FILM: FIVE CELEBRATED CINEASTS SELECT THE TOP FILMS OF THE YEAR. (2024)

John Waters

FILMMAKER JOHN WATERS' EIGHTEEN-CITY SPOKEN-WORD TOUR, "AJOHN WATERS CHRISTMAS," BEGAN ON NOVEMBER 27 IN CHICAGO. (SEECONTRIBUTORS.)

1 BABY DRIVER (Edgar Wright) The best movie of the year is apopcorn thriller, an art film, and a gearhead classic that grossed over$100 million. It deserved to! Watching the star turn of Ansel Elgort waslike seeing John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever for the first time.

2 I, OLGA HEPNAROVA (Petr Kazda and Tomas Weinreb) A hypnoticblack-and-white docudrama based on the case of a pretty,twenty-two-year-old chain-smoking lesbian from Prague who in 1973 hoppedin a truck and mowed down twenty pedestrians on a sidewalk. Deadpanindeed.

3 THE STRANGE ONES (Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein) Thisbrilliantly conceived, slow-to-reveal-itself drama pulls the rug outfrom under any audience's comfort zone by asking them questionsabout adult-teen sexual relationships they'd never even want toconsider.

4 NOCTURAMA (Bertrand Bonello) A long, thoroughly irresponsiblefilm about teenage French terrorists who blow up buildings in Paris forno apparent reason, then hide from the police in a luxury mall, wherethey watch coverage of their exploits on big-screen TVs they wish theycould afford.

5 WONDERSTRUCK (Todd Haynes) Want an IQ test for your cinephilechildren? Just take them to see this beautifully made, feel-goodkids' movie about the hearing-impaired, starring a little girl wholooks exactly like Simone Signoret. If your small-fry like the film,they're smart. If they don't, they're stupid.

6 GRADUATION (Cristian Mungiu) This quietly harrowing tale ofcorruption and family dysfunction in Romania has the intensity ofBergman and the humor of Fassbinder ... if he had been heterosexual.

7 THE WIZARD OF LIES (Barry Levinson) A jarringly perceptiveportrait of the Madoff family's behind-the-scenes panic and denialover their greed. De Niro's performance is restrained to perfectionas Bernie, and Michelle Pfeiffer is downright astonishing as his wife.This ain't no TV movie--give 'em both Oscars.

8 LADY MACBETH (William Oldroyd) The exact opposite of GetOut--here the bad white liberals actually win. Viciously funny and maybethe meanest movie of the decade.

9 WONDER WHEEL (Woody Allen) An impeccably acted potboiler in whichWoody channels Tennessee Williams meets The Honeymooners, with apyromaniac kid thrown in to add a touch of Bad Seed flavor. Say what youwill, Mr. Allen has never made a bad movie. This is one of his best.

10 TOM OF FINLAND (Dome Karukoski) This dirty but dignified, oddlycommercial biopic of the artist who inspired the modern-day s/m gayleather scene is now the Finnish government's official entry in the2017 foreign-film Oscar race. That's what I call patriotic penisprogress, and I hope it wins.

Amy Taubin

A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF ARTFORUM AND FILM COMMENT AND THE AUTHOROF TAXI DRIVER (BFI, 2000), AMY TAUBIN HAS SERVED ON THE SELECTIONCOMMITTEE OFTHE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL SINCE 2012.

1 SPOOR (Agnieszka Holland with Kasia Adamik) A primeval forest inPoland is the battleground for the no-holds-barred struggle of a womanwho risks everything to protect the creatures that live there from acorrupt, death-dealing, patriarchal status quo. The greatest film by aworld cinema master.

2 QUEST (Jonathan Olshefski) A remarkably intimate portrait of theRainey family of North Philadelphia, who welcomed Olshefski and hiscamera into their home over ten years with a kindness and generosity ofspirit that make the documentary a unique gift to audiences.

