Expanding access to vasectomy care could help shift some of the burden of birth control.
In early May, after the Supreme Court draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked, Google searches for vasectomies spiked — and then spiked again in late June when the final decision was handed down on June 24.
Bobby Najari, a urologist and assistant professor at NYU Langone Health, says some of that spike translated into a modest uptick in vasectomy consultations. “It came up in a consultation about vasectomy just today with a patient saying that [the Supreme Court decision] just highlighted the burden that is placed on women when it comes to reproductive health.”
Despite the sudden interest in the term, chances are it won’t lead to a wave of vasectomies. According to 2019 CDC data, women undergo tubal ligation, the female sterilization method colloquially known as getting one’s tubes tied, at more than three times the rate that men get vasectomies, which involves minor surgery to prevent sperm from moving out of the testes.
The sterilization gap persists in the face of the clear medical facts that vasectomies are slightly safer, less invasive, and four times as cost-effective as tubal ligation. (Vasectomies are also the most cost-effective contraceptive over time.)
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Tim Ryan Williams/Vox
Much of the sterilization gap can be explained by the simple fact that the burden to prevent pregnancy in the US — like the burden of managing childbirth and reproduction more generally — disproportionately falls on people who can become pregnant.
One example: Mara Gandal-Powers of the National Women’s Law Center notes that, prior to birth, many health providers ask in advance whether the child will be the person’s last, and if so, whether they would like to have their tubes tied. “I think that partially contributes to [the gap] … but I also think there’s a reason why providers are asking that and not asking do you or your partner want to have a sterilization after this last child?”
There’s no easy way to shift at least some of the contraceptive burden onto men. There will be moments, like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, that prompt introspection and, for some, action. And forthcoming technologies, like male birth control pills and injections, could provide more flexible contraception options for men.
But simply making vasectomies more accessible and less expensive could shift some of the burden soon, at the moment when it is most needed: The overturning of Roe v. Wade will severely restrict or practically eliminate abortion access in over 20 states, which will disproportionately affect low-income people and people of color.
With Republicans gearing up to further restrict access to abortion and potentially contraception, and Democrats’ options to fight back limited, modest measures like increasing access to vasectomy care could be a previously underutilized route for change and serve to level some of the playing field of birth control.
Making the snip accessible
The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, requires insurance providers to fully cover 18 forms of contraception for women, including sterilization. That means that if you want to get an IUD copper ring or get on the pill, you shouldn’t have to pay a single cent, though there are notable exceptions. Some health plans have onerous restrictions and employers that object to contraception on religious grounds are exempt from Obamacare’s contraception mandate due to the Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.
If you want to get a vasectomy, you’ll probably have to pay at least some of it out of pocket. Obamacare doesn’t require insurers to fully cover the procedure and health insurance plans vary on how much of the procedure they’ll pay for. Plus, millions of Americans still lack any kind of health insurance.
Congress could help to close the sterilization gap. The Affordable Care Act required insurers to cover a few categories of preventive services without cost-sharing, including women’s health care; Congress could pass a law requiring the ACA to cover contraception for all genders, or expand the law’s requirements to include preventive services for men. But Liz McCaman Taylor of the National Health Law Program says a regulatory approach makes more sense, since panels — composed of doctors and health experts and mostly commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services — already actively determine which preventive services Obamacare covers.
One of those panels is the Women’s Preventive Services Initiative. While some reproductive health advocacy and research groups, including Taylor’s, have requested the panel add vasectomy to its set of recommendations, the procedure didn’t make the cut in its latest update, which was finalized in late 2021.
The reasoning is that even though women do stand to benefit from their partners getting a vasectomy, vasectomies aren’t performed on or used by women, so it isn’t currently considered a preventive service for women. But that doesn’t mean the panel’s experts couldn’t change their minds; coverage for condoms was included in the panel’s late 2021 update.
Another panel that recommends preventive services under Obamacare — the US Preventive Services Task Force, which recommends a wide array of preventive services for people of all genders — could also get the job done.
But an obstacle to expanding coverage is the paucity of research around vasectomies, said Taylor. “I think most if not all of the contraceptive research is dominated by women’s methods, so that doesn’t leave advocates a lot to go to the [panels] with. The fear is if you don’t go to the [panel] with strong research, they’re going to come out with a D [not recommended] or I [inconclusive] rating.”
