This was a year in which I saw an awful lot of average films, very few terrible ones (one of the advantages of not doing this sort of thing for a living is you tend to be able to anticipate the dross and not subject yourself to it), but not a huge number of brilliant films either. Settling on a top ten was not particularly difficult this year, and creditable as many of the films in the “Also worth seeing” list are, few of them were in any danger of ending up getting a longer write-up here.
I bent my own rule once (the rule being, only considering films released this year where I happen to be living) because I discovered the fantastic Trenque Lauquen too late to see it in time for the 2023 list. Its inclusion here, alongside The Settlers and The Delinquents, gives the impression of this year being one of an annus mirabilis for cinema from the cone of South America (all of it tied together by connections to Mariano Llinás, who didn’t even direct any of those three films) but that is purely coincidental.
Unusually, there are no French films in the top ten this year. Most of what I saw was decent at best and the two French films that gained the most plaudits from French critics – Alain Guiraudie’s Miséricordie and the late Sophie Fillières’s posthumously released Ma vie, ma gueule — left me a bit underwhelmed despite admiring previous films by each director.
As with any list, it’s an idiosyncratic selection, and I admit that a few of my preferred films won’t be to everyone’s liking, not least because many of them are very long, but they’re all worth giving a go if you have the time and inclination.
- Occupied City – Steve McQueen (UK/Netherlands/USA) 266 minutes
Steve McQueen’s adaptation of a book by his wife, the Dutch historian Bianca Stigter, charts the unfolding of the Nazi Occupation of Amsterdam during the Second World War and the way the city’s residents, particularly its Jewish ones, negotiated it. It’s a film of challenging length—though nothing like the 36-hour version the director also prepared, and which fits all of Stigter’s material in. It is also by nature repetitive, the entire thing narrated by the Anglo-Dutch actress Melanie Hyams (whose presence is essential to correctly pronounce the multitude of placenames and proper nouns), laid over static shots of the contemporary city filmed either side throughout the pandemic and its aftermath.
Not surprisingly, many audiences bristled at the length and the format — one review I read described it as “four and a half hours long and two inches deep” — but for those willing to surrender to this sort of thing, it’s a hugely rewarding and stimulating affair. The formal constraint makes for a meditative experience and an elastic relationship between filmmaker and viewer, similar to Patrick Keiller’s excellent Robinson trilogy.
McQueen presents us with the unsettling counterpoint of the present-day city and its manifold mundanities and the grim history recounted in matter-of-fact fashion. It’s a film that is dense with allusion and meaning, even if it sometimes feels like it is trespassing in the cinema. Then again, McQueen’s best movies — Hunger, the Small Axe films, and this — have tended to come when he has veered closer to his video art roots. He is a perfectly competent mainstream director, as evidenced in his other Second World War film this year, Blitz, but his films really catch fire when they get more experimental, and Occupied City is a masterwork that will bear repeated (lengthy) viewings.
- The Settlers (Los colonos) – Felipe Gálvez Haberle (Chile/Argentina/UK/Taiwan/Germany/Sweden/France/Denmark) 97 minutes
Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s superlative debut feature is a grim and bloody account of the Selk’nam genocide at the turn of the 20th century, from the Chilean perspective (Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja covered the same episode on the Argentinian side of the border). The narrative is told through the eyes of MacLennan (Mark Stanley), a British Army veteran, and his mestizo associate Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), who are entrusted with “clearing” lands for their wealthy landowner employer, José Menendez.
Like Alonso’s film, The Settlers is a South American Western that verges on the absurd, with an almost bleak collegiality — the encounters MacLennan and Segundo make become increasingly dark (though there is on the way an amusing episode at the border in Tierra del Fuego where they arm-wrestle their Argentinian counterparts, in the form of Mariano Llinás, lynchpin of contemporary Argentinian cinema, and co-writer of this film), as they find that even perpetrators of atrocities like them are not immune to the depredations of other imperial forces.
The Settlers has a sardonic grasp of the dialectics of settler colonies, where the reformers who disapprove of the methods of Menendez and his men are scarcely more evolved in their attitudes towards the indigenous population, as shown in the film’s unforgettable final scene. A technically masterful film all round, the crowning achievement of The Settlers is its sound design, provided by Taiwanese duo Tu Duu-chiu and Tu Tse-kang, regular collaborators of Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai, among others. That Gálvez Haberle sought them out for his first film is testimony to how clued in he is to the important things in film production.
