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Moments Out of Time 2019

Images, lines, gestures, moods from the year’s films

* Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), on the roof to repair Rick’s TV antenna, leans into the California sun and the music Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) is playing in the nearby house. Once upon a Time…in Hollywood…
* “Now is not the time to not say.” Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel) to Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), The Irishman…
* Joker: Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) meets gaze of clown in passing taxicab….
* Marriage Story: the Invisible Man watching a horror movie on TV…
* Richard Jewell: “Why did Tom Brokaw say that about you?” Bobi Jewell (Kathy Bates) to person-of-interest son (Paul Walter Hauser)…
* It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: Minute of silence in Chinese restaurant; Mister Rogers (Tom Hanks) looking us in the eye…

Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers in It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

* Tigers Are Not Afraid: goldfish in the river in the floor…
* The Kims all smell the same—Parasite…
* Playing off profiles at cliff’s edge—Portrait of a Lady on Fire…
* Jojo Rabbit: seeing his mother’s shoes…
* James Stacy’s (Timothy Olyphant) discreet look away as Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) repeatedly muffs a line; his diffidence both in character for the Lancer scene underway and a gesture of sympathy for fellow actor’s distress. Once upon a Time…in Hollywood…
* A Hidden Life: Tyrolean rhapsody of opening sequence…
* Permanent tsunami around Death Star, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker…
* Heat haze obscuring most of port, Atlantics…
* The Lighthouse: flash image, Willem Dafoe as lunatic Poseidon…
* The downed plane from over the hill, 1917…
* Steel chrysanthemums whirling down rainswept street, Shadow…
* Parasite: the curvy hill street you go up to get to the Parks house…
* Pain and Glory: Sitting in front of wall-size landscape photo in waiting room, Salvador (Antonio Banderas) looks up through skylight at tree branches….
* Ordering lunch at the lawyers’, Marriage Story…
* Uncut Gems: folding aluminum foil around the late-night leftovers…
* Dark Waters: cold-day sound of cord wood being chucked off a pickup…
* The Art of Self-Defense: family raising car windows against assaultive heavy metal music…
* The Irishman: Skinny Razor (Bobby Cannavale) tossing away a cigarette…
* Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) stepping out from behind beach fire, Portrait of a Lady on Fire…

Adèle Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

* Thready clouds moving above woman atop cliff, Midsommar…
* In Little Women, light and sand drift as Beth (Eliza Scanlen) and Jo (Saoirse Ronan) speak of dying…
* The Souvenir: the walk between the fields, with dogs…
* Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) snatches Rey’s necklace long distance—Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker….
* Once upon a Time…in Hollywood: “Can’t ya do something about that heat?” “Rick, it’s a flamethrower.”…
* Depraved: Accosted by monster, Asian investors go to their cellphones to video it….
* “I ain’t no hobo. I’m a repository of African American folklore.” Ron Cephas Jones as Rico, Dolemite Is My Name…
* “Wallpaper’s chippin’. People are killin’ this house.” Jimmie’s face peering through frosted door, The Last Black Man in San Francisco…
* Introduced to windowless workspace, Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) turns on desk lamp to see if bulb is good—The Report….
* Joker: camera moving, seemingly out of curiosity, after Arthur gets into fridge…
* A Hidden Life: bike messenger passing on hillside, at once everyday and portentous…
* Overheads of quiet suburban intersections, the interstate, byways—The Irishman…
* In Richard Jewell, the almost subliminal image of Jewell passing across or nicking the corners of crowd shots at the Olympics…
* Zhao Tao moving across deep backgrounds of a changing China—Ash Is Purest White…
* The urban movie outside the Kims’ window—Parasite…
* Once upon a Time…in Hollywood: Cliff driving, anywhere, anytime, either car…

Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

* Walking Le Mans track in rain the night before, Ford v Ferrari…
* Midsommar: inversion of car and highway, and passage into upside-down forest…
* “If we start from a position of crazy”—Marriage Story…
* For Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) returns to say another “I know”….
* “Shall we?” “Yes.” High Life…
* “Am I dying?” “Yes, I think you are.” 1917…
* “They’re burying me. I’m cold.” Tigers Are Not Afraid…
* Breath on prison windowpane—A Hidden Life…
* White sand feathering edges of undersea sinkhole—Sweetheart…
* Once upon a Time…in Hollywood: Sharon’s blond hair blowing as Polanski (Rafal Zawieruchka) drives through the evening to the Playboy Mansion…
* “‘I don’t want any Mickey Mousin’ on these grounds.’” Quoting the dean back to him, Richard Jewell…
* “Mister Rogers knows my name!” Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood…
* Craig Robinson launching into an exuberant “There’s Gotta Be a Morning After”—Dolemite Is My Name…

Craig Robinson in Dolemite Is My Name…

* Comical/Horrifying shout-out to “The Interview” in The Shining? First meeting with divorce attorney Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta), with daffily grinning associate (Kyle Bornheimer) as prop—Marriage Story…
* The Nightingale: Arrant gunshot dusts aborigine (Baykali Ganambarr) with flour….
* Grieving woman and red windmill vanes, Domino…
* Carrie Bufalino’s little gold cigarette pouch, The Irishman…
* Joker: Robert De Niro’s entrance, as Murray Franklin, is compositional and sickly-TV-color match for Jerry Lewis/Jerry Langford’s in The King of Comedy….

Robert De Niro in The Joker

* Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: Ben’s Harrison Ford-y gesture before taking up lightsaber against six Imperial Troopers…
* Painter (Noémie Merlant) wearing green dress to study folds in mirror; exits; lower half of the lady to be painted (Adèle Haenel) steps into mirror frame. Portrait of a Lady on Fire…
* Midsommar: dream image of an SUV wending through a village that might be medieval…
* Pain and Glory: dream of dead friend, who looked the same, “except she was a mite transparent”…
* Parasite: window a CinemaScope frame within CinemaScope frame, two families brawling and dogs run amok…
* Rick’s game go at participating in the “Behind the Green Door” dance number, Once upon a Time…in Hollywood…
* Jojo Rabbit: the kids’ bursting into dance at the end…
* Imploring a dead man to breathe, Ad Astra…
* Wounded hand plunged into rotten corpse, 1917…
* Midwife’s baby touching Sophie’s face after abortion—Portrait of a Lady on Fire…
* Little Women: Ecstatic, absurd, indomitable—the anarchic romp of Jo and Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) in the wintry chill outside the French doors as a staid cotillon unreels within…
* Greta: dancing feet and the needle…
* Fingers clasped against sky, A Hidden Life…
* The Irishman: glancing at the door to the murder-house kitchen, after…
* Us: comic shadows of family on sand as they cross the beach; an anticipatory clue, as it turns out…
* Seabird feast, The Lighthouse…
* “I wouldn’t expect too much from that cat.” Alan Alda sublime in Marriage Story…
* The Art of Self-Defense: dog advised “I won’t be petting you anymore.”…
* Midnight sun? “Oh fuck, I don’t like that!” Will Poulter in Midsommar…
* Pain and Glory: “I don’t understand why they like me in Iceland.”…
* Ash Is Purest White: Bin (Fan Liao) drops his gun while dancing to “YMCA”…
* Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) reassuring Frank, in The Irishman: “‘Motherfucker’ didn’t apply to you!”…
* Bruce Lee (Mike Moh): “Did I say something funny?” Cliff: “Yeah, ya kinda did.” Once upon a Time…in Hollywood…
* Joker: Garish color design that comes to seem normal…
* Tan bamboo roof introduces the first note of color into the filmworld of Shadow….
* Little Women: autumn backdrop to Jo and Laurie breaking up…

Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet in Little Women

* Claire Mathon’s night paintings of Dakar, Atlantics…
* Night run by flare light through hellish ruins—1917…
* The Kims running through, and eventually on, torrential rain—Parasite…
* Crawl: boating into and through flooded house…
* Hauling out the dory, and the door opening behind—The Lighthouse…
* Woman in white at end of hall, Portrait of a Lady on Fire…
* The Souvenir: when she hears about the heroin…
* Closing the gate that wouldn’t close—Marriage Story…
* Queen & Slim: changing cars in foggy predawn…
* Argument in snowfall, Dark Waters…
* Cryogenic forest in space, High Life…
* Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: In re: Storm Troopers: “They fly now.” “They fly now?” “They fly now.”…
* “Simmer down there, hot sauce.” Watson (Sam Rockwell) to Nadya (Nina Arianda), Richard Jewell…
* Manson (Damon Herriman) leaning past Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch) to see Sharon—Once upon a Time…in Hollywood…
* Us: “Family” at head of drive; kids break to the sides….

The Family in Us

* Raccoon and Hulk on back of pickup, Avengers: Endgame…
* The other Whispers, The Irishman…
* Enchanting, shiveringly right music cues in Once upon a Time…in Hollywood: “Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson” under the first exchange of looks between Cliff and Pussycat (Margaret Qualley); “The Circle Game” transition from Rick’s encounter with 8-year-old Trudi (Linda Butters) to Sharon happy in her car; “California Dreamin’” to set the capstone on February…
* It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: closeup of “Daniel” rubbing his eyes…
* Joker: Bleeding corpse and madman behind him, the midget (Leigh Gill) can’t reach the door lock….
* Clipboards for last words, A Hidden Life…
* Retrieving ghost dragonfly with iPhone—Tigers Are Not Afraid…
* Little Women: The second time the camera accompanies Jo downstairs to see who’s at the kitchen table….
* Uncut Gems: Actress in school play spits gold coins, eliciting an unfeigned “wow” from Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler)….
* In Fabric: clunking of pneumatic tube as fingers explore red cloth…
* Face broken on rock, Midsommar…
* “The pie makes it worse.”—Marriage Story…
* Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) emerging from behind frosted glass after Hoffa walks away—The Irishman…
* Ocean waves seen through/melding with rippled glass windows—Atlantics…

Jimmie Fails in The Last Black Man in San Francisco

* The Souvenir: “Please tell me what I’ve done”—deception/self-deception in a mirror frame, tiny in center of suddenly large-seeming screen…
* 1917: the falls…
* Masterclass in filmmaking and film imagining, screenwriting and editing, performance and choreography: Spahn Ranch, Once upon a Time…in Hollywood….
* “It makes me feel like a brown belt to wear this brown belt!”—The Art of Self-Defense…
* Queen & Slim: the second dance, after “I think we’re safe here”…
* Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) at the window—Us…
* The stillness at the core of Jimmie Fails, The Last Black Man in San Francisco…
* Bobi’s Tupperware returned—Richard Jewell…
* It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: Episode finished, the movement from Mister Rogers exiting the back door, passing the monitor, and sitting at the piano as the crew shuts down for the day. Then he plays that chord…
* “I’m going there to see my Mother…” Soldier boys in a grove listening to a mate sing “Wayfaring Stranger,” 1917…
* Adam Driver, “Being Alive,” Marriage Story…

Adam Driver in Marriage Story

* Address inked on Frank’s palm, The Irishman…
* Sunstroke, Pain and Glory…
* The last smile, Transit…
* Pirandellian grace notes: the sadness of the late Bruno Ganz leaking through his A Hidden Life role as the judge who must pronounce a death sentence; in Once upon a Time…in Hollywood, Jim Stacy’s casual departure, by motorcycle, at the end of a workday; and moments earlier, Luke Perry, unexpected ghost…
* At the climax of 1917, more than one charging soldier crashing crossways into Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay), and vice versa…
* For the last time? On Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the trapezoidal crawl preparing us to drop in medias res…
* Dark Waters: Bill Camp’s utter inhabitation of a West Virginia farmer (though I knew this guy in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania)…
* Midsommar: Mesmerizing tradeoff of graphic images for three-dimensional space, landscape master shots for subjective closeups, interior life for assimilation in an inscrutable epic…
* Marriage Story: tying the shoelace…
* “It’s what it is.” The Irishman…
* One more music cue, the best for last. As benediction at the end of his Once upon a Time…in Hollywood, Tarantino summons Maurice Jarre’s theme for the John Huston-John Milius The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. That film’s epigraph: “Maybe this isn’t the way it was … it’s the way it should have been.”

RTJ

George MacKay in 1917

With thanks to Kathleen Murphy and Sean Axmaker.

Copyright 2020 Richard T. Jameson

Parallax View's Best of 2019

Welcome 2020 with one last look back at the best releases of 2019, as seen by the Parallax View contributors and friends.

(In reverse alphabetical order by contributor)

Richard T. Jameson 

1. Once upon a Time … in Hollywood
2. The Irishman
3. Marriage Story
4. Little Women
5. Midsommar
6. Richard Jewell
7. A Hidden Life
8. Transit
9. Atlantics
10. Pain and Glory / Parasite

A few steps behind, in alphabetical order:
1917, The Art of Self-Defense, The Dead Don’t Die, Dragged Across Concrete, It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Joker, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Lighthouse, The Nightingale, The Souvenir, Uncut Gems

Keep Reading

I Wake Up Streaming – March 2019

I just started a new monthly column for the Film Noir Foundation that searches out and showcases classic film noir available to stream. Here is the debut installment….

