In this strange and frightening year, the importance of art and the sharing of the experience of art has become even more significant. So, although my cinema viewing has plummeted, watching films however I can and meeting people virtually to talk about them, has been both nourishment for the mind and a way of maintaining and strengthening bonds with others. It has been a means of holding on to sanity in a world where it seems that leaders who display incompetence, mendaciousness, and narcissism are being supported by the very people who are most at risk from their foolish policies.
Uncertainty is everywhere. The already rickety edifice of the cinema industry is now experiencing significant subsidence and is under emergency reconstruction. What we can be sure of is that whatever finally emerges is in large part unpredictable. My hope is that there will be more space for a greater variety of independent films being shown in a greater number of independent cinemas; that diversity will fight back against the economic forces driving us to greater uniformity.
Anyway, for what little it’s worth, here’s my list of favourite films for 2020. Or rather, a snapshot of my favourite films at this moment in time.
The films are listed alphabetically within each category.
1. New releases in 2020 (inc festivals)
a. The Very Best
Lovers Rock [Steve McQueen, 2020, UK]
Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series has been one of the highlights of 2020, and Lovers Rock the stand out best of the five films.
Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock – one of five films in his Small Axe anthology – is an undeniable triumph, in which the milieu of a 1980s house party in West London is beautifully rendered with a realism that affirms the significance of Black lives. A study in Black joy, it submerges the audience in an alcohol- and weed-fuelled, sweat-soaked snapshot, against the backdrop of Thatcher’s London, of a Black Britain where love, music and dance reign…
McQueen is expert at immersing audiences in his characters’ experiences; as the camera follows bodies moving across the dancefloor, men and women holding each other close, hips swaying to the rhythm of reggae, he creates a sense of blissful communion. The film is a celebration of Blackness; each and every detail is perfectly pitched – the kitsch wallpaper in hues of green, the simple ritual of Cynthia straightening her afro hair with a hot iron, the cooking of curried goat – and made me feel as though the house itself were welcoming me to join the dance. The intimacy with which the camera lingers on a couple’s embrace, the energetic writhing of men dancing, or the minutiae of silent communication through dance and body language is reminiscent of certain sequences in Shame (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). In Lovers Rock, however, the focus is not on trauma; instead, McQueen gazes on in wonder, and marvels at the ordinary, everyday Black experience…
One sequence in particular endures, a morning bike ride that becomes an emblem of bliss and sanctuary in a divided city. In this lovely film, Steve McQueen proudly declares that Black love rocks.
Nadine Deller, Sight and Sound
Available: BBC iPlayer
Vitalina Varela [Pedro Costa, 2019, Portugal]
Close to perfection; poetry in every frame. Pedro Costa and his team produce exceptional cinema that is beautiful, profound, and transcendent. Perhaps it’s too slow for many, but patience is richly rewarded here.
Every so often, a shaft of daylight pierces the deep, spectral shadows of Vitalina Varela, the haunting and profoundly haunted new movie from the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Your eyes drift toward every beam of light, every carefully placed pool of illumination in this grimly beautiful nightscape, the latest work by an artist who has found, in darkness, a remarkable new way of seeing. Toward the end of the movie, when all those shadows briefly lift and give way to pale blue skies, it’s as if Costa had cracked open a window, allowing a burst of warmth — it almost feels like hope — to penetrate this epic of perpetual night…
This is cinema that pushes beyond the medium’s usual representational modes, beyond the observational qualities of neorealism or the interior states of psychological drama. Complex histories and unspoken emotions are distilled into a series of carefully composed tableaus, each one proceeding with slow, ceremonial deliberation. (The rich, painterly digital cinematography is by Leonardo Simões.) The undeniable intimacy that Costa achieves with his subjects is matched by an equally undeniable distance: Speaking in deliberate, drawn-out cadences and rarely making eye contact, these men and women exist at a remove from the audience and from each other…
You could call it demanding, I suppose, though mainly in the sense that, like most worthwhile art, it demands the commitment of your undivided attention. Having seen it a second time myself at home, I can attest that not only does the spell still take hold, but also that there is a strange solace, even refuge, to be found in its labyrinth of shadows. Dim the lights, cast your distractions aside and let Costa’s dark rooms merge with your own.
Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
Available: blu-ray / DVD
b. Outstanding
A White, White Day (Hvítur, hvítur dagur) [Hlynur Palmason, 2019, Iceland / Denmark / Sweden]
There’s something refreshing and bold in director Palmason’s choices, including a narrative style which carefully lures you in, and is happy to take unexpected paths. Definitely a talent to watch.
Hlynur Pálmason’s Icelandic drama A White, White Day is a stark, controlled psychological thriller that unpicks its hero’s troubled soul with forensic coolness. Yet at the same time, it’s also an exercise in highly stylized film language that every now and then makes you sit up in amazement at the boldness of the directorial flourishes. In theory, this shouldn’t work: what Pálmason does ought to “take you out of the story,” as the phrase goes. What it does, rather, is “put you into the film”– that is, deeper into the filmmaking. We tend not to worry about style being disruptive in written fiction—at least, we don’t if we’ve learned any of the lessons of literary modernism—so why should we in cinema? But Pálmason, I think, wants us to worry, and the anxiety we feel about whether A White, White Day is telling its story properly—whether it’s efficiently bringing us closer to its protagonist without inappropriate detour—is all part of the strategy of this bold, troubling drama…
You could easily imagine a version of this film in which Pálmason had decided simply to tell the story with no directorial frills, and it would be still be extremely strong, just some seven or eight minutes shorter. But include his digressions and you get something really quite extraordinary: along with those jump-cut sequences on the house, a montage of “portrait” shots of key and minor players all gazing at the camera; a set of close-ups of miscellaneous objects and details that all play a key part, narratively or (perhaps) symbolically; and an absolutely remarkable episode involving a rock…
This is a small but intensely idiosyncratic film.
Jonathan Romney, Film Comment
Available: see here for options
About Endlessnes [Roy Andersson, 2019, Sweden / Germany / Norway / France]
Andersson has distilled his distinctive style to the point where need for the customary punchline becomes almost superfluous – the emphasis is on observation and connection. It results in a purity of approach that still retains the Andersson humour, but is even more moving and powerful.
About Endlessness is …a collection of tragicomic tableaux revealing large truths about humanity’s everyday struggle for happiness, but through the minute interactions of lost souls, all wandering through the pallid purgatory that is Earth. On the basis of previous works such as A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and You, The Living, it may have felt fine to refer to Andersson as a sketch comic working at the level of a conceptual artist.
With this new one, he’s stripped things back to their absolute essentials, and has in turn delivered a work of quiet, almost unassuming transcendence. The artfulness is ramped up, and the humour tamped down. Gone is the absurdism of yore, and in its place a clear-eyed and stirring social realism that’s excitingly in tune with humanity’s most obscure desires and tendencies…
There are barely any punchlines in this film, as each scene just drifts off into the next. The swift cut to black can occasionally catch you off guard, and you’re instantly forced to replay the scene in your mind to deduce its meaning or its focus, which is never instantly obvious.
This is Andersson’s most nakedly moving film to date… [But] for anyone who thinks that Andersson is just a soldier of untrammelled despair, in About Endlessness he delivers the most ecstatically joyous thing he’s ever filmed, as three young women break into spontaneous dance outside a café. How great was it? Reader, I wept.
David Jenkins, Little White Lies
Clemency [Chinonye Chukwu, 2020, US]
The inner struggle revealed through Alfre Woodard’s controlled and powerful performance adds to the horror of the subject matter. Everything is summed up in that long held shot on Woodard’s face at the end.
In the UK there are rumours that our government are considering the re-introduction of the death penalty. This is an important reminder of why this must never happen.
