The rules: Movies on my list had to open in my city of residence (Austin, TX) between January 1 and December 31, 2018, and I had to see them on a big screen. These are highly subjective, personal choices, so I use the word "favorite" instead of "best." I prefer movies that are a strange combination of music, photography, painting, theater, dream, and accidental time capsule (I'm using the loosest, broadest application of most of the nouns in this sentence). I like a good story, but I don't require one, and I hate movies that are just professionally photographed storytelling with no visual point of view. I'm more interested in a film's rhythm, structure, form, look, use of light and shadow, performance style or styles, approach to character, atmosphere, marginal detail, and POV, and its mysterious, ineffable qualities than its story, plot, events, etc., but I'm also a hopeless amateur when it comes to writing about these things.
Thanks, me from last year. Let's get to it.
FAVORITES OF THE YEAR
(alphabetical by title)
Kiarostami's body of work expanded my thinking about what a movie is, and his death is a huge loss. His final film, which he spent the last three years of his life meticulously preparing and which his son Ahmad finished for him after his death from cancer in 2016, is a curious and beautiful thing, a combination of painting, photography, and digital animation that turns 24 still frames (a painting by Bruegel and 23 of his own photographs) into 24 short films, each one about four-and-a-half minutes long. Mostly nature scenes derived from landscape photos taken through windows of homes or cars or out in the elements (animals appear in nearly every segment, people in only a few), the film begins with Breugel's 1565 painting The Hunters in the Snow and ends with a laptop screen playing William Wyler's 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives. Each still image is slowly manipulated with digital animation (animals, rain, falling snow, smoke from chimneys, etc.), creating an odd visual texture that is natural and artificial, calming and eerie. Meditative and hypnotic, 24 Frames feels like both a throwback to the earliest days of cinema and a glimpse into the post-cinema future.
Like 24 Frames, this is a collection of short segments adding up to a unified whole. The Coens' anthology of death in the Old West has some of their harshest, saddest, and funniest scenes, and each story complements and adds flavor and poignancy to the others. I initially placed Buster Scruggs in the honorable mentions section, thinking it was good but minor Coens with the exception of the title story and "The Gal Who Got Rattled" (the latter filmed 30 miles from my hometown in rural western Nebraska), which I thought held up to their best work. In the weeks after seeing it, however, I couldn't get images from all six stories out of my head. I belatedly realized the late-career hot streak the brothers have been on since they got The Ladykillers out of their system is still going strong. See this one on the big screen if you get the chance.
Van Sant as a director regularly moves back and forth between personal films he writes, co-writes, or adapts himself and director-for-hire projects on other people's screenplays. I tend to love the former (yeah, even Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), and, with a few notable exceptions (To Die For, Milk), find myself disappointed in the latter. After the disaster of 2015's for-hire The Sea of Trees, Van Sant comes back strong by turning that most impersonal, artless, formulaic, and dishonest of genres, the biopic, into something beautiful and strange. Don't Worry is about the life of cartoonist John Callahan, but instead of the grindingly boring trajectory most Hollywood directors would have tracked for Callahan's life (depressive alcoholic in wheelchair becomes successful syndicated cartoonist, gets sober, finds love, inspires us all, lives happily ever after until he dies of respiratory problems after surgery in 2010, friends and family mourn his loss but his example continues to inspire, and so on and so forth), Van Sant's narrative structure understands what most film biographies don't -- that lives don't go straight up or straight down or straight forward but instead zig-zag and ping-pong all over the place every single day. Don't Worry lays out Callahan's life in nonlinear shards, skillfully jumping back and forth through time, and Van Sant sees the real story of that life not in how he became a semi-famous cartoonist but in how he stopped drinking and maintained his sobriety. The film avoids the hero worship trip, too, and never romanticizes Callahan's flaws, critiquing his regressive opinions and self-pity. And that cast. Hot damn. Joaquin Phoenix might be my favorite American actor working right now, and he does such an empathetic, feral, unsentimental job as Callahan, but the film is just as much about the community surrounding him, with beautiful, unusual performances from Kim Gordon, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Beth Ditto, Rooney Mara, Mark Webber, Carrie Brownstein, Tony Greenhand, Emilio Rivera, and, briefly, Heather Matarazzo, though we don't get enough Udo Kier for my taste. More Udo, Gus.
