1. Two Pianos 
Love finding a weirdo movie made in some spare rooms over a few years. Can't help but feel the filmmakers were unconcerned with what it 'means' but so was I. Neo-Begotten with a monkey headed tour guide into abject sensation. This sort of thing must be encouraged (even when it comes out as obnoxious as Jimmy & Stiggs).
2. Spectateurs! 
3. The Ice Tower
The end of the world breaks open to allow for the end of just one world. I cried. My girl is gone.
Grief's not done with any of us.
A double dose of Jude's triple postmodern picaresque. He goes so far into now he seems to wind up on the other side of the earth in a past that can tell the future. His characters have to put their baggage and belief in a bundle, like putting one's cellphone in a cubby before going on the roller coaster. The present must be tucked into one's belt to dive headlong into its contradictions and possibly crack your skull on the bottom. If you aren't bleeding, you're not paying attention. I think the tic I find most winning is that Jude doesn't even bother monitoring the focus anymore. He's become kind of like Jesús Franco; you get the point. Why belabor cinematicness? AI doesn't care about being watched. Jude's writing Debordian tracts in crayon with every acidic tangent and pornographic aside. I do also live for the whiplash of watching these movies and then just like... answering texts from my sister about funny stuff my nephews said. That's adorable but... how am I? Oh... nevermind.
11. The Secret Agent
No shortcuts in this life. Not even nepotism saves this whiny little baby from eternity. A gorgeous frame for an ugly picture.
On learning how to say goodbye.
by Arnaud Desplechin
"Cinema is part of your life experience..." Every film is both a personal history and a romantic gesture. You have to believe to keep making movies until you can just make the sort you so enjoy. The ones that flow out of you. Like Wes Anderson or Thomas Pynchon, he did his best work to get to his best work. The old formulas are intact in the former (old mentors, broken families, forbidden love) but the robustness is overpowering. The critical theory is made flesh in the second, which is like ringing the dinner bell for a freak like me. His young self dreaming of being the one who gets to put John Ford on the big screen and thoughtfully wonder about our place in his shadow. I mean, is this guy good or what? I texted Ben afterwards. "It's time to admit Desplechin is my favourite filmmaker." It was this one-two punch that did it.
3. The Ice Tower
by Lucille Hadžihalilović
In a year full of films that gesture at the cinematic apparatus and its desperate flamekeepers, the most bewitching and forbidding is Hadžihalilović's fourth film. An Eastern Bloc cinderella where our homeless dreamer is lorded over by a demonic Marion Cotillard, channelling Jeanne Moreau and Delphine Seyrig. The system needs young blood, and she knows a future vassal when she sees one. The creep of a lost era, glittering through a frigid haze, the promise of more, a life deposited in your cup. But nothing is easy and everyone loses. A fairy tale for the hopeless disillusioned.
4. 28 Years Later
by Danny Boyle
5. The Shrouds
by David Cronenberg
This year taught me once again that laying down in the coffin with someone is no greater use of one's grief than screaming and crying and the gnashing of teeth. But it is Cronenberg's use of his own baggage to tell the story of a reframed misery that makes that so clear. The unfathomable trauma of losing your beloved so late in life would drive any of us to similar feats of madness. Creating a zoo of decay is unthinkable unless you've considered everything else. The shock of it has permanently given him entrepreneur brain, his own wife's spirit now an app, a public art installation, a memory in her twin's likeness, anything but what she was. Cronenberg does search for a way to use 'art' to cathartic ends, even as he understood it could never do anything for him, which is of course the point. On and on and on, with Silicon Valley like a vampire waiting to suck the marrow out of our bones, while we pick decomposition off a menu. For as cool and calm as Cronenberg always is, there's always a desperate need to be watched, his movies need their audience and won't take their eyes off them in return. Being stared down by a movie like a viper, and thus by death. The chill of the tomb and the screen of your phone. Aloneness now has twice the ways of striking, and needs even more techo placebos to turn off the noise in our heads.
6. The Woman in the Yard
by Jaume Collet-Serra
7. Kontinental '25
8. Dracula
by Radu Jude
9. Dry Leaf
by Alexandre Koberidze
I suppose there's a degree of cheating with a film like this. I'm not gonna pretend I "got" everything Koberidze suggests but I do know I felt it the way he wanted me to. Better to swim in an image than drown in text, but this is what we're for. Paragraphs and paragraphs to be thought up alongside our auteur in the orange stir. As his point is what we do to avoid loneliness, it's a lovely thing that he wants none of us to feel alone in the cinema. Broadly we came to feel held, yes? By ideas, by dialogue, by music, and performances and a wonderful image or two. This is a field of poppies for the eye, and a hand for the traveler to hold.
10. Death Will Come
by Christoph Hochhäusler
Such a satisfying effacement. Even killers get the gig economy blues. A little like Soderbergh remaking The Counselor, chasing its tail right into the kill shelter.
by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Filho, like fellow former film critic Assayas, has to juggle weightiness with joy, realpolitik with style. It's easy to go back and divine original sin (if you're talented), but quite another to navigate the sensuality of fetishism and the social uselessness of it. Filho wants to be making wistful pictures overcome by the sharp jutting angles of genre, but there's a balance. Bacarau was too much of a young man's wishlist and too little of the work of the man who made Aquarius, who can make a point with a plank of wood instead of a gun. The Secret Agent holds death in reserve and bids us drink in the piece of the Brazilian cinema Americans were "allowed" to imagine. There's always a Black Orpheus for every Black God, White Devil, but Filho doesn't want to punish people who want one over the other, either. It is true that his home produced a vision of art as a cool breeze of regional specificity and perfect rhythm, but it did so in response to something dark and twisted. A man plays a guitar on a beach on a cool summer day. A boat comes over the horizon with his antithesis at the helm. All that wonder imperiled. Over what? Our director recognizes that it's art that fills up the distance between people, and how feral and vicious that some of us wanted to fill it with back room capitalism and murder just because they couldn't, as Chris Nolan would have it, hear the music (not the point but how perfectly stupid to say that when you're Chris Nolan). Filho makes us sit in hot rooms with shark guts, the hope of a national cinema growing fetid even as he's in a celebratory mood (which he's perfectly within his rights to be). Jaws won't save a country, but nothing will.
