1-2. Familiar Touch / Last Summer
by Sarah Friedland / by Catherine Breillat
Two diametrically opposed studies of women in the autumn of their lives, with time running out and pleasures and comforts no longer guaranteed. In the former Sarah Friedland show the search for dignity as the mind goes and the world is what you remember of it in a feedback loop betraying you to your surroundings. Enfeeblement your reward for a life lived and losses incurred like fines from the heavens for trying to be. In the latter Catherine Breillat shows her prototypical heroine, the sexually liberated hellion, reaching the age where the chance to risk is starting to evaporate, and so she invents a drama for her to playact, and the horrible third act, the one waiting for her once she has lost even these freedoms and the memories of her actions haunt her. They both ask what it is to come to a place of repose. One woman wants happiness, the other disruption and degenerate thrills, neither is satisfied with where their lives have deposited them in this unremarkable time. Familiar Touch, dripping with Fassbinderian pathos and designed with the care required to hold its viewers without coddling or breaking them, as it must its protagonist, gifts a loving final look at ordinary decency. Last Summer, like a cat still finding ways to destroy the things you love most, creeps up on you and sinks its claws in. I was never more enraptured than I was by these visions of wonder and despair.
3. Air
by Aleksei German, Jr.
"He's every bit the filmmaker his father is." Breathed my friend Veronika Ferdman of this perpetually neglected son of cinema. She was talking about the director of Hard to be a God, My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Khrustalyov My Car! She was not singing idle praise. It is difficult to imagine Aleksei German making anything as conventional as Air after swearing off its sort of linear narrative following the aptly named Trial on the Road, still a whizzbang entertainment for such a dark hearted testament to the death of trust, it is not hard to see him nodding along to his son's heart-breaking tribute to the faceless and nameless whose bodies paved the road to such a desperate future. Russian cinema is going to be even more blacklisted than it is now thanks to its dictator's murderous whims, which is a shame as it seems to be among the most vital in the world lately. Air, an accidental corrective to the missed opportunity that was Masters of the Air, and a far more honest work in every way, follows the underestimated female fliers who helped cripple the Nazis during their years of military dominance, when America was still deciding its role in the future of the world. German, Jr.'s camera explores the blood soaked beaches and trenches looking for something to hope for and finding only the faces of the perpetually bereft. His once-friendly novices become steely lifers for the minutes in which they survive their latest mission, with death in every cloud, and loss in every landing. They escaped to the heavens and when they came back their worlds had changed forever. The terror of watching people grow into calloused nationalists is equalled only by the optimism and romance he does not reward. A place you don't want to leave but can hardly stand. A hilarious film to see when Wicked has captured the attention and hearts of most Americans, as 'defying gravity' comes to mean something quite different. This director, after all, has risked everything on the idea of us looking backwards, finding little but a graveyard, and still being enthralled by what we see. I could barely move or breathe while it was on. They still make movies like this.
4. Megalopolis
by Francis Ford Coppola
It's much easier to go through life imagining this won every prize at Cannes. What other film truly investigated why we make films, what films can be, what the moving image is capable of giving the human heart? What other film went looking for the future and found the most beautiful and strange celebration and indictment of what has been? What other movie looks like this? I'll have more to say later, because this film is too big for my words right now.
5. Hokage
by Shin'ya Tsukamoto
A director who has always believed movies should hurt, that an artist should mean it and an audience should know they're risking their soul's equilibrium by taking in another point of view, a movie that is not just an easy way to view the past's conventions and traumas.
6. The First Omen
by Arkasha Stevenson
A new voice's first aria. I live for the terror I felt watching this for the first time.
7. Black Tea
by Abderrahmane Sissako
Sissako hints at a wider world, beyond the usual settings of his work, and still locates a devastating simplicity: the distance between two wounded people who are only just learning what the world can offer them. The reviews and hesitance before this one baffle me. I was moved enormously by this love story and the narrative of self-actualization through atonement. Two characters learn to let themselves be loved only after they figure out how to love themselves. There were a lot old fashioned films that failed with audiences this year, but this, which harks back to the earliest African narrative films, with a dash of French poetic realism and early Chinese melodrama, but Black Tea's failure seems like a real indictment of a modern sensibility. If we cannot make time and space for something so elemental, but deeply felt...
8. Here
by Robert Zemeckis
The film beyond the reasonable doubt. The movie about death covering you with its shadow as you stand and plan for the future. Over before it's begun. Your birthplace and graveyard the same 100 square feet.
9. The Room Next Door
by Pedro Almodóvar
Almodóvar has been building towards this since Talk to Her, securing a niche between the shade and shape of the melodrama and poetry of yore, and here, while seeming to do very little, he locates his mos simple expression of grief and longing. It looks like a film about people trying never to offend one another, a reflection of the contemporary sensibility which would prevent an artist like this from having become an icon in the first place, but soon it's just two women alone in a house with nothing but history and poetry binding them, sticking them to their place and time. One of them is dying quick, the other slowly, and in their bourgeois decadence it suddenly becomes clear how little of the busyness of their lives, the collection of things, tokens and quotes and gossip, symbols of a life well lived by a crooked rubric, will not stand between life and death. It's only the way light falls on a sleeping body, the way colors greet the eye like a beloved family member's embrace, the way James Joyce's words capture so perfectly the condition of being alive even as you veer closer than you ever have to disintegration, to death. These things are ephemeral to the dying, but timeless in truth. And so, in the reflection of meaninglessness, what do we remember? What do we hold dear? Who was a great lover, who was a great friend? Unspeakably touched by a film pausing to ask these questions out loud after so much preamble designed to spare feelings that soon won't even exist. The waste, and yet, how could anything we do while we're alive that accepts the splendor of life be a waste? These are just some of the things on this director's mind. Thank god he's lived so long. That he's still here with us, considering us.
