James Quandt is a film critic and curator based in Toronto and the editor of monographs on Robert Bresson, Kon Ichikawa, Shohei Imamura, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Thanks to another shut-in year, my Top Ten is culled entirely from the superlative 2021 New York Film Festival.
1+2
INTRODUCTION and IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE (Hong Sangsoo)
Both films commence with a prayer, but while the former proceeds to play Hong’s usual narrative games of Chutes and Ladders, the latter deepens into a poignant contemplation of regret and mortality.
3
THE ROUND-UP (Miklós Jancsó)
The restoration of the year. Jancsó’s 1966 epochal political allegory makes devastating use of Hungary’s birch-stippled steppes, their oppressive horizontals providing the baseline for the director’s stark CinemaScope compositions, rendered less in black-and-white than in obsidian-and-ash.
4
AHED’S KNEE (Nadav Lapid)
An act of mourning for the director’s beloved mother, who was crucial to both his art (as his longtime editor) and his ideological formation, that culminates in an excoriating denunciation of the state of Israel, increasingly unlivable in Lapid’s estimation.
5
IL BUCO (Michelangelo Frammartino)
Surprisingly schematic, this exquisite account of an expedition of speleologists to explore a Calabrian cave in 1961 predictably features a Frammartino bestiary—stalwart mules and inquisitive cows who prove more engaging than the young spelunkers.
6
ÎNTREGALDE (Radu Muntean)
The usually urban Romanian auteur Muntean departs Bucharest for the picturesque environs of Transylvania, where a vanload of humanitarian volunteers learn that virtue is not its own reward but a precondition for calamity.
7
FLEE (Jonas Poher Rasmussen)
I am usually averse to animation, but this affecting chronicle of a family escaping Afghanistan brilliantly incorporates newsreel footage to trenchant effect.
8
RETURNING TO REIMS (Jean-Gabriel Périot)
Périot’s adaptation of Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir dubiously qualifies as loose or free—it replaces the gay male narrator with an asexual female voice, for instance—but its virtuosic deployment of archival clips from movies, newsreels, and TV to illustrate the vicissitudes of the French working class and leftist politics over the past seven decades goes a long way toward disguising its troubling deviations.
9
UNCLENCHING THE FISTS (Kira Kovalenko)
The strongest of the year’s many fine debuts, this obdurate portrait of a young woman attempting to escape domestic tyranny in Ossetia is reminiscent of one of the most underrated films of the past decade, Kantemir Balagov’s Closeness (2017).
10
HUNDSSTERN STEIGT AB (DOG STAR DESCENDING) (Aykan Safoğlu)
Family memoirs figured prominently in this year’s slate of experimental films, and Safoğlu’s poetic recollection of attending a German school in Istanbul in preparation for eventual emigration, a tight braid of historical and personal memory, proved the most impressive.