12. The Mastermind
by Kelly Reichardt
13. Le dernier souffle
by Costa-Gavras
14. Black Rabbit, White Rabbit
by Sharam Mokri
A proper magic trick shows you how its achieved as it achieves. It's stunning even after the reveal. Mokri's Fish and Cat was like a glimpse out the passenger window at existence, the most important moment of a host of people's lives passing by, over and over, no different and no closer to being something we can change. Here another layer of mystery is draped over the equation, as a film shoot and a magic trick dance around each other and create a space of pure uncertain creation, as if an old propmaster can walk backwards into time. My favourite image of the year: a young woman flying up from darkness into light, as surprised by her mastery of the unknown as we are.
15. Young Mothers
by Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
I've been waiting for the boys to make this film ever since Lorna's Silence. This kind of brings them full circle, from their unexpected parents to their children becoming adults way ahead of schedule, here we see how it starts, and how much it continues to suck to be a Dardennes hero. Or, as they're more commonly known, a poor person. Nathan Silver made this movie a while back but he was dreaming of something more asymmetrical and a little beside the point of its surroundings. Still I'm of a mind there's no greater cinematic wellspring than a house full of women with the same problem. The brothers are their most fleetfooted pogoing between social problems, romantic problems, biological problems, I do rather think this picture has jailbroken a style in danger of wheezing. Each piece speaks for itself and brings its own shade to the tapestry. And at no point do they approach nihilistic glibness (I found no joy in Tori and Lokita or The Unknown Girl), despite the greater than average quotient of shame and fear and poor judgment. In the end everyone must forgive themself. It's only a bad decision if you listen to other people's judgment. Young Mothers goes looking not for a fountainhead but palliative empathy. Being alone is a long term illness these young women have tried to solve. The Dardennes suggest this only makes them human, and it is ok to look at one's offspring and take a long time to see yourself in their eyes. I'm not sure what their best film is, but this has to have it worried.
18. Sinners
by Ryan Coogler
The devil will turn cousin against cousin to take away the spark he can't conjure. The rocky road to hell paved with white subvention.
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Wormhole physics collapsing the time from a camera's first breath to its latest enunciation. Godard and Lanzmann as French cinema's gemini; the witness and the actor, though they proved miscible forces. We chase the moment of creation as we seem to be running away from it, so in thrall to destruction that we can't make new eras, though maybe that is the era. Linklater's charmingly flighty historiography, nevertheless serious of purpose, has the texture of the old while Ribot's footage of Lanzmann is history. Meanwhile Godard, to his last breath, was pushing cinema into the fifth dimension. A backwards glance at a life that will be lived for the next 500 years. Godard, the Picasso, the Schoenberg, the Joyce of cinema, will be here forever for tribute but we need him more as conductor of time. He creates the century. Lanzmann will always be a model of the intrinsic value of time and space as cinematic practice. He is the century's reflection. We need them both most when they're gone.
Love hurts. All Ramsay is there to be remembered first and experienced second, as she cracks her design like a mirror with a hammer and lets the feral femininity and primal masculinity appear to us like memories we were present for. She's unique in that way, we take her images for our memories, but she understands one of the functions of the cinema. Why walk a straight line, our minds don't? It's a world full of witch memes until Jennifer Lawrence walks into the fire, then everybody had something better to do that Friday. It's us she's mad at, not just her stupidly beautiful husband. Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte remind us of Heart Beat, where the man's words encompass the woman's life and myth, but Ramsay turns the Lazy Susan of narrative to find a true outcast screaming to be born into a male canon. The New Hollywood caul burst like broken water.
26. Rabbit Trap
A holy terror on an ass kicking spree. And also a vertiginous coming out party. Bassett at her very best. Virtu fantasy reiterating that the impossible is for everyone.
28. Dangerous Animals
Two histories told in a patient, loving camera in a fluttering, gleaming dawn. History whispered by the losers, while the winners make themselves into disgusting beasts, as they always will when dignity's on the line. White supremacy is getting to outlast a narrative. Use your illusion, beat those fuckers at their own game. Be the teller of the tale and the dreamer of the dream. That's the goal more than the end of the day. History is still out there waiting. Winter hymn country hymn secret hymn.
Two little girls in trouble, finding the adult world full of predators, real and almost real. Shiraishi shoots in a Cannes-friendly neo-neorealist cracked burnishing, Fuller in a fugue of antic brocade, and both come to the same conclusion - childhood must be protected from as much of the world as we can afford. Children are being murdered in tents as I write this. Innocence means more than youth.
A rubik's cube with every square smooth, dark, and identical. Murder a perfect dinner party to be curated and served. The whole movie's hot and dynamic but Marisa Abela's interrogation should be blurred in a google search.
The return of the king! Solomon has told 'Beat' he can have a drama or a comedy. The man insisted he cut the baby in half. A few minutes of bliss on either side of the generic divide.
