IT FELT LIKE LOVE (A-minus) - When we first see Lila, at the beach, she's
wearing an excessive amount of sunscreen (or greasepaint) on her face that has dried into
a pale white Kabuki mask. We will study that face for an hour and a
half, as the teen tries mightily to be perceived as an experienced woman
rather than as a kid. Near the end, she'll literally be wearing a mask
during a dance routine (to a racy rap song), and we won't be any
closer to seeing the real Lila inside. But we'll know her.
Filmmaker Eliza
Hittman, in her feature debut, creates a dreamlike
world full of wonder and peril, and everything in between, as we look
over Lila's shoulder or stare past her pixie eyelashes into those
yearning eyes of hers. Lila (doll-like newcomer Gina Piersanti) spends
her days hanging with her sweet-sixteen pal Chiarra, who has a boyfriend
and seems to be far more experienced sexually. Chiarra, lean and more
overtly flirtatious than Lila, boasts of having slept with three
other boys, but her reluctance to go below the belt with Patrick
strongly suggests that she's lying about already having lost her virginity. Lila
is the third wheel in the summer adventures, which includes breaking
into a home near the beach, mainly just for grins, or just hanging out in the surf (it looks like Coney Island).
Lila
steals some of Chiarra's one-liners to do some boasting of her own to
her neighbor pal, a younger boy. ("He went down on me," she claims about
a supposed beach hookup, sounding more confounded than confident. "But
he needs practice.") Hittman isn't shy about exploring teenage
intimacy, and her camerawork is mesmerizing. It's as if the camera
becomes one of the intimates, entwining itself in the clumsy passion.
The makeout sessions between Chiarra and Patrick are surprisingly
innocent, with a lot of tender kissing and simple stroking of bodies. I
don't think I've seen a more boldly intimate (yet nearly chaste) film; it sweeps you up into
its swirl of adolescence.
Lila, aching for that human contact, spots an older boy at the
beach, Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein, perfectly cast as another Channing Tatum
clone), and pursues him. She has barely a clue about how to seduce someone
and even less game. She visits him at the gaming center where he works,
tries flirting by text and crashes one of his parties with Chiarra. While Lila lacks
the wiles of a woman, she's smart and calculating, and she tries to make
Sammy think that he passed out after the party and slept with her. As
she diligently tries to implant herself in Sammy's world of pot, fellow goons and
disposable girls, Lila flirts with danger.
Hittman
uses Lila's dog in sometimes obvious ways to parallel the girl's story. The
dog is somewhat abused by Lila's uncaring father -- when he forgets to
buy dog food, he just lets the pup eat from the garbage -- and I've
never seen such an expressive face on an animal (as when Lila is
dragging it outside by the collar). Lila clings to the dog like a child
does, luring it into bed with her, and we fear that one of them will be
harmed in some way. When it comes time for Lila's showdown with Sammy
and two of his pals, one of them literally commands her, as if to a dog, to "sit,"
pushing the boundaries of how far she will let them degrade her. How far will Lila's insecurities take her?
The
film builds to a truly terrifying climax. You want to leap into the
screen and rescue her from the brutes; hug it out with her and reassure
her that this is not the way to grow up. Hittman finds layers in these
interactions. She discovers an interesting balance between making the
young men
ugly thugs but sort of understanding how these simpletons would be tempted to toy
with such a willing "seductress."
This is a brilliant debut, rivaling the litany of French filmmakers who have made this subject their hallmark.
NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (A-minus) - Eliza Hittman gets back on her game with this powerful rumination on the travails of a teenage girl seeking out an abortion. The less said, the better, here.
Hittman, who exploded with 2013's "It Felt Like Love" and stumbled with "Beach Rats," returns to the female perspective of the former and bonds intimately with her new protagonist, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), stalking her documentary-style through the trek from suburban Philadelphia to the mean streets of New York City. What Autumn thought would be a simple procedure turns into a bureaucratic odyssey.
Autumn's journey also is an opportunity to escape from the horrid boys at school and her creepy (step?)dad. Tagging along for support is her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder), whose more conventional pretty face is an asset in faking their way through the Big Apple and taking an advantage of a gropey boy when necessary. Pitfalls abound, and the girls don't always make the best choices.
