2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #1

And the 2016 Golden Muriel Award for Best Picture goes to…

[246 points / 23 votes]

“Jim Jarmusch’s sublime Paterson is a movie in which every unobtrusive, offhand moment seems to matter. I’ve always run hot and cold on this director’s brand of deadpan observation—Stranger Than Paradise, Night On Earth and Dead Man are better than fine, but I find movies like Down by Law and Coffee and Cigarettes close to insufferable, the nadir being The Limits of Control, in which the director precisely locates the dead zone of his title and practically disappears in a black hole of Eurotrash cool. But Jarmusch’s next movie was an astounding rebound, the dazzling, achingly muted Only Lovers Left Alive, and the analog-only sensibility of the vampires in that film feels strangely of a piece with this new work. Paterson looks an awful lot like a masterpiece to these eyes.

“Among the general choruses of praise for this film, I have heard dissent, objections to what has been perceived as shallow celebration of an unremarkable milieu as processed through the usual detached urban romanticism that has been Jarmusch’s bread and butter. But in much the same way the director managed to worm his way inside the sympathies of centuries-old bloodsuckers who couldn’t help but absorb the effects of a developing culture over (lots and lots of) time, Paterson reveals itself as not so much a hipster’s evocation of a working-class hero as it is one imbued with an acuity which illuminates, with a precision that’s never precious, the modest and poetic pursuits of its title character, played by Adam Driver, a Paterson, N.J. bus driver also happens to be named Paterson. (First name or last is our guess.) In Paterson Jarmusch manages to evoke an ostensibly familiar setting that’s attentive but also respectful instead of just acting as fodder for arch observations about the numbness of the lower middle class. This is one of the only movies I can think of in which the routine of the everyday isn’t portrayed as soul-killing drudgery but instead as a source of inspiration. (Paterson toils on a poem throughout the film, the words of which are written in the air in halting rhythms that duplicate his struggle to evoke imagery and the sound of words working together.) And all of this without feeling the necessity to draping its protagonist in a cloak of everyday sainthood along the way.

“Taking its cue from Paterson himself, the movie’s persona is almost preternaturally serene, ushering us to an understanding of the way he sees the world and intensifying those occasional moments which are suddenly anything but tranquil or untroubled. Paterson, and Paterson, is almost subconsciously intuitive in regard to the ephemeral connections that seem to reverberate through the air largely unprocessed-- there are instances when the viewer’s Spidey-sense tingles with moments that in other hands would connect all too clearly. But in Jarmusch’s that tingling is left to resonate, to form independent angles and attitudes inside the viewer’s head. The movie has an offhanded fixation on twins—Paterson and Paterson, N.J., Paterson and Paterson, the William Carlos Williams poem that seeds the bus driver’s soul. And early on, on his nightly walk to the neighborhood bar accompanied by stubbornly lovable bulldog (a hilarious performance by Nellie, as Marvin, who Jarmusch rewards with a great payoff joke involving the bus driver’s mailbox), Paterson encounters twin brothers named Sam and Dave, who themselves add little to the movie beyond another thread in its observational tapestry, but whose presence sensitizes us to the curious longing in Paterson that is beginning to develop. There can be no doubt that Paterson unfailingly loves and supports his wife (Golshifteh Farahani), an effervescent dabbler in homespun creativity who designs their modest home with her painterly whims and fills the air with bake-sale cookies and dreams of being a country-music star. But he has an unarticulated hope for a connection with someone else in his bustling, preoccupied workday who is sympathetic with his way of processing the world, and it is on this plane that Jarmusch’s twinning motif pays of in an ephemerally lovely way.

“The Italian poster for Paterson features the catchphrase ‘La bellezza spesso si trova nelle piccolle cose,’ which translates to ‘Beauty is often found in the little things,’ an exquisite distillation of Paterson’s, and Paterson’s beating heart. Jim Jarmusch’s unassumingly gorgeous and expansive movie locates that beauty. It’s the story of a man who searches for, and eventually finds, a measure of fulfillment in work, and in love, and simply by keeping his eyes and ears and soul open to the quotidian wonders of being alive.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio

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2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #2 (as well as Best Documentary)

