1. West Side Story
by Steven Spielberg
As good as movies get. The kind of pure-hearted spectacle that cameras get built to capture. Every second of it carries sixty years of planning, of care, of hope. If you weren't whistling the Sondheim and Bernstein tunes, you'd be humming the steadicam and snapping along with the edit. Steven Spielberg fulfilling a destiny I don't think any of us knew was his to chase.
2. The Matrix: Resurrections
by Lana Wachowski
Staring into the eyes of God looking for answers, taking a step back, realizing you're looking in a mirror.
3. Benediction
by Terence Davies
Davies has endured and evolved as a visual storyteller to fit the times without losing anything except perhaps the need for his most pained memories. Now the world can be filtered through what we know about Davies, the things that bring him joy, the torments he's had to suffer. Here at last is something of a veiled self-portrait after a decade of seeing the world through women on the edge of madness, and he's found a lightness of touch and a biting wit that was hitherto relegated to the parenthetical. The story of Siegfried Sassoon is rendered as a liquid, poetic installation, something like Peter Greenaway struck with a ruler by a nun, maybe the sharpest of Davies' works since his Liverpool diary Of Time and the City, perhaps because in Sassoon and his lovers Davies has found vessels that can speak in a voice he recognizes. The cutting remarks and Algonquin sarcasm buoy the anguished cry of lost time and cracked hearts.
4. The Card Counter
by Paul Schrader
Letters never sent to grieving mothers, to Judas and to Roman torturers, to god himself.
5. Petite Maman
by Celine Sciamma
Trying to describe the effect of a movie like this necessarily diminishes it, like plucking a flower to describe its beauty, but suffice to say, the tiniest gestures carry the weight of dying stars. This petite movie has tremendous heft.
6. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
by Radu Jude
In which antique forms crash into microwaved political hangups. The film truest to life this year, for better and worse.
7. Labyrinth of Cinema
by Nobuhiko Obayashi
A trip inside the home of one of cinema's most passionate and open chemists. Here his movie posters, there his yellowing history books with bent pages and footnotes, here the signed LPs from his favourite singers, and there his hard-drives and software with ten thousand edit points. Obayashi was always generous, of spirit, with technique, to his characters, to his audience, and this is truly the kind of gift you could never hope to repay, his whole philosophy of life, his rendering of the history that led to this movie house, a purgatory or a paradise. Cinema is time machine and resort in his hands, it always has been. For every nightmare image or violent outburst there is such love and warmth generated by the hands of this much missed man.
8. Faya Dayi
by Jessica Beshir
Beshir makes the strongest feature debut this year (though she has been busy the last decade), with her study of labor, narcosis, injustice, and hopelessness, mingling like smoke in dingy dens and forgotten streets. Her silky form and heart-stopping monochrome images captures the khat trade in melting tin types, a document that will never lose its potency because the world will never lose the need to search for oblivion. The drugs numb the pain, harvesting the drugs brings the pain, the world sends nothing but judgment.
9. The Souvenir: Part 2
by Joanna Hogg
Hogg digs deeper than ever, finding the places in her youth where she realized that she couldn't compromise if she was to survive but she needed certainty to know not to. Her unsteady heroine is assailed by opinions and sideways glances that would drown her, because her memory of failure already has one hand on her, pulling her down. Hogg is ready now to see all that she was, what she was hiding, who she had to pretend to be, and even to find crooked beauty in the hurried flings and nights of loneliness. The dutch colors, the Alan Clarke starkness, the post-punk soundtrack, it's a New Order album as pictures reflcted in broken glass.
10. Unclenching the Fists
by Kira Kovalenko
Heartrending admissions of enfeeblement from a family who share scars more keenly than blood.
11. Ste. Anne
by Rhayne Vermette
What it looks like when a woman is finally for the love of fucking christ, allowed to speak in a filmic language unfamiliar to colonizers, unfamiliar to sexist authority. Ste. Anne is a movie I have been waiting for most of my life, a non-narrative display of loss, a powerfully non-linear examination of a life lived outside American morality. A somber study of independence's collateral damage. A fierce-some study of possibility in a magnificently off pallet. I'm always excited to see something called Avant-Garde and find nothing but clarity.
12. Hit the Road
by Panah Panahi
A gift from a son to his father.
13. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
by C.W. Winter & Anders Edström
Almost a full day of labor, loss, and time. The pure heaviness of time's passing, the exhausting realization that it won't stop. For a season, a small gathering of the world's lost sit at one corner of its massive uncaring expanse and exists. They go to work, they do their part, they mourn, they eat, they gather and drink and take stock of each other. Cinema, at heart, was always so geared and guided, it just lost its way. Be lost and be found at once here. An experiment, sure, but human, recognizable, us.
14. The French Dispatch
by Wes Anderson
"It's all Simone." On obsession's happy children, the product of caring benefactors. No art without money, but no money without moneymen who see. See that the world is better with the absurd and irregular, that the work of the artist is the point of life. Not money, not any of the rest of it. What is the world without the word, the smear of oil paint, the sculpted figure, the nature of beauty brought right to our senses like a doctor's ministrations. The moneyed have brought us to a dismal moment but there has to be hope as long as we have art so neurotically produced, so meticulous, and yet so oddly shaped; something only this mind could have dreamt. "He brought the world to Kansas." And vice versa, so to speak.
15. Licorice Pizza
by Paul Thomas Anderson
16. No Sudden Move
by Steven Soderbergh
Soderbergh's crime films are the window to his soul, more so even than the confessional sci-fi with all that fear and doubt. Here is where he wishes he'd been born, allowed to practice his trade. As a studio hand circa-1970 creating the world in grimy bars and cold, trash-strewn alleys. The world turns its nose up at his heroes and his camera stretches wide to hug all of them, 'scope nausea stranding them with their dreams out of reach and happiness around some corner they'll never touch. The greatest cast he's assembled squabbling like siblings as the future squeezes everyone to dust.
17. Old
by M. Night Shyamalan
Shyamalan's cubist period probably started with his work on Servant but he's really painted his sharpest canvas yet with this. Every angle is like a knife through butter, every cut bisecting the insignificant life of his doomed heroes like separating chopped, bleeding roast at a carving station. His vision has never felt more frighteningly anti-social, so malevolent, and so diamond perfect.
18. This is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection
by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
A truly new kind of cinema, the director's eye seeing his people, his beloved culture, ignored by cameras until he found them, as if cinema had just been invented. That's how unique his vision of humanity is, his view of folklore and still moving, breathing life like a vision from a better dimension.
19. Annette
by Leos Carax
Sparks sing the body mahogany, Leos Carax belts out a sequel to Pola X.
20. C’mon C’mon
by Mike Mills
Mills keeps writing his manual on how to be a human being and each time he finds some new grace-note, some new shattering instruction learned from being there for others as best as he can be. The monochrome brings out his anthropologist's curiosity and his graphic designer's specificity. The world as a catalog of possible emotional reactions to the unstoppable. People as forces of nature. Nature as the keeper of people. Can we endeavor to be worthy of being held so by the world we inhabit?
21. Benedetta
by Paul Verhoven
Our sainted pervert master returns for (at least [fingers crossed]) one more bacchanal clad in thorny crown and little else. Draped in rubbery late cinema digital easiness but still stopping to take time and smell the shit, Benedetta's parade of sin is easily the most self-assured good time at the movies this year. Asking a question as old as god himself: if we're made in his image, why can't we fuck him, and why can't we fuck each other however we please? The answer is a bloody slideshow of depraved offenses and smiling trespassers.
22. Parallel Mothers
by Pedro Almodóvar
Almodóvar finally remakes Magnificent Obsession for a time obsessed with easy answers that bypass science and head straight for mysticism. His question is whether love can transcend betrayal, logically and rationally proven. Should we leave human fate up to numbers? Isn't it more fun to see if they can intermingle like lost, horny people must do? His images, as always, curative. So perfectly shaped, so imaginatively colored and designed. And into them strides a ferocious Penélope Cruz, always at her best for Almodóvar.
23. 24. Mad God / The Spine of Night
by Phil Tippett / Philip Gelatt & Morgan Galen King
Two of the most inspired movies of the year were deliberate midnight movie throwbacks, one a nightmare in clay courtesy of the Frank Zappa of science fiction special effects Phil Tippet. The other was an unyieldingly gorgeous hand drawn marvel, a Frank Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi cover song that blew my mind out of my skull with every cut. Across a grim hyperborean hellscape directors Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King paint a fresco of bloody psychedelic discovery, a song in severed heads and "bodies ripped apart like fresh bread" to use an MST3Kism. Displaying more creativity in any given six seconds than most movies muster in 120 minutes, these two films gave me hope that you can fill your new work with love for the old without sacrificing a personality. I was enraptured by their visions of forsaken places and doomed creatures and heartened by the same show of creativity from new voices and decades old veterans at once.