- All We Imagine as Light – Payal Kapadia (France/India/Netherlands/Luxembourg/Italy) 115 minutes
Payal Kapadia’s second feature All We Imagine as Light won almost universal acclaim when it took the Grand Prix at Cannes, with many thinking it deserved the top prize. In many respects, it is a miracle of finely calibrated drama, and probably the most atmospherically beautiful film of the year. So lyrical and elegiac it is throughout you are constantly fearful it will tip over into an overwrought aestheticization at the expense of its characters and their respective plights. It is testimony to Kapadia’s skill as both screenwriter and director that this never comes to pass and underneath its handsome surface the film has a steely resolve.
It would be glib in the extreme to call All We Imagine as Light a “love letter” to Mumbai — there is far too much pain and dejection accompanying its protagonists for that—but affectionate it certainly is. It is also a largely nocturnal one — nearly all of it takes place after dark. Its three main protagonists are three generations of Mayalali migrants from Kerala—hospital cook Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), nurse Prabha (Kani Kasruti), and her spirited younger flatmate and colleague Anu (Divya Prabha)
Though the three are far from the worst-off of Mumbai’s millions of residents, they are all hamstrung by circumstance and social expectations — Anu by her family’s likely non-acceptance of her love for her Muslim boyfriend Shiaz, Parvaty by the unrecompensed eviction from her home of 22 years to make way for a luxury development, and Prabha by the marital limbo she is left in by her husband, who emigrated to Germany shortly after their marriage years before.
Each of these predicaments seems doomed, even in the case of the youngest, Anu, who has a more independent streak and who surreptitiously dispenses contraception to poor young women. Nonetheless, Kapadia does not succumb to fatalism and the film is a touching portrait of solidarity and generosity that is distinguished by characters that are, in the face of all that befalls them, genuinely good people.
- Trenque Lauquen – Laura Citarella (Argentina/Germany) 260 minutes
Laura Citarella’s almost Borgesian interior epic is one of the strangest and most fantastic of low-key films in recent years. Set in the unremarkable eponymous town in upstate Buenos Aires, Trenque Lauquen, at four and a half hours, appears way longer than a film of its kind has any right to be, but it never feels long, not least because it is, in effect two films, with the single thread joining them being the disappearance of its heroine, Laura (the brilliantly enigmatic Laura Paredes).
Laura is a biologist dispatched to the region by the Department of Agriculture to research local plants. She soon gets sidetracked from her Linnaean pursuits and, much like Borges, loses herself in the local library, where she discovers secreted in a book a love letter sent decades before by a local married landowner to his paramour. Laura goes in search of further traces of this epistolary exchange, with the help of a local colleague Chicho (Ezequiel Pierri). The thing is, by the time we are introduced to Chicho, Laura has already vanished, along with his pick-up truck, which she had promised to have back to him a few hours after she borrowed it. Chicho helps Laura’s fiancé Rafa (Rafael Spregelburd) in his searches but the best he can do is recount what has happened.
The second part of the film sees Laura bring her taxonomic curiosity to bear on a strange mutant creature that has been found in a local lake, having been requested by the pathologist (Elisa Carricajo) in charge of the investigation to source a mysterious yellow flower. This is where the film’s bedrock strangeness comes to the fore, and Laura gets ideas about leaving her previous life behind.
Trenque Lauquen is very much in the lineage of recent Argentine films (as with The Delinquents, also in this list and also starring Paredes) in which urbanites see the vast Argentine interior as a place of escape and retreat, only for it to contain unseen pitfalls. There is probably some wider cultural or political point being made there though it eludes me, I’m afraid.
- The Zone of Interest – Jonathan Glazer (UK/Poland/USA) 105 minutes
It’s hard to say if The Zone of Interest derives its particular capacity to disturb—in excess of the usual dread of a Holocaust film — more from the bland petit-bourgeois domesticity of its setting or from the cold functionalism incarnated in its main character, the notorious Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), who tells his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) that he whiled away a boring Nazi function in Berlin by imagining how much Zyklon-B it’d take to gas everyone in the ballroom.
