these are the ones that left the biggest impression on me.
Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)
An iconic political thriller of staggering power and detail. Gavras turns his lens to 1960s Greece during political upheaval against a military dictatorship and dissects the behavior and attitudes of that world at every layer of the system on both sides of the political divide. The movie particularly concerns the assassination of leftist politician Grigoris Lambrakis and its aftermath, and with Gavras's intense attention to detail you can practically feel the ripple effects of that killing as if you had been there and seen it with your own eyes.
----------------------------------------
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2018)
Saw this very early in the year and it's just lovely. PTA's film is so beautifully and richly textured. Novelesque in story, setting, character and dialogue while still being a purely cinematic treat for the senses. Once I'd given myself up to its spell I was completely hooked. It was so much fun being in this strange little cinematic world with an asshole dressmaker, his snarky sister, and his untamable muse. Unlike
The Master (my second favorite PTA film), it was tremendously easy to surrender myself over to this world without wondering what it all meant.
----------------------------------------
The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
Very late to the party with this one, but it's just as riveting as I could have hoped. This is the most layered performance I've seen from Hackman. I've never seen him convey so much vulnerability (that scene with him and that Meredith chick dancing beneath the underpass...wow). Of course the directing and editing and use of sound is also phenomenal. This movie fits into that category of 70s paranoia thrillers where unseen threats loomed behind every corner and were intimately connected with the protagonist's troubled past or mental state, but this one is the best. It got under my skin and never left.
----------------------------------------
State of Siege (Costa-Gavras, 1972)
Another Gavras political thriller. This one's unique for examining the US's meddling role in South American affairs and a group of leftist Tupamaro guerrillas who must decide what to do with an American official they've kidnapped. More generally, the film raises the upsetting question of how much blood is on America's hands with its past of supporting politically advantageous rightwing dictatorships that used intimidation, torture, and death squads against political dissidents. The film is a richly-detailed political drama and powerful statement against neo-colonialist interference.
----------------------------------------
Séance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes, 1964)
An underseen masterpiece with two of the most poignant performances of the 60s. It's a kind of psychological horror film where a troubled medium alleges to communicate with departed spirits but is unaware of the demons in her own head. Structurally it plays like a high-wire Hitchcockian thriller, but at its core it's a soul-crushing story of grief, loss, and loneliness.
----------------------------------------
Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963)
Not a highly-regarded film, but I fuck with it. I love the tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that always seemed to be hiding more cynical and subversive undercurrents just beneath the bawdy exterior. I don't even know how to defend this film because virtually everything about it clicked with me. I love that Tom Jones is basically a lovable rascal who's greatest vice is enjoying life and being irresistible to the gentler sex (I really appreciated this kind of satirical, sex-positive inverse moral perspective -- Tom is maybe the most virtuous, most attractive, most vibrant character in the story and yet he's also the most vilified by the prudish and moralistic authority figures he comes across). There's an air of freedom and fun about the film that was just so invigorating. Freedom from social mores, freedom from religious moralism, freedom from stuffy attitudes about sex. At the center of it all is young Albert Finney's winning charisma and the inviting, unassuming smile of someone not fully aware that they're drop-dead-gorgeous. This movie understands why being
bad is fun, and why being
bad isn't such a bad thing.
----------------------------------------
Columbus (Kogonada, 2017)
Another 2017 gem I saw early in the year. This movie is a kind of cinematic spa. The whole thing is so zen. So many shots of buildings and bubbling brooks and floating weeds, and what ties it all together are these two fascinating strangers with their own problems, fears, hopes, dreams that meet by chance and become friends in Columbus, Ohio. Kogonada's touch is so gentle and reassuring. Watching these two people (played with such quiet elegance by Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho) interact and bond and talk through their issues felt like vicariously going to therapy.
----------------------------------------
The Draughtsman's Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1983)
I don't know, I guess I just really love tongue-in-cheek Elizabethan bawdiness. In the first 60 seconds of this weird, delightfully fun, thoroughly unique, vulgar little playground of a film, we have a wigged character with a powdered face at a candle-lit party recount in beautiful baroque language how a wealthy landowner's plums gave everyone diarrhea, and the character says all of this ...WHILE EATING A PLUM. There's probably something to say about how the film uses a landscape artist's sketches to toy with the audience's perception and reveal an intricate murder plot while making a greater statement about how we perceive reality through art, but the film is such a sensual experience that it's easy to miss that altogether. A lot of that has to do with Michael Nyman's score, with all its
ironic sense of significance. Hearing this magnificent music in a playful, sardonic, gutter-minded little farce is
everything.
----------------------------------------
In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Ōshima, 1976)
This romantic drama about Sada Abe and Kichizō Ishida's infamous love affair in 1930s Japan is a carnal delight. I've seen it described as a horror film but I didn't quite see it that way. The movie is about a mutually destructive relationship between a businessman and a geisha that becomes increasingly intense and all-consuming. The sadomasochism in the later part of the film reflects the burning passion and lust that's consuming both these individuals, and is punctuated by a final shocking act of violence that gave the movie its notorious reputation. I'm not going to pretend that what this movie has to say about this one particular relationship is all that unique, but I was thoroughly fascinated by its intensity. I really enjoyed the movie's raw sexual energy. Its honest approach to sexuality was refreshing (at one point these two lovers spend so much time fucking that their room "starts to smell"...eww). You just don't get that in most films, at least not to the extent that you get it here. The movie is also beautiful to look at. It's definitely not pornographic, but between the period detail, the lurid cinematography, and an unbearably anxious score,
In the Realm of the Senses is a powerfully sensual experience that I won't soon forget.
full list on letterboxd of my 2018 viewings that I gave a rating of 8.5 or higher:
letterboxd.com/joe_hughey/list/favorite-first-time-viewings-of-2018/