10. Horizon: An American Saga Part 1
by Kevin Costner
I need no further proof I'm getting old. The things one's body gives up doing without complaint, the impatience developed for cultural trends that you have little proof are anything of the sort, the way everything you don't like becomes evidence of a contrarian plot against good taste and common sense... all of it found particular expression in my love for Kevin Costner's first piece of a four part puzzle about "the way things used to be." I just loved this movie, which could have been silent, a mixture of Erich von Stroheim's Greed and John Ford's The Iron Horse, and the more it became clear America was rejecting it the more I loved it. This isn't unusual for me, I grew up with the birth of indie rock and the death of the interesting American blockbuster, and I make something called The Unloved every month. But even so I never felt like more like an old man than when railing against the box office and critical failure of a three hour western that could have been released 100 years ago. With all that table setting, its pleasures are both macro and micro. Well-managed scale is its own reward, and certainly the country that loves a 50-part series and made The Lord of the Rings and Avatar into billion dollar phenomena must somewhere appreciate what Costner's done, taking the every lesson he's accrued from both the westerns he's starred in and loved as a boy. And then there are the grace note hanging around every corner of this behemoth. Abbey Lee's tenderness towards Costner, Michael Rooker as a Victor McGlaglen character, acting as the spine of a community forged in dirt and blood and tears, James Russo's tired eyes and gorgeously weathered face returning to once more play a heel for this director, Jeff Fahey joining him for a scene of awful tension, both of them reminding us who they, who we all, used to be. And the sense that all of his stories are illuminated by the same kinds of rifts brought about by pride and a need to be understood and appreciated. That may indeed be the great sin of America, the undoing of the place carved out of native territory like a bullet from a back. We could have had it anyway... but maybe we couldn't. Maybe these people were always going to give into childishness, into the need to impress and replace their fathers. And a tragedy of a nation needs a movie this huge to show us how enormous our folly.
11. Hard Truths
by Mike Leigh
The evident passion was deceptive. Leigh places Marianne Jean-Baptiste in a blank space, a spotless house with two actors who can do little but hold on for dear life as she rages (exactly what the situation calls for) at all of life and its people, happy and sad. They are all the same now, to her. And then once we have the lay of the land, he stops her and us dead in our tracks and the simplest questions and notions suddenly seem like things asked of gods and seasons. "Why does the wind blow" seems an easier question than how did this woman get so miserable. But of course they discover her, the heart so broken, the head so heavy, the human being abandoned to her agony, and Mike Leigh and his star do what they do: they break your heart without doing appearing to do anything. The unsparing gaze dissolves the pristine surface and there stands the naked wounded soul.
12. Suspended Time
by Olivier Assayas
There's little denying that 2018's Non-Fiction was a career low for Olivier Assayas, a half-checked out and too contemporary study of flagging book sales and awkward luncheons with no stake in the lives or artistry of its well-fed protagonists. And yet here is the sequel, in all but name, and it's some of his most affecting work. The split at the heart of it finally retroactively fixes the problems with the earlier work (and indeed even improves upon the restless Summer Hours) - he places the sniping and grousing in a deeply personal context. Two brothers, each a different unflattering shade of their auteur (and what is more personal than laying your neuroses bare with only the hope of humanization through the idea of a backstory to explain it all away to soften your complaints about food and trash day), must share their childhood home during lockdown. It would be too easy if they solved all their problems, so they don't. They live in them and kick them down the road as Assayas narrates his real connection to the home, to the sight of trees, the memories of care from family members long dead. It looks like a film about the banal terror of sharing a home during COVID while rich. But we leave with a piece of the director he has never before offered us, the man stripped of desire and experience; the child. I've seen many sides of Assayas before, many of them uninteresting, but never this. At long last he's become a director I cannot live without.
13. La Bête
by Bertrand Bonello
Neither past, present, or future has answers to the dead-ends and culs-de-sac that prevent us from reaching our destination. Bonello's project of divining the specific character of cinema against literature, oral histories, and social media reaches its stately apotheosis.
14. Scorched Earth
by Thomas Arslan
Blown away by Arslan's fifteen years-later-sequel to In The Shadow, which finds him even more intense and driven, like his hero, who has not grown a sense of humor in the interim. Trojan is now even more battle hardened as the job of honest criminal has become obsolete in the age of the gig economy, though after all weren't hastily assembled heist crews the original temps and lyft drivers? The menacing atmosphere and anonymous perfection of a city rendered in unsparing sleek digital images feed each other as it becomes clear that people like this will be consumed by the future a la the sin Kurosawa's Pulse. And yet there are still beautiful things to be found when you do it the old way.
15. Juror #2
by Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood's work is never finished, because the work of taking part in civilization never ends either.
16. It's Not Me
by Leos Carax
Carax's living diary can't possibly be as heartrendingly sad as Holy Motors, so it opts for a more quizzical, investigative tone. Just who am I now? And who have I been all along? Carax's subject has always been the parts of himself he fears most, and this video essay, a trifle really, when placed side by side with the full length work and the biography, is a half smiling parting glance at the last 40 years of his life.
17. The Bikeriders
by Jeff Nichols
Old fetishes for a culture marching steadily backwards. Naturally it went all but unnoticed.
18. Trap
by M. Night Shyamalan
19. Kubi
by Takeshi Kitano
Very few artists are as plugged into the single-minded derangement of those closest to the power afforded to the wealthy as Takeshi Kitano. His Outrage trilogy showed, over and over again, the dissolution of family ties and business organizations the minute someone threatens the natural order and tentative balance between parties interested in the same goal in the same territory, and here he's extended the same paranoia and death drive to the pastoral chanbara, finding the same cannibalistic urges in royal courts instead of yakuza board rooms. His deliciously bitchy backstabbing gets the Ran treatment, with every massacre rendered like an impressionist picnic, the colors of warfare, yellow banners, red blood, the only true expression these hardened maniacs allow themselves.
20. Cuckoo
by Tilman Singer
Buy the ticket, take the cure...
21. Rebel Moon: Director's Cut
by Zach Snyder
This year two radically different artists took a look at the plague that is endless Star Wars and the insidious commodification of what was once a personal statement to fastidious assembly line production by happy company men. Did you truly, my little lamb, imagine arguing about the directorial work of Bryce Dallas Howard for eternity when you first clapped eyes on Boba Fett? Zack Snyder, of all fucking people, took one look at the storm clouds of mediocrity encircling Lucasfilm and decamped to fairer climes. Here, in this Star Wars for perverts, which Eli Roth fell on his face failing to make a few weeks later, sometime between one of his regular calls for the destruction of Muslims, Snyder unfurls a deeply personal vision of art. Namely that it requires all of you, body and soul. Certainly he knows keenly about loss, and about sacrifice, and what it feels like when you appear to have been given everything and yet misery stays close at hand. For the first time, I felt and understood what occupies Snyder, that in the mire of slaughter, he dreams of art in which violence is purity of expression, in which you can paint guernica in the blood of martyrs. That just because it looks like juvenilia, does not mean it needs to act like it. That just because this wretched culture produced it, does not mean it is of it. Not that anyone much paid attention, but in its way this is the film the present moment needed most this year.
