Ashley, the other relief bartender at the Disco Duck, had told me not to worry, that she was an expert at the manifestation of cold, hard cash. “It’s called the dry hustle, honey,” she’d said in her saccharin drawl. “Dry because you never have to, you know, fuck ’em?”

It suddenly occurred to Amy that the one person she wanted to talk to was the one person who remained elusive, hidden, actually, by the blacked-out glass of his Ram truck. The driver had not appeared. Between the tinted windows and the reflections off the glass, she couldn’t be sure who was in the truck or how many there might be. 

A silver-haired woman with still-taut cheekbones smiles from the ad. A pitch for magic potions aimed at women with crow’s feet and creases. A woman like me, experienced in flutters of self-doubt and twinges of loss. Vulnerable to the seductive pull of junk science and sly text—serums with proven clinical strength, the latest in anti-wrinkle technology. Sweet-smelling fruit extracts to moisturize, rejuvenate, illuminate. Who doesn’t want to glow with renewed vitality?

I want to be clean. I want to be clean in the way that birds are when they molt, shedding their feathers to grow newer, brighter ones. A snake grinding against rough wood to slip itself out from its old skin, leaving it in its slithery path. A hermit crab, buried underneath the sand in the early morning, eating the exoskeleton that it sheds.

Gabriel Ricard looks back on the (screwed up) year that was 2017 and ahead to the (hopefully less screwed up) year that will be in 2018, in his latest Captain Canada column. 

Featuring: Amarcord (1973); Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces (2014); Fantastic Planet (1973); Thor: Ragnarok (2017); Justice League (2017) 

Phantom Thread, at its heart, is about control—the lengths we will go to grasp it and who we choose to yield it to. Luckily, control is what Paul Thomas Anderson does best. Don’t let the first half of this movie, which pretends to be about a fashion designer (Daniel Day-Lewis, brilliant for, supposedly, the last time here) who takes in a young waitress turned model (Vicky Krieps, brilliant for the first time here), fool you—Anderson is spinning a fiendish yarn, with surprises so dark they make 2017’s other provocateurs, Darren Aronofsky and Yorgos Lanthimos, look like rank amateurs.