Some progress has been made at the state level to expand vasectomy access. Around 20 states cover part of the cost of vasectomy care in their Medicaid expansion plans, and seven states have passed laws that require their state-regulated health care plans to fully cover contraceptive care for people of all genders, which includes vasectomy care.
But in 2018, the IRS issued new guidance that hobbled those states, saying that allowing individuals with high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) — in 2017, that was over 40 percent of insured Americans — to receive vasectomy care at no cost before meeting their deductible would mean they’re no longer HDHPs. People with those plans would no longer be eligible for tax-free health savings accounts.
The seven states had to either put the vasectomy component of their laws on hold or amend them to comply with the IRS guidance. The National Health Law Program wants to see the IRS change its guidance, but it’s not a top priority given the more pressing threats to contraception access and reproductive rights resulting from the overturning of Roe.
Changing roles in family planning
More than the thicket of regulations or the obstinance of insurance companies, however, reproductive rights experts say the biggest barrier to closing the sterilization gap is that US culture puts the onus on women to be responsible for birth control. And one symptom of that is the fact that research and development to expand options for men, like a pill or injection, has been anemic.
“It’s a real shame, and especially right now when we are starting to see calls for men to step up and generally people who can impregnate other people to take responsibility,” said Gandal-Powers. “I think there aren’t a lot of ways for them to actually prevent pregnancy.”
“As a man, I’ve only ever been told condoms or vasectomies are your two options, and condoms suck,” Rob Venturo, a 33-year-old supply chain consultant from Connecticut, told me outside the Supreme Court on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned. (Employed properly and regularly, condoms are an effective birth control method, and unlike vasectomies, also provide protection against sexually transmitted diseases, but the perceived reduction in pleasure has been a stubborn obstacle to their use.)
Venturo said he and an ex had discussed his getting a vasectomy, but the semi-permanent nature of the procedure — vasectomies can be reversed, though success isn’t assured — didn’t feel right, as he said there’s a chance, albeit slim, that he may want to have children someday. “We thought about it, but vasectomies are more permanent, right? An IUD is something that’s temporary, so that was why we went with that route.”
There have been efforts underway for decades to create male birth control pills, and more recently, an injection, but none have come to market. Adam Sonfield, a health policy consultant whose 2015 report on vasectomy access inspired this article, said there’s a “running joke that the male birth control pill is always five years down the road, no matter what year [it is].”
An effective, commercially available male birth control pill would probably do more to shift the burden of birth control than just about anything else. But until one is available, a vasectomy will usually make more sense than tubal ligation for couples and individuals who know they don’t want more children, or no children, because they are safer and less invasive than tubal ligation.
Ad blitzes could move the needle too. In the 1990s, a TV and radio commercial campaign promoting vasectomies in three major Brazilian cities temporarily increased vasectomy rates there between 59 and 108 percent.
Dr. Najari, the urologist in New York City, said he has seen the potential beginnings of a culture shift in recent years among patients who come in for vasectomy consultations. “I do remember the sentiment years ago being more ‘I’m here because my wife told me to be here’ — essentially she got sick of being on contraception or for medical reasons she’s not able to be on contraception,” Najari said.
Nowadays, more men tell him they’re getting a vasectomy because they don’t want their partners to have to deal with the side effects of some forms of contraception, or because their partner had to deal with childbirth and it should now be on them to contribute to family planning.
“I think part of that is the slow but perceivable shift in terms of expectations around family planning and also just the expectations of what men and women contribute to a family,” Najari said. With American institutions increasingly limiting access to abortion and contraception, those expectations will only — and rightly — grow.
A looser schedule can allow for serendipity.
On the spectrum from carefully curated scheduling to go-with-the-flow attitude, most people fall somewhere in the middle: a few can’t-miss occasions here, some loose plans there. The conditions of the past two years, however, have rendered impromptu hangouts difficult, if not impossible.
Unplanned dinners, playdates, and afternoon jaunts to the museum were complicated by pandemic restrictions, staffing shortages, reservations needing to be secured weeks in advance — not to mention concerns such as whether outdoor locales would have bathrooms or the weather would hold up. Even the easiest of hangs required at least a little planning.