So ubiquitous are Hollywood films about capital punishment and death row that they have formed a small yet significant subgenre within the ‘social issues’ drama niche, often with a distinct crime thriller edge…
It is into this terrain that Chinonye Chukwu enters with her extraordinary feature Clemency, which she both directed and wrote, starring Alfre Woodard in what is surely the role of a lifetime as Warden Bernadine Williams, a straight-faced, highly professional woman who struggles under the enormous psychological and emotional weight of her job. The film begins with an execution that goes horrifically wrong due to a medical error in an extraordinary sequence that simultaneously underscores the ritualistic, business as usual aspect of what we are seeing, but also vividly illustrates the reality of what it is that is being done: a man is being killed by the state…
Chukwu from the outset demonstrates an extraordinary ability to never over-play her hand. This is by all accounts easy material to mine for exploitative, overwrought moral pearl-clutching, but rather than reductively dismiss the material in question, Chukwu instead turns towards Bernadine. Clemency is a compelling character portrait of a woman caught within a perfect storm of ideological volatility; as both witness and part of the machine, it is her very professionalism that places her humanity in crisis…
In her powerful collaboration with Woodard, Clemency speaks in a determined, steady voice about questions of dignity, humanity and civility, not just for those condemned to death, but also of those whose job it is to enact state-sanctioned murder.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, The Blue Lenses
Available: see here for options
Collective (Colectiv) [Alexander Nanau, 2020, Romania / Luxembourg]
What is really frightening in Collective is how endemic and far-reaching corruption can become and how many people go with the flow of moral blindness.
What is heartening is to see the people who stand up for truth and progress, both the journalists uncovering what is going on and the politician/technocrat trying to deal with the corruption that has found its way into all levels of society.
A brilliantly constructed documentary.
For years, actually for decades, Romanian directors have been warning us about top-to-bottom official corruption in their homeland – an insidious malaise undermining the state and infecting the soul. Cristi Puiu’s The Death Of Mr Lazarescu (2005) is about an old man’s final hours turned into an ordeal by hospital inefficiency and insensitivity; Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (2016) is about a doctor who calls in favours to fix his daughter’s exam results and Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (2009) was about the bizarre bureaucratic slowness of a police station. Now documentary film-maker Alexander Nanau has arrived with something to show that this wasn’t just mannerism or metaphor. It’s based on sickening fact.
Collective is about what happened after a horrendous fire at Bucharest’s Colectiv nightclub in 2015 which killed 64 people. It wasn’t simply official laxity about inspecting fire exits and building materials: the majority died later, not of their injuries, but of hospital infections. A heroically tough investigation led by Cătălin Tolontan, a reporter at a sports paper, Gazeta Sporturilor, showed that the disinfectant supplied to state hospitals was useless due to being secretly diluted…
The title itself has unbearably ironic echoes. Partly, Collective is about the grisly authoritarian habits that have survived the fall of Ceausescu in Romania; partly it’s about the big money to be made, Moscow-style, in exploiting national assets. It’s also a warning to us here about how mouth-wateringly lucrative a state health system is to a certain kind of well-connected entrepreneur whose impulse is to save money and make a profit.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Available: see here for options
Echo (Bergmál) [Rúnar Rúnarsson, 2019, Iceland / France / Switzerland / Denmark / Finland]
I love this film.
There is no conventional narrative connection between the scenes, but the sum of their parts is something quite magical and moving; from scenes which just observe something of little ostensible significance, to others which are like beautifully observed short stories.
It is another of those films which proves how narrative is not always about stitching together plot points; it can be an elusive and strange creature.
Don’t waste time looking for a narrative thread or common character in Echo. The third feature from director Rúnar Rúnarsson is a series of single-shot vignettes (56 in total), connected only by their setting: Iceland, around Christmas and new year.
The brevity of these scenes doesn’t prevent them depicting nuanced emotions: a teenage girl visiting her father is shown up at the piano by his new girlfriend’s daughter. Or delivering political commentary: a man listens to a radio broadcast about a union dispute while toiling in his workshop. Echo also takes full advantage of each new scene-setting opportunity by presenting us with an abundance of aspirational interiors, impressive landscapes and meticulous mises en scène. The cumulative effect is like strolling through a Reykjavík gallery where each painting moves within its well-chosen frame…
The scenes that leave the most lasting impression are those featuring a display of storytelling virtuosity. We’re introduced to characters one moment – a drug addict and his kind outreach workers, for instance – then moved to tears by them the next. It’s a wonderful (Icelandic) life. Echo’s surprisingly cockle-warming take makes it a worthy contender for your alternative Christmas classic.
Ellen E Jones, The Guardian
Available: MUBI
The Assistant [Kitty Green, 2020, US]
It is the understatement that makes this film so powerful. Attention to the tiny details of the working day, and the growing moral dilemma of how to act in the light of what takes place behind closed doors. Then that marvelously awful scene with the HR manager.
Wonderfully filmed; great performances.
Thanks to [the] approach [taken] – examining not a single offender but instead a suffocating culture of silence, peopled by enablers – the understated film builds into a gut punch that’s more painful than anything in the superficial, recent Roger Ailes exposé ‘Bombshell’.
Before then, we watch a day in the work life of the selflessly committed office newbie Jane (Julia Garner of ‘Ozark’, finding astonishing emotional precision in the smallest details). Green, a director of provocative nonfiction films like ‘Casting JonBenet’, observes Jane’s routine with a documentarian’s clear-eyed compassion and delicate, rhythmic discipline: Jane makes copies, scrubs appalling stains out of the boss’s couch, recovers a piece of incriminating jewelry and drafts humiliating apologies when she is unfairly blamed for mistakes. A pair of seasoned male assistants guides her, adding to her intimidation with their arrogance.
Garner’s breathtakingly controlled performance – all withheld tears and suppressed screams – brings to mind Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feminist masterpiece, ‘Jeanne Dielman’, itself a study in mind-numbing routine. You wonder if Jane will eventually snap, and you almost wish she would during her visit to a condescending, dismissive HR exec (Matthew Macfadyen, memorably cringe-inducing) to report her suspicions after an entry-level female hire is inexplicably treated to a fancy hotel stay. But Green doesn’t grant us that release. Instead, she amplifies Jane’s suffering with a vigilant camera that’s fixated on her quiet isolation in a banal, unglamorous office. Here, the only relief is knowing that a watershed moment is on the horizon.
Tomris Laffley, Time Out
Available: see options here
Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema [Mark Cousins, 2018, UK]
Mark Cousins is a force of nature. His enthusiasm and erudition, and his works such as the monumental The Story of Film, have helped bring attention to films and filmmakers from all over the world that were often overlooked. His latest 14-hour epic is a long overdue challenge to the male-dominated canon. He argues passionately that there have always been great women filmmakers, and it is time that they received the recognition they so richly deserve.
Epic in both scale and scope, Women Make Film is that all-too-rare treat: a documentary given ample time and space to delve deep into its subject. And despite its title (which could be both statement and a call to arms) and premise — a global exploration of movies made by female directors — Mark Cousins has resolutely not made a film about the female gaze, or one bemoaning the lack of women filmmakers. Instead, he takes the far more proactive approach of celebrating the myriad women who have made extraordinary films by presenting their work as a 14-hour masterclass of how great movies are made…
An astonishing achievement, Mark Cousins’ expertly assembled documentary provides both cracking entertainment and eye-opening education. A celebration of female directors, and a reminder that they deserve so much more attention and respect.
Nikki Baughan, Empire
Available: BFI player, Amazon, iTunes
c. Excellent
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood [Marielle Heller, 2019, US / China]
This exquisite adaptation of Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire profile paints a carefully shaded picture from a sceptic’s vantage point. When investigative reporter Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is assigned a puff piece about one of the nation’s heroes, he takes it upon himself to locate the dark heart of Mr Rogers (Tom Hanks, the epitome of on-screen goodness). There isn’t one. Director Marielle Heller (2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me) cleverly mines comedy from Rogers’s boundless empathy as Vogel tries to probe for weak spots, finding only his own. Through their interaction he is encouraged, gently, to confront his own demons and daddy issues.
Rogers explains that his show tries to give children a positive way to deal with their feelings. It sounds preachy and schematic, yet the film itself is subtle, melancholy and deeply felt in its sincerity.
Simran Hans, The Observer
Available: see options here
An Impossible Project [Jens Meurer, 2020, Germany / Austria / UK]
(shown at the online Amplify! film festival)
German filmmaker Jens Meurer started off in documentaries but went on to produce titles such as Black Book, Carlos, Filth and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, arguably the first fully digital film “that did any business”… He has now returned to the documentary field with An Impossible Project, world-premiering in International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Deep Focus section, a picture about the love of analogue technology, which is enjoying a big comeback, not least thanks to the film’s protagonist, Dr Florian “Doc” Kaps…
One photographer interviewed in the film talks about physical photographs in terms of “experiencing the real, and not an image of something real”. This represents a shift in perception that has taken place over the past decade, and paradoxes like this make the documentary essential food for thought for anyone interested in culture and media and their development in the modern age.
