Rebels of the Neon God (1992)
There are two types of people: those who watch the new titles on a streaming service and those who focus on the titles leaving. Being a habitual procrastinator who loves a deadline, I am firmly in the latter category. On the first day of every month, I happily make a list of the films leaving the streaming services I subscribe to and try to watch as many as I can. So when a bunch of Tsai Ming-liang films were slated to leave the Criterion Channel, I penciled them into my schedule. Of the three films I watched, Rebels of the Neon God was the best (the other two being Wayward Cloud and Stray Dogs). Rebels of the Neon God is often singled out as the most accessible movie Tsai Ming-liang has made, because, unlike some later works, there is a discernible story in this film. It is too bad that he has moved even further away from traditional narrative in more recent films, because Ming-liang is a damn fine storyteller in his own minimalist fashion. But no matter: Rebels of the Neon God is a damn fine contribution to film narrative on its own. Ming-liang brings the sensibilities of a street photographer to his movies and has a masterful ability to find beauty and symmetry in urban decay. The crime story at the heart of Rebels of the Neon God is so minimalist that it feels like it inverts the conventions of the genre. All of Ming-liang’s films are sublime explorations of alienation in late capitalism, and Rebels of the Neon God is just as worthy as his later works.
My Letterboxd review of Rebels of the Neon God can be found here (and my Letterboxd reviews of The Wayward Cloud and Stray Dogs can be found here and here).
Rebels of the Neon God can be found streaming at Kanopy and Mubi.
Husbands (1970)
Husbands is the first Cassavetes I ever saw and it won’t be the last. Husbands is the cinematic equivalent of “The Boys Are Back in Town.” It is a movie about men and the manly things they get up to. This may sound as if Husbands is a glorification of men, but nothing could be further from the truth. It takes watching men in their native habitat to understand what savage beasts they are, to glimpse the vulnerability underneath their aggression.
My Letterboxd review of Husbands can be found here.
Husbands can be found streaming at Amazon Prime. It is also available on DVD/Blu-Ray from The Criterion Collection.
Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion (1970)
This year was the year I read, watched, and listened to more mysteries, police procedurals, and true crime stories than I ever have before. It was also the year I fully realized how bad these types of stories are for me. One of the main consequences of the George Floyd protests this year, and part of the reason that it felt like it was different this time, is that they have brought a real reconsideration of the way that police procedurals are structured. I have not been able to wean myself off the sugar rush of crime stories, but at least I fully realize how bad they are for my ideological health.
It may seem like the height of hubris — or whiteness — to claim that an Italian film has something to say about the police in America in 2020, but I honestly think it does. Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion portrays the police not as problem solvers, but as an occupying force who subject the native population to violence. The film makes it clear that the police are the true heirs to Mussolini. While this vision of the police does not amount to a one-for-one fit with the American situation (the film has very little to say about race, the most salient aspect of American problems with policing), recognizing that the police are fascists, I think, is a good start.
My review of Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion can be found on my blog here.
You can buy Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion from The Criterion Collection.
Hell or High Water (2016)
Hell or High Water is the consummate 8/10 film, the perfect comfort watch, the Blu-Ray to pop in when the world has you down.
My Letterboxd review of Hell or High Water can be found here.
Hell or High Water can be bought on DVD/Blu-Ray on Amazon (it’s usually cheap — $7 at the time of writing).
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
All right — I am sorry. I somehow managed to avoid this film until this year. You can stop yelling at me now. I am proud to announce to precisely no one that Mad Max: Fury Road slaps. It is my Platonic ideal of an action film, focusing on non-stop action but letting character and thematic resonance grow in the brief interludes from the action.
My Letterboxd review of Mad Max: Fury Road can be found here.
You can buy Mad Max: Fury Road on Blu-Ray at Amazon. It will be the best $5 you have ever spent.
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)
Let Fitzcarraldo be damned — Aguirre is Werner Herzog’s definitive madness in the jungle movie. There are images in this film that are indelible, from the ship in the tree to the bizarre parody of a royal court held on the boat to the final scene of monkeys barraging the boat. Madness has never been so surreal and beautiful as it is in Aguirre.
