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fearraigh · 8 years

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Films of the Year 2016

It was a far from vintage year for films with fewer stand-outs than in other years but there were plenty of decent movies and a few that bear repeat viewing. My own list is more limited than it usually would be as I left Paris halfway through the year; the range of stuff on show in Hong Kong really isn’t comparable so I missed out on a number of films that most likely would have been included here, such as Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada, Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius and Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, to name but four. Expect to see at least one or two of them in next year’s list. Among the films that did make the list, I was struck by the prevalence of comedies. I don’t know if that speaks of a particular trend in international cinema or simply my appreciating that sort of thing more as I get older. Either way, it was a pleasure to see comedy, a genre too often overlooked by critics, flourish in many diverse forms this year. It should also be said that comedy is a far trickier genre to pull off than drama, especially in its more cerebral incarnations. In that respect at least, 2016, an otherwise bleak year, delivered.

1. The Assassin (Cìkè Niè Yǐnniáng) –– Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Taiwan/China/Hong Kong/France) 105 minutes

Hou Hsiao-Hsien turned to wuxia for his first film in almost a decade but his attempt is very unlike Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou’s past forays into the genre, being almost wilfully non-commercial. His regular leading lady Shu Qi plays a feudal-era assassin Nie Yinniang, who specialises in taking out corrupt government officials, in this adaptation of Pei Bing’s 9th-century martial arts story. When one day she declines to carry out a job because her prospective victim’s young child is present, her Machiavellian master, the nun Jiaxin (Fang Yi-sheu) punishes her by forcing her to kill her cousin Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen) to whom she was once betrothed. There’s not much more in terms of plot and Hou has drained the film of most of the more spectacular trappings of the wuxia genre––while the action scenes are slickly mounted, they are brief and sporadic. It is a slow-burning film that will frustrate many but it is like an alluringly mysterious objet d’art––a work of consummate production values (In the Mood for Love’s Mark Lee Ping Bin excelling himself once again with the cinematography) and it has the strangest entrancing air of calm about it (occasionally punctuated by violent murder). I have seen few films in my life as quiet as this one and it’s one you want to watch again and again and let wash over you, like water lapping on the shore. Hou deservedly won the Best Director award at the 2015 Cannes Festival and his direction is mysterious to the point of being miraculous: how did he get it all so still and quiet?

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2. Look Who’s Back (Er ist wieder da) –– David Wnendt (Germany) 116 minutes

In any other year this adaptation of Timur Vermes’ bestseller about Hitler landing in present-day Germany and becoming a reality-TV star might have been no more than a minor diversion, albeit a very funny one. With the election of Donald Trump however (not to mention other advances of the far right in Europe and elsewhere), Look Who’s Back has a striking prescience and now appears to be a lot more than simply a sharp satire on the vacuity of contemporary television. Hitler (Oliver Carsucci) himself and his disorientation in a German society lights years from what he had envisaged are initially a source of mirth –– there are particularly good gags about cereal bars (‘is rationing still going on?’ he asks) and the Greens, whom Hitler sees as the only party with any real commitment to the Heimat. The audience is not let become too indulgent of the humour though and the increasing acceptance of previously taboo jokes and comments will have a disturbing ring to it, as is the manner in which Hitler rises again undetected by a public that can see only irony and absurdity rather than the danger of the secondhand rhetoric itself. The interspersion of documentary-style vox pops with angry populists adds to the unease the film provokes. I’m not sure if Vermes or Wnendt had any particular foresight that everyone else missed but their film does look eerily prophetic now.

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3. The Treasure (Comoara) –– Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania/France) 89 minutes

Porumboiu, one of the Romanian New Wave’s finest directors, continues his excavation of the country’s recent history in a literal fashion with this archeological comedy. Costi (Toma Cuzin) is an honest low-ranking office clerk who lives a quiet, and largely contented, existence in his Bucharest neighbourhood. His shifty-looking neighbour Adrian (Adrian Purcacescu) convinces him to go in on an investment to rent a metal-detector and unearth treasure that Adrian’s grandfather, on his deathbed, had told him was buried at the family’s country home. The pair devote a Saturday to the task––being careful to avoid the attentions of the law, as finds that are over a certain value become the property of the State––but they find they need more time than they initially thought. Porumboiu, if you’ll pardon the pun, mines some great humour from the subject matter, and The Treasure resembles both Beckett and Stoppard in its winsome humour (it is particularly surprising how few people have exploited the comic potential of metal-detectors before). It is a further reminder of how fertile a field for exploration Romanian history is (and Romania’s contemporary society too). Another great film by Porumboiu, who seems incapable of making a bad one.

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4. Homeland: Iraq Year Zero –– Abbas Fahdal (Iraq/France) 334 minutes

The Iraq war is the source code for much of what has gone wrong with the world in recent years. Any number of things bear the stamp of its baleful influence –– the rise of Donald Trump, the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, the creation of ISIS, not to mention a widespread distrust of news and media that has now spiralled irrevocably out of control. The aggression of the US and its allies from 2003 has coloured everything that came after and it is a shocking dereliction (though not such a surprising one) that American cinema has failed so badly to frame the conflict.

Abbas Fahdal, a French-based Iraqi video-journalist, offers a rare glimpse of the Iraqi perspective on the war. His two-part film documents in its first half (‘Before the Fall’) the run-up to the offensive, as his Baghdad family watch with a resigned and cynical eye the impending disaster, while all the time being careful not to say anything, good or bad, about Saddam. The second part (‘After the Battle’) is an ultimately draining account of the chaos that prevails in the wake of the US invasion, as the Fahdal family negotiate with difficulty an increasingly perilous city, with already scarce rations rapidly diminishing and armed gangs prowling looking for prey to finance their nascent cottage industry of kidnapping and abduction. Homeland is a vital historical document, presumably one of the few of its kind, and is a horrendous, if humane, telling of the effects this world-historical event had on one family. It’s a far from comprehensive portrait of a reckless conflict that destroyed a country but at its core is a truthful lode. It is also entirely appropriate that US soldiers are for once presented onscreen as shadowly menacing and really not to be trusted.

