Tag: Best of Year

  • Best Films of 2018

    Best Films of 2018

    I hope it’s not bad form to say that the film highlight of 2018 for me was the small program I helped to organize at Big Ears Festival. I say “organize” because most of the curation was performed by others. David Dinnell brought nearly five hours of 16mm films culled from the collection of Canyon Cinema. Paul Harrill presented “A Sense of Place: A Retrospective of American Regional Cinema, 1960-1989.” Blake Williams curated a diverse and challenging program of 3D work, “Stereo Visions.” And I collaborated with Lewis Klahr on an installation and two screenings. The majority of my favorite film discoveries this year screened during our four-day festival.

    The other festival highlight of the year was “A History of Shadows,” a wide-ranging program curated by Gerwin Tamsma and Gustavo Beck in Rotterdam. Also, I was thrilled to finally catch up with Angela Schanelec’s work and to see my first Jean Rouch films, both courtesy of Mubi’s retrospectives.

    As for 2018 theatrical releases, Zama and Western towered over every other feature I saw. Looking over my lists, I’ve just now noticed that all of my favorite shorts were also directed or co-directed by women, with special mentions to China Not China, Please step out of the frame., I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, and The Remembered Film. I expect Ash is the Purest White, Transit, High Life, and The Image Book to all rank near the top of my list of 2019 releases.

    Writing and Programming in 2018

    Favorite US Releases of 2018 (Ranked)

    1. Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)
    2. Western (Valeska Grisebach, 2017)
    3. Dead Souls (Wang Bing, 2018)
    4. Beoning (Burning, Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
    5. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)
    6. Bisbee ’17 (Robert Greene, 2018)
    7. Un beau soleil intérieur (Let the Sunshine In, Claire Denis, 2017)
    8. First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)
    9. Milla (Valérie Massadian, 2017)
    10. PROTOTYPE (Blake Williams, 2018)

    Favorite Feature Premieres of 2018 (Ranked)

    1. Jiang hu er nv (Ash is the Purest White, Jia Zhang-ke, 2018)
    2. Transit (Christian Petzold, 2018)
    3. High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)
    4. Le livre d’image (The Image Book, Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)
    5. Dead Souls (Wang Bing, 2018)
    6. Beoning (Burning, Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
    7. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)
    8. Bisbee ’17 (Robert Greene, 2018)
    9. L’empire de la perfection (John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, Julien Faraut, 2018)
    10. What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (Roberto Minervini, 2018)

    Favorite Short Films of 2018 (Alphabetical)

    • Arena (Björn Kämmerer, 2018)
    • Blue (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, 2018)
    • China Not China (Dianna Barrie and Richard Tuohy, 2018)
    • Fainting Spells (Sky Hopinka, 2018)
    • I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (Beatrice Gibson, 2018)
    • more than everything (Rainer Kohlberger, 2018)
    • Please step out of the frame. (Karissa Hahn, 2018)
    • The Remembered Film (Isabelle Tollenaere, 2018)
    • Walled Unwalled (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2018)
    • Wunschbrunnen (Wishing Well, Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2018)

    Favorite Features I Saw for the First Time in 2018 (Alphabetical)

    • El Desencanto (The Disenchantment, Jaime Chávarri, 1976)
    • Geschichtsunterricht (History Lessons, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1972)
    • Kirmes (The Fair, Wolfgang Staudte, 1960)
    • Mein langsames Leben (Passing Summer, Angela Schanelec, 2001)
    • Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948)
    • Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, 1933)
    • Polyester (John Waters, 1981)
    • La pyramide humaine (The Human Pyramid, Jean Rouch, 1961)
    • Seeking the Monkey King (Ken Jacobs, 2011)
    • Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)

    Favorite Short Films I Saw for the First Time in 2018 (Alphabetical)

    • L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat 3D (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat 3D, Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1935)
    • Billabong (Will Hindle, 1969)
    • Boston Fire (Peter Hutton, 1979)
    • City Film (Lewis Klahr, 1992)
    • Dans le noir du temps (In the Darkness of Time, Jean-Luc Godard, 2001)
    • Hand Held Day (Gary Beydler, 1975)
    • Love It/Leave It (Tom Palazzolo, 1973)
    • On Sundays (Bruce Baillie, 1961)
    • Point de Gaze (Jodie Mack, 2012)
    • Starlight (Robert Fulton, 1970)
  • Best Films of 2015

    Best Films of 2015

    Favorite Theatrical Releases

    Favorite films that had a one-week run in NYC during 2015. In order of preference.

    1. Carol (Todd Haynes)
    2. Horse Money (Pedro Costa)
    3. The Mend (John Magary)
    4. Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
    5. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
    6. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako)
    7. Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont)
    8. Amour Fou (Jessica Hausner)
    9. Beloved Sisters (Dominik Graf)
    10. Tu dors Nicole (Stéphane Lafleur)

    Favorite As-Yet Undistributed Features

    In order of preference.

    1. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
    2. In the Shadow of Women (Philippe Garrel)
    3. Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo)
    4. Cemetery of Splendor (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul)
    5. The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (Ben Rivers)
    6. Santa Teresa and Other Stories (Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias)
    7. The Academy of Muses (José Luis Guerin)
    8. Campo Grande (Sandra Kogut)
    9. The Other Side (Roberto Minervini)
    10. Minotaur (Nicolás Pereda)

    Favorite New Experimental Shorts

    In alphabetical order.

    • Cathode Garden (Janie Geiser)
    • Faux Départ (Yto Barrada)
    • Mad Ladders (Michael Robinson)
    • Mars Garden (Lewis Klahr)
    • Navigator (Björn Kämmerer)
    • Prima Materia (Charlotte Pryce)
    • Scales in the Spectrum of Space (Fern Silva)
    • Something Between Us (Jodie Mack)
    • Something Horizontal (Blake Williams)
    • Traces/Legacy (Scott Stark)

    Favorite Discoveries

    Older films I saw for the first time this year, limited to one film per director. In chronological order.

    • Stark Love (Karl Brown, 1927)
    • Heroes for Sale (William A. Wellman, 1933)
    • The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934)
    • History is Made at Night (Frank Borzage, 1937)
    • Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1963)
    • Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, 1964)
    • The Soft Skin (François Truffaut, 1964)
    • The Inner Scar (Philippe Garrel, 1972)
    • Something to Remind Me (Christian Petzold, 2001)
    • Augustine (Alice Winocour, 2012)
  • Best Films of 2014

    Best Films of 2014

    Favorite Theatrical Releases

    Favorite films that had a one-week run in NYC during 2014. In order of preference. (The complete list can be found at Letterboxd.)

    1. The Immigrant (James Gray)
    2. The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zurcher)
    3. Jealousy (Philippe Garrel)
    4. What Now? Remind Me (Joaquim Pinto)
    5. Norte, The End of History (Lav Diaz)
    6. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard)
    7. Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt)
    8. Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)
    9. The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann)
    10. Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi)

    Favorite As-Yet Undistributed Features

    Hopefully at least half of these will make their way into theaters in 2015. In order of preference.