I was not expecting such a great film this late in the game from the fascinating but inconsistent (sometimes incoherent) Paul Schrader, especially one starring Ethan Hawke, an actor I just can't seem to like even when I try. Schrader in First Reformed uses the old masters of world cinema (Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Bergman, and Tarkovsky) as his compositional models and applies that formal rigor to a story packed with the anxieties, fears, and terrible crises of the present moment. It's a bold, unfashionable choice, and a painfully alive piece of art that wrestles with the despair, rage, and helplessness so many of us are feeling about climate change and the unchecked corporate greed deliberately impeding any solutions. Hawke (surprisingly great) plays Ernst Toller, a troubled minister at a tiny Dutch Reformed church in small-town upstate New York. The church has only a few dozen congregants, but its status as a historical landmark brings in tourists, and its upkeep and Toller's salary and rent are bankrolled by a garish megachurch (whose pastor is played by Cedric the Entertainer, in a sharp, subtle performance). After counseling a congregant who is in deep despair about climate change, Toller experiences a crisis of faith and conscience that takes him to some wild, extreme places. This is an intense movie that is willing to get dark and uncomfortable, but it's righteous and emotionally honest, too, with moments of humor. It's only the second widely distributed American movie I've seen that places climate change front and center in a fictional story (Downsizing was the other one), and maybe that's box office poison, but I admire Schrader for going all in and somehow making a great movie out of it.
Excepting my wife and those maniacs at the Cahiers du Cinema, I'm not expecting too many people to share my love for this movie. The culture at large decided Lars von Trier was canceled a handful of years ago, and a lot of people online who have and haven't seen this movie have expressed a lot of loud reasons why they think it's bad and why the people who enjoy it are also bad. Von Trier is consistently written off as an edgelord misogynist/misandrist troll and/or a boring dinosaur stuck in the faux-edgy past, and he certainly gives his detractors plenty of ammo with each film's marketing gimmicks and his public persona. What I never find in all this window dressing and noise is my own personal experience with his films. I don't know what movies other people are watching when they watch von Trier, but they're not the same ones I'm seeing. It's a strange disconnect I don't know how to reconcile. I think his work is funny, moving, and compositionally exciting, and he's the only filmmaker I know who has managed to translate depression as I understand and feel it into a visual and narrative language, particularly in Melancholia. Von Trier puts so many people off, I think, because the emotionally serious and prankster troll parts of him are fused, not separated. It makes people think he's having a laugh at their expense or going for a cheap shock, and maybe at his worst, he is, but I feel a lot of sympathy with this contradictory way of seeing the world (and it makes for some exciting, playful, strange art), and I don't think he's ever disingenuous. Having said all that, I expected The House that Jack Built to be the von Trier movie that didn't work for me. A graphically violent movie about a serial killer who considers his murders to be works of art, huh? It sounded so played out and wannabe controversial and stupid on the page. Turns out, it's a pretty hilarious comedy (with some admittedly horrifying scenes) of self-examination and a real companion piece to his previous two-part film, Nymphomaniac, another sustained piece of self-examination. Von Trier has made a film about whether the damage he's caused in people's lives in the process of making his art was worth it, and he's not afraid to explore the possibility that it wasn't. I loved it. Okay, throw your stones.