The pandemic wasn’t the only deterrent to spontaneity. Before Covid shutdowns and restrictions, Americans’ daily schedules had become packed with meetings, classes, extracurricular activities, happy hours, and work dinners; there was no time left for pleasurable diversions.
“My daughter’s 15, and I look at a lot of her classmates and their lives are just scheduled from morning to evening with school and lessons and tutoring and organized sports,” says Edward Slingerland, professor of philosophy and distinguished university scholar at the University of British Columbia and author of Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity. “From an early age, we overschedule our kids and then we overschedule ourselves. Smartphones and laptops allow us to be constantly on.”
Constant planning comes at a cost. Planning is mentally taxing, research shows, and when leisurely activities, like going to the movies or grabbing coffee, are scheduled, free time starts to feel like work.
A looser schedule can infuse playfulness and adventure on a minor scale into life. Spontaneity is the state of being open to whatever situation is presented to you as it happens, says clinical psychologist Linda Blair. This can mean anything from trying a new restaurant for lunch at your colleague’s suggestion to waking up and deciding to go to the beach today. Living in the moment opens you up to new experiences, which can boost happiness, Blair says. “When you’re spontaneous, you get to enjoy what’s happening to you, rather than thinking, ‘What’s coming next? Am I going to be able to make that deadline? Am I going to be able to be on time for this?’”
While the two are often conflated, spontaneity is not the same as impulsivity. Impulsive actions are often made with little thought or consideration for consequences, Blair says. Spontaneity involves a gut check before deciding to, say, put off cleaning the house in favor of an afternoon reading in the park. “There’s no thought process whatsoever in impulsivity,” she says. “But spontaneous people, by staying connected with your gut, you’re responding to your emotions, you’re doing a logical process, which takes longer, but your emotions say ‘This is fun, this looks different, I’ll do it.’”
As much as the pressures of modern life have constrained people’s days to calendar appointments and to-do lists, spontaneity isn’t a relic of more free-flowing times. Ironic as it may seem, there are ways to prioritize spontaneity by creating conditions where serendipity can occur.
The curse of overscheduling
When all of life’s moments are planned and you’re rushing from one event to the next, you miss out on small, accidental joys: a quick conversation with a neighbor, a new favorite store you decided to pop into on a whim, a chance to grab ice cream with your kid on the way home from soccer practice. Without moments of serendipitous interaction and activity, “it’s not a fully lived life,” Slingerland says.
With overscheduling and overplanning, leisurely activities are often given concrete beginning and end times, which is why these pleasurable pursuits can feel like work, says Selin A. Malkoc, professor of marketing at Ohio State University, who has studied the effects of planning on leisure. Social plans, Malkoc says, “those happen in life more spontaneously, or we’d like to believe that leisure happens more spontaneously. Because we put these leisurely things into what we would normally schedule — chores, responsibilities — it just takes on those qualities to some extent.”
Constantly monitoring the time so you can make it to a friend’s birthday party after your child’s morning swim lessons distracts from the fact that leisure activities are supposed to be pleasurable, Malkoc says. Spontaneous events, by nature, don’t require much planning or rushing around for the sake of punctuality. As a result, “in many instances, spontaneous things give us more overall enjoyment,” Malkoc says.
Phones, the mechanism for overscheduling, are distracting and enable users to tune out the world around them. When the road map for the day exists on smartphone apps, you become dependent on them for where to be and where to go instead of reveling in the people and places around you in the moment. “Back in the day, when we were on public transit,” Slingerland says, “people would talk on public transit, and no one does that anymore.”
How to be more spontaneous
During the first year of the pandemic, when socializing and leisure outside the home came with caveats and restrictions, intricate planning was essential, from making reservations to monitoring time limits at attractions and restaurants.
The constant checking and verifying and planning — from both a health and social perspective — were inherently stressful, Blair says, and you may still be feeling the effects of all that stress. “Which is why you might go do something new and find it so exhausting,” she says. “My work right now is helping people get calm again, bring down those cortisol levels, stop the watchfulness so that you can react from your amygdala — that’s the emotional center that says, ‘Oh, this is fun. Let’s do it.’”