My Letterboxd review of Aguirre: The Wrath of God can be found here.
You can find Aguirre: The Wrath of God streaming on Amazon Prime.
A Woman Is a Woman (1961) and A Married Woman (1964)
Two Godard films surprised me this year, revealing the unexpected extent of of Godard’s talent.
I have a theory — undoubtedly undercooked — that the animating question of French cinema is “What is a woman?” French movies frequently ask us to wonder and marvel at the mysterious, often chaotic, energy of the female sex. To that question, the title of A Woman Is a Woman suggests an answer, tautological and unhelpful as it is. A woman is a woman; she is what she is. It’s a solution that explains very little but works for a comedy, a genre that often ends where it began. Comedies often affirm what we already know; the surface anarchy masks their deep-seated conservatism. A woman walks in, a woman leaves. A Woman is a Woman, in its status as a warped musical, shows how much Godard’s gifts are suited to comedy. It is only a short hop from subverting the medium to actively mocking it, and Godard exuberantly leaps into that role. The film is genuinely funny while preserving the recognizable off-kilterness of French New Wave cinema.
If A Woman Is a Woman’s stable title compensates for its underlying chaos, A Married Woman promises exactly what it delivers: a story about a married woman. Before seeing A Married Woman, I never expected Godard to pull off a character study. His characters often feel like little wind-up toys: put them on the ground and you do not know what direction they will hop. This approach has worked for Godard in movies like Breathless, because he is less interested in psychological realism and more interested in interrogating and expanding cinematic language. A Married Woman changes all that; here is a deep, nuanced character study of a woman trying to decide if she will stay with her husband. As in A Woman Is a Woman, the viewer is asked to contemplate the mystery of “woman,” but this time instantiated in a fully realized character. And as one might expect from Godard, A Married Woman’s cinematography, with its shades of white on white, is fabulous.
My Letterboxd review of A Woman Is a Woman can be found here. My Letterboxd review of A Married Woman can be found here.
You can find A Woman Is a Woman on VOD, but you might want to wait until it returns to The Criterion Channel (the DVD — no Blu-Ray — is sadly out of print). You can also find A Married Woman on VOD.
Shin Godzilla (2016)
Before Shin Godzilla, it was possible to believe Hideaki Anno was a fluke. Neon Genesis Evangelion, it could be argued, was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment, a weird confluence of Anno’s mental state and the show’s tortured production process. That cannot be said for Shin Godzilla. And like the best artists, Anno has proved himself by making a work completely unlike his others. It would be hard to find a movie more different in its editing style and rhythm from Neon Genesis Evangelion than Shin Godzilla. The use of quick cuts as the Godzilla situation ping-pongs through the Japanese bureaucracy shows Anno’s ability to match content with form. The real monster, as Shin Godzilla shows, is an inadequate government response to a disaster, a lesson very pertinent for Americans living through 2020.
You can find my review of Shin Godzilla on my blog.
You can find Shin Godzilla on VOD. The Blu-ray is (usually) inexpensive.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
Buñuel delights in prodding and poking the bourgeoisie, laughing when their repressed hypocrisy finally explodes into view. But The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, I think, diagnoses something essential to the middle-class experience: the way that dining out, whether at a restaurant or someone else’s house, constitutes an affirmation of being middle class. Without the luxury of eating out once in a while, would we even have a bourgeoisie? If you wonder why people are risking their lives to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings during a global pandemic, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie supplies part of the answer.
You can find my Letterboxd review of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie here.
You can find The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie streaming at Amazon Prime.
Days of Heaven (1978)
Days of Heaven is simply the most gorgeous film ever made. There is really not much more for me to say than to point at it, with my jaw slack in admiration.
You can find my Letterboxd review of Days of Heaven here.
You can find Days of Heaven streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Uncut Gems (2019)
I love a New York movie where everybody is screaming at each other, all the time. It kind of reminds me of my family gatherings.
