The best movies on Metrograph At Home—the streaming service curated and maintained by the fine folks behind Metrograph NYC’s theater and the Metrograph distribution company (which helped bring restorations of films like Possession to discerning moviegoers—are hard to nail down simply because there’s so much quality on offer. Much like the Criterion Channel or another highly curated service, there’s some serious distance between what Metrograph At Home offers compared to a more slop-centric streamer like Amazon. That’s a huge plus, but it can also be a little intimidating. We’ve looked at the very best on offer, and kept our list up to date with the films coming and going to the service
Available on Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, Google TV and Chromecast, Metrograph at Home offers over 100 movies, hand-picked by the same team programming the theater. Maybe you can’t make it out to a screening at Ludlow Street. Maybe you want to supplement your frequent trips with some bonus content and better deals. Maybe you live somewhere where an “arthouse theater” is just whoever in town owns the most Criterion DVDs or has the biggest torrented Plex library. Whatever the case, there’s fewer and fewer opportunities to watch rotating film collections that actually feel like collections rather than business decisions. With movies streaming from filmmakers like Jane Campion, Jafar Panahi, Joanna Hogg, Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard and others whose first names don’t start with J, there’s a ton of film history at your fingertips—supplemented by filmed Q&As and informative subsection write-ups. It’s relatively inexpensive ($50 gets you a year, with extra goodies if you live in New York) and thoroughly rewarding.
Here are the best movies streaming on Metrograph At Home right now:
1. Possession
Year: 1981
Director: Andrzej Zulawski
Starring: Sam Neill, Isabelle Adjani
Rating: R
Genre: Horror
When Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession finally opened, critics, unfamiliar with horror movies to the point of lacking qualification to cover them, plead the fifth by pivoting to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. Let’s be fair to these critics: In 1983, they saw Zulawski’s vision trimmed by 40 minutes and recut into what writer, filmmaker and scholar of Eastern European cult cinema Daniel Bird calls “a conventional horror film,” speaking with Paste. As if proving the point, Metrograph Pictures premiered a new 4K restoration of Zulawski’s masterwork. This version of the film, Bird says, is not a conventional horror film, by either the 1980s’ standards or those of today. Because today, Possession has an audience and a reputation. Possession is gooey, gory and grotesque, and on romantic matters it’s plain old icky. The movie’s hardest to watch scenes occur between its protagonists, Anna (Adjani) and Mark (Neill), a husband and wife in the midst of upheaval against the backdrop of Cold War-era West Berlin, a place experiencing upheaval of its own. Mark’s a spy returned home having completed undisclosed espionage in an undisclosed country. Anna fell for another man in Mark’s absence and wants to try separation. Mark abhors the idea, though he abhors the man, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), more. Most of all, he abhors the discovery that Anna’s been two-timing both of them with a slimy tentacle monster in a derelict apartment just a hair away from the Berlin Wall. Possession captures the dissolution of two relationships: West Germany’s from East Germany and Mark’s from Anna. Everything ends in tears. That’s horror, folks.—Andy Crump
2. Caravaggio
Year: 1986
Director: Derek Jarman
Starring: Nigel Terry, Sean Bean, Tilda Swinton
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
A tragic, beautiful experiment in blending painting with cinema—and in blending period biopic with modern nonlinearity—Caravaggio saw filmmaker Derek Jarman get about as mainstream as he ever would. Replicating the masterworks of Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) in exquisite detail (and what else would be expected from the production designer for Ken Russell’s The Devils?), Caravaggio is stunning in its pseudo-static moments. Lingering on immediately recognizable compositions, lit and colored to perfection, poetic interludes of voiceover are broken up by sheer artistry from Jarman and production designer Christopher Hobbs. But Caravaggio’s merits aren’t simply found in its media-bending stagings of paintings. Add in some anecdotal adventures from the painter’s admittedly punk rock life, and the cheeky anachronisms, heartfelt AIDS gestures and searing religious criticism craft a truly representative portrait of a person while keeping to a non-traditional method befitting its subject. Another way in for contemporary viewers: Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton fulfill their destinies in their debut performances as two vertices in Caravaggio’s bisexual love triangle.—Jacob Oller
3. It Felt Like Love
Year: 2013
Director: Eliza Hittman
Starring: Gina Piersanti, Giovanna Salimeni, Ronen Rubinstein, Jesse Cordasco, Nicolas Rosen, Richie Folio, Kevin Anthony Ryan, Case Prime
Rating: NR
Runtime: 115 minutes
