Best Films of 2018
10. La Flor (Mariano Llinás)
Across three days at the New York Film Festival, nearly 15 hours of alternately infuriating and exhilarating art damage.
9. Night Pulse (Damon Packard)
Packard is a national treasure and his latest conniption fit takes on the Poppy Bush Interzone, particularly 1991. Characters include Dick Cheney, USA Up All Night host Rhonda Shear, Julia Roberts, Kim Fowley, Sade, Janet Jackson, William Friedkin, Geddy Lee, and "the drummer from Roxy Music." Subjects include the poppy fields of Afghanistan, the Illuminati, the death of the CD, multiplexes, the Los Angeles riots, and the DuPont Family (I think). The genre is the psychological thriller as told by unnaturally lit, Snapchat-cured dialogue spewers stuck in digital loops and endless chase scenes. The feel is paranoid, nerve-wracked, stuck. The message (or one at least): Even the Keepers of the Matrix are in a (the?) Matrix.
8. 24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami)
The Iranian master's final film. Or photograph. Or animated photograph. Or magic lantern show. Or screen saver. Or stereogram. Or...
7. Nightlife (Cyprien Gaillard)
Eternal thanks to the Gladstone Gallery for the United States premiere of Gaillard's 2015 eye-dazzling 3-D meditation on race, nature, and cross-pollination, all scored to a gut-wrenching sample of Alton Ellis' "Blackman's Word" repeating "I was born a loser."
6. Wishing Well (Sylvia Schedelbauer)
My favorite film at the New York Film Festival brings cinema back to (one of) its origins in the novelty of motion pictures with still and moving images pulling at one another as they tumble down a vortex. It's such a generous vision that the title is as much a verb as a noun.
5. Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada)
It plumbs deeper into the subjectivity of its black male principal character (Daveed Diggs, superb) than Sorry to Bother You, bursts with more ideas than BlacKkKlansman, and, like Baby Driver, is a de facto musical to boot! There are several corny moments but this ranks with Mikey and Nicky as one of the most pungent explorations of male friendship on film.
4. Dead Souls (Wang Bing)
Grim, artless, displaying little confidence in film's ability to testify, Wang's 495-minute record of the forced starvation of "rightists" in late-1950s China stands as one of cinema's great testimonials.
3. Avatar - Flight of Passage (Walt Disney Imagineering, LEI, Weta Digital)
I had to be dragged kicking and bitching last summer to my first trip to Disney World in over 25 years. But this 4D flight simulation through Avatar's Valley of Mo'ara damn near justified the grotesque expenditure. It takes the irrational enlargement of cinema to a tumescence undreamt of in the surrealists' philosophy. Next attraction: Josef von Sternberg Land.
2. Eniaios IV, Reel 2 (Gregory Markopoulos)
The Museum of the Moving Image unleashed one sliver of the Markopoulos' 80-hour monument, a 40-minute re-edit of his 1967 Bliss (shown below and also screened in the program) alternating flashes of light with black leader at unpredictable intervals and reorienting our concepts of previously self-evident truths of weight and, especially, height. As with so many avant-garde masterpieces, part of the immense pleasure lies in learning how to watch it.
1. The Films of Betzy Bromberg
Anthology Film Archives' retrospective introduced a filmmaker unknown to me whom I now rank among the greatest ever. I downed four punkish shorts from 1977-1981 and three recent feature-length films and all were astonishing. But a Darkness Swallowed (2006) is quite possibly the most gorgeous film I've ever seen. Confounding the ears as much as the eyes (and kicking off a major Creel Pone obsession immediately after), it begins with a brief meditation on two old photographs and then plumbs down into a universe of increasing abstraction. The lasting effect is one of wonder about the worlds lurking beneath our immediate perception.
Most overrated film of the year:
You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay)
Saw it in 70mm and never again need to see it in that format:
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Two excellent films with awful endings:
Burning (Lee Chang-dong)
First Reformed (Paul Schrader)
Three fantastic explorations of space/de facto westerns:
Leave No Trace (Debra Granik)
Sollers Point (Matthew Porterfield)
Western (Valeska Grisebach)
Two great films, one great director:
Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis)
High Life (Claire Denis)
Better than even Mandy:
Mom and Dad (Brian Taylor)
Best Unearthing:
Assignment: Female (Raymond Phelan, 1966) in Anthology Film Archives' Beyond Cassavetes: Lost Legends Of The New York Film World (1945-70) series
Other Highlights:
The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles) on 35mm at the New York Film Festival
Show & Tell: Helga Fanderl at Anthology Film Archives
Nathaniel Dorsky's Arboretum Cycle at Anthology Film Archives
Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)
The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)
Your Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
Across three days at the New York Film Festival, nearly 15 hours of alternately infuriating and exhilarating art damage.