2 GET OUT (Jordan Peele) Racism and the history ofslavery--America's foundational horror story--are front and centerin this stunning pop-culture movie. Brilliantly written and directed,Peele's debut feature was not only a critics' darling, itgrossed over $200 million at the box office worldwide.

4 TOP OF THE LAKE: CHINA GIRL (Jane Campion) Like the originalcable series, the sequel brims over with maternal desire, a rarity indepictions of determined professional women.

5 BEATRIZ AT DINNER (Miguel Arteta) Collaborating with screenwriterMike White, Arteta has made a film that is neither comedy nor tragedy,because both are incommensurate with the insight of the Antigone-likeheroine (played with grief-stricken defiance by Salma Hayek): that wehave all collaborated in the destruction of the planet.

6 FACES PLACES (Agnes Varda and JR) At age eighty-eight, Varda onceagain does a tour de France, this time in cahoots with much youngeractivist photographer JR. Joyous, poignant, and, inevitably, a mementomori.

7 TONY CONRAD: COMPLETELY IN THE PRESENT (Tyler Hubby)Conrad's antic presence enlivens a documentary that is essentialviewing for anyone involved in the interpenetration of music and visualart throughout the second half of the twentieth century, right up to ourweb-enveloped moment in the twenty-first.

8 OKJA (Bong Joon-ho) Defying genre, Bong's tender andaudacious depiction of the love between a young girl and her companionanimal--a hippo-size pig-turns into an expose of factory farming ascapitalism at its most brutal.

9 EN EL SEPTIMO DIA (Jim McKay) An intimate character study of anundocumented Mexican man who works long hours, six days a week, in anupscale Brooklyn restaurant and on Sunday plays futbol in Sunset Park.The cast--almost all first-time movie actors--is superb, andMcKay's return to no-budget New York indie filmmaking a joy.

10 TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, PART 8 (David Lynch) This episodecontains small-screen fiction's most terrifying image. Nuclearfission is the Rosetta stone for the Lynch oeuvre; once the atom splits,three Coopers are elementary.

J. Hoberman

A FREQUENT CONTRIBUTOR TO ARTFORUM, J. HOBERMAN EXPRESSES HISSOLIDARITY WITH THE STAFF LETTER OF OCTOBER 26, 2017.

1 DRUNK (AKA DRINK) (1965) (Andy Warhol) An astounding behavioralperformance: Emile de Antonio slugs an entire bottle of scotch and getshopelessly hammered in real time. This 1965 Factory masterpiece wasshown once late last year at the Museum of Modern Art. Rather than beingreturned to the vault, it deserves to be in heavy rotation.

2 ZAMA (Lucrecia Martel) Latin America's preeminent director(and one of the world's most inventive narrative filmmakers) findsan even more violent and absurd-and disconcertingly beautiful--degree ofstagnation in an eighteenth-century backwater than in the contemporarysettings of her previous three feature films.

3 STREETSCAPES [dialogue] (Heinz Emigholz) After decades of filmessays on modern architecture, Emigholz turns inward. His script is atranscription of a six-day session with an Israeli trauma specialist,with actors playing both him and his therapist. Part psychodrama, partcinematic autofiction, it's in several ways something new.

4 THE VIETNAM WAR (Ken Burns and Lynn Novick) And this is somethingold--a brute, unavoidably flawed, horribly familiar, deeply absorbingchronicle of waste and stupidity. The Dylan song I kept hearing was theone in which he waits "to find out what price you have to pay toget out of going through all these things twice."

5 NOCTURAMA (Bertrand Bonello) Was it George W. Bush or AnnaWintour who, in the aftermath of 9/11, advised people to combat terrorby going shopping? That's one theme in Bonello's supremelystylish, blithely insolent political tragedy--a movie at onceultracontemporary and haunted by historical ghosts going back to 1848and before.

6 GET OUT (Jordan Peele) Fusing the interracial romance of GuessWho's Coming to Dinner with the interracial mortal combat of Nightof the Living Dead, Peele's brilliant, comic horror film took onadditional urgency for being released a month into the Trump nightmare.