Hittman slowly peels away the trauma -- great and small -- that Autumn has endured and which led her to this miserable pursuit. Older women pop up to either guide her or exploit her, but you always sense that Autumn has the inner strength to handle any peril that comes her way. Flanigan carries this shoulder-weight like a pro, until you want to either cheer Autumn or hug her.
VIVARIUM (C+) - If you are going to make a horror film about the pointlessness of life, you still need to have a point. Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots display little chemistry as a couple trapped in a suburban-subdivision from hell, where every home looks alike and there's no escape from the labyrinth that they call home. Oh, the soul-crushing conformity of the suburbs, amirite?
The couple, Tom and Gemma, are given a baby to raise, and he matures faster than a puppy, growing to a school-aged lad, and he is a horrid being, screeching whenever he wants to be fed and playing video "games" on the telly. Tom soon resents eating the same eggs for breakfast every day and becomes obsessed with digging in the yard, searching for an escape or a clue to their existence. Tedium ensues for the couple and for the viewer.
To its credit, this sci-fi nightmare from sophomore director Lorcan Finnegan starts out dark and stays dark. It is a relentless slog. The outlook for this couple, punished for pursuing the ideal of domestic bliss, is bleak from beginning to end. When the kid grows up, he is no more pleasant, and there you go, parents -- be careful what you wish for.
WILSON (B) - A misanthropic luddite with an apparent heart of gold, middle-aged Wilson navigates a mid-life crisis, jolted by the death of his emotionally distant novelist father, and he seeks out an ex who is more messed up than he is.
From the poisoned pen of graphic artist Daniel Clowes ("Ghost World," "Art School Confidential") comes this traipse through our dark and haunted subconscious. Woody Harrelson stars as Wilson, a man unafraid to let his id rule all of his personal and social interactions (uttering unpleasant truths that we all think but don't say). He rails against "the oligarchs" and the suburbs and chides himself for using the word "closure." He is a social provocateur who butts up against others at cafes and on buses (not afraid to nudge
them awake, even), even though there's plenty of room to sit elsewhere. He is ardently devoted to a scruffy companion, his dog Pepper.
Wilson tracks down Pippi (a delightfully manic Laura Dern), a messed-up bleach-blond in recovery (with a former pimp's name tattooed on her back). He assumed that Pippi had aborted their child when she left 17 years ago, but it turns out that Pippi put the girl up for adoption.
They then begin stalking Claire (Isabella Amara, channeling Thora Birch's Enid from "Ghost World"), a chubby, nerdy teen who apparently has inherited Wilson's sarcastic ways. With the plot points cued up, skilled director Craig Johnson ("The Skeleton Twins," "True Adolescents") melds "Beavis and Butt-head" comedy with inch-deep indie drama. Engaging their "daughter" without her parents' knowledge is not likely to end well.
This is a hit-and-miss character study, almost a little too tidy. For
contrast early on, we see Wilson visit a childhood friend who's even
more bitter and unpleasant than he is (or, in Wilson's estimation, a
"toxic, soul-draining vampire"). ("Want some beet juice?" the host
offers. "Fuck. No," Wilson responds.) Also early on, as Wilson's father lay comatose in a hospital bed, Wilson begs for a declaration of love. OK, we get it, he's scarred from childhood.
Harrelson does his best to keep this all zipping along, and he succeeds until the narrative runs off the rails in the final half hour, scattering its focus and diluting its message. Some cues are too obvious. Elsewhere, Judy Greer, as Wilson's dog-sitter, is wasted in a dead-end role. And a sappy ending threatens to undo much of what came before.
BEACH RATS (B-minus) - This gorgeous, intimate examination of teenagers frolicking around Coney Island digs mostly only skin deep.
The story follows Frankie (Harris Dickinson), an intensely disaffected hunk who dabbles in drugs with his loser friends and secretly trolls older men on a sex-hookup website. Frankie explores a traditional relationship with Simone (Madeline Weinstein), but suffers from performance issues that he blames on the drugs. The pair make for the perfect couple on paper -- they have arresting good looks, full lips and boy/girl-next-door qualities about them.
