It’s been a fine year so far, so I’ve got a second almost-ten-best list of also-rans too.
THE BEST OF 2015
The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien) – Drop dead gorgeous from start to finish as well as being a provocative and ambitious reimagining of action cinema. Perhaps the most plot-heavy film Hou has ever made, but he still refuses to pander to the conventions of hand-holding cinematic exposition: this is a genre film for grown-ups.
Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) – A sublimely becalmed film that occupies the mysterious realm between sleep and wakefulness, dream and reality, life and death. Spoilers follow, but this isn’t really a film that’s about its plot. In what is already a dream-like set-up, a middle-aged woman, Jen, comes across a ward of soldiers afflicted with some form of sleeping sickness, and adopts one of their number, Itt. He wakes up and falls asleep several times, in addition to being possessed by / possessing a friendly medium. Some of what unfolds seems to be what he’s dreaming. The weird colour-therapy totems that infest the ward come to infect the wider world (in an eerie Lynchian interlude), the hospital momentarily reverts to its true identity as an abandoned school, and a couple of goddesses take time out from their shopping spree to thank Jen for those cute carved animals. Weerasethakul shoots scenes of ordinary life as if they were surreal apocalyptic visions and vice versa.
Under Electric Clouds (Alexey German Jr.) – Dense, literary quasi-science-fiction and (like his similarly ambitious and expansive
The Last Train and
Paper Soldier) the kind of film hardly anybody is making on this scale any more. Seven chapters explore, in the past, present and future, the impact of an abandoned architectural project on the people around it. There’s a careful, intensive rhyming of motifs and themes and characters, all building to a nuanced portrait of the many ways in which we disconnect from one another, with each chapter pivoting on a brief moment that goes against that tide of indifference. Phenomenal artistry at work here, in a radically different and more classical vein from the work of German
père.
The Ground We Won (Christopher Pryor / Miriam Smith) – Tough and warm portrait of a small town New Zealand community seen through its rugby club. Inevitably, this is an exposé of outmoded rites of masculinity, but thankfully it’s much more complex than that, and one of the most beautifully shot films I’ve seen in years.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy Andersson) – More of the same from Andersson, for which I am extremely grateful. He’s in the entertainment industry. He just wants to bring some fun into people’s lives. He’s so happy that everything’s going fine with you.
Phoenix (Christian Petzold) – I already wrote a bit about this. One of the best neo-noirs ever made, and I haven’t seen a more perfect ending to a film in a long, long time.
Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes) – Gomes’ ambition with this film is so insanely great that he runs screaming out of it in the first half hour, appalled at what he’s taken on. All this in the midst of an amazing sequence that layers sound and ideas in the manner of 70s Godard but which is nevertheless, you know, fun. Over the next six hours, we also get nods to De Oliveira, Pasolini and Rocha, but mostly a one-of-a-kind miasma of ancient and modern storytelling forms. The structure, particularly the way it all ends, is audacious and deliberately frustrating but, the more I think about it, also weirdly appropriate. Truly a magnum opus (and one that incidentally skewers the fundamental pointlessness of Garrone’s amiable
Tale of Tales).
The Tribe (Miroslav Slaboshpitsky) – So dark it almost seems gratuitous, but the filmmaking here is so stunning you can’t look away. This film is one of a number of recent ones (e.g.
Jauja,
From What Is Before) that finds thrilling new possibilities in silent film
mise en scène. Here it’s through the spectacularly expressive deaf cast (who talk ninety-to-the-dozen, though none of their dialogue is subtitled) captured in long shot in mobile, dynamic compositions evoking Tarkovsky, Tarr, Bosch.
The Andes (Cristobal Leon) – Creepy Chilean pixilation in which an entire room transforms itself. A film that defies description, so
here are some shots from it (the actual film unfolds in a single 'take').
Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas) – Grand arthouse film about Art (darling!), which makes it profoundly old-fashioned and profoundly unfashionable, but Assayas is such a great filmmaker I relished every set-up and every cut. Binoche and Stewart’s rapport is beautifully observed, and everybody else is pitch perfect.