With It Felt Like Love, writer-director Eliza Hittman takes a few routine subjects—the coming-of-age story, sexual awakening, adolescent confusion—and reminds us that a confident directorial voice can make material this common appear as fresh, strange, and surprising as a good science-fiction story. She herself invokes Maurice Pialat and Catherine Breillat when describing her influences in this genre, but her fascination with skin and bodies also owes a debt to Claire Denis. The movie’s opening image shows the protagonist, 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti), standing on the shore of a beach, staring out onto the water in a one-piece bathing suit. At the start of the shot, she’s out-of-focus; by the end of it, her back has come sharply into focus. (Hittman’s use of shallow focus is one of the movie’s greatest qualities; one particularly enthralling example arrives during a fleeting moment aboard a Ferris wheel, when Lila’s blurry hand collides with the people below on the ground.) Our first look at Lila’s face, which directly precedes the title card, is startling: it’s caked with white sunscreen lotion, and she’s staring back into the camera, as if wondering what we’re even doing here watching her. Set during a hot summer in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, It Felt Like Love’s primary concern is charting Lila’s sexual anxieties and experiences. Hittman’s aforementioned experimentation with soft focus is nothing less than extreme, and her employment of slow motion and expressive colors likewise pushes the material into aesthetically adventurous terrain. A key party sequence in the middle of the film speaks to this: Hittman depicts Lila wandering through the space in a slow-motion haze, surrounded by red and green. Hittman and cinematographer Sean Porter’s insistence on close-ups puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of Piersanti—who, like her director, is here giving her feature debut. But the actress responds to the challenge with an absorbing performance that manages to remain true to the film’s troubling ambiguity without sacrificing psychological consistency or clarity.—Danny King
4. Long Day’s Journey into Night
Year: 2019
Director: Bi Gan
Starring: Tang Wei, Huang Jue
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
The film that’s broken box office records in China asks that you wait to put on your 3D glasses until you see its title card, which emerges 74-or-so minutes into the film, after our wandering noir-oneiric narrative leads Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) to a theater where he falls asleep. His 3D glasses perched on the end of his nose, we’re pulled into his dream, a mild-mannered noir (of sorts) of its own, part psycho-sexual sinking into complete delusion and part alternative history, all represented by a 59-minute (or so) single take. It’s anecdote enough to justify broken record talk, but it hardly does any justice to just how enchanting director Bi Gan’s film can be, even before we stumble into the virtuosic stuff, as Luo’s drawn back to his old neighborhood by the death of his father, though mostly preoccupied with finding his long-ago lover. Her name is Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), and she was probably involved in a criminal organization that probably had something to do with the murder of Luo’s childhood friend Wildcat. Probably—as Luo draws closer to tracking down the woman he remembers with so many charged emotions, his memories return in hyper-stylized fragments, like premonitions for both good and ill, and the prospect of actually finding her becomes more and more laced with dread. But then, we plunge into his head even further, feeling—through unbroken immersion and unpretentious iconism—the many complex ways he’s forever drawn to more than this woman, but to the life that’s died behind him. Bi’s second film after the similarly ravishing Kaili Blues, Long Day’s Journey into Night astounds as powerfully as it refuses to rest on gimmick alone. —Dom Sinacola
5. Behemoth
Year: 2015
Director: Zhao Liang
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
The experience of watching was never more ravishing at True/False than in Behemoth, Chinese director Zhao Liang’s visually striking overview of a mining community. Somewhat predictably, Zhao juxtaposes gorgeous images with ugly truth: the miners dying of black lung, the devastation of a region’s natural resources. Still, if Behemoth tells us depressingly familiar news—China’s rush to modernize is poisoning its people spiritually and physically—Zhao has assembled a mournful picture book of atrocity.—Tim Grierson
6. Nostalghia
Year: 1983
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Oleg Yankovsky, Domiziana Giordano, Erland Josephson
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
It’s pretty much unavoidable that, in any discussion of Andrei Tarkovsky’s work, the phrase “cinematic poetry” will come up. The great Russian filmmaker was a master at evoking emotions, and in Nostalghia he lures the viewer into a deep sense of longing and sadness. Oleg Yankovsky plays a Russian poet who travels through Italy, unable to resolve his fascination with the country with his disconnection from his homeland and general sense of isolation. Tarkovsky delves into his character’s psyche with one visual wonder after another. Steam engulfs and obstructs a mineral spring pool. A damp room with puddles transforms into a hilly landscape. Dreams recall scenes of the past and confuse character identities. It all leads to an utterly engrossing closing sequence, which culminates in the glorious reveal of the film’s majestic closing shot. —Jeremy Mathews
7. All Is Forgiven
Year: 2007
Director: Mia Hansen-Løve
Starring: Paul Blain, Marie-Christine Friedrich, Victoire Rousseau, Constance Rousseau
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
Her first feature film is also her most heart-wrenching, rough and colored with the imperfect emotion characteristic of Pamela (Victoire and Constance Rousseau) and Victor’s (Paul Blain) relationship. With All Is Forgiven, it is clear that Hansen-Løve had yet to gain complete control over cinematic pacing, and yet her ability to structure ordinary stories that coil around a single, devastating event proves to be a thrilling watch. Furthermore, Constance Rousseau’s performance as the older Pamela proves to be one of Hansen-Løve’s best casting choices. Her absorbent gaze reflects a flurry of unspoken questions and conveys an infinite reserve of care and concern for the father she can’t quite remember.