Packard is a national treasure and his latest conniption fit takes on the Poppy Bush Interzone, particularly 1991. Characters include Dick Cheney, USA Up All Night host Rhonda Shear, Julia Roberts, Kim Fowley, Sade, Janet Jackson, William Friedkin, Geddy Lee, and "the drummer from Roxy Music." Subjects include the poppy fields of Afghanistan, the Illuminati, the death of the CD, multiplexes, the Los Angeles riots, and the DuPont Family (I think). The genre is the psychological thriller as told by unnaturally lit, Snapchat-cured dialogue spewers stuck in digital loops and endless chase scenes. The feel is paranoid, nerve-wracked, stuck. The message (or one at least): Even the Keepers of the Matrix are in a (the?) Matrix.
The Iranian master's final film. Or photograph. Or animated photograph. Or magic lantern show. Or screen saver. Or stereogram. Or...
Eternal thanks to the Gladstone Gallery for the United States premiere of Gaillard's 2015 eye-dazzling 3-D meditation on race, nature, and cross-pollination, all scored to a gut-wrenching sample of Alton Ellis' "Blackman's Word" repeating "I was born a loser."
My favorite film at the New York Film Festival brings cinema back to (one of) its origins in the novelty of motion pictures with still and moving images pulling at one another as they tumble down a vortex. It's such a generous vision that the title is as much a verb as a noun.
It plumbs deeper into the subjectivity of its black male principal character (Daveed Diggs, superb) than Sorry to Bother You, bursts with more ideas than BlacKkKlansman, and, like Baby Driver, is a de facto musical to boot! There are several corny moments but this ranks with Mikey and Nicky as one of the most pungent explorations of male friendship on film.
Grim, artless, displaying little confidence in film's ability to testify, Wang's 495-minute record of the forced starvation of "rightists" in late-1950s China stands as one of cinema's great testimonials.
I had to be dragged kicking and bitching last summer to my first trip to Disney World in over 25 years. But this 4D flight simulation through Avatar's Valley of Mo'ara damn near justified the grotesque expenditure. It takes the irrational enlargement of cinema to a tumescence undreamt of in the surrealists' philosophy. Next attraction: Josef von Sternberg Land.
The Museum of the Moving Image unleashed one sliver of the Markopoulos' 80-hour monument, a 40-minute re-edit of his 1967 Bliss (shown below and also screened in the program) alternating flashes of light with black leader at unpredictable intervals and reorienting our concepts of previously self-evident truths of weight and, especially, height. As with so many avant-garde masterpieces, part of the immense pleasure lies in learning how to watch it.
Anthology Film Archives' retrospective introduced a filmmaker unknown to me whom I now rank among the greatest ever. I downed four punkish shorts from 1977-1981 and three recent feature-length films and all were astonishing. But a Darkness Swallowed (2006) is quite possibly the most gorgeous film I've ever seen. Confounding the ears as much as the eyes (and kicking off a major Creel Pone obsession immediately after), it begins with a brief meditation on two old photographs and then plumbs down into a universe of increasing abstraction. The lasting effect is one of wonder about the worlds lurking beneath our immediate perception.
You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay)
Saw it in 70mm and never again need to see it in that format:
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Two excellent films with awful endings:
Burning (Lee Chang-dong)
First Reformed (Paul Schrader)
Three fantastic explorations of space/de facto westerns:
Leave No Trace (Debra Granik)
Sollers Point (Matthew Porterfield)
Western (Valeska Grisebach)
Two great films, one great director:
Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis)
High Life (Claire Denis)
Better than even Mandy:
Mom and Dad (Brian Taylor)
Best Unearthing:
Assignment: Female (Raymond Phelan, 1966) in Anthology Film Archives' Beyond Cassavetes: Lost Legends Of The New York Film World (1945-70) series
Other Highlights:
The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles) on 35mm at the New York Film Festival
Show & Tell: Helga Fanderl at Anthology Film Archives
Nathaniel Dorsky's Arboretum Cycle at Anthology Film Archives
Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)
The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)
Your Face (Tsai Ming-liang)
Labels: Best Films
posted by Kevin John at 2:19 AM
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