Vladan Petkovic, Cineuropa
Available: not yet released in the UK
Ava [Sadaf Foroughi, 2017, Iran / Canada / Qatar]
“This impressive first feature from writer and director Sadaf Foroughi uses long takes and buffeting, overlapping dialogue to bring a fresh, vital energy to the inventively framed widescreen scenes. Initially, Ava floats around the periphery, as her parents discuss her. She’s like an actor waiting for her cue to take to the stage, and her cue comes soon enough: inflamed by jostling teen egos, marking territory over boys, Ava ets a rival that she will secure a date with the unwitting lad in question.
…There’s a jagged emotional authenticity scored into the film like initials carved into a desk.
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Available: Amazon, Google, iTunes, BFI player, Curzon
Being a Human Person [Fred Scott, 2020, UK / Sweden]
The amazing artistry of 77-year-old Swedish director Roy Andersson is illuminated in this tribute, a documentary that follows the work on his latest film, About Endlessness, which emerged last year to much acclaim at the Venice film festival… Andersson himself is renowned for his brilliant tragicomic visual gags and dreamlike visions, with hints of Beckett, Fellini and Monty Python. (He acknowledges here, too, the influence of Breughel and Goya.)
Andersson emerges here as a slightly mysterious figure, smiling beatifically like the much-loved elder statesman that he is, speaking in general terms about his art addressing the frailty and vulnerability of human nature, but giving little away about himself…
What the film does show is the overwhelming importance of his personal studio, which he created in 1981 from the shell of a huge townhouse building he bought in Stockholm. It really is a studio in the artistic as well as movie sense, and vital for the Andersson style. Almost all his unmistakable tableau scenes are created in that building with stunningly clever model and greenscreen work: those eerie, hallucinatory perspectives leading the eye from the figures in the foreground to the pinsharp details in the far distance… I would have liked to have heard even more about how the magic was fabricated there. But maybe Andersson (understandably) doesn’t want to reveal too many trade secrets. A valuable introduction to the movies and to the man.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Available: Curzon
Dick Johnson Is Dead [Kirsten Johnson, 2020, US]
Through her darkly comic approach to documenting her father’s dementia, Johnson’s film gives us a serious and humane portrait of a special relationship and how they both face up to an inevitable demise.
When documentary filmmaker and cinematographer Kirsten Johnson noticed a decline in the health of her aging father, Dick, living alone in Seattle and still working at his lifelong profession as a psychiatrist, she opted to move him to New York, where she’d be better able to take care of him. At the same time, finding herself unable to imagine life without him, she decided to enlist him in a playful experiment: she’d use her filmmaking skills—and a cadre of helpers including set designers and stunt, makeup and sound people—to create fake death scenarios in which Dick would star. Making an absurdist film in which her father would seemingly die but also come back again and again would be one way to allow him to live forever. The result is the sometimes funny but often probing documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead, now streaming on Netflix, and although it focuses on one particularly close and joyful father-daughter relationship, it’s bound to resonate with anyone who has watched, and worried, as a parent ages.
Stephanie Zacharek, Time
Available: Netflix
Faith [Valentina Pedicini, 2019, Italy]
The photography is stunning, and the director’s observational, no commentary, approach immerses us in the strange and troubling world of this isolated community.
This documentary will be the last film we see from the Italian director Valentina Pedicini who died last month tragically young – aged 42 – from liver cancer. And what an extraordinary film it is, opening with an intoxicating rave scene: a room full of lithe muscular men and women dressed all in white, some with shaved heads, dancing furiously to German techno. They are monks, disciples of the Master: the oldest man in the room, a martial arts expert who 20 years ago opened a monastery in the Italian hills where he trains “warrior monks” in Catholicism and kung fu. He is the god of his little universe…
The picture that emerges of is of emotional abuse and control. The Master dominates his acolytes, particularly the women, who are woken up in the middle of the night and summoned to his bedroom for creepy group therapy sessions – five or six at a time gathered around his bed. His workout sessions with them are power trips. His goal seems to be submission, body and soul. He pushes them until they are broken – to fuel his narcissism and ego, I’d say.
Cath Clarke, The Guardian
Available: MUBI
Ghost Town Anthology [Denis Côté, 2019, Canada]
I fist came across Denis Côté’s work through his fantastic documentaries Bestiaire and Joy of Man’s Desiring. I’ve slowly been catching up with his fiction work – always fascinating. Ghost Town Anthology is typically atmospheric, strange, and gripping.
At the time of writing and shooting Ghost Town Anthology, my main inspiration was “present-day Quebec, Canada.” I feel that people today are very afraid of losing the sense of comfort that my homeland offers. This fear presents itself in various ways—no need to say more about the current Covid-frenzy—and our resistance to change is fierce. The rise of populism in the media, the migrant crisis, the reluctance to be open to other people and identitarian closure are all themes that interest me. Laurence Olivier’s book is a poetic collection of slices of life and disjointed stories, and I tried to keep its spirit. Changes and tears in the social fabric are fascinating phenomena, and I designed a story with holes in it where the supernatural could creep in, bringing multiple anticlimaxes. It’s not a complex script, but I enjoy playing with tone; I like when things aren’t easy to define or categorize. Essentially, I wanted to write a script about the Other and the fear it inspires.
Denis Côté, Mubi
Available: Amazon
I’m Thinking of Ending Things [Charlie Kaufman, 2020, US]
I may not have been able to face Kaufman’s 720 page novel Antkind, released this year, but I thoroughly enjoyed his latest film as director. Even if it weren’t such an inventive and disorienting piece of cinema, it would be worth watching for Jessie Buckley’s brilliant performance alone.
We already knew that Jessie Buckley is something special. But she’s fully miraculous in the central role of a young woman who has agreed to meet her boyfriend’s parents (a frazzled Toni Collette and David Thewlis) on their isolated farm, even as the snow begins to fall and the angst sets in and she is “thinking of ending things”…
This is not cinema that leaves you feeling good about things. Nor does it tread a familiar path. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most daringly unexpected films of the year, a sinewy, unsettling psychological horror, saturated with a squirming dream logic that tips over into the domain of nightmares. Buckle up for this one and make sure you’ve stocked up on your meds.
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Available: Netflix
In My Room [Mati Diop, 2020, France / Italy] *short*
During the Covid crisis, some directors have turned to the short film. This is an example of why this format can be so rewarding.
Both filmmakers [Akerman & Diop] see voyeurism as a two-way street and offer the intimacy of their private lives just as naturally as they accentuate the humdrum goings on of neighbors and anonymous passersby. Or in the case of Akerman’s isolation classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975),it’s not just a stolen glance at a stranger. Rather, we’re strapped in for a nearly 4-hour study on the home life of a Belgian widow, who sticks to a painstakingly regimented domestic routine of cooking, cleaning, detached sex work, and efficient baths.
In My Room picks up where Akerman left off and introduces a quarantine special that treats isolation as a universal inevitability. It offers the comforting notion that while many of us might be alone and beside ourselves with the monotony of remaining at home, behind countless other panes of glass are other lonely goldfish. Whether with a light-up disco ball or a cigarette at dusk, we will continue to get by as Maji did, until she couldn’t.
Neyat Yohannes, Mubi
Available: Mubi
Influence [Diana Neille / Richard Poplak, 2020, South Africa / Canada]
(shown at the online Amplify! film festival)
An admirable addition to good recent films about one of the political sicnesses of our times: how democracy can be subverted from within.
Influence is both a portrait of controversial advertising and public relations executive, Lord Timothy Bell, and a disturbing examination of influence in a world of weaponised communication…
Influence explores how, in some countries, democracy has been for sale to the highest bidder. It is absolutely chilling to see example after example of vote rigging, media manipulation and the use of fear and violence as political tools.
Jane Douglas-Jones, 500 Days of Film
Available: not yet released in UK
Las niñas (Schoolgirls) [Pilar Palomero, 2020, Spain]
(shown at the online Amplify! film festival)
A nuanced and insightful coming-of-age film. Palomero gets stunning performances from the young actors.
