The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sangsoo)
“In its breezy 77-minutes, The Woman Who Ran accumulates a multitude of hinted-at stories and happenings, of lives that have arrived at their own unique stages. Hong is a master of weaving together complexities so nonchalantly that they graze the viewer, almost unnoticed.” - full review here
Days (Tsai Ming-liang)
In Tsai’s return to narrative feature filmmaking—after seven years of working on shorts, documentaries, installations, performances and even a VR piece—he strips down all of the elements of his work to only the bare essentials: two otherwise lonely bodies come together in transient transcendence. Without the usual artifice, or playful narrative periphery, the emphasis on the physicality of loneliness and connection has never been stronger or more deeply felt. - Full review here
City Hall (Frederick Wiseman)
The foremost American documentarian continues his string of incredibly revealing and compelling dioramic portraits of how institutions operate, this time turning his subtly incisive lens on city government in Boston. The usually disparate and seemingly dislocated facets of a major city are brought into illuminating view, rendering an organic whole that lives and breathes even as it moves uneasily as if through quicksand.
DAU. Degeneration (Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Ilya Permyakov)
I’ve seen less than half of the work from the year’s (century’s?) most controversial film project, Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s maddeningly ambitious—and possibly just mad—DAU series. (If you’re unfamiliar with the particulars of its production, this is one place to start). It spans over a dozen feature films, most of which have been released on its own website. I wont get into the details (and ethical questions) around the project here though I may write further on the project as a whole once I’ve seen it all. Degeneration is its most epic instalment at over 6 hours long and taking place at the end of the timeline—but it’s also an effective place to begin and get immersed in the obsessive world-building embarked on. It’s also a deeply unsettling encounter with ideological and emotional danger that may be unlike anything I’ve experienced in cinema.
Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu)
If you can’t stand stuffy costume dramas, this film is both your worst nightmare and a biting antidote. Malmkrog is a surprising addition to Puiu’s growingly fascinating oeuvre. The film is centered around a series of conversations between a handful of social elites in a manor that unfold in lengthy scenes over afternoon tea, dinner, and drinks. Discussing political and philosophical concerns of their time, at the end of the 19th century, these formally polite and articulate characters engage in a rhetorical battle of ramping intensity that points to the blinders provided by any given age and the deceptiveness of language itself.
Let Them All Talk (Steven Soderbergh)
Soderbergh’s elegant, entertaining drama is one of his very best films as well as one of the best displays of his stylistic intelligence. Mostly driven by conversation—and led by some of the year’s best performances from everyone in its ensemble—Let Them All Talk is nevertheless purely cinematic in its visual strategy, elevating shot-reverse shot sequences into studies of faces, behaviour, and character beyond dialogue, mostly taking place on an actual cruise where the director finds no shortage of inspiration for this masterclass in seemingly simple formal expression. - full review here
The Salt of Tears (Philippe Garrel)
For those familiar with Garrel, you are likely to know what you’re getting here — an understated black and white melodrama where a naive male character clumsily navigates romantic relationships — and yet the director always finds something to freshen up the formula. Here, one of his most quietly likeable protagonists has his selfish nature slowly revealed as he moves from one woman to the next. The distance that has crept into Garrel’s late work allows for a layer of ironic reflection as these human connections dissolve or are abused, harshly regarded by the camera as regrettable matters of fact.
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
Though it originally premiered in 2019, I’m making an exception here as the life of Reichardt's latest seemed to kick off more purposefully once it played the Berlinale in February 2020. Merging the gentle rhythm of Old Joy with the formal precision of Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow tells another tale from the frontier in a portrayal of an unlikely slice of history, through the friendship between a cook and a Chinese immigrant on the run. Refreshingly, even touchingly slight, Reichardt brings this tiny pocket of American experience to life with the most bittersweet of touches.
Fauna (Nicolás Pereda)
Pereda’s best film is also his most playful. Its closest cousin is another one of his strongest, Minotaur, which also felt like an exercise in cinematic gamesmanship, but Fauna is warmer and more serious at the same time. The 70-minute answer to Mariano Llinás’ 800-minute La Flor, Pereda’s meta-almost-satire collapses in on itself, foregrounding elements of performance and storytelling while calling into question the nature of imposed narratives (in this case, narco-crime dramas in Mexico) altogether.
The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane)
Most notable for the trajectories and digressions it doesn’t follow, Tamhane’s The Disciple is a memorable and original artist’s tale, telling the story of a Classical Indian musician whose lifelong striving for greatness—and attempt to step out of his father’s murky shadow—doesn’t take him where he had hoped. The film impressively works within a recognizable framework while inventing its own narrative logic and crafting something uniquely sober.
Special Mentions
The History of the Seattle Mariners (Jon Bois)
On one level, it’s the brilliant mapping of a cursed franchises’s (un)storied history, and on another it’s a profound articulation of what makes sports so much more than Ws and Ls.
Hopper/Welles (Orson Welles)
Two iconic figures duke it out on uneven ground, the camera tilted so as to pin Hopper in a corner for an uncomfortable amount of time as opposing generations of culture clash—both performatively and revealingly.
Honourable Mentions
Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito)
A beautiful gesture of expansion and illumination, Gianvito focuses on Hellen Keller’s socialist beliefs, writings, and speeches — giving her words and ideas the space they deserve and have heretofore largely been paved over in favour of more convenient narratives of inspiration.
The Metamorphosis of Birds (Catarina Vasconcelos)
Plunges into family history are a dime a dozen in cinema, but Vasconcelos peers into hers with a tender embrace of mystery and poetry, feeling its way through memories and assembling something of a constructed vision of a family’s life and the living, virtual past.