Frankie, though, is an emotional black hole. He repeatedly states that he doesn't know what he likes, wants or cares about. Twice he proclaims, defensively, that his Guido buddies are not his friends. And why older guys? No particular attraction; it's only because they won't know people in his age group. A rape scenario at the hands of one of the men is seemingly shrugged off by Frankie.
Writer-director Eliza Hittman first explored teenage sensuality and angst (and the beach) from the female perspective in her brilliant debut, "It Felt Like Love." But what felt like a shared intimacy with sharp insights then comes off here as artifice and inscrutability. (It could simply be a fact that young women are more interesting than boys.) Hittman's camera again gets up in the pores of her actors, but she struggles to break through the surface. Boys in bare chests play handball; they don wife-beaters for their jaunts on the boardwalk; the sharing of a cigarette is sexy. But those images can't detract from the fact that Frankie is mostly moping around like a zombie, exchanging monosyllabic grunts with interchangeable fellow teens with zero inner lives.
Most of the narrative heft takes place in the final third of the movie, but by then you might not care whether Frankie snaps out of his funk or not. Hittman makes a questionable plot choice to force a climax. She leans on the growing indie trope of fireworks displays to suggest romantic sparks (albeit ironically) and deeper emotional meaning. It's ever so stylish, but by the end, when we return with Frankie to the beach, there's a hint of an epiphany about him, but we're still clueless about what it is he wants and whether he has the wherewithal to pursue it.
BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER (B+) - This expansion of a lecture retains all the assets of a thoughtful polemic and juices it with engaging visuals to string it into a compelling narrative. Nina Menkes, an independent filmmaker for decades, began presenting her lecture around 2018 and turned it into a film release four years later.
Menkes is quite good at conveying some complex concepts, mainly through diagramming scenes from films. She goes beyond just the concerns about the "male gaze" and deepens our understanding of how filmmakers and audiences are the subjects who objectify the objects (female characters). Menkes never gets stuck in a trite academic rut.
We get numerous examples of cinematic tropes -- such as presenting women as disjointed body parts -- and we get to assess these entrenched ideas from a fresh perspective. There is invaluable insight from a host of film scholars (from the likes of UCLA and Dartmouth) and filmmakers, a refreshing mix of women who are not the same old talking heads, such as pioneering director Julie Dash ("Daughters of the Dust") and the young standout Eliza Hittman ("It Felt Like Love," "Never Rarely Sometimes Always"). Stories from the Weinstein-era trenches come from the likes of Rosanna Arquette and comic actor Charlyne Yi.
It does seem odd (even prurient at times) to indulge in so many examples of sexist filmmaking in order to make the case here, but Menkes never slips into voyeurism. She has important points to make, and she is a filmmaker who knows how to tell a compelling story.
LOVING HIGHSMITH (B-minus) - This leaden documentary tries but fails to bring to life the famous novelist, Patricia Highsmith, as it sketches her biography through her love life. It too often feels like a trudge and glosses over the personality pitfalls of a woman who grew more and more bitter and insular as she aged.
Highsmith is most known for "Strangers on a Train" (brought to the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock) and the '90s cinematic touchstone "The Talented Mr. Ripley." We're more familiar with a novel she wrote under a pen name so as to hide her homosexuality; it became Todd Haynes' touching film "Carol" a few years ago. We get clips from those movies and others as pick-me-ups, though relative newcomer Eva Vitija otherwise dons a wet blanket to slog through Highsmith's love life.
We visit with a trail of Highsmith's former lovers; she apparently left behind quite a few broken hearts on her path of devastation. (Besides being a diligent worker as a writer, she was a drinker and a smoker and eventually descended into a swamp of racism and antisemitism in her final years. That fact gets swept away with a quick line toward the end of the film.) Vitija also assembles three relatives of the author, but they seem oddly detached and fairly clueless about the subject.
It would be difficult to see this film as being perceived as inspiring to LGBT people. Highsmith isn't very fun to be around. She might have had good reason to be such a pill. But we don't have to wallow in it with her.
Let's just put an asterisk after every entry of 2020. We don't need to belabor the point.
Herein we celebrate the best films of the past year. As usual, it takes us a few extra weeks out in flyover country to catch up to the straggling titles. These past months it was actually easier to keep up with the scattershot slate of releases, because we could stream them on demand, with a few exceptions (more asterisks).
