The year 2018 on
the Gregorian calendar may have ended three whole months ago, but I will let
neither this fact nor a plethora of extenuating circumstances (plus possible
procrastination) prevent me from putting together a Top 10 list! This annual
feature and mainstay of critics everywhere is also a tradition I hold dear – it
both helps put a movie year into perspective and embodies one’s (hopefully?)
idiosyncratic tastes and sensibilities. And for the future, it reminds us of
what we were watching and taking pleasure in. Ideally, that pleasure extends
far beyond the 365 days that delimit the scope of the list.
So treat this as
a testament to that transcendent pleasure, to the ways in which the following
films continue to affect me and make me think, their images and sounds and
gestalt effects reemerging to remind me that they are now embedded in my
existential being for the better.
One note on something different this year: because it has taken so damn long for me to publish this list, and because my time has been so diffused across various personal and vocational obligations, the blurbs here will mostly, regrettably, be ones I have previously posted to the blog, with some adjustments for space. To riff on one of the titles included below, turning a beseeching question into a desperate command: please forgive me!
Sorry, I STILL have not seen: Blindspotting, Private Life, Bisbee '17, Capernaum, Wildlife, At Eternity's Gate, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Wild Boys (if 2018).
Special mention to: Abbas Kiarostami's hypnotic neo-structuralist swan song 24 Frames, certainly one of the best films of any year but I'm counting it as a 2017 work.
On to the Top 10, after the break!
Ali Abbasi’s folkloric-realist Border shrewdly subverts the cultural codes inscribed in narratives of difference, conceptualizing its characters' unique identities outside prevailing dualisms of normative and other. The film's impressively entwined inflections of social realism, horror, and queerness constantly unsettle it from generic distinctions, allowing it to engage, most excitingly and even radically, with the politics of anti-humanism. Without giving too much away, watching Tina on her path of discovery becomes a gentle entreaty for us to think about genders and bodies that defy binary, essentialist, and anthropocentric categories. Human or not, Eva Melander’s extraordinary performance, perhaps my favorite screen acting of the year, anchors the film to a sense of lived experience. Behind the impressive prosthetics, the actress powerfully conveys the arc of a woman shambling from the shadows of diffidence and internalized hatred to self-actualization. Border is filled with a surfeit of imagery earthly and ethereal, but Melander’s accented face supplies it with its most arresting moments: the plays of anxiety, anger, and shame that capture a life kept on the sidelines of one society, and the blossoming confidence of one emerging tentatively into the center of another.
In Roma, Alfonso Cuarón frequently packs his wide, long panning shots with abundant activity, every movement from the center of the image to its ever-expanding margins suggesting the breadth of a world his film can inevitably represent only a fragment of. This knowingly circumscribed perspective becomes the organizing principle of the film, subtly and rigorously modulating point-of-view so that we feel as if we’re simultaneously seeing a big picture (Mexico City social and political life in the 1970s) and an interior, inherently limited one (the life of a live-in domestic worker), privy to the former only to the degree that the latter can observe it. From the first image, Cuarón’s visuals are crafted to evoke this bifocal perspective: acutely rooted in the subjectivity of Cleo, the housekeeper, while made constantly aware of the societal fabric around her, Cuarón’s panoramic shots by turns center Cleo and push her into non-hierarchical tableaux, favoring a Bazinian democracy of vision that refuses to privilege individual subjects through close-ups. Bringing us into the folds of his characters' daily lives while also keeping us at a certain remove, Cuarón creates a portrait of a place that illuminates its material and spiritual boundaries, making us wonder about the multitude of experiences we’ll never know, or only get to know through the cinema.