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5. Train to Busan (Busanhaeng) –– Yeon Sang-ho (South Korea) 118 minutes

Few genres have become clapped out so quickly as the zombie flick and, on the face of it, Train to Busan ought not to buck any trends. There is nothing particularly novel either in its content or its execution (bearing a rather strong resemblance to the so-so World War Z, for one thing) but this rather straightforward tale of a zombie epidemic that stalks a train trying to get from infected Seoul to the safety of Busan in the very south of Korea, has an unexpected, er, freshness. The performances have something to do with that, even when they enliven with brio the hoariest stock characters (Kim Su-an as a kind-hearted eight-year-old who finally gets to bond with her deadbeat corporate dad, played by Gong Yoo; Ma Dong-seok as a resourceful blue-collar tough; Kim Eui-sung as a pantomime-villain chaebol figurehead). It is also due to the brisk direction of Yeon Sang-ho, who brings a wonderful verve to his first live-action feature. And the film delivers in spades the thrills expected from such an enterprise as this without making every concession to the audience – not everyone is going to pull through, regardless of how the film’s various mini-morality tales play out. The film also has a political resonance, the entirety of which will probably only be picked up by Korean audiences, but even those less familiar with the country will get something from it.

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6. The Woods Dreams Are Made Of (Le bois dont les rêves sont fait) –– Claire Simon (France) 144 minutes

Claire Simon’s latest documentary is a sympathetic portrait of Paris’ largest public park, the Bois de Vincennes, situated at the city’s easternmost extremity, in the old royal town of the same name. Its 995 hectares draw Parisians for walking, jogging, cycling, picnicking, playing sports, as well as a number of less family-friendly pursuits such as cruising and prostitution. Simon interviews a number of the park’s habitués, such as a Portuguese pigeon breeder, a family of Cambodian immigrants attending a community picnic, a pair of the park’s many streetwalkers, an elderly couple living rough in a tent, a quixotic would-be gay cruiser and, in one particularly bizarre sequence, a voyeur/exhibitionist who reels off the intellectual justification for his activities. There is also an interview with the daughter of Gilles Deleuze, who taught at the prefab university that existed, without legal planning permission, in the park from 1968 to 1976 (these days it is the University of Paris 8, having been transplanted north to St-Denis). Audio of Deleuze’s lectures is laid over the footage of the grassland where the lecture theatres once stood. It’s a reflection of the scope and interest of the film and Simon does justice to what is one of Paris’ most undervalued public amenities, as beautiful and welcoming in winter as it is in summer.

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7. Everybody Wants Some!! –– Richard Linklater (USA) 117 minutes

Linklater, more often a director of instinct than intellect, is generally at his best when he tackles seemingly more frivolous subject matter. Everybody Wants Some!!, his first film since his biggest hit to date, Boyhood, takes us back over somewhat familiar ground. Or so it seems. The semi-autobiographical account of a college baseball team (who knew there was such a thing as college baseball?) in Texas in 1980 has more than a whiff of Dazed and Confused about it. You even find yourself doing a double-take wondering if some members of the young cast are the same in the two films, made 23 years apart. Such is the ease with which Linklater conjures his world and the seamless fashion in which he enacts his drama. There is something infinitely persuasive about the texture of Everybody Wants Some!! that makes it compelling viewing. While clearly fictive, his scenarios are at the same time convincing in a way that few Hollywood films are. It is testimony to his actors and his own directing of them that the film’s diegetic universe is at once tangible and credible. An example of the film’s success is the night club scene, something that is rarely done with any persuasiveness in cinema – Linklater’s club scene is vibrant, pulsing and, most significantly of all, populated by people who are there to have a good time, which you imagine those involved in its making were themselves having. Like Dazed and Confused before it Everybody Wants Some!! is a wonderfully warm and funny film, and a reminder that inconsequential films can sometimes turn out to be cinematically the most substantial.

8. Slack Bay (Ma Loute) –– Bruno Dumont (Germany/France) 122 minutes

Bruno Dumont, a filmmaker whose career to date has been characterised largely by a po-faced aesthetic, tries his hand at big-screen comedy for the first time, following the success of his relatively humorous TV series Ptit Quinquin. It is also only the second time he has worked with name professional actors (the first time was in Camille Claudel 1916, featuring Juliette Binoche, who reappears here). The result is a surprisingly masterful broad comedy of the sort that would be difficult to pull off for even the most seasoned of comics. The Van Peteghems (Fabrice Luchini, Valérie Tedeschi-Bruni and Binoche) are a ‘prominent family of the Lille bourgeoisie’ holidaying on the northern French coast, oblivious to how much their obnoxiousness riles those around them. They are equally oblivious to the rather anti-social nature of the Bruforts, a local family of impoverished mussel-pickers, whose eldest son, the enigmatically named ‘Ma Loute’ has designs on the Van Peteghems’ androgynous niece. The film veers between slapstick and Brechtian agitprop with a Heath-Robinson zaniness underpinning everything. It looks like it could fall apart at any minute, like Luchini’s wind-powered motor-contraption, but Ma Loute (I can’t bring myself to call it by its limp English title) is a brilliantly surreal and daft curiosity that sits very well alongside Bruno Dumont’s more serious work.