Welsh-based, Zambian-born filmmaker Nyoni returned to the country of her birth and early childhood for her first feature (after several shorts), and it's a stunning debut that has me excited for whatever she does next. A visceral drama with elements of comedy and fantasy and an incredible central performance from a nine-year-old non-actor (Maggie Mulubwa), I Am Not a Witch occupies a tonally tricky space with confidence and invention, and Nyoni captures beautiful, haunting, vibrant images throughout. Mulubwa plays Shula, a girl who wanders alone, wearing a "Bootylicious" shirt, into a small Zambian village. She doesn't say who she is or how she got there, and the village authorities decide she's a witch. They take her to a witches' camp, populated mostly by elderly women, where Shula has two choices: remain in the camp, tied to a long tether so she can't fly away, forced to put herself on display for tourists and work odd jobs for the local government, or roam free with the catch that she would most likely be magically transformed into a goat as punishment. Shula has other ideas and attempts to live her own life, to much resistance. Nyoni's film paints universal truths about the indignities and lack of choice forced on so many women everywhere, every day, while remaining a specific, eccentric, singular vision.
Jenkins follows Moonlight, one of the only great movies to win a Best Picture Oscar, with a sumptuous adaptation of James Baldwin's 1974 novel. I have a couple of gripes with the film (the Puerto Rico scenes lack the complexity, detail, and atmosphere Baldwin gave them in his novel, and Jenkins' ending, a scene that doesn't appear in the book, softens the uncertainty of Baldwin's conclusion), but the surrounding movie is more than strong enough to survive them. Like Todd Haynes' Carol, this is a visually elegant period love story where the personal and the political pour into each other with amazing closeups that are both beautiful and loaded with meaning, and like Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, this is a literary adaptation that is faithful (mostly) to its source material while also being a personal work for its director (yes, I know Carol is a literary adaptation, too, but I haven't read Patricia Highsmith's novel yet, so gimme a break; it's on my shelf). Beale Street is a film of faces looking and being looked at; cigarette smoke catching the light; jazz, soul, blues, Latin rock, and Nicholas Britell's gorgeous orchestral score moving from background to foreground like a cast member; family meetings over tables; streets at night and in the light of day; boxes and cages; and families doing what they have to do.
Granik follows Winter's Bone with a quiet, patient masterpiece about a widowed veteran with severe PTSD illegally living off the grid with his teenage daughter in an Oregon state park and what happens when certain choices become available after other choices are taken away. Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie give empathetic, subtly devastating performances as the father and daughter, and Granik finds powerful drama in small moments and gestures with zero over-emoting or artificially heightened narrative gimmicks. I love the way Granik films raindrops and dew on leaves in Oregon forests, and I was happy to see one of my favorite obscure singer/songwriters, Michael Hurley, turn up in a cameo. A major achievement.
A difficult film to describe or grab hold of, Let the Sunshine In, about the romantic hopes and disappointments of a painter in her early fifties, is deceptively slight and not a particularly good entry point if this is your first Claire Denis film. I don't mean it's not great, because it is, but I do mean that it's a little too easy to misunderstand as a trifle or an incomplete story if you're not already seduced by Denis's narrative rhythms and elliptical style and way of looking at the world. (Get seduced, please. She's one of the greatest living filmmakers.) This is not me making an excuse for a lesser work because I'm a Denis superfan; it's me saying, if you don't like this one or don't get it, watch a handful of her other movies and then give it another spin. You'll see all kinds of things you missed. (I don't have the talent to put those things into words; just know they're there.) Now that I've driven you away, come back, because Juliette Binoche plays the painter, and her luminous face and its instinctive understanding of how to be photographed by a camera is the film's real subject.
An act of radical subjective empathy (unlike most recent American films, which force you to dissolve your own thoughts and desires into a solitary hero's journey while every other character exists only to support or get in the way of said hero), Madeline's Madeline puts you deep in the head of Madeline (Helena Howard), a 17-year-old girl trying to figure out the normal teenage biz and the problems specific to her family while also coping with mental illness (probably bipolar disorder, though the film doesn't name it) and creating characters for the experimental theater troupe she's an extraordinarily talented part of. Decker's film is a formally complex marvel, somehow turning the indefinable shape of the interconnected ways a person thinks into images and a narrative structure. Decker trusts the audience to find its way in, and instead of putting Madeline's personality and point of view into easily definable categories, she presents a space where clear thoughts, delusions, the creative process, and fantasy coexist, mingle, combine, and influence each other. A daring and relentlessly creative film that somehow carves a perfect ending out of an unendable premise.