As any fan of classic movies seeking treasures on streaming services knows, it’s a wasteland out there. There are oases, of course, but at any given time there are fewer options for pre-1970 movies between the three major streaming services—Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu—than you could find in your better neighborhood video stores twenty years ago.

Given that, there are some treasures to be found out there, especially on Prime Video. The problem is knowing what to look for. Since the shuttering of FilmStruck, there really isn’t a service that curates its catalog of classics (Kanopy, a free service offered from public and college libraries, is an exception). So, consider this your guide to streaming noir, and, for this inaugural installment, we’ll look at the options among the big three streamers.

Netflix

Netflix is first in subscriber numbers but last in its commitment to classic movies. It does, however, currently feature a couple of noir classics. Many services offer a copy of Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946), with Orson Welles as a Nazi war criminal in hiding and Edward G. Robinson as the government agent on his trail. Netflix, to its credit, presents the superb Kino Classics master, which is also streaming on Kanopy.

Continue reading at Film Noir Foundation website

Streaming the 2019 Oscar nominees

The Academy Awards will be handed out on Sunday, February 24. Are you caught up on the major nominees?

Eight films made the cut in the category of best picture and a few of them are still in theaters, notably the offbeat royal drama The Favourite (2018, R), which came away with ten nominations, political commentary Vice (2018, R) which scored eight nomination, and Green Book (2018, PG-13), with five nominations in all.

Also still in theaters is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018, PG), the current favorite in the animated feature category.

A number of nominated films, however, are already available to watch at home. Here’s an easy guide to what you can see and how you can see them.

Best Picture

Two of the top nominees are currently available to stream on Netflix. Roma (Mexico, R, with subtitles) and Black Panther (PG-13).

Continue reading at Stream On Demand

Moments Out of Time 2018

Images, lines, gestures, moods from the year’s films

* At the movies, Roma: German slapstick on screen in deep distance, a pair of lovers in closeup silhouette in left of frame, gray ranks of anonymous filmgoers in between. The space is familiar, auspicious, yet somehow fraught. Camera does not move, but things come undone….
* “I felt like I was Jacob wrestling all night long with the angel, fighting in the grasp. Every sentence, every question, every response a mortal struggle. It was exhilarating.” Rev. Toller (Ethan Hawke), First Reformed…
* Leave No Trace: the myriad intonations and valences Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie can get into “Dad”…
* Pirandellian rewrite: At the outset of The Other Side of the Wind—begun 1970, completed 2018—Peter Bogdanovich speaks with old-age voice….
* The Death of Stalin: body tumbling down stairs in background as Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) makes his rounds…
* Hereditary: rooms that suggest dollhouse miniatures, and may be…
* Filial love in You Were Never Really Here: Joe’s honk honk honk mock hammering of Mom; Joaquin Phoenix and Judith Roberts…
* The endless, obscuring, occasionally decapitating frames of civilization in Zama; maddening protocols and deflections…
* The Old Man and the Gun: Forrest/Robert Redford’s “yeah it’s for real” shrug after slipping note to bank teller…
* The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: the Wingless Thrush (Harry Melling) catching snowflakes in his mouth…
* Lisa (Regina Hall) almost falling asleep in the midday sun—Support the Girls…
* Widows: Dog in arms blinks as Veronica (Viola Davis) enters husband’s workshop….
* If Beale Street Could Talk: moving “furniture” in the loft…
* Bohemian Rhapsody: cats in window watching Freddie’s limo leave for the concert…
* Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) petting a rabbit while having her hair brushed—The Favourite…
* Michael Myers mask rising out of car trunk—Halloween…
* Border: yearning through windowglass—werewolves in love?…
* A Quiet Place: Creature that can’t see and one who can’t hear pass in the night….
* “Being dead” up on the roof, Roma…
* “Go for a cruise,” the horseman proposes, and his steed breaks into fluid glide, camera tracking right along. Brady Jandreau, The Rider…

Brady Jandreau in ‘The Rider’

* “Shoot her before him and make sure he sees it.” Beria’s instructions for disposition of politically superfluous married couple—The Death of Stalin…
* Recurrently in First Reformed, the sound of footsteps on bare wooden floors. Such sense of place, community, ethos…
* Private Life punctiliousness: “The seltzer comes from one place, the syrup from somewhere else.”…
* Blake Lively to Anna Kendrick post-sudden-kiss, A Simple Favor: “You’re OK. You wanna order pizza?”…
* The Little Drummer Girl: in mid-interrogation, need 50p to turn lights on again…
* The Favourite: “Must the duck be here?”…
* Film freak: “I’m Marvin P. Fassbinder!” Jake Hannaford/John Huston: “Of course you are.” The Other Side of the Wind…
* Bad Times at the El Royale: Far across rainswept parking lot, Jon Hamm’s glasses reflect lightning….
* Small plane like a dragonfly over arctic waste, Hold the Dark…
* November, an Estonian ghost story: flying skull carries cow over treetops…
* The reservoir and what might be in it—Burning…
* Dying man singing along to ambient music; his killer lying down beside him and joining in—You Were Never Really Here…
* Hereditary: papers blowing out through backseat window just before … you know…
* Bird Box: Woman steps into blazing car and takes her seat….
* Les Affames/Ravenous: cow eating lawn along suburban street…
* Zama: squeak of native-operated wood fan behind ambiguous flirtation…
* Candles on railing of borrowed porch, Leave No Trace…
* BlacKkKlansman: Flip (Adam Driver) and other cops turning as they hear Ron (John David Washington) on the phone listing all the types of nonwhite Americans he hates…
* Motherhood is hard. “I am so sick of that face on your face!” Toni Collette, Hereditary…
* “So grandma only wanted their money, not me?” Could be, kid. Then again, what’s family anyway? Shoplifters…