9. In Jackson Heights –– Frederick Wiseman (USA/France) 190 minutes

Queens may have provided us with the next president of the United States but the borough, with a few exceptions such as the Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming to America and Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop, has been largely ignored by the movies. Frederick Wiseman’s 41st film is another exception and takes a look at the Jackson Heights neighbourhood in the northwest of the borough, just south of LaGuardia airport. A little over three hours long, In Jackson Heights unfolds in typical Wiseman style, at a leisurely pace, with no voiceover, intertitles or explicit narration – it tells its story by observation and to-camera interviews. We sit in on conversations in old folk’s homes, birthday parties of local dignitaries, prayers at a mosque and meetings at a Jewish Community Centre. We see hair being cut, tattoos being inked, animals slaughtered at a halal butcher’s, punters dancing to Saturday night salsa and the local Colombian community celebrating their team’s wins at the 2014 World Cup (the population of Jackson Heights is about 60% Latino). The neighbourhood was also a pioneer of official support for gay rights following the homophobic murder of a local man, Julio Rivera, in 1990. But the area is beset by familiar problems: gentrification and rising rents, which are pushing longstanding small businesses out of the frame. Wiseman documents everything with an apparent impassiveness, letting his subjects have their say. While some might say the portrait of Jackson Heights it presents is unduly utopian, the film, as ever with Wiseman, is unfailingly engaging. Its director is now 86 years old and shows no signs of letting up in his industriousness. Long may he continue.

10. Things to Come (L’Avenir) –– Mia Hansen-Løve (France/Germany) 102 minutes

Isabelle Huppert’s proficiency as a comic actress has not exactly been unknown to the world, having been seen from time to time in films as varied as Hal Hartley’s Amateur, Hong Sang-soo’s In Another Country, Serge Bozon’s Tip Top and David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees but it was a surprise to see those comedic chops being put to use in quick succession this year. All the more so that none of the films in question, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, Pascal Bonitzer’s Tout de suite, maintenant and Mia-Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come, are comedies in the strictest sense of the word. The latter is probably the best of the three and the best showcase of Huppert’s own talents. Loosely based on the divorce of Hansen-Løve’s own parents, Things to Come tells the tale of philosophy teacher Nathalie Chazeaux, whose husband (Andre Macon) leaves her for a much younger woman. Nathalie finds her feet after what is initially an unexpected setback and, much as Juliette Binoche does in Three Colours Blue, finds a direction for her life, even as it means dealing with a strangely indifferent daughter (Sarah Le Picard) and a neurotic elderly mother (the brilliant Edith Scob). Hansen-Løve, directing her fifth feature, still aged only 35, has matured into an astute director of family dramas but this film has a lighter touch than before, not least due to Huppert, who shambles elegantly through things, with her a permanently bemused air and an expressiveness that sees off all setbacks.

11. Love & Friendship –– Whit Stillman (Ireland/France/Netherlands) 92 minutes

Whit Stillman’s comedies are often a bit too mannered for my tastes but his adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan was one of the most pleasing surprises of the year. A wonderfully wry comedy that is one of the few screen adaptations to fully capture Austen’s humour, it benefits in particular from a grandstanding performance by Kate Beckinsale in the main role of Lady Susan Vernon, “the most notorious flirt in all of London”. Stillman also reunites her with Chloë Sevigny two decades on from The Last Days of Disco, one of the most inspired pieces of self-referentialism in recent cinema.

12. I, Daniel Blake –– Ken Loach (UK/France) 100 minutes

Loach’s second Palme d’Or drew grumbles from some but the powerful tale of a stricken Geordie carpenter enduring the hell of a punitively Kafkaesque benefits system is one of his best films. Stand-up comedian Dave Johns gives a game performance as the titular Dan, who is messed around by a willfully obdurate bureaucracy enacting Tory dogma. There are moments when the film lurches into overly-familiar territory but Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty are a well-oiled machine, adept at fashioning a singular tale that is representative of the ordeals thousands have faced under an uncaring system. Excellent political cinema and a profoundly moving film.

13. John From –– João Nicolau (Portugal/France) 95 minutes

João Nicolau comes from the same stable as Miguel Gomes and there is a similar playfulness to his second feature, an off-beat comedy about a bored teenage girl, (Julia Palho) who gets on the nerves of her parents and everyone else in the Lisbon tower block she lives in. She also develops an obsession with a Polynesian exhibition at the local arts centre (whence the title comes), which gives rise to some quirky Rivettian set pieces. A languid unassuming film that is a welcome addition to the pantheon of films about the dog days of August.

14. After the Storm (Umi yori mo mada fukaku) –– Hirokazu Koreeda (Japan) 117 minutes

The incredibly prolific (and unerringly consistent) Koreeda serves up yet another family drama, with feckless fathers once again at the centre of things. In this case, there are two––Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), a perennially blocked novelist and gambling addict, who is perennially destined to disappoint his young son, and his recently deceased father, whose own gambling habit squandered the family wealth. Ryota now hangs around the family home, hoping to persuade his mother (Kirin Kiki, who also played his mother in Koreeda’s Still Walking) to part with a supposedly valuable family heirloom. The film is structured around the typhoon of the title, which draws most the cast under the one roof. It gives the film a slightly stagey feel but Koreeda keeps things cinematic and real.

15. Right Now, Wrong Then (Ji-geum-eun-mat-go-geu-ddae-neun-teul-li-da)/Yourself and Yours (Dangsin Jasingwa Dangsinui Geot) –– Hong Sang-soo (South Korea) 121 minutes/86 minutes

Another prolific Asian director, Hong Sang-soo, came out with two new films this year, each one representing a further detour into experimentation. Like most of his films, they resemble one another. In Right Now, Wrong Then, a boozy arthouse film director courts a young artist in two different scenarios, each time with different results. Yourself and Yours is on the other hand a variation on Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, in which a young couple decide to go on a break, the woman disappearing and being replaced by an identical woman (played by the same actress) who acts very differently, flummoxing all around her. As ever, Hong’s films have an enigmatic core buried at the centre of a comedy of manners, and what at first seems straightforward is a good deal stranger.

