Jessica Kiang’s Top 20 Films Of 2016

10. “Neruda”
It’s hard for me to name a director whose current form I admire more than that of Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín: bucking every “cinema is dead” and “the world is shit” 2016 trend, he released three films this year and every one is brilliant (the sole reason he’s only on this list twice is that his other 2016 title “The Club” premiered in Berlin in 2015, and was my third favorite film of last year.) Even more impressive, given the Fassbinder-ish level of productivity, is just how very different each of these three films are from one another: “The Club” is mordant, austere and angry, “Jackie” (see below) is brittle and moving, while “Neruda,” his tribute to the Chilean poet, politician and Nobel laureate, is tricksy and mischievous and, of all things, zany. With something of the manic, caper-movie energy of “Pierrot Le Fou” and the meta hi-jinks of “Day For Night” (a Godard title and the Truffaut film that Godard fell out with Truffaut over — Christ, even these meta references are meta), the film is chaotic and inventive and impossible, zig zagging more ideas and experiments into every scene than most filmmakers manage in a trilogy. In one way it does resemble “Jackie,” though: it’s about as far from a traditional biopic as can be imagined, with Gael Garcia Bernal‘s dogged, Chandler-esque policeman, a man with monumental daddy issues who fears he may himself be fictional (which of course he is) becoming as much a player as the tubby folk hero (perfectly played by Luis Gnecco) who is his quarry. It could all be insufferably show-offy if Larraín didn’t so frequently pause to wink at us through a silly sight gag or some anachronistic back-projection or the arch humor of the pathos-laden, poetically hardboiled voiceover. I seldom feel the urge to rewatch even my favorite films — the best ones continue to nourish on a single viewing, I find — but after my first time with “Neruda” I really felt like I’d only seen half the film, it is that replete with ideas and jammed with jokes. [Review]

9. “The Age of Shadows”
The Koreans basically killed it in 2016, with Na Hong-jin‘s “The Wailing” (see above), Park Chan-wook‘s “The Handmaiden” (see honorable mentions) and Yeon Sang-ho’s “Train to Busan” (note to self: see “Train to Busan”) all regularly turning up on year-end round-ups. But for me the cream of the crop, perhaps surprisingly given it’s the one that broke through least, is Kim Jee-woon‘s utterly spectacular, ravishing spy thriller. The unique factor here is not the convoluted plot, involving double agents, a rat in the gang, a shipment of explosives and something about black-market artifacts, nor the somewhat cursory, archetypal characterization, despite a typically excellent turn from Song Kang-ho as the conflicted Korean policeman in the employ of the occupying Japanese authorities. It’s not even the luscious period photography that renders 1930s Korea in the rich, noirish compositions of “The Third Man“‘s Vienna. It is simply the level of directorial attention lavished on every single scene: “The Age of Shadows” is a movie without filler, as though every single moment were the one that director Kim had summoned this entire movie into being to shoot. And whether it’s epic wide shots of black-clad soldiers flowing across rooftops like liquid, or the urgent exchange of information in a quick look between conspirators, or the tension-building staccato scenes that explode into crisply choreographed violence, it’s as though Kim Jee-woon spent years on a mountainside learning to hone the mystical arts of genre filmmaking just so he could not only make “The Age of Shadows,” but also make it spool out like silk — almost insultingly effortless. [Review]