Following its positive reception in Berlin, further festival play seems assured for the latest outing from the producers of Carla Simon’s Summer 1993 in a film that’s part of a school-child-focused strain of quality Spanish cinema that stretches back as far as The Spirit of the Beehive…
Schoolgirls shares much with Summer 1993 apart from being set just one year earlier. As in the earlier film, scenes that feel like carefully reconstructed screenwriter memories play out with a quasi-documentary spontaneity and freshness; the scenes featuring children only (they were apparently given no script) are easily the most memorable, with one in particular moving credibly from joy to disaster in just a couple of entirely compelling minutes. The performances from these young actors are terrific when taken separately, but what works best is the dynamic between them, and some of the looks that these dark-eyed girls exchange are so rich that they are little movies in themselves.
As with 1993, the social background is also key. The script is sharp to pick up on the fact that in the playground, for example, these girls are singing rollicking sailor songs that reflect none of their own experience while reinforcing sexist values. “How do we know that God exists?” asks Celia, and her mother replies, “Just because,” while the repressive approach to sex at school contrasts with the liberal attitudes in the teen mags the girls start to read. In 1992, Spain was still far from shedding the Francoist legacy, and the country’s struggle for the souls of these youngsters at times feels tantamount to child abuse.
Jonathan Holland, The Hollywood Reporter
Available: not yet released in UK
Letter to My Mother [Amin Maher, 2019, France] *short*
The young boy in Kiarostami’s Ten has grown-up (now using the pronouns she/her) and reveals a shocking truth about her childhood, in this powerful short film, which she has directed.
In a bold and heartfelt cinematic letter to his mother, the filmmaker Amin Maher reveals the most painful of childhood secrets. The film explores gender confusion, sexuality, guilt and repression in relation with violence and identity. “Letter to my Mother” is a means for survival, a way to stand and speak up and to understand. It is an attempt to break taboos and push boundaries – both social and personal, and to create life and art out of the darkest experiences. There are times when cinema itself seems implicated in this difficult story, charting abuse that began at the exact time he was appearing in Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002) which was nominated for the Palmed’or at Cannes film festival and featured the real-life relationship between his mother and Amin.
aminmaher.com
Available: not yet released in the UK
Lynn + Lucy [Fyzal Boulifa, 2019, UK]
Newcomer Roxanne Scrimshaw is very impressive.
Spare and direct, but composed of many artful emotional and moral layers, this melodrama confronts the misery that can be born of the compulsion to be on the right side of something. In desperate search of the good response to something which, in the end, is only bad, we find Lynn (Roxanne Scrimshaw), best friend of the wayward Lucy (Nichola Burley). In the wake of a catastrophe, Lynn steps in to defend the woman who has been her wilder half since school; but when local gossip turns firmly against Lucy, Lynn’s loyalties shift.
Making his feature debut after a highly acclaimed shorts career, writer-director Fyzal Boulifa wisely lends a plain, low-key telling to a potentially lurid story, letting the startlingly good performances and unpredictable plot turns speak for themselves. New discovery Scrimshaw and the always compelling Burley both bring conviction, subtlety and raw emotion to characters who feel fiercely real, as people and as friends: Lynn the stoical, sensible one who both loves and resents her reckless mate; Lucy the bombshell whose charisma masks a feral blankness.
Hannah McGill, Sight and Sound
Available: BFI player, Amazon, iTunes, Sky
Mangrove [Steve McQueen, 2020, UK]
The other stand out film in McQueen’s Small Axe series. The running time allows for an epic drama grounded in issues which are sadly still relevant today. I wish the last three Small Axe films had the same luxury of time to breathe – they felt too constrained (though still excellent).
Among the most important films of the year, and certainly one of its filmmaker’s finest, Mangrove sets the bar high for the rest of Small Axe – a series which McQueen hopes to develop further to explore Black lives in other British cities. The possibilities of the project seem wonderfully wide. Both intimate and monumental, Mangrove itself ends on a deliberately low-key, contemplative note that makes memorable use of the Maytals’ Pressure Drop and complicates any sense of triumph. Still, the film’s urgent, intelligent portrait of collective activism and resistance lingers. Connecting us to the past, Mangrove enlightens and empowers us in the present.
Alex Ramon, Sight and Sound
Available: BBC iPlayer
Only The Animals (Seules les bêtes) [Dominik Moll, 2019, France / Germany]
The narrative ingenuity requires some suspension of disbelief, but it is much more than a clever hook; it heightens the sense of loneliness and desperation of the characters who find themselves caught in a Hardyesque web of tragic coincidences.
A film that doesn’t ask you to keep up so much as it encourages you to sink into the mystery and go along for the ride…
Only the Animals is a mystery thriller with two mysteries to solve: who killed Evelyne and why does the primal pull of love and sex lead people to commit immoral acts… Ultimately, Moll’s film is a cautionary tale for the lonely among us, a reminder that one step away from idealizing romance lies the risk of becoming a fool for love, which just might get you killed.
Mark Keizer, Variety
Available: Netflix, Chili, Amazon, Google, iTunes, Rakuten, Curzon
Ronnie’s [Oliver Murray, 2020, UK]
An excellent documentary about this important British jazz musician and club owner. So much great music featured. A good balance of the different aspects of Ronnie’s character.
“Ronnie Scott was a remarkable man: ‘Jazz Musician, Club Proprietor, Raconteur and Wit, he was the leader of our generation,’ reads the memorial to him at Golders Green Crematorium. Oliver Murray’s documentary film Ronnie’s is an affectionate and portrait of him and of the jazz club he founded…
Oliver Murray … clearly has the priorities to ensure that the story be well told and to give that story a convincing shape…
Ronnie’s also tells the story of the man, and there is a well-placed darkening in the mood just after the hour mark, as attention shifts to Scott’s history of depression. Clues have been given earlier as to how difficult it was to get to know him, and the “reveal” of his battle against depression, and the catastrophe of his disastrous dental treatment, is effectively and sensitively handled.
Ronnie’s tells a fascinating story very well.”
Sebastian Scotney, The Arts Desk
Available: BBC iPlayer
Rose Plays Julie [Joe Lawlor / Christine Molloy, 2019, Ireland / UK]
(shown at the online Amplify! film festival)
Molloy and Lawlor’s fascination with the switching of identities is further developed in this atmospheric thriller. It features stand-out performances from Ann Skelly and Orla Brady. Superb score from Stephen McKeon,
“Adoption dramas are surely nothing new, and the plot scenario of a child – be they young or old – on a quest to find their birth parents has all the melodramatic trimmings to make this a relatively tried and true formula. Stepping outside of the more pedestrian terrain that this kind of film so often safely treads is Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s Rose Plays Julie, a jarring yet moving character portrait of a troubled young woman who discovers more than she bargained on the family history front when her biological mother sets her on the path to a challenging encounter with her biological father…
Rose Plays Julie is not shy in its approach to the thematic intersection of power, gender difference and violence and how they feed into the lived experience of women in particular. But it approaches its subject matter with a sophisticated balance of sensitivity and frankness…
A taut and at times uncomfortable journey, Rose Plays Julie is a shrewd reimagining of the adoption drama narrative that reframes the trope in a powerful and compelling manner.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, AWFJ
Available: not yet released in UK
Strange Cities Are Familiar [Saeed Taji Farouky, 2019, UK] *short*
Ashraf has been a political refugee in London for some 30 years, content with spending his days in his study or at his local social club. One day he receives a phone call from his friend in Palestine, telling him that his son Moataz has been fatally wounded in a protest. His friend pleads with Ashraf to return home.
As Ashraf struggles to return to Palestine, he recollects moments from his past – memories that are a heavy burden and a reminder of his failures and mistakes.
Vimeo
Available: Vimeo
Strasbourg 1518 [Jonathan Glazer, 2020, UK] *short*
The dancers’ bodies lurch and lunge and swivel in their confined spaces, leaping and collapsing, clenching and undulating. One woman periodically lopes over to what looks like a barrel or butt of water (more suitable for a barnyard than a 21st-century interior, and perhaps it’s the one literal allusion to the world of its title) and washes her hands. A very Covid moment. Other dancers whirl in the same fierce way, periodically clashing against the wall like Westworld robots. There is little or nothing else to be seen in the frame but the dancers themselves, nothing but the bare room, though in one shot, the curtain is drawn back slightly, revealing what looks like a typically British urban street outside – maybe London – and the effect is very dreamlike. Eventually the editing quickens and becomes almost stroboscopic. And all the while Levi’s amazing score is sawing and pummelling at your head.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
The Australian Dream [Daniel Gordon, 2019, Australia]
I was deeply affected by this documentary.
