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Best of 2014: #6. Abuse of Weakness
#6. Abuse of Weakness (Abus de faiblesse). Catherine Breillat. France/Germany/Belgium.Perhaps still best known for their brilliant, unsettling portrayals of dark sexuality, writer/director Catherine...
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Best of 2014: #7. Maps to the Stars
#7. Maps to the Stars. David Cronenberg. Canada/Germany/USA/France.It only takes a few minutes into David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars to realize why John Waters named this his favorite film of 2014....
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Best of 2014: #8. Child's Pose
#8. Child's Pose (Poziția copilului). Călin Peter Netzer. Romania.Winner of the Golden Bear at last year's Berlinale and starring the grand dame of Romanian cinema Luminița Gheorghiu who has appeared...
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Best of 2014: #9. Obvious Child
#9. Obvious Child. Gillian Robespierre. USA.It's not everyday that I walk away from a film with as many scatological jokes as Obvious Child with such a beaming smile on my face. In what could have been...
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Best of 2014: #10. Only Lovers Left Alive
#10. Only Lovers Left Alive. Jim Jarmusch. UK/Germany/France/Greece/Cyprus.Director Jim Jarmusch (Stranger than Paradise, Mystery Train, Dead Man) is no stranger to a certain kind of "cool," and it's...
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Best of 2014: Honorable Mention. Nymphomaniac
Nymphomaniac. Lars von Trier. Denmark/Germany/France/Belgium.I don't even know what to really say about Lars von Trier's films any more. With each new one, they tend to feel less and less like films...
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Best of 2014: Cinema
Few years in recent memory have felt as lousy as 2014. I fear that I might make such a claim every year, but in looking back, it's been a while since I've struggled to put together ten films from a...
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Best of 2014: Music
If 2014 was a lackluster year for film, it was a pretty fantastic one for music, at least from my own vantage point. As the ways in which we consume and discover new music rapidly changes, I can never...
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The Worst of 2015: Jurassic World
Jurassic World. Colin Trevorrow. USA.Following not-so-closely on the heels of two famously reviled sequels, Jurassic World certainly should have earned its place next to its unfortunate predecessors,...
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Worst of 2015: The Overnight
The Overnight. Patrick Brice. USA.Let’s hope in the coming new year that we see an end to the unsavory cinematic trend of using fake genitalia! As the most glaring and embarrassing example of a fad...
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Best of 2015: The Here After (Magnus von Horn)
The Here After (Efterskalv). Magnus von Horn. Sweden/Poland/France.The bleak Scandinavian chamber drama is a class of film dear to my cold heart, and Magnus von Horn’s feature debut is one of the...
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Best of 2015: The Club (Pablo Larraín)
The Club (El club). Pablo Larraín. Chile.Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Berlinale, the latest from Pablo Larraín (No, Tony Manero) is a searing portrait of a group of ostracized Catholic...
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Best of 2015: Carol (Todd Haynes)
Carol. Todd Haynes. USA/UK.Only the upcoming award season will be able to tell us whether the buzz patrol (or the hype train, as my friend Brian put it) had done a disservice to Todd Haynes’ latest...
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Best of 2015: All Yours (David Lambert)
All Yours (Je suis à toi). David Lambert. Belgium/Canada.Shamefully overlooked by the mainstream film festival circuit as well as the LGBT ones, All Yours is Belgian filmmaker David Lambert’s bold and...
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Best of 2015: Tales of the Grim Sleeper (Nick Broomfield)
Tales of the Grim Sleeper. Nick Broomfield. UK/USA.With the year book-ended by a pair of first-rate miniseries (Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx on HBO and Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi’s Making a Murderer...
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Best of 2015: Everlasting Love (Marçal Forés)
Everlasting Love (Amor eterno). Marçal Forés. Spain.Comparing Marçal Forés’ Everlasting Love to Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (L'inconnu du lac) is almost unavoidable. Both films explore the...
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Best of 2015: Full Contact (David Verbeek)
Full Contact. David Verbeek. Netherlands/Croatia.Working from an air force base somewhere in the Nevada desert halfway across the world from the targets he's surveying, Ivan, a stoic drone operator...
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Best of 2015: Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro)
Neon Bull (Boi Neon). Gabriel Mascaro. Brazil/Uruguay/Netherlands.What’s most impressive about Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull isn’t its lush cinematography by Diego García (who also shot Apichatpong...
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Best of 2015: Nova Dubai (Gustavo Vinagre)
Nova Dubai (New Dubai). Gustavo Vinagre. Brazil.When radical queers bemoan the rise in the gay marriage movement or the focus of institutions like the Human Rights Campaign, their criticisms can be...
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Best of 2015: Te prometo anarquía (Julio Hernández Cordón)
Te prometo anarquía (I Promise You Anarchy). Julio Hernández Cordón. Mexico/Germany.If you held a knife to my throat and forced me to choose a number 1 for my 2015 list, my favor would probably lean...
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Best of 2015: Ten Honorable Mentions
For fun, I’ve also put together a list of 10 more films that wouldn’t exactly qualify as numbers 11 through 20 of my favorite films of the past year as much as simple honorable mentions for leaving...
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Best of 2015: Cinema
With each passing year, my annual lists (which seem to mark the only time I have in a given year for writing “for fun” about film) become increasingly, unintentionally esoteric, purposefully defiant of...
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Best of 2015: Music
I don’t really have any sweeping or acute observations about the state of the music industry in 2015, so here are some unrelated, purely subjective revelations of the musical variety that I had over...
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Is It Still Light Outside?: The Knife’s Silent Shout, 10 Years Later
February 17, 2016 marks the ten-year anniversary of the release of my favorite album of the Aughts, one that has haunted me from my very first listen, one that feels no less powerful or rich a decade...
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Streaming Suggestions, February 2016: Lior Shamriz, Gabriel Abrantes,...
For the next few weeks, you can stream some incredible works by a handful of visionary young filmmakers on Vimeo and MUBI. For a limited amount of time, director Lior Shamriz has made several of his...
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