Mandy is a lysergic swirl of beauty and horror with a visual palette that blends so many disparate (and beloved by me) '70s and '80s elements that I can't decide whether it avoids retro nostalgia by mutating the old into something new or whether it's expertly designed to overwhelm a guy like me with too many things I love at once, overpowering my nostalgia aversion with a strain of super-nostalgia I have no antidote for. Somehow fusing the pictorial essence of Tarkovsky's Solaris, every '70s prog album cover, every '70s and '80s metal album cover (with the exception of hair metal), horror and fantasy paperbacks, cult classics and obscure midnight movies only available on VHS, fundamentalist Satanic panic PSAs, pseudo-religious cults, Frank Frazetta's Conan art, every issue of Heavy Metal, the best Mad Max ripoffs, blacklight posters, idyllic Pacific Northwest nature footage, and every LSD and magic mushroom hallucination between 1982 and 2001 (oh yeah, and a little bit of 2001), Mandy turns an intimate love story, a kidnapping, a murder, and a plot for revenge into an operatic and mythological descent into hell, a transcendent visual experience, and one of the trippiest, mindfuckingest horror movies in years. I also love how Cosmatos nails that particular cult leader combination of scary charisma and pathetically fragile masculinity, and how the major events of the second half of the film are set in motion because a woman laughs at a man's mediocre soft-rock music and his ego cannot handle it. Read the room and Mandy's Black Sabbath t-shirt, motherfucker.
This impression of free jazz drummer Milford Graves is a top-shelf mindblower and a real alternative to the lack of imagination plaguing most music documentaries. Is this even a documentary? It's a limiting word and not that accurate here. Directors Meginsky and Young are both musicians, and they understand that a conventional, linear history, quick clips, and talking head interviews don't tell you shit about a person or that person's art. Instead, we get lengthy, meditative shots of Graves' home (a work of art in itself) in Queens, recent and archival performance footage (full pieces, not the truncated stuff, all incredible), a camera that lets him talk instead of answer questions, and impressions of him doing his thing, whether that be strapping himself or visitors to his home into his EKG machine and turning their heart rates and rhythms into electronic music pieces, practicing his own discipline of martial arts based on the movements of the praying mantis, gardening, and playing drums. Graves has a wonderfully nonlinear mind, and thoughts that initially come across as eccentric rambling always end up going somewhere wise and beautiful.
Bozon made the delightfully strange and melancholic war film La France in 2008, and now he's made a delightfully strange and melancholic take on the Jekyll and Hyde story with a great, physical Isabelle Huppert performance at its center. Huppert plays Marie Gequil, an idealistic but mostly lousy high school science teacher who is too stiff and nervous to connect with her students and colleagues until she's struck by lightning while working in the chemistry lab. This sounds like the setup for wacky comedy or horror, and though what happens next is often funny or horrifying (or both), Bozon is not going to give you what you expect (or maybe even want). Bozon has the damnedest, driest tone and the good sense to leave some of his mysteries unsolved (and a penchant for a surprise musical number or two), and I dig where he's coming from even if I sometimes don't understand why. He combines so many things that shouldn't belong together, and anyone who does that is climbing my tree. Huppert is on fire here, adding another essential performance to a career full of them.
