldn’t make the movie a hit, and it topped out at $38 million in domestic grosses.

Conversely, no one would accuse writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson of being a box office juggernaut. His Licorice Pizza, released that November—continuing a similar streak of detours out of the past since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love—made its diagnosis of 1970s malaise entirely out of shaggy-dog stories and irrational impulses. Based partly on the tall tales of Hollywood producer Gary Goetzman (co-founder of Playtone with Tom Hanks) and on Anderson’s own San Fernando Valley childhood, its bottom-up view of show business—from a variety show starring Lucille Ball to an audition for Breezy (1973) and an encounter with future superproducer Jon Peters, then the hairdresser paramour of Barbra Streisand—betrayed less a sense of nostalgia than an interest in the rough draft of history. The succession of small business schemes by Cooper Hoffman’s Gary Valentine could have belonged to one of the late novels by Inherent Vice author and 20th-century sage Thomas Pynchon, culminating in the young entrepreneur running his pinball-machine empire in an ice-cream suit, a tableau that suggestively summarized a nation’s arrested development segueing neatly into the Jimmy Carter years, with Gary as an actual son of the sixties ready to put away childish things—or put them up for sale.

Unafraid either of bad taste or of plunging boldly into the now, comedy mogul Adam McKay, meanwhile, made his Netflix debut with Don’t Look Up, an end-times parable that substituted an impending, world-destroying meteor for the climate catastrophe unfolding off-screen. Released onto the platform on Christmas Eve 2021—as the COVID-19 Omicron variant surged through the country—McKay’s satire put appealing A-listers Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio (a longtime spokesperson for climate issues) in the roles of scientists pleading with a variety of vulgar comic types in the White House, tech industry, and media to unite humanity and take immediate, coordinated action. As messaging, the movie had an extremely contemporary problem: like sobering packages on the daily news, Netflix movies seemed to come and go without much staying power. The face of a distressed—and middle-aged—DiCaprio addressing the TV cameras directly felt like an honest transmission of its director’s state of mind, earnestly trying to make use of the mass platform granted to him while knowing full well its intended use was to placate, not to galvanize.

Those going out to the movies may have hoped for some escapism from the persistent pandemic doldrums in the form of The Matrix Resurrections, the Warner Bros. reboot helmed by franchise co-creator Lana Wachowski. Her sister Lilly had declined the invitation to return, though as Lana’s script made clear, it had not been extended in a welcoming spirit. The first act presented Keanu Reeves’s Thomas Anderson (alias Neo) as the visionary designer behind a video game franchise patterned on the Matrix films, now contemplating a reboot at the mandatory request of his company’s new owners—Warner Bros. This winking, thumb-in-the-eye critique went only so far; Wachowski’s repudiation of the original trilogy’s balletic, Yuen Woo-ping choreographed action in favor of jittery handheld and chaotic gunplay represented a more striking rejection of the corporate mandate.

As pop-cultural savants whose conversance in critical theory exceeded even the density of generational peer Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic syntheses, the Wachowskis were well positioned to puncture the crushing fatigue of reboot culture. Lana Wachowski’s treatment, presenting Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) as pawns of a malicious program (in the smirking, hateful guise of Neil Patrick Harris) that uses their romantic drive to fuel a self-refreshing panopticon, reformulated the original film’s critique of end-of-history office spaces into a more cutting articulation of late capitalism’s emotional logic: a machine that runs on both the denial of escape and endless, thwarted longing. The most bravura set piece saw the Matrix pursue Trinity and Neo in the form of activated drones hurling themselves out of skyscrapers, a haunting elaboration upon Adam Curtis’s Suicide-soundtracked montage in Hypernormalisation (2016), illustrating the death drive at the heart of the blockbuster. Some critics, such as Sam Bodrojan in Reverse Shot, praised Wachowski’s carefully thought-out themes and cathartic trans allegory. Writing for The Baffler, on the other hand, John Semley lamented that “The Matrix felt like it was speaking to its time. Now, movies seem to chatter only among themselves.”

If the movies were speaking not directly to their audiences but to each other, what were they saying? Mostly, they were acknowledging a desire for escape—and a liberation from illusory, unsatisfactory choices. Trinity and Neo had defeated the Matrix only to find themselves exploited by new masters. In preparation for a new era of IP management, the MCU had embraced multiversal storytelling with December’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, uniting Tom Holland’s Peter Parker with the heroes and villains of the earlier Sam Raimi and Marc Webb Spider-Man films. In May 2022, Raimi himself would join the MCU for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which reintroduced Disney’s recently acquired Fox IP in the form of X-Men and Fantastic Four characters. Recalling both the alternate lives and multiversal storytelling of The Matrix Resurrections and of the struggling MCU, March 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once celebrated the legacy of Marvel’s dominance by connecting it to a longer lineage of pop storytelling, including the honorable Hong Kong action cinema of its star Michelle Yeoh and the handmade surrealism of breakout indie underdogs Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, except more aggressively ingratiating: the film’s signature image is Yeoh in a kung fu stance that makes it look like she’s going in for a hug. Co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had created a genuine phenomenon, yet the troubling question remained whether their model of comic-inflected indie storytelling could rejuvenate the ailing industry, or if its decidedly profitable run—then the highest-grossing A24 release, making back its small budget several times over—represented a new, diminished ceiling for consensus cinema: quirked-up, goated with the sauce, and produced by the goddamned Russo brothers.