Gordon doesn’t shy away from depicting Australia’s larger problem with racism and laudably straddles the micro/macro case study of Goodes’ fight. The more Goodes becomes an avid spokesperson for reconciliation and for using racism in sport to confront the more deeply rooted problem, the more pushback he received from the white majority. Commentators, pundits, bloggers, and everyday fans decry him for speaking up and put him in his place. The fans boo him and he argues that the booing has an inherently racist undertone, which only inspires more fans to join the chorus. The louder the boos become, the more they amplify the gravity of the situation. At the same time, Goodes’ outspokenness and activism inspires a level of awakening as settler Australians recognize their complacency. They join him in calling out racism when they see it, and showing that they stand with him and not with the nation’s colonial past to which his aggressors desperately cling.
This energetic and emotional portrait of footballer Adam Goodes is an essential snapshot of the road to reconciliation. The film shows how change is possible only when a culture collectively asks itself the hard questions and encourages the conversations it’s been long avoiding. It’s difficult and it’s painful, but it’s absolutely necessary.
Pat Mullen, POV Magazine
Available: BFI player, Curzon
The Fall [Jonathan Glazer, 2019, UK] *short*
It’s a chilling film, which seems to distil an ocean of trauma down to a essence of evil, hate and fear.
‘I think fear is ever-present,’ said Glazer. ‘And that drives people to irrational behaviour. A mob encourages an abdication of personal responsibility. The rise of National Socialism in Germany for instance was like a fever that took hold of people. We can see that happening again.’…
The imagery immediately calls to mind a lynching, but the absence of dialogue and the masks untether the violence from any specific place or time. The masks suggest Japanese theatre, or the faces in Goya. The bodies of the mob are stocky, nimble and slightly uncanny, their clothes bland and dark. This could be happening to anyone, for any reason. And we have no idea how far it will go. The fall itself seems to go on for ever, brilliantly, agonisingly shot by Glazer to suggest a bottomless hell, or the echoing consequences of this act of violence.
Pamela Hutchinson, Silent London
The Mole Agent (El agente topo) [Maite Alberdi, 2020, Chile / US / Germany / Netherlands / Spain]
(shown at the online Amplify! film festival)
Another great documentary. I love the way it starts as one thing, somewhat contrived but funny, then morphs into a touching study of old age.
We didn’t get a James Bond film in 2020, but who needs one when we have Maite Alberdi’s charming hybrid drama-documentary The Mole Agent?
Rómulo (Rómulo Aitken), an ex-Interpol op now a private detective in Chile, places a newspaper ad seeking men aged 80-90. A lovely montage shows the jobseekers. The successful applicant, Sergio (Sergio Chamy), is a grieving 83-year-old widower hoping to feel useful again. His mission is to infiltrate a nursing home and investigate whether a female resident is being robbed…
Pablo Valdes’ omnipresent camera makes the viewer wonder exactly how much everybody onscreen knows. (Officially, Alberdi received permission to film inside the nursing home by telling its staff that she was making a documentary about old age.) But the film never hides its artifice or playful devices.
Besides, there’s no faking Sergio’s emotional impact at the home and the lovely, heart-tugging friendships we witness along the way.
How often can you say that about a James Bond film?
Tara Brady, The Irish Times
Available: Amazon, Microsoft, Rakuten, Sky, BFI player, Curzon
The Truth [Hirokazu Koreeda, 2019, France / Japan / Switzerland]
Perhaps not the strongest Koreeda, but still full of his humanity and insight.
The Truth starts as a droll tale but then morphs into something else, something stranger and more elusive, something with a hint of fairytale magic realism, which plays with the interconnection between cinema and reality…
This movie is an absorbing serio-comic flourish.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Available: Mubi, Amazon, Curzon, Rakuten, Google, Chili, iTunes
True History of the Kelly Gang [Justin Kurzel, 2019, Australia / UK / France]
Kurzel’s magnificent Macbeth featured in one of my previous annual round-ups. A director whose films are always worth checking out (though I can’t face watching his excellent but gruesome Snowtown again!)
George MacKay’s Ned Kelly writes his own would-be legend against the warts-and-all backdrop of Justin Kurzel’s gruesome and empathetic biopic…
Ambiguous to the end, True History of the Kelly Gang leaves us to ponder on the story Kelly might have told his son (in reality, he never had one) and comrades, but also on the one he may have told himself, the power it had over his life, and its necessary falsehoods.
Elena Lazic, Sight and Sound
Available: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, iTunes, Rakuten, Curzon
Veins of the World (Die Adern der Welt) [Byambasuren Davaa, 2020, Germany / Mongolia]
(shown at the online Amplify! film festival)
“Veins of the World” is a drama set within the context of the over-exploitation of countries such as Mongolia. Byambasuren Davaa tells the story of a family as well as a culture threatened by mining corporations acting in the name of profit and egoism, undermining the bonds between people and the earth.
Rouven Linnarz, asianmoviepulse
Available: not yet released in the UK
Villa Empain [Katharina Kastner, 2019, Belgium] *short*
When I first entered Villa Empain, a museum of contemporary art in Brussels, I had a particular sensation, as if I witnessed a folding of times, as if the house would communicate its elusive inner life to me. The feeling grew stronger as I stepped into a room with an installation of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who had re-invoked the bedroom of the Villa’s creator, Louis Empain. There was an almost tangible intimacy, which I had never before felt in a public space. As I started to learn about the life of Louis Empain, who built the house at only 22 years of age in 1934, I was truly touched—for one, how this very young man was even capable of creating such a marvelous blend of two distinct architectural styles, Bauhaus and Art Deco. However, even more fascinating was to learn that once the house was completed, Louis himself realized that he had created a piece of art. It could never be a home. He tried for three years to inhabit it, but could not find a home within a total art concept. The fact that you would build something so beautiful and never live in it, struck a nerve with me and became the vantage point of my filmic exploration. Louis Empain stayed connected with his first creation throughout his life. The film touches upon both, the life of its creator and the Villa.
Katharina Kastner, Mubi
Available: Mubi
2. Older films discovered for the first time
a. The Very Best
Diamonds of the Night [Jan Nemec, 1964, Czechoslovakia]
One of the greatest cinematic pleasures over the last few years is discovering classic films made in Eastern Europe (in large part due to the many superb releases by Second Run). This is simply brilliant.
The Czechoslovak New Wave is perhaps one of the most radical film movements to emerge in the mid-20th century… One of the most defiantly revolutionary filmmakers to emerge from the movement was Jan Němec…
[In Diamonds of the Night] he directs with a sense of dark surrealism, the imagery sometimes recalling the disturbing dream-logic of Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. Němec seems to refract time like light through splintered diamonds, losing all sense of time and place, replacing them with disorientation and fear. It’s a visceral experience, the kind one feels in their gut – Němec isn’t telling us a story, he’s making us *feel* something, and he’s throwing out all the rules of narrative cinema in order to do so. It’s difficult to watch Diamonds of the Night in 2019 and not see parallels with László Nemes’ Oscar-winning Holocaust drama, Son of Saul, with its fierce adherence to first-person perspective in a world gone mad. Němec has similar goals here, focusing on the men and their experiences, their bodies taking center stage in his increasingly untethered frame, and yet we are unsure what those experiences really are…
Diamonds of the Night remains a touchstone, a film of such raw power that it still feels genuinely radical, a hallucinatory, aesthetically visionary work that redefined the cinematic language.
Matthew Lucas, From The Front Row
Available: Vimeo
Good Bye, Dragon Inn (Bu san) [Tsai Ming-liang, 2003, Taiwan]
I have actually seen this film before, but it was a very poor copy on, I think, YouTube. Watching this beautiful new restoration, available on Second Run, is like seeing the film for the first time. Ravishing.
Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film, newly released on Blu-ray, is a poignant and powerful love letter to the cinema…
Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a beautiful film. With scarce dialogue, few camera movements, and an average shot length of 55 seconds, it offers a deeply contemplative meditation on the forgotten magic of the cinema as an institution. Whether observing a stroll down the well-trodden corridors, a lone usher completing menial tasks, or simply the dark blanket of the auditorium itself, each shot is composed to encourage a full ingestion of the architecture and atmosphere of this ancient temple of exhibition.