16. 45 Years –– Andrew Haigh (UK) 91 minutes

Andrew Haigh’s follow-up to Weekend is a sort of updated version of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, with the gender roles reversed. Kate and Geoff Mercer (Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtney) are preparing to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary when a letter suddenly disrupts things. It’s from Switzerland, informing Geoff that the body of Katya, a lover of his youth, has been finally recovered decades later from the mountain where she died. Geoff continues to give undue attention to the matter and his insensitivity grates on Kate. Haigh’s adaptation of a David Constantine short story is a fine study of grief and loss, and is probably one of the most persuasive onscreen portrayals ever of the crushing desolation of amorous rejection.

17. Memories and Confessions (Visita ou Memórias e Confissões) –– Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal) 73 minutes

Manoel de Oliveira passed away in 2015 at the age of 106 but he left one last surprise, this autobiographical essay, filmed in 1982 and, one single screening in the early 90s aside, unseen until after his death. Memories and Confessions is set almost entirely in de Oliveira’s own home and, given he was at the time 76, it was probably intended as a testament. He reminisces about his childhood, the troubles with the family’s factory that followed the fall of Salazar and his own stop-start attempts at filmmaking that only really took off in earnest when he reached his sixties. The fact de Oliveira would live for another 33 years, making at least as many films, gives this film an even more curious air.

18. Maggie’s Plan –– Rebecca Miller (USA) 98 minutes

Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America is a more adventurous Greta Garwig vehicle but I have put Maggie’s Plan in here because it has a whole complement of brilliant performances in addition to Garwig’s Maggie. She has made the terrible mistake of having children with Ethan Hawke’s self-absorbed n’er-do-well writer John (Ethan Hawke) and tries to get him and his ex-wife, the icily imperious Danish academic Georgette (Julianne Moore) back together. It’s a splendidly entertaining film with Moore particularly hilarious in a role that provides an amusing counterpoint to her Oscar-winning turn in Still Alice. Also great are Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph as Maggie’s well-meaning but hapless friends.

19. Elle –– Paul Verhoeven (France/Germany/Belgium) 130 minutes

Verhoeven said he wouldn’t have been able to make this adaptation of Philippe Djian’s novel Oh… in Hollywood and he was probably right. If anything, it is a bit surprising this tale of a middle-aged rape survivor, played by Isabelle Huppert, who plots revenge, has not been more controversial (though that may just be because it has yet to be released in English-speaking countries). In any case, Elle is a worthwhile addition to the Verhoeven canon, a broadly stroked portrait of a woman taking justice into her own hands. Huppert is once again superb.

20. Your Name (Kimi no Na wa) –– Makota Shinkai (Japan) 105 minutes

Makota Shinkai’s fifth feature, adapted from his own novel of the same name, was the smash hit of the year in Japan, becoming the country’s fourth largest ever grossing film and the most successful anime film ever worldwide. It tells the tale of a fortuitous body swap between two teenagers, a small-town girl, Mitsuha, and a Tokyo boy, Taki. An extra variable in the mix is their respective timelines are out of sync and when Mitsuha disappears suddenly, Taki goes off in search of her. It is impossible not to draw comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki but Shinkai’s film is on a different metaphysical plane (and concerns itself with older children). It’s a film that is at turns beautifully wistful, shocking and has some of the best animation you’ll see all year.

Also worth a look

The Big Short –– Adam McKay (USA) 130 minutes

Mistress America –– Noah Baumbach (USA) 84 minutes

Mountains May Depart (Shan he gu ren) –– Jia Zhangke (China/France/Japan) 131 minutes

Spotlight –– Tom McCarthy (USA) 128 minutes

Mysterious Object at Noon (Dokfa nai meuman) –– Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/Netherlands) 83 minutes

Nahid –– Ida Panahandeh (Iran) 105 minutes

Room –– Lenny Abrahamson (Ireland/Canada/USA/UK) 118 minutes

Midnight Special –– Jeff Nichols (USA/Greece) 112 minutes

Merci Patron! –– François Ruffin (France/Belgium) 84 minutes

The Ardennes (D’Ardennen) –– Robin Pront (Belgium) 96 minutes

Eva Doesn’t Sleep (Eva no duerme) ––Pablo Agüero (Argentina/Spain/France) 85 minutes

Green Room –– Jeremy Saulnier (USA) 95 minutes

Julieta –– Pedro Almodóvar (Spain/France) 99 minutes

99 Homes –– Ramin Bahrani (USA) 112 minutes

Évolution –– Lucile Hadzilhailovic (France/Belgium/Spain) 81 minutes

Volta à terra –– João Pedro Plácido (Portugal) 78 minutes

Zootopia –– Byron Howard, Rich Moore (USA) 108 minutes

Anomalisa –– Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson (USA) 90 minutes

#film #cinema #Films of the year #movies #hou hsiao-hsien

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fearraigh · 9 years

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Films of the Year 2015

Most of the best films of the year, in France at least, were released in two ‘swarms’, one in the first few months and the other in the autumn. At other times, what was on offer in the cinemas wasn’t so exciting. Still, at the very top end of things, there were many great films this year, with movies with conceptual underpinnings seemingly predominating (though that may be coincidental). It was also cheering that so many of the better films were genuinely aimed at and accessible to a mass audience. We have become almost resigned in recent years to mainstream cinema flailing in the wake of television drama and comedy. Is this year proof that cinema might still be able to go toe to toe with the more couch-friendly small screen?