You can find my Letterboxd review of Uncut Gems here.
You can find Uncut Gems streaming on Netflix.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002)
Do not get me wrong — Old Boy is fantastic and is one of the all-time greatest riffs on the Oedipus myth. But I feel like it contains more spectacle than meaning. I prefer the first film in Park Chan-wook’s so-called vengeance trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. This film analyzes and dissects how violence is cyclical: vengeance only breeds vengeance. It does the rare thing of presenting characters that do not fit into easy binaries of good or evil.
I have not gotten around to watching Lady Vengeance, the final film in the trilogy, but I am excited to see it.
You can find my Letterboxd review of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance here.
You can find Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance streaming on Hoopla and The Criterion Channel.
The Grandmother (1970)
In a year where I have watched lots of horror, no movie has genuinely terrified me as much as David Lynch’s short film The Grandmother. Shot in surreal expressionist shadows, this story of childhood loneliness and abuse feels like it occupies another plane of reality. The death scene of the grandmother is genuinely one of the most terrifying things I have seen this year. If you need more motivation to watch The Grandmother, it operates as the perfect companion piece to Eraserhead, which is why it is packaged with the Criterion edition of that film. The Grandmother, at the very least, helps to explain the weird dirt and soil imagery in that movie.
You can find my Letterboxd review of The Grandmother here.
You can find The Grandmother streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Van Gogh (1991)
In a movie about a famous artist, we all watch, not so secretly, for references to their art. We want to have our sophistication and learning affirmed; we want to see Shakespeare stage Romeo and Juliet or Truman Capote gain the trust of his sources. We like to see, even in pretend, the “inside story” of how the art was made and the little accidents that created some of its defining features. We all — even the most cultured among us — are at some level philistines and want to be pandered to.
Van Gogh is not movie concerned with flattering the audience; it is more interested in the man rather than the artist. The film has very little use for the signifiers of genius; we never see Van Gogh putting the final touches on his last painting Wheat Fields with Crows. We, more often than not, glimpse his paintings bound up and gathering dust in a corner, the artifacts of a man misunderstood. Nor do we see the type of sensationalist, histrionic madness that is part of Van Gogh’s story — there is no ear cutting to be found here. Van Gogh shows an artist not as some transcendent genius, but as a lonely outcast struggling with mental illness and poverty. Van Gogh is often mean, nasty, and unpleasant to the people around him, even to those he loves. We watch him push away his friends and sabotage every positive relationship in his life.
What elevates Van Gogh from a feel-bad misery movie, however, is the moments of pure joy. Even though he suffers from mental illness, Van Gogh and Van Gogh find merriment in the small moments. I fell in love with this movie at the dance sequence in the brothel, a moment of spontaneous joy that made Van Gogh’s death a short time afterwards all the more poignant.
You can find Van Gogh streaming on Kanopy.
Le Quattro Volte (2010)
Recently Robert Eggers gave a key piece of advice to new screenwriters: don’t put a goat in your movie. Thankfully the director of Le Quattro Volte, Michelangelo Frammartino, never received this advice. The second part of this movie is nothing but kids (the goat kind) being dumbasses — and it is glorious. That is, until heart-wrenching tragedy strikes and the poor little goat gets separated from the herd and perishes. Such death is common in Le Quattro Volte, which takes reincarnation as its main theme. We watch an old man die, get reborn as a goat, die again, and get reborn as a tree. Throughout this cycle of life and death we witness some of the most glorious and poignant still shots ever made. Le Quattro Volte is a meditative masterpiece.
You can find my Letterboxd review of Le Quattro Volte here.
You can find Le Quattro Volte streaming on Kanopy.
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Marvel movies are often said to be uniform, homogeneous products made to print money for the The Walt Disney Company. And to a certain degree, this is true. While Marvel movies are never terrible, they often feel rote, the cinematic equivalent of a fast-food hamburger you have had a million times before.