The film has been dubiously lumped in as an example of “slow cinema”, but this is far too dull a descriptor to effectively communicate the power of Tsai’s engaging style. As this stunning restoration illustrates, a sense of energy is palpable in the striking colours that light up each shot, from the flickering yellow foyer lights to the pastel-blue bathroom tiles, bright red cinema seats and the green, paint-flecked concrete walls…
A FIPRESCI Award-winner at the Venice Film Festival in 2003, Goodbye, Dragon Inn feels even more potent today than it did upon initial release. It’s a film that makes you yearn for those imperfect spaces that are feeling increasingly out of reach – not only the cinemas; but also the concert halls, the decaying Victorian pubs, the dive bars and even the greasy spoon cafes.
James Balmont, Little White Lies
Available: Second Run
Portrait of a Lady On Fire [Céline Sciamma, 2019, France]
I sadly missed this when it was screened at the 2019 Cambridge Film Festival. I had high expectations, as I am a big fan of Sciamma’s films. I was not disappointed. Indeed, this may be her best yet.
Sciamma’s rapturous costume romance finds a halcyon space without men for its artist and her subject to look and love their own way…
Watching Céline Sciamma’s haunting and downright revolutionary fourth feature makes me think about all the phoney period dramas I’ve sat through. Prestige heritage cinema is so often packaged for women, but rarely does it bother with the nitty gritty of their lives beyond who the characters will marry.
Men are banished to the background in this thoughtful and tender 18th-century set romance between a painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), and her unwilling subject Héloïse (Adèle Haenel)…
The politics of representation and the power of the gaze are constant themes of the film but they’re always wrapped into the love story rather than a lecture.
‘Take time to look at me,’ says Marianne, modelling for her class of female students at the start of the film. It equally works as a provocation to us. Take time to look at these characters properly, Sciamma is saying…
Isabel Stevens, Sight and Sound
Available: MUBI
b. Outstanding
Blindspotting [Carlos López Estrada, 2018, US]
Recommended by a friend. At first, I wasn’t sure whether I would like it, but I soon became fascinated by the characters and the direction the film was taking.
With the crackling anger and punchy humour of an early Spike Lee movie, and a flow of rhyme, rhythm and ideas that is all its own, Blindspotting could well be the most potent commentary on US racial politics since Get Out…
What could have been laboured and polemical is deftly handled, defused with comedy and powered by a pulsating score. Dialogue that slides into rap at key moments adds a heartfelt sense of honesty. This is the real deal.
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Available: see options here
Danube Hospital [Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2012, Austria]
My first introduction to Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s work was at the Cambridge Film Festival, where I had to take on the post-screening Q&A with the director at very short notice. I hadn’t seen the film until that screening. Thankfully, the film was Homo Sapiens and it is a masterpiece. The Q&A took care of itself.
Many of Geyrhalter’s films are not readily available. However, you can now see a selection of them on a new documentary streaming service, True Story (including Homo Sapiens).
This one is excellent, employing Geyrhalter’s trademark observational, perfectly composed approach, with no commentary.
…Danube Hospital is a deft, exacting piece of documentary cinema that is so subtly crafted that, upon first glance, it could be mistaken for Geyrhalter’s most conventional work to date. In fact, it is every bit as experimental as his previous work, but by narrowing his focus so specifically on one key institution, Geyrhalter is able to generate a set of dynamic metonymic relationships across multiple levels of the film. Danube Hospital may or may not adequately represent the state of medicine in Vienna, or Austria, or Europe. (A friend with personal experience has seen the film, and cautioned that his stay in an Austrian medical facility much more closely resembled an Ulrich Seidl film than Danube Hospital.) But Geyrhalter is indeed using the different modular components of his film to make an implicit argument that, yes, the Donauspital works. It is a bureaucratic machine that has semi-independent parts, and none of them is perfect, but they are all in above-average working order.
Michael Sicinski, Mubi
Available: True Story
The Cow [Dariush Mehrjui, 1969, Iran]
Finally got to see this classic Iranian film.
With The Cow, Mehrjui creates a unique blend of realism and absurdist folktale. Influenced by Italian neorealism and his teacher at UCLA, Jean Renoir, the director coaxes incredibly nuanced and realistic portrayals from his actors, especially Ezzatolah Entezami, who deservedly won an acting prize at the Chicago Film Festival for his amazing performance; his face and body literally begin to look like his cow after he takes on the animal’s persona. The cast of professional stage actors, all of whom got their first film experience with The Cow, also communicate the anguish and perplexed looks of villagers confronted with a phenomenon they do not understand. Mehrjui’s stunning, yet sparse cinematography consistently frames individual villagers and groups in tight closeups or through windows, doors, and above walls, limiting our vision, and that of the villagers to move around in space; it is an unchanging world that suddenly appears to fall out of its anchor when the cow dies. But mysteries remain: three shadowy figures from another village may have killed the cow, appearing periodically in the village and on a distant hillside. Hassan’s metamorphosis, like that of Kafka’s clerk, remains unknowable, as do the quasi-religious rituals performed by an old woman…
This is a deeply moving film about what it means to be human.
Jan-Christopher Horak, UCLA Library
c. Excellent
10 + 4 (Dah be alaveh chahar) [Mania Akbari, 2007, Iran]
The earlier films by the great Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari were hard to come by, but thanks to the new streaming site Cryptofiction, some of these important Akbari features are now availalable.
A kind of loose follow-on from Kairostami’s TEN (in which Mania starred), and using the in car camera style of the earlier film, this is nevertheless very much Akbari’s film, dealing with the period in which she was facing up to cancer.
The main purpose of Akbari’s film would be not so much to bear witness to the filmmaker’s proximity to death, but rather to embalm in time her own self-rediscovery, as well as related concepts such as beauty, pain, death, family, society. Seen this way, Akbari’s testimony wins out against cancer, as she transforms its ravaging power into the defining prism through which the artist looks at the world.
Cryptofiction
Available: Vimeo
A Gentle Creature (Krotkaya) [Sergey Loznitsa, 2017, France / Germany / Lithuania / Netherlands]
Loznitza creates a relatable heroine, quiet and almost mute, but persistent as the ground is being pulled from under her feet. We are with her, in her body, her longings, her revulsions, her descent into horror. Like K in Kafka’s novels, the gentle creature fails, but still retains agency and even desire when confronting a faceless administration.
Bérénice Reynaud, Senses of Cinema
Available: Amazon, Google, YouTube
A Piece of Bread (Sousto) [Jan Nemec, 1960, Czechoslovakia] *short*
A Loaf of Bread details three prisoners plotting and undertaking a scheme to steal bread to feed them on a planned escape. Though more straightforward than Diamonds of the Night, it displays a similar tight control, reminding me somewhat of the French noir of Jacques Becker or Jean-Pierre Melville for how the attention to small action builds tension. It’s easy to see the promise in the young director that would pay off four years later.
Jamie S. Rich, Criterion Confessions
Abendland [Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2011, Austria]
A film poem about a continent at night, a culture on which the sun’s going down, though it’s hyper alert at the same time, an “Abendland” that, often somewhat self-obsessively, sees itself as the crown of human civilization, while its service economy is undergoing rapid growth in a thoroughly pragmatic way. Nikolaus Geyrhalter takes a look at a paradise with a quite diverse understanding of protection. Night work juxtaposed with oblivious evening
Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion website
digression, birth and death, questions that await answers in the semi-darkness, a Babel of languages, the routine of the daily news, and political negotiation: All this has been captured in images with a wealth of details that make us look at things in a new way. The longer you consider a word, the more distant is its return gaze: ABENDLAND.
Available: True Story
American Animals [Bart Layton, 2018, US / UK]
A heart-pounding heist movie and a bantering conversation between real life and fiction, the debut drama by documentary director Bart Layton (The Imposter) is a great deal sharper – and more slickly executed – than the lunkheaded criminal debacle on which it is based…
With its knotty tangle of unreliable witnesses offering often wildly conflicting accounts, the regular potshots over the fourth wall and the punchy use of music, there are obvious parallels with the recent I, Tonya. But there is also some kinship with Sofia Coppola’s 2013 The Bling Ring, not least in the role that pop culture plays in the crimes perpetrated. In The Bling Ring, it’s reality TV that prompts the kids to steal; here we have a group of movie nerds who prepare by watching Tarantino flicks and come to believe that the heist is the inciting incident needed to kickstart their own unexceptional lives. Supremely watchable and surprisingly poignant, American Animals takes its bumbling, hapless frat-rejects and places them in a tightly plotted high-stakes thriller: a kind of Dude, Where’s My Getaway Car?