To make decisions from a place of spontaneity, you have to feel safe, which may be a hard habit to develop after living in self-preservation mode for so long. Break out of fear-based responses, in which you feel threatened and make a choice to protect yourself, and instead shift to more mindful-based thought processes to embrace spontaneity.
If a friend suggests a last-minute concert on a Tuesday night, take a few deep breaths to help break you out of a potential mindset of fear, then make your choice, Blair suggests. “That settles you down,” she says, “allows the fear response, which is also in the amygdala, to settle, and then you can make a logical calculation about what’s going on.”
To create conditions that allow for spontaneity, you first have to have the time to be spontaneous. Excited as you may be to reconnect with friends, resume hobbies, or even meticulously plan every second of a vacation, leave a day of the week or even a few hours of your day unscheduled to see where the wind takes you. This goes for planning with kids, too.
“When I schedule my kids, it feels like I’m improving them and enriching them but … they’re very uncomfortable the one day that they don’t have something to do. They get bored if I don’t give them an activity to do,” Malkoc says. “Let them be comfortable with being and just finding something interesting to do on the spot.” While this may mean turning down some plans, you can let family and friends know you’re free all day on Saturdays for visitors if anyone wants to drop by, Malkoc says.
Of course, having expendable income makes being spontaneous a little easier: You don’t have to worry about where the money to pay for an impromptu vacation will come from or feel the pinch after taking a surprise day off of work. But many off-the-cuff activities can be cost-free. Wearing an old band T-shirt you found in the back of a drawer, saying hello to other students at school, sending a text to a friend you haven’t seen in a while, and taking a different route to work are all ways to shake it up without spending a cent.
Slingerland suggests ditching your phone for a few hours (or just putting it in airplane mode) to rid yourself of distractions: “You may find a store you never noticed before. You may have a conversation with a neighbor you wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
After a prolonged stretch of planning, prioritizing spontaneity may be anxiety-inducing, but each time you leave a weekend unscheduled or agree to tag along to a friend’s kid’s dance recital after running into them on the street, you eventually won’t have to be as intentional. “Spontaneity just doesn’t happen,” Malkoc says. “We have to make the space for spontaneity for it to be able to happen.”
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From great blockbusters to a mockumentary about a talking inch-high shell.
The year is half over, believe it or not. But while studios often hold their most prestigious releases for the second half of the year, 2022 has already served up a feast of cinema worth seeing — if you know where to look. From blockbusters to microbudget indies, documentaries about political issues to a mockumentary about a tiny talking shell, here are the 21 best movies of 2022 … so far.
- Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
Rory Kennedy’s enraging documentary traces the events that led to two crashes of the Boeing 737 Max planes and the deaths of hundreds of people. Boeing’s slide from a well-respected company built on trust and attention to detail to one that hid the truth to satisfy the demands of profit is familiar, but terrifying nonetheless. And Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is an exceptionally strong exposé, one with a clear thesis, a powerful, direct argument to make, and implications that extend far beyond just Boeing.
How to watch it: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is streaming on Netflix.
- Crimes of the Future
Horror master David Cronenberg’s latest, Crimes of the Future, is certainly one of the weirdest (and maybe queasiest) movies of the year so far. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, and Scott Speedman, it’s a tale set in a dystopian future, when pervasive microplastics and a world that leans on synthetic materials have prompted new directions in human evolution. With bodies evolving as-yet-unseen organs, surgery becomes a public performance art. Societal factions form around different ideas about where humanity should go. Somehow it’s all wrapped up in an oddly sweet package, with human connection at its heart.
How to watch it: Crimes of the Future is playing in theaters.
- Top Gun: Maverick
In a film set 35 years after Top Gun, Tom Cruise returns as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, no longer a bright young whippersnapper but still the best flyboy around. He’s called back to the elite Top Gun program to train a group of fresh-faced pilots for a daring mission, but while there he has to confront both his past with old flame Penny (Jennifer Connelly) and his own mortality. Top Gun: Maverick is almost unprecedented in its class, a nostalgia sequel that doesn’t feel like a cheap IP cash grab. Instead, it brings Maverick’s story full circle in a satisfying manner that adds depth and dimension to its predecessor, but still tells a story that’s all its own.
