#seen-said

10) Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016, UK/USA) No starring female role this year left me feeling more satisfied yet exhausted, sympathetic and contemptuous, annoyed and amused. Christine is Rebecca Hall’s greatest work and my favorite female performance of the year. There’s a reason she specifically won the ‘Courage in Acting’ award at this year’s Women Film Critics Circle. You’ll see why, and she’s fantastic.

9) Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016, Chile/France) There’s something a bit “off” about a lot of Larraín’s latest and Jackie is all the more stronger and memorable for it. It’s that wiggle room that’s most intriguing, between historical accuracy and artistic liberty, public record and private pain, and performance of all kinds: for reporters, for a grieving nation, for us here to covet an icon’s account of Camelot. Imagined histories rarely feel this authentic.

8) Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2015, UK/Luxembourg) Possibly Davies’ most dismal work to date (but wait, his Emily Dickinson biopic is on its way). Yet it still fills me with his signature warmth and light, no matter how temporary Sunset Song demonstrates that state of happiness and fulfillment to really be. Even as the horrific shadow of war stretches across his canvas, he still holds his faith in our ability to endure.

7) Ovarian Psycos (Joanna Sokolowski & Kate Trumbull-LaValle, 2016, USA) Community. Culture. Awareness. Mobilization. Solidarity. All meaningless buzzwords I loathe but that the documentary Ovarian Psycos made me believe in again, showing each of these talking points translated into concrete action. This stellar example put forth by an organized all-girl Latina bike “gang” watching over their Boyle Heights neighborhood—and more importantly each other—is truly motivating.

6) American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016, UK/USA) I just can’t get enough of Arnold’s keen eye for the rough and the poor. Her cinematography is consistently astounding, and here all the more amplified by her foreign, idyllic take on America through the eyes of a lovestruck runaway teenager. A movie shamelessly flooding late-afternoon vistas from an open-top convertible with Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” is a movie after my own adolescent heart.

5) Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro, 2015, Brazil/Uruguay) Mesmerizing with its visual repetition and sounds, striking in the knee-jerk assumptions about a rugged Brazilian vaqueiro it shatters. Iremar’s hands and manner are coarse, but the garments he designs in his free time are delicate and refined. And my god, is he sexy. Neon Bull is really an extraordinary testament to the power of dreams, and how vital it is to nourish them amidst such a barren present.

4) Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016, France/Germany) Utterly and wonderfully preposterous, and a formidable contender for comedy of the year. Yes, this is quite possibly Isabelle Huppert’s finest hour, and good luck trying to convince me Elle is anything more than Verhoeven simply toying with the dexterity and delicious poise of his muse. He takes everything we love about her, cranks it way up, and lets us have it. You should be grateful.

3) Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016, Germany) In hindsight, I am so thankful Toni Erdmann took up the majority of my election night. I probably won’t laugh like that at a movie for some time, and it’s a reminder to try and not take this (or myself) too seriously. Maren Ade is coming for our invisible, repressive socioeconomic barriers with a sledgehammer, and our clumsy, imperfect loved ones are out there in the verdurous world just waiting to embrace us.

2) Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016, USA) My favorite male performances of the year. All of them. Especially Ashton Sanders as the adolescent Chiron—the wounded heart of this remarkable story—whose every nervous twitch was just too much to bear. Rare is the collective and collaborative talent that can make one line of softly spoken dialogue work as a resounding climax so perfectly. What a rare, beautiful film.

Faces of November (Robert Drew, 1964, USA)

Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971, USA)

OJ: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, 2016, USA)

One from the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982, USA)

Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016, USA)

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016, Germany)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966, Italy/Spain)

The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000, France)

Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016, France/Germany)

The Fourth Man (Paul Verhoeven, 1983, Germany)

Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, 1966, Senegal/France)

Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989, USA)

Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973, Japan)

Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro, 2015, Brazil/Uruguay)

Touki-Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973, Senegal)

A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971, Taiwan)

Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson, 1981, USA)

American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016, UK/USA)

Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977, USA)

Body Parts (Eric Red, 1991, USA)

Take My Eyes (Icíar Bollaín, 2003, Spain)

Ovarian Psycos (Joanna Sokolowski & Kate Trumbull-Valle, 2016, USA)