25. Il Buco
by Michelangelo Frammartino
The further down scientists go into the earth, the further stuck in the past the people above seem to get. Frammartino's journals of lives ending as nature plods on with bluntness and occasional moments of beauty (usually hidden from cameras) take especial interest in quiet, amiable vulgarity, of the ways in which it can feel as though the natural order of the world is playing a prank on we lonely preoccupied human beings. This will be tough to top for him, because he's perfectly bifurcated his interests. To lose yourself in a hole of discovery, or to die alone above?
26. France
by Bruno Dumont
The worlds of each of Dumont's movies is pressed into the shape and size of a viewmaster slide and his most thorny character just switches between them as her life becomes less and less something in which she wants to participate. The poor, spat up by her people, the foreign, destroyed by her people, the wanton, ignored by her people, they all get their moment alone with France's hollow woman. She's the Statue of Liberty sent to check on everyone whom she didn't protect.
27. Procession
by Robert Greene
Film entering the real world through fantasy, only Robert would have done this but fans of Joshua Oppenheimer should get their bibs on too, this is for them. Painful doesn't begin to describe the experience of sitting through these living museums of trauma and therapy, but it is, after every insult, joyous to see men of every background finding common language to describe what they've lived through. They build sets together. That bonds them. They create this world together.
28. Wrath of Man
by Guy Ritchie
The bell tolls for every stripe of coward, soldier, crook, and conniver. Every mother's son gets his turn in front of the barrel of a gun.
29. The Power of the Dog
by Jane Campion
A fifth-hand masculine west is dried like leather and bound in a braid. What is still left to be uncovered? Forgotten passions and unforgiven sins. Women too shy to touch ivory, men too proud to ask forgiveness. Jane Campion's west is a place of sorrow, of land trying to bury you now that you've tamed it. The nightmare begins once you've conquered every beast. What now, Bronco Henry? What now? The world won't have you back once you defect.
30. A Crime on The Bayou
by Nancy Buirski
Buirski is one of the greatest non-fiction artists in this awful country, one of the few who treats her work with the care of our best fiction artists. So yes she tells the story, but she also makes it into cinema. Here we are told a tale as old as the nation itself, of a gesture misrepresented to make a man feel like an insect. She tells of the aftermath of a hate crime, a wrongful arrest, and an unlikely friendship without giving into the temptations of cliche, even though again, both form and setting would demand it.
31. Sabaya
by Hogir Hirori
The unspeakable business of reclaiming the stolen people, the hostages taken in the name of reclamation on behalf of dead gods. There is no thank you waiting for the men who risk everything to save people they've never met. There's no certain future for the women coming back from hell. And there is no plan to help this ecosystem of lost men and women. Impossibly sad and terribly gripping.
32. Zeros and Ones
by Abel Ferrara
"And now we've made the film. And I just watched it. And you just watched it." Ferrara and Hawke, two mercenaries out here trying to keep the furnaces lit, attacking the idea of the self in the 21st century with their joint ferociousness. Ferrara destroying images by capturing them, Hawke killing men by playing them. There's no way back from this. Dark hallways and screaming Marxists, who will believe us when we tell them every chance we had to pull the reins. The fatalist work of the year. "Not only am I gonna die, everyone I know is gonna die...This is part of the movie, by the way, and now it's over." So is 2021.
33. The Village Detective: A Song Cycle
by Bill Morrison
34. 35. Babi Yar. Context / State Funeral
by Sergei Losnitza
Losnitza's deeply untidy histories hit twice, at the start and end of a war. History didn't make heroes. It just filled graves.
36. The World To Come
by Mona Fastvold
To read someone poetry is to give them the world, and to love them like they love you is to put poetry inside their heart.