22. L'Empire
by Bruno Dumont
And on the other extreme, adult Star Wars as precisely the joke it seems based on the one sentence description. It is now no longer impossible to imagine Bruno Dumont happy, he's set off fireworks and novelty car horns and clowns loose on his once hallowed grounds, and then in come the jedis. What a perfect absurdity, exactly what the present moment deserves.
23. Green Border
by Agnieszka Holland
Like Marco Bellocchio, Agnieszka Holland is a survivor of the system and decades of looking for financing hasn't dimmed her anger or her focus. Here the attention she once gave her countryman is thrown at the people who need it most: inconvenient immigrants. The search for a better life remains the simplest tale one can tell with a camera, and this neo-neo-realist tale has no easy pathos or academicism about it. It's hard and it's horrible and moments of grace are few and far between, for that is the lot of the humanitarian. Your rewards are off screen. Here the struggle, every painful second of it, is in front of us.
24. Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: 'Phony Wars'
by Jean-Luc Godard
A final statement (one of a few) from a man who never stopped dreaming in the language of cinema. Every year people search for new modes of expression, but sometimes the simplest disruptions remain the most imperative. To just have his images and thoughts thrust upon the screen for one more twenty minute burst, like a stay of execution for the medium.
25. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
by George Miller
"Do ya have it in ya to make it epic?"
26. Vermiglio
by Maura Delpero
Steeped in Ermanno Olmi's winter chilled anthropologies, this lovely film looks for a future in past glories of Italian cinema, in the truths that have not dimmed with age. A film that depicts the pleasures and perils of community, cozy and treacherous in the same gestures.
27. Vulcanizadora
by Joel Potrykus
Joel's best film, a study of growing up without growing up and a terribly accurate diagnoses of curdling down home anti-masculinity. Searching for a refuge in legend and finding only frailty. This is an artist discovering his truest purpose.
28-29. Union / Strike: An Uncivil War
by Brett Story & Stephen Maing / Daniel Gordon
Two studies of strike breaking and insidious corporatist ideology eating at humanity within and without. In the former the camera is witness to impossible cruelty and cowardice. In the latter the story is older and transcends the form, as does the frustration and anger of each interview, whose feelings, still caught in the throat as if they described injuries incurred yesterday, burst from the screen. The injustice of Strike boggles and rankles, even more so because in response to this show of humanity, the government simply erased the industrial backbone of the country in order to ensure the stories here could not be applied so easily in the future, as in the strikes depicted in Union. Both maddening. Both Essential.
30. No Other Land
by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor
"Our villages appear on maps from the 19th century." And a genocide began as soon as someone could arrive to dispute it. The old adage about the violence inherent in a border meets its match in the lust for expansion of those borders. You don't need to defend if you conquer the world, but how will you win when it's by blood alone you have taken what you claim to own. The phantom film, the most important images released this year, were the videos, millions of them, of children hobbling towards hospitals they may never reach, of infants in rubble, of parents and children grieving, all on cell phone videos released to a world split in half, the horrified and those who blinded themselves to the sights, deafened themselves to the sounds. No Other Land is a vital film and an ingratiating one - placing us on the front lines of forever as more and more is taken by force. At a certain point it's impossible to imagine the living humans still clinging to the little life left in Palestine. This is more proof, unheeded warnings, that these are just humans. And the world is watching them die.
by Mati Diop
Seeking the rest of ghosts and spirits born in war and conquest. People who have never had a global voice finally receiving one at the hands of a champion with truly elegant calligraphy. Diop's elliptical form meets the subject of the conundrum of the modern museum head on, with poetry and reportage mixing in the film's bloodstream. Dahomey argues persuasively without seeming to; haunting, persistent sound design and sharp pictures of protest and things made voiceless by context, a quilted tapestry, a necklace of talismans from forgotten ages. Everything comes back, no matter how hard you try to bury it. There is no bill of sale to be honored for what European powers took.
32. Rumours
by Guy Maddin, Evan & Galen Johnson
Shriekingly funny and a complete 180 for Guy Maddin, who hasn't made a film this straightforward in decades, this bizarro zombie film isn't so much a mirror held up to the world as it is holding a mirror under its nose to confirm its death. Most welcome all the same. This is a satire of the political reality of rich worldbuilders but also of film financing and festival culture, a companion piece to Assayas' remake of Irma world-builders in that way. Trying to make laws or art, to keep the peace without destroying the world, follies when you're so easily distracted. The wrong men for the job always seem to get it, and so Maddin takes himself out of his comfort zone to see if he can't get a little more done than usual. Not that his perversion of early 19th century storytelling doesn't serve a purpose (specifically: entertaining me) but it's a great joke to make an "important" film that draws no conclusions. Like the stories of the making of the Fleetwood Mac album of the same name, it shows that pettiness and drunken bickering can sometimes produce great art...or the end of the world.
33. Abiding Nowhere
by Tsai Ming-Liang
Beyond the cheap thrill of knowing Tsai and Lee Kang-Sheng were feet from the Raising Cane's at Union Station, it's of course just a pleasure to once more be allowed to breathe in and slow down with an artist considering the body in every space. Permission, as it were, to consider yourself in a foreign and ancient spiritual lineage, to be one with every human who passes Lee on the sidewalk, and picture yourself frozen in time, allowing each second to pass like an enveloping river. The self and nothingness, contradicting each other forever in the form of the monk who seems to stand while others work. But he, too, like a zen Bugs Bunny, will get where he's going.
34. Caught by the Tides
by Jia Zhangke
A searching greatest hits compilation and a reminder of what the censors are afraid of from this artist. The genre fluidity, the way his camera exists to love both his hometown and his wife, the great Zhao Tao, whom he so movingly still sees as a twenty-something troublemaking moll. Jia Zhangke will always be a thorn in the side of his government, who cannot abide the hope and despair he juggles so deftly, the freedom he wields in spite of everything, freedom of form, with time, with fiction and non-fiction, and this, against all odds, is one of his freest experiments.
35. The Dead Don't Hurt
by Viggo Mortensen
As if he stayed on the set of Lisandro Alonso's Eureka and made himself a 70s western of assimilation and rejection, Mortensen's second feature as a director is quite a tender affair. Despite the handsome setting and movie stars in the lead, the film still feels homemade and small enough to get one's arms around its contours. This is a tale of differing forms of duty and the search for purpose under a foreign sun in land governed by the feckless. To whom do we answer when the rules are rewritten before our eyes? The cowboy here is underlined as a type defined not by American values but those that became American when worn by the right people. Those who understood what they really had to lose.
36. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
by Mohammad Rasoulof
The tale of the film's premiere is as cinematic as they came, so thankfully the film is just as interesting. Iran's draconian state takes the form of a father who starts to see malicious intent in every action his daughters take. Everyday defiance becomes an attack on the state, as he starts to see himself as an extension of his position. The lies start and can't stop. A complicit mother doesn't understand how far gone everything is until she's fighting for her life. A horrifying film right out of Fritz Lang or Nicholas Ray, in which teenage rebellion proves the undoing of a covenant of power. Films can barely change the hour anymore, but governments are still right to be afraid of them. They last longer than the wrong people would hope.
37. Hitman
by Richard Linklater
I think after 35 years of filmmaking it's clear that Linklater is lately at his best when at his most amoral, enjoying the hi-jinx of people who are getting away with something. As with the shaggy and handsome baseball players in Everybody Wants Some!! his hero is a man who stumbles into a life of leisure thanks to a simple gift. Playing baseball and lying shouldn't really lead to the best years of your life, but Linklater is a filmmaker very attuned to the American character and well... he's right. They do. And furthermore seeing the doors fly open for both his cinema and his lead allow us to coast into laid back philosophical discourse, to question the nature of the universe with the ease and curiosity of a stoned freshman. Add to that more sexual chemistry than can be found in any of the major "erotic" movies this year (your tennis twinks, your office doms, your vampire beards, your expat addicts; they all try much too hard while this film ice skates to the err...conclusion) and that's one breezy afternoon of a movie.
38. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
by Nick Park & Merlin Crossingham
Aardman, alone it seems among English language animation studios, has lost none of its termite art peculiarities and proclivities. Rather than relish in easy nostalgia, Park and company remind us what we love about the lads in a few minutes, then dream up bigger set pieces than ever with Keatonian timing and Chaplin-esque big heartedness. In resurrecting Feathers McGraw, they've done the smartest thing possible; this is a character whose every movement and bead of sweat is a work of devilish futurist wonder. A villain for all time.
39. The Killer
by John Woo
I spent the better part of the year looking at the work of John Woo on my patreon and then this came along like a reward for my work. One of his most upbeat films (even with the gleeful and plentiful slaughter rendering its central conceit moot), in which a classic is redrawn for modern visual elasticity, two stars whose beauty is distinct from the original leads (the way gunfire becomes like platonic flirtation is acceptable because if the sexual tension were thicker it would become criminal not to have them act on it), and a Parisian milieu that's a love letter to Jean-Pierre Melville and a lament for the dark city he once knew. The world changes, old landmarks disappear, light bulbs no longer have the sweet haze they once did, film no longer looks like film but John Woo can still film a gunfight that makes me sit up straight in my chair and beg for more.
40. Blossoms Shanghai
by Wong Kar-Wai & Ronald Lee
An admitted cheat to include a 30 episode TV season (and a nod to Gus Van Sant's Capote V. The Swans, for its similar achievement) but to not indulge in this many hours of Wong Kar-Wai and Peter Pau images would have been criminal, even with a color grade that wasn't up to Pau's standards and subtitles that made the byzantine plot and historical capitalist dogma all but impossible to follow one minute to the next. However ever five minutes there's a tableaux or idea that stops one in their tracks, a sudden onset point of view change, a halted flow of time for only one character in a busy scene that allows us to understand how much is at stake. Suddenly two competitors will share an accidental moment under the neon of the enormous set recreation of the flourishing Shanghai of the 90s, suddenly everything will make room for two gorgeous people under moonlight, united in antagonism, but bound for a moment by shared ambition. Wong Kar-Wai took three years to shoot this and even longer getting it made, which makes this rather like his Cosmopolis, though his delivery may seem much more palatable to an audience expecting a soap opera take on the likes of Succession or Industry. But he went to once more lose himself in haute couture and rarefied gesture, and it's wonderful to get lost with him.
41. A Different Man
by Aaron Schimberg
Impostor Syndrome is stretched like a cartoon character by a bully in Schimberg's confident sophomore feature. With real movie stars around, nevertheless it's his on screen surrogate Adam Pearson who wanders in like a mix of James Mason and Michael Caine and makes a pathetic afterthought of the selfishness of Renate Reinsve (whose actions probably read too large to people who've never met someone like that) and the foundering of Sebastian Stan, here playing the opposite of his young Trump (in the kind of movie his character here would be auditioning for). It's all hands on deck for this nervous breakdown of a showbiz satire (certainly half my Brooklyn twitter feed! Good work everyone!).
42. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
by Soi Cheang
Johnny To may have hated it but I'll be damned if this isn't the most gripping action picture of the year in a pure, animal sense. Ducking at every kick, wincing at every blow. This is a showstopping display of physical prowess and a homerun for Cheang, who realizes a full society on a cramped set, a town made of scraps and memories of the outside, where poor men can live like kings and die like warriors.
43. Universal Language
by Matthew Rankin
Trading Guy Maddin for Elia Suleiman (a much better fit for this director) Rankin uncovers a core of melancholy that any graduate of a diaspora will relate to even when the Iran-specific cultural signifiers don't cohere. The wonderful Truffaut-inspired early goings give way to a gently surreal yearning for a home that never existed and the perfect symmetry of the frames melts to a warm wash of feeling. A welcome surprise, and a thank you to Kate McEdwards for making me watch it.
44. Blackout
by Larry Fessenden
Larry's magnificent latest, a most personal and quite sad look at the warped and bent spirit of the artist who dreams beyond his means, shows once again what a real innovator can do with the classics.
45-47. Serpent's Path / Chime / Cloud
by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Kurosawa's triplicate studies of the debilitating effects of late stage capitalism get more despairing as they go, but they all weave a similar tale of self-destruction. Chime has self-mutilation strike those with money to burn on frivolity, Cloud shows re-sale obsessives becoming an ad hoc criminal syndicate, and Serpent's Path makes flesh the endpoint of deep state conspiracy mongers. You might, by accident, kill the right person, but it'll never make you whole. This micro period of low budget high concept cinema shows this director energized and feisty, barrelling into one violent set-piece after another, though maintaining his usual dread atmosphere. The world moving into a depressing unknown, people just holding on for dear life.