    1. Horse Money (Pedro Costa)
    2. Phoenix (Christian Petzold)
    3. Amour Fou (Jessica Housner)
    4. Episode of the Sea (Siebren de Haan and Lonnie van Brummelen)
    5. Tu dors Nicole (Stéphane LaFleur)
    6. De la musique ou La jota de Rosset (Jean-Charles Fitoussi)
    7. Sentimental Education (Julio Bressane)
    8. Pasolini (Abel Ferrara)
    9. How to Disappear Completely (Raya Martin)
    10. Approaching the Elephant (Amanda Wilder)

    Favorite New Experimental Shorts

    Putting these lists together has made me realize that I need to make a habit of going to Rotterdam. In alphabetical order.

    • Deorbit (Makino Takashi & Telecosystems)
    • Dot Matrix (Richard Tuohy)
    • The Innocents (Jean-Paul Kelly)
    • Konrad & Kurfurst (Esther Urlus)
    • New Fancy Foils (Jodie Mack)
    • Photooxidation (Pablo Mazzolo)
    • Red Capriccio (Blake Williams)
    • Sea Series #9, 11, 12, 13, 14 (John Price)
    • A Study in Natural Magic (Charlotte Pryce)
    • Sun Song (Joel Wanek)

    Favorite Discoveries

    Older films I saw for the first time this year, limited to one film per director. In alphabetical order.

    • D’Annunzios Höhle (Heinz Emigholz, 2005)
    • Gideon of Scotland Yard (John Ford, 1958)
    • The Goddess (Yonggang Wu, 1934)
    • The Great Flamarion (Anthony Mann, 1945)
    • Lars Ole 5.C (Nils Malmros, 1973)
    • Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)
    • Rivette – The Night Watchman (Claire Denis, 1990)
    • The Spy in Black (Michael Powell, 1939)
    • Tchoupitoulas (Bill Ross and Turner Ross, 2012)
    • Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)
  • Favorite Films of the ’90s

    Favorite Films of the ’90s

    Thanks to the AV Club, film nerds everywhere are declaring their favorite films of the 1990s. I spent all of five minutes on mine, which is why they’re alphabetized. Three things stand out as I look over this list from the vantage of 2012. First, the movies that meant a great deal to me at the time (Pulp Fiction, Rushmore, Unforgiven, The Player, etc.) are all fantastic gateway-to-cinephilia films that mean very little to me today. Second, all those critics talking about “new waves” in Iran and Taiwan were on to something. And, third, if you exclude Kubrick (71) the average age of these directors was 41 at the time of their film’s release. The older I get, the more impressive that seems.

    Terrifying trivia of the day: Bela Tarr was 39 — younger than I am now! — when he made Satantango (which just missed the cut here).

    Buffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998)
    Casa de Lava
    (Pedro Costa, 1994)
    Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
    Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
    Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
    Good Men, Good Women (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1995)
    I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994)
    A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)
    La Promesse (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1996)
    Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994)

    Edit: Removed Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995) after I realized I’d forgotten Buffalo ’66.

  • Best Films of 2012

    Best Films of 2012

    Last updated January 3, 2013

    Favorite Commercial Releases

    I’ve seen about 45 films that had a one-week theatrical release in NYC in 2012. Of those I’ve missed, only a few have a chance of making my top 10 (Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film is the best bet), so I’ll edit this list if need be as I catch up with the stragglers on DVD.

    A quick word about my favorite film of the year. Soon after the pivotal scene in The Loneliest Planet, I realized the main characters are named Alex and Nica, and I began to sob — so much so that I worried the strangers seated on either side of me would think I was a crazy person. Aside from the emails we exchanged, I never knew Alexis Tioseco or Nika Bohinc, a young couple, both of them film critics, who were murdered in 2009, and I understand that the similarity between their names and those of Jula Loktev’s characters is a simple coincidence. But that one strange resonance was all it took to release the emotional pressure that had been building within me for the previous hour.

    The Loneliest Planet might be my favorite film about marriage ever because it stages the potential destruction of Alex and Nica’s relationship as a tragedy of the highest order. How many other films can make that claim? A Woman Under the InfluenceDon’t Look NowSunrise? But the genius of Loktev’s film is that the drama is so quietly self-contained and so rich in gestures. I don’t know much about much, but I’ve now spent exactly half of my life with the same person, and if I was overwhelmed by The Loneliest Planet it’s because I recognized in it so many of the intimate struggles of marriage — the stupid shame, petty fantasies, and fumbling reconciliations. And also, of course, the joy and pleasure. The Loneliest Planet is so good because so much — everything, really — is at stake.

    I wrote more about The Loneliest Planet after seeing it at TIFF 2011.

    1. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)
    2. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
    3. Barbara (Christian Petzold)
    4. Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman)
    5. Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
    6. The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo)
    7. A Burning Hot Summer (Philippe Garrel)
    8. Haywire (Steven Soderbergh)
    9. The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
    10. Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

     

    August and After

    Favorite Unreleased Films

    Films I saw in 2012 that haven’t yet been released theatrically in the States. I suspect a few of them will also appear on my list of favorite commercial releases of 2013. I wrote about most of them in my TIFF 2012 report at Senses of Cinema.

    1. August and After (Nathaniel Dorsky)
    2. Viola (Matías Piñeiro)
    3. differently, Molussia (Nicolas Rey)
    4. Three Sisters (Wang Bing)
    5. Big in Vietnam (Mati Diop)
    6. Walker (Tsai Ming-liang)
    7. Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
    8. Museum Hours (Jem Cohen)
    9. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel)
    10. Memories of a Morning (José Luis Guerín)

     

    Whirlpool of Fate

    Favorite Discoveries

    Older films that I saw for the first time in 2012. In chronological order, with a limit of one film per director. I didn’t make enough discoveries this year. Hence, two resolutions for 2013: two old films for every one new one, and at least two silent films each month.

    • Whirlpool of Fate (Jean Renoir, 1925)
    • Zéro de Conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933)
    • Caught (Max Ophuls, 1949)
    • Death in the Garden (Luis Bunuel, 1956)
    • Far from Vietnam (Marker, Godard, Resnais, Klein, Ivens, Varda, and Lelouch, 1967)
    • Le Gai Savoir (Jean-luc Godard, 1969)
    • Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969)
    • Daguerreotypes (Agnes Varda, 1976)
    • The Cry of the Owl (Claude Chabrol, 1987)
    • Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)

     

    Haywire

    Movie Recommendations for People Who Don’t Like the Kinds of Movies I Like

    I get especially awkward when people ask me about my favorite movies because I have very particular interests in film. I’m more interested in form (how they’re constructed) than content (what they’re about). My preferences are often esoteric, but I like “regular” movies, too. (Marvel’s The Avengers ranked higher on my year-end list than a lot of important films by important directors.) So this year I’ve decided to offer some additional recommendations. As of January 2, 2013, all of these films are streaming on Netflix in the States.

    Haywire
    As fun an action film as you’re likely to find. I watched it four times in three days. Soderbergh released this, Contagion, and Magic Mike all in the span of ten months. Unbelievable.

    The Queen of Versailles
    Did you hear about the billionaire and his trophy wife who set out to build the biggest home in America? Did you hear about what happened to them after the real estate market collapsed and access to credit evaporated? There’s no reason this documentary should be so good. It should’ve been one more piece of schadenfreude porn, as we in the audience get to laugh bitterly at the troubles of the attention-seeking morons at the center of this story. Instead, The Queen of Versailles manages to dismantle the nation’s obsession with “reality TV” from the inside while also offering a fine critique of the economic policies that allow people like David and Jaqueline Siegel to exist.