37. Oxygen
by Alexandre Aja
A woman's journey to remember herself, her every mistake, is the only thing that may save the race to the future, the human race entirely. And that's true, in so much as a human race without flaws, without affairs and lies and treachery is no human race at all. Aja's sequel to Crawl has a woman also trapped by claustrophobic circumstances and her refusal to meet the past half-way, a marvel of directorial ingenuity and mid-budget charm.
38. The Novice
by Lauren Haddaway
Isabelle Furhman is the neo-lib angel of death, the woman born to privilege who wants the world to roll over when she calls it. She's trapped by the limits of her body and doesn't see that she can't make even herself do as she wishes, what hope does she have commanding other bodies and minds. Lauren makes an insanely assured first-timer. Together they make bitter magic. A movie like an itch you scratch til it bleeds.
39. The Last Thing Mary Saw
by Edoardo Vitaletti
by Edoardo Vitaletti
The other great movie about a dogged Isabelle Fuhrman trying to make fortune in a setting that rejects her.
40. Blind Body
by Allison Chhorn
Can a camera see what people cannot? it is always riveting to see an artist try to unearth new ways of seeing and not.
41. El Planeta
by Amalia Ulman
42. Exterminate All The Brutes
by Raoul Peck
Peck looks back at a life cheated by racism to find the foundation of the myths that keep people from thriving.
43. Cry Macho
by Clint Eastwood
At 91 Clint Eastwood gives us one last dusty daydream of chivalry and bruised honor. Regally photographed and expertly underplayed, Eastwood sends himself into eternity with a loving last glance.
44. In The Earth
by Ben Wheatley
A welcome return to the wild for Britain's beat poet of violent revision.
45. Come Here
by Anocha Suwichakornpong
A daydream of Rivette and Lav Diaz, perfect surfaces protecting lost souls.
46. The Last Duel
by Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott is always going to shock you when it looks like he's down. His lesser film this year took millions and shaped the zeitgeist, his better film is slowly winning hearts and minds. The Last Duel is obviously the better film, the look back at his years of medieval epics and recognizing that a hero to some is a villain to others waiting for the other shoe to drop. This bloody, uncompromisingly nasty look into yesterday is the kind of thing I expect from a director who's filmed every sight twice and needs to complicate what he's done before.
47. The North Water
by Andrew Haigh
"Can you eat a bear?" Haigh creates another sumptuous bummer, this one the farthest back in time he's yet looked. Men traipse to eternity looking for dignity and find only blood-stained ice, a dirty mirror. Jack O'Connell does his best work since Starred Up, and fights barbarism with his every bone until he sees that there is no fighting it. You simply use of it what is necessary to not end up in the stomach of a monster, human or not. Somedays the bear will eat you, and some days you'll eat the bear.
48. 49. The Deep House / Kandisha
by Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo
The reigning champs of 90 minute horror movies got in two delightfully frightening works this year. The first was a study of teen girls adrift in a broken city. The other was the most ingeniously simple little inversion of horror tropes I'm frankly stunned no one's done this before. Their submerged haunted house movie scared me to death with its extra deliberate ghosts and compacted claustrophobia. It's always good to remember how fun it is to be scared of simple things.
50. Cityscape
by Michael Snow
The king of the structuralists pulls his eye out of storage, dusts it off, and gives it one last spin on the mechanical arm of displacement. You can forget, I feel, what the image is for, if people like Snow don't remind you what it is from time to time. I laughed, I nodded, I tapped my feet.
51. All Light, Everywhere
by Theo James
One of those beautiful works about the nature of sight. Who sees you at all times? Who sees them seeing you? Can you stare back? Dare you do so, for fear what you might divine beyond the lens making itself familiar with you? James does away with the obliqueness of Rat Film and doubles down hard on Fuck the Police, realizing there's more at stake than just Baltimore. This whole wretched country will lose itself in the search for safety. A work with one hand on the door of an emergency exit and another gesturing at the whole horrid kingdom before you.
52. The Harder They Fall
by Jeymes Samuel
"I'm making a classic," Samuel told his cast. Time makes a classic but I'd be willing to call time on this. This beautiful, agile riposte to Tarantino's westerns of privilege is a great hang and a better hanging. Death to the old representation, down with stories of men in chains, no more black characters learning dignity from kindly whites. The future is yours.