8. “Sieranevada”
What madness is it that Cristi Puiu‘s bustling, brilliant “Sieranevada” is still without U.S. distribution? Perhaps it’s the combination of the words “three hours long” and “Romanian family drama” and “largely set in one cramped apartment” that cools a buyer’s ardor, but Puiu’s film is so much brighter, messier, livelier than the image those phrases might summon. It’s the story of a rambunctious extended multi-generational Romanian family, fraught with personal grudges and political divisions, coming together to mourn the passing of patriarch Emil, in a weird ritual that his widow has devised that involves an empty suit of clothing, a priest who is constantly delayed and immense tables groaning with food that no one’s allowed touch however hungry the bickering and waiting makes them all. It’s a film alive to the chattering absurdity of family, in which the large ensemble cast hits not one single false note between them in communicating their characters’ relationships to one another, their histories, resentments and shared in-jokes. It’s almost impossible not to recognize elements of your own family get-togethers in this one, be it ever so ritualistically removed from your experience — perhaps that is a factor of the kind of exasperated affection with which the camera, the only silent observer of this hubbub, seems to view these funny, flawed people. In fact, as time goes by (and it flies along), you might start to suspect that sense of warmhearted, melancholy watchfulness actually derives from Emil himself — maybe his ghost or his echo, or maybe that empty suit really did summon his spirit to return — looking on with a heart full of love, irritation and regret, at all this gorgeous life going on without him. [Review]

7. “Toni Erdmann”
Perhaps the greatest film ever to fully capture the liberating potential of social awkwardness, Maren Ade’s bizarre and deeply funny “Toni Erdmann,” tells of straitlaced corporate lackey Ines (a brilliant Sandra Hüller) who is thus enlightened, though in her case it comes via her bearish prankster father’s alter ego, a pair of false teeth and a certain green-frosted French Fancy. A highly original and skewed look at a monumentally idiosyncratic and yet ultimately completely relatable father/daughter relationship, the film is a delight, full of moments of transcendent surreality that are all the more powerful, and often hilarious, for being so ruthlessly bedded down in the banal. Peter Simonischek plays Ines’ father Winfried, a man who, on his strained weekend visit with her in Bucharest dolefully announces to a table of her clients that he likes “to make jokes.” But where most of us have suffered through enough of our fathers’ bad puns to regard that as a fairly benign characteristic, in Winfried it’s almost pathological, and frequently inappropriate. And so there’s a certain logic at work when, suspecting his daughter’s repressed misery, he stays on in Bucharest, affects a weak disguise and the fake name “Toni Erdmann,” reintroduces himself to a horrified Ines and proceeds to make her life infinitely better by making it temporarily much, much worse. With two or three of the funniest scenes of the year, and also the most sublime, silly yet rousing rendition of “The Greatest Love of All” ever captured on camera, “Toni Erdmann” is eccentric, unique and the only time in 2016 that my heart was slightly broken and then serially repaired by a scruffy man in a bad wig and joke dentures, who doesn’t at all remind me of my own father, and yet kind of does. [Review]

6. “One More Time With Feeling”
If there is any human experience that, in being almost beyond the reaches of human comprehension, therefore by rights could be almost beyond the purview of art, living through the death of a child might be it. I can only imagine that in a similar situation I would lock myself away from the world and hole up in a cocoon of misery. But then I am not Nick Cave, and do not have the astounding facility for un self-pitying, meditative self-examination, even at this most difficult and tragic time, a quality proven by the very existence of Andrew Dominik‘s beautiful completely devastating black-and-white documentary. Dominik’s “The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford” hovers around the number one spot for my personal films of the century, and I am a Nick Cave fan anyway, which makes this project a collaboration toward which I would always be well-disposed. But even I was not expecting the sheer intricacy of emotion and intellect and artistry on display, from the silky 3D camerawork to the clever, simple and lovely staging of the musical sections. It’s ostensibly a document of Cave recording his (superb) album Skeleton Tree, singing words he wrote before the death of his 15 year-old son Arthur, just a few months after that tragedy. But really it’s a portrait of grief — not resolved, not cathartic but real, and raw and examined as honestly as I have ever seen in a film. It is an act of the most extraordinary bravery to try and connect with people this way — to try and report to the world from inside a loss so profound it makes you, as Cave says, a stranger in your own skin — but it’s also, on Dominik’s part, a beautiful act of friendship, which is all anyone can offer the inconsolable. [Review]