8. Mountains May Depart
Year: 2015
Director: Jia Zhangke
Starring: Zhao Tao, Zhang Yi, Liang Jingdong, Dong Zijian
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
The films of Jia Zhangke often explore a simple, supple theme: the ways time changes everything. A frequent chronicler of the massive transformation going on in China—technological, cultural, economic—Jia studies how individuals cope when the world they know shifts under their feet. The filmmaker behind The World, Still Life and A Touch of Sin plays with that theme anew for Mountains May Depart, a somewhat straightforward love story. I say “somewhat” because the film, which travels across three time periods, could almost be viewed as Jia’s one-movie version of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, watching the development of a couple’s relationship over 25 years or so. But Mountains May Depart soon proves that with whom it’s concerned is more than just a handful of characters—yet again, the writer-director is investigating an entire society in transition. Opening in 1999 to the strains of the Pet Shop Boys’ exuberant cover of The Village People’s “Go West,” Mountains May Depart introduces us to a romantic triangle already in progress. Tao (Zhao Tao) has feelings for both Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), a worker in a coal mine, and Zhang (Zhang Yi), a wealthy man who will end up buying Liangzi’s mine. Liangzi resents Zhang, a feeling that’s only exacerbated when Tao accepts Zhang’s marriage proposal, declining to attend the wedding. That triangle’s destiny will play out over two more eras—2014 and, provocatively, 2025—but that summation doesn’t do justice to Jia’s particular ambition. While he certainly cares about his characters’ fate, he also has his eyes fixed on larger issues. In this sense, Tao, Liangzi and Zhang represent different aspects of Chinese culture, their individual paths meant to be heavily symbolic. In the world of Mountains May Depart, people lose themselves for plenty of reasons, but Tao alone seems to retain a core sense of herself, which is a triumph in a Jia film. It can hardly be an accident that the movie ends on her in a scene that can only be described as hopeful. Time changes everything, Jia tells us, but maybe some things survive—a good person’s soul, for instance.—Tim Grierson
9. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
Year: 2002
Director: Park Chan-wook
Starring: Shin Ha-kyun, Song Kang-ho, Bae Doona, Han Bo-bae, Im Ji-eun
Rating: R
Genre: Thriller
Blunt. Pointless. Devoid of passion. And no, I’m not just talking about my first reviews. This is revenge in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, where attempts to better one’s station or right injustice end in a cacophony of senseless brutality and collateral damage. Park’s film is filled with offbeat, outsider characters, but the whole film is framed and shot so clinically, it’s difficult to muster a whole lot of sympathy for the players involved—despite how horrible a situation they find themselves in, be it bereft of a child or conned out of a kidney. Stylistically, it often feels more like a industrial film about murder than a crime thriller, distancing us from the rich and thorny emotional crises that plague the protagonists of Oldboy or Lady Vengeance. Can we ever truly feel sympathy for those who commit such barbarity? Can there ever be satisfying closure once violence is committed against someone? Sympathy may feel colder than other Park Chan-wook films, but its rebuttal to the glorification of violence in mainstream cinema still grabs you by the throat.—Rory Doherty
10. Black Mother
Year: 2019
Director: Khalik Allah
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
When any advertising agency is commissioned to shoot a Jamaican tourism commercial, they’ll inevitably wend their way around to the same old hook: Bob Marley’s “One Love.” Come and visit Jamaica, the land of All Right! Everything’s all right, all the time here on the Jamrock! The ad people are just following the path most traveled (and perhaps even dictated by travel agencies and tourism boards), promoting Jamaica as a land of leisure and ease, where the sun shines, people smile, life is good, and no one wants for anything, especially spiritual assuaging. Advertising may sell audiences on a Jamaican ideal, but with his documentary, Black Mother, director Khalik Allah achieves a goal far greater: presenting audiences with the truth, however lovely or hideous it may be. Allah’s approach takes the form of a visual essay/tone poem. It’s a fractured piece of work, a story about Jamaica the way that Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a story of Alabama. Allah’s filmmaking functions as stream of consciousness. He eschews narrative documentarian traditions. This approach poses a challenge to the viewer—Black Mother is made in a language rarely spoken in cinema, be it multiplex or arthouse. Allah throws his audience into the ocean and forces them to tread water, soaking in the country’s textures and contradictions and trauma. Through his lens, Allah presents a nation decayed by oppression, whether political, social or even religious, and a people forced to do whatever they can to sustain themselves. That doesn’t mean Allah is committing poverty tourism. Instead, he’s a character in the film, made invisible by the tool of his trade. But he lets the people he meets tell their stories in their words, and anchors those words to truth through imagery. The effect of Black Mother’s technique—Allah shot on both 16mm and HD—is dizzying to the point of overwhelming, but the discipline required to engage with it is rewarded by a singular moviegoing experience. —Andy Crump