53. 29 Needles
by Philip Scott Goergens
As painful as pictures get. Rest in peace Brooke Berry
54. Wife of a Spy
by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Kurosawa's wartime melodrama splits the difference between the future and the past like nothing since perhaps Avatar or The Hobbit. Frame-rates cutting up action like a stump grinder and men and women trading comfort for the icy comfort of being one step ahead of modernity, and their fellow countrymen. No one is in shadow in this little noir, but no one can be trusted.
55. Drive My Car
by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Hamaguchi's silent man overseeing a kingdom of self-loathing and uncertainty from out the window of a red Saab. The camera must stay on until every last sin has been confessed. Riveting trips to who knows where pinned to your cortex with the raw power of vulnerability. Everyone knows everything, but nobody knows what to do. A series of tense interactions stretched to three hours of old fashioned theatrical drama. Chekhov is the muse but O'Neil and Hong Sang-soo sets the stage for a broken family's secrets informing every taken drink.
56. The Night House
by David Bruckner
In this dreary age of loglines that stop and end with "it's about grief," I like a movie that looks like it's headed for the nearest shore only to lose it in fog and rough seas. Rebecca Hall and her thousand pound screen presence anchor this nifty little haunted house yarn to the floor while symbols and red herrings pile up all around her. Bruckner's formal patience impress mightily, he gets better with every picture.
57. The United States Vs. Billie Holiday
by Lee Daniels
Lee Daniels is one of the only American directors who knows what it's like to be poor, who understands characters who came from nothing
58. Jungle Cruise
by Jaume Collett-Serra
59. A Weave of Light
by Bram Ruiter
60. Marx Can Wait
by Marco Bellocchio
61. Mariner of the Mountains
by Karim Aïnouz
A woozy travelogue from festival staple Aïnouz yields the richness of life that escapes most European eyes. As much an investigation into the existence of past lives as it is a visit to a place responsible for his own birth and the death of his father. Edited like a redacted government report but always open to the truth of life, you'll get homesick for a place you've never been and people you've never met. You'll never want him to return.
62. Eight for Silver
by Sean Ellis
Somehow this gorgeous little monster got away from distributors, despite its painterly touch and savage implications. A werewolf's blood passes between the ne'er-do-well children of the elites of superstitious village. Not even a professional monster hunter can exorcise the blood of this place, hell-bent on exterminating the unfortunate. What I wouldn't give to see this teeth-marked Rembrandt copy again right now.
63. Pig
by Michael Sarnoski
My prince, my patron saint, my everything Nic Cage is back in everyone's good graces after a decade at sea. He's being given parts worthy of his talent and eating them like feast after famine. Here he's a man who's waited his whole life for a friend like his pet pig, and will do anything, debase himself, grovel to cowards, to see her again. He's grieving everything he was, everything he's lost, and first-timer Michael Sarnoski gives him the perfect canvas to paint this picture.
64. Shiva Baby
by Emma Seligman
I don't know that I laughed harder than at this film's collection of horrid interludes imagined, we presume by the nebbish burning like a dying star at the center of the drama. The prom night recollection in particular broke my funny bone. All around the laughter is a perfectly rehearsed choir of embarrassment, hemmed in by tradition, with an old woman needing to be escorted to the car waiting to save you when you knock over bibles, like she too were in on the joke. What a marvelously uncomfortable debut. My heart will always go out to the religious misfit, especially when surrounded by orthodox judaism, the first real language of cinema in my opinion.
65. In Place of Monuments
by Naima Ramos-Chapman
66. We’re All Going To The World’s Fare
by Jane Schoenbrun
This year we were flooded with cautionary internet horrors but perhaps none that felt like both a warning and a way forward as this. Jane Schoenbrun looks back to the start of found footage and the end of our lives on screens and finds Casey (Anna Cobb) staring at us, wondering if the world ahead of her, adulthood, could be the violent uncertainty, the IED of aggression and regret, it appears to be. If so, why bother leaving her bedroom? She's safe there, right? A radical work; disorienting and truly frightening.
67. What We Left Unfinished
by Mariam Ghani
A museum wing of lost possibility, of gorgeous restored footage with no sound, representing a people who for years had no voice. This is the reply to the ending of Rambo III, the forgotten movement, the dead hopes and live fears. We never knew to what we were laying waste, so we never knew what we lost.
