In a court of law, defendants are entitled to a presumption of innocence. In the court of public opinion, Senator Bob Menendez enjoys no such indulgence.

The Democrat from New Jersey was indicted today—along with his wife, Nadine, and three others—on three counts of corruption. Federal prosecutors say the group accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes to assist the Egyptian government. Among other allegations, they say Menendez gave sensitive U.S.-government information to the Egyptians and tried to shield two of the defendants from prosecution.

This isn’t the first federal corruption case against Menendez, and his continued representation of his state in the Senate and as head of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee (at least up until today: Menendez stepped down from the chairmanship after his indictment) are a testament to the pusillanimity of Democrats. The news also shows how the heated partisanship of the current era can keep bad politicians in office for fear of helping the other party.

The indictment includes claims that New York accurately characterizes as “cartoonish.” In Menendez’s closet, FBI agents found envelopes full of cash in the pockets of jackets that had Menendez’s name sewn on them. They also turned up more than $100,000 worth of gold bars, like in some sort of harebrained Yosemite Sam scheme. (For good measure, the bars are stamped Swiss Bank Corporation.) Prosecutors also cite texts from Nadine to Bob Menendez complaining that a co-defendant, Wael Hana, had not paid the bribes he’d promised. And prosecutors allege the senator agreed to derail a prosecution in exchange for a Mercedes C-300 convertible. The document is, perhaps needless to say, a compelling read.

If corruption allegations against Bob Menendez sound familiar, that’s not just because you’re familiar with the recent history of other Democratic senators from New Jersey. In 2015, Menendez was indicted by federal prosecutors for a sweeping bribery scheme, alongside a doctor named Salomon Melgen.

The evidence against Menendez seemed compelling, but he got a lucky break: In the midst of his trial, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a corruption conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, a decision that, Matt Ford wrote, “fundamentally changed the standard for bribery.” The jury hung, the Justice Department dismissed charges, and Menendez got off with a severe admonition from the Senate Ethics Committee. (Melgen was later convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison for Medicare fraud. Donald Trump commuted his sentence in one of his last acts as president, crediting Melgen’s “generosity in treating all patients especially those unable to pay or unable to afford health-care insurance”—on your dime.)

By then, as the journalist Dick Polman wrote in The Atlantic, Menendez had “escaped more scrapes than Houdini,” and his name was “synonymous with ethical lapses.” The moment would have seemed right for Democrats to be rid of Menendez. Not only was he an ethical liability in his own right, but his presence also undercut the corruption accusations the party was lodging against Trump. But they didn’t want to expel him from the Senate, because New Jersey’s governor at the time, Chris Christie, is a Republican, and could have appointed a Republican to the seat. So Menendez stayed, and in 2018 was reelected to the Senate.

Some people might lay low for a while after a fortuitous escape from the law, but prosecutors say Menendez promptly went back to doing corruption in spring 2018, around the time of his censure. The scheme was helped by the fact that in February 2018, just after charges were dropped, Menendez became the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Three years later, when Democrats retook the Senate, he became the chair. That gave him a perfect position to use his power to benefit Egypt.

Menendez says he’s innocent, and released a scorching statement this morning. “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he said. “Since this investigation was leaked nearly a year ago, there has been an active smear campaign of anonymous sources and innuendos to create an air of impropriety where none exists. The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent.”

He added: “Those behind this campaign ... see me as an obstacle in the way of their broader political goals.” That sounds a lot like Trump’s “I’m being indicted for you,” and his claims that he’s the target of retribution by the “deep state.” Menendez’s protests are hard to take seriously given that New Jersey is run by Democrats and the president is a Democrat (though Menendez is not a close pal of Biden’s), but voicing these arguments could help validate Trump’s defense against his own indictments, just as Menendez’s presence undermined the political case against Trump in 2018. But Democrats may have only delayed their headache, because Menendez is up for reelection in 2024. His travails could give Republicans a chance at taking his seat.

Menendez’s survival has left New Jerseyans, and Americans, with an ethically compromised senator, because Democrats were afraid that getting rid of him would produce a Republican senator—something they viewed as even worse. Today’s politics is suffused with what political scientists call negative partisanship—the phenomenon where partisans are more motivated by fear and loathing of the other party than affection or affinity for their own. In this way, Menendez’s indictment echoes the 2024 presidential election too, in which each party is poised to nominate a candidate based on the belief that he’s the one best positioned to defeat the other side—not for his own talents or character. Are there worse things than losing an election? The Menendez prosecution might offer one answer to that question.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Earlier this month in San Francisco, two friends and I wanted to imbibe strong rum drinks at the bar Smuggler’s Cove, so we used a phone app to summon a car. It arrived without a driver, we climbed into the back seat, and a trivia app entertained us on the way to our destination while distracting us, at least a little bit, from the fact that no one was in the driver’s seat.

The driving was safe and efficient. But at the end of the ride, the car stopped in the middle lane of a three-lane street, forcing us to cross a lane of traffic to reach safety on the sidewalk.