Shoplifters

* Roma: Seriously stressed Galaxie pulls into frame below Aztec entablature….
* All the good doctors in Moscow having been liquidated, how to get medical assistance for Stalin? Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) rationalizes: “If he recovers, then we got a good doctor, and if he doesn’t recover, then we didn’t, but he won’t know!” The Death of Stalin settles that….
* Night Eats the World: man contemplates suicide, nods off, accidentally discharges shotgun in his sleep….
* The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: creak of Leone windmill that isn’t there…
* Gray church, gray sky, gray dusk—First Reformed…
* The Old Man and the Gun: Forrest, horseback on hilltop, watching caravan of cop cars on road below…
* Torch-bearing riders spread into the night, The Favourite….
* Pact under red umbrella, If Beale Street Could Talk…
* “I can take fuckin’ up all day but I can’t take not trying”—Support the Girls values…
* The Sisters Brothers: riding through cemetery of discarded luggage on seashore…
* A scattering of rocks in a green graveyard: rough memorials for Border’s deformed dead…
* The Rider: Cat Clifford’s talking prayer by campfire…
* The food no one ever gets to eat in You Were Never Really Here, until someone does…
* “Kentucky Fried Chicken—in Kentucky! When’s that gonna happen?” Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) open to delight, Green Book…
* Llama kibitzes at dashing of Zama’s (Daniel Giménez Cacho) hopes…

Daniel Giménez Cacho in ‘Zama’

* Vigil in rain with two geese—Happy as Lazzaro…
* The grandmother at the beach, setting about dying. The late Kirin Kiki, Shoplifters…
* John Carroll, Norman Foster, Tonio Selwart; shades tenderly at large in The Other Side of the Wind…
* Burning: The bewitching Haemi (Jun Jong-seo) slips out of her shirt to dance in the warm light of a setting sun; two young men watch (Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun), curiously impassive….
* The towering blond distraction of Elizabeth Debicki, Widows…
* Kayli Carter’s misconstrued “OK,” Private Life. (Watch this young actress. And, to be sure, Thomasin McKenzie.)…
* The Favourite: Emma Stone’s imposing lexicon of sniffles, snorts, head wags…
* Zoe Kazan as Miss Longabaugh … Has Sarah Vowell seen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs?…
* Cabiria-like, the unsought power to balance on one foot: Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) at the martial arts field, Roma…
* Night run through corn shocks, A Quiet Place…
* Leave No Trace: Truck driver (Art Hickman) who has to know he’s doing the right thing…
* The Armstrongs’ laughter at “kinda neat,” First Man…
* Touching the nose, A Star Is Born…
* Ants crawling over head as oblivious motorists drive past, Hereditary…
* Elder doctor pursued across white plaza, The Death of Stalin…
* Rooftop sleepwalk under full moon, November…
* The Quake: shattered skyscraper like a tyrannosaur profile…
* Nocturnal greeting from/to reindeer, Border…
* Cold Skin: mermen climbing down off lighthouse in first rays of sun…
* First Man: Pre-launch, bird flies past porthole….
* “You’re starting to harsh both of our mellows”—Sorry to Bother You…
* “You know you’ve missed me.” The return of Frank Underwood. Kevin Spacey on YouTube. OMG….
* Zama: coy menace of Vicuña Porto (Matheus Nachtergaele)…
* Ron’s karate-chop war dance in front of Records counter, BlacKkKlansman…
* The Old Man and the Gun: Tom Waits’s reminiscence about why he hates Christmas…
* Bad Times at the El Royale: Father Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and the right/wrong jukebox tune: “you’re just too good to be true”…
* The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: the Impresario (Liam Neeson) walking back from the gorge…
* “She died. Or maybe she didn’t die. Maybe she just moved back to the suburbs.“ Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) can’t be expected to remember everything. Can You Ever Forgive Me?…

Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant in ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’

* Eighth Grade: Dorky father (Josh Hamilton) wants to “say one thing.” She (Elsie Fisher): “Dad, this is more than one thing.” He: “It’s a chunk of things.”…
* “Same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me”—Leave No Trace….
* Dog running out to chase truck, Les Affames/Ravenous. Life goes on, even in zombie apocalypse.…
* The Favourite: hand job disquisition on realpolitik…
* Avengers: Infinity War: Dr. Strange saying douchebag…
* Brotherhood of the toothbrush—The Sisters Brothers…
* In Support the Girls, stormin’ Cubby (James LeGros) popped in stomach. Did not see that coming….
* Hold the Dark: Offered soup, sorely wounded Slone (Alexander Skarsgard) asks, “What kind?”…
* President Pierce’s accommodation to change, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs…
* Park Chan-wook’s red and green rooms, The Little Drummer Girl…
* What rough beast sinks into the depths with its tender burden—You Were Never Really Here…
* A Star Is Born: Ally’s final, hieratic closeup; Lady Gaga indeed…
* Wig? No wig? Sharon (Regina King) calculates her best approach in Puerto Rico. If Beale Street Could Talk…
* “Has anybody got a Swiss Army knife?”—First Man…
* Somewhere Don Gabriel Figueroa smiles: in Roma, thundercloud light on cactus as mommy drives her family home from vacation….
* Schrader’s use of the classical 1.33:1 format in First Reformed: initially startling; effective at setting the tone of austerity; then disconcerting as, what, the whole film is going to be in this shape? Yes, and rightly so….

First Reformed

* Hulk towering darkly above parkway, bisecting Scope frame—You Were Never Really Here…
* Cliff fall without end—Happy as Lazzaro…
* Zama: ambush by red-painted phantoms amid the long grass…
* Outlaw King: apples rolling in the road under horses’ hooves…
* Molly Shannon murdering roast turkey, Private Life…
* Daniel Kaluuya, stone cold malevolence in Widows…
* “First time?” The Ballad of Buster Scruggs…
* Hereditary: house swallowed in night, silver tree trunks shining above…
* Atavistic thrill of that music coming on as Michael Meyers once again walks the streets of Haddonfield—but there’s still only one Halloween…
* Border: smelling smartphone…
* Cellphone call among tombstones, First Reformed…
* Kid in hospital to fellow survivor of 22 July: “Cigarettes would be nice … except I don’t smoke.”…
* Hold the Dark: Vernon reclaiming cigarette from windowsill after killing rapist…
* Erramentari: torment by chick pea…
* Apostle: the silhouettes around “the purification”…
* Car painted pink by neon sign, Bad Times at the El Royale…
* Suicide in white lake amid white trees, November…
* Sarah (Golshifteh Farahani) appears to have won approval of zombie Alfred (a new frontier for Denis Lavant)—Night Eats the World….
* The Death of Stalin: breathtaking precision of comedic ensemble…
* Unsettling, unexpectedly heartbreaking memento mori: in The Favourite, Olivia Colman’s final closeup, the Queen’s voice the slurry growl of a stroke victim…
* “Cut” (The Other Side of the Wind). “Shantih Shantih Shantih” (Roma). Things Netflix didn’t want you bothered by…
* Apollo 1 mission: the two shots of the cockpit hatch—First Man…
* Ferocity of the Cheeon shootout, Hold the Dark (Julian Black Antelope as Cheeon)…
* Emily Blunt cocking a pump shotgun, A Quiet Place…