    How to Survive a Plague and We Were Here
    Although We Were Here is technically a 2011 release, it only became widely available this year. It deserves mention because it and Plague benefit from the pairing. Each documents the early years of the AIDS epidemic. We Were Here is an oral history of the nightmare in San Francisco; Plague is about ACT UP in New York. Both are heart-breaking, inspiring, and really well made.

    Bernie
    I’m pleased to see Richard Linklater’s Bernie receiving so much attention in year-end critic polls. I don’t blame the distributors for marketing it as a Jack Black comedy, but it’s really something else — although I’m not sure what, exactly, which is probably why so few people saw it. Inspired by the true-life story of a good-hearted, well-loved, thieving murderer, Bernie is less about the title character than about the small Texas community who tell his story and make his myth. A fascinating mash-up of fiction and documentary, satire and earnest affection.

    Woman in the Fifth
    I mean this as a compliment when I say that Pawel Pawlikowski is a great middlebrow director. The script for this psychological thriller is a bit silly, and the pacing of it might be too slow for some tastes, but this is the kind of film Michael Douglas would have made 20 years ago. Instead, we get Ethan Hawke in the lead role as a quiet novelist who moves to Paris in order to be closer to his daughter and gets caught up in various intrigues. (Come to think of it, I’d be fine with Hawke becoming my generation’s Michael Douglas.) Honestly, the main reason I like Woman in the Fifth so much is because every single shot is immaculate — to a fault.

    Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Marina Abramovich: The Artist is Present, and Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    Three excellent documentaries about the work and craft of art-making.

     

    Singin' in the Rain

    Film Event of the Year

    On July 12 I took my two-year-old daughter to her first movie, Singin’ in the Rain. Despite it starting past her bedtime, she stuck it out for the whole thing and clapped after every song. She didn’t mention the experience again until just a few days ago. While I was getting her dressed, I started singing “Make ‘Em Laugh,” and when I finished she smiled and said, “I love that movie!” Santa must have heard because a blu-ray showed up in her stocking.

    There was no close second in this category.

  • Best Films of 2011

    Best Films of 2011

    I’m writing this on June 15, 2012, a full six months after the annual explosion of year-end listmaking and a year-and-a-half after the archival date of this post. With the latest redesign and relaunch of Long Pauses, I’ve decided to take a different approach. Rather than wait until December, I’m going to rank films as I see them. The only 2011 release I haven’t yet seen that might have a chance of cracking the top 15 is Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales.

    Favorite Commercial Releases of 2011

    Going by the one-week in NYC rule.

    Top Five
    In preferential order.

    1. House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello)
    2. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz)
    3. Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)
    4. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
    5. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)

    The Next Ten
    In alphabetical order.

    The Arbor (Clio Barnard)
    The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)
    Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
    My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa)
    A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
    Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman)
    To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues)
    The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
    Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)
    Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

    Favorite Undistributed Films of 2011

    As of December 31, 2011, these films had not yet been released commercially in the States. On a level playing field, Low Life and The Loneliest Planet would knock Certified Copy and Meek’s Cutoff out of my top 5.

    1. Low Life (Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval)
    2. The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)
    3. Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman)
    4. A Burning Hot Summer (Philippe Garrel)
    5. Fatherland (Nicolas Prividera)
    6. The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
    7. Twenty Cigarettes (James Benning)
    8. Dreileben: Beats Being Dead (Christian Petzold)
    9. The Silver Cliff (Karim Aïnouz)
    10. The Student (Santiago Mitre)
  • Best Films of 2010

    Best Films of 2010

    John Price’s Home Movie isn’t on any of my Top 10 lists but I’ve thought about it as much as any film I saw in 2010. The title is literal: Price shot Home Movie in and around his house with an old Russian 35mm camera and processed the film by hand. In some ways, it’s not so different from those silent 16mm films your uncle would shoot at birthday parties and family reunions. It’s built mostly from images of his two daughters as they do typical little-girl things like playing dolls and riding swings. But the literal size of the film—I saw it beautifully projected in Cinemascope ratio—and the playfulness of Price’s montage won me over. It also helped me to understand the curious sensation that’s overtaken my day-to-day experience of the world since I became a father in April: a nostalgia for the present. To be a parent is to live each moment twice: once right now and also, simultaneously, in the future, when the particular joy of this particular experience is a memory. Price’s film somehow manages to get that, and I’m grateful for it.

    Best of 2010

    This year, to determine eligibility I’ve decided to follow the “New York commercial release” rule, which means that this list has been culled from the 40 or so films I saw. Honestly, this Top 10 could be shuffled randomly and I’d probably be as satisfied with the results. I also wouldn’t complain too loudly if a few of these were replaced by Wild Grass, Greenberg, Dogtooth, The Oath, or The Ghost Writer. There were a lot of very good releases in 2010 but no one film stands out as an overwhelming favorite. I finally settled on Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl for the top slot because the final cut made me gasp. It’s just a devestating moment—totally original, unexpected, and right. I’ve included Lee’s Secret Sunshine as an honorable mention because it does, technically, qualify as a 2010 release but I saw it three-and-a-half years ago! If you’re keeping score at home, feel free to put it in the top slot and bump down the next ten. If my memories are to be trusted, it’s my favorite film of 2007/2010.

    1. Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira)
    2. Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat)
    3. Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes)
    4. Boxing Gym (Frederick Wiseman)
    5. Vincere (Marco Bellocchio)
    6. Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor)
    7. The Social Network (David Fincher)
    8. The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray)
    9. Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette)
    10. Everyone Else (Maren Ade)

    Honorable Mention: Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong)

    Favorite New Films I Saw in 2010

    The top six films here are all nearly perfect in very different ways.

    1. Atlantiques (Mati Diop)
    2. Film Socialism (Jean-Luc Godard)
    3. Promises Written in Water (Vincent Gallo)
    4. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
    5. RUHR (James Benning)
    6. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
    7. Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira)
    8. Coming Attractions (Peter Tscherkassky)
    9. Boxing Gym (Frederick Wiseman)
    10. Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean)

    Favorite Discoveries of 2010

    I suppose I’ll eventually run out of John Ford films to put on this year-end list, which will be a damn shame. I considered The Quiet Man (one film per director rule), but The Long Gray Line is such a strange and moving film. I’m glad I didn’t see it years ago, when I would’ve mistaken its melodrama for ridiculous sentiment. It made me weep like a child. (Although by that standard alone, Line finishes a distant second to Make Way for Tomorrow. Obviously.) In alphabetical order:

    The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935)
    The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)
    The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)
    The Long Gray Line (John Ford, 1955)
    Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
    A Married Couple (Allan King, 1969)
    Les rendez-vous d’Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)
    Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977)
    Tender Mercies (Bruce Beresford, 1983)
    Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956)

  • Best Films of 2009

    Best Films of 2009

    I’ve now seen about 40 of the point-earning films from the 2009 IndieWire Critics Survey, which seems a reasonable enough number. I’m not even sure how IndieWire qualifies a film as a 2009 release, although given the appearance of Sokurov’s The Sun (which I saw in September 2005!), I assume they go by the one-week theatrical release rule. I’ve taken the coward’s route and included eleven films because I just couldn’t decide which one to leave off. All in all, I’d say it was a good but far-from-great year. As one guide, none of these films made my Favorite Films of the Decade list, and I can’t imagine any of them will gain greatly in stature over time. (Although after a single recent viewing of The Headless Woman, I wouldn’t be surprised if I later come to the realization that it’s Martel’s masterpiece. Still thinking on that one.)

