5. “America To Me”
Taking its title from the Langston Hughes poem “Let America Be America” (“…America never was America to me”) Steve James‘ monumental 10-part documentary series, set in on ostensibly progressive high school in Chicago (the one James’ own children attended) is an urgent and topical State of the Nation address disguised as an incredibly engaging, addictive and entertaining TV show. Oak Park and River Forest High School — the very name a barrage of bucolic nouns — prides itself on its diverse student body, but as James’ seemingly omnipresent cameras follow a select group of the school’s non-white and mixed-race students (and their parents and teachers) over the course of a year, the hollowness of that pride is immediately revealed. The choice to focus exclusively on minority students may seem risky — especially for a show in which the first episode deals with the (largely white) anger at a Black Lives Matter event which explicitly excluded white students. But as James later explains that was partly because the white students simply weren’t equipped to talk about race they way their Black peers are, and certainly the articulacy and insight that these young people bring to bear on the insidious workings of racism more than bear that decision out. Yet there is nothing of the lecture about “America To Me” — it’s difficult not to fall a little in love with the kids, from the dorky freshman to the charismatic but undisciplined junior to the mixed-race girl coming to terms with her gender identity to the heavyset teen code-switching fervently between his white marching band-mates and his black wrestler friends. But while we invest in their journey much as one might the teen heroes of your average high school movie, there is no easy happy ending to this piercingly insightful project. This microcosmic environment — in many ways the most hopeful and positive example there could be — is sprawling, compelling, extraordinary evidence of an unpleasant truth: American racism is a feature, not a bug, and if America is ever going to be America to all its citizens, it will require no less than a radical redrawing of the national blueprint, starting perhaps, with making every lawmaker involved with education watch “America to Me.” Available now on Starz.
https://youtu.be/Fbfx9OpcUoc
4. “Shirkers” [Review]
Stand aside, “The Other Side of the Wind.” Take a step back, Jodorowsky‘s “Dune.” Sandi Tan‘s singular, wistful, offbeat, occasionally creepy, often chaotic memoir-cum-detective-story suggests that a previously unheard-of 1992 film, also called “Shirkers” might actually be the greatest film never made. That’s a bombastic statement that today’s Tan, who narrates with wry humor and a stiff dose of retrospective self-critique, would likely never make. But the Tan of 1992, whose indomitable, take-on-the-world enthusiasm is utterly infectious, would have had no problem with it. It was a film made out of the fervent cinephilia of the voracious pop-culture-punk teen, and out of the equally fervent friendships we make at that age: Tan’s BFFs Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique acted as producers and factotums to Tan’s writer/star. The tantalizing glimpses we have of the film suggest a sincere hoot (it was about a serial killer called “S” and looked to be heavily in thrall to David Lynch-like almost every amateur project was in 1992). But that only glimpses remain is down to the other creative partner in the endeavor, the director George Cordona, an American a good bit older than Tan and her friends, and a peculiarly covetous pathological liar. The doc morphs from rueful, spiky nostalgia to something close to a confessional in the shadowy description of her younger self’s naive relationship with this, well, creep (almost self-confessed — one of his more revealing lies was his claim he was the inspiration for James Spader‘s character in “sex, lies & videotape“). The disturbing parts are worth it, though, for the sense of catharsis that “Shirkers” finally delivers: this regretful tale is also gently hopeful in its belief that whatever we’ve lost along the way — reels of film, friendships, innocence, the belief that we can do anything — can at least partially be found again, even if just for a few flickery seconds. Available now on Netflix.
3. “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening”
If the legacy of the seminal “Hoop Dreams” hovers on the margins of Steve James‘ astounding new documentary series “America To Me,” (see above) it should by rights threaten to engulf “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening.” Filmmaker RaMell Ross, a teacher and a basketball coach in the Western Alabama county of the title, loosely organizes his film around a couple of the players on his team, following their lives over the course of five years, on and off, to make this movie. But the intent is more philosophical than sociological, and the effect more lyrical than political: This is the movie that “Hoop Dreams” dreams. The births and deaths and basketball games that pass before his quiet, searching camera are just the dramatic embellishments of lives lived more revealingly in the disregarded moments in between. Ross, who is also a photographer, is not so much recording these moments — lingering on the face of a new mother which is still partitioned from her body after childbirth; summoning a world of slowly healing grief in the wallpaper picture of a cellphone; finding a glimmering beauty in a gang of guys hanging out and shooting the shit at night in a parking lot, too far away to hear distinctly. Instead, he is reciting them, in his film’s unmetered visual poetry, which is full of surprising assonance, caesuras that feel like the deep sigh of the Deep South and pockets of pattern and rhythm when you least expect them. This is one of those rare films that doesn’t just tell its story but suggests a new way we could tell our own, if we can just look at those in-between, nothing stretches with enough curiosity and compassion.