Wendy Ide, The Observer
Available: Amazon, Google, Chili, Microsoft, YouTube, Rakuten, iTunes
Booksmart [Olivia Wilde, 2019, US]
Such a good film. Funny and sharp.
It’s evident that so much love and thought has gone into Booksmart, from its profound sense of empathy for each of its characters to the carefully curated soundtrack, a hot contender for best of the year. Into the fine canon of pool party scenes goes a stand-out in Booksmart, soundtracked to Perfume Genius’ ‘Slip Away’, and the sight of Kaitlyn Dever and Noah Galvin belting out ‘You Oughta Know’ sits alongside Cameron Post’s ‘What’s Up?’ in a new genre of lesbian empowerment.
As Mean Girls was for teenage girls some 15 years ago, Booksmart feels like a watershed moment for the next generation. It’s so sure of itself and so full of the boundless possibility of youth. Whether you’re a teenager now or were a long time ago, this film makes you realise how important those formative years and friendships are, no matter where you end up.
Hannah Woodhead, Little White Lies
Available: Chili, Microsoft, Rakuten, Sky, TalkTalk
Boy [Taika Waititi, 2010, New Zealand]
A disarmingly lovely, big-hearted film, and hilarious in places…
Set in 1984, Boy (James Rolleston) is a bright, full-of-beans 11-year-old with a lovely open face. Boy hero worships his dim-witted criminal dad (Waititi, giving a dynamite comic performance, like a biker Ali G, with a mullet and crap prison tattoos).
It’s heartbreakingly sad watching Boy’s illusions shatter as he begins to see his father for the cringeworthy immature man-child he is. And with a level of emotional realness missing from most quirky indie comedies, Waititi lets in the thought that, in this deprived rural community, a promising kid like Boy might grow up to be a man like his dad. A tender and funny film; it deserves to be seen.
Cath Clarke, The Guardian
Available: Amazon, iTunes, Google, Chili, YouTube, Sky, Curzon
Dirty God [Sacha Polak, 2019, Netherlands / UK / Belgium / Ireland]
An astonishingly vibrant and engaging performance by feature first-timer Vicky Knight drives this urgent, passionate drama from Dutch film-maker Sacha Polak…
Co-written by Polak and Susanne Farrell, this European co-production is a multifaceted drama which deals with a range of complex personal and political issues. On one level, it’s a powerful indictment of the poisonous misogyny that pervades contemporary society, subtly drawing connections between casual lad-culture bullying and online “slut shaming”, and the vicious physical attacks that have increasingly become a part of our daily news cycle. Yet look deeper and you find an insightful drama about mothers and daughters; about estrangement and reconciliation; about the new world of virtual interaction and its relationship with reality in an increasingly fragmented society.
Mark Kermode, The Observer
Available: see here for options
Donbass [Sergey Loznitsa, 2019, Germany / Ukraine / France / Netherlands / Romania / Poland]
This new film takes an absurdist comic view of a country in moral free fall…
The strength of Donbass is that it is unremittingly bleak, but brings a sense of levity via its dazzling whirlwind of cinematic invention. It’s unlikely that this will be Loznitsa’s final word on this pet subject, but the prospect of seeing how the maestro of miserablism further uncovers this ghastly societal rot is certainly a tantalising one.
David Jenkins, Little White Lies
Available: see here for options
Ernie Biscuit [Adam Elliot, 2015, Australia] *short*
There is something refreshingly honest about the film, never shying away from presenting Ernie’s hardships as bluntly as possible. The writing never attempts to be overtly poetic; Ernie’s alcoholism is shown with straightforward sincerity, and a later character’s depression and isolation is covered in similar fashion. Yet, it’s this very approach that coats the distressing situations in such dark comedy. The result is a film that is completely relatable as well as oddly comforting.
Joseph Banham, UK Film Review
Available: iTunes
In Which We Serve [David Lean / Noël Coward, 1942, UK]
Few morale-boosting wartime films have retained their power and entertainment value as emphatically as Noël Coward’s… In Which We Serve. To witness Coward’s sober, no-nonsense direction (in collaboration with his co-director/editor, David Lean) and to watch his straightforward portrayal of navy captain Kinross, one would never suspect that he’d built his theatrical reputation upon sophisticated drawing-room comedies and brittle, witty song lyrics. The real star of In Which We Serve is the British destroyer Torrin. Torpedoed in battle, the Torrin miraculously survives, and is brought back to English shores to be repaired. The paint is barely dry and the nuts and bolts barely in place before the Torrin is pressed into duty during the Dunkirk evacuation. The noble vessel is finally sunk after being dive-bombed in Crete, but many of the crew members survive. As they cling to the wreckage awaiting rescue, Coward and his men flash back to their homes and loved ones, and, in so doing, recall anew just why they’re fighting and for whom they’re fighting. Next to Coward, the single most important of the film’s characters is Shorty Blake, played by John Mills. (Trivia note: Mills’ infant daughter Juliet Mills appears as Shorty’s baby.) Even so, the emphasis in the film is on teamwork; here as elsewhere, there can be no stars in wartime.
Gary Tooze, DVD Beaver
Available: britbox, iTunes, Amazon
Knives Out [Rian Johnson, 2019, US]
In the deliciously entertaining Knives Out, Johnson goes back to his roots with an updated homage to the Agatha Christie whodunnits he loved as a child, and to those “cheekily self-aware” screen adaptations in which Peter Ustinov would lead an all-star cast through a labyrinthine murder mystery…
As with the very best whodunnits, everything is set up and sneakily signalled in the opening moments of the drama, but it’s only on second viewing that those early clues become evident. There’s real pleasure to be had watching Johnson wind the coiled springs of his steel-trap plot, yet none of it would bite if we didn’t care about the characters, who remain just on the right side of caricature. Built upon a wittily verbose script that delivers more laugh-out-loud lines than most of the year’s alleged comedies, Knives Out retains a beating human heart into which daggers are regularly plunged. Witness Linda delivering a stinging reminder that all this entertaining mystery is playing out in the wake of a family tragedy, with Curtis’s imperious performance capturing that balance between the arch and the empathetic that is the film’s signature.
Mark Kermode, The Observer
Available: Microsoft, Rakuten, Amazon, Google, Sky, Chili, BFI player, iTunes, Curzon
Le Corbeau [Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943, France]
This clever, dyspeptic whodunnit from 1943 by Henri-Georges Clouzot…brilliantly captures a spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing…
A French provincial town is plagued by poison-pen letters from Le Corbeau, or “The Raven”. Who is the villain? And is there more than one, as the virus of evil replicates itself with copycat letters?
A shrewd glimpse into the heart and mind of Vichy France, disclosing a kind of 20-century Salem.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Available: Amazon, YouTube, iTunes
Over [Jörn Threlfall, 2015, UK] *short*
There are two outstanding elements to the latest short film by Jörn Threlfall, Over. The first is its gorgeous still cinematography, which vividly immerses us in the narrative without manipulating the way we evaluate it. The second is its twist, which comes out of nowhere and shocks us to high heaven. The combination of those two elements makes for some idiosyncratically chilling cinema…
Threlfall has created a near-perfect short.
Cameron Johnson, The Spread
Available: jornthrelfall.com
Quai des Orfèvres [Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1947, France]
As it dealt with unwanted pregnancies, drug addition, pedophilia, and the bourgeois naïveté of anyone who believes in righteous absolutes, [Clouzot’s] Le corbeau is certainly a pessimistic and cynical picture… Compared to this jaundiced view of humanity, Quai des orfèvres, released in October of 1947, seems to be a markedly undemanding, easily entertaining departure, like a reprieve from the overwrought illustration of Le corbeau’s dire austerity. Taking on a more conventional formal identity, with contented types and a customary trajectory, Clouzot’s third feature pivots on the backstage aspirations of theatrical performer Marguerite Chauffournier Martineau, going by the stage name Jenny Lamour…
Confirming his masterful management of character and corresponding strain, a strain fostered by spectator identification and empathy…, the narrative efficiency of Quai des orfèvres earned Clouzot Best Director honors at the 1947 Venice Film Festival. As opposed to the claustrophobic ambiance of Le corbeau, with restrictive settings only partially relieved by Germain’s movements as he frantically dashes about, Quai des orfèvres offers precise moments of demonstrable suspense, built on singular events and the verified predisposition of certain individuals.