48. Baltimore or Rose's War
by Joe Lawlor & Christine Molloy
Between her appearance in the Palestinian film The Teacher (regrettably unseen at this date) and Baltimore, the true story of class traitor Rose Dugdale, Imogen Poots became the most interesting actress in the West this year. I was inclined to include the perfectly fine Speak No Evil on this list to pay similar homage to Mackenzie Davis, who joined instagram to promote the film and immediately began giving oxygen to the Palestinian cause. Where was I? Oh yes, this sly little thriller, which owes a debt to the 00s-10s terrorism thriller (The Baader Meinhof Complex, Carlos, La Prima Linea, Mesrine) without picking up their grammar. The heavy visuals and the light touch with the timeline meet with devastating effect in the final act. Dugdale, a posh girl who joined the IRA rather than become a socialite or a junior Tory, just died this year, having lived as a bomb maker until about 15 years ago. She never lost the spirit. Here was just one action she undertook, holding hostages in exchange for the release of the Price the sisters (who got their own series this year, which disappointingly suggests the great tragedy of the troubles was friendly fire), before her own arrest while pregnant. It reminded me of John Ridley's work behind the camera but here's hoping it's the start of something new. We need a new political cinema. Badly.
49. Red Rooms
by Pascal Plante
Though any calculous of modern political cinema cannot be complete without a look in at the hermetic world of edgelord monsters who get away with murder...if only to solve a murder... it's got a perplexing message, but is perhaps all the better for how slippery it remains even after its end game has been revealed. The whys and hows never arrive, which is all the more accurate, ultimately. The whim of the obsessed are indeed unknowable to we laymen who do not see the world in the frightening absolutes of the terminally online. It gave me a sort of erotic fright recalling when the most beautiful woman I've ever met told me she was a superstar on the Red Scare reddit page (and yes she's exactly the sort of person who'd have deeply held opinions about a murderer of teen girls as presented here). You don't want to look in those places, you never recover whatever peace of mind you once desperately clung to. A red room is anywhere the world ceases to make sense to people who put any store in the order of the universe. There's no room for the petty concerns of the public in a mind like this, itself a tomb-like room in the dead of night. There's work to do. And you'll live longer if you never ask what it is and why. All these hundreds of modern movies about trauma and still nothing explains something like this mindset.
50. Smile 2
by Parker Finn
And here an annex to the museum of horrors that is Red Rooms, in which our would-be icon is the real thing and the gnawing voices and disturbing behavior don't get better when she gets everything she wanted. Trap showed a relatively well adjusted alien, popstar Lady Raven, getting too close to reality and seeing, very quickly, the best and worst it has to offer. Skye Riley on the other hand (a magnificent Naomi Scott making everything she can of this unadorned, uncluttered star turn) is someone too close to us and still rattling off our habits in her weaker moments (read: when she's off stage, not performing for fans in any capacity). Her drug habit, her contentious relationship with her mom and the friends who have become snapshots of her old terrestrial life, her anxiety, depression, and frustrations; they should ground her but they've just pushed her higher up a ski lift. If she snaps the chain she has a lot farther to fall, and less room to be human. Be a shame if a demon with the face of her every meaningful connection started haunting her waking life, wouldn't it? To call back to an earlier entry in the countdown I think there's something to be said about the public' enduring fascination with Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac and the way our pop stars have to have dirty secret lives and sordid crimes to account for to stay relevant. They sort of invented the kind of music Haim makes, however you wanna classify it, and they fed us with coked up drama. We like it when our stars are messier than we are, because it seems like it might be capable of destroying the bridge between us, and now the goal of millions is to be trapped in a limo with their favourite singers for a few hours to scold them for a political faux pas. It's all as alien to me as the life of a pop star, and makes me wish I could go back to a time before I knew the every passing thought of the beautiful people whose work I pour over. But now we know as much about Phoebe Bridgers as we do about Rose Dugdale (just wait a few entries, that'll make sense in a second). Skye Riley isn't handling that reality well when we meet her. The demon is almost beside the point, but damn if Parker Finn doesn't deploy him like a loaded gun. Terror made worse by knowing what happens every second Skye Riley deviates from her schedule.
51. Sister Midnight
by Karan Kandhari
A marvelous debut picture that hints at a dozen stylistic possibilities in this director's future.
52. Dream Team
by Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn
Another of Lev and Whitney's ironic carpet rides, something I truly look forward to jumping on. The endlessness and variable form mark this as a different animal than their earlier works, where the tidiness (which matched the featureless lives of their absurd protagonists) was part and parcel with the delivery. This means to run into an hall of mirrors of recycled culture, where Andy Sidaris never retired and Linda Fiorentino is still in a new movie every six weeks. A better place, in other words. This has the wispy character, dry, otherworldly look, and loopy plot corridors of a Jesús Franco spy movie. The world may not be at stake, but all the better to stroll through sleepwalking parties and labs where scientists work to make the world much weirder, which is not a bad metaphor for Horn and Kalman's creative impulses.
53. Grand Tour
by Miguel Gomes
Grand Tour really is the perfect name for this picture as it unfurls plenary sights and sounds, capturing a continent through a teasing of the senses; a film that really must be seen in a big, empty, black room to let the sound design wrap around you, and the luscious pictures massage you. Miguel Gomes only makes those sort of pictures; this is sort of like an adaptation of a Graham Greene novel without any political intrigue, and I think absent the contemporary dimension that would make it just about a perfect film. I'll take what we got in the meantime, because it's such a giving work (even though it's about the urge to withhold).
54. In The Land of Saints and Sinners
by Robert Lorenz
I have a soft spot for the late works of Liam Neeson, but this one has the sturdy craft of the very movies it's looking back at (Patriot Games, A Simple Plan, Red Rock West), courtesy of a director who joined the system just as this sort of movie was going extinct, so I didn't have to overlook a thing to sing its praises (he's even got Martin Campbell, a clear touchstone for this kind of thing, old and new, beat in that department). Though he isn't yet at the level of his mentor and old boss Clint Eastwood, he's trying to wed some of his tearful Irish balladeering to the kind of raucous crowdpleaser that does good numbers on streaming services (Liam can sell tickets there and in theatres, somehow). This has the kind of stuff I love in a movie that's just about people killing each other over old grudges and long bled honor. There's a weave of local color (which features Sarah Greene, so... five stars), two competing kinds of bad guy, and little bits of drama occupying hero and villain between dust-ups. Though Jaume Collett-Serra has much more in common with Mann, this has the preoccupations of his westerns, and some of our best actors to make up for the fact that it's no longer 1953 and The Naked Spur is not playing down the block with its coterie of pulchritudinous mugs in glorious technicolor.
55. Tiger Wolf Rabbit
by Wu Bai
A complete surprise. What starts as an eerie, wistful tragedy becomes a livewire action film without losing sight of its underlying human concerns. Lost souls discovering each other at the lowest ebb of their lives and finding the right rich guy to take down and make amends for their mistakes. Snappily and sensitively directed, with the heft of real woe under each death-defying stunt.