7 NORMAN: THE MODERATE RISE AND TRAGIC FALL OF A NEW YORK FIXER(Joseph Cedar) Cedar's Jewish fable has Richard Gere (I?) playing acharacter one can only describe in Yiddish. Norman is a warm-heartednudnik (pest), who is also a hondler (hustler), a luftmensch (dreamer),and, ultimately, a lamed-vovnik (secret saint).

8 THE FLORIDA PROJECT (Sean Baker) Following his p*rn portraitStarlet and his cell-phone chronicle of the lives of transgenderprostitutes, Tangerine, Baker ponders life in the cheap motels for theotherwise homeless on the outskirts of Disney World.

9 BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY (Alexandra Dean) The mostbeautiful star in Hollywood may also have been the most intelligent. Anamateur inventor, Lamarr collaborated with the avant-garde composerGeorge Antheil on a frequency-hopping radio guidance system that, whiletoo advanced for its intended purpose (sinking Nazi U-boats), did pavethe way for Wi-Fi. The rest of the Lamarr saga was pretty sensational aswell.

10 AN ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE (2015) (Ja'Tovia Gary) Installed aspart of the Whitney Museum of American Art's "An IncompleteHistory of Protest," Gary's six-minute cut, paste, scratchassemblage-a percussive, achronological remix covering several hundredyears of African American history--provided the exclamation mark at theend of a powerful exhibition.

James Quandt

JAMES QUANDT, SENIOR PROGRAMMER AT TIFF CINEMATHEQUE IN TORONTO, ISTHE EDITOR OF APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL (AUSTRIAN FILM MUSEUM, 2009) ANDROBERT BRESSON (REVISED) (INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012).

1 "THE BOAT IS LEAKING. THE CAPTAIN LIED." (FondazionePrada, Venice) This exhibition, curated by Udo Kittelmann, ingeniouslyinterlaced work by Thomas Demand, Anna Viebrock, and German directorAlexander Kluge, offering a bracing reminder of the letter's wit,compassion, political acumen, and formal audacity.

2 JEAN VIGO (II Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, Italy) The restorationof Vigo's tragically abbreviated oeuvre, including a referenceprint of L'Atalante (1934), proved the high point of thisyear's II Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, though his silent short Apropos de Nice (1930), a film stubbornly resistant to musicalaccompaniment, was regrettably live scored.

3 ZAMA (Lucrecia Martel) Martel transforms Antonio diBenedetto's slim, existential novel of stanched desire and deferredprospects into a fiercely elliptical and political film. The sounddesign alone is a work of genius.

4 WESTERN (Valeska Grisebach) This complex triple portrait--of adusty, sun-baked Bulgarian village; of a company of German laborers whoarrive to work on its power plant; and of a taciturn, middle-aged loneramong the foreigners--confirms Grisebach's status as a burgeoningauteur of the so-called Berlin School.

5 THE NOTHING FACTORY (Pedro Pinho) Pinho touches on everythingfrom political polemics reminiscent of Godard's Dziga Vertov periodto Jacques Demy-like industrial dance routines in his three-hour radicallabor film set in austerity-hobbled Portugal.

6 FACES PLACES (Agnes Varda and JR) Varda's poignantcross-country excursion with photographer JR turns a road movie into anambulatory essay--on evanescence, resistance, work, and, mostly, thetraps of memory.

7 CLOSENESS (Kantemir Balagov) The debut feature of the year,Balagov's harrowing true account of a Jewish family's struggleto pay the ransom for their kidnapped son in Russia's NorthCaucasus in 1998 exhibits formidable maturity and tonal control.

8 12 JOURS (Raymond Depardon) Ultra-rigorous French documentarianDepardon unwisely interpolates three prettifying sequences scored by theunavoidable Alexandre Desplat into his otherwise severely parametric andmoving portrait of involuntarily hospitalized patients arguing for theirrelease before a judge.