The Hösses’ domestic calm is, of course, knowingly portrayed. The offscreen sounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau are never kept at a firm remove and the top of the buildings we see in the distance beyond the family bungalow are all too familiar. But the comfort of the family, however squalidly it might be underwritten by the despoliation of murdered Jews, is part of the point. The Zone of Interest is a frontier film, set in the newly conquered Lesser Poland, one of the many regions being annexed as Lebensraum for a growing Aryan population. If not too many Westerns or films about colonialism have been quite as unsettling it is purely down to the fact they are far less honest about it than Jonathan Glazer is.
There are occasional cracks in the wall separating the domestic from the barbaric — a prisoner escapes from the camp next door, and Hedwig’s visiting mother sheds her initial enthusiasm at this brave new world and realises something sinister is afoot. But Glazer maintains the division and focuses for the most part on the logistico-bureaucratic side of the Nazi’s genocide. If there is an air of a post-war American suburban idyll about the setting, it is surely deliberate, given Höss is nothing if not a Taylorist professional in his grisly doings.
- Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – George Miller (Australia/USA) 148 minutes
It’s fair to say that an origin story for Miller’s however excellent 2015 Mad Max reboot Fury Road was not exactly something the world necessarily needed but Furiosa wastes no time in making even the most jaded viewer overcome their scepticism. Like its predecessor it’s essentially one long chase, and it’s none the worse for that.
In an age when the self-important sprawling genealogies of superhero adaptations have vitiated the action movie out of all life, Furiosa stands out as a magisterial exception. This is partly down to the strength of the Mad Max storyline (I shudder at the thought of using the word “franchise”) and Miller’s brilliance as a director of kinetic cinema. While a vague ecological concern does prevail in Furiosa, as it did in Fury Road, Miller doesn’t get bogged down in analogies or political commentary. He just actions. And one of the best compliments you can pay the film is it works more or less as a silent movie if you turn the sound down.
The whole work is a technical marvel, brought together with aplomb by the editing of Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel. Anja Taylor-Joy is the equal of Charlize Theron in the title role, despite having scarcely any dialogue, and, in her words, going weeks at a time during shooting without speaking on camera. It’s at once unsporting and futile to compare Miller’s film with the mass of self-regarding fanboy fodder that Hollywood spews out but you do hope someone–anyone– in one of those comic universes has been taking notes here.
- The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma’ābed) – Mohammad Rasoulof (Iran/Germany/France) 168 minutes
The premiere of The Seed of the Sacred Fig at Cannes this year was overshadowed by its director’s escape from Iran after being sentenced by the Islamic regime to eight years in prison and whipping. Mohammad Rasoulof had, no doubt, been rehearsing that departure in his mind ever since Goodbye, his 2011 film about an Iranian lawyer attempting to flee the country in a hurry.
Before getting out of Iran Rasoulof crafted this enthralling political family drama that has the unique quality of being topical and unlikely to be overtaken by events any time soon. It has a thematic commonality with his previous film There Is No Evil, which gathered four tales about the death penalty in Iran. The man of the house in his latest film is a lawyer, Iman, who has recently been appointed a judge in the Revolutionary Court, meaning he becomes, by default, a hanging judge.
We are led to believe that Iman is reluctant in his new role, what with the recent rise in anti-hijab protests meaning he is extra-busy. There is also a conflict brewing at home where his two daughters, one a college student and the other a teenager, are each implicated in the protests. When Iman’s service revolver, which he has accepted with no great enthusiasm, goes missing, the family is thrown into turmoil.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig’s family drama at times feels like it is rather overly explicitly analogising the current upheaval in Iran but Rasoulof’s script and the quality of the acting keep it from being mechanical. The sad thing is that, for now, he is no longer able to make films in his homeland. He will no doubt have plenty of offers of work in exile but there is no guarantee it will provide the stimulation that has made his cinema to date so unmissable.
- The Delinquents (Los delincuentes) – Rodrigo Moreno (Argentina/Brazil/Chile/Luxembourg) 190 minutes
The rude health of Argentine cinema continues to be in evidence in Rodrigo Moreno’s heist-less heist movie. Disillusioned bank clerk Morán (Daniel Elias) concocts an ingenious plan to steal a retirement nest egg of $650,000 from the Buenos Aires bank he works for. He intends to turn himself in, and retrieve the cash from a colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) he has implicated when he gets out of prison.
