This is when people make up “best of” lists. I am disinclined. I am about three years behind with music and comfortable with a delay that helps to sort out the truly terrible stuff from the bands that are a little bit steadier, deeper, more interesting. Call me old fashioned.
But this year has presented me with a chance to see a lot of films, and curated at that by a knowledgeable practitioner. So here’s a list of four I liked (I am not going to stretch it out to ten just for form’s sake).
It’s hard to describe The Florida Project because there really aren’t any films like it. The story is told from the perspective of a couple of seven year olds who live in an Orlando motel that has been converted into a housing project. Their lives are really really fun: little adult supervision, plenty of playmates and a playground-like environment of bright colors, weirdly decorated fast food restos, tourist hotels and abandoned housing developments. The actors playing the kids (Brooklyn Prince and Christopher Rivera) are riveting as is their mother (Bria Vinaite): Willem Dafoe as the manager lends a contrast, but even he plays along with the kids pranks and games. But as the film goes on, we can’t help but have a different understanding of what’s going on, and those other parts become more consequential even as we retain the kids’ perspective. The film works at so many levels, seductive, fun, colorful, playful, bratty, deep, disturbing and emotionally powerful: it’s one you’ll still be thinking about weeks after you see it.
Mudbound is set in the Jim Crow south of the forties. The “invisible lines” we think we’re familiar with are drawn in a little more darkly, a little more specifically, more dramatically. Director Dee Rees drew on family stories for details and they are telling. It’s about farm life: I kept thinking of the Drive By Trucker’s lyric, “There ain’t much to country living, sweat, piss, jizz, blood.” Add mud, which abounds. It opens on two white men digging a grave in a downpour who are stopped when they hit shackles and a skull.
It’s a film about parallels and contrasts: middle class white newlyweds move onto a farm where a family of black share croppers already lives. Characters share a life, a space, but not a society and crises have differential effects. Support cannot be offered or accepted, neighbors are not neighbors. Then WWII takes two sons of that mud—one black one white; parallel, contrasting—and when they return, damaged and liberated by their experience of the European war—parallel, contrasting—they are forced to play old roles that no longer fit. The bond they form is dangerous for both of them. You can see it on Netflix, but try to see it in a theater, the film is cinematic.
13th is from last year but I saw it this year and it really moved me. Ava DuVernay’s polished film analyzes the history of African-American incarceration since the Civil War as an extension of slavery based on the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception for convicts. The superlative use of images and news clips and the interviews with academics and public intellectuals (Angela Davis!) are pointed and clear. A fine film on an issue that needs to stay current as the national political discourse fragments. Like Mudbound (and 2017’s outstanding O.J.-An American Story), you can see the fruits of #oscarssowhite in the high production values based on suddenly better funding for work like this.
Baby Driver is a fun movie and it is built around music which sounds a good note for me. It is set in Atlanta, which is another plus, it is unusually smart for a chase movie and it has great performances from John Hamm, Jamie Foxx and Eiza Gomez (who can really deliver a line) and an only OK one from, well, he whose name should not be mentioned. It is a way above average, fun summer movie. I have not heard anyone who saw it diss it (except a few critics who are….well, often notoriously off base on films like this).