11. Her Socialist Smile
Year: 2020
Director: John Gianvito
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
Everyone labeled Millennial and older will likely remember Helen Keller’s story as one of inhuman or maybe hyper-human-perseverance, of someone overcoming the unimaginable to inspire countless generations to never give up, or something. John Gianvito’s Her Socialist Smile pushes beyond Americana, beyond Keller’s mythos to explore her writing, activism and, ultimately, her popularly uncelebrated populist character. Beginning in 1913 with Keller’s first time, well into her 30s, speaking in public, Gianvito has poet Carolyn Forché (a fellow progressive American luminary) read a prepared narrative, as well as Keller’s speeches in voice over, the words stark white over a black background. Intoxicatingly tangential images, mostly pastoral and wonderfully tactile alongside Forché’s voice, form bridges between Keller’s speeches, all gorgeous and alive with socialist revelry and functional leftism. As her ideas mature and gain experience, Her Socialist Smile expands on Keller’s incredible biography, re-shaping her image as a figure of American moralizing while never losing track of Gianvito’s own intentions. After all, he’s telling a story about Helen Keller too, albeit a leftist-leaning one. The more we attempt to examine a life, the more we mold its story to fit our own.—Dom Sinacola
12. A Touch of Sin
Year: 2013
Director: Jia Zhangke
Starring: Jiang Wu, Zhao Tao, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan
Rating: NR
Genre: Action
A Touch of Sin, from Chinese director Jia Zhangke, would appear to be a departure from his previous acclaimed work. But on closer inspection, his particular cinematic DNA has been perfectly preserved. It’s just that, this time, there’s a lot more bloodshed than we’ve come to expect from him. A Touch of Sin is Jia’s stab at more commercial filmmaking, although one should not confuse this ensemble drama with a conventional action movie or anything so easily accessible. (Jia made this film with the backing of Shanghai Film Group, a government-sponsored production company, which was a first for him.) The independent auteur of quiet character pieces like The World and Still Life has constructed a story about four loosely connected individuals whose lives are touched by violence or death. At its center are the same concerns that have always interested Jia—namely, how ordinary Chinese citizens are adapting to the rapid economic development of their nation. As usual, the characters struggle mightily with that proposition. But in A Touch of Sin, their anguish is expressed in gunfire and knife fights. This is less an action movie than it is an acting-out movie.—Tim Grierson
13. Distant Constellation
Year: 2018
Director: Shevaun Mizrahi
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
Distant Constellation is a muted, dreamlike work-in-progress from director Shevaun Mizrahi centered on a Turkish retirement home. We meet some of the residents—including a survivor of the Armenian genocide and two pranksters who just love riding up and down the elevators—while, outside their walls, an ominously large construction project is ongoing. Does the juxtaposition suggest that “progress” is always threatening the old order? Mizrahi doesn’t nail down specifics, which adds to the movie’s surreal, limbo-ish vibe, but for all its wistful reverie, Distant Constellation remains more a sense of place than anything concrete or insightful about that place. Maybe that’s fitting for a community in which its inhabitants keep on dying—several of the people we meet in the film, we’re informed in the closing credits, are no longer with us.–Tim Grierson
14. Lady Vengeance
Year: 2005
Director: Park Chan-wook
Starring: Lee Young-ae, Choi Min-sik, Kim Si-hoo, Oh Dal-su
Rating: R
Genre: Thriller
The best entry in the Vengeance Trilogy marked its first female protagonist and Park Chan-wook’s first collaboration with Jeong Seo-kyeong, and there’s no better film to kick off one of the finest writer-director partnerships in modern cinema. Park’s female characters changed drastically for the better from this point; here illustrated by the aggrieved Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), released from prison after a lengthy sentence for a crime she falsely confessed to so she could protect her daughter. It unpicks the emotional burden and aftereffects of vengeance in a measured, almost surgical way, and only in the trilogy’s final chapter do we see a central relationship that doesn’t become corrupted and vile. The final act, where the vengeance is actually carried out, is undoubtedly Park’s finest hour; filled with brutality, tragedy and quiet displays of powerful humanity. It’s a turning point for Park—one that would only lead him to greater glory.—Rory Doherty
15. Millennium Mambo
Year: 2001
Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou
Starring: Shu Qi, Jack Kao, Chun-hao Tuan, Yi-Hsuan Chen
Rating: R
Genre: Romance