Emily Blunt and Millicent Simmonds in ‘A Quiet Place’

* Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Parting after dinner, the shy dynamics of Lee (Melissa McCarthy) and Anna (Dolly Wells) wordlessly wondering what this might lead to…
* Burning: The cat with no name has one….
* Queen passing offstage, leaving the screen to the vast crowd. Bohemian Rhapsody…
* You Were Never Really Here: suicide skip on the check. “Have a nice day.”…
* Profile, pirogue, endless carpet of green—Zama…
* Seahorse frond, Leave No Trace…
* “Whistle for him when you walk away, please”—The Rider….
* The Death of Stalin: furtive glances of the next men in line who suddenly, inexplicably, just avoided getting executed…
* The Ballad of Buster Scruggs reaches its destination, the prairie precursor of the Hotel Earle….
* Roma’s transcendent final shot. Stay for the last plane….

RTJ wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Kathleen Murphy to this year’s edition.

Copyright © 2019 Richard T. Jameson

Relive past “Moments” at Parallax View here…

Thomasin McKenzie and Ben Foster in ‘Leave No Trace’

Parallax View’s Best of 2018

Welcome 2019 with one last look back at the best releases of 2018, as seen by the Parallax View contributors and friends and a few special invitations.

Sean Axmaker

1. First Reformed
2. The Rider
3. Roma
4. Leave No Trace
5. If Beale Street Could Talk
6. Private Life
7. Burning
8. BlackKkKlansman
9. Hereditary
10. Zama

A second ten (in alphabetical order): Annihilation, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Cold War, The Favourite, First Man, Happy as Lazzaro, Revenge, Shoplifters, Support the Girls, Suspiria

Cinematic achievement of 2018: the decades-in-the-making completion of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, left incomplete at the time of his death.

First Reformed – Photo credit: A24

David Coursen (Washington, D.C.)

Best DC non-theatrical Premieres:
An Elephant Standing Still
Family Tour

Singular Blessing:
The Other Side of the Wind

And the 11 best of the rest, listed alphabetically
BlacKkKlansman
Black Panther
Claire’s Camera
First Reformed
Happy Hour
Loveless
Madeline’s Madeline
Private Life
Roma
Sorry to Bother You
Wormwood

The Other Side of the Wind
Peter Bogdanovich, John Huston in Orson Wells’ “The Other Side Of The Wind”

Robert C. Cumbow

The Top 10

(Disclaimer – The list of important 2018 films I have not yet seen is embarrassingly long—so many movies, so little time—and is included here for context: If Beale Street Could Talk; Roma; Black Panther; Transit; Other Side of the Wind; Can You Ever Forgive Me?; Eighth Grade; Mid-90s).

Of the ones I did see, the ones I enjoyed most:
First Reformed (Paul Schrader)
Hostiles (Scott Cooper; technically 2017 but released in Seattle—scantly—in 2018)
The Party (Sally Potter)
The Old Man and the Gun (David Patrick Lowrey)
The Endless (Aaron Moorehead & Justin Benson)
You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay; year’s best example of telling a story in sound design)
Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson)
First Man (Damien Chazelle, whom I still don’t like, but I can’t deny how much this film affected me)
Green Book (Peter Farrelly)
Annihilation (Alex Garland)

A Little Respect (because it’s actually been a pretty good year for movies):
Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coen Bros.)
The Mule (Clint Eastwood)
The Wife (Björn Runge)
Mary Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke)
The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)
The Rider (Chloé Zhao)
Disobedience (Sebastián Lelio)
A Quiet Place (John Krasinski)
A Simple Favor (Paul Feig)
A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper—a few things about this movie made me like it a lot more than I expected to, and persuaded me that Cooper has a directorial eye and instinct to be reckoned with)

2/3 of a Good Movie:
Vice
Hereditary
BlacKKKlansman

1/3 of a Good Movie:
Sorry to Bother You

Music:
Justin Hurwitz, First Man
Max Richter, Mary Queen of Scots

Too many great performances this year to list favorites, so I’ll just mention Cynthia Erivo, a compelling presence in Widows and Bad Times at the El Royale, whose name should be a household word by this time next year.

First Man – Photo credit: Universal Pictures

Jim Emerson

Favorites of 2018
1. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel & Ethan Coen)
2. Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)
3. The Rider (Chloé Zhao) / The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard)
4. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
5. Leave No Trace (Debra Granik)
6. Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada)
7. Hereditary (Ari Aster)
8. Bird Box (Susanne Bier) / A Quiet Place (John Krasinski)
9. Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham) / Mid90s (Jonah Hill) / Minding the Gap (Bing Liu)
10. First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs – Photo credit: Netflix

John Hartl

1. Leave No Trace
2. First Reformed
3. Fair Game (director’s cut)
4. Springsteen on Broadway
5. Three Identical Strangers
6. Love, Gilda
7. The Death of Stalin
8. A Moment in the Reeds
9. Sorry to Bother You
10. Outside In

Also recommended: We the Animals, BlacKkKlansman, Return to Mount Kennedy, On Chesil Beach

Leave No Trace – Photo credit: SIFF

Robert Horton

(as published in the Seattle Weekly)

1. The Rider
2. Support the Girls
3. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
4. Lean on Pete
5. First Reformed
6. Roma
7. Hereditary
8. Zama
9. You Were Never Really Here and Leave No Trace
10. First Man

My Top 10 honorable mentions would have the slow-winding Korean gem Burning; the psychotropic Nicolas Cage thriller Mandy; Bo Burnham’s very funny coming-of-age tale Eighth Grade; the Melissa McCarthy film Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which is as much about loneliness as literary scandal; the cutting British comedy The Death of Stalin; the torrid black-and-white romance of Cold War (opens locally in January); Yorgos Lanthimos’s wicked comedy The Favourite; Hirokazu Kore-eda’s prizewinner Shoplifters; Alex Garland’s sci-fi puzzler Annihilation, with a strong Natalie Portman performance; and Charlize Theron’s postpartum workout in Tully.