    1. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) [ more ]
    2. Revanche (Gotz Spielmann) [ more ]
    3. Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung) [ more ]
    4. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso) [ more ]
    5. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
    6. Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
    7. Birdsong (Albert Serra) [ more ]
    8. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
    9. Duplicity (Tony Gilroy)
    10. Two Lovers (James Gray)
    11. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)

    Phantoms of Nabua (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, 2009)

    Favorite New Films I Saw in 2009

    Distribution rules be damned! I saw about 80 films this year that qualify under this category, which is a catch-all: If I saw a recently-produced film in 2009, and it was my first opportunity to see it, then it qualifies. So I’m working from a deep pool here: shorts and feature-length films; narratives, essays, documentaries, and the avant-garde; DVDs, festival films, theatrical releases, museum installations, and, in one case, a pre-release screener. From this vantage, 2009 looks a hell of a lot better.

    1. Phantoms of Nabua / A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul) [ more ]
    2. Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat) [ more ]
    3. Face (Tsai Ming-liang) [ more ]
    4. To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues)
    5. Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)
    6. Lucky Life (Lee Isaac Chung)
    7. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
    8. Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes)
    9. Wild Grass (Alain Resnais)
    10. In Comparison (Harun Farocki)

    The Long Voyage Home

    Favorite Discoveries of 2009

    Were it not for my “one film per director” rule, this list would likely consist of nine John Ford films and Jeanne Dielman. Instituting the rule makes it more representative of my movie-watching year, though. Along with the thirteen Ford films I saw, I also went through a brief ’80s phase last spring, when I made a couple great discoveries, and there were a couple hold-overs from last year’s trip through the Borzage and Murnau DVD releases.

    • 7th Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927)
    • City Girl (F. W. Murnau, 1930)
    • Emergency Kisses (Philippe Garrel, 1989)
    • Grown Ups (Mike Leigh, 1980) [ more ]
    • Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
    • The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, 1940)
    • Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980) [ more ]
    • The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)
    • Tren de Sombras (Jose Luis Guerin, 1997) [ more ]
    • Voyage en deuce (Michel Deville, 1980) [ more ]
  • Best Films of the Decade (2000-2009)

    Best Films of the Decade (2000-2009)

    I’ll follow Tom Hall’s lead and call this my “Incredibly Personal, Completely Subjective List of the Best Films of The Decade.” Consider it a snapshot of my taste right now. Conspicuously absent are several filmmakers who made great films this decade but who, for whatever reasons — my age? critical backlash? the weather? — didn’t make the final cut. Check back in another ten years and things will likely look much different.

    The ground rules: Feature-length films of any genre. One film per director, although I don’t think the list would look too much different without that qualification (Denis, Jia, and Costa would probably get in another film or two). I went by theatrical release date, mostly because there are quite a few 2009 festival releases I haven’t yet seen, and that just doesn’t seem quite fair.

    1. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 2000)
    Quite possibly my favorite film of any decade, Beau Travail constitutes a genre unto itself. Equal parts literary adaptation (Melville’s Billy Budd), contemporary dance piece, psychological character study, formalist experiment, postcolonial analysis, and music video, it is also on my short list of Truly Beautiful Things.

    2. The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002)
    The format they established in The Promise and Rosetta — hand-held cameras, natural lighting, the famous “back of the head” shot, and moral questioning along the lines of Dostoevsky and Bresson — made the Dardenne brothers the most influential art-house filmmakers of the decade (judging by the slew of imitators that land in festival lineups, at least). The Son is the one I keep returning to, though. Olivier Gourmet as a wounded carpenter: the conceit is six feet thick with metaphorical implications, most of them valid and compelling, but it’s his body — the sheer, muscular physicality of it — that drives the film’s momentum.

    3. Still Life / Dong (Jia Zhang-ke, 2006)
    Jia is, for lack of a better word, the most “important” filmmaker of the decade, I think. Each of the seven features he made documents globalization by examining some small corner of China. Watching his movies is like watching helplessly as a museum is looted. There’s an urgency to his project, as if he’s reluctant to put his camera down for too long or risk losing his tenuous grasp on a nation’s culture and history and humanity. I consider Still Life and Dong, made and released simultaneously, a diptych — each benefits from the juxtaposition. Together, they’re Jia’s best, most complex, and most compelling work.

    4. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
    Any of the Vanda Trilogy films could fill this spot. But Colossal Youth was the first I saw and, so, it left the deepest impression. I remember thinking, only 30 minutes in, “Well, I didn’t know the cinema could be this.” Like several other directors on this list (Denis, Jia, Godard, Lynch, Varda, Zahedi), Costa is also significant for his contributions to the evolution of digital filmmaking, which is surely the real story of film in the first decade of the 21st century. More here.

    5. What Time is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)
    My favorite Tsai films, What Time is it There? and Face, probably won’t be the ones he’s best remembered for (my money’s on the more sexually transgressive The River and The Wayward Cloud), but his treatment of grief — the strange tangle of pain and desire, shame and beauty — is what he does best. I watched parts of Time over and over again in 2004, after my mother- and father-in-law died suddenly, and years later it still brings me great comfort. More here.

    6. Syndromes and a Century (Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
    After being frustrated by a first screening of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus, I was offered a useful insight by my friend Girish: “The line separating narrative film from the avant-garde is pretty arbitrary, really.” Apitchatpong has erased the line completely, and God bless him for it. I mean, just watch this clip. Not for all tastes, obviously, but there’s a magic and beauty in those few minutes that many great filmmakers will fail to achieve in a lifetime.

    7. Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2004)
    Hou’s films were more groundbreaking in the ’80s and more ambitious in the ’90s, but he has perfected his craft and refined his taste to such a degree that I find him almost impossible to write about or discuss: he makes these perfect little objects full of soul and wonder. That Cafe Lumiere was inspired by Ozu never interested me much, except that it gave Hou an excuse to deal with a father/daughter relationship. The trailer I’ve linked to is almost ruined by the music, but it includes my favorite moment from the film: the shot of the father picking out the potatoes from his meal and giving them to Yoko.

    8. In Praise of Love (Jean-luc Godard, 2001)
    Suddenly it occurs to me that a good number of the films on my list are obsessed with history, memory, power, and image-making, which I’ll blame, in part, on my having spent the first half of this decade in a graduate English program. But it’s a reasonable obsession, right? Certainly it’s nothing new for Godard, whose first feature of the 21st century borrows techniques from the films he made 40 years earlier (I love equally the first-person interviews in Masculine/Feminine and In Praise of Love). Also, this film ranks high on my list simply because I got to see it projected on 35mm at a multiplex in Knoxville, Tennessee.