A searingly intimate witnessing of one man’s anguished prayer and crucible; a jeremiad wrestling with a sermon; a rumination in perpetual twilight solitude; First Reformed creates an experience of ascetic contemplation in which questions of faith, responsibility, and morality are put on ruthless trial. Shot in the constricted Academy ratio in mostly muted wintry tones and with an emphasis on minimalist, geometric space, Schrader’s film is marked by a severe perceptual austerity that effectively underscores the stark anxieties and obsessive thought patterns such questions foster. For Ethan Hawke’s tortured Rev. Toller, the questioning itself, the spiritual inquiry and guidance that form his very bedrock, becomes an act of increasingly destructive self-flagellation exacerbated by the series of undeniable existential threats he is forced to confront. What is the role of religion in a contemporary world corrupted by commerce and ideological extremism? How can one respect God and his creations and accept man’s systematic despoliation of the planet? How does one maintain hope in the face of such pervasive darkness? Through multiple, soul-searching discourses, Schrader sets up a tonally complex dialectic that bristles with intermingled outrage, skepticism, ambivalence, and intellectual frisson. His film is a nuanced, agonized tract that still manages to arrive at something resembling catharsis.
Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel is something of an accidental countercultural hero. Everything that excludes her from acceptance by the literary establishment – her abrasiveness, her femaleness, her iconoclasm – become in McCarthy’s portrayal the markers of a personality defiantly inassimilable to its market-driven standards. She exposes the meretriciousness of a system that values brand above content; she punctures the hypocrisies of publishers and agents who purport to honor authentic voices but only do so on their rigid institutional terms, shunning ones like hers that don’t conform to commercial expectations. But just as Israel’s foray into forging authors’ letters starts as an economic necessity, this undermining of literary pretenses is not a purposeful salvo but a byproduct of how she navigates a tenuous professional position, which the film understands as profoundly bound up in her personal struggles. Without defending the immorality and deceitfulness that were the results of this, Can You Ever Forgive Me? displays a poignant admiration for Israel and her complicated outsider status. As the tale of an unlikely, unlawful route to self-actualization, it is a perversely inspiring coming-out story, an example of how an individual’s renegade ingenuity, however disreputable, permitted her to become the person the system never allowed her to be.
Their faces filling the screen in sharp frontal portrait, the characters of If Beale Street Could Talk commune with us across barriers of time, geography, race, and class. Their looks are ones of ardor, frustration, rage, defeat, ecstasy. Their eyes pierce the screen, their skin becoming its tactile surface, their histories and emotions writ large through and in expressions that resonate as metonyms of complex social relations. The lingering close-ups create a palpable sense of co-presence, a feeling of physical and spiritual communion with the characters reinforced by the film’s richly expressionistic use of color, sound, and music, which symphonically draw us closer to the film’s 1970s Harlem as it is lived and dreamed by a young African-American couple. Instead of emphasizing their oppression through gritty docu-realism or desaturated color, Jenkins fashions a vibrant aesthetic of sumptuous jewel tones and swelling orchestral arrangements, providing Tish and Fonny a rare domain of romantic rapture made all the more poignant by how cruelly society disrupts it. If Beale Street Could Talk shows, plainly and powerfully, how racist systems have and continue to make living as a black person in America a daily struggle, with dignities, freedoms, and livelihoods under constant attack. But in its evocation of black love, family, joy, art, and solidarity, it also furnishes a cathartic counter-narrative to so many stories of insurmountable pain. In the faces of Tish and Fonny, there is defeat, and there is a strength that refuses to be extinguished. James Baldwin, and now Barry Jenkins, have decided which is more worth nurturing.
Continuing to prove his aptitude for unnerving and intellectually stimulating science-fiction filmmaking, Alex Garland crafts Annihilation as a taut, dread-infused plunge into the mysteries of the natural world that is undergirded by a swamp of psychoanalytic symbolism. Like the “shimmer,” the enigmatic alien organism that exposes the fundamental porousness of living things through its disordering of taxonomical systems, the film luridly evokes the primal anxieties of the unconscious – specifically, fears surrounding the self. This places Annihilation firmly in the realm of body-horror, and Garland, deftly exploiting the visceral and psychological dimensions of the territory, realizes a vivid archaic mother allegory that mines both terror and wonder from the biological condition of existence. His rendering of the area under the shimmer is spectacular in its hyper-articulated terror, necessarily exciting and abject at once: its warped matrix of unstable subject positions and material mutability suspends the bounds of differentiation, beckoning its inhabitants to the abyss. Or is to rebirth? Garland sharply emphasizes details that unsettle such a duality. The hand of a dead woman is graphically matched with the root of a fecund tree; an ursine creature howls with the voice of a human; the womblike chamber that acts as the source of the shimmer both obliterates subjects and reproduces them. In thrilling accord with the schools of thought it engages, Annihilation is propelled by the abstract and the unrepresentable, its language offering a tantalizing glimpse of realms that will forever tease our apprehension.