Support the Girls – Photo credit: Magnolia Pictures

Richard T. Jameson

1. Roma
2. First Reformed
3. Leave No Trace
4-12 alphabetical:
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Border
Burning
The Death of Stalin 
Hereditary 
If Beale Street Could Talk
The Rider
Shoplifters 
You Were Never Really Here 

Yalitza Aparicio in Roma – Photo credit: Carlos Somonte

Moira Macdonald

(as published in The Seattle Times)

In alphabetical order:
Black Panther
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
If Beale Street Could Talk
Mary Poppins Returns
Paddington 2
The Rider
Roma
Shoplifters
Widows
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

A splendid second 13: BlacKkKlansman, Crazy Rich Asians, Disobedience, Eighth Grade, The Favourite, Incredibles 2, Leaning Into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, Searching, A Star Is Born, Where Is Kyra?, Whitney, Wildlife

Shoplifters – Photo credit: Magnolia

Kathleen Murphy

Most Memorable Movies (2018)
1. Leave No Trace
2. First Reformed
3. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
4. Roma
5. Shoplifters
6. Burning
7. You Were Never Really Here
8. The Rider
9. Support the Girls
10. If Beale Street Could Talk
Documentary: Struggle: Life and Lost Art of Szukalski

Burning – Photo credit: Well Go

Amie Simon

1. Suspiria
2. Revenge
3. Apostle
4. Hereditary
5. Mandy
6. Sorry To Bother You
7. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
8. Eighth Grade
9. Love, Gilda
10. Black Panther

Hereditary – Photo credit: A24

Andrew Wright

1. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
2. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
3. Hereditary
4. Paddington 2
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. First Reformed
7. Roma
8. The Rider
9. Mandy
10. Cold War

You Were Never Really Here – Photo credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/Amazon Studios

Filmmakers and film programmers

Brian Alter (programmer, Grand Illusion)

Best gut-punch ending: BlacKkKlansman
Best film about millennials: Never Goin’ Back
Most depressing film: First Reformed
Best weird film: Mandy
Favorite repertory screening: AGFA’s restoration of Godmonster of Indian Flats

Megan Griffiths (filmmaker, Sadie, The Night Stalker, Lucky Them)

You Were Never Really Here (d. Lynne Ramsey)
Eighth Grade (d. Bo Burnham)
The Rider (d. Chloé Zhao)
Minding the Gap (d. Bing Liu)
Destroyer (d. Karyn Kusama)
Roma (d. Alfonso Cuarón)
Madeline’s Madeline (d. Josephine Decker)
Outside In (d. Lynn Shelton)
Leave No Trace (d. Debra Granik)
Sorry To Bother You (d. Boots Riley)

Jennifer Roth (producer: The Wrestler, Black Swan, Laggies, Mudbound)

Cold War
Shoplifters
Zama
You Were Never Really Here
American Animals
Land of Steady Habits (self-promotion aside)
Can You Ever Forgive Me
Roma
Private Life
The Rider

The Seattle Film Critics Society gave their 2018 awards; you can find them here.

Cold War – Photo credit: Amazon Studios

Polls / Lists

Film Comment
Sight and Sound / BFI
Time Out London
Slant
Roger Ebert.com
Indiewire

Other lists

2018 additions to the Library of Congress National Film Registry
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s Ten Best Films of … 1928
Rotten Tomatoes Top-rated movies of 2018
Here’s the Parallax View list for 2017

Remembering those we lost in 2018

What to stream: ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ on VOD, ‘First Reformed’ on Amazon, ‘Sorry to Bother You’ on Hulu

Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Now, Showtime Anytime, FilmStruck, video-on-demand, and other streaming services …

A Chinese-American professor (Constance Wu) collides with the culture of the ultra-rich in Singapore when she meets her boyfriend’s family in Crazy Rich Asians (2018, PG-13), the hit romantic comedy based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Kevin Kwan. Henry Golding, Awkwafina, and Michelle Yeoh co-star. Now on Cable On Demand and VOD, also on DVD and at Redbox.

Ethan Hawke is a priest facing a spiritual crisis in the provocative First Reformed (2018, R), a personal drama from filmmaker Paul Schrader. Reviewed on Stream On Demand here. Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Sorry to Bother You (2018, R), the feature debut of hip-hop artist turned filmmaker Boots Riley, is a social satire as comic fantasy starring Lakeith Stanfield as a telemarketer who finds the secret to sales success and rises up the ladder of a soulless corporation. Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Terry Crews, Danny Glover, and Armie Hammer co-star. Streaming on Hulu.

The British miniseries version of the classic Little Women, starring Emily Watson as the mother of four sisters, originally played on PBS in the U.S. and is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

For something a little less serious, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Gauntlet offers more cheesy films for Jonah Ray and the bots on the Satellite of Love to heckle. Six new episodes on Netflix.

FilmStruck, the premiere streaming service for American and international classic movies, ends its service after two years on Thursday, November 29. Criterion has announced a plan to restart its own service in Spring 2019 and Warner Media (parent company of Turner Classic Movies) promises to bring back its classics in a new streaming service in a year, but until then this is the end. If you’re a subscriber, time to see those films on your watchlist or browse through the catalog one last chance to stream some of the greatest films ever made.

Continue reading at Stream On Demand

Holiday Movie Streaming Picks

The holiday season is already arranged around rituals, so it makes sense that we come back to the same movies every year. In certain households annual showings of A Christmas Story or Elf or It’s a Wonderful Life are as rigorously observed as the lighting of Advent or Hanukkah candles. I’m not necessarily comparing religious belief with the secular comforts of Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, but let’s just say there are different kinds of gospel.

A scan of the streaming services reveals a collection of acceptable films, but I’d like to point out how thin the tree is. Netflix has a scattering of bona fide holiday classics, for instance, but after that you’ve got a whole lot of chintzy-sounding movies with “Christmas” in the title. Given the recently announced demise of the classic-film service Filmstruck, it would be nice if someone reminded these providers that movies existed before 1980.

Nevertheless, here are a few titles for the Christmas stocking, and maybe a couple of lumps of coal.

White Christmas

Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye play entertainers who put on a show for their former military commander at a snow-less winter resort. Definitely a time capsule from a vanished era (1954), this Irving Berlin musical has great production numbers, eye-popping color, and the enduring fascination (for me, anyway) of Crosby’s hepcat patter. Netflix

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Method, Madness, and Metaphysical Mysteries

If you’re reading this you’re one of us. You see the patterns that no one else does. You find the answers to questions too bewildering for others to comprehend. But the deeper you dig, the more confusing things get. And then there are the shady characters who keep weaving through your journey. It’s a conspiracy, but you’re the only one who can see it! That path can lead only to madness. Or a movie. We all love a good conspiracy thriller, but we are mesmerized by a conspiracy plot where the answers one seeks may not exist in the material realm.