Finnish writer/director Kaurismaki has long been one of my favorites, and his string of bone-dry, humanist comedies about the daily routines and dreams of local no-hopers has been a reliable, offbeat pleasure since the '80s. With The Other Side of Hope (and its predecessor, 2011's incredible Le Havre), Kaurismaki retains everything I like about his work but lets more of the rest of the world in, adding urgent, political bite by looking at the interactions between immigrants and native-born Europeans and the lack of basic humanity and decency in immigration laws, strictly enforced borders, and xenophobia. The Other Side of Hope tells the intersecting stories of Wikstrom (Sakari Kuosmanen), a retired traveling salesman in Helsinki who wins a sizeable amount of money gambling and impulsively buys a small restaurant, retaining all the existing employees, and Khaled (Sherwan Haji), a Syrian refugee trying to survive government bureaucracy, immigration officials, a fascist right-wing gang that has targeted him, and the culture shock of Finland while trying to earn enough money to bring his sister over. Wikstrom hires Khaled at his restaurant. Kaurismaki avoids the white savior bullshit of toothless message movies by emphasizing shared community, humanity, and the uncertainty of an often remorselessly cruel world, retaining his wonderful sense of humor and beautiful shot compositions throughout.
A new Orson Welles film in 2018? Welles shot this scathing, melancholic, cinephile's dream, backstage melodrama, film-within-a-film, ahead-of and of-its-time critique and self-critique of machismo and the-male-director-as-genius between 1970 and 1976 and edited about 45 minutes together sometime before his death in 1985, but an explanation of why it was never finished or released until 2018 (with a newly composed Michel Legrand score) is such a winding and complicated road that I don't have the space to go into it here. (See the documentary They'll Love Me When I'm Dead and the 30-minute making-of trailer for The Other Side of the Wind on Netflix to get some of the historical background and myriad reasons for the delay, though I suggest you watch them after seeing Welles' film. Also, see The Other Side of the Wind on the big screen if you can, but if you can't, it's streaming on Netflix, who helped finance the film's completion. I'll stop telling you what to do now.) Longtime and long-suffering Welles cinematographer Gary Graver carried the torch for The Other Side of the Wind until his own death in 2006, and it is Graver's masterpiece as much as Welles'. It's a shame that roughly two-thirds of the people involved in Wind didn't live to see it finished and released, but it's an amazing thing to have at all. Co-written and co-starring Welles' longtime partner Oja Kodar (who also directed a few scenes herself), Wind is about the last day in the life of veteran director Jake Hannaford (John Huston, playing a character that's a composite of Welles, Huston, Ernest Hemingway, and every 20th century great man myth) attempting to mount a comeback with a sexually explicit youth picture in the style of the New Hollywood of Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider and the European art film (in particular, the film-within-a-film parodies Antonioni, a director Welles inexplicably disliked). The film opens on the set of Hannaford's film before moving to a raucous house party for his birthday, where reels from the work-in-progress are shown and old wounds are ripped open. The film (by this I mean the Welles film in toto, not the fictional Hannaford's partly fictional film-within-the-film), which took a Herculean effort to edit together, jumps back and forth between different film stocks and aspect ratios, as 8 and 16mm black and white and color footage from home movies and different documentary crews at the party are cut together with Hannaford's lushly composed 35mm color film, also called The Other Side of the Wind. It's a dizzying, overwhelming experience that can feel chaotic and messy, but Welles knew what he was doing, and a controlled narrative structure emerges from the madness. The cast is a real treat for film lovers, too, featuring a wild assortment of actors, directors, film critics and historians, and amateurs playing variations on themselves or other people in the film business, including Huston, Kodar, Cathy Lucas (a teenage waitress from a nearby restaurant where the crew liked to eat, in her only film role -- she'd never heard of Welles or Huston when she agreed to be in the movie), Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, Norman Foster, Bob Random, Lilli Palmer, Edmond O'Brien, Mercedes McCambridge, Cameron Mitchell, Paul Stewart, Gregory Sierra, Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Curtis Harrington, Claude Chabrol, Stephane Audran, George Jessel, Peter Jason, Joseph McBride, Gary Graver, Frank Marshall, William Katt, Rich Little, Cameron Crowe, Todd McCarthy, and even recently disgraced TV executive and horrible human being Les Moonves. I was astounded by the whole thing (admittedly, as a rabid movie lover, The Other Side of the Wind is like heroin to me), but a sex scene in a car during a rainstorm in the film-within-a-film is one of the greatest pieces of filmmaking I've ever seen. Welles was so much more than the boy wonder who made Citizen Kane, and we're lucky to have this strange, beautiful, conflicted, experimental, triumphant thing as yet more proof of that.