9 CANIBA (Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor) Thedeliquescing flesh of Bacon's paintings manifests in the claustralclose-ups and extreme rack-focusing in Paravel andCastaing-Taylor's mesmerizing documentary about the cannibal IsseiSagawa and his ailing brother.

10 EX LIBRIS: THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY (Frederick Wiseman)Unlike Wiseman's recent marathons, his portrait of a library systemthat appears increasingly more non than ex libris warrants its epiclength.

Erika Balsom

ERIKA BALSOM IS THE AUTHOR OF AFTER UNIQUENESS: A HISTORY OF FILMAND VIDEO ART IN CIRCULATION (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017) AND ASENIOR LECTURER IN FILM STUDIES AT KING'S COLLEGE LONDON.

1 TONSLER PARK (Kevin Jerome Everson) The quotidian and thehistoric converge in a Charlottesville, Virginia, polling station on theday of the last presidential election. A careful study of people atwork, positioned at the intersection of race and politics. This is thecinema we need.

2 BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK (Anocha Suwichakornpong) Forget thecomparisons to Apichatpong Weerasethakul: They are too easy and fail todo justice to this kaleidoscopic, confounding film. Imagemaking,history, and enchantment intertwine in a highly original work.

3 THE HUMAN SURGE (Eduardo Williams) Across formats and continents,Williams punctures Silicon Valley myths with dead batteries, crackedscreens, desultory bodies, and elusive Wi-Fi signals. More proof thatthe best diagnoses of digital culture need not look like post-internetart.

4 FREAK ORLANDO (1981) and CHAMISSO'S SHADOW (2016) (UlrikeOttinger), BEN RUSSELL'S "HALLUCINATIONS" FILM PROGRAM,GREEK FILM ARCHIVE, ATHENS, DOCUMENTA14 Ottinger's fantasticallyqueer carnival Freak Orlando continues to astonish, whileChamisso's Shadow, a twelve-hour masterwork of experimentalethnography, demonstrates that she remains more radical at seventy-fivethan most filmmakers a fraction of her age.

5 WESTERN (Valeska Grisebach) What is it about women directorsmaking terrific films about male-only spaces? Stunning performances fromnonprofessionals ground this cross-cultural tale of animosity andbelonging. No cowboys, but all of the titular genre's epic themes.

6 ALSO KNOWN AS JIHADI (Eric Baudelaire) This homage to MasaoAdachi's AKA Serial Killer (1969) questions two apparatuses oftruth: the Japanese director's notion of "landscapetheory" and the juridical system of France. With deep causesnowhere to be found, Baudelaire directs our gaze to surface traces.

7 EIGHT HOURS DON'T MAKE A DAY(1972-73) (Rainer WernerFassbinder) and the nothing factory (2017) (Pedro Pinho) Two factoryepics--a new restoration of Fassbinder's made-for-TV "familyseries" and Pinho's reflexive take on Portugal's economiccrisis--explore collectivity, struggle, and self-organization in longform.

8 EL MAR LA MAR (Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki) Along theUS-Mexico border, an artist and an anthropologist search for signs oflife and death in the desert. Cinema and landscape come together assites of inscription marked by an encounter between the human and thenonhuman.

9 SUNSTONE (Filipa Cesar and Louis Henderson) Setting thelighthouse against GPS, overlaying 16-mm film with CGI, Cesar andHenderson trace epistemic shifts in orientation and representation fromthe optical to the algorithmic, always with an eye to the afterlives ofcolonialism.

10 LIFE IMITATION (Chen Zhou) Scenes of mediated life in Shanghaibleed into images from Grand Theft Auto Vina somber, moody portrait ofdisconnection and disaffection. The anti-Trecartin.