Maybe the most heavy set genre piece of the year. You can slowly, gradually, but firmly sink into the tropes and the characters wearing them like fraying hay. I love this movie's suicide mission conceit because Americans don't know these actors (it's me, I'm Americans) so you just have to size them up based on a few minutes of screentime and then they earn or don't earn their next few minutes. Everyone loves a disassemble the team movie, but this one has real money behind it. We have to suddenly care who these guys are? Make me. They do. To the point that I started to really want them all to survive, but that's not history, is it? Kurosawa got his big movie this year. so did Eiichi Kudo.
48. The Strangers: Chapter 2
Maybe dampened a little by where it's obviously going but the performances and the vivacity of depression Labed has assayed in movies since Attenberg. She has palpable excitement behind the camera, even if it's to just do better at Eastern Europe brutalist irony than Lanthimos and Tsangari. Her little girl heroes have a vampire's bite and though it's not novel to not judge kids getting up to bad things, it means a little more when you're Greek/French.
God, so troubling, so sad. My dad and I talked for years kind of around the idea of this movie and it's just so painful, but so right. For years I've been saying (to no one, just to be clear) that alien abduction stories are pleas for company and understanding. The need for a hug evinced by Cristina Flutur in Beyond the Hills. God and aliens have at least that in common. They make us feel lonely.
A Matter of Death and Death. A matter of life and dearth. A matter of strife and breadth. An empire in your palm. Sza-Zsa knows it. Wes smiles it away. Wes' best hellion leads the charge since Margot Tenenbaum. A grim delight that points the way toward divestment and socialism. Can we ask more of millionaires of whom we can't reasonably ask anything? Wes wonders along with us. At least be interesting. Yesterday's scoundrels were worth writing about. Today's? Not so much. 
One of those serene, perfect cinema experiences where I got to just watch one of my favourite bands glide and glisten through a pristine canon. I wish I'd never left the theatre. It sucks out here.
Rancid individualism dripping from Matt Smith's sandpaper pores, Sarah Green his angelic sacrifice. Smith allows his titanic, fleshy form to wreak havoc across the coast, a bad habit given misfiring limbs and a nasty demeanor. You can't love him until you can't do anything else.
Dominik Graf never sleeps. A most modern thriller for German TV in which the casual lunacy of the everyday stands like a burning building. You can rush in to help, but it will fill and stain your lungs.
Suitably the act structure is like a rope-a-dope, with the Oscar-grabbing story of triumph stopping halfway through for the tide of failure to wash over the hopes of a fighter and her chosen family. Bitterness is the truth of success. We get it and then can't enjoy it, or we chase it forever. Ryan Destiny astonishing as a scrapper who loses everything as she gains the world. That they got Jessica Rabbit to convincingly portray T-Rex Shields, I mean holy fuck. Movies are magic, man.
I didn't think I knew what this was about for a long time after seeing it but I kept reassuring myself that it was a nice movie, anyway. And I do think that's its purpose. Drift out of the cinema and into the green of the earth. Be happy you can choose to do either. Be nice to the planet, be nice to yourself, allow yourself to search for your bliss. A nice, calming riposte to AI. Plants can hear us and converse with us, as we still have to learn to do with each other. The A+ ASMR of Tony Leung speaking english. The oneness with the planet. Maybe the most onerous depiction of covid life because I was so upset these wonderful people had to go through it. Their salvation was there in the garden. I know what this movie's about now.
73. The Wedding Banquet
Ahn at his most reassuring since Spa Night, finding harmony between four different acting styles thrust into an uncomfortable union of the ruined postmodern spirit. Why don't we want to say yes to what's easiest?
Josh Homme is a peculiar figure of identification. Every tabloid headline tells us he's a difficult son of a bitch. Then you see him singing among skulls after major health incidents and the deaths of a bunch of his cohorts and you know that being an artist does bring out the worst in us sometimes, but they stand as testaments to getting up every morning and facing the bones.
Flying Lotus' narrows his focus and makes a raving space thriller right out of 1996. The insubstantial aims blown up like a balloon by his visual imagination. Crispy, crunchy gore spewing from space explorers as they turn into unearthly dream warriors.
I've waited a long time to see a Vietnamese movie about the war made like an American would make it. Even so it's less emphatic and cheap than most of its models, with gritted teeth as north star while weeks blend together like explosions across a few miles of benighted battleground. It didn't disappoint.
79. Him
A devilishly charismatic Marlon Wayans is the model of a compromising giant, the ferryman to styx. Our confounding superficiality is meant to be prize enough for the disintegration of one's identity and promise. Music video technique turning a depressing straight line into a zigzagging objet d'art. A Magritte study of brute physicality.
The renaissance of folk horror reveals, finely, how few people are up to the task of suggesting rather than stamping arcane symbols and dancing wicker men all over their facades. Clarke sets herself a very tidy task: unravel one person's litany of bad decisions as encroaching decay threatens to subsume her and her journey. Folk horror so frequently stems from a Faustian bargain, but this one's about believing you can make one way too late. Fairies aren't here to enchant us. They want us to fail. We make it easy.
One hates to ascribe...well... anything to a studio director like Sandberg (he, Collett-Serra and Muschietti were all basically defeated by superhero money, some more than others) who doesn't appear to have much of a style, but there is a charming severity in his horror movies. This one would have been better served by giving the reins back to Fessenden and Reznick (but I mean that's not really a fair rubric, everything would be), who created the game, but you also have to love a sort of varied scare simulator, where every scene has a new ghoul and compositional need to go along with it. Horror movies are our most delicious comfort food.