How to watch it: Top Gun: Maverick is playing in theaters.
- Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack star in this two-hander, a heartfelt comedy about a 60-something widow who hires a sex worker to — well, she’s not really sure what, but she knows she can’t go on the way she’s living. They meet in a hotel and slowly reveal themselves to one another, developing a friendship that has implications for them both. Directed by Sophie Hyde and written by Katy Brand, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a sexually frank and good-natured movie about trying to come to terms with yourself, your history, and your body, and Thompson and McCormack give subtle, generous performances.
How to watch it: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is streaming on Hulu.
17. The Batman
The Batman might be the moodiest and broodiest of the tales of the caped crusader — no small feat when you’re competing with the Dark Knight series — but it’s also one of the most innovative. This time, Batman returns to his roots as a detective, and director Matt Reeves places him in the middle of an old-fashioned noir, with the rain and shady lighting and twisty mystery that requires. The Batman is also a story about the morality and futility of revenge, and about a character who lives in a state of constant struggle between the two. The Batman is a slow burn, but its climax is a banger.
How to watch it: The Batman is streaming on HBO Max and available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.
- Navalny
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, survived an assassination attempt in August 2020. (Putin is so threatened by Navalny that he refuses to speak his name in public.) Daniel Roher’s Navalny follows the opposition leader through the events following that poisoning, and in particular the investigation that Navalny and his team at the Anti-Corruption Foundation launched into the attempt on his life. Much of the documentary is dedicated to observing and exploring that investigation, with Navalny speaking straight to the camera in interviews about his beliefs and work (including his controversial willingness to align with some far-right groups in opposing Putin’s regime). And there’s a scene involving a phone call that is worth the price of admission, making this thriller a must-see in our political moment.
How to watch it: Navalny is streaming on HBO Max.
- The Fallout
Of the crop of more recent films about school shootings, Megan Park’s film The Fallout, which is as much a teen drama as a movie “about” a shooting, may be the best. Soon after the film starts, shots ring out; of course, the teens know exactly what’s happening. They have been participating in active shooter drills since grade school. They know about the Parkland kids, about what happened at Sandy Hook. They are getting shoved into a narrative they know all too well. Vada (Jenna Ortega) is in the bathroom when it happens, and she takes refuge with Mia (Maddie Ziegler) and Quinton (Niles Fitch). The violence occurs off-screen, while the trio huddles in a stall, trying to turn invisible as the unthinkable happens outside. But, they survive. The film’s focus isn’t on why it happened. Instead, the teens spend the movie asking why they survived, and how they can live in their altered reality.
How to watch it: The Fallout is streaming on HBO Max.
14. Cha Cha Real Smooth
Andrew (Cooper Raiff, who also wrote and directed the film) is a recent Tulane graduate who has moved back home to New Jersey while figuring out his next step. He meets Domino (Dakota Johnson), a single mother more than 10 years his senior who’s raising a teenager on the autism spectrum named Lola (Vanessa Burghardt). Andrew and Domino start to form a friendship that will teach them both something about themselves. And if that sounds like standard twee fare, rest assured — Raiff and Johnson’s performances turn it into something irresistible and lovely.
How to watch it: Cha Cha Real Smooth is playing in theaters and streaming on Apple TV+.
- The Pink Cloud
Onscreen text at the beginning of The Pink Cloud tells us the film was written in 2017 and shot in 2019, which feels like an odd announcement to make to your audience. The reasons become almost immediately clear. In the story, a rosy pink cloud suddenly rolls across Earth, and if you breathe it in, you die. So everyone is instantly quarantined with whomever they happened to be with at the moment the cloud arrived. That means Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça), who met only the day before and spent the night together, are now stuck together indefinitely. The pink cloud hovers over the world for years, and Giovana and Yago slowly experience the stages we’re familiar with now: certainty that it will be over soon, rage, exhaustion, fear, weariness. The Pink Cloud is haunting and riveting in the best way, acutely diagnosing a mental state that will feel startlingly familiar. And in a strange way, it’s a little encouraging. We’ve been isolated, but we’re not alone.