So … not yet ready for prime time, but pretty close.

Are driverless cars the future? Should cities allow them to be tested on the street now? Even in your neighborhood? What about the multiton driverless trucks that the Teamsters want to ban? (I am pro-innovation, but when sober, I also like driving. I hope I’m never forced to give it up.)

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Laughs, Lies, and Fabulist Hate

Last week, Clare Malone published an article in The New Yorker revealing that the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who came of age as a practicing Muslim in post-9/11 America, made up various stories he has told about bigots engaging in prejudicial or abusive behavior toward him.

For example, in a 2022 Netflix special, he speaks about the reaction to his talk show, Patriot Act. Malone describes the scene from the special:

The big screen displays threatening tweets that were sent to Minhaj. Most disturbing, he tells the story of a letter sent to his home which was filled with white powder. The contents accidentally spilled onto his young daughter. The child was rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be anthrax, but it’s a sobering reminder that Minhaj’s comedic actions have real-world consequences. Later that night, his wife, in a fury, told him that she was pregnant with their second child. “ ‘You get to say whatever you want onstage, and we have to live with the consequences,’ ” Minhaj recalls her saying. “ ‘I don’t give a shit that Time magazine thinks you’re an “influencer.” If you ever put my kids in danger again, I will leave you in a second.’ ”

Powerful stuff. But it didn’t happen, Malone reports:

The New York Police Department, which investigates incidents of possible Bacillus anthracis, has no record of an incident like the one Minhaj describes, nor do area hospitals. Front-desk and mailroom employees at Minhaj’s former residence don’t remember such an incident, nor do “Patriot Act” employees involved with the show’s security or Minhaj’s security guard from the time.

During our conversation, Minhaj admitted that his daughter had never been exposed to a white powder, and that she hadn’t been hospitalized. He had opened up a letter delivered to his apartment, he said, and it had contained some sort of powder. Minhaj said that he had made a joke to his wife, saying, “Holy shit. What if this was anthrax?” He said that he’d never told anyone on the show about this letter, despite the fact that there were concerns for his security at the time and that Netflix had hired protection for Minhaj.

The article describes other similar instances of fabulism, and Minhaj’s explanation for them: The stories are based on “emotional truths” and “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise.”

The revelations have prompted a lot of journalistic reactions. Few have defended the falsehoods. Yet as Kat Rosenfield put it at UnHerd, “It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this—even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves.” So many observers have had a hard time describing why Minhaj crossed the line, even though most of them are committed to the proposition that something is amiss.

In fact, I’ve yet to see anyone pinpoint what I see as the strongest case against Minhaj’s style. But before I tip my hand, here’s a quick rundown of some alternative indictments. In The New York Times, Jason Zinoman argues, “When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people.”

For Nitish Pahwa at Slate, the problem was something to akin to stolen valor:

There are more than enough brown people across the country who’ve actually had their loved ones and livelihoods attacked in those very ways. If those same Americans were fans of Minhaj, it was because he effected a nationwide breakthrough of the truth that many of us have, in fact, been abused in our personal and professional lives thanks to our skin color or faith … The people he claimed to be speaking for were led to believe he really did get it on a visceral, fundamental level. This was a rare public figure who could be a high-profile voice for our fears, who could get people in the highest levels of society to hear and pass on his onstage and offstage anecdotes … Minhaj never even hinted that he was doing a character, or giving voice to stories he’d heard from others, or gesturing toward the broader landscape of Muslim Americans. Minhaj took what real, everyday brown folks were going through and led those people to believe that he’d also been there—earning his fame and plaudits from that very trust, as well as the trust that engendered among those who wished to understand brown Americans.

My own take?

Hate crimes carry an additional legal penalty. And there’s a strong argument in favor of hate-crime enhancements: Robbing or assaulting or murdering someone because they are Muslim or Black or gay sows fear in whole communities, harming many beyond the primary victim. When a person fabricates a hate crime or adjacent acts of bigotry, they do similar second-order harm. The gang-rape hoax that Rolling Stone published in 2014 scared many women on college campuses. Chicagoans who believed Jussie Smollett were frightened at the prospect of MAGA zealots beating Black pedestrians. Obviously, gang rapes and street assaults do happen; nevertheless, fabulist accounts of such incidents cause many to erroneously believe they are a bigger threat, or a different one, than they had previously judged.

Imagine the ripples of fear an Islamophobic bigot would cause––to Muslim Americans, and to Muslim public figures and their families especially––by mailing mysterious white powder to the house of a prominent Muslim comic. Imagine how such an act might chill the speech of some Muslims. The ripples of fear such a bigot would cause are the same ripples that Minhaj himself caused! And that, in my estimation, is the strongest case against Minhaj’s “emotional truths.”