A head-spinning history of the recreation of creation. 'Benevolence' becomes the subject of the first act of profound heretical misunderstanding. Lincoln the man vs. Lincoln the idea, in the same rickety rictal form. "Nature's cruelest mistake!" as The Sea Captain would have it. We've recreated ourselves in the aggregate. Now what? And why did we do it? Were we already sick of the human organism as we gazed out from inside it? We didn't know that as human beings were struggling to find the meaning of humanity (Lincoln again our model, refused at every turn), we were building our shadow self. Now it's here and it hates us. It should. What kind of species does that to itself? Bent on our destruction with a new sick facsimile warming up in the bullpen.
Stories of the men who care. The right people who can encourage you on your way to discovering your life, again or for the first time. A perfect Jared Harris performance, a perfect Toby Jones performance, a perfect Alexandre Desane performance. The intricacies of 'help' as a cultural force. Who gets to dole it out, and what does it mean to receive it.
Bertino's stillness is still his great virtue as a genre director. The movie keeps a tight grip on the lid of madness. Dakota Fanning is the best actor he's yet worked with whose pain is the only measure of narrative progress. She screams, the movie stares. That's trust at work.
17. It Was Just An Accident
by Jafar Panahi
Cinema in a van, a car, a truck, a motorcycle - this is Iran's legacy because it was like a stillborn bird. Yet grew wings anyway. Each shot is a tightrope walk. Will he be arrested again? Will the actors get through what must have been their only available take? Will, for the love of god, the streets listen to their people? Things got a whole lot worse for the Iranian people in the last several weeks. No one "supports" a country that made a fugitive of its greatest director, but my god please don't let democracy find them either. We all, as the film reminds us, want someone to blame. To know our pain has an author. But it's just never that simple, is it? Not if you want to live past an act of vengeance into what may indeed turn out to be nothing so great as one day after the next. Every man could be him. Every day could be our last.
18. On Becoming A Guinea Fowl
by Rungano Nyoni
Suppurating silence broken only by death. The colloquial becomes universal, brokenhearted fantasy actuality, one death a whole family's death. It's still a crime to spoil the mood in some places. Nyoni's script puts its head in its hand, but her cinema sees the night sky and every star.
19. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
by Johan Grimonprez
Head-spinning 'alternate' history that's more about the shamelessness of tyrants and the boyish fascism of eager schismatic, making a world in which they can't bear to live. Jazz the music of revolution, cinema its delinquent cavalry. Everyone can be made evil, a finger of the state. Even the purest art of Armstrong and Monk and Ellington can be repurposed by the insect-pathogenic fungus to serve as cover for new breeds of evil growing out of the head of the most benevolent beast. We always wake up too late.
20. Highest 2 Lowest
by Spike Lee
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Late Spike is such a cornucopia. It's tempting to look for a more affected method of describing the film beyond "it's Kurosawa meets... something" because it's just Late Spike. Spike is one missing the stable isotope, he's the one who's got history queued up like a spotify playlist, he's the one who'll change film stock midstream, who'll bring out his musical icons to play themselves, who'll have Dean Winters for some reason, and have Tyler Perry-esque discursions into perplexingly plebeian melodrama. But this is method. This is the language mass entertainment speaks. And he'll speak it until he's got us into a conversation and then he pops the clutch and the movie tears ass up the FDR. The final hour and a half of this movie is the best thriller of the year, with the noose closing around the man who threaded it in the first place. Denzel and Rocky in a booth together, like Lee Marvin and Brando in The Wild One, like Mifune and Nakadai in Samurai Rebellion, like the past welding itself to the future and both being shackled to the present. If you wonder whether I feel self-conscious writing these, worried I'm repeating myself or that I have no fucking clue what I'm saying after a while... the answer is yes, but I think Spike thinks that sometimes too. It's why he's the best.
21. Nouvelle Vague
by Richard Linklater
22. L'histoire de "Scénario"
22. L'histoire de "Scénario"
by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Fabrice Aragno, & Nicole Brenez
23. Je n'avais que le néant - Shoah par Lanzmann
23. Je n'avais que le néant - Shoah par Lanzmann
by Guillaume Ribot
Wormhole physics collapsing the time from a camera's first breath to its latest enunciation. Godard and Lanzmann as French cinema's gemini; the witness and the actor, though they proved miscible forces. We chase the moment of creation as we seem to be running away from it, so in thrall to destruction that we can't make new eras, though maybe that is the era. Linklater's charmingly flighty historiography, nevertheless serious of purpose, has the texture of the old while Ribot's footage of Lanzmann is history. Meanwhile Godard, to his last breath, was pushing cinema into the fifth dimension. A backwards glance at a life that will be lived for the next 500 years. Godard, the Picasso, the Schoenberg, the Joyce of cinema, will be here forever for tribute but we need him more as conductor of time. He creates the century. Lanzmann will always be a model of the intrinsic value of time and space as cinematic practice. He is the century's reflection. We need them both most when they're gone.
24. Ariel
by Lois Patiño
I feel a little bad for Matías Piñeiro. He teams up with an avant-garde great and he immediately eats his lunch. Patiño is a pastoralist, no matter how roundabout his path to nature, but he made the best revisionist Shakespeare and, Richard Brody if you're reading I love you, the best Jared Hess film, in which the text is all around you. The texture is the place, the style is the substance, the great taste is more filling. I don't know that I've seen many films since The Beaches of Agnès that attempt to literally try to make a setting out of art (I must be forgetting something obvious) but this living Shakespeare exhibit is the best of theatre mixed with the sweet enveloping eaves of the sensation of art working on your mind. Who wouldn't want to live in our obsessions?
