Listomania! My Favourite Films of 2019

“Sometimes it gets a little hectic out there
But right now, yo, we gonna up you on how we just chill”
-- Tajai of the mighty Souls of Mischief crew - 93 ‘til Infinity

It can be very, very tempting to put a button on the decade or the year as the final days roll past. A sentence or two to wrap things up in a decorative yet artificial and constricting bow. But there can be an infinitesimally fine line between the profound and the trite, the manufactured and the heartfelt. So let’s agree not to do any of that.
 
Here’s what I do know. This was the year when Souls of Mischief’s 93 'til Infinity turned up in Jonah Hill’s beautiful elegiac paean to skater boys Mid90s, and then accompanied Ali Wong and Randall Park in the delightful Always Be My Maybe (which featured Keanu Reeves in the greatest cameo appearance of the year), before making one final outing in Tim Story’s woefully misjudged buddy-comedy contribution to the Shaft dynasty.

Time to unveil my undisputed film of the year, followed by the rest in no particular order. Let’s do it.

Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer)

Avengers Endgame (Anthony Russo / Joe Russo)

Border (Gräns) (Ali Abbasi)

The Chambermaid (La camarista) (Lila Avilés)

For Sama (Waad Al-Khateab / Edward Watts)

Foxtrot (Samuel Maoz)

One of the first films I saw in 2019 and I haven’t been able to shake it. Wonderfully strange with exhilarating tonal shifts, and you really don’t want to know any more than that to feel the full impact of it.

In Fabric (Peter Strickland)

Which I wrote about earlier in the year here.

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)

Us (Jordan Peele)

War (Siddharth Anand)

This was a lot of movie. Imagine a Fast and Furious film stopping for a brief musical interlude so that the Rock can perform a song-and-dance number, and that barely covers it. Invigorating and overwhelming in the best possible ways.

And that makes Ten. But wait! There were a handful of others, every single one of which could have very easily nabbed a slot on that list. To the Almost Top Tenners...I salute you!

Close But No Cigar

3 Faces (Se rokh) (Jafar Panahi)
Beanpole (Dylda) (Kantemir Balagov)
John Wick Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Chad Stahelski)
Knives Out (Rian Johnson)
Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (Pedro Almodóvar)
Photograph (Ritesh Batra)
The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard)
Thunder Road (Jim Cummings)

I have no idea what 2020 holds for us all. But I will leave you with a couple of fortifying epigrams to wear like luminescent armour in the days to come:

“The most courageous decision that you make each day is to be in a good mood.” -- Voltaire

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.”
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

A very Happy New Year and love and peace to you all. See you at the movies.

It's never...

Listomania! My Favourite Films 2010-2019

Five years ago, in something akin to an insomniac fugue state, I cobbled together a decade-by-decade list of lists, from the 1930s right up to 2015. Now, as this decade weaves its way to its bewildering conclusion, it is most definitely time for an update. A symmetrically pleasing Top Ten to put a cap in whatever we’re calling this decade. Pretty majestical, aye? Let’s do it.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi)

“Me and this fat kid
We ran we ate and read books
And it was the best”

It really was.

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)

The obsolete audio technology of the recent past, the demolished innards of violated vegetables and the exquisite, excruciating sounds of the unseen The Equestrian Vortex. Slippery, sickly, elliptical and absolutely gorgeous.

John Wick (Chad Stahelski / David Leitch)

Keanu Reeves gives one of the decade’s greatest physical performances in this flawless action movie masterwork as “the one you send to kill the fucking Boogeyman”. When he snarls emphatically through gritted teeth that he’s back, it's not just John talking. Keanu was back with a vengeance. My most endlessly rewatched film of the decade.

Get Out (Jordan Peele)

I don’t believe in the sniffy, apologist concept of “elevated horror”, but I do believe in Jordan Peele. Holy shit! Disturbingly chilling, depressingly topical and exuberantly crowd-pleasing, Peele hits all the right notes, like a spoon hypnotically scraping the side of a teacup.

One Cut of the Dead (Kamera wo tomeruna!) (Shin'ichirô Ueda)

I summed this up best in my Top Ten of 2018 list: “You will grudgingly admire the 37 minute non-stop single opening shot, but you won’t really understand what all the fuss is about. Hang in there. Your persistence will be rewarded. By the time you reach the end, you’ll get it, I promise. Pom!”

Faces Places (Visages villages) (JR / Agnès Varda)

I could wax rhapsodic about the penultimate feature of La Reine Agnès at length. And I did. Right here.

The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski)

I’ve been trying to convert people to the many pleasures of Verbinski’s much-maligned Western for years now (to varying degrees of success), mostly via this blogpost.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright)

I’m still totally in lesbians with it.