68. Sator
by Jordan Graham
Deep in the woods out of sight of everything but sweet diminished sunlight in small beams, lies family secrets and monstrous histories. But not even sunlight can cure a moldering in the soul.
69. Taming The Garden
by Salomé Jashi
An accidental work of futurism, imagining a place where nature can still run even though we've destroyed everything else for miles and the air isn't breathable. How do we support some little part of life when we've been so hellbent on destroying the rest of it? A zen-like calm descends on this pre-apocalyptic exercise. What is the way forward?
70. Belle
by Mamuro Hosoda
A gorgeous cautionary tale about leaving yourself behind as you search for an identity that fits you better. You can be yourself, sure, so long as no one asks who you are. Hosoda's imagination soars conjuring worlds of teenaged imagination. We've heard these ideas before, but they've never looked quite like this.
71. A Glitch in the Matrix
by Rodney Ascher
A gorgeous cautionary tale about leaving yourself behind as you search for an identity that fits you better. No one cares who you are. That's the hard bargain. In this world, no one's reaching out to save you. There is no Trinity to your Neo, no one on the other end of the phone. You're flying blind. If you decide that the world isn't real, no one stops you in time. The world is real, though. That's the problem.
72. The Beatles: Get Back
by Peter Jackson
Getting the past back just long enough to kiss it goodbye. There goes the greatest band in the western canon, or so the history books say, there goes the reasons we had to be mad because they broke up when it was time, there go the songs we imagined created in some holy fugue. The Beatles were just unshaven men in a room, pushed this way and that, ultimately tired of each other. And yet spending these hours with them feels like an otherworldly gift from the same unholy land of the dead that broke New Zealand's unions. It's too late to wonder if we should have this technology. We do.
73. The Velvet Underground
by Todd Haynes
One avant-garde school views another. Do the ostrich.
74. Les Olympiads
by Jacques Audiard
The year's most electrically erotic film, this triangle overflows with Raymond Carver-style messiness, where everyone's immediate goals are misinterpreted. Identity is left behind every few seconds and from the absence springs fresh, sensual melancholy. You can always lose more, especially with the taste of success still on your tongue.
75. Seance
by Simon Barrett
Simon Barrett's pint-sized slasher-keeper is all joyous revision and knowing nods, a Scream for a time when Scream is being remade by pretenders. The knowingly vicious are pitted against each other in this frigid revisionist exercise, exactly the kind of thing I wish more people would do when they have a little money and a little clout. Striking, sexy, and scary.
76. The Tragedy of Macbeth
by Joel Coen
One of America's great screen novelists goes back to class.
77. Moon, 66 Questions
by Jacqueline Lentzou
Jacqueline brings in the wildness of experimentation to the too-normal domestic drama of her past, her own recollection. A young woman pines for the absurdity, the non-linear life of a Harmony Korine character but she's pinioned by responsibility, by her relationship to the real world. She's confessing a desire to be free of all that made her, as Lentzou's heroines always do. But there is no escape until they're all dead.
78. Passing
by Rebecca Hall
Rebecca Hall makes quite the showing for herself behind the camera, crafting a film about race and old new york that feels like we've been watching it in private all these years. Her smartest move is letting Ruth Negga loose on a script filled with contradictions that calls for a star. Ruth Negga is a star, no mistake. She's ably supported by Alexander Skarsgård, André Holland, Bill Camp, and Tessa Thompson, but all movies Ruth Negga in them for more than five minutes are Ruth Negga movies. She paralyzes with her Mae West body language, her Bessie Smith delivery, her Josephine Baker charisma. This is a performer about to be rock the world.
79. The Empty Man
by David Prior
A reactionary Grimm's fairy tale, bad luck for yesterday's man with today's fears. As haunting as it is disconcerting.
80. V/H/S/94
by Timo Tjahjanto, Jennifer Reeder, Ryan Prows, Chloe Okuno, and Simon Barrett
The most metal horror film of the year, unvarnished blood letting monstrosity, aimless, nameless anti-gods and Raatma make mockeries of carefully constructed careers in deconstruction. Bodily fluids pour in every direction like loosened beer taps and all the while the cameras seem seconds from giving out.
81. Bingo Hell
by Gigi Saul Guerrero
82. The Worst Person in the World
by Joachim Trier
One of those films that's probably technically Trier's best movie, but I miss when he had room to grow, things were mangier. The next one. I'll wait for the next one. This is huge, obviously, an important thing, but important and good don't play so nicely in the rearview mirror. Still, imagine having made something like this?