Gratifyingly resisting any impulse to simply relay historical information or lionize a famous public figure, First Man commits itself to invoking a cosmos of sensations – frightening, exhilarating, overwhelming – with Neil Armstrong as an embodied conduit. Chazelle channels his subjective, sensory experience(s) through a magisterial command of the medium’s formal properties, placing us inside clamorous cockpits, bombinating test vehicles, and even astronaut helmets, manipulating visual and acoustic space to thrillingly immersive perceptual effect. The film’s visceral emphasis on embodied experience is as much a self-justified experimental approach to this subject as it is a thematization of the story’s preoccupation with life, death, and the phenomenal. Subverting nationalist-historical narratives as well as aesthetic expectations, Chazelle foregrounds the unwieldy and precarious materiality of spacecraft to convey the danger, even folly, of interstellar flight. Propagandistic discourse is stripped away in favor of a representation of the space program as suicide mission, as a possibly preposterous boondoggle whose human risks outstrip its potential for scientific gain. Contextualized alongside the Vietnam War, First Man measures the defensibility of putting lives in jeopardy for questionable ends, and Chazelle takes every opportunity to conjure the magnitude and physical weight of this peril through rattling equipment, groaning metal, and the tension of bodies strapped inside the apparatuses constituted by them.
One note on something different this year: because it has taken so damn long for me to publish this list, and because my time has been so diffused across various personal and vocational obligations, the blurbs here will mostly, regrettably, be ones I have previously posted to the blog, with some adjustments for space. To riff on one of the titles included below, turning a beseeching question into a desperate command: please forgive me!
Sorry, I STILL have not seen: Blindspotting, Private Life, Bisbee '17, Capernaum, Wildlife, At Eternity's Gate, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Wild Boys (if 2018).
Special mention to: Abbas Kiarostami's hypnotic neo-structuralist swan song 24 Frames, certainly one of the best films of any year but I'm counting it as a 2017 work.
On to the Top 10, after the break!
10. Ghostbox Cowboy / John Maringouin
This one's still awaiting distribution, but it was at Tribeca last year and deserves highlighting. With a barbed,
cockeyed wit and profound sense for the uncanny, Ghostbox Cowboy chronicles the travails of a wannabe American
entrepreneur in China’s booming tech market as an ignominious descent into the
maw of global capitalism. The film offers one of 21st-century cinema’s
most potent representations yet of the absurd, grotesque spectacle of commodity
culture and the predatory machinations of out-of-control capitalism under
globalization, its mockumentary form a thin veil over the veracity of the world
it documents. As our hubristic protagonist
weathers increasingly debasing (and hilarious) humiliations in a hyperreal China impervious to his hucksterism, his cowboy persona
deflating from an icon of mythic imperialism to a tawdry commercial relic, the
film takes trenchant account of the US’s displacement from the putative center
of cultural and economic domination. Wryly, uneasily, it suggests how the
American Dream has been reduced to an exportable and antiquated commodity, now
fully consumed by the market it helped spawn.
9. Border / Ali Abbasi
Ali Abbasi’s folkloric-realist Border shrewdly subverts the cultural codes inscribed in narratives of difference, conceptualizing its characters' unique identities outside prevailing dualisms of normative and other. The film's impressively entwined inflections of social realism, horror, and queerness constantly unsettle it from generic distinctions, allowing it to engage, most excitingly and even radically, with the politics of anti-humanism. Without giving too much away, watching Tina on her path of discovery becomes a gentle entreaty for us to think about genders and bodies that defy binary, essentialist, and anthropocentric categories. Human or not, Eva Melander’s extraordinary performance, perhaps my favorite screen acting of the year, anchors the film to a sense of lived experience. Behind the impressive prosthetics, the actress powerfully conveys the arc of a woman shambling from the shadows of diffidence and internalized hatred to self-actualization. Border is filled with a surfeit of imagery earthly and ethereal, but Melander’s accented face supplies it with its most arresting moments: the plays of anxiety, anger, and shame that capture a life kept on the sidelines of one society, and the blossoming confidence of one emerging tentatively into the center of another.
