FAVORITES
Sadly two of Assayas' hardest-to-see films thanks to distribution and rights issues, Paris Awakens and Cold Water share a finely detailed, deeply empathetic but unsentimental understanding of the vague, foreboding, prickly space between adolescence and adulthood and how young people find themselves in trouble. I love Assayas' unconventional beats, jumps, and transitions between scenes.
A pre-Code gem, full of wild but earned tonal changes, gorgeous shot compositions, and one of the all-time great Barbara Stanwyck performances in a still-modern story of one woman making our sexually exploitative world work in her favor instead of against her.
I finally got to see my favorite Peckinpah on the big screen this year, and I'm pleased to say it still looks as grimy and dusty and fucked up in its restored, full-screen glory as it did on muddy VHS. Warren Oates, a severed head in a bag, lots of trouble. Oh yeah. A last gasp film noir? A modern western? A grindhouse movie? A tragic romance? An action thriller? Yes but also nah. It's a lot stranger, tougher, and more personal than that. Maybe a fictional autobiography of an artist's eye or maybe that's a pompous way to describe it. Whatever it is, hook it to my veins.
Demme's first film as director was a women-in-prison exploitation drive-in movie for Roger Corman that required a certain amount of violence and nudity but otherwise provided Demme a lot of freedom. Even in these modest beginnings, Caged Heat showcases what made Demme such a great filmmaker and such a sad one to lose last year in his unassuming but sophisticated visual style and pacing, his focus on a whole community's ecosystem without neglecting the individual members or making one person more important than another, his sense of humor and playfulness, and his reverence for film history without getting bogged down in look-how-cool-I-am pop-cult referentiality.
The story of a fucked-up family (but all families are fucked up), told almost entirely through wedding and funeral ceremonies over the course of several years, Oshima's '71 epic kicks his blend of heavy drama, absurd comedy, psychosexual perversity, death-haunted melancholy, and healthy disrespect for nationalism, social norms, traditionalism, and status quo politics up to operatic levels. It's kinda-sorta his Godfather, his "This Be the Verse," and his "Fall of the House of Usher."
Finally got to see my favorite (alongside Stranger than Paradise) Jarmusch film on the big screen, thanks to a beautiful restoration that coincidentally screened the same week its cinematographer Robby Muller died, in a lovely accidental memorial. Jarmusch's western is a weird, violent, hallucinatory condemnation of white American greed and depravity with a non-condescending attitude toward its indigenous characters, a poetic meditation on death and dying, and a road movie without the road, with a polarizing (and, in my opinion, essential) Neil Young score and Muller's gorgeous black-and-white cinematography.
One of a handful of great punk documentaries, D.O.A. is a living map of late '70s British (and a little bit of American) punk rock culture, with the Sex Pistols' mostly disastrous tour of the southwestern United States at its center. Kowalski's side trips from the main story include American audiences' reactions to the Pistols, the Sid and Nancy trainwreck, live footage of some of the best British punk bands (plus Cleveland's Dead Boys), local London no-hopers Terry and the Idiots and their sweet, misguided leader, and anti-punk politicians and moral crusaders, who seem to have stepped straight out of a Monty Python sketch but are decidedly not in on the joke.
The word "genius" is often tossed around to excuse the horrible behavior of talented old white guys, but Fassbinder was one of the few filmmakers I have no reservations about calling a genius. He was no stranger to horrible behavior, and his personal life was a flaming wreck, but he delivered one deathless masterpiece after another at an alarmingly frightening pace until a drug overdose killed him at the age of 37 in 1982. My climate change despair has shifted from mourning human life (we have our moments but are an invasive, cancerous species the world will be much better without) to mourning all the poor cats and dogs and great works of art that are going down with us. Someday, no more copies of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant will exist and that's a bigger tragedy than any of us biting the dust. It was the greatest part of my year, cinematically speaking, to revisit these films on the big screen, but the real revelation was the previously unavailable five-part television mini-series about the contrast between work life and home life, Eight Hours Don't Make a Day, which is shockingly warm and optimistic while maintaining his complex formal composition. In most of his other work, Fassbinder sees society (and I mean all society) as a crushing force destroying individual happiness. He has great empathy for almost all his characters, but he doesn't see any way out of being either the exploiter or the exploited in any situation involving more than one person. His characters crush or get crushed, are needy and weak or cruel and strong (though this cruelty is also a weakness). His most intense films are pyramid schemes of cruelty with the abuse trickling down from the top, his characters taking their own exploitation out on others even weaker or destroying themselves so they won't hurt anyone else. (I should point out to anyone who hasn't seen a Fassbinder film that his movies are also extremely funny and sexy and unusual and full of unforgettable images, he shoots the greatest bar scenes, and his troupe of regulars are some of the best actors you'll ever see, so none of these films are a slog to get through even though the point of view is extremely bleak.) Without ignoring life's imbalanced power dynamics or its toughness, Eight Hours Don't Make a Day is about people who truly care about each other and help each other. The family, romantic relationships, and work life are all seen more positively than in any other Fassbinder film I can recall. It's almost utopian, this idea that people can work together to improve each other's lives and the collective health of society. We really can do this, we just won't. Whatever caused this warmth in Fassbinder, it didn't last, but it hung around long enough to give him another masterpiece, including my favorite wedding reception scene ever.
