From the spiritual to the scary, many genres had quality offerings.
Roma
Praise has been sung and adulation showered, so just another reminder here that Roma, a rapt, heartfelt ode to Mexico City and the domestic worker who worked for the household of director Alfonso Cuaron, is still showing at House RCA and Scala. You can also catch it on Netflix.
Malila: The Farewell Flower
The Thai film puts homosexuality next to Buddhism, and putrefaction next to meditation. Anucha Boonyawattana's film -- Thailand's representative to the Oscars, though it didn't make the cut -- is an existential drama that proposes a generous interpretation of love, religion and death. You can find it on DVD.
Ten Years Thailand
The kudos for the political cinema of the year may go to the rap music video Prathet Ku Me, but Ten Years Thailand -- a portmanteau of four short films with an anti-authoritarianism message -- quietly rattles the norm of what can be shown on the big screen in military-ruled Thailand. The film has just left the cinemas, but it's making a tour around the country in special screening sessions. Follow the film's Facebook page for updates.
Hereditary
Ari Aster's Hereditary is the ghost film of the year -- the way it deftly hides its cards and stacks up mystery upon mystery, secret upon secret, madness upon madness, until everything unravels in demonic hellfire. The film ticks all the familiar elements of a ghost story -- a dead grandma, a spooky house, a grave robbery, a candlelit seance where spirits are summoned, an occult sign written on the wall, etc -- but it rises above the genre formula with its coolly composed formalism, deliberate pacing, and sly psychological manipulation that almost convinces us at certain points that this is more of a domestic drama than a horror movie.
Burning
Lee Chang-dong's class drama, adapted from a Haruki Murakami novel, captures the ethereality of bliss (a shaft of light glimpsed during an act of lovemaking) and the irredeemable weight of hopelessness. The three leads (Yoo Ah-in, Jun Jeong-seo, Steven Yeun) are remarkable. The film had a good run here in limited cinemas and has now been back in the headlines as one of the nine titles long-listed for the Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film.
Shoplifters
Another strong Asian title, a Palme d'Or winner and also a contender for the Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters is a story of family bond and human (dis)connection, set firmly inside the underbelly of Japanese society.
If Beale Street Could Talk
Barry Jenkins' follow-up to Moonlight is an adaptation of James Baldwin's novel about black lovers torn apart by racial injustice. Jenkins again lets his characters inhabit that rarefied terrain between the harshest reality of America in the 1970s (Harlem, racial profiling, police brutality) and the rhapsodic dream where lovers almost float around, propelled by longing and heartbreak. The film will have a spot in the Oscars and let's hope it opens here soon.
Ash Is Purest White
Jia Zhangke's film follows a woman (Zhao Tao) from her origin as the wife of a small-town gangster through her peripatetic journey after being released from prison. Again, Jia puts his character in the midst of social changes and physical development of China, and again he does it with such honest, clear-eyed sensibility. The last act, when the woman returns to the place where her life started, is a masterful portrait of despair. It is unlikely to open here in Thailand.
Long Day's Journey Into Night
The future of cinema will be safe in the hand of the young Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan. Long Day's Journey Into Night (the title borrowed by Eugene O'Neill) seems to float above the ground, like a lost soul aching to remember its life. The narrative about a man and his lover in a small rural town is elliptical, disjointed, and fuzzy, while the 55-minute long take (in 3D!) is perhaps the most ambitious shot in cinema this year.
The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs
You can watch this new Coen Brothers' film on Netflix now. An anthology of six Western stories, the Ballad Of Buster Scruggs gives us an assortment of humorous, violent, sad, tragicomic misadventures of cowboys, bank robbers, prospectors and frontier settlers. It is an homage to the Western genre as well as a signature piece where the Coens bring their brutal comedy and existential sorrow -- think No Country For Old Men, but subtler -- into the vast prairies and dusty outposts of early America.
Season Of The Devil
Lav Diaz has given us perhaps his darkest films to date, and one that subverts the happiest genre in cinema history: musical. Season Of The Devil, set during the martial law years in the Philippines, is told in elegant black-and-white images and in verse, since every character sings instead of speaks, and the repertoire is a beautiful singsong that smells of earth, blood and sorrow. Diaz composed all 33 songs himself and through them he has turned the tragic tale of a murder spree by a right-wing militia into a poor man's a cappella opera, a disturbing La La Land set in a forgotten war.
Border
This Swedish film by Ali Abassi is partly a monster film that pushes it to the (sexual) limit and partly an allegory of migrant souls and other forms of otherness. It follows a woman who appears to be disfigured and who has a supernatural sense of smell that allows her to work as a fool-proof customs officer, sniffing out illegal drugs, fear and paedophilia at a border station. When a traveller who looks vaguely like her appears, the secret of her identity is revealed. Perhaps we have to ask the Swedish embassy to bring this brilliant film here.