Millennium Mambo is the first movie in director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s career to be distributed theatrically in the U.S., and that’s reason alone to seek it out. It’s the story of Vicky (Shu Qi), a modern young woman in Taipei with a little money in the bank and not much to do besides smoke, drink and hang out at clubs with her friends. She bounces between her controlling, on-again-off-again boyfriend Hao-Hao (Tuan Chun-hao) and the older, possibly wiser Jack (Jack Kao), with occasional detours to a snowy part of Japan. Each of these three locations has a gravitational pull on Vicky, sometimes defying all reason, and the movie artfully balances them and seems to weigh them for their worth, just as Vicky is doing the same. Every frame of the movie pulses with color and light. One of Hou’s strengths, evident in all of his movies, is his masterful sense of space. He fully utilizes the three dimensions of his locations, but not by roving the hallways. His camera usually sits still, but he makes the audience aware of spaces beyond its reach so that his worlds feel observed rather than acted. People disappear through doorways, but they still exist. They don’t stand artificially in front of the camera. If they need to move into the kitchen to get something, they do, and Hou’s camera waits for their return. The spaces in Millennium Mambo are more cramped than usual, and the situations more urban and tense. He packs the frame with people and furniture, reflecting not only the characters’ physical locations, but their lives as well, bouncing off each other, unstable, in need of fresh air. The way the music both connects and contrasts the settings is often mesmerizing. A country and its history are reflected in its people, and few filmmakers capture them so well.—Robert Davis
16. The Image Book
Year: 2019
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Jean-Luc Godard, Dimitri Basil
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
Jean-Luc Godard’s discursive follow-up to Goodbye to Language feels like a film that’s been put in a broken blender; it flings everything at the wall and sees what sticks. This is a Dadaist treatise on cinematic representation, violence, the fate of the world—or maybe none of those things. Le Livre D’Image produces everything from portraits of Arthur Rimbaud to clips from the cinema of Michael Bay, asking the audience to cling to whatever fragments of meaning they can find. In doing so, it’s an even more radical—albeit less focused—extension of Godard’s previous work. (The film is certainly peppered with the same unexpectedly lowbrow humor—be sure to look out for the cuts between Tod Browning’s Freaks and some abrupt anilingus.) If that isn’t enough of a hint as to the madcap, kamikaze nature of Le Livre D’Image, there are plenty of others. The screen periodically goes black while the scenes from films like the director’s beloved Johnny Guitar go on unabated. Home movie footage of executions and terrorist violence come hand-in-hand with a stream-of-consciousness voiceover full of Godardian declaratives. Split into unruly sub-headings that allow some brief guidance, Godard’s tendency toward the dislocated and oblique nonetheless reaches new heights here. Free floating without an evident thesis, the film bounces between wide-ranging issues—war, the environment and the potential for revolution. In one typically circular statement, the voiceover tells us that any activity can be art provided it is no longer dominant. If this is a statement about the death of cinema, retrospectively honored now that its 20th century dominance has faded, that seems to fit the filmmakers’ perspective well. It’s undoubtedly the viewpoint of an older man, revealing Le Livre D’Image as a rather grouchy film. As an elderly Godard ruminates on the fate of the world and the end of cinema, the film fills with apocalyptic imagery: the nuclear explosion at the finale of Kiss Me Deadly; abrupt bombings caught on camera. This could well be the old-man-yells-at-cloud meme in avant-garde cinematic form. Yet amid countless examples of pessimism both verbal and visual, Le Livre D’Image also occasionally ventures into hopefulness. It’s always been somewhat difficult to encompass Godard’s intentions, and this is particularly the case with his latest unwieldy creation. Are we doomed to an endless cycle of violence and degradation? Was cinema only great when no one regarded it as art? Is this all a profound joke? Is there anyone out there, on first viewing, that grasps every reference to political and cultural theory the film contains? It’s fitting, ultimately, that Godard seems so fixated on images of trains and train-tracks. Le Livre D’Image is a film that derails itself constantly and self-consciously.—Christina Newland
17. Metropolis
Year: 1927
Director: Fritz Lang
Stars: Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Brigitte Helm
Rating: NR
Genre: Sci-Fi
Metropolis never slows as it delivers a constant stream of iconic images. Fritz Lang filled his parable with all the sci-fi/adventure tropes he could: the mad scientist, the robot, the rooftop chase, the catacombs and, as it turns out, a devious henchman. Metropolis, too, is a great reminder of just how difficult it is to judge an incomplete film. In fact, many silent films are missing material, even when it isn’t made clear in screenings or on home video. While Lang’s film has always been known for its spectacular special effects—it’s legally required that I use the phrase “visionary” while discussing it—not until a few years ago did modern audiences see a film anywhere close to the one that first premiered. It turned out that Metropolis’s best performance, Fritz Rasp as a ruthless spy for the corporate state, was part of that missing material, and it gives the film a greater sense of urgency, increasing the feeling of class-based antagonism. With that unknown excellence lurking in one of the most famous films of all time, it leaves us to wonder what else was lost in nitrate flames. —Jeremy Mathews