    9. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
    For the longest time, Waking Life seemed destined to fill the Linklater spot on my list, but after rewatching it and Before Sunset recently, I realized that the latter does all of the things I most love about the former — it delights in human curiosity, engages with life, and champions the creative imagination — but it does so in a form (the romance, generally speaking) that tends to degrade those qualities in its characters. It’s quite a feat.

    10. RR (James Benning, 2007)
    At the start of the decade I could have counted on one hand the number of avant-garde films I’d seen. Now, it would take, like, fifteen or twenty hands, which is a start, I guess. More here.

    11. Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)
    There Will Be Blood is finding its way onto many Best of the 00s lists, but Glazer gets my vote for Kubrick Heir Apparent. More here.

    12. In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin, 2007)
    I can’t decide if I should feel guilty for loving this film as much as I do. Formally, it’s as perfectly controlled as any movie I can name. Guerin has made a little cinematic fugue here, discovering new rhythms and dissonances as he returns to and transforms images — hair blowing in the wind, a hand sketching faces, a man with a limp trying to sell a lighter, two people walking. But, really, this movie is about the pleasures of watching, and parts of it (the cafe sequence, “Heart of Glass,” the final five minutes) just make me smile like an idiot.

    13. The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003)
    I spent the majority of my spare time between 2001-2006: 1. researching and occasionally writing a doctoral dissertation about the American Left and the Cold War, 2. swallowing bile. I’m sympathetic to the complaints leveled at this film, but I have watched The Fog of War at least a dozen times, and it’s the only Iraq/Bush-era documentary that comes close to representing my deeply-felt ambivalence about the “American Century” that came to an end ten years ago. I was pleased to find this clip on YouTube because it’s my favorite section of the film. You see McNamara’s prevarications, his pride and shame, but most of all you see the ironies contained in that poisoned word, “efficiency.” Did Hannah Arendt ever write about spreadsheets?

    14. Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
    I wonder if other cinephiles of my generation have had this experience? After discovering Blue Velvet as an undergrad and declaring Lynch The Greatest Director Ever (cough, cough), I matured, turned my back on him, and declared him That Overrated Director Who Is Loved Only By Pot-Smoking Undergrads. So, in 2007 I rewatched all of his films, ending with Inland Empire, and concluded that he deserves neither title. Rather, he is just exceptionally gifted at making a particular type of film. I’ll stand by my comments from two years ago: “My Damascus experience came midway through the first season of Twin Peaks, when I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed by the deep sorrow that pervades the Laura Palmer story. While watching Inland Empire again last night, it occurred to me that one reason I’m completely unconvinced by all of the critical praise being heaped on the Coens’ treatment of evil and violence in No Country for Old Men is because violence — real, non-metaphoric violence — is always sorrowful and tragic. Lynch seems to have been born with a peculiar sensitivity to that fact, and has spent his career perfecting the formal means of articulating it.”

    15. When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, 2008)
    It’s easy to forget that, for the better part of a century, the experience of cinema was created by projected light, fast-moving gears, and strips of celluloid. And then you see something like When It Was Blue, and you hear two projectors running behind you, and you’re occasionally blinded by the brightness of the bulbs, and you ask yourself, “What am I seeing? How did she get that image on that frame of film?” More here.

    16. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
    Last year I saw, within just a few days of each other, Agnes Varda and Terrence Davies introduce and discuss their latest films, The Beaches of Agnes and Of Time and the City, both of which are autobiographical essay films. And I’m still struck by the juxtaposition: Davies the bitter nostalgist versus Varda the curious anthropologist. Varda is my hero. At 80, she’s as alive to the wonder and potential (and the sorrows and ironies) of the world now as she was 55 years ago, when she first picked up a camera. The Gleaners and I makes me want to be a better man.

    17. In the Bathtub of the World (Caveh Zahedi, 2001)
    In 2000, Caveh shot at least a minute of video a day and then assembled it into this remarkable film. Ironically, there are no clips from this YouTube-anticipating project on YouTube, so, instead, I’ve embedded a clip from The World is a Classroom, his short contribution to the post-9/11 collection, Underground Zero. More here.

    18. Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)
    Life on Earth (1998) is my favorite of Sissako’s films, but Bamako was the first I saw and it left me teary-eyed and speechless. The court scenes are didactic and on-the-nose — deliberately so — but it’s all that life going on around the court that makes the film work. It all culminates in one of my favorite scenes of the decade, as an elderly man sing-speaks his testimony to the court, an act of astonishing beauty that also exposes the absurdity of the proceedings.

    19. Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2007)
    This is the only film by Klotz I’ve seen, and, frankly, I’m surprised to find it on my list. I’d anticipated including a Haneke film instead (Code Unknown, probably, or maybe Cache), but Heartbeat Detector is the film I found myself most eager to revisit. The first of two Mathieu Amalric performances to round out the top 20. More here.

    20. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
    I considered cheating here by naming two films, this one and Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach (2006). While their styles and ambitions are quite different, I’ve decided I like Desplechin and Hong for basically the same reason: their movies constantly surprise me in small but significant ways. On the Kings and Queen DVD, Desplechin recounts a story about Truffaut’s frustration with a screenwriter. “How do you expect me to shoot a four-minute scene that expresses a single idea?” he asked. “I want every minute of film to express four ideas!” Desplechin has taken that as his motto, and you can see the results in each of his films, which are consistently messy, ambiguous, and haunted — Kings and Queen especially so. I mean, just try to summarize Louis Jennsens’s (Maurice Garrel) deathbed letter to Nora (Emmanuelle Devos). Watching a scene like that, I actively envy the imagination of its creators.

    And ten more (alphabetized) that just missed the cut
    Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005)
    Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000) [ more ]
    Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
    Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
    Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005)
    Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina, 2006)
    Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuaron, 2004) [ more ]
    I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)
    Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 2004)
    Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006)

  • Best Films of 2008

    Best Films of 2008

    This year, for the first time, I submitted an official Top 10 list, abiding by the “one-week theatrical run in the States” rule. The full write-up can be found at The Auteurs’ Notebook.

    1. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke)
    2. In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin)
    3. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
    4. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
    5. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
    6. Paraguayan Hammock (Paz Encina)
    7. Love Songs (Christoph Honore)
    8. The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat)
    9. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo)
    10. The Romance of Astree and Celadon (Eric Rohmer)

    In the three weeks since I submitted that piece I’ve caught up with a couple other well-reviewed films, and I suspect that one of them, Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz), would have bumped Rohmer from the list had I seen it sooner. I’m eager to watch it again.

    RR (Benning, 2008)

    Favorite New Films I Saw in 2008

    As I mentioned in my write-up for The Auteurs, these year-end lists offer a really frustrating glimpse into the state of film distribution. If I hadn’t spent ten days in Toronto, the list below would include one film, Love Songs, which, it’s perhaps worth noting, played at TIFF ‘07 and which I saw more than a year later when it finally found its way to DVD. Someday, hopefully, Senses of Cinema will post their next issue (it’s already more than a month late), which will include my essay about many of these films.

