15. “20th Century Women”
If you have a talent for making movies about sentimental people in sentimental situations that are not of themselves sentimental but compassionate, bittersweet and funny, you’re probably Mike Mills. His follow-up to “Beginners,” which detailed a late-life coming out and the way it impacted a father/adult son relationship, is ostensibly a more familiar story of motherhood and a young man’s coming of age. But Mills infuses the screenplay with such minutely personal detail, and then his superb cast bring their idiosyncratic characters to such thrillingly holistic life, that it feels completely fresh: an almost painfully affectionate portrait of a remarkable yet ordinary woman tussling with the challenges of raising a son in the late 1970s. Drenched in California sunshine, peppered with choice soundtrack cuts and adorned with an especially outstanding supporting performance from Greta Gerwig (whose first name I always mistype as “Great” then briefly consider leaving that way), still there’s nothing that can take the film away from Annette Bening, whose performance is itself radiant, emitting pulses of warmth and light. Equal parts graceful and baffled, and eternally engaged not just emotionally but intellectually in the project of raising her son to be a good man, Bening’s Dorothea is a profoundly beautiful, three-dimensional character, a moving, empathetic, clear-sighted tribute to Mills’ own mother that, if she was anything like Dorothea, could only have made her burst with pride.
14. “Elle”
There was a brief period in the late 1980s/early 1990s when the subversive and sensationalist tendencies of impish Dutch director Paul Verhoeven temporarily aligned with prevailing Hollywood tastes. Or at least, he managed to smuggle his provocative agenda into genre films that were then sold as mass-market products, gently but irrevocably corrupting malleable young minds via VHS (for which: thanks, Paul! xx). But for a much longer period he’s been on the outs with the Hollywood establishment, so much so that you could have imagined that his first feature in a decade might be a kind of “hey, remember me?” calling card, an indication that’s he’s around, and still willing and able to play that game. But instead, he gives us “Elle,” a snapping, snarling, ferocious, gleefully “problematic” thing that, as both he and star Isabelle Huppert have said repeatedly, could never have been made in America with an American actress. You can see why: this is a film that uses a graphic rape scene as grist for light social satire and a witty investigation into the contradictory and sometimes self-destructive patterns that inform erotic desire. Slick, boisterous and in deeply questionable taste it also boasts the key Huppert performance in 2016, The Year of Huppert: even if it’s not the absolute best film she was in (see below!), only she could have made it what it is, and negotiated such a fraught role with such lightness and well, sass. It was very marginally let down for me by an ending that didn’t quite feel like it had the courage of the rest of the film’s dangerous, borderline offensive convictions, but perhaps that’s just a factor of how brilliant the rest of it is, this very funny film about a powerful, weird woman who dares not have her rape be the thing that defines her into victimhood. [Review]
13. “La La Land”
Happily it seems like general audiences have ignored the crashingly predictable critical backlash against Damian Chazelle‘s modern musical (it’s almost like Film Twitter squabbles hardly matter in the real world!) and treated themselves to this cathartic, candy-colored daydream. I realize this leaves me in the mortifying position of actually liking the Best Picture Oscar front-runner, but it can’t be helped, I was charmed to a kind of swoony dizziness by the invention and affection on display in Chazelle’s follow-up to “Whiplash,” and would have happily dived right back into that world after it ended had I been able to. It is slight in terms of plot, to be sure, but the greater project is the communication of a manifesto I could not have believed in beforehand: that life is, in fact, a musical, you just have listen for the melodies and notice when you fall in step with the cosmic choreography. In a way it’s a more impressive feat of universe-building than ‘Rogue One’ or any Marvel movie has achieved, as this is not a simple what-if, this is a sincere attempt to inject elements of melancholic, true-feeling reality into the musical form, while also mining the musical form for its magic, to sprinkle over reality. It puts forward a new way of looking at life, and the struggle for creative fulfillment that is both inflected with sadness and yet infectiously hummable. There are those who disparage its dreams-come-true side, but the narrative never suggests that there isn’t a cost, and what other conclusion could Chazelle come to, as a young director with two low-budget indies under his belt who was suddenly given the chance to realize his risky, ambitious, (relatively) expensive dream project in a form that had been unpopular for decades? “La La Land” is a dream come true. [Review]
12. “The Wailing”
Na Hong-jin is a director I only came to recently, catching up with his previous two excellent films “The Yellow Sea” and “The Chaser” immediately prior to going to Cannes where “The Wailing” would be premiering. In the event, clashes prevented me from seeing it while there, but I can’t help but wonder if that might have been for the best: watching it months later in my living room, with all the lights on, on a small screen, was as unheimlich an experience as I care to handle — it’s possible I’d have lost it completely in a theater. It’s the weird, oddly structured, stop-start story of a genially bumbling policeman (a brilliantly hangdog Kwak Do-won) who gets embroiled in a potentially supernatural string of inexplicable, grisly murders, before whatever-it-is seems to afflict/possess his doted-upon young daughter. It is funny and gruesome and very scary in unique combination, a beguiling mix of bawdy, banal and batshit crazy, a police procedural that also operates as a fully-fledged horror. And while there’s not a second in which it feels like Na is in anything less than total control, the sense of danger you feel as a viewer, in that you’re watching a film that does not adhere to traditional narrative rules, is almost palpable — yet that constant wrong-footing, and those disquietingly irregular rhythms are also was makes for one of the most purely entertaining films of the year. [Nik’s review from Cannes]
11. “The House Of Others”
I didn’t cover the Karlovy Vary Film Festival for The Playlist but for Variety, so there are a couple of discoveries from there that I haven’t had a chance to talk up in these hallowed pages. Top of the list is Rusudan Glurjidze‘s loosely autobiographical film from Georgia — actually her debut feature, which is astonishing given the immense control and maturity of execution. It’s an opaque, hard-edged but atmospheric quasi ghost story set in the evocative surroundings of a small cluster of houses in the war-ravaged Georgian countryside that were hastily abandoned by their occupants, fleeing the oncoming troops. A short time after the war, a family moves into one of the houses — still furnished with the previous owner’s abandoned belongings — but as though the walls and fields and orchards hold on to the memory of those whose home it really is, they find themselves ever so slightly haunted. There are mysterious neighbors, illicit trysts, puppy love, a figure in black who might be a literal ghost and even an undercurrent of repressed sexual hysteria, and the film’s elusive, elliptical storytelling, and often enigmatic dialogue is certainly not for the impatient. But the stark, pictorialist beauty of the images, that often resemble the compositions of a Dutch master, only lit in the half-light of a dull, misty day is breathtaking. Here the eloquence is that of the camera (stunning work from DP Gorka Gómez Andreu) which communicates Glurjidze’s themes in frames of exquisite perfection and gentle moves away from the action of the scene, as though every moment were an ending, and every shot a eulogy for the vanished. [My review for Variety]