Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers) brings glamorous style to familiar spy-movie clichés with Cliff Walkers, a knotty 1930s-set espionage saga in which four Chinese communist agents sneak into Japan-occupied Manchuria to smuggle out the sole survivor of a torture camp. This quartet splits up into couples to achieve their covert aim, only to be immediately and constantly beset by encounters with comrades who may be double (or triple?) agents. Be it early shots from the perspective of its parachuting-through-trees protagonists, or a snowy attempt to infiltrate a metropolitan gala, Zhang blends Hitchcockian suspense with Dr. Zhivago beauty, all while simultaneously shouting out to (among others) Charlie Chaplin and Sergio Leone. Virtually every convention in the Spy Fiction 101 book makes an appearance at some point, but the thrill is in the director’s orchestration of numerous set pieces that are all the more suspenseful for being somewhat inscrutable—a situation caused by plotting that keeps identities, and relationships, fuzzy and in flux. It may be dedicated to the Communist Revolution, but its real heart belongs to classic Hollywood.
Things go horribly wrong in The Vigil for Yakov (Dave Davis), a young man who—having left his ultra-orthodox Jewish community for a secular Brooklyn life—accepts a job sitting vigil for a recently deceased Holocaust survivor. That task not only returns him to the neighborhood (and faith) he rejected, but puts him in the crosshairs of an evil demonic force that, it turns out, plagued both the dead man over whom he watches, and his wife (Lynn Cohen), who behaves creepily around David in her darkly lit Borough Park home. Keith Thomas’ feature debut has a great sense of its insular milieu as well as the trauma and stress of escaping an extremist religious environment, and the writer/director drums up suspense from set pieces that exploit silence to eerie effect. Davis’ harried countenance is the glue holding this assured thriller together, lending it an empathetic anguish that helps cast its action as a portrait of confronting the (personal and historical) past as a means of transcending, and escaping, it.
Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci don’t just craft indelible portraits of affection and grief in Supernova; they suggest, in the stillness and silence between them, the invisible but unbreakable ties that bind them together. Harry Macqueen’s understated drama charts Firth’s Sam and Tucci’s Tusker as they travel in their RV across the English countryside, their nominal destination a comeback concert for classical pianist Sam and their purpose a farewell tour for Tusker, who’s beset by irreversible early onset dementia. Their story is light on bombshell incidents but heavy on quiet, barely suppressed anguish and fear, both of which are kept at bay—if also amplified—by their enduring amour. Macqueen’s gentle and deft writing is in harmony with his imagery of his pastoral setting, allowing his performers—Firth defiant and pent-up; Tucci brave and terrified—to fully embody their protagonists’ fraught emotional circumstances. Supernova understands the tragedy and triumph of love, and the way in which our lives, at best, shine brightly before burning out, their dying embers touching and transforming those left behind.
22) The Dig
Archaeology is the means by which the past is resurrected in The Dig, a based-on-real-events drama about the famous 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo, which unearthed innumerable 6th-century Anglo-Saxon finds contained within an intact ship. Driven by the “hunch” of Sutton Hoo’s owner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), local excavator Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) searches for secrets buried in the mounds on her estate. Working from Moira Buffini’s script (based on John Preston’s book of the same name), director Simon Stone crafts a supple portrait of our quest to revive yesterday through the investigations of today. As his film expands to address the impending threat of WWII, and the way in which it impacts the circumstances of Edith’s RAF-bound cousin Rory (Johnny Flynn) and the wife (Lily James) of a researcher (Ben Chaplin), it also becomes a poignant examination of life’s impermanence, and the importance of seizing – and cherishing – whatever brief moments of joy and love one can. Its exquisite visuals (often indebted to Days of Heaven) enhance its graceful storytelling, as do sterling performances from all involved, led by Fiennes in one of his most understated – and quietly moving – performances to date.
21) Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
Jia Zhangke investigates the ongoing transformation of China—and the inextricable relationship between the past and the present, the urban and rural—through the prism of three famed authors in Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue. Guided by interviews with writers Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong, all of whom grew up in the same Shanxi province as Jia (albeit in different decades), the director examines the way in which their own travails before, during and after Mao’s Cultural Revolution helped inform their feelings about their fractured families, their remote countryside hometowns, and themselves—pressing and complicated issues they address through their artwork. That they recount their own biographical narratives here only further underlines Jia’s focus on the act of storytelling as a means of understanding, processing, expressing, and passing down unique and universal human experiences. Split into chapters and shot with a lyrical focus on contemplative faces and serene, changing landscapes, Jia’s snaking, inquisitive non-fiction work proves a subtle rumination on shifting individual and national Chinese identity.
With The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller set new standards for visually and narratively inventive animated features, and they continue that hot streak with The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a wild tale of warfare between a family and a legion of robots controlled by an angry outdated AI (Olivia Coleman). This unlikely battle breaks out during the Mitchells’ cross-country trip to deliver wannabe-auteur Katie (Abbi Jacobson) to college, which itself is instigated by dad Rick (Danny McBride), who’s desperate to reconnect with his from-different-worlds girl. Father-daughter rifts are at the heart of writers/directors Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe’s adventure, which blends CGI, hand-drawn and live-action material to create a zany rainbow-hued aesthetic that’s constantly surprising and inherently attuned to 21st-century online reality, where cartoons, memes and DIY styles reign supreme. Aided by an expert voice cast and a script that piles on gags and one-liners with verve—highlighted by a showdown with a legion of evil Furbys—it’s a manic ode to accepting and embracing the future while retaining bonds with the past.
18) Nobody
Bob Odenkirk takes one hell of a beating in Nobody—and, per a joke made by his Hutch Mansell, you should see the other guys. Director Ilya Naishuller’s film is an obvious riff on John Wick, concerned as it is with a non-descript and seemingly meek family man who, following a home invasion, taps back into his government-assassin true nature and goes on a rampage that eventually inflames the ire of a Russian gangster (Aleksei Serebryakov). Yet a lack of novelty is hardly necessary in light of Odenkirk’s masterful performance as a man brought low by self-deception and, consequently, resurrected by facing his inherent angry identity. Odenkirk’s ability to handle the barrage of brutal set pieces thrown his way is itself part of this affair’s conceit, and yet once he proves his action-movie mettle, the proceedings lose none of their verve, delivering gory mayhem with a tongue planted firmly in cheek. The late participation of both Christopher Lloyd and RZA only enhance the goofy charm of this R-rated romp, which goes for broke—and breaks a lot of bones in the process—to amusingly ferocious ends.
The sound of chopping wood and cocking pistol hammers are incessant in The Killing of Two Lovers—jarring and ominous sonic punctuations that do much to augment the roiling suspense of writer/director/editor Robert Machoian’s tormented domestic drama. In a barren Utah town where the sky seems to weigh down upon its inhabitants, David (Clayne Crawford) strives to deal with an unwanted separation from his wife Nikki (Sepideh Moafi), who lives in their old home with their four kids, and is sharing a bed with Derek (Chris Coy), much to David’s chagrin. Opening with the sight of David pointing a gun at his wife and her lover in bed, the film proceeds to detail its protagonist’s efforts to mend his marriage while coping with the barely suppressed killing rage ignited by his circumstances. The struggle to keep inner turmoil from begetting external bloodshed is brought to poignantly tumultuous life by Crawford, who embodies David with an empathetic hurt, rage and desperation that’s mesmerizing, as well as by Machoian’s direction, full of long takes and hardscrabble compositions that place an emphasis on anguished faces and interpersonal dynamics.
Loss leads to retreat for Edee (Robin Wright), a woman who responds to an unspecified tragedy by moving to a remote Wyoming cabin in Land. Willfully cut off from civilization, Edee finds her new survivalist existence more than a bit difficult, what with the bitter cold, the sparse food (courtesy of fishing), and the occasional outhouse run-in with a bear. In her directorial debut, Wright employs compositions that call understated attention to the alienated anguish of her protagonist, whom she embodies as a fragmented (and potentially suicidal) woman with a sorrow as deep and cold as the vast wilderness. A spark comes at her moment of wintery death courtesy of Miguel (Demián Bichir), a rancher who revives her first literally, and then figuratively, teaching her to hunt (as her personal Yoda) and reminding her of the vital human connection that gives everything purpose. Guided by Wright’s expressively interior performance and Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam’s spartan script, the film captures the universal desire for escape in the face of grief, and the way resurrection often comes from accepting death as an inescapable facet of life.