A Debt Unpaid

In The Atlantic, Adam Harris flags an attempt to quantify a particular kind of racial discrimination:

On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters with a clear message to 16 governors: Over the past 30 years, their states have underfunded their historically Black land-grant colleges by hundreds of millions—or, in some cases, billions—of dollars … the first time the federal government has attempted to put a comprehensive number on the financial discrimination against these institutions.

He goes on to note “the exact amounts each land-grant Black college would have received from 1987 to 2020 if the institutions had been funded at the same level per student as the 1862 land grant stipulated.”

For example:

If Alabama A&M University had received its fair share in comparison to Auburn University, which has been dogged for decades by low enrollment figures for Black students, it would have had an additional $527 million over the period; meanwhile, Tennessee State University may have had an additional $2.1 billion if it had received an equitable share of the pie.

“There is now a number attached to the legacy of discrimination at historically Black colleges, at least for the most recent decades,” he concludes. “The lingering question is whether states will actually atone for it.”

Wonder Wall

At Wisdom of Crowds, Damir Marusic makes a claim about an aspect of aging:

I found myself outside of a bar with a friend. As we stood outside on the sidewalk, we remarked how funny it is to see all the people out, walking around, going to one place after another, clearly anticipating a great night ahead. “I remember what that used to be like—that excitement,” I said. “Sure, it was just a bar or a club we were heading to, but it represented a kind of energy.” I personally never went out to bars to meet new people, just to meet up with my people. So that feeling wasn’t so much a sense of possibility at serendipitous encounters with strangers as it was being surrounded by an electric charge. Drinking in loud crowded places amplifies the inherent buzz of alcohol. And for whatever reason, the novelty of that amplified buzz felt like it would never wear off.

But wear off it did. I don’t drink much these days, as it makes me slow the next day. And as I grow older, I don’t want to squander days on useless things like recovery. Beyond being more gun-shy, however, is a more banal truth: it got repetitive. All senses, if overstimulated, dull out. Looking at all the happy buzzing people out on 14th street that night, it struck me that what separated me from them is a sense of wonder. When you’re younger, you have more capacity for it. You don’t recognize patterns quite so well, so you believe that things are more mutable than they are. As you discover the world, it seems limitless, and limitlessly astonishing.

But as you experience more and more of it, you start to figure out how things work. Not in the sense of gaining ultimate and total knowledge—that’s hubris. Hard-won wisdom is the opposite: figuring out what is unknowable, and appreciating how chance works. Still, as the patterns become a little more recognizable, the world becomes a little less enchanted.

How the First Amendment Works

In Politico, Adam Cancryn reports, “Biden officials have felt handcuffed for the past two years by a Republican lawsuit over the administration’s initial attempt to clamp down on anti-vaxxers, who alleged the White House violated the First Amendment in encouraging social media companies to crack down on anti-vaccine posts. That suit, they believe, has limited their ability to police disinformation online.” To which National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke responds, the suit has limited the Biden administration’s speech-policing “as opposed to what?”

He writes:

The First Amendment’s protection of the progenitors of “misinformation” is not an esoteric loophole or a marginal technicality or the remnant of a bygone era. It is not vestigial, or contingent, or the product of a quirky mistranslation. It is one of the foundations of our society. In the United States, it is the authorities, not the citizens, who are cabined by the law. The Constitution grants no enumerated power to the federal government with which it might legitimately police lies, and, as if to make the matter as clear as possible, the Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits such policing. In totalitarian nations, the state is permitted to determine what it considers to be authoritatively true, to disseminate its resolutions across the country, and to punish anyone who dissents. Here, the state must allow individuals to speak irrespective of the contempt in which it holds their opinions. Remarkably, this applies even when the president is a Democrat and the topic is vaccines.

The frame that both the Biden administration and Politico have adopted is thus defective. The White House has not “felt handcuffed”; it is handcuffed. The limits on its power are not the consequence of “a Republican lawsuit”; the Republican lawsuit is meant to uphold the constitutional limits on its power. Biden’s compliance with the ruling has not given those whom he disdains “more space to promote their views”; that space existed beforehand and was being temporarily invaded by the executive branch. Throughout, Politico implies that those who have benefited from the verdict are not really exercising their rights: The lack of force, the outlet sneers, has allowed them to “tout themselves as free speech warriors.” But there’s no “tout themselves” about it. They are free-speech warriors. They’re engaged in “free speech,” which, in America, includes misinformation, and they’re “warriors” because the government is trying to shut them up. That the content of their speech is often preposterous is no more important to the case than it would be if it were “hateful.” There are no classes of expression in the First Amendment.

Provocation of the Week

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey writes:

Being vegan means forgoing many of life’s pleasures—cheeseburgers, peppermint ice cream, warm sourdough with cold butter. It means absenting yourself from your own culture—not taking the piece of birthday cake, not going to the amazing new restaurant. It means constantly feeling like you are failing, given the difficulty of avoiding animal products in a world where animals are a commodity. It means living in a way that makes other people feel judged and uncomfortable. It is exhausting, abstemious, weird. One paper found that omnivores view vegans more negatively than any other stigmatized group except for drug addicts.

