Tuesday, January 22, 2019

My Favorite Films of 2018


Despite having more than a handful of fairly significant blind spots in my viewing (Happy as Lazzaro, The House That Jack Built, Dead Souls and The Rider being the ones I'm most curious about), I'm still feeling like 2018 was one of this decade's standout years in terms of cinematic releases. Unlike last year, I didn't include any television or online series because the theatrical crop was just that good. And I'm 22 days late because there were some big titles that I felt I needed to catch up with before finalizing a list, so what follows looks a bit different than what I included in the list I submitted for Slant Magazine. I also had a clear #1 for the past several years but it wasn't so set in stone this year; therefore, consider 1-3 a kind of joint #1. Writing assignments were a bit more sparse over the last twelve months (voluntarily) so forgive the many slots without accompanying text. Otherwise, enjoy.





20. Classical Period (Fendt, USA)




19. Zama (Martel, Argentina)

I wrote about a particular scene in this great movie for Slant's Best Film Scenes of 2018 list.


18. Support the Girls (Bujalski, USA)

"With Support the Girls, a seriocomic study of a single day at Double Whammies, a fictional Hooters-style restaurant in an unnamed Texas city, writer-director Andrew Bujalski splits his attention between the individual and the collective. In doing so, the filmmaker synthesizes the two poles of his cinema so far: Lisa (Regina Hall), the restaurant’s manager, joins a growing list of memorable protagonists in Bujalski’s canon who are united by their struggle to get by in a society increasingly predicated on transactional relationships, while the ensemble-driven exploration of a professional milieu and its culture recalls Computer Chess and parts of Beeswax."


17. Golden Exits (Perry, USA)


16. Prototype (Williams, Canada)


15. Unsane (Soderbergh, USA)


14. Winter Brothers (Pálmason, Denmark)

"Shot on desaturated Super 16mm film in a Danish limestone quarry, Winter Brothers is one of the more aesthetically idiosyncratic directorial debuts in recent memory. Icelandic visual artist turned filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason, who decamped with his crew to the film’s inhospitable setting for the duration of the production, approaches his chosen location like Michelangelo Antonioni did with that of Red Desert, transforming a place of grim labor and scant sunshine into a punctiliously designed cinematic space. Where Antonioni painted trees and grass to achieve his pallid industrial dystopia, Pálmason creates his by coating the scenery in calcite, dressing his cast in filthy faded denim jumpers, and partitioning the world into a careful visual system, with each location treated to its own rigorous compositional scheme. If nothing else, the film is a feat of formal conception and craftsmanship."


13. The Green Fog (Maddin, USA)

I wrote about a particular scene in this great movie for Slant's Best Film Scenes of 2018 list.


12. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Japan)




11. L Cohen (Benning, USA)


10. Welcome to Marwen (Zemeckis, USA)


9. Unfriended: Dark Web (Susco, USA)




8. Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Ross, USA)

I wrote about a particular scene in this great movie for Slant's Best Film Scenes of 2018 list.


7. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (Wilkerson, USA)

"Given these intriguing byways, it’s hard not to yearn for an expansion of this project, and yet the film’s concision is also a byproduct of its attempted self-effacement. Noticeably uncomfortable with the intermittently tasteful construction of his own work (at one point he calls attention to the fact that he’s shooting an unmarked grave with “an expensive camera”), Wilkerson takes every opportunity to ground his filmmaking in concrete realities that may not always be conducive to easy viewing, awkwardly superimposing a low-resolution photo over an otherwise appealingly composed image or leaving certain scenes bereft of any auditory embellishment. The film’s final movement directly quotes Chantal Akerman’s thematically analogous Sud in packaging an act of remembrance as a seemingly endless traveling shot. As with the Peck footage, Wikerson tints the shot red, making clear that we’re on a road that embodies the plague of racism itself."