Under the Silver Lake, the latest film to explore a mystery that seems to defy the logic of science and reason, has been pushed back from its original June release date to December. Ostensibly it’s to give filmmaker David Robert Mitchell time to recut the movie. But could there be another, more sinister reason behind this delay? What exactly aren’t they telling us? Just who is really pulling the strings here?

Continue reading at Fandor

Women Who Take Revenge

If the revenge movie is a staple of American exploitation cinema, the female revenge film pushes exploitation to extremes. At its most gratuitous it makes a spectacle of sexual assault on a female victim for the gruesome entertainment of a male audience, then celebrates righteous vengeance on the perpetrators with additional spectacle. It’s a genre dominated by male filmmakers, which makes the new movie Revenge a welcome alternative to the male gaze. Director and screenwriter, Coralie Fargeat, making her feature debut, brings her own sensibility to these conventions.

Here are some of the films that paved the way for Revenge. No, these are not the pulp thriller answers to #MeToo—grindhouse exploitation and serious art film alike, they have their sexist blind spots—but they do offer a little more complexity to the formula and, sometimes, they empower women beyond simple violence.

Continue reading at Fandor

Moments Out of Time 2017

Images, lines, gestures, moods from the year’s films

* Dunkirk: lapping of leaflets as they fall in quiet street of a seaside town…
* Imperceptible bleed of newsreel and movie, Detroit…
* Post-first-kiss, Christine’s (Saoirse Ronan’s) milestone-marking scream in middle of suburban street, Lady Bird…
* Bobby (Willem Dafoe) fires up a cigarette; lights come on all over The Florida Project….
* Super Dark Times: interior-lit plastic snowman, no snow, rain sheen on blacktop driveway…
* Ben Bradlee’s (Tom Hanks’s) voice changing on the single syllable “Jack” during a recitation of Presidents who have lied—The Post…
* Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) and Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) going at each other hammer and tongs. Suddenly he coughs up a spray of blood and she says, “I know, baby!”…

Keep Reading

Parallax View’s Best of 2017

Welcome 2018 with one last look back at the best releases of 2017, as seen by the Parallax View contributors and friends and a few special invitations. (In reverse alphabetical order, just so you don’t have to see your intrepid managing editor at the top of the list every single year.)

Andrew Wright

1. War for the Planet of the Apes
2. Brawl in Cell Block 99
3. Ex Libris
4. Soul on a String
5. Okja
6. Phantom Thread
7. The Florida Project
8. Lady Bird
9. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
10. The Girl With All the Gifts

Amie Simon

A quick list of my fave 2017 films (in alphabetical order):
Baby Driver
Blade Runner 2049
The Big Sick
Brawl in Cell Block 99
Cult of Chucky
Get Out
It
Jim & Andy
John Wick: Chapter 2
The LEGO Batman Movie
Logan
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
War For the Planet of the Apes
Wonder Woman
XX

Bruce Reid

The Florida Project
Detroit
A Quiet Passion
A Ghost Story
Marjorie Prime
Personal Shopper
Nocturama
Wonderstruck
Gerald’s Game
Dunkirk

Kathleen Murphy

1.  Best war films: “Dunkirk” (Christopher Nolan), “Detroit” (Kathryn Bigelow)
2.  Best films about mortality, memory, human connection: “Personal Shopper” (Olivier Assayas), “Marjorie Prime,” elevated by the magnificent Lois Smith (Michael Almereyda), and most especially, “A Ghost Story” (David Lowery)
3. Best Distaff Revenge (and much more) films: “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (Martin McDonagh) and “In the Fade” (Fatih Akin). Frances McDormand (“Billboards”) and Diane Kruger (“Fade”) kill.
4. Richest evocation of a poet’s place, time, character, art: “A Quiet Passion” (Terence Davies). Cynthia Nixon shines.
5. Best growing-up film: Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” a Petri dish—place, time, family dynamics—where a passionate misfit and artist-to-be takes form. Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf rule.
6. Best films about sharing ground with the Other: “Mudbound” (Dee Rees), “The Other Side of Hope” (Aki Kaurismaki)
7. Best Big Movies: Patti Jenkins’s “Wonder Woman” (Gal Gadot!); “War for the Planet of the Apes,” Gotterdammerung demise—well-deserved—of Homo sapiens as master species (Matt Reeves); “Logan,” the genuinely poignant passing of an aging superhero (James Mangold)
8. Best evocation of the eloquent patience of beasts vs. surpassing cruelty of Homo sapiens: “Okja” (Bong Joon-ho)
9. Best down-and-dirty cinematic energy, celebration of genre, Vince Vaughan performance: “Brawl in Cell Block 99” (S. Craig Zahler)
10. Five good, not-great, movies well worth a second viewing: “Split” (M. Night Shyamalan), “Good Time” (Benny and Josh Safdie), “Wind River” (Taylor Sheridan), “The Lost City of Z” (James Gray), “Super Dark Things” (Kevin Phillips)

TV I could not quit, from standouts to guilty pleasures: “Mindhunter,” “Game of Thrones,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Big Little Lies”; “Halt and Catch Fire” and “The Leftovers” (final seasons); “The Deuce,” “I Love Dick,” “Fargo,” “Peaky Blinders,” “Longmire,” “Godless”

Moira Macdonald
(originally published in The Seattle Times)

In alphabetical order:
The Big Sick
Dunkirk
Lady Bird
Lady Macbeth
Mudbound
Phantom Thread
The Post
The Shape of Water
Step
Their Finest

Richard T. Jameson

(Order of 3-10 in alphabetical order)
MINDHUNTER
TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN
Detroit
Dunkirk
Get Out
A Ghost Story
Lady Bird
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
Mudbound
Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

Robert Horton
(originally published in Seattle Weekly)

1. Twin Peaks: The Return
2. Phantom Thread
3. Get Out
4. Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
5. A Quiet Passion
6. The Lovers
7. Detroit
8. The Shape of Water
9. Personal Shopper
10. Logan

John Hartl

Five Came Back
Battle of the Sexes
The Other Side of Hope
Call Me by Your Name
Land of Mine
Lady Bird
Frantz
The Crown
Get Out
The Post

Runners-up: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, I Am Jane Doe, The Killing Fields of Dr. Hang S. Ngor, Feud: Bette and Joan, Whose Streets?, A Journey Through French Cinema, The Farthest, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, Nuts!