In Best Film – 243 points / 22 votes

In Best Documentary – 133 points / 30 votes

“First of all, let’s get that pesky film-versus-television debate out of the way. On an aesthetic level, I suppose I understand the gripes from the ‘O.J.: Made in America is TV, not film’ camp. Those fades to black are clearly meant to be commercial breaks, which may well throw some people off in a theater; and as far as the filmmaking goes, Ezra Edelman’s nonfiction epic hews pretty closely to a fairly conventional talking-heads style familiar to faithful ESPN 30 for 30 watchers, the nonfiction series in which the film debuted on television. And maybe the questions surrounding the fact that O.J.: Made in America qualified for year-end poll and awards-season consideration simply because it played for one week in one theater in New York City—which, in some people’s minds, adds up to little more than category fraud—are worth pondering, especially as plenty of other films—like Jonathan Demme’s Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids, which premiered on Netflix—were disqualified for not playing in any theaters for a week. Maybe we all need to rethink those qualifications in the first place, especially with more people seeing movies through streaming platforms instead of in theaters these days.

“In the end, though, O.J.: Made in America, as with any work of art, deserves to be considered as an experience unto itself, regardless of the medium in which it was consumed. And Edelman’s film (yes, you’ll see me refer to it as a ‘film’ from here on in; deal with it) is, by any measure, quite the experience. O.J.: Made in America is so consistently gripping throughout its almost-eight-hour length that it’s perhaps all too easy to be suspicious of how effortless Edelman makes it all seem. After all, the story of O.J. Simpson has just about all the tried-and-true elements of great drama: a rise-and-fall arc, a charismatic yet complex and possibly deeply disturbed protagonist, a courtroom drama in the middle of it all with a host of colorful supporting players and a whirlwind of interlocking and/or diverging motives, and so on. One might uncharitably argue that Edelman has hold of a great subject, and that O.J.: Made in America works simply because he doesn’t screw it up.

“But such faint praise would be doing a grave disservice to Edelman’s startling achievement here. Surely, it took a filmmaker of deep vision to not only see the broader implications of the ‘Trial of the Century,’ but to boldly give those implications their full exploratory due. Edelman isn’t afraid to spin off into lengthy tangents that dive into, among other subjects, the fraught history of American race relations, especially in Simpson’s own home city of Los Angeles, all of which would feed into the murder trial itself, turning it into even more a referendum on racial progress in this country than it was about discovering whether Simpson really murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In some ways, Edelman sees O.J. Simpson the way most of the U.S. did during that trial: as a symbol, though in Edelman’s case, it’s one with the full weight of not just American racism, but the American Dream itself and how it can curdle in an instant.

“Still, all told, this is the story about one particular individual and his own personal experience, and Edelman knows that to give us the full dawning visceral awareness of just how high he climbed and how steeply he fell, he has to give us his entire story, without any shortcuts: from celebrated athlete to plain celebrity, and from tabloid notoriety to eventual has-been scraping the bottom of the barrel for any remnants of his previous fame. At the very least, O.J.: Made in America offers a sterling example of the inadequacy of any two- or three-hour biopic to bottle up a person’s life into an easily digestible package, especially one as full of twists and turns as O.J. Simpson’s, and especially one as chock full of unsettling connotations for race and class in America.

“Ultimately, it’s Edelman’s thoroughness that mightily impresses. But let’s not give short shrift to O.J.: Made in America’s brilliance as filmmaking. In his Chicago Reader review of Reds, Dave Kehr talked about what he saw as Warren Beatty’s skillful evocation of the ‘novelistic effect’ in his film: ‘the network of delayed effects, sustained motifs, developing characters, and echoing ideas that gives a great novel its power.’ This is precisely the artistic arena Edelman is playing in with O.J.: Made in America, to equally powerful effect. Seeing, say, home-movie footage of O.J. Simpson with a protege re-appear on-screen about an hour later in a starkly different and more sobering context, it’s clear that we’re in the hands of a sure-handed filmmaker who is shaping his material for maximum revelatory dramatic impact. O.J.: Made in America doesn’t need to reinvent any aesthetic wheels: It already has the richness of a great piece of long-form journalism, one that, considering our current political climate, will probably still resound for years, maybe even decades, to come.” ~ Kenji Fujishima

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2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #3

[243 points / 21 votes]

“Moonlight is a gloriously, painfully romantic film set in modern-day Miami, following the early life of Little (Alex R. Hibbert), a black gay kid growing up in the hood. Moonlight may be about as modern as a film can get, yet it's reminiscent of classic Hollywood love stories. Moonlight's days are infused with the hot yellow-white of the sun, at once beautiful and unforgiving, and at night, the deepest black of the sky framing the harsh glow from urban streetlights. Throughout are the bright colors of a fable, tiny splashes of aqua and red and gold, royal colors to remind us of ancient tales of romantic conquest. Thanks to director Barry Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton, the film boasts the confidence of long takes in everyday locations, lingering stills in a religious Renaissance style, and deliberate use of washed-out color and unsynchronized sound, knowing that these techniques could easily be blamed on the film's low budget, but doing it anyway, fearlessly, the film's construction mirroring the emotional growth of the young boy whose story it tells.