The experiment that was the start of the third decade of the millennium (asterisk for the sticklers, you know who you are) mixed the good with the bad. On the one hand, a bunch of high-profile titles got pushed back to 2021. On the other hand, the ones that did get released were often immediately available, for a price, online. On the third hand (asterisk), we couldn't view them on the big screen in the company of others in a shared experience. It was what it was.
But as usual, there are only two or three films that could be considered truly great and which will stand the test of time (asterisk: I can't predict the future), followed on our list by some very good ones. We're going to be generous this time and make the list a fat 15, weighing it down with titles but lightening the load by including some sweet (if at times bittersweet) and uplifting minor-key movies that normally would have had a tougher time piercing our defenses. A little positivity couldn't hurt. (Asterisk.)
This year, it'll be a simpler list, with fewer categories and titles. Even before the asterisks started flying, we've made a conscious effort to downsize this forum and streamline what is now an eight-year relationship online. But you all out there still need images to stream, and below you'll find a couple of weeks worth of entertainment.
While it was easy to get cynical and jaded as a veteran moviegoer who feels like we've seen it all, we instead tried to get a little more discerning. And we were rewarded by seeing a lot of new talent and first-time filmmakers who made the list. We denote four of them below -- with an asterisk.
THE TOP 15
1. We Are Little Zombies* - Easily the year's best director, Makoto Nagahisa, who splashes with this dark but heartwarming tale of four orphans banding together through post-millennial uber-angst. Never has nihilism been so colorful and groovy.
2. Someone Somewhere - From France, the ache of loneliness, even when that certain someone is within reach, if only you knew.
3. Never Rarely Sometimes Always - As raw as cinema gets, Eliza Hittman ("It Felt Like Love") gets back on her game in this jarring documentary-like traipse through the abortion system.
4. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - Viola Davis (best actor) is like a cat with a bird in its mouth, big-footing around this August Wilson play like she owned the damn recording studio in 1927.
5. The Forty-Year-Old Version* - Another fresh voice, Radha Blank, a complex exploration of both race relations and the imminent approach of middle age, and how both of those factors help or hinder the making of art. (Best screenplay.)
6. Beanpole - Visually striking and heart-wrenching -- how we somehow manage to get by psychologically in the wake of war.
7. Corpus Christi - A gripping tale of a doomed young man vainly seeking redemption.
8. Epicentro - One of two documentaries on the elite list, this one a gorgeous, meandering dive into one aspect of Cuban culture.
9. The Climb - A novel take on the classic buddy film involving love triangles and the shifting power dynamics between two grown men. Both funny and unpredictable, with a smart visual sense.
10. Driveways - A mom, a son and the codger next door. The subsidiary culture clash takes a backseat to old-fashioned sweetness and light, giving hope to outsiders.
11. I Am Greta* - Remarkably intimate, this one succeeds not on its politics but rather on its sociological and psychological insights of one teenager trying to make a difference. From Nathan Grossman.
12. The Wolf of Snow Hollow - Jim Cummings' sophomore effort gets a little silly at times, but there's no one like him tearing up the screen with wild ranges of emotions mixed with acrid comedy.
13. First Cow - Another buddy film, this Kelly Reichardt period piece takes its sweet time to charm you.
14. The Life Ahead - Similar to "Driveways," this Italian mood piece presents an odd couple -- Sophia Loren's Holocaust survivor and a rebellious street kid -- and tugs at the heart in just the right ways.
15. Shithouse* - Another debut film, this one about a young man (writer-director-star Cooper Raiff) putting his vulnerabilities out there as he struggles through his first year of college.
JUST MISSED THE LIST
I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Wonderfully bizarre, until Charlie Kaufman goes completely off the rails in the final 20 minutes.
Banana Split - Two girls bro it up as they bond over a shared boy toy.
The Trip to Greece - We just can't quit these two clever Brits fictionalizing themselves in the hands of Michael Winterbottom.
The devastating documentary about Romania's health care system, "Collective."
Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults - HBO's four-part series is the epitome of historical storytelling, spanning the decades-long death march of the most captivating of all cults.