8. Roma / Alfonso Cuarón
In Roma, Alfonso Cuarón frequently packs his wide, long panning shots with abundant activity, every movement from the center of the image to its ever-expanding margins suggesting the breadth of a world his film can inevitably represent only a fragment of. This knowingly circumscribed perspective becomes the organizing principle of the film, subtly and rigorously modulating point-of-view so that we feel as if we’re simultaneously seeing a big picture (Mexico City social and political life in the 1970s) and an interior, inherently limited one (the life of a live-in domestic worker), privy to the former only to the degree that the latter can observe it. From the first image, Cuarón’s visuals are crafted to evoke this bifocal perspective: acutely rooted in the subjectivity of Cleo, the housekeeper, while made constantly aware of the societal fabric around her, Cuarón’s panoramic shots by turns center Cleo and push her into non-hierarchical tableaux, favoring a Bazinian democracy of vision that refuses to privilege individual subjects through close-ups. Bringing us into the folds of his characters' daily lives while also keeping us at a certain remove, Cuarón creates a portrait of a place that illuminates its material and spiritual boundaries, making us wonder about the multitude of experiences we’ll never know, or only get to know through the cinema.
7. Minding the Gap / Bing Liu
The feeling is ecstasy, at least in the beginning. After scaling a building with a reckless abandon that can only belong to youth convinced of their invincibility, a triad of young men soar through empty streets on their skateboards. The camera floats behind and alongside them, the ceaseless forward movement imparting on the spectator a sense of weightlessness, liberation, boundlessness. But slowly, the pain creeps in, and we learn that for these boys, this physical and mental release has for their whole lives served as a reprieve from the domestic abuse, neglect, and financial privation that brought them together in the first place. Minding the Gap is an essay on economic disenfranchisement in contemporary America, particularly in the Rust Belt, here embodied by Rockford, Illinois; but it is also a personal diary and therapeutic self-interrogation of director Bing Liu and his childhood friends. The 12 years of footage that make up the film reveal, in what is essentially real-time for its inchoate subjects, the burgeoning awareness of young men coming to delayed terms with the depredations that have shaped their lives. With great delicacy and empathy, Bing shows us how abuse operates as a systemic intergenerational cycle, and how individuals caught up in this cycle find outlets to process it - through skateboarding, friendship, film - as they fight to stem its tide.
6. Won't You Be My Neighbor? / Morgan Neville
For many, Fred Rogers was a paragon of basic human decency, wisdom, and unconditional kindness, the rare famous media figure who was as much a screen personality as a civil servant. It's been reiterated enough that his rectitude and egalitarianism resonate even more loudly today in a media climate prone to vitriol, ignorance, and division. While Won't You Be My Neighbor? is certainly a salve, this is not why it's one of the best films of the year. It's on this list because it demonstrates, lucidly and lyrically, why one of television's most popular programs was also one of its most socially important, radical, and personal. Through dexterously edited montage of archival clips and interviews, Neville opens up Fred Rogers beyond hagiography, revealing his deep-seated vulnerability carried since a lonely, often infirm childhood. The film illuminates how his show, with its iconic sets of a microcosmic neighborhood, became a platform for Rogers to privately work through his own insecurities and fears while simultaneously staging those that weighed on society during tumultuous times. Rogers brought to young people's consciousnesses racism, war, and death; his show's form, no less progressive, dwelled in slowness when most children's programming favored manic activity. Won't You Be My Neighbor? may argue that Rogers was an anomaly in a culture of commercial crassness, but it also quietly posits that the values he represented are what allow society to function at all.