How to watch it: The Pink Cloud is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.
12. The Northman
The Northman is a bone-crunching Viking epic from detail-obsessed director Robert Eggers, based on the legend of Amleth, from which Shakespeare adapted Hamlet’s story. It stars an extremely ripped Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth alongside Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe, and Björk. Eggers, who co-wrote the film with the Icelandic poet Sjón, had historians of Icelandic and Viking history on speed-dial throughout production, and the result is an extraordinarily detailed reproduction not just of the Vikings’ world, but also their way of thinking. If you can extract a modern message from The Northman — that “toxic masculinity” has been destroying men for literal eons, that women have been granted limited agency to push back — it’s really not the point of this retelling of a much-retold tale. Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as if it’s tapping into something in the back of our minds that we’ve always known but half forgotten.
How to watch it: The Northman is streaming on Peacock and available to purchase on digital platforms.
- We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
The genre-defying, subtly unnerving We’re All Going to the World’s Fair captures the experience of the internet through the eyes of a lonely, isolated teenager. Casey (Anna Cobb) becomes immersed in an online horror challenge, one in which players complete a series of tasks (chants, rituals, and so on) and then experience some kind of transformation. She makes an unusual online connection that could be benign or could be menacing — how can Casey really tell? Director Jane Schoenbrun keeps us on our toes, too, and in so doing questions how we exist online, and why.
How to watch it: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
Everything Everywhere All At Once functions as a pretty good summary of the film, which is a big-hearted, hilarious, boldly sentimental tale of a mother and a daughter just trying to love one another. Also, it’s about the multiverse. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) is stuck in her life, running a laundromat with a hapless husband (Ke Huy Quan) and trying to reach out to her acerbic daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Plus, they’re being audited by the IRS. But when she stumbles into a mind-boggling discovery — that she must save all the universes from imminent destruction — things get weird. It’s absurd and wild and wonderful, and will probably make you cry.
How to watch it: Everything Everywhere All At Once is playing in theaters and available to purchase on digital platforms.
- Benediction
Terence Davies’s last film, A Quiet Passion, centered on the poet Emily Dickinson; in Benediction, Davies turns to a different poet, Siegfried Sassoon (a terrific Jack Lowden). Benediction — which means “blessing” — spends most of its time on Sassoon’s passionate but thwarted relationships with several different men, after which he eventually married a woman. The whole story is framed by Sassoon’s late-in-life conversion to Catholicism, amid his soured marriage and his son’s derision. There is no happy-go-lucky ending here, only the sense that an ineffable longing we have, to know and be known, is so precious and rare that most of us never find its fulfillment here on Earth. But the film’s title lays bare its aims: to offer words of blessing over a man who never quite found the love he craved and, yet, kept looking.
How to watch it: Benediction is playing in theaters.
- Jackass Forever
You want me to explain the inclusion of Jackass Forever on this list? Well, have you seen it? I have, and discovered it was as cathartic, unhinged, and weirdly good-hearted as any of its predecessors. Yes, it’s a movie about (mostly) dudes doing really stupid things together, and that’s what makes it great. Jackass Forever is the first of the films to add a new cast, because Johnny Knoxville and his long-suffering pals are hovering around 50 these days. They’re a lot more brittle than they were in the 1990s. And the new members are delighted to be in the movie we used to watch! Who can blame them? They have taken on a high, low calling: to be the fools who prostrate themselves across a pile of mousetraps or take an enormous belly flop for the camera, for us.
How to watch it: Jackass Forever is streaming on Paramount+ and available to rent or buy on digital platforms.
- Happening
Set in France in the 1960s, Happening is the story of Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) and the abortion she can’t legally attain. Anne is a talented student from a middle-class family who hopes her literature studies will be the key to a long and satisfying career. But when she discovers she’s pregnant, she is left without guidance and, seemingly, in a world full of potential minefields. Happening’s narrative power comes from how it evokes the profound loneliness that Anne feels, unable to speak to her friends, family, or doctors about what to do next. It’s brutal in spots, but especially vital to watch right now.
How to watch it: Happening is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.
