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).
1
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.
2
VITALINA VARELA (Pedro Costa)
Darkness visible. Abandoned by her husband’s death, the eponymous Cape Verdean woman, who returns from Costa’s previous film, Horse Money (2014), discovers her spouse’s many deceptions as she sifts through the scant traces of his life in Lisbon. The idyllic flashbacks are redundant, but the film, set in the catacombs of memory, achieves a pitch of grief all the more moving for its materialist austerity.
3
BEANPOLE (Kantemir Balagov)
In his intense portrait of two broken young women attempting to rebuild their lives in postwar Russia, Balagov lives up to the promise of his astounding debut, Closeness (2017), and proves that the art of portraying an other requires only intelligence and empathy.
4
State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa)
It is amazing that Loznitsa assembled and edited his mesmerizing montage of vintage footage of Stalin’s funeral commemorations throughout the Soviet Union solely in black-and-white, because the use of color in his final version is nothing short of staggering.
5
Collective (Alexander Nanau)
This excoriating investigation into corruption in the Romanian medical system has at least two heroes: an obstinate journalist who writes for a sports gazette and an idealistic politician defeated in his crusade against entrenched mendacity.
6
BACURAU (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles)
To those who claim that the premise of this anti-Bolsonaro allegory, which thrillingly revives the spirit of Brazil’s Cinema Novo, is too outrageous and implausible: “I read the news today,
oh boy.”
7
HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME (Thomas Heise)
Heise’s poetic epic ingeniously interlaces the history of his family with that of Germany but frustrates in the contest it inadvertently creates between its gorgeous black-and-white images and the copious subtitles necessary for the non-German-speaking viewer.
8
THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF EURÍDICE GUSMÃO (Karim Aïnouz)
Aïnouz’s heady, heartbreaking melodrama, set in midcentury Rio, about two sisters separated by patriarchal shame, had me weeping at ten in the morning.
9
FIRE WILL COME (Oliver Laxe)
And it does. Aside from some musical missteps, Laxe’s sparse, ambiguous character study of a Galician arsonist—whose guilt is one of the film’s many uncertainties—proves as withholding as its reticent protagonist.
10
NANA (Jean Renoir)
The restoration of the year. As Émile Zola’s fated courtesan, Catherine Hessling heads straight OTT and keeps going until one needs a telescope to peruse her impetuous performance.