It is not surprising that the share of people forgoing animal products has barely changed since at least the late 1990s. Just 5 percent of Americans say they are vegetarian, and only a sliver of the population, perhaps 1 percent, truly never eats meat. Globally, the number of animals consumed per capita has nearly doubled in the past five decades, as has the share of animals raised in confined, industrial environments.

DxE believes it can change that, not by turning omnivores into vegans but by turning vegans into vegan activists. It has attracted thousands of donors and participants, mostly Millennials and Gen Zers, over its 10 years of existence. (There’s no formal membership count, as there’s no formal membership process.) But it has also amassed plenty of detractors, who see the group as cultish and its activities as pointless and obnoxious. Social change is hard enough for movements that don’t ask people to give up anything, let alone their grandmother’s brisket …

Focusing on radicalizing vegans rather than converting meat-eaters allowed DxE to embrace a revolutionary message: “Animal liberation in one generation!” rather than “Try out meatless Monday!” But the activists adopted some tactics that were unpopular even with vegans. In addition to targeting big grocery chains, DxE went after small businesses devoted to slow food and humane meat, including Chez Panisse, the beloved originator of California cuisine. The group stopped weekly protests outside a revered Berkeley butcher shop only when the owners agreed to put up a sign reading “Animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust.” (The owners described this as “extortion.”)

Read the rest for some harrowing scenes of animal abuse by factory farms and an interesting exploration of what drives radical activism even when, as here, it may be ineffective or even counterproductive.

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The ongoing Hollywood strikes may have dimmed the usual glitz that comes with the fall festival circuit—the star-studded red carpets, the applause-filled Q&As, the endless photo shoots—but this year’s Toronto International Film Festival still featured hundreds of new titles from established auteurs and first-time filmmakers alike. Earlier this month, my colleague David Sims and I caught as many of TIFF’s offerings as we could, leaving with plenty of movies to discuss and recommend. Below, David and I have rounded up our favorites from this year’s festival, most of which will be in theaters or streaming before long. — Shirley Li

TIFF

The Royal Hotel (in theaters October 6)

Kitty Green quickly proved herself a master of the slow-burn nightmare with 2019’s The Assistant, a film starring Julia Garner as a young woman forced to tolerate her unseen studio-executive boss’s sexual indiscretions. In her follow-up, Green casts Garner as a young woman backpacking across Australia with her best friend (Jessica Henwick). When the pair take bartending jobs in a male-dominated remote mining town to make some cash, they dress for work, not for play—no skirts, no heels—and even claim to be Canadian to ward off judgment about their American backgrounds. But the line between a gaze and a leer can be terribly thin—and The Royal Hotel shows in taut, tense sequences how being accommodating only works so well as a defense mechanism.  — Shirley Li

Anatomy of a Fall (in theaters October 13)

The winner of this year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s French legal drama is amassing buzz as one of the fall’s clear art-house breakouts. The plot is straight out of a ’90s paperback best seller—a novelist (played by Sandra Hüller) is arrested for murder after her husband dies in a fall at their mountain home, and must fight to prove her innocence during a long and complex trial. But Triet’s film delves beyond the (thrillingly showy) French legal system and into the intricacies of a troubled marriage, asking the audience to consider whether every subtle sign of decay in a partnership should amount to motive. The film works largely because Hüller, a German actress probably best known for her role in Toni Erdmann, gives an extraordinary performance already being tipped for Oscar success.  — David Sims

The Burial (in select theaters October 6, streaming on Prime Video October 13)

A legal drama about a man trying to save his business from a greedy investor may sound dreadfully serious, but this Maggie Betts–directed film—based on a 1999 New Yorker story—is a crowd-pleaser, full of well-drawn characters, show-stopping monologues, and a wonderfully energetic performance from Jamie Foxx. The actor stars as the boisterous personal-injury lawyer Willie E. Gary, who improbably joins forces with Jerry O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), his first white client—a funeral-home director being bankrupted by a heartless corporation taking advantage of low-income communities. But The Burial isn’t just a skin-deep look at an unusual partnership; it also observes the way a courtroom distills people into tidy narratives according to attributes such as their race, class, and gender, producing a microcosm of society’s most basic impulses.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Pigeon Tunnel (streaming on Apple TV+ October 20)

The documentarian Errol Morris is famous for using the “Interrotron,” a device for interviewing his subjects that allows him to look them in the eye as he explores their life stories. He’s used it on notably controversial figures such as Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, and Steve Bannon, but in The Pigeon Tunnel he tries to capture the essence of a much more celebrated personality: John le Carré. In what was le Carré’s final major interview before his death in 2020, the British novelist and former spy talks Morris through his childhood, his complicated relationship with his con-man father, and his life in the world of clandestine intelligence. Through it all is the tension of whether one can truly know le Carré, a man who first made a living hiding his true self, and then another living as a writer delving into it. Morris captures that paradox, and the author’s effortless intelligence and charm, quite perfectly.  — D.S.