Avengers: Endgame, however, feels different. It does not entirely rise above being disposable entertainment, but it invests its material with enough genuine darkness and tragedy to be something more than a dopamine rush. And no matter how low your opinion of Marvel movies is, when the heroes reappear to fight Thanos, you can feel cinematic history being made. It is stirring and epic in all the right ways, and I want to watch it a million times.
You can find my Letterboxd review of Avengers: Endgame here.
You can watch Avengers: Endgame…easily. It’s part of the Disney megabeast.
Gods and Monsters (1998)
Biopics are among the dullest films ever committed to celluloid. Their essential mediocrity are proved by the amount of awards they receive; nothing affirms slop like a Golden Globe or even an Academy Award. And yes, I perceive the irony of lambasting biopics after singing the praises of Van Gogh above. But that movie is French, so it doesn’t count. The French could film a movie about anal parasites and somehow make it sensual.
Gods and Monsters is different; it’s the rare biopic that has won an Academy Award that is worth your time. The lion’s share of the credit should go to Ian McKellen, whose performance carries the film even during its occasional missteps. The movie is ruthlessly, naughtily gay, and therefore has more bite than your typically sterile biopic film.
You can find my Letterboxd review of Gods and Monsters here.
You can find Gods and Monsters streaming on Amazon Prime and HBO Max.
Us (2019)
I have never loved Get Out as some others have. No matter what my #hottake is of it, Get Out remains a terrific film. But I have always suspected it benefited from being released at precisely the right time, the beginning of the Trump administration, when white guilt was most raw. Get Out became the perfect movie for liberals to work out their complicity in the new regime.
Of Jordan Peele’s two films so far, I think Us is superior, and I suspect critical consensus will eventually agree with me. While Get Out is largely a cleverly made genre exercise, Us is a truly polyvalent, multifaceted work. You can watch this film a dozen times and come out of it with new insights. And, unlike Get Out, Us does not provide all the answers. Some of the central questions in Us are never fully explained. If Get Out provided white people a safe way to consider their guilt, Us does not provide easy answers. It’s central conceit suggests that the evil, the menace, may just have been within and among us all along. It was us all along.
You can find Us streaming on HBO Max.
The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)
This year brought me my first experience of Peter Greenaway. The two films of his I watched, The Draughtsman’s Contract and A Zed And Two Noughts, are as different as different can be. To make a comparison, The Draughtsman’s Contract is Greenaway’s Get Out, while A Zed and Two Noughts is his Us. The first two films are firmly anchored in genre, while the second two films are much more diffuse, hard-to-place movies with a more self-consciously arthouse vibe. The Draughtsman’s Contract is a hybrid between an English estate drama and a murder mystery. It has a simple, elegant premise: an artist is hired to sketch a British estate. Each day, something is added to the estate, and thus to his sketchings. It becomes clear that these objects are evidence of a murder, and the artist’s drawings are not the only things intended to be framed. It’s a brilliant premise, and sustained by Greenaway’s subversive writing and brilliant mise-en-scène.
A Zed and Two Noughts, by contrast, is a grotesquerie of the absurd. On the surface the film is about two brothers who, when faced with tragedy, become obsessed with death and decay. But Greenaway spins an even much more bizarre tale than even this premise promises — a tale full of overcooked and decadent symbolism. It is one of the few films that defy explanation.
You can read my Letterboxd review of The Draughtsman’s Contract here and my (very brief) Letterboxd review of A Zed and Two Noughts here.
You can find The Draughtsman’s Contract streaming on Kanopy. You can find A Zed and Two Noughts streaming on Kanopy.
1917 (2019)
The film 1917 is often dismissed as a trick film, an empty exercise in keeping its “one-shot” premise going. That is, I think, a mistake. Underneath the camera hijinks in 1917 is a compelling story of one soldier’s journey through the war. And what’s more, this story is told mostly free of the jingoism that infects even Dunkirk, a relatively apolitical war film.
You can read my review of 1917 on my blog here.
You can find 1917 streaming on Showtime.