- Friends and Strangers
Friends and Strangers feels a little bit like a throwback to the indie mumblecore movement of the aughts, but with a distinctive and slightly absurdist Australian twist. Alice (Emma Diaz) finds herself on a perhaps ill-advised camping trip with Ray (Fergus Wilson), with whom she doesn’t really have any chemistry. Soon, out of nowhere, we’re following Ray through some misadventures of his own. Set in and around Sydney, but spotlighting the ways human relationships languidly unfold on the terrain, it’s a little bit about the inherent silliness of what we call “civilization,” and also about how often we live our lives in a state of perpetual missed connections.
How to watch it: Friends and Strangers is streaming on Mubi.
5. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
The summer’s funniest movie might be Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, based on short films that Jenny Slate (who voices Marcel) and Dean Fleischer-Camp (who directs the film) made for YouTube over a decade ago. Slate and Fleischer-Camp were married in 2012; they’ve since split up, and in a somewhat remarkable fashion, explored that experience obliquely in this feature. The protagonist, Marcel, is a 1-inch-high shell (with sneakers) who lives in an Airbnb rented by a newly single filmmaker named Dean, who decides to make a documentary about his tiny new pal. It’s hilarious and extremely sweet, and also somehow skirts the edge of over-sentimentality with aplomb — a feel-good movie that’s not like anything you’ve seen before.
How to watch it: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is playing in theaters.
- The Worst Person in the World
One of 2021’s breakout festival favorites was The Worst Person in the World, about four years in the life of 20-something Julie (Renate Reinsve), which was finally released in the US early this year. Like many young people, Julie realizes in university that she doesn’t want to be a neuroscientist; she wants to be an artist. So she blows up her life and starts over, winding up in a relationship with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). That’s just the beginning. The Worst Person in the World tells Julie’s story in 12 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue — she is the main character in her own story, one that she’s writing as she’s living it. It’s a film about navigating life as a millennial, trying to figure out what love is like, what work is for, and whether you’re following your heart or whether you’re just, well, the worst person in the world.
How to watch it: The Worst Person in the World is available to stream on Hulu and to rent or purchase on digital platforms.
- Petite Maman
Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma returns with a much smaller-scale but no less affecting film. Young Nelly (Joséphine Sanz), whose beloved grandmother has just passed away, is helping her parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne) clean out the now-empty home where her mother grew up. Nelly is close to both of her parents, but is especially concerned about her mother. She longs to have one more day to spend with her grandmother. One day, in the woods, she meets a girl named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), and the two forge a friendship that might be the fulfillment of her fears and wishes. Petite Maman is a pithy, gemlike film, clocking in at only 72 minutes and as pristine and poignant a reflection on the bonds that tie us to one another across time and generations as one can imagine.
How to watch it: Petite Maman is playing in theaters and available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.
- Donbass
Donbass was selected by Ukraine as its entry for the 2019 Oscars, but the Academy didn’t nominate it. Then it seemed to disappear, at least in the US. But in 2022, with the name “Donbass” (sometimes rendered “Donbas”) — the region in eastern Ukraine that has been the seat of pro-Putin, pro-Russian unrest since 2014 — newly recognizable to American audiences, it finally made it to the US. Set in the mid-2010s, Donbass is a festival of absurdism in 13 vignettes of a region gone haywire, falling apart in the mess of conflict and deceit that has sprung up in the fighting between pro-Russian separatists, backed by Putin’s government, and Ukrainian government forces. In the way that The Wire unpacked something vital about the layered mess of American cities, Donbass digs with the grimmest of grins into a conflict that has been going on for a long time. The question isn’t what the fix is; it’s whether we’ll ever stop thinking it’s an easy one.
How to watch it: Donbass is available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.
- After Yang
In the near future, you can purchase a “techno sapien” — a humanoid robot — as a companion. Jake (Colin Farrell, who is terrific) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) bought a refurbished model named Yang to befriend their daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), in part to help her learn about her country of origin, China. But now Yang is malfunctioning, and Jake is desperate to figure out how to bring him back. Directed by Kogonada (Columbus), After Yang moves slowly and quietly and then comes in like a tidal wave, exploring grief and love and memory with aching poignance.
How to watch it: After Yang is streaming on Showtime and available to rent or purchase on digital platforms.