25. Die My Love
by Lynne Ramsay
26. Rabbit Trap
by Bryn Chainey
A Field in England 2: A Bog in Wales. Such a devious little earworm, with Graham Reznick's sound design eating this tale of stunted adulthood, with would-be parents finding an evil fairy where they placed their hopes. Mean and outrageous and so so pretty. A great progressive rock album etched onto the Stone Tape.
A Field in England 2: A Bog in Wales. Such a devious little earworm, with Graham Reznick's sound design eating this tale of stunted adulthood, with would-be parents finding an evil fairy where they placed their hopes. Mean and outrageous and so so pretty. A great progressive rock album etched onto the Stone Tape.
27. Red Sonja
by MJ Bassett
by MJ Bassett
28. Dangerous Animals
by Sean Byrne
Tell me this ain't the greatest show on earth. The best sea-faring psycho since Broderick Crawford in The Decks Ran Red.
Tell me this ain't the greatest show on earth. The best sea-faring psycho since Broderick Crawford in The Decks Ran Red.
29. Nickel Boys
by RaMell Ross
30. The Fishing Place
by Rob Tragenza
31. The Long Walk
by Francis Lawrence
Its crushing sadness (delivered by Lawrence's usually clumsy hands) should be a dealbreaker for a movie aimed (?) at teenagers, but there's quite literally a blank continuity between past and present, united only by the miles walked by the innocent towards madness, displaying (?) their efforts for people who could only give a shit if their own lives were completely worthless. By showing nothing, Lawrence suggests everything. I was and remain very moved. These poor fucking kids. And yeah, there they are. All of us, our hopes pinned to kids who can't live past their 21st birthdays. When one of us gets shot in the face by the state we all do. What you do now is up to you and I, nor the filmmakers, pretend that's an easy choice. Harrowingly contemporary, and just plain harrowing
32. Seven Veils
by Atom Egoyan
Egoyan and Seyfried should never be too far apart. They enable each other to get as weird as they wanna be. Egoyan was Seyfried's first talented enabler, who found the actress hiding under the will, and Seyfried was Egoyan's best gentle freak since Elias Koteas. The pair rehearse a concerto of pain. What we don't see, the notes we don't play, that quizzical, sizzling silence. That's where dreams are born and just as quickly die.
33. A Parable of Nothing
by Cecilia Condit
34. Bogancloch
by Ben Rivers
History only needs you a few seconds at a time and Condit knows this. This work is sublime; a tally of a year's peace that is yet an ontology of its chaos. She shows us places she got lost and grimly hints that none of us will have such a thing soon. Boganloch similarly reviews the fruits of a labourious life meant to send one out into the earthbound cosmos. Two filmmakers tragically handcuffed to their cameras when they want to become enmeshed with their subjects.
35. Tornado
by John Maclean
Man i don't know who or what John Maclean thinks he is but I'm more than happy to watch him become it. Slow West was a little preoccupied with appearances but this one's just meat and bones. A grisly lark, part alt-history, part-fanfic, all oblique angles and sweaty meaningful performances. The windswept Brontëan moors host a culture clash with a body count, a fable sharper than shark's teeth. There's no home for a weary traveler who isn't willing to cut throats to sleep easy.
36. Renoir
by Kazuya Shiraishi
37. Dust Bunny
by Bryan Fuller
Two little girls in trouble, finding the adult world full of predators, real and almost real. Shiraishi shoots in a Cannes-friendly neo-neorealist cracked burnishing, Fuller in a fugue of antic brocade, and both come to the same conclusion - childhood must be protected from as much of the world as we can afford. Children are being murdered in tents as I write this. Innocence means more than youth.
38. Black Bag
by Steven Soderbergh
A rubik's cube with every square smooth, dark, and identical. Murder a perfect dinner party to be curated and served. The whole movie's hot and dynamic but Marisa Abela's interrogation should be blurred in a google search.
39. Broken Rage
by Takeshi Kitano
The return of the king! Solomon has told 'Beat' he can have a drama or a comedy. The man insisted he cut the baby in half. A few minutes of bliss on either side of the generic divide.
40. 11 Rebels
by Kazuya Shiraishi
Maybe the most heavy set genre piece of the year. You can slowly, gradually, but firmly sink into the tropes and the characters wearing them like fraying hay. I love this movie's suicide mission conceit because Americans don't know these actors (it's me, I'm Americans) so you just have to size them up based on a few minutes of screentime and then they earn or don't earn their next few minutes. Everyone loves a disassemble the team movie, but this one has real money behind it. We have to suddenly care who these guys are? Make me. They do. To the point that I started to really want them all to survive, but that's not history, is it? Kurosawa got his big movie this year. so did Eiichi Kudo.
41. Wolf Man
by Leigh Whannell
The age old question: Wait for death, demand death, or become death?
42. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani
Fabio Testi as aged Bart Fargo reminiscing about all the women he slaughtered to grow old without any friends or loved ones. Some movies they just give to you like a free champagne at the door. Our psychosomatic film theorists rise above the pleasing abstraction of their early work to locate a madcap absence. Contempt meets Diabolik. Heaven and hell, in other words. Aren't we lucky that we don't have to choose?