5. First Reformed / Paul Schrader
A searingly intimate witnessing of one man’s anguished prayer and crucible; a jeremiad wrestling with a sermon; a rumination in perpetual twilight solitude; First Reformed creates an experience of ascetic contemplation in which questions of faith, responsibility, and morality are put on ruthless trial. Shot in the constricted Academy ratio in mostly muted wintry tones and with an emphasis on minimalist, geometric space, Schrader’s film is marked by a severe perceptual austerity that effectively underscores the stark anxieties and obsessive thought patterns such questions foster. For Ethan Hawke’s tortured Rev. Toller, the questioning itself, the spiritual inquiry and guidance that form his very bedrock, becomes an act of increasingly destructive self-flagellation exacerbated by the series of undeniable existential threats he is forced to confront. What is the role of religion in a contemporary world corrupted by commerce and ideological extremism? How can one respect God and his creations and accept man’s systematic despoliation of the planet? How does one maintain hope in the face of such pervasive darkness? Through multiple, soul-searching discourses, Schrader sets up a tonally complex dialectic that bristles with intermingled outrage, skepticism, ambivalence, and intellectual frisson. His film is a nuanced, agonized tract that still manages to arrive at something resembling catharsis.
4. Can You Ever Forgive Me? / Marielle Heller
Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel is something of an accidental countercultural hero. Everything that excludes her from acceptance by the literary establishment – her abrasiveness, her femaleness, her iconoclasm – become in McCarthy’s portrayal the markers of a personality defiantly inassimilable to its market-driven standards. She exposes the meretriciousness of a system that values brand above content; she punctures the hypocrisies of publishers and agents who purport to honor authentic voices but only do so on their rigid institutional terms, shunning ones like hers that don’t conform to commercial expectations. But just as Israel’s foray into forging authors’ letters starts as an economic necessity, this undermining of literary pretenses is not a purposeful salvo but a byproduct of how she navigates a tenuous professional position, which the film understands as profoundly bound up in her personal struggles. Without defending the immorality and deceitfulness that were the results of this, Can You Ever Forgive Me? displays a poignant admiration for Israel and her complicated outsider status. As the tale of an unlikely, unlawful route to self-actualization, it is a perversely inspiring coming-out story, an example of how an individual’s renegade ingenuity, however disreputable, permitted her to become the person the system never allowed her to be.
3. If Beale Street Could Talk / Barry Jenkins
Their faces filling the screen in sharp frontal portrait, the characters of If Beale Street Could Talk commune with us across barriers of time, geography, race, and class. Their looks are ones of ardor, frustration, rage, defeat, ecstasy. Their eyes pierce the screen, their skin becoming its tactile surface, their histories and emotions writ large through and in expressions that resonate as metonyms of complex social relations. The lingering close-ups create a palpable sense of co-presence, a feeling of physical and spiritual communion with the characters reinforced by the film’s richly expressionistic use of color, sound, and music, which symphonically draw us closer to the film’s 1970s Harlem as it is lived and dreamed by a young African-American couple. Instead of emphasizing their oppression through gritty docu-realism or desaturated color, Jenkins fashions a vibrant aesthetic of sumptuous jewel tones and swelling orchestral arrangements, providing Tish and Fonny a rare domain of romantic rapture made all the more poignant by how cruelly society disrupts it. If Beale Street Could Talk shows, plainly and powerfully, how racist systems have and continue to make living as a black person in America a daily struggle, with dignities, freedoms, and livelihoods under constant attack. But in its evocation of black love, family, joy, art, and solidarity, it also furnishes a cathartic counter-narrative to so many stories of insurmountable pain. In the faces of Tish and Fonny, there is defeat, and there is a strength that refuses to be extinguished. James Baldwin, and now Barry Jenkins, have decided which is more worth nurturing.