THE SECOND BEST OF 2015
The Lobster (Jorgos Lanthimos) – An absurdist satire that’s truly, refreshingly vicious, and much, much darker than I anticipated (despite warnings to that effect). Fortunately, it’s also very, very funny, especially if you’re a sick fuck like me.
When Marnie Was There (Hiromasa Yonebayashi) – Also unexpectedly dark – basically, it’s a film about a 12-year-old girl struggling with depression, dressed up as a rustic mystery – but ultimately a beautiful and warm film, establishing Yonebayashi as a distinctive director in his own right, combining the strengths of Takahata and Miyazaki just as this film is kind of like '
Only Yesterday meets
Totoro'.
Very Lonely Cock (Leonid Shmelkov) – Bonkers, hilarious, surreal animation featuring arbitrary transformations of escalating absurdity.
The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin) – I generally like Maddin, but even I found the prospect of a two-hour plus feature daunting. Fortunately, this is possibly his most experimental and funniest film to date, and it has the audacity to try and bludgeon the ‘Most Nested Narratives Ever Presented on Film’ trophy out of Miguel Gomes’ twitching, bloody hands.
World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt) – Wonderful, bizarre and hilarious. Just fund his Kickstarter, already, and see for yourself.
Hill of Freedom (Hong Sang-Soo) – One of the most formally playful Hong films in years. A girl receives a bundle of letters from a Japanese friend who has travelled to Korea just to find her, drops the bundle and jumbles the undated letters (losing one entirely), then reads them in the resulting random order. The language of the film is ESL, which just adds another layer of comic incongruity to the proceedings. It’s a good, typically low-key Hong story, and to his great credit he doesn’t use the film’s structural conceit to forge easy ironies or micro-mysteries. Nevertheless, I had great fun after the screening reconstructing the correct order of events and admiring his typically fine craftsmanship.
Around the World in 50 Concerts (Heddy Honigmann) – Anybody could have made an interesting documentary on the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra travelling around the world, but only Honigmann could have transformed it into such a moving meditation on the myriad ways we use music. Amidst the expected
cinema verite goings on there are moving and entertaining interviews with musicians and audience members about their very personal responses to specific pieces of music. It’s a well Honigmann has returned to more than once, but nobody else is exploring that material with the same attention and sensitivity, so I’m not complaining.
Dreamcatcher (Kim Longinotto) – Another great female documentarist adds another fine chapter to her brilliant career-long project. In this case, it’s another portrait of an inspirational woman standing up to patriarchal oppression. Ex-prostitute Brenda Myers-Powell empowers Chicago prostitutes and at-risk teens to change their lives, on their own terms. The stories we hear are about as disturbing as they come, and the victories are very small and localized, but Myers-Powell and Longinotto are realists, and this is the only kind of change at their disposal, so let's celebrate it.
Tamatea Dusky (Alex Monteith) – Wildly beautiful landscapes and seascapes interspersed with a vestigial narrative conveyed through journal entries. This experimental short was basically eye candy, but what eye candy!
THE WORST OF 2015
Normally I'd have more than one of these, but the one I do have is so far up its class of its own that every other lousy film I've seen so far this year looks good in comparison.
Love (Gaspar Noe) – Even I was unprepared for what a terrible, terrible, terrible film this was. Noe is like the world’s most pretentious twelve-year-old, inflicting a prepubescent macho fantasy of what adulthood is all about on gullible self-flattering men who really should know better. (This is the kind of film in which a woman’s deepest desire is the lesbian-but-not-really-lesbian sex scene from every single porn film. “Oh snap!” says Noe’s surrogate cretin protagonist). The film has one visual idea (the match cut) that it employs relentlessly and unchallengingly (the
mise en scene is so dull and standardized that just about every shot is matched anyway, wherever one cuts them): this is auteurism with the ‘eur’ removed. As a side dish, you’ve got some of the worst dialogue ever captured on film (much of it in redundant voiceover); phenomenally boring use of 3D (this film is the anti-
Adieu au langage in that respect); and on-screen narcissism that’s only just falls short of the heady heights established by Thomas Clay. Yikes!