15) This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
Faces don’t come more sorrowful than that of Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo), an 80-year-old woman whose solitary life in a rural African village is rendered lonelier still by the unexpected death of her miner son. This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection begins with that man failing to return home, and ends with Mantoa reuniting with the dearly departed for whom she pines. In between, it recounts—via the narration of Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha’s lesiba-playing sage—a quasi-mystical fable of grief and loss, as Mantoa and her compatriots face a crisis of disconnection thanks to news that a dam will soon flood their land and, consequently, the cemeteries where their dead slumber. Through boxy-framed imagery that’s at once gritty and ethereal, and a score that cries out with its protagonist’s misery, Lesotho-born director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese conjures a lightly magic-realist mood of mourning and yearning. Disaster born from “progress” arrives at regular intervals for these forlorn individuals, none of whom are more distressed than Mantoa, embodied with a mixture of ferocity, despair and determination by the magnetic Mhlongo.
Acclaimed East Village artist David Wojnarowicz spit politicized fire with every painting, song and piece of writing he produced, and director Chris McKim’s Wojnarowicz: F--k You F-ggot F--ker captures his spirit with piercing urgency. Composed of Wojnarowicz’s home movies, audio recordings and voicemails, as well as collages of his art and snapshots of NYC in the ‘80s and early ‘90s that are embellished with interview snippets from colleagues, lovers, curators and admirers, the documentary is a tribute to an outspoken and unconventional (and, at times, controversial) queer firebrand who spoke truth to power right up until his 1992 death from AIDS, which itself became a late focus of both his output and activist energy. Locating the intersection of personal, cultural and political trauma that made him who he was—beginning with an abusive upbringing that he fled at an early age, to his time as a street hustler and, then, a gallery star—McKim’s film is an immersive peek inside the iconoclast’s mind and heart, its eclectic form exuding the mixture of sorrow, warmth and jagged rage that defined Wojnarowicz.
Tall tales about crime, war, power and survival are layered upon each other in Night of the Kings, Philippe Lacôte’s drama about an Ivory Coast prison ruled by an incarcerated kingpin named Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu) who, on the night of the blood moon, demands that a new inmate (Bakary Koné) become a “Roman” and spin a yarn that will last until dawn. The ensuing fable that Roman recounts concerns a local gangster whose blind father was counselor to a queen, and who rose to prominence in the aftermath of a revolution—a legend that boasts echoes with the predicament of Roman himself, trapped as he is in a jail where treacherous schemes are afoot. In both the present and in CGI-enhanced flashbacks, Lacôte conjures an atmosphere that mixes stark City of God-style grit (Fernando Meirelles’ 2002 film is even cited as an influence) with dreamy magical realism, the latter augmented by the many men who surround Roman during his oration, acting out his narrated action with dancer-like movements. Harrowing and lyrical, it’s a film about the transformative and redemptive power of storytelling.
The gig economy gets satirized in oblique, mysterious sci-fi fashion in Lapsis, Noah Hutton’s low-fi tale about a futuristic new exploitative industry. Tired of delivering lost airline luggage to its owners, and in need of money for treatment for his brother Jamie (Babe Wise)—who’s suffering from a chronic-fatigue syndrome known as Omnia—Ray (Dean Imperial) joins millions of Americans in laying cable between giant quantum server cubes in the forested Allegheny mountains. Writer/director/editor Hutton provides myriad clever details about the intricate mechanics of cabling without every quite explaining the larger implications of the business, which serves as the MacGuffin powering this tale of worker subjugation at the hands of a monopolistic tech conglomerate. Hutton’s film is like a blend of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, carefully doling out specifics (and establishing relationships and rebellious plots) while simultaneously leaving answers just out of reach. It’s a balancing act that Hutton pulls off with aplomb, his suggestive widescreen visuals as unnerving as Imperial’s lead performance as desperate-everyman Ray is charismatic.
