THE FILMS OF JOSH AND BENNY SAFDIE move at a hotfoot, thinking-on-your-feet pace, built around fraught and frantic protagonists who can see no further than the next contingency, or around the next corner of the personal maze they’re negotiating. Compulsive and often reckless behavior is a through line in the Safdies’ filmography; from 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed—concerning the misadventures of a female kleptomaniac—onward, they’ve dealt in men and women working desperately to stay one step ahead of consequences. More recently, they’ve centered films on a lovelorn teenaged heroin addict

A TRUE “HOTHOUSE FILM,” Little Joe opens with a fluid overhead shot from a rotating surveillance camera, circling rows of genetically modified plants. They’re the creation of workaholic geneticist Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) and her team of plant breeders: a purported “happiness” flower, whose scent releases a precursor to oxytocin, the hormone that facilitates bonding between mother and child. Alice’s smitten associate Chris (Ben Whishaw) makes this artificial attachment sound warm and gushy: “What this plant really needs is love.”

The flower, which Alice names Little Joe, after her son,

Filmmaker John Waters’s sixteen-city spoken-word tour “A John Waters Christmas” begins December 2 in West Palm Beach, Florida.

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CLIMAX (Gaspar Noé)

The best movie of the year gives new meaning to the term “bad trip.” Frenzied dance numbers combined with LSD, mental breakdowns, and childhood trauma turn this nutcase drama into The Red Shoes meets Hallucination Generation. Freak out, baby, freak out!

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JOAN OF ARC (Bruno Dumont)

There is a God and his name is Bruno Dumont. His piously poisonous sequel to last year’s best film, Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, is artier, holier, and will give

Amy Taubin is a Contributing Editor of Artforum and Film Comment. She is currently working on a collection of forty years of her criticism.

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HONEYLAND (Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska)

Hatidze Muratova, likely the last female wild-honey gatherer in Europe, is the charismatic hero of this observational documentary in which an almost-abandoned stone village in Macedonia becomes the scene of a battle between sustainable environmental measures and earth-destroying capitalist greed and stupidity.

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THE SKY SOCIALIST: ENVIRONS AND OUT-TAKES (Ken Jacobs)

What was almost lost—the heartbreaking handheld

James Quandt, Senior Programmer at TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto, is the editor of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Austrian Film Museum, 2009) and Robert Bresson (Revised) (Indiana University Press, 2012).

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LUC TUYMANS (Palazzo Grassi, Venice) and THE WHITE ALBUM (Arthur Jafa)

Tuymans’s glorious retrospective of paintings dense with references to the cinematic and Jafa’s justly consecrated video in the Arsenale provided the high points of this year’s Venice Biennale.

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VITALINA VARELA (Pedro Costa)

Darkness visible. Abandoned by her husband’s death, the eponymous Cape Verdean woman, who returns from

Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns.

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LA FLOR (Mariano Llinás)

For nearly fourteen hours, this protean magnum opus, held together by an extraordinary quartet of actresses (Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes), immerses us in the pleasures of densely detailed fiction.

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A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan)

Several titles on my Top Ten list are new restorations of older films I saw for the first time in 2019; none seduced me quite like Hazan’s beautiful 1974 docufiction about David Hockney, then in the midst of romantic agony and creative fervor.

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ATLANTICS (Mati Diop)

J. Hoberman is a recovering film critic. 

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STATE FUNERAL (Sergei Loznitsa) 

The official footage documenting the pageantry around Joseph Stalin’s death—reorchestrated here by Loznitsa—is a totalitarian spectacle that, in its interplay of leader and mass, is a sort of found Triumph of the Will starring a “dead god” (Loznitsa’s phrase) in a carnation-red coffin. The Trial (2018), another Loznitsa film, might serve as a prologue—long-lost footage from an early show trial that was evidently shot for an audience of one still-living god.

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MARTIN EDEN (Pietro Marcello)

Bursting with ideas, Marcello’s

ALEXA KAROLINSKI AND INGO NIERMANN make war movies about love. Their two moving-image works to date, both currently on view at Auto Italia in London, are premised on the existence of an Army of Love, an entity as real as it is speculative, comprising a motley cluster of volunteers—soldiers spanning sexualities, generations, abilities, and ethnicities—whose purpose is “to offer all-encompassing love . . . to those who need it.” It is an imperative at once simple and extraordinarily difficult. Love here is understood as a practice involving “care, desire, sex, and respect,” indiscriminate of its

AESTHETICALLY PROMISCUOUS, confoundingly likable, and intermittently unhinged, Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is a crash course in mid-twentieth-century Hollywood mores and backlot intrigue. Taking Citizen Kane (1941) for its template (and enlisting Kane midwife John Houseman as producer, for good measure), it ricochets off so many touchstones that you could a construct an entire class in postwar American film from the scintillating shards. Coming two years after Billy Wilder’s baroque tragicomedy (traumedy?) Sunset Boulevard and in the same year as Stanley Donen’s

MATI DIOP’S ATLANTICS is a girl’s coming-of-age story wrapped in a magical realism thriller, edged with an unsparing depiction of economic exploitation in a rapidly modernizing Senegal. It’s a lot to handle in a debut feature, but thanks to ambition, intelligence, and the desire to relate a story that is seldom told from the inside, Diop—aided by Claire Mathon’s hauntingly shadowed cinematography and composer Fatima Al Qadiri’s sinuous, dissonant score—pulls it off almost without a hitch. The influence of Claire Denis, who gave Diop her first screen role in 35 Shots of Rum (2008), is clear here,

THE PRESENT FEELS INESCAPABLE, like a miasma too close, too everywhere, to apprehend. Yet it is precisely because of this blinding proximity that the present demands to be given shape in a lasting, shareable form—so that we might make sense of our place within it, so that the feeling of our time will remain available to encounter in times to come.

In her third feature film, The Hottest August (2019), geographer turned documentarian Brett Story proposes one way to give shape to our moment. Story roams the five boroughs of New York in the eighth month of 2017, posing questions from behind the camera

SINCE 2006, Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška, collaborating as the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, have created brainy and ebullient works for stage, film, and video, aerating serious conceptual heft with an oddball comedic sensibility. For the directing-and-writing duo, scripts have never been hard-and-fast things. Take the one for their epic nine-part video Life and Times (2009–15): The words were transcribed from phone conversations between Liška and company member Kristin Worrall, during which the latter recounted the (often banal) details of her life thus far. What else would one expect from a team