18. Nocturama
Year: 2017
Director: Bertrand Bonello
Stars: Finnegan Oldfield, Laure Valentinelli, Martin Petit-Guyot, Hamza Meziani, Manal Issa, Jamil McCraven, Ilias Le Doré, Rabah Nait Oufella, Robin Goldbronn, Vincent Rottiers
Rating: NR
Genre: Thriller
Nocturama trusts its audience—more, even, than its audience may want to be trusted. Throughout, director Betrand Bonello folds timelines, indulges in flashbacks and replays moments from different perspectives, rarely with any warning but hardly without precision or consistency, investigating the comparatively small world of his film from every angle while implying that a much bigger, much more complicated world exists outside of its admittedly limited view. Bonello’s tact offers no explanations; his story follows a gaggle of beautiful Parisian teens, seemingly representing a broad swath of life, participating in a terrorist act, from planning through meticulous execution, and then, in the aftermath of the explosions, to the high-end department store where the teens hide out to watch the City respond. Bonello never allows these kids a monologue or conversation or anecdote to explain why they’ve gone to such extremes—their political understanding is about as sophisticated as that of a college student who’s only recently discovered Noam Chomsky, and even these beliefs they mumble to one another without much dedication. Instead, Nocturama is all surface, all watching: the faces of these innocents as they silently go about their terror, the tension that arises from knowing there is so much obscured behind those faces but also seeing so much so clearly in those faces, and then knowing that we will never know. Because these teens seem fine, even existentially so. They seem middle class, comfortable, unburdened by the wiles of puberty, free to do what they want, be with whom they want, say what they want—and only in the department store, amongst designer clothes and expensive, pointless home goods, do they yearn for more, potentially blowing up Paris not to protest anything, but to beg to be a part of the elite who define it. This is terrorism not against capitalism, but for it. Bonello trusts his audience to know the difference. —Dom Sinacola
19. The Stranger
Year: 1946
Director: Orson Welles
Stars: Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
Orson Welles’ third feature film was the first to feature documentary footage of the Holocaust. This film noir follows a UN War Crimes Commission agent, Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) who’s hunting down fugitive Nazi Franz Kindler (Orson Welles). Wilson releases a repentant former associate of Kindler’s, hoping the man will lead him to the fugitive. Kindler has has moved to a small New England town and married the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice, teaches at a prep school—essentially has erased every possible trace of his former identity, save one: a longtime obsession with clocks. The former associate does find him, but Kindler’s a little reluctant to confess, opting to strangle his former friend, instead. Wilson continues to prove Kindler’s identity, and Kindler goes to greater and greater lengths to conceal it. Ultimately, of course, his undoing is a clock—literally. The producer was originally planning to hire John Huston to direct The Stranger; Welles got the job because of an ill-timed military tour that took Huston (literally and figuratively) out of the picture. Welles hadn’t directed a film in four years and was so eager for the work that he took a contract stipulating that if he went over-budget he’d be paying the studio out of pocket. It’s possible that Welles’ inventiveness was partially forged by the constraints under which he found himself working on all of his early films. He was dogged by cut-happy producers (it’s not even clear how much footage was removed but Welles was relieved of the first 16 pages of his script before principal photography even started) and contrarian casting and locations choices (Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead to play the investigator; the studio cast Robinson; likewise he got a budget-driven “no” on filming the prep school scenes at The Todd School in Illinois, his own alma mater). The desire to personalize this film despite so many interventions were probably fundamental to the development of its nightmare-like tone and the use of reflective surfaces to provide depth and dimension in his constructed set. (Check out the drugstore scene where Wilson plays checkers with Billy House.) But perhaps most striking is the use of actual footage from concentration camps, which are still shocking to look at today but were exceedingly potent in the 1940s when large numbers of Americans still did not understand that the camps really existed. In typical Welles-versus-studio fashion, the producers backed out at the last minute on the promise of a four-picture deal to follow this film—-they had become convinced it would run at a loss and Welles was incapable of directing a mainstream hit movie. As it turned out, it was Welles’ only significant box office success on release, and remains a canonized film noir. —A.G.
20. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Year: 2014
Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Stars: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Mozhan Marnò, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains
Rating: NR
Genre: Fantasy, Horror
Advertising itself as “the first Iranian Vampire Western,” A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night transcends just about every word in that description, and yet it has the defiant one-dimensionality of a lurid graphic novel. Its moody atmosphere is all of a piece, cutting off our connection to characters or any sense of deeper thematic or emotional terrain. The film stars Sheila Vand (Argo) as the titular girl. She lives in Bad City, a desert community littered with slowly churning oil derricks and an unsettling open pit where dead bodies are dumped. This unnamed character walks the city streets at night decked out in a chador, which makes her look like a superhero. More accurately, she’s a vampire, feasting indiscriminately on men deserving of the grisly fate. (Pimps and other baddies seem to be favored targets.) Shot in Southern California, A Girl Walks is a triumph of high-contrast lighting, the dark shadows coexisting with the flickering streetlights. (The whole movie exists in the same arresting permanent-midnight environment of Touch of Evil, where empty desert threatens to consume the few signs of civilization.) Such a heightened visual palette risks becoming monotonous, but Amirpour and cinematographer Lyle Vincent keep delighting the eye, finding endless ways to surprise us with the ghostly appearance of Vand in the background. (With her pale face, heavily-mascaraed eyes and dark cloak, she’s the most bewitching vision of death you’ve seen on a screen in a while.) Amirpour has crafted a tone poem to alienation and first love that’s incredibly sensual and eerie. It has its share of spilled blood, but Amirpour prefers the creepy-crawly to the crudity of gore. Like Jim Jarmusch, she enjoys playing around with genres from an ironic distance, letting her noir-ish tone set the terms for everything else that goes into the film. Hers is a feature debut is so enveloping that it doesn’t much matter that not a lot happens within the frame. Draped in dreamy black-and-white and scored with proto-Morricone instrumentals and evocative goth-rock, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night proudly stakes its claim as an aspiring cult classic. —Tim Grierson
21. Goodbye to Language
Year: 2014
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Héloïse Godet, Kamel Abdeli, Richard Chevallier, Zoé Bruneau, Roxy Miéville
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
Jean-Luc Godard made Goodbye to Language in much the same spirit as Taro Gomi’s seminal children’s book Everyone Poops: no matter what differences may set us apart from one another, we’re all united through our undeniable human need to defecate. It’s the greatest of equalizers. This, of course, suggests that any such spirit can be coaxed out of the film in just one screening. Woven sporadically throughout Godard’s visual essay are moments in which his quartet of protagonists talk philosophy on the john, the thunder of their bowel-voiding peppering conversation with the sounds of intestinal exertion. Coming from any other director, these sequences might stretch our willingness to offer our continued patience, but anyone who signs on for a modern Godard flick should probably have an idea of what they’re getting into. This holds true for Goodbye to Language as much as it does for, say, 2010’s Film Socialisme or 2004’s Notre Musique—though the latter films are downright coherent by comparison. It’s dense. It’s opaque. Goodbye to Language is crafted in a way that aggressively defies immediate understanding, really allowing only mitotic absorption; though it clocks in at 70 minutes, it feels like it’s twice as long. As a topper, Godard and his cinematographer Fabrice Aragno shot the whole damn thing in 3D. Coats, branches and many sundry objects poke out at us from the screen while the colors—oh, the colors!—practically vibrate with intrusive urgency. The toilet humor is almost a palette cleanser for his movie’s experimental qualities—which is a sentence I stand wholeheartedly behind. But these aren’t complaints; they’re the exact reason that the movie is such a joy to behold. So what does it all mean? What’s the ultimate point? Godard has a lot on his mind, as evinced by the sheer volume he’s jammed into Goodbye to Language’s sinewy frame. In that regard, maybe there doesn’t have to be a point, because the point, perhaps, is just to rifle through Godard’s brain-library and glimpse if only briefly what it’s like for him to live within that overstimulated architecture. That explains, if not justifies, the film’s sheer breadth of referentialism, which includes archival footage clips alongside nods to Fritz Lang, Alexandre Aja, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Jean-Paul Sartre and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Godard himself. These materials, which Godard weaves together with a young man’s brio, aren’t a sendoff for language but rather a send-up: They wryly blur the line between truth and fiction, reality and fantasy. Maybe language keeps us at arm’s length from nature, but if so, it still does a pretty solid job of articulating the full gamut of human emotion. Put in short, the film is chaos, but glorious, wondrous chaos that lets us see what genius looks like from the inside. —Andy Crump
22. malni – towards the ocean, towards the shore
Year: 2020
Directors: Sky Hopinka
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
Sky Hopinka walks through spaces special and spurious in his first feature, malni – towards the ocean, towards the shore. The translation of the title lies within it, representing a liminal reality known well to both those who live in the Pacific Northwest now and those now who know of the death myth of the Chinookan people, those who lived in the Pacific Northwest first. In joining two Native locals, Jordan Mercier and Sweetwater Sahme, as they go about their rituals, daily and communal and otherwise, Hopinka grafts a sense of spiritual wonderment onto the warmly mundane stories they tell. Cultivating a lush soundscape, and seduced by long walks through the Columbia River Gorge or in and out of outcroppings rising by seemingly abandoned beaches on the Pacific—forward and backward through the membranes that separate sacred terrains—the film uses the death myth as a way to convey the power of the region, of especially the Portland area. Half an hour outside of the city in any direction wait things almost magical to behold; those of us who live here can feel ourselves change the more we cross urban lines. malni’s imbued with all that subtle transformation. —Dom Sinacola