Caption: 1. Edgar Wright, Baby Driver, 2017, 35 mm, color, sound,112 minutes. Debora (Lily James) and Baby (Ansel Elgort). Productionstill. Photo: Wilson Webb. 2. Petr Kazda and Tomas Weinreb, /, 0/gaHepnarova, 2016,4K video, blackand-white, sound, 105 minutes. Olga(Michalina Olszariska). 4. Bertrand Bonello, Nocturama, 2016, HD video,color, sound, 130 minutes. 7, Barry Levinson, The Wizard of Lies, 2017,HD video, color, sound, 133 minutes. Ruth Madoff (Michelle Pfeiffer) andBernie Madoff (Robert De Niro). 9. Woody Allen, Wonder Wheel, 2017,digital video, color, sound, 81 minutes. Carolina (Juno Temple). 10.Dome Karukoski, Tom of Finland, 2017, 4K video, color, sound, 116minutes.

Caption: 1. Agnieszka Holland with Kasia Adamik, Spoor, 2017, 2Kvideo, color, sound, 128 minutes. Priest Szelest (Marcin Basak) andaltar boy (Szymon Kontyka). 2. Jonathan Olshefski, Quest, 2017, digitalvideo, color, sound, 105 minutes. Isaiah Rainey. 4. Top of the Lake:China Girl, 2017, still from a TV show on SundanceTV. Episode 3. Mary(Alice Englert). 6. Agnes Varda and JR, Faces Places, 2017. HD video,color, sound, 89 minutes. JR and Agnes Varda. 8. Bong Joon-ho, Okja.2017,4K video, color, sound, 118 minutes. Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun). 9. JimMcKay, En el septimo dia (On the Seventh Day), 2017,2K video, color,sound, 92 minutes. Jose (Fernando Cardona). 10. Twin Peaks: The Return.2017, still from a TV show on Showtime. Part 8.

Caption: 1. Andy Warhol, Drunk (aka Drink), 1965,16 mm,black-and-white, sound, 66 minutes. Emile de Antonio. 2. LucreciaMartel, Zama, 2017, HD video, color, sound, 115 minutes. 6. JordanPeele, Get Out, 2017, 4K video, color, sound, 104 minutes. ChrisWashington (Daniel Kaluuya). 8. Sean Baker, The Florida Project, 2017,35mm, color, sound, 115 minutes.

Caption: 1. View of "The Boat Is Leaking. The CaptainLied.," 2017, Fondazione Prada, Venice. Floor: Anna Viebrock,Runners, 2009. Walls: Anna Viebrock, Four Doors, 2017. Center: AlexanderKluge, Die sanfte Schminke des Lichts (The Soft Makeup of Lighting),2007. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. 2. Jean Vigo,L'Atalante, 1934, 35 mm, black-and-white, sound, 89 minutes. Jean(Jean DastS). 4. Valeska Grisebach, Western, 2017, HD video, color,sound, 119 minutes. Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann). 6. Agnes Varda and JR,Faces Places, 2017, HD video, color, sound, 89 minutes. 8. RaymondDepardon. 12 Jours (12 Days), 2017,4K video, color, sound, 87 minutes.

Caption: 1. Kevin Jerome Everson, TonslerPark, 2017,16 mm,black-and-white, sound, 80 minutes. 2. Anocha Suwichakornpong, By theTime It Gets Dark, 2016, HD video, color, sound, 105 minutes. 4. UlrikeOttinger, Freak Orlando, 1981, 35 mm, color, sound, 126 minutes. Monks(Hiro Uschiyama and Claudio Pantoja). 7. Eight Hours Don't Make aDay, 1972-73, still from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV show on WDR.Episode 4. Marion Andreas (Hanna Schygulla) and Monika (Renate Roland).8. Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki, El mar la mar, 2017,16 mm. color,sound, 94 minutes. 9. Filipa Cesar and Louis Henderson, Sunstone, 2017,digital video, color, sound, 7 minutes 30 seconds. 10. Chen Zhou, LifeImitation, 2016, digital video, color, sound, 83 minutes.