56. The Soul Eater
by Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo
Of all the crime films this year, this takes an admirable approach cultivated for years by these makers of urban poverty parables without easy answers: when something seems so horrible it must be the work of dark magic, is it easier to believe that or the truth? The two directors' feel for locations and modern malaise is put to good use in their most ambitious film where each twist reveals only how desperate everyone truly is under their chipped and cracked exteriors. How much lower can our expectations of humanity sink? A look back at their film Among The Living and Kandisha (the bloodstained answer to Céline Sciamma movies) from the perspective of the adults letting down latchkey kids all over France.
57. Le Grand Chariot or The Plough
by Philippe Garrel
Every Garrel film is personal, it's why he was the only director to survive the French New Wave without ever getting sucked in as a synecdoche. Rohmer and Godard would always be judged by their earliest stylistic volleys, Varda became a meme, Truffaut died a national treasure before a full tally of the French cinema of the 70s could be made, etc. etc. Garrel experimented, which meant he had no American baggage when he decided to become more subdued and supple. It's allowed his unparalleled run of cinema since the 80s to rack up quiet accolades and keep him from having to compete with his own public image. Which makes The Plough all the more essential because he has his own children playing the son of a puppeteer slowly piecing together their next acts as the specter of death begins to loom. About as un-self-aggrandizing as a funeral thrown for oneself can be, this ably shines a light on Garrel's theoretical pursuits, his intuitive cutting and shooting, and his very straight forward scripts (this one, as usual, aided by the late legend Jean-Claude Carriére, may he rest in peace). If Regular Lovers was his response to The Dreamers, and indeed the very idea of looking back at May '68, this is his look back at the man who directed Regular Lovers, a much more humble aim, and dripping with the real warmth that comes when a family of artists share in a gesture of love.
58. Lost in the Night
by Amat Escalante
Somehow completely underreported, Amat Escalante's film went straight to Netflix and there it sits, a pretty searing indictment of the artistic class swallowing up tragedy for their own gain. Having made the kinds of cartel movies the west expects of Spanish speaking artists and then finally made art-for-arts sake, a Żuławski riff called The Untamed, my favourite of his films, he got a lung full of the culture of international art funding and the attitudes of patrons. Lost in the Night is a movie about the tourist's gaze, and as such it's an autocritique as well. The only way to experience the full breadth of what the lower class receives from the upper is to be buried alongside them, which he cannily suggests without climbing into the mass grave himself. All this and he finds time for a not embarrassing look at influencer culture, which is a frustrating thing as it sits squarely between coloniser culture and tool of the working class. Lost is the word for it. This is a time of befuddlement, and intractable dialectics, but at least Escalante doesn't shrink from it.
59. Sugarcane
by Emily Kassie, Julian Brave NoiseCat
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"We're on this journey...we're just trying to heal." Maybe the scariest and most terrible viewing this year, a shocking exposé of a crime that happened in plain sight. People just moving through the world who happen to have been targeted for incineration. A grim, unyielding misery that will last generations, presented with something resembling hope.
60. A Quiet Place: Day One
by Michael Sarnoski
The wonders you can work when you approach a commercial project with no interest in an audience's expectations.
61. We Were Dangerous
by Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu
A time honored staple of the cinema of Oceania is the boarding school/reform school drama (The Getting of Wisdom, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Heavenly Creatures, Flirting), wed here with another slightly less tourist-friendly tradition: the cinema of forced assimilation (Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Tracker, The Proposition). Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu walks a tightrope between the ugliness of what her characters, an ingratiating bunch of unruly teens, discover is being done to them and the idea of this becoming a classic for the age it describes. You can't fully cop to the fascist agenda or you're making a much more grueling picture. Still, she doesn't lie and she doesn't skimp on the importance of even the most simple acts of discontent, from the look in a girl's eyes that suggests she's mentally singing a folk song, to the pretense of obedience to play the long game of escape. A very fine film that I hope finds its audience. It's not as though it was made to appeal to a viewer like me, though of course... it did.
62. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
by Guy Ritchie
by Guy Ritchie
A strapping yarn and a case study in eliminating the friction between an audience and the special joie de vivre we get from watching Nazis get dismembered by hulking hunks. It's all about the removal of obstacles in the text and above it, because this director, for some reason, cannot tape back into the vein of American favor, despite having done some of the best work the popular cinema has ever seen. This, just edging into Ritchie's top 5 best films, is a delirious romp, a cackling caper, a full metal fashion statement, and a reminder, one that Americans apparently still need, that it's not hard to know who the bad guys are.
63. Lumberjack The Monster
by Takashi Miike
Though perhaps it lacked the boyish energy of Midnight, his phone advertisement short film (which is excellent), Lumberjack is essential Miike as it transposes his classic themes to a more modern and compromising framework. After cleaning up his image in the mid-00s and adding a little of producer Jeremy Thomas' extra polish in the 2010s, Miike reinvented himself as a different sort of artist and provocateur. The amorality now had the rigor and philosophy of academia (specifically in school bound nightmares As The Gods Will and Lesson of the Evil), and the anarchy of the 90s films now finds its way into his shows for kids and teens. Lumberjack is quite clearly a fond look back at films like Ichi The Killer, Audition, Happiness of the Katakuris, and Dead or Alive where charismatic psychos carve their way across Japan-as-netherworld. Here our murderer-in-chief has to decide whether to live life as a monster when someone worse than even he comes out of the woodwork as shadow and, though he recoils from the suggestion, ideal. The Miike of today allows his killer room to find his conscious, which may rescue the film from the Dostoyevskian intrigue of his early works, but my growing intolerance for the bleakest narratives thanks for it. Age is softening my bloodlust, it seems, and Miike's too. Just look at his 2023 show Inspector Daimajin, his answer to Dexter, in which even the man who sets out to kill bad people, learns to be a better man. The self-investigation and the room to evolve was always why Miike was so interesting on the surface. The malevolent 2000s films which Lumberjack rewrites came seemingly from nowhere (anyone who'd been following him could have predicted Ichi and Visitor Q, though nobody could have seen audition coming Audition avant la lettre). He still has more imagination than most children, but now he looks at the world and his place in it with a well-earned wistfulness between bloody murders. The artist who once made a scourge of himself to censors is now a valedictory figure; thank heaven he doesn't act like one.
64. All You Need is Death
by Paul Duane
65. Limbo
by Ivan Sen
About the search for a new leaf to turn over, only for it to crumble as you pick it up.
66. Carry-On
by Jaume Collett-Serra
Today's (Anthony) Mann returns to the wrong man movies he sings like Springsteen doing the records of the 60s.