6. El Mar La Mar (Sniadecki, USA)




5. The Other Side of the Wind (Welles, USA)


4. First Reformed (Schrader, USA)




3. Monrovia, Indiana (Wiseman, USA)

(Capsule written for Slant's year-end list.) "After making a series of films over the last few years that took encouraging views of communities and institutions, celebrating how people of different backgrounds can be brought around to new ways of thinking, Frederick Wiseman settles with Monrovia, Indiana on a milieu whose relative social, cultural, and religious homogeneity results in a brutal narrowing of horizons for the eponymous town’s population. Over the course of a relatively curt two-and-a-half-hours, the film volleys between town council meetings, commercial farming shifts, freemasonry ceremonies, class sessions at a high school, and more. Wiseman stitches each episode together with depopulated shots of Monrovia’s one-block main street and surrounding cornfields—all edited in uptempo fashion to emphasize the almost chilling emptiness of the town. The filmmaker lingers attentively on the minutia of labor within Monrovia, even as he leaves out the ultimate upshot of all this repetitive work. What awaits the souls of Monrovia—or contemporary America, for that matter—other than the grave? Wiseman’s elegy, which concludes with one of the most profoundly unsettling monologues in his oeuvre, seeks this answer and comes up wanting."


2. 24 Frames (Kiarostami, Iran)

"24 Frames is a delight on sensory levels alone, and depending on one’s patience for contemplating glimpses of natural and almost exclusively non-human goings-on, the overall effect is near-transcendent. But there’s also another feeling shading the experience, a steadily creeping poignancy that relates to the extra-textual knowledge of Kiarostami’s passing and the way in which the film’s ultra-simple structure—title cards announce each frame chronologically in between vignettes—acts as an expiring clock on the master’s career. If Kiarostami is, as suggested by Jean-Luc Godard, the end of cinema to D.W. Griffith’s beginning, then there’s a sobering poetry in the film’s use of the medium’s paradigmatic frame rate for its title and underlying construction. And especially gut-punching is the film’s concluding vignette, which bears witness to the last slow-motion stutters of an After Effects display rendering out an old movie’s soaring final kiss, all while the female editor dozes off at the workstation."


1. Let the Sunshine In (Denis, France)

(Written for In Review Online's year-end list.) "Made as a lark during production delays for the much more ambitious High Life, Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In nevertheless manages to alight on some very profound subject matter: namely, love, and the hours upon hours we spend conceptualizing it, pursuing it, and tripping over ourselves trying to just make it happen. Occupying a genre (romantic comedy) that’s typically thought to be the domain of the frivolous, Denis’s film doggedly details the love life of bohemian divorcée Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), a woman of deep sensitivity and resilience, and one for whom all other day-to-day concerns — her painting career, her family, the obstacles of living life in modern day Paris — become secondary to the hunt for her own romantic ideal. Though Isabelle’s superlative man is never explicitly defined by Denis, nor discovered by Isabelle herself, this film’s narrative does circle around a cluster of eligibles who fall short: the rapaciously horny Vincent (Xavier Beauvois), the emotionally out-of-step Marc (Alex Descas), an unstable and possibly alcoholic actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle), an ex-husband (Laurent Grévill) who still swings by for afternoon lovemaking, and a few others who briefly catch Isabelle’s fancy. Less oblique than usual, Denis’s filmmaking is intimately tethered to the temperament of her protagonist and the remarkably vulnerable performance of her star. When Isabelle’s in the throes of desire, the camera swoons along with her; when she’s defeated and confessional, it regards her with an honest, unmediated clarity. By turns gut-wrenching and revitalizing, Let the Sunshine In is anything but a fluffy diversion; its ostensible lightness cuts right to the heart of the matter." I also wrote about a particular scene in this great movie for Slant's Best Film Scenes of 2018 list.

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order): Burning, Cam, The Commuter, The Day After, Distant Constellation, Good Luck, Infinite Football, Isle of Dogs, Leave No Trace, Love After Love, Lover for a Day, Mandy, Pow Wow, Werewolf, Western

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

The Sacrifice (1986) A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky


"In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the distance from hope to despair is a short jump—a chasm crossed with the help of something so immediate as a television transmission. As his birthday celebration winds down on a gloomy summer evening in remote Sweden, retired intellectual Alexander (Erland Josephson) tiptoes half-drunk into his living room to find a small company of friends and family bewitched by the soft blue glow of a TV set’s screen, out of which emanates an announcement of nuclear conflict. The warning winds down, the TV is turned off, and the mood descends—first into stunned silence, then into outright hysteria, and then into a kind of sedated anxiousness from which the film never quite resurfaces. In certain contexts, this dramaturgical pivot might register a bit maudlin, but in 2018, when Twitter and cable news provide an endless gushing stream of outrages, the film’s evocation of being rapidly thrown into disarray by a piece of topical turmoil hits home."

Kino released a new Blu-ray for The Sacrifice, so I reviewed it for Slant.

