Where’d You Go, Bernadette

Director: Richard Linklater

Country/Distributor: USA, Annapurna

Opening: August 16

ONE COULD SAY THAT ANY SERIOUS work of cinema, theater, literature, music, painting, photography, or critical writing is in essence an unspoken search for meaning; Richard Linklater’s oeuvre has been explicit in dramatizing these aims. The writer-director may have shifted to a more mainstream narrative register over the years, but the ethos he espoused in such epochal, millennium-adjacent works as , , and—in which his characters wandered as they wondered about the point of it all—has remained detectable throughout. In his early ’s Jesse (Ethan Hawke) was already feeling existential about aging, musing to his partner in pontification, Celine, about what matters in the ever-spectacular now: “This is it! This is actually happening. What do you think is interesting? What do you think is funny? What do you think is important? You know, every day is our last.”