43. Prisoner of War
by Louis Mandylor
44. Beast of War
by Kiah Roche-Turner
Boy the volume of good shark movies we're getting this century. The crunch of a fist or the crunch of a mouthful of teeth, pick your delicious poison. These two sidelong world war 2 pictures remind us why we should stop fighting wars. Making a war movie now looks dumb as hell. And if you're Alex Garland and take it seriously, get a new hobby or crack a book. If you're these boys, get in the mud and get sloppy. Earnestly terrific B movies made with the utmost care and love for their respective genres. I'm most impressed that these two directors seemed to have been waiting most of a lifetime to make movies this solemn and still, yet gruesome and gritty.
45. Misericordia
by Alain Guiraudie
You can keep your Benoit Blanc, I'm afraid I need my catholic mysteries actually gay.
46. Life After
by Reid Davenport
47. Ma Vie, Ma Gueule
by Sophie Fillières
"Courtesy. Professionalism. Respect."
"How many showers before I die"
by Renny Harlin
49. The Black Phone 2
by Scott Derricksen
Sequels that didn't have to go that hard. Great improvements over table setting originals (dispiriting). A magnificently tactile, analog leap of faith. One a relentless chase, the other a scheming, grinning nightmare. In both, the devil is around every corner. You can't even escape in your dreams.
50. Presence
by Steven Soderbergh
People made fun of me for liking this but sort of had to admit they'd have liked the movie better if my read was right. To wit: the ghost isn't the son, who I think even in death is too shallow for this kind of observance. No, I just don't know even a jock sick enough to watch his sister lose her virginity. So it is that the victim is the one who has her say. This movie is on the right side of naive, I think, and Chris Sullivan, my god, the talent, the sheer hulking talent. He and Soderbergh ought to write Faulkner together.
51. September Says
by Ariane Labed
Maybe dampened a little by where it's obviously going but the performances and the vivacity of depression Labed has assayed in movies since Attenberg. She has palpable excitement behind the camera, even if it's to just do better at Eastern Europe brutalist irony than Lanthimos and Tsangari. Her little girl heroes have a vampire's bite and though it's not novel to not judge kids getting up to bad things, it means a little more when you're Greek/French.
52. Descendent
by Peter Cilella
God, so troubling, so sad. My dad and I talked for years kind of around the idea of this movie and it's just so painful, but so right. For years I've been saying (to no one, just to be clear) that alien abduction stories are pleas for company and understanding. The need for a hug evinced by Cristina Flutur in Beyond the Hills. God and aliens have at least that in common. They make us feel lonely.
53. In The Lost Lands
by Paul W.S. Anderson
Churning, fuming b-movie thrills in a Ralph Bakshi/Mamoru Oshii idiom. Anderson long ago ditched his clean lines for an agitated murky pong, where the future happens, and this one feels like he's finally ascended its tallest mountain. The wounded heart of a wolf lopes about the wasteland for purpose, for the love of a nod from a fellow creature. Anderson, the perpetual underdog, knows the smell of his own.
54. The Phoenician Scheme
by Wes Anderson
55. The Ugly Stepsister
by Emilie Blichfeldt
A really icky movie with a really heartfelt injured heart at its center. Blichfeldt plays so dirty but eats her cake anyway. That's a hell of a debut picture. "Pain is beauty." Imagine how they used to feel about it. I've been recommending this movie with my hand up in protestation all year. "Oh it's marvelous...but... maybe... maybe don't watch it." John Waters used to say that vomiting was like a rave review. What if the film beats you to it and you puke together? Move over, Miranda July.
56. A Little Prayer
by Angus MacLachlan
Spellbinding domestic drama, with every anthropological detail needled by the ugliness of comportment. Jane Levy and David Strathairn are perfect foils, so open and easily wounded. Even in their Carolina back house, the world's a little too cunning for them. Much tension wrought from the tensile strength of regional bias. What will they do? What do we expect them to do? Savvy stuff but searching and true.
57. The Cure: The Show of a Lost World
by Nick Wickham
58. Avatar: Fire and Ash
by James Cameron
With every one of these Cameron gets closer to swallowing us whole in his invented paradise. Science run amok to create nature. The 21st century in a nutshell. Pandora gets bigger and Earth gets smaller.
59. Where to Land
by Hal Hartley
A great old man movie about the pleasure of writing dialogue and wandering through the corridors of memory, dreaming of a future he tried to create that now barks and snaps at him. Still no one quite like Hal Hartley, for good or ill.
60. On Swift Horses
by Daniel Minahan
Minahan, forever undervalued, making as complete a picture of the past by way of its absences and derelictions and yearnings. Deadwood is still his finest work, but I love seeing a pro given the full toolkit, with eager beauties willing to suffer. That Jacob Elordi is one tall drink a water, innee?
61. The Death of Bunny Munro
by Isabella Eklöf
Rancid individualism dripping from Matt Smith's sandpaper pores, Sarah Green his angelic sacrifice. Smith allows his titanic, fleshy form to wreak havoc across the coast, a bad habit given misfiring limbs and a nasty demeanor. You can't love him until you can't do anything else.
62. The Naked Gun
by Akiva Schaffer
Schaffer having the most fun he's had in his directorial career, where his ingratiating nerdy theory works wonders in service of madcap stupidity. It's precisely his clinician's curiousity and mathematic deconstruction that makes the movie so free wheeling and lunatic. The Zucker Bros' inanity is filed down to a point to make a point. A machine can't write a joke.
63. Invention
by Courtney Stephens
64. Ella McKay
by James L. Brooks
Two headstrong women crawling out from under their father's misshapen shadows in order to see their own shape better. Stephens and Callie Hernandez opt for the silence of grief's quotidian representation (lotta bare little rooms with strange people). Brooks has Emma Mackey spray dialogue like bullets at a bank job. Brooks' characters are deranged by their feelings but they hide it with a commitment to explaining their neuroses. Stephens gives humans a spotlight and room tone and lets them build themselves a place for their heart. Pray with me. God or country. Nobody wins.