The Holdovers (in theaters October 27)

After the muddled (if fascinating) Downsizing, Alexander Payne has tapped a familiar face for this return to form: a curmudgeonly Paul Giamatti, who last worked with the director on his Oscar-winning hit Sideways. In that film, Giamatti was a wine snob; here, he’s a classical-history teacher at a stuffy Massachusetts boarding school in the early ’70s, pressed into service as a caretaker for the few kids staying over during Christmas break. The Holdovers kicks off with all the grumpy cynicism of Payne’s past classics such as Election and Nebraska, but there’s a touch of holiday sweetness as it explores the deepening bonds between Giamatti’s character, a rebellious young student (Dominic Sessa), and a chef in mourning (the tremendous Da’Vine Joy Randolph).  — D.S.

Nyad (in theaters October 20, streaming on Netflix November 3)

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are well regarded as documentary filmmakers, with work such as the Oscar-winning Free Solo and the Thai cave-diver film The Rescue earning great acclaim. Nyad is their first narrative feature, but it’s a close cousin of their prior films, as it also delves into the strange passions and the involved process behind an extreme athlete—in this case, the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (played by Annette Bening). An accomplished athlete in the ’70s, Nyad resurfaced in the 2010s and declared that she would attempt a never-before-done free swim from Cuba to Florida. The film is a fairly standard triumph-over-adversity true story powered by strong work from Bening and Jodie Foster as her coach, Bonnie Stoll, but the exacting technical details of Nyad’s process are its most fascinating elements.  — D.S.

TIFF

Dream Scenario (in theaters November 10)

The premise of Kristoffer Borgli’s dark and surreal dramedy is a zany bit of speculation: What if, out of nowhere, people around the world started dreaming of the same person, someone they’d never met before? That starts happening with milquetoast professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage), who begins popping up in people’s subconscious for no discernible reason, and becomes a strange celebrity. Cage, balding and sporting a bushy beard, plays the character’s growing egotism and mania wonderfully as the script spins into ridiculous directions; eventually, Borgli loses some grip on whatever metaphor for fame he’s exploring, but there are some hilarious (and terrifying) swerves along the way.  — D.S.

Fallen Leaves (in theaters November 17)

The most consistent filmmaker working today might be Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish master who produces a soft-spoken and mordant comedy every six years or so and never, ever misses the mark. Even by his high standards, Fallen Leaves—an 81-minute yarn about a halting but tender romance between a lonely supermarket stocker (Alma Pöysti) and an alcoholic contractor (Jussi Vatanen)—is close to perfect. As both scratch out fairly meager existences in Helsinki’s working class, they’re troubled by news of Russia’s nearby war against Ukraine and besieged by uncaring bosses. But Kaurismäki delights in depicting how they forge a connection, lobbing pithy line after pithy line along the way.  — D.S.

Rustin (in theaters November 3, streaming on Netflix November 17)

Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, Rustin is a biographical drama about the civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo), an architect of 1963’s March on Washington who worked closely with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph. George C. Wolfe’s film stresses Rustin’s status as a brilliant outsider, often ostracized even within the civil-rights community for his homosexuality and his past membership in the Communist Party. Domingo’s outsize performance gets across how he survived and succeeded through charm and sheer force of will. The film is most interesting when it examines the staging of the march, and the internecine politicking that went on behind the scenes, even as the script (co-written by Milk’s Dustin Lance Black) often veers into more typical biopic formula.  — D.S.

American Fiction (in select theaters November 3, everywhere November 17)

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (a witty, wondrous Jeffrey Wright) is an English professor and an author, and, yes, he’s Black—but must all of his work be classified as Black writing? Frustrated that only stereotypical characters and narratives find success with mainstream readers, Monk comes up with an obnoxious parody of such novels, only for his work to become a hit. Based on Percival Everett’s book Erasure, the Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut dissects Monk’s psyche with a surprisingly light touch, turning his grift into an intimate character study that explores his love life and family (including siblings played by Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown). Smart, meaty, and funnier than expected for a film juggling weighty relationship drama with the philosophical conundrums running through Monk’s head, American Fiction is a dramedy with a refreshing point of view.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Boy and the Heron (in theaters December 8)

The masterful Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has been supposedly approaching retirement since the mid-’90s; each of his films from Princess Mononoke on has been rumored to be his swan song. With The Boy and the Heron (originally titled How Do You Live?), the 82-year-old has made a transfixing statement on the perils of guarding one’s legacy too closely, and the necessity of letting younger generations conjure up new worlds on their own. The Boy and the Heron begins as a direct enough fable, following a 12-year-old who loses his mother during World War II and is then moved to the countryside when his father marries his mother’s younger sister. There, he encounters a mythical bird-creature and a forbidden tower containing a dimension beyond our own, but that’s merely scratching the surface of the wild dream logic that unfolds. The Boy and the Heron may or may not be Miyazaki’s final movie, but either way, it’s a staggering addition to one of animation’s most totemic filmographies.  — D.S.

