France)
The first new feature in eight years by one of the medium's greatest artists, and one 2015's most outstanding achievements, The Assassin masterfully pursues its super-cinematic fetish to the point of conceptual exhaustion: rippling silks, a flickering candle, a fluttering branch. Hou returns to cinema's first source of spectacle in this lavishly detailed portrait of invisible presence.
For Kiarostami's first fiction feature shot outside his native Iran, the director makes explicit the European sources (especially Rossellini and Resnais) of his half-neorealist, half-modernist idiom, while adding a new dimension to his art: a heretofore forbidden sensuality that as always relies upon spectator participation. A major return to narrative form for Kiarostami, and the best of the recent spate of Asian-made European art films.
An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, 2018, China)
An Elephant Sitting Still’s massive achievement resides in the crystalline clarity of first-time feature-filmmaker Hu's worldview, of his unshakable insistence on the irredeemable quality of life in contemporary China. Shot in a series of artfully mobile, shallow-focus long takes that collectively convey the inter-connectedness of his characters' tragic fates, Hu's novelistic opus is one of cinema's great what-ifs--a masterpiece completed just before the filmmaker's suicide. It also may be the best film from Mainland China this decade.
La Flor (Mariano Llinás, 2018, Argentina)
In a year of epic-length achievements, nothing could match the scale or scope of this 14-hour shapeshifter from the south. Protean in its survey of language in its many forms, both linguistic and cinematic, La Flor is first and foremost a film of its four female leads' faces, obsessively captured by Llinás. Equally a film about genres, cinematic again but also painterly, the face gives way to bathers and landscapes, up to and through a 40-minute credit sequence set on the bottom of the globe.
Dumont provides a masterclass in contradiction and tonal contrast throughout his four involving parts: the extreme violence of the crimes finds a bedfellow in frequent moments of levity and humor –many of which are a consequence of the film’s bumbling investigators; seriousness pairs with absurdity; and the sacred is brought into comic contact with the profane, especially in a first-part funeral passage that seems to confirm many a famous (and less than flattering) adage about small-town vicars. Once criticized for the bleakness of his worldview–as with 1999 Cannes prize-winner Humanité–Dumont, in Li’l Quinquin, has come to seize upon a rhetoric of comedic contradiction that nonetheless maintains his former outlook.
Ceylan synthetically constructs his portrait of bi-continental Turkish national identity from the tissues of high-modernist European and Middle Eastern masters, from the metaphysical phantasmagoria of Tarkovsky to the cosmological landscapes of Kiarostami. With the sun setting on the autumnal latter, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia descends into an endless digital expanse of sensual blacks, cut by glowing high-beams, which in turn will give way to an unforgettable gas-lit interlude. Ceylan's latest, easily his best, is 2011's most inexhaustible work of cinema.
Premiering out of competition at last February’s Berlin Film Festival, A Quiet Passion was almost singular this year in its concern for the inner life of its protagonist. This heartrending Emily Dickinson biopic, starring Cynthia Nixon in a career-best performance, was also the year’s most bitterly–and courageously–personal piece of auteur filmmaker, an emotionally overwhelming confessional object from Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives; Sunset Song), the greatest poet of the British screen since Humphrey Jennings.
After a virtuosically choreographed, pre-credits long-take that ranks among the year’s most exceptional sequences, Romanian master Puiu sets up inside a Bucharest flat, his camera moving from room to room as he maps a cavernous domestic space, complicated familial relationships, and the history, politics, and religious attitudes of the post-Communist nation. The director’s darkly comedic reinterpretation of the chamber drama feels sui generis, even as it proves to be the natural extension of the occluded, outside-the-threshold aesthetic of his 2010 feature Aurora.
France/Germany/Switzerland/United States)
Purportedly Hungarian master Tarr's final film, The Turin Horse provides the most distilled expression of the director's style to date: Tarr's heavily choreographed, phenomenological long-takes bleakly inscribe a series of quotidian gestures on a perpetually windswept Central European plane. No less signature is Tarr's Nietzschean take on a European civilization that has already collapsed. This is Tarr bringing both his corpus and Europe's fin de siècle late modernism - in form and in content - to a highly masterful conclusion.
In what is likely the Thai auteur's greatest achievement to date, Apichatpong explores not only the past lives and origins of his terminal lead, but also those of his own cinematic career - and even of his chosen medium (down to a Platonic shadow-play) - constructing a dense web of self-reference that transforms the filmmaker's reincarnation narrative into a comprehensive career reexamination. Uncle Boonmee is the best new film in years.
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