Bursting through the ceiling that summer was Top Gun: Maverick, a long-delayed “legacyquel” to the 1986 original, a dream of Morning in America deferred. The sanitized plot had Tom Cruise’s perennially underpromoted flying ace Pete “Maverick” Mitchell tasked with an aerial raid on an unnamed foreign enemy’s nuclear facility, a bowdlerized variant of war games with Iran sanded down to suggest the faceless Imperial pilots in Star Wars. The screenplay, credited in part to Cruise’s favored director and script doctor Christopher McQuarrie, had to stretch to find an appropriately depoliticized scenario in which to assert the US military’s dominance in the 21st century. In the process, Maverick stretched to accommodate decades of Cruise’s tumultuous public image, as a troublesome asset (in his time) with a checkered romantic history (no kidding!) fighting the good fight for human craft and artistry against the dominance of bean-counting bureaucrats. The real miracle was that Joseph Kosinski’s direction and the young cast—led by Miles Teller as the son of Maverick’s fallen wingman Goose (played in the original by Anthony Edwards)—managed to wring some pathos from the preposterous dramaturgy. As Canada’s Will Sloan wrote, “Tom Cruise is the only decaying American institution that still works, and I trust him.”

The training class at Top Gun was filled out by ingenues in search of stardom; co-star Glen Powell, who had broken out in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), was a former child actor who had been sniffing at the A-list for years, now acting alongside Monica Barbaro, a future Oscar nominee, and Lewis Pullman, soon to be of the New Avengers. The subtext was a finishing school for movie magic, with Cruise as lecturer, headmaster, bankrolling trustee, and prize alumnus all in one. They were making this one not just the way they used to make them—with Kosinski doing his best impression of original director Tony Scott’s sun-drenched montages—but also the way they ought to be made. McQuarrie’s presence on set clinched the sequel as un film de Tom Cruise, whose producing career had begun with a director-driven franchise in Mission: Impossible (1996). Since 2015, that series had been in the hands of McQuarrie—now helping to finesse Maverick to his meal ticket’s desired specifications. The underlying conflict wasn’t an aging pilot confronted with his impending obsolescence, but rather the tension between Cruise’s showcasing of his chosen recruits and his pathological inability to cede center stage.

For now, the box office numbers certified that Cruise Enterprises had landed the plane, the right decisions had been made, and the professionals were still in charge. But like No Time to Die’s gun-barrel ellipsis, Maverick’s closing image (soundtracked by Lady Gaga) had more a sense of displacement than triumph to it. Several critics reached for the comparison between the sadder-but-wiser Pete Mitchell and the aging Joe Biden, another man out of time who had returned when his country needed him most. Preoccupied with youth and experience, the picture was death-tinged, haunted by the specters of Goose as well as Maverick’s onetime rival Iceman, reprised by the ailing Val Kilmer in a curtain call performance preceding his character’s on-screen funeral. It was also meaningfully anachronistic: the film was at once a relic of the 1980s and a Trump-era asset kept in cold storage, having begun shooting in pre-COVID 2018. Cruise, who had masked up for a 2020 screening of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, reportedly insisted on holding the movie until the world was ready for a traditional wide release. This decision—as well as keeping it off streaming until Christmas—helped cement Maverick’s status as a modern classic, but its unusually long gestation period and self-reflexive qualities indicated an acteur-style passion project, not the return of mass movie culture. Meanwhile, Cruise and McQuarrie were still prepping the first half of a two-part Mission: Impossible installment, itself greenlit in 2019: To Be Continued.

What connected Cruise and Biden most of all was an uneasy relationship with their own historical moment, chosen or not. Cruise’s skill as both star and superproducer had won him back control of his public perception, but his films were increasingly haloed afterimages, untethered from the realities of the business he sought to resurrect, let alone the balance of world power. The choice of Maverick’s final shot, a corkscrewed flight into the sunset, might have played very differently only a couple of years before: either a collective dream of release from the anxious Trump reign or a less palatable affirmation of peace through military prowess. Premiering well into the Biden administration, in a decimated theatrical environment and after the last flight out of Kabul, Maverick spoke more to the psychology of the man in the cockpit than to conditions on the ground.