“My Golden Days” [Review]
If you exclude his dreadful 2013 English-language debut “Jimmy P.,” we hadn’t had a new film from the mostly wonderful French helmer Arnaud Desplechin since “A Christmas Tale” in 2008, so anyone who loves his work was excited by the arrival of “My Golden Days” at Cannes last year, and subsequently in theaters earlier this year. And they were not disappointed. A spiritual sequel/prequel to 1996’s “My Sex Life…Or How I Got Into An Argument,” it’s a gorgeous coming-of-age picture following the younger version of Paul Dédalus, played in a framing device by Mathieu Amalric but in the past by striking newcomer Quentin Dolmaire, as he flirts with espionage, and develops an on-off relationship with his sister’s younger friend, Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet). It feels at times like the sort-of ultimate Desplechin film, filled with nods to his earlier work and the warmth and humanity that the best of it represents, while also revealing a gorgeous tangle of love, heartbreak, pain and memory that, despite a relatively brisk two-hour runtime, makes you feel like you’ve devoured a dense novel.
“The Nice Guys” [Review]
It’s hard not to take the box-office underperformance of “The Nice Guys” personally: It’s a big commercial movie starring two big movie stars that’s leaps and bounds better than any of its blockbuster competition this summer, and yet audiences seemed irritatingly uninterested in turning up to see it. But screw the general public: Shane Black’s third film as director got made, and it’s brilliant. A similarly convoluted crime caper as “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” but set in the 1970s, it sees hired muscle Russell Crowe and inept PI Ryan Gosling team up to crack a case involving a disappearing girl, with the aid of Gosling’s daughter (Angourie Rice). The two leads are better than either have been in years, and play off each other unexpectedly well, with the film culminating in what Russ Fischer’s review for us called “an almost Rube Goldberg-esque sequence of comedy/action scenarios,” with Black’s direction taking a big leap forward from earlier movies too. In fact, this thrilling, darkly funny tale might be Black’s “high-water mark as director, and a feast for audiences ready to take a ride deep into genre-blending territory.” That more weren’t ready to take that plunge suggests that they just didn’t deserve it.
“The Wailing” [Review]
In some ways, it’s a shame that Na Hong-jin‘s “The Wailing” bowed so soon after its Cannes Midnight slot (the film had already opened in Na’s native Korea, where it quickly became one of country’s biggest-ever indigenous box-office hits) as it might have benefitted from a little more time for buzz to build — certainly, we’d have been banging the drum every chance we got. A fantastic, fantastical supernatural thriller that makes up in invention and thrills what it lacks in strict narrative logic, it’s both recognizably a film from the director of “The Chaser” and “The Yellow Sea” (both excellent) and a progression. Particularly, it turns out, in terms of the director’s use of humor, albeit of the blackest kind — it’s a commodity in short supply in those twisty, jagged, often nasty previous outings, but here it brings a self-aware zaniness to the sensory-overload story of reanimated corpses, shamans, ghosts, demons, occultist rituals, and so on. In case we were in any doubt as to which national cinema was producing the most genuinely inventive and entertaining genre fare right now, “The Wailing” seals the deal — it’s Korea, folks.
“A War” [Review]
As a director, Tobias Lindholm, also the writer behind Danish TV phenomenon “Borgen” and co-writer of “The Hunt,” is now three for three, at least in our books. And he has evolved a distinctive, muscular style and a fascination with enclosed, volatile situations: His debut “R” is a bruising prison drama, while follow-up “A Hijacking” dealt with a hostage situation on a Danish freighter taken over by Somali pirates. In “A War” — which, like his previous outings, stars Pilou Asbaek (recent recruit to the “Games of Thrones” team) — the enclosure is more psychological than literal, but no less real. It’s the story of an army captain who makes a split-second decision during combat duty in Afghanistan and then faces the fallout, in the form of a war-crimes tribunal back in Copenhagen. As desperately compelling as anything Lindholm has made, it’s at once a sobering investigation into the moral strain that war puts on the men and women on its frontlines, and an intimate study of a decent family man trying to come to terms with actions he undertook for only the most noble of reasons.
“The Witch” [Review]
For all the ways that Sundance sensation and subsequent arthouse breakout hit “The Witch” is a new phenomenon — from first-time director Robert Eggers, it’s an austere, immaculately researched period piece, complete with borderline incomprehensible New England argot and accents — it also reminded us of that most traditional of horror basics: It’s absolutely bloody terrifying. Set within a family who’ve been excommunicated from their puritan village and go to live on a small farmstead near a forest, there are shades of fairy tale and folk story within the film’s classic archetypes (the off-limits forest that exerts a seductive lure on the children, the doomed baby, the titular creature made up partly of actual glimpses but mostly of childhood nightmares), but Eggers approaches it all with a kind of deeply invested seriousness that makes it feel completely fresh. Also showcasing a breakout performance from newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy (along with standout turns from Kate Dickie and a goat), “The Witch” is remarkable, in these po-mo, self-aware times, for a thrilling kind of confidence in its complete sobriety: It’s what makes the scares, when they come, land so uncannily deep in the pit of the stomach.
And there are plenty more beyond our 20 favorites that’s been worth checking out. Some of the ones that only just missed the list included Disney megahits “Zootopia” and “The Jungle Book;” John Carney’s musical “Sing Street,” a film as charming as its director is apparently not about his former cast members; striking microbudget indie “Krisha,” and Amos Gitai’s powerful, Venice-approved docudrama “Rabin, The Last Day.”
We also liked Icelandic comedy-drama “Rams,” Pablo Trapero’s crime pic “The Clan,” Gallic animation “April And The Extraordinary World,” Cannes-acclaimed “The Measure Of A Man,” Brazilian rodeo drama “Neon Bull,” charming Susan Sarandon comedy “The Meddler,” French comedy “Marguerite,” sexy, sunny Luca Guadagnino film “A Bigger Splash,” and Ewan McGregor as Jesus and the Devil in “Last Days In The Desert.”
More divisive, but with some fans on staff, were the Coens’ starry, melancholy “Hail, Caesar!,” meta-superhero pic “Deadpool,” Jia Zhangke’s latest “Mountains May Depart,” SXSW winner “Creative Control,” Terrence Malick’s “Knight Of Cups,” Matteo Garrone’s fantasy “Tale Of Tales,” Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in “Miles Ahead,” and, most of all, Ben Wheatley’s J.G. Ballard adaptation “High-Rise,” a film loathed by some senior staff and adored by others. Oh, and we’ll be covering documentaries in a separate list very soon.
There’s plenty more great stuff to come this year, so stay tuned for our verdicts on everything from the new Scorsese to the new Star Wars. And let us know what your own favorites were in the comments.