    1. RR (James Benning)
    2. When It was Blue (Jennifer Reeves)
    3. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)
    4. Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso)
    5. Revanche (Gotz Spielman)
    6. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
    7. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
    8. Winter / Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky)
    9. Horizontal Boundaries (Pat O’Neill)
    10. Love Songs (Christoph Honore)
    11. Birdsong (Albert Serra)
    12. Salamandra (Pablo Aguero)
    13. The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda)
    14. Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
    15. Hunger (Steve McQueen)

    The Bad and the Beautiful (Minnelli, 1952)

    Favorite Discoveries of 2008

    This list is a lot more fun. Older films that I saw for the first time in ’08. Limited to one film per director, listed in alphabetical order. This was a great year for silent films — starting with the Ford at Fox boxset, followed by a trip to San Francisco for the Silent Film Festival in July, and ending with a brief trip through Murnau. With the recent release of the Murnau, Borzage and Fox set, I suspect 2009 will be a good one, too.

    • The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincent Minnelli, 1952)
    • Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, 2000)
    • Faust (F. W. Murnau, 1926)
    • Four Sons (John Ford, 1928)
    • Jujiro (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1928)
    • Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)
    • Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
    • Life on Earth (Abderrahmane Sissako, 1998)
    • The Lovers on the Bridge (Leos Carax, 1999)
    • Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 2004)
    • Platform (Jia Zhang-ke, 2000)
    • ‘Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier, 1986)
    • Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)
    • The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962)
    • The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)
    • Vers Mathilde (Claire Denis, 2005)
    • Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)
  • Best Films of 2007

    Best Films of 2007

    I saw more than thirty films that I would call very-good-to-great in 2007 but none that impressed me as much as my favorites from last year, Syndromes and a Century, Still Life / Dong, and Colossal Youth. On average, though, the quality was excellent, and there were several really pleasant surprises. So here are ten favorites, in alphabetical order, with some honorable mentions thrown in, followed by my favorite discoveries of 2007.

    Favorite New Films of 2007

    • At Sea (Peter Hutton) — The highlight for me of TIFF’s Wavelengths program, followed closely by Heinz Emigholz’s Schindler’s Houses. Both are rigorous essay films told in silence (or near-silence) and shockingly beautiful images.
    • En la ciudad de Sylvia (Jose Juis Guerin) — My most pleaurable film-watching experience of the year. My ambivalence about that pleasure is what makes the film more than just an exercise in spectatorship.
    • Fengming, A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing) — I’ve forgotten many of the details of Fengming’s story, but I can clearly recall her gestures and expressions. As a work of documentary, though, I find the film most interesting for the ways it foregrounds the fact that, when recounting someone’s story, editing takes place even when the filmmaker never cuts.
    • I’m Not There (Todd Haynes) — On most days, it’s my favorite film of the year. It went from “interesting” to “great” during the second viewing, when I realized that Godard is at least as important to the film as Dylan. I’m Not There is closer in spirit to a Don DeLillo novel than a biopic. It’s about a specific historical moment — the period roughly between the inauguration of JFK to the end of the Vietnam War — when the image won and what we call postmodernism was born, and, more specifically, it’s about the constant slippage between our culture of images and real political power. Haynes gets my Director of the Year Award. Also, I still can’t believe that the Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg scenes are: 1. My favorite part of the film, and 2. An even more enjoyable throwback to the New Wave than Christophe Honore’s Dans Paris.
    • Inland Empire / More Things That Happened (David Lynch) — My other favorite of the year. I finally “got” Lynch in 2007, and this film more than any other captures what I most admire about him. Grab any random snippet from Inland Empire and you’ll find something strange and beautiful that is full of earned emotion, written in the distinct hand of its maker. A day after seeing it, I’m tempted to say the same of Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd.
    • Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung) — Chung’s is far and away the best debut film I saw in 2007. It’s a beautiful character piece that melds Western and African cinematic sensibilities in illuminating, non-didactic ways. I can’t wait to see what he does next. And speaking of films from/about Africa, my favorite final scene of the year goes to Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt. Heartbreaking.
    • Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong) — Lee’s is the best of several great Korean films I saw this year that blend melodrama with genre and socio-political critique. They’re more pathos- and plot-driven than the films I typically watch, but they’re also unpredictable, smart, and, at times, startlingly transgressive. See also Im Sang-soo’s The Old Garden and Bong Joon-ho’s The Host.
    • Useless (Jia Zhang-ke) — Less epic and refined than last year’s combo of Still Life and Dong, Useless is nonetheless a work of subtle complexity. For another rich essay on memory and art-making, see also Heddy Honigmann’s Forever.
    • Une Vieille Maitresse (Catherine Breillat) — After watching nearly all of Breillat’s films this year, I’ve come to think more highly of her as an essayist than a filmmaker. She’s at her best when she’s grounded in naturalism, as in Une Vieille Maitresse, and I really enjoyed seeing her aesthetic mashed-up with all of those period trappings. (Asia Argento and Roxane Mesquida in corsets!) It was a good year for sexy French period pieces, generally. I also loved Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley and Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astree et de Celadon.
    • Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Hou Hsiao-hsien) — That shot of the painting near the end of the film? The one that slowly pulls in and out of focus, finally catching the faces of the children in reflection? Best shot of the year, and a perfect example of why Hou’s newest film will always appear on my year-end list.

    Favorite Film Discoveries of 2007

    Limited to one film per director. Otherwise it would consist only of films by Watkins, Costa, Ray, and Tourneur.

    1. Les Bons Debarras (Francis Mankiewicz, 1980)
    2. Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)
    3. Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins, 1974)
    4. Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947)
    5. High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968)
    6. No Quarto de Vanda (Pedro Costa, 2000)
    7. Sicilia! (Straub and Huillet, 1999)
    8. They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)
    9. Time Indefinite (Ross McElwee, 1993)
    10. The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi, 1978)

    And Special Recognition to . . .

    The Wire — If Berlin Alexanderplatz, Histoire(s) du Cinema, and Scenes from a Marriage can be discussed as films, then so should each season of The Wire. What David Simon, Ed Burns, and their crew at HBO have accomplished isn’t television. It’s the best traditional narrative filmmaking on display anywhere in America right now. And in the process, it also offers a kind of prolonged economic analysis that I never imagined possible from this medium. I’ve only watched the first two seasons so far, so expect to see mentions of seasons 3-5 this time next year.

  • Best Films of 2006

    Best Films of 2006

    I’ve been debating for the last few days what I should write about in my year-end film post — wondering, frankly, if a write-up was necessary at all — and I’ve decided that the source of my ambivalence is the presence of so many similar lists and accompanying essays already out there. And that, I’ve just realized, is the real film story of 2006: the coming-of-age of online criticism. (See? Time magazine was right. We are the People of the Year.)

    Not too long ago my twenty-link selection of “Daily Reads” constituted a near-complete list of the quality, regularly-updated websites that focused on world cinema. Now, with established print critics moving online and new voices chiming in everyday, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of writing that greets me each time I open Bloglines — so much so that, to be honest, I’ve fallen out of the habit of reading much of it at all. I find that I now approach the film blog-o-sphere in much the same way that I would behave if we all gathered face-to-face for a massive cocktail party. I grab my drink and find a quiet table over in the corner where I chat with the folks I’ve known the longest and the best and whose tastes are most similar to my own.