2. “John McEnroe: In The Realm of Perfection”
When French director Julien Faraut‘s bizarre and totally sui generis documentary premiered at the Berlinale, it did so without John McEnroe’s name in the title. The addition is understandable, perhaps — if you’ve got a name in your film, use it, right? But it’s a backhanded recommendation ( I am not above a tennis pun or two) that subtly misdirects the audience’s expectations: this is not a film obsessed with John McEnroe. It’s a film about a filmmaker who was obsessed with John McEnroe and those two approaches are as far apart as the opposing baselines on Roland Garros’ Court no 1, separated by a Martian desert’s-worth of dusty red clay. It is the footage of McEnroe shot by Gil de Kermadec for the French sporting institute INSEP that Faraut makes his main focus. De Kermadec was a tennis enthusiast but a peculiarly technically minded one (it’s a telling detail that he initially wanted to teach tennis as one might the foxtrot, with a floor plan diagram of where your feet should go and when). But in Faraut’s hands, this footage of McEnroe during the storied 1984 French Open, often focused on him to the exclusion of all else — ball, net, umpire, opponent, — often in ecstatic slo-mo, becomes an essay not just on power and motion in sports but on the craft of filmmaking, the nature of image and persona, and on the seductive idea that somehow through cinema we can access a granular truth that eludes us otherwise. Whenever the weird and frankly counterintuitive project of relating tennis to cinema looks like it might founder, Mathieu Amalric’s silky voiceover points us in another direction or McEnroe’s own outsize personality, here at the height of its charisma and volatility, takes the wheel for a moment. But though there are fascinating, borderline outlandish and yet somehow justifiable digressions about the nature of his “tennis auteurship,” Faraut’s film is at its most scintillating when, through the alchemy of de Kermadec’s gorgeous 16mm footage, the simple yet complex action of a serve or the swooping arc of a lob is turned into thrilling, transcendent cinematic ballet.
1. “Minding the Gap”
Blissed-out, gliding images, taken by a teenage Bing Liu, of his friends as they skateboard through multistorey parking lots and pick up speed on downhill portions of deserted freeways, lull us into an idea of his Sundance winner as yet another skating doc, if an extraordinarily well-shot one. But it’s an impression quickly eroded: Liu uses these carefree images as the sweet soil from which an increasingly gnarled and raggedly heartbreaking story grows, as the three young men featured — a Benetton lineup of Black, white, and Asian — stumble painfully into maturity to discover that the cycles of racial discord, domestic violence, and parental inadequacy they witnessed as kids have no off-ramp. The footage Liu assembles was shot on-and-off over a period of years, making “Minding the Gap” feel a bit like “Boyhood,” but from the inside, and for that later loss-of-innocence moment when you realize that you are not a rocket shot straight out into space, but a satellite destined to fall into the orbit of old patterns, helpless to resist the gravitational pull of your social class and your upbringing, which, in Rockford, Illinois we’re told, was as likely as not marred by some form of domestic abuse. There are confrontations, with parents, lovers and each other, and there are bitter conclusions drawn for all three, but overridingly, the film feels like a quest to understand the mystery of time, how it pushes us forward and pulls us back. It’s a perspective all the more remarkable for coming from a 24-year-old, as it plays like a long-tail arrow of regret shot back through time, back through every moment of teenage abandon and mischief and bonding, to the very beginning; to the three kids on skateboards doing trick moves on empty streets that stretch off into an unsullied future, with their youth and energy bouncing off them like lens flare. Nothing smashed my heart like “Minding the Gap” this year. Available now on Hulu.