The elegant, fascinating love story "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" would have made our top five last year.
The invigorating documentary about a family of rogue EMTs in Mexico City, "Midnight Family"
From Serbia, the somber '90s war story "The Load."
COMING ATTRACTIONS
As noted above, releases were a little scrambled in 2020. You'll see "Nomadland," from Chloe Zhao ("The Rider") on some lists, and it did appear briefly online late in the year, but it won't get an official release until 2021. Same for "Gunda," the wordless documentary about farm life, which comes out next month.
We're curious about Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" anthology (especially "Lovers Rock" and "Red, White and Blue"), but it's an Amazon exclusive. And Sofia Coppola's "On the Rocks" belongs to Apple TV. Finally, we doubt "Martin Eden" would crack our Top 15, but it's coming out on disc next week, so we'll find out soon.
Stay tuned for reviews of those titles and more as we re-emerge in 2021, hopefully in a dark, confined space at some point.
THE MACALUSO SISTERS (A) - It would be difficult to find a movie as gorgeous and sad as this tale of five siblings dealing with tragedy at three different stages of life. Writer-director Emma Dante unleashes an epic tone poem about the sisters in Palermo, bereft of parents and ranging in age from tween to twenties, who keep doves on their roof for renting out to weddings, their main source of income.
Dante seeks to delve into the paralysis of families who get stuck in the past and their sclerotic traditions. Their grief -- tied to the death of the youngest of them during a day at the beach (and probably connected to whatever happened to their parents) -- haunts them in the form of little Antonella (Viola Pusateri), who continues to appear in her sisters' visions, having never aged beyond girlhood. Dante takes us to a second phase in time, when the survivors are relatively young adults, bickering over the house, as another of them announces a cancer diagnosis. Finally, she jumps forward to old age, when only two are around to bury a third.
The two the younger middle sisters are not fleshed out much (one is a bookworm; the other is homely and lonely), and the focus turns to vain Pinuccia, who is popular with the men, and melancholy Maria, a frustrated ballerina with lesbian tendencies. The casting is impeccable -- except for Antonella, each character will be played by two or three actresses -- and the aging of the sisters does not become a distraction but rather a selling point.
Dante is working in familiar territory -- the movie brings to mind the sister film "Mustang," as well as Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and the recent mood pieces from Eliza Hittman. She elides dialogue at times, going for atmosphere over direct storytelling (with an effective loop of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie No. 1" ringing out at key moments). Some of the scenes -- like a playful, tender moment experienced by a young Maria -- can be suffused with joy, longing and a little dread.
Dante makes the steadily decaying apartment a character unto itself. By the end, that dwelling is weighted with hopes and dreams but pockmarked by bird droppings and faded wallpaper, a haunted museum. Dante unveils the fateful beach outing in flashbacks that reveal a little more of what happened each time, and she injects a montage-like scene at the end that plays out like a brain emptying its memories just before death takes hold, and the effect is both thrilling and anguished. Some heartaches never heal.
EL PLANETA (A-minus) - With a notable nod to early Jim Jarmusch and a bit of the Maysles brothers' "Grey Gardens," Amalia Ulman offers a deadpan take on a mother and daughter eking out their last days of grifting in an economically depressed seaside Spanish town. Ulman, a New Yorker from Argentina, once lived in Gijon, which hosts this cinema verite polemic touching on Ulman's common themes of class, gender and sexuality.
She stars as Leo (Leonora), a 30-ish would-be fashion aesthete who has bad luck meeting available men and is stuck with her eccentric mother in a flat with no heat and, eventually, no electricity, as the pair's economic reckoning slowly comes to a head. The women still put on airs and a confident face to the world -- Leo in funky fashions of her own creation and her mom, Maria (Ulman's own mother, Ale), in a full-length fur coat and designer handbag (convenient for carrying shoplifted items). They dine out on the tab of a local politician that Leo may have dated at one time. With little food in the house besides pastries, Leo whines, "If I keep eating carbs, I'm going to have a poor person's body."