Armstrong and Ivers worked in New York City public access as video editors and camera operators in the '70s and '80s, and they shot hundreds of hours of videotape footage of the downtown music scene. (They're still best friends and have lived in the same New York apartment building since the '70s.) This anthology collection of their late '70s work includes performances from Richard Hell & The Voidoids, Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers, Lounge Lizards, Bad Brains, The Erasers, Dead Boys, and Divine, among others. Armstrong and Ivers are always re-editing the footage together, adding and taking away different performances, so the film is never in a fixed state. If they visit your city, go see it in whatever form it's currently occupying.
Bette Gordon should be better known. Working in both experimental and narrative film, she really gets the rhythms and weirdness and mundanity and sexism of American life in ways you don't see in many mainstream or independent movies. Her work has been marginalized and damned with faint praise by mainstream critics, which happens to a lot of women directors, but this series gave me a chance to see several of her films for the first time. I liked them all, though Luminous Motion is a bit of a mixed bag (mostly thanks to source material I wasn't too fond of), but the two in particular that made me bug out in awe were Variety and The United States of America. United States is the pinnacle of the collaborative films Gordon made with her then-boyfriend James Benning, a great experimental filmmaker in his own right. The two drove cross-country in the mid-'70s and rigged a camera to a wooden pedestal in the back seat to capture the backs of both their heads, the steering wheel, and the entire front windshield. The film edits the trip down to 27 minutes as the couple alternates driving through the varied landscapes and weather of this large, beautiful, ugly, weird, occasionally banal country to a soundtrack of nationwide '70s radio, FM and AM, large and small markets, up and down the dial. Hard rock, disco, country, soul, news reports, farm reports, religious proselytizing, political talk radio, advertisements, and heavy rotation of Minnie Riperton's "Loving You" spill out from the speakers as Gordon and Benning drive down the highway. I knew three minutes in that this was already destined to be one of my favorite films. It's one of the truest and strangest portraits of what it's like to live (and drive) in America. Variety (co-written by Kathy Acker) marked Gordon's move from experimental shorts to full-length narrative features, but it retains her adventurous spirit and the feeling that anything could happen or that any image could appear. Variety looks to me now like one of the greatest '80s films in its mix of character study, film noir, downtown New York hangout, waking dream, and exploration of film-as-voyeurism, while showing what it's like to be a woman at work surrounded by men and also taking a complex but mostly positive view of sexual desire and fantasy. The story of a financially strapped woman who takes a job at the ticket booth of a porn theater, Variety never goes where you expect it to and is beguiling, mysterious, and exciting. Both these films are still with me, months later.
An ultra-strange, pitch-black noir that sits alongside A Face in the Crowd and Elmer Gantry in its clear-eyed take on the American grift (always more real than the American dream), Nightmare Alley moves from the carnival to the nightclub to high society pseudo-religion to the gutter and back to the carnival in a story of an ambitious striver with no ethics working his way up the ladder in the mentalist/spiritualist racket. The movie has at least one scene too many (in my opinion, the last one), but that's just a nitpick. Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell are the highlights of a strong ensemble.