Big Hero 6 (Don Hall / Chris Williams)

From the lush production design of San Fransokyo to the soothing voice of an inflatable healthcare robot repeating “Tadashi is here”, this just might be the greatest superhero film of the century. You’ll believe that a fist-bump can make you cry.

Killer Joe (William Friedkin)

If Friedkin never makes another narrative feature film, this is a helluva good one to go out on. Grungy, visceral, warped and with just the right amount of nastiness. It’s worth having a read of this Q&A that Friedkin did at the BFI Southbank around the time of the film’s release.

That’s the decade done, but I’ve still got one more list to unveil before the year fades to black. My favourite films of 2019...Coming Soon!

Sex, Lies and Manuscripts - Olivier Assayas' Non-Fiction

It’s rarely wise to begin a critique of a film by presenting a directorial statement of intent, but in this case, I think it’s both warranted and instructive, largely because it diverges so wildly from what I got out of the experience of watching it.

So...here’s Olivier Assayas on Non-Fiction (or Double vies, which is a much better title): "Our world is in constant change. It has always been. The issue is our ability to keep an eye on that flux, to understand what is truly at stake, and then adapt, or not. After all, that is what politics and opinion are about. The digitisation of our world and its reduction to algorithms is the modern vector of a change that unrelentingly confuses and overwhelms us. Digital economy infringes rules, and often laws. Moreover it questions whatever seemed most stable and solid in society and the reality around us, only to dissolve on mere contact. Doubles vies is not about analysing the workings of the new economy. Its more modest intent is to observe how those questions beleaguer us, personally, emotionally, and sometimes humorously."

I’ll concede that last sentence somewhat, in that Non-Fiction is sometimes humorous, particularly in a scene where a recollection of a blow job during a screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens becomes fictionalised so that it takes place during a viewing of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon instead - it’s a lovely moment of lightness that pricks the gauche pretension of flailing author Léonard (Vincent Macaigne). But I’m getting ahead of myself…

The first hour of Non-Fiction is eye-rollingly self-satisfied and smug, as we are subjected to an unremitting stream of irksome verbiage about the relative merits of print and digital technologies. We hear from authors and publishers and readers and PR people and all manner of exclusively white and middle-class Parisians who say things like "Tweets are modern-day haiku", even though real people just don’t talk like this at all.

Publisher Alain (Guillaume Canet) - he’s the one who said that wearisome thing about tweets - is married to actress Selena (Juliette Binoche) who is getting fed up of playing a cop (she often protests that she’s actually a "crisis management expert", not a cop) on Season 3 of the hit show Collusion. All that acclaim must be a real drag, because Selena also joins in during those excruciating digressions about Print! and Digital! and How We Communicate and Consume Media and Ideas and Language in the 21st Century! Anyway…

Loads of people are cheating on their partners with other people who are cheating on their partners, or just with people who are rampant careerists who also like to expound at length about Technology! and The World Is Changing, Isn’t It, Have You Noticed?

People banging on about this stuff for an hour is not great storytelling. It’s a cinema screen blasting Hot Takes and Think Pieces and interminable Twitter threads at you. The print vs digital discussions already feel wildly out-dated. It’s a film arguing about the waning relevance of certain cultural artifacts, raising questions that already feel vaguely immaterial, housed within an already decaying cultural artifact. Pop has eaten itself, excreted itself out, and is sitting down for a second plateful. Thankfully, the low-key drama that begins to develop in the second hour is far more engaging than the shallow narrowband intellectual chin-stroking of the first hour, and as soon as Non-Fiction dials back on that and loosens up enough to let the character interactions and revelations unfold, it improves considerably, and by the end I was surprised by how much I was enjoying myself with it.

Shot on Super 16mm and reminiscent of Assayas’ Summer Hours (although this is ultimately more playful), Non-Fiction is in cinemas and on demand in the UK from Friday 18th October 2019.

You Who Wear Me Will Know Me - Peter Strickland’s In Fabric

“The dress is your image on to what you project through an illusion.”

Somewhere far behind the window displays of Dentley & Soper's Trusted Department Store, a switchblade slices open a cardboard box. Strange things are afoot deep inside the uncanny Thames Valley on Thames shopping mecca that appears to be staffed by a coven of witches. The trappings and fixtures of the store seem familiar...except when they don’t. It looks like the late 1970s. Or maybe the 1980s. Possibly the 1990s? The southern England town of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric is exhilaratingly hard-to-place.

Shoppers are lured to the store by a hypnotic television commercial, just in time for the January Sales. Amongst them is Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), looking to get back into the dating game following the end of her marriage. Sheila is drawn to a malevolent "artery red" dress with a black flame motif. It’s a size 36, and yet it always fits the wearer perfectly, irrespective of their body shape. As the sales assistant Miss Luckmore informs her: “Dimensions and proportions transcend the prisms of our measurements”.