As ever, my rules for inclusion are a cinema release in France before the third weekend in December (films too late for last year’s list are also considered). If there are any unexpected omissions, it’s probably because it either got here last year or hasn’t arrived yet, or possibly because I just didn’t like it.

1. The Arabian Nights (As mil e uma noites) – Miguel Gomes (Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland) 381 minutes

Having seen Miguel Gomes’s free-wheeling adaptation of The Arabian Nights for a second time this summer, I had little desire to go watch any other new releases because in comparison every other film then in the cinema seemed slow-witted, predictable, contrived and unsophisticated. I resisted watching it a third time because, if I had, I might not have set foot inside a cinema for the rest of the year.

As the film’s title card indicates, it’s not really an adaptation of The Arabian Nights but it does take inspiration from its structure and Scheherazade’s own story does take up a fair amount of time, though told in a very unconventional fashion, with little overweening attention to period detail. It is the disregard for convention, familiar from Gomes’s earlier work, that makes the film so exhilarating. Working from a trove of stories from recession-hit Portugal which he commissioned journalists to unearth, Gomes draws up a compendium of sad forlorn tales, shaggy-dog stories (one with an actual shaggy dog) and short observational documentaries. He uses professional actors (often in multiple roles) and amateurs (in some cases reenacting their own stories) and blends burlesque drama with Frederick Wiseman-style social realism. Some tales are less than five minutes long, others are related entirely in voice-over, like the one of a Chinese student who falls in love with a Portuguese policeman and the testimonies of the workers of the Viano do Castelo shipyard facing redundancies.

What is truly remarkable about the film is the way Gomes shows complete mastery over what is an unstructured, free-flowing narrative, one which is allowed to breathe in a way you normally don’t see on screen. While Gomes is not a revolutionary innovator as such, his films do give a sense of new possibility to an art form that is in desperate need of formal change. And, insofar as six-hour films without any major stars go (albeit released in three parts), The Arabian Nights is very accessible, with a superlative soundtrack, ranging from Phyllis Dillon to The Exploited, Tim Maia and the Langley Schools Project. Cinema is far too often an over-parented child –– whether it be Hollywood fare or the more integrity-ridden stuff of art-house film, there is a tendency to fret too much over the nurturing of the final product. Miguel Gomes has let his characters and his scenarios run a bit wild and the end result is something that is at times unruly, lovable and ultimately inspired.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yONovEHyvXo]

2. Son of Saul (Saul fia) – László Nemes (Hungary) 107 minutes

There will be few debut films this decade as astounding as this holocaust drama by former Béla Tarr assistant László Nemes. The titular Saul is a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz –– namely a Jewish deportee given a stay of execution so as to be used to dispose of corpses –– whose living death is suddenly interrupted when he finds (or thinks he finds?) the body of his son when cleaning out the gas chambers. He is suddenly seized with a sense of purpose, which is to give the boy a decent burial, complete with a rabbi to say kaddish, and he proceeds to enlist people to help amid the camp’s linguistic and logistical muddle. Nemes’s camera follows Saul in practically every scene in what is a gruelling though enthralling journey –– the horror of the camps takes place generally out of focus at the periphery of the frame, which might be seen as a visual representation of the Sonderkommandos’ self-desensitising. As well as being a bracing piece of kinetic cinema, Son of Saul is also an interrogation of the ethics exercised by people in impossible situations such as the death camps. It has already been the subject of one monograph, Sortir du noir, by the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. One can expect many more to come.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh2toNTE7rA]

3. Hard to Be a God (Trudno byt’ bogus) – Aleksei German (Russia/Czech Republic) 177 minutes

The last of the great Soviet directors left one last film after dying in 2013, a three-hour adaptation of the 1964 novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, best known for writing the source novel of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Hard to Be a God tells the tale of a team of scientists sent to a distant planet, which is just like Earth but which is going through its own violent and chaotic Middle Ages, in which artists and intellectuals are ruthlessly suppressed. The observers are forbidden from interfering in the course of history but they are tempted to protect one enlightened prodigy. German’s film is a dizzying, immersive experience where the Dark Ages are recreated in an uncomfortably immediate way –– unidentifiable shreds hang in front of the camera at times, partially obscuring the view, while boorish bystanders lurch in and out and you are thankful the black and white photography spares you the worst impressions of the mud and excrement the characters are literally up to their knees in. Medievalists might rankle at the familiar travestying of an era that gave us Dante, Chaucer and gothic architecture but that quibble aside, this is a savagely brilliant film.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-cIDknVCj8]

4. Jauja – Lisandro Alonso (Argentina/Denmark/France/Mexico/USA/Germany/Brazil/Netherlands) 109 minutes

Lisandro Alonso’s Patagonian Western is one of the most beautiful films of the year, stunningly photographed in burnished colour, to give it a near sepia air of wistful nostalgia. It is also a hard-nosed portrayal of colonial encounters and the genocide of native Patagonians such as the Yaghan (also documented this year in Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button) and the resistance of the Mapuche. Viggo Mortensen plays a Danish military engineer engaged in a ‘civilising’ mission among the colonisers whose daughter goes missing. The similarity to The Searchers is obvious but Jauja goes down a different route, with lurches into surrealism and a coda that Kubrick would have been proud of.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpsyW1Dq37Q]

5. Mad Max: Fury Road – George Miller (Australia/USA) 120 minutes

George Miller hadn’t exactly disappeared from sight but he has spent most of the last two decades making things very different from the movies that made him famous. When the fourth instalment of the Mad Max films (not, strictly speaking, a sequel) finally arrived after years of stalling, few would have expected anything more than a mildly entertaining jaunt through the franchise’s past, à la Star Wars or Jurassic World. What we got instead was one of the greatest action movies ever made. A brilliantly inventive rereading of Miller’s own creation, in which Tom Hardy’s Max is shunted to the side by Charlize Theron’s astounding Imperator Furiosa. The film recounts a roaring tale for two hours, much of it without any recourse to dialogue. It’s a triumph of editing and photography brimming with virtuoso turns and it ties in a range of contemporary concerns, such as climate change and apocalyptic death cults into what was already a most visionary conception.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjBb4SZ0F6Q]