2. Annihilation / Alex Garland
Continuing to prove his aptitude for unnerving and intellectually stimulating science-fiction filmmaking, Alex Garland crafts Annihilation as a taut, dread-infused plunge into the mysteries of the natural world that is undergirded by a swamp of psychoanalytic symbolism. Like the “shimmer,” the enigmatic alien organism that exposes the fundamental porousness of living things through its disordering of taxonomical systems, the film luridly evokes the primal anxieties of the unconscious – specifically, fears surrounding the self. This places Annihilation firmly in the realm of body-horror, and Garland, deftly exploiting the visceral and psychological dimensions of the territory, realizes a vivid archaic mother allegory that mines both terror and wonder from the biological condition of existence. His rendering of the area under the shimmer is spectacular in its hyper-articulated terror, necessarily exciting and abject at once: its warped matrix of unstable subject positions and material mutability suspends the bounds of differentiation, beckoning its inhabitants to the abyss. Or is to rebirth? Garland sharply emphasizes details that unsettle such a duality. The hand of a dead woman is graphically matched with the root of a fecund tree; an ursine creature howls with the voice of a human; the womblike chamber that acts as the source of the shimmer both obliterates subjects and reproduces them. In thrilling accord with the schools of thought it engages, Annihilation is propelled by the abstract and the unrepresentable, its language offering a tantalizing glimpse of realms that will forever tease our apprehension.
1. First Man / Damien Chazelle
Gratifyingly resisting any impulse to simply relay historical information or lionize a famous public figure, First Man commits itself to invoking a cosmos of sensations – frightening, exhilarating, overwhelming – with Neil Armstrong as an embodied conduit. Chazelle channels his subjective, sensory experience(s) through a magisterial command of the medium’s formal properties, placing us inside clamorous cockpits, bombinating test vehicles, and even astronaut helmets, manipulating visual and acoustic space to thrillingly immersive perceptual effect. The film’s visceral emphasis on embodied experience is as much a self-justified experimental approach to this subject as it is a thematization of the story’s preoccupation with life, death, and the phenomenal. Subverting nationalist-historical narratives as well as aesthetic expectations, Chazelle foregrounds the unwieldy and precarious materiality of spacecraft to convey the danger, even folly, of interstellar flight. Propagandistic discourse is stripped away in favor of a representation of the space program as suicide mission, as a possibly preposterous boondoggle whose human risks outstrip its potential for scientific gain. Contextualized alongside the Vietnam War, First Man measures the defensibility of putting lives in jeopardy for questionable ends, and Chazelle takes every opportunity to conjure the magnitude and physical weight of this peril through rattling equipment, groaning metal, and the tension of bodies strapped inside the apparatuses constituted by them.
Rocked by the tragedies
that surround him, a series of shocks catalyzed by the loss of his daughter,
and unable to easily communicate emotion, Gosling’s Armstrong is an unlikely
biopic hero. For most of the film he is taciturn, sullen, even inscrutable;
Singer’s script wisely homes in on his internal struggles, framing his missions
through the unspeakably private rather than the mass-mediated, and the actor
responds with a portrayal of anxious, guarded, but resolute obsession. Chazelle
and Singer suggest that his quest to walk on the moon was as much motivated by
any professional pride in country as it was by the desire to literally defy
limits, to tempt and transcend death, to accomplish the impossible. To the
degree any film reasonably could, First
Man approximates the transgressive, masochistic thrill of this desire made
historically manifest, allowing us to feel the dread and the excitement of
flying so close to the void.
And the spectacular, so-close-it-hurts runners-up:
EIGHTH GRADE, by Bo Burnham, a unique, perceptive, and wonderfully uncomfortable coming-of-age story that profoundly understands incipient identity, desire, and the pervasive anxieties not only of the titular grade, but of living life. Elsie Fisher is, as you know, brilliant.
SHOPLIFTERS, by Hirokazu Kore-eda, a truly heartbreaking realist melodrama about family bonds that exceed blood relations, and the impossible circumstances of those whose social welfare has been neglected by the systems that should be designed to ensure it. A wonderful cast, with Sakura Ando particularly warm and wrenching.
WE THE ANIMALS, by Jeremiah Zagar, a poetic child's-eye portrait of a boy coming to realize his nascent queerness in his fraught, masculine household. Evan Rosado's curious, yearning eyes might melt you.
No comments:
Post a Comment