There’s an intoxicating, evocative tactility to Peter Strickland’s films. He’s an eclectic fetishist who revels in texture and sound. Strickland makes the kind of films that end with a credit for “Mannequin Pubic Hair”. The Nagra tape recorders and three-track magnetic film of Berberian Sound Studio are superseded by the pneumatic tubes and bakelite telephones of In Fabric, and the film’s musical accompaniment is the dark rhythmic pulse of Cavern of Anti-Matter.

Strickland also plays with the low-grade euphoria of ASMR, to both comedic and erotic effect, predominantly via the involuntarily seductive drone of washing machine engineer Reg Speaks (Leo Bill) as he explains incomprehensible technical faults in exhaustive detail.

Over time, Strickland’s films have gradually become more overtly funny, moving from the severe austerity of his debut feature Katalin Varga to the frisky The Duke of Burgundy. In Fabric is his funniest yet, but he never loses his grip or formal rigour over his vividly-realised worlds.

Berberian Sound Studio remains one of my favourite films of this century, so I was already primed to love In Fabric, and I loved it unreservedly. I absolutely cannot wait to immerse myself in this bewitching phantasmagoria again very, very soon. And I really need to get my hands on that Cavern of Anti-Matter soundtrack.

In Fabric is in cinemas and on demand in the UK from Friday 28th June 2019

Il Cavaliere Oscuro si alza - Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro

Todd Phillips’ Joker arrives in cinemas later this year...but if you can’t wait that long for a profile of a grotesque entitled white man-child with a backcombed slick of artificially coloured hair and an unnerving, humourless rictus smile that masks the sting of indignities both real and imagined, then you’re in luck!

Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro opens with a Giorgio Manganelli quote that sets the stage for what's to come: "All Documented. All Arbitrary." Take it any way you want it. This may or not be a heavily fictionalised look at real people and events - not dissimilar to James Ellroy’s real / fictional interrogations of post-war Los Angeles through the eyes of history’s supporting players.

“Loro” is Italian for “them”, and they are the initial preoccupation of Sorrentino’s film about Silvio Berlusconi in the years between 2006 and 2009. We spend half an hour rolling around in the gilded gutter with the social climbers and venal wannabes on the periphery of Berlusconi’s world, particularly the opportunistic Sergio (Riccardo Scamarcio). I could have easily done without this first half-hour, although it is a useful illustrative case-study of the thwarted, deluded ambitions of those in Berlusconi’s orbit.

The film finally sparks to life when Toni Servillo appears as the man himself - the man talked of in awed tones right up to that point, and never by name - just “lui” (him). It is an unalloyed joy to watch one of my favourite living actors as Berlusconi. He nails it. The flat reptilian eyes. The insatiable hunger for attention and adulation. Restless, ambitious, egotistical and vain, it's a glorious performance and Servillo manages to imbue Berlusconi with (arguably undeserving) pathos.

The title also indulges in a bit of wordplay. L’oro. The gold. And there’s an escalating orgy of excess and hedonism on display. Loro opens like Sorrentino’s riff on Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is actually Sorrentino’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and it’s occasionally tiresome when the film revels in the leering, vulgar decadence of sex and drugs and bunga bunga.

It’s a frustratingly uneven piece of work. Some of Loro is up there with the very best of Sorrentino. An uncomfortable scene where the seventy year-old Berlusconi fails to seduce twenty year-old Stella (Alice Pagani), and confrontations between Berlusconi and his wife Veronica (Elena Sofia Ricci) are high points. Veronica cuts straight to the essence of Berlusconi when she calls him "a child who's afraid of dying" and refers to his life as "one long uninterrupted performance".

Loro also falls down when it resorts to heavy-handed symbolism: a dying sheep; a muted gameshow on an unwatched television screen; a garbage truck flying off a bridge to avoid a rat before exploding with a fountain of trash; the political pomp of a swearing-in ceremony cross-cut with an earthquake. This isn’t a film interested in subtlety, and a little more nuance and ambiguity would have gone a long way.

Some of my issues with Loro could be attributed to this “international edit” that is being released - a combination of two films that were released separately as Loro 1 and Loro 2 in Italy. The international edit is an hour shorter than the original diptych combined and that can sometimes be felt quite keenly. Character subplots are dropped without resolution, and that skewed pacing has a way of making it feel overlong and indulgent, even in this truncated version. Loro is strongest when the focus is directly on Servillo's magnetic, compelling performance as Berlusconi.

Loro is in cinemas and on demand in the UK from Friday 19th April 2019

Agnès Varda 1928 - 2019

"In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don't want to show things, but to give people the desire to see." 

"Quand je suis la, J’ai l’impression que j’habite le cinema, que c’est ma maison, il me semble que j’y ai toujours habite."

"If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes. If we opened me up, we'd find beaches."

À dieu vit, cher Agnès.