third-wave masculinity

Films about men taking a hard look at the version of manhood they were handed, whether that is the stoic provider, the soldier, the cowboy or the macho. Some of them keep performing it. Some put it down.

The first group keeps the act going. Tomas runs when an avalanche sends the diners at a mountainside restaurant fleeing, leaving his wife Ebba to protect their children, and his marriage hangs on whether he can reclaim his role as the family patriarch in Force Majeure. Galoup runs a strict, regimented life leading troops in Djibouti in Beau Travail until a promising young recruit arrives and plants jealousy in him. Phil Burbank, a Montana rancher in 1925, castrates bull calves with two swift slashes of his knife and drives the widow his brother marries, and her son, to tears in The Power of the Dog. Ferdinando knows the sentence for killing an adulterous wife is light, so in Divorce Italian Style he tries to trick his own wife into an affair.

The second group asks what is left once the act stops. Ryota has earned everything through hard work in Like Father, Like Son, and when the hospital tells him his six-year-old was switched at birth, he starts to ask whether he has been a father at all. Michael Dorsey dresses as a woman to land a part in a daytime drama in Tootsie, and loses himself in the role.

Two more films watch the code being applied to a boy. Jackie and Tony, miners in 1984 County Durham, take a dim view of eleven-year-old Billy's boxing record in Billy Elliot, and a dimmer one when they find he has switched to ballet. A nine-year-old's obsession with straightening his hair sets off a wave of homophobic panic in his hard-working mother in Bad Hair.

You spend each film waiting to see who gives the act up.