Friday, August 31, 2018

Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2018) A Film by Bruno Dumont


"For all its natural beauty and genuine sense of surprise, however, this is a film handicapped by Igorrr’s uniquely terrible music, a near-constant formless riffing that alternately suggests reheated Evanescence tracks, Raffi sing-alongs, and the electronic tinkerings of a GarageBand apprentice. Where the silences in between words in Dumont’s cinema used to be filled with spacious field sounds and feelings of unspoken dread, now they’re stuffed with skittering breakbeats and doomy double-bass-pedal hammering. It’s true that the disorientation produced in the collision of Igorrr’s frenetic style-mashing and Dumont’s unadorned long-take aesthetic ensures that the film feels remarkably distinct from prior cinematic adaptations of Joan of Arc’s life, but it’s also hard not to wonder how this particular story might have played without the farfetched musical conceit grafted atop it. As it stands, Jeannette is admirable in its defiance of recognizable modes and its naked showcase of Dumont’s exploding imagination, but it’s a tedious novelty indeed."

Full review at Slant.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Love After Love (2018) A Film by Russell Harbaugh


"For a film about the breakdown of a bourgeoisie family’s comfortable suburban existence following the death of its patriarch, Russell Harbaugh’s Love After Love is a remarkably cool-headed, composed piece of work. Like John Magary’s The Mend, which Harbaugh helped conceive, this melancholic drama is marked by an acute focus on the quarrelsome collision of various family members’ ideas of themselves and each other, and it benefits from its nuanced, fully inhabited performances. But unlike The Mend, which is as abundant in frantic leaps in style as it is in mood swings, Love After Love displays a commitment to balance, consistency, and a persistent formal idea: In every scene, a steady camera observes Harbaugh’s characters from a careful distance on a zoom lens, and the cutting is dictated less by the tempo of their banter than by the turbulent pace of their inner lives."

Full review continues at Slant.

Monday, April 2, 2018

Drift (2017) A Film by Helena Wittmann


"The ocean has provided fertile territory for visual experimentation in recent years in a number of non-narrative art-house films, from Mauro Herce's hallucinatory Dead Slow Ahead to Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's frantic Leviathan. Helena Wittmann's Drift can now be added to this micro-genre, which isn't so much nascent as inextricably connected to an ancient tradition of storytelling based around the unknowable mystery of the sea. Two examples of this narrative legacy get cited early on in the film when its nameless female protagonists share thoughts at a beachfront café somewhere in wintry Germany prior to their parting from one another after a long weekend. One (Theresa George), who will soon embark on a solo expedition across the Atlantic, paraphrases a Papua New Guinea creation myth regarding a primeval crocodile and the warrior who slays it. The other (Josefina Gill), who plans to return to her native Argentina, responds by mentioning the legend of Nahuel Huapi, a Patagonian riff on the Loch Ness monster."

Full review of this New Directors/New Films entry continues at Slant.

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Winter Brothers (2017) A Film by Hlynur Pálmason


"Shot on desaturated Super 16 mm film in a Danish limestone quarry, Winter Brothers is one of the more aesthetically idiosyncratic directorial debuts in recent memory. Icelandic visual artist turned filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason, who decamped with his crew to the film's inhospitable setting for the duration of the production, approaches his chosen location like Michelangelo Antonioni did with that of Red Desert, transforming a place of grim labor and scant sunshine into a punctiliously designed cinematic space. Where Antonioni painted trees and grass to achieve his pallid industrial dystopia, Pálmason creates his by coating the scenery in calcite, dressing his cast in filthy faded denim jumpers, and partitioning the world into a careful visual system, with each location treated to its own rigorous compositional scheme. If nothing else, the film is a feat of formal conception and craftsmanship."

Full review of this incredibly striking directorial debut, part of the New Directors/New Films series, continues at Slant.

Monday, March 26, 2018

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? (2017) A Film by Travis Wilkerson


"The documentary Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? begins with a baritone voice intoning the following credo over pin-drop silence: “Trust me when I tell you this isn't another white savior story. This is a white nightmare story.” The voice belongs to director Travis Wilkerson, whose documentaries are often self-narrated, and here, sounding as though it belongs in a scare-mongering PSA, the voice immediately dispels any expectations of casual entertainment or purely pedagogical history lesson. In directly requesting the audience's trust, Wilkerson initiates a not-particularly-inviting proposition for the viewer, and specifically the white American viewer: Follow my lead, the voice seems to say, and my conclusions will make you uncomfortable."

Full review continues at Slant.