The Best Hollywood Films of the 1960s

On the occasion of the criminally tardy Blu-ray release of 7 Women, I herewith offer my list of the ten greatest Hollywood films of the 1960s:

1. 7 Women (John Ford, 1966)
2. The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
3. Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968)
4. Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks, 1965)
5. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
6. Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)
7. The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968)
8. Bye Bye Birdie (George Sidney, 1963)
9. Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)
10. The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)

I arrived at this top ten by asking a question on Facebook a few years ago:

"Hey fellow film dorks! Can you name an American feature-length narrative film from the 1960s better than any of these listed below? Caveats: 1. I want it as mainstream/Hollywood as possible. So no sexploitation, no avant-garde, no Russ Meyer, no indies, etc. 2. No other films by directors already listed. I know Hatari! and Marnie are great. 3. I’ll puke (and you’ll clean it up!) if you mention Best Picture Oscar winners or anything by Kubrick. 4. I hate Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and no to The Graduate.

Bonnie and Clyde (Penn)
Bye Bye Birdie (Sidney)
The Hustler (Rossen)
In Harm’s Way (Preminger)
The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis)
The Legend of Lylah Clare (Aldrich)
The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer)
Petulia (Lester)
Point Blank (Boorman)
Psycho (Hitchcock)
Red Line 7000 (Hawks)
Rosemary's Baby (Polanski)
7 Women (Ford)
Shock Corridor (Fuller)
Too Late Blues (Cassavetes)
Two Weeks in Another Town (Minnelli)"

The purpose was threefold: 1. to focus my viewing schedule 2. to discover if there were indeed any films greater than those I listed and 3. to gain the illusion that I was "done" with the Hollywood of the 1960s, a decade which seems to me (preposterously, I admit) manageable. Plenty of friends offered suggestions, all of which are below and most of which I managed to watch. Years later, I discovered only two titles to rank with the powerhouses listed above - The Boston Strangler and Midnight Cowboy, the latter of which I apparently saw far too young since it hit me much harder when I watched it again in 2022.

Given the arbitrary nature of years, decades, and even nations, it was silly for me to be a stickler for rules. But again, I longed for focus. So no Boom! (Joseph Losey, 1968) or Paradise Alley (Hugo Haas, released in 1962, but shot in 1958). The 1960s were notorious for runaway productions, a phenomenon skewered by Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town which itself got skewered by the very system it critiqued. So is it a Hollywood film or a meta Hollywood film or more Hollywood than any film listed on this page for how it perfectly traces the death of classical cinema? Is Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) a Hollywood film or even American one? I wouldn't prevent anyone from top tenning it but I left it off my list. I would definitely find a spot for Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965) but in the end, I slotted it as a British film. 

To be clear, my top ten list would not comprise my list for the decade overall, not even close. For one, the avant-garde was really starting to whip up a storm in the 1960s; Andy Warhol's Drunk and Jack Chambers' The Hart of London are better films than anything above. For another, there's the rest of the world to manage which became downright torrential by 1960. And finally, there are beloved indies like Cassavetes' Faces, Juleen Compton's The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, and Andy Milligan's Seeds. Nevertheless, the ten Hollywood baubles I come here to praise are sources of endless renewable energy and curiosity.


All Fall Down
BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER
Billie!
Blast of Silence
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
The Boston Strangler
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Cape Fear
CAPRICE
CHARADE
THE CHASE
The Collector
COMANCHE STATION
Cool Hand Luke
DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
The Disorderly Orderly
Don’t Make Waves
DOWNHILL RACER
Elmer Gantry
Experiment in Terror
Gunn
The Haunting
HELL IS FOR HEROES
Hud
In Cold Blood
Inside Daisy Clover
The Killers
Kiss Me Stupid
Kitten with a Whip
Lonely Are the Brave
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
MADIGAN
The Magnificent Seven
Major Dundee
MARY POPPINS
The Masque of the Red Death
MEDIUM COOL
Mickey One
THE MISFITS
Mutiny on the Bounty
MY FAIR LADY
North to Alaska
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
ONE-EYED JACKS
The Party
THE PAWNBROKER
PLANET OF THE APES
The President's Analyst
PRETTY POISON
THE PROFESSIONALS
RACHEL, RACHEL
THE RAIN PEOPLE
Reflections in a Golden Eye
RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY
ROME ADVENTURE
The Savage Innocents
Something Wild
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
THE SHOOTING
Strangers in the City
Support Your Local Sheriff
SUSAN SLADE
THE SWIMMER
Targets
TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE
That Cold Day in the Park
They Shoot Horses Don't They?
Two For the Road
WAIT UNTIL DARK
The Wild Bunch
Wild River
The World of Henry Orient
YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE

Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)

Midnight Cowboy stands as one of the great phantasmagorias of 1960s Hollywood cinema. Visually and sonically, the film astonishes. It matters not a whit that Schlesinger interrupts the narrative with moments of short-shelf-life psychedelia (rapid editing, telephoto-flattened images, blue-and-white flashbacks, dazzling superimpositions) or that he puts them in the service of skin-deep critiques of consumerism or NYC savagery. They form little de facto avant-garde films that generate surges of jittery, intense excitement. And the music only heightens the effect. Listen to the record-scratch rhythms that overamp the sweetness in John Barry's "Florida Fantasy" or the eternally returning Nilsson version of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" that drains the song of hope with each go around. Everything nags at you evoking both the energy and danger of city living. 

Then there are the myriad indigestible trills: a mother and son playing with a plastic rat in a diner; a bowl of matches behind a curiosity cabinet/color wheel; kids fishing off a bridge in Florida; radio voices linked miles away to the talking heads who own them; dozens of extras afforded a closeup. Rampant homophobia too, more an ugly part of the landscape than assurance that Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) enjoy a properly heterosexual bromance. In short, Schlesinger has expended a great deal of effort to fashion a complex outer and inner life for two (and more!) characters whom society would much rather sweep into a sewer. It's such a rich, surprising film that I might even claim it's the closest Hollywood ever got to Ulysses in deeming less-than-ordinary lives worthy of the highest art.

Grade: A

The Best Film of 2020 (so far!)

Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) starts at Point A and winds up at Point ∫ba∫dc|ru×rv|dudv (stole that from some math website). I don't want to say too much more because the story twists up like a wiener package and you'll be stunned at the unpredictable vectors it takes. It concerns the fictional utopia of Bacurau, a dusty village in Northeastern Brazil sometime in the near future. The first third runs its finger over the contours of the village, delineating its operations in a manner most Fordian. But utopias fail to generate much profit so complications arise. And then more complications arise... Swerving in and out of social realism, art-film ellipsis, and extreme violence, Bacurau elicits complicated reactions from the viewer. You guffaw at the carnage when you're not baffled by this unexplained development or that unidentified flying object [sic!]. In its florid wipes and contrapuntal use of popular music, it recalls the operatic mythmaking of a great Cinema Novo classic like Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, Glauber Rocha, 1964). But more immediately, it's of a piece with recent popular (populist?) titles such as Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) and Uncut Gems (The Safdie Brothers, 2019), films that use class aspirations to fuel narrative intensity. Bacurau is even richer, though, because it tries to envision a classless society with no need for aspirations. Ten years in development, it somehow has arrived right on time as an allegory about the terror Bolsonaro has unleashed on Brazil, prompting Howard Hampton in Artforum to deem the film "[p]erpetually in and outside of the present moment." I fully support a campaign to have it win the Best Picture Oscar next year. Grade: A+.  

Best Films of the Teens

1. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, 2011)

2. Autumn (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2016)

3. Un couteau dans le coeur (Knife + Heart) (Yann Gonzalez, 2018)

4. For the Plasma (Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan, 2014)

5. Sleep Has Her House (Scott Barley, 2017)

6. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)

7. Wishing Well (Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2018)

8. Nightlife (Cyprien Gaillard, 2015)

9. Margaret (186-minute version, Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)

10. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2016)

Best Films of 2019

Best Films of 2019

10. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)
Yes, Scorsese is still obsessed with goodfellas, wise guys, and tough nuts. The intractable machismo is still suffocating. The narrative trajectory is still Oedipal. But. Women do talk in this film, contrary to some of the negative reviews. In fact, in the last hour or so, they turn the film, if not Scorsese’s entire oeuvre, on its head. What, finally, has all this macho posturing been about, the last hour asks, especially if it ropes you off from those you love the most, and it’s quite possibly Scorsese‘s most moving work ever. I was fighting back tears all the way up until the soon-to-be-classic final shot.