Rivette, like Fassbinder, is on my short list of genius filmmakers, and Noroit, an extremely loose adaptation of Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, is one of his strangest and most pleasurably baffling films. Bernadette Lafont plays Giulia, the vinyl-pantsuit clad leader of a ruthless gang of pirates. After her brother is killed by Giulia, Geraldine Chaplin's Morag plays the long revenge game by infiltrating the pirates' island compound, becoming Giulia's bodyguard, and tearing things apart from the inside. Noroit continually messes with form, identity, and narrative, including a film score played by onscreen musicians who follow the characters around and soundtrack their movements, and appears to make its own rules for what it is and how to watch it as it goes, which is the kind of movie experience I love the most.
Bill Gunn (see Bette Gordon above) should also be better known. A writer, actor, and filmmaker who worked in theater, movies, and television, Gunn wrote the screenplay for Hal Ashby's first (and, in my opinion, greatest) film as director, The Landlord, one of the smartest and funniest comedies about the intersections and separations between black and white American life, and wrote and directed the complex, offbeat, art-horror vampire film Ganja & Hess. Gunn, who died in 1989, also directed this incredible two-part miniseries in 1980, which finally saw a belated big-screen and DVD/Blu-Ray release in 2018. Personal Problems, which Gunn and co-creator Ishmael Reed described as an "experimental soap opera," started as a late-'70s throwback to the radio plays of the pre-television years for New York public radio. Reed wrote the script with some input from Gunn, Gunn directed the voice actors. (Please correct me if I have any of this wrong. There is some conflicting information out there.) The project continued to intrigue Gunn, who wanted to turn it into an ongoing television series for PBS. Using some of Reed's characters from the radio play, Gunn directed a large ensemble of talented black artists from the New York theater, music, and literature scenes (including Reed, in a small but memorable part), combining his own writing with the improvisational skills of his cast. He filmed the two-part, four-hour pilot on videotape and presented it to PBS, who rejected it as a series and only aired the pilot in two markets, New York and San Francisco. That was mostly that until this year. This is a major rediscovery and a masterpiece. The videotape is rough and home-movie quality, but Gunn uses the primitive technology to create both an intimate realism and a hallucinatory, dreamy feeling. He has a great eye, and he notices so many quiet, usually unseen moments. Most films and TV shows about black life that get past the mostly white gatekeepers on the business side of art and entertainment tend to focus on heroes, victims, and/or historical figures, the extraordinary, the stereotypical, and the symbolic, but Gunn presented black characters that were regular, everyday, contemporary people with jobs and lives and relationships and families and regular problems and complexities and nuances and idiosyncrasies, which shouldn't be so unusual but unfortunately is. OK, I'm starting to get too white-guy-just-found-out-about-racism-and-lectures-world here, and nobody needs that. With a remarkable performance from Vertamae Grosvenor at its center (and some beautiful work from Sam Waymon, Nina Simone's brother and bandleader and a great musician and fascinating actor in his own right), Personal Problems is full of life and art, and PBS really fucked up by not airing it everywhere and by not turning it into a series. I'm glad people have the chance to see it now. Don't pass it by.
A quintessential film noir. Gorgeous and gritty black and white. A conflicted antihero. Men and women in trouble. Double and triple crosses. A sleazy, menacing villain. A love triangle. Light and shadows and people on the run. A couple of personal sacrifices that may be too little, too late. A fatal yet romantic worldview. Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor, Marsha Hunt, John Ireland, and Raymond Burr. A taxidermied bear. Okay, that one's a bit of a curveball. Mann has such a tightly constructed, elegant visual style with lots of complex but un-show-offy shot compositions. Raw Deal provides all the expected pleasures of noir, but it also feels personal and emotionally invested, and Mann is a master of the expressively claustrophobic frame.
Speaking of elegant, The Smiling Lieutenant is as beautifully composed and constructed as you'd expect from Lubitsch. One of a handful of early '30s musical comedies Lubitsch made with Maurice Chevalier (all good-to-great), this pre-Code love triangle between Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Miriam Hopkins is funny, sexy, ridiculous, sophisticated, and goofy, and has a pretty complex pro-and-con take on tradition and routine, lust and desire, and freedom versus obligation.