“Little, about 10 years old when the film opens, struggles with poverty, bullies, and a mother falling into drug abuse, while local drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali) and fellow student Kevin (Jaden Piner) help him navigate a harsh world, in their way. Kevin kindly offers to help toughen Little up by teaching him how to fight; several years later, Kevin does it again, but not kindly, and not until after he and Little, now known by his given name Chiron, have had a fleeting romantic night together on the beach. The third panel of this cinematic triptych finds a 30-something Chiron, again renamed, this time as Black (Trevante Rhodes), driving his way back to Miami after an unexpected call from Kevin (André Holland).

“Just as in classic Hollywood romances, the characters in Moonlight move like they're in a musical, deliberately and gracefully, as the passage of time speeds up and slows down and the space around them bends and stretches, having broken completely free of the science that explains it, instead being powered by the sheer will of emotion. The old-fashioned romance genre is used in a very modern set of circumstances, where traditional tropes -- coming-of-age, lost love, loneliness -- are recontextualized within non-traditional realities such as homophobia, institutionalized racism, violence and poverty. The big minds at the big studios would surely have passed on such a tale, thinking that its themes would alienate most audiences, when in fact the opposite is true: Moonlight is universal.

“That's not to say the film bypasses cinema's past altogether. The adult Kevin is a cook at a diner, something that can't help but be a nod to the dozens of black actors who spent entire decades-long careers playing nothing but background characters in service positions. How many films came out of Hollywood where the only black character was a diner cook or a porter or a butler, who often didn't even have a word of dialogue? Hollywood for decades, and even to an extent now, has contempt for both the non-white actor and the real-world people in the service industry they play.

“In Moonlight, the adult Kevin, whose job at the diner is more about slinging hash than haute cuisine, is a success story, and that success story is both social commentary and a show of the character's strength. At the same time it acknowledges the scores of underdeveloped characters just like him in films of the past, chiding those films a little, asking how dare they consider this job some little nothing that never mattered. It did matter. It always mattered. And here we see, in terms that cannot be denied, that cooking is care and it is love, and you don't have to be of a certain Hollywood-approved demographic for that to be true.

“On the surface, Moonlight sounds like a social commentary film, and it is to a certain degree, but it's also a fine example of modern independent filmmaking that has been deeply influenced by the classics. It's the kind of film that would have been relegated to a specific genre not that long ago -- LGBT film, or black film, or indie film -- and to an extent, it's a bit of a surprise that it wasn't this year, but if nothing else, we should know by now that with Moonlight, the rules very happily do not apply.” ~ Stacia Jones

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #4

[214 points / 22 votes]

“I saw Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By The Sea at the Sundance Film Festival the morning of January 24th, 2016. (Later that afternoon I saw Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. It was a very good day.) I mention this not to sound like a showoff calling ‘firsties,’ but rather to explain just how long I've been living with the film, and the front row seat we festival-goers had for how perceptions change as movies get chewed up by The Thinkpiece Industrial Complex.

“It's difficult to believe that the Oscars used to be held in April, given the endless grind of what's come to be known as ‘Awards Season’ -- which now lasts half-a-year, stretching from the Telluride Film Festival in early September to the Oscars at February's merciful end. During this time there are frontrunners and there are dark horses, with exorbitantly expensive campaigns keeping a cottage industry of nutty pundits in business, struggling to either capture or maintain ‘momentum’ through an endless procession of precursor awards seemingly designed to sap any of the joy and spontaneity out of seeing actors you like dressing up in fancy clothes and giving emotional speeches on television.

"’Momentum’ comes and goes, but the movies stay the same. When I saw Manchester last January I said I didn't think I'd see a better film all year, and I was right. (Silence came awfully close, though.) At that time, Kenneth Lonergan was a Hollywood pariah still in exile after the six-year editing room battle over his sophomore feature Margaret. Casey Affleck was basically Batman's kid brother, struggling to get back into the industry's good graces after he and Joaquin Phoenix's (brilliant) performance art prank I’m Still Here went over like a fart in church. Here was a strong, sad little movie without easy resolutions or even a theatrical distributor -- one that I and most others at those early screenings assumed was destined to be doomed commercially but remembered fondly by film lovers.