9. Climax (Gaspar Noé) 
Stupid, obnoxious, juvenile, unrelenting, and great! If you don't like this film, then you're no rock 'n' roll fun. 

8. Uncut Gems (The Safdie Brothers)
A thoroughly exhausting film, starting at 10, shifting down to 8 or 9 about halfway through, and then revving up to 11 if not beyond in its nail-biting last half hour. Adam Sandler's superb performance brings to mind Divine's in Female Trouble (John Waters, 1974) in that it's an extended aria (to borrow Jonanthan Rosenbaum's words, I think), a suffocating series of fuck ups. No spoilers but even though you should be able to see the end coming from leagues away, it's no less shocking. All this and another slimy, neon-soaked score by Daniel Lopatin. One of the best films ever made about toxic masculinity (what do these guys want?!?). I've never been so excited about the outcome of a sportsball game in my life! 

7. The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg)
Hogg's film keeps you abuzz and relaxed like the best art films. Your mind is working to make sure you haven't missed any narrative information. But the overall languor lowers the blood pressure. It's all about the interstices of a relationship, not to get at The truth but simply, A truth. Pungently observed and transfixing throughout. I'm baffled at all the hate I've read. It's a challenging film but no more so than the art film norm. How did the haters wind up watching it in the first place? And perversely, a sequel is coming albeit sadly without Robert Pattinson.

6. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa) 
The moment the end credits appeared, a sense of longing washed over me, the feeling of wanting time spent with loved ones to continue. More here.

5. Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello)
Before exegesis, there is observation. More here. 

4. Show & Tell: Josh B. Mabe
Mabe himself may not believe it. But Anthology Film Archives' retrospective of his work proves he's a major filmmaker. Ranging from one to thirty-seven minutes and mostly silent, Mabe's films evoke Brakhage's Arabics in that you cannot possibly imagine the profilmic event. Color-field oblivions alternately terrify and lull you. Light stretches objects like so much taffy. Etudes and leader collapse into one another. I was lifted. 

3. Liberté (Albert Serra) 
My favorite film at NYFF 57, Albert Serra's Liberté recalls my favorite film of the century, Jacques Nolot's La chatte à deux têtes (aka Porn Theatre, 2002). Based on a play Serra mounted for a controversial performance at Berlin's Volksbühne last year (according to an Artforum review by Dennis Lim, patrons shouted “Louder!” and “Some acting please!”), Liberté's central presentational mode is cruising: a dozen of so 18th-century libertines roam a German forest at night and engage in a variety of polymorphously perverse acts with one another. More here. 

2. Empire (Andy Warhol et al., 1965) at the Whitney
Saturday, January 12 at 1 p.m., the Whitney Museum of American Art, in conjunction with their Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again exhibit, showed Warhol's silent Empire at 16fps making for a screening of eight hours and five minutes. It was one of the greatest cinematic experiences of my life. More here. 

1. Un couteau dans le coeur (Knife + Heart) (Yann Gonzalez) 
Un couteau dans le coeur is one of those impossible things - a great slasher film AND a film with a great ending. In fact, it may be the greatest slasher film ever made (unless something like Psycho counts). The most moving of its many, many fine qualities is a compassion for secondary characters (and not just the murder victims). This is a film that shows care for a group of people even though the main character (Vanessa Paradis!) has individual goals of her own. Despite never stinting on seedy sex and violence, Gonzalez infuses every moment with hope and warmth, not nihilism and misanthropy, the slasher/giallo’s default mode. And then the ending...gawd, I’m choking up now just thinking of it. Poetic, dreamy, inviting, astonishing, an absolute stunner from frame one to frame last. 

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)

Best and Worst Films of 1999

Here's a list I found of the best and worst films of 1999. Beau Travail, Rosetta, and The Wind Will Carry Us wouldn't make their way to me until 2000. No clue why my fave Jarmusch (Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) is missing. Kikujiro would probably top the list today. I still loathe the moralizing final third of Eyes Wide Shut but the rest hypnotizes (the grain! the performances! the dorky sex castle! Xmas!). * means I remember not a damn thing about it.