A quick disclaimer: Sydney Pollack’s Aretha Franklin concert doc “Amazing Grace” was given a brief Oscar-qualifying release in 2018 but none of us has been able to catch up with it yet, despite hearing extremely positive reports, so we’ll consider it instead for our 2019 lists after its wider release in the spring. And another notable omission is Alexandria Bombach‘s “On Her Shoulders” about ISIS survivor and activist Nadia Murad, which comes to us highly recommended but which also we’ve been unable to see so far — neither of those are deliberately left off this list. By contrast, the absence of Dinesh D’Souza‘s “Death of a Nation” should be entered into the record as an entirely deliberate act of avoidance because fuck that crackpot and the both-sides-ism that suggests we should continue to legitimize him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA6lBW3R__M
Otherwise, as I mentioned this list is pretty subjective and if I’d been in a different mood a whole other host of excellent non-fiction movies could have figured. In particular, aside from the examples above, I felt even more of an aversion than usual to including too many biographical documentaries, as often, even the good ones can feel nichey, narrowly focused on their subjects to the detriment of outside context or urgency. That said, there were still some terrific examples, some of which do indeed make valuable comment on these troubled times: the bristling, pugnacious profile of controversial Tamil-British musician “Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.“; the eye-opening rags-to-riches, rise-and-fall story of renegade designer Alexander “McQueen“; the tender connective rhythms of ‘Coda,’ a portrait of composer Ryuchi Sakamoto; the affectionate and socially aware outline of the remarkable life of “Quincy” Jones, co-directed by his daughter Rashida; the entertaining but also movingly humane HBO Sports doc “Andre the Giant“; the pontifications of Wim Wenders‘ “Pope Francis: A Man of his Word“; the delightful “Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind” that rightly focuses on his life and comedy, rather than his death and tragedy; Kevin Macdonald‘s compelling and shocking “Whitney” that focuses (perhaps too much) on the tragedy; the self-critical but very winning “Jane Fonda in Five Acts” that makes one look forward to Act 6; the warmly appreciative tribute to “Hal” Ashby (in which Fonda also features); the 2-part Netflix film “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling” which is a must for Shandling’s many fans; the galvanizing and forthright portrait of a tireless crusader “Seeing Allred“; and probably the most controversial omission from the above, “RBG,” which supplies a perfectly good, energetic and upbeat picture of the indomitable Supreme Court Justice, and which made such a killing at the box office (with a likely long life on home formats too, especially with fictionalized version “On the Basis of Sex” keeping it top of mind) that it hardly needs any more shine.
Also in contention were sharp-eyed archival documentary “The Waldheim Waltz“; two eccentric family history docs in the rambunctious “Lots of Kids, A Monkey and a Castle” and its rather more twee American cousin “306 Hollywood“; Alison McAlpine‘s dreamy exploration of the night sky as seen from the Atacama desert, “Cielo“; “Mercury 13,” the story of the aspiring astronauts who were denied access to the Mercury program due to being women — if only the film was as inspired as its subjects are inspirational; somber, necessary cautionary tale about campaign finance fraud “Dark Money“; equally hard-hitting and challenging medical-device-industry expose “The Bleeding Edge“; Lauren Greenfield’s somewhat scattered but highly entertaining “Generation Wealth“; cackling gossipy treat “Tea With The Dames“; and Netflix’s spruced-up and expanded release of seminal cold-case mystery series “The Staircase,” to which our current glut of true crime TV shows owes a clear debt.
There were a few minor disappointments too, though others seem to have got more from than I did, among them Frederick Wiseman‘s typically sprawling but somehow not quite so revelatory “Monrovia Indiana“; Werner Herzog’s curiously cosy and fanboyish “Meeting Gorbachev“; Errol Morris‘ interview with sentient pile of flammable rags Steve Bannon “American Dharma” and ivory-trade doc “When Lambs Become Lions” which didn’t for me live up to the fascinating promise of its premise, but to which our reviewer gave a straight A, so what do I know.
And finally, there’s a host of docs that we caught up with at festivals various but that will hopefully get proper releases in 2019 and may well factor into next years mid-year or year-end lists. A selection of the best ones we’ve seen, for which you should keep your eyes peeled: fascinating behind-the-scenes doc from Peter Medak “The Ghost of Peter Sellers“; fittingly beautiful tribute a master cinematographer who died this year, “Living the Light: Robby Muller“; amusing flat-earth doc “Behind the Curve“; woozy, stunning tone poem “Black Mother“; sailing doc “Maiden“; and the shiver-inducing “Putin’s Witnesses” in which North Korea doc “Under the Sun” director Vitaly Mansky essentially condemns himself and his family to exile by turning a critical eye on Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, and his own small role in that ascent.
Sure, why would you even bother with fiction anymore?
Click here for our complete coverage of the best and worst of 2018.