6. Inside Out – Pete Docter, Ronaldo Del Carmen (USA) 94 minutes

Pixar’s finest film since Wall-E is a nuanced portrayal of children’s emotions, which are represented by five different characters inside 11-year-old Riley’s mind, in a manner not unlike the long-running ‘Numskulls’ comic strip in The Beezer and The Dandy. Riley is having difficulty adapting to her family’s move from Minnesota to San Francisco, falling prey to loneliness and depression. It’s a bit of a truism that Pixar’s films are as much for grown-ups as for the kids that drag them to watch them; Inside Out though seems more like a film for grown-ups that might interest kids as well. It’s a film that is at turns sunny, sprightly and touchingly sad, replete with gags and scenarios that never lag or feel contrived, and the cast is superb, led by the wonderful Amy Poehler, who is perfect in the role of Riley’s inner emotional Candide, Joy. It’s an improbably daring film for its intended audience and is probably the most profound piece of children’s entertainment we will see for a long time.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seMwpP0yeu4]

7. El Club – Pablo Larraín (Chile) 98 minutes

Larraín’s subject of predilection to date has been the Pinochet regime and El Club continues in the vein of his previous three films. A number of disgraced priests live in retirement with their housekeeper on the wintry Pacific coast, keeping distant from the local community, their only activity being training a greyhound to race in local meets. Their cover is one day blown by the arrival of a disturbed homeless man who has tracked down the padre who abused him as a child. With a left-leaning young Jesuit sent down from Santiago to investigate, the priests decide they must react quickly. Combining fascism and clerical child abuse in one political parable might easily have made for a lugubrious tale but El Club is a limpidly persuasive film. The visuals exert an icy, murky hold (Larraín used old Soviet lenses in a successful effort to replicate Tarkovsky’s aesthetic). The director’s regular leading man Alfredo Castro once again embodies Chile’s bad conscience in a role that is as compellingly disturbing as the film itself, which is Larraín’s finest since his 2008 masterpiece Tony Manero.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8c2DYoF7lA]

8. Aferim! – Radu Jude (Romania/Bulgaria/Czech Republic/France) 108 minutes

Probably because recent Romanian history offers such rich subject matter, the abundantly fertile New Romanian cinema has not touched much on period films to date. Radu Jude, previously director of sharp social comedies such as The Happiest Girl in the World and Everybody in our Family, takes a step back in time to offer us what is effectively a Western (or, strictly speaking, an Ostern), set in early 19th-century Wallachia, albeit one that has a strong contemporary resonance. Constandin, a provincial police officer –– played by Teodor Corban, great as ever –– is hired by local boyar Iordache to recover Carfin, the runaway Roma slave who has cuckolded him. Constandin and his son Ionita cross the Romanian plains in search of the slave, whom they find to be far more cultured and worldly than most others in the land, his master included, having accompanied his mistress to Leipzig, Vienna and Paris. Marius Panduru’s gorgeous monochrome scope photography gives the film an eerily mythical air and Romanian speakers have commented on the beauty of the archaic language the film uses, adapted as it is from a number of literary works of the period. Aferim! (the name comes from an Ottoman word for ‘bravo’) deservedly won Jude the Silver Bear for best director at Berlin this year and is another reminder that every film that comes out of Romania is worth watching.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmTYOY_jQWc]

9. The Look of Silence – Joshua Oppenheimer (Denmark/Finland/Indonesia/Norway/United Kingdom) 107 minutes

I was less taken by Oppenheimer’s acclaimed documentary The Act of Killing than most other people were, finding it too enamoured of its own ingenuity for my liking. The Texan stayed in Indonesia for this follow-up, which tells the victims’ side of the story, or rather the unnamed brother of one victim, who confronts the killers. It’s an act of incredible bravery on the part of the man, given the impunity which reigns among the country’s genocidal Pancasila rulers. It is also indicative of the difficulty Oppenheimer had in getting relatives of the communist victims to speak (this had been his original intention before he found the killers to be far more forthcoming about the massacres). The Look of Silence is a simpler, less artful film than its predecessor yet speaks far more to the climate of fear that continues to prevail in Indonesia. He is also gifted a fortuitously elegant metaphor: the hero is in real life a peripatetic optician, who slides lenses in front of the persecutors’ eyes as he speaks to them. Oppenheimer probably won’t be able to work in Indonesia again after these films (most of his crew are, once again, credited as ‘Anonymous’) but it is satisfying that he has managed to, however inadvertently, issue a corrective to his earlier impressive but deeply flawed film.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA_ZHAs4M9k]

10. The Second Mother (Que horas ela volta?) – Anna Muylaert (Brazil) 112 minutes

Val (Regina Casé) is a faithful housekeeper in a wealthy São Paulo household, tolerating with the best grace the petty everyday humiliations such a role incurs. A cuckoo in the nest soon shakes things up, namely Val’s bright but bolshy teenage daughter Jéssica, who moves down from Pernambuco to go to college and whom Val hasn’t seen in ten years. Jéssica has few of her mother’s scruples about knowing her place in the household, which is accentuated by her being a far better student than Fabinho, the family son, to whom Val is, as the English title indicates, is a second mother. Anna Muylaert’s film was a big hit in Brazil and it’s not hard to see why –– it’s a feelgood film buoyed by Casé’s perfectly modulated performance that binds cheerful ingenuousness and petit bourgeois propriety into one tight ball. The Second Mother also has a tough core though and charts the emerging class consciousness of a middle-aged woman with robust grace. A great piece of popular cinema and one that, along with Felipe Barbosa’s similarly themed Casa Grande, Kléber Mendonça’s Neighbouring Sounds and Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s Trabalhar cansa, is testimony to the current rude health of Brazilian cinema.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5WzbcjBQtE]