67. Ingeborg Bachmann - Journey into the Desert
by Margarethe von Trotta
Any potential US distributor would likely have lost interest the minute the reviews came out, which claimed, not unreasonably, that reducing a poet to her marriage was to miss the point. However, I don't think seeing how easily an artist can see themselves through the eyes of someone whose gaze swerves from admirer to paranoid minder is a waste of cinematic space. If we cannot see a poem, we can see what shapes a poet, and the only-too-familiar story of a woman stymied by male jealousy and avarice which nearly smothered her language into silence. Thus the film is split into bad memories and a pleasant present free of that kind of love that destroys a union. Trotta, one of the great poets of the imprisoned historical feminine herself, wants to make an artist a human without passing judgment on the decisions that kept her miserable. Loving someone through their emotional violence is the stuff of great art even if it's also its own death sentence. She has been charting these decisions since her earliest films, and her conversations with poets, composers, journalists, revolutionaries produce snapshots of trapped passions, and warnings to the future. Everything we do will be remembered when we touch people with our art.
68. The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed
by Joanna Arnow
In a year of neurotic self-investigation, this one wins the blue ribbon.
69. Janet Planet
by Annie Baker
Knowing Baker comes from theatre complicates this transition to film in the best way. She uses her frame like the proscenium, yes, but duration and silence become heavy with her every pen stroke. She wants us to sit in the uncomfortable truths her little hero discovers with every impulsive decision her mother makes. Very strong performances evoke a period of fraught self-discovery as well as the clothes and the sets. We go back not to recall what decisions led us to a place of confused myopia, but to understand that we once had a different kind of freedom to become ourselves. It had its limitations too, especially when so many corrosive forces want to decide that for you. With cults a cottage industry and celebrities our spiritual advisors and religious figures, Janet Planet veers close to paradise but misses it every time. This kind of blindness was always the American birthright. But it's not always so keenly observed in hindsight. It's shares fixations with The Master, and a similar eye towards performance of burgeoning national identity.
70. My First Film
by Zia Anger
Though it must lose the intimacy of the live performances that gave this film its screenplay (and was only, what felt like, inches from the director, even during the zoom screenings of the project), it loses nothing of the aching regret that brought the piece to life in the first place. My First Film is now what it always said it was going to be, with a glimpse into a kind of rural godlessness I found both very ingratiating and anathema to survival. I loved this movie even as I cringed the way I imagine Anger intended I do. "What's the end of the movie, Zia?" There can't be one.
71. Vermines
by Sébastien Vaniček
The film I most hated enjoying this year.
72. The Order
by Justin Kurzel
One of a million ripped-from-the-headlines stories you could tell to make some kind of sense of the abject cruelty and stupidity of the present moment. When it seemed at all noble to take down white supremacists, who had a plan they kept secret. Now it's all out in the open, unsophisticated and the loyal opposition is powerless before the dumbest enemy of all history, and you can't make this kind of grim paranoid thriller about us. Kurzel brings his Aussie doomsayer bonafides to a punchdrunk moment of bloody discovery and makes a great update of Frankenheimer's Dead Bang, which was huffing the same fumes.
73. Longlegs
By Oz Perkins
By Oz Perkins
Though it wears the symbols and ratty clothing of a serial killer story Longlegs is about generational rot, the things we excused or ignored becoming full grown terrors just up the road. The country has been reduced to a few culs-de-sac and stores running out of business while dozens of cops gather in a confounded heap sucking up the power of supposed righteousness, unaware it's giving them institutional radiation poisoning. These luckless fools can solve puzzles in a room all day but can't make sense of real evil or movie evil. Clinton pictures smile malevolently from the walls of federal offices, as a fetid caricature of an entertainer turns children into puppets. As outlandish it gets (and it's got some of the most unsettling photography of the year) the heart of it is true in its grotesque outline.
74. The Settlers
by Felipe Gálvez Haberle
by Felipe Gálvez Haberle
A western of ravishing colors and horrifying conclusions, where the adolescent excitement at colonial violence turns the very grass and stones around these unnatural men into unwilling witnesses, rebelling against the red of uniforms and blood alike. Entering, with Zama and Jauja, a garden of South American neo-westerns, where the gaze fractures at the meeting of the wilds and minds bent by perceived order in bodies meant only for growing voluptuous with ill-gotten riches.
75. Hellboy: The Crooked Man
by Brian Taylor
Crispy punk poetry from an eternal innovator.
76. Rebel Ridge
by Jeremy Saulnier
Truly wonderful to see someone find a new way to show you narrative devices as well documented as co-star Don Johnson himself. I cannot get enough of the film's action sequences, quick favourites in a small canon, for mechanics, certainly, but crucially in attitude. In Aaron Pierre we have a hero who hangs disgust with centuries of American law enforcement in his perfect eyes, and whose body is exactly the sort of temple that needs to be erected over the ruins of democracy. Even making it up as he goes, an extemporaneous school of heroics Saulnier has been experimenting with for four movies and finally gotten the mixture just right, this is a man you want to watch swat away obstacles. You all but demand this actor and this character reach the end of the picture on top, but then, how could anything else be possible?
77. The Mercy Tree
by Michele Salimbeni
How marvelous to see a filmmaker as indebted to Ford as he is to a new school of Italo-Emersonianism. Like Frommartino he searches a landscape for interiority, the dignity of the caretaker adduced by the shape of their life. A near silent rumination on lost stoicism.
78. Samsara
by Lois Patiño
Absolutely stunning images of the search for transcendence, the blues and oranges are so vivid you could grab them and knit them into a scarf. The second half's disappearing act should have been incorporated into the first, but I still like that Patiño is trying to turn film into a state of being, a psychedelic and spiritual investigation of the mind.
by Christoph Hochhäusler
German cinema will always wrestle with the legacy of Fassbinder, most recently and quite messily in this wonderfully downcast thriller from theorist/filmmaker Christoph Hochhäusler, the most academic member of the old Berlin school, but unafraid of treating emotions like open wounds, triaged and sutured in front of us. This tale of a trans moll's persecution by a jealous lover (who happens to be her underworld handler) is all about manipulation, and spares us no twist of the knife. Relationships can be prison sentences with the wrong lover; what would we do for a pardon? What is life until then?
80. Here and Elsewhere & Is All Around / A Black Screen Too
by Bram Ruiter / Rhayne Vermette
Bram's windows and Rhayne's shadows, beguiling and tactile, real reach-out-and-touch-it cinema. Reminded variously of Ernie Gehr and Peter Kubelka, and as always of the velvet hand of the avant-garde. To spend even minutes with artists like these is a perennial joy.
81. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
by Neo Sora
This beautiful man, this one-of-a-kind artist had the grace to turn his slow death into a piece of his artistic life. Allowing us a moment of grace with him as we prepared for a world poorer one genius. A gift, though it was not without a price tag.
82. Aggro Dr1ft
by Harmony Korine
Like a Jean-Pierre Melville film, except instead of paring one's life down to become the perfect killer or a cop designed to withstand the corruption of the world, it's to become the world's biggest dumbass. Harmony Korine's Le Samouraï was nothing the world asked for, but it's a wonderfully unselfconscious and blinkered dream of capitalism as a liminal state. Very few things reflect us, our worst habits for hungrily and unquestioningly consuming myth especially, so strikingly and accurately without blinking. Korine does seem to mean this... what on earth that means I'm still working out, but I laughed all the way through.
83. Never Let Go
by Alexandre Aja
Aja's return to small town America and its patterns of repression and ingestion. A folk tale for a time of forced ignorance.
84. The Deliverance
by Lee Daniels
Another of Lee's maudits, this one about the horrors of poverty, and the poverty implicit in being haunted.
85. Watchers
by Ishana Night Shyamalan
by Ishana Night Shyamalan
A sparkling debut of gorgeous loaded images and unspoken histories bursting at the narrative's seams.
86. In a Violent Nature
by Chris Nash
A beautifully plaintive, yet sweetly naive, story of disembowelment and splatter. People reached for the usual slow cinema suspects in ironically rewarding its plentiful, if simple, merits, but to me it played like if Alexander Sokurov had been ported over to direct an early Friday the 13th sequel instead of discovering his peculiar modernism.
87. Pictures of Ghosts
by Kleber Mendonça Filho
A demonstration of cinema's ability to celebrate and preserve a community's core values, to allow something to survive that has otherwise been killed and forgotten. So much changes, but in our images we remember, and hopefully, one day, rebuild.
88. Here
by Bas Devos
Gentle to the point of feeling more like a breeze than a statement, but it was exactly what I wanted to experience when I turned it on, a picture of social harmony across all borders. Unchallenging, perhaps, but centering and verdant, a reminder to slow down and to look down with interest.
89. Death Game
by Yuhai Wei
A cracking martial arts potboiler with as much hidden and mistaken identity, rug pulls and red herrings as an Agatha Christie novel. The creativity in any given scene would make the head of an American screenwriter spin, and the sensual execution would make our directors no more comfortable.
90. Nutcrackers
by David Gordon Green
With every movie David Gordon Green makes I understand him less and less, but this at least made sense on paper. After taking his leave of two horror franchises, which he quite evidently had no business boarding, he wanted to return to his roots as a director of unruly children who come to define the world of adults by highlighting their indifference. One kind of fecklessness in response to another. And sue me I was won over by the four kids at the heart of this one, whose mother has left them with little but a decaying house whose every closet is a bedroom now and a love for dance, which Green does strangely, know how to photograph. Like his friend Jody Hill's Legacy of a White Tail Deer Hunter this seems to be missing some crucial bones, but the body works all the same.
91. Apartment 7A
by Natalie Erika James
The devil wants his due but there is always a way to be yourself in defiance.
92. I.S.S.
by Gabriela Cowperthwaite
A well acted B programmer with the cast out of a solid 50s western and the premise of a lousy 50s sci-fi movie directed on the verge of prestige. Just the right ambition tucked into a small space craft coming apart at the seams.
93. The Becomers
by Zach Clark
Though less emotionally affecting and precise as Little Sister (though sweet jesus, what is?) it's great to have Clark's try-anything sensibility. Here we have, perhaps too perfectly captured, the split between two kinds of modern selfishness, a xenophobic conspiratorial self-annihilation, and an alien longing for togetherness above the concerns of individual lives. A queer viewing experience, for sure, but Clark's view of life as a series of catastrophic accidents and conflicting personalities is very alive. They think about us, which is becoming rarer in this country.
94. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
by Tim Burton
My goodness what a charge to see Tim Burton so energized. I'm one of those crazies who thinks he never quite lost his touch (Though I found myself squinting to find things to love in Alice in Wonderland, Big Eyes, and Dark Shadows, Dumbo is a Fordian study of changing times and mores, with Farrell as a Wayne-in-Wings of Eagles style hero losing his place in the world he once knew. I love that film) this is absolutely in a class by itself, where every scene features some invention born of cost cutting or cornered script logic. Even the things in poor taste or old vernacular were still exciting as they came to represent a man thinking his way out of purgatory in order for the film to continue tripping its way towards a conclusion. A self-loathing drunken, ash-covered cautionary tale that thrillingly just barely rises above the lessons it's attempting to impart.
95. Goodrich
by Hallie Meyers-Shyer
And a similarly exquisite showcase for Michael Keaton as the kind of modern hero only a few writer/directors are interested in, specifically the daughter of a famous writer/director taking up her mother's mantel and grinding her every ax in public displays of therapy. Here she's stood in for by Mila Kunis as a woman coaching her absent dad through parenthood on his second go-round. Its collection of very 2024 problems don't ingratiate one to this particular passel of champagne problems, but the commitment to the bit does, after a fashion. Keaton's joyous self-deprecation is winning, as is the film's nostalgia for a certain kind of yuppie problem film. If we can't have the sophistication of Nancy Meyers, this shameless and sure footed approximation will have to do.
96. Grave Torture / Dancing Village: The Curse Begins
by Kimo Stamboel / Joko Anwar
97. Mayhem / Under Paris
by Xavier Gens
A bone-crunching, hope-devouring double feature from a director who knows how to deliver.
98. Gladiator II / Those About to Die
by Ridley Scott / Roland Emmerich & Marco Kreuzpaintner
Two old paint crowd pleasers deliver twin treatises on the old way of entertaining a crowd. The director's spread out to allow in the farthest corners of civilization that have expanded the perimeters of even so shopworn a story as these but focus like scholars when it's time to deliver on arena-trapped guts and glory.
99. Weekend in Taipei
by George Huang
A delicious throwback in almost every way, with Luke Evans, who is somehow always the right man for every job, a handsome brick wall with a dancer's enthusiasm and a bouncer's build, and a director who hasn't had a hit in years proving himself an able Europacorp utility infielder. You'll see it all coming, but not how much easy fun it is.
100. Rap World / Standup Solutions
by Conner O'Malley & Danny Scharar / Harris Mayersohn
