For Fans of Spike Jonze

Released in 2013, Her arrived before the public conversation about AI companions had any real urgency. Jonze staged the whole story in a near-future Los Angeles that feels cozy rather than dystopian, which made the grief at its center far harder to dismiss. The film's real subject is not technology but the human capacity to love something it cannot hold, and the particular loneliness of a person who communicates for a living but cannot reach the people around him. It has aged into something that feels less like science fiction and more like documentary.

Charlie Kaufman's script gave Jonze a playground with no precedent and he ran with it completely. The film is a comedy, a body-horror parable, and a meditation on identity and ego all at once, and Jonze never lets any one register swamp the others. What holds it together is craft: the transitions between the real world and the tunnel-vision of Malkovich's consciousness are cut with such confidence that the absurdity becomes its own kind of logic. No one has made the same film again because no one has quite figured out how it works.

Kaufman was hired to adapt Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief and found himself unable to, so he wrote a film about that inability and cast Nicolas Cage as two versions of himself. What sounds like a trick actually functions as a remarkably direct portrait of creative paralysis, the way a project can become so weighted with meaning that forward motion seems impossible. Jonze films it all with a kind of tender amusement, never mocking the anxiety but never letting it become self-pity either. The result is funnier and more moving than any conventional making-of story.

Most adaptations of beloved picture books either inflate the story with incident or drown it in sentimentality. Jonze did neither. He expanded Maurice Sendak's ten sentences into a film about the specific terror and grandiosity of being nine years old, when your emotions are the largest things in any room. The Wild Things are not cuddly; they are frightening and needy and mournful, which is exactly what the book asks for. The film was undervalued on release and has quietly become one of the defining portraits of childhood in American cinema.