23. IWOW: I Walk on Water
Year: 2020
Director: IWOW: I Walk on Water
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
One may feel every minute of Khalik Allah’s IWOW: I Walk on Water, some 200 of them, the director’s autobiographical screed written in 16mm, tape, Super 8 and HD. Ostensibly about the corner of 125th and Lexington in Harlem as much as it is about his tumultuous, long-distance relationship with an ex-girlfriend, as much as it is about his abiding devotion to using mushrooms, IWOW is so completely obsessed with itself as a cultural object that one wonders, 60 minutes in, why it even exists for anyone but its creator. About 70 minutes in, one wonders if he’ll record himself getting his dick sucked, and then 90 minutes later he records himself getting his dick sucked. We only hear it, but it’s a strikingly intimate exchange to witness, especially within the context of the film’s previous two hours of personal tribulation. Elsewhere, Allah introduces us to Frenchie, a Haitian immigrant who’s lived on the street for decades, diagnosed schizophrenic, struggling with addiction. Allah photographs him constantly, having previously made Urban Rashomon (2013) and Antonyms of Beauty (2013) about him, spends countless hours with him talking and shooting, Frenchie sometimes painfully lucid about life and sometimes totally gone, occasionally given to moments of intense anger or instability. Allah eventually takes him home, gets him a haircut and a shower and some new clothes, recording him endlessly, transforming him into a movie’s subject. We watch white audiences watch Allah’s previous film, Black Mother, in museums. We hear Fab Five Freddy, one of many legendary artists with whom Allah crosses paths, warn Allah about letting his guard down around Frenchie, a man who up until filming IWOW, Allah thought was dead, suddenly resurrected. Allah declares himself Jesus; our empathy feels twisted, in thrall to the film’s contradictions, wondering along with Allah if he is who he says he is. It’s frequently beautiful, practically endowed with a knack for stumbling upon, too often, the sublime. While Allah rambles over top, saying what he deeply means as much as what he knows he deeply doesn’t, IWOW counters with a visual language that prioritizes the delicate connections between all the people he’s captured on film. Mostly, he does this through keeping his conversations non-diegetic, very rarely allowing the image to sync up with the sound, but also never really divorcing the sound from its context either. Long, unbroken shots of his ex-girlfriend’s face seem to touch on and occasionally embrace the rhythm of a conversation from another time, drawing those experiences into a single, felt moment. We understand more about the person inside the frame—or, at least, we begin to understand them the way Khalik Allah does. We’re bewitched by his many compulsions, by the way he feverishly, stubbornly documents everything, leaves seemingly nothing out. We maybe even start to fall in love with his ex, too. —Dom Sinacola
24. Don’t Blink – Robert Frank
Year: 2015
Directors: Laura Israel
Rating: NR
Genre: Documentary
Robert Frank, the subject of Laural Israel‘s documentary Don’t Blink – Robert Frank, and his art — striking photographs and film of Americana — reflect one another like those collages of dog owners and their pets. Rather than both having droopy ears or a snooty nose, they crunch like shards of glass beneath boots. Frank and his creations grind against good taste while still being sharp and beautiful. His is an imperfect America, as if Norman Rockwell subjects stepped out of frame for a few drinks and a game of dice, then got lost on their way back home. Shot in black-and-white, except for color archival footage, Don’t Blink visually equates the photographer and the work. His are photographs of tense peace, threatening to shatter at a moment’s notice. As more and more of Frank’s life peeks through, so deepens our appreciation. The film doesn’t shove its photo slideshows against lazy, grungy, bluesy tunes to inflect a hopeful melancholy, but to amplify that which already exists within them. Frank’s triumphs and tragedies are captured through his work. His marriage and young love bursts from each frame, all smiling faces and shy adoration, while the early losses of his children, either by accident or suicide, are memorialized in frosty landscapes. That the film remains so spritely despite the turning hand of fate mimics the artist’s response. Don’t Blink becomes a quick, poignant, funny manifestation of its subject’s ethic. The aging artist looks back on his life, whether it moved with or against him, and filters it all through work and friends made.—Jacob Oller
25. Fourteen
Release Date: May 15, 2020
Director: Dan Sallitt
Stars: Norma Kuhling, Tallie Medel
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama
Fourteen explores lives in transit. Dan Sallitt’s minimalist epic takes up the slowly unspooling friendship between Mara (Tallie Medel) and Jo (Norma Kuhling), two twenty-somethings in New York City building careers in education and social work, respectively. It presents a vivid portrayal of the minutiae of a friendship, especially its rhythms. Sallitt’s editing style cuts together moments from their lives in a gamified way, with the viewer having to discern how much time has passed between one scene and the next, the time jump made discernible by a character’s new job or boyfriend. As a viewer, the feeling is that we’re brought into each scene in medias res. But this jumpy, fragmented way of editing adds to the film’s brand of realism. It helps that the film was shot gradually over several years—Sallitt’s previous film was 2012’s The Unspeakable Act, which also starred Medel—so changes in the characters’ appearances reflect the actors’ movements in time. Each scene is pared to the essentials, capturing Mara and Jo at a particular moment, allowing the viewer to observe subtle differences in each character’s behavior, from an annoyed tone on the phone or a missed dinner. With each passing scene, there’s a sense that Mara and Jo’s relationship is also the fantasy of an indissoluble friendship, tied together by aspirations to see the other in a way that no one else ever could, or the false promise that their once easy, breezy bond could stay the same as time goes on. The unsentimental drama aspires to evoke a slice-of-life naturalism, and mostly succeeds, illustrating the slow strain of a one-time best friendship that becomes just too difficult. —Isabella Bridie DeLeo