“Of course Amazon Studios felt otherwise, buying the film for a jaw-dropping ten million dollars and going on to gross almost five times that at the box office on such a tsunami of hype that my friend Ty Burr's rave review in The Boston Globe was worded as a warning to potential audience members expecting the film to cure their psoriasis and lower their mortgage rates. Manchester had more than ‘momentum,’ it was already ordained as a modern American classic.

“But the problem with our accelerated media culture is that we quickly run out of angles with which to feed the content maw, and attention spans aren't what they used to be. (A lot of the time we in the cultural commentariat have grown tired of arguing about them before they're even released.) These films get picked to the bone during the Bataan Death March to Oscar Night, and contrary takes are what get clicks, which is why you see bizarre headlines calling La La Land ‘fascist’ and such.

“Manchester By The Sea got tagged and dismissed in certain circles as a ‘sad white people’ movie, which I guess is technically accurate as the characters are indeed white and often quite sad. I understand that Trump's election threw a lot of us lefties for a loop, but if you can't feel sympathy for a janitor whose kids died in a fire because he's a member of the white working class then you've got much bigger problems than a movie. The discourse got even sillier and more shrill on the run up to awards, with Lonergan derided as of all things a Hollywood insider and Affleck's checkered personal history dragged into nearly every discussion of the film. I was told by more than one person that Manchester By the Sea is ‘a Trump supporter's Best Picture pick.’ (I guess none of these folks heard of Hacksaw Ridge.)

“Now that the Oscars are finally over things will hopefully settle down and we can go back to having real discussions about the brilliance of these performances and whether or not you dig Lonergan's distracting classical music cues. Despite changes in perception, presidents and thinkpiece trends, Manchester By The Sea is still the same film I loved last January, and it's the kind of movie that will endure for some time.” ~ Sean Burns

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #5

[193 points / 19 votes]

“When talking, or thinking, about Silence, Martin Scorsese’s thirty-years-in-the-making passion project, from the novel by Shusaku Endo, about two Portuguese Catholic missionaries (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) in the 17th century traveling to Japan to both aid the violently persecuted Japanese Catholics and to discover the truth about the fate of Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who, it’s been said, has apostatized and is currently still living in the country under a Japanese name and with a Japanese wife, it is natural, and useful, to think also of The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun, Scorsese’s two earlier, explicitly religious pictures. All three films deal with religious faith, the responsibility to others of men with religious authority, oppression, and violence. Yet what recently occurred to me, and I’m certain I’m nowhere near the first person to think of this, is that the Scorsese film that philosophically, metaphysically, and passionately (if not stylistically) most gracefully, in all sense of the word, matches Silence is Mean Streets, his 1973 film about a low-level gangster played by Harvey Keitel struggling, and pretty much failing in my view, to live up to his understanding of the values of his ingrained Catholicism while continuing, with it must be said little in the way of the kind of remorse that would do anybody any good, his life of crime. Though not especially violent, and apparently not murderous, himself, and even displaying a genuine heart and genuine caring from time to time, Charlie’s, the Keitel character, willingness to not only stay put but also not stand up to any of the crime bosses who might do him good down the line, allows (in a small way, but nonetheless a real one) the violence and murder around him to continue unabated.

“Contrast this with Father Rodrigues, the character played by Andrew Garfield in Silence. Eventually, he and Father Garupe (Driver) are forced to separate in order to not further endanger the Catholic villagers to whom they’ve been bringing the long-craved-for Christian sacraments and blessings (there being no ordained priests in the village). Villagers have been brutally murdered by government officials for not admitting their Catholicism, and this will only continue if they continue to harbor two priests. But soon enough, Father Rodrigues is captured and imprisoned by The Inquisitor (an exquisitely strange and frightening Issei Ogata) who demands one thing only: that Rodrigues, and the Japanese Catholics imprisoned with Rodriques, step on a picture of Christ. This symbolic gesture will count as a renunciation of their religion and they will be free. When all refuse, the Inquisitor begins murdering the Japanese peasants. The only way to save them, Rodrigues is assured by both The Inquisitor and his translator (Tadanobu Asano, giving a performance comprised equally of fierce intelligence and complete moral indifference), is to put his foot on the face of Christ. This is purely symbolic, and it will save their lives. Believing himself to be in Hell, a terrified, furious, sickened Rodrigues continues to refuse. And he does this in the shadow of God’s apparent absence. And the violence continues unabated.