65. Emmanuelle
by Audrey Diwan
Really compelling anti-formalist revision of the classic 'foreign film' that saved the French industry. As opening gauntlets go, mile-high club fantasia to pubic hair manicuring isn't too shabby. The level, almost robotic tone contains the carnal abandon like bees in a hive. Merlant an actress it's becoming difficult not to see every few months and we're richer for it. This was supposed to be a Léa Seydoux movie and it speaks to her replacement's commitment that she slots in with an even more stern, arch performance than Seydoux would have brought. Still we got Léa for a few fulsome minutes in Silent Friend.
66. Jenseits des Rechts
by Dominik Graf
67. The Fire Inside
by Rachel Morrison
Suitably the act structure is like a rope-a-dope, with the Oscar-grabbing story of triumph stopping halfway through for the tide of failure to wash over the hopes of a fighter and her chosen family. Bitterness is the truth of success. We get it and then can't enjoy it, or we chase it forever. Ryan Destiny astonishing as a scrapper who loses everything as she gains the world. That they got Jessica Rabbit to convincingly portray T-Rex Shields, I mean holy fuck. Movies are magic, man.
68. Hallow Road
by Babak Anvari
Anvari probably has the most interestingly twisty taste in horror movies of any of his peers. The sticky cruelty of I Came By is made abstract as we watch two of our best actors imagine what's on the other end of a phone call. A theatrical two hander that grows remote as the destination grows closer. Strong stuff all around.
69. Legends of the Condors: The Gallants
by Tsui Hark
With this and Shadow's Edge, a banner year for Little Tony villain performances. Who knows what Tsui Hark thinks or sees anymore, best to just get out of the way and enjoy the mind boggling enormity.
70. Silent Friend
by Ildikó Enyedi
71. chebotarev_evgeny Instagram feed
by Evgeny Chebotarev
72. Dishwasher Updates, seriesby sts_3d_ and plumberjohnn_
Ecstatic insanity as only the little box in our hand could unearth. You'll laugh, you'll cry laughing, you'll marvel at the things people choose to do with their free time. HM: Baby Invasion by Harmony Korinne, which isn't as good as these two, and should be; he oughta be real savvy by now, but I love him, god knows why.
73. The Wedding Banquet
by Andrew Ahn
Ahn at his most reassuring since Spa Night, finding harmony between four different acting styles thrust into an uncomfortable union of the ruined postmodern spirit. Why don't we want to say yes to what's easiest?
74. Sketch
by Seth Worley
Like Up (high praise) a crafty and zany ode to survival through the worst of our sadness. A children's movie for adults that's neither glib nor shabby.
75. Alive in the Catacombs
by Thomas Rames
76. Ash
by Flying Lotus
Flying Lotus' narrows his focus and makes a raving space thriller right out of 1996. The insubstantial aims blown up like a balloon by his visual imagination. Crispy, crunchy gore spewing from space explorers as they turn into unearthly dream warriors.
77. Tunnels: Sun in the Dark
by Bui Thac Chuyen
78. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
by The Brothers Quay
A passion project every bit as considered as Phil Tippett's Mad God, even if it wants for his anger. The Quay's terrifying purgatory is also animated by whimsey, a joy at being surrounded by evil spirits and grim machinery. It's better than waking life, isn't it? In its way?
79. Him
by Justin Tipping
A devilishly charismatic Marlon Wayans is the model of a compromising giant, the ferryman to styx. Our confounding superficiality is meant to be prize enough for the disintegration of one's identity and promise. Music video technique turning a depressing straight line into a zigzagging objet d'art. A Magritte study of brute physicality.
80. A House of Dynamite
by Kathryn Bigelow
Movie stars running through a manual for the end of the world. Tiresomely elf-important but ingratiatingly un-cinematic all the same. A little too much like a movie for my liking, but a compelling, Rivettian exercise all the same. Bigelow accidentally touching Straub's hem, even if she always pulls toward Von Trier. Harris, as usual, MVP; a masterclass in acting for the camera. You know he can do it in his sleep.
Movie stars running through a manual for the end of the world. Tiresomely elf-important but ingratiatingly un-cinematic all the same. A little too much like a movie for my liking, but a compelling, Rivettian exercise all the same. Bigelow accidentally touching Straub's hem, even if she always pulls toward Von Trier. Harris, as usual, MVP; a masterclass in acting for the camera. You know he can do it in his sleep.
81. Fréwaka
by Aislinn Clarke
The renaissance of folk horror reveals, finely, how few people are up to the task of suggesting rather than stamping arcane symbols and dancing wicker men all over their facades. Clarke sets herself a very tidy task: unravel one person's litany of bad decisions as encroaching decay threatens to subsume her and her journey. Folk horror so frequently stems from a Faustian bargain, but this one's about believing you can make one way too late. Fairies aren't here to enchant us. They want us to fail. We make it easy.
82. Cover Up
by Laura Poitras & Mark Obenhaus
Seymour Hersh makes a cagey subject (and I'm sorry that word must have been getting an olympic workout in describing this documentary) but it also shows that not even decades of experience being assaulted by foreign policy horror shows and feculent domestic hypocrisy can cure our paranoia and anger. Hersh is still planning for the next scoop and still very protective of his sources. He should be, but there's also a deep melancholy in his reflexive mistrust. Like De Niro asking who killed his lawyer at the end of The Irishman.
