14th Place: A Quiet Passion
“It's not often that a literary biopic fully works as cinema—writers, almost by definition, lead visually uninteresting lives devoid of physical drama unless your idea of riveting kineticism is the image of someone staring sadly at a blank page—but when one does, it's a cause for celebration. A Quiet Passion is, as proclaimed, quiet, but it stirs with a love of art, and the inextricable connection in the heart of the artist between the life force and creative work.
“While it's a film with no weak links whatsoever, in the interests of brevity the two main players will suffice to highlight: writer-director Terence Davies' cinema is one that is equally theatre, painting, and poetry, yet wholly cinematic. It's a vision of cinema as art, and art as cinema, exquisitely rendered and so fully, warmly alive that invites its audience in, in a friendly embrace. All this would collapse without a centerpiece, which is Cynthia Nixon's performance as Emily Dickinson. It's a stage actor's work in a film that requires just that, creating in full a great American poet without breathing down the back of the audience's neck that they're to gaze upon A Great American Poet and genuflect. Nixon's Dickinson is the most wondrous subject of attention there is: a full human being.
“A Quiet Passion is a brilliant, erudite film about a great artist, and it's also a ruefully funny movie about a woman who could kind of take or leave most people. It's bursting with a love of language, and a love for those who shape it, like clay, into the stuff that lives on forever. It's a great film, and one that shouldn't slip through the cracks of history.” ~ Danny Bowes
26th Place: Mudbound
"The American dream: earn a little money, buy a bit of land, and build yourself a place to call 'Home.' Is the dream achievable? For some, maybe, but for others the enterprise is a Sisyphean chore, a never ending struggle against the land, its inhabitants, and its history.
"Mudbound, written by Rees and Virgil Williams, and directed by Rees, is a study in struggle. Two families, the McAllens and the Jacksons - one white, one black - share a plot of farm land in Northern Mississippi. Pride and prejudice, despair and hope, are all hallmarks of a story that is ultimately about how we set about establishing a place in the world we can call our own. How we fight to express an identity that is uniquely our own, and how the world fights back when it thinks that identity has crossed a predetermined line.
"On the surface it is a story all too common; a story of racial relations that have echoed through film and literature in many thousands of tales. But, thanks in large part to the subtle and sure-handed direction of Dee Rees, with a gorgeous visual assist from cinematographer Rachel Morrison, what could have been a heavy handed exercise became, instead, an almost poetic ode to the characters and characteristics that shape this country to this very day. It is an eternal struggle, it seems, one destined to trap us all in the mud, forever damning us to dream in brown." ~ Donald G. Carder
35th Place: On the Beach at Night Alone
“The Korean master Hong Sang-soo had a breakout year in 2017, premiering three great films – On the Beach at Night Alone, Claire’s Camera, and The Day After – and garnering both acclaim and US distribution for all three of them. The latter two will be released in 2018, but On the Beach at Night Alone feels both of a piece with and yet distinct from its coequals, and not only because it was released the year it premiered.
“Hong’s style – that of single-take conversations punctuated by conspicuous pans and zooms, mercurial relationships between men and women, and soju-sodden outbursts amid naturalistic dialogue – is so recognizable, but it always varies in fascinating ways from film to film. Informed to no small extent by his experiences as a member of the film industry, they always take on some veneer of self-referentiality (if not autobiography), something that On the Beach at Night Alone takes almost to the limit.
“The film, in its portrait of an actress (played by Hong’s muse Kim Min-hee) essentially in hiding after her brief dalliance with a director is exposed, obviously invites comparisons with Hong’s real-life affair with Kim. But it almost seems more productive to take the film in the context of an entire career rather than the past few years; if this – along with the films he has made since 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, almost all of which feature Kim – signals a new phase of his career, it is nevertheless deeply, vitally indebted to his other work.
“Like many of his films, it takes place in two parts, the first set in a self-imposed exile in Hamburg, and the second taking place an indeterminate amount of time later in a resort town in Korea. The chronology appears to be straightforward, unlike many of Hong’s other works, but the implication that the first may just be a dream or even a film within the film is never far from the viewer’s mind.
“What makes this, to my mind, one of the best films of a career defined by its uniformly excellent quality is the level of examination and emotion on display. It is at once among his most even-keeled, almost placid works and among his most self-lacerating, but the emotions never feel telegraphed or forced whatsoever. They emerge out of Kim’s extraordinary performance, characterized by such control and ambiguity that every moment feels charged with a simmering undercurrent.
“It is enlivening and gratifying to see one of my favorite directors continuing to flourish and develop, and the final image, that of a slow release and acceptance, seems emblematic of that. Infinite possibilities within a single framework is Hong’s MO, and so many grace notes, so many conversations only make the power of On the Beach at Night Alone more mysterious, yet more palpable.” ~ Ryan Swen
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