“So in Mean Streets, a man’s faith is too weak to help him or those he cares about, whereas in Silence a man’s faith is, if anything, too strong. Which I find interesting but is nevertheless a gross simplification of both films, especially Silence, a film that is for me is one of the three or four great masterpieces of Scorsese’s career. It’s a film of startling, stomach-turning violence – the opening shot of a Japanese soldier standing by severed heads on a table, the tableau lost and then found every few seconds by thick, drifting fog is one of the most alarming opening shots I’ve ever seen, particularly in a major studio production – as well as terrible bravery, and the beauty of the hope that is the bedrock of true religious faith. Much has been made by some critics, both pro and con the film as a whole, of the arrogance of Father Rodrigues, and of the missionary quest in general (some have also taken the morally grotesque route of insisting that the viewer remember that historically the hands of the Catholic Church aren’t bloodless; therefore, presumably, while we would never condone the beheading of a Japanese peasant only because he’s a Catholic, it is still worth noting etc. etc. etc.). And it’s true that, if The Inquisitor is to be taken as a man of his word (a big if, I might argue, but anyway), Rodrigues would have saved lives by stepping on that picture of Christ. It is also true that those peasants who die because he does not do this were at least under the impression that they could save their own lives by stepping on that picture themselves. Which they didn’t. Rodrigues’s argument, when faced with the accusation that he’s more complicit in their deaths than the actual executioners’, that apostatizing would be a betrayal of the victims and their faith, and would further mean that they’d died in vain, is not the argument of an arrogant man – or at least, of a man who is not merely arrogant – but rather it is the argument of a man who seems to understand death and why the Japanese Catholics died, and were willing to die, better than any of the men who by act or by order are stopping the hearts of poor villagers whose hands are tied behind their backs.

“And as a film, Silence is also rapturous. Garfield’s performance is intense in a way, and with a restraint one doesn’t often associate with intensity, that I wouldn’t have thought him capable. Late in the film, his Rodrigues appears and sounds, honestly, physically and spiritually, pummeled. And yes, he plays a certain arrogance, as well as a love for humanity, and of God, and frustration and prickliness and disgust, and abject, mortal terror. It’s an astounding piece of acting, placed in the middle of one of the most unusual and talented supporting casts that Scorsese has assembled, at least in many years. The characters played by Ogata and Asano have such color and personality. There’s a moment in the film when The Inquisitor and Rodrigues are debating their mutually intractable positions, and Rodrigues says something that deeply disappoints The Inquisitor. Ogata begins to slump in a way the audience should recognize – it’s something like a full-bodied sigh. But Scorsese holds on him long after such a physical motion would have completed itself, and Ogata continues to sink in on himself, to collapse slowly downwards in his seat. Before the shot became funny -- which it is, I believe, intentionally -- I thought ‘What am I seeing? What is happening?’ Though reserved by Scorsese’s standards, and by those of his editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Silence is a film that somehow in its visual construction, and even in its moral construction, can allow a moment like that, and still be, as it is especially late in the film, heartbreaking in its simplicity. That last shot is some kind of a flourish, though, isn’t it? Finally, Silence comes to a perfect and beautiful and sad end, and so the film becomes something that lifts up as it’s also despairing. Silence is not merely the best film of last year, but one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.” ~ Bill Ryan

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #6

[190 points / 20 votes]

“What is she thinking?”

“There's a reason the title of Elle translates to She or Her. In the end, it's all about what's going on in the head of Isabelle Huppert's character, Michèle Leblanc. In the very first scene, she gets raped, in such an archetypal way that it could easily have become abstract: violently, by a stranger in a ski-mask.

“Many viewers have expressed bafflement at how Michèle reacts. They don't understand why she simply cleans up the mess, takes a bath and orders sushi. An anonymous Oscar voter recently admitted that they didn't vote for Huppert: ‘I eliminated her because when you get attacked, beaten and raped, you're not the same person afterward, but she was, and I wanted to slap her to try to get a reaction out of her.’ Some called the movie a modern comedy of manners, which does not quite prepare you for the more brutal moments. One reviewer, taking the current trend of treating movies as puzzles to be solved entirely too far, even concocted a theory claiming that Michèle was the one who really committed the murders her father was convicted of.

“Before the film's release, director Paul Verhoeven predicted – with no small amount of glee – that Elle would enrage feminists. Some feminists indeed decried the film, claiming that it strengthens the sexist idea that women secretly want to be raped. Others, however, embraced it, seeing Huppert as a ‘post-feminist’ hero who subverts the traditional rape-revenge narrative in unsettling ways.