Sunset Song (Terence Davies, 2015, UK/Luxembourg)

Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977, West Germany)

A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961, UK)

Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982, USA)

Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016, Chile/France)

Angst (Gerald Kargl, 1983, Austria)

Christine (Antonio Campos, 2016, UK/USA)

The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015, USA/UK)

Five Miles Out (Andrew Haigh, 2009, UK)

The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1963, Spain)

Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949, Italy)

For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965, Italy/Spain)

Crisis (Robert Drew, 1963, USA)

Looking: The Movie (Andrew Haigh, 2016, USA) 

13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016, USA)

Belladonna of Sadness (Eiichi Yamamoto, 1973, Japan)

Designing Woman (Vincente Minnelli, 1957, USA)

Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958, USA)

A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926, Japan)

Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971, USA)

Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952, USA)

Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016, USA)

Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950, USA)

Love Exists (Maurice Pialat, 1960, France)

The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi, 2016, Iran/France)

Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003, France)

Electra Glide in Blue (James William Guercio, 1973, USA)

Moonlight is a rare beacon in an often very white, predetermined gay-indie landscape, and it illuminates as such from any path one chooses to follow: as a gay narrative of self-acceptance, as a deconstruction of masculinity and machismo, as empathy for drug addiction's everlasting ripple effect, and especially as a loving portrait of what it means to grow up black in an impoverished America. But for a film setting out to wrestle with all of this—and as it also wrestles within one man, no less—Jenkins keeps these histrionic forces restrained and grounded, and it is Chiron who’s placed front and center. He's a fully drawn and astonishingly realized character spanning three actors in three distinct acts, each compounding the hardships previously weathered behind the despairing gaze of the next performance.

Chiron starts as "Little”, a boy whose defiant silence against school bullies, an addict mother, and the neighborhood dealer offering the best of supportive intentions is ultimately broken by his own blunt questioning of what it means to be the slur his peers use to hurt him. That shame will retain its grip, but it’s under the titular glow one night on the beach where the teenage Chiron first explores this sexuality with his only friend Kevin, a pivotal scene so thoughtfully executed it becomes less about sex and more about healing a soul long deprived of attention. Ashton Sanders’ embodiment of Chiron is the wounded heart of this story and possibly its greatest, his masterful balance of few words and fear in every twitch of his body language is often too much to bear. It eventually is, and his violent breaking point results in his arrest and the dramatic change into “Black”, his adult self that predictably emulates the sole example of unlawful manhood afforded him in his youth. 

This seamless casting and performative consistency across a single figure— continually and gently forecasting his future while echoing his buried past—is what makes Moonlight so impressive. By the end, Chiron is understood as a set of necessary choices that give painful complexity to a flat media stereotype, choices making us understand why survival and an image take precedence over the privilege of getting to be yourself. Jenkins is after my own heart with a film insisting on the circularity of time, always bringing ashore the unresolved, both good and bad. The good for Chiron comes on those first notes of Veloso’s song upon his return to where it all started, in which those two friends ripped apart by circumstance are dumbfounded to see each other again, and what kind of man each of them have become. Black may now be big, but he’s still just as quiet and hesitant as when he was Little, and if the whole thrust of Jenkins’ efforts aim to make Chiron’s softly but courageously spoken conclusion ring with the resounding depth of the whole film, he has succeeded beautifully.

Stonewall (Roland Emmerich, 2015) Viewed out of morbid curiosity, and found it more "interesting" and far less god-awful than it's been made out to be. Still, not good on all fronts. As a historical document, it's as ludicrously biased and agenda-driven as the "Watch Out for Homos" instructional film shown in our whitebread protagonist's classroom. But as a kind of historical fiction/fantasy, it's worth tracing what Emmerich thinks the straights and middle-class America need to take away from our history. And Caleb Landry Jones and Karl Glusman are in this?!  2/5

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (David Zellner, 2014) Discovering that there's an actual place called "Pump and Munch" is the real treasure, Kumiko.  2/5

What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi, 2014) I think I'm most happy that Vladislav found his best selfie face and I'm most disappointed Christopher Guest didn't make a zombified cameo at The Unholy Masquerade.  3/5

The Unknown Known (Errol Morris, 2013) Oh that Mr. Skullhead. Such a way with words!  2.5/5