As the year winds up and the movie industry takes a holiday before the announcement of Oscar nominations early next year, it’s time to sit back, reflect and catch up on some of the best of this year’s offerings, many of which slipped under the radar and did not enjoy big-screen releases, despite offering rewarding affirmation that the art form remains in the hands of its best practitioners, who are finding new and innovative ways to keep it alive.
I Saw the TV Glow — Buy from Apple TV+
Director Jane Schoenbrun’s quietly uncomfortable tale of two misfit adolescents who find escape from the existential dread of their mundane existence in the world of a strange, mythologically rich 1990s television show is one of the year’s most distinctive and emotional films. Starring Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine as outsider teens Owen and Maddy who develop an awkward friendship based on their mutual appreciation for the dark bizarre world of their favourite show, The Pink Opaque, which will indelibly change their lives and imprint on their fragile psychs for decades to come.
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World — Mubi.com
Romanian director Radu Jude cements his status as one of cinema’s most original voices with this sprawling, almost three-hour satirical comedy that takes on many of the shibboleths of the late-capitalist, digital-obsessed world with anti-authoritarian glee. It stars the excellent Ilinca Manolache as an overworked, underpaid production assistant given the exasperating task of driving the streets of Bucharest in search of potential cast members for a workplace safety video. It is a dark, often uncomfortable, but always true assault on all the horrors of modern, globalised existence.
My First Film — Mubi.com
Deeply personal, angry and not always subtle, director Zia Anger’s film is an inventively medium-boundary pushing film that defies adequate description. Starring rising newcomer Odessa Young, the film follows the journey of young filmmaker Vita who tells the story of the chaotic and seemingly impossible task of trying to bring her first film to life, 15 years earlier. The film she was making was a semi-autobiographical drama about a young woman who falls pregnant and decides to leave home. Anger weaves part of that film into the broader story about its making to create a meta-narrative film that asks difficult questions about truth, mythmaking and the toll the creative process takes on those who are part of it.
Occupied City — Mubi.com
Released last year but made available to local audiences only this year, Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen’s epic, almost four-hour documentary essay film is simple and repetitive in its execution but far-reaching in its broader contemplations on the evolution of historical sites from places of terror into everyday utilitarian spaces. Using the text of his wife Bianca Stigter’s book about the history of Amsterdam during the years of its occupation by the Nazi regime during World War 2, the film shows the locations of the past in their present incarnation in contemplative, long still shots that observe modern Amsterdam residents going about their lives during the lockdown restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic. While libertarian paranoiacs may like to see the film as drawing parallels between Nazis restrictions and those imposed by democratic governments to deal with Covid-19, McQueen is not interested in such conspiracy fodder, but rather in the ways that looking squarely at the spaces of the past with full knowledge of their past leads us to wrestle with their implications.
Self-Portrait As A Coffee Pot — Mubi.com
William Kentridge’s nine-part series, filmed in large part during the Covid-19 lockdowns, when the artist was confined to his studio, provides a fascinating look into his process and the idea that the restrictions can be used for inspiration and creative ingenuity. Delving into Kentridge’s practice and thematic concerns as well as the necessity of collaboration, the series is a distinctively Kentridge creation that offers perhaps the most concentrated examination of the ideas, images and processes of one of the world’s most recognised and celebrated artists.
Janet Planet — Buy from Apple TV+
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker makes her feature film debut with this quietly moving theatre-style story that follows the tender relationship between 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) and her free-spirited mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) over the course of one memorable 1991 summer in western Massachusetts. It’s a bittersweet childhood memoir told with gentle feeling for its young protagonist as she begins to realise that her mother is not the planet she once thought her world revolved around. Restrained but deftly directed when it comes to the acting, it’s all held together by the complexities of the veteran Nicholson and the impressive newcomer Ziegler, who provide the careful nuances needed to make it one of the year’s most impressive debuts.
Perfect Days — Screened at the Johannesburg International Film Festival
Not much happens in veteran director Wim Wenders’ slowly observed rhythm of life film about a Tokyo toilet cleaner who is completely content with the ordinariness of his life in a city that’s too busy for most of its residents to stop and look at the small beauties of the world. Anchored by a remarkable performance from Koji Yakusho, it’s a subtle film that offers a glimpse into a part of Tokyo and way of life rarely seen on screen and asks some questions about how we bring meaning to our existence and find beauty in the everyday.
Dahomey — Screened at the Durban International Film Festival
French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s docu-essay is a sharp examination of the big questions around the return of colonial-era artefacts to their ancestral homes. Following the return of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey to the Republic of Benin from the museum in Paris where they’ve been exhibited for decades, the film reflects on how the objects might find a place in a country that has changed so much since their departure. Winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, it’s a riveting piece of smart cinema that offers a new insight into a conversation that’s been raging in the museum world for decades.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat — Screened at the Encounters Film Festival
Belgian director Johan Grimonprez uses a wealth of fascinating and rarely seen archive footage as the material for stitching together his layered essay about his country’s colonial past, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the role of CIA-backed cultural initiatives during the Cold War. Sprawling, ambitious, fierce and angry, it’s one of the year’s most thought-provoking and engaging films, scored to a fabulous jazz soundtrack and pulsing to the rhythms of the chaotic and turbulent times it investigates.
Green Border — Screened at the EU Film Festival
Agnieszka Holland’s righteously angry drama uses true stories as the basis for its dramatisation of the Kafkaesque nightmare that is life for thousands of refugees in the hellish limbo of the Poland-Belarus border. Taking aim at the prejudices of the governments of both countries and the callousness of their attitudes to brown-skinned refugees, the film hits home because of its careful focus on the battles that its characters must wage against Sisyphean external factors and emotionally tumultuous moral challenges. It’s final scenes, which contrast the welcome treatment given to Ukrainian refugees fleeing from the war with Russia, with the devastating battles fought by their non-white counterparts says all that needs to be said about the influence of race in shaping official approaches to one of the world’s most urgent crises.
Conclave — On circuit
On many levels this drama about the political machinations that take place in the cloistered walls of Vatican City after the serving pope dies, and his colleagues must elect a successor, is pure silliness, full of eye-rolling twists and turns suited to its source material by writer Robert Harris. Director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) has an immaculate eye for detail that helps to reveal the cadences and peculiarities of one of the world’s most secretive places. In the hands of a cast, led by a quietly brilliant Ralph Fiennes and featuring excellent work from co-stars Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini, the film elevates itself above its thriller genre roots to ask pertinent questions about the delicate balance between the faithful and those they put their faith in to lead them to the promised land.
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