    All of this is good news in every respect, I suppose, but one: As the film blog-o-sphere has evolved, I’ve felt my relation to Long Pauses change as well. Strange as it is to say, I feel a greater pressure these days to make declarations, to take a side, to join in “the critical conversation.” That bloggers now have a legitimate (or legitimated [by marketing departments]) voice in that conversation blows my mind. But, as anyone who has festival’d with me can tell you, making declarations and shaping consensus is the last reason I started writing these “responses” six years ago. Which is why I found it so odd to find myself thinking recently, “I really need to see A Prairie Home Companion, When the Levees Broke, and those Scorsese and Eastwood films.” I needed, in other words, to make my Top 10 “count.” Strange.

    The tenor of this post might imply that I have a deep stake in the debates about the current state of film criticism. I don’t. Or, at least, I think I don’t. I’m genuinely grateful for the film blog-o-sphere, for the close friendships that have developed because of it, and for the remarkable resource it has become. It’s exciting. To continue the analogy, the cocktail party’s warming up and the room is getting noisy. But I’m a hopeless introvert, and crowds make me anxious.

    But anyway, here are the obligatory lists. The top three films (I count Jia’s two films as halves of a whole) are as great as anything I’ve seen since The Son, and the rest of the top 15 (yes, I needed 15 this year) are all fantastic as well. I can’t wait to watch Syndromes and Century and Colossal Youth again. Both are crammed full of beauty and mystery, and I’m eager to reexperience their magic. I forced myself to order the list this year and was surprised by the rankings. So Yong Kim’s remarkable debut, In Between Days, climbed a notch or two higher with each revision, as did Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction (Will Ferrell’s is probably my favorite performance of the year); Tsai Ming-liang’s surprisingly conventional and touching I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone dropped a bit.

    As usual, I’ve ignored “official” release dates and am, instead, listing “new” films that I saw in 2006. It’s just easier that way.

    Fifteen Best New Films I Saw in 2006 (by preference)

    1. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
    2. Still Life / Dong (Jia Zhang-ke, 2006)
    3. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
    4. Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina, 2006)
    5. Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)
    6. Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006)
    7. Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck, 2006)
    8. A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006)
    9. In Between Days (So Yong Kim, 2006)
    10. Schuss! (Nicolas Rey, 2005)
    11. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, 2006)
    12. Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006)
    13. Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006)
    14. Flandres (Bruno Dumont, 2006)
    15. The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006)

    Five Best New Short Films I Saw in 2006 (by title)

    • A Bridge Over the Drina (Xavier Lukomski, 2005)
    • Hysteria (Christina Battle, 2006)
    • Nachtstuck (Peter Tscherkassky, 2006)
    • Silk Ties (Jim Jennings, 2006)
    • Song and Solitude (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2006)

    Ten Favorite Film Discoveries of 2006 (by title)

    • Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)
    • Counsellor at Law (William Wyler, 1933) *
    • Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
    • The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman, 1998)
    • New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)
    • No Fear, No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)
    • Satantango (Bela Tarr, 1994)
    • Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) *
    • The World (Jia Zhang-ke, 2004)
    • And a bunch of great films from 2005 that I didn’t see until this year (by preference) — Good Night, and Good Luck; Mysterious Skin; Kings and Queen; Last Days; Tropical Malady; The Beat That My Heart Skips; Junebug; Clean; Grizzly Man

    * For the record, this list could very easily have consisted solely of Wyler and Godard films. The time I spent with them (37 films and counting) will be my main film memory of 2006.

  • Best Films of 2005

    Best Films of 2005

    Of the ten best new films I saw this year, eight were festival screenings, and, of those, only two (Cache and Tristram Shandy) have a reasonable chance of making it to a theater here in Knoxville. I mention that in passing as a reminder of how these year-end best lists are shaped by distribution and by the brand of popular American film criticism that still ghettoizes the vast majority of world cinema into a single, convenient category, “Foreign Language Film.” Like last year, I’ve again ignored distribution dates and chosen, instead, to simply pick my favorite “new” films from the list of those I saw between January 1 and today.

    For me, the two highlights of the otherwise lackluster San Francisco International Film Festival were Ana Poliak’s Pin Boy and the one-night-only screening of Frank Borzage’s Street Angel, which was accompanied by a live performance from American Music Club of their newly commissioned score. That Pin Boy hasn’t fared particularly well on the festival circuit or received wider critical attention is a complete mystery to me. I picked up a ticket after reading David Walsh’s review, and other than the write-up by Doug Cummings (who was sitting with me in SF), Walsh’s remains one of the few English language reviews. It’s really a brilliant piece of naturalistic filmmaking.

    The two films on my list that played here in East Tennessee are Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know and Bergman’s Saraband. If forced to single out my favorite film of 2005, I would probably choose Saraband, which is as good as any of Bergman’s many films — and better than most. My high opinion of it, I’ll admit, was likely influenced by the specter of the event itself: I never imagined I’d have an opportunity to see “the new Bergman” down at the local multiplex. For one afternoon, I felt just a bit like Pauline Kael or Stanley Kauffmann or, hell, like Alvy Singer.

    The other seven films on my list were all screened in Toronto. The only surprise in that fact is that none of those films are The Sun or L’Enfant. (They would likely come in at #12 and #13, respectively, with Bohdan Slama’s Something Like Happiness taking the eleven slot.) In deciding which films make the cut, I often find myself asking, “Which of these would I be most excited to rewatch right now?” And by that standard, Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven, Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy, and Nobuhiro Suwa’s Un Couple parfait all stand out. Winterbottom and co. deserve special mention for making a film that is so smart and so ridiculously funny. I was beginning to worry that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant were the last men left who could pull that off.

    Cache has become the odds-on choice these days for most of those “Best Foreign Language Film” votes. If such a category must exist, then Cache is a fine choice. What most haunts me about the film is the precision of Haneke’s direction. Nothing else I saw this year was so surely controlled. How else to explain why, three months later, I’m still troubled by the image of a man lying down to take a nap? The only other piece of direction that can compare is Cristi Puiu’s work in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I’m tempted to call the “most important” film of the year, though I’m not sure exactly why. Not surprisingly, my top ten is rounded out by Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, two filmmakers whom I admire and adore to the point that I can no longer consider myself an objective critic of their work.

    Also deserving of special mention are: the films of Claire Denis, which have become an almost unhealthy obsession for me this year; Michael Apted’s Seven Up series, which Joanna and I watched night after night in August; the eighty-seven, always brilliant episodes of The West Wing that kept me entertained on the treadmill; and Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, which is an aerobic workout of a completely different kind.

