2018: Best of world cinema
How does one make a perfectly distilled list of yet another perfect year full of perfect cinema? Hope I made a decent dent at this Sisyphean task, in no particular order, of course.
TheWildPearTree: After two monstrously hypnotic epics like Winter Sleep and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan finishes his loose trilogy with this film about an idealistic literature loving man’s struggle for his identity in an increasingly strife-ridden Turkey. It’s almost as if Ceylan took over the baton from Béla Tarr and they share the same auteur signature: Making films about everything and nothing at once. Phantom Thread: This movie about a gifted fashion designer’s cranky mannerisms (Daniel Day-Lewis) in Fifties’ England has to be 2018’s funniest, just like how Manchester by the Sea was the funniest movie of 2017. Only Paul Thomas Anderson could have made something about an artist and his muse so innovatively depraved. It’s only fitting that Day-Lewis bade farewell to cinema after emitting such morbid irresistibility on screen. First Reformed: Paul Schrader’s tale that beautifully blends religion and eco-terrorism is a disturbing watch for the way it unfolds. The film’s solar plexus is the crunchingly powerful role from Ethan Hawke as a devout reverend who finds his faith shaken in the wake of a suicide. If Schrader can find his mojo again at the ripe age of 71, maybe there’s hope for all late bloomers out there.
The Rider: Chloé Zhao’s sophomore effort about a gifted rodeo who is grounded because of a fatal brain injury in Nowhere Specified, USA, is a beauty. Brady Jandreau plays the titular character with just the right amount of understatedness. Also, I wonder when was the last time horses were shown in their complete equine glory on screen like Chloé Zhao manages to do here. Milla: I watched this truly haunting and sensorily enveloping movie about a young French couple and their perennial quest with tragedies at New York’s Anthology Film Archives. Director Valérie Massadian shoots the movie in such a way that shot after shot can be hung in a gallery. The voluptuous visuals of coastal France and the sheer celebration of heightened ordinary are to be experienced on the big screen, something I was lucky enough to immerse myself in.
McQueen: If you have time for watching only one documentary from 2018, make sure it’s this one about a tormented British genius who made haute couture street-like until he killed himself in 2010. Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui piece together the story by assembling an array of super interesting talking heads who have known the fashion designer from close quarters. YouWereNeverReallyHere: Lynne Ramsay is an expert in making the quintessential antiChristmas movies, and she continues in the same vein with her latest one about a war veteran suffering from PTSD who rescues runaway girls in exchange for money. There’s a moody incandescence to the proceedings that makes the seedy side of New York look like a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch painting. Joaquin Phoenix is a revelation in this nimble adaptation of a novella by the same name by Jonathan Ames. Revenge: Imagine Quentin Tarantino trying his hand at Khoon Bhari Maang and you have this French rape-and-revenge thriller directed by Coralie Forgeat. It’s not an easy watch but in the age of #MeToo, it’s a pitch perfect tale of the saying, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Leave No Trace: A war veteran dad leaves the confines of urban life and starts living in the woods with his teenage daughter only to find trouble in their makeshift paradise in the form of civic authorities who find the arrangement farfetched. Director Debra Granik makes her movie, set in Portland, look spectacularly scenic, and Ben Foster as the troubled man is inspired casting. If this doesn’t rack up Oscar nominations, it would be gross injustice.
Widows: SteveMcQueen’s drama-thriller is chocka-block with a cameo-rich cast that includes Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell, Daniel Kaluuya and Liam Neeson. Despite that, there’s no murder on this narrative express because four women, including the always excellent Viola Davis, know exactly how to pull off a heist they would be least expected to carry out.