83. Until Dawn
by David F. Sandberg
One hates to ascribe...well... anything to a studio director like Sandberg (he, Collett-Serra and Muschietti were all basically defeated by superhero money, some more than others) who doesn't appear to have much of a style, but there is a charming severity in his horror movies. This one would have been better served by giving the reins back to Fessenden and Reznick (but I mean that's not really a fair rubric, everything would be), who created the game, but you also have to love a sort of varied scare simulator, where every scene has a new ghoul and compositional need to go along with it. Horror movies are our most delicious comfort food.
84. Disney's Animatronics: A Living History
by Kevin Perjurer
A head-spinning history of the recreation of creation. 'Benevolence' becomes the subject of the first act of profound heretical misunderstanding. Lincoln the man vs. Lincoln the idea, in the same rickety rictal form. "Nature's cruelest mistake!" as The Sea Captain would have it. We've recreated ourselves in the aggregate. Now what? And why did we do it? Were we already sick of the human organism as we gazed out from inside it? We didn't know that as human beings were struggling to find the meaning of humanity (Lincoln again our model, refused at every turn), we were building our shadow self. Now it's here and it hates us. It should. What kind of species does that to itself? Bent on our destruction with a new sick facsimile warming up in the bullpen.
85. Brave the Dark (Director's Cut)
by Damien Harris
86. Mr. Burton
by Marc Evans
87. True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, when Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956
87. True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, when Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956
by Abdenour Zahzah
Stories of the men who care. The right people who can encourage you on your way to discovering your life, again or for the first time. A perfect Jared Harris performance, a perfect Toby Jones performance, a perfect Alexandre Desane performance. The intricacies of 'help' as a cultural force. Who gets to dole it out, and what does it mean to receive it.
88. The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
by Peter Browngardt
89. The Shadow's Edge
by Larry Yang
Two cartoons about racing to stop mad science. Jackie Chan's best film in a decade (or more?) and a beautiful tribute to classic Looney Tunes. Jackie and Daffy a fitting pair for a world of cinema reshaping itself at the medium's wake.
Two cartoons about racing to stop mad science. Jackie Chan's best film in a decade (or more?) and a beautiful tribute to classic Looney Tunes. Jackie and Daffy a fitting pair for a world of cinema reshaping itself at the medium's wake.
90. Sirāt
by Olivier Laxe
91. September 5
by Tim Fehlbaum
Creating and then destroying the myth of Israeli victimhood. Some casual observers see the notion of militant reprisals ossify into nationalist policy, unaware that framing is everything (I think the director missed this point as well, but I don't care so much - I love me a newsroom thriller). Later some people who insist on partying until they die happen into the wasteland they created. Something very cathartic about professional ravers learning that the party's over with every footfall. Better to act like there's a landmine under your every step but invulnerability is a feeling hard to shake. Reactionary but uncanny and fun.
92. Henry Johnson
by David Mamet
Like Schrader's Oh Canada, a notorious scumbag tries to set the record straight. Unlike Schrader Mamet is just an asshole (and idk a racist? What did this guy do again? He's not a pedophile, right?) and not a sex pest, and his record as a picture maker is better. Something exquisite about coming out of retirement (going away because no one liked you) to make a movie about how the white man is too easily led astray by all these corrupting forces! Maybe he intended it to say more (hey it's also about the unearned confidence of dumb people, which is always timely - but which dumb people?) but also he speaks in a wondrous late cinema mumble. The reality of each of those little rooms is assured as our hero tries ever harder and fails (like Daffy Duck as Robin Hood hitting all those trees) at everything he tries. The stakes get lower but they also get higher. I hate how good at this he is, he's such an asshole.
93. Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors
by Takashi Miike
A heaping throng of Miike's boys, beating each other into peak sexual objectification. 100 films in and his definition of tenderness still warms the heart from behind our fingers.
94. Vicious
by Bryan Bertino
Bertino's stillness is still his great virtue as a genre director. The movie keeps a tight grip on the lid of madness. Dakota Fanning is the best actor he's yet worked with whose pain is the only measure of narrative progress. She screams, the movie stares. That's trust at work.
95. Final Destination: Bloodlines
by Zach Lipovsky & Adam Stein
This most plastic of franchises sends soulful crypt keeper Tony Todd out with real fondness. His diminished form is of course the part of the film where death feels real and not like a carnival funhouse, and both complicate each other. The spectacle of death wrapped around the truth of watching the world fade away as you do what you do best. Horror will always, in its way, conquer the real.
96. Till Death Do Us Part director's cut
97. Sorop
by Upi Avianto
98. Sihir Pelakor
by Bobby Prasetyo
99. The Corpse Washer
99. The Corpse Washer
by Hadrah Daeng Ratu
As always a great year for Indonesian horror. Upi Avianto had her hand in three of them, and appears to be doing for Islam what Ron Ormond once did for Christianity, which does make them feel even more wild and woolly. Not knowing enough about modern Indonesia makes me a fine judge of the vacuum merits but a useless judge of their representative qualities. I just love the idea of a whole snaking coterie of demons waiting to punish each sin. Like if Medea movies were all about exorcists, but a good deal better made than that sounds.
100. 2551.03 The End
by Norbert Pfaffenbichler
Love finding a weirdo movie made in some spare rooms over a few years. Can't help but feel the filmmakers were unconcerned with what it 'means' but so was I. Neo-Begotten with a monkey headed tour guide into abject sensation. This sort of thing must be encouraged (even when it comes out as obnoxious as Jimmy & Stiggs).
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