Ulman shoots in distinct black-and-white, with long static camera shots and languorous dialogue reminiscent of Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise." She uses old fashioned screen wipes for a corny retro effect. Her camera lingers on the shuttered businesses of Gijon, a town that apparently has never recovered from the 2008 recession. The women -- exhibiting that bittersweet "Grey Gardens" loopiness -- bicker over mundane household things. Maria likes to "freeze" her enemies by writing their names on scraps of paper that she places in the freezer. Leo, meanwhile, pursues relationships but can't find a man who wants anything but a side romp. (Her meet-cute with a blase shopkeeper (Zhou Chen) finds a real connection between the two actors.)
Ulman is endlessly appealing as she acts out a parallel version of her own life story. She doesn't lay all her cards on the table, and the pace of this 80-minute exercise can be a bit lethargic in spots, but she reels you in to the sadness and ennui of the mother-daughter team at this critical juncture in their lives. Ulman has a lot to say here about fourth-stage capitalism, and it's fascinating, not really knowing her history going into this (there's this profile focusing on Ulman's transition from fashion and art to film), to be introduced to her fresh voice.
Teen cousins go on an adventure after one of them experiences an unwanted pregnancy in what is hopefully a comeback for Eliza Hittman ("It Felt Like Love," "Beach Rats"), "Never Rarely Sometimes Always."
A dark drama from Poland about a convict posing as a priest in a grieving town, "Corpus Christi."
We're
going to trust Michael Winterbottom and his muse, Steve Coogan, to pull
off the decadent tale of a billionaire throwing himself a 60th birthday
party in "Greed."
It could go off the rails, but we're drawn to John Turturro's update of his "Big Lebowski" character, "The Jesus Rolls."
Manohla Dargis of the New York Times has a thoughtful piece about some of the highlights of the Sundance Film Festival and finds political threads -- real or imagined -- as we descend into the Trump era. That's an excuse for us to flag a few promising offerings that splashed at the fest.
Familiar faces
Kumail Nanjiani, one of our favorites from HBO's "Silicon Valley," co-wrote (with his wife, Emily V. Gordon) a biographical dramedy about a Pakistani-born comic who must deal with parents who disapprove of his white American girlfriend, "The Big Sick." (Warning: Judd Apatow is a producer.)
Indie auteur Alex Ross Perry ("Listen Up Philip," "The Color Wheel," "Queen of Earth") explores the world of some unlikable women in "Golden Exits."
Eliza Hittman ("It Felt Like Love") returns to the world of young adults with "Beach Rats," about another teenager adrift in the world.
Miguel Arteta ("Cedar Rapids"), who has spent a lot of time lately in the TV world ("Getting On," "Nurse Jackie"), is back on the big screen with writer Mike White (HBO's "Enlightened"), where they previously scored with "The Good Girl" and "Chuck & Buck." Their new project is "Beatriz at Dinner," starring Salma Hayek as a new-age hippie type who inadvertently falls in with the 1-percent crowd.
Dee Rees, last seen directing the coming-of-age tale "Pariah" (our fourth favorite film of 2011), is back with "Mudbound," a sweeping World War II-era story of a black family and the white clan that owns the land on which they work. Carey Mulligan and Mary J. Blige star.
Craig Johnson ("The Skeleton Twins," "True Adolescents") teams with Daniel Clowes ("Ghost World," "Art School Confidential") for "Wilson," starring Woody Harrelson as an obnoxious misanthrope.
Luca Guadagnino ("A Bigger Splash," "I Am Love") explores a May-December gay romance in the early '80s in "Call Me by Your Name."
Jenny Slate and Gillian Robespierre follow up "Obvious Child" with a '90s period piece about cheating among the various generations, "Landline."
Fresh voices
"Quest" is a documentary created over decades looking at a black Philadelphia family coping with life in the big city, including urban violence.
Geremy Jasper debuts with "Patty Cakes," about a chubby young woman from New Jersey looking to hit it big as a rap star.
In 2014, I started paying attention to the birds. Straining to divine their daily message. Toward the end of the year, I bowed to the familiar form of human communication and took it as a sign that "Birdman" and "Bird People" spoke to me in special ways. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki unleashed a mesmerizing visual display in "Birdman," with a touching story and powerful performances, in a film that feels both modern and old-fashioned.