11. Cemetery of Splendour (Rak Ti Khon Kaen) – Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/United Kingdom/France/Germany/Malaysia/South Korea/Mexico/Norway) 122 minutes

Weerasethakul has said his latest film is explicitly political and that he doesn’t expect it to be shown anytime soon in his native Thailand. There’s no reason to doubt him but the political subtext is a lot more subtle than explicit, even if it’s not hard to see something in the scenario of soldiers suffering from some sort of sleeping sickness as they lie in a hospital built on an old royal cemetery. The film takes the point of view of a middle-aged woman volunteering to care for a soldier whose family lives in a distant province and a younger woman with telepathic powers hired by families to communicate with their sleeping children. As ever with Weerasethakul, the lines between illness, spiritual ancestry and national malaise are blurred. Cemetery of Splendour is beautiful, stately and enigmatic and will probably require multiple viewings to fully grasp what it’s about. And that’s no bad thing.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nt84GI_U3Y]

12. A Most Violent Year – J.C. Chandor (USA/United Arab Emirates)125 minutes

A Most Violent Year, on the face of it, appears to be a rather straightforward New York film, heavy on the period trappings of 1981, the year of the title. But there is a lot more to it than that –– J.C. Chandor in his third film constructs a counter-narrative to the traditional mob movie, in which an immigrant businessman Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) desperately tries to skirt the violence and illegality of the city’s fuel trade, even as his fleet of delivery men runs the daily gauntlet of hijackings and harassment. Abel’s wife (Jessica Chastain), herself a mobster’s daughter, is about to go into Lady Macbeth mode, to ensure he resists the twin attacks of his competitors mounting a cartel against him and the District Attorney, who is combing through Abel’s accounts, waiting to pounce for any irregularities. It’s a smart, dramatically taut interrogation of the genre, in which the New York winter looks as handsome as it did in the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis (also starring Isaac), and there appears to be enough left over from the film to warrant a sequel, or even a whole TV series.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o87gG7ZlEAg]

13. It Follows – David Robert Mitchell (USA) 100 minutes

David Robert Mitchell’s second feature was one of the big surprises of the year, a stylish, thoughtful horror movie about a curse that can only be lifted by passing it on to someone else via sexual intercourse. It Follows manages to be genuinely scary while also painting a discursive landscape that leaves ample room for interpretation, weaving together AIDS, Dostoevsky, existential angst and even American urban decay (the film is set in Detroit). It’s all the better for being intelligent without being pretentiously gauche.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymoh5SIqgtw]

14. Taxi – Jafar Panahi (Iran) 82 minutes

Jafar Panahi’s third film since his enforced house arrest cocked a further snook at Iranian authorities, filmed entirely from the dashboard of a taxi that the director himself drives around Tehran. Among those he picks up are a thief who vaunts his profession while arguing morality with a schoolteacher, a couple desperate to get to hospital after a serious accident, a pair of pious old women on their way to visit a grave and an itinerant hawker who used to supply him with foreign contraband movies. It’s uncertain whether the encounters are staged or real but from this uncertainty the film draws its dramatic force. You can even forgive Panahi for ripping off the conceit of the film-set-in-a-car from his former master Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten since Panahi has been unflinching in his long-running defiance towards the social and political repression in his country. Taxi won him the Golden Bear at Berlin, yet another award the director was unable to pick up in person.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM2tblIkL4g]

15. ’Til Madness Do Us Part (Feng ai) – Wang Bing (Japan/France/Hong Kong) 227 minutes

China’s foremost documentarist stayed in Yunnan province, where he filmed last year’s Three Sisters, for this documentary set in a severely dilapidated psychiatric hospital. The conditions in the place are so decrepit and superannuated that you are tempted to use the term ‘lunatic asylum’. As ever with Wang’s work, the film is an oblique look at Chinese society and its structural and institutional sclerosis. Some of the internees are severely insane, others have been committed by their family due to personal distress or, more often, poverty. It is a moving humane work, especially in the case of a man who protests his sanity every time his wife comes to visit. She has the patience of a saint and clearly loves him but it is also apparent that whatever happy domestic life they once had is never to return.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFfyu9b97Ww]

16. While We’re Young – Noam Baumbach (USA) 97 minutes

The prolific Baumbach turned out two highly-regarded films this year (Mistress America is absent here because it doesn’t arrive in France until the New Year), cementing his reputation as probably the finest American director of comedies working today. While We’re Young is a bittersweet account of forty-somethings John and Cornelia (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who feel rejuvenated hanging out with young hipsters Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried). The older couple paradoxically relearn the joys of analog living from the kids but Jamie is on the make in a way John, an artistically blocked filmmaker, has never been able to master. The film recalls the better of Woody Allen’s more erudite comedies but Baumbach’s range of interests is far broader than Allen’s. His attention to detail is also impressive –– even the fragments we see of John’s work-in-progress are amusingly credible. And in Driver’s Jamie, there is one of the best portrayals of a man on the hustle ever committed to screen.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAt4T-FoEuI]

17. Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary) –– Hirokazu Koreeda (Japan) 126 minutes

