1 White God Could Hungary be the new Romania? Next month Chicagoans will get a look at László Nemes’s debut feature, Son of Saul, a Holocaust drama like no other, and earlier this year the Gene Siskel Film Center presented the local debut of Kornél Mundruczó’s arresting, dreamlike White God. A child could follow its story, about a spirited schoolgirl who scours the city in search of her big old mixed-breed dog, but that child would be in psychotherapy for years if he saw the climax, in which hundreds of shelter dogs tear through city streets on a deadly rampage.
5 Queen and Country American comedies suck (Get Hard) suck (Entourage) suck (Sisters). This year brought a few cagey low-budget efforts—Patrick Brice’s The Overnight, Shira Piven’s Welcome to Me—but I was more tickled by movies from Australia (Josh Lawson’s sex comedy The Little Death), New Zealand (Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s vampire romp What We Do in the Shadows), and Sweden (Roy Andersson’s deadpan art film A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence). The best of all came from 82-year-old British master John Boorman (Point Blank, Deliverance); continuing the personal memoir he began with Hope and Glory (1987), Queen and Country is a jubilantly anarchic service comedy in the tradition of Stripes and MAS*H, with a delectably dour performance from Richard E. Grant and a brilliantly manic one from Caleb Landry Jones.
10 Results Nothing is funnier than human weakness, which is why real actors can often dig out laughs beyond the reach of sitcom hacks and SNL ad-libbers. Writer-director Andrew Bujalski, our foremost chronicler of nerd passion (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation), has gotten great work from amateur players, but for this superlative screwball comedy he’s recruited three seasoned professionals. Kevin Corrigan stars as a fat slob with an inheritance who falls for overachieving personal trainer Cobie Smulders; he can’t buy himself a body she’ll love, so instead he throws money at her boss, a dopey wellness entrepreneur played by Guy Pearce.
3 Eden This sweeping, highly personal account of the French house-music scene from the early 1990s to the present confirms writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve as one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. With a sophisticated command of cinematic technique, Hansen-Løve acutely conveys experiences that are difficult to describe in words, such as creative epiphany, loss of innocence, and the longing to recapture one’s youth. What might have come across as arcane feels immediate and universal. The film moves with breathtaking fluidity between different moods, achieving an emotional complexity that one associates with great literature.
These are two immersive, apocalyptic visions by master filmmakers, glorious in their imagination and pessimistic in their view of human nature. Hard to Be a God is the final work by Aleksei German, one of the most important Russian directors of the last 50 years, and it marks the culmination of his art; every shot is a little symphony of densely realized imagery, exquisite camera movement, and meticulous sound design (indeed, German spent over five years on the soundtrack alone). German envisions an alternate reality where humanity, stuck in the Middle Ages, wallows in a state of barbarism. The film is grotesque yet hypnotic, drawing viewers into a state of meditation where they may reflect on man’s capacity for atrocity. Fury Road, on the other hand, is a wholly kinetic experience, bounding from one image to another with lightning-fast intensity. One gets so swept up in the movie that it’s easy to get aspects of the plot wrong (as I did when I reviewed the film over the summer). Yet its stirring feminist message is unmistakable, as is the exuberance of director George Miller and company in their realization of the futuristic settings.
- Magic Mike XXL12. In the Name of My Daughter13. Taxi14. In a Foreign Land15. In Jackson Heights16. Ned Rifle17. The Wonders18. Manglehorn19. On the Way to School20. Aloft v