“Personally, I see Elle as a movie about a woman who is determined to regain control of her life in any way she can after someone wrests that control from her – but the beauty of the movie is that it allows for all kinds of interpretations, some of them contradictory, at the same time. In that sense it is very much of a piece with Verhoeven's earlier oeuvre: Starship Troopers and Robocop, which can be seen as either satires or endorsements of militarism; Showgirls, which is either cheap exploitation or, in the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum ‘one of the most vitriolic allegories about Hollywood and selling out ever made’, etc.

And Verhoeven's hand has only become steadier. Take the opening of Elle. We hear the rape first. And then the first shot shows … Michèle's gorgeous gray cat, who boredly takes in the scene in front of him and then walks away. ‘You couldn't at least have scratched him a little?’, Michèle asks the cat later, after she has a traumatic flashback in which the rape is shown start to finish. In this way, Verhoeven plays with our expectations: do we really want to see? Will that help us understand?

“Verhoeven is helped by a script (by David Birke, based on a book by Philippe Djian) full of complicating factors: the fact that Michèle's son is being abused by his fiancée, for instance, or that she herself is complicit in eroticising rape at her work at a video game company, where she orders underlings to make an attack in the game more orgasmic.

“His main ally, however, is Isabelle Huppert. She makes the movie – and this complex character – her own. This is also what makes the comments by the Oscar voter quotes above so short-sighted: Huppert's performance is all about her reactions. The fact that the movie ends up being surprisingly funny is due in large part to the reaction shots in which you can, from just a twitch of her mouth or an eye-roll, see exactly the contempt Michèle has for most of the world around her. And in the scenes in which she does show you a glimpse of the vulnerable woman under the hard, jaded shell, she makes you empathize with this woman who stubbornly resists empathy.

“I don't know if I'll rewatch Elle any time soon: the rape scenes aren't exactly easy to watch. But it's stayed with me since I watched it mid-2016, and I'm sure I'll be thinking about Elle – and elle – for a long time to come.” ~ Hedwig van Driel

2016 Muriel Awards Best Picture Countdown: #7

[186 points / 19 votes]

“You know who doesn't get enough attention? Park Chan-wook. After making a splash with Oldboy way back in 2003, he's made a string of inventive, intricately crafted, diabolically perverse (on multiple levels) genre movies that haven't gotten nearly enough attention: the third and best part of his ‘vengeance trilogy,’ Sympathy for Lady Vengeance; a bonkers sci-fi romantic comedy that I didn't even know about until yesterday, I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK; an adaptation of a classic Émile Zola novel about adultery with added vampires, Thirst; a spin on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt starring Mia Wasikowska and Nicole Kidman, Stoker; and last year's The Handmaiden, which is equal parts British gothic thriller, tract on Korean-Japanese relations, Polanskian provocation and The Sting-esque conman thriller. Park is a genre mixmaster on the level of Tarantino, and one with a wider, more sophisticated set of international influences who is yet still happy to include tentacle porn as part of his cinema.

“So why aren't we talking about Park these days? Possibly it's because the movies he made his name with were more masculine and action-oriented, and his films have become increasingly more interested in feminine themes, less interested in revenge for revenge's sake and more concerned with structural societal issues; multiplexes are more likely to show Korean movies if they have hammerfights than girdles.

“But this is not to say that Park is getting more respectable as he's moved from adapting manga to140-year-old French novels. The Handmaiden might feature double layers of subtitles and a plot loosely modeled on Wilkie Collins, but it still has all the Lesbian sex of an Abdellatif Kechiche movie, unapologetically presented through a very male gaze that nonetheless regards men as fools and perverts.

“Credit also goes to the broad array of craftspeople working at the tops of their games here, most of whom are longtime collaborators with Park: co-screenwriter Jeong Seo-kyeong, cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, doing some of the most velvety perfect work of the year, production designer Ryu Seong-hie and editors Kim Jae-bum and Kim Sang-bum. But special attention goes to the two women carrying the film, and both giving unusually tricky performances, Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri. Between them, they have to be sexy, crazy, seductive, seduced, defeated and victorious throughout the length of a particularly complex, plot-heavy film.

“For me, this is the kind of film that represents a kind of platonic summation of what movies can do: look beautiful, be made with precision and total control of tone and concept, be constantly surprising and inventive, be simultaneously part of its world and part of a totally synthetic formal realm; and leave you someplace that you didn't expect to be. No 2016 movie was more baroquely beautiful and grotesque to me than The Handmaiden.” ~ Jeff McMahon