Morán has modest ambitions for when he gets out — buying a house in the countryside and living a chilled-out early retirement is about the height of it — which is relatable in a society where so many people work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. Unfortunately, prison is not quite the breeze he expected, and he is persecuted by a gangster, Garrincha, who is played by the same actor, Germán de Silva, who plays his boss at the bank. But he gets out, and goes to recover the cash, which has been stashed by Román near his country bolthole.
Much has been said about The Delinquents’ insistence on taking the opposite tack to everything that is expected of it within the heist genre. And there will be many that find this recalcitrance infuriating. But Moreno has made a wonderfully off-beat comedy that charms and delights as it takes its glorious time over three hours, and you can forgive it the succession of detours, MacGuffins and even loopholes it serves you along the way.
- Evil Does Not Exist (Aku wa Sonzai Shinai) – Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Japan) 106 minutes
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s masterful follow-up to his Oscar-nominated hit Drive My Car starts off as a seemingly much more conventional film, in the vein of the David v Goliath ecological genre, familiar from Hollywood films such as Mike Nichols’s Silkwood, Stephen Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich or Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land.
A peaceful mountain village a couple of hours’ drive west of Tokyo is threatened by developers who have bought land nearby with the intention of building a glamping facility, to attract other city slickers to unwind on weekend breaks. A pair of poorly briefed PR hacks Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) are sent to front the operation but they find the locals, particularly the taciturn widowed woodsman Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), far more knowledgeable about the stakes of the project.
Hamaguchi takes the film in an unexpected direction in its second half, which to describe would be to divulge far too much. Suffice it to say, the action is reoriented towards the outsiders, Takahashi and Mayuzumi, a sad-sack corporate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are shown to be fundamentally decent people in the wrong job. The film’s enigmatic title also comes to the fore — a reflection of the impersonality of nature, which is the overarching dominion in this film—and the sole thing that Takumi fears, even as he loves it.
Hamaguchi’s quiet yet powerful drama, with superb performances by its entire cast, shows nature to be a potentially terrifying force, capable of killing you in a thousand different ways, without any malignancy, without it being anything personal. In the wild, evil does not exist, but that doesn’t mean bad things can’t happen.
- No Other Land – Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor (Palestine/Norway) 95 minutes
This collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian journalists chronicles the Israeli military’s eviction of West Bank inhabitants of Massafer Yatta off their land, ostensibly for “military exercises”, but it is later shown that the real motive is simple ethnic cleansing, to pave the way ultimately for Jewish settlements. Two of the villagers, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, are among the co-directors.
No Other Land (its title coming from Basel’s grandmother when asked where the villagers will go after eviction) is ultimately as unsuccessful as other fine films documenting the Occupation such as Avi Mograbi’s Avenge But One of My Two Eyes and Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 Broken Cameras have been in stopping the Israeli land grab of Palestinian land but the fact of documenting is not negligible. It is a quiet amassing of evidence for the prosecution, even as so many people in positions of power choose to look away (though a greying Tony Blair does pay a brief visit and his presence manages to provide a momentary stay of execution for a new school the villagers build).
Basel, Yuval Abraham and their co-directors doggedly record the at-times deadly confrontations with the IDF, and later, armed settlers; as in the above-mentioned films, the act of filming is treated as an outrage by the soldiers. There are also reflective moments, where the Israeli Yuval discusses with Basel and Hamdan the discrepancy between their respective situations; though Abraham and Adra could easily be mistaken for brothers, it is only the former who has the liberty to return across the Green Line and escape the institutionalised poverty, precariousness and confrontation. There is gentle ribbing of Yuval and the articles he hopes to get published, but the locals are generous in their acceptance of two journalists from a country that is hell-bent on dispossessing them.
The film won Best Documentary at Berlin this year, with Abraham calling out the de facto apartheid system his Palestinian co-directors must live under. The Germans, who, with a colossal dose of whatever the Teutonic equivalent of chutzpah is, have positioned themselves in recent years as a global authority on antisemitism, weren’t long in responding. Berlin’s CDU Mayor Kai Wegner called the speech “antisemitic” and motivated by a “profound hatred of Israel”. But what would Yuval Abraham, an Israeli Jew whose family has been targeted by far-right Israeli mobs, know about antisemitism?