    The Ten Best New Films I Saw in 2005 (by title)

    Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005)
    Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)
    Un Couple parfait (Nobuhiro Suwa, 2005)
    The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)
    Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005)
    Pin Boy (Ana Poliak, 2004)
    Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2003)
    Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005)
    Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, 2005)
    The Wayward Cloud(Tsai Ming-liang, 2005)

    The Ten Best Older Films I Saw for the First Time in 2005 (by title)

    Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)
    The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
    Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)
    I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994)
    It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (Richard Linklater, 1988)
    A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)
    Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)
    Seven Up Series (Michael Apted, 1964- )
    Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)
    Wavelength(Michael Snow, 1967)

    Some Honorable Mentions

    Short: Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky, 2005)
    Live Music: Street Angel (Frank Borzage, 1928) with a new score by American Music Club
    TV/DVD: The West Wing Seasons 1-4 (Aaron Sorkin, 1999-2003)

  • Best Films of 2004

    Best Films of 2004

     

    At the end of 2004, these are the films that I most look forward to seeing again. Several films that impressed me at the time — Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé, Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are, Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, and Kim Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron — have since faded from memory, while a few that did make the list have done so despite my reservations about their style (Tarnation and ScaredSacred) and despite my frustrated incomprehension (L’Intrus). I’m paralyzed by the process of ranking films, but Café Lumière was an easy choice for favorite of the year. A transcendent film about transcendence, Hou’s homage to Ozu is a beautifully human piece, full of silence and grace and, most of all, curiosity.

    Favorite Film of 2004:

    • Café Lumière by Hou Hsiao-hsien

    Nine More (in alphabetical order):

    • Before Sunset by Richard Linklater
    • Cinévardaphoto by AgnèsVarda
    • Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi
    • The Holy Girl by Lucrecia Martel
    • L’Intrus by Claire Denis
    • 9 Songs by Michael Winterbottom
    • ScaredSacred by Velcrow Ripper
    • Tarnation by Jonathan Caouette
    • Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow by Theo Angelopoulos

    Ten Favorite Older Films I Saw for the First Time in 2004

    • Dog Star Man by Stan Brakhage
    • Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais
    • In the Bathtub of the World by Caveh Zahedi
    • The Landlord by Hal Ashby
    • The Last Bolshevik by Chris Marker
    • The Son by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes
    • Spirit of the Beehive by Victor Erice
    • Ten by Abbas Kiarostami
    • Woman in the Dunes by Hiroshi Teshigahara
  • Best Films of 2003

    Best Films of 2003

    Living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with its two or three screens devoted to interesting fare, leaves me grossly ill-equipped to make sweeping generalizations about the year in film. The following, instead, is an odd mix of movies (or, more often, groups of movies) that I will probably forever associate with 2003. With only one or two exceptions, I saw each of these for the first time this year.

    1. Tarkovsky Retrospective — Seeing Mirror (1975), my all-time favorite film, with a large and enthusiastic audience at the National Gallery in May was, without question, the highlight of my film-watching year. I can’t imagine that anything in 2004 will top it.

    2. Angels in America (Nichols, 2003) — Last year I predicted that Angels would be the best film I would see in 2003, and it came awfully close. By paring Tony Kushner’s plays down to a more purely human drama, Nichols accomplished what several other talented directors, including Altman, thought impossible: he actually filmed the damn things, and, small quibbles aside, he made a fine film in the process.

    3. Hal Ashby — I have watched and rewatched and rewatched Hal Ashby’s films this year. He is, to me, the personification of the Hollywood Film Renaissance of the 1970s — its vitality and decadence, its fearlessness and political rage, and, most of all, its profoundly intimate voice. I so wish that Ashby had lived to see the rebirth of American independent cinema in the early-90s. Imagine what he might have done had he been given an opportunity to make a comeback like Altman’s.

    4. John Cassavetes — Before 2003 I had never seen a Cassavetes film. In a way, I think that 30 was just about the right age for the experience. His films are painful to watch — they break your heart while making you self-conscious about the very act of spectatorship. Maybe by the time I’m 40 I’ll finally be able to write about Cassavetes.

    5. Russian Ark (Sokurov, 2001) — My favorite film image of 2003 was that expression on Sergei Dreiden’s face at the end of the ballroom sequence. So much nostalghia and regret and tragedy in a single look.

    6. Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003) and The Station Agent (McCarthy, 2003) — Two American films that show a genuine fondness for their characters. And sometimes that’s enough.

    7. After Life (Kore-eda, 1998) — About 70 minutes into After Life, we see an old woman sitting on a bench in the middle of a large sound stage. She’s smiling, as crew members drop autumn leaves around her. It got me. I cried. The whole film got me, actually.

    8. Close-Up (Kiarostami, 1990) and Calendar (Egoyan, 1993) — Two brilliant films that investigate the power of images to shape memory and understanding. What I love about them, though, is that they’re self-reflexive and intelligent without being caked in irony and cynicism.

    9. Documentaries — Along with some fine new releases, including Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, 2003) and Spellbound (Blitz, 2003), I was stunned by my first encounters with Mark Rappaport. From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996) is the only film that I watched three nights in a row.

    10. Six Feet Under and The Office — Yeah, I know they’re TV shows, but they’re also better than 99% of the films that came to Knoxville. The first seasons of both series were released in fine DVD collections this year, and I’m grateful for it.

  • Best Films of 2002

    Best Films of 2002

    For me, 2002 will be most remembered for the Actors Theatre’s production of Angels in America, which I saw while visiting Phoenix in October and which only qualifies for a mention here because if Mike Nichols’s rumored seven hour adaptation of the plays captures even half of the magic and the joy of Tony Kushner’s language then it will surely be the best film I see in 2003. I spent the rest of the year, though, here in Knoxville, TN with its two screens devoted to interesting fare, leaving me grossly ill-equipped to make sweeping generalizations about the year in movies. (Ask me again in ten months.) Instead, here are some impressions of the 2002 film experiences that still linger.

    The only film that I watched three days in a row, more enraptured by it each time, was Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? The magic of the film for me is found in Lu Yi-ching’s performance. In this remarkable woman, a widow experiencing the mysteries of mourning and loss, Tsai has offered a counterargument to all who would summarily dismiss his films as simply Antonioni-like laments of alienation. What Time was also the most beautiful film I saw all year, featuring brilliant camera work from Benoît Delhomme.

    My favorite sequence from any film was buried in the middle of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan stands before his dream woman, Emily Watson, while the rest of his world collapses around him. A screaming telephone harasses him, a forklift crashes, and the voices of his coworkers conspire in a cacophony of fits and shrieks. I actually laughed out loud during the scene, partly as a temporary reprieve from the tension, partly out of sheer admiration for Anderson’s gifts. Punch-Drunk Love earns my “outstanding sound design” award for 2002. Hitchcock would have loved it.

    The most consistently entertaining film I saw was Roger Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, which manages to be both provocative and surprisingly even-handed. Setting out to discover why we Americans are so good at shooting each other, Moore finally offers few concrete answers but succeeds in undercutting the most commonly held misconceptions, by conservatives and liberals alike. Moore still struggles occasionally to balance his earnest concern with parody, but the film makes a quality statement. Bowling is worth seeing for its interview with Charlton Heston alone—the most cringe-inducing moment in a film littered with cringe-inducing moments.

    The film experience that I most cherish from this year was getting to sit beside my parents for a screening of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, which was sponsored by the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts and accompanied by the Annapolis Chorale’s performance of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light. My parents had never seen Passion, or anything like it. Their silence as we walked through the hushed crowd toward our car is testament, I think, to the sublime majesty of Dreyer’s film.

    And finally, a short list of films that I saw for the first time in 2002 and that made me a better man for it: Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson), La Promesse (Dardenne), Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman), Good Men, Good Women (Hou), Waking Life (Linklater), The Children of Paradise (Carne), and Dancer in the Dark (Von Trier).