The Zone of Interest (in select theaters December 8)

Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, which tracks a family living just outside Auschwitz, casts an unsettling chill that’s hard to shake. All day, every day, the concentration camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss (a real-life figure, played by Christian Friedel); his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller); and their children can hear screaming, but they go about their lives with blissful thoughtlessness. Based loosely on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, Glazer’s film would be a completely nauseating watch if not for the way the writer-director keeps the audience at a distance. He isn’t trying to humanize the Nazis or retell the terrors of Auschwitz; instead, he delivers a mesmerizing, almost anthropological study of how evil can manifest in mundane ways, through ordinary people.  — S.L.

La Chimera (TBA)

There’s nothing quite like La Chimera—which is typical of the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who is fond of adding dashes of magic to tales that explore her country’s past. On paper, her latest effort sounds absurd beyond belief: It’s a film about a vaudevillian Italian troupe that robs ancient Etruscan tombs by using a vaguely mystic human dowsing rod (played by Josh O’Connor). The movie uses O’Connor, known for his stuffy work as Prince Charles in The Crown, wonderfully against type as an oddball in a group of outsiders who’s mysteriously connected to ancient times. In case that wasn’t enough, the film also features Isabella Rossellini as a swoony Italian grandma. — D.S.

Origin (TBA)

Ava DuVernay’s first film since 2018’s bizarre adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time attempts something even more ambitious, dramatizing Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents—a work of cultural anthropology that examines America’s history of racism through historical systems of caste, such as Nazi Germany and India’s stratified society. Origin plumbs all of that, but it also retells Wilkerson’s personal narrative, with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor playing the author as she faces personal tragedy and professional skepticism on the way to publishing her book. The overall result is possibly too muddled to function as a successful piece of dramatic storytelling, but too much inventiveness is on display to easily dismiss.  — D.S.

TIFF

Woman of the Hour (TBA)

In a festival packed with directorial debuts from actors turned filmmakers, Anna Kendrick’s effort stands out for its gutsiness. Though the movie tells the story of the real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala (played by Daniel Zovatto), Woman of the Hour is not just a true-crime drama. It’s a study of how violence can loom at the margins of courtship—and how dangerous rejecting advances can be for women. Kendrick juxtaposes scenes of Alcala killing victims throughout the 1970s with sequences from the day he infamously appeared on the blind-matchmaking game show The Dating Game and wooed the contestant Cheryl Bradshaw (played by Kendrick herself). With so much screen time devoted to Alcala baiting, stalking, and hurting women, the movie can be punishing to watch; I certainly struggled to sit through my screening. Still, Kendrick proves herself a skillful director, with a knack for building suspense.  — S.L.

Hit Man (TBA)

Leave it to Richard Linklater, the director behind Dazed and Confused and the Before trilogy, to pull off what’s perhaps TIFF’s most tonally versatile film. Hit Man tells the story of Gary Johnson (played by Glen Powell), a bland college professor who works part-time as a tech consultant for the local police department. When the precinct’s usual assassin impersonator—yes, such a thing exists—is sidelined during a sting, Gary steps in and proves himself a surprisingly dashing replacement. The movie is based on a Texas Monthly article, but Linklater has taken plenty of welcome liberties with the material, turning Gary’s tale into a delightfully mischievous romance-noir about the appeal of pretending to be someone else, if only for a while. The police scenes are just light enough to be funny, the screwball sequences are just dark enough to keep you on the edge of your seat, and Powell, along with a playful Adria Arjona as one of Gary’s marks, is obviously elated to be handling such twisty material.  — S.L.

Sing Sing (TBA)

Few creative outlets exist for people in prison, but the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program isn’t just an extracurricular activity; for some inmates, it’s a lifeline. In Sing Sing, Colman Domingo delivers a soulful—but, crucially, never showy—performance as Divine G, a real-life former program participant who was incarcerated for murder but has long maintained his innocence. He’s surrounded by a skilled cast of actors, most of whom are real alumni of the RTA; together, they engage in acting exercises and brainstorms as they build their next show. The film can sometimes feel like an earnest documentary as a result, but Bryce Dessner’s score and Domingo’s deeply felt work help anchor Sing Sing as a lyrical depiction of a unique way of life.  — S.L.