The rest of my favorite films were mostly cynical and twisted, or just plain moody. The main exceptions were "We Are the Best!" about three Swedish girls discovering punk rock in the early '80s, and another retro treat, "The Grand Budapest Hotel."
There are a few glaring omissions here, from some of my all-time favorite directors: "Winter Sleep" from Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the Dardenne brothers' "Two Days, One Night" played or will play only in Santa Fe, and the timing was just off there. Tsai Ming-liang's "Stray Dogs" arrives on video in just a couple of weeks. It's a good bet that one of those or all of them would have found a way into my top list.
Speaking of, here it is:
THE TOP 15
1. Birdman - The thrill of cinema, with a whirlwind story, great performances and the year's best director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
2. Ida - Visually stunning, with a simple, heartbreaking story.
3. Foxcatcher - Bennett Miller establishes himself as a new American master with this deeply troubling tale.
4. We Are the Best! - A moving and wickedly funny tribute to grrrl power and the life-affirming qualities of rock 'n' roll.
5. Citizenfour - A true-life thriller expertly reported from behind the scenes.
6. Listen Up Philip - A mature offering from Alex Ross Perry, with a perfectly acerbic Jason Schwartzman in the title role. The best screenplay of the year.
An elderly woman enjoys the company of a hologram version of her dead husband, who is as handsome as Jon Hamm, in "Marjorie Prime."
Eliza Hittman had a knockout debut with "It Felt Like Love," and she's back infiltrating the lives of teenagers in "Beach Rats."
A nearly three-hour chat-fest about a family reunion, from Romanian director Cristi Puiu (the landmark opus "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu"), the character study "Sieranevada."
Teen hormones rage as women are getting killed in a Brazilian city in a stylish debut thriller, "Kill Me Please."
The great Frederick Wiseman ("Boxing Gym") checks in with another three-hour stem-winder in the vein of "At Berkeley" and "In Jackson Heights," this one for book rats, "Ex Libris: New York Public Library."
An Argentine actor looking to disappear for a while finds himself adrift in New York City in Julia Solomonoff's "Nobody's Watching."
This is the danger zone This is where I came in They know not what they do Forgive them all their sins -- The brothers Gibb
I knew, just a few days into this new year, that it was time to reboot. After a hugely disappointing 2017 for movies -- and the movie industry -- I'd been feeling a significant shift coming on.
On January 3rd, at the end of a long day, I craved mindless entertainment. I settled on the revived version of the TV game show "Match Game." And there, in the seat once reserved for Charles Nelson Reilly -- top row, right -- was Mark Duplass. A lot of people don't know his name. He is a Mumblecore legend, and, with his brother, Jay, the face of independent filmmaking. He is a great actor and producer. And now he has achieved the level of amiably yukking it up on game shows.
Seeing him cavorting on network TV presented the perfect dichotomy: It upends notions of me as a film snob and elitist -- because I was, you know, wallowing in "Match Game" -- yet it reaffirms my old-school Mumblecore gangsta cred, going back a decade or so. It's a neat bow to tie on the end of an era.
It's difficult to recall a worse year for films -- and for moviegoing -- than 2017. Besides the unmasking of the Hollywood machine, there simply were not very many good films released last year. I had to stretch things to get a respectable Top Ten list (below). Worse, the string of disappointments from favorite filmmakers of the past runs even longer. That list (also below) includes less than sterling films from the likes of Sofia Coppola, Noah Baumbach, Asghar Farhadi, Jim Jarmusch, Greta Gerwig, Luca Guadagnino, Steven Soderbergh, Mike White, and Francois Ozon. Francois Ozon, alors! And I didn't even bother to go see movies offered up by old favorites: the Coen brothers, George Clooney, Alexander Payne, Darren Aronofsky, Yorgos Lanthimos or Paul Thomas Anderson. I've pretty much given up on Christopher Nolan.
There is one filmmaker out there who can consistently knock me out, and he made the only great film of 2017: Sean Baker, who followed up "Starlet" and "Tangerine" with another profound character study of the underclass, "The Florida Project." Nothing else was close to that gem, with a cast full of newcomers. All is not lost, but that's a lot of responsibility to place on one filmmaker.