There are few filmmakers in the world as unerringly consistent as Koreeda. The Japanese director has never made a bad film and he doesn’t look like going off the boil anytime soon. Our Little Sister starts with the funeral of the estranged father of three sisters, Sachi, Yoshino and Chika. They haven’t seen him in fifteen years and at the ceremony, they discover they now have an orphaned teenage half-sister Suzu. They invite her to live with them in the big ramshackle house they have inherited from their parents. Based on Akimi Yoshida’s manga series, Our Little Sister is fascinating from a dramatic point of view, given there is little or no friction onscreen –– all of that lingers in the family’s painful past –– and the characters are all effortlessly nice and sympathetic, even Yoshino and her bank colleague who are pained at having to bring bad news to a struggling client. The whole thing ought to be dramatically inert and insufferably good-natured but Koreeda suffuses the film with a sad undertow of loss that makes it both winsome and lovable. Another great film by one of the best humanist directors going.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRktvTd5KZo]

18. The Wakhan Front (Ni le ciel ni la terre) – Clément Cogitore (France/Belgium) 100 minutes

The first film to emerge from France’s 14-year involvement in the Afghan war was actually filmed, on a modest budget, in Morocco. Video artist Clément Cogitore teamed up with Jacques Audiard’s regular screenwriter Thomas Bidegain for this unusual take on wartime alienation. A number of sentries on a French outpost on the Wakhan front go missing without trace, prompting the platoon commander, played by Jérémie Renier, to confront insubordination and flagging morale among his men. He even collaborates with the Taliban, who have themselves been experiencing the same phenomenon. The Wakhan Front is a gripping tale of suspense that yields its secrets in small doses, heavily influenced by John Carpenter and is the best French film of the year.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBn9hCg-OSw]

19. Foxcatcher – Bennett Miller (USA) 134 minutes

Miller stuck with sport for his third feature, once again drawing his material from real life –– the hands-on effort by John du Pont, he of the eponymous industrial empire, to fund and train the US wrestling team for the Seoul Olympics. Of course, that is not really the story here –– it is rather the fact du Pont shot dead one of his trainers, Dave Schultz, whose brother Mark had also been on the Foxcatcher roster. For a film where everything is known in advance, Foxcatcher is compelling stuff, with Steve Carrell’s performance as du Pont the stand-out –– it is unnerving and creepy in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has once known a domineering incompetent in a position of authority. Marc Ruffalo and Channing Tatum as the two brothers round off a superb lead cast. Foxcatcher is an old-fashioned studio film that does everything right and is a good portrayal of slowly simmering resentfulness, for which Miller deservedly won Best Director at Cannes in 2014. Academy voters preferred the so-so Birdman, but that’s hardly surprising.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8361stZ8n0w]

20. Fish Tail (Rabo de peixe) –– Nuno Leonel, Joaquim Pinto (Portugal) 103 minutes

Leonel and Pinto, whose documentary memoir What now? Remind me was one of the best documentaries last year, made this film about a fishing village, evocatively named Rabo de Peixe, in the Azores around the turn of the Millennium, and it only got a release outside Portugal on the back of the success of their latest film. More socially inclined than the similarly-themed Leviathan, which came out a couple of years ago, Fish Tail is in the same half-breezy, half-melancholy register of much Portuguese cinema (particularly the 2011 documentary It’s the Earth, Not the Moon!, also filmed in the Azores). The two directors, who have long worked as crew technicians for numerous major European auteurs, have a splendid mastery of recorded material and historical texts, and they tell an ordinary tale very well. A rain-lashed pleasure.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QxhqDnBJFY]

Also worthy of mention

The Duke of Burgundy – Peter Strickland (UK/Hungary) 104 minutes

Louder than Bombs – Joachim Trier (Norway/ France/Denmark) 109 minutes

Wild Tales (Relatos salvajes) – Damián Szifrón (Argentina/Spain) 122 minutes

Amour fou – Jessica Hausner (Austria/Luxembourg/Germany) 96 minutes

The Wonders (Le meraviglie) – Alice Rohrwacher (Italy/Switzerland/Germany) 110 minutes

Inherent Vice – Paul Thomas Anderson (USA) 148 minutes

The Voices – Marjane Satrapi (USA/Germany) 103 minutes

La Sapienza – Eugène Green (France/Italy) 101 minutes

Story of Judas (Histoire de Judas) – Rabah Aimer-Zaïmeche (France) 99 minutes

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron) – Roy Andersson (Sweden/Germany/Norway/France) 101 minutes

Casa Grande – Felipe Barbosa (Brazil) 115 minutes

Marshland (La isla mínima) – Alberto Rodríguez (Spain) 105 minutes

Love & Mercy – Bill Pohlad (USA) 121 minutes

Amy – Asif Kapadian (UK/USA) 128 minutes

Red Rose – Sepideh Farsi (France/Iran/Greece) 87 minutes

Les deux amis – Louis Garrel (France) 100 minutes

Blood of My Blood (Sangue del mio sangue) –– Marco Bellocchio (Italy/France/Switzerland) 106 minutes

Much Loved – Nabil Ayouch (France/Morocco) 104 minutes

Marguerite – Xavier Giannoli (France/Czech Republic/Belgium) 129 minutes

Fatima – Philippe Faucon (France) 79 minutes

The Missing Picture (L’image manquante) – Rithy Panh (Cambodia/France) 92 minutes

The Pearl Button (El butón de nácar) – Patricio Guzmán (France/Spain/Chile/Switzerland) 82 minutes

Black Mass – Scott Cooper (USA/UK) 122 minutes

Mia madre – Nanni Moretti (Italy/France) 106 minutes

Rams (Hrútar) – Grímur Hakonarson (Iceland/Denmark/Norway/Poland) 93 minutes

The Floor Below (Un etaj mai jos) – Radu Muntean (Romania/France/Sweden/Germany) 93 minutes

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – J.J. Abrams (USA) 136 minutes

#film #cinema #movies #films of 2015 #films of the year #miguel gomes #Mad Max #jauja #son of saul #arabian nights

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