Jim Emerson

BPM (Beats Per Minute) (Robin Campillo)
A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
Get Out (Jordan Peele)
Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)
Mudbound (Dee Rees)
A Quiet Passion (Terence Davies)
The Shape of Water (Guillermo Del Toro)
Long Strange Trip (Amir Bar-Lev)
Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)
I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie)

Robert C. Cumbow

I don’t know from “best” and “worst” but here’s a list, in no particular order, of the ten films of 2017 that I most enjoyed watching, thinking about, and discussing with friends. [NOTE: I have not yet seen The Last Jedi or The Shape Of Water.]

The Lost City Of Z
A Ghost Story
Logan Lucky
I, Tonya
3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Dunkirk
Get Out
Lady Bird
Wind River
Atomic Blonde

David Coursen

1. I Am Not Your Negro
2. Get Out
3. Faces Places
4. Neruda
5. The Florida Project
6. Lady Bird
7. Right Now, Wrong Then
8. The Other Side of Hope
9. After the Storm
10. A Quiet Passion

Honorable Mention: Jackie, The Workshop, In the Fade, Paterson

Sean Axmaker

Twin Peaks (David Lynch)
Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayass)
A Ghost Story (David Lowery)
Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello)
BPM (Beats Per Minute) (Robin Campillo)
Graduation (Cristian Mungiu)
The Shape of Water (Guillermo Del Toro)
Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes)
Marjorie Prime (Michael Almereyda)
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villenueve)

10 more films (alphabetical): Brawl in Cell Block 99 (S. Craig Zahler), In the Fade (Fatih Akin), Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow), Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017), Get Out (Jordan Peele), Logan (James Mangold, 2017), Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig), The Lost City of Z (James Gray), The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (Noah Baumbach), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh)

Filmmakers and film programmers

Rick Stevenson (director, Magic in the Water, Expiration Date, The Millennials)

Favorite Ten of 2017 (really favorite 11 since his amp goes to 11), in no particular order:
Wonder
Wonder Woman
Wonderstruck
Call Me by Your Name
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water
Get out
Lady Bird
I Tonya
Coco
The Greatest Showman

Jennifer Roth (executive producer: The Wrestler, Black Swan, Laggies, Mudbound)

1. The Phantom Thread
2. The Square
3. I, Tonya
4. Get Out
5. The Meyerowitz Stories
6. Call Me By Your Name
7. Baby Driver (Because I love a good musical)
8. 3 Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri
9. Good Time
10. Mudbound (shameful plug, I know)

Megan Griffiths (director, Eden, Lucky Them, The Night Stalker)

1. Get Out
2. Sami Blood
3. Call Me By Your Name
4. Beach Rats
5. Detroit
6. Wonder Woman
7. The Shape of Water
8. The Florida Project
9. Lane 1974
10. First They Killed My Father

Beth Barrett (Artistic Director, SIFF)
(originally published on IndieWire)

Top 10 in no particular order:
Call Me By Your Name
I, Tonya
Get Out
Lady Macbeth
The Square
Lady Bird
Jane
Faces Places
Beach Rats
The OA

More Seattle lists:

Scarecrow’s Top Ten

1. Get Out
2. Logan
3. Moonlight
4. Twin Peaks: Season 3
5. Dunkirk
6. Shin Godzilla
7. The Handmaiden
8. Wonder Woman
9. Raw
10. Arrival

The Seattle Film Critics Society gave their 2017 awards; you can find them here.

Polls / Lists

Village Voice (annual film poll comes out later this week)
Time Out London
Slant
Sight and Sound / BFI
Roger Ebert.com (compilation list and individual lists)
Indiewire (critics list and filmmakers list)
Film Comment

Other lists

2017 additions to the Library of Congress National Film Registry
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s Ten Best Films of … 1927
David Hudson Remembers Those We Lost in 2017
Here’s the Parallax View list for 2016

The Movies That Mattered in 2017

The new Star Wars movie opened a few days ago. It will make a mint. But within hours of its opening, it also made waves.

Before the end credits had finished rolling, an army of devoted Star Wars faithful had taken to their devices to declare that The Last Jedi was a disgrace to the memory of the doctrinal faith. One online commenter called it the “assassination of the entire star wars universe,” which sounds really serious. The new film’s alleged sins include over-jokiness, a reluctance to answer every plot question raised by the previous chapter, and, well, just being different. Being different is the worst offense of all.

Perhaps because I do not worship at the House of Skywalker, I found The Last Jedi to be perfectly delightful, and probably the best Star Wars picture since the first one. If that doesn’t get me excommunicated, I don’t know what will. But I bring up the issue because while the films of 2017 offered plenty of worthwhile titles, it marked a downturn in how we talk about movies.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Documentary: Capturing the Human Experience of War

There is no shortage of documentaries on war. The subject fascinates us as history, as sociology, and as drama. Some documentaries chronicle history in great detail, some grapple with the issues and forces behind the conflicts, and some flat-out propagandize. But very few of those documentaries actually engage with the human experience. So for Memorial Day we look at films about the diverse group of men (and in some cases the women) in war—not just why they fight but what they saw, heard, and endured, and how it changed them.

The Battle of Midway (1942)

American director John Ford (The Quiet Man, The Searchers) served his country by offering his talents as a filmmaker to the Armed Services. His first assignment was to photograph what turned out to be the first major American victory in the war against Japan. “Yes, this really happened,” informs one of the film’s four narrators during the combat section of the film, but audiences didn’t need to be reminded. The authenticity was evident. One bomb landed so close to the camera that it knocked both Ford and his camera assistant off their feet.

Continue reading at Independent Lens

The Love Story of Bones’ Booth and Brennan in 12 Episodes

It took 12 years and 245 episodes to tell the story of Temperance Brennan and Seeley Booth on Bones, the Fox series that comes to an end tonight. For those who are curious but lack the time, patience, or commitment to take the journey in its entirety, we’ve put together a guide to the highlights and turning points in their relationship told in 12 episodes, all available on Netflix.

“The Man in the Fallout Shelter” (Season 1, episode 9)
The show’s first Christmas episode quarantines the team in the lab over the holidays. Along with the inevitable seasonal bonding between characters who are, at this point, barely more than colleagues, we meet (through a glass barrier) Angela’s blues-guitarist father (ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons) and Booth’s young son, Parker (Ty Panitz). The first is the coolest addition to the Bonesiverse (seriously, this guy becomes an enigma bordering on mythological trickster). The second is our first peek into the personal life of Booth and an introduction to the most important person in his world. The team’s chemistry really starts to bubble here.

Continue reading at Vulture