Chloe Zhao is a Chinese woman who was born and raised in the third most populous city in the world, and she's made an empathetic, detailed, open film about young men, masculinity, rural America, and rodeo culture with a cast of nonprofessional actors playing variations on themselves and their peers. Filmmakers make films outside of their personal experiences all the time, so I hope my observation isn't condescending. I'm just excited by the possibilities of what an outsider with a great eye and an open mind can bring to a location and a community. The Rider is about an injured Lakota Sioux rodeo rider and horseman in rural South Dakota contemplating whether to keep doing what he loves at risk to his life and health or give it up and lose his identity. He's played by real-life rodeo star Brady Jandreau, whose real-life father and sister play his character's father and sister. Zhao pulls subtle, beautiful performances out of her non-actors and captures the South Dakota landscape in its overwhelming and sometimes unforgiving grandeur, finding the connections between people, animals, and geography in her gorgeously composed shots. Zhao's next film is going to be a Marvel superhero movie, oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly considering that every mainstream American movie for the rest of my life will probably be a damn superhero movie). I'm intrigued by what she'll bring to it, but I hope she keeps making movies like this one, too.
I love this movie, and I'm also a little suspicious of it, which is why I placed it in both the favorites and special problems sections of my year-end list. I have trouble reconciling these conflicted feelings, but they probably don't need to be reconciled. Movies, like people, are a lot of things at once. Cuaron's return to his native Mexico for the first time since Y tu mama tambien is a semi-autobiographical drama set in Mexico City in the early '70s based on the life of the live-in maid, Liboria Rodriguez (named Cleo in the film), who worked for Cuaron's family when he was a child, and his extensive interviews with her informed his screenplay. The movie's pleasures are many: gorgeous black and white cinematography (oh my god, digital cameras have come a long way), strange and wonderful images in nearly every scene, extensive period detail, a cast with real presence (especially Yalitza Aparicio, in her first movie, as Cleo), a narrative that's driven by character and time more than plot, and an offbeat sense of humor. That is more than enough to recommend it, and I do recommend it, especially on a big screen (it's also streaming on Netflix). My suspicions crept in, mostly after the fact, when I thought about certain scenes (especially the ending), and how I was unsure whether in those scenes Cuaron was critiquing his family's upper-middle-class privilege or whether he was blinded by it. To get into this in any more detail, I would have to give away a few scenes, including the ending, but Cleo (and probably Liboria, and probably many people working as live-in domestic help) is in the complex role of being both a family member and an employee in a household that decides which one she is based on its needs and conveniences, and I felt as if Cuaron was sometimes sharply observant of this and sometimes ignorant of it, depending on the situation. I'm not sure if I'm articulating my specific discomfort in any coherent way, but I think Cuaron's empathy and privilege collide in Roma in fascinating and contradictory ways, which I guess is another reason to see it.
Boots Riley was in film school when his band The Coup got a record deal in the early '90s, so he made the choice to put one dream on hold while living out another (though he did direct several Coup videos). Finally getting the chance to make a feature, Riley delivers a funny, vibrant, and scary comedy about where we're at right now, transforming his city of Oakland into a surrealist playground of the imagination but keeping the emotional and political landscape grounded in reality, or whatever the hell we're calling what we're living. Sorry to Bother You understands that everything is connected: class, race, sex, corporate profits, workers' rights and lack of rights, endless war, the military-industrial complex, paying the rent, success and failure, having a good time with your friends, art, entertainment. Riley packs each frame with layers of visual detail without smothering his ideas or his audience, and he'd earned enough of my trust as a viewer that I was completely ready to take the third act's wild turn. Sorry to Bother You in setting, atmosphere, and tone finds at least partial kindred spirits in Being John Malkovich, Putney Swope, Do the Right Thing, Brazil, and Charles Burnett's short film When It Rains, but mostly it reminded me of itself. It also placed one of my favorite currently working American actors, Lakeith Stanfield, in a leading role after some pretty great supporting work in Atlanta and Get Out. I like him because he doesn't just think about who his characters are and how they say their lines. He also really gets inside how these characters move physically, how they walk and sit and talk, and reveal or hide emotions in certain movements, and he does this without obvious actorly tricks or affectations.