Sorry/Not Sorry (TBA)

How should we treat public figures who have abused their power? Sorry/Not Sorry, a documentary about the comedian Louis C.K.—who, in 2017, admitted to a pattern of sexual misconduct toward female comics—and his subsequent return to the stage never fully answers this question. But the film, directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Mones and produced by The New York Times, considers this through interviews with female comics who spoke up about C.K., as well as male colleagues who wrestle with how they responded to C.K.’s “open secret.” Though a movie with C.K.’s involvement would probably have been more illuminating, Sorry/Not Sorry remains a fascinating documentary as it breaks down, scene by scene, how easily misbehavior can be twisted into a punch line.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Beast (TBA)

One of the oddest and most compelling films I encountered at TIFF this year was Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, the rare drama that actually bears comparison to surreal masterworks such as David Lynch’s Inland Empire. A three-part story that zaps from our present into the distant future and back to the turn of the 20th century, each strand of The Beast centers on a woman (Léa Seydoux) and a man (George MacKay) having a chance encounter and sensing some distant familiarity. Bonello uses these encounters to pose questions about love, desire, and more terrifying masculine urges, depicting moments of pure tenderness and tense, unsettling threat.  — D.S.

Backspot (TBA)

The phrase cheerleading movie probably brings to mind montages of showstopping flips, energetic routines, and bitter rivalries between squads. But Backspot is not Bring It On. Rather, it’s an intense study of a perfectionist athlete whose enthusiasm and drive can work against her. It’s a film about mental gymnastics, in other words. Directed by the DJ turned first-time filmmaker D. W. Waterson, the story stars Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs as Riley, a teenager whose joy and anxiety are wrapped up in her extracurricular activity; she’s dating her fellow cheerleader, Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo), and she sees her steely new coach, Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood), as akin to a demigod. Competition, then, both excites and scares her, and the film’s greatest strength is how it conveys that turmoil. Riley’s entire identity is cheerleading. Being so passionate about something is beautiful, the film posits, and brutal too.  — S.L.

Concrete Utopia (TBA)

An earthquake destroys Seoul at the beginning of Concrete Utopia, but it would be a mistake to call South Korea’s Oscar entry a mere disaster movie. The film, directed and co-written by Um Tae-hwa, blends spectacle with social satire as it follows the people inside the only apartment complex still standing. What begins as a sanctuary for the city’s survivors rapidly turns into hell on Earth: Those who lived in the structure before the apocalypse clash with the desperate newcomers, corruption plagues their attempts to self-govern, and supplies rapidly dwindle as winter stretches on. Concrete Utopia traces familiar themes of class warfare—think Snowpiercer in a building—but sets itself apart with impressive production design, inventive set pieces, and an ensemble of memorable characters, including Yeong-tak (played by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun), a man whose unyielding vigilance when it comes to protecting his home becomes calamitous.  — S.L.

His Three Daughters (TBA)

Indie filmmaking is robust with stories about dysfunctional families, but His Three Daughters does more than just mine difficult dynamics for tension. Starring Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as three stepsisters reuniting to care for their ailing father, the film is at once bitingly funny and disarmingly honest about how siblings treat one another under pressure. The writer-director Azazel Jacobs’s assured, dialogue-heavy script keeps the melodrama to a minimum, focusing instead on the ways in which each sister reacts to her situation. Moving but never maudlin, His Three Daughters is a film packed with delicate moments and realistic conversations, bolstered by a uniformly excellent cast.  — S.L.

A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion.

“There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.”

But after hearing Trump’s abortion comments on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Dickson, who is one of the architects of Texas’s so-called heartbeat ban, feels differently. He’d been helping plan a big Trump rally in Lubbock. Now he’s worried. “What I want to do is get up onstage and brag about Trump. But at this point, his statements do not represent what we have worked for for 50 years,” Dickson said. “The goal of the movement was not overturning Roe v. Wade—it was ending abortion in all 50 states.”

Trump confounded Dickson and the rest of the anti-abortion coalition when he told NBC’s Kristen Welker not only that a federal abortion ban would be low on his to-do list during a second term as president, but also that six-week abortion bans like the one in Florida are “terrible.” The outrage from the movement was predictably ferocious. “This isn’t just evil, it is absolutely delusional,” the conservative podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey wrote. Live Action’s founder, Lila Rose, tweeted that “Trump should not be the GOP nominee.” In an email to supporters, Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, said, “Trump just broke my heart.”

[Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion]

Dickson felt equally bruised. If Trump really thinks Florida’s six-week ban is so bad, he mused, “then what does he believe about Texas outlawing abortion from the moment of conception?” If he thinks that’s terrible too, Trump “is going to lose a whole lot of Texas support.”

A few advocates say that, like Rose, they’re writing Trump off. Others have called on the former president to retract his comments. Neither reflex does justice to Trump, who has on occasion demonstrated savvier political instincts than his GOP opponents. What appears to be his current operating assumption—that talking about abortion bans is a turnoff for many voters—is a smart one: Most Americans support access to abortion. Trump is the only real contender among Republican presidential candidates acting in a way that acknowledges this fact. The question is: Will it hurt him?

The MAGA faithful have so far seen nothing to make them withdraw their support from Trump—after each of his multiple criminal indictments, their devotion has only deepened. Trump’s remarks about abortion seem similarly unlikely to damage his standing. In a general election, they might even help.