There were plenty of disappointments to fill up a C-list. Rehashed stories, trite set-ups, played-out plots. Maybe I'm just an out-of-touch middle-aged white heterosexual male who just didn't understand the subtle brilliance of darlings like "Get Out" and "Call Me by Your Name," but I couldn't wait for either one to be over.
Too often in 2017, I was shut out while searching for a decent Sunday matinee. The arsty multiplexes clinged longer to middling indie releases, and a ripple effect seemed to starve the rest of the food chain, including the next option for distributors, our beloved Guild Cinema. Last month, I picked up the new two-month schedule for the Guild, turned to February, my Sharpie at the ready -- and I didn't find one title worth circling.
I do think think the Weinstein scandal is a symptom of many ills, beyond the sexual predation of some men. We've never nurtured a hotbed of mainstream fare here, but why did we give even scant attention to the extended "Ocean's Eleven" fraternity and their good ol' boy enablers? Even the indie crowd is turning insular and indulgent. And archly mainstream. (Damn you, Duplass.)
Why am I so cranky? Am I getting burned out? That could be a part of it. Or maybe it is just the nature of the grinding cycle of cultural consumption. I believe in turning new chapters and evolving. Weeding out old standbys. Meantime, I feel called to other duties. My long-running feature "Life Is Short" has taken on an extra yip of resonance. I've even been distracted from completing this essay in recent days.
I plan to continue this blog, but in abbreviated form. For the past five years, I've posted about three times a week, often writing full reviews. I will scale that back in frequency and quantity; there will be more capsule reviews than extended essays. It should, however, continue to fulfill its primary function: providing a guide to worthwhile films that you might otherwise overlook or never hear about. (Click away at the links below.) We might dip more often into the archives, searching out the gems we ourselves overlooked.
Maybe this will be a temporary lull, a way to wait out this rain delay, so to speak, like when WGN used to turn away from shots of the Wrigley Field grounds crew dragging the tarp onto the field to air highlights of Oakland A's World Series wins from the early '70s. Maybe it's just the way things are these days, now that my boyhood team, the Cubs, ended their World Series drought and exorcised decades-old angst. Maybe I just miss Charles Nelson Reilly.
Pardon me as I shuffle along the row of seats toward the aisle and the exit. This is the part where I came in.
THE TOP TEN
1. The Florida Project - Master storytelling with a mostly rookie cast. A true feel for the human condition. Including, for the second year in a row, the best director, Sean Baker. 2. Baby Driver - I know it's flawed, but I saw it on the big screen twice and fell for it each time. The most fun I can imagine having in a cineplex. Thank you, Edgar Wright, for the music and the mania. 3. Dawson City: Frozen Time - A mesmerizing, meandering trip to the turn of the 20th century, to a gold-rush era and the origins of Hollywood. 4. Donald Cried - Kris Avedisian's manic title character is riveting from beginning to end, as he makes life miserable for an old high school buddy who is back in town for a visit. Featuring the year's best screenplay by Avedisian. 5. Lovesong - The wonderful Riley Keough drives this moody road movie about an unhappily married young mother rekindling a crush on her college pal. 6. Suntan- From Greece, a harrowing depiction of a middle-age basket case going off the rails as he tries to recapture his youth while fixating on a beautiful young woman. This depressing exercise is somehow sexy and intoxicating. 7. The Big Sick - An old-fashioned feel-good movie about defying family traditions and pursuing true love. 8. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World - An impeccable documentary about unsung musicians of the modern music era. 9. Brigsby Bear - This seems like it is too weird to work, but goofy Kyle Mooney pulls off one of the sweetest films of the year. 10. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail - Another meticulous documentary, from Steve James ("Hoop Dreams"), with a compelling story to tell about our nation's priorities.
BONUS TRACKS
It took us a while to get to some leftovers from 2016. "Toni Erdmann" would have ended up in the top five on the 2016 list, if I'd seen it in time. Such a powerful father-daughter story -- quirky and uplifting, heartbreaking and soulful. And Daniel Burman, a true storyteller with heart, exploited the father-son dynamic for another of his charming little movies, "The Tenth Man." Meantime, Emmanuelle Bercot tore things up in "My King" as a woman paralyzed by rage in a frustrating marriage. And Denzel Washington was fantastic in "Fences."