Support the Girls is one of the rare American films to understand what it's like to go to work and do a job, and it gets its balance of comedy, drama, political anger, and joy just right. It reminded me, formally and in spirit, of '70s and '80s Jonathan Demme in its portrait of a community of peers (in this case, a group of coworkers and regular customers) and its mixture of the bitter and the sweet. The film follows Lisa (Regina Hall) throughout her work day as the manager of a Hooters-style breastaurant on a frontage road near the interstate. Though Lisa is the central character, we also get to know the other women who work there, the customers, and the owner in fairly nuanced detail. Everyone is really, really good in this (excepting the unfortunate Southern accent sported by Lea DeLaria), especially Hall, Haley Lu Richardson, Shayna McHayle (better known as the rapper Junglepussy when she's not acting), and James LeGros (an actor I keep forgetting how much I like -- I need to stop doing that, he's always so good). In a deceptively simple hour-and-a-half running time and day-in-the-life structure, Bujalski's film covers so much ground about the modern workplace, the hustle to pay bills, the ways women support each other, the ways men idealize and/or demean women, how certain bars and restaurants become surrogate families for lonely customers, independent businesses competing with chains, hiring, firing, and quitting with (and without) dignity, and finding a space to live a little when you're working too much.
Bertrand Mandico's first feature-length film after 20 years of experimental shorts is a gender-bending, glitter-skulled head trip that resembles some unholy marriage of Guy Maddin, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Kathy Acker, Jean Vigo, Todd Haynes, Kenneth Anger, glam rock, Hollywood high seas adventure movies from the '40s and '50s, Greek myth, and reels from vintage stag movies decaying in real time. More a full-on experience than a straightforward narrative, the film is about five spoiled teenage boys (played by five women) found not guilty due to lack of evidence after committing a horrible crime under the influence of occult force TREVOR and their own aesthetic interest in the arts. The boys' wealthy parents try to scare them straight by sending them out on a ship with a rugged, manly sea captain legendary for taming wild boys. He brings them to a lush, mysterious island, where all I'll say is that everyone goes through some changes. Mandico's film is a marvel of color, image, wit, construction, beauty, and androgyny.
Like Madeline's Madeline, which I called "an act of radical subjective empathy" several paragraphs up (maybe that's a little pompous, but I'm keeping it), You Were Never Really Here embeds the viewer in its main character's head. That main character is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix, in his second great performance of the year), a Gulf War vet with major trauma, living with and taking care of his elderly mother (Eraserhead's Judith Roberts, fantastic) and working as a hired killer and recoverer of missing persons for wealthy, politically connected clients. (Some people online have complained that the characters and story are unrealistic, as if verisimilitude in art is a virtue and universal goal rather than one of many tools in the box, but some people online are always complaining, including, sometimes, me.) Joe's head is a tough place to be, but Ramsay and Phoenix kept me there, curious and invested. Ramsay is great at taking a linear story and cracking it into pieces that she puts back together with style and emotional heft (especially in Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar), and Phoenix as actor and Jonny Greenwood as the composer of the score are fellow travelers and partners in crime. That Greenwood score is great, by the way. If that whole Radiohead thing doesn't work out, I think he'll be alright.