83. Lisey’s Story
by Pablo Larrain
84. News from the World
by Paul Greengrass
85. When I get home director’s cut
by Solange Knowles
A dazzling dose of self-mythologizing in minor key, Solange seizes her sister's form, just as it was becoming in-line with Disney house style, and does something daringly abstract with her record company's budget. Solange emerges as would-be cult leader and record spinning fetishist, at the center of a small universe she creates with every cut. Afro-futurism meets the concrete nowness of any given moment. They're only immortal because women like Solange make them so.
86. The Banishing
by Chris Smith
87. Mad Woman’s Ball
by Mélanie Laurent
Laurent's project of contextualizing female hysteria as the natural outgrowth of any given historical epoch is an altogether more successful strategy than most of the work done in this direction in American film but her stately grammar withholds her from American audiences so a minor figure in this country she remains, much to my chagrin. She has the solidness and social reasoning of a Sidney Pollack without having yet fallen prey to his lugubriousness. This is perhaps her most proudly enunciated missive yet, a look at the way independent minded women were treated before suffrage.
88. The American Sector
by Courtney Stephens & Pacho Velez
Why does America still have pieces of the Berlin Wall littering its parks and offices like souvenirs from a bachelorette party? What message are we hoping to send? That your parent's screams will be kept in locket form around the necks of strangers who have never cared if you ever lived or how miserably you died.
89. May June July
by Kevin Jerome Everson
There's nothing unusual, per se, about where Kevin Jerome Everson chooses to point his camera but he always seems to see the future when he does it. Here a man, free, on the streets, is tied with a plant, which needs water and sunlight to grow but is in darkness. So many dead flowers, so many that never got their chance to become what they were meant to be.
90. Censor
by Prano Bailey-Bond
91. Kingdom: Ashin of the North
by Seong-hun Kim
Netflix's great Korean experiment has yielded some of its most popular TV and its most quickly forgotten modern classics. Here, somewhere in no man's land, a film meant as a bridge between seasons of the thoroughly watchable Kingdom. Here a woman abandoned by all life on earth finds her people in the undead after a crucible of horror. Moody and tough, but exciting and exacting.
92. Prisoners of the Ghost Land
by Sion Sono
Though Nic Cage ended the year in Oscar conversations, he began it in high vulgar style.
93. All the Moons
by Igor Legarreta
A gentle fable about contemplating infinity. For the child afraid of death in all of us.
94. 95. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin / The Forever Purge
by William Eubank / Everardo Gout
Two franchises highjacked by directors who know no one's watching them carefully enough to stop them from technical excess. Magnificently choreographed fast-food delivery; bad taste joys, both. Whether it's Dan Lippert as amish livestock or Josh Lucas as a recidivist redneck, you'll get your money's worth.
96. Cow
by Andrea Arnold
After a detour having her work maimed in Hollywood, Arnold returns to fundamentals, finding the essential nature of a woman in captivity. Some kind of Kuleshovian affectation at work, a cow can seem sassy when the right song plays under standing still. Her ideal heroine.
97. Hell Hath No Fury
by Jesse V. Johnson
Jesse V. Johnson is the sardonic smartass tearing up the rulebook for VOD, the guy you wished for as cinema went out of video stores and into redboxes and segregated streaming services. He cares how low budget movies feel. Here he steps into the exploded crevice left behind by Inglourious Basterds and delivers on that film's promise of non-stop violence and uneasily shifting alliances. Traitors and bastards holding hands with their left and a grenade with their right.
98. Joy Ride
by Bobcat Goldthwait
A trip to heaven with two guys who've seen the inside of hell and come back. Dana and Bobcat prop each other, give each other strength and purpose, and seeing them together, sharing a stage, a car, or a memory, is as loving an image as documentary gave me last year.
99. 100. Skyfire / Ice Road
by Simon West / Jonathan Hensleigh
The two polarities of action schlock from many year veterans given newly buoyant CGI canvases on which to paint. One sees fire from the heavens interrupt a nationalist PR display, the other sees desperate men driving to their doom across tundra and asphalt. Both are better than anything with superheroes I saw in the last year.
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