That’s because of Trump’s unusual capacity for shape-shifting. “He can say, ‘I gave you the Supreme Court,’ but also ‘I’d look for a compromise on a national level,’” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump political strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. He can sound moderate, in other words, “in a way that Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence would not.”

[Read: It’s abortion, stupid]

The Meet the Press interview with Welker did not immediately ring alarm bells in the pro-life camp. Although Trump refused to commit to any federal anti-abortion legislation, he did appear to embrace some form of restriction. He said he’d work with Democrats to come up with a number of weeks that will bring “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.” Standard fare for Trump: vague, noncommittal, self-aggrandizing. But then he brought up the six-week ban that his main primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had signed into law as the Heartbeat Act.

“Would you support that?” Welker asked.

“I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” Trump replied. And, well, that was that.

Right away, Team DeSantis had campaign interns posting assurances that, as president, DeSantis would “NEVER sell out conservatives to win praise from corporate media or the Left.” Other Republican primary candidates jumped into the fray too. “President Trump said he would negotiate with the Democrats and walk back away from what I believe we need, which is a 15-week limit on the federal level,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott told a crowd in Mason City, Iowa. On CNN, former Vice President Mike Pence accused Trump of wanting to “marginalize the right to life.”

The right-to-life activists certainly saw it that way. “Heartbeat Laws,” Hawkins wrote in an open letter to Trump, “should be an absolute minimum for any Republican candidate committed to protecting many from death by direct abortion.” I spoke with Steven Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life. “Any time a leader of a national party throws pro-life conservatives to the curb, it’s extremely disappointing,” he told me. “I hope that his comments were a temporary aberration from an otherwise excellent record.”

One can’t help being a little surprised at their surprise. This is Donald Trump, after all—a man not noticeably wedded to any principle but self-interest, and who, in a previous life, was an abortion-rights-supporting New York Democrat. No one would mistake Trump for a true believer in the vein of, say, Pence. Even Trump’s attempt to throw some red meat to the movement in 2016 when he expressed support for punishing women who sought abortions was clumsy and counterproductive, flouting all of the anti-abortion movement’s best practices. Not that this blunder seemed to faze voters, either.

[Read: The abortion absolutist]

Trump has continued to exercise stubborn independence on the issue. Last year, he blamed the GOP’s disappointing midterm losses on “the abortion issue” and the extreme positions held by some Republican lawmakers. At the time, this mainly looked like an attempt to shift blame, given the poor performance of several high-profile candidates he’d endorsed; with hindsight, it also begins to look like a foretaste of how he’ll campaign in 2024.

Rose, from Live Action, was disgusted with Trump in November; this week’s comments were the last straw. “He takes us for granted, and treats us like a punching bag,” she told me. “I think that’s a huge error on his part. The pro-life movement is one of the most important voting blocs, especially in Iowa and South Carolina.”

She’s right that because Republican-primary voters are more socially conservative than general-election voters, they are more likely to oppose abortion access. And it’s possible that Trump’s position on this single issue might spur some of those voters to change their allegiance to a DeSantis or a Pence. But Rose’s assumption about the anti-abortion movement’s clout seems wishful. Trump is up by about 40 points in the latest national polls—and by about 30 in Iowa. So far, no signs point to any imminent Republican realignment, let alone one led by the anti-abortion set.

Many of Trump’s opponents have imagined that they can beat him by exposing him as a fake conservative, like Velma ripping the mask off a Scooby Doo villain. The problem with this strategy is that it has never worked. Trump doesn’t talk or campaign like a conservative, even when he governs like one. And traditional conservatives, including many anti-abortion activists, have supported him because he promised to appoint judges they favored to the U.S. Supreme Court—and did.

[Mary Ziegler: Roe was never Roe after all]

None of this is great news for Democrats. As I wrote recently, Joe Biden’s party would very much like the 2024 campaign to center on abortion. They believe that the path to victory lies in framing Republicans as fanatics who want to ban abortion completely; they’re probably right, given how unsuccessful attempts to restrict abortion have been since the fall of Roe. v Wade—and how salient the issue is for voters who support abortion rights. But Democrats will have a harder time tarring Trump as an extremist if he’s talking mostly about compromise and accusing his own party of extremism. Trump may end up “muting some of the intensity of the issue,” Longwell said, “because he will sound like a moderate in a way that Ron DeSantis, Pence would not.”

That could explain why, since Trump’s Great Betrayal on Sunday, not all anti-abortion groups have adopted the bitter tone of the most zealous activists. Some have done no more than call half-heartedly for clarification—or, in the case of the Susan B. Anthony List, issue a tepid plea for the candidates to please stop attacking one another. In other words, alongside the anger of the movement’s radicals is the realism of its mainstream.

Everyone is keenly aware at this point that Trump is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination. And when he does, he knows he’ll have their votes.

How do you bring the music and story of a contemporary opera to life? In this edition of Musica, we go backstage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and reveal what it takes to present the groundbreaking opera ‘Champion’.