1. Crazy in Alabama (Antonio Banderas)
2. Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Julio Medem) - This is listed with This Is My Father (Paul Quinn) but all I remember about the latter is a cameo by John Cusack as a pilot. 
3. Amerikanos (Christos Dimas)
4. Fight Club (David Fincher)
5. Black Cat, White Cat (Emir Kurastica)
6. An Autumn Tale (Eric Rohmer)
7. The Iron Giant (Brad Bird)
8. Election (Alexander Payne)/Stir of Echoes (David Koepp)
9. eXistenZ (David Cronenberg)
10. My Parents Read Dreams I've Had About Them (Neil Goldberg)
 
Runners-up: 
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (Jay Roach) 
Besieged (Bernardo Bertolucci) 
The Blair Witch Project (Eduard Sanchez, David Myrick)
Bowfinger (Frank Oz)*
Dick (Andrew Fleming)
Get Real (Simon Shore) - But I hate how the female best friend was shrugged off.
King of Masks (Wu Tianming)*
Limbo (John Sayles)*
Loss of Sexual Innocence (Mike Figgis)
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson)
The Omega Code (Rob Marcarelli)
The Red Violin (François Girard)
Romance (Catherine Breillat)
Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer)
The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan)
The Straight Story (David Lynch)
Summer of Sam (Spike Lee)Superstar (Bruce McCulloch)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella)  
The Winslow Boy (David Mamet)
 
Worst:
1. American Pie - I no longer recall why this was #1 but voilà!
2. The Phantom Menace
3. The Mod Squad - At a preview screening, there was a loud industrial scraping sound that made the film great for 90 seconds.
4. The Out-of-Towners
5. The Thirteenth Floor*
6. Detroit Rock City
7. An Ideal Husband
8. Jawbreaker
9. Mystery Men 
10. Mystery, Alaska - Directed by Jay Roach for what it's worth.
11. Happy, Texas - At the press screening, the reels were out of order. A fascinating experience of a terrible film. 
12. The Dinner Game*
13. Dogma
A film called Elvis Lives was listed in the Worst category. But I can find no such film released around the time. Maybe I saw him at Taco Bell.

Best Films of 2017

10. Division Movement to Vungtau (Benjamin Crotty and Bertrand Dezoteux)
These enfants terribles dishonor 16mm footage sourced from the US National Archives of off-duty American soldiers in Vietnam c. 1966-1968 by inserting motion-captured anthropomorphic fruit. To quote Phil Coldiron in a dead-on summation for The Brooklyn Rail, "the pair throw stink bombs into...the boomer nostalgia that marks Vietnam as more than just another catastrophe in our idiot nation’s storied history of them" and, as such, would make a perfect coda to Ken Burns' The Vietnam War.

9. Tonsler Park (Kevin Jerome Everson)
An 80-minute observation at a polling precinct in Charlottesville, Virginia on November 8th, 2016 of the black bodies our legislatures are gerrymandering out of existence.

8. The Florida Project (Sean Baker)
With many parking lots to cross, the barely working poor at a motel in Anywhere, USA find no relief from noise, heat, and the fitfully sympathetic management.

7. The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra)
Not a requiem but rather an ode to cinema's embalming function. I see dead people indeed.

6. Ismael's Ghosts (director's cut) (Arnaud Desplechin)
24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro (Douglas Gordon)
Hitchcock is always with us. Desplechin retells Vertigo as four films in one for the ADD set while Gordon's 2008 installation (at the 21st St. Gagosian through February 3rd) features one 24-hour Psycho running forward while another adjoining one runs backward. I haven't had so much fun at a gallery-cum-cinema, well, ever! My friend Bill and I were like giddy children before this monument to a lifetime of close readings. "Wait - wasn't Vera Miles walking backwards away from the house at one point?" "Do you know the name of the actor who played the cop?" "Man, he held this shot a long time." "Let's stay to see Ted Knight!"

 

5. Zama (Lucretia Martel)
A welcome and criminally tardy return of the genius Martel for a tale about a victim of hope winding his way through various disorienting spaces, the most terrifying pictured below from a brief moment I won't soon forget.

4. Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)
Finally - a big-budget Hollywood action film/box-office smash I loved! And a far better musical than La La Land. I can't even: Ansel Elgort.

3. On Generation and Corruption (Takashi Makino)
Makino takes Maya Deren's concept of vertical editing to unprecedented depths as you dive into his blizzard of superimpositions.

2. Sleep Has Her House (Scott Barley)
So gorgeous, so uncompromising that I actually wept at the end. Sleep Has Her House evokes Edward Steichen's eerie Moonlight photos or maybe The Turin Horse devoid of humans. You can scarcely imagine the profilmic events Barley encountered even though the film was presumably shot on this planet. As of this writing and for shame, Sleep Has Her House has yet to have its New York (or even North American!) premiere.

1. SPF-18 (Alex Israel)
In a year when cinema kept dying and Twin Peaks: The Return was a film (or not), and streaming threatened the thingishness of things, SPF-18 suggests that such epistemological uncertainty is the natural order of art. This is a film alright. But it's also part of a multi-platform project comprised of, to quote the VIA Art Fund's sober description, "a feature-length film, soundtrack, artwork, digital outreach program, and accompanying high school curriculum." Apparently, Israel toured high schools with the film although I've yet to uncover evidence that this actually happened and any documentation thereof would compete with the film as a primary aesthetic object. The film features cameos by Keanu Reeves, Molly Ringwald, Rosanna Arquette, Pamela Anderson, and Goldie Hawn (as the narrator), a 1980s soundtrack including hits from Duran Duran, The Cars, and Yaz, several of Isreal's art works, and some of the most ridiculous aerial shots ever filmed. It's basically an after-school special about the need for beautiful teenagers to follow their creative muse. I have absolutely no clue how to position myself with respect to this thing and I imagine further inquiries into Israel's access and privilege will force my mind in one firm direction. But for now, this was the most head-spinning encounter with cinema (or whatever) I had all year. SPF-18 is available on Netflix as of this writing. Watch it, kay?

The Best Films of 2016

The "it has to play for one week in NYC" rule is narrative feature film bigotry which almost never applies to avant-garde shorts. So you bet I ignored it here.

20. Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
Two formidable films about death.

A few years after my mother died, I had a dream in which she drank coffee with me in the kitchen. Even in the dream, I knew she was dead. But somehow I could still interact with her, a bittersweet sense of precariousness and confusion hanging over the encounter. Kurosawa's film evokes that feeling better than any I can recall. And unlike his godawful Creepy, its implausibilities only strengthen the concept.

Akerman's swansong recalls the conceptual hijinks of Jafari Panahi's This Is Not a Film. This is no home movie in the sense that Akerman winnowed down 40 hours of conversations with her mother to an assiduously constructed 115 minutes. But it's also a movie about having no home in this world or any other. Akerman's mother died in April 2014. Akerman died on Oct 5, 2015.

19. The Ornithologist (João Pedro Rodrigues)
Staying Vertical (Alain Guiraudie)
They're here, they're self-indulgent, get used to it!

18. Kaili Blues (Bi Gan)
Going Journey to the Shore one better, this debut feature lends both the past and the future a tangible plasticity in the present, most incredibly in a 41-minute shot [sic] corralling all three registers.

17. American Honey (Andrea Arnold)
I accepted this film's non-ending because that's what it's about, the "common people" Jarvis Cocker sang about who cannot call Dad to stop it all.

16. Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello)
The Third Generation meets Dawn of the Dead, ok. But the fumes from M are the strongest in this de facto portrait of a city and all its tentacles.

15. Foyer (Ismaïl Bahri)
In Tunis, Bahri places a piece of white paper in front of his camera to catch the imprint of the wind. Instead, various passersby, including some scary authorities, question his activity and force a meditation on work, whiteness, and the very indexicality of cinema.

14. The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (Ben Rivers)
Half documentary on the filming of Oliver Laxe's Mimosas in Morocco (with a touch of Buñuel's Las Hurdes?), half adaptation of Paul Bowles' "A Distant Episode" starring Laxe, Rivers' latest whasit is a difficult, upsetting condemnation of Orientalism including the filmmaker's own.

13. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)
Walter Ong would have loved it too.