Walter Hill is near the top of my list of great American action directors, especially in his mid-'70s-to-mid-'80s peak. Flavoring the tough-guy action movie with classic Hollywood and European art film influences and surprising moments of vulnerability, Hill also populates his work with some of the best character actors in the business. I'm a big fan of Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, and Streets of Fire, but I hadn't yet seen Southern Comfort until the Austin Film Society's mini-Hill retrospective, which they gave the gloriously stupid/brilliant title "Hill on Earth." (I love them for that. And for many other reasons.) A post-Deliverance take on townies vs. hillbillies, Southern Comfort sees a group of arrogant, boneheaded National Guardsmen get on the bad side of some bad motherfucker Cajuns in the Louisiana swamp in the winter after stealing some of their canoes. With a winning pair of leads from Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine, the movie is tense and brutal and most of the twists and turns are genuinely unexpected, while the unusual closing scenes find a weird visual poetry.
Seimetz is a Renaissance woman of independent film (and the occasional Hollywood project) who works as a writer, producer, editor, costume designer, actor, and director. Though her directing work has mostly been on television (The Girlfriend Experience, Atlanta), I fervently hope her sole feature as director, Sun Don't Shine, will be followed by many more. Sun Don't Shine, which she also wrote, went under my radar in 2012, but a one-night revival at the film society this year knocked me out. Seimetz has such a natural, unusual structural rhythm in her storytelling and characters. I was always uneasy and always in awe. Taking the familiar lovers-on-the-run trope and contorting it into something strange and new, Seimetz created a pair of characters I'd never seen on screen before. I wasn't ready for it to end even as its ending immediately became one of my favorite scenes of the year, 2012 or 2018 or anytime in between. Take your pick.
A creepy, surrealist fairy tale from the tail end of the Czech New Wave, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a marvel of dream logic and imaginatively beautiful imagery and a wild take on a girl's transition from childhood to adolescence. It's also, alongside Ginger Snaps, one of the great horror films about puberty.
No two Agnes Varda films are alike, but they share a warm empathy for people and their physical environments without any bullshit sentimentalizing or sugarcoating of hard truths, and they share her amazing eye, which notices all kinds of details most of us miss. La Pointe Courte, her debut film, is about both a small French fishing village and a conflicted young couple within it, with Varda moving back and forth between the macro and the micro and the intersections between. One Sings, the Other Doesn't is a feminist musical about the enduring friendship between two women, one a free-spirited artist and musician, the other a practical working-class single mother, over the course of several years and life changes large and small. Mur murs is a document of Los Angeles murals and the artists who paint them, as well as a historical snapshot of a cross-section of Los Angeles neighborhoods in the early '80s. (Whether it was even on Varda's mind or not, the film also reveals how little of the character and personality of the city ever appears in the thousands of Hollywood films shot there.) All three of these films are filled with life.
Wanda is one of the dozen or so movies I've seen on the big screen twice, and one of my favorite pieces of art in any medium, and I don't have a clue how to write about it. It's such a singular experience that any blather I type ain't gonna cut it. Here's a little blather anyway. Loden wrote, directed, and stars as the title character, a woman in Pennsylvania coal-mining country who has had enough of her limiting, confining role as wife and mother. She leaves her husband and family to just drift, letting chance, accident, and movement decide her fate. Wanda is one of the damnedest, most complex characters I've ever seen, and I catch myself wondering what happened to her as if she were a person I knew and not a fictional character. Wanda is such a specific, unique creation, a unity of opposites, that she (and the film as a whole) resists interpretation. Wanda is Wanda, and it's not anything else. Sadly, Wanda was Loden's only feature as director (she also made a few short films), thanks to a few later projects falling through and industry sexism and her complicated marriage to Elia Kazan and her early death from cancer at the age of 48, but she did more in one film than most directors do in a lifetime.
Despite its fairly conventional talking-head approach, this documentary about the life and music of Arthur Russell is a beautiful portrait of the man, his short but full life, and his incredible music. I also loved how the film puts Russell's music on a pedestal but keeps Russell off it, revealing him as the complex, messy, flawed, lovable, funny, selfish, shy, real person he was instead of the hero worship propaganda too many music docs peddle. The film also gives deserved credit to the people around Russell, especially his boyfriend Tom Lee, a tireless advocate for Russell's art who kept a roof over their heads and food on the table and worked a day job so Russell could make music. Lee was also responsible for maintaining Russell's copious unreleased recordings and getting so much of this beautiful, unfairly neglected music released in the last couple decades. People like Lee are too often unsung heroes, footnotes in the histories of the great artists, but Wild Combination finds room for these stories, too.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
Night and Fog in Japan (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)
The Rite (Ingmar Bergman, 1969)