Maybe my favorite film of 2018, Zama is an adaptation of Antonio Di Benedetto's 1956 novel about a low-level Argentinean administrative official in a remote South American colony in the late 18th century fruitlessly attempting to get a promotion and transfer to Buenos Aires. Martel's eerie, hypnotic images go beyond a critique of colonialism and its attendant moral and environmental rot (though that's there, too), taking it somewhere much stranger and turning the emasculation of a bureaucrat into an ecstatically potent work of visual art. Martel's images have the visionary power of the great art film masterpieces from the pre-digital age without imitating or referring to them and without their canonical baggage. Her eye is her own and belongs to the present. Zama is a weird, darkly funny, beguiling movie, and I was entranced by every frame.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Before We Vanish (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Fascinating but curiously distancing alien invasion epic/domestic drama hybrid that is pretty defeatist about our chances as a species. I admired its ambition, weirdness, and the wild opening scene that made me think I was in for a horror film. (I still want that horror film.)
Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (Sara Driver)
Driver's first feature film since 1993's When Pigs Fly is a good but traditionally straightforward documentary about Basquiat from the years when he was a homeless teenager on the streets of New York until the weeks right before Warhol made him a celebrity, told by the people who knew him well between the late '70s and middle '80s. Driver, tired of dealing with bullshit industry sexism, spent the years in between her last film teaching at NYU, writing and directing plays, making a few shorts, and working in various capacities on her life partner Jim Jarmusch's films, but it's great to have her back behind the camera. I hope she makes many more. You Are Not I and When Pigs Fly are so great, and Sleepwalk is one of my favorite things on this earth.
Halloween (David Gordon Green)
This affectionate, nostalgic, fan-letter tribute to John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween is a solid, exciting horror movie with a new Carpenter score, a returning Jamie Lee Curtis, and a film-stealing performance from Jibrail Nantambu, an exceedingly rare child actor you won't want to strangle. I had a really good time.
Ismael's Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin)
As densely packed, narratively unconventional, psychologically mysterious, and exquisitely performed as Desplechin's best, Ismael's Ghosts didn't make it onto my favorites list because it didn't linger in my thoughts the way his other work did (and still does), and I was a bit skeptical of his sympathies for his lead character. Still, this is a strong, underrated film (maybe I'm underrating it?) with emotionally complex work from Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Marion Cotillard.
SPECIAL PROBLEMS
Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable (Sasha Waters Freyer)
Absolutely worth watching this documentary to see hundreds of Winogrand photographs on the big screen (or at least big TV screen), but, my god, some of Winogrand's old New York male peers interviewed at length here are windbags, sexists, racists, world-doesn't-exist-outside-of-Manhattan snobs, and dullards. Part of this may be Freyer's intention, giving these men out of time enough rope to hang themselves with, but the women, younger people, and mentees of Winogrand interviewed here all have more insightful things to say than the old guard. Also, Freyer's music choices were a bit annoying, and I felt like a bull being pulled by the nose ring (for example, when Winogrand was feeling lost and out of favor and wondering what his next creative move would be, the soundtrack begins playing U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For").
Here to Be Heard: The Story of the Slits (William E. Badgley)
Badgley's documentary about punk and postpunk (and beyond) pioneers The Slits is entertaining, engrossing, and captures the varied personalities of each woman in the band, with lots of great music clips, but it's also amateurish in construction and visually flat, leaving out important details and context, never giving the audience enough information about when the chronology of events occurred, and rushing through parts of the story. Still, if you love the band, it's worth seeing.
Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson)
Anderson's second stop-motion animation film after 2009's Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox is the first Anderson film to leave me cold, though I liked the way the animation looked when the wind blew through the dogs' fur. I thought the mini-controversy about Anderson appropriating Japanese culture was dumb. Anderson's films are massive hits in Japan, and Isle of Dogs is a love letter and thank you to the country, co-written with Japanese actor Kunichi Nomura, with inside jokes, references, and signs in nearly every frame specifically intended for Japanese audiences, and reading Japanese critics on the film has been pretty illuminating. I just thought it was kinda boring, with too much plot and not enough character development and jokes that mostly fell flat. I bear it no ill will. I was just underwhelmed. Anderson's films come dangerously close to being too smothering, too fussy, too intricately composed, but there's a warm, human heartbeat and playful sense of humor that keeps me invested in his work. There wasn't enough of that heartbeat in Isle of Dogs and a little too much fuss.
Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
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