12. Happy Hour (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
Five and a half hours of four women grappling with their 30s leaves plenty of time for all sorts of purposeful narrative trills and glissandi like the late arrival of an iced coffee. 

11. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
More past in the present. And as full of assholes, penises, and deformities as The Greasy Strangler. The difference here is that bodies are touched rather than ridiculed in an effort to realize the interconnectedness of various generations and planes of existence.

10. The Love Witch (Anna Biller)
As with Viva only more so, a promised campfest becomes something more moving, here a trenchant observation of a woman exiled to her fantasies.

9. Sin Dios ni Santa María (Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón)
Yet more past in the present. Present-day footage of Delgado's grandmother in the Canary Islands shot with expired 16mm film vies with a soundtrack of late 1960s recordings of men from Tenerife narrating encounters with witches. It ends with the long-ago documenter confessing that the recordings are imperfect "due to faults in the narrator's memory." Duras is thanked. 

8. A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies)
This astonishing Emily Dickinson biopic does nothing less than reconceive the nuclear family unit as a site of queer possibility. More here. 

7. The Other Side (aka Louisiana) (Roberto Minervini)
Minervini uses the term "short-circuiting" for how he tacks on a coda documenting a Louisiana militia to his uncomfortably intimate glimpse into the life of an impoverished meth addict. In order to rewire the two sections, the viewer must see the rural white poor in a wider context of economic deprivation and corporate/government indifference. It's a model for the rewiring of coalitions that must happen to dismantle Trumpistan.

6. Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu)
A richly detailed and ever chatty narrative about how our identities derive from the taking up of space. More here.

5. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt)
An impossibly delicate film where even the most dramatically inert moments create cause and effect chains and then break them off again. 

4. Homo Sapiens (Nikolaus Geyrhalter)
Composed of shots of abandoned spaces (malls, train stations, stadiums) around the world with no dialogue, Homo Sapiens improbably contains the most complex soundtrack of the year. It even credits a Foley artist who helped highlight the sounds of wind, water, and animal cries for a reminder that no matter how much we fuck with the environment, Mother Nature will win in the end.

3. Fort Buchanan (Benjamin Crotty)
Sure to go down as one of the great gay films because there's a way in which it's about the utter banality of so much gay media. A Washington native filming in France with a mixture of soap stars and refugees from Rohmer and Bonello films, Crotty sourced his dialogue from TV scripts found on line for closed-captioning purposes so that his characters emit awkward witticisms like "I'll take a slice of that." The effect is akin to an episode of Lifetime's Army Wives scripted by Ionesco as homosexuality is normalized into oblivion with stories concerning parenthood, marriage, and eternal monogamy.

2. For The Plasma (Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan)
You can tell that this is a self-conscious attempt to approximate a garbled vanity project like After Last Season (Mark Region, 2009) because Chris Messina's cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, the score comes from legit musician/composer Keiichi Suzuki, and both filmmakers cite Raul Ruiz's The Territory as an influence. A closer antecedent might be Walter Ungerer's The Animal with its blandly menacing New England forests. Conspiracy theories mutate into concerns over reality and its visual mediation. The nonsensical story frequently goes off the rails into pillow-shot poetry. And somewhere in here there's a landscape film worthy of James Benning. In short, For The Plasma is the work of free individuals, however temporarily, and a gift to those of us who huff cinema like so much amyl nitrate. I felt so close to this film that, in a rare move for me, I purchased it on iTunes where, incredibly, you can benefit from close-captioning. Also included: the most hilarious tracking shot in cinema history.

1.  Projections Program 8 at the New York Film Festival:
Autumn (Nathaniel Dorsky)
The Dreamer (Nathaniel Dorsky)
Bagatelle II (Jerome Hiler)
Eye-confounding superimpositions which find the world in a drop of water...or is that a drop of water in a world? More here.

Best unwitting cinema moment of 2016:
The bootleg copy of Doctor Strange on the Amazon Fire Stick that begins in medias res with a chunk of Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time," a commutation test classic.

Great films that made me feel stranded at the end:
Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Being 17 (André Téchiné)
The Measure of a Man (Stéphane Brizé)
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)

Feel-bad films are just as banal as feel-good films:
The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)

A horror film I actually liked:
Demon (Marcin Wrona)