Also worth a look (in alphabetical order)
A Good Jewish Boy (Le Dernier des Juifs) – Noé Debré (France) 90 minutes
All of Us Strangers – Andrew Haigh (UK) 105 minutes
American Fiction – Cord Jefferson (USA) 117 minutes
Anora – Sean Baker (USA) 139 minutes
Auction (Le Tableau volé) – Pascal Bonitzer (France) 91 minutes
Benediction – Terence Davies (UK/USA) 137 minutes
Blitz – Steve McQueen (UK/USA) 120 minutes
Borgo – Stéphane Demoustier (France) 117 minutes
Bye Bye Tiberias (Bāy Bāy Ṭabariyya) – Lina Soualem (France/Belgium/Palestine/Qatar) 82 minutes
Cobweb (Geomijip) – Kim Jee-woon (South Korea) 135 minutes
Dahomey – Mati Diop (France/Senegal/Benin) 68 minutes
Day of the Tiger (Tigrù) – Andrei Tanase (Romania/France/Greece) 80 minutes
Dream Scenario – Kristoffer Borgli (USA) 102 minutes
Emilia Pérez – Jacques Audiard (France) 132 minutes
Enys Men – Mark Jenkin (UK) 91 minutes
Eureka – Lisandro Alonso (France/Germany/Portugal/Mexico/Argentina) 146 minutes
Flow (Straume) – Gints Zilbalodis (Belgium/France/Latvia) 85 minutes
Ghost Trail (Les Fântomes) – Jonathan Millet (France/Belgium/Germany) 106 minutes
Grand Tour – Miguel Gomes (Portugal/Italy/France/Germany) 129 minutes
Hit Man – Richard Linklater (USA) 115 minutes
In Water (Muraneseo) – Hong Sang-soo (South Korea) 61 minutes
It’s Not Me (C’est pas moi) – Leos Carax (France) 42 minutes
Juror #2 – Clint Eastwood (USA) 114 minutes
Love Lies Bleeding – Rose Glass (UK/USA) 104 minutes
MaXXXine – Ti West (USA) 104 minutes
Monster (Kaibutsu) – Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan) 125 minutes
Ni chaînes ni maîtres – Simon Moutaïrou (France) 98 minutes
Only the River Flows (Hébiān de cuòwù) – Wei Shujun (China) 102 minutes
Rotting in the Sun – Sebastián Silva (USA/Mexico) 109 minutes
Santosh – Sandhya Suri (UK/India/Germany/France) 98 minutes
Suleymane’s Story (L’Histoire de Suleymane) – Boris Lojkine (France) 93 minutes
Terrestrial Verses (Ayeh haye zamini) – Ali Asgari, Alireza Khatami (Iran) 77 minutes
The Apprentice – Ali Abbasi (Canada/Denmark/Ireland/USA) 123 minutes
The Beast (La Bête) – Bertrand Bonello (France/Canada) 146 minutes
The Count of Monte Cristo (Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) – Matthieu Delaporte, Alexandre de la Patellière (France) 173 minutes
The Hypnosis (Hypnosen) – Ernst de Geer (Sweden) 100 minutes
The Iron Claw – Sean Durkin (UK/USA) 132 minutes
The Man With a Thousand Faces (L’Homme aux 1000 visages) – Sonia Krunland (France) 90 minutes
The Other Way Around (Volveréis) – Jonás Trueba (Spain/France) 114 minutes
The Second Act (Le Deuxième Acte) – Quentin Dupieux (France) 80 minutes
The Substance – Coralie Fargeat (France/UK/USA) 141 minutes
The Successor (Le Successeur) – Xavier Legrand (France/Belgium/Canada) 93 minutes
The Teachers’ Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) – İlker Çatak (Germany) 99 minutes
Three Kilometres to the End of the World (Trei kilometri până la capătul lumii) – Emanuel Pârvu (România) 105 minutes
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (Gau lung sing zaai zi wai sing) – Soi Cheang (China/Hong Kong) 126 minutes
Upon Entry (La llegada) – Alejandro Rojas, Juan Sebastián Vásquez (Spain) 77 minutes
OLIVER FARRY 