Still from Toni Erdmann.

• One of my favorite movies of 2016 is Toni Erdmann, which is full of madcap genius and a deep generosity of spirit. It turns a fairly ordinary, even archetypal premise—the reunion of an estranged father and daughter—into a deadpan comedy of embarrassment unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Francine Prose writes of the movie, “It’s rare that a film can have one of its characters pose a question that so baldly states its larger philosophical concerns—What does it mean to be human and how should a human being live?—without seeming overly obvious or sanctimonious. But Toni Erdmann gets away with it, in part because its characters are so complex and precisely drawn (we are fully persuaded that this father would ask his daughter that) and in part because the film is at once so understated, so broad, and so funny; in fact, humor and the ways in which humor expresses our humanity and allows us to get through the day is one of Toni Erdmann’s themes … Nothing in Toni Erdmann is predictable, though, as we gradually realize, we have been prepared for everything that occurs by a minor detail or casual exchange that we recall from earlier in the film.”

• I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time watching the Instagram videos of Paige Ginn, who specializes in falling over, very publicly, very painfully. Philippa Snow writes, “Ginn films herself not only in a state of collapse, but also while getting there; in the process she’s gone viral, and somehow succeeded in making, by accident or by design, some of this year’s best and most interesting video work … A body count only really matters when the body counts, in purely capitalist terms, which helps to explain why the news cares so deeply about young, white bodies from upper- to middle-class backgrounds, and so very little about others at all. White male bodies have a great value in the sense that the people who inhabit them make the most money, but it’s ultimately female bodies that carry greater value as bodies, aka de facto objects. Blonde American girl-flesh offers, to the pound—up to about 115 of them, at least—which is why Paige Ginn is the KLF of the Instagram stunt. It takes real guts to say, Here is this object of supposed value, this fictionally delicate thing, being messed up, and here I am doing the damage.”

• The photographer Mitch Epstein visited the homes and work spaces of some of the many brilliant people who died this year, including Prince, Marisol, Edward Albee, and many more: “The goal was to arrive not long after each person’s death, in those days when a person’s spirit can still seem palpable somewhere among their rooms and their things—as in his photograph of the writer Jim Harrison’s studio, where the items on a bedside table seem as if they were set down only moments ago … Epstein was especially struck by the number of rooms that felt like places of freedom, with each figure creating his or her own unique interior world. ‘They’re not just spaces,’ he says. ‘They’re actually sanctuaries. That’s the word that comes to mind.’ ”

• In paintings of the nativity, Jonathan Jones sees traces of the apocalypse: “Far from soppy, painted equivalents of a modern school nativity play, these paintings are premonitory visions of suffering that invite the most serious of meditations. The world is ending. It is in ruins. A civilization is collapsing around us. That is the setting of Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi and many more depictions of the infancy of Christ. In Leonardo’s unfinished Adoration, the enigmatic ruins of wondrous buildings stand behind Mary and her child. Staircases lead to nowhere. Trees grow out of the crumbling structure. These ruins represent the decay of the classical pagan world. With Christ’s coming, the pagan age is over; its achievements—which Renaissance artists revered—must all fall into ruin.”

• This Christmas, give your loved ones the gift of Depression-era cuisine: “Loaves and casseroles were the centerpieces of Bureau of Home Economics cuisine: easy to make with cheap ingredients, and to spike with healthy but unlovable foods like canned meat, liver, or lima beans. The new approach—guided by the relatively new science of the calorie, and by a general zest for modern rationality of diet—emphasized thrift and health above enjoyment, and generally seemed to treat the notion of pleasurable food with suspicion. ‘Enough is better than a feast,’ Aunt Sammy would say on her radio program, ‘Housekeepers’ Chat.’ ”