Jeremy Carr, Mubi
Available: Amazon, Google, YouTube, iTunes.
Tehran: City of Love [Ali Jaberansari, 2018, Iran / UK / Netherlands]
Precisely paced and offering shrewd insights into the tension between tradition and progress in modern-day Iran, the action flits between three characters: ex-bodybuilding champion Hessam (Amir Hessam Bakhtiari), beauty parlour receptionist Mina (Forough Ghajabagli), and funeral singer Vahid (Mehdi Saki). Each has a secret to hide… As events conspire to compel the impeccably played trio to face up to reality, Jaberansari and co-scenarist Maryam Najafi question assumptions about physical beauty, while also examining the way in which ordinary people keep kicking against the restrictions imposed by an Islamic state.
David Parkinson, Radio Times
Available: Google, Amazon, Curzon, iTunes
The Border Fence (Die bauliche Maßnahme) [Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2018, Austria]
The focus here is on the Brenner Pass, a strategically vital conduit between northern and southern Europe for millennia, and which has been part of the European Union’s soft-frontier “Schengen” zone since 2003. The so-called “migrant crisis” of the current decade has, however, altered the mental landscape of politicians and citizens in many of the continent’s countries, often with concomitant consequences for the physical environment. The original title translates to “construction measures,” a euphemism for the border fence which provides the more prosaic English-language moniker.
The debate about whether such a fence is desirable or even practically possible is the rumbling background noise of Geyrhalter’s film, which downplays the role of elected officials — he sometimes shows them holding forth on television broadcasts, then cuts them off mid-flow — in favor of face-to-face interviews with ordinary people in and around the Brenner area. Heard but never seen, Geyrhalter proves an outstanding interviewer; he asks intelligent questions which dig beneath the genial, tolerant surfaces his subjects usually present. Sympathy for the migrants’ plight is frequently mixed with a streak of prejudice and even xenophobia; the film thus provides valuable, coolly modulated contributions to a debate all too often beset by noisy headlines and populist manipulations.
Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter
Available: True Story
The Cameraman [Buster Keaton, 1928, US]
When Keaton sacrificed that independence and control by signing a contract with MGM, where production schedules were tighter and less open to the sort of gag-improvisations that he was used to indulging, many observed it as the beginning of his career decline. Which makes it all the more poignant that his first MGM feature, 1928’s The Cameraman, directed by Edward Sedgwick, who up to that point in his career was more or less a director-for-hire, is right up there with Sherlock, Jr. as one of Keaton’s most impressively self-reflective films and an ode to the unexpected and elusive lightening-in-a-bottle nature of filmmaking.
Eric Henderson, Slant
Available: Blu-ray / DVD
The Chambermaid [Lila Avilés, 2018, Mexico]
Slow, steady, and with an exacting eye for detail, Lila Avilés’ “The Chambermaid” is a painfully astute observational drama about a young woman working in one of Mexico City’s posh hotels. The movie closely follows Evelia or Eve (Gabriela Cartol), for short, on her daily rounds of dreary tasks…
Cartol gives an incredibly nuanced performance as Eve. It’s thrilling yet painful to watch her pent up so much quiet frustration in her eyes. Like waiting for an unsteady stack of Jenga tiles, you don’t know when her emotions are going to come crashing down, but they most assuredly will—they must. Yet, even in the movie’s quieter moments, Cartol’s performance is just as effective. Her character is shy, and we see her struggle to navigate the social awkwardness of her co-workers trying to sell her their items or the rush of panic when she’s uncomfortable with a man’s attention. Cartol never has to spell out what’s Eve thinking about; her eyes tell us so much.
Monica Castillo, rogerebert.com
Available: BFI player
The Final Quarter [Ian Darling, 2019, Australia]
Interesting to compare with The Australian Dream (see above), with the same events from slightly different perspective. Equally well worth a watch.
A supercharged current courses through it, Darling having created less a documentary than a kind of electric cine-essay, pulsing with energy and urgency.
Despite much of the material being confronting, The Final Quarter is also inspiring, with a message that each of us will be remembered ultimately for two things: what we say and what we do. And so it is also a film about the purpose and value of legacies. By calling out racism, and by refusing to be put inside a box where the powers that be might have liked him to remain, Goodes unquestionably made life harder for himself.
But he also created a narrative, if not a reason for being, far more important than any act of sporting prowess. Goodes’s role in attempting to make Australia a more educated and tolerant country will be remembered long after all the marks, kicks, and tackles have been forgotten.
Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian
Available: iTunes
The Last Survivors [Arthur Cary, 2019, UK]
I was very moved by this documentary. A great testament to and by these survivors.
Documentary compiling the personal testimonies of the remaining Holocaust survivors living in Britain, all of whom were children during their incarceration in the concentration camps. They discuss how these experiences continue to influence their adult lives and why particular memories have stayed with them. The film follows one man on a return journey to Auschwitz, accompanied by his daughter, while another survivor revisits his home town in Germany for the first time since 1946…
This extraordinary, harrowing and powerful film hears testimony from some of the small band of men and women who survived the camps as children and later settled in Britain.
Alison Graham, Radio Times
Available: BBC iPlayer
The Street [Zed Nelson, 2019, UK]
Zed Nelson’s powerful documentary focuses on an east London street reeling from the advance of craft beer shops, art galleries and property developers…
Nelson filmed for four years, capturing the end of a way of life as the craft beer shops and art galleries move in, followed by property developers catching the whiff of profit…
An unmissable portrait of modern London.
Cath Clarke, The Guardian
Available: Amazon, Google, iTunes, BFI player, Curzon
Together [Lorenza Mazzetti / Denis Horne, 1956, UK]
More people need to see Lorenza Mazetti’s film, starring legendary Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi…
The London East End laid bare in Italian film-maker Lorenza Mazetti’s fascinating 52-minute piece of post World War Two poetic realism looks a far cry from the gentrified hipster’s paradise it would become half a century later…
Beyond Paolozzi’s appearance, Mazetti’s film works on so many levels, both as a vital contribution to the Free Cinema movement, with a young Lindsay Anderson working as the film’s supervising editor and as a social document of post-War Britain. MacDonald and Ferlaino’s twin sax, piano and percussion-based soundtrack speaks volumes too, as it both illustrates and pulses the life going on beyond the pair’s reach.
Neil Cooper, The List
Available: BFI player
Welcome to Leith [Christopher K. Walker / Michael Beach Nichols, 2015, US]
The terrifying documentary Welcome to Leith is a twisted thought experiment come to life. What if, today, a white supremacist lunatic convinced enough other white supremacist lunatics to move into a small American town and managed to take it over, using the democratic systems in place — town council meetings, elections, etc.? (No Trump jokes, please.) Well, it almost happened, in the teeny-tiny North Dakota town of Leith — consisting of ‘three square miles and 24 residents, with the children’ — when, in 2012, a notorious neo-Nazi named Craig Cobb moved in, bought up cheap lots of land, and started selling them to ‘luminaries in the white supremacist movement.’
…It’s a fascinating story, filled with fascinating characters — not just the nutter-butters like Cobb, but his neighbor, councilman Lee Cook, known to his fellow townsfolk as ‘the nicest fucking guy on the planet,’ who runs afoul of Cobb early and starts packing heat and sleeping with a small arsenal after receiving threats from the man. Or the kindly Bobby Harper, Leith’s sole black resident, who refuses to be intimidated by the neo-Nazis cropping up in town. Or even Kynan Dutton, a troubled Iraq War veteran and white supremacist who moves to Leith with his family and at first seems coolly articulate about all the legal issues involved, then later shows his shockingly violent side.
…The film is about more than just this one incident in this one small town. It also explores the vast cosmology of neo-Nazism and Aryan separatism in America, and does so with an unusual amount of fairness; that is to say, Nichols and Walker often let these head cases speak for themselves. That very matter-of-fact approach enhances the horror. Welcome to Leith is a sober, terrifying look at the very real monsters roaming the quiet countryside.
Bilge Ebiri, Vulture
when curiosity threatens 