10.Dean Fleischer Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On seems like a mistake on paper. Marcel could have easily been laziness, cloying nostalgia, or a too-late attempt to capitalize on a bygone era of internet quirk, based on viral shorts from around a decade ago. Marcel, on the other hand, is a touching children’s film that manages to strike a delicate balance between the serious and the silly.
9.The quiet, melancholy film directed by Saint Omer Alice Diop is a courtroom drama, but not in the usual sense. There is no lawyerly speechmaking, and no significant evidence is discovered at once. Instead, Saint Omer is a thoughtful look at a tragedy:the infant’s death, whose mother, Laurence (a ferocious Guslagie Malanda), is being tried for murder.
8.Hit the Road: In the course of this year, two Iranian filmmakers presented scathing depictions of their nation and its government: No Bears, a secretly shot metadrama by Jafar Panahi, and Hit the Road, a film by Panah Panahi. Their last names are not just random. The Panahis are a father and son team, and one of them bravely enters a film tradition that his father has contributed so much to.No Bears’ stony neorealism is a reflection of Jafar’s current legal battle with the Iranian government, which prevents him from making films and leaving the country.
7.One Fine Morning
No one catches the ordinary meander aimlessly of life very like Mia Hansen-Løve. The ninth film by the French filmmaker is a lighthearted look at beginnings and endings. Sandra, a diplomatic translator played by Léa Seydoux, is slowly losing her father to a degenerative illness. She develops a romantic relationship with a married man who was once a friend of her husband as she navigates those upheavals in all of their mind-boggling sadness and morbidly amusing frustration.
6.Armageddon Time is not a trip back to Queens in the 1980s that James Gray took when he was younger. Armageddon Time is a pathetic moral drama about how a Jewish family’s awareness of race and class changes at the beginning of the Reagan era. Armageddon Time examines the tangled and multilayered systems of prejudice in this nation without resorting to self-flagellation. Instead, it stands steadfastly in its guilt. Gray, on the other hand, presents a thoughtful and nuanced look at a family caught on a faultline that is uniquely American. The family makes terrible decisions, which are typical of many Americans whose passive or active reliance on power structures becomes complicity.
5.This captivating documentary from Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, is a biography of the artist Nan Goldin and a report on her efforts, among many others, to bring the Sackler family, who released Oxycontin, to justice. However, this is just the beginning of a much longer narrative about America’s numerous breaches of its duty of care, from the smallest to the largest.
4.Benediction Fire Island and Bros this year presented gay contemporary social and romantic life in vibrantly comedic shades. Benediction, a biopic directed by Terence Davies and starring Jack Lowden, tells the story of poet Siegfried Sassoon’s struggle to overcome the traumatic events of the First World War. However, it has a gay community map that is just as intricate and rich in information as its cheerier counterparts.
3.Sam Mendes, the director of Empire of Light, has directed numerous lavish and lacquered films. Another one of those polished gems, Empire of Light conceals a wealth of humanity beneath its exquisite aesthetics this time around. The film is a touching short story about two movie theater workers—a middle-aged, lonely, and troubled woman named Hilary, played by Olivia Colman, and a young man named Stephen, played by Michael Ward—making a brief connection as their lives change and strain at the beginning of a new decade. Roger Deakins’ cinematography and a shocking score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross extraordinarily add to Domain of Light’s ordinarily Mendes-ian faint, yet they don’t overpower the finespun human show at the focal point of the film.
2.This eerie and contemplative supernatural drama from debut feature director Goran Stolevski is one of the most criminally underrated films of the year. You Won’t Be Alone is a dizzyingly vast meditation on the human condition. The story is about a Macedonian witch who can take on the form of other creatures by killing them and stuffing some of their guts inside a cavity in her chest. In one scene, she even takes on the form of a dog.
1.T What a rush it is to watch Todd Field’s glorious riot for nearly three hours. T’R is a grim satire and a thriller all rolled into one. It is very much in tune with contemporary debates about power and abuse, genius and tyranny. Because of its bracing and exciting immediacy, the film has the impression, in some ways, that it was written the night before the day you watched it. Cate Blanchett has never been better as a brilliant conductor-composer whose career begins to crumble when past bad behavior is revealed.TR is the perfect vehicle for her ferocious intelligence and slight air of haughtiness, which are amplified to almost comical levels in Field’s masterwork, which is wickedly funny while remaining bleak and shocking.
Field appears to anticipate the controversy he courts, but not in an arrogant or combative manner. He really just wants to talk about what we’ve all been talking about for the past few years, and he wants to do it in a way that is elegant and breathtakingly entertaining.TR, a film about the possible end of a whole hero worship tradition, places itself at the forefront of a new era, regretting some of what has been lost but moving forward toward the possibility and a better understanding of what will happen next.