Cinematheque salutes the decade’s best films
The Cinematheque looks back at the 2010s with an epic series of screenings beginning this week. Artistic director Jim Sinclair and programming associate Shaun Inouye each picked 10 titles to represent the best of the decade. Here’s the opening week’s lineup:
TONI ERDMANN
(2016) An unhappy overachiever is forced to deal with her prankster dad in Maren Ade’s woolly comedy-drama. Universal acclaim followed its Cannes debut, but the Georgia Straight dissented. Ken Eisner wrote: “the cast is terrific, but many improvisations drag, dulling the few inspired moments that pop up along the way. Essentially, Toni Erdmann is a bleak look at the virtues of indiscipline. But that’s a message this ‘comedy’ takes far too seriously.” Sunday, January 12 (7 p.m.)
THE ACT OF KILLING
(2012) It asks a great deal of the viewer, certainly more than some are prepared to give. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s doc, the genocidal thugs of Indonesia’s antiCommunist purge of the mid-’60s participate in increasingly surreal Hollywood-style reenactments of their bloody crimes. Oppenheimer told the Straight’s Allan MacInnis: “There was this shamelessness that came from feeling like the whole world supported them, and this openness because they were still in power and had never been forced to admit what they did was wrong. It was as though I’d wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust and the Nazis were still in power.” Thursday, January 9 (6:30 p.m.); Monday, January 13 (8 p.m.)
ZAMA
(2018) The first feature from
Argentina’s Lucrecia Martel in almost a decade, this haunting, elliptical period drama—based on Antonio di Benedetto’s novel about a colonial officer stuck in liminal South America—was worth every moment of the long wait. Wrote Eisner: “the merging of raw nature and well-researched colonial history with magic realism tinged by Kafka, Camus, and Borges is fascinating throughout.” Thursday, January 9 (8:45 p.m.); Saturday, January 11 (6:30 p.m.)
UNDER THE SKIN
(2013) Alien Scarlett Johansson cruises Glasgow for human flesh in Jonathan Glazer’s spellbinding flick. In a film stuffed with risks, the most audacious might have been the decision to send the star into the general public, with hidden cameras monitoring Johansson’s seductive game with unwitting nonactors. In an interview with the Straight, Glazer declined to reveal which scenes were “real”, adding: “I think the fact that you’re asking me the question is a good sign.”
FORCE MAJEURE
(2014) Nothing in the last 10 years aced the comedy of discomfort as effectively as Ruben Östlund’s feature, in which a flash act of cowardice shatters the perfect family. The Straight described Östlund as “a sadistic behavioural scientist” with a “wicked sense of humour”. In a recorded speech sent to the Vancouver Film Critics Circle, the filmmaker expressed the purpose behind Force Majeure. “To increase the percentage of divorce in society,” he said.
The Cinematheque’s Best of